Pandas, Canyons, and Hookers, oh my!

For the first time since I started blogging, I went an entire month without posting a single entry.

Often I attribute the dearth of posts to a lack of bile: I'm at my most prolific when irascible, and as the months go by, I'm finding less and less in the world around me that is worth increasing my blood pressure over. Every now and again, just to see what happens, I'll spend some time in front of the keyboard when I don't feel a vein pulsating in my head, but what comes up on the screen is the gushing schlock of a love-sick-teenager. Happy people don't make good writers. You want to hear about what a terrible time I'm having. I want to write about what a terrible time I'm having. When I'm in the middle of a horrible situation that is steadily encroaching on my dignity, I can feel the words arranging themselves in my head for the inevitable blogging.

More often, I blame my taciturnity on the fact that I've been too busy to blog. Sometimes I'm gripped by the notion that getting a good night's sleep is more important than telling nobody-in-particular about the time a barber shaved my earlobes for the first time without warning.

My most recent absence was a combination of the two factors: I spent three weeks hanging out with that elusive ladyfriend of mine, who has a somewhat soothing effect on my pent up frustrations. Furthermore, two of those weeks were spent road-tripping across California, Nevada, and Arizona. Just check out this map showing where I was in the world when I took these GPS-tagged photos.

Pretty freakin' cool, yes?

The highlights:

The San Diego Zoo!

The Grand Canyon!

Las Vegas!
(Note the boast that the photo is an "Actual Photo")

Mark my words, dear reader - I'll make up for the deficit, just don't hold your breath for a story involving sexual misadventures with hookers. (Or Pandas, for that matter.)

One From the Road: Crappy Crapper Redux

Am I really talking about public bathrooms again? At this rate I may as well just commit myself to exploring this niche to the extent it so thoroughly deserves, and finally settle on a name and blog layout that I’m happy with...

So where was I? Bulgaria, actually. This story isn’t quite as epic a tale as the last in the series, but I hope you paid attention to the character development. (Cheat sheet: my father doesn’t like to be prepared on holidays, so spontaneity is the name of the game).

Last August, my two younger brothers and I decided that we would like to accompany our father in a visit to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. After three days, we grew weary of wandering around the immensity of the city (novel as it was to play charades when negotiating nourishment from waiting staff) and we upped and left to Sunny Beach – an atrociously soulless tourist spot, akin to the Canary Islands.

Sunny Beach, which not only has an awful name, is also located an awfully long way away from where we were located. For some reason, we decided the best course of action was to hire a taxi to drive us the 360km to where we wanted to be. As much as I’d love to make this entry about the hilarity that ensued as this inept driver got us lost 150km in the wrong direction, stopped to defecate at the side of a busy (not to mention dusty) road, and the non-conversations we had with him through wild gesticulations and half-comprehensions, I feel I should keep to the theme.

Considering the magnitude of the voyage, Sunny Beach was a huge letdown. It was overrun by poor interpretations of Irish Pubs, and brimmed with beer bellied Brits who found the most efficient means of trans-cultural communication to be raising one’s voice. Since none of our party was interested in any whistle-wetting, we were only too happy to bugger off two days later. The only problem with this was securing a means of locomotion that would get us home in time for our flight from Sofia, which lay about 6 hours to the east.

In the end, we settled for hopping on a bus at 1am or so, in the hopes of sleeping until we got to where we needed to be. Getting to sleep was difficult, if not impossible, thanks to the sheer heat of the bus. Amazingly, the broken air-conditioning made enough noise so as to keep a person awake, while offering no cooling comfort whatsoever. About two hours into the journey, my 16 year old brother took off his t-shirt and lay slumped in the chair topless. I laughed at him. An hour later I joined him. Fifteen minutes later my father joined us. Must have been quite a sight; three crazy shirtless foreigners in the back row, arranged in order of chest-hair prominence.

So where does the eponymous toilet come in, the more impatient readers ask? At about 4am sometime, maybe later, the bus pulls into a really dodgy looking rest-stop, and everyone files out. We begrudgingly clothed ourselves and ventured outside into the refreshing cold night air. Despite how late it was, the rest stop were serving food and drinks, and there were a few kids playing around in the house that this makeshift cafe was attached to. It seemed quite perverse.

The pitifulness of my bladder has been well established by now, so it’s almost needless to say that my first order of business was to find a suitable venue to purge my piss.

Having learnt from past experience, I was equipped with sufficient amounts of the local currency to deal with even the most burdensome of bathroom invigilators. Staggeringly enough, there was one present after 4 in the morning! How much money is there to be made from charging people for their excretory needs, I wonder? Regardless, the results of the premium I paid for such a privilege are perplexing.

That is a toilet. Your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you; that bowl is set into the floor. It’s not a misplaced shower-basin either; all of the other stalls were the same! Unfortunately, the phone doesn’t capture the local species of creepy-crawlies that reside in and around the bathroom prefab (to date, I’ve yet to see a bigger millipede)!

The most entertaining part of this story for me, on personal level, is my father’s reaction to my account of one of the more unique toilets I’ve encountered in my day. He decided he had to see it for himself, and so he bounded past the bathroom attendant. When she barked at him, seeking remuneration, he turned, shrugged at her, and continued on his mission.

Cheeky bastard.

Random Craving #2

Another day, another project being completed with moments to spare! But the last few days have also seen the resurgence of that feeling of wanting something that I know I won't get here in the States! This one, randomly enough, is me wanting to get in my car, on my own, and drive around for a bit, while listening to some music!

So bizarre things from home that I can't get my grubby mitts on are popping into my head now and again... I won't dare say it's homesickness, but I'm sure that it's happening for a reason. Could be something to do with the fact that as it stands, it doesn't look as though I'll be going back to that Emerald Isle until late April at the earliest, owing to the fact that I've decided to stay on another semester, and my Visa expires this month.

People around here are also talking about spending Christmas with their families a lot, which reminds me that it's the first Christmas I'm gonna be spending away from home (which is an exciting prospect, to be honest, because I want to see how the yanks do it). I'm nine days shy of heading out to see Caitlyn again, which should be a lot of fun, and all I have to worry about in between is one measly "exam" (I say 'exam' in quotes, because it's an open-book test, and we have unlimited time... That's right - limitless)!

Maggie has offered me a chance to see some of the country, by joining her on her unholy voyage to Florida. I'm not quite sure how much time this entails spending in a car, because I refuse to look up the distance from Pittsburgh to wherever the hell it is in Florida we're going! I'll take my camcorder along so I can record anything interesting I see along the way, and my DS shouldn't be too far from my person, should my mind begin to numb from the boredom. Should be a make or break experience for mine and Maggie's friendship (the smart money's on the latter)!

Since I've cleared the backlog of project work (how I don't know, what with the dangerous levels of chronic procrastination I've been afflicted with), I can take it easy for a few days, so I'm going to use this time to watch a few episodes of Scrubs, ring the folks at home (I don't get to do it quite as much as I'd like), and maybe start paying attention to my physical appearance again (as I sit in front of the computer, my hair is scruffy, my face is sporting a heavy fuzz after five days of not hearing from my razor, and my t-shirt, hilariously enough, has little brown stains on the front, from where I dropped crumbly bits off the chocolate covered pretzels I was eating, and neglected to wipe them away before they melted on - so dedicated was I to making my deadline)! I might also go back and fix the pictures at the start of the blog, but all that uploading seems like a lot of work at the moment.



For no good reason, here is a picture of Dermot that I found on my computer, and felt like sharing with the world... What a girl's blouse, eh?