Reasonably Logical

Well, my Europe trip has officially been over for a couple of days. I got back late Friday evening after some hellish security at Heathrow. (I’m not complaining mind you.) Talked with a friend for a while then crashed.

Saturday, I got up and drove with two friends to the Equal Marriage Illinois statewide conference. I hadn’t planned on being able to go, but since I was back anyways, I figured what the heck. It was a productive day. I got a chance to briefly meet Representative Greg Harris - the author of Illinois Civil Union bill - and saw a wonderful play that illustrates why marriage is often so important for same sex couples. (I’ll probably be writing more about that latter.)

On Sunday, I spent the day madly packing and then had dinner with a good friend. Monday, I got up continued the packing until the movers showed up at noon then made a series of panicked phone calls to arrange the rest of the move. Ryan and I finally got out of Champaign around 5:30 pm. We drove through the night and arrived here in Stamford, CT at around 11am. The rest of the day has been spent moving in, resting, and taking care of outstanding bills from Europe.

Thanks everyone for reading my blog and keeping in touch with me while I was in Europe. Hope you enjoyed the trip as much as I did.

— Stamford, Connecticut at 6pm local time

Well. this is my last morning in Europe. After writing this, I grab my stuff and head to the airport to fly home. Its been a good trip and I have had fun, but honestly I’m looking forward to sleeping in my own bed.

Yesterday, I hung around a bit then headed to the palace to see the changing of the guards. I got some decent pictures through the gaint crowd, but it took forever. Honestly, I got tired of it and gave up about 1/2 hour in.

After eating lunch, I took a train out to Oxford. The university/town of Oxford is beutiful. I happened to arrive on a tour day for prospective students, so everything was open and free. (Hey, good luck for a change.) I’ve got lot of great pictures. I loved the architechture. Elegant, but not over the top like so many I’ve seen.

Met two girls from a university in Jersey who I spent most of the afternoon with. We spent a lot of time walking through parks and gardens, which are scattered throughout the town.

After leaving them, I wandered down to some of the famous landmarks, but since it was after 5pm most were closed. Sorta by accident (I got a little lost) I ended up taking a 6 or so mile jaunt around the outscirts of town. My feet are still very sore this morning, but it was nice scenery.

On another topic, someone beside me just told me they found a bomb in downtown London a few minutes ago. Don’t know any details, but it was found in a station I travelled through on Wednesday. *glup*

— London, 9:54 am local time

Well, on Yesterday when I arrived at the train station to go do Edinbrough I discovered I couldn’t (or at least shouldn’t). The flooding up north is bad enough they weren’t sure if I’d be able to actually get there, much less get back.

Instead, I went hung around London for the day. After dropping my gear back at the hostel, I went first to St. Paul’s Cathedral. I actually made it inside this time! Third time is the charm I guess. The view from the top is amazing, though I was reminded of my not all that mild fear of heights. (A steal mesh stair case for the last stage. I know _exactly_ how tall it was.)

After the cathedral, I went back to the book street I’d discovered on my first stop in London. Since I won’t have to be carrying them all over Europe now, I felt free to buy a few books. (Okay, a _lot_ of books.) Spent the afternoon wandering through a lovely collection of bookstores.

After shopping, I stopped and picked up the box of stuff I had mailed to myself so I wouldn’t have to carry it. Then I eat dinner at a decent though not superb Itialian place near Trafalga Square. After dinner, I went back to the hostel and repacked everything into my backpack and the extra expandible duffle I brought with me.

Today, I went out to Stoneheng and then down to Brighton. Stonehenge was interesting in a now-I’ve-been-there way, but I was definitely ready to leave by the time the next bus came. (1 hour) Brighton was so-so. I didn’t really have any objectives in mind so I just walked around for a few hours. Senic, but the beach is terribly rocky and it was cold and windy while I was there. Not a bad stop, but I probably won’t go back. I never did see the gay district, but I saw several same-sex couples walking around right by the train station. That was sorta cool.

Other than that, I spent a lot of time on trains today and got a lot of reading done in one of the sci-fi books I bought yesterday. Overall it was a good day.

— London, 10:58pm local time

OK, while the clothes are drying lets continue… (And of course, I ran out of time again. I will add the days in Amsterdam soon.)

Update (6-27-07): This entry is more of less complete. I’ve filled in all the missing bits.

Tuesday (Amsterdam)
- Transfered from the hostel I was staying at near the central station - Bob’s Youth Hostel - to a no-star hotel furthur out near one of the major gay areas of the city. Had a hard time finding it because I started by walking a bit to far. It turned out I wasn’t where I thought I was, so nothing seemed to fit my map. Wasted an hour or so wandering around. (With my full pack on my back.)
- Walked around the area by the new hotel (without gear) while waiting for them to get my room ready. (About an hour.)
- Went to a beach an hour north of Amsterdam — Zundvoort am See (or something like that). Pretty nice, though it got a bit chilly later on. I spent a little too much time in the sun, but not too bad.
- Had dinner on the beach. Really good Satay at a pancake place strangely enough. The dutch really seem to have the food down. Everything I’ve had has been excellent, even the cheap stuff.

Wednesday (Amsterdam)
- Hit several of the gay bookstores in town looking for fiction to read.
- Did laundry while reading one of the books I bought.
- Walked around town for several hours, including back over to the homomonument. (The only one of its kind in the world. Very easy to miss, but hey that’s kind of appropriate in a ironic kind of way isn’t it?)
- Mostly just a day to relax and recuperate some. Nothing major in terms of sightseeing. I was getting a bit worn out from all the travelling.

Thursday (Amsterdam -> Freiburg, Germany)
- Packed up, then stopped by the gay bookstore I’d hit previously and grabbed the next two (quite short) books in the series for reading on the train.
- Left Amsterdam and headed to Freiburg Germany. I was looking for a smaller town because I had gotten tired of seeing only cities. Went through Franfurt and didn’t arrive in Freiburg until around 10pm.
- Couldn’t find a hotel room anywhere and ended up having to camp out. (There’s a large solar power exhibition going on. Rooms were aparently booked out 6 months ago.) Was able to rent a tent and had brought my own bag and pad so I was fine. Hey, I finally justified carrying that thing around the entire time!

Friday (Freiburg/Hinterzarten)
- Got up early, but was trapped in the tent for a while due to a rain storm. Didn’t make it out of the camp ground until 11am.
- Talked to the tourist info people and was told I had no chance to find a room in Freiburg untill at least Sunday. They suggested I try a few smaller towns up the train line. I ended up finding a place in Hinterzarten (the first town I tried). Wonderful hotel (4/5 stars), which only cost 46 euro a night. I book for several nights because I was really tired of switching rooms and hotels every night.
- Went back to Freiburg, walked around and explored for the evening. Eat at a small cafe on the square by the tourist info place. Pretty good and I was surprised by how much I could communicate in German.

Saturday (Hinterzarten/Freiburg)
- Slept in, then went into Freiburg for the afternoon. Went up the cable car into the black forest, but I didn’t make it there until late in the afternoon. The last car down was 5pm, so I really didn’t have much time up on the mountian. It was beautiful, but a little cold. Definitely glad I didn’t get stuck over night.
- Back in Freiburg, I wandered around and discovered this great little special interest bookstore with a large English collection. I picked up a great fantasy book which I read that night. (The bookstore is in a passage (side corridor) off the main street you walk up from the station to the shopping district. Just past the small park on your left.)
- Eat dinner a little Itailian place (not great, didn’t get anything like what I expected).
- Went back to the hotel and ended up reading the entire book in one go.

Sunday (Hinterzarten/Freiburg)
- Slept in, then walked through Hinterzarten (the town I was staying in). Eat lunch at local pizza place, which was absolute crap. (Made me slightly sick, litterly.)
- After recovering from lunch, I walked out of town (with a day pack and survival supplies.) I followed a bunch of other people to this wonderful nature preserve/hiking area. Beautifully maintianed trails and once I got off the main one, there weren’t even that many people. I ran into some English speaking folks who told me that the trail led to Tilisee (the next major town over). I ended up walking all the way to Titisee, eating some ice cream and then taking the train back by Hinterzarten on the way to Freiburg.
- Eat dinner in Freiburg and grabbed another book to read. Unfortunately, the really good bookstore I found before was closed and I had to scronge at the station bookstore in their extremely limited English collection. Finally headed back to Hinterzarten, read for a while, then crashed.

Monday (Hinterzarten -> London)
- I spent the whole day trying to get to London. Left Hinterzarten at 7:45 am on what should have been a direct route, but was eventually told (once I spoke to someone in english) that I couldn’t easily make it to Paris and if I did, they wouldn’t honor my Europass on the Eurostar since it was busy. I ended up going back to Frankfurt, then to Koln, then Brussels, then London. For while there, I did not think I’d make it at all. Just about anything which could go wrong did go wrong. Talked to some fellow american tourists on the Eurostar though. Other than that, I had lots of time to sit, think, and listen to music on the train. I didn’t make it to the hostel until 11:30 at night. (12:30 in the timezone I got up in.) It was a very long and not much fun day.

Yeah, its been a couple of days since I’ve been able to update this blog. Sorry! I tried posting from an internet cafe in Germany, but they use a different keyboard layout. Made it very difficult to type at a decent speed. I’m in London now and am heading up to Scotland today. Unfortunately, I’m having to head home earlier than expected. (Move complications) I’ll be going home on the 29th versus the 1st like I expected. Oh well. Honestly, I’m about ready to go home anyways.

Now for a rough outline of what I’ve been up to.

Monday
- Met Evan (the guy I met in Paris) for boat cruise around Amsterdam. I had to catch up with him, which took a while. We went to Anne Frank’s House and eat lunch in that area. After that, we walked over to the Red Light district where I gave him a summary of my tour the previous night.
- Went on a pub crawl some guys from the hostel had told me about. Had fun, but honestly it ran a little long for me. And would you believe they won’t give tap water here? I had to pay for my water. (I always drink a lot of water when I’m out drinking. It keeps me a lot more sober and makes the next morning a lot more fun.) I made it back to the hostel at about 2am. Had a really interesting conversation with this dutch guy on the way back. He was a *lot* more drunk than I was, but seemed to think I needed help getting back. (I didn’t.) Rather amusing actually.

To be continued … (Have to go throw my laundry in the dryer)

— London, 9:02 local time

I’ve got a long post coming up, but since I’m currently typing on a European keyboard with all the keys in the wrong place it’ll be waiting a day of two. Typing on this thing is hard!

— Freiburg, Germany, 6:55 pm local time

Just been offline for a couple of days. Well, this post is going to have to be briefer than the last couple. I don’t have a day to kill writing. So an outline it is.

Thursday (after previous post)
- Went to Eiffel Tower. Tried waiting for it to be dark before going up, but they closed it. Met several internation high school students who showed me the quick way to the tower from the metro. The offical stop is not the right one. Had a nice dinner, but totally blew budget at place near tower.

Friday (6-15)
- Went to Luavre Musuem. Walked around for 6+ hours. Saw Mona Lisa. Spent a lot of time in Greek and Roman scuplture. (Statues of naked guys, what can I say?) Walked through the rest pretty fast. The place is bloody huge!
- Went to Napolean’s Arch of Victory. Also monument to unamed soldier (WW1). So so. Nothing that special.
- Went back to Eiffel Tower and actually went up this time. What a view. Very worth doing once, but I don’t think I’d ever do it again. VERY touristy. (What else would you expect?)

Saturday
- Went to Catacombs. Spoky, but cool. Mile of so walk underground through caverns with bones litterly stacked besides you. Thoughout, I kept flashing back to every horror movie I’ve ever seen. And asking, what do we do if the lights go out?
- Took train to Versialle Palace. (Or however you spell that.) Took the whole tour, but honestly, wasn’t that impressed by the building. The gardens on the other hand… WOW. Spent several hours in the gardens with a group of foriegn student travelers like myself. Amusingly enough, one of them went to the Naval Academy and knows a good friend of mine. (John) Small world aint it?
- Changed from hostel to a hotel in hopes of some privacy and a better place. Utter mistake. I would not wish the Rivoli Hotel on my worst enemy. Yuck!

Sunday
- Took train to Amsterdam transfering at Brussels. Met traveler (Evan) at Paris station and talked for a while. Also American and traveling. Nice guy. We’re probably going to do something today (Monday) in Amsterdam.
- Checked into hostel. Kind of crappy place, but its cheap. It’ll do for a couple days.
- Walked around for a while. Amsterdam is weird. I have never been to a place where the gay community is so intergrated. There are gay bars/cafes all over the city. Very visible and accepted too. Amsterdam is beautiful, though I don’t think I’d actually want to live here. One thing I don’t like is how many “coffeeshops” there are. I swear I’m gettting high just walking down the street. Mind you, I have no problem with other people partaking if that is their choice, but damn it I don’t want to!
- Took a walking tour of the red light district. 2 hours. Very interesting with lots of history and factoids about the sex industry here in Amsterdam.
- Got back to hostel late. Sat in downstairs cafe talking with other tourists for an hour or so. (Sam and Ried?) Nice guys and very good looking. They’re staying in a different room than I am. Crashed around 1am.

Monday
- Woke up around 7:40 am or so (well before my alarm) for some reason. Eat breakfast and then walked around for a while. Not really planning on doing much here, just want to relax some. Going to take a boat tour in a few minutes.

BTW, thanks for the comments!

— Amsterdam, 10:41 am local time

I’ve had a couple of folks ask why I was using a seperate email account for the trip, so I thought I’d answer here. For those who haven’t noticed, I’m using eurotrip@p..r..com rather than my usual philip@p..r..com.

There were two real reasons:

1. I need to be able to login from public terminals here and I didn’t want to have to change my password on the main account.
2. This way if the account gets hacked due to someone stealing my password, I don’t loose anything. (Everything is being copied and forwarded from my standard account. So worse comes to worse, I still have a copy.)

Well, after yesterday you’d think today would have had to have started off better right? Nope. I got up on time, paid for my room (I couldn’t last night since it was so late) and had breakfast. The problem came with my morning antibiotic. I must not have used enough water or something swallowing it. I burbed and got a mouthful of (very caustic) antibiotic (once out of the pill case) and stomach acid. Suffice to say that was _not_ pleasant. Thankfully, I had this happen once before, so at least I knew what was happening. After wasting an hour drinking anything and everything I could, I continued on with my morning.

First stop for the day was just wandering through some local streets. Entirely by accident, I stumbled across Notre-Dame and did the tour there. After that, I went back to the hostel, got my laundry and went to the laundry mat/internet cafe. (That’s where my earlier post came from.) After doing all my laundry, I walked to the Bastille Plaza (where the french revolution started with the storming of the Bastille prison.) There isn’t anything there anymore (it was dimolished by the mob), but still I was there! On the way over, I stopped in a sidewalk cafe and had a great lunch.

After that, I took the tube down to the Invalides (Nepolean’s Tomb) and the Rodin(sp) Musuem. Both were fairly interesting, but I won’t bore you with a listing of the exhibts. I didn’t finish up there until around 5:30, then I headed back to hostel, folded my clothes, relaxed for a few minutes and got ready to go back out. Next, I’m heading to the Eiffel tower and dinner.

As a sidenote, I’ve been really suprised how little difficulty I’m having getting around without knowing any french. A lot of people know (and are willing to speak) English which makes this a breeze compared to Japan. The only time I’ve had issues was trying to get a taxi last night. (And there I’m fairly sure they understood me just fine and didn’t want to leave the expensive/profitable area of the city.)

— Paris, 7:30 pm local time

Well, lets continue now. Where did I leave off? Oh yeah.

Anyways, after it finally stopped raining more-or-less I went back to the hostel, grabbed my stuff, and walked up to O’Conner St to catch the bus to the airport. (It was about a 15 minute walk.) On the bus to the airport (40 minutes), I went over some basic French. (And boy do I mean basic. My entire vocabulary is “Yes”, “No”, “Thank you” and “Hello”.) Once I got to the airport, I checked in with Ryan Air. Despite what I’d been warned, I had no problems with the weight of my bag and everything went very smoothly.

The actual travel was pretty uneventful. Left 40 minutes late, but no problem with imigration or luggage or anything. However, it turned out I had overlooked something. The flight went into a regional airport which was an hour away by bus from Paris. On arrival, I had 12 Euros to my name. The bus fair was 13. You can see the problem. Thankfully, there was an ATM nearby.

I finally made it into Paris at about 1:00am. Unfortunately, all the subways/buses stop running at 12:30. So I ended up having to get a taxi to take me to the approiate area of the city. (Have you ever tried getting a taxi at one in the morning, in an unfamiliar city, where you don’t speak the language, and have only the vagest idea where you’re going? Suffice to say it was quite the adventure.) When I finally made it to the Marias (the gay district of the city), I found a hostel and got a room for the night. By this point it was 2am. As you can imagine, all the travel problems did not make for a great end of the day.

So, to summarize, Wednesday morning/night sucked, the middle of the day was just fine.