HQ, this is Shuttle Julia…

... we are preparing for final approach and reentry into the Real World at 26/05/04.  We have begun our final countdown and expect to be able to enter the atmosphere of English-speaking-relatives at about 17/04/04.  Until that time, we will go through our procedural checklists and begin jettisoning all unnecessary baggage, expecting that with our advanced “French Mail System (tm),” all jettisoned materials should reach their intended target of Portland, Oregon at some time in the next several years.

Shuttle Julia, over and out.

Happy March!

Hello everyone!  I am safely in cold, snowy Prague and having a brilliant time.  I’ve spent the past few days hanging out with people from Japan, England, Italy, New Zealand and Ireland, all of which makes me feel very cultured and global.  Prague is a really nice city, although I’m not sure that I don’t still like Venice better.  More fun for wandering.  And easier to read the signs.  I don’t have enough Russian, nor is Russian always close enough to Czech, for me to read anything more than a few little words.  Like “bookstore” - always a good one for me!

I went to a splendiferous concert yesterday afternoon - an oboe quartet playing a sort of “greatest hits of classical music” concert, including a Mozart and a Beethoven Oboe Quartet.  They were marvelous, and what’s more, the setting made me feel like I was in a movie.  We were in a grand salon of a like palace in Prague, with a high, frescoed ceiling, beautiful drapes and swags across the windows at either end, the quartet under one window, and snow falling outside.  I felt like I should have been wearing a ball gown and fanning myself with a fan made of ostrich feathers.  ::grin::

I have today and tomorrow here in Prague, and then I’m off to Oxford for a few days.  I’ve made quite a few contacts across Europe (and the world), and we’ve all exchanged visitation invitations.  Who knows - I might take my Japanese friend (who’s living in Switzerland) up on his invitation sometime in the next month!

No time…

but just wanted to let everyone know that I made it to Venice safely and am off to Prague tomorrow!

Well, I’m off!

I head for Venice on Monday!  I’m excited, although a bit nervous.  I hope that all of you have a wonderful couple of weeks, and expect several long updates when I return!

Thought for the day

Supercalifragilistikexpialidocious!

(No, I’m not sure if that is spelled correctly.  Sorry!)

Mucha!

One of my favorite artists is Alphonse Mucha, who coincidentally happened to be Czech and therefore has a museum devoted to him in Prague.  I’m very excited to go see it.  I don’t know how big it will be, nor how well-kept, but nevertheless, I have 5 days in Prague - I can afford to spend some time there, whether it’s great or not.  ::grin::

It’s a tough life, but someone’s gotta do it.

Well, Paul is safely back in Portland now, after having spent an uneventful but still fun week here.  I really enjoyed having him around - it made France seem like home for just a little while.  And I also really enjoyed watching “Firefly” with him; good, good show, although too short-lived.  We honestly didn’t do much other than watch “Firefly,” “Highlander,” and “Johnny Carson.”  Occasionally I dragged him out for a walk or to school (where he made quite an impression on the girls, let me tell you! ;-) ), but other than that, we just lounged.  It was great.  ::smile::

Now, however, he is gone (alas, alack), and I have to suffer through two whole days of school before vacation begins.  Like I said, it’s a tough life.  But as soon as I’ve finished the English club tomorrow at 1:15 (since the class that I normally have on Friday afternoons has been cancelled), I am officially on vacation.  I’m going to meet up with a friend of mine that I haven’t seen for several months on Saturday in Reims for a few hours, and I have a bunch of calls to make this weekend, but other than that, I’ll just be packing, double-checking that I have my passport (I have contacted a surgeon about attaching it to my wrist), and packing my cameras and film!

On a possibly-less-exciting note, I have recently joined the NBA.

That’s right - I am the sole, founding member of Nail Biters Anonymous, and I am proud to say that through a strict mental and physical regimen I have now gone for 39 hours without biting or picking at my nails or my cuticles!  Go me!

It may seem odd that I’m making such a big deal of this, but breaking myself of the nail-biting habit is my way of convincing myself that I can break myself of an equally-long-standing, much-more-ingrained habit: my tendency to hair-trigger emotionality.  Without going into a long discussion, I have decided that the “work” that I have been doing on this problem for the past three years just isn’t cutting it, and I need to really crack down.  ...

The bell has just rung, so I can’t really go into this now, and besides, my thoughts are jumbled already, but wish me luck, please!  I really want to beat this habit (both of these habits, I should say), and I’m going to need all the luck that I can gather!

I’ll try to write once more before I leave.  Until then, have a good week/weekend!

Paul’s here, Paul’s here, hip hip hooray!

It’s so good to have one of my best friends here!  I get to speak English as fast as I want, I get to exchange quips, I get to show him around my pretty city.  (Well, okay, that last will happen once the fog lifts, which it hasn’t yet, but I’m sure that it will clear up for the weekend, right?)

We’ve not been doing all that much, although we did go to dinner with two of the other English assistants last night at the house of one of the English profs.  We’ve mostly just been lounging around, watching “Firefly,” and occasionally heading off to that “work” thing and trying to teach kids English.  And that has even turned out to be less than usual, since the teacher with whom I was supposed to have both of my classes yesterday afternoon was on strike, and so I didn’t have any classes!  Woo hoo!

No big plans for the weekend and Monday.  Mostly more of the same, minus the classes part.  On Monday we’ll head into Paris, and spend the night there so that we don’t have to get up so early on Tuesday to get Paul on his plane.  I already don’t want him to go, but I just have to remember that I’m more than halfway finished with this job and will be back in the US before I know it!  And besides, I get to go travelling the week after next, so that will help distract me from my melodramatic loneliness and angst.  ::grin::

Chinese Ballet

I went to see the Peking Ballet Troupe on Thursday.  Their performance was entitled “The Red Star,” but without a program (which cost 6€), I don’t know to what the title was referring.  Quite frankly, without the program, I didn’t have any clue what any of the acts meant, so I spent most of my spare mental energy making up fun titles for all the numbers.  Without further ado, here is my list of titles.  (The least funny titles correspond to numbers that I was most interested in.)

1.) Green Willow Whirlwind Girls
2.) Tibetan Warriors (music: Tuvan throat singing)
3.) Chopstick Fetish Romeo (either I really don’t know something about the Chinese psyche or they are a LOT more passionate about their eating utensils than Westerners)
4.) Bowl Girls (okay, so I wasn’t actually all that interested in this number, but neither could I think up a funny title for it)
5.) Me Hunt Big Mosquito (music: really annoying hummed, mosquito-sounding)
6.) Bedroom Girl (this beautiful, lyrical, extremely flexible girl, I was amused to note, used what has to have been a borrowed piano stool as one of her props)
7.) Go West, Young Communists (music: oddly classical)

Intermission – spent finding a piece of paper and borrowing a two-cent pen from a snippy woman who insisted that I had to use it right there in front of her (she obviously thought that I would steal it), so that I could write down the acts from the first act for future reference

8.) Fabulous, Phallic Pheasant Feathers (“fabulous” as in “absolutely fahbulous, dahling”; probably my least favorite number of the entire production)
9.) Red and Yellow Wind Girl (my favorite female-centered number)
10.) Amazingly Acrobatic Warriors (this was my favorite male-centered number)
11.) Just Cut Your Hair Already, Okay?
12.) Insane Asylum Inhabitant
13.) Red Fans Go to War

I’m sorry if this description seems a bit flippant.  I really liked the show, in general, but in a very superficial way.  I didn’t understand any of the symbolism that presumably abounded in the show, and without the program I was simply reduced to admiring the dancing just as dancing.  But, since a lot of it was very interpretational-style dancing, it would be extremely difficult to describe it.  So I will just have to let you draw your own conclusions from my titles!  ::grin::

Oops, weirdness.

I was wandering around Laon this afternoon (as I generally do of an afternoon) when I noticed that the main doors to the cathedral were thrown wide open.  This is very unusual, and I approached them carefully, worried that someone was going to shout something incomprehensible at me in French.  But it appeared that whatever had been going on was over; everyone was slowly trickling out.  I thought it might have been the end of a Wednesday mass or some such thing. 

I was drawn into the cathedral by the sound of the organ, which was going full steam – or as “full steam” as any French organ ever seems to get.  The organists of this country seem to have a unnatural fondness for only-vaguely-melodic mumblings of sound, which, no matter how loudly they may be played, never really seem impressive. 

The organist decided, about three minutes into my sojourn in the cathedral, to prove me wrong.  He started playing a piece that sounded liked it should have been titled “Wrothful Jehovah Smites the Ever-Damned.”  I was caught up in the thunder rolling around in the vaulted ceiling when I subconsciously noticed that the people around me in the cathedral had quieted and were standing to one side of the main aisle.  Fortunately I was as well, because as I looked around, I noticed a casket being wheeled past on a velvet-covered gurney. 

Of course, I was a bit mortified to have stumbled in on someone’s funeral, but I was fascinated as well.  I had never been an outside witness to a funeral – most people haven’t, I would guess – and so I don’t know if it was just the French influence on the ceremony, but things seemed oddly out of kilter.  For instance, although people were quiet and respectful when the casket was immediately opposite them, conversation reblossomed the instant it passed.  Even the people walking behind the casket – the bereaved, presumably – were talking amongst themselves, and laughing, in one case.  Then there was the music.  It didn’t strike me as a benevolent send-off for dear old granddad.  No, had I been constructing an idea of the guy being buried simply from the music, I would have assumed that he was a horrible old lecher who had swindled widows and orphans for most of his life and had spent the other, younger years consorting with the underbelly of society and participating in quite a lot of skullduggery.  (I know it was a guy and a grandfather because a bit later they carried past some of the floral offerings, across which I read, “Pour notre grand-père.”)  And then, for the final, resounding bit of oddity, the pallbearers picked up the casket, carried it out the main doors of the church and loaded it into a silver, “get-away” style van with the funeral home’s name, address and telephone number emblazoned on the side along with a large, bright orange spot.

Still, the organ was splendid.

Getting geared up

So much planning going on, so many reservations to make, so many tickets to buy…  I’m so excited!!!!
 
Paul arrives exactly one week from today - in fact, if all goes well, at this time next week we’ll be on the train back to Laon from Paris.  I find it hard to say exactly how excited I am to see one of my best friends without resorting to teenagerish masses of exclamation points, italics, astericks, etc.  Even though I don’t really have a lot to offer in the area of Laon - walks around the ramparts, a day trip to Reims, lots and lots of movies - it will just be so wonderful to see someone with whom I am completely comfortable and with whom I can act utterly weird and he won’t judge me.  I can speak English at full speed, I can show off my French (after all, he won’t know if I’m messing up, unless the person with whom I’m speaking bursts out laughing.  And that’s happening less and less frequently - I think that I’m down to about two hilarious outbursts per day.  ::grin::)

Then, when Paul leaves two weeks hence, I’ll barely have any time to be sad before I dash off to Venice, Prague and Oxford.  I have my hostel rooms for all but my first night in Venice - the last night of Carnivale, of course - and I finally have my transportation between Venice and Prague.  I’ve just reserved a room in Prague (8€ a night!) for the time that I’m there, and am starting to get together maps and things.  I’m also excited because, in addition to seeing my friend Amber in Oxford, I will probably get to see an old friend, Tim Cascone, who is now living in England and who said that he’d probably be able to pop down to Oxford to hang out for a bit. 

So, chances are, what with everything that’s going on in the next few weeks, you’re probably not going to hear that much on this page.  I’ll try to update now and again, to let y’all know that I’m alive, but there probably won’t be anything lengthy.  (Was that a collective sigh of relief that I just heard?)  Take care, all!

Re: Paul’s most recent weblog entry

I saw Paul’s version of the map below and decided to try to make one of my own.

create your own visited states map
or write about it on the open travel guide

Well, I’m not doing nearly as well as Paul is in terms of how many US states I have left to get to.  I thought about doing a map of the countries that I’ve visited, but that would also have been a surprisingly unimpressive map.  Thus far, I have been on 5 international trips, but since three of those have been mostly just to France, my list of countries is short: Germany, Australia, France, Spain, England and Scotland.  Before the end of this stay in France, I should be able to add Italy, the Czech Republic and Ireland to the list, but it still seems pitifully short.  Oh well - I’ll just have to keep traveling later in my life!

Geriatric days

Walking on two inches of hard-packed, frozen-solid snow certainly gives you a scary preview of what it’s going to be like when you’re old and tottering.  You are forced to take itty-bitty steps, to move at a snail’s pace, to have your head bent and looking at your feet, to be forever worried that you are about to fall flat on your face/hips/knees… 

Frankly, I don’t like it very much.  Maybe I should become one of those old people who uses the little motorized scooters.  However, once I realized that my sneakers had little enough traction, it was actually a lot easier and a lot more fun to skate my way along the sidewalks.  Of course, I nearly went into a full forward splits a couple of times, but my legs needed stretching anyway.  I got into an hour-long snowball fight with a bunch of random kids yesterday, and I’m extremely stiff in my legs (from the sprinting around) and my right shoulder (from my rather-pleasingly-accurate throwing).  It was fun!

Things that I’ve learned from one inch of snow:

-snow is impossibly pretty while it’s falling and when it’s new
-snowflakes look nothing like the little paper things that you make in elementary school. 
When it’s snowing, it looks like the Big Vacuum Cleaner In The Sky has sneezed.
-it has to be very cold indeed for snow to stay on the ground
-snow can look normal and yet be frozen solid all the way through and, therefore, very
slippery
-ice is clear; step carefully
-one inch of snow does nothing to cushion you when, despite remembering the previous
two notes, you slip and fall in front of many people.  Nor does the coldness do anything to make it seem like you aren’t blushing; rather, it accentuates the redness.

It snowed here in Laon Monday night and stayed on the ground all day yesterday, and it has been snowing steadily since I got up this morning at 7 a.m.  It’s so pretty!  This is the most snow that I have seen outside of a ski resort since I was four!

Bemused grumble

You know, as much as I like Paris, and as beautiful and historic of a city it may be, I’m really not all that fond of it.  I know that may sound strange, but hear me out.

Paris is a fantastic city in terms of culture, history, architecture, etc.  Every time that I walk along its streets (as I did yesterday, on a successful quest to get my new passport), I realize just how privileged I am to be there.  So much has happened for so many centuries; the city is renowned the world over and has been for almost as many centuries as things have been happening there.  Every few steps, it seems, you run across some world-famous monument or piece of sculpture or museum, and by and large the city is relatively clean.  (Relative, say, to my town, Laon, where it is literally impossible to walk in a straight, rhythmic line down the sidewalk.  Too many little “presents,” and too much litter.)

For all that, however, I am starting less and less to like going into Paris.  I always end up with a splitting headache while I’m there, and the heart of the problem lies in the people.  There are just far too many Parisians.  According to my 2001 Frommer’s guide to France, Paris at that point had 10 million people crammed into 432 square miles.  Now, it shocks my students here (Laon: pop. 26,000) when I tell them that I’ve lived in two towns, each with around a million or so inhabitants. When you think about it, a million is a lot of people.  But the feeling of the multitude increases exponentially when going from one million to ten million.  It increases way beyond the actual number increased.  The feeling of people being everywhere is overwhelming and, to me, very stifling.  You never have a street to yourself, no matter how small and hidden the street may be.

The people themselves don’t help.  It’s not that I’ve found Parisians to be rude; that’s too active of a word for it.  Rather, they don’t bother to care about anything that doesn’t directly affect them.  Take litter, for example – since they aren’t the ones who have to pick it up, and since it might put them out a bit to have to hold onto a piece of trash the 30 feet to the next trash can, they just drop it. 

Or take this example: I stopped in a post office yesterday to use their phone book.  After I had finished, I headed towards the door, and reached it a split-second before another woman.  She was quite obviously completely shocked when I held the door open for her and let her go through first.  She didn’t move at first, actually, and when she did, she thanked me three times and said something about how long it had been since anyone had done that for her.  I don’t know what’s sadder – that she was so effusive in her thanks for such a small gesture (and the neglect that those thanks imply), or the tens of other people for whom I held doors who didn’t even nod as they swept past.  That lack of even passing attention to those around you, along with the seemingly-contradictory feeling that you are always being watched, combine to make my impression of Paris an increasingly distasteful one.