Virtually Home

Last Christmas season, I had undertaken a fabulous holiday journey that started at my friend Tom's house in Poole, Dorset, England. After a horrendous number of setbacks that made me believe I would never make it to Tom's, he picked me up at the train station. We had some great times, in a house full of kittens and new friends. We drank a lot of cider, and walked to the grocery store in the freezing rain singing Tilly & the Wall at the top of our lungs. A year ago today, I left Tom's house to meet Rachel in Geneva, Switzerland, where everything was cold, beautiful, and expensive. We traveled to Lauterbrunnen and Zurich, too, and encountered such difficulties as coin-operated showers and respiratory illness. We met up with Hunter in Paris and spent several days in a shuffle of hostels and holiday crowds. We saw an anniversary light show at the Eiffel Tower and met an excellent Danish couple under the Arc de Triomphe at midnight. Hunter and I went on to Berlin and c...

Last night we went out with our friends Carley and Danielle to celebrate the end of their finals week. It was still sort of surreal to me, maybe because I really only had about two weeks of actual work during the whole semester, and most of that was me procrastinating my paper rather than just getting it done. Still, it was a good celebratory outing. Vianney and Benjamin ended up meeting up with us. Somewhere near the park at Gambetta at around midnight we encountered the only group of violent people I've yet run across in France, who, after asking us if we had any cigarettes, for some reason I couldn't understand, hit Alex and then pushed Benjamin over twice before disappearing into the night. Everyone was okay, if a little confused. We hurried home. This morning was its own trial. I had alerted our landlady to the possibility that Something Was Very Wrong with our kitchen plumbing. Every couple of hours there's this tremendous gurgling and water sort of shoots out of...

Time passes strangely here. My schedule hardly conforms to the one I kept over the last several semeseters in Oklahoma. It involves a lot of late nights and a lot of sleeping in, eating meals at strange times and bouncing between the attention span of a goldfish and marathons of one activity or another. Lately, I've been throwing all my time at procrastinating studying for my various tests and writing my paper for typology. I'm about to get to the end of a book I'm reading on lingustics, and one of the last chapters is talking about the connections that link language to race and customs in a sort of awkward way. I'm going to blame the fact that it was written in 1921 for the way it talks about race, because it's not strictly politically correct. But then, what does that even mean? Other than that, I've spent a lot of time in my room listening to Tilly and the Wall, really. When I have something to do and feel guilty about not doing it, I spend a lot of time ...

So I went to the book store this afternoon and picked up a Robert & Collins English vocabulary study guide, which I'm planning on using backwards. I thought it was pretty clever. Plus, it'll teach me Britishisms! The better to understand my rapidly expanding base of non-American anglophone friends. On the way to the book store I took several photos of the various Christmas trees and light displays near my house. Unfortunately, I discovered that the photos are just a little too blurry even for my hasty posting here. I'll go back and take more time with them. Practice holding my breath and being really still for those long exposures. Maybe I should get a tripod. Point being: you have to wait a while for Christmas photos. In other Christmas news, I've expanded the Great European Christmas Adventure of Ought Nine/Ten (I'm rethinking this title as a result of the awkwardness of the year 2010. On the one hand, I'm already angry about not being able to use the ...