I stayed with my friend Jaime (who I graduated high school with) in his apartment at Sylvie Lodge in Segny, France, a smallish town about 20-30 minutes’ driving distance from Geneva, Switzerland. There were horses across the street and mountains on all sides (read: I could probably have stayed forever). For almost the first week I was there, it was rainy and cold, but we made the most of it – sucking it up and hiking the Jura mountains anyway. It was gorgeous…see?

One of my favorite little stories from hiking the Jura actually happened when we were making our way through the town of Gex on our way to the trails. I had just bought a France World Cup jersey and was wearing it. Now, France had lost the night before so I wasn’t too worried about getting it sweaty – in fact, that’s really why I was wearing it in the first place. So we’re walking past a school and this kid starts making fun of me (in French) for wearing a France jersey, chanting the losing score. Wait…I was in France, wasn’t I? One of the first things that Jaime told me about France was that “no one hates the French more than the French” – some merit to that, maybe? Anyway, here’s the offending jersey (I’m posing with a wooden statue of one of the first settlers of the Jura mountain range – these guys were everywhere!):

We fell into a bit of an evening routine in Segny: after exhausting ourselves doing awesome things during the day, it was time to head back for a baguette and a bottle of wine. While in the grocery store, we also discovered that France sells “Pringoooals” (not to be confused with normal Pringles – these were FAR more extreme) and we just couldn’t resist. On the way home one evening, we discovered that the little Toyota Yaris had a cup holder that seemed just all too perfect… :)

Next big stop on the trip was Paris, and I can’t even begin to upload the hundreds of photos from that part of the adventure. On day one, we wandered the entire city (on foot, mind you) in the general direction of Hard Rock Paris. We passed most of the big sights: the Eiffel Tower (only a few blocks from our hotel), the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame (okay, we only saw the spires on day one), the river Seine, where Napoleon’s buried, aaand so much more. Needless to say, our feet were quite sore but that didn’t stop us from going back out that night to explore the city even more. We were determined to find the Louvre, and eventually got there. What a magnificent sight at night – unfortunately we found no Rose Line and weren’t able to go kneel by the tomb of Mary Magdalene like Tom Hanks (sigh).

I’m really shortening the Paris trip here (more to come later). Another highlight of the trip was when we discovered a cafe called Iolanda Paris which will actually serve you an entire liter of Warsteiner (a German beer) all at once in one HUGE glass. The French staff was convinced that we wouldn’t be able to walk out of the restaurant under our own power, but we certainly showed them. :) We ended up going back for dinner and then again for a quick breakfast on our way out of Paris. The staff was so friendly and hilarious – definitely the most fun people we met in Paris! Thanks for the good times, guys!

After a bit of downtime back in Segny, we were off to the town of Les Diablerets in the Swiss Alps. Words just cannot describe how breathtaking those mountains really are. I would have been completely okay with missing our train home and just hanging out, you know, in the Alps. We scrambled up rock faces, stood in a (freezing, freezing cold) glacier waterfall, listened to awesome cowbells, and threw snowballs in June. The Alps are going to get a post all to themselves later, but in the meantime, here are a couple of photos to hold over in the meantime:

After a tired (and kinda sad) train ride back to France from the Alps, we crashed for quite some time to recover. Not long after, one of Jaime’s colleagues (a professor from Kansas University, I believe) took me on a fantastic tour down into the depths of CMS, one of the experiments at CERN located in Cessy, France. More on this later, too – but this is the location where they filmed part of Angels and Demons. I didn’t actually get to see the magnet since it was on, but the rest of it was really, really cool (kinda made me question my choice to be an English major..at least a little bit!).

Here I am using an oscilloscope (like a “real” physicist!).

This is what one of the particle collisions looks like — pretty. :)

Okay – at this point, I was sadly nearing my last day in France and Switzerland. Jaime took me into Geneva to spend my last full day there and it was awesome. We visited the St. Pierre Cathedral, hung out by Lake Geneva, saw the fountain, ran into a parade, I finally found a Swiss soccer jersey, and we just enjoyed the city (this is another full post…later). We ended with dinner at a yummy restaurant close to the lake. I had some kind of ostrich steak (really delicious, by the way).

Last day in Geneva, hanging out by the lake.

(deep breath) This really was a trip of a lifetime. I’m so glad that Jaime convinced me to come visit – it was completely worth every penny. The people I met were wonderful, the scenery was absolutely amazing, and I really can’t wait until I can go back. It was a fantastic experience and I definitely found a place where life just feels good. :)

More details and photos to come! Hang in there, everyone.

Stay tuned for photos and stuff. :)

Au revoir!

I chose to focus my web essay on reflecting about my experience in my ENGL 314 Literary Journals class. I had a really awesome interview and found a way to incorporate an interactive fiction author and his work into our online literary journal, Othergate Journal.

Here it is:
The Coolest (Academic) Thing I Did in College

Luck meets Life in Blog Directory Listings

blogville.us

From left to right: Mike, Lauren, Elinor, Me, Hart

I hope to be posting again soon!

-Kay

Unfortunately, I’ve been about as good at planning my amazing fun times as I have been at applying for jobs. There’s still just so much to worry about with school that it’s awfully difficult to find time to sit down, take a breath, and think about the future (even the immediate future!). My roommate and I started with grand plans to tour Ireland, then thought vaguely about going on a cruise. Now we’ve been looking at taking a trip out to backcountry Yellowstone, something that’s a bit closer to home, but still an experience that we’d be so stoked to make happen. I haven’t really been out to the western United States (save for living in Colorado when I was pretty young), and what could be better than hanging out in Yellowstone away from “civilization” for a bit? It turns out that I also have an amazing (get ready to read this word quite a bit here) opportunity to visit Switzerland at the beginning of June and stay with a good friend of mine. That means hiking in the Alps, seeing Geneva, and maybe even visiting CERN (because that’s where he gets to work on breaks – so. lucky.). Heck, the rest of Europe is right there, so maybe I’d e ven get to adventure even farther than that! It’d be pretty neat to work over there for the summer, but that might be asking for too much.

So, Yellowstone National Park. Geysers, mountains, bears, oh my! I don’t think I’ve seen a single picture from Yellowstone that’s not been stunning. I haven’t done the amount of hiking that I meant to around the Shenandoah region this semester because of my hip surgery (boo), but this summer I’ll be relatively unlimited, so Yellowstone, here I come! We haven’t worked out all of the specifics, but we know we want to make it past the spots that tourists generally stop at and see the backcountry of the park. We’ve read through the Backcountry Trip Planner and learned all about bears, bear pepper spray, and bear encounters. Here are a few key bear safety rules that we learned while reading:

1. Avoid dead things; bears like to eat them.
2. Don’t run away. Especially don’t run away and then climb a tree.
3. Try not to have your period in bear country. You might attract bears, but no one’s really sure about that.
4. Don’t hike at night. There are bears, and you can’t see them.
5. Avoid baby bears. Momma bear doesn’t need you to babysit.
6. Make lots of noise while you’re out and about. Your (terrible) singing voice will alert bears to avoid you.
7. This is what a bear looks like (see below).

From b1ubb’s Photostream

I actually don’t know much about my trip to Switzerland other than that I’ll be staying a short distance from Geneva and it will undoubtedly be really cool. I’ll leave you with a gorgeous picture of the Alps, courtesy of Curious Expeditions’ photostream:

And also one of my friend’s favorite pictures related to CERN and the Large Hadron Collider:

I really hope everything’s going to work out: job, adventures, and all. Anyway, I found two four-leaf clovers out in the courtyard of the UMW apartments today – that’s gotta be lucky, right?

1. North America: St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada. First of all, I’ve never been to Canada, so that’d be pretty cool. Secondly, my reason for wanting to see St. John’s is a little strange – one of my favorite bands is Great Big Sea, a band that started in St. John’s. Plenty of their songs reference St. John’s and it seems like they draw a lot of their inspiration from the city. All of the pictures look beautiful and it seems like a really neat part of the world to see.

From Wikipedia.org – St. John’s, Newfoundland

2. South America: The Amazon Rainforest. How. Cool. I’m not sure that I could spend very long in a rainforest (Wikipedia says that it’s home to about 2.5 million species of insects – gross), but the Amazon is something that I’d really love to see. A friend of mine just spent her spring break in the rainforests of Costa Rica for one of her science classes and came back with all sorts of awesome stories (my favorite being the one in which she “asserted her dominance” by roaring at a bush that was shaking as if there was an animal in it on her way to camp in the middle of the night). Also, there are a couple of episodes of River Monsters (one of my favorite shows!) that were filmed near the Amazon River (so now I know not to get in the water). :)

3. Asia: The Taj Mahal, Agra, India. What’s there to say? It’s one of the New Seven Wonders of the World – and I don’t think that photos do it justice. It looks amazing. End of story.

From Wikipedia.org – The Taj Mahal

4. Europe: Greece. There’s so much history in Greece – everything from the Parthenon to Mount Olympus. I’d definitely say that I’m most interested in the stuff that has to do with Greek mythology. Also, the country looks gorgeous – I’m sure I could spend quite awhile there.

5. Africa: This one’s a hard one. Africa’s kind of gigantic, so there’s a lot to pick from: Kilimanjaro, the Sahara, the Serengeti, the Kalahari Desert. I just don’t know; the deserts would be really, really cool to see (also really dry), but I think I’d go with the Serengeti. The Serengeti Migration includes lots and lots of zebras, gazelles and wildebeests. Sign me up!

From Wikipedia.org – The Serengeti Migration

6. Australia: The Great Barrier Reef. It’s the largest reef system on planet earth filled with all kinds of fish, sharks, whales, and so much other stuff living in and around there. Come on, you can even see it from outer space – it’s a pretty big deal. Being able to visit the Great Barrier Reef would be a great excuse to learn to scuba dive as well. They even have trips to take you out to see Great White Sharks – I honestly think that I would be terrified, but how awesome would it be to be able to say that I’d gone down in a shark cage?!

From animal.discovery.com – Great White Shark

7. Antarctica: I’m not sure that there’s a “where” in Antarctica that I’d like to go, but I definitely know what I want to see: the wildlife. There’s penguins, orcas, whales, seals, giant squid… (can you tell that I’m the nerd who watches all of the Animal Planet/Discovery programming on sea life?). I don’t know how all of this would work out; maybe a cruise would be my best bet? This is the one that I’ve looked at/researched the least. Word is that it’s awful cold down there in Antarctica, so I certainly can’t go until I stockpile a bunch of really warm clothes.

From nmfs.noaa.gov – “Killer Whale spyhopping” (COOL.)

So there you have it: a focused list of things I want to do around the world. By all means, let me know if there’s something you’ve seen/heard of that I should make sure gets on the list! I think this part of my bucket list is going to take quite a bit longer than some of the others, but that’s okay. I’m sure I’ll eventually get around to everywhere I want to go. :)

]]> http://lindseybechtold.net/2010/04/05/around-the-world/feed/ 0 http://lindseybechtold.net/2010/03/28/hip-surgery-marathon-eventually/ http://lindseybechtold.net/2010/03/28/hip-surgery-marathon-eventually/#comments Sun, 28 Mar 2010 23:38:51 +0000 shamrockon http://shamrockon.umwblogs.org/?p=199 I used to go out and run for a good hour or so almost every day; now I end up out of breath and back at a walk after about fifteen minutes of jogging. It’s pretty frustrating, especially since I even used to head out and run before or after riding a horse or two out a the barn.  I used to feel decently athletic, now not so much. It’s been awhile since running’s been hard for me and I guess I forgot just how difficult it was to push myself to the point where it was enjoyable (at least when it wasn’t freezing outside). In any case, I’m remembering all the old soreness and aches that come from getting into running – again. Ice packs are my good friends. I’m having to get back into running because I had arthroscopic hip surgery back in December and they don’t exactly let you run right off of the operating table. In fact, I spent three weeks on crutches because I wasn’t allowed to put more than 20 pounds of weight on my right leg (which feels like a lot less than one might think). So, hip surgery at age 21? Yup, it happens.

Turns out, the pinching and aching I had in my general hip area and the funky muscle tightness that was throwing off all of my alignment all had to do with what’s called a labral tear, which is what happens when the cartilage in your hip socket is damaged. I also had some extra bone that was making the issue worse (I’m a mutant or something, I guess) – here’s a more in-depth explanation for that.  This Washington Post article explains it a little bit better – actually, the Derek Ochiai mentioned in the article is the surgeon who worked on my hip. Thank goodness that my physical therapist sent me off to get checked out when she did; one day she looked at my hip flexion and realized that my right hip didn’t move nearly as far as my left. One MRI arthrogram and a visit to the orthopedist later, I was looking at hip surgery at (what I thought was) a ridiculously young age. The damage to the lining of my hip socket was likely to only worsen if I didn’t get it fixed. Greeeeaaaat. I had to stop riding and running for how long?!

Anyway, surgery wasn’t as terrifying as I thought. My team of anesthesiologists was pleasant and I don’t remember a thing past being lifted onto the table. Plus, my surgeon gave me a packet of really sweet photographs from the inside of my hip. It mostly looks squishy to me, but you can be the judge:

Two days after being home, I was crutching around the house and completely off my painkillers. I was raring to do something, but there wasn’t much that I was allowed to do. (My arms and shoulders started looking a lot better, though.) Physical therapy was exciting times – I finally had exercises! I still wasn’t able to do any sort of cardio, but I felt slightly more active. I ditched my crutches on New Year’s Eve, a day or two before I was really supposed to, but come on, who wants to be the “gimp” on New Year’s? Let me tell you – when you haven’t really walked for almost a month, it’s a really bizarre feeling – quite tingly, actually.

Now that I’m a bit over three months post-surgery, I’m finally at the point in my physical therapy protocol where I can return to running and “social sports.” I’ve got clearance to get back on a horse (but not to “overdo it” – who, me?). I actually know what it feels like to sweat again – hooray! I haven’t told my physical therapist about my marathon-running dreams because I’m fairly certain they’d get shut down real fast. My hip’s not due to feel “normal” until about a year after surgery, so I doubt I’m anywhere near where I need to be to start training for a marathon. In the meantime, I’ve got a new pair of running shoes and my very own pair of Superfeet insoles that are supposed to be excellent for both support and alignment. I’ve got a (mostly) good attitude about getting back into shape and spring’s coming up – the perfect running weather (aside from all of the pollen)! I need a healthier dose of patience so that I don’t “overdo it,” as they say – I definitely don’t want to be spending any more time on crutches any time soon. I’ve also discovered MapMyRun.com which has been great to switch up my running routes so that I don’t get bored with the scenery. Until I’m past the huffing-and-puffing stage, neat scenery is key. Hopefully it won’t be long until I’m back in that running “zone.”

Even though it’s going to take a lot longer than I’d like, I’ve got my eye on the Marine Corps Marathon. It’s gonna be awesome.

While it’d be neat to go learn to surf somewhere more exotic (like Hawaii), it’s possible to stick close to home to learn to surf, as evidenced by this list of surf schools in Virginia. I also think that the waves on the east coast of the United States might be a little bit nicer to beginners. I’ve found lesson prices that range between $45 and $110; 2 hours seems to be the usual time slot for lessons. The price depends on whether or not you want private or group lessons. I got this information from Surfline.com, a website that features “everything you ever wanted to know about surfing but were afraid to ask.” Why you’d be afraid to ask anything about surfing, I’m not sure. Surfers don’t seem all that intimidating; most of the ones I’ve met on the beach have been pretty friendly and easygoing about answering questions about their sport of choice.

One thing that I’ve always thought about surfing is that it comes with its own dictionary full of special surfer words. Turns out, I was right: there’s an online surfing dictionary full of surfing words and terms. I personally prefer the Riptionary because it sounds way cooler and seems easier to navigate. I’ve learned that a “hodad” is a beginner or non-surfer. Some other strange words that I came across in the Riptionary are:

- liquid smoke: the spray that comes off the back of a wave from an offshore wind

- schnot shot: the process of alternately plugging a nostril and blowing out in an attempt to eject seawater from ones sinus cavity after being worked by a bomb or getting rag dolled

It’s definitely a dictionary that sends you all over looking for other terms once you’ve looked up one thing, so here’s what “bomb” and “rag dolled” mean:

- bomb: a hard breaking close out wave that pitches up and dumps over

- rag dolled: to get drilled, rolled and tumbled by a breaking wave

I guess that every sport comes with its own lingo, but it seems as though surfing comes with a ridiculously large vocabulary. It kind of reminds me of how Eskimos supposedly have an unusually large number of words for “snow” and how gamers have all their special words that they use to talk about video games. I wonder if they teach classes on surf culture and lingo? In any case, I can definitely see myself doing this someday, even if it involves plenty of face plants into the waves:

From mikebaird’s photostream on flickr.com

Allow me to set the scene. It was cold, and it was raining (not drizzling, raining). They had us follow a trail of people wearing pink ponchos and handing out special chest bump stickers. When we reached the stage where the chest bump was going to happen, we hung around and made friends with our fellow record-breakers. Most of them were already several beers into their day and were quite excited about it. Several members of bands playing that day were also present, including singer Barry Privett of Carbon Leaf, who was there to talk about “Pink,” a song off of the band’s most recent album that tells the story of a young girl who was diagnosed with breast cancer. We were organized into haphazard lines facing our partners and a couple of men with Irish accents (there’s a good chance they were faking) showed us how not to chest bump, and then demonstrated the correct way (faces turned to the side, a solid approach, then a smart leap into the air to bump chests). There was a lot of “are you all ready to set a world record?!” shouting and anticipation as the rain just kept coming. Finally, on the count of three, we all leapt into the air and bumped chests with our awesome chest bump partners, and in front of video cameras and everything, we set the world record. It was a pretty exhilarating feeling and a really good time. I’m not exactly sure how much money was raised, but based on the amount of people there, I’d say it was a decent amount.

Helping to set a world record was only the start of a fantastic day. Sure, by 2pm we were so soaked that we could wring out our sweatshirts (ponchos came a little too late in the game), but we were having a good time rockin’ out. We jumped around (a wacky combination of dancing and trying to keep warm), made friends with some guy who had a large umbrella (he shared for awhile), jumped over puddles (the beer to water ratio of the puddles grew as the day wore on), and waited for our favorite bands (here’s my plug for Carbon Leaf and Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers). Unfortunately, someone executed poor planning, and my two favorite bands had conflicting time slots. I spent the first half of Carbon Leaf about 5 rows back from the stage getting shoved around and trying to dodge crowd surfers. Then, my roommate and I threaded our way out of the massive crowd of people (it took us awhile to get out – clearly, Carbon Leaf was the extremely popular choice for that time slot) and made our way to the other end of the grounds to catch the end of the Sixers. She heard her favorite song; life was good.

Train came on next. We stayed for a little while, decided that hearing “Drops of Jupiter” wasn’t important as a hot shower, and started to head out. On our way out, we ran into Barry (again), who stopped to talk for a minute. He asked us where we were going (my great, but honest, answer: “the bathroom”) and asked how they’d sounded. Then he asked if we’d participated in any of the moshing - I told him that I hadn’t due to hip surgery back in December, but that I was looking forward to getting back into it. He informed me that I’d soon be as good as new with my “bionic hip” and did quite the hip-intensive dance to demonstrate. It was a great end to the day – awesome to get to talk to one of the guys from my favorite band ever on the way out. :)

Shamrockfest was a solid success: Guinness World Record and Guinness beer, all in one.