Not only can you wander the streets of St. Petersburg without the hassle of getting a visa to visit, now you can also ride the Trans-Siberian Railway from the comfort of your living room. Check out the various things to listen to on your journey.
Google sent their Street View car around Oslo recently, but Boing Boing recently reported that some friends of the drivers waited to ambush the car. While Google Street View hasn’t come to Russia yet, it turns out that Yandex, the predominant search engine in Russia, has been adding their own street views. Some users have discovered an Easter egg (in the software sense of the term) in the street views of St. Petersburg.
Étudiant № 7 est une étudiante portugaise!
You know how some people have a collection of exercise equipment in their basement from unkept resolutions? I have a small collection of French textbooks. My first was acquired almost five years ago in Moscow: a cheap paperback that I could travel with. While learning through Russian was not a problem (in fact, helpful in certain ways), I found two many errors in the book to trust it any more. My second was a gift (book and CD), but I never made time for it. Later I invested in an overpriced textbook with exercise book (and CD), and made it through a chapter or two. But still never found time and motivation to concentrate.
But then, in December, I disovered the Alliance Française in Dublin, conveniently located downtown, not far from work, with courses twice a week in the evening, two hours each night. Put this together with my employer’s benefit of reimbursement of up to €75 from my employer for a personal-enrichment course (every little bit helps!) and it starts to sound like a pretty good deal.
So my first class was last night. Thanks to my years of not actuallly practicing, I started with a beginner class. Naturally you have to start with simple phrases and expressions, so we learned how to say our name, where we live, and what our nationality is. So, our of six people, we had:
So … only one Irish person. And it came out that her father is Dutch, so, you know, she’s only half Irish.
Reminds me of the staff at work: one Canadian, one English, three American, one Italian, and one Irish. Or of a meeting I had at NUI Galway in August: four American, one Hungarian, two French (or was one Italian?), and one Irish. “Typical Galway meeting,” they said. Wikipedia tells me that 10% of the country’s population are foreign citizens, but someone I keep running into all of them!
After my encounter with a bland curry with celery, you would think I had learned to stay away from ethnic food in Ireland. However, I fell for it again. At a farmer’s market there was a stand with a Mexican guy and his Irish wife selling various Mexican dishes. (Think Pilar’s Tamales in Ann Arbor.) I thought I would risk it since he was actually Russian, but my burrito came with … carrots and celery. You call that a burrito?
Haven’t really written much of anything about life in Ireland since complaining about the country being unprepared for winter weather. (This despite the Economist warning expats not to complain about your host country.) First, to follow up on my complaints about management of city water, I’m pleased to report that last night was the first time our apartment had water through the whole night. (We had lost water pressure every night starting around 8 p.m. and going through the night for the past month, so I’m hoping things are fixed for good now.)
Anyway, the days are slowly getting longer and warmer, and work has slowed down, so both have allowed me to explore Dublin a bit more, formulating and revising my thoughts on the city as I get to know it better. I could offer comparison between Dublin and Ann Arbor, but I’ve been thinking a lot about how Dublin would compare to a similar US city (Providence seems like a good fit) and about the ways in which Dublin is similar to or different from other European cities. So let me approach it this way.
It’s nice to be in a city and not just a college town. There are real adults on the streets who live, work and shop there. They dress like adults and have good taste in food, sustaining a strong restaurant scene.
As is more common in Europe than the US, the center of the city has real stores that people shop in, and there are convenience stores within walking distance of anywhere you live that have things you might actually buy, not just junk food. Ann Arbor is more walkable than your average American city but still caters mostly to out-of-town visitors.
Through a Russian conversation group, I’ve met a number of students at Trinity. It’s good to see that so many of them, even those not majoring in Russian, have a chance to study abroad for a whole year. I’ve encountered a higher level of language proficiency than I generally find among US students, though I’ll admit that the group is self-selective.
Now for a few things I don’t like:
I came back from Russia drinking more tea than I used to, and I expect to come back from Ireland eating digestive cookies.
If you’ve been avoiding answering an email from me, let me just say that it’s okay that you won’t be coming to visit me. I understand. While I was optimistic that I’d have more visitors than in Russia five years ago, I understand that life keeps people busy. And I haven’t made Dublin sound all that appealing anyway. I’ll soon have to give back the sleeping bag anyway, so perhaps it’s all for the better!
(I’ve embedded this photo by Marc here.)
Now that I’ve finally finished droning on about my trip and sharing all my photos (and everyone else’s!) with you, you probably want to know what my general impressions of Morocco are.
I liked it as a whole, though I will admit that Marrakech left me a bit disillusioned realizing that there were so many people with so many ways to make money off of tourists. I was impressed with the infrastructure of the country—on par with Queretaro and similarly European in feel—yet disappointed that Marrakech, crawling with tourists, couldn’t have put up a few more street signs. We were all disappointed that we had practically no opportunities to interact with Berber women during our time outside of the major cities. As one woman in my group put it, “You feel like you’re only getting half of the story.”
We met in the morning for a walking tour of Marrakech led not by Abdou but by a local. (More on this below.) Our tourguide took us to Koutoubia Mosque (but not inside) and then the Bahia Palace, whose architecture is well-preserved but appreciation of which was somewhat distracted by installations of contemporary art (like this dumpster covered with mirrors). Next we went to a place full of second-hand everything called something like “Ali Baba’s Bazaar”.
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Be sure to click words that aren’t in black to see more photos!
Those who slept outside said they slept well.
Throughout the past few days, we kept asking Abdou if we would ever reach a part of the desert where there was only sand and no greenery. He said we would. This was the day. The past two days had been in a valley, but now we entered a more open area, where the wind was stronger. My hat kept blowing off (luckily I had a neck string!), so I switched to using a towel to cover my head.
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Readers asked for more beards and camels. I can only provide one new beard shot, but here’s one camel and another. Plus me looking uncomfortable from camel-riding. (I didn’t just look the part!)
