Das Capitol

The last day in NYC we went to MoMA. It's one of the best museums of modern art in the world, the only one in US that I've encountered that can compare with European art collections. They have the really famous paintings of the really big names.

The entire family packed into an over AC:d bus to DC, drove for 4.5 hours and arrived at Union Station. Unfamiliar with the public transportation system, we received a lot of help from kind locals. Within an hour we had concluded that the population of Washington DC is the most beautiful and kind people anyone of us had ever encountered. NYC is supposed to be full of fashionables and models, but the only beautiful people we saw there were Swedish tourists. Swedes on the other hand are reserved and not very kind to strangers. DC is clean, they don't leave the trash in the streets like in NYC. The black population is not marginalized, but rather rich middle class. Seriously, I had not expected that.

Under the blazing sun in 34 degrees Celsius we wandered on the National Mall. The White House had snipers on the roof but no protesters in front of it. The Washington monument was huge ( What part of Washington was the monument modelled after...?). There were all the places you use to see in the moives: the reflecting pool between the Lincoln and WWII memorials, the Capitol with its impressive dome, Arlington cemetary with the rows and rows of stones rised for soldiers who'd died in battle. However, the thing that gave me thew chills was "visiting" Pentagon. We took the metro to the station with the same name, submerged from the underground scanning the bus stops for signs to Pentagon. Then we turned around and saw the gunmen, the do-not-enter and no-photography signs and behind all that the beige wide-angled walls.

Another pretty cool thing was the Smithsonian museums. The Air and Space museum had the Apollo 11 lunar lander and space shuttle, the Wright brothers flight and The Spirit of St. Louis that Lindbergh used to cross the Atlantic for the first time. I really wanted to see Enola Gay, but it's displayed at Dulles Airport instead of the museum downtown, and there was no time this morning when we flew from Dulles to San Francisco for a detour like that.  The Museum of National history was awesome, with the blue Hope diamond and big dino skeletons, but we had way too little time to enjoy it in the way the exhibitions deserved.

Disclaimer: The last 10 days I've been sick, with a nose running like the Niagara falls, shaking with coughs and with respiratory problems of somebody mustard gassed.  Hence, if you noticed lack of rationality and ease in my posts, that's the reason, I'm more or less brain dead at the moment.  

These Boots are Made for Walking

We hit the streets. We hit them hard. Manhattan is best seen on foot, so the Pirate and I walked. We've followed the guidelines of the "Bible", we went on a pilgrimage to to the UN building, Empire state, Central park and Strawberry fields, Guggenheim, which had a lovely architecture but nothing worthwhile inside, we crossed Times Square and strolled on Broadway, it even dictated what to eat in Chinatown and Hell's kitchen...

Monday night we partied with six other Swedes, three of Turtle's friends, the ones he lived with, and one friend of mine and his cousin, who just happened to be here right now. We started off in Aquavit, a fancy Swedish restaurant where Turtle and his friend new the waiter, Jonathan. We ended by closing the bars in East Village.

Tuesday night Mom and my three younger siblings arrived. Some people say that it's weird to meet your family after so long, but for me it was as if it was yesterday. My littlebrother, the Comedian, told entertaining anecdotes, the Spartan, on the other hand, doesn't talk too much, my baby sister, the Fashionista, was more concerned about matching her outfit than wearing comfortable shoes, and Mom, well, she is Mom. Without any ceremonies, I turned into a domestic dictator, telling the Fashionista to get different shoes, pushing them to walk up and down Manhattan, only allowing them breaks every once in a while when they started to complain about hunger or hurting feet. Look, this is the Flatiron building, it is very beautiful, there we have the Library, watch the ceiling, over there is the Statue of Liberty, take out your cameras...

My camera started working again, it was the moisture that had killed it, it improved my mood dramatically. Still, we went to B&H and bought a camera for the Comedian. Almost everyone who works at B&H are orthodox Jews and buying a camera is a mere procedural, they have to many expensive stuffs so you don't get the camera before you've payed it. There are four stations, first you look at the display items and make your decision and get a printout of the camera you want from a Jewish worker, then you go to a counter where they send for the camera from the storage and it arrives on a conveyor belt, you order the memory cards and everything is put in a bag and sent on the belt to an elevator downstairs where you pay and then at the last stop you pick up your bag. 

PICTURES (from the days when my camera actually worked):

The UN building is ugly as fuck...

...but it's a beautiful idea of peace.

This is the ceiling in the public library:

Most of the streets looks something like this with crazy traffic and yellow cars: 

From Empire State Building we got a pretty view of Manhattan...

 

More cabs.

 

The intersection of Broadway and Fifth Ave, with the Flatiron Building and the Manhattan skyline in the distance, first before dusk and then after dark.

Manhattan by night.

 

The Statue of Liberty from the Staten Island ferry and the Manhattan skyline

And the photographer...

...wearing her San Francisco T-shirt, tsk.

A Swedish Woman in New York

Our heroine arrived in New York at midnight on the same plane as Turtle. She will live with her family in a hotel in the countryside of New Jersey, while Turtle stays with his friends one block from Times Square. Life is fair. This is out in the bush, so the first night she had a hostel close to the airport. In fact, the hostel even picked her up from the airport, which is nice after a long trip. She mused about the fact that she seemed to know the English language better than the driver and the hotel receptionist, but the area was called Jamaica after all. When she entered her shared dorm room, ready to crawl into bed, someone was already lying in bed number 5. What on earth? A very unsuccessful communication with the Asian girl followed, after repeated excuse-mes and some poking, she murmured something, got up, and wandered out in the living room area. Strange. 

At the airport, when asking for directions one man (you know the anonymous white middle-aged business looking guy) who'd noticed the confused look in her faced and helped her out, asking her in a true New-Yrkian way: "Why are you staying in Jamaica?" It was not before she got up and out early Sunday morning, that Vanilla Ice realized why he'd asked it with such an emphasis. Jamaica, just like it would turn out, New Jersey, is very multiculti, which is the politically correct way to say that it's a segregated area with mostly Spanish speaking immigrants and African-Americans. She was uncomfortable in her skin. Walking around with a too thick sweater saying "University of California Santa Barbara" she was probably the only one who had attended college. Underneath, she had a T-shirt with neon colored "Las Vegas"-print, and showing that, she would probably had not received God's blessing from that self-proclaimed preacher in the corner. On the subway to Manhattan, she got acquainted with a tall colorful young man from Brooklyn, who very kindly offered to show her around the city and make her "Experience things she'd never imagined". Vanilla Ice felt terribly prejudiced when the first thing that popped into her mind was getting robbed in an alley. She wants to be tolerant and open-minded, and anything but racist, but today, she got extremely aware of the color of her skin, just like that day a long long time ago in Los Angeles. However, there was a difference between Chinatown in NY and Chinatown in LA, here there wasn't at all poor and many tourists walking around, in LA it was a ghetto.

She was supposed to meet  her aunt at 2 pm on Sunday, but she was lost in the public transportation between her hotel and Manhattan and missed the reunion. She was standing all alone in lower Manhattan, with a cell phone with a dead battery, not even able to call Turtle. And then it started raining. She bought an umbrella and wandered alone on Wall St, looking at New York Stock Exchange, discerned the Statue of Liberty in the fog. There was some contruction work going on at Ground Zero. 

Further north she saw the a picture perfect view of Chinatown, pulled up her camera ready to shoot, and everything went wrong. Lens error. No, no, no, no, no! She couldn't take pictures anymore. This was sad, especially since her iPod had met it's Waterloo in a wave and it seemed there was an epedemy among her electronics. She tried to memorize the views of the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. Her brother, the Pirate was supposed to arrive Sunday night. He didn't. She tried to trace him for a few hours before she got to know that his plane was delayed. He arrived in the morning, together with a sore throat. The vacation couldn't have had a worse start.

The Power of Goodbye

This was our last night together. 

Today I cleaned and packed the last things. Tomorrow I'll fly to New York City with Turtle. It will be awesome, of course. My brother and I will come to Santa Barbara in two weeks, but it will not be the same, then almost all my friends will be gone. I got people to sign my skate board, Pokerface contributed with a heartfelt piece of poetry: "Everytime I eat something sugary, I get acid reflux. Everytime I drink beer & coffee, I get acid reflux. And everytime I'm with you, I get acid reflux." Eddie wrote a lasagna recipe, because he's always cocking Italian cousine. We emptied a way too expensive bottle of sparkling wine that Youtube (Trulli) gave me on our shared birthday. Then we hit the streets of IV and the house parties. In some sense it was a perfect last night, because I met so many people I've made friends with here. Some of them I'll meet again, I'll definetely go to Copenhagen for a visit, but there are so many people that I don't know if I'll ever see in person again. We'll keep in touch through social medias, but it will never be the same again.

This might seem like a sorrowful post, but I'm not sad, I'm merely reflective. I'm thrilled about my three weeks of travel, I'm looking forward to return to Sweden, hell, I could teach Candide optimism. In the future, I'll remember the good times we had together, not the last time I saw you.  

Time is (Undie?) Running Out

The last days of the quarter are vibrating of intensity. I'm aware of every moment that goes by. Every time I'll run into a person in the street it might be the last time we'll ever meet.

Last night was hilarious, it was the Undie Run. Each quarter, at midnight between Wednesday and Thursday in Finals Week there is an Undie Run. A couple of thousand gauchos gather outside the library in underwear and then run through Isla Vista singing and cheering. The underwear was more or less revealing, there was a couple of Borats, some lingerie, a lot of glow sticks and body paint. 11:30 the Davisdon Plaza was packed, techno music blasting while people stripped down and threw their clothes in a pile that will be donated for some charitable purpose. Singing "Olé, olé, olé, olé, gauchos, gauchos!". At midnight the horde stormed the library (that is open until 2am) and run around between desks and computers with studious wide-eyed people. Then the flood of people turned and run across campus, past Freebirds and into Isla Vista. There was a poor woman in a car stuck in an intersection, waiting for the mass of more or less dressed students to run by. There was much confusion what route to take and soon the runners split into smaller groups. The event was definitely on the bizarre side of my experiences, but it was not at all weird to walk through the center of IV in a neon pink bra and matching Converse when everyone else did it too. 

Check out pics from the event on Facebook. 

This morning I had one final in history, quite fast and painless, then I did my laundry and packed my bags, everything before 10:30. I have my last final at 4 and then it's time for one last dance down town. 

Live Like We're Dying

I have four days left in Santa Barbara and really need to get my affairs in order. I have a long TODO-list (of things, not people!). Sell back books, return books to the library and to a certain train wreck partner from last quarter that lend me one, get refunds on deposits and from my student billing account, do laundry, pack and clean, print flight tickets...

And yeah, I have to study for my finals too. At least I don't have to bring all my stuff to NY, since my return ticket to Sweden is from Santa Barbara (the curse of buying the ticket 10 months ahead).

I also have to maximize the time I spend with my friends. Tonight I went with Eddie, Turtle, MaryJane, Cleopatra and one more Italian guy to an all-you-can-eat-spare-ribs restaurant. We were so full that we fell into food coma at the table.

It's a little bit sad to leave and have to say goodbye to everyone. I'm really bad with farewells, especially when I might never see the people again. Eddie said something insightful today: "I'm not sad that I'm leaving, actually I'm fed up with Isla Vista, what I'm worrying about is coming back home". I think many exchange students think it will be boring to return to a dull normal life, after such and intense year abroad. Still I'm not sorry for leaving, I always look forward to new adventures and if I know myself at all, there will be plenty of adventures.

The reason we love it here is because we know it must end soon, so we live like we're dying.

Not Any Given Sunday

On this sunny Swedish National Day I went downtown with two fellow nerd girls, Lucky and Arty. I'll leave in less than a week and we wanted to hang out before I disappear to live my awesome Swedish life.

The plan was lunch, but in the beautiful and spoiled Santa Barbara a lunch is never just a lunch. We did a tour worth a Lonely Planet recommendation. First it was lunch at Something's Fishy – a sushi bar with half price sushi during weekdays and apparently a Sunday too. It is a nice little restaurant on State St close to the ocean where they prepare the food just in front of you, either at the glass bar or on a big metal frying plate at the tables. We got two rolls each and shared between us trying all the different kinds of sushi.

Then we strolled along State St. Lucky needed a dress for her graduation, so we went  to Forever 21. However, I was the only one finding a dress, and what a dress it was! Flaming red, the fabric is folded into big roses, it's so pretty and sweet that I looked like a red cupcake in it.

Arty recommended the small art museum, so we went there, it was free. They had some wonderful Monets and amazing contemporary art. After the art we wanted dessert. We tried some gelato, but the goal was Crushcake cupcakes. It's a little cupcake place with the sweetest looking and tasting cupcakes you can imagine. We sat in the park devouring the delicious pieces, looking at the turtles and fishes in the pond.

On our way back we went up to the court house tower and watched the view over Santa Barbara. In the south there's the blue ocean, in the east the mountains. In the north and west the roofs are red, the walls white and the lush palm trees stick up between the houses.

When I got back I finished my take-home exam. Now there's only two more exams to go. What a wonderful Sunday, the last one in Santa Barbara.

Cred to Lucky for the pics.

Red Red Wine

Today I had my last day of classes and also the last day of the wine tasting class. Now it's time to summarize what I've learned. About wine, that is.

Wine is part of our cultural history, it was even excepted from the prohibition in the 30s because of the sacral communion. It's pretentious and classy. A label might describe the wine in words like honey suckle, licorice, apricot and vanilla, while the $2-dollar bottle might taste like ash and smell like a fish tank. Wine was quite a mystery that needed to be uncovered.

First we need some words to describe wine:

Red wine is fermented on the skin, white is fermented without the skin, the inside of the grape is always transparent. Fruity means that the wine is sweet, but you never ask for a sweet wine, that means that there is sugar added. If a wine is dry it feels like sand paper in the back of the throat. Acidity is another important factor, this should be balanced because otherwise it's like drinking vinegar. Tannins is an acid, it's supposed to taste like when sucking the skin of the arm, after the taste of salty sweat. A wine can be mellow: medium bodied or full-bodied, I would describe this as the density of taste, from watery to something more complex (:-P).

  

You have all seen them, the cultural snobs swirling their wine glasses, holding it in the foot, examining the color, sticking down their nose in the glass, sniffing, taking a sip, gurgling the wine in their mouth and then uttering some opinion about the vineyard, the year, the body, flavors etc, and you hate them. I've joined the club now, hehehe.

The reason you swirl the glass is to aerate the wine, adding oxygen to it. Oxygen brings out the flavors of the wine. Swirling it also increases the kinetic energy of the molecules, making them vaporize so that you can smell them. The reason you smell the wine is because a big part of your taste is actually smell. The form of the glass is also no coincidence. You might have heard about serving wine at different temperatures, if you like the wine chilled, then you should hold the glass in the foot, if the wine is too cold, you hold the cup in your hand warming the wine. Just like beer is served best cold, but tastes bad warm, the cold brings out the fresh and crisp taste in white wine, reducing bitterness. Even red wine is best served a little chilled , at "room temperature" from the old non-central-heated era.

You examine the color because it's beautiful but also to see if there is fruit left in the wine, fruit adds flavor, but might look nasty so usually wine is filtered. If there is sediment in your wine, then it's a "good" wine. You gurgle the wine to add more oxygen to bring the flavors forward. Then you're supposed to say what flavors you taste. This is personal. If you eat a lot of apples you'll recognize the apple flavor immediately. I almost never taste the apricot, but instantly notice flavors of blackcurrant, it's only a matter of what you're used to. Usually wines are described with pleasant flavors, but there is no need to keep it safe. I described one wine as "smells like corn tortillas". Corn tortillas smells awful. 

Since the weather varies from year to year, wine from the same vineyard from different years taste differently. So if you really liked a wine, try to find more bottles from the same year. If it's the first time you taste a wine, the year doesn't really matter, unless you remember how many sunny days and the amount of precipitation there was in Australia, Chile, South Africa or wherever the wine comes from. The reason you buy an old bottle of wine is not because it tastes better, it will almost certainly be undrinkable, but it's part of our cultural inheritance, just like art. A white wine can be aged 4-6 years, a red 8-10 years, they will oxidize if they stay longer. In rare cases (:-P), like in the cold at the bottom of the sea, carbonated wine like champagne might last longer, because cold and carbon acid is preservatives. Thus wine bottles like dark,  cool and humid environments, like a cellar, they don't like to be shaken (maybe all the earthquakes make Californian wine bad?).
 

In class, we talked about how wine affects the body and mind. First: don't drink and drive. Don't drink too much. Don't drink if you're on medication. Excess drinking or mixing alcohol with for example painkillers can cause liver failure. If the liver fails, you  need a liver transplant, you're a dead man walking. Women should not drink if they're pregnant unless a retarded child is on the wish list. Women should not drink if they have a family history of breast cancer. Simply put: don't drink if your doctor tells you not to.

Well, that said, let's get juicy.

Our teacher had his own winery so we tasted his wines. Every week we tasted three wines, one white, one red and one desert wine.

Whites

07 Chenin Blanc: this is the corn tortilla wine. It has lemon taste and is spicy in the end. The grape is very acid so it's usually mixed so it will be more balanced. 

07 Sauvignon Blanc: it has a little acidity and tastes like pear. The best Sauvignon Blancs come from New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, Chile, Australia and Italy.

06 Semillon: like a bowl of dried fruit in it's fig and raisin taste. No freshness. Drink it with a baguette and gorgonzola.

05 Chardonnay: golden color, smells and tastes like syrap, it's like apricot juice with 14% alcohol.

06 St Emillion: buttery and wooden, which sounds pretty bad but is quite pleasant actually.

Reds

07 Barbera: Light orange-red color. Dry. Tastes syrup, raisin and blackcurrant. I can be chilled. I liked it.

06 Cabarnet Franc: Mild and fruity. Tastes like plum.

06 Carignon: smells like blackcurrant, tastes like plums and have an acid aftertaste.

07 Cabarnet Sauvignon: fruity blackcurrant aromas. Wow. I. Love. It.

99 Syrah/Shiraz. Usually I like shiraz. This was awful. It tasted green olives and salty. It was hilarious watching the row of people tasting it, when they one by one got a disgusted facial expression.

Desserts

Forgiveness (a mix of grapes). This wine was dedicated to the teachers mother after her death. I tastes like a melted strawberry lollipop.

Jolie: the wine is a golden blend of symphony and muscat, like liquid honey and tastes like honey too.

Lady in Pink: it has a beautiful pink color and tastes like strawberry lemonade.

07 Symphony: this is an American grape, the best contribution UC Davis has done this world. It's a hybrid of Muscat of Alexandria and Grenache Gris. Overwhelming taste of mint.

05 Muscat of Alexandria: there are two more kinds of muscat, Black and orange Muscat. It's hard to find in stores so if you see them get a bottle and dry. It's heaven on the tongue.

The most important thing I've learned from the class is that the best wine is the wine you like, and if it's a cheap German import, then it's perfect. If you like ice cubes in your white or like to add spices to your red and heat it, it's all up to you, wine is meant to be enjoyed. The wine can taste like BP's oil spill and still be the best wine you've ever had, if you drink it in good company.

Rolling on a River

I went on a four-day canoe trip with the excursion club to the Colorado river on the border between Nevada and Arizona. It was quite an adventure.

It started off Friday morning 6 AM when we gathered outside of Embarcadero Hall. It was 24 people on the trip so we got into the cars and drove off. After an hour we got a call from one of the other cars, their vehicle had broken down, it was oil all over the floor, so they had to rent a car and would be delayed. 

Well then, we drove happily to Las Vegas, stopped on the way for lunch. There was an outlet just beside the restaurant so I added two more pairs of Converse to my collection, the classic red and some pink-orange-ones with bright blue laces. I cant help it, they cost $15 each.

After Las Vegas approaching cars started flashing their lights at us, we didn't know why until the car started wobbling. There must have been sparks from the wheel. One of the tires was almost blown away. Something had stuck in the wheel and cut up the tire so it was almost falling off. We called the others and told them what had happened and that we would be delayed. 

There was a full-sized spare tire and it took only 10 minutes to change it, so soon we could continue. It took us 8 hours to get to Colorado river, 12 miles downstream from Hoover Dam. 

It was already late so we didn't start paddling the first day but cooked dinner and camped  instead. We slept  under the stars. In the middle of the desert the nights are warm and dry.

Saturday we paddled 7.5 miles upstream. It was hard, especially when the dam was open and the current strong. We paddled two and two and we soon figured out the necessity to keep close to the shore to avoid the strong current in the middle of the river. The sun was cruel and I wore my hippie hat and classes and one of the leaders soon gave me the nickname Residental Hippie. It was beautiful. The water was deep green like a melted red wine bottle. I stared into it mesmerized. The canyon walls rose infertile on both sides, yellow, reddish and gray. We found a nice little camping ground along the river. There where hot springs, one of them had a waterfall with hot water that worked as a shower. The water was warm and clear like a jacuzzi. In the dusk, the air swarmed of bats. Other animals we saw were snakes and mountain sheep. The excursion club had planned the meals for the entire weekend and brought gas stoves and pots and everything. It was pretty advanced, they had even taken two gallons of pancake mix with them for breakfast. We had a campfire and were taught the art of making s'mores. The recipe for s'mores is the following:

two graham crackers

one mashmellow

chocolate

there are two ways to make them, the traditional way is to roast the mashmellow until it's golden, put it on a cracker, add a piece of chocolate on top of the melted mashmellow and then add the second cracker creating a biscuit. The improved way is to put the chocolate inside the mashmellow and then roast it.

I slept in the open close to the rock wall. In the middle of the night there was a loud bang, like a gun shot, and sound of some scattering. I thought the rock wall was bursting and falling down on us. In the morning one of the leaders got up to make breakfast, then there was another bang. It was the pancake mix that exploded. The baking soda had been heated for one day so the containers were full of high pressure gas. There was pancake mix all over the camp.

On Sunday we left all the back packs and some of the canoes at the camping ground and paddled upstream to Hoover Dam. We were three people in each canoe without any load. The current was very strong. Our team consisted of two girls and one guy, we were not very physically powerful and rather unexperienced paddlers, but we were cheerful, kept close to the shore, planned ahead before attempting to round a corner with strong current and kept the same rate when paddling. We even had a motivating song "Na na na na, oh yeah!". This was a winning strategy and our power team was one of the first boats to reach Hoover Dam. Only half of the teams managed to do that.

On the way back we stopped on a small beach and totally randomly found a long deep cave with a hot spring inside, it was like a sauna. We needed a flashlight to explore the 20 m deep pitch black cave.  Even more downstream we went hiking. We walked along a little stream of hot water that sipped from the mountain walls. The rocks were covered with brown-green algae that was soft as jelly and hot from the water that fell like soft rain. The path had ropes so that we could climb steep passages, some of them were vertical walls and we had to walk on the rock with the legs pointing horizontally out from the wall, pulling us upward with the rope. 

During the second night we sat at the campfire. Most of the group had gone to sleep, but a few of us stayed for a while. One Norwegian guy wore "capris", shorts that end on the calves, which is very non-American. An American dude with the old-fashioned German name Hans, mercilessly teased the Norwegian for it. Whatever the Capri said he got a retort from the American about the trousers. They were not manly enough, obviously foreign and simply ridiculous. Finally a German guy intervened: "Some people wear capris, some are named Hans, it's OK". Not much later, words were abandoned and the fireplace turned into a no man's land in a marshmellow war. In the morning the entire hillside was covered with small white pillows, as if the marhmellow trees had shed their seeds.

We had dreamed about the last day, when the current would carry us all the way back to the cars without a single paddle stroke. Something went wrong.The dam was closed and the wind blew in the wrong direction, turning the waves upstream. We had to fight against the current both up- and down the stream!

It was Memorial Day, but we avoided the traffic jam on the 15 between Las Vegas and LA and took a detour through the Nevada desert. The air conditioning in the car was on -40, it was cool as long as we were in the desert but I woke up in the car freezing. Now I got a cold.

My camera battery died on me, so I will add pictures when I manage to get some from other people.