DC has been immeasurable these days.  I usually carry hate in my heart for the tourists who flood the city each summer, but I've never seen people chat so amiably while crammed head-to-armpit in subway cars.  The whole world was on holiday.  Everyone was too relaxed to be cranky (except texile , who will always twitch and glare when crowded).

It was a ( Read more... )

I'd forgotten how bitter cold winter can be. It's been 2 years since I've seen snow at all, much less too-cold-for-snow. Plus wind chill. Jesus.

On the plane I naively thought, "Crap, I forgot the glovies, will buy some at the first Walgreens I see," as if my glovies would have made a difference, ha ha. Because Nick has ESP, he showed up at the ( Read more... )

I've been to-ing and fro-ing between HK and Singapore this month.  They sound like they ought to be neighbors, these two tropical city-state urbanopolises, but it's a 3.5-hour flight, like NY-LA.

Death penalty notwithstanding, it's a nice change from noisy HK.  People speak English, and they are not as hard on the eyes.  I could get my hair cut here ( Read more... )

Bristol is full of hummus.  Or, I was full of hummus when I was in Bristol.  Something like that.

Also, strawberry shortcake.  I so much love the days where my central dilemma is, "What shall I eat for dinner with my friends?"

And, "What kind of alcohol would go nicely with aforementioned dinner?"

I loved Bristol so much that I graffitied it.


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The moors at Dartmoor do not look like this:


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Monaco has an aquarium that is buckets of weird.  There was a giant hermit crab that had anemones attached to its shell.  Whenever it trades up, it manually removes the anemones and reinstalls them on its new home.  Awesome.

And I saw a fish with legs (see video).

A Genoan haiku:

Container port, coal,
wow infrastructure junkies
thrive thrive thrive thrive thrive.

Look at the red train-cars for scale.  We're talkin' a bigass mountain o' coal here.


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I'm struck by Byzantium.  16 hundred years ago, this village was the seat of empire.  I boggled at mosaics commissioned by Justinian and Theodora.

If Theodora's whore-to-empress story doesn't impress, how about this from my guidebook:

Across the grass from the basilica is the tiny Mausoleo di Galla Placidia named after the half-sister of Honorius.  ( Read more... )

Ah, Bologna, seat of the oldest university in existence.  The University of Bologna has been a center of thought and discourse since [some damn long time ago].

Some days I think about our fleeting lives.


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