pics!

In case anyone is interested, here's a whole raft of photos from my trip:

Well, let's start with my birthday night, since it was the night before and lots o' fun. The day though, it was not nice, with crappy weather and wet bird shit all over the place:



But Claire totally came through. She tried to take me to a cookie place, since I'm a huge fan and the French usually suck at making cookies, but it was closed. But she did manage to get chunky(!) peanut butter and pancake mix for me, and a killer Keith Jarrett CD.



And as I would expect, people didn't let me off easy for my 26 years. Here I am pouting about something ~ 2:30 am:



It's getting late, but Claire is still smiling. We'll be awake again in about six hours, heading to the airport:



Glasgow isn't that beautiful, but besides the great music scene, there are some perks:



This is the coolest bar we came across: The 13th Note (which is much nicer than its website). We both lament the fact that there's not much like this in Paris. The music during the day was great, and the dj at night, fantastic and ecclectic.



For the first three days, we were hanging out with my aunt and uncle, who were in town for their 25th wedding anniversary, and to celebrate my uncle's April birthday -- the day before mine. Here's everyone:



This is the ridiculously charming b&b we stayed at. The owner was soooo nice and chill, and stuffed us way too much everyday for breakfast. It was so peaceful there ...



Here's why. This is half a mile from the house:



A nice lake-side walk with the gang. Yes, good weather was a suprising feature of the trip:



Scotland is a little weird. Check out this 'cuisine de France'. They also had apple pie made by the same company:



Anyway, after a few days hanging out and driving around with the fam, Claire and I headed off to Edinburgh, the Paris of the British Isles. We didn't actually do much, just walked around a lot, checking out the cafs and cheap eats places. We found excellent coffee, brownies, some kind of Indian food, baked potatos, and beer. Book and music shops were also on the list, and there were some great ones.

The city is quite lovely, with these cool little passageways perpendicular to major streets in the old part of town, kind of like shortcuts. The old part is also an odd melange (mix, in case we don't actually use that word in English) of levels, with massive one block-long bridges over smaller streets below. Very steep hills I guess. Sometimes in the passageways you find random stuff, like the smallest wildlife preserve I've seen:



Or a stormtrooper:



The famous castle is quite spectacular and the exhibits are excellent. Turns out the Scots are pretty badass, and it so happens they used to fight with the French, against all sorts of people including the English. The visit was definitely worth the 10 pounds (!).

No comment:



We rented bikes too, and went up this extinct volcano outside of town. This is the view from the south side. Nice, eh?



Claire and I managed to get through the week without killing each other, but not without occaisional bouts of madness. One evening included watching Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure with a bunch of Claire's sister's friends. I enjoyed it, but most of them were more skeptical. But where else can you see Keanu Reeves and not gag?

Holding off madness ... we're not tourists, we're pensive!!



This is how we passed the time the last night in Glasgow before the 6:45 am flight back to Paris (though this photo is actually from the bus station in Edinburgh the night before). We had almost no cash, so we went to see Spike Lee's movie "The Inside Man" (credit cards rawk!), which is great fun, then pretty much played cards all night:



So that was Spring Break 2006. Sorry, no stories of debauchery or alcohol poisoning, but I did get a paper cut on the white part of my eye from twirling a flyer around. No permanent damage though, as far as I can tell.

So that's it. Back to the grind, which sucks. Just trying to make it through till summer ...

P.s. has anyone noticed how MySpace screws up accents (look at the title of the music I'm listening to)? Do they not realize that most languages in the world have them? Philistines!

back in black

I'm back from good ol' Scotland, now a bit under the weather from all their rain, except that it was actually pretty sunny. It was a great time, andd I've got lotsa photos that I'll put up later. But for the moment I'm just going to head off to bed. I'm so not motivated about heading back to school ...

Nevertheless, many thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes!

And happy birthday Barbara!

oy

Just a quick note to say thanks for all the birthday wishes. I had a lovely day and stayed out too late last night, but it was tons of fun. I'll have photos of Scotland for you when I get back next weekend. Happy Easter!

just in case

Just in case it turns out that I actually go to Columbia this fall, I have decided to do an all-out crash course to learn Spanish in three months, like the Manhattan project, only more peaceful and smaller and shorter. It looks like a group of people from my masters may be going to Bogota, which would make it that much cooler and more attractive as a project. And didja hear? FARC paramilitary guys turned in more of their guns last week. Sweet!

Anyway, those capable of doing so are welcome to make my life slow and frustrating by writing me in Spanish, and I will try to return the favor by butchering this lovely language that I know so badly. It's pathetic really. Extremely anal corrections of grammar and usage are also welcome.

Tal vez voy en Colombia este otono, entonces tengo que aprender el espanol muy muy rapidamente. Son los bienvenidos a me escribir en espanol para me torturar un poco. Tentar responder con todo mi habilidad.

Jeez, my Spanish paragraph is so much more boring than the English one. This is going to be tough. And doing research for my thesis without knowing the language is kind of ridiculous. Oh well.

shameless self-promotion

It's my birthday tomorrow (Saturday)! And since I'm in Paris, I want to make the most of living in a different culture w/different traditions, etc. So I'll be getting pancakes for my b-day breakfast at this cool American diner and going bowling tomorrow night. Sadly there will be no grande fete, as most people will be out of town on spring break.

But I'd love to hear from people back home. If you want to say hello, leave a voicemail here: 415-354-9685

Happy friday! Hope you've done your taxes.

Give me sleep or give me death!

There was another costume party last night, organized by a group of students that had just finished midterms at a different university. It may seem like all I do is go to parties, and it's true this weekend, but school stuff is all pretty much the same: some of my classes are great, some aren't so good, I still wonder what I'll do after, etc. It's not very interesting.

Nonetheless, I'm having a great time goofing off on the weekends, as you'll see by the following photos:

Saturday, instead of studying Claire and I had a picnic, on her bed. We were just kind of lazy, but the weather was also deteriorating so it was actually better this way. Before this I'd spent the morning trying to remember how to do math. It's really sad how bad I've gotten since the days of Calculus 1B (though Matt will be glad to note that I now stop doing homework at the drop of a hat, instead of continuing my old habit of working on math problems during band practice). Coming up with a compound interest formula taking recurring deposits into account shouldn't be that difficult. In my defense, I only got a few hours of sleep Friday night. Anyway, here's the start of our meal. We started with avocado and chips, then moved on to smoked ham with bread and cheese, with a glass of wine, and some cookies at the end. Quite lovely:



That night, the costume party theme was the US, to celebrate the admission of the host Olivier into Boalt law school at Berkeley and Ina (the Cambridge girl) into Harvard. Another boy, Marcello, also recently got into the American University of Paris. I did The Dude again, and Claire didn't have a costume, but since she's half American she could pull it off with whatever she was wearing. In any case, there were enough gangster hats to go around:



We also learned how to do this snappy roll-a-hat-up-your-arm-and-onto-your-head thing. It's very simple really, but to the uninitiated it looks incredibly cool. Not having a video camera, I couldn't get a shot of it, but here's the result. I feel like Jay-Z!



Sadly, that's not my necklace. As for the post-it note, it was originally for one guy who'd come as an obese McDonalds customer. It was very impressive but I didn't get any shots.

why I REALLY went to grad school

Who does it for the education? Not me. I've been to more costume parties this school year than in my entire life. The one last night was themed 'your hero.' Since it's kinda hard to pull off whatever peoples' real-life heros might be, pretty much everyone just went as whatever they could scrounge together. Thibault (see below) didn't even know it was a costume party, but the girls drew hair on his chest and christened him 'latin lover.' There was another, more unfortunate fellow who didn't have a costume who received one of those Mexican mariachi-style sash things, and was christened 'dirty sanchez.' Not being from an English speaking country, he had no idea what it meant. But a few of us were cracking up every time we saw him. Yes, very juvenile and all, but oh so much fun!

Here are some highlights:

The boyz: Antonio, yours truly, Thibault, and some guy I don't really know



There was a hula hoop. But I don't have any pics of me trying it out.



Julie was attacked by a pen.



Yours truly at the end of the night. Who here has seen The Big Lebowsky? Well, guess who was dressed up as 'The Dude.' It was quite a success, on the level of "badly-dressed." Wow, my room is so clean in that pic!

Anyway, yes, I did actually rollerblade through Paris in a bathrobe at 2:30 am.



Voil, this is what grad school is all about ... I suppose I should be learning stuff too, of course, but it's the weekend!

A gloriously wasted day

I slept until 5pm this afternoon, after staying out way too late last night, after not sleeping much the night before in order to finish a project. Good thing it had rained earlier in the day, otherwise I would have been really annoyed to miss that much sun.

For you Spanish speakers out there, I saw an Argentinian taxidermy-bank robbery movie tonight: El Aura. As you might imagine it was rather odd, but beautiful landscapes and weird characters.

In other news, I'm homesick tonight. But tomorrow it's a full day of capoeira, caf, a catered reception, and a dinner with a wonderfully creative and funny family. I used to give there son English lessons, with Claire taking over this school year because although I've turned into a damned slacker, I can't be bothered to get paid to help a kid with his English. He is an avid fisherman, at 14 yrs, his little sister will describe and act out entire books for you if you're not careful, the dad is a video editor/amateur guitarist with a charming bald spot, and the mom is a graphic designer for the airline magazine for Air France. On their summer vacation this year they spent a couple of days shooting a hilarious fake (obviously) Survivor knockoff.

By the way, does anyone know where I can buy/download a decent Spanish-English electronic dictionary? I have a fantastic French-English one, but all the Spanish ones I've seen for Mac don't come anywhere near being as useful as the French one.