Drive to the Balkans, and familiar ground.

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Oh dear god. You know that feeling when you return refreshed and relaxed from a nice long vacation, only to come back to an inbox thirty feet high and a shrill tremulous voice telling you how much needs doing? Well that's kind of where we're at right now. Fortunately, most of the stuff in question is this kind, the kind of mental bookkeeping that ensures when my memory turns to pinkish goo I'll have something to remind me of what I did and where (at least most of it). Course part of it's also jobs, sorting out my social life and class schedules, figuring out what I want to do with my life, and possibly distilling an elixer of eternal life if there's time leftover. Still, the trip was great fun. (Un)fortunately, Jerry Sheridan (our fearless leader/cult father) has a network of contacts across all of Europe so we actually spent most of our days meeting incredibly brilliant and high level bureaucratic types in a pile of separate institutions and-ok no, none of these folk would inspire so much as an "ooh" from anyone not already hopelessly mired in international politics. However, they also keep the world going round in their own sometimes substantial way. In short, it was a little like class was still happening, only the setting was now a myriad number of strange and sometimes still half demolished locales. I'll try and speed along through these:

I'll start with the trip. Did I mention how we were getting there? What? A train you say? Adorable. No, in this case it meant a bus ride, and a fourteen hour one at that. This was also probably not helped when Jerry decided the cure for our near Mutiny on the Bounty style mood was the film Amadeus. Director's Cut mind you, I've never seen so many people wish for the death of Mozart all at once

Vienna pt.2 : Alright, I know I've written about Vienna before, so I'll keep the department of redundancy department out of this. Yes, Vienna remains pretty, yes, it looked nicer with all of the trees actually having leaves and the like on them. It's also still bleeding expensive, so I hunted down the best the bottom of the barrel had to offer. In this case that usually means a Schnitzel box. Really, I can't think of too much more to say here, we met an institution called the OSCE, whose main selling point was that they didn't have power, and could therefore talk diplomatic shop without a care in the world. Right. Still, that plus a bit of time spent wandering around the city can always be nice, I reacquainted myself with all the pretty arms and armor I could find, something I always view as a plus.



Budapest part 2: Again, you’ll forgive me if I sort of sprint over this part of the trip rapidly. It’s not that it wasn’t fun, just that there’s nothing really for me to bring up a second time. Budapest is still damn pretty, there’s a lot to see and do, and with a little bit of drunken ingenuity I even found my old hole in the wall Szimpla (after first finding another place three blocks past). It’s nice, and it’s a crying shame that the tour company here never got back to me about work, I suspect it’s got something to do with me being American (what’s Magyar for “they took our jobs?”). Ah well, what can you do? We didn’t have any speakers from this session, and other than a few friends finding inspiration in climbing the steel cables supporting a bridge I don’t think I even managed to litter, much less my usual mayhem. Since this part’s been rather boring, I’ll conclude with this: Snuffywumples.

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