Maru's Mun Journal

Last year, my sister and her husband had time to kill before their plane left from Keflavík airport, and so they went to this Viking museum in Njardvík (basically, across the bay from Keflavík town), and they took all these pictures of this colourful cartoonishly funny art installation about the Norse myths, so I decided I really wanted to go there as well and take my own pictures to iconise, print on large canvasses, or do other fun things.

My mother and sister mocked me for not using an audio guide but instead wandering through the exhibit just looking at what it looked like and taking pictures of cute colourful details. But really, I just wanted the colourful pretties. My flist and tumblr dash tells me enough about Norse myth as it is. Audio guide no thank you.-

( OMG the colours!! Cut cut cut! )

OMG we at so much food!

I did Thanksgiving again, with wiebke and cracicotus and brickling. Now we are having pumpkin pie and watching 'Krabat'.-

Even if I'm not yet home, I am at least back at my own computer, having returned from the outermost leg of my journey.

My mother went straight back to her own little foldup puter, which unfortunately consented to boot up after only ten tries or so, and immediately proceeded to play a quiet evening's mahjongg...

And Paolo, the cute little mutt in Berlin, was the first dog I ever met who was actually afraid of me. Normally, dogs love me on the spot; little Paolo took one look at me and fled, shivering abjectly with deep-rooted terror. No obvious reason for his fright was discernible; and as I like dogs, this outcome was somewhat hurtful to me, but I tried to bear it like a man.-

There is a special revenge England visits on Germany for its many shortcomings: it is called Rosamunde Pilcher. That's some writing lady of the Barbara Cartland/Maeve Binchy/Nicholas Sparks (last one no lady, but still the same for all practical purposes) persuasion who is only moderately successful in her native language but enormously popular among elderly females of the middle to lower middle classes in Germany, in translation, of course.

Following that success, German public television makes the most stomach-heavingly saccarine made-for-TV-movies of those stomach-heavingly saccarine books, filmed on location somewhere over in .uk, and cast with German TV actors. The worst stuff anyone can be subjected to on the effin' tube short of actual so-called "Volksmusik" (wiebke and floppy_hat probably know what that is; the rest should be really grateful they are spared that knowledge!!!), and my mother is just now watching this year's newest offering. Of course it's on for Christmas, too.

So, as not to be forced to eventually spew forth my just-eaten Pink Herring Salad, I will go and read the newest part of the "Taxes" AU POTC fanfic by the_mad_fangirl in pirategasm. Unfortunately, she's strewn that story all over the place, so I'll have to do some hunting and gathering until I get it complete. I like AU fanfics of the reincarnation flavour, as this one is; it's so funny to find the personages from a familiar fandom all mixed and matched differently, and slowly remembering who they used to be. Almost as much fun as ruminating what anybody would be like if they were to reincarnate as Wraeththu in the future...

So I'll be nicely busy until that accursed Pilcher thinggy has run its natural course, and I can go over into the family room again, settle on my favourite sofa, and go on reading The Standing Dead while my parents do as usual in the background.

A propos of that book, I must say Ricardo really does know how to keep his readers on their toes emotionally. He draws you into his world and makes you fear and suffer with and for his characters, as utterly alien to us they might seem at first glance. The whole system is so cruel: everybody suffers dreadfully, from the sartlar all the way up to the Wise, the Chosen and the God Emperor - but somehow nobody gets anything for all their suffering, really. But, on the other hand, do we get any more for all our varigated sufferings in our present world-wide civilisation; any more than a few fleeting pleasures, that is, just like these people back then in that fictional past had as well? Anyway, that's a question I might dwell on when I've finished the second book and write my review for Areion.

I like to "Name the Dinosaur", though. Earthers, heaveners, raveners and even bellowers are comparatively easy, but I'm not quite decided on aquar (Struthiomimus, perhaps? But weren't those supposed to be smaller?), and can't tell at all in case of the "dragons".-

Yesterday I spent in a corner, making exactly like a snake who'd just eaten a warthog. The Thanksgiving dinner on Saturday evening (one must adapt a bit to local conditions) at my cousin's place, by and for his American wife (she gets so homesick at Thanksgiving, and he sorta lends her his family - awwww!) was just as it was supposed to be: far too much. Peacock feathers were in evidence in a vase. They didn't get used after all, but I poked fun at it while I was still able to do any poking.

Later, I fell to thinking that America must have seemed like the legendary Land of Plenty to those early settlers who started the tradition of Thanksgiving. I mean, no measly, hard-shelled wheat, but huge, succulent corn cobs; gigantic turkeys so stupid a child could hunt them instead of the mean geese from back home; a small plant you just pull from the ground to harvest huge tubers that would fill you up easily; and then the pumpkins! Everything was oversized to those ex-British starvelings; small wonder they were grateful for that miraculous new country. And the natives were still friendly then as well; from all I hear that was the point of the whole exercise, right? What a wonderful place to come to, after being the lowest of the low back in England...