Really, Really Early Morning

hiya

i'm at the airport and they have free wifi at the gate, so i'm going to try and post some pictures.

okay.  i wrote that on wednesday morning (in vienna, so tuesday night here).  they started boarding right after that, so it just didn't happen.

after about 20 (yup, count 'em, 20) hours, i was back in lovely LA on my way home.  the trip went smoothly, although however much i hate to say it (being a committed anglophile), heathrow airport kind of sucks.  it's possible there's just no way to do it better, but i had to take two buses and a train to get to my connecting flight, as well as any number of trips up escalators to get to the line to wait in to go down the elevator.  honestly, it just shouldn't take 25 minutes to switch gates for the same airline.

all right.  enough bitching for the moment.  here's a last round of pictures:

 this one's for you and dad in particular, in  memory of my greece 'cat period'.  this is the ruins of three old temples (which are actually right in front of the theater that stands on the spot where caesar was murdered.  turns out, the forum was under construction or something that week, so they were meeting in a different spot.)

anyway - they've fenced off these ruins and turned them into a preserve for the cats of the city.  it's crawling with 'em, and they're all clean and healthy and adorable.  you should have seen megan's and my faces - you'd have thought we'd never seen a cat before.  seriously, i have about eight pictures of it.

flowers at the market in rome.

a view of rome from the top of castel sant'angelo (where hadrian is buried).  our guide assured us that if you ask anyone who studies roman emperors, they'll tell you hadrian was the best.  so there.

i forget what this monument (in rome) is called, and i'm sure he's someone very distinguished and important, but i swear the guy has a duck on his head.

as i said, venice looks pretty much just like it does in the movies.  they really have taken genteel decay to a whole new level.  i don't know how they maintain it.

this was a window in the chapel at dachau.  they have a bunch of religious monuments there, as well as a very simple, small chapel.  it's made of grey concrete, and very spare.  i don't know yet if i liked it or not, but the window was amazing.

megan and i saw this while out walking in munich.  it's on top of a six-or-eight-story office bulding, hanging over the street.

it rained most of the time we were in munich, but we did get one spectacular afternoon.  the blue kind of reminded me of van gogh's cherry tree painting.

and, last but not least, here's a signpost somewhere between the freud museum and the mozarthaus in vienna.  apparently it looked cold, so someone knitted (knit?) it a cozy sweater.

and i think that's about it.

for those of you who have been with me on this journey - thank you for sharing it with me!  i've felt you with me every step of the way, and it has been a truly extraordinary trip.

i'm not sure yet how it will change my life, but i can feel all these places rumbling around inside my head and heart, and like i've been so enriched (that word feels so cliche and silly, but it does describe the feeling) by this time away.

thank you for being my family, and my friends.  you make my life extraordinary.