Finally...

The New York Times has caught up with my style. 

Reject!

For the sake of blog honesty I'll continue my clothes documentation even after an itchy and uncomfortable day. But that's the point, right? I'm actually self-conscious about posting pictures of my outfits because I'm so critical of other "fashion" bloggers. I am not pretending I'm fashionable, or even well dressed, the purpose is that I'm just trying to recognize reasons for the clothes I collect. All that aside, I totally cringe when I see pictures of a blogger trying to look stylish in a boring outfit, sexy-posed for a self portrait in a cluttered second bedroom or sewing nook. Of course I've elevated myself out of that scenario by taking pictures of myself in a cluttered kitchen wearing clothes from tenth grade.

Here I am, wearing my invisible cloak that does not see enough use.


No really.


On Monday I broke out a pair of brown tweed wool pants from the Gap that I got in my sophomore or junior year of high school. I liked them very much and I fancied them resembling the great slacks outfits of Katherine Hepburn. I wore these a lot throughout high school and then into the early years of college and I probably haven't touched them since. After Monday's wear, I still like the idea of them a lot, they're a solid winter pant, but the execution is almost unbearable. First, even through two tucked in shirts, the wool waistband itched and itched and itched. Secondly, the waist was up near my ribs. Even with this feature the zipper was much too long and the crotch had a billowy, balloon-like quality. In the back, the high waist also brought a balloon-like quality to an area that doesn't need the term billowy attached to it.  Then there were the wide legs. The problem I have wearing wide legged pants is that they always make me feel short and I don't like feeling short. I can hardly stand these pictures and today I had to overcompensate by wearing all black. 

As a result, the the 1997 wool slacks are headed to the Goodwill unless I decide I want to use the fabric for something else, or unless someone wants them after my glowing review.


**BONUS**


Ninja outfit

Two Things

1. The rest of this week I've worn standard clothes. I did wear a shirt to yoga that I never wear and had forgotten I had. It was okay.


2. I'm assuming if I mailed you a christmas card last year, you'd like one this year. Yes? Let me know.


Over and Out.

Green on Green

...for Ceri, because no one else is reading. 

Also note the Gordon Matta-Clark installation to my left.

Initiative for the Initiative-less

After online christmas shopping turned into a glut of personal clothes shopping, I'm using a rainy day to clean out my closet. Generally, I wear the same rotation of clothes each week; a couple of button ups, some knit-wear, and jeans with an occasional pair of fancy pants (ha!). The problem is that I have loads of clothes I never wear, but keep around because I like the material or color or it's a piece that fits into the life I wish I had--the one where I go to nice places wearing red lipstick, smoking cigarettes on long holders (obviously, this life also involves time travel). So my new initiative is to try to wear my entire wardrobe at least through several laundry rotations. I will wear everything and if I don't like it everything marginal is going to the Goodwill, then I'm going to establish my uniform and be done with idle clothes shopping.*


So that's that.




*Unfortunately, I found a really great pair of jeans and, of course, they're not sold anymore. 

Travel Week 2: Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan is the seventh largest country in the world. It only has two major cities and apples originated in the foothills of the Tien Shan mountains.


The Tien Shan mountain range separates Kazakhstan from China and when we flew into the old capital of Almaty we were about a four hour car ride from the Chinese border. But we had flown east to go west and we were in Almaty trying to catch a train. We arrived in the early morning after an all night flight from Kiev over the steppe where I couldn't sleep and even looking down in the dark I had seen strange things all night. We rushed through customs but by the time everyone was through and had gotten their bags it was decided that the -best- thing to  do was to pile into ten taxis and take a mad dash to the next train station with the hope of catching our missed train. So four of us piled into a car. In Kazakhstan there's an informal network of taxis, basically if you have a car you can pick people up and charge them money for the ride. I ended up in an aging Mercedes without the ability to communicate with our driver who was also reeking of vodka after, what can be assumed, was a hard normal night out. I unfortunately ended up in the middle of the backseat where the seat belts were nonexistent. And so we headed out into the countryside.


The highway near Almaty was four lane and new and as we drove west we paralleled the mountains. It was a beautiful morning, but then the road narrowed down to two lanes and the ride became more and more terrifyingly video-game like. Obstacles would pop up in front of us, like the old slow-moving dump truck or the semi truck with three trailers trained together. Our driver's method for addressing these things was to zoom up behind them as if they weren't there and then drive in the other lane without actually passing. He'd stay mostly in the other lane until we approached a curve or a hill and then he'd accelerate and try to pass. Inevitably we would meet another car, truck, or tank head on and he'd have to downshift* and swerve behind whatever we were trying to pass. But human adaptability is really amazing and instead of clutching at the front seats the entire trip I relaxed into the ride and started recording the landscape whipping by.


After a long drive, what I'd estimate to be an hour (?) we got to the next train station where the first taxi of our convoy, without surprise, saw the train pull away from the station. It was about nine in the morning and we were stuck in Otar without much of a plan. Out of the 40 people in our group only two people spoke Kazakh and one spoke a kind-of Russian and where we were no one spoke English. Somehow it was arranged that the afternoon/evening train would have an extra car attached for us. So we waited seven hours in the dusty train station yard for our 30 hour train ride west to the Aral Sea.


The Aral Sea used to be one of the four largest lakes in the world, but since the 1960s Soviet irrigation projects it's been shrinking at an alarming rate. The plan was to spend a day driving from the former shoreline across the now dry lake bed to the new shoreline; with 4x4s it would have been a four hour one way trip. We got into the Port of Aralsk the evening of the next day and because we were a day late because of our missed connections we spend the evening poking around the former port. We had a group meeting to decide the next course of action: take the 4x4 trip to the new shore or take an all night bus ride to catch a rocket launch the next morning. It was a hard choice but the rocket launch won. So after the sun set we took cold showers in a dumpy hotel had a quick dinner and loaded on the bus.


Now, this wasn't a typical all night bus ride. First off we had a Kazakh driver, who had a similar driving style to our taxi driver. Secondly the entire trip was on either a dirt road or a gravel "highway." Because we were heading to Baikonur, Russia's spaceport, the organizers put a DVD of Carl Sagan's Cosmos PBS series and looped it most of the night. I'd wake up periodically to feel the bus swaying and bumping as if the carriage was separate from the axels and Carl's soothing voice describing stars and galaxies.


We arrived at Baikonur in the early morning and headed to our hotel. When we pulled up to the front it took me a while to realize that we had actually arrived at a hotel and not just another abandoned building. On the plus side I can now say I've stayed in a former Soviet housing block. We, for some reason, unloaded our luggage from the bus into one room and then got back on the bus to head out to the launch pads. The rocket was an unmanned Zenit set to lift off at 08:00 hours. It was, we were told, carrying a weather satellite into space. It launched, it was awesome, and then we headed back to town. By the time we got back to town the officials knew we had changed our plans, gotten there early, and had just watched the rocket launch. This upset them and they revoked our permits to tour the launch pads and other miscellaneous spaceport infrastructure. After a few bribery attempts we were left to tour the museum and spend the next two days in town not doing much.


The last leg of the protracted trip getting back to London. We left Baikonur in the early afternoon to drive three or four hours in an unair-conditioned bus to the nearest train station. This was a horribly hot ride with periodic, unexplained stops where we would all pile out and stand in the shade until the bus started again. I don't know the town we ended up in, but we had enough time to eat dinner and buy food for the other 33 hour train ride east to Astana. When I first heard we'd be on a train for 60+ hours I was dreading the confinement, but the train rides were my favorite parts of the trip, especially this leg to Astana. Our route was more or less diagonally northeast through the entire country. We rode for hours (yes hours) next to a lake where half of it is salt water and the other is fresh; two completely different ecologies in the same lake!


We were on the train a night, a day, and then another night arriving early in the morning. Astana was cold and I was exhausted. We went to a hotel and took showers and quick naps before taking another series of ad hoc taxis to the Pyramid of Peace and Reconciliation. We spent the rest of the day talking about the projects we were to have been working on during the trip, it was a mobile studio after all. Dinner was planned at a yurt on the bank of a river with a sheep slaughter, but we got rained out and ended up at a fancy restaurant in the new part of town. Our flight out the next morning was so early that we would have to leave the hotel at 02:00 a.m. so we decided to stay up all night. We did and got on our flight from Astana to Kiev with a brief layover then Kiev to London. I was unconscious for the first flight and only remember waking up and seeing a box of food in front of me and then the next time I woke up it was gone. On the next flight I only remember being shaken away when the flight attendant put the next box of food in front of me. Then we were in London and everyone split up.


Pictures are here.






*I'm pretty sure his brakes were mostly unhelpful.

Travel-Week One

I used to like how my blog roughly chronicled my grouchy life, then I actually started being fairly content and everyone knows blogs get boring when bloggers are happy. So not much is happening.

It's also hard to manufacture things to write about when my job, while not sensitive, isn't something I can really write about. I guess I can write that I write reports all day, some days I draw plans and make maps. I like my job and that's boring too. My work is generous with vacation days, which meant this summer I cashed out all of this year's vacation for two weeks in Chernobyl and Kazakhstan touring atomic and cosmic sites with a group of forty other architects, landscape architects, artists, film makes, photographers, and graphic designers.

From home I flew to Chicago to connect to London and immediately my flight was delayed three hours. Luckily I was still at home and could have lunch-dinner brought to me because in Chicago I had 15 minutes to run through O'Hare to connect with my international flight. Not my original flight, but the rebooked one where I ran up to the gate panting trying to ask if my bag would make it. The flight attendant could fortunately make out what I was trying to say, hurriedly reassured me it would make it on, and forcefully told me to get on the plane. Oddly, there were four people from my Champaign flight getting on the London flight and I was only the second to last person on the plane.

Week one was in Ukraine. We flew out of London at mid morning and although we got to Kiev in the late afternoon ended up hanging out at the airport for two hours because someone's dosimeter got stolen off the airplane.* With a stolen dosimeter setting the stage we headed out to our hotel. The hotel was nice, but strange. We got there late in the evening and missed dinner because the hotel's two bars and one restaurant ran out of food or they wouldn't make anything for us. The people who stayed up late found out that the hotel turned into a brothel at night.

The next morning we got on the bus for the two hour ride north to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. I'd done some reading and there's a lot of images online, but I didn't really know what to expect. The group organizers had made us packets including orange suits, dust masks, and safety glasses and had recommended we pack shoes and pants we could throw away. We got to the Exclusion Zone in the early afternoon and after going through passport control we were allowed in. What I didn't know is that the Exclusion Zone is a pretty busy place, and it has always been since the explosion in 1986.

Apparently, after reactor 3 melted down the authorities decided to keep reactors 1 and 2 online where they continued to operate until 2003 when they were finally closed. Back then more people were in the Exclusion Zone, but now the daily total is around 5000. From the main gate to the reactors is about 15 km and the drive cuts through overgrown grasslands, forests, and the occasional pocket of lived-in high rises. Heating pipes are above ground and arch over the roads. The towns were originally constructed this way, but now, because of the radiation nothing can be buried or disturb the soil. We stopped at the town of Chernobyl where our hotel was and got a safety briefing, signed papers saying we would never sue the Ukrainian government for our future cancers, and got a brief history of the explosion and migration.

Driving toward the ground zero from the south the first thing you see is the plants cooling towers, these are of the stereotypical nuclear power plant variety and then you see the unfinished reactor 4. Reactor 4 was under construction when reactor 3 blew and so it still has cranes and other construction equipment forever frozen around it. Being relatively uninformed everyone thought this was the famous reactor 3 and so we were shocked when the bus turned and parked at a building close to it. We were told to get off and directed to walk down a road its sides crowded with overhanging trees and shrubs. At the end of the lane was the cafeteria where we were given a lunch of mystery meat with dill, lots and lots of dill. Outside the open windows we could see the construction workers building the new sarcophagus over the old one that was allegedly containing so much of the radiation.

Even by that point we were becoming desensitized to the idea of radiation. The next stop was Pripyat the town north of the reactors that was one of the first places to catch the fallout from the explosion. The Soviets built it as a model town illustrating how safe nuclear power plants were and there all the workers lived with their families. Now, the buildings have trees growing in them and everything is wearing away. Standing on the ground it's hard to make out the impressive boulevards from the main town square. Here, in front of the culture center, is a plaza that had fountains, limestone stairs, and benches. Visibly plants have taken over, but we have to stay with our group because there's a very real danger of running into wild boars, which, when startled, will gore you to death. It was hard to see because of the tree growth, but surrounding the main nucleus (if you will) of the city are rows and rows and rows of housing blocks. The rumor was that wolf packs were now populating the lower floors of some of the apartment complexes, but we didn't see any.

We didn't actually stay too long the first day we were there, just climbing through the public buildings before heading back to the town of Chernobyl for dinner and to stay the night at the Hotel Chernobyl. The authorities like to have everyone at the hotel long before sunset so no one can sneak out and, I guess, spend the night in the abandoned city. I'm not picky, but dinner was gross. It was hot that day and we had been wearing long sleeves and pants under safety suits and at dinner we didn't get water just a strange smoke flavored tea. It tasted like smoked sausage and wasn't refreshing, but I kept trying it to see if it would get better only it just got worse and worse. Afterward, we spent the evening listening to presentations about psychology of long-term space travel and how to design environments for it and how to make dark matter in your bathroom sink (I'm still a little unclear on the actual results). Hotel Chernobyl is more of a barracks than a hotel, but they did have beds, which was counter to the rumors being passed around.

Breakfast the next morning was plain dill pasta, another piece of mystery meat, and bread. And then we were out for a full day in Chernobyl, which meant spending more time in Pripyat. But this time we got to climb to the roof of one of the tall housing blocks for an unparalleled view around. From the roof we could see the arrangement of the housing blocks, the town center, and the river; everything, though, was grown up with trees with the buildings emerging from their canopy. Later we saw giant catfish in the river and got really close to the sarcophagus. We were told we could only stay at reactor 3 for five minutes, but we were there longer.

In the late afternoon we headed back to Kiev where we would fly out of the next evening. The next day was spent at the Chernobyl museum, the grocery store, and being rejected from touring a former military ammunitions factory.

Our flight to Almaty, Kazakhstan was supposed to leave at 7:00 pm arriving in the early morning. There we would have two hours to clear customs, get luggage, and make a connection to our 33 hour train ride. Of course, in Kiev the flight was delayed for two hours and left at 9:00, ruining the schedule.

Kazakhstan is a big country.

*Kiev's airport is strangely laid out and there I've enjoyed the shortest bus ride of my life. They also had the best wifi for the next two weeks. It was also free.