Monday, July 24, 2006

Reservations and the lack thereof

Well, its about a week till I climb aboard a heavier-than-air marvel of engineering and hope I safely land in Dublin. And if not that, then at least the peanuts had better be good. Its strange. Most of the flight arrangements have been taken care of. I’ve begun test packing to see what I’m going to have to exclude from the suitcase, figuring out what book to read on the flight, little stuff like that. Basically, it’s a lull in the action, much like the point where you realize you’ve strapped yourself into the roller coaster, but the fun part hasn’t started yet. Its that middle part in between, where every second that goes by with another clunk is a stark reminder that bit by bit, the comfort of the ground is slowly slipping away whether you want it to or not. At least there’s no ratcheting “Klink klink klink” sound as you get dragged to the crest of the hill. It’s not quite the eerie silence before the plummet where you begin to have reservations on it being good idea after all. It’s the moment when you realize that the eerie silence is close at hand.

Surprisingly, I’ve managed to find time for television amid all this chaos. Not a whole lot of television, so most of that time’s been spent on the Travel Channel. Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations is a show I’ve been slowly getting into over the last couple of months here and there, but its finally won me over. The premise is simple; famous author and chef travels around the world and tells you what he thinks. It’s a great show because he eats everything, even the nasty stuff. Greater still is his command of language and imagery. The guy knows his narrative stuff. Now, on a completely opposite end of the spectrum is Passport to Europe which, while showing interesting places in Europe, just doesn’t have the whole “I want to go out of my way to watch this” factor. Actually the only reason I did watch it was because they went to Dublin.

And I’ve just run out of stuff to say, so I’ll stop.

No comments: