In which Amtrak's customer service is unsurprisingly bad

My sister is going to a marathon in Washington, D.C. next weekend!

I decided to also go! (Well, spectating rather than running. But hey, it's a rock and roll marathon! Also I guess there are museums there?)

And just as I was booking train tickets the web site crashed. And remained crashed. Since Amtrak charged my credit card I'm rather reluctant to rebuy the tickets, but I don't have any confirmation that they got bought...

So I called, and got told there was a 39-minute wait to speak to a person; and I emailed, and have not had any kind of response after two hours; and I tweeted, and got a terse response that emails are answered in the order received.

I love trains. If you can make me hate trains, you are doing it wrong.

Edit: I called them up and it actually took about five minutes for it to be resolved very politely. It would help if I didn't work in a basement that didn't get cell reception.

(no subject)

On Sunday I was lamenting to my sister that I just kept on studying Chinese and it didn't seem like I was making any progress no matter how much I studied.

On Monday some books I ordered came in the mail, including Chinese translations of one of the Magic Treehouse books and one of Sara Pennypacker's Clementine books (I love these -- Pennypacker is up there with Beverly Cleary for being stone-cold serious and sympathetic to the dramas of ordinary childhood that look funny if you're standing on the outside but are not funny when you're seven or eight.)

I can actually almost read the Magic Treehouse book. I'm at the level just below "I can pretty much get the gist of it" -- there are places where I can get the gist, and there are places where I drift away from the gist and become completely unmoored, and then I recapture it.

Watching myself learn to read a new language is a very strange experience. I learned Japanese long enough ago that even though I'm a lot slower than with English, and even though there are still a ton of words I don't know how to read, large swathes of text feel like they're just -- text. Shape, sound, and meaning, transparent enough so that I don't have to think too hard. And with Chinese -- it's all still intellectual, still in my head, trying to figure out how to parse sentences, how to parse words, whether X is a word I know, whether I've seen that hanzi before in a different word.

I am happy I know how to say "owl." It will make it easier when I try to tackle my Chinese edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. (I have already learned to say "magic," from a TV show about fairies.)