Posts (page 2)

Long story short: last night my wallet was stolen (or else I lost it, but I'm pretty sure it was pickpocketed. Though, if I knew what happened, it wouldn't have happened, so idk.) I called my parents when I realized it this morning, around midnight Denver time, and my dear old mother spent about 4 hours with me on Skype, Gmail chat and Facebook chat "figuring things out." I bumped my flight to Denver up to tomorrow, though British Airways doesn't fly out of Krakow so I had to buy a cheapo Ryanair ticket to London.

I was supposed to be here until next Monday, but continuing as planned without any cards would be extremely difficult, so I am just going home early. Which sucks, since I am obviously not going to Stockholm or London as planned, and I was really looking forward to them. I was weirdly excited to go to Stockholm and see if I could find one of those "family crests" with my name on it. I've seen them in Scotland, Ireland and Spain, and since my last name is Swedish I was excited to see if they had them there! But, alas. I also have a ticket to see Love's Labour's Lost at Shakespeare's Globe in London which I was really looking forward to.

Anyway, my mom wired me $200 via Western Union, which was a bitch to find. Banks are closed on Saturdays in Poland, apparently, and most Western Unions are in banks. Fortunately some exchange booths have Western Unions and those things are EVERYWHERE here. It's weird how different cities and countries have something like that that's everywhere. In Spain there are banks like, literally every other shop. In the US it's Starbucks. And here, apparently, it's exchange booths (and kebab stands! I like kebabs as much as the next person but jesus christ I would like to walk down a street without smelling fucking lamb.) BUT I DIGRESS. My mom wired me the money, so now I can actually eat and pay for another night at the hostel and all that. There was an issue with my British Airways flight to Denver, because you need to have a physical card, but my mom apparently worked some magic and it's paid for and I don't have to worry about it. So right now the only potential issue is if I get into London Stansted and can't find an exchange place to exchange my zloty for pounds, because I need to get from that airport to Heathrow. But, I still have some sort of money so that's a good thing.

Being virtually penniless is a terrifying experience. Not just like, leaving the house and forgetting your wallet and not having money, but like, being in the middle of fucking Poland with absolutely nothing except for 10 euros and some loose zloty in your pocket (I had enough to buy a pop and pee in the pay bathrooms.) When the lady was counting out my money transfer I was like, super excited and giddy to get it. She handed it to me and I just let out a sigh of relief.

So yeah...that ended up being a long story long rather than short, but whatever. This is the second time this has happened (my wallet was stolen when I was studying in Barcelona but by some miracle it happened a few days before my parents and sister came to visit me, so they brought me replacement cards.) My mom was quick to remind me of this after everything with the money and flights was resolved.

I am going to get home and stay home for a while. Seriously, this trip has been a hell of a lot of fun and I had an amazing time, but shit I did not have very good luck. Like, at all. :| Universe, I get the hint. Or maybe it was the gypsy lady in Granada who cursed me.

I am getting tired. Overall this trip has been quite relaxing, despite some fiascos here and there, but after hauling everything around on my back for...*counts* 40 days, I am getting wiped out and ready to just unload my backpack and never look at it again.

I'm still not sure what I'm going to do with myself after I get back. I'm not sure if the pre-holiday season is a good time to go looking for a job. Don't a lot of people lose their jobs around that time of year? Hmm.

I've also been toying with the idea of studying abroad again. Uh oh! I don't think I would do, like, an American program again, though maybe. I don't know. It would be interesting to just, like, enroll at a foreign university and go there.

(and no, that's not me saying "I miss school and want to go back," it's me saying "I want to go abroad again and live in a foreign city and 'studying' is a good excuse.")

In other news, I am finding myself weirdly excited for winter.

(Note: This entry is about my visits to the Anne Frank House and the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, so if you're in an exceptionally cheery mood and don't want anything to rain on your parade, perhaps you should read this later.)

I feel like I should reflect on the past few days since I feel that a lot has happened, even though relating it via blog entry might not give that impression.

Sunday morning I arrived in Amsterdam. Being the free-spirited and liberal 22 year old that I am, I was most excited to, shall we say, go to the local farmer's market and try out the local produce (ahem.) First, however, I wanted to go to the Anne Frank House, the "Secret Annexe" that she and the others hid in during World War II that has been turned into a museum.

While visiting the museum, which is beautiful and sobering and depressing and uplifting all at the same time, I realized that I have not actually read all of her diary. It was assigned in middle school (7th grade I believe, which is the worst year to assign any book of any level of importance - all I remember from 7th grade was social drama, hating teachers, hating my parents, and more social drama. But I digress.) I think I made it about halfway through and stopped. So, after visiting the museum, I went to the museum bookshop and bought myself the 60th anniversary "Definitive Edition" of her diary (along with an 'exclusive' museum postcard to celebrate what would have been Anne's 80th birthday this past June.) The "Definitive Edition" includes entries that were edited or cut out entirely from the original publication due to discussion of sex and "unflattering passages" about some of the people hiding in the Annexe (mainly Mrs Frank and Mrs van Pels.) I tore through it in 2 days.

I hardly need to say "oh this book is so amazing" because you know it's amazing. However I feel it's worth noting that, other than being just a good book about World War II and the Holocaust from a unique perspective, what I found most fascinating was not Anne's reactions to the War and Hitler and all the huge injustices to humanity, but just her. I loved reading her criticisms of the other house-mates, her defending her own actions in one passage only to admit that she is flawed and needs to better herself in the next. I would also be lying if I said that I didn't see myself in her. She was intensely flawed and intensley gifted and intensly human, it was quite refreshing. She is also one funny girl and made me laugh out loud more than a few times.

Back to the museum for a moment: they were playing a short clip of an interview with her dad, Otto Frank, where he talked about reading the diary after the war. He said that he was shocked at the level of emotion and deep thought in her diary, and that it showed a version of his daughter that he had never really seen. His last words of the interview clip were "most parents don't know their children, really." I have always felt that way but for some reason hearing a parent admit that was quite....I don't know. I haven't been able to get it out of my head, though.

Anyway so that was last night that I finished her diary and cried like a baby. This morning I got up and had breakfast and then caught a scary bus/van to Auschwitz. I saw a short film twice (because I accidentally went in to the Polish version of it, then re-saw it right after in English. It was not fun) and then went on a tour of the camp. Auschwitz I is the original camp built in I believe 1940 for Polish political prisoners. It's not that large and is mainly just barracks and administration buildings, though there is also a gas chamber. Its entrance is marked by the infamous "welcome" message over the front gate of "Arbeit Macht Frei," or "Work Makes Free" ("Work Will Set You Free" by some translations, I believe.) Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, is a couple kilometers from Auschwitz I and is much larger and mostly destroyed from the Nazis trying to "hide the evidence" and then Polish people taking building materials from it for the couple years between the end of the war and the creation of the site as a museum in 1947. It's mainly barracks and gas chambers/crematoriums, which I believe have all been mostly destroyed though there were some ruins that were intact enough to give you an idea of how they were like (structurally.) There was a large sort of "plaza" area between two large gas chamber ruins with plaques in probably 20 languages with a statement about the site being a reminder of what happened, and to honor those who suffered and died there. There were also 4 simple tombstones, each with the same phrase in Polish, English, Hebew and Yddish, in front of a ditch that was used to dump ashes. It was, as you can imagine, intensely sobering.

I think the hardest parts of the entire thing were the "hair room" in one of the barracks in Auschwitz I, where they had a massive pile of hair from the victims as well as examples of how the hair was used by the Nazis to make other things, like cloth and nets (which I found highly disturbing, possibly made worse by the smell.) They also had rooms with piles of eyeglasses, shoes, suitcases, toothbrushes and hairbrushes, pots and pans and childrens' clothes. The train tracks going into Birkenau were also pretty intense, knowing that that was the location where people were forever separated from their families, and told to go "right" to the gas chambers and an immediate death, or "left" for hard slave labor and a postponed death.

I definitely realized my general ignorance when it comes to World War II, Nazism and the Holocaust, though. We were of course taught about it in school, but never in very much detail. Usually it would amount to "Europe was shitty after World War I. Germany was especially fucked. Hitler got control, started blaming the Jews. Propaganda. Gold stars, concentration camps, lots of death and suffering. Pearl Harbor, yay Americans. Schindler's List. Pictures of emaciated people. People are capable of horrible things. Anne Frank's Diary. We need to learn about this so it doesn't happen again. Ok, now onto the Cold War" (which, of course, they taught us even less about.) So now I feel intensly compelled to go to the library when I get home and, well, teach myself. I find it fascinating and horrifying and would like to learn more. I have never been particularly interested in history after about the 17th century, but I am now finding more recent things just as interesting, if not moreso. Educating myself is the first step towards helping the world be a better place, so that's what I'm going to do. I am in Krakow for a few more days, and plan to visit several other historic WW2 sites, including one of Oskar Schindler's factories.

Sorry for the downer of an entry, but I needed to share it and it needed to be shared. 

What’s your favorite quick, easy, and healthy recipe?
Presented by Intel, Sponsors of Tomorrow.

No idea. I do know what my favorite slowish, messy, and ridiculously deliciously unhealthy recipe is though:

Muddy Buddies. (also known as "Puppy Chow" I believe.)

Something got me thinking about Muddy Buddies the other day and I have been craving them ever since. Making them is a bitch with melting all the chocolate and the peanut butter and then you end up with powdered sugar EVERYWHERE, but it's SO WORTH IT. oh man. Totally adding that to my "Shit To Do When I Get Home" list.

I flew into Frankfurt on Thursday and stayed the night in Mainz. I had a bit of a fiasco (again) and basically ended up calling my mom and crying like a baby. lol. I fail.

Anyway so yesterday I got on a boat early in the morning for a day cruise down the Rhine. It was very nice and pretty, though about halfway through it started getting more industrial and less castle-y and pretty. Still was probably one of the better days I've had. Nothing went wrong, at least!

So now I'm in Cologne until tomorrow morning when I'm going to Amsterdam. I'm only there for one night but it should be fun! Then I'm off to Poland.

Germany is nice so far, I've always wanted to come here and so here I am! It's nice like...blending in, lol. I'm like half German and the rest is other northern/eastern European, so it's nice to not be the only blonde haired and blue eyed person around, like in Spain. I can walk down the street and not feel like I stick out like a sore thumb. It does, however, kind of suck that I don't know a lick of German (though I can say "I want to fuck" and "hermaphrodite" thanks to Rammstein.) A lot of people here speak English, but a lot...don't. Fortunately everyone speaks Hand Motion.

I'm glad that I'm well into the final stretch of my trip...It's been awesome but I'm ready to go home. It also sucks not having my computer...At least there are a LOT more Internet cafes in Germany than there were in Spain. They were impossible to find in Spain, and here I walked out of the hostel with the intention of wandering around til I found one and...there was one right across the street. I couldn't print there though so I walked like 3 stores up to another one. Zaz! (zaz is the new yay, since these German keyboards are crazy.) And I'm pretty sure that most, if not all, of the hostels I'm staying at from now on have Internet. The one here does but I had to come to the cafe to print my boarding passes for my other flights (cuz I didn't for the Spain-Germany flight and had to pay out the ass for them to reprint me one. Fuck you, Ryanair.)

Anyway, gonna go wander/shop/etc. Tschüss!

Well I've had a rather interesting couple days. Sunday night (I think it was Sunday? Maybe it was Monday? Damn I have no concept of time over here) I was on the expensive wifi at the hostel in Caceres (town between Madrid and Portugal) when my computer decided to go batshit insane. The screen started flickering and long story short: it doesn't work. So that kind of, like, sucks and stuff. As upsetting as it is to not have a computer (apart from the whole "hey I want to post some random crap to Twitter" stuff, it's also very useful for, like, you know. Planning what I'm doing next. Booking a place to sleep for the next night. Finding bus/train schedules, etc) I am actually more upset by the fact that now I have no way to charge my precious iPod, Norbert. Fortunately Norbert was fully charged when all this went down, so I was going to save him for when I was feeling deprived and angsty and wanted some music to angst to.

So Tuesday afternoon I caught a bus from Caceres to Santander, on the north coast of Spain. 9ish hours later, at 10:30pm, we arrive in Santander in the pouring rain. Oh, did I mention that I didn't have a hostel reservation? Or anything? I had written down the address of one hostel, which apparently no longer exists because I walked through that plaza several times and never saw it. Anyway, I found 3 other hostels, one of which was full and the other two didn't even answer the buzzer things on the door. So it's almost midnight, I've been walking around a foreign city in the pouring rain, I'm soaked, tired, emotional...so I got a cab and went to a 3-star hotel on the beach. The room is depressingly tiny, I actually walked in and started laugh-crying cuz I was so fed up with everything but at the same time the whole situation was weirdly comical. So anyway...The room is 50€ a night so it's a fair bit more than a hostel but not bad. I classified the situation as a level 7 emergency and deemed the hotel necessary (so, thank you Mom and Dad.)

Oh, yeah: As if to LAUGH IN MY FACE, I unpacked my iPod when I got into my hotel room only to see that it had been on THE ENTIRE FUCKING TIME since I had packed it like 14 hours earlier. It was still going and still has some juice, so part of me is well impressed by its battery life, but WHAT THE EFF MATE. So I shut it off and then later took it out again and it was ON AGAIN. Wtffff. The TV also like, sort of half turns on sometimes. Like I slid my backpack across the floor and it made the sound that a TV makes when you turn it on, but didn't actually turn on. I was kind of weirded out by that. Electricity ghosts are haunting my room.

So, yeah. I am getting tired of Spain, lol. It's lovely here but I am ready to move on to my next destination. Which is GERMANY, which is TOMORROW. OMG. I am flying into Frankfurt but will be staying the night in Mainz, then getting on an early morning boat for a cruise up the Rhine all day, ending up in Cologne. I'm in Cologne for a day and then I'm going to Amsterdam for a day and then to Dusseldorf, where I'll be flying out of to Krakow. I'll be there 4 days, then fly to Stockholm for 2 days, London for 2 days and then back to Spain for a few days before I leave for home.

I'm also excited for Germany because, being like, half German (and the other half is other northern and eastern European blood) I "look German" so will hopefully blend in a bit more, lol. I won't feel self-conscious about being the only blonde-haired and blue-eyed girl in the room.

Anyway. Just an update letting yall know I'm not dead or anything.

BTW if any of you nerd-types are reading (ahem Deltan) you should totally look at my post over at the Apple forums about my fucking weird ass computer issues: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2162873&stqc=true

I had an amazing day today. It got off to kind of a slow start - I left the hostel around 11:30, had a (expensive) coffee and croissant for breakfast and headed over to the Renfe (Spanish rail network) station to hop on a train to Toledo which is super close so I was going to do it as a day trip.

In general in Spain, things are decently well marked. Major landmarks usually get a sign with an arrow in the right direction at major intersections/plazas/etc. With transportation, though, it's definitely hit-or-miss. Sometimes it's impeccable (hello, Barcelona and Madrid metro systems) and sometimes it's....not. For instance, today, I was unsure if my train to Toledo would be considered "larga distancia" (long distance) or "cercania" (short distance.) It is about 1-2 hours by bus or "normal" train and 30 minutes by high-speed train. So after going upstairs and then downstairs and then trying to get through security without a ticket ("but where do I GET a ticket?!?") I finally got what I wanted, after asking two different people and fucking around with two different ticket machines (neither of which were for what I wanted.) So, thank you Renfe, but you really kind of suck.

Bus systems are another thing that really irritate me here. I hate buses in general so it's a given that I would hate them anywhere, but here they seem to be exceptionally horrible. From cities that have super shitty route maps that don't even cover the area that you're currently in (I'm looking at you, Malaga) to just fucking horrible fucking shit. Just. Ugh. I hate buses. I also hate how most bus stations that I've been to don't have a map of the local area, or even the larger town in general. Chances are a fair percentage of people coming through the bus station are not locals and do not know where exactly they're going. So what's the deal? How much does a map cost, anyway? I'm paying out the ass to ride buses via your station, you can shell out 2 euros for a cheap ass fucking map of your own goddamn city.

And don't EVEN get me started on Portugal. The. Worst. Transport. System. Ever. (though Lisbon's metro was pretty good, I have to say.)

ANYWAY. Back to like, a thousand minutes ago when I was talking about my Amazing Day. I did eventually get to Toledo, and spent several hours just walking around and getting lost. I came across the "Ancient Instruments of Torture" exhibit which was quite fascinating and unsettling. Seriously, some of that shit is just...who came up with that? There was one contraption where they'd strap your neck to the back of a chair (via a metal band, of course) and then have this pointed aparatus that they would proceed to screw into the back of your neck. WHAT THE HELL. Also, wtf, "breast strippers"? Basically giant breast-shaped tongs that they would clamp onto your precious mamaries and..well...strip them off. fucking. wtf. Oh then there was this wooden pyramid that they would hang people over so that it would enter their anus/vagina, and how "deep" it went depended on little more than "the humor of the executioner." Seriously. And don't even get me started on the "head crusher" where they would just gradually crush your skull until brains "exited through the orifices."

And I thought people today were fucked up! Yeesh.

Anyway. Tomorrow (Sunday) I am going to leave Madrid and head for Caceres. I have no idea what's there. Should be fun!

Yesterday marked the halfway point of my trip (I think -- depends on if you count the days of travel betwen Denver and Barcelona.) Bad news is that I have already burned through well over half my money. lol. oops. Actually I haven't spent that much more than half, but I only have about 500 euros (499.91 to be exact) left in my bank account and 100 euros in cash. I knew I wasn't going to have enough but it still kind of sucks.

I have a week left in Spain and then I am going up to Germany/Netherlands/Poland/Sweden/UK for two weeks. I am RIDICULOUSLY EXCITED FOR THAT. It's going to be so crazy. Then after that I get back into Spain on the 30th and then go back to the US on October 5th. Unsure what I'm going to do for those few days, other than be an exhausted, hungry, stinky mess who wants to go home.

*sigh* I said I wasn't getting homesick, and of course right after....I got homesick. I'm not really homesick, more just like...I don't know. Mainly I just really, really want to sleep in my own bed. My big, clean, comfy bed in my room that I don't have to share with anyone. And I would really like to take a nice long shower in my nice big bathtub in my nice bathroom that doesn't have who-knows-what growing on the floor. Not that the hostels I've been in have been bad - on the contrary they've all been pretty nice and clean, but whenever you get multiple people sharing small spaces, things get dirty and annoying.

I am also fed the fuck up with FUCKING BUGS. Seriously. Bugs are not really ever an issue in Colorado - we have flies, mosquitoes, spiders etc but I have never been bitten so many times in my life (other than camping, maybe.) I am telling myself that it's normal bugginess and I'm just not used to it, and not, like, something gross like "bed bugs" or whatever, because ew. Again, not saying the hostels are dirty, but wtf. Bugs. Need. To die. (preferably in a fire.)

In completely unrelated news, yesterday someone I stalk follow on LJ posted a poem by Anne Sexton and I got to thinking about how horribly depressing most poetry is. Then I got to thinking about Shel Silverstein and how awesome he is (make that was....I didn't know he died? Or maybe I did and just blocked that knowledge from my memory? :( sad day) and now I really want to re-read his books of poetry that I read back in elementary school. Where the Sidewalk Ends, Falling Up, A Light in the Attic (and the Giving Tree, natch.) So that's going to be on my list of things to do when I get home. I also want to get those "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" books and re-read them, because they always freaked me the hell out when I was little (my sister and I still make references to some of the stories, mainly one where this lady has some horrible boil on her face and it turns out to be spider eggs. Freaky!)

Anyway, back to my dinner of Pringles and wine...

What the fuck is a "meme" anyway? Where did that word come from? It's kind of dumb.
Anyway I found this and am bored and drinking coffee and waiting for something so I thought WHAT BETTER WAY TO WASTE TIME THAN TO FILL THIS SHIT OUT. so yeah. at least it's a pretty short one.

What kind of magazines do you read?
None really anymore. I used to get EGM and Wired, occasionally I pick up a trash mag from the checkout counter at the store (US Weekly or People.)

What's your occupation?
Professional bum.

What's really creepy?
The way Amazon and Facebook seem to know things about me before I do.

Who is your celebrity crush?
Oh jeez. Always and forever Keira Knightley. Sara of Tegan and Sara. Alexander Skarsgard. Leonardo DiCaprio. The lovely ladies of Skins.

What's your current fandom/obsession/addiction?
Skins, True Blood, Harry Potter (always.)

What are you listening to right now?
No idea what it is. Some British sounding stuff on the radio.

What are you most excited for?
The rest of this awesome trip to Spain/elsewhere that I'm in the middle of.

What websites do you always visit when you go online?
Gmail/Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook, LJ, Vox, Last.fm

What was the last thing you bought?
Wine and yogurt for like 2.25

What was the cutest thing you've seen today?
Grown man walking around with a sarong around his waist. Unsure if that's "cute" but it's a bit odd.

Does the weather affect your mood?
Quite a bit.

Do you want to learn another language?
Would like to! Then I'd be trilingual and awesome.

What song(s) are currently on repeat?
Like what am I obsessed with atm? (I like how I ask the question a question, as if it's going to respond.) Right now I'm digging most things by Low, mainly "Point of Disgust." And "Dart For My Sweetheart" by some people whose name I can't think of right now is neat. Uhmm. La Roux's "In For the Kill" has been stuck in my head a fair bit.

Do you have any siblings?
Yes, my sister is 4.5 years older than me.

What's something you'd like to say to someone right now?
I've wanted to say "Who the buggering tits are you?" to someone for a while now, but haven't had the opportunity yet.

If you weren't doing this meme, what would you be doing instead?
GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM. Cuz I'm, like, in Bilbao, yo.