summer break :(

It's summer „break“ over here, which basically means all students either do internships or are locked in their rooms writing papers. It's the latter for me, which is rather a shame considering how nice it's outside, and how big my books are (way too big and heavy to take to the riverside). So I'm trying to keep myself from procrastinating too much (so far I've seen neither Friends nor The West Wing in their entirety, which is rather an improvement over the last years).

So basically I'm not going out much, and spend most of my day reading up on the medieval Flemish art and court scene, which means I have absolutely nothing to talk about. Yay. I could tell you about medieval feasts featuring orchestras playing in giant pies and stuff, but I'm too lazy to scan the pictures. One day I'm going to use my accidental expertise in early stage design for something useful (it's an utterly fascinating topic, since they did all sorts of crazy stuff you wouldn't expect them to be able to do back then (and that would be way to expensive to do today), but, you know...)

Ooh, a few days ago we saw a semi-staged reading of Dracula near a pseudo-medieval tower above town (the one we like to bullshit tourists into believing is the Rapunzel tower, despite it having been build after the Grimms snuffed it – it's a bit of a hobby among towns that have any connection to the Grimms ;) we like to lay claim on Little Red Riding Hood as well). Anyways, the play was awesome (mostly thanks to the great actors). We were sitting outside, in the middle of the forest, and the sound was so astonishingly good that you really couldn't tell whether the birds you heard in the background were real or not. Plus they served really strong (vampire-themed) drinks, so the audience was rather giggly by the end. Only getting back down to town was rather an adventure (it was dark, near midnight, and none of the buses went where they were supposed to go. By foot it would've been a ten minute walk through a dark forest potentially full of mines or a 90 minute walk along deserted roads (... and highways).)

QotD: What's your most useless area of expertise?