London

Aug. 17th, 2005 06:32 pm
ellarien: a nice cup of tea (British)
This hotel lobby terminal is not only expensive but slow, so I'll be brief.

I've made it to London, had my visa-approved photograph taken, and located my hotel in the mazes of Bayswater. Central London seemed a bit quieter than usual, and the tube was half-empty, but otherwise things seem fairly normal -- and I should have brought my sunglasses.

Tomorrow I go to the US Embassy for my visa appointment.

Yes!

Jul. 5th, 2005 11:09 am
ellarien: Higger Tor (Home)
I have my shiny new passport. Am wobbly with combination of relief and panic that now I can/have to start moving on with my plans for the rest of the summer.
ellarien: 5x5x5 cube (puzzle)
The bus was almost half-full this morning, and all the seats in the front half of the shady side were taken, so I went to the back, and was reminded again of the strange thing about buses here. (Edit: in Tucson, AZ).

The seats at the back are never as comfortable as the seats nearer the front. On the older buses, the front seats are fully padded, the back ones metal or plastic with thin slips of padding; on the newer ones, the thin slips of colourful plush padding are at the front and the rear seats are mere black vinyl. I doubt any of these buses are more than ten or fifteen years old.

I'm probably completely wrong, but I always wonder if this is evidence of some weird cultural blind spot left over from the days of segregation -- a conviction that something inescapable about the nature of public transport requires the back half of the bus to have inferior accommodations even though there are no longer laws requiring certain people to sit there. I know, from growing up on buses in the UK, that this isn't true. Even in the days when the back half of single-decker buses was the domain of smokers, the seats were the same all the way back.

Thursday

Jun. 16th, 2005 07:26 pm
ellarien: Red barrel cactus flower (scarlet)
Hot, hot, hot. Oh, and dry. I haven't taken a photo for a couple of days now, though I'm keeping a hopeful eye on some barrel cactus buds.

Last time I needed to renew my passport, I used photos from one of the coin-operated booths that are ubiquitous in British cities. This time, I went to our in-house photographer, who had a certain amount of trouble with the trimming because it was specified in mm (35x45), and his passport-trimming gadget produces the US 2"x2" standard.

Somewhat analogously, when I was in England and needed a document notarized to US standards, I had to go to a fancy law office downtown, whereas here it would just be a matter of popping across the road to HR.

Living in other people's countries is awkward sometimes.

And hot. Did I mention the heat?

On the other hand, Amazon is finally, finally, 'about to ship' my copy of Traitor's Knot by Janny Wurts.

Edit: It shipped!
ellarien: Blue/purple pansy (Default)
Yes, I'm going to bed soon. (I read the first chapter of Destroyer; it's good!)

But I just had a thought that I'm noting down here for future use, and offering to anyone who might find it useful. When I first moved here, I went through a period of a month or two when I almost completely lost the ability to recognize people by voice; on the phone, I couldn't even reliably tell men from women. My theory was that my voice-recognition circuits simply registered 'American accent' and shut down without doing any further processing. Somewhat later in the acclimation process, I found myself sometimes losing nouns; when the American and British names for a thing differed, I'd temporarily fail to remember either version.

This kind of thing might well be a problem for anyone suddenly dumped in an environment where the ambient language is slightly different from the one they grew up with.

Phoenix

Jan. 9th, 2005 06:48 pm
ellarien: Blue/purple pansy (Default)
I made my usual bi-weekly trip to Phoenix. Nearly lost my book on the shuttle on the way up, and had a ridiculously hard time convincing various people I knew what I was talking about when I maintained that yes, my book was in the back of that van, and no, I wasn't under the impression that it was my SuperShuttle to the suburbs. Did lose my bus-pass on the way back, which is annoying, and very nearly missed my city bus as a result of hanging around to look for it. Otherwise, it was a nice visit.

But it struck me, in the shuttle on the way back, what a rootless place Phoenix is. When I was an undergraduate in Birmingham, England, living in a Hall of Residence eighty miles from home, I was easily the most transient member of the group of seventy-odd I was worshipping with. Now, I commute farther than that every couple of weeks to worship with a couple of dozen people, of whom six are literal refugees from a couple of different African wars, and hardly any of the rest have been here longer than ten years. And the developers keep scraping away old farmhouses and their shading trees to fill the land with cookie-cutter houses and apartments.

Mission Statement

Reading, writing, plant photography, and the small details of my life, with digressions into science and computing.

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Ellarien

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