Virtually Home

Last week I tried to watch the Superbowl. I'm not really all that interested in professional football. It's just too pretty when everyone is the best guy on the team, and since I have no professional team to root for, the babbling of the commentators is usually too much for me. On a side note, my extra-North American anglophone friends think it's hilarious when I say "to root for", but since my audience is largely back in North America, I'm not worried about this. Anyway, we went to the Cock and Bull, which is an English pub a few blocks from my house, for the 12:30 kick off. It was pretty disappointing because the coverage was coming from the UK, so they kept playing the same Domino's pizza commercial. I'm not usually that interested in Superbowl commercials either, but since there was all the fuss about the Tim Tebow spot, I wanted to see them this time. No such luck. And then the pub closed at 2 a.m., just before the end of the first quarter. ...

This is going to be a long and rambling post. Most of it is going to be specific information about the two concerts I saw this week. Don't say I didn't warn you. Last weekend was a rather nocturnal one for me. Sunday night found me trying desperately to sleep "early" and utterly failing until 7:30, which made going to class at 1 pretty painful (and believe me, I know how sad that is). Monday night I didn't manage to sleep until 2 a.m., and woke up on account of a too-early alarm at 4:30 before getting up at 5:30 to start my epic London adventure. It was a really foggy morning. You probably can't tell very well from this photo, but even in the train station there was fog about the rafters. I would have appreciated it a lot more had I not been so exhausted. The train ride to Paris passed in a haze. I arrived at Paris Montparnasse and had to cross the city on the number 4 metro line to change trains (not to mention going through all of the metal detecting...

The last few days have been pretty un-noteworthy, which I guess explains the lag in posting. I guess I've mostly been playing guitar, watching Star Trek: TNG and X-Files, and surfing YouTube. For instance, today I finally heard about President Obama's speech for the first day of school. That's one frustrating thing about living abroad -- I keep not being apprised of presidential addresses or  major pop culture events until way after. Most of what I have to show for yesterday involves successfully finding the laundromat, which was about a 3/4 of a mile from my apartment. I know there's one closer. In fact, I remember walking by one a few days ago and remarking aloud to my roommates that we should remember where it was, in case we needed it. As it turned out, we did have need of it -- and I didn't remember where it was. I'm sure it was closer than the one I found, but I didn't want to invest a lot of time and energy into the hunt when I still had to fetch...