28.1.11
"On Being Lame"
7:29 PM | 
Posted by
Maj
Hola, kids. (This entry is a couple of days old, just so's you knows.)
A couple of days ago, I discovered the sickeningly beautiful fact that I can meet my ILLC credit requirements even if I don't finish my course in Basic Logic (i.e., hand in a final take-home which very much requires some real thought to complete.) Worrier/lazyass that I am, until that moment, I was pretty worried my lazy ass wouldn't be able to catch up with the work I left myself from the first two semesters of this program in time to start working on a thesis which, from the get-go, was bound to take at least the usual amount of time to write anyway. Yikes. So it seems I have hope: I'm telling myself that all that's left to this semester (if I ditch BL) is a pair of assignments for MRM (one of which I've already started and plan on finishing this week, hoorays!) and a paper with Kasper on one type of conversational disagreement settlement for our Semantics and Pragmatics class. (In a world in which it's always the early 90s and I'm married to Damon Albarn AND a young Wittgenstein and everyone rides gryphons to work and so on, our paper will go down in history for introducing... waaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiitttttt for iiiiiiiittttttt... THE AUTHORITY FUNCTION. It crushes all other, punier functions with its authoritative fists of functionhood. Crushes.) Then, I'll just have to... finish my Philosophical Logic paper during March Break? Write my Wittgenstein's-later-metaphilosophy and Wittgenstein's-later-ethics papers over the summer, at the same time as the new papers for Phil of Semantics and Phil of Logic? Do a project with Martin in August? Cram the thesis into the remaining months? ugh. Let's hope Structures rocks it like Modal Logic and LoLaCo and has nothing but manageable assignments throughout the term. How I love classes with that structure.
You're bored to tears by these details and regretting ever getting roped into reading these posts, yeah?
Here's the point. After watching myself be myself for a couple of decades, I've come to see that I have the foresight of a napkin (maybe a handkerchief on my better days.) Fittingly, I knew that it'd be impossible for me to complete both MRM assignments during this trip unless I spent most of the first half of it reading and most of the second half writing. So I sent the lovable Mr. Dekker an email saying I wouldn't be done by the end of the month (he hasn't replied? grounds for panic?) and consequently planned on finishing the first of those bad boys by tomorrow. I rented a bike for tomorrow, though, so maybe... Thursday? My Superego is off somewhere crying at the fact that my Ego's going to have to deal with this mess in June. Or Feburary 2012, when I'm supposed to graduate. Ohhhh well.
Oh, and, er... point. Not only am I supposed to graduate on time, but I'm also supposed to be doing all sorts of fun and exciting things while I'm here, too. But the internet is (surprise!) a big part of my life, so I've been on it a fair amount while I've been here in hopes of posting blog entries.
BUT.
Inevitably, something like this goes down nearly every day:
1. Something cool/weird/worth sharing happens. There is no one to tell (man oh man, I don't think I'll be travelling alone for such an extended period again. Happiness is hanging out with friends, how could I have forgotten that?!) and I remember I can tell the BLOG, because that's its purpose in its digital life. Log into Blogger.
2. Blogger displays blogs I follow. Kailey (Caleb's wife) keeps a blog which I like to visit on occasion because it's nice to see what they're up to and she posts sometimes-fantastic posts. Click on link to Kailey's blog.
3. Happen across link to Natalie's blog (there have been others in the past, but this one's the most recent.) She has one of those blogs which makes me want to blog more and more thoughtfully. I mean, have a look at this. That's serious business.
4. Read others' blogs for a while. Gain blogging inspiration, but get sore eyes/hungry/thirsty/feeling that I shouldn't be reading interblagular stuff for so long while I'm here. Go do stuff.
5. Something cool/weird/worth sharing happens. ...And so on.
How strange that this trip has reawakened my interest in blogging largely because I didn't end up accomplishing the blogging I intended to do in Santa Cruz. :) At least I'm writing now, though. Look Paul, look! It's happening! :D
In order, then?
Santa Cruz
I wonder why bigger, better towns always (seem to) establish themselves in places with crappier weather. Take Santa Cruz de Tenerife, for instance. It's the capital, it has NON-SENIORS walking its streets, it has tons of streetwise-looking cats and discount Miu Miu shoes (but all shops close at 2pm?!) and it rains there way more often than it does in Southern Tenerife (Los Cristianos/Playa de las Américas). Here are some photos.
Santa Cruz feels so far away now, it seems silly to bother mentioning anything other than what went down when I decided to leave. My next destination was the legendary (to me: it's a hotel from the same chain as the hotel in Barcelona, and it seemed like it was going to be heavenly, so I had high hopes) Hotel Gala. Google told me it was in/around Santa Cruz, so around four in the afternoon, after having a couple of powerful rum and cokes, an avocado salad and a chat with a British guy working on cruise ships, I got in a cab and asked to go to Hotel Gala.
I should've known something was up when the cab driver was all like, "Hotel Gala?", and I was all like, "Heeeeeells yeah!" and he asked Hotel Gala again and I showed him the name on a piece of paper and then he left the cab to go ask his cabling friends if they knew where the heck it was. Well, Google, Hotel Gala is nowhere near Santa Cruz -- it's actually right next to Los Crisitanos, on the other side of the island. Cab driver and I had an awkward Spanglish conversation where he offered to bring me there for a "special deal" of €100 instead of €160. Thanks, cab driver, but I think I'll take the €5 bus ride there instead. Statión bus, por favor. €160 is way too muchos diñeros. Man, my lack of any knowledge of Spanish is super embarrassing.
So I get dropped off at the bus station and the right bus is there as I arrive! Hooray! So I hop onto the Playa de las Américas express bus (seriously, this was miraculously lucky... that bus comes once an hour or something) and arrive at my destination within one round of Plastic Beach.
Las Américas
Hotel Gala's in the middle of what, so far, is the most tourist-trappy part of Tenerife: lots of Burger Kings and McDonaldses and places with fair rides for kids and strip clubs and stores selling rock necklaces with giant "health, love, energy, trust: the power of stones" signs over the displays (barf.) I get into the hotel and wait at reception for what seems like forever behind couples and families checking in and out. I get my hotel card, go upstairs, watch a TV5 special on Russian icebreakers and pass out.
The next day, I wake up and head downstairs for the dreaded free breakfast. Don't get me wrong, free breakfast (which you're actually secretly charged €15 for, but whatevs) is great, but it's really unpleasant to eat alone. There's little that's fun about going downstairs and sitting at a table set for four and have hotel staff come by and ask whether you'll be 2, 3 or 4 dining there. They always look a little surprised when you say there's only one, and then they take all of the other dishes and cutlery away and you eat in rushed silence because you sort of want to get out of there because everyone else is either there with his/her 80 year old SO or pregnant or teething or something. sigh. My last day at Hotel Gala, I sat a table away from another girl who was eating on her own, but she looked all tough and awesome and no-bullshit. She looked like she was eating alone because she couldn't stand anyone else hanging around. She was mostly eating fruit and pasta, but I prefer remembering her as eating nothing but a plate full of roast beef. She was an effing rock.
After breakfast, I decide to make use of the hotel's spa. I take the elevator down there with my bathing suit and towel in a bag and I'm a bit nervous. I go into the ladies changeroom and... there's a man in there?... and I'm a bit more nervous, so I get changed in the washroom. (Sidenote: the next day some old man took a shower in our change room and came out as I was leaving the washroom, exposed wang and all. By that point I couldn't have cared less, but really? You guys have your own showers, you know.)
I leave my glasses in the change room and walk into the spa area (a bunch of pools and some showers) and I can't see aaaaaaanything. I walk right up to a sign you're supposed to read from afar which reads "envigorating pool". I step in and feel... nothing? A little cold? ...Should I stay in it? I get out and walk into the biggest pool, which has about 30 water features: bubble jets and "swan necks" and all sorts of things.
The only other person in the pool is some old man, and there are a couple of people poolside. I awkwardly roam around, sitting near various bubble jet things, not knowing what I'm supposed to experience.
...Then, at some point, I think, yeah, I get this. I get a little solipsistic and everyone disappears -- first figuratively, then literally. Once I have the place to myself, I alternate between the various pools. One... is a jacuzzi.
Jacuzzis and I go way back. Back until that time when my parents and I were staying at some swanky hotel around Calgary (I was 2 or something) and Dad stuck me in the hotel Jacuzzi (wait, that sounds super unsafe... so maybe I was older, but then this story is way more embarrassing?!) and noticed everyone leaving the pool after a couple of minutes. Yes, ladies and gents, Dad then noticed I had one of those ear-to-ear, I-just-pooped-and-it-was-AWESOME grins on my face. Dad promptly removed me and my parents bought me a new swimsuit. Two decades later, I congratulate myself for not pooping in a public pool.
Eventually try the fancy showers, with no success. They're all pretty lame. I mean, one is called "bucket shower". I don't know what I was supposed to expect, but I walked into it, looked up... and there was a wooden bucket with a chain hanging down from it. ...What?
Later that afternoon, I pick up €7 rum and some cans of coke from a convenience store and start wandering around with a can of honey rum and coke, trying to find a cheap place to eat.
That's when I think I'm probably in trouble because there's some super tall black guy yelling at me from across the street, visibly trying to sell stuff. I keep... sort of walking? I'm bad at not talking to people, so I keep looking over at him and wondering what I should do. Then he comes over and is actually pretty nice; he introduces himself (his name is Papi), hedoesn't try to sell me garbage I don't want, and doesn't ask if I have a boyfriend or want to go out tonight. We talk for a bit, I tell him it was nice to meet him and I keep walking.
... Then I walk about 20m and get approached by another guy. This one isn't so nice, ignoring the fact (and I am not lying here) that I hate the ticking of analog watches, so I can't wear the ones he's trying to sell me. He asks if I want to have coffee sometime. I think, yeah, alright. That I can do. I go get some bike-rental pamphlets and come back. The guy insists we go to his place for coffee, I insist we go to a café. He tells me there's one in his building, but we just end up going to his place... I refuse to walk in, telling him I don't think it's a good idea. He gets kind of irritated and we start walking back to his place of work (I guess the café thing is off? ...Uh...) He wants to hang out at night. Bleh.
Then I run into Papi again, who remembers my name and is chill. I tell him about the guy I met and how things were sketchy. He suggests going to a donair place, where we hang out and he tells me everything about his move from Senegal to Tenerife and his plans to move eventually to somewhere with better work opportunities. He shows me photos of his family. He's a nice guy with a €300/mo apartment and a job that pays €15/day at best, sometimes nothing in a day... and he works every day for 10-12 hours. I buy him a drink and complain about all of the old people at Los Cristianos. He says January and February are prime-time for geezers. I can finally chat with someone about all of these old people being everywhere.
Later, Papi walks me a nearby place he knows of with good bikes to rent. We chat up the French bike-rental lady, who is especially pleasant to talk to. She and her husband offer me a sweet bike rental deal and are hugely entertained by my Canadian accent. Her husband says he can't help but laugh through the entirety of any Céline Dion interview he watches because Canadian French is just so funny. I totally understand, since I can't keep a straight face when Hraban speaks with his Parisian French accent either. Man, it's nice to talk to nice people.
I walk home in the lovely 18-degree night air, watch some of the Australian Open and (although I like being here) look forward to being back in Amsterdam. Call me lame, but I like spending way too much time on the internet and I have a crush on Science Park. I mean, look at 'er. :)
A couple of days ago, I discovered the sickeningly beautiful fact that I can meet my ILLC credit requirements even if I don't finish my course in Basic Logic (i.e., hand in a final take-home which very much requires some real thought to complete.) Worrier/lazyass that I am, until that moment, I was pretty worried my lazy ass wouldn't be able to catch up with the work I left myself from the first two semesters of this program in time to start working on a thesis which, from the get-go, was bound to take at least the usual amount of time to write anyway. Yikes. So it seems I have hope: I'm telling myself that all that's left to this semester (if I ditch BL) is a pair of assignments for MRM (one of which I've already started and plan on finishing this week, hoorays!) and a paper with Kasper on one type of conversational disagreement settlement for our Semantics and Pragmatics class. (In a world in which it's always the early 90s and I'm married to Damon Albarn AND a young Wittgenstein and everyone rides gryphons to work and so on, our paper will go down in history for introducing... waaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiitttttt for iiiiiiiittttttt... THE AUTHORITY FUNCTION. It crushes all other, punier functions with its authoritative fists of functionhood. Crushes.) Then, I'll just have to... finish my Philosophical Logic paper during March Break? Write my Wittgenstein's-later-metaphilosophy and Wittgenstein's-later-ethics papers over the summer, at the same time as the new papers for Phil of Semantics and Phil of Logic? Do a project with Martin in August? Cram the thesis into the remaining months? ugh. Let's hope Structures rocks it like Modal Logic and LoLaCo and has nothing but manageable assignments throughout the term. How I love classes with that structure.
You're bored to tears by these details and regretting ever getting roped into reading these posts, yeah?
Here's the point. After watching myself be myself for a couple of decades, I've come to see that I have the foresight of a napkin (maybe a handkerchief on my better days.) Fittingly, I knew that it'd be impossible for me to complete both MRM assignments during this trip unless I spent most of the first half of it reading and most of the second half writing. So I sent the lovable Mr. Dekker an email saying I wouldn't be done by the end of the month (he hasn't replied? grounds for panic?) and consequently planned on finishing the first of those bad boys by tomorrow. I rented a bike for tomorrow, though, so maybe... Thursday? My Superego is off somewhere crying at the fact that my Ego's going to have to deal with this mess in June. Or Feburary 2012, when I'm supposed to graduate. Ohhhh well.
Oh, and, er... point. Not only am I supposed to graduate on time, but I'm also supposed to be doing all sorts of fun and exciting things while I'm here, too. But the internet is (surprise!) a big part of my life, so I've been on it a fair amount while I've been here in hopes of posting blog entries.
BUT.
Inevitably, something like this goes down nearly every day:
1. Something cool/weird/worth sharing happens. There is no one to tell (man oh man, I don't think I'll be travelling alone for such an extended period again. Happiness is hanging out with friends, how could I have forgotten that?!) and I remember I can tell the BLOG, because that's its purpose in its digital life. Log into Blogger.
2. Blogger displays blogs I follow. Kailey (Caleb's wife) keeps a blog which I like to visit on occasion because it's nice to see what they're up to and she posts sometimes-fantastic posts. Click on link to Kailey's blog.
3. Happen across link to Natalie's blog (there have been others in the past, but this one's the most recent.) She has one of those blogs which makes me want to blog more and more thoughtfully. I mean, have a look at this. That's serious business.
4. Read others' blogs for a while. Gain blogging inspiration, but get sore eyes/hungry/thirsty/feeling that I shouldn't be reading interblagular stuff for so long while I'm here. Go do stuff.
5. Something cool/weird/worth sharing happens. ...And so on.
How strange that this trip has reawakened my interest in blogging largely because I didn't end up accomplishing the blogging I intended to do in Santa Cruz. :) At least I'm writing now, though. Look Paul, look! It's happening! :D
In order, then?
Santa Cruz
I wonder why bigger, better towns always (seem to) establish themselves in places with crappier weather. Take Santa Cruz de Tenerife, for instance. It's the capital, it has NON-SENIORS walking its streets, it has tons of streetwise-looking cats and discount Miu Miu shoes (but all shops close at 2pm?!) and it rains there way more often than it does in Southern Tenerife (Los Cristianos/Playa de las Américas). Here are some photos.
A park near Hotel Contemporaneo, where I stayed in Santa Cruz. At night, walking through it felt like walking through a natural history museum. This place is not for real.
Santa Cruz has some spots which are pretty obviously poorer than others.
I took this instead of an awesome shot of a lady looking out her window, since she wouldn't stop staring at me. Understandable, I guess.
Santa Cruz feels so far away now, it seems silly to bother mentioning anything other than what went down when I decided to leave. My next destination was the legendary (to me: it's a hotel from the same chain as the hotel in Barcelona, and it seemed like it was going to be heavenly, so I had high hopes) Hotel Gala. Google told me it was in/around Santa Cruz, so around four in the afternoon, after having a couple of powerful rum and cokes, an avocado salad and a chat with a British guy working on cruise ships, I got in a cab and asked to go to Hotel Gala.
I should've known something was up when the cab driver was all like, "Hotel Gala?", and I was all like, "Heeeeeells yeah!" and he asked Hotel Gala again and I showed him the name on a piece of paper and then he left the cab to go ask his cabling friends if they knew where the heck it was. Well, Google, Hotel Gala is nowhere near Santa Cruz -- it's actually right next to Los Crisitanos, on the other side of the island. Cab driver and I had an awkward Spanglish conversation where he offered to bring me there for a "special deal" of €100 instead of €160. Thanks, cab driver, but I think I'll take the €5 bus ride there instead. Statión bus, por favor. €160 is way too muchos diñeros. Man, my lack of any knowledge of Spanish is super embarrassing.
So I get dropped off at the bus station and the right bus is there as I arrive! Hooray! So I hop onto the Playa de las Américas express bus (seriously, this was miraculously lucky... that bus comes once an hour or something) and arrive at my destination within one round of Plastic Beach.
Las Américas
Hotel Gala's in the middle of what, so far, is the most tourist-trappy part of Tenerife: lots of Burger Kings and McDonaldses and places with fair rides for kids and strip clubs and stores selling rock necklaces with giant "health, love, energy, trust: the power of stones" signs over the displays (barf.) I get into the hotel and wait at reception for what seems like forever behind couples and families checking in and out. I get my hotel card, go upstairs, watch a TV5 special on Russian icebreakers and pass out.
The next day, I wake up and head downstairs for the dreaded free breakfast. Don't get me wrong, free breakfast (which you're actually secretly charged €15 for, but whatevs) is great, but it's really unpleasant to eat alone. There's little that's fun about going downstairs and sitting at a table set for four and have hotel staff come by and ask whether you'll be 2, 3 or 4 dining there. They always look a little surprised when you say there's only one, and then they take all of the other dishes and cutlery away and you eat in rushed silence because you sort of want to get out of there because everyone else is either there with his/her 80 year old SO or pregnant or teething or something. sigh. My last day at Hotel Gala, I sat a table away from another girl who was eating on her own, but she looked all tough and awesome and no-bullshit. She looked like she was eating alone because she couldn't stand anyone else hanging around. She was mostly eating fruit and pasta, but I prefer remembering her as eating nothing but a plate full of roast beef. She was an effing rock.
After breakfast, I decide to make use of the hotel's spa. I take the elevator down there with my bathing suit and towel in a bag and I'm a bit nervous. I go into the ladies changeroom and... there's a man in there?... and I'm a bit more nervous, so I get changed in the washroom. (Sidenote: the next day some old man took a shower in our change room and came out as I was leaving the washroom, exposed wang and all. By that point I couldn't have cared less, but really? You guys have your own showers, you know.)
I leave my glasses in the change room and walk into the spa area (a bunch of pools and some showers) and I can't see aaaaaaanything. I walk right up to a sign you're supposed to read from afar which reads "envigorating pool". I step in and feel... nothing? A little cold? ...Should I stay in it? I get out and walk into the biggest pool, which has about 30 water features: bubble jets and "swan necks" and all sorts of things.
The big pool.
The only other person in the pool is some old man, and there are a couple of people poolside. I awkwardly roam around, sitting near various bubble jet things, not knowing what I'm supposed to experience.
...Then, at some point, I think, yeah, I get this. I get a little solipsistic and everyone disappears -- first figuratively, then literally. Once I have the place to myself, I alternate between the various pools. One... is a jacuzzi.
Jacuzzis and I go way back. Back until that time when my parents and I were staying at some swanky hotel around Calgary (I was 2 or something) and Dad stuck me in the hotel Jacuzzi (wait, that sounds super unsafe... so maybe I was older, but then this story is way more embarrassing?!) and noticed everyone leaving the pool after a couple of minutes. Yes, ladies and gents, Dad then noticed I had one of those ear-to-ear, I-just-pooped-and-it-was-AWESOME grins on my face. Dad promptly removed me and my parents bought me a new swimsuit. Two decades later, I congratulate myself for not pooping in a public pool.
Eventually try the fancy showers, with no success. They're all pretty lame. I mean, one is called "bucket shower". I don't know what I was supposed to expect, but I walked into it, looked up... and there was a wooden bucket with a chain hanging down from it. ...What?
Later that afternoon, I pick up €7 rum and some cans of coke from a convenience store and start wandering around with a can of honey rum and coke, trying to find a cheap place to eat.
Sugar overload.
... Then I walk about 20m and get approached by another guy. This one isn't so nice, ignoring the fact (and I am not lying here) that I hate the ticking of analog watches, so I can't wear the ones he's trying to sell me. He asks if I want to have coffee sometime. I think, yeah, alright. That I can do. I go get some bike-rental pamphlets and come back. The guy insists we go to his place for coffee, I insist we go to a café. He tells me there's one in his building, but we just end up going to his place... I refuse to walk in, telling him I don't think it's a good idea. He gets kind of irritated and we start walking back to his place of work (I guess the café thing is off? ...Uh...) He wants to hang out at night. Bleh.
Then I run into Papi again, who remembers my name and is chill. I tell him about the guy I met and how things were sketchy. He suggests going to a donair place, where we hang out and he tells me everything about his move from Senegal to Tenerife and his plans to move eventually to somewhere with better work opportunities. He shows me photos of his family. He's a nice guy with a €300/mo apartment and a job that pays €15/day at best, sometimes nothing in a day... and he works every day for 10-12 hours. I buy him a drink and complain about all of the old people at Los Cristianos. He says January and February are prime-time for geezers. I can finally chat with someone about all of these old people being everywhere.
Later, Papi walks me a nearby place he knows of with good bikes to rent. We chat up the French bike-rental lady, who is especially pleasant to talk to. She and her husband offer me a sweet bike rental deal and are hugely entertained by my Canadian accent. Her husband says he can't help but laugh through the entirety of any Céline Dion interview he watches because Canadian French is just so funny. I totally understand, since I can't keep a straight face when Hraban speaks with his Parisian French accent either. Man, it's nice to talk to nice people.
I walk home in the lovely 18-degree night air, watch some of the Australian Open and (although I like being here) look forward to being back in Amsterdam. Call me lame, but I like spending way too much time on the internet and I have a crush on Science Park. I mean, look at 'er. :)
See you soon, beloved Science Park, with your subtle Saint Andrew's Crosses.
22.1.11
Do Not Despair.
Dear Lord, this is awesome.
Ladies and gents (and Baltic demi-gods of 80s synth lines with names rhyming with Saul):
Last year, I did some very important research concerning places where I'd like to end up in the long run. In the process, I discovered that the people of the blogosphere largely agree that the Canary Islands have the best weather in the world. (Not many work opportunities, though: presuming (in pipe-dream) I end up working at a university, the only one here teaches exclusively in Spanish. Just a place to visit, then, I guess.) A couple of months ago, I mentioned my eventual plans to go there to Adam, another MoL student in Amsterdam. He'd been to Tenerife (the biggest of the Islands) and said he really enjoyed it, so within a couple of weeks I decided to go there, too.
Tenerife Adam.
The ticket prices were pretty reasonable -- under €100, with stops in Barcelona both ways. I booked a relatively cheap room in Barcelona through EasyJet and, er... ended up with this:
The FiraCongress has free WiFi and no English TV channels.
Not having eaten (and staying outside of the city centre), I decided to get a room service "Club Sandwich". The scare-quotes are appropriate because the sandwich had slices of ham, tuna and an egg-in-a-basket top slice. Actually, eggs are in everything here: egg and potato omelettes on a baguette, "eggs and chips"... you name it.
...And now for a story you've probably already heard: when I talked to Adam about coming to Tenerife, he said he came with no accommodation reservations and everything worked out. He recommended I do the same and "keep my options open", so I did… but I'm not a very relaxed/adventurous type, so I panicked once I got to the airport on a Friday night, thinking everything would be booked everywhere. (I spent some time looking up places to stay while in Barcelona, and there were alarmingly few hotels with vacancies over the weekend.) Worried I might end up sleeping on the street if I didn't find a place to stay very soon, I got a list of hotels from the info desk, called a random place in Los Cristianos (about 20km from the airport) and made a reservation immediately.
I took a cab to the hotel and walked in. Never had I seen so many old people in one place. They were EVERYWHERE -- in the lobby, in the restaurant, in the bar, everywhere. No one there (apart from the hotel staff) was under 60. No one.
I went to the hotel counter, thinking I may have made some sort of mistake, since this didn't seem like a… regular hotel? I thought I must've been at a senior resort. But there was a reservation under my name, so I paid for my room and ran for the elevator so I could hide upstairs. As I was waiting for the elevator, the only other twenty-something guest I'd seen showed up. We waited for our elevator in solidarity/awkward silence while some old British man tried to chat us up (in that sweet but lame old-man-humour way) about all the elevators being stuck on the 4th floor. Actually, within the time I was at that hotel, three old men told me old-man jokes about the elevators… one in Spanish. sigh.
The room was nice, but not nearly as nice as the cheaper place in Barcelona. Its hair dryer wins first prize in both the Weirdest Dryer and Best Approximation to an Elephant's Trunk categories:
...I seriously thought it was a vacuum cleaner at first.
The view was outstanding, though.
Los Cristianos sunrise.
Again, being not so great at relaxing and well-trained in the ways of panic, I worried about where I'd stay and what I'd do over the next couple of days. The Tenerife Sur airport had no internet whatsoever (not even pay-machines!) and the WiFi in my hotel cost € 4 an hour to use, and I somehow had to figure out where to stay, make reservations and get out of Seniorville. (It's come to my attention now that my hotel wasn't exceptional... the whole neighbourhood here is teeming with British and German people born well before the 50s.) Thankfully, I did a little walking around after checking out, bought a much needed (€6.50!) bag, some crappy pink sandals which clearly belong on a tiny Japanese tourist, and some sunscreen, and found a café with free WiFi. That gave me the opportunity to settle everything (and rest assured that, yes, there is internet access on Tenerife.) I'll be staying in hotels in the Northern, capital city of Santa Cruz for the next four days. Incidentally, about those sandals: I changed into them at the café and was immediately annoyed with them. They were painfully big and destroying my toes with every step. Eventually, I gave up on wearing them and went to a store to buy another pair, but nothing there was more comfortable than what I was already wearing -- so I left, walked for two blocks and decided to put socks on or something. That, my friends, is when I noticed these things were actually adjustable. They fit like a dream now and it's all gravy. So ends my acute bout of despair. :)
We'll chat again once I'm in Santa Cruz. xo!
SENIORS.
10.12.10
Berlijn, baby!
Sylvia and I drink ourselves some fancy, €3 cocktails before eating ourselves some fancy, €5 Indian dishes:
More cocktails at the venue:
The Brothers Dewaele:
You may want to turn off your speakers for this one (the sounds ain't pretty):
More to come. Long live Berlin, and see you in two weeks, Canada! :)
15.11.10
the night I finished my inquisitive semantics paper at 5:30am because I stupidly thought it'd be done before these lovely folk came over for dinner.
Notice we were five, and there are five bottles of wine on the table. I love these people. :3
18.10.10
Polder piano
I've found three pianos around the city now: one in the Astrophysics Department at Science Park 904, one at the Kriterion café/movie theatre, and one at Polder (a restaurant next to Science Park.) Avi is my duet partner. Adil took this photo of us at Polder on his birthday. :)
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