A Nice Long Weekend, Or Travel in Upstate NY

I had a lovely long weekend at jakal88 's place.  We had a quiet Shabbat together, which was very relaxing. It was very comforting to be able to spend Shabbat in a familiar environment after a week of everything being brand new, no matter how interesting all the new stuff has been.  Sunday we went to see the new Star Trek movie (which I enjoyed, although I had a hard time accepting some of the characters as potentially growing into the characters we already know, and there were a few technological inconsistencies), and then jakal88 was quite lovely and took me to go dance for a while, while he hung out and read.  We came back to his place, and had a late dinner, afterward. 

The travel to and from Rochester was its own brand new experience.  The actual train was, of course, quite familiar, but getting there and back were new.  On the way there, I tried to find bus directions and the trip planner on the website was no cooperating, so I gave in a took a cab.  I think the cabs here are even more expensive than they are most places, oddly enough.  Maybe I was evaluating the distance inaccurately, but the fare was rather more than I was expecting, and the cab driver had his dispatcher in the car and they spent the whole time talking about what they used to do in the summer as kids, and where the best stores in Syracuse were 25 years ago.  

So before I left Rochester, I tried the trip planner again, and this time it gave me a couple options for buses.  So I wrote them down, and stopped at the local bus counter to get some schedules and a bus card.  The people at the bus counter were slow, and didn't seem to have a real concept of serving customers in order, but they were friendly and well-meaning.  However, when it came to understanding that I might understand how to read a bus schedule, I just didn't know the area yet, they were pretty confused.  I tried to get their advice as to which schedules would be useful for me where I lived, which seemed to confuse them, but eventually we came up with a few schedules.  After that adventure, I stepped outside to wait for the bus.  Well, the next bus going where I needed to go had none of the numbers that I'd been led to expect either from the schedule or the internet, but did get me to the place where I needed to make a transfer.  From there, I asked some folks to help me find the right side of the street to find the bus I wanted, and one of them asked where I was going, which was a good thing, since she helped me find another bus that took me to the same stop which came well before the one I thought I needed to wait for came.  The whole system seems pretty messed up to me thus far.  Perhaps it will start to make more sense as I see more of it, but for now, it seems pretty incomprehensible.  If a general bus map existed (maybe it does I just haven't found one yet), it would be really useful to see...

Tomorrow morning I need to get to work quite early, as we're going to a training on end of life related issues, along with about a quarter of the 3rd year medical students.  It should be an interesting (if long) day.  Then Wednesday night will be my first evening on (we're required to do one evening a week in the ER- that's a pretty scary concept for me, but we'll see how it goes.  It's part of what I signed up for, and I'll learn to manage it.).