Who else besides one of the three little pigs lives in this house? On my running route, between our house and the embassy, lives, I assume, Grandmother, of Little Red RIding Hood fame.
When I was five or six years old I HEARD, with a wheelbarrow full of coins, in the hall, coming towards my room, the toothfairy. Seeing this wolf/stray dog that looks exactly LIKE a wolf right in front of that little house felt like that. I'm never going running in my red riding hood again!
The running path by our house looks like it might be good for mushrooming. And I'm pretty sure The Big Bad Wolf is wearing Grandmother's nightgown and glasses and waiting for Little Red Riding Hood at the end of that path.
And look what came in the mail today! 600 pages of Annotated Dracula, with an introduction by Neil Gaiman! I'm excited. Creeped out, but excited.
1. As opposed to the French school, where you just read, at the American school before you read, you discuss why reading is important.
2. Still need to find the Brancusi section of the National Art Gallery, but Van Brughel could sure paint flowers.
3. Camille was right, it's sort of like France and sort like Africa.
4. Africa with reallly good wine.
5. And malls that have Starbucks with wifi, Mossimo Dutti and yes, Cinnabon. And a charming, sort of dive-y old town with antiques, art supplies and wedding dress stores galore, like a five-hundred-year-old Eureka, California (Or a 30%-as-hip Pearl district in Portland) with a million times more outdoor cafes, better weather, more grandiose architecture and cobblestone streets. If this were Portland it would be SO full of itself.
6. Esperanto fans, attente! Bonjour for good day, bona sera for good evening! Mersi, arriveder, casa, unday (where), aichi (here), maina (tomorrow) da and nu–all the languages you know, combined into one! We are signed up for official language training, but the embassy just moved, so like everything, they are overwhelmed and will start…sometime, maybe maina.
7. Sunny and in the 80's everyday so far, but you can have the brand new embassy pool on a Saturday all to yourself.
8. Extreme lack of manhole covers!
9. Today while running I passed six street dogs. None of them have bitten me so far.
10. The best part of Romania is out of Bucharest, and we haven't even been there yet
So there I am, wandering down Ianou Nicolai with my brand new copy of Wildwood under my arm, musing about how it's probably the only copy in Romania. I don't even want to start reading it, because, I don't care if it's bad! I'm going to love it! Colin Meloy has more twitter followers than David Cook for god's sake, he's the lead singer of a supposedly indie band, and Carson Ellis illustrated this little series of JA books called, oh, Lemony Snicket. The illustrations in Wildwood are so good they HURT. Mr. Meloy was just on NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, so how huge can he get in my world? So, let the book be a piece of non-interest, I'll love it regardless.
I read the first paragraph. It's GENIUS. Also, it invokes this cozy, in, Portland-ness: knitting and coffee and libraries and cutely dressed babies– all described with a sweet humor, and, yeah, I'm on page two. If I were home, maybe I'd hate it because it's possibly overhyped, but you know, in Bucharest, it's pretty low-key, compared to say, soccer or actually, anything.
I read the back flap. One paragraph each about the author/illustrators. And I discover that Colin Meloy once wrote a letter to Ray Bradbury and that Carson drew when she was little and They. Are. Married.
Carson Ellis, the COOLEST illustrator EVER is MARRIED to Colin Meloy, lead singer of the Decembrists? How can they not kill each other in I'm-more-current-than-you combat?
My version of a creative collaboration? I demonstrated worlds colliding with my hands and Stefan did the explosion sound effects.
twenty-something years of "what have you been up to?" 