going to greece!

i just booked my skyeurope ticket to athens! i'm so excited... i will arrive there this sunday! i haven't decided which islands i'll go to (at least two of the following: spetses, naxos, and santorini) but i wanted to get my flight while they were still fairly cheap. i'll also spend a night or two in athens but mostly i'm excited for the islands - i've heard nothing but amazing things about them. for a few hours i got caught up in fancies of combining it with a trip to malta, but i think i will save that for later in october or maybe thanksgiving time. because they don't celebrate thanksgiving here and i hear malta has some well-known birds.

since i last posted i've been reading a lot. i finished "when you are engulfed in flames" in a day; i've now moved on to the short fiction of oscar wilde. i'm going to need something a little more exotic to prep me for this holiday, though.

tuesday night i debated between going to see 'eraserhead' on the big screen at the film museum, or going to see a Missouri band called "someone still loves you boris yeltsin" at a club i haven't tried yet. i opted for the latter because doing anything lynchian alone at night in a foreign city seemed like maybe the worst idea i ever had. the band was pretty good - poppy and catchy. the club was fun - it's situated under one of the u-bahn lines so every so often the whole place would shake and there would be a nice additional whirring noise added to whatever song the band was playing. i would have stayed for my usual "i'm from america too!" speil, but i wasn't feeling so great. i think it's all the temperature changes (cold outside, warm in my house, hot in a crowded subway, cold walk to club, hot sweaty club, etc.).

yesterday was a walking adventure day - i went downtown in hopes of trying out a place called 'cafe central.' i guess it's where all the intellectuals used to hang out, and now it is an overpriced tourist attraction with dry cake and free wifi. it was unbelievably crowded so i went to a lebanese restaurant down the street instead - had some lentil soup, researched greece, people watched. then i walked down to the wiener konzerthaus, where leonard cohen was/is playing sold out shows last night/tonight. i was hoping that maybe they'd reserved some student discount tickets, but no such luck. i hung out outside the venue for a solid hour with some hitch-hiking australians who had made a fancy sign asking for tickets. they got one! there were two of them (people) and i was hoping maybe they would just give the single ticket to me, but no dice. i was going to try again tonight but it is raining like mad and, regardless, now i'm saving all my euros for greece. then i got semi-lost wandering around, found my way back to the stephansplatz, and stared at nothing for half an hour. i sometimes wonder what the hell i'm doing here, but then i remember that i felt that way in portland and i might as well be somewhere fancy if i'm going to contemplate the futility of my existence. right. right?

today the weather was as predictable as my german language abilities, so it was a good opportunity to catch up on some work and logistics management at home. i might go to the turkish pub for a round of darts later, but we'll see. my sleep is irritatingly back on pre-jet-lag-adjustment schedule, due mostly in part to good books and tired feet.

i think a lot about what wonderful friends and family i have. i don't know who reads this, but most likely if you do, i love you a whole darn lot. you are all so lovely and talented and interesting and generous and wonderful - i hope that my intermittent postcards and/or artery clogging gifts from abroad convey this properly.

auf wiedersehen for now meine lieben!
ashley

PS if you have greece info/tips please pass them along. my mom will have a heart-attack, but i think i'm going to try to be flexible and not have much booked in advance.


this is part of the hofburg imperial palace by day. i say 'part' because this thing takes up a solid 1/8th of downtown vienna. i've been to the at least 3 museums inside of it and still fail to recognize what it is when i walk by. you can read more about it here, if you like. as far as i can tell, the best part about this place is that it houses the 'princess sisi' museum - a venerable shrine to princess sisi, who was the incredibly vain and anorexic mother of franz ferdinand et al. they worship her here. she wasn't even that pretty or skinny, if you ask me.


this is that same part of the hofburg palace by night! so pretty...


this is the wiener konzerthaus. if you look closely you can see me begging for tickets in the cold pouring rain like a character from a dickens novel, if dickens was obsessed with jewish singer-songwriters in the 1980s.


this is an eastern european dish that michael would like me to learn how to make before i come home. yes, i am still inexplicably in love with him.