Life Redux

(Geneva, Switzerland) - I've been holding off posting anything recently 'cause stuff keeps happening yet I feel like I have to update the old stuff before I can update the new stuff. It has all piled up though and I'm so paralyzed with too much to write, so I write nothing at all. Here's just a smattering offload so we can move on to other things. Shall we?

Seoul redux: I am not going to be able to do Seoul and Korea the justice they deserve ... as I wanted to a few months ago so. I noticed ...
-that Seoul is HUGE! I had no idea. There is so much here and hustle and bustle. I feel like I needed one more day to "do it" at a totally superficial level. I was there for 3 days and probably needed four.
-a sign in the Korean cultural museum describing traditional village games "Games include stick hitting game and game of slap match!" Stick hitting game was always my favorite also when I was about 5. Somethings transcend culture.
-the two finger "V"'s is flashed by every cute Korean girl when getting their picture taken in front of tourist landmarks
-mirror image swastikas with the same aspect ratio and proportions used by the Nazis on the nave of Bhuddist temples. A traditional Bhuddist symbol, but the exact correspondence (except for the 180 deg flip) was visually arresting and vaguely unsettling.
-that Seoul is huge!

Baltimore redux:
-Like something out of Alice's restaurant I got a ticket for drinking coffee on the metro between Baltimore and BWI. An overly serious young turk transit cop wrote me a $30 ticket for taking a sip of my coffee in front of him despite the 'IT IS UNLAWFUL TO EAT OR DRINK' signs. "Do you know what the word unlawful means!" he hollered at me, "wipe the smirk off your face, I will slap the cuffs on you so fast your head will spin". Unfortunately, I had a plane to catch, but I feel Officer Brown and I will get to know each other better when I have more time.
-Baltimore is cool. Spent part of a Saturday afternoon reading through the Balimore alternative weekly City Paper and then spent part of Saturday night in bar with an old friend and met half the stuff of said City Paper.

Chamonix redux: Skied off the top of the Auguille de Midi in above Chamonix and down the glacier of the Mer de Glace. My brother Alex and I wanted to do this when he was here in March, but the weather was bad then.

So, two weeks later, I skied off the top with coworker Alexey with absolutely phenomenal weather. It was almost 9000 vertical ft. descent and totally awesome. The snow on the lower southern exposed slope of the valley is totally gone, but since you come down the north exposure after the glacier we could ski almost back to town. It seems to be a traditional late season thing to do among the locals because there were lots of people saying goodbye for the year at the end of it.

It is billed as a kinda touristy thing to do because the technical ski challenges rise not much beyond usual expert level, but it was still awesome and the sheer scale of it and the mtns around (next to the Mt. Blanc) make it one of the coolest things I have ever done on a Saturday afternoon. A guide is reccomended, but my opinion is I that as long as the weather is good there hasnt been snow then it is not necessary if you have rudimentary mountain skills, an idea about glaciers, and exercise common sense. There is real danger from crevasses, but it since the route is so skiied if you just stick to the main pathway then you can be sure than a few hundred or so have skied it on that route since that last snow fall. There were probably a hundred over it before us on the day we did it alone. So it is safe... unless the weather is bad. Weird weather things can happen of course at 3800 meters, but they we did it the weather was beautiful and forcasted to be for the next 36 hours. We took a bunch of pictures and I won't miss the opportunity to post those soon.