June 2003 Archives
See my wanderlog. I posted the first couple of entries. More to come in a couple of days.
Hi! I'm doing fine, but I haven't had much time to update the wanderlog. Internet cafes aren't always as convenient or as inexpensive as I would like, but I've been writing as often as I can in my paper journal so that I can update when I get a moment.
At the moment, I'm in Budapest, on Andrassy Utca (street), which is a main boulevard. We found a park in Heroes' Square (where Madonna filmed a scene in Evita, Michael Jackson shot a music video, and Elton John played two nights ago), at the end of this street, with shade and a couple of lakes and lots of ducks. We've been trying to rest a bit today as we're leaving tonight (in about three hours) for Romania, a 12-hour bus trip. As it happens, I didn't get any sleep at all last night, so I'm exhausted today. My feet are very sore, my shoulders are very sunburned, and I have all sorts of funny languages swirling in my head, but I'm having a blast. Vienna was beautiful. Claudia and I have decided to open a Freebird's franchise there, because Vienna is in dire need of burritos. Now all we need is some rich financier to help us fund our newest scheme.
More later when I've had a chance to update. It might be easier to do so from Targu Mures, where I'll be in 15 hours or so.
Sziasztok!
There are never enough hours in the day, nor enough dollars in the bank, are there? I've reserved two beds for two nights in a Vienna hostel, across town from the U-bahn station at which we will arrive. Since U-bahns are subways, that's not such a bad deal, but it'll be strange trying to figure out how to work Viennese subways after 20 or 25 full hours of travel.
I haven't left Texas yet, and already, I'm worn out.
Well, not quite the eleventh hour. I'm running late leaving for Arlington -- I was supposed to leave at 9 or 10am, but I didn't even wake up until 9:30 -- but it doesn't matter so much, since my plane doesn't leave until Monday. I was up late last night packing, and I've been running errands all morning. I'm starving, since I haven't eaten yet today. The bags are packed, and I think I have everything I need. I've got the weekend to sort it out before I leave.
My sarong hasn't arrived in the mail yet, which is a bummer. It'll probably arrive this afternoon. I still need to take my iMac to be repaired again (the screen is once again pink, which does not help my photologging), and to stop by Fry's to pick up a few electronic sundries for my trip. It's out of my way, but maybe I'll do those things, then stop back by and see if the mail has come. Sarongs have many uses.
I finally finished uploading the last of the Taniguchi pictures from a couple of weeks ago to the photolog. Enjoy. I won't be posting here much in the next few weeks, except to point to my wanderlog, which will hopefully be updated relatively frequently.
Be good while I'm away, and don't hit your brother.
--Rachel
Says Claudia: oh shit! how do you say Austria in Czech?
Banal bits of travel-related trivia, for anyone who might be interested.
- It's impossible to find a pair of Tevas in Austin, TX, in size 9.
- Sarongs are incredibly versatile, and can act as skirts, blankets, towels, hair wraps, and so forth.
- International plug adaptors are incredibly hard to find anywhere except an airport.
- I have a lot to do before I leave, and very little time to do it all.
- The Hungarian name for Targu Mures, which is C's hometown in Romania, is "Marosvasarhely." She tried to explain to me how to pronounce it, but I will never remember. There's no picking up Hungarian.
- There are geocaches and geodashes in several of the cities I'm headed to. I need to program the coordinates into my GPS and remember not to forget it.
- I managed to install Movable Type successfully on a new domain name, which I plan to use to upload pictures and travel logs during my trip. It just now occurs to me that I can probably rig up some pinging silliness so that I can publish excerpts on this weblog, as well. Even more to do in so little time.
I'm sure there's more, but this is all I can remember for now. So so excited!
As my trip approaches, I find myself writing cryptic pieces of information, "just in case." It's all falling together, like pieces of a puzzle that you have to squeeze a bit to fit. I have this weekend to pull everything together in Austin. My new camera should be arriving by UPS this afternoon around 4:30. There's a sarong in the mail to me, because sarongs are not only multi-purpose, but light and easy to pack.
Mentally, my backpack is already full, though in reality, my dirty clothes are still strewn upon my bedroom floor. I have a week left in Austin and so much to do in that time. Three weeks is a long time to be away from home.
Notes scribbled in my travel journal:
Buy ticket to "Nepliget" (bus station) at minibus counter at the airport.
That's the worst case scenario, to take the shuttle from the airport in Budapest to the bus station, then take the 6:30 bus to Targu Mures. It's a twelve-hour bus ride. Complicating the matter is that the town has a completely different name in Hungarian. I need to write it down before I leave.
Most likely is that Claudia will be there to meet me when I arrive, and that we'll travel that day to Vienna.
I'm feeling very scattered these days -- so much to do, both at work and at home. I'm easily distracted always, but more so lately. I'll be posting more Taniguchi pictures soon, for my sanity if nothing else.
It's been months, actually, since I've had a chance to spend any time at the Taniguchi gardens. Feithy, one of the Austin journallers, had been having a stressful time of it a few weeks ago, and I had suggested that she take a trip to the gardens to relax and ground herself. She hadn't had a chance to make it there on her own, so I took her and her kidlet to see them.
I had a great time. I find Feithy sort of mysterious and fascinating, and she has the coolest kidlet I've met in a while -- brilliant and very funny. It was wonderful to see the park through the eyes of people who had never seen it before, and I left more in love with the place than when I arrived. The water levels were low, which was a bit disconcerting, and some of the ponds were dirty, but I took enough pictures to keep the photolog full for a week or more.
I posted the first one this evening.
CHICAGO, June 3 (Reuters) - U.S. environmental group the Sierra Club said on Tuesday it plans to run advertisements criticizing Ford Motor Co. F.N for making vehicles that are less fuel-efficient now -- on its 100th birthday -- than when it began.
The ads, scheduled to run in The New York Times and BusinessWeek magazine, note that the Model T got 25 miles to the gallon nearly a century ago. The group sent copies of the ads to journalists.
The average vehicle now made by Dearborn, Michigan-based Ford gets 22.6 miles per gallon, the ads said, with its popular Explorer sport utility vehicle getting 16 miles per gallon.
I think that certain members of my family believe with full certainty that I will grow up to be your Great Aunt Myrtle. You remember your Great Aunt Myrtle, don't you? She's the one who lived in the small town, was the possessor of the One True Original Fruitcake, and owned about thirty cats. Yes, -that- Great Aunt Myrtle.
It's the cats, really, isn't it? I don't live in a small town, after all, and I'd be bored if I did. Most tellingly, I despise fruitcake. Intensely. What a waste of green artificial cherries.
Yeah, it's the cats. I -like- the cats. They're fascinating, and it's rewarding for me to be able to help them. If you knew me well enough, and you were to ask me what I would do if I won the lottery, I'd tell you that I'd build a huge cat palace, with rooms where colonies of rescued cats could live in harmony with one another until I was able to find loving, responsible homes for all of them. Yeah, that's what I'd tell you, because I'm a big softie like that.
But truthfully, in my heart of hearts, I know that I'd have to hire a full-time staff to run the cat rescue palace, and I would live someplace nearby but very separate, where I would have a rotating menagerie of cats to play with and even more full-time staff to play with them. Because really? Cleaning llitterboxes is not my thing.
And I can tell you from experience that two cats is plenty to keep me occupied. It helps that I have two wacky little cats.
Take Liam, for instance. He's about 8 1/2 months old and weighs well over ten pounds already. He doesn't know a stranger, and he's not scared of anything. Anything. He tries to stick his paw under the vacuum cleaner when it runs, and if he's in the bathroom while I'm taking a shower, he tries to climb in with me. He's a goofy boy, but his crowning glory is that he adores dogs. I don't know how this happened. He was never around dogs as a kitten, and I don't own a dog, but he thinks they're the coolest things. He runs up to them and rubs up against them. Hysterical.
Ani Banani, on the other hand, does yoga. She's not nearly as confident as Liam in everything she does, but she's a bit of a clown at the same time. She does everything with a solemn expression, be it eating, purring, or playing. She has one favorite toy; the others she doesn't seem to care much about. It's a plastic wand with an elastic string and a fur mouse attached. She adores it and performs all sorts of acrobatics trying to catch it, but she looks painfully serious the entire time. She's very protective of the mousie, growling when Liam approaches her and tugging on it when I hold the wand, hoping to pull it away from me. Her funniest trait, though, is her sink fetish. It started early on, when she would jump up to the bathroom sink to drink the water from the faucet. That's not so unusual in cats -- nor is sitting in the basin of the sink. But Ani, when she sees someone go remotely close to the bathroom, goes running up to jump on the sink, then makes these funny little mooing sounds until that person comes and pets her as she stands on the sink.
With idiosyncracies like these two have, how could I ever find time to keep more cats?
After days and days of stiflingly hot weather, ominous grey clouds rolled into Austin this afternoon.
Friday afternoon, I went to an office party at a park just a couple of blocks from my building. It was over 100 degrees as we walked, and by the time I got there, I was worn out and dehydrated. I'm used to the walking, but I'm not used to the heat. It took only ten or fifteen minutes of playing something resembling volleyball hackeysack to completely wear me out, and I spent the rest of the party trying to find a nice shady place to hang out.
The garden is starting to bake, despite my best efforts to water it regularly. Most flowers just can't handle these temperatures -- especially in May and early June. I find myself leaving the temperature a little cooler now at bedtime, so that I don't wake up in a hot sweat at three in the morning.
But today, the grey clouds rolled in, and they aren't supposed to leave until the weekend. It's amazing what a difference that makes. When I left work this afternoon, my car registered the temperature in the 80s. The stark slate-grey sky was punctuated by bolts of lightning, followed by loud claps of thunder that marked this as the first summer thunderstorm of the year.
It was beautiful and distracting, and I'll become used to it if the rest of the week is like today.
I can hope, right?
I dreamt last night that I was in Corpus Christi, in the middle of a big hurricane. It's easy to trace that subconscious thought back -- Kramer and I were talking about hurricanes last night at Halcyon after the Mr. Sinus showing of Terminator last night. I don't remember exactly how we got to that topic, actually, but we were talking about how Corpus Christi is way overdue for a hurricane. It's not that I want a hurricane to hit -- it's just that I grew up on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, and that's the way it is.
