my apologies to those of you i intended to see in the states, but never manged to see.
my apologies to those of you i saw once or twice, said that i'll definitely be in contact and we'd hang out again before i left and then i didn't. again, it's my lazy and distracted fault.
also, my apologies to everyone who will try to read this post. it's enormous and would be in everybody's best interest, probably, download the word version and print it up.. it will be easier on the eyes.
so, what happened?
well, my visit to the states was absorbing and nice and i was able to immerse myself in the bubble of home comfort once again. i wasn't particularly missing the states when i headed home, but when i left i reflected upon how much i actually had missed it. it caught me at quite a bit of a surprise.
i enjoyed seeing my family, my friends etc etc. i think american people... in particular midwesterners, are truly nice people and i truly appreciate that now. when i arrived back in europe - to be specific, Schipol airport in Amsterdam - i tried to idly chat with a KLM agent (admittedly, they're not renowned for being very nice) while she printed up my boarding pass, and she was simply having none of it. she wasn't rude, she just simply didn't care. couldn't be bothered.
whereas, everywhere i went in the states, people would chat freely. maybe one in twenty wouldn't smile when i smiled at them, but that percentage gets much higher this side of the pond.
on a similar, us vs them note, i've written before how i think czech drivers are quite probably the worst drivers anywhere in the world - not true, i know, but certainly they are much worse than the states... well, i saw a car accident before i ever got into the terminal in prague. i'm not talking about seeing it from the airplane, either. no, the accident was two service vehicles in the airport.
when we landed in prague, we pulled into a new wing of Terminal 1 - a wing which is unequipped to deal with international passengers (i.e. no passport checks). so, what did they do? they put us on a bus, drove us in a big circle and let us out at a wing where they could check passports. however, as we were driving in the big circle, skirting the base of the wing at which we arrived, there was an accident in the formal lanes demarcated for service vehicles. one of the super heavy, super strong carts used to pull carts full of baggage to and from the airplanes had been run into head first by a little Skoda Fabia - the smallest car available by the czech national. the Fabia was definitely a car for service crew of some sort... regardless, the front end of the Fabia was completely crumpled in and it looked like the cart was mostly okay.
the funny part is that the accident managed to take up BOTH LANES of the service road! we had to swerve outside the lines to get around it. i found that very funny and very prototypically czech.
anyway, so how were the States, Iain?
i arrived in St. Paul/Minneapolis way back in November, just before Thanksgiving. i spent Thanksgiving with my extended family, which i hadn't done in at least two years and everybody got a kick out of the socks i brought them as a gift. (my friend who owns the company that produces them needed to unload some stock so i got bundles for free - other friends i saw on this trip were also gifted with them as well.)
after Thanksgiving, i hung out in the Twin Cities for the weekend, hanging out with my brother and his wife and also with some friends from Carleton. a good time was had and i followed the weekend up with a few days in my grandmother's flat.. er.. apartment (i'm already slipping back into british vernacular) before flying back to Indiana.
i managed to unload some DVD's and almost sold my car during the week that followed. but my friend couldn't afford the price i quoted and i wasn't willing to come down... but i'll come back to that.
my brother and his wife came down to Indiana the following weekend, which was excellent. i reinvested myself in IU basketball at the time, too. once i started watching and/or listening, they started winning their games. i also, for some reason (maybe it was their perfect record at the time) started following the Colts. i've NEVER EVER been even remotely interested in American football, but for some reason (i think it might be the fact that i'm watching more sports in general over here - notably European football aka soccer) i got into following the Colts. i couldn't bring myself to watch the games, but i at least read the analyses.
anyway, after completing a monster 1000 piece Simpsons puzzle (a mosaic of Homer's head made out of scenes from the show) in a mind-bending 40-some hours (i'm guesstimating), my brother, his wife and i all hopped on a flight from IND to the Twin Cities. however, from there i continued directly onto San Jose, a ticket which i had bought ages ago thinking that i might need to meet with representatives at Apple and/or the film studios in LA regarding my business. but i had found out the week before that no meetings were necessary and so i ended up staying with my friend (hey, aka kandi!) in San Jose the entire time.
i had a blast in San Jose because my friend and i have somehow managed to independently develop the same goofy sense of humor.
my first real out of context event took place in CA. my brother, who is a consultant and is working in Oakland at the moment, met up with my friend and i for a viewing of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. i rarely see my brother outside of familiar places, so it was very awkward to see him in CA - let alone Oakland. to top it off, aka kandi was there too, which was weird in a good way. my brother had never met her before and she and i had met in prague, so it was all very out of context.
also while in CA, i went to Monterey twice. the first time was to take the Monterey Movie Tour, but it didn't go the day that i went down there - having rented a car explicitly for that reason, it was waste of money. however, i did have a wonderful time walking along the shoreline instead. i walked from downtown Monterey to Cannery Row and out of Monterey (the city) to the end of the (Monterey) peninsula... and back.
the second time i went to Monterey was on my last full day in the area, i was with my friend (kandi) and we went whale watching. we saw one huge (blue?) whale breaching and ostensibly saw one more and falsely saw about a million more. we also saw an otter, many sea lions and other random sea creatures.
in between all of this, i spent a lot of time uploading a lot of music onto my computer, courtesy of kandi's boyfriend. (thanks, dude!)
i returned to IN from CA. i was in IN for only a few short days before the X-mas holidays, for which my family went to Kohler, WI. we stayed in a nice golf resort there, but it seems as if we did little of note outside of spend a lot of time with family (which was indeed fun). i have some photos, including of a house built by the Kohler family. the house was built in the style of the family's house in Austria. it was an alpine house and looked very out of place in central WI (and surrounded by semi-modern suburban housing). again, an out of context event.
after the X-mas holidays, i drove my grandmother back to St. Paul, where i stayed for a few nights. her flat was an organized mess because she, being the astoundingly capable 90-year-old that she is, had to move all of her belongings out of the kitchen because at the beginning of the new year, a remodeling was going to happen to the kitchen. thus, she moved everything in her kitchen, one by one, into her living room/dining room. as my cousin (once removed) said: i'm surprised that she didn't wear a path into the carpet, making so many round trips.
that was the last time i saw her kitchen in its old form - i took some (blurry) photos of it in its old form (which i may post at some distant time). her new kitchen will have a state of the art fridge, a state of the art (convection) oven/stove, a new microwave, and many other modern amenities, not to mention a bamboo floor.
despite dropping off my grandmother, i needed to pick up some bags i brought with me from prague for my return trip to IN... because on my way home i was going to stay with a friend in Chicago (for 4 nights or so, through New Year's Day) and most of the items in the bags belonged to my friend in Chicago - he's the one who i helped one night in November pack and/or organize all of his (remaining) belongings in prague in preparation for his move to Chicago (actually, St. Charles, IL to be precise).
i arrived in St. Charles a few nights before New Year's. i met up with N + C, which was my second major out of context event in the trip. since i knew N from prague, it was very weird to see him St. Charles/Chicago. but it was also very cool! (a big thanks goes to N + C for putting up with me for those 4 nights!)
the third major out of context event happened during my first full day in IL. that (Friday) morning, i woke up very early and boarded the commuter train from St. Charles to Chicago with N. since N had to work, i wanted to see Chicago, a place i hadn't been since high school, so i did my typical first day maneuver and walked all around the city. i walked from the train station out to the lakeshore to the pier to Big John (aka the John Hancock Building), where i went up to the viewing platform on a day with about 3 miles visibility, and then to Marshall Fields (roughly) to meet with some Carleton friends. that was the third major out of context event for the trip.
i hadn't seen E or A since Carleton - actually, i hadn't even met A at Carleton - but it was spectacular to hang out with them. we walked around the fully festive, post-x-mas Marshall Fields before heading out to Wrigley Field for a snapshot. i figured that my brother, at one point a huge Cubs fan, would appreciate the effort. it began to rain when we got there, so we went to a pub across the street from the park, where more Carleton friends joined us. it was a very weird, very out of context experience, and i had a blast!
all of my Carl friends had to depart early, so i ended up meeting N + C for a sushi dinner somewhere inside the loop. i hadn't had sushi in a LONG time (and i didn't take to it - or really the copious amounts of alcohol i consumed afterward - to kindly the last time) so it was good to have it. plus, sushi is much better and a bit "cheaper" in the U.S. than in *coughcoughlandlocked**coughcoughfarfromthepacific* Prague.
we caught the commuter train back to St. Charles after that (where we completely made fun of a man opposite us who was completely verbally assaulting - in a chitchatnonstoptalking manner - a pair of strangers. GABLESSYU!).
the next day was New Year's Eve Day and we did the lazy thing and did almost nothing of substance. for dinner, N, C and i had lobsters, which N bravely dropped into the boiling water, something C and i could not bring ourselves to do or even watch.
thanks again to N + C for letting me stay with them!
on New Year's Day, i drove back to B-ton for my final few days there. i managed to sell my car to the friend who previously couldn't afford it. how could she afford it all of a sudden? because i was an idiot.
i advertised my car in the local paper as being for sale starting while i was in Chicago. one person responded and said that the price i had quoted in the paper was off by some $2000 or so dollars.
i thought that was ludicrous. but i double checked. upon reentering my car info into kbb.com (kelly blue book), the price did come up being $2000 cheaper... because i opted to put that i was a private seller, whereas before i had found the resaler's price. so, basically, it ended up being well in my friend's price range and instead of selling it to the person who had called (and was interested), i just called up my friend who i knew would take it off my hands within the limited time period i had left, and gave her the good news. it was hers for well under the price she had been willing to pay - since i am an honest individual and, in particular, don't like gouging friends, i gave it to her for the kbb price and not her vastly exceeding price.
so i sold my car. which was nice, albeit disappointing, since it ended up being far less valuable than i had thought. oh well. que sera sera.
also, while in b-ton, i took my laptop to a mac repair specialist who told me that yes, indeed, my cd drive was *&#^$*(& ^$%*($@(*&% up. and that i would need to pay about $300 to repair it. since i also needed other things added into the laptop, it turned out to be significantly easier to buy a new laptop...
which i did when i returned to St. Paul/Minneapolis that Friday (which was the 6th of this month). so, yes, i'm typing this on a new 15" powerbook... which i bought only a matter of days before Apple announced their new computers with Intel chips would be available to ship within weeks, instead of months. oh well. que sera sera.
having this new laptop allowed me to completely upload my cd collection onto one of my two new external LaCie hard drives i had purchased... i'll come back to that.
i spent the weekend with my brother and his wife, followed by a few nights with my grandmother (and her now-in-renovation kitchen) and hung out with some Carleton friends on my final night in the States (this time). i told them that i most likely (and hopefully) wouldn't be able to attend their wedding this upcoming July. i had said the same thing to my Carleton friends i had seen in Chicago - i hope i don't see them at reunion because i hope i'm not at reunion in June... because that means that my business is up and running and keeping me extremely occupied. so occupied that i can't afford the week (including transit time) it would take for me to attend each event respectively...
so i hope i don't see any of you in the U.S. this summer. you are more than welcome to pop over here and visit me and take our tour!
and the final piece of my story: i'm now back in Prague. i'm still on U.S. time and i've been back for almost a week. it sucks, but i can't seem to sleep during hours normally reserved for sleeping. i went to sleep yesterday at 5:30, when my flatmate was waking up to continue studying for the exam she took today.
that, and the external hard drive which i had loaded with my music back in the states has already crapped out. there's no remedy except to send it back to the states.
not to mention that the reason that i bought it was to not have the need to carry my mp3 cds all over the place. hey, so i left my mp3 cds and dvds back in the states. and now my music is not accessible! how great is that! i even had intentions to reburn it all onto dvds once i had it all organized, since the mp3 cd organization has since been undone by a growing number of other burned cds and dvds of mp3s.
so yeah, that was what i found out today, and that pisses me off... a LOT LOT LOT! i now need my father to send me my dvd's of mp3s and somebody else to send me copies of my mp3 cds. i did distribute multiple sets of the mp3 cds, so i should be able to get them here somehow.
it's still annoying though.
and so, it's now midnight. the question is, can i go to sleep soon? or not?