Itinerary

As of 10:36 pm there exists a vague plan for the next week or two. It consists of a good deal of driving (at least for European standards), some familial obligations, and then a lot of spontaneity hopefully combined with good travel karma:

Tomorrow! i.e. Wednesday: Geras-> Vienna -> Moneglia
Thursday, Friday, Saturday?: Moneglia
Sunday: Interlaken (Grandparents)
Monday: Astrid and I go off to Paris or Marseille, Dad goes back to Vienna to fly to Beijing (he wouldn't take me, grr). Sponteneity sets in. We all report back to Vienna about a week later.

Tomorrow will be about 10+ hours of driving, split between my dad and my sister. I'm just glad I never got around to getting my license. Lunch will happen as usual in Udine, where we will arrive just too late to go to the-trattoria-we-are-always-too-late-for. (I remember eating there once, but standing outside the door at least a half dozen times. It stops serving lunch at 3 I think.)
Moneglia is a small Genovese bathing/resort town, right next to Cinque Terre. It's still populated mostly by Italians, unlike Cinque Terre which was utterly American the last time I was there. Moneglia is where my parents used to go for weekends when they were living in Zurich. One of my earliest memories is of a New Year's Eve there when I was maybe four; the noise at midnight woke my sister and me up and we went downstairs to the restaurant, due biondissime belle bambine, to the great amusement of all... Also great plates of small sea snails that you had to extract with a pin. The owners of the restaurant in which all this happened still remember us/my parents well, which is why I'm so happy to go back: even besides the opulent 5? 6? course meal they served us last time we came, they were wonderfully hospitable people (Italian restaurant owners - how surprising, right?) and it's lovely to be known and remembered in such a place, to really be more than just a tourist (traveler, blech). The density of social relations in Italian towns is something that's been romanticized enough, especially by those of us who are only very loosely tied to any particular place or people. As a kid there was also the fact that the bimbi and raggazzi seemed to have much more freedom within this communal structure (than we did, anyway), so there was always the fantasy of getting in with them, "becoming Italian" and leaving the parents behind. Mostly, it's nice discovering things in the proverbial family closet that aren't skeletons, but nice little Italian restaurants.

In related news, my luggage finally arrived, from Neverneverland (LGA? JFK? VIE? AKX?). Be grateful and don't ask too many questions.

I have the bad trait of not enjoying rereading my own writing, so if these posts are overly rambling and incomprehensible let me know. I doubt I'll be online until I get back to Vienna, certainly not enough to post much.

Ant Update

Blogger is getting the timestamps completely wrong - the last piece was published around midnight. Just so you know.

The ants have just about cleaned up their pile of eggs. I wonder where those eggs went, but I'm glad to not see them anymore... hopefully the ant swarm will dissapear now too. Just calm down and go home and no one's gonna get hurt.

Geras nightlife

Last time I was here in Geras, in January, the fields were turning green and it was warm and springlike; it felt like March. Thus it is now November in August - cool (ok, probably the same temperature as in January, but it's all relative), grey, wet. Slug weather - they're all over the place. Slugs are called "naked snails" in German; there are plenty of large clothed snails too.

The little hut I live in here has a couple shingles missing and so there's a hole in the roof where the rain comes in and keeps my mind from wandering where it will go. It also soaked my shoes last night. Haven't fixed it yet, since it's still raining - it's just dripping down steadily onto the concrete floor. There's not much damage it can do in this shack though, and after Finlandia this is making me feel just at home. Pictures will come as soon as I figure out how to charge my camera. I like this little hut, it fits into the idyllic cuteness here. It used to be a storage shed until I cleaned it up two years ago, took all the crap out (including decades old marmelade and catechism cards), redid the windows and painted the inside. So it's livable, kinda, in the summer...

eeeeee ew ew ew ew I really wish my camera worked right now... there's a small ledge about halfway up the wall where a small train of ants usually marches by. They don't bother me, I don't bother them. Then I put my computer adapter box up there yesterday... I just moved it now by accident and there's a HUGE pile of ants and ant eggs underneath, I'd guess about 1/2 cup of ant eggs. The ants are going crazy now that they've been disturbed. They're the tiny ones, but there are SO many of them, it's creeping me out. I wonder how long it'll take them to carry everything away - I considered scooping them out but then they started crawling over my hands and it was nasty and so I gave that up. One small lost ant is crawling around the screen now.

Slugs and ants... idyllic countryside indeed.

Strike caterers!

So - when I said 14 hours, I meant 14+24=38 hours... As one of 70,000 people displaced and stranded by the British Airways catering strike, I don't have much of a unique complaint, and besides, all's well that ends well, though that's not original either. It was very strange returning to Providence, 8 hours after I'd thought I'd left for a good long time; the solemn finality of good-byes suddenly becomes ludicrous.
Airports and airplanes are their own little world - and once I enter this world, I expect to emerge in a different place. While anyone who's traveled a fair amount has probably wished for teleportation at some point, I think it'd be too jarring. Air travel, much more than train or car, is a neutral space. There are token references to the language and culture outside (Almdudler on Austrian Airlines, etc.), but it's much like the Internet: International English is the primary language, geography is reduced to abstract nodes of no importance through which you are routed until you reach your destination, the only place that counts. (I like analogies too much - this one is a bit weak. I think it works though in the end analogies are just funky, not useful.)
Point being - once I reach the British Airways counter in Logan Airport, I don't want to see fresh air until I've at least left New England. I was supposed to fly Thursday evening, but ended up back in Providence due to the above-mentioned strike at Heathrow. After spending an hour on hold I managed to get a reservation through NYC and then directly to Vienna with Austrian Airlines on Friday, but Friday morning I realized that I couldn't get to Logan on time. I went to Logan airport anyway, where, armed with two failed reservations, I managed to convince a British Airways matron to put me on real (read future) flights. This process involved going around Logan on their circulating bus at least three times, during which I ran into my sister. She managed to get on a 5pm shuttle to LaGuardia, I followed at 6pm, we bussed over to JFK where lo and behold our luck suddenly changed and we got onto the 10:15 flight to Vienna on standby. We even got the emergency aisle with plenty of legroom which we didn't use since we/I just curled up and went to sleep, to at last emerge in Vienna. The End.

The logistics of traveling is never the interesting part of the story. We met/saw some interesting characters, including one Middle-aged White Male Businessman who argued with the check-in counter attendant while on the phone until she called the security guard and both managers - I didn't catch what the argument was but he was utterly obnoxious, and in the process delayed my checking in just long enough that my baggage wasn't on the flight to LGA with me. I'm still waiting for it, which is bad news for my surroundings - this tshirt was already smelly when I got on the airplane.
On the bus from LGA to JFK Astrid and I were talking in Swiss German. The only other passenger turned around and asked us if we were speaking German - he used to work for Lufthansa. He hated the job (the first he could get out of college, always the kind of thing I like to hear) but loved the language and wouldn't let us go until he'd regurgitated all the bits he could still remember. Viel Glueck, Patrick, auf deiner Suche nach einer deutschen Frau...

It's always strange how not strange it is to be back here. The culture shock part happens on a deeper level, like when I follow a random train of thought and it lands me back in Providence, and I realize how far away that now suddenly is.

This journey made possible by: Matt my personal taxi driver, thanks; Chris, for nothing, really; George, the Austrian Air check-in wunderking; British Airways lady, for making my fantasy itinerary a reality; crazy Chinese bus chauffeur who made me believe I was in NYC; the Bank of America help-line guy for making me laugh when my credit card got rejected (not my fault). It's amazing, considering how moronic and terrible these service jobs are, to be to be treated considerately and generously, to have people go out of their way to help you.

Packing, sort of

My flight to Heathrow/Vienna leaves from Boston in 14 hours. Instead of packing, I'm playing with blogs. Huzzah. I can only pack when completely sleep deprived and braindead, otherwise it's too depressing. It's still too depressing.
I'm also too numb to write anything of worth here now. The point of this thing is to make sure that I'm still thinking and writing about things every once in a while (not now, I'm not). May the excitement begin.