The Big Trip

Well, I've been putting off writing this entry on our grand tour of Europe for a while, so now that I have some homework due tomorrow, I think the time is right. First off: London!

We arrived in London and delighted in our ability to order food in English without feeling like total dicks. While passing through King's Cross Station, I got to take a picture with the sign and cart for Platform 9 and 3/4. It was a big deal for the secret Harry Potter lover inside me. Carolina and I checked into our Hostel, and immediately went to look for a big red double decker tourist bus to ride. We found one quickly and spent a retarded amount of pounds on a ticket. I'm not even going to tell you how much it cost, but it was really fun, and we saw pretty much every big deal building in London. This includes: Big Ben, Parliament, Westminster Abbey, the Globe theater, the London Eye, and a whiole bunch of other shit. Then we napped for a while. I recently was able to contact my best friend growing up, Amber Strellis. I've known her since we were wee babies, but her aversion to any kind of technology has left me unable to keep in touch with her for the past few years. I hadn't seen her since winter of 2006. Turns out, she's studying in London right now. So Carolina and I navigated the Tube and met up with her at a pub/restaurant called Shakespeare's Head, where we drank Strongbow's (cider is the best thing ever, both more delicious and higher alcohol content than beer), and ate fish and chips. It was awesome to see her, she's the funniest person ever, but unfortunately she was leaving for a trip to Rome the next day, so it was a brief, hour long reunion. But she told us to head off in the direction of an area called "Shorditch" (not "Shortage", as we thought everyone had been saying), which was supposedly where all the young people go out.

We finally found it, after asking a million people for directions, and following those directions until we ran into someone else to ask. Apparently, it's considered common courtesy to give people directions if they ask you, and rude not to, so people will tell you something even if they have no idea where your destination is. This resulted in us having to ask almost everyone we saw, which we also probably did because we were so happy to be in an English speaking country. We finally got there, and discovered is surely is where the young people go out--hipster centraaaaal. We met up with Baber and Kelsey and her sister, who lives in London, and we started to look for a bar or club. One of the first ones we passed was blasting MGMT, so that was our obvious choice. We pushed through the THICK crowd of hipsters to the dance floor, where no one was really dancing. Between shots of Beam and a few trips to the "off-license" (read: liquor store) to chug Strongbow (chanting "it's apple juice, it's apple juice"), we got a pretty legit dance party going on the dance floor. There wasn't an actual DJ at the DJ station, presumably he had gone to get drunk and left a mix CD to do his work. We had no problem with this, as it played more MGMT, Arcade Fire, Bro-Hymn by Pennywise (I'm not kidding), What's My Age Again (we were probably the only ones excited about this), London Calling, and some other good stuff. We somehow managed to get a bus back to our hostel, but it was a 45 minute ride with some Indian dudes from San Jose who were way more interested in us than we were in them.

The next day we walked around, took a boat cruise tour that came with our bus tour, and then went to sit in the park near Buckingham Palace. We thought it looked lovely and scenic, and there were tons of nice folding chairs in the sun, which we found out cost 2 pounds to sit in. Carolina found a tupperware full of rice that someone had left behind and scattered it into the grass. Twenty thousand pigeons started feasting on it, and Carolina was delighted until we all realized that rice expands in pigeon's stomachs and kills them. Hilarity ensued. Luckily we did not see any pigeon genocide, but a few of them had to lie down. We met up with our friend Claire, and then Lexi came into the city to meet us, and we all went to see Avenue Q. It was great, just some good old puppet sex and musical singing. We walked around forever trying to find someplace near there to get a drink until we realized it was futile. Carolina, Claire and I went back to the Shakespeare's head for the best deal on food/beer we'd seen in that insanely expensive city. Claire went home, and Carolina and I headed back to Shorditch to try and find some fun for the evening. After drinking some cheap vodka on a bench and hipster-watching, then chugging more Strongbow, we realized that all the clubs have huge lines or cover charges on Friday nights. We decided to play the pretentious game, where you go up to the most pretentious looking person you can find, and ask them where the least pretentious club around is. In this way, we ended up talking to four really cool guys. We chatted and goofed around with them for about forty-five minutes (actually I have no idea. I was pretty drunk), and a few people had come up and talked to the guys, but we thought nothing of it. Then some girl came up and was like, "Oh my god, Dave, I love you! You were my first crush!" or something, and then to Carolina she was like, "Oh my god, you guys are so lucky to be talking to them. Do you even know who they are?" and Carolina was like uhhhh no and the girl told her they were a famous band who had been at the top of the charts a couple weeks before. But we still have no idea what band they were. So if you've heard of a British band with a bassist named Carl and a drummer or guitarist named Dave, please let me know. Then they left, and we caught the bus back to our hostel.

The next day, before leaving for Dublin, we went to Portabello Road, where there were a bunch of touristy souvenir tables and a mean old racist bitch who's table Caro stole five brooches from. That was lovely. Then we went to Dublin! I for, some strange reason, booked myself a flight that was on the same airline, at almost the exact same time, but from a different airport than everyone else. Though my compadres had doubts that I would make my flight when left to my own devices, I managed it no problem, and met them at the Dublin airport. We shuttled into town and met up with Lara!! It was so nice to see her. We went back to her International student dorm in Blackrock, and bought ourselves some cider, then met all her friends and took the bus into town to a pub, and then what I like to call a "plub", a pub with a dancefloor playing shitty US top 40 hits. I even got to dance to "I Kissed A Girl and I Liked It" so needless to say it was a good night. We then experienced the bane of Lara's existence--trying to catch a cab back home. It took us over an hour, seriously. I don't know how she does it all the time. The next day we walked around, went to the museum of art (museums are FREE there... wow), walked through the park, and got some dank Irish food. Basically the conclusion we came to, which Lara backed up, was that Dublin is just some city that's not really that special, and that it's only cool once you get out into the country, where it's beautiful. Unfortunately, we didn't have enough time there to do that. C'est la vie. I was just glad that I got to see and hang out with Lara. We woke up early to head to AMSTERDAM the next day.

Well I gotta say, Amsterdam is pretty awesome. And seriously, not just because of the weed thing. It is an incredibly beautiful city built mainly on canals, with really picturesque tall houses lining them. And EVERYONE bikes. Seriously, everyone. It was so cool, because you just see everyone going about their normal day the way people in America do in cars, but they're on bikes. Old people, businessmen, people doing their errands. Everyone just does them on their bikes. All the streets are lined with bike racks and there are at least a hundred bikes on each block. Plus, they're all perfect looking. It's like they don't have jobs, they're just hired for their natural beauty and paid to cruise around the city like they just rode right out of a J. Crew catalogue. And, you can smoke weed. So, a freakishly perfect society. We had a good time. The first day, we went to a coffeeshop and smoked huge joints to our faces. Then it got a little creepy because there were these trippy mushroomy paintings on the walls and all these mirrors reflecting them everywhere, eeeeugh. So we left to go find a canal. This led to the first of a many, many part series called "We Are Lost". We spent the rest of the day trying to figure out where we were on the map, and how to get where we wanted to go, which was complicated because we didn't really know where we wanted to go. The evening ended with us finally finding a movie theater and selecting from the large selection of bro-flicks. We chose "Wanted" but left the theater because it sucked, and going to see "The Bank Job", which was probably a worse choice. Don't go see it.

The next day we rented bikes. This was a pretty good decision, but I have to admit I rode in constant fear that I was breaking the bike laws of the road that all the inhabitants knew so well. We biked through the beautiful Vondelpark, found a coffeeshop called Kashmir that was pretty cool, we tried to go to the Planetarium but it was expensive and you had to buy a zoo ticket too, and so we went to the Hash and Hemp Museum which was the biggest piece of shit waste of money ever. Seriously, talk about some uncreative stoners. Then we went to a windmill/brewery and got a beer. All this took the entire day since we continued the many installations of "We Are Lost". I am pretty sure I spent more time looking at a map bewilderedly in Amsterdam than doing just about anything else. We got back to the hostel and met some nerdy Canadian guy who wanted to go look around the Red Light District. We walked around with him and saw the hookers in their windows. It was pretty cool. The Canadian guy was waaay to into it, but really weirded out when a prostitute waved and beckoned him. He said he could never sleep with a prostitute because it would be too hard "emotionally". We ate some bomb falafel/kebab and then went to sleep.

The next day Baber went back to Hungary for the anniversary of the 1956 revolution, and we headed to Paris! We got there at night, ate dinner, walked around, drank wine, and ended up drinking wine while walking down the Seine River. We ended up at the Eiffel Tower, which was beautiful. I was too drunk at this point, and feeling sick, so we caught a cab back to our hotel. That is probably the only time I will sleep on a real mattress between arriving here in August, and going home in January. Because our Ikea mattresses at our apartment are basically hostel beds. The next day we walked through Luxembourg Gardens, went to the Luxembourg museum, which was basically like MOMA if it were four rooms big and had shittier, less well known of the artist's pieces. Then we met up with Kelsey and this guy Adrien who is from Paris, but we met him in Budapest. And his little shuffley leprechaun friend Gregory. He was oh so precious in a gingery, butt-chinned way. We went to the Sacre Coeur Church, which has an amazing view of Paris, where we witnessed a beezy who apparently had come alone, and was taking pouty-face, lip bite myspace style pictures of herself in front of the view. It was highly amusing. Then we tried to find a vintage store where Adrien told us we could "maybe find the hot fashions" and that he hoped we would find "quality products", but we were unsuccessful in our hunt. So we met up with our friend Claire, went out to a nice dinner for Carolina's birthday, and then did all we could do--bought a bottle of whiskey and drank it on the sidewalk. Then we tried to find a fun club, but just ended up at a shitty one somewhere we didn't know where we were. Then we followed some boys back to their place because they said the magic word "marijuana" but they turned out to be pretty cool and we danced to Justice. We left to find that we were very, very far from our hotel, and in the Red Light District. We made it back circa 5:30 am, and since our flight was at 9 am, and we had to be there at 7, we went to sleep for half an hour. Then we flew to Copenhagen.

Copenhagen is awesome. It's a lot like Amsterdam, except less touristy, and it seems like it has a really legit artsy, underground, bohemian deal going on. Also lots of pretty houses and people riding bicycles. It is where all the real blondes come from. On our one real day there, we rented bicycles from this really cool place. It's a charity that takes donated bicycles, repairs them, and then sends them to Africa to be used as ambulances, etc. It just started in May, and they've already donated 1200 bikes! Plus, he was so friendly. When we came in, he asked if we wanted coffee, made it for us, and we chatted for like, and hour. Then he gave us a map and drew a path with different cool things to do on it. So we had a lovely ride through Copenhagen. We saw Hans Christian Anderson's grave (he wrote Ugly Duckling, Emperor's New Clothes, Thumbelina, Little Mermaid, etc), lots of cool street art, cool shops, a little skate park, a graveyard, a beautiful park with a free elephant zoo, and finally arrived in Christiania. Christiania is a Freetown, started in old military ramparts by a bunch of hippies in the 70s, and there are no laws there. I guess. I dunno. But it was so cool! There's art everywhere on every building, all the buildings are really unique and homemade looking, there are stray dogs wandering around everywhere (really clean, cute ones too), fires in trashcans, homemade playgrounds, and stands selling, among other things, weed and hash. We bought some, went to a bar, rolled joints and drank whiskey. It was awesome. But when it got dark, the crazies started coming out. Or rather, they congregated at one bar we made the mistake of entering, where they stumble around drunkenly to songs about being wild American men and leer at stoned girls who didn't know what they were getting into. We left, tried to find an electronic club but were too drunk at this point, and ended up participating in the final chapter of "We Are Really Lost", before we finally found the club. We paid 80 Kroner to get in, then left immediately because it sucked and no one was dancing. Then we sat outside our hostel room wasted, trying to figure out the time change, and trying to set Carolina's watch alarm clock for our 7am flight back home to Budapest.

Needless to say, we woke up in a hostel room of 14 beds at the very moment our flight was taking off. We hustled off to the airport anyways, where we discovered that our airline's next flight to Budapest was three days later, and the other airline's flights were really expensive. So we did some quick thinking and ended up renting a car from Avis to drive to Berlin (so we wouldn't get charged a one-way fee, since the car was from Berlin), with the plan of taking the train back from Berlin. Carolina, being 21 and feeling much healthier than me at that point, rented the car and got in the driver's seat, only to realize that it was a manual, which she couldn't drive. So we switched seats, and I got to drive a VW Golf all the way to Berlin! We went the wrong way at first and ended up in Sweden, then drove back through the Danish countryside (which was beautiful), then took a ferry to Germany. Three countries in one day! It was dark as we got into Berlin, so we found an internet cafe, then tried to get to the train station to catch a late train home. Unfortunately, Berlin is nearly impossible to navigate, as all the streets change names all the time, and the smaller ones weren't even on our map. We finally made it, right after the ticket office had closed. We now had the task of finding the Avis, then sleeping in our car all night before returning it. Sleeping in a car seems like it would be warm, but it isn't at all. At 5am the next morning, we woke up, returned the car to the rental agency we had slept in front of, and caught a cab back to the train station (which is the most futuristic train station ever), where we finally got on a train bound for home at 6 am. We slept for 10 of the 12 hours of the ride. And we were finally home.

And now Obama is president!! (Or actually, he will be after Bush has a few more months to further decrease environmental protection, make getting an abortion more difficult, and make it easier for the government to spy on it's citizens!) Wahoo!! Obama-rama-ding-dong! Everyone in Europe is very happy about this, and I am finally not ashamed to admit my nationality. This is great. Let's get drunk and then go to Krakow tomorrow.