18 Jul 2012: Circadian Rhythms Jhghghhhghgh

Howdy!  It's currently 19:24 in Glasgow, and I'm trying to force myself to stay awake until 21:00 so that I don't completely mess up my Circadian rhythms beyond hope of recovery.  This actually worked really well the first time I went to Europe—they forced us to keep moving until 20:30 and then sent us to bed, I had some of the most amazing hours of sleep in my life, then woke up with my Circadian rhythms completely fixed and ready to start my previous Europe trip—so, hey, hopefully it works again?  I figured writing a blog post would give me something productive to do that wouldn't involve me, I don't know, trying to write a manuscript at ???!?!??!?!?! o' clock in my head.  But my apologies if I'm near-incoherent at time.  Based on the emails I sent at rhombus o' clock from Amsterdam, I apparently start using bigger words when I am tired.

Also, wtf, 70 pageviews?  You people are ridiculous! <3

So, let's see, how have travels gone?  Shockingly, the flight from LAN to DTW was uneventful, except the gate we waited at was un-air-conditioned for no apparent reason.  Our departure from DTW was then delayed for about an hour because our cabin was too hot for Delta travel guidelines.  Well done Michigan!  Detroit's temperature of 38C at the time was the hottest in the country, according to the CNN feed I saw on one of the in-terminal monitors.

This is the only picture I took yesterday in the US.

Once we finally got onto the plane, I got stuck next to a chatty guy.  Now, you know me - normally I'm happy to chat it up.  But usually I like to read on plane rides and just use them as a time to disconnect and destress; they were wonderful times to use to write down reflections of different grad school visits this spring.  Plus, I wanted to try to sleep on the plane, at least a little bit.

This time, though, it was different.  It turns out the guy I was sitting next to was pretty awesome.  For one, he has the best birthday in the whole world.  (Along with Madonna.  And me.)  Which I thought was a pretty awesome coincidence.  But he also lived in the DC area for 40 years (went to Georgetown for grad school and stayed there until retirement) and absolutely loved classical music - in his house in Dayton, Ohio (where he grew up and retired to.  protip guys: retiring somewhere cheap is a good idea!), he has more than 6000 classical music CDs and 4000 classical records.  He was headed to Amsterdam to connect to a flight to Budapest to begin a journey down the Danube, which would complete a trans-European river extravaganza he had planned.

So, like, three hours into the flight, I realized we were almost half-way into the flight and I hadn't attempted to sleep or made use of the plane's entertainment features.  Oh, yeah, those: zomg.  Everyone had their own little remote control they could use to control the TV in front of them, where we had like 40 movies to choose from and 40 TV episodes it was all so CRAZY and even while I was having fun let's-talk-about-Osmo-Vänskä time I was also like "I JUST WANT TO WATCH 20 OF THESE MOVIES RIGHT NOW" so eventually I just kind of was like "welp I should probably go to a quiet place so that I can pretend to rest some" and watched "Hugo" (which was good!) and then attempted to sleep for an hour but it wasn't very effective.  Meanwhile my awesome seatmate watched Office Space, because he was awesome.

The one drawback to the entertainment system: they had a single episode of Game of Thrones to watch.  Okay, cool, makes sense.  And what was that one episode?  Season 1.  Episode 9.

Season 1.  Episode 9.  w.  t.  f.  FAIL.

Tragically, though, I failed to swap contact information with him.  In fact, I never even got his name, I don't think.  Argh.  I really need to not do that, because yay for friends from all over the world :\

Anyway, as we were landing, awesome seatmate was like "I don't remember Schiphol being all that big" but of course it was huge.  The first thing that Schiphol remended me of was vanilla chapstick, because I think the cleaner they used smelled like it.  I wandered over to my gate and gave my awesome seatmate a manly handshake as we parted ways.  Then I did something really stupid: I wandered over to my gate and went through the random passport checkpoint they had there to sequester all the UK-bound passengers on KLM flights in one area.

Yeah, no.  Don't do that.  Not right away.

Can you spot the semantically-implausible syntactic ambiguity?

You see, I had about a four hour layover. When I landed, the only thing I could think of was "I have to go to the bathroom REAL BAD". So, when I was looking for a bathroom outside the passport perimeter and saw that the first one I located had a long line (i.e., it had one), I immediately thought to myself, "Aha! There will be one through the checkpoint!" and went through right away and it turned out I was the opposite of correct because it turns out that the men's bathroom inside the checkpoint area was entirely closed and so now I was stuck in an area where there was one overpriced snack vendor and nothing to do and AUGH.

I did fix the bathroom issue (there was a unisex one) and the nothing to do issue (free wireless internet in Schiphol?!) but the food issue ended up being anti-fixed because one reason I thought it was okay to go through security was that they said they were going to feed me lunch on the Amsterdam-->Glasgow plane but then "lunch" was A TINY BAG OF SALT-AND-PEPPER CRACKERS WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN??? (crackers with salt and pepper on them. my Minnesotan sensibilities were offended by the pepper.) Also American carry-on standards are apparently quite different from European ones so I had to be "that guy" who puts his bag in sideways into the overhead bins. The one redeeming thing about Schiphol was that there was a guy with a copy of Storm of Swords, but he wasn't even reading it.
So by the time I get to Glasgow I'm cranky and hungry and frustrated and sleep-deprived, but at the same time I'm exhilarated and excited and enthusiastic and ready to jump around because there's people around me talking in SCOTTISH ACCENTS like that's a PERFECTLY REASONABLE THING TO DO.  What on earth is that about?  So I get cash, get lunch from a lovely lass named Lindsay, then head out the door and onto the Glasgow bus, where I have to ask, in the most pathetic way possible, "What do I do?" to the bus driver to make my way to the place where I'm staying.

One of the things that struck me about important trips before, and international travel in particular, is how interesting the difference is between the perspective of the traveler and everyone else around them.  For me, this is a really important day: it's the start of an exciting and awesome new adventure, a fitting end to my undergraduate career and start to my graduate, where I'll be visiting awesome places in Europe and having a lot of fun.  For most everyone else who got on board that bus as it wended its way through Glasgow, it was Wednesday.  (Worse yet, I was taking up slightly more than a seat with my bags, and whenever I'm doing that a cute old granny sits next to me, and I have to dislodge her from her seat to get out.  argh.)

EU = Holiday Inn = Scotland?

So, Glasgow.  Fun fact, Americans: you know how weather this summer has been hot, sunny, and dry?  Well, Europe's had the opposite of that.

You know what are fun?  25C temperature drops from departure to arrival.

So it's in the low teens here, with occasional rain.  Pretty lovely.  Glasgow itself is very... er, industrial.  I think it's the European equivalent of, say, Toledo, or Lansing, or Rochester, or whatnot.  Some buildings are not without their charm, but overall I wasn't particularly impressed, besides the novelty of OMG THEY'RE NOT AMERICAN BUILDINGS YAY.

To help keep myself away, I took myself on a walk up to the conference location for tomorrow and then visited the close-by Hunterian Museum, which was pretty alright (and free!).  Apparently, though, all museums in Glasgow close at 5, so I didn't see the Kelvingrove Museum, which is supposed to be better.

Siamese deer say "och aye" to that!

Wow this is a long post.  Okay.  Anyway.  Now I'm at my accommodations, which are really just a dorm room that was vacant for the summer and was thus rented out.  That works great for me; I get Intarwebs and dorm-style living, which is basically what I'm used to, so it's nbd.  And it's cheap!  Yay for cheap.  And convenient.

Tomorrow, the first day of the conference and presentation time!

Flails,

Chris

17 Jul 2012: Setting Off

Pretty much the entirety of my life for the next 20 days has been put into these bags.  The exception, of course, being Nikola, as I'm not very good at typing on a keyboard inside a backpack.  What a weird thought.  You might not find this so extraordinary, you people who do outdoorsy things and commune with nature and whatnot, but for me this is rather abnormal.  It may shock you, but I tend to overpack a bit.  I once went to quiz bowl nationals (a weekend quiz bowl tournament in Chicago) with a bag I would've had to check if we had flown, because I decided I was somehow going to sort through all my college spam that weekend.  (Instead, I went to a Mexican restaurant that I didn't want to go to and was grounded for it and, unrelatedly, played Mafia with Mississippi girls.  Long story.)

In any case, I'm going to be doing laundry in sinks and stuff, which will be an exciting and new experience.  I largely followed the advice of people who had done it before online.  They all say to be sure to fit everything in a single carry-on and leave at least some of your bag empty for souvenirs along the way.  I'm not exactly sure how they managed to do that.  My bag is pretty much full, and I followed their instructions as well as I could.  The only exception is clothes; I have a couple extra long-sleeve shirts because it's so much cooler over there than here, and my clothes are a bit dressier (--> heavier) because I'm presenting at a conference and everything.  (current temperature here: 36C.  current temperature in Glasgow: 13C.  also, sorry this blog is in metric, so there.)  They must have magical powers of cramming stuff into suitcases or something.

Speaking of advice, one thing I remembered from my Europe trip four years ago was to not wear anything with English writing on it or else you'll be branded as an awful tourist.  (Well, maybe not in the UK, but it just so happens that almost all of my clothing with English writing has an American placename on it.)  So the only non-collared long-sleeve shirt I have that doesn't have English on it is this one:

Aww yeah.  I don't know if I'm going to be brave enough to wear it like that, but luckily it's easily reversible - the only tag is on the side.  Alternatively I'll just buy something over there, but given my extreme distaste about entering clothing stores I'm not sure I'm going to be brave enough to do so.

Also, speaking of four years ago, we were also misinformed then to the purposes of a travel belt - we were told to use it for everything, but instead you're supposed to wear it somewhere inconvenient and store petty cash in your wallet.  Huh.  Funny how that works.

So, anyway, this will be my travel blog, and hopefully I'll update it about on a daily basis.  In less than an hour, I'll be being picked up by the incomparable Mark Bogner to head to the Lansing airport.  I'll be flying from there to Detroit, where I have about an hour between flights.  From Detroit I head to Amsterdam.  It'll be interesting flying trans-Atlantic again.  The last time I did, I only got about an hour and a half of sleep.  Maybe I'll get more now because I'll have a window seat and can lean against the window?  Also my sleep habits have definitely gone downhill a lot since high school.  In Amsterdam, I have about a four-hour layover.  Then I go to Glasgow.  (pronounced /glæz.gow/ - "a" as in "apple", "s" as in "is", "ow" as in "tow")  Oddly enough, despite being only a half an hour longer than my flight from Lansing to Detroit, lunch will be served on the plane from Amsterdam to Glasgow.  wtf.  Hooray for living in America, where we get budget service for big-name carrier prices.

The next time I'm sure I'll have internet access will be afternoon EST on Thursday, but I'll try to write down something tomorrow so you don't get two days in one post?  Maybe?

Flails,

Chris