Travel(bl)ogue: The Danube, 2009.
I'm still working on the pictures from the trip - a task complicated by not having internet access at home, and not having (or being reluctant to be seen to have) sufficient free time at work - but then, you still haven't gotten the pictures from Christmas in London, and I haven't heard any complaints. Let patience be our watchword, etc. It was a nice trip, though, and in good company, if rather hot. August is probably the trashiest month there is, weather-wise, at least in this hemisphere. Nor is September (in Atlanta) ever as nice as its name makes it sound, but it won't be all that long before the harvest moon is shining on my pillow, brightly enough for midnight reading, and I'm thinking for the hundredth time that there really aren't any sufficiently gorgeous songs about fall. Shortly thereafter we greet the turning of the year, and then eventually everyone is middle-aged and rueful.1 It's none of it so bad, really.
I'm in an unusually good mood right now because I mailed a couple of packages this week (perhaps to you?) and so now I have the pleasant expectation of their arrival. I should start writing letters, I guess; it's a cheap thrill.
A few trip-related points for your consideration:
My cousin and I are compatibly nerdy and take joy in roughly the same things, like composing fake articles. Our output for this trip is the soon-to-be-heralded "'Fishy-fishy, Darling': Linguistic Standardization Among Multilingual Service Personnel." This groundbreaking study will determine once and for all whether the one waiter's flamboyant speech patterns and behaviors were actually contagious, since they certainly seemed to be spreading to all of the other waiters as the week went on. At first, only he was calling us darling and announcing the entrees with diminutives and a flourish, but by the end of the cruise, even the waitress clear on the opposite side of the dining room was doing the same. (However, she was not drawing me aside to impart scandalous (and spurious) gossip; on the other hand, flirting with a straight female server would be even weirder than flirting with a gay male one.)
If time allows, we'll also investigate whether said behaviors were indicative of his actual sexuality. Is it possible to learn English by watching The Birdcage a thousand times? Is it safe? Is the end result perhaps less hilarious to Slovakian sensibilities? (Our paper won't address the well-known fact that having a possibly gay man flirt with you is like sky-diving while strapped to an instructor: less exhilarating than the real thing, while also less likely to cause damage. Sure, kid; you can come visit me in the States aaaaaany time. Bring your Mozart wig.)
There is a separate but equally clear fact, which is that tri-lingual people my own age should not be serving me food - I should be serving them food. Humbly. With my mouth shut.
As to the itinerary, Budapest was a properly jarring start, because I have never before visited a country where the language was 100% impenetrable. Not that I eavesdrop on the locals in Prague or Reykjavik or even Paris, but, you know: More or less Russian. Basically German. Essentially Latin. Whereas Hungarian is Chinese, only without the prejudices/physical markers that would tell my brain not to worry about it. I suppose I would feel the same way in Finland or Greece. (But Greece is too sunny, so it's really only Finland I need to consider.) It was nice to get that out of the way at the beginning; by the time we got to Austria, I was so grateful to be back in the game that I thought very seriously about speaking some German, before concluding that it wasn't truly necessary.
Austria at a glance: we were somewhere in that country when we composed the devastating put-down "Cram it in your waistcoat, Amadeus," I think. Anyway, it's a lovely stretch of the Danube, if you don't mind Hapsburg domes and Easter colors everywhere. There will be pictures to help you decide.
In Regensburg I finally gave in to temptation and lit a candle in a church. It's an image I've always loved - traveling the world trailing little points of light, building constellations on Earth to try to get God's attention - but it seems like kind of an awful thing to fake.2 This particular altar, however, was right out in the bustling aisle and I wasn't interrupting anyone obviously at prayer, so I went for it. I conjured up a nice safe thought to avoid one or another type of retribution (divine wrath, dishonesty, demonic marshmallow giant) and picked out a nice spot in the sandbox. Enjoy your € 0,50, St. Peter's! It's my thanks to you for not being a hideous cherub-ridden gilt-and-marble dung pile.3 I mean, for you not being any of those things. I'm not in the business of thanking anyone for not having myself been born a hideous cherub-ridden gilt-and-marble dung pile, although now that we're on the subject, I guess I should be glad.
Nuremberg is precious - did you know that? I was expecting a generic city center studded with Nazi chunks, but it's actually miles of medieval walls (probably reconstructed - I don't know) and window boxes with cheerful flowers up in the castle, and little stone bridges reflected in canals everywhere you turn. Not that there are no problems! Almost any one of the public fountains in that town would, if encountered unexpectedly, keep Dali himself from enjoying his breakfast. Still, very cute. That was a surprise to me.
Our train from Dresden to Prague was also a surprise, in that there were four of them, each very local. (Unlike the fountains, though, the trains got better as we went, working up from Italian levels of busted at the border crossing to very nearly German on the last leg.) Why did it take just one train and two hours back in 2006, but four trains and four hours this time? Is it because I bought my tickets in German? Damn, and I was so proud of myself! And how did DB even find a route that ends at Masaryk station? That's like flying from New York to Atlanta and landing at Charlie Brown instead of Hartsfield. Weird. Anyway, it gave us more time to practice our Czech pronunciation using the towns we passed, effort that was rewarded when my ř met with the waitress's approval. Prague itself is full of castles and glass stores and such; you know the drill.
I came home late on Wednesday and stayed home through the weekend, doing laundry and catching up on various deferred tasks, like paying my MasterCard bill and reading library books and finally finishing a mix CD. Have we talked about how terrible I am at those? It's painful. In this case, I had an elaborate Joycean structure in mind - and like the man in question, I had to publish a separate explanation so that the recipient could make sense of my rambling failure. (Unlike the man in question, I drew a sweet sketch of the man in question on the cover.) It was at least gratifying, though, to find how easy it is to gather medically-themed songs if, like Oedipus, you blind yourself to metaphor (that last part is not like Oedipus). There are many, many songs about broken hearts and scars and wounds and healing.
If the promise of pictures to come is not sufficient - or if you simply aren't holding your breath - you might be interested to hear of threatened action on another front. Today one of my coworkers expressed an unexpected interest in my social life (Coworker: "Well, how are you EVER going to date if you won't talk to strangers? They're all strangers at first." Me: "And do you see me dating?" Coworker: "...We'll fix that."), so shit could be about to get real. Oddly, when I shared that story with Holly, she reported that one of her coworkers recently did the same thing. As she concluded, "Alarming for us both. Although dying alone and being eaten by wild dogs is not particularly appealing either."
It's nice to have options!
1. And Gabs, please god, is married to a Cajun boatwright and chatting with his sisters in bayou French while they make quilts. Between shifts in the ER. I'm counting on this.
2. I'm more accustomed to seeing myself as a fire burning in a forest somewhere, slowly destroying the woods in tempo with my waste and consumption. If you wondered why I don't permit myself air conditioning, now you know. Of course, I do permit myself trans-Atlantic travel, and that kind of inconsistency is why I can believe things as dramatic as that first sentence and yet not wind up baking a head soufflé a la Plath.
3. Gothic rules, Baroque drools. My cousin is now well aware of my feelings on this subject, which turned into a William Carlos Williams thing, only far more frequent.
I'm in an unusually good mood right now because I mailed a couple of packages this week (perhaps to you?) and so now I have the pleasant expectation of their arrival. I should start writing letters, I guess; it's a cheap thrill.
A few trip-related points for your consideration:
My cousin and I are compatibly nerdy and take joy in roughly the same things, like composing fake articles. Our output for this trip is the soon-to-be-heralded "'Fishy-fishy, Darling': Linguistic Standardization Among Multilingual Service Personnel." This groundbreaking study will determine once and for all whether the one waiter's flamboyant speech patterns and behaviors were actually contagious, since they certainly seemed to be spreading to all of the other waiters as the week went on. At first, only he was calling us darling and announcing the entrees with diminutives and a flourish, but by the end of the cruise, even the waitress clear on the opposite side of the dining room was doing the same. (However, she was not drawing me aside to impart scandalous (and spurious) gossip; on the other hand, flirting with a straight female server would be even weirder than flirting with a gay male one.)
If time allows, we'll also investigate whether said behaviors were indicative of his actual sexuality. Is it possible to learn English by watching The Birdcage a thousand times? Is it safe? Is the end result perhaps less hilarious to Slovakian sensibilities? (Our paper won't address the well-known fact that having a possibly gay man flirt with you is like sky-diving while strapped to an instructor: less exhilarating than the real thing, while also less likely to cause damage. Sure, kid; you can come visit me in the States aaaaaany time. Bring your Mozart wig.)
There is a separate but equally clear fact, which is that tri-lingual people my own age should not be serving me food - I should be serving them food. Humbly. With my mouth shut.
As to the itinerary, Budapest was a properly jarring start, because I have never before visited a country where the language was 100% impenetrable. Not that I eavesdrop on the locals in Prague or Reykjavik or even Paris, but, you know: More or less Russian. Basically German. Essentially Latin. Whereas Hungarian is Chinese, only without the prejudices/physical markers that would tell my brain not to worry about it. I suppose I would feel the same way in Finland or Greece. (But Greece is too sunny, so it's really only Finland I need to consider.) It was nice to get that out of the way at the beginning; by the time we got to Austria, I was so grateful to be back in the game that I thought very seriously about speaking some German, before concluding that it wasn't truly necessary.
Austria at a glance: we were somewhere in that country when we composed the devastating put-down "Cram it in your waistcoat, Amadeus," I think. Anyway, it's a lovely stretch of the Danube, if you don't mind Hapsburg domes and Easter colors everywhere. There will be pictures to help you decide.
In Regensburg I finally gave in to temptation and lit a candle in a church. It's an image I've always loved - traveling the world trailing little points of light, building constellations on Earth to try to get God's attention - but it seems like kind of an awful thing to fake.2 This particular altar, however, was right out in the bustling aisle and I wasn't interrupting anyone obviously at prayer, so I went for it. I conjured up a nice safe thought to avoid one or another type of retribution (divine wrath, dishonesty, demonic marshmallow giant) and picked out a nice spot in the sandbox. Enjoy your € 0,50, St. Peter's! It's my thanks to you for not being a hideous cherub-ridden gilt-and-marble dung pile.3 I mean, for you not being any of those things. I'm not in the business of thanking anyone for not having myself been born a hideous cherub-ridden gilt-and-marble dung pile, although now that we're on the subject, I guess I should be glad.
Nuremberg is precious - did you know that? I was expecting a generic city center studded with Nazi chunks, but it's actually miles of medieval walls (probably reconstructed - I don't know) and window boxes with cheerful flowers up in the castle, and little stone bridges reflected in canals everywhere you turn. Not that there are no problems! Almost any one of the public fountains in that town would, if encountered unexpectedly, keep Dali himself from enjoying his breakfast. Still, very cute. That was a surprise to me.
Our train from Dresden to Prague was also a surprise, in that there were four of them, each very local. (Unlike the fountains, though, the trains got better as we went, working up from Italian levels of busted at the border crossing to very nearly German on the last leg.) Why did it take just one train and two hours back in 2006, but four trains and four hours this time? Is it because I bought my tickets in German? Damn, and I was so proud of myself! And how did DB even find a route that ends at Masaryk station? That's like flying from New York to Atlanta and landing at Charlie Brown instead of Hartsfield. Weird. Anyway, it gave us more time to practice our Czech pronunciation using the towns we passed, effort that was rewarded when my ř met with the waitress's approval. Prague itself is full of castles and glass stores and such; you know the drill.
I came home late on Wednesday and stayed home through the weekend, doing laundry and catching up on various deferred tasks, like paying my MasterCard bill and reading library books and finally finishing a mix CD. Have we talked about how terrible I am at those? It's painful. In this case, I had an elaborate Joycean structure in mind - and like the man in question, I had to publish a separate explanation so that the recipient could make sense of my rambling failure. (Unlike the man in question, I drew a sweet sketch of the man in question on the cover.) It was at least gratifying, though, to find how easy it is to gather medically-themed songs if, like Oedipus, you blind yourself to metaphor (that last part is not like Oedipus). There are many, many songs about broken hearts and scars and wounds and healing.
If the promise of pictures to come is not sufficient - or if you simply aren't holding your breath - you might be interested to hear of threatened action on another front. Today one of my coworkers expressed an unexpected interest in my social life (Coworker: "Well, how are you EVER going to date if you won't talk to strangers? They're all strangers at first." Me: "And do you see me dating?" Coworker: "...We'll fix that."), so shit could be about to get real. Oddly, when I shared that story with Holly, she reported that one of her coworkers recently did the same thing. As she concluded, "Alarming for us both. Although dying alone and being eaten by wild dogs is not particularly appealing either."
It's nice to have options!
1. And Gabs, please god, is married to a Cajun boatwright and chatting with his sisters in bayou French while they make quilts. Between shifts in the ER. I'm counting on this.
2. I'm more accustomed to seeing myself as a fire burning in a forest somewhere, slowly destroying the woods in tempo with my waste and consumption. If you wondered why I don't permit myself air conditioning, now you know. Of course, I do permit myself trans-Atlantic travel, and that kind of inconsistency is why I can believe things as dramatic as that first sentence and yet not wind up baking a head soufflé a la Plath.
3. Gothic rules, Baroque drools. My cousin is now well aware of my feelings on this subject, which turned into a William Carlos Williams thing, only far more frequent.