Thoughts to Pass the Time

1. You know you’re a good traveller when someone asks you for directions mere hours after you’ve arrived in a new city, and you can answer them correctly.

(You know you’re me when those directions are to a grocery store.)

2. Make sure you check that the freezer compartment in your hotel room’s microfridge is working properly before you buy a pint of ice cream, otherwise you’ll end up eating ice cream soup for dessert. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, but still. You might want to check anyway.

Non-Dairy Ice Cream Goodness

3. Watching multiple Broadway/musical/dance productions within the space of three weeks is likely to affect one’s sense of reality. I seem to have decided that it is normal to start singing quite loudly as I walk around in public.

I’m hoping the people near me at such times think “charming ingenue” rather than “oddball tourist”. It’s a distant hope, but it’s hope.

And Ice Cream Sandwiches

4. I’m still in shock about the number of people who don’t wash their hands after using hostel bathrooms. I blame them all, collectively, for my current state of being slightly under-the-weather.

On the plus side, being away from said hostel and instead residing in a Charleston hotel means I can plan for tomorrow to consist entirely of me, a large bed, cable tv, iPod, and convalescing. It could be worse. Particularly as I also have Cold Comfort Farm, a Janet Evanovich novel, and Bleak House to keep me company.

What's this? More?

5. Last but not least, Happy New Year in 7 hours time to my Southern Hemisphere readers! Be good, all of you.

This one's for you, Emma.

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Savannah Happenings That Made Me Smile

• People getting off a non-smoking train with cigarettes already in their mouths. Must not waste precious smoking seconds. PRECIOUS SMOKING SECONDS.
• Being approached in Savannah’s Holiday Inn Express dining room by an older lady (really, what else did you expect by this point?) wanting to know what I was reading during breakfast, as I was “so engrossed and seemed to be enjoying myself immensely”. Having a follow-up conversation about books with said lady.
• As a corollary to this, having free plentiful buffet breakfasts at the hotel whilst reading Cold Comfort Farm, and being unable to repress giggles at the line “There’ll be no butter in hell!”

Plus scrambled eggs, sausage, bacon, biscuits, gravy, oatmeal, grits, yogurt, muffins, bagels, english muffins, toast, coffee, and condiments.

• Watching a young-ish breakfast worker at the hotel stir nine packets of sugar into her coffee.
• Hearing orchestra members at the theatre talk about putting something on Facebook then seeing them duck out quickly to, presumably, do so.
• Having one of those giggling fits, where neither person can stop laughing, with a complete stranger. I went to the hotel’s front desk one day and saw just the top of the receptionist’s head poking over the top. I waited for several minutes, presuming she was reading something, but then realised she was just… resting her head. At about this point she realised I was there, and while for about three seconds we tried to conduct our business as per usual, we both ending up giggling for quite some time. You know what? I think it was one of those ‘had to be there’ moments.

Holiday Inn Express lobby

• Being offered a free bottle of water by another receptionist when I was checking out, even before he knew I had a 12-hour Amtrak ahead of me.
• Having one more Savannah post to go, despite having almost finished my ensuing week in Washington, DC…

Rose made of plant material given to me by a homeless man in Forsyth Park.

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