Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Here I am ...



Rock me like a hurricane...

I'm back ... and as anyone reading this knows, I have been for a while. No excuse for not writing -- except that my muse suffered greater jet lag than I did.

'Twas lovely, Spain -- as was Cambridge, which I was emphatically told last night is NOT PART OF LONDON. The teller of this fact went on to say that equating Cambridge to London is akin to equating Burlington, Vermont to Manhattan.

When I was in Burlington four years(ish) ago, I did something very out of character: I rode in a hot air balloon. I have always been afraid of heights -- incredibly so. The leader of this hot air balloon excursion confirmed this, saying that, while many people claim to have this fear, I was the first person in his six(ish) years running these excursions who actually is afraid of heights ... not ledges or edges or that they might have the urge to jump. I know this fear made the trip up a lot of fun for those around me. Once up, it was an exhilerating and beautiful experience, though I did get viscerally nervous a few more times. And as soon as we landed I wanted to do it again.

I digress ... though my fear of heights did come into play during our visit to the Alhambra when I once again discovered that scaling great heights and peering down at the views is not my favorite activity. So I let Neil take my camera to the tops of things while I sat below and wrote in my travel journal and did my best to not look like a girl whose boyfriend had scaled great heights with her camera because she was too afraid to join him.

We spent the first part of our trip in a lovely apartment on the beach in a town called Aligate, outside of Marbella, with our dear friend George Breakfast. Senor Desayuno. We took day trips, in George's rented Fiat, to Marbella, Puerto Banus (from which we could see Africa) and Ronda ... and then spent a few days on the beach. Most nights the boys cooked dinner and we watched movies and they played music -- a real vacation -- no work obligations hanging over my head, no gigs for Neil, nothing to fix or work on around the house. And then we parted ways for a few days -- Neil and I traveled to Granada and spent two nights in a little hotel with a balcony that looked out over a monastery and its orange grove. We began each morning with a walk through the tiny, fragrant orange grove, and spent our days exploring, drinking sangria and vino tinto, eating free tapas (one of the few places in Andalusia where this lovely tradition is still practiced), visiting the indescribably beautiful Alhambra ... it was blissful, occasional extreme heights notwithstanding. On our last day in Spain we took a three hour ride to the Malaga airport, through mountains covered in olive trees and cypress. Oh, the olives -- never have I appreciated this odd little fruit as much as I did in Spain. We flew back to Stansted, the airport nearest Cambridge (which, my friends, is NOT IN LONDON), and spent the next day exploring the town. I explored -- Neil knows it well. And on our last night there, we had a curry with George and his kids and then George and Neil played a show at one of George's favorite pubs, The Flying Pig. The show ended at 11, we went back to George's and rested, then took a 3AM bus to Gatwick to fly home the next day.

So, so many photos, which is, in part, why there's been such a long delay in my posting. I will post them separately.

Hasta very soon.

Sunday, April 6, 2008

Hasta la semana proxima...


Tomorrow I leave, illogically early, for England and Spain -- mostly Spain. Having never been there or immersed myself in Spanish culture, what this trip will entail is a mystery. I have my guidebook, I have my phrase book, I have my tourguide(s). And I have some tiny bottles of Tabasco sauce that Neil's friend asked me to bring to him.

Hablo solemente un pequito de espanol pero a cause de mon francais, je ne parle pas de tout couramment. But I can kind of read it.

May the travel gods smile upon this trip.

Until the 17th, my dears.

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Up in smoke


So, my dear friend from college (Hi Ed!) with whom I've recently gotten back in touch thought that the photo of Neil was my dad -- not my dad today, the '70s version. He pointed out that the hazy quality of the picture is reminiscent of photographs from that era, and I see what he means. You remember those photos -- not the thick, shiny ones with the white borders, but the ones on textured paper, usually square with rounded corners, probably taken with a Kodak Instamatic and that weird, telephone receiver-shaped film. Is this ringing any bells? Anyway, he suggested that I label it "My Neily-pie" or some other term of endearment. In lieu of that, I will root around my numerous boxes of photos to find some actual Vintage '70s Buchwalds on Vacation shots, and we can compare. But, this will have to wait until after my trip, because in the meantime, I have three days to finish an article, finish editing/rewriting a laborious web site on Oriental rug care and restoration, do my taxes (by "do" I mean gather everything and give it to someone who knows how to do them), shop for my trip, clean my apartment, get a pedicure, dye my hair ... what am I leaving out? Plans with Sandy (b) on Friday night, with Cheech on Saturday, and with Berun on Sunday. A woman's work is never done -- especially when said-woman leaves everything till the very last possible second.

Neil (not my dad) is in Norway right now on tour - tomorrow they head to Sweden. I accompanied this band on tour to Norway and Ireland last summer, and it was an incredible experience. As we're all a bit older and seemingly wiser now, this was not the hotel-trashing kind of tour one might associate with rock musicians. Instead, our outlaw behavior included stealing extra packets of tea from various B&B's, getting in trouble in a bar in Dublin for lighting a candle that had blown out, and -- our version of the rock star OD -- one of the band members ate too much Irish bacon and had an attack of gout. Quite a walk on the wild side, eh?

Here are a few shots from one of the shows they played in Donegal, in the north of Ireland (not to be confused with Northern Ireland, which we also visited). Neil, on the right with the accordion, had the misfortune of standing right where the special effects went off, and so every few moments the smoke machine would exhale, partially obscuring him from view, giving the illusion that he'd spontaneously combusted. The lighting effects were very rockstar, though, as you can see:



And here's a photo that I love of the rabble-rousers, or three-quarters of them:

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Dagnabbit


My Neily's in Norway now, and I miss him so. He's only been away since yesterday around 2:15 ... and I will be seeing him in less than a week. But his absence reinforces how much I love him, and he loves me, and what a lucky girl I am.

The 24th Street Rabbit has come up in conversation at least twice within the past week, so I suppose it's time I indulge him with a modicum of the notice that he craves. This rabbit-fellow frequents the patch of sidewalk across the street from us, in front of what I think is the Gagosian Gallery. As best I can ascertain, it seems his purpose is to protest the Chelsea art scene. His means are not effective. He wears a poster board every day -- actually they do; there are two -- with a vague and poorly worded message, a non sequitur, intended as a thought-provoking barb against the art world. The main one, the one that I saw first and see most often, asks "Are you kidding me?" on the front. On the back, this: "How come the best galleries are like a rope that is thrown to a drifter after he arrives on shore?" The thing is -- I kind of know what he's asking. Then the one that just gets my goat: on the front, "Stupidity makes me violent," which flows neatly into the posterior statement, "Now I'm furious."

Oh, you.

I once saw him sans rabbit hat, avec balding head, glasses, and cellphone into which he was arguing.

This is him:


I love how little attention he gets. Everyone going about their business.

Pay no attention to the man in the bunny suit.