New York 1

Well, the days are just flowing past, with too much things to do, so I haven't written anything about my trip to New York and the Inside Out: Dress and Identity in the Middle Ages conference at Fordham University.

Since I think that I would go on forever if I start writing it all down I decided to make a few themes and write about them in order:

1. The travel

2. Hanging with Andreas

3. The Museums

4. The conference

5. Meeting the SCA people

6. The shopping

That ought to cover the most.

The travel
As I might have written already this was my first ever trip to the US. And that was actually one of the reasons why I wanted to to go that conference - my university pays for conference tips up to a certain sum every year and this way I could go to the US while still being rather poor since they took away my part time disability benefits. So I was rather excited just about the trip.
The trip there was uneventful and much more pleasant than I expected. I left Sweden around noon CET, changed in Munich and when I got on to the plane to the US I found to my delight that not all seats were occupied, which meant that since I was seated in a row with four seats and there was only me and another guy in that row I had plenty of space to put my back pack next to me so that easily could reach my embroidery, book, tablet, or whatever I wanted to have. I had this crazy idea to work on an application for funding during the trip, but that didn't really work out, I am not used to write long texts on a tablet yet. So I mostly watched films and embroidered. I'm working on a red version of the embroidered 16th century shift from Prato in Tuscany that I made with black thread for Valeria. This one is for me. And yes, I will make more of the embroidery for both her and me eventually.
I watched the new version of "Murder on the Orient Express", which was rather nice, it probably helped that I had not seen it before, nor read the book, so the end was a surprise for me. Though extremely unlikely ;)
The I watched "Valerian and the city of a thousand planets" which I also enjoyed - I was a great Valerian and Laureline fan when I was a teenager. It wasn't really like the comics, but close enough to be interesting to compare.
The last film that I watched was "Song to song", which I didn't get to finish before we arrived in Newark. That one has got very mixed reviews, but I liked it, it was beautiful and dreamy and I fell so much in love with Rooney Mara. It might have helped that I was in a rather dreamy state myself, since by that time my personal clock was on 2 am, while the clock in NYC was 8 pm.

There we stood in the longest immigration queue ever, even worse than Heathrow airport. But I had a Star Wars book to read and was too tired to really be bothered. After going through customs I was met by my old friend Andreas, who lives in New York since nine years and we went home on trains and subway to where he lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn. We had tea and sat talking until midnight, which was 6 am by my personal clock. This was probably a good thing because when I woke at 7 am the next day I felt almost normal; a little tired from the long travel, and from taking methotrexate the evening before, but perfectly in sync with the new time zone.

Cat overlords Marble and Gus:






The trip home was not as smooth, though I had the same seating arrangements as on the trip there, and managed both to see the end of "Song to song" and see most of the highly enjoyable "Rangoon", and sleep maybe one and a half hour stretched out over three seats. But when I got to Düsseldorf my connecting flight was 2 hours and 40 minutes delayed. This I didn't know until I had passed immigration, which took a lot of time and made me very stressed about missing my connection. Also the info wasn't there from the beginning and only given in pieces (when the flight company got them, there was some problem with the plane), so I couldn't go back and browse through shops, but had to first sit in a very boring waiting area, then on a bus, then leave the bus and wait some more, then on the bus again and then on a very cold plane where the heating didn't work.
When I got home I was exhausted - and it had taken so long time that Rickard had gone to work so I didn't get to see him until late in the evening. But at least my luggage made it all right, I did have some tubes of cake frosting that I was a bit worried about, and I managed to get onthe airport shuttle bus with half a minute to spare and got home very quickly from the airport.

Now I have to get dressed and get to work. I'll get back to write about hanging with Andreas later.

Possibly my next project

I've been blogging about Italian 1330s and weird gowns over at my costuming blog.




I haven't yet made up my mind which of the versions that I want to make. The mi-parti one is cool, the white unusual, but the striped ones are more insane, and I tend to go for that.