Okay okay okay. I know this is late in coming, but I've had my ass kicked by jetlag for the past week, and I'm only just now getting around to dealing with the little niceities of life again.

So... Where was I?

11 August, 2004: AMSTERDAM

Right. Amsterdam. It's times like this that make me wish my Mom didn't have my blog URL. Let me just put it this way: 5 hours seems like a lot of time to walk two blocks to the train station, retrieve bags from a locker, find your platform, board a train to the airport in order to get yourself on a plane to London. It seems like a tremendous amount of time for that, especially when you've been travelling nonstop for two weeks. However, Amsterdam has charms to slow down all but the most disciplined and clear-minded of travelers. I was not so disciplined or clear-minded.

Truth be told, we probably arrived at the airport gate about an hour early, but I couldn't tell you. All I know is that I thought I might never make it.

11-13 August 2004: LONDON

There's not much that I feel compelled to say about London. The weeks of traveling had caught up to me, and I was pretty excited to get back home. We spent our first evening in town walking around by the Thames. The hostel we were staying at was located about 5 blocks from London Bridge Station, which is in fact about 6,000 miles from the actual London Bridge, which currently spans a lake in Arizona.

http://www.roadtripamerica.com/places/havasu.htm

Anyway, The Tower Bridge is there, and that's quite nice.

On the 12th, we went to Camden, which sorta reminded me of the Melrose shopping botique-y area of LA. It was pretty cool, though. Ferdinand got a pretty sweet pair of old-school Nike tennis shoes. As I was traveling light, I kept from buying anything too bulky, although I did pick up a few pairs of socks. You see, I had run out of socks a few days before, and was sockless after a few days of wearing the same pair of socks, which got uncomfortable enough that I decided to ditch them. Oh, I remember that being really nice - being in clean, dry socks. Of course, after wearing those socks around Leicester Square and Picadilly for an hour or two, the London skies opened up and let loose a downpour to remind me of what damp feet feel like. Thank you, London.

The downpour did inspire us to step into a local pub though, and that was pretty pleasant. There were some good beers in London. Certainly, it was no Belgium, but they did know how to serve up a nice pint of bitter, and the people were pleasant. Oh, and the waitresses all had this really cute English accent or something.

After waiting out the rainstorm, we finished our shopping excursion with a trip through Harrods, but managed to escape without breaking the bank. We kept it mostly to gifts for people back home, but they had some really nice clothes there that tempted us.

That night, there was a little concert in the basement of the hostel that we were staying at. It was two local London acts, and they kicked a lot of ass. I can't find either of them on the web, though, or I'd link you to them. One was called Candy Tree, and the other was Kefranzskie (or something... I'm not surprised that I can't find them on the web. I can't even spell their band name!). Kefranszkie was a punk/rock band, and they really knew how to rock. Candy Tree had a late-Sonic-Youth-post-punk sound, but with a girl in front that actually knew how to sing. It didn't hurt that she was cute, too!

We went out dancing that night at Metro Club, which on that particular night was something akin to London's Club Bang!, but a little more down to earth. People were making out everywhere. The music was great too, especially toward the end of the night. We stayed until the very end, which was around 3am, and instead of shelling out the 12 quid (US$24) for a cab, decided to try to walk most of the way back. Not that it was very close. In fact, I think it would have been pretty far, but we never actually made it. We were doing great, walking down the streets in a direction that seemed to be toward the Thames. Once we got there, we would be able to follow the river east to Waterloo Bridge or (the new) London Bridge and make it home. All seemed to be going well when the street grew dark and woods sprung up on either side of the street. Nobody was around. <insert spooky music here> All of a sudden, without warning, we came upon THIS!

Yeah, it was Buckingham Palace. Not so scary, except that it meant that we were walking southwest, when we should have been going southeast. The rest of our walk led us past Big Ben and Westminster Abbey, which were pretty nice looking. It was nice to be able to see the sights, which I would have otherwise missed entirely. Somewhere after Westminster Abbey, we took another wrong turn and ended up heading back north to Picadilly Circus. It was about that time that we decided to find a bus that would take us back to our hostel. We made it home by about 5am.

The next day, Ferd and I checked out of the hostel at 10am and went to breakfast before killing time at the pub. You see, my flight home to NYC was supposed to leave at 4pm. I started to worry when it got to be 7pm and we were still on the tarmac. It wasn't until the "Upper Class" (as Virgin-Atlantic likes to call them) passengers were getting off the plane and being booked on other flights while us plebians sat and sweated on the plane for a few more hours that I knew that I was in for a long, painful night, and I wasn't going to see my friends and family in NYC that night like I thought I would.

The airline was nice enough to put us up in a decent hotel close to the airport, but they weren't nice enough to have anyone around for us to talk to about flight info for the next morning. As it turns out, they never even called our contact-people to deliver our messages like they said they would. Bastards.

The next day, I made it home. Maybe I'll tell you more about that later, but right now, my battery's about to die, and I'm sick of typing.

Oh, and I'll post photos soon.

I'm sold. Barcelona is a great city.

I wasn't so sure at first, because our first night here was pretty quiet. In fact, we were thinking of shortening our stay to 2 nights instead of 3, but yesterday was great. We went to the Picasso museum, which was great, and then we went out and danced until 6am at this little club a few blocks from tourist central. The place was cool, though, and it was filled with all local folks who were super nice. Surprisingly, my high-school spanish is coming flooding back to me, which is pretty cool. Unfortunately, Ferd doesn't speak a lick, so he can't be as cool as me! Actually, a lot of people speak english here, but not as many as in Paris or Belgium.

We're going back to that bar tonight to dance some more, and I think we're leaving town tomorrow evening, either for Geneva or back to Paris, en route to Amsterdam...

Will the adventure never end? (I AM starting to get a bit worn out here... It'll be nice to get home again... All things in time.)

Ciao!  (they say that here!)