The Scottish Highlands and Not Much Else

I was going to do a proper blog post but then I realised I haven't watched the latest episode of Nashville yet, and that is clearly a priority. So instead I will post a bunch of photos of the Highlands that I took over the Christmas holiday and send you big hugs. Because hugs are like words, but better, because they're less work. 

Did you know you can cover Glencoe, the Highlands, Loch Ness, and Loch Fyne in two days? You can. And you should. Just not in the dead of winter. Brutal.

It's hard to see, but there's a train bridge in the distance background of bottom left picture. It's the one from the Harry Potter movies! You can actually hike to it, but it was torrentially raining when I took this photo and the wind was so fierce I could barely stand upright, so I decided that this view was good enough for me. The castle in the top left photo is Eilean Donan where Entrapment and a million other movies were filmed. (I should probably be relating these places to moments in history - 'This is where the Young Pretender made his first stand in 1745!' - but I don't know history the way I know movies so I'll just go ahead and continue to embarrass myself this way.) Bottom right: Glencoe from Skyfall! Some sort of brutal massacre happened here. You should google it because it's dark and bloody and violent like all good history stories, and also because I don't remember the details. 

 No movies filmed here.

The earth was so dark red and purple and orange it was unbelievable, really wild.

Braveheart was probably filmed here, because obviously.

And so concludes my history of northern Scotland! Stay tuned, I'll be covering Yorkshire soon! 

Big hugs and lots of love,

Essss

P.S. I'm currently playing with blogger's dynamic layouts and so far I think I like this one the best, but are my pictures too large? Are they taking years to load on your screen? 

On boxes, a lucrative career, and photo good times.

It has been a LONG time since my last post. As in, seven MONTHS. This is the longest I have ever gone between blog posts, and significantly different from how I used to post when I first started a blog many moons ago in San Francisco and used to post three times a day at work. (But only during my lunch break, boss! Love you!) I think I want a lot of different things from this space and I'm not sure how to go about doing any of them (well). But maybe I shouldn't worry about any of that and instead just hit up photos and thoughts and miscellany and rock it old style. 

There are some old uni projects from last year I should put up here. Maybe I'll do a series. I can call it 'A Million and One Reasons I Was Not Meant to Be a Furniture Designer.' You've never seen a box until you've seen me design a variant of one in response to every single design brief I was given for two years. I constantly got feedback from my professors along the lines of, 'That's a bit...lateral-thinking, isn't it?,' but I like to think that what they really meant was, 'Wow, you're really creating a recognisable brand. You are so far ahead of your peers.' 

On the bright side, I've been given a job in the design industry despite that. Sure, I probably got it due to my ten billion years of admin experience, but I like to think my bosses saw a little something more in me, a little something that said, 'Now THERE is a girl who can design a box,' and they thought, 'We need that girl' and even now when I'm tracking invoices and filing bank statements, they're thinking, 'There is some real creativity there.'

Now for Random Photo Series.

A Sunday roast served in the back garden of one of my favourite people, who also happens to be an amazing cook, which may or may not play a part in why I love her so much. It's between that and her smokin' bod. I mean, personality.

Art by a wildly prolific street artist in East London. I should know his name,  but I'm not that cool and also I have dementia so please do tell me his name in the comments if you know it so that I never have to worry about remembering again.

I took this picture because I love hip people carrying hip chairs in hip neighborhoods, but I've just noticed the background and I feel like this could use explanation: 'Off License' here is the same thing as a dirty corner store that serves alcohol. You will often hear it referred to as the 'offie,' as in, 'I can't go the party empty-handed; I'm going to pop in the offie on my way there.' (Grampa, I obviously don't go to parties like that; this is only street-talk.)

 Bridge over the canal in Camden.

Boat party. 

Painting on the side of a canal houseboat,  like so many floating carnivals...on the canal.

Two shops on a road near my flat: a mad taxidermist and a haberdashery. Oh yes. Haberdashery. It's a real word here.

Alright, I've got to jet -- it's Friday night here and I'm now That Girl who's clearly not out and needs to pretend to be. 

Big hugs and lots of love,

Essss

On roads, castles, dragons, and towers.

To make up for all those words in my last post, I'm making this one pretty much photo-only. Also, words don't always make sense to me or line up the way they should, so when they decide to play puppies-in-a-box like they have today, I have to let them be. 

This is a path called The Long Walk. It's at Windsor Castle and it's lovely.

Coming from the other direction, you see this: 

One thing I often forget to do when I'm in a beautiful place is turn around. It doesn't matter where I am or what the setting is. If I have a camera in hand, I have to look backwards as often as forwards. For some reason this is difficult for me to remember. I am always moving.

Speaking of turning around: I had a wonderful long reminiscence with my old college roommate today, and it was exactly what I needed. My whole day has taken on a much nicer spirit since our chat. 

And speaking of looking forward: I like this picture because the Shard looks like it's right next door to the Tower of London rather than across and down the river. I don't think I realised how truly big it was until I took this. I can't wait for it to open. 

Until next time,

Big hugs and lots of love, 

Esss

Freedom never looked so free.

See what I'm doing here? That's right. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Because I SURVIVED MY SEMESTER PROJECTS! And my world--for the next two precious, precious weeks--is all about The Nothing. My book stack a mile high? I'm gonna SMASH that thing. It's going to be so beautiful being able to read without feeling guilty about The Things That I Should Be Doing that I may just explode into bliss-pieces. My coffee cup is bottomless, my flat is clean, and my biggest source of stress will be about whether or not I want to tackle that new mega-recipe today or tomorrow. Even my LAUNDRY is caught up--that's how I rewarded myself on Saturday for a job well done. Hours and hours of delightful laundry and watching the overflowing hamper gradually empty like so many rain barrels in a drought. I feel like a million bucks.

I'm not going to lie, though--the work on these latest projects was actually...okay. It felt GOOD. Was it because the projects were far more difficult than anything we were expected to do last year, so were therefore more rewarding? Was it because the work I produced is something that doesn't make me want to crawl into a hole with embarrassment, maybe just hide under the bed? Or was it because Aya stayed over for a week and we worked from 8 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. every day and survived on a diet of energy drinks, wasabi peas, and Japanese pop music? I don't know! But not once did I think, 'I can't do this.' 

Of course, it's hard NOT to have fun when we have Aya playing yeejay (that's my new term for a youtube-deejay). We played the below song at least ten times a day. It's awesome. You have to at least watch the first half of this video. It is SO. FUNNY. I can't decide my favourite part. It is in the first fifteen seconds, when the second singer leaps into the frame in slow motion, her hair floating in the breeze? Is it at 0:58 when the main singer swirls and her outfit changes? It's really impossible to say. But oh it makes me belly laugh every time:

Aya also taught me about Japanese Radio Exercises (or Radio Taiso), which is something every person in Japan knows. That's right. Every person. That's what Aya told me and Aya doesn't lie. She says they grow up doing this before school every day. Families do it together in the morning. 'To wake up,' she says. I'm not surprised. The mornings we did it, the injuries I sustained were enough to get my blood flowing:

And I know what you're thinking, because you only watched the first twenty seconds: Rona, this looks EASY. Any stretching done to piano music canNOT hurt you. Well. You certainly didn't see Part Two, designed for the younger Japanese set. When Aya and I would get to this half of the exercises, she'd be swooping around like a tiny, graceful ballerina, all stretchy and petite, while a half-beat behind, my giantess arms swung around like so many gorillas in the jungle, my floor-scraping knuckles knocking things from their shelves with every twirl.

It was awesome. I still like to do them. 

Alright, off I go! It's time to READ! I may even indulge in a THIRD cup of coffee. I KNOW! Someone slow me down, I'm on a crazy train! 

Big hugs and lots of love,

Essss

It turns out German rest stops look a lot like American rest stops.

Okay, so you know how sometimes you get on a plane and you think, 'This plane will land in the location I chose and paid for!' and so even though the plane may be delayed two hours before taking off, that's okay! You're going where you want to go!

Except for now. The gig is up, people. It turns out airlines can take you ANYWHERE THEY WANT TO. Like say you board a flight and you think it's going to Munich. That's the ticket you bought, after all. It says it right there, on the ticket! Munich! And everybody else around you is ALSO going to Munich, so you are definitely not boarding the wrong plane.

So you're feeling pretty gosh darn confident you are on your way to the city of your choosing until about ten minutes into the flight, when an announcement is made. 'Hey! We're not going to Munich. We don't really feel like it. But look, since you bought tickets to Germany, we'll at least drop you off in Cologne! Cheers!' This is like getting dropped off in LA when you need to be in San Francisco. Or Memphis when you're aiming for Tulsa. 

This is exactly what happened last night. You can only imagine the uproar. But it's okay, they say! There are arrangements on the other side to get everyone to Munich! Sure, they aren't FLIGHT arrangements, but come on! You'll still get there! Plains, trains, or automobiles, you should get there anyTIME this week!  

I know. I KNOW. 

So we all get off the plane a short while later, bleary-eyed, disoriented, and not a little upset. We're shuffling around an empty deserted airport at one a.m. in the middle of nowhere and still not sure exactly how it happened. We are then gathered round the luggage conveyor belt and given our options: take a bus now and be at Munich in five or six hours, or take a train at 3:30 and arrive in Munich by 8. They strongly encourage the bus option for anybody who wants to get to Munich early. 

In hindsight, this was a trick. They just wanted us to leave as soon as possible and quit hassling them with our thousands of interjected questions. Tricksy Germans!

So we all shamble on to the bus, like so much brain-dead zombie cattle totally confused and just wanting to be moving in the right direction. Or any direction, really. 

We wake less than an hour later to the smell of burning. SMELLS LIKE BURNING! We aren't sure what it is--plastic? rubber? our bus's soul?--but it's rank and it's bad and it's clearly not going to survive the autobahn and we have to pull over and shut it off before it turns into a giant ball of fire. It will not be coming back to life.

OH YES. THE BUS HAS BROKEN DOWN. 

Our night has officially gone from bad to THIS HAS TO BE A JOKE WHERE ARE THE CAMERAS? Everyone is laughing with hysterical delirium. We are never getting to Munich. We are all becoming friends in our shared disaster. One girl is pretending we are on a desert island together and fighting for survival and every human moment becomes part of the montage in the future movie about us. 

The driver calls a second bus to come pick us up. It arrives nearly an hour later. But we aren't allowed to change buses yet. It seems the local police that have pulled over to watch the show want to make the second bus tow our bus off the highway due to some regulation that said passengers couldn't disembark on the autobahn.  Eventually they give this up as it is clear we are all thisclose to throwing ourselves into traffic, anyway, in a mad attempt to find some other route--any other route!--to Munich so they finally let us get on the second bus. It is now around 3:30 in the morning.

The second bus is more modern than our current bus--maybe 25 years old instead of 30--and significantly more compact. My knees are up around my chin to fit into the seat. But it will get us there. Albeit slowly. Our new driver is a grumpy old man who likes to take a lot of breaks. 30 minutes here, 20 there, 10 there. We see all of Germany in rest stops. Our driver also likes to yell a lot, but the direction of his ire isn't clear. His honking at other vehicles wakes me on a number of occasions but eventually it becomes a soothing background because at least it means we are not pulled over taking a break. 

We finally arrive in Munich at 10 this morning. Roughly twelve. hours. late. I nearly kissed the pavement.

On the bright side, the charming city of Munich appears to be pulling out all the stops as an apology for their airline and bus failings. Snow is falling from the heavens in great plump white swirls of plump swirly whiteness, the shops are all twinkling away, and every two feet is a stall selling sausages or sweets or gluwein or pretzels or dark baked bread. It's a lovely Christmas wonderland. 

And just in case you wondered what Santa is up to this week:

I must take a bit of a nap now--soon two friends are arriving and we'll be off to dinner and more market fun times! Word on the street (actually, word from one of my new German friends from the bus this morning) there's a tiny market in the courtyard of the old palace that's excellent, and a medieval market where they actually dress in costume and serve your drinks in goblets, and a romantic market that's all super duper twinkly at night, and also an art market, and a charity market, and a * on and on and on *!  I really can't wait. So much to do, so little time! And off to Salzburg for a day trip tomorrow! 

I hope you're all having a good week and staying away from all major airlines! 

Big hugs and lots of love, 

Essss