Archive for November 2007

feeling v. stupid

In Madrid, where I shouldn´t write too much since I´m on the communal, free internet in my hotel, and where I am probably over-enjoying the easy accesibility of upside-down punctuation (¡¿) on the keyboard. This is the last leg of my trip, which is a bit sad (though I miss home like crazy) and so far I´m having a great time exploring and trying to pretend like I know how to speak Spanish (I have a really horrible ability to nod like I understand when in fact I don´t, which seems ... ominous, but I´ve also been able to more or less politely get by, if not interact overmuch, so, hooray for dimly recalling those four years of high school Spanish and not starving to death or sleeping on the street.

In hopes of at least marginally improving my inexcusably bad Spanish, I actually bought a copy of the first Harry Potter book in Spanish (along with a Spanish to English dictionary) today, in large part because I´ve almost finished the only book I brought with me and the only English books for sale were $20 paperbacks by Michael Crighton or Patricia Connolly and the like. I spent a good 30 minutes painstakingly making my way through the first two pages, dictionary in hand, and can confidently say that I a) have spent an unreasonable amount of time feeling almost sympathetic for the Dursleys, with their boring ties and tuneless humming and as-of-yet unexplored tendencies towards child abuse, and b) know the Spanish word for drill! So much better than a Michael Crighton book. I don´t really know if this will help me communicate while I´m actually here (unless Voldemort stages an attack against Muggles, in which case I´m all over that) but at least my brain can stop atrophying at least a little bit and maybe I can even make friends with a dentist. Or something.

I bet the Sheep Man drinks Sheep Beer

Two things that have very little to do with travel and a lot to do with sheep:

a) I didn't even know blogs had to have names till I started up this blogspot, but, hey look, in honor of Wales and its many many sheep (and also what is a more accurate reflection of my travels so far in lieu of "ruins, rain and islands"), hey look - new blog name (with apologies to one of my favorite books ever....sorry, favorite book ever). And also new banner, featuring a real live sheep that I actually saw. Will probably take this down in about 12 hours after waking up and deciding it is in fact pretentious rather than clever, so enjoy my mad photoshop prowess while you can. Figuring how to do a star is deceptively difficult.

b) In the veins of other things I didn't realize, "sheep beer" was not the tag I intended to attach to my last entry (again, tags being one of those things like names that I didn't realize blogs needed to have) but now I kind of like it. It is demonstrably the only "sheep beer" tag floating around out there, and it sounds slightly disgusting.

SHEEP EVERYWHERE


So last weekend I took a three day whirlwind bus tour of Wales, which turned out to be lots of fun; here are more photos of Wales, in roughly chronological order, than you probably thought you'd want to look at, but oh well:


Caerphilly Castle (yes, that tower is actually crooked)



This ruined church overlooks the more-celebrated ruins of Tintern Abbey; it was hollowed out by fire in the 1970s, which means it doesn't quite have the history or the ridiculously-long-when-you-have-pages-and-pages-of-Romantic-literature-reading-to-do (sorry, I mean "famous and terribly significant") poem associated with it, but I liked it almost more just the same; the stones are all overgrown with ivy (and swarming with hungry insects but I'm almost used to that by now) and it's really quite beautiful.


sheep in the mist









Books for sale at Hay-On-Wye, the "Town of Books" which is - apparently, not Wales, but rather it's own Kingdom, according to the bookstore map I consulted. These ones were 35p each.




Mount Snowdon (pictured here, directly above, and in the first Wales entry I posted) ws my favorite place in all of Wales, and it was so so frustrating to be on a bus tour at that point and be hustled away from it instead of getting to hike around an explore more. Also it has a stone quarry that looks sort of like Mordor, if you're a nerd like me, and the bus driver blasted Sigur Ross as we wound our way up the mountain, both of which were pretty awesome.


I walked across this aqueduct and did not fall off. Awesome.

I had been a bit apprehensive about doing bus tour since I've gotten pretty used to traveling under my own schedule and was worried I wouldn't have anyone to talk to, but it turned out to be pretty fun and a nice change of pace; also I made it to a pub for the first time (which sounds sort of pathetic but come on, pubs are no fun alone) since our hostel was right below one, where we played a pub quiz and I won a free pint of Brains beer (best! name! ever!) for knowing the answer to "What girl's name did J.M. Barrie invent?" Thanks, Mom!

je ne pa parle francais




Hey, a scaffold site! Let's all take photos of it.



Back from Paris, where the keyboards were too disorienting for me to try and update (it is still odd to me that periods are secondary keys but exclamation points are not; maybe French is just more exhuberant), and where I did lots of "Hey look I'm in Paris!" things like visit the Louvre, Versailles, the Champes d'Elysee and Arc D'Triomphe, and also sit in cafes, drink painfully strong espresso and eat an obscene amount of pan au chocolat (they sell heated chocolate croissants at the metro stations; how awesome is that? Also on the topic of the Metro - my subway stop was designed to look like a submarine. Croissants + submarines + whimsical carnival music whenever an announcement is made =BEST MASS TRANSIT SYSTEM EVER.)





It was definitely a little more isolating being alone in a big city and where I only speak enough of the language to apologize for not speaking the language (and to order a pan au chocolate), especially since internet access was expensive and my mobile wasn't working, though next week both Maggie and Sean will be out here, and it will be SO MUCH FUN I might actually explode, it'll be that much fun.

Anyway, up next, photos of Wales, but for now I need to actually leave the house and do something with my day.

Wales!





Back from a three day backpacker tour of Wales, which was actually much more fun than I thought it would be, though I definitely want to sleep a lot now. Will post more photos tomorrow before heading off to Paris, but for now here's Mount Snowdon in the early morning mist. It may well be my only picture of Wales that doesn't have at least one sheep in it.

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