Voices

As promised quite some time ago, here are more pictures from my trip to Greece to astound and amaze your delicate American sensibilities. Clicking upon individual pictures will result in the unprecedented phenomenon of allowing you to see them at a larger size! Egads!

( Behold my photography-fu! )

I made to Athens just fine. I couldn't sleep on the planes at all, and once I got here I decided the best way to adjust to the jet lag would be to stay up until something approaching a normal bedtime, rather than giving in to the urge to collapse immediately upon reaching The Artemis. Thus, I went 31 hours without sleeping. Fun fun.

I had delays in both Seattle (1.5 hours) and Washington D.C. (45 minutes). It worked out okay, though, because without the D.C. delay, my connection would have been really tight because of the Seattle delay. My original 2.5 hour layover in Frankfurt, Germany was correspondingly shortened to 1 hour, but all in all, I got to Greece when expected and without any problems.

On Monday, I leave town for my first vacation in almost 20 months. Despite the fact that PAX is awesome, and I always have a blast, I do not define a vacation as "working twice as hard as I do at my regular job around the clock for 96 hours without getting paid"; therefore, PAX05 does not count as a vacation. If you insist on calling it such, then I still haven't had a vacation in a year.

Anyway, for this vacation I will be flying to Athens, Greece. My parents are currently the directors of a satellite campus for American university students to study abroad for a semester in Athens. The hotel that is their campus will be student-free during the month of August, so we are taking advantage of that fact. I haven't seen my parents (or anyone else in my family) since December '04, and my brother and his wife and kids will be visiting during part of my trip as well, meaning that I will get to meet my new niece (who was born a few months ago) for the first time. I will also make every effort to simultaneously see cool things that I didn't get to see when I was in Greece in 2000 and be a total lazy bastard for the entire trip. We'll see how it works out. I'm fairly certain there will be at least occasional internet access while I'm there, so I may or may not post here during my stay, and I'll probably respond to email, albeit perhaps a bit more slowly than usual. I will be arriving back in Seattle on August 19th.

Why only 12 days (including travel time) you may ask? Well, my friends, the reason that my epic Greek vacation lasts only 12 days is because I needed to save enough vacation time for my epic PAX06 adventure! That's right, it's PAX time again! Upon returning from my vacation, I will be at work for only 3 days before I again take on the identity of an Enforcer for the nerd-wrangling, mind-numbing, utterly-awesome spectacle of the Penny Arcade Expo. I hope to see you all there.