the end

unbelievably, my time here in bremerhaven is rapidly coming to an end. i am leaving here in two days, arriving back in san francisco in three. it's weird to even type that.

this summer has been a lot like summer camp. it was weird at first and strange to get used to and i missed home a lot, and then suddenly it was three months later and the time had come to go and i wasn't quite ready yet.

i am going to miss the country, i am going to miss my friends, i am going to miss my work. this has been such a crazy random amazingly cool opportunity, it will be hard to see it go.

but like all good things, this too must come to an end.

this is going to be my last entry from here. i have some more videos and pictures, find me if you would like to see them. but now i must sign off. clean out my desk and start up the packing.

thank you all for reading, and for sharing in my misadventures from afar.

i will see you all so very soon.

love,
me

next time, i hope it's johnny depp

i went up this last weekend to london to meet my mother, who is visiting me. we ran around and did a bunch of tourist-y stuff. we saw the two tates and the sommerset and rode the london eye (this giant ferris wheel type thing they installed on the thames that takes you high above the city and you can see for miles. and you feel like you're in a giant bicycle wheel, because it's built exactly like one. really neat).

and we ran into a movie star. you know, the usual.

so the last time i was in london, which was also my first time, i came across the filming of the da vinci code in this little alley i had decided to take. it was pretty random, some quiet little street i was using because it looked pretty turned out to be sectioned off to become a set. i watched the action for a few minutes, saw audrey tautou (one of my favorite actresses actually) and tom hanks and someone who i later found out was ron howard all working out the details of a chase, and laughed at my strange fortune of coming across that.

and this time, the same exact thing happened. my mom and i were wandering around, and we decided to take this random alley, and came across a blockade that sectioned off the bit of the street. this time it turned out the movie was the adaptation of the book atonement, starring keira knightley. we stayed and watched it for a few minutes, starring at the back of keira knightley's head for a while, and then wandered on, laughing at our dumb luck.

it turns out, when in london, i naturally gravitate toward movie sets with famous stars.

next time, i hope it's johnny depp.

flickr

finally put my pictures up.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/judt/

enjoy!

some more video fun

jim posted a video he shot on our trip!

it's of a cuttle playing with him and camoflauging itself as a rock. really neat part where he makes his skin all bumpy suddenly:

http://judit.drtoast.com/video/imarock.MOV

enjoy. and thanks again jim!

dina, this one's for you.

so my friend dina 'tagged' me in this little game of blogging, i think it's really cute so i'm gonna play along. :)

RULES - Once you've been tagged, you have to write a blog with 8 facts/things/habits about yourself, saying who tagged you. In the end you need to choose 6 people to be tagged and list their names. No tag backs.

1) i have driven across america four times.

2) i won a gold medal in a national pistol competition in college.

3) i collect pictures of the snail graffiti around sf, and note their locations on a map (in hopes of one day finding the artist through density tracking).

4) i speak hungarian.

5) i really like to find the people in the corners at parties who aren't talking to anyone and go talk to them.

6) i played the sexy librarian in a film about a zombie mariachi band.

7) i am the only person in the world who doesn't like nutella.

8) i believe the duck is the most perfect animal because it can both swim *and* fly.

people i tag: cary, adrian, lauren, lynn, irene, and danah. oh and stephanie because i didn't realize she had a blog that i hella want to read now and i meanly forgot her. go!

a vacation from a vacation

apologies for the lack of postings, i have been away from my computer for the past few weeks.

my little holiday from my holiday began in barcelona. i arrived there in the evening and met my friend jim who had flown out to travel europe with me. while at dinner, we noticed an oddly large amount of fireworks going off around us. we thought at first it was just kids playing or celebrating something the world cup, but the poppings increased until we finally asked our waiter. he explained to us that we had arrived on the night of the celebration for the patron saint of fire, and that this was 'typico.' (it is also known, aptly, as the night in barcelona when no one sleeps.) we wandered through the city streets enjoying many many strange displays of affection for fire (including a huge hedonistic fire dance performed in a church courtyard at midnight. 'es typico.') and wound up on the beach listening to the city crackle and hiss well into the night.

barcelona continued to be amazing. we spent our time sauntering around gaudi's city totally stunned by his beautiful and crazy architecture, stuffing our faces with fruit and horchatas from the local markets, and winding up on the beach most every night. we spent a day in singes, a quaint little mediterranean beach town south of the city that has become a haven for gorgeous gay couples, sunning ourselves and swimming in the clear blue water (and eating a lot of cheese since i only remembered how to say 'half' kilo in spanish). it was absolutely lovely.

next, came paris. from our little room on the rue mouffetard (such a good word) we ventured to explore this truly gorgeous city. (did you know they light up the eiffel tower at night so it glitters? i was sold.) we played in the art at the pompidou center. we got severe whiplash on bumper cars in front of the louvre when the local punk kids decided to come after us. we ate an obscene number of crepes from the vendor down the street who rapidly grew to recognize us. we watched a mass of people dancing fully clothed in a fountain to the symphony of drums and carhorns to celebrate the world cup. we watched hundreds of people dancing to spontaneous live orchestral music (as well as an itunes list of traditional turkish songs) on a weeknight along the seine. our daytrip from paris was to giverny, where we got stranded after visiting monet's garden and missing our bus, and consoled ourselves with feeding ducks while consuming our umpteenth bottle of (excellent) french wine.

then, berlin. my father and his wife met us there and served as excellent (and much needed) tour guides. we made the rounds of museums and saw the remnants of the wall. we explored my father's favorite antic map store. we talked about life in communist europe. we stood amongst 1.3 million fans to watch a soccer game with little flags painted on our faces. we lounged in beer gardens. we stayed in a hostel named after a spaceship. (the heart of gold. each room comes with a free towel.) we took advantage of the executive lounge at the hilton and its excellent buffet and view. we got drenched in a thunderstorm. we saw the church where bach composed as choirmaster. we went 165 miles per hour on the autobahn. we speculated about extracting memories from mummies. we played in the teddybear's picnic of the berlin bears.

and finally, we returned for a quiet(er) weekend in bremerhaven. after a few bikes rides, fresh pastries, and world cup games, as well as a good session of sepia poop-scooping, i set jim on his plane home last night.

all in all, totally spectacular. totally whirlwind. really more than i think i can process right now.

thank god we took about 8,000 pictures. (which are forthcoming.)

i love traveling. isn't it always wonderfully nothing at all like what you expected?

i am that girl

last weekend my boss frank and i went out to a little island off the coast of germany, called helgoland, to retrieve some cuttlefish that the group had left at a research station out there. we went out on thursday morning on a giant tourist boat (the island gets a lot of day-trippers as it is this weird tax-free place where liquor and cigarettes are really cheap) and arrived a little after noon. we had packed these huge transport drums and a bunch of equipment for moving the animals back, and decided to start by dropping it all off at the research station so we could stop lugging it around.

walking around the island, we found ourselves enjoying the first really gorgeous day in a long string of rainy dreariness. it was absolutely gorgeous. sun shining, water flat as a mirror, not a cloud in the sky. and the island, which was probably less than a mile in diameter, was gorgeous too. it really resembled a mediterranean city, with cobblestones and whitewashed houses and huge sloping streets leading up into the cliffs. gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous.

we arrived at the research station and found that one of frank's old college buddies was the assistant curator there. sweet. he gave us a tour of the place, taking us all around and showing us his experiments and all these cool creepy creatures. he took us through this big alarmed door and we went into the aquarium that adjoined the research station. tourists were wandering through, complete with khakis and cameras and big floppy hats, and we were standing there obviously devoid of bags and carryings, with frank sipping occasionally out of his mug of coffee.

after touring around a bit more and enjoying a beer in the employee lounge, we made one more stop before we left.

i swear it was in slow motion. i thought it might happen, and i saw it happening, and then it was happening, and it left me speechless.

when we were walking around, i noticed on a map the seal exhibit in the aquarium. i thought, aw, cute, seals, that would be neat to see on this little tour. but then we were sitting and chatting and leaving and i thought oh well, maybe next time. and like he had read my mind, when he was walking us out frank's friend just quietly took a turn, unlocked another door, and stepped through it. then i watched frank step through it. and i honestly stood there for a moment, staring back at the seal who was staring at us walking in, and could barely breathe.

we went into the seal exhibit. stood on the little fake rock platform. the seal, a little overwhelmed by two new people, didn't come out of the water, but instead just hung there, about two feet from me, bobbing and staring. and after a little while he got bored and started swimming in circles and showing off for the people behind the glass in the aquarium.

and we stayed there. watching from the platform. in the exhibit. 'cause we were the aquarium people. the ones in the seal exhibit.

and i thought to myself: holy crap, i am that girl.

we stayed the night on our little mediterranean island, and had dinner with a bunch of really nice grad students who live and work there. we woke up early the next morning and loaded the animals into our big barrels (which involved reaching into a completely inked up opaque black tank and feeling around until we caught all of the beasties by hand. so cool).

for the way back we hitched a ride on a research vessel sent out by the awi for a survey of the local sea life. that week was a special week at the awi, where the magazine geo (the national geographic of germany) sent a bunch of writers and photographers out to do a piece about the populations in the north sea. so our goal was to find as many individual species as possible in this trolling expedition to show off to them.

it was really something else. we pulled up a massive amount of sealife, the likes of which i had never seen before. hundreds of fish, thousands of crab, a pile of starfish the size of a minivan. and the whole time these photographers taking pictures. (frank and i kept joking about the amount of press i have been getting recently, and how i will likely become famous before i leave at this rate.) it was really great. and after a hard morning of work, we spent the late afternoon sunning on the front deck and chilling and chatting as we cruised back into bremerhaven.

life rules.