Curiouser

Travel Planning

Much to my general ire, I only get 10 days of vacation per year. This is very upsetting under any circumstances, but especially so when you take into account the facts that I love to travel, grew up traveling, AND work some pretty crazy hours.

ANYWAY, from now until Jan 1, 2008, i only have 4 official vacation days left. However, I am determined to somehow stretch this into two weeks with careful planning around the 4th of July weekend and some pathetic pleas of exhaustion (both physical and mental!) to my boss.

My very preliminary plans are as follows:

Hopscotch through Eastern Europe

1. Arrive in Moscow - my motherland, beloved place of birth and location of idyllic dacha.

Alex and I will (this time) ignore Moscow's many attractions and spend three days walking around the woods, buying fresh milk, saying hello to old ladies and their pet goats. And enjoying the banya, of course.

2. St. Petersburg - as I write my application for NYU's Gallatin school (due in September), I will need this visit... seeing as how my planned thesis centers around Russian literature, which was primarily born in Peter's capital.

3. Prague!! (more details to come)

4. Budapest or Copenhagen, or both!... we're not sure yet.

Ah! I'm so excited and will begin planning tomorrow. Alex, being the nerd that he is, will then buy at least 4 guide books to every city we plan on visiting and compile detailed itineraries.

Is NBC's "Journeyman" the new Quantum Leap? Sort of... ?

On Monday, NBC unveiled its next season of shows. Some of them are pretty pathetic (the new spin on the played out Bachelor where older women compete against 'kittens' right out of school, for example), but a few seem quite interesting.

Journeyman, about a guy who suddenly starts popping up in different places in time, caught my eye. From the short promo-clip, it looks like he lost his first love (in a plane crash??) and is now married with a son. Suddenly, his unexpected time travel might give him a chance to save his first love -oooh!

I'm excited! First of all, the main character is played by Kevin McKidd, whom I adored as Vorenus on Rome.  

Second, it reminded me of two things I really love: Quantum Leap and Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife. I finished reading that book on an uncomfortable overnight flight from London. At the end I started crying so hard, like such a pathetic thing, that the man sitting next to me woke up and started handing me tissues while patting me on the back.

As for Quantum Leap--- well! My my my how I used to love Quantum Leap! The weird thing is that of all the times I watched that show, for some reason whenever I think of it (and I do, occasionally think of it) the episode in which Sam suddenly finds himself in a strange place dressed only in diapers pops into my head. How peculiar!

Yeah yeah, Journeyman isn't about scientists in New Mexico, but still!

Anyway, the truth is, NBC has been known to let a lot of great ideas go to waste with boring scripts and poor choices of time slot. So I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Let's hope the script has a lot of suspense rather than an over-abundance of dialog (which, in my opinion, contributed to the quick demise of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip).

As a final note, NBC seems to have a history of making a REALLY expensive show, airing 3 episodes and then canceling without giving it a chance to develop an audience (Black Donnelys, etc). They seem to have completely forgotten that Seinfeld didn't hit it off with audiences until its second season. So please NBC, give your new shows a chance this season!