things you have been missing

...if you haven't checked in with my new blog location at www.jackietravels.com:

1. I find similarities between my life and a giraffe cartoon, which feels sad but also right (which just feels sad).

2. I try to teach myself French by eating food (so really, I eat food).

3. Awkward picture of me at LACMA in the dark.

4. I talk about my plans for visiting Spain and Portugal and Gibraltar in January, which hopefully makes you mad jealous of my life.

5. I miss you all? Really though. Come visit? I'm blog-lonely. Which is the worst kind of lonely, I would imagine.

And here's a picture of my cat for the road:

i'm excited! be excited!

And that's because I have set up my new blog design at Wordpress, which you can view at http://jackietravels.com/. Woo!

I haven't yet set up Google Reader with this blog (help?), but you can currently follow me through Twitter, Bloglovin (that page is so lonely right now), or the RSS feed (top right corner), and also friend me on Couchsurfing and Travel Bloggers Unite.

I love this new format so far [even the parts that I barely know how to work] and I am planning more frequent posts now that I'm all settled. Thanks so much for sticking with me!

in which I am unemployed and sitting in a cafe

I am in an almost ideal situation. I have about a 4 month break from my job, during which I'll be celebrating Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years; I will also be traveling across the country on my first Amtrak train, and then flying off to Europe for a visit to Portugal, Spain, and possibly a bit of eastern Europe. I also get to write about my time there.

Before I venture off, I'm here at home in Chicago, with no set plans until December 12. You'd think I'd be ecstatic with this amount of free time: about a month and a half. Just enough time to get by without necessarily having to find a job or other way of making money until my job starts up again in February (I'll be living with my parents for December and traveling for all of January, so I'm using the money I'd normally be spending on rent during that time to fund myself for those two months). Enough time to read, study my French, write on my blog, write other things, watch movies, get back to sewing.

Tomorrow will mark two weeks since the last day at my job, and it's been nice so far. But more than nice it's been strange, and very quiet. I can entertain myself really easily, but most of the time I feel overwhelmed with options, and I'll usually just end up in a coffee shop writing or making notes about my trip to Portugal and Spain instead of going out to explore my city. This also has to do with the weather, which is -- just weather, I guess. I'm still used to being in my little California bubble, where weather does not exist.

During the past week I've been working on moving this blog over to Wordpress. Nothing against Blogger -- I just like the Wordpress templates and the operating system a little more than Blogger's. But guys, IT ISN'T WORKING. It says it has accepted my imported blog and that they'll import it as soon as possible, but nothing is happening. I'm considering just starting over there from scratch. It's kind of a sad thought, but at the same time, starting over feels kind of appropriate right now. Either way, I'll keep you posted.

how to buy a plane ticket

1. Pick the city where you'd like to go. Pick 5 other cities that you'd also like to visit and pretend that they are realistic options.
2. Start pricing out these trips using different and sometimes complex combinations of departure and arrival cities, dates, and flight comparison websites.
3. Seven hours later, take a break to eat.
4. Resume the search. Agonize. Check bank account. Further agony.
5. Script a rousing pep talk for yourself.
6. Procrastinate by googling pictures of the places you'd like to go.
7. Thirty minutes later, realize you have ended up on the Wikipedia site for catfish.
8. This reminds you of your cat; spend about 20 minutes looking through pictures of her on your phone.
9. Filled with love for your cat and a determination to make her proud, resume your search with confidence.
10. Find a ridiculously cheap flight from Chicago to Barcelona via Pakistan International Airlines.
11. Argue with boyf through text messaging about the relevance of Pakistan International Airlines to this particular routing.
12. Book different flight.
13. Choose a type of drink that will simultaneously celebrate your achievement while also mourning the hit to your bank account [suggestions: whiskey]
14. Break news to parents via blog post. Mom, Dad, I'm going to Spain.

travel video by mood

Last month, the boyf and I ventured off to a bed and breakfast in Wisconsin, as some of you may recall. I have just recently purchased a flip camera and decided to take some video of the drive back home to Chicago, which was almost irritatingly gorgeous. Instead of forcing you to watch the video with whatever song I felt like putting it to at the time (my taste probably would have embarrassed us both, honestly), I decided to upload the video 8 times with 8 different songs, so that you can enjoy the video no matter what mood you are currently in (the first video is the only one where the song's length matches perfectly with the video's length, so if you want to watch it all the way through, watch the first one). And so, if you are feeling...

Happy:

Melancholic:

90s:

Ominous:

Drunk:

Female Empowerment:

Beatles:

Closing scene of Cruel Intentions:

the train nightmares

As many of you know, I currently work in the travel industry. I spend at least 8 hours a day, five or six days a week, advising different train routes and researching how to get from Dublin to Athens in the least obnoxious way by train*.

I am also one of those people who has dreams that I can remember almost every single night. I've always been that way and I kind of like it, especially since I rarely have any nightmares.

Until recently.

A few weeks ago, the boyf woke up in the middle of the night with a coughing fit. Apparently he got up to get a glass of water and then came back in to lie down, where he proceeded to cough for several more minutes while I continued to sleep angelically beside him, blissfully unaware of his anguish.

I must have been in the midst of a dream where I was advising someone at work, because when he started to nudge me awake, seeking some sympathy, I distinctly recall being very irritated and incoherent.

"No," I snapped, "you can't take a direct train from Barcelona to Munich," irritated that he would even consider the possibility at this time of night.

A few minutes later, when I was more lucid and the guilt had begun to set in, I gave him a back rub and offered to get him more water.

Later that week, we were at his house. As usual, I was exhausted from work and had fallen asleep before he had. When he came into bed and got under the covers, I shifted and started to wake up a little.  He hadn't said anything, but in my dream someone else definitely had. Slowly, so as to break it to them gently, I whispered, "No, the train from Milan doesn't run every day."

I heard the boyf say, "What?" and that woke me up a little more. Suddenly realizing where I was, I sighed and waved my hand. "Just mumbling about trains again."

Later, he said that I hadn't actually been forming real words during most of that.

Two nights ago was the worst. Getting my beauty sleep alone this time, I was half-awake a few minutes before my alarm was set to go off. I don't remember what exactly had happened in this dream except that someone had wanted to go from Guyana to Munich -- Guyana being the country in South America.

Somehow this one translated into text messaging. Half-awake, I was suddenly irritated with myself that I could no longer find the written request that this person had given me. I looked under my pillow, on the floor next to my bed, and then it dawned on me that oh, of course, it was probably in a text message. I grabbed my phone and open to the most recent text I had received, something from the boyf about our weekend plans.

Grumpily, I sighed. I wasn't so much irritated that I had woken up before my alarm and therefore missed out on three valuable minutes of sleep as I was that someone in my dream had not known that you cannot get from South America to Germany by train.

My job is seasonal, and it ends this Friday. Perhaps this is a good thing.

*there isn't one.