13-III-2010.
Long day. Between 7 and 8 in the morning took Lena to Norfolk, science fair at ODU („Old Dominion university“ - yes we are a republic, but this is Virginia and we love them colonial names). Drove a bit further down Monticello, because we were looking for Princess Anne (ah, the love of their colonial masters never dies) street after the place where we made the U-turn last august when we were buying tickets for Gogol Bordello. Well, we shouldn't have looked any further, that nondescript corner with a defunct gas station is the Princess Anne street. Of course there's a Princess Anne boulevard in a completely different end of town, which is not in any way connected with the eponimous boulevard in VB... which also has a high school of the same name which is on a different boulevard... makes you dizzy.
Norfolk is trying hard to, at least in „historic Ghent“ (how many of them do they have?), to look like a little town from ages unknown, and the people are striving to spruce it up, increases the real estate value. True, these are all just slats and clapboard, it's plastic on the outside and all those white columns are just a bad imitation of those that Jefferson put on his university and Monticello (the manor, not the street), which are an imitation of what he saw in France, which are an imitation of the greek columns. But there, people are trying.
And, by the way, the aborigines don't say Norfolk, it's Nofok.
Then we two went for a little grocery. They still have those ridiculous „for anyone buying alcohol, if they* look as if they may be below “40“, they will have to show identification...“. So I asked the ladies at the desk where they oversee the you-scan-your-own-stuff-and-charge-yourself machines if they had a spare plaque with that text. There's one at each cash register. "I just want to know what do they mean by quote-forty-quote" (instead of saying 'quote', I applied the American 'funny rabbit ears' gesture), what is the difference between “40“ and just 40... I want to know". They laughed, but gave me nothing. (see 05-IV-2010. about this, the picture is there)
Tried Columbian cheese from the FreshWorld (the Korean-Latin shop which replaced the south Kroger a year ago), better than Mexican queso fresco. We ate almost a quarter.
Went to pick her up in the afternoon, now going straight there, buzzed around on the field aka meadow aka campus, took pictures... I just had to shoot this one even as nondescript as it is, because it's the best specimen, while we're still here, of the american nightmare, the fear of litigation. This is a university, all healthy young people. This staircase is outside, doesn't have much of a slope. Just the same, every six feet there's a handrail, in case someone smacks his head (aka „all of their heads“) and his lawyer sues them for damages because university made a life threatening staircase where one has nothing to grab at while falling.
It's also possible that the handrails were there for the insurance, if the students (just as much as the personnel, including elderly) are insured against injury while on campus, that insurance costs a lot more unless the steps are raken, such as this, or doors opening outwards (to run out if it burns) and other such. Actually, in about half of the cases when I almost said „how silly/stupid these Amers are“, it would turn out that the issue at hand was a conditioned by a bank or insurance.
Lena won the award and 50$ and an XL T-shirt with periodic system ("glows in the dark!")... they probably guessed the sizes wrong. This one ended by 16:00. I sat in the lobby, afraid I'd snore too loud during the ceremony. Three guys spoke in Russian and I almost joined them, because they were on the edge of hearing - I could make an odd word here and there, but the AC was too loud, and I have trouble extracting voices from noise for the last dozen years.
What gold prize she won in chemistry was, of course, just fake gilded plastic, but the check was for real. She didn't really like this, because it means she'll have to stand another saturday, two weeks from now, at the next level fair. But then maybe she wouldn't have to, because some prizes are awarded by the military something, and they take only citizens, so she may bail out. She doesn't feel like going there at all. The damnation of each school is that the professors take, for all these competitions, the same twenty students and look how to fill their fighting ranks with them. Specially as all these commendations mean nothing to her now - she's got place in each university she applied to (except the MIT who read between the lines and understood that her paperwork wasn't quite kosher, so they found some elegant wordin to say they were sorry but no can do).
----
* I'd usually ask „"they", as in "all of them"?“, but the nonsense has spread too wide so I gave up
Mentions: 05-IV-2010., Jelena Sredljević (Lena), in serbian