Free Lunch, Final Wisdom, Total Coverage

I'm writing this final post with a time limit: I have three hours until I'm driven off to the Munich International Airport by my cousin and my dad, to make the long trip back to San Francisco. My dad is snoring away pleasantly on a mattress on the floor nearby, and I have opted out of sleep since my flight is at 6:30 am. It worries me that in the past few hours, I've already ajusted to y and z being switched on German keyboards.

I've been rather absent from the whole blog thing in the last month or so, and for rather good reasons. But I'll try to do as much catch up as possible. As I learned from the Hungarian novel Embers, you don't know the truth about everything that's happened until the end. But I also learned from Embers that you can't learn anything that you don't already know from a novel. So hopefully this is good enough, even though I haven't spent 41 years preparing it in my head.

Of our last few weeks in Budapest, highlights include but are not limited to: an all-you-can-eat-and-drink buffet courtesy of the study abroad office, at a very fancy and delicious restaraunt (read--drunk Marcel); having Bank buy us two rounds and chat about many things, aliens included (he believes); buying shitty weed from a guy from San Diego who took the time to smoke us out and then tell us his really complicated, unpleasant, awkward life story; going to see a performance at Trafo where a little French acrobat seriously made me doubt the existence of gravity; having one of our mentors cook us a dank meal while serving us bottle after bottle of wine, then make us all take shots of pahlinka (disgusting, 70% Hungarian fruit alcohol); running into the cast of Valami Amerikai 2 (Valami Amerikai is one of the most famous Hungarian movies, and our second favorite after Kontroll) at the premiere of the movie, while on our way to a bar that sells pints for 230 forint ($1.00); Scott and George visiting and our trip to Aquaworld, a crazy new indoor waterpark that looks like the set of Legends of the Hidden Temple; my dad arriving and taking us to nice places to eat in return for us taking him to "sketchy" (his word) bars; going to a party at the Rudas bathhouse with included bellydancers and lots of innappropriate underwater activity; throwing a huge tire (that Carolina and I had stolen a couple weeks before) off our 4th floor balcony into the courtyard and not remembering that we had done it until the evidence made the transgression apparent the next morning; and frequenting Christmas markets where we learned that A) mulled wine is delicious and so are weiners but B)unless you want sausage burps all night, you only need half a wein.

My dad and I left Budapest on the 22nd on a charter bus to Vienna, thanks to the Hungarian railworker strike. Pops kind of flipped out and got all dad-angry when we got lost trying to meet his friend on our first evening there, saying he was "sick of this shit" (meaning snags in plans). I told him that's just what you have to expect when you travel and don't have a cell phone or a sense of direction. I don't even want to think about how pissed he would have been if he had been there on any of our misadventures in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, or Berlin. But I think by the end of the trip he kind of got the idea that in order to have a good time en route, you kind of can't expect things to work out. Especially in comparison to my aunt, who's favorite expression is "good grief", he was chill.

Vienna was cool because I got to see another Hundertwasser creation, the Kunst Haus Wein (meaning Art House Vienna, as dirty as it sounds in German). On Dec. 24th we took the train to Munich, where my dad's sister, Sharon, lives. She and my cousin Robert (age 38) picked us up and drove us back to her house in the country about 45 minutes away, where my other cousin Susie (33) was cookin' up dinner. We proceeded to have the most Christmassy Christmas Eve I've had in a while. We opened the presents, drank wine, and sang Christmas carols. *sidenote: In Europe, the Christ child brings the gifts, and sometimes even the tree, on Christmas eve. Santa still exists, but he comes on Dec. 6. You leave your boots out and if you've been good, you get candy in them. If not, according to Hungarian legend, he leaves sticks for...your parents to beat you with. Not kidding.* All this left me to wonder what you do on actual Christmas. Well, we drove to an old castle in a picturesque German village, and then went to see Swan Lake performed by Chinese acrobats in the evening. It was pretty awesome.

On the 26th, we rented a car and all drove to Berlin. Berlin is a really sick city. There is street art everywhere. And because it's so plentiful, a lot of it is pretty good, too. I had a field day taking pictures. It gave me something to focus on and distract me from the fact that I was traveling with the fam. I couldn't exactly say this, but I really would have liked to have just been traveling with my dad. But anyway. We stayed at a really cool hostel that Susie booked (I'm pretty sure everyone else was under the impression we were going to stay at a hotel, but I was stoked). I made friends with the bartenders and they were very generous with the free drinks. On one of our five days there (too many, at least when it's fucking freezing out), I went on the "alternative Berlin" tour which I will begrudgingly but highly reccommend. Take the real one, not the corporate copycat by new europe tours. It was really cool, they took us all over the city seeing some of the coolest street art (including the world's biggest Banksy), and cool shops and art communities. Our guide was a cool, sincere dude, and he said we could take their "anti" pub crawl that night if we wanted to. Well, I met some cool girls who were in my tour group, and we thought it would be fun to take this pub crawl thing later, especially if it was led by the same people that took us on our awesome tour that day. I don't really feel like going into specifics, but basically we did it, and this Australian guy who started or runs Alternative Berlin tours took us to some really cool places. But he just pissed me off. He kept talking about how crazy of times they'd had, how much absinth they went through a week, how they didn't overcharge, how they were fighting the big corporations and I was just like, buddy, shut up and stop trying to sell this to me or something. I paid the €8, I'm on the tour, let's not be all talk and no action here. I just felt like he was a walking advertisement for something that would have actually been cool if he had shut the fuck up.

On to Rome...We only had two nights in Rome, the first of which was NEW YEARS EVE!!! It was crazy. The streets were absolutely packed, it was like being at a concert it was that hard to move. There was a circle that people were just throwing firecrackers into, there was a band playing cover songs, and everyone was drinking. When it hit midnight, fireworks started going off and we got to wash off our travel odors in a lovely champagne shower. Everyone was just so happy, it was awesome. AND IT WAS WARM. Rome was balmy and pleasant, even when it rained the next day. A welcome change from Eastern Europe (normally I would call it Central Europe but I'm trying to conjure an image of a freezing icy, gray, unforgiving Soviet landscape). Put my dad in a great mood. Surprisingly, the food we had in Italy was no more than decent. I really am going to go out there and say that there is no better food in such variety than in California and Oregon. The Italian food we had was good, but nothing special. Pretty uncreative. And if you are in the mood for anything besides pasta, pizza, or foccaicia, you're out of luck. But other than that, yeah, Rome was beautiful. It's like every little apartment building is supposed to be on some cute artsy postcard, and you're walking along these cobblestone alleyways between them and then it's like, holy shit, ancient ruins!

On the second, we took the train to Cinque Terre, five small picturesque villages on the northwestern coast of Italy that were reccommended to me by friend and fellow explorer, Julia Le. Seriously, I couldn't have had any better end to the whole trip. We stayed in Vernazza, the fourth village, and it was incredible. The weather was a bit cold, but it was clear, allowing for two sick hikes. The first day, we hiked from Vernazza to the third village, Corniglia, and back. It was pretty rigorous, but I was determined to prove to my dad that my attitude had changed since I was seven years old and bitched and whined and sulked all the way up and down trails. The towns themselves might as well be crooked rocks sticking out of the coast, painted brilliant yellows and reds, and interconnected by lines of laundry. Also the home of pesto. Bomby pesto. Second day hike I took by myself, up into the hills past the town graveyard with the best view ever (I saw the guy whose job it was to replace the flowers in each vase and take care of the stones, and I actually envied him), zig zagging up to some sanctuary. There was this really cool thing I naively thought might actually be a roller coaster outlining the hills, but it was like a mini monorail the size of a lawnmower that a farmer could use to transport heavy shit to his orchard. I climbed around off the path on little hobo-trails into the bushes and crevices, until I saw a little hideout with clothes in it and realized it may actually be a hobo home. Anyway, I would love to go back to Cinque Terre in summer, though I'm sure there are way more tourists, but it was the first part of this "vacation" that's actually been relaxing and peaceful. It ruled.

So here I sit, doing some good old reflecting. But I'll spare all of you, that shit's meant for a diary or something. I can't wait to get back to San Francisco and Oregon. Some people whose faces I haven't seen in far too long. And a whole bunch of moderately attainable aspirations for 2009. I gotta say though, it's going to be really tough to beat 2008, so thank you to all of who helped make last year so much fun(in retrospect, I think that one word was truly my 08 mantra).

BLAH BLAH BLAH