Chapter Twenty-Four

Nap Time

2011-05-15T07:42:00.000-07:00

I need to finish packing, then I may take my Sunday afternoon nap. I'd seriously be willing to switch the order on those two activities, but I decided that it would be a good idea to use my bed as a staging area so until I finish packing I don't have anywhere to nap.

After I get back home, maybe I'll be able to catch up on my blogging. If nothing else, I have a bunch of pictures to share. For now here's one to tide you over, in honor of today being Good Shepherd Sunday.

For the annoying customs and immigration people who will want to ask all sorts of silly questions when I enter the US again: I have not been anywhere even remotely agricultural in the entire time I have been out of the United States. I don't know why you might think otherwise. For everywhere else: if you go to England and take the drive up from Salisbury to Avebury to see the neolithic stone circles, earthen-works, and barrows (which you totally should) security at the site is basically comprised of a sign next to the gate latch that says 'please don't let the sheep out'. The adult sheep do not particularly care about the humans who occasionally tramp through the fields to point at the rocks they're grazing around, but this about as close as you can get to the lambs before they shy off.
For extra bonus fun, bring a dog that's used to life in the city with you. Watch it go nuts trying to figure out what it's supposed to do about these interesting new creatures. This is only fun for the dog. The sheep know what their dog is like and are prepared to ignore any others, much the same way that they are prepared to ignore tourists.

I'll see you soon,
Elly

Preview of Comming Attractions

2011-04-13T11:24:00.000-07:00

I'm about to take off for Easter Break, which means I will be effectively out of communication for the next week and a half (more so than usual I mean).

For the curious, my schedual looks like this:
April 14 - 16: Vienna, Austria
16-21: homebase in Canturbury, UK; day trip to Bath, Salisbury, etc
21-23: Bratislava, Slovakia
23-25: London
April 25: return to Madrid

Overlapping dates represent the days I move from one city to another. I'm quite looking forward to it. At some point in the future, there will be pictures.

-Beth

Pictures from Pompeii

2011-02-26T18:34:00.000-08:00

I was in Rome last weekend for my winter break, and I took a day trip down to Pompeii. I have a bunch of pictures to share. Right now they have all been unceremoniously dumped here. Further details will have to wait until tomorrow, because it's really late my time, and I ought to be in bed. The picture on the left is me crossing the street. The sidewalks are raised about a foot above the road. At intersections, there are a series of stepping stones, which allow pedestrians to cross without touching the street, spaced in such a way that the wheels of a cart can still fit around the cross walk.

As a further note, links to pictures on my older posts are now almost assuredly all broken. This is because I have finally enacted a much needed re-organization of my photo bucket. I do intend to go back and fix the now broken links, but it will take a while because there is only one of me and there are so very many of them. The good news is that this re-organization has allowed me to see just how much I haven't shared yet. It turns out that I've been selfishly sitting on quite a lot of pretty pictures. Expect to see lots of them in the coming weeks.

Almost Home

2010-12-14T16:39:00.000-08:00

Part of my brain is worried about adult things like have I packed all the documentation I need in order to re-enter Spain next month? What time do I need to leave my apartment in order to check in on time at the airport? Am I sure? Because I'm really bad at math, and this would not be a good time to miss-read the clock and show up an hour late? For sure, sure? What's the most up to date map I can get for Dulles airport, and more importantly, how do I find out things like which gate my flight from Madrid will arrive at, where is the gate for my flight on to DFW, and is two and three quarters of an hour enough time to get from the one to the other, knowing that I will have to go through passport control and customs somewhere along the way?

The other half of my brain keeps saying things like, "I'm gonna' ride on an airplane tomorrow! Yay! I love airplanes!"

This is not as helpful as I would like.

Adventures, I Have Had Them

2010-11-29T10:48:00.000-08:00

I went to Avila the first weekend I was here. I've actually had the pictures up for a while, but I'm just now getting around to writing about it because I am a bum. It's an easy day trip from Madrid (less than 15 EUR for a round trip train ticket) both because of it's distance (about an hour Northwest) and because there's really only three things that you would go to Avila to see. Those three things are, in no particular order: the cathedral, the medieval walls, and St. Teresa's birthplace. In the picture on the left, I'm standing on one of those things and a second is in the background. I trust you can work out which thing is which, and which is not pictured.

I went to the cathedral first, and found that I had it mostly to myself. The end of September is the beginning of the off-season, and Avila isn't at the top of the tourist list anyway, so instead of having to fight hordes it was just me, a few pairs of Spanish and Japanese tourists, and a French group. As for the cathedral itself, well the only interesting things are the fact that it's apse is actually a part of the city walls, and that it has a secret passage way that leads into the old city. Disappointingly, despite all sorts of signage talking about the secret passage way and its discovery (including several pointing right to the entrance) , the public is absolutely forbidden from exploring it.

Another thing the public is absolutely forbidden to do is take pictures, although given the guard/visitor ratio I probably could have gotten away with it if I had wanted to. Alas, the only thing I wanted pictures of was the one thing in the whole city I absolutely would not dare approach with my stupid flash-happy camera: the 15th century illuminated choir books. Naturally, since I have an interest in it, this was also the one thing about which the sleepy ticket agent/souvenir vendor did not have a book.

Something that kind of bothered me was the half-assed way that signage was applied to everything. It was not informative (i.e. nothing was said that I could not figure out myself by looking at the various items), and the signs themselves looked as if they had not been made or applied with much care. Especially in a sacred setting, I'm of the opinion that if you are not going to do something well, it is better not to do it. I would rather you gave me enough light to read the Latin inscription on a statue's base than have a poorly translate English card pasted next to it.

St. Teresa's birthplace was long ago converted into a convent, complete with a chapel on the location of her old bedroom. Like all pilgrimage sites in Spain, this one has over the years acquired a thick layer of bling that almost completely obscures it.

In the basement, there is a nice little museum explaining the events of Teresa's life. At least it is a nice little museum if you can read Spanish, which is the only language option there. I can read it well enough to get the gist, but by the time I left I had a splitting headache. Included in the museum are her writings, including a few of her actual manuscripts as well as printed versions. That's interesting for three reasons: 1.) she has a very distinctive style of handwriting, that is regardless of content, quite attractive; 2.) the printing press was still the hot new technology at the time, so the fact that her writings were noteworthy enough to print during her lifetime is interesting; and 3.) she is the only female Doctor of the Church which not only puts her in the same select group as Sts. Jerome and Thomas Aquinas, but means that essentially she was cannonized for her writing. For a woman in 16th Century Spain to have had the sort of influence that she had and continues to have, is absolutly mind boggeling.

The museum also includes exhibits about the founding of her order (she thought the order she was a part of was not strict enough, so she started her own), and her friendship with John of the Cross (Avila's other local Saint). There's the expected bit about the process of her canonization. To me the other truly interesting thing was a room about all the other Saints (and yes, the capital S is important). Whose lives were directly influenced in one way or another by St. Teresa. Most of them are there because they were members of her order or else the order of monks that St. John of the Cross founded. There are over a dozen, from John of the Cross, to a couple of martyrs of the Holocaust. To me, the fact that she lead others to a Saintly life is the most powerful testimant to her memory.

There are relics of Teresa and John on site (part of her finger and a ring, some un-specified bone of his). The relics themselves are located in a small room that is only accessible through the gift shop. I have a hard time not being insulted by this.

As for the city walls... well they're walls. And they wrap around the old city. The apse of the Cathedral actually forms part of one of the walls, and unlike most medieval structures in Europe, the walls have miraculously not been disassembled and used as pre-made construction materials elsewhere in the city. I bought the ticket and went for a walk until the combination of hurting feet and the sneaking suspicion that Spain is trying to kill me with non-OSHA compliant railings led me to decide that I did not want to stay in Avila for three more hours, no matter how attractive the guidebooks say that the walls are at night.

I exchanged my train ticket for an earlier one, and was back in Madrid in time for dinner. Including the train ticket, I spent just under 30 EUR on the trip (a number that does not include meals, because I ate lunch and dinner in Madrid), which is not to bad for one afternoon of site-seeing.

The BBC Lied to Me

2010-11-29T09:35:00.000-08:00

More specifically, the BBC's weatherman was wrong today. The guess on the temperature was about right somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 degrees (just above freezing, but is sounds a lot colder in Celsius than in Fahrenheit), but it was alleged that today would be sunny (as per usual) with some rain later in the week.

Today it snowed.

It wasn't a very hard snow, and it's not sticking, so in practice is like a very persistent rain, but it was still snow. All in all, tonight is a good night to stay in, curl up around my coffee pot, and write, which is what I'm doing. It's finally clicked in my little head that the semester will be over in two weeks and that if I am going to finish my final papers (two 12+ page research papers, one 40 page play) I need to do a lot of preparation work now.

On Cow Squeezings

2010-10-27T22:56:00.000-07:00

As a graduate student, two of my primary food groups are things-that-can-be-eaten-from-a-bowl (cereal) and things-with-caffeine-in (coffee and tea). As such, the state of milk is a concern to me. Here is a list of the attributes I associate with milk I buy in the United States:
-comes in a jug
-sold by the gallon or half-gallon
-available in whole, 2%, 1%, and skim verieties
-goes bad in about two weeks

Here are the attributes of the milk I buy in Spain:
-comes in a box
-sold by the liter or half-liter
-available in whole or semi UHT
-goes bad in about 4 months
It's that last item that is a concern to me. I can't help but think that somewhere between me and the cow, something has gone horribly wrong.

For the record, the milk here is thinner and smells different from the milk back home, but it tastes just fine.

Also my travel plans have changed. Due to ongoing strikes in France (boo french-y frog-ies!), RyanAir canceled the flight that would have taken me to London this weekend. Why a strike in France affects a flight from Spain to England, I'm not sure, but I had to rebook anyway. Assuming everyone is back at work, I will be going to London next weekend instead.

In the meantime, I have a long weekend because All Saint's Day is a holiday here. Since I don't want to waste the chance, I will be going to Berlin this weekend.

What I've been up to

2010-10-21T19:42:00.000-07:00

There's been some interest in what I've been doing in the month or so since I arrived here. (By which I mean that my mother worries if she isn't updated frequently.) The long answer involves a day trip to Avila (a post of which has been stuck as a draft for most of the past month), a run to IKEA (unusually frustrating), and moving into my apartment (far more difficult than it needed to be, due to a lack of communication between the schools various campuses). The short answer is the picture on the left. That's what I've had to read since I arrived here. It's not quite complete. There was a copy of All My Sons that I borrowed and returned, and several hundred pages of pdf that I opted not to print. In addition, there's the 21 pages of A4 that I've written an turned in, at a rate of approximately an hour's worth of work per finished page. That's not counting the 5-7 page paper I have due tomorrow, or the two annotated bibliographies I have due next week. Other time consuming tasks I have include going to class, knitting, eating, and catching up on my sleep.

Apparently I'm going to take breaks from all of this soon. Next weekend I'm going to London, and the first weekend of December I'm going to Prague and Budapest. I know I'm doing this because in a fit of cabin fever I just gave RyanAir and the Deutche Bahn a bunch of money to get me there and back, and I wouldn't want to waste my investment. Knowing me, I will take a bunch of school work with me, and forget something essential like my toothbrush or socks.

If I get really adventurous, I might go to the Zoo tomorrow or Saturday to see the new baby pandas.

Sock!

2010-10-12T18:10:00.000-07:00

I've got a post brewing about my latest adventures (trips to Avila and IKEA, and moving into my apartment), but for now here's an update on what's really important. I finished another pair of knitted socks. More pictures are here.

Temple of Debod

2010-09-22T12:30:00.000-07:00

So today after class I went to the Temple of Debod, which is a 2,200 year old Egyptian temple currently located in a park here in Madrid. What is Egyptian construction doing in the middle of Spain, you might ask. Wikipedia has an answer that is not awful. Long story short, Spain helped Egypt move a bunch of stuff when the Aswan Dam was built, and Egypt gave Spain a temple that wasn't particularly important as a thank you gift.

I went there today because the site is small enough that I could get to it and see the whole thing between the time my classes ended (5:15) and the time it gets shut for the night (8:00). The Temple was actually quite small, I thought. All the doorways where very narrow and on the second floor my head was barely clear of the rafters. The stairs were tight enough that they had to put guards at both ends to direct traffic up and down. There was not room for two people to pass each other on those stairs, even if they were really good friends.

On the other hand, from the outside it looks pretty cool. It's in a park on a hill, so there are nice views of the city to be had from it, especially around sunset, when the locals come out to enjoy it. Everything is pretty well explained, if you can read Spanish. The English versions were less helpful. The also had a pretty nifty system of lights projected inside, which highlighted the architecture, and explained what it was. I dumped a bunch of photos into the bucket, and I think this is once case where the pictures definitely do a better job of explaining what I'm on about than I can do on my own.

Most importantly, at least to the view of this poor student, entry to the temple is free. I took the metro to get there, because I was coming straight from class and had a backpack full of books. Someone with a more touristy agenda could walk from Puerto del Sol or the Palace, or take the metro if they were feeling lazy.

Arrival in Madrid

2010-09-21T05:25:00.000-07:00

Getting set up in Madrid was easy. Getting here was a long and boring process.

For starters, I didn't get a lot of sleep on Saturday night, because I was dithering about getting everything packed, and I was excited about leaving the USA again. Then, I got up early to go to church with my parents one last time. We went to St. Nick's because it's on the way to the airport and the service time was confinent. Aside from my allergies deciding to act up during the lessions, it worked out rather well.

The frist leg of the flight was from Dallas to Tornoto. My Air Canada flight turned out to actually be on Air Canada Jazz, which is their puddle hopper/low fares service. In other words, instead of the big plane that I've come to expect on international flights, it was a little commuter plane. On the other hand, the flight was nowhere near full, so I had an entire exit row to myself. Aside from food being considered a frill, and thus not included, it was a pretty nice flight.

Then came a six and a half hour layover in Toronto. That may be the most soulless airport I've ever been in. If it weren't for the occasional advertisement for their free wi-fi service there would have been no way to tell it was in Toronto. If it weren't for the Tim Horton's and all the left-over merchendice from the Olympics in the duty-free shop, you would never know it was in Canada. The free wi-fi, by the way, was free, but it was also so unberably slow as to be practically useless. I was unable to check my email successfully, much less skype into my D&D game back in Texas, like I'd planned on. On the other hand, I used the time to write a 3 page paper for my class on Emily Dickenson, so it wasn't a total waste of time.

The flight from Toronto to Madrid, despite having a Lufthansa flight number, was served by Air Canada, with a Canadian crew, in a 767 with a giant Maple Leaf on the side. The entire thing was tri-lingual English/French/Spanish, which gets old real fast if you are at all proficient with all three languages and you just want to know what your options are for in-flight movies. I was seated in the very last row of the sterrage section, next to the window, which meant every time I wanted to go tot he bathroom, I had to climb over the sleeping Spanish lady next to me. That happened a lot, becuase I have never been able to sleep sitting up, and I was guzzeling water in a more or less successful attempt to stave off dehydration.

Getting setttled in Madrid has been painless. My Spanish is adiquite for getting a taxi, checking into a hotel, and buying a cell phone. I've finished the paperwork necissary to get a permanant resident card (now I have to wait for an apointment, which will basicly be whenever they feel like it). This will be my second day of classes, and also the day I turn in my second paper. Tomorrow I have an appointment with a real estate agent to see an appartment, and hopefully, sign a lease.

Hasta luego.

I Live!

2010-09-20T05:58:00.000-07:00

I have arrived in Madrid, and will be giving the MA thing another go. The blog shall be back for the ride, since I now have something interesting to write about. I'll write more later. Right now I'm very, very tiered because I still havn't mastered the art of sleeping on airplanes.

North Italy Pictures

2009-11-07T02:20:00.000-08:00

By popular request (OK, the same person asking me multiple times) my pictures from the trip through northern Italy I took in 2006 are up. You can find them here. I just dumped them all into the photobucket. No discrimination was made between the ones that are worth looking at and the ones that are so blurry you can't even identify them. Browse at your own risk.

NaNoWriMo '09

2009-11-02T18:28:00.000-08:00

Well, NaNoWriMo has begun again, and since I originally started this blog to keep track of my writing progress it's time to update again.

I left the house today and camped out in a Starbucks with my laptop and did some writing. I got about 2000 easy words in, which put me about a thousand words ahead (4,415 words at the moment) on day two. I was home in time for Top Gear.

Now you're probably thinking: You haven't updated your blog since February, and that's all you're going to say? You went to Starbucks and watched some British TV?

The answer to your incredulous thoughts is yes. That's all I've got to say. If you wonder what I've been up to in the meantime, I've got some photos up here. Some of them were even taken within the past year.

That's all for now.

My Horoscope for Today

2009-02-13T21:33:00.000-08:00

I read my horoscope in the paper, mostly because it's printed on the funny pages*. I figure I might as well read it, since I already have the paper open to that page. It's like getting a fortune cookie every day, except I have to share it with everyone else who reads the Dallas Morning News and I don't get a cookie.

Today my horoscope actually managed** to reflect the very things I had planed to do today (stay out of an argument, go bake something). How's that for a crazy coincidence? The paper also said my day was a 5 out of 10, which sounds about right as I'm still unemployed and I have this nasty chest cough which makes me sound as though I'm being savaged by a dying goose***.

Also, I made a new thing today. It's sort of a mini-scarf neck warmer thing that buttons up one side. The yarn is some cheap acrylic stuff I got in Spain, but ended up not using for a Christmas present after all. I hadn't crocheted anything in a while, and that seemed as good a reason as any to start trying to clear the junk out of my stash.

Later,
Ely

*where it belongs [back]
**though the Monkeys on a Keyboard Theory of Shakespeare Composition [back]
***And no, I didn't bake anything today after all. No one wants to eat anything after I've coughed on it. [back]

The Importance of Watching the Super Bowl

2009-02-09T22:40:00.000-08:00

My brother informs me that not watching the Super Bowl is the first step to becoming a pinko commie, so it's a good thing I watched the first half, even though my preferred sport is futbol, not football. After the half time show I got board and wandered off to make dinner, but the TV stayed on, which is alomst like watching it. I guess this is my way of saying that I resent the implication that I might be harboring any bolshivik tendencies.

In other news:
-My job search proceeds slowly. I'm told that I picked a really lousy time to join the job market.
-Rewrites on my novel are coming along well. I might have something ready to submit this summer. *crosses fingers*

Later,
Elly

5 Year Old Humor

2009-01-31T18:48:00.000-08:00

I should clarify that this is not a joke that I have been hoarding for five years*, but rather a joke told to me by a five year old kid who has learned about synonyms and puns but does not understand them.

Q. Did you hear about the fuzzy who lost his left side?
A. He's OK now! [cue riotous laughter] Get it? Get it?**

The original telling of this joke occurred somewhere on I-35, while mom and I were taking my brother back to college station. When we finally got the joke, I very nearly fell out of my seat laughing, but I was physically restrained by my seat belt, so I settled for laughing until I cried.

Later,
Elly

*Although I do have a tendency to repeat jokes until I get the response I want. [back]
**Translated into adult-speak, the punch line of this joke is actually "He's all right now." [back]

And We're Back

2009-01-23T23:58:00.000-08:00

I was going to make regular updates over the holidays.
I was going to update at least once a week in 2009.
I was going to write an interesting re-cap of all the things I've done in the past year, especially the things that happened since my last post, such as narrowly avoiding be squished by a tree and teaming up with Mom Lady* to build a gallon-sized graham cracker cathedral.
Unfortunately, I've been stricken with a horrible case of Mañana Fever ** So, instead of doing any of that, I'm going to make an observation about the weather: if this cold-one-day-hot-the-next pattern we've had for the last month or so keeps up, we are going to have some interesting storms this Spring.

That is all.

*her super power is Being My Mommy. This is important. [back]
**Differential Diagnosis: Procrastin-itis [back]

G.T.T.

2008-12-17T15:45:00.000-08:00

I'm Gone To Texas.

I should be there a little over 20 hours from the time I hit post.

Zuh, What?

2008-12-12T10:19:00.000-08:00

It finally clicked in my little head that I'm flying home this Thursday. So, I thought I would refresh my memory and look at my flight information so I could make sure I had a ride home from the airport and all of that.

Can someone please tell me what I was thinking when I booked a seat on a flight that leaves Madrid at 6 a.m.? With only an hour and a half* to change flights in Frankfurt?

Later,
Ely

*That sounds like plenty of time, but really, it's only just enough. EU arrivals are on the opposite side of the airport from international departures, and in between I have to go through two security checks (at which any liquids I may or may not have purchased in the duty free shop and subsequently forgotten will be confiscated) and passport control. I've complained about this before, and you'll probably here about it again.[back]

Lentil Soup

2008-12-06T07:25:00.000-08:00

A staple of dinner here is lentil soup. Despite the fact that none of us actually like it, we have lentil soup at least once a week. I have nothing against lentils in principle, it's just... they're lentils, and when boiled for hours to make the stock for a soup they tend to loose all of their flavor and (paradoxically) make every other ingredient in the soup (from chorizo to carrots) taste like lentils. The end result is a dark brown mush that I have had to eat once a week ever since I got here. Back in September lentil soup was something that I was mostly indifferent to; now I want to call in sick to dinner every time I see Juan or Ana setting out soup bowls.

The rest of the this post is kind of like that soup. This is sort of a grab bag of things which are mostly innocuous on their own but -- taken in combination after four months of exposure -- are really starting to annoy me.

First, I would like to address the club hoppers who make the move from Dreams to Joy between two and three in the morning every damn day. Would you all please shut up? I'm trying to sleep. That goes double at five in the morning when the clubs all close. Whatever you do, stop singing. Your voice is not attractive, and after you've had that much to drink you don't even remember all the words. Just. Shut. Up.

Second, I would like to address whoever is responsible for the civic infrastructure on Calle Arenal. Why does the trash get picked up at 1 a.m.? Why can this not be done at some hour when I am not trying to sleep? And the guys you sent last week to use a jackhammer to remove random paving stones and replace them with un-leveled piled of sand? That wasn't funny. I starting to wonder if my randomly non-functioning knee isn't connected to that time I tripped on the place where you removed a tree and replaced it with a pile of sand. Why are you creating more obstacles?

Third: to the writers of CSI (any version). When was the last time an episode did not include a murder/manslaughter/negligent homicide? I thought the team investigated all sorts of crimes. To the Miami people: the only member of your team I liked was the ME, and she's left the show. Horatio's sunglasses are not enough to get me to keep watching. Please get off my TV. To the Las Vegas people: how is it that you can kill off Warick (who I kind of liked) but Sarah (who I hate almost as much as I hated the Sarah/Grissom relationship story arc) still isn't gone even though she technically left? To the New York people: congratulations, you're the only iteration of the show where I like all the characters. Please keep it that way. Also, the "member of the team has been taken hostage and/or seriously injured plot" has gotten old and stale. If I recall correctly, the only team members who have not been sucked into either of those plots are Sid and Adam, both of whom never leave the lab. Also, I notice that suspects try to run a lot more in New York than they do in Las Vegas. While I enjoy watching Detective Flack tackle people as much as the next fan girl, it's getting kind of old.

Fourth, to people who write knitting patterns: is there some sort of law that states that every printed knitting pattern must include at least one typo that will result in me having to frog at least two rows in order to correct? The pattern I'm working from now makes the rather blatant error of giving directions for a stockinette rib stitch instead of a seed stitch. For any readers who don't speak knitting, and have followed the post thus far, the directions to produce something like this:

V - V - V -
V - V - V -
V - V - V -

were labeled as the pattern for this:

V - V - V -
- V - V - V
V - V - V -

Speaking of knitting, I finished Juan's Christmas present. He teased me one too many times about making something for him. If I understood the Juan-ish correctly, he was asking for a gray knee length slip [translator's note: that could mean boxer shorts or it could mean slip, I'm really not sure, and either way, I'm not knitting it] with an American flag on the butt. What I made him is a basket-weave scarf. It's knit from pink acrylic (2 EUR for 200 grams), which experienced knitters will instantly recognize as really, really, cheap. The yarn was thin and the only needles I had on hand are 7mm and solid aluminum, so I doubled the yarn when I made this one. Even after I made the tassels, I still had a ball a little smaller than my fist left over. Take a look if you dare.

On the subject of knitting needles: solid aluminum is a bad choice of material for a large-gauge needle. It's just too heavy, and using these stupid things is about to kill my hands. Why can't I find another option in this city? Surely plastic or bamboo needles exist in this country, why doesn't anyone sell them?

I think I'm done complaining about things that don't really matter now. Thanks for reading.

Later,

Ely

Happy Thanksgiv-a-dring-a-dring-ling

2008-11-27T12:19:00.000-08:00

So Thanksgiving in Spain is just another Thursday. An effort was made to celebrate here in the apartment, but two of my roommates have relatives in town, so Megan, Renee, and Emma were all out visiting, and for dinner it was just me and the three vegetarians. Dinner was pretty yummy anyway, but I'm struggling to deal with the fact that this is apparently a pie-free country.

Christmas decorations went up on Tuesday, because we got tired of waiting. There's me and the tree on the left. It was sort of an adventure, because we were all working in a confined space, with Juan up on a ladder, and the one person (Ana) who was trying to coordinate our efforts was speaking only in Spanish. I've got a few more pictures of the decorating, in various stages of completion, which you can see if you follow this link.

If you scroll down below, you will see that I have finally finished my post about Rome, which is backdated to the end of last month (between "When in Rome" and "Juan-ish"), when I actually wrote most of it. It's actually been written for a while, I was just too lazy to type it up. My photos of Rome (which may look suspiciously similar to some that I took when I was there two years ago) are all here, although I have not managed to caption or even tag most of them.

I've got a write up of my Berlin trip written and typed, but it needs to be cleaned up (and possibly broken into pieces, I was pretty long-winded there) before it will be readable. In the meantime, you can see my photos of the trip (again, caption free at the moment) here.

London, I have neither written or typed about, but here's the link to the photos.

In the next couple of days, I mean to get captions up on all of those, even if they're just of the "this is a building" variety. In the meantime, if there is any of them catch your eye and you want to know more, either comment here or send me an e-mail and I'll do my best to answer questions.

For something more interesting than a list of things I haven't done, I now turn to Juan who recently explained to us how Obama ruined Christmas *:
-His first act as President-Elect was to free the Elves who were forced to work in Santa's North Pole Sweat Shop
-This has brought Santa's entire operation to a halt (no elves = no toys)
-Even if there were toys, they could not be delivered, as Rudolph's nose was found to be causing global warming
-Rudolph was then shot by Bruce Willis, who was quoted as saying "Yippie-ki-yay"**

Later,

*Loosely Translated from the Original Juan-ish [back]
**Explination for Mom and Other People Who Don't Watch Action Movies: this is a reference to the "Die Hard" series (starting liberal actor Bruce Willis), the first of which did take place at an office Christmas party. [back]

Ceci n'est pas un Update

2008-11-13T15:04:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the quietness of late. I have much to tell, but it will have to come later, as I'm going to London for the weekend.

-Ely

But I Don't Want to Be a Socialist

2008-11-05T08:17:00.000-08:00

Unfortunatly, there are fewer and fewer places in the world I can go to get away from socialism.

That's all I've got to say about that.

Juan-ish

2008-11-03T12:59:00.000-08:00

My host father, Juan, does not speak English. He does not speak Spanish either. He speaks Juan-ish, which requires special skill to translate.

Things I've learned today:
-Juan is from Ft. Leramie, Wyoming
-Juan is the 5th Beatle
-Ringo Star is not Chinese
-"Jingle Bells" actually begins "Wrinkle birds, wrinkle birds" and is properly sung to the tune of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star"
-Pallea is made from Jackalope
-Amanda is from the North (New Hampshire), therefore all her family members are all penguins, and when they go to vote, they drop sardines in the ballot box.

Speaking of voting, don't forget to vote tomorrow. You'd be better off going earlier in the day then later if you want to avoid a line. Maya's boyfriend Nick (who is visiting us this week) voted early, and he said he stood in line for an hour, and this was in Orange Country. I voted absentee (mailed my ballot a couple of weeks ago, thanks for asking). The statistics-making-people are saying that in this election roughly a third of the voters have voted early or absentee, which I think is interesting.

Tomorrow night I'm planning on staying up for the election watching party, which really means getting up early on Wednesday. 7:00 in the central time zone in midnight here. So, even though the polls should be closing on the west coast at about 2 a.m. my time, I'll be stuck at school because the metro doesn't re-open until five or six. Watching returns means an all-nighter, but it's OK, pizza will be for sale.

-Ely

SPQR

2008-10-30T09:34:00.000-07:00

NB: There are a ton of photos to accompany this post. They aren't linked up yet because I haven't gotten around to it yet, but you can see them for yourself by going here.

So I arrived in Rome on Friday night. I found the convent where I was staying easily enough* and wasted a large number of my minutes by calling home.

Saturday morning I set my alarm clock for a ridiculously early time (6 a.m.) and was still trying to convince myself to get out of bed when the sound of the nuns singing Lauds came echoing up from down stairs. That right there is a better alarm clock than any electronic device.

I started the morning in St. Peter's (if you get to the cathedral before 8:30 you beat the crowds, any later and you spend the rest of the day standing in line). I thought that I remembered that photography isn't allowed inside the cathedral, but a review of my hard drive revealed that isn't so. Photography is allowed inside the cathedral (as it is most places in Rome), but none of my photos from two years ago where any good. This time I had a little bit better luck with the photography, but not much. Taking photos inside a space that large is tricky at best. I loitered around the cathedral for a while, went down to the tomb of the popes (no photos allowed in there, which is a change from last time), and then loitered around the piazza for a while. Piazza San Pietro is a good place for people watching. There's plenty of free seating (anywhere along the colonnade), and tonnes of people day or night.

To that end, I have formulated the following theory**:
For every four normal tourists (t) visible, there is/are also: 1 priest or monk (p) or 3 nuns (n, any order).

4t = p where p = 3n

(Buy this you can see that one tourist is only worth 3/4 of a nun, and if you really want to enjoy your trip to the Vatican City, you should bring a priest with you to act as a tour guide and read the Latin signs.)

After St. Peter's, I went to Piazza del Popolo (a large piazza in the north of the city) and started walking south, map in hand***. I did a lot of wandering, saw a few things that are on the normal tourist crawl, and a lot of odd things that aren't really. Some things were old favorites, others were things I can't believe I didn't see before, and others that had opened since I left.

Just in the churches around Piazza del Popolo I saw two Caravaggios and a 3rd century martyr. A little south and east of the Piazza, along the Tiber, there is the recently (re-)opened Altar of Peace, one of Caesar Augustus's many monuments to himself. The museum is pretty simple: there's the altar (which is about the size of my parent's living room), a model of the altar with all the people in the exterior panels neatly labeled, a row of plaster busts of Augustus and his family, a chart showing the line of succession from Julius to Augustus, and through the next few generations of his successors (which makes it all look a lot more tidy than it really was), a model showing the Campus Martus (i.e. the local area) at the time of the altar's construction, and a sign giving some back ground information. The building itself was a shiny modern glass box, which I disprove of in general, but like in this instance. It was all marble and glass, the former always looks natural in Rome and the latter is by nature transparent, and does not obstruct the view. As for the museum itself... well, there's also a gallary in the basement, so if you're interested in whatever the temporary exhibit is (I wasn't), then it's worth the price of admission (6 Euros, 4.50 for a student). If you're not interested in the exhibit, then the glass and stone architecture of the museum means that you can stand outside and see the altar for free.

Also, the church across the street from the altar was celebrating St. Rocco's day (no, I've never heard of him either), and the crowd was big enough that the festivities were being held outside. That was pretty entertaining too, but since I could only understand every fourth or fifth word of the homily, I went back to the Via del Corso (one of the longest streets in the city, built over the top of the Via Flaminia that Augustus had built) and headed south again. I paused at the column of Marcus Aurelius (the forward thinking emperor's alternative to the triumphal arch) long enough to take a photo and do a map recon before continuing to the Pantheon.

The Pantheon continues it's long tradition of being really cool looking and really crowded. It was the first pagan temple in Rome to be converted into a Christian church, but certainly not the last (and officially, it's name is St. Mary's of the Martyrs). It's home to the graves of two kings of Italy (Vittorio Emanuele II and Umberto I) and Raphael (the artist, not the ninja turtle). It's dome is made of concrete and features a giant hole at the center that would confound architects until the Renaissance (and it's still the largest un-reinforced concrete dome in the world), which is even more impressive when you consider that the modern building was built in the time of Emperor Hadrian (c. 125 AD, you may also have heard of a wall in Scotland he had constructed) and has been in continuous use ever since. The original bronze roof tiles were taken in the 7th century (some to Constantinople, must to Castel San Angelo) and most of the exterior marble went soon afterwords, but the brick and concrete are still holding strong.

Next I stopped for lunch. Most of the eating type places around the Pantheon (or any other landmark, for that matter) are ridiculously crowded and over priced. I would however recommend a place around on the back side of the Pantheon called Pizza Minerva. Despite being surrounded by tourist traps on all sides, this place serves good pizza at reasonable prices (pizza in Italy should be sold by weight, if it's not, you've made a bad choice in restaurants, try again), and the crowd inside is composed entirely of Italians. I discovered this place two years ago (in fact, it's the pizzeria mentioned in this story) and I was happy to see it still thriving.

My next stop was catercorner to the Pantheon: Santa Maria Sopra Minerva (St. Mary over Minerva). There are a lot of St. [pick your favorite] over [pagan god] churches in Italy, the name just means that it is a pagan temple converted into a Christian church. This particular church is home to a Michelangelo statue and the relics of St. Catherine of Sienna, both of which were new discoveries for me.

From there, I hit Largo Torre Argintina (where Julius Ceasar was assassinated, now home to a large bus stop and a lot of stray cats) and the Campadolio, as I attempted to enter the forum. I had been for warned that the forum now charges admission, but I didn't get instructions on how to enter it, so I spent some time wandering the back side of the Capitoline Hill, looking for a way in (as opposed to an exit, of which I found several).

As I was looking for the way into the forum, I found the Marmetrine Prison, something that had been around for 2 millinia, but which I still unaccountably failed to visit the last time I was here. You might recognize it from the write-up it got in the best selling book of all time. It's teeny-tiny, with a ceiling so low I felt like I had to duck. All the signage is in Italian and Latin, but as there are only tow rooms (upstairs and down in the cell), even if you don't know either, it's not hard to figure out what's what. It's not crowded (cause it's tucked into an out of the way corner) and admission is only whatever you want to give as a donation (give generously, that hand-rail needs fixing). If you go, take a moment to sit down in a quiet place out of the sun, and think about whose footsteps you've following.

I never did get into the forum, because the entrance was blocked by a political rally (It's always and election year in Italy). the signs posted all around town said that the event would be in Piazza Republica early in the afternoon and at he Circus Maximums later in the day. Italy being Italy, there was only one rally and it was sort of between those tow times, and sort of at the half way point between the two locations (sort of, I say, If I were walking from the one to the other, it's not the route I would have taken, but if you've got a mob to direct you have to stick to the main streets).

Instead, I went to Trajan's forum/markets. There's a museum explains a little of what's what, and a whole swath of Roman ruins I'd not been able to see before because they weren't open to the public the last time I was here. Unlike the forum, which is mostly official Rome -- temples, the senate, and law courts -- this area is public -- shops and public gathering places. I spent the rest of the day exploring. It's interesting to me how archeologists are able to piece so much together from so little information. For instance, they know from 'contemporary' accounts (i.e. ancient letters home, "Dear Mom, I have arrived safely in Rome. Today I went to the forum and I saw...") that there was colossus of Caesar Augustus at the site, and that copies (existent today) were made in the colonies. What have they found of it in Rome? 3 pieces of one hand, and a foot print. The original bits are on display, while replicas have been attached to a wire frame skeleton to give some idea about what the original hand would have looked like. You did read that right, one foot print. the building it was in was built around the statue, so they didn't bother paving the floor under it's feet. The statue is gone now, but the floor remains with a footprint where the colossus once stood. It's about as long as three of my paces.

I did lots of climbing, even though heights make me nervous and just because something has stood for thousands of years doesn't mean that it hasn't just been waiting to collapse when I get there. Also, the stairs were installed by Mussolini's architects in '36 and the railings are an even more recent addition. Prove to me that they are stable.

After that it was dinner time and back to the convent. the next day, I had just enough time to go to the Trevi fountain at the crack of dawn and toss in a coin before collecting my luggage and heading to the airport.

Later,
Ely

*By "easily enough" I of course mean that I did far more walking than I needed to because I got tired of waiting for a bus that only comes twice a,n hour (if the driver feels like it) and re-routed to a bus that dropped me off on the other side of the Vatican City. It wasn't that bad, except for the fact that suitcase wheels and cobblestones don't like each other. [back]
**If you, or anyone you know is heading to the Vatican City in the near future, I invite you to collect more data, so I can refine my theory. [back]
***I purchased this map at the train station on my way into town. Fully unfolded it's over a yard long, and, at a scale of 1 to 17,000 (the units arn't specified), it's appropriate for use in planning your invasion of the city.[back]

When in Rome...

2008-10-26T09:39:00.000-07:00

Well I'm back from a whirlwind weekend visit to Rome. I had a lot of fun, and I'll tell you all about it once I get the photos in order (it takes longer than you'd think to write caption). For now, a couple of anecdotes.

I was riding the metro back from the Trevi Fountain this morning when, one stop before I exited, an Italian Boy Scout troop got on with all their hiking gear. Is there anywhere else in the world where one would use public transportation to go on a camp-out? One kid even had a guitar with him.

Then, I walk through the Vatican City to the bus stop, so I can go back to the guest house and check out, when a car pulls up to the curb and stops just long enough to let a bishop (wearing the official black dress and hot pink beanie) hop out. The car spreads away, and the bishop just walks down the street, talking on his cell phone and carrying a briefcase. It's strange to think that for some people, a trip to the Vatican City is just another day at the office.

Later,
Ely

Sock!

2008-10-23T12:14:00.000-07:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present the first sock I've knitted all by myself. There's actually more photos where that one came from: I've been showing off all afternoon.
I also hit an office supply store to purchase a new notebook (as my current one is nearly full) and some colored pencils. Right now life is good, and I'm flying to Rome tomorrow for a long awaited trip.

Later,
Ely

P.S. I finally got the Columbus Day pictures up, they're linked below.

Luggage Restirictions

2008-10-20T11:22:00.000-07:00

For your consideration I submit the following statement from a confirmation e-mail for my trip to Rome this weekend:

PLEASE NOTE THAT ONLY ONE ITEM OF CABIN BAGGAGE PER PASSENGER (excluding infants) WITH A MAXIMUM WEIGHT OF 10KG AND DIMENSIONS OF 55CM X 40CM X 20CM

Do they mean that infants don't count as baggage, or that infants don't get a bag? I'm not sure which interpretation is more disturbing.

On the subject of baggage, I was stubborned into purchasing a bag with wheels as my new backpack. It's really more of a laptop bag/roll-aboard suitcase than a backpack but it meets the "doesn't put any weight on the injured right shoulder"* requirement. It also means means that I now have the perfect size carry on bag. How I am going to get all of this home, I have no idea. Something will have to be shipped, and now I'm thinking it'll be the messenger bag just because it weighs the least.

In totally unrelated news, Ana's mom is a frequent guest in the apartment. She usually stays here on the weekends and with Ana's brother (he and his wife are both opera singers, how cool is that?). The reason mom stays with the kids is because she has Alzheimer's and really shouldn't be left on her own. She's nice, although none of us really know Spanish well enough to talk to her. Mostly we just smile and nod. Sometimes I'll get out my knitting and sit next to her while she's working. Anyway she's been getting worse the past couple of months. Today Ana and her mother left for a doctor in Andalusia (in the south) who Juan says is one of the best doctors for Alzheimer's in Spain. After this guy, the experts are all in the US. They'll be back in Madrid on Wednesday, but for right now, it's kind of quiet around here.

-Ely

*The shoulder is doing much better, thanks for asking. I still don't have my full range of movement back in my neck, and it still hurts to move my right arm too much, but it's getting a little better everyday. A weekend of sitting around playing World of Warcraft and only leaving the apartment for food (even though I really wanted to attend the Dickens conference but traveling across town seemed like a terrible idea when it still hurt to get out of bed in the mornings) seems to have helped greatly. [back]

Oww

2008-10-16T04:33:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening I tripped on the stairs at school. I managed to catch myself before I fell, but something in my shoulder decided that was enough and quit on me. I've got a throbbing pain from my neck and spine, across my right shoulder down to my elbow. It hurts to turn my neck, bend at the waist, or make any sudden movement with my right arm. I took some Tylenol and waited, but this morning there was no improvement. I went to the doctor the school works with (a very nice guy, and his English is perfect). He says I pulled a muscle. I've been given a cream to apply 3-4 times a day (still working on the logistics of that since its a muscle in my back and it hurts to move my arms that direction), a muscle relaxant to take at night, and Ibuprofen. The Ibuprofen is in a powder form that I'm supposed to mix with water and drink, but some fool decided that adding a mint flavor would help. It doesn't. Those of you who know me, know I don't like mint. To me, this is like trying to drink tooth paste. It's taking me all afternoon because drinking more than a sip at a time triggers my gag reflex. Other then that, I'm supposed to take it easy, and not do any work, especially not anything that requires putting any stress on my right shoulder.

As if that wasn't enough, no one at SLU seems to know where my insurance card is, nor do they seem to be able to locate any documentation that I ever applied for insurance in Spain. I know I registered, because I had to present proof of registration in order to apply for my visa. I've got my documentation and I've requested a statement from last summer from the bank, so I'm going back in tomorrow to see if I can't get this sorted out. Today, I had to pay out of pocket for the doctor's visit and the medicine, and once I get my insurance information I'll have to present the receipts and in theory I'll be re-reimbursed. In practice, I have no idea if I'll ever see my money again.

When I got back to the apartment, Ana told me that the reason I had hurt my back was because my backpack was to heavy (probably true). I got a lecture about how "that's the only back you've got" and how I need to go to el Rastro on Sunday and buy one of those little backpacks with wheels (I good idea).

The good news is that my absentee ballot finally arrived. I should have it in the mail on Monday. Would someone who lives in Denton County send me an e-mail and tell me what's the deal with Bond Propositions No. 1 and 2? No. 1 is "The issuance of $310,000,000 general obligation bonds for constructing, improving and maintaining roads and bridges within Denton county and the levy of a tax in payment thereof". No.2 reads "The issuance of $185,000,000 general obligation bonds for constructing, improving and equipping existing county buildings and facilities to wit: county government centers, service centers, county administration facilities, detention, probation and law enforcement facilities and, related technology improvements, and the levy of a tax in payment thereof." (The punctuation mistakes in both quotes are, sadly, copied straight from the ballot.) What I want to know is exactly what are they planning on improving with this money, and what (and how much) is the tax that goes with these improvements? (Income tax? Property tax? Another sales tax hike?) I'd ask if there was any reason no to re-elect the sheriff, the tax assessor, or the constable, but since no-one's running against them it sort of a moot point.

I'm going to finish lunch and spend the rest of the day sitting very still.
-Ely

Columbus Day Parade

2008-10-13T15:56:00.000-07:00

There are all sorts of holidays and festivals here in Spain that they don't tell Americans about. I just get up on the weekends and, because I live in the center of town, there is usually some pretty interesting street theater going on just underneath my window. A couple weeks ago there was a religious procession (it took two and a half hours to walk a statue of Mary out of the church, to the end of the block, and back), and before that there was a horde of cyclists (apparently they're a pretty regular occurrence, and ride nude in the summer*).

I've started to accept the idea that I probably will never understand why these things keep happening around me, so it was kind of a shock to find a familiar celebration this past weekend. Columbus Day is a national holiday here.

It makes sense, 1492 was a very good year for Spain: the Reconquista ended with the fall of Granada in January, and Columbus's discovery of the New World brought prosperity to Spain for the next century. At one time, Spain owned all of South America except Brazil (which was Portuguese), all of Central America, Mexico, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Florida, and parts of the Caribbean. Then the British defeated the Spanish Armada and the Spaniards backed the wrong horse in the 30 years war, and after that things just sort of collapsed slowly for the next three hundred years or so. The country hit rock bottom either just before, during, or after the Civil War (depending on who you ask). But, to get back to where this story started, Columbus brought good times to Spain, and Columbus Day is a holiday here.**

There was a big fancy schmancy military parade in down town Madrid, with all the different units with their own uniforms. For instance the Spanish special forces wear a hat that looks like the hat an Aggie would call a bitter (What does the rest of the world call it again?) except it has a dangle-y red tassel in front. That combined with the fact that they wear the top button of their shirts unbuttoned (with no undershirt) makes them look pretty ridiculous. That and their mascot is a goat with golden tinfoil on its horns (for no reason that anyone could tell me, and I'm not even sure how to begin to Google an explanation). Remember, they're special forces and if you laugh at them they can totally kick your ass.

I watched this parade on the TV in the living room because 1.)I didn't know about it until it came on and 2.)it's been raining all weekend. After the parade the king traditionally hosts a reception at the Palace (down the street from me on the other side of the Opera House) for the president, the cabinet ministers, any visiting heads of state who might show up, and the commanders of the military units that were in the parade. The upshot of this is that the parade came to me, as it's easier to march (or ride?) a mounted unit down pedestrian streets than ones open to cars (because you don't have to worry about stopping traffic), and the palace guard rode right under my window. [I will have pictures up as soon as my computer decides that it will read my camera's memory card.]

Fun fact: while normal troops march in parades, equestrian troops 'bailar' ('dance'), at least in Spain.

Later,
Ely

*I'm still not sure if Ana and Juan were kidding about that. It was a source of great amusement for about an hour, then we finished dinner and that was the end of that conversation. [back]
**But it fell on a Sunday this year, and that did not translate to a Monday off like it does in the States. Apparently it's felt that there are enough other holidays disrupting the calendar already.[back]

The Law of Elevator Function

2008-10-08T10:59:00.000-07:00

The elevator in my apartment building is one of those old fashioned things with two sets of doors that open in opposite directions (one is in the stairwell, the other set is in the cage itself). You can't call it if it's already in service, you have to wait fifteen minutes for whoever is using it to finish before you can push the button. [Or you can stand there and push the button like an idiot even though the light is on, it just won't do anything.] There's no real air circulation, so if anyone smokes in there you smell it the rest of the day. Only three people can use if at a time (or four children), and even then it moves slower than cold molasses in January.

The Law of Elevator Function is this:
the more tired you are, the more frustrating your day has been, the less it is likely that the elevator will be there when you need it, or even be working at all.
More simply: elevator function is inversely proportional to the users existing level of frustration.

-Ely

Am I Real Student Now?

2008-10-07T02:59:00.000-07:00

The graduate semester finally started!

There are a dozen or so English MA students (all in varying stages of "I just have to finish my thesis and then I´m done") here and about twice that number of Spanish MA students. My cohort in the English department is a whopping three students (including myself), although there are supposed to be two more joining us in January.

Coincidently, three is also the number of classes I'm taking. There's the graduate class which is basicly an introduction to literary research, in which we're focusing on the genera of the pastoral. It´s either going to be really good or really tedious. The jury is still out on that one. I'm also in a linguistics class taught on the undergraduate schedual. I just turned in my first paper there (not my best work, but improving it would have required starting over completly and I just didn´t have the time for that, but it will probably be good enough) and took the first partial exam (a piece of cake). Today was also the first partial exam for the Spanish class I'm taking. I think I did pretty well there too, but that one doesn't really matter since I'm just sitting in, instead of getting a grade.

The important thing is, I am learning Spanish. Yesturday at dinner (half a chicken each and curry rice, with marizipan for desert) Ana was asking us all about how our exams were going and she complemented me on my Spanish. She said out of the six of us girls I had made the most improvement. I´ve gone from practically nothing to nearly always speaking in complete sentences in one month.

My absentee balot still isn´t here. (Any day now the lady in the mail room says, they've started to arrive.) I did recieve my admission ticket for the Subject GRE test I'm going to Berlin to take in November. When I registered for the test, I thought the name of the university there sounded kind of familiar and figured that it wouldn´t be to hard for me to track it down. Now that my ticket is here I have the street address and realized that the reason it sounded kind of familiar because it's right smack dab in the center of the city, on Strasse des 17 Juni. In other words, if you start on Under den Linden Strasse and walk under the Brandenberger Tor into the Teirgarten, once you enter the park the road changes its name to Strasse des 17 Juni. Just keep walking strait down through the park, past the Victory Column and out the otherside, and the place for the test is right there.

Later,
Ely

P.S. If the wear on the keys of the computers in labs here at school are any indication, the least used letters in English and Spanish are (from least to slightly more used) ç, ñ, q, z, x, and p.

Hot Garlic-y Goodness

2008-10-03T13:51:00.000-07:00

Ana, my host mom, made humus for the first time today. It was a great success: full of garlic. We've been promised pita bread at dinner tomorrow. Life is good.

Holy Toledo!

2008-10-01T07:28:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday I went to Toledo, a half an hour trip by high-speed train. It was such any easy trip to make, part of my wishes that I had gone sooner. The sensible part of me is glad I waited until the weather started to cool off*, because it would have been a miserable trip in the summer heat. The joke is that all of Toledo is uphill. That's not entirely true, there are some flat bits on the other side of the river from the bits that you come to see**. So, for the most part Toledo is all up hill, add in streets that are almost all cobblestone, and walking three blocks becomes a serious hike.

I caught the first train from Madrid, which was itself an adventure. I had help from a professor who has been living in Spain for the past 30 years in buying my ticket Friday afternoon, for which I was extremely greatfull, as I don't think I could have found the correct ticket counter on my own. Fun fact: the main train station connects the metro with two (unconnected) train networks, a food court, more magazine stands than you can shake a stick at, and a greenhouse complete with turtle pond. You can't buy an AVE ticket at the RENFE counter, and you're just expected to know which trains are which. When you take a number and wait 15 minutes for your turn, the ticket minion will tell you that contrary to what the time-table says, the first train on Saturday leaves at 8:20. After you've bought the ticket, getting on the train is comparatively easy. There's no line at security, where your luggage goes through a metal detector but you done. There's a short wait in a departure lounge, and boarding begins twenty minuets before your ~~flight~~ train leaves. Your ticket is checked by a minion before you're allowed down ~~the gangway~~ to the platform. Arrivals are in a different part of the station, if you want to change trains you have to leave the secured area and come back in. The whole deal is pretty neatly run, but feels more like getting on an airplane than a train.

I arrived in Toledo at 9:50 and took a bus up the hill to Plaza Zocodover. The plaza is the city center, not because it's particularly central or nice to look at, but because it's the largest open area left up there. One of the results of the Moorish occupation is the labyrinthine street plan. The streets are almost all twisty little alleyways that would not be out of place in Morocco or Algeria. The sub-folder Side Streets and Go Betweens is full of pictures off some of the little buildings and streets that aren't anyplace particularly special, but caught my eye anyway***.

I started my guerrilla tourism in the Cathedral. The local legend is that one day as Saint Ildefonsus(d.667) was saying mass the Virgin Mother herself came down from heaven and presented him with a chasuble. A story that the diocese has used ever since as its claim to primacy in the Spanish Catholic church. Even in Visigothic times, there was an important church on the site, which was knocked down in order to make a mosque when Toledo was captured by the Moors in the 8th century. Because the city was so important to the church, Toledo was the first city to be taken by the Reconquista (in 1085, for those of you playing at home). The mosque was then re-converted to a church and the current cathedral was built between 1226 and 1493. The cathedral has been remodeled more or less continually ever since (the current work is cleaning the exterior). The most dramatic change was the addition of el Transperente, essentially a giant hole in the roof behind the main altar, with a clear window, and a huge baroque painting/sculpture/altar/thing-that-doesn't-fit-at-all-with-the-Gothic-architecture showing an assortment of saints and angles descending form heaven, unless they're ascending. Mary is near the top, with St. Ildefonsus and the chasuble just in case you forgot where you are. The second most interesting bit of the cathedral# was a collection of 16th and 17th century vestments. The plainest of the group are just silk with more silk embroidery. The fanciest each have enough precious stones on them to start a jewelry store.

The vestry has painting of every bishop Toledo's ever had starting with in the late 300s and going up to the present day. The portrait's have been painted from life since the early 1500s, so it is interesting to see the development of both art history and clothing. There are red hats hanging throughout the cathedral (I counted 4, but I might be forgetting one): according to local tradition when a cardinal dies they hang his hat above his grave until ~~it rots~~ his soul arrives in heaven. I found enough to see in the cathedral## to keep me occupied for two hours. I have pictures only of the outside because "It is not allowed to make photos or film inside the cathedral". As crowded as it was in there, I probably could have gotten away with it, but I didn't think I would have difficulty finding postcards of the largest building in town.###

I went to the Alcazar next. It's an old fortress that has been many things over the years: it was the Spanish military academy for over a century. In the 30s, Republican (that's Franco's buddies) forces were besieged there by the Nationalists (not Franco's buddies), until other Republican troops arrived to break the siege. Because Toledo was rescued* the Nationalists were able to fortify their positions in Madrid, thus dragging the war out for several more years. Reconstruction on the Alcazar began almost as soon as Franco's rule was secure. Currently, it's closed for remodeling but it will open next year as a military history museum. If you visit now, there's a big monument to the civil war outside, some bits of the original Moorish architecture, and some nice views over the river in a nearby park. The 8th floor houses the local library, so it's also a nice place to use a free public restroom and do a map recon in a quiet air conditioned place with comfy chairs.

Then it was back down to Plaza Zocodover, past the statue of Cervantes at the top of the page, to the Museo de Santa Cruz. It's an old monastery with free admission to see a bunch of things that don't have any thing in common other than coming from Toledo. The courtyard has interesting architecture and some bits and bobs left over from a recent reconstruction. Photographs were allowed in the courtyard, but not inside, and the guard-to-tourist ratio was about 1:3, so they were able to enforce that ruling pretty well. There's a museum on the ground floor with some processional crosses and other assorted religious articles, along with the one El Greco** that another church in town didn't claim. Up stairs there's a little museum about the history of the ceramic industry in Europe. The explanations were all in Spanish however, so while I found the recreation of an artist's studio interesting, the rest got the reaction of "meh".

After an early lunch (1:30 is early in Spain) I made the hike (uphill both ways) to the other side of town for a marathon tour of the remaining sights.

The Church of St. Thomas (Santo Tomé) hosts the "Burial of Count Orgaz", one of the few El Greco paintings to be left in situ, or at least it's in situ until someone thinks of a way to move the wall it's painted on without damaging the painting. I don't like El Greco (he starts off in Manarism, and ends up with something like Surrialism, two art styles that have both made my Top 10 least favorite art movements list), but I do like this painting. [N.b.: I don't necessarily agree with the interpretation on this page, but it has a good copy of the painting and some nice close ups)The scene of the Count's body being lowered into the coffin is balanced perfectly by the scene of his soul (that's the ephemeral baby the angel in the center is holding) being carried into heaven. The count's body and one of the clerics look up towards the scene in heaven, the rest of the earthly figures look at the body. (Except El Greco -- in the back row -- and his son -- the boy in the very front -- both of whom look straight at the viewer, inviting you into the scene.) Meanwhile, in the heavens, the attention is focused to Jesus at the very top of the scene, in the center with the brightest light. Jesus and Mary both look down towards the earth, showing their care for those who must remain below while Count Orgaz is able to rise (with the help of an angel).

The rest of the church looks like any other parish in Spain, which is to say, it received a lot off money up until the last century, and every available surface is either marble or gold-plaited. The other surfaces are either carved wood, or painted wood. As the Vatican apparently demands nowadays, there is a pro-life poster on one of the confessionals, and a rack of fliers in the back. I risked a photo of one of the side chapels, where they had not one but two statues of Mary that caught my eye.

I then went to the Synagogue of the Transit, which is now a memorial to Spain's Jewish heritage. Jews first came to Spain with the Romans, and established large communities after the destruction of the Temple by Titus. They were tolerated by their pagan Roman neighbors, then their Christian neighbors after Constantine changed the official religion, then their Visigothic conquerors#, then their Moorish conquerors, then their Christian re-conquerors. In 1492## the Christian Monarchs Ferdinand II and Isabella I captured Granada, the last remaining Muslim territory in Spain (freeing up funds to allow a crazy Italian to take three ships on a long cruse to the Dominican Republic, but that's another story...), and they turned their attentions to solidifying their rule of Spain. As a result of the Inquisition, 1/3 of Spain's Jewish population remained and converted to Christianity, 1/3 refused to convert and were killed, and 1/3 left Spain. The last third, called Sephardic Jews, mainly went to large trading centers in England and the Low Lands and got rich in banking and the far east trade, so it worked out mostly all right for them. The synagogues (and mosques as well, the Muslims faced the same persecution, but those who chose to leave went to North Africa, not central Europe) that were left behind where converted to churches or demolished, which is why Toledo has a Sinagoga Santa Maria la Blanca (Synagogue of St. Mary the White) and a Mezquita del Christo de la Luz (Mosque of Christ of the Light).

The Synagogue of the Transit was interesting architecturally, but you can see that same style of architecture anywhere in town. The exhibits of the museum were only explained in Spanish, and no audio guide was available. There were explanatory sheet in other languages (I spotted English and French, I think there were more) offering poor translations full of misspellings of the text at each exhibit, but nothing to indicate when it was referring to which displays. If it hadn't been randomly free admission day, I don't think it would have been worth the price. The Sinagoga Sta. Maria la Blanca definitely wasn't worth the 2.30 I paid to get in: one room, empty except for part of the altar piece (the rest has been removed to another museum), and the only signs were a floor plan and a "No Photo" warning.

The House and Museum of Victor Macho was a pleasant surprise though. I'd never heard of Victor Macho before making this trip, but Rick Steve gave the place a nice write up and he usually has pretty good judgment (even though he does like El Greco). He described the house as having good views of the river, and the art as being art deco, so I gave it a go. It was not very crowded (unlike the cathedral, St. Thomas's, and the Synagogue of the Transit), and a short film of the history of Toledo was included in the ticket price. The lady even put the English version on for me, even though I was the only person there. (A Spanish-speaking couple came in as I left.) I found it very informative, and at that point my feet welcomed the break. The promised views of the river where indeed there, as was the art deco statuary scattered all over the buildings and garden.

My last stop was the Monastery of St. John of the Monarchs (Monasterio de S. Juan de los Reyes). It was originally built to be the burial place of Ferdinand and Isabella, but after the capture of Granada they chose to be buried there instead (as a symbol that they were not going to give up the territory again). The outside of the church is hung with chains belonging to Christian prisoners freed from Granada. In the courtyard there's a nice opportunity to play the guess the saint game, in addition to some other fun carvings. The church itself is technically no-photo, but there was no one to enforce that ruling, so I rebelled along with most everything else. The walls are covered in giant eagles (the symbol of St. John, for those of you playing at home) carrying Ferdinand and Isabella's coat of arms, just in case someone forgot which monarchs had the place build. The side chapels have most of the color: such as St. Peter facing down a rooster (the one that crowed after he denied Jesus three times) or this painting of a group of 30 Franciscans martyred during the civil war (they're buried in the crypt).

At this point, this point it was time to hike back to Plaza Zocodover (uphill both ways) for the bus back down hill and a walk back to the train station. I was back in Madrid just in time for dinner.

Total cost of the trip: 65 Euros, including 14.40 for a round trip train ticket, 18 for a damascene rosary, and 10 for lunch. The rest went to admission fees, postcards, and gelatto.

My pictures are all up in the photobucket, but they got scrambled when I uploaded them, so they're more or less in the reverse of the order in which I took them, except for where they're not. Sorry for any confusion. The good news is the foot notes now have links so you don't have to go scrolling up and down.

Later,
Ely, or Elise, or Isabella
no one can quite agree on what the Spanish equivalent of Elizabeth ought to be

*yes, dear reader, fall is starting to arrive in Spain. [back]
**the ruins of a Roman horse-racing stadium with a 10,000 person capacity are also in the flat bit, but I ran out of time and had to skip them in favor of catching my train [back]
***It's also part of my ongoing quest to make an absurdly long, but still logically arranged, URL [back]

#at least to my eye [back]
##the 5th largest in the world, according to a tour guide I eavesdropped on for a while[back]
###I was wrong, I found two. The Spaniards are really missing out by not selling a photo license. I would have been willing to pay the admission price (7 Euro, no negotiating) again in exchange for photos. [back]

*and Franco made Toledo a priority for the same reason it was a priority for the Reconquista: Toledo is the cultural heart of Spain [back]
**El Greco was a Cretin who studied art in Italy, who came to Spain to work on El Escorial but was turned down because Phillip II didn't like his work***, and who made it big in Toledo
***for the record, I think Phillip was right [back]

#Fun fact: the last place in the world where the Visigothic Catholic Rite (they're in communion with Rome, they just never followed the same service as the one in Rome because the one they had was just fine, thank you) is still held is Toledo Cathedral, in the Mozerabic Chapel at 9:15 in the morning. Mozerabic chant is also one of the ancestors of Gregorian chant. [back]
##Conveniently for Americans who don't want to learn anyone else's history, 1492 is also a very important year in Spanish history. [back]

Free Admission Day

2008-09-24T11:16:00.000-07:00

The weekend before last I made my first, and so far only, call home, so my parents at least have had an update since me last post, but it wasn't until just now that I realized that the nagging feeling in the back of my head was me trying to remind myself that I promised that I would post more pictures.

I joined a gaggle of 12 people I mostly didn't know for a bus trip out into the suburbs. We went to the monastery and palace of San Lorenzo de el Escorial, which is conveniently located in the town of the same name, roughly an hour away from the city center. It was, for some unexpected and still unexplained reason, it was free admission day which was a very nice surprise and meant that I had enough cash handy to rent the audio guide. The library was, unfortunately, not included in the free ticket, and the basilica was closed when I went.

Photography is not allowed inside, but because I am a bad person, I snuck a few anyway. Because I'm the kind of nerd who thinks that looking at foundations and bits of archway to see what's holding the building up is the niftiest thing ever, 1.)I thought the architecture museum in the basement was the most interesting part of the visit and 2.)the things I want pictures of are never in the postcards. The fact that I got in for free only encouraged me because in the back of my mind I couldn't help but think, "what are you going to do, kick me out?"

The wikipedia article I linked does a good enough job of explaining the place, and I've added captions which should be sufficient explanation for the pictures. If some thing is unclear* leave a comment here and I'll try to explain. Leave comments anyway, they make me feel like someone cares about my vacation pictures. :P

After lunch, we loaded onto a different bus and went to the Valley of the Fallen. Franco built the place in the 50s as a memorial to the people who died in the Spanish Civil War (or at least, those people who were on his side). Out side there are a few terraces with great views of the Sierra Guadarrama** mountains, a huge pieta over the door, and a Giant Cement Cross that can be seen for miles***. The wikipedia article does again does a good enough job of describing the place, especially the controversy about it's construction.

It was free admission day there as well, and photos were also not allowed inside. I tried to sneak a few of the interior, but the lighting was so low that they didn't turn out and I had to be content with the post cards and a ton of exterior pictures. The postcards actually aren't that great, because they brought in extra lighting and fancy tripods so they have the statues centered in the frame and you can see all the detail, but that isn't what you experience when you actually visit the place. The interior of the basilica is in what I call the Catholic Fascist style (a combination of neo-classisim and futurism, see anything Mussolini had constructed as an example). The lights are so dim it's hard to see the ceiling, copies of 16th century tapestry depicting scenes from the Book of Revelation line the walls, and giant representations of the Our Lady guard each of the side altars. The neo-gothic carved wood quire is almost comforting when compared to the angels who stand at the four corners of the crossing and in the narthex. The feet of these statues are on pillars higher than my head, they each hold some sort of weapon bigger than I am, and the way they are back lit in the already dim light, it looks like they are ready to come to life at any minute and fight any devils that might present themselves. You, the observer, will be squashed into a grease spot on the floor if you get in their way.

Outside, it's a beautiful day with clean air, sunshine, and a good view of the landscape. My photos are in the same album as the ones from El Escorial, again with lots of captions, if you haven't already looked through them. The one thing I'm not sure that my pictures accomplished was showing just how large the place was, mostly because there's no way to fit it all into one picture without a wide angle lens and a helicopter.

Week-end Adventure #1, complete.
-Ella

*The captions, I mean. I know the pictures are fuzzy, but it they were the best I can do under the circumstances.
**redundancy alert! Sierra means mountains
***There is a similar sized cross in Effingham, Illinois (because it's the CROSSroads of America, get it?), but the one in Illinois doesn't have any crying angels, so it's hardly art, is it?

Postcards

2008-09-12T10:41:00.000-07:00

Why is it that the things I like in museums are never the things that have been made into postcards? Or included in the museum guide book?

I went to the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza today (the Prado's not-so little brother) and they did manage to get 4 Euros worth of postcards out of me, but they could have easily gotten triple that (or convinced me to buy the book) if they had postcards of the things I liked instead of the avaunt-guard crap that I didn't even see because that part of the museum was "closed for remodelations". My personal theory on art: nothing good* has been created since 1950, and everything after 1850 is highly suspect. Search your feelings. You know this is true.

-Later

*I define "good art" as something I would hang in the living room above the sofa.

Many the Hail?

2008-09-11T03:11:00.000-07:00

The day before yesterday we had rain off and on during the afternoon. Then, at one in the morning we had hail. That's Ana, my house mom, holding a piece that she saved in the freezer. Freak storms aside, it's still hot and un-airconditioned here, only now it's uncomfortably humid as well.

This is the view out of my window looking to the left, towards Puerta del Sol, and this is looking to the right, towards the Opera House. Puerta del Sol is the center of Madrid containing city hall, "Kilometer Zero" (the marker from which all distances in Spain are measured), a statue of King Charles III, and a bear and a tree (which is the city's symbol).

In front of the Opera House is Plaza Oriente. King Philip IV is in the center of the square. The gardens around it have statues of other (dead) kings. The first night I was here we went down to the square for a free performance of songs from "Beauty and the Beast". We were in the back of the crowd, so we could hear, but not see. Instead we had a better view of the back of the square, which is defined by the back of the Royal Palace.

My room mates and I took the tour on Saturday, but photographs are only allowed on the outside. Inside, there is a over the top baroque/rococo interior. It's all carefully designed to show off the wealth of the inhabitants, but mostly it's just gaudy. On the far side of the palace is the Cathedral. It's new construction, only finished within the last century. The exterior is neo-classical, to match the palace, but he interior is neo-Gothic. At least, that's what I've been told. I haven't actually been able to get inside it yet as every time I've tried it has been closed for no apparent reason. We also took a short walk through the palace gardens, and they got some nice photos of the palace lawns and a peacock. I got nothing, because it was at that point that my camera batteries decided to die on me.

On Sunday we took a longer trip to Plaza Mayor* which has been the home to many things in Madrid's history: a market, bull fighting, carnivals, futbol fans, tourists, and the Inquisition. Now it houses a coin and stamp market on the weekends. Just down the street from Mayor is the beginning of el Rastro - Europe's largest flea market, held every Sunday. I brought my camera, but left if in my purse, because the market was just to crowded to justify the risk of taking it out.

Sunday afternoon, I split off from the group to go to the Museo del Prado, the largest and most important of Madrid's art museums. They don't allow photography inside either, but here's a statue of hometown favorite Goya from the park outside. I just made a quick tour. I need to go back sometime when my feet aren't hurting to enjoy it some.

Tuesday was a state holiday, so we had a day off from classes. Emma and Renee went to Toledo, Megan and I stayed home and did a whole lot of nothing. Also it rained and there was a hail storm during the night, see above.

Classes continue a pace. Spanish continues to go well, although two days in a row now I have been told that I'm pronouncing things like an Italian. Linguistics is coming along nicely as well, although there is a lot of homework. The professor has a contract to write a textbook on the subject, so we are the guinea pigs for her draft of the book, meaning that we have to do all of the little exercises that might otherwise be skipped.

This early in the semester, working in the writing lab means sitting quietly in the corner under the stairs and knitting.

In addition to going to Berlin for the GRE in November, I'm also going to go to Rome for a weekend in October. I may try to go to London this semester as well, but that all depends on how cheap of a flight I can find.

Til later,
Beth

P.S. click the link in the side bar to brows a few more of my

*5 minutes walking, if you walk slowly and stop frequently.

Home in Madrid

2008-09-04T06:11:00.000-07:00

I am safely arrived in Madrid. This is my third day actually. From the air, Spain looks a lot like Texas, on the ground it looks more like Rome. The temperature is a bit more moderate than back home, even cool in the evenings, but there is always a little wind, and it is very dry.

The flight over was long and boring. The flight was pretty bumpy until we got past Greenland, so that alone was uncomfortable. I was in the second to the last row, in the very middle. On my right there was a large American. On my left there was a large Russian. Both of them went to sleep almost as soon as we were in the air. I was stuck in the middle, with no way to sit without touching both of them. The smaller I tried to make myself, the more they expanded to fill the available space, until I would get up, and pretend walk to the WC, thereby forcing one of them completely out of his seat, and allowing me to reclaim my space when I returned. In the row in front of me, there was a toddler, probably about one, so old enough to stand on the seat and yowl, but not old enough to be expected to use words when she was a.)tired, b.)hungry, and c.)having her ears hurt. In fact, given her age, she was very well behaved, and probably could have yelled louder if she had tried. As if that weren't enough, the couple across the aisle had two cats with them, and the kid's crying periodically set the cats to meowing. It was kind of entertaining to watch as the people around me, one at a time, over the course of the entire flight, put up their heads and asked, "Katzen?"*

By the time I finally landed in Frankfurt, I was so tiered that the layover and the flight to Madrid seemed uneventful. I got to the school with no problems, and was soon shuffled off to my host family. Ana and Juan have a large apartment on the 5th** floor of a building on the main street between the Opera house and Puerta del Sol, so it's literally in the middle of everything. There's a lot of street noise, which isn't _too_ bad at night, provided you are asleep before the garbage truck comes by at 1 a.m. Two of my room-mates use ear-plugs, but I'm to afraid that I'd sleep through my alarm clock to try it.

In addition to myself, there are 5 other girls here: 3 from Saint Louis University, two from Sufolk University. Ana and Juan are great people. She works from home, and is full of advice and energy. He is an architect and a real character. Every time he opens his mouth something funny comes out of it. His firm is in charge of the effort to make most of down town a pedestrian zone with lots of restaurants and upscale shopping, while the traffic continues in tunnels underneath the major plazas. This is the construction project currently going on around the neighborhood at all hours of the day and night.

Classes have started; that picture is me on the porch of one of the building with the English Department and the registrar in it. Right now I'm sitting in on a Spanish class which meets four days a week (Monday through Thursday). Yesterday the threat was that Dr. S would shoot us if we didn't speak in Spanish, today she was just charging a Euro***.

I'm also taking a class on linguistics. There was some confusion over where the class would be held, as it is cross listed two or three ways, and each course number was assigned to a different room. Apparently who ever makes the schedule thought that Dr. M could be in two places at once, or would stand in the hall and shout towards both rooms.

Next month I will start a third class, about research methodologies, which is on the graduate schedule instead of the undergraduate.

I've got a job working in the writing lab, except I'm being payed with a tuition discount instead of money, because the student visa is different from a work visa, so they can't legally employ me otherwise. I'm waiting now for the finance office to get me billed correctly; the tuition is different in Madrid than in St. Louis, and I've been given a discount as a scholarship, in addition to what I'll receive from the writing lab. I've been assured that they know that they need to fix things, but since the graduate semester doesn't really start for another month, it probably won't be sorted until then. On the other hand, it's the natural state of affairs to be frustrated with the bursar, so I'm not two worried.

Later,
Ella

*Trans: "Cats?"
*or 6th, depending on how you want to count
***or a cup of coffee, offender's choice

This Space Intentionally Left Blank

2008-07-29T19:08:00.000-07:00

Last week mom and I drove to Houston to apply for my Spanish visa (5.5 weeks until departure, but who's counting). We got a later start then we wanted because we had to go by the doctor's to get a note that says I don't have the plague*. I had left the form, which only required the doctor to check one box and sign it, on Monday, so naturally when I arrived on Wednesday morning it had not been checked or signed, and certainly not photocopied. Fortunately, because I was there right as they opened it didn't take long for the form to be completed and returned to me. Then we had to make stops at the grocery store, the gas station, McDonald's, and Wal-Mart**, in that order. So it was 9 before we really got on the road. Normally that would be a good departure for us, but the Spanish consulate is only open from 9 to 1.

Those would be great hours if I were working them, but as a customer they're terrible. For those of you playing at home, remember that the Consulate*** is in Houston, and I am coming from one of Dallas's northern suburbs, a good 4 and a half hours away. We made good time getting there, but we still didn't make it into Houston until 1:40.

It was about that time that it started to rain. This was the very edge of hurricane Dolly. It was not nice drizzly well behaved rain, nor was it what one would characterize as raining cats and dogs. It was just rain, and it lasted the entire time we were there.

Houston is the largest city in Texas and full of interesting and cultural things. But we had been to the Kimbell on Tuesday and were planing on going to the DMA on Thursday, so instead of seeing the sights, we went to the Galleria instead and spent the afternoon looking in designer windows.

The next morning we could not find a good cup of coffee. The stuff in the hotel was no better than hot water with a packet of non-dairy creamer (ick :P) and two packets of sugar (stale, I didn't even know that was possible). Then we went to Taco Cabana (so mom could get her breakfast burrito fix) and the coffee there was so over brewed I could have used it for motor oil. All the half and half and sugar in the world could not make that drinkable.

So we set out for the Consulate and maybe a Starbucks only to discover that the windshield wipers, which had been working perfectly the day before were making a squeaky noise. I have only a small tolerance for nasty little noises, but mom has no tolerance for them. So after two repetitions of this noise, mom rearranges our agenda to 1.)new wiper blades, 2.)coffee, and 3.)visa. The auto parts store told mom they didn't have blades for our car and that we'ed have to go to a Honda dealership if we wanted to replace them. Then the only Starbucks we could find was on the wrong side of the street and didn't have a drive through, so we didn't stop because it was still raining and mom didn't want to get out of the car again.

We went to the consulate. I told the lady at the desk that I was there to apply for a student visa and forked over the paperwork. I was allowed to pay in advance to have the visa FedEx-ed back to me, so at least I won't have to go back there to pick up my passport when they are done with it. I didn't even spend 15 minutes in the consulate.

All in all, it was a pretty painless trip except for the bit where I had to make a overnight trip to Houston, we never got the wipers fixed, I didn't get my morning coffee until after 11, and in rained the entire time we were there.

There's nothing to do now but sit and wait for the FedEx man.

-Yami

*the form really did say I don't have the plague, nor a host of other diseases as well
**to get a money order to pay the processing fee as the Spaniards wouldn't take a personal check
***where I must apply in person

Shameless Capitalism

2008-07-16T22:37:00.000-07:00

It's been a pretty boring summer thus far here at casa del mi genitori*. So boring that the most interesting photo I could come up with is from last December. I use it anyway, because Abraham Lincoln makes most things better and I figure I can use the help.

I've been spinning my gears sending paperwork back and forth across the Atlantic in preparation for grad school in the fall. I leave for Madrid on the first of September and I really wish I could fast forward through the next month and a half so I can get started. Or, just travel to the first and switch places with my future self, except then she'd be stuck in an infinite loop of a really boring month and a half, and I wouldn't want to do that to her. Or me. Or whoever.

In the mean time, I'm bringing in gas money by doing housework for a few people from church, and searching for freelance writing work. I'm also supposed to be working on my novel and learning Spanish, but that's gotten about as far as my carrier as an artiest.

I just got my graduation/birthday present: a shiny new laptop to supplant the much-abused HAL**. I love my new machine, and the transition has been surprisingly easy, barring the fact that Vista is out to thwart my every plan, and I can't find the CD for Office.***

You might have noticed the advertising that has appeared in the sidebar. You might be gnashing your teeth and shaking your fist that yet another site has ads on it, but you shouldn't be. When people who aren't me click on the adds, AdSense gives me money. I like getting money without really having to do anything, so if all of you out there in reader-land will do me a favor and click on the ads, that would be much appreciated. (You don't even have to look at the pages. Just right click on the link and choose open in a new window. Wait for it to finish loading and then hit the Red X in the corner to make it go away forever. Unless you use a Mac. Then you have to do something else because you don't have a right mouse button and you probably call windows by some other name*. I'll let you figure it out on your own.)

If you like me enough to actually spend a little money, then you could also go to Deviant Art (link at left) and buy a print from me. They're cheap, I get a cut, and you have a crap gift to bring to your next White Elephant exchange, so we win all around.

Later,
Yami

*translation from my limited (and ungrammatical) Italian: my parents house
**HAL had an annoying tendency to freeze up and lock me out of important things, such as the pod bay doors.
***It's in the house somewhere, it just hasn't been used in a couple years and has been squirreled away in some really clever hidey-hole that I haven't remembered yet.
*like 'Apple Cores'?

Warning: Incoming Latin

2008-06-15T15:37:00.001-07:00

Universitas Dallasensis
Omnibus has litteras visuris
Salutem in Domino
Praesentium Litterarum Vigore
E.A.S.
Confirmatur studiorum curriculum ad normam praedictae universitatis rite persolvisse praescriptaque pericula feliciter superasse. Quapropeter curatores universitatis, ex facultatis consulto, eidem academicum gradum,
BACCALAUREI IN ARTIBUS
cum omnibus iuribus, honoribus ac privlegiis huic gradui adnexis, conferentes, hoc diploma, publico universitatis sigilllo munitum, in collati gradus testimonium tradunt.
Datum Dallasii, Die XVIII Mensis Maii Anno Domini MMVIII.

For my non-Latin-speaking audience, all of that means that I am now a certified smart person. Now, diploma in hand, I am facing the fact that it would probably be a good idea for me to learn some Spanish before I head off to graduate school.

I take off for Saint Louis in August, and will be in Madrid at the beginning of October. Interesting things should start occurring around that time. In the meantime, I'm back at my parent's house, working odd jobs so I'll have enough money to fly there and back. This is, if anything, more boring than even regular school stuff, but I don't really have a choice about this.

I saw this flower (see above) growing in my parents driveway. That's what passes for an exciting time here in Flo-Mo.

Until Later,
Yami

One Week and Counting

2008-05-06T20:57:00.000-07:00

I'm done with comps (passed all three rounds on the first go!), and it's the last week of class. Technically, all I have to do now in order to graduate is show up. Why am I so busy?

Mostly, I'm waxing the cat, and doing other assorted chores to avoid doing the last little bit of school-work that I need to get done. Like the term paper due on Saturday. I should probably start working on that. Instead, I've cleaned the kitchen twice in the last three days.

Crunch Time

2008-04-25T14:17:00.000-07:00

Ask me how I'm doing tomorrow at about 5:00 pm, for then I shall be done with round one of comps.

-Beth

Spring in Texas

2008-04-04T23:27:00.000-07:00

**Warning, if you don't like links or my landscape photography, this is not the post for you.***

Yes, it's spring is finally here. I can tell this because for the past few weeks it has been difficult to breath through my nose, the weather has gone bonkers*, and wild flowers are in bloom. I finally got some free time, and went on a little expedition to the various pathways around UD and took pictures.

As every true Texan knows, Texas is at all times more beautiful than any other state in the union, and she is at her most attractive in the Spring. Bluebonnets can be found singly, but they are more often seen in great sweeping masses of them on the side of the road. One of my personal favorite places to view them is at the 121/114 merger just north of the airport. The on ramp makes a 270 degree turn, during which the smart driver will follow the recommended speed of 30 mph, allowing one a nice chance to gaze at the flowers growing in the median. Unfortunately, there is really no safe way to photograph this. The Texas driver will slow down for bluebonnets, but not pedestrians. I settled for pictures of Northgate and the railroad bridge, which have the advantage of being 1.)within walking distance of campus, and 2.)not a highway. I've seen evening primrose, Indian blankets, and Indian paintbrushes out as well, but unfortunately there weren't any within easy walking distance from the hovel.**

Some other typically Texas things I snapped include a tornado siren and a sign warning of an underground oil pipeline.

I got a few more shots along the paths at the base of seminary hill and a lot of pictures of trees. Including several bizarre looking ones which don't know when to quit. I returned to the hovel by way of Madonna Pond, the Art Village, and the Rat, which is to say, the long way.

While I'm thinking about it and have the evidence at hand. I'd like to say that for a university that prides itself on a classical education, the art department produces a surprising lack of classical style art. It can be quite difficult for the lay person such as myself to tell the difference between things that have been placed around the art village and things that have been left there to die.

I would also like to say that this swing, found out back of the raw materials lab*** looks like it came from the set of a horror movie.

These signs are from the outside of the science building. I think the one on the left is a little redundant.

This limestone altar is one of many on campus which are all that remain of a lost dwarven civilization that existed in Texas after the giants, but before the humans.

See you next time, when I promise to talk about my comprehensive exams, and cutting up fetal pigs,
Yami

*i.e. Alternating between 87 degree days, and golf ball sized hail.
**OK, there are several that are within a distance I am capable of walking, but all of them are across highways and even I am not crazy enough to try that.
***which I didn't know existed before I saw it today. I was disappointed to discover that these raw materials seem to consist mostly of bricks.

Adventures in Biology

2008-02-28T21:14:00.000-08:00

As many of you know, it's my senior year of college and I'm finally taking the introduction to biology course that all undergraduates at UD are required to take. I put it off this long because in general biology is squishy and gross, and I was kind of hoping that there would be a change to the course bulletin so I wouldn't have to take it. Alas, that was not to be, and the registrar held a gun to my head and made me sign up for the class.

The past two weeks the laboratory portion of the class has been a non-starter. Last week the lab about fruit fly genetics* didn't happen because mites decimated the school's fruit fly herd. The lab assistant and Dr. D spent an hour explaining in detail why we weren't doing the lab, and what we would have done if we had done the lab. That's an hour of my life that I will never be able to get back. It's unknown at this point whether or not we will have to make that lab up at a latter date.

This week we were supposed to be determining our blood type, a process which takes about a minute. You put three dots of your blood on a slide each, and mix each dot with a different chemical. You wait a second, and the way the blood reacts to the chemicals indicates your blood type. This is an easy enough process, except that due to all the typing** I do, the skin on my finger tips is really thick, and I wasn't able to draw blood with the little lancets the lab has. I got tired of cutting up my fingertip for no reason, so I typed my lab partner's blood instead. For the record, Anita is AB+***

One can only wonder what sort of pitiful excuse for science we will preform next week.

-Yami

*No one's been able to tell me why I'm supposed to care about whether or not short wings are a recessive or dominant trait.
**Not to mention knitting, crocheting, and sewing that involves me regularly jamming sharp pointy things into my fingertips
***my other lab partner, Taylor, is O-, which means that his blood reacted to the lovely chemicals in exactly the opposite way hers did, and he's also the universal donor

The 7th Inning Stretch

2008-02-26T15:32:00.000-08:00

I'm right smack dab in the middle of everything here in the hovel, so it's time to take a break and stretch before my muscles cramp permanently into a somehow-still-sitting-improperly-despite-using-an-ergonomic-chair position.

My application to Oxford was completed last month, so I'm waiting to hear back from them. I'm working on applications to King's College London, Saint Louis University, and Columbia. All three of those are in the rounding up recommendations and transcripts stage, which means that all I have to do in order to complete those applications is nag other people.

The first round of tests and papers has been passed, and passed well, so I can stop worrying about that for a little bit.

Pearl Dust is taking a ridiculously long time to type up. I wrote a lot more than I remembered I had, and there's far more to be done in revisions. Outlining for 9 Revolutions -- my next big project -- has hit a snag because a couple of the characters are not talking to me at the moment. In the meantime, I have an idea for a short story that I want to get to work on while I still think its a good idea, so it's not as if I'm without a writing project.

In the sticks and string front, the maroon scarf of fuzzy DOOM! is finally complete. I have three more projects started which I can see from where I'm sitting: four if you count the one for which I need to buy more yarn.

I really want a cup of coffee, but I can't have it because I gave up caffeine for Lent. I'm ready for Easter to get here, I don't remember the headache lasting this long in previous years.

-Beth

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Dinner

2008-02-15T14:12:00.000-08:00

Experience has shown me that whenever I ask a person to give me directions, I always get where I'm going without problems, but when I consult a map, a computer, a guidebook, or, God forbid, a computerized map in a guidebook, I always get lost. 9 times out of 10, this is because the map bears little to no resemblance to the actual place. I thought I was done with aimless wandering when I returned from Europe, under the mistaken assumption that I know my way around town pretty well. This is, alas, not so.

A couple days ago Aerisith and I decided that we wanted a pizza, and not just any pizza, because we were not going to pay more than $5.00+tax for one, which was not coincidently all the spending money we had between the two of us. The only way to get 1 large pizza for $5.00+tax* is to go to Little Ceaser's, a chain which has only recently moved into our neck of the woods. We knew of one up in L-ville, but not wanting to drive 15 miles one way for a $5 pizza, I used the locate a store feature on the company's website to find one closer to home.

We looked at the address, compared it to a couple of maps, and concluded that we knew where it was and could get there easily. How wrong we were. A couple minutes of driving later, we arrived at the spot indicated by the Internet and discovered that it was actually the parking lot of the Police Station. Next door were the Fire Station, City Hall, and the Public Library. If there was a pizza place there, it was evidently hiding up in a tree or something, were we missed it because it was after dark. We went further down the block, and while other assorted fast food places did materialize out of the gloom, none of them had cheap pizza.

We gave it up and went to the one on Main Street in L-ville, because we knew where it was.

In other news, classes are proceeding well, the first German paper, the first German test, the first paper about Camus, and the first long lab write-up have all been turned in, leaving me with little to do this weekend. The maroon scarf of fuzzy doom now officially stretches from the floor to my shoulders, and I am currently accepting bets on whether or not it will be taller than I am when I finish it. The yarn is approximately 3/16ths of an inch thick, and remaining ball is roughly 3 inches in diameter. I estimate that I would need 36 more rows to make it over my head.

I think I may have finally finished this draft of Pearl Dust, so that's one project at least that is all over but the typing. Of course, I finally thought of a way to get rid of that first part, which I never really liked, but doing so will require a lot of restructuring of the rest of it, so I have my work cut out for me in the revision.

I also got a quick ego boost in the form of this:

How grammatically correct are you? (Revised with answer key)

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!

Congratulations! If your mission in life is not already to preserve the English tongue, it should be. You can smell a grammatical inaccuracy from fifty yards. Your speech is revered by the underlings, though some may blaspheme and call you a snob. They're just jealous. Go out there and change the world.
Take this quiz!

Quizilla |
Join

| Make A Quiz | More Quizzes | Grab Code

That's it for now,

Yami

*short of you know, making it ourselves

The Maroon Scarf of Fuzzy DOOM!

2008-02-01T21:29:00.000-08:00

As many of you are doubtless aware, I must either do something with my hands or fall asleep. I do not handle sitting still and doing nothing very well.* The end result is that I usually have multiple knit/crochet/embroidery/quilt/doodle/novel projects going at once.

One such project, pictured here, is the Maroon Scarf of Fuzzy DOOM! It started with the discovery of not one, not two, but three skeins of maroon chenille yarn in the stash of truly random yarn which appeared, seemingly by spontaneous generation, in one corner of the office closet, right in front of the fusebox. Eager for a fast and simple project, I cast on and declared it my Sitting-in-front-of-the- computer-reading-the-10-page-pdfs-that-my-professors-are-so-fond-of project. The picture shows the scarf after one skein was used, but before I added the second. As you can see, when I cast on I dramatically underestimated just how big 31 stitches with a thick yarn and size 13 needles really are. For those of you playing at home, the answer is as wide as a large pizza box, and a bit longer. As I type this, I am half-way through the second skein, and the Maroon Scarf of Fuzzy DOOM reaches from the floor to mid-thigh. If this thing does not eat me when I finish it, it will at least be warm, which is good, as all the schools which have caught my eye seem to be in the Frozen North.

This morning I got an uncomfortable brush with the Uncomfortably Chilly South, as I ~~emerged from my den~~ woke up early so I could participate in one of the more beloved Groundhog's Day** Traditions: Mimosas on the Mall. Estimates on the actual temperature outside vary according to who's computer you want to listen to, but it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 32 Degrees when I joined Nick and Treco for the drive across the street to campus.***

I should include a bit of information about Nick's car at this point. It is a little Toyota, which is amusing because both of the guys are over 6 feet tall. Needless to say, there is no leg room in the back seat, on account of both the driver and passenger side chairs being pushed all the way back. So anyone in the back seat (i.e. me) must sort of stretch their legs over all three seats in the back to be kind of comfortable, in much the same way that I must shoehorn potential passengers into the back of my Civic. We drive to the parking lot closest to the science building only to discover that all the parking places are, alas, all taken, except for one guy who was parked in two spaces.

Against both Treco's protestations and mine, that he will probably loose one or both wing mirrors if he tries it, Nick was able to squeeze his narrow little car between the offending van and the SUV to its left, blocking the offender's driver side door almost completely. The three of us however, still had enough space to get out**** of our vehicle, and Nick was actually entirely within the lines of his newly claimed space. Satisfied that a suitably obnoxious counter-maneuver had been executed, we continued to the Mall, where the traditional Groundhog Day Mimosas were waiting for us.

Now we did not spend a lot of time waiting for the Groundhog***** to emerge from the tower and tell us if we will have another 6 weeks of psudo-winter, because soon after we satisfied the CSO guy at the drinks table that we were over 21, and therefore allowed champaign in our orange juice, it was announced that the breakfast buffet was open.+ No alcohol being allowed inside, the mimosas were consumed rather quickly before heading in to the nice warm building to get food that I was only eating because it was free, and beggars can't be choosers.

If I don't kill my loud, party going neighbors*, I'll post again soon.

-Yami

*Because I tend to zone out, and fifteen minutes later I have no idea what line of the poem the rest of the class is examining, or even if I'm looking at the right poem.

**The most beloved holiday in UD's calender, for reasons that are not entirely clear to anyone, but we have been celebrating for several decades, so it's a tradition and we can't change it now, now can we?

***Of course we drove. It was cold out and, as seniors, we are nothing if not lazy.

****Although the door I used was actually the hatchback: it was just easier that way.

*****Dr. O in a Groundhog Suit.

+I do not like ending a sentence with a preposition like that, but it has already gone on long enough, and I do not feel like reformulating the whole sentence just to avoid that construction, especially since I think that 'open' is being used as an adjective, not a preposition, in this sentence. Debate?

*I.e. Everyone in the apartment complex except for me, or at least that's what it seems like some days.

The Demon

2008-01-26T21:35:00.000-08:00

I was going to post a big long catch-up post to let everyone know what I've been up to since I last wrote* but I have something far more important to discuss than little old ladies trying to pick up Grandpa and my Great Uncle's funeral.

There is a demon in the wall between the Hovel and the hovel next door.

We thought that Something Had Been Done About It because our neighbors complained to the apartment complex and we hadn't heard from the Thing in a while, but it made noise just a moment ago. The current theory is that it is some sort of bird which has gotten trapped in the wall, as the alternatives are just to horrible to contemplate. Given how long it has been in there, we posit that it might be an undead bird, risen from the grave to kill us all, so we have the baseball bat handy Just In Case.

Then Aerisith and I started debating the differences between the terms 'undead' and 'living dead'. As ever, your comments on the subject are welcome, dear reader.

-Yami

*Here's the short version: I quit my job, I made two back-to-back trips to the frozen north, I applied to grad school, I played a lot of WoW, I read for fun, I didn't burn down the kitchen, and now I'm back in school for my last semester.

Let the Record Show That I Was Innocent

2007-12-13T12:44:00.000-08:00

I had a pretty good Sunday. I worked for a little bit, went to the English Tea with my mom, and went to the office Christmas Party. Then I came home and found that cardboard had already been put up in the place of the broken window, the blood had been cleaned up off the concrete, and Jenny and Debby were cleaning up the office.

Sensing that I had missed something important, I asked my roommates what was going on. The story, as best as I have been able to reconstruct it, is this:

Lynné and Andrea came to the apartment, and Lynné promptly locked her keys in the car. No problem, she's got an extra car key in the apartment, and the engine isn't running, she just needs to get inside. I'm at work, and forgot my cell phone, so she calls Jenny. Jenny was at her parent's putting up Christmas decorations, but she agrees to come down and let Lynné in from the cold.

While waiting for Jenny to arrive, Lynné decides that she would like to drink the soda that she has stashed in her purse. Being the graceful creature that she is, she managed to loose her balance while doing so, and put out a hand to steady herself. She was justifiably surprised when, instead of supporting her weight, her hand went straight through the window.

Now that we know she's going to be OK, we can laugh at the conversation Andrea had with the 911 operator while Lynné was busy applying pressure to her wrist. It went something like this:
"My friend just cut her wrist on a piece of glass."
*pause for operator's next question*
"Yes, it was an accident."

So, an ambulance arrives on the scene, and the paramedics put a super-heavy duty bandage on Lynné's arm. She declines to take the (expensive) ride to the hospital, and calls her parents, so they can take her to the ER instead. It is at this point, after the departure of the ambulance, when Andrea and Lynné are waiting for her parents in one of our downstairs neighbor's apartments, that Jenny and Patrick arrive.

They find a broken window, a pool of blood, and no Lynné. One quick phone call explains what's been going on, and that there is no need to call the police. So they came down to wait for the parents as well. Lynné parents came and took her to the hospital, where she got 8 stitches. While Jenny and Patrick set about cleaning up the mess.

So by the time I got home that evening, Lynné was back from the hospital, curled up on the sofa with many blankets, the glass was swept up, cardboard duct taped into the window frame, the blood cleaned up, and Jenny and Debby (at some point she was swapped for Patrick) were tidying up the office. I helped clean more, and we called it a night.

On Monday, I reported the broken window to the office (Lynné had strict orders not to do anything, and Jenny was at work) and they sent a man out to see about it. He did not have an extra window just sitting around in the back of his trunk, but he did put up some super-wide insulating tape to keep the air out. It still wasn't as good as a new window, but it made an appreciable difference in reducing the draft coming in around the edges of the cardboard. I asked if he could do anything about our heater (which wasn't working, just like our AC hadn't been working very well before that). He conceded that it wasn't working, and sent the guy who worked on heaters around about 15 minutes later. After about half an hour of mucking about with some sort of duct work that I refuse to learn anything about, he got the heater working, which made me very happy indeed.

We finally got the new window Wednesday morning, with very little fanfare.

Other than that, Jenny caught a cold which caused her to miss work for a couple of days, so that was bad as well. I assume that she's back to normal, because instead of sleeping on the couch all the time, she's back to never being here. I've been helping Lynné put hydrogen peroxide on her stitches every day when we change the band aide. It's not difficult, but she can't do it herself because she's only got one arm that works right. Also, it looks pretty gross, although it's better than it was Sunday night.

Classes are finally done (my last one was today), exams start on Saturday, which is the only night this week when I'm not closing.

I'm tired. It's been a long week, and it's still not quite done.

Le Sigh

2007-12-04T13:53:00.000-08:00

We have reached that time of year when I start thinking "Why do I need this degree anyway? You can't do anything with a BA in German." That's followed by speculation about how far I could get if I filled up my car with gas and just started driving.

I'm ready for exams to by done. Does anyone have a time machine handy?

A Word of Advice

2007-12-02T01:26:00.000-08:00

If anyone every proposes building any kind of professional sports stadium within ten miles of your home, or if the only road to said stadium will pass within ten miles of your home, gather up everyone you know, get down to the polls, and vote that sucker down. Trust me on this. You will not regret it.

So, Thursday I was very nearly late to work because of the Cowboys game.* In order to more easily regulate the flow of traffic into the stadium, the Irving police department likes to do things like block off any road that does not lead to the stadium, such as all those by my apartment. Three hours before the game starts. During rush hour. While I'm trying to get to work.

Basically, once they've set up the traffic patterns for the game, the only highways I can get to from my apartment are west bound 183 and west bound 114. That is all well and good, except the highway that takes me to work is northeast of my apartment. There is a back way to work, which I had to take, which takes me ten miles out of my way down roads with a speed limit of 35 miles per hour.

My parents live just off the only road connecting their town to I-35W, where Texas Motor Speedway is. Anytime there's a race (a couple three times a year), we can't leave the house along that road. It's stop and go traffic all the way to the county line. Grr.

In conclusion, professional sporting arenas should be in the same place as federal prisons and hippy communes: not in my backyard.

-Yami

*First of all, what is an NFL game doing on a Thursday that's not Thanksgiving: does someone want to explain that to me?

Blarg

2007-11-27T22:59:00.000-08:00

Blarg, I say, blarg. That's pretty much all I've had to say for the last, oh, two weeks.

More accurately, I've been saying "meh." I've dragged myself to class and to work, waiting to hear back from my doctor (who took Thanksgiving off because it was a National Holiday, or some such flimsy excuse), and people, seeing that I am as pale as a repeated victim of a vampire attack, keep asking me how I'm doing. So my answer has been "meh" because anything else would require way too much effort.

Moral of this story: blood is very important, do not let anyone tell you otherwise.

I finally have a diagnosis (anemia, Dr. Mom figured that one out, why did I need to see an MD again?) and the appropriate drugs (go go gadget iron supplement), so life is slightly improved here at the hovel.

The bug-killer guys have been dispatched by the apartment and will be here tomorrow to eradicate our pests with many chemicals which I probably would not want in my apartment if I had any say so in the matter.

I had my follow up meeting with the Registrar today. They conceded that my major does exist, and that I might have a degree. I am on track to graduate, and I do not need to do anything weird, such as take an inter-term class. Life is good, and I am now officially a degree candidate for a Baccalaureate of Arts in German and Comparative Literary Traditions with a Concentration in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. I am pretty sure that come May, no one else will have a degree that sounds anywhere near as impressive as mine. Heck, it even goes onto the second typed line. You should see it hand written: that's when it really gets imposing.

Now that I'm assured of my degree, I may get on with other important things, such as grad school applications. None of which I completed before Thanksgiving (as per my original plan) because there was no point in applying to a master's program if I wasn't going to have my bachelor's degree.

On the NaNo front, I am afraid that this year I am going to have to throw in the towel. I don't like quitting, and I really like winning, but this year it is just not to be. I am going to let my brain reset for a few days as I do school work (see below) and then finish Pearl Dust before I pick this year's project up again. I'm at a little past the 30k mark with 9 Revolutions, but the past week and a half or so I've been so sick I couldn't write. I couldn't do anything else for that matter.

I passed out at work last Friday, and went home early, which was an adventure in its own right. I ended up paying more for the pair of shoes I bought that day than I got paid that entire week. I may try to return them, if I can find the receipt.

Now that I'm feeling better, I find that tons of work has crept up on my while I was curled up in a ball on the sofa, waiting for the vampire to come finish me off. I have tests in French and Linguistics tomorrow, for which I am totally unprepared. I have not read a word of Kant, but since I'm doing quite well otherwise in Philosophy, I may sacrifice a level of my grade there in order to prepare properly for everything else. I have a paper due for History on the 4th, which is next Tuesday, for which I have done not one whit of research. Also on the 4th, I have a test in German Grammar, another thing for which I am not yet prepared, but I must do well on it in order to get any grade higher than a C for the class. [The vampire also apparently took my ability to remember the past participle of any irregular German verb, even the easy ones like haben and kommen.] If that weren't enough, I also have a review of an article for Linguistics due the week after that. There I have at least made the step of choosing my topic, but that's as far as I've gone. I'm pretty sure there is supposed to be additional work for Philosophy in there somewhere as well, but if Dr. R has forgotten, I am sure not going to remind him. If I live through all of that, then there are still final exams to contend with, and I'm done on the 19th.

Then I'll be able to rest my brain, but not the rest of me, because I work retail and we are officially in the busy season.

So, until noon on the 19th, St. Joseph of Cupertino, pray for me.

Fun with Technology

2007-11-13T23:56:00.000-08:00

I finally got around to downloading the latest version of Firefox. For those of you, who like me, are kind of late adapters, I recomend that you go ahead and download it. It has in-line spell checking. You have no idea how happy that makes me.

Also, I've passed the 20k mark for NaNo.

-Yami

Have You Ever Felt Like You Were Stuck in a Kafka Story?

2007-11-09T20:38:00.000-08:00

So, like the title says, have you ever felt like you were stuck in a Kafka story? I had that feeling today. Right now I do not think anyone will be dying randomly a the end, but today did feel like the middle bit of one of his stories, where everything you thought you understood about the way the plot is going gets turned on its head.

I started the day by getting something in writing from Dr. D, the chairman of the Modern Languages Department, saying which courses that I have taken (or will take in the Spring) will count for which requirements for the Comparative Lit major. Thinking life was good, I went on down to the registrars office to review my degree plan.

I was told that I should be alright for German, just as soon as Dr. E tells them exactly what was being substituted for what. I've been nagging him for a week, and he still has not forwarded me that information. We worked it out last month, I just did not get a copy of it at the time, and I can not remember which of the classes I took we decided counted as the introduction to German lit, and which one was most like Lit Trad III.

I was told that my Medieval and Renaissance Studies concentration is good to go, because I already have everything in order for that, and am currently enrolled in the last class I need for it. For the Core, I am likewise in good shape, all I have to do is take a biology class next Spring (either Basic Ideas of Biology or Darwin) and I will be done just in time for graduation.

Then I said, that's great, but I want do double major with Comparative Lit Trad. Here's Dr. E's signature on the major change request, and here's the list of what classes I have/am/shall take(-n)(-ing) [select appropriate]. She looks at the list and says something to the effect of, "you want to major in what? I don't know if that is allowed."

It's new I say. It is in the latest bulletin, the one that I did the paper work two months ago in order to graduate under. I show her the page number. I show her the print out from the department website with all the pretty colors that Dr. M gave me to line out the requirements in a clearer fashion. I show her the list of courses from Dr. D and his signature. The Department head is on board with this, I remind her.

Yes, she says, but some things got into the bulletin that were not actually approved, and she thinks that this is one of them because she does not have the forms for the degree audit. We need to talk to the dean she says. The dean is naturally not in her office when the call is placed.

I'm told to take the major change form upstairs for the filing minions to deal with, and to go ahead and sign up for what ever classes the Modern Language Department thinks I need. I now have an appointment to see someone with the authority to make a decision on the 27th, and the assurances that I will be allowed to do any and all add/drops that I might need.

I leave, fighting the urge to shout "IF THE MAJOR HAS NOT BEEN APPROVED, WHY IS IT EVEN IN THE BOOK? DID NO ONE READ THE BULLETIN BEFORE IT WAS PUBLISHED? IF IT IS NOT OFFICIAL, WHY DID NO ONE TELL ANY OF THE PROFESSORS IN THE MODERN LANGUAGE DEPARTMENT? WHY ARE THERE COURSES LISTED IN THE CATALOGUE BOTH THIS FALL AND NEXT SPRING WITH A CLT NUMBER IF IT DOES NOT EXIST? WHY CAN YOU NOT USE AN OUNCE OF COMMON SENSE AND TELL ME WHETHER OR NOT I AM GOING TO GRADUATE?" But I didn't shout anything, nor did I throw anything, I just said "Thank you for your time."

So, long story short, I still do not know if I have the number of credits I need to graduate, if I will have to take a class over Christmas break, or if I need to do a Directed Readings class, because according to the registrar, my proposed degree does not, in fact, exist.

On another note, my Philosophy mid term and Linguistics Presentations (both of which were last Wednesday) went pretty well. Dr. M finally finished grading our French mid-terms and I got an 87, which makes me pretty happy. Some days I am sure that Joseph of Cupertino has my back.

On the NaNo front, I am storming right along at 14,404 words, not nearly as far behind as I have been in previous years (in fact, I'm on target and hopping to hit 16,667 tonight). Aerisith is no were near the mark to keep on pace for 50k, but she has passed 5,000 and is so thrilled about having written this much of one story that I can not help but be happy for her. Keep cheering us both on, because the writing is going well.

-Yami

Degrees of Insanity

2007-11-02T23:08:00.000-07:00

My class ring arrived yesterday, nearly a month before I expected it. It still feels weird to have it on my finger, but I'm pretty happy. Also, after much running around to Drs. E, M, and D, it looks as though I will be able to double major and still graduate in May*. If that is the case, then I will receive a Bachelor's of Arts in German and Comparative Literary Traditions with a Concentration in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. This will net me a very impressive sounding transcript, and prepare me for a short and intellectually fulfilling life living underneath the Ponte San Angelo. (See photo at left.)

All that could change of course if I ever manage to sell a book. The Conclusion to Pearl Dust has been placed on the back burner for now, with the idea that I will polish it up in December and fob it off onto a few ~~gullible~~ wonderful friends who have agreed to beta-read for me. National Novel Writing Month has begun again, and with that I have started a new project. 9 Revolutions starts a few months after the end of Pearl Dust with a few old characters and a bunch of new faces. So far I'm having fun with it. At the end of day two, the old word count is 5,081, which means that I am a little over a day ahead. Hopefully I'll be able to use the weekend to turn that lead into an even bigger lead. I know from experience that I'll need every word that I can get when the inevitable week two slump hits.

-Yami

*Hopefully the Registrar aggrees with the Modern Language Department in that respect.

Funny How This Works

2007-10-25T13:58:00.000-07:00

The strange thing about UD is that even though the place is crawling with doctors, there's only one MD, and her office closes as 4. So when I catch the highly-contagious creeping-crud from my lovely roommates the day of my History Exam, I have to make an appointment to see her tomorrow.

Ugg. :P

Well Done, Maintance Guys

2007-10-22T14:34:00.000-07:00

In what may be a record for efficiency in this apartment complex, the broken window has been repaired.

On my way to class at about 11:30 this morning, I stopped by the office and told them about the window, and was told that someone would be out either today or tomorrow. When I came back for lunch at two, the window was still broken. I went to talk to Dr. M about the possibility of double majoring, and then to my last class. When I walked in 15 minutes ago, the window was fixed.

This is a good thing. Especially since the weather has gone from hot, humid, and miserable (yesterday) to chilly, windy, rainy, and miserable (today). The change in weather means two things. 1.)Summer is finally over. 2.)I need to go to my parents' house and get the rest of my jackets and sweaters out of storage. :)

In other news, 9 days left by my count until NaNoWriMo starts. That also marks the third anniversary of this little blog.

-Yami

My Brain Is Melting

2007-10-21T21:44:00.000-07:00

Like the title says, my brain is melting. I can feel it dribbling out my ears, unless that's just sweat. It can be hard to tell the difference between brains and sweat some days, today being one of them.

The reason that I feel like I'm melting is of course the fact that the air conditioner in my hovel is having a tough run of it. The reason our* poor, overworked AC can not handle my crazy demand that the temperature in my apartment be lower than the temperature in my body, is that one of the windows is broken.

We did not break this window. In fact, we can not even pinpoint the time in which said breakage occurred or what caused it. I have my suspicions though. Read on, and marvel at my deductive reasoning.

On Monday or Tuesday of last week, we noticed that it was getting really hot in the apartment. We chalked it up to time to replace the air filter, a not unreasonable idea, since it has been about five months since we moved in and replaced the filter. The first day or two we were here it was almost unbearably hot in the apartment, but then, at a suggestion from Aerisith's dad, the filter was replaced, and lo, we had cool air. Now, five months later, we figured it was the same situation. Aerisith and I waited until Thursday to go buy a new filter, because there was the very real possibility of our being evicted through no fault of out own, and we were not about to do anything like maintenance if we were just going to be tossed out into the street. So on Thursday the outstanding rent was paid, we received assurances that we would not be evicted, and then we had the air filter replaced.

This solved the problem of it being to hot in the kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom. The living room/dining room remained unbearable, and here in the office, my wrists have adhered themselves to my laptop and I don't think I could get up from my desk without hurting myself. Today after church, I was sitting on the sofa eating lunch and watching a DVD from the ole' collection when I heard the blinds buzzing. I thought it was probably just a wasp stuck in the blinds** and figured I would do something about it later. I finished eating, and the noise was still going on, so I decided that later was then, and rolled up a newspaper in preparation for swatting a non-existent bug.

For, when I rolled up the blind to see what was making the noise, I found that the only wasp on the windowsill was long dead, and a piece of glass about the size of my palm was laying there as if it belonged. I looked up, trying to find a source for my potential weapon of opportunity, and found that it had come from the top right window pane. Another piece of equal size was sticking out, held in place only by the weatherstripping. In fact, further investigation showed that the only thing holding the entire pane in place was the sealant around the edges.

The original break in the glass is a mostly round area about half an inch in diameter. Long cracks branch off of it in several directions, so that in addition to the piece already on the windowsill and it's buddy that looked like it was about to fall, the window was divided into two large panels, and then three smaller ones in the top right corner.

I pulled the hanging piece down so I wouldn't have to worry about it falling and shattering into a million tiny pieces in the dinning room.*** Then I tapped up a trash bag to cover the hole temporarily. When Aerisith got home to provide some reinforcements for my hovel-improvement schemes, we set about making a more substantial fix. Tin foil (to try and reflect a little of the sun light and keep the place cool) and a trash bag (to further seal up the window against some rain that is allegedly in the five-day forecast, and to try to keep out precious cool air from getting out) were duct taped into place over and around the break.

When the apartment office opens again Monday morning, Aerisith and I will be there to demand that a repair man be sent to fix this damage that we did not cause.

As for what did cause it, my personal guess is an air rifle. A small, not very dense, high-velocity projectile, which was still not a big enough incident for any of us to notice immediately is to blame here. Of course, since there is no pellet inside our apartment to prove my theory, and I don't feel like crawling around the circus maximus looking for one, I can not prove this one way or the other. The fact that it could have happened any time in the past week does not help any.

Not looking forward to dealing with the landlord,
Yami

*N.B. I am not suffering from MPD, thanks for asking. The reason I'm switching back and forth between the singular and plural first-person pronouns in the body of this post is because I have two roommates. They share in different degrees my level of involvement in this little caper, because they are around the apartment in different degrees. In fact, I'm pretty sure that one of them doesn't know about the window yet, because she's rarely here and neither Aerisith nor I have told her yet.
**Because until the painters came, we had several wasps nest on the exterior of our building. It was therefore not unlikely that one might have followed us inside and then gotten stuck in the blinds in a desperate bid for freedom.
***Something particularly to be avoided, in addition to all the obvious reasons for not wanting broken glass in the dinning room, because one of my roommates has a phobia of broken glass.

This Space Still for Rent

2007-10-20T18:55:00.000-07:00

Something I like about my job: the look on people's* faces when they see their diamonds for the first time after they comes back to us from the jeweler. Nothing like the look on a woman's face when I get to tell her that yes, her fiancee really did get that ring for her.

Something I hate about my job: when every person in the store is running as fast as they can serving people, both registers are going full tilt, we have a back log of people waiting to check out, me trying to simultaneously ring something up and tell a co-worker how to fix the randomly not working receipt printer, and people getting antsy because all they want is their ring cleaned and why can't one of you do it for me real fast. Here's a hint for everyone out there: at one o'clock on Saturday afternoon, no one wants to do anything for you for free.

I've got other complaints, but that is one of the bigger ones.

Much has passed since my last post, dear reader.

Charity week came and went. The theme was Bond, James Bond** and the slogan was "the World Has Not Enough". I gave away some of my hard-earned cash monies, and got to watch Father Maguire bust out of jail (twice). Not everyone can use "Soldiers for Christ!" as their battle cry and get away with it. Fewer still can also use "Gondor Lives!" as their declaration of victory after escaping. Needless to say, good times were had by all.

Then Mikhail Gorbachev was the McDurmott lecturer this year. I was able to attend the question and answer session in the gym, but not the main talk (there were only 150 student tickets). He used a few prepared remarks to butter up the audience, answered the questions he was asked tangentially, and had a pretty scathing opinion about US foreign policy. All in all, exactly what one would expect from the last Soviet Premier.

One of my roommate's checks for rent bounced and we very nearly got evicted this week. A little guilt and much stress later and the offender payed the amount of the bounced check plus half a month of accumulated late fees and we were not all kicked to the curb. That is one adventure I never, ever want to have again.

I am changing my major, or more accurately I'm adding to it. I still have some meetings with one or two assorted professors, and some signatures to collect to make the registrar happy, but if all goes according to plan I will be double majoring German/Comparative Literary Traditions with a Concentration in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. This is an impressive sounding degree that will enable me, after graduation, to spend a short and intellectually fulfilling life living in a cardboard box under the Ponte Sisto.

-Yami

*Usually women. Let's face it we all know who really likes the diamonds.
**It's 2007, so the theme was 007, get it?

Back in the Sadle

2007-09-18T13:40:00.000-07:00

That would be a much better title if I liked to ride horses at all.

Anyway, it seems that my attention span for any new project lasts about a week. My little foray into photo blogging did serve its intended purpose and jump me back into the habit of writing daily. Pearl Dust* is very nearly complete, I'm something like three chapters from the end. Then it's time to clean it up and get copies to the various friends who offered to beta read for me. After that, I don't know. I'm thinking of trying to get it published. *knocks on wood*

Today's edition of the University News included a Rome report. I wish I was back there. On that note I bring you this picture from Piazza Novona. The photo was taken sometime around dusk, I think around March or April of '06, by me.

*the novel I started for NaNo last year

If I Were to Become a Stand-up Comedian, This Is the Kind of Material I Would Want

2007-07-06T20:58:00.000-07:00

That is in fact, a sale at a dollar store. I witnessed this in a suburb of Houston, about three years ago. Jenny, Sasha, and Rose saw it as well, and they to will be happy to tell you about it, Les Miserables (we had come down to Houston to see it), and the black maze of Texas death. Those were harrowing times, dear readers, harrowing times, made all the worse by the fact that the windows of Jenny's car would not reliably roll back up once they were rolled down.

Double Header

2007-07-05T20:05:00.001-07:00

For the 4th or July I went and spent the day with family and friends. Since I stayed for fireworks, I didn't get home until late, hence the lack of a photo yesterday. Today I have two to make up for it.

This is from my first, and so far only, attempt to use the fireworks setting on my digital camera. I think the woobly line effect is kind of cool looking, but a google image search turns up well over two million pictures of fireworks that do not look like something went horribly wrong at the silly string factory. That makes me think that maybe my fire-picture-taking-fu could use a little work. I don't think I'm really going to bother with it. This picture is not actually of the 4th of July anyway. It's of the opening party for the World Cup on Strasse der 17 Juni last year in Berlin.
I was happy to be in the States on the 4th this year. Last year, I was overseas at this time. It is such the strange feeling, because outside of this country no one cares. I don't know why that should seem so odd to me, I mean it's not their national holiday, why should people in other countries care? Americans living abroad typically go out of their way to make a party, but for the locals it's just another day.
The picture above was taken on 10-day, and shows the American Embassy in Prague. Especially given how long I was away from home, it was always comforting to find the embassy and know that home wasn't so very far away after all.

This is just to say

2007-07-04T01:42:00.000-07:00

This is just to say that the new Transformers movie is all kinds of awsome.
This 4th of July, remember this lesson on inalianable rights, as taught by a giant robot/semi-truck: "Freedom is the right of all sentiant beings."

Poke Poke

2007-07-03T13:22:00.000-07:00

I'm making yet another attempt to resucitate this blog. We'll see how far I get this time. I havn't been writing as much as I want to lately, here or on anything else, and I aim to fix that. My plan is to post a different picture everyday and a paragraph or two about it. For now, I have more than enough pictures saved on my harddrive to be getting on with, but soon I'll find my camera and take some new ones.

Day 1:
The Egyptian Museum in Berlin has, amongst other cool things, a collection of papyrus. This particular one is relativly recent, for starters it was written on this side of the AD/BC break, sometime in the 7th Century. It is writien in coptic, and is a record of a debate between St. Cyril and a group of pagan philosophers about the sole existance of the Christian God.

Yet Another Crazy Adventure

2007-03-23T20:36:00.000-07:00

Well, I learned something new tonight. Apparently, the big red thing in the cabinet full of duct-work above the stove is a fire extinguisher full of vinegar. If it is set off -- by say, me resting my head against the corner of the vent/hood thing so I can see the pot of pasta that my crazy roommate put on the back burner more comfortably -- there's a loud *POP* and a bunch of vinegar flavored steam as a non-existent grease fire is extinguished.

The campus safety guy didn't know that thing was up there either, until I told him. Their advice was to put in a work order, which I did. The thing is, it's FRIDAY NIGHT. That means, that the earliest anyone can come work on it will be Monday, and then there will be a wait for them to get in the appropriate part. In the mean time, Genesis and I have to clean up a vinegar covered stove. The good news is, we don't have to worry about ants on the stove for a long time now. The bad news is, I think the fire extinguisher may have tripped the circuit breaker in the stove, because now the oven clock is out, and I have no idea how to reset that one.
This is a close up of the stove, and our (ruined) dinner, complete with vinegar-puddles.
This is the culprit, lurking in my cabinetry.

And this is the whole deal, you'll note the newly non-functioning oven-light.

The Die Is Cast

2007-03-02T09:00:00.000-08:00

Well there have been a few major developments here at the apartment this past week.

The first is that I had my interview to be an RA next year. I should know before Spring Break (so before next Friday) if I got the possition or not. I'm nervious, my application looked good, and I had good references, but I was a little shakey at the begining of my interview. The last part of it was not a problem, but the first two or three questions I gave crap answers for, so I don't know. *knocks on wood*

The other big news is that Jenny is done with her THESIS! She printed it off this morning as I was heading to me first class. She'll have turned the thing in before I see her again this afternoon, and returned her library books as well. This morning she made a show of removing all the sticky notes from her references, because she doesn't need them anymore.

Later,
Yami, who will try to post more frequently.

News from the Test Kitchen

2007-02-05T21:19:00.000-08:00

I return after a month long posting hiatus to tell the world about my dinner.

I approach cooking the same way I would approach mad science (or alchemy even, cooking makes about that much sense to me), that is I dive right in and worry about the instructions later. The kitchen is not supposed to have any order to it, I say, otherwise one would not conduct mad science there. I usually prepare dinner ~~by making ramen~~ by starting with some basic ingredient (say, chicken) and adding additional elements (spices if you will) to the dish until I get board or turn the frying pan into gold. Sometimes this works well and I get yummy goodness. Sometimes it works, but ends up nothing like I had originally intended, such as the week before last when I made something akin to funnel cake out of fry bread dough. Sometimes I eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and call it a success because I did not have to call the fire department or poison control.

Tonight's experiment resulted in yummy goodness, I am happy to report. Here's the recipe for Pineapple Honey Curry Chicken Salad, such as I can remember it.

1.)Marinate one chicken breast per person with honey, cilantro, and mild curry. Cut the chicken into chunks so it will absorb more of the marinade per bite, and also cook faster.
2.)When you get to hungry to let it sit any longer, open a can of pineapple and pour enough out enough of the juice to cover the bottom of your frying pan. Turn on the heat (I've got an electric stove, and use five out of a possible ten).
3.)When the juice is hot, add the chicken and the marinade to the pan. Fry it until the chicken is cooked through, adding more juice as necessary. Once I decide its done, I usually continue to cook it until all the remaining liquid has boiled off, since it makes cleaning the pan a lot easier.
4.)Remove the chicken from the pan and set aside while you get the rest of the ingredients together.
5.)In a mixing bowl, add a bag of salad (the leafy kind with that weird purple lettuce and baby spinach thrown in, iceberg lettuce need not apply), feta cheese (the kind I used had Mediterranean spices added, according to the container, as near as I can tell this means little chopped up bits of olive), pecans, and the chicken.
6.)Mix it all up well, and eat it. Have the pineapple from the can you opened earlier for desert. End of story.

The future is a lot closer than I thought

2006-12-04T21:18:00.000-08:00

I have been quite disapointed since the year 2000, that I do not have a flying car, or a space ship, or a telaporter, or any of a number of other cool things that Science Fiction has promised me over the years. This gives me hope at last. God bless America.

Third Time's the Charm

2006-11-06T17:22:00.000-08:00

It's NaNoWriMo time again. I still can not quite believe that this is the third time I've done this. It's Monday, and I'm at 10,046 words, which puts me slightly ahead of the goal for today, but not as far ahead as I would like to be. This year's effort has been christened with the working title of Peal Dust and so far it is going well. *knocks on wood* Here's the one sentence summery: When Sleeping Beauty doesn't get a fairytale ending, a group of gentlemen of fortuine -- who are utterly unsuited for the job -- are called in to save the day. So far it is going pretty well, I had thought that this first bit between the fairy tale prolouge and our hero's arival on the scean would be hard to write, but it has actually been easy going. I just don't know how to tell all of these villagers that they are red-shirts and that most of them will not live to see part two. -_-; I mean, if the teenagers, who go at night to see what is up with the creepy ghost thing on the other side of the vally is, won't die, who can you kill off?

Additional exploration of this subject will have to wait until tomorow, because I have a paper to write for Medeival Lit that is due in another 22 hours. It's hard to analyse poetry that you are absolutly indifferent to.

I'm writing something else so the last word of this post will not be a preposition, so there. :P
-Yami

I'm spoiling my system here...

2006-10-28T21:09:00.000-07:00

Two years, and not one quiz do I post here, and now I go and ruin everything. Way to go me.

Take the quiz at dicepool.com

[This Space for Rent]

2006-10-23T21:55:00.000-07:00

Well another week, and another recording for the UD radio. It's not up yet of corse. The school has to sort out something with its broadcasting liscence. -_- When things finally get up and running I'll tell people.

There's only eight days left until National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) starts again, which would also mark the two year aniversery of this blog. I can't believe I've kept this going that long. I can't believe I'm a junior. I can't believe Italy won the World Cup. There's a lot of things I can't believe. I've got some pretty good ideas for this years NaNo, but I'm not comfortable with my lack of outlining for the second half. I know what has to happen, but only in the broadest sense, like I'm staring at a wall that I know needs to be painted, but I don't know what color to paint it, much less where I hid the brush. I think part of it is that I'm not as familiar with my supporting cast as I have been in previous years. The main character is Aihan once again, and the female lead is one I created for an RPG back in high school, so I have a good enough grasp of her character to be getting on with, its everyone else creating a problem for me.

The good news is that Dr. S., my new favorite proffessor, has agreed to take an excerpted/abridged/edited 10,000 word cutting of my novel as my term paper for Philosophy of Language. Best. Paper. Topic. Ever. Now I defeinatly have motivation to finish this year.

-Yami

Look Ma! i'm on teh Internets!!!!!1

2006-10-16T22:37:00.000-07:00

UD Radio is radio in name only: the last vestiges of a dying technology. Soon campus radio will be remembered only as a quaint tradition we used to practice back in the benighted days of the Eisenhower administration. Soon after that, its name will be changed to UD Podcasts, or whatever new technology will replace this.

Genesis and I recorded the first session of the Groundling Revolution today. Sometime tomorow it ought to go online, and you will all be able to listen to it at http://www.udallas.edu/radio. Make me happy listen to our pitiful efforts to work the computer. Our show is comprised of showtunes, and we started things off with songs about revolutions, or at least really big changes.

It took us two hours to record 45 minutes worth of programing. Hopefully someone will appriciate it.

-Yami

Good News, Bad News

2006-10-10T10:45:00.000-07:00

The good news is that the spider (or whatever it was, I didn't see it) that bit me yesterday does not seem to be of the killer veriety. I am not dead yet, and my arm is no longer all tingly like it was last night.

The bad news is that I do not seem to have developed any super powers. I'll give it another day or two, just in case.

Hal, Hal, Why Hast Thou Foresaken Me?

2006-09-13T10:27:00.000-07:00

Who ever did the wireing in the Student Apartments made some crazy decisions.

We have for instance, not one but two over head lights in the living/dinning room, but the bed room is illuminated only by a single wall-sconce. That's right, the room we live and study in came equiped with a 60 Watt bulb cleverly hidden behind a frosted shade.

We also have a power outlet which is controled by the lightswitch. When the light is off, the outlit has no power. We discovered this the hard way when Genesis turned off the lights and her computer when *whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaam* and shut off with out so much as an 'are you sure about that?' prompt.

The think that is really driving us nuts however is the Internet. We are college students. We live, sleep, eat, and breath online. The school thought it would be funny to install one ethernet outlet for twopeople. We got a spliter from the school, which naturally failed to work. We dragged up the wireless router I used in the quad last year, complete with all the cords and drivers. It failed to work. We hauled out the wirless router Megan used in her appartment last year, and wrangled together all the associated pieces and parts. It failed to work. We called Andrew in, and he worked with it for two hours, and was not able to figure out why on God's green earth it wasn't working. Andrew has promised to return and try again. Stenoh and Pyro have both promised to take a crack at it. We're all strating to fear that this may require a sacrifice to the dark gods before this starts working properly, and have started to compile a list of freshmen no one would miss.

All we want is for both of us to be able to get on line at the same time. Is that to much to ask?

-Yami

Gadeamus Igitur

2006-09-06T10:35:00.000-07:00

Well I’m safely back at school, and things are off to a roaring start. By that I mean things are going well, and my cooking has yet to start any fires, although the olive oil in the skillet likes to hiss. I got my schedule finalized today, and it’s looking like a fun semester.

I’m taking Medieval Literature with Dr. K, and we’re currently reading all sorts of lovely old Anglo-Saxon things including “King Edwin’s Council” and “Caedmon’s Vision”. Also, I have finally learned to spell Medieval on the first go, a truly wonderful thing since I’m concentrating in Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

Then I have German with Herr Dr. E. The topic of this semester is German Culture and History from 1900 to 1918. Last fall, you might recall, I had a course about the Weimar period, which means I’m moving backwards in time at a rate of about 20 years per semester. If this continues, by the time I graduate I’ll have gotten to 1840-1860 which includes the first rounds of revolution, and major literary players like the Brothers Grimm. It also means that in order to study the Goethezeit, I’d have to stay on the six year plan. -_-; Hopefully the trend will be broken. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the German Lit Trads will be offered again next year. Herr and Frau Dr. E both seem nice, and after two days his class is still interesting, and I already have a number of quotes worth remembering.

Principles of American Politics with Dr. Mi seems like a breeze after taking so many higher division courses, but watch me eat those words come mid-term time.

Phil of Language, with Dr. S. sounds really interesting now that I’ve had one class and read the syllabus. I really want to take Linguistics now, hopefully it will be offered again soon. If it’s not, I may petition to have it offered before I graduate.

My fifth class was going to be a politics class about Machiavelli, which would have filled another requirement for Med and Renn. I went to the first class on Wednesday (it’s an hour and a half, MW) and I was there five minutes before the posted start time. I would like to stress that I was not late. Unfortunately, Braniff has these long skinny rooms with the doors at the front, which means that when someone walks in, everyone stares at you. The room was already full of graduate students with beards, none of whom made any noise as I shuffled in to a seat near the front. (All the good spots in the back and by the windows where already gone.) One guy did arrive after me, with the clean shave and the giant coffee mug identifying him as someone who has returned to school for a second degree, but is still working in a field where the grad student beard would not be appropriate. Then Dr. de A arrives, introduces himself and the course and calls roll. I am the only new face to him, and he messes up my name even after I say it for him. Then, he launches into the lecture, begging with “I assume you all have read The Prince” and “You should have read the Dedication, Preface, and first Chapter of Discourses on Livy.” He then proceeds to lecture in a fast, monotone voce about this reading, comparing and contrasting it to similar sections in The Prince, and making what would probably have been very pithy comments if I had any prior knowledge whatsoever on the subject.

I went home and tried to do the reading, and it started to make more sense. I thought about the rest of Wednesday evening. I thought about it all day Thursday. I thought about it most of the day Friday. Then I went to my advisor and talked about changing my schedule. When I pointed out that even though I was taking it on the 4000 level, the course was also listed with at the 7000 level, he conceded that I was probably in over my head. We came up with a couple of options for me, one of which required changing my whole schedule around, and another that required a signature from an instructor to get into an already over-full class. In other words, take either Music of the Western World or History and Theory of Gregorian Chant. I decided to try for Gregorian Chant before the other one. I went to the Registrar for the add/drop form, filled it out, ran over to the music department, and was told by the administrative assistant that Father Ralph would be in by 4:30. I thanked her, came back at 4:30 and talked to Father Ralph. He agreed to let me in the class, even though it was already three people over the class limit. So, I start Gregorian Chant on Monday, and I’m determined to do well, so I don’t make the saintly, 80 year old Hungarian monk regret his decision.

Until later,
Yami

Theater of the Absurd

2006-07-02T12:42:00.000-07:00

In Weimar I spent the afternoon with a couple of guys from the Music Composition course named Glen and Nathan. We were in search of a concert of some sort to attend because Weimar is the center of German high culture and going to concerts is the sort of thing that one does when one visits Weimar. Our search reveals that anything really interesting will be happening next weekend, which doesn’t help us any, so our choices for that night ended up being 1.)a mass by Handel or 2.)an electronic music recital. We weighed our options carefully: Handel didn’t have any particular connection to Weimar, unlike Back or Lizit, both of whom lived there, and a ticket to this concert would cost 12 EUR. The electronic music concert however was free, and was someone’s final project at the Franz Lizt conservatory, and we all kind of liked electronic music, so we went to that.

Now when I think of electronic music, what I have in mind is some sort of techno derivative (alas, I am an uneducated louse who can not differentiate the myriad of techno genres). Since the poster and the information guy at the school both said that a violin would also be played at the concert, we went in with no real expectations for hearing art, but thinking that this would be some sort of techno + violin combination that had a potential to be really interesting.

These people were definitely in the possession of the latest noise making technology. Unfortunately, they got so wrapped up in making all kinds of cool sounds that they forgot to actually write any music. The most entertaining bit was in the last piece when the girl spent about twenty seconds playing a putty knife. Then she picked the poor, abused violin back up and it was back to screeching. As a whole the concert represented everything I hate about avant guarde art and violins. Luckily, we were able to get out the door without talking to anyone, because none of us at enough good will left to even complement the violinist’s dress.

We scooted from the conservatory to the town square, which is the public viewing place in Weimar for the World Cup. We got there about five minutes into the USA-Italy game and were able to snag seats on the fest benches. It was a pro-Italy/I’m-just-here-to-watch-football crowd, but there was a sizable American contingent (mostly FUBiS students) complete with flags and painted faces.

Half time rolls around and the commercials start rolling. I should say commercial. It was for beer. Scenes of suspiciously good looking farm hands harvesting something, probably hops, were cut with scenes of a remarkably good looking man, presumably the land owner/brewer ridding a horse through the fields. The last shot is a family gathered around a table toasting something with glasses full to the brim with beer. Either the sound was turned off, or it was just down very low, because I could not hear the thing. This played through twice, while a band set up on the stage in front of the big screen.

It turned out that the band was a South Korean group playing modern songs on traditional instruments. They were stopped in Weimar or a visit before going on to Leipzig to play for the South Korea/France game. They weren’t bad, I might even say that they were good, except that their drummer had no rhythm at all, and rhythm is pretty much the most desirable characteristic of any percussion player.

I couldn’t really see the band very well, because it was about dusk by that time and the powers that be decided not to turn any lights on for the stage. The band was back-lit though, because the screan behind them was still playing the beer commercial on a continuous loop. Off on my right I could see the small TV in the beer tent, where the usuall half-time replays and analysis were running. Behind me there was a larger than life statue of Schiller and Goethe looking on. This random South Korean band playing bizare pop music was playing its heart out and the whole time this beer commericial keeps playing over and over and over and over and over and over behind them. It passed the realm of advertising, went through propaganda, and then straight on into absurdity.

No one thought it was as funny as I did.

[If I cared, I'd find some sort of logical transition to put here, but since when have I cared?] Berlin, and the rest of the country too, is getting more and more Cup Crazy with every day. Take for example the victory dances of German coach Jurgen Klinsmann: in the first game against Costa Rica, he just did this little fist pumping number for each goal. Over the course of the past three weeks this has gotten more and more elaborate, to the point that last Friday, when Miroslav Klose scored the tying goal in the game against Argentina, Klinsmann ran the length of the bench, kicking up a wedge of turf in the process, and jumped into the arms of one of the substitutes, before turning around and hugging the assistant coach as well. I’m getting into this as well, I’ve learned most of the words to the chorus of “Weltmeister” and the “Finale in Berlin” song gets funnier every time I hear it.

In attending* different games I’ve noticed that the fans of the different countries all cheer differently. The Italian cheer book consists of one verb (forzza, which means GO!), thee nouns (Italia, Ragazzi, and Azzuri, Italy: guys, and the blues, respectively), and inarticulate screaming. The goal for them is to make as much noise as possible for as long as possible. The Mexicans have a few chants, most of which I can’t understand because my Spanish vocabulary is all about food, but their favorite is the one where they spell out Mexico. For the USA, when we remember that we have a soccer team (which isn’t often) we just chant “U! S! A! U! S! A!” for as long as we feel like doing so, this is the way we cheer for every sport except football and basketball.

When the name of your country is Deutschland however, spelling doesn’t make for a good chant. The do however have a very long book** of catchy chants. Unfortunately, it can be hard to understand what exactly they’re saying since as a rule no more than 30 people are ever using the same chant at the same time. So to help you blend in with the crowd of German Football Fanatics, I’ve put together a do it yourself list of phrases which can be assembled in almost any order to make an acceptable German cheer:

*Deutschland
*Olé!
*Sha-la-la
*Weltmeister (world master = world cup champions, in German the World Cup is the Weltmeisterschaft, lit. world mastership)
*Schwarz-Rot-Gold (black, red, and gold, the national colors)
*Seig or Seiger (victory or victor)
*Champions
*Tor (goal, which also means gate, many puns are bandied about at the Brandenberger Tor, where the fan mile begins, puns are a major part of most German jokes)
*So schön’ (so pretty/cute/beautiful)
*Any explicative starting with S
*The name of any player

Just mix those together with your favorite adjectives and conjunctions, and any conjugation of the verb sein (to be) and you have a cheer. If you really want to get fancy, sing it to the tune of “Michael Row the Boat Ashore”, “My Darling Clementine”, or “Stars and Stripes Forever”. Here are some examples:

The olé song*** (German version): Olé, olé, olé, olé, wir sind die Champions, olé! (Olé, olé, olé, olé, we are the champions, olé!)

For the big goal scorers: Lu! Lu! Lu! Lukas Podolski!
Miroslav Klose! *clap clap* *clap* *clap clap*
Michael Ballack! *clap clap* *clap* *clap clap*
For the goalie: LehrmanLehrmanLehrmanLehrman or
Hans Lehrman *clap clap* *clap* *clap clap*
The favorites: Deutschland, Deutschland, Deutschland, Deutschland!
Tor!
Berlin! Berlin! Finale in Berlin!

If you’ve got that pretty well handled, then you might also try to lend your hand to taunting your defeated opponents. When a player on another team is sent off with a red card, yell Auf Weidersehen (good-bye) in your best taunting sing-song. When Germany wins, parade through the streets and sing: “Schade [Gegeners Name] alles ist vorbei! Alles ist vorbei! Alles ist vorbei!” ([Tough] shit [insert name of opponent] it’s all over! It’s all over! It’s all over!) or “Geht’s schön’ nach Hause!” (It’s nice at home!)

That’s just the basic guide. If you get out to the middle of the crowd and you can’t remember any of this, then you can’t go wrong with inarticulate screaming and wild clapping. Booing the referee and yelling “Blind!” (the word is the same in German) can’t hurt either. At the end of the game, don’t forget to sing the olé song and Queen’s “We are the champions”

-bis später, Yami

*OK, watching them on TV with thousands of other people
**Except it’s not actually published anywhere
***In the States, the only word to this song is Olé.

Prauge Report

2006-06-29T06:36:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I went to Prauge, the last of the group trips. It was fun, and nice to see the places I visited back in March, now that they are actually doing business.

A couple guys brought a German/Czech phrase book, which was a source of amusement on the trip down there*. The first three questions the book teaches the reader to ask are (and I would like to stress that I am not making this up, I acually read the page with my very own eyes): 1.)Are you married? 2.)Do you have any children? 3.)Do you have a sister?

The cover of this book featured two guys, one playing a string bass and one playing somesort of woodwind instrument, who are evedintly supposed to be folk musicians. The think is, on Saturday, we saw these guys playing on the Charles Bridge. This is one of the main pieces of evidence for the "Charles Bridge = Trap for Lost Souls" theory. Obviously, these guys offended an evil sorcerous (or more likely an alchimist, this is Prauge after all) with their alleged Folk Music and were cursed to remain on the Bridge for all eternity unable to leave it: not to the west bank, not to the east bank, and definatly not to the next life. The second piece of supporting evidence for this theory comes from one of the two tour guides the group had. She led her crowd through the castle, down the hill, to the Charles Bridge... and disapeared. This poor wandering spirit is doomed to stay in Mala Strana, leading groups of English-speaking ammature photagraphers around, with an umbrella raised high. But she will never be able to cross the river to freedom, oh no, because the Charles Bridge has trapped her.

The other guide, the one I was assigned to, was entirely gold. She had a very dark (fake) tan, lighter around her eyes, where sunglasses have given her a sort of raccoon face. She had very pale, shiny makeup. Her hair was bleached blonde. All her close were shades of beige. Her finger nails had gold polish. I could not look directly at her when we were outside because she actually shone in the sun. On the other hand, it was really easy to find her in a crowd.

-Bis Spaeter,
Yami

*a trafic jam and a long wait at the boarder turned our 7 hour trip into a 10 hour trip. :(

Reporting Live from Weimar

2006-06-16T14:46:00.000-07:00

I'm on the second of three weekend trips organized by the University, this one to beutiful, historic, tourism-driven Weimar. The bus driver for our little trip was quite the entreprenuer: when he wasn't driving us around he sold drinks -- water, fruit juice, and beer. The list of places where it is not sociable acciptable to drink in Germany is quite short. -_-; Places that would be alcohol free in America are not here, such as Burger King or a suburban bus at 8 o'clock in the morning on a work day. The security check at the Brandenberg Gate is concerned with keeping out nutcases with AK-47s and glass containters, not drinks.

Speaking of the Brandenberg Gate, the reason there is now a security check neat it is beacuse it is one end of the Fan Mile. As the name implies, one mile of 17 Juli Straße (from the gate to the Victory Column in Tiergarten) has been blocked off to automobile traffic, giant TV screens have been set up so ticketless pleblians (like me) can watch the games of the World Cup (in German the Welt Meisterschaft, or WM). Also, food is sold there for almost double the normal price. There are other public viewing areas, like the Addidas World of Fottball (a scale model of the Olympic Stadium), the Sonz Center in Potsdamer Platz, and the Kultur Brauerei, for example, but the main advantage of the Brandengerg Gate is tha admitance is free, and everz place else either charges zou 3 EUR admittance, or (in the case of a Knipe) insists that you buy a drink.

When I'm not watching footbal or in class... that doesnät leave much time for much except sleeping. Fortunatlz, my classes make frequent excursions into the city.

With the German class I spent a day exploring the neighborhood of Prinzlauerberg*, which is home to the Kultur Braueri and Berlinäs best Currywurst Stand. That afternoon (a week ago Wednesday) I also went on a river -boat tour of the citz on the Spree, so there was a nice view of the Reichstag, the new Parlimentarz Library, and the Tiergarten. Then, this past Wednesday, we went to the Gorki Theater (in Mitte, near the Museum Island), one of the 4 state threaters in Berlin. We had a short tour of the threater** and spent the rest of the day doing a workshop on Kafka's Amerika which was the play being performed that evening. I thought about going to see it but 1.) I donät like Kafka well enough to sit through a 2 hour play without an intermission and 2.) the Germany/Poland game was that eveing. I'm happy with my choice, it was a really exciting game. :)

With my literature class, weäve been making a small expidition every day that hasbeen more or less related to the topic. We read a short storz by Kleist and then went to his grave. We read a poem by a Jewish yuthor and then went to the Jewish Museeum. We read a poem by Rilke about a panther and when to the zoo in time to see the big cats get fed. Today we were reading works by the expresionists and the escursion was to the museum of expresssionist at. I was unfortunatlz unable to go beacue the morning class went long, and I had to run in order to meet the group foing to Weimar.

I also spent a day in Dresden, thanks to the University, where I took a walking tour of the city, went to the old masters gallary (I am now in lover with the work of Gerrard Dou), and saw the crown jewels of Saxony.

As ever, I promise to have pictures up really soon, but I canät upload any until I get back to Berlin.

-Later

P.S. forgive me if there are a lot of Z's where there should be Y's or # or ä instead of '. I'm using the computer at the hostel and the German Keyboard is set up oddly.

*but if you really want to sound like a Berliner you'll say Prinz'berg or P'berg
**which didnät take all that long since it's really small, it only seats about 400, as it was origanly built for choral concerts

I love IKEA

2006-06-08T01:51:00.000-07:00

I’m settled in to my room in the Studentenheim here in Berlin. Berlin is made up of a lot of neighborhoods which have grown up and fused together over the years to form one massive city of 3.4 million people or so, but each neighborhood also clings fiercely to its own identity. I’m in the part of town called Stegliz. It’s a quiet residential neighborhood in the south-west part of the city about half-way to Potsdam. Dad tells me it’s in the old American Sector.

I have my own room, and I share a kitchen and 1.5 bathrooms with five other rooms. There is one more American, Ben, who is also in the Summer Course, and the others are full time University Students at FU*. There are two Germans (Raif and Suzi), one guy from Morocco** (Madhi)***, and one guy from Cyprus (name unknown, lets call him Mr. X until I get around to asking). I’m not sure where the Greek girl or the Japanese guy actually live, but they’re over here all the time as well.

The Unknown Heathen With the Ukulele* (lets call him Mr. UHWU) was at it again the deay before yesturday, when I first wrote this post. Apparently the rain did not discourage him in the least. As soon as the clouds passed on I heard that infernal *plink, plink, plink* floating in on air that had just been scrubbed free of cottonwood.** One of my suitemates decided to combat this racket by turning on the stereo in the kitchen, and managed to find a station playing jazz. As long as I concentrated on the saxophone it was pleasant, but as soon as I let my mind wander the twitch in my left eye came right back.

Tuesday was the first day of my literature class. The title of the course is “Boarders and Crossings: German Literature from Romanticism to the Present”. The class itself is quite small. Dr. Peggy is the leader of the Vanderbilt contingent here at FUBiS, she’s taught this class for several years in the past, seems quiet knowledgeable, and is very enthusiastic. Including me, there are four students in the class (the class on Understanding the EU sucked up most of the other students). The other three are Vivian, Jen, and Bridget (I’ll call her Bridg to avoid confusion with the one at UD, my roommate last year). Vivian was sick Tuesday – she ate a bad Doener*** somewhere and got some sort of stomach bug – Dr. Peggy called at lunch to see how she was doing and told her to stay home and get some sleep. We all want to know which stand she went to so we don’t go there ourselves.

Jen did something to her ankle and left at lunch to try to go to a doctor, didn’t return in the afternoon, and wasn’t answering her phone, so when it came time to go on our excursion into the city it was just me, Bridg, and Dr. Peggy. For class today, one of the texts was a short story called the Marquise of O— by von Kleist, an early German Romantic*, so this afternoon we took advantage of a break in the clouds to go out to the Wannsee** and see his grave and the place where he committed suicide.*** It was pretty (the lake, not the grave so much, although that wasn’t hideous, just hard to find) and Dr. Peggy and Bridg took pictures, which they promise to send to me. We’ll see how that goes.

After class my friend Joy (who is in my German class) and I made a run to the nearest of Berlin’s three IKEAs. The apartments came with a lot of things. I have a desk with a drawer that locks, a lamp, and a bed which is too low to the ground to slide Big Bertha under it*, a duvet with cover, a couple pillows, a fitted sheet the standard IKEA cabinet/closet, and 6 wall mounted shelves that I can adjust along their little tracks. I was also given a frying pan, a sauce pan with lid, one butter knife, one spoon, one fork, one tea spoon, one lunch plate, one saucer and one T-cup. That’s a good start to a room, but there are some things missing. Like a spatula for actually cooking things with, or a knife capable of cutting something that is not butter, or a cup that can hold more than two sips of liquid at a time. Also while the duvet is nice, its June, and the weatherman swears it will get warm soon. Right now we’re suffering from a freak cold snap that has left temperatures hovering around 50 degrees. Of course, the weatherman also said it would be sunny on Tuesday, which it was, when it wasn’t raining. If the promised summer conditions ever do materialize a down filled duvet will be far too hot, even with the seersucker cover. For these, and many more little things like that, Joy and I decided we did need to go to a store and buy some stuff. But we did not want to spend a lot of money (mostly because we don’t have much to spend, but also we didn’t want to have to worry about not being able to take it back to the States with us). A short moment of thought (“Where can I buy hangers really cheap?”) and a consultation with the Internet led us to the Templehof IKEA.

Making a list and bringing a friend are to important things when going to this place. If you have a list and stick to it, you can control your spending easily. If you have a friend, then you can split the cost of things that are only sold in packs of more than one. The IKEA steak knifes for instance only come in packs of six. Neither of us need six steak knifes. We each needed one, but for 2 EUR a piece we could split a pack and have three apiece. [If any other FU students see this and need a steak knife, come find me. I have two extras that I could sell you real cheap.] And for that price I won’t feel guilty about having spent the money when the time comes to jettison most of this stuff.** The extra-basic plain white plastic power strips come in packs of two. I don’t kneed two of the things. I don’t even need all eight of the outlets that are on one. I just need a way to plug the lamp that came with the room, the cell phone charger, and my computer in at the same time, and some moron decided that each room in the Studentenheim only needed one plug (so only two devices could be used simultaneously). However Joy and I split the pack, and for my share of 2.50 EUR I know have a surplus of five outlets.

I spent just under 50 EUR, and now my room and kitchen are both useable and I have no qualms what so ever about leaving all this crap here when the time comes. If I decide that I really like something, I can by another one just like in the IKEA in Frisco when I get home.

-bis spaeter

*die Freie Universitaet. I am not making this up. I might even have to shell out the 12.50 EUR for a T-shirt, if I can figure out when the University store is open.
**more specifically, from Casablanca, he says he hasn’t seen the movie, but everyone always asks about it
***if that’s not the correct spelling of it, it’s totally my fault, he even spelled it when he introduced himself

*or ukelele, dictionary.com says both spellings are correct
**an even bigger menace than football hooligans in this part of the city
***basically a gyro on a bun instead of a pita, this wonderful meal has been spread all over Europe by Turkish immigrants, and Berlin has the third largest Turkish population in the world. Constantinople is the first largest, which begs the question, what is the second largest Turkish city?
More importantly, could I buy a Doener there for less than 1.50 EUR?

*a literary movement which has nothing to do with being in love
**one of the many lakes in the area
***he lived in Berlin, in the winter, during the period in which the French occupied what is now Germany, he was deeply in debt and the English Romantics had already taken all the good places to live in Rome. He did have a pretty depressing life.

*according to the scale at the Milan airport she’s 7 kilos overweight, at a rate of 6 EUR for every kilo over. That’s better than Ryan Air. They charge 8 EUR. Bertha is going to loose some weight for the return trip, even if it means leaving my toothbrush here and wearing four shirts on the plane home.
**Bertha is full, and they won’t let you carry steak knifes on airplanes. They show them in the little picture of sharp objects that you're not allowed to have

I hate the Ukelele

2006-06-06T05:24:00.000-07:00

After an exausting Italian sojurn with Mom and Kathi in Rome and Florence, I have arrived safely in Berlin. I'll have more details to follow soon, but for now, a note on musical instruments.

At UD, the random instrument that you occassionaly hear around campus is the bagpipes.* We have one piper and he practices in the woods near the Art Village. Here, there is a guy who plays the Ukelele. For two hours. The same song. Over and over and over and over. The music sort of worms its way into your head and pitches a tent there, so even after the finaly stops it bounces around your head going "plink plink plink". If I didn't think it would have bothered my suitmates I would have played my own music loudly, but my headphones are broken and I had to settle for nice pretty soft music. It was an improvement, but only just.

Bis Spaeter,
Yami

*and loud Tejano music from concerts at Texas Stadium

Homeward bound

2006-05-16T10:04:00.000-07:00

I'm coming home.

I'll be in Dallas Wednesday night.

London bridge is falling down, falling down...

2006-05-10T12:41:00.000-07:00

Actually, I've completely failed to go to London Bridge. I did cross a bridge today, and it was in London, but it was Blackfriars Bridge. Why did I cross the bridge? To get to the otherside, because that's where the Globe is.
I saw Coriolanus, which I had never seen nor read before, but I now heartily recomend. (Seriously, go get out your copies of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare and read it, I'll wait. ... Done yet? OK, moving on.) I was a groundling, and payed £7* for the privalige, which is 1,400% inflation from the Bard's time. I may get over this eventually. One of the many things that I thought was well done about this performance was the use of the space. The pleblian characters were frequently down on the ground, mingling with the audiance while the patricians were striding about the stage, speachify-ing.

I'd say that there will be pictures... but there won't be. I snuck a couple of the inside of the theater before the performance began, but you're not allowed to record the performance**.

Tommorow I'm heading back to Rome, the land of really cheap food (and the peasents rejoice). I like London, but with the Dollar/Pound exchange rate what it is*** I can't afford to stay any longer. That and I told Mikey that I'd be back on campus Friday to get the rest of my stuff.

(Almost) on the road again,
Yami

*Aw, look: the cute little British keyboard has a key for both the Pound and Dollar signs.
**That's true of most plays come to think of it.
***a little over two dollars to the Pound

Those Crazy Mensa ladies

2006-05-08T12:35:00.000-07:00

From the air, England looks a bit like Kansas or nebraska with smalle fields an more frequent towns. in the plane, I race over the ground like a Titan over a Persian carpet, covering seven leauges with every rapid stride. From this heigt, the countryside is unmoving, as i dance down towards it balacning on first one arm then the other in my spiral. I right myself, and then with nary a bump the plane touches down: first the back wheels and within the heartbeat the front. Teh runway grumbles as the vehical slows to a mortal's pace. My gum has lost its flavour and my ears are popping.

***

Aside from the plane being an hour late because of a weather related delay last night - it was a nice flight to London. As a final send off the Mensa packed us all breakfastes. Breakfasts. Breakfasti. What's the plural of breakfast? So, I was well provided for on the plane and did not have to buy any of the over-priced food from the flight attendants.

The sack lunch they always made us for fild trips consisted of:
*two sandwiches (types varried, no selection, take what you get or trade with a friend, there was usally quite a market trying to get rid of the cicken with lettuce and nothing else)
*a fruit (an orange or an apple depending on what was handy)
*a bag of chips (usually the Italian version of white chedder cheettos, only without the white chedder, or the cheetto-y packaged artificial food goodness)
*some sort of desert (usually these bizare fake-chocolate-covered, oranged-flavored, soggy sponge cake bars that noebody liked)
*a bottle of water
*a can of coke

Breakfast was always:
*sausage (fried in olive oil)
*bacon (really strips of procutto fried in olive oil, which sort of looks like bacon from a distance)
*eggs (allegedly scrambled, but judging by the complaints of the people foolish enough to eat them, not remotly like the American dish of the same name. Olive oil was involved in their production)
*has browns (which looked suspiciously like left-over scalloped potatoes fried in olive oil)
*random flavors of yougurt (not olive oil flavored, but they did make up for it with the coffee and cereal flavors, which you should not under any circumstances actually eat)
*the same four types of creal (coco pufs, rice puffs, frosted flakes with out the frosting which I gues would just be flakes, and granola)
*whatever pastries they felt like putting out (I never had the same filling in my cornetto two days in a row, they one thing they had in common was that they were all covered with enough powdered sugar to blind a persuing ninja team and allow ou to escape#)
*fruit (the same selection offered at all the other meals)
*mineral filled tap water (takes some getting used to, better with ice)
*any of three varriations on orange juice
*some truly awful coffee
*never enough milk to go around, partly due to our love of cereal and partly due to the badness of the coffee (no one was man enough to drink it straight)
If this sounds like a lot to go around, bear in mind that the portions were tiny: the sereal bowles had about the smae carrying capacity as the tea cup I got in Salzburg. The 'plates' which we were supposed to use wee actually sauscers for the tea cups (which the mensa had pressed into service as coffee mugs). If you were foolish enough to try to grab seconds on anything not liquid (except the milk, which was out anyway) or do something radical like take two pastries then you would get the look and emidiatly feel the need to amend your life and take religous orders.

Now, I'm sure the question nagging in the bak of all your minds is 'How did those maniacs in the Mensa combine breakfast with their sack lunches to make everyones last meal?##) Although I good second choice would be 'How did she get here from talking about airplanes?' The answer to the second question is 'Isn't stream of conciousness, however its spelled, fun?' The answer to the 1st question is:
*one sandwich (ham and cheese, no mayo, there never is, allthough the bread apeared to have had a close encounter with some olive oil)
*one muffin (no powdered sugar, am worried about attacks of ninja/gypses, as I have no way to defend myself)
*one apple
*one box of appricot juice
*one can of coke

Arn't the Mensa ladies cute? But what do you expect from a group that made us a desert so big that it could not fit through the door?###

Reporting live from London,
Yami

#You have to watch out for ninjas in Rome, they're quite a menace. Or maybe I mean gypsies are a menace and ninjas are spies from feudal Japan. I get confused on that sometimes. The point is, you don't want either one following you, and you can use the powdred sugar from your pastry to cover your escape.]
## or form Voltron
### not kidding, I have pictures of it, which I'll post when I get the chance, which may not be until I reach Berlin

All Quiet on the Due Santi Front

2006-05-05T20:20:00.000-07:00

Well, the buses have departed with the hoards for the gorup flight. Me, I have finaly rescued my ticket home from the clutches of the business office, which has been holding onto it all semester. Unfortunatly, I won't be able to use it until the 15th of July and even then, I have to start in Berlin. Clearly, I have more adventuring to do.

More later. Right now, its nap time. Hopefully the cats will wake me up when its time to go to London.

Done and Done

2006-05-04T08:12:00.000-07:00

Well finals are over, and primal screams of an ephemeral combination of joy, victory, frustration, and rage have left the throats of one and all. My roomates and I have taken great joy in throwing away every hand out we have been given all year one at a time. The room looks like it has been hit with a very selective white paper tornado. Packing has also begun in earnest as everyone has realized that the buses are leaving for the airport (alas, I won't be on it) at 4 o'clock in the morning, and we all seem to have accumulated a lot of stuff.

One last pull through my notes turned up two more worth while quotes.

The first is from Dottoressa Lytle, the director of Student Life, who's job is mainly to worry about us: “Watch when you’re crossing the street and be careful when you’re sitting on bridges.”

The second is from Dr. Stibora, about Jesus and Peter, he paraphrases the Gospel a bit: “I’m changing your first name. You’re no longer Simon, you’re new name is Rock.”

-Yami

Tradition, tradition

2006-05-03T03:08:00.000-07:00

One of UDs most beloved tradtions has crossed the ocean with us, and slowly it begins to take root in Rome: the midnight pancake breakfast the night before finals. Our professors and the Student Life staff made and served pancakes for all of us. I hadn't realized just how much I had missed those little things until they served them. Granola and yogurt is all well and good, but it is nothing compared to pancakes. Also, it was the first meal I've had in this country that did not include olive oil. Although I suspect that if the Mensa ladies had cooked it, then olive oil would have found its way into the meal anyway.

And now for something completly different:
It’s finals week here in Rome, which means its time for the last round of funny professor quotes:

Dr. Flusche, Art and Arch:
On the church of San Clamente, the current building was built in c1100, which is not old at all for Rome, but older than America by about 600 years: “That’s pretty good for us, it’s like 900 years old – we don’t have much except grass that is that old.”

Dr. F is famous for not proofreading any of the handouts she gives us, in one case she had two different typos for the word ‘artworks’ on the first page of one packet: “Artiworks – that’s like what people do when they sew sequins on their clothes… Artoworks –that’s when you sew really big sequins on your clothes.”

On Pope Julian II: “He was not a particularly religious guy, which was sort of normal for Renaissance popes.”

Michelangelo wanted to be an artist, but his family disagreed: “Michelangelo’s father beats him, his uncle beats him, they didn’t seem to beat it out of him.”

Talking about the state of Michelangelo’s clothes, remember, she’s been overseas for a while: “There was no Fee-Breeze back then, or whatever that stuff is called.”

On God, as seen in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: “These huge muscles of God, rippling beneath his pink outfit.”

On why Mary is sort of off to the side in the Last Judgment: “If you have to pray to the Virgin for intercession at the moment of the Last Judgment, its too late. There’s not much she can do for you at that point, so make your appointment early.”

On Michelangelo: “I wouldn’t say having fun, because I’m not sure that ever happened to him.”

On the restoration of the Sistine Chapel: “A huge debate broke out in the art history world, and that could get ugly.”

I really don’t remember how this one came up, other than it was in the class on Michelangelo: “Of course there were exceptions, this is Italy you can always get around the rules.”

On Caravaggio’s ‘Self-Portrait as a sick Bacchus’: “This isn’t Bacchus the joyful guy getting drunk, this is Bacchus the slightly hung-over.”

Dr. F also doesn’t always put the slides together correctly, more than one work has been shown to us upside down, or flipped over, or sideways, and she usually just takes it in stride: “This tendency… to paint paintings sideways *fixes slide* … gets him in trouble.”

On Caravaggio in general: “I like to call him the bad boy of the Baroque.”

On Cardinal Scipione Borghese: “He looks like the cardinal, if you’re going to choose one, that you want to have a martini with.”
“In addition, Cardinle Scipione Borghese had the worlds largest collection of pornography… Which was sort of a trendy hobby then, I suppose it could be now.” ‘
On a sculpture of the baby Jupiter playing with a satyr and a goat that Bernini made when he was eight or nine: “Yeah, kind of makes you feel like a looser.”

On Bernini’s Pluto and Persephone: “Borghese liked it so much when they get it, they give it away.”

On Bernini: “I call him the first rock star.”

On a slide of Michelangelo’s David which was in backwards: “You’ll remember that Michelangelo breaks from the earlier Florentine tradition, in that he does it backwards.”

Dr. Moran, Lit Trad III:
On the Frogs, which makes fun of the tragedians: “When Aristophanes writes this play, Euripides’ body is barely cold.”

On Hamlet: “I’m going to read Hamlet, because I want to.”

On campaign adds: “Have you noticed the adds all over Rome with the smiling Communists?”

Hamlet is 30, and yet he is still in school: “So maybe Hamlet’s one of those perpetual graduate students?”

Hamlet dresses in all black: “He’s the Johnny Cash of Elsinore.”

On King Lear: “The play wants to confuse you.”
“I’m not trying to turn you into nihilists. I promise, nothing, nothing, nothing. The Latin is nihil.” (Trust me, it was funny when he said, he just got more and more demented as he went on, and than became serious abruptly in the last sentence there.)

Someone made a comment relying on a very ordered view of the world: “You only said that because you go to UD and you have to spend lots of time reading Aristotle during your philosophy classes.”

There’s an Italian military instillation 20 minutes down the road sort of built around Ciampino airport (or maybe the airport’s built in the base, who knows) and every now and then their jets fly really low over campus, shaking the windows in the basement: “They didn’t drop a bomb. Those are my last words.”

A random siren alarm thing was going off outside: “I don’t think it’s an air-raid warning.”

Dr. Stibora, Theology

“Before we move on to Aquinas, I’d like to say a final word on the greatness of Texas. It will take more than one word.”

On Aquinas: “He thinks you don’t have to sit down and have a cappuccino with God in order to really know Him.”

Usually he stands in more or less one area to lecture, but one day he was really lively: “I’ve been pacing up and down all morning because I only woke up 30 minutes ago and I want to stay awake.” Further questioning revealed that he’d been up till 2:30 the night before prepping for class and had slept through his alarm clock.

Aquinas has five proofs of the existence of God, we spent most of a class on one of them: “Let’s keep going. We have 4 left and only 10 minutes.”

Nothing can make itself: “I would have to exist before myself in order to make myself.”

“So we take Bud as the absolute minimum standard for beer: that than which nothing worse can be?” (God = that than which nothing greater can be imagined, according to Boetheus and Aquinas, both of whom are conspicuously silent on the subject of beer.)

Sure it’s theoretically possible that the universe developed beings with rational thought by coincidence, but do you really believe it? In theory, its possible to shuffle a deck of cards and have it come out in order, but if you see someone do it, you suspect that a person stacked the deck, not that its chance. “So a deck of cards is all you need to prove that God exists.”

On portrayals of the Trinity in art, he drew on the board to illustrate his point: “You’ve always got god the Father up there with a beard, and the Holy Spirit is some sort of bird, and here’s the Son, it’s Lent so he’s frowning because he’s doing penance.”

A paper airplane was used as a demonstration and then thrown away, to our protests: “You guys got too quickly attached to that plane.”

On natural law; his attempts to encourage class participation ware stymied by our collective desire not to say anything remotely inappropriate. Ever. Especially not in class: “Come on guys, its been on your mind since you were 11. I can’t be the only one. The answer is SEX!”

On the papacy at the time of the Reformation: “There hasn’t been a pope who’s first name was Saint since 1294.” that guy abdicated after less than a year as well

On indulgences: “As soon as money gets attached to anything in the Church, we immediately have a train wreck.”

According to Luther: “Women are the sure road to perdition.”

It really doesn’t matter what this was in reference to, because it’s Dr. Stibora saying it: “Yipee!”

On Calvin: “…As his system ushered most of us, without our will directly into hell.”

On the purposes of the course evaluations: “And to help my chairman, who has no dealings with me at all across the ocean. Otherwise I just say that I’m great and it’s great.”

On how to fill out the course evaluation: “My name, because some of you apparently still haven’t learned it, is S-T-I-B-only one- O-R-A.”

Dr. Hadley, Phil of Man:
“I’m a professional academic, so when people say ‘that’s academic’ I get sad. Sometimes I cry.”

Our basketball team lost to the Italians: “It’s not American to participate and enjoy, it’s American to win. In fact, to crush them, they’re just Italians man, come on.”

Sewer systems are quite and amazing invention, and since we should count our blessings: “Count your sewer systems.”

On how your mind can play tricks on you: “Yesterday, I thought the soccer field was on fire. I had not been drinking.”

“I was just about to reveal something about my 3rd grade teacher that perhaps shouldn’t be said.” Now we’re all dying to know what it was.

“I am not… giving in… to the sleepiness.”

On how your mind plays tricks on you: when you stick a pen in a glass of water the refraction makes it look like the pen is bent, he was performing this demonstration, except he didn’t have a glass of water, he was just waving a pen around.: “It’s broken, it’s whole, it’s broken, it’s whole, try it at home.”

Something about the difference between humans and animals: “I’m not sure whales do this, just go with me on this.”
“The turtle whispers to you ‘be strong.’”
“It would be helpful if dolphins were more consistent.”

On Nietzsche’s life: “Nietzsche said ‘God is dead’ so God said ‘Nietzsche is crazy.’”

“I hate to make things all uncertain for you, but that’s philosophy.”

On the monumental use of history, using the past to inspire yourself to future greatness: “Have you ever aced a test? Surely you have, you may have to interpret that metaphorically.”

Nietzsche is big on strength of will and self-control: “Can you say no to something? Can you be strong in the sense of say taking down an antelope? I don’t think you could, but it would be fun to see you try.” *laughs manically, then abruptly serious, he turns to the side door* “OK, release the antelope.”

“I want to be an animal, leaping about, frolicking in the field.”

Quoting a line from Nietzsche, in his best animal-voice: “’Becaaause I ahhlwaays forgeeht whaat I waahnted to saahy.’ I’m assuming it’s a goat.
Then Cesar did the line in his Kermit the Frog voice: “Nietzsche didn’t have the Muppets to learn from.”

On food: “Pasta’s at the top of the menu because its so easy to catch.”

“Pray to the sheep god that the wolves don’t come tonight.”

We were dividing up into small groups to discuss some of Nietzsche’s aphorisms: “Martin, you lead the group about being misunderstood.”

One of Dr. Hadley’s pet peeves is people who don’t enumerate their points in there essays, which is most people except Nietzsche: “He has enumerated his points. Well done Fredrick.” *claps*

A question was raised about the front gate, which didn’t stop thieves form coming in over the back wall:
“What is the point of that gate?”
“To make it difficult for us to get in or out.”

On Nietzsche’s view of the relationship between man and the world: “The world’s a dead-beat dad.”

They were testing a new security system on the last day of class, which meant that the lecture was constantly being interrupted by buzzing noises from outside. “We’ve got a new security system. It’s working apparently. It’s running your lives.”

The end of the last lecture: “I’d ask to have a group hug, but I’m already known as the hippy on the faculty, so I won’t do that.”

Dr. Hatlie, West Civ I:

On the way the Romans learned from the people the conquered: “When they go to Gaul the Frenchmen don’t really have much to teach them, to tell you the truth.”

On how the Greece that Rome conquered was not Greece in its hay-day: “They didn’t get the A-team, they got the C-team.”

On the invention of political partied in the Roman Republic: “You and I are used to partied: you’ve got Republicans, Democrats, Communists, Green People, etc.”

On street crime in the Late Republic: “Everyone has a knife in their toga.”

On Caesar’s take-over of the government: “It’s an aggressive tactic, but it ends up failing rather miserably, as he ends up rather dead as a result.”

On the battle of Actium: “Mark Anthony is totally inebriated, he has been drinking heavily for decades.”

On Ovid’s Art of Love, and the end of class: “Most of it is the lead up, how to trap a woman and get her to love you, and that’s where we’ll end today.”

On Augustus: “We’re all equal, but he’s slightly more equal than everybody else.”

On the problems with Rome in the time of Constantine: “… and full of the proletariat of the sort of lower class people.”
On the fall of Rome: “The scourge of Europe, a gentleman by the name of Attila.”

St. Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine contains rules for Christians reading pagan texts: “Think of those early Christian martyrs: they’d be rolling in their catacombs by now.”

Local culture in the early middle ages, most people never went further than 9 miles from their house: “You woke up in the morning and thought, gee can I really do 10 miles today? Nooo.”

On Theodric, one of the Ostrogoth kings: “Theodric, although he routinely executes some of his highest ministers, is a very reasonable person.”

“When you have to cover 2000 years, the last 500 years sort of get squeezed.”

On how territory was divided up in the Middle Ages, basically you just declared yourself to be the ruler of your own land: “So, I own North Dakota.”

Vikings conquered most of Europe: “So, this is very, very bad news.”

On feudalism: “It’s like a pyramid scheme in a certain way.”

Important themes in the early middle ages, he skipped directly from the crusades to the emergence of vernacular languages: “It’s completely different from what I as just talking about.”

On why the High middle ages won’t be on the final: “I’m not going to hold you responsible for it; among other things it would require you to read about 50 more pages at a very inconvenient time.”

On the texts we read this year: “They’re oozing with Literary Sophistication.”
“Not to take away from virtue. Please keep being virtuous.”

On the format of our final: “You might be getting tired of Thesis. Body. Conclusion. I’m sure you’re not, its hard to get tired of them.”

bis spaeter,
Yami

How do you stop this contraption?

2006-04-27T14:25:00.000-07:00

The first half of the semester was all a ruse I tell you. The first couple months, we read, went to class, took notes, ~~saw sunset glow~~ and just generaly thought we had a handle on the course load here in Rome. I wondered what eveyone was talking about when they said that this was the tough semester. Then midterms came and where followed immediatly by the Greece Trip, with 10-Day close on its heels. There was a little time to recoup, and we were all off again for the North Italy Trip, and then Easter came. It's the end of the second week since we came back from Easter Break, and we're all worring about finals next week. In the mean time there were five page papers in Theology, Philosophy, Lit Trad, and History to contend with, 6 1-page journals to write for Lit Trad, and one 2 page Philosophy paper. Tommorow, I have another 5 pager due for Lit Trad, and on Saturday another short one for Philosophy. Once all that is finished, I can try to catch up on my reading and write the take-home (which doesn't mean much since our classroom is in the basement of the dorm) esay for Philosophy.

What I'm getting at here is that if I havn't been the best story teller lately, there's a good reason for it. Now would someone please tell the powers that be to return all the time they stole? It was January yesterday, I sware. To tide you over, here's one of my Journals for Lit Trad. Note the complete and utter lack of photographic evidence.

The Godfather rides my bus.* When one is packed on a vehicle as small and as crowded as one of the COTRAL buses, one can’t help but get a good look and smell at your neighbors, in most cases a far better observation than any right-minded person would ever desire. I usually watch the people around me without taking too much notice of them. I can’t differentiate between any of the newspaper wielding grandmothers, between any of the middle school rats, the high school punks, the luggage toters bound for Ciampino, or the creepy middle-aged bums. I might see the same people every time I get on the bus, or I might never see the same person twice; I have just never bothered to pay that much attention.

Every now and then, someone will stick out in my mind, for instance, the gay couple singing, yes singing, in the aisle and hassling the driver. There’s one particular gentleman that sticks out in my mind. He is in that late middle-aged stage where it is difficult to judge a man’s age – he could be as young as forty or as old as sixty-five – his hair is black and hits his shoulders. He is going grey in his beard, and at his temples. He always wears a baseball cap, a scarf, and about five more layers than anyone else on the bus, wears beat-up sneakers, and carries a black duffle bag.

The Illuminati is run by a housewife in Montana**, which is why I am not surprised to find the Godfather ridding the bus from the black hole on the other side of Albano***. On fact, he does not seem to do much except ride the bus back and forth from Rome. I see him, coming from or going to the city, about once a week.

There is always an empty seat next to him, even during rush hour. He uses this, in some sort of modern version of the ancient Roman system of cliente, to talk to people. The Godfather knows everyone. People will sit down next to him and talk for a while, they sit down looking concerned or worried, and when they leave (you always get up when you finish speaking to the Godfather, someone else might want to talk to him) they look relaxed. A month or two ago, when the gay couple was making a scene, the Godfather called one of them over too him. The Godfather talked for a while, with the young man explaining things every now and then. After they finished talking, the guys stopped causing a scene, and got off the bus two stops later.

I don’t speak enough Italian to know what he does to solve their problems, but he does something. That doesn’t matter much to the Godfather: he speaks English. He knows about our campus and its residents as thoroughly as he knows about anyone else. More than one UDer has had a conversation with him about how the semester is going, along with playing the usual game of twenty questions (‘what’s your major?’ ‘when will you graduate?’ ‘how do you like Italy?’).

Seeing such an important person riding public transportation might be odd somewhere else in the world, but this is Italy after all, and organization stops on the north side of the Austrian border. The Godfather is a nice guy, and whatever he does after he makes the sign of the cross after disembarking from the bus, one can’t help but hope that he will be coming back to dispense wisdom on the bus another day.

-Yami

*he won't be riding it tomorow though, the bus and metr people will be on strike from 8:30 to 16:30
**This one does take some explination. When we were in London, there was a little mix-up with the hostel, we had to wait for a guy who had been staying in our room to leave and go to a different room (which required some searching before the hostel people found an employee who spoke Spanish well enough to convay that information to the guy) and then to change the sheets on the beds. While all this was going on, Nick and Mr. Boy and I sat in the lobby and watched 3 or 4 episodes of Jailbreak, which is a dumb show, but utterly addicting. We couldn't even collect enough energy to change the channel, or maybe that was because they had the heat going full blast and it was a tiny room. At any rate, on this show, there would be periodic segments in which we would see the Illuminati guys plotting, which neccessitated phone calls to the boss. It turns out that the boss is a house wife in Montana.
***it sucks up all the buses and never returns them, this is why when you’re waiting to go to Rome you always see three buses heading the other direction before yours shows up

Quizes

2006-04-23T16:46:00.000-07:00

You Should Be a Film Writer

You don't just create compelling stories, you see them as clearly as a movie in your mind.
You have a knack for details and dialogue. You can really make a character come to life.
Chances are, you enjoy creating all types of stories. The joy is in the storytelling.
And nothing would please you more than millions of people seeing your story on the big screen!

What Type of Writer Should You Be?

You know, I don't connect seeing things clearly with writing for the screen. If you can't see a story clearly in your head, what are you doing writing fiction at all? Let's try this again, and go with my second answer choices.

You Should Be a Science Fiction Writer

Your ideas are very strange, and people often wonder what planet you're from.
And while you may have some problems being "normal," you'll have no problems writing sci-fi.
Whether it's epic films, important novels, or vivid comics...
Your own little universe could leave an important mark on the world!

What Type of Writer Should You Be?

My own little universe, that's it exactly...

Updates

2006-04-18T14:15:00.000-07:00

I'm slowly plugging away with the writing here, but my 1500 -2000 word history paper comes first. On the other hand, I have pictures of Greece up in the photobucket. Click here, or use the link on the right. Also, there's a new link to my Elfwood site, its been around for a while I just don't talk about it. Odd that I'm more comefortable showing complete strangers my artwork than people I know.

If nothing else, maybe I can get caught up with posting my pictures before the semester ends. That shouldn't be to bad, because I can load them while I work on papers, right?

After I finish this paper for history, I can start considering another 4-5 page paper for Lit Trad, 4 more journals for the same, and a two page philosophy paper over Nietzche. Once that gets done, I have final exams. There are less than 30 days left in the semester for me. Where did the time go?

Well this is fun

2006-04-12T16:37:00.000-07:00

The latest post is actually under the April Fools post (just scroll down a bit, you'll see it, it's long). I've been working on it and saving the thing as a draft without publishing it since March 31st, so that is the date it's been published under. There's probably a way around it, but I'm tired, so you guys can just scroll down if you really want to know what I've been up to.

You know what?

2006-04-01T13:06:00.000-08:00

I quit. I'm tired of writing this, I'll tell people stories and show pictures when I get back to the states, in the meantime, not another word out me.

See you all in July,
Yami

P.S. Check the date :P

10 Day Stories

2006-03-31T11:15:00.000-08:00

What's been going on in Due Santi you ask? (And furthermore, where is your intrepid Rome corespondent and what has she been doing?)
Well, after our return from Greece, we had a week of class, in which time we had a five page paper due for Lit Trad. At the end of the week, the student body literally scattered to the four winds and we went on our 10-day break. We came back from 10-day, turned in two journals for Lit Trad (1 page each, they've both been incorperated into the body of this post) and a five page paper on Aquinas for Theology. At the end of a week and a half, we boarded the buses agian for the North Italy trip (2 nights in Florence, 1 night in Vinice, and 2 nights in Assisi). We got back from that on Monday afternoon, and I'm currently taking a break from writing a 4-5 page paper for Philosophy answering the question "What does it mean to be human?" It doesn't help that tomorow the Doppleganger and I are taking off for Salzburg, to return sometime on Monday.

So yeah, the last post was just an April Fool's joke (I'm told I got a good reaction out of Mom at least) I did mean to post this before leaving for North Italy, but that just wasn't in the cards.

For now, I'm going to post my 10-day stories since I've been working on this draft for a while now and I want to be able to show something for it. I probably won't finish writing about Greece (there's just no time left in the semester), but I promise I'll put the pictures up sometime next week, along with more pictures of 10-Day. Easter's got priority for the next story slot, and after that North Italy, plus anything else that comes up. I promise more and better stories when I get back to the States and have a little time to decompress.

Anyway, on with the show...

So my 10-Day travel companions were Anna (there's only one Anna present for the trip, so the Doppleganger gets her name back) and Andrew. 10-day technically began at the end of classes on Thursday, but our flight to Budapest didn't leave until 6:40 on Friday evening, so we stayed on campus one more night. All students had to be off campus by 10 am Friday, so at 9:59 the three of us, hit the road, massive bagage in hand, or more acurately, on back.

Since we had several hours to kill, we first went to Termini, and stood in line for 20 minutes so we could put our stuff in the baggage deposit before going on our merry way. A breakfast so late that it had morphed into lunch was aquired at a bar/cafeteria near the Spanish Steps, and was consumed on said tourist trap. We avoided eye contact with the people hawking cheap toys, and avoided being accosted by them. Then on to the American Express office to transmute travlers checks into ~~gold~~ cash, our original purpose for approaching the Steps in the first place.

Then we went back to Termini, collected our luggage, and took the bus to Chiampino. We sat around the departures area for a while, then as soon as it was posible to do so, got our boarding passes and checked our monstrus bags. We went through security, played hury up an wait for a while longer, then flew to Budapest.

We found the bus we needed to take into the city, but couldn't find a place to buy tickets, so we hopped on the back and hoped no one would check tickets. We won our little game of roulett with the Budapest Trasnportation Authority, and arrived at the southern end of one of their subway lines (it's such a cute litle system, there are only 3 lines) and began a search for tickets. naturally, the ticket office was closed, so rather than playing charades with a real human being, we got to play 20 questions with a machine. We were joined in our games by a pair of Canadian backpackers who were just as confuesd as we were. The machines did speak English, which helped a bit in what came next. naturally, the ticket machines didn't accept bills at all, and the exchange at the airport left us all 10 Florents short of enough change to buy a ticket. We appealed to the mercy of the lady behind the counter selling train tickets, who, while unable to just sell us metro tickets, did give us all change for our smallest bills, if reluctantly. so, we went back to the machine and descovered that it did not want to accept coins. There's a little blocker thing that only moves aside when its actually time to pay for tickets (to prevent people from sticking things other than money in hte slot) that decided it wasn't going to move aside. So all five of us -- the two Canadian guys, Anna, Andrew, and myself, all wearing big backpacks -- trooped back outside the station to the only other machine we've seen. The 1st Canadian is avle to secure a ticket, and then that machine stops working as well, joining the station wide consperacy against people who speak English as their native language. After poking the touch screen repeatedly, in both the English and Hungarian versions of the instructions, we concede defeat and go back inside, where the 1st machine decides that it's working now. Once we finally all have tickets, we go down to the platform to wait for the metro. There's only half a dozen or so other people who get on when we do, on account of the time and being at the end of the line. Sonce none of us can really read the subway map, our stops are located by counting the stations as we go through them. The Canadians get off two stops before we so, and we wish them well, thinkign that's the last we would see of them. We exit the metro and encounter the first of many ticket checks. We passed, and all said silent prayers that we had fooled with the machines instead of just walking on. Our hostel was easy enough to locate, although true to form, we didn't exit through the door the directions told us to use, even so, we were able to find the hostel with a minimum of fuss.

We checked in, left out stuff and went out to eat. Andrew began his quest for goulash, of which we found plenty throughout our trip, but none spicy enough to satisfy him. We returned to the hostel, plotted the next day's activities, and crashed.

Saturday, we got on the road an hour later than we'ed planned (we realized belatedly that we had forgoten to pack a morning person to wake us up) and crossed the Danube to the Buda side of town. We exited the metro at what the map advertized as a major stop and started looking for a tram to take us further south. Finding nothing identifiable as a tram schedaul or a ticket booth for trams, we asked the people behind the counter at the trainstation portion of the building. Through a combination of broken English, pointing at the map, and interpritive dance, we were led to understand that we wanted tram 18 and we could get tickets in the metro. So we wnet back down two flights of stairs to the metro ticket office, got the tickets we needed and went back abouve ground to the tram. We managed to get on the correct tran, heading in the correct direction, and even got off at the correct stop. We walked down one street, and then up another, which brought us to St. Imre. The original crop of monks who founded UD came fromBudapest, now the monestary itself i s way outside of town, so we couldn't go there, but this http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e104/umbrakatze/Rome%20Pictures/10%20Day/Budapest-CistercianChurch3.jpg was within easy reach. Unfortunatly, in what became a theam fot the trop the church was closed for no apparent reason (top three theories: it was raining; it was Saturday; they knew we were coming and shut the doors to spite us). So we went back the way we had come, and decided that since we were on that end of town, we would go see the cave church. In the '20s, a group of monks (not Cistercians) went to Lourdes, then came back to Budapest and built a mock-up of it. Unfortunatly for us, it was closed for Reconstruction, to the point that it wasn't even worth taking pictures of the outside. We did however sanp up this statue of St. Stephen, and take advantage of the great view of the Elizabeth Bridge. We got back on the tram and took it up towards the castle. We got off thinking 'OK, it's lunch time, we're near the biggest tourist attraction in town, there must be food here.' We were mistaken, a search of the neighborhood reveled one vegitarian place, and two up-scale places. We gave in and went to the one the guidebook recomended. Then we went to the castle, sort of. See we were coming from the south, and there's all sorts of deciptive pathways leading up-hill towards the castle, but absolutly no sinage. It turns out that the only way to get into the castle and palace (and thus to the museums inside them) is to approach from the north, so we lost a goof hour or more going all the way around, but we got a couple of nice shots along the way. We finally made it in, and chose to go to the history museum first, which is located in and on the oldest part of the castle. The sinage was all in Hungarian, so unable to really apreciate anyting on the ground floor, we went down a level to see what remained of the castle Going down the stairs was sort of like walking into the Twilight Zone.

When we got our tickets, we were handed a map , which had the places of intrerest marked, but what the map failed to tell us, was that this "basement" consisted of more then one level, so as we went around the floor, we had to go up and down numerous stairways which had been placed over the centuries with no apparent rhyme or reason. Areas that this map (and the map of the whole museum, which was three stories plus the basement, was squeezed onto one side of an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper, with the quality that you would expect from something a 6th grader made all by himself) said were just hallways were full of pictures and wax models of things acompanied by (presumably) explanitory Hungarian text, and areas identified as important places to see (such as the promisingly named Gothic Hall) were just being used as storage for extra chairs. The Gothic hall contained two doors, one through which we entered, and another which was shut and had a really obvious alarm wired to it. We left the way we came, searching for a room on the map which was shaped like a star. We never found it, but we did find the other side of the locked door in the Gothic Hall. An increasingly small series of rooms with household artifacts (such as a large stove) on display ended in a room with a locked wooden door with a really obvious ~~trap~~ alarm on it, which unless we were wildly mistaken was the otherside of the locked door we'ed seen earlier. There was a display of helmets on the wall to our right as we entered, and to our left was a set of stairs leading up about half a floor. At the top of the stairs, where a door leading to the star-shaped room should have been was a large sheat of styrofoam bolted to the wall. It was at this point that the crazyness of the place finaly got to us, and Andrew and I fell to giggling so hard that we had to sit down on the steps.

After that, we found our way out of the Museum, vowed to return one day and slay the minotaur, and moved next door to the Art Museum. The Museum was going to close at six, which gave us a little less than two hours in there, but when we left our stuff at the (manditory) coat-check, we were told that the check closed 15 minutes before the museum did, so if we wanted our stuff back, we would have to be there by 5:45. We agreed to their terms, three months in Italy having innoculated us to anger at such arbitary changes. We wander through the 18th and 19th century art galleries, and are starting to feel pretty tired when we realize that there are still three more floors to this building that we haven't even though about yet. Constrained by time and our hurting feet, we decided to swing through one more arm of the museum, so we look at a display of late-medieval winged alters which was well worth the trouble. After spending the past several hours completly insensable to what we were being shown, it was nice to see something we could understand. This was actually a pretty nice museum, and the signs were all repeated in English, so we knew what we were looking at. Sort of. Maybe. It didn't help that we could read a sign saying that the six foot long by five foot tall oil on canvas we were looking at was "The Reinternment of Louis IV" when we didn't know why he was being dug up in the first place, or why the people doing the digging were all well armed members of the noble class. We returned to the lobby at 5:30 thinking that we would buy a few postcards of works we had enjoyed, just in time to see the gift shop being closed up, so we collected our stuff and went back outside, souvanier-less.

We took a few picture of the Chain Bridge from our vantige up on the hill, and then continued north. We discovered that this part of town -- on the hill and near the castle, but not a part of it -- was where all the cheap resturaunts and touristy shops had gone to hide. We snaped (blury) pictures of the Mathaias Church, or more acurately, of its roof, in the fading light, and descovered that the church was closed, and had been since 4:30. We took a few pictures of Fisherman's Bastion, because it was pretty, than admitted that we would never get a good picture of any of it at night, and walked back to the metro. We took the subway back to the area of our hostel, had a nice dinner and then called it a night.

The next morning, we got ourselves up in time to go around the corner to the 10:30 mass at St. Stephen's Cathedral. We took seats in the very last pew on the epistle side about ten minutes before mass began, giving us plenty of time to examine our surroundings and to decide that we would just leave our coats on because a practical way to heat an open interior space of this size. The Cathedral is newer than most things in Rome (the guide book tells me that it was built from 1851 to 1905), but no less grand. Words are unfortunately failing me at this moment, and I’m afraid that the only way to really understand what the building is like would be to go there, looking at pictures is a distant second.

The choir there – some sort of fancy-shmancy ‘ooh we’re the cathedral’s choir, we’re better than you group’ – turned out to be well worth their pay. Halfway through the opening line of the processional hymn Anna and I turned to each other wide eyed and told one another that we would get a CD of their music if we could find one (we did, it’s amazing stuff). Now remember, that we don’t actually speak Hungarian, so following the order of the service, which we did not have memorized as it turns out, was a bit of an adventure. Some things were obvious: everyone is standing and just made the itchy sign of the cross, so this must be the Gospel; the priest in the funniest looking hat has been droning on for a while now and no body is stopping him, this must be the sermon; everyone is standing and reciting something long at once, so this must be the Nicene Creed; a bell just rung and everyone just charged forward, so this must be Communion, everyone who wants the sacrament, get in line. Other things the Choir helped on, because they were singing in Latin so we were able to recognize this is the Sanctus, this is the Angus Dei, etc and follow the service in that way. But there was one point, where there were two priests chanting back and forth at each other (sort of like they were playing dueling cantors), and part of the congregation stood while the rest knelt, that all three of us completely lost the order of service. By process of elimination we were later able to figure out that it must have been during the prayers of the people (although not being able to understand what was said, and the congregation not taking an active part in them sort of misses the point I feel) but at the time we were quite confused.

Actually, Latin did turn out to be quite useful for us, as our 10 day rapidly turned into a church-hopping tour of Eastern Europe, because the churches are nearly always open (except aparently, in Budapest) and everything else we saw was either being restored, or closed early, or both. Now Andrew knows a little Polish, but it’s conversational Polish, so his vocabulary is pretty well limited to food, the weather, and everyone’s health, and none of us know Hungarian or Czech, which is where the Latin came in handy. All the churches we went to were built well before Vatican II, so all the signs on the important things were in Latin (with hasty little paper signs in the local language hanging nearby), which enabled us to piece together what we were looking at. So in a twisted little backwards way, we arrived at the reason that the Roman church used Latin in the first place – so that everyone, no matter where they were from could understand what was going on in the Church.

After Mass, we went to the street which was advertised as being the main shopping area of Budapest. We cought lunch at the Spring Craft Festival, which was being held in the square just off the metro station, and spent the afternoon moseying down the street. Budapest, as it turns out, is home to more bookstores per square mile than any other city in the known world, and this street had more than one hawking wares printed in all languages known to man. Our wallets did not come through unscathed. We grabbed dinner at a gyros stand (which were all over Budapest, a relic of Hungry's Turkish occupation) and were stopped at an ATM, about to go down into the Metro, when who should we see but our Canadian friends. We stopped to chat for a while, and then continued on our seperate ways.

Our way took us to the State Opera House, where for the cost of $1.63 (or 400 Florents) we saw the opera Jenufa. Jenufa is a Czech opera, and the translation projected above the stage was naturally in Hungarian, so we really arn't sure what the plot was. Anna and I thought we had a pretty good grasp of it at intermission, but then the second act happened and it turned out that the guy we thought was Jenufa's father was really the love interest and her father was the guy we thought was the rival's father. We still don't know who the old lady was or what happened to the child at the end. I suspect that Google could tell me what it is I saw, but the curiosity isn't killing me. Besides, I didn't understand anything else I saw in Budapest, why should that be any different?

We cought a taxi to the airport for 3,000 Florents total, which comes out to about $10 US each, for a ride all the way across town, which was a deal. We ended up spending the night in the aiport for the following reason. Our flight to Warsaw left at 6:40 on Monday morning. We could have spent one more night in the hostel, but in the end it just wasn't worth it, since we needed to be at the airport no later than 5:40 to check-in, which meant that to allow ourselves enough time to get there using public transportation, we would have had to be going out the door by 4 am. In the end we decided that four, maybe five, hours of sleep was not worth paying for an extra night when we could get just as much sleep for free at the airport.

We set a watch, a one person stayed up with the luggage while the other two slept, and we were some of the first people in line when it came time to get our bording passes on Monday morning. We cought a quick nap on the hour-long flight to Warsaw, and that lasted us most of the day.

Richard and Yolna (I'm not even going to try the Polish spellings of their names), friends of Andrew's grandmother, met us at the airport and took us back to their house. We were scarcely in the front door before Yolna said “Maybe you are hungry?” I suspect that in the Slavic languages, the sentence construction ‘maybe you [fill in the blank]’ is used more or less the way English speakers use ‘would you like to [fill in the blank]’, because we encountered the same phenomenon in Prague as well. Knowing what they were trying to say wasn’t much help though, because when a petit Polish grandmother tells you ‘maybe you are hungry’ what she is really saying is ‘we have ways of making you eat, now are you going to do this the easy way or the hard way?’

We decided to do things the easy way and conceded that we were hungry, so we were ushered to the dining room and breakfast was placed before us. It consisted of three kinds of meat, one cheese, two kinds of bread, and a relish tray. We were pretty content, and then Richard opened the liqueur cabinet and offered us our choice of three kinds of vodka, two kinds of beer, gin, or whiskey: all this before ten in the morning. We declined, and after a little negotiation with Andrew’s broken Polish and the broken English of Marta (Richard and Yolna’s daughter in law) we were able to get orange juice instead.

Then we launched upon a whirl-wind tour of Old Town Warsaw, and it's churches. See, Marta appoligized to us, because all the museums in Warsaw are closed on Mondays, but, she suggested "maybe we could see a church". We assured her that we liked visiting churches, so we saw churches. Good Lord, we saw churches. Poland is 98% Roman Catholic, and they are especially fond of John Paul II, because he's a local boy. Warsaw has Catholic churches next door to Catholic churches. It has the church where people came to pray when JP II died last year. It has the Chruch where Richard and Yolna were married. And if that weren't enough, there is random religous art all over the sides of buildings.

To be fair, Warsaw also has a beutiful Old Town square, Medival fortifications, and the presidential palace, but mostly we looked at churches. We got back to the house in time for a late lunch. Once again, we were shepherded into the dining room where we were offered five meats, two cheeses, two breads, a relish tray, some things filled with ground meat which Marta called croquets which were meant to be eaten along with a red borsch soup, mash potatoes, dumplings, and two cakes. The bottles of alcohol had not been moved from where they had been placed on the table at breakfast, but we were also offered a choice of orange juice, cherry juice, and mineral water. Who would have thought that Poland would have really good cherry juice? I sure wouldn’t have, before this trip.

It was then about 4 o'clock and Richard loaded the three of us back into the car and drove for three hours to a little town about 20 kilometers from the Russian border in order to visit two of Andrew’s great aunts. We arrived at the first great aunt’s house at about seven, and we were promptly led to the dining room and told to eat. Now none of Andrew’s relatives knew much English, but the one word they all knew was ‘eat’ (which sounds like ‘it’ when the speaker has a Polish accent) so we ate: three types of meat, one type of bread, one type of cheese, and a choice of sweets for dessert. After a couple of hours in which Anna and I didn’t do much other than smile politely, because neither of us spoke Polish, we left and went to the second great aunt’s house. Great aunt number two lives two doors down from her sister, and when we walked in the door we were told ‘eat’ and shown the dining room, where we were fed three types of meat, one type of bread, one type of cheese, and a choice of sweets for desserts. By the time we left, even Richard was making jokes about how much we had been fed.

We got back to Warsaw at about 1, and were able to deflect Yolna's offers of more food by going straight to bed. We dragged ourselfs up early Tuesday morning for a quick bit to eat, and then the three of us Americans, Richard, and Marta all loaded back into the car and we headed south for Cracow and Czestochowa. We were still sitting in the drive way, working on making the turn out on the main road when Marta pulled out a plastic bag -- aparently from sub-space, since the car was a Toyota Camrey and we were filling all five seats -- full of sandwitches, handed it to Andrew, and told us all to eat.

In the two hours it took us to go from Warsaw to Czestochowa I ate four sandwitches. Czestochowa is the Polish Mecca, and the chief thing people go there to see is the Black Madonna, an icon supposidly written by St. Luke the Evangalist. (Google any three-word combination of the words 'Black', 'Madonna', 'Poland' and 'Czestochowa' and you'll turn up more information than you ever wanted to know.) So we saw the church, it's in a small chapel, made up off four gothic-vaults put together to form a little basilica, the back doors are always open, connecting it to another basilica of equal size which holds the overflow crowd from the first room, all of this in turn is only a side chapel for a much larger cathedral. The Madonna hangs above the alter in her shrine, and the walls of the room are compleatly covered in crutches left be pilgrams who have come to the site and been healed. If you look closely in the picture, you can see little silver medals which show parts of the body (mostly hearts, but also a fair numver of arms and legs), also tokens of thanksgiving from people who have been healed here. Next to the icon hangs the belt that JP II was wearing in 1981 when he survived the assassination attempt, you can see the blood-stains on it. Like all good religous sites, there is so much gold and silver in the room that it is impossible to take a decent picture, with or without the flash.

Outside, there is, amongst other things, a large ultra-modern viewing stand set up for the purposes of holding papal masses. When JP II came here last, he filled the square in front of the church, and on into the street beyond.

From here on out you get the cliff notes version:
After Czestochowa we went to Cracow. The next day Anna, Andrew and I trained down to Prauge, during which ride we had adventures in a station apperantly connected to the Twilight Zone, and also with the Czech Boarder Patrol (why does it take nine guys to check the passports in each compartment?). Prauge was also nice, Anna and Andrew were there two nights, the next morning they hopped a plane back to Rome. The purpose of this little trip was so that he might propose to her at the Trevi Fountin (I've got pictures of the ring, although a quick servay of my photos does not reveal any of them together, odd).
Nick and Treco joined me in Prauge the afternoon A&A left, and we spent one more evening in the city, coming to terms with our camera's inability to take good night pictures and buying swag. The next morning, we hopped the 9:15 train to Nurnberg, because we had rail passes, so why not? We discovered that German is nearly incomprehinsable to Americans when the speaker has a strong Czech acent (although the conducter had no difficulty understanding Nick and I). Upon arrival in Nurnberg, we procured tickets back to Rome, stashed our luggage in a station locker (cheap and secure), then spent the afternoon buming around the Alt Stadt. If you know the right stand to go to, you can find a Drei in Weckle (three of the local sausages in a bun) for a Euro. Turn right at the Human Rights Monument (it you're coming from the Bahnhoff) and follow your nose, and the crowd.
A train that evening brought us to Muenchen, where we waited for about half an hour in the train station before boarding a night train leading back to Rome.
On Sunday, we ate in Termini when we arrived, bumed arround the station until it was time to go back to campus (they wouldn't let anyone in before noon), and then went home. We wern't the first ones in the gate, but it was a near thing.

That's my 10 day story, more pictures to come soon, I promise.

Greece, Part I

2006-03-17T00:20:00.000-08:00

I had a five page paper due for Lit Trad this week, so alas I wasn't able to finish writting about the Greece trip, or upload any of the photos that go with it. :( Anyways, here's the first third or so of the trip, I'll be back with the rest of it, pictures, and 10-day stories a week from Sunday at the absolute earliest.

UD is nothing without its traditions, and one of the events that always takes place right before the Greece trip is the G(r)eek Olympics. The class was randomly divided into eight teams of eleven, we donned our best bed-sheet togas, marched out on the soccer field, and the games began. I was on team six, and we failed to win the name and chant making contest, the broom-stick relay, the 3-legged race, the egg toss, the tug of war, or the gum chewing contest. Then Greener* shoved a plate full of whipped cream into Shane’s face and we earned one point for amusing the gods, so we didn’t come in last. After the Olympics we all trooped down into the Capp Bar for the traditional toga party. Technus – the God of Computers – and Caesar both graced us with their presence and shirts with rebellious slogans writ large upon them might have been worn. A good time was had by all.

One of the other events that takes place before the Greece trip is CLEANING. No one can go on the trip unless: 1.) the bathrooms are all clean and 2.) the bedrooms are at the very least not filthy. My Suite won the prize for the cleanest bathroom. ^_^v

Thursday began bright and early, with breakfast starting an hour later than normal and going 15 minutes longer. In a clear sign of God’s approval of our trip, the rain-bearing clouds which had been hovering over Rome for the past several weeks finally cleared up. The buses were loaded with a minimum of chaos and we left only a quarter of an hour late. There were 88 of us Students, all of the professors except Dr. F, and most of the Student Life staff on the trip with us, so we took up two buses. I was on bus number one, Jupiter Optibus Maxibus.** From Rome, we headed south and east across the Italic Penensula where the port of Bari was waiting for us. We stopped three times: twice to use the bathroom and once, at a cold windy auto grill which was pearched on the side of a mountain, to eat the sack lunches that the Mensa ladies had packed for us.

If Italy is shaped like a boot, then imagine where the heel of the foot would be, and that is about where Bari is located. We got off of the bus there, followed Dr. Ht. through a maze of medieval backstreets and arrived in a large Piazza which was empty except for us and a larger than life statue of St. Nicholas. Dr. M spoke a piece about the history of the area (the Normans conquered most of Greece and Southern uitaly at about the same time that they invaded England) then Dr. Ht spoke about the life of St. Nick, and why, as Bobby put it, the statue shows him holding 3 flaming peaches.*** You’ve heard of St. Nicholas. His feast day is the 6^th of December, he performed a numver of miracles including calming a storm at sea, rescuing the children from the brine, and giving the three gold balls. His relics emit a fragrent smell, and exude a water-like substance that has miraculous helaing properties.

For a short time we got to go explore the Basilica San Nicola – a pretty little thing with nothing on some of the other churches I’ve seen in Rome and Greece – including a delve into the crypt to see the relics of the Saint. I bought a postcard, since there was some sort of vigil going on and it felt wrong to be taking pictures while that happening. The church has a small room full of bottles of the oil from the relics, apperantly they get about a liter of water every year.

We gathered in the Piazza again and Fr. Andrew led a prayer. Monsignor F is our normal campus chaplain, but he has a day job working at the Vatican, so he couldn’t come with us. Instead, we had the loan of Fr. Andrew a surfer from San Diego turned Benedictine Monk as our chaplain for the trip. Then we hopped back on the bus and drove around the block to the port, where we played hurry up and wait while our tickets for the ferry were fetched. We boarded the boat at last and settled in for a night on the Mediterranean Sea. It was right at dusk when we finnaly got on the ferry, so there wasn’t really anything to see until the next morning, although I know I was far from the only one who went out on deck to stare at a whole lot of nothing. We were three to a cabin, where smoking was not permited, in marked contrast to the intire rest of the ship. I spent the bulk of the morning alternately out on deck and staring out the windows.

We arrived in Patras, on the Peloponesian Penensula at about 12 local time (Greece is an hour ahead of Italy) hopped back on the bus and continued on our merry way, with much turning to each other and saying in shell-shocked voices “We’re in Greece.” We drove over the bridge spanning the Gulf of Corinth, which was built**** for the Olympics in 2004 using EU money and might be the longest suspension bridge in the world, but Dr. Ht wasn’t exactly sure. He also said “You really shouldn’t miss it, and since you’re on the bus, you don’t have a choice.” We continued along the cost for an hour and then stopped for lunch in a beach side restaurant. I had some good squid. ^_^

Then it was back on the bus for a few more hours to the town of ITea where we stayed for the night. The school provided dinner for us in the hotel, and the food was OK. I wandered around town with the Doppelganger, Mr. Boy, Nick, Bridget, and Shannon, saw the coast, played on a nifty jungle gym and a chess board large enough for us to pretend to be the pieces. Unfortunatly, other people took the pictures, so I’ll have to wait a while before I can get my hands on them. That evening, Mr. Boy, as part of his campaign to get into the local culture, tried Ouzo.***** The Doppleganger has a priceless photo of his expression that I mean to get from her soon. Nick also has a video that I’m planning on grabbing – it’s dark, but you can see Mr. Boy shudder and hear the rest of us laughing at him.

Itea is a quaint little town, and today it has the same attraction that it did in ancient times: it’s a good stopping point on the way to Delphi. So Saturday morning the group checked out of the hotel, we loaded into the buses and started driving. I tell you now, you have not known fear until you have gone around hairpin mountain turns in a bus, on a road with no guardrails and a two thousand foot drop on one side*.

The first stop in Delphi was at the lowest point in the site: the Temple of Athena. Dr. Ht talked for a little bit about where the ancients would go on their way to visit the oracle (they’d begin at this temple for one) and the history of the shrine. We had ten or fifteen minutes to explore the site, and then we moved on. We climbed up the hill, or should a say, part of Mt. Parnassus. The paths are well maintained and well marked, but as I have said before, Dr. Ht walks at about warp factor 6, and if you want to keep up with him** you’ll get quite a workout. Next we went to the Castalian Fountain, which is where pilgrims would wash themselves before continuing into the site. It’s fenced off – one of the few things we encountered in the whole trip that was – and Dr. Ht. talked a little more before moving on. Also located near the shrine was a small statue of Our Lady of the Soda, or some such.

Next we entered Delphi proper, hiked through the site and up to the Temple of Apollo. Dr. Hd spoke a little about how the oracle changed the life of Socrates, and of other Greek notables who consulted her. I got to see where the crack in the earth that the oracle supposedly sat above supposedly was: the area is earthquake prone so archaeologists debate where in the temple Pythia would actually have sat. After that, we were given an hour before we had to be back down the hill to see the museum, so most of the group, my self included, continued uphill to the stadium at Delphi. The Delphic games were part of a cycle of sporting events along with the Pan-Athaneic games, the Olympic games, and others that were a major part of ‘the world of Sport’*** for the ancient Greeks. I concluded that the stadium’s location was actually part of an ancient crowd control mechanism: you have to be in pretty good shape just to get to the stadium. It is a long way up.

We were given about 45 minutes in the little museum in Delphi, which was really all we needed because it’s a tiny little museum. If you have ever heard of anything in the museum it is probably either the omphalios, which the ancients believed marked the center of the world (or maybe it was the center of the world, as with most myths, the details are fuzzy around the edges) or the charioteer. The story with the statue is that when the French were beginning the first excivations here in the mid-19^th century, there was a small town on the site. They took the obvious solution of relocating the whole town to a spot a few miles down the road, but naturally there was one little old lady who did not want to move. Repeated attempts to plead with the lady were rejected and it looked like the French were just going to have to dig around her house when she came to them an offered to move. Apperantly she had a dream the night before, which she took to be a sign, of a young boy, trapped below water asking her to free him. She sold the house and moved to the new town with everyone else, and this statue was found buried underneath the house.

-Till later, wish me luck on 10-day. I'm going to Budapest, Warsaw, and Prague.

*Or at least I think that’s who did it, I was on the other side of the crowd taking pictures when it happened.

** The other bus created a name for themselves that was some sort of sad attempt to rhyme the words ‘ouzo’ and ‘bus’.

***They’re three balls of gold, which are on fire for some reason. You won’t be able to look at a picture of him again with out thinking about peaches.

****The bridge, not the gulf.

*****It’s a Greek liquor made from Aniseed. In other words, it taste like black liquorish with alchol added. If you are ever offered this stuff, pass.

*Although there is a great view of the sea in the distance as you ponder your impending falling-bus related death.

**and you do want to keep up with him

***if I may be so bold as to steal the BBC’s phrase there

I'm back...

2006-03-11T08:08:00.000-08:00

I've been in Greece for the past 10 days, it was loads of fun and I'm still toying with the idea of dropping out and moving to Athens. To tide you over until I can get this all typed up, here's a round of funny proffessor quotes, all of which I culled from the margins of my notes. Someone tell me if they are nearly as funny as I think they are.

FromWestern Civilization I with Dr. Ht:

Course intro: “There’s very little to loose except for a little bit of your self esteem.”

Neolithic civilizations and the begings of agriculture: “instead of gathering the famous nuts and berries, now known as granola…”

Ötzi the Iceman: “He’s one of those living… OK, he’s not living.”

The existance of pottery fragments indicates an economic surplus, because pots are used to hold stuff, and then a run down of different types of pottery, including funerary urns. Dr. Ht imediatly realized what was wrong with that statement... “Well, not funerary urns, that means you have a surplus of dead people.”

On Sparta: “And if things don’t go right, they just slaughter the local population and it works out really well for them.”

Cylon: “On the strength of his Olympic victories he became archon, and we could make comparisons to a certain governor of California, but we won’t.”

Pericles’ Funeral Oration, and applying what he says to your own hometown: “Fix your eyes on the greatness of Fargo North Dakota.”

Athens in war: “Do I feel well today? Maybe I can go kill 100 men.”

On Tririemes(sp?): “What Themistocles tried to do was build a kind of SCUD missile or Nuclear Bomb of the ancient world.”

Alcibiades: “He was certainly homosexual in a way that was uncomfortable even for the Greeks.”

Phillip and Alexander: “They have a very strong cavalry, and I just spelled it wrong.”

Carthage: “If any of you want to have an adventure in a Moslem country – and I’m not recommending this – then Tunisia is a nice place to go.”

The founding of Rome, an attempt at class participation: “Then what happens to Romey and Remy?”

Literary Tradition III, with Dr. M:

Intro: “I’m not trying to brow-beat you to stop watching movies and read more great books.. well I guess I am, I’m a professor of literature.”

“Why do people cry when the semi-androgynous Leonardo di Caprio goes down with the ship?”

“Tom Cruise isn’t a heroic fighter pilot, he’s a creepy scientologist.”

“I have a sheet where I say what makes an A Paper, essentially I say make it really good.”

Immigration Office: “The hope is that Dr. Hadley and I don’t get deported, ‘cause that would really mess up the schedule.”

Symbolism in the Oresteia: “If any of you love playing with snakes, I don’t care.”

Aristotle’s Poetics, Rhythm is one of the 6 parts of tragedy: “We’ve all got rhythm. Who could ask for anything more?”

Delphi: “It’s irrational to trust in this woman who is high on Ethylene vapors.”

The Birth of Tragedy: “Nietzsche’s really gloomy.”

“It’s UD, you always have to talk about Philosophy.”

Art and Archetecture of Rome, with Dr. F:

“We don’t have emperors like this now, after all we wear pants.”

“Café Grecco: it was the Irish Pub of the 18^th Century.”

The Sistine Chapel: “Adam doesn’t really have life yet, though he’s been to they gym.”

A statue of Saturn eating his children: “It’s completely gory and disgusting and you guys shouldn’t miss it.”

Hercules: “One of the laws of mythology is that whenever a god makes love to a mortal there will be a baby, so Jupiter has like his own posse.”

“Hercules is one of these guys who is never Zen at all.”

“He wears the lion skin sort of preppy style over his shoulders.”

“Hercules had 40 watts of a 100 watt bulb going.”

The Rape of the Sabine woman: “This makes Rome like the 1^st Australia.”

“It’s like the 1^st fraternity prank ever.”

The Via Appia Antica “This was before they invented SUV chariots.”

“It’s hard to sneeze online.”

“I don’t know the answer. We’ll have to Google that.”

Building a concrete dome: “you let your wooden courses sit there until the concrete is cured, then you cross your fingers and take them away.”

Guest speaker over Augustus:

Greece v. Rome is like UK v. US “You have Shakespeare. What do we have? We have the Atom Bomb. OK, that’s cool.”

“You bring obelisks from Egypt to Rome and set them up. It’s sort of like having a space program.”

“Not only does he become the richest person in the world overnight, but he’s also the only person in the world who can put on his resume ‘I am the son of a god.’”

“You can tell he is an effeminate Eastern Persian because he’s wearing pants.”

“Everything was leading up to … ME!”

Western Theological Tradition with Dr. S. He's not very funny in class, but I have a list of goofy things he said in Greece that is as long as my arm :

The letter of St. Clement: “This is not just papal plagiarism going on.”

On Neo-Platonism in Augustine’s work: “If Augustine ate a sandwich, your editor included a footnote saying Plotinus ate a sandwich too.”

“Let me see that I’m not making this up to much.”

Philosophy of Man with Dr. Hd:

“I hate Nietzsche. That’s a good start for philosophy, in more ways than one.”

There are some lessons that you have to learn yourself, and there are some things that you just accept when you are told, such as don’t get in cars with strangers: “Thank God, most of us believe that without trying it, but some people come back 6 months later as the captain of a pirate ship ‘hey mom and dad, that was a crazy adventure’.”

“Unicorns, to be sure, if they exist, they probably ask questions like this.”

“It’s hard for me to be the serious scholarly professor of Philosophy when the cheerfulness keeps breaking though.”

On the immigration office: “I’ll be treated like an animal at the immigration office, when I come back I’ll have a brand to show you.”

Crito: “If you’re auditioning for this, go for the Socrates part, not Crito.”

on different human desires: “Desire for a bigger breakfast than what Italy offered.”

Starting sentences with 'however' is one of Dr. Hd's pet peeves, and yet there in the Crito what do we find but: “He stated a sentence with ‘however’… ooh.”

“You haven’t met them yet, but we have a small group of philosopher-kings that we keep in a locked room.”

“In a city of pigs, maybe there’s some roasting that has to be done.”

“We’ll leave wisdom until graduate school.”

“The truth is basically wacky.”

There’s an intermission in the Phaedo “It’s nice to know that Plato is responsible for our modern television programming.”

“The jedi formerly known as Darth Vader.”

This is an exchange with a student:
S: “Is the defining trait what makes you you, or is it what separates humans from animals?”
Dr. Hd: “The later.”
S: “Is that the 2^nd one?”

St. Augustine: “You see how I work. I’m just a selfish child.”

St. Augustine: “Hey drive in Italy sometime! Not all roads lead to Rome, but all roads lead to God.”

That's all for now, I'll have Greece stories and photos up soon, I promise.

The 10 EUR Nap

2006-02-22T10:38:00.000-08:00

The Olympics, right, I was there last weekend sort of at the womans ice hockey game of Germany v. Italy and I have pictures to proove it.

Notes before the story:

The original plan was to take a night train from Rome to Milan, where we would check into our hostle and maybe see one sight before hopping on a train to Turino. In Turino we were to take a bus to the ticket office to collect the tickets, then to the Official Enormous Souvanier Store of Doom, then to the game which began at 6:30. After the game we would take a train back to Milan. We would spend Saturday sight-seeing in Milan, and then take an Express train back to Rome on Saturday night, arriving before the busses would stop running because none of us had been able to make heads or tails of the night bus schedual.

In honor of the lady in the pizzaria behind the Pantheon, from now on Treco's name is Mr. Boy.

I forgot that Nick was going to be in Nurnburg when I ordered the tickets, and Lauren decided to go to the woman's retreat, a fact which I also forgot. The Doppleganger, Mr. Boy, and I ended up splitting the cost of five tickets three ways.

I decided to take my large backpack, the one with the waist strap and the internal frame. I did this 1.) so I could bring an extra blanket and sweater and 2.) so I could make absolutly sure that I had all the straps adjusted correctly before Greece and 10 Day. I'm glad I did that, because I did have to make several adjustments, but remember that for most of this adventure I was carrying a 30 pound backpack. The Doppleganger and Mr. Boy also had bags, but nothing on the order of mine.

On with the story:

As we were entering the Metro station at Anagnina Mr. Boy said that he had a bad feeling about the out come of the trip, which I seconded. The Doppleganger's Bad Vibe Detector (TM) is apparently broken, because she said she was feeling pretty good. Our conncerns were written off as hunger, nervousness about our first attempt to use the Italian train system, and the relization that Mr. Boy had forgotten his camera.

We got our tickets in Termini, ate in the station, and made our train with no problems. The conductor was nice, we did not over sleep, we were not tobbed by gypsies during the night, and when we woke up in the morning, we were in Milan.

After the grief we gave her for not printing the confirmation for our hostle in London, the Doppleganger was careful to have confirmation and directions in hand once we arrived in Milan. We were able to navigate the Milanese subway with little difficulty (they have three different lines, 0_o) and were able to find the hotel with little trouble. The hotel bore all the signs of being a private residence recently repurposed (one bathroom on the 2nd floor, a non-sensecal floor plan, a front yard) and was owned and run by a Chinese family (the only sizable ethnic minority in Italy). The owner didn't know much English, but he knew enough to tell us that we were too early, and that we should come back afte 10 a.m. He was nice enough to let us leave our luggage behind the front desk (which looked like it was orriginally a breakfast bar). Thus libberated from our bags, we set off down the street in search of breakfast.

The neighborhood was a little more graffitti-ed then I would have liked, but the pedestrians were all well dressed, and we saw more than one mother walking with young school-aged children so that was reashuring. Besides, the backyards of most of the buildings here look like the less plesent parts of some 3rd World countries, so who am I to complain. To tell the truth, the most unnerving thing was seeing billboards all over the place advertising Quintin Tarintino's new movie Hostel. Any way, we found a bar and grabbed pastries and coffee. We were able to stay for the next hour and a half, as we plotted our plan for the next day, by continually purchising more food, and then consuming it slowly. For instance, the Doppleganger got a cup of hot chocolate so thick that the spoon did not sink when placed upon the surface. Swiss Miss eat your heart out.

We went back to the Hotel and checked in. Then we decided that instead of going to see St. Ambrose's relics, that what we really wanted to do with the rest of the morning was take a nap. So I set the alarm on the phone for noon, and we were all out like lights within ten minutes. About 11:45 we were woken by knocking at the door. It was the owner's son, who spoke much better English than his father did, arrived on the scean to tell us that there was a mistake with our booking.

It turns out that the Doppleganger made this reservation late at night, while simultaniously plotting for 10 day, and trying to write a paper, and that our reservation at the hotel was for the 17th of March, not the 17th of Febuary. They did not have any extra room in the hotel, so they were very sorry, but we had to leave. They refunded some of our money, but seeing as how they would have to change all the sheets (which we slept on top off because we were to lazy to do anything other than just crash >| )... they would only give us half the money back, which means that we each paid 10 EUR for a two hour nap.

Armed with directions to a main street where we were assured that we would be able to find a hotel, we gathered up all our luggage and set out. We spent the next hour and a half walking around searching for a hostel, or a hotel, or something. We found zip, nadda, and nothing. After an hour and a half, we decided to cut our losses and go to the train station so we could catch the two o'clock train to Turino. At the station, there were several palces that advertized hotel reservations, but as we found out, in addition to handeling the overflow from the Olympics, there was also some sort of exhibition in Milan last weekend and the cheapest room to be had would have cost over 200 EUR a night.

Wandering around for so long for no purpose would not have been so bad, except we were no where near the city center and our map did not extend out as far as we were wandering (we had to ask directions to find the Metro again, thankfully we do know the Italian words for that). Just a note if any of you decide to go to Milan, the northern part of town is the grungy industrial part of town where the buildings are all windowless boxes with fences around them.

We grabbed a bit to eat at the station and got on the train to Turino. It wasn't Express, which meant that we had to stop in every thorp along the way. On the other hand Fila, which apparently makes the ski gear for the Italian Olympic team handed out free lip balm on the train. It was attached to an advertising booklet, which would probably have been more interesting if any of us skiied.

In Turino, we left our bags in the Luggage Depository, and changed our train tickets. One of the many advantages of train travel over air is that (at least in Italy) once you have a reservation on any train, going anywhere, at anytime you can easily change it to a different reservation on another train, going somewhere else, at a completly different time and the only thing you have to pay is the difference in price between (if any) between the tickets. So, we traded our express train home on Saturday night for a night train leaving Milan on Friday, figguring that we had come to see the game and Milan had just been an after-thought anyway.

A phone call to the ticket office, and a short conversation with an American employee revealed that all we had to do to get to the office to pick up our tickets so we could acrually get into the game would be to take bus 67 to the end of the line (about 10 minutes) and the office was just off of the piazza. We found bus 67 at the bus stop right outside the station, and hopped on. A few moments later, Mr. Boy and I felt our danger senses tingling, but as we had no knowledge of the Turino bus system, we let it go after all, it was bearly after 4 and the game started at 6:30, we had plenty of time, right?

Turino has really cleaned everything up for the Olympics, it's quite a pretty little town, as is at least on of its suburbs. We should know, because we were on the right bus, heading in the wrong direction. We spent the better part of 4 hours ridding buses around Turino. We finally make it to the appropriate end of the line and see nothing that looks like the right office. I call again, and one of the locals working there is able to guide us in. We collect our tickets and hop the bus to the stadium.

It is now about 8. The game started at 6:30. There is no line at the security check point.

We come running up, and the first minion to encounter us looks at our tickets, and tells us that ice hockey is being played in one of the other stadiums. We say "grazie" and walk away a bit. The Doppleganger cries for a bit, and Mr. Boy and I say things in the "I'm mad at the universe line." Then Doppleganger decides to take pictures of the outside, in order to show that we at least made it that far. I, not to be defeated by a mere minion, look at the ticket again. On it, the name of the stadium in which the game is played is printed clearly. On the side of the stadium I can see the same name printed in very large letters. Mr. Boy confirms that my eyes have not decived me. We grab the Doppleganger and run around to a different security check point, where we are let in.

We arrived during the break between the 2nd and 3rd periods. After securing our seats (and they were good seats - the second row on the Italian end) the Doppleganger and I went back into the concorse and purchased souvaniers. We went back into the arena just after play resumed, and were back in time to see Germany's fourth goal.

The crowd was overwhelmingly Italian. By overwhelmingly Italinan, I mean there were small groups of well-organized German fans scattered around the stadium, but most of the spectators either were Italian, or if forigners, had bought their tickets blindly like we did and were just cheering for the home team. As it turns out, Italians are really good at cheering for sports, but unfortunatly they arn't any good at playing sports.

We don't think we were in the news, because the camera crews were standing in front of us, facing the ice. Not only that, the other side had cheerleaders. I kid you not, sitting on the stairs and periodically standing up to (supprise) lead cheers were girls with pom-poms wearing the most attrocious neon orange and yellow uniforms that I have ever seen. They even had gold trim, if you looked for more then a few seconds then your eyes would start to water.

It turns out that "Forza, Ragazzi!" (Go Guys!) is the appropriate cheer to use for any Italian team, regardless of gender (ragazzi is male plural, ragazze is female), except the national soccor team. If you see them you should yell "Forza Azuri!" (Go medium-blues!*). Because blue is randomly the color for their national sports teams. It's not in their flag anywhere, but there you have it.

Germany ended up winning 5-2, but we didn't get to see the end of the game because we had to go so that we could get on the train back to Milan, so we could get the train back to Rome.** We crunched the numbers and realized that we had each spent 10 EUR for each of the seven minutes of game play that we actually saw.

On our way out the door, Mr. Boy stoped to buy a pin for his collection at the souvanier stand, and the Doppleganger went back to picture taking. There were a number of cops clustered near the door, waiting for the game to let out. One of them took a picture of all three of us. As soon as I get a copy of that one the Doppleganger I'll put it up.

We got back to the station and then on to Milan and Rome without a further problem. We talked on the train and agreed that the problem was the bus, because if we hadn't spent four hours riding around lost we would have seen most of the game, and then we could have lived with not seeing the very end. As it was the whole weekend was just sort of a bust.

Lauren didn't have a very good time on the retreat either, as it turned out. Then Nick arrived and poured salt into everyone's wounds by reporting having a great time in Germany -- the land of punctual buses and food that actually includes sugnificant quantities of meat***.

Tune in next time as I return to Rome and go exploring in the Pantheon (hear the origin of Mr. Boy), Piazaa Nuvona, and the Trevi Fountain and then into the Colusseum and the Palitine Hill with the Art and Arch class. Also, it's mid-term time, so that means a round of Funny Professor Quotes.

-Yami

*Light blue is celestia and dark blue is... get ready for it... blu.
**Train stations are far less secure then airports, for starters, there are no doors to the outside, everything is just sort of open, and no security like at airports. We wern't about to spend the night in a station.
***Dad, we may have a lead on the world's perfect Saurbrauten, as prepaired by a little old lady operating a hole in the wall resturaunt in Nurnburg.