A great man once wrote,
“There is an art, it says, or rather a knack to flying.
The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
Pick a nice day, it suggests, and try it.
The first part is easy.”
On Monday, I decided to take that advice to heart. I’d been looking for something big I could do to cap off my travels, and jumping out of an airplane seemed to qualify. What follows is a collection of photographs and observations from that experience.
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…one giant hit for awesome.
I don’t usually just post links or youtube videos, but this one is almost too amazing to pass up. Today is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and somebody pointed me to the above video. How I managed to go this long without seeing this or hearing about the incident is beyond me.
In the 2002 clip, a 72-year old Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, punches a guy named Bart Sibrel in the face. Sibrel is apparently a filmmaker who claims that the moon landing was a hoax. He invited Buzz Aldrin to do an interview for what Aldrin thought was a Japanese TV show, and then started harassing him.
The lesson: Buzz Aldrin is a total badass. He may be old, but he doesn’t put up with crap. Also, he has just rocketed to the top of my Favorite Astronauts List.
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I’ve been back in the US for almost two weeks now, and it still feels pretty strange to me. I’m not used to seeing people I know, to easily overhearing conversations going on around me, to being able to read menus effortlessly, to not standing out as a gringo or a foreigner.
Getting back from Brazil involved a one-hour flight from Rio to Sao Paulo, an hour+ bus ride (in Sao Paulo traffic) from the Congonhas domestic airport to the Guarulhos international airport, four hours waiting, a six-hour overnight flight to Mexico city, and finally five more hours to Chicago.
The transition from “near-absolute freedom in Rio de Janeiro” to “my parents’ house outside Chicago” was rather jarring. Luckily for me, the airport in Mexico City is basically like a American colony created to ease the transition. There is a Starbucks, a Carl’s Junior, a 7-11, an Angus Steakhouse, and no actual Mexican businesses that I identified.
I had the following conversation with one of the very helpful information desk attendants. It began in Spanish, but he shifted to nearly-flawless English as soon as he figured out I was American.
<Spanish>
“Good morning, how can I help you?”
“I was wondering if there is a place I could get Mexican food.”
“There is a Chili’s on the upper level.”
“I’m sorry, my Spanish is very bad. I don’t mean food in Mexico, I mean food of the type that is typical from Mexico.”
</Spanish>
“You can get fajitas at Chili’s.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes.”
“See, I’ve just been in South America, and I really missed good Mexican food. There isn’t any real Mexican food at the airport?”
“Only Chili’s. Sorry.”
I took a pass on the airport Chili’s, but there are plenty of other things that are amazing about America: bendy straws, free refills, ice cubes in drinks, the Eisenhower Interstate System, In-N-Out, Chicago-style pizza, actual Mexican food, and 24-hour diners.
Being at home after traveling for so long felt kind of strange, so after about a week I beat it out west for Defcon in Las Vegas, which is where I am at the moment. The convention has been pretty cool, and I’ll try to write about that later. Sunday night, I’m hitting the road again, this time headed for the Seattle area for the returning Watson Fellows conference.
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