25 May 2006
I think this is what day it is. It's 1am here, so I'm still unsure. We
made it to Scotland, wandered around and slept to get over jetlag on
Tuesday. Then today we rented a car and drove down to Vindolanda. Fairly
scary driving experience. I just kept repeating every time Patrick
changed lanes or turned, "Stay on the left!" But we made it down and back
with nary a scratch on us - or our lovely little Hyundai that got over
35mpg. Beth and Alex were awesome hosts for the afternoon and showed us
around the site. We ate at this cute little pub in this cute little town,
with amazing food. I had a vegetarian wellington - mushrooms, brie, and
cranberries in puff pastry. Vindo was quite awesome.
Tomorrow Patrick is giving his talk at WWW (what's weird is that Edinburgh
is pretty small, and WWW is on the nightly news). That would never happen
in, say, San Francisco. Then we fly down to Cambridge so that Patrick can
give the same talk on Friday at Microsoft. Meanwhile, I get to shop!
Unfortunately, since the dollar is so weak, I will have to choose my Zara
clothes carefully.
The one weird thing about Edinbugh is that it smells like beer. All the
time. Patrick thinks it's the fields of hops all over the place. Could
be. Then again, I saw some guy in a suit pissing at a bus stop in broad
daylight (like, 7pm, not fake 10pm daylight), so perhaps people just spill
beer a lot. But 10:30pm sunset is quite weird. I feel like it's too
early to go to bed.
The one thing I really appreciate about England is: they have normal,
clean toilet facilities. Most European countries have simple bowls or
(worse yet) Turkish toilets. But the British do it right. There's always
toilet paper, it's always clean, there's always soap... the weird thing is
there are often no mirrors. But whatever. I'm just happy when I don't
have to
cop a squat to pee in Europe!
Posted at 1150.
22 May 2006
OK,
Sports Racers, we are
headed off to Bonny Ol' England. And Ireland. And Croatia. Which I will
forever associate with a former ECU colleague who insisted on pronouncing
"The Croatan," which was a dining hall named after the
famous
letters left behind at Roanoke Island,
"The Croatian." Not to be funny. He was just dumb. I've packed a bunch
of light reading (on American mortuary practices), a European cell phone
(just in case), the fewest pieces of clothing I've ever managed to take
(basically 4 of everything I could possibly wear), and an umbrella.
Stupid England and its stupid rain. If you're lucky, I will send you a
postcard. But don't count on it.
The
Dubrovnik
Airport website has a poll that asks, "Would you recommend Dubrovnik
as a holiday destination to others?" The results: 38% yes and 60% no. Uh
oh. The weird thing is, though, that there is a similar poll on the
page in
Croatian, which is 79% yes and 14% no. I'll let you know which I
agree with when I return.
Then again, considering
this is
where I'll be
staying, it
should be
awesome.
Posted at 1150.
18 May 2006
Yeesh. So I passed my oral exams/proposal defense/written exam defense. And I survived 72
hours with lots of people crammed into my house. Now I'm just going through all my crap
trying to decide what goes to Goodwill, what goes to the trash, and what goes to Ithaca.
My books are especially entertaining. They're like a serial time capsule. I tend to put
things in the books that I'm reading at the time (hence, the reason I lost my passport on
the way from Heraklion to Athens) and never take them out. Which means that I found
airline ticket stubs from my cross-country flight the summer after I graduated college
(1999); a recipe for tomato sauce, partially in Greek, from Kostas written during the
summer of 2003; a bookmark on which I had written the word "sockdolager," apparently to
look it up; oh, and my GRE scores from April of 1998. I did pretty well, actually, 96
percentile in two of the three sections. It's too bad they can't be reported anymore.
Then again, who needs tests? Did I mention I'm ABD?
Posted at 1717.
9 May 2006
I used the phrase "bookin' it" today. As in, "I was bookin' it across
campus to get to an appointment on time." Bryan said he'd never heard it
and didn't know what it meant. I figured he was being a weirdo from
Pittsburgh as usual, but it's surprisingly hard to find the phrase in that
context on the in-ter-web. The best website I could find is a
UK
discussion board of, as far as I can tell, random American phrases.
The poster says, and I quote, "I grew up in a red-neck town in the USA,
mid-atlantic coast. This expression was used often by school mates all
through elementary school up to high school (circa 1968-1980)." Well, I
guess it makes me
old and
uneducated, but it doesn't make me
crazy. For a while, I thought perhaps I was getting it confused with
Book It!, the program in
elementary school that rewards kids with a Pizza Hut pizza for reading a
book. Honestly, with today's obesity epidemic, do we really need to give
kids greasy caloric food as a reward for sitting on their asses? At any
rate, it wasn't nearly as funny explaining this term to Bryan as it was
explaining what a
cabana
boy was to Erik.
Posted at 1933.