:: p-dog ::

I said goodbye to my high school friends tonight. In a bar--where else? I wasn't really that excited to go, and I wasn't feeling sad or nostalgic at all for most of the night. But when it actually came down to goodbyes, I suddenly realized that, hey, these were my oldest friends, and leaving seemed so final. We're all really going separate ways now, more so than when we just left for college. And while usually I don't feel much of a pull towards these girls, tonight it was different, as it dawned on me that I could remember all of them as middle schoolers, some all the way back to 2nd grade. We may not have a lot in common anymore, but a hell of a shared history.

Ah, goodbyes. I thought I was done with them for a while. This one sort of snuck up on me.

:: Leslie H - 10:08 PM - ::

So I'm in California. For another night at least. I feel like I've reached that critical mass of things to say that I don't know where to start or if it's even worth it to try and give more than a perfunctory overview of what I've been doing/thinking/feeling. I suck at blogs.

When I get back, I hope I will have some time, and I will try and write something coherent. In general, I have really enjoyed meeting all my fellow TFA kids, whom I've been imagining for months now. They're about as cool as expected, and I'm forming some nascent friendships. But it has been exhausting feeling like I have to "make friends" every hour of the day--the reason Allison and I just closed our door in the dorm and became the antisocial ones. I'm grateful to have next week off before the real work begins at the summer institute.

I've also loved seeing the Bay area for the first time since I was 10 and in San Francisco. Chances are excellent that I'll be teaching in San Jose, which was not my first choice. It's about 45 min - 1 hour south of the city (San Francisco is just "the city"), and while it's a huge city on its own, it's not all that unique or interesting. It does have lots of cute neighborhoods with beautiful little houses, though, and I want to live in all of them.

Teaching high school might actually be back on the table if a charter school I interviewed with today will have me. That's strange to think about since I've been psyching myself up for elementary. But it's still too early to know anything.

Anyway, I've got to run. I'll be back in Texas tomorrow and hopefully will have some time to write and catch up... I miss you all, and Austin, a lot.

:: Leslie H - 5:40 PM - ::

Sorry I haven't been posting, but my life is far too boring for anyone to care about right now. Bryan got in on Wednesday night and we've mostly been cuddling for 3 days. But tomorrow I leave for my Teach for America orientation (5 days in San Francisco, doing god knows what), and after that I'll definitely have things to report. Hope everyone is doing well!

:: Leslie H - 8:57 PM - ::

Two down! I started my Teach for America readings (did three lessons out of ten yesterday, thank you), and hung out with my high school friends in two remarkably pleasant encounters. I'll elaborate later--just wanted to commit myself to a post today. Now I'm running off to get a tuberculosis test. Evidently TFA's afraid I'll infect the children. Or that, if I have tuberculosis already, my fragile constitution won't withstand the Hepatitis C they give me. Whee!

:: Leslie H - 6:36 AM - ::

Once again, I totally failed to start on my Teach for America work. I've got five course packets to read and zero motivation. At least I took them out of the box today to look at them. I suppose you could call that progress.

Tonight I'm sucking it up and calling my friends. Hopefully we can come up with something to do that doesn't involve an obnoxious, smoky bar and prowling for random, boring men. (sigh)

:: Leslie H - 6:39 PM - ::

I'm posting pictures from my graduation celebrations on gallery. Go look at them! There are some great ones, and everyone is in at least a few. It's the fourth album from the top.

:: Leslie H - 2:04 PM - ::

Bryan's coming home from Ecuador. Go figure.

:: Leslie H - 11:57 AM - ::

And now I've added the "bad" pictures to old blog posts. Revisit the Amsterdam posts to see them.

I've spent most of the day in my closet sorting through old (very, very old) clothes, books, etc. Making room for newer keepsakes. Also finding more things to haul to CA (kids books mostly). I suppose tonight I should go out with my high school friends, but I don't want to. :D

:: Leslie H - 4:28 PM - ::

All of my pictures from the trip are now up and labeled on gallery.overt.org, if you're interested in the illustrated version. I still need to get Sarah's to add (some from Paris and Interlaken), but almost all of them are there. I'll probably post the R-rated (drug-related) ones up here when I get around to it.

:: Leslie H - 2:57 PM - ::

Our last day we spent in Zurich, actually a really cool city. Unfortunately, it was practically shut down for another random Catholic holiday (Pentecost). And I thought this was the heart of Reformation country. But we didn't miss much, because I was also pretty shut down by allergies (or maybe it's just a cold), that had been plaguing me the whole trip but finally just confined me to bed in our mercifully clean hostel. We sprang for a private room and basically spent the entire evening watching crappy murder mysteries on the BBC (the only English channel available). We did walk around for maybe 2 1/2 hours, which was plenty of time to see that Zurich was a neat place. Those lovely quaint narrow streets with cobblestones and tall old buildings, mostly filled with trendy (in a good way) boutique shops. We had a blast window shopping. On our first excursion the streets were mostly empty and the stores were closed. But when we went out for dinner, there were more crowds and open restaurants. Very diverse--young, old, gay, straight, all colors of people wandering around, very few obviously tourists. We were spoken to in German a lot, instead of the automatic English. We saw the outside of a few beautiful buildings that would have been fun to go into but were (of course) closed. And for dinner, we ate the fabulous regional cuisine of vegetable fried rice. We were trying to avoid withdrawing any more money and squeaked by with 12 swiss francs between us.

In the morning, we caught a 7:20 shuttle to the airport to embark on our 11 hour flight. Particularly because of my aching and racking cough, I expected a miserable trip home, but it was actually quite painless. With the 7-hour time change, I made it to my parents' house by 3:00.

So that was Europe. Mostly relaxing, occasionally boring, often a lot of fun. Also two of the longer weeks ever in my life. I can't decide whether it was helpful in separating me physically and emotionally from college life. I had hoped it would help with homesickness by filling my days with exciting and new things, distracting me from the end of life as I knew it. Certainly, I missed everyone a lot, but maybe not as painfully as if I had just been in Dallas. I was also happy to see much of northern Europe for the first time.

Sarah and I travelled well together. It was helpful to have Casey around a lot (she also met us in Interlaken--did I mention that?). Not only is she just a cool, friendly, fun person herself, but it added someone to the mix who was happy to drink a beer with Sarah while I trotted off to a museum or to bed. Although Sarah and I lead quite different lives and have different opinions on what exactly constitutes a good time, we understood those differences and were very cooperative. She's heading off to Peace Corps and I for Teach for America, so we talked a lot about these futures we've got planned. And we also had some breakthrough sorts of conversations (admittedly, they were usually fueled by an intoxicating substance, but that didn't make them less informative or important) about our own strange little friendship, so I think the trip was good for our relationship.

Overall, a nice vacation. I did not have a fabulous time, but I think that was inevitable. Given the circumstances, I wasn't going to have a fabulous time doing anything, and I could have been quite miserable. This may have been the best way I could have spent these first few weeks of life's next bit.

:: Leslie H - 8:18 AM - ::

Interlaken, Switzerland: beautiful alps, shitty hippie commune of a hostel, dirtiest bathrooms of my life, little to do but expensive extreme sports and get fucked up. i'm bored, filthy, and ready to come home.

Well, that's what I wrote in a terrible hurry on Saturday, intending to fill it out later. But, truthfully, that pretty much sums it up. I'll try expanding a bit.

Beautiful Alps: Really, they're beautiful. I had a great time during the days, when we went on 2 ambitious (for Sarah and I), 5-hour mountain bike treks, and one river rafting adventure, down a river of melted glacier. We tooled around the mountains, around the lakes in the mountains, down the rivers in the mountains, etc. The town was also lovely--all blue and green, accented with the red of the roses blooming everywhere and the dark brown of the wooden houses.

Shitty hippie commune of a hostel: Mother of God. I don't know where to begin. As soon as I get my pictures developed... So, this hostel used to be a barn. Our particular dorm (the 20-person room), used to be (and not too far into the past) a horse stable. It still had stall separations and troughs, for god's sake. Walls and floors were cement; beds were 3-story metal bunks. Also, it reeked of urine, though that was probably more due to some drunk kid a week ago than to the horses that used to live there. In the flowerbeds outside the place, marijuana plants grew. (It's legal in Switzerland--who knew?) But the grime was not my biggest objection. The kids who stayed here ranged from frat boys to stoners and back to frat boys, and I didn't have a lot to say to them. Especially when they were so stoned. Evenings were spent exclusively drinking beer, smoking pot, and sitting around a fire. Now, I have nothing against this, and it would have been fine for, say, two nights. (Or one night. Or no nights.) But we got to do it for four. If you weren't fucked up--which I was really tired of being, so I didn't do much of at all--it was staggeringly boring.

Dirtiest bathrooms of my life: The common bathroom had (in addition to a host of communicable diseases) black lights in place of flourescents, a disco ball, and a constant loop of trippy trance music. Weirdest showers of my life.

Little to do but expensive extreme sports and get fucked up: People usually spend a weekend in Interlaken blowing their money on $300 skydives, paragliding, canyoning, bungee jumping, river rafting, and drugs. We spent four days, and didn't have the money for any of it. As I said, I did have a great time during the days, without spending too much. We rented bikes twice and went river rafting down a glacer melt (the least expensive and heart-stopping of the sports). In the evenings, people got stoned. I was ready for a long break from intoxication, so I just counted down the hours until I could reasonably expect to go to bed and be able to sleep through my dorm-mates' noise. Drugging yourself to sleep helped, and would have been especially nice the night the fat Irishman who was way too old to be staying in a hostel snored like an air raid siren and forced Sarah and I to pack our blankets and head for the living room. Evidently there was a mutiny later that night, when everyone in the dorm chunked pillows at him and drove him out.

So that was Interlaken. Mediocre times.

:: Leslie H - 12:55 AM - ::

Well, here's my attempt at rewriting the Munich bit, which was eaten by an internet blip in easyeverything café. But it won't be perfect. As I mentioned before, there were liters of beer involved.

So we hopped on the night train from Amsterdam to Munich, in sleeper compartments that fit 6--tightly. We were just hoping for nice people who didn't smell too rank or snore too loudly. Our wish was sort of granted. About half a minute before the train lurched out of the station, half a basketball team lurched into our room. Turns out it was 4 guys who went to high school just a sneeze away from us (at Lake Highlands, which will mean something to you Dallas folk). They had graduated 1-2 years after we did and were doing the grand Europe tour. They were also stoned out of their minds. (We had to run through introductions about four times that evening.)

Fortunately, Amsterdam had tired them out as it had Sarah and I, so they were amenable to my suggestion that we set up the beds at 12:30. After they smoked another joint in the space where the train cars connect. So we actually got a very decent night's sleep, and rolled into Munich about 7:30 in the morning.

Sarah and I checked into a hostel--we sprung for our own room--quite near the train station, and set off to stagger around the city. And we did a pretty good job. The old part of Munich is quite walkable. Our activities included a half-delerious shopping trip during which I bought three shirts I didn't need but were really cheap, and a profoundly ugly yellow visor to keep the sun out of my eyes. Also, we wandered into a cathedral of some kind. We saw the glockenspiel (a big clock tower as well as some funky instrument) chime the hour, complete with a Disneyland-from-the-60s display of jerky knights and ruddy peasants rotating slowly under the clock face. We wandered through a large and elaborate outdoor market. We learned our one German vocabulary word: "spargel" (extra zart!), which refers to the local seasonal delicacy of white asparagus, which every stall offered alongside cherries and apricots. Finally, we visited the museum of science and technology, which featured a slew of well-done exhibits on everything from sea navigation to paper-making to physics optics (my favorite!). But we were a little too tired to do the museum full justice.

After a nap in our happy room with yellow walls and pink sheets, we bought a $3 dinner and ate it in the downstairs bar (I swear to god, *cathedrals* in Germany have downstairs bars). There, we were lured into the biergarten tour, promising 3-4 of the best beer gardens in the city, and all the free beer we could drink as we walked and took the tram from one to the next.

Well, it was *Germany* after all, home of beer. And it was a way to meet some fellow travellers. And also to get deeply, shamefully drunk. Which is exactly what we did.

A liter is a lot of beer. Four liters is--trust me--four times as much. And a shot of jagermeister in the middle of a square, while not my finest moment, seemed the thing to do at the time.

I had a tremendously good time. Managed to pull back before the intoxication reached a dangerous or unpleasant level, and met/talked to/danced with lots of cool people from all over the place.

Naturally, I woke up the next morning feeling a bit delicate, but we managed to make a long trek through the city, get hopelessly lost, get stung by furious biting ants, but finally find the big, beautiful public park which was our goal. We even saw some of the famous naked sunbathers before the looming thunderstorm drove them all back into their knickers. That night, we met 2 more recent UT grads, and we went out with them to Yet Another Beer Garden. I took it Very Easy.

:: Leslie H - 4:50 AM - ::

Amsterdam is not a beautiful city. I'd call it charming if that didn't sound so condescending. It's like the East and West Village in New York expanded to fill every niche of wealth and utility. Everything is red brick and four stories tall. I'm told I'm not seeing the *real* Amsterdam because it's been so warm and sunny, when usually it's cool and drizzling. The streets--dark maroon brick or gray pavement--are dirty, and the architecture of even the most important buildings is pretty modest. Or it's in that cuckoo clock northern europe style that I can never take seriously. There's nothing of the grandeur of Rome or Paris. But I'm comfortable here. It is approachable, friendly, digestible in a way that the more splendid capitols are not.

On Saturday we rose late, and Sarah and Casey went to the train station to buy tickets for our later journeys, while I went to the Anne Frank house. They'd been before and told me I just had to see it. So I did. Not much in there but a few letters, identity cards, and her original diary, but it was quite remarkable to actually see this place where the families lived for so long. I bravely managed not to cry. After we reunited, we (the three of us plus Casey's boyfriend Josh) spent the afternoon riding many kilometers through the dutch countryside--a weird combination of suburbia and sheep pastures--to a little village. Our goal was really to see a (humble, dutch) castle, but it was closed. So we settled for a cola (don't say coke here--they think you're asking for drugs, and that sort isn't legal) and a rest before riding the 20 km home. The weather was as perfect as it has been all week, and the land was beautiful--very flat, very green, lots of sheep, more red brick. Those black and white dairy cows with swaying udders. Evidently we saw about as rural as Holland gets (it's a weeny country, with the 3rd highest population density in the world, i'm told). The little village--the name of which i've forgotten--was lovely, too. More canals, and no tourists at all. So we rode home and capped our athletic triumph with cheese fondue for dinner. Mmmm, melted cheese...

Sunday I was determined to see a museum, so I set out for the Van Gogh museum while Sarah and Casey went shopping (who's surprised?). I spent hours in there--it was very cool. I'm not sure I've ever been to a museum devoted to just one artist, and they did an excellent job with the exhibits of teaching you about Van Gogh's life, values, artistic influences, etc. [Evangelical preacher turned artist, idealized the sturdy, noble peasant, dramatically shifted his color scheme from dark to bright, and was influenced not only by his contemporary European artists, but by Japanese prints and woodcuts. And who knew Gaugin was his lover? Not I...]

After my culture interlude, I met Sarah and Casey, who had ensnared a couple of dopey but endearing frat boys from Georgia, who were starting their 3 month European tour. Joshua Hambulton Duckwall and Gary Murphy Sindall--I wrote their names down because we found them really funny at the time... Sarah called them frat-tastic. We went to Amsterdam's version of Central Park around four, had a light picnic, and didn't move again until 10:00.

It was lovely, and we had some very interesting conversations. Casey is a lot of fun to talk to--she's been in Europe for 2 years now and has a lot of international and Dutch (and no American) friends, so she has interesting things to say about Europe and Europeans. Among our revalations: she thinks of distances and temperatures in km and Celcius here but doesn't convert them in her head, and when she's back in Texas, she thinks in miles and Farenheit. So she could tell us it was about 22 degrees in the park, but she was way off in her Farenheit estimate, just because she doesn't interpret temperature that way in Amsterdam. Also, the Dutch tend to be alarmingly sarcastic at first and make jokes about everything. But unlike we snide Americans, they love you and accept you anyway. There's no real concept of cheesy in Europe: you may get poked fun of, but you can pretty much behave however you want without worrying about looking uncool.

So today I'm heading to another museum, the big national one, while Casey and Sarah rollerblade. Ah, how I love being a nerd. Tonight at 8 we catch the night train to Munich. Our trip is half over. I feel like I've been here for a year.

:: Leslie H - 4:38 AM - ::