The Trainboat
Hi again!
Sorry for the super-long absence but I've been pretty busy and finding time to write, or even sleep has been hard. First off, work has been great. Everyone at the office is fun, the workplace is great, and the work has been interesting and challenging. Quick background of what I'm actually doing here. I'm working on a project for the European Environmental Agency, which does all of this crazy environmental studies stuff. They aggregate a ton of information and put out these reports about the state of the environment in Europe. Pretty cool stuff. All of, or most of their websites run on Zope. Wait a minute, this is boring. I HAVE to stop and tell you what's going on right now.
So, I decided to head down to Berlin to visit a friend of mine since we have Monday off. I've always wanted to see [what's left of] The Wall, and this seemed like the best opportunity. So, I used one of my Eurrail trips and booked this train trip from Malmö (Sweden) down to Berlin on the Overnight Express, which puts me in at 06.00. What I DIDN'T KNOW, is that the train, at some point in the trip, gets, are you ready for this, put ONTO a boat and shipped across the sea! Yes, so there I am in my couchette writing emails, and I hear all of this noise, and the train starts going forward and backwards, then BAM, and CLANK, and then we're in this weird tunnel like thing. So I get up to look around and as I look out the window, I see all of this boat-like stuff. Instructions on where to find life preservers, everything's painted in marine paint, etc. And I think to myself, "We're on a boat!". Sure enough, I get off the train (with passport) and look around and they've literally driven the train onto a ship and we're sailing across the sea to Germany. Which sea, I don't exactly know. Not the Baltic, which is up on the east side of Sweden. I'll look it up. But the point is, here I am on a floating shopping mall, with 3-6 TRAINS parked below deck. There's a restaurant (actually, two), sleeping quarters, a casino, etc. etc. So, since the diesel fumes were getting to me, I came upstairs to write this. So, there's some context for you. Quite unexpected.
Where was I. Oh yes, I was making excuses for not writing. So, work is going well. The first week I spent getting oriented and working on some CSS work, which can totally suck sometimes, and did. After the first week, I started to get the hang of where things are (servers, email, etc.) and then we had Thursday and Friday off. So, short week, 4 day weekend. What to do? I could stay in town and explore Copenhagen, but I figured I'd have plenty of time to do that when my mom comes to visit (more later on this), or I could go somewhere and explore Scandinavia. So I booked a trip to Stockholm! Yay!
I'm gonna write a full entry on that trip with photos and movies, so if you wanna hear about the Stockholm trip, stand by. Needless to say, that trip was awesome. So glad I went. I was gonna go to Berlin, but my friend Nina Schuetz was away in Spain, so I went to Stockholm instead.
Hmmmm, what else. Yeah, so I moved into my new apartment. (See video tour). After a few days of having the owners come and go and get stuff, I felt ready to make the place mine, so I cleaned, moved some furniture around, put a bunch of her stuff away. It's pretty obvious this girl hasn't ever sublet her place before, so I had to do some work. For instance, she left all of her towels, dirty, in the bathroom and shampoo and such in the shower. So I went around and (politely) gathered up stuff and put it into her closet. Well, she came by again, and said that the place looked great! She really liked how much I'd cleaned up, and the ay I'd arranged the bed and desk. Frankly, the Feng Shui sucked. I went to IKEA and bought some plants. There was no skillet so I had to get one of those. Tea candles are a must so now they're everywhere. (For those of you who are familiar with my finances, this all cost me under $40 and it was money I had in cash).
The apartment is a short bus ride from the Central Station (Centralen), and in a quiet neighborhood near the Konserthuset (Concert Hall). There's a French bakery on my walk to the busstop where I stop in the morning to get a fresh croissant on my way to the train to work. It's a good thing I have to get up so early for work (06.51) because the day I moved in, they put scaffolding on the building across the way and start banging and making tons of noise just about the time I get out of the shower. Oh the shower. Right. It's a european shower with the "hold it in your hand" nozzle thingy, which is great and all, but it is lacking a place to put it for when you want to wash your hair. This kinda sucks and I'd love to find a little thing to be able to hang it from. So for now, I sit down and put it in the holder, lather up, rinse, etc. The sucky part is that showering, for me, is a big mental process where I do a lot of thinking, and I really like to put my face under the water and wash my face. There's something very mentally different about having to spray yourself in the face, rather than put your face under a shower stream. So, this part could be better. But whatever. I also found these Alka Seltzer-like vitamin C pills that taste like strawberries (yum) so while I'm in the shower, I make a glass of this and drink it down in the morning. Hurrah for vitamins! I look forward to this every day. And sometimes I want another one because they're so much fun and fizzy.
The apartment has a nice kitchen, but no dishwasher. Man, you spend so much time washing dishes, it's ridiculous. I get home, make dinner, and wash the dishes and it's already 9pm!! Stupid dishes. I hate washing dishes. Some of you may already know my hatred for washing dishes. I'd much rather put them away. I think this might come from my childhood chores of having to wash the dishes, although then, I was mostly the "drying guy", which also sucks.
The apartment is in an apartment building where all of the apartments go all the way through, so on one side is the front door, which looks out into the central courtyard, and then on the other side, has a small balcony that looks onto the street. I like the balcony a lot, which has pansies growing on it. I think they're pansies. I need to water them or they wilt. My bedroom is on the street side with a window out, and next to the bedroom is the living room, whose primary color, I've decided is green. So I bought a purple plant to go with the room. I love the living room, but it really needs something. In fact, the whole place needs something and I've figured out what it is: carpets. There could be a nice rug under the table, and a hallway runner. ANYTHING. It's just too echo-y. Alas, it'll do. I got some speakers from Sasha so now I listen to Theory Radio while I make and eat dinner. Kudos the the SF Theory Radio DJ crew for keeping my spirits up and a smile on my face. Frog made me laugh a lot today and I have to make it a point to listen to her every Friday. PQ does good too, playing my requests and giving me shout outs. It really makes me feel good when ya'll back home say Hi on the radio. I've tried Theory at work, but it's usually Robo DJ and it gets a little bizarre, so it hasn't gone over well. I usually defer to Tor (more on him later) for the music and if I don't like it, I blast punk rock in my headphones and it seems to make me more productive and the day go faster. not that it goes slow or anything.
Where was I. Oh, my apartment. Umm, bedroom, porch, living room, nice kitchen, huge walk in closet and totally empty spare room. I need to get something for that room for when my mom comes. For now I just keep the door open for the extra light.
So, those are the gritty details. I'll write more a little later! Thanks for reading. And hey, you can leave comments, like "This was totally boring" or "tell us more about the soapdish" or "What?! Are you some kind of interior decorator art fag?" Anything is appreciated. It lets me know somebody's actually paying attention.
~Spanktar the Sectarian
Sorry for the super-long absence but I've been pretty busy and finding time to write, or even sleep has been hard. First off, work has been great. Everyone at the office is fun, the workplace is great, and the work has been interesting and challenging. Quick background of what I'm actually doing here. I'm working on a project for the European Environmental Agency, which does all of this crazy environmental studies stuff. They aggregate a ton of information and put out these reports about the state of the environment in Europe. Pretty cool stuff. All of, or most of their websites run on Zope. Wait a minute, this is boring. I HAVE to stop and tell you what's going on right now.
So, I decided to head down to Berlin to visit a friend of mine since we have Monday off. I've always wanted to see [what's left of] The Wall, and this seemed like the best opportunity. So, I used one of my Eurrail trips and booked this train trip from Malmö (Sweden) down to Berlin on the Overnight Express, which puts me in at 06.00. What I DIDN'T KNOW, is that the train, at some point in the trip, gets, are you ready for this, put ONTO a boat and shipped across the sea! Yes, so there I am in my couchette writing emails, and I hear all of this noise, and the train starts going forward and backwards, then BAM, and CLANK, and then we're in this weird tunnel like thing. So I get up to look around and as I look out the window, I see all of this boat-like stuff. Instructions on where to find life preservers, everything's painted in marine paint, etc. And I think to myself, "We're on a boat!". Sure enough, I get off the train (with passport) and look around and they've literally driven the train onto a ship and we're sailing across the sea to Germany. Which sea, I don't exactly know. Not the Baltic, which is up on the east side of Sweden. I'll look it up. But the point is, here I am on a floating shopping mall, with 3-6 TRAINS parked below deck. There's a restaurant (actually, two), sleeping quarters, a casino, etc. etc. So, since the diesel fumes were getting to me, I came upstairs to write this. So, there's some context for you. Quite unexpected.
Where was I. Oh yes, I was making excuses for not writing. So, work is going well. The first week I spent getting oriented and working on some CSS work, which can totally suck sometimes, and did. After the first week, I started to get the hang of where things are (servers, email, etc.) and then we had Thursday and Friday off. So, short week, 4 day weekend. What to do? I could stay in town and explore Copenhagen, but I figured I'd have plenty of time to do that when my mom comes to visit (more later on this), or I could go somewhere and explore Scandinavia. So I booked a trip to Stockholm! Yay!
I'm gonna write a full entry on that trip with photos and movies, so if you wanna hear about the Stockholm trip, stand by. Needless to say, that trip was awesome. So glad I went. I was gonna go to Berlin, but my friend Nina Schuetz was away in Spain, so I went to Stockholm instead.
Hmmmm, what else. Yeah, so I moved into my new apartment. (See video tour). After a few days of having the owners come and go and get stuff, I felt ready to make the place mine, so I cleaned, moved some furniture around, put a bunch of her stuff away. It's pretty obvious this girl hasn't ever sublet her place before, so I had to do some work. For instance, she left all of her towels, dirty, in the bathroom and shampoo and such in the shower. So I went around and (politely) gathered up stuff and put it into her closet. Well, she came by again, and said that the place looked great! She really liked how much I'd cleaned up, and the ay I'd arranged the bed and desk. Frankly, the Feng Shui sucked. I went to IKEA and bought some plants. There was no skillet so I had to get one of those. Tea candles are a must so now they're everywhere. (For those of you who are familiar with my finances, this all cost me under $40 and it was money I had in cash).
The apartment is a short bus ride from the Central Station (Centralen), and in a quiet neighborhood near the Konserthuset (Concert Hall). There's a French bakery on my walk to the busstop where I stop in the morning to get a fresh croissant on my way to the train to work. It's a good thing I have to get up so early for work (06.51) because the day I moved in, they put scaffolding on the building across the way and start banging and making tons of noise just about the time I get out of the shower. Oh the shower. Right. It's a european shower with the "hold it in your hand" nozzle thingy, which is great and all, but it is lacking a place to put it for when you want to wash your hair. This kinda sucks and I'd love to find a little thing to be able to hang it from. So for now, I sit down and put it in the holder, lather up, rinse, etc. The sucky part is that showering, for me, is a big mental process where I do a lot of thinking, and I really like to put my face under the water and wash my face. There's something very mentally different about having to spray yourself in the face, rather than put your face under a shower stream. So, this part could be better. But whatever. I also found these Alka Seltzer-like vitamin C pills that taste like strawberries (yum) so while I'm in the shower, I make a glass of this and drink it down in the morning. Hurrah for vitamins! I look forward to this every day. And sometimes I want another one because they're so much fun and fizzy.
The apartment has a nice kitchen, but no dishwasher. Man, you spend so much time washing dishes, it's ridiculous. I get home, make dinner, and wash the dishes and it's already 9pm!! Stupid dishes. I hate washing dishes. Some of you may already know my hatred for washing dishes. I'd much rather put them away. I think this might come from my childhood chores of having to wash the dishes, although then, I was mostly the "drying guy", which also sucks.
The apartment is in an apartment building where all of the apartments go all the way through, so on one side is the front door, which looks out into the central courtyard, and then on the other side, has a small balcony that looks onto the street. I like the balcony a lot, which has pansies growing on it. I think they're pansies. I need to water them or they wilt. My bedroom is on the street side with a window out, and next to the bedroom is the living room, whose primary color, I've decided is green. So I bought a purple plant to go with the room. I love the living room, but it really needs something. In fact, the whole place needs something and I've figured out what it is: carpets. There could be a nice rug under the table, and a hallway runner. ANYTHING. It's just too echo-y. Alas, it'll do. I got some speakers from Sasha so now I listen to Theory Radio while I make and eat dinner. Kudos the the SF Theory Radio DJ crew for keeping my spirits up and a smile on my face. Frog made me laugh a lot today and I have to make it a point to listen to her every Friday. PQ does good too, playing my requests and giving me shout outs. It really makes me feel good when ya'll back home say Hi on the radio. I've tried Theory at work, but it's usually Robo DJ and it gets a little bizarre, so it hasn't gone over well. I usually defer to Tor (more on him later) for the music and if I don't like it, I blast punk rock in my headphones and it seems to make me more productive and the day go faster. not that it goes slow or anything.
Where was I. Oh, my apartment. Umm, bedroom, porch, living room, nice kitchen, huge walk in closet and totally empty spare room. I need to get something for that room for when my mom comes. For now I just keep the door open for the extra light.
So, those are the gritty details. I'll write more a little later! Thanks for reading. And hey, you can leave comments, like "This was totally boring" or "tell us more about the soapdish" or "What?! Are you some kind of interior decorator art fag?" Anything is appreciated. It lets me know somebody's actually paying attention.
~Spanktar the Sectarian
posted by Spanky at 6/03/2006 03:24:00 PM
2 Comments:
what kind of plant is it? What's most important is to make your new apartment yours in some way, like adding the plant and moving the furniture around. Buy a picture even if it's of a plant and before you know it, the place feels like your place. I'll bring something to add. Love MOM
keep this coming! we love it! makes us feel like we're part of your life.
love you ,
Dad
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