xiphias | Entries tagged with travel

I've been several days behind in blogging, which I am sorry for. Not just because you don't get to read what I'm doing, but because writing it down helps me remember and enjoy.

June 21 was several things. First, it was the longest day of the year, being the solstice. Second, it was Lis's birthday. And, third, we realized that it was exactly my one-third-century mark.

It was also the first day we went into Florence.

Bucine, where we're staying, is like an hour outside Florence, so it's easy to hop on the train, spend the day, and come back. Which is one of the things we've been doing. On the 21st, we did said hopping with my sister, mother, and father. We couldn't figure out how the heck the ticket machine worked, so we ended up riding without the ticket, which is a gamble . . . if you get caught, it's a five euro fine. As it happened, we got caught, and our tickets cost 10 euros apiece, rather than 5 euros. Oh, well.

My sister was hungry enough to be grumpy on the way in, so we stopped at a cafe when we got into Florence, and had pastries and fruit and coffee and juice and stuff. After doing so, we all felt in much better moods, not only Leila. Healthy blood sugar levels are a good thing.

Then we began wandering about the city together. We headed toward the Duomo, and just walked around that area, admiring the gorgeous cathedral, and eventually (after looking at the outdoor spot with dozens of famous statues, including the reproduction of Michalangelo's David (the original is in the Acadame museum, but the reproduction is in the original space where it was put) headed off to the Uffizi Gallery, where we had timed tickets for 12:45.
( Read more... )

So, did we make it on time?
( Read more... )

Lis and I were in a sleeper car going from Paris to Florence. We'd swapped bunks, because I decided that I wanted the window open while I was sleeping, and, when we went through towns, the streetlights threw light onto the bottom bunk, which bothered Lis. But I don't mind that, and the top bunk was higher than the window, so light didn't shine on it.

I woke up looking at a beautiful sunrise. And, we passed through a town, the first stop in Italy. It was gorgeous watching the red sun rise over the town.

Then it occurred to me that we were supposed to go through that town something like 4:15 in the morning, and it was now quite a bit more like 6:15.

We were scheduled to arrive in Florence at 7:06 AM, and there were several trains from Florence to Bucine. We had not, really, expected to make the 7:13 train, especially since we had left half an hour late. But we now realized that we weren't going to make any of the OTHER trains, either, except MAYBE the last one, the 9:34. Well, not the LAST one, but the last one until 11:something, which would get us to Bucine at too late to go back to Rome at the time we had to in order to catch the train to Castelgandalfo.

We had plans for the afternoon and evening of the 20th, you see.
( Read more... )

I last blogged from London, on June 18. So let me pick it up more-or-less from where I left off.

June 19, aka Tuesday, we got breakfast at the pub across the street from the hotel, and discovered that THEIR breakfast was about half the price of the breakfast at the hotel. The hotel's breakfast was all-you-can eat, though. Still, as the breakfast we got at the pub WAS as much as we can eat, I think it was a better deal. (But, they weren't open for breakfast on weekends, anyway, so the only time it would have made a difference was Monday. Big whoop. We did well enough.) We then went to Waterloo station, uneventfully if I remember correctly, and got on the London-to-Paris train. We got our passports stamped on the way in.

It was a train. We got to see really nice bits of English countryside, then we got to see the inside of a dark tunnel which was going under the English Channel, then we got to see really nice bits of the French countryside. Quite cool. We got into Paris as expected, and we had a couple hours to kill. We had a good plan for what to do, and it almost worked.

The plan was, go from the Nord train station, where the Chunnel train arrived, to the Bercy train station, where the Italy train would leave, put our bags in a locker at Bercy, and then wander the city for a few hours, see some sights, and get an actual Parisian meal somewhere.

'Cept Bercy didn't HAVE luggage lockers.
( Read more... )

In Leicester Square is the most . . . wrongly named sex shop I've ever seen.

Lis says she'll blog a photo of it to prove that we're not making this up.

I guess someone wanted to express the idea that, y'know, they helped people with the craft of making love.

Nonetheless, I will NEVER have the guts to go into a sex shop called "Lovecraft".

Oh, yeah, and I blew up our UK-->US power converter. I tried to charge up my PalmPilot, and the magic smoke fell out of the square transformer. The PalmPilot is fine, and I suspect the cradle is also fine, but the thing that I plug into the cradle to send power to it to charge the PalmPilot is toasty.

We picked up a replacement lapel pin for me from WSET, as I lost mine at work. We then went to the Tower, which was pretty awesome. Ravens are cool.

There are a few things I'm not crazy about in London -- the pretty-much universal closed-circuit camera monitoring, for instance, creeps me out. But, in general, everything's pretty cool.

However, I'm now at the I WANNA GO HOME stage. I've now been away from Boston for about as long as I can really stand, and I WANNA GO HOME. And we've still got weeks in Italy ahead of us. I'm hoping this is just something I'm going to be able to get over, and work through.

After the Tower, we went to Westminster, and saw the Horse Guards in review, and saw Westminster Abbey. We got there a bit before 5, and we COULD have gone in for Evensong, which, I have heard, is the most beautiful Anglican service, but I just couldn't feel comfortable going into a Christian service. We tried to listen in from outside, but not much sound gets out. Still, it was pretty cool to see the choir line up ahead of time for the service, and the older choir members whack a couple of the younger ones on the head to stop them poking each other, and one choir member come tearing around the corner at a dead run because he was late.

We went around that neighborhood for a while, and eventually went more Piccadilly-ward and Leiscter-Square-ward (which is more or less where we are now), and we saw "Windmill Street" and decided to see if that was where the famous "Windmill Theater" (as in "Mrs Henderson Presents"), and there WAS a strip club there called "Windmill International", so there WAS a place with naked women, but the bouncer didn't know if it was the same as the original Windmill.

So we neither went into the Windmill to see naked women, nor Westminster Abbey to hear Evensong. I'm not actually sure about which of those I regret more.

Oh, yeah, and there was a really good upscale Scottish restaurant, so I had haggis and whiskey for dinner. Which was awesome.

My brain has pretty much melted and I want to go home and everything nifty here and I'm still WEEKS away from home but my body is holding up better than one would expect since I'm not randomly bleeding yet which normally happens after about three days but it still could yet happen.

So, we left Boston at about 7 pm on Thursday night, arriving in London at about 7 am Friday morning. On about a six-and-a-half hour flight. The numbers do not add up due to rounding. And me forgetting exactly when the plane took off and landed.

I probably got about an hour of sleep on the plane, but we knew that we weren't going to sleep until bedtime London time. As annoying as it is, Lis assured me that the best way to beat jetlag is to just deal with it as an all-but-allnighter the day before, and try to keep to your intended schedule as best you can.

I hate travel, as I've mentioned before, and my skin was crawling by the morning. It took us about an hour to clear customs. And then Lis found a luxury spa thingy in the airport, and we paid £12 (see? British keyboards have a £ key. And a $ key. Hunh. What symbol is missing? @ is somewhere I didn't expect. . . oh, I see. There's an extra key over here by the left shift, which has \ and |) for a shower, which may seem like a lot, but was worth every penny. After I took a long, hot shower, brushed my teeth, and changed my clothes, I felt human, and ready to deal with London. We went to the Tube with our luggage (we travelled all carry-on, largely so that we could get around the city easily before we dropped off our luggage), and got into London about ten or so.

The weather was BEAUTIFUL. I mean, GORGEOUS. About 20, 21 degrees centigrade, 68 or 70 farenheit, blue skies, gentle wind -- I mean, you cannot design weather that I would like better.
( Read more... )

So, I'm finally beginning to get really nervous about the trip we're going on Thursday. It will be the first time I've ever been out of the country, and I'm just plain scared. My hands are shaking, palms sweating, and mouth dry. I hate travel, and I'm going to try my best to have a good time. Because it's an awesome trip: London for a few days, then train to Italy for more time. We're even already packed, and our luggage is reasonably lug-able. So, now that there is nothing to be nervous about, I'm massively nervous.

You know that song "Boston" by Augustana? About a woman who's sick of her life and wants to start over, so is saying that she'll go to Boston, away from California? The whole idea of Boston being the exotic, far-away place where you can start over, and California being the starting point you're getting away with so messes with me that I literally feel nauseous every time I hear the song. Not because the song's bad or anything, but because that idea of Boston being there and some place other than Boston being here is so disorienting that I get motion sickness.

We are going to Italy this summer. We should have bought our plane tickets already; we haven't. Lis wants me to take on some more responsibility for this stuff, as I'm the person who's home during the day and generally have more free time than she does.

I don't want to.

Because I hate travel.

So, Lis asked me just now if I'd go through the Rick Steve's Guide to Rome, just to look at things that I'd find fun and want to do.

"Just so you know," I told her, "I'm now feeling nervous and scared."

"Why?"

"It's related to travel; I'm feeling fear and discomfort with the idea of even looking at the book for Rome."

"Hmm. How would you feel if I asked you to look through things for Western Mass, Lenox and the Berkshires and all that?"

"Um. . . let's see. . . bored and resentful, but not nervous and scared."

"I'm just trying to understand I work out the parameters.

"Yes, I understand that."

"How about New York City?"

"Also bored and resentful, but no fear yet."

"DC?"

"Now I'm starting to feel the nervousness."

"But when you WERE in DC, you enjoyed it."

"Yes, I know. Okay, I'm starting to feel scared and dizzy."

"Alright. Why don't you go sit down. Are you feeling too out-of-it to blog this?"

"No, I think I can do that."

"It might be a good idea to document this, just for future reference."

So I did.

I'm pretty sure I have written about it before, but I know that I've added folks to my friends list since then, and I just mentioned this in comments to someone else. It's the story of a space station.

See, the Soviet Union was always aware that they were technically behind the United States, and made up for it in, well, brute force. For instance, they knew that their T41 tanks were like only a third as good as the M1 Abrams, so they would build three times as many tanks as the US would. So it all balanced out.

This is what they did with their space program, as well.

They knew that their tech was more likely to fail than the US technology would -- so, when they built a space station, they built THREE of them. The idea was, sure, our space station is going to fail after only a third as long as a United States built one would, but then we'll just launch ANOTHER one, and then ANOTHER one.

So they built three identical Mir space stations, at once. And they launched the first one.

Then the Soviet Union collapsed. So Mir was never going to be replaced.

Which left two extra Mirs.

One of them is missing. Nobody knows where it is.

It's been misfiled or SOMETHING. For all I know, maybe they never actually even built it, and just said that they did.

Or maybe there's a space station lost somewhere in a warehouse in Russia. A lost space station.

But the THIRD one, the third one, the Russian government auctioned off, since they weren't going to use it, and they could get some money for it. Some museum or other would pay them for it.

There were really only two possible bidders for the thing, in the world. The Smithsonian museum would be one obvious choice -- they have probably the word's most wonderful collection of spacecraft and other things like that. And the British Museum was also interested (although that's a bit outside what I tend to think of their collection's strength). They had a gentleman's agreement about what the upper limit of what they'd bid for the thing was. Clearly, no other group would be around to bid against them.

Tommy Bartlett bid against them. And won.
( Read more... )

Back from Florida, where we visited Lis's family for Rosh Hashanah.

As most of y'all know, I hate Florida, but love my in-laws. So, I put up with Florida for their sakes, and it's worth it. They're good folks.

This time, Lis's aunt and uncle and cousins were in town from Milwaukee and Phoenix, and we were up from Boston, along with her parents, brother, sister-in-law, nephew, and grandparents, who live there, so it was a real gathering of the clan -- although, for Lis's family, a "gathering of the clan" is a lot smaller than it is for us. There aren't many more than a dozen Ribas in her family -- "Riba" isn't that uncommon a name, actually, but all but a dozen of them are unrelated to our Ribas. So, if you encounter a Riba, and wonder if it's a relative -- it probably isn't.

That said, what the Ribas lack in quantity, they make up for in quality and general insanity-of-the-good-sort.

Our nephew continues to gain adorableness by the day. He's two-and-a-half, and is unusually articulate for that age, which, I suspect, is one of the factors in him being far, far less two-year-old-like than most two-year-olds. I mean, he throws tantrums and stuff, of course -- he's two -- but of much shorter duration and intensity, and of lower frequency than I'm used to. I suspect that the fact that he can actually communicate what he wants helps that.

Also, the fact that both his parents are really good and skilled parents helps. And I think they just also got some good luck-of-the-draw on behavior.

So, yeah. Good services both days, extremely good holiday meals by Lis's mother and her grandmother, good company, good time.

Well, let's see. We got to meet someone who's working with Lis's parents, and she's cool. Then we got to attempt to see the Space Shuttle lift off, but it must have been behind a cloud. If the skies are clear, you can see the contrail from the Shuttle lift-off from the street in front of my in-laws' house. But we didn't see it.

And our nephew Nate was there. And Nate's parents -- Lis's brother and sister-in-law -- but they said fewer absolutely adorable things.

Nate is 28 months old, so, about two-and-a-third. And he's really smart and adorable.

Among other things, I taught him the "Sneak sneak sneak. . . POUNCE!" game. In which you sneak up on someone, saying "Sneak, sneak, sneak, sneak. . . " and then you POUNCE on someone and give them a hug.

He spent much of the rest of the afternoon going, "Neak, neak, neak, neak. . . POUN!"

Guess where I am? Florida!

Okay, my grandparents-in-law read this occasionally, and, if they do, posting this is ruining the surprise. Um, so, if that's the case, hi Bubbe and Zayde! I'm in Florida!

Hopefully, we're going to see them before they read this, so we can surprise them.

We certainly surprised Lis's mother. Pleasantly, I hope.

See, a couple weeks ago, Lis's father emailed Lis saying, "So, we're having a barbecue for the Fourth -- want to come?"

Lis told me about the email, and asked if I could think of any good reason not to do so. Lis and her father decided that it would be even more fun if we kept this all quiet from the rest of the family to surprise them.

Our cat is staying with

felis_sidus for a few days -- nearly a week, really, since we dropped the kitty off a day or two early, and are going to pick her up a day or so late, just to give us chances to pack and unpack without our kitty underfoot. Boopsie LOVES her Auntie

felis_sidus, and, even though she's an elderly cat who dislikes disruption in routine or change in general, settled regally into

felis_sidus's home within, like, an hour of when I dropped her off. If she HAS to have a change in her routine, going over there is quite acceptable.

So we're here. We haven't seen Lis's folks since, like, October, so it was definitely about time.

I'm posting from home on Saturday night; I'll be going back to Boskone in the morning, but I'm sleeping here tonight. Our plan had been to stay at the youth hostel on Hemminway St, three blocks from the con, and that's where Lis is staying tonight; I'm not.

See, we wanted to demonstrate that I could stay at a youth hostel, because they're cheap. And if I could stay at youth hostels, we could potentially travel more, which would be a good outcome for Lis. So I got my hostelling card, and we tried it.

Lis had no real trouble sleeping last night. Me, however -- I count last night as among the most horrific nights of my life.
( Read more... )

First, something that Lis reminded me that I forgot to mention about yesterday: Lis and Nate and I were in Aunt Paula's kitchen, and Lis leaned down and said, "This is your uncle Ian," and Nate said, "Yin." Lis said, "That's right! It's Ian; can you say, 'Ian'?" and Nate said "Yin" again. Lis nudged me and said, "You could do the same thing for me. . . " and I said, "This is Lis!" And Nate said, ". . .okay."

Also, Nate speaks Japanese, I may have mentioned. The main things he says are, "Buzz," "Woody," "Finty an' neon," (aka, "To INFINITY AND BEYOND!!", Buzz Lightyear's battle cry), "No" (he's a toddler), and "Hai". Which is what he uses for "Yes." The fact that he's a toddler with a word for "yes" is far more remarkable than the fact that the word he uses is Japanese. I mean, there are MILLIONS of toddlers who speak Japanese, but many fewer than that who say any word that means "yes" on a regular basis.
( Read more... )

We got up on the early side, got showered and dressed (the hotel soaps are Rusk soaps, by the way, which turns out to be one of the few brands I can use, so I got to have the rare pleasure of using the HOTEL soap instead of the soap I brought with me), and went down to the corner to The Corner Bakery to grab a something light for breakfast. At a couple minutes before 8 AM, we met up with Josh, Missy, and Nate to drive up to Milwaukee -- we picked up our cousin Barry at his apartment on the way. Barry lives in Chicago, but his parents were the folks we were visiting, so, as long as we were driving up there, there was no reason not to have Barry along. Especially since we like him and all.
( Read more... )

So, we're in Chicago. We got in this morning, and Lis's brother and sister-in-law picked us up. He booked rooms at a very nice hotel, Hotel 71; I'm posting this from their business center, which has free wifi.

It's within very easy walking distance of Grandma Rose's condo, so we walked over there in the early afternoon, while Josh, Missy, and Nate (who is two and adorable) took naps. We spent a good couple hours hanging out with her. Josh, Missy, and Nate had been over in the morning -- it was the first time he'd gotten to meet his great-grandma, and she him. She loves him to pieces, but as she is not strong or in good health, she could really only socialize with a toddler for an hour or so. Lis and I, however, are generally less strenuous than a toddler, so we could hang out for a couple hours.
( Read more... )

From Lis's most recent email to me: "Honestly, I feel so at home in this city [London]. Just seem to be picking up an innate directional sense of where thing are. I'd love to move here if we could make it work."

Uh oh. . .

What I've been up to the past couple days

It occured to me just now that I've been too busy the past couple days doing things to actually sit down and write about what I've been doing. So I figured I'd go and talk a bit about the past couple days.

So, my father, my uncle Bob, Lis and I flew down to Orlando, Florida on Thursday. Actually, we first met with the private insurance adjuster we are working with, so he could work on our behalf while we were in Florida. Then we flew to Florida. We flew on Song, by Delta. If you ever get the chance to avoid flying Song, take it. It feels like some Delta executives flew on Southwest, and took notes on what made Southwest work, distilled them to bullet points, converted them to action items, extracted the core competencies that were required, then presented a PowerPoint presentation on ways to actualize an implementation of the distilation of the core valuations of the Southwest paradigm. In other words, they totally didn't get it. And it is painful and horrible.

Our trip took quite a turn for the better as soon as we got off the plane. For one thing, we were no longer on the plane.

When we got to the hotel we were staying at, we found that the following people were also staying at the hotel:
My mother and father.
My mother's mother and father.
My father's mother and father.
My uncle Bob. (Yes, Bob is, in fact, my uncle. Actually, Bob is two of my uncles, one on each side of the family. This one is my father's brother Bob, not my mother's sister's husband Bob.)
My cousin Meghan.
My cousin Jenna, who I hardly ever see, because she's from Australia.
My mother's adopted daughter Tobin, aka Doctor Belzer. She's the one who's published an essay on being a Jewish Femininst Valley Girl.
Another one of my mother's adopted daughters, her husband, and their two kids, Winter and Drew.
Not staying at the hotel, but still spending a lot of time there were my sister Leila, and her roommate Joanna (who, incidentally, was a Hospitality major, and who worked at the hotel at which we are staying, and who therefore got us the hotel employee rate for all these rooms).
( So, why were all these folks here? )

So, I chickened out on the Florida trip. We were supposed to go down to visit Lis's family for Rosh Hashana, but I hate flying in the best of times, and just chickened out on flying into a hurricane. Even though it looks like Ivan is going to totally miss Lis's folks' area. We got a credit from the airline, so we can reschedule.

This, of course, means that we now have to work out where we ARE going for Rosh Hashana. We've got several possibilities. Cherie Kohler-Fox is going to be running services for the first day, and we got an invite to go there, which we'd declined since we were going to be in Florida, but which we can phone up and find out if we can un-decline. For the second day, we probably will go to the shul where I work.

It's a bit odd -- I have never in my adult life paid for High Holiday tickets. I've always either been someone's guest, like when we go down to Florida, or gone to places where my mother or I work, so get I get comped in. So that's our next challenge.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30

Bartender Geek

pedagogy and rhetoric a specialty

What about June 21?

Wed the 20th, continued

So, picking up on Wednesday, June 20:

I seem to like Italy.

Oh, yeah, one more thing:

Last day in London

London, day 3

Two related thoughts

Thoughts on travel

Have I mentioned the story of the Mir space station to you guys?

Gee, but it's great to be back home. . .

Independence Day at my in-laws

Florida for Independence Day

Hostel experiment was successful, in that it disproved a hypothesis

Monday in Chicago

Our second day in Chicago

In Chicago

Should I be worried?

Our weekend

Rosh Hashana

Profile

November 2018

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags