Picture Dump Part 1

Way back in January, when my moot court brief was but a spot on the horizon, I visited Elliott in New York to spend the last part of my winter break.


We visited the Imagine circle in Strawberry Fields in Central Park.


Central Park maintenance's own version of Christo and Jean-Claude's The Gates.


Some simple stir-fry on the new CB2 plates we got. (We also visited my personal mecca, the MUJI store in Soho, but those pictures are on Elliott's camera.)


Elliott opened his belated birthday presents on a damp bench in the Columbus quad.


Elliott's happy about his new Alice Waters book. Yay!

And then Elliott came up to Boston, whereupon we made a lot of food.


First, we made chicken enchiladas. Recipe from Chow.


Then we made lots of gingerbread cookies.


And we finished with a winter vegetable kale soup. Mmmmmm.

Happy Iowa Caucus Eve!

If we're good boys and girls, mayhaps we'll get a nice Democratic presidential candidate tomorrow.

(Yep, still gafiating [getting away from it all]).

Snow Day, For Reals

The view from the bus stop this morning. Seriously, how beautiful is that?



You know what was not so beautiful? My property midterm, which was probably the hardest test I've ever taken. They weren't kidding when they said that law school is hard. Go to graduate school, kids.

Snow day!

Almost December

Turkey Day and its attendant delights (the food, the company, the drunken charades) and downs (the hives, the trip to the ER) has passed, and it's now time to buckle down for finals. Ergo, my thoughts turn to Christmas gifts, especially of the knitted kind.

Some inspiration from Urban:

Beret
Slouchy beanie (one can never have too many)
Cowl-like scarf thing
Eternity scarf which would look great in a Habu yarn (maybe I'll get some for Christmas)
and
Reversible cabled scarf (so tempted to knit this for myself but there are already two projects in progress intended for that purpose, *cough*)

I just need an another extra pair of hands. One to knit and the other to brief cases.

Snapshots of food

Here are some of the dishes that Elliott has made over the past couple of weeks. My culinary output has been null (unless you count microwaving or making cookies, which I don't). And let's not even talk about my literary diet. I did get Naomi Novik's Empire of Ivory and Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, but I'm not optimistic about starting either of them soon.

Anyway, food!


Elliott proudly stirring the absolutely fantastic chicken tikka masala, almost an exact replica of the one we loved at Pakwan in San Francisco.


Yummmmmmmmm. Maybe we'll (and by we, I mean Elliott) attempt homemade naan next time.


Absolutely amazing stuffed pork chops.


With gravy on top and bacon braised cabbage on the side. Elliott really likes to stress his German heritage sometimes.


And because that wasn't enough food, we also made an onion and leek tart, which was very simple and very tasty.

Ooof. I'm full just from looking at those pictures again. The stuffed pork chops, cabbage, and onion and leek tart recipes are all from Chow.com. The chicken tikka masala recipe was just something I googled.

Okay, back to my civil procedure casebook now. Whoo.

I'm back. Again.

Sorry for the radio silence. Law school is taking up all my time and sorta getting me down. I'm hoping that I get over it soon and refocus on the reason why I'm subjecting myself to this in the first place.

Anyway, look for food pictures soon! Elliott and I have been cooking up a storm on the weekends that we see each other.

Speaking of spam

Here's some more, specifically, on what this blog is purportedly about: books.

I read most of David Sedaris's Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim over the weekend, which is very good but definitely not my favorite book of his. As a whole, I'm not very interested in stories from or about his childhood. I feel a little squeamish reading dysfunctional accounts of someone else's childhood (the same reason that I've never read any Augusten Burroughs).

And now, a book meme.

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users (as of today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn’t finish, and strike through what you couldn’t stand. The numbers after each one are the number of LT users who used the tag of that book.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Karenina (132)
Crime and Punishment (121)
Catch-22 (117)
One hundred years of solitude (115)
Wuthering Heights (110)
The Silmarillion (104)
Life of Pi : A Novel (94)
The Name of the Rose (91)
Don Quixote (91)
Moby Dick (86)
Ulysses (84)
Madame Bovary (83)
The Odyssey (83)
Pride and Prejudice (83)
Jane Eyre (80)
A tale of two cities (80)
The Brothers Karamazov (80)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (79)
War and Peace (78)
Vanity Fair (74)
The Time Traveler’s Wife (73)
The Iliad (73)
Emma (73)
The Blind Assassin (73)
The Kite Runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70)
Great Expectations (70)
American Gods (68)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (67)
Atlas Shrugged (67)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : A Memoir in Books (66)
Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (66)
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (65)
The Canterbury Tales (64)
The Historian : A Novel (63)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (63)
Love in the Time of Cholera (62)
Brave New World (61)
The Fountainhead (61)
Foucault’s Pendulum (61)
Middlemarch (61)
Frankenstein (59)
The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
Dracula (59)
A Clockwork Orange (59)
Anansi Boys (58)
The Once and Future King (57)
The Grapes of Wrath (57)
The Poisonwood Bible : A Novel (57)
1984 (57)
Angels & Demons (56)
The Inferno (56)
The Satanic Verses (55)
Sense and Sensibility (55)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (55)
Mansfield Park (55)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (54)
To the Lighthouse (54)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (54)
Oliver Twist (54)
Gulliver’s travels (53)
Les Misérables (53)
The Corrections (53)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (52)
Dune (51)
The Prince (51) [I think that reading parts of it very closely in a political theory class counts, don't you?]
The Sound and the Fury (51)
Angela’s Ashes : A Memoir (51)
The God of Small Things (51)
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-Present (51)
Cryptonomicon (50)
Neverwhere (50)
A Confederacy of Dunces (50)
A Short History of Nearly Everything (50)
Dubliners (50)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (49)
Beloved (49)
Slaughterhouse-Five (49) [Not sure if this deserved to be italicized. I mean to finish it one day!]
The Scarlet Letter (48)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
The Mists of Avalon (47)
Oryx and Crake : A Novel (47)
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (47)
Cloud Atlas (47)
The Confusion (46)
Lolita (46)
Persuasion (46)
Northanger Abbey (46) [Optimistically bolded. I think I'll finish it this semester.]
The Catcher in the Rye (46)
On the Road (46)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (45)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (45)
The Aeneid (45)
Watership Down (44)
Gravity’s Rainbow (44) [There should be a style for books that intimidate the hell out of you. I think that The Satanic Verses would qualify, too.]
The Hobbit (44)
In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (44)
White Teeth (44)
Treasure Island (44)
David Copperfield (44)
The Three Musketeers (44)

Man, that was so embarrassing. Not the number of books of I haven't read but the number of them that I've picked up and couldn't bring myself to finish. I'm not so much a devourer of books as a page-nibbler.

A new week, a new season

It's Monday again, which means that it's time for torts torts torts torts and SPAM. Fortunately, there is a lovely crispness in the air and the promise of a new Radiohead album in 9 days! And only four and a half days from a three-day weekend.

Life is all about the anticipation of the next pleasurable moment.

PS:

Some pictures from the weekend I spent in New York visiting Elliott (and Karthik and Suzannah).


The Hungarian Pastry Shop by Elliott's apartment.


Elliott in front of the Psych Department building.


Purl Soho in Soho where I bought some nummy yarn.


Lunch at Peep in Soho, where the bathrooms are definitely... surprising. :)


The boys at dinner.

Happiness

May be a warm gun, but it is definitely the end of the week. I can't believe it's already been four weeks of law school, but this week felt like it could have been an entire month in itself. I spent every spare waking moment either writing my legal memo or reading for class. Enough. I am done. I am taking a step back and taking a deep breath (even if I can't smell anything due to my cold).

The plan for this weekend:

Clean the apartment. Actually cook something by myself. Hang up some pictures on the walls. Go out drinking with some friends. Read a book outside.

These are my goals for this weekend, and hopefully, they'll make me feel better about this whole law school thing. Bah.

The end of the end

This is it. The last day of freedom before the first day of law school. Or rather, the last day of peace and ignorance before law school consumes my life. I am, however, getting more used to living here. The weather has been absolutely lovely this weekend, with the sweet anticipation of fall. Elliott came up to visit me on Saturday and was pressed into being a moving mule for me again. He's currently on the Chinatown bus heading back to New York, and I'm enjoying some peace and quiet in the law library (and checking my e-mail, the US Open scores, and updating my blog :).

Tomorrow it begins. Wish me luck.

Obernau and Now

Finally, to wrap this baby up, put Europe behind me, and look ahead to 1L (somebody hold me).


The lovely German countryside.


Elliott with the pet pot-bellied pig, Big Bertha.


The absurdly beautiful Rhine.


Me and a "round" of Koelsch.




And now I'm home (for a certain value of "home") in Las Vegas, driving on wide boulevards and shivering in the ubiquitous air conditioning. Emily Dickinson once wrote that "Pain has an element of blank." I think that travel is much the same. Without the thousand or so pictures that I took on this trip, I doubt that I could have remembered half of the places we'd seen and things we'd done. I wish that I could say that our trip was a life-changing experience, but for the most part, it was just spending some good times (and not-so-good times) with Elliott in some of the most beautiful places in the world. And that? Is really all that I wanted.

The End of the Road

Berlin was lovely, barring burning myself. It was a chance to catch up with Nicole and to see a foreign city through a (near) native's eyes. But we also took in the usual tourist attractions: Museum Island, the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag. After Berlin, we spent a little over a week with Elliott's relatives in Obernau, in the Windeck region of Germany. It is absolutely gorgeous countryside, the German equivalent of the Lake District in England. And Elliott's family was really fantastic, as well as their pets, from the shaggy-haired black dog to the Maine Coon cat (the most awesome cat ever, omg) to the half-bald, pot-bellied pig. Our time in Obernau was very relaxing and uh, filling, as we were fed absurd amounts of food and with alarming frequency. And then it was Obernau to Frankfurt to Chicago to San Francisco to Mountain View.

Hearing American English regularly took some getting used to at first; it's almost like deciphering a foreign language. It's hard to believe that we spent the last six weeks in Europe, in four different countries, moving from hotel to hostel to sobe, always on a plane or a fast train. I wish that I could stop for a long, long while, but tomorrow morning, we're driving down to Las Vegas to see my parents. Maybe I'll take a breather when I start law school, eh? :)

Here are some pictures from Turkey and Berlin.


Whirling dervish by the Blue Mosque.


Pride Parade down Istiklal Caddesi.


Our Bosphorous cruise, on which we saw dolphins/porpoises!


Elliott and Sun at Ethnicon in the Grand Bazaar, where Elliott bought a lovely teppich.


Nicole und ich at a cafe in Berlin.


Wet and rainy in front of the Brandenburg Gate.


Mmmmmm... wine warms me up.


Inside the glass dome of the Reichstag.


Walking on the Shalechet exhibit at the Jewish Museum.

Turkey Hates Me - Misadventures in Turkey and Germany

I think that I must have done something to offend Kemal Mustafa in a past life. You know how some people get the Revenge of Montezuma when they travel? Well, I got the Revenge of Atatürk when I was in Turkey, for like, two weeks, reducing me to pre-packaged food and Starbucks. Yum. As my friend Nicole put it, 'You like Turkish food, but Turkish food doesn't like you.' Not only did I have, um, tummy problems, but I was also shat on by a bird in Tophane. And two days ago, on Friday the 13th, I was dealt the coup de grace. While enjoying a nice smoke at shisa bar in Kreuzberg, I managed to knock over the pipe and dump a good portion of the coal onto my chest, which resulted in burns from my breasts down to my stomach. After spending pretty much the entire day at the hospital yesterday, it was determined that I have second and third degree burns on my left breast. A third degree burn (don't Google, the pictures are pretty disgusting) is a burn that goes through all layers of skin, down to the muscle or bone, and it doesn't hurt because you lose all the nerve cells there. In German, die Sensitivität ist nicht intakt. Luckily, mine is only half an inch wide, but it will probably take 2 to 3 weeks to heal. So no more nude beaches for me, at least for a while.

You win, Mustafa. You win.

Book Update

Stolen from Elliott, started and finished in Istanbul: Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

A quick pop science read. Nothing groundbreaking. Although it's fun that Elliott knows some of the researchers mentioned in the book.


Started in Istanbul, finished in Istanbul: Queen of Babble, Size 12 Is Not Fat, Size 14 Is Not Fat Either, all by Meg Cabot

These were really fun, fast reads, and the last two books are actually about more than retail therapy and finding a boyfriend/husband.


Currently reading: A collection of short stories called Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules, compiled by David Sedaris

The David Sedaris totally sold me on the book, and it's given me an opportunity to read some authors that I've been meaning to get around for a while, like Alice Munro and Joyce Carol Oates, a.k.a., depressing Canadians.


Completely abandoned and finally sold to a used bookstore in Berlin: Pamuk's The Black Book.

Photo Catchup - Croatia and Istanbul

Zagreb really showed off during the day and a half that we were there.


Sunlight church after the clouds parted.



And a rainbow.

Some pictures of Istanbul from our first couple of days in Sultanahmet.

One of the Medusa heads in the Basilica Cistern.



Your standard picture of the Blue Mosque.



Beautiful inside, but a distinct odor of feet.



The view of the Sea of Marmara from Topkapi Palace.

Ich bin ein Berliner. Nicht.

It's nearing the end of our third day in Berlin, and we've already done so much. Nicole has been wonderful in taking us around both the touristy sites (walking along Unter den Linden, the Brandenburg Gate, etc.) and watering and feeding us at really cool bars in Prenzlauer Berg. Last night, we went to a place called the Weinarie (I think), where you can get unlimited glasses of wine and food (we had chili) and then just pay however much you want as you leave. It's the most brilliant thing ever.

Today was more of a touristy day, as we went to Museum Island, and hit three museums in a row. Other than the National Gallery (where the paternalist, fascist security personnel made us so unwelcome that we left after only 15 minutes), they were all pretty good. Nothing so overwhelming as the Archaelogical Museum in Istanbul had been, and Nefertiti is really quite lovely. The only thing is that I kept thinking as I was looking the statues that the Germans 'rescued' from Egypt and Greece and the Middle East, that it's all just so much glorified grave-robbing. And the thing is, unlike say the Met in New York or even the British Museum in London, the Germans seem to have no shame at all about this fact. The Gate of Ishtar that they're so proud of? I had seen those same glazed lions in Turkey, without knowing that the Germans had apparently taken the more spectacular pieces.

Anyway, we're going to end our supremely touristy day by watching the new Harry Potter at the Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz.

Will try to upload pictures later. Tschüss.

Another day, another Turkish breakfast

I feel much better today, much less belligerent. After being woken up from my nap yesterday afternoon, I was ready to start picking fights on Istiklal Caddesi, which would probably wind up with Elliott getting beat up.

Anyhow, today's plan was to visit the Istanbul Modern, but since that's closed, we've decided to lounge around in cafes all day and write you all postcards.

While you wait with bated breath (I'm sure) for my missives from Turkey, here are some of our pictures from Croatia:


Dubrovnik, Croatia


View from the city walls, taken by Elliott, after I quit the exhaustive climb halfway through.


Renaissance faire in Croatia!


The clear waters off of Hvar.

İstanbul

In İstanbul at the moment. A little tired and sweaty, but otherwise okay. We moved from our hotel in Sultanahmet to a hostel in Beyoğlu today, I´m still recovering from the lack of towels and a working faucet thing. So pictures later, when I feel better.

Highlight of the day - A small gay pride gathering that marched up İstikal Caddesi. That was pretty cool.