Dusk Through Narrow Streets

…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.

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