home again

Getting out of bed yesterday was awful. I don't remember jet lag like that since I visted New Zealand in 2005. I feel less spaced today, and my sense of taste seems to have returned. Long haul really fucks with your mind and body.

So, wow, LA. People keep asking what it was like; was it what you expected? Kind of. I expected the writers and film guys and movie chat (which was fun). The people and the food and the things going on in the city are incredible; the place itself, a bit odd. I am used to London's busy flow of people. Everyone is in a car in LA. Public transport barely exists. I am lucky to know someone who was willing to show me around and take me to cool places. If you went on your own and without a car it would be pretty miserable.

Incredible things: watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers at the Hollywood Cemetery; Gogol Bordello at the Mayan Theatre (weird website); Anthropologie; Harold Lloyd silent shorts at the Cinefamily cinema; the Hollywood sign and the observatory building; the Korean BBQ truck (they gave us - three girls, admittedly - free food); the Cabazon Dinosaurs; the Ace Motel at Palm Springs; the iced coffee drinks at Koffi, also in Palm Springs; so much more... I'll write about some of it in more detail next time.

LA made me miss London, which was a shock. I have suddenly fallen in love with the city I live in.

LA

LA is not like any other place I've ever been. I don't think I could ever live here.
I am not thin or cool enough, for a start.

(Determined to drop 10 pounds when I get home).

More when I return to the UK.

I'm in Spain

"I brought you a present."
Dad proffers a pizza cutter. It has come free with wine. We already own three.
"No, thank you."
"Also there are some of these." Two wine coolers. Also free with alcohol.
"Er. You can buy those at home."
...
Later; I'm packing. He brings in eight steak knives. I put them in my bag, resigned.
(They did not come free with the wine).

back

Things I ate:

2x chocolate almond croissants
1x other pastry with chocolate on it
1x Angelina's hot chocolate
1x Angelina's Mont Blanc
2x cheese omelettes
1x onion soup
1/2 small President camembert
2x bottles of champagne
1x brownie
chicken in rocket sauce with courgette and bechamel gratin
gorgeous bottle of Fleurie

and it was good.

paris

We are going, today! After my last exam(s)! It is good.

I forgot to post yesterday. I was packing. I have too many clothes bundled into my little suitcase. Boyfriend rang this morning while I was still in bed and I confessed to this. He fully supported the decision to take too much stuff because "it's nice to have choices" and this is why he is brilliant; even though it is clearly deranged to take eight dresses and two pairs of shoes and two jumpers and a skirt and and and etc for three days away he just says what he knows he should and everyone is happy.

Definitely not enough punctuation in that last sentence.

To revision! And making myself look chic and so on.

bloody trains

Stuck in Cambridge due to trains being rubbish. Am actually just being rather dramatic but don't particularly want to go to Stansted airport on a bus in order to get back into London.

Have just made a Lego train, though not without some difficulty. Boyfriend, increduously: 'Rachel, it's for ages three and up.'

Had forgotten that Lego hurts your hands when you try and pull it apart.

working on it

Had a brief, I love London moment today. Unexpectedly, it was on the bus. Transport in the city usually makes me snarl.

Asked for trouble by sitting next to an Italian in tight white jeans. Instead, I became surrounded by more Italians, a couple of Russians; a Thai girl, someone speaking French. Telephone calls. I was almost somewhere else.

Itchy feet.

american dream

For the last ten years, only one thing has been constant in my life "plan". I use the irritating little " because I am well aware that every major decision I have ever had to take has been made at the last minute. I have no plan. I have only this overwhelming, sickening desire to move to the US within the next five to ten years.

I cannot really explain it. It is an American Dream as far removed from Steinbeck's as you might get, but then, not. I'm not after wealth, but I am in search of something seen on the screen, something ostensibly perfect, something a little Desperate Housewives with a big twist of malicious Stepford smashed in among the ice. I want Disney, but I want it with the undercurrent of all that is terrible about clapboard facades and signs swinging in a humid bay breeze.

I'm in Connecticut. I might get my wish, if just for a while.

I'm afraid I shall be sending e-mails to all those who didn't request them, telling you about the things we're going to get up to, but do check here for pieces more tedious and pretentious in tone. Wouldn't want to let you down.

the shoe fetish gets really silly

I have packed five pairs of shoes for my month away. Five. That is stupid.

Oddly, my backpack has still got a fair bit of room. My sleeping bag squashes to nothing (as nothing as a sleeping bag can be) and I have all the magical frugal travelling things you're meant to take, like a bit of chamois leather masquerading as a towel. I'm very fond of my car cleaning cloth, as it happens - until it starts to smell. That happens round about the ten day mark, I've found, as a result of being transported in its plastic bag home, nestled in among many other rucksacks in the belly of a dodgy bus.

Seriously, five pairs of shoes. That's not counting my beloved battered boots that I'm wearing on the plane.

On Wednesday I fly to Connecticut. Next week, we go south to Buenos Aires. The reason I have five (fine, SIX) pairs of shoes is really quite logical; the two climates will be very different.

In other shoe news: I have given myself yet another haematoma (the thing that is causing my nail to fall off), but this time, with the aid of high heels, rather than ill-fitting running shoes. That tells you all you need to know about my last few weeks in the city.

getting the message

Dear ex-boyfriend who found me on Facebook,

Given that I did not reply to your Myspace message, did you really think I'd react favourably to a Facebook friend request? If I wanted you in my life, I'd have kept you in it. Leave me alone.

Sincerely,
me.

PS: Facebook need to make their blocking process simpler. Your name, ex-boyfriend, is so common that it took me ten minutes of clicking through search results to find your photo and remove your electronic presence. Ugh.

...

In better and unrelated news, I am going away tomorrow; ten days of sailing in the BVIs. I am taking my notebook. All I have been able to think about for the past month is Leaving. I will be writing. Hopefully I'll blog about travel when I get back. It was the primary purpose of this, I know.

Until then.

diet coke days

My sister came home at Christmas looking like a Fresher. As in, looking like all of us do when we first go to university and spend every night Not Sleeping and instead drinking things with curious names. As an officially boring finalist, I can't cope with the colourful cocktails and late nights anymore. However, I never learn and so am today nursing a mild hangover, aided by the cure for all known diseases, Diet Coke.

I suppose it was a celebration of sorts, because Good Things have happened this week. Here. Have a list. Lucky you.
1. I wrote a bit of my dissertation. 12000 words is still a lot but at least I have a few of them in an order that vaguely makes sense.
2. I got into Law School. That should maybe be first. Whatever.
3. I booked flights to Buenos Aires for July. I say "I", I actually had very little to do with it and merely nodded when appropriate. Friends are brilliant.

Millions of other little happy things have occurred recently as well.
Oh my! Life is good. Even with a hangover.

you tart

Of course I was ill this weekend, just when there were plans with girlfriends, a party splattered with neon paint, cold clear weather to walk in.

Still. We laughed and went to an exhibition and ate thick hot chocolate in a cafe filled with bittersweet scents, drank too much wine in a favourite pub. Every year since we left school I have travelled with these girls, the Tarts, and after they left on Sunday I flicked through my travel notes. I never wrote about Bordeaux, other than in that nostalgic romantic way from E's living room in a creaking apartment. Here, because I still haven't got around to posting any more of my summer travel e-mails and reflections, are a few notes I wrote while spending time in a wonderful French city last September:

J is having a rather sexually frustrated time of it. Things she has yelled out this holiday, with no prompting:
"BOOBIES!"
"Can you switch this fanny thing off?"
"Willy!"
When asked why she'd said the last one, she replied "I don't know. It just came over me."
...
I have just found a Parker ink pen in S's bag. S says:
"It's for drawing in my eyebrows."
Gullible E asks, after a pause, "What colour ink does it have in it?"
...
J, as she hides a piece of gum in a napkin, giggling to herself all the while:
"Nasty surprise."
...
Stood in the winery cellar, having boring making-of-wine process explained to us. French man keeps referring to "Racking off."
E starts to giggle and a minute later we are both the subject of disapproving stares as tears of laughter start to trickle down our cheeks.

I did write a lot of pretty, prosaic pieces about the churches and the architecture and all the overblown deliciousness I usually indulge in. But this sitting around and eating and laughing is the stuff memories are really made of, don't you think?

getting fresh

I spent the weekend in Southampton visiting my younger sister. She is in her first year at university and still in the Hardcore Fresher phase where every night is full of drinks with questionable names (Jesticle, anyone?) and chicken burgers from a van owned by a man named Ali. I drank one of those innuendo laden cocktails last night and regretted it when I woke up with a head full of gnomes with gongs at 7am. Clearly my body clock does not allow for Jesticle abuse and still believes I should get out of bed (or, you know, off the floor) at Bright and Early AM.

Southampton is fun. Getting home was not. Stuck at a sorry excuse for a train station because the delay to the first part of my journey meant I missed my collection I texted nearly everyone I knew with much RAGE about the fucking trains. My experiences in relatively economically weak Eastern Europe this summer with trains that Run! And! Are On Time! make me particularly bitter about the stupid fucking government and their stupid fucking trains.

But! I had an awesome time. Like, totally groovy, which is my sister's new phrase du jour. I didn't embarrass myself particularly. I didn't throw myself at men who are too young for me, and I only had to use the toilet in that awful, awful bar once.

I am exhausted now because I am a sad old fart and so, to bed.

bonjour, kiddo

Springtime in Paris this year sold France to me in a way I'd never expected. When it comes to travel I am apparently a hopeless romantic. All that emotion that most 20-something women expend on men is, in my case, channelled into falling desperately in love with cities.

Bordeaux is seducing me as I type, as my girlfriends tunelessly sing old songs in a kitchen on the Rue Jean Burguet and we chat about what we've done today (an art gallery; an excavation that pertains nicely to my dissertation under a church on the Place des Martyrs de la Resistance; drinking hot chocolate that gave me a shaky sugar rush) and the sun sinks and the gin at my right hand goes straight to my head.

It is beautiful, it is interesting, I am in love.
More soon.

geography 101

Could someone who has a clue about these things please tell me why my handy little stat count code is registering my visits as coming from Birkenhead? I don't live in Birkenhead. I live nowhere near Birkenhead. I had no idea where it was until I Googled it. (It's in the northwest of England, far too close to Liverpool for accented comfort.) I thought for a week (because in theory my visits are actually blocked, my sweet stat counter) that I had a devoted northern fan.

Quite why I have the thing when hardly anyone reads this is entirely due to that self-indulgent smugness that makes anyone start a blog in the first place.

Anyway. The geography thing, it is a recurring problem. My knowledge of English counties and their locations is sparse enough to make the traveller in you fall to the ground moaning. As you will discover when I finally post the next batch of e-mails from my trip to Eastern Europe this summer, my grasp of worldwide geography isn't too hot, either. Let's take, for example, the fact that I had no clue Auschwitz was in Poland until my sister casually dropped it into conversation - as smoothly as you can do so with a death camp, that is - that we could head there from Krakow.

It drives that same sister insane that I will set out for a destination with very little idea of how we will actually get there. But this is the magic of travel for me; to set out in a new city on foot and get lost. You find so much more when you're not bent over a map.

Tomorrow I leave for Northern Ireland to spend two nights with friends. I then fly to Bordeaux for a holiday with some close girlfriends.

I suspect I will have some stories.
Until then.

extra!: Vilnius

The day after I sent that last dispatch from Vilnius, we crept into the sleeping town early to visit a district called Uzupis. This slightly run-down part of town declared itself "independent" in 1997, and has its own flag, currency, president, and all the other tidy tasteless little factoids that you can munch on at Wikipedia.

On April 1st each year the residents set up border guards on the bridge you must cross to reach the district and you can have your passport stamped.

The upshot of all this tongue-in-cheek, er, cheek, is that they have their own constitution, posted on Paupio street near the statue of an angel standing on an egg. Oh, yes.

I was possibly particularly struck by the following points of the constitution, because I copied them into my notebook, but you can never rely fully on my reasons for writing things down. For God's sake, I wrote the words TUK TUK TUK in my notes the previous day and expected my later self to recall why.

Anyhow. They're really rather lovely:

10. Everyone has the right to love and take care of the cat.
13. A cat is not obliged to love its owner, but must help in times of need.
24. Everyone has the right to understand nothing.
27. Everyone shall remember their name.
32. Everyone is responsible for their freedom.
41. Do not surrender.

I have searched for a link to the whole list, but failed to find anything sensible, so I suggest you book your flights now.

You think I'm joking.

travel snobbery

I was going to write about my time in Marbella this week, but it will have to wait until tomorrow, as this has turned into a big (and, let me point out wearily, tongue-in-cheek) rant about why I hate airports.

Spain was good and I shall write proper travel shit about it soon.

My irritation with the Stupid People of the planet is never more venomous than at an airport in high season. I don't just fly at UnGodly AM because I'm cheap; I also do it because the demon children of the world are likely to be dopey from interrupted sleep and their pramface parents mute in surprise, celebrating with 4am pints of wifebeater in that cozy traditional fashion.

I had the misfortune to take a flight home from Malaga yesterday that coincided with every awful Brit on the Costa del Sol attempting to flee Torremolinos, or wherever they'd been munching through plates of chips and sizzling their skins to a perfect hog roast red, at the same time as your delicate author was merely trying to make it to the Easyjet flight with one smug hand luggage bag full of all I had needed for five days in Marbella intact.

Malaga airport, as it happened, was relatively free of the zombified stupids. Bristol airport, it was not. The queue for immigration was dismally enormous. They didn't open the Non-EU passport lane to ease the rush because, well, we're British, and if you put a sign up that says "Jump" we're programmed to bleat "How high?". At least this time they didn't ask me to remove my glasses when they checked my passport as they did at Heathrow when we flew in two weeks ago. Spectacles! they're the way forward for the terrorists, don't you know.

There were three policemen (three!) patrolling the luggage reclaim hall, guarding a trolley of bags that needed to be pawed through by customs. There were children on those demonic wheely trainers, flying into pillars and making a noise that twisted my shrivelled soul still further. There were even more children, clambering on the belts that your bags, if you're lucky, appear on after a wait of a day or more. Every time I pick up my hold luggage I make it my aim to swipe as many hellspawn as I can as I swing it away from the belt; the record so far is two. Could Do Better. There were more children and more children and Oh God why do people have children?

And why arm the policemen if they're not allowed to use totally reasonable force to subdue the little shits? (Just to point out, in total seriousness, if one person, but one, gives me the "excuse" that such children are unable to behave because they are "only three, what do you expect?", I will smack you into next week. I was a very well behaved three year old. I know plenty of well behaved kids that age. Hence the call for arresting the children. And more on that point another time.)

We made it home after a trip through Bristol city centre during which I saw far too many men wearing women's clothes (was there a special festival?), and far too many women wearing clothes that were at least ten sizes too small (that, I am aware, is a totally average sight in any British town).

And yet, I am sat here, browsing through flights for the next year, wondering idly where next.

Oh, the trials we face.

responses to Riga

via e-mail:

"Living in the hen party capital of Britain (though quite why anyone would choose to go to York for their hen party is completely beyond me) I can assure you it is strictly necessary to take parents. Both mothers in fact. There is a beautiful thought to ponder."

"you're daft."

[describing a Spanish McDonalds. The food is evidently a reassuring constant world over.] "Was like eating melted, flavourless spam."

dispatch: Riga

14/07

Riga is the stag party capital of Eastern Europe, so I am told. I didn't quite believe it until in McDonalds just now (we shall avoid the shame that is the fact that I ate in McDonalds) there were 20 full grown men wearing numbered shirts with nicknames printed on the back, things like Acorn and Sputnik or The Daddy (do you have to take the appropriate parent on such pre-wedding adventures? Terrifying thought). Should be interesting to see what the bars are like tonight.

On a slightly similar note, Eastern European men are so much less sleazy than their Western counterparts. Think of the number of times, girls (oh shit, political correctness and a creeping sense of amusement demands me to include you boys in this as well) you've been chased down the street by a pizza-greased Italian (stereotype? Me?). None of that here. That, or I look so much like a tramp these days they just don't bother with me.

Talking of tramps (this flows rather nicely today, though I haven't told you anything about Riga itself) the women here, oh God. Amazing. I wrote this in my notebook (yes, I carry a notebook, Hi, I'm Rachel, I'm a total loser, also I use too many brackets) last night while sat in the central square:

Young people in the Baltic States like to wear socks with sandals. WHY.
Also, women are orange.
Also, they like matching tie dye suits.
And high heels.
Day and night.

The streets in the Baltic State old towns are generally cobbled and represent a challenge to me in my Converse, so God knows how the Fake Baked beauties (word used in the sweepingest of sweeping ideas) don't break their ankles daily. It's quite fascinating to watch them hobble, fake Chanel sunglasses perched on bleached blonde hair, over plucked-to-oblivion-and-redrawn-in-black eyebrows, around stunning Old Town Riga.

Riga itself. Yes, it's gorgeous. Apart from the bit where we are staying, where outside our hotel three drunk people sit huddled on a broken bench all day. It's the Russian quarter, apparently. I'm not sure whether the German meant the bench, or the streets in general. The Art Nouveau district is a treat, totally different to most Baltic buildings and well worth a visit. Riga market is truly hellish, though the setting is great; five enormous hangers that they intended to use for Zeppelins, but, well, never really got round to. The parks are frustrating, because you can't walk on the grass. Why bother having them? Very odd. The romantic bit of me that is twisted somewhere in my stomach was delighted by the padlocks on the bridge, though, inscribed with lovers' names and the date they were placed there. Quite sweetly naff.

We have been to a ton of churches, and also the Ethnography Museum, which I'm not quite sure I understand as Ethnography to me is not something that can be quite defined in traditional museum terms. I'll leave the Archaeology out of this, though.

Shit, this is long, again. Apologies. On a finishing note, have a few more bits from my notebook, most of which sprung from God knows where in my brain:

SEGWAY!

Sarah is being attacked by killer pigeons.

Swiss people don't get engaged.

dispatch: Tallinn

11/07
It is raining in Tallinn as well. Also, we are sat in a basement internet cafe surrounded by gamers. W A S and D are particularly worn on this keyboard, and if you're into your geekery this is a pretty sure sign that not a lot apart from lovely nerd gaming has been going on down here.

Let us pause momentarily to enhance this picture. The boy next to me is belching more or less continuously. The man behind the desk looked terrified when my sister and I entered, despite the necessary dork uniform of waterproofs and chunky glasses. There is weird incongruous techno music blaring. I feel horribly at home.

Moving on. Tallinn has a staggeringly beautiful old town. It is built onto a hill, and looks a little like a fairytale castle. There's a Disneytown vibe, which is a little... I was going to sad, but I'm not sure I mean that. Artificial, certainly, but it does mean what they have is preserved beautifully. Some gorgeous Gothic architecture and a whitewashed church that belongs in a Spanish square stained with orange trees and filled with wooden coats of arms.

We spent an hour curled under the low ceilings of a cafe that definitely makes my favourites list, hiding from the weather, which had thoughtfully rearranged our plans to go the beach.

I can't remember where we're going tomorrow. I don't know why I can't remember.

I shall be keeping these short-ish from now on. [This will turn out to be a lie. I am incapable of shutting up.]