Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Jumping over the Atlantic
It been about a month since I arrived in the US after leaving Norway.
The first week in Boston with my family was a welcomed vacation. The days leading to it where tiring mentally and emotionally and the safety of being with my parents and sister was uplifting.
Boston sans University
Boston holds a special place in my heart. My two years there where really amazing, and most corners have a fun memory attached to it. This was my first time after three visits that nostalgia didn’t get the best of me. I just looked back and smiled.
I like nostalgia. It’s usually is the result of a extremely happy memory that is not easily replicated. It does hurt a bit, but in a good way.
Grunge and Starbucks
After Boston it was off to Seattle, where the most concrete part of my almost non-existent current plan lies. The results won’t be seen for some time, but the trip was still worth it. It reminded me lots of Austin -with its yuppie feeling- and any city with such a great science fiction museum1 gets my eternal love.
I finished reading Enders Game on top of the Space Needle, this is something I will never forget for some reason.While I don’t know the significance, someday I hope to find out (or make it up).
Train South
Since I was already on the West coast, and I still had the adventureness feeling that Wolf and Nav radiate, I decided not to fly straight to Miami and take a train to San Francisco.
The Coast Starlight boast a scenic route all the way down to Los Angeles. The views are pretty, and the train itself is not half-bad, but what it lacks in speed and amenities compared to any European train, it makes up for in the friendliness of almost every passenger.
I got to met some interesting people along the way, among them: a surfer dude on his way to pick up all his stuff to move back to Portland and help his mom, and older guy who reads Greek novels and visited Caracas 30 years ago, or a sad looking girl that really doesn’t seem to want the train to stop ever, but has a lot of Kindle questions.
I don’t know if I never tried hard enough in Norway, or if I was in a very touristy train ride, but I never experienced this easy friendliness back there.
The City, for a Day
Afterwards, San Francisco was as inviting as ever. A city that looks you in the eye and tells you:
>“I know you don’t want to be a tourist; stay a while longer”.
But isn’t the right time yet, or so I hope.
Welcome to Miami
Bienvenido a Miami, a place too messy to be American, but too organized to be Latin. Accents, customs and food seem all-too-familiar, yet at the end of the day, it’s a very different place.
Everyone is pretty, too pretty. The boundaries of sexiness are pushed at both ends of the age range. Some want to start right away, and others don’t want it to ever end.
While people in Oslo seemed to be fit so they could enjoy life, here it seems that fitness is a byproduct of trying to be beautiful.
Facebook Live™
The good thing is that there are friends here, great ones. The Internet let’s people keep in touch, but distance matters and changes things. You need to see people, friends and family in real life, not just in HD or commenting on their photos.
✈ to Home 1.0
On Friday I head to Caracas. My best friend is getting married and I couldn’t be happier about his happiness.
Plans continue to happen around me, and it makes me a bit envious. But that doesn’t change that I like what I see.
- I can’t recommend this museum enough if you like science fiction, it has an excellent collection of displays and stuff that would just seem important to geeks (the handwritten manuscript of Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle)↩︎