Moonshiner

I got some tacos at Chipotle today, and they were playing Uncle Tupelo's "Moonshiner" as I ordered. I suppose the very expensive muzak service Chipotle employs has decided that this song calls up Western misery and images of gringos fleeing to Zihuatanejo to live out their days away from the prying eyes of Texas lawmen, and that people eat at Chipotle because they feel a kinship with those dudes running south of the border. But "Moonshiner" is about an Appalachian whiskey-still operator who can't quit the bar scene. Oh well. It's one of my favorite songs so I was at once happy to hear it, and cringing that Chipotle has coopted it.

You can tell the place is run by McDonald's, by the way, because of the way your stomach revolts against the food in the middle of the afternoon. It tastes good while you're eating, and then bam! The payback.

London/Geneva

I went to London for work last week and got to see Kara in the process - she came up on her R&R from South Sudan! It was great and we ate lots of bad (as in good) English food, like cheeseburgers and steak and ale pie and pizza. We had coffee every morning at this really super little cafe around the corner from my hotel in Brentford.

We also met up with my college friend Josh, who's doing research for his PhD in the British Library. We went to the Tate Modern and went down the Holler slides:

and then saw the "Sliding Doors" exhibit:

On Saturday we went to another ex-power-station-made-into-art-space, the Wapping Project, which had huge fashion photographs in it. I was a little bored with the 'fashion photos and models in old brick industrial space' concept, and the cafe service was terrible. That said, the candles on the huge pumps and machinery still in the building made the early evening quite pleasant, as did the comedy of five english majors speculating on how the plant made electricity.

We set out for some dinner through Brick Lane (Indian restaurants galore) and Spitalfields, which has a Sunday market and a really good restaurant I'd been to the past summer, St. John. After some street BBQ we got a few beers at a bar, where I explained the sociology of Baltimore's heroin addicts to Josh's friend Ian. Honestly, most of it I just made up. Sorry Ian.

Sunday Kara and I had yet more coffee and went on a hunt for a scarf that took us up to Russell Square, where we perused books at Judd's, and where I accosted a man with a nice scarf, much to his shock and horror, to find out where he'd gotten it. Then back to Covent Garden, where I found said scarf right where he had told me, and then up to King's Cross to confirm Kara's hotel, down to Oxford Circus to grab food and an earful of live blues, and then home on the tube to pack my stuff up.

In Geneva I met with a bunch of people and all went quite well. I even have a friend to go skiing with next time I'm there and there's snow!

Mes excuses!

Sorry for not posting - I've been away on vay-cay to Puerto Rico (awesome) and work trip to London and Geneva (also awesome!). As soon as I figure out how to offload the pics from my new Blackberry (incredibly useful while traveling; bane of my existence when at home) I will post you some nice things. In the meantime, here's Nick's last post. Phantom Tollbooth author addresses love and math. Awwww.....

"A romance in lower mathematics"

Ran across this cute 1960s animated short of a children’s book by Norton Juster (of Phantom Tollbooth fame and also a western Mass resident): “The Dot & the Line: a romance in lower mathematics”.

Seeing that it’s about love and math, how could I resist?

[nick@anize]

Pics from Maputo

All my good pictures were lost when baggage handler thieves in Johannesburg stole my mom's and the project's digital cameras (and my cellphone) out of my checked bag en route to Zambia. So all we have are pics of the meeting, boring! I do have 1.5 seconds of excellent video of our M&E guy doing a Zulu dance and we'll see if I can figure out how to put that up. And EA will provide pics of our ill-fated cruise a bit later....along with the story I still have to write.

The Maputo meeting went really well, I think, and we accomplished most of our goals. The town is quite nice, pretty deserted but with tall office buildings and apartment buildings that are more or less covered in mildew. There are a number of good restaurants, including Micasa, which serves excellent caipirinhas and ostrich medallions. Yum! You can find prawns everywhere, butterflied and grilled with lots of butter, and the South Africans have opened a bunch of chain restaurants and clubs à la TGI Fridays or a mini African House of Blues. The first evening we saw some Portugese jazz at a place that had a faux treehouse quality to it, with vines and leafyness and a real rubber tree growing up out of the courtyard. The band sat in front of a large fake clamshell and there were five big video screens showing two different camera angles.

There was a really really good Indian restaurant not far from the hotel, and the Natural History Museum was AWESOME - stuffed lions and zebras and antelopes and civet cats and a coelacanth (Wikipedia here). Coelacanths are prehistoric fish that everyone thought were extinct until fishermen caught one off the coast of Madagascar, and then Indonesia, in the 20th century. They have little legs and look like Far Side cartoons (they also give birth to live young called pups!).

The museum was great - huge - with fish and mammals and insects, including our beloved anopheles. There were big wood carvings of cellular biology and the prehistoric time periods, with dinosaurs and cavemen. One wall had about 8 elephant fetuses of varying ages (cool!). And - all the animals were eating one another! The lion was perched on the back of the zebra, in the correct position to bite through the spinal cord. Areana said "Wow, that's great - lions are trying to be humane by killing the zebra quickly!" Always the party pooper, I pointed out that it's just more efficient for the lion to not waste a lot of energy mauling the zebra to death.

That's it for now - off to Puerto Rico tomorrow very early! Thank goodness the flight is out of Reagan and not Dulles, like I'd originally thought. In fact, I thought that Reagan and Dulles were the SAME until I checked my flight info last week. It's ok, you can laugh. I don't mind. :)

Shower Bliss

Last weekend at Target I got Edith and myself an early Christmas present - a new showerhead! After two weeks of really awesome water pressure in Africa I came home to our drizzly pathetic shower and said "no mas!". For fifteen bills we got a brand new kickass showerhead whose major advantage over the old one is that it is entirely unclogged with hard water residue.

It is a whole new world right now, and every time we step in that shower it's like a symphony is playing.

Fixies are Everywhere

I come back after two weeks in Mozambique and Zambia and what a difference! There are fixies everywhere in Baltimore. Everywhere! Downtown, Charles Village, Penn Station, Brewer's Art. Ok, so there used to be fixies at these places before, but I just ain't never seen so many. It's nice.

Also the new Chipotle is open up the street from me - won't get to that anytime soon I'm sure, given my past patronage of local eateries. Just can't seem to make it up past the grocery store when there's perfectly good food at home.

Other than that, nothing much is new. I will get to news of the trip a little later.

In Maputo

Made it to mozambique. hotel is nice and purports to have wireless, but i can´t make it work. flights were long but not brutal. it is overcast and warm and breezy and reminds me of libreville but with no people (it is sunday though). i still hate my haircut and want to cry every time i see it but since this is not conducive to getting anything done i am stopping with the pity party and pretending i have my old haircut. i should also stop saying ´thanks, but i hate it´when people say hey you got your hair cut!

i dont have to facilitate many sessions, thank goodness, but areana has already nominated me to go to kenya directly after london to do i don´t know what exactly. i am hoping she was joking but fear she was not. i do have a job to do stateside, after all! didn´t get out in paris at all as the layover was shorter than i thought (7 hours) and i was tired and didn´t want to waste the 195 euro (!!!!!) that the project was spending on the day room.

Hopefully I will have some pics to post during the trip. On verra. There´s a jazz concert tonight we will try to go to, and Matt wants to eat prawns, so who knows what´ll happen.