home again

i'm home. in the usa. where i belong. FINALLY!! YEA!!! these will be three glorious weeks.

on the way home, i realized that i may not be able to stay in switzerland for just one year. because by the time i boarded my plane in zurich yesterday, i was already missing switzerland. deba will not be happy to hear that.

i also miss my italian *boyfriend, ivan. but that's neither here nor there.





*i use the word boyfriend very loosely here.

maybe i'm not a big fan of expedia anymore.

they sent me this urgent email saying "call us immediately! your flight has changed!! you might explode!!! bring us some figgy pudding!!" so i called and sat on hold for an hour while howard (who i really thought was a computer, or maybe a robot, for the first 5 minutes of our conversation) tried to find a solution to my problem. (my problem being that one of the legs of my flight had changed, messing up the entire trip.) howard the computer couldn't find a solution that didn't involve a 6 hour layover in san francisco, so he told me he'd call me in 10 minutes. good thing i didn't wait up: he never called.

i tried again a few days later with philip, who sounded like an actual person, but had the same problem. on hold forever (i literally watched the dollar amount in my skype account shrink to practically nothing) and then they never called me back. finally i sent an email to expedia saying something like "please help me via email because your robots never call me back and international calls are not my favorite thing to go into debt for." to which they replied, "we can't help you over email and actually we can't help you at all, why are you emailing us? you should be emailing the jerks at united. we have nothing to do with it. plus also, we hate you. and what was your name again?"

after all these fruitless attempts at resolving the situation, i got another email from expedia saying "we tried to reach you, you chump, but you didn't do anything to fix this problem, so you're stuck with a 6 hour layover. sucks to be you."

so now i hate expedia and i'll be spending january 7 in alcatraz. wanna come?

why i'm a bad friend.

two weeks ago, i brought miss j a nice package of stroopwafels from amsterdam. it's been sitting on my shelf, patiently waiting for me to take home to light up miss j's life with that chewy caramel-y goodness.
until two nights ago...


i ate it. the whole thing. i just couldn't help myself.

merry christmas, miss j! (please don't be mad.)

my productivity has gone way down.

thanks to these guys and all the free episodes i found online.

sure have missed you, dr. reid.

four things about here.

the high school kids might be bratty. but they call me "miss." or rather "meess." other teachers hate it. i love it. it makes me think there's still a bit of youthful respect left in these kids. hearing "thank you, meess." warms my heart.

every time i log into my bank account i have to use my password generator. it is a tiny computer into which i enter my pin, it then gives me an 8 digit password which can be used to log in to my account online...BUT ONLY FOR 60 SECONDS. if, after 60 seconds, i haven't logged in, the password self-destructs. isn't that cool? i feel so good knowing that my swiss bank is keeping my pittance safe and secure, even though i'm sure my mini computer cost more than what i actually have in my account.

i have grown to appreciate sunshine more than i ever have. i come from a desert. it rains thrice a year. what a novelty. not here! it has stopped raining now, but only because it's turned into snow!! i really feel for these poor palm trees. i think we all got a little more than we bargained for.

and after spending the three hottest summers of my life here and being such an active participant of the sweating community, it's a little disorienting seeing this:


sunday was the high school christmas concert, held at that nice church. i was part of the exclusive faculty/staff choir that wasn't actually exclusive at all. i suggested we sing "o, holy night" because i've always had ridiculous fantasies of singing a solo of this song. (if you heard me sing, you'd know just how ridiculous) so i was very excited when the choir director chose the song. i was finally going to perform it! then, some chump said how he ALWAYS sings this song every christmas and he ALWAYS sings a solo. so the rest of us were allowed only to sing the chorus. i was so sad because i wanted all of us to sing the whole song. but when performance time came, i was grinning up there on stage because i was able to tune out the chump and imagine myself singing that solo and mesmerizing the audience with my clear and sweet voice. and then we came to the chorus and i belted it out with all i had. apparently, not only was i the only one smiling, but i'm fairly sure you could hear me over all the other singers. oops. my student, sara, who was there to hear her sister sing, ran up to me after the show. i expected her to say how enchanting my solo was, but instead she said, "it was so funny to hear you sing!" welcome back to reality, sweetpagene.

austria is really nice, despite having produced that heinous führer

anna lives in alpbach. so do 20 other people. i went to visit.i took a late train and shared a compartment with 2 czech lesbians (who actually turned out to be 2 slovak sisters, but what would you think if you saw identical mullets?) we had a very halting conversation using pieces of 6 different languages because they spoke little english and i spoke no slovak. finally i had to fake narcolepsy to put an end to the painful conversation. (normally i'd love that sort of thing, but it was 1 am, give me a break!)newsflash: the austrian alps are just as beautiful as the swiss alps. i just love me some alps.
i also learned that "wien" is vienna. and that if something is from vienna it is "wiener." and, in austria, there are lots of signs advertising things from vienna. i spend way too much time with fourth graders because i could not stop giggling. everything is wiener!

a nice jog, a nice hike, some nice knödel and palatschinken (i swear i'm not making those words up) in a restaurant where all the seats were covered in hairy animal skin. (dog, i think) anna said it's very austrian. (she's practically austrian.)

a jaunt around innsbruck city center the next morning. one of the most charming little cities i've ever seen.


and a tasty topfenstrüdel ....

that i shared with my friend.

my train got in too late to catch a bus, so i walked home. but this view made it totally worth it.