Mozilla:

Mozilla crashed on me a couple of days ago. I restarted my computer, but now when I try to start Mozilla, I get the following error message:
The program must close to allow a previous installation to complete. Please restart.

Any suggestions? I've tried restarting the computer again, but with no luck. Should I just reinstall Mozilla?

Never mind. I figured it out. Thanks, google.

Worst. Doctor. Ever:

I went to the doctor for my throat today finally (the sick day that I took is the reason for the flurry of updating here). The man looked down my throat, looked in my ears, told me my throat looked inflammed and gave me a prescription for amoxycillin.

Romania II: Train between Budapest and Cluj:

ll that being said, here's a bit about my trip.

I landed in Budapest Friday afternoon and met T at the hostel. The next day was the train to Cluj, which was an experience. We were in a compartment with an older Hungarian woman, no air-conditioning, and a window that wouldn't stay open. (I should probably mention here that T is black and does not in anyway resemble the population of either Romania or Hungary, and we were pretty obviously identified as Americans. Or at least as non-locals.) An American came into our compartment and the following conversation ensued:
Him: Does this train go to Debrecen?
Me: I don't know.
Him: Can you ask her (jerking his thumb at the Hungarian woman)?
Me (to the woman): Sprechen Sie Deutsch?
Her: Nem.
Me(to her): Koszonem. (to him) Sorry, I can't.
Him (to T): Don't you speak Hungarian?
T: No, I don't.
Him: Oh. I thought you did. (to me) But you speak Hungarian?
Me: No. (Thinking 'why do you think that?' But I try in Romanian, to the woman) Acesta este trenul la Debrecen?
Her: (answers in a flood of Hungarian, of which I understand zero).
Me: Nu intseleg. Nem ertem.
Her: (speaks much slower and mixes in some Romanian, which I understand much better than Hungarian. I get the idea that he needs to go to the front of the train.)
Me: Koszonem. The front car, I think.
Him: Are you sure?
Me: No.
He left and headed forward. She nodded vigorously. I hope I was right.

The border crossing was a little scary. The Hungarians just asked us in English where we were going. The black-uniformed gun-carrying Romanian border patrol came into the compartment, looked at the woman's passport and returned it to her, and took our passports with them. As I was thinking "Oh, shit" and remembering that the Romanian security service does still exist, I noticed he has a pile of them, Romanian and EU and Hungarian. And maybe American. I'm still concerned about the passport, but it's returned to us, stamped at the top of the page (?) in a few minutes. No one asked me where I worked.

The final train story is short. T and I are sitting in the compartment. The Hungarian woman is gone now. The language barrier was too pronounced for us to talk, so we didn't miss her, though she seemed friendly. A man walks by our car with a little boy about 3 years old. They stop and look in. A minute or two later, they come by from the opposite direction and stop again. Then a third time. T and I understood what it was to be an animal in a zoo.

Crappy apartments:

(S is an entomology grad student)

S: Where you live is nicer than where I live.
Me: Really? Where I live kind of sucks.
S: I found a new species of roach in my apartment.
Me: Eww.
S: I keep bringing my friends unusual species of bugs for their classes and I found them all in my apartment.
Me: Fine. You win.

Romania, part I (intro):

I know I promised to write this months ago, but maybe the distance helped me a bit. I want to write about Transylvania.

In Transylvania, I saw what I love about central and eastern Europe, something I haven't been able to explain to my mother no matter how hard I've tried. The mix of cultures, the way cultures coexist without losing their distinctness is evidenced here. The settlers were Romanian, Hungarian, and Saxon (the Saxons are ethnically German, though their culture is distinct from that of their kinsmen to the west). The Hungarians live in northwest Transylvania and many of them pursue a way of life that Hungarians from Hungary come over to see. The ethnic Hungarians who live in Romania live how all Hungarians lived 100 years ago. They originally lived in central Transylvania, but the Saxons are mostly gone, now; they left after the fall of Communism when they were permitted to leave. Though these people had been gone from Germany for generations, the German government fought Ceausescu to allow them to return to Germany and a few of them were able to leave under his regime. The rest mostly left after 1989. The Romanians live everywhere else. Each group has its own characteristic style of archictecture; the Saxons lived in fortified churches with Gothic spires pointing up jaggedly into the sky (Vlad the Impaler was a Saxon), the Romanians have rounded churches in the eastern style, the Hungarians have Gothic-style cathedrals but did not fortify them.

Transylvania is somewhere that cultures can coexist reasonably peacefully. Sure there is both a Hungarian National Theatre and a Romanian National Theatre in the university town of Cluj, population less than 100,000. The Hungarians do sort of look down on the Romanians, but they don't kill them.

Romania is poor, though I don't think it's the same level of poverty that travellers see in India. A few Roma children begged for food from us, but most of the children looked well fed and wore weather-appropriate clothing. You would see more beggars in a reasonably sized American city. The farmland is reasonably fertile and if it is stil plowed by horse and human labor, a farm does provide enough to feed a family. Living in rural Romania would be hard work. I was motivated to donate money to Romanian charities when I came back, but I didn't feel the same overwhelming sense of guilt that I've heard Americans talk about feeling in sub-Saharan Africa and India.

Still, though, seeing a little boy with his shoes worn through is heart-wrenching. We were eating outside in a restaurant in Cluj, when a beautiful little girl came up to us. She said something, but saw we couldn't understand, se she pointed to the food on the table. I couldn't eat, so I offered her mine, but she wanted something with meat, so T gave away her food and I gave T mine. She sat on the curb and shared the food with a little boy a couple of years younger than her. I don't know if we did the right thing, chosing to give only food and not money.

More to follow...

Life and stuff:

A few random odds and ends before the weekend--

1) My promotion is finally official, so I can write about it here. This does not result in a new job, just a raise, which is totally awesome. I think it'll be a little over $100 a paycheck after taxes, which is not bad at all.

2) With that raise, I decided I could afford to put new freon in the car, so in about another hour, I will have functional air conditioning for the first time in the last two years. I'm also getting an oil change, and I'm going to get the emissions done tomorrow. I also am working on getting my proof of insurance to Maryland which has decided that, even though I had to show proof of insurance to register the car, I must not have had insurance and has kindly figured out the fee. Unfortunately for them, I did have insurance and am getting the letter faxed over.

3) I am sick. I do not know what I have but I have had a sore throat for six days now. In this time period, I have eaten 12 containers of yogurt, about 4 pounds of grapes, a burrito, two salads, a lot of pudding, vegetable soup, an eclair, some cheese, half a giant beer (the giant beer is a quart, so I guess I had a pint), and a whole lot of Diet Coke. I have gargled with warm salt water, taken vast quantities of ibuprofen, used Halls and vitamin C to no avail. I am currently starving and eying the lunch meat. I think I can get that down.

4) There is a picnic today at work. I am going, but God only knows what I am going to eat. Maybe my throat will be better before the two brunches I have scheduled for this weekend, since otherwise I'm going to be limited to eggs.

I think that's enough of my truly exciting life for one day. If anyone has some tips for making a sore throat go away, I will be your new best friend. Email me with alumni email address! Sorry comments are down still. Enetation sucks, and I haven't had time to switch over.

Feeds:

So I've attempted to turn on feeds for this blog. The atom feed can be found at: http://home.uchicago.edu/~kathleen/atom.xml. The RSS feed can be found at http://feeds.feedburner.com/acoolweboflanguage.

If either of these don't work, please let me know.

Odyssey:

For those of you who have been following my odyssey from Chicago to Baltimore, I am back in DC, about 10 hours after I originally got on the plane. I did not have to drive from Norfolk, since they managed to find another pilot about 10pm.

Trip was very good. Delicious food and great people and of course, Conor's mom's margaritas. I want to write up a 36 hours in Chicago thing, like the NYT does, since I felt my trip was a lot like that.