In Airport Limbo
A favorable wind over the Atlantic put me into Toronto a fair bit early. This is both boon and... considerable disadvantage. It's technically about 9:00pm for me, and I still have another eight hours of today left. And I am starving. I spent most of the flight reading Sherlock Holmes (I ♥ iBooks sometimes. Mostly because it allows me to read in dark places without hurting my eyes. Such a fantastic invention), and in the back of my mind I was endlessly daydreaming about finding some good Indian food when I get back. (Something I missed in London, much to my regret, as one of my goals was to get take-out curry. Because... I have weird goals.) Unfortunately Hyde Park doesn't have any Indian food, so I might have to get take-out from one of the overpriced places downtown and drag it back to my apartment. Along with my luggage. And in a few hours I'm not sure I'll be awake enough to pull that off. I'm already flagging a bit. (I think we've officially hit the point in the day where my body is starting to go "Hey wait, why is there still sun? It's been more than 14 hours and there's still sun, something unnatural is afoot!")
I spent a few hours last night sitting around filling in random facts that I'd left out of my travel notebook. Before I left Chicago, I got a little Moleskine city notebook for Paris and, as useless an investment as it'd be for most people (a map and an awful lot of blank pages), this book saved my life countless times. Obsessed as I am with not looking like a tourist, having a map inside a nice little bound book is a lot less conspicuous. Plus all the blank pages were indispensable in cafes and restaurants and other such places where I would otherwise have had nothing else to do with myself while waiting for food. It also has pretty much everything about the London leg of the trip, when I was without internet. It has museum notes and favorite places, lists of everywhere I ate and what I ate there, which hostels were my favorite (oddly, Oops! was by far my favorite hostel. Not as trendy and obnoxious as I thought it'd be, and it was much cleaner, more professional, and put-together than either of the others), a list of the places everyone I met in hostels were from (mostly New Zealand and Australia). It also has a full outline of that ridiculous broken timeline dream I had, in all its convoluted glory. Next time I jet off to explore another city, I am bringing one of those city notebooks.
Additional things that served me admirably well: My suitcase. Totally worth the extra investment I made in it. I cannot over-emphasize the wonder of swivel wheels. It also endured a beating and took it nobly. My ancient (probably five-year-old, at least) rechargeable batteries also somehow lasted all the way to the end of the Catacombs. Thankfully I'd bought an extra set of batteries in London, but that's part of another story. My iPod batteries, with one brief recharge in London, only finally dropped below 20% on the flight back here, and with my cell phone in some kind of time warp it functioned as my watch for the entire week. And Hrunting! My adorable, wonderful Hrunting. A full week on only one battery recharge, with countless uploads and SD card transfers and foreign wireless networks and being lugged around for miles and miles on my back (mostly pointlessly, but I'm protective of Hrunting).
If I did it all again, I think the only thing I'd do differently was get some more listening practice in with French. And I don't know if I'll ever do a city without knowing the language at all (which a lot of English-speakers I ran into were doing). I can read and write French more than proficiently, but my listening comprehension is abysmal, and my pronunciation is worse. Then again, expecting proficiency in a language before travelling to some other city is probably a bit much, if I want to get anywhere in the future. (Especially since Tokyo is still high on my list, and the chances of me being anywhere near proficient, or even passable in Japanese (especially written) are... small. Very small.) I wish I'd walked more of London, but there's no way I'm not going back there for a thorough visit, or possibly as an immigrant, so my regrets in that matter are minimal. And if I go back to Paris, it's going to be to a place with a kitchen so I can take advantage of all the markets (it follows, then, that this will only be after I learn how to cook properly).
I think I'm getting more and more scatter-brained as the minutes go by, here, so I'm going to stop here. There isn't too much more to say, though, other than to finally go back and fill in the gaps from my days in London, and maybe scan in/write up some of my notebook pages for the heck of it (probably the museum notes). I guess, since today is going to be an exercise in keeping myself awake, now is also the time for any questions! Just in case you... I don't know, want to know about something I forgot to talk about. Though, given these huge entries, I can't imagine you even making it this far, so you probably don't know I'm asking you to ask.
Still a half-hour left before my flight boards. This is going to be a long day, indeed.
I spent a few hours last night sitting around filling in random facts that I'd left out of my travel notebook. Before I left Chicago, I got a little Moleskine city notebook for Paris and, as useless an investment as it'd be for most people (a map and an awful lot of blank pages), this book saved my life countless times. Obsessed as I am with not looking like a tourist, having a map inside a nice little bound book is a lot less conspicuous. Plus all the blank pages were indispensable in cafes and restaurants and other such places where I would otherwise have had nothing else to do with myself while waiting for food. It also has pretty much everything about the London leg of the trip, when I was without internet. It has museum notes and favorite places, lists of everywhere I ate and what I ate there, which hostels were my favorite (oddly, Oops! was by far my favorite hostel. Not as trendy and obnoxious as I thought it'd be, and it was much cleaner, more professional, and put-together than either of the others), a list of the places everyone I met in hostels were from (mostly New Zealand and Australia). It also has a full outline of that ridiculous broken timeline dream I had, in all its convoluted glory. Next time I jet off to explore another city, I am bringing one of those city notebooks.
Additional things that served me admirably well: My suitcase. Totally worth the extra investment I made in it. I cannot over-emphasize the wonder of swivel wheels. It also endured a beating and took it nobly. My ancient (probably five-year-old, at least) rechargeable batteries also somehow lasted all the way to the end of the Catacombs. Thankfully I'd bought an extra set of batteries in London, but that's part of another story. My iPod batteries, with one brief recharge in London, only finally dropped below 20% on the flight back here, and with my cell phone in some kind of time warp it functioned as my watch for the entire week. And Hrunting! My adorable, wonderful Hrunting. A full week on only one battery recharge, with countless uploads and SD card transfers and foreign wireless networks and being lugged around for miles and miles on my back (mostly pointlessly, but I'm protective of Hrunting).
If I did it all again, I think the only thing I'd do differently was get some more listening practice in with French. And I don't know if I'll ever do a city without knowing the language at all (which a lot of English-speakers I ran into were doing). I can read and write French more than proficiently, but my listening comprehension is abysmal, and my pronunciation is worse. Then again, expecting proficiency in a language before travelling to some other city is probably a bit much, if I want to get anywhere in the future. (Especially since Tokyo is still high on my list, and the chances of me being anywhere near proficient, or even passable in Japanese (especially written) are... small. Very small.) I wish I'd walked more of London, but there's no way I'm not going back there for a thorough visit, or possibly as an immigrant, so my regrets in that matter are minimal. And if I go back to Paris, it's going to be to a place with a kitchen so I can take advantage of all the markets (it follows, then, that this will only be after I learn how to cook properly).
I think I'm getting more and more scatter-brained as the minutes go by, here, so I'm going to stop here. There isn't too much more to say, though, other than to finally go back and fill in the gaps from my days in London, and maybe scan in/write up some of my notebook pages for the heck of it (probably the museum notes). I guess, since today is going to be an exercise in keeping myself awake, now is also the time for any questions! Just in case you... I don't know, want to know about something I forgot to talk about. Though, given these huge entries, I can't imagine you even making it this far, so you probably don't know I'm asking you to ask.
Still a half-hour left before my flight boards. This is going to be a long day, indeed.