Halloween: Pittston, PA

The streets were quiet, but potential, while Amanda and I snuck out with her grandmother to the Olive Garden for dinner on Halloween night.  Leaving a note for the candy hunters on the door, telling them when we would be back, seemed more dignified than my effort the past year.

Although I learned many things in school, I do feel academia sheltered me from any exposure to these lil’ ones who are so potent and lifelike.  This became clear to me as I answered a knock on my door in San Jose last year: two trick-or-treaters.  With a shocked look on my face I greeted the dashing beasts with an “Is today Halloween?” and before they could reply asked them to hold on.  I closed the door and turned to Silvio quickly telling him to help me search the house for anything sweet and giveable.

After a little sweat and a twice over of the cupboards we returned to the door with the option of a banana or canned garbanzo beans.  Already halfwaydown my walkway the little beasts politely declined my offer and scampered off for a chance a sweeter plunder next-door.  Silvio and I quickly turned the lights out and hid in the backroom until we established a plan and proper escape route from our cornered situation.

Despite being in a State with arguably less youth, the return from the Olive Garden this year went a bit smoother—the neighbor greeting us to tell that the streets were quite calm this year.  “Not to many Haloweeners,” he said.  I quietly let go a sigh of relief, currently disregarding the fact that they refer to ‘trick-or-treaters’ as ‘halloweeners’ over here (I guess it is more appropriate for their average size). But Amanda’s grandmother wouldn’t let go so easy. 

This halloween I witnessed the type of compassion they don’t teach in academia.  Within minutes she was out on the porch with the candy bucket yelling at kids who looked like they might be passsing without getting the generous handful of sweets they were due: “Hey, come ova here!” she yelled to the ghost.  “I’ve got candy for ya!” she yelled to the zombie.  With plenty of effort she emptied that basket, mostly on the neighbor who also got a few extra handfuls to give to friends, though an eloquent bout of pro-active halloweening.

Meter Maids and Company

Two train ticket from New York to Philadelphia cost $35.00.  Amanda and I paid it.  But that I guess is not interesting.

My friends across Southern Europe had different interpretations of their public transportation systems.  Let me give you a list of our trips savings:

Barcelona: +16 Euros.  (Tickets to Sitges 6 Euros, but you can get on for the price of a metro ticket, 2 Euros.) Lyon: +6 Euros.  (There is no barrier in the Metro Station) Paris: +10 Euros. (Here you just jump, it is very circus like) Milan: +4 Euros (You validate the ticket in a machine on the Bus)—————————- Total Debits: +36 Euros in metro-hopping savings, a gift of local knowledge

But here comes the catch, the grand equilibrator (Yes, I’ve tactfully hidden information from you).

Milan: -34 Euros (A gift of foreign knowledge.  As we pulled up to a station and saw a handful of ticket checkers collaging the doors, we decided to jump off as to not be on the bus with them, though as it goes, they didn’t want on, but to see our tickets once we got off ((sad music)) (Yes, this is my story, i can choose the music).—————————- Total Credits: -34 Euros in metro-hopping slappings

Grand Total: +2 Euros!

Some people play Bingo or go to the Horse Track.  I ride public transportation while in foreign countries ((trail off with Hawaii Five-O type music)).

Introduce: Jean

Lyon, France.  Jean welcomed Amanda and I as we descended from the bus, greeted us warmly and treated us to our first metro ride a la Parisiansans ticket.

It was 6:00am by the time we reached Jeans apartment, late enough to get a wink of sleep (as the bus isnѕt always conducive to a full nights sleep) and early enough for a two-hour breakfast and some catching up.  We drank tea from bowls as it is done and as Jean head off for work, Amanda and I slept from 8am to 4pm and then went for breakfast again.  This time, croissant and pain au chocolat, or what was left of the pickings at this hour.

We met Jean back at his place after work, and along with his brother, had a Lyonese feast of quenelle, gnocchi, roquefort and friends, wine, cava (the Spanish bubbly), a homemade vodka, and chocolate.

City Folk

Along with a Scottish anarchist with a sharpened umbrella, we left Barcelona.  A good stay.  Please check out my visually imprecise, yet emotionally cordial pictures of Gaudis Casa Battllo.

I would also like to mention that they sell chickens - yes, real live chickensin the streets of Barcelona at 10 o’clock at night.  I am unsure where anyone who purchases a chicken in this city might keep it, as I am unsure of what type of farmer traffic frequents downtown Barcelona (the last time I checked the full-grown chicken wasn’t much the pet you give to a child on his birthday).  Though, contrary to the presumed falsity of most urban legends, I am sure they sell chickens.

Order

Yes, order. What of it?  I presume, as this is a diary of travels, which in itself is a linear experience, that, as one day we may meet and discuss a story or two from the breadth of our disordered recollection, an incongruous presentation is a minor detail.

Ikea

In the many homes in which we have stayed, I have come to believe that IKEA may be the Tupperware phase of home furnishing.  Or maybe it is something much bigger.

Frameless beads with headboards, bookshelves, miniature beanbag chairs and placemats with holsters for the silverware have all served as tools in the houses in which we have stayed, and they have all been from IKEA. 

Does this IKEA phenomena only appear in life on the cusp of ones studies and the work world, or is it much deeper than this?  I must admit my sample set is quite biased: friends from college who are now working.  I am about to start working. The lone fact that my family has a barn-full of salvageable dusty things (and this comment makes no assumptions of the quality or orderliness of said barn; it is an excellent, well ordered barn with the potential for horses and is currently being slabbed, a project that I cannot wait to see) may label me in another furnishing group, yet I must also admit that this sample set has invoked a small fear in me.  Am I also about to acquire grave instincts to start ravaging the nearest IKEA?

Introduce: Santi & Mar

If any of you have read the Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown mentions that in Da Vinci’s painting of the Last Supper, Da Vinci put a wine glass at every seat as opposed to just one single goblet as Sophie Nevu (who’s voice is awful in the book-on-tape version) guesses, the holy grail.  For some reason (and my unfamiliarity with the topic may come shining through right here) Da Vinci is apparently trying to reveal the true nature of the grail within these nuances in his art.

I just wanted to mention I saw a painting of the Last Supper from the same time period as Da Vinci where there was also a wine glass in front of each person at the table.  Maybe Da Vinci wasn’t the only one onto such secrets after all!

At a more recent supper, which also was a final supper to our stay in Madrid, I must openly commend someone who many of you may never meet: Chef Santi.  I had the pleasure of knowing Santi as an In-House Chef my last stay in Madrid, but it was many interests above food that brought us together in the first place.  Music such as the Tindersticks and Los Nios Gusanos stoked our bond and drinks like the Venezuelan Cacique and the Red frizzante cemented it.

Regardless, food once again was the centerpeice in the weaving together of our interests (and talents).  Even though I begged for the purple rice dish, Santi prepared us a fabulous plate of wide noodles and farfalle with the choice of a verdant Cinqueterra pesto or Spinach-a-la-Santi on the side.  During the preparation, Mar, from the entertainment division, cultured our Italian travel palates with stories of their travels through the Northern end of the Pasta-land.  Dinner led to more stories and discoveries(!) such as the origin of surfing and the ice cream brindis (cheers, salute… what the heck is the verb for this!?).

While some nights should never end, others are bookended with a bus ticket that leaves at midnight.  We pulled ourselves from sharing new music and waking the neighbors with drums and ran for the vacation home!  Yes, the vacation home is a Volkswagon bus.  I think the 1989 model. (Westfalia?  It said California on the side.)

With charismatic farewells, the bus was soon to bring us no sleep and to Barcelona.

Museums

My vision is to be able to tell you of all the marvellous places I am finding and re-finding, and give their longitude and latitude,  to upload pictures with real space/time coordinates (within 26 feet or so), and finally, to include the direction you should face!  Perhaps utopic, though i am just a common dreamer.

Madrid is still the encantador.  Between the de novo ambience of Cafe La Palma and the constipated woopie-cusion seats you can try shoes on from in the Camper outlet store, I am continuously amazed.

I also discovered a trick I would like to share with any of you not so hot on classical art (perhaps a ‘dirty trick’ for those of you who are) yet nonetheless fancy peeking at what all the hype is about. 

Short for time, Amanda and I swung by the Museo del Prado just to get a postcard (and as a second hint for abridged tourism: the gift shop is often a good place to start if you are unsure you want to purchase a ticket to enter a museum or not).  We learned, to my poor recollection, that the gift shop is in the center of the musem and they will let you in for 20 minutes, without a ticket, to tend to any shopping impulses on premise.

Noticing their fault in not recognizing our intentions to speed through the museum at some uncanny pace, we entered the gift shop and precariously bought the first thing that looked like it might satisfy my intended goal.  Maintaining regular breathing techniques, we purchased the postcard an quickly, not haphazardly, began our 17 minute ‘free’ tour of the museum!

In this 17 minutes, albeit a tad rushed, we enjoyed works by Goya, Velazquez and even my favorite work in the musem, The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch.

Also, all of our museum viewing has lead me to a philisophical question—or maybe just a curator-istic one:  How do they choose what color to paint the museum walls?  Any insights into this mystery would be greatly appreciated.

Madrid

Despite a bagel-fire and a surreptitious and aggressive sprinkler system, I am still welcome here in Madrid and feeling quite nostalgic.

Isabel (my flatmate while in Madrid) is putting Amanda and I up in her very fashionable flat (I hope to provide an unsatisfying visual soon, though, in the meantime, a quick spin through the nearest IKEA (pronounced ‘ee-kay-uh’) peppered with stippled paraphernalia from a Lichtenstein exhibit should suffice).  The flat is downtown in the Alonzo Martinez area, which provides us good company with her and Bruno, and easy access to most all we could wish to visit.

As we walked around Madrid these past two days, the memories came rushing back to me—the drums in the park; the long, slow, chat-full walks; the cars parked in the middle of one way street with no driver inside and a chorus of horns shortly behind; the near-mulleted hipsters; and our server picking his nose as we awaited our order.

Even though Isabel cooked a spectacular Spanish dish of seaweed and carrots our first night here, such strange foods to my Bay Arean palate like tortilla patata (Spanish omelet), morcilla (blood sausage), tapas, cafe cubanos and mojitos are filling my days.  I notice myself trying to get tired of each of them so when I return I will not have unachievable longings.  Yet I have had no success thus far.

And we continue.  Off to see Lichtenstein or whoever replaced him.  And maybe some chocolate and churros, or two.

Pixels and Peaks

Within the next 4 months, I hope for everyone’s benefit, I will try to learn to talk in pixels (or at least learn to hear in pixels).  Until then, I hope the scattered-quality photos in the photo albums section will do.

My fascination with Fall continues.  Fall and iron-bar-laden hiking trails.  These Eastern trees are merely teasing us at the moment.  Perhaps they are more concerned with dodging hurricanes, though under such stressful conditions, my scientific urges lead me to believe their leaves would be changing in droves—the equivalent of blushing or turning white in fear.

Amanda and I just finished up a short jaunt through Acadia National Park in Maine.  Despite the parks peculiar shape (a conjunction of privately donated lands), there were plenty of spectacular trail-like continuums to enjoy.  We found a couple non-technical climbing trails to be the best of them.  These were essentially teetering trails up modest granite cliffs and ledges.  The trails were strung together with iron handrails and ladders where gravity would naturally get the best of the not-really-rock-climber tourists like myself.

A new toy, or should I speculatively say, life-saving piece of technology which accompanied our ascent was a handheld GPS (global positioning system).  This machine, at a casual speed, tells you your current longitude and latitude amongst other neat, if not essentially unessential information.  Amanda humored my intrigue with grace, yet I must boast that, on more than one occasion after a hike, the GPS helped us find our way back to the trailhead parking lot.

More humbly, I will also admit that there were numerous occasions where, while globally disoriented and locally perplexed, Amanda found the way to where we needed to go before that darn GPS even finished turning on.

Next, my sights are set on places where we will more likely get lost for more than a few minutes, where foreign language will confuse and misdirect us, where directions may come in awkward finger-point fashion: Southern Europe.  I will continue to bear the GPS (maybe sometimes turning it on a little ahead of time), and amongst friends and foreign lands, I will report back on my success.

Campus Bike Laws Like US Foreign Policy with Cuba

Dear Campus Police,

Kindly, this past week, you warned the campus bicyclers of their boundaries.  And in appreciation of this altruistic behavior, I wish to help you understand why your actions are superfluous.

The prohibition of victimless crimes leads to deadweight loss (please, come over to the Economics department and I will be happy to explain this to you with fancy graphs and mathematical equations).  That is, by enforcement of your law, there is a portion of the net social benefit that neither you the policeman, nor us, the bicyclers, can attain.

Prohibition also leads to the reduction in the quality of a product, or in this case, the act of riding a bike.  For example, these restrictions will not deter bicyclers from biking innocently to where they need to study, it will only give them incentive to bike faster and more surreptitiously, leading to an increase in fatalities (or small scrapes) and a decrease in the attention they lend to operating their bicycles with efficiency.

Furthermore, the transfer of revenue from the bicycler’s pocket to the campus’ will place a financial burden on the average bicycler.  In the long run, the quality of the bikes we own will diminish because over time we will have less revenue to invest in their upkeep and maneuverability.

Also, I wish to comment on the placement of various bike racks that incite us bikers to inflict harm upon ourselves.  These bike racks are located in areas that we cannot legally access on our bike.  This is much like Americas immigration policy with Cuba.  We place an inhibiting trade embargo (no bicycling laws) on their country (campus).  It is extremely dangerous to cross the Florida Straits (space between ok zone and bike rack).  Yet, if the Cubans (the bikers) arrive on US land (the bike rack) they are given citizenship (allowed to park their bike).

These revenue-accruing acts that you are paid to carry out originated in medieval England.  The King learned that the punishment of victimless crimes was a great method to gain revenue.  These crimes were defined as acts that disturbed the Kings peace and permitted the sheriff to collect a fine.

I am aware we have only an interim King at the moment, though maybe you could explain to him, as I have to you, the negative externalities that arise from your duties.  Perhaps he will recognize your ingenuity and relieve you of such education-intrusive decisions.

Sincerely,

A concerned biker