Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Goin’ on a trip
Far away
I am leeeeeeeeeeaving today
On my
Rooo-oooo-ocket ship
Rock. Et. Ship.
– The Dead Milkmen
Or, if not a rocket, then a reasonably fast plane.
So long, rainy, dark, gloomy, mossy, wet Vancouver! I still care about you very much, but I think we need some time apart.
I’ll be in Australia until Feb 19 and then in New Zealand until March 6. My internet access may be sporadic, but hey, email me, leave comments on my blog, give me travel advice, whatever you like.
Watch this space for exciting updates! In typical blogger style, I’m writing this to tell everyone I’m planning to write more here in the future.
So, Thursday I’ll be leaving Vancouver for my grand trip down under. I have to admit, I’m quite excited.
First stop, Canberra. I think that the Machine Learning Summer School there will help me to focus on a research topic. I know generally what I’m interested in — Active Learning — but it’s such a big and unexplored topic that the problem is whittling it down to something manageable. This will be the perfect opportunity to talk to both experts in the field and students in the same position as me.
And then, after ten days of that, it’s off to New Zealand with my charming and lovely friend Jan! My plan is, essentially, to not have a plan. I don’t usually travel like that, but I’m looking forward to it. I leave Canberra on February 17th, fly to Dunedin, and have to catch a plane from Auckland on March 6. In between… who knows? There are places I want to see, but really, I know I won’t see everything I want to, and I mostly just want to enjoy not operating on an itinerary.
Schedules can start to chafe, sometimes. I… am a Free Spirit.
Link (to satellite images of NZ)
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Yesterday was the first Vancouver Zombiewalk. I’m a huge fan of zombie movies. I usually zombify myself for Halloween, and I even wrote a short (unfilmed) zombie movie back when I was in film school. So naturally, when I heard about the Zombiewalk, I was pretty excited, but maybe a little apprehensive. The thing didn’t really seem to have much central organization, and it seemed to be spreading only through a few local blogs and word of mouth. How many people would hear about it and be enough into zombies to put together costumes and spend a Saturday afternoon in August wandering around Vancouver?
A neurontin 300 mg uses lot, it turns out.
I was expecting maybe few dozen people, tops. But we were an army. A mighty army of the living dead, lusting after the brains of the living.
We shuffled around the Vancouver Art Gallery, past the war protesters, into the the Pacific Center mall to the shock of the shoppers, stumbling down the escalator and into the bowels of the earth to catch the train. The skytrain passengers could only watch helplessly as their train pulled up into a sea of zombies which invaded the cars, only to be disgorged at the Main Street station. We staggered up Main Street, surrounding buses and police cars, past the trendy restaurants and hipster hangouts and into the residential streets and parks. People came out to their front lawns and balconies to gawk at us, until finally we lurched into Mountainview Cemetery to rejoin our resting brethren.
It was a fantastic experience — unexpected and surreal and pointless and bizarre. The people we passed were (mostly) completely surprised and amused to see this invasion of the dead. Even the police escort we eventually picked up was entertained, joking and posing with the zombies. Hopefully, we made helped make everyone’s day just a little more surreal.
- Link (to my pics of the event).
- Link (to hundreds more pictures by other people and zombies).
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