Song of the day: Þjóðvegur 66 (Road 66) - KK
Today started out pretty good, and promises to get better. DOMA got overruled, I had a croissant for breakfast, and oh, yeah. I'm going to Romania tonight.
That's right, who's going vampire hunting? This guy.
So this might for the time being turn into a travel blog (exciting, isn't it.) and document my discoveries and trials at a course/convention on youth unemployment. After that, me and my friend who shall henceforth be known as The Queen of the Flying Tigers (at her request; I'll think of something shorter) will frolic about the country, and among other things visit Castle Bran; one of the several places linked for marketing purposes to the disturbing individual known is pop culture as Count Dracula. Full name Vlad 'The Impaler' Dracul III.
We will be staying at a location in Transylvania, and this will cause me quite a bit of distress for the reason that after watching that awful Sandler flick Hotel Transylvania, I am utterly incapable of pronouncing it normally. Instead it will sound like I am being injected with a syringe full of clichéd stereotypical accents while being electroshocked at the same time and it goes something like 'TRANSilVANia!!!'
I will therefore resist all and any impulse to ever say the name. This may prove difficult.
From what I've seen, the temperature in Romania at the moment and for the foreseeable future will be hanging somewhere around 30 degrees Centigrade. This, of course, means that my brain is going to melt and I am going to DIE. Because, you see, here in this particular part of the northern hemisphere, we call it summer when the temperature rises over ten degrees, and 17 degrees for any amount of time is considered a heat wave. We do occasionally get something like 24 degree, at which point we stop wearing clothes at all and sleep outside. But I exaggerate (only a little bit:)
I'm not even going to get a tan, because I don't get tans; I get slightly weathered, or in extreme cases bleached, rather like a piece of driftwood on a foreign beach. And if I don't wear sunscreen at, like, strength 30-50, I'll burn so badly I won't be able to move. But I shall prevail; I have churches and museums and weird shops to see and people to meet! I even intend to wear my Pizza John shirt as much as I can in the vain hope that I will meet other Nerdfighters, and that they won't be discouraged from talking to the maniac with the giant map getting lost as soon as she steps outside her hostel in midtown Bucharest.
It's odd, though, how things turn out. I didn't ever expect going to Romania of all places; I don't even know anyone who's gone there, but I immediately got excited when the Queen (let's just call her Europa. For the moon/continent, not the mythological figure. Though I could of course make some nasty and uncalled for joke regarding her love of animals) told me about the project and since we could both afford it we thought why not? Although when looking at the photos she was a tad discouraged by the fact that the architecture looked very similar to Poland, from whence she originally hails. But we think it will still be different enough to be very interesting and worth visiting. It will be an adventure.
So I'll try to upload some pictures of interesting things and some interesting facts/happenstances as well once we've began our journey.
Now all I need is Rafiki to shower us with pieces of wisdom and make us get lost and we're set.
Friday, June 28, 2013
Sunday, June 23, 2013
Fiction is strange, but reality needn't make sense
Song of the day: Combine Harvester - The Wurzels
So right now I really should be working on the Harry Potter fanfic which seems determined to overtake my life, but I have got to get today's happenings out of my system or I might actually go a bit barmy.
Sometimes, working at a grocery store is kinda boring. There are the bad days, where you end up with that person that's always late and can only be persuaded into doing something with a forklift, and the good days, where there is just the right amount of customers for you to actually get a chance to eat your lunch. And then there are days that are just... weird.
For example last week, when over two days I met two elderly men who both happened to be missing their left thumb. And yesterday when the local vicar paid for his 198 krónu Diet Coke entirely in ones and fives (which takes ages to count and the UK/US equivalent is probably someone paying entirely in pennies.) And that time when some woman threatened to stop doing business with us because we were out of her preferred brand of butter.
And today, when a seventy year old man in a leather jacket and a Mohawk bought a pineapple, talked to me about mathematics, in which he concluded that the only numbers in existence were 1-9, and that Darwin's theory of Evolution was the equivalent of 0. Then he tried to get me to convert to Christianity on the basis that school books were constantly being rewritten but not the Bible (hah.) so the good book had therefore to be correct. He was even carrying a Bible with him. To the grocery store!
And then he swept off. I don't think I can emphasize enough just how strange he was. It was impossible not to be drawn in by what he was saying (especially the math), and then suddenly he just vanished with barely a ktnxbi.
After sitting dazed for a few minutes, I went back to work, but when the store was conveniently empty, I nearly had a stroke from laughing too hard (note that this wasn't as commentary on anything that he said, but just on the sheer weirdness of something so odd happening.)
Then my mum dropped by, surprised to see me nearly catatonic, but her confusion cleared when she saw the piece of paper he had scribbled on. 'Oh, you've met the Zero-man.'
And it turns out he had had that exact same conversation with her a few weeks earlier, but apart from that, neither of us had ever seen him before. Which makes all this even stranger, because our town is pretty small (only about 13,000 people live here), and I can assure you would not miss a person like that.
Then there is his really weird Darwin argument. So his point the entire time (when we were still in the less surreal territories of math) was the importance of zero... But then he turns right around and asks me if I 'believe' in the Theory of Evolution, with the implication that it is but a toerag and I should get me some 2 Corinthians 5:7.
I am SO. CONFUSED.
I am going to submerge myself in wizarding trivia, and by the time I resurface, the world had better make sense again. Well... at least more sense than it does right now.
So right now I really should be working on the Harry Potter fanfic which seems determined to overtake my life, but I have got to get today's happenings out of my system or I might actually go a bit barmy.
Sometimes, working at a grocery store is kinda boring. There are the bad days, where you end up with that person that's always late and can only be persuaded into doing something with a forklift, and the good days, where there is just the right amount of customers for you to actually get a chance to eat your lunch. And then there are days that are just... weird.
For example last week, when over two days I met two elderly men who both happened to be missing their left thumb. And yesterday when the local vicar paid for his 198 krónu Diet Coke entirely in ones and fives (which takes ages to count and the UK/US equivalent is probably someone paying entirely in pennies.) And that time when some woman threatened to stop doing business with us because we were out of her preferred brand of butter.
And today, when a seventy year old man in a leather jacket and a Mohawk bought a pineapple, talked to me about mathematics, in which he concluded that the only numbers in existence were 1-9, and that Darwin's theory of Evolution was the equivalent of 0. Then he tried to get me to convert to Christianity on the basis that school books were constantly being rewritten but not the Bible (hah.) so the good book had therefore to be correct. He was even carrying a Bible with him. To the grocery store!
And then he swept off. I don't think I can emphasize enough just how strange he was. It was impossible not to be drawn in by what he was saying (especially the math), and then suddenly he just vanished with barely a ktnxbi.
Here, have an alien Marmoset. It makes just as much sense as anthing
else in this post. I am told it comes in peace.
After sitting dazed for a few minutes, I went back to work, but when the store was conveniently empty, I nearly had a stroke from laughing too hard (note that this wasn't as commentary on anything that he said, but just on the sheer weirdness of something so odd happening.)
Then my mum dropped by, surprised to see me nearly catatonic, but her confusion cleared when she saw the piece of paper he had scribbled on. 'Oh, you've met the Zero-man.'
And it turns out he had had that exact same conversation with her a few weeks earlier, but apart from that, neither of us had ever seen him before. Which makes all this even stranger, because our town is pretty small (only about 13,000 people live here), and I can assure you would not miss a person like that.
Then there is his really weird Darwin argument. So his point the entire time (when we were still in the less surreal territories of math) was the importance of zero... But then he turns right around and asks me if I 'believe' in the Theory of Evolution, with the implication that it is but a toerag and I should get me some 2 Corinthians 5:7.
I am SO. CONFUSED.
I am going to submerge myself in wizarding trivia, and by the time I resurface, the world had better make sense again. Well... at least more sense than it does right now.
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