You know the drill by now...

[pantryslut]

roina_arwen asks:

"If you won an all-expenses paid vacation anywhere in the world, where would you most want to go? What is your favorite all time movie and why? Where does your username come from? What is your favorite flavor of ice cream?"

If I won an all-expense-paid vacation, I would want to go to the Central Asia and the 'stans -- Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan. I would get to see in person all the blue mosques. I would suffer through the awful food. Except the walnuts. I hear the walnuts are pretty good.

I don't have a single favorite movie. I am moody about my movie, music, book, and food choices, and so choices vary according to my temperament at any given moment.

My username is explained in my bio; it's the nickname of my middle cat.

My favorite flavor of ice cream is, no kidding, vanilla. Unless it's from the MSU Dairy Store, in which case it's strawberry.

Comments

[teawiththecheat.livejournal.com]

What's the MSU Dairy store?

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

MSU = Michigan State University. There's a Dairy Store on campus that sells ice cream, cheese, and other products as an offshoot of its agricultural education programs. It used to be a couple blocks from the Engineering Building, where I spent a lot of time growing up while my mom pursued her PhD. (They moved to another building a few years ago, and expanded their offerings.) It has the best ice cream in the world, and it's super-cheap, too.

It sells chocolate cheese, too, which is a strange and wonderful substance.

[teawiththecheat.livejournal.com]

Good to know, if I am ever in Michigan, I suppose.

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

I have had a decades-long yen to ride the Trans-Siberian Railway from east to west. And on that trip, I would want to make a side trip to Samarkand (even though I'm told that nowadays it is a grubby industrial town that isn't the least bit romantic).

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

That's funny. I want to ride it from west to east.

[susannochka.livejournal.com]

me, too! I even bought the handbook at some point, to motivate myself. An acquaintance of mine went- he had a good time. He'd invited me to join him, but he wanted to go with a tour group, which I wanted no part of, plus I was broke. He spoke Russian pretty fluently, which helped him out a lot- especially when he ended up with giarhdia in Moscow...

[susannochka.livejournal.com]

My sister, you might know, just came back from two and a quarter years of Peace Corps service in Kyrgyzstan. (you can read a scattered collection of emails she sent here in this blog. She was just here for a few weeks, and there was one story in particular I will have to ask her to write down for me, or tell again, because I can't remember the particulars, but it had to do with a very nice tourist she met while in Uzbekistan on vacation. He was traveling through the Stans on his own, and a month or so later her former traveling companion, another PCV, recognized the gentleman passing through her village in K-stan. Instead of the gentle, patient man he'd been earlier, he now seemed nearly out of his wits with exhaustion and frustration- all aimed at Kyrgyzstan in particular, it seemed- because he just couldn't figure the people and their lack of helpfulness (or customer service, I should say) out. Anyway- not sure if that made sense, but it was funny when she told it. I'd already been listening to her tales of maddening experiences in post offices, shops, etc. for a long time by that point. I think there's some of it in the blog I linked to above.
ramble!