nawl

Imagine, if you will, an ancient house, in the center of a tiny village of haphazard roofs, perched above a river flowing through a valley, carpeted with lush green terraced pastures that become, as the viewer's gaze rises upwards, the imposing rocky cliffs and spiky peaks of the Alps.

In order to get there, you board a plane in whatever horrid uncivilized country you were coming from (really, every country is uncivilized in comparison to Switzerland) and disembark in Geneva's charmingly retro airport, where you proceed to walk right through the terminal to the train station that is conveniently right where you need it, and board a swift, silent, and shiny train into the countryside. Somewhere you change trains to a smaller one covered with pictures of cuddly St. Bernards, and ride that one into the mountains to the end of the line at Le Chable. At this point, you could walk right out of the train station and into the telepherique that would take you right up to a glacier at 3000 meters of elevation, but instead you want to board the postcar bus, which is just barely narrow enough to fit between the stone and darkened wood walls of the villages that it winds through on your way up the valley. (Unless, of course, someone's father has decided to drive his shiny right-hand-drive Jaguar into town just in time to meet your train, and then you'd take a slightly different road.

The house has a new number attached to it, but old letters in the basement are addressed to "la maison en face du four".

The milk is fresh every day from the laiterie in the next village over, collected that morning from the cows on the high pastures for the summer. We asked how they got it down: they used to have pipes, but now they just use milk trucks. Each village has its own distinctive cheese--all somewhere in the spectrum of Gruyere to Raclette--and the artisanal butter comes imprinted with a flower. Water is fresh and cold from the fountain running across the street. Many houses in the village have impeccable vegetable gardens laid out in front of them.

The house comes equipped with a lovely Swiss mother who cooks simple yet fabulous meals for lunch and dinner for you every day from scratch, raclette and fondue and fried potato patties and lentil salad with local farmer cheese and salad from an enormous head of lettuce from a neighbor's garden that she dropped by to deliver just because. While walking through the village, an old friend of the mother's wordlessly gives you a handful of the raspberries she has been snacking on while walking.

We hike up a nearby trail. The scenery passes from grassy meadow to pine forest to wide expanses of many-colored wildflowers to a sort of short-grassed rocky wilderness by the time we're finally in view of the cloud-shrouded white peaks and glaciers.

At 2000m we find a herd of cows grazing above a lodge overlooking a perilous drop to the valley far, far below. The lodge won't let us sit on their benches to eat our lunch, so we walk further up and eat our lunch underneath an enormous wooden cross where the view of the glacier and the valley is even better, and listen to the many-toned cow-bells clinking.

Another day we take the cable cars up to the top of Mont Fort, over a herd of grazing goats with musical bells, over the barren wasteland of short grass and piles of dirt that is the ski resort in the summer, a change of cars as the attendant tells us they're still having electrical problems as the cable cars were hit by lightning the day before and out for the entire morning, and finally to the very spiky pile of rocks and snow that is the peak. It's a long, rocky, snowy fall in any direction. Only one other couple is at the top, and they leave before us. It's desolate and deserted, and there are huge billboards on the wall of the cable car lodge for watches.

The next day we go on a long drive to the German part of the country to spend a day at some famous baths, which are more of a water fun park than a therapeutic bath. The most fun is the current pool, which at full speed is honestly dangerous, but we had a blast being pulled around the rapids. I was a bit surprised the first time a teenage boy rudely threw me off of an overhanging rock I was hanging on, and it quickly turned into an afternoon-long battle for king of the hill, with dozens of strangers jumping up to attack the current rock occupants as they were pushed by by the water.

The last day spent in Geneva, I decided to recreate my first Geneva experience and buy chocolate from as many chocolatiers as I could find walking around in an afternoon. This time I ended up with 19 truffles from six different stores for about 25 Swiss francs, of which 15 are currently still waiting for the taste test I promised myself.

Posted by nadia at 05:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So the most common comment I got from people I told about this trip was "Wow, I could never spend so much time with an ex-boyfriend."

A much more useful response might have been "What kind of idiot thinks it's a good idea to sail across a thousand miles of open ocean at five miles an hour?"

(Read Jan's account of the trip here.)

We flew to Antigua. Continental has one flight there a week, on Saturday. It's the kind of airport where they offer you free drinks on arrival. This means that the immigration officials also have to go around and pick up all the little half-filled plastic cups of alcohol that the arriving tourists then leave on the tables where one is meant to fill out paperwork.

After doing battle with the customs officials over Jan's 100 lb inflatable dinghy that he'd schlepped by hand all the way from Norway (who smuggles a dinghy into a country by air, anyways?) we took a taxi all the way across the island to English Harbour.

English Harbour is an incredible natural harbor, the base from which the not-yet-Admiral Nelson raided American ships trading in the Caribbean. Now there are costumed tour guides chatting at the entrance, and if you look enough like a tourist they'll charge you a few dollars to enter and poke around at the few stalls of Caribbean tourist schlock that are full of chickens at night, a tiny museum with handcrafted displays, and the variously restored ruins of the buildings and fortifications.

Two months ago, the entire place was filled with yachts and boat people for the Antigua Sailing Week, apparently the event of the year for yachts. Now it was a ghost town, and my experience of Antigua echoed the handful of sentences that the until-then florifically verbose Patrick Leigh Fermor dedicated to Antigua in The Traveller's Tree. "Alas, I can only just, after remaining there exactly twenty-four hours, claim to have been there; and I saw no evidence of it, perhaps because I scarcely saw anybody at all... the island while we were there seemed to be either empty of its folk like the village on the Grecian Urn, or locked by some spell in a state of catalepsy." It would seem that most of the tourists we did see were secreted away to walled-off all-inclusive resorts owned by foreigners, any remaining tourist infrastructure on reduced hours or closed for the season. What's more, the entire country was closed for Sunday and Whit Monday.

So we sailed for France.

Guadeloupe, that is. About eight hours sailing south of Antigua.

It really is France, in a way much more fundamental than a former British colony like Antigua might retain some vestiges of Britishness after being used up and tossed away. In the guadeloupeen town where we stopped, Deshaies, French cars with French license plates, French tourists, French restaurants with handwritten outdoor menus, and a Spar filled with imported French products.

We ate an expensive dinner where my assiette vegetarienne was filled with vegetables that I did not recognize (little French cat begging scraps from the carnivores at the table), and stocked up on all the canned soup, French cheese, and tropical fruit that we could find.

Never did manage to clear customs--another woman from a boat who trekked up to the customs office on the hill with us said it had been closed for the past three days.

And then we set sail. We lost sight of land by the end of the first day.

A couple of dolphins accompanied us during dinner, and after the sun set we watched a faraway thunderstorm illuminate clouds on the horizon.

After that we looked up in the On-Board Emergency Handbook what to do in case of a thunderstorm. (You ground the mast by running a cable from a stay into the water.)

One of the realities of long-distance sailing is that you can't steer by hand for weeks on end. You have to find a mechanism to get the boat to steer itself. There are a few options for self-steering. The boat has an electric autopilot system, but it would drain the batteries in about 3 or 4 hours, and without a gyroscope it was knocked off course by even 5-10 foot waves, a calm day of sailing in a pond compared to what we encountered later in the trip. There are mechanical wind vane systems, which are either expensive to buy or tricky to build yourself. And then there's the sheet-to-tiller system outlined in a legendary out-of-print book called "Self-Steering for Sailing Craft", which is what we ultimately ended up using.

Here's a summary of the main idea. Jan adapted it for his boat by rigging a small sail behind the genoa (that's the triangular sail in front, for non-sailors following along at home) and running lines from the end of it back to the wheel, counterbalanced with elastic. When the tension in the steering sail changes by heading too far into or away from the wind, the changing force on the rope and elastic pulls the wheel in the correct direction. This demands a lot of construction materials and a lot of tinkering to get right, and depending on conditions more modifications were necessary: a preventer to pull harder on the elastic in case of a jibe, more knots to precisely place the rope away from the inconvenient spokes of the wheel, a significant reduction in sail area and speed to keep the boat in control. But by and large it worked great.

Jan was somewhat rightfully proud of himself for getting the steering system to work so well. It's much more in the grizzled-old-man-on-a-boat-with-no-engine style of sailing than the shiny-new-yacht kind. The general opinion seems to be "Oh yeah, I've heard of that, I tried it once, it was kind of fun."

The wind out of Guadeloupe was somewhat less than could have been hoped for, so we made less than 5 knots average for the first few days.

On the sea the world shrinks to the snow globe of what's visible: boat in the center, a disk of water a few miles in diameter, the vault of the heavens above. Weather appears in the distance and moves towards or away from us, cargo ships appear on the horizon, grow closer, then retreat. Schools of flying fish leap out of the water in front of the boat and flap over the waves. The moon was near full for the first half of the trip. I was glad to see it rise luminous around sunset and light our way, silvering the crests of the waves and bathing the cabin in moonlight through the hatches.

By day five, I was going positively batty on the water. I was ready for a vacation from my vacation. So we made a halfway stop on Aruba.

When we were still 60 miles out, a gray military plane buzzed overhead, turned around, and went back the way it came.

At about 2 am we were sailing along the coast of Aruba towards Oranjestad when the Aruban coast guard swooshed up to us in a long super-fast motor boat with all its lights off. Several burly officers boarded us, inspected our paperwork, looked under the floorboards. I was amused to see such an enormous man taking down my address in a rounded girly handwriting.

I suppose such diligence is understandable, considering the proximity to Colombia and the popularity of drug-running as a funding source for boat owners who are not yet independently wealthy. But still, we could have left with bales of cocaine and a whole crew of illegal immigrants in the places they didn't look.

By 3 am we'd made it to the harbor, but when we called on the radio they told us to go away until dawn. So we drove backwards and forwards for three hours in the waves. The wind had picked up by the time the coast guard stopped us, we were going 7 knots downwind on only the genoa, and actually surfing down the waves. By dawn we were completely exhausted from banging against the waves, having both spent sleepless the hour rest from steering.

We followed another sailboat into the cruise harbor and recognized the name Cisnecito from a flyer they'd posted in a cafe in Antigua. When we docked they helped with the ropes and said "Hi! We're on our way home after sailing around the world for the past three years."

While I waited on the boat for Jan to return from immigration and customs at the cruise ship terminal, I watched hundreds of tourists disembark from their cruise ship in the most garish exercise gear, mill around and stretch for a few minutes on the concrete, then all set off at once for some sort of massive communal morning jogging routine. I hadn't seen anything but Jan, water, and boat for the past five days. Surreal, man.

We docked at the closest nearby marina, the Renaissance. Nobody was around on a Sunday morning to take our money, but we found out later that for $1 per foot per day we could use all the amenities of the associated nearby swanky resort, including a sort of private island they'd built up. Ultimately we ended up showering in the employee locker rooms, led past the employees-only door into the bowels of the hotel offices. (It's also possible to anchor for free near the airport south of the marina or along the high-rise hotels on the east, but we were hesitant to do that with no charts or guides.)

Early on that Sunday morning, all we could see of the island was an empty shopping mall, a handful of sunburned tourists wandering aimlessly among the deserted luxury shops. It's not clear to me why one would want to travel long distances only to spend one's time in a mall filled with the same stores as the Netherlands or the US, but it must be common enough to be profitable.

I ended up walking from Oranjestad nearly to the northern tip of the island, along five or six miles of nonstop white sand beach lined with luxury high-rise hotels. The whole way, I stepped over and around blissed-out tourists sprawled out in the perfect white sand and the perfect turquoise shallow water, stopped at the beachside bars for pina coladas when I was thirsty.

At the end of the row of hotels, I found the beach favored by the windsurfers and kitesurfers, and ended up talking to an Italian windsurfer managing a hotel there. He offered me water and a shower, warned about Colombian pirates who had robbed some friends at gunpoint off the Colombian shore, and gave me a ride back to the marina.

That night we had dinner with Chris and Julie from Cisnecito. They told us stories of trading empty coke bottles for lobster in Madagascar and dispensed advice for transiting the Panama Canal. Highlight of the conversation: "So about ten years ago there was this thing called string theory that wasted a lot of people's time."

The ground hadn't stopped moving the entire time I was on land.

The first two nights I slept on the boat in harbor, the mild creaking of the boat as it rocked gently in the waves had been disturbing, I didn't sleep well, and was up well before dawn. That night in Aruba I slept like a rock for twelve hours--a comparatively windy harbor was like a baby's cradle.

We left Aruba the next afternoon. Our departure was like a comedy of errors, except that it wasn't really funny.

On our first attempt out of the harbor, we unfurled the genoa only to have it collapse on deck. A shackle had lost its peg. We motored back to harbor, I winched Jan up the mast, and he installed a replacement. Moral: do not hand-tighten your vital shackles.

On our next attempt out of the harbor, Jan dropped the spinnaker pole on his head and let go of the spinnaker uphaul. It flew away in the 20 knot winds and swung about wildly above our heads in the growing waves. At this point, the sun was close to setting, and if we tried to return to harbor again we would have lost a night of sailing. In order to retrieve the swinging spinnaker uphaul of death, Jan climbed onto the boom, which jerked violently back and forth over every wave that passed underneath us. I was at the wheel under motor, but by this time the waves had built up such that we slid out of control on every swell. All I could do was try to go over the waves in a way that might encourage the spinnaker uphaul to further wrap around the mast stays.

He eventually retrieved it, put up the genoa, and poled it out in order to go directly downwind. As soon as the genoa was up, the boat pulled towards the wind harder than I could pull back, and the boat tilted so far that the the rails were underwater.

I'm not sure I can accurately convey how scary this is. At the time, I was screaming obscenities. I guess I now know why sailors are foul-mouthed.

It is perhaps important to note at this point that I was largely incapable of sailing the boat on my own. A 34 foot boat is a lot further from a 14 foot dinghy than I had expected. Most of the lines had been run back to the cockpit for ease of singlehanded sailing, which meant that there were ten unlabled ropes, several of which were the same color, to learn, remember, cleat, uncleat, let out slowly, winch up, and winch down in a variety of combinations to do any one of many operations (put up, take down, reef once, reef twice, tighten, loosen, tack, jibe) one can do involving sails. We're ignoring the actual art of balancing the sails, here, something I have little concept of. When pressed, I eventually managed to get a fair approximation of the correct ropes for commands yelled at me, but if any Jan-threatening emergencies had happened far from land, I'd have been alone and helpless.

We were sailing with the wind and current, which meant that even in the worst case, I would eventually hit land. However, in these conditions, one of Jan's sailing books suggests the following as the most realistic man-overboard procedure: a wave goodbye over the stern.

Additionally, every time the ropes tangled on the mast, or we needed to take down the main, or rig or fix the self-steering sail, or mess with a spinnaker, or any number of innumerable causes in the name of sailing, it was necessary to leave the safety of the cockpit and go up to the bow of the boat, by then likely bouncing wildly in the waves, often even worse when it was necessary to steer into the wind. We had safety harnesses, but in the dark of a moonless night with invisible fifteen-foot waves slamming into the bow of the boat and the wind screaming in whatever sliver of a genoa we were sailing on, this is a scary prospect. (Not one that I engaged in. I only went up in nice weather.)

It's important to be reminded that the wind and waves are far more powerful than we can ever be, and that if you play with them you'd better know what you're doing or hope you're damn lucky. In this case, under unbalanced sails, I might not have been able to pull the boat back in control at all. It's weighted such that it should right itself even if the mast hits the water, but that would result in far more serious damage.

The wind and the waves kept increasing as we sailed along the coast of Colombia. At its worse, Jan estimated force 7 winds, waves at nearly 20 feet, cresting above us, foam blowing off the water. In order to get the self-steering to work, we sailed on a fraction of the genoa alone, and even so the GPS told us we were going 10 or 12 knots surfing down the crests of waves. Mostly the waves slid harmlessly beneath us, but every so often one would happen to break just so beneath or over us with a loud bang and roar, send the boat spinning 180 or 360 degrees out of control, undo the self-steering, and throw anyone unlucky enough to be sitting on the wrong side of the boat across the cabin.

This happened a couple of times a night.

(It was then that we concluded that even if the Jeanneau is marketed as having a hull capable of blue-water sailing, it certainly doesn't have the interior for it. There are not nearly enough handles. We both got some serious bruises and cuts from those days. Several of the cuts that I got stayed open and refused to heal until I was back in civilization.)

One such killer wave crashed over the boat and broke the steering entirely. Jan acted quickly: the emergency tiller came out (a length of heavy metal pipe), we checked the guide for the closest safe port in Colombia (two full days of sailing at that point), and began to prepare to cut the trip short. I was ordered into the cabin to unscrew some panels and see what was wrong (in fifteen foot waves) - the cables connecting the wheel to the rudder had twisted off their pulleys. We hove to, fixed them, and were back on our way to Panama.

We spent an inordinate amount of time staring off the back of the boat. Huge wall of water towering above us, boat is lifted up, huge chasm of water opens below us. Wave TV. Endlessly entertaining.

Sleeping while the boat is underway is a surprisingly loud and restless prospect. There are a multitude of noises--the water burbles and rushes past the hull, the boat creaks and strains under stress, jars and dishes slide back and forth in their cabinets, the sails snap and pull when the boat is too far downwind, and crack violently when we accidentally jibe. You learn what the boat sounds like when it's on course, and wake up when it speeds up and tilts into the wind, or slows down when it's about to jibe.

We kept six-hour watches at night, waking up once an hour to check the course and sails and for other ships, every half-hour or continuous when we crossed paths with too many cargo boats that day. We were both jarred awake several times a night by a huge wave breaking over the boat, necessitating a bout of groggy hand-steering while the self-steering was fixed. Most mornings I was awoken by an "Oh, fuck!" or a stream of curses in Norwegian "Fan i helvete!" or my name being shouted by a captain who wanted his oatmeal and I would stumble groggily, dehydrated and exhausted, into the sunlight.

We ate a fraction of the food I'd stocked. Most days it was all I could do to dump a can of something into a pot and heat it up, or stay below just long enough to gather a snack of bread and cheese or fruit. I wasn't seasick, at least not in the vomitous sort of way, but trying to remain upright down below while braced against multiple walls as gravity pulled strongly in new and entirely unexpected directions left me rather muddle-headed until I took a break in the fresh air.

My worst failure as a cook was the day of the biggest waves. I boiled two packages of udon on the stove. The stove is hinged so that it would swing with the waves, but it tended to stick at a tilt so that the next wave would unstick it and send boiling water flying across the cabin. Half the water was lost in the boiling process. I transferred the remaining soup into bowls and another half of the broth sloshed out. I brought a bowl up to Jan at the helm, and just then a huge wave hit and overturned everything. He ate his noodles off the floor of the cockpit.

By this point I had no more moon on my watch. The stars were incredible. Venus was bright enough to cast its own reflection on the water, and I could watch the milky way rise as my watch went on. The sky was actually just slightly brighter than the water. Without the moon it was possible to see the phosphorescence in the water, leaving a little glittering trail behind the boat and illuminating the crests of nearby waves. Every night thunderstorms surrounded us on the horizon, clouds lighting up in quick flashes.

We were becalmed a day out of Panama. We took the opportunity to go swimming in the open water. We were still out of sight of land, and the water was stunningly clear, below our bodies in the ocean nothing but perfect deep blue in every direction.

We motored in the rest of the way. We sat on the bow and dolphins came up to swim alongside the boat, first one then two then ten then twenty coming and going, jumping out of the water, swerving back and forth in front of the boat to show how much faster they can swim.

Finally we arrived in San Blas. The San Blas islands are a rather unique place in the world. The native Kuna rebelled in the 20s and managed to secure autonomy for their territory. Some of the communities have chosen to remain traditional, thatch-roofed cane huts built in villages covering an island to the waterline, or small huts alone on other islands. They have dugout canoes that they paddle and sail and pole between the islands. Many of the women wear brightly colored dress with beads around the wrists and ankles. They sew and sell brightly colored cloths called molas, which are inexplicably world famous as the local handicraft.

El Porvenir, the landing port we'd been dreaming of for two weeks, turned out to be an island containing an airstrip, a cement block hotel alongside the airstrip, a mola stand, a police stand, and immigration and customs.

While Jan was away doing immigration paperwork, two sets of women and children paddled up to the boat to sell me molas, and a guy rowed out to advertise his store on a neighboring island. Even when I wouldn't buy molas, they begged candy for the children. We'd run out of chocolate by that point, so the kids got a stale Petite Beurre with Nutella. (I'd tried to study some Spanish on the boat, but I got the feeling that the mola-sellers didn't believe my "No tengo dinero." I'd bought my souvenir molas before learning that the immigration had cleaned out most of Jan's cash with extra "fees", and we had to do some serious scraping to come up with enough dollars to buy my plane ticket off the island. Credit cards are not useful when electricity is only available from a flickering generator from 6-10 pm for the tourists.)

We motored out to a set of stunning pristine islands covered with palms and went snorkeling among the reefs. I realized that for all the snorkeling I'd done in Hawaii, I'd never seen live coral before. The reefs here were incredibly alive, and full of all sorts of any-colored fish.

In the evening we anchored off an island covered in village. We tried to ask the hotel if they would sell us dinner, but the hotel only had one guest and had no food for us. They led us to the primary school where they sold Jan a plate of leftover turtle and rice for $1.50.

Outside the school three small girls were sweeping. "Camera" they said when they saw my camera, "Quiere photo?" "Si." "Un dollar." "Oh, you're clever. No." But later they came back and asked me to take a picture without paying. I showed them on the screen and this launched an extensive photo shoot where they would adopt a pose and then rush back to see the result on the camera screen. Picture previewing is just about the most brilliant camera feature ever invented.

The mother of one of the girls looked on indulgently. We talked a little, but we quickly reached the limitations of my nonexistent Spanish, and I was on edge from trying to remember my usteds.

Perhaps the pictures they took themselves (with my help pressing the shutter all the way down) are more revealing, a blurry child's-eye-view of the school, the mothers in traditional dress, the tourists towering above everyone.

For the most part, I felt enormously tall and foreign walking around the village. Mothers would send their babies running after me to try to sell us things, and I decided taking pictures felt weird and exploitative.

At night we sat on hammocks in the balcony of the hotel and chatted with Will, the one guest, who's working his way around the world by volunteering as an animal tour guide. We learned that the hotels here are all-inclusive deals, for $30 a day you get a room, all meals, and a full-time guide who schleps you off to pretty islands for beach-laying or snorkeling. According to his guide, the Colombian drug smugglers use San Blas for their dropoffs because the Panamanian police don't have jurisdiction here. Every so often, the Americans will bomb a drug ship, and bales of cocaine will wash up on shore. Best moment of the conversation: when he starts going off on how much he hates American girls, having apparently forgotten that I am one. (Worse, Californian.)

The next day we anchored off of Dog Island, snorkeled the wreck of a Colombian trading ship there (the winch is enormous), bought fresh coconuts. Jan bought two lobsters off some fishermen who sailed up to our boat for $2 each.

He winched me up the mast to take some pictures of the boat. (And incidentally, the guys who stopped by to ask us to charge a pump for them while I was up there.)

At 3 am I was up to vomit everything out of my stomach (Was it snorkeling in questionable water, the fresh coconuts, old Guadeloupan fruit? Who knows!), at 5 am to see the most incredible snunrise.

The 6:30 am flight out of Porvenir didn't leave until 7:30 am. I shared a cab from Albrook (local) to Tocumen (international) airports through Panama City with three Texans who'd flown to San Blas for one day. They paid my fare. (Thanks!)

The flight to Newark was delayed an hour in the air and almost diverted to Philadelphia when they threatened to keep us in the air long enough to run out of fuel. I made it through immigration, customs, an agricultural inspection, re-entering security, and running the length of the terminal in 20 minutes.

I was kind of shell-shocked after re-entering the first world. One of my first experiences was walking through a gourmet supermarket, not a light undertaking in any situation, positively mind-blowing after the previous two weeks.

I weighed myself and discovered I'd lost between 10 and 15 lbs on the boat, and weighed less than I have since I was 12. (This includes my post-mono weight at 16.) It took a good week for my appetite to return in full. Since then I've discovered an odd sort of aching hunger. (I'm fattening up again now.)

It was a week or two before I managed to sleep more than about six hours at a time.

Posted by nadia at 02:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Welcome to paradise.

(Comparing to a map, it appears that St. John is in the foreground, and the west end of Tortola is in the background.)

Here, "British" means that they drive on the left and speak English, being next to the US Virgin Islands means that the portion sizes, measurements, voltage, currency, and cars are American.

The taxi ride across the island was fairly hilarious. From one end to the other took more than an hour, even though the island is maybe ten miles long, and included slowing down to pass various chickens, goats, and cows hanging out on the road, and stopping to pick up and drop off two different groups of people.

The afternoon radio programming appeared to consist entirely of the DJ wishing good afternoon to every person on the island, interspersed with the occasional Caribbean-style Christmas song. "To Desiree and Natalia and Cyrus, a good afternoon to you. And a good afternoon to M. Johnson, and your husband too, and to..." When he got done with people, he started wishing good afternoon to all the islands: "To St. Croix and St. Kitts and St. John, good afternoon, welcome aboard, merry Christmas. To Puerto Rico, como estas usted?"

Greetings in general seemed to be extended affairs. Any sort of interaction is preceded with a "good afternoon" and an extended discussion of how the people involved are feeling today. I was amused to discover that this was actually true and not merely the kind of useless "cultural" advice that guidebooks have the tendency to dispense.

Some sort of large sea bird--a brown pelican, my sister has informed me--sits around in the harbors and in the breaking waves along the beaches and goes diving for fish. They hover about twenty feet above the water, and then suddenly *zoom* dive down in a great splash, and resurface a few seconds later, gulping.

Along the coast it they're replanting mangroves, little seedlings in tubes thrust unevenly into the shallow water.

We spent two days looking at boats. This, along with Croatia, is apparently the place to a. charter a sailboat, or b. buy a used sailboat fresh out of charter. Unfortunately for Jan, this is the best time of the year to be sailing, and therefore the worst to be buying a boat. According to one guy we met over breakfast, the best time to pick up a boat for cheap is just before hurricane season, when the dock owners start repossessing boats whose owners have defaulted on payments.

On his recommendation, we traipse over to the nearby boat yard one morning, find two rough-looking men puzzling over linkages in a workshop. "Is James around?" They look us over suspiciously. "He's not in yet. Why?" "I'm looking to buy a boat." "You want to buy a boat, eh? Have you tried lying down until the feeling passes?" They don't like us, it's clear that we're foolhardy young things with too much money. "If you want to know what owning a boat is like, I suggest you go take a cold shower and rip up thousand dollar bills as fast as you can."

There are boats available in the yard--Swedish Gladys, who we had looked at the day before, and "the Tahiti ketch", who's looking for a carpenter with $30,000 to love her--boats with soul, unlike the pristine mass-produced Jeanneau Jan ultimately ends up making an offer on, but too big of projects for someone who's looking for "one of those sweet sail-away deals".

(See Jan's account of boat shopping for boat details.)

That evening we get drunk with Yuri, one of the guys from the yard, and he softens up. We may be young and rich ("You're like the couple from Numb3rs,", he tells us), but we talk about math and Wikipedia and sailing and blogs, and he tells about sailing tall ships along the west coast and falling in love with the boat he's been fixing for years.

The boat broker told us that most tourists come to charter boats, and pretty much leave as soon as they arrive, so for a tourist attraction the island itself is largely free of tourist infrastructure. Hotels are small and funky and car rentals are minimal. Road Town, which the guidebook describes as "the only settlement truly worthy of the description 'town'", is about four roads wide. We're staying in the Jolly Roger Inn, (see "small" and "funky" above, and "expensive", below) just past West End, which, says the tourist magazine, was first settled by pirates. Of course it's flying a skull and crossbones.

Everything is hideously expensive. Restaurant menus make me cry. It's worse than Norway. We discovered why no prices were displayed in the supermarket when we bought cheese, crackers, and a bottle of sunscreen, and the total was $20. I had planned to buy some sandals here, but am refusing on account that it goes against my principles to pay $50 for a pair of flip-flops. The only thing that's cheap here is booze. (Every boat we toured had an extensive liquor cabinet.)

There is no public transportation to speak of, so we got around by walking, hitchhiking, begging rides, and taxis when hitchhiking didn't work. The combination of insane speeding, two-lane roads, and hitchhikers makes traffic control rather scary: cars picking up hitchhikers screech to a halt in the middle of the road, stopping all traffic that direction, while the hitchhiker has to cross to get in the passenger door of a left-driver vehicle driving on the left side of the road.

But it is paradise. The sky is blue, filled with little fluffy clouds, the weather is warm day and night, the breeze refreshing, the seas unendingly turquoise, the horizon dotted with green peaks of nearby islands to explore, and when we walked twenty minutes on a dirt road through the jungle to Smuggler's Cove at sunset, the immaculate white sand beach was perfectly empty, the only sounds the cries of birds and cicadas, the wind in the trees, and the waves lapping gently against the shore.

(Actually, the beach was only empty until two cute teenage girls in bikinis showed up and started frolicking in the waves, and there was visible settlement in the form of a dilapidated bar whose hand-written menu read "Lunch Jerk Chicken Potato Salad $8.00 Chips & Burger $8.00 Smuggler Punch with a smile :)", and the cadillac used to ferry Queen Elizabeth around when she visited decades ago is decaying among the trees. That probably still counts as paradise.)

We went on a crazy hike around the entire western half of the island on my last and only day to explore here, along the beaches of the north side, found an artist's studio where we picked up a map and Jan arranged a place to stay over new years, past the Bomba Shack (home to a full-moon party involving legal psychedelic mushroom tea), up the mountain to the highest peak on the island, down the south side on the steepest roads I've ever seen in my life, and caught a ride home in a taxi-bus made from a couple of benches and an awning welded into the back of a pickup truck.

The taxi ride to the airport used up the last cash I had, the departure tax desk only took cash, the only ATM in the airport was telling me there was a problem with my requested transaction, and according to a taxi driver all the ATMs he could think of in an increasingly wide radius around the airport were out of order. While I was on the phone with my bank, failing to get a human being in order to verify that my card hadn't been stopped for some reason, the taxi driver came back and handed me $20 and his card.

Posted by nadia at 07:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The leaves are mostly gone from the trees, now.

At their best, the days are spectacular, bright and clear, cool without an edge, little fluffy clouds, worry-line bare branches reaching into the sky.

After a big storm the gardeners organize the leaves into long piles along the paths on campus in order to suck them up with truck-sized vacuum cleaners, and the classes of small children who mysteriously always seem to be touring the campus run crunching through them, screaming and laughing.

Recurrent headaches. Every time it happens I forget, I should really know better, and then I realize I'm in immediate danger of descending into non-functionality somewhere unfortunate, like a boomy flashy dance party in Manhattan, a noisy and bright hour and a half on the train away from sleep. The pills I was prescribed evaporate the pain, but I feel wrong for the next few days. I'm losing my nights.

I had an MRI. They injected me with rare earth metals, packaged me up on a tray in blankets, earplugs and ear padding, and loaded me into a tube in the machine, with a mirror above my eyes and an alarm in my hand for contact with the outside world. For all the precautions about the noise, it really wasn't much different from the construction outside my window.

I have "minimal nonspecific white matter abnormalities", which probably doesn't mean anything.

I realized that in the past year I've spent more than $600 on shoes, including one pair of snow boots, two pairs of normal shoes to replace the ones that I managed to misplace during Burning Man, and three pairs dancing shoes, the most recent being a stunning pair of pristine white satin standard shoes to break in before the Viennese Opera Ball. They're too beautiful to dance in.

For the first time ever I'm not going home for Thanksgiving.

Posted by nadia at 06:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Life has been busy.

There are school things.

I'm TAing this semester, the introductory programming course, which is called rather unspecifically "General Computer Science". I'm responsible for a "precept" (discussion section) of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed undergrads who are being taken on a super-fast-paced tour through everything in CS. In Java. Standing in front of a class is not nearly as difficult as I had thought it might be. My students are all really nice and smart and hard-working, and they ask lots of really good questions during class, and the light-speed pace of the class means that none of the material really sinks in enough for them to start asking hard questions.

Teaching is taking up almost all of my time.

I'm taking one course, algebraic methods in combinatorics. The mathematicians are startled that so many computer scientists have infiltrated their tower. The book, "Linear Algebra Methods in Combinatorics" is just one check for $30.15 to the University of Chicago away from your doorstep and is really beautiful.

I'm also taking introductory Russian, on the solemn promise to myself that I wouldn't work too hard in it. (Princeton offers neither Hungarian nor Norwegian, and Spanish was full.) I now know how to write my name in Cyrillic (Надя). Learning to write cursive Cyrillic is kind of a mind-bending experience: 't' is written 'm', 'd' is written 'g', that backwards N is written 'u' and pronounced 'i', that sort of thing. I'm recognizing a lot of words that must have been borrowed into Hungarian from Russian. In fact, it's extremely difficult to overcome the urge to speak Hungarian all the time while in Russian class.

But in actuality, I'm doing super-important research. Yeah.

I've started to get regular migraines. This is not pleasant. I've also been sleeping 10, 12, 16 hours a day, which oddly enough becomes as commendable to fellow grad students as sleep deprivation used to be. "Way to just... check out."

Last weekend I cut off about a foot of hair, taking it back to tailbone length. I did this by taking a pair of scissors to a party.

I have my own room in the old graduate college, and for the first time in a year and a half, some actual items of furniture that I own myself. Theoretically, my room could sleep up to six people on soft surfaces, so you should all come visit me.

This is Princeton. I live in a castle. My room overlooks the main courtyard and tower.

It's really quite pleasant when the construction isn't going on both sides of my room.

I eat breakfast and dinner every day in Proctor hall, which is really too magnificent for the food that is served in it. Last Thursday our dinner clique dressed up in our nicest clothes for dinner, thoroughly confusing many grad students who had difficulty understanding "just because".

I've been dancing a lot: the international social at Ballroom on Fifth, tango in Central Park, Millennium Hustle, tango in Philadelphia, ballroom lessons on Monday, tango lessons on Thursday. I own more pairs of dancing shoes than I do street shoes.

The weather is slipping gently into fall. It was late summer when I arrived, humid, warm, crickets and cicadas and birds and squirrels blending into a constant hum day and night, one particularly spectacular thunderstorm that took out the power for a good portion of the evening. The near-freezing temperatures that came along with the snowstorm that took out upstate New York last week appear to have quieted the last of the crickets.

The leaves have begun to turn.

When it's sunny it's like a blessing, these absolutely sparkling fall days that are not humid, not warm, not cold, just perfect. We went for a ride along the tow path on one of these.

Posted by nadia at 03:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I flew 26 hours from Hungary to Maui, and I had no jet lag whatsoever.

There was family, and food, shave ice and thai and barbecues, and lying on the beach, and sunburns, and snorkeling, and sea turtles, and the rise and fall of crashing waves, and a long walk from Kihei to the big beach.

Posted by nadia at 12:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

It was a trip involving many different forms of transportation.

We took the bus to Halhjem, then the ferry from Halhjem to Våge, then bicycled across the island to the cabin.

At this point, things are much the same as the trip to the cabin in January. Just subtract out the frost, add in some flowers, and you've got it.

The scenery is, of course, stupendous.

The next morning we packed up Jan's little sailboat and set off with vague plans to, like, camp out on some islands and stuff.

The weather was fabulous. It could have rained, or the wind could have disappeared for days, or blown too hard to sail. But it did none of those things, and our vague plans turned into an itinerary of epic proportions, at least when you scale for a four-day trip in a sailboat whose max speed is something like 12 km/hr.

I made a little map of our route. (I looked around for nice interfaces to input a custom path to Google maps and this is the best I found. But I can't extract the URL to take away the annoying rest of the site.)

We were sailing for ten, eleven hours a day. You'd think being in a slow-moving boat for that long would get boring, but somehow it didn't. The sky, the water, the rocky cliffs and trees along the coast are ever-changing.

The sea in these fjords is sometimes green, sometimes blue, sometimes gray, sometimes black, sometimes sparkly, sometimes glassy smooth, sometimes rippled, sometimes choppy, sometimes full of meter-high swells.

I watched for jellyfish. Clear ones with four pinkish round pads that don't sting humans. In shallower areas there would be thousands upon thousands of them spread evenly through the water, disappearing as pale ellipses into the depths. Red ones with tentacles that do sting. I only saw two blue ones.

I got bitten by: midges, mosquitos, klegg ("horseflies", but they're evil and look like skinny bees), ticks, stinging ants. I learned to like the adventure of leaning myself out over the edge of the boat to pee. (I haven't quite mastered the art of peeing while standing up, and when you gotta go you gotta go, especially when you've been staying properly hydrated and you're six hours from the next stop and completely surrounded by water.)

The first night we camped on the most adorable little island, the boat tied up in a shallow green inlet, the tent set up in a perfect little grassy area underneath the trees. Someone had put in a lot of effort to make a nice little dock area that was now clearly abandoned, and at the highest point of the hill we found a modern house foundation, complete with beautiful fireplace, and the wreckage of the rest of the house strewn about.

I'm told that Norway, (much like California) now has laws against building within 50m of the coast, except for structures like docks and boathouses that obviously need to be on water, in order to preserve the coast for the use of everybody (like us). This has resulted in the phenomenon of luxurious three-story "boathouses" with big windows and balconies placed improbably far from the water, and most likely in the apparently reluctant destruction of the house on the island, which was small enough that no structure was more than 50m from water.

The other half of the island appeared to be used by a farmer to keep his goats. I guess goats can't swim, so an island is kind of like a pasture with built-in fences.

Night was never really dark, just sort of an extended sunsetdawn.

The second night we camped in the ruins of a thousand-year old monastery. It's a national monument (open only in the summer, tours available to groups of eight or more), but I was assured that nobody would care. Nobody did.

On the island at night, there were the cries of birds, the quiet murmur of someone's dinner party on a balcony watching the dusk of midnight, the occasional baa of a discontented sheep, the occasional moo of a cow, and the rising-falling engines of the rånerer, the kids who get drunk on a Friday night and drive their souped-up scooters back and forth across the island. And that was all.

The island shares a single police car among several islands, so when the ferry came in, the scooters roared over to the dock to see if the police car was on it.

In the morning we sailed out very slowly, gliding silently past the tiny farm where the sheep were kept and a woman was fluffing hay in a field with a rake. Absolutely surreal.

The third night, we rowed into a shallow inlet when the wind died in the fjord, where Jan managed to spear a flounder with a hunting weapon fashioned out of a paring knife, the rudder handle, a chocolate wrapper, and a small piece of rope.

I suppose being a carnivore is slightly more understandable if you're capable of killing the creature yourself, as he did when he cut its head off with the knife when it failed to actually be dead after an hour of sitting in a plastic bag.

Anyways, it was a charming little camping spot.

The beach was covered in perfect shells, two halves still attached.

And then we sailed back to Tysnes.

Posted by nadia at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Sun feels like a blessing here where it rains something like 270 days a year.

I haven't seen full darkness in more than a week. The sun dips behind the mountain at 10:30 pm, but at 1:30 am it's still dusk. I haven't stayed up later than that.

This is the stave church by light. I'd only seen it at night before. There was a concert inside when we walked by, a woman singing bridal songs.

I've been cooking a lot. Fløte poteter, salad, a birthday dinner of four kinds of pizza and a massive chocolate cake, a fondue party with cheese and chocolate.

Off for a week at the cabin.

Posted by nadia at 09:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Episode 432, in which I experience winter.

My birthday was quiet. Jan took me to the only vegetarian restaurant he managed to find in Bergen, an Elvis-themed fast food place called Viva las Vegis. I got two presents this year: a beaded scarf and a large prime number.

I walked up to the top of Ulriken, the tallest mountain around Bergen, on a mostly-clear day. The top was clouded over by the time I got up, and had cleared by the time I got back down.

Being away from Princeton has given me a newfound enthusiasm to be back.

My new strategy will be to appreciate this place by spending as much time away as possible, so that while I'm here I will embrace a monastic (nunntastic?) life of quiet scholarship.

Since I left Bergen, I've been cultivating my jet lag, going to sleep between 10 and 11 pm, and waking up between 6 and 7 am. We'll see how long it lasts.

I like the IAS. There was a conference all last week, on discrete math, Lie groups, expanders, representations, or whatever the theme is this year, many of whose talks I crashed. I like that many of the speakers have what I characterize as "math charisma", the ability to be precise and lively at the same time, to talk while writing on the blackboard, to tell a story through problems and proofs, and a tendency to punctuate equations with emphatic periods. I like that the mathematicians occasionally start attacking each other during the talks, and I like that Peter Sarnak was often there to heckle the speakers. (After someone presented an O(n^22)-time algorithm, he asked "Have you implemented this? You computer scientists always come up with these algorithms and you never implement them." To which someone suggested "Give it to a grad student.")

And for the first time I walked around Einstein's woods.

The dining hall has apparently decided that it's "Food service worker appreciation month". There are baskets of orange plastic bracelets that say "Food Mood Attitude" on them.

I've seen the name Fourier come up in computer science contexts multiple times in the past week. So I asked Boaz for a 30-second summary, and he gave me an hour-long lecture with input from two other people who happened to be in the office. Turns out that Fourier was meant not really in the analysis-and-signal-processing sense that I had been thinking of, and instead in the algebra sense, in which characters provide a convenient change of basis whose elements have some useful properties. Kind of like eigenvectors.

So the continuous Fourier transform is really just easy power series, and the discrete Fourier transform is really just easy algebra, and all of math is actually talking about the same thing. Why doesn't anybody ever tell the engineers this?

Someone pointed out at breakfast that only people from California say "smoke out". People from other places in the US appear to say "smoke up". This has led to much mocking of my dialect in the form of overcorrected phrases like "I'm fed out" and "blow the building out" and "fucked out" and so on.

I went tango dancing. I think I've found my dance.

Tonight Leo wanted someone to try out his "personal dance kit", an mp3 player connected to an FM transmitter and headphones and a FM radio connected to another set of headphones.

It was 1 am. It'd been snowing nonstop for the last 12 hours.

So we waltzed alone in the silent courtyard of Rocky college, snowflakes swirling around us, enclosed in our private world of cinematic music (think "Nara" by E.S. Posthumus), crunching a woven path through six inches of virgin snow on the ground, lit gothic arches and windows spinning as we turned. Magic.

There is something that I want to capture in these pictures, the luminance of snow, the delicate highlighting of the tree branches, worry-lines of barren branches against the sky. Am I being repetitive? Do you see?

Posted by nadia at 03:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jan took me to spend the weekend at his family's cabin on the island of Tysnes.

We took the bus from Bergen to the ferry, and the ferry to the island.

As we crossed the water, the rising sun lit up snowy mountain peaks and fjords all around us. (Linked large panorama.)

Then we rode our bicycles across the island, mostly alone on the one-lane road except for a burst of traffic every time a new ferry arrived. ("What kind of idiots are out bicycling at this time of year?")

The road was beautiful, crossing up and down hills, along bays, through fields and forests, along blasted out rock cliffs dripping with moss, mini-waterfalls, and icicles. Places that lay in perpetual shadow were frosted over in a kind of winter wonderland that melted away where the sun hit.

The path was frosty moss.

The cabin looks out over a small inlet that was partly frozen over. When we weren't making noise, there was only silence, except for the slow cracking of the ice as the tide moved in and out.

Even the smallest noises echo against the hills.

The cabin is lovely, very cozy. It took us all day to get it warm. Here's a gratuitous picture of fire.

We went out in a rowboat. The water is so calm you can see the marine life really well. We didn't see any fish, but I did see big red anemones, and big round red spikey things that apparently roll around on their spikes, eat fish, and make for good soup, some starfish, huge clam shells, and lots of mussels and seaweed.

And as always, hills in the mist, glassy water, and a fishing boat that appeared, when it passed us by, to be (illegally?) trawling for fish.

We went hiking in the forest, where hiking means tottering over narrow little compressed paths through the partly-frozen layers of moss and mud and tree branches that would creak and crunch ominously before plunging me unexpectedly ankle-deep in mud.

We walked across a frozen inlet. You could look down and see seaweed smashed against the underside of the ice.

On the other side of the trees was a wide expanse of frozen sea. In the picture you can see the rocks we threw onto the ice like little kids to see how solid it was. It probably could have held our weight, but I wasn't about to test it. (Linked panorama.)

That day the clouds had returned and melted most of the frost, but on the way backto the cabin we passed by several tree chandeliers of icicles draped over a stream.

And of course the sun set on the way home.

Posted by nadia at 02:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The super-friendly woman at the airport check-in line recognized me from last time. We chatted a bit. She told me she was a cardiologist until she got tired of watching old people die, so she got a job loading cargo onto planes which she loved until she had an accident. After the accident the airline put her upstairs. I told her I hoped it got better. She pulled up her sleeve to show me a wire cage around her wrist and said "Oh, it's permanent."

I watched the sun rise in the Amsterdam airport. Some people stopped to take pictures of a pretty spectacularly pink sky, most kept going on their way without looking out the windows. In the airport there are many nice areas with ideal sleeping chairs set facing the windows. My favorite is by the D wing.

In Bergen something amazing happened: the clouds cleared for the better part of a week. The lake froze over and everything was hoary with frost. I was hoping it would get solid enough for skating, but it never did.

Blue skies! Such a novelty.

Morten took me on a long walk at night, down the blasted out path of an old train line to Grieg's (the composer) house, which sits alone on a small peninsula surrounded by water and hills. It would have been nicer a hundred years ago, he said, when there were no other houses to destroy the view, but at night the lights glittered on the water and I didn't think it was that bad. Then we wound back around, unexpectedly up through Jan's parents' backyard, past the stave church again, and home.

It seems incredible to me to live within walking distance of your family, your friends, and the schools you attended from elementary through graduate school, and in a place where buying a beautiful flat of your very own is not only the reasonable but apparently expected thing to do on a grad student salary.

One afternoon I walked to the aquarium. At the end of the peninsula is a totem pole, a gift from the city of Seattle, an appropriately rainy sister city relation. On the way back, I discovered that the best place to get a nice picture of the harbor and Ulriken looking snowy in the backround seems to be a parking lot.

I got a bike from the used bike shop next to the math department. It's an appropriately funky place. The guy who showed us bikes told us "Here the customer is always wrong." and when we were on our way out he launched into a 15-minute sermon on how modern medicine is death and how diseases were actually just psychological disturbances. You could actually tick off the fallacies as he talked: "Most great ideas face some resistance when they're new, and we're certainly getting a lot of resistance, so we must be on the right track." "The doctor asked a whole bunch of cancer patients if they had experienced a 'loss' in their life, and all of them had. Cancer is actually an expression of this 'loss'."

Posted by nadia at 09:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

During lunch we took the funicular to the top of Fløyen. I took a bunch of pictures.

These panoramas are put together by Canon's crappy software, because I'm logged out of the fast machine with Matlab now. You can see the blurred transitions in all of them. Click for larger view.

This is the view from the bottom, same picture as before, except now with snow.

No, the pond is not bent in real life.

This is the view from the top.

I'm staying all the way over on the left, not far from one of the ponds.

The university is among the big buildings to the left of center, which include the "Realfagbygget", or (I think) "Natural Sciences Building". I giggled when we walked by. Nobody else had noticed.

Right smack in the middle is the pond I took the above picture from. Just above and to the left of it is a large black and gray building which is a concert hall. It's supposed to look like a piano from above. Below it is a museum.

On the right is the harbor. You can see the white tent that the "outdoor" fish market occupies in winter (a big tourist attraction in summer, I guess), and the big white sailboat which is owned by the city and apparently still used in military training.

Also, this is the first time I've seen the sun in nearly a week.

Posted by nadia at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The bad: Princeton's finals are held after Christmas break. Every moment I spent not working during Christmas was guilt-ridden, and I suffered for it later. The good: All of my finals are take-home or projects. I don't technically have to be in Princeton to work.

In an amazing fit of pre-work procrastination, I cleaned my room at home. I unpacked the five boxes of books that have been sitting on my floor for the past year, recycled four years of schoolwork, and cleaned off the desk which has been piled with junk for the past five years.

I did my last algorithms problem set and the take-home final. I went to bab5. I started my computer vision project. I went dancing. I visited Hixie in his new Mountain View location, and he showed me his train set, which covers his entire living room. For scale, you can see the two laptops that control it on the left side.

This image is actually a blended panorama of four pictures, which I created with my computer vision project. I actually intended to try Canon's built-in image stitching software because I figured it would work better, but then I learned that it won't accept images taken in an arbitrary configuration. I linked to the larger version, where you can see better how distorted the left side is, and the imperfect blending along the seams of the tracks. (Or if you're into model trains, you can admire the trains.)

I went to Berkeley and saw many dear friends, both expected and unexpected. Ping gave me a short lesson in poi-spinning. It's easier than it looks. I went to Thai brunch. The weather was gorgeous.

I went to Zachary's with Sarah and Elliot. I went back home.

I programmed in Matlab. I flew to Princeton. I worked the whole plane flight.

This is what Princeton looked like the week before I left, which is approximately what I was expecting to see when I got back.

Instead, it looked like this:

It was sunny and warm enough to walk around without a coat. I prepared my presentation slides. I worked on the cryptography project. I gave my presentation. I flew to Europe. In Amsterdam I paid for wireless to do what I hoped was a last-minute review of the cryptography project before it was turned in, and ended up proving on two hours of sleep that the whole idea I was writing up was fundamentally incompatible with our goals. I flew to Bergen.

My first impression was of mountains, and water, clouds and rain and rocky grassy hillsides. For those unfamiliar with Norway's geography, Bergen is pretty far south and right on the west coast, which means that it gets a lot of light in the winter, and the sea (and jet stream which is in danger of stopping from global warming) keeps the weather relatively mild, where relatively mild means around freezing and rainy.

I think this is the typical tourist view of Bergen, which is of prettily-colored houses going up a hill. (Actually the real tourist view is the row red and orange fish houses along the harbor, but I haven't really been that close to them.)

Notice that the sky is gray. According to a weather-statistics site I found, it rains something like 270 days a year here. When it's not raining, it's gray. And in the winter, it's dark. So the following picture is a slightly more accurate depiction of what I see of the city.

Last night it snowed, which would be an improvement over the miserable rain of the past week except that it turned to slush immediately upon hitting the ground. But actually, it's not so bad. It turns the pre-dawn hours blue.

When I wake up in the morning, it's dark. Dawn comes just about as I get into work at 9 am, though today we were a bit later. The moon was just setting over the mountain as we walked to the bus stop.

It's dark again when we leave to eat dinner at 4 or 5 pm.

I did my cryptography final and my project report for vision. I wanted to start my programming languages final this morning, but I guess it's not available yet, and it's not yet morning on the East Coast.

Norway is a funny country. It only has about 4.5 million people, which means that "national" means something very different than it does in the US. For example, the front-page article in one of the Bergen newspapers a couple days ago was a story about a girl who froze her hand to her freezer, complete with a picture of her bandaged hand covering the full front page. It even made national news. (Tabloid schmabloid.)

Now, admittedly, a US paper might run an article on a similar topic, but it would focus on the "rising tide of hand injuries due to freezers" and feature national statistics on injuries, interviews with industry spokesmen and freezer victims, and investigative reporting into the lives of the workers in the Chinese factories producing 90% of the freezers owned by Americans.

One night we walked home past the stave church. (Also a panorama.)

So the story is that it was an 800 year old wooden church, perfectly preserved. (According to the internet, the stave churches were so designed because it elevated them off the ground and kept the wood from rotting. I guess it was also coated with tar.) Then it was burned down by a satanist on June 6, 1992. They found a charred rabbit inside. He was sent to jail for murder and other things.

But it just so happened that they had complete plans of every single piece of the church, so they chopped down a bunch of endangered trees and rebuilt the whole thing down to the last detail. Why did they have a complete catalog of every piece? Because the church was originally built somewhere else, and a century or two ago the townspeople were going to knock it down to build a new church, so some rich guy bought the whole thing, had it deconstructed piece by piece, kept detailed records, and reconstructed it in Bergen.

I'm going to go study architecture. No, the boring kind.

Posted by nadia at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Christmas with family. To be precise, something like four celebrations over three days, involving four parents, one sibling, three grandparents, four aunts and uncles, and four cousins. (That summary makes it seem almost like you could choose one from each category per day, but strangely that's not actually how it works.)

The last week or so was spent with my step-grandparents who have a beautiful house on a dammed lake in the Sierra foothills, gold country, away from internet and therefore rather unexpectedly from my ability to do the work I brought along. (Tomorrow I will regret this when I begin real work on the three take-home finals, two projects, and one problem set that are all due within the first couple weeks of January.)

It rained pretty much the whole time.

I read, slept twelve hours a day, watched old movies, weighed myself constantly. Bathroom scales are so interesting when one doesn't normally live near one. My weight fluctuates something like five pounds in the course of a day. I'm somewhat at a loss why people often appear to consider losing or gaining a pound to be significant.

On Thursday it was clear enough to go for a walk down the Yuba river. Everything is green because it is winter and raining.

The river was high and muddy and churning. But not, apparently, as high as a few years ago when it had snowed and a warm storm melted off the snow.

Yet another storm came through on Friday, and on Saturday morning the lake level had risen above the dock.

We checked out how the dam was coping.

And then we drove home, past golden waves of grain, cows, minor flooding.

This kind of sums up how I feel about Sacramento, although I really shouldn't be so mean because I've really only been there once and I mostly remember looking at trains. Besides, it's probably a good idea to isolate politicians among cows. And freeways. In a flood plain.

Around Vacaville, traffic came to a complete halt. We backed up along the shoulder to get off the highway, bought a map from a gas station, and detoured along side roads past Fairfield.

When we got back on 80, it was clear that it was flooded completely across, and contrary to what the gas station attendant had said, no lanes were getting through at all, in either direction. 680 was also closed for flooding.

I haven't looked at the news, but I suspect the last day of yet more rain hasn't helped.

Around Emeryville the sun was setting beautifully across the bay over the San Francisco skyline, providing one of the saddest missed-picture-opportunities in a long time. Here it is, un-photoshopped but cropped in a way to suggest the long-sky effect that Ryan sometimes goes for.

In honor of my new camera, I've linked to the originals of every picture, so you can debate that cropping decision.

And later, over Oakland, the city skyline still visible through the shipping crane animals, and off to the right the slender row of cranes for the construction of the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge.

For New Year's Eve I went dancing at the ball in Berkeley, had vegetarian chili at Au Coquelet at 1 am before taking bart to San Francisco to spend the rest of the evening and a good portion of the next day cuddled up with good friends, a wonderful day in nearly every respect.

Posted by nadia at 06:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This snow thing is, in my humble opinion, a vast improvement over the dead winter look that the campus had been cultivating of late.

The morning after it snows is particularly lovely--everything fresh, and clean, and sparkly, as snow-clouds rain off of the trees in the wind and everything begins to melt in the sun.

Nature must realize that I approve, since it's snowed three times in the past week.

The first day it snowed, I decided it was a good excuse to break out the real winter jacket. I put my hands in the pockets and pulled out: 103 forints, a receipt for a purchase of 1884 forints made at Rothschild Elelmiszer at 11:04 pm on March 14, and a folded-up flier about Hungarian freedom and March 15.

It's like an annual time capsule.

The temperature hovers just around freezing, slightly above during the day, slightly below at night. The snow does this charming thing where it melts into puddles during the day that refreeze into ice slicks at night, ready to kill the unsuspecting victim who walks down stairs a little too quickly.

Fortunately, the Princeton University Printing & Mailing found it appropriate to email all faculty, staff, and graduate students on "Avoiding slips and falls this winter". They take such good care of us here. I've already mastered the compacted-snow shuffle, despite the fact that my boots were recently derided as "fake".

They're also incredibly fastidious about the plowing. There are armies of workers out in trucks, tractors, with shovels. It's like aural confirmation of a snow in the morning, the rumble of the plow motor interspersed with the bang! bang! bang! that it makes when it jerks the shovel to detach the snow.

Apparently the golf course separating the grad college from the rest of campus is the premier (read: only) sledding spot in the area. My way to class is obstructed by crowds of bundled-up children with plastic coasters and sleds and inner tubes and fake snowboards who go down the hillside over and over again until the snow has been stripped down to the grass.

Manhattan is a mess of slush. In a moment of distraction, I stepped ankle-deep into one of those dirty slush-puddles whose bumpy black surface looks, to the untrained eye, exactly like asphalt. Fake boots to the rescue.

(I'll be slightly more open than usual and give you the following real translation of this entry: "I've been working just about nonstop every day for the past two weeks, breakfast to bedtime, meals and an hour of Norwegian exercises before bed my only recreation. I went to a couple of nice talks this week, though, including one at IAS where I took a few pictures on the walk over. I would have posted about Thanksgiving, but I ended up pulling two semi-all-nighters sandwiching my flight back to New Jersey, so that went right out. Grad school isn't that bad, though. Assuming I don't fail any of my classes.")

Posted by nadia at 11:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Home now. Happy Thanksgiving.

I've been feeling homesick lately.

It's becoming increasingly difficult to keep from screaming out "The east coast is a soulless pit full of pale people who dress in tasteful collared shirts and short skirts and pointy-toed high heels all carefully matched in seasonally-appropriate color schemes and live in boxy houses and who relax by sitting in bars and getting drunk and only work hard in search of some kind of external validation and eat beautiful food that tastes uniformly like cardboard and nobody touches anyone unless it's sexual," where by "east coast" I actually mean the ivy-league Princeton microcosm that I spend most of my time in.

I mean, I know that isn't entirely fair. East coast people who get stuck in California complain about the lack of seasons and black-and-white cookies.

But really, instead of mountains and sea, there are strip malls and wimpy trees. What am I supposed to do?

The weather is dipping towards winter. Last week the temperature dropped 30 degrees within a couple hours, and when I woke up yesterday morning the sidewalk was dotted with frozen plates of ice covering the puddles from the rain the day before.

When I took my bike out, the gear shift and brakes were stuck until I pulled on the cables and little chunks of ice fell out.

With other students from the bay area, we reminisce about cheap food that doesn't suck, about living in Berkeley co-ops, about Gaskell ball. With students who aren't, I end up trying to explain what exactly it is about long-haired bi Pagan poly geeks that I miss, and tell probably inappropriate stories about food orgy and naked hot tubbing that are sure to brand me as a hairy hippy for years to come.

Am I so fundamentally a west-coast person that I'll never be happy anywhere else?

(Update: Mike, native east-coaster and former Princetonite, responds to my holier-than-thou grousing.)

Posted by nadia at 09:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I never feel so alive as when I'm somewhere else, which is somewhat unfortunate given that I've only been here two months, surely not enough time for Princeton to have become the "here" from which I need to escape.

In any case, a weekend trip to the Dominican Republic, on a whim, because it was the cheapest place to fly in the Caribbean, and the Caribbean is quite a bit warmer than here.

I flew first class on the way down. This was fortunate since this fact, along with my lack of baggage, was apparently the deciding factor in their eventually letting me on the plane after I finally got to the ticket counter and a human exactly one minute after the one-hour cutoff for check-in on international flights.

I need to get a scannable passport.

First class is pretty spiffy. I could stretch my legs all the way out and not touch the bulkhead in front of me. The food was also pretty tasty. And the flight attendants were obsequiously nice.

I read a good portion of The Mind-Body Problem and identified with way too much of the first half, not always a flattering comparison.

Most of the details of the trip we trusted to serendipity. I checked a guidebook on the Caribbean out of the library (someone had already checked out the Lonely Planet Haiti/Dominican Republic) and we skimmed the skinny chapter on the Dominican Republic in the plane and decided to take a bus to the coast.

After passing through passport control, a counter offered free drinks. What a country.

From the airport we negotiated a heart-stopping taxi ride to one of the bus companies in Santiago listed in the guidebook (Did the driver quote his price in dollars or pesos? We didn't even know the exchange rate, and it wasn't posted at the airport. Ultimately we did find it out, around 30 pesos to the dollar, and deduced that we did correctly pay in dollars.), and bought bus tickets to Sosua, which appeared to be on the coast.

Everything we saw was sort of cheerfully run-down, shacks next to strip malls next to empty lots exploding with greenery next to half-built but for all appearances abandoned hotels, poles of election posters, fruit stands piled with bananas and candy next to entire zoos of rattan animals (from the bus, a rattan llama with an enormous rattan penis straddling a second rattan llama, at which the girl sitting next to me and I traded amused glances), big trucks driving along piled with men standing or sitting on whatever they were carrying in the back, a mule tied up on the green hillside right next to the road.

Most of the time I didn't quite feel comfortable whipping out my camera on the street, so I have no pictures.

Neither of us speaks any Spanish at all. I feel like I can understand a fair amount in context, particularly in writing, what with all the French and a bit of basic vocabulary from existing in California, but I couldn't produce anything if you asked me, and my inability to count higher than fifteen made me pretty useless in terms of practical communication. In contrast to everywhere I've been in Europe, people for the most part tried to speak Spanish first, and would only reluctantly switch into whatever English they knew when it was made abundantly clear that we were clueless. I always feel guilty traveling somewhere where I don't speak the language. For some reason it would be more okay if I weren't American, but here I felt like I was just confirming the monolingual idiocy of my people.

The security guards we saw all carried shotguns.

We arrived in Sosua, and were immediately besieged by dozens of men offering us taxi or scooter rides to our hotel, and with some amount of bewilderment accepted a taxi ride to the (tourist) "center". (In no case did any of the taxis we rode in have a meter. We just ended up pre-negotiating a price for our destination.)

We chose a direction to walk in, within half a block found a nice-looking hotel, went in, and arranged a room for $30 a night. The owner (who was Hungarian and used to live in Montreal--we chatted in French and I shocked her by thanking her in Hungarian) drew us a little map with directions to nearby beaches, most of which went along the lines of "Go this way, walk through the all-inclusive resort past the guard who won't stop white people and go down to the beach." She told us companies offering snorkel tours from the main beach bring tourists to an old shipwreck that was just 50 meters off a much smaller beach, so we could just swim out if we wanted.

We went off in search of dinner. The town is apparently expat central, and from the restaurants you'd think you were in eastern Europe: pasta, pizza, goulash, schnitzel, fried Camembert. Menus were in German and English, sometimes both intermixed, we found an entirely Dutch bar and a place that had a Finnish menu. Dominicans yelled out at us "My friend! Remember me?" "Let me show you..." "You lookin' for somethin? Marijuana? Cocaine?" An old man we followed back to our hotel was pursued by a prostitute who cried "Papa! Papa!"

The hotel owner told us stories. There was a fuel crisis, so the government ordered gas stations to close on weekends to decrease consumption. (If there was a fuel crisis now, you couldn't tell from the youths constantly zipping around on their scooters yelling out offers of rides for however-many pesos at tourists.) Buses would run out of gas. Police cars would run out of gas. (We saw the most beat-up 80s-era police car imaginable when our taxi stopped at a gas station, stenciled letters on the side reading "Inspector".) Eventually someone died on a weekend when there were no ambulances with enough gas to get him to the hospital. So they added some exceptions to the law.

The hotel was charming. We watched two older American men frolicking in the pool and speaking heavily accented baby Spanish with two Dominican girls (how much had they paid, I wonder).

At night I awoke to rain pounding down on the roof. The second night towards 4 or 5 am, someone knocked very quietly but very persistently on the door of the room for several minutes. I didn't answer the door, too sleepy to remember it, but when it was answered there was a girl standing there, a prostitute, and a man behind her. Is this how they solicit?

The beaches were indeed stunning.

The water was warm, bright blue, perfectly clear, and quite calm. Swimming out into the water, you could look right down to the gently rippled sandy bottom ten, twenty, thirty feet below. Three of the four beaches we found were practically deserted. From the second beach we swam along the rocks to the third, then looked out and saw diving boats clustering not so far off from the shore as expected, so we swam out and just looked down through the water at the reef and blue and yellow fish swarming around the scuba divers on the bottom.

The sun set over the beach.

We ate in an overpriced resort restaurant with a fantastic view. Both nights the electricity flickered on and off in the restaurant as we ate.

At night the moon lit up the clouds. It's impossible to take a picture.

The next morning we woke up at an ungodly hour to take the bus back to Santiago. The driver was listening to the radio, nonstop merengue at 7am. At one point outside of Puerto Plata the small towns flying by outside gave way to an *absolutely ginormous* unmarked gate and fence, followed shortly by impressively large and clean gates with the names of well-known resorts. So that's where they all are.

Once back in Santiago, ahead of schedule thanks to some generous padding, we picked a random direction and walked until we found a cafe open for breakfast. The waitress spoke no English, but the family next to us used to live in New York, so they translated for us. It was a fantastic brunch, fried eggs and cheese, plantains, avocado from a man selling them on the street, and cow foot soup, for about a tenth of the price of the tourist restaurants in Sosua.

And then it was time to fly home. The airport is completely open-air, and families plastered themselves against the upstairs windows to watch their loved ones boarding the plane.

Posted by nadia at 01:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Sunday was absolutely stunning, warm, clear, sunny.

I was almost ready to forgive the horrid weather of the past few weeks, when I realized that it felt exactly like Christmas in California.

In any case, we went for a ride along the tow path. Lots of pretty leaves, lots of people out enjoying the nice weather and some sort of crew race that was happening on the lake.

It was less populated a few highways away from Princeton.

Does that last picture look funny to you? It's upside down.

Posted by nadia at 08:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

News flash: when all four classes have assignments due in the same week, I don't have time for much else.

Apologies, dear neglected blog.

There is a golf course separating the grad college from the rest of the campus. Every day I walk past rows of golf carts neatly parked in a row, and evil thoughts enter my mind. Have *you* played GTA: Vice City?

These are the leaves on my way through campus:

I bought a bicycle. It is beautiful and shiny and quiet. Every day I lock it next to the rusted-out hulls of older bicycles and know that soon enough it will join their rusty ranks. Some people park their bicycles under the archways, just locked to themselves or to nothing at all. This scares the heck out of me. As does leaving my (ground floor, unbarred) windows open during the day. Perhaps I spent too long in Berkeley.

A single branch of yellow leaves in the rain:

I like having an office to work in. When I go there I can enforce a rule of no distractions besides email. The sound of the little Unix-beep brings such warmth to my heart.

The trees outside of the CS building all turned yellow one day. Then the rain knocked off all their leaves:

It's a small, small world. One night over dinner, I was discussing the difference between American and international style ballroom, and got up to demonstrate a foxtrot feather-step. Later a guy came up to me and asked if I danced. We chatted, first-year, CS department, blah blah, and he said "Oh, you're the one who was in Hungary." I asked how he knew, and he said he was from Budapest and a dancer acquaintance told him about a friend who was starting at Princeton. When I asked who it was, he said "Glasses, brown hair to about here" and motioned to his chin. I can count the number of you who will get this on one hand.

The engineering library has big glass windows:

I ran out of anecdotes, so here are some big glass library windows at night:

I saw a political analyst talk about why political revolutions need to have impetus from the population, or in other words, why this Iraq thing is going to fail. It was in the Woodrow Wilson School, or "Woody Woo". The lecture hall was lined with wood cut from logs and arranged so they formed symmetric patterns on the wall.

This is the school at night, on my way home from the department:

They paid me. I looked at the amount on the check. It seemed like such an enormous quantity of money, so I amused myself by calculating how much disposable income that gave me per day. I spend that much per week, maybe, and that's because I'm being extravagant. Maybe I'll travel around the world.

Ghost clothes in the fogged-out windows of J.Crew. Perhaps it's time to turn down the air conditioning.

Posted by nadia at 05:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A family picnic at the beach.

We went to Natural Bridges, which, in addition to the natural bridges (of which only one survives), is where the monarch butterflies come to do their thing in the eucalyptus trees.

We spread out our blankets and ate sandwiches and guacamole and cookies. We took pictures of things. Everyone in my family takes pictures. This is my little sister Maddie with her camera. It's bigger than she is.

This is the seaside of my youth. A proper beach.

A proper beach is littered with massive piles of kelp that dry out and rot on the sand, attracting swarms of flies.

The water here is cold, even in late August, cold enough that you really probably want a wet suit if you're going to be doing anything serious in the water. So most people just splash around. But an impressive number were actually swimming, or more accurately, letting themselves be submerged when the waves came crashing down.

I was surprised that it was sunny. After a few hours, the fog threatened to come back in from the ocean.

I walked down along the cliffs to investigate the tide pools.

The water erosion makes abstract patterns in the sandstone.

The tide was coming in, so it was dangerous to get too close to the interesting tide pools, but I did see some anemones and tiny crabs.

Flash back to elementary school and our class trips to visit the tide pools in Half Moon Bay.

I met a group of high school aged girls. One of them was having difficulty crossing a section where the water had eroded a channel all the way to the cliff and the only way to pass was to jump down and climb back up before the next wave came crashing through, or cling to the cliff and step across a couple of scary ledges. They asked me to take pictures of them. I said I would email them, and we didn't have a pen, but one of the girls had a lip liner so we took turns writing our email addresses on each other's forearms in brown lip liner pencil.

Later the most outgoing one told me they were from a group home, and she had just gotten out of jail and was stuck there until her father or grandmother could get themselves a stable enough living situation. She told me, "I want to go to college, I want to have a house of my own, I want to be a photographer, I want to be a beautician, I want to be a computer technician, I can hold down two full-time jobs; I've been hustling since I was a kid, I want to move in with my boyfriend." All this from a 16 year old with thick black eyeliner and shell-like green toenail polish. I found myself reciting platitudes: "Find yourself the nerdiest friends you can, spend all your time on your schoolwork, and go to college." She said she would write to me.

Digital cameras are a great way to make friends.

--

I bought three pairs of shoes today, doubling the effective number of shoes I own.

Packed, ready, and weighed, leaving for Burning Man at 10 am tomorrow. "Our camp "Comfort" will be near the 3 o'clock plaza, close to the BRC volunteer fire station."

Posted by nadia at 03:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday afternoon: stunningly beautiful. Your choices are a. homework or b. a leisurely walk across the chain bridge, up the hill to Buda castle, through gardens and courtyards and paths to the f