wshaffer

Tested my nascent Bulgarian language skills by greeting a colleague on the phone in Sofia with "dobar vecher!" (Good evening!). He seemed quite surprised.

In theory, I also know how to say, "Good day", "Please", "Thank you", and "I would like a cup of coffee, please." I figure that's about 50% of the working vocabulary I'll need for my visit in June.

Paris was absolutely great. We did so much stuff that I'm not sure how I would go about summarizing it all. I think the highlights were our visits to the Louvre, Chantilly, and the Chateau de Vincennes/Bois de Vincennes, so I'll try to get it together to post more about those. We also ate a lot of fantastic food, including some very odd but unexpectedly good things like seaweed butter (butter with flakes of seaweed mixed in instead of salt), and sheep's milk yogurt sorbet on cucumber gelee with black olive tapenade on the side. (Also, creme brulee flavored with herbs is apparently A Thing right now in upscale Paris restaurants - I think I had one version infused with tarragon and another infused with Thai basil.)

I'm also pleased to report that the stereotype of French waiters as being stuffy and snobby appears to have little relationship to reality these days. With just a couple of exceptions, in everywhere from Michelin-starred places to random pizza joints in the suburbs, we encountered staff who were friendly, eager to be helpful, and very tolerant of the limitations of my French language skills. (In any of the touristy areas, it's pretty rare to encounter someone who doesn't speak at least a bit of English. Some conversations became a bit of a battle to see who was more eager to demonstrate their foreign-langauage skills.)

I did use odd moments of wifi access to upload a few photos to my G+ account. I'm going to try to get my full photo set up on flickr for those who are interested. I didn't take a huge number of photos - most museums in Paris allow photos, but for some reason it would have felt weird to me to be snapping away while in the Louvre or down in the catacombs, so most of my shots are of gardens, exterior architecture, and food.

The only real disappointment was the weather - it was pretty uniformly overcast, and on a couple of days it rained pretty hard. Mostly, we just bundled up and coped, but I think we did a lot less leisurely strolling around various neighborhoods than we would have with better weather.

I shook hands with Paul McGann. I have TOUCHED EIGHT, you guys!

I also had a perfectly coherent and sensible conversation with Louise Jameson, while all the time the ten year-old girl in the back of my head was shouting, "I'm talking to Leela! Leela!"

The guys at Mysterious Theater 337 have made me realize how very, very innocent I was when I last watched "Creature from the Pit."

More to follow later. Right now I need to unpack and fall over.

I feel like I should post something about my World Fantasy Con experience, because I had a really wonderful time. However, I had a wonderful time in a way that doesn't lend itself particularly well to recaps. A typical day went something like: get up, maybe get some exercise, go to the con suite for coffee and chat with interesting people, go to a panel or reading, find a group of people to have lunch with, go back to the con suite and have another cup of coffee and chat with more interesting people, go to another reading, find a group of people to have dinner with, go to the bar and chat with interesting people, realize that my poor introvert brain is going to explode and go back to my room and read a book until I fall asleep.

I have to give serious props to the con suite organizers. Not only did they have sufficient quantities of good coffee to keep me adequately caffeinated the entire weekend, but they had a pretty wide array of food options. I ended up having to rely less on my emergency stash of Larabars and protein powder than I'd anticipated.

( A few highlights )

I expect it will take a few more days before I catch up on my sleep and re-establish my introvert buffers.

Back from Worldcon safe and sound. I had a great time. I took some panel notes which I have ambitions of typing up and posting - we'll see if that actually happens before I decide that Worldcon was so long ago that nobody cares anymore.

Someone I was chatting with in the elevator this morning opined that it was a good con if you got everything autographed that you brought to be autographed. Not being an autograph hound, I have a rather different definition of a good con: it's a good con if I don't go to too many boring panels, and if I spend my social time hanging out with people whose company I enjoy, or meeting new people whose company I hope to come to enjoy. By that standard, this Worldcon was a roaring success. My only regret is that I didn't get to more of the parties, but it's really better for everybody involved if I don't try to socialize while stupidly sleepy or nursing a sinus headache brought on by the smoky casino atmosphere.

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I've eaten a lot of weird things in my life, since my philosophy on food is that I'll try anything once, but the one that makes the best story is the sheep tripe.

Daniel and I were in Florence, with Daniel's parents, and we went to a Sardinian restaurant. Being a Sardinian restaurant in Florence is not easy, I gather, because the Florentines are firmly convinced of the superiority of Tuscan food, and the tourists don't exactly come to town to eat Sardinian food either. Anyway, I kind of felt like they felt under-appreciated.

See, we get to this restaurant, and I see that they cure their own guanciale (cured pork jowl - it's a lot like bacon). Curing your own pig parts is an activity that I consider worthy of respect, so I said, "Oh, look, they cure their own guanciale. We'll have to order some."

The waiter, on hearing this, became instantly convinced that I was not only a person of surpassing good taste, but a serious connoisseur of Sardinian food. And so he said to me, "And for your main course, if you want to try a real Sardinian specialty, you must have the sheep tripe." (Cow's tripe is the stomach lining of a cow. Sheep's tripe, I believe, is the lining of the small intestine.)

So, here I was, in a bind, because I hadn't really set out that evening intending to eat the intestines of a sheep. On the other hand, I will try anything once. So I ordered the tripe.

It was basically two little coils of white tubing that had been tied with twine, skewered, and either grilled or roasted. I ate it, while my tablemates looked on in amazement. It tasted sort of vaguely lamb-like and gamy. It's not something I would ever go out of my way to order again, but if circumstances resulted in my being served it again, I would not refuse to eat it.

The waiter was so impressed that I'd actually eaten the stuff that he completed our Sardinian dining experience by giving everyone at the table a shot of grappa on the house. Not to be outdone, I actually drank it, but I was the only one at the table to do so.

I'm mostly recovered from my cold, and the buses and subways are mostly running. (In Queens, they were still busily plowing streets late last night, and our bus took a parallel course to its usual route, its usual route being still blocked by snow. I think it may be a few more days until things are back to normal here, unless the anticipated warm spell at New Years' just melts everything.)

So Daniel and I ventured into Manhattan, and enjoyed such delights as fresh air, coffee that didn't come from a vending machine, and food that wasn't prepared by a hotel restaurant where neither the usual chef nor the usual food delivery has been able to make it through the snow. I also bought some comics, a couple of Reginald Hill novels, and a stash of Larabars - I think I'm subconsciously preparing to be snowed in again. (Or more likely, I'm preparing for the possibility of spending some serious time idling in airports when we try to fly home.)

Also, I got some postcards of lousy weather in New York to send to my grandfather.

Thanks to everyone who left messages of sympathy on my previous posts. It helped.

Anyway, I suppose I ought to get on with figuring out what we're going to do with ourselves today. Hope you all are having a lovely day!

Heard a rumor that buses were running this afternoon, so we attempted to venture out of our hotel. We enjoyed the show drifts, chased Daniel's hat down the street when it was blown off by the wind (and successfully recovered it), and I slipped and fell in the street three times. (My dignity and my butt are both bruised, but not so seriously that they won't recover.) After waiting in vain for our bus for 30 minutes, we conceded defeat and walked back to the hotel. Turns out that while some buses were running, the one we wanted to take wasn't.

Tomorrow we attempt to fly to Florida. Wish me luck!

A couple of people I know have expressed some curiosity about the 4th Street Fantasy convention, and whether they'd be interested in going. I'd say yes, provided that you a) are a writer, or at least not averse to participating in lots of moderately technical discussion about writing and b) the highlights of your convention experiences are usually the random conversations you end up in at parties or in the consuite.

4th Street is a pretty simple setup. There's a single track of programming; a dealer's room selling books, jewelry by Elise Matthesen, and other necessities of life; and a consuite stocked with snacks and drinks. There's a communal brunch on Sunday morning, and if you stick around until Monday, a vast group expedition for sushi and good ice cream. (I think other cons, especially small ones, ought to consider adopting this idea of arranging more group meals. I find it a great low-stress way to meet people.)

Probably the most though-provoking panel I attended was "Fantasy vs. Progress", featuring Sarah Monette, Marissa Lingen, Adam Stemple, and Patrick Nielsen Hayden. It kind of went all over the place, because I think there were several related-but-distinct questions being addressed at various times, including: Why do so many fantasy writers choose to write in worlds in which technological, social, and historical progress seem not to happen? Why are many fantasy writers reluctant to think through or explore the consequences of the technological level they've chosen for their society? Why do so many fantasy writers choose to write books set in a quasi-medieval world of swords and castles instead of writing about cool stuff like steam trains? Why do so many fantasy novels seem to be determined to treat technological, political, or social progress as if it's a bad thing (with a digression into exactly how anti-technological Tolkien really was)? But if a good panel is defined as "a panel that keeps you talking and thinking about the issues it raised long after the panel is over", it was a really good panel.

Also fun were "Point of View: How not to suck" (Jo Walton, Steve Brust, Sarah Monette) and "The new cliches" (Teresa Nielsen-Hayden and Tom Whitmore).

If all goes well, I'll see if I can pull together some more organized post from my panel notes, or at least post some good quotes. But since I only have about a 50% success rate at creating detailed con reports even when I haven't just moved house, I thought I should at least post some preliminary thoughts while they're still fresh.

So, there you have it. 4th Street. A most congenial little con, and I commend it to your attention.

Well, they weren't going to let us off the plane because the lightning was a danger to the ramp crew, but then there was a tornado warning, so they hustled us off. The nice lady at the SuperShuttle desk seems very optimistic about the prospect of a van appearing to take us to our hotel. And it seems like the storm might be slackening.

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