Austin: The Kid, Day 2

My apartment search is still underway, but I've got some leads now. And I'm once again slightly drunk on that orange vodka, so let's keep the ball rolling.

On our first proper day at SXSW, we went to see Much Ado About Nothing. We got our first queue experience. I got saddled with a rather boring music blogger guy, who's seen it all before and sneered at all the people excited about various freebies. I was one of those people, but kept my mouth shut and soldiered through the small talk.

The film was ok. The panel afterwards was better, as the whole cast (and Joss) was there. Everyone, except Fran Kranz, was funny, but I don't remember a single line. Fran just seemed full of himself, and his line I remember: he said something about being grateful for these roles that allow him to show "his amazing acting range". Oof.

The Whedon fans were a bit overwhelming. One poor girl nearly had a nervous breakdown. But you know what - more power to them for standing up and having a public moment.

After the screening, we went to the food truck enclosure to get something to eat, and oh my God food trucks. There were these tiny sliders, they had 6 varieties, I think. One was with pulled pork. One was with a meatball in tomato sauce. One was with some sort of honeyed chicken butter thing... I'm drooling, I need to stop. But yes, food trucks.

When we got back home the acroyoga guy was there, and he juggled Gosia around for a bit while we gawked and giggled. After that surreal interlude, we got shuttled to Before Midnight by our host. We were supposed to meet him for drinks later, but that never really came together... but I'm getting ahead of ourselves. Our next queue line experience turned out to be an elderly couple from Austin who have been attending the festival from the very start. They have a flat in one of the highrisers downtown (which was surprising to me), and at some point the elderly lady mentioned that when she last checked Twitter there was a tornado warning. So yes, twitter-savvy grannies. And tornados.

Unfortunately (well... I guess - I'd like to see a tornado) that never materialized, but when we got out of the theatre, there was a rainstorm. Thankfully our host came to pick us up right off the street. When we got into the car, we realized that a) the boy is drunk, and b) there's someone else in the front passenger seat. A quiet, slightly giggly Indian-looking person who wasn't really introduced to us, so we had no idea what the deal was.

To make matters even more fun, it turned out that there's MORE couchsurfers coming - a French couple who had had a dismal layover in Chicago (they missed their flight) and were due to arrive in Austin any moment. And they kept calling our host, who wouldn't pick up the phone as to not be saddled with international charges. Eventually he managed to learn that they landed, and that the taxi driver dropped them off... somewhere in the vicinity of his apartment, but not quite there. So he delivered us to the flat with the strange guy, and promptly left. Awkward small talk followed, until the guy - who by now we realized was also tipsy - said: God... I'm too old for this. I just want to go home.

And then, as we stared in dumbfounded silence, he proceeded to tell us that our host has this boyfriend, but the boyfriend's going off to college, so he's a bit lost, and this guy is some sort of deal on the side, but he's just really tired and this is weird and he just wants to be home now, but he didn't want to be an asshole, and also he has no idea why he just told us all that.

I started giggling uncontrollably. I tried not to, but I was just not ready to be a supporting character in one of those sitcoms.

At that moment our host arrived with the French people, and the Indian guy quietly negotiated getting dropped off at his own place. The final image from that day is the French guy suddenly perking up when he realized the two boys are leaving and asking: "Oh, you're going out, guys?" To which Gosia, of all people, blurts out in a moment of well-intentioned panic: "It's a private party!"

Austin: The Kid, Day 1

Ok, obviously this is very long overdue, but I have a bottle of homemade Sicilian orange vodka and...

And I just spilled some on my keyboard. Like, seriously. Thankfully it's a crappy cheap one, and I'm moving anyway, so I might as well replace this piece of hardware too.

Oh, right. I just learned (yesterday) that I have to move. The flat is no longer available. And I love this fucking place. It's home. Sigh.

Anyway, I can process that later and elsewhere. Back to the roadtrip. Austin. The couchsurfing adventure begins.

We arrived quite late in the day, towards 6 p.m. I remember that our host's flat was located in the north part of the city, and that it was a very nice area. Quiet, with low, two-story brownstones. They weren't really brownstones in the big city sense of the word, but they were made of brick, and the brick was brown, so I'm not sure what I should call them. Our host was young (23-ish, I think) and accompanied by someone else whom I took to be his boyfriend. The supposed boyfriend was thoroughly American in the sense that you really don't see bodies like that outside the US and American TV shows. Later it turned out that he was actually another couchsurfer, from San Diego, and that he was in town to attend an acroyoga workshop. Acroyoga, in case you were wondering, is a combination of acrobatics and yoga (I know!) And from what I gathered, and then saw - as we were given a show - it mostly consists of juggling people using your legs.

The guy actually had a good sense of humor, and seemed like a really nice, warm person, slightly in the vein of Rudy from Generation Kill - talking about taking care of yourself, good energy, etc., but as we were leaving I asked if I could get his personal information so that we'd be able to find him on Facebook and ask for sightseeing tips for San Diego (since that was on our route), and he said yes, but then refused to accept my friend request, so that has retroactively tainted my image of him. I mean, come on, he could have just said he won't be in town, or will be busy, or whatever. It felt a bit like a "oh, so I guess all this time i thought we were getting along pretty well, we really weren't" type of deal. But that only came later.

We put down our stuff and headed out to the opening events of the Interactive section. I've no idea why, or whose idea it was (it might have been our host's), but we did. As it turned out, the showcase was winding down, and we didn't have the credentials to get into the Interactive parties, so we headed downtown and stood in a random line to get into some other, more generic party. Later we were told that badge-holders (i.e. me and Gosia) could cut in line, but we didn't want to leave our host, so we persevered. Which is how we met an insanely talkative Pakistani girl and her reserved, but very nice, IT friend. Who accompanied us for the rest of the evening, which was actually quite a fortuitous thing in that whenever we ran out of things to talk about we could note how talkative that girl was. (She really was intense).

An hour and a half later we were in. At some... party. Promoting something. We never learned what it was, but who cares, the booze was free. I mostly remember grabbing something to drink and making my way past throngs of people somewhere. That somewhere turned out to be the roof. All around us there were downtown Austin skyscrapers. There was some sort of screen showing a not exactly engrossing visualization, an absurd amount of strange people, and a profound sense of being somewhere not home. In a good way. It was the sort of sensory overload that carries you with it, wide open to anything that might happen next, and screams "memories under construction!"

Eventually we got drunk and tired enough to make our way out, and try to catch a cab home. Apparently catching a cab in Austin during SXSW is... I don't think it ever occurs in nature. Eventually we managed to call one, and got back home, only to have our host put us in his own car and drive us to late night burgers at some drive through. Totally shitfaced. This was the first (of several) instances in which I was made aware that Europeans approach drunk driving quite differently than Americans. Apparently in the US it's no biggie - I mean, how else are you gonna get those late night burgers, right? There's no public transport! And nobody walks! Thankfully, I was still inebriated, and carried by the "Advernture!" current, so I didn't mind a bit and just took it all in. Weirdly enough, I remember the burger very well. At our host's advice, I ordered something chicken-based. It was dunked in batter, and almost sickly sweet, either because of the bun, or the sticky sauce. Weird. Foreign. Delightfully so.

SXSW: The Basics

A couple of words about SXSW.

It has three segments – green Music, blue Film, and orange Interactive. You can get badges for either one of the three, a Gold badge (Film + Interactive), or a Platinum one (all three). All of them cost a fortune, and the Platinum one also requires you donate an organ.

A peg lower are wristbands – you can get a Film one for 80 bucks, and a Music one for 180. Wristbands place you in the queue behind badge holders, but in front of general admission.

The Film and Interactive parts start off at roughly the same time, then Interactive ends and is replaced by Music. Film lasts throughout. That’s the basic structure. It’s also bullshit. Once Music arrives, everything else ceases to matter. It dwarves the other two segments combined – it’s spread out over nearly 200 venues, and consists of about 2000 separate concerts. It’s ridiculous and all-encompassing.

That is why everyone Film-related who knows what they’re doing LEAVES the festival halfway through. Barely any new films are screened in the latter part, and so the only people that stick around are clueless morons like me and Gosia, and Platinum badges.

This year, there were about… seven or eight Film venues, including two so-called “Satelite” ones that I never saw, because they were somewhere outside the venue map and required some sort of transportation (that’s literally all the info you are given, so I suspect they’re just a money-laundering scheme, no one I talked to actually went to either one of those). The big marquee one is the Paramount, a beautiful old-timey theatre with equally old-timey ushers and a general aura of grandeur. It has 1200 seats, so that’s where all the flashy premieres are held. Of note is also the Alamo Drafthouse – a cinema where you can order drinks and food to be brought to you during the screening. And I don’t mean coke and popcorn – there’s burgers, salads, pizzas, various alcoholic drinks, and – my favorite – adult milkshakes. Yup, the kind with booze in them. I spent an entire day in that cinema (had three screenings there, back to back), and I have to say it was a very good day for me.

The whole thing is very well organized. There are separate queues for the various echelons of spectators, and if the queue is long, at some point you get issued a queue card – a tiny piece of paper with the name of the screening and a number that is lower than the amount of seats at the venue. Basically, if you get a queue card, you’re guaranteed to get into this particular screening, so the stress is off, and you can go pee or grab a bite.

The queues lend themselves to a sort of “queue culture” that is one of the most fun aspects of the festival. People often just strike up conversations randomly, and since you’re sometimes in line for close to an hour, you could end up exchanging numbers. These random chats are also aided by the fact that festival badges are like these big registration plates you wear around your neck – I’ve had complete strangers pause for a second to openly peer at my badge before moving on.

Most of the cinemas are downtown, within walking distance, but there are also two that are south of the river (which is for some reason called a LAKE), and for those you get special festival shuttles with counter intuitive AC (as in: blasting Antarctic chill on an already cold evening, or gentle warmth on a 31 degree day) and opaque windows that make it impossible for you to keep track of where you are at the moment. These are provided for Film and Interactive people, the Music crowd would just suck them into its pulsating mass, and there are – as I mentioned – almost 200 music venues, many of them on closed-off streets, so there’s really no point for Music transportation.

On top of the film screenings, there are also panels (that you need a badge to get into), and parties (that a badge helps you get into). Panels are pretty self-explanatory, and parties are free booze watering holes where you’re supposed to network, I guess.

Throughout the festival there is also a whole lot of free events that operate on a first come, first serve basis. They offer free food, free booze, free t-shirts… anything, really. Apparently there was a tumblr page dedicated to posting directions to the free stuff events of the day, and the festival-goers like to say that theoretically you could get through the entire SXSW not spending a dime on food, alcohol, or clothes.

One last thing: the people. There were some seriously pretty people around. The place was  crawling with them. And most of them wore orange (Interactive) badges. I have no idea at which point gym memberships and grooming became part of the gaming industry landscape, but at times I found myself questioning my career choices. It was actually enough for me to start taking pictures of people, like a bona fide pervert, but I got caught - and judged, hard - by one of my subjects very early on, and decided I just didn't have the balls. Oh, and also the moral aspect. That too, totally.

Temporal Rift

This is going to look off when I revisit these notes, but my backlog has grown too big, and I've grown tired of reheating memories. I want to write about something that just took place, before the adrenaline fades and things get packed into a cut and dried, impartial infodump.

I'm in Los Angeles right now, it's 2 a.m. We're leaving tomorrow. It's the penultimate day of this roadtrip, but as far as I'm concerned it could very well be the last one. We're staying at a cozy North Hollywood apartment belonging to a married couple I "know" through Pajiba. And it's been quite a day.

We got up pretty early and went with Rob (the husband) for a drive up Mulholland Drive to see the city from the hilltops. Mulholland is very long and very windy. The views are all pretty, but have this "I think I've seen it all before" quality that many famous American sights suffer from due to... well... global imperialism. The green seems (expectedly) faded, and the skyline (expectedly) smog-hazy.

The plan is to do the Mulholland thing, and then drive down into the valley to an abortion clinic where Mary (the wife) volunteers as an escort person on Saturdays. She and a couple of other people are basically there to escort women who want to get - perfectly legal - abortions past the pro-life protesters that gather outside the clinic. Yeah.

We're supposed to go down there, experience that particular bit of Americana, then go to brunch with the volunteers, and then drive down to Venice Beach to catch some sun and do some people-watching on the famed boardwalk. The whole thing still sounds surreal to me, by the way. Anyway, it's not meant to be - the traffic is pretty bad, and the protesters apparently decide to call it a day earlier than usual, so we head straight for the brunch place. And then it turns out that one last protester appeared at the last minute, so some of the brunch crowd had to go back to keep on escorting. We end up driving back and forth, and when we finally meet up with Mary, she seems pretty upset that the carefully prepared get-together has unraveled. We order the food, have some mimosas, chat about nothing in particular, and slowly get ready to hit the beach. Which is when a very handsome young man walks in. It turns out he's one of the volunteers, and that the others are not far away. We chat for a while, cracking jokes. He seems sweet, smart, very funny, and groomed well beyond heterosexuality (though it's possible that my readings were off and it's just an LA thing).

Finally, the rest of the volunteers arrive, and it's obvious that we don't have enough room at the table to seat everyone. We hang out for a short time, waiting to see if maybe another table becomes available. They all seem like a load of fun and at that point I basically want to do nothing more than hang out with them. Yes, mostly on account of the first arrival, but not exclusively so.

It's also when I finally come to the conclusion that for me, traveling is 95% about the people. I'd be perfectly happy leaving a city without having seen anything of note, if it meant that I got to spend time with a cool newly met person. Really, no contest.

Unfortunately, the most logical solution to the conundrum is for me and Gosia to just leave and go to the beach, thus vacating some space. Which we do.I get a very familiar feeling of wanting more, but also a certain satisfaction. I've had several of these hopeless end-of-the-road encounters now, and this one's a perfectly manageable, microcosm version - I'm gone tomorrow anyway, the whole thing's completely insignificant, but it does provide the barest minimum of substance to feed my personal narrative. I indulge in it, to the degree that I'm able to.

The drive to the beach is pretty long, and we spend over an hour looking for parking. Actually, Gosia does - I spend most of that hour texting our host (which is part of my indulgence). We finally do get out of the car though, and dip our feet in the ocean. It's icy cold.

The beach is enormous, and sparsely populated - it's still too early in the year. We lie down. The sun is shining, the ocean is doing its thing... Things are nice. We take a long walk up the coast, and then return down the Venice Boardwalk (which is not the official name, but I'm too lazy to look it up). It's crazy crowded, but we're sort of mellowed out, and don't mind it at all. Full reception mode.

We get into the car at about 6 p.m. and start driving back home, which - according to the GPS - is almost 50km away. Just to to give you an idea of the LA sprawl. We make a pit stop at Stone Cold Creamery - a place Gosia wanted to go to since we landed that had eluded us thus far. Having learned a lesson in Venice, we take the first parking spot we see in the general area, even though it's several blocks away from the Creamery. We walk those few blocks as the sun is setting. As we get closer, the crowds start getting thicker and... younger. Like... kiddie younger. And ecstatic kiddie at that. Then we see that the cops have taken over traffic control on a big intersection just up ahead. Apparently, this being Los Angeles, the Kids' Choice Awards are being right down the street, and everyone wants to catch a glimpse of Selena Gomez, or whoever... There's even a bunch of paparazzi. In a way it makes me feel like I'm really getting my money's worth.

As we walk back with our ice cream, one of the cops winks at us. "Stone Cold, huh? I know where I'm heading after work." Yes, we even get the Disney version of LAPD. America really wants to get into our pants.

We get home, change into evening clothes, and go out for food and drinks with our hosts. I'm kind of hoping we'll get to see the abortion clinic people again, since I sort of tried to make it happen (fuck off, why not?) but that doesn't quite work out. Still, we end up having a lovely evening waiting for a food truck and then having drinks at a logwood cabin style bar called the Yeti Lodge (or something along those lines). It's loud, sort of rustic, and very nicely lit with these weird, gigantic bare light bulbs that look like something out of a folksy indie band video shoot. As we're about to head out and go home, this song comes on:

Fleetwood Mac, and specifically Stevie Nicks has been something of a recurring theme over the whole trip. They just kept popping up, sometimes in very unlikely places. So that is going to be my final snapshot. A crowded bar, bare light bulbs giving off a warm glow, and Gypsy. Tomorrow's (well, today's) drive up the scenic Highway 1, is doomed to be an afterthought. But I'm fine with that.

Albuquerque - Dallas

The main thing I remember about Albuquerque is that we got into a mini-fight in the car - the first (and only, at least so far) one. The city was scorching hot, and the Old Town mercifully tiny and mostly empty. We wandered around for a bit, and finally popped down for a Mexican breakfast at a nice-looking restaurant. Breakfast burritos are delicious. Actually, almost everything we'd eaten until that point was delicious. Food is definitely one of America's fortes.

As we were leaving, an oldtimer sitting at a table near us asked what language we were speaking - a question we get asked very often, and one we don't mind at all, since it serves as a perfect bridge to some interaction. When he learned we are Polish, he told us the story of his friend, a Polish soldier captured by Germans during WWII who survived the war because he was very good with machines and was put to work by the German army. After the war he came to the US and settled in New Mexico, of all places, running a machine shop, or something. I told him my grandfather's convoluted story in return. Then Gosia came back from the bathroom and we headed out.

I mention the bathroom bit because I just realized that that's probably the reason why this exchange actually took as long as it did. Usually when we strike up conversations with strangers, I take a step back to make way for Gosia's cascade of words. It's not a role I'm accustomed to, but I don't really mind it. It's kind of a time warp for me - going back to a time when I was far less outgoing and would just pop into a conversation from time to time to - hopefully - make a joke. It offers a certain type of comfort, and certainly takes some pressure off.

The drive from Albuquerque to Dallas was 700 miles. That's like driving across Poland, and then some. It took ages, and we lost another hour due to switching time zones, so we arrived at our destination past 1a.m. I mostly remember the approach to the Dallas-Fort Worth agglomeration. We were later told that the distance between the easternmost suburbs of Dallas and the westernmost suburbs of Fort Worth is about 40 miles. And in-between it's all city (though of varying density). We were driving through all that on a 8-lane highway, ducking under some underpasses and then circling around on others. There was also some roadwork being done, with new lane lines painted over the old ones, and flashy signs all over. It was a trippy experience that I thought would never end. "Ok, so I guess we're in Dallas. No, now we're in Dallas. No, now..."

It was also our first non-hotel night in the US. Our host was a very sweet Pajiban who gave us his own bed and braved our personalities. He had a rather unusual mustache, which he claimed was for a theatre role (he was supposed to be a circus ringmaster), but I don't buy it. Despite being exhausted we talked til about 3 a.m. He also offered me some amazing gin. I'm saying amazing because I drank it neat, and it actually tasted good. I returned the favor by setting my alarm clock several hours late (I compensated for the time change, but added an hour instead of subtracting, or the other way around), which resulted in us having absolutely no time to hang out the next day, even though he specifically took he morning off to take us to breakfast. That felt shitty. He said he was coming to Austin for a day or two though, so at least there was that.

He also pointed us to the breakfast place he wanted to take us to. Apparently he lives in a gay neighborhood, which he claims is pretty much the only nice area in Dallas - a sentiment we've since heard repeated over and over again. (I mean the part about Dallas not being great, not about gay neighborhoods being the creme de la creme.) This meant that we had our breakfast in what seemed like a very laid back restaurant/club manned by pretty handsome and uniformly bearded waiters. A gay(ish) club that serves breakfast - and very good breakfast at that - kind of broke my brain a bit, but in a good way.

We left Dallas around 2 p.m. and headed for Austin, and SXSW.

Sedona - Albuquerque

So we're in Flagstaff. And we decide we want to see the sunrise over Sedona's famous red rock formations. We google the time the sun will rise on that day, set our alarm clocks one hour in advance (it's a 40 mile drive), and go to bed. Wake up 4 minutes later, climb into the car, drive to fucking Sedona. The sun rises as we're about one third of the way there. Because why the fuck not. We get to the rocks, climb up to some vista point (my left foot still being sore, btw), and take a look around. I admit - it's quite pretty.

Drive back to Flagstaff, Gosia goes to sleep for another hour, until we are called down by the reception, because it's past checkout. How rude - we still have at least half an hour left!

Except we don't. Turns out Arizona is in a separate timezone from the rest of the world ("It's a redneck thing" the concierge explains), so we lost one hour when we entered the state. Hence the sunrise mishap. We never stood a chance.

Meanwhile, it turns out that one of the Pajiba people used to live in Flagstaff, so they recommend a whole bunch of stuff for us to see and eat. We do both (including something called a Navajo Taco - which is pretty good indeed), and make our way north to the Grand Canyon.

The Grand Canyon is grand and filled with Asian tourists. It's kind of like the Vegas of nature - you can't really describe it. We take pictures. I remove my hoodie to strike a Johnny Bravo pose over it, and that's the last I see of that particular article of clothing.

Once we're done oohing and aahing, we head east, towards Albuquerque. It turns out that the Grand Canyon isn't done with us yet though - at times the drive offers even more amazing views of its immensity, so I quickly forget about the hoodie.

And then we just drive, until the end of time. We arrive at the Travelodge in Albuquerque shortly before midnight, utterly exhausted, since we've been up since around 5 a.m. on account of the friggin' sunrise. Towards the end of the drive we reach a sort of desperately cheerful hysteria, laughing at the most absurd things. The motel looks like a place you go to to network with serial killers. As we fiddle with our keys, the door behind us opens and we are greeted with the sight of a very well-worn blond lady with a child in one hand and a cigarette in the other, staring at us somewhat confrontationally. We opt not to make a new friend and duck into our room - which turns out to be very clean and comfortable.

Las Vegas - Flagstaff

On day five we got up early and took in the view of daytime Vegas from our 23rd floor windows. It looked bright and hot and somehow too real. Gosia went down to swim in the pool, and I discovered that the hotel Internet does not block porn. Alas, we were not provided dressing gowns, so my Destiny moment was incomplete.

After checking out, we did some research and determined that our best buffet option is the Golden Nugget in Old Vegas. Driving there took us about an hour, because 6-lane highways are very unsurprisingly confusing, but it was more or less worth it. We paid around 14 bucks each, and ate two freight trains worth of everything. Hot plates, cold plates, desserts... anything from crab salad to teriyaki chicken. It wasn't exactly fine dining, but none of the stuff we picked tasted bad (and we picked about 15 different dishes each), and some of it was quite tasty.

And so, we left Las Vegas on a high note and headed to Flagstaff. The drive offered us another tiny cultural shock - Nevada was scorching hot, but in Arizona we actually saw patches of snow. It might have something to do with elevation - Flagstaff is about 3000m above sea level, I think - but still, it took us by surprise.

Flagstaff is a really cool little city. The closest comparison I can think of is the town from Northern Exposure - except more populous, and with an overabundance of really cool bars and cafes. It's surrounded by fir forests (I've no idea if those are actually firs, but just go with the image), and there's a single snowy peak on the horizon, called Snowball, from what I recall.

We checked into our hotel - the Hotel Monte Vista, with every room named after a different Old Hollywood star - and hit the town, eventually ending up at some brewery/eatery, where I sort of amazed myself by flirting with our waiter for a bit, and then immediately disgusted myself when it came up that he isn't even old enough to drink yet. We drank for a while, ate chicken wings, wrote some postcards, and finished the evening at our hotel bar. And then set our alarm clocks to 5 a.m. or so, because we decided to see the sunrise over the red rocks in Sedona. I'm still not quite sure what possessed me to agree to (and possibly even propose, it's all a haze now) this plan. It was probably the "might not get another chance" Jedi mind trick, and I'm never falling for it again.

Leaving San Francisco

We woke up early and headed by train (or rather: by BART) with our bags to the car rental place adjacent to the airport. The people at the counter were very taken with the fact that we actually spoke English, and proceeded to talk to us about car driving exams, German food... all sorts of stuff. We knocked out three working stations worth of car rental people. Eventually they processed us and pointed us to the parking lot, where we were told to pick out our car. I managed to force a Dodge Avenger over Gosia's Corolla, and we're very happy with it so far. It actually looks like a proper car, and it seemed more fitting to go with something thoroughly American.

At first Gosia was a very nervous driver and kept up a constant monologue about the situation on the road, actually talking to almost every passing car. It wasn't exactly non-annoying. I would try to figure out a better way to say that, but I'm kind of in a hurry.

Inner California is very pretty - green rolling hills with vast expanses of pink flowers, on account of the peach orchards (at least I'm guessing they were peaches). After you pass those you get into uneventful desert land. Uneventful desert land is uneventful, except for the car shadows strobing across the grass, which at 75 mph look kind of jittery, as if you set your graphics settings too high.

We drove hungry, because it was a long drive and we figured we'd just hit a buffet once we reach Vegas, but we got there several hours after sundown, and by the time we left our hotel room most restaurants were closed. That took me by surprise, because I didn't think Vegas EVER closed, but there you go.

I should probably mention that we stayed at the Luxor, which I call the Pyramid of Power (though our room was actually in a tower adjacent to the pyramid). The hotel was vast and had a sickly sweet vanilla scent. The room - clean and comfortable. We dressed in our weary finest and headed out.

Las Vegas itself... well, you can't really describe it. It's just as tacky as you'd expect from seeing all the movies, etc. We went up and down the entire Strip, and wandered into several hotels/casinos (though I only remember the Bellagio and Ceasar's Palace). There's an absolutely insane musical fountain show in front of the Bellagio that goes on for several blocks. There's a weirdly stocky Statue of Liberty. There's madness all around.

We eventually found a restaurant that was open around the clock and went in to celebrate having made it through our first day of driving. I wanted to have a lobster burger, but they no longer served those, so I settled for crab. Gosia got a disapointing shrimp cocktail. It wasn't cheap, and on top of that I miscalculated and overtipped, but hey - Vegas, right? We got slightly tipsy and they played Pink's "Glitter in the Air" from the speakers, so I settled into contentment.

I was ready to head to the hotel and run myself a bubble bath - the thing I was most looking forward to on this stop of our tour, actually - but I promised Gosia we'd gamble for a moment, so we found some slot machines. Gosia lost two dollars and we decided to call it a night. As we were walking out, I figured what the hell, popped 25 cents into one of the machines and pulled the lever. Some symbols locked in place, and the meter started counting my win. Around a minute later it stopped at 120 dollars. We cashed the ticket in at the machine, I gave Gosia 20 bucks to reimburse her for the disappointing shrimp, and we got the hell out of there.

At the hotel I ran myself a bubble bath, but it was so late, and I was so exhausted, that I only clocked in around 30 minutes of soaking.

The bed was soft. There was a "Do Not Disturb - Getting Our Lux On" card on the door. The whole day seemed - and still seems - like a blur.

Day Four: Mission and Castro

By day four my feet still hurt, so for the first time, we made use of public transport and took the bus to Mission. Unfortunately, I don't remember too much from the district on account of the pain. We did begin the day with a breakfast at some super hip place Gosia found online (we actually had to wait for a table, and stuff). The hip element was provided by a pair of young people who played cards over their meal. The surprise element was provided by tofu. Gosia ordered some complicated pile of food that starred said ingredient, and I had something containing chorizo and hash browns and generally everything fat and delicious. To my shock and horror Gosia's plate tasted better. I'm not exactly mending my wicked ways yet, but it made me reconsider tofu. For a short while.

Mission is mostly Spanish. That's all I can say about it. And Castro is mostly gay. Major bombshells, I know. It's not that big though, which was a bit surprising to me, given its fame. Rainbow flags everywhere, names with puns, but it was just several streets. Then again, I don't know what I expected.

All this time, we kept walking into every bookstore (second-hand or otherwise) we came across, because I was looking for a particular book - the second part of a SF trilogy. I bought the first part for 1 pound in Birmingham on a semi-whim, devoured it in record time, and have been looking for the next installments ever since. I finally found the book in a seemingly SF-oriented bookstore called Borderlands and learned that it had actually gone out of print in the US. And I paid 17 bucks for it. Go whims.

After Castro, I realized that there was simply no way I could take any more walking, so I bid Gosia good luck and went home by subway. Going home by subway unfortunately entailed climbing 70 more hills. I literally contemplated just sitting down in the middle of the street at some point. I was beyond caring.

But I did manage to get back to the hotel, and after my feet rested, I was even able to go out for a Thai dinner with Gosia. The food was good, though often unrecognizable (the running phrase became "Again, I don't know what I'm eating"). Then another nightcap at another bar - once again manned by a very friendly 30+ woman - and off we went to sleep.

Day 3: Haight-Ashbury, Golden Gate Park

A little note on scheduling: thanks to jetlag management, we get up at around 8 a.m. (and are sort of awake from 6 a.m. onwards), and we go to sleep around 9 p.m. It feels a bit weird, but we cram so much into these waking hours that I can't stay up any later even if I wanted to.

Day 3 was the day my feet broke. I already started feeling some weird pain in the outer arch of my left foot towards the end of Day 2, so I decided to try to take out my orthopedic insoles for a day and see how that would work out.

It did not work out. At all. We don't use any form of public transport, and have seen almost the entire city by now. That's a lot of walking. And so my recollections of Day 3 are a bit of a blur - I mostly just remember the pain and the frustration about it happening when I really needed my fucking feet to work.

Anyway, we started with Haight-Ashbery, which looks pretty much like a hip Berlin neighbourhood, except with more hippies. At one point a possibly homeless guy who was washing bookstore windows struck up a conversation with me. I didn't understand half of what he said, but it all sounded very poetic, so I alternated between Bemused and Appreciative, until I finally realized that he was basically lamenting the stupidity of "my generation". He ended his monologue by expressing his hope that "China would take over all these businesses."

We ate a late breakfast in a big, dilapidated diner that smelled of mildew and gave off a very peculiar vibe. Neighborhood diner meets Turkish bath/opium den. It was really quite spacious, with tiles on the floor and painted walls. Everyone seemed to know each other. Both the waitresses were in jeans and looked like they should have had dreadlocks (none of them did). One flirted with a young all-American guy who seemed to be writing code on his laptop. Two tables down two middle-aged tattooed lesbians were chatting away over breakfast. The place had everything.

Quick note on cafe/diner/restaurant demographics: all the places we've been to had a full cross-section. People with little kids next to hipsters next to middle-aged couples next to white-haired ladies. I have to say it's awesome.

The breakfast was insane. Gosia ordered a breakfast burrito - and I can honestly say that I'm 100% behind that particular idea. I had eggs benedict with hash browns and... God, I don't even remember anymore. So much food.

We left Haigh-Ashbury and went straight into the Golden Gate Park, which is really a neighborhood in its own right. There's an Academy of Sciences, a Botanical Garden, some museum, an island, a small marina, a Japanese garden, an AIDS memorial grove - it's enormous. Me, I mostly remember how much my feet hurt walking around it.

After the park the plan was for Gosia to get a bike in Richmond (the area between the Golden Gate Park and the actual Golden Gate Bridge) and ride across the bridge and back, while I busied myself with the Internet at some cafe. Unfortunately, Richmond proved to be relentlessly residential - at least to the uninitiated. After Gosia took off, I spent over half an hour looking for ANY place to sit down. At one point I just plopped down on someone's front steps and gave into despair. Eventually I figured out that I had to get to a big street (luckily I had a map), and managed to find a cafe that would have me. The world seemed beautiful once again. The barista was really nice and complimented me on my Dr. Zoidberg t-shirt. And at one point, as I raised my eyes from my laptop to look outside, an African-American girl crossing the street gave me a big smile and waved at me. I was relieved to find I immediately smiled and waved back, despite being raised in a place where that NEVER happens. And then they played this song:



Things were good.

Eventually Gosia came back, very happy with her ride, and I managed to persuade her to go eat at a Korean BBQ restaurant that was just down the street. She wanted to go to something called the Stinking Rose that prides itself on only serving things that contain garlic - which is an admirable venture in its own right - but I promised myself I would try this legendary Korean grill food, and we even researched the best places in SF, so we knew one was nearby. We still weren't hungry after that ridiculous breakfast from 6 hours ago, but oh well.

Thank God I won. It was amazing. The place was pretty bare-bones - PCV on the floor, cafeteria tables, and charcoal smoke hanging in the air - but the food was incredible. I had short ribs marinated in... something, and Gosia actually ordered tripe with vegetables. (Yes, grilled tripe. And it was good.) We had to grill all the stuff ourselves, using a grill built into our table, and while I don't really find that sort of DIY stuff appealing, the food was so good that I didn't really mind. Aside from the actual stuff we ordered, we also got rice, a pot of spicy tofu soup (on the house), and a gazillion bowls of various side dishes. My favorite were some sort of dried anchovies with... something. Honestly, I've no idea what we ate, but it was divine.

And then we went back home. On foot. From the Westernmost district of San Francisco to one of its Easternmost ones. With me barely being able to walk. I think we passed through Japantown on our way - I vaguely recall seeing a rather cool-looking, very modern building with a huge red circle - but I mostly just remember the pain. Thankfully there was a pharmacy near our hotel, so I as able to buy some pain-relieving cream, blister patches and a bandage/support thing for my foot. American pharmacies are ridiculously well-stocked, and it's all self-service. Finger splints, wound dressing, something called GOODNIGHT BUNION... I swear, in a couple years they'll have limb-restoring gel and replacement eyeballs.

By the time we finally got back to our room, I didn't even have the strength to make bulletpoint notes for this recap. I just prayed the pain would go away, because on the next day we were supposed to go to Castro and Mission - i.e. the places I was most curious about. Spoiler alert: as I'm writing this, my feet still hurt.

Day Two: So Much Pretty

Yesterday we started out early to catch a free tour of Chinatown that Gosia found on the web. We arrived at a tiny park whose name eludes me now 10 minutes before time, but found only a shitload of Chinese senior citizens there. No young, hip and beautiful free tour guides in sight. Eventually a middle-aged Chinese lady holding a CHINATOWN TOUR sign arrived with a whole bunch of little kids in tow, and we fell in behind her. That's how we were treated to a brief history of Chinese immigration at the 2nd grade level. After that was done, the Chinese lady declared that I would become her assistant in wrangling the children - at which point one of the school teachers explained that me and Gosia were actually not part of the children's group. This was when we realized that it was actually a special tour for some private school - and were promptly kicked out. Oopsie.

And so, we made our own tour with the help of Lonely Planet. I'd say it ended up being pretty OK. San Francisco is absolutely beautiful. I imagine the hill-after-hill aspect might get tedious really quickly if you live here, but when you're just visiting the whole city changes into a sequence of  Places You Want to Live. Downtown is like New York convulsed into skyscraper canyons shrouded in fog. Simply beautiful. My favorite places are Russian Hill and Telegraph Hill - both pretty steep, and both looking very... pricy. Like the sort of places where you really want one of your friends to have a house or something, so you can visit, but don't have to actually pay for it.

Telegraph Hill is very green, with some buildings covered in flowering vines, and lots of various nooks and crannies. At the apex there's a tower that I took for a lighthouse (it's not, some eccentric lady donated it to the city to pretty it up. It worked). We didn't go inside, and instead plopped down on a nearby lawn, took in the sights, and ate our ginormous gourmet sandwiches from an Italian deli. 

(Side note about food: we're finding it very difficult to eat more than one meal per day. The portions are simply enormous. And the things we do eat are delicious.)

Russian Hill is more Scandinavian dark wood tiered houses (you know, like the ones you see in those glossy design magazines) and an air of record exec opulence. We got to the top after sundown, and were treated to an amazing vista of the bay and the downtown area glimmering with lights, with the Bay Bridge actually shimmering because of some atmospheric thing that I probably should know an explanation for. And atop that hill stood a 30-floor high-riser with floor-to-ceiling windows. I can't even begin to imagine what the view must be from there.

We also went to the waterfront again. Visited a museum filled with old coin-operated arcade games, watched a whole bunch of sea lions lounging next to Pier 39, and finally took a nap in a small park right by the water, with a splendid view of the Golden Gate Bridge. There was a mounted police lady texting someone on her phone, a bunch of twenty-somethings lounging about, and even some people swimming in the bay. It was perfect. And so sunny that I actually got my face and neck burned a bit.

After that bit of downtime we went into a really cool coffee shop nearby to do Work Things using free Internet. Nothing spectacular happened there, but I'm writing it down so it (hopefully) jogs my memory somewhere down the line, because I felt really happy there. The barista was very nice in a laid back sort of way, there was a very hot guy sitting right outside, and I was filled with sunshine.

On our way back (after Russian Hill, I got a bit achronological there for a moment) we decided to pop into a bar for a nightcap. And yes, the bar was great. Small-ish, nicely underlit, with a 30-something friendly bartender lady in a simple black t-shirt, and just beginning to fill up, so we had a nice little bay window table, and then moved to sit at the bar. I honestly don't know why I don't sit at the bar more often, it makes everything better. We had drinks, got very excited when The XX's Intro came on, as we both love it, and felt really good in each other's company (at least so I assume). It was a perfect ending to a perfect day. As stupid as it sounds after just 4 days, I can't imagine anything else topping it.

The Grand Opening

Ok, let's do this. I remember hating reconstructing stuff from notes later during the NYC/Washington trip, so I'll try to keep this more or less up to date.

We arrived in San Francisco yesterday, at 1 p.m., having spent over 15 hours in transit. The flight was pretty uneventful apart from Smelly Foot Gate. Before I go any deeper into that, I should point out that I was sitting a row behind Gosia, and so couldn't really hear any of the actual conversations, so I only have body language and her subsequent account to draw upon. Smelly Foot Gate began with Gosia taking off her shoes. This encouraged an Italian lady sitting next to her to take off hers as well - but unfortunately, there was some serious odour involved, so she quickly put them back on again. The odour, however, persisted. 10 minutes later a stewardess came and asked Gosia to put her shoes back on. Gosia started arguing that it wasn't her odour, and eventually the stewardess left. 20 minutes later a stately gentleman sitting in front of Gosia turned around and asked her to put her shoes back on. Gosia started arguing again. This time the ripples spread - more and more people started turning around and asking what was going on. Finally, Gosia relented and very resentfully put her shoes back on (she claims that in the meantime she actually went into the bathroom to smell her socks and shoes and make sure that her feet didn't smell). For my part, I was happy to be watching from the sidelines and not hearing what was actually being said.

The other slightly interesting thing about the flight was the flight map - as we were nearing our destination, I saw things like Klamath Falls and Redding pop up. Until then, these were purely Fallout names to me.

The journey to our hotel was pretty uneventful as well, unless you count lugging suitcases up a series of hills. Apparently San Francisco is more vertical than it is horizontal.

Our hotel is located on Bush Street in a district called Knob Hill, so there's that. The actual name is Nob Hill, but I refuse to acknowledge that, and you can't tell the difference in speech anyway, so I just pretend I'm saying Knob whenever I talk about it.

We miraculously avoided getting jetlagged - despite only having slept around 4 hours total over the past 48 hours, I wasn't sleepy at all when we landed, and convinced Gosia to go and see the ocean. We arrived around sundown, and... well, it was pretty. Obviously. Chasing the high, we went into one of the gazillion seafood restaurants clustered around Pier 39, and gorged on crab, shrimp and mussels (seafood - check). It as pretty awesome, even if the tip alone ended up being worth as much as a good meal + service in Warsaw.

On our way back, a very friendly- and somewhat homeless-looking older man stopped us and asked if we spoke English (he must have heard us speaking Polish, or something). I followed my first instinct and defensively said "barely". He said he's a comedian and that he'd like to tell us a joke - and if we liked it, he wouldn't mind if we gave him a buck or two. We got into a short conversation, which was a bit awkward because I forgot I supposedly barely spoke English at all. Finally, he told us an "atheist joke".

- Knock knock.

- Who's there?

- Nobody.

I liked it.

At one with the moment

We watched the Simon Amstell standup, and it was actually... well, it certainly was well-crafted. You could see how much work went into breaking it down into small segments that flowed into each other pretty seamlessly, and how aptly placed the callbacks to earlier bits were. A lot of it struck so close to home though, that I found myself drifting away from the humor towards some sort of internal scoreboard, checking off whether I was more, equally, or less fucked up in the currently discussed capacity. The whole thing's on the Internet by the way:

We're running, and everyone else I think is one with the moment, one with joy, one with the universe, and I'm there, as we're running, thinking 'Well, this will probably make a good memory...' Which is living in the future, discussing the past with someone who if they asked you 'Oh what did it feel like?' [you'd go] 'I don't know, I was thinking of what I'd say to you.'

That one gave me the longest pause, because it's pretty all-encompassing, and therefore related to all my other... peculiarities. I think I'm still a bit ahead of Amstell on that front. It's not a crippling mechanism - usually - but it felt very weird when I realized that I had had the exact same thought literally three hours before.

I was at my parents' house, and as I was about to leave, my mother asked if she could show me and dad something she'd been practicing. We sat down in her room, she put on a Russian folk song on YouTube, and sang the second voice to it. It was the first time I've ever heard her do anything like that. She was visibly nervous, and off key at times. At first I had no idea how to react. And then I heard this voice in my head: stay in this, take in as much as you can. When they're gone, you will want to remember it.

So I tried, vacillating between sitting in that room in Winter and listening to my mother sing, and some vague point in the future when this memory would need to be as vivid as I could make it. Unsure whether what I felt in the moment was a direct response to the now, or a bizarre reflection of this projected, inevitable loss.

Maybe I'm not ahead after all.

Custom-made

Had a fun night out. Met a cute fetus. Went urrrrr gurrrr blerrrr at him. Then learned he's straight and charmed the shit out of him. Like a motherfucking Ninja of the Fruitless Orchard.

I'm not even surprised. I just want my superpowers WHEN I ACTUALLY NEED THEM. For once.

Pauli tells me Simon Amstell did a whole standup set about just that. We're gonna watch it on Tuesday. Because misery loves company? Bullshit, everyone loves company.

Because I've no other plans. *drops mic*

Stories

I don't really have this one mapped out... we'll see how it goes.

A while ago I was shown a film called Weekend, which is a gay love story. I usually balk at calling things gay anything (why can't it just be a "love story" and all that crap), but in this case the qualifier is quite essential. More on that later.

Anyway, I thought the film was really good - especially the acting and the dialogue. Real people talking, and not talking. Meanings carried inbetween. I figured it was a cool new addition to my catalog of relationship studies.

A day went by, then two, and I realized that it didn't go away. A buzz in the back of my head, a lump in the pit of my stomach - it was still there. I got my own copy, re-watched a few scenes. Started cutting out clips, and flinging them at people. I spread the word. Finally I rested, satisfied.

Some time after, my mother asked me if I could get the movie for her. I had sent her a song that played over the end credits (it was very much her sort of music). She did some digging around on YouTube, found a couple of scenes, and wanted to see the whole thing. I figured why not, except the Polish subs were pretty horrible, so I decided to tweak the translation first. This of course meant that I had to see the whole thing again, which rekindled my urge to share it with someone.

Today I watched the whole thing with Ana, and here is where - at long last - the Thoughts come in. One of the characters in the movie is a self-proclaimed artist and semi-militant gay... activist, I guess? If you consider speechifying about the societal structure to be activism. It's even nicely played up for humor, when he delivers a drunken sermon on the inherent heterosexuality of narrative in popular culture to an increasingly confused middle-aged bar patron. The thing is, my first reaction was to roll my eyes at most of the stuff he said. And then roll them again once I realized that he also serves as a delivery system for the filmmaker's thoughts on the subject (it actually gets a bit meta at one point, with the guy musing on whether anyone will see his work, since it's just gay stuff - but the character is so well-written that I hadn't picked up on it at first).

I kept thinking that I long for the day when you don't need to have a character give the audience a crash course in Being Gay in Our Society, and highlight the suckage involved. Or preach on the importance of taking charge and making up "our own" - i.e. gay - stories. Once again: why do they have to be gay? Why can't they just be "stories"?

Well, the thing is... maybe they can't. Or maybe they shouldn't. It's been hours, and I'm still riding a wave of crushing melancholia. The thing punched right through me and pulled out a horrible, gnawing hunger right to the surface. I can recall only one other instance of me having this guttural a reaction to a film - and that was after seeing Angels in America.

I get emotional watching... my first instinct was to write "universal", but yes, the truth is "straight" stories. Stuff happens, I empathize, I appreciate the nuances, I revel in the dynamics. But I do not get fucking incapacitated. That stuff gets filtered and translated through my brain, I guess. Meanwhile, this movie bypassed all those checkpoints, and interfaced directly. And I doubt that's because it was just that good.

The sinking feeling will pass, I should have it locked and chained again in a day or two, but I guess I might need to rethink some of my kneejerk reactions towards ghettoization.