I wrote something somewhere else

Hey, I did a guest review of Mack & Mabel, one of the shows I saw while I was in London. It's on @MildlyBitter's excellent blog, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in THEATAH in New York and beyond.

I hate the Beloit College Mindset.

I HATE THE BELOIT COLLEGE MINDSET

Supposedly it's "a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall." I'm not buying it (even accepting that "students entering college this fall" means "17-to-18-year-olds," which, come on). Mostly it serves as a "YOU SO OLD!" reminder for professors, I guess. I'd rather watch I Love the 90s, thank you.

So, instead of doing a nice write-up of my vacation, I present you: my annotated version of the Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2016.

1. They should keep their eyes open for Justin Bieber or Dakota Fanning at freshman orientation.
I don’t know what this means... Is the Biebs going to Beloit? I would have thought he’d at least take a gap year. If you were Justin Bieber, where would you go to college?
2. They have always lived in cyberspace, addicted to a new generation of “electronic narcotics.”
Have they ever even heard the term “cyberspace”? I guess it’s better than “Information Superhighway.” Librarian pro tip: if you search for “cyberspace” or “information superhighway” in your library’s catalog, you will find SHELVES of stuff to weed. I will not comment on "electronic narcotics" (because I'm too busy playing Angry Birds).
3. The Biblical sources of terms such as “Forbidden Fruit,” “The writing on the wall,” “Good Samaritan,” and “The Promised Land” are unknown to most of them.
As opposed to... who? Fun anecdote: last spring I sang William Walton’s “Belshazzar’s Feast” with a local chorus and orchestra, and many of the singers (including myself) were interested to discover that the phrase “the writing on the wall” comes from said Biblical story. Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin, folks.
4. Michael Jackson’s family, not the Kennedys, constitutes “American Royalty.”
I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS
5. If they miss The Daily Show, they can always get their news on YouTube.
Yeah, those kids, always looking for news stories on YouTube. Also, The Daily Show is on Hulu, yo, get with the program.
6. Their lives have been measured in the fundamental particles of life: bits, bytes, and bauds.
BAUDS. BAUDS. I ASK YOU.
7. Robert De Niro is thought of as Greg Focker's long-suffering father-in-law, not as Vito Corleone or Jimmy Conway.
I guess this is probably true? Full disclosure: I haven’t seen Goodfellas.
8. Bill Clinton is a senior statesman of whose presidency they have little knowledge.
I guess? I mean, he was president until they were like five years old.
9. They have never seen an airplane “ticket.”
Probably true. Although, you know what, I actually bought a paper airplane ticket from a travel agent a couple of years ago. It was on the Greek island of Kastellorizo - you should go, it’s very peaceful. And if it’s not siesta time you can walk into the travel agent’s office and pay cash for an airplane ticket.
10. On TV and in films, the ditzy dumb blonde female generally has been replaced by a couple of Dumb and Dumber males.
Eh. I’m sure someone at Beloit did the research and checked out the number of “dumb guys” to “dumb girls” in movies pre and post 1995. Right? They wouldn’t just make stuff up.
11. The paradox "too big to fail" has been, for their generation, what "we had to destroy the village in order to save it" was for their grandparents'.
I guess since I am neither of these kids’ generation nor of their grandparents’ generation, I must have missed out on paradoxical aphorisms. Can anyone think of a good one for the early 90s?
12. For most of their lives, maintaining relations between the U.S. and the rest of the world has been a woman’s job in the State Department.
I don't understand why this sentence avoids using the phrase "Secretary of State."
13. They can’t picture people actually carrying luggage through airports rather than rolling it.
When *I* was a child we had rolling suitcases but they just had tiny wheels and a leash! Things were so different. Oh and actually I don't use wheeled luggage myself.
14. There has always been football in Jacksonville but never in Los Angeles.
This may very well be true. I would not know.
15. Having grown up with MP3s and iPods, they never listen to music on the car radio and really have no use for radio at all.
Is this true? I guess it could be. For me, sometimes I listen to the radio because it is just too much work to plug my phone into the AUX jack, but I was born on the Gen X/Gen Y cusp, with the moon in Slackass, so that’s where I’m coming from.
16. Since they've been born, the United States has measured progress by a 2 percent jump in unemployment and a 16 cent rise in the price of a first class postage stamp.
But I bet they don’t spend much on postage because they’re always sending their messages with the BAUDS.
17. Benjamin Braddock, having given up both a career in plastics and a relationship with Mrs. Robinson, could be their grandfather.
This really says a lot more about the people this list is aimed at than the people this list is supposed to be about, doesn’t it?
18. Their folks have never gazed with pride on a new set of bound encyclopedias on the bookshelf.
TRAGEDY.
19. The Green Bay Packers have always celebrated with the Lambeau Leap.
I don’t know what this is. The Packers are the ones with the horns on their helmets, right? (KIDDING! Get back, cheeseheads!) But Beloit is in Wisconsin, so I will defer and assume that this is indeed a cultural touchstone there.
20. Exposed bra straps have always been a fashion statement, not a wardrobe malfunction to be corrected quietly by well-meaning friends.
Also, wedding dresses have always been strapless. Actually I don’t know if that’s true. But it could be. Put it on the list!
21. A significant percentage of them will enter college already displaying some hearing loss.
Is this different from my generation? Or my parents’ generation? Is it all the iPods? Increased diagnosis? I don't think you can just lay this out there without a cite.
22. The Real World has always stopped being polite and started getting real on MTV.
True story: I thought that The Real World had gone off the air years ago. I think I was thinking of Road Rules, or possibly Real World/Road Rules Challenge (which is back!!!!)
23. Women have always piloted war planes and space shuttles.
Yeah!
24. White House security has never felt it necessary to wear rubber gloves when gay groups have visited.
Gay men have never been allowed to donate blood. Oh, wait these aren’t supposed to be downers, are they?
25. They have lived in an era of instant stardom and self-proclaimed celebrities, famous for being famous.
Yeah, this is probably true. I think it’s connected to 22.
26. Having made the acquaintance of Furby at an early age, they have expected their toy friends to do ever more unpredictable things.
Ah, Furby. Would Kids These Days even remember Furby? Was Furby all that great?  I remember a couple of my friends having Furbies senior year, but I still get Furby mixed up with Funzo, I’m not going to lie.
27. Outdated icons with images of floppy discs for “save,” a telephone for “phone,” and a snail mail envelope for “mail” have oddly decorated their tablets and smart phone screens.
That is odd, isn’t it? Do you think that’s going to go on forever? What would make more sense at this point? Is this how ideographs happen?
28. Star Wars has always been just a film, not a defense strategy.
It's too bad they didn't start doing this list until 1998, otherwise they could have busted out, “Star Wars isn’t just a film, it’s a defense strategy,” circa 1990.
29. They have had to incessantly remind their parents not to refer to their CDs and DVDs as “tapes.”
This seems highly specific. What parent of an 18-year-old contributed this one?
30. There have always been blue M&Ms, but no tan ones.
This gives me great insight into the lives of college freshmen.
31. Along with online viewbooks, parents have always been able to check the crime stats for the colleges their kids have selected.
Again, I just don’t see that this offers a lot of insight into the lives of freshmen, especially given that there haven’t been any amendments to the Clery Act (which requires reporting of campus crime statistics) since 2008. Maybe this was on the list last year, too. I don’t know. I’ve spent too much time thinking about this already and I'm not even halfway done.
32. Newt Gingrich has always been a key figure in politics, trying to change the way America thinks about everything.
God, it seems like Newt Gingrich HAS always been a figure in politics. Well, except for that period of several years when he was kind of off the radar. But still.
33. They have come to political consciousness during a time of increasing doubts about America’s future.
So this is maybe a thing they have in common with the aging boomers who write this list.
34. Billy Graham is as familiar to them as Otto Graham was to their parents.
Those kids! With their Billy Graham! (Otto Graham apparently played football in the 40s and 50s. As in, MY parents wouldn’t remember this guy, never mind the parents of 17-year-olds.)
35. Probably the most tribal generation in history, they despise being separated from contact with their similar-aged friends.
Not like those earlier generations of teenagers, who were always angling to hang around with the elderly.
36. Stephen Breyer has always been an Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Is this an aid to understanding the class of 2016 or an argument for Supreme Court term limits?
37. Martin Lawrence has always been banned from hosting Saturday Night Live.
Did you know Martin Lawrence was banned from hosting SNL? Seems kind of unnecessary now, doesn’t it? Am I banned from hosting SNL? Is that why they never call?
38. Slavery has always been unconstitutional in Mississippi, and Southern Baptists have always been apologizing for supporting it in the first place.
You guys, was slavery constitutional in Mississippi in 1994? You could tell me it was and I would believe you. But I’m guessing this is about the Southern Baptists. I feel like I remember something from around that time.
39. The Metropolitan Opera House in New York has always translated operas on seatback screens.
Oh, yeah, the kids go crazy for those seatback opera screens! (FOR SERIOUS, WHO IS THIS FOR??? I DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT THIS AND I GO TO THE OPERA A COUPLE OF TIMES A YEAR, though not at the Met obviously.)
40. A bit of the late Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, has always existed in space.
Sometimes I feel like they just went to the Wikipedia page for 1994 and picked things at random.
41. Good music programmers are rock stars to the women of this generation, just as guitar players were for their mothers.
What are we talking about here? Like the people who create the beats over which sweet raps are laid down? Or people who book clubs? Or, like, that guy at Clear Channel that decides what music everyone in America is going to listen to? Also: music programmers are male, and boys kiss GIRLS, Lisa.
42. Gene therapy has always been an available treatment.
And the kids just eat it up!
43. They were too young to enjoy the 1994 World Series, but then no one else got to enjoy it either.
Just couldn’t wait until next year to work in a reference to the MLB strike, could you?
44. The folks have always been able to grab an Aleve when the kids started giving them a migraine.
I need an Aleve if I’m going to get through this list.
45. While the iconic TV series for their older siblings was the sci-fi show Lost, for them it’s Breaking Bad, a gritty crime story motivated by desperate economic circumstances.
Do kids watch Breaking Bad? Really? On AMC?
46. Simba has always had trouble waiting to be King.
I remember watching this movie with kids I was babysitting in high school. So yes this is true. I guess.
47. Before they purchase an assigned textbook, they will investigate whether it is available for rent or purchase as an e-book.
Or for illegal download from a torrent site.
48. They grew up, somehow, without the benefits of Romper Room.
SO DID I. I AM 34 YEARS OLD.
49. There has always been a World Trade Organization.
Yeah, 17-year-olds just can’t get enough of the WTO! Amirite!?
50. L.L. Bean hunting shoes have always been known as just plain Bean Boots.
Those kids and their Bean Boots!
51. They have always been able to see Starz on Direct TV.
Movies, movies, movies, movies, movies, movies, moooovies! Movies, movies, movies, movies! When I want movies I wanna see STARZ!”
52. Ice skating competitions have always been jumping matches.
No artistic bla bla kids these days with their tire irons, hitting girls in the knees.
53. There has always been a Santa Clause.
AND OUR LIVES ARE RICHER FOR IT. God Bless You Tim Allen.
54. NBC has never shown A Wonderful Life [sic] more than twice during the holidays.
I don’t know why, but I suspect someone wrote this as “once” and then they fact-checked it and actually it was “twice” and they were like, “huh, twice really isn’t as strong as once,” but then they left it in anyhow.
55. Mr. Burns has replaced J.R.Ewing as the most shot-at man on American television.
This is poorly-phrased; please rewrite.
56. They have always enjoyed school and summer camp memories with a digital yearbook.
You know what *I* think is interesting is when you explain to Kids These Days that a facebook used to be an actual physical book that you would get with pictures of people’s faces in it. They are TOTALLY SURPRISED. Seriously, tell an under-20 this, or better yet dig one out and show them. You will BLOW THEIR MIND.
57. Herr Schindler has always had a List; Mr. Spielberg has always had an Oscar.
It’s funny because Schindler’s List came out in 1994.
58. Selena's fans have always been in mourning.
If you said Selena to a Kid These Days I bet that Kid would think you meant Selena Gomez. That’s why it’s important to use Selena’s full name: Slain Tejano Singer Selena.
59. They know many established film stars by their voices on computer-animated blockbusters.
I just. I mean, stars have done animated voices for a long time! Not on computer-animated blockbusters,  I guess.
60. History has always had its own channel.
But how long has that channel been showing Ancient Aliens???
61. Thousands have always been gathering for “million-man” demonstrations in Washington, D.C.
I guess. Whatever.
62. Television and film dramas have always risked being pulled because the story line was too close to the headlines from which they were ”ripped.”
Like, accidentally or on purpose? I don’t understand this one. Probably because I don’t have the right mindset.
63. The Twilight Zone involves vampires, not Rod Serling.
This item would be 50 times better if it included the word “sparkly.”
64. Robert Osborne has always been introducing Hollywood history on TCM.
They love Turner Classic Movies, those 17-year-olds. They watch it because they want more blonde bimbos and less Dumb and Dumber guys.
65. Little Caesar has always been proclaiming “Pizza Pizza.”
Has he, though? I feel like Little Caesar’s heyday was during my sleepover days, circa 1990. I haven’t heard “Pizza Pizza” in 10 years.
66. They have no recollection of when Arianna Huffington was a conservative.
Not like previous generations of 17-year-olds, who were deeply clued-in to Ariana Huffington’s political past.
67. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome has always been officially recognized with clinical guidelines.
And therefore is being successfully cured! Oh, wait.
68. They watch television everywhere but on a television.
Except when they’re watching TCM, the History Channel, or Breaking Bad.
69. Pulp Fiction’s meal of a "Royale with Cheese" and an “Amos and Andy milkshake” has little or no resonance with them.
Please write a 250-300 word reaction piece on the resonance the "Amos and Andy milkshake" holds for you.
70. Point-and-shoot cameras are soooooo last millennium.
Because of the phones, I guess.
71. Despite being preferred urban gathering places, two-thirds of the independent bookstores in the United States have closed for good during their lifetimes.
This is a peeve of mine. I mean, sure, there are GREAT independent bookstores out there, but there were also a lot of crappy ones. Most of the independent bookstores in the United States were not "preferred urban gathering places."
72. Astronauts have always spent well over a year in a single space flight.
I did not know this. Like, I didn’t know that all space flights take a year. I guess it’s because of the space station?
73. Lou Gehrig's record for most consecutive baseball games played has never stood in their lifetimes.
Two baseball references and two football. Can we please get some hockey up in here? Maybe some basketball?
74. Genomes of living things have always been sequenced.
Yet my colleagues don’t want to throw away our DNA sequencing books from 1995.
75. The Sistine Chapel ceiling has always been brighter and cleaner.
And that really says it all, doesn’t it?

Things I would have tweeted on the way to Maine if I dared text while driving

circa 11:07: On the road at last!

c. 11:20: Lots of disabled cars on the Mass Pike. Tough start to a holiday weekend!

c. 11:45: Yikes! My bike rack is slipping big time! Better stop at McDonalds to tighten the straps!

c. 1:25: OMG this traffic is making me want to die. Time for a McCafe break.

c. 1:30: Life is much better with a fresh iced latte in my cupholder.

c. 1:45: Traffic was from a broken down RV on a bridge! Hooray for the open road.

c. 1:50: So much for the open road. Stopped again. #killmenow

c. 1:55: I should have just started riding the bike instead of tightening the straps on the bike rack.

c. 2:35: I don't care if it's only been an hour since the last McCafe, I'm stopping again.

c. 2:40: Took an inadvertent tour of charming historic Amesbury, but I've got a full tank of gas and another iced latte, so who cares!

c. 2:50: My "Queen: Greatest Hits" album seems to be missing a lot of their greatest hits. Whither "Bohemian Rhapsody?" Whither "Radio Ga Ga?"

c. 3:00: Listening to "Don't Stop Me Now" while you're stuck in traffic is more depressing than not. #makeasupersonicwomanofme

c. 3:20: Getting off of I-95 to take route 1 instead is an interesting idea, Google Maps, but I'm not falling for your tricks.

c. 3:45: Only 4.5 hours to drive 170 miles! That's almost 40 mph! In medieval times people would have thought I was a wizard! #stupidpeasants

A post about farms, bumper stickers, and shared cultural touchstones

Around here I see a lot of cars sporting "No farms, no food" bumper stickers. It's the slogan of an organization that works to protect farmland from development, which is a pretty popular position around here, where the quality of the soil and the short growing season make farming even more of a dicey proposition than in many other parts of the US. Add to that the fact that New England is pretty heavily developed already, and it's not hard to see why a farmer in Western Massachusetts might be willing to sell her fields to Wal-Mart or something.

Anyway, over the past week or so I've seen two variant bumper stickers. One said, "No farms, no beer," which is funny (beer!) and more accurate than the original sticker - after all, we could always fish and hunt and gather, (though I wouldn't like to do it myself) but making beer exclusively from wild hops and barley seems pretty unlikely. The other one was a more positive, but less grammatically parsable "Yes farms, yes food." Would "Yes farms, yes food" make sense to someone who wasn't already familiar with the "No farms, no food" sticker? I've heard of (though I haven't seen) yet another bumper sticker that says, "Know farms, know food," which is another nice take on the topic AND possibly a riff on a popular religious slogan - "No God, no peace; know God, know peace"* but again, not something that makes a whole lot of sense on its own.

Which reminds me of a great bumper sticker I saw last year at a gift shop near Baxter State Park in Maine. It said, "This car climbed Mt. Katahdin," and I thought it was hilarious (I didn't buy one and I'm still annoyed with myself about that - next time I am at Baxter I am 100% definitely getting one). Now, in order to find that bumper sticker as hilarious as I do you have to be in a certain shared cultural space with me.

1. You have to be familiar with the "This car climbed Mt. Washington" bumper sticker, reasonably common in New England, advertising the prowess of cars that have ascended New England's highest peak via the (genuinely treacherous) Mt. Washington auto road.
2. You have to know that the peak of Mt. Katahdin is accessible only by foot.
3. And for good measure, it helps to know that although Katahdin is about 1,000 feet shorter than Washington, it's an absolute bastard to climb, and significantly more difficult (and vastly less popular) than Mt. Washington.

Anyway, what I'm saying is, bumper stickers don't have a lot of room to get their message across, and so the best ones use not only catchy slogans but also cultural in-jokes and shared understanding. I'm coming to appreciate the genius of the clever bumper sticker, and thinking it might be time to get some for my as-yet-sticker free car. If you're heading up to Baxter pick one up for me.





* With assorted variations like "No Jesus, no love," etc.

Crowdsource the anthem!

So, I didn't watch the Super Bowl last night because I am a Bad American, but I did at least get to hear Christina Aguilera's version of The Star-Spangled Banner on Hot 93.7* this morning. And you know what? I think on the whole, we are better off just singing our national anthem our own damn selves. It is time for all patriotic Americans to reclaim control of our national anthem from the "singers" who, let's face it, haven't exactly been doing a bang-up job with it.

Exhibit 1!

The crowd at Fenway Park picks up the tune when a disabled man dissolves into nervous giggles (also, note that this man gets further into the song without making mistakes than Xtina does!). Everyone sounds great.



Exhibit 2!

The crowd at a minor league hockey game in Virginia finishes the anthem when a little girl's mic cuts out. They sound even better than the Fenway crowd!



What I'm saying is, yes, The Star-Spangled Banner is kind of a difficult song for any one person to sing, but it actually sounds good when sung by a crowd. Which makes sense, given that the tune comes from a drinking song. Who sings drinking songs as dramatic solos?** And even if people mess up the words, there are enough other people singing to cover for it.

I'm not saying a solo version of The Star-Spangled Banner can't succeed - I've got a soft spot and a half for Rene Rancourt***, for example:



To me, the most successful performances of The Star-Spangled Banner are the ones that let the crowd sing along! But no, no one just sings the damn song straight, everyone wants to show off! I wish we could have the singer(s) get the song started and then let the crowd take over. I think the main barrier is not the difficulty, but just that it's a long song - I don't know if everyone would stay in for the whole thing (without an adorable child or intellectually-challenged person to support).

And it's not going to happen, because people want their chances to show off, and even with eleventy-million professional, semi-pro, college, high school, and peewee sports games being played in the US every year, there eleventy-one million stars, starlets, kids, acapella groups, military bands, and state troopers itching to perform their souped-up versions of the national anthem. And maybe because we've all been taught that The Star-Spangled Banner is too difficult for ordinary people to sing.

But it's not! Really! Together we can perform this song! Let's do it! We'll sound great!

NOTES
*Connecticut's #1 for Hip-Hop and R&B - I'm mostly an NPR girl, but I can't stand Cokie Roberts' "analysis", so every Monday morning when she comes on, it's Hot 93.7 all the way.

**Ooh, now I'm tempted to record an extended, melisma-filled version of, I don't know, "The Irish Rover" or something.

***Although really I think I like Rene Rancourt's O Canada even better than his Star-Spangled Banner. Observe this fabulous example of classy passive-aggressiveness exhibited by Rancourt and a Garden full of Bruins fans after Canadiens fans booed the Star-Spangled Banner in Montreal:

Buying woollen things

I said I would write more about Iceland and then I forgot. Whoops! Here goes, then - I did a bunch of shopping when I was in Iceland. I am not much of a shopper when I'm at home, but I do like visiting shops in unfamiliar places, that carry unfamiliar goods. I don't always buy much, but it's fun to look.

Iceland has a reputation for being very expensive, and this is true to some extent; food and alcohol are especially high-priced (with the exception of fish, lamb, and brennivin), and a lot of the items in shops would be much cheaper anywhere other than in Iceland. Check out these Silly Bandz knockoffs selling for almost $3 a dozen!



I don't shop for Silly Bandz regularly but I hope that's not how much they cost in the US, because if so all those poor kids are getting shafted.

But there are bargains to be had in Iceland, especially on wool. Did you know that in Icelandic the word for "money" and the word for "sheep" is the same word? That's what a shopkeeper told me, and this online English-Icelandic dictionary backs me up.

One nice thing about buying wool products in Iceland is that if you export them you can get all your VAT (something like 15%) back, no matter how much wool you buy. These yarns cost about half as much in Iceland as they do in the US, so there are great bargains to be had for knitters. They also have wool for felting at what appeared to be an excellent price, though I am not a felter so I don't know how it compares. I bought a lot of yarn at the Handknitting Association of Iceland shop, enough to fill my small suitcase (fortunately, I had brought an extra suitcase in anticipation of this event). Most of it was for me, but some was for a friend. I swear! I wish I'd bought more.



The Handknitting Association also sells great handmade Lopi sweaters, which are very, very popular in Iceland, though I think most of the ones you see Icelanders wearing are not just handmade but homemade - all Icelanders learn to knit in primary school, and Lopi sweaters are not difficult to knit, so pretty much any grandma or aunt (or uncle or whatever!) has the know-how to make one of these. Non-knitters can skip the rest of this paragraph, but knitting nerds may be interested to know that Lopi sweaters are knitted from the bottom up, in the round, from bulky weight Icelandic wool, and they feature a stranded colorworked yoke, often featuring 3-4 shades of the same color (grays, browns, or blues, for example). Pullovers, buttoned cardigans, and zip cardigans are all pretty popular.

As a knitter, I chose to buy the yarn and knit my own, but if you don't knit but want a great souvenir of Iceland, I think a Lopi sweater is a great choice - they're very attractive, unmistakeably Icelandic, and super-useful (I use mine in place of a jacket in fall and early winter). They're scratchy, but they're also nearly waterproof, and pretty durable. If you can't afford the prices in the tourist shops, check out the Icelandic Red Cross thrift store on Laugavegur in Reykjavik - you might luck out and find a used one you like there.

In addition to the yarn, I bought two scarves, one fancy and one functional, both of Icelandic wool. I spent way too much on the fancy scarf but I love it. It's by a small Icelandic brand called Kurlproject (WARNING: site plays music automatically, ugh). It seems like everyone in Iceland is either a clothing designer or a musician. Or both.

I also bought an adorable felt Christmas ornament:



The brand on this one is Kata Handverk, and the crafter had loads of different types of ornaments and figurines, all the same basic shape. I wish I'd gotten her little nativity/creche! It was so cute. On the other hand, I don't really have any spare surfaces in my apartment that I want to turn over to a nativity scene and I'm not really religious. So, maybe I was right. I like buying souvenir Christmas ornaments, because you don't get used to them - you get to rediscover and remember them every year when you trim the tree.

I bought some other stuff but it was mostly junk. The main exports of Iceland are fish, fishing-related equipment, aluminum, software, and woolen goods. I don't really need any aluminum or fishing-related equipment, software I can buy pretty easily from home, and I can't legally import fish into the US. So woolens it is! Oh, and some cute little hand-carved wooden sheep for a toddler cousin.

Frozen

I think a lot of people have the experience where they're dreaming but they're frozen - unable to move to run away from something or towards something or whatever. This makes a lot of sense, since when you're in dream-stage sleep all your muscle movements are frozen, and just like a light or noise from outside of your brain can sneak into your dream (I once had a dream that a friend was excitedly telling me about the Red Sox home opener, which turned out to be my clock radio telling me the same information), the feeling of paralysis can sneak into your dream as well (I think! Any stray sleep scientists stumbling across this blog, please correct me as necessary!).

I had a weird variation on this experience the other night. I dreamt that I was on a subway with some (ill-defined) friends, and someone started singing the Hallelujah Chorus (sort of like one of those Hallelujah Chorus flashmobs you see on YouTube). I tried to join in on the soprano part (because no one else was singing it), but I could only make choking, squawking noises. I strongly suspect that if anyone had been in the room with me, they would have complained to me in the morning about how I had been waking them up with my weird chokey squawky noises. I think my sleep-paralyzed vocal chords weren't responding to my brain's message ("Sing 'King of Kings!', dammit!") and I worked that "my voice doesn't work" feeling into the dream. I can't think of another time when I've dreamed about singing; I wonder if this always happens?

Holiday! Celebrate! Waffles!

I had a very low-key holiday season this year, with one exception - I was supposed to go to New Orleans but was prevented by a blizzard. That was frustrating, and required me to spend a lot of time on the phone trying to contact airlines and travel agents, but what can you do? I'll make it to New Orleans someday, and in the meantime my airfare's being refunded.

And the blizzard also meant I got a great chance to try out my new snowshoes (a Christmas present) on the rail trail behind my dad's house, which was a lot of fun. Sadly, the blizzard was a coastal storm so by the time I got back home to the Valley there wasn't any snow to speak of, but I'm sure it will come soon enough. Hopefully I'll be able to procure some gaiters and trekking poles by the time it shows up. I also got a lot done around the house while I was not in New Orleans (including a redo of my bedroom, pics to follow).

I got a NordicWare Belgian Waffler for Christmas. This is a stove-top waffle maker (not electric), and it's how we made waffles in my house growing up (and by "we," I mean "my dad"). I wanted one of these because, dammit, sometimes you want waffles, and pancakes won't do! But I didn't want a big counter-top appliance that I would have to store someplace. The Belgian Waffler fits in my cabinet with the cookie sheets and the muffin pans. It's a bit harder to master than an electric waffle maker, but I was able to make recognizable (and delicious) waffles on my first try.

I made Overnight Waffles from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. (Actually this was either from the original, yellow cover copy of HTCE or HTCE Vegetarian but the same recipe is in all three books.)

The great thing about this yeast-risen waffle recipe is that (as the name suggests) you mix it up the night before so, #1, you hardly have to do any work in the morning to actually prepare the waffles and, #2, you get to go to sleep dreaming of waffles. I was slightly uncomfortable about leaving dairy-containing batter out overnight, but I put my trust in Bittman and sure enough, my fears were unfounded. If you don't feel like whipping egg whites in the morning, don't worry about it, just throw the eggs in. I whipped the whites because I had just rescued my old hand mixer from my dad's attic, where it had been since sometime in 2002.

I put the extra waffles in the freezer and I heated one up for breakfast this morning - ace! I will be making some whole-grain waffles for the freezer soon, since I generally try to make my weekday breakfasts healthier than white-flour waffles. For the past couple of months I have been eating like some kind of feral animal that lives behind a candy factory, so although I'm not making a formal New Year's resolution, I am going to try to eat healthier in the coming months.

Snaefellsnes! (God bless you)

So, on Sunday, I took a tour of the Snaefellsnes peninsula. I signed up for the day tour, but was upgraded to the luxury tour with gourmet dinner and aurora borealis on the way home! I think because I was the only one who wanted to do the day tour, and it's a small company, so they were only going to do one or the other. On the one hand, this was great - I got the fancy tour for the price of the less-fancy tour! On the other hand, it was an incredibly long day, longer than I was prepared for. I was picked up at my hotel at 9AM and didn't get back until 11:30PM. 14-and-a-half hours in a minivan with a bunch of strangers! Woo-hoo! On the website, they say the tour is 10-12 hours, so it's not like I thought I was going to be back in time for dinner or anything, but still.



Oh, wait, was I bitching about something? Aside from the grueling 14-hourishness of it, this tour was amazing. At 9AM, it was still very dark, and the streets were deserted. It felt like the middle of the night. We picked up sandwiches ("We won't stop for lunch - we have so little light," our guide said) and piled into the minivan. By the end of the day I was VERY glad I got one of the bucket seats and didn't end up crammed into the back seat. If I were a nicer person I guess I would have volunteered to switch seats with someone else, but I'm not, so I didn't!

We drove north from Reykjavik, in the dark at first. After maybe an hour and a half, we stopped at a rest stop in Borgarnes, the last "city" we'd see for the next several hours (it was a tiny supply town for the surrounding farms - maybe a few thousand people). We stopped at a couple of places to take photos of a volcanic crater (above) and the Snaefellsjokull (a glacier, behind the mountain below).



We visited a natural hot tub, where we hung out in 100+F water while freezing wind blew across the field. I am still washing the peat out of my swimsuit. While we were in the pool I tried an Icelandic delicacy called hakarl, or fermented shark. According to the wikipedia entry Anthony Bourdain called hakarl "the single worst, most disgusting and terrible tasting thing" he had ever eaten. Tony speaks the truth! I chewed, and chewed, but I couldn't make myself swallow it, and after I'd gagged twice I spit it out and threw it away.

I attempted to wash the shark taste out of my mouth with brennivin, traditional Icelandic schnapps made with potatoes and flavored with cumin. Brennivin will never be my favorite taste (and for what it's worth it's apparently the favorite tipple of the Icelandic problem drinker) but it's a hell of a lot better than hakarl.

Snaefellsnes is gorgeous, and, in the winter at least, it feels completely deserted. We hardly saw any other cars; we passed occasional farms with Icelandic ponies or sheep roaming around outside, but didn't see any of the farmers.



It was bleak, but stunning. Our guide talked about how Icelanders traditionally have a kind of adversarial relationship with nature, and haven't always seen it as something to be preserved, but rather to be defended against. You can see where they were coming from.



Really otherworldly. Driving through a lava field while listening to Sigur Ros was pretty amazing. (Also, Icelanders talk about Sigur Ros a lot. And Bjork.) We had a great dinner (amazing fish soup, yummy lamb, and apple caramel cake) and then we saw the Aurora Borealis on the way home, huge and gorgeous. There was a new moon and the sky was completely clear. It was as many stars as I'd ever seen in my life. I was freezing cold and exhausted, but taken all in all it was a great night. I just wish I'd know how long it was going to be; I would have gotten some more sleep the night before!

Iceland, take 2

So, this past weekend I went to Reykjavik again. It was a lovely trip. I went by myself and didn't re-do any of the things I did when I went last year, except for eating lobster soup (humarsupa) at Sea Baron again.

And I saw the Northern Lights! And utterly failed to get any kind of a good photograph of them.


My best shot.

They were huge, and gorgeous. I saw them on the way home from a VERY LONG small-group day tour to the Snaefellsnes peninsula. I was completely exhausted and out of sorts but then we got out of the car and the lights were taking up what seemed like half the sky (actually they were probably about 120 degrees wide and 60 degrees high). They were moving and shimmering and streaks kept appearing and then disappearing. It was pretty damn sweet.

One of the people on the tour, a very nice French girl who worked for the tour company, was trying to explain what causes the aurora, leading to a very funny and odd conversation.

B: It's because of the... I don't know how you say the word in English... "Yawn"?

The English speakers in the car: Yawn?

B: You know? Yawn? The yoan?

Jonas, the tour guide: What, me?

B: No, no the yawn? With the charge of electricity!

English speakers: IONS!

Hah, it was the exact same word just pronounced differently, and we spent probably five minutes going back and forth like this. If she'd just spelled it, we would have gotten it much sooner. It reminded me of one time I was talking to a French-Canadian girl at the museum of science and she was trying to ask me if the monkeys were "amiable", but pronouncing it in this half-French, half-English way. I had no idea what she was talking about. One word, two languages.

At home for fall

What with the solstice last week I can feel the days drawing in. I love fall, but it always reminds me of the opportunities I missed during the summer. Now that the sun is setting before 7PM I can't help but regret the post-dinner hikes and bike rides and runs I didn't take back in June and July when it was light until nine. And soon enough it will be dark when I get home from work.

Seriously, though, I really enjoy fall and winter! There's something enjoyably primal about battening down the hatches (or at least putting those plastic storm-window sheets over the windows) and curling up with a hot beverage and a throw blanket or two. In my last apartment we had no control over our heat (steam radiators controlled at the building level) so I am really looking forward to having control of my own heat this winter. And on the gas company website I was able to see how many therms the previous tenant used over the last couple of winters, so I'm geekily looking forward to seeing whether I can use less gas than she did. I lead an exciting life.

Also on the energy-saving front, I replaced most of my light bulbs with fluorescents yesterday. And while I was at it, I washed the old-fashioned glass shades on the ceiling lights in the sink. Man, were they gross. One was full of dead ladybugs. So I'm glad I got that cleaned up. Next: cleaning out under my range top. A couple of weeks ago I spilled something down there and when I went to clean it up, I discovered that no one had cleaned under the range top in a long time, maybe not since it was installed (and it is an old stove). I started cleaning it up, but it was just too much work with the tools and products I had at hand, and I have not been able to bring myself to open up the range top since. I'm not sure what I'm going to need to use to clean it up... hopefully I won't set anything on fire in the process. At least there weren't any ladybugs.

Oh, and speaking of my stove, yesterday I baked bread in a covered casserole and it has the awesomest crust in all the land! If you have not tried baking bread in a casserole or dutch oven or whatever, can I just very very strongly recommend that you do so? The bread itself was only OK, because I only decided at around 5:30 that I wanted fresh bread to go with my pumpkin soup, so I couldn't give it as much rising time as I would have liked and still eat it that same evening, but it was not bad at all for 2-hour bread. I can't wait to bake a nice bread that I make with a proper sponge and everything in the pot. Yum.

Glorious food

I went to the Northampton farmers' market on Saturday and I got seriously the best peaches I think I have ever eaten. And the tomatoes were great too. I always either underbuy or overbuy at farmers' markets - I can never seem to accurately gauge how much vegetables I'm going to want to eat in the next few days. I guess I didn't completely underbuy this time; I still have most of a head of lettuce in the fridge, and half a cucumber, and there's another farmers' market today. But I definitely didn't buy enough tomatoes.

These weren't heirloom or anything but they were the kind of tomatoes where you cut into them and you are just startled by the rich, gorgeous color of them. And they taste... dang. I ate them in salad with a little vinaigrette, mixed some, chopped, into guacamole (perhaps a waste... I'm not sure), made salsa (so good).

A couple of weeks ago I picked up a bunch of kale that someone from work had gotten in a farmshare or something and did not want. I am not a huge fan of kale. First, I made the mistake of trying to just eat it sauteed. This is not a good way to eat kale for me, especially summer kale (winter kale can be a bit sweeter). Then I mixed some of the leftover sauteed kale into pasta with pesto and tomatoes (not the glorious tomatoes, just some pretty good tomatoes). That wasn't bad.

Then last night, I thought, you need to either use that kale or throw it away, and it might have too much oil on it to compost even. So I made a bread pudding with some bread ends I'd stuck in the freezer. It was so good, I ate the whole pie plate full (which wasn't quite as bad as it sounds... though it was still a lot of food).

Here's my recipe for bread pudding with kale:

Ingredients:
1-2 cups of cut up bread (supermarket baguettes in my case, but any bread will work)
2/3 cup of milk (would have used more but I was running low and wanted to save some for coffee)
2 eggs
2 oz or so of cheese, grated or cut into 1/4 inch dice (I used gruyere)
1 cup precooked kale, chopped into bite-sized pieces
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350.

Put the bread in a 8-inch baking dish or 9-inch pie plate.

Warm the milk (should be hot, but not boiling or burnt) and pour it over the bread. Let it soak in for 5 minutes.

Meanwhile, lightly beat the eggs with the salt and pepper.

Add the eggs, cheese, and kale to the pie plate and stir until everything is pretty evenly distributed.

Pop it in the oven for about 30 minutes (or go work on adjusting your TV wall mount and forget all about it until it starts smelling delicious). When it's done it should be golden on top, and if you put a sharp-bladed knife into it it should come out fairly clean.

Chow down.

Western Mass(achusetts)

So, I've been living and working in the Pioneer Valley for over a month now, and I'm actually liking it very much. I'm not entirely comfortable with how much I'm driving (from a financial and an environmental standpoint) and I have no friends (if you're in the Five Colleges area and want to be my friend, let me know!), but I am kind of a loner anyhow so that doesn't actually bother me much (it bothers me a bit how little my friendlessness bothers me, but that's getting silly).

Anyhow, this weekend my mom and my sister came to visit me on Saturday and we went for a nice bike ride and did some shopping in Northampton and had a slightly excessive lunch. After a very good tired sleep I woke up on Sunday with no particular plan besides possibly building a window seat in my bedroom, but I really need to price out foam and cushions before I can make that a reality. So instead I gave myself twenty minutes to tidy up the apartment, then I got in my car and drove to MASS MoCA.

MASS MoCA is a modern art museum in almost the very northwesternmost corner of the state, in North Adams, about an hour and a half away from me. The museum is housed in old mill buildings, and there is a lot of exposed brick and industrial-looking business, and honestly it would be a pretty cool place if they just let you wander around the old buildings! But instead they've filled it up with modern art, which is also cool.



This was one of my favorite pieces I saw - it's called Re-projections: Hoosac, and it's by Tobias Putrih. It's made of hundreds (thousands?) of pieces of monofilament fishing line strung across this very long gallery and lit by a spotlight maybe two-thirds of the way down. It's tunnel-shaped, and it slopes, so you can get right inside it like these people are doing here. It's incredibly disorienting! Turns out I love large, disorienting pieces of modern sculpture. Although it's completely different in execution, walking inside the tunnel reminded me of some of the Richard Serra pieces I saw at the retrospective at MoMA a few years ago.

I also really enjoyed the huge Sol Lewitt retrospective. I'd never heard of Lewitt before (in this respect he is like most artists of the last 100 years, I'm afraid) but he was a conceptual/minimalist artist, and most of the things on display at MASS MoCA are huge wall drawings/paintings. Lewitt would conceive the drawings, and then draftspeople would execute them. Some of the drawings I saw were never executed in his lifetime, which is kind of interesting.

Here is a video of the installation being, um, installed:



SO COOL. Would it be blasphemous for me to decorate my new coffee table ($6 at Goodwill! Ugly!) in the style of a Sol Lewitt drawing? I'm not sure I care. That video makes me want to get out the masking tape, big time.

When I saw the paintings and read the label copy and understood what they were, I thought, "He's like John Cage, but for visual art!" But I guess it is still even a little stranger to do this for visual art; most composers intend for other artists to interpret their work, but most visual artists do most of the execution of their work themselves. Though I can think of exceptions on both sides of that equation.

On the way home a bald eagle flew right over my car as I crossed a bridge. The Mohawk Trail (Route 2) is a stunning drive, and I can't wait to do it in the Fall. I stopped in Shelburne Falls, which is an adorable little town with a garden on an old trolley bridge and interesting geological features. Then I drove the rest of the way home along the Connecticut River, but I skipped the interstate so I was on nice little secondary roads most of the time. I drove past tobacco farms! I didn't even know there were tobacco farms in Massachusetts (though I knew there were in Connecticut, so I guess why not). First I noticed the strange barns where they dry the leaves, which seemed vaguely familiar (either from seeing them in Virginia or from photos, I don't know) and eventually I put two and two together.

Anyway, an excellent (non-lazy) Sunday.

One blog

So, I've decided that instead of having a travel blog and a crafting blog, I'm going to just have one blog and it's going to be about more than just crafting and travel (though it will occasionally be about crafting and/or travel), and I'm going to update it at least a couple of times a week, hopefully more often.

And of course, now that I've said that, I feel like I have nothing to say.

But I do, kind of! I will talk about a recent Sunday I spent in Maine.

I went to an annual church service at a historic church, which shall remain nameless. They only open this church up once a year, and a guest pastor comes to preach at one shortish service, and then they lock the church back up until the next year (unless someone wants to get married there in the meantime). There's an organ with foot-pump bellows, box pews, the works; it's not in great condition (think peeling wallpaper, stained ceiling) but it's old, at any rate, and has a certain charm.

As you might guess, this service attracts a fairly... mature crowd. There were a few people there in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, and two adorable children had been brought in to ring the church bell, but for the most part the congregation ranged from Old to Really Very Old Indeed.

Anyway, the minister was giving a sermon about how he had gone to Tanzania to train bush pastors who could not even afford bibles. Which, to me, raised the question, "Why didn't you give them bibles, then?" He did say that the conference he was at distributed 50 bibles, but seriously, I don't understand why there should be a limit to the number of bibles they're distributing. For the cost of this guy's and his wife's plane tickets to Tanzania, surely they could have photocopied at least a few hundred Kiswahili New Testaments. But perhaps I am missing the point. And I digress.

About halfway through the sermon, one of the members of the congregation collapsed. It was pretty scary. At first the minister kept going and we all tried not to pay attention, because it wasn't entirely clear what was going on, but it quickly became clear that it was serious, and my cousin (who was an EMT 15 years ago) and another woman (a nurse) ended up performing CPR before the ambulance came.

The minister had most of us leave the church and wait out in front while all this was going on. I'm not sure this was actually such a good idea; it took so long for people to get out of the church I was genuinely afraid that when the ambulance got here the EMTs wouldn't be able to reach the patient because the aisles would be clogged with very slow people using walkers and canes, and I considered trying to get everyone to sit back down. (It wasn't an issue - the aisles were clear by the time the ambulance came. And who knows, maybe someone else would have collapsed if we'd all stayed in the stuffy little church.)

The man who'd collapsed was conscious when they got him into the ambulance, and I hope he is OK. My cousin (the one who resuscitated him) hadn't been planning on going to the service, but decided to go because her dad usually goes but was out of town and disappointed about not being able to make it. Anyway, here's to my cousin and to that nurse, for saving that guy's life! Without them, it would have been a tragic service.

So, after the ambulance left, we all filed back into the little church (slowly) and after a prayer of thanksgiving, the pastor picked his sermon right back up where he left off! And didn't appear to change a single thing about it, even though he had mentioned earlier in his sermon how much we take for granted having access to medical treatment! I am not minister, but I tell you I could think of twelve ways to incorporate the actual events of the day into that sermon, none of which this minister took advantage of. I suppose he was rattled just like the rest of us, but really, missed opportunity.

Then we went back to my family's cottage, where there were more family members, and we had a nice cookout which I had to leave Way Too Early because of my long, trafficky Sunday-afternoon drive home. It was an odd day; a strange combination of sleepy and intense.

It never hurts to ask

I went out to Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago, and because it was significantly cheaper I flew through Chicago, rather than direct. Not ideal, but liveable on the way out (although I was really annoyed when they gate-checked my bag from Boston straight through to LA - if I was going to check a bag, I would have packed completely differently!).

I was really not looking forward to the trip home, though - I was scheduled on a red-eye flight to Chicago followed by an early morning flight to Boston. I was tired and ready to go home by about 5PM and my flight didn't leave until 11:30. So I decided to go to the airport a little early and see what my other options were. The little check-in computer was uninterested in letting me change my flights BUT it also asked me if I would be willing to give up my seat on the Chicago flight, which was overbooked (as near as I could tell, another Chicago flight had been cancelled).

"Hmm," I said to myself, "this seems like an opportunity - the airline doesn't want me to go to Chicago, and I don't want to go to Chicago either!" After a half-hour of wandering around the terminal and checking on the little check-in computers to see if there were any other flights available, I found the customer service line. Which I then waited in for 45 minutes.

Easily half the movement of the line was people getting frustrated and walking away (yikes!), but I persevered. I was wearing comfortable shoes and I had podcasts to listen to. But finally, I got up the front of the line, just as boarding was starting for the direct LAX-BOS flight!

I explained the situation to the woman at the desk, and she said, "If it'll make one of the Chicago people happy, no problem. But I have to type like the wind!" She gave me a boarding pass and said she didn't know if it was a good seat or anything but I figured I didn't have a particularly good seat on the Chicago flight, and this way I didn't have to go to Chicago. And when I boarded the plane, my seat was a perfectly nice window seat and, get this, the seat next to me was empty! I think it was the only empty seat on the plane!

I got home hours earlier than I expected, I didn't have to get off the plane in Chicago at 5AM (5AM Chicago time, so 3AM LA time), and I got to spread out and take as much sleeping room as I wanted for the whole flight. It was awesome. All it took was 45 minutes of waiting in line, and let's face it, I was already in the terminal and it's not like I had anything better to do with my time. I felt triumphant. Travel Win!

Dream vacations

It's HOT in Boston right now - we're having an honest to God heat wave. Any sensible person would be getting out of town, and fast, but my vacation savings account (yes, I have a savings account just for vacations) and my time off balance are both at record lows right now, so here's a list of places I'd like to be going, though I have no prospects of actually getting there.

Chile

My sister and her husband went skiing in Portillo, Chile on their honeymoon last year:

photo by nessfc on flickr

Oh, that looks lovely. And I haven't been skiing in seven or eight years!

Iceland

I'm not saying you shouldn't go to Iceland in March - I had a great time in Iceland in March. But I think that I would enjoy it even more right now. They're going to have highs in the 50s (F) all week. We're going to have highs in the 90s all week. And there are views like this:

photo by strawberrymaya on flickr

Back in March I was in the very spot where this photo was taken, but all I saw was fog and snow. Alas.

Maine

I love Maine. I have loads of family in Maine. If I had the vacation time I could go up to Maine right now and take a dip in the freezing cold ocean off a rocky Midcoast beach; I could lie in a hammock next to a lake; I could take a boat out to one of the islands in Casco Bay; and there might very well be an aunt or grandmother around who I could mooch a delicious meal or two off of; but it is too much to think of. Here are some photos of Maine.

photo by jkbashkin on flickr

photo by dana_moos on flickr

Bhutan

I bet it's cool up in the mountains right now. And relaxing. Bhutan is somewhere I'd like to go but I expect I never will go, because it is so expensive and so inconvenient. That's part of what makes me want to go - not exclusivity for exclusivity's sake, but the fact that it's an extraordinarily beautiful part of the world where tourism's impact is low. And I mean look at this:

photo by jmhullot on flickr

It makes me want to convert to Buddhism on the spot!

OK, enough fantasies for today. It's nearly time for me to head outside into the 90 degree heat and sweat my way home. Good times.

(Many thanks to the photographers whose photos I've used here and to all those who post to flickr using Creative Commons licenses!)

Athens, belatedly, and Madrid

Hi! I never got around to writing about Athens.

I had heard that Athens was really only worth spending a day or so in, and indeed I ended up only spending a day or so there (about a day and a half, really, and actually a lot of that was in my hotel room). This is probably overly dismissive, but you can definitely see some very cool things in one day in Athens.

I arrived in Athens via overnight ferry from Rhodes. This was actually quite nice. I shelled out a little extra money so that I had a bed in a shared cabin - it was somewhere between a floating hostel and going on a cruise with a couple of complete strangers! But it was fairly quiet and though I didn't fall asleep immediately, once I did I slept like a baby - right through my iPod alarm. Oops!

The ferry arrived around 6AM, then I got lost trying to find the metro station, and wandered around for what felt like hours but was probably about 20 minutes, and eventually I found a tram stop and a nice woman waiting for the tram told me to get on and ride it to the metro station. Though of course I did not have a ticket, since this tram stop did not sell tickets. But I didn't get caught, so there. I buy a bus and subway pass at home every month and usually don't get nearly my money's worth out of it, so I will absolve myself of that particular sin. If they had put up a sign that said where the metro station was, I wouldn't have had to fare-jump their tram, so there!

My hotel in Athens was in Omonia, which is apparently kind of a sketchy red-light district. I figured I would be tired and going to bed early anyhow, so who cared if there were drug deals and prostitution going on outside in the middle of the night - I intended to be in bed by about 10PM. In the morning, it was a little on the gritty side but nothing to send me screaming. And the hotel itself did not seem prostitute-infested (it was a Best Western, for what that's worth).

Once I was checked in to my hotel, I went to the Acropolis. This was pretty good! I considered hiring a guide for a tour, but they seemed to vary dramatically in quality, so I ended up just eavesdropping on other people's guides. I really only needed to spend an hour or so here, which was good - by 10:30AM or so it was crowded to the point of uncomfortableness. When they tell you to get to the Acropolis early, they mean it!

Here's the amphitheater at the Acropolis, the Odeon of Herodes Atticus. This is where such exciting events as "Yanni: Live at the Acropolis" and the 1973 Miss Universe Pageant were held. Seriously, though, it's lovely. And the seats have cushions!



This is before it got crowded:



The Parthenon - seriously impressive:



Even with the scaffolding and hordes of tourists:



I also visited a few other ancient sites - with your 12 euro Acropolis ticket, you also get admission to six other ancient sites in Athens (I only made it to three). Here's a photo of a frieze in the Ancient Agora:



I also visited two museums, the Cycladic Art Museum, which was not a big museum but had some lovely art from the prehistoric Cyclades. The people of the Cyclades (islands which include modern-day Santorini and Naxos) made these ritual figurines that I found incredibly appealing.

This is a very large version of the classic figurine (maybe four or five feet tall, near life-size):



They carved these figures over and over. To me they look quite modern, but maybe I just misunderstand the prehistoric Cycladeans. I thought the figures were absolutely lovely, and considered buying one of the reproductions in the gift shop but they were pretty pricey.

And here's a less-typical figure they call "The Cup-Bearer" - I love this guy:



Later in the afternoon, I went to the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, which was delightful! I spent a couple of hours in the prehistorical section - featuring more Cycladic art, Neolithic art, and gorgeous Mycenean gold, before I realized that there must be a lot more to the museum that I hadn't seen yet. Between my feet being exhausted and the museum getting ready to close, I was only able to spend an hour or so in the rest of the museum, but I wasn't all that upset - for whatever reason, the prehistoric stuff is closer to my heart than the classical Greek and Roman stuff. Maybe I need to re-read my Odyssey.

One funny thing happened when I was in the Archaeological Museum - in a room of Neolithic pottery, an American tourist was asking the guard what was the oldest thing in the room, and the guard helpfully pointed out a jar dating to 6000 BCE. Then she kept asking the guard, "Why does this label say 14056 then?" and the guard didn't seem to understand and I was right there so I explained that the 14056 was an inventory number or something, and didn't actually mean anything.

Then we got in a discussion about human evolution in which I had to explain that Lucy the fossil was actually millions of years old, not thousands like this pottery, and that the people who made this pottery were genetically almost the same as us and if you gave them a bath and a haircut and taught them modern language and culture, you'd hardly be able to tell them apart from any other person, but Lucy was a creepy little ape-lady who wouldn't pass for human with any amount of shaving and instruction. And then she said she wasn't sure if she believed in all that, and I said I was on vacation from my work in a museum anyhow and we both moved on.

It was a lovely museum and I would love to visit it again someday. And on the way home, I saw a political demonstration (nonviolent), for the PASOK party. There was a lot of political advertising up all over Athens and Rhodes, as the European elections were being held that weekend I think. Video of political leaders speaking languages I don't understand always seems sinister to me - something about the motions and cadences of a crowd-pleasing oration deprived of their meaning turns me right off. Oliver Sacks wrote about a group of aphasics (people who do not understand speech) laughing uproariously at Ronald Reagan's speeches, but to me political speech devoid of content is more creepy than hilarious. (This is all terribly unfair of me, I know!)

I flew home through Madrid and stayed one night there, but I didn't take any photos. I visited the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia which I loved! Their showpiece is Picasso's famous Guernica, but they don't just show you Guernica - they also have loads of sketches and studies Picasso did in planning the painting, and actual photographs of the canvas at various points in the painting process. Excellent exhibit.

I also spent a good twenty minutes watching the Buster Keaton film "One Week" at the Reina Sofia. It was hilarious! I laughed out loud more than once. Honestly, I think I kind of missed the point of the exhibition it was part of, but whatever, it was a pleasure to sit in a dark room and watch that movie.

After the museum I had a fried calamari sandwich and a beer at a sandwich/tapas place near the museum. Delicious! And I got an olive and a mussel on a tiny plate to tide me over while they made my sandwich. The next morning before my flight I had churros and coffee for breakfast. I definitely want to get back to Madrid. Churros for breakfast!

All in all it was a great trip. It will be a while before I can get away for that long again, and I don't really have any vacation plans on the horizon, which is odd for me (I'd been planning on going to Turkey for about two years!), but we'll see what comes next. I've been doing a lot of staycationing - visiting tourist areas in and near my own city - and I've enjoyed it lots.

Solo travel to Turkey - one woman's experience

A brief diversion from an account of my trip to talk about a few things people have been asking me about (in real life, not on the internet, but hey, maybe someone out there will get some use out of this).

I know that before I came to Turkey I wondered a lot about what it would be like to travel there on my own, as a woman - whether it would be safe, whether I would be extraordinarily conspicuous, etc. I have friends and acquaintances, male and female, who had traveled to Turkey in pairs and small groups, but I didn't know anyone who'd gone to Turkey on their own, male or female. None of my friends who'd been to Turkey urged me to go on my own (one of the things about traveling solo is that your friends don't necessarily learn a lot about your travel style!), but none of them said, "God, no, don't do it!" So, I took to the internet to hear what other women trave ling alone had thought about Turkey. I found a lot of encouraging firsthand stories, a few people who had been miserable, and some news and guidebook accounts of actual crimes and other horror stories.

But you know, I think by the time I started looking at other women's stories, I'd already made up my mind to go. So if you're a woman (or a man) who's already decided to go to Turkey on your own, go ahead and read this post for lots of reassurance and a few caveats and cautionary tales.

Now, for starters, solo travel is not for everyone, period. Some people don't like traveling alone, and I think this is largely a personal temperment issue. Solo travel in general and its challenges and rewards is probably worth a whole blog entry of its own (which I may even write at some point!), so for now I'll just talk about Turkey specifically.

Lots of people have asked me if I felt safe in Turkey, and overall I would say yes. I acknowledge that the risk of being affected by a terrorist attack is probably higher than in the US or Western Europe, though still extremely unlikely. As far as crimes against my person (attack, robbery, rape, whatever), I can 100% say that I never once felt that I was at risk of bodily harm from another person. I did get lost more than once, and that was unsettling and a bit scary, but realistically I do not think I was in any actual danger (other than the danger of needing to take an expensive taxi ride to get where I needed to go!).

I was appropriately cautious; I did not stay out very late, I kept to well-populated areas, especially at night, I did not drink to excess or use any mind-altering substances, and I was vigilant about what was going on around me. I'm a reasonably street-smart person - I used to work in an inner-city hospital complex until midnight, then take the bus home, and I never came to any grief there - and I used my own good judgement.

The time I was most scared, and probably in the most actual danger, was when I got lost in the scrub forest in Kas. This was my own fault for wandering off the trail, and I would have been in just as much danger if not more if I'd been in the mountains of my native New England (in Kas, I at least had a great mobile phone signal, which you can't count on in the White Mountains!). Even then, though, because I'd taken appropriate precautions, the risk I ran was pretty small - I had a mobile phone that I could use to call for help if necessary, I had a whistle, a flashlight, a small first-aid kit, food (dried fruit) and water, and I had good long-sleeve, long-trouser, synthetic hiking clothes. I might have really annoyed my hotel and the local police if I'd had to call for help, but there was never really any risk that I wouldn't be able to get out!

I would say that as far as physical danger goes, you can greatly reduce the amount of risk you run by observing a healthy level of caution, being prepared, and thinking things through. Also, if you know you're prepared, you'll feel a lot more comfortable! (Just don't get too comfortable and stop observing your healthy level of caution...)

A couple of people have asked me about food safety - I didn't drink tap water, but I wasn't particularly careful otherwise, and I felt 100% fine. I ate raw fruit and vegetables without worrying about whether they'd been peeled or how they'd been washed, and a lot of the food was served lukewarm, which I know are all the red flags you're supposed to avoid, but I never had any problem. I do have a stomach of steel, though; I've never had food poisoning that I can remember, and I seem to be able to eat whatever I want, whenever I want, with basically no ill effects (besides weight gain). I think the cure for IBS is lurking somewhere in my digestive tract (OK, gross image; we'll move on now). Obviously if you have a more sensitive stomach you might want to ease into things and be more cautious.

Enough about danger - let's move on to "hassle". In the touristy parts of Turkey that I visited, people (and by people I mean men, actually) are constantly asking you, "Where are you from?" and "What is your name?" and "Are you lost?" I found it a little bit exhausting, just because there are so many of them; individually they're no more annoying than many Save the Children and Greenpeace canvassers I've encountered at home. Mostly I was able to ignore them or develop a sense of humor about it - when I ignored one guy who asked me where I was from he said, "Are you Japanese?" and I said, "Yes, konnichiwa!" which he thought was pretty funny. And I just had to bust out laughing when one guy asked me "Are you lost?" while I was standing directly in front of the Aya Sofya! I don't think it would be possible to be less lost anywhere in Turkey - it's surely the most famous and recognizable landmark in the country.

Constant questioning aside, I did feel very observed on occasion. More than once when I was wandering around in Istanbul I would suddenly find myself in a bustling street (just beyond a touristy area) that was full of men, with no women at all besides myself. It was disconcerting! I don't recall ever finding myself in that situation in North America or Western Europe. It certainly made me feel like I stuck out. In Ankara, also, I felt like people were paying me more attention than I would have liked. But what can you do? I did try to maintain a low profile in terms of my appearance, but I was clearly not Turkish, and clearly a tourist.

I did run into one scam (um, one scam that I noticed, anyway), at the Nevsehir bus station - as described in many other travelers' reports and in all the guidebooks, people at Nevsehir bus station will try to scam you into taking their taxis and private transfers to Goreme and Urgup, rather than the bus company transfer included with your bus ticket. Be prepared and don't fall for it. Make sure you buy a through bus ticket to your final destination, and if you do have to transfer make sure you find the real transfer bus (it will be the one without a bunch of guys trying to talk you in to taking it!).

Another question people have asked me is "What did you wear?" and "What do women wear in Turkey?" I wore long sleeves with highish necklines most of the time, but this was actually as much for sun protection as it was for modesty (I am of the Pink race). I was traveling light, so I brought one pair of (quick-drying, nylon) trousers and one skirt (likewise a wringable, comfy breathable polyester knit) and some long-sleeve shirts. I also brought a couple of t-shirts (and I didn't feel conspicuous in these, either) and a couple of sweaters (almost completely unnecessary - should have left them home!).

As for what how other women dressed, I saw people wearing just about any old thing you've ever seen on anyone - Western and East Asian tourists in tank tops, shorts, beach caftan coverups, jeans, t-shirts, sundresses, a kameez top from a salwar kameez with no trousers underneath (my personal favorite), and other tourists, pilgrims, and local women in various kinds of Muslim traditional dress from long sleeves and ankle-length skirts right on up to women in niqab/black face veils. All over Turkey I saw lots of women in headscarves and lots of women with bare heads. In Cappadocia I saw lots of women in traditional salvar trousers (I can't find any good pictures but basically they have as much fabric as a skirt and a very low crotch, well below the knee; I wish I'd taken photos but I hate asking people if I can take their photos). I saw lots of women wearing variations on these drop-crotch trousers in Greece and Madrid, and I remember seeing those kinds of trousers on The Sartorialist (a fashion blog). I guess I should have bought some - I'd be tres chic! But I'm not sure tres chic is really the way to go in Boston. We're simple people; frumpy and content to stay that way.

The last thing I should mention is the Turkish language. People didn't speak as much English as I expected; not that I have any right to complain about this, as I am pretty monolingual myself. But I didn't do much to prepare myself at all. I wish I'd at least brought a proper phrasebook, rather than relying on the abbreviated one in the back of the Lonely Planet guide. Turkish mostly just washed right over me. I think by the end of two weeks I knew maybe 15 words of Turkish, five of which I've now forgotten two weeks later (I definitely knew the word for "ten" at one point, but that's gone). My favorite Turkish word was "feribot" which, disappointingly, is just pronounced the like "ferryboat", not like some kind of exotic robotic ferry system.

One consequence of the language barrier was that it could be a bit lonely (constant "Where you from?" and "Are you lost?" queries aside). I only spoke with one or two Turkish women the whole trip; almost all of the women I spoke to were either expats living in Turkey or other tourists/travelers. This was a language thing and a cultural thing - my impression was that at least in the tourist industry the men were more likely to hold the public-facing jobs, and the women were more often working behind the scenes; women don't need to speak English to do these jobs, so they don't know English, and so even when I did interact with the Turkish women working at the hotels and restaurants I visited, we couldn't really talk (though some of them were incredibly friendly).

Anyway, to sum up: There are some dangers and annoyances in Turkey, as in anyplace worth going, but I found them completely manageable and worth it. If you can ignore a charity canvasser or a panhandler, you can ignore a Turkish carpet salesman (and the carpet salesman will be a lot more polite than either the canvasser or the panhandler). Read Turkey Travel Planner and a guidebook or two or three before you go to give you an idea of what to expect. Think through a couple of worst-case scenarios (worst-case scenarios aren't as scary to think about if you're prepared for them). Even if you're uncomfortable in one part of Turkey there's probably someplace else that will be a perfect fit for you (it's a big country, and it offers a diversity of tourism experiences). Solo travel in Turkey can be loads of fun; it's probably not for everyone but it was great for me, and if you think it sounds good, go for it!

More Rhodes

I did eventually venture out of the Old Town in Rhodes, and went to what you might call the Actually Much Older town, i.e. the Acropolis of Rhodes.



This is the ancient city of Rhodes. There were three other ancient acropolises on the island of Rhodes, but I did not make it out of Rhodes Town, I'm sorry to say. There's also a stadium there:



Wikipedia says that "acropolis" literally means "city on the edge" (edge in the sense of extremity). I like the idea of a "city on the edge" even if the translation maybe has some layers of meaning that the original version might not. Unsurprisingly, ancient people liked to build their cities up high, where it was easy to defend them. Then the actually living city of Rhodes built up around the acropolis, and the part of the city near the harbor ended up being the more important part.

I also went to several more museums in Rhodes, and I think my favorite was the decorative arts museum. It was all everyday objects like pottery, bedsheets, cabinets, and that sort of thing. It was small, but I really liked the stuff in it. Here's one of my favorite pieces, a jug with a beautiful young lady with a unibrow on it:



So much of the stuff here was just simple and charming and lovely; I took loads of pictures mostly with the idea of eventually stealing the motifs for as-yet-unconceived-of art and craft projects.

I also took the Wall Walk, which, as you might guess, is a walk around the city walls. This was cool, even though it was raining a little bit (it did not rain much while I was in Turkey and Greece. It was lovely).

Rhodes rooftops:





When I was up there I noticed loads of solar hot water heaters and satellite dishes, but they're not so obvious in the photos.

I took a Blue Star ferry overnight from Rhodes to Athens. I got a berth in a four-berth cabin - it's cheaper than getting a private cabin, but more comfortable than sitting up all night on the brightly-lit areas above decks! It was a little noisy, but I got a several good hours of sleep and didn't wake up until they played the "coming in to Athens, time to get off the boat" announcement (at six AM, ay-yi-yi).

I then proceeded to leave my iPod on the boat and spend a good hour wandering around Pireas, lost, but the iPod was old and had something wrong with the screen, and eventually some locals took pity on me and dragged me onto a tram that took me to the metro, so all was well. Next entry: Athens!

Goodbye Turkey, Hello Greece

So, yesterday morning I was checking out of my hotel, planning to take the bus to Marmaris and then take the ferry to Rhodes in Greece from there. But when I asked Marie at the hotel if she could help me book the ferry she was like, don't go to Marmaris! You can go via Kastelorizo instead and it will be cheaper and more fun and more comfortable! But you have to leave right this second! So she hurriedly checked me out, got me and my luggage on a scooter down to the harbor for a boat to Kastelorizo, and called to make sure there was indeed a way for me to get from that island to my final destination of Rhodes.

I went on an excursion boat to Kastelorizo, which is an interesting place in a sleepy kind of way. You might say that it's boring, but for interesting reasons.



Kastellorizo has been occupied by basically any entity that has ever occupied an island in the Mediterranean. It is currently part of Greece, and before wwII it had something like 15,000 residents; after bombings, fires, and assorted other geopolitical difficulties, it currently has a population of about 250. There are a lot of ruined buildings:



Part of the problem is they can't have such strong ties (trade and otherwise) with the towns on the Turkish mainland as they once did. One interesting consequence of this population loss is that, in order to maintain sovereignty to an island that is actually much closer geographically to Turkey than to any other part of Greece, the Greek government basically pays people to live on Kastelorizo (which is also known in Greek as Megisti, and to Turks as Meis). And it subsidizes travel between Kastelorizo and other Greek islands, which is how I ended up on the afternoon flight to Rhodes (I paid 26 euros for the flight!). Here's the airport*:



Here's the plane, just landed from Rhodes:



Here's the baggage claim area:



Anyway, so we all got on the Olympic Airlines plane (maybe 25 of us) for a 25 minute flight to Rhodes. The flight attendant gave us all drinks and snacks and everything, just as if it were a real flight! Then we landed in Rhodes and picked up our luggage from a real luggage claim.

Now, at this point, because I had not been planning to come to Rhodes for another day, I had no hotel reservation and no real idea of how I was supposed to get from the airport to any place that I would want to stay. A difficulty. I saw a sign for a bus stop and there were some kids waiting at the bus stop and the bus timetable said a bus would be by soon, so I waited for the bus, and took it into Rhodes Town. Then I still had no idea where to go so I wandered for a bit until I found a tourist information office. A nice young man in the tourist office called a pension for me and got me a room, and while we waited for the pension owner to show up to take me to the room he showed me on a map all the places I should go while I was in Rhodes. Given that I had no idea what I was doing at any step in the process, I think it turned out very well!

And Rhodes - I love it! The old town, where I am staying, is just about the most romantic thing I've ever seen (or at least it was at first; I've gotten lost in it several times since and now it seems to be equal parts romantic and irritating). But seriously, it is great:

Winding passageways:


Ruins:



A laundromat called Hobby of Laundry for some reason:



Rhodes Old Town is super-touristy - almost all of the businesses are souvenir shops or restaurants (and not particularly good souvenir shops or restaurants, either) - but it's still wonderful. I really like it here. Today I went to a couple of museums, which didn't allow me to take pictures, and then I got lost, stuck in the fortifications of the city:



I walked three-quarters of the way around the city stuck between those two walls.

Anyway, tomorrow a lot of museums and things are closed so I think I'm going to do some open-air activities, and maybe even go to the beach!

*I think Kastelorizo airport is smaller than Beverly Municipal Airport, the airport in my backyard growing up; Beverly has three runways, and Kastelorizo only has the one.