Happy Post-Christmas/New Years, Pre-Semester break

Well! Hi! Happy near year!

It seems that last we left off, there were midgets in Santa outfits, juggling in front of the Chanukiah at Stephansplatz. So! Since then came our trip back to the states + a few weeks at the end of the semester. It begins:

CHAPTER THE FIRST: Pre-christmas
Pre-christmas was full of shopping the Christkindlmarkts at Spittelberg and Karlsplatz. Christkindlmarkts, or 'The Christ Baby Angel™ Markets' are big outdoor markets, somewhat resembling a fair, with wooden stalls and stuff, where people sell art and weird food and tibetan singing bowls and all sorts of cool stuff. It's kind of ideal for christmas shopping. To fight the ridiculously biting cold, the austrians have Punch (or Punsch!), which is hot alcoholic sweet spiced apple-y stuff. You can either carry around a mug the whole time and get it refilled, or they will provide you mugs with deposit. A good tradition all around.

CHAPTER THE SECOND: The Magic of Air India
On our way over here in September, we flew this retarded itinerary involving multiple airlines, dragging hundreds of pounds of luggage through heathrow airport in a mad rush to re-check-in with airline #2, and prettymuch uncanny amounts of stress, time, and crappiness. "Never again!" we said. Well "never again" is a silly thing to say when your roundtrip ticket leaves on Sept. 4th and returns on December 22nd. We flew British Airways to heathrow, were delayed 2 hours since there was thick fog over Heathrow, had our luggage take a good 50 minutes to arrive, and took what was a too-long, 4-hour connection and shrunk it to a panicked ~1 hour of *again*, running through the miles and miles of heathrow airport and trying to check in all over again to our Air India flight. Lame.

Air india is a special airline. I hold it dear in my heart. When you walk onto the plane, you think "Urine? Does it really smell like urine?" and the airplane says "Yes, yes I do.". And by the time you think "I can't believe this plane smells of urine", your nose has adjusted and it smells like nothing at all. And then comes the good part. Noone flies Air India, at least not the London-NYC route. If you dont believe me, you can look at the pictures. The plane is like 10% full. You get *your choice* of row to sleep in. Your row can be next to the left window, the right window, or in the center. I chose a 4-seat middle row to lie down and sleep comfortably for a couple hours. It was awesome. Also, they provide really good indian food, and really weird indian snacks (CHAKLI! and MASALA CHANA! Yum!). Oh yeah, and I went around collecting headsets from the empty seats, and after picking up and testing 6 headsets, I concluded that the only one with a working left speaker was the one that had a RUBBER BAND, bending the wire in such a manner as to fix the short in the line. Also, the call-stewardess buttons on many of the seats have electrical problems, so that every 3 seconds or so, you hear a "BING!" from the call system. You stop hearing it for the most part right away, but every few hours you think "Wait, has that been binging every 3 seconds the WHOLE time??" and you smile. Air India is a special airline.

CHAPTER THE THIRD: Pennsylvania
I stayed in PA with Chuck and Andrea, Melanie's parents for a couple days before leaving to go back home (Melanie came to LA a week later than I). PA was pretty and snowy, and I had my first Christmas, which was a day early, since I wasn't around for the day of christmas. I have a stocking with my name and a dreidel sewn onto it. This is extremely sweet. (Thank you!).

CHAPTER THE FOURTH: Los Angeles
I went home on a comfy, uneventful Jetblue flight. Home was a nice mix of sushi, family, presents, reading, post-christmas shopping and kitty cats. I cooked a lot, we installed a TV into a wall, I read a lot (His Dark Materials, the trilogy from which The Golden Compass is the first book, is *excellent*. Read it.), we saw some friends, and then it was all over and we went back to cold, but much warmer than it was during Christmas, Vienna.

CHAPTER THE FIFTH: Vienna
The flight over was a United flight to Heathrow, and an Austrian hopper to Vienna. This was my second United flight as a premier member, and it was similarly awesome. Checking in with bags takes all of 5 minutes, security takes all of 5 minutes, and then you get to get on the plane first and sit in nice, leg-room enhanced seats and feel superior to everyone. Fantastic. Flight was relatively uneventful, except that big umbrellas are really a pain to travel with (I bought one in the states, since the dollar is now a form of monopoly money. I would recommend finding some way of fitting an umbrella you wish to transport into your checked luggage.) I arrived and went straight to rehearsal from the airport, since I didn't have my apartment keys. Less than fantastic. The following week was a jetlagged blur, and we were back in the swing of things. We've finished our history and Russian tests/classes, and now we're in dress rehearsals for our scenes performances coming up this Wednesday and Thursday, and then


CHAPTER THE SIXTH: Spain
We're going to Spain! Woota! We found some €20 roundtrip tickets to Barcelona (Ryanair), and because of that, we're spending a whole lot more than that on an 11-day trip to Espain. The last week and a half has been prettymuch filled with itinerary planning and hotel reserving and all of that insanity. We've probably put in about 40-50 hours going through websites and books and such. I think the point of travelling is to get a vacation from the stress of planning a vacation. Anyway, our itinerary looks like this:


Feb 1: Vienna to Bratislava bus, Bratislava to Girona plane, Girona to Barcelona Bus, Barcelona public transit to hotel. Crash.
Feb 2,3: Barcelona!
Feb 4: Barcelona morning, Afternoon plane to Málaga, Night bus to Seville
Feb 5: Seville on Carnéval! Crazyness, hopefully
Feb 6: Early morning bus to Arcos de la Frontera. Check out city till afternoon, then afternoon bus to Ronda. Stay in Ronda
Feb 7: Ronda during the day, afternoon bus to Nerja (Mediterranian beach! Wish us sun and a heat wave)
Feb 8: Nerja during the day, afternoon bus to Granada
Feb 9: Granada day, tour Alhambra
Feb 10: Early plane to Girona, spend day in Girona
Feb 11: Off to Bratislava/Vienna

Lodgings have been figured out for about half of the trip. It's currently raining and gusting violently, so perhaps I'll get to try out my new wind-proof umbrella, if I leave the house today, which is unlikely, since it's Sunday, and everything is closed.

Cheers!


(Music notes: Don Giovanni @ Staatsoper[8-4-2] sucked, Dialogues of the Carmelites @ Theater an der Wien[2-0-0] was great, though that theater's subtitle system somehow convinces you that you really do need glasses, even though you really don't want them, and the next two days, your eyes have trouble focusing because you strained so much to read the damned things, but no, you don't in fact need glasses, your eyes are perfect perfect perfect la la la la)

There are kind of a lot of pictures (55 or so), so I'm gonna put up two small albums here, but there are more where those came from on Flickr. Email me if you have any troubles finding them.