The Reading Journal of RMS

I'm never going to write up a full travelogue -- I spend enough time working on the pictures for Flickr -- but here are some random thoughts about my trip.

1. Denmark is expensive. We thought we were prepared for it -- we've been to Europe before, and based on the hotel rates we thought we had a feel for how expensive it would be. We were wrong. The food was insanely expensive, as was getting around by bus or train. (In Copenhagen we walked everywhere, but in Esbjerg we had to takes buses and trains to Ribe and Legoland.)
   
   
2. Denmark is cold. Esbjerg is especially cold and damp, and the nicest it gets there is approximately the worst it gets in Santa Barbara.
   
   
3. Danish food, with the fish and the mayo and the herring and the pork, is so not our thing. I did have some tasty fishcakes at one point, but we ended up eating lots of shwarma and falafel. You know you're in trouble when you're looking forward to London for the better prices, weather, and food.
   
   
4. Legoland was awesome, though.
   
   
5. We went to the British Museum, and wandered into their Africa galleries. We were sorely disappointed by the curation of it, though -- organized by type of object (masks, ceramics, textiles), with little to no discussion of culture or history. Boo.
   
   
6. I sampled the eeee!'s beer in Denmark, and didn't particularly like any of it -- lagers are just not my thing. But I love English ales, and at a random pub he had a pint of Sharp's Doombar, which was the best beer I have ever tasted. Maybe it's just because I haven't really had any beer for the past five months, but it was amazing.
   

All in all, it was a great trip, and seeing my brother was wonderful. But I do not see myself going back to Scandinavia any time soon.

Things here have been pretty good! I will enumerate, because transitional sentences are too complicated for me today.

1. Friends threw me a small graduation party/baby shower this weekend at the beach! It's been overcast, but the sun did come out for a few hours, and it was lovely. Lots of tasty food -- the eeee! wowed everyone with his spicy grilled corn -- and lots of fun. One person got us this navy blue hoodie that has a SHARK embroidered across the front of it, which is totally awesome.
   
   
2. The eeee! and I are incompetent when it comes to grilled chicken -- we burn it, or undercook it, or both. Blah! But we tried the Italian Grilled Chicken in a recent article of Cook's Illustrated, and it was amazing. We might blog about it at some point, but highlights include butterflying the chicken, pressing it on the grill with a hot cast-iron pot (or bricks), and eight cloves of garlic. It came out perfectly, and as we were eating it, we were exclaiming, "We could actually make this for a guest!"
   
   
3. I will actually need to buy maternity clothes soon, because while my low-rise jeans still fit (especially the sexiest ones, which is kind of hilarious), my skirts are getting tighter and tighter. This means I have to buy stuff before I leave for Europe, ack. But! I have a gift card for the Gap (graduation present from my brother), and a 25% off coupon. So I am about to go crazy online.
   
   
4. When I go to Italy in July, I get into the Venice airport at 9 a.m., but my shuttle to the middle of nowhere isn't until 6 p.m. or so. I started doing some research on the Venice airport (awesomely named Marco Polo), and I think I might actually be able to get into Venice for the day. Yay! If any of you have been to Venice, I would deeply appreciate any and all advice about transport to and from the airport, and about Venice itself.
   
   
5. We finally watched the pilot of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency last night, and loved it. We have the whole season recorded, and so far I cannot recommend it enough. It's shot in Botswana, and is so beautiful and funny and interesting. Now I need to read the books -- which will require going to the library, which will require paying my library fine, egad.
   
   

Okay, I guess that wasn't all strictly about my weekend. Anyway. Happy Monday! The sun is shining, our new chairs are coming today, and life is good.

The lovely pescana asked me some questions, so here we go!

1. So how are you finding life in Santa Barbara?
   
   I like it. I don't love it, but I've barely been here two months, and for me, that's not nearly long enough to meet people and get involved with things locally. A lot of the day-to-day things are really nice -- the weather, the food at the farmer's market -- so I'm trying to take advantage of all of that. I am not particularly outdoorsy or athletic, but I want to step that up, now that I live somewhere I can enjoy the outdoors year-round. It's a small town, though -- smaller than Ann Arbor, and I had previously marked AA as the minimum size town I needed to live in.
   
   I don't think I could stay here long-term. It's not really an option, since we can't afford to stay here long-term, but I don't know if I'd want to even if I could. But who knows -- ask me again in six months!
   
   
2. How do you think being a science geek influences your view of the world? (I'm specifically thinking things like feminism and the working world, but feel free to go where ever you want with this.)
   
   This is an awesome question, so I am copping out and giving it its own entry. I've been thinking a lot about this, particularly about how physical scientists and social scientists aren't generally capable of talking to each other.
   
   
3. What are you reading these days? Any trends, or no?
   
   I seem to be on a food memoir kick. I just finished Heat, by Bill Buford, and I'm reading Julie and Julia right now. From the library I just got Ha'penny, by Jo Walton, and Children of Men, by P.D. James, and I'm really looking forward to both of them. So I suppose I'm veering into dystopia sci-fi alternate fiction genres.
   
   
4. If you could go anywhere in the world for vacation with no issue of expense, where would you go? What would you do there?
   
   Oh, I want to go everywhere -- Southeast Asia (again), Spain, Turkey, Tanzania, New Zealand . . . okay, I'll limit myself to two itineraries:
   
   
   
   • Southeast Asia: I'd go to Bangkok and Phuket (and maybe Chiang Mai) in Thailand, then to Vietnam to visit zoje_george in HCMC, and then to the Mekong Delta. I'd see everything -- beaches, floating markets, modern SE Asian cities, the back country, you name it. And the food! Oh my god, the food. But, I've been to SE Asia, which is why I would also consider:
     
     
   • Spain: Traveling all around and hitting Barcelona, Madrid, Sevilla, Granada (and the Alhambra), plus some of the islands. This gets me islands and beaches and a variety of awesome, old cities. I love old cities. And the food! And the wine!
     
   
   
   
5. What's your favorite leisure activity?
   
   It's a tie between photography and reading. There is something seriously wrong with me -- I go for a walk, and the next thing I know I've spent half an hour taking pictures of a fence. (And then I don't get any of them quite right.) Going to the beach with the dog is gaining, though!
   
   

Happy Friday, everyone! And if you want questions, just ask for some.

With spectacular timing, I am sick tonight. We leave at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning for our drive across the country.

I'm really hoping it's just a nasty combination of stress, allergies, lack of sleep last night, and too much to drink last night.

I am looking forward to the drive, though. I've always wanted to road-trip across the country, and now I get to do it with the eeee!. (I hope to put pictures on Flickr during the trip, but we'll see what sort of free wifi Motel 6 has across the country.) And I am SO READY to drive in flat states! I drove today on a quick errand run, which included a fast-food drive through (hey, we were hungover), and I didn't stall out at all!

I'm not looking forward to finding a dog-friendly place to live in Santa Barbara, but I am not thinking about it now!

( Travel Meme stolen from wonderlanded and others... )

In other news, I am at the stage where I am writing a paper. Hooray! Although, um, that means lots of opportunities for procrastination as I try to craft the perfect damn sentence . . .

I've been back from Europe for a week now, and in that time I've done a crapload of work and gone to a wedding in my hometown. Egad. Now I'm just trucking through to my committee meeting on Friday, and then I leave for the family reunion/golf outing. And then, THEN, the eeee! and I have a luxurious four consecutive weekends at home.

I finally got a Flickr account, and I've uploaded my pictures from Italy and France. But there are three things worth mentioning that aren't in the pictures:

1. The location of our flat in Rome was perfect. It was a side street in Trastevere, so we were close to everything, but a bit off the main tourist drags. So the restaurants right by our flat were cheap and fantastic, as were the cafe and gelateria outside our doorstep. It rocked. And oh my, the cappuccino at the cafe was the best I've ever had, and it was only eighty centimes! I love Rome so much.

2. When driving from Florence to Nice, we (me, the eeee!, and his sister) didn't want to eat at just an AutoGrille, so we vaguely picked a small town on the map that looked close to a highway exit. Near the exit for Sarzana, there was a sign about the "centro historico", so we figured that was promising. Sure enough, we ended up in this smallish town and found a restaurant that was open for lunch. No one spoke any English -- we were definitely the only Americans around -- but we managed to order some pasta off of the menu. And of course, we then found some good gelato. It was a lovely, quiet break in our day -- we really lucked out with the exit we picked.

3. While in France, we went to the Matisse Chapel in Vence, and we ended up in there with about 75 Dominican nuns. It turns out that since the St. Dominic's pilgrimage goes through that area, a Dominican nun (who used to model for and nurse Matisse) convinced Matisse to design a chapel for the Dominicans. So these Dominicans nuns were following the pilgrimage, and this was a stop on it. That was really neat, but it also meant that we got to hear about the art from some sort of official guide. And the translator was awesome -- she had a booming voice and a very strong presence.

And now, to bed! Zonk.

I just finished A Year in Provence, by Peter Mayle, and it was delightful. And oh, it's the sort of book that must be read with a good cup of coffee or glass of wine in hand. Or maybe some good cheese. But the descriptions of the food were mouth-watering, and now I want to drop this whole astronomy business and buy a vineyard somewhere. That's probably a bit impractical, but another side effect of this book is that now I'm really excited about my upcoming trip to Europe. (I leave on Friday!)

I haven't had much time to read lately, and I wasn't sure what to bring with me on the plane this weekend. However, I have just now learned that You'll Never Nanny in This Town Again is in at the library, so now I have something fluffy to read on the plane. I'll probably also bring Wives and Daughters, by Elizabeth Gaskell, which I am late reading (as usual) for Chicklit. I'm really enjoying it, but I haven't had time to really sink into it lately.

On my Hawaii trip (pictures soon, I promise), when I wasn't swimming or talking about cosmology, I had a chance to get some reading done. I flew through The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood (thanks, aakepley!), and knocked off a significant chunk of Sense and Sensibility. Screw Emma: I much prefer the Dashwoods. And I'd never read any Atwood before, but I loved The Blind Assassin, and I feel like I've been digesting it since I finished it. Stories within stories and roundabout narratives are both techniques that I love, but I also think something finally clicked for me when I was reading it, and I've been looking for that feeling for a while now.

Also during my stay in Hawaii I went to see the lava flowing from Kilauea. We were staying near Kona on the big island, so this required a 3.5-hour drive each way (over the saddle road!), plus some significant hiking (climbing over rocks in the dark) to get to the surface flows. We started hiking at 11 p.m., and as there are no direct trails to the surface flows, we were on our own with our flashlights. First we followed the coastline for a few miles to where the lava was flowing into the ocean -- there was plenty of orange steam, and from the right angles you could see the lava flowing out of the lava tubes into the ocean. Eventually we cut inland, hoping to get close to the hotspots we could see in the distance. There were some very large ones that never seemed to get any closer, but we finally noticed a hotspot flaring behind us.

I think I was too awestruck to take pictures, but a friend did -- he and another friend also got close enough to this hotspot to poke sticks in the flowing lava ("Lava on a stick! Lava on a stick!"). I was content enough to stay a whopping 75 feet away and watch the ongoing creation of earth, and feel the warm rocks beneath me. By now the moon had risen behind us in the east, so while the lava still stood out (which it doesn't really do in daytime), we could see each other and the ocean behind us. It was one of the most spectacular things I've ever seen -- nothing to see but rock, but it was beautiful.

I think that may have been the coolest thing I've ever done in my life. And I'm finally starting to think that I really can do anything I set out to, whether it's hiking to see an active volcano or reading modern fiction.