English language and wife beater

I bought a great book in San Francisco, its name is I just want my pants back, it's written by David J. Rosen and it's very funny and smart at the same time. Anyway, in this book - and it wasn't the first time - I encountered, once again, the word "wife beater"... She was wearing a wife beater, that's the typical sentence... I never really needed to know what exactly she (be it any female character in any of the books I read) was wearing and that's why I never looked the word up in a dictionary. I guess it might have been the fact that I was reading the book on a plane (and the plane's air :)), or whatever, I really wanted to know what piece of clothes can have such a weird name. So I looked it up, finally. My dictionary - Macmillan - doesn't know the word, neither does Longman Online Dictionary. So I tried to google it first to see what it looks like. I was a little surprised, I must say, as I expected it to be something different (for those ignorant as myself, wife beater is sleeveless shirt. Anyway, does this information gratify your curiosity? It didn't work with me, I still wanted to know why on earth would someone call it this.
So I tried Wikipedia. :) And here we go: "The nickname wifebeater originates from its association with aggressive, underclass males, usually living in poor conditions, such as a dilapidated trailer, especially as frequently depicted in television shows and movies." Seriously... Wanna a graphic version?


What can I say... I'm for equality and all that but I strongly believe that men shouldn't wear anything like that. :) Then it should be stopped called a "wife beater" since it's a little weird that a girl is wearing a wife beater. Isn't it? :)

Ok, that was a very serious post. One more thing about how I acquire a new word every day. I just found out that I never knew how to say "Vídeň" (the capital of Austria) in English. I thought I knew but I didn'd. I believed that it's Wien in English, but it's Vienna, could you believe that? I had a BA in English Language. What a joke. :)

The place where we spent more days than anywhere else during the trip - Boulder, CO

We arrived in Denver in the morning pretty tired because it was really cold on the train and thus we couldn't sleep. We left Denver immediately and using the public transport system, we got to Boulder. We had some troubles trying to find the hostel, but after a-little-longer-than-necessary walk, we found it, checked in, took a shower and then Jirka went to bed and I was doing some school work for a while.

Our plan for the first day was to realx and so we did. Later, we visited the Information Center, got some maps and tips, went for dinner and walked through the Pearl Street Mall which was really nice.

Some negative things... I think I had expected Boulder to be something like Banff so I was a little disappointed, although it's definitely a nice place. Not as beautiful as Banff, though. Also, the people there are a little weird. They don't smile much and some are scary weird, which made me believe that I wouldn't like to live there (although I thought it's a pretty cool college town :)).
And the hostel... Probably the worst one I've ever seen. Boulder International Hostel, definitely the cheapest place in town, but - does it mean that I want to live like a pig when I don't want to spend a fortune on accommodation? Seriously, it was very very dirty. In the ladies' bathroom, there were four toilets. Three out of them didn't have doors, just shower curtains (I heard about public toilets without doors in Russia, but in the US, I didn't expect that :)), one of them didn't even have proper walls. The showers were disgusting, the first time I used them I was a little afraid that I'd be more dirty after using them than before... If you go there, you definitely have to have flip flops... The mattress wasn't the cleanest either and there was often no hot water in the kitchen which made it a little hard to wash the dishes...

But enough about the hostel, I don't want to think about it anymore. :) The surrounding area was really nice and is great for biking as there are real bike paths (not like in San Francisco, for example, where you can meet a bus on a bike path :)). So we spent the second day on bikes which was quite hard, with all the mountains and the wind, but it was really nice. Jirka got completely sunburnt, though.

The second day, we decided to go for breakfast to Lucile's where you have to wait for at least 20 minutes to get in. It's worth it, though, it was a great breakfast, although quite pricy, too. After that we decided to stay in the hostel for a while and wait until it gets a little less hot to go for a hike. We went in the afternoon to the ARCH, which was a little harder than we had thought. It was a nice hike and we met some nice people on our way back.

Our last day in Boulder wasn't the nicest... We had to cancel our hiking plans as it was raining heavily and went to the movies instead because we didn't want to stay at the hostel the whole day. We watched Forgetting Sarah Marshall which is a really funny comedy, and the last Indiana Jones which, in my opinion, isn't that good. Also, we had to walk all the way there because the buses weren't running due to a festival going on... We really trusted what it said at the bus stop, though, and thus believed that there was a bus going from the mall back to downtown. There wasn't. Don't trust the American public transport! :) Well, at some places, anyway.

And that would be it 'cause we left Boulder the next morning.

"Exploring" Omaha

I told you about Chicago and then had no time to tell you the rest. And now it's over, and so is my stay in the US. I'm going to tell you a little about the rest of our trip, if you want to. If you don't, just stop reading now. :)

So we made it to Omaha and it wasn't a very pleasant morning... It was raining, the Greyhound station was too small to have a lugguge storage area. That was to start with. We decided to walk to the Amtrak station, from which we were leaving the same night, but it seemed that nobody really knew where it was. And then we found out it is closed until about 9 pm, which is about an hour before the train leaves. What a lovely town! :)
We were lucky and found a hotel where we could leave our backpacks. Then we found a place for brunch, which wasn't anything particularly special, but it was good enough. Plus - we were soaking wet so it was nice to sit inside. :)

Then, after some time, it stopped raining, we walked a little around the Old Market, which is probably the only area interesting for tourists :), and then went to the library where we spent a couple of hours reading books. Being tired, though, it didn't work that well, so we went for a walk when the sun finally turned its nice face to Omaha. :)

I'm going to make it short - we walked around, waited and it seemed that we had too much time, all the time we needed in Chicago and didn't have, we had here and didn't know what to do with it. When the right time came, we went to the train station. The train was late, of course. :) But it wasn't that bad and the conductor was a really nice guy. And we left Omaha at aroun 11:30 pm and agreed that we wouldn't miss it at all.