Happy happy happy happy happy 18th birthday to my sweet, darling angel Cherie!!!
I love you so much, baby. I wish I could express to you how much you mean to me, and maybe someday I will, but in the meantime know that you have changed my life forever just by being your caring, adorable, brilliant, and beautiful skippy-rat self.
I started writing this at the beginning of this month, and never had time to finish. Maybe I will someday, but here's the first bit of my Prague trip:
I guess that last post was the unhappy one... Sorry about that; I didn't realized I had published that completely inane link. Anyway, that would make this the happy post! Weeee! :)
I just got back from Europe last night at 9-ish, and it was really really really ridiculously fun. Read fun as 'expensive', but that's cool. Alright, here goes, although I doubt very much that I still remember how to tell a good story.
Day 0:
The plan was to meet at IST (where two coaches and two team members work) at 9-ish so we could leave at 11:00. Naturally, I hadn't even packed by 9:00 because I don't travel and I'm not so bright about these things, so Cherie, my mother and I scrambled to stuff enough clothing and entertainment goods into my luggage to keep me clothed and entertained for the ten days. Somewhere in there we had french toast and berries for breakfast :)
If I had a sidebar, I would have used it here to say that I only own nine pairs of underwear, that I wore a different pair each of the ten days, and that somehow I came home having one extra pair. Leave me a moment for my confusion... Okay, done.
Anyway, we stopped at Target where Cherie bought me pink sunglasses (okay, they're only pink from a few specific angles) and I loaded up on batteries and pens. After driving around like chickens with our heads cut off (and, trust me, they don't navigate so well), we found the right combination of roads to pull up to the Computer Science building to pick up a recommendation letter from one of my teachers, then off to IST we screamed, arriving at about 10:50. I got some glares, but fortunately my Mother and Cherie both radiate impenetrable force fields of glee, so the mood stayed civil. We departed for the airport at 11:03.
When we got there, Delta couldn't find our tickets.
This would be an unfortunate but not entirely unlikely thing except that we had only moments before handed them said tickets, and the woman behind the counter (who moments after the trouble began somehow turned into several women of similarly aggressive and condescending demeanor) couldn't seem to find them in the envelope. Somehow the mighty gods of travel decided that fifteen minutes of handing our passports to the desk, getting them back, receiving our distributed tickets (minus one each time) from the swarm of airport personnel, handing those back with our passports, and repeating this process as many times as about fifteen minutes could allow was a sufficient ritual to satisfy their appetites for frustration and humor, and so after doing so we were finally allowed to pass. Aside from Dr. Orooji mistaking Cherie for my sister (after a misunderstood joke on the topic) and developing throughout the process an intense suspicion that incest was afoot, the departure from Orlando was without major incident.
Wait, go back. I failed to mention my amateur flight attire, which consisted of pants with metal fasteners down both sides, metal keys, a metal belt buckle, hiking boots with metal eyelets and hooks, a metal necklace, metal sunglasses, and a metal travel wallet that managed to escape my attention during every single painstakingly long pass through security during which dignity was maintained only by the fact that I could be wanded and cleared one body part at a time without having to remove all of my clothing, save my polyester shirt, at once. That and my socks.
*sigh*
We got to Atlanta, ate some overpriced Burger King (that is to say, it was overpriced by my naive definition at that time... but more of that later), then after passing through security again (ARGH) we boarded our plane to Zurich.
Day 0.5:
Okay, so I don't really care when you want to define the first day as starting, but for the convenience of all I'll include the twelve hours between getting on the plane to Zurich and finally reaching Prague as day 0.5. I mostly slept on the plane since I had spent several hours of the previous night working on the hack pack for the contest. I managed to catch "Stuck on You", the movie about the siamese twins. My headphone jack didn't work so I watched the movie without sound... after watching it meander its way through the plot I decided that the creators wrote down every funny situation that could arise from siamese twins, threw them in a hat, shook it around (not nearly enough), and drew them out one by one without concern for the sequence of events. It might have been better with sound, but I'll never know since I wouldn't have wasted even that hour and a half of my life on the movie except that my eyes would have fused to my contact lenses had they remained closed much longer. Other than that, I listened to audiobook Spanish lessons, read Robot Vision papers, and tried not to think about what specifically would happen to the plane (and its passengers) in the event of any of several unlikely emergencies. None were particularly encouraging, and our 767 met the runway in Zurich with all the grace of a drunken sumo wrestler attempting figure skating on a dare.
The terminal we were directed to in Zurich was tiny, but was only our home for an hour and a half until they bussed us out into the cold to climb the stairs into our compact, foldable, multipurpose Swiss Army Jet. The nice thing about being on a plane that doesn't really fly so much as take a running leap from point A to point B was that my small paranoia about running out of fuel was rendered fully moot.
We landed in Praha sometime in the morning, collected our luggage (fully intact somehow), and piled into a shuttle-bus to take us to Namesti Republiky (Republic Square) which was supposedly somewhere in the vicinity of our hotel. It was snowing for the first half hour waiting for the bus, but sadly (or perhaps fortunately) it had ceased by the time we reached the square, leaving us snowless as we took the second-shortest path around the wrong block to the hotel. After that, I remember a lot of scurrying about the lobby with pens and chocolates and forms and passports and such, getting our rooms authorized since one of them was in my name. Finally, we entered the rooms and collapsed for awhile.
Let me take a moment to describe the Renaissance Hotel that was our temporary home while in Praha (oh, and that's Czech for Prague). Imagine a really nice American hotel.
That's it. It was like walking back onto US soil when you walked through the door, except that everyone had a Czech accent, and the electrical sockets were different... except for those in the bathroom which were oddly enough compatible with our appliances. So much for the exotic life of world travel... but we made up for that in Zurich, I assure you. In due time.
After an hour or so of becoming over-acquainted with our rooms, we decided to head out for dinner. After intense debate, it was eventually decided that we should eat at an American restaurant the first night so as not to upset our frail stomachs (GRRR). I got the last laugh in that argument, though, because the place we chose was Red, Hot & Blues, which does share the same name as a Southern-US establishment, the particular place we found ourselves at was in fact a quaint blues bar modeled after some version of the US that was probably instilled by communism. It was friday, so I don't know why I was complaining; I had to order the salad anyway. Still, the idea of travelling several thousand miles around the world (11k or so) and trying to find food like home is just silly to me.
Oh, and we got lost twice on the way there. *sigh*
After this, we headed back to the room, but as anyone might have expected I decided to go exploring. Within two blocks of the hotel (all in one direction), I found two casinos, two bars, one train station with a little grocery store, and one sex shop. Yes, indeed, the city wound up exactly as my guide book had indicated (thanks Brad). Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, or perhaps of no consequence at all since none of the places interested me in that particular company) everything in Prague had closed at 9pm, two hours earlier. I returned to the hotel to call home.
I spent $70 calling home that night. Five calls, each no more than a minute. Insert credit card, wince, dial number, wince, hear answering machine, cry, leave message, hang up, wince... Sadly, the multitude internet cafes near the hotel were closed, too, or this wouldn't have been a problem. I think I managed to go the whole trip without missing some form of communication with Cherie each day... I hope so, at least.
This was the first thing I decided that I couldn't stand about Europe: without an internet connection it's ridiculously difficult and expensive to contact home.
Anyway, I filled the inflatable air mattress that we brought along, rolled up my shirt from that day to use as a pillow, and tried to sleep. By halfway through the night the mattress had lost enough air that I was sleeping on the floor in a little inflatable wading pool, so there was little rest to be had.
