I've been spending my time sweating profusely and dealing with the fallout from the U.S. Geological Survey Mapper's Meeting last weekend (I have a map in production that needs to meet some new standards).
Saw X-Men II in Boston (I was seeking air-conditioning). I will be the 4,987,204th person to make this observation - will X-Men III have a character called Jean White?
By the way, Strom is gone - has a nice ring to it, doesn't it...
Off to tourize..
Posted from Starbuck's on 22nd and Sixth, Manhattan
I am a pleasant hole-in-the-wall coffee shop with a practically pornographic mermaid for a sign in Pike's Place Market. In front a very good doo-wap group complete with herbal remedies and chef engaging in a display of open air culinary kung fu in which the spring onions and parmesan cheese are the loser.
Fresh produce. Mmmmmm...
I want to learn to cook.
Photos from Santa Cruz and Point Lobos in the Big Sur area are up.
NOTE: the great thing about this medium is that factual accuracy, grammer and spelling improve with time!
Posted from the original 1971 Starbucks, Pike's Place Market
Apart from the gently descending sky waters, Portland offers hills, America's largest bookstore, red brick pavements, public transport, Chinatown, sushi, the largest and smallest city parks in the U. S., a river, and the arts district known as the Pearl. Being here for only one day, I hit Powell's City of Books (picked up Edward Tufte's influential Visual Explanation) and will now see Kiwi Niki Caro's much hyped film Whale Rider , before riding business class Amtrak to Seattle tonight.
I reckon I should be able to find a Starbucks there...
Uncaptioned Grand Canyon images can be found
here
Posted from Portland Borders Books and Music
I arrived at the Chicago Union Station an hour before I needed to get there, a schedule mistake that cost me the Field Museum with Sue the litigious Tyranosaurus Rex and the stuffed man-eating lions of Tvaso (shot by Val Kilmer, as I recall). Like Amtrak, I have chronic problems with timing.
This time I got assigned an aisle seat. Window was held by a Spanish-based American sailor. An interesting, rather intense, fellow, he spoke in a detached deadpan punctuated by violent bursts of laughter. He was a railpass regular and was writing a travelog on Amtrak advice. His previous journey on this pass had been interrupted by the engine breaking down, domineering freight trains and the discovery of a legless corpse by the track (as first on the scene, the entire train had to wait 4 hours for the authorities). The trip before that had erased a car at a road crossing. He told me this as the current train sat high on a levy, stalled in the green canopy of a forest, ten minutes out of Metropolis, as a smoky wraith that once had been brake linings wafted out from under one of the cars. After an hour the train was moving once more - the worse to happen after that being the Chief's subsequent elimination of all but the odor of a too-slow skunk.
Somewhere about La Plata, Missouri the conversation turned to very meta. He tried to convince me that time did not exist, citing the New Age-y "Power of Now". I tried to convince him that language, and by extension, artifacts such as books and the Internet are as integral to memory as grey matter. Quantum mechanics came up, which is always a bad sign.
We sensibly turned to the America's Cup.
Having obtained cash for this trip, I discovered that Amtrak do take plastic on board - I now regret that one tip I left on the Texas Eagle. I decide to try the dining car for dinner. My verdict: the food was okay, but overpriced, but the conversation was worth it. On my first night, I shared a table with a retired couple from Kansas celebrating their fiftieth anniversary, and a twenty-year-old blond woman with the sparkly make-up now in favor, who had emerged from the 24-hour-party that was the smoking compartment. Like so many people I know, she was in the process of escaping Michigan (Kalamazoo, in this case). Her destination was her uncle's apartment in southern L. A. and an yet-to-be-determined job in southern California. As for the retired couple, she had been a nurse, and he had been a high school driving instructor. They were also both registered pilots and had owned a plane. Somewhat thrown for a loop, I asked (in not so many words) how the hell they could afford such a thing.
"Well, it was expensive, but if you like something enough, you make room".
A good philosophy. They recommended that I should get my pilot's license (Mum?); I noted that I should work on my driver's license first.
The second dinner I shared with a effusive young mother and her two-year-old son, Ty, and a retired Vietnam veteran. She was Californian transplanted to Colorado; he was a Texan - I lived in fear of civil war. I managed to divert one conversation about taxes but then inadvertently returned to dangerous topics when discussing Southern Methodist University's rather obvious courting for the George W. Bush presidential library. Ty had the best comment:
"Oga baba jam wahumag oky dada laha CHOO CHOO!!!"
Posted from Heather DeShon's living room
I am also reading Sun Tzu for the first time - and thus getting even more pissed of at the Bushies....more later.
Grand Canyon tomorrow, and more details once I reach Los Angeles.
Posted from the Du Beau International Hostel
Not that I have anything against the Sears Tower (And of cource it was the sinister John Hancock Building that I spied on Sunday-not the tower that junk mail built). In fact I sent this from the lower concourse Starbucks, with half a million tonnes of steel, concrete and office worker above my head. It is big, but I am far from overwhelmed - not as awe inspiring as I thought it would be. I wasn't that impressed with Niagara Falls either, back in 1999. Being desensitized to scale is an occupational hazard of a planetary geologist.
That being said, I didn't go to the top - either because I am cheap, or because I am afraid of heights, I will let you decide.
I spent most of yesterday wandering around the Loop (the urban core of the city, necklaced by elevated train tracks), getting a feel for the layout of the city. I snapped away idly at the soaring verticality of the mixture of new and old skyscrapers, gleaming and crumbling - a virtual "mug me, I'm a tourist" sign affixed to my back. In the Loop, concrete and steel are not just superimposed on the sky - they are part of the sky, grey and black divided by street-shaped channels of blue and white. On Monroe Street, out east toward green Grant Park (the site of the 1968 convention riot that fatally wounded the old Democratic party) there was a spectacular panoramic view of the skyline (sans Sears), red cranes stately swaying above a yellow and silver Guggahime-esce structure rising from Millennium Park in the foreground.
I was also swaying - if not stately. Bad burrito on Sheridan Street the evening before. Vile. I took some photo of myself, blindly (my camera, a Cannon Powershot A70, is not one of those flip view finder cameras) in the small park by the Arts Institute. It was interesting to see (or in this case not see) the effects of the subtle, unconscious facial feedbacks that occur when looking in the mirror - I swear I did not look that bad that morning while shaving, when the Burrito was in full swing. The camera is cruel. Call it a theory for the non-photogenic. The Henry Moore sculpture I shared the park with looked much better.
I am staying at the Chicago International Hostel, way up to the north near Loyola University. In the ethnic geography of Chicago, I would suspect this area is Little India. The hostel is cheap ($17/night) with few distractions (as nothing works). It is convenient to public transport (the El train roars past my dorm room every 5 minutes day or night).
On the first night, as always happens in hostels, I ran into a fellow Kiwi. Richard from Taupo was a true Road Warrior in the geek sense - he worked as an IT consultant in New Zealand while simultaneously touring the world, his office being his 1 GHz Powerbook. Nice work if you can get it. On the second night, I talked with Nerish, an Indian student about to begin a Ph.D in economics at University of Illinois after three years in the corn fields of Bloomington, two hours to the south. We talked for a long time about academia, and the pitfalls of being a foreigner in this foreign land. That old tension for any international student came up: America is where the great professional challenges are, and it has its tremendous all-singing, all-dancing, all-consuming society.
But it isn't home.
Yet.
Posted from Chicago city center Starbucks
Eastern Missouri was pretty. Limestone and lots and lots of foliage. Truely, a lot greener than I though it would be. Southern St. Louis, on the other hand, looked like Sarajavo - the city center is probably much cleaner, but AMTRAK didn't get to close to it. The nearest money machine was three blocks away from the train station. Having narrowly survived an experience in Florence, Italy where an idle detour lead to being on the other side of town relative to the train station with 15 minute to departure, I decided that I wasn't going to solve my food problems there . The one saving grace of the view from Union Station was the wonderfully tacky Sheraton building. Crossing the mighty Mississippi was a great view of the steel rainbow that represents St. Louis in stamp collections. I guess it rains aluminium in Missouri.
After passing a billion ears of Illinois corn, and yawing wildly over heat stressed rails, we arrived at Chicago six hours late. Looming in the distance was a great Mail Order Tower, dark, flaring toward its base, with two great ivory fangs piercing the sky. I will leave it to the geeks in the audience to figure out what I was thinking of.
Posted from Sears Tower Starbucks
It began inauspiciously. The Texas Eagle, train number 22, popped its front wheels off the line less than 30 meters from entering Dallas' Union Station, leaving me to contemplate the crazy-quilt skyline reflected in the windows of the Reunion Center. The resulting ninety minute delay, added on the the existing 25 minute wait put the lie to my desperate half-arsed packing-jump on DART (Dallas Area Rapid Transit)-sprint to the AMTRAK counter maneuvers today. It also bolstered the rumor that schedule is not one of Amtrak's strong points. The service, however, has been good so far.
My previous encounters with trains was in Europe, and immediately the scale derived differences in design are apparent. 26 hours (as I am enduring on this Dallas-Chicago run) in the Paris-Milan style sardine sleeper, or the French Concorde-without-wings TGV would probably lead to murder or suicide. On AMTRAK, however even the coach seating is pretty expansive, with nearly enough room for a 6-foot high human being to stretch out. I have been lucky with seating - having a window to rest my head. The young fellow who eventually got my aisle is off in some other part of the train with his buddies (UPDATE: Said buddies were ejected from the train at the Missouri-Arkansas border for public drunkenness. Aisle guy has still not materialized). And despite the teeming masses of hyperactive, adorable moppets that were in Union Station, no crying babies interrupt my sojourn.
One thing I did forget is electronic money will not work on a train. So there is a good chance that I will starve before reaching the Windy City. If I manage to post this you will know that the buried Christmas toffee pop I found in my backpack was able to sustain me.
Posted from Sears Tower Starbucks