lodryons

[lodryons]

Budapest

$1 = 290 Hungarian Forint (HUF)

So I thought Hungarian people were brown, they’re not. They’re just white people.

Budapest is actually two cities divided by a river (presumably the river is the demarcation, I didn’t look that up but it seems right). Buda is the old town, it has pretty stuff like a castle and a giant house for the prime minister.

People don’t like the prime minister here. A satirical political party called the dog with two tails has quite a following here. I walked with their protest group and had a nice chap translate some of their messages. “We don’t want schools!”. “We don’t like hospitals!”. Funny.

The nice translator was Rebecca’s friend from high school. His name is Tomas. He stayed with her family for a year. I find Rebecca’s family to be so loving and intelligent that I kept thinking this kid won the lottery. Tomas is very kind and has a warm smile. He’s also more intelligent than me which was nice to get out of the way early on.

Speaking of intelligence, I can’t help but feel it is a pointless pursuit to feel intelligent. For every victory, there are so many failures that are downright embarrassing. I suppose the feeling to pursue is not intelligence, but rather the feeling that you’re someone that puts a lot of effort into the things that matter to you. It’s an interesting torment to be around people that make things look easy all the time. Such is life, I suppose.

I met a nice guy named Vlad. He was a hostel roommate. He’s Romanian, raised and works in London, and was a great companion for a night. That sounded like we slept together. I’ll leave that to your imagination. We went to a ruin bar that no locals go to. A ruin bar is an old, decrepit building with bars and drunk people. It’s quite hipster-y, with lots of random things on the walls and interesting seating arrangements such as a bathtub and… stools (perhaps not that crazy).

I found some cool cafes and spent a lot of time just chilling. I did a bit of walking around to the sites and had some of the locals recommendations of course.

Anyways, I was pretty over traveling at this point. I’m starting a new job soon at Reddit and my thoughts are consumed by how I’d like to hit the ground running there. I’d really like to not get fired so I spent some time thinking about what I’m truly afraid of and how I’d like to go about focusing on that.

I did eight European cities in around 30 days. That brings the total number of European cities I’ve visited to 14. I’m pretty happy with that number for now.

My next adventure will be something much more out of my comfort zone. I like the idea of getting a motorcycle and doing a big circuit through Asia or Australia.

I need to work on grammar and punctuation and really how to write with more economy and power and not use ‘and’ so much too.

I hope older Rodney enjoys the time younger Rodney spent writing these posts and actually improves on the things younger Rodney is tortured by.

[lodryons]

Krakow

$1 = 4 Zloty

Krakow is in Poland. They speak Polish in Poland. It’s apparently quite hard to learn but I’m starting to feel like every Eastern European country has a hard language to learn. Also, can we talk about language real quick? There are way too many damn languages. Every country does not need its own damn language. America just took English, and now look how nice it is to go to the United Kingdom! If you’re born in Romania do you know where you can go where people speak Romanian? Romania! That. Is. It. I think we should look into consolidating currencies and languages into half the amount we have now. I’ll leave this as an exercise for the reader.

Krakow is a southern city in Poland that was sacked by the Germans in WW2. A man named Oskar Schindler famously saved many Jewish lives by employing them in his factories instead of giving them up for deportation. Oskar was a spy for Abwehr, a Nazi intelligence agency, and relayed important information about the opposition’s movements to Germany from Poland. Miraculously, he managed to bribe SS officials for years to not have his workers sent to death camps until the war ended and he spent his entire fortune doing so. He’s buried on Mount Zion in Jerusalem for his great service to the Jewish people. You could argue that he murdered millions of Jews by relaying important information about the allies for years thus enabling the Nazi’s to extend their time in war and by extension, murdering people in concentration camps but I’m not pointing any fingers. I get the sense that a lot of people that weren’t directly affiliated with the wartime efforts of the Nazi party were basically forced to join or be killed. I can’t imagine Hitler saying, “I get it, you don’t want to be horrible towards an entire group of people. Just keep running that bookstore in Berlin and don’t hire any Jews and we’re square!”. It’s a little hard to say that in Oskar’s case since he started as a spy prior to Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia so I’m a little conflicted honestly. I don’t think I have the full story on this one.

Our Airbnb wasn’t fake. The place was basically brand new and came with a PlayStation 4. We played a lot of Grand Theft Auto 5. No regrets.

Everything here is super cheap, it’s awesome! We had the nicest dinners and ended up paying $12-15 each after several drinks, entrees, and dessert.

We visited Auschwitz 1 & 2 as well as the salt mines.

The salt mine has been active since the Middle Ages and is no longer in production. We only explored 1% of the entire mine but everything was made of salt which might come as a surprise to you. I mean everything. Obviously, there were some wood planks here and there but the damn stairs were carved out of salt!

The concentration camps were of course very powerful places to visit. There is something very odd about walking through the original gates where millions of people that were horribly treated and murdered once did. I kept finding myself staring at the barbed wire fencing and outposts that surrounded the victims of the camp for years. I imagined someone trying to escape by climbing a section of fence or being discovered by an outpost shining a light down on them.

It’s so odd to me how humans can do this to each other. I don’t think it’s an anomaly either. I think humans can and will be evil given the right scenarios and that civility is not in our nature.

Anyways, I mostly wanted to go to Krakow to see the concentration camps and I did that. Morbid curiosity satiated.

[lodryons]

Prague

1 USD = 25 CZK

We arrived in Prague to a fake Airbnb. You can’t scam someone of money on Airbnb so this was perhaps a troll or they were actually a real person that has been missing for days. We might never know.

Airbnb support reimbursed us up to $150 for the night to which my good friends, Christian and Damian, decided to burn on a penthouse. It was about 1:30 AM when we got in the room. We left at around 3 AM to burn some more money in a club called Roxy. It wasn’t unpleasant. Damian went missing around 5:30 AM. Christian and I went to Burger King at 6:30 AM and chatted with two Swiss guys for a good hour about all things Switzerland and Trump. We talked about a lot of interesting things and I remember none of them. Nothing fills you with dread like walking out of Burger King to pure daylight when it was previously dark.

We found Damian sleeping outside of our room. He looked like an angel. Christian shook him by lightly kicking him and Damian popped up like an MMA fighter and began throwing punches in a windmill fashion. Christian moved out of the way and began hysterically laughing. There is something special about witnessing a person laugh in response to violence towards himself. Once we got in the room Damian threw a punch at me and we had another laugh. Damian is a sweet boy and this was clearly the work of alcohol and sleep depression. Damian doesn’t seem to remember this, unfortunately. He felt quite bad about it when we told him.

We slept from about 8 AM to 12:30 PM and scurried out by our check out time. We arranged to have our new Airbnb host check us in at 3 PM so we grabbed some lunch down the street in the meantime. Damian wasn’t fairing too well at this point. He hadn’t endured the great feast of nuggets and fries that Christian and I had previously that morning and was running on pure Long Island ice tea fumes.

We got to the meeting point and the Airbnb lady was nowhere to be found. We didn’t have data so Christian went to get some WiFi and Damian and I stood outside looking like travelers in need of an Airbnb.

We were at this main plaza square next to this massive mall and Damian was forced to stand or sit outside with no water and certainly no privacy to throw up. So instead he threw up in a corner of the building that mostly went unnoticed. A group of girls must have heard his vomiting noise because they peered around the corner and looked mostly unsurprised. Damian waltzed over to me and quickly had another vomit spell shortly thereafter. I’ve never seen someone puke in this manner. He kind of leaned over a bit, contorted his face and let out a little stream of vomit right in the middle of the plaza. Most surprisingly, no one seemed to notice this time. I told him I’d watch his stuff and handed him the little water that was left in my bag as he went to sit somewhere. Poor Damian. Some pigeons quickly descended on the vomit and devoured his half-processed quesadilla with joy.

The Airbnb sits in a decrepit building with a door that could probably be kicked down by a five-year-old. You walk down a cold alley and up a spiraling staircase to a door with 4 more deadbolts. In reality the door has a single deadbolt that appears to do nothing but you do have to turn the key 3 times to either lock or unlock it. The woman that took pictures of this place is truly an artist in deception. She managed to capture the perfect amount of the place such that the blemishes don’t appear. I don’t really care about blemishes as long as the place has WiFi, a decent bathroom and a suitable place to sleep.

I’ll start with the name of the host. Barbora. I have red, squiggly lines underneath that name right now in my text editor. Now that might be a Czech name but we’re pretty sure it’s a misspelling of Barbara.

Here is her profile picture. I thought it looked quite fake. That photo looks like a woman recoiling at what her lover is dishing out on the couch of Dr. Phil. Here’s the thing. That’s not Barbora. Sorry to break the forth wall here but I keep having to stop my editor from automatically correcting Barbora to Barbara. Again, that is not Barbora. Barbora is about 10-20 years older than that woman. I think that is what Barbora wishes she looked like but their similarity diverges after their shared characteristics which are that Barbora is a woman with blonde hair.

Here is the listing name: Old Town Apartment wifi free. It is located in old town, it is an apartment, and it does technically have WiFi.

We texted Barbara, I mean Barbora, about the WiFi and here is her response:

“Hi Cristian, yes I know :). Is two posibility to conect. One is name GrandRooms and second is Lovely All of two is free without password. Bye”

Now I know what you’re thinking and no, I’m not trying to make fun of her English. What’s funny about this is that she’s clearly marketing her place as having WiFi when these are obviously not her WiFi networks. Lovely is better on my phone and GrandRooms on my laptop. They work, but you get kicked off every 1-5 minutes. Sometimes it reconnects automatically which is nice.

The bathroom has a towel rolled up next to the bathtub because it is leaking water. Barbora told us not to move it. The bathroom has your standard 5-bulb sockets above the mirror but only the middle one is filled with a small bulb that you would find in a nightlight. I’m going to give this one to Barbora and say it’s strategically this way to lower electricity costs. This morning I got up to a considerable amount of the bathroom floor wet. We have no more towels to dry the floor with so I hopped in the bathtub next to the sink from the hallway and brushed my teeth. The mirror oddly extends across the wall so this was a decent short-term solution.

We saw a castle and some gardens, walked across a bridge with a lot of tourists, and went into a sex machine museum yesterday. It was all mildly interesting.

I spent a lot of time being quite tired from being up all night. This is not a good way to live. I feel like 25 is a great time to retire from this.

[lodryons]

Zurich & Interlaken

The airport is really nice here. I’m already convinced we should all pay higher taxes just for that. An old man helped me get a train ticket from the kiosk. The train was very sleek and clean. It ran quietly and made me sad that nothing like this exists in America. Everything is so damn clean here. I witnessed the man who owns a bookstore near my accommodation sweeping up fallen tree leaf things (blossom tree ones not like American-style leaves).

The Swiss are all taught German primarily and of course, their English is really good too. They actually speak both German and what is called Swiss-German which I’m told is very different from German. A lot of Swiss also know a fair amount of French and Italian from what I’m told but I can’t say that for sure.

Everything here is very expensive. The minimum annual salary (as in required by law) comes out to be $53,000 a year. The currency is approximately 1:1 with the dollar so it’s quite easy to see how insanely everything is priced. A McDouble is $5. Lattes are around $5-$7 and beer in a bar can be anywhere from $8-$12 for a 33 deciliter or half-liter glass of normal beer. We did get a six-pack of beer for $10 last night so you can do just fine if you don’t go out.

The first night we went to this highly rated Thai place near us. It costed us $100 for 3 beers and 3 entrees. We then went to a bar near us and met a coy Irish guy named David. David wrote some poetry and gave it to two women near us when they were leaving. David is a chef. Other than that I cannot say what I know about David. He surmised that I was a spoiled kid and kept commenting on my hair and ears. We ended up taking a taxi to a dirty street of bars that he said was our only option on a Tuesday night. The taxi was $15 for a 5-minute drive. I spent $80 on a round of drinks. I’m making a lot of monetary mistakes here.

Today we went to a cafe called Bros, Beans, and Beats. It’s a nice cafe that has a 20% hipster vibe to it. The internet works well enough. I paid $6 for a latte. I learned that in France they do half espresso and half filtered coffee in their lattes. I finally know why I thought my latte was disgusting in the Charles De Galle airport. I hate normal coffee. I like my espresso diluted with a gallon of milk.

We walked around Zurich for quite a while. There were a lot of stores. I don’t find most stores interesting. It feels like such a waste of time to aimlessly go form store to store browsing shit you won’t be super happy owning. Every time I aimlessly browse a store and buy something I almost always regret it sooner or later and get rid of the item.

I’ve got a black swan story for you that is for the ages. Christian, Damian and I were sitting by the lakefront enjoying the sun and shooting the shit. At first, there were big ole’ white swans coming up to people looking for food. I’ve never seen a swan from behind swimming. They truly do have a caboose that is crafted for floating in the water. The efficiency of a swan gliding in water is astounding. Soon we spotted some small duck-sized black swans. The probably were not swans but they didn’t look like ducks and that’s the only two birds we really wanted to consider that day so we shall call it a black swan. After sitting for a while we noticed one of the black swans had scooped up a stick in its mouth and began swimming towards a little white boat that was docked perhaps 20 feet from the shore. You have to realize that we just got done shitting on this thing for a while and then it does a complete 180 and acts like a bird on a mission.

It begins ramming the stick between the boat and its rudder. It would inch the stick through so purposefully that we found it hilarious. What could this little guy possibly think he was doing? What was his goal in all of this? Was he trying to nest? Was this a game? We will call this damn bird Bob to inject some dignity into this story.

Bob pushes the last inch of the stick through the rudder and it shoots out the other side. Bob then swims on over, grabs the stick and again, pushes it through the rudder and again, it shoots out the other side. Bob then grabs the stick and instead of playing this boring rudder nesting game finds an inch-wide hole next to the rudder. He then pivots his body and begins ramming it up the boat hole. Bob seems to be enjoying this. Bob starts really going at it and lodges it successfully up the boat hole. We figured this was it. Bob had done it! Bob turns away and aimlessly moves back towards the shoreline bobbing with the waves as Bob loves to do.

About a minute later, Bob finds another stick. We were ecstatic!

It seems rather obvious to me now that I’m writing this that Bob was likely trying to build a nest but at the time it seemed like something much grander than that. Bob strolls up to the boat hole and begins ramming his stick in the same fashion, in the boat hole. Of course, the hole was already filled so only one stick could fit. This boat hole just couldn’t handle two of Bob’s sticks at once. Bob ends up getting the 2nd stick up the hole while losing the 1st stick. The 1st stick just began floating away. Bob then fetched the first stick, shoved it up the hole, and then, of course, the second stick would float away. This went on for a while. Eventually, Bob gave up and just swam away. This was much more fascinating yesterday.

We went to Interlaken yesterday. Interlaken means between two lakes because the city is between two lakes. Initially, we were going to go to Lucerne but Christian doesn’t care about money and wanted to go hang gliding. At $230 for a 15-minute flight, I couldn’t really justify the cost. I didn’t really put up a fight but I shouldn’t have even gone to Interlaken because the damn train ticket was $140 round trip. This is a 2-hour train ride mind you. I’m still sick and blame my lack of assertiveness on that honestly. Anyways I stopped the loss there and just watched for a few hours as hang gliders and paragliders came raining down from above me. The hang gliding company did let me have a few big beers for free so I tossed some shorts on, threw my shirt off and lounged in the sun staring at the landscape. This saved the trip for me. Afterward, we got some authentic Swiss food called Rochi (which is definitely not how you spell it). It’s melted cheese on ham on hash browns. It costed $23 which was oddly cheap to me. That is a sad statement.

There don’t seem to be any homeless people here. I seriously haven’t seen a single person that looked homeless or was just sitting on the sidewalk holding a cup in the air hoping for money.

I’m going to come back to Switzerland but with a few thousand dollars and the intention of doing some proper snowboarding and hang gliding.

I’ve been sick since about April 7th. I never get sick and even when I do it usually lasts a few days. I can’t believe people do this every 2-3 months it’s annoying as hell.

[lodryons]

Edinburgh

Oh, my God, I forgot how good it was to have everyone speak English and speak it clearly. Stayed in an Airbnb last night. A Swedish woman and Austrian man with their 3 children in this massive home in new town. It was really nice not waking up to someone zipping a bag or turning on the light at 6 AM. Luckily the house was barely a 5-minute walk to the yoga studio where the Wim Hof workshop took place. I had a fantastic bagel and wait for it, LATTE at a proper coffee shop right next to the yoga studio. I’ve been trying to find a damn cafe that had working WiFi and wasn’t actually a restaurant (I hate it when breakfast and lunch places call themselves cafes!).

So I went to see this guy called Wim Hof today. He’s from Amsterdam and has been traveling around doing workshops on his breathing technique. He’s a very fascinating guy that basically learned how to do all of this by himself. The breathing techniques are simple and essentially make you feel light-headed and incredible. It’s not entirely clear to me why this method allows him to run a marathon in the desert or stay in ice water for nearly 2 hours though. He certainly has a high caliber of mental toughness and willpower that enables him to achieve such feats but he insists that anyone can do it and it’s all rather simple. At the end of the workshop, the entire group was lead outside to a pool filled with ice. I decided to whip my shirt off and just hop in with the first group to get it over with. This kind of stuff gets me so amped with energy that I would rather jump in and go than be filled with anxiety before my death. He had all of us step in, sit down and place our hands on our thighs so that our bodies were submerged to about chest-level. I was quite shocked at how my body reacted. Instantly my breath was taken from me and I began inhaling and exhaling violently. The desire to stand up and get out was one of the most intense things I’ve ever experienced. For 10 seconds I battled with mind and eventually began breathing consistently on my own with big and fast breaths. Luckily after 20 seconds, it gets much easier as you numb a bit. This is where the magic begins with Wim because he can actually control is core body temperature and not die in this scenario like the rest of us. I’m excited to start a practice of his breathing technique and cold showers. We sat in the pool for a minute and then sang the beginning of “Somewhere over the rainbow” together. It made a lot of sense in the moment.

I finished a non-technical book for the first time in a while. It’s called The New New thing by Micheal Lewis. It follows a guy named Jim Clark through the 80’s and 90’s in Silicon Valley. I didn’t really know anything about the early dot-com boom or why anyone gives a shit about Silicon Valley but figured it would be useful to learn a bit about the place before I go there. Jim Clark created companies like Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and Healtheon which I really had never heard of before the book. Lewis makes the argument that Jim Clark is largely responsible for the current state of tech companies and how Silicon Valley works. Everyone chases what he calls the “New New Thing” (The thing that is even newer than the new thing) and Jim Clark seemed to possess a secret compass in finding it. I’m quite curious what Jim Clark has been up to for the last 20 years since the book was written around 1999-2000.

One of the worst things about being sick is going to bed at night. For hours a mess builds up in your lungs and throat just waiting to be discovered. For some odd reason you’ve been breathing just fine for hours in your slumber but your first conscious breath makes you cough that both sounds and feels awful. It feels like someone has taken a knife and sliced it down the center of your chest. It’s kind of funny to me actually. You wake up and someone punches you right in the chest and all you can do is just lay there pathetically. You can’t say to hell with this and punch them back

I went to bed quite early so I was up at about 6 AM. I watched a movie on my laptop for a bit while the Argentinians below me packed up and left for a train to London. A bit later I got up and walked down to a cafe called The Elephant House. I’m not sure why it’s called that. Apparently, J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter author for those living under a rock) wrote the books here. Or at least she wrote the first few here. There’s a cemetery nearby that she used to come up with the names of characters in her books. I was trying to think of a book or book series that has captivated the world like Harry Potter has and couldn’t find something to match its stature. I remember Oprah having movie screenings and book parties for the last few in the series. That’s kind of insane when you think about it. I also find it incredibly inspiring that someone can sit down and create something that will be loved by hundreds of millions of people (perhaps billions at this point) all with their own brain and some hard work.

They don’t have WiFi at The Elephant House. Apparently, people come in here and don’t buy stuff and they will charge you just to be a tourist and use the space for your Harry Potter fandom blog. I probably won’t come here again. I bought a latte and finished watching Manchester by the Sea. Fantastic film.

I bought some sick pills from the pharmacy near the train station in Rome. I just told the pharmacist I was sneezing and my throat hurt. One of the drugs makes me quite loopy and feel a bit high. If you take it near a beer you have this little party in your body that no one knows about. It’s not a rager necessarily but I enjoy it. If you mix it with a latte you get very sleepy. I don’t like taking drugs and would prefer to just ride it out by sleeping and eating quite well but both of those things aren’t possible while traveling.

I went on a walking tour today with a feminist woman that works at my hostel from Barcelona. She was quite nice overall but kept getting rather upset at how Women were treated in Scotland hundreds of years ago. At one point a famous, ownerless dog of the city had been elevated to the status of a man so that they wouldn’t kill it along with the other stragglers. Meaning a dog had more rights than women in Scotland for a brief time. Hilarious.

I found a hipster cafe today. Finally.

I went for a run and I’m finally getting over this sickness. I keep hacking up something horrible looking which I take to be a good thing. Man, running is hard.

I leave for Zurich tomorrow morning. Edinburgh is more my style in terms of landscape and people. I don’t think I’d like to live here for more than a few months though.

[lodryons]

Rome

In Italian, Latte means milk. So you have to say cafe latte to have your espresso added to the milk. I took cafe to mean coffee, which I take to mean drip coffee, which is definitely not what I want. So I have great news. I have successfully ordered a latte at a non-Starbucks. I just say Cafe Latte and it magically shows up after I pay for it. I’m not sure if I’ll try my luck on requesting latte art.

I arrived at about 5 PM with 20 minutes in the chamber on the last walking dead episode of the season. I know this is despicable but I actually stayed in this dinky exit building from the airport that had 1 cafe and 5 companies trying to all sell me 4 euro bus tickets to Roma Termini and watched the rest of it. And you know what? It. Was. Worth. It.

I’m staying at Funny Palace Hostel. I don’t know what it’s called that. It’s not a palace, maybe that’s the joke? My hostel mates are all quite nice and hail from Denmark, South Korea, and Mexico. I explored Rome with the dane yesterday. We’re both pretty bad tourists and didn’t see much but we get along great.  

The South Korean, Kim, is 20 and nearing the end of his 40 day gallivant and returning home to serve his 2-year “duty” to serve in the military. I told him he could just renounce his citizenship and skip that silly business but he seemed confused.

The Mexican, Emmanuel, is 32 and here for a 3-day single element fluids conference. I trust I got that right. He has his Ph.D. in Numerical Systems and now lives in Mississippi working for the Army on optimizing construction costs for our pop-up bridges. Apparently, the army can construct an entire bridge in a few days but has never done any cost analysis on the structure (they might be using twice as many wires for instance). It’s always fun meeting people that are on another level of intelligence than you.

The Dane, Amanda, is 25 and traveling on break from her bachelors. She’s doing her masters in Medicine and plans on being a psychiatrist. She currently works with immigrants with PTSD and is writing her thesis on the issue. I asked her how much she pays in income tax and she said, “I don’t make very much so I only pay 40%.” The maximum you will pay in Denmark is 60% which honestly doesn’t sound that bad when you consider that everyone receives health insurance (not sure of its quality though), free college education and a 1000 euro a month stipend while in school, and probably some other dope shit I don’t know about. The free education along with a living stipend can basically eradicate the issue of poor children not having a chance to work hard and get a great education and high paying job.

Amanda and I grabbed a drink after dinner last night and the question of the night was who is the most beautiful celebrity? I, of course, said Emily Blunt, as I usually do but for someone my own age, I said Emily Stone. Her answer was Collin Firth. I’m not kidding. “He has a stone cold face except for his kind eyes.” She actually said that too. I entered a laughing fit but began getting worried about being murdered since I was clearly in the presence of an insane person. I then spent 10 minutes beautifully arguing why Ryan Gosling should be her answer. It should be everyone’s answer. We met in the middle with Jake Gyllenhaal.

I saw the Colosseum yesterday and listened to an audio tour while walking through it. Some of the highlights include the Romans constructing a giant Whale and having 50 bears rush out of it and having 10,000 soldiers fight 10,000 wild animals like panthers and tigers. Apparently, they stayed a lot of Christians in there and when they took over they decommissioned the place. I know it’s messed up but I would have loved to see some of this shit. We definitely have the best life in 2017 but if you were born in Rome during the games you certainly observed some once-in-a-lifetime shit. Perhaps we can relive it with virtual reality one day.

My hostel room is a tricky situation for sleeping. For some odd reason, the locking mechanism is very loud and requires two complete turns to toggle it. The bathroom has paper-thin walls and you can hear every droplet of urine hit the toilet water and the shower head sings as water erupts from it. Basically, the first person up means that everyone is up.

I did my laundry for the first time on the trip. It’s hotter out and all of my shirts are disgusting. I asked the man to not dry 3 shirts and use cold water. It cost me 6 euro. He seemed like a solid guy so I trust my clothes are in good hands. I’m lucky to have a closet with hangers in my room to air dry the shirts for 2 days. This is a riveting paragraph.

I keep expecting things to be fake and not like the movies but god dammit Europe is awesome. I’m doing some coding in a cafe off the tourist path and I’m surrounded by locals who look Italian as fuck and no one understands me remotely. A group of men just came up and started playing their accordions all fancy like and no one gave a shit which I take to mean this is a normal occurrence. I will say that I’m worried about everyone dying here. It seems like everyone smokes but I have hope as I see an old Italian man and presumably his wife vaping right as I type this.

I got sick. You know what’s an impossibly hard question to answer on the micro scale? How the hell did I get sick? I found that I had dumped some change in my bathroom bag and my toothbrush head was resting firmly on it. That’s a solid bet I think. I got some drugs that are not in English from the pharmacy and they’re doing me pretty well. It’s a great thing I’ve got to wake up and spend the day with the ice man Wim Hof tomorrow!

[lodryons]

Madrid

Hola! They speak Spanish in Spain. Makes sense. Portuguese in Portugal. Man, these people are consistent. Everyone here is tan and beautiful too. Americans really were the undesirables. Murderers and uglies breeding for centuries really messes with a society. I’m just kidding, we have Kim Kardashian, she’s a real beauty (except for like everything on her body but it’s what is inside of her that matters, Mr. West!).

I flew with TAP Portugal or air Portugal TAP? Whatever. It was really nice. The seats looked crisp and felt new. They even had a universal outlet for each chair. This is luxury ladies and gentleman. My phone that gets 2G via shitty T-Mobile is now at 100%!

I met a man from NYC that moved here 3 years ago and he says he loves it. He’s finishing his Ph.D. here in psychology. It’s costing him 600 euros. I do wonder if the quality of education is comparable to our $50K/year system. Probably not. He was telling me they speak weird Spanish here (or maybe we’re the weird ones?) and in Barcelona, they speak something called Catalina which is even weirder. Apparently, the Spanish people have the best work-life balance. Generally starting work at 10 AM and working until 2 PM. From 2 PM - 4:30 PM they will eat lunch. From 5PM-9PM they will finish work and then eat dinner around 11 PM or midnight. He also mentioned that if it’s nice outside absolutely no one is inside. They must not have video games here.

I tried another latte and I’m getting closer to something latte-ish. You’d think espresso and milk would taste the same everywhere but the leche in Spain is weird I think. I’ll wait for Rome to get a proper one. Everyone drinks espresso here anyways. Gross.

Lost one of the tips to my $80 earbuds. That’s like $40 in tips lost. Luckily I got a free pair of the absolute worst earbuds from Delta and cannibalized its tips and they fit! I was just describing to someone how I absolutely hate everything about earbud tips. A new 1st world problem in my life!

Apparently, they love Fish here too. God dammit.

I keep thinking people are speaking Russian in my hostel when really it’s Spanish or Portuguese. I even asked a girl if she was from Russia and she was from Portugal. I was in Portugal. I didn’t ask anyone else that question.

A friend recommended I try out this great app called Lonely Planet. Found a great tapas place (read: snackys) last night and spent many euros on lots of great ham, veal meatballs, blood sausage and some potato ball things. An American from New York overheard us talking in English and was delighted to find someone to chat with. He’s here on business with a bunch of people from his company that’s in the Oil & Gas industry. It’s probably because I’m an Elon Musk fanboy but I felt like he had just told me he works for the Tobacco industry. It’s not a fair view. He seemed like a nice guy. Probably drives an electric car.

I slept 11 hours last night. In reality, the quality of sleep is about 50-60% since you’re woken up about every 15-30 minutes by someone snoring, rummaging through their belongings, turning a light on, speaking in their outdoor voice to one another or entering/exiting the room. There is a reason it costs 30 euros to sleep in these beautiful establishments.

I failed to secure a latte today. I was sure I was on the right track. The woman asked me if by latte I meant coffee in milk! Yes. This is progress. I said oh no, espresso in milk! I might have thrown out an “espresso con leche!” Which I don’t think is right because she just smiled and then said something slightly different. I didn’t specify the volume of milk and so I received essentially an espresso with a dash of milk. Still, this is progress. I’ll order an espresso con mucho leche next time.

I tried but couldn’t find a damn cafe that had both WiFi and an outlet. So I went to Starbucks. Within 3 minutes of being there, a group of 3 American girls (I think) sat near me and sounded basic as hell. I’m not judging but damn that’s impressive. They’ve gone worldwide at this point. I must say the internet & quality of latte at Starbucks in Madrid was quite good.

One of the most interesting things about sleeping in a hostel room is experiencing each person’s take on nighttime civility. Being American I will generalize this to how every member of their home country acts at night too. Everyone that practices Islam is a terrorist right? I’d say that Americans might be described as stupid and fat but in my opinion, we take the cake when it comes to nighttime politeness. We at least do that annoying “Shhh!” thing to each other.  From what I can tell most people not in America think that chatting at full volume to each other past midnight when there are 4 people sleeping around them is normal. I wish I understood what they were saying because perhaps it’s warranted. For example, “My mum slept with the neighbor again. Dad’s buying another boat to spite her.” I’d forgive that.

This morning I had 4 snorers and one guy sleep through his alarm for at least 20 minutes. I just left. How haven’t we solved snoring as a society? I think there should be a Richter scale for snoring and your rating is placed on your license. Then we can bucket people of similar ratings in rooms by law. I’m running for president on this.

I did a walking tour yesterday. Easily the worst and best tour I’ve ever had. The gentleman was quite nice and eccentric but his accent made everything rather hard to understand and he didn’t speak loudly at all. I met some cool Americans studying in Rome for the semester that were doing a vacation across a few cities in Spain. One of them is actually studying Computer Science at Michigan right now. Small world. We all had a laugh at how ridiculous our tour guide was. He basically asked us what we think we should do if President Trump were to visit Madrid and stay at the Royal Palace in the most awkward way. I can’t even recall how he phrased it but it took him several minutes for him to relay to us that he was actually joking and not trying to give us some interesting note on how foreign presidents are treated in general in Spain. He said we should put him the bosses room, lock and throw away the key. I found it hilarious that he thought this was a good joke (as did half the group).

Apparently, Madrid has bomb hot chocolate. It’s thick and you can dip churros in it. So I did at 1 AM last night with a nice chap I met on the tour named Brandon. An eccentric Italian man came in and started making lots of noises and questionable body language positions next to us. I found him quite funny and charming. He played the Clarinet really nicely too. I gave him 5 euros. He seemed like he was in his 60’s or 70’s. Feels bad man.

The South Korean guy’s alarm went off blazing this morning at 8 or 8:30 AM this morning. Shortly afterward the Brazilian guy adjacent to me got up for breakfast presumably and decided to turn the light on and start singing for 10 minutes while he packed his bag. I think my data is getting pretty damn good at this point. Other cultures don’t have a noise or light policy when others are sleeping. Animals!

Today’s my last day so I figure I’ll go to a museum or two. I’m sure it will be riveting.

I got to the Prado (famous paintings of kings and shit) and it was so nice and sunny that I decided to sit on the lawn right outside it and read for a couple of hours instead. Judge me and my fabulous tan all you like.

I had tapas with my girlfriend’s childhood friend and her boyfriend in a non-touristy area called Rosa Rosia (or something like that). Man, my girlfriend is so popular. I hope I have friends one day.

Slept a beautiful 6 hours last night (that’s about 3 hours less than I’m used to). I’ve written a lot about sleeping in hostels for this post but it cannot be understated how screwed you are if you think you’re going to sleep normally.

If you go to bed too late, you’re screwed because some animal will always be getting up at 5 AM for a flight or maybe 6 AM because he was a loser and wants to be a damn tourist all day, nice and early bird style.

No one has anything around the night before so they will spend 20 minutes purely on zipping and unzipping 3 bags as they dress themselves in a sleepy stupor (picture yourself putting pants on, zipping your bag shut, and then realizing you also need a shirt, repeat, and then you need socks, and then you want to wear that bracelet actually, etc etc).

Now, consider the other case, the loser going to bed early to avoid the early bird traffic case. You are absolutely screwed anyways. You go to bed at 10 or 11 PM and for the next 4 hours you will have someone come in or out of the room either to get ready to get drunk for the night, or they’re already drunk coming to sleep, or they need something in the middle of a drunk-infused night.

You might be wondering how I don’t add to this chaos? I pack my bag the day before and leave out only exactly what I need in the morning. Upon waking I grab it instantly and get the hell out of the sleeping vicinity and move to the bathroom area. No lights and zippers and shit.

I’ll never post about sleeping or hostel sleeping etiquette again.

Madrid was fine. I think I should have gone to Barcelona though. I didn’t really find the city interesting as a traveler. It would be swell to live there I’m sure. I also had the worst luck with my hostel roommates which is quite rare for me. It’s still nice to have visited Espana. Peace.

[lodryons]

Lisbon

The flight was rather quick. I watched one of my favorite Mel Gibson movies, The Patriot, a 2 hour and 45 minute film about how the British were dicks to us before we were dicks with all of our slaves and that whole not letting women vote thing. It just so happens that the universe placed a British guy behind me who stole my freedom to sleep. I watched another flick called The Girl on the Train and found it mildly enjoyable. Emily Blunt looked quite aged in the flick. She’s still a babe though. I bet being married to Jim from The Office would be really fun.

I had a layover in Charles de Gaulle airport. Getting through customs was pretty chill. Some security man stopped a woman with a hijab. I didn’t catch what he asked her but I’m sure it was justified.

I think I went through about 15 different escalators before I got to my gate. Up and down and all around. I can’t tell if this place was designed to have people miss their flights but man they did a great job if so. I didn’t miss my flight.

I had a 5 euro “latte” after getting to my gate. I don’t think the French know what a damn latte is. It was basically coffee. Not my precious espresso and milk poured beautifully into a swan cresting a lake latte. It came out of a machine! A MACHINE!! It’s the most American thing in France I’m sure. I’m demoting France to a 2nd-world country for this.

My wing of gates looked quite cool. It’s basically a giant greenhouse of windows constrained into an arc-shape so people get really cramped on the end. Beauty is pain as Madonna always says (she probably didn’t say that).

I landed in Portugal! So people here speak a language called Portuguese. I’m not sure if I give off a Yankee vibe but no one has tried speaking to me in it. They go straight to English. It might be the backwards cap. I read that no one wears a cap in Europe backward. Thinking about it now, a backwards cap is really odd.

My God, it would suck if I didn’t speak English. I did have a woman come up to me and ask what language I speak while I was walking the riverside. I ended up giving her 3 euros. You’re welcome children of Portugal.

Apparently, my hostel won the best hostel in the world award like 4 times. I think it’s the welcoming staff and the beer I received upon arrival didn’t hurt either. I met a man who just graduated from Michigan law and is celebrating being rich soon. I had some more beers with him later and he gave me the wrap on how tech companies IPO. Lawyers make bank if you’re good.

People keep asking me why I’m not going to Porto or Barcelona. I didn’t realize those were great places. I don’t know anything about Portugal and Spain honestly. People really like it here. The food and vibe. The men are all good looking and fit. This is not a place for us tubber Americans. Everything in Portugal is named in that scary way where you’re not sure if you should pronounce it nearly phonetically (for instance Spoon is so damn easy to say) or if every 3rd letter is silent. For instance, my hostel is located at Rua São Nicolau 13. How the hell do you say that? ROO-AHH SAW-OH NEE-KOO-LAHH?

You know how in movies where James Bond goes to some not American place and fights villains? He always starts by running down alleyways and jumping off buildings? And everything is beautiful? That’s what it’s like here! The sidewalks and streets are covered in this incredible marble that always looks wet and smooth. The buildings all have that golden hour look to them and of course, you have statues and other landmarks that are old as hell. There is something poetic about browsing Reddit under a horse statue from centuries ago.

I’d definitely consider living here for a year. They really like fish down here though so that’s kind of a deal breaker. I’d have to buy some white pants though. A lot of people in white pants down here. I probably wouldn’t want to live here actually.

I went surfing! It cost 40 euros. That included the 45-minute drive there and back and 2 hours of me re-living the fact that I’m not athletic. I actually feel like I did quite well overall. About 50% of the time I’d get on the board and instantly fall off. The other half I’d manage to ride it out. I’d like to live somewhere where I can surf every day.

I learned that the Swiss speak a made-up form of German they cleverly call Swiss-German. Apparently, if you know German it is of no help. I still want to learn German I think. I’m sure I’ll get to that right after completing that ultra.

I’ve been sleeping quite poorly but managing to function decently well by taking a nap randomly during the day. Hostels aren’t really for sleeping anyways. They’re for meeting travelers and locking your shit up.

I met the nicest plumber from North Carolina last night. It was nice meeting another person from a boring state that no one cares about. I have found it refreshing to say that I’m moving to San Francisco because it’s one of the 3 places that the rest of the world knows (the other two being Las Vegas and NYC of course). It’s also been really fun saying I’m about to start a new gig at Reddit. A lot of guys light up when I say that. The ladies obviously melt too. If I had gone with Instagram I think I’d be seeing that flip quite a bit. It’s really nice not having to explain I work for a tech company in Farming and that it’s actually really cool. People’s eyes just glaze and I truly hate any interaction that glazes people, you know?

I was the least touristy person in Lisbon I think. I basically spent 90% of my time socializing with travelers and learning about them and their lives. 5% sleeping and 5% trying to find a good latte, body wash, and the damn post office. I don’t regret it but I definitely feel like I’d be getting judged if someone looked at my schedule for the last 3 days. Good thing no one reads this blog! Hahhahaha… haha.. heh.. ahem. Anyways. Lisbon was dope, I’d go back and basically sit at the riverside drinking most days and surfing the rest of the time.

[lodryons]

Berlinnn touristing

I'm not done being sick. It's really weird. I don't cough, I don't feel like being bedridden, I'm just stuck with a throat clogged with phlegm (sorry I'm not sorry) and a runny nose. I haven't run in like 5 days and have been off my usual diet for the last 17 days which has been pretty rough. Sleeping in hostels makes it hard to get a solid 8 or 9 hours because people are always in and out at odd times as well as making a lot of noise. The 10 euros a night is pretty nice nonetheless. I've always needed a lot of sleep though so more often than not I find myself nursing on some caffeine throughout the day or I feel miserable.

On Friday I didn't feel like doing anything. I took a stroll down to the East Side Gallery which is one of the 3 remaining pieces of the Berlin wall that remains. It's the largest outdoor gallery in the world with some beautiful paintings etched across its entire length (quite a ways to my surprise). Sadly a lot of graffiti has defaced the artwork and within a few decades I'm guessing the more beautiful artwork will get completely ruined. It only takes one person to make a poor decision and ruin it for everyone.

Today I went on a free walking tour just like the one I did in London. My guide was a Kiwi again! She was quite funny and I enjoyed talking with her one-on-one as we walked to the various waypoints. I really like tour guides because they rely on charisma and being interesting in order to get customers and good reviews so naturally they're good people to befriend in general. 

First up, the memorial to the murdered Jews.

It's this giant bar graph of concrete slabs all of varying volumes that's supposed to be whatever you want it to be.

Memorial to the murdered Gypsies. On the stones surrounding the memorial are the names of the various camps where Romas and Sintis perished. In the middle of the pond is a black triangle representing the black triangle identifier on the camp uniforms for these people. Everyday someone puts a fresh bouquet of flowers on it as well.   

and the memorial to the murdered Homosexuals. Inside this concrete slab (purposely similar to the jew slabs) is a looping movie of two men kissing. Homosexuals were horribly treated in the camps but until recently were not given the same amount of thought and memorializing as the other persecuted groups have received. It is tucked away to symbolically represent this injustice. 

Now this might look like a parking lot, and guess what, it is! But just 15 meter below this parking lot is the bunker of Adolf Hitler where he stayed during the entire war. It's quite large, and being a bomb shelter, has stayed intact mostly but is sealed off and essentially unreachable at the moment. 

The great nazi book burning of 1933 also has a memorial in the Bebelplatz square where some of the burnings took place. The room below is an empty library that can hold 20,000 books which is the number burned on that day nearly a century ago. Some of the books burned were original works with real knowledge and one of a kind which is horribly sad. 

The next day I took a trip about an hour outside of Berlin to one of the first concentration camps built: Sachsenhausen. This place served as a model for other concentration camps and was truly a horrible place. I learned quite a lot during my time in Berlin and sadly didn't know some pretty basic stuff about WW2 and the nazis. Sachsenhausen was mostly used as a labor camp and was also used to murder groups of people sometimes as well. 

This was quite a large map of the camp. The important part is in the middle where the prisoners were contained. At the edges and along the wall were guard towers with a master guard tower in the middle bottom where total control was maintained. 

Escape was pretty much impossible for many reasons. The first was the damn enclosing. 

It's a bit hard to see but that's a ground line of curled large razor wiring and then a tall electric fence followed by a tough to scale concrete wall. If you managed to escape the camp you would still have to make it through the surrounding neighborhood which was entirely occupied by S.S. families. Beyond that was the city of Berlin which wasn't exactly a safe place to be retreating to either. In the history of the camp not a single person successfully escaped the camp. Incredible. 

Tower A was the central guard tower where roll call would be done each morning promptly at 5AM. For over 2 hours the prisoners would have to stand in the freezing temperatures wearing a thin pair of pants and a single long sleeved shirt. My entire group was freezing and we were all wearing thick winter clothing and at least got to walk around to warm up a bit. Some days the prisoners would be told to simply stand in roll call all day for 13 hours. The nazi's warm and safe in their towers couldn't care less and the prisoners could do nothing but bare the cold or be shot in response. 

The saying on the entrance of the camp says "Work makes you free" a chilling message because upon entering the camp you're sentenced to a life of labor and only death will set you free. 

Sadly most of the buildings in the camp were flattened by the soviets after the war but many important ones remained too.  

Prisoners stayed in a barracks that had a maximum capacity of 100 people. Near the end of the war over 400 people would be stuffed into these buildings. The washrooms were basically a joke and only a few could actively clean themselves at a time.

This is one of those death pits you always hear about. The business of killing people in mass is quite tricky so before they moved onto more efficient methods they would simply round them up and shoot them in this pit near the camp. The patch of grass I was standing on was one of the many mass grave sites where thousands of prisoners were tossed and laid to "rest". 

Here's where they started using the shower method of gassing the prisoners after performing a "health check" where blue crosses were placed on the chests of those with valuable gold teeth and dentures for collection postmortem.

Some of the showers were underground in the camp's morgue. The gassing took about 20 minutes to kill everyone inside. I'm not sure of the pain but scratching your fingers away on concrete walls as you die sounds like one of the worst ways to die in this life. 

On my last night in Berlin I went out to a Jazz club with some British girls I met and enjoyed some music I don't normally listen to.

I'd love to work in this city one day. One of the my favorite destinations so far!

[lodryons]

My wonderful day at the airport

So I was supposed to fly out of Amsterdam this morning at 9AM for Berlin. That didn't happen. I was about 15 minutes by train away from the airport and had gotten the checking-in/security/gate thing nailed down so I figured I'd give myself about an hour and a half to get to my gate. Most people give themselves less time than this so I don't feel that bad. 

I get to the train station and hop on my train (it comes every 15 minutes) and all of sudden the Dutch voice erupts that the train is cancelled. Not just that train, but all trains from this station to the airport were cancelled. They never tell you why. I later learned that there was an "incident" on the rails and the police had it shutdown for a couple hours. 

Life isn't supposed to fit its way perfectly into your schedule and this was one of those days where it didn't. If I had arrived 2 hours early like I normally do I would have been fine. But I didn't, and that is that.

I was pretty sleep deprived (4 hours) and so I found myself whispering under my breath, "you've got to be joking me", as if a train being cancelled was so inconceivable that this could only happen in a nightmare. So 10 minutes later they announce a workaround which required hopping on a different train, getting off 3 stops later, hopping on another and you're at the airport. In total that took 1 hour plus the 15 minutes of waiting around to see what they were going to do. When I arrived at the airport I had about 15 minutes to check my bag, get through security, find my gate and board. Quite impossible even on a good day. To make it worse they stop checking bags at 40 minutes from the departure time so that means I would have had to carry my giant backpack through security and likely have it taken apart since it's not going to fit through the scanner and then haul it all the way to my gate further slowing me down and then check it on the plane. 

This happened to me in London as well but that day I gave myself over 3 hours to go from my hostel to the gate so I made it just fine. 

So I talked to the EasyJet lady who was very nice and she helped me book the next available flight. I would have to wait 11 more hours at the airport. Not only that, but I had to pay 80 euros to have this changed. I can hear my mother saying out loud, "I always tell him he diddy-dallys (sp?) too much! He's such an airhead! He has poor time management!", and she's right. Even that isn't that bad. I had to wait in the common area that anyone can be in because I couldn't check my bag until 2 hours before the flight. So no comfortable lounges and awesome food options for 11 hours. C'est la vie! 

I called the train company to see if they can reimburse me for my flight and they told me I had to mail them my receipts and explain the situation. So that money won't be coming along anytime soon. 

I must say I'm a little proud of myself overall. I feel like most people would have lost their minds at my morning. Train late, expensive flight, sleep deprived, surrounded by the dutch, and out even more money! I didn't even give myself a minute to bitch about it in my head.

There's nothing I can do about this. So I choose not to get upset about it and simply recalculate my day around it. I actually didn't have the worse day in the world. I got to eat junk food, watch a great movie, catchup on a ton of writing for this blog and organized my photos, charged all of my devices, and did some surfing as well. I'm still sick (nearly better) so I figured this is probably better for me than walking around a bunch of people in Berlin for the day possibly getting sicker or prolonging my sickness. It's moments like these where I the agnostic choose to see the positive side and nothing else. If I were a religious man I'd say this is God giving me a little forced R&R that I've been resisting because I'm on my grand adventure and have no time for such things. 

I also can't help but love the kindness of strangers. Everywhere I go I find people helping me immensely with directions, plans, etc. I found these two nice retired gentleman who live in Amsterdam and Liverpool who helped me navigate the changeover train and guided me to the correct check-in spot at the airport. I could have done all that myself but it might have cost me even more time or I might have gotten lost for a bit! This makes me want to help people whenever I can with no thought towards reward as well. Those men are now sitting in their home, enjoying some tea and telly with no mind to me, but here I am so thankful for their help. Maybe I will help someone tomorrow and have the same effect. And they, and so on.

Momentum. 

[lodryons]

Amsterdammmn

I left Dublin feeling like I had done enough and was ready for Amsterdam. Aside from possibly meeting a friend there I had no idea why I was going to Amsterdam. I know it's known for weed and prositutes and that's about it. I learned from a few that it's beautiful there as well. A man from Italy told me some refer to it as the 'Venice of the North' which got me a bit more excited.

I was still fighting some kind of cold when I arrived and was also quite sleep deprived. Nonetheless when I entered my room I found a brit who was there for a festival but had missed his flight. We got dinner and it was mostly small talk. I'm quite uninterested and horribly non-interesting when I'm both sick and operating on less than 6 hours of sleep so I was quite happy to get back and take a nap. I awoke at 10PM to the brit and another group of 4 young guys from Ireland who were quite hilarious. They had these great accents that I hadn't really found in Dublin and were basically living like the world was going to end for the last 4 days. Nothing but drugs and prostitutes with a little bit of art and tourism for the last 4 whole days. They told me of their adventures and how certain things worked. It was quite nice meeting them because I felt like I had experienced more than I actually had just by re-living their best experiences of the whole trip.

The next day I felt pretty miserable and basically was in bed for the day. On my last day I met with a friend and we walked around a lot and got some dinner. After she left, I went to the hostel lounge to do some surfing and check into my flight for the next day to Berlin. I struck up some conversation with a woman sitting near me and we ended up walking around the red light district while I snapped some hopefully good nighttime photos.

The city is quite beautiful and I think I got some decent shots of the water with good lighting. It's weird how I kept thinking wow this is like something out of a video game which is the weirdest way to say, "Wow! Real life is so realistic in these photos!".

The city is either these alley ways or these gorgeous canals.

Everyone owns like 3 bikes I think. Bikes everywhere. A lot of them are unlocked. They're like napkins free for taking but who needs a napkin really?

I just had to take a stroll down red light district lane and luckily found a friend to do it with.

I was nervous about going alone since it seems like a good place to end up murdered or something but it's all quite touristy surprisingly. The general layout is about 3-4 streets each of about 8 blocks worth of "red light-worthy" storefronts. There are prostitutes of course. They're the most interesting because holy shit that's like a super model in a window that costs 50 euros. Most men can only dream of even kissing a woman like that and here you can have it all for 50 little euros. If you don't think about how many men run through that doorway and how easy you can probably get HIV it almost seems like it's worth it too. Then there's the matter of how many of these women are doing this purely on their own volition. It seems to me that prostitution is a pretty hard thing to legalize since exploiting young women for their bodies is too lucrative given that your user base is every living man and your product never runs out since there are always new 18 year-olds popping up. I couldn't keep saying to myself how crazy this all seemed.

Obviously a curtain closed means they're busy at the moment. I figured maybe that could mean they're out for the night or getting food but why keep the light on then?

Here's some women posing in their respective booths. Basically they stare at you and try to entice you to come up to the window. Then they name their price for whatever activity and you can counter with a price or activity too. They don't like their picture being taken which is weird to me since ya know, they're prostitutes so I took this one from afar where you can't really see them that well. They dress in bikinis mostly. The window is usually a glass door and behind that they have another room with a bed.

I'm glad I went to Amsterdam. It let me recharge and explore on my own. 

[lodryons]

More touristyness in Dublin

So Dublin is known for their famous Guinness brewery and Jameson distillery. I'm not a huge dark beer fan but I've had a few Guinness and they're quite good nonetheless. Trying Guinness straight from the source was quite fun for a few reasons. I got to learn how to poor the perfect pint (it takes 120 seconds!). I got to drink it in this sweet gravity bar which was on the top floor (7th floor) of the brewery and gave you a 360 degree view of Dublin.

I also got to taste what Guinness really tastes like which is rare since you have to be in Dublin in order to do this. The moment it ships out its flavor profile changes (because reasons I don't remember) and it actually did taste different in the brewery which was cool. I don't have the best palate so I don't know if it's really that much better but it seemed better so I'm good with that.

I also went on a day tour to the Cliffs of Moher with my French brother Nico! We were inseparable in Dublin and I bonded a lot with him. We had a ton in common and could joke around even though there was kind of a language barrier (I don't speak French at all and his English is a 2nd language for him which he's still learning). 

These cliffs are just insane. 700 feet tall, nominated for a wonder of the world ranking, and rumor has it that Abraham Lincoln wanted to die by jumping off them (that might be made up). The day tour was only 40 euros which required 6 hours of bussing in total and a ticket to the cliffs so the value was fantastic.

Oh yeah, and it was pretty windy. 120 km/h winds which was just below the threshold needed to shut down the cliffs. Lucky us!

[lodryons]

Touristy tourist touristing in Touristland

I was finally a tourist today! I tell everyone I'm not a tourist, or at least that I'm not the tourist type really. I've never enjoyed the schedule of a tourist. Wake up, walk forever, stand in lines, stare at pictures on walls and read small text on 45 degree angled platters for some dead guy who did something for some people one time. I enjoy learning about history, who doesn't really, but not in this mass consumable way where the moment my head hits the pillow I've forgotten it all anyways. But alas, I feel like I need to do some tours on this trip because then no one can say I failed to see some historical hoo-hah (not sure what hoo-hah is but let's roll with it).

Emmy and Ally (these two kind of took my travelers virginity and helped me a lot as a solo traveler) recommended this free walking tour of London. At the end you tip of course but nothing is compulsory. I thoroughly enjoyed it and gave my guide, Charlotte, 10 pounds which was a lot to me but it's her living so whatever. 

My guide charlotte is the one with the gimp leg in the middle wearing all red. She was from New Zealand and we got along well enough. I ended up going out with her, another tour guide and tourist later to a wine place and we talked like locals for a while. It was grand. 

Big ben, along with some asian couple that just got married. Apparently people don't actually get married in London. They fly in after the wedding, get back in their outfits, and pose in all of those cliche toursity areas like Big Ben and what not. You will probably see them in that default photo you get whenever you buy a frame.

The palace where the Queen is supposed to live but she doesn't because it's ugly (i'm guessing). 

We also walked through this huge park called St. James park. It is a runner's paradise. The animals are all really friendly because no one can harm them and tourists feed them all the time too! Interestingly enough, this is the park where one of the kings (I don't remember which #) would go and and sleep with his mistresses. His excuse to his dear wife was that he was taking a stroll through the park to "smell the flowers" and so she had all of the flowers removed so he had nothing to hide his lies. There are seriously no flowers in this entire giant park. 

The animals loved me. 

Now my guide Charlotte also does a night tour called the Grim Reaper. It takes place at 7PM (it's dark by then) and we go to all of the raunchy areas of London. This was so interesting. I saw the exact spots where Jack the Ripper killed his victims. I saw this dungeon castle where they kept prisoners who were about to be hanged.

I even got to the border of London the city and the metropolis where there is a bit of wall revealed showing that in fact, current day London is actually 14 feet above where historic London has been. That's right, modern day London is resting above millions of dead, along with their homes, stables, pubs etc. 

This was like 7 hours of touring for me which was a lot for my ADD brain. Happy I did it though. Man being a tourist is hard.

[lodryons]

Winter Wonderland!

I went to an annual festival in Hyde Park called Winter Wonderland today. I don't usually like going to these kind of things because they're generally the same old things from my childhood experiences of festivals. Ferris wheels, loads of unfair games, overpriced food, etc. This one was in London and Emmy/Ally said it had a few cool things so why the hell not go.

I bought a brat, fries and a can of coke for 10 pounds which didn't really compute for me since this currency still feels like nothing more than colorful monopoly money. 10 pounds is a lot of money. That's like spending $16 or something in America. I'd never even pay $8 for that and yet here I was like yeah sure I'm hungry, it looks good, and the number 10 doesn't seem to cause me much anxiety so lets do it. I think it's interesting how money is somehow infinite when you're on vacation than in the real world. I'm not really on vacation though. I've eaten in a real restaurant I think twice and the rest has been cheap street food. A month long vacation would leave me broker than hell. I'm traveling here!

The area we were in is quite famous for being the ritzy part of London. I started believing it when I ran into my first Aston Martin store ever. 

The festival had some cool things that I'd never seen so that alone made it worth it. 

The festival had an ice bar too which I find so cool and really want to do still. There was one in vegas that was quite expensive that I also never tried. I have this romantic conception in my head of myself sitting with a flask on a mountainside with just me and the view. It's sunny out so I'm not freezing. I'm not even really cold, it's one of those rare moments when it's not snowing, it's not windy but it is still below freezing so everything is just frozen in time. I've had a few of these moments briefly when snowboarding. You can just feel it and so you stop and sit on the mountain and just stare off into the distance. The ice bar is one of those things for me. I'm sure it's just really expensive alcohol in a crowded touristy slush fortress so I'm holding out for the real thing.

[lodryons]

Cya London, Sup Dublin Baby

Oui mates!

So I was supposed to go to Paris after London but I had a bunch of Englishmen tell me it sucked (crazy, I know) and Emmy and Ally had just come from Dublin and loved it!

I'm feeling a lot more comfortable traveling alone now. I was worried about meeting people and getting around but the first is fairly easy to do in a hostel and the second is just asking everyone you see where the hell you are.

People in London were insanely helpful whenever I needed guidance on the tube or overground train. The day of my flight to Dublin I had to take a tube to London Bridge and then an Overground to Gatwick airport. I get to my platform at the train station and see that to my luck, the only train cancelled was the Gatwick one due in 15 minutes. I asked a gentleman if he knew why that would be cancelled (since a train to an airport is pretty damn important) and he said it could be anything. He then walked me around and showed me how to read all of the different schedules for the trains at their various platforms and find additional help. None of this is particularly hard but it was totally new to me so in a way it was hard.

So far people in Ireland seem to keep to themselves and when I ask for help they're pretty short with me more in a cultural way than in a rude way. I got to my hostel and once again knew no one. Oddly there was a big group of high school students around and I thought I chose the wrong hostel. Luckily I met a real nice Irishman named Patrick who was in town for a sales meeting and we talked for a good hour. He helped me find cool spots to go to and asked me lots of questions (which is weird because I don't really find my background interesting which is why I tend to ask a lot of questions of others instead) but he was quite interested.

The view from my bunk in my hostel room.

I went up to my room to do a little writing and rest since I wasn't feeling well and in pops Nicolas! My brother from another country. We said our hellos, and he invited me to Burger King, of which he had never been. I declined having already eaten dinner but if you're only willing to meet people when it suits you 100% then you're going to be either alone or with some pretty boring people.

Meet Nico! I just asked him to stand in the light so I could snap a picture but he wanted the big screen so here's an intro video too!

We met up with his friend Julie who was also French and went to the local gathering spot for mourning the victims in the terrorist attack in Paris. There we met Gersende, a Parisian Julie knew, who joined our wolf pack of Allies, and we headed to Burger King singing our respective national anthems (less than 1% that's true). We returned to the hostel to drop some things off and I met my bunkmate Donovan, a South African who was leaving in the morning.

We went to a famous bar in Dublin called temple bar and sat outside under a heat lamp. We befriended a few more french people there and made up a game with 3 dice that basically just had you drinking nonstop. After a couple hours we headed over to a really cool club that was built from an old house with lots of rooms and had a couple DJ's playing on different floors. 

I've been pretty damn lucky so far.

[lodryons]

Yeahhh so blogging and traveling don't really jive well for me. I've got like 6 days of posts and pictures to throw up. They won't be as long as this one don't worry!

The hostel in Greenwich was lovely and I met some really cool people there from all of the world. Australians, South Koreans, Americans, Irishmen, Brazilians, Spaniards and this was all in some random little hostel tucked away in Greenwich! Of these people, I met two awesome sisters, Emmy and Ally, hailing from the bush of Australia! Emmy was in the middle of her 12-month solo travel and Ally was visiting her during her short holiday. I was hoping they'd sound all yippity like the movies make them out to be but they speak and sound more British to me. There are loads of 1st and 2nd generation Australians from all over the world so the standard Australian accent I was expecting is more of a melting pot of accents from the nearer Asian and European countries. 

Emmy in the red hair and Ally eating on the right!

We ended up traveling the next day to the Southwark borough where we found a cheap hostel called Safestay for 15 pounds a night. Checkin was at 2PM so we decided to head to a nearby famous market called Borough Market.

Borough market is quite large and has really nice artisan shops everywhere. I'm not usually into these kind of things in America because they're not really interesting to me and I'm not a foodie so I mostly end up walking and staring at people eating food for a few hours. This trip was quite fun because hell I'm in London and everything's interesting here (at least right now it is). 

I had to explain to Ally that cheese wheels weren't actually used in cars before the invention of rubber. 

Artisan bread cabin!

This guy thought I was a spy with my little camera. He had these alien eggs that Ally recognized and we bought some. 

We returned to our hostel in Elephant & Castle and checked into our room as Safestay (the hostel's name). It was a 6-bed ensuite mixed dorm and at the time it was just one person with some underwear hanging up in an empty bed and us. The hostel itself was quite nice. It had a large lounge in the basement with a bar, lots of different tables and sofas, as well as pool and foosball tables too. 

Later that night we met up with some of Emmy and Ally's friends from back home that were in London doing work for a month. They were Indian (well one was Sri Lankan but surprisingly Sri Lanka is owned by India) so we decided to go to a famous borough of London called Brick Lane for some Indian food. Brick Lane is quite famous for this apparently and a lot of tourists go here for food. There are at least 30 to 40 Indian restaurants, all seemingly the same, with one dude outside trying to cut you a deal. The standard is 20% of your meal and a round of free drinks. This might sound pretty good if not for the insane prices and horrible service. A free drink is a half pint of cheap beer or flat 2-liter pop (yep, they just have ghetto 2-liter bottles in a mini fridge in the back of the place). I'm probably sounding pretty petty and what not in this bit of the post but I was told this is supposed to be an amazing experience. I even asked some lads walking out how it was and one exclaimed it was fantastic! We all found it to be shit but c'est la vie. 

Here's the road where all of the restaurants sit. They're farther down but this is the only one I have.

I also found some police officers and naturally wanted to get a picture with them. I asked if they could put me in some cuffs or slap me around with a baton but they said that's illegal. I asked if there was a minimum crime that would warrant such action but allow me to walk free, sadly there is not. 

I faked being arrested, they smile all the time because the law is always right. 

[lodryons]

Note: So I wrote a whole post, plugged in my GoPro to grab a few images for the post, and iPhoto crashed my computer. So yay, now you get a totally different post because I'm 10 second Tom with my 2 hours of sleep at the moment.  

The flight from DTW to ORD was pretty standard. Going through customs in ORD took a while which was odd to me since NYE seems like it should be a light day to travel since celebrations happen that night and not during the next day so why would anyone be flying on the night of NYE?

Upon boarding my London flight with British Airlines I dreaded having the window seat on a 7 hour overnight flight for several reasons: I'm a giant, I like to pee, and the window has no room for my giant legs either. 

Oh by the way, I've forgotten how to write non run-on sentenced stories and I've never been good with grammar or punctuation so these posts might be sort of cringey for the Jessica Shinns' of my readership (sorry I'm not sorry). Prepare to be deluged with commas and improperly used semicolons and dashes!

All was well though. I was rowed up with a young family of 5 and they needed the window for their baby seat so I got an aisle seat next to their adorable 4 year old. Her father was next to her and we hit it off for the first hour of the flight. He took my barrage of random questions on London, Finance and being a father of 3 really well and I hope to get a beer with him later this week.

I gotta say I couldn't stop giggling from the moment I got near the gate for British Airlines. The first time I heard a blimey I had to turn away so I didn't look like an insane person smiling at nothing. I was heading up an escalator and at the top I heard a, "Aye Martin! What're you doin' ear mate!?" and gave up trying to hide my delight and just broke out the Rodney smile for the rest of my traveling. People kept smiling back at me and it started freaking me out because I'm not a smiler as many of you know. 

Google told me it would be an hour to my hostel from Heathrow. It took me 3 hours. 

Greenwich is pretty sweet, beautiful buildings and a park nearby that will serve as a good place to go on my first Euro run tomorrow (so excited!). 

My Greenwich barista buddy told me she really liked my accent which was awesome since it made me feel like more of a foreigner and less of a dumb tourist American (if that makes sense).

I told my barista I was taking a selfie and to help me judge my face for this one. I'm a liar, get over it. Here she is, we will call her Sarah because I'm pretty sure this is illegal.  

Anyways I've had two cappuccinos and need to pee really bad so until next time, keep it classy Greenwich.