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 (4)

For the next two weeks I'll be in a sailboat in the Caribbean.

We're leaving for Antigua tomorrow, and setting out for Panama as soon as possible.

I have in my bag yellow fever vaccination papers, anti-malarial medicine, anti-seasickness drugs, antibiotics, a spare GPS, unopened nautical charts, precisely one pair of pants, A Continent of Islands, Dove, The Discrepancy Method, and Learn Spanish in a Hurry.

June 11-17 I will be in San Diego.

Posted by nadia at 11:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The taxi driver offered us a joint. Seriously, he just passed a fat one back to us in the rear seats of the rickety minivan he's swerving around in the traffic. One of the girls squashed two to a seat in the middle, of some sort of nebulous relationship to the driver or the Canadian guy with a backpack and a ratty blond ponytail up front who'd also mysteriously ended up in the car, helpfully hands back a lighter. We raise our eyebrows at each other and try to figure out how one politely refuses the offer without damaging the Caribbean goodwill.

Fortunately we arrive at the water taxi terminal in one piece (well, four) and take the boat to Caye Caulker.

Caye Caulker is amazing, the sort of place that manages to be an island paradise with an extensive (if funky) tourist infrastructure without actually seeming to lose a semblance of authenticity and sincere friendliness. It's a tiny island, you can walk from one end of the tourist area to the other in five or ten minutes, and from one end to the very other in less than an hour. There are no cars to speak of, just golf carts and bicycles swerving around on the sandy roads. We were told the cayes to the north had problems with golf cart traffic jams, but there was none of that on Caye Caulker.

Our hotel was minimalist: a room with three beds, bathroom with cold-water shower down the hall, $25 a night for four people. We found it by wandering around for a morning. If you're staying for longer with more people, you can rent a house for less. You can rent a bike to explore the island for $7 a day. All the restaurants we ate in were charming, tasty, and cheap. There's a bar where the upstairs terrace has swings for seats.

The houses in the village brightly colored and picturesque, a small power plant in the middle producing all the power and quite a bit of noise to boot, men swerving around at high speed on bicycles far too small for them, little kids and dogs playing on the street until late at night, girls on sundresses on bicycles in the dust looking ever so much like Burning Man, palms bent against the ever-present trade winds.

In short, the kind of place that twenty-somethings trade amongst each other. "It's cool, man. Check it out."

For our part, we spent a lot of time on the porch of the house that the Livejournal team was occupying for the week.

We paddled around and snorkled at the "split", a channel ripped between the north and south pieces of the island by hurricane Hattie in the 60s. When Sam gashed himself open on something in the water, a bouncing rasta-man with long dreads brought a first-aid kit, then bounced nearby as we mopped up the blood. He had ugly scars across his stomach, he told us, from getting robbed at knifepoint in Belize City. "I don't like it there, much better here." he told us.

He bounced away and was later seen being thrown off the dock into the water by blonde girls in bikinis that he'd tried to throw in first.

I swam across the split to explore the other side of the island, consisting largely of mud, aggressive mosquitoes, a handful of houses, a few more houses under construction, lots for sale.

We splurged on a trip to the Mayan ruins at Lamanai. We were picked up at the water taxi terminal by the taciturn brother of the normal guide and his girlfriend who ferried us awkwardly and wordlessly across the country, stopping at regular intervals to pour water on the engine. We were then loaded on a speedboat full of other tourists and followed the speedboat trail up the river at high speed. (Any stories we were told about seeing "animals" on this "jungle tour" were greatly exaggerated. We did see the Mennonites, though, who were fishing on the river in the afternoon and sitting in their finery in a horse buggy on the shore.

Our guide for the ruins themselves recited the stories of the ruins and their excavation with great gravitas, often repeating several synonyms of a word for greater effect. We were told how the Maya civilization collapsed in the middle ages, but Lamanai was inhabited long enough for the Spanish and the English to find people live there, and remains one of the only Mayan sites to retain its original name. We were told how Dr. David Pendergast began excavating the jungle-covered mounds at Lamanai and uncovered the stone buildings layer by layer, the top layers destroyed by jungle, but the deeper ones perfectly preserved. We were told the buildings rose tall in layers as each new ruler erased the memory of the old one by building a new majestic layer of building over the existing structure.

On the way home, we skipped the water taxi experience a last time and took the $50 small plane ride direct from the island to the airport instead. The Caribbean is very beautiful from the air.

Posted by nadia at 03:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The last week of winter vacation was a whirlwind tour of your stereotypical favorite European captials: London, Berlin, and Paris.

--

I'd never actually been to London before.

I wandered around with Lucas, who I hadn't seen in five years, rode the Underground a lot, ate a lot of sushi. (Though sadly we discovered that Itsu, the sushi place where that Russian guy got poisoned, was temporarily closed. A sign out front stated "An international espionage incident has transformed this Itsu into a world-famous meeting place. Sad and shocked... We will reopen and we will flourish. Meanwhile, enjoy Itsu's health and happiness at...")

It wasn't worth bothering to be a tourist for a day, so I mostly saw the big monuments in passing, and that's fine with me.

The parts of the city I saw were very polished, rich, shiny, seemingly happy.

I had high hopes for the Indian food, but the random restaurant I tried was awful.

--

Berlin was uglier than I remembered.

I suppose revisiting places tells as much about how I've changed as about the place itself. In this case, I was surprised at how *eastern* east Berlin was, how much certain things reminded me of Budapest. Just with, well, awful architecture.

But of course the magic of Berlin is in the way people seem to more freely transform spaces into something different and funky, at least compared to cities with comparatively higher property values.

We met up with Jake and followed the remnants of the 23rd Chaos Computer Club Conference for a couple of days. The first night, we ended up drinking Club Mate in the basement of c-base, a sort of hacker space/bar fronting a darkened muddy path along the river a few blocks from the Park Inn hotel at Alexanderplatz, where rooms cost 150 euros a night and have windows onto the shower, but not to the outside world.

New years eve began before sundown as a steady crescendo of firecrackers, bottle rockets, home fireworks. Everyone had them all over the city, and as we walked people tossed them off buildings, into the streets, down the stairs to the U-bahn stations. At midnight itself we ended up somewhere around Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden in a joyful war zone of a million other people, all of whom were shooting off their own fireworks. I felt ash raining down on my face, but surprisingly, given the number of drunken people with flaming projectiles, sustained no actual injuries. Later we watched the continuing explossions from the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which may well be a solemn place of remembrance at other times of year, but at that point was full of revelers playing hide and seek.

I was awake early enough the next morning to see workers sweeping up the last of the evening's detritus, broken champagne bottles, firecracker wrappers. The city was serene, quiet, hotel room rates had dropped to more reasonable levels. Breakfast discovered at a random hotel was suitably German: bread, cheese, fresh-squeezed juice, fruit with yogurt.

On our last evening we ate a luxurious vegetarian feast at Ex Oriente Lux, a Persian restaurant hidden in a seemingly nondescript neighborhood further from the center of the city than we would have ventured otherwise. The food just kept coming: tiny cups of interestingly flavored sauces and bread, platters of cous-cous and vegetables, interesting sweet sauces, sweet tea and coffee, shishas, absinthe. We were there from 8 pm until something like 3 am.

--

Paris, in contrast, had somehow transformed itself to the stereotypical Paris de mes reves, cleaner than I remembered it, charming in all the right ways.

(I'm not sure where my memories came from, the city could only really manage to be dingy in comparison to the cote d'azur.)

We chatted with shopkeepers, bought croissants and pains au chocolat from boulangeries on the street, wandered nearly all the way across the city in a night, peered into crypts at Pere Lachaise, and in a fit of tourism, visited the millions upon millions of bones in the catacombs.

Renaud managed to find a second vegetarian restaurant in the city, Le Potager du Marais, a charming little place offering vegetarian versions of our favorite French dishes, such as tartiflette and boeuf bourgignon. Every single one of the other tables in the restaurant was speaking English.

Posted by nadia at 01:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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)

December 17 - 21: Tortola

December 21 - 27: Bay Area

December 28 - 30: London

December 30 - January 2: Berlin

January 2 - 4: Paris

January 4 - 5: London

January 5: Arrive back in Princeton

I know, I know, it's a bit more whirlwind than I'd like.

This semester has been the longest stretch of time that I've stayed out of an airplane since fall 2003.

My cell phone works in Europe now.

Posted by nadia at 05:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

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 (4)

This city is magical.

Here is a guide to my week.

Math

The actual reason for my visit was the Horizon of Combinatorics summer school held at the Renyi Institute. The talks ranged from bare-hands type graph theory and extremal problems to probabilistic models and geometry.

Most of the world doesn't know it, but Hungary is a great place for math. Joel Spencer says maybe it's the coffee.

Food

Being a vegetarian in Europe is always a challenge. Particularly in Hungary, where waiters roll their eyes when you ask for a vegetarian option, "vegetarian" soups taste of chicken broth, and a dish of pesto pasta tastes mysteriously of bacon fat.

Here are some things to eat:

1. Breaded fried cheese. Most likely the only vegetarian thing on the menu at a restaurant serving up traditional Hungarian food. Probably accompanied by french fries or rice and tartar sauce. If you're lucky, you can cut the grease with some cold fruit soup, which in some incarnations resembles melted ice cream, in others is a sort of spiced fruit juice with chunks of unidentifiable fruit matter.

2. Pizza. The best pizza I had in the week was actually not at any of the usual suspects, but at a tiny little Kávézó-Pizzeria on Kethly Anna tér where the kitchen and the linguistic capacities of the waitresses were completely overwhelmed by a group of nine of us showing up at once. The Olasz mint lemonade was tasty.

3. Goat cheese salad. In this case, somewhere hip-looking on Liszt Ferenc tér while watching the tarted up club bunnies pass by for a pre-clubbing meal. You'd think that with the decor a place like this would have figured out that iceberg lettuce is not to be used without irony.

4. Greek food. Downscale is a 400 ft falafel from a case with flies crawling on it, upscale is some Mediterranean place on Raday where the enormous appetizer platter featured... breaded fried feta.

Language

Hungarian is everyone's favorite non-Indo-European european language. Well, ok, maybe not yours. It's highly agglutinative, meaning that everything you want to say comes in the form of a conjugation or prepositional prefix or suffix. This means that I know a fair number of words, but have difficulty actually forming a sentence.

I had two major language victories during the week in the form of interactions that were not about buying food: I successfully asked for directions and understood a non-trivial answer, and had a halting and awkward conversation with a thirteen year old girl who spoke about as much English as I spoke Hungarian.

Music

On Tuesday we ventured way off the tourist grid to a farm-house museum in Szentendre for a concert by Ghymes, my favorite Hungarian (er, Slovakian) band. Their music is a sort of mishmash of traditional songs performed with saxophone, mandolin, and drums and angsty new-age stuff with electric guitar and synthesizers. The sun set, the stars came out, the air was cool, and we were rapt with hundreds of dedicated Hungarian fans.

On Bastille Day we ended up at Godor Klub, a bar underneath the pond in the middle of Erzsebet tér, watching a very enthusiastic crowd for Beaubourg, a French-Italian rock group that includes a trumpet and a clarinet.

One evening, there was an outdoor classical concert in front of the Szent István Bazilika. We sat on the ground outside of the fenced-off paid enclosure with seats and listened to who-knows-what... Tchaikovsky, I think. Warm summer night, beautiful, lighted basilica, music, laughing and talking from the cafe behind us, beer and spilled Chinese take-out on the ground.

Dance

Thursday evening we went folk dancing at the Szabadido"központ on Almássy tér. It was a great party, hundreds of people talking and laughing, drinking cheap beer and the "house specialty" pálinka, dancing in pairs or in a huge circle, everyone joining hands and shuffling, kicking, jumping, stomping in complicated rhythms. There's no better way to enjoy the music than to jump right in.

And of course, ballroom dancing at Forgách utca and 5 Órai tea, where everyone dances salsa Cuban-style, and swing is "rocky" or "boogie-woogie", and I've never found a happier straight-up ballroom scene anywhere else.

Public Transit

I'm in love with Budapest's public transit system. They have a web site, which probably doesn't properly convey the awesomeness of being able to get anywhere at any time of day or night for cheap. Like from Zuglo to the airport at 5:15 am in three buses and an hour and a half. (Which was partly my stupidity in forgetting to call for a shuttle, and partly my public transit fetish.)

A fair number of things have changed since last year: The construction at Keleti is finished. There are spiffy new tram cars on the 4/6 tram line, and all of the stops have been rebuilt with spiffy new shelters to accomodate them. The reptérbusz has a number, now, 200, and the night bus system has been completely reworked and they all now have numbers in the 900s.

And while we're on the subject of changes, check out this incredibly detailed and totally amazing site about Budapest's old tram lines (via Pestiside). I know you don't speak Hungarian, but if you've ever been to Budapest the pictures are a trip. Trams across Erzsébet híd!

Baths

When I lived in Budapest we always went to Széchényi because the guidebooks assured us it was mixed-gender, and later, because it was familiar. This time we went to Gellért, which is bright and beautiful in a modern sort of way, though less than ideal for a trip to the baths with a bunch of mathematicians because the thermal pools and steam rooms are segregated. I sat on my own among the naked Hungarian ladies and tourists in the sauna before reconvening in the mixed pool room with the boys who were busy speculating about the possible meaning of wearing one's modesty apron in the front or the back.

One night we went to Rudas, which is open and mixed-gender from 10 pm to 4 am on Fridays and Saturdays. On the other side of the wall was some sort of open bar blasting bumpy music, and inside we sat serenely in dimly lit warm pools, contemplating the dome, the 16th century Turkish architecture, the sulfur-smelling water.

Architecture

There's something about the center city, the way rows of magnificent old buildings are gray with soot and crumbling away, neglected, it seems, since they were built. Particular buildings have been cleaned or repainted, and seem to be regressing back to gray just as quickly. The style of the public spaces--either late 19th century Austro-Hungarian empire urban dream or space-age communist urban dream.

The way the city is lit up at night, bridges and river and outdoor cafes and trams, the green phosphorescent bugs that looked ever so much like spilled LEDs along the completely darkened paths up the front of Gellerthegy.

This is the railing of Szabadság híd, a spot that a random passer-by invited me to watch for as we walked across. All of Budapest's bridges were destroyed during WWII and rebuilt by the communists. This is where the original bridge ends and the rebuilt part begins.

Balaton

Ok, Balaton isn't Budapest, but it might as well be. I went to talks, luxuriated on the grassy "beaches", swam in the milky lake, refrained from purchasing a langos.

Posted by nadia at 11:40 PM | 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)

All the Danish people in the line for passport control merely held up their passports, closed, and were waived through.

The train to the center of town is clean and quiet, takes 15 minutes, and costs less than $5.

There are bicycles everywhere. They are all locked to themselves. Many roads have separately paved bike lanes as wide as a real lane in both directions, and traffic lights at big intersections have separate signals for cars going straight, cars making right turns, bicycles going straight, bicycles making right turns, and pedestrians.

Everyone is blond, much more so than in Norway.

There is a bigger difference between Norwegian and Norwegian than Norwegian and Danish.

We rented bicycles one day and went riding around the city.

We gawked at the big ugly new opera house.

We spent a long morning wandering through Christiania. Pot used to be sold there openly, heaped on tables. Now the main square seemed to be occupied mostly by confused tourists and grizzled hippies getting drunk at outdoor bars. I saw more police there than in the rest of Copenhagen for the entirety of my stay. We ate a vegan lunch in the sun in a little cafe.

The residential areas are actually quite lovely, little houses overrun by lush greenery. A note in the window of one house read (in Danish) "Thieves! If you must steal, please do so from someone who can afford insurance." and (in English) "Please don't break my door. I'm poor enough already."

Posted by nadia at 09:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nikita and Lenore got married. There was much merriment.

I stayed up all night before leaving.

Maybe that gave me a quirkier outlook on the airport scenes.

Maybe not.

A bunch of us had planned to fly to Buffalo, rent cars, and carpool to Toronto in order to save money. Except that apparently the wing flaps broke in flight on the plane that all of the Californians were on, and they were stuck in Dulles for hours. So Riana and I drove up on our own.

Toronto is a much nicer city in summer than in winter. Funky ethnic neighborhoods, tasty samosas, vegan brunch overlooking a sun-dappled street, and a significant population of my favorite people in the world flown in especially for the wedding.

The festivities were probably one of the most well-blogged and photographed events I've ever been to.

There was a barbecue with a (rented!) inflatable hot tub that soon enough was overflowing with people.

There was a late-night concert by a group called The Legendary Pink Dots, and we stood right below the stage and the saxophonist/flutist/electronic bagpipe player made fun of my yawns. (I had been up for probably 40 hours outside of a nap in the airport.)

I ended up staying across from "Filmores Hotel", a strip club offering "1981 prices 2006 service" as well as an open wireless network.

The ceremony itself was sweet, a cozy non-religious affair with original vows, video-game music, a brown sari-like bridal gown from Firefly the TV show, home-made bridal party costumes, and best man and bridesmaid speeches that referenced Livejournal. Before I took this picture, I accused Paul of blogging the ceremony. (He was actually doing the music.)

On the drive back to Buffalo, we stopped at Niagara falls, making this the second huge American tourist attraction that I've seen in the past month.

Yup, it's big.

We paid to don silly yellow ponchos and walk through the tunnels they've dug behind the falls.

Apparently the falls used to erode several feet a year, and they've slowed that to inches by diverting up to 90% of the water at night through power plants.

I spent the night in New Jersey, and then I flew to Copenhagen.

Posted by nadia at 09:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Phoenix

From the air, Phoenix sprawls as perfectly square built-up blocks across a uniformly brown desert, broken here and there in straight lines around pointy hills.

On the ground, the blocks are strip malls and subdivisions. Few buildings are more than one story high. The roads between blocks are four or six lane highways. Particular developments are edged by decorative lawn in that very short, very fine, very green grass that is peculiar to desert climes where people seem to feel that growing grass in a desert is worth building dams and depleting aquifers. In an unscientific survey of a particular parking lot, more than half of the vehicles were enormous trucks or SUVs.

During the day, it is 105 degrees outside, and every single person is inside in the air conditioning.

I suppose it's the ultimate American dream: cheap land to cover in settlement, cheap fuel to burn in huge cars.

One day we hiked along the South Mountains. From there, the city extends as far as the eye can see to smog-blurred mountains in every direction.

Along the trail the cacti were in bloom.

Sedona

According to a tourist brochure, more than 60% of visitors to the region come to visit "vortices". Ok.

The red rock formations are beautiful.

We rented mountain bikes and went for a bumpy ride along a canyon trail. Mountain biking is hard on the wrists. And crotch.

The Grand Canyon

The Grand Canyon is really big. It's impossible to capture on camera how big it is. It's impossible to comprehend in real life how big it is. It sort of looks like painted scenery.

We did an afternoon hike into the canyon, down the Bright Angel trail to the campsite at the plateau. The trails are lined with signs warning hikers not to try to make it to the river and back in one day. On our way back up, we were passed by a great Dane carrying only a small water bottle who was coming back from the river.

The squirrels on the rim appear to have learned how to beg for food.

Burglary

Driving up to the house in Phoenix, we noticed that the shed was open. And then that the screen on the kitchen window had been cut out and the window was open.

Inside, every drawer and cabinet was open and things were strewn everywhere. The TV was gone, and the stereo, and the laptop bags with computer paraphernalia, batteries and chargers and credit cards, passports, social security cards, medication.

In an incredibly lucky stroke of paranoia, we had left the laptops with a friend before leaving.

I was lucky to not lose anything. The thieves declined to steal my STOC proceedings, despite the fact that it almost certainly cost more than the digital clock that they did take.

The policeman said that robbers target old people who have lived through the Depression and don't trust banks, that one couple lost $400,000 that had been stored under the mattress.

Posted by nadia at 12:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Late spring flowers.

West of campus and the IAS woods.

New Jersey is very flat from Fine Hall.

An Apple store opening in Manhattan. There was a big crowd waiting to go in, and a second crowd gathered around the first, snapping pictures on their cell phones and commenting on the lines. "I talked to one woman who'd been waiting for six hours!" "There was a guy in line on his Segway who was taking pictures of people as he rode by!"

I flew to Seattle.

Within hours of landing, I was feasting on sushi, and cupcakes bought from a newly-opened cupcake cafe that replaced the Ben and Jerry's that closed because the neighborhood shut it out for being non-local and competing with the 85-year-old neighborhood ice cream shop, and ice cream bought from said ice cream shop (chocolate orange!) and lounging in a hot tub watching the sun set over jagged mountains.

I'm charmed by this city. It's on the correct coast. The trees are familiar. There are cozy little ranch houses with little flower gardens. The downtown area may be a bit shiny and sterile for my taste, but there are funky little neighborhoods up and down hills, and mountains in the distance, and water everywhere.

I realized there was something odd going on while riding the bus, and then I figured it out. There are no black people here.

Oh, and the conference. There are interesting talks, and lots of interesting people. But really, it is a night at the opera, or a society ball. We are here to see, and be seen, and work, and we new students are like debutantes at our coming out. Where do you come from? And who do you work with? What are you presenting? Who is your advisor? How's the dog?

It's fun. I have lots to read.

My favorite quote of the conference so far, from Impagliazzo, in response to some question I couldn't hear: "If it could be done by 19th century techniques, Gauss would have done it. Gauss is 19th century complete."

I fixed my blog the other day, but in the process lost nearly all of my comments to a corrupted database. This has the interesting effect that anybody commenting on an entry causes all the comments to disappear. Goodbye girly-girl comments, goodbye angry Christians.

Posted by nadia at 01:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Sykkeltur

Within 24 hours of finishing my networking midterm in Princeton, I was feasting on French cheese at a cabin belonging to a local band overlooking a lake just outside of Bergen, watching a pair of horses frolic on the ice.

Bike rides in the sun and fresh air turn out to be an effective way to stave off jet lag.

Too effective, actually. I went to bed at 10 pm and woke up at noon the next day.

Norway in a Nutshell

This is on the list of tourist things to do in Bergen. You take the train into the mountains, then another train ("one of the the steepest normal-gauge trains in the world") out of the mountains, then a boat down some fjords (branches off of Sognefjord, "Norway's longest and deepest fjord"), and then a bus back (through "the second-longest road tunnel in Norway").

Undredal, "wonder valley".

Can you find the farm?

Fjords are really big.

More farm.

Ski

Let me get this straight: you pay lots of money to strap some boards to your feet and throw yourself down the side of an icy mountain. And this is supposed to be fun?

Skiing, like driving, is one of those things that I never learned how to do when I was a kid.

It took an hour to get down the easiest slope the first time. The third time, it took five minutes and I only fell once. At the end of the day, I managed to go down twice without falling, twice passing a beginner class of Norwegian teenagers. Jan was shocked that there were so many Norwegians who hadn't learned to ski yet by that age.

The day's casualties include a bruised tailbone and a mildly sprained hand.

Nice views, though.

Posted by nadia at 11:02 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)

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)

So, fun in Oslo.

There appears to be quite a lot of happy geek/goth/etc. subculture here. Hixie took me to not one but two large nerd emporiums, each with a wide collection of 1. games, mostly in English, 2. role-playing game paraphernalia, 3. assorted sci-fi and fantasy figurines, 4. DVDs of all sorts, 5. comic books of both superhero and modern angst persuasions, in both Norwegian and English, and 6. books of the genres sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and various Japanophilia, all in English. Later I was investigating his enormous pile of games, in a pile approximately 8x3 in size, and noticed a distinct lack of Set. Neither store above nor a nearby toy store had it. I'm shocked and disappointed.

We also investigated a store that captured a truly odd cross-section of guns, swords, knives, other potentially violent male-oriented gadgets, and military and rave clothing.

The touristy street and the palace. Apparently they just re-did the street so that it has underground heating to melt off snow. Because it's more efficient than plowing. The palace is just kind of hanging out, no major security (though there were guards in funny costumes at the door). Random people were sunbathing on nearby lawns. I don't think they want random people to sunbathe on the white house lawn.

The statue park. It's a park decorated with an enormous number of statues in iron and granite of naked people doing things with each other. There are men and women and adults and children, laughing and serious and in motion and still. Many of the women have braided hair. Two that struck me were the man drop-kicking a baby and the children on the back of a woman on all fours, using her braid as reins.

The ski jump. It's a ski jump on a hill overlooking Oslo. There's a museum about skiing. You can go to the platform of the jump and look at the view of the city, although right then the massive thunderstorms were just clearing up, so mostly it was city-through-clouds.

A fancy-schmancy dinner in a fancy-schmancy French restaurant. Some of the prices in Kroner (7 to the dollar) were approaching Budapest prices in forints (200 to the dollar). Hixie pointed out that the use of language on the menu was rather amusing; for example every dish was described in Norwegian, French, and English, but it only said taxe et service compris in French and Norwegian, and the wine list only informed customers in French and Norwegian that if they didn't find their wine they could ask for a more extensive cave book.

Every day in front of the train station are cars painted with "MTV: Fight for Your Right" blasting music. There was also an "MTV: Fight for Your Right" ad before the movie. Apparently the local cable company is cutting MTV from its service, so MTV is trying to stage a consumer backlash. Nobody I've observed seems to be paying much attention.

The shower in the apartment. No stall, no curtain, no nothing. Just a shower head in the corner, with a floor squeegee to push water towards the drain when done. The floor is heated to help evaporation in the winter.

Posted by nadia at 04:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It's past midnight, but it's just sort of dusky outside.

Everything is bright and shiny and clean and new here.

They give you ice water in restaurants without asking that you don't have to pay for. The tap water tastes like bottled water. A week-long transit pass costs as much as a month-long transit pass in Budapest. There are five wireless networks visible from where I'm sitting.

Norwegian looks like German and sounds like English if you're not paying attention.

I saw Star Wars. I haven't seen a movie in a theater in... I don't remember how long. As Hixie says, "Norwegians are strange. They have assigned seating in movie theaters, but don't have assigned seating on airplanes." The scrolling text in the beginning of the movie was in Norwegian, but fortunately every major noun and verb was a cognate, so it wasn't too hard to get the idea.

I think I should be discovering my ancestral homeland here, or something, but currently I'm just feeling the transition back to the west.

Posted by nadia at 11:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We started with no plans, really, except for a destination for the first day. The idea was to see some mountains, see the sea, see some nice old seaside towns, maybe spend some time swimming or sunbathing. The weather forecast was good, except for a little rain expected on Sunday, so I packed light. This was a mistake. The whole week was unseasonably and unreasonably cold and rainy. So much for summer.

We took the train from Budapest to Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. Only just past the Croatian border, they herded us all off the train and into a bus, with some explanation in broken English about constructing a wall. At this point it became clear that the only people on the train were teenagers from North and South America backpacking around Europe, though I suspect that most of those with Canadian flags badly stitched onto their backpacks were really Americans who heard that Europeans will be friendlier if they think you're Canadian. The bus drove for a few hours through farmland, and then we were all herded off the bus and onto a rusty regional train, a far cry from the sleek Italian train we had started out on. I thought to use the bathroom, and looked down the toilet bowl to see the track rushing by below.

Zagreb, hmm, was a table piled with religious literature in a variety of languages next to a small prayer room on the train platform, a park of flowers and a large yellow cake building across from the train station, an impressive selection of porn magazines (covers visible in all their glory, of course) offered at the magazine stands, and a wall of artistic graffiti on the way to the bus station, where we bought a ticket to Plitvice.

Zsolt at this point was waxing deeply nostalgic. Ten years ago, he and a friend hitchhiked through northern Croatia on 5,000 ft, about $25 with today's exchange rate. Of course, the war was still going on then, though they stayed away from the fighting. "This was where a truckload of (UN? NATO? US?) soldiers offered to take us to the front." "We saw an army marching through a city, tanks and all." "When we reached the sea, we decided we should have a party. So I bought a paprika, and Laci took out a can of fish we had brought, and I ate my bread with a paprika, and he ate his with the can of fish." "One night, we were so tired that we just fell over in a field asleep. In the morning, an old woman rode by on a bicycle and gave us two peaches."

The bus to Plitvice took us closer to the Bosnian border, and we passed many abandoned houses, some riddled with bullet holes. One particularly decrepit one was labeled with a large banner in Croatian and English that said "Future site of the Museum of the Homeland War". Many other houses appeared to have been constructed more recently out of a sort of bright orange new brick that I saw all over the country, but were missing windows, doors, large sections of roofs, and had no sign of life or construction activity around them. Were they abandoned in the midst of reconstruction? I don't know.

At Plitvice, we were supposed to meet up with Nikita and Lenore, who were also traveling through Croatia, but when the bus finally dropped us off in the middle of the park, we discovered we were 8 km from the campsite we wanted to meet at, the only accomodation in the park was overpriced hotels clogged with tour buses, and that there were no local buses at all. We walked a couple kilometers along the narrow shoulder of the road and at the front gate of the park an old lady offered us a night in her house for 200 kuna ($16 a person). Her house was just a little beyond the park, a small white place looking over a large crater in the ground where she kept a vegetable garden. We never did find Nikita and Lenore, despite confused negotiations with the old lady and her neighbors about finding a phone to call the camp, and Zsolt walking the remaining 5 km in the rain next morning to leave a message.

On Sunday, it rained all day. In the morning, it was mainly a light mist, and I decided it would be better to get a bit wet than miss a day, so we set out to explore the park. This turned out to be a stupid idea, albeit one with beautiful scenery.

Plitvice is famous for its waterfalls. There isn't just one, there are dozens connecting a stairstep series of bright turquoise pools. The paths in sections are wooden platform bridges curving their way across the water, directly in front of and over the falls, and the wood against the bright blue water creates an effect straight out of Myst. It is almost ridiculously beautiful, so that by the end of the day you're ready to groan "Oh, another waterfall." In a couple areas, the waterfall was entire wall of falling water overgrown with greenery, curving around for 100 meters to form a wall of one turquoise pool overflowing into another. The effect is difficult to photograph.

This attracts tourbusloads of old ladies with umbrellas. By the middle of the day, I was completely soaked through, but kept warm enough by walking fast. We took the long route around the lakes, walking where the old people took the ferry boats between easy sites, and walked for hours without encountering anybody else. We heard frogs arguing with unfamiliar calls, saw enormous black slugs and yellow snails, and saw many, many black and yellow spotted lizard-like creatures that must be salamanders. I believe I hit bottom after I fell down a muddy incline on a detour around a fallen tree that hadn't been cleared from the path, and could only hold my hands up to the rain to wash them. It's a miracle my camera survived the soaking. My wet wallet dyed a 5,000 ft bill purple, and when I got back to Budapest the store refused to accept it, despite the presence of the proper holograms.

On a side note, the park people are apparently completely unprepared for people who come on foot, and it's possible to accidentally enter the park (and avoid the entrance fee) just by walking off the road.

That evening, cold and miserably wet, we continued on in the bus to Zadar on the coast. Zadar is somewhat unremarkable in comparison to other, bigger, tourist-destination towns on the coast, so I don't have much to say. I was mostly hoping we'd be able to catch a ferry to continue down the coast. There is an attractively lighted bridge to the touristy old town. The old town was bombed to shreds in WWII, but it has an old church and marble car-free streets (which, incidentally, are incredibly slippery when wet).

So we caught a bus to Split. More abandoned houses. This time, we saw wide expanses of wild countryside cris-crossed by low stone walls. Sometimes the walls looked like the foundations of ancient houses. Sometimes they were on hillsides holding up terraces that could plausibly have been farmed. But most of the time they just formed mazes in completely untended land. What were they for?

I was somewhat surprised, though I'm not sure why, to see nuns riding the bus on all of the trips we'd taken thus far. As I was exiting the bus in Split, a nun in full traditional habit grabbed one of my braids and held onto it while saying something long in Croatian to a non-nun conversation partner across the aisle. What am I supposed to do? I've never had my hair grabbed by a nun before. After that she started trying languages on me. After a couple attempts, "Parlez-vous francais?" "Oui, qu'avez-vous dit?" "Excusez-moi." And she delivered me into the waiting arms of a sobe-lady.

Right, so the sobe ladies. In Croatia, the place to stay is not in a hotel, not in a hostel, but in a private room. The guidebook told us that private rooms are supposed to be negotiated by a local agency that sets a fixed rate and has quality standards, but it was clear that the majority of people offering rooms side-stepped this bureaucracy by going in person for obvious tourists on the street. So the moment we stepped off the bus anywhere, we were surrounded by a waiting crowd of women (and a few men) holding signs saying "sobechambreszimmercamererooms", and had merely to negotiate a price and figure out the location in a mix of broken English, German, and cognate Slavic words.

The tide of tourists coming off the ferry meets the waiting wall of sobe ladies in Dubrovnik:

Split is a neat little town spread out on the lower part of a peninsula ending in a hill. The big tourist attraction of the old town is Diocletian's palace, a Roman ruin that big posters everywhere advertised was a UNESCO world heritage site. The cool part of the ruin, though, was that the town was built straight into it in a mess of white stone construction of all different eras. Apparently they tore off the 19th-century facades of the buildings to expose the original stonework when someone finally figured out that the town was a Roman ruin, but as it was it was hard to figure out where palace ended and other building began.

There were lots of old stone coffins everywhere. I don't think most tourists realized what they were looking at. "Excuse me miss, do you realize you're using a 600 year old receptacle for somebody's corpse as a bench?"

A group of boys was playing soccer in a small stone courtyard area on the way to the upper part of the palace ruins. Further on up, a group of children was playing a game of dodgeball that looked to me more like a game of "hit the littlest one with the ball". I can't imagine growing up in a such an ancient place.

We took a 7 am ferry to Dubrovnik. Along the way, there were lots of spectacular views of the sea and the islands along the coast. The boat made several stops at adorable old island ports along the way. And for once, the weather was nice. We lounged in the sun and read along with all the other tourists. There were a large number of people speaking German with a hoidy-doidy accent.

Arriving in Korcula:

Do you want your own stone tower on a tiny island isolated in the middle of the sea? I do.

Did I mention that the Adriatic is perfectly smooth? It's disturbing. Seas are supposed to have waves. The Mediterranean around the coast of France at least has small waves. Here there were none, except for boat wakes. No waves, no tides. A saltwater lake.

I liked Dubrovnik. For one, the old town is amazing, a perfectly maintained and reconstructed town all in white stone, surrounded by amazing fortress walls, a real-life seaside incarnation of the town of men in the Lord of the Rings, and just as striking as Venice.

But the best part was that it was a town that kept some easy secrets, or perhaps I should say, not everything worth seeing was placed in the direct path of the busloads of tourists that came through every day.

We stayed in an enormous room in a building in the middle of the old town that was inhabited by two old ladies who spoke only a bit of German and a frail old man that we only saw once. The interior of the building had obviously been recently redone, and the main entrance and second floor seemed to be some sort of museum for an artist, but the room that we stayed in had three walls of unfinished cement, painted white and clumsily patched with gray concrete and one of white stone blocks. On the second morning, I sat out on the balcony as a herd of French tourists filed by, and the group leader pointed to our building and explained that it had burned down when Dubrovnik was shelled during the war. A large plaque near the entrances of the town showed a map of the old town and marked every one of the 600-some places that were hit by shells in 1991.

There were cats everywhere. Everywhere. They stalked pigeons, hid their kittens in storage garages with broken windows, and begged food from the outdoor tables of restaurants.

The first night we walked up to the entrance of a fort raised over the sea with a view of the town, then wound our way through stone staircases built straight into the rock down to a tiny rocky beach where a group of British teenagers were having a late-evening swim. Then we wound up to a parking lot overlooking the sea, then over some rocks to a deserted concrete beach area, and found ourselves trespassing through the garden of a nunnery to escape.

This is someone's front door, after already walking through a small maze of stone staircases overgrown with flowers to get here:

And looking down to the little rocky beach:

The second afternoon, we took a long hike in the general direction of up, in an attempt to see how far we could get up the hill towering over the town. We went up an enormous staircase to a busy road with a narrow shoulder.

The houses on the hillside along the road had built their driveways above the houses, much like in Berkeley, and many of them had spectacular views. After a short walk down the shoulder of the road, I noticed a stone path-staircase leading up the hill again.

The guidebook had mentioned that, in particular, the hills behind Dubrovnik had not been entirely cleared of mines from the war. This made us think a bit before deciding to take a random hike. But I figured that a path that had obviously been used in recent history couldn't be that dangerous.

The views were incredible.

As the sun set, we saw a large cruise ship pass by. As it passed close to Dubrovnik, suddenly it lit up in a sparkle of hundreds of camera flashes, an effect much like the sparkle-lights on the Eiffel tower. Hundreds of tourists will have memories of Dubrovnik of the form of pictures of highly illuminated grime on their cabin windows.

Along the path there were black crosses with roman numerals on them, some sort of holy hike.

Near the top we suddenly encountered a lot of shit. Some of it was cow-sized, some of it was human or dog-sized, and some of it was deer-sized. I don't understand.

At the top there was an abandoned old stone fortress, crumbling and full of holes. An enormous radio antenna had been built into it.

Further along the ridge, we encountered a hulking concrete and metal structure with enormous holes blasted in it that had been covered with chicken wire. The metal door bled rust from dozens of bullet holes. From another angle, I finally realized what it was: the war-torn remains of a ski-lift (more likely a carriage-lift thing) that had once brought people up the mountain.

There were memorials to people who died in 1991, and a new large white cross that was illuminated at night, without an inscription.

From there we could look south and east, towards Cavtat and further towards Montenegro, and towards the brown mountains of Bosnia.

And then my last camera battery ran out. No more pictures.

We walked down the hill on a new asphalt road. Behind a fence, I could barely make out a skull and crossbones on a sign that had been bent and twisted to face away from the road. Further down, I found another skull and crossbones sign, with a Croation inscription about "mina", lying face-down on the ground.

This caused some consternation. There was a shortcut past some huge concrete structure to a dirt road that appeared to go more the direction we wanted to go, but right next to it was a tree tied in white tape reading "mine".

So we stayed on the nice safe asphalt road, and made it home, all limbs in place. From so far up the mountain, there were incredible views of Dubrovnik lighting up at night.

The next morning, we took the bus to Montenegro. At the border, we were told to disembark, and we passed through the border on foot among the cars. Past the border, we resumed the voyage in a Montenegrin bus, much less well maintained. We passed the construction sites of new border buildings, and signs about the EU. We stopped to spend the afternoon in Herceg Novi, mostly because we didn't know anything about any of the towns. It turned out to be a fairly standard Mediterranean-style beach resort town, albeit a bit deserted on the beaches because the water was still to cold to swim. We spent a lovely few hours on a gravel beach, reading in the sun and appreciating the high green hills plunging into the intensely blue sea. During an early dinner of pizza, I watched in horror as the man at the next table asked for ketchup and mayonnaise and proceeded to coat his slice of pizza with both before eating it. (In Hungary you have to be attentive when ordering pizza by the slice because they'll often douse it with ketchup without asking, but I've never seen mayonnaise before.)

Some interesting things about Montenegro. Everything was in euros. People demanded payment in euros, the ATMs dispensed euros, and there was no hint that they were either a. part of another country (Serbia) with its own legal currency (the dinar), or b. mere miles from another country (Croatia) with its own currency (the kuna). Pardon my innocence if this is common, but for the first time ever I ran into an ATM that didn't accept my Visa ATM card. Also, as far as I was told, they speak basically the same language as in Croatia, but suddenly half of everything was in Cyrillic. I was amused by the appropriation and spelling of borrowed words: "pomfrit" "friserski salon".

Besides the apparently EU-funded new border control buildings, there was an EU-donated garbage truck (it said so on the side in Slavic cognate words). And along the road, we saw many signs next to old buildings saying "US AID". So, dear readers who are EU or US citizens, apparently your tax dollars and donations are being put to work.

We were still left with the puzzle of how to get home. We decided to take a late afternoon bus to Belgrade, in the hopes that it would be easier to take a train back to Budapest. We had thought to go through Sarajevo, since it's closer, but the train from Sarajevo takes an incredible 12 hours to get to Budapest. I asked why. "They destroyed all of the train lines during the war. It was a real war, you know. They're only just being re-opened."

So we bussed it to Belgrade. The ride through Montenegro was absolutely incredible. The first few hours were spent just on the road curving around the bay on the coast. Enormous green mountains and white rock cliffs fell straight into the sea. I tried to take pictures from the bus, but they don't show the incredible scale of it all.

From there we went inland to a rocky mountainous area of little farms built into valleys and enormous white boulders. At one point, inexplicably in the middle of nowhere with no obvious settlements to support such a development, we drove past a series of car dealerships. When night fell, it was completely dark, and I could look through the window and see the ghost-shapes of trees illuminated by the bus headlights, and high rocky cliffs on both sides of the road, and many stars in the sky.

We got to Belgrade (Beograd) at 6:30 am. A city of uncompromising ugliness as far as the eye can see. Pre-communist ugliness. Communist ugliness. Post-communist ugliness. At least they appear to have recovered from being bombed. We walked around for an hour and a half before finding an ATM that worked. I saw a large line of old men in front of the post office more than an hour before it was scheduled to open. What could they possibly be waiting for? I saw a city bus that said on the side, in English, "Donated by the people of Japan". Glossy magazines like Playboy were printed in Roman characters, serious-looking newspapers were in Cyrillic. Graffiti was in both.

I had been warned that Beograd was ugly, but in my innocence I thought ugliness could still be interesting, in a sort of fading-glory, horrors-of-Communism, bombed-to-pieces, signs-of-ethnic-war sort of way. Unfortunately, it was 10 C and raining, and my tolerance for such aimless adventuring dropped with the temperature of my sandaled toes, and there was a morning train back to Budapest. So thus was the trip cut a day short.

On the train ride home, I looked out the windows onto trash-covered shanty towns sandwiched between freeway overpasses and the train lines. I saw a Gypsy man and a young girl standing by a fire next to a pile of tires. The young girl waved at the train, and we waved back. From the other side, I realized that the pile of tires had a *door*, and that someone was coming out of it.

There were ugly dehumanizing high-rises, ugly industry, and ugly suburbs of houses built out of the same thick orange brick, as far as I can tell by the owners themselves.

So much traveling requires books. The ferry ride exhausted the second book I had brought from my expedition to an English-language used bookstore in Budapest (How to Lose Friends and Alienate People and The Joy Luck Club, joined rather unexpectedly by the recurring theme of "americans are shallow people who have no emotions"), so I replenished my reading supply with Balkan Ghosts and a history of Croatia from a tourist-oriented store in Dubrovnik. The first makes for some rather powerful reading on the beaches of the former Yugoslavia. Nothing bad ever happens in America.

Posted by nadia at 02:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Slovensky Raj and the Tatras

A weekend trip hiking with Gabor, Gabi, and Zsolt in Slovensky Raj, or Szlovak Paradicsom ("Slovak Paradise"), in Slovakia near the Polish border.

On the way up, we drove through the Hungarian countryside, rolling green hills and farmland dotted with picturesque little villages filled with red-roofed cottages, and a jarring city filled with ugly block-of-flats communist buildings and broken factories. It was explained that the communists thought every country should produce its own steel, so they built this huge city in northern Hungary to mine coal and produce steel, except that it was just a ridiculous money sink because there isn't much iron or coal in Hungary, and so when communism ended, there was absolutely nothing for all of the people who were moved there to work in the factory to do. It was filled with Chinese stores.

The Slovakian countryside looks much like the Hungarian one, except they have more mountains and the place names have fewer vowels. There's also some sort of lovely yellow wildflower that was blanketing the hills.

We stopped at the side of the road in Hrabusice, just outside the preserve, and soon enough a round old Slovakian lady came up, offered us a room in sign language, and hopped into the front seat of the car to guide us to her house. They called her mama. Once there, they negotiated the exchange in a mix of broken Slovakian, English, Russian, sign language, stick figures, and numbers. Gabor bargained her down 100 crowns just for the heck of it. It was about $6 per person per night for the entire bottom floor of the house, including the bathroom and kitchen. I learned that "privat" means "accomodation".

The communication fun persisted throughout the trip. Despite the fact that this area is a major tourist destination for Hungarians, and nearly every other person we met was Hungarian, none of the waiters, park staff, or store owners spoke any Hungarian. English was sketchy at best. One waitress told us she spoke English but actually spoke to us entirely in German. "Ja, das ist ohne Fleisch." Highly amusing.

My experience with Slovakian food included potato pirohy with sour cream, fried cheese with tartar sauce and a side of boiled potatoes, and some sort of deep-fried potato pancake from a sulky fast food stand attendant who refused to understand any form of non-Slovakian communication whatsoever. The one time I tried to order a side of what the menu termed "fresh vegetables/friss zoldseg/friche gemuse" (to the adamant protests of the waitress, who insisted it didn't go with my meal), it turned out to be sauerkraut.

On Sunday morning, we woke up early, when local residents were filing solemnly into the church in the center of town, and attempted to shop for some food at the local Potraviny. I'd never seen a store that worked like this one did. A counter runs around the entire inside of the store, and you wait in line to ask the shopkeeper to fetch everything you want. This is more effective when you actually speak the same language as the shopkeeper. Also, when there's actually something to eat in the store. Most mini-marts in gas stations have more selection. We did get an exciting sausage tube-shaped cheese product labeled "Bambino" that turned out to taste exactly like spray cheese.

And the hiking. The spectacular thing about this particular area is what the English signs term "technical aids", ladders and platforms placed so that the hiking trail goes across sheer rock faces and straight up magnificent waterfalls. We hiked along rivers, up a creek, into waterfall ravines, and then back down the mountain.

We saw an enormous ant hill that was at least three feet wide and four across. I also heard a cuckoo bird for the first time.

There are also beautiful views of the Tatra mountains.

On the last day, we drove to the Tatras for a half-day of hiking. Along the way, we passed a Gypsy town of poorly constructed houses connected by dirt footpaths. All I saw were pregnant women and children. I asked why they live that way, and how they survive, and the answer I was given was "They steal from the surrounding towns and get money from the government for having children." We passed yet another inappropriate block-of-flats city in the valley below the Tatras.

And then everyone in the car gasped, because suddenly on both sides of us were vast expanses of freshly clear-cut forest, raw brown stumps off into the distance and huge piles of logs by the side of the road. Except that all of the stumps had been either violently ripped out of the ground or snapped in half.

Last winter, wind storms flattened enormous areas of the pine forests here, but the story didn't get much coverage after the tsunami. They're still working on clearing it up. It's absolutely heart-wrenching. Cute hotels that used to look out on forest now look out on dirt. The metal railing along the road is ripped and twisted in parts from the trees that fell on it. I have no idea how many houses must have been damaged.

We had planned to go hiking along a pretty little path through the forest. This was the path. Not the view from the path, the actual path. We knew that this had happened, and had seen some areas of flattened trees earlier, but nobody believed that it was actually this bad.

Foiled, we drove further up into the mountains to the ski resort area, and hiked up a different path through a snowy pine forest that had for the most part survived to a waterfall still covered in snow. There were long traces of snow still packed into steep slopes on the mountain peaks lining the saddle we hiked up, winding snowboard paths still visible in every one.

Note the person above the waterfall.

On the way back, we passed more Slovakain villages, castles on hills, bewildering communist statues on the side of the road, and Hungarian traffic jams.

Posted by nadia at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last-minute trip to Venice. I seem to be doing a lot of traveling on a whim these days.

When our flight landed in Milan, the weather was *balmy*. It must have been at least 15 C. This winter thing is destroying me. We made plans to start a Florence Semesters in Mathematics, or perhaps the Bahamas Semesters in Mathematics.

Also on our flight, or at least on the silly bus that took us from our plane to the actual terminal were three absolutely exquisite Italian women with nearly identical black leather calf-high boots and expensive-looking tans. They flirted with the security as we went through more metal detectors (Budapest's security must not be up to snuff) and made incredulous noises in Italian about having to remove their boots. I haven't seen any women like that in Budapest.

We arrived in Venice in mid-afternoon with no hotel reservations, no plans, and only Jonah's fat all-Europe guidebook for a reference. I didn't actually realize before arriving that Venice is actually an island in the middle of a lagoon, so that you have to take a bridge from the mainland to get there. Second, it is also almost entirely covered in stone. The very little green that is there is fenced-off and looks expensive. So much for Diane's grand plans to find a park to sleep in. Third, there are no cars anywhere except for a small area around the bridge to the mainland. And finally, it seems that Italy has banned smoking inside.

We promptly walked off in a random direction and lost ourselves until evening. As far as canals and beautiful buildings go, it was everything I could have hoped for. You can't walk very far before finding yourself crossing some adorable little bridge over an adorable little canal surrounded by adorable stone houses.

Many houses bordering canals had doorways leading directly to the water, yet few of them had boats tied anywhere nearby. I was somewhat puzzled.

We filled our first two days with wandering. The streets are as narrow and twisty as you like, making it exceedingly easy to lose yourself when that is what you want to do, and exceedingly difficult to find yourself on a map or guess the correct route somewhere even if you know exactly what direction you need to go. The first two nights, we lost our hotel. The second time, we were actually afraid we wouldn't find it again.

There's also the grand canal. The bridges across it make for nice pictures.

After the canals, the second major thing that Venice is famous for is pigeons. In San Marco square they sell little bags of feed for 1 euro to tourists who feel like being besieged by the most fearless pigeons I've ever seen.

On Saturday morning, the city changed. The tourists arrived for Carnevale. Sure, there were quite a few around before, but for the most part things felt pretty serene. No more. I've never felt so crowded in my life. Tourists everywhere, streaming in every which direction, speaking every sort of language. San Marco square filled with people.

Those cute little streets became bottlenecks for the hordes of people. I don't normally have a problem with crowds, but this time I honestly couldn't handle it.

The Carnevale bit itself was, well, not quite what I expected. For an idea of the ambiance, think of a cross between the Castro in San Francisco during Halloween, Paris in the middle of the summer (except there were quite a lot French people in Venice), and a Renaissance faire (to be more accurate there was a decidedly 18th-century bent). We did see people in fabulous costumes, but for every person with a fabulous costume, there were 50 tourists shoving each other out of the way to get a picture.

Many of the people in costumes just stood around in San Marco square to be photographed. We weren't quite sure who these people were: official city-sponsored people, Venetian residents with a passion for costuming, random tourists with a passion for costuming. A cafe on the border of the square advertised costumed happy hours, 45 euros for hot chocolate. Tourists lined up outside to photograph exquisitely costumed people sipping their expensive hot chocolate.

Costumes ranged from the rather spooky plain-masked abstract to incredible historically accurate outfits with full makeup and wigs to random Halloween-type affairs, particularly for kids. I'm sure if I had shown up in my full Renaissance nobles, picked up a random mask, and stood around for a day, I could have made it into thousands of people's vacation albums. The big thing to do seems to be to coordinate with all of your friends. We saw groups of at least 20 dalmatians, almost as many penguins, people in sombreros, fro wigs, and curlers and trashy makeup.

There were obviously real parties going on for people with money, and there was free music every night in San Marco square for the cheapskates. Jonah is the previously mentioned ballroom dancer. The first night was predominately salsa, the second swing, the third disco. So we danced. And crowds formed around us as various people filmed us or snapped pictures. Of us dancing sloppily in sneakers on concrete. Well, as the weekend progressed the thickening layer of confetti coating the ground made it easier to dance. I wonder how many people noticed that I don't even know how to lindy.

So that was that. The dancing crowds seemed to be rather into smashing bottles on the ground. Things ended early on Sunday. We spent all of Monday flying home. Budapest is gray and cold and nobody eats parmesan. We met a Chilean guy on the bus from the airport who was spending his summer break doing the backpacking through Europe thing, and had apparently just spent several days trying to get into Hungary after being turned back at the border.

Posted by nadia at 06:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When we last left off, there had been arrivals in a strange city, museum visitations, and strange cultures.

On Thursday, we took the train to Princeton and split up for dinner with different sets of friends. I narrowly missed going to Hooters, but did manage to acquire some vanilla fudge. (I have been on a quest for the past week to find fudge, and have mostly failed.) The most interesting part of the evening was a chance encounter at the Small World Cafe involving Waterloo people and French Canadians which showed that the world really is small, at least among ivy league academic types. New Jersey is very flat and quiet after New York, and the constant low roar of life (cars) here was audibly gone at night. There were even geese.

I spent Friday afternoon walking along the river from 46th street to the bottom of Manhattan. Apparently a major city project to prettify the piers is underway, including a mostly decent foot and bicycle path that runs along the water in exactly the direction I randomly chose to walk. It was interesting to see the different areas in various stages of completion. Some piers were nothing more than vast expanses of rotting logs sticking out of the water, others were abandoned stretches of concrete. I walked by several helicopter landing pads. I was about to exclaim about how odd New York's definition of a "park" was when I ran into a very obviously newly developed commercial area along the water around Chelsea. There seemed to be quite a bit going on inside some brightly colored warehouses, but it was a bit forboding to foot traffic. Further down there were more areas that could reasonably be called parks.

When the parks ended, I found myself in a mall-like structure called the World Financial Center. Hmm. It was all glossy glass and polished marble, full of corporate cafes that sold $10 salads and Gap stores and the like. Then I went up a level and found myself looking out of a wall of glass onto a panoramic view of the World Trade Center site. Somehow it was actually spookier to be in a building that felt like the ghost of what the World Trade Center must have been like, and where you might end up having lunch or buying flowers or the like if you worked there, than to look out on the site from the side that tourists are normally brought to and see merely the cavity of buildings I've never seen. When I walked over to the other side, I discovered that the subway station underneath the towers had been reopened since the last time I was there. I had no idea it had even survived. That was also spooky. The platform that looked out on the site was full of tourists taking pictures of themselves against the view.

I took a train from there to upper Manhattan, where I'd been given a random intersection to meet at. Only I apparently made a bad choice of lines and a bad choice of directions when leaving the station, and ended up taking an impromptu tour of Harlem (which was a strange combination of burned out buildings and snazzy new ones, and people on the street who kept asking if I was ok) before discovering that the street I thought I was supposed to be on ended in a cliff, which I scaled by stairs only to discover that it disappeared again into a gate which turned out to be an entrance to Columbia University. The view from the top of the cliff over the park that contained it and Harlem was actually quite nice, but I realized that the park felt a bit odd, like a fissure in the pavement that manages to almost completely cover nearly everything else I'd seen until then.

On Saturday we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. I was most impressed upon reaching the other side to see large buildings apparently owned by Jehovah's Witnesses. There was even a tower labeled Watchtower, and large amonitions written on the side of the buildings to read the bible and the other publications the Jehovah's Witnesses distribue. We wandered a tiny amount around Brooklyn, then subwayed back to Manhattan for a very snazzy Italian dinner at a place called Briocco where our waiter was quite suave and Italian-accented and introduced the specials using the first person: "I have steamed asparagus, with a sauce of..."

After dinner, we had big plans to go out ballroom dancing. Our first stop was supposed to be a free open house of a pretty standard ballroom dance place, so we were a bit surprised when the elevator doors opened and we found ourselves at "Big Apple Ranch", a gay and lesbian country-western dance night. Apparently our hostess had a bit of confusion with dates. So we made our way to Cachet, a swing dance held in a hidden little corner off Times Square. I ended up being most popular with a crowd of older guys from New Jersey, and by the end I was so tired that I was content to watch some of the best dancers do an amazing spastic Lindy Hop.

Today we had lunch with another one of Kevin's friends from grad school who moved out here to teach high school in the Bronx. He had some pretty amazing stories, including being alarmed to discover that some of the parents he was meeting at parent-teacher conferences were younger than he was (he's not yet thirty), and that it was pretty standard around here for high schools to have nurseries. We were also introduced to the smallest park I've ever seen, a sad little plot .04 of an acre big, set up with benches and ivy and squeezed between buildings on either side.

Tomorrow morning we fly home.

Posted by nadia at 10:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm in New York. Did I mention I was leaving? Everyone seems pleased with the weather here. It's about like the middle of winter in California.

We're staying for the moment chez one of Kevin's friends in Queens. He's super-nice. The night we flew in we met David and Morgan in Manhattan for a dinner of chic Afghan food and very chic and expensive desserts while listening to techno.

The next day, we got up at the crack of 1 pm (which felt like 10, of course) and spent the afternoon wandering around the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Well, I was happy to wander aimlessly. Kevin was intent on finding the section of modern art. We wandered past Byzantine stuff, and medieval European stuff, and whole rooms full of armor and swords (one section of European and one section of Japanese), and through a reconstructed Egyptian temple and by temperature-regulated Egyptian sarcophagi, through entire reconstructed 16th and 17th century European rooms full of furniture and plates (and the coolest bed ever, in dark blue velvet with a canopy 10 feet high), rows and rows of mostly unlabeled paintings and chairs and sofas and glassware, Greek art, Roman art, rooms full of suggestive terracottas... And then Kevin started to get more and more agitated when we kept circling through the Greek area and a hall of statues where it looks like a reception was being set out, so I had to take the map and find the modern art section for him. There was an impressive room full of Manets and Picassos and such, and an exhibition of paper collages and lithographs, but after all that we had walked through, it felt sort of like an afterthought.

In the evening, we ended up at what really must be called bab5 East, although there are slight differences.

New York is a foreign country. I think before when I was visiting, I was content to just speak French and *be* foreign. But now I'm not, so there's this sense that it must be home to me. People have strange accents and use different expressions ("to stay or to go?"). They look and dress differently: it looks like winter, everyone scowls all the time, and I've seen more "couture" than after a week in Berkeley. Bagel shops are run by Thai people. Food is expensive even by bay area standards. Strange people always seem to be jumping into holes in the ground. However, I'm still endlessly pleased with the transit system. The bus and subway run on the same cards! You can by a 7-day pass for $21! You can get from somewhere random in Manhattan to Queens at 3 am without a car!

Posted by nadia at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Pictures, exciting pictures.

Toronto looks different than here mainly because it's flat and there is snow on everything. It makes houses look so dignified and traditional.

Downtown might have been interesting to explore above-ground, but as it was I mainly ended up experiencing interesting architecture from the inside. Not so bad. This was where we ate dinner inside, reachable from the mall-tunnels.

Big buildings, a touristy tower which I did not go up, and construction.

On Sunday, it was warm enough to go skating outside. Next to the free public rink, there was a larger rink reserved for teaching small children to skate. It was snowing. The ice was covered with a few inches of snow and carved up underneath that. But skating outside is not a privelege we get here.

When we left, it was -15 C outside and dumping snow. The flight was delayed, and the view from the airplane was not so reassuring. Before the plane took off, I got to see the de-icing of the wings up close. But after we were above the clouds, everything was fine.

Posted by nadia at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's very cold here. There is this strange white stuff that seems to fall occasionally from the sky and then sit on the ground. Its primary purpose seems to be as something to throw at Kevin. People seem to think I'm wimpy because I walk around wearing a shirt, two sweaters, a winter jacket, two pairs of pants, two pairs of socks, hat, gloves, and a scarf done up to my eyes, and I'm still cold. I think they're crazy for living here. Today my braids froze into solid sticks after a 15 minute walk outside. That can't be good for my hair.

I am still on California time, which means that I go to bed at around 6 am and wake up at around 3 pm. Today we managed to get out of the house before 5, which I thought was pretty darn impressive.

Kevin has many geeky friends. In one night we played many games across multiple houses: some strange card game where you say things like "these are 10 8s" and get away with it, a rousing game of Trivial Pursuit (Canadian Edition), this game with colored lizards on them that was called Coloratura or Coloretto or something like that, and then watched a video game that involved some scantily clad fantasy-style Charlie's Angels running around and changing outfits and casting a spell or two at big scary monsters. I've been informed it's called "Final Fantasy 10-2". I dunno, any game that gets preteen boys of all ages into costume changes must be pretty cool.

Today we walked around downtown Toronto, only we never actually ventured outside. A huge section of the downtown area is traversable by way of these underground tunnels, which are sort of like a cross between a labyrinth and a mall. You can take the subway in, get off in a station, end up in a (real) mall, cross the street in a covered walkway to a department store, descend some floors, and go around underneath office buildings and banks until you're in an entirely different part of the city several subway stops later.

We had dinner "outside" on the "patio" of this "Marche" which was kind of like a food court where you paid with stamps. The "outside" was a sectioned off area of a massive glassed-in structure with a huge cathedral ceiling that you could look through and see distorted lights from the skyscrapers above, and pretend that it wasn't below freezing outside. The big glass structure also, for reasons not entirely apparent to me, contained the big stone facade of some bank building that was more than a hundred years old.

Lots of things are in French here, but often it seems pretty silly. I mean, freeway signs have to be twice as large to accomodate the repetitive "North" "Nord" "East" "Est" and so on. I mean, isn't that stuff obvious enough? Kevin says "you don't understand the subtleties of Canadian language politics." Sure I don't, but come on, you kids are supposed to have learned both languages in school. Other than that, it hasn't been too exciting language-wise. The only really deep hoser accent I heard was from the airplane pilot on my flight from Chicago to Toronto, who also seemed to speak French pretty well, but with *exactly the same accent*.

As for future plans, well, I suppose we could venture outside for once in the downtown area. Maybe I'll get to go to Waterloo, which I refuse to pronounce the Canadian way, which is with an accent on the "loo" and not the "wa". Or maybe I'll just hide inside away from the evil cold and continue reading "Aha! Paradoxes to amuse and confound". That's not actually the title, but you get the idea.

Posted by nadia at 12:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The alarm clock went off at midnight California time this morning. I'd dozed off less than an hour before. Deja vu. My flight left four hours later, at 7 am eastern. My handwritten boarding pass (jetblue's check-in system had crashed or something, leaving a small amount of chaos at the terminal) was marked "SSSS", meaning, apparently, that I must look like a terrorist and must be searched thoroughly in that the-magnetic-wand-beeps-on-the-rivets-in-my-jeans-so-they-look-at-me-warily and the-attendant-makes-small-talk-about-how-beat-up-my-wallet-is sort of way. These searches seem to be mostly for the psychological effect.

If this keeps happening, I'm almost tempted to pack something totally inappropriate (weird-looking sex toy, gigantic bong, etc.) in my bag just to see what they'd do.

Continue reading "East coast adventures" »

Posted by nadia at 02:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Wednesday afternoon, we departed out in Tobin's family's VW Vanagon and headed north with the vague idea of finding neat things to look at for a few days.

Our approximate route ended up along these lines (leaving out side trips):

Continue reading "Road Trip North" »

Posted by nadia at 07:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Why did I go to New York for a weekend? Well, really, it was kind of a random last-minute decision. But it was awesome. Christophe just moved to the east coast, and one day when he (probably facetiously) suggested I come visit for a weekend, I looked at plane tickets online, found the price to be reasonable, and went.

Continue reading "New York - The Weekend" »

Posted by nadia at 06:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Featuring:

tall mountains * snowstorms * parched deserts * oceans of sage * steaming hot springs * one-lane roads * white buttocks glowing in the moonlight * two dozen strapping young men and assorted staff * rolling green hills * smog clouds of death * misty cliffs * roaring seas * majestic redwoods * the San Francisco skyline

This is quite long and contains many pictures. You've been warned.

Continue reading "Oh California (the trip)" »

Posted by nadia at 01:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here:

Mapquest made it for me. Isn't that neat? I had to put in some extra "destinations" (the numbered locations) to get it to trace out a semi-correct path, but there you go. Only inaccuracy is that we're planning to drive up highway 1 all the way along the coast on the way back, not 101/880 the way it shows there.

We'll be spending most of our time at location #2, around Bishop/Big Pine/Deep Springs. Total mileage according to mapquest is 1020 mi. That's a big chunk of California.

Posted by nadia at 06:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Seven of us from the house decided to go on a one-day camping trip this weekend. It was a lot of fun. We ended up going to the Montebello open space preserve, which is in the south bay right near where I used to live. It is on the bay side of the Santa Cruz mountains which separate the bay area (and Silicon Valley) from the ocean.

Here's a nice view. The San Andreas fault is off to the right. This is right next to the epicenter of the 1989 earthquake.

Continue reading "Ridge House Camping Trip" »

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

That's the name of the big city around here. It's pronounced po, like 'peau' which isn't quite as fun.

Stuff I did:

Lots of apéritifs. Averaging about 2 a day now. Every time someone comes over, or you have a meal, the alcohol comes out. Sheesh.

Slept in a couchette on the train to get here. I remember waking up fuzzily before dawn in Toulouse. Airplanes should have couchettes too. I guess that's first class.

Won 50 euros in a casino. On the very last 50 cent piece of the 20 euros we were going to play with. We being Christophe, his sister, and me. Spent it all (the 30 left over) on crepes for lunch the next day. I don't really understand the appeal of slot machines, which I'm going to consider a good thing.

Drove to Basque country and went boogie boarding in the Atlantic. We stopped first in St Jean de Luz but ended up at a beach halfway between there and Biarritz because I wanted real waves. Basque names are cool, there's lots of Zs and Xes. Very touristy.

Today the weather is ucky and grey. Last night there was a massive thunderstorm with lightning that crashed really close. I want to drive to the Pyrénées today. Or Spain. But not much time because we're taking the train back home this evening.

Posted by nadia at 01:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The town

There is a lake, and mountains, and lots of buildings. Oh, and people too.

[a 180 degree panorama from the lake]

It's a nice place to be 35 with kids. I'm told it's more expensive than Tokyo, now. You live there for the school system, but do your grocery shopping in France where it's cheap. The town itself is really small, at least compared to its reputation. You see things that would probably get destroyed anywhere else, like the giant chess sets in public parks.

Continue reading "Things in Geneva, illustrated" »

Posted by nadia at 05:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Saturday we went to Italy. I'd never been before. The border is not that far from here, so we just kinda packed up and set off in the morning in the general direction of Genova/Genoa/Gênes, hoping to run into something interesting.

Here are some pretty pictures of fish, in case you get bored reading the whole thing. [one fish] [two fish] [red fish] [blue fish] (only one of those descriptions is accurate)

Continue reading "Acquario + gelato" »

Posted by nadia at 11:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today we were sitting outside in a cafe over coffee and banana juice, and it decided to rain on us. Slowly at first. Of course, it had to rain because I didn't bring the umbrella. The weather had just been cloudy, so at first the rain was just some tentative sprinkles, and the cafe owners had time to roll out their spiffy awning before it started really pouring. So we remained outside at our table just at the edge of the awning, and watched the rain pour down and the people running across the courtyard, like some kind of full-color French film about Parisian cafe life.

Continue reading "L'auberge espagnole" »

Posted by nadia at 01:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today I went shopping. I know it's terribly girly, but it was a lot of fun. I stayed in the 1ère arrondissement... Saint Denis, apparently. There were dozens and dozens of little stores selling random and oddly specialized clothing from local, apparently small-range distributors (sometimes it looked like the lady sitting in her store also made the clothes herself). I've never seen anything like it. The equivalent stores on the cote d'azur sell the same thing for 150 euros a skirt - here, I was actually surprised to learn that a pair of gorgeous calfskin (I think) pants was 20 euros. I didn't buy anything, but it was an adventure just to look, and be surrounded by hordes of experienced shoppers.

Continue reading "Girly-girl stuff..." »

Posted by nadia at 02:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (61)

Today we went to see the Moulin Rouge. Yes, it's there, it's red, with mill wheel and all. What you don't see in the movie are the dozens of tour buses dumping their passengers off in front to take silly photos standing proudly in front, or wander around reading the illustrated history in the entrance.

What was funnier, I thought, was the surrounding region. It was apparently one of the less-nice areas of Paris, and the entire street was lined on both sides with very loud sex shops, even more so than the street I remarked yesterday. "Cuir, latex, lingerie, poppers, poupées en 25 modèles, jouets..." In one rather amusing spot, a poor post office was surrounded by at least 5 sex shops on either side rather loudly and fluorescently advertising their wares. And these nice middle-American tourist families who would probably never bring their kids to an equivalent region in the states were happily strolling the street, looking at their tourist maps to find Sacré Coeur or the Moulin Rouge.

Continue reading "Le moulin rouge, sans Nicole Kidman" »

Posted by nadia at 02:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This afternoon we set off for day #2 of Paris sight-seeing. And because I thought to bring my parapluie, it didn't rain. This is quite long, apologies in advance.

We started off in the Forum des Halles, a rather large and modern shopping center plop in the middle of an overly cute and mainly pedestrian region. A small walk away was the Centre Pompidou, which I'd heard about but never seen before. Well, the people who don't like it are right: it is ugly. But that's ok, the world needs things like that. We looked at art books and expensive souvenirs inside, but I didn't feel like paying to look at modern art at the moment, so we left to wander around.

Continue reading "Les Halles, Les Champs Elysées" »

Posted by nadia at 01:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Today we actually made it to Paris proper. Gabriel had several places on his list that he wanted to show me, most of which I'd seen before in my highschool-era tourist experience in Paris, but was happy to visit again in my newfound state of actually understanding French.

Continue reading "Comme c'est bizarre, comme c'est curieux, et quelle coincidence" »

Posted by nadia at 02:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, I'm off for a lovely weekend (more like week, as I rather recently discovered) just outside Paris. Gabriel and I just barely made it to the train this evening (having forgotten that trains are dependably 15 minutes late) and then we had a relatively calm ride to the Paris station. The route the train takes along the cote d'azur and through provence really is beautiful.

Continue reading "Au secours!" »

Posted by nadia at 02:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lots of fun with the w3c. You never would have thought that EARL could be so exciting.

Actually, I'm starting to like meetings. It's sick, I know, but it's like a 24 hour geek party. Wireless lan, catered food, pub-hopping... what more could you ask for? Even in the business parts, people who never pay attention to us normally have dropped by and contributed really valuable insights. If only that would happen on an average week.

Continue reading "England, day 5 (the meeting begins)" »

Posted by nadia at 01:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Day 3 was rather uneventful. We saw a neat theater piece, though.

Day 4, I underwent a minor displacement to Bristol. I really like w3c people. They have amusing conversations about web browsers and tactile style sheets, and just now they were discussing the dangers of hooking one's TiVo up to an open wireless network. Now I know this may often degenerate into conversations on tab spacing, parse types, and resolvable namespaces, but for now it's fun.

The current ambiance chez danbri and libby.

Posted by nadia at 01:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This has nothing to do with England, but some people have way too much free time on their hands.

Other than that, well, the weather was more cloudy/rainy/England-like than yesterday. We walked around some more, I saw the baths that Bath is named for, and the crescent building, which is oddly enough shaped like a crescent. Oh, and Marks and Spencer, which included a grocery shop in the back.

Continue reading "England, day 2, and underwear" »

Posted by nadia at 12:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I got back from the concert last night at 1 am, packed, left my residence at 7 am, flew to London, bussed to Bath, and in an amazing chain of events, actually made everywhere I'd planned on time.

Now I'm writing from chez Hixie because he was so kind as to offer me his floor for a few days.

Continue reading "England, day 1" »

Posted by nadia at 02:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)