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.

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.

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…

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.

…and once again, it was at night. When I can’t see a thing. Thanks for harshing my potential buzz there, Mr. Mountain.

Uh, right, so that sounds like…weird. Whatever. The point is, Redoubt went off at 10:38 tonight yesterday, again at 11:02, and yet again at 12:14. That may be slightly out of date because I got those times of an Anchorage Daily News article published online at 11:30 p.m. and last modified…well, about 45 minutes ago five minutes ago, dang, when do these people sleep? The most recent edit about doubled the length of the article, it looks like. (Can I also say, one, I feel deep pity for the poor writer who probably got hauled out of bed to write this little breaking-news piece and slap it up online, and two, it amuses me more than it should that the previous edit of the article said Redoubt went up at “about 10:38 p.m.” because I’m sure everyone cares that you didn’t specify down to the second.)

The article continues:

Long threatening Mount Redoubt erupted three times tonight sending an ash cloud an estimated 50,000 feet into the air, the Alaska Volcano Observatory reported. … Winds are carrying the ash plume north toward the Susitna Valley, and an ash advisory has been issued for the area until 4 a.m., the National Weather Service said.

Ash is not expected in Anchorage or Wasilla at this time, the Weather Service said. …

“It looks like (Anchorage) might dodge the bullet,” Alaska Volcano Observatory geophysicist Peter Cervelli said.

An FAA official at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport early Monday said there were no immediate plans to close the airport.

Article also has a handy little sidebar with facts about the volcano. For instance: Redoubt is a stratovolcano. I did not know this. I am not sure at this point what a stratovolcano is, and if it were not 1:30 in the bloody a.m. I would look it up on Wikipedia. Maybe tomorrow later today.

Other links of potential interest: the Alaska Volcano Observatory (will it interest anyone to know that in my head I automatically pronounced “observatory” the British way, although this may have more to do with watching A Bit of Fry and Laurie than with having been in England? No? Okay then) has a Twitter feed, for anyone wanting to keep up-to-date on Redoubt’s rumblings (…now I’m alliterating. Clearly I need sleep). There’s also the webcam positioned seven miles from Redoubt, but at the moment it’s showing total blackness because it’s, you know, 1:30 a.m. (I had a hopeful theory that it was black from ash covering the lens because that would be more interesting, but most of the other webcams are black too. Le sigh.)

I’ll see if I can get any pictures tomorrow–of the view from my house, if there is one, but more likely from ADN or the observatory since they’ll be better. And to think I was just going to whine about the new snow…

(Image credit: Anchorage Daily News. That photo is of the much smaller eruption March 15.)

If you know much about Alaska, you probably know that the best time to be an Alaskan is right around mid-September–that is, when Permanent Fund Dividend checks get mailed out. Last year it was even sweeter, because we got a good PFD year from the high price of oil, plus a $1,200 “resource rebate” because gas and stuff was so expensive. That came to $3,269 for every Alaska resident, just for…well, being Alaska residents. I especially appreciated mine because it went right to paying for my housing in England. (That answer disappointed a flatmate who asked if it was true that the state gave us money every year. I said yes and told him how much, and when he asked what I did with it, I think he expected to hear “I threw a wild party/bought a new car/something else extravagant”. Nope, it went straight for my tiny, overheated room in an all-concrete building on an all-concrete campus. Because I’m boring that way.)

Of course…when it hurts is tax time. It’s not like anything’s automatically withheld from a PFD, after all. And considering a not insignificant amount of my 2008 income is on a 1099, I’m gonna be paying through the nose to Uncle Sam pretty soon.

Sigh. I want my refund. Yes, the one I’m not going to get. I want a refund for…breathing. And being a college student. Something.

I suppose I should really take this opportunity to explain the whole PFD thing. Eh…maybe later.

I think I mentioned before that I miss Norwich and in many ways it’s Anchorage that is making me miss it. Anchorage is fine, don’t get me wrong, and I like living here; it’s big enough to have reasonable opportunities (for entertainment, employment, friends, outdoor stuff, whatever), small enough to not be overwhelming. But it’s…very new, and very small as cities go. We just hit 300,000 last year and we’re the biggest city in Alaska, so as cities go…we don’t have much soul.

Maybe that’s a weird way to put it, but when I’ve visited cities before that I’ve fallen in love with, it was because I got a sense for the soul of the city. That usually rules out any city whose buildings were constructed mostly in the last fifty years, so Anchorage is definitely out, as was London in this case (I know London has old parts, I just couldn’t find any of them–I saw stuff like the Tower and Big Ben and Trafalgar Square, but virtually everything was so modern it was just boring). Katowice and Marseille had grafitti everywhere and odd courtyards and alleys and cobbled streets. They were kind of exciting and very different. Edinburgh was old, really old, and full of history…plus more cobblestones and alleys. Same for Norwich. And I just eat that stuff up. I love that sense of magic and mystery to a place when you know it’s really seen things. To some extent you can get that even in cities with predominantly modern architecture, at least if you find parts with grafitti on subway tunnels or something. There’s a beauty in the grit and ugliness.

Anchorage is fine, and it’s got mountains and trees and all, but as a city–it doesn’t have enough beauty and history to give it a soul, and it doesn’t have the right kind of ugliness.

Neither did Norwich, for the most part, but despite being roughly the same size as Anchorage if you included the surrounding area, it felt much…cozier. And it sure had a lot more history. (And cobblestone streets and little dark alleyways. Have you got the idea yet that I love those?) I miss that. But the specific thing I’m missing right now, which seems to show up a lot more often in Europe?

Outdoor bare-bulb light displays. I don’t even entirely know how to describe it. Particularly when they criss-cross over a street–this picture I took my last week in Norwich isn’t great (click to enlarge), but it gives you an idea. And I’m sure that sort of thing is done in the US, but I sure haven’t seen it in Anchorage, in part because…well, none of our streets are set up right for it. And I miss it, because it’s pretty, and I don’t see it here.

(Uh…long time no blog? I don’t even know, I was busy and then finally got on spring break and everything I wanted to blog about seemed long? Lame blogger is lame.)

Yeah, this is one of many things I should have posted ages ago, back when it was more relevant, but for whatever reason I didn’t think of it until recently…and after all the attention Alaska got thanks to Palin nearly becoming the nation’s vice

president, she and her state aren’t likely to leave the international spotlight entirely for a while. And that’s weird, because in the rather odd position of largest and least populated state in the US, we’re not really used to getting that kind of attention.

It was especially surreal for me, since I was in England before, during, and after the election, and I swear, whenever I met someone new and said I was from Alaska (basically everyone could guess by my accent that I was an international student, I imagine), 9 times out of 10 the other person would respond with something like “Ooh, Palin country. What do you think of her?” I invariably responded with some hemming and hawing, the gist of which was “Well, I like most of her policies…” because, almost as invariably, the person asking 1) was an Obama fan (seriously, almost everyone was over there–and it was kind of amazing just how invested people in Europe were in the US election), 2) fairly liberal, at least compared to me, and 3) of the opinion that Palin was either evil, scary, or “a cunt, and an incompetent cunt at that” (that’s a more-or-less direct quote from a fellow member of the creative writing society who was also, incidentally, an American). All of this tended to make me uncomfortable, especially when opinions of Palin seemed to extend a bit to Alaska in general, because…well, come on. It’s my state and my state governor, and Alaska breeds a bit more of what I’d have to term, for lack of a better word, nationalistic feeling than most other states. It’s understandable if I got a little defensive.

It also struck me as very weird when people acted as if Sarah Palin had something against them personally, but…okay, whatever.

For me, though, it really got annoying when British students made statements of opinion on Alaska issues as if they were facts, in part because those issues were never treated with the evenhandedness they needed, and in part because…well, come on, it took me a day and a half of solid travel to get from here to there. Alaska is a long way away from England, and the parts of it that people were really talking about–the parts with oil and polar bears–are the sort that most British have never seen and don’t know much about. Having lived in Barrow for five years, I’m no expert, but I know a lot more about the reality of such issues than most.

The actual point is that about a month into the term, another student published an article in the environment section of Concrete, UEA’s weekly student paper, essentially saying that if Palin became vice president, animals everywhere would be more or less doomed. Also he made this cute little accrostic out of “Palin” and came up with something for each letter that spelled out what Palin really stands for, supposedly. “I” was “Ignores indigenous Inuit people,” which is kind of ridiculous to begin with (almost nobody in Alaska, least of all Native Alaskans themselves, use the term “Inuit”) but really ridiculous as a throwaway statement with absolutely nothing to back it up.

So I got my own article printed in response. It’s been published in print over in England, obviously, but because they are slow, it isn’t online. So I’m reprinting it here: Continue Reading »

Wow, this has really been a month for plane crashes or something. (I guess the Hudson River one doesn’t count, seeing as it was in January…although it’s been less than a month since that happened. Whatever.) Just a day or two ago there was the one near Buffalo, NY, and today a plane crashed on landing at London’s City airport.  The really amazing thing there is that only two people were injured and no one died; in fact, everyone had already got out of the plane by the time emergency services got there. Of course they were already on the runway, so it wasn’t anything like as bad a crash as it could be, but…a crash landing is a crash landing, and one you walk away from is pretty darn good.

This doesn’t exactly make me feel better about flying, though. At times I sympathize with my grandpa and uncle, who absolutely refuse to fly.

(Image from Reuters.)

One of the slightly more annoying things I noticed in England was that all the lifts talked. (Never mind the confusion about which floor is which: “ground floor” I understand perfectly, and I suppose I can go along with the idea that the ground floor is then floor 0 and what Americans consider the second floor is then floor 1 and so on, meaning any basement levels are floor 01, floor 02, and so on. This isn’t a problem except at UEA where the main part of campus is connected together by raised walkways and in these areas only cars and service deliveries and the like actually use the ground…which means that the “ground” floor in many, but not all, of these buildings is actually the one you enter from the walkway, and not on ground level at all.) Other annoyances aside, for some reason for sure every lift at UEA, and I think those elsewhere (I honestly can’t remember if this was true of the airports but I imagine it was, and I didn’t use much in the way of lifts otherwise), had to talk to you like all the time, in this computerized female British voice, telling you important things like “Doors closing” and “Lift going down”. So for a single ride up two floors, say, you’d get to hear “Doors closing. Lift going up.” *a couple seconds’ precious silence* “Floor two. Doors opening.” Because…it’s handicap-accessible and therefore it’s trying to tell blind people what’s going on? Because England is even more litigation-happy than the US is and maybe people have got hurt in elevators because they couldn’t figure out themselves that the doors were closing? I honestly can’t imagine.

The actual point here is that while I was gone, one of the elevators in a building on the UAA campus was extensively renovated; I can’t say whether it works better or faster (it was a real clunker before, though, and very old), but it sure looks nicer inside. Also it talks. It’s got a computerized female voice (American accent, naturally) that tells you your floor and whether it’s going up or down; it’s not as much as the lifts at UEA, but it’s close enough I wonder if this is just a new thing in making elevators more accessible than they already are (although that begs the question, why choose those messages instead of “doors closing” since the others are much easier to figure out by yourself?) or if, I dunno, some engineer just wanted to copy Britain.

Mostly it makes me think of Douglas Adams’ talking doors on the Heart of Gold.