here, there, everywhere

Do these windows look like eyes to anyone else? 

Books for sale.

The fishing nets by day.

The rain has stopped, but the lake in Lenin Park is still overflowing (above: the back of a submerged park bench near the normal edge of the lake); this is just across the street from where I'm living at the moment. More photos of the park to come, but for now I'm just keeping my fingers tightly crossed for Obama (and for the floods to end!).

Above: the ride home Friday, in the middle of the heaviest rainfall Vietnam has had in 24 years. My motorbike stopped working fairly early on in the storm (and is still waiting in the parking lot at work, where I left it after pushing it several flooded blocks) and I would have had to walk home from work, as there were no cabs or xe om in sight, but was rescued by Iain, who rode his bicycle out to pick me up and then heroically pedaled me, some massively heavy groceries (if you were going to be rained in, you'd want a bottle of wine or two, too) and my camera 2 miles (or 40 minute!) home. The ride back was insane - the streets near my school had turned into thigh-deep rivers of muddy, petrol-slick water and we had to hop off the bike and slog through at one point. The few people who were out on the roads seemed to be in pretty good spirits, considering that most of them were tending to similarly broken motorbikes, and a few cars were still trying to push through the rain (see above, where the water had receded somewhat) but it was still pretty nuts.

Two days later, the rain has pretty much kept up, torrentially and more relentlessly than I would have ever thought possible, though there've been some dry patches and Iain's street has remained fairly unflooded, thankfully. Nonetheless, I was a bit relieved to be woken up by a text at 6:30 am today informing me that the school was closed - yay for having an actual weeked for once, even if all we're doing is staying inside listening to the rain.

So for the first few days, the weather in the Orkneys looked like looked like the photos I posted below. The rest of the days looked like this:

The first day of un-pristine weather began innocently enough (see ridiculous sunrise above); I woke up early and took the bus to the Tingwall ferry so I could go to the small island of Rousay, which is home to a wide variety of ruins ("You're the first passenger to Tingwall I've had all week," said the busdriver, though I didn't take much warning from this since I was also the only passenger on the bus for most of the ride). The ferry itself was tiny, with about 80 lifejackets for the three of us onboard ("odd time of year to go to Rousay," said the ferryman), a copy of the New Testament and Psalms and a coffee machine; I had planned on renting a bike when I got to the island, though there weren't any signs of life anywhere (the Visitors Center next to the ferry was dark but unlocked). I walked a bit up the hill and found a sign that said BIKE RENTALS tacked to a trailer containing bikes, but when I followed the directions taped in the window, I found only an empty and apparently abandoned-for-the-season farm with ducks and chickens who scattered and hid behind rusted barn equipment, so I went back to the main road and decided just to hike for the day, since it was only about 4 miles to the furthest archeological site I wanted to see.

There is definitely something both sort of awesome and yet deeply unsettling about walking all alone down the only road in sight on a tiny island where you have yet to see another human. After a few minutes it started to rain lightly, and I found the first of the various neolithic funeral cairns (it is still weird to me that you can just open the gates to these things and walk inside; I kept feeling like I was trespassing but the sign merely said Please shut the gate behind you); inside it was cramped, with a tiny ladder descending into an even darker second level.

I wish I could say I was cool enough to have waited out a rainstorm in a cairn, but after a few minutes I started to get slightly creeped out at the thought of hanging out in what basically amounts to a grave (and where the map of the tomb included little marks where they had found bodies) and decided to just keep walking. By the time I got to the second cairn, it was raining much harder and I think I would have been able to get over my fear of graves if I had been able to open the door (which was metal and heavy and along the top of the mound). At this point I was soaking wet and getting cold, so - ignoring the pitying stares of the sheep - I turned back around, hiked down the road and hung out in the abandoned visitor's center till the Pier Restaurant opened (the woman looked utterly horrified when I crawled in and pathetically asked for coffee while a puddle of rainwater collected at my feet). Fortunately the next ferry came not long after that, and the guy who took my ticket was kind enough to get his friend to give me a ride back into town, since there weren't any buses for that particulary ferry.

Anyway, not a particularly exciting story but hey, look, I got to actually combine all the words in the blog-title that I hastily made up way back in my little cube at work. I do really, really wish I could have spent more than two hours on Rousay, but maybe this just means I'll have to come back someday. At any rate, it is late and I'm heading out early to Wales tomorrow, so goodnight :)