Virtually Home

I can tell you that in the airports and the train stations of western Europe, there is nothing nice being said about Iceland. It is, of course, hardly their fault that a volcano erupted, but it is wreaking havoc with spring break plans all over the place. Our trip started out on Monday. We took the TGV up to Paris and dodged the RER closures to get to Draveil, which is a little town south of the city where our hostel was going to provide a free shuttle to Orly for our 10:30 a.m. flight the next day. We were nervous about the ash, but Orly had re-opened on Monday and was operating most of its flights. The only flights that weren't landing in Athens as scheduled were coming from France and Germany. This didn't bode well. Tuesday morning, and we have received no cancellation e-mail from EasyJet, and the internet tells me that our flight status is still "on time". We walk to the train station, get on a bus to the airport, walk from the bus stop to the terminal. I real...

I will start by saying that this is the only photo I have from Amsterdam. It was a delicious pizza, and the photo illustrates an interesting quality of European pizzas, which is that not every slice is guaranteed to have all the ingredients you might have ordered on a single pizza. I particularly enjoyed the artistry of the ascending triangles of sliced ham on the left side overlayed by the more organic shapes of the onions. However, as "only" photos go? I probably should have tried to get some shots of the actual city with my phone. Every time I was outside it was cold and raining and I had other concerns, like not being run over by bicycles. So I will backtrack and start from the beginning. Alex and I left for Amsterdam on Saturday morning. The train left at 8:30 a.m., which meant leaving around 7:40 to take the two tram lines to Gare St. Jean. It should be noted that this was about 4 hours earlier than I've been waking up lately, and only two and a half hours after ...

This morning I woke up to find that the hall of records across from our apartment was, for once, flying a French flag. One of the things that is a little strange about living here is that I really only see flags on official buildings. People don't hang flags in front of their businesses, schools, or homes like they tend to in the States. I'm not sure whether that makes any kind of meaningful statement about patriotism or not. The other thing about the flags here is that they seem to be a lot thinner than we make them. I think the photo sort of illustrates that well -- all the flags are transparent. Yesterday, my roommate Alex turned 22. We went out to a really nice Indian restaurant not far from our place, and had some korma lamb, some chicken vindaloo, a vegetable I can't remember the name of, some rice, some naan, and a tasty bottle of Bordeaux. It was really my second time to go out and have a sit-down meal since getting here, and the first was pizza with Maria'...