Been here in St. Petersburg for a day now. My stomach's a little queasy and I'm very cold. That's the long and short of it. Beyond my own personal feelings, the city itself is very loveley looking with all the architecture and grandeur I would expect out of a fromer imperial capital.
Since a.) internet access is and will be hazy b.) I'm trying to sort out the current problem with the domain name alaskanbulgarian.com and c.) I don't want to spend my vacation typing, I'll do sparse updates like this and longer summaries when I get back to Bulgaria. More to come. Pity my stomach.
Well then, I'm here in an internet cafe in a town near Rammstein. The name of he town escapes me for the moment, but it definitely starts with a K. Fortunately, since I'm going around forgetting the names of towns, etc. I have a couple of great guides to show me the sights (for example tonight we'll be visiting a movie theater where we can see "King Kong").
Not a whole lot to say about the trip up here. The flights were comfortable. I travelled from Sofia to Budapest and from Budapest to Frankfurt on Wizzair. And although the name of the airline sounds a bit funny (I kept thinking that Pissing Shipping ought to be a spin-off), the airline itself is great. It's cheap, it uses new planes, everybody speaks English as the airline's first language, and there's open seating. Now, to you, open seating might sound like nothing more than a lack of order on the plane. To me, a person of height, it sounds like a perfect chance to score emergency exit row seats on every flight. Legroom! Endless legroom for every hour of the trip. It was heaven.
Other than that, Budapest has a small, but really shnazzy modern airport, and Germany has narrow streets and sidewalks. Those are the revelations to this point. I'm suer there will be more to come on further reflection, but digging for tidbits when a half hour at this internet just cost me 1.30 Euro (which seems absurdly expensive to me, but probably isn't) seems not so good. More to come later.
Well, so much to write, so little time. The internet connection has been abysmal lately, so I spend most of my time staring at a blank screen.
For the next couple of weeks I'll be hopping all around Northern Europe, and posting updates about my experiences whenever I get the chance. If I don't wind up doing much posting, I'll serialize my recollections about the trip when I get back.
So, basically, until then, Merry Christmas, and all the best.
Suddenly, I'm uncomfortable in a situation where I'm not working. In the past, if you had told me I wouldn't have to work one week because the school didn't have enough fuel to heat the building, and part of the next because of a teachers' strike, you probably wouldn't be able to find a happier person. But last week was, well, not terrible, but just horribly confusing.
When time is flying by, I guess, it's nice to have a routine a person can grip to in order to not get swept away. Last week, I wasn't swept, I was flushed. While I was spending most of my time working on college applications, I missed two appointments I never would have missed if I'd had to go to school. I just let them slip by.
I also never updated the site, as you probably noticed, and probably have fewer readers than ever. But I did manage to submit two college applications, so I'd have to say that was worth it.
There might be more destructive freedom next week, too, if the teachers' union doesn't get their way by the end of tomorrow. It doesn't look too promising.