Dusk Through Narrow Streets

Yesterday it was about 20°. That’s…fairly typical for this time of year, maybe a tad warm, but it’s been snowing a lot lately. Today? Today the temperature went up above freezing and it rained. Come on universe, seriously? Rain in December in Anchorage? (Notice I do not say “in Alaska.” I suspect that rain in December in Juneau, say, is not that uncommon.) Thankfully it didn’t rain much, so things aren’t as death-defyingly slick out as they might be, and there’s still plenty of snow–it’s not all gross and melty as it would be if, say,  it had rained all day, but it’s still sad, because it’s snowed heavily lately and everything looked magical (like in the photo, for instance, taken Dec. 16; find more here). Now the trees are half-bare with sad random clumps of half-melted snow.

It’s been a weird winter overall, though. There was some early snow before the ground froze, like I complained about, and then the temperature plummeted and stayed there a good portion of the fall semester–January weather in November, basically, like 15° and below, and as I’ve said before, the only thing that makes that kind of bitter cold almost worthwhile is the beautiful thick hoar frost that forms on the trees. We never got enough snow during the term for a snow day, of course…

On the plus side, it did make nice comfortable weather to walk my dog. Bundling up in two scarves to keep my face from freezing just for a quick walk outside is pretty annoying.

It’s funny, I said it was ridiculously early to get snow (even immediately disappearing snow) before Halloween, but now that we’re three days into November and thereby definitely into winter, it seems equally weird that we don’t have snow. Like I said: apparently six years hasn’t been long enough to give me a good idea of a typical Anchorage winter. Anyway, the last few days it’s been getting much colder, such that the ground has been frozen with temperatures below freezing for at least a few days straight and the frost doesn’t even disappear when the sun hits it in the morning. Forecast says it’s going to rise above freezing tomorrow, though, and that we may be getting snow, which adds up to my very favorite combination: slushy wet snow and/or freezing rain. Getting cold and wet is just not fun, and freezing rain makes for seriously dangerous streets. Right now, even though I’m guessing the windchill was around 15 degrees F most of the day (especially fun when I walked home from the auto shop, about a mile) and let me tell you, living through five nasty Barrow winters doesn’t keep low double-digits from feeling FREAKING COLD, at least it’s cold enough that everything is dry because what little water is around, even in mud, is frozen. The only thing worse than cold is wet and cold. ‘Course, once it snows, you still get wet; the snow just doesn’t turn to water until you get inside, and then you’re soaked.

(Long time no blog. I’m lame. What can I say? I got eaten by my thesis and then I thought it would be a smart idea to start on my master’s here, so I’m doing that while also teaching a section of freshman composition as a teaching assistant, and looking for a second job. And a replacement car. I am freaking busy, guys.)

Anyway. Yes. I promise that at some point I am really going to talk about my travels in Europe, which were hectic and exhausting but also pretty fantastic, especially since I added nine (!) more countries to my list…in ten days. It was supposed to be 10 for 10 but I missed a flight. >_<

The real point is, the weather’s been fairly miserable lately, with lots of cold rain that does a nice job of soaking right through my Converses (yes, I know they’re not remotely waterproof and I should wear something else, but it’s not like I’ve got anything better at the moment), and wind, and…things. It doesn’t help that the trees have been bare and ugly for at least a couple weeks. But today I went out to drive to campus and realized that everything wasn’t wet because it was raining again; it was honest-to-God snow. Before Halloween. Despite having spent six winters in Anchorage by now, I still don’t quite feel like I have a feel for quite what a typical winter or a typical summer is, but…I’m pretty sure this is weird, especially since snow before the ground freezes is…well, weird.

Now, it wasn’t so cold that the snow was actually building up anywhere, but it did stick in a handful of sheltered places I noticed on the way home, and…seriously? Snow? Before Halloween? This may be Alaska, but the North Slope it ain’t. I’m just not ready for winter and shoveling and scraping/brushing off the car and constant wet and cold, thank you very much weather gods.

…and I’m leaving in less than a week. D: That would be a good thing,  aside from “zomg must pack augh”, except for the whole part where, um, my thesis isn’t done and there were a couple hundred other things I meant to do in the last…month and a half…oh, frell. Also there was packing. I will have to pack really, really well, for once, because I have got to travel light, in no small part because I will be traveling almost nonstop on this trip and also using RyanAir a lot, and I may have mentioned this in one of my many posts whinging about them, but they charge for any luggage at all. (This becomes rather less surprising, I suppose, when one considers that most US airlines are moving toward the same sort of thing.)

In part to that end, and because my laptop is a beast and not at all portable but I will really want to have something while I’m gone, I bought myself an Asus Eee 1000HD, which is little and cute, and more importantly it came to about $200 for a baby laptop with 1GB RAM and a 120 GB hard drive. Which is pretty darn good, yeah. (Got it off eBay, if you couldn’t tell.) The small screen is a little annoying–it’s only like 600 px high–but entirely usable, and it’s very much a full-functioning computer…just littler. Weighs three pounds, I think, so I can pretty much take it anywhere and use it a lot more easily when my main laptop is difficult or impossible to tote around. My only real beef is with the trackpad and keyboard–actually, the keyboard is entirely fine as such things go, except for the weird and uncomfortable placement of the right shift key; I’ve been using capslock instead. The trackpad is also kind of fussy, or not sensitive enough, or something; I can tap it to click on things but it usually doesn’t register unless I do so several times, for instance, and the buttons are kind of awkward to push. Given enough time on here, I’d probably accelerate the carpal-tunnel syndrome I seem to be developing anyway. But for its purposes, it’s pretty awesome…and did I mention it’s cute?

Right. The more interesting part is, tickets are actually being/have been bought, and while for some reason we’re having a very hard time getting anything from Vilinius, Lithuania back to London, other things are coming together. Plans certainly are. The upshot is that I should be visiting 10 countries in about as many days. Crazy, yeah? It’s going to be interesting, all right.

For anyone who’s curious: my first weekend there, we’re flying from London to Helsinki, Finland, and then going through Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, although I forget if we managed a ferry/train thing like we originally planned or if we’re flying between them all. Then right after we get back from that, I’ll fly out by myself on Tuesday to Düsseldorf, Germany–or rather the RyanAir-serviced airport sort-of nearby in Weeze–and take a train from there to Amsterdam, from where I’ll also do a train day-trip to Antwerp, Belgium, and then fly back to London from Amsterdam. Then after that, on the second weekend, we’ll fly into Bratislava, Slovakia, and go to Vienna and also to Budapest. Pluses: more passport stamps, lots more countries on my list, likely outpacing of my sister for some time to come (she’s currently at four going on six to my also six), hitting multiple cities on my list. Cons: uh, did I mention this is crazy? Should give new meaning to the idea of power sightseeing.

Ulp. Now I just need to finish buying those train tickets and find some hostels to stay in. And…work on my thesis…frell. MUST GET THAT DONE.

Um…yeah. Didn’t I mention something about posting more often? Yeah, about that…well, last time I posted I was coming up on the end of the semester, so I didn’t have time then between all my papers and projects, and then there was graduation, for which I had my best friend (who now has her own blog–go say hi at Cabinet of Wonders) up for a week and a half and was busy doing actual social-life type things with her, like MST-ing Twilight and geeking out over Iron Man and Portal, and making artistic-photography attempts at a pile of interesting trash by the side of a gravel road, and lots of shopping, and…stuff. Also thoroughly converting her to a new show by watching lots and lots of Chuck, which is awesome and you should watch it too, which is true for all values of “you”.

And then my undergrad thesis ate my brain. Actually it kind of ate my life, because I got an extension on it but now it’s even more late. And then I got a job, and the brain-eating thesis still isn’t finished.

So the point is, I have been way busy and haven’t updated, even though I have more than one nearly complete entry to post (most of which are now months out of date), but as soon as the thesis gets semi-done, I will get back to more regular posting. Honest. And you want to stick around for that, because my major graduation present from my dad is tickets to visit him for two weeks in England, where he’s living for a six-month deployment. So not only will there be more England posts, there’ll be a lot more than that: we’re going to visit several other countries on the weekends, and I’m planning to visit some others by myself during the weekdays when he’s working. Places like three different Baltic nations (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, I think?) , and Barcelona and Amsterdam and maybe Vienna and Budapest and…yeah, not all of this is planned yet. Annnd I have two weeks until I leave, oops.

Anyway, it’s going to be epic, I promise. Stay tuned.

No, I’m totally serious. I actually wrote it a few years ago, back before I had a car and took the bus way too much, but the idea is the same. The season described here is really just spring in name only, though; it’s actually breakup, like I described in my previous entry.

As I said, though, it’s much nicer now–well, today was gray and kind of windy, and there’s a huge difference between cloudy 40° and sunny 40°, but there’s still clean pavement and the grass isn’t greening up yet but we can see it again, and the temperatures should be edging into the fifties in the next week or so. I might actually be able to wear a skirt soon without freezing! Would have done that Tuesday if I’d known the weather would be that way. The best part is that even though all the grass is all still dead and brown, now and then you can still smell something that–well, I suppose it’s actually, I don’t even know, suddenly uncovered rotting grass and leaves or something else nasty, but it smells like life, like green and growing things.

Anyway, poem, which I’m sharing because I can and also because it was already published a couple years ago in Understory, my uni’s little literary magazine.

(more…)

Spring here isn’t like spring everywhere else–around when other parts of the US are seeing the snow melt, we’re hitting breakup, and when my friend in Pennsylvania is talking about warm weather edging into the 70s and 80s, I’m thrilled to get a blue-sky day in the 40s.

Yeah, you’re all laughing at me now. This is spring in Anchorage: generally speaking, I’d say the latter half of March and first half of April tend to be breakup, which…I’m not sure if I’d define breakup as a fifth season, or a subseason of winter and spring, or what, but it’s a very common term here, and it’s that period between genuine winter, when it’s cold and snow covers everything, and genuine spring, when the vast majority of the snow has melted, the roads are dry, and the grass…well, the grass and trees aren’t green again, but they’re getting there. Breakup is the between-time, when all the ice breaks up (get it now?)  and the temperature settles above freezing and the snow starts to melt.

And it’s disgusting. Do not ever visit Alaska during that time of year. You won’t want to come back. Half the streets are flooded with giant dirty puddles, and the rest are covered in brown slush and mud. It’s too warm for winter boots but too dirty for normal shoes, and unless your shoes are waterproof (none of mine are), you’re pretty much guaranteed to get your feet soaked just walking to class. (Granted, that was true on all the rainy days in Norwich too.) Parking lots turn into giant muddy, slushy messes, some nearly impossible to drive in because the ice and hard-packed snow built up all winter melts unevenly. Park in a bad place and you’ll step into an ankle-deep, ice-cold puddle that probably surrounds your entire car.

If you couldn’t figure it out by now, breakup is one of my least favorite times of year.

Sometime around last week, though, I’d say we finally transitioned into spring. Everything’s still kind of dirty–during the winter, dirt is spread on the streets for traction, so when the snow melts, the dirt stays–and we haven’t had any rain, so there’s still a lot of dust and ash, and of course the melting snow reveals just how much litter everyone chucked out their car windows over the winter. Streetsweeper trucks sort of clean the dirt off the streets, although then it just gets in the grass and kind of stays there, so…I don’t know how helpful that is. But the vast majority of the snow is gone, and–this is the real mark of spring beginning for my purposes–almost all the roads, sidewalks, and various paths at UAA are clean and dry. Seriously, when breakup finally starts to leave because there’s not much left to melt, the most beautiful thing in the world is clean, dry pavement, and while I’m getting my feet soaked trying to get to my next class because everything is wet and slushy, I tend to think pretty longingly about places like Florida with sunbaked pavement that’s cracked from the heat, not potholed from freeze-thaw cycles.

Not very romantic, is it? But for me, spring means dry pavement. The first beautiful spring day meant clear skies, sun, temperatures above 40°, and the ability to walk outside without looking like a loon because I’m gingerly stepping from semi-dry spot to semi-dry spot. I wore my Converses outside again for the first time last week because they’re even less waterproof than my other shoes, which was kind of awesome.

Now I just need to get the studded tires taken off my car, and won’t that be fun…

Yet again, lame blogger is lame, because I should have talked about this a long time ago–but in light of recent events (and plenty more eruptions since), it bears mentioning.

In his official Republican response to President Barack Obama’s speech to the nation [on Feb. 24. Shut up], Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said repeatedly that “Americans can do anything!”

With one exception, apparently. We don’t need to keep an eye on simmering volcanoes.

Jindal singled out “volcano monitoring” as an unnecessary frill that Democrats stuck in the recently adopted stimulus package.

“Their legislation is larded with wasteful spending,” Jindal said. “It includes … $140 million for something called ‘volcano monitoring.’ Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.”

Jindal’s comments provoked an eruption of their own. Alaska politicians, liberal bloggers and some scientists began pointing out how useful it is to let people know when a volcano in their neighborhood is about to explode.

Read the rest of the article: Alaskans fume over Jindal volcano-monitoring gripe.

Yeah, it’s old news. But considering that not long after Jindal said this, Redoubt started going off? It hasn’t caused tremendous damage by any means, and even though I’ve been amused by the fact that a number of Google searches leading people to my blog have been something like”has redoubt killed anyone” (it hasn’t), the danger is real. It’s especially dangerous for airplanes–why do you think flights keep getting canceled because of the volcano?–and it’s only our ability to monitor the situation that keeps everyone out of trouble. I mean, let’s say we couldn’t monitor Redoubt and other Alaskan volcanoes by anything except whether we can see it actually erupting. Say we also know that it’s a Really Bad Idea to fly an airplane through an ash cloud. So even assuming that doesn’t happen, what do we do? Shut down the airport every time we get some seismic activity or a little plume of steam? I mean, you can imagine what that would do to the economy here, right? And again, that’s assuming something worse didn’t happen.

So, yeah. We kind of need our volcano-monitoring.

I should also mention that we’ve had some ashfall and semi-regular eruptions of varying magnitudes, and I almost got stuck in Juneau or Fairbanks (horrors) because of one, but it’s time for bed. So I leave you with an awesome link I got off Twitter: a whole bunch of insanely awesome volcano-eruption photographs. These shots are truly amazing. Some are unlabeled, but I think this one is probably from Hawaii (although I thought that about several that were labeled and was wrong on each one), and judging by what I can see of the mountain’s shape and by the trees, I’m guessing this one is from Redoubt’s 1989 eruption. But I could easily be wrong.

Redoubt went off again last night, which I need to post about in more detail soon; I still haven’t actually seen an ash plume from where I live, but there was enough ash fall last night that people were advised not to go outside and to wear masks if they did. All our snow is pretty dirty, too.

What I’ve got right now is a post written up by a blogger with a number of sites about the New Jersey shore, an area where I’ve spent very little time but would really like to visit–at the tail end of a trip to D.C. and surrounding areas with several other college students, I did get to New Jersey and managed to sneak away with a few other students to spend about an hour at the nearby beach (I say “sneak” because it wasn’t actually directed by the professors, omg, but we had a free period between panels at this conference we were attending). We all rolled up our dress pants and took off our suit jackets and splashed around like little kids; the salt air and the wind were glorious.

So I have brief but very fond memories of the NJ shore. The rest of this post should tell you a bit more, from someone who actually, you know, knows about it:

“Many people vacation in east coast beach resort areas like Myrtle Beach, Virginia Beach, or at one of many Florida locales. These areas are great and offer lots of nice amenities - beachfront high-rise hotels, Subway shops and Starbucks - but they can be somewhat bland in regards to local culture. If you want to experience something a little different, you can instead head to New Jersey and see a slice of Americana. (more…)

First I should say that if anyone found their way here from Travel for the Over 30s or Emm in London, I apologize that it’s taken me so long to get this post up–here in Alaska it’s still March 28, but it’s late evening for nearly everyone else, if not tomorrow already. My excuse is that I was out of town the past couple days and only got back late last night…and then I woke up with a cold. So that’s fun.

Anyway, the awesome blogger at Golden Prague had a great idea: get together expat bloggers to post about their experiences as an expat and link along to the next person in the list. (This also means that at some point I am really going to comment on the other entries in the list. No, really, I am.)

My expat story probably isn’t that of most other expats; I lived in Norwich, England, for one semester, just less than three months. The fact that I came there from Alaska, and shortly after having spent two weeks in Turkey, probably affected my experience a bit; as a nearly lifelong Alaskan and certainly a lifelong American,  I’m used to certain things, and England–England is different. My time there was far shorter than many, and I’m not sure that it’s enough to experience a foreign country the way it really needs to be lived–but for me, it was more than enough to fall in love.

Part of that, I suppose, is that I was already something of an Anglophile and wanted to visit; I love Doctor Who and other British things (I’d count Merlin and A Bit of Fry and Laurie, except I watched those after coming back), and British accents kind of make me melt. Somewhat less since I lived around them, but still. I’ve always been fascinated by history, and since spending three weeks in the D.C. area a few years ago, I’ve had a real love for the physical, cultural history you can see in the land and architecture of a place like that. (There’s more evidence of my Alaskan-ness: I live in Anchorage now, the biggest city in Alaska, but apparently I’m still a small-town girl, and our city doesn’t have much of what makes even ugly cities a little bit magical. We’ve got a lot of concrete and modern glass-walled buildings and some old houses. The 4th Avenue Theater is from the 1940s or 50s and looks like it, but it’s really not used for anything and might be torn down. That’s about it.

Compared to what I’m used to, virtually everything in Europe is old–and that makes it somehow magical. After I first came back from England, I didn’t really know what to say to people who asked how it was–how do you sum it up, anyway? Usually I settled for making a joke out of it and saying that it rained a lot. Lately, I’ve been saying instead something like “Norwich was really pretty…I miss it.”  I am not used to cobblestone streets everywhere and dark alleyways leading off to funny little courtyards, and buildings that look like they’ve been pieced together from bits of other buildings, and old cathedrals, and visible history even in the fields that have clearly been fields longer than those in America. I walked around Norwich a lot, mostly on the way to shops or gigs, and I took gobs of pictures, but mostly I tried to drink it all in.

Not all of it was great. The administration at the University of East Anglia was just as bureaucratic as at any college, and it really was wet almost all the time. Plus I think everyone there drinks and nearly everyone smokes, which I’ve whined about before, both of which were kind of odd for someone who does neither. But the people were almost universally friendly,  and I saw much more interest and participation in the political process there than here. Everyone was invested in the US election even though it wasn’t their own country, and I went with several other UEA students to protest high student fees (my reason for it was a free bus to Cambridge, but still). I didn’t make as many friends as I’d have liked, but I got to know people that I miss.

To be honest, though, it was mostly the place itself that captivated me. In early November, when I’d been there maybe a month and a half, I wrote something in my travel column for the student paper back home that pretty well sums it up (even though my phrasing didn’t survive an edit job I won’t comment on in a public forum):

Back in my dorm, rain still coming down outside and my wet shoes slowly drying on the floor, I can think of plenty of things I should be doing, like cleaning up the papers strewn across my desk or getting to bed. But I’ve had a minor epiphany growing in me over the week that I can’t help thinking about. It’s hardly profound or life-changing, and it’s simply this: I love this place. I really, really love it.

I’m not sure what brought me to that realization—I haven’t hated England by any means while I’ve been here, but something’s subtly changed. Maybe the Guy Fawkes Day fireworks did it, the rain on the wet leaves at night, the old brick houses. Maybe it was Great Yarmouth with its run of tacky tourist traps and long boardwalks, or the buildings with red tiled roofs and odd sections at different heights, as if each was cobbled together from leftovers of other houses, many sooty and marked with graffiti but compelling in their ugliness. Maybe it was a few nights ago in Norwich, walking down St. Benedict’s Street, peering into the shadows in all the tiny alleys and shadowed courtyards that branched off from the main road. Maybe it’s the way every corner positively bleeds history: Houses and streets here have long memories, longer than you’ll ever find in America.

Whatever it was, in only the short time I’ve been here, England has already crawled into my soul and made a home there in a way I can remember very few other places doing. This isn’t going to change much for the time being, I suppose, except for this certainty: I have no idea when I’ll be able to do any international travel again after I return to Alaska, but I do know that someday, I’ll be back.

I could natter on more about how much I like British phrasings or odd little differences like how their standard paper size is bigger than ours (seriously, it’s like a couple centimeters narrower and several longer), or the weird pronunciations I got completely used to (like Gloucester, which looks like three syllables to Americans but is actually two), but that right there is the most important thing I have to say about it.

And now I’d like to direct you on to the next blog in World Blog Surf Day: Emm in London describes her expat life in, you guessed it, London, and how much she loves the city despite the many, many bureaucratic headaches she fought through to move there from South Africa.