So, this is a treadmill

Hooray!

2012-01-09T22:30:00.000-08:00

I did not, in fact, fall off the horse on Saturday. Showed up for my last Groupon lesson, and was given Oso again. (Oso. The shorter horse. Yay!)

The classes were advertised as including "horsemanship," which basically meant learning a bit more about saddling/unsaddling and basically caring for your horse each time out. So, my teacher goes off to get a saddle and tells me to brush the horse. I pick up the one brush I'd been taught to use. This brush loosens the dust on the horse, but does not, in fact, remove said dust from said equine. When she returns with the saddle, I asked if there wasn't some other brush I should be using at this point. She asked if I hadn't already been taught about it. "No," I pointed out, "you'd just asked the other student to show me, and he'd only shown me this one." I think, at this point, my teacher had a moment of realization that I'd been somewhat overlooked in the instruction department on my earlier lessons.

The result was that I actually got a lot of instruction. First, I learned how about both brushes and the hoof pick. (And I learned probably the most important thing about cleaning your horse's hooves: do not put your feet underneath where the horse might want to put his hoof down.) Then, I actually got a lot of detail going when I rode the horse around the ring. There was lots of walking and making turns (and standing up in the stirrups!) But, without my teacher paying attention to other students at the same time, she made lots of minute adjustments to everything I was doing, and answered all of my questions. (I'm a pretty asky student, when you get right down to it.)

I also found that my relationship with my teacher vastly improved if I said out loud everything I was trying to make the horse do. (Not that I expected the horse to understand, mind, but if I said, "gentle turn to the left," while I tried to do it, it cut down dramatically on miscommunications with the teacher.) On occasion, the horse wouldn't do what I wanted (teacher said I got a lot of lessons on what to do when my horse was being "naughty"), but the difference between Oso and the taller horse of the other day (Sterling) was that Oso just stopped when being naughty, whereas Sterling would try to canter off (ideally, I expect, out from under me). Besides Oso being rather safer with this whole stopping thing, this rather matched my own way of dealing with things. So, teacher is giving me all these commands (generally, "kick him; kick him again") and I start just narrating what I'm doing: "stop; regroup; heels down; lean back in the saddle; reins steady; upper body to the left; kick on the right," (At which point, the teacher will add whatever I'm missing, like, "eyes up," and I growl at myself and say, "Shit! Eyes up," but then I try it again, and am rewarded with horse motion in the right direction.) But once she understood that I was intentionally stopping and regrouping when things weren't going my way -- rather than just being frozen with confusion -- she both approved of the practice and started giving me more appropriate instruction.

A bit unfortunate that it actually took until the final lesson for me to figure out how to relate to the teacher, but I ultimately DID get out of the lessons what I wanted: an increase in my comfort factor on an English saddle; and a much better understanding of how to control the horse (beyond "reins to the left or right").

Indeed, my most surprising breakthrough in understanding came when she said that it isn't really the reins at all; it's the shifting of your weight on the horse. Turn your upper body, and the horse feels it and moves with you. And I said, "Hey! That's just like skiing!" (Like I'm some expert skier or something. But in my introductory skiing lesson, I learned the fairly magical fact that if you turn your upper body in the direction you want to go, the rest of you goes with it.) Teacher agreed that it was just like skiing. I hadn't expected to make a connection like that at all, but once I made it, I aimed for another cross-training one -- and set my feet in the stirrups on exactly that "ball of your foot" point that you're supposed to balance on in figure skating. I think it was right -- I didn't mention it, but teacher didn't correct my foot placement again.

So, yeah, I think the most interesting thing I walked away from this experience with is that I can actually take my limited experience from one sport into another -- none of this stuff is completely new. How cool is that?

Guess Where I Was Today?

2012-01-02T13:13:00.000-08:00

Hint:

In case you need another hint:

I was there because of this young lady:

She's one of the Rose Princesses. She's also my friend's niece. My friend's husband, in turn, works at one of the places on Colorado Boulevard. Said place of employment sets out a few rows of seats in front of the operation, for its valued employees. Because of the bit with the niece, they booked up nearly 20 seats there (for friends and family) and we all cheered for Megan up there (Cynthia, in the press releases). They got really good seats, too. I didn't entirely know what to expect -- perhaps some seats on the sidewalk with a few rows of people (who had camped out) in front of us. This, in fact, is where I was sitting:

That's my foot, my tea (and that nice Lacoste bag someone gave me for my Bat Mitzvah that, yes, I am still using 30 years later). The significant thing here is that blue line on which my bag and tea are sitting. That's the "honor line." It's painted on both sides of Colorado Blvd., a few feet into the street from the sidewalk, and you (and your belongings) are not allowed to cross it. In other words, I was sitting in a nice folding chair in the front damn row, with nobody allowed to get any closer. Awesome. (I now feel much better about the thousand bucks I've spent on eyeglasses at this establishment over the years.)

Most of the photos are self-explanatory. I was particularly moved by the Donate Life float:

OK, in this float:

there were some folks riding inside. Most of them were smiling and waving. The one in the blue, er, wasn't:

You can't quite see it, although you can certainly tell by her hand position. Girlfriend was texting. (Or tweeting, or live blogging the parade, or whatever.) Some guy behind me shouted, "Stop texting and wave!" and she had the good sense to look embarrassed and give us a half-assed wave before going back to her blackberry. Apparently, the City of Glendale (the float's sponsor) already took some hits for a design that included a Circus Elephant (the title is "Just Imagine the Music, Fun, and Freedom" -- apparently, the circus elephant is imagining what it would be like to not cart around a bunch of teenagers), and I think they need to reconsider their riders (or, at least, give them some instructions on proper float-riding etiquette), because this is not cool.

Oh, and these guys?

There are several groups of them walking the parade route (strategically placed after most equestrian units). They tended to get really huge applause as they went by, and some of them -- if they didn't have any poop to scoop -- would raise their shovels over their heads triumphantly, to further cheers from the crowd. (Yo, Glendale girl -- THAT is the way to behave when you're in the Rose Parade.)

In fact, they were not placed after all the equestrian units, which led to the question: what happens when a marching band follows an equestrian unit. The first such incident occurred with the US Marine Corps marching band (which followed the USMC mounted color guard). There was a big pile of horse poop in the center of the street, and the marching band deftly went around it -- you couldn't see anyone break ranks, but, when they passed by, the poop was still intact.

A High School band later was not so skillful. ("You're dancing in poop!")

I think all the rest of the pictures are just floats. No, wait. Does everybody know this guy?

That's Raul Rodriguez, float designer extraordinaire. He is riding on the 500th float he has designed for the Rose Parade. That's, like, eleven whole parades worth of floats. He's clearly the go-to guy for your float designs and, this year, his floats won another stack of awards.

OK, now the rest of the pictures are just floats. :)

You may wonder if I stayed to see the "Occupy" float. Here's what you need to know about the Rose Parade. It ends with the Parade of Tow Trucks -- half a dozen (or more) trucks, moving slowly and honking their horns. The Parade of Tow Trucks is followed by the Parade of People Going Back to Their Cars. During the slow passage of the tow trucks, everyone around me gathered up their stuff and started walking away. Within minutes of the end of the parade, the seats were cleared (and already being folded up), and the street was mobbed by people going every which way. Possible that the Occupy folks were behind the teeming masses, but, honestly, it was too much of a mad house for me to wait around for them. Had they (and their police presence) come marching down immediately on the heels of the tow trucks, I could see us sticking around to see what they'd come up with. As it was, though, I have no idea how the thousand or so Occupy folks managed against the 900,000 or so trying to get back to their cars.

Happy New Year, everyone!

So, this is a horse

2011-12-22T21:34:00.000-08:00

Frequent readers know that I like going on trail rides when I'm on vacation. I've been on various horses about a dozen times -- although, what with the rides being vacation trail rides, my horse was pretty much just following the horse in front, and I wasn't exactly controlling the animal.

After the unfortunate experience in the Czech Republic (when they wouldn't take my horse off the lead for half the damn trail ride), I stumbled upon a Groupon for 3 riding lessons at a nearby stable. This seemed to be exactly the ticket -- I very much doubt I'm ultimately going to take riding lessons, but I wouldn't mind having a few beginner lessons under my belt the next time I'm in a foreign country and trying out the local equines.

First lesson was Tuesday night. Did not go entirely well, in that my horse was on the lead for the whole damn thing. But I didn't really mind being on the lead when I'm actually learning to do stuff with the horse, rather than having the horse just follow a set path like the boats in "It's a Small World." So, I spent an hour on Tuesday in an English saddle, being regularly yelled at to keep my heels down, riding my horse in an ever-increasing circle around my teacher.

I was on a (relatively) small brown horse named "Oso." There was another guy there taking his third Groupon lesson from the same teacher. He was on a larger white horse. While I'm going around in a circle, he's going around the whole ring, attempting to get the white horse to trot. It isn't going well; the horse is just not in a trotting mood. As soon as he gets a little bit of trot out of it, the horse goes back to walking. Meantime, the teacher is trying to get him to post, and (in what I am certain was simply for her amusement) making me to stand up in the stirrups while my horse was walking. (She claimed this was good for my balance, and I suppose the idea was that I'd eventually be trotting a horse and would need to be able to post, but I'm still thinking it was for the laughs.)

I was wiped out. When I got home, I decided the horse was named Oso, because when I was finished riding him, I was Oso tired.

Took a hot bath and everything. (Which was a good trick, as the little thingy that plugs the drain wasn't working, so I just jammed some plastic sandwich bags in there. When the bags started floating to the surface, the bath was over.)

Felt fine yesterday -- until about ... well, until about 24 hours after the ride. Apparently, feeling sore after a ride is a time-delayed sort of thing. Realizing that I would be getting back on the horse again today, I sat with a heating pad across my, er, inner thighs last night.

So, today, back off to the stables. To my surprise, I did not get Oso -- one of the other riders got him. I got ... the tall white horse the other guy couldn't make trot. This: (1) concerned me (on the issue of how far I'd have to slide off this thing to dismount); and (2) gave me a (false!) sense of security that the horse actually wanted to go slowly.

(On the plus side, I got "the dressage saddle" today, which was way more comfortable than your standard English saddle of the lesson before. Even though I had a great laugh over the idea that I'd be doing dressage today. Because, yeah, controlling a horse through precise movements with pinpoint accuracy totally describes my riding style.)

My teacher had an assistant today, and two other students. The other students walked their horses around the ring. My horse was guided by the teacher's assistant. For about 30 minutes, we all did the same things (walk horses, stand up a bit, sit back down), although my horse was being led and the other students' horses weren't. I was getting a little annoyed by this, because I was pretty sure I could handle the horse at this point. (I think the other students were getting a little annoyed by it, too, because the teacher would tell us all to stand up in the stirrups, and then compliment me on my standing, and I'm sure they were thinking, "uh, yeah, she has it easier, what with not simultaneously controlling her horse.")

Eventually, my teacher decided I'd graduated to actually Operating the Horse Solo. (After an intermediate step of the assistant releasing the lead, but still walking next to me and the horse.) And I did pretty well! Walked the horse all by myself! Turned left! Turned right! Go me!

So, we're walking around the ring, turning between gates (they jump horses there) whenever I feel like it, and my mind momentarily wanders ...

... and the horse knows. The horse is freakin' on it, and immediately starts trotting off. So, here's me yelling "Whoa!" and pulling on the reins, all of ten minutes after they sent the assistant away (and I'm sure everyone is questioning whether that was the right call), but I'm actually more amused than anything. Because, with all of those trail horses (and the mules in the Grand Canyon) I've ridden, you can pretty much daydream and the horse will still follow the butt of the horse in front of it. But, now, I'm on a horse that is genuinely not going to fall for that crap, and I think it's pretty cool.

So, back to paying 100 percent complete and utter attention to the fact that I'm on top of an animal that has a different idea of how he would rather be spending his time. We walk some more; we turn some more; I ask the teacher what I should be doing -- she suggests that I try standing up in the stirrups again, although I should go closer to the rail when I do it. (I say to the horse, "Let's go over to the rail, so that when I fall off, I'll fall on metal!") We're toddling along near the rail at the far end of the ring and ...

... honestly, I'll take the blame for the first one. The first one was totally my fault. But this time -- well, if this was my fault, there is cause for concern, as I have no damn idea what I did to set the horse off. One second, we're walking along, and the next second, the horse starts something rather more akin to a gallop. It happened pretty quickly, but I assume there may have been a buck involved too, as, all of a sudden, there's mane in my face, and I'm pretty sure that my head shouldn't be anywhere near the back of the horse's neck if we're all doing what we're supposed to be doing. I yell "Whoa!" a few times and pull on the reins. It doesn't seem like it's working, but eventually it does. (I was moments away from yelling, "A little help here?") The teacher asked if the horse got spooked by something, and I went with "yes," as it seemed the best explanation (as well as the most face-saving one). The assistant had mentioned there were sometimes coyotes in the trees near the far end of the ring (where we were) and the teacher confirmed that and suggested we stay in the near half of the ring for the rest of the lesson. Good plan.

Teacher said she was proud of me. (I was all, "For what? Not falling off the horse?" Apparently, I got points for my attitude of not jumpng off the horse, saying, "Screw that," and walking away.) I'm good with it, though. I mean, I (eventually) did the horse back under control, so I should be less freaked out at the possibility it may happen again.

One more lesson, in January. I'm staying away from the coyotes.

XBox Report -- Day Two

2011-12-11T23:56:00.001-08:00

So, I finally broke open "Dance Central" for the XBox/Kinect. Light years ahead of the old dancing game I had for the PS2. No more putting a mat down and stepping on the arrows. This is full body dance moves -- just mirror the dancer on screen.

As for my own personal dancing abilities, I did fairly well (on the easiest dances, on the "easy" level). Given the difference between my score on the Lady Gaga song and my score on ... well, I can't even remember the name of the song, but it had dance moves with names like "merengue" and "Latino" and, overall, a substantial increase in hip action over the Gaga tune ... the only conclusion I can come to is, "I am so white."

I am very glad that this whole experience went down in the privacy of my living room, because, damn, the whiteness of my dancing is downright embarrassing.

Human Beings: Largely Decent

2011-12-11T23:48:00.001-08:00

My thanks to the three people involved in returning my wallet to me, when I dropped it in the parking lot, and hadn't even known it was lost.

I was attending the theatre. I dropped my wallet in a public parking lot where it was picked up by another theatregoer. Who was going to another theatre. He handed my wallet over to the artistic director of the place, who happened to recognize my name, and telephoned a publicist who knew me. The publicist called me on my cell phone ... with the result that I got a call about a minute after I walked out of the theatre, telling me that I'd lost my wallet, and that I could pick it up from the other theatre's artistic director. (I went directly there.)

Now, clearly, this process was helped along greatly by the fact that the artistic director knew me -- but this wasn't strictly necessary. When I returned to my car, I found a note there from the dude who had found my wallet, and left his phone number. I'd already picked up my wallet by this time, but I called the guy just to thank him. He said it was a karma thing.

(I guess I just got repaid for sharing some electricity with my neighbors, when they had a downed power line for several days.)

Still, this is clearly one of those days when I'm having a lot of faith in my fellow humans.

That's It. I'm Officially Five Years Old

2011-12-03T11:00:00.001-08:00

Got the XBox yesterday. Began playing with it last night.

The Kinect really does get you moving -- I'll give it that. And I like the fact that the "Kinect Adventures" (which isn't so much a game as an opportunity to familiarize yourself with the way the controller works -- which is an odd thing to say as, like the adds profess, you are the controller) ... ANYWAY, I like the way that the game is set up so that it's fairly easy to succeed, so you move through it quickly.

It was set to the mode to automatically take pictures of me. I subsequently turned that off. I mean, it's one thing to dodge and weave and jump in the privacy of my living room --- another to have photographic evidence of it.

The real problem was that upon winning a game, it asks you to record a "living statue," where there are a bunch of avatars on the screen, and you're supposed to dance around and talk -- and then play it back and all the avatars are doing your dance moves while your voice plays back.

So, now, although all photographic evidence has since been deleted, my XBox can now play six little avatars dancing around while my voice says, "I did it. Go me. I did it. Go me."

(Oh, the shame.)

Now I'm a Tourist Attraction

2011-12-01T12:06:00.001-08:00

I saw a car drive by this morning and slow in front of my house while someone leaned out the window and took a picture of my downed tree. Hey, lady, get your own storm damage! This one's mine!

Here's my backyard. Branches everywhere. Also lemons. And shingles.

Lots of shingles.

I was trying to look up the warranty on my roof when I my next-door neighbor came by with the happy news that the shingles aren't mine. My roof (which you can see from their house) is still intact. The shingles aren't theirs, either, although their yard is also full of them. They came from the house on the other side of theirs. That's two houses from me, if you're keeping score.

That was the good news. This is the bad news.

Note the gap in the fence on the left of that walkway by the side of my house. Shouldn't there still be fence there?

Oh! Here it is!

In my other neighbor's yard!

I'm not 100% sure that I own the fence. It could be his (although I think it's mine). I left a note for him (he's a firefighter, so is busy working right now) -- if it's mine, I'll be calling my insurance carrier.

(I already checked. My tree removal isn't covered as the tree didn't fall on my house. All things considered, I'm happier with this set of circumstances.)

It's ... er ... windy

2011-11-30T22:58:00.001-08:00

The City of Pasadena's automated computer called me (several times) to cheerfully inform me that starting at midnight, red flag warning parking restrictions will be in effect. Basically, the combination of Santa Ana winds plus low humidity means that if there's a spark, fire can spread really, really, really quickly.

A friend at work was planning to go away for the weekend. I told her that they're expecting some serious Santa Anas, so I hoped she wouldn't have any flight difficulties. She asked what Santa Anas were. I said it would be windy. Really, really, windy.

Because a picture is worth 1000 words, I'll shut up now, and give you the picture I just took out my front window.

I'm concerned. Largely because the winds were that fierce and it isn't even midnight yet.

(Aside to folks concerned about "Pokey" -- the five-foot plywood reindeer that I put out this weekend, back when it was 80 degrees and beautiful. Pokey has to be on the parkway. I tied him to a tree (a different tree) and set a light out in front of him. Indeed, that brown line you see across my driveway is the duck tape covering the extension cord which continues down the lawn, under the downed tree. I only discovered the tree when I looked out my window to check on Pokey. I then went outside to observe the damage. Pokey had, in fact, escaped his ropes. (My knots held, but the rope attached to the frame on Pokey's backside didn't.) He was lying flat on the ground -- miraculously, he hadn't crushed the lightbulb in front of him (and started one of those fast-moving fires). I briefly tried to pick him up but the utter stupidity (not to mention impossibility) of carrying a five-foot piece of plywood in 45 mile per hour winds quickly struck me. I decided that flat on the ground was probably the best place for him. I went back inside the house, pleased that (for now), I still have electricity, internet, and satellite TV. Gonna hunker down with the cat.)

Fortune Cookie Fate

2011-11-27T20:13:00.001-08:00

Er, yeah, so... one of the items I totally don't need that I was thinking about picking up this holiday season is, in fact, an XBox. It was on a pretty good deal (expiring Monday) but, you know, since I'd missed an even better deal, I was going back and forth on it.

Went out for Chinese food today, and mentioned the dilemma to my friend (who understood, as she was experiencing the same thing -- only it was about a $3 price increase for some skeins of yarn). When I picked up my fortune cookie, I said, "Oh great fortune cookie, tell me whether I should buy the XBox."

The fortune cookie was empty.

I figured the fortune cookie wanted nothing of this decision. My friend really wanted to know what the fortune cookie had to say about the XBox question, so asked the waiter for another cookie. He gave us three more. I picked one, opened it, and read:

"Happy events will take place shortly in your home."

The Worst Thing About Black Friday

2011-11-27T12:13:00.001-08:00

Well, no... the worst thing about Black Friday would be people pepper spraying each other, or getting robbed in the parking lots, or trampling other people. Dudes. It's an XBox. Get over it.

The worst thing about Black Friday for me, however, is when I find something I want to buy and discover it was on a really good sale two days ago. Don't get me wrong -- I'm not talking about a doorbuster or an Amazon lightning deal, or some such other situation where they only had a couple dozen (or hundred) available, and you had to brave pepper spraying lunatics to get one. I'm talking about a perfectly good on-sale-for-a-couple-days price. Which I missed. And now, while the item may be listing for a decent price, I don't want to pull the trigger on it because I could have got it for less the other day, and who really knows if it will go on sale again next week?

In other words, I'm not making my buying decisions based on whether I'd be getting good value for my money right now ... but on the fact that I could have gotten better value for my money the other day, and the speculation that the better value price may reappear. Because, I mean, I'd feel like a jackass if I ordered something today and it went cheaper again tomorrow.

And I'm talking significant money here. Lord knows, in the great big "Time = Money" calculation (the calculation that had people camped out in front of my local Best Buy from the night before Thanksgiving), my time is worth more than five or ten bucks. But there are two, er, big ticket items I've been looking seriously at. If I hit the right prices, I can get both of them for about $500 total. (Doorbusters would have put the combination at $350, but let's not go there.) Worst case scenario prices put the combination at $700 or more. And since these are what you might call luxury items -- you know, I don't really need either one -- my brain can justify spending $500 for the pair, but I balk at anything over that, because then it's, you know, real money.

In the meantime, I've still got another, I don't know, ten or fifteen things to buy for other people for the holidays, but the process of: (1) actually figuring out that I do want these things; (2) hunting down the cheapest current prices; and (3) figuring how much I'm actually willing to spend on this has taken up most of my weekend.

Pics from Capitoline Museum

2011-11-26T19:46:00.001-08:00

These last pics are from the Capitoline Museum.

This one is mandatory -- anyone going to Rome is required to take a picture of Romulus and Remus being suckled by the she-wolf. I'm not sure they let you out of the country without this shot, but I didn't want to risk it.

Here is the really cool statue of Marcus Aurelius, now displayed inside the museum what 'cause the elements were damaging it.

Here's ruins of some temple they found when they were building this room in which to house the statue. Check Marcus Aurelius in the background -- it's like, right there, so they made it part of a lower level of the museum.

Here's the ancient law thing I mentioned:

And, finally, the statute of the Dying Gaul. I mentioned earlier that I thought this one might be known only through the Roman copy, and it turns out I remembered correctly on that one. So, I mean, this is the only way we know this statue. Two things I remember about it from Art History class -- (1) we're talking about the Hellenistic period here, where the emotional intensity of the moment made its way into the physicality of the work -- so, I mean, check out the guy's hair for crying out loud; and (2) the Gaul was an enemy -- this is one of the earlier times in art history where we see sympathy for the enemy; he's not portrayed as weak or a monster, he's a man wounded in battle, dying with dignity.

Pics of Old Stuff From Rome

2011-11-26T19:38:00.001-08:00

Colosseum! I went to the Colosseum!

And saw the Constantine Arch.

And used my zoom on the Arch. Dude, check out the relief on that thing!

I saw lots of ruins. Even got my picture taken in front of them.

This one is interesting. Look straight across behind me. That's Palantine Hill. Now look below me, where the helicopters and planes are. Apply imagination. That's a large round track (stretching out in both directions behind me). Now imagine chariot races there. Conclusion: Circus Maximus. (Now used, apparently, for temporary displays of aircraft.)

Pics from Rome

2011-11-26T19:21:00.001-08:00

The Pantheon. OMG(s?), I so loved the Pantheon.

The dome on this thing just resonated with me in a crazy geometrical perfection sort of way. I mean, yeah, sure, here's the dome on St. Peter's, which has its own undeniable appeal:

But they're something like 1500 years apart. (I think I incorrectly posted the Pantheon was 1500 years old -- it's more like 1500 years before St. Peter's -- it dates to 126 A.D. Come to think of it, that's exactly 1500 years ahead of St. Peter's, which was consecrated in 1626.) I digress. The point is: Look at that thing! Look at the architectural ballsiness involved in putting a great big hole at the top of your dome. Not to mention the way that the shadows fall is a huge part of the beauty of the pattern in the dome. Man, I loves me the Pantheon.

Since I mentioned St. Peter's, this would be a good time to throw in the shot from the front:

(I'm too close to see the dome here.)

Also, Michelangelo's Pieta was there. Photos don't really do it justice, but, y'know, I was there, I saw it, I snapped a picture.

What else? Me, Rome, Trevi Fountain:

(Before I left, everyone warned me about all the pickpockets in Rome. Please note the way I'm holding my bag -- it isn't the big blue thing -- that's the jacket of the guy walking below me. It's the tiny brown bag clutched under my arm with my forearm on the zipper. My philosophy is this: when you're dealing with pickpockets (as opposed to, say, armed robbers), all you have to do is be a less attractive target than the guy next to you. I walked all over Rome with my purse clutched that way. Took a little effort to relax my arm at the end of the day, but I'm happy to say I left Rome with all my stuff.)

Pics from Monaco

2011-11-26T19:15:00.001-08:00

OK, this first one isn't from Monaco. It's from somewhere on Corsica. I don't know where, exactly. But it's me! I'm there! (Wherever there is.)

OK, I think I mentioned the oceanography museum in Monaco and how they displayed their jellyfish in a crazy expensive tank with cool lighting that almost made the whole thing seem neon. And my picture didn't do it justice, but they still look like awfully pretty jellyfish.

And, then there was the automotive museum -- sorry, not museum, private collection, as this sign explained:

Not sure why, exactly, but I took a ton of pictures of the cars. Here's ... some of them.

And before we go off to the pictures from Rome, here's another one of those Bonifacio shots. Not my favorite, but still pretty impressive:

Pics from Cruise

2011-11-26T19:00:00.001-08:00

I just love holiday weekends. Gives me time to get caught up on things, like going through the 275 photos on my camera's memory card, and figuring out which ones are worth sharing with you guys.

So, let's cut to the chase. The reason why I take 275 photos is because I'll have no idea as to which ones are the good ones. I had anticipated the best photo being a sunset shot I took from the top of the Capitoline Museum in Rome -- there was a flock of birds in the sky and thought they'd make a great shot. Not so much. It looks like this:

On the other hand, the very bestest shot turned out to be one from Bonifacio (on Corsica). I'd had hopes for this, actually -- I took it six different ways, but this was by far the best one:

I hadn't really expected the surface in front of the camera (I think it was just the top of a very old guard rail) to make the photo -- I left it out of most versions -- but, honestly, I think the texture makes the picture somehow. Ah, the things I'm learning about photography.

So, let's start this photo essay in Nice. I didn't see much OF Nice, but there were some really spectacular views of the Mediterranean from there. Here are a couple.

The first, obviously, is from a height. I think that's when I climbed to the top of the castley thingy -- a mistake which made my knees hurt pretty much until I'd gotten to Rome. But you have to admit, the view is gorgeous.

The second picture is from a little area I accidentally found when I was looking for steps down to the port (so I could get to my cruise ship). The steps instead led down to this little rocky area, where a bunch of people were sitting (I found an angle that excluded them) and eating lunch.

(It was time to leave when I saw a big old rat get up and scurry between those rocks, probably looking for leftovers. At the time, I wondered whether this was going to be some sort of metaphor for France -- lovely on top and rat-infested beneath. As it turns out, I still haven't seen enough of France to know for sure.)

Something Cool and Something Cooler

2011-11-13T21:14:00.001-08:00

Cool: I saw a performance of a new Broadway musical called Bonnie & Clyde. The actress who usually plays Bonnie was out, and of her two understudies, the one that went on today is usually a swing. Which means she doesn't have a regular role in the show. Which means -- as excitedly pointed out by two of her friends sitting behind me -- that this was her very firstest time performing any role on a Broadway stage. And here she was, playing the lead (on relatively little notice, and -- I'm guessing -- not a whole ton of rehearsal). She was good, too -- had a lovely singing voice and good characterization. Congratulations on your Broadway debut, Cassie Okenka.

(The show itself wasn't particularly engaging. I think the problem was that, the way it was set up, you didn't particularly identify with Bonnie and/or Clyde, and you didn't particularly want them to get caught/shot either. So, I mean, the songs were good and the acting was terrific, but I wasn't particularly involved in the show. Thank goodness for Cassie over there -- I was much more interested in seeing whether she could pull it off than in seeing what happened to Bonnie and Clyde.)

Cooler: And I saw The Book of Mormon. Which was, like, instantly engaging from the first moment, when I was completely involved in the story of Elder Price and Elder Cunningham and their mission to Uganda. I don't really see much point in analyzing something that's just so damn entertaining -- but when you think about it, it's quite remarkable how the script simultaneously mocks Mormon beliefs (and religion on the whole) while still somehow connecting with what it is that's good and valuable about faith. But, mostly, it was really f*cking funny.

Not Wolverine...

2011-11-12T19:45:00.001-08:00

Anonymous (hi there) inquired if I was going to see Hugh Jackman's show. I was tempted, but I'd already seen it when he did an out-of-town tryout in San Francisco. (Really! I did!) And there was so much stuff I still hadn't seen, it seemed better to go for something new.

So, no Wolverine last night.

Instead: Harry Potter.

Now, obviously, Daniel Radcliffe did not take the lead in a revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying for the money. This is his second Broadway show (his first having been Equus), and in this one, he's called upon to sing and dance and be charming and generally be a leading man. And he pulls it off. From clips I'd seen on television, I had my doubts, but he was genuinely good. (Indeed, he might have improved a bit from earlier performances.) Actually, he had a bit of a misstep in the big dance number -- he either slipped or got slightly lost in the choreography; it went by so fast, I couldn't be sure. And I was happy to see him make that mistake. Because from what I'd seen from him in Equus, that never would have happened before. His performance was competent, but safe. And with that sort of safety, you never miss a step, but you also miss out on the opportunities for real greatness -- you miss out on getting lost in the play and letting the moment take you someplace unexpected. So I was pleased that he's loosened up enough to the point where a tiny mistake is allowed to happen. It means he's not so caught up in making it perfect that he misses the chance to make it wonderful.

This is also that fun time of year when shows compete to raise money for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. Most shows have collection buckets; some sell off autographed merchandise. At the end of How to Succeed... Radcliffe makes the BC/EFA sales pitch. He is accompanied by John Laroquette (who won a Tony for playing the company boss). Radcliffe takes out a card and reads, in his own voice, a list of all the good things BC/EFA does. Laroquette waits a beat, then backs up in shock, saying, "You're BRITISH?!!" (Much audience laughter.) Radcliffe then explains they're going to auction off the signature bowtie he's wearing on stage. He and Laroquette will autograph it and personalize it (and pose for pictures...). Bidding starts at an embarrassingly low $50, and is soon about $1000.

I got a great seat for this show. It was the last seat available, a cancellation, sixth row center orchestra. I'm seated more or less in the middle of a bidding war, as people right behind me are fighting it out with people a few rows in front.

(When they're around $3000, a voice bids from somewhere in the back. Laroquette asks the bidder to stand up, as they can't see him. The bidder is finally identified as sitting in the mezzanine. Laroquette quips that he could probably have afforded a better seat.)

The bowtie finally goes for FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS, a price which makes the dude sitting next to me comment, "I guess we've been sitting with the one percent."

Vacation (again?)

2011-11-11T21:20:00.001-08:00

OK, yes, I'm on vacation again. And yes, I just got back from vacation.

The only thing I can say in my defense was that I'd actually planned this one -- a quick cheap long weekend in New York -- long before I'd found out about that really cheap cruise I just got back from.

But this is a pretty standard vacation for me: go to New York, see many shows.

I'm trying a new hotel this time -- Yotel. It's described as a "pod" hotel, which is pretty funny, because my "cabin" seems roomier than plenty other rooms I've had in New York in regular old hotels. (Here, there is actually room for a tiny desk next to the bed!) So far, I quite like it. I'd like it better if it was on 9th Ave. rather than 10th, but it's still doable. I also get the feeling that they really need to keep it pristine; it'll suck if the clean white surfaces start looking less clean.

I would be telling you something about the show I saw tonight, but apparently, my mother doesn't read her text messages. She's been challenged to guess what I saw, so I can't go and spoil it all until she takes up the challenge.

A Good Day to Call Your Bank

2011-11-06T16:18:00.000-08:00

I called my bank today to question a questionable interest charge on my credit card.

(I missed a payment by a day a couple months ago. I paid the interest charge without question the next month, because I stupidly deserved it. Did not understand why there was an interest charge the month after that, however, as I'd paid the previous statement in full on time.)

The customer service rep immediately explained it. Then she immediately offered to waive it.

Then she immediately offered to waive the interest fee from last month as well.

I don't know how many people are taking part in the whole "dump your bank and join a credit union" thing this weekend, but if today's call is any indication, there is definitely a friendliness and eagerness to help coming from my bank which wasn't necessarily there the last time I called.

So, thank you, protestors.

The Long Slog Home

2011-11-05T10:13:00.000-07:00

I've been home for a few days now, and have barely recovered.

We start at the hotel. They'd booked a car for me (50 Euros, no more, no less) and wanted to have it arrive at 7:20 a.m. -- this would, if traffic behaved, get me to the airport an hour and a half before my flight. I told them to kick it up to 7:00, just to be safe. (Probably should have gone earlier, but my desire for sleep was overwhelming.)

So, at 7:00 a.m., I'm in the hotel lobby with my stuff. The driver is not.

Time passes. More time passes. The guys at the hotel desk keep telling me he'll be here "in a minute" -- I do not think this phrase means what they think it means. He eventually shows up around 7:15. I'm more or less livid, but would have been frantic if he'd been this late on a 7:20 pick-up.

We head to the airport. A few minutes in, I notice the meter is running -- did he do a flag drop on a fixed rate trip? I say, "This is 50 Euro, right?" and he turns off the meter.

(Aside: Did anyone try to pick my pocket in Italy? No. Did anyone try to rip me off? Yes. In my two days in Rome, I caught two different vendors short-changing me. Then again, there was also that merchant on Corsica who refused to accept my friend's coinage because it was Italian money rather than French. Dude, they're EURO -- it doesn't matter where the coins were minted. That's what a unified currency is. I can't count that as ripping off, though, just being a dick.)

So, as we approach the airport, my cabbie asks me what airline. Alitalia. He asks if my destination is international; it is. He says all Alitalia international flights leave from Terminal One (of the five-terminal airport). He dumps me at Terminal One, takes his 50 Euro, and disappears into the day. I go into Terminal One and do not see my flight on the board. Odd. I go the Alitalia check-in machine and try to check in for my flight. It finds the reservation but will not let me check in. Odd again.

You see this coming. I was on about four hours sleep and did not.

The Alitalia rep comes by and asks if she can help. I explain the problem. She tells me the flight to London is out of Terminal Three.

Crappity, crap, crap, crap.

I grab my luggage and start booking down the sidewalk in front of the terminals. As I round the corner into Terminal Three, it dawns on me that this little unnecessary burst of energy has pretty much used up my supply. I'm on fumes now, and I haven't even boarded the plane.

I check in (the line is very long -- then I realize I'm in the wrong line; my line is shorter, but by the time I clear it, I'm running out of time). I am checked in for my flight from Rome to Heathrow, but not from Heathrow to L.A. I had noticed some British Airways check-in counters nearby; since BA was operating my Heathrow flight, I thought maybe I could get a boarding card from them. But nobody was at their counters, and time was tight.

Went through security. (The Rome airport has a separate security line for flights going to five destinations: the U.S., Russia, the UK, Israel and ... something else I forgot. In any event, this was clearly the "high security" line.) We had to take all electronics out of our bags, but they didn't seem to care about liquids.

Made it into the terminal. There was a place where they were selling food. I needed food. Badly. There were three workers behind the counter; each one was handing food to people. I got in the middle line. I knew what I wanted and had the change in my hand to pay for it. I got to the front of the line (ten minutes later) and the woman said something in Italian to me. I did not understand. She changed to English and said "pay first" and pointed me to the line on the left. During this exchange four more people joined the line on the left. I would never get my food before my flight. Dammit.

Went to the gate. A minute or two after I got there, they started boarding. It was general boarding -- no concern about rows or anything. This was one of those airports where you have to take a little bus out to the plane, and they were just filling busses and sending them on their way.

The bus ride must have taken 20 minutes. I shit you not. I couldn't believe we were still in the airport; thought maybe we'd drive this thing to Calais and take a boat to England.

Finally got on the plane. I had a center seat. Was sitting next to some Italian dude.

Lance had commented, the other day, that there are no douchey guys in Italy -- when you see a guy dressed all in black with red shoes and expensive red sunglasses in the States, he's a douche; but when you see him in Italy, he's just Italian. I was pretty much sitting next to this guy.

Best thing I can say about Alitalia: Instead of a bag of peanuts, it's a bag with biscotti in it. I downed that right quick.

Arrived at Heathrow; took the shuttle bus to terminal five; checked in...

OK, there were two reasons I chose British Air for this flight. One: little personal video screens in coach, so I could watch whatever I want; Two: they have a "premium economy" section I intended to attempt to upgrade to. I was unable to book an upgrade in advance (because I'd booked my ticket on Orbitz, rather than with the airline directly), so I was stuck with trying this at the airport. Bad news: No premium economy seats left. Worse news: Only center seats left.

I had a couple hours in Terminal 5 to prepare for ten hours cramped into a center seat on a transatlantic jet. I approached my next two hours as an attempt to buy anything I could that would make the following ten hours survivable. Mostly food items. I got a peking duck wrap, a scone and cream, some Jaffa cakes, and a bag of pretzels. I really wanted one of those overpriced airport massage places, but there wasn't one in Terminal 5. Someone had really missed out on a business opportunity there, I thought. You had thousands of people killing time between flights (often hours); you could make a killing with one of them overpriced airport massage places.

Terminal 5 has a billion gates, several are in satellite terminals -- B and C. Signs tell you not to go these terminals until your flight is announced. About an hour before my flight, it is announced that it leaves from Gate section B. I take the little train over to section B. Where I immediately discover the overpriced airport massage place. Man, if any shop needed to be in the main terminal ... I note their menu of services includes hour-long treatments. How can anyone get an hou-rlong massage if they don't go to section B until their flight is called? I'm telling you, the existence of this shop in section B is something I am seriously going to remember the next time I have three hours to kill in Terminal 5. Between center-seat flights.

So, I've got about 30 minutes before boarding -- at least I can get a ten minute quickie neck massage. Er, no, I can't. There's one lady working the shop; her partner just went on break, and she is giving some guy a pedicure. She'll be done in ten minutes, and there's a woman in line in front of me who is planning a 20-minute service. Well, poop. (At least I've saved the fifteen pounds, but still.)

Board the flight. I am seated between a woman (on the aisle on my right) and a dude (in the center seat on my left) who are both Dutch. Throughout the flight, they have many animated conversations in their native language over me. I would have gladly traded seats with one of them (even the dude in the other center seat) to avoid this, but I hadn't realized this would be an issue early enough in the flight to offer.

Full marks, at least, for BA's personal video screens, which had way more selection than American's did (on the flight over) and which let you start and stop the movies whenever you wanted. (AA ran each movie on a schedule, so you'd have to wait until the film on channel 12 was restarting.) I watched three movies (Paul, Green Lantern, and, X-Men First Class) I am certain I must have slept on the plane, as I drifted off during the big ol' fight scenes in the latter two films. (Did not mind as I'd see X-Men before, and Green Lantern was pretty stupid.)

The flight landed at 7:05 p.m. I did not clear Customs and Immigration until 8:05 p.m. I noted that, as a general rule, I wait longer at Immigration in the U.S. than in any foreign country I've visited. Customs guy was a hoot, though.

Customs guy: Anything to declare?
Me: No.
Customs guy: It says here you've got "food."
Me: Yeah. Chocolates, olive spread, honey ...
Customs guy: You got any apples, oranges--
Me: No, no. Nothing like that.
Customs guy: (continuing) -- meats, sausages, dope, dung, soil--
Me: Wait a minute. Did you just say dope?

What with Halloween traffic and all, I hit the door at 9 p.m. Pacific Time, some 22 hours after I'd started in Rome. There was no food in the house. But there was candy!

Rome Bonus Post -- Never Send a Jew to Buy a Rosary

2011-10-30T15:29:00.000-07:00

So, a friend had requested "some Holy Water blessed by the Pope or something like that." This seemed like a reasonable request. Heck, the little font thingie near the door of St. Peter's has perfectly good Holy Water in it free for the touching (or doing whatever one does with Holy Water ... Rudy told me to dip my fingers in it and joked that it wouldn't turn me Catholic or anything) -- certainly Pope-blessed Holy Water should be around and available for purchase.

Ha.

Rudy gave me about 20 minutes ("but take as long as you want") to make my Vatican purchases, and aimed me toward the right shop for all my Vatican needs -- there's the Vatican bookstore (largely limited to books) which is right next to the Vatican post office (which is not limited to postal items, but has all sorts of religious items). So, I go into the Vatican post office, where lots and lots of people are filling out post cards to mail them from the smallest country in the world. Stamps are also available for purchase -- many in sets. I gave some consideration to the set with images of the Popemobile through the years -- but if you were expecting some Holy Water, I'm thinking a stamp of the Popemobile may be a let-down. So, I approach the cases with religious items. If there's no holy water, maybe there's a medal of a saint or something.

Saint medals are surprisingly limited. In fact (and I'm guessing this is largely a result of market demand), there's way more stuff commemorating the beatification of John Paul II. I do not recall my friend being a huge devotee of the former Pope (not that she had anything against him or anything -- I just don't think she'd get much comfort from a medallion with his face on it).

If we omit the crazy expensive stuff, I'm left with three or so cases of crucifixes, rosaries, and crosses. It is around now that I realize I'm totally out of my depth. I haven't experienced this particular feeling since the first time I set foot in an REI (to buy someone a topo map) even though I'd never been on a hike (or camping, or skiing, or kayaking, or anything else that REI sells stuff for). I was walking around with a look on my face that clearly said, "I have no idea what to do in here," only, in this case, it was compounded by, "and I don't speak Italian, either."

My first problem was that, not having prepared for this shopping experience, and not having had any cause to ever meet a rosary up close, I had no idea as to which of the pretty crosses on beaded chains were rosaries and which were just, y'know, crosses on chains (e.g. bracelets or necklaces). OK, yes, some were some that I could clearly identify as rosary beads, but others were somewhat ambiguous to me. And I had no idea if the friend in question even uses (or would use) a rosary -- heck, I know my friends' faiths as a sort of general manner; I rarely get into the details of how they actually pray. It's sort of personal.

Fifteen minutes have ticked away, and I've walked up and down the cases a couple dozen times, and was no closer to a decision. Those popemobile stamps were starting to look good. I was tempted to find someone who spoke English in there and ask for advice, but I couldn't quite figure out the question I would ask ("Hi, what's a good reasonably-priced gift for a not incredibly devout Catholic who had been hoping for something like Holy water?") and didn't want to offend. I mean, I definitely got the vibe that I was the only non-Christian in the place, and one wants to be respectful.

Ten minutes later, I walked out, tightly clutching a bag with a pretty silver cross in it.

Rome, Day Two

2011-10-30T13:49:00.001-07:00

So, as planned, I spent today withLance, the American dude on his way back from Iraq.

It went really, really well. Actually,a lot better than planned in a lot of ways.

Rudy had driven my be a lot of stuff inRome – for instance, the ruins and a building that goes by the nameof “the wedding cake.” With Lance, I had the opportunity toactually stand next to all this stuff and take pictures (and, bonus,now that Rudy had given me all the background info, I was able tocall up bits and pieces of it to share with Lance – it also helpedme get a better handle on things when I was seeing them for a secondtime and trying to repeat some of the info). We started off lookingat a bunch of the ruins (there are so many pictures, it will take mehours to go through them all). Lance saw what looked like a reallypretty building way up the hill and wanted to get a good look at it. I didn’t quite realize it until we were there, but it was “thewedding cake.”

On the way up the hill, we got anawesome view of the Constantine Arch. I’d seen that the other dayfrom the Colosseum, but that was down on the ground level – seeingit from a staircase gave us a much better view of the frieze on it. Then, once we reached the top of the winding stairs, we were in anopen piazza which looked vaguely familiar. Yes! I recognized thestatue of Marcus Aurelius on horseback in the center. Rudy haddriven me by this piazza – we were on a road at the bottom of themain stairs leading up to it – and told me about the statue. (Basically, someone had lied and said it was a statue of Constantine,the first Roman Emporer to convert to Christianity. For this reason,the Church did not destroy the statue as they’d destroyed otherRoman stuff.) The statue is in the center of a plaza with buildingson three sides (the main stairs are on the fourth). Two of thosebuildings make up a museum. I know this because it said “Museo”on it. The museum had two other words I recognized, on a bannerannouncing a temporary exhibit: “Michelangelo” and “Leonardo.” These were good words to see on a museum. I made a note of the nameof the place, and Lance and I made our way down the main stairs andaround the corner to the “wedding cake” building.

Am still not entirely clear what thewedding cake is – it’s labelled as something like the ministry ofhistory and culture, but that isn’t the name it goes by now. Wewent up the stairs on the front of this thing (there were a lot ofstairs today – I happily report noknee issues at all), at which point I remembered Rudy had said therewas a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier here. We hit the top just in timeto see the changing of the guard. We went inside the building (inLance’s continuing quest to get to the top of the damn thing forthe view) – there were lots of flags inside; they looked likeregimental flags, and I guessed we were in a military museum of somesort. There also looked like there was a second Tomb of the Unknownon the inside.

Wenever quite made it to the top. There was a scenic elevator, forwhich there was a fee, so we decided to take a pass on it, but we gotsome lovely pictures from a terrace.

We hada map. Looking at the map, it seemed like we weren’t all that farfrom the Trevi fountain, so I suggested we walk over there. WalkedLance over to the Trevi fountain and got some more pictures. On ourway over, I noticed a sign that said Pantheon, and realized thatwasn’t all that far from things either. I wanted to show that toLance – I’d been talking it up the other day – and, actually, Ireally wanted to give it a second look. So, after lunch (yummylasagna), we walked on over to the Pantheon. Way more crowded thanit had been yesterday, but still as impressive.

Wethen decided to head back to the hotel, but first stopped at aninternet cafe. While there, I googled the museum in question anddiscovered it was hosting a temporary exhibition of upwards of 60drawings by Michelangelo and Leonardo – the largest collection everexhibited together. I was all over this. Admission was 6 Euro, butadmission to the exhibit AND the museum was 12 Euro. I did somefurther research and decided that, yes, I wanted to see the museum,too.

Now,Lance had arrived her from Iraq with a backpack and the clothes onhis back, so he was in need of some clothes shopping. We split upfor a few hours – he hit the shops and I hit the museum.

I wantto be very clear that, as the whole fate thing goes, I never wouldhave known about this exhibition if I hadn’t spent the day withLance. I’d looked at a magazine listing museums and exhibitionsand it didn’t mention this (it was an October magazine and thisexhibition had just started on the 27th). And I would not havewalked up to this plaza if Lance hadn’t wanted to walk to the topof the wedding cake. So, totally, even though Lance didn’t end upgoing to the museum, it’s indirectly due to him that I ended upthere.

Andthe exhibition was awesome. No photos were allowed in there, and thelittle weasels were not selling a catalog of it. (I checked. Forthe record, this is the first time in my lifethat I wanted to buy the catalog for a museum exhibit.) I’veprobably mentioned that, as a general rule, I like artifacts morethan art – manuscript rooms are often my favorite parts of museums,and I love seeing drafts written in the hand of famous authors. Andthis here exhibit was about 66 examples of, basically, the placewhere art and artifact meet. I was standing with no more than sixinches (and some museum glass) between my face and a piece of paperon which Leonardo sketched a design of a machine, or Michelangelosketched a study of a face. These were terrific from the “I digmanuscripts” point of view, but there was also some impressive artgoing on in some of them (Michelangelo’s “Cleopatra,” forinstance). And it was such a great opportunity to see the differencebetween the two artists – see them both sketch a man’s profile;Leonardo’s is a perfectly accurate depiction of how the manappears, while Michelangelo’s is idealized and captures the emotionof the moment. See them both sketch a building; Leonardo’s is amathematically-precise blueprint, Michelangelo’s looks pleasing. (And both were huge fans of the ancient classical ideal.) They wereeach dancing around perfection, but in completely different ways.

Havinggiven that exhibit about an hour, I had another hour to spend in therest of the museum, which also held plenty of treats. I discoveredthat the statue of Marcus Aurelius we had seen in the courtyard was acopy – the original was inside the museum (having been harmed byyears of exposure to the elements), and was much more impressive. (In this case, the copy didn’t compare. Hell, the color alone wasamazing on the original.)

Rudyhad taught me that most of current Rome is built on top of ancientRome (the latter having been at the level of the river Tiber). Thiswas conveniently demonstrated by the museum itself – when doingsome excavation near the impressive room where Marcus Aurelius isdisplayed, they discovered that the museum itself is located on thesite of an ancient Roman temple, so they just opened the floor for usto get a good look at it. Thus art and architecture happily meethere.

Variousother cool things – some unexpected (like a tablet indicating thepowers of the emporer – the damn thing contained what I can onlycall an early “supremacy clause” – my inner lawyer geek wasimpressed) and some anticipated (the Greek statue – although aRoman copy – known as the “Dying Gaul”... I’d studied it incollege and loved seeing it up close; also got a camera angle on itI’ve never seen before)

(Interestingnote about Roman copies – Rudy, who is otherwise a 100% awesometour guide – tried to pass off a Roman copy as an original Greekstatue in the Vatican, until I called him on it (in most instances, aRoman copy is crazy easy to spot). He gave an explanation about howwhen something is this old, you can safely call the Roman copy an“original” artistic piece. This may be legit, although I hadspecifically asked if this was an original Greekstatue. In any event, I pretty much gave notice that I’m notfalling for that.) ANYWAY, the Dying Gaul that they have at themuseum is a Roman copy – I’ll have to look it up, but this may beone of those statues that we ONLY know through its Roman copies –and the piece was getting a lot of attention in the museum. I’dgiven Rudy a certain amount of shit for trying to pass off a Romancopy as a Greek original in the Vatican, but now that I was lookingat Dying Gaul up close, I didn’t entirely care that it wasn’t theoriginal. In retrospect, I gave Rudy a pass. While I hadn’tappreciated what he was saying at the time, I sort of got it while Iwas looking at the Dying Gaul. This wasthe Dying Gaul – even though it was a Roman copy of the Greekoriginal, it was a copy made by someone trying to exactly copy theoriginal, and he’d done a job that convincingly lasted for nearlytwo centuries. That’s good enough (and may be the only chance I’llget).

Lanceand I met for dinner (I am happy to report that Italian hot chocolateis just as good as nice, thick French hot chocolate) and said ourgoodbyes. (I have to pack.) I’m very glad I had a friend to shareRome with today.

Earlystart for the airport tomorrow – I’ll be home soon.

Rome Wasn't Toured in a Day

2011-10-29T14:33:00.001-07:00

I’d hired a driver/guide.

I’d argued with myself over this forweeks, trying to find a way to do everything I wanted on a reasonableamount of money. Honestly, there was no way, so I did it on anunreasonable amount, and hired a damn driver/guide.

The ship docked in Civitavecchia (“oldcity”), which is about an hour outside of Rome. The driver/guidemet me outside the ship to drive me into Rome and give me a full daytour of the place. Happily, a nice couple I’d met on the ship,Brian and Judy, needed a ride into town as well, so they joined mefor the first half of the tour. It gave me some company, and a bitof a break on the price.

So, Rudy picks us up at about 8:00 a.m.and we’re off to Rome. There will be all sorts of photos. Rightnow (and, honestly, the room is rocking now, but I can’t saywhether that’s the after-effects of the cruise or the moreimmediate after-effects of the wine), this morning seems like a hellof a long time ago, and I really can’t believe we did all of it.

We started off at the Pantheon, whichwas mostly empty and largely awesome. One of the themes of this tourwas that the Ancient Romans were amazing engineers, and all you haveto do is look at the dome on this thing and think, “yeah, theyreally had their engineering shit together.” The building is alsobeautiful. No, that’s not the word. I’m not sure what the wordis. There may not be a word. Here’s a few sentences: You canlook at the dome at St. Peter’s Basilica (and I did, a few hourslater), and it’s beautiful in its gradeur. It’s elegant andbeautifully decorated, and it reflects the use of all the bestdecorative materials used by the best artist/architect of the time,all to the end of making you look up at it and marvel at the glory ofGod. And then you can look at the dome of the Pantheon. And there’sno gold on it at all, and the pattern in the ceiling is pretty muchsimple, although it’s pleasing to the eye in a very happysymmetrical geometrical sense. But it’s freaking open at thetop; they’ve engineered itwith a big old hole in the middle. Through which you can see sky. And the sun shines through it brightening a single patch on the walllike Indiana Jones is going to use it to tell him where to dig forthe Ark of the Covenant. And they built the damn thing somethinglike 1500 years ago and it’s still so undeniably powerful in itssimplistic appearance and truly awe-inspiring design. And I wasstanding there right under it. I actually wiped away a tear (andhoped my friends didn’t notice).

Andthen Rudy took us over to the Trevi Fountain (fed by one of threestill-functioning aqueducts). We snapped pictures and tasted thewater. I reached in my pocket and unobtrusively plinked a small coinin. (I even said “plink” as I tossed it off, and a moment later,it made that exact sound.) We also saw the Spanish Steps.

Thenit was over to the Colosseum. There are a bunch of Roman ruins inthe area – really, a lot. I’m actually impressed at how much of it is still preserved –but we pretty much did a drive-by here. Guide then left us to walkaround the Colosseum ourselves.

Thereare dudes dressed in Roman gladiator garb posted at various placesaround the Colosseum. They seem to be there to just pose in yourtourist photos. As we happened by a group of them, one came over tous and, from the way we happened to be grouped at the moment,erroneously guessed that I was with Brian and that Judy was thesingle one. So he goes right up to her and asks if she’s single. No, she explains, she’s with Brian. Gladiator then realizes thathe has it wrong. He turns to me and says “Single?” I can’timagine this interaction is going to end without him trying to posewith me in a stupid photo, but don’t really have a way out of it,so I say, “yes.” He walks over to me, leans in to my ear, andsays …

“Intelligente.”

Hewalks away, and the three of us start laughing.

Wefinish with the Colosseum, and Rudy takes us to Brian and Judy’shotel. We say our goodbyes, and then I’m off with Rudy to PalatineHill, a view of Circus Maximus, and, oh yeah, the Vatican.

There’sa lunch break before the Vatican, at some tiny little restaurant Rudyrecommends, where I’m served what is probably the best pasta I’veever eaten.

THENwe go to the Vatican. OK, tip: get a guide. Book your reservationfor the museums in advance and get a damn guide. They’re prettyinformative, can show you whatto see in the massive museums, and will save you hours and hours ofwaiting in line.

Fact Ihad never really processed: The Vatican has a massivemuseum. The Church collected tons of ancient art – not just Roman;there’s loads of Greek and Egyptian stuff too.

Fact Ihad never really known: The leaders of the Church weren’t intoreligious art. Which is to say, they were quite into it for itsvalue in conveying religious stories to the illiterate masses – butwhen it came to the art that Popes just liked to look at,they went with the Classical ideal.

ThoughtI’m Certain The Church Would Never Go For: You know, it wouldreally speed traffic in the Sistene Chapel if they’d just loadeveryone in those buggies like they have at the Haunted Mansion (atDisneyland). They could lean back so you’d stare at the ceilingwithout bumping into other people; and they could slowly pass infront of the Final Judgment so folks don’t block it. OK, yeah,they’d have to take the buggies out when the College of Cardinalsis meeting in there, but still...

Yes,He Really Was That Good: You’re not allowed to take photos in theSistene Chapel, and that’s really ok, because no photo I’ve everseen of it comes close to capturing the 3D effect of that ceiling. I’ve heard about it and seen photos, but the photos always seemedflat. But stand there (or ride by in a buggy), and interact with it,and, damn. Also? The Pieta is, like, beyondart.

Afterthe Vatican, Rudy took me to a spot where there was a nice view ofRome, and then brought me to my hotel.

I waswiped. Let me be clear on this: I’d had four hours of sleep andeight hours of touring; it was a pretty full day.

Whilechecking in, I met another American who was also travelling alone. He was on his way back from Iraq – not a soldier, but an employeeof one of the military support contractors. With the militarypulling out at the end of the year, it’s time for the supportcontractors to head home, and this guy had just arrived in Rome fromIraq (via Dubai). We decided to pool our vast combined knowledge ofRome (and the Italian language) and attack this place togethertomorrow. The hotel is right by the ruins, so we’re going to givethem a closer look.

Ourtemporary partnership was cemented at dinner tonight. We found arestaurant nearby – open terrace dining (the weather is prettynice) – and shared some appetizers, a pizza, some nummy desserts,and a decent bottle of chianti. (Actually, it was a quite decentbottle – dude said he would buy me dinner, so I said I’d buy thewine, and I didn’t want to be all cheap.) We didn’t entirelyfinish it (it had been tasting really goodon the second glass, but was going downhill when we got near thebottom).

I haveto say that, when thinking back on the cough drop I had in Nice, myfirst dinner in Italy was substantiallybetter than my first dinner in France.

In Vino Veritas

2011-10-29T14:32:00.001-07:00

The amusing thing … the reallyamusing thing … is that I’ve intended for most of today to postabout last night under this title.

And now, I’m pretty darned tipsymyself. I’ve never actually “drunken blogged” before. I’mnot entirely certain that this counts as drunken blogging now –although, given the amount of typos in the pre-proofreading versionof that sentence, I’m somewhere along the continuum. So take thispost with a grain of salt. Or a hair of the dog...

To my great (and pleasant) surprise,there actually WERE people at the party on deck. (Deciding to go upon deck, with my netbook under my arm, was one of those decisionsthat makes me absolutely certain that humans have free will. BecauseI really couldn’t decide whether to go. Part of the time, I wascertain I would do the rational thing and go back to my cabin, finishpacking, and get a good night’s sleep. And the other part of thetime, I figured it was my last chance to have some fun time withthese folks, and I really should just stop doing the rational thingall the damn time. Irrational won. Although rational decided that,since I’d have to wake up the next morning on very little sleep, noalcohol would be consumed.)

So, I went up on deck and discovered agrand total of two groups of people. One group consisted of twopassengers I knew and liked, who were speaking with a third personI’d never met. The other was comprised of crew. So I joined thefolks I knew and liked, met the third, and immediately became engagedin a wide-ranging conversation which was partially fueled by alcohol.

If you know me, you know I drinkrarely. (Kathy, my Ireland travelling companion, saw me drink a pintof cider, and commented that it was the most she’d ever seen medrink. This was because it was pretty much the most I’d everdrunk.) A friend in Law School advised me that not drinking whilewith people who were drinking can be quite a lot of fun, if you sortof look at it as a sociological experiment. And that was sort ofwhat I did while up on deck last night – about half of me wasparticipating in the conversation and laughing and joking along withthe other three, and the other half of me was really enjoyingwatching where conversations go when people are somewhat releasedfrom social conventions by the freeing effects of being a littlebuzzed.

Or, to put things a bit moreconcretely, someone who I’d only known for about a week asked me,very honestly, how one knows what God’s plan is for them.

And my mind started spinning on severaltracks at once. I knew enough to know that this particular questionwould not properly be answered by my saying that, while I personallythink that the existence of a Supreme Being is something of an openquestion, I generally don’t think that said Being has a plan for meany more than it takes an interest in who wins the Super Bowl or theBest New Artist Grammy (i.e., none at all). But I also knew thatthis was a serious question coming from a serious place. So I tookthe “God” out of it and tried to provide a suitable answer to“how do I know if I’m doing the right thing with my life?”

It’snearly a day later and I’m still puzzling over it – not theanswer – the fact that the question came at me in thosecircumstances. A little booze and an interaction with people youknow you’ll never see again can put you in a place to feel safeenough to ask something you might not otherwise ask … but reallyneed to.

Eventually,that particular gathering broke up, leaving just two of us and theremnants of the crew party. Conveniently, the crew party nowconsisted of three people, two of whom were, without a doubt, my twofavorite people on the crew. So, even though it was now past 1:00a.m. and I had to wake up at 6:15, I booked on over there and hungout with them for a little while.

OK,maybe an hour.

I gotback to my room in time to get a solid four hours of sleep.

It issomewhat unfortunate that I spend enough of my life in a state ofsleep deprivation that I know I can function well enough, if a bitslowly, on four hours of sleep. So, yeah, I was a bit punchy goinginto today. Which was all kinds of insane, given where today went.

Wrapping up the Cruise

2011-10-28T14:15:00.001-07:00

Well, that’s about the end of thecruise. Today, we docked in Porto Vecchio, another port in Corsica,this time, facing Italy. (Still France, though – Corsica is ownedby the French in its entirety.) Tour went up to Bonifacio (thiswasn’t the tour I’d signed up for, but it was the tour that wasgoing, so I went with it), which was a medieval city built on the topof a hill. Nice views. As per usual, there will be photographs,when the internet is not costing me a dollar a minute.

Other than that, the city was prettymuch like every other city in Corsica, which means that it had shopsselling All Things Corsican (olive oil, honey, coral, and (for somereason) knives). I actually scored when I found a shop selling stuffmade out of cork. Apparently, cork is also big in Corsica, and someenterprising dude handcrafted some stuff out of cork (as opposed tojust stoppers for wine bottles) and I picked up another gift there. So, basically, I came out of the shore excursion with photos andgifts.

(We pause for a moment to note mycurrent location. It’s nearing 11:00 p.m. on the last night of thecruise, and I’m in the lounge, alone. There were some people here,talking, and they just bailed. There is, apparently, a party up ondeck – or, at least, there was. I am curious as to whether it’sstill going. It was scheduled to start at 9:30. Then again, it’scold, dark, and windy; the sea is fairly choppy; and we have to getup really early tomorrow. If I’m going by the amount of suitcasesalready lined up in the hallway, outside cabin doors, the party musthave ended pretty early. I just finished my packing and decided tocome upstairs to the lounge to use my last 14 minutes of internet. Iwas tempted to go upstairs and join the party for a few minutesfirst, but I didn’t want to go up and down the stairs again to pickup my netbook … and I’ve already packed my jacket, In any event,the boat just rocked quite nicely on the sea, so I’m wondering ifanyone else is still up there drinking and/or attempting to dance. Perhaps I’ll check after I’ve posted, when it’ll be evenlater!)

In any event, I haven’t said muchabout my fellow cruisers. Can happily report that (although perhapsnot party animals), they don’t appear to include anyone like thecrazy racist woman on that last trip. This whole group seems prettynormal, sane and friendly. I even met someone who knows someone Iwork with. Small world and all that.

(Tee hee. The crew is cleaning up, anddoesn’t quite know I’m in here. I hear singing. Enthusiastic,but not particularly good singing. I’m trying to type a littlelouder to alert him of my presence, but there’s only so hard I canhit the keys without sounding like I’m in a flame war.)

Where was I? Oh, yeah, the peeps. Wasseated at dinner last night with an interesting couple. He’sSwiss; she’s (originally) Polish. They met, and then correspondedby mail for 8 years, while she lived under the Communist regime andwas unable to leave the country. (I’m not even entirely sure thatshe ever received letters back from him. English is not their firstlanguage. Or second, for that matter.) Still, it’s a greatromantic story that they ultimately got married, raised a family, andseem very happy now. VERY happy. I don’t think you could scrubthe smile off her face if you tried. They had a real “carpe diem”thing going on. Every night at dinner, the menu includes variouscourses, and, always, the “Chef’s Recommendation” – in whichthe chef recommends one item in each course. And every night of thecruise, they each order the Chef’s Recommendation in its entirety. I mean, that’s what he’s recommending, right? So they’re goingto order it, and enjoy every bite. Over dinner, I got a lot ofphilosophical tidbits from them, mostly about living life to thefullest while you can, but also about how having your health is moreimportant than money, and that you should judge a person by thethoughts in his head and not the suit that he wears. It’s allstuff I’ve heard countless times before, but it somehow resonateswhen you’re hearing it from someone who has really lived it, andknows whereof she speaks.

Singing crewman just came in. I justtyped that he’d stopped, but he was just changing songs. Camewalking in the lounge singing fairly loud. Saw me, and I sorta bitmy lip, as I was typing about him. I thought he muttered “sorry”as he passed by, but he kept right on singing. More power to you,dude.

Able was I...

2011-10-27T16:09:00.000-07:00

Oops. Didn’t post yesterday as I’dbeen promised an internet cafe today. This did not materialize. (While I will happily blame the crew for the fiasco that has been myinternet usage this past week – long story there – I’m notentirely certain the fact the internet cafe was closed today can beblamed on them. This was our first day in Italy, and I’ve justcome face to face with the Italian practice of closing stores atnoon, only to reopen at 4 … or whenever they feel like it. Dudes,I’m not trying to tell you how to run your businesses, but whenyour port is teeming with tourists ready to dump Euros in your laps,maybe you’ll want to be open when they’re there. Just saying.)

ANYWAY, we were at sea yesterday –hauling ass from France all the way around Corsica to the (Italian)island of Elba. It was a largely fun day – the sun was shining, soit was a great day to sit out on the deck; there was somethingresembling wind, so we were able to turn off the engine and sail fora few hours (which I greatly enjoy, even though it makes some of myfellow passengers run for the barf bags); I took the engine room tourwith the very entertaining Chief Engineer; I had a lovely dinner outon the deck; and was up past midnight hanging out with some fun folksin the lounge. All good.

Today (as previously mentioned), wearrived at Elba. About all I knew about Elba is that Napoleon wasexiled here, and it shows up in a famous palindrome. Took a shoreexcursion in which I saw Napoleon’s country home (not palatial byany means, but, y’know, if I was in exile, I could probably get bythere) and learned that Napoleon was here for only ten months. You’dthink it was longer, given all the Napoleon stuff that pretty muchcovers the island. I would have thought making this place NapoleonCentral was something of a calculated ploy to increase the touristtrade, but, apparently, the population of Elba genuinely liked theguy. Seems that, although he was only here for ten months, he didtons of stuff for the people of Elba – like increase industry andopen schools. So they’re pretty cool with the association. (Also,learned this fun fact: You know the Rosetta Stone? Was discoveredon a Napoleonic campaign in Egypt. Did not know this; would havethought it was discovered substantially earlier.)

(I can accept the fact that everysouvenir stand is going to be plastered in Napoleon-related items. Am still trying to figure out the rationale behind the Mussoliniapron.)

So, yes, country home; Napoleonsouvenirs everywhere … (I used to play this game with a friendwhere we’d buy each other the tackiest souvenirs we could find. But it couldn’t just be a useless piece of kitsch – it had to besomething that purported to have some sort of utilitarian purpose. Today I saw a Napoleon shoehorn. That’s the stuff.) …internet cafe closed; nice view of Monte Cristo (yay!); shops closed;back on ship. Somewhere in there, I managed a quick half hour ofshopping. (Er... some earrings for me. Elba is also all aboutmining, so the shops werefull of local hematite, pyrite, and various other -ites.) I am mostproud of myself for not yet succombing to the gelato. I am certain,however, that it is only a matter of time.

Villefranche?

2011-10-26T02:37:00.001-07:00

I like days like today.

Well, I didn’t really dig it at thestart, but it turned out great.

Problem One: My shore excursion gotcancelled. (No surprise there. So far on this cruise, I think onlytwo shore excursions have actually gone out – and one of them wasthat tour of Calvi that they did even though there were only five ofus.)

Problem Two: It was raining. I’mactually surprised we got this far without rain. This cruise wasreally inexpensive for a reason – it’s the end of the season –so you sorta have to expect rain.

Result: A rainy day inVillefranche-sur-Mer, with nothing to do.

Villefranche is a small little village(“fishing village,” we were told). Given the season and therain, most of the little shops in Villefranche didn’t even botheropening. Hell, local traffic wouldn’t keep them open, and therewere only 98 of us. Tendering over every half hour. Only if weweren’t feeling too wet. So: A rainy day in a largely closedvillage.

Here’s the upside: Villefranche-sur-Mer is pretty near other cities. Indeed – ourcruise started in Nice and was just in Monaco last night –Villefranche is actually between the two – about a ten minute trainride from Nice, and (I’m guessing here) maybe 20 or so from Monaco. So, a bunch of people from the cruise ship planned to take busses ortrains to other cities.

I figured I’d just wander aroundVillefranche and see if I couldn’t find an internet cafe. (Actually, I’d planned to ask for an internet cafe at the touristinformation desk – but the tourist information desk was closed bythe time I tendered over. So, aimless wandering it was.)

I figured the best shot would be one ofthe shops along the street fronting on the water. So my plan was towalk all the way down the street to the end (not a particularly largevillage), and if I didn’t find internet by then, I’d turn aroundand walk back. At least I’d have gone for a little walk inVillefranche. (Update on various aches and pains: knees and thighsstill sore. I can walk all I want … as long as it’s flat.) So,I started off down the street.

I reached the end of the street, havingcome up empty on the internet front. I’m about to turn around whenI see the sign saying “gare.”

I nearly laugh because I know what a“gare” is. It’s funny, because when, on the second day ofFrench class, they teach you stuff like “bibliotheque,” youthink, “when am I ever going to need to ask someone in French whereto find the library?” (Because, hell, my French will never be good enough to read a Frenchbook.) But, at thesame time you’re learning “bibliotheque,” you’re learning“gare.” And while I’d thought, at the time, that I’d neverreally need to know the French word for “train station,” itturned out to be pretty useful here.

Therewas an arrow pointing up a flight of steps. Fate brought me to thetrain station. I’m not doing anything today – let’s take atrain someplace! I go up the steps and see I’m dealing with twoplatforms. Monaco in one direction; Nice and beyond in the other. Ijust got back from Monaco. Sure, I could go back there again for thechocolate shop I’d missed … but I had a hell of a time navigatingthere when it wasn’tpouring down rain, it seemed silly to go back there now.

And I didn’t wantto go back to Nice either. How about someplace new? Where else doesthis thing go? Apparently, the train to Nice continued on toAntibes, Cannes, and Grasse.

I consideredGrasse. That’s the place where you go to the perfume factory. (Ithad been on my cancelled shore excursion.) But, although the trainto Grasse was leaving fairly soon, it only ran every hour and a halfor so, and I didn’t want to be stranded in Grasse waiting that longfor the train back.

Antibes waspossible, too. I’d read something about Antibes (when waiting atthe tourist information center for someone to show up and tell mewhere the internet was) – but I couldn’t quite remember what itwas.

Cannes it is, then. I know stuff about Cannes. (I’ve heard of it and everything.) And the folks on the ship had recommended it as a really goodshopping place (both for high end stuff and artsy stuff). I tried iton: “Let’s go to Cannes, today.” Felt good.

Through acombination of charades and bad French, I purchased my ticket (andgot directed to the correct platform). Actually, I could havefigured out the platform thing myself. You don’t need much Frenchto figure out the train station. There was a map of the line – Icould figure out the final destination of the train to Cannes, so I’dknow what to look for. I could even read the board enough tounderstand when my train was delayed 25 minutes. (The monitor wentred and said “retard” under the train number.) I like trains. I’m much better at trains than busses, when it comes to figuringout what you need. I can do trains.

Thetrain arrived and I realized my first mistake – the train did nothave the line map inside it, so I couldn’t follow along and figurehow far I was from Cannes. (You should always count how many stopsyou have to go before you get on the train.) I had a vague idea(Cannes is the next bigstation after Antibes), most of the stations were labelled, and thewoman over the loudspeaker would say something involving the words“prochain” (“next,” said my memory) and, at some point,“Cannes.”

I should not haveworried. I actually knew that we were approaching Cannes before sheeven announced it. All of a sudden, the scenery looked veryCannes-like – which was surprising to me, because if you’d askedme what Cannes looked like, I would have said I had no idea. But Isaw some buildings and trees in a familiar color scheme that justscreamed “a snooty film festival belongs here” and, sure enough,it was Cannes.

Gotoff the train and realized my second mistake. Having come to Canneson an impulse, I had no map of the place, and no real idea what to doonce I got there. And there weren’t any maps in the train station. Having spent about an hour on the train, though, I knew one thing –the Mediterranean is thatway. (And, having spent some time in Nice and in Villefranche, Iknew that there is going to be good stuff near the beach.) Iprepared to go in that general direction, but first walked a block orso on the street fronting on the train station, until I found …

… theinternet cafe! OK, sure, I’d spent an hour (and about 14 Euro) onthe train to get to Cannes, but this was a totally awesome internetcafe. Three lousy Euro for a whole hour AND, when I began by askingthe man behind the counter if he parlez-ed Anglais, he immediatelydirected me to one of his terminals with an English keyboard! Yes! “A” and “Q” where were they belonged! Victory!

Spent about 20minutes getting caught up on my e-mail, took care of booking myVatican ticket for when I get to Rome, and then pulled up the ol’Cannes Gare on Google Maps to find out where the hell I was.

Once I’d solvedthat little mystery, I realized that I had to figure out what Iwanted to do in Cannes. I remembered that I’d had unfinishedbusiness with the chocolate shop in Monaco, and figured there’dhave to be a good French chocolate shop in Cannes. There wereseveral. I picked out one that also served French hot chocolate (thegood thick stuff that tastes like a melted dark chocolate bar). Onewas on “Rue D’Antibes.” Said rue (thank you again, googlemaps) was parallel to, and two blocks away from, my current rue. Andthe chocolate shop wasn’t too far down. Now, I had a plan.

I somewhatreluctantly said goodbye to my nice, cheap, internet, but since I wasaiming for French hot chocolate, I had a serious incentive to get amove on. Easily found my way to Rue D’Antibes, which is, as itturns out, one of your main shopping streets in Cannes. All sorts ofsnooty high end boutiques … and a Claire’s Accessories, for somereason. I did a bunch of window shopping, and found me the chocolateshop.

Very snootyParisien chocolate shop. I bought some very snooty Parisienchocolate to bring home for presents (packs flat!) and got me a hotchocolate to go. (Actually, the very snooty lady comped me the hotchocolate, so perhaps wasn’t all that snooty after all.) Hotchocolately lava warmed me nicely from the inside, and I continued ondown Rue D’Antibes, checking out shops. I even stumbled upon aperfume shop (yay – saved me a trip to Grasse!) and acquired a fewmore gifts (they pack flat, too) for people back home.

At some point, Ifigured it was time to turn back – I wanted to get back toVillefranche before dark, as, with the rain and all, it was alreadypretty darned cold, and the dark would make it downright unpleasant. So, I found my way back to the Cannes gare and picked up the trainback.

On the way back, Istarted thinking that I had a great start on a perfect gift for myCatholic friends – Parisien chocolate, French perfume, and a littlesomething from the Vatican would make a great little “sin andsalvation” package!

I chuckled all theway back to the boat.

Lost in Monaco

2011-10-24T13:24:00.001-07:00

Famous Last Words: It’s only asquare mile, how lost can I get?

(Thought, shortly thereafter: It fitsin Central Park. I’ve gotten pretty lost in Central Park.)

The problem, navigationally speaking,is that the place is on a hill. Well, several hills. And the mapsthey provide are not (yet) in three dimensions. (Some folks from thecruise reckoned that, in a few years, they’d have a “holographicmap of Monaco” iPhone app. This would totally rock.) Because Ilook at the map, and it looks like I need to cross three streets toget from Point B to Point C. Seriously, the destination in questionis directly across three streets. You do not simply cross threestreets to get there. In fact, you can’t get there – not withouta bus that circles half of Monte Carlo. Because those streets are onthree different levels. When there’s a cliff between you and thenext street over, the map loses usefulness. So, yes, lost. Prettydarn lost.

Overall impression of Monaco: OK, youknow how people in the States are talking about being part of the “99percent” (and wanting to tax “the one percent”)? Monaco is the“0.1 percent.” Maybe the “0.01 percent” or less. These arethe crazy super rich, and this is their playground. You’ve got theyachts (which, apparently, are what all the men here have “mine isbigger than yours” arguments about), the casinos, theultra-high-end shops, and the extremely conspicuous consumption. (Someone reported seeing a pair of shoes for over 2000 Euro (somultiply by about 1.3) – SHOES, people.)

(I saw a homeless guy sleeping on thestreet in Nice. I assume Monte Carlo exports their homeless toFrance. They certainly import their working class. Nobody workingin Monaco could actually afford to live there. Saw a real estateshop advertising a ROOM – not an apartment, a room, a 40square meter room, for 345,000 Euro. Can the guy parking cars in thecasino afford that? I’m thinking not.)

My first impression of Monaco, though,was none of this. (Well, my very first impression was getting lost –I’ve decided the Tourist Information lady was not nearly as usefulas she appeared, as I ran into several other folks from the cruiseaimlessly wandering around the area looking for the elevator she toldus existed.) My real first impression was the OceanographicMuseum/Aquarium.

Said museum was started by PrinceAlbert I in something like 1906. Cousteau was involved with theplace for years. It’s all about conserving the environment(particularly the Mediterranean); getting people involved; anddisplaying the fish in a manner in which they are quite beautifullydisplayed and also appear to be pretty happy. The jellyfish wholooked almost neon in a blacklight were stunning. (There will bephotos, but they didn’t do it justice.) There is no doubt that aton of cash went into this place, but this was cash spent forsomething good – preservation and education. Full marks forAlbert and the Oceanography Museum. (OK, take away a half a pointfor the restaurant in the museum having fish on the menu – but I’dbe willing to bet they are from sustainable populations.)

The other place I really wanted to seein Monaco (only got slightly lost finding this – conveniently, Ihooked up with another couple from the cruise in the museum, and wefound it together) was the automobile collection. “Collection”is the key word here – as a friendly sign on the wall explains,this is not an automotive museum, just a private collection of cars. (A private collection of cars owned by a dude with a crazy amount ofmoney.)

Actually “cars” might not be theright word either, as the historical collection begins withcarriages. (They even display some of the harnesses for the horses.) Then the collection works its way into the automobile era, withplenty of very early cars from the early 20th century and(eventually) beyond. By the time you’ve hit the 1960’s, you headdownstairs to another floor, where, around the corner (behind theMercedes McLaren) is all the speed cars – up to and including rallycars and a Formula 1 racer. All (well, except for a well-worn rallycar) in absolutely perfect, shiny,I-wouldn’t-even-want-to-breathe-on-it condition. On the way outwas an electric car that looked like a luscious aerodynamic machinebuilt for speed. About the furthest thing from a Prius I’ve everseen. Very spiffy collection (and, again, there will be photos).

Those were the first and best things Isaw in Monaco (also passed a “Chocolate Shop and Tea House” whichhad great potential...). I mean, sure, there was tremendous cash ondisplay in both of them, but even with the 100+ car collection, itseemed like the money was put to a decent (or, at least,understandable) purpose.

I will never understand the 2000 Euroshoes.

Victory is Mine!

2011-10-23T15:53:00.001-07:00

Ha!

Now that’s better.

I’ve been on cruises alone severalother times. On most of those cruises, I somehow managed to geteveryone to know who I am. I like things that way. (Get invited toshare many other tables at dinner.)

The first time this happened quite byaccident (these things usually do). The cruise ship was only aboutone-third full. We were out cruising the Great Barrier Reef, and Iwas the only one SCUBA certified. So, every time we’d get aweather report for the next day, the activities guy would telleveryone about snorkelling, and then say, “Hey, Sharon, divinglooks good,” and everyone would turn around and look at me. I was“that SCUBA girl.”

I like this. I might not know everyoneelse, but they all have a general idea who I am. Much easier to makefriends.

So, second night of this cruise, I amnow officially known as (my mom will be so proud) the one who kickedeveryone’s ass at “Name That Tune.”

Seriously. Pianist Guy passes outanswer sheets – everyone else is all teamed up. I have no one whowants to join my team, so I figure I’ll play alone. Pianistcomments that people usually come late, so they can join me. Whatever. He tells us that it’s not just “Name That Tune,” but“TV Theme Song Name That Tune.” I figure I’ve actually got ashot at this by myself.

Two games – 20 songs each. Firstgame, we’re about 7 songs in when another couple comes in and joinsme. (I have 6 of them right, at this point.) The woman doesn’twatch much TV, but the guy helps. (He gives me two I wouldn’t havegotten otherwise, and confirmed me on a couple I wasn’t sure of.) We end up with 17 out of 20 – a decisive victory. The couple saysit was mostly me. Pianist Guy points out to the crowd that I was theone who was going to play alone, which sort of seals everyone’simpression of me as knowing Way Too Many TV Theme Songs.

Pianist guy says the second round iseasier than the first. We only get 13 on that one, so I figure we’rewell and truly beat. Nope … turns out we won that one too.

For winning, they gave us a bottle ofchampagne, in which I had very little interest, so my new teammatessuggested we get a bunch of glasses and offer to share with whomeverwants. A brilliant idea.

So, now I’m the one that kickedeveryone’s ass at Name That Tune and shared the winningswith the other teams.

(Pianist is doing it again with MovieTheme Songs later in the week. I have been requested to attempt todefend my title.)

Calvi

2011-10-23T15:52:00.001-07:00

So … Corsica.

Bookwise, my timing could not be betterfor this cruise. I’m reading The Count of Monte Cristo,and the damn thing takes place in this particular area of the planet. Just last night, I read a passage in which someone (from Corsica)recounts the story of when he threatened to kill a man, and told himthat there is a “vendetta” between them. The person hearing thisstory asks if the threatened man understood that word, as it is aCorsican word. So then, today, I’m on a bus tour (somewhatextravagently called “Corsican Panorama”) and our tour guidestarts talking about Corsican history and talks about how Corsicansare famous for their vendettas and I thought, “Dude, I so totallyjust read that!”

(The bus alsostopped and our driver chatted with a few locals out on a wild boarhunt. The tour guide told us this was a great opportunity for us tohear the Corsican language. It is apparently a cross between French,Italian, and Latin. To my ear, it sounded a lot like someonespeaking French with an Italian accent. Which makes a sort of sense,I guess.)

The cruise itselfis at about 2/3rds capacity. There is an upside and a downside tothis. The upside is that the “Corsican Panorama” tour, whichwent off in a 50-person tour bus, had only five of us on it – so itwas really like a private tour. The downside is that my tourtomorrow in Monte Carlo got cancelled, because there were only about3 of us on it. Ah well – shit happens.

So, anyway, five ofus on the ol’ Corsican Panorama bus. The ship is at anchor a shortways out from Calvi, a city on the western coast of Corsica (facingFrance – yeah, I needed a map for that). We pile into the bus fora drive up to a church – Notre Dame de (or de la, I forget) Serra. ANYWAY, this isn’t a church you go to for sightseeing. Actually,it’s pretty much a room and a statue of the Virgin Mary. (And whenI say “room,” I’m overstating things, as one generally expectsa room to have a ceiling. I’m just saying.) But the church islocated at the top of a hill, with a terrific view down on the townof Calvi and a lot of, well, Corsican outdoors. There will bepictures.

There’s also apicture of the cemetery. This because, when I looked over at thecemetery, a certain distance away, I totally underestimated the sizeof the gravestones. I mean, I thought they were all, y’know,gravestone sized. And then I saw some people walking around them,and realized that I was seriously mistaken – the gravestones were abit taller than the people. (“Family graves,” we were told.)

The church was thehigh point (literally and figuratively) of the Corsican Panoramatour. The rest of it was just riding around on the bus while thetour guide told us about Corsican life (historical and present day). I confess I may have dozed off slightly. (And, as there were five ofus, the guide probably noticed.)

After the tour, Ican back to the ship … and ultimately went back to Calvi to do alittle shopping (bought a great little linen jacket) and hunt down aninternet cafe.

Interneton the ship is crazy expensive. It’s under a buck a minute, butnot by much. On the other hand, internet in Calvi is no picnic. It’s 4 Euro for 30 minutes (more like 20 cents a minute), butyou’re working on a French keyboard, which definitely slows youdown. I mean, you need to hit “shift” to get to the numbers; the“a” and the “q” are switched, and the “m” has relocated. Typing took much longer than usual, and proofreading was mandatory. (I ended up getting cut off when my 30 minutes ran out while I wastrying to type in my damn password.) Was not expecting the keyboardto be different – I guess I’d just expected that everyone whouses the same alphabet as we do would have had the keyboard set up inthe same way. That’s a surprise. (The things we learn travellingthe world.)

I am pretty wipedout. I can now honestly say I completely overdid things with thewhole walk-to-the-ancient-castle thing in Nice. So I’m all soreand stiff and feeling like an idiot. My tour for Monte Carlo isn’tthe only one they’ve cancelled – indeed; they’ve cancelledthree of the four tour options, due to lack of interest. The onlyone they’re running has an “activity level” designation of“Strenuous” because of “numerous steep inclines.” My kneeshave vetoed any idea of going on this tour. I’m yielding to themon this one, as that wasn’t a tour I’d wanted to sign up foranyway. On the plus side, I’m told most of Monte Carlo can just beseen independently (and on foot … at one’s own pace), so that’sgoing to be Plan B.

Nice

2011-10-22T14:22:00.001-07:00

Where was I? Ah, yes, enjoying thefine French cuisine of a berry-flavored cough drop.

My cheap-ass hotel redeemed itself witha comfy bed, a television with at least one English speaking channel(news – all Ghadaffi, all the time), and the free breakfast (whichincluded chocolate croissants, edible yogurt with fruit in it, andmany tea selections).

I headed off for a walk at around10:00.

I pause for a moment to note that, whenI’m on vacation, going for a morning walk – even an uphillone – seems like a generally good idea. I contrast this withmyself on a daily basis, when any sort of exercise is largely frownedupon (and is only tolerated because the elliptical machine is planteddirectly in front of my TV). No idea why this is. I mean, I knowwhy I don’t like walking in general – what I don’t get is whyI’m actually eagerto do it on vacation.

Alsonot clear on why I was eager to do it today. I slept well, but theremay be some residual jet lag. And there’s the annoying pulledmuscle thing (in the general neighborhood of my upper thigh – Idon’t know what muscle it is, exactly, but the soreness returnswhenever I put my cell phone in my front pants pocket). I’d beentaking it easy because of said injury, and even put a heaty-wrap onit while on the plane, but today I thought, “OK, let’s hike up ahill in Nice.”

It’squite lovely, actually. An old castle (largely destroyed) with alovely view of the bay. There were pictures. (You’ll get themlater – probably when I get back. Internet on the ship is spottyat best – the lady at reception actually tried to talk me out ofpurchasing it – so I’m looking at quick logins to post and checke-mail.)

I’mahead of myself. I went for a morning walk down to the port. Waseasy to spot the ship I’d be on, as it was the largest thinganywhere near the port. Usually Windstar ships are the tiniest thingin a port – but this was a teeny port and the Wind Spiritoutclassed everything else.

Then Ispotted the signs for the “Ancien chateau.” I was pretty surethat was what I was aiming for. Mostly because it was roughly whereI thought it would be. Also because the signs were pointing upward.

Ilearned two things about the chateau last night (thank you, people ofthe internet) – first, that there is an elevator, but it’s on theother side and very hard to find; second, that there are many pathsbut they all eventually rejoin each other. So, the signs pointedtoward both a gently sloping road and some stairs. I went with theroad. After passing two more sets of steps, I finally went with thethird (it looked friendly), and climbed my way up the hill. The pathbranched off a few times, but I’d randomly pick a direction (always“up”) and, with the exception of path that led to a clearing andnowhere else, made it to my destination – a very lovely lookout. Itook some pictures (and helped a nice family with theirs), rested abit, and headed back down. (Hotel checkout was at noon. Theywouldn’t give me another hour, even though I asked nicely. I idlywondered if I would’ve gotten the extra hour if I had asked inFrench. Given that I couldn’t figure out how to phrase it, I doubtit would have helped.)

So. Went back down the hill, at which point the injury in my upper thighsaid, “Why did we walk all the way up here?” At which point Ichanged my stride somewhat to make it easier on the injury, and myknee said, “Fuck that,” and decided to hurt every time I bent itand put weight on it. Which is, when you think about it, a fairlycommon occurrence when walking down a couple hundred steps. It wasfine as long as I didn’t do the bending/weight-supporting combo,though, so I made it down the steps keeping the leg straight. (Whydid I not accept my friend’s offer of her hiking stick? Or evenbring my own (foldable) hiking stick? This is exactly why I WANTEDthe damn thing in the first place. Idiot.)

So,down the hill a little slower than intended, but no real harm done. Went back over to the dock – I could see the ship from where I wasstanding, but the entrance was down below. I wondered how to getdown there from where I was – could not easily see a way down. Behind me were some stairs, though, so I thought I’d give them ashot.

To myhappy surprise, they did not lead to the dock, but the beach. A veryquiet section of rocky beach, right on the ol’ Mediterranean. There was a couple eating lunch on the rocks, and another couplepeople thinking about swimming – but, other than that, it wasmostly deserted. I sat on a big cement block which seemed to bethere for the sole purpose of sitting on it and looking out on thewater, so I went with that, and had myself a nice littlecontemplation (there will be another photo) before heading back tothe hotel in time to check out.

Notmuch else to report. Got a taxi (driver knew how to get down to theship’s entrance); got my room; got unpacked; met some folks on thecruise; had some tasty meals … the usual. I am (also as per usual)currently the only person sitting in the lounge (it’s me and thebartender). There was a “sailing off” party up on deck afterdinner, but it’s a bit cold and windy and I’m wearing a skirt. No idea how long anyone stayed out there, but it certainly isn’tskirt weather. If this is anything like my previous cruisingexperiences, everyone is asleep now, anyway. (I saw a foursomeplaying cards in the library and one guy in the casino. But unlessthere’s a big ol’ dance party outside in the wind – which Isorta doubt – I’m not here with a bunch of night owls.) I likejournalling in public spaces, rather than sitting in my room – I’mhappy to chat with anyone if they come by, but I don’t think anyoneis coming by.

Cometo think of it, I bet they’ll shut down the lounge as soon as Ileave. They’ve turned off the lights in the casino, and I hearvacuuming.

Tomorrow,we arrive in Corsica.

Nice -- First Impressions

2011-10-21T13:52:00.000-07:00

I intended to accomplish two things: first, find some food; and second, find out how far the port is.

I was only partially successful. I learned quite a bit, though. I learned that my hotel is within walking distance of the port -- but not walking distance while dragging my luggage. I also learned that most of the restaurants around the port serve pizza and fish (although perhaps not simultaneously); their kitchens close at 10:00; and nobody really wants to seat someone who comes walking up at 9:45, speaking English, and wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt that look suspiciously like she slept in them. I could have gotten something from the take away sushi place, but I'm not a big fan of sushi to begin with, and I'm not at all certain that words like "French" and "take away" should be in the same sentence with "sushi."

The port, though, is really beautiful. Indeed, one of the top tourist attractions in these parts is walking to the top of a nearby hill and taking in the view. I may do this tomorrow; will have to see how early I get up (and whether my vending-machine-restaurant hotel can store my luggage if I go off investigating after check-out). But the whole place was lovely at night; I quite liked it.

(Did I feel safe aimlessly wandering the streets of Nice searching for food at 9:45 at night? Yes, although I did idly wonder what the gun control situation is in these parts. My hotel is near the port, in an antique shop area of town -- and all the antique shops were closed, so there weren't a whole lot of people out on my street. When I first walked out of the hotel, I saw a dude getting off a motorcycle holding what looked like a club. And I thought, "you know, maybe I shouldn't be walking alone here." And I got closer, and saw it was a baguette. I shit you not, people. Dude drove up with a baguette in his hand. Welcome to France.)

Things I saw in Nice I haven't seen anywhere before: motorcycles with refrigerated boxes on the back for delivering the take-away sushi; and ... a condom machine on the street corner. I was actually using it as a landmark -- when trying to remember the way back to the hotel, it was, "walk to Northwest edge of the port; make a left at the condom machine...."

Didn't get dinner, though. (Ate my complimentary Ricola. Seriously, they gave me a free bottle of water and a little packet with a single ricola in it. At least it was berry flavored.) But in the hunger/tired continuum, tired is winning out over hungry, so perhaps I can manage a good night's sleep, and wake up nice and early for my free breakfast (allegedly NOT out of the vending machine) and hike up the hill.

On the Road Again

2011-10-21T12:15:00.000-07:00

Yeah. Haven’t been posting much(sorry, loyal reader), but things have been a bit hectic. Somewhereshortly after that last vacation, plans were made for the nextvacation. I got an e-mail for a crazy good deal on another cruisefrom the nice Windstar people, and have spent the last month or sogetting all my ducks in a row – both FOR the trip, and so that Icould LEAVE on the trip. (Oh, hey, also, I’ll be co-producing anAwards show again this spring, so that’ll be another light-postingseason.)

ANYWAY, though, the Adventure Beganthis morning. Well, no, the adventure began last night, when I waspacking. Here’s the thing: I wear jeans all the time. And I hategetting into dirty jeans. Hate it. (I dunno – maybe I likewearing my jeans kinda tight, so it feels gross sliding into legsI’ve already lived in for a day.) ANYWAY, avoiding the re-usingjeans problem would require packing 9 pairs of jeans. (Yes. I HAVE9 pairs of jeans. And a few leftover, too.) I managed to doaccomplish this.

Certain sacrifices were made. I’dhave to wear my heavy boots on the plane. I’d have to use thecarryon which is 1/2 inch too big (in one dimension) for 2 of theairlines I’m flying, and may therefore end up getting checked ifsomeone looks too close. And I don’t have much room to carryanything I may acquire over there. (Expect flat gifts.)

About 11:00 last night, I decide tofollow up on a question a friend at work asked me yesterday (when Iwas anticipating the packing problem) – I checked whether Windstarhas laundry on board.

Turns out that they do. And, comparedto hotel laundries, it’s CHEAP. They have a plan where you can doall the laundry you want (well, they’ll DO it) during your trip,turning it around within 24 hours, for the low low price of $50. Well, sign me the hell up.

This would, however, requireRE-packing. (As if packing wasn’t enough fun the first time.) Iwas too tired to commence the repacking at the time, but I made alist of what would go (6 of the 9 pairs of jeans, for starters) and,in some cases, what I’d replace it with. That done, I went to bed.

Woke up this morning, went to get mynails done (the ol’ pre-trip manicure – brush-on gel totallyrocks, but that’s another story). While at the salon, I realized Ineeded to stop off at Target to pick up a few last-minute things forthe trip. While at Target, I saw a little $20 cassette-to-mp3converter. I like this idea. I have a box of cassettes I haven’tunpacked (why? what the hell am I going to do with them?) andthere’s a lot of music there that I’d like to save. So I throwthe thing in my shopping basket. I check out. (I think they’veovercharged me. They charged me $10 for the cheap headphones Ibought, and I’d swear the sign said $5. I look around at how busythe checkstands are, and the lack of a readily-available employee. Ido a mental calculation on how much time it will take me to findsomeone who will make the correction and give me my $5 back (assumingI’m right about it). Given how much time I’ve got before theairport shuttle picks me up, it doesn’t seem worth the risk. Still, I am annoyed by this. I hope I get $10 of use out of the damnheadphones.)

I get home around 12:45. I’ve bookedSuperShuttle to pick me up at 3:55. Actually, between 3:55 and 4:10,but I am to be ready at 3:55.

OK, 3 hours and change. Do I beginremoving stuff from my suitcase to repack it? Do I start to pack my“personal item” (which I still have yet to do)? Do I eat lunch? Do I pay the bills that still have to be paid? Do I go online andbook a tour I still need to book?

Or do I go into the big box of cassettetapes looking for the one tape I’d like to try that converter outon?

Yeah, that’d be the one. I mustspend 20 minutes trying to find the tape that I want. And while Isucceed in finding lots of tapes I’d sorta like, taking a trip downmix-tape memory lane, and totally messing up any order that mightpreviously have prevailed in the box, I do not find the tape I’mlooking for. I take the tapes I’d sorta like and go to thecomputer.

The software that comes with it is on amini-CD. My computer is a tower. A slim tower. A tower in whichthe CD-drive is mounted sideways. I put the mini-CD in the drawer(there’s a slot for it), hold it in its slot, and close the drive. The drive closes.

The mini-CD does not load. Thecomputer does not recognize it. I am confused, so I open the drivedoor.

The mini-CD is gone. It’s in thecomputer someplace. This is not good. This is SO not good.

I reach around in there trying to grabit with a finger, but no dice. I lean the tower on its side, to seeif gravity might drop it into the drawer. No luck.

As with all computer problems, I googleit. Surely I cannot be the first moron to lose a mini-CD in a drive. I’m not. In fact, the general consensus is that anyone who putstheir software on a mini-CD is a moron. I agree.

I can’t get it out. I can’t evensee it still in there.

I have no explanation for what I donext, as it’s all kinds of stupid: I put another disk in the drive(a normal-sized one) to see if whatever I’ve done has put the driveout of commission.

It has. (No real surprise there.) Moreover, now the drawer won’t even eject.

I apply the ol’ paper-clip to openthe drive. (I’m frantic now – I know I’m behind on my packing,but I figure I might have broken my brand new computer by losing amini CD in there, and what kind of idiot sends in a larger disk? What was I hoping it would do? Find the little one and show it theway out?) But, at least I find a paper clip and get the drawer toslightly eject. The drawer is inset, though, so I can’t get myfingers around it to pull it out. I go into my computer tool kit andfind a tool that’s grabby (almost like oversized tweezers) and itopens to about the depth of a drive tray. Works perfectly. Havealways wondered what that tool was for; I very much doubt it wascreated to pull out problem drives, but I’m glad I had it for thisparticular application.

Drawer open, the regular CD comes out(at least it didn’t go after its friend), and I return to thesolutions provided by google. The consensus is, “no, really, trygravity.” Rather than using gravity to get the CD to drop backdown to the tray, I hold the computer up (with the drive facing theground) and start shaking it. Gravity indeed takes over and the diskdrops right out onto the floor. Hooray!

The drive won’t open and close withthe button anymore – apparently, the paperclip killed that. So Ireboot the computer. Then I try to open the drive. (It opens! Yay!) Then I try to make it read a normal sized CD. (It reads! Yay!) Then I shut down the system and repack.

No, no, no. That’s what a saneperson does.

I put the computer on its side (so thetray is flat) and try the damn mini-CD again. This time, it works!

Well, it works as well as it’s goingto. The software loads, but the software interface only opens partof the window. I do not know how to explain this. I can’t get tohalf of the buttons. I want to hit “maximize” or something, butthere is no maximize. I can’t even tab down to the invisiblebuttons. (Well, I can, but I can’t hit them – my cursor justdisappears.) I google this too, and discover I’m not alone. That’s just what this software does in Windows 7. (And XP,apparently.) Lovely.

Well, I can still get at the “record”button. I crank up a cassette, hit record, and THEN go into mybedroom and start taking jeans out of my carryon, and moving theremaining contents into the smaller,international-regulation-friendly carryon. This accomplished, I runback over to the computer, test the file, name the file, and tryanother cassette.

This goes on for about a half hour,with me running back to the computer just as a song ends (to hit themagic “break the files here” button, so my songs are separatefiles). I’m doing the sliding-across-the-floor thing, and miss theright moment a few times, but even I know that I don’t have enoughtime to redo it.

A half hour later and I’ve got THREEWHOLE SONGS as usable mp3 files, a carryon ready to go, and my mainsuitcase partially repacked. I box up the stupid cassette thing andfigure I’ll deal with it later. I transfer the three songs to mycell phone (so I’ll have them for this trip), and search amazon andiTunes for an mp3 of the damn cassette I couldn’t find in the firstplace. Still doesn’t exist. Someday, I’ve got a date with a bigbox of cassette tapes.

It is around this time that I get acall from the SuperShuttle guy, who asks me (in heavily-accented,kind-of-hard-to-understand English) if he can pick me up at 3:30. It’s just after 2:00 by now, and after dicking around with thestupid mini-CD and the cassette box, there is no way I can guaranteebeing ready in 90 minutes. I tell him as much. We have a fiveminute conversation in which neither one of us understands the other. I know this because the conversation ends with him again asking,“Can I pick you up at 3:30?” This time, I just say, “No.” We hang up. I hope he’s still coming at 3:55.

I make with the repacking, pay all thebills that will come due when I’m away, and do everything else onmy “do this before you leave” list. I haven’t yet eaten lunch,and I manage to sit down to my meal at about 3:20. Saladsuccessfully scarfed. At 3:40, the phone rings. It’s theSuperShuttle computer, telling me that my driver is 5 minutes away,and please be ready so as not to make my fellow passengers wait.

(“OK,” I think, “I told you no on3:30, and that I needed to be picked up at 3:55 as agreed, so youshow up at 3:45 anyway. Lovely.”)

I go back into frantic mode. Pet cat;tell her I’m leaving and a friend will take good care of her. Bathroom. Brush teeth. (Well, gargle with watered-down toothpaste.) Run into garage in mad search for luggage tags. One of them hasseparated, so now I’ve got glue all over my hands. Wash hands. Kiss cat. Set alarm. Open door. Drag luggage outside to see thevan pulled up.

And... that’s pretty much it. Theother passenger in the van was now the one in frantic mode – shehad a flight at 6:00, so needed to get her bags checked by 5:15. She’d scheduled a 3:15 pickup with SuperShuttle so that she’dhave plenty of time … and SuperShuttle had (rather than giving useach our own van) tried to make it work by picking me up early –but, with me being (fairly) adamant about my own pick-up time, theyjust picked her up late AND made her wait. We had about an hour anda half to make it to the airport, and there was a TON of traffic. Weeventually made it, but there was certainly a frustrated call toSuperShuttle Customer Service from her end, and there will be anunfavorable email from mine. I mean, it’s all well to let yourcustomers book whatever 15 minute window they want, but it meansNOTHING if you’re going to then change times on everyone so thatyou can combine trips.

Am now cooling my heels in LAX. Planedoesn’t leave for another hour forty-five yet – but internet hereis $10 (for a “day pass”), so you’ll either get this once I’velanded in London (3 hour stopover) or reached my hotel in Nice. (Where I have been promised free Wi-fi. One can but hope.)

ETA: Yep, Nice. It's about 9:15 at night here, and somewhere along the line, I missed dinner. My hotel may be too cheap to have a restaurant ... I see vending machines, though. I'm sure there's something really wrong with one's first dinner in France coming out of a vending machine, but this may very well be an "any port in a storm" situation.

"Oh! You're a bleeder"

2011-09-24T22:15:00.000-07:00

That's on the short list of things you don't want to hear from the person giving you your flu shot.

"Oops," I imagine, tops the list.

(Was at Costco today. For some reason, I didn't trust the evening shift at my local grocery store pharmacy. I'm sure they're totally capable of giving me a flu shot; but they always seem so bored.) I went with the theory that Costco probably does a high volume in flu shots, so their flu shot person is likely pretty good at it.)

Costco lady was not particularly talkative. (The woman who had me fill out the flu shot form was quite friendly; the woman who took my twenty bucks equally so. The woman who actually had me in her office with the alcohol pad, cotton ball, injection and band-aid -- all business.) Pretty much the highlight of the conversation was "Oh! You're a bleeder!" as she rather quickly reached for the cotton ball. She then volunteered that she's done tons of these and I'm her first bleeder.

Somehow, this does not make me feel special.

Just hoping I didn't bleed out all the good flu vaccine. I've never gotten a flu shot before, but after last year's experience with the Worst Sore Throat I've Ever Had, I'm thinking that perhaps an ounce of prevention (or a couple of cc's, or however they measure it) is the prudent way to go.

In retrospect, I probably could've gotten it done for less money had I gone to someplace that took my insurance. Still, I was there. It was an impulse buy. Besides, I promised myself that if I was a good little girl and got my flu shot, I could get one of them free sample brownies the lady in the back of the store was handing out.

By the time I was done with the flu shot, free sample brownie lady had packed up and left. :(

Things That Make Me Happy

2011-09-23T20:41:00.000-07:00

- I'm playing with my new computer, which came with a bunch of games. There's a chess game on it. I lost twice. On level 2. This annoys me. I used to be fairly decent at chess; but haven't played in forever. In each of the two games I lost, I could pinpoint the stupid move where I lost the game, but that didn't stop me from making it. I really hate the idea that I've lost whatever chess-playing mojo I had. Just played again, gave the whole thinking ahead thing my full attention, and managed to checkmate the computer. (I knew it was going well when I took out its Queen fairly early in the game.) Go me.

- Haven't exercised in forever. I saw this coming; really, I did. Back when I first got my elliptical machine, I used it each and every morning -- no matter how late for work it would make me, there were simply no excuses. (I started at 12 minutes a day, and ultimately worked my way up to 45.) Well, over the past few months, I've allowed excuses. Figured that I needed sleep, too, so allowed myself to sleep in when I needed to, rather than exercising in the morning. Result: Very little exercising. I realized I had to go back to the No Excuses plan (especially since I haven't lost the weight I picked up eating all that strudel on vacation). Today was the 7th day in a row I actually got on the damn elliptical. (And I can manage about 25 minutes without feeling like I'm dying.) Now I have to get the sleep back in there while still exercising every morning.

- Am also working on the whole Eating Healthy thing. One thing I managed to do (and keep to doing) was cut the frozen dinners out of my diet. I'd gone for them because of the ease and the low calories, but all the sodium (and the processedness of it all) had been getting to me. There are also two meals per week that tend to cause trouble for me. One is a salad which I adore from a nearby restaurant. It's probably over 1000 calories, and I generally split it up between two meals. This week, I split it between three meals, without any noticeable hunger pangs. Second problem meal is a Friday lunch at work, where I always get French Toast. I left one of the four half-slices on my plate, again, without any noticeable hunger. So, yay.

Haven't actually seen much improvement in my actual weight from these latter two things, but I'm at least feeling better about myself.

The Perfect Day

2011-09-02T21:35:00.000-07:00

I bought a Groupon for an interior designer. Having finally finished unpacking all the boxes in my house from moving in (YAY!), I figured it was time to schedule an appointment. (Well, that and the Groupon would be expiring soon.)

So, I e-mailed and set up a time to meet. Prior to our meeting, the designer has asked me to answer several questions so that she'll know a bit more about me and the sort of things I like. (She also said to write as much as I want -- something you should never, ever say to me.) Some of these questions were easy, like what colors I like and dislike, or how I'd like to be able to describe my home.

But then there's this one: Please describe a perfect day.

Really?

I got nothing here. I've thought and thought and decided that this question does not warrant a serious answer.

So, this is what I have so far:

I am rudely awakened by the phone, but it's OK because it's the Nobel Committee with good news. My invention of an easily-synthesizable vitamin-enriched non-fat chocolate analogue that cures cancer has actually won in three categories (medicine, chemistry and peace). Besides, it's a good thing they called as I needed to get up anyway, as I have to address a joint session of Congress.

After a lovely breakfast (pastries filled with my very own chocolate-analogue) at my hotel, I drive over to the Capitol. (My invention in its liquid form? You can run your car on it.) At the joint session, I set forth my economic plan, which immediately earns bipartisan support and is passed by acclamation. I have another 10 minutes left, so I get them to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, fully legalize abortions, and let that Deaf dude serve in the military.

For lunch, I'm invited to join the President at the White House. He's arranged a command performance (in my honor) of highlights from all of the good musicals running on Broadway.

When I take my leave, my (very zippy) private jet is ready to whisk me back to Los Angeles in a couple hours. My boyfriend, that guy who played Thor in the movie, fills the time with two hours of mind-blowing sex.

Arriving back on the West Coast, we immediately go to Disneyland where they give us super-secret passes that let us cut to the front of every line.

Afterward, I return home, to find that magical elves had cleaned everything while I was away, and my cat did the New York Times crossword. I have an idea about time-travel which I jot down before bed. I'll need something to work on tomorrow.

What? Too unrealistic?

OK, a perfect day is me waking up before my alarm clock -- and this unusual event is occurring not because of an earthquake or my cat barfing on my bed, but because I've actually had enough sleep. I have time to exercise for a full 45 minutes, which makes many happy little endorphins course through my brain. I get to work on time (no traffic!) and find: (a) my boss is very pleased because the state Supreme Court denied review on a case we worked on; and (b) somehow the Judiciary found it in its budget to not only cancel furloughs, but give us all Cost of Living Adjustments for the first time in, like, a decade. I cheerfully zip through the rest of the day at work, and head off for a blind date with some dude I met on the Match.com, who does not look like that guy who played Thor, but, amazingly enough, actually does look like his online photographs. (And he's even as charming and intelligent as his profile suggests!) He buys dinner; I take him to the theatre (as I'm reviewing that night). At the opening night party, one of the actors pulls me aside to thank me for my last review, as the constructive criticism helped him change his performance for the better. I say my farewells to Dude Who Isn't Thor, but we've had a great time and we're both filled with the excitement that this could possibly, maybe be the start of something good. I go to bed thinking happy thoughts, and looking forward to another day without cat barf.

Today's Thousand Words

2011-08-12T07:38:00.000-07:00

Wiped Out

2011-08-11T12:24:00.000-07:00

Dudes. I took, like, 80 pictures today. That's got to be some sort of record for me.

Also: exhausted. Started with a walk to the Estates Theatre (where Mozart premiered Don Giovanni). Our guide told us photos were not permitted but he didn't care what we did when his back was turned. So, I snapped this when he looked away:

Then, we started the Architectural (walking) tour at the Municipal House, which is an art nouveau number that looks something like this:

It houses a main concert hall, a few restaurants, and a bunch of small "salons," used for anything from political meetings to music recitals to dance lessons. Although the rooms fell into disrepair during the Communist Era, they have been painstakingly refurbished (and, in some cases, downright recreated). Each room was more beautiful than the last, and this was where my camera really got a workout. I ended up being unable to capture the essence of the rooms, so I chose to focus on details. Here, for instance, is a small photo collection of the chandeliers in the different rooms:

OK, ok, here's a whole room. This was a "ladies' salon," apparently used for drinking coffee.

The building was created right around the dawn of electric lighting, so some of it was a Celebration of the Light Bulb. You can sort of see this in the "chandelier" in the main concert hall. To wit: there isn't one. Just a glass window for natural light (with a bit of stained glass for detail) encircled by individual lights. It gives it an almost circus-like feel.

We then walked over to the Old Town Center, and this time took in the rooms inside some of the historical buildings there. Continuing on the ceiling theme, here is a Renaissance ceiling -- that's wood it's made of:

Then we went under the main buildings. The Old Town Square in Prague is built on old Romanesque buildings (dating, oh, 11th or 12th Century) -- think of it as the Older Town Square. Smells musty (and smells like it has always smelled that way) and looks kinda like this:

Finally, we came back to the hotel (and crashed). Tonight we had our farewell dinner in Lobkowicz Palace. What we hadn't known is that the Lobkowiczes have the largest private art collection in Europe -- a part of which we got to tour before dinner. (Had I known, I probably would have crossed 100 photos today. In addition to some cool paintings from Artists You've Heard Of, they also had stuff in Mozart's handwriting, the largest set of Delft dinnerware (anywhere, I think) and various other collections. Very impressive.) After walking around the Lobkowicz Palace Collection, we then got fed, and I am way ready to crash again.

(So far, to my mother's relief, it looks like a no-go on the AK-47 tomorrow. But I'm so wiped, I'm not even sure I'll be able to remain vertical on a horse for a couple hours, much less aim an assault rifle.)

Photos from Prague

2011-08-10T13:48:00.000-07:00

We may have hit the part of the trip where I just take lots of pictures. There isn't much to say here -- just some awesome stuff.

We started this morning by going up to Prague Castle, which is (allegedly) the largest castle (in Europe or the world, I forget) but only if you're counting the gardens as well. Still, it's big. Here's one of the guards in front of it (and one of the buildings).

Most impressive building inside the castle is the cathedral, a gothic number named for St. Vitus. Here are exterior and interior. It's something like the third-largest gothic cathedral in Europe. Whatever. It's gorgeous.

As we walked through it, our guide explained a lot of the history of Prague -- religion played a big part in the history, and we were able to learn about the place through the stained-glass windows, the saints honored there, and the rulers who claimed the place (and built, or didn't build, parts of the cathedral). To the extent I have anything even remotely profound to say about today, it's this: in the course of walking us through the cathedral and telling us the history of Prague, our guide noted that, during World War II, the Germans had plans for Prague in that (based on certain historical facts), the Germans had a claim that Prague was a German city. Of course, Hitler also wanted to exterminate all the Jews and deport all the native Czechs. And when our guide told us this, and mentioned Hitler's name, I sorta got squicked out, because this is a house of God, and it just felt wrong to mention his name in there.

Also in the castle was this long hall used for jousting. Indoors. (Mom always said, don't knock someone off his horse in the house.)

The castle, being up on a hill (like all good castles) had a nice view of the city.

Then we went to a monastery, home to some Norbertine monks and (rather more importantly) home to a really beautiful (and quite old) library. You've got two rooms, the theological and philosophical. They look like this:

Any book would be proud to be in either of these rooms, but the walnut walls of the latter just can't be done justice with a photograph. But I tried:

That's about it.

(Then, we went and spent money. I bought some Bohemian paper. Because I am a geek.)

I have an Architectural Tour tomorrow -- gotta make sure there's still room on my SD card. That's the last day of the tour itself. We've got one extra day in Prague, and I'm on my own for that one, so am trying to find something to do -- I've largely overdosed on beautiful things to look at (and certainly will have after tomorrow) as well as Jewish history, so I asked the hotel concierge to find me something different -- maybe something a little active. Apparently "active" is the magic word; he immediately brought out the brochure with 16 tours/activities ranging from tandem skydiving to playing a round of golf. It's a bit complicated because there's only one of me, and most of these tours won't take just a solo traveller (without an additional 100% single supplement), so I'm at the mercy of whatever other travellers in Prague sign up for. I'm currently confirmed for a nice horseback ride through Bohemian countryside in the morning and, er, they'll let me know tomorrow whether I can go shoot an AK-47 in the afternoon. :)

A Word About Hotels

2011-08-09T14:11:00.000-07:00

I apologize for not taking photos of my hotel rooms (other than the wacky safe location in the room in Warsaw). But the room in Warsaw wasn't particularly impressive. What I hadn't realized is that, on this particular tour, the room quality would improve with each successive city. With the result that my room here in Prague is better than at least one apartment I've lived in.

Vienna was no slouch either, although, there, we're talking "old world elegance." My room had a chandelier, for crying out loud. And, although they were small, five closets. (I imagine putting one ball gown in each.) It was all elegance and beautiful mouldings (and, honestly, I've no idea why there was what appeared to be a cup holder next to the bidet, but I'm sure it made perfect sense a hundred years ago). It was clean, but not pristine -- there was a certain beigeness to all the whites that says "come on, there's years and years of use here; we can just shine up the top layer." Gorgeous, though -- don't get me wrong.

We drove to Prague today where, upon checking into my room, I declared, "I'm not giving it back; you can't make me." The hotel is very new -- everything is absolutely pristine, full of totally modern tech I need a Caltech graduate to explain to me. (The phone has a screen with a menu. The PHONE.) And the room is huge -- more like a suite, with bedroom, bathroom, living room, entryway, and kitchenette. I have two TVs. There's a chandelier in here too, but it's surrounded by a cylindrical black shade (yes, a shade on a chandelier) which makes it look all cool and modern.

If I wasn't in Prague, I'd never leave the room.

Of course, I am in Prague, and after having had a 90-minute orientation walk (which took two and a quarter hours), I now feel (vaguely) oriented. (Enough to wander off on my own in the vague direction of the nearest "Laundryland." Which is not the Disneyland of laundromats. But at least I found the damn thing.) I'm confident that I can find Old Town Square all by myself, and I'd put the chances that I can make it from there to the Charles Bridge (via the uncrowded "shortcut" our guide taught us) as high as 75%. We've got two days of touring ahead of us -- actually, two mornings of touring and two free afternoons (I see shopping in my future, and perhaps a museum or two).

I have Friday to myself. My parents are taking a tour out to Terezin and I am opting out, due to being (for lack of a more sensitive way of phrasing it) Holocausted-out. (I'm even opting for an Architectural Tour of Prague rather than a Jewish Heritage Tour on Thursday -- the synagogues are already starting to blend together.) Which means I've got a day to fill in (or around) Prague. Anybody got any ideas?

Religion Break in Vienna

2011-08-08T07:40:00.000-07:00

This morning, I took in the Jewish Heritage Tour (or whatever they called it), although, as it turns out, we saw only one synagogue but two churches. This is simply a matter of geography (and population) -- when you're dealing with a largely Catholic country, particularly one with a history of overlap between Church and State, you can't walk very far without running into a church.

I wanted to give you a lovely photograph of St. Stephen's Cathedral, but it is undergoing a major renovation, so you can't really capture it in a photograph. Here's the spire, though, which I think screams "Viennese."

Now, we did see (and go into) one of 12 (now existing) synagogues in Vienna, but it doesn't present a photo-worthy facade. Indeed, it was designed to blend in, on a side street. It is the one synagogue in Vienna that wasn't burned in Kristallnacht in 1938, for (as we were told) three reasons -- two of which had to do with location (the third was that it contained records of the Jewish community, which the Nazis could use). But since the synagogue was so physically integrated into the community, it could not be burned without burning neighboring buildings. Moreover, the synagogue was about a block away from this:

That's a medieval church -- the oldest in Vienna (or Austria -- I forget) -- and the Nazis did not want to risk it. So, the synagogue has the church to thank for its continued existence.

Now, current Austrian attitude toward World War II is a bit ... I don't want to say dodgy, exactly -- but our tour guide said (with a laugh) that Austrians will try to convince you that Beethoven was Austrian and Hitler was German. Aha ha ha. (Read: OK, yes, Hitler was Austrian, but we'd rather not claim him.) The official line (certainly the official post-war line) was that Austria tried to characterize itself as a victim -- in that Hitler's annexation was something Austria didn't want. Our local tour guide, however, said that this was a crock (and don't we all remember 250,000 Austrians cheering Hitler when he took to the balcony at Heroes' Square?) Sure, there was opposition and a Resistance, but Austria wasn't the victim it tried to whitewash itself as. (Pretty much every tour guide we've had has said that the one country which was done the best job of stepping up and admitting responsibility is Germany.) We were also told, however, that things have been changing; Austrian children are learning about the Holocaust in schools, and Austrian relations with the outside Jewish world are improving (relations which certainly took a hit during the Kurt Waldheim presidency).

I digress. In 1900, there were something like 200,000 Jews in Austria; now, there are about 10,000. 120,000 left, and 65,000 died in the Holocaust. Here's a Holocaust memorial in Vienna (unlike the one in Hungary, you can't miss it -- of course, unlike the one in Hungary, it is simply a memorial to the dead, and not any admission of participation).

The concept here is of a library that you can't enter. The doors cannot be opened. The books are all stacked the wrong way -- we see the pages, not the spines -- and the idea is to mourn all of the cultural contributions of which society has been deprived by the murder of 65,000 Jews. I dig it -- it's a way of universalizing the loss. It isn't just the families of the 65,000 who are impacted, or the Jewish community of Austria, but society as a whole which has been deprived of the richness that these lives might have brought. The books not written, as it were.

The synagogue itself had its own Holocaust memorial -- those granite blocks are inscribed with the names of the 65,000.

It reminds me, in its way, of the Vietnam Wall Memorial in D.C. -- because 65,000 names are an amount you can inscribe -- it's a number you can get your brain around.

(And then I took a look at the data -- there are under 60,000 names on the Vietnam Memorial. Which means that more Austrian Jews died in the Holocaust than American service men and women who died in Vietnam, and I find this terribly depressing.)

Good thing we've got a Mozart and Strauss concert tonight.

Vienna, Day Two

2011-08-07T08:26:00.000-07:00

Oh happy day! Due to some "misunderstanding" (of no further description), we're told that we won't be charged for internet usage in our rooms. Hoo-ray! All keys are where I remember them, and I can upload photos. Oh, netbook, how I've missed you.

We started this morning with some sightseeing. There are many spiffy buildings in these parts, in different historical styles, but the one we got off the bus to see was the Hundertwasser Haus -- an apartment building in a distinctly modern style.

The entire facade was fairly impressive, but what I liked best was how that bit on the left was in the traditional old school style, and it looked peeled back to reveal Hundertwasser's design beneath.

We then went to the Museum of Fine Arts, where we saw lots of paintings -- but you get no photos here because no photos were allowed, and this wasn't really my favorite type of art anyway. Interesting, though, that the curator of the museum displayed paintings in different ways -- she did one room where the paintings were displayed as they'd been originally -- virtually covering the walls, rather than each by itself in its own little area. The curator also chose to display some modern art alongside the old classics. It was a bit jarring, at first, but I actually thought it works. Why do we have to sort art by time period?

Then, it was on to lunch -- preceeded by a display of strudel-making (or, more precisely, the "Apfelstrudelshow." Lunch (schnitzel) was followed by consumption of the aforementioned strudel. While strudel was being consumed, someone suggested that we should have taken photos. It was a bit late to capture the strudel itself, but here I am, post-strudel-fest.

(Yes, that was my actual seat at lunch, and my actual strudel plate.)

Thereafter, we tried to walk off all of that food by touring Schoenbrunn palace. We're talking about the summer palace used by the Hapsburgs. No photos allowed inside, but here's the front and some gardens.

The rooms, many in the Rococo style, are impressive. They ooze wealth, really. It's good to be Emporer. Crystal chandeliers, gold leaf on everything, original furniture intact, and many, many paintings recording the history of the Hapsburg family. Lovely stuff.

We got back to the hotel just before the promised thunderstorms. We'll have a short walking tour tomorrow morning (I hope the weather behaves) and some time to ourselves before our final night in Vienna.

(I miscounted jeans. The laundry situation may soon become dire.)

Slow down, you crazy child...

2011-08-06T13:07:00.000-07:00

Hey, guess where I am.

(Or, more precisely, "Hez, guess where I am." I'm in a lovelz hotel in Vienna. No free wi-fi, but free use of a couple of desktops in the "business center." Because this is my first time in this part of Europe using a computer that is not mine, it's my first experience with what I assume is a German keyboard. Which switches the "y" and "z" kezs (dammit) around from their usual Qwerty setup. This is not the easiest thing to get used to. Also had a hell of a time logging in to my account at work, because I know that my password involves "whatever the hell is over the 8" -- and it definitely isn't the same thing that's over the 8 in these parts.)

The other downside about tzping (shit) from the business center is that I can't post photos. Which isn't particularly troublesome todaz (aargh), as I didn't take any, but will probably grow to be a problem over our next two days in Vienna.

Today was mostly a travel day. We started from Budapest early - conveniently having our rest stop at a truck stop in Hungary which included a small souvenir store, so everyone (on every tour bus out of the country) could unload the last of their local currency. (I gave my parents the last of mine; adding to theirs, mom was able to buy a small jar of paprika.) Then, we went across the border for lunch in Bratislava, Slovakia.

We had been in Slovakia on the way to Hungary, but didn't see much of the place. This time, we had a speaker tell us about the history of the country and its economy, followed by a short tour of Bratislava, and some free time.

Things I learned about Bratislava and initial impressions of the place: Modern Bratislava is a young city. Which is really bizarre because it has a medieval castle, a Plague monument, and most of the other trappings of a standard European city. Here's the thing, though: Slovakia became an independent country very recently. It was only 1993 when Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia -- and, when they had been a unified country, Prague had done most of the heavy lifting from the "capital city" point of view. So, I mean, with Bratislava as the capital of a shiny new country, all of a sudden it has to host all necessary government buildings. Not only that, but Slovakia didn't have a ton of income potential at the time of the split, and has recently undergone a bunch of dramatic economic reforms (our speaker didn't specifically identify any other than the institution of a flat tax) and has very quickly developed a positive income-producing economy, with a ton of manufacturing and tech going on. The Slovakian people are (rightfully) very proud at how they turned their economy around and have one of the best rates of GDP growth in the EU.

While Bratislava has a lot of old architecture, it also has a lot of new stuff. Our tour took us down what appeared to be a main street of sorts (opera house at one end, some embassies along the way), and it seemed very new. Planned, even. There was, for example, a long thin fountain running down the road, spanned by a cute little bridge -- it was supposed to be evocative of an old castle moat. And it was pristine. Adorable. Every few blocks or so there would be some sort of whimsical statue designed to get your attention (often accompanied by a whimsical street performer designed to get your coins). Everyone on our tour thought Bratislava was just a charming place -- I agree, although the cynical part of me wonders how it will be in a few years, if perhaps Slovakia fails to weather the current world-wide economic ... issues. I don't know how to put it exactly -- it's just that the current version of Bratislava looks like one that has been calculated to be a perfect little European city -- with a good balance of old and new, sidewalk cafes and street performers, and a stage set up for free concerts. And a little voice in the back of my head asks what it will look like when the shit hits the fan (as shit so often does).

And then it was back on the bus and on to Vienna. (Thanks to the free wi-fi in the Budapest hotel, I downloaded the Billy Joel song for the occasion.) I haven't seen much of Vienna -- we just had a couple hours between arrival and dinner. I spent it buying a watch battery (do watch batteries always crap out on vacation, or do I just notice it more then?) and aimlessly wandering a main shopping street in Vienna.

Initial impression of (main shopping street in) Vienna: I get this. I put my earphones in, cranked up the tunes and bopped along the street, something I haven't really done since London. I didn't feel a need to take in the street noise, or that I'd be missing something if I didn't have all five senses focussed on the act of walking in a strange city. Vienna, or at least this particular bit of Vienna, is familiar to me. It's like Oxford Street in London, only with a few differences: (1) about half the signs are in German; (2) the street is totally closed off to traffic, so it is totally pedestrians only (which allows for street performers); (3) there is a massive, impressive, crazy ornate cathedral (which, if you polished it up, would look like the world's biggest wedding cake) at the other end of it (I'm pretty sure the tour is going there later, so there should be photos for whenever I can post again); and (4) there are about 12 guys dressed like Mozart trying to sign the tourists up for some Mozart-related thing. But, basically, I can do this. It's a European Pedestrian Shopping Street -- I understand its tempo and can fit into it.

I bought some stuff -- nothing particularly interesting, but it involved my first purchase (slightly off the touristy pedestrian shopping street) in a market where locals shopped and I couldn't count on the salesperson speaking English (she didn't). But there were nods and smiles and I know what a price in Euros means, and everything went off without a hitch.

This was just a first impression, based on one street -- I expect I'll have a different impression of Vienna once I've seen a bit more, but, right now, it feels more like the Western European cities I've visited than the others in Central Europe.

(Oh. And the dinner? Totallz tastz.)

The Last Day in Budapest

2011-08-05T14:10:00.000-07:00

It's almost overkill, really. Today, we had a tour of the Hungarian Parliament building, which (in terms of beautiful design) looks suspiciously like the opera house and Cathedral -- this is not accidental. Still, it's all kinds of stunning, and here are a few pictures of it:

Lovely, innit? This is actually only one wing of the Parliament building -- there's another one just like it. Hungary used to have a bicameral legislature, but now has only one house. (They kicked the former "upper" house -- the one that was nobility -- and now only the house of elected representatives is in business. So the Legislature does all its work in the other wing, leaving this one open for tours. Convenient.)

Some of the night-time shots I took from the Danube were of the Parliament building. Here it is in daylight from across the river:

And, here is the view to the left from where I was standing (on the Buda side of things) when I took that picture:

There are seven turreted ... well, stone yurts is what I think they called 'em ... that go by the name of Fishermen's Bastion. Never actually used for defense, but they give you a terrific view of the other side of the river.

We had the afternoon free, so my mom and I went over to the House of Terror. It's a building that is now a museum, but was once the headquarters of the Hungarian Arrow Cross (read: Hungarian Nazis) and, once the war ended, home of the Communist terror organization (during Soviet occupation). Not a happy place -- "House of Terror" is not an overstatement. While most of the museum is educational (what went on during the first decade of Soviet occupation of Eastern bloc countries might have gotten a sentence in my High School History textbooks, if that), everything is displayed very evocatively. The entire basement floor of the museum is a recreation of the prison/torture cells which had been located in that very building. Pretty intense stuff.

While the museum has a memorial to the victims of those who used the building to perpetrate evil, perhaps my favorite part was the "Perpetrators' Gallery," (located at the very end of the museum) which included names and photographs of those responsible. I quite liked this. It's one thing to talk about the names of the guys who put the tyrannical policies in place, but I really like the idea of identifying each and every son of a bitch responsible. ("Just following orders," my ass. You torture someone, you end up on the wall as a victimizer.)

I did not take any pictures. I have here a related photo. On the topic of memorials to victims, I was generally very impressed with the memorials we saw in Warsaw -- even the ones I haven't posted photos of had a silent eloquence. The one memorial to Holocaust victims in Budapest (or, at least, the one that I saw) is this:

It's kind of subtle (and not at all easy to photograph from a tour bus). Members of the Arrow Cross party rounded up Jews and shot them, letting their bodies fall into the Danube. The victims were forced to take off their shoes before being killed -- and this memorial is 60 pairs of actual-sized bronze shoes. (Including men's, women's, and children's shoes.)

The more I look at it, the more I like it. At the same time, though, it sort of accentuates something our tour guide said -- there's a certain amount of Denial going on in Hungary. In comparison to what we saw in Poland, I agree. When we were on our initial tour (with Rafal) in Warsaw, my mother talked the post-War period as one of Soviet Occupation, and Rafal immediately corrected her -- he said that they were not occupied; their leaders were Poles. Admittedly, they were a puppet government controlled by the Soviets, but the people running the place were decidedly local. I don't mean to suggest here that the Soviets treated Hungary in exactly the same way they treated Poland -- there were some massive differences. But, even when I was in the House of Terror, I got the feeling that Hungary was saying "Nazis were responsible and Soviets were responsible," without clearly saying, "Hungarian Nazis and Hungarian Communists were just as complicit." Hell, our tour guide had to remind us that Hungary allied itself with the Axis powers in World War II. While there is no doubt that the Hungarian people suffered a hell of a lot, there's a certain reluctance around here to admit that a lot of the suffering was caused by other Hungarians. (Again, thank you, Perpetrators' Gallery).

I digress. The point: I think the shoe memorial is reflective of the whole attitude here. The memorial is there -- but it's small, and you can easily miss it. It doesn't grab you and say, "Look at the atrocity committed here!" It just says, "If you look for it, we're acknowledging that an atrocity happened here." In this way, I think the small size of this memorial is the loudest thing about it.

Pictures from Pest

2011-08-04T09:15:00.000-07:00

Today was See Beautiful Buildings Day in Pest (tomorrow, we cross the Danube and do it again on the Buda side).

First, the Opera House:

Then, the Basilica. (Also Cathedral.) St. Stephen (Istvan). Lovely place:

I included the detail of the image so you can see (almost) that it's a mosaic. Only my zoom lens could tell for sure; from the ground, it looks painted.

I always get a little weirded out taking pictures in a church -- because it's somebody's house of worship and they don't really need tourists walking through it with guides and cameras and all that stuff. But pictures were pretty much encouraged in St. Stephen's. And, you know, when in ~~Rome~~ Budapest....

Actually, the weirding out part sorta reached a zenith at St. Stephen's, as you can go in back and check out the relic -- in this case, the (actual) hand of St. Stephen. I don't believe I've seen an actual religious relic before, so I went with the group to take a look. Here's the thing: photography was allowed (although not with flash) but there was a little light inside the glass case which would stay on for a certain amount of time if you point a Hungarian coin in. Our tour guide handled the actual payment -- but it basically came down to, "Plop in a quarter and see the relic!" (Or, since the place was crawling with tourists and it didn't look like there was anyone in that little chapel for actual religious reasons, "Plop in a quarter and see an actual dead man's hand!")

I want to be clear here -- it wasn't that hand that weirded me out, it was the paying to see it. I'm not a Catholic, but it seems to me that a relic of a saint is something that ought to be treated with respect, not displayed like a carnival side show. So, yeah, I declined to take a picture; the whole thing just seemed wrong.

Then, continuing in the See Beautiful Buildings Tour of Pest -- and, from the Turnabout is Fair Play Department -- we actually went to a synagogue, where (for once) I'd see a house of worship of my own faith turned into a tourist attraction. I had mixed feelings about the experience, but they were based largely on the fact that the synagogue in question (Dohany) is sort of a restored relic of a bygone era, and not the center of a vibrant religious community.

First, the good news. It's awfully pretty. As synagogues go, it is beautifully designed and decorated. (It looks a bit more like a church than a traditional synagogue. There is a reason for this -- the architects were not jewish, so modelled it on a church.) It's also huge -- the second largest synagogue in the world (the largest is in New York). Can seat about 3000, when you include the galleries. See... pretty:

OK, here's the depressing bit: Before World War II, the Jewish population of Hungary was something like 800,000; after the war, it was 200,000. 600,000 people wiped out. A word like "decimated" is a dramatic mathematical understatement. (In fact, Hungarian Jews were the largest group killed at Auschwitz.) While current numbers are hard to get hold of (because it is now illegal in Hungary to ask people to identify their faith), there's an estimate of between 100,000 and 160,000 Jews in the whole country. This particular synagogue is still active, but, on a regular basis, is used to a small fraction of its capacity.

It is also a memorial. I already showed you the mass grave of Warsaw Ghetto dead; there is also a mass grave of Budapest Ghetto dead -- and it's in a garden area beside this synagogue. The Budapest Ghetto was fairly unusual in that it was only in operation for a number of weeks near the end of the war (I think the guide said seven) before it was liberated. Still, nearly 3000 people died there. They have been buried in 24 mass graves in this little garden -- the few tombstones around each plot have been placed there when family members were able to identify the dead; most of them are unknown. Still, it's an oddly beautiful place.

The last thing to see at Dohany ... and I regret I did not get a good picture ... is a section (in another garden) honoring Raoul Wallenberg and other so-called Righteous Gentiles who saved the lives of Hungarian Jews during the holocaust. There is a large stone engraved with a list of the names of people who saved many, and four more stones engraved with the names of people who saved just one person or family. And there are a lot of names there. We talk about people like Wallenberg and Carl Lutz who saved tens of thousands, but it's important also to honor those who risked their lives to save just one other life. Dohany does that, and it's a beautiful thing to see.

The Pictures

2011-08-03T14:07:00.000-07:00

(Either Picasa is my new best friend or the world's biggest pain in the butt. Let's find out.)

I mentioned this earlier. THIS is where they put the safe in my Warsaw hotel room. Can't say a whole lot of planning went into this particular design.

This next pic is of one side of the Old Town Square in Warsaw. For some reason, it made me think of Epcot -- I mean, this is how Disney constructs an old European town square -- and it actually is the old town square in Warsaw.

Next up is the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial. It has two sides -- a side to memorialize the victims, and a side to memorialize the young fighters in the ghetto uprising. We saw plenty of statues and memorials in Warsaw -- they really know how to make a monument there.

That's the side for the victims, obviously. Our tour guide told us that the stones used for the memorial had conveniently been brought there by the Nazis, who had wanted to use them for a victory monument. Using them in this way is a sort of "Fuck you!" of which I wholly approve.

The next shot is my sister admiring the side remembering the fighters in the ghetto uprising.

And if the memorial isn't depressing enough, our tour also stopped at an old Jewish cemetery in Warsaw. They had some symbolic graves there for holocaust victims. When I was looking around for a stone to place on one of those graves, I saw this clearing...

... except it isn't a clearing. See those white posts at the far end (marked with a black stripe)? They're marking off the area. It once served as a mass burial pit for the people who died in the Warsaw Ghetto.

In retrospect, I gotta say that this hit me a bit harder than Auschwitz did (or rather, it hit me how I expect Auschwitz would have hit me, had we seen the crematoria or the sites of mass burials). I was standing there on the edge of a pit in which countless, nameless bodies had been thrown. And something green was trying to grow there now.

On to happier photos. Here's a tower from the outside of the old town of Krakow. I expect a princess to be held captive in there.

And a series of shots from the Danube dinner cruise. Budapest at night is just one beautiful building after another. (And, at some point in the future, I may actually know what each of these buildings is.)

(Yes. Picasa is perfectly suited to this task.)

If it's Wednesday, it must be ... is it Wednesday?

2011-08-03T13:16:00.000-07:00

Budapest, actually.

Today was a travel day, and a bit of a bear. We were all kind of wiped out from Auschwitz -- either physically, emotionally or both -- so we spent most of today on our tour bus. We started at about 8:00 in the morning and left Krakow, stopped for lunch someplace in Slovakia (our second country for the day) and ended up at our hotel in Hungary (country number three). It was a lot of travel and a reasonable amount of dozing off. Surprisingly (considering that we spent most of the day seated), we were all still kind of wiped out when we got here. After a quick walk and a half-hour break to "refresh," (this company is big on euphemisms)*, we went for dinner on a cruise up (and/or down -- my sense of direction, which was never particularly good, is totally clueless at present) the Danube.

Back at the hotel, with a good solid (free) wireless connection, this seems like a good time for a camera dump.

(Well, a half hour ago seemed like a good time for the photo dump, but I had to have a twenty minute Quest for the Camera Battery Charger beforehand. I haven't charged the camera yet this trip, and was afraid I'd left the damn thing at home.)

* New Favorite Euphemism: Someone on the tour needed a, er, tampon. The tour guide helped her find a drug store, and later mentioned helping her find "a make-up related item." I shall hereafter no longer refer to "feminine protection" (which always reminds me of a little pink handgun, anyway), but a "make-up related item."

Battery now found, I'm going for the pictures.

Well.

2011-08-02T13:38:00.000-07:00

Hmm.

I am speechless after the visit to Auschwitz, although not for the reasons I'd expected.

The visit didn't really have the effect on me that I'd anticipated it would -- and since it was probably more me than it, and because it just feels like all kinds of wrong to come away from Auschwitz feeling largely unmoved, my first instinct is to just shut the hell up and not talk about it.

I just got a very encouraging email, though, so I feel like maybe I should take the opportunity to explore what just happened.

I think it was the convergence of three distinct things. First, there's me. Come to think of it, there's two (sub-)things about me that are of importance here. The first one is I relate best to the tangible. I prefer artifacts to art, when it comes to museums. I don't want lectures and photographs; I want to touch and feel. The second is that I have a certain amount of experience dealing with this sort of artifact. I've been to the Museum of Tolerance in L.A.; the Holocaust Museum in D.C.; and Yad Va'Shem in Israel. So, I mean, I've seen the impossibly large piles of shoes (collected from the victims of gas chambers). And they knocked me out the first time I saw them. But I did see them; and the fact that the impossibly large pile of shoes at Auschwitz is even larger than the piles of shoes I've already seen doesn't make it have any more of an impact. (And, indeed, it doesn't even have the same impact as the somewhat smaller piles of shoes I've previously seen. Because nothing can hit you quite the same way that first pile of shoes can.) Not only that, I've also (in my career) had experience with artifacts of murder and murderers. I remember the first time I held in my hand a letter written by a murderer (and I thought, "I am holding in my hand a piece of paper held by a murderer," and found it chilling); I remember the first time I saw the picture of a murder victim; and the first time I saw the blood spatters. The point is ... and I think it's a point I somehow failed to realize before I got on the bus to Auschwitz: I've held these things in my hands -- and even though what I held were artifacts of a single murder and Auschwitz was a place where over one million people were murdered, seeing evidence of the murders of over a million did not hit me with a million times the strength of holding in my hands the evidence of one.

In fact, it kinda didn't even hit me with the same strength. Which sorta brings me to thing number two: You don't visit "Auschwitz"; you visit the Museum at Auschwitz. This is a key distinction which I wish I'd appreciated a bit more in advance. Look, the setting is undeniably Auschwitz; you're walking through the entrance gate; down the same roads; into the same buildings -- it's the camp, and there's no getting around that. But inside, you're seeing a museum. The place is full of displays. They've repurposed the barracks to house photographic blow-ups, gas chamber models in glass cases, artifacts in glass cases, and impossibly large piles of shoes in glass cases. (Are you noticing a theme here?) Even when you can peek in a room which houses bunks or piles of straw on which the prisoners slept, the room itself is totally blocked off. There is a distance between you and the artifacts whereas I'm a person who craves immediacy.

I would never diss the Auschwitz Museum for making this call. As long as there are Holocaust deniers out there, there is certainly a tremendous value to laying out, for everyone to see, the plans, the documentations, the piles of shoes ... all of the evidence of what happened there. It's proof, and it needs to be seen. It just isn't what I need to see.

Now, what I need to see, as it happens, is hanging out down the road at Birkenau -- sometimes known as Auschwitz 2. While Auschwitz 1 started out as more of a concentration camp; Auschwitz 2 was put together in order to kill people more efficiently. Birkenau is the one where the railroad tracks run right into the camp, for disgustingly easy access to the gas chambers. Prisoners were housed not in brick buildings but wooden stables (really, stables -- originally designed to house horses). Birkenau is a museum too -- but not one with exhibits. You can walk into the buildings, or down the train tracks to the one cattle car on display, or up into the tower to get an overall view of the place. It's just the place without the people -- a place where you can put your hand on the wall and know that some 67 years ago, a victim of Nazi tortures touched that same wall; a place where you can step away from your group of privileged tourists, take a minute of private time where it's just you and the canvas of history, let your imagination run away with the facts as you know them, and try to call up an emotional connection to the unimaginable.

... and here's where the third thing got ahead of me: we ran out of time. The Auschwitz Museum was crazy crowded today, and we didn't have nearly enough time at Birkenau. Our guide gave us a quick talk there and that was it -- time to go back to the tour bus. I stole about five minutes on the way back to the bus (my sister -- bless her -- stole ten), but it just wasn't enough time.

I wouldn't call the whole experience a waste of time or anything. I learned some more facts and now have a few more images to call up when I think about what the Nazis tried to do (and very nearly succeeded at). I laid a rose in a gas chamber and whispered a quick prayer for the people who died there. (I later learned my father was simultaneously doing the exact same thing -- a fact which I find kind of interesting all by itself.) I looked at individual photographs of prisoners who were chosen to work rather than immediately be killed, and saw in the meticulously kept records how few of them lived more than three months, and one lived only three days. (I compared these images to the photographs I'd seen earlier in the day, on the walls of Oskar Schindler's factory, of the people lucky enough to be saved by that particular individual.)

But speechless? No. Not today.

Speechless

2011-08-01T14:39:00.000-07:00

I expect to be speechless tomorrow. We’re going to visit Auschwitz, and, honestly, I don’t anticipate having sufficient words. Hell, I’m going to see a place that was designed by people to exterminate other human beings. How, exactly, am I supposed to wrap my brain around it and be eloquent?

I gotta tell you, when we rode through Warsaw and looked at the destruction wreaked by the Nazis and the memorials to those who fought and those who died, something in the back of my mind wonders whether X-Men: First Class and Captain America could play here. Because the wounds from World War II seem so RAW here, and so RECENT – when the city hasn’t physically recovered from Hitler’s attempt to wipe it off the map and the jewish population hasn’t even returned to the smallest fraction of what it had been – would it seem somewhat disrespectful to look at Nazis as villains in superhero movies?

I’m not sure. I don’t think I’m going to come out of this trip thinking that Hollywood has no business using Nazis as the go-to villains. (I’m still going to enjoy the Ark of the Covenant going all science fiction-y retributive on some Nazi ass, no matter how unrealistic.) But I am thinking that, living in America, without the more constant reminders of the very serious evil that the Nazis accomplished, we may be not entirely on top of the SCOPE of it – even when we’ve read the books and seen the documentaries. A lot of the people on this trip are talking about bearing witness, and about how seeing the camp is necessary when there are Holocaust deniers out there – but I’m starting to think it’s a little something more than that. I think I need to see it to fully get, on a base, gut, primal level, the exact size of the evil that was done here. So, yeah, I expect to be speechless – I already KNOW the words; what I’m here for are the feelings that words can’t convey.

Er... none of which explains why I’m speechless tonight.

Tour groups are weird little social groups; you’re thrown in with a bunch of total strangers with whom you’re having a shared experience. And when the experience is something as emotionally edgy as this one, you may end up with intensely personal conversations with the aforementioned total strangers. I just got back from dinner with some of my tour-mates. And because the visit to Auschwitz tomorrow is on everyone’s mind, the conversation went there.

And one Australian woman at the table, speaking from a position of (admitted) ignorance asked how it could have happened. “If someone came to take my neighbors away at gunpoint,” she said, “no matter what their religion, I would stand up and say ‘stop.’” So, she wondered, how could non-Jewish Germans have stood by when it happened to German Jews? It’s clearly a question that people have been struggling with since the Holocaust, and most of us had some sort of answer to give her. We spoke of social experiments which have shown how very EASY it is to accept benefits when someone tells you you’re better than other people, or that the others are “less” than you. We spoke of acts of discrimination, intolerance, and “ethnic cleansing” throughout history and the world today. We spoke of the segregated US South, and how people took “Whites Only” water fountains for granted. We spoke of how Nazi discrimination against Jews didn’t happen overnight – but was instead a series of incremental incursions on rights (which everyone “let” happen) which ultimately expanded into the unthinkable. We spoke of how the German people felt particularly put-upon following World War I, and how Hitler played into that psychology, making them feel good (and even superior).

Because I felt like being political, I spoke of some current attempts to limit the rights of Muslims to practice their faith. I mentioned how there are communities all over the country where people say, “We don’t want a mosque here,” and in many communities, it appears to be only the Muslims, and not their neighbors, who are standing up and saying, “No.” I suggested that it isn’t enough to say “No,” when the SS comes to take your neighbors away at gunpoint, and that we must be ever-vigilant to stop the FIRST incursions into others’ rights, so that it never gets to that point.

And our Australian questioner nodded and appeared to get it.

And then someone said to her, “Well, look at the Aboriginals in Australia.” And she rolled her eyes and said they were “a real problem.” And she said they’re alcoholics, and the male aboriginals rape little children. And we all said, “There are good aboriginals and bad aboriginals – and you want to punish the rapists but not take away the rights of the whole group.”

And she continued to not get it (throwing in, for good measure, what the “problem” with “Blacks” was).

And because we were sharing a table with her, and would be sharing the next couple of weeks with her, none of us went that last step and said, “THAT’s how it could happen, you racist idiot.”

And so, I am frustratingly speechless.

Warsaw -- the Tour Begins

2011-07-31T07:09:00.001-07:00

Not entirely sure why I’m so tired, as I’ve actually been sleeping quite satisfactorily. OK, sure, I did wake up around 3:15 this morning with a headache, but I was back to sleep soon after I tossed back an Advil or two. (I was actually pleased when I saw the clock said 3:15, as I was pretty energized then, and I figured I had several more hours of sleep coming to me.)

We had a tour of Warsaw today. This was the first tour from our tour company, and, actually, I think the tour guide we had today was not as good as Rafal was yesterday. (Our tour company supplies different local guides on the ground in each city. Our tour director seems pretty good. The local Warsaw guide is a moron.)

No, “moron” is much too strong of a word. (On second thought... the fact that she twice tried to count the group, to see if we all (41) were there, and each time gave up because she couldn’t count that high … yeah, maybe “moron” is appropriate.) She told us much of the same history of Warsaw as Rafal told us, but she was very disorganized and didn’t paint it as clearly. (One particular story was told to us in three separate chunks, as she twice had to stop to tell us something else, and didn’t quickly return to the topic.)

The tour company also gave us great little “whisper” devices, so we could listen to her without standing directly in front of her. She had a microphone and we had little receiver packs and earpieces – so not only could we wander around (the range on ‘em was more than 50 yards), but she didn’t have to raise her voice. Great invention for tours. The downside was that she had no freakin’ clue how to use it. She’d often be looking up at a tall building while describing it – which put her voice right out of range of her microphone. She also wasn’t really on top of the whole idea of her tourists wandering. She’d say something like, “Over here is …” or “let’s walk this way,” without realizing that half of us might be looking at something else and (since we’re listening to her over the device, rather than out loud) have no idea where “here” is. So, yeah, great toy, but she really didn’t take advantage.

Fun that I could keep listening to her ramble on even when I was in the bathroom – and that was a whole floor away.

She was older than Rafal, so totally grew up during Communism. And she confirmed the bit about how the Communists never really taught the true history of Poland. “The Nazis killed the people and the Communists killed their memory,” she said. Very sad. (She did not make the same linguistic error Rafal had – she totally spoke about Polish Jews – but candidly admitted that, until 1968 (when the Communists tried to expel all the Jews from Poland), she didn’t really know any Jews, or have a solid grasp on what a Jew was.)

Sights today consisted partly of Things Warsaw Is Proud Of (the Chopin statue; the largely recreated Old Town; the Warsaw Uprising Memorial statue) and partly of WWII/Warsaw Ghetto/Jewish history things (the Jewish cemetery; the mark on the ground where the wall around the ghetto used to stand; the memorial marking the departure point for where Jews were transported from the ghetto to Treblinka). I suppose the memorial dedicated to the Ghetto Uprising falls in both categories. That was quite impressive – it was made of stone that the Nazis had imported into Warsaw in order to build a victory monument; a few years later, the people turned it around and built a monument which, on one side, honors those who fought in the ghetto uprising and, on the other, serves as a memorial to those who suffered and died there.

What’s really interesting about the whole of Warsaw is that World War II is more immediate here. This makes sense – so much actually happened here, and the City suffered so much from the destruction wreaked by the Nazis – it can’t be easily forgotten or put aside. At the same time, it was only when the Poles got out from under Soviet control that they could really teach and learn about the truth of what happened – so, in that sense, remembering the war is even more immediate because the people are only recently being allowed to do that.

I have pictures of most of the sights I talked about – but I haven’t the time (or speedy connection) to resize and post them. We had a three(ish) hour break after the tour – my sister and I spent most of it having lunch and hunting down (on the web) the story of a dude with our last name who had been buried in the Jewish cemetery here. I was planning to spend the rest of it aimlessly wandering around Warsaw (OK, not ENTIRELY aimlessly – I got bit by mosquitos in the cemetery, so wanted to hunt down some cream to make the bites stop itching) but it started raining torrentially, so I came in and wrote up this post instead. I’ve got just enough time left to run downstairs and post it before I have to change clothes and get back on the bus for our Chopin concert tonight.

Early start tomorrow – we’re back on the bus for the drive to Krakow.

Warsaw -- the Day Before the Tour

2011-07-30T12:23:00.000-07:00

(Man, I'm tired. Probably has something to do with going off on a tour at 9:00 a.m. I'm not ready for 9:00 a.m. Pacific time, much less Central European.)

Because we have a traditional tour of Warsaw tomorrow, I booked us a more "off the beaten path" tour. In fact, that's what they call it: Adventure Warsaw does an "Off the Beaten Path" trip. We didn’t exactly do that tour – my folks were with me and there was no way that they were going to climb in and out of the old-school Communist-era van. Instead, the company set up their “private angel” tour for us, which covered everything on the “Off the Beaten Path” tour (except the lunch, the vodka, and the van) from the convenience of a Honda Civic. And we got the guide all to ourselves (which meant that, when my father needed to stop in a pharmacy to pick up a band-aid, we had our very own translator at the ready). (Actually, they needed two translators – our guide was going from Polish to English, and I was going from English to American, as my parents were asking for a “bandage,” when what they really wanted was a “plaster.”)

The tour was very interesting, and it was supported by a couple of interesting visual aids – an aerial view of Warsaw before WWII, and a view of it after. The guide had said that 85% of Warsaw had been destroyed (between the German invasion, the ghetto uprising, and the Warsaw Uprising), and the pictures certainly supported this. Where once there had stood a lovely European city, there was mostly rubble. Which ended up clearing the way for the subsequent Communist government to build all sorts of communist buildings. The result is – as I’d remarked last night – the occasional really gorgeous old-school building, some less well-preserved buildings (some heavily marked by gunfire), many ugly communist-style buildings of the 1950s (often with “People’s” or “Workers’” in the title) some restorations and the rare piece of shiny (often glass) new architecture.

Our guide, Rafal, really knew his stuff, and was pretty accommodating in terms of showing us whatever we wanted to see. But the one thing that sorta weirded me out was that he – in what seemed to be a totally natural manner – talked about “Jews” and “Poles” as two mutually exclusive categories. Don’t get me wrong; Rafal went out of his way to distance himself from any anti-Semetic thoughts, and seemed disappointed that there’s still a lot of distrust between Jews and Poles – but that’s the way he put it, "Jews" and "Poles," as though there are no Polish Jews.

Well, to be sure, they were damn near wiped out in the Second World War (Pre-war, Warsaw had 450 synogogues; now, it has 1) – but he used the Jew/Pole distinction even when he was talking about the pre-war time period, when there definitely were Polish Jews. He spoke of how some of the Poles helped the Jews, especially with hiding Jewish children with Polish families – and while I found that to be a genuinely cool thing, I still sorta cringed inwardly about the language. It probably would not have been difficult (or inaccurate) to have said that there were Catholics in Poland who helped the Jews, but that’s just not the way Rafal has been wired to think. Interesting.

Perhaps the most interesting thing he said, though, is something that he used to pretty much open the trip: he is a member of the first generation in 200 years that isn’t fighting against someone – whether it was Russians, Germans, or a puppet Communist government – Poles haven’t been entirely free to develop their own national identity (and the course of their country) for centuries, and the current generation is really just starting. Communism fell in 1989. To put this in personal perspective, I was in Law School in 1989. I like to think I’ve accomplished a reasonable amount of stuff since then, but I honestly can’t expect an entire nation to have come into its own in that period.

Which is why I ultimately cut Rafal some slack on the Jew/Pole thing. Because, as he pointed out, he had to learn a lot of the real history of Warsaw himself – because schools weren’t allowed to teach the truth about the Warsaw Uprising when the Soviets were pulling the strings. I was pretty much dealing with a guy who represents the future of Warsaw. Hell, he started his own tour business (and ended up very highly rated at TripAdvisor), teaching the history that he wasn’t taught, and showing visitors the story of the city through its architecture. He’s honest about the problems facing a work force emerging from a communist system (in which everyone had a job, but few people actually worked), and he, for one, seems to have grabbed onto capitalism with a pretty firm grip. Overall, I was impressed by him, and figured that the city has a real shot if the rest of his generation is a lot like him.

Hello from Warsaw!

2011-07-29T13:53:00.000-07:00

More precisely, from my hotel lobby. High speed internet is something crazy like $50/day here, but they've got (not particularly speedy) free wi-fi in the lobby. I anticipate spending my evenings (and possibly mornings) right here in this chair. (And you may not get Poland pictures until the next city, as I'm told we have free high-speed there.)

After exchanging a few text messsages with my sister, who had just arrived at Heathrow from New York, we managed to meet up with her (in one of the many little airport restaurants) before heading off to Warsaw. My folks, who have taken this particular tour before, have an opinion of Poland which, er, suggests there might be a basis in fact to all of those Polish jokes we used to laugh at in Elementary school. So, when our flight was twenty minutes late, my folks exchanged a glance and said "Poland" -- as if that explained it all.

(Can't say I've experienced much that gives credence to that stereotype -- with the possible exception of the safe in my hotel room, which is located on a shelf at the tippy top of my closet. I can barely reach it when I stand on the edge of the closet itself, and I have no way of looking inside it (to make sure I didn't leave anything) without bringing a chair over and standing on it. There is a very long shoehorn sitting on the closet shelf beside the safe -- it may well have been provided so you can sweep your stuff out of the back of the safe.)

So, we made it to Warsaw (Chopin Airport), cleared passport control, were safely reunited with our luggage (hooray!), found an ATM, found our ride to the hotel, and checked in. With the time we killed at Heathrow, the time we spent in flight (and waiting to take off), and the one hour time change, it was pushing 7:00 by the time we got to our rooms.

My sister (who, as previously mentioned, was still pretty much in transit from New York) was wiped out, so she just crashed, leaving me and my folks to dinner. We took a little stroll down the "old" part of the city, had dinner at a little outdoor cafe (which conveniently offered English translations in its menus), and ... that's about it. Our waitress spoke English, which was a definite plus. She said she didn't speak it very well, but considering that it would take me a week or so to learn how to say "I don't speak Polish very well" in Polish, we were all pretty impressed.

We also felt crazy ignorant. My folks made conversation with her, asking what she'd studied at university (besides English). She said she'd studied Polish literature, so my mother asked who some famous Polish authors were we might have heard of. She started off with a Polish poet. When we gave her blank stares, she said, "She won Nobel Prize." This didn't make our stares any less blank, though -- just made us think, "yeah, perhaps we should have at least recognized the name." She went through about a half dozen other Polish writers, and couldn't get a glimmer of recognition with any of them. In what was clearly (if you'll forgive the pun) a Hail Mary pass, she suggested John Paul II, pointing out that he wrote some books (as well as, you know, being Pope). It was a stretch, granted, but we were all able to say, "Oh yes! Of course!" so that we didn't look like complete idiots.

Initial impressions of Warsaw: Looks like Europe. (Yes, I know.) But, I mean, it has that same old-buildings-next-to-new-buildings thing which you don't get in America because we don't have buildings that are hundreds of years old. (Although, the Nazis burned the hell out of the place, so a lot of the buildings that look hundreds of years old are simply recreations.) Also: they've got that whole former Soviet oppression thing going on (remember Solidarity and all that?) so there are relics of former Soviet domination scattered about.

It is (I think) Friday night. Walking back from the restaurant, we walked through an open plaza or square, where some woman was playing the fiddle and (a little further down) some dude was dancing with fire. The hotel itself is located next to the Presidential Palace. This afternoon, we passed some guy exercising the equivalent of his First Amendment rights in front of a small gathering. (We asked our hotel doorman what he was saying; doorman said, "He's talking politics.") This evening, there was a (slightly larger) gathering in front of the Presidential Palace, apparently mourning the previous President's death. (That's what we think, anyway. We didn't understand a word they were saying, but there were Polish flags, people speaking ritualized speech, and I saw someone holding a rosary -- so it's a reasonable guess.)

Our official tour doesn't begin until tomorrow night; our unofficial tour commences tomorrow morning (when some highly-rated dude on TripAdvisor is giving us a tour of "the real Warsaw.")

Oops

2011-07-28T16:30:00.000-07:00

What was I saying about how I'm pleasantly surprised when things work the way they're supposed to? Yeah, got a voice mail message (at, I don't know, a dollar a second) which needed an immediate response. Twenty minutes of dicking around with the phone, my MagicJack, and various cables ... the phone call is unmade and I owe the hotel an apology. Honestly, though, the MagicJack was behaving and it was a (rare?) case of Problem Existing Between Keyboard and Chair. Part of me actually thought, "You know, if I had my screwdriver kit here, I could fix this." Conveniently, the absence of my fix-it kit made cooler heads prevail -- the remedy will be a very sheepish "stupid American" admission of guilt at the front desk on the way out tomorrow. (I'm still not entirely certain HOW I managed something this stupid. Let's just say that the next time I take a phone cable out of both the phone and the wall, I won't assume both ends are the same. Idiot.) Besides, I damn near knocked the very-breakable-looking lamp off the nightstand while messing around back there -- which was a clear sign I should leave everything well enough alone and let the hotel deal with my stupidity in the morning. I tried sending an e-mail to what appears to be the contact address for the person who called me ... if that doesn't work, I'll have opportunities to (more cautiously) re-attempt the MagicJack experiment in hotel rooms across Europe. (Hopefully not leaving a trail of broken phone lines behind me.)

ANYWAY, today was a very nice day, setting aside the Unfortunate MagicJack Incident (and my father nearly doing a header down the stairs). After a good sleep-in and breakfast, we headed out to the RAF museum in London. This was actually quite impressive -- lots of aircraft on display (largely WWI and WWII); a whole building devoted to the Battle of Britain; a simulator ride or two. It was pretty cool. Here's my folks standing in front of a, er, plane.

(Yeah, we're gonna have to have words with the automatic settings on my camera. Dad's shirt: yellow. The plane: not so much.)

THEN, after a brief stop back at the hotel, we went off to have dinner and see a musical (Sondheim's Road Show). While I'd never seen the show before, I was actually somewhat more interested in the theatre itself -- the Menier Chocolate Factory. It's a very small theatre (I guess it's the English equivalent of Off-Broadway) which has put together some incredibly well-received productions (which have made it across the Atlantic). So I was pleased to finally see a show there. Besides -- perhaps because the place really is a former chocolate factory, their restaurant did a divine warm chocolate brownie.

And that's about it for the London part of this journey -- we're catching a plane for Warsaw tomorrow morning. (Goodbye free internet.) (Oh. Yay! My email made it where it had to go.) The adventure is about to get rather more adventurey. For now, at least, we're accustomed to the time change, and we managed to cram two shows, a scenic walk, and a museum into a day and a half. Not bad.

The Awesome Power of the Captain America T-Shirt

2011-07-27T17:27:00.000-07:00

Before I forget (and before it becomes no longer timely), I must take a break to discuss the Awesome Power of my Captain America T-shirt.

As you know, the movie opened with midnight screenings on Thursday night. My local favorite theater (the Arclight) had a Members Only screening at 9:00. I was so there. I was so there even before I found out about the free posters for everyone and the cap/T-shirt raffle.

And when I returned from getting popcorn, I discovered that my friend and I had won a cap and T-shirt. Cool! She took the cap; I took the shirt.

I wore it once over the weekend and received a lot of positive feedback (and I did a lot of marketing for the movie -- you're welcome, Marvel). I'd be in line at a store, or getting my nails done, or whatever, and I'd invariably get, "Did you see it yet?" At first, I didn't know what they were talking about, but then realized it was the shirt. So I'd say, "yeah" and talk up the movie. (Because the next question would be, "Was it good?" and I'm thinking, "If it had sucked, I wouldn't be wearing the damn T-shirt.")

The thing ... the awesome thing ... is that the T-shirt has magical mood changing powers. Mostly for me. Because sometimes, when you're running around trying to get stuff done (particularly when you're about to leave the country), you can get a little grumpy -- especially when there aren't enough registers open, or they're out of whatever you went there to buy. So, here's me, ready to lay down a dose of Grumpy Customer on someone, and they say, "Did you see it yet?" and I'm immediately transformed into Happy Movie Fangirl. (One guy even asked me to tell him about the post-credits tag scene -- I was more than happy to oblige.)

It worked so well, I wore the shirt again today (yesterday, whatever). And it worked again. Not only at the store where I made a last-minute adapter-plug purchase, but also at airport security. And I was totally in Grumpy Traveller mode -- my friend who drove me to the airport lost track of time, so was nearly an hour late picking me up, and we hit a ton of traffic, and the bozo customer occupying the one check-in desk agent was on his phone and taking way too long with his transaction -- so, by the time I finally got checked-in and went upstairs to security (where I usually try to force a cheery disposition, since I know TSA people take a lot of crap and don't really need any more), so, yeah, by then, the cheery disposition was definitely a bit forced, and all of a sudden I find myself discussing the relating merits of Captain America and Harry Potter with the screeners while I'm taking my shoes off. And it wasn't just me making nice with the people who were going to look at fuzzy(ish) pictures of what was going on under my Captain America shirt, it was 3 summer movie fans sharing a brief connection.

I hope "Cap" would be pleased.

We're Here ... Because We're Here ... Because We're Here ...

2011-07-27T17:00:00.000-07:00

Made it. Whew. I'm currently in London, with my parents, on the "prologue" to what I've been calling the Central European Extravaganza.

Longtime (or, let's face it, casual) readers will know I'm kind of a fan of London. As a vacation destination, it pretty much rocks. We've arranged two days here before my sister meets us and we're off to Warsaw. Plane got in around 2:00 (a few minutes early -- surprising, seeing as we took off about 30 minutes late -- I see this as just more evidence that airlines overestimate their flight times, so that they can say, "Hey, we have a 90% on time record!"). Since there were three of us, we pre-booked a transfer to London (rather than taking the train) and (also to my surprise) the car was there. So was my text message from the car company -- which meant that (a) they are reliable; and (b) the loaner international cell phone that Verizon sent me actually works. (Digression: My mother's cell phone, a Droid 2 World, didn't. We spent the ride into London on the phone (mine) to Verizon's tech support in order to make hers work. Apparently, they activated the wrong SIM card number. Don't ask. But, see, when stuff like that happens so darned frequently, I'm actually quite surprised when things work the way they're supposed to.)

I'm proud of my folks (well, my mom, mostly) for how well they handled our whirlwind first day in London. Quick stop at the hotel to change out of clothes we'd slept in (or hadn't) on the plane -- then off to the underground. We wandered around the stalls at Covent Garden for a bit (I'd hoped to see some vendors I'd bought from last time I was here, but it's very hit and miss around there), and off to dinner. My dad started to fade at this point -- so it was a good thing we had theatre tickets for just me and mom. We pointed dad in the direction of a taxi, and mom and I walked to the theatre. After that, mom was even awake enough for a walk along Waterloo Bridge. It's one of my favorite things to do in London -- a nighttime walk across the bridge is beautiful and peaceful and centering. For me, anyway. I realize this may be a bit quirky of me -- I think that most people find "centering" experiences to be those in which you're out in nature -- getting away from city life, I guess. For me, I tend to do all that touchy-feely re-finding myself in the middle of a major metropolis. (On the plus side, it isn't my metropolis, so I guess it satisfies the whole getting-away-from-it-all requirement.)

Please forgive the rambliness, There may (or may not) have been about 3 hours sleep somewhere over the Atlantic -- but I've been awake for quite some time and I feel the coherence slipping. Still, both of my parents commented (with, I think, some amount of stunned appreciation) on how the hell I was so energetic after all that travelling.

To which I can only respond: I'm in London.

In the Dark, No One Can Hear You Lick Your Plate

2011-07-25T16:20:00.000-07:00

OK, so Groupon had a deal for Opaque, which is a restaurant where you eat totally in the dark.

Totally. In the dark.

I'd actually been wanting to try this ever since I first read about the concept (Dans le Noir -- in London, although I think it originated in Paris). Basically, you're in a pitch black dining room (your waitperson is blind, which helps), they plop food in front of you, and you do your best to eat it. Dans le Noir works on a "surprise" menu basis, where you pick one of four types of food (e.g., vegetarian), tell them about your allergies, and then try to figure out what they've put on your plate. This sounded cool to me.

Opaque follows the trend, although the menu is not a surprise. (You choose from two or three selections for each course. Wimps.) It's also crazy expensive, so the Groupon seemed like a good idea. I bought it figuring that by the time it expired, I'd be dating someone.

Yeah. That plan went well. It was supposed to expire last weekend and I hadn't used it yet. I mentioned this to my new co-worker at the office, and she thought it'd be cool to go. Offered to split the cost of the groupon with me. This sounded like a plan. I called Opaque to make the reservation...

... and they were sold out. BUT, they would extend the Groupon another few days and take us the following Wednesday. They normally aren't even open on Wednesdays, but they were opening to accommodate all of the groupons. So, Groupon Night At Opaque it was.

Here's the thing. Opaque is located in the back of a nightclub. And since it's dark in there, you have no idea where you are exactly. I couldn't shake the vibe that we were actually in some tiny little back room. I mean, it isn't like they had to splurge on decor -- I'm not even certain the floors were anything other than unfinished cement. Just something about the feel of the place -- it didn't feel like a nice restaurant where they'd turned out the lights; it felt like a table crammed in some anteroom between the nightclub and the kitchen. "The ambiance was lacking" is what I'm trying to say.

So, my pal and I went to the empty nightclub (not much action on a Wednesday), sat in one of the booths, and placed our orders from the "check this box" menu. This was phoned in to the kitchen staff in back. Then, our waitperson was called. She met us at the door to the dark room and escorted us (single file, hand on the shoulder of the person in front of you) through a short maze of turning corridors (to make sure no ambient light sneaked in) to our table. Once seated, she told us what was on the table. In this case: tablecloth, rose petals (very tactile), a napkin with silverware rolled in it, and two little bread plates in the center of the table.

She came back with our drinks. I'd ordered a hot tea -- it was served sorta warm in a bar glass. (That was OK with me on both counts.) She put the drinks down and told us where they were.

I immediately moved my drink to where I wanted it to be. I mentioned the rearranging to the waitperson, and she approved -- apparently, you're supposed to put things where you want them, even though that will mess things up for when she has to clear the table.

They'd left the tea bag in the tea, which called for some early-stage two-handed work in the dark -- I managed to remove the bag and place it on a little plate (she'd brought a little amuse bouche with the drinks). It felt like I didn't drip tea all over the tablecloth, so this gave me confidence.

Actually, I had quite a bit of confidence on this almost from the start. I'd read a lot of reviews about the place before I went, and it seemed like eating dinner here was navigating a minefield. For instance, when she gives you a basket of bread, she says there's a little dish of butter in there, and everyone apparently sticks their finger right in the butter. Perhaps just because I'm cautious (and/or methodical), I sort of started the proceedings by patting my fingertips all around the table to map the place out in my head. Whenever the waitperson added something, I'd feel for where it is, figure it out in relation to everything else, and work my way around the edges of the plate. So when the bread came out, both my companion and I gingerly felt around the basket until we found the little unexploded butter mine, and worked around it. Easy peasy.

Not so easy was figuring out where stuff was on your plate -- unless you wanted to take your fingers to it. And, really, why not? It isn't like anyone can see your bad table manners. But I was determined to do that only as a last resort, so I tried feeling around with my fork and, whenever I met with resistance, tasting whatever was there. This, too, had its potential pitfalls. Like with the "lava cake" dessert, when my first forkful was the mint leaf and my second was only whipped cream.

One thing I was particularly curious about was whether I'd eat less when I couldn't see the food. I mean, are our eyes a big factor in determining when we're done? Or do we eat the same amount whether we can see the food or not?

Answer: Inconclusive. I didn't finish the salad, although I couldn't say whether that was because: (1) I really didn't want any more; (2) all I could taste was the dressing, so it wasn't that exciting; or (3) after six or seven forkfuls, I didn't want to press my luck on stabbing my plate with the fork and hoping to pick up food.

The lava cake, however, was completely demolished.

My friend and I initially laughed over our inability to eat in the dark, but, by the end, it was (rather surprisingly) a non-issue. We'd even worn clothes we weren't that attached to, in case we spilled -- but we both ended up without a speck of food on us. (I can't always say that when I'm eating with the lights on.) We enjoyed the meal and had a really good conversation. We ended up staying there for a total of about 2 hours, just chatting in the dark and picking at the remnants of our desserts.

As an aside, though -- I think Opaque hires their wait staff because they're blind, not because they're particularly good waitpeople. Ours kept coming by the table fairly frequently to ask if we were OK -- it was nice at first, but, after dessert, when we were just chatting, it got kind of annoying. Finally, when she said, "Are you OK?" for the zillionth time, I jokingly asked, "Are you trying to get rid of us?" To which she replied, "Yes." (OK, maybe, because we're in the dark, we missed out on the fact that there weren't any other empty tables and lots of people were waiting. But, perhaps a, "Would you like to continue your conversation in the lounge?" would have been a bit more polite.)

Of course, we didn't continue our conversation in the lounge. We could have, but when we were back in the lounge, we could see what time it was, where the hell we were, and that there were all those people around us -- and there were a dozen reasons to stop talking and get going. Being in the dark suspended time and location, and that was pretty darned cool.

A Quick One

2011-07-01T00:47:00.000-07:00

(So much to report, but too much work to have time to do it.)

Today, I was working at home. The cat was sitting by the window (in a raspberry-flat box that is her current favorite place) and she jumped up and ran -- this suggests someone was coming up the walk to my door.

It was the FedEx Ground guy delivering a package. Apparently, he was in a hurry and didn't want to ring the bell and wait to see if I was around to sign for it.

I know this because, as I saw him walking away from the door (presumably marking "nobody answered bell" for the delivery), I heard him loudly call, "Ding Dong!"

Thank You, New York...

2011-06-25T12:02:00.000-07:00

... for making California look bad.

Seriously.

Back when I was in Law School, if you wanted to see the forefront of where the law was headed, you'd look to California (and, oddly, New Jersey). While the courts of California are still in the business of doing their cutting-edge thing, the people of California took a giant step backwards, and now the legislature of New York showed us up.

The New York legislature passed marriage equality; the California legislature can't even pass a budget. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?

Still, I'm happy for my gay friends for this particular success. Actually, I'm pretty much just happy for New Yorkers (and, to a degree, Americans in general), regardless of orientation. This is a civil rights victory, and we should all be celebrating the elimination of a discriminatory law. I do believe there is only one way this issue will ultimately be resolved, and the sooner we get there, the better.

(I still challenge anyone to give me a legitimate argument against gay marriage that does not involve imposing their own personal religious beliefs on everyone else. Remember civil marriage is not religious marriage. While a religious leader may "solemnize" a civil marriage; the legal institution is itself purely civil.)

Finally! The photo saga ends

2011-06-20T19:44:00.000-07:00

Yes. Well. That was exciting.

Getting the photos fixed took three trips to the place, a phone call and an email, but, thanks to the help of a manager who was as frustrated with the lab as I was, we finally got it.

Clearly, I prefer the one on the right. (And/or bottom.) While it is the same photo, I think the shiny reflection off my glasses makes my eyes look better. And, bonus, they did some good 'shopping over there next to my right eye, so that you look through my glasses and see hair, rather than extra face.

They also did the colorizing they'd promised on the casual looking one, which now looks like this:

I went with the grey background basically because the red wall looked totally fake, so I wanted to force it more into the background since, hey, it's all about me.

Jamie Oliver Would Be So Proud

2011-06-11T22:25:00.000-07:00

At Costco, I bought, like, 12 chicken breasts, and a ton of corn, potatos, and fruit.

I came home and realized I'd have to cook it. (Well, not the fruit. Although I did spend about a half hour decapitating three pounds of strawberries.)

I stared at the chicken breasts. For some reason, it was about 9:30 when the staring commenced. (Oh, right, spent an hour on the Verizon website trying to find a way to give them more money. You'd think they'd be more user-friendly when the issue comes down to "gee, I'd like to pay for higher speed DSL. Sigh.)

So. Contemplated today's packet of two chicken breasts. In wanting to prepare them quickly, I remembered that I'd bought some of them Ziplock Microwave Steam Bags. They claim to work with poultry. Chicken is poultry.

I also have a lemon (I have lots -- I have a tree). And, come to think of it, some rosemary. Rosemary lemon chicken. That sounds like food, right?

(I am ashamed to admit that, although I purchased the rosemary about two years ago, I haven't yet opened it.)

I take the plastic cap off the rosemary, and take a few lemon slices. Put chicken in bag. Put lemon slices on chicken. Sprinkle with rosemary, as though I know what I'm doing.

Cook for about 6 1/2 minutes in the microwave. What comes out is cooked chicken. Smelling like rosemary. And it's sorta soaking in lemon juice. I take it out of the bag and taste it.

It's juicy as hell. Not even tasteless.

I'm very pleased with myself.

So ... Costco

2011-06-11T22:11:00.000-07:00

As per usual, I walk into Costco expecting to buy one thing (eyeglasses) and leave with ... rather more.

My local Costco (and, perhaps, all Costcos) has discontinued frameless glasses. Apparently, they're sick of the damn things breaking on everyone. So, as I did at Lenscrafters, I picked out a pair of "close enough" half-frames. As it turned out, the best looking ones were the house brand, so the frame was a whopping $40. They hooked me up with the same lightweight brown Transitions lenses, with the same two week waiting period (actually, perhaps a bit less), and the whole thing totalled out to about half what Lenscrafters wanted to charge. And I'll probably get at least $75 of that back (perhaps more) once I submit a claim to my insurance (which, apparently, they're authorized for). So, yay.

And then I proceeded to walk around Costco. I stopped for the $1 hotdog for sustenance, and attacked. Two hours later and I was packing my car with three hundred and forty-three dollars worth of stuff. And no one purchase was more than $30. So, I mean, I got a lot of stuff.

After a while, I was sort of shopping in a daze. By the time I hit the non-prescription drug aisle, I was just mumbling things like, "Ooo, Advil," and throwing a box in my cart.

I even ended up buying their crappy tasting energy drink -- this because the nice man gave me a free bottle of it and it actually gave me enough energy to make my way through the rest of the store. Getting through Costco actually requires quite a bit of energy, so I thought it was a pretty good energy drink.