today is october 30. tonight is the rock show
at the hole in the wall. i put this site up last night and then
gave out the address to some of them at work.
only one more day left at work.
its 8 o'clock, and
the plane leaves at 8:15pm next tuesday.
this is sort of a test.
______
today is november 3.
i grew up in the suburbs
and that is where we are right now.
my dad is talking about the similarities
between finnish and estonian
and i am eating and eating, like a teenager.
they have an ugly photo of me on the wall.
______
today is november 5.
karen and nicholas and i are going to see the submarine.
the liberty bell is blocked off so no one can blow it up.
we are in philadelphia.
______
today is november 8.
the keys on this keyboard are all in the wrong order.
we are in the nordic house library using free internet.

it took alot of bus riding and airplane riding and subway riding to get here.
yesterday afternoon before i even had a chance to sleep and make it feel
like it wasn't still the same extended day, a boy in the hostel guestkitchen
asked me if i liked music and then handed me a ticket
to see will oldham that night.

last night i dreamt that we came home for "just a few days",
and then were to go back, except home was a sort of studio-garage
sort of place that was very large and complicated, and i was very
happy to see the cats, because i miss the cats.
there is cat here and his name is Atli. he is orange and white.

we woke up too late today. the sun appeared for three hours and
then was gone.
______
right now it is about noon. november 9.
we are in the listasafn reykjavikur, the reykjavik art museum,
looking at an Erro retrospective.

its raining. its 40 degrees. everything has melted and turned green.
the sun rose at nine this morning.
______
this afternoon i went swimming outside.
the water was very hot and relaxing and the air was freezing and there were
were different pools to climb in and out of, with mist or condensation
i guess floating off the water and filling the air and it was so, so quiet.
later i sat around felling my hair dry and eating ramen noodles
and decided it was silly to spend any time not swimming, so i went back
and stayed until they closed.
______

today is november 10, barely.
we are in the easy Everything.
amsterdam overwhelms us. saturday. we are not on the inside. except
we are inside easy Everything. and it is huge! and orange!
this morning at five am we stood against the wind by the picnic
table infront of the hostel and waited for the flybus with plastic
bags flying around across the grass and nicholas explaining why it is
very, very safe to fly into the sky in airplanes while the winds
outside are making the buildings shudder. oh.
______


UIO{}:"
i sure wish karen horner would write a message on my message board.
valerie jouve is my new favorite photographer/videographer.
today included a somehow epic and miserably exhausting trip to find
the eurolines office and collect our passes. after which we dragged
ourselves to the stedelijk to stick our noses close to the paint of
famous paintings to see the brushstrokes.
the best pizza by far is the new york pizza
and they have a website, the address is written on all the napkins
we had amstel beers at a bar called cafe otten.
on the stereo were songs that everyone seemed to know already and sang
and sang joyously along with. the old lady wearing purple did a little dance
and threw her fists in the air. honduras was playing...um...the team wearing
green. or the team with blue stars. i couldn't concentrate.

today is november 11.
tomorrow night we're just going ahead to poland.
______
today is november...today is november 14th, maybe.
we had an amazing bus ride. twenty hours. right away met a boy
named wojtek who carried a drum under his arm and was full of
joy. he said he had just been in ireland playing drums with
brendan perry of dead can dance and i found that amazing.
the whole bus ride we told each other stories and talked about
america and poland and everywhere in between. he lives in Lodz
and is great. this is his website.

right now i am in warsaw. the beer i am drinking is called
zywiec. the cafe is called casablanca. we went through the
exhaustive history of warsawa museum, i tried to imagine wandering
around your city and your city being gone. just rock piles.

warsaw is much more beautiful than i thought it would be.

also today we looked at the russian airplane and dead tank parking lot.
nicholas was very excited when we first saw it: "That's where
we're going tomorrow."
______
i am sitting quiet with a coffee, waiting for a slow computer. its raining.
it rains every third day. always our photograph/videotaking day,
the day we have all the cameras with us.
feeling very comfortable in poland. this internet bar is very dark. and empty.
they havn't turned on the lights where i am sitting. there is a giant television
screen (sound turned off) showing buildings collasping and men in hardhats
and red jumpsuits, news broadcast;
traffic circles and and round signs and europe's red and blue and grey everything.
i've been trying to get a moment free to make postcards and now i'm sewing fast,
writing this down on paper, drinking coffee, sew, glue, look outside, look at the
screen (buldings, frowning workers, red, grey) etc

i feel i have enough time to do every single thing i want

last night, november 16, we talked and danced ourselves into exhaustion
swimming in unbelievably loud europop music, we drank Lech beer with our friends
particularly MARIUSZ, who nicholas has probably told the reader all about,
but i will mention that he is GREAT and drove us all over northern poland
in his white mercedes with the constantly breaking pipe and depeche mode playing
along with a constant flow of interesting conversation...we had a ball in gdansk
and everyone learned new words like octopus, penninsula, lungs. i learned some
polish but can't spell any of it.

hel is on a penninsula. we ate a fish in hel.
i think nicholas will tell you more about gdansk in his story.
______
vilnius is the best. i love it.
it is winter and drab and ornate and crumbling to peices and no neon and completely
beautiful. i was thinking about a city with no proper signs with words or billboards
or advertising, but instead just the buildings and structure with information written
right onto them. and not necessarily in words, but in scribbles and tags and symbols.
and it worldn't be difficult to figure out where you were going, because the marks would
sort of grow organically out from the city, you would mark something yourself to remember
and to tell others, srcatch a symbol into the wall maybe, etc.
thats how parts of vilnius look to me. falling apart and with a strange secret life. it
is like an italo calvino story.
but of course eventually you walk into the center of town
and it is less magic and more cellphone.
the mayor of vilnius has a webcam.
since i can't show you my pictures yet, here is some other girl's travel site about vilnius.
______
today is november 20 maybe.
last night for dinner i ate ravioli stuffed with apples, leeks,
raisins, and blue cheese,
and that night stayed up late talking about the world with a canadian girl
from the arctic part of canada.
today we walked in the cold to stare at various tall castles and
other structures and to find the frank zappa monument (a statue
of his head).
i just want to go into the thrift stores and
grocery stores and watch people's faces more.
i feel frozen inside. the bus to tallinn is tonight, and on
to nicholas's relatives.
______
today is november 23. yesterday, we were informed, was
thanksgiving. we learned this fact when brigid, lauri's
girlfriend, showed us a photo in the newspaper of george bush
posing with a big white turkey. "he is...pardoning? it" aha!
thursday and it must be thanksgiving. nicholas telephoned his
family from the strange australian bar but my family must have
been in craigsville because i could not raech them. but i tried.
the moment we arrived in tallinn, it began to snow and has not let
up.
right now, we are in the upstairs of the giagantic department store
where lauri loo, nicholas's cousin sort of, works as head window decorator.
madonna is playing over the PA.
muna has written me an email involving andrew bourne playing piano
and i am picturing them all having a cozy singalong before disappearing
off to newyork or vilnius.
i feel to scattered to update properly. um, tallinn is sweet and candy-colored,
and i can't help but remember ryan mcsweeny saying it looked like disneyworld,
which is not true, its beautiful and not fake at all. but i've never
been to disney world.
its cold etc, and tonight we'te the four of us heading out to the country to
meet the grandparents...
______
so. right at this moment, this very moment, i am trying to ignore the fact
that i am in another huge department store, loud noises and buying-selling
and christmas light etc

we went to estonia and it was crazy. it was nonstop delightful.
i had no chance to do internet so now it is a big colorful mess in my
head. i'll try to write a list of it, in a sort of order.

the cold and the buses have no markings or adverts. just block colors.
the tallinn department store. i watched the elevator go up and down through
the window, guarding the luggage, while nicholas attempted to find a cousin
he'd never seen before.
lauri's excellent apartment, big and half-finished and newpaper walls. i can't
shake my fascination with russian letters, which you see everywhere. he
thinks i'm just being nice when i say the walls are beautiful and i would
keep them just the way they are.
we are exhausted and collapse into our temporary room.
the sea museum. meri annab, meri vötab.
the bar noku. secret membership cards. "you aren't supposed to talk about
anything that happens here."
spicy soup. everybody agrees we are all very alike. cakes and tequila shots.
lauri's explaination of how things are for twenty-year-olds in tallinn.
in my head, i am writing essays based on mark's experience of late twentieth
century poland, and lauri's estonia. i am thinking about politics and capitalism and youth.
dancing. video on the walls.
nicholas and lauri stay awake until three am playing guitar.
the snow. there's alot of it. it doesn't quit.
a train to lehtse for 26kr.
the countryside, which is much colder.
artur liivak, in a knitted cap and light steps for someone who's just recently
broke a hip. everyone has the same shaped eyes. lauri and brigit translate his stories,
except the sword swooshes and hand chops, which everyone understands. i keep
thinking how much my mama would love to live in a house like they have. cooking
on a wood stove!
we exclaim over coats and soviet coins and old children's books in the new apartment, which is
full of the grandparent's furniture and possesions but they are in no hurry to move
into.
delicious chocolates.
the incredible sauna, saku beer, running around in the snow to cool off.
a wonderful dinner including bright pink food and smoked herring and many vodka shots.
another aunt and uncle. we are all talking somehow. the sisters all start to remind me of
my own aunts. all crazy.
their son raymond, who hadn't been home in a year and a half. within two mintues,
everyone is drinking syrupy finnish "vodka" that he's won in a dance contest.
five mintues later, we are in his room, spraypainting the walls.
etc.

catch a bus at seven am to berlin, which never works for me. berlin.
______
i love seeing films in an unfamiliar language.
i was just talking instant messenger with a friend and now all i can think
about is how my house is probably collasping right now. the image of the cats
galloping away, like animals fleeing a forest fire. stephen would be
at the garden, playing chess with andrew bourne, and would come home
later and stand blinking in disbelief at the rubble. i know this is not
about prague, but i have reaching the point in travelling where all your dreams
are a hodgepodge of old friends and houses you lived in when you were eight.

more tomorrow, love from anda
______
today is november 30.
we met jenny and neil in the metro station and they had just come from a squat in berlin
and we had no money for the metro. they had banjos and guitars. i got to cut jenny' hair and
drink whiskey in the clown and bard's kitchen with her.
neil took us to a cavernous vinarna at one point.
and then today i went to the gigantic warehouse thrift store where they sell clothes by the kilo
and laughed alot and bought mukaluks that say "antartik" on the sides of them. gemma bought me beers
and we talked about cognition while i was very sad about the usual things.
and we all keep eating dinner at the czech place next door because the fish and chips and cabbage
is only 39 crowns.
i woke up at six am this morning and could not get back to sleep so i walked around and watched everyone go to work.
______
a few days ago it was december 1 or 2. the hostel is filled with the go-out-dancing types and
also a few of the argue-with-everyone sorts. particularly an insane philadelphian that managed
to constantly pick weird fights with strangers while simutaneosly keeping a running self-promotional
monolgue going ("seen Slacker? i was in it!") etc and while we all stared uncomfortably into our
beers and tried to resume talking about plain things, like where to go dancing later, getting even
more drunk that we ought to because the beer is twice as alcoholic.

i was hit with a lazy winter depression that week and thus bought no cameras like i'd planned to. nor
did i go to the countryside. i went to the square, where they'd applied gold lights to everything,
and videotaped the stage where some fiveyearolds were doing a hilarious dance routine to some good old
european techno. dressed at elves. i drank some gluwein. i searched for edith wharton novels at the
globe for muna. it kept getting dark so early! every night we still eat at the czech place. on sunday
nicholas and i saw a football game, victoria zizkov vs. banik ostrava, but we sat i think in the
very angry opposing team section of the place, which frightened me, and it was extremly cold,
so we left after the first half.
we wandered around in strange neighborhoods until our noses and cheeks were red.
we saw a french movie and an american one.
we talked about politics with everyone but other americans, but never read the news.
i dreamt about my cats, and in the dream when we got home stephen and darren and jessie all lived
in a house out in the country with miles of fields in all directions. which would be great.
if we came home and our house was suddenly out in the coutryside.

i took photographs of everyone and threatened to post their pictures on this site when i got home.
______
a house is on fire two doors down from my house. we were the first ones to notice.
we stood outside and watched it smoke and waited for the firetrucks to come.
today is december 12.