VISI, day 20

The second half of today was uneventful.  I went to the beach - a closer beach than the one I went to the first time - but it had no sand, really, just a bunch of rocks.  I moved some rocks around so that I had a relatively smooth place to sit and lean back, and I read for an hour and a half or so.  Very, very quiet - next to no one around.  Steep incline from the main city, quiet waves.  A Wednesday afternoon - the only people at the beach are the ones trying to relax.  :)

I then went home, made some dinner, and hung out on the Internet for a bit before bussing to a concert about 20 minutes away - a lovely miscellany of art song, rounded out with a second act consisting of Ralph Vaughan Williams' Songs of Travel, a cycle I had never heard all the way through.  I quite like it.  

And then we all bussed back to UBC, and hilarity ensued as several of my VISI-mates began reading the program of the night's concert in a sort of tone-imbued English, substituting alternate phonetic pronunciations of consonants, creating diphthongs or taking them out (or, goodness, triphthongs), speaking in a very singsong fashion (hence the choice of the term "tone-imbued"), and just generally mangling the language so that it sounded nothing like English at all.  It was incredibly funny, and some of them were really very good at doing it on the spot.  

Now I am home, and snacking on cereal while getting ready for bed.  G'night world ... tomorrow I shop.

VISI, day 10

As promised: 

I went to church.  

I bought laundry detergent, and sunscreen.  (and cheese and meat.  I`m going to have to buy more vegetables soon, too.)

I went home, made lunch, and put sunscreen on.  (I think this is the first time in my life I've actually applied sunscreen 30 minutes before sun exposure.)

I walked to the beach.  The route I took was not as direct as I expected it to be, and so it took me 45 minutes instead of 30, and my feet hurt.  I am not used to doing quite this much walking.  Anyway.  I plunked down on a grassy bit for an hour, reading a book (Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson; Dad, I hope you haven't been wondering where it is).  I then picked my way along the rocks to the actual beach, where I spent the next hour.  

I then walked back, and elected to take a scenic route through Vancouver's forest preserve - a gorgeous ten/fifteen-minute walk through nothing but trees.  I couldn't hear the city for most of the time.  It was beautiful.  (It was accented by the fact that I was playing Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess music on my Zune, and I totally felt like I was on a heroic quest all the way across some fantasy land.  super cool.  yes I am a nerd.  but most of the time it was gentle town/forest music and so it felt really peaceful and not so heroic.)  When I came out of the preserve, I wasn't quite sure where I was - neither of my first contacts could help me out, so I just went in the direction of the university, and was delighted to realize that I was far closer to it than I thought I was.  As such, it was only another twenty minutes to home - and that was walking slowly.

(I now have blisters on my feet, and again, they hurt.  Sheesh.  I feel like such a spoiled ... I dunno.  city kid.  The next few days will be interesting.)

On returning home, I made supper.  One of the downsides of A) not having much money, B) not having a lot of room to bring things home, and C) only being here for three weeks means that I have bought no spices, and so my meals are somewhat bland.  But!  At least I have food, and it is not cafeteria food.  That is nice.

I then went on an extended Wiki wander through the unsolved ancient and modern mysteries of the world, started by an article on the Hum (which I swear I've heard at home ... but only a few times in a very short period ... and Mom has too.  it was really weird.  We chalked it up to the transformer, but, you never know), which then proceeded to the Julia unidentified sound, and ended up (after a large ballooning) at The Starving of the Saqqara.  Normally when I do Wiki wanders of this type I feel rather small and frightened of the world, feeling like something's watching my back, but this time I'm a bit better.

Oh!  I also did laundry.  They have multiple washers and dryers here - I got all my laundry done in an hour.  Granted it was only two loads, but even two loads at BU takes me three hours.

Now I am going to relax, eat some cheese (I like cheese, it's yummy) and play a video game.  and then sleep!  ... and back to the lectures tomorrow, sigh.  They're so interesting ... but it feels like this day just started.  I'd like some more days like this one, where I don't worry about anything at all.  I may not have necessarily done much during May, but the frustration of not having a job kinda took over.  (I realized several times today that I don't have a job to come home to.  I need to start applying ... but that's a little bit hard to do from Vancouver.  Notably because I hate calling people.  But that's another story.)

Anyway.  Cheese.