Busking Journey

What I'm doing, dramatically, Early Fall 2011

2011-10-13T16:28:00.000-07:00

Call and Response's real title became Descending Harmony. It's been submitted. We are waiting.

Am trying to get some fundraising going for BHF.

Still attending classes at Lifebook.

Still going to Daniel Hoff in hopes of getting him to be a commercial agent for me.

Started Groundlings classes with Jordan Black. I recognize him from TV. *geek snort*

Did an industrial: conversations in English for people learning English as a second language to listen to.

Updated website, trying to organize CGETC.

Hm. I don't think I'm doing enough.

Oh! I'll be shooting a short film, Forget You, in December.

Still working on scripts, etc. I want to be doing less of that and more acting. Where are the auditions?

What I'm doing, dramatically, Summer 2011

2011-09-11T23:50:00.000-07:00

Let's see, when last we spoke, I was preparing for the 48 hour film festival.

That happened. Our film can be seen if you look around the website at www.deadnorthfilm.com.

Since then, that group has made another film, the working title of which is Call and Response. We will be submitting it for consideration to Sundance.

I continue to produce the web series Bureau of Home Furnishings.

Several writers from WMM have approached me to ask about my being in their movies, but no dates have been set.

My acting class at Lifebook is going well. I'm preparing to audition for the showcase.

I've submitted myself to an agency where I have a reference, and gone to an open call for another.

I plan to take Groundlings classes as soon as I can.

This making movies thing is really pretty cool. Next step, get paid for it.

What I'm doing, dramatically

2011-07-22T08:57:00.000-07:00

And I'll try to keep you all up to date when new things arrive:

Joined the We Make Movies 48 Hour Film Festival Team as an Actor/Writer/Production Manager

Writing (and now editing) 3 scripts for the We Make Movies short film contest (winner gets $2000 to make their film): Zombie Jesus, Part 1; Who Are You?; and Hitchhiking for Kids

Stage Managing and attending classes taught by Allen Levin at Lifebook.

Writing and producing Bureau of Home Furnishings with Struggling Actors Productions.

Performing Monday nights at 7 with Opera del Espacio at sites around L.A.

Things to be thankful for

2011-07-13T13:38:00.000-07:00

It's easy to feel overwhelmed. I'm fighting off a wave of it right now. I don't have a job, I'm about to begin a ten-day medical study for which I will be paid $1,980, I interviewed at Barnes and Noble for a position that pays $8.50 an hour and starts at 20 hours a week, and I've got a 6-month window to start a job as a telemarketer. And I just keep thinking things, unhelpful things, negative things, and I don't want to go there.

Instead I want to find the things I'm thankful for, and find the humor in all of this.

Being a lab rat might just be an awesome experience. I'll have loads of time to read and write, and at the end of it we'll have replenished our savings a little.

It may not be an exciting job, but darn it, there is a job waiting for me.

I can say no to a part-time job that pays crap.

I have an amazing husband who makes delicious meals for me, and he's a great actor.

We own so many awesome games.

I have no shortage of clothes because I keep finding them for free!

I am almost finished with the first edit of my book--I will finish during this ten-day study.

We live close to beaches. Real beaches.

We won tickets not only to the aquarium, but also to the Tim Burton exhibit at LACMA.

We have the most adorable dog in the world.

And those are just a few things.

Career PROGESS!

2011-05-29T10:42:00.000-07:00

The sense of fullness and happiness is almost unbearable.

Belmont lies cuddled in Stina's arms, and I am about to write a blog about how wonderful it is to pursue your dreams, and, almost literally, live them.

My career is feeling gang-buster-ey. I had several auditions last week, and while I didn't get the job in any of them, I felt happy with how they went, saw room for improvement in myself, and got positive and constructive feedback from the people auditioning me. I'm meeting weekly with a group of actors in L.A., and have made contact and will be meeting with other groups of filmmakers and actors around L.A. I qualified for The Groundlings professional track courses, and plan to take them in a few weeks. A children's theater company is interested in my directing a show for them. Finally, the subject of today's blog is about the amazing experience Stina and I both had on the set of Transients yesterday, where we performed as featured, if silent, players in a visually stunning and socially powerful movie with a target release date later this year.

I haven't mentioned it to the blogosphere before, but I've had an occasional recurring dream theme since childhood in which I am working as an actor alongside actors I admire but only know from their work. In general, the dreams tend to focus on what I can or should say or do in a professional setting to interest my fellow artists in working with me again. When I was a child, it was almost always Billy Crystal. Since moving to L.A., it has been a number of different actors, including Felicia Day of The Guild fame.

Two weeks ago, I answered a Craigslist ad looking for a stiltwalker. I sent the poster a link to my newly created website: www.andjuggling.com/brendan. The director responded soon thereafter (while we were with Stina's mom on our Disneyland Vacation, actually. Thank you, mobile phone internet!), and was interested in using Stina as a stiltwalker and me as a Living Statue in a scene set in an art park. The shoot was on location in Redlands, CA, about an hour away from L.A. by car, so we could only do it if the film could provide transportation for us. Rhianon Gutierrez, the director, assured us she would find a way to get us out there and back, so we agreed.

Jordan and Ariel arrived a few days later, and we had a grand time playing games with them, and talking about the world, puppies, kittens, and internet memes. Stina worked and I had auditions and interviews, but they amused themselves and Belmont while we were away. On Thursday, we went to the Santa Monica Pier and beach, and while there Michael, our CS friend from NOLA and NYC, called to let us know he was going to be in Los Angeles that evening. Later that day, we also learned that the transportation Rhianon had arranged for us would pick us up the night before and take us to a hotel in Redlands so Stina could be on set for a 6:30AM call.

Momentarily panicked, we asked Jordan and Ariel if they could watch Belmont overnight. They said yes, and, as luck would have it, that left a bed available for Michael to spend the night, too.

We had a nice, busy apartment for a few hours Friday evening, catching up with Michael and saying goodbye to Jordan and Ariel, who left the next morning for San Francisco.

At 9:45pm, our ride, Eric, one of the producers of Transients, arrived to take us to the Howard Johnson in San Bernadino. I felt like Eric looked out for us while on set, making sure we knew when we would be needed and looking for opportunities for us to shine in the film. He's also a director, and we talked about future projects of his on the way down...some of which might have a place for me. Stina and I shared a room with another couple, one of whom was the ASL interpreter for one of the PAs and the other of whom was an extra. We awoke at 5AM, grabbed a couple bagels from the lobby, and headed out to the set with Eric, where we met Rhianon and the other cast and crew of the movie.

Coming up in a moment, you will see Stina and me flip out with excitement. Rhianon is a very welcoming and capable director. She made us feel valued, respected, and like a part of the team of filmmakers who had been working on this project for almost a year. Rhianon took us around and introduced us to the ADs, the PAs, the make-up artists, and the cast. The woman being made up at the moment looked tremendously like another actor we had seen. A few moments later, Stina and I compared notes. We both worried that some ableist idea had reared its head. We saw one female actor in a wheelchair, and our brains jumped to the conclusion that she was the same actor we had seen in a wheelchair before.

We asked Melanie, the AC and an actor in the film (and UW SoD alum! We're going to her creativity jam on Wednesday.), if our brains could possibly be telling us we were, in fact, not ableist, and rather in the presence of unexpected awesome.

Turns out, we were in the presence of unexpected awesome. Stina jumped up and down a few times while I smiled broadly and gasped for air. Teal Sherer of The Guild fame had just shaken our hands, plays the lead in Transients, and was about to be in scenes with us. I immediately turned to the education my dreams had given me, preparing for this opportunity of a lifetime.

Between takes in the scene where my living statue character tells her Sandrine character "make your own story" with his eyes, I managed to overcome my shyness, tell Teal what fans we are of her work, and tell her how excited we were to be on the set with her. She responded with such openness and friendliness that we became friends. She told me a little about her production company and the work it does. I learned a little about a project her company did, which she called a "devised" project: essentially an original, ensemble-created work.

I think every serious theatre artist wants to do the same thing. Melanie talked about creativity jams; the Tiles project, before it was scrapped, was all about collaboration; all of Nikki's and Alissa's shows have varying degrees of original, ensembly goodness; and you know it's why I make theatre.

After my scene finished shooting, I visited Stina at one of the picnic tables, where she and the body artist working on her had been at it for three hours already. Tracy Kiggen and her assistant, Braidy Connolly, transformed Stina's upper body into a garden of flowers over the course of nine hours.Eric came by to let me know that the film would like me to walk on my stilts in the scene as well, and they'd be careful not to film my face so that no one can tell I'm the same actor as the red man from earlier in the scene. Poor Rhianon could do nothing about the fact that there was no costume for my stilt-ness, and we made do with my plain, old, un-artsy jeans.

Ali arrived and told me about Pazookies, a cookie covered in ice cream that everyone seems to agree is a must-try. Ali was Teal's umbrella holder and jacket placement expert. Yep, she had an umbrella holder. Such a diva. He's also her boyfriend.

Stina strode regally across the set. She waved her magic bubble wand and led the audience around the art park. Folks enjoying a day in the park asked for pictures with her. She hugged trees and maneuvered around sculptures as if she were born on stilts. You'll have to watch Transients to see it.

After a 12 hour day of being on set, we met Rhianon's family, and then Stina and I were driven home by Rhianon and Alex, the film's editor. Rhianon treated us to some In-N-Out burger. It was our first time at the legendary Californian restaurant. We talked about our visions for theater and film, and made indefinite plans to play games in the not-too-distant future. We made movie magic yesterday, and I'm sure we'll do it again sometime. I'm sure.

Traipsing has its consequences, a blog about Lyme Disease (Yay for doctor friends)

2011-05-07T15:31:00.000-07:00

So, I have Lyme Disease.

On the Saturday of the Grilled Cheese Invitational (at which we took 4th), they put wristbands on us to signify our participant status. A few minutes afterwards, I noticed a welt on the palmside of my wrist. I blamed skin irritation from the wristband and ignored it.
By Monday, a few more hives had appeared and we worried that Belmont had fleas or I was having an allergic reaction to something.

By Saturday, I had lots of hives, and we were trying to eliminate allergens from my environment. I bought Benadryl and anti-itch ointment, but it wasn't having any effect on the hives.

On Tuesday I noticed the classic bullseye rash.

I worried. I read internet articles about Lyme disease. I contacted Jocelyn (our friend who just finished med school in New Orleans). I told Stina my fears via text. I sent a picture of the rash to Jocelyn. After seeing it, she agreed it was suspicious, verging on pathognomic (my new favorite word, look it up!).

On Jocelyn's advice, I sought a medical practitioner in my area. There's a low-cost clinic about a quarter mile from our house, so I walked down there.

The clinic only accepts new patients at 7AM, so, reassured by Jocelyn that a few hours wouldn't make too much difference, I waited until the next morning and arrived at 6:45 AM. I stood at the end of the already 40 person long line waiting for the doors to open. Once the line started moving, I soon came to a person who asked my name and wrote it on a list.

Inside, I and the 3 dozen other people took our seats while the woman who was writing down names explained the procedure for getting to see a doctor and what to expect in Spanish. She did not translate it into English. I was the only person in the room who did not speak Spanish. I went up to the counter afterwards, and she explained in English that I would wait until 11AM, then, if they thought they would be able to see me in the afternoon, they would ask me to come back at 1PM to continue waiting. There were no guarantees that I would be seen, and if I couldn't be seen after waiting all day, I could come back the next morning at 7AM to wait again.

I thanked her and re-took my seat and texted with Stina and Jocelyn about how I was feeling and what was happening. There were at least 60 people in the waiting room above the door to which read a sign "Maximum Occupancy: 40 Persons", and another 20 in the children's play area. I worried I wouldn't be seen. After 2 hours, another lady behind a desk (I don't know if they were nurses. I assume so.) called me up, and asked me for the reason for my visit today. I told her about the rash, and then went back to my seat. After 2 more hours, the original lady called me up and told me to come back at 1PM.

I went home, took Belmont out, re-charged my phone, half-heartedly looked for work on Craigslist (What if I were still waiting at the clinic tomorrow?), and ate lunch. Then I went back to the clinic. This time I brought a book (no magazines in the waiting room, sadly).

I went up to the lady behind the desk and told her I was back. She politely but disinterestedly waved me back to a chair. I read my book and texted with Stina and Jocelyn. I told Jocelyn I realized more medical professionals were needed. She responded that I could probably finish my first year of med school while waiting in this clinic. True.

Around 3:30, the desk lady called me up and handed me some papers, promising there was a space available for me if I could fill out the paperwork really quickly. So I did. Faster than she expected, I think. And by 4, I was talking to a nurse practitioner.

First a nurse or orderly or volunteer or intern or something took my blood pressure (fine), weight (50 lbs more than I'd like it to be), and checked my blood sugar (86 - not diabetic).

Then came the moment I'd been waiting for. I told my medical caretaker about my symptoms: the progression of the hives, and the appearance of the bullseye rash. She took one look at it, said yep, Lyme, then asked me about a host of other symptoms. I had none of the other symptoms. She told me she was going to check on what the United States recommended dosage was of Doxycycline for Lyme (from which I inferred that she was from ... somewhere south of the U.S. Mexico, perhaps).

I thanked her, waited for the pharmacy, etc. Got the Doxy.

I took the first pill that evening around 6pm, making sure not to have any food in the 2 hours before or one hour after. Thursday I took my pills in the morning and evening. Then Friday morning I took my second dose at 8:30 AM. Friday night, I took a pill around 11PM.

During this time, we worried about whether Belmont might have Lyme disease and what we should do. Stina remembered that we had gone traipsing through an overgrown stairway between streets two weeks ago. We decided it was most likely I had picked up the tick there. Stina was carrying Belmont through the growth, so it was no more likely that he'd get Lyme than Stina, and neither of them have any symptoms, so we decided not to worry, and make sure to have him tested at his next regular vet visit.

This morning (Saturday) I awoke around 8:30AM after a fitful night's rest. I kept dreaming that I was crushing Belmont in my sleep. He was fine, and very happy to be firmly snuggled between Stina and me.

My right thumb felt mildly swollen. It also looked mildly swollen. I started to worry. One of the things the doctor had said was that if I felt muscle pain or joint pain, then the antibiotics weren't working, and I should go to the emergency room. Was this what joint pain felt like? I took my pill at 9AM and emailed and texted Jocelyn, then searched the web. The search turned up plenty of stories people told about how the dosage of Doxycycline I was being given wasn't nearly enough and other such worrisome horror stories. I do my best to trust the medical professionals rather than the internet, so I decided not to worry about that. I couldn't figure out whether my slightly swollen hand was something to send me to the ER or not.

So, we looked up a medical hotline. The lady at the other end told us to tell the doctor treating me about the new symptom. I told her the doctor treating me was at the free clinic and I couldn't get ahold of her. She told me to go to Urgent Care. Hmm. I called the free clinic, which is open until noon on Saturdays. The lady at the other end said they couldn't see me today, but that I should stop taking the Doxycycline and come in on Monday. No, they don't do appointments, but she can transfer me. She transferred me to a voicemail that said, and I quote "Hello, the party you have reached is not available. Please leave a message for at the tone." No name or otherwise helpful information. I left a detailed message. Maybe they'll return my call.

Alright, time to tap in a new doctor friend. Britt, Stina's Cousin's Wife, also just finished med school. After explaining the situation, she thought the swelling was within the realm of normal. The way I understand it (all factual errors are mine, not Britt's), the Doxycycline builds up in your body. Now, after I've taken 4 doses of it, it's finally starting to work. It breaks open the bacteria, and my immune system attacks the bacteria. The swelling is because of what my immune system is doing. It's expected. There's not a lot of swelling (no pitting), and the pain when I press it is just a two (On the scale of one to ten, but my scale is more reasonable than this guy's. My ten is the appendicitis of August 2008, May 2009, August 2009, and October 2010.)

Jocelyn agrees with Britt's diagnosis. Yay for friends who are docs. I want to be a doc, too. So, I will continue to take the Doxy, and if the swelling isn't better on Monday, I'll go in to the clinic and see what they can tell me.

It's obnoxious, and I hate the hives that I'm still getting, but cross your fingers for me (or, you religious folk out there can do your equivalent of that if you want) that all will be well.

My elbow is feeling a little tender, much like my ring finger (though not my thumb). The spots are warm, but not super-hot, and the swelling is minor, pain is minimal, itchiness is perseverant.

Check in with me on Monday and see if it has all gotten better.

Love,
Weird Sicky

P.S. It has all gotten better.

Everybody Agrees.

2011-05-02T16:34:00.000-07:00

Everybody agrees, there's a way in.
Or at least the people looking for the way in agree there must be some way in. There are a number of different camps.

Most commonly, you have the camp that swears by LACasting.com. Or, okay, not swears by, but thinks you, the fellow actor, are doing yourself a tremendous disservice if you aren't subscribed to their services. Into this camp also fall the people who swear by ActorsAccess.com, and, to a lesser degree, NowCasting.com and Backstage.com.

Second most commonly, the "work your way through agents" camp believes that it doesn't matter which agent you get at first, just get an agent (or manager) right away, and simply ditch them once you can get the interest of a better agent. They think the best way to break into this business is to send your kit out to everybody on the list of agents, and see who bites.

Thirdly, the casting workshops camp accepts that it's just a part of the biz that you pay to get seen. They'll dish out several hundred bucks to attend seminars or workshops taught by casting directors so that the casting director will know who you are and cast you in something. This camp is generally aware that "legit" actors and organizations, like the Screen Actors Guild and the columnists for Backstage.com disapprove of this practice, but respond, "Hey, it's the way things are done."

Fourthly, the work NEAR the biz camp seeks jobs near the entertainment biz, hoping to break in that way. Ideally, they find a job with a major studio, say, as a production assistant, but waiting tables at places industry professionals frequent will do in a pinch. This camp is being proactive about waiting to be discovered.

Fifthly, the make-your-own-work camp makes movies and theater on a shoestring budget, hoping someone will notice. Hey, at least they're doing what they want to do while they wait to get paid to do what they want to do!

Sixthly, the I-Don't-Have-A-Freakin'-Clue-How-To-Break-In camp scours Craigslist for auditions, tries to make friends with everybody on the off chance that person might be a go-getter, and calls the Central Casting hotline several times an hour.

I fall in the sixth camp. I made half-hearted attempts at following the advice of the second camp, and promise to redouble my efforts once I get an adequate reel together, am on the verge of following the advice of the first camp, am actively seeking jobs like the fourth camp, and am doing my best to be a part of the fifth camp.

Industry folks, are there more camps? Which camp do you belong to? Non-industry folks, are we crazy?

Acting is for suckers

2011-04-25T18:08:00.000-07:00

Or so it seems. Sorry, folks.

But here is the life of an average gig.

On, say, Tuesday, I hop on Ye Olde Craigslist, and I find an ad that says "ACTORS NEEDED". I click it and find a description that says, "Need 2 Actors/resses for a Short Film. I am a director. See? http://www.imdb.com/lookimreallyadirector ... Credit, Copy, and Meal. No Pay."

Compared to so many others, this one looks less sketchy, so I send an email to the anonymized email address that says "Dear Sir or Madam, Please consider me for a role in your Short Film. You can find my resume and headshot attached. If you follow this link: http://www.youtube.com/twowhitewines , you can find examples of my acting." I customize this form letter if they give me enough information to customize with.

7 out of 8 times, I hear nothing back. 1 out of 12 times, I hear from some scam who wants me to sign up for their service. 1 out of 48 times, I hear from someone calling me in for an audition, and 1 out of 48 times, I hear from someone telling me to just show up for the shoot. Let's pretend I got called for an audition.

If it's a good one, I might go to the Film Independent studios, smile and shake hands with the DP and Director, and slate, then perform a monologue to a camera.

If I just show up, I get an email that says: Come here at 9am and we'll be done by 1pm.

Last time I just showed up to a shoot, I rode Stina's too-small-for-me bike 4 miles to the location because Belmont peed on and rusted my chain. Once there, I was directed to the bagels and leftover pizza from the night before. After standing around for 30 minutes, I was given a contract which said "We get to do whatever we want with you. You don't get anything for it." I signed it. Then I waited around some more. Eventually, a costumer comes and gives me pants 2 sizes too small, and a shirt 3 sizes too big. Then I wait. Then I listen to someone talk. Then I wait. Then I wait somewhere else. Eventually I am handed a cigarette because I'm an army guy in WWII and everybody smoked. I smoke it. They take moving pictures of me smoking it while some guy plays a guitar and I look afraid, excited, bored, and moved all at the same time. Then we do that 80 more times and I smoke 10+ unfiltered cigarettes and sing in a hoarser and hoarser voice. Then it's 4pm, and they acknowledge that they've kept us longer than they promised, but can we stay for just one more scene - it'll only take 15, 20 minutes, tops. We agree, even though some of us know we have to be somewhere else. After we wait an hour, we film for another hour. They ask us then if we can just stay to record our voices. We are getting mutinous, but we stay... another hour. Then they ask... and I say no and leave. Others stay. They're probably getting famouser as we speak.

But I love acting.

Don't you forget about me (in which I quote another song, too)

2011-04-09T21:27:00.000-07:00

Over a month has gone by since we last posted. A promised post has failed to come, and will still not arrive at this moment. This post, rather, will be about where we, or at least, I (Stina) have been all this time.

Around the beginning of February I got a job at a cafe called Tada! I have full-time or near full-time hours there, depending on busy-ness. It is a take-out cafe with a full coffee bar that serves the surrounding businesses and schools. TOMS' administrative headquarters is right around the corner, the administrative offices for the Grammys are across the street, various production companies are nearby, and a school that teaches the children of some famous people and some not famous people is a hop, skip and a jump away.

It being L.A., or rather, it being Santa Monica, you can't seem to help bumping into celebrities even when you're not on a set. I helped Demetri Martin without realizing who he was, though I remember thinking he looked like Jason Schwartzman. I did have a heart-thumping moment, though, when I realized another man who looked vaguely familiar was none other than Val Kilmer. I covered well--I don't think he realized I was shouting "ohmygodthat'svalkilmerohmygod!" in my head.

You might remember we do not live in Santa Monica. I travel by bus and by foot to go to work every day. In the morning, my total commute time is about one hour. In the afternoons, though, with heavier traffic, it is always at least an hour and a half. I'm grateful to travel this distance by bus, where I can read the paper or a book, or text, or read Facebook posts on my phone, or occasionally have interesting interactions with other travelers.

For example:
One day, heading home, I was looking to pin my butt down to any available seat, my feet being rather tired (also, I've realized I'm started to get old: my knees ache after standing all day). At the back there was a seat. There was also a very large plastic bin on a nearby seat, which I realized belonged to the passenger seated to my right. I had a brief interaction with him in which he asked about a stop and I was able to provide him some useful information. Therefore we were genial with one another.

Another gentleman (I say gentleman to indicate his more advanced age and his stately mustache) got on the bus and sat next to the big plastic bin. He pulled out some papers and used the bin top as a sort of desk. After a few minutes, the man to my right rearranged the bin to allow more seat-room to the gentleman, and as he did so he pushed the papers to the side a little and said, "Just gotta leave some clear space here." It was then the gentleman and I noticed the air holes.

The gentleman said, looking at me, "Oh, I thought it belonged to you." (Don't ask me.) He then looked at the man to my right. "You've got an animal in there, eh? Sure is quiet!"

I asked the man to my right, "What kind of animal is it?"

He turned his head to me and said very quietly, "A python."

"Oh," I said.

A few minutes later the gentleman again said, "Sure is quiet! What kind of animal do you have in there?"

"Just a little snake."

"Oh! Well, sure is quiet."

"Yeah. Snakes don't make any noise."

Later, after the gentleman had exited the bus, I resumed a bit of conversation with the man to my right, and found out he was going to get some hens to feed to his snake. I guess it probably wasn't so little. Why he had to bring it with him to buy its dinner, I never found out.

The only trouble with working full-time and the long commute, is it doesn't leave much for other pursuits, like writing blogs. I've been meaning to remedy this for quite some time, but when I do have the energy and/or the force of will to write, I do my best to devote it to editing my novel.

I'm about halfway through the editing process, but it is slow-going. Some days I barely get through half a page when I feel too mentally drained to continue. Other days I manage quite a bit more, but then there are also days I don't open that file at all. I'm trying to eliminate those days.

When not working, commuting, or editing my novel, I'm generally found with Brendan and Belmont. On Saturdays we host game night, and on Sundays we alternate between a Brendan-led World of Darkness Vampire game, and a Our-Friend-Joe-led WoD Vampire Game.

That's basically everything that's been keeping me from writing in this here blog. I'll let Brendan answer for himself.

It's my life. Don't you forget. And I'll try to share it with you more often, to help with that point.

First speaking role on national television!

2011-02-03T19:23:00.000-08:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present, for your delight, the tale of one Fred Brown. An upstart small businessman, renowned for his fantastical parties. Due to circumstance beyond his control, a client was unhappy with the service he provided, and despite his offers of a partial refund, she chose to sue him in AMERICA'S COURT.

Now, I can't give the ending away. And I don't know when it's airing. So you'll just have to watch America's Court (With Judge Ross - He's got this. He's Boss Ross.) forever.

We were given a case and told to make up our arguments. Then the director came in and told us to argue more, and not back down until the judge has told us to settle down at least 3 times.

My co-star was a very nice lady (from Seattle. WhaaaT?). Who's been in LA for the past 7 years. She's an animal care provider. (She was a vet assistant, then owned a doggy day care, now owns a doggy dentistry place.) She's also a funtabulous actress, who told me about IO west. It's an improv group that I'll look into.

I got HD makeup and a dressing room just shared between my costar and me. Pretty awesome. I can see why I want to be an actor. I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.

Oooo. I just thought of an argument I should have made. Oh, well. My character didn't think of it in time.

Adventures in Photography!

2011-01-10T21:05:00.000-08:00

This morning, we were surfing the Facebook on our phones, as we do every morning before getting out of bed, and Stina saw a friend of ours from New York say a thing about Los Angeles. Being the people we are, we were all like "OMG LOL R U N LA? US 2!". Being the sober adult our friend is, he responded with a phone call. Sooooo last century.
As it happens, he needed someone to take pictures of some cargoes he was thinking of purchasing (he works for a company that does that; he's not an eccentric millionaire, but if anyone was going to be one, I can imagine him as one very well). He hadn't found a photographer via his usual routes yet, and was I interested in doing the work? I was. And this is my story.

I headed out at quarter to noon, because he said everyone was on lunch breaks from 11AM until 1PM. I bought some batteries up the street from Unicorn Jesus.

I caught the Red Line to the Blue Line (and went past the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Shopping Center "I have a dream... of convenient shopping at affordable prices!" (credit to Adam Sauer)) and got out at Del Amo Station, where I saw this sign:

I was At Del Amo and Santa Fe. Remember that. It makes later funny/sad. I ran to the 192 bus, which had just arrived. Showing her my $6.00 Day Pass, I asked if she went to my stop. She did, but my Day Pass was no good to her. I need a $0.35 transfer from the subway. Could I pay her $0.35? No. I could pay her $1.25. I ran back to the subway, helped a possibly blind man buy his ticket to Los Angeles, bought my $0.35 transfer, and ran back to the bus. She took the transfer from me. (Sidenote: my friend and employer paid for all my transportation expenses, so yay!)
I rode that bus for 5 blocks. Then my stop arrived. Los Angeles seriously needs a new Metro trip planner.
Los Angeles (the city of Long Beach, really, but come on, it's Los Angeles) also seriously needs useful sidewalks. I crossed the road to my destination and walked on the vine-age they had in lieu of a sidewalk. Entering where the trucks would because I saw no other place to enter, a security guard directed me to the office where I found my contact on her lunch break. I waited. "I'm looking for the peanut brittle," (peanut brittle is code for what I was really looking for. It's all very spy movie.) I told her when she came to me. "He'll show you where it is," she responded. And he did. He showed me to 50 barrels. They had markings on them, which I took pictures of. They were...barrels. They could have had kittens inside them or the archangel Michael and his cronies. But I assume they had peanut brittle in them. Then I called my friend/employer to ascertain if I had what he wanted. He asked me to ask for paperwork explaining why the barrels said they came from one place when the ad he had said they came from another place. She went to find out. She came back to tell me these were not the barrels I was looking for. They had multiple shipments of peanut brittle. She told me where I could find this other peanut brittle, at a different warehouse. "I'm walking," I said. "Is it far?" She looked taken aback. I swear, there are plenty of people in L.A. who don't have cars and get around using public transit, but the ones who don't can't comprehend it. "I'll see if I can find someone to drive you."
She found the man who had shown me the earlier boxes. I felt like I was on the road again. An adventure and I was hitching a ride! This ride lived in long beach and liked it in the summer and had an ear infection. I answered all his personal questions, but was evasive when he asked about my employer... according to him (and I may be exaggerating for emphasis) evil supervillains win if they can guess who is buying what. We arrived at what were presumably the correct barrels. I took more pictures of kitten-containing barrels, and I bid adieu to my ride. I stepped out the gate of this new place. I had directions from my old place to my next place, not from this place. So I asked the man putting dirt in a hole with a shovel. He didn't know, but his buddy might. They yelled across the street in Spanish. I thought the word that was supposed to be my street sounded like a different word, but chalked it up to my Sesame Street Spanish. I walked the direction the man told me...past the Del Amo Subway Station. The distance she thought was too far for me to walk? 5 blocks. But I'm not complaining, there's plenty of walking ahead. I walked that way for half a block. Why half a block? Because the sidewalk ended in the middle of the block. I shrugged off the impression that I was part of an absurdist theatre piece, and walked jay. I walked past that sign again, the one about the kiss and ride, to Del Amo and Susana. I doubted the directions I'd been given, and went on the Kindle in my backpack to double check. Indeed, I was walking towards not my street. I retraced my steps and found the correct street. No problem, still an hour and a half until the warehouses close. I reach my destination. "I'm looking for a lot of toenail clippers." I say to the receptionist (again, not really toenail clippers). "Are you looking for Awesome Delivery Service?" (also not real) "Yes, yes, I believe I am." "They moved." Oh. "Are they far? Can I walk there?" "You should take a car." "I don't have a car, can I walk there?" "Yes" I follow her directions to...Del Amo and Susana. 3 miles round trip from point A to point B and back.
So get this, I'm walking up Susana, and suddenly: No sidewalk! Okay. I clamber over some bushes and get this: A crosswalk! If I were coming from the other direction, I would have crossed the crosswalk, and come to a terminal point. No sidewalk leading away from the crosswalk in any direction. Who designed this thing? What do people think pedestrians want? Pedestrians want sidewalks! Not just anywhere, we want USEFUL sidewalks.
Seriously.
I go to the warehouse. They send me to the office. They send me to the warehouse. I take pictures of toenail clippers. There are no customs officials present. I come home.

My Day at the Library

2011-01-06T15:37:00.000-08:00

I'm on the job hunt*, and a thing I keep hearing is, “Oh, that's all handled online. You have to apply online.” I find this frustrating. I feel that a personal meeting, being able to shake someone's hand and actually give them my resume and talk to them about it on the spot, is a much better way for them to get to know me and see that I'd be the perfect fit for whatever the job is. It's how I got a job at J. Matheson Gifts, and that was a fruitful, two-year-long relationship.

Anyhow, I'm ranting, and this is meant to be a post about my day at the library. Let's get to it. I went to the library on Tuesday with our laptop so I could spend the day applying online to a bunch of places. Brendan had background work, so I went solo. I took over a small, round table in a back room at our local branch and got to work. This room is where the teen books live, as well as a row of computers which people can sign up to use in one-hour time slots. It's usually pretty quiet.

I got to the library when it opened at 12:30pm. Later in the afternoon, just when I was needing a break from writing cover letters and answering stupid questions like, “When at work, are you seen as more a) interesting, or b) motivated,” I got to witness quite a show.

A woman had arrived in the room a few minutes earlier to use one of the computers. She had a small child with her in a stroller that she had pulled up next to her and sort of behind her, to her right. The child was whimpering and she turned to it and said, “SHHHHHH!!! You stop that!!” then went back to the computer. The child whimpered some more, and she said, “SHHHHHH!!!” some more. The child whimpered. She turned around and looked at the child and said, “Do you see my face? I am serious. You better quit that or you are gonna get a spanking.” A whimper. “I'm not joking. Look at my face. Do I look like I'm joking?” She did look kind of scary.

The child stopped whimpering and I stopped noticing what was happening with the woman. But the show was not over. A man stood behind another man who was using a computer next to the woman and her child. Allow me to illustrate:

So Indignant Man says to Unmoving Man, “I booked this computer, could you please move?”

Unmoving Man: "It doesn't say you booked this computer."

Indignant Man: “If you try to log in, you'll see that you can't because I booked this computer. Could you please move?”

Unmoving Man: “It doesn't say you booked this computer.”

Indignant Man: “I wouldn't say I booked this computer if I hadn't just booked this computer. You're wasting my minutes. Could you please move?”

Unmoving Man's friend comes over and joins in the chorus: “It doesn't say you booked this computer.”

Indignant Man: “I booked this computer. Now would you please move so I can log on. You're wasting my minutes!”

Unmoving Man doesn't move.

Indignant Man then pushes his way past the stroller so he can reach the keyboard and input his information to log on. That's when the woman stands up.

“Excuse me! Get your ass out of my baby's face!” (Indignant Man was showing some major ass-crackage.)

Indignant Man mutters something about wasting his minutes and continues doing what he's doing. Unmoving Man is starting to move, backing his chair out of the space Indignant Man is now occupying.

The woman says again, “Nobody cares about your stupid minutes! You don't put your ass all up in my baby's face! You say excuse me, you say something to me, you don't just push my baby!”
Unmoving Man is standing now, and Indignant Man is sitting.

The woman says, “I'm serious! You wanna take this outside right now? I'm not from L.A.!” She then says to Unmoving Man, “Would you go and tell a librarian this man is getting his ass all up in my baby's face?” Unmoving Man doesn't move.

The woman sits back down, still muttering about ass in her baby's face, then she gets up and says to Unmoving Man, “Would you watch my computer?” He nods, and she gets up and pushes her baby out of the room.

She comes back with a librarian and says to the librarian, “That's him. He pushed my baby and was rude.”

Indignant Man says, “I was just trying to log into the computer I had booked.”

Unmoving Man and his friend say something about Indignant Man being rude.

The librarian looks around at all of them and sees that they all are on their own computers. She says, “You're all on your own computers now. Just try to stay out of each others' way.”

The woman says, “Okay, thank you.”

The librarian leaves and Indignant Man starts laughing uproariously, like he's just won the battle.

The woman sits back down and says, “If my brother were here, you wouldn't be laughing. He would take care of you.” She mutters something else in Spanish and continues working on her computer.

There was one other thing that happened, where a man was prosthelytizing to some teenagers about the Muslim religion and really pissing me off in his talk about women being made after men and therefore being meant to follow man, but there's wasn't much of a show in that. I told the librarian, and she was going to tell him to keep his conversation down, but he was done by the time we went back.

I'm at the library again now. What else might happen? Stay tuned.

*Since writing this Tuesday night, it seems I've found a job as a medical marijuana promoter! More on that to come.

Brendan's Company Makes a New Film

2010-12-19T00:31:00.000-08:00

Settling into Los Angeles

2010-12-07T16:48:00.000-08:00

Our lives here are slowly getting settled. I (Stina) initially planned to try and find a job, any job, as soon as we had an address here. Then we heard about background acting. We joined Central Casting, a casting company that posts available work for extras on a hotline. If you hear a job that you think you match, you call the number provided until you get through. The casting director pulls up your profile and says yay or neigh based on whether you match the look they need.

There are several good things about this kind of work:

There is downtime, so it is possible to do other things (ie, edit my book)
Overtime pay, and frequent overtime (so we've heard, anyway...I've only gotten a little overtime)
Free food (usually)
It's super-duper easy
Rubbing elbows with stars (or sometimes accidentally knocking one's elbow into a star's face--ask Brendan)

But there's a downside, too. It's not regular work, and it's hard to get the work. When I hear something I think I match, I start calling on it immediately and inevitably get a busy signal. I keep on calling, just hoping to get through. Sometimes I do after half an hour and get booked, sometimes I do after an hour and don't get booked, and sometimes I give up after more than an hour. For Brendan calling the men's line, even the hotline is often busy.

We've been hearing a lot about call-in or calling services (they're called both depending on whom you ask). Call-in services are companies that book you for background work, thus saving you the trouble of calling the hotline and trying to book yourself. They cost anywhere from $60-$75 per month. We think we'll try to go with a call-in service for the month of January, just to see if we're able to get booked regularly.

But it's scary, not having a regular income, so I think I'll also try to find a regular job once we return after the holidays. We've got savings to keep us afloat for a few months, but after that . . . well, we don't want to arrive at a desperate situation.

I've been trying to think of jobs I wouldn't hate but that would also be somewhat easy to get. Working at a grocery store, maybe, so I can easily access what would otherwise be thrown out, and so we could get discounts on some of the more expensive fake-meat products I like. Something having to do with animals. Or maybe something that will allow us free access to something fun, like a museum or the zoo or a theatre.

But enough about that. We've been making some lovely friends here. We've kept in contact with the couchsurfers we stayed with when we first arrived, Ross and Dane, and we met another couchsurfer from Seattle, Sydney. We joined a role-playing group and really like the storyteller and other players. We've been getting to know Randy, another UW drama major, and making films with him. I met another writer, Craig Pitchford, randomly in the library, and we're going to start a writing group in January. Los Angeles is filled with kind people, but I guess that's to be expected. We meet kind people everywhere we go.

I guess that's the lesson I can take away from this post. Even with all the stress of money woes, the people we come into contact with brighten our days and offer solid game-playing and/or creative companionship. I will find a job, but more importantly, I will keep these friends beyond whatever job temporarily keeps us afloat.

Ross is in green in the middle (he was a tree, or maybe broccoli),
Dane is wearing the rainbow wig on the left

Sydney and Randy, at a late late dinner or early early breakfast after midnight Harry Potter

Sydney and me with James Dean

Two White Wines

2010-11-30T13:20:00.001-08:00

Brendan (that's me) has started a new production company with his friend, Randy Vinneau. Where'd they get that name? First hint: There are two of them (us). Can you figure the rest of it out? Let us know in the comments.

Their (our) second film (still in post-production) has what Stina described as, "a Leslie Nielsen sense of humor" (that's a paraphrase of a quote). Mr. Nielsen passed the day after we finished shooting. I hope he would enjoy them.

We give you:
Two White Wines' youtube channel
Go there and subscribe to get notifications whenever we post a new film.

And our first film:

Our First Full Day in L.A.

2010-10-30T18:11:00.000-07:00

Today was AWESOME! Aside from running into a wall about 10 minutes ago, today was ideal. We woke up this morning feeling fine. I had something special on my mind.

That's how it's been going all day. I've had a song in my heart, and a smile on my lips. We set out from our couchsurfers' place and walked to the Ralph's to buy our bus passes for November ($84 each). Then we took the bus to Wilshire center. We missed our stop by one, but the day was beautiful and the walk was pleasant.

Our first apartment was on the north end of Koreatown (hereafter referred to as K-town). It was close to some shops; a grocery store in particular encouraged us. The apartment was the same deal as so many others - run by Statewide Enterprises, $695/month, a $2.96/month admin fee, utilities included, no refrigerator. What's that? Where are we, Germany? No fridge? Indeed, place after place (with a few exceptions, like Germany - thanks, Sven!) had no fridge. No big, though, we can use our Amazon wedding gift cards to get a fridge. The place was (in hindsight) largish, it had a space for a breakfast table, and had a "first two weeks free" special. Also, like every place that follows, it had laundry on the premises: $1.25 wash, $1.00 dry.

Just around the corner, Stina had contacted someone about another place, not Statewide this time. We stood outside the building and called. Then someone let us in. Then we stood outside the manager's apartment and called and knocked. No answer, so we moved on. It will turn out, I am sure, that that apartment had a magic sink that grants wishes.

Proceeding on to the southern part of K-town, we saw another studio. This one had a nice outside entrance and bigger kitchen, but overall it was smaller and had carpet instead of hardwood. It just didn't make us AS happy, so we left quickly.

Heading East now, we checked out a pad WITH a fridge. The kitchen was significantly bigger, and this one was $670 instead of $695, PLUS the laundry was $0.75 and $0.50, so over 24 months, we'd save $700. It was smaller, though.

By this point, we were about an hour ahead of schedule, so we sat and discussed the places we had seen. The 3rd place we saw and the first place were the 2 contenders for the top spot. After figuring out the money and envisioning our lives in each, we walked to lunch. Our next appointment was the immediate neighbor of our last, but we're speedier than we expected and were 1.5 hours early. I mean, we'd been early for the last couple, but there was someone on site; this lady said she could come later. So we walked to lunch and decided that the first place was better than the third, though we were still kinda up in the air and hoping something would jump out at us so we wouldn't have to make that awfully close decision.

We ate at a market/taqueria/pupuseria. I had 2 tacos, and a pupusa. All were delicious. So delicious, they musta had to violate a health code to do it, 'cause I noticed after the meal that, while every other place we had passed had a grade of A posted in their windows from the health department, this place had a C. A delicious C.

We walked back to the apartment. No lady. We called some other numbers we had for Statewide people ('cause her voicemail was full...). Sergio picked up and sent someone over from his office, which was, we later learned, half a block away. Saw the apartment. It was okay. It had a nice big closet that we almost thought we could sleep in. And I noticed a wide windowsill that I'm sure we could grow plants on. Ultimately, it was smaller though, with none of the perks of place number 3, so we proceeded on to apartment number 5.

We walked through MacArthur Park. We started telling ourselves to get used to the idea that this apartment was going to be smaller and worse than all the others, because the area is so nice, if it's the same price, it must be crappier, right? WRONG! Perfect! It even has a second room that we'll use as a studio, and a breakfast nook. No fridge, or really ideal place to put a fridge, but the VIEW! And a fridge can go anywhere, and we don't need a large fridge.

So we called Sergio. He summoned us to his office. We spent an hour relaxing with him, filling out paperwork and chatting. He was super nice, and he gave us a ride back to our couchsurfers' place. He likes the observatory, and came to L.A. when I was 1 year old. He only has a sister or two still in Mexico. Almost all the rest of his family did what he did, and moved to the U.S. - L.A. and Chicago. We know more about him than that, but you'll learn more if we get the apartment and he becomes our property manager. We're crossing our fingers that happens. We have great credit scores, but no income... so...

In all, we walked 5 miles today, and my missing appendix is tired. Oh yeah. And the place where we're staying has a pond. I slipped, almost fell in, didn't fall in, but "oh no! a wall!" I'm fine.

In other news, our CS hosts are awesome. One of them owns a car, but only uses it once a month. They bike everywhere. They're at the end of a 30-day dumpster challenge. They've eaten only dumpstered food for the past 29 days.

We saw couches and mattresses on the roadside. Not as many as in Magdeburg, but plenty. We think we'll use our Zipcar gift from Nikki to wander about the city picking up useful trash to furnish our new apartment.

I can't wait to chop veggies in my own apartment!

We wed

2010-10-12T06:50:00.000-07:00

Hitchhiking talk

2010-09-23T20:07:00.000-07:00

Well, sign us up for the talk show circuit. We spoke at our first public event last week in a workshop titled "Hitchhiking, couchsurfing, and scavenging" (And I would subtitle it - living efficiently in a wasteful civilization) for the Candlelight Collective.
A few minutes after the meeting, I was browsing the bookshelves and came across an anarchist cookbook (not THE anarchist cookbook, apparently there are several). It had a section on hitchhiking. The author said almost word for word what we said. So... go us! Hitchhikers agree: hitchhiking is awesome and very possible.
We spoke on how to prepare for a hitching trip, evaluate the rides you'll get, and get dropped off in a good space. We addressed safety, because everyone's always concerned (though not this group as much as most individuals are... or perhaps we made our case before they could get concerned).
We spoke briefly about scavenging and couchsurfing, but those weren't the focus of our talk, as our audience was already more familiar with those issues than hitchhiking.
The group left the meeting very enthusiastic, and, I think more well prepared than if they hadn't attended the talk, for what that's worth.

Hitchhiking, for us, is about getting from point A to B, adventure, and building a global community.

Preparing:

Know your route. Use a map (or online mapping service like Google maps) and know the names of cities between you and your destination.
Make a schedule. Leisurely travel can take you 300 miles and offers time enough for unforeseen adventures, and 12 hour days can get you 600+ miles if you get long semi-truck rides and don't accept off-route adventures.
Pack as lightly as possible, but be ready for inclement weather. If you go on any major trips, you'll probably spend nights on the road and get stuck in rain or snow. Don't forget food and water! Bonus: A big backpack makes you appear more trustworthy to some rides.

Picking your spot:

For long distances using a thumb or sign, find an interstate onramp close to a gas station.
Try approaching people at the gas station. Even if everyone says no and you move on to the onramp, sometimes the impression that you gave them there will take a little time to marinate and they'll pick you up at the onramp.
People are friendly and helpful. Use your own judgment, but you can ask for advice from the truck stop employees or patrons.
Find a spot with high visibility of cars approaching you for a long distance (500+ meters/yards) and room for them to pull over.
Stay on the legal side of no hitchhiking signs.
Rides will leave you in bad places. Do your best to avoid it, but if it happens, you may need to trudge to a better spot. Smile anyways. Always thank your ride. You are a hitchhiking ambassador.

Signs:

Who knows?
No, seriously, sometimes signs are good, sometimes they seem like hindrances. Rides read them and think "I'm not going THERE" and don't stop. Sometimes they don't stop anyways. Who knows what the rides who don't stop are thinking. It's all a guessing game.
We heard making a sign with many place names helps. Drivers see one name and block out the rest and stop because they are going to that one place. Or so we heard from another Hhiker.

Getting someone to stop:

Smile.
Look like someone you think people you want to get a ride from would stop for. For us, that means (relatively) frequent showers, clean (ish) jeans, and plain t-shirts or sweatshirts. For others that might mean a suit and tie, military garb, or Anarchy patchwork. I think our garb is relatively innocuous and gets us a wide range of rides.
It's POSSIBLE that traveling in pairs leads to more consistent rides, but who has done a study on this? Not many research dollars funneled towards hitchhiking studies.
If you have a weapon (or weapon-like utensil like a knife) displayed, people may not feel comfortable stopping for you.
Smile. Or not. Who knows if it really works? But it makes you feel good. Make eye contact with drivers passing you, too.
Keep your cool. If you get frustrated, pray to the hitchhiking gods. Getting angry at passing cars will only hurt your chances of getting a ride, and might draw the attention of the cops.

Deciding whether to take the ride:

Look for signs of drugs or alcohol, and don't get in the car if you see or smell them. Just say "no thanks". Walk away if you have to (grab your bag as you go).
Check for seatbelts. There HAVE been studies done on the importance of seatbelts. Wear one.
Ask where they're going. If you don't know it, take a sec to check a map, or ask if there's another onramp near a truck stop along your route (usually the interstate) before they turn off it.
Trust your instincts. They might be wrong, but if you're nervous about hitchhiking anyways, always remind yourself that you have the power to turn down a ride. If your partner feels uncomfortable, listen to them. You're there for each other, so let your partner's feelings sway you.

Once you have the ride:

Tolerance. You'll have a lot more fun if you give up your responsibility while in the car to promote your point of view. You don't have to agree, just observe. This is one of the best places to get to know a whole 'nother world that you might otherwise never encounter.
Listen. It's conversation 101, but it bears repeating - to be a good conversationalist, ask a person questions about themselves and then just let them go.
If you get uncomfortable, ask them to stop and let you out. Keep your eyes open, and your wits about you. I have no advice for people in a bank during a robbery, but whatever that is, do that. Stay calm, probably. If you don't avoid going into banks because there might be a robbery, don't avoid hitchhiking because you might meet a crazy, but be as prepared.
If someone offers you something, it's up to you. We often accept a can of soda or a candy bar (sometimes a meal or a place to sleep, too) if they're offering, but turn down money or inedible gifts, because we don't want to seem like we're panhandling. Food and accommodations seem like hospitality, other stuff seems like charity, which we don't need and should go to someone more deserving. Maybe you! =)
Be POLITE! Always thank your ride. Even if it was the worst ride ever, thank them profusely. A stranger is trying to do you a kindness; thank them. Be nice.

And finally,

Be flexible. It's an adventure! Balance your journey between getting to your destination in your predetermined fashion, and finding a new route because person A IS going West, but first they're going to a hot springs. That's where the awesome is.

Hitchhike today for a better world tomorrow!

Resources:
digihitch.com
hitchwiki.org
couchsurfing.org - group: hitchhikers

Final Day-Seattle to West Bend

2010-09-21T20:30:00.001-07:00

I left you all sitting on the edge of your seats--"Surprise thunderstorm?" you asked. "Did they make it out alive?" you further questioned, then reminded yourself, with relief, that they must have, because they are writing this.

It was just a gentle rainfall when it woke us up. We started to pull out the tarp to throw over the tent, then checked the watch and saw it was 6:15am, only fifteen minutes until we planned to wake up, anyway, so we just decided to pack up. We hurried as much as we could, but the rain just kept falling harder and harder and the lightning and thunder came closer and closer together. We had nearly everything put together when it really started to dump and we made a run for it. The parking lot was already covered in a light layer of water, so what the rain didn't wet, the splashes did.

We got as far as the pumps and stopped to catch our breath and put our stuff together the rest of the way. Then we went inside and I changed into my only other dry leg coverings, my shorts. Last time we took a big hitchhiking trip, my second pair of pants were nondescript black sweat-type pants. They were comfortable to sleep in, but also fine for day wear. It was good having them for times like this, when my jeans got drenched. However, on this trip my second pair of pants were just pajama bottoms, not something I feel comfortable hitchhiking in. Lesson learned for the next big trip.

We ate breakfast at the truck-stop diner (have I ever told you all how much I love diners?), then headed out to start asking truckers for rides. None of the truckers filling up could give us rides, and we started to head out to the freeway entrance. We noted a Jefferson line bus filling up, and decided not to ask the driver. As we walked past him, though, he said "Where ya headed?" and when we said east, Milwaukee, he said he was going to Minneapolis. That sounded like it was in the right direction, so we accepted the ride. But as we drove off with him, he told us he would get to Minneapolis at 4pm because he was making stops along the way to pick up and drop off paying passengers. Also, we looked at a map and realized Minneapolis wasn't right on the I-90 route, so ultimately it seemed like it would cost us time. We told the driver our concerns and asked if he could let us out. He said it was no problem and pointed which direction we needed to go to get back to the freeway entrance.

We were really kicking ourselves at this point. We should have taken the minute to figure that stuff out while we were still at the truck stop, in a good position to get a different ride. As it was, we had to walk all the way back to the truck stop, costing us about 45 minutes. We chalked it up to our exercise for the day, though, and picked a couple pretty flowers along the way.

When we got back we asked around again, then headed out to the freeway entrance. By this time it was nearly 10am. We got a ride just a few minutes later from a kindly older gentleman. He dropped us off at 10:52am near Worthington, MN. At 11:11am (chicken feet!), John picked us up. John is a heavy equipment operator who has been working on windmills for the past six years. He travels all around MN for his work and was on his way home for the weekend. He'd gotten off early that day because the thunderstorms prevented work on the windmills. Speaking of thunderstorms, the one that woke us up in the morning was moving east, but thankfully the frequency with which we got rides kept us ahead of it the rest of the day.

John dropped us off at 12:20pm near Blue Earth, MN. We walked over to a nearby gas station to use the restroom. Earlier, just before the kindly older gentleman picked us up, we noticed a couple of recreational trailers pass us by. Then, just before John picked us up, we saw the very same two trailers get back on the freeway. Now, as we were headed to the gas station, we saw them a third time! They were also using the restrooms, and they noted that we were keeping right up with them. We tried to use the conversation opportunity to show them we are good people and that they should give us a ride east, but they declined. Too bad, because they were going all the way to Chicago.

No matter. At 12:42pm we got a ride with Abdi Gani. He was a nice guy, but inclined to try and convert us to Islam. It was interesting how similar his attempts were to Christian conversion attempts. He asked us to look at the sky, the heavens, look at our own miraculous bodies--how can we not believe in a creator when we see such evidence? It's a weak argument, and when we continued to tell him that that doesn't make us believe in God, he gave us the names of some great Muslim debaters we should check out on Youtube.

Abdi Gani dropped us off at 1:10pm by the turnoff for Albert Lea, and at 1:15pm we got a short ride from Brad. Brad wasn't going far, just to the junction of 35, where he would head south to visit his mother. He wondered if he should have dropped us off at one exit he had already passed, because then he was at his exit and it wasn't really an off and on-again spot. It was really two highways meeting each other, and the spot where we ended up standing to get our next ride was kind of scary. It was a lane to get from 35 to 90, but cars were going fast and it wasn't really an exit, so it was probably illegal for us to stand there. Thankfully, we got a ride pretty quickly.

At 1:35pm Ginny and her college-age daughter, Mandy, picked us up. They were going all the way to Wisconsin and could drop us off near Tomah. They were headed to a wedding and we joked that it was really our wedding they were coming for. Ginny did say that we reminded her of her niece and soon-to-be nephew in-law who were getting married. We talked with Ginny and Mandy about politics and agreed that capitalism is not working. Ginny told us how she writes a lot of letter to her local representatives about how important it is to focus on environmental problems and that they always kind of blow off her concerns. She thinks they're worried about losing their monetary support from big businesses, but this infuriates her because (I'm paraphrasing) the economy is meaningless in the face of a dying planet.

They dropped us off at 3:51pm along I-94 and we crossed over from the west entrance to the east one. A few people stopped who were going to get onto I-90 west, but then Curtis stopped at 4:28pm and was headed towards Madison. Curtis was a super-nice and interesting guy. He's from Alaska, but lives in Madison now with his wife and six kids because he and his wife are both getting graduate degrees there. He is studying Psychology to become a counselor and wants to open his own counseling office someday. I felt really inspired by him. He was, by his own admission, not a great student. He wanted to quit high school and get right to working, and had only recently finished his undergrad degree. But he had the guts to apply to graduate school and he got in and now he's doing it, while raising six kids. I think that's amazing.

He dropped us off at 5:30pm where 94 meets 33, and at this point we got off the freeway so we could follow a more direct route to Brendan's parents' place. Our hope was to get all the way to their door. At 5:40pm we got a ride with a ranger from Devil Lake who took us to Portage. He dropped us off at 5:50pm and we got a ride immediately with Crystal, Dotty, and Princess Sasha Fuzzybutt (the latter is a dog). Crystal and Dotty are Wiccans who were preparing for the 13th Annual Pagan Pride Days in Madison. They were really nice and Dotty offered us each a bottle of Mountain Dew Code Red as a wedding present.

Crystal and Dotty dropped us off at 6:20pm by the intersection for 73, and at 6:30pm we had a ride with Christina and her four adorable children, who were on their way back from a day at Wisconsin Dells. She dropped us off at 6:37pm in Fox Lake, and at 6:52pm we got a ride from a teenage boy named Donovan, who took us to a Kwik Trip gas station in Beaver Dam. By this time it was starting to get dark, and we were pretty tired, so we called Brendan's parents and asked them to pick us up there (about a 45 mile drive from their house). We bought a bag of sale donuts and sat down to eat and wait and they picked us up there at about 8:30pm. Turns out there are a couple of Kwik Trips in Beaver Dam, so it took them a little longer to get to us, but it gave them a chance to buy their own bag of sale donuts.

4 days, 3 nights, 17 rides (counting my sister and Brendan's parents, and not counting the bus driver), 1973 miles. This trip, like all our others, has reminded me how wonderful and generous people are. I think everyone should hitchhike, just to be reminded of that, or perhaps to experience it for the first time.

Day 3 - Seattle to West Bend

2010-09-16T20:28:00.000-07:00

Our completely out in the open stealth camping at a campsite worked out problem-free. Brendan even got to take a shower because the men's restroom was unlocked. I used the restroom, but couldn't bring myself to strip and shower in case someone walked in. I settled for washing the top of my head in the sink.

We got up the next morning at 5:32am, much to my dismay and protests. Once I stood up, though, I felt a little more awake and ready to deal with the early-morning world. Plus, we wanted to get out of there before anyone woke up. We succeeded. We used the restrooms in the truck stop, then asked around to see if we could get a nice long ride with a trucker again. No go, so we made our way out to the I-90 east entrance and were standing there by 6:35am.

At 6:41am we got a ride with a nice guy named Dusty. He wasn't going far, but he could take us to the truck stop on the other side of Billings. Dusty was our age and was very interested in traveling. He got the bug when he was 18 years old and won a trip to Australia from a Powerade bottle. Now he is married and has a 17 month old son, so he thinks it will be more difficult. We told him about couchsurfing and about our friends who braved the seas to live in Germany with their two-year old daughter (okay, so they flew across the ocean). He seemed pretty interested, so I hope he follows through on traveling more.

It was about 7am when he dropped us off at the truck stop. We went into a McDonald's there so I could get a cup of coffee and while I was paying for it, Brendan was being offered a pair of nice hiking boots from a trucker. The tape on Brendan's shoes attracts a lot of attention. Brendan assured the trucker that he was happy with the shoes he had, and that he had more shoes at home.

There's a shoe under all that tape

We asked several truckers for a ride, but they were either going the wrong direction, or said they couldn't take us because of company policy. So, again, we made our way out to the I-90 east entrance and were standing there by 7:27am. The spot we were at seemed to be well-frequented by hitchhikers, and here's how we know:

It says "Husband + pregnant wife" in the corner

We borrowed this sign for a short while, then decided it was repetitious since we were standing at an I-90 east entrance

Can you spot "www.andjuggling.com"?

At 8am, a big rig stopped for us. Success! Our ride was with Roy and Jeff and Asia. Roy and Jeff were the truckers, Asia was the adorable rottweiler puppy. Roy and Jeff were hauling vehicles and were going all the way to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, before heading south. That's 717 miles! And they were willing to share their already crowded cab for that entire distance. This made an amazing third day for us. We enjoyed our ride with them. They were both nice guys and the only trouble was my voice got tired from talking over the noise of the truck. Jeff and his family are interested in moving to Seattle one day, so we told him to keep in touch so we can introduce him and his family to all our friends there.

Our long-distance Thursday ride

They dropped us off at a Love's truck stop around 10pm that night. Jeff told us there was a big field just on the other side of where a bunch of trucks were parked, so we headed over there after a halfhearted effort to get a nighttime ride. The field was great. There was lots of tall grass at the edge of it, plus all the big rigs parked up next to the edge of it, so we felt well-secluded. It was even pretty peaceful sounding with cicadas all around us, once we got used to the squealing and screeching pig noises coming from a nearby trailer. That is, it was great until the surprise thunderstorm the next morning, but that's another day and another blog post, my friends. Do come back.

P.S. I almost forgot to show you these pictures from the Love's. We considered asking for rides here because someone probably would have offered us one...but we didn't want to disturb.

He's got all the big rigs, in his hands

Day 2 - Seattle to West Bend

2010-09-14T18:45:00.001-07:00

So it's 4AM and we're back at the free way entrance. Middle of the night, a couple cars every 15 minutes. There are 2 eastbound i-90 freeway entrances. One for people coming from the truck stop, one for people coming from other parts of Spokane. We chose a spot on the median between the two. Around 4:30, a cop pulls up and tells us to move to the sidewalk. So we did.
Around 5:15AM the clouds caught the first edge of sunlight, and by 5:45AM it was light enough to read by.
At 6:35AM we caught a ride with Frank about 30 miles to Post Falls, ID. He let us off at a rest stop where we freshened up and then started in earnest around 7:33AM. We asked a few truckers and moved on to the rest stop exit.
At 10:18 we got a ride from Steve. He's trucking with his Silkie Terrier, Shadow, to Billing, MT, a good 500 miles away.

Steve had some crazy stories to share. He's been a thousand different places and worked a dozen different jobs. Everything from Vietnam Sniper to Cowboy to Animal Rescue, Firefighter, Horse Trainer, etc, etc...

He let us out just before Billings, and we spent the night at the campgrounds near the truck stop. A sheriff stopped to talk to us, and suggested that we sneak into the campgrounds and leave before anybody else woke up.... silly law enforcers. So we did.

And that was day 2.

Wedding Note, and Our Latest Hitchhiking Trip, Part I

2010-09-13T20:55:00.000-07:00

See the kittens, hiding on my lap?

We are in Wisconsin now, at Brendan's parents' farm (there are kittens here!), and the day is drawing near. Soon this place will be decked out in who-knows-what (ribbon? pumpkins? fall leaves? your smiling faces?) and we will be gettin' hitched. And as we are preparing for the day, we've been talking more about what we want it to be like. So there's this thing we just decided, that you should know. Instead of simply having toasts at our reception and putting just a few people on-the-spot, we'd like to turn the traditional toasting time into an open mic session. If you want to toast, great, but you could also sing a song, play an instrument, read a poem, read something else, perform a comedy routine, whatever you like! It will be your chance to offer us a little gift of yourself, expressed however you like. It won't be mandatory, but please consider sharing something.

Now, to tell the story, or rather, many stories, of our latest hitchhiking journey. As many of you know, we were most recently in Everett and Seattle, catching up with family and friends there. But we needed to get back to Wisconsin to prepare for the wedding. In the past, we've taken the bus or the train to get to Wisconsin (we've never flown there, though, which I find kind of funny), but this time we wanted to save money, and we wanted to flex our hitchhiking muscles. So we thumbed it.

Our first ride of the day on Tuesday, September 7, was from my sister Amelie. She had the day off and offered to get us started, and we accepted. She took us to Vantage, WA, we ate lunch together, then she dropped us off at the I-90 east on ramp. It was pretty dead, so were worried we would get stuck there, but within just a few minutes a woman who was just coming off the freeway asked where we were headed. We said east and she said she could take us as far as Moses Lake. We said that would be great, then she asked if we could chip in some gas money. That kind of put us off. We hesitated, but then said yeah, we had just a couple bucks. We were worried about the spot, remember. She said okay, she was going to fill up and then be back to pick us up. As soon as she left we talked about how it made us uncomfortable that she'd asked us for money and that we'd agreed to pay her. It's not hitchhiking if money is involved, it's ridesharing. But still, it was only two bucks, and it would get us out of the bad spot. But it must not have been such a bad spot, because before she even came back, we had another ride, and this one was going all the way to Spokane.

Russ was a nice guy who told us all about his travels in Europe and in the US. He went on a trip east once and started out by bus in Montana. When he left it was 30 degrees, and when he arrived somewhere in North Dakota, it was 30 below, and this was where he started hitchhiking. He said he could see ice in the air, and at one point he slipped and fell back into a covey of quails. He thought he just kept on falling, then realized it was just that all the birds were flying up around him. He didn't say how long it took him to get a ride, but it must have been pretty quick because, well, he obviously didn't freeze to death. He dropped us off at a Flying J, where we were greeted by this:

Aww, thanks for the welcome!

We decided to ask the employees, anyway. Just because they have a sign like that doesn't mean the people on duty care much about it, right? So we approached the two guys behind the counter and said, "Excuse me, but we saw the sign about hitchhiking outside, and were wondering, is that very strictly enforced?" We try to be polite. And they politely said yes, we would have to step foot off the gas station grounds before we stuck out our thumbs. Well, it was dark by this time anyway, so we asked them if they knew of any place around where we might be able to set up our tent for the night. One of them said he thought there was kind of a field near some warehouses further up the road, so we headed that way.

We didn't find anything much, though, at least nothing that was free of big chain-link fences, so we kept walking. We came to a little residential area, and turned down a street with some homes. At one house that had a nice big front yard with plenty of room for our little bitty tent, we saw the home-dweller walking from his backyard to his driveway. We said to each other, "It doesn't hurt to ask" and approached him. We greeted him and he responded "Hello, WHAT?" as in, what do you want? So we asked if we could set up our tent in his yard. He responded "No frickin' way," but upon noting that we did not seem drug-crazed, he recommended we set up tent in the nearby schoolyard. If the police came, he reasoned, we had nothing to hide.

We followed his advice, even though this was a much more open spot than we normally feel comfortable with when we're trying to stealth-camp. It seemed to be the best we could find, though, so we just tried to find the most hidden spot possible, and we set our alarm for 5:30am so we could get out of there before anyone showed up for school the next day. But who needs an alarm when there's a built-in wake-up call right there in the field? Around 2:45am I woke up and thought I heard falling water, but then convinced myself it was wind. Wind that seemed to come and go in a regular pattern, but hey, how awake are you at 2:45am? I went back to sleep. About 3:15am, the "wind" had started up right by our tent, and was actually sprinklers. They rotated, at least, so we had some dry moments to get out of the tent and pull it to a dry spot. But that was it for sleep for the night, so we packed everything up and headed back to the freeway. That is the end of Installment I, folks. Installment II comes tomorrow.

Wedding Housing, Cont'd, and Update

2010-08-27T11:08:00.000-07:00

Hello friends and family and comers-by! We have a lot of catching up to do. At the moment, Brendan and I are staying with my parents in Everett, WA, just north of Seattle. We moved out of our apartment in Germany, gave away most of what we had acquired over a year of living there, then flew back to the United States; more specifically, to Boston. We stayed there three nights with Couchsurfers and saw the famous Boston sites (you know, Harvard, almost everything along the Freedom Trail, etc.).

We then traveled by bus to Wisconsin and stayed with Brendan's parents for several days. Our good friends Anja and Tini, from Germany, just happened to be taking an American tour around the same time that we needed to get from Wisconsin to Washington, and they kindly picked us up on their way. We journeyed with them to Yellowstone National Park and camped for a few days on the way. It was awesome.

And ever since they dropped us off in the greater Seattle area, catching up is exactly what we've been doing. Between visiting with my parents and siblings, in-laws, nieces, nephews, friends, former colleagues, and wedding party members, it has been a whirlwind of two weeks. And in the midst of it, we are still doing wedding-planning. My sister will be refitting my grandmother's wedding dress to my measurements, AND she will be making a special reception dress for me, AND a vest for Brendan. We are still getting estimates for porta-potties, and receiving RSVPs, and planning the reception menu. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you say. Get to the point, Stina--where am I going to stay?

There are several options available to you. In order of price, here we go:

Free: Camping at Brendan's parents' farm, which is also the site of the wedding. Bonuses: it's free and it's on site, so you likely wouldn't need to rent a car. Downside is it might get pretty chilly at night, so you'd need to be prepared for that. Also, one shower for however many people decide to camp and are staying in the house, so bathroom time might be limited. And you can consider this a bonus or a downside--we'd want your help with wedding prep work.

Also free: Couchsurfing. I just searched West Bend and the surrounding 20 miles, and it yielded 16 Couchsurfers (not including Brendan's parents). Bonuses: Couchsurfing rocks! It's free and mind-opening and you can make friends with your hosts. Downside? You'd likely need a car to get to and from the wedding.

$30-$60 per night: Wellspring Retreat and Conference Center, which is also a B&B and hostel. This place looks awesome! You can stay in a dorm room with other people (read: other wedding guests! Coordinate travel plans!) for $30, or have a private room for $50-$60. Plus, let me quote Peg, Brendan's mom: "And it is only 7 minutes away travel time so we would be willing to pick your friends up there and take them back if they don't have a car." That sounds like an offer you can't refuse.

$50 and up: Hotels in the surrounding area. My parents are staying at the Bonne Bell Motel, which is cute and on the closer to $50 a night side, but last I heard they were fully booked for the weekend of our wedding. Might be worth checking to see if they've had any cancellations, though. I googled hotels near 53021 and came up with a lot of options. Upside: private room, don't have to share a shower, yada yada. Downside: it's the most expensive option and you'd need a car to get to and from the wedding.

We are so excited to see you at our wedding. If you have any questions, just call us or email us and we'll help out in whatever way we can. Leave a comment here with your email address if you want to request our phone number. See you soon!

Wedding Housing Options

2010-07-10T16:29:00.001-07:00

Information to come. Email us if you have any urgent questions.

Spain and Portugal - Across the Peninsula in One Day

2010-06-14T15:51:00.000-07:00

To Frankfurt and Valencia

2010-06-04T01:42:00.000-07:00

This is not one of the promised blog posts to come.

Our plan had been to leave Magdeburg on Wednesday, May 26th to hitchhike to Frankfurt. We stayed Tuesday night so that Stina could go to choir practice. She's awesome at singing, by the way. ;)

But Wednesday rolled around and Stina wasn't feeling well. So we hopped on the ol' interwebs to find out what our options were. We decided we could take a Sachsen-Anhalt/Thuringen ticket (28€ for up to 5 people) to Gerstungen and then a Hessen ticket (31€ for up to 5 people) to the Hahn airport about 120 km from Frankfurt (Ryanair's hub). In theory, we'd then use mifahrgelegenheit.de to find 3 other travelers, and we'd wind up paying 12€ per person. Not bad, considering that the bus from Frankfurt to Hahn is 12€ per person alone. We'd spend the night in either the airport or the forest outside the airport. We weren't positive this would work. We couldn't be sure we'd find anyone to share the price of the tickets, but that was the least of our worries. The real problem was that, while there's information on the Hessenticket online, it doesn't show up when we use the train route planner. Also, the bus to the airport (which is the only way to get there) seemed like it might be another one of Ryanair's schemes to make money (I'm not saying it is, just that I couldn't tell if it was part of the national transportation network or a more private company that wouldn't recognize the Hessenticket).

Anyways, the whole point is moot. We found someone else's Mitfahrgelegenheit. It cost more than the ideal circumstance of our travel, but less than the probable outcome. So we left Thursday morning with this fellow, and arrived early Thursday afternoon in Frankfurt. It was still several hours until Angelika got off work (our CS host), so we ate some carrot-lentil mush, and found a park to read in. We met up with Angelika no problem. Made some dinner, went out for tea, and slept. The next morning we took this kinda expensive bus to Hahn, hung around for our flight (during which time I saw more Americans than I've seen in the past 9 months, including one reading a Magic novel), and flew to Valencia.

Here the airport is in the city. So we simply took the subway (1€ for a rechargeable card, 1,90€ per person for an AB ticket) to Christiane's flat. Since getting here, we have:

grown to hate my flip-flops

spent a total of about 10 hours on the beach so far

eaten many plates of tapas

gotten ice cream at regular intervals

gotten lost and seen a rat *this big*

visited a museum celebrating the 32nd America's Cup (which I now know is a sailing race)

stabbed my ring finger with an orange tree branch

seen the purplest flowers and agéd tiled buildings

learned "una carafa clara, por favor"

relaxed with Buffy and Smallville

buried me in the sand

and hung out on a balcony looking over the rooftops of the city.

Stina has managed most days to write her 2000 words. We've started doing sit-ups on the beach. And we never get out of bed before 11AM.

Tomorrow we start hitchhiking to Faro, Portugal. Press your thumbs for us!

Hello, May

2010-05-15T04:06:00.001-07:00

I promised my sister-in-law a blog post by Friday.

I almost kept it. If you are up very, very late on Friday night in Washington state, you might read this before you consider it Saturday, even though it technically is Saturday.

Sorry, Naomi. Better late than not at all, though, right?

Also, sorry April. Even when we are lax in the blogging department, we usually manage one a month. So what happened during April that kept us away from our blog?

At the end of March, just after back-to-back visits from my sister, Amelie, and Brendan's dad, Wes, we hosted some couchsurfers for two nights. When they left, we just breathed. It was delightful and busy and socially and mentally engaging and just . . . like home, having Amelie and Wes come to visit. I wished Amelie could have stayed just a little bit longer, because the weather got warm the day, the very day, she left. Ergh.

Here's a post to come: Visit with Amelie, and pictures.

Another: Visit with Wes, and pictures.

And then we took a trip. We hitchhiked to Kampen, the Netherlands and visited our friend Anna, whom Brendan met at university. We stayed with her four nights, then hitchhiked Düsseldorf, to visit our couchsurfing friends Anja and Tini. We stayed with them two nights, then took a Schöneswochenende ticket back to Magdeburg. That's another post to come, in which we detail some of the happy happenings and dumb decisions that come along with hitchhiking.

We got home and breathed some more.

I've dedicated myself to writing. For long years I've considered myself a writer, but I haven't produced much. Well, that's just silly. So now I'm writing every day. I'm currently following Stephen King's advice in On Writing and meeting a word count every day. I started with 1000 words, what he recommends for the beginning writer, upped it two weeks later to 1500 words, and starting tomorrow won't stop writing until I've hit 2000. That's what Stephen King says is his target limit for each day. So, wow! I'll be writing as much as Stephen King!

Brendan discovered a new love while we were in Kampen: animating. Here are the videos he made in two days of working in Anna's studio:

We're working on getting the materials and space he needs to continue animating here in Magdeburg.

Thanks for reading, family and friends, and thanks for the bugs to write more. It lets us know you are reading. Promised posts soon to come. Promise.

With Special Guest Star, Wes WEINHOLD!!!

2010-03-27T18:05:00.000-07:00

Solo Stina

2010-03-12T02:46:00.000-08:00

My desire to see my sister as soon as possible when she arrived at Tegel airport in Berlin did not outweigh my budget concerns about spending 25 euros each way to get there and back. It did, however, outweigh any apprehension I felt about hitchhiking alone. I knew the apprehension was illogical, anyway, based on all the conversations we've had with solo female hitchhikers, yet it was still there. The best way to get over it was just to do it, hitchhike alone, and yesterday I had a really good reason to try. I figured if I could get to Tegel for free, it wouldn't be so bad to spend 25 euros on the return trip since it meant I got to spend that much more time with Amelie.

I set out from home around 7:45am and took the #5 tram to Opernhaus, then the #9 tram to a stop at the north end of town, Krähenstieg. I was trying to get to an Aral gas station where Brendan and I had once tried to hitchhike to Hannover. We gave up that time after waiting for two hours and being offered several rides to Berlin but none to Hannover. I figured this was the perfect spot to hitch at yesterday since Berlin was exactly where I was trying to go.

The only trouble was finding the gas station. I took a wrong turn and wasted about 20 minutes wandering up and down the wrong street before I found the right one. By 8:45am, though, I'd made it to my spot, sporting a thumb on one hand and this nifty sign in the other:

As soon as I was standing there in that familiar position any remaining anxiety disappeared. Cars passed me by and the people in them looked just as friendly and safe as they do when I'm hitchhiking with Brendan. Ten minutes later I had a ride with an on-the-younger-side-of-middle-aged man. He said he needed to make one short stop on the way, but after that he was going into Berlin.

We talked only in German and I was really proud of myself for what I was able to communicate to him and what I understood. He told me he had a twenty year old son and that he would like to travel to the US with him, but he wanted to improve his English first. I offered to speak English with him so he could practice, but he said "Überlegen und fahren geht nicht," which means "Thinking and driving don't mix."

I asked him at one point which city in Germany he thought was the most beautiful and had a little embarrassing moment where I didn't understand his response.
"Essen?" I asked.
"Nein, __________." (I still didn't understand.)
"Ezden?"
"Dresden."
"Oh, Dresden!"
Then we talked a little about Dresden.

He dropped me off at an U-Bahn station in Berlin around 10:30am. I didn't know to get from there to the airport, so I approached a young man and asked him, in German, what to do. He gave me clear instructions, I got a ticket, and hopped on the next subway.

The subway ride was long. So long, I worried I might miss Amelie's 11:10am arrival. I had to switch from the subway to a bus and by that time it was already 11:10am, so when I got to airport it was 11:25am. Thankfully her flight was a little late and had just landed at 11:19am. I asked at Information where I could find her, and got to the spot where everyone was waiting just five minutes before she came through the doors.

Together we navigated the bus to the train station and the train back to Magdeburg and now have an exciting week of visiting and sightseeing ahead of us.

Visiting a Castle and Friends!

2010-03-06T10:13:00.000-08:00

Teaching German Kids

2010-03-02T09:05:00.000-08:00

I should have been keeping a blog of these experiences all along, but it just occurred to me now.

Today I heard something I've never heard before in English or in German. I've heard "So-and-so pushed me" or "So-and-so cut in line", and even what I thought was "So-and-so stepped on me", which I just learned actually means "So-and-so kicked me", but today was the first day that I heard "So-and-so bit me on the butt".

The Promised "How We Afford It" blog

2010-02-26T03:42:00.001-08:00

It's true, we're cutting it closer than we wanted. We'd hoped that by working our jobs all through our time in Europe, we'd return home with more than $20,000 of cushion, and a little more to have some fun with. We didn't really think that through. We thought we could travel and work, but it just doesn't work. Work schedules don't necessarily adapt to fit one's preferred time table, and even if they did, there just aren't enough hours in the day to do all that we want to do, and especially not with commuting, work, and all the in-between time that working requires. So we decided, with all respect and appreciation to our jobs for the opportunities and the money, we needed to quit. Stina went over this last blog, but now I'll walk you through our decision that we could, in fact, afford it.

One of the reasons we no longer find it worthwhile to work is that we just aren't earning what we were. The dollar has grown stronger in the past few months. Nearly 30% of my wages are taken out for the German equivalent of Social Security, unemploment insurance, and other things that don't quite translate. Stina discovered that she can't take many days off if she wants to make the 2€/hour bonus that her employer offers if she works at least 120 units per month.
All of this means that, on average, we've been putting 2500€ (*1.35 = $3375) into our bank account for the past 3 months before expenses, rather than the expected 3200€ (*1.5 = $4800) per month. No matter what we make, our expenses remain rather constant, and as bare bones as possible. Each month we pay about $300 for student loans. We pay 375€ for rent, water, heat, electricity, internet, and other utilities. We pay 68.50€ for our tram passes. We pay 52€ for Stina's health insurance. We pay about 200€ for food (totally a guess). And we spend maybe 100€ on luxuries each month, like going out to eat, buying games, etc. (also a guess, but pretty accurate, I'd say). All together, that's about 1000€ a month.

So, now you know. When we finish our work, we will have about $15000 worth of currency in the bank, and will live on that for the next several months. We'll reduce our food costs by dumpster diving more. We considered giving up our apartment, but having a place to come back to is necessary to our happiness. And we'll probably stop buying tram passes. We won't really increase any costs, since we'll be hitchhiking and couchsurfing. We're a little worried about the cost of airplane tickets, so if anyone sees a mode of transportation from Europe to America for less than $500 per person, let us know. At $1000 per month while here, $1000 for plane tickets home, and $1000 while we visit family in Seattle and Wisconsin, I expect that after our wedding, we will have $5000 (that's a wedding budget of $3000) left. That's a bit scary, but we're good at living cheaply, and so while we make our new homes in L.A., I expect that we'll easily find our feet before we run out of money.

Wish us luck!
Brendan and Stina

Below, find our projected budget until our wedding. Numbers rounded for safety. No sharp corners!

Brendan Verity: $5000
Stina Verity: $1000
BECU Accts $2000
Total in American Accts: $8000
Deutsche Bank Konto: 6000 €
Brendan Earn March: 300 €
Stina Earn March: 300 €
Total Euros: 6600 € Converted to Dollars: $8910
Total of all currencies: $16910
Itemized costs (in Euros)
Rent (Warm) 1200€
Internet 160€ (hopefully)
Student Loans 1800€
Electricity 175€
Food 1000€
Travel 1950€ (Includes ticket home)
Wedding Budget 2220€
Totals by month (in $)
March: 797
April: 1122
May: 1122
June: 918
July: 918
August: 1768
September: 1088
October: 408
November: 3427
Total Expenses: $11567
Money after wedding: $5342

Getting back to the spirit of this trip

2010-02-10T07:36:00.000-08:00

"We are a couple of newly free wanderers...." This is the start of our little bio on this here blog, but I feel like we lost our freedom when we decided to get jobs in order to live here in Germany. Maybe we lost it way back when I gave up on busking. So what if I'm not very good at juggling and our routine doesn't make us any money? At least Brendan and I were doing something fun together all day. Okay, well, to be more honest, I didn't always find the busking fun. But it was a big part of the spirit of this trip, and I want to get back to that. I don't know if that means trying to reincorporate busking, but I want to take the time to figure it out.

Brendan and I gave notice at our jobs and March 10th is our official last day, though I will continue teaching one class through the end of March. We are going to get back to the spirit of this trip.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not sorry we did this. We've met so many amazing people here, and many of them through our jobs. But I'm also not sorry to say goodbye my job here. It doesn't mean we'll be saying goodbye to all the people we've met, it just means we can spend even more time with them and be the happier for it.

I feel like a fog is lifting around me. Oh, there is so much more I could say but will wait to say, having already nearly lost my job once for words posted on this blog.

As I bid my job farewell, I thank it for the people I've met, both teachers and students, and for my improved knowledge of English grammar. I also thank it for showing me this is not what I want to be doing in my life and that it is more important for me to pursue my dreams than to make a buck.

Next post: a money one where we show you how we are affording to quit our jobs.

A family of five

2010-01-24T03:21:00.000-08:00

On Thursday, Stina and I bought the Quer-Durchs-Land ticket (39€ for 2 people), and took a 6 hour, 3 train trip to Frankfurt (am Main) to meet our friends Lena, Adam, and their 1 1/2 year old daughter Ilya. We had hoped to get their early enough to meet them at the airport, but there were no reasonable options for that, so we got there at 6 PM, and found them moments later across the street at their hotel. After a quiet evening including some Chinese food, hugs, and this (see the video halfway down), we all bedded down for a few solid hours of sleep.
The next day started pretty early. We went out to see the city as soon as it was light enough to see what was there to be seen. We walked along the Main for a bit, and then saw some ruins from the 1st century C.E. From there, we wandered to the main square, Römerberg, and found some breakfast. Walking around after breakfast, we happened upon a street market, and about halfway through it, were accosted by a man asking "Thema der Woche?" into his ZDF mic. I told him the theme of the week was Americans in France, er Frankfurt, because WE were Americans in Frankfurt. He wondered if I cared at all about German's deficit, and I told him America also has one that I'm worried about, and that the solution is to spend less, not more, because, and here's my quotable quote for the day "Consumerism breeds consumerism". Later we decided that what I meant was that, since any economic problem is only really a problem if people are not getting the things they need to live the happy lives they deserve, the solution to the problem is to make more goods available to them. Aside from increasing production, that can also be accomplished by not consuming the goods yourself. then they'll be available for other people to consume. This is contrary to what capitalism teaches, which is, if you consume more, everything will be okay. I generally find that when something is counterintuitive, it is, in fact, wrong.
But that was just a brief moment of our day.
We asked a security guard for directions to the Apfelwein. He directed us across the Main, where we enjoyed the company and giant glasses of Apfelwein. From there, we went to the park near the river, and we demonstrated the powers of the fulcrum and lever and pendulum.
Back at the hotel, everybody crashed, conveniently in phases. First I passed out, then Lena went, then Adam. Then I woke up and Stina passed out. Then Adam and Lena woke up. Then Ilya and Lena went out. Then I went for a walk to get some Döner Kebap and Falafels for us. When I got back, Stina woke up and we scarfed them down, read a little (I'm reading about the moon landing, and hoping I can someday be in a position to travel to the stars, or maybe write a show that compiles faux news articles about life aboard the generational starship), then went for a walk. Having Lena and Adam here really reminded us how much we want to travel, so we're figuring out budget stuff and where we want to go. I theorized that in order to enjoy our travels and live in the moment (as we haven't been as much), we both need to know that at the end of the moment we have a place to belong, and that nothing stressful is waiting for us at that end. So, we need a home base. We have a home base. Awesome!
We came back to the hotel, and went to sleep. Then Lena woke up, ate, and then we ALL slept.

Next morning, we dilly dallied until we wandered over to the train station for the ride back to Magdeburg (Schönes Wochenende Ticket-37€ for 5 people). This time, though, we had a mobile entertainment unit: Ilya. Now we're having a lazy Sunday as our first day as a family of 5.

Wintertime in Magdeburg

2010-01-05T08:32:00.000-08:00

There is snow on the ground and like good bears, Brendan and I have been hibernating. We get a daily dose of sunshine and snow enjoyment, then return indoors to our cozy cave. All our plans for traveling during this winter break fell by the wayside, and I blame the cold. I want to hitchhike and spend lots of time walking around the unfamiliar cities we visit, but when it is wintertime the biting wind pushes me home to the warmth of the great indoors. So here I sit, wrapped in a blanket, like a cozy little ladybug .

In the background you can see the lovely tree that Brendan brought home for us in the background, and our smoking man in the forefront. The little smoking man was a gift from our friend Frank when he came to visit for Thanksgiving. He smokes a little cone of incense (the smoking man, not Frank). The lovely candle was a gift from one of the classes I teach.

We have so many expansions of Carcassonne now that it's not easy to play them all at once. We have been honing our skills so that when our Seattle friends join us here we will be able to compete. They are the ones who introduced us to the game, after all. In the background you can see the beautiful guitar Brendan gave me for my birthday and our pet tiger.

You'll see graffiti like that all around Magdeburg. On January 16th there will be some sort of an anti-Nazi demonstration, with different events taking place all over the city. Brendan and I will attend.

That's the little Christmas tree I made before I knew Brendan would be bringing one home. We still kept the presents under this tree, though we put the decorations on the other one.

This is the playground near our house and I took this picture primarily to show our Seattle friends where their little one can play. The ping-pong table is barely visible in the background, though recently it was impossible to play on. Not because of the snow, which we expected and brought along a brush to sweep away with, but because of the fireworks residue from New Year's Eve.

This is the building behind ours. I thought the icicles looked cool.

This is a snow-covered bicycle.

And this is our pride and joy. This snowman was with us for a sadly short while. First, he was defiled by a dog. That I could handle. But then he was toppled and we found him in pieces. His nose is still missing.

Happy 2010, everyone! This is our wedding year and I am getting excited! 10/10/10 is marching ever closer, perhaps to the tune of Pachelbel's Canon. Nah. How cliche would that be?

A blog for Aunt Eileen

2009-12-26T07:07:00.001-08:00

Christmas has come and gone. On the 23rd I brought home a tree from near the dumpster at work, and the 24th and 25th were spent in a very relaxing manner. Our landlord gave us a bottle of wine, and our neighbors gave us a board game, so we spent Christmas eve playing a game and indulging in sekt and glühwein and lebkuchen.
The Christmas season cannot, however, overshadow that most important of holidays, Stina's birthday.

rights belong to Randall Munroe of xkcd.com

On Stina's birthday, we celebrated with our neighbors, couchsurfing friends, and her co-worker by seeing a movie, wandering the Weihnachtsmarkt, and going out to eat at Vina Pearl. By her account, Stina had a good birthday, getting several games, a calendar, good eats and drinks, and a guitar. In the days preceding, we also got some random drop-ins from friends.
That's maybe a different cultural thing. Maybe it's just us, but I don't think people in the States just drop in on each other as much as they do here. We get a couple random visits a week. It's fun!
Love to all. Have a Happy New Year!

Ages and Real Life

2009-12-08T03:52:00.000-08:00

Yes, sadly, it's been ages since we've updated. It's time to find out what real life is like when you're an immigrant.

Stina and I have a delightful one bedroom apartment. It has high ceilings and looks into our neighbors' home. We can't avoid watching their kittens play with the blinds.
In general I work from 11:30AM to 5pm, Monday to Friday. Once a week I work until 6pm, and less often, but still possible, I start at 6AM. My commute is about 40 minutes on either side. I work at a private grade school as an Erzieher. I guess the closest equivalent is a classroom aide, but we're much more prevalent here than aides are in the U.S. I take my class (the first graders on the English track - 1e) to lunch, occasionally sub, and teach a theater class every Wednesday. In January, I'll start directing a play as one of the kids' extracurriculars.
I enjoy my co-workers. One of them reminds me a lot of my co-worker Amanda from YTN (from her keen fashion sense right down to her occasional observation of the darker side of childcare). Another one has horses, lives in Quidlinburg (sp?), and has served as sort of my guide to figuring out this job. She's been very helpful, and I anticipate that Stina and I will visit her so we can play with her horses (and get to know her and her family better, too, of course). Yet another and I have struck up a friendship. He's vegan and punk and down-to-earth and would fit quite well with our old Seattle crowd. There's also a teacher here from Vancouver, WA. I've also made friends with a young lady on her Social Year and one of the French Erziehers, who knows someone who works at Berlitz with Stina. I haven't gotten to know everyone here very well, but I'm quite satisfied with being able to look forward to chatting with the friends I have made here.

We take time to play games together and with our neighbors and friends, watch videos from the library, and go to the Weihnachtsmarkt.
We are hoping to make monthly excursions. Our first will be in January while my kids are still on Winter Break. Ski trip or Vienna trip or someplace warm? Submit your suggestions in the comments!

Establishing a Routine

2009-11-08T04:08:00.000-08:00

Sorry it's taken so long for us to update. I (Stina) am now two weeks into my teaching career . It is going well. It is nice to be official and teaching my own classes.

In other news, Brendan and I are working on National Novel Writing Month, where one's goal is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.

We had a Halloween party and it was a huge success. Brendan and I both dressed up as pirates. We made a ton of food and thought we would have leftovers for days because we didn't think that many people would come. Turned out we had a total of 25 guests, everything got eaten, and the last people left at 3:42am. A bunch of Couchsurfers came that we'd never met before and that added a nice dynamic...everyone was mingling and meeting new people. It was a real party party. We are now working on organizing monthly Couchsurfing potlucks and we're having the first one at our place next week.

We are still finding lots of stuff. A couple weeks ago we went on a walk. We were searching for a street I had driven down when a co-worker gave me a ride home. All the building on it are brightly and crazily colored, and I wanted to show Brendan. We found the street, and we also saw a bunch of stuff on the curb. There was a bag filled with pans, tupperware, bowls, pots and mugs. We wanted it! So we divided the stuff into two awkward piles and proceeded towards home.

On the way, we passed another big pile of stuff on the curb and saw some really amazing things, like a bread slicer and a brand-new showerhead. We wanted it! Thankfully, there was also an old baby carriage out there, so we were able to put all the stuff we already had plus the new stuff in the carriage. As we started to head home, though, we realized the reason the baby carriage was out there was because it only steered to the right. So for the 30 minute walk home, we took turns pushing this baby carriage, starting on the far left of the sidewalk, letting it veer to the far right of the sidewalk, then resetting again to the far left of the sidewalk. It was easier that carrying everything, but still incredibly awkward.

I (Brendan) am still waiting on my Arbeitserlaubnis. I called about it last Monday and they said to call back at the end of this coming week. My boss wants me to come in to work on Wednesday, but she didn't say why...

We finally bought some ping pong gear, and had our first match at the park half a block from us. We're taking regular evening walks, and have pretty full evening schedules, with lots of friends nearby. Last night we went over to a friend's apartment and played new games and old, and today some friends are coming over to play games with us. Every Tuesday, a friend comes over on her way home from work, and we often feed her, and always play Carcassonne with her. Speaking of feeding, we've continued expanding our culinary horizons, as I make once-a-week special meals for Stina's birthday, and she feels the same urge. We haven't found a regular place for dumpster-diving yet. The one dumpster we successful dove in hasn't been out on a Saturday or Sunday night since that time. If anybody reading this is a part of the Magdeburg Dumpster-Diving scene, shoot us an email, so we can figure this city out.

We've thought about dropping everything and buying a van and hauling curbside treasures for a living. The things we find are amazing, and we're feeling sated. We almost feel a sense of guilt for not being able to give all the wonderful things a home. Luckily we go pretty regularly to Lirum Larum, and give them the excess stuff we find. I don't know how much of it they use or what their procedures are, but they certainly relieve our guilt.

All-in-all, we're settling in to a very comfortable day-to-day existence here. We find plenty to fill our days with, and there is no dearth of delightful personalities near us. Wir sind zufrieden.

Helping YOU navigate moving to Germany

2009-10-13T06:49:00.000-07:00

Well, Stina and I have gotten this far, and I think it's useful to share our experiences. We found no good how-to guides, and really didn't know what to expect. Let me break it down for you future movers into Germany, specifically Magdeburg:

Step zero: decide what, where, and why, and move to get those things done. Americans have three months from the time you enter the Schengen Treaty zone (includes most of Europe). If you want to work here, it's pretty much the same procedure as in other parts of the world. Make contacts, send out C.V.s (definitely convert your resume to a C.V. Do it here), pound the pavement. You are looking for a job that no German can do, otherwise the officials might deny your application and send an otherwise unemployed German citizen to do your job. If nothing else, teaching your native language somewhere is a good option. It will be very important for you to have official documents stating your qualifications: college and high school diplomas are good, official transcripts seem to be working as well: get certificates for anything and everything. Decide where you want to live and make that happen. Knowing what you hope to get out of the experience of living in Germany will help you make all your other decisions.

Step one: find an address. Whether this means finding an apartment to rent or a friend willing to let you stay with them for a few months, you can't really do anything official without a physical address. See our blog here for our experience with this part of it.

Step two: register your address. Go to the official building (you'll have to ask someone which building it is for your city... I've registered at police stations, city halls, and the Bürger Büro here in Magdeburg)

Step three: get a German Bank account. Almost all transactions are made through the bank. Rent comes out of the account directly, as will fees for electricity, internet, and insurance. If you work, paycheck deposits are also directly made from your employer to your account.

Step four: get health insurance. Whether or not you get a job will define how you go about this. If you work as a freelancer or don't work, you will need private insurance. If you get a contracted salaried position, you will need government insurance (which are still handled by private companies). Stina has the former. I will have the latter. Stina pays 51€ per month. According to reliable sources, I will pay 20% of my gross income of 2000€ per month, 7.9% for health insurance, 9.95% for what I think is the equivalent of Social Security, 1.4% for unemployment insurance and 1.1% for "nursing care insurance". Stina set hers up by calling a coworker's mother who works in the insurance industry, and I set mine up by asking my boss for help, and she took me to IKK and talked to them with me.
You should set up health insurance within the first month of your arrival in Germany. If you're reading this and it's been more than a month, I think, but am not sure, that it is acceptable to cross the border and return to reset the date of your arrival in Germany. If you don't get it within your first month in Germany, you can talk to someone who knows about the insurance industry and the laws governing it and get help from them. I'm still not clear on how it all works, but essentially we told someone in charge our dilemma, and they figured out any workarounds we might need.

Step five: assemble your various documents for the Ausländerbehörde (Foreigner Authority) and make an appointment. The packet of documents should include passport photos (done biometrisch-ly; they'll tell you how), a copy of your lease, proof of health insurance (something from the insurance agency that states that your health insurance conforms to paragraph 11), proof of financial support (i.e. a contract offering gainful employment), passport, copy of your address registration paper, a pink form that they will give you to fill out, and, if you are working, a copy of your University transcript or Diploma. A strange warning: we heard someone was denied because the agency thought their apartment was too big for just one person and said she had to find a roommate. Germany does have 80 million people in a country the size of Montana, so perhaps overcrowding is an issue for them. Magdeburg has empty apartments galore, though. [edit: Stina corrects me. It was about the money. They thought she couldn't afford it. She brought more proof of more money, and they allowed it.]

Step 6: submit all materials to Ausländerbehörde and wait. We've heard tales of it's taking as few as 2 weeks. Stina's been waiting 3 weeks now. We hear they have to return it within 4 weeks. We've also been quoted up to 6 weeks. (A lady in Bonn said 6 months. I can't imagine that). I will have to pay 50€; we're not sure for which part of things the fee is. Stina's on her way out the door with 50€ just in case she has to pay it, too, though she was never told of this fee.

Good luck! If you have more questions, visit our ...And Contact Us page (http://andjuggling.com/contact.html)

Disclaimer: this is our experience, which is incredibly specific. It is also not guaranteed to be accurate. I hope it is nonetheless helpful.

Life in Germany

2009-10-05T14:37:00.001-07:00

I apologize on behalf of Brendan and myself. We have been so busy getting used to this new life we are making for ourselves that we haven't kept you all up to date. Here is my attempt to rectify that.

We now live in a two-room apartment in Magdeburg, Germany. In the three weeks we've been here, we have managed to furnish it nearly completely for free. People who are moving out leave what they don't want to take with on the curb, much like in Seattle but times a million. First we found a table across the street, and a full-length mirror. Then we found a few chairs. Then a loveseat. The loveseat was kind of far away, but we endeavored to carry it home. About halfway there I gave up. My arms were too tired and, most of all, my fingers hurt from gripping the edges of it. Thankfully we were very near our neighborhood grocery store and Brendan had a great idea. Why not use a shopping cart to take it the rest of the way home? Unlike some stores in the US, they don't put alarm sensors on the carts here. To ensure people return the carts to their proper resting place, one must insert some amount of money (between 20 cents and 2 euros) to release a cart. You only get the money back when you return the cart.

This worked like a charm. We got the loveseat home without further strain and returned the cart a few minutes later with no one (from the store, anyway) the wiser. A few days later we found a couple nice looking mattresses on the curb in our friends' neighborhood, even further from home than the loveseat had been. This time we took advantage of the month-long tram passes we had recently bought and hauled the mattresses onto first one tram, then another, until we were much closer to home. A short walk to the grocery store, then the cart served us once more the rest of the way. Now we have a bed and an extra mattress for couchsurfers and friends and family!

Last week a couchsurfer we had communicated with a bit via the Magdeburg couchsurfing group rang our doorbell. We thought this was a little strange as we had no plans to see him that day. We invited him up and he told us that his flatmate, who was moving out, was getting rid of a couch that would fold down into a bed. This was exactly what we were looking for (more sleeping space for couchsurfers and friends and family!), so we went with him to his place to look at it. Turns out he only lives about a 15 minute walk away. Along the way our couchsurfer friend explained that he had left a phone message that we didn't get because our phone was off, and he had sent us an email that we hadn't checked. His housemate was about to put the couch out on the curb and he wanted us to see it and lay claim before this happened. His sudden arrival to our place suddenly made so much more sense!

We really liked the couch, but it was way too heavy to carry all the way home, especially since there were no grocery stores on the way. We told him we definitely wanted it and that we would figure out some way to pick it up with a vehicle in a few days. We started walking home and were talking as we walked about how we would be able to pick up the couch. If only we knew someone with a van or a truck! we lamented. Kind of like that guy, we said, pointing to a man who had just parked his big van. What harm in asking? we asked. We approached this man and Brendan explained (in German, of course) our situation and asked if there was any chance we could borrow him and his van sometime soon to pick up the couch. He was super nice and said he was free right at that moment. Ten minutes later we had the couch in our apartment! Not only did he drive it and us over to our place, but he also helped carry it down three flights of stairs and up two.

We are also making good use of a wonderful place called Lirum Larum. It is like a thrift store, but everything there is free. We've been giving them many things that we find on the curb that are in great condition but that we don't need (toys, children's clothes, rugs, etc.) and taking things that we do need (dishes, towels, clothes, utensils). I am interested to see if we can get involved volunteering with them. Speaking of getting involved in things, I joined a choir! Marc, the delightful couchsurfer who gave us the couch, is a member of several choirs, and now I am also a member of one of them. I went to a rehearsal with Marc just to check it out and I loved it, so I joined that night. I will already participate in a concert on Friday!

We are finding it very easy to make friends in Germany. Couchsurfers, sure, but also random people we meet on the street, and neighbors. At this very moment Brendan is playing Magic with the two college students who live in the apartment just on the other side of the courtyard. This weekend we are hoping to go bowling with the middle-aged couple we met through one of our shopping cart expeditions. Manny approached us as we were loading up the mattresses and asked if he could help. We started talking and he noticed our American accents and when we told him we just moved here he said he had some stuff from when his daughters lived at home that he could sell us. We went over later that evening to see the stuff and were treated to the lovely hospitality of Manny and his wife, Ines. The stuff wasn't yet gathered together, so we made further arrangements to see it the following week. When we went back, they gifted us with a set of 6 glasses, 6 tea-cups and saucers, and six dessert plates.

We spent the weekend with our new friends Suzie and Bastian, and their adorable dog Bailey. I met Suzie at the Berlitz training in Hamburg. She and Bastian planned to go to Munich for Oktoberfest and they invited us to join them. They picked us up on Friday evening and we arrived rather late at Bastian's parents' house in a small village about 2 hours outside of Munich. We ate some pie then went to bed. The next day we drove to Regensburg and walked around for about an hour, then took the train to Munich. We knew we couldn't experience Oktoberfest the way the locals do because it would have meant getting there very early and since we didn't get to sleep until 3am, well, you get the picture.

The village where Bastian grew up

A shop in Regensburg

Hanging out in Regensburg

A cat in Regensburg

The first sight to greet us in Munich as we stepped off the train was a man in Lederhosen lying on the platform in a drunken stupor. That turned out to be par for the course for the rest of the day. We walked through Oktoberfest feeling a little like we were drunk because of all the weaving we had to do to avoid the actual drunk ones, surrounded by the fumes of beer and fair-food. Outside the beer tents the ones who did not get there early waited outside the doors, hoping for a chance to be let in if space opened up. We saw some get in and decided it was worth waiting a while to see if we could get in, too. Though we were enjoying playing 20 questions while we waited, we still gave up after an hour of the line not moving at all. It's possible we are the only people in history to visit Munich during Oktoberfest and not spend any money there.

Dirndls and Ledehosen and drunk!

The view inside the beer tent we did not get into

Carnival rides at Oktoberfest

My favorite part of visiting Munich was seeing and listening to an amazing band of buskers near the Rathaus, then seeing the beautiful Rathaus with the full moon peering over it. We took a much more full (of drunk people) train back to Regensburg, then drove back to the village. We stopped on the way at a gas station to pick up some local beer for 1 euro a bottle. Please take a moment to compare that to the cost of a glass of beer at Oktoberfest, which is 10 euros. Yikes!

The band of talented buskers

The moon and the Rathaus

No seats for Suzie and Bastian on the train

We are savoring these days of being unable to work. Hopefully in about a week and a half I will receive my residency permit and work visa and begin working that same day. Brendan will soon get a work contract and then take his paperwork into the Ausländerbehörde and soon enough he will be working as well. For now, though, we can stay up and sleep as late as we wish, join friends for weekends away and homemade dinners and hours of game-playing, and take long walks with crisp leaves underfoot. I hope we will still be able to do many of these things even after we begin working full-time, but I know it will be harder.

Coming together...

2009-09-16T03:35:00.000-07:00

things are. The only thing stopping me from proceeding with the residency permit and work visa process is lack of insurance, and papers are on the way for me to sign and return which will result in my having insurance. The Big Worry, what about Brendan?, is less worry-full. He had a job interview today at a primary school and it went very well. He will observe some classes there tomorrow and speak to someone regarding a contract next week (that person is currently out of town). We signed our lease yesterday for the place in Sudenburg that comes with a kitchen sink, registered our address, opened a bank account, and opened a utilities account. Oh yeah, and I'm also waiting on my transcripts from UW to arrive, because I need those in order to get the work visa. A copy of my diploma would have sufficed, but I wasn't about to ask my parents to dig through the dozen or so containers sitting in their shed, holding most of my earthly goods.

My head is swimming less today.

The Berlitz training in Hamburg went well. I had fun with the practice-teaching, and I think the real-live teaching will be even more fun. It's such a great feeling to see the click of understanding in someone's eyes when they learn how to use a new word or grammar concept. I will co-teach a lesson on Monday. I feel a bit nervous about this, but glad that I will be able to get some experience teaching with someone else before flying solo.

Once the paperwork is processed for both of us and we have the stamps in our passports that allow us to stay here, then I will be able to relax a little and enjoy the amazing and unexpected fact that we are living in Germany. At this point nothing feels sure enough, but that point is coming, I can tell. Maybe I'll even get a library card today.

Bureaucracy

2009-09-14T04:32:00.000-07:00

Living in Germany requires:
Step 1: find a job
Step 2: find an apartment
Step 3: get a bank account
Step 4: get insurance
Step 5: go to ausländerbehörde

Seems simply enough, right? But there's a catch-22... you don't actually GET the job until after step 5, and you can't complete step 5 unless you can prove that you won't be a burden on the system. Step 2 also wants to see proof of income, and step 3 requires an address first. So right now we're sitting on our bums, engaged in email negotiations with the landlord of the place we hope to rent. It would all be great except he sent us the lease, and IT says 220 kalt 300 warm. That's not what we had agreed on. Sigh.

Finding an apartment in Magdeburg

2009-09-13T09:12:00.001-07:00

We are considering 3 apartments right now, and We need your input.
Things to know: Warmmiete and kaltmiete. Warmmiete is the cost you will be paying each month to the owner. It includes water, gas, and heat. Kaltmiete is the price of the apartment without water, gas, and heat. The difference between the two is called the Nebenkosten. When one moves out, the total utilities used is calculated. If you've used less than the Utilities cost, you will receive some money back. If it's more, you will receive a bill for the missing amount. Electricity is not included in any listed rent costs (nor is internet, phone, tv or anything like that), but is generally estimated to be 20€ per average person. A Genossenschaft is, as far as we're concerned, a rental agency. When renting from them, one must pay a 1330€ deposit. One only receives this amount back after 2 years. Most apartments come without a kitchen sink, cabinets, oven, stove, fridge, or lighting fixtures. We estimate that buying those will cost about 250€. By law, renters must give 3 months notice before moving out.
The first is in Südenburg (Wolfenbuttelerstraße 31). It's 5 minutes by tram to the city center. It's in a neighborhood that is, itself, interesting. There's park just a block away that's not super big, but has things, like a place to climb on and pingpong table and benches and sand. The neighborhood has shops and cafes and restaurants. The apartment itself comes with a fridge, stove/oven, cabinets, sink, and lighting fixtures already included. It consists of a short entryway with the bathrrom just off that, then the kitchen, big enough to also be the dining room, and a bedroom. You see the problem with it... not a lot of space. It costs 300 warm, 200 kalt / month.
The second is in Leipziger Strasse (Lion-Feuchtwangerstrasse 6). It is large (living room, bathroom, kitchen, and 2 bedrooms), and has a balcony. It also has a good view of the city from the bedrooms, though kind of just an okay view from the balcony. Leipziger Strasse is about 10 minutes from the city center by tram. There is, however, nothing much in the immediately walkable area, maybe a restaurant or two. It costs 311.56€ warm and 198€ kalt / month. It is being rented out by a Genossenschaft.
The third is in Neu Olvenstedt (Hans-Gradestr. 107). It is large like the one in Leipziger Strasse, but the floors are an ugly linoleum. It has a BEAUTIFUL view from the balcony. The area has many small paths from apartment building to apartment building with statues, and small parks around each corner. It is 18 minutes from the city center by tram. it costs 184.16€ kalt, and 279.24€ warm. It is being rented out by a Genossenschaft.

Ignore this unless you want to know what playing in a giant Magic tournament is like.

2009-09-05T14:56:00.000-07:00

It´s done. I played 20 games of magic today, 19 of them sanctioned, and I won 10 and lost 10. Not good enough, but better than I feared. One guy I beat went on to qualify for day two. My overall matches were 4-5
It all started last night. I had purchased an apple, a pepper and tomato (all sleva, though) and some buns as I walked home from registering. I made myself a lunch for the next day, put my sleeves, my dice, my camera, a notebook of fun stuff from Nikki, and pens and pencils in the detachable part of my bag. Then I tried to fall asleep. I did a very poor job of that, including one dream where I was sure I was awake and it was after 9 and I was at my parents´ house. Somehow I couldn´t figure out that it was a dream, even though I knew that I wanted to be at the grand prix in Prague. I think I was frustrated at the quantum probability fields that sent me to WI. Anyways, I was so upset in the dream that I woke myself up, and then spent another hour trying to fall back asleep. It was worse than childhood Christmases.
I finally got up at 7:43 even though the alarm was set for 8. I took a shower, which I hadn´t planned to do, and put the lunch I´d made in my bag and ate jelly-syrupy delicious stuff that my host has in the fridge in a water bottle on buns with fake butter for breakfast.
I walked to the palace. This time there really was a stream of geeks headed in. Noteworthily, There were a countable number of women playing as well... the proportions were probably 60 to 1 or worse, but it was good to see more gender diversity than could be feared. I arrived 10 minutes before 9, as they had warned us to get there before nine. I then wandered around and did nothing, as they didn´t actually start anything until 10.
Everybody was assigned a seat and was given 6 boosters. These we were to record on a deck list, ... well here´s the play by play:
I received 6 boosters (and my promo Chrome Mox). They said we wouldn´t be playing with the boosters we opened. This is a mechanism to prevent cheating, of course. Then I recorded on a checklist they gave me all the m2010 cards that had come in those 6 boosters (liliana vess and
royal assassin!), and I alphabetized and colorcoded them as required.
Then We were instructed to check the list of the person sitting across from us. We did, everything was in order, and we were instructed to pass the cards and list to the person to our right :(. then again. then again. And this one we kept. I counted all the cards in each
color that I wanted to play with. Each color had 11. poop. So I played green and white with 1 foil mountain and 1 fireball.
Here, you may not care, But I´ll get my cards and tell you everything I had. First and foremost, a wolf token, which I loved, and used a lot.
In my deck:
Stampeding Rhino
Windstorm (which I never used)
8 plains
Howl of the night pack
Giant spider
griffin sentinel
blinding mage
master of the wild hunt
foil mountain
2 excommunicate
silvercoat lion
fireball
white knight
llanowar elves
entangling vines
elite vanguard
2 serra angel
elvish visionary
razorfoot griffin
mist leopard
rampant growth
8 forest
craw worm
veteran armorsmith

not in my deck:
lightning bolt
trumpet blast
lava axe
clone
snapping drake
zephyr sprite
magma phoenix
sage owl
canyon minotaur
wind drake
jackal familiar
essence scatter
seismic strike
negate
dragon whelp
divination
air elemental
goblin piker
merfolk looter
raging goblin
ice cage
emerald oryx
solemn offering
spellbook
2 oakenform
wurm´s tooth
2 siege mastodon
tome scour
fabricate
convincing mirage
open the vaults
holy strength
2 lifelink
angel´s mercy
shatter
panic attack
weakness
sign in blood
2 drudge skeletons
vampire aristocrat
wall of bone
warpath ghoul
mind rot
howling banshee
underworld dreams
soul bleed
whispersilk cloak
gorgon flail
Demon´s horn
fog
bountiful harvest
nature´s spiral
bramble creeper
pithing needle

Anyways... So I did what I did, and played my first match against Jan.

I beat jan (even though he went at least 6-2 later). He made some play mistakes, and I capitalized on them.
My day goes like this
win
loss (Lots of play mistakes by me)
win
loss (a few play mistakes by me)
win
loss (some play mistakes by me)
win
loss (Lots of play mistakes by me) won 1 of the games, though
casual game won - played at the special tables
loss (Lots of play mistakes by me)
I suppose I could have dropped when other people did (you couldn´t go on to day two unless you had fewer than 3 losses), but I´m in prague to play magic, dammit, and play magic I did.
At some point I decided that I really wanted to play at the special tables. I got Sony (my second
loss) to play with me at the tables where they hold the feature matches when no one else was using them. Other than that, though, it was really hard to get people to play just for fun. But I did see Raphael Levy, a pro, play in a feature match.
There were 1543 people there, the third largest grand prix ever. I came in 293rd of the people that stayed till the end of the blue portion... out of 350 people or something. not at the bottom, certainly. Yay!
what else... 3 people noticed my untap upkeep draw a card shirt, two of them judges, and the
third an opponent from Romania who took a picture of it for his friend who always mutters the names of the phases when he´s stalling (and bluffing).
Just before my last round, I couldn´t find one of my cards. I went on a wild expedition with a judge, and she replaced the missing card with a plains. No stampeding rhino for me.
I´m proudest that I never broke a rule, that I successfully bluffed in 1 extra point of damage once (attacking with my griffin sentinel into a razorfoot griffin with green mana available), and when I went out I was 5050.
Burnt soybeans taste like burnt popcorn.
That was my grand prix experience.

If you care about Magic...

2009-09-04T11:38:00.000-07:00

I´ve done it. I registered for Grand Prix - Prague. The Palace of Industry, built at the end of the 19th century, is only a 10 minute walk from where I´m staying. I expect that tomorrow Prague´s residents will see giant spiders crawling over its towers of glass and metal and lightning bolts lancing the skies above it. It´s a majestic building, and it´s filled to the brim with Magic.
I have never participated in a professional tournament before. I´m a bit overwhelmed at this first look at what my weekend will hold. Packs of international players roamed the courtyards. A timid "money draft" was whispered by players who, I´m sure, know they´re better than most. I may or may not have seen an international group of pros speaking English in French and Japanese accents.
I´m humbled by the vastness of it all.
I´m going to play Magic in a freaking palace.

Prague

2009-09-04T05:49:00.000-07:00

Brendan speaking here. As you may or may not know, Stina is in Hamburg for the week training for her new job with the Berlitz in Magdeburg. While I was disappointed not to be offered a position as well, I am quite pleased that it allows me the opportunity to participate in Grand Prix - Prague, a major sanctioned Magic: the Gathering tournament with a top prize of $3,500 and an invitation to Pro-Tour Austin, which has a top prize of $40,000. So wish me luck and enjoy my adventures:
I got to the hitchhiking stop that Hitchwiki suggests from Hamburg headed south, and the directions are good. Follow the road in the same direction as the bus, and after about 50 meters, you will indeed start to hear the Autobahn. The road curves to the left, but there´s a smaller paved area that´ll lead you to the gas station. First, though, note the supermarket across the road. That´s where I bought a yogurt and two bananas for my breakfast. I ate the yogurt and one banana while I walked to a place under a tree by the exit, because just as I got there, it started to rain. The tree did its job well, and I was surprised to find that I was pretty excited to be on the road again. The challenge of getting from there to here with only my wits and little else was exciting to me. I think the fact that I felt entirely well returned much of the exuberance that´s been flagging for the past several weeks. My first ride was a delightful ride from an Indian man who, like all other German speakers, was shocked that I spoke German.
Take that as a given for all my interactions, and I won´t mention it again. He gave me a ride out of the rain about 50 km down the road.
Then I got a ride from a German who wanted to practice his English. He was older, but a fit bike rider and he´d recently gone to Görlitz which he wanted me to go to as well as it´s kind of on the way to Prague. Next time, I promised him. He likes to practice languages. He worked at an American army base for many years as a dishwasher, and he learned his English there from the soldiers, by reading articles about the same topic in German and English newspapers, and by listening to the news on the American radio station from the base and the regular German news radio stations. He said his English was so bad that his English teacher wouldn´t let him talk in class. His English was excellent. Quite meticulous, even. He spoke very carefully and slowly, and asked me to do the same. When I did, his comprehension was complete, and his vocabulary was extensive. He also practices Dutch with a friend of his from the Netherlands. They´re penpals, and they pretend they are the Dutch queen´s marshall and Germany´s ambassador to the Netherlands. He said his friend just wrote to him that he has retired from his marshallry,
more´s the pity.
He was going to west of Hannover, and, as you know, the route from Hannover to Prague takes one east. We looked on the map, and saw that there was a Raststätte not too far along the western route. I knew I didn´t want to run across six lanes of 100mph traffic again, but we found an underpass leading from the westbound side to the eastbound side. I walked the wrong way for a while, and thought what a nice autumn day it was for a walk with a loved one, as I saw two people pushing two other people in wheelchairs along the sidewalk next to a very autumnal copse of trees. Then I realized my mistake, and turned to follow them.
There I waited 3 hours. I made several mistakes which probably cost me some of those hours, but even so, it seemed there were fewer people willing to pick me up than the volume of traffic should have suggested. Of course many were just going into Hannover, but there were plenty of other license plates, notably Polish, Czech, MD and Berlin. My major mistake was believing people who said that they were going to Berlin but not through Magdeburg... okay, okay, I suppose they don´t go THROUGH Magdeburg, but they come darn close to it, so I
eventually cornered a Ukrainian guy - and by cornered, I mean he stopped for me, despite initially shrugging apologetically and seeming he would continue. My gaze and fierce thumbing halted him. He was going to Berlin and dropped me at the Tankstelle I told him to.
I waited there only a few dozen minutes before a Czech guy stopped and took me all the way here. This country is gorgeous. If it weren´t for all our other plans, I would say we should buy a place in the countryside here and raise those sheep immediately. What a lovely drive. I borrowed my driver´s cell phone to let my couchsurfing host know I´d get there a day early. She said it was fine, but she was out with friends and wouldn´t be home until 1130. I said okay even though I got to her house at 8, but I went to a Chinese restaurant and got some fried rice for 59czk and a half liter beer for 30czk. In all, I had a full sit down restaurant meal for less than 4 euros ($5.70). I started writing in my journal, but then everybody left the restaurant, including my waitress. I started to think that they were closing so I finished quickly and left. When I got out, I saw that they would be open until 11 and it was only 9, so I kicked myself and went in search of an internet cafe. I didn´t find one, so I wrote while sitting in front of a very old church. By the time I looked up, it was 1030 - close enough to 1130, right? I walked up to my host´s front door and plopped down on my bag to wait. I had barely written a sentence before she showed up with a "contemplating Magic strategy?" I greeted her, and she led me to here. She has a tremendous flat, about which she keeps apologizing for the mess. The mess, however, is not particularly dirty, but rather is made up of glorious books. Some of them are in English, and this morning I claimed one and am now 128 pages in. The reason for my progress (despite all of the other opportunities Prague has to offer) is that there were 2 other Couchsurfers here as well, a very nice couple originally from Bavaria but now studying in Salzburg. They were out late at a jazz club last night, and so didn´t get up until noon. Despite my being awake, I didn´t want to go anywhere or do anything noisy and didn´t have the key, so I searched amongst the books and read. Tonight: Registration. Tomorrow: DAY ONE!

A whole new world

2009-09-01T12:06:00.000-07:00

My goodness, here we are indeed. We've had a whirlwind of a time this past almost a year, and It's not quite settled down yet, but the net stage of our trip is in sight.
Stina and I will begin living in Magdeburg, Deutschland within the next two weeks, and we intend to stay there for a good long while.
What's that you say? I need to catch you up? You have no idea what I'm talking about, or if you do, you don't know how we got from there to here 'cause we haven't blogged in a while? Well, here goes then:
Before we left Saarbrücken, We checked our emails once again. Lo and behold, Stina's email had in it a job offer from the Magdeburg Berlitz! We redid the budgets, figured out we could just squeak by if only Stina is employed and she gets enough hours, and accepted the position on the spot! After evaluating our many travel options, we decided to head to the places we had the greatest concentration friends (northwestern Germany) so I could bask in their warm glow on my birthday.
We tried to leave Saarbrücken by tramping (hitchhiking). It was a hot day, and we trudged about 2 miles from the Studentenwohnheim where we were staying with our couchsurfing host. (and where I discovered that Bulgarians play a much funner card game of BS than the American version and that Stephen King really is a good writer - Lisey's Story grabbed me. I'm on page 375. I had to leave the book with our host.) After that 2 mile trudge, we saw that our spot looked kind of dead, but we waited faithfully anyways until a lady from across the street hollered at us that no one was going anywhere from where we were standing. She invited us to her shady backyard and gave us sparkling water and then drove us to a bus stop near the freeway entrance. We waited for about an hour and a half, then gave up, took the tram back to the Hauptbahnhof, and got our quer durchs ticket. We rode the train to Bonn where we got to relax again with the most pleasant of people. We headed the next morning by train (can you tell we're tired?) to Düsseldorf and to our Magic friend's door. We couch hopped for the week in Düsseldorf, staying a few nights with each of several friends we had made before, making new friends, and indulging our passion for relaxion. My birthday was particularly relaxing, as we spent most of it lounging around a park and eating the pasta salad I had made that morning.
We hitched pretty easily from Düsseldorf to Hannover, now fully refreshed from our long stay in Düsseldorf. Our final Düsseldorf couchsurfing hosts accompanied us to the gas station in Oberhausen, 'cause they were on their way to do some geocaching out there, too. It took us 2 rides, and our last ride, a buddhist priest who wrote a book on relationships and generosity with his girlfriend, dropped us right in front of our hosts' door. In Hannover we stayed with friends of Stina's from her bible school days. They, too were game enthusiasts (like attracts like), and we spent a rollicking 2 days with them. We ate plenty of good vegetarian food, and discovered trampolines and centrifugal force and mini golf in various parks. After our stay, we hitched the most efficient hitch ever - I stuck out my thumb for the first car, he pulled over like magic and took us all the way to the central station in Hamburg. We took the Sbahn to Veddel, walked 5 minutes and arrived at our current couchsurfer's home. Now Stina's spending her days in unpaid training for Berlitz, and I'm trying to figure out what happens next. I'm researching for this weekend's Magic Grand Prix in Prague, and will be hitchhing there on Thursday. Wish me luck!

How we got from there to here, part 2--leaving Oslo

2009-08-19T03:19:00.000-07:00

After arriving at Mia-Simone's in Oslo and getting a good night's sleep, the next day we simply rested. We lounged in bed, read books, and were bums. It felt delightful. Later in the afternoon we went downstairs and hung out with Mia-Simone, and Brendan made dinner that night for the three of us and Mia-Simone's flatmate, Lauren. We played some Yatzy (not quite the same rules as Yahtzee, but very similar) and enjoyed laughing together. We felt very comfortable staying with Mia-Simone and Lauren and were a little reluctant to get back on the road. We ate a late breakfast together the next day and took a leisurely time getting ready, and then checked our email. We had invitations to come and interview at a couple of Berlitz locations! This got us motivated to continue on to Germany. We responded to the emails to try and set up some possible interview dates, and then set out on the road once more.

We walked from their place to an E-6 south entrance. It wasn't a busy entrance, but it was in a beautiful spot surrounded by high hills and trees, and the weather was finally not rainy but rather beautiful. Sometimes slower spots almost seem like better spots. It's as if the people passing us realize that we will have a hard time getting a ride, so they feel more responsible for helping us get to a different spot. I sometimes think that people who pass us at very busy spots are just thinking "Ah, I'm sure someone else will stop for them." So just 11 minutes of waiting and we had a ride. This was at 2:46pm.

Our ride was from Nels, a football (soccer)-coach dad. His team had recently played in the Norway Cup, the largest youth football tournament in the world. They had been eliminated after a couple of days and even though they had planned to stay and watch the rest of the tournament, the coaches were so disappointed that they left. They made it up to their team by taking them out for pizza later. One of my Norwegian cousins was also participating in this tournament with his team from Haugesund, but I'm not sure how they did in the end. If any Norwegian relatives are reading this, could you post a comment with the results?

Nels wasn't going far but said he could drop us off at a better spot outside the city. It was indeed outside the city, but not the greatest spot. It was another plain entrance rather than an entrance by a gas station, which is usually better for us. Even so, we got a great ride within half an hour from a man named Frederick who was going quite close to Gothenburg, which was where we were trying to get. Frederick is from Sweden but had been in Norway for the weekend for a jazz festival. He is our age or a little younger, but has a house and I think he said he has a kid. He has been working since he was 17 years old and now has his own company. He sounded a little jealous of our travels because he feels he is too tied down to do much traveling.

Frederick dropped us off at a gas station. We used the restrooms and by this point Brendan wasn't feeling very well. He wasn't sure if it was his appendix, but the pain was feeling similar to what he has experienced in the past, so we started talking about the possibility of going to a hospital. He wasn't feeling so bad, though, so we kept on hitching. We walked out to the freeway entrance and soon had a ride with Leo, a man we'd had a ride with on our way north to Norway. As Brendan described in a previous blog, he felt more comfortable with Leo because we had already met him, and Leo showed us the way to the hospital in Gothenburg.

The rest of the story you have probably already read, so I will end part 2 here. We are in Saarbrücken now and had interviews at the Berlitz here yesterday. They were the last of our scheduled interviews, so now we are going to return to visit friends in Bonn and Düsseldorf as we wait to hear back from the Berlitz locations where we already interviewed--Magdeburg and Hamburg. Next post I will try to bring everything back to the present moment, but for now we must begin another hitchhiking day.

How we got from there to here, part 1

2009-08-10T06:52:00.000-07:00

It's been awhile since I've done one of these posts, a post that recounts the journey. In the past two weeks we have traveled approximately 2,261 kilometers, or 1,405 miles. This leg of our hitchhiking journey began in Christiansand, Norway on Thursday, July 30. From Karmoy Island we had traveled with my cousin Unni and her husband Sven Erik to Sven Erik's family's cabin about an hour or so away from Christiansand. We spent one night there and the next day Unni and Sven Erik kindly drove us into Christiansand. At this point we had decided to try and get to Germany as quickly as possible because of our new life plan, so we planned to take the ferry from Christiansand to Denmark.

New life plan? What's this we talk about? Since arriving in Germany, and really, quite a while before then, we've realized how much we want to settle down again for awhile and have a home of our own. When we were in Seattle we applied for jobs and seriously planned to shorten our trip and move back if we got a good offer. We didn't. In Germany we learned about the possibility to become English teachers with a company called Berlitz and started forming all sorts of new dreams.

While in Norway we converted our resumes to the Curriculam Vitae (CV) format and sent them to every single Berlitz location in Germany. We got a lot of "Thank you for submitting your CV, but we are not currently hiring..." and, thankfully, a few offers to come and interview. We scheduled interviews as soon as possible because we want to settle down as soon as possible, so off we headed to the ferry terminal.

We found out that tickets would cost $75 per person. We had heard from Sven Erik's family that there are two ferries going to Denmark from Christiansand, a fast one and a slow one. We wanted to take the slow (read: cheaper) ferry, but it turns out they canceled it some years ago and the only option was the fast one. Tickets were that expensive because we did not book in advance and those were the only seats left. Since you recently read about our budget, you know $75 per person for a ferry ride is way outside it. Plus, the next available ferry was the next morning. So we set out to hitchhike.

Feeling a little forlorn, we went the grocery store first and bought some comfort food (this is where that cheap chicken was bought, and chocolate for me), ate some of it, then walked to an entrance to E-18 to head to Oslo. We had sent a few couchsurfing requests to Oslo before making the plans to take the ferry so we just hoped that we could find internet when we arrived in Oslo and that someone would be able to host us.

After about 45 minutes of holding out our thumbs, and just as we started talking about how maybe we should bite the bullet and just take the ferry to Denmark, we got a ride at 2:53pm. Stefan was not going far, but he said he could put us at a better hitchhiking spot. He had hitchhiked a lot in the past, so he picks up hitchhikers now. He dropped us off at a bus stop just off of the E-18 where we could thumb and be visible to all traffic along the E-18.

It was indeed a good spot. Five minutes later we had a ride with Helge, who shared cold cokes with us. He was on his way to Lillesand to pick up his son for the weekend. He had a funny conversation with his Polish friend while we were in the car with him. From our end we heard "I cannot understand you. Are you drunk?" He dropped us off at about 3:30pm.

It started raining. It rained, I think, every single day that we were in Norway, so this was no surprise, but unpleasant all the same. Just after getting thoroughly wet, we got got a ride with Johnny. He also wasn't going far, but he said he could take us to a gas station where at least we would have some cover. We took a bathroom break, then walked out to the road where, thankfully, there was another bus stop with a shelter. I sat under the shelter while Brendan thumbed, protected as you can see.

At 4:30pm we had a ride with Tor Magne, another man on his way to pick up his son for the weekend. He was going quite far along our way so we had plenty of time to dry off and sit back and relax. Tor Magne is a plumber who is hoping to get a job at a college because the pay is good and he would get all the right time off for holidays. His son lives in Tonsburg and he used to also and would like to move back there. He grew up in Christiansand and his parents live there still, but his extended family and all his friends are in Tonsburg.

He dropped us off at 7:30pm at a gas station just off the E-18. He drove at least another 20 minutes out of his way just to put us at a good spot. The weather that day hated us. It started raining again just after he dropped us off (by the way, Tor Magne told me that Norway has had its rainiest summer in over 100 years), rained just long enough to drench us, then stopped raining.

At 8:05pm we got a ride with a man who is living in Norway but is from Poland. His holidays had just started and he was on his way to Oslo with his son and the next day would fly to Krakow to visit. (Brendan thinks the son had been visiting his dad in Norway and was now headed back home on a plan... slightly different understandings of speakers of English as a second language are not uncommon to us. Two days ago Jan (of Elke and Jan, you'll learn about them soon) said that he just couldn't sleep if one of his friends was snorkeling in the room.) We were with him not quite long enough to dry out all the way, but at least it was warm and comfortable in his car, and he was listening to some fun music (take my breath away, bum bum, bum bum, bum bum). He dropped us off at a metro stop and told us we could take the metro into the city center.

We got on the metro and got some further instructions from the driver about where to get off and where to find an internet cafe. I was feeling pretty miserable by this point. Wet and cold and hungry and I could only really solve one of those problems. So when we got to the central station, after finding that toilet in the pizza place, I sat down to eat some beans while Brendan got started checking our couchsurfing messages. I felt a lot better after that, and Brendan had some good news.

One couchsurfer had responded with a yes, so we called her and explained that we were at the central station and could we please come to her place right now? She said of course, and we happily made our way there on the metro. By this time it was dark outside and around 10pm or so. When we got off at her stop, we walked in what we thought was the right direction and just before we had the chance to get really lost, a car pulled up by us. A woman poked her head out the window and said, are you Stina and Brendan the couchsurfers? Yes, we are! It was Mia-Simone, our hitchhiking-couchsurfer-host, whom you know from the interview-video. There wasn't room in the car for us, but we could follow it right to her doorstep.

Mia-Simone showed us where we would sleep, we changed out of our disgusting wet clothes, then joined her for hot tea. It is the greatest relief in the world to be relieved of physical discomfort and know that you will sleep in a warm bed. This post will have to be continued because we must do a little shopping so we can look nice for our interviews tomorrow at the Berlitz in Magdeburg, Germany. Wish us luck!

Greetz from Oslo!

2009-08-04T14:27:00.000-07:00

One of those promised posts - finances

2009-08-04T07:03:00.001-07:00

How in the world can we afford to do what we're doing?

In all, we've spent about $5000 in the past 10 months, including student loan payments, airplane and bus tickets, 4 months of rent, and emergency medical care. Excluding those, we've spent about $200 per month or $3 per person per day. And we're having fun, that's important, too, isn't it? We have since increased our daily budget to $15/person because we saved so much in the earlier part of our trip and anticipate either having jobs in Germany or moving to Los Angeles in 3 months. Please note that the "Europe on a Shoestring" and other budget travel books suggest a daily budget of anywhere from 40-70€ per day (That's, like, 4 times our budget. Plus, they make sweeping generalizations about nationalities, and that just smacks a bit of racism/nationalism, especially when the generalities are on the order of "Austrians are grouchy and right-wing". NOT a view we espouse.)

Here's what you should do to live a typical week of our lives (spliced together to accomodate a wide variety of money-saving tactics, but all borrowed from real experience):
Wake up in Lingdal with some cousins. Eat a full breakfast, compliments of the family. Get a cozy, comfy ride to Kristianstad and bid adieu to the relatives.
Go into the Ferry terminal. Learn that the cheap tickets to Denmark sold out, and we can either pay the equivalent of $75 or wait a week. Leave ferry terminal to consider options. Go into grocery store. Brendan is pleased as punch to find a whole grilled chicken for 29,90 kr ($5). Stina gets chocolate and beans (pork and beans style, but without the pork) for about the same total. Eat on the curb while watching the Norwegian world go by.
Upon having full stomachs, come to realize that hitchhiking is the best thing in the world.
Catch some rides into Oslo (Thank you, rides!). Ride the train ($6 each) to the center of town, getting directions from the train driver while aboard. Hurry into the central station (it's dark now) to find bathrooms. Discover these cost money, so go to Peppe's Pizza across the street and ask the bartender if we can use their bathroom. Get the kind man's permission. Use the toilets. Eat bread and cheese or chicken.
Haven't confirmed a place to sleep tonight, so find the Sidewalk Express internet terminal (1 hr - 2€ - $2.80). Log in to Couchsurfing.com. Find kind like-minded host has responded to request (have sent about 9 to potential hosts). Copy down the directions left in the message and a phone number. Log off after 12 minutes, save sidewalk express username and password in wallet. Find whole cigarette laying on ground. Pick up, examine, determine cleanliness and perfection, hide in brim of hat for use later as bargaining chip when thrown in the slammer.
Ask the lady at the newspaper kiosk which numbers to dial into the pay phone. Put lots of small change and one large piece of change into the phone. Dial the correct numbers. Confirm that you can stay with her, get some specifics about getting off the train, down the hill and to her home. Hang up and collect all the pieces of small change, losing only the 20 kr piece ($3.33). Get on subway, noting that bus ticket from earlier will suffice for this ride. Ride tram to appropriate stop, enjoy sensation of rain in anticipation of dry abode. By happenstance, meet host as she drives past. Follow car to home. Go to room. Spread out wet gear to dry. Go downstairs for a cup of tea and to get to know host. Sigh with contentment.
Awesome day! Total cost: $14.07 per person
Awake next morning around 10:30AM. Shower. Plan to go into Oslo to see the sculpture park and all the awesome things there are to do for free in Oslo. Opt to read and nap instead. Around 3PM journey downstairs to visit with hitchhiking-enthusiastic host. She's making jam. Go outside and pick plums and cherries from her trees. Interview host about her hitchhiking. Learn of her housemate's impending birthday. Choose to make a special meal for the evening. Go to store and discover that they don't carry tomato paste or lentils. Buy fixins for spaghetti and sauce: Pasta ($2), tomatoes ($2), canned tomatoes ($1), red peppers ($2.50), Hvitlok (garlic, $2). Already have onions. Buy ice cream ($4). Buy yogurt ($2). Go home and make dinner while everybody chats in the kitchen. Be the opener of a fine Riesling contributed by the birthday girl. Eat way more than necessary. Play Yatzy (the Scandinavian version!). Giggle until breathless. Sigh with satisfaction.
Awesomer day! Total cost: $7.75 per person
Awake next morning around 10AM. Wish the birthday host her happy birthday. Eat jam and bread and leftover pasta. Use internets to discover possible jobs in Magdeburg and Saarbrücken. Relax in the sun with Euro Shopper brand müsli and yogurt. Bid adieu to hosts. Tramp, upon consultation of map and knowledge of hitchhiking-savvy host, to nearby freeway entrance. Catch some rides (thank you, rides!). With last ride of the day, learn of a medieval festival in a castle taking place in Kungälv. Ride is working at festival, and can sneak you in for free. Accept invitation to stay the night in host's tent on the castle grounds. Borrow clothes from host. Meet host's friends, all fellow LARPers. Notice that they all call one of their number "Dansk". Also call him "The Dane". Imagine he's decended from the same line as Hamlet. Learn to say "Kann jorg yelpe de?", "Jorg elske de.", "Wat hette du?", and "Hor mor du?". Become "The American". Find a discarded plate of medieval stew. Follow the partying medievally-garbed men and women around the castle. Sigh with excitement.
Unexpected day! Total cost: $0 per person
Awake around 9AM. Use toilets. Help set up a beam for an activity for the public to enjoy. Anticipate swinging a straw pillow at an opponent and falling off. Gather straw and spread on mat under beam so that falling off won't hurt. Follow someone important-looking to their car and ride with them to the store. Buy tomatoes ($2) and cheese ($8). Return to castle by secret entrance. Note that porta-potties have become pay-porta-potties. Thank lucky stars you already went. Wander around festival now in progress. Watch the slave auction. Try to participate, but fail. Covet others' candy apples. Find candy apple dropped in dirt and abandoned. Take to hose. Wash thoroughly. Enjoy thoroughly. Listen to rocking German bagpipe group that everybody's been talking about, Schelmisch (trans.: Rogueish). Scavenge two more candied apples and some bread from trash cans. Everything free tastes better. Leave festival, using workers' toilet on the way out. Tramp about 1k to nearest freeway entrance. Catch some rides (thanks, rides!). End up at deserted entrance. Watch gorgeous sunset as you try to catch another ride. Wander into woods and make good use of alt mann's rette (trans.: every man's right). Sleep with the gurgle of a stream to lull you. Sigh with appreciation.
Delicious day! total cost: $5 per person
Awake to rain pattering the tarp on the tent at 7AM. Hurry up and pack away everything. Thank goodness for tarps. Hitch towards Copenhagen (thank you, rides!). Have a slow day. STop at a gas station with a Burger King. Bus other people's abandoned food. Scavenge 1 large fry's worth of fries. Get ride to Malmö. See the Turning Tower and the bridge to Denmark at night. Ride asks his building's "fake cop" (his words. Americans might say "rent-a-cop"... but properly and in order to not be derogatory, you think "security guard") if you can sleep in the apartment building's side yard. The guard says that he won't disturb you unless someone complains. You decide that's too much of a risk, and your kind and patient ride leads you 200 meters to a park. Find an out of the way corner and pitch your tent. Awake to rain pattering at 2AM and cover the tent with a tarp. Toss and turn restlessly. Sleep fitfully. Sigh with exasperation.
Rough day! total cost: $0 per person
Get up at noon. Trudge to hitchhiking spot as advised by hitchhiking-unsavvy ride the night before. Stop to use the restrooms in a mall along the way. Complete trudge to spot. Turn down 3 rides (thank you, almost rides!) going the wrong way. Make a sign. Wait at fruitless spot through heavy rains. Get cold, wet, and frustrated. Practice singing. Give up. Trudge back to mall. Go to grocery store. Find too-high prices and a confusing array of goods. Buy chocolate (16,50 kr - $2.35). Sit despondently. Get fed up with bread and cheese. Go back into grocery store. Buy lettuce ($3), tomato ($3), mango (7,90 kr $1) and feta cheese (13,90 kr - $2). Eat salad in a plastic bag. It's a delicious change of pace. Decide to go to train station to see your non-hitchhiking options. Have no Swedish cash for tram. Try to buy crackers and get cash back at store. Get told "not with that card". Buy crackers anyway in embarrassment (9,90 kr - $1.40). Just start walking towards the center of town. Get confused about which way to go. Ask a lady who speaks no English. Watch her disbelief as you try to explain you are WALKING into the center because you don't have 18 measly kröner to take the bus. Accept with grace that she has pointed in two directions 90 degrees apart and indicated that they are the centrum. Note that the signs also point in two directions, and suspect that one is for cars and one is for bikes. Then accept that that still doesn't make sense, but walk in the direction that seems for bikes. Spy a streetcar after trudging a couple km. Discover hurrah! that you can buy tram tickets with a Visa. Get flustered when presented with options for Copenhagen and Malmö centrum. Choose the cheaper of 2 options (18 kr - $2.65 per person). Feel poor. Eat some chocolate. Find Malmö centrum to be bustling but closed. Note the very sad woman on the floor and the man protesting to a transit employee that they don't have any money. See Sidewalk Express. Use a few more of the minutes you already have from your card in Oslo to check some internet. Consider the lateness of the day and the possibilities available to you. Get frustrated and flustered when you realize you poured $5 down the drain. Get over it. Bite the bullet and buy tickets to Copenhagen ($14 per person). Discover that nothing seems cheap or easy. Then discover that Sidewalk Express provides free access to Gmail and Blogger. Send emergency couchsurfing requests for Copenhagen and to a friend in Copenhagen. Call friend in Copenhagen (5,20 kr - $1.40). Get email from friend. Go to her home. Sleep soundly. Sigh with relief.
Long day! total cost: $16.75 per person
Wake up at 9AM. Enjoy the company and generosity of friend and her roommate, who both insist on paying for everything. See the amazing city of Copenhagen. Sleep.
Rejuvenating Day! total cost: $0 per person
Cost for the week: $87.14 for two people or $6 and some change per person per day.

Most mornings when we wake up in someone's home we have a full and leisurely breakfast during which we share our jam, cheese and chocolate, and they offer us some veggies, bread and spreadables.

Now play mad lib with the details for a choose your own adventure and send it to us. You can do this. If you don't, we'll try to live it out vicariously for you!

Greetz!
Brendan

Wow, past couple of days

2009-08-04T03:50:00.000-07:00

Hello everybody.

We are still alive.

At some point really soon, we will write a blog about how we afford it, since that's the absolutely most common question we get. We'll also update everybody on the past several days of hitchhiking.

But first things first.

We're alive.

I had a brief bout with appendicitis a few days ago. My stomach started to hurt as it has in the past, and on our way to Gothenburg, I told Stina that I had to see a doctor. We had just gotten a ride with Leo... a man who picked us up near where he had dropped us off about 10 days earlier (that's right, two rides with the same guy!). I think because he had given us a ride before, I felt more comfortable talking with him openly about what I needed... I.E. a hospital. He took us to the public transit (a ferry to the center of town) and showed us which tram to get on and which stop to get off at for the hospital. We did as we were told. I tried not to groan with pain, but when we got off the tram, I walked about 100 meters and then lay down on the ground. Stina went to find the entrance to the emergency room. It was only 30 meters away. I got up and walked in. Stina had gotten a number. It was 6:45pm. We waited an hour or two. A nurse called my number. He was very kind and very clear. First, once we were away from Stina, he asked if there was anything secret I was here for, then he did the things nurses do when they're checking you out like blood pressure and temperature (in the ear!). Then he took my passport and my Visa. I paid 2898 (398 dollars) kröner, which is what Americans must pay. He told me this would cover the emergency room visit, but anything else would be extra. Then he sent me back out to the waiting room with a spiffy new bracelet that said my name and had a bar code on it. A kind fellow waiting room patient offered us any help she could provide. Stina borrowed her cell phone and called the couchsurfer we had lined up for the night to explain that we wouldn't make it, 'cause we were in the hospital. We watched very quiet Family Guy, Simpsons, some Stevel Segal and Keenan Ivory Wayans movie, and had just gotten to a Jackie Chan film called The Accidental Spy when an orderly led me to a room just outside of the waiting room where I could lie down on a gurney. They watch TV very quietly since it's all in English and they read the subtitles, I guess. Stina got to dozing on my shoulder after I made her tell me a story promising that all would be well. She reassured me with a story about how my appendicitis was actually a bizarre pregnancy that would have to be resolved after 9 months of pain and a c-section. She could have been more reassuring. I rubbed my belly and jiggled it, and this seemed to ease the pain. I've noticed in past circumstances that showers tend to ease the pain as well. I hypothesize that the nerve endings start to pay attention to the surface sensations and distract my brain from the pain a little bit. The doctor arrived at I don't know what time. As soon as he entered the room, my pain eased a little more. There was something very healing about this humorful Swedish doctor. He felt my belly, listened to my description of the pain and my medical history, and joked about the U2 concert. He told me that the symptoms all added up to a minor flare-up. He said they used to take out all appendices, and he could do it "snip, snip in 10 minutes" but then I might have bowel problems tomorrow or in 20 years. So he came up with two recommendations: 1. He could keep me overnight for observation or 2. He could send me on my way. I said our travel was flexible, and so a day or two, if he recommended it, would be fine... would it cost much? His response... he didn't know. From this point on, I felt very much like I was in an American hospital. Nobody had any inkling how much anything cost. He said he would ask the secretary, but he couldn't imagine it was more than a couple hundred kröner. He left and came back... she didn't know either... she'd tried to find the answer on the internet, too, but couldn't. He said, though, that he would make sure I was sent away with some antibiotics and painkillers as a gift from Gothenburg. That was a funny phrase to me that he mentioned several times. He said "I can't stand here and say Sweden is perfect, it won't cost you anything, but I think so." Then he sat in a chair and chatted with us for a bit, which was really nice to see. Hospitals often make me feel harried and hurried, but I felt like if something was wrong, I would have an opportunity to tell him. I think that's a rare gift that some doctors possess. I've seen it before, and it's one of the best feelings I can get from a doctor. We told him about hitchhiking and I mentioned that if he said we should not do it, we wouldn't. He didn't say that. He poked me once to prove a point... as if to say, "I know this hurts, but it doesn't hurt SOOOO much". He was right, of course.
My mother keeps saying I have a high tolerance for pain... but I wonder if maybe I have a low tolerance. We keep hearing stories now about people having their appendices taken out, but doctors don't want to take mine out.
Later a nurse came in and gave me morphine. I felt mostly better already, but wasn't awake enough to protest.
To conclude, I spent the night in the ward. Stina also got a bed to sleep on. The nurses were very nice, one of them even promised to find out how much a night in the hospital would cost. She never did. I felt much better in the morning, ate breakfast, saw the doctor one more time, took a shower, got antibiotics ("a present from the hospital"), and checked out with the nurse. I have no idea if they're just going to charge my Visa card for the further expenses or if everything was covered in that initial 2898 kröner.

A Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe - Somewhat hard to hear

2009-07-28T13:29:00.000-07:00

Quickest blog post in the west

2009-07-28T03:09:00.000-07:00

Brendan at the campsite in Kinsarvik

Waiting for three hours makes us desperate!

Where we slept in Kinsarvik

The tent we slept in at the medieval festival

Brendan in medieval garb

Me in medieval garb

Some belly dancers at the medieval festival

Or at least it will try to be. I've been meaning every day to write this blog post, but every day seems to get filled up so fast that there has been no time. Blogging requires one to be a little bit anti-social, and that is difficult when surrounded by so many family members. Therefore, I will try to write a long blog very quickly.

We left Copenhagen on the 15th of July. We took the Metro to what was supposed to be outside the city but before the airport, but turned out to be the airport. I wasn't happy about this because it is often difficult to navigate away from an airport via hitchhiking, but thankfully that wasn't the case at Copenhagen Airport. We were able to follow signs leading to a highway entrance and stand by a bus stop to hitchhike. Just using our thumbs, within 15 minutes we had a ride to Sweden. We'd gotten a late start, so it was already 6pm.

Mats, an avid hang-glider, drove us across the bride into Sweden. He lives in Sweden and works in Copenhagen. It is cheaper to live in Sweden and he makes more money in Denmark, so it is a good deal for him. Mats dropped us off at 6:30pm.

Almost instantly we had another ride, this time from two Danish women heading to the summer home of one of them to do some home improvements. They needed to stop at a home improvement store to pick up some materials, and then could take us a fair distance.

At 7:35pm they dropped us off and we got a ride right away from a man named Christian, who was just going a short ways down the road. I think by now we were around Halmstad, Sweden, but honestly I wasn't keeping very good track of where we were exactly so long as we were still on the correct highway (the E-6/E-20).

(From Brendan: at some point in our travels through Sweden, a ride pulled up as we were still getting our gear out of our last ride. I don't have the notebook in front of me, so I'm not sure which ride this was, but that was very thrilling to us.)

Christian was a man with young daughters who seemed convinced the world is becoming a much worse place that will not be as safe for his daughters as it was for him growing up. Christian dropped us off at a truck stop that he said was not a very busy spot, but where we could probably get a nice long ride. It was around 8pm when he dropped us off, and we were not able to get another ride that night. We did, however, have some wonderful wild raspberries and a fun camping night.

The next day, July 16th, we got a ride at 1:10pm with Jasper down the road a little ways. Even thought it was a short ride, it was enough to get us out of a tough hitchhiking spot. Our next ride was with Jerker, pronounced with a soft J sound and much nicer sounding than it looks. He took us another 30 minutes down the road to a gas station.

After a food break, we were hitching again by 3:15pm. An hour and half later, we had a ride with Johann. He dropped us off at 4:40pm at a gas station. Now we were nearly to Göteborg. Our next ride came at 5:45pm from a man named Johan and it turned out to be our last ride of the day, because he took us to the medieval festival in Kungälv, north of Göteborg. He even let us borrow some medieval-looking clothing so we wouldn't feel out of place.

We had a great time at the festival, and I think I'll save the details for another post. The next day, Friday the 17th, we left the festival in the evening to see if we could make it a little ways further while it was still light out. We got a ride at 7:10pm with a lovely family literally just going to the next exit. There we saw another hitchhiker and spoke to him to make sure we weren't invading his space. Turned out he was coming from Oslo and making his way back to Italy, where he was from. He said he'd been having good luck hitchhiking.

Our luck was a little better than his that evening, at least, because we got a ride first. It was another short ride, but our next one was a little longer. We camped near a gas station and woke up the next morning when it started to rain.

By 9:30am the next morning (Saturday the 18th) we were back out there with our thumbs well-rested. We got a ride an hour later with Benny, who didn't speak as much English as many of the younger people we'd been getting rides with, but who was a really nice guy on his way to work. He dropped us off at a fairly dead spot, so we were worried we would have a hard time getting a ride. We needn't have! We had a ride five minutes later with Jobst.

Jobst was on his way to pick up his son, who'd been on a sailing trip. He was kind and offered to share his breakfast with us, but we weren't hungry again yet. He picked us up at 10:40am and dropped us off at 11:10am. Where he dropped us, the E-6 had changed from a 4-lane to a 2-lane highway with a lower speed limit, so we felt safe standing just on the shoulder of the road near a truck pull-out. We stuck out our thumbs there in the pouring rain.

At 11:45 we got a ride with Katarina, who was going to Oslo! We decided to go all the way into the city center with her rather than try to take another tunnel-highway that also headed the direction we wanted to go, in the hopes that there would be more people leaving the city. Katarina was really nice and took us on a 15 minutes tour around Oslo before dropping us off at a gas station on the edge of the city. The gas station was ideally located by a grocery store, so we were able to stock up on some bread and fruit.

We then had a ride with Bernt, a kind older man who told us how people in Norway are wary of picking up hitchhikers because of some recent news stories where people posing as stranded motorists had in fact been thieves preying on the kindness of strangers. He gave us the contact info for one of his sons who lives in Germany when he heard we would be returning there. He also gave us his contact info in case we ran into any trouble and needed to contact him for help. He dropped us off by an entrance for the E-134, which crosses the mountains and ends in Haugesund, near where my relatives live.

Our next ride, though, came from a man who was going quite far, but not on the E-134. His name is Botolv, and he would be taking a highway that also runs west, but north of the E-134. He was going very far, though, so we decided to go all the way with him even though it meant taking a different route. He was a very interesting man to talk to. He is a linguist who works in Oslo at the university. He specializes in place names and is a part of a committee of experts on geographical names for the United Nations. He's moderately famous in that of the one couple we told about him one of them had seen him on TV. We also got to listen to a little bit of The Hobbit on CD in German.

We camped that night in the most beautiful spot. It was near Kinsarvik by a fjord and it was so incredibly lovely. It was raining all night, but we stayed mostly dry in our tent with a tarp on top and another beneath us. The next day, though, even though the spot was so nice to stand at, we were frustrated that it took us three hours to get a ride. Our ride came, finally, from some German tourists who'd been stopped nearby fishing and took pity on us, I think, because they had seen us trying to get a ride the whole hour or so they were parked there.

They dropped us off back on the E-134 and we got a ride within 10 minutes from Ole, a sheep farmer. He drove us into Haugesund even though he wasn't planning to go that far, and let us use his cell phone to reach Heidi and Dag Terje. We couldn't through on their cell phone, so he did some sort of text message search for their home number and we got through. He dropped us off at the bus station there, and Heidi and Dag Terje picked us up and took us to Karmøy Island! Phew.

Cousins, rain, and hiking

2009-07-21T14:44:00.000-07:00

Preikestolen (or Pulpit Rock) is 604 meters above the fjord. The hiking trails are maintained by the Tourism Bureau of Norway (or something like that):

"Why," you may ask, "do we care at all about the Norwegian Tourist Forening?" Because several Norwegians have told us about them very proudly and with good reason: They maintain hundreds of huts around the country that anybody can go and sleep in and that are sometimes stocked with food. The fee is on the honor system, and you leave it in an envelope after your stay.

And to leave you with just a slice of what can happen when you keep contact with the family left in the homeland: Stina was in a room with 1st cousins twice removed, 2nd cousins once removed, 3rd cousins, and 3rd cousins once removed (everybody's eyes are on Ingeborg, Linda-in-the-foreground's one-year-old, eating and making a mess).

1st European Vlog!

2009-07-20T12:23:00.001-07:00

Just to brag a little, that's the t-shirt I won for coming in 2nd at the M2010 Prerelease. Now I have FOUR t-shirts! (And two of them are Magic: the Gathering-related...)

From a laptop in a motor home

2009-07-16T11:06:00.000-07:00

We are riding with Johan, who is taking us to a medieval festival tomorrow! This puts us a little behind in hitchhiking to Karmoy Island, but this is the beauty of hitchhiking and being flexible.

Travels from Hannover to Copenhagen

2009-07-15T03:16:00.000-07:00

It's a very sad thing to lose one's hitchhiking notebook, which we keep so that we don't have to rely solely on our memories when we try to recount our journey. Yet somehow in Duesseldorf it must have fallen out of my pocket somewhere, so this post may not contain all the details it once would have.

We last wrote a thorough blog post when we were in Hannover, over a week ago. We had a great time there. My favorite part about it was riding bikes around town, as I think I may have already mentioned. Leaving Hannover on Tuesday the 7th, we followed advice found on Hitchwiki.org, taking a streetcar well outside the city center and then walking another thirty minutes through lovely fields to get to a Tankstelle.

This is where our memory fails. I believe we had about three rides from Hannover to Bremen, but we can only remember the last one. He was a nice man who told us about several places in Germany we should visit (Hamburg is his favorite) and made one or two disparaging remarks about the French being unfriendly (as so many Germans are wont to do) and noted negative stereotypes about and feelings towards Belgians (some of them stemming from a child pornography ring busted about 10 years ago that reached up into the government). He had a GPS system in his car, and he was kind enough to take us directly to our destination in Bremen. When we arrived around 9pm, our host was away but left a note for us, so we sat at a nearby bench and ate one of our trademark meals--cheese, bread, and apple.

About an hour later our host arrived and we visited with her a bit that night before going to sleep. The next day we wandered all around Bremen in a very touristy way, absolutely loving the tiny streets in the older part of town, and ended the day by eating at the Ratskeller restaurant we posted pictures of before. We left Bremen on Thursday the 9th to make our way back to Duesseldorf for a Magic: the Gathering prerelease we'd heard about when we were there before.

Leaving Bremen, we decided to just walk out of town and hitch along less main roads until we reached the Autobahn. Our first ride was a short one from a woman who dropped us off near a road leading onto the A-1. We walked along the road a little ways until we found a semi-decent place to stand. Soon enough, we had a ride! Sort of...it was the Polizei, coming to tell us we were not allowed to stand there. Now we've had two rides in police cars. They took us to a bus stop outside of an Ikea near an entrance leading to A-1 and said it was okay to stand there. We were just given warnings, not tickets, but they said it could be quite costly to hitchhike illegally in Germany.

Our next ride was from a man going quite far. He was heading towards the Münster area and dropped us off along the 43. We were picked up next by a lovely woman named Ricki and her two daughters. It was her older daughter's birthday and they had just been to large park (riesengrosser Spielplatz) to celebrate. Even though she was heading to Wuppertal, she took us all the way into Duesseldorf and dropped us off at the main station there. We wrote a little birthday story in both German and English while we drove along for the older daughter. (It was about their having a fantasy adventure saving the lonely oldest tree in the area)

Thursday night we stayed with a nice couchsurfer who would have played Settlers of Catan with us if we had had more time. He had family coming to visit, though, and could only host us the one night. On Friday we went in the evening to the game/comics store where we would be playing in the prerelease the next day, and there I left Brendan so he could play some Friday Night Magic. I traveled on to our new hosts' home and got to know them a bit.

Later, Brendan was given a ride home from some Magic players, Tobi and Alex. On the ride there Brendan had found out that our new friend from the week before, Stefan (the one who had told us about the prerelease), lived very close and was hosting a poker night. So Brendan, our host Alwin, Alex, Toby and I headed over to Stefan's place to play. Alwin, Brendan and I took the pot. I came in first, Alwin second, Brendan third. I'm not sure they'll have us for poker again.

Saturday morning Brendan and I headed out for the prerelease. The store, Drachental, is filled with games, comics, and geeks. It was lovely. We paid our entry and the tournament began. I used most of my time for deck-building just carefully reading the cards and asking for help with the German words I didn't understand. Finally, with just a few minutes before play was to begin, one of our new Magic player friends helped me throw together a deck. I did okay, and most importantly had fun. Brendan, though, did so well. He came in second place overall and won nine booster packs. Wow! I was very proud of him.

Magic player, Magic player, Florian, me, Brendan, Stefan,

Alex and Florian

We then traveled with our new friends Alex, Stefan, Florian and Frank to a French festival near the river, where we had plans to meet our hosts. The bunch of us all hung out for the next several hours, then Brendan and I and Stephanie, one of our hosts, traveled back to their place and played some Carcassonne.

On Sunday the 12th after a lovely breakfast with our hosts, we headed out. Alwin kindly gave us a ride to a nearby gas station so we could try to hitch out and head to Copenhagen. We waited there for over two hours before giving up and trying to find a better place to stand. We walked up the road a bit and discovered we were actually in the same spot where we'd stood when we were leaving Duesseldorf before. From this new vantage point, though, we were better able to get the attention of drivers, and soon we had a ride towards Wuppertal, though by now it was already 5pm.

Our ride was with Leo (son) and Hans (father) and they explained that if we were willing to wait, Hans would drop Leo off and then be able to take us a little farther on to a gas station. We were happy to wait. From the Tankstelle, we got a ride within just five minutes from a man headed towards Muenster. He dropped us off at 6:35pm at another Tankstelle, and just a minute later we had a ride with Angelica, who was going to Bremen. She dropped us off at 7:45pm at another Tankstelle and about half an hour later we got a ride to Hamburg with a lovely family.

Before we even left the Tankstelle with Antje and Detlef (who were traveling in separate cars because they'd just been to pick up the car of one of their parents, to try and sell it, I think, or maybe just use it - yes, to sell it - Brendan), they offered us a place to sleep that night. They now feel like another set of parents in Hamburg. They fed us dinner that night and breakfast the next day, and Antje took us to a gas station along the A-1 after breakfast. I know I've mentioned this before, but people's kindness just amazes me! I hope I can be so kind to strangers as our couchsurfing hosts and hitchhiking hosts have been to us.

Taking the A-1 north towards Denmark leads to a ferry, unfortunately. After a very frustrating time of hitching, where it took us two and a half hours to get our first ride, a short one, and another two hours to get our second ride, with one more short ride after that, we arrived at the ferry. It would have been far cheaper for us to avoid the ferry, but we had some hopes that we could hitch a ride onto a car already going on the ferry. However, we were redirected away from the line of cars waiting for the ferry by a ferry employee, who told us where we could buy tickets. So we bought tickets for 18 euros, or about 25 dollars. After such a slow and frustrating day of hitchhiking, this felt like the final blow. We ate some scavenged food, though, and then we both felt a lot better. Yay for dumpster diving, even if it's just trash diving on the ferry.

As the ferry was about to dock, we were wandering around the cars that were about to get off to see if we could get a ride. We succeeded, and a had a nice ride with a woman named Helle who lives in Denmark, but works at the border shop across the ferry in Germany. She took us about a half an hour along the way and ten minutes later we got a ride another half hour along the way with a woman named Karin. Our next ride also came within about ten minutes, from a man named Freddie.

Freddie was going all the way into Copenhagen, and we had a great time riding with him. He was very easy to talk to and by the time we got to Copenhagen he was committed to helping us find our way. He dropped us off at a train station from which we could get to the city center and from there find our way to my friend Marie. Before leaving us, though, he helped us find an ATM, then changed the large bill Brendan got for smaller coins, then helped us buy our tickets.

We got to the main station with no troubles and asked someone how to get to Marie's address. We were told which bus to take and asked the driver to tell us when we arrived at our stop. When we got off the bus, though, we still had no idea where to go, so we just started asking passers-by. The first person had no idea about the address, and the next people, a couple perhaps, didn't either, but the guy of the couple called his parents for internet help. Unfortunately they had a hard time finding it on the internet, so he explained that they lived very nearby and we could actually just walk there and he would look it up himself.

When he and his partner came back down, he explained that he was embarrassed, because the street was just right around the corner and he felt he should have known it. He said his mother was embarrassed as well because she drives down the street every day on her way to work, yet didn't know it. We were just happy that it was, indeed, nearby. He and his partner walked us to Marie's door, and ever since we've been having the loveliest of visits.

Marie has been feeding us and supplying us with tasty treats, and yesterday Marie, her roommate Lene, Brendan and I visited Christiana together. Christiana was created in the seventies when squatters took over what had been a military base. After we visited there, Marie treated us to a picnic lunch along a canal. We went next to the palace and hung out near there by a fountain for awhile, then made our way back.

Marie, Lena and Brendan in Christiana

Marie (and Brendan in the Pissoir in the background)

Brendan, me and Lene in the fountain

That brings us to today! I've been writing this post over an hour, I think, but soon we will head out. We are going next to my relatives in Norway, and we plan to camp along the way. I think we will make it there by the 18th at least, and hopefully sooner. Speaking of which, I should probably write them with another update. Haj haj!

Pictures, out of order

2009-07-09T02:56:00.000-07:00

Wine barrel at Ratskeller (restaurant under the Rathaus) in Bremen.

Ratskeller

In front of the Bremerstadtmusikanter statue.

Rheinturm in Duesseldorf.

The line we waited in to get tickets to see Twelfth Night in Central Park.

A kid running through the fountain in Washington Square Park.

Brendan waiting in line to get tickets. We camped out from 6am-1pm.

Brendan and me with my twin-cousin Gladriel (she is 8 days younger than me) and her husband Jared.

The funny security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He would act like a zombie when little kids approached the Temple of Dendur (sp?).

Here we are in front of the Jekyll and Hyde Club, the restaurant where I celebrated my 17th birthday. We happened to walk by it by chance and met a nice 13ish year old who raved about how much fun she'd just had at dinner there.

A pretty church in New York City.

The ceiling in the Rose Reading Room at the public library in NYC.

The police department in Times Square.

Brendan in Times Square.

Grüsse aus Hannover

2009-07-05T12:06:00.000-07:00

We're doing a much better job of practicing our German now.

We arrived in Hannover yesterday evening after a long day of slow hitchhiking ("trampen" or "per Anhalter"). It was difficult to leave Düsseldorf because while we stood in a high-traffic area, there wasn't much room for anyone to pull over. There was, however, a light, and finally after two hours waiting as we walked forward to see if there was a better spot to stand, Brendan held out our sign and a man at the red light said he was headed our way. Brendan sat up front and held a conversation in German with him, and about 30 minutes later he dropped us off at a Tankstelle (gas station).

At the Tankstelle we again waited a nice long while before walking around to see if there was a better place for us to stand. We discovered we were on the side where people could come and park and rest, but that there was a whole other gas pump on the other side and we'd probably been missing many potential rides.

We moved over to this other side and held up our sign that said "Hanover" (there was only room for one N) on one line, and "A-1/2 Ost" on the other. In this new spot we were in sight of several trucks parked nearby, and one truck driver came over to talk to us. Brendan talked to him and I understood little of what they said, but Brendan told me afterward that the truck driver said he would be there for the weekend.

We kept sticking our thumbs out and holding up our sign at cars passing by, and then another truck driver came over and talked with Brendan. A little later the first truck driver came back and had another conversation with Brendan. Maybe you can tell by now that the German is coming back more slowly for me. Brendan told me that the two truck drivers were offering to take us to the next gas station, which was a busier one, but each of them could only take one of us. They said they only had one extra seat each, but they were going to the same place and one would follow the other on the road. Brendan and I discussed in English whether we should take them up on this offer, and we decided we would.

We were nervous about this because neither one of us is carrying a cell phone, so if somehow we got quite separated, we would be in a fix. We both had a good impression of the truck drivers, though, and decided we would trust them. If we did get separated, we would find internet as soon as possible and email one another.

Off we went in our separate rides. This was an excellent chance for me to practice German because my driver did not speak any English, and I didn't have Brendan to carry the conversation for me. I wrote down the license plate number of the truck Brendan was in, just in case for some reason I needed it. Brendan told me later he kept checking the rearview mirror to make sure the truck I was in was still visible. We had our guard up, and I think that's okay, but it is also important to trust people. Our instincts proved correct that these guys were honest and safe, and about 15 minutes or so later they dropped us off at a much busier gas station.

Within ten minutes or so we had a ride, finally, all the way to Hannover. A man and woman around our age were headed to Berlin and would take the A-2, which also passes by Hannover. They very kindly took us all the way into town, to the Hauptbahnhof (main train station). From there we were able to find our way to our host by foot, and here we are.

Last night after we arrived we were introduced to an old German tradition where a craftsperson (in this case a carpenter), after completing an apprenticeship, may embark on a three-year-long journey. During this time they are not allowed to return to their home area, nor can they carry a phone, though they can call home. They must travel by hitchhiking and seek jobs where they go. First, though, there is a grand party to send them off, and we got to attend such a party last night, for a friend of our host.

At the party, there is an auction for all the items the carpenter will need on his journey, and friends and family bid for them. Afterwards, the money and the items are given to him. One of the items auctioned off is an earring, and another is a nail. After the auction, the nail is used to pierce the carpenter's ear, and the earring is placed in the hole. This was somewhat unsettling to watch, especially since it took awhile for them to get the earring into the hole and there was blood running down his ear. It's kind of hard to see, but in this picture the nail is already through the ear. The wood stick is his walking stick.

We had a great time getting to know the friends of our host, whose name is Sebastian, and drinking beer and eating yummy food. In between this party and returning to this party, we attended the birthday party of a Couchsurfing friend of Sebastian's. This whole night, we were riding borrowed bikes and feeling like real Europeans as we rode around.

I must end now as it's bedtime, but soon we'll post more pictures from New York, plus pictures from Düsseldorf and Hannover.

To Hannover!

2009-07-04T03:45:00.000-07:00

Today we leave the comfort of Düsseldorf for the excitement of Hannover... Last night we visited a brewery (Uerige for the aficionados) and Bobby, a pub of ancient and glorious lineage (since the 1st half of the 20th century, I believe). For those who might be confused, we are NOT joining the hitchhiking contest, and instead are doing our best to let go and let the winds of whimsy blow us where we will. So next is Hannover... then, who knows! We'll probably come back to Düsseldorf for the 2010 prerelease next weekend if the Magic-playing guys we met last night actually write us an email.

Entschuldigung, haben Sie die Uhrzeit?

2009-07-03T07:03:00.000-07:00

Ah, Düsseldorf. After a long plane ride, one should always take a few days to put one's feet up and relax. We thought we'd hit the ground running (reference our itinerary of a few days ago), but this seems like a much better plan. When we arrived here on Tuesday morning, we didn't know where we were going to stay. I had sent out some Couchsurfing requests, but had only received a "no" and nothing from the others by the time we had to leave Michael's mother's house. We arrived around 8 am local time, 2 am to us, and went through all the customs and security and everything half asleep.
We soon realized we were so totally exhausted that we couldn't manage to make obvious choices, let alone even think up some smart solutions. We wandered outside to see where Düsseldorf might be. We laid down on the grass to rest. Little green bugs hopped around on us, and we were twitchy enough that we couldn't find peace. We wandered back inside.
We wandered around the airport. We wandered to the information booth, pretended to speak German, wandered out, wandered back to the information booth again... and did that about 3 or 4 times until the woman helping us began to smile knowingly when we approached. I used the 5 Euros I had left over from 3 years ago to get some change. We plunked 50 cents into the internet kiosk and used 3 of our 5 minutes getting from one website to the next, one minute blogging that last crazy (but hopefully reassuring) blog, and one minute taking down a name and phone number that Couchsurfer Robin sent us. For though he could not host us, he delivered unto us our saviors.
After some shenanigans with the phone we managed to call Chris, and over a period of time during which a nap, a train ride, and some pretending to speak German happened we reached his abode, where Ieva let us in. Ieva and Chris have made us feel quite comfortable here. We play games, chat about hitchhiking, travel, school, Twilight, breakfast, and couchsurfing, and hang out like old friends. Yesterday evening they took us along to a dinner party. We ate delicious veganerrific ratatouille, watermelon, and salad. We übed our Deutsch. We played charades (and they all played in English for us, though we tried to push for German). We met Kathi, our host, who is a costume designer and currently works for a costume shop as a seamstress building for theatres all over the world, including the Metropolitan Opera in New York. She and Stina and I talked shop a bit, and decided that if Stina and I move to Berlin, we'll produce a show together, and she'll make it fit in her schedule somehow. We're thinking Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead or Waiting for Godot (which because of the Tonys we now know is pronounced GOD-oh). I'd also like to make something by Thornton Wilder. I think I should avoid Ionesco and other non-English-language plays because if I'm doing it in Germany, I should either do the play in its original tongue or in German... and I could never translate from French to German, and I'm sure I'd butcher Brecht in German... maybe not, though. Anybody else out there have a suggestion? Nikki, want to visit Germany and maybe direct a play? Anybody else want to join us? Apartments in Berlin are only 250€ ($325)

Bis dann!
Brendan

In Duesseldorf!!!

2009-07-01T01:39:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone!
We are safe and well in Europe!
Wish us good travels!

Tentative Itinerary

2009-06-30T09:31:00.000-07:00

Due to popular demand (my parents) here is an itinerary that we reserve the right to change dramatically and whimsically at the drop of a hat:

Arrive Duesseldorf, Deutschland on July 1st 7:10 AM local time
July 3rdish Arrive Senj, Croatia
July 6thish finish hitchhiking contest
July 11thish Arrive Copenhagen
July 15thish Arrive Norway
Early August or somewhere in here visit Anna in The Netherlands
August 15th Arrive Ireland
September 1st Arrive Continent
September 5th-October 10th visit (in mostly West-to-East order):
Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece
October 15th Arrive Istanbul (or other part of Turkey)
November 20th - either continue on to Asia or fly home for the holidays.

Hitchhiking and New York City Pictures

2009-06-30T08:33:00.000-07:00

This is where we best like to hitchhike. In FRONT of no thumbing it signs.

Just like that! Beautiful!

Ooooo... Dan, I have to go to the bathroom, too!

I got your nose!

Muskrat along the road - found at an "Oasis" (See earlier post)

That's really us with Anne Hathaway, I'm not kidding.

And there's Nic!

Isn't Stina an elegant architectural photographer?

New Jersey across the Hudson at Sunset

Goodbye, New York City

Sorry there are not more words in this post, but we're frantically doing all our errands before we go get our plane.

We're in New York City!

2009-06-26T11:09:00.000-07:00

Tuesday morning in Toledo (really, Sylvania) after we grocery shopped for bread and apples, a grapefruit and a mini-notebook for taking hitchhiking notes, Dan drove us out to an I-80 entrance. It was an entrance for both east and west, so we made a sign that said "EAST" and stuck out our thumbs at about 11:30am. It was a very low-traffic entrance, so after a few minutes we decided to walk a little closer to the actual turnpike and catch people coming from the other direction as well. Within minutes, a cop pulled up and very kindly told us we couldn't stand on turnpike property and hitchhike. He said if it were up to him, we were standing in a safe place and he didn't mind, but it was against the law. He directed to where we could legally stand. This was around 12:10pm.

We moved to our new spot, which seemed more promising, at least, than our original location. Here, though, we were greeted with the rudest responses to our hitchhiking that we've encountered. One youth flipped us off, another man made a crude sexual gesture, and then another person flipped us off. It was disheartening. At 1:13pm another cop stopped. He apologetically said he wouldn't normally hassle us, but Joe Biden was going to be passing near us on the turnpike, so we needed to move along. This is the first time we've been moved because we pose a security threat. Or maybe they just thought the vice-president would find us unsightly? Anyway, we ended up moving to our original location and its few cars.

It was very hot outside and when the few cars passing us kept on not stopping, we were growing a little dismayed. Then Adam came to our rescue at 2:13pm and said he could take us nearly all the way to Pennsylvania. We were with him for about two hours and learned that he repairs refrigeration units for major companies across the midwest. He is on the road a lot and said he gets tired of it, especially because he is married and has a young daughter at home. He told us about http://www.slacker.com/, a free radio website. He dropped us off just before I-80 splits with 76 at 4pm.

We spent nearly an hour at the rest stop there, fixing up sandwiches and resting. I had a horrible headache, likely from so much sun exposure and not drinking enough water, so I hydrated a lot and then we headed out to thumb. Around 6:25pm two guys stopped, but when we said we were trying to get to New York City, they said they weren't going that far, they were going to Penn State, and then they oddly and slowly drove away as we were telling them we'd be happy for any ride east.

The ways things work out while hitchhiking often seem meant to be, though, and it may have been because we need to meet Jake and Kati that those two guys drove away. Jake and Kati, on their way home from a day at an amusement park, picked us up at 7:22pm. They weren't going far, they said, only about 60 miles. To us, 60 miles is a decently long ride, so were quite happy. Plus, they were close to our age and seemed really interested in our trip, and were very interesting people themselves. Jake is a parks manager and gave us his card so we could contact him if we got into any problem at a Pennsylvania state park. Kati recently finished her degree in education and they'd been out celebrating that she had just gotten a teaching job.

They dropped us off in Barkeyville, PA, apologizing that it wouldn't be helpful to us for them to host us for the night because they lived another 30 miles or so off of I-80. We thought we might try to get one more ride after eating dinner at an all-you-can-eat diner there, but we were happy to pitch our tent if need be. After seating ourselves in the diner, though, we got a call from Jake offering to host us for the night, and promising that he and Kati could drive us back out to I-80 in the morning. We happily accepted and bought Subway sandwiches while waiting for them to return.

They made us feel so comfortable at their place, treating us like good friends, sharing wine that night and making breakfast for us the next morning. Our second night on the road, and we had another bed to sleep in. The kindness of strangers keeps astounding me and reaffirming my trust in people. We had a great time getting to know Jake and Kati and learning about their lives. And I think they enjoyed learning about ours.

The next day they took us back to Barkeyville at 12:30pm and after asking one trucker to no avail, we walked over the I-80 east entrance and stuck out our thumbs. At first, we weren't right by the entrance, so one kind woman stopped but wasn't heading onto I-80. After that we moved closer to the entrance so people wouldn't be confused about where we wanted to go. At 12:38, a trucker was getting on and seemed to be passing us, so we waved good bye. Lo and behold, he then slowed down and stopped for us!

Van, the 32 year old trucker, was heading to Waterbury, Connecticut, which is only 87 miles from New York City. He was happy to take us all the way there, or drop us off earlier, as we wished. We talked books and movies with him, and he invited us to come and play X-box with him if we ever pass his way again. I hope we do, because I think it would be really fun to play Rock Band with him. We asked him to drop us in Danbury so we could go to New Canaan for Mike Chmiel's show (Mike was a teacher and administrator at First Stage Milwaukee when I went there). The earliest train from Danbury to New Canaan didn't leave until 8:59pm, though, so we'd never have made it. From Danbury we took the train to New York City. By this time it was about 7:30pm or so. We'd spent the whole day with Van enjoying the scenery of Pennsylvania.

At the train station in Danbury while waiting for the train to arrive, we met a friendly, most thoughtful cop named David. He is from New York, and told us we've got to go to McSorley's, the oldest bar in the US. There's more I could tell you about David - his politics and his attitude towards the world were refreshingly down-to-earth, and he had interesting things to say about the history of Danbury and interesting stories to tell about his life as a cop, a carpenter and a human being. And I've got to tell you what we've done in New York so far, but I'm nearly out of time on this computer in the Rose Reading Room at the New York Public Library, and I still have to print our itinerary to Germany. So long, then, and sorry for any typos.

Harold, Mike, Amy, Dan

2009-06-22T18:55:00.000-07:00

We begin again! Our travels today took us through 4 states in 5 rides.
The first, from Wisconsin to Illinois, came from my parents. My mother (and father, too, I'm sure, but he's not as vocal about it) worried about us all the way down, and was even making contingency plans for if we didn't get a single ride all day.
They dropped us at an Oasis (a gas station and shopping area along the tollway - significant because one usually has to pay to exit the tollway, but since you're staying on the tollway and there's no access from the oasis to the rest of the world, it's free to get off at). We wandered over to the entrance, pausing to ask a truck driver and hearing he was going some other way. We stuck our thumbs out, and saw nary 5 minutes go buy before Harold stopped to pick us up. Harold is a carpentry contractor at O'Hare who was commuting back to his Indiana home. Harold took us our first 60 miles, and got us off to a quick start. He spent his teens in the Philippines. He worries about his kids and where they're going.
In Indiana, we got a ride from Mike after only 6 minutes. Mike loves to travel, and told us about the places he wants to go. He took us about 30 miles, to Laporte, IN. Mike was involved in gangs. He worries about his kid and how he feels about where he is.
Mike dropped us at a pretty dead entrance, so we waited on the side of the highway, in the grass median between the entrance and the roadway. Across the road, a dead car was being towed. After about 15 minutes, an official looking truck slowly approached.
"Are we going to be hassled?" I asked Stina. "I think..." I answered myself, but as the truck arrived and stopped, the face inside didn't look like it had any chastising to do.
"Where are you trying to get to?" Amy asked.
"New York City," I responded.
"I can't take you that far, but I can take you to the end of my zone, about 20 miles."
As we rode with Amy, we learn that she had, indeed, saved us from probable harassment. She'd overheard a co-worker radioing in to alert the Highway staff to the presence of 2 hitchhikers, and so she stopped to help us out instead of leaving us to the mercy of the highway patrol. Now that's what I call good citizenship! Amy likes to go to Miami. She referenced La Cage aux Folles (okay, not really... she referenced The Birdcage), and we talked a little about Albert. I'm sure she, like all people, worries, but it didn't come up. I don't think she has children either... see a pattern?
She dropped us off at an Oasis, and just as we got out of the truck, Dan approached us. He'd seen us earlier, and briefly paused to learn more. We took advantage of the opportunity and asked him for a ride. He obliged. He thought maybe we were Phishheads (odd, since Harold had dropped us off at an Oasis, and a man exiting the Oasis with two dogs had asked us about the fish; were we there because of fish...?). We are not, but we learned about Phish the band and that there had been a big concert this past weekend in the Alpine Valley, WI. Apparently there's currently a wave of hippies without cars exiting the area en masse, and so the assumption will be that a hitchhiker was at the concert. Not a bad reputation to have, no matter how false, if other Phishheads feel an affinity for you. Dan seems a reluctant, but most generous host. After giving us a ride, he offered to let us pitch our tent in his yard, then seemed to wrestle with himself, and ultimately opened his home to us, letting us sleep in the luxurious guest bedroom, offering us towels and this here internet that I'm using. He's offered to give us a ride back to the freeway in the morning. Dan has an adorable cat, works in insurance, travels regularly, and gave us a window into the world of a Phishhead. He worries that his neighbors would worry what their kids would think [about us camping on his lawn] and whether or not his pets get enough attention.
And so tomorrow morning we'll go grocery shopping and then head onwards towards NYC. If things keep going at this rate, we'll be in New York by Wednesday! Wish us luck!

A week and change in Wisconsin

2009-06-19T19:55:00.000-07:00

I'm writing to you from the wilds of southeastern Wisconsin. This week has been an upturn for me. I began the week with some sort of illness, a fever and cough. My mother worried that the respiratory illness had to do with my appendicitis, and we almost went to the emergency room when my fever hit 102.4. Luckily, a little tylenol on day 3 of the illness and a steady recovery since then allowed me to attend my regularly scheduled doctor's appointment on Monday. Dr. Froehlich told me the illness was unrelated to my appendicitis. My dad thinks I had the swine flu (Wisconsin has the highest incidence of H1N1 of any U.S. state).

I finally left my cloud of illness on Tuesday, and realized that my mother was in Madison for the week at a writer's conference in Madison. Stina and I spent most days lounging about the house, avoiding mosquoitos and going on brisk walks with the dogs (running past the pond to escape the mosquitos). We thank our luck stars that we're getting married in October 2010, after mosquito season.

On Wednesday I started to show an interest in being a useful member of society, and managed to make Stina one of her birthday dinners, a delightful task I've been catching up with for the past several days. On Thursday I managed to acquire the presence of good friends Wiley and Nicole for a little RPG action. They'll return in the morning for the final installation of our game.

Wiley may (fingers crossed) join us for part of our tramping through Europe.

I've seen some family here: the Bruces on the day we arrived; Delmer while I was sick, and we were just able to reconnect with my family at my uncle's 60th birthday party: David, Roseann, Sarah, Betsy, Delmer, Helen, and extended family, including Stina's first-cousin-once-remove-in-law-in-law-to-be (or, as we say in Wisconsin, "a shirttail relation").

And so, another day passes, and we get this much closer to my whole body wellness and our next journey. We're leaving on Monday for NYC and will leave NYC on June 30th (with my appendix still intact) for Dusseldorf and lands beyond. Michael (of Freeballin fame) will let us sleep at his mother's home in NYC.

After Europe we plan to move to L.A. so I can pursue my dreams of professional acting... then on to the wedding and back to Seattle if the film industry doesn't love me like I hope it will.

Love It! and you,

Brendan

The Choices We Make

2009-06-12T19:32:00.000-07:00

Guess what I spent all day doing? Loading hay bales onto the back of a truck. If you guessed we're not in Seattle anymore, you are right. Brendan had a follow-up appointment on Monday and the doctor said he was looking good and it would be fine for us to travel. This doctor even said that he doesn't recommend Brendan has his appendix taken out as long as there aren't any more problems with it. We are taking his advice to heart so far, but also keeping a close eye on Brendan's health. Right now he is running a slight fever and has a cough, but no pain in the appendix area. We think he may have just caught something from someone, because we did just spend two days on a bus traveling from Washington to Wisconsin. Brendan has a doctor's appointment this coming Monday with the Weinhold family physician, so they'll check everything and make sure he's really okay.

As soon as we found out we were cleared for travel, we started packing up our things and making plans to leave the next morning. My sister Amelie and I treated my dad to an early Father's Day treat of dinner and a movie that evening since I won't be there to celebrate with him on the 21st. Tuesday morning, we were off! My parents drove us to the Everett bus station and we headed out at 10:10am. We arrived in Milwaukee around 8:30am Thursday morning, where Brendan's dad picked us up. We've already had one delicious dinner at our favorite pizza place, Tomaso's, and we played mini golf last night. And today I worked my butt off and I'm now going to reward myself with sleep. Good night.

Hanging in Everett...and in the hospital!

2009-05-30T20:57:00.000-07:00

I'll get to that hospital part, but I'll start with some of the other activities we've been up to. Last weekend was very busy. We volunteered at the Folklife Festival on Friday, the 22nd, all morning. We were asked to come at 8:45am to help at a pre-festival event for sponsors. We showed up, bleary-eyed and tailless, to find out they didn't really need us at that event so we could go to festival services and see what else they needed us to do. At least we found a good, free parking space since we got there that early. We were then sent over to an information booth to help run it, and then we were greeters. It was fun to see the festival from the very beginning, but my lord we were tired by the time we left.

That evening we baby-sat one of our favorite two year olds and had so much fun with her that she didn't want to go to bed. She made us feel loved. When we got "home" to our friends' apartment we checked our email and found out our friends were returning Saturday afternoon, not Sunday like we had expected. This threw us into a frenzy of tidying and trying to figure out how we would handle the next day. See, we were both scheduled to work a one-day, all-day project to help convert WaMu to Chase, but now we needed to pick up Jesse and Larisa and their baby in the middle of that. Brendan left a message for our team lead and we just hoped we could work out some way to do everything.

Saturday morning we both showed up for the job, and our team lead said the higher-ups hadn't yet figured out what to do about our predicament. We hoped that Brendan could start the job, then leave to pick up our friends, then come back to finish the job. Soon, though, we got word that they didn't want him to start the project at all if he couldn't stay for the whole thing. So Brendan took off to finish up a bit more cleaning, and I stayed to work for the day. We divided it that way because I don't know how to drive a stick shift (a sad fact that must someday be remedied), so I couldn't be the one to pick them up.

The work was easy and boring because it involved a lot of sitting around and waiting for things to be tested, but the people I was working with were nice and I got to tell them about this very blog. Jesse and Larisa and Ciprian returned safely from Romania/Italy and we visited with them that evening for a little while before they crashed into bed. We stayed that night at their place still, and all of us went to a birthday party on Sunday for our friends' one year old. Sunday was a beautiful day to be outdoors celebrating life. Even the butterfly balloon wanted to play, so it took off and we watched it fly far away. Can you see it? It quickly became a speck.

We also spent Sunday night at Jesse's and Larisa's and on Monday my sister Amelie picked us up and the three of us went back to Folklife, this time to enjoy from the spectator end. We had lunch first at Bamboo Garden, then wandered over to the storytelling room, then to hear a fiddle/guitar band, then over to the hospitality room. The hospitality room was set up for volunteers and performers, for them to hang out and get free beverages and snacks. Since we had been volunteers, we had the special purple buttons that got us and a guest in. Later we met up with Adam and Lena and baby and co. and listened to ska music, amongst other things. Brendan and I went to the front of the stage where the ska bands were playing and joined in the rhythmic jump-dancing. It was great exercise.

After Folklife we went back to Jesse's and Larisa's and loaded all our stuff into Amelie's car since we planned to spend the rest of the week at her place in Everett. On Tuesday Brendan spent some time sorting through Magic cards, working on his deck for the Grand Prix, then we headed over to my parents' place to hang out. Brendan had started to feel bad, the bad-abdominal-pain-type-bad, but when we got to my parents' he took some Advil and felt well enough a little later to eat dinner.

On Wednesday Brendan felt sick all day. It was the same kind of pain he'd had the year before, but since it had gone away then, we figured it would go away again. I bought him some popsicles and Gatorade so he wouldn't get dehydrated, them Amelie and I went hiking to Explorer Falls. If I'd known what was going on in his body, I probably wouldn't have left. As it was, though, Amelie and I got to see this (photo found here on flickr):

On Thursday Brendan still felt ill, but he thought it was getting a little better. I had lunch with my friend Miranda and on my way, walking to meet her, this little girl that hangs out in Amelie's neighborhood approached me. This is the conversation we had while I was walking:

First the girl says hi to a passing car. I assume she knows the driver. Then she crosses the street (on rollerblades) and approaches me, followed by her friend who remains silent.

Girl: Hi!
Me: Hello.
Girl: Are you in 8th grade?
Me: No, I graduated from high school a long time ago.
Girl: Oh. Are you in college?
Me: No, I graduated from college too. I'm 27.
Girl: Oh. You look like an 8th grader.
Me: (Laughing) Well, that's good right? It means when I'm 40 I'll look 20.
Girl: Yeah.
Me: What grade are you in?
Girl: 6th.
Me: Are you out of school already? (It was 11:30am and I wondered why she wasn't in school. She misinterpreted my question)
Girl: No, we still have two weeks before summer break.
Me: Ah. I bet you're excited.
Girl: Yeah. (Pause) Watch out, there's a dead bird ahead.
Me: Yeah, I know. I saw it the other day.
Girl: The crows keep picking at it. We wanted to bury it, but we don't have a place.
Me: Oh, well, that's nice of you.
Girl: We throw rocks at the crows when we see them by it.
Me: I don't see it anymore.
Girl: It's in the grass. The crows keep moving it from the grass to the sidewalk and back to the grass.
Me: Oh. (Pause) Yeah, now I see it.
Girl: Well, bye!
Me: Bye.
Girl: Have a great day!
Me: Okay, thanks. You too.

As she was saying goodbye, a car passed and as she and her friend turned around, I heard her say to her friend "Shoot! I missed saying hi to that car!"

It was a bizarre exchange.

Later that day I left Brendan watching movies at Amelie's place, and I went over to my parents' for dinner. Amelie came over too and then she and I went back to her place. Brendan was just finishing a movie and was planning on going to sleep when I felt his forehead. It was incredibly hot. Amelie got a thermometer out and his temperature checked in at 102.8. I didn't think it could be right. Brendan didn't feel like he had a fever and that just seemed so high. So I shook the thermometer down and checked again. Still 102.8. That called for a mom's opinion, so I called mine. She said she thought we should go to the hospital. Brendan agreed, so off we went to the emergency room at the Colby Campus of Providence Hospital. This was at 10pm.

He was triaged almost immediately and taken back to a shared room. Then we had to wait for a little while before a nurse came and got him going on fluids and took a urine sample and a blood sample. Another hour or so after that a doctor came to see us and when he heard how Brendan was feeling and did a brief exam he said he was pretty sure it was appendicitis, but he wanted to run a CAT scan. Within an hour that happened, then another hour or so later we got the results and it was indeed appendicitis. Surprisingly to us, though, it also showed that the appendix had already ruptured, and had an abscess, so instead of operating right away, they wanted to start Brendan on a course of antibiotics to make the inflammation go down.

That's when Brendan got moved to what's known as the "penthouse," or the 8th (and top) floor of the hospital, to his very own room. And that's where we are still. Brendan is on antibiotics and painkillers, and we are still in the "watch and wait" phase of things. If he responds well to the antibiotics (and he seems to be doing so), he will probably be released tomorrow (Sunday) and can schedule an appendectomy for a later date. This is the preferred course of action, because they want the inflammation to go down so the surgery won't have to be very invasive. If things don't go well and the antibiotics don't keep working, they may have to do the appendectomy now anyway. The more time we spend here, though, the less likely it seems that will happen.

The next time a doctor comes to visit, we'll ask if it's okay for Brendan to travel by bus to Wisconsin. We're scheduled to leave Monday, but we'll probably postpone by at least a day or two so we can see how he handles being out of the hospital. If all goes well, though, we'll carry forth with our travels and take a lot of documentation of this hospital visit with us in case his appendix freaks out again while we're in Europe. Ideally it will stay calm until we get back and can schedule the appendectomy to take place here at Providence. We've met a lot of doctors and nurses here and everyone is very capable and kind.

In other news, have you heard our latest life plan? The more I was applying for jobs and trying to make myself seem appealing to employers, the more I wanted to be doing something else. Our dream of opening a store someday began to sound more and more like something we should do now, rather than waiting. So that's what we're going to try and do. I don't know exactly when, because we're still not sure how long we'll be overseas, or how, but we're both really excited about this. It probably means delaying our dream to buy a house, but it will firmly establish us in the Seattle area. We're determined and intelligent people, so I believe we can do it no matter how hard it seems at the outset.

That's the scoop, folks. Never a dull moment.

Spending time in Seattle

2009-05-12T12:49:00.000-07:00

This blog post is dedicated to my sister-in-law Naomi, who faithfully reads our blog (she is our only actual blogspot follower), and who reminded me that we haven't blogged in a long time. Today is her birthday. Happy birthday, Naomi!

We decided at the end of April to stay in Seattle through the month of May. This decision had many factors. One was that we have the opportunity to apartment-sit for our friends through May 24. We have a home of our own and a car at our disposal and it has been wonderful to have this extra time and this space to visit with people.

Another factor was that we realized while traveling around the US how much we love Seattle. We would love to buy a house here and have Seattle continue to be our home base, and now is a great time for first-time home buyers to get in on the market. However, we don't have jobs and getting them is the first step toward settling in Seattle. So we decided to use this month to look for work. I've been applying to organizations I want to support, such as the University of Washington, the Pacific Science Center, and other non-profits in Seattle. If I were to get a job offer, we would either significantly revise the rest of our trip or postpone it. And if not, we will continue with our trip as planned, except we will take the bus to Wisconsin in order to get there more speedily, and probably spend a little less time at our destinations between Wisconsin and New York.

Yet another factor is that there is a Magic: the Gathering competition at the end of the month. Brendan wants to get into the competitive Magic playing scene and this is a good opportunity for him to try it out, and possibly win a small chunk of money. We are also making a little money doing odd jobs this month. Tomorrow I'll be babysitting for a friend, Brendan has been substitute-teaching at YTN, and in a couple weeks we'll be doing a one-day computer job for Washington Mutual's transition to Chase.

With the rest of our time, we are enjoying spending time with friends and family. A little over a week ago my sister Amelie, Brendan and I had lunch with Amelie's and my second cousins. I connected with them via Facebook while we were in New Orleans and am so glad we got to meet in person. This trip has shown us how much family we have all around the country. There is something extra special about staying with people you don't know, but with whom you do have a shared history.

On Sunday, May 3rd we followed through on something we'd told one of our hitchhiking rides we would do. Remember our post about an older man who told us all about his nutcracker collection? He mentioned a nutcracker museum in Leavenworth and said the woman who owns it is a collector friend of his and a member of the same nutcracker club. We went to Leavenworth with our friend Nikki, found the museum and met Arlene Wagner the nutcracker collector friend, and saw her amazing collection. There are nutcrackers there from thousands of years ago. And there was Karl.

Meet Karl.

Karl is a trickster.

We spent the rest of that day enjoying Leavenworth, the river that runs through it, and the beautiful day.

Last Friday we went camping on Camano Island with Amelie and several friends. It was the perfect weekend for it. The moon was full on Friday night and so beautiful shining over the Puget Sound, and the weather Saturday was sunny and warm.

On Mother's Day all my siblings and their spouses and offspring and Brendan and I got together and took my parents out for a late lunch at Ivar's in Mukilteo. It overlooks the water and we could watch the ferry to Whidbey coming in and going out.

Mama and Daddy

My sister Jennifer and her son Liam

Jennifer's husband Jeremey, and their kids Erin and David

My brother Aaron and his wife, Naomi

Aaron and Naomi's kids, Juliann and Race

Race and me

Brendan and Amelie, showing off their coloring

It is so wonderful to have more time in Seattle to catch up with people! The first few weeks of April just flew by and were mostly spent hanging out with my parents and family and friends in Everett. It was great to spend time with all of them, but it was hard to get together with friends in Seattle. Staying this extra month has given us the chance to relax into Seattle again and see friends we would otherwise have missed. If you're reading this and you haven't seen us yet, call us! We will definitely be around through May 31st, and possibly longer if something pans out job-wise.

The last leg of the journey north

2009-04-21T00:49:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to write this for a long time, while the memories were still fresh, but, well, no excuses. Here is the story of our trip from Arcata to Seattle.

Alyssa gave us a ride to a busy 101 entrance in Arcata and we stuck out our thumbs. A passer-by told us we'd have better luck if we had dreads, but I think that would only be true in Humboldt County. Ten minutes later we had a ride with a long-bearded man and his schnauzer, Hagfish. He moved to the area from Illinois, got his medical marijuana card and described life in Humboldt County as "freedom." He dropped us off near McKinleyville, where we wrote and recorded what you've already heard of the hitchhiker's song.

A couple and their 7 kids picked us up next. They saw us and passed us in the first place. We remember them giving us the hand symbol for "little ways" and looking hopefully after them as they drove off. I guess our obvious disappointment that they hadn't stopped paid off, because they turned around and came back for us. Their kids were very well-behaved and the two or so year old sitting beside me adorably showed me her toys and her snacks.

They dropped us off just a couple exits down, at kind of a dead freeway entrance near Trinidad. We decided to walk out and stand on the grassy strip between the entrance and the freeway, so people coming from both directions could see us. About fifteen minutes later we got a ride with guy in a truck with Oregon plates. We were hopeful he might take us far, but it turned out he was just borrowing the truck from his brother and was only going a very short ways. I think it might have been one of our shortest rides, actually. We were only in the car with him for three minutes. His truck rumbled so loudly it was hard to carry on any kind of conversation. By the way, he saw us as he came down the freeway (Brendan isn't sure this is true, though) and pulled over onto the shoulder for us.

Still in the Trinidad area, we walked out again to the grassy strip between the freeway and the entrance. I don't remember if the next person that picked us up was coming from the freeway or from the entrance (entrance again, thinks Brendan), but in any case we got picked up fifteen minutes later by a guy headed to pick up his daughter from her mom's house. He had been out kayaking with a friend in the ocean that morning and had seen whales and dolphins and seals. It made me want to go kayaking so badly! He took us beyond his destination, to a spot where he often drops off hitchhikers.

He dropped us off where 101 reduces to 2 lanes from 4, and told us it's legal for people to walk along the road when it's two lanes. It really looked like an ideal spot. It had a beautiful view, for one, but more importantly there was plenty of room for cars to stop, and they had plenty of time to see us as they rounded a wide curve. Yet this is the spot where we began to record a video about how frustrated we were, because it took us more than an hour to get a ride. We couldn't understand it. Lots of people were passing us, probably 7-10 a minute, and we were in an area where a lot of people hitchhike. But just as we started to record the video, where we were going to say that sometimes there's no way to tell what makes a spot good or not, someone pulled over.

He was a 19 year old from Eureka who was on his way to Oregon to see a friend, a friend-with-benefits type friend. He could take us all the way to Roseburg, Oregon. We talked about a variety of topics with him at first, like what he was doing (trying to find a better job than the retail one he had, thus staying off pot for awhile so he would be clean for drug testing), what kind of music he and we liked (he also grew up listening to oldies and introduced us to the group Cream. I told him he would probably enjoy Three Dog Night), and what he was studying (Math). Somehow the conversation turned to religion, and we found out he was raised Jehovah's Witness and though he doesn't go to meetings anymore, he still believes in everything he was taught, or at least almost everything. He believes in the Bible and said he was staying "on the fence" about issues like evolution, because he doesn't know how that lines up with a literal take on Genesis.

It was a fascinating ride. I feel like I can usually tell pretty quickly when someone is religious or not, and I didn't think this kid was. I guess it's because he was open about how he smokes pot and was getting together with his friend to have sex, and those aren't things I think of Christians doing. But by his own admission, that was one of the problems he had with how he'd been raised--his inability to not have sex.

He was the most metaphorical person we've ever met. When I said I didn't want to get some job I only kind of liked, he said it's like oil and water. Even if you have just a little bit of oil in the water, the water is still not clean. Even if you only hate your commute to work and like your job, you still won't be happy with it because you have to make that commute every day. He had a metaphor answer for everything. Eventually the religion talk ended with him saying that some things just have to be taken on faith, an answer that has never satisfied us in response to the problems we have with Christianity. He said, though, that he expected the elders would have had better answers to our questions.

Along the way to Roseburg we called Brendan's cousins to let them know where we were, and they said they could come to Roseburg to get us. That was over an hour out of their way and so kind of them. If they hadn't, we might not have made it to Florence that day because it was getting dark by the time we got to Roseburg. We got dropped off outside of a Rite Aid and Rita and Richard arrived to pick us up about ten minutes later. They were so hospitable. They have a guest cottage with its own private bathroom and we felt a little like we were at a hotel, but with better conversation. That night they made us quesadillas for dinner and provided all the wine and cookies we could want.

I wish we could have stayed with Rita and Richard longer, and they had hoped we could too, but we made plans to catch a ride from Portland to Seattle with our friends who had been rehearsing their show in Arcata, so we needed to get to Portland the next day. We had time to have a leisurely breakfast with Rita and Richard and for Rita to show us around Florence. Over the course of our visit with them we learned a lot about full-time RVing and about websites where you can find cool jobs, like coolworks.com. After showing us around, Rita drove us all the way out to Mapleton, another cute small town near Florence, but inland.

We got a ride about a half hour later with a middle-aged hippie and his snuggly basset hound, Otto. Our driver told us all about the rainbow gathering, which is a big hippie festival that happens once a year, in a different location each year, around the beginning of July. It sounds cool, kind of like Burning Man, but with less organization. This year's will be somewhere in New Mexico. Our driver took us to Eugene and dropped us off at a busy gas station. We found some cardboard and made a sign that said Portland, and walked to the nearby I-5 north entrance.

It looked like a busy entrance, but it turned out that most people driving past us weren't getting on the freeway. Finally, about 45 minutes later, we got a ride from someone headed to Brownsville. He worked at a factory, boxing briquets. He didn't like his job, but he was happy just to have one. He liked living in the area because he loves the outdoors, and fishing, but he sounded a little wistful about the idea of traveling. He told us hitchhiking is legal in Oregon, and it seems to be true. At least, we never saw any signs prohibiting hitchhiking, or telling pedestrians to keep off the freeway.

From where we got dropped off, we walked out to the side of the freeway and got a ride about fifteen minutes later with a very silent man to Albany. From there a woman in a pickup truck picked us up after 20 minutes, and we rode in the back of her truck. At one point some silly young people in a car driving beside us held up a sign that said "Show us your ya yas!" Does that mean breasts? That's what I figured. I gracefully declined.

The woman dropped us off along the freeway right by an exit, and as we hopped out of her truck we noticed a car pull over a little ways ahead. Could it be for us? We didn't really think that was possible. We've never had a ride waiting for us the moment we got out of another. But we walked up closer and waved at him to see if he wanted us to come over, and he motioned for us to come. It turned out he had seen us waiting on the road earlier, but had been on the phone and couldn't stop. Our driver in the truck was driving faster than him, so when he saw us getting dropped off he pulled over for us. He could take us to Portland!

He was a very informative and interesting person to talk to. He told us all about how he'd been making cider recently and what went into that process. He was as gas conscious as we were when we had a car. His car came equipped with a tool that tells you how many miles you're getting to the gallon, and he never drove more than 55 mph. It was fun to share tips of energy conservation with him. He took us within Portland city limits and dropped us off at a gas station. From there we called my cousin in Portland and he said he could pick us up there. We had made plans to have dinner with him, his housemate, our friend Kaitlin and her boyfriend.

It's become a Portland tradition that as we pass through, we will eat with David and Kaitlin at an Ethiopian restaurant. So we all met there and were sad to see the restaurant was closed. As we milled around outside it, though, someone came out and told us the bar below was open and that they served food from the Ethiopian restaurant. It was short shorts night at the bar, so we didn't quite fit in with our pants attire, but the bartender was forgiving. We had a yummy dinner with great conversation, then David and Britt drove us to a grocery store parking lot where we met Alissa and Claytie, our Seattle friends.

We headed north and it was so great to round that curve and see the Seattle cityscape. It's such a beautiful city! We headed to Alissa and Claytie's house on Beacon Hill (which no longer has a Grocery Outlet, sadly) and my sister Amelie picked us up there. We were going to surprise my parents, but by the time we got to their house they were in bed. It also turned out they already suspected we would be arriving a day early. It was great to see them in the morning, anyway. (Stina's mom even called us stinkers for trying to surprise them.)

We've been here now for two weeks. We were in Everett with my family from the 7th to the 16th, now we're cat-sitting on Capitol Hill until tomorrow, then we'll be apartment-sitting for friends on Lake City Way. The weather was kind of icky for several days, but yesterday and today have made up for it. We've been walking all over Capitol Hill and hanging out at the park, where all the pale Seattlites come out to play.

Settling into Seattle mode

2009-04-17T11:55:00.000-07:00

Well, being in Seattle again certainly brings more questions to light, namely, "what do we really want?"

It seems that our adaptability is a bit of a curse. We can see all the options and opportunities out there, and are having a tough time figuring out which path we want to follow next. On the one hand, we're loving the travel. We love meeting new people, seeing new places, and just being free of the stresses that come with obligations.
On the other hand, we've been missing the parts of life that come with being settled. We like having an income and all the security that brings with it. We want a home - a private space that we can invite others into. We miss the long, loving friendships, for which brief hitchhiking interactions cannot substitute.

But addressing this decision brings up a whole host of other questions, chief among them: how should our lives proceed from here? The only certainty is that Stina will definitely go to grad school. Of course, even the when of that becomes uncertain when we address the question of what other education we might prefer. She and I have been talking lately about returning to university for B.S. degrees.
Some days, we are definitely ready to write the book of our travels, and others it seems impossible. We only recently discovered that our visions of the final product are vastly different.
I have a list of aspirations. I don't know when or how they'll all happen, but I want to attempt them all soon.
Gosh. So much!

Three Vlogs and then a break, incl. Top 5 Hitchhiking communications

2009-04-08T12:23:00.000-07:00

Since we're here and stable for a little bit, we'll take a little blogging and vlogging break. Check back in about three weeks for new adventures! If you're in the Seattle area and want to know if, where, and when we busk (probably at Pike Place Market or Seattle Center), be sure to subscribe to our Twitter feed.

The Hitchhiker's Theme Song - feat. the incredible Christina "Stina" Ann Pederson

2009-04-08T11:53:00.000-07:00

Music by Stina Pederson, Lyrics by Stina Pederson and Brendan Weinhold

Over the course of our trip, Stina has been humming this tune. Over the course of our trip, she occasionally pleads with passersby in song. We wrote the lyrics, recorded the tune, and added a chorus.
Everybody now!:

We're in Seattle!

2009-04-07T23:28:00.001-07:00

That's right, Seattle folks, we are here. Technically, we're in Everett, but it's not so far away. We're staying with my parents and we'll be in town at least until the 28th of April, possibly a few days more. In about 10 days we'll be housesitting for a friend on Capitol Hill for a few days. Our schedules are pretty much wide open, so if you're in Seattle, let's hang out! More to follow, but I just wanted to share that much for now.