MEDIA LAB: Where we plugged inThe media lab was in a separate building from our pod accommodations. It contained a refrigerator and a horseshoe arrangement of tables upon which sat an assortment of PC's and Mac's. A few folks brought their own laptops and other equipment. I was leary to transfer pix from my digital camera because there were no surge protectors - as some discovered the hard way when their equipment got fried!
Fakeshop ended up sleeping in the media lab after they found an air conditioner and hooked it up. From then on it felt like I was walking into a bank every time I'd enter. It was almost too cool because after you'd acclimate to the coolness, the return outside would strangle you with 90+ heat and humidity. The best remedy for the heat was swimming in the Mediterranean. In fact, this trip marks the first time Jef ever swam in a warm sea! (Where we live, hypothermia is a genuine possibility - even in the summer.) So one especially hot day, Jef, d2b, Lala, Francesca and I hijacked a rental car and drove to the beach. I wish I had a camera for the look on Jef's face as he approached the water.
He looked positively suspicious as though he were thinking, "It must be a trick!" Then, when the first waves lapped his feet, he looked completely surprised. Soon we were all frolicking and body-surfing and having a wonderful time. As Jef remarked, "It's kind of funny that I joined hell and ended up in heaven." d2b told him that in France if it's the first time you've ever done something you should make a wish, so he did. As we bobbed in the warm waves Jef and I started singing an impromptu ditty about, "Floating in the sea with d2b." Lala and Francesca don't speak much English and I don't know any Italian, so when they said "appiccicoso" and rubbed their arms after our swim, it took me a while to figure out what they meant. "Sticky!" I realized at last. "Sticky," they echoed, laughing at how silly the word sounded to them. "Appiccicoso," I repeated, laughing at how silly their word sounded to me.
According to d2b we all felt appiccicoso because the Mediterranean is extra salty. So I asked him how to say 'sticky' in French and he told me, 'Je suis pegueux.' Over the course of our stay, I learned how to say sticky in several languages: kleeferig or plaakerig (Dutch), lepkave (Slovak), lipkij (Russian), venejoso? (Spanish) and watashiwa mebaru (Japanese). But "appiccicoso" quickly became a buzzword among our crew because it's just so fun to say and can be used for so many things. For instance, "Io sono appiccicoso!" ("I am sticky!") makes a fine toast when drinking sparkling wine on a hot summer evening.
A few days before we left Villa Vicente there was a meltdown in the media lab: First a projector blew a fuse, so Jef suggested the handy-dandy trick we've used over the years; if you don't have a new fuse, simply wrap the old one in tinfoil and reinsert. The result in this case was a lot of smoke and sparks. :-/ Later, when Luca made one of his fruit smoothies, the plastic lid flew off and blue sparks shot out of the blender. Soon after, folks started noticing an odd odor from one of the PC's, followed by the realization that it, too, had bitten the dust. And lastly, Atty's camera, which was attached to the smoking PC, got fried.
Being online was touchy, too. Our modem was called the Diva 3800 and did she ever live up to her name! We were online one day, then we weren't for roughly a week. Nothing we did would help. Turns out the line had been cut to our ISDN service. It was incredibly slow, like being on a 14.4 when I finally got my chance. Then I got an electrical shock while typing - agh! I felt like I was in a Skinner box sans treats. But really, aside from making it hard to communicate with our families, it wasn't that big of a deal. After all, we weren't in Spain to face the monitor, we were there to see what was on the other side. | |||||
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More Photos in the Media Lab | |||||
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