Berlin Day 2, was it?

 

kopenhaga

i padło ulubione pytanie! 'jak było?' otóż było... intensywnie. ale nie o wszystkim trzeba pisać i nie wszystko trzeba pamiętać.
Kopenhaga. Jaka? Niska. Budynki niskie. Dużo czerwonej cegły i brzydkich pałaców/gmachów/bibliotek/instytucji. Dla kontrastu nad brzegiem nastąpił wysyp mnóstwa bardzo nowoczesnych konstrukcji: biblioteka (czarny diament), nowa opera i teatr... Tworzą miłą dla oka odskocznię od tradycyjnej zabudowy centrum.
Jest jeszcze Christania, o której nigdy wcześniej nie słyszałam - autonomiczny (i ogromny) region w samym sercu Kopenhagi. Zdjęć robić nie wolno, a wszsytko wygląda trochę jak obóz hippisów w Tybindze - tyle, że tu na dużo większą skalę - są sklepy, bary, restaruracje, galerie... Na jakiej zasadzie oni jeszcze funkcjonują? Nie mam pojęcia, a wydaje się, że nie idzie im najgorzej, bo rośnie tam już trzecie pokolenie mieszkańców, zjednoczonych walką z kapitalizmem podsycaną świeżym zielem.

tybinga wiosną.

tybinga

trochę już niektórzy mają dość, że mała, że nic się nie dzieje, że ciągle się trafia na te same twarze. pewnie i prawda, tyle, że mi to nie przeszkadza. podoba mi się tu, choć przyznaję, że rok to tak właśnie opytmalnie.
brakuje mi tarabuka, kafki, czułego... po prostu przyjemnych kawiarni, gdzie można siąść samemu i poczytać książkę, to co jest jest skrojone na przeciętny gust, który ma pasować i do studenta, i do matki z dzieckiem i do emeryta, który właśnie się wybrał na przedpołudiową kawę z przyjaciółmi.
ale i tak urocza, z niecierpliwością czekam na kwiaty, słońce i park.

and I let Poland take me by surprise again. rude shop attendants, horrific traffic and stinky buses
I have to admit: it's a jungle out here, baby

ajajajaj, HOMESICK, warsawsick, a-little-bit-of-chaos-sick
I was wondering what picture I should upload, what do I really miss, my family, friends, my house in the middle of nowhere? it's all true, but I don't need to be any more sentimental than necessary - hence the picture

freiburg

Freiburg
Duuuużo turystów ;)
niewygodne buty ;(
nienaładowana bateria
w aparacie
nowa torba
kelner, który mówi ile płacę, a potem znika
tanie, niedobre winogrona
pierwszy mitfahrgelegenheit
schwarzwalderkirschtorte
jednak przyszedł
nie żałowali alkoholu
siedzę na turkusowym krześle!
freiburdzki akcent
i msza w Münster o 1830
toi toi na Schloßberg

and munich

tiny as she was...

konstanz and munich alles auf einmal

after tübingen it´s now so hard to find a city i could like so much
konstanz? nice, sure, worth a visit, tübingen-cute? definitely not
munich? big, nice rathaus, nice? i was expecting more. my mistake was that we went there to see oktoberfest and we should have kept it that way instead of trying to see the city the same day - all the stuff i didn´t like about oktoberfest i now associate with munich - crap
conclusion? two conclusions 1. you should visit tübingen last or 2. you should always spend more time in one place so taht you can really say something about it
but being a budget tourist is another story

nice but there is a 'but'

ladies and gentlemen, here comes tübingen.

cute, small, rainy, fucking ordentlich - ok, maybe I'm just freaking pissed off coz I was given a ticket today for riding a bike in a Füßgängerzone which went for about 50 meters!!! 50 bloody meters where you have to get off your bike only to hop back on it after a 40-second walk, agghhhrrrr, that was frustrating.
other than that - the city is unbelievably pretty, it's actually quite hard for us Poles to even imagine that, it's as if the whole city looked like Warsaw's old town. ok, for Brazilians or Australians it's another story - I reckon they are amazed but in a way I was amazed by India - it's so totally different, it's so old, and clean, and cute that it escapes any comparison. but for me it's a problem, coz I know many of our towns and cities used to look like that - not like that - here I mean the history and the atmosphere behind it, but some how after the war we couldn't bring them back to life and there we are left with a handful of historic buildings here and there, and the rest are communist leftovers.

deutschland

11.09.2008 my first day in Tübingen.
people, older people hold hands when walking down the street
for the first time in my life i live in the city center
in the historic city center, I should add
it's nice and clean (me), and safe (friends from Chile and Brazil)
except for one bus driver who said to a guy sitting next to me: weź diese kartony bo nic nie widać, nice nice, I’m sorry but it’s our bloody stereotype coming true, aghhhhh
oh, one more thing – when a hausmeister was giving me keys I had to sign that I have a chair, a bed, a sheet, a blanket, and all this good stuff, I also have three keys and one key ring – I couldn’t hold it any longer and had to burst out laughing at this one ;)
other than that – you can’t pay with a card in Plus and I think I’m gonna like it
oh, and I haven’t spoken a word of English yet!!! I’m so proud of myself, we’ll see how long I can go with it ;)
tschüss!

not-mine-anymore lukow

a little bit of catching up to do on Lukow

on Lukow that I don't recognize any longer, or no, not 'don't recognize' but rather lukow that I can't make out any longer, what keeps people there, why they don't mind those ugly, really ugly new mini-shopping centers, why they buy those shitty clothes, why they can't be bothered to do something with their neighborhoods, agghhrr, no point worrying about it, i'm in tubingen now, ready to immerse myself in a german smiling sauce of happy people, cute little shops, and students from all over the world

kiev

"Do you like it so much?" asked my sister. "No," said I "I DISlike so much" I simply couldn't stop taking pictures of this Kiev hotel.
It's called Salut, such a nice name for such a tacky place. Dunno, maybe Kievians like it, who knows. It certainly stands out - it's not massive and gray like most other edifices in Kiev but it's still a bloody blot.
Golden domes of countless Orthodox churches interweave with what remains of the previous system creating a unique patchwork of old and older. Both styles pompous, they make you feel out of place, the era of such buildings like this one is hopefully over and the churches simply don't fit into this urban mess, either way - not only do they fit one another, they also leave no room for what could and should be happening in a modern city architecturewise. Simplicity must be a taboo concept there.
If the buildings leave no place for the new, the streets definitely do. I have never in my life seen so many hight-end posh cars all in one place, not even in the U.S. My Toyota looked pretty lousy, to say the least, among all those big, bugger-off-I-have-black-windows SUVs and other not so compact cars.
Who drove them is yet another story.

long weekend empty weekend

i've never seen warsaw this deserted, cafes closed, stores (and shelves) empty, traffic like in a provincial town on a sunday morning. it looked almost ridiculous - the empty warsaw

coming up:
kiev
warsaw
nieborów
tübingen
stuttgart
...

to catch up on:
łuków
łódź
grand canyon
boyup brook
udaipur
...

roztocze

no pictures this time, just good memories brought back from a weekend get-away in Roztocze. real nice landscapes, perfect for bike-riding, not so perfect for a penniless student vel. would-be movie festival goer.
I went to a cute little town of Zwierzyniec while we slept in Szczebrzeszyn, full of references to a beetle, a monument of a beetle playing violin, a Beetle bookstore and all this. It's a small town, two churches, one main street, one closed Orthodox church, one totally dilapidated Jewish cemetery. Worth a visit on a slow sunny day, as one of many stops on the way thru a beautiful region. Enjoy.

Wiejska, right opposite my workplace, I quite like it, not the best shot, must admit. But it's a kind of thing you walk pass every day and you don't notice it, after all, it's just a roof over a garage entry. There must be a whole lot of sights like that in Warsaw. I dont' have too much time for a quest for them, though, but I'll do my best. If not Warsaw, there's always Kiev coming up pretty soon.

just realized something, duuuurrrrr! what did I put in my profile here? that it's a place where I want to tell you things about places I've been to or places I AM to. which means? hello!
I took a short walk around my workplace today and I found so many amazing places - amazing like off-places, not amazing like the Louvre - I had no idea they're there. important things is this - they don't have to 'beautiful' or 'breath-taking', they're simply there, they strike as you walk pass
and obviously enough I didn't have my camera on me. thank god for going to work tmr!
wait a couple more hours for the pictures to arrive, for the time being you just have to take my word for it

can't help it - clouds again

seriously, I just can't help it! If I could, I'd just be staring at the wonderful Warsaw sky all day long. Am I getting sentimental? Who knows, but I definitely now know what I missed all those summerswhen I went abroad missing out on THIS.
You probably think Warsaw, you think the lousy Pałac Kultury, well, no more. From now on you think Warsaw, you think WONDERFUL CLOUDS. Just look at it, I didn't even mess up with any photo processing, honestly, that's what I really saw from my window yesterday evening. Maybe that's where wedding photographers get their inspiration while shooting those freaking tacky studio photos.
Okidoe, check it out for yourselves

warsaw, you should get to know the city - why don't we start with places closest to me?

there we go: a post-communist building (Smyk@ Al.Jerozolimskie) reflecting one of nicely-renovated old-fashioned buildings (@bracka) in warsaw






next:
it's not my personal favorite but i'm glad we have it in warsaw, you can see what having no tripod does to your shot, anyway, we're in the center of warsaw, just off the Poniatowskiego bridge, next to empik megastore, a popular meeting place for young varsovians who hit the town@ 7pm and scurry home no later than 11pm, leaving the city deserted even on weekends, or maybe i'm being unfair, after all, i'm the worst party animal you've ever known

culture shock

i was just thinking - what struck me most after coming back home?
no 1 - well-dressed people, with all due respect to my american friends i was simply amazed at what ppl look like in poland, the first time i went to the city I was just amazed! no PJs, no tacky sneakers, no folders sticking out of over-sized bags. dunno, it just looked so good and civilized, did the fact that it was the law faculty have anything to do with it? ;P

the other thing was this:
dunno, were there no clouds in chicago, or what?

hello! from a country with no finger-wide holes in public restroom doors
hello! from a city of good looking and not-wearing-PJs-to-school people
hello from home

greater little rock church

looks like I like quizzes but I couldn't stop myself one last time. Is this really not Jamaica??? It surely looks like it. With all the colors, tacky paintings, broken clocks and a fluorescent cross at the altar.
When you enter this church on 834 Armitage Av in Chicago you need to wipe the safe familiarity of the Western civilization the way you wipe your shoes. There's no place for distancing yourself from what's happening in the church. You're supposed to sing, clap your hands, give testimonies of how good Lord's been to ya to let you wake up one more time, and nod in agreement. Fine, it helped them thru the shitty times in the South, a meeting point, safe from the master's supervision, but will it get them thru the 21st century Chicago?
I took off for a nearby Starbucks after half an hour.

butterflies, more butterflies, nature museum

Do I really want to know what those two are up to?
Nature Museum had one thing I liked and that was its butterfly room, it was pretty amazing, no, it actually was amazing to walk into a room full but I mean teeming with butterflies, all colors, all sizes.
Now comes a quiz: who knew butterflies had tongues? I didn't until one huge butterfly decided to keep me company and sit on my arm and that's when I saw it, long, black, rolled up like a cinnamon roll. I don't think you can see it in this picture what you can do, though is go to the Nature Museum and see for yourself.
It's also worth a visit because of what's on the way, and I don't mean the nearby marina.
I mean St. Joseph's hospital. I wish I could say to all architecture lovers 'You're in for a treat, guys." I can't really, unless you have a very peculiar taste. See why: like that, huh? It is one of those buildings my dad would surely appreciate (anyone who's seen my house in Warsaw knows what I'm talking about), if you wanted to use an euphemism I guess you could say it's eclectic in its style, to me it was a genuine 'mood-perker', you just can't pass it and not smile.

margie's candies

for how many people, four? it's gonna be a twenty-minute wait
neeee... twenty minutes? we're not waiting. we'll have it to go

what we didn't know was that it's faster to sit in than to carry out. after a half hour wait this hot caramel banana split eaten with a plastic spoon out of a silo container tasted even better

$ 4.95 including a sentimental trip to 'good old times' from decades ago

chicago hasn't been treating us too well this year when it comes to its crazy weather but if that's how it's gonna repay us for weeks of nervous forecast checking and cursing then i'm willing to forgive it

ya man

the best part about the trip - going with so many people and having so much fun with them. i've never suspected seven totally different folks could get along so well, everyone surely compromised some of their wants, but it turned out to the best.
the best part about jamaica - the forest at the bank of the rio grande, plus, of course, the bus rides, taking a chicago bus seems like a such a luxury now, no familiar squeezing, no elbowing your way thru the bus, no palms outside the window neither
i liked jamaica a lot, i liked the people, sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile and tired of tourists, oh, one thing, no matter how much smiling was done, i never quite escaped the feeling that they eventually would make things happen the way they want, it was us, intruders, who adapted to their rules, to their easygoingness, to their style of haggling, to their attitude in general, also to some calling us whities, we were just visiting, and i suppose we did our job well, smiling, taking pictures, getting ripped off, getting friendly with the locals and secretly taking the mickey out of a jamaican gigolo courting middle-age and -size americans.
dunno, seems like we should get straight a's for the trip, so should everyone we met on our way
ps. especially our guide in the forest, who, incredible as it sounds, did get lost and was cutting his way thru the bushes with a pocket-knife, good on ya, mate!

sugar daddy

sleeping in a brothel (officially a montego bay downtown guesthouse) was quite an adventure, and i don't mean the already mentioned noises, or dilapidated restrooms or vacancies in all 17 rooms. it was about this man
first he told me his life story, he told me about his awesome car, his daughter and ex-girlfriend in germany and all the fun stuff
after a while he suggested that if i speak german i should come to jamaica and be a tour guide.
'not a bad idea' i say
'so when are you coming'
'oh, not too soon probably, you know, i can't afford it, anyway, i need to finish my studies, and i dunno what i wanna do'
'but you could come for a weekend' he goes
i laugh
'no, seriously, it wouldn't cost you anything, you could stay at my place'
ha! that's how for the first time in my life i was offered a job after a ten minute interview, keep up the good work, anna!

simply jamaica

so what did you do when you were in jamaica? the question is what didn't we do when we were in jamaica. i came home tired as hell, no, actually my body was tired but my mind hadn't been that rested for a long time.
we didn't sleep a lot, and when we did it was either on a bus (or i should say in the bus) or in a brothel with obvious noises coming from behind the wall
we ate good, you know me, lobster, shrimp, or rather: swimp in jamaican, delicious almond cakes and creme de la creme: patty, looks like a big pierog, delicate and crispy outside, deliciously spicy inside. did i mention jerk pork? smoked in an old oil barrel, served in alu-foil, for 3 american dollars i got a carefully selected handful of marinated hearts, livers, cheeks and sheer pork fat, and all of this at 10pm at night during a blackout in port antonio, candles and good food, does it get any better?

just look, no buy, pretty lady

there is so much to jamaica it's hard to pick one subject and stick to it, whenever i try to talk about one thing there're hundreds others so closely connected to it, that it's almost impossible to make it a somewhat coherent story, or any story at all

let me then start with something typical for all 'southern' or non-western cultures, i.e. haggling. i think i came to jamaica with wrong expectations, hoping i can get pretty much anything for a quarter of an asking price. well, it might be true for less touristy places like black river but hectic kingston or negril swarmed with american springbreakers - forget it. many people didn't even bother haggling after a minute or two when they didn't get a desired price. at first, i haggled restlessly just for the fun of it, not for those couple of american dollars i was keeping in my pocket. i though, ignorant me, that maybe all the tricks i learned in india i could i apply here, to no avail, calling them friends and portraying myself as a poor polish student simply didn't do the trick in jamaica, and one more thing - walking off from their stand, to my great surprise, simply made matters worse, they didn't run after you, like in india or arabic countries. we were wandering where it came from, this attitude and to be honest i dunno. sure thing they're spoiled by americans who are happy to get twenty per cent off (making the locals roar with laughter), either way, we could always get something off, unless we were asked a regular price, but even then we were so used to being tricked that we tried to haggle nevertheless,
some sellers were defiant, most very kind telling us to 'just look, you don't have to buy, pretty lady', agnieszka even heard 'you insult me by walking off', well, my friend, you insult me by giving me such price in the first place

jamaica, a try

trying to see jamaica in seven days is even harder than trying to recap what happened during those seven days.
i guess it takes an honest brainstorming session to organize all the striking oddities about the country, its people and the land.
being such a small island, jamaica still creates the feeling of diversity and great abundance of landscapes, attitudes and behaviors. it surprises anywhere you go, it seems the more people you talk to and more things you see, the less you know about what this caribbean island is all about. every person is a story, every place invites an interpretation

garfield park conservatory

quiz:

what does the picture show?

1) lukow, browarna
2) warsaw, praga
3) lodz, anywhere
4) chicago, near garfield park conservatory


a real trick question, right?
i wandered off today somewhat to the south, it still says 300north, but it does feel like the south side near the uni of chicago. this time it's near the garfield park conservatory, an hour away from my place on a bus. an hour and a world away.

dunno, maybe the older the more comfortable i get but i kinda freaked out today, in the middle of a day! it didn't seem safe at all, and i don't actually know why i held my purse tighter and speeded up in my futile attempt to look confident passing countless groups of young blacks. i reckon there was no good reason to think this way, but still. the last time i seriously freaked out like that was over a year ago on a beach in india where i foolishly (easy to say after some time's passed) went out on my own to see the sunset, a freaking romantic soul, right. when i wandered off i came across a group of young indian kids, aged seven thru ten maybe, i said namaste trying to win them and it did work for a while but when i wanted to back off they started well... throwing stones at me, which i can assure you made my heart thump widely, nothing happened fortunately but that was the worst moment that comes to my mind when i think of india

the observatory itself made up for all my efforts of whizzing thru the neighborhood - it's big showcasing a lot of various plants, most of which i've already seen somewhere but not on such a large scale. i liked it and i'd surely like to go back, during a day, and maybe with a companion :) this time

quickening my pace in run-down neighborhoods and longing for a garden of my own, am i growing old, or what???

anchovies

three steps that will perk you up when you're down
1. walk into an ethnic restaurant
2. order something you've never had before, which shouldn't be too hard considering the number of various cultures and hence their cuisines here in chicago
3. look closely at the server when s/he brings your check and sees what you've done to the food, how you try to fish our a teeny tiny octopus from a bowl of soup, fyi: bowl of soup full of reeking tofu which you don't know how to eat - do you mix it with rice and use chopsticks or do you use a spoon or do you drink it out of the bowl?
anyways, the point is, the way the lady looked at me was hilarious, and she had to be polite and not burst out laughing into my face, which I have to admit did yesterday seeing a guy putting sour cream over gołąbki and mielone

hopper, the real thing

after our initial failed attempt to see Hopper's show at the art institute we tried again last Friday.
said Anna four five months ago
no last Friday but late February we finally did make it to see Hopper. I didn't whiz thru it and it still took me no more than an hour, they didn't have my favorite painting but all in all I still like the artist. I liked the transitions between the sections, you could see how his style developed and how he became more and more minimalistic, which is nicely (what a word to describe art) captured in my personal favorite

andersonville

andersonville, or the swedish neihgborhood, is a small patch on chicago's multicultural map. it looks like a nice place go for a walk, wander thru really cool european clothes shops, european prices, too, stop and enjoy a swedish bagel and bump into yet another lesbian couple. the place is colorful and friendly, but watch out! don't go there if you're feeling homesick, it will make it worse.

hopper, false start

anyone who knows me a little better than hi how are you knows about my hopper craze. so when i found out a couple of months ago that there's gonna be a hopper exhibit in chicago i couldn't believe my luck,
speaking of my luck, it's a second day after the opening and it doesn't take a fortune teller to guess that the line would go outside the door. and no fortune teller am i. i guess coming back during the week would make much more sense
and that's how the story ends, for now

milwaukee in snow

most of my travel experience this year seems to somehow be defined by weather, it was no different with today's trip to Milwaukee

catching a megabus in Chicago is not a piece of cake, it's an adventure on its own, but when you finally get on a bus, get over initial excitement about going out of Chicago and you finally get to Milwaukee... well, dunno how to put it... you are dropped off next to the main station, or, to be more precise - they drop you off under some bridge with lots of crumbled pieces of concrete lying around, looked like Poland a bit

make a right and keep going, and keep going, and keep going and all of the sudden you see three cute ladybugs

you walk a couple of blocks east and you get to the lake, not that you can see the lake in such weather (see, again!) you just assume it's there, but you can surely see a weird thing on your left, looks like a huge white bird, they say, to me, it looked more like a bird of paradise, what do you reckon? anyway, from the outside, I admit, it looks good, but what really took my breath away was when you walk into the main hall and see the frozen lake, it's all white, the walls are white, the window frames are white, obviously enough, the lake is mostly covered in snow, my eyes actually hurt from all this bright white around

the museum itself hosts an interesting collection of ancient, Renaissance and the 19th century art (might as well not be there for me) and modern and contemporary art. I liked a small op art section, you can't really look at it too much, actually, you can't look at it at all, the eyes hurt so much,

the place is supposed to be really cool in the summer, we weren't that lucky but it was still worth a visit, especially that after the museum we still had more than three hours to go, and imagine this, five people can spend three hours in a Milwaukee bar for ... less than 20 bucks, and we didn't linger over a pitcher of water neither

india 07

the time's come to live up to my promise of going back to my past trips. it seems like for the time being there's nothing much happening in my little bit of Chicago, and since it's been almost a year that I went to India it seems like a good place to take off.

You might think - ancient history, in a year you are bound to forget the whole trip, maybe all that's left are some stereotypes that, after all, stay with us the longest. But that's not true. I remember a lot, the longer it's been, the more I miss India. And it's not because I look at it through rose tinted glasses, no, I think I am aware of all the faults that lie in this subcontinent, of great poverty; nevertheless, I appreciate my Indian experience a lot.

When I think of it, the most amazing thing about India are its people. They are open and hospitable. This is what some say of Poles when they come here but to my mind there can be no comparison between these two nations. After all I don't know any Polish family that would invite complete strangers from a different country to dinner. And that's only one of many nice things that happened to us during our three-week trip. At first I thought it was because they wanted us to buy something from them or trick us somehow. Now I am ashamed this thinking. Most people we met on our way turned out extremely friendly and helpful, which makes you wanna come back even more.

The more you realize how immense and undiscovered the country is, the more you want to come back. We only visited two regions and it took us almost two weeks to see some parts of them. Anywhere we went there were people telling us what else there is to see and all we could do is shrug our shoulders with helplessness at our limited money and time resources and promise ourselves that one day we would be back.

What struck me most in India was the colors and the smell. I don't think I have to explain this. For me, a product of European mass culture, it was like being dumped in the whole different world, a world where women don't wear black jackets and don't scurry off to their offices. I realize it's not like that everywhere, and definitely not in Mumbay ;) but still. I really liked the fact that young girls and women wore sari one day and jeans and a T-shirt the other, that they have a choice and they are wise enough not to reject their tradition but they know how to combine it with the new.

Our cultures are different, we eat differently, we work differently, we dress differently. I appreciate all those differences realizing that it's just the way we are, you have yummy veggie dishes, we have good dumplings, for you it's OK to run late, we wouldn't be admitted to classes coming 30 minutes late, you wear lots of jewelery, for us one or two rings and a bracelet is enough. But there is one thing about which I can't think differently but in terms of sheer jealousy. It's about how you dance! When I went to a Hindu wedding and saw ten-year olds dancing I turned into a green-eyed monster.

Even though I skipped classes during these three weeks I learned a whole lot. This India experience taught me not to give up so easily (haggling) and to enjoy little things (an ice-cold lassie in a crowded street cafe) and to know what you want and how much you can sacrifice.

art inst

My first museum in Chicago: the Art Institute of Chicago. It was a Sunday, the last day of Jasper Jones's Gray exhibit. In Poland when you go to an exhibit on the last day you'd better prepare for some elbowing, well, not here.
Lukasz said he was disappointed with the exhibit, I quite liked it, Aga liked it a lot, but she says she likes gray color, that's why. What I liked the most, though was the way in which the exhibit was organized, there were I think about ten big rooms, each focusing on a different aspect but it was all very coherent, sort of flowing one into the other.
What we all liked was Girls on the Verge: Portraits of Adolescence, a series of photographs of young girls from all around the world. Some time ago there was a coverage on it by Wysoki Obcasy. Can you see peer pressure steaming in this pic? Don't even let me started on American teenager girls...
With love, grandma

crazy chicago weather

now, what could that be. you wake up, look out of the window and decide to put on your cute red spring coat, it's plus 11 Celsius out there and no trace of snow that had just fallen yesterday night. you go to school, walk out in the evening and it blows your head off, and you find yourself in the middle of a snow blizzard, oh, and sure enough it's not plus 11 any longer. where on earth is that possible but chicago???

let's start from where I am now, and then I could tell you where I've been so far and where I'm headed. Sounds like a plan?