I'm going on an adventure!

Last night I baked granola bars, and this can only mean one thing: I’m going on an adventure. For months I’ve been looking for June 28^th, and now that it’s in sight I am all nervous and fluttery, counting down the mass of my three-day pack in cubic inches, and making list after list after list of to-dos and to-brings which, if history repeats itself, will devolve from a series of note cards and bullet points to a mad “mash all objects in reach into the bag with five minutes to catch the bus” kind of affair.  

This is the plan. On Friday at 4:45 I meet the Boys and Girls club for a weekend camping trip. They needed a female leader, and I am both female and a lover of camping, so I got the job because absolutely no one else volunteered. Then on Monday I leave the kiddos and catch a train to London where I meet my friend William, and so begins the expedition.  I’m just going to go ahead and admit the purpose of this blog entry right now. First, I want people to know why for the next few weeks while I’m not at home I will probably be even worse at responding to emails than my usual lack-luster standard. Second, I plan to use as many Hobbit quotes and chapter titles as possible in this entry and possibly the next for my own entertainment and the delightful challenge of integrating Tolkien into my vacation tales. They’ll be in italics or quotation marks. 

William and I are taking an overnight bus from London to Paris where we will breakfast on crepes and espresso and then somehow maybe try to kind of manage to hitchhike to northeastern Italy or something. Neither of us have experience with this sort of thing, and the lesson planning, backup anticipating, what-if preparing part of me that already has insect repellant and two three kinds of sunscreen packed is like – should I bring a poster and Sharpies so we can write “Take us to Venice, please”?

On one hand, adventures are “Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!” And it is a distinct possibility that my friend and I may spend several frustrating days subsisting on McDonald’s and granola bars in rest stops before we (I) decide to shell out for train tickets. Being that I am me, I looked up the inside information on car shares, which I think is a pretty satisfactory middle ground between standard transport and full hitchhiking. Maybe I already downloaded the app and made a profile and scouted possible rides. My name is Abby, and I have problems with self-perceived irresponsibility and the possibility of sleeping in fast food booths. What I like about hitchhiking is that it is entirely unpredictable. That abandon to the unknown shoots stomach-drop thrill through me that I crave and hate at the same time. My biggest fear is that we won’t find a ride. My second biggest fear is that we’ll be abducted Liam Neeson style. And my maybe-realistic expectation is that I’ll probably spend the beginning of next week attempting to review my dissertation sources while contorted to a barely human shape in the back seat of a tiny Citron and cramped between luggage and a large, panting poodle listening to Bob Marley and conspiracy theories while I slowly asphyxiate on second hand smoke and dog hair. All of which makes me want to bathe in hand sanitizer and reminds me that I should pack antihistamine just in case. I’m not allergic to dogs, but I kind of am. 

The end game is that William and I meet up with other friends from the rock climbing society in a little town north of Verona/Venice where we use the home of one of our friends as the base. And then we climb, climb, climb and “mountaineer” over hill and under hill and maybe camp and eat Italian food with our friend’s family and traverse glaciers. I’ve never traversed a glacier before, but I’m not opposed to it at all. Next week’s blog post will probably be a little late and basically just a thousand pictures. Though I insinuate a weekly schedule, we all know this to be a loosely identified “week” consisting of anywhere between four and fourteen days.  

Amsterdam: a concise overview

Reasons why Amsterdam is cool:

Canals, bikes, bridges, WWII museums, ART, waffles, house boats, and waffles

Reasons why Amsterdam is not cool:

Bridge locks, bikes, and mascara prices

We started our Dutch exploration with waffles and ended it at the cute, local bakery. I could write a whole blog about why I love waffles, but stroopwaffles don't have some of the  more vital waffle qualities, like the ability to hold copious amounts of syrup or yogurt in the little squares. Instead, they are more like a sandwich of glorified cookies with melted caramel in between, which is a tasty combination lacking only chocolate drizzle and almond flakes.

We then waddled our waffled selves to the Rijks Museum and witnessed a Madonna and child where the portrayal of infant Jesus had serious muscle definition.

And there were Rembrandts for days! 

And the lovely, ribbon bow sash seems to have been the height of men's fashion. 

And by the fourth floor, I needed to find my favorite exhibit:

The Anne Frank Museum was really cool because it's the actual house where the Frank family hid, but I don't have any pictures. I'd say the Rijks Museum and the Anne Frank house were my favorite two, followed quickly by the Dutch Resistance Museum and quite distantly by the Van Gogh Museum. 

This is a map the German SS commissioned that points to the exact  location of Jewish residents in Amsterdam where each dot represents 10 Dutch Jews. By the end of the war, over 70 percent of Dutch Jews had been murdered. It was cool to hear actual recordings of Christian pastors risking their lives to speak out against the targeting of the Jews. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was Dutch!

This is an artist who has a whole museum dedicated to him, and at the end its three levels, it's a just a really depressing, kind of long testament to his ultimately unsuccessful search for significance in founding his worth on the respect of other artists. I do not recommend unless you really love Van Gogh or sad, sad stories.  

And this is my mom probably procuring a million diseases by drinking out of a public water fountain. 

All in all, Amsterdam was cool, but the drug/prostitution culture takes away from some of the history and art culture. It's a beautiful place to walk around during the day, but it doesn't have the same "strolling European streets at night" charm as Paris because it kind of devolves into a "club culture" that's loud and drunk, and there don't seem to be alternatives to the nightclub life. 

a pirate's life for me

I'm writing this entry on a ferry between Holland and England. This is significant because it indicates both the amazing technological advances of my time and the astounding disregard my mother and I have for efficient travel. We're boat people. 

We floated to Holland four days ago and made friends with the museums guards and waffle salespeople. For two days we train hopped from tiny Dutch city to tiny Dutch city following the feigned insight of the world's worst tour book and whatever wifi we could scrounge. 

Under the guidance of this waste of weight and tree tissue, we hiked to the outskirts of Lisse in search of glory and riches (tulips and bulb gardens). And we found them!... two months too late. I miss you, Rick Steves. 

The last day of May, we took on Delft and Schiedam. If you think you're pronouncing the latter correctly, you're probably wrong. Unless you speak Dutch or German. Then you might be right. The "sch" sound comes straight from the back of your throat, like your uvula is trying to communicate. The taxi driver's brief instruction to the sound resulted in several days of growling attempted Dutch consonant blends. I could brandish my nationality with equal effect by flashing my passport or asking directions to Schiedam. 

Despite our horrid tour book, we did find the Royal Delft factory (their café sandwiches were wonderful!) and the five biggest windmills in the world. I happened to have a loaf of bread in my bag (because who travels without emergency bread?) so while my mother took pictures of the WWII armories and ancient abbeys and cathedral spires, I fed the cutest baby ducks ever I've ever seen in the canals. 

-- This building looked important. --

-- with the Delft cow --

-- holding a windmill in the rain --

-- Feeding ducks is my favorite. --

The Gastropoda Massacre of 2015

It's hard to describe traveling with my mom without immediately lapsing into the dreaded preface "Well this one time..." 99% of my travels with mom stories involve us being lost. In our defense, there are some things you do not have to worry about when you're perpetually lost: missing out on those exciting residential streets or hand-gesture communication with the natives, getting an American version of the city, maintaining any sort of normal meal schedule, gaining weight from the bread/cheese diet, plans. We make up for organization and timeliness in gelato and coffee, in instances of her charging ahead and me trying to figure out how I'm going to explain her untimely, foreign demise to my siblings.

Italy (2008)

I've learned a lot traveling with my mom. Brunelleschi isn't a brand of chocolate. I learned the meaning of the word "hanger" (as in hunger + anger) with her, broke every traffic law in Paris with her, and slept in some scary hostels with her.

And now she's on my island! We started things off right by me rolling down a hill in an neolithic stone circle that turned out to be covered in slugs. It was a horrifying realization that I'd just made myself a human bulldozer and single handedly mashed onto my body a dozen or so black slime bugs with the internal consistency of snot. Based on the difficultly of freeing my clothes from the squashed, sticky slug pieces, I have to say that slug goo is probably the undiscovered adhesive of the century.

Sometimes traveling with my mom looks like me trying to catch a baby sheep, and her looking like a neolithic rock model.

Later in the Bath/Wiltshire area we ran across some big rocks. Those looked heavy, and we had THE SUN the whole day, which was glorious.

We happened upon the 15something-something Magna Carta in the Salisbury Cathedral! My mother's little heart was all a'flutter at seeing it in person. I found it difficult to read.

And we found HARRY POTTER'S HOUSE, and the abbey where THREE of the movies were filmed!!!! And my mother didn't care to get in the picture with me. 

Student Lyfe

I dropped off the blogging planet for a little while during essay season. Essay season begins the end of February and ends the middle of May. It's like hunting season, but different in every single way. If I knew how to draw a Venn diagram in this blogging program to compare essay season to hunting season I would, but probably the only thing in that middle area would be the word "season". All that to say, I've turned in three beautifully crafted essays and one statstical analysis writeup, and I only cried once. Just kidding. Actually I did, but it's because I fell walking to school, and it really hurt. Turns out short cuts still aren't always the way to go. The good news is that despite the massive bruise on my hip, I managed to not spill my to-mug of coffee, and very few people were around to witness my grace. 

In recompense for the lack of blogs for the past several months, I offer instead an insider's perspective at the process of essay writing. Please be warned that the following images have not been edited, staged, or in any other way modified to facilitate my mother being anything but horrified at my state of living. 

Essays tend to begin as lengthy emails to professors. Sometimes this includes the thesis statement for the whole project. Usually it involves a somewhat vague idea I've been dreaming about for a while and several citations of past research. After settling on a topic with the professor come days or weeks of reading and reading and reading. Sometimes it's not so bad, and it looks like this: 

But when you get the mass of double sided papers together, even without the books involved, for one essay it's a little like this: 

(I put a filter on that to make it look cooler.)

After reading, the embryonic essay moves to the mirror. This is where I map out the main ideas and different authors' concepts and how they go together. It's like a glorified outline. Brace yourselves for the savage barbarism and unadorned reality that is final essays living (Sorry, Mom!):

This lasts for several days (weeks) during which I survive on peanut butter, apples, and coffee. And sometimes baked butternut squash with pesto, feta, and pomegranate seeds. Writers gotta eat. Mike and Gill Poole rescued me from this involuntary vegetarianism and fed me a proper roast dinner, and that was the best essay break ever! 

Sometimes I write note cards instead of mirror outlines for my sources. The mirror is good for more theoretical papers with confusing interrelations of terms, but if I have a large number of sources, I need notecards to keep them straight. This also allows me to color code them by topic and number them, so they're almost exactly in the order I want to use them in the essay. It looks like this:

And on nights (ok, it happened one time) that I stay up all night in the library, it looks a little like this:

And library snacks, which apparently I thought I was packing for a family of four:

And that, dear peruser of blogs, is why you've had no blog entries for two months. And now I'm off to study for my final exam that's in a week. 

Classy Days of Classlessness

I have class here three days a week. Yes, mathematicians and blog readers, that means I have four unclass (but still classy) days -- namely, Wednesday, Friday, and weekend days. When I'm not sitting in class or the library, you may be wondering what exactly it is I do here. I'm not going to tell you about last Wednesday because all I accomplished was maintaining a consistent and fairly convincing human slug impression for the whole of 24 hours. I slept for 12 hours, read in bed, and moved only when motivated by hunger to glug down sustenance and roll back under my duvet. In my defence, I was fighting a cold.

No, dear pursuer of blogs, I am going to tell you about yesterday, which was sufficiently productive to merit an entry. This is what I do when I don't do anything (aka when I don't go to class):

2:00 am - Go to sleep --- I have no idea why I was up this late, but I sure hope I had a good reason.
7:15 am - Alarm clock goes off
7:20 am - Decide not to fix my hair
7:25 am - Decide not to make coffee
7:30 am - Decide not to wear make up
7:40 am - Decide to pick out clothes by thinking about them from the comfort of bed
7:45 am - Realize I need to be walking to the bus in under half an hour. Regret not being able to fix hair. Layer clothes for purposes needed throughout the day. Pack climbing shoes for workout.
8:15 am - Miss the bus. Sprint to beat it to the next stop. Bus driver isn't nearly impressed enough.
8:20 am - Put on makeup in the back of the bus. Try to look inconspicuous, nothing to see here.
9:00 am - Take society pictures with the rock climbing club. "Tight Bright" themed outfit was previously layered for ease of picture attire. Finally realize life goal of being picked for the top of the human pyramid.

9:30 am - Coffee with the rock climbing kids
10:00 am - Bus back to town to try to figure out how to use the National Health Service since the number I was "supposed to call" is a clinic 45 minutes away.
11:00 am - Admit defeat on previous endeavour. Resign myself to a doctor at the university health clinic. Mourn the unavoidable presence of college kid sick germs.
11:30 am - Bus back to campus to help the Christian Union kids get ready for "mission week" lunch.
1:00 pm - Dissertation meeting with the government department
3:00 pm - Decide I need to be more specific in my analysis and focus my dissertation topic. Consider expanding the years included in my data set so that I can use a regression model. Determine that my Starbucks cup is hitting on me in English and French. Inappropriate Starbucks, inappropriate.

3:15 pm - Think about working out. Search for student ID yields no results. Decide not to workout. 

3:30 pm - Explore Wivenhoe Park lakes with two government department friends. Discuss the dilemma that ducks, while cute, are also tasty. They may be the cutest, commonly-accepted meat source. Take jumping pictures because it's sunny and that's reason enough. Teach my friend from India the proper way to jump in jumping pictures.
4:00 pm - Bus back home and fall asleep half-on, half-off my bed still wearing my coat, scarf, and boots.
5:30 pm - Start laundry and walk to grocery store with three day pack.
7:00 pm - Walk back from grocery store. Search for black beans and quinoa was unsuccessful.
8:00 pm - Hang now-clean clothes around room/stair bannister/dining room to dry. Commence mass cooking of lunches to freeze and take to school for the next few weeks.
1:00 am - Finish cleaning kitchen and go to bed.

And that's pretty much what I do. Wednesdays are usually for cooking, laundry, and reading. Well, everyday is for reading. So much reading.

Off to do more reading.

I see the sea; the sea sees me.

Today is Friday. I wrote this entry on Tuesday. I have big plans for a blog entry on a Tuesday, but I have to start it at 7:30am, and I keep forgetting! Regardless of the continent on which I am physically located, I still don't think before coffee. Coffee, coffee coffee. Today I thought, "I'll just brush my teeth and then go downstairs and make coffee." I walked into the bathroom, closed the cabinet door, stared at the washing machine, and walked out of the bathroom and downstairs to make coffee because I couldn't remember why I was there. Maybe you can get my cool blog idea next Tuesday. 

My Turkish friend Ece and I decided we need to travel more — like as a new-term resolution. I've been on a small island for months and still haven't looked around! We also decided we need to study more, hang out with people more, job search more, cook more, and work out ever. Maybe when it's warm.

But we made our first improvement to our student-life traveling, and we organized a Saturday day trip to the coast last weekend! Clacton-on-Sea is only a 30 minute train ride from campus, so we gathered our grad school buddies and hit the road. 

I haven't been to a sunny, warm European beach ever, so that definitely wasn't the expectation. It's an entirely different beach experience than the tan, sunscreen-mandating sand experiences of weekends gone past. But it's beautiful in a sad, winter way, and after all, I love rain. The people made the trip. We raced and climbed on sea walls and ate fish and chips and drank coffee and watched "football". It was an awesome day away from political theory and library shelves.

 I LOVE THE SEA! 

Pictures with captions following:

The group on one of the breaker walls.  

Seriously. I need more sand in my life. I'm completely content next to large bodies of water.  

My friend Luis and me on the famous Clacton pier. 

Can't keep a climbing girl down!!!! I'm thankful for friends who put up with this kind of behavior. 

Luis requested we wave. He captured our varying degrees of acquiescence.