Random Thread ~Usagi-Chan ☮ Tūsurī~

[TotallyUncool]

It sounds like you're having a wonderful vacation!

[esm]

I saw ducks in Montenegro today.

[erilaz]

Not with a tour group (not into those)

Agreed. A friend of mine has done a few Rick Steves tours and loved them, but I think they would drive me crazy. I need freedom to see and do what I want and not waste time on stuff that I'm not interested in. That's why I prefer to travel solo.

If I can meet up with friends with similar interests for bits of the trip, great! But I don't want to impose my crap on anyone else any more than I'd want to suffer through theirs. Case in point: I love to spend HOURS AND HOURS rummaging through used CD shops in Tokyo, which would be a fate worse than death for any friends or family that I might drag along with me from back home. But spending the day shopping in Shibuya with iceymoon and her husband was a blast.

I'm not a big fan of compromise. Relationships are not something that I do well. I always hated group projects at school, but luckily I've found a group of competent, simpatico Tolkien scholars with whom I can collaborate successfully, where everyone is contributing to make the project better and nobody is dragging it down.

On the flip-side, I'll be getting together with some of my old college gang on Saturday, and we're currently accumulating everyone's likes and dislikes re pizza toppings. I expect that I'll end up paying twenty bucks for a couple of slices of pizza loaded with garbage that I don't like. (It's going to be Chicago-style stuffed pizza, which doesn't lend itself very well to removing unwanted toppings.)

[esm]

I'm always surprised by how much time I end up having when I travel alone because I'd be so efficient at doing things. Plus, having to figure out everything myself means I learn more being in a new place. The day tours are fun though, especially smaller group ones. I had a blast going to Bosnia and Herzegovina because it was just 8 of us plus the tour guide. The Montenegro one turned out to be a bigger group, so it was less fun, but the coastal region of Montenegro also looked pretty similar to coastal Croatia, whereas Bosnia was more Ottoman style. But it was still nice not having to figure out the whole logistics myself.

Here are the ducks:



I just came back to DC last night.

[Moh]

That pic is so beautiful it almost looks unreal. Glad you had a nice time over there!

[TotallyUncool]

That does look beautiful - and a perfect spot for ducks. The structure in the background looks kind of Byzantine, but I suppose it's later (or at least was rebuilt later).

[Celedam]

The Google Adsense algorithm, as it is implemented on YouTube, is convinced that I'm desperate to buy insurance products. I'm getting Allstate, Nationwide, USAA, State Farm, and Liberty Mutual on pretty much every video. Is it just me (I think it's keyed to my age), or is anyone else seeing this?

[Nayoko-Kihara]

Not quite the spread you've got there, but definitely an increase on my end too.

[erilaz]

I'm not getting insurance ads. Mine are all over the place: Hotels.com, Toyota, Nutrisystem....

[rikkikow]

I don't get any youtube ads on my desk top, with Windows 10 and using Firefox. Of course, I am using ad blockers thru Firefox. But on my iPhone and Amazon Fire tablet I do get ads using youtube which is frustrating for sure.