Sean and I went to Turkey for two weeks. It was awesome and I'll try to work up some blog posts with pics in the next week. We were supposed to fly back Sunday. With the whole hurricane thing, we tried twice to change our flight but no one would let us change unless our flight got canceled. When the flight was finally canceled, we spent 3 hours trying to call the airline -- never reaching a human being -- before deciding to go to the airport. There, it only took 15 minutes to rebook us on a different airline for Monday, although it was a 1 hour train ride to the airport. Unbelievable that in this day and age, going physically to the airport is still the most effective thing to do.
I have a whole bit to write about the actual trip back, but I'll save all but the punchline for another post: we made it back but our luggage did not.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Not Stranded
Monday, August 08, 2011
New Apartment
No pictures yet of our new place in Cambridge, but here I am, blogging from my very own balcony, and it is glorious. More than twice the space of the old place and with lots of cool features for cheaper rent. Also, since the move means that I can't take the train to work anymore, we finally bought a car, ending my 5 years of carless-ness.
Anyway, I used to tell everyone, 'hey, you should come visit me in Boston!' but then I would feel terribly disingenuous. I do want all of you guys to come visit me, but there wasn't really room in our old place for guests. And hotel rooms in Boston are outrageously expensive. So I kind of felt like I was telling people that 'hey, why don't you spend $250/night to come see me.' Which seems pretty jerk-y. But, in the new place, there's room for you, your spouse, and maybe even your progeny! So everyone should come visit. Well, maybe not right now, since we're going on vacation this weekend (new travel photos to blog!) and we haven't bought anything for guests to sleep on yet. But soon!
Monday, August 01, 2011
South End, Boston
After two years, we're moving out of the South End of Boston. We're not going far, just across the river to Cambridge. Even though the South End is expensive and gentrified, full of restaurants equal parts nice and douche-y, it's still a pretty and fun place. Also, it is super conveniently located (south of the river, Back Bay, downtown), and even though Boston is one of the few places in the US with a useful subway system, I hardly took the T and just walked everywhere.
Neighborhood things I'll miss:
SoWa market: A farmers' / food truck / arts & crafts / vintage & antiques market, Sundays in the summer, only a couple blocks from our apartment. We'd get kringle from the Danish Pastry Shop, salted caramel chocolate cupcakes from the Cupcakory, the best iced coffee from the actual bricks & mortar cafe on the site, fresh veggies, decorations for our apartment, and good baby shower presents. And, we'd wander around and point out all the really adorable dogs people have (a lot!).
Don Ricardo's Restaurant: Amid all the fancy-pants restaurants, this is a real neighborhood place. It's Peruvian (plus Brazillan and South American). Everything comes with this burning hot salsa that's so good that you want more even though you're in pain. Other notable items: empanadas (specifically the spinach and cheese ones which sound like they'll taste like Hot Pockets but are actually really great), paella that comes with a lobster tail & claw (for less than $20), and, the dish I couldn't stop ordering, whole fried pampano fish with plantains, salad, and a whole other plate with rice and beans ($15).
J.J. Foley's Cafe: An Irish bar and restaurant, this was our neighborhood bar. We went at least once a week. And the food is significantly better than average bar food.
The dog park: In a neighborhood with a lot of young people with money to burn, we saw a ton of adorable puppies all the time. Even better, the dog park is just one block from our old apartment.
Things I'll have to come back for:
Toro: I wrote about Toro the first time I visited. In short: it's fantastic. Prices have risen significantly, so it's not the steal it used to be. Now it costs about what you'd expect it would and more than you'd want to pay everyday, but it's still great.
Aquitaine: Sean wouldn't let us go to Aquitaine; he was sure it was 100% douche-y. But his parents came for a visit and I argued that we could live with douche-y on someone else's dime. There's no question that it's an expensive place, but it was excellent in every aspect. The interior and ambiance was classic and classy, not douche-y. The service was possibly the best service in a restaurant ever. And the food. The food. (It's French, by the way.) Everything was at minimum 'really good': the arctic char entree and the bread pudding were incredibly and unbelievable good, respectively.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Not Courmayeur, Mostly Valle d'Aosta
And here are all the photos from my Italy trip that were not of Courmayeur itself. 
I went for a 'walk' (which turned out to be hiking -- I hate hiking). But it was pretty (pics above and below). 
On one afternoon off (there was more than one afternoon off: it was that kind of conference), we went into Aosta itself. Here is the town hall, but there were a lot of nice Roman ruins too. 
Arco d'Augusto:
Porta Praetoria and the Torre dei Signori Sancti Ursi:
And a Roman theater:
For the conference dinner, we went to some 'agriturismo' place with a field full of cows with very very loud bells attached to them. 
And somewhere behind those clouds and thereabouts is Mont Blanc.
Finally, back in Milan, I stayed one night in a hotel before catching my flight back to the US. It had a garden and pool area crawling with these (kinda cute) little lizards, which did not want me to photograph them.
Saturday, July 02, 2011
Italy II: the revenge (Courmayeur)
I went on a week long trip to Italy for a repeat of the 2009 Italy conference I went to: lots of the same people, same organizers, same week in June, same region of Italy. While still in Valle d'Aosta, this time the little town was Courmayeur not Cogne. And this time I was going to be prepared. 
Imagine June 2009: winding mountain roads, wildflowers everywhere, cheese at every meal (even cheese soup). Me: lactose intolerant, allergies and no antihistamines, antiemetic chewing gum that made my whole mouth numb and freaked me out.
This time I brought piles of Lactaid and Claritin and Dramamine. How did it go? Well, for some reason (maybe they had an early spring), there were no wildflowers. The Dramimine seemed to work okay. But even though I took Lactaid like vitamins, everything I ate made me sick. The first few days were the worse; I felt terrible and I was starving because I couldn't eat anything. Still, I guess two out of three isn't bad.
Here's a photo of my hilariously tiny bed:
And a bunch of photos looking out of my hotel room in different weather conditions:
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
How Weird Is This?
I'm working on a post or two about my trip to Italy, but I thought I'd post about this since it happened today. This morning, when I went to put my laptop in my backpack, I noticed that one of the rubber feet had fallen off. I wasn't surprised since it had been loose for a while:
The odd thing is that it turns out that the rubber foot is structural. Without it, you can see straight into the inside of my computer. I tried to take a pic: 
How weird is that?
By the way, I found the missing rubber foot on the floor of my office and currently it's held in place with tape. Should I try to glue it back on? With what?
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
At the AAS
I'm attending the AAS meeting in Boston right now (yes, right now). I brought a poster to justify my presence here and a lot of people bring flyer size copies of their poster to give out. The work in my poster is already published, so that seemed a little silly for me (people should just read the paper). At the printer, however, they made a proof of my poster and I figured I might as well bring that and see if anyone took it. I really didn't believe anyone would though. It's not regular paper -- it's like a square foot big (maybe bigger) and much much thicker than regular paper. But it's already disappeared from my table! It was gone before lunch. So someone here is carrying an oversized, cardboard-y version of my poster.
Sent from my iPhone
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Random Germany Thought #3-- Strawberries and Doing the Dishes
I've been eating grocery store strawberries lately. On the whole, they're crap: giant monstrosities that taste like crunchy water. In Bonn, you only buy strawberries for a few weeks, when they're in season. They're always very local -- small, but super sweet and full of strawberry flavor -- and you have to eat them right away. Many farmers set up road-side stands (there was a very good one across the street from work, in front of the bakery) where you can buy them in giant boxes. Mmmm.
Is this a German / European thing? When I do the dishes, I wash, then rinse, then dry (if for some reason I didn't have a place to air-dry them). When I would do a dinner thing with the students in Germany, they would wash, then towel dry. No rinsing. I got used to it although I think it kind of freaked out the Canadian postdoc.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Pufferfish Cake
For Sean's birthday, I bought this cake in Chinatown.
Isn't it awesome? I didn't even bother to ask what it tastes like. Even the box it came in is cool. 
We thought it'd be really funny if it turned out to be durian flavored, but it turned out to be something angel food cake-like. 
There was fruit inside (pineapple, grape, apple, and unidentified others), and the layer that looks like fruit in the photo turned out to mango flavored custard (or maybe more like jello). Yummy.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
My Gym Is Closing!
This post is 100% pure whine. My gym is closing at the end of the month -- just two weeks notice! And I'm very sad about the whole thing. What will I do when it's gone?! Reasons why my gym is awesome:
1.) Conveniently located between our apartment and the train station.
2.) Reasonably priced (including towel service and all the group classes).
3.) Sean and I get to be gym buddies every day.
4.) Nice facilities, always clean locker room, never really crowded, no sign-ups for cardio machines, no waiting for a shower. [These features are probably not unrelated to the reasons for their closing.]
5.) People working there are friendly (some even knew my name) and a relaxed (non-douche-y) atmosphere.
6.) Little things: the big bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and body wash in the shower stalls (and, yes, I used them -- I'm too lazy to tote my own product); hair dryers and lotion too; the translucent glass shower stall doors (curtains inevitably lead to someone ripping the curtain opening while you're inside showering); and probably a lot of things that I'm forgetting but will remember and shake my fist about when I'm working out somewhere else.
And now it I will probably have to migrate to the further away women-only gym and Sean will have to go back to the university gym. Sigh.
Monday, January 17, 2011
My Morning
I'm at work today -- at least for a few hours. Since it's MLK day, school is closed and I have to swipe my ID card to get in the building, to call for the elevator, and to hit the button for my floor. I'm usually only here during business hours, so this is rare behavior for me and it took more of my concentration than you might expect.
So I get into the elevator in the lobby (I notice that there's only a couple of people around), try to hit '3' for my floor, remember I need to swipe my ID again, swipe again, and then finally get '3' to light up. The door closes and the elevator starts moving. Then I turn around. And there's a little black toy poodle standing next to me in the elevator. There's no one else in the elevator. It looks at me inquisitively. Oh crap.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
I Made It to Work Today
It snowed a bunch yesterday and I never made it out of my apartment at all. But today, I thought I'd try to make the slog to work. Fortunately, I ordered a pair of waterproof boots the very morning after the last snow storm. They seem to work pretty good. 
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Lambic Beer
I went to Brussels a few years back (and blogged about it) and had lambic beer for the first time. It is traditionally brewed in only a few places in Belgium by spontaneous fermentation (from the medley of wild yeast in the environment of the brewery and not from carefully controlled yeast strains), taking several years to make, and has a distinctive sour taste (maybe more winey than beery). Often flavored by fruit, the authentic stuff adds real, whole fruit with a secondary fermentation. The imitators add sweeteners and syrups. Here's a good article I found on lambic, and here's the wiki page.
Some of the best of the real deal comes from the Cantillon brewery in Brussels. Thankfully, it is acquirable in the U.S. The most commonly found 'lambic' in the U.S. is Lindemans. It's dangerously yummy, but if you've had Cantillon at the brewery in Brussels, you will immediately know that Lindemans' not the real deal. It's sweet, never sour.
Given the complexity of the lambic-making process, blending and aging is as important as the spontaneous fermentation. Hanssens Artisanaal is a blender -- buying lambic from brewer before fermentation takes hold and aging and blending in their own cellars.
Which brings us to the beer in the photo: Hanssens Artisanaal's Experimental Cassis. A friend found it in a local liquor store. Fruity, sour, dry, with little aftertaste -- it's great. Here's the Beer Advocate listing. All of the reviews which rate it below an A are written by idiots with no taste buds.
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Best Food Day (in Boston) Ever
On Friday, we went to Men-Tei, a tiny hole-in-the-wall Japanese noodle and rice bowl shop near Newbury and Hereford. It was our first time, and it was awesome. I had fried pork chop noodles. It was exactly like the noodles you get in Taiwan -- fried pork goodness and chewy noodles for a good price ($9 in Boston, probably $3-4 in Taiwan).
For special occasions, my Mom makes a roasted duck stuffed with sticky rice dish. Since Sean and I are staying in Boston for the holidays this year, we decided that Sean would try to make it. But my Mom outright refused to tell us how -- she decided that deboning a duck, stuffing it, and sewing it up again was beyond our abilities. (She said she's show us how next year.) Anyway, we compromised and made the duck and sticky rice, separately. The sticky rice is made with sweet rice, onions, mushrooms, chestnuts, and a little ground pork. The key ingredient in the sticky rice, however, is duck fat collected from the roasting duck. For dessert, Sean made raspberry pie. It was a glorious meal: 
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Das Räuchermännchen
Sean went to Germany a few weeks ago and came back with a räuchermännchen ('little smoking man'). A figurine of a woodsman or craftsman (is this little guy a shepherd?), there is a little plate in the center of it on which a little cone of incense is burned, and the smoke comes out of the mouth. 
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Germany is on the Honor System Redux
I wrote a post a long, long time ago on how the German public transportation system operates on the honor system. You buy and validate tickets, but bus drivers are not checking boarding passengers for valid tickets (you can get on in the back of the bus) and there are no turnstiles in the subway. The honor system is probably the reason that you can go to the bus stop in Germany, look at the bus schedule posted, and know at what minute the bus will arrive. There are random checks and fines if you are found without a valid ticket, but I cannot remember ever being checked in the entire time I lived there -- never on the bus for sure, never on the U-Bahn, maybe once on the S-Bahn (actually, that might have been a Deutsche Bahn train). I assumed that the system works because Germans are just more honest than Americans. Anyway, Sean is in Germany right now and he says that today when the ticket checker came into his S-Bahn car, 4 of 8 people did not have a ticket. There goes that theory.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Still Alive ... For Now
I accidentally ate some moldy pie (apple, if you're curious) this morning -- yes, for breakfast --which puts me one step closer to actually being Homer Simpson.
Also, it gives me an excuse to post this classic clip:
This was the best resolution clip I found. It has the added features of being the German version and, for some reason, mirror-reversed. (German Homer is weird, right? Very pimply-faced kid-like. I tried to explain this when I lived in Germany, but they were just too used to it to hear it.)