|
|
June 28th, 2006 14:19
Well! here I am at Yad hashmonah, on yet *antoher* compeltely demented keyboard. WHy is it that these keyboards are so unable to type?!?!
It took me a couplehours to travel here this morning: I got up, packed all my stuff together, went to th beach and walked in the water for a bit, bussed to Tel aviv central bus station, bussed to Jerusalem, during which I sat next to a nice old man who told m, in broken English, about the days when Israel was angrier than now, and pointed out the carcasses of busses along the highway that had been blown up while transporting food from Tel Aviv to Israel, he said. Then I got a sandwich, and bussed here to Yad hashmonah, spending the time talking t a tremendously fat lady who 1) told me where to get off 2) expounded at great length about how people are always asking her if she is Navajo 3) as extremely opinionatd about just about everything. I actually at some points wondered if she was quite mad, because at first she was insisting that she was pure jewish and could trace her bloodlines back to Aaron, and then at the end of the conversation I swear she told me her mother was Swiss German. Maybe I wa imagining things.
Anyway, I hiked up a l;ong hot hill and here I am: my group is arriving in 3 or 4 hours and I am taking this time to chill out a bit. It is MUCH more peacful here: I wasn’t too much a fan of Tel Aviv. The air here is sweet with flowers; we are on a hill that overlooks some dry green and yellow valleys.
Last night I took a long walk along the Tel Aviv beaches. It is nice at night: if it weren’t for the endless noise and the flashing flourescent lights! Everyone was going nutsabout soccer and there were all these giant lit-up orange things which look for all the world like 2.5 meter traffic cones, and poeple sitting around them watching soccer on enormous screens on the beach. Ther was even an ATM machine sprouting up out of th sand, I kid you not, and everyone was smoking from these giant hookah things. Idont’ know what was in them, but even children, like 9 year old boys were smoking out of them! Hmmm.
I was hard pressed to keep the grubby men away from me. One insisted on sitting down and telling me about his children even while asking if I would “make him a lucky man tonight”. Honestly!
The German girl in my hostel was very cool, unlike the terrible teeny-boppers: I think if I had stayed a bit longr we would have become friends: rare for me with women. For some reasons german women seem to like me, unlike American women. Ah, well. This entry = completely discombobulated as this is yet another demented keyboard (sorry!) and I am limited to 10 minutes here…. which is just about up!
Off to explore.
June 27th, 2006 21:20
Apologies again for demented keyboard: this one’s half Hebrew and doesn’t like the spacebar…
So here I am in Tel Aviv. Royal Jordanian actually came through with a plane, but that’s a story I’ll tell.
Sorry I can’t remember the LJ cut tag :-/
So last night I spent two hours walking around Bangkok airport hunting for the Royal Jordanian lounge. I went literally 6 places– it was like a joke, seriously — everyone told me it was somewhere else, with that particular flavor ofbland smile that only Asian women can do. I eventually figured out that no such lounge existed, and spent the night curled up in the fetal position on top of my two carryons on two very small attached seats with my headphones in my ears and my jacket on my head,while a small brown man — boy? — leered at me over the top of the adjacant two seats.
Lurched onto my plane at 5:30AM sharp.This flight (8 hours or so) was entertaining simply due to the passangers. While the flight was full,it appeared not to be for the simple fact that the plane was more than half full of diminutive aging brown women in lacy headresses — these ladies were, in fact, so diminutive that their heads did not show over the top of the airplane seats. When we finalyl stood up to get out, I loomedover them (and indeed,over mostof the men on the plane too) like some kind of pink and white and blonde monster. All of these women had a very strange habit of hoarding all the plane food too: every time a snack or whatever came out, they would furtively whip out these little plastic bagsand drop all the stuff in there.
The planeleftlateandflewslow so wearrived wellaftermy final plane was supposed to leave and I resigned myself to along wait in Amman airport. However, whe I made it to the transit desk (dodging diminutive lace-cladladies like mad) they simply gave me a boardingpass and sent me through a strange locked door. The strange locked door led to an absolutesurreal walkway — think airport terminal walkway meets biggest duty free ever meets Vegas — and I speedwalked madly down this (following a short plump man who appeared to know where he was going), ultimately ending up at a big ‘Gate 6′ that dead ended in an ominously locked door.
A tall, thin, jovial man accosted me and Mr.Plump and told us we should wait “just five minutes”.We sat down,worriedly checking our watches. As other exhaustedpoeple filtered in, he told them the same thing, offering all of us simultaneously a cup of coffee sloshing in his hand.
We waited in puzzlement for 20 minutes before we found out we were waiting for a bus to take us to a plane that would take us to Tel Aviv. I was the only female aside from an Asian women who appeared to be married to a guy whose background I couldn’t for the life of me place. While we waited, I tested the bathroom — a stark and unhappy, toilet-paper-free, chrome affair. Thankfully, only one of the stalls contained the much-feared hole in the floor. The other two had proper toilets.
I checked my reflection and saw a bright pink face surrounded by lankand crappy hair.I got ahaircut yesterday before I left. WHY is it that gay male hairdressers always insist on blowdrying my hair as flat and as forward as possible?
It was at this point that I realized that, while I had a spare shirt, I did not have a bra so it was moot. Blah.
Finalyll the bustcame,and we filed onto it: it took us to a cute little (modern!!) plane full of a lot ofother impatient passangers: I can only imagine they had been sitting there for an hour and a half. The trip to Tel Aviv couldn’t have been more than half an hour: the scenery was beautiful: bleak orange-yellow plains and ragged hills of what looked like soft sandy dirt.
When we arrived in Tel Aviv I waspleasantly surprised by the airport which was really beautiful, and compeltely empty. It took all of 10 minutes toget through passport control, pick up baggage (it came! hurray!) and get through Customs: the Customs guys didn’t even check my passport let alone my luggage, they weretoo engaged in conversation. And so I strode out into the muggy air.
Caught a train to Tel Aviv and then took a bus to the sea: ran into a few complications there. If I was expecting things to be mostly in English, and most people to speak some English, well,I was dead wrong. mrtee misled me!!
The traffic was stunningly badas the bus angrily lurched down the street, and thereare notafew khaki-cladmen with machine guns. Seems like a bit of overkill to me: what exactly are they going to do with that given the masses of civilians…? Most of them seem to be barely more than boys, as well.
So here I am at my hostel, a stone’s throw from the beautiful green ocean: while what I’ve seen so far of Tel Aviv is a complete dump,the ocean smells sweet and in warm and beautiful (way too many people at the beach though, and they will take a fit if you sit on one of the ubiquitous beach chairs). I am rooming with 1 nice German girl and 3 teenyboppers of highest degree:partof the reason I’m hiding down here with the computer!
I am completely exhausted, and missing Zaubi has just hit me hard, being as I’m not stressing over the travel anymore. Even though this is my first night in Tel Aviv, I think I will just have to collapse on my tiny hostel bed in preparation for the journey tomorrow…I don’t even know where I’m going yet, hah!
June 26th, 2006 22:35
Oh yeah, and what’s more, this airport is crazy. It’s like being in a Taiwanese night market. it’s also the longest airport I’ve ever been in: I must have speedwalked several kilometres from my debarkment point to the transfer desk.
And I find it impossible to change the time and/or set an alarm on my digital watch (which I never wear). There are only three buttons: how hard can it be?
June 26th, 2006 22:21
Well, I didn’t have time to write before I had to rush out the door and catch my plane… was way too busy all this morning, doing last minute things, cooking Zaubi things to eat, and mamking him a treasure hunt so he wouldnt’ be too lonely when he came home from work to a empty house 
I am in Bangkok. The flight here was good enough: it turned out for this first leg I was flying Thai Airways not Royal Jordanian. Thai Airways’ theme color is a lurid purple. They have very nice bright purple blankets, and they serve Thai food! Teehee. Bad Thai food, but it’s still Thai.
Sadly, while I was in a rather opportune seat (at the front of a section so lots of legroom) and there was a giant screen 3 feet from my face, that screen did not work, except to flicker horribly once every couple minutes. No movies for moi.
My keyboard is demented.
Anyway, the reason I’m sitting here at 2AM in the morning Brisbane time, typing away on an extremely demented Thai keyboard is because Royal Jordanian’s reign of evil has already begun. Well, I suppose it had already begun some weeks ago when they started changing all my flights aruond, but now it has begun in earnest.
I was supposed to be getting on a plane to Amman after 1.5 hours layover here in Bangkok. However, they decided to just not have that flight. Therefore, I shall be sitting here in Bangkok for the next 7 hours, until my plane to Amman goes at 6AM tomorrow morning.
Unfortunately, this means that I am going to miss my 10:25AM flight from Amman to Tel Aviv since my new horrible flight from Bangkok arrives at 10AM. And you know what? Flights from Amman to Tel Aviv go only twice per day. Therefore, I shall be sitting in Bangkok airport right now for 7 hours, sitting on a plane to Amman (providing they don’t get rid of that one too) for 8-9 hours, and then sitting in Amman airport for TWELVE HOURS until my *FORTY-FIVE MINUTE FLIGHT* to Tel Aviv.
What say you all that I just get out and walk from Amman to Tel Aviv? I mean, honestly.
And to add insult to injury, given these changes, I am more than certain I will not be seeing my baggage at the other end.
Good thing I packed some spare undies!
What’s more, this means that instead of arriving at my final destination at midday or thereabouts, I will be arrive at 11PM or thereabouts. This means I will have to take a taxi instead of the train, and now if I can’t find a space in the hostel that never got back to me about my reservation, I shall be wandering around at midnight in a strange city looking for a place to sleep. With no more spare undies.
Perhaps at that point it will be a good thing that I won’t be lugging a backpack. (There’s always supposed to be a silver lining, right?)
Oh boy, I can’t wait to see what they do to me tomorrow. How can an airline be this bad?? I’m actually angry at Student Flights at this point: yes, I asked for the cheapest flight possible, but I feel they should have given me some warning about how notoriously bad Royal Jordanian is. They must have known. I would gladly have paid extra.
With this kind of service, will I ever get home at the end of this all?
Well, I should be off. It’s time to find out if Royal Jordanian has a VP lounge, and bludgeon my way into it if they do.
June 24th, 2006 21:23
My wonderful backpack has turned out rather smaller than I anticipated. It looks like I’m going to be going a month on not very much clothing….. Oh well.
I’m also an idiot. Do you want to know why I’m an idiot? Well, I don’t really want to say, because I’m embarrassed to be such an idiot.
…okay, I’ll tell you. I already had a backpack. I had just forgotten about it! My true hiking backpack, big blue thing that I love, that I took on NOLS, is indeed back in the States somewhere, but I had another backpack, this an EMS 2800. I just found it in the closet this morning, filled with old hiking gear! Aggggh! Oh well, looking on the bright side, now if/when Zaubi and I go hiking we will both have a backpack.
But this brings me to the strange thing: US backpacks (as far as I’ve noticed) tend to be measured in cubic inches, thus the 2800 = 2800 cubic inches. Now, when I put that backpack and my new, 75L backpack side by side, they are *exactly the same size*. Practically identical. However, if you do that math, you see that 2800 cubic inches is a little under 46L, not 75L as this new backpack claimed to be!
Besides, our beer brewing tank thing is about 25L, and while I can see fitting the contents of 2 of the tanks (maybe) into one of these backpacks, there is NO way that 3 would fit in there.
So my question is, was I completely ripped off, or do litres with regards to backpacks mean something dramatically different than litres in the normal world, and everyone knows it but me?
This question is extremely important. It is vital to the fact that I now find myself setting off for almost a month in the Middle East with far too little underwear.
It also means that I am, for the first time in my ENTIRE life, going to be taking a long trip — drop the long, even — with basically no books to read. I find that all I managed to fit in there were two pathetically small Sudoku magazines, a Bible, an extremely battered copy of We the Living, and a small book on Beginner’s Latin: the Story of Lucia and Paulus; Conspiracy in the Cloisters.
Those of you who know me well know that for me to embark on a 26 hour journey (and much more!!) so ill-equipped in literature is sheer insanity.
**********************
I had a lot of other things to write about, but I find myself lacking the energy right now. I could tell you about how wonderfully my online Carcassonne game is progressing (how can I bear to be away from it for a month?), the 14 apples that appeared in my fridge, or about the strange mental disorder that comes upon me every time I find myself waiting at the red light at the end of my street.
But that can all wait till later.
June 23rd, 2006 10:16
Reading this site has made me very depressed about the fact that I am flying Royal Jordanian. Also about the fact that on the way there I am stuck in Amman airport for 7 hours layover from 4AM. (On the way back the layover is 9 hours so I will have some time to wander around Amman, hopefully).
June 20th, 2006 15:29
I think perhaps Zaubi’s cake has poisoned me. I ate some of it, and now I feel quite ill. My poor tummy cannot handle such rich things any longer.
I think I’m going to have to start swearing off sweets altogether. I always feel terrible after I eat them, and also what with the way I have been expanded recently…
I’ll have to go for the carrots instead.
*****************
I told my mother about the surfski and she told me that it sounded dangerous. My mother is quite convinced that both I — and particularly Zaubi — are extremely accident prone. She can’t forget that fateful Thanksgiving evening when Zaubi appeared to responsible for the near demise of two of us Riordan girls… teehee!
June 20th, 2006 15:09
While cutting vegetables in preparation for S. & M. and maybe A.? coming over for dinner tonight, I have, in altogether too typical fashion, sliced through my finger.
WHY?
It hurts.
I have been doing this regularly as clockwork for about 15 years. Ask mrtee or viacimo…
I taped it up good with kleenex and Scotch tape… the dinner must go on…
June 20th, 2006 8:09
June 19th, 2006 14:44
Today I am twenty-eight years old.
I never liked birthdays much, they never seemed very special or purposeful to me. Perhaps the fact that when I was a child my family (if you could call it that) which was generally so remote and unhappy, was actually happy on people’s birthdays, so having birthdays always reminded me of how things weren’t, or soemthing of that sort. But that would be just harping on the negative.
Anyway, today, Zaubi took off work (hooray!) and we shopped and cooked all morning. He wanted to make me a birthday cake, and I wanted to start the sauerbraten since we’re having S. & M. over for dinner tomorrow. He’s frosting the cake right now and that’s what we’re having for lunch…. Mmmmm…. cake….
So, he got me a terrific present! I had absolutely no idea, but I guess last week he and A. sneaked away from work and drove down to the Gold Coast and bought me this.
This fascinating thing is a surfski, a kind of hybrid kayak/surfboard that is meant to do pseudo kayaking in the waves with. You zoom around and surf on the waves in it! Sort of like this.
We took it out on the Brisbane River today to practice. It is super tippy so I thought we’d be swimming half the time, but we didn’t fall in once. We paddled up and down the river, stopped at a public dock on the other side (where I managed to fall down a hole in the dock and break the right half of my ass) and paddled back. This weekend we’re going to take it down to the Gold Coast and try it in the waves!! It’s the depths of winter here but it’s still warm enough — in fact, it was even raining as we paddled around. I like Brisbane.
Here it is on top of Clyde.
|
