When she loves the guy, he doesn’t care. When she doesn’t care, he proposes marriage. When through some miracle they fall in love with each other, it ends up in tears.
Love sucks.
I’m back again! Let me quickly finish our story from last week…
We did go hiking, although a soft rain was falling down on us… but we are brave! And were well rewarded!
As we enter the natural park of the Catskill Mountains, M is making fun of me and my naturalist enthusiasm.
And then he shouts: – Stop!
Breaks, confusion follow. – What’s going on?
-A bear!
Oh, come on, you could find something better. Like flying saucers! I mean, here we are, on a public road and 15 meters from us are the tents of the unfortunate campers (unfortunate because of the rain).
-No, no, it’s a bear! A black bear!
And it is, just 5 meters away from us, staring at us, as I pull up the car’s windows. The bear moves slowly away from us, but close to the tents.
M decides to save the world! – I’m going out of the car to warn those people! So he does. And since I have no interest in being alone with the bear, I follow him. And we meet a nice couple doing stuff around their tent.
- Do you know there is a bear only a few meters away from you?
- Oh, him? He’s always here looking for food…
And then they tell us how they were cooking curry chicken and the bear came right to them, brought by the chicken aroma…
M sympathizes with the bear. – I would come too if you were cooking curry chicken!
Now that we have a better understanding of M’s priorities, we decide to move on our mission to save the world. We go looking for the Rangers! No, not the Texas Rangers, but the park rangers… Let them know where we spotted the bear and ask them to do something about it. Secretly we hope for a ride in their car, in search of the black bear. No such luck!
We leave the bear and his feeders to their own and set on our intended trail, the North Point trail.
That’s it for now. Tomorrow I will tell you about M’s special way of identifying the easy trails.
Long weekend in US … extra-long for me, since I didn’t take vacation this year yet! Car, tank full, music, apples and a map! And off we go, up the Hudson River Valley. Beautiful scenery, as leafs turn to red in New York State… autumn makes me romantic.
We take a 2 lanes road that goes through small towns and villages, not the highway, no more highways! Viva the country road!
We embark on a mission to find a good ski resort close to Korman. There’s a ski sign on my map, so we make a detour to have a look. It’s a family resort, all inclusive, there’s a hotel, a Jacuzzi, a pony ride and fake Indian huts. And they do have a ski slope, a bunny slope! M is frustrated: “they should not be allowed to advertise that as a ski resort!�
Soon we will discover that in this part of the world everything is worth of advertising, at the very least of a small billboard. We see on the side of the road several billboards: “Historic site.� When we pull over we discover that the history goes back about 50 years and it talks about the nephew of the town builder who got sick while spending his summer vacation there… Ok, I am exaggerating, but you get the picture…
Finally we make it to the Catskill Mountains, in the middle of the Hunter town. The tourist guide takes pride of this region’s contribution to world art, through its landscape painters. The scenery is awesome! Have a look:
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/Hudson_River/1.r.htm
We spend the night in the quaintest little house you’ll ever find (Snowed Inn). Next morning we explore a little the town. We have our morning coffee at “Maggie’s Krooked Café� and get acquainted to a real character. First thing he tells us is he just gave up a great patent, after drug companies refused to take a look at it. Of course, it doesn’t help that M offers that I work for a drug company. And so, we hear the full story, which obviously the young bartender heard a thousand times before. The story of the best, invisible female condom ever invented…We leave half an hour later with a slight headache.
To be continued…
Have you ever been to a baseball game? Then you know how suspense builds up and excitement reaches limits never attained in any other sport and all eyes stare at the playing field and all hearts beat faster!
If you fell for this, then you’ve never been to a baseball game. To call it dead boring is a huge understatement. The highlights of the game were Sam’s hotdogs and the beer pub at the 7th inning.
That’s right; we were there, at the Yankee Stadium, watching NY Yankees vs. Detroit Tigers. I spent the first hour trying to understand the rules of the game, and the second one waiting for something to happen. Since nothing did, we left the stadium and went across the street where we got a bit of action and good beer.
The Yankees lost, but I’ve always supported the weak ones, so I still bought a Yankee girl t-shirt…
Yesterday we decided to have a nice, relaxed day, after all the stress of organizing a birthday party for 5 birthday girls and boys! (but about this some other time)…
So… what do a bunch of high potential marketers do for relaxation… well, they try something different, exotic, like a Korean Sauna, for example.
We are proud friends of J, from Korea and she found out about this cute Korean town, West of New York. Said and done, after some waiting in the Korman saloon, for the girls to fix their make up, we were ready to go! Then we waited some more minutes as the boys needed to urgently print something off the Internet.
And finally, one hour later than planned, we were ready…
Arrive at the Korean Sauna with little trouble … I love MapQuest! …
Once inside… totally immersed in an alien culture… we decide to have a full blown experience! So we go for the total sauna and massage!
Where should I begin? They boys are separated from the girls in the wet sauna area, so I can only tell you about the part I’ve seen… Perhaps there were one hundred people in there, the place was huge! All the little Korean women were totally naked and doing meditation or stuff on the hot floor, or taking a wet massage, or taking a hot bath in the hot tube… The massages seem a bit rough for my taste, but I don’t pay too much attention to it!
Perhaps I should now describe a bit our party… We were 4 girls, J, I mentioned earlier, L – from UK, C – from Finland and myself – proud representative of Romania. Then we have the boys – K from Finland, E – from Italy and G – from Italy…
The 2 Fins, we quite happy to be there, apparently sauna is one of their favorite past times…
We all book massage at the same hour and so go up to the massage center… I was quite looking forward to it, for I’ve been quite stressed lately and felt pain in my muscles…
Now… I am shown into a dark room, by a lady massager, who doesn’t speak English. And abruptly, the massage begins. (after I undress, of course). But hey! It feels like I’m being beaten up, not massaged! I try to stand, but am pushed back and somebody says something… “Errr… I don’t understand�… repeat of the same words… finally I make out: “First time Korean massage?� Yes!!!! It’s my first time, so please be gentle! “No worries!�
I am beaten up, more gentle now, for the next 45 minutes… In the meantime I hear slapping in the next rooms and I am happy I told her to be gentle with me…
Now it’s about time she finished… happy, I start to relax. She seizes the moment, moves behind me, grabs my head with both her hands, like a coconut and swiftly turns it to my left!
My neck goes: CRACK! I think everyone in the sauna heard it. I go “OH MY GOD!� … and to my horrible surprise she goes “OH MY GOD!�… Now that was reassuring!
We leave the Korean Sauna very unhappy, but cannot complain much, for J really went through a lot of trouble to find an authentic Korean place… And I’m not even going to mention the price…
I am ok, can move my body parts quite easily, though I have a continuous pain in my neck and head and wonder whether I should go see a doctor… Well… let’s hope all is well….
By the way… I’ve had enough of experiencing new cultures for the moment!