A is for Arizona

Not to be outdone by the Hollywood hills, Phoenix has it's own sign on a mountain...although the city could only afford one letter it appears. While I was there, some of the crazy uni kids painted the A purple. Of course it was redone yellow again before the end of the day, although I am not sure why it had to be yellow and could not be purple or orange or green.

Here is a bunch of those crazy uni kids gathered for a candlelight vigil for the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting, which happened the day before I arrived...carazy American gun laws!

Talking of crazy kids though, it seems that May 1st is when the kids in Norway start going crazy. All the school students in their final year are now wearing bright red overalls and driving around in big old red vans. Turns out that all across the nation the school leavers join in 2 weeks of celebrations before their final exams, which for some reason involves them all wearing the same red overalls (personalised with various white transfers that they buy from a particular supplier) and transporting themselves from one party place to another in big red vans. Madness I tell you.

I did promise some blog news on my nightmare flight details in my previous post though so here they are. During my flights between Bergen and Phoenix I learnt that flying is not always fun. On my flight from Amsterdam to Minneapolis (just one leg of a multi-stage journey) I was sat next to possibly the worst passenger in the whole world. To start with he was an absolutely huge, and I mean HUGE, stinky man. He was from Nigeria and spoke no engligh except 'one more', which he used for everything offered on the flight, and I mean EVERYTHING! One more bag of pretzels, one more dinner, one more bread roll, one more water, and always one more wine. Even the normally super polite hosties were getting the shits with him. After he had very noisily stuffed himself full of plane food (did I mention that he had a gold tooth?) he promptly kicked his shoes off to my side of the floor, spread his legs as wide as they could go and fell into a very deep sleep, with his head occasionally lolling onto my shoulder. Of course he also had three children who sat in the centre row and went beserk while he was happily snoring at my side. At this time, the entertainment system on board failed and I thought that this might just be the longest 13 hours of my life. Then of course I had to pee but was not at all game to wake the sleeping giant and could certainly not get by him, or indeed even over him. His bottom lip alone was almost literally as big as my fist, I know this because I measured them as a form of entertainment while he slept. Anyway, somehow I survived that journey and thought the trip home could not possibly be worse. While that trip fortunately involved pleasant travelling companions, it did not involve functioning aeroplanes! We had both primary and reserve generators fail before we left the ground, which rather than boarding a functioning plane (themost obvious solution perhaps) actually meant waiting on board for hours while they tried to fix them, which in turn meant missing connecting flights, which in turn meant sprinting through massive airports to catch other ones, which in turn meant promises of delayed luggage etc. Lesson learnt...Flying is not always fun.

Anyway, to leave you on a lighter note...here is a pic of some native American etchings in a rock. Something soothing and spiritual about spirals...ahhh, yes, that's better. Kisses....