Part two of my Scotland vacation: traveling around!

First stop: Edinburgh, during the time of the Edinburgh Fringe, which I was very excited for. ( Edinburgh Fringe )

( Further travel details )

( Scotland, general thoughts )

Overall it was a great vacation, I had a fantastic time.

I'm back home from Scotland! The flight back was delayed and I arrived at 2am and had to go back to the office the same day, but at least unlike on the flight there they didn't leave my baggage behind this time.

Worldcon was fantastic, and traveling through Scotland with LB afterwards was also great. I have so much to talk about!
Sadly on the second to last day I tripped and fell while running to catch a bus, scratching my glasses (not bad fortunately) and scraping up my chin, knees, and hands, so now typing is uncomfortable and the long con & travel report will have to wait. But battleshipex revealed while I was away and I want to finally post about the four fics I wrote for it.

Shiny Things For Your Bird (Hermitcraft)
Mumbo/Grian/Scar, 862 words, fluff
Summary: Three weaknesses Grian's boyfriends take advantage of and one they don't.
Author's Notes: Look, "buttons," "birdification" and "volcano" were all on the board, of course I had to write about Grian. Not something I would have written otherwise most likely but I think it's sweet.

Four Double Victories (Life Series – Third Life)
Grian/&Scar, 893 words, canon divergence AUs
Summary: Three universes in which Scar won Third Life, and one in which he didn't.
Author's Notes: There was a prompt for Scar/Grian, 3+1, and desert, and then I added betrayal and wrote some Third Life finale AUs, that was fun.
Also, my fic #100!

Once More, With Fewer Secrets (Life Series – Secret Life)
Etho & ZombieCleo, 1k, time travel
Summary: At the start of Secret Life, Cleo offers Etho some insight into the future.
Author's Notes: I've wanted to write Etho & Cleo Secret Life fic for a while (THEM) and I'm glad I finally did. With bonus outsider PoV on time travel, too, and I think it came out well. (Next step: fic ft. the full Roomies.)

Claw Out Your Eyes And Devour You (Hades 2)
~Scylla/Melinoe, 1.4k
Summary: The witch lady is Scylla's favorite fan.
Author's Notes: I saw "mermaids" on a board square and wondered which of my fandoms have canonical mermaids and then what kind of prompts there were, and, well. Another fic I didn't expect to write but I had a lot of fun with it and I'm happy with how it came out.

I used to regret not doing more to refresh my Russian because it would have made it easier to read so much Russian fic. Now I regret it because there are by far not enough Ukrainian- or Russian-speaking volunteers at the welcome center for Ukrainian refugees and I wish I could have been of more help. Unfortunately I expect I will have plenty of opportunities to practice. Of course it would be smart to study at home but I am not at all sure I will manage. I feel like I have no brain for most of anything at the moment. There is just… a lot.

Tomorrow I go back to work after my vacation and I'm not at all looking forward to it, but it has to happen at some point. The vacation was worth it though, Paris was great. We went to many museums and even the opera (I hadn't expected a version of Cinderella where the stepsisters are not evil but I enjoyed it.) One of the highlights were the catacombs, soo many bones and arranged in pretty patterns too.

Another highlight was listening to the last nine episodes of season 4 of The Magnus Archives with dhampyresa, who had managed to avoid all spoilers, and being able to watch her reactions during such wonderful moments as that reveal in #158 ("…what?! Wait, go back…") and all of #160. It's so nice to be able to share the excitement/suffering, and being able to pet a cat at the same time (well, sometimes) is a very nice bonus.

After leaving Dublin – thankfully I had no problems at the airport, unlike several other people – I flew to England and stayed with frith_in_thorns and her wife Ellie for two nights, which was wonderful. They have the fluffiest bunny, and very impressive full bookshelves, and great stuffed toys :)

The first evening Frith and I caught me up on The Untamed episodes I hadn't seen yet and on the second evening the next two, and because my flatmate DD wanted to see my reactions to certain revelations she watched with us via Skype (modern technology, so convenient.) Then there were only two to go and English subtitles were already available, but for some odd reason Frith decided she didn't want to watch subtitles where a sword's name is translated as "Dustproof"… xD ("Golden Unicorn Tower" for Jinlintai and "Brilliance Overgrowth Lord" for Zewu Jun were also certainly… choices.)

On Wednesday Frith and Ellie showed me around Oxford! They're both alumni, so not only was it easier to get into colleges, they also know all the best stories. For example I now know that there are underground waterways in Oxford that nobody really knows the extent or exact location of, that there is a traditional tortoise race (though some colleges' tortoises died and now as a substitute there are people in tortoise costumes but they have to eat an entire head of salad at the beginning of the race to prove that they really are a tortoise), that Magdalen (pronounced: maudlin, for some reason) college has deer, and that in the 60s students at Merton invented a tradition to save the space-time-continuum which involves all students in full academic dress walking backwards around the square lawn drinking port in the "lost" hour of time changes. (I didn't look any of this up, so if it's wrong I blame them.) (I did see the deer, that one's definitely true. There's a deer park, with a fence that made me immediately go "how often have drunk students climbed across"; the answer is apparently "every now and then," which is not very precise.)
Speaking of square lawns, they're pretty much everywhere, and you're not allowed to step on them, until, in some cases, when you're a professor. Because clearly when you're a professor that has to come with privileges.

We also went punting! Which is shoving a boat along a shallow river with a long metal pole. Frith is very good at it, and I – well, we didn't hit the banks? But we were moving in a distinctly slalom pattern, and I did almost decapitate her. No actual injuries though! Apparently there's a student challenge where people jump from a punt up to a bridge, climb over the bridge, and then into the punt again, that sounds like fun but we didn't try that. Unlike all the tourists, who went downriver and kept crashing into the bridge and each other, we went upriver and there was almost nobody else, it was very nice.

On Thursday I left for London and met cesy there :) We walked around in the Victoria&Albert museum for a bit and especially admired the embroidery on the Chinese imperial robes, wow. European courts had more tapestries than embroidery, at least the exhibitions; there was one very impressive embroidered torah cover, and one waistcoat (but it wasn't as pretty imo.) Then we had waffles, always good, and got to the Serpentine Galleries & Hyde Park via bike taxi, that was fun.

Cesy went to Cambridge, so I got more fun stories. I now know that there's an Assassin's Guild in Cambridge, where you have to "kill" your targets using things like pens that have "knife" written on them, and about the "secret" gay society "the Adonians" (and I haven't been in SGA fandom for years but we immediately started sketching out an SGA AU.)

Then we had excellent typically British food for dinner (pie&mash), and afterwards I felt so heavy that I decided to walk toward the hostel for a few stations. London does have very impressive buildings, and a lot of them. Walking around central London at night, I can almost understand how people who spent most of their time here could get a skewed view about the UK's importance etc.

IF you have a lot of money. I was also told some shocking information about the British rental market, and later did some quick research: "About 80% of tenancies in England and Wales are set at six months or 12 months", and "46% of 25-34-year-olds now live in private rentals" (source: The Guardian, July 2018), and there are short-notice no-fault evictions – apparently the government planned to finally change that a few months ago, but now who knows. (source: The Guardian, April 2019.) 6-12 months! How are you supposed to get a sense of home and security with such short contracts? Austria has a minimum of 3 years and I never properly appreciated that before.
(I also found an 840-page-report on tenant rights in Europe, which sounds fascinating but I don't have the time to read it rn.)

On my last day I went to the Tate Modern gallery, which I'm glad I saw but modern art is hit or miss for me and what I saw didn't really "speak" to me much. Then I walked along the south bank of the Thames for a while, spent some more time in the Museum of Natural History and in the V&A, and then in the evening I went to see a musical!

I saw Wicked, and it was a lot of fun. The costumes were great, and the music, and overall the atmosphere… I haven't read the books (and only very vaguely remember what happens in "The Wizard of Oz"), but I'd heard two of the songs before and was spoiled for the "epilogue" somehow. In the first half I had a seat near the front but at the side, so I couldn't see some parts of the stage, but in the second half I switched to a previously empty seat more in the middle and had a great view. My favorite song was "What is this feeling," followed by "Defying Gravity," and my favorite costume was Elphaba's in the second half. I liked the story too.

And then early the next morning I left for the airport :) With one short anxious moment when the train ticket machine didn't want to take my money, but fortunately there were other travellers there who bought a ticket for me and took Euro, and the rest of the trip had no problems. It was a great vacation and I enjoyed all of it, but I was also very glad to be home again. DD had prepared lunch, then we watched the final episodes of "The Untamed", and then I finally participated in the next session of our D&D campaign. (I found a good solution for "oh no what do I do now that I've become head of a pirate goblin tribe"!, and it felt good to kill monsters with my greatsword again.)

I'm very behind on reading fic and commenting. And there are so many books I want to read… Maybe I can finally take this opportunity to whittle down my many many AO3 subscriptions? (Doubtful tbh.)

In conclusion, vacations are wonderful, conventions are great, meeting friends is fantastic, and I'm a very lucky person.

Back from Hamburg! Our first "proper" family vacation (elsewhere than with other family) in several years, it was nice. We had a tour at the Elbphilharmonie, the new concert hall, which looks great and is architecturally very interesting, and walked up several hundred stairs to the tower of St. Michael because the elevator at St. Nikolai was broken, and had an argument which town hall looks more impressive, the one in Hamburg (mom) or the one in Vienna (everybody else) – we could only judge the outside because sadly there was an event and we couldn't get a tour. We also spent several hours in the world's largest model railway miniature world, which spans several rooms and countries and continents; my favorite parts were the ice bears walking up the dam, the penguin in the bouncing castle, the Easter bunny school, and other fun details like that.

And we saw The Lion King! The costumes and staging etc. were amazing (the giraffes! and elephants! and birds! and antelopes! Etc. etc.), and "Circle of Life" almost brought me to tears. My favorite was Zazu, the puppet was amazing. (Though, German language note: Zazu addressed Mufasa with "Sie, " usually the polite address in German, but by far not polite enough for a king, he should have used "Ihr. " That bothered me more than it probably should ^^ ) I also loved the scene where he's kept in a cage by Scar and has to sing for him: idk if he picks the same songs every time, but in our version he started with "Nobody knows the troubles I've seen, " and when Scar wanted something "with more oom-pa-pa" started "Atemlos durch die Nacht, " the entire theater cracked up. Zazu providing background vocals for the hyenas shortly afterwards was also hilarious.
The adaption was very faithful to the film! And maybe seeing the musical in German helped not to make too many comparisons. They added some things I didn't like as much, like Scar trying to woo Nala, and some I liked, like Nala's song "Shadowland. " The first half was stronger, story-wise, in the second I was reminded too often that it's a children's story, and/or started overthinking things. ( e.g. )

More notes on Hamburg: the traffic lights are terrible. Way too often I started crossing the street right when the light went green and it was already red again before I finished crossing. No blinking phase either. How do slow people manage? Public transport at least seemed good (but most of it looked inaccessible to wheelchair users…) There are many pretty buildings, and I also enjoyed the boat tour. (As citizen of a landlocked country, I'm not used to paying attention to the tides!) We also had a guided tour through St. Pauli, very much 18+, which was, idk, interesting but not fascinating I guess.

So that was vacation number one, and I leave for Dublin in about 24 hours *excited and anxious flailing* Sure I still haven't planned half of it but it'll be great.

Soo it looks like I'm going to Worldcon! Which is in two weeks, aaaaah. It's not that much to organize really, flight tickets are easy and then I just need to find a place to stay (probably a hostel and maybe a bit further away from the convention center but whatever, there are probably bikes to rent) but still. I don't often go on vacations...

I've only briefly looked at the program so far and there's lots of cool stuff! I need to make a plan. I've never been to a convention before, I think I need to be careful to schedule enough breaks.

Speaking of plans, I'd also love to meet up with people! Let me know if you'll be there and would like to meet :)

Off on a week-long vacation at my grandparents' in a few hours, I still need to pack and I'm inexplicably anxious about leaving. Stupid nerves. I'm not even leaving the country. It just feels like there's so much I should be doing at home, which I obviously can't when I'm not here (and I already know I won't look forward to doing it when I return either.) I'm being ridiculous. I'm just glad I don't live alone, otherwise it would be worse.

I am kinda looking forward to the several hours of train ride. Uninterrupted reading time! When I was a kid the train ride to my grandparents meant I had sooo much time to read, now it's always less than I think. But then as a kid I only had two books in my hand luggage, now I have my ebook reader with currently 174 unread books/stories on it.

I finally, after half a year, updated my TAZ WIP: Undead Memories, the one where Kravitz breaks the Umbrastaff early, has 4 chapters now, planned are 7 so I'm more than halfway done. I'm not completely happy with the last two, but I told myself "done is better than perfect" enough times. Good thing I started posting it as a WIP otherwise I'm pretty sure it'd never get finished. I'm trying a different narrator for every chapter, and it's fun as an experiment but I'm pretty sure I'm not going to do that again. (I want to write the next chapter like a fairy tale and I think that one will be the hardest.)

Yesterday instead of staying indoors all day I went to the zoo, where I haven't been in ages. I forgot how much I enjoy it; I have an annual ticket now and aim to go more regularly. They're building a new giraffe compound, and they're currently hand-feeding baby waldrapps so they can release them into the wild (they'll fly ahead with a plane to show them the way to the wintering grounds) and hopefully re-establish a breeding population in Austria. I also saw adorable squirrel monkeys and was reminded how incredibly elegant penguins are under water, and many other animals. Maybe one of the next times I'll take a few pictures.


Speaking of penguins! The Pens just won a game and nobody got hurt, so I'll take the opportunity to talk about watching hockey as long as I'm feeling better about it.

The timing of my US trip was determined by "quite soon but after the marathon", which meant end of April/beginning of May. Only later did I realize that this meant I would be in the US for the first two rounds of the NHL playoffs. More than that, I was in NYC when the Pens played the New York Rangers and in DC when they played the Washington Capitals. This was an opportunity I had to make the most of.

I thought about going to a Pens playoff game, but MSG tickets are quite expensive and I waited too long for tickets in Washington (DD's fault.) But I did want to go to a live NHL game, so I went to an Islanders-Panthers game at Barclay's Center. I had a good time :) (Except for when I lost my camera shortly after I entered the building, but a staffer got it back to me before first intermission.) The atmosphere in the building was very cool, even though I was semi-secretly rooting for the Panthers.

At least as much fun was getting to watch Pens games with other fans. In Vienna, if I stay up to watch a game in the middle of the night I'm alone, and sometimes I watch games with DD. I got lucky: via reddit I got the name of a bar in NYC full of Pens fans. That was SO MUCH FUN. They were all very nice, I even got an XL yellow Pens playoff shirt. The excitement when our team scored! It was amazing. Except for when I was sick, when I was in NYC I went to the bar for every Pens game. It's very near MSG so on my way home I saw possibly hundreds of Rangers fans, more often than not sad (which ngl I secretly enjoyed a little because sports is weird like that.)

When I was still in NYC I got an email from DD that her mom, who because of DD became a big hockey fan as well, suggested that DD fly to Washington and see a playoff game, so we were there at the same time! Fantastic that it worked out this way. We also have similar taste in museums.
This time I hadn't heard about a Pens-friendly bar, but during the first game (second in the series) someone invited me to sit with them, and didn't even rescind the invitation when she noticed what shirt I was wearing. I tried to celebrate quietly *g* It was great. The next game on a rainy weekday the bar was almost empty, unfortunately. Meanwhile DD and kinetikatrue had purchased Caps tickets for game 5 and got an invitation to watch game 4 on the jumbotron in Verizon center, so of course we went :) There were maybe two or three other Pens fans apart from DD and me and both of us kept our jackets closed. It was fun, and the Penguins won in overtime.

Game 5 I watched at the bar in NYC again. I started talking with two other women and eventually, very carefully, after they'd said that they're semi-familiar with Tumblr, mentioned "the Archive" - they knew what I was talking about xD
For the last game of that series I was back in Vienna and I did briefly consider staying up to watch it, but ultimately didn't.

Even if I hadn't found friends to watch the game with, even only being in the right time zone to watch the games would have been a huge plus. It was cool to actually see people wearing hockey apparel on the streets – every game day I wore a Pens shirt and it did occasionally start conversations :)

Another thing I didn't expect was that my relatives (first cousins twice removed, the internet told me) found me being a hockey fan so fascinating. In fact it was one of the first things they'd tell people about me: "this is my cousin Anna, she's visiting from Vienna, Austria, and she's a hockey fan", pretty much. G. and her husband even watched a game with me while I stayed with them! G. only for twenty minutes or so, but her husband told me the next day he'd recorded a bit extra, and he'd seen some other highlights, and that Caps-Flyers game looked pretty brutal… G., when she found out that my favorite team was called the Penguins, gave me a plush penguin from the Falkland Islands that she had lying around xD And L. asked me about the games before and after every game evening. I had such a great time with them, I hope I can visit them again soon.

Ok, now trying not to think a lot about hockey again. The Conference Finals are very stressful. At least this year, because neither the Austrian team nor Pens players are there, I'm not additionally interested in the World Championship. Only so many hours in the day and there's other stuff I should be doing.

Four hours after I arrived at Vienna airport I had dental surgery because I'm that good at scheduling. My last two wisdom teeth were removed, and while thankfully it doesn't actively hurt a lot it's still uncomfortable. One of the teeth had to be broken down into several small pieces to be removed, but I could take home the other one and for some reason I keep staring at it. Maybe it's time for another ice compress.

To sum up, my vacation was amazing. It was pretty much everything I'd hoped for and more. I spent about two weeks in NYC, a few days in New Jersey, and almost a week in Washington DC. So many museums! I think on average I visited a museum a day. The cities were very interesting, the people were very nice, and in general I had a fantastic time. Really the only complaint I have is that I got sick in the middle of it, but on the other hand that leaves more things still to see for my next visit. There will definitely be a next visit.
The best coincidence was that DD spontaneously decided to come to DC at the same time I was there, so we explored the city together. Always more fun with two people.

I want to do several posts about my vacation: museum & sightseeing reviews, unexpected & weird things about America, watching hockey in NYC and DC, and all the books I read while I was over there. (I love my ebook-reader.) But I also have to unpack, clean, deal with jet lag, sort the photographs, figure out what to eat until I'm allowed more than soup and puree again, and a bunch of miscellaneous stuff that I'm forgetting right now, so I'll see how long it'll take.

New York is amazing. I’m having a great time so far. The weather is great, the sights are impressive, and the people are so friendly! It started with the customs officer, cab driver, and doorman on my first evening here; today I asked a woman for directions on the subway and she ended up giving me a free ticket for a gallery where she works because she said I absolutely have to go see it. I will – I’m so glad I decided to stay in NYC longer because there are so many things to see. So far I’ve been to the Met (my favorite part was the American wing, the windows and glass works there etc.), the MoMa (mostly the Degas exhibition, very interesting), and the Intrepid (an actual air craft carrier and they did a good job painting life on board, with bonus space shuttle); and Times Square and the High Line. I also had poutine, it was very good. Linda, my grandfathers’s cousin who I’m staying with, is very nice and a great host.

I have musical tickets (She Loves Me) for Saturday, and Islanders-Panthers playoff tickets for Wednesday! I’m already excited.