travelogue, part 2

My dad went back to the US, and I took a plane to a much hotter and sunnier country. The hostel in the capital had a rooftop bar with quite a view.



Here there were many ancient ruins.



I took the overnight ferry to an island:



I went to visit King Minos, but he wasn't in. His interior decorator had done some pretty impressive stuff, though.



I continued on to another island, this one more medieval than ancient.

travelogue, part 1

So, first I went to a cool and rainy country.



It had fences.



And there were many cliffs.



(My dad was with me for this part of the trip, so we did quite a lot of hiking, and even tried to climb a mountain; which, however, was not a great success as it was entirely covered in bog.)

We traveled north, across the border, and found some murals.



There were also a whole bunch of hexagons.



And a puffin. (With Dad along, you do a lot of birdwatching as well.)

Well, I'm back...

Six weeks. Five countries. Four different types of currency. Three languages that I do not speak AT ALL, not even to say hello and thank you. Two completely new alphabets to learn. One lost-backpack incident (the backpack was retrieved; a few other items, such as the backpack cover, my bottle of Dr. Bronner's, and the hairbrush I bought at the one-Euro store, were not so lucky).

I shall try to do a more substantive travel post later, with photos and everything; for now, I will say only that I have a new appreciation for air conditioning and cold water, and that I really want to do it all over again, only going to different places this time.

Summer meme, from Sisyphus

1. What is your favorite part of summer?

Travel! Woo hoo!

2. What's your favorite quintessentially summer food? Least favorite?

Peaches! Or better yet, blue crabs with lots of Old Bay.

Least favorite: Probably potato salad, which strikes me as a waste of perfectly good potatoes. (Unless it is the German kind with vinegar and no mayo, which is fine.)

3. Best beverage to beat the summer heat:

Sam Adams Noble Pils.

4. Least favorite/most annoying thing related to summer?

Centipedes and millipedes. Ugh.

5. Pick one: the lake /the beach. Why?

The beach! Because dude, WAVES. And that salty, seaweedy ocean smell.

6. Most amusing summer vacation trip you've ever taken?

I don't know if I can think of too many amusing trips I've taken, so I will tell you about the time I went to Bosnia, because I'm fairly sure this one is at least interesting. I was sitting in a restaurant in Croatia, and I thought "hey, you can totally take a bus to Bosnia from here," so I did. I went to Mostar when they were rebuilding the bridge, and fortunately I ment a nice woman at the bus station who spoke English and rented out rooms for 10 Euros, so I spent the evening sitting on her patio eating cherries with her family and frustrating her three-year-old son, who couldn't understand why I couldn't read to him in Bosnian. Then I went to Sarajevo, where they had an actual youth hostel, and one of my roommates was a Canadian guy who wanted to look for this park where they had pickup soccer games (which I think continued all through the war). Which we eventually found, so I cheered while he played soccer with the locals. Soccer is, pretty much, the universal language.

7. Most ridiculous/cringe-inducing/blush-provoking summer outfit you have seen? (Bonus points if you yourself were wearing it!)

Not a clue. I'm lucky if I notice my own clothes; anyone else's are a lost cause.

8. Your absolute dream summer afternoon would be:

Exploring a new city, preferably somewhere with twisty medieval streets and lots of wine and olives and sun. (Which I will totally be doing this July! Woo hoo again!)

A five-year-old job market story

Once upon a time, way back in my last year of grad school, I had a campus interview at the American University of Foreign Parts. (Not its real name, obviously.) I don't know what I said or did in the phone interview to luck into a campus visit, apart from mentioning that I had been to a couple of countries that don't quite border Foreign Parts but are in the same general corner of the world, so I guess they figured I was at least halfway serious about the job. Which I was. But anyway, for some reason they paid my way to fly all the way out to Foreign Parts.

It was in the dead of winter and the air was hazy with smoke. I remember rows and rows of communist-era concrete apartment blocks, and old women selling sacks of potatoes and apples out of their cars by the roadside. And brightly colored frescoes in the porticoes of the church across the street from my hotel.

The student guide who showed me around the city asked me if I thought I could live there. I think I said yes, by which I meant I don't know, but I'd like to try.

As you've probably gathered already, I didn't get the chance; the department secretary told me they had an inside candidate, so I figured my odds were not good. It's probably just as well that I didn't, since it was a three-year contract position, so I would have been looking for work two years ago at the height of the job market crash. But I do wonder, now and again, what my life would have looked like if I had gotten the offer.

I think I might make it back to Foreign Parts this summer. (At any rate, I will certainly travel to at least one bordering country -- where I have never been, and always wanted to go; one of the big draws of the job in Foreign Parts was that Other Country was only a train ride away.) So I've been thinking a lot, these last few days, about what almost was, and wondering.

Two things that fall into the general category of mixed blessings

1) Discovering that the edited collection you sent an abstract off to and then forgot about has, in fact, found a publisher. And oh yeah, the deadline to submit the final version of the essay is in six weeks...

2) Learning that the QEP proposal you wrote six months ago has, in fact, won your university's QEP competition, and you are cordially invited (read: obligated) to join the committee that is supposed to figure out how to execute it. (There is, thank God, a small amount of cash involved. Otherwise, I might be inclined to think of this one as an unmixed curse.)

I am not sure whether I should be celebrating or hiding under the bed.

Full circle

Wow. Some of the students who were freshmen in my very first freshman comp courses at Misnomer U. have just graduated.

I feel old.