Thoughts at 3AM after insufficient dancing

Life is ending. At least part of it. Friends are moving away to other states, other countries. I'm moving away. There will be no more classes with the same professors, no more South College, no more late hours at the W.E.B DuBois.
As we all know, the water will flow on and the river we're leaving will never be the same again. New batches of students will take our place and live out their own stories in 4 years filling the same dorms, cafeterias, fields and clubs that we used to inhabit with their own sets of human emotions and thoughts.
I will never come back to the Amherst I knew (partially because I don't even know what it is that I knew about it to begin with).

I'm a coward, I avoid facing such change by burying my head into work or drinking with friends or riding my bicycle. I think, however, that the time has come even for me to accept that something is ending here today as I write. Something may have already ended and I with my sluggish mind am just now realizing what had happened.

Fortunately for me, life is really like a phoenix: out of the ashes and ruins of the old the new is constantly born. This rebirth happens all the time but it is at certain points in my narrative that I notice it and fill myself with hope for the new beginning. I wish the hope were always fulfilled, it usually isn't. The new is marginally different from the old, there being nothing but the old to utilize in its generation. I'm not upset by this, the injection of hope is all I care about, it's what keeps me going.

Winter-cycling

I was planning on "killing" this blog when I left Konstanz.
I was planning on publishing one final post where I would have made sense of what had happened to me over the year I spent in the Old World; what from Germany I missed now that I was back in the US; what maybe not so much.
I was planning on including some beautiful pictures from Bodensee in this last post.

This, however, didn't happen. I'm not entirely sure why. I'm also not giving This means, dear readers, you are still stuck with my rants and/or musings and/or mediocre puns until I run out of topics to write about.

A hot topic lately have been our weather conditions. Western Massachusetts has namely been hit with a streak of days with an average temperature of -10 degrees Celsius and a couple of snowfalls.
I have been riding . While I have not been alone in this, I have heard quite a few surprised remarks from friends and coworkers about the feasibility of what I was doing. I thought a short report of how it is in fact to be cycling around the valley in the winter was in order.
Here it is, I put it in my favorite format of questions and answers.

Isn't it cold?
While it isn't exactly beach weather outside, the frosts have not yet been drastic enough that sufficient protection and exercise can't counteract them. As always, extremities are at risk. Especially this is true for hands, since their function is only to hold on to the handlebars in the wind. Wind becomes a very serious foe anytime temperatures go near or below zero. The only way to counteract it is to wear resistant gear (especially gloves) and keep moving, perhaps exerting more effort than usual in order to keep the blood flowing in one's body and legs. This also has a nice side effect of decreasing the time you are outside.
I even find it more useful in the winter to "stand up" on the bike, placing some of my weight on the arms and thus getting some blood there as well.
It is also key to have some sort of cover for one's mouth so that one inhales warmer air.

What about snow?
The following is a very subjective observation/speculation, I have not yet quantified it. It seems to me that riding in a light rain and also light snow is somehow considerably easier than on dry pavement. Perhaps it's the reduced friction, perhaps its just my imagination (it's been known not to have much traction with reality at times).

My roadster generally can't handle snow deeper than 15-20 cm, depending on its consistency. However, I remember only two occasions when the snow was deep enough to force me to dismount. I have also, knock on wood, yet to have

I find it useful when going on roads that have not been cleaned yet to shamelessly occupy one of the ruts left by cars where the snow (if present) is much shallower.
I did have to move over a bit to make space for passing cars, but I do not recommend doing so unless you think the snow on the side of the road permits it. In my opinion it is much safer for both me and the cars if I don't slip and fall even if I occupy more of the road in order to avoid that and cars have to sometimes wait a little to pass me. Ultimately, if the snow is deep enough that you cannot ride on the roadside, cars really shouldn't be driving much faster than you anyway.

One important thing to be wary of in snow are breaks. The same precautions as when riding in heavy rain should be sufficient: (i) don't speed up beyond the speed at which you can adequately react to a slip by braking and (ii) apply the breaks occasionally so as to clear the layer of snow/water/salt/gunk that may have accumulated between the pads and the wheels.

Does winter affect interactions with pedestrians at all?

I haven't noticed any major difference in the bipeds so far. They may be less likely to notice a cyclist because they're paying even more attention to the 50cm in front of them than usual, but I can't say I've noticed that.

How does the bike hold up against the conditions?

If you have an insanely expensive bike that must be in spotless condition at all times, definitely do not take it out on the street in the winter. However, if you are an average every-day kind of lass/fellow, as long as you are willing to take the two-wheeler inside once now and then and give it a thorough going over with a rag and lube (for the gears and chain), you should be alright.

I have had an interesting experience with fenders this winter. I've had both plastic and metal ones on the bikes I've owned so far and can confirm the general consensus that metal ones are far superior. So with the first snow I got myself some fenders. Unfortunately, the very first time I rode with them I was going to Northampton via the Bike Trail. Naturally, the path was not cleaned and hence covered in a decent layer of snow. Unfortunately, it happened to be of the wet sticky kind. It instantly clogged my fenders and started freezing. At the end of the journey I had to exert almost double the effort it would have taken to maintain my speed at anything more than a crawl. This is not to mention that I had to punch the wheels a couple of times before I parked the thing or else I would not have been able to ride it back.

After such a bad experience, I decided to demount the fenders and brave the elements as is. Due to lack of equipment I was only able to follow through on this plan with the front wheel. But of course, once I took that fender off, the snow outside promptly turned into cold rain and mush, so I was back to spraying myself with cold dirty water every time I got on the bike. It is now January and I have yet to see the same kind of fender-stalling snow I witnessed that one time I rode to NoHo... This past weekend I remounted the front fender and my feet have thanked me for that ever since.

The moral of my story is: get fenders and stick with them! The winters here are clearly not snowy enough to pose clogging as a problem. They are wet enough, however, that plugging the showers that are your wheels will be noticeable.

Coco's Friseur

Seeing as the summer semester in Konstanz had its kick off yesterday, I thought it fitting to get back into the blogosphere with less geeky posts than this.

A week ago I went to get a haircut. Being a student means one a) has limited finances and b) doesn't worry about one's looks the same way as some of the more respectable classes in society do (that is not to say one doesn't worry about one's looks at all, it's just that on average one's worries can be satisfied without the help of a high-class haircut). Considering these two things I went to the cheapest barber in town, Coco's Friseur. In case some of my readers are actually from the area, here is a GoogleMaps link showing its location.

In this establishment one can get quite a presentable haircut for only 5 euros, if one asks for a "dry" one. Since a "wet" haircut is essentially just getting your hair washed before getting it cut, I don't see the point in spending more money on it instead of washing one's hair at home right before hitting up the barbers.

The downside to Coco's being so cheap is that it is insanely popular. Out of the two times that I have been there, the wait always exceeded an hour.
This was one of the two times, so I did not at all regret bringing my a notebook with me along with a tome of Oscar Wilde.

I did, however, have time to make some observations in the place during those almost two hours that I spent there.

Observation 1:
It is amazing what ladies from the older generation want done with their hair. Almost every one of them wanted her hair redyed, recurled, rewashed and God knows what else. Almost every one of them had a head covered in rollers or tin foil at some point during her stay. I suspect (though I have no conclusive proof, I wish someone would do a study), they were the ultimate cause of the long wait times.

Observation 2:
The behavior of the older gentlemen complimented that of the ladies in a strangely gallant way. Their hair situation seemed to be the opposite of the ladies: most of their heads possessed only a fraction of that which originally covered them completely I am sure (or else there was a whole generation of bald young men, but I have never encountered any supporting evidence for this). And yet these fellows braved hours of stupefying wait while the ladies beautified themselves endlessly only to sit themselves in a barber's chair and ask for their sole remaining lock of hair to be shortened by one centimeter.

At the time I found the whole picture slightly annoying. The next day I thought it touching.

Observation 3 (unrelated):
I never really noticed until last Tuesday how strange a conversation between a barber and their client appears to an on-looker. Somehow one forgets that normally one converses with a barber through the mirror in front of one's chair. To someone looking from the side (as I was doing for a good portion of the day), the picture is reminiscent of a Duo Interp skit, where both of the participants cannot make direct eye contact and so are staring and making faces at the space in front of them, pretending that their partner right there too. Seeing barbers and their clients perform this was a bit unusual to me, for some reason.

These are a Few of my Favorite Things

My left hand felt strange the whole day. There was a feeling of something missing from it, a feeling of lightness that even bordered with corporeal insubstantiality.
A friend had borrowed my watch in order to keep track of time during her exams (for some reason most German lecture halls do not have clocks and since the presence of phones, iPods, etc. is prohibited, a good old-fashioned watch becomes a necessity). Turns out, I was missing said watch and it's weight on my hand.
I thought this strange, because I never expected to grow that attached to a simple watch. This got me thinking about what other regular presences or activities I needed for comfort.

I haven't really give this much thought before because for a very long time (to be honest I don't even remember anymore when (if) it actually ended) I was on a campaign to deny habits in general. I claimed that they, in a more formalized form, led to the generation of rituals and traditions. These in turn often became the everyday embodiment of religions, with people fervently holding on to their particular rituals or traditions as if they possessed a meaning on their own and were not instead a set of often arbitrary or anachronistic actions/ideas that were assigned an equally often arbitrary or anachronistic meaning. I never seemed to comprehend why people voluntarily refused to reassign these meanings or change sets of actions, thus depriving themselves of the power that was responsible for creating the traditions in the first place. I wanted to have nothing to do with all such "nonsense" and so tried to live my life without acquiring anything that might be considered a habit. To be honest, I am far from certain that I was successful in this, but instead got very good at ignoring whatever habits I did have.
I suspect this all might have been a result some sort of teenage rebellion that I simply forgot to revise in the following years. I cannot, of course, say for sure, but seem like the most plausible explanation for such a vehemently extreme position.

Well, whatever it was, it appears to be over. I will now proceed to list all of the things (some of them living) that can be, I think, considered as habits. I will admit that my definition of habits in this post is somewhat loose and for a couple of things listed the word attachment would most likely be more appropriate.

Getting up early/Breakfast:
To me a day is lost, if I got out of bed after noon and doubly so if I missed breakfast. It is, of course, necessary to note that I am in college and for me an average early day starts at nine or ten in the morning, but all of that is relative. It is in any case important to grab something to eat or drink even if it is cup of tea. Breakfast (or an equivalent) is the only official meal I sometimes have in a day (snacks don't count, mind you).

Physical Exercise:
This did not really start until I got into exercising regularly in the first place. Until I joined the UMass fencing team, I was perfectly happy limiting my movements to an occasional bike ride (it is true that one of them was 25 miles long, but that was an exception). This need is opposed by the following one.

Slothing time:
There are a couple of days every month, when I'd rather not see anyone and am perfectly happy doing useless things like staring at walls blankly or roaming around my house or the outdoors without a plan. Once upon a time I thought this was a weird necessity, but the more people I talk to nowadays, the more I discover that the necessity is fairly common to humans. There, now it is official: I have a common ground (and a potential topic of conversation) with most of my species. Now I feel a part of something big, bigger than me or any of its individual members: the set of people, who like to waste their time doing absolutely nothing productive or useful.

People:
I have heard there are people capable of surviving on an uninhabitable island without human contact for years but still remain happy and sane. I even think I know one such person. I also know that it is not me.
I require regular interaction with fellow humans, even if it is just a meaningless grunt or an awkward joke. I like watching people happen, sometimes I like to take part in the happening as well, occasionally contributing an (in)appropriately ridiculous grimace here or an often crass comment there. I genuinely find the whole mess of human interactions (for I firmly believe it is a mess where we all have only a very approximate notion of what exactly is going on at a given moment) quite entertaining and captivating. Without it my life would be immensely much more boring. If there were no people around me, I would also have nowhere to channel a certain kind of indescribable energy and desire to socialize. I would like to thank people, especially the ones close to me (conventionally called friends, I believe) for sticking around and making life truly bearable.

Family and Cats:
A quite special subclass of the aforementioned "people" group is my family. I fairly certain that among the people I know I am one of the closest connections with my parents and sisters (over 7 years together in an 18 m² room of a two room Moscow apartment one gets to know the people one shares these things very well). My family are the only people I have consistently spoken to regularly for more than 5 years.
In my case it is also impossible to mention the family without saying a word or two about cats. For as long as I remember my family has always had at least one of these beasts (most of the time more than one).  Thus for me they have become an inseparable part of the family gestalt.

Fazit
In conclusion I would like to say that to me writing these things down had a somewhat cathartic effect. For some reason it felt nice writing down some unoriginal yearnings and attachments. Perhaps it was because I defined them on paper for the first time.

Yuka goes Hiking

The path ran between two rocky shoulders of the hill overlooking the plantation, through sparse bushes and low trees. The stranger was keeping up a decent pace, but so was Yuka. In fact, she was mostly running off ahead and occasionally coming back to check up on his progress.
The moon was full and the path could be clearly seen, as well as the stars

After a while the path started bearing more and more to the north, away from the hilltop. The stranger seemed to notice that and stopped for a moment hesitating. He then almost immediately turned off the path and started trudging through the undergrowth straight towards the hilltop. Yuka followed, even though she had to zigzag quite a bit to avoid bushes and rocks that the stranger simply stepped over.  

After a somewhat arduous fifteen minutes in the thickets, the dog and the human reached  another path, that forked in three directions. One led west, to a couple of taller peaks, one south down to the coast and the last one directly to the hilltop overlooking the plantation. The stranger deliberated for a second, then took the latter path.

The top of the hill was completely bare and consisted of some big rocks and boulders piled loosely together. The stranger quickly strode up to the highest point and sat down. Yuka attempted to do the same, but encountered an impassable obstacle on the way. There was a crevice in the rocks deeper than her height and wider than her step. She couldn't cross it.  A search for alternative routes proved hopeless too: there were none, so she thought. The stranger seemed to disagree on this point and tried to guide Yuka to a surface a bit further down that seamlessly led to his position. That surface, however, was a slightly narrow ledge with a dead branch cutting through its middle. To Yuka, who was afraid of heights, this was impassable.

After several unsuccessful attempts to coax the dog into joining him, the stranger got down from the summit and headed back in the direction of the forked path. Yuka, overjoyed to be on familiar turf again, sped to the path intersection and immediately turned left, hoping that the stranger would follow her down into the valley. This was not his plan, however, as she discovered when he continued on straight ahead in the direction of the taller hills. She retraced her steps and tagged along.

This path dipped into the saddle between the hills and then wound methodically up the side of one of the taller ones. Even though it got steep sometimes, there were no big obstacles or stretches of loose rocks, so it was easy going for both and they reached  the top in an effortless twenty minutes.
Once there they saw a seemingly forsaken house that nonetheless had a respectably threatening "private property" sign in front of it and was flanked on the western side by some trees. The hilltop itself was bare save for some tall bushes and other undergrowth, staples of the region's flora.

The stranger again stopped and started looking around at the landscape and up at the sky. He looked like he was enjoying it. The view was indeed in a way extraordinary. To the east lay a flat strip of coastline, teeming with yellow, orange, and white lights from the nearby cities and towns. As one's gaze turned to the west, however, one beheld a sudden decrease in lighting where the coastal valley ended the hills began. The hills themselves marched in seemingly endless rows of grey and black humps from the north to the south with occasional valleys or towers radiating light here and there.

The stranger started in the direction of the hills, stopped (as if contemplating whether or not to go further), and finally turned to the direction whence they came. Yuka followed.

They soon reached the intersection of the paths again. Once more the dog turned left intending to finally leave all elevations behind and once more the human continued on straight, heading for the rocky hilltop that she could not scale earlier that night. This time was no different: the same crevice, the same directions from the human, the same result.

This time, however, the stranger seemed determined to cross over the top. After several unsuccessful attempts to lure the dog up to the rocks, he came down himself and sat down on the ground. Yuka ran away down the hill, hoping again that the stranger might join her, then returned and approached . Then he moved in closer, slowly extending one arm towards the dog. She ducked down, but stayed put. The stranger picked her up, she started shivering. Holding the dog, he sprang over several boulders then set her down on a rock. She instantly found a path down from there and sped to a lower spot on the hillside, then turned to check if he was following. He was still at the top, looking around. one could see the compound, a whitish rectangle at the foot of the hill.

The stranger seemed to be enjoying the view of the hills to the north and the plantation directly below. Yuka, however, was not. For one thing, being a young and active dog, she wanted to run off somewhere. Then there were also the height and the big rocks: she liked neither and wanted to be away from them as soon as possible.

She waited, impatiently. Finally, he started the descent. The hillside was steeper than any of the previous ones and the path was full of loose pebbles. Yuka kept speeding down home, but the stranger was making miserable progress down the slope, slowly trying to find a solid foothold, slipping constantly and even falling from time to time. When he finally caught up with Yuka at the foot of the hill he was covered in dust and had a little blood on the left palm.

They were on one of the orange fields and a dirt road led them directly to the home compound. The main gate was closed, it being past midnight at the time. The stranger tried the back door, but it was locked too. He then proceeded to climb over the low wall and head into the house. Yuka waited a little bit and then ran over to a familiar hole  in the wall on the other side of the compound and thus ended the night.

Two mornings later  the strangers got into the van with the Owner and left. A little over an hour later the Owner returned with the van, but without the strangers.

Yuka

I think my holiday travels this year were an exceptional experience. As such, I found it hard to summarize and describe in any kinds of usual blog entries. Instead, I decided to write a short piece that, I think, captures one aspect of the journey in a fictional form (though based on real events). This is in many ways an experiment for me, as I have only really written a story once before in my life (an unfinished one, at that!). This story is a very clear combination of fact and fiction and I especially feel strange about describing Gustave and me in the third person as well as the way we act. Hence constructive criticism is appreciated. So much for the introduction, here goes...

Yuka loved running. Especially after things thrown by humans. Especially after the yellow rubber ball that was covered in pimples and squealed if squeezed. She loved the thrill of chasing down that ball (or a twig or a stone or a cone, anything, really), snatching it up from the ground or out of the air and then triumphantly trotting back to the human with the catch in her mouth. She loved the sound of the wind in her ears and the pebbles under her feet as she ran down her prey in the yard of the orange plantation she lived in.

The plantation consisted of several orange-tree fields tucked in between two rocky hills and a walled compound consisting of a house, yard and a pool. Apart from Yuka, this compound was inhabited by her Owner, his wife and their two children, though one never knows if Yuka thought of them that way. There was also a cat, but it was fairly boring: it either wailed to be let in the house and fed or was gone God knows where. It was just a little smaller than Yuka and she liked to chase after it occasionally or wrestle with it.

Other humans were constantly in the compound, coming and going. Yuka tried to make all of them throw her something at least once. She would follow them around with whatever object she wanted to chase (usually it was the yellow ball), set it on the ground as soon as they would stop or sit down. Sometimes she even nudged it in their direction with her nose with a facial expression, that showed utter longing and anticipation. If it so happened that one of the humans gave into her pleas and picked up the object to throw it, Yuka would focus on the human's hand while trying simultaneously to predict in which direction the object will be thrown. As soon as the object left the human's hand, the dog would take off after it as if upon its successful retrieval depended the fate of the free (and maybe even the not so free) world.

Yuka's obsession with retrieving things was so strong that she could follow humans around for a very long time no matter where they were going, because she never abandoned the hope that someone might throw her something.

When two new strangers arrived at the compound late one night in the Owner's van, Yuka was asleep. The next morning, however, she submitted them to the same treatment as all the inhabitants of the compound, permanent and temporary. She noticed right away, that these strangers were unusually tall, taller than most of the other humans she saw in the compound. One had long black hair, walked around barefoot and seldom spoke. The other had reddish hair and wore glasses.

Both strangers, to Yuka's delight, seemed to enjoy playing with her from the start. Even though their enthusiasm waned slightly after she had retrieved various objects several dozen times in a row, they still were considerably more eager to oblige her with a throw or two than the local humans, those being a bit jaded in this respect.

Of the two, the stranger with the long hair tended to spend more time with Yuka. He would pick up her yellow ball, get a few huge steps head start, and then hurl it as far as he could, which tended to be limited by the bushes and the walls of the compound. Yuka for her part would race to where the ball fell and bring it back to the stranger, then the procedure would repeat. During one of these throwing and retrieval sessions, he tried to pet her. She dropped on her stomach and squirmed a bit. She did not like being touched. It reminded her of her previous owners, the ones she had before she was taken in by the Owner of the Plantation.

As for the red-haired stranger, Yuka saw him walk out through the main gate one moonlight night and, as was usual for her, followed him. He started walking up one of the hills around the plantation, stopped for a second to exchange some phrases with the other stranger and the Owner, then continued walking down the path that led westwards from the farm. Yuka followed.

To be continued...

Happy New Year!!

This entry is really not intended to inform the reader about my journeys, unless they are interested in time travel. I thought it would, however, make sense to mark the transition into the new year with some sort of entry dedicated to the subject.

I would also like to continue the preface by saying that the reader will find no new year's resolutions in here. First of all, I'm not sure I base my approach to life on resolutions. Secondly, I find it silly to either wait with the implementation some resolutions till the new year arrives or else frantically come up with resolutions the week before New Years in order to have them. In short, there will be no resolutions in this post.

Instead I will try to sum up year 2011 in a couple of words and then share some thoughts about the year to come.

2011
Winter:
This past winter featured the usual combination of homework, snow, colds and fencing. I did have my car on campus for the first time, however, and that was a series of new adventures: getting stuck in the snow, driving friends around to practices and parties. And this winter, for the first time in years, I actually played in the snow, went sliding down hills etc. That was cool.

Spring:
Apart from the usual studying, spring can be characterized as the time I got addicted to a computer game, World of Tanks, namely. This rarely happens to me, but when it does, I become a lost cause. I am really glad going abroad took me away from The Game, I don't think I would have had the willpower to end the addiction myself.

Summer:
The World of Tanks addiction continues, but now luckily it is curbed by two jobs, reading and friends. My jobs were actually interesting: at OIT I helped give presentations to freshmen, at the UMass linguistics department I got to model child language acquisition with python (the work is far from done, but here is what progress has been made so far).

Friends really made this summer bearable, I would want to thank all of them for sticking around Amherst and initiating great nights of movies, breaking into pools and ponds, not to mention the regular parties and jumping off of cliffs/rope swinging (during the day). Unless I stay in UMass for grad school (highly unlikely), I think this might be the last summer I get this kind of combination of cool work and fun.

I also liked this summer also because it was bittersweet. I was saying good-bye to friends for a year and some of them were having their own issues and the combination somehow motivated me to go out and do more things than I would have done otherwise.

Fall:
If I were to talk about this fall, I suspect I would be repeating much of what has already been written in this blog, so I will limit myself to a couple of general statements. I have definitely improved my German, even if just a bit. I have reconnected with some old friends and made some new ones. I've survived without cats for perhaps the longest stretch of time, if one counts the preceding summer as well.


On this note I say farewell to 2011 with all of its work, troubles and joys. Off we go into 2012...


2012
I generally don't pay much attention to the future, with the exception of some fairly obscure career plan that I have lurking somewhere in my head. That being said, I realized as I was writing this entry, that the year 2012 seems to be a promising one, though with a hint of finality to it.

For one thing, I will still be in Germany for over half of the year, perhaps not only Germany. Then, for better or for worse, my stay abroad will end. After that I will seamlessly transition into the graduate school application craze and all the beauties associated with choosing my further path in life. In the middle of this craze the year (and, according to some, the world!) will end.

This brings me to an issue, much discussed in the media in an eschatological light, of  2012 being the last year in this century when the number of the day, month, and year can be the same. Some say this is why the world will end on the 12th of December of that year (some say it won't), but I am sad about this year for another reason. I will simply miss the days when all the numbers in the date are the same.

I never believed in any nonsense about making wishes on those days or any of that. I just liked to write down the date in my notebook and think: "How nice, all the numbers are the same!"  That's it, a small detail that would make a potentially hopelessly boring day a bit more bearable. 2012 is the last year in this century when I can have this luxury. As I am not very likely to make it to the 2100s in a condition suitable for appreciating number patterns, for all intents and purposes 2012 is in fact the last year in my life that can bring the joy of identical date numbers. There is something final about that and this is what makes the 2011-to-2012 transition a somewhat sad one.

Paris

My stay to date in Paris consisted mostly of roaming around the city, so I cannot really give an account of everything that has happened. Here are some notes instead.


The city was made for roaming. In almost a week here I did not see practically any ugly or characterless buildings. The streets reminded me of rooms in an old and comfortably cluttered apartment. I now understand the people that claim it is the most beautiful city in the world.


Beauty seems to lead to expensiveness, as maybe should have been expected. A pint of Guiness will run up to over 7 Euros.


My two favorite places thus far: 
- as cheesy as this sounds, almost all of the embankments of the Seine at night
- Rue de Mouffetard, just a very nice street
- Rue Oberkampf, this is the street we walked the most as it takes us from our apartment on Bld Menimontant to the center. It has a couple of bars and clubs and a decently priced creperie, where we get Nutella crepes at early hours in the morning.


Famous places that I didn't find so impressive:
- Champs Elysee, because it was overrun by tourists and reeked of militant consumerism
- Top of Monmartre at 3pm. My complaint here is similar to the one mentioned above, namely, too many herds of tourists. I suspect, however, that if one were to show up there very late at night, the view would be worth it. After having visited Monmartre, I understood the mixed feelings locals usually have towards tourists. In massive quantities the latter are quite an unbearable lot with their constant aimless wandering, eating, picture taking, nonsense foreign speech, and uncontrollably loud children.


Hence here are some nice non-touristy places I've seen:
- The west side of Montmartre (Rue Chevalier de la Barre, Passage Cottin, Rue Ramey). The residential areas of the hill are actually quite empty and charming. One might even glimpse a bit of the past in the old men playing boules or a woman out for a walk with her three cats.
- The Parc André-Citroën. It was strange visiting this place in the winter, with all of the trees bare and grey and all of the grassy surfaces dead, but the place is nonetheless full of many nooks and quiet corners. 
- Another nice park is located in the yard of the Rodin Museum.

In the event that I would be presumptuous enough to write an autobiography I would title it, with appropriate presumptuousness, "Walking in a Dream".

Lately I have been getting the feeling that this is precisely what I have been doing. Life this past month consisted of a stream of events that swept a complacent me away in the direction of the next day. A stream of readings about medieval society, summaries of said readings, lunches at the cafeteria with friends, more readings and summaries, some simple finite-state networks followed by a stream of movies and unpredictable weekends... oh, and of course a very consistent stream of rain water falling on the city throughout the month.

Out of this stream of events I was only able to fish out the following (mostly mundane) observations and memories:

- Cream cheese, a loaf of bread and fruit make for impressively simple and effective travel food. One needs no utensils to consume this food (unless you take a pineapple or a pomegranate as fruit), it is filling and relatively healthy.

- Book tickets a month in advance: early enough to be cheap, late enough to procrastinate with plans.

- Young couples on park alleys are much more dangerous to cyclists than cars. They have a tendency to try to take up the whole path just at the moment you are about to pass them. That alone, however, is not dangerous, just a nuisance. The problem arises when one rings one's bike's bell, thus shocking the love birds into reality and as a result causing them to dart in unpredictable directions in the most uncoordinated manner. Beware of couples in park alleys!

- Eat more. Getting blown off of a bike by the wind is becoming slightly embarrassing.

- If one falls off a bike, one should get up and look for one's glasses. Once they have been found, one can continue on his or her way.

- Sleeping 8 or 9 hours a day does not make one less sleepy. The more you have, the more you want.

- Some knowledge of music theory greatly helps when composing music.

- Bridges have a tendency to freeze over when the temperature drops below zero Celsius. Beware of bridges in winter.


It seems that this year Christmas will be white only online on most major websites. Talk about virtual reality replacing the real one!
I nonetheless wish everyone and anyone reading happy Holidays, whatever they may be. Considering that I am supposed to be on break from academics, I should be posting some more entries fairly soon, perhaps even still in the old year.

A good Weekend

I have been told brevity is the soul wit.
In an attempt to capture this soul, I will make the following entry very short.

This past weekend was phenomenal.
I want to thank all of the great people that came to my WG for some chess, checkers and cards on Friday night and drank all of my (glüh)wine. Special thanks to Stanislav for extracting boatloads of tangerine and orange juice (and thus showing us that tangerine juice is actually more "orange", than orange juice) and to Fiona for making some sort of glühwein-mold wine hybrid using cheap french red wine, tangerines and assorted spices found in my kitchen.
I want to thank all the sporty folks who I joined on a bike ride to Stein am Rhein on Saturday. It was a very pleasant ride with nice scenery (including a very impressive castle), a relaxed pace and some practical discoveries, such as the versatility and usefulness of cream cheese for meals without utensils.
I want to thank the inhabitants of WG 7 in Sonnenbühl Ost, who kindly invited a new acquaintance who was lost on the way to another party to share some great tea with them.
I want to thank Molly & Minions for cooking a kingly feast (both with respect to quantity and quality of the food) and for letting me consume a considerable portion of it despite showing up late. I would also like to thank them for (albeit unsuccessfully) trying to introduce my snobbish self to the film "Elf".
I want to thank Rajesh Bhatt and Rui Wang for being the social highlight of my otherwise reading-centered Sunday, explaining the concept of statistical entropy (Rui) and introducing me to the GEIL song (Rajesh). I would also like to thank Marc Novel for a pleasant conversation about logic and programming languages.
I want to thank my flatmates Inken and Claire as well as Jasmin for finishing the weekend "in style" by watching Tatort.
And lastly (but not leastly?) I would like to thank the weather gods for providing a quiet partially sunny day on Saturday and a warm sun-lit Sunday (that I was unable to take advantage of outdoors, unfortunately).

How I went to Bremen and discovered I am NOT to be trusted with letters

I wake up on a Tuesday, drag myself out of bed around ten and am given three envelopes. To my surprise I recognize these as letters containing postcards to my relatives that I dropped off in a mailbox in Bremen the day before on my way to the train that would take me to Konstanz. They were supposed to be at least half-way over the Atlantic ocean by now, and yet here they were, once again in my hands.

A friend told me that if I placed a postcard in an envelope, thus giving it the status of a letter, it would arrive at its destination much faster than a regular postcard would. I needed this increase in delivery speed because I was under pressure to produce some sort of paper trail to mark my year abroad. I had not exchanged any snail mail with my family since the beginning of mystay, hence they were getting a bit impatient about it. I decided that a weekend in Bremen was as good an excuse to start producing the paper trail as any.

One might wonder why I was in Bremen in the first place. A high school classmate of mine from Russia is studying on exchange in Tampere, Finland until the end of December. I had not seen him for four or almost five years, not counting the two days we hung out in Sweden in the beginning of October, and calculated, that this past weekend was our only chance to meet up before he disappeared again behind the "iron curtain" of the Russian border.

And so we decided to meet up half way, which for him meant flying south for a couple of hours and for me - riding a train north along the Rhine. This ride I undertook for the first time on Friday, boarding the train to Karlsruhe (no matter where I go from Konstanz, it always seems to start with the Karlsruhe train!),  changing there and continuing through places like Mainz, Frankfurt am Main, Köln, Düsseldort, Dortmund, Hannover... over 8 hours in a train all-in-all.

Luckily for me I had books (I swear, I think I went through half of the Finite State Morphology textbook as a result of this journey), homework, Chopin and Queen along to keep me company. As if that was not enough, I completely accidentally ran into Fiona, a friend from the September course at Konstanz who was on her way to visit a friend in Bonn and happened to be taking the exact same trains as I (the saying "the world is small" should really be incorporated somewhere in the description of this blog). Thus the journey was really not as bad as I thought it might turn out to be.

However bearable or at times even pleasant, the ride was long, and I arrived in Bremen late Friday night, met up with my friend and headed over to a hostel where he had already checked us in. The whole time I could not help but notice how much colder it was in the North. Whereas in Konstanz I could get away with wearing a shirt, sweater and jacket, here I would need at least one more layer to barely stay warm. I was a bit apprehensive about spending most of the next day outside walking around the city.

The next morning we took a tram to the center of town and started out at the main city square. We first tried to have a look inside the Dom, but it was closed for service and we were told to come again at 14:00. We then tried the City Hall, but that turned out to be completely closed on weekends.

Nikita and the
Bremer Stadtmusikanten

As usual, my visit was about as planned as an improvisation comedian's routine. From that it follows that we didn't let these initial mishaps dampen our spirits and instead took some pictures with the Bremer Stadtmusikanten, then in front of the exuberantly decorated City Hall (that has SPQB engraved above one of its entrances... Senatus Populusque Bremensis) and after that with the Roland. We then listened to some fellow play a piano right in Roland's shadow.

That morning and in fact throughout my whole visit I kept noticing how much more clear and understandable the Bremers' German was. I have been told several times that in Konstanz and in general in the south the local accent strongly deviated from Hochdeutsch, but it never dawned on me how distinguishable this difference was until I heard the people in Bremen.

A street in the Schnoor district.

Once we were semi-done with the central square, we decided to visit Schnoor (the main museum and tourist district of the city) and then return to the Dom around 14:00 for a second attempt to get in that church.

We had read about at least three museums located in Schnoor: the Toy Museum (Spielzeugmuseum), Antiquity Museum (Antikenmuseum) and the House of Bremen History (Bremer Geschichtenhaus). They were our goals. As it turned out, they were hard to find ones too. The Schnoor consisted of several blocks of small Bauwerk houses all separated by tiny-tiny streets and alleys, some barely wide enough for two people to squeeze through.

We found it surprisingly difficult to orient ourselves in this labyrinth, walked around in circles for quite some time as a consequence and managed to wander past all of the museums at least once and even trespass (by mistake, of course) on some dude's property. This dude was very polite and understanding, however, and led us back out to the Schnoor.

Finally, we found the Toy museum. It turned out to be a small private collection (three one-room floors of old toys) located above a toy shop in one of the small old houses. The owner of the shop said her boss had started the museum when she realized there were toys she didn't want to part with.



As can be seen in the photographs of this museum, the majority of the collection was comprised of various sorts of Teddy Bears, dolls, trains and a plethora of various semi-broken toys. There was also a guitar with one half of her strings broken and the other half tuned to what sounded a bit like a pentatonic scale. And then on our way down we noticed a couple of African masks (at least I thought they were African, I'm sure some anthropologist would know for sure) hanging on the wall. Since this was clearly a place where one could touch everything, I took one off the wall and tried it on. It felt very cozy... just like the museum itself, the kind of a quaint place one would prefer to visit with a male friend, so as to avoid the exalted expressions of adoration which women for some reason are prone to produce when visiting such places.

We then wandered across the History Museum, where we were told again to come back at 14:00. From the museum staff we found out how to get to the Antikenmuseum and decided to pay it a visit in the free time that we had till 2 pm.

post-modernist stairs...

This Antikenmuseum was located in a street of small post-modernist houses and of course we had passed it by at least once before during our wanderings without noticing. It contained two rooms of (mostly) Athenian and Corinthian vases and a highly talkative ticket lady (who must have been by extension also a guide). We chatted with this lady perhaps longer than we spent actually looking at the vases. Our conversation (it was more of a lecture actually) wandered a bit, most of what was mentioned had to do with Olympic games, methods of producing vases and the difference in clay between different regions of Greece. Some other topics did remain in my mind though.

... and buildings

It turned out, the museum was originally a private collection and its owner, an archaeology enthusiast bent on digging out vases, was only eventually persuaded by friends to open the collection to the public. It also turned out that the lady herself was from Eastern Germany and remembered the Russian occupation troops as extremely polite, helpful but fearful people.

This fellow was just "chilling" in this position
in the cold for two days in a row.

At that point it was time to go to the Geschichtenhaus and we did so. There we were met by guides dressed in old-fashioned clothing who proceeded to give us an acted tour through the city's history. As a result of the tour my unflattering opinion of the Habsburg dynasty was strengthened, I realized that I didn't mind the taste of good coffee as much as I thought I did and learned that some of the most well-known characters in Bremen history were a poison-murderess and a tobacco swindler.


What amazed me in the two last museums was the amount of brochures and papers we kept being given. I believe at the end of the day I was carrying around a map of the center of Bremen (albeit a touristy one), a brochure from both the Antikenmuseum and Geschichtenhaus and several miscellaneous advertisements for events and places to visit in Bremen. All of this just for paying the entrance fees at each of the museums.

Inside the Dom

The end of saturday was uneventful: having arrived at the Dom too late, we missed opening hours by five minutes and were forced to return to the hostel. We then talked a lot about this and that, having decided to visit the Dom and the Weser Stadium the following day.

Bremen riverbank in the fog.

Sunday turned out to be considerably colder than Saturday and we only managed to see the Dom (a very nice piece of Gothic architecture), wander through a park and then trek over to the stadium. In addition to the cold by early afternoon the city was covered in fog. I tried to keep my spirits up by joking that this fog must be from Konstanz and it took one day for it to catch up to me in the north. Jokes do not generate warmth, however, and after braving the icy cold for several hours we retreated to the hostel and spent the rest of the evening talking.

Weser Stadium looks like a spaceship in the fog.

On Monday we got up around 8 am, headed to town, breakfasted on chocolate croissants and some delicious but alas indescribable cookies (sometimes I sincerely wish I was better at depicting food) . Nikita then took a tram to the airport while I found some postcards and then a post office. In said post office I dealt with the cards and put them in stamped envelopes, so as to send them out right before I got on my train. As the reader might remember, I was told letters go faster than postcards and seeing as my family was getting impatient, time was of the essence.

More foggy Bremen.

I then realized I had almost forgotten how properly to address a physical letter. Where does one put the destination address? Where does the return address go? I had no internet access, the post clerk was away from her desk and my train arrival time was getting nearer and nearer  the longer I pondered and scrambled around in my head for a solution.

Sometimes I think the quality of a decision is inversely proportional to the amount of time one spends panicking about it. When one deliberates in peace and quiet with no pressure, that is a whole different matter. However, when one is faced with a decision that needs to be made in anything similar to the "now or never" circumstances, it seems like the first gut instinct is the way to go and any further hesitation will only drift one in the direction of the worst decision possible.
I do not always subscribe to this theory, but sometimes it seems highly attractive.
Given that I had about 15 minutes till my train (even though the station was next door, I did not know exactly how far away the right platform was), I panicked and stalled, then decided to fill out the envelopes according to what I remembered of the American way of addressing letters. Naturally, I remembered it in reverse order and placed my German address as the destination and my relatives' American addresses as the return ones.

It should have come as no surprise to me then, when on Tuesday morning I received all three of the letters I sent from Bremen. At the time it did.

So cozy inside the mask...

Vocab

This might come as a surprise to some people, but the actual purpose of my year abroad is to learn German. This purpose is somewhat hard to trace in this blog so far and I think that if one was to base one's opinion only on reading my entries, one might think all I ever do is wander around cities and towns, try food of varying quality and find ways to mess up the logistics of my travel with differing degrees of creativity and success.

Well, this entry is addressing this misconception and I hope it does so well.

Below is a list of words and expressions that I have learned (well enough to write them all down in a post). Please note that quite a few things in this list, especially expressions, are definitely slang. I am well aware of the limits of their acceptable usage, but nevertheless count them as valuable acquisitions that widen my knowledge of German as a whole.
All entries are given with an English translation on the right of and a note of acknowledgement below the German expression.

der innere Schweinehund -- inner lazy person.
Thank you Rosie.

Kein Thema! -- No problem! (also Kein Ding! Kein Problem! Kein Stress!... the germans must love this expression).
Thanks to my roommate, Claire.


der Kater -- along with the traditional meaning of "male (tom)cat", this word also means "hangover"
Thanks to my other roommate, Janis, for using an idiosyncratic version of the word (Katerchen, aka minor hangover) and thus introducing me to the more conventional version.

Chill, mal, Alter! -- Relax, man/dude/bro! (literal translation of Alter is more like "old man")
Thanks to the next door neighbors Tillman and Andre along with countless other people who use the word "Alter" every day.


Wie läuft's? -- yet another slang expression to ask how someone is doing.
Thanks to Lukas Kawerau for using it for the first time in front of me.


Haudegen, Lehen(swesen), Ross, Fahne, Festung -- All very useful and current vocab from my medieval history class (the geeks among you can plug these words into Leo and see what they mean).

genau die Geschichte -- precisely (more colloquial version of the ubiquitous "genau")
Thanks to an anonymous worker at the Rechnenzentrum


Maultaschen -- A local version of dumplings, with minced pork and spinach inside. They, along with pasta, potatoes, onions and cheap bread constitute most of my diet :)

P.S.
I will be editing this post and adding more stuff as the year progresses.

Londinium II

My second raid on London I had to do alone, because Caity was stuck in the dorm reading all the plays of Shakespeare and writing a short story about mice fooling drunk cats. It was a Sunday and I was hoping to get into Westminster Abbey for service. This way I could have a chance to appreciate how live music sounds in that church (always nice) for free (also not bad). My mother pulled off a trick like that when she was in London and her description made me look forward to the experience. Little did I know what was awaiting me. I am getting ahead of myself, however, and should tell the story properly from start to finish.

I got off-peak tickets only for the train to and from London for 16 pounds because I was running a bit low on money. "I'll walk around, get some exercise and maybe see something small and unexpected and be able to stop to investigate it" - I told myself. Upon receiving the tickets I put them in a back pocket of my jeans.

I started the day by walking to Buckingham Palace from Victoria Station, thus having an opportunity to view the royal residence from a different angle. Right before the Queen's Gallery and the back entrance to the Palace there is a underground pedestrian pass. As I descended into it I was met with a strong smell of cheap beer and unwashed human. On the floor of the pass lay two matresses, one of them was occupied by what looked like a pile of rags with a weathered red face slightly protruding from under it. I had heard of the growing wealth disparity in Britain, so I naturally saw some symbolism in a beggar living almost at the doorstep of Buckhingham.

As I emerged from this underpass, I was greeted by a egyptian-style building that houses the Queen's Gallery. I didn't have money to go inside the gallery, so I just walked around some of the halls and browsed the collection of postcards in the museum shop. Having found some very authoritative-looking columns and no interesting postcards, I continued on my way, went around the front entrance to the Palace, cut through Hyde Park and found myself in Kensington Gardens.

Caity said  somewhere in these gardens there was a monument to Peter Pan, who allegedly lived in the area. I wasn't particularly interested in a specific goal, however, I just wanted to roam around a grassy area, and Kensington Gardens proved to be exactly the right place for it. It is what in Russia would be called an "English park" with well-tended lawns and sparingly placed trees and bushes.

From the Gardens I saw a tall gilded spire and navigated to where it stood. I came out of the park onto a sqare with a quite sizeable monument to king Albert, that for some reason reminded me of Charlemagne's reliquary in Aachen. Perhaps it was all the gold on the sculptures.

Across the street from this monument was the Albert Hall and some very neat brick buildings. The English like their brick, I have to say, just like they like their classical/empire architecture. I made a semi-circle around the Hall and started meandering through the area behind it, heading gradually in the direction of Westminster Abbey, where I was planning to catch the 3 pm service.

After walking through some extremely posh-looking neighborhoods I happened to pass what I at first took to be a Greek Orthdox church. I stopped and read the sign on it: Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Dormition - Dioceze of Surozh. I had stumbled upon a Russian Orthodox church! And the main cathedral in London, at that! I of course walked in and for the first time had a chance to see how a romanesque basilica looked as an Orthodox church. My impression was that it was looked less unusual inside than outside.

As I continued to probe my way towards Westminster, I found myself once again at the entrance to Hyde Park. This time I encountered some cavalry Guards on their huge black horses and with slightly ridiculous-looking plumed helmets on their heads. They were peacefully trotting in the direction of Buckingham Palace and, seeing as that was approximately where I was headed too, I attempted to keep pace with their column for a s long as I could. In the process I discovered that an average horses's walking speed is roughly equivalent to a brisk stride for me. Upon reaching the Palace, the troops and I parted: they turned left in the direction of Traffalgar square and I branched off right towards Westminster.

Visiting one church made me late for service in another. I missed the 3 o'clock one at Westminster by an hour and was told by the gatekeeper that there wouldn't be any until 6 pm. Not too much disappointed by this, I decided to hit the road to see the Globe Theater before the service.
As I crossed the Westminster Bridge I saw a demonstration against some health-care reform. "I really should read more newspapers" - I tell myself sometimes.

I then raided the nearby McDonald's bathroom, despite some authoritative signs prohibiting non-customers entrance, and continued along the southern bank of the Thames, a touristy and bustling part of town. There I finally bought a proper map of London along with a candy bar to eat. Food slips my mind sometimes, to be honest, and then reminds of the necessity of its intake in the most inconvenient places.

I made it finally to the Globe, a well-kept-looking bauwerk rotunda, overshadowed by neighboring modern glass giants. Entrance was 12 pounds, I dared not spend that much on a building where I didn't plan to live, so I moped around a bit in the lobby (I seemed to do that a lot during this trip), overheard the ticket sellers discussing their personal finances and went back out onto the windy esplanade.

Having taken the Millenium Pedestrian Bridge to the other side of the river, I strode my way back to Westminster past an imperial river-front, an obelisk 'acquired' from some egyptian tomb (I found it amusing how certain objects and symbols keep getting recycled by humans with power) and erected to honor queen Victoria.

This time I was fifteen minutes early for the 6 pm service and queued up along with a multitude of other foreigners at the entrance. Before we were let in, a slightly desperate-looking priest warned us that this was in fact a service, not a tour, and asked all those planning to take pictures or walk around to come back the day after for an offical tour. Some of the more honest in the queue left. I stayed.

We were then shuffled past the graves of some prime ministers and kings into the central part of the cathedral, where the naves intersect with the transcept. The cathedral was lit only on the ground level and so the gothic roof with its branching arches was full of shadow, increasing the impression of being in a forest. I thought it was a very majestic place, which made what follow the more painful.

For in this majestic place assembled a bunch of foreingers, not all christian and definitely mostly not aglican and these presumptuous people, instead of hearing the beautiful sound of a well-trained choir singing hymns, were asked to sing said hymns themselves, as well as listen to a sermon about life being a pilgrimage. I hope no one will get offended by what will follow. I tried to record only my observations and opinions and this is by no means a reflection on the overal state of the Anglican Church or Christianity of today.

Singing, of course, was a complete disaster. A catholic spanish couple next to me mumbled something very approximately in tune under their breath. A young fellow across the aisle refrained from singing at all. I tried to listen to the first verse and then emulate the melody in it when the second verse was sung. Not having any practice in this tradition, I naturally failed a lot and had to occasionally descend into mumbling and humming, much like my Spanish neighbors. A quick look around the church confirmed my guess that the majority of the 'parish' was experiencing the same problems. One or two actual anglicans with trained voices led the chorus, but they were the meager spots of knowledge in a sea of complete and natural ignorance and incompetence.

After we had butchered a couple of hymns, the nun who led the service read us a sermon based on some passage from the Bible about life being a voyage in an almost tear-inducingly powerless voice. She also thought it relevant to mention then that the abbey had always been a center of pilgrimage in England and that its founder (Edward the Confessor), whose day of birth or death was soon, was also keen on such religious journeys. I believe there was something more to her sermon, but I don't remember it anymore. When she was done, we were asked to torture several other hymns before being ushered out of the cathedral, so that the next group could be let in to, presumably, do the same thing.

I walked out of the Cathedral not very pleased with myself for botching an important to someone else ritual as a result of my desire to be a sly tourist. I then trekked over to Victoria station where I discovered that I had lost my return ticket to Brighton with 4 minutes till the earliest train. I was so upset by this, that without a second thought, purchased a one-way ticket for a ridiculous 22 pounds, missing my train by a minute. As I was waiting for the next train the second thought did arrive at my brain and I realized that I could have saved 4 pounds by buying another off-peak 2-way ticket. I swore a bit to myself at such a ridiculous price arrangement and at my own poor panic-influenced decision-making and boarded a train heading South.

My second day in London, though it began so well, ended on this unfortunate note.

Londinium I

 I originally had no idea how far away from London in fact the city of Brighton was. I guess that was not such good planning on my part, but I don't regret this because I got to stay and hang out with a friend, as opposed to being stuck in a hostel in London alone. In fact, I felt like the two days that I spent just walking around London gave me a fair impression of what the main tourist attractions in the center of town looked like. This impression is something that I can further build on if I find myself in the city once more.

Caity and I calculated that the best ticket for us would be an all-day off-peak rail, tube and bus pass for 19 pounds. Off-peak meant we had to travel to London after 10 am and head back to Brighton no sooner than 7 or 7:30 pm (I don't remember exactly anymore). In exchange for that we could use any tube trains or buses during the day inside zone 1. This restriction didn't bother us because all the attractions were located in that zone.

 Our first destination was the Sherlock Holmes Museum. We got there from Victoria Station using the Tube. Despite it being "off-peak" the stations and trains were quite full and I was reminded of the good old days when I had to shove my way into a subway train in Moscow. There was something different this time: unusually shaped doors. For some reason in the Tube some trains (I only took one, so cannot speak for all of them) have very low slanting roofs and the doors follow the roof contour, yielding something like this as a result. While this looks cool and extraordinary, it seems quite impractical in the case of much human traffic, because the people left standing next to the entrance have to always be aware of their head (or neck in the case of very tall individuals) getting hit by a closing door. Then, after the doors have closed, they are stuck in a slightly ridiculous posture with head and shoulders bent into the car, following the shape of the doors.

221 Baker Street

At the time Arthur Conan Doyle was writing, 221 Baker Street did not exist in reality. This address, I believe, was specifically created for the Sherlock Holmes Museum later. The museum itself was primarily an example of a mid or late nineteenth century interior with the majority of the house consisting of a staircase trunk, with a couple of rooms strung around it on every floor (of which there were at least 4), like leaves or some hollow kind of fruit.

Touristy Picture, courtesy of anonymous Schweitzer

We were greeted on the first floor by a sly-looking old man wearing an ascot who, upon hearing that we were from Boston, remarked on the high quality of tea parties in that city. We chuckled at the "compliment" and Caity proceeded to persuade me to be in a touristy picture, holding a pipe and wearing Holmes's hat on my head (can be seen left). We had some Swiss people, speaking their incomprehensible dialect of German, take said touristy picture.
 
We then went up the staircase to higher floors where we encountered some wax figures depicting some of Holmes's famous cases. Likely an influence of the nearby Madamme Tussaud's, these figures seemed strange to me in a victorian house.We looked at them for a bit, then bummed around the expectedly overpriced museum shop and set out to the Brittish Museum via Regent's Park.

Madamme Tussaud's influence

This is a rare picture of me smiling at a dog

In Regent's park we went along the pond for a while, I fooled a swan into nibbling on my hand by presenting it as if I had bread to give (there was an enourmous number of hungry and hence almost tame water foul there). Then we passed Regent's college, a very posh looking place with a gatekeeper and ID check at the entrance. After that we found ourselves suddenly on the outskirts of the park and not being content with that, ventured back in, made a loop back to the college, and as a result discovered a charming rose garden with an abundance of different species of the flower. Not being a big flower-lover, I can't say I appreciated this find as much as Caity.

Making friends with the swans.
Caity's camera died shortly after this picture, so the rest
of the day was only documented in written form.

After that we exited Regent's Park for the second time and for good. We then turned our steps in the direction of the Brittish Museum, picking up a sandwich per person from Pret a Manger. We arrived at the museum sometime around two or three o'clock, and roamed through the classical antiquity and european section until its closing sometime around five.

I remember finally seeing the barelief "The Battle of the Centaurs against the Lapiths" live after bumping into photographs of it in several books. I was also surprised to discover that heart-shaped ornaments dated to as far back as the 18th or 17th century. I always thought that symbol was invented fairly recently. The last thing I remembered from the visit was us being rushed out by the museum personell through a very impressive quasi-two storey library room built in classical style and containing various rarities besides books. As we were leaving, I gathered from a sign that this room was the orininal museum and the rest of the complex was built around it in order to house more exhibits.

I also (a bit later) made a list of things to see when (or if?) I come back. These include, but are not limited to, the reading room and the egyptian and babylonian sections.

After we were kicked out of the museum (I lived to see the day when I had to leave a museum against my will!) stumbled on St. Paul because the bus that was supposed to take us directly to it happened to unexpectedly end for some mysterious reason at a stop one block away from the church. We were able to find it because one of the steeples was visible from the stop, otherwise considerable wandering would have ensued.I cannot say much about St. Paul's other that it is impressive and that I had the cheesy song 'Feed the Birds' from the movie Mary Poppins stuck in my head the whole time we were around it. Oh, and there was a monument in front of it to a queen Anne, and we could not figure out when she lived or why the monument was erected.

We then bused over to Traffalgar Square, saw the Nelson Collumn, the Olympic Games Countdown Machine (not its official name!) and lots of yet mor classical empire style buildings, seemingly a staple of London architecture.

As it was getting late, we quickly marched to Buckingham Palace, glanced at it from a respectable distance, and discussed what it would be like to throw parties in there. We then walked over to the Parliament Building and Big Ben, the latter turning out much shorter and less impressive than I had imagined from postcards and movies. The amount of detail in the decorations of both buildings was astounding, however. When a nation dedicates so much attention to beautifying their parliament, that says something, I think.

Naturally after seeing the Parliament, we walked around the very well-lit Westminster Abbey. I don't think I have anything of note to contribute to the plethora of different things said and written about the place, so I will limit myself to a dry but sincere "very impressive".

At this point it was eight o'clock and we decided that was a good time to head home. Having trudged to Victoria Station, we boarded a train to Brighton... and fell asleep. I did so somewhat too blissfully and with too much commitment, because I remember being somewhat amazed at being woken up by Caity, who was beginning to suspect that our train had arrived at it's final destination. Our car was indeed suspiciously empty and not moving at all. Unfortunately, it was dark outside and hard to tell what station we were at exactly. I used this as an excuse to attempt to make a case for going back to sleep, but then somehow Caity won (I was not awake enough to remember) and before I realized completely what was going on, we were standing on what looked like the platform of Brighton Station. Luckily for us, there was a train headed to Falmer (our home station) in 3 minutes, so we made it. By Jove, what would have happened, if my arguments had prevailed?

Thus ended the day of my first visit to London.