Travel Angie

New Template!

2010-07-23T19:33:00.001-07:00

Blogspot is offering new templates for blogs, so I went ahead and updated my Travel Angie and my California Dreaming sites...what do you think? I think they're purty.

Belated Texas Post

2010-07-05T15:40:00.001-07:00

While our trip to Austin occurred over a month ago, I feel as though I would be remiss if I overlooked the event entirely on my travel blog. We're not doing serious travel at this moment in our lives, but when we do some minor travel, why not blog about it?

I had not seen my Texas cousins since Monique's wedding in 2007. They have historically made the trip out to Cali once a year but between Kane and I leaving for Oz in late 2007 and the two Texan ladies each popping out a baby boy in the interim, it was quickly approaching the time where three years would have passed since our last reunion.

This is not ok. Some people are cursed with family they don't like, and that's something they have to live with. I, on the other hand, love my family. I am related to some really fabulous people and am pretty dang happy about it. Adele and Monique (et al) are two such family members. We, therefore, made all efforts to find a date where the stars aligned and our crew could hang with their crews.

So for one fine day at the end of May, Mom, Jenny, Kane and I flew with Miss Taylor-face over to Austin to meet Adele, JJ, Isaac, Monique, John M., Henry, John and Denise. Yes, it actually happened.

While the trip was short and our time to spend with everyone was even shorter, it was worth the trip. We swam with the kiddies in Barton Springs had a picnic lunch, enjoyed some fine Mexican food, swam the following day with Henry at Big Stacey pool, and had a lot of fun chill out time at Monique's and John's house.

The baby (Taylor) wasn't an angel on the airplane, but it's hard to blame her; flying isn't exactly fun. The trip was a bit hectic, the weather was hot and humid, and the baby managed to exhaust the four of us with ease. But it was great to meet some other babies we're related to, catch up with far-away family, and enjoy some fabulous food (out of the house and in--John M.'s a fabulous cook). Thanks so much for having us, Texans, we had a great time!!!

Have a look at all of my best pics on my Texas 2010 Picasa album!

Play Money

2010-05-16T09:55:00.000-07:00

That's sort of what Japanese money looks like--play money. I guess that's what all foreign currency looks like compared to our greenbacks; why don't we use more color in our money like everyone else? Who knows; I digress.

We spent three weeks in Japan spending play money all over the place. Here, I can finally show you the coveted pie chart that documented the entirety of our spendings. Ta-da:

This was the first (documented) trip where we ever broke the budget. We've gotten rather good at estimating travel costs and knowing the cost of our travel style. We made two main errors in calculating our estimated costs for this trip:

I accidentally forgot to multiply the cost of our hotel by the number of night we were staying. Our original estimate hence only included like 5 nights of hotel. Oops.
We drastically underestimated the cost of transportation around the cities.

These weren't really huge tragedies, but it did leave us about 18% over budget (after adjusting for the hotel pricing blunder). Most of that error was due to severely underestimating the quantity--and hence the cost--of subways, taxis, and train tickets during our travels.

Here is the breakdown of estimated versus actual costs (in US dollars for both of us together), with the percent over (or under) budget:

Accommodation: Prediction $1807, Actual Cost $1614, 89%
Transportation: Prediction $267, Actual Cost $1118, 418%
Food: Prediction $900, Actual Cost $1272, 141%
Activity: Prediction $720, Actual Cost $501, 70%
Stuff: Prediction $90, Actual Cost $147, 163%
Other: Prediction $180, Actual Cost $25, 14%
Flight: Cost $1524 (no prediction)
Insurance: Cost $43 (no prediction)

So, as you can see, transportation was what killed us. We just didn't realize how many $1 trips we were going to need to take every day, and that they would rack up to quite a bill. Accommodation was under $100/night on average, so we were happy with that, and we apparently used "Food" as an "Activity" since the surplus of the first fits nicely into the latter. Which is fine with me; food was a main part of the trip for me and I'm happy to fork out* the bucks for their delicious foods.

"Stuff" is anything we buy like gifts for others or souvenirs for ourselves. I think I pretty took over this category (surprise) and spent $70 of that on all my bowls. The "Other" category is for laundry expenses, ATM fees, and renting a locker at the train station. This ended up being minuscule on this trip, which I won't complain about.

The cost ended up being just over $150/day for each of us ($312 for both of us), compared to the $140/day each we had estimated. And we weren't doing the super-thrifty hostel route this time; we were almost traveling like normal people. I think it worked out well for being our most costly trip (per day) to date.

Overall, I pretty much don't care how much it cost because this trip was one of the best ever. It was totally worth it in order to spend time with two of our best friends enjoying a truly awesome culture and probably my favorite type of food for three weeks. Plus, we technically spent our Australian dollars on this trip, which was left over from working there (oh so long ago), so it really is like spending play money anyway. Yeay for Japan!

*I suppose "chop stick out" doesn't exactly fulfill the needs of this phrase quite the same way? Har har har...

Serious about Souvenirs

2010-05-09T23:06:00.000-07:00

If you recall, in 3.5 months in Europe I essentially bought only one thing for myself as a souvenir. It was a cute and portly piggy bank and I love him very much. He is currently full of change and holding up books on my bookshelf - he is multi-talented. Our trip to Japan was a bit different.

I mentioned that in Osaka there is an extensive web of shopping arcades. Block after block of pedestrian streets lined with shops, restaurants, and entertainment venues; one of the main attractions in Osaka, and other cities. It's fun to walk up and down the endless avenues and engage in total sensory overload of all the colors, flashy lights, loud noises, and masses of people. It was in this vast sea of commerce that I found the kitchen and restaurant supply area of stores.

This may not sound exciting; it's not like I'm in the market for a deep fryer while on vacation. And while they do sell stoves, mixers, and other large restaurant kitchen items, they also sell serving dishes. In America, we typically see the standard white, round ceramic plate at restaurants. Sometimes they go all chic and use square or rectangular plates. In Japan, each meal consists of a great many types of food, each with its own sauce or side. See the picture below for an example. This necessitates using up to half a dozen tiny plates and bowls to accommodate each person's meal. Hence, some of the stores in this fabulous area of town are what I like to call Bowl Stores, where people can purchase their multitudes of serving-ware.

The Bowl Stores make my eyes bug out and my heart skip a beat. I love bowls. I love all dishware in the same odd way that I love office supplies. Cute, decorative, and cheap Japanese dishes make me melt with happiness. There were half a dozen Bowl Stores in one strip of the Osaka arcades alone, in addition to there being a hearty dishware section at every dollar store (of which we frequented many, much to Marc and Kane's increasing dismay). It was fabulous. Look at the blissful chaos that is the Bowl Store:
I made multiple trips to the Bowl Stores, purchasing dozens of bowls and plates of different sizes and designs. Perusing the bowl selection was one of the most satisfying experiences ever. I bought a special little carrier to carry them home and Kane carried all these bowls for me from Osaka to Tokyo and then on the plane back - he's the nicest and bestest boyfriend ever. And so I arrived home triumphant, with not one broken or chipped platter, and am able to present you with this--behold the bowls that I bought in Japan:

Engrish

2010-04-25T09:28:00.000-07:00

I think we take it for granted that it's hard to speak other languages. Well, maybe you and I don't take it for granted, since we probably don't speak any other languages and have little prospects of learning (myself at least), but as a society I think we kind of do. Example: I am assuming that any billboard written in Spanish (there are plenty in Hayward) is written in correct Spanish. Similarly, when I see the menu at a Chinese restaurant, or see the labels on my hair dryer in 14 languages, I'm assuming they are all written in proper other-language.

I suppose the first problem with this assumption is that there is no way for me to know this. But the validating fact for this assumption is that we, in America, have access to people speaking pretty much every language. It would not be difficult to hire someone to correct your Mandarin or Farsi or French around here. It would probably be difficult to find someone who couldn't correct your Spanish. You get my meaning - there are a zillion of us crammed into America, and we're from all over and speak a variety of languages. We're all used to it by now.

In Japan, this is not the case. 98% of the population of Japan is Japanese. Can you imagine such homogeneousness*?! I did find it odd. Everyone is Japanese! Anyway, the point I'm getting at is that they may not have someone - their neighbor, co-worker, friend - who speaks every other language on the planet. When they print signs or goods with English words, for example, they don't necessarily have a proofreader driving by in every other car, or sitting at the table deciding how the words will go. At least I assume this is the case, as it seems reasonable to me. It is this occurrence leads to what we call Engrish**.

We know that Japanese (and I think Chinese, too?) people have a problem with the Ls and Rs in our language. They also have problems with articles (a, the, an) and general word placement. When we were in Japan, we saw this all over. And though I love Japanese people, their culture, and, let's face it, their food, I found it humorous to poke fun at them from time to time. I hope they don't take too much offense as I point out some of the better Engrish that we came across during our trip.

Exhibit 1: Food-Related Engrish (click to enlarge)

The motto "Italian food of sticking to" is just not a catch phrase that draws me in the door. I'm not sure exactly what they mean by "Not for having but for tasting", but it may just be a stupid phrase instead of bad English. Pretty sure they shoved an extra "h" in the "silky touch" napkin, and, my personal favorite...miso soup is "soup from soybean past"...so spooky.

Exhibit 2: In Store Notices (click to enlarge)

I think the "it is accounting in each floor" was trying to tell you that every floor has its own cash register and you should check out with the stuff you buy on each floor rather than carry it all around the complex. But, I am clairvoyant, so I'm not sure how anyone else interprets this. I did "take care about the foot", thanks for the warning. However, I found it hard to not touch the wall while I repaired it, though I tried my hardest. They were so close with "the front entrance is this place", but, no cigar.

Exhibit 3: Engrish at Museums and Sites (click to enlarge)

No idea what sign #1 is trying to say about the "hot fighting"; this was a label at a museum exhibit. The other three were at a monkey park outside of Kyoto. These people need some assistance with their translations, that's all I'll say.

Exhibit 4: Dollar Store Engrish (click to enlarge)

Yes, the dollar store. Why do they offer items in English at the dollar store when the English is totally unintelligible? I have no idea. Is it extremely amusing? Yes it is. Am I going to stop answering my own questions? Yes, I am. These were all little envelopes, I'm not sure what you're supposed to use them for. The quotes are: "The place is his reserved seat. He generally passes daytime there."; "Pleasure to have a gut feeling" (my personal favorite, so romantic); and "Heaven Scent: For a wonderful friend! A perennial favorite." Them's sum gud Engrish.

A couple more good ones:

This sign (above) makes slightly more sense when you know that the store is called "can-do". Also, a wagon is a shopping cart. For everything else, you're on your own.

The only thing funny about this sign is the bottom right warning. No danger allowed.

And finally, the finale (above, click to enlarge) - the remaining Engrish signs that I photographed while we were in Japan. Enjoy.

*I looked it up, that is a word.
**By the way, there is indeed an entire website dedicated to this, engrish.com, and no, I have not submitted anything.

Tokyo Subway at Rush Hour

2010-04-16T23:00:00.000-07:00

Tokyo has one of the largest and busiest subway systems in the world. One of the main inner-city stations, Shinjuku station, boasts over 3 million people passing through it every day, making it the busiest train station in the world. Though we did not experience this particular station during peak hour (which I'm sort of thankful for), we did manage to capture a glimpse of the madness on our last morning in Japan.

We wanted to see the Tokyo fish markets, which are best before, like, 6am, but go strong until around 10-11am, per our guidebook. We had gone the day before, but some unknown holiday meant that it was closed (we were upset at the early wake-up for no reason). This was our last day to try it - we were up at 6:45 and out the door two hours later (we had to eat, pack, and check out in the interim). And so it was at the tail end of rush hour that we approached the subway, and were finally up early enough to see it at it's very worst.

To be honest, we were both morbidly curious about the subway at rush hour. We'd heard tales of transit employees being placed outside train doors for the specific purpose of shoving people onto the trains to pack them as full as possible. We did not see this particular practice, but we did experience a mass of humans unlike anything we've ever seen, even in all our travels.

Our entrance station was at the end of a subway line, so when we got on, there were very few people. We took good standing positions against the far wall across from the doors (leaning against the inoperable doors), so as to ensure easy access when we needed to exit. The station we wanted was about ten stops down the road, so we had a bit of time to wait.

At each stop, a relatively large number of people would get on our train. In Japan everything is orderly and calculated, so at every stop there was a neat line of business people standing in front of each train door. The train conductor parks the train at each station such that the doors line up exactly with the noted marks on the floor of the platform. The trains are always on time, and when they pull up, the doors open, the line of people steps aside to let any passengers wishing to disembark out of the train, and then proceeds to file onto the train in the order in which they arrived at the station. It's blissfully calm and organized.

At rush hour, this process is no different, except that the amount of free space on each train car diminished very quickly and we all had to pack tighter and tighter at each stop. After a few stops, the train was what I would consider full. All the seats on either side of the train were taken, and all the standing room was filled. I was still comfortable at this point though, with a modest amount of space between myself and those passengers around me such that we weren't in constant physical contact.

At the next stop, this changed. About 20 more people filed on with no hesitation; now we were all smooshed together, body to body. Ok, I've been to concerts before, no big deal, it's only for a few stops. Next stop, 20 or so more people smash onto our train. Now we're not just touching the other passengers, we're pushing on them and they on us. Odd, but, people have places to go, so we'll have to deal with it. Next stop, 20 more people get on. At this point, we were really squished. I hadn't really though it was possible to pack more people on the train, but apparently it was. Fortunately we were against the back wall so we were only surrounded by people on one side and not the other. I was smashed against the inoperable door so hard, I thought I might break it.

At this point, I was highly amused. Can you imagine being smashed on a BART train or any other urban train system like this? You'd have obnoxious teenagers yapping to each other, moms babbling away on cell phones, homeless dudes trying to cop a feel. The Tokyo subway at rush hour is not like this. Everyone is in business clothes. Suits, leather shoes, nice coats. Their hair is combed. Everyone showered but a few short hours ago. No one is on a cell phone, and in fact, no one speaks at all. It's a completely homogeneous crowd of well-dressed, silent people. It's fabulously entertaining.

And though pick pocketing and groping aren't the norm, groping has become quite a problem in these consistently over-packed cars. Men who molest women on the crowded subway cars are called chikan and are apparently fairly common. It is for this reason that certain railway lines have instituted "women-only" train cars during rush hour, so that women can be safe on their ride to/from work. I did not see nor experience any of this (except that I saw the women-only cars), but it's interesting to know what's going on under the surface.

The best part? Once the train car was completely full and we all had to take turns breathing in, the way additional people cram onto the car was like this:

Doors open
New passenger standing at the entrance to the train car turns around so that their back faces the train and the solid mass of people inside it.
New passenger backs into the mass of people in the train car.
Mass of people on the train somehow absorb this extra person, and the person wiggles themselves on until they've cleared the threshold for the doors.

It is both incredible and hilarious to watch. And everyone knows the protocol! Not one frightened or confused passenger took a look at us sardines and waited for the next train. Each person took stock of the situation, turned around, and backed into the hoard of humans behind them. If I had had the space for my lungs to expand to chuckle, I would have.

At this point the train car really was full. We were reluctantly accepting one or two people at each stop, and we were so smashed together that each additional person stepping on the train was a true feat. While Kane and I figured we would survive this endeavor, we weren't sure how we'd get off the train when our stop came. There was no way we could "excuse me" our way through the crowd like on a normal train. We had resolved that we'd be forced to miss our exit and get off at the first station where it was physically possible, then get back on the opposite direction and hope we could exit at our stop. There was just no other way.

As we approached closer and closer to our stop, we kept hoping some people would get off the train. They wouldn't. Where were all these people going? How could they do this every day? We didn't want to miss our stop, but what else could we do? We pulled up to the stop right before ours. Everyone on the train emptied out onto the platform one by one, leaving the two of us and a few weary stragglers on the train car. Deep breath, and, sigh. Thank goodness. Where were they all going? I have no idea. But we were fortunate enough to be heading to a stop that came after wherever they were all going. Whew.

So, with a clear view of the floor of the entire train (which was, and is, always spotless, by the way), we sauntered off the subway train at our intended stop, free from harm. We made it through the Tokyo subway at rush hour, and we're darn proud.

Japanese Food

2010-04-10T16:20:00.001-07:00

I loved Japanese food before we even set foot on Japanese soil. I love lots of food, hence why I now have a food blog. But Japanese food has long held a special place in my heart. I'm really glad that I waited until my Japanese food tastes matured to a point where I could enjoy a lot of what Japan had to offer (namely sushi and sashimi) before venturing across the great Pacific. I don't eat meat that isn't seafood (no beef, pork, chicken, etc.), so there was a certain amount of food in Japan that I didn't experience. I'm not really sad about it the same way I'm not sad about missing those foods in my own country. It doesn't work if you're always yearning for food you "can't" have; I like being veggie/fishie. Fortunately, the Japanese are very keen on their seafood, and so am I. We got along well.

The first thing I was wondering with three weeks of vacation ahead of me was if I was going to get sick of Japanese food. I tend to get sick of things quickly. Not only that, I tend to binge on one type of food for a while and then get so sick of it that I never want to see it again. It's sort of irritating - send your sympathy to poor Kane who has to deal with it. This is one reason that I love living in the Bay Area; great food of all different nationalities at my fingertips all the time. I never have to get sick of anything because I can constantly change it up.

In Japan, they eat Japanese food. They have other food, but they mostly have Japanese food. And since I love it so much, I was happy to have it for every meal every day. This is what I thought might kill the whole experience - too much too fast. But I found that I did not get sick of Japanese food. I loved it for every meal, every day. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner for three weeks straight did not curb my desire for this kind of food. Sure, I got a bit sick of all the deep fried stuff after a while, and the strictly protein/rice diet was starting to weigh on my system a bit, but I was far from sick of the food. In fact, the day after we got back, I was sad to have cereal for breakfast; I wanted my weird Japanese breakfast that I'd grown to love. So let's talk about some of the food we had and where we had it.

Breakfast
I'm not sure what people in Japan eat for breakfast, like, in the privacy of their homes. There were occasional bake shops, and things like pancakes and waffles could be found at certain restaurants, though they're usually for dessert. This is what we were served, generally, every morning at our hotel:

Rice Balls: small triangular balls of cohesive rice, sometimes with something in the middle like tuna or pickles, sometimes with stuff sprinkled on the outside like seaweed flakes or sesame seeds.
Pickles: pickles are everywhere in this country, they seem to pickle everything. I didn't always know what vegetable I was eating a pickle of, but they were offered with most breakfasts, and most meals for that matter.
Bread: thick, white bread cut in half. There was a toaster and butter and jam packets. I don't know how this fits in with the rest of the Japanese stuff, but I ate it all.
Rolls/Croissants: depending on the hotel, sometimes there was bread, sometimes rolls or croissants instead.
Salad: Green salad with choice of ginger-oil or mayonnaise-based dressing.
Macaroni or Potato Salad: we liked to call the macaroni salad "mayonnaise noodles" because that's what they were. Potato salad was consistently good, in my opinion.
Mini Sausages: sometimes there were party wieners. Why? Not sure. I avoided them.
Miso Soup: always delicious, see the picture below for a humorous sign (I wonder if they serve soup from soybean present?):

Tea/Coffee/OJ (sometimes)/Milk (sometimes)

I typically had a breakfast of salad with ginger dressing, miso soup, rice balls, pickles, potato/macaroni salad, and toast or croissants. It was great. I love salad for breakfast, it's so refreshing. Miso soup should be at every meal in my opinion; it's light, salty, tasty, warm. I love this breakfast and I want it in my home. It's just not the same when I make it though...

Nomihodai
One of the more interesting things we encountered in Japan was nomihodai, pronounced, roughly and in my crappy American accent nom-ay-hoo-dye. This means "all you can drink". This is offered sometimes at bars (with a time limit) and you can get totally plastered for a less-than-standard fee, but we utilized this fabulous idea in a much more fun and coherent way. We found a coffee shop with an all-you-can-drink beverage bar. This particular coffee shop had no English menu, so we could not figure out what the deal was with the drinks, but Marc faithfully remembered the word for all you can drink and we were able to do it. The listed three different prices for the all you can drink bar, but we didn't know the difference (maybe one was for cold beverages only, one for hot, and one for both? we couldn't tell) and just had to hope they charged us accordingly.

It was awesome. There's the coffee machine to the far left - but we couldn't read the labels so we weren't sure exactly what we were getting each time. Trial and error is a good tactic at the all you can drink bar. Plus, Japanese coffee is terrible anyway, so it's pretty much just an exercise in how much sugar and milk you can physically fit into your coffee cup to make it palatable. Next to that is the hot tea area, then the iced tea jugs, then the wacky soda machine (see green soda below - not sure what flavor it was exactly), then the hot chocolate machine, which was the star of the show. We had a fabulous time getting all water-logged before a day of walking around.

Sushi Train
For lunch (and sometimes dinner) we often found ourselves being sucked into a sushi train restaurant. They have these kinds of restaurants in America (and Australia) too, but there's one on every block in a downtown area of Japan. A sushi train works like this: you are seated in a row at a counter, like in an old coffee shop. In front of the counter is a conveyor belt that winds around the restaurant in front of all the customers. On the conveyor belt are little plates, each with a type of sushi on it. The patrons view the plates as they pass by on the conveyor in front of them, and take whatever looks good. You take the whole plate off the conveyor, eat what's on it, and stack up all the plates you take so they can bill you at the end. In the middle of the sushi train, the area in the center of the big conveyor belt loop, are the sushi chefs. They make little plates of sushi and continuously refill the conveyor belt with these plates as they are taken by the patrons. It's a fabulous idea and I think all food should be served this way. It means you get a little bit of everything you want. It's fabulous!

Most places have about six different colors of plates, all corresponding to different prices, which are posted all around the restaurant for you to consult. Some sushi trains offer all the plates at the same price, which makes it easier for us cheapos, though the dishes don't get quite as fancy when they're cheap like that. Then you can also summon one of the chefs or a host/ess if you want to order something in particular, which they'll happily make and deliver to you. The ginger and soy sauce is unlimited and free and lives on the counter between every other seat where you can take it at your leisure to go with your sushi. There are some other variations of this arrangement, but those are the basics of the sushi train...and it's making me want some right now. Let's look at some of my sushi train pics (click to enlarge):

Izakaya
An izakaya (pronounced is-uh-kie-uh) is supposed to be a place where you get drinks and have some little foods to accompany the drinks, like tapas. We used this for full blown dinner probably a dozen times. And forget the drinks, we'll have tapas with tapas, thank you very much. Most of these places had an English menu (we had to share it between us) which we'd use to order many rounds of dishes during our stay. And the very best part? The button. To call the waiter over, you press a button at your table. Within seconds (usually) your waiter has arrived, ready to take your next order. It's fabulous. We really racked up quite a bill a few times (oh this is only $5, and this is only $3...and on and on), but had a pretty dang good time doing it. Here's some izakaya food that we enjoyed (click to enlarge):

And while there is a whole plethora of other things to talk about, I'll stop this entry now before your eyes become too weary. Needless to say, I fully enjoyed the food in Japan, and just writing about it is making my tummy rumble. Oh, I could go for some sashimi right about now...

Karaoke Part II

2010-04-02T18:03:00.000-07:00

So, you're sick of reading about Japan. I don't care, I'm writing more anyway. I kept a log of possible blog topics the whole time I was there just so that I could make sure to touch on the most interesting (to me) aspects of our trip when I got home. And by George (whoever he is), I'm using that list. Today is a bit of a reprieve since I'm discussing a topic previously blogged upon, but I have in store (hopefully) stories of food, Engrish, hotels, Tokyo Rush Hour, and, of course, an obligatory budgetary pie chart and commentary.

You may recall that I previously discussed at length the merits of Japanese karaoke, describing our experience in Kyoto thoroughly. First karaoke was a great time, we really loved it.

For good measure, we decided to try it again on one of the last days of the trip, this time in Osaka. We found a karaoke establishment of the same chain as the first one we went to, but this one was not nearly as nice. It was smaller, the lobby was not nearly as grandiose, and the rooms were older and dingier. For some reason the "Premium" rooms here were far more expensive than the Standard ones, so we went with the Standard.

We were met with a less thrilling version of the previous experience. The room was smaller, the walls were wood paneled, and the tv was not a flat screen (see below). Borrrrring. It was ok, and we had a good time, but it was nothing like the first time in Kyoto. Ah, memorieeees.

This time we chose such hits as: Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da, The Rose, Summer of '69, Waterfalls (my personal favorite), Billie Jean, Ain't too Proud to Beg, Hit the Road Jack, Rocky Raccoon, with a finale of The Cars' You Might Think. We did also manage to appropriately fit in Styx with Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto, so don't worry your pretty head about that one going missing.

Since my videos from the original karaoke incident have been properly stored and labeled, Kane has so generously agreed to be featured on this blog, singing his rendition of Billy Idol's Eyes Without a Face. This is from our original karaoke expedition and also shows Marc and Alana faithfully fumbling with the music remote control (it's all in Japanese, we were still figuring it out) and messing up Kane's song. Take it away, Kane:

Travel Companions

2010-03-29T23:47:00.000-07:00

Note: The final set of Japan pics is here (Japan III: Osaka (again) and Tokyo).

---

When I tell people that Kane and I traveled with another couple for two weeks, I often get responses like,

"Did you guys drive each other nuts?"

"I don't think I would be happy to see that much of my friends."

"You guys hung out the whole time?"

Apparently it's quite a point of contention, even among the closest friends. How is it possible to be with another couple virtually non-stop for 15 days? I'm not sure, but it is. We did it.

Let's not ignore the fact that we had many a trial run with these particularly fine folks. We started hanging out at the beginning of 2008 and steadily ramped up our meet-up schedule for the following year and a half. Six months after we met them, we were seeing each other at least once a week. A year after we met, we were hanging out almost every weekend and at least once during the week. In March 2009 we geared up for our first trip together: a four day jaunt over to Alice Springs and Uluru in the hot, dry center of Australia. On that trip we were really attached at the hip, even staying in the same hotel room together. In June 2009 we put the pedal to the metal and moved our moochy-asses in with Marc and Alana, staying in their apartment for the few weeks until we left Australia permanently (sad face).

Making friends is a bit like dating. At first you know you like each other, but you're searching for things in common, looking to make some memories and establish some norms and inside jokes to work from. You get to know each other a bit better, and, assuming everything is still going well, you become more casual, make cruder jokes, and start to make memories together. You want to hang out more, but you don't want to impose; then you find out they feel the same way - joy! The best of friends remain friends even in the face of time and distance. Marc and Alana are those types of friends to us - we'd like to commit ourselves to a lifelong friendship with them. Did we friend-propose to Marc and Alana on this trip? No, but probably only to avoid the awkwardness.

It has always seemed plain, to me at least, that we're a group that gets along well. We work well together, we can make decisions, and we have a hierarchy for leadership already established (the boys are cool with whatever, Alana and I hash out the rest). None of us are drama queens (or kings). None of us are difficult or inflexible or overbearing. None of us are extremely different from the other three in what activities we'd like to partake during vacation*. None of us are easily offended or find it difficult to be relatively honest with each other. On this trip we each had our roles: Alana was the planner, I was backup planner and keeper of maps and directions, Kane told us which direction we were going/facing and was keeper of the guidebook and general carrier of stuff, Marc held the iPhone compass for when we came out of subway stops and had no idea which way we were facing. We all contributed to the "what do you want to do today?"s and the "what do you feel like eating for lunch"s. A well oiled machine; we were smooth.

It is these traits that seem to make good traveling buddies, for us at least. If at first they seem like good, solid people, test them out, then book a flight and enjoy. Or have a completely disastrous vacation, whichever happens first. For us, we had a great time together. I'll speak for myself (so as not to impose on my perhaps-politely-smiling-friends**) when I say that at no time was I peeved or dreading waking up to another day of sightseeing with Marc and Alana. As you know from my relationship with Kane, if it's the right person (or people), I am cool to hang out 24/7. Give me Marc and Alana any day (or all day every day) and I'll be happy.

*With the exception of Marc who likes to go drinking. For the most part, he didn't get his way, since the rest of us aren't as into it (mostly me). Sorry, Marc, I hope you can forgive.

**They're like, "What is she talking about? We're never booking a trip with those freaks again."

A Tale of Three Cities

2010-03-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

On this trip we spent 20 days in Japan, mostly concentrated in the cities of Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo. Japan is a country with an area about 10% smaller than that of California with a population about 3.5 times more than my fair home state. 127 million people call Japan home, and 98.5% of them are of Japanese descent. Talk about not in Kansas anymore. The time we spent in this wonderful country was mostly divided between the major two cities in the Kansai region of the country, Osaka and Kyoto, shown on the map below.

On the map above you can see Tokyo (click to enlarge the map) marked in approximately the geographic middle on the eastern coast. The Kansai region is highlighted pink (and shown close-up on the map below), and Osaka, its largest city, is marked in tiny print. Kane, Marc and I flew into Tokyo on March 4 and spent one night near the airport. On the 5th, we three headed down to Osaka, via Tokyo, on the bullet train, which takes about 2.5 hours covering over 500km (about 310 miles). The bullet train (Shinkansen) is like a regular train, but in fast forward motion. It's awesome.

Our schedule was a bit weird because we wanted to meet Alana in Osaka (she flew in there), but we also wanted to be in Osaka for the sumo tournament in mid-late March, toward the end of our trip. We decided to spend three nights in Osaka, March 5, 6, 7, head over to Kyoto for eight days, then come back to Osaka at the end of the trip to see the sumo. A bit strange, but it worked.

So, on March 5, we trained to Osaka and met Alana. Her ability to find our hotel alone and unassisted was incredible. March 6 and 7 we poked around the Namba area of Osaka, a city with 2/3 the population of Los Angeles crammed into 1/5 the area, wandering the endless arcades and marveling at the flashy lights and plastic food displays. It was a good introduction for us since we could discover the culture and acclimate to everything at our own pace.

On March 8 we took the one hour train ride over to Kyoto, the nearby cultural capital of the country. For eight days we walked around the compact but plentiful downtown area, meandered the cobbled streets of the traditional (now touristy) avenues, and visited temples and shrines aplenty. This is also where we were able to do the geisha dress-up, which was one of the highlights of the trip for me. This was also the place Marc chose to propose to Alana in a fancy romantic (read: expensive) restaurant on the most famous traditional street in Kyoto overlooking a tiny, pretty creek.

Kyoto is a wonderful town that apparently boasts a massive population of 1.5 million, but has the charm and feel of a city much smaller. Apparently, much to my surprise, the Allies purposely refrained from bombing Kyoto in WWII in order to preserve the cultural significance that is so rich and concentrated in this area. Now some of the oldest and best preserved cultural artifacts are located in and around Kyoto for us to enjoy.

Eight days was a great amount of time for us to spend in Kyoto - we got to see most of the major sights, but we could do so at a leisurely pace. On March 16 we took the train back to Osaka and stayed there again, in our exact same hotel rooms no less, for another three nights. We took one day trip out to Himeji Castle (pictured below) in the nearby town of the same name to see the most visited castle in Japan. We took another brief day trip out to Nara, a city known for the deer that eat out of your hand in the central city park (pictured below Himeji). Finally, we did get to see a sumo match, which was extensively blogged about in a previous post.

On March 19 we said goodbye to Alana as she flew out of Osaka back to Melbourne. The three of us then trained up north that day, retracing our steps back to Tokyo. Marc spend the following half day with Kane and me in Tokyo walking around the electronics district and over to the massive famous crosswalk in the suburb of Shibuya (pictured below). That afternoon we said goodbye to Marc as he flew home, and Kane and I continued to explore Tokyo for another two and a half days. We were pretty tired by this point, but still managed to make it over to the major sightseeing districts before heading out on a flight on March 23.

We had a great trip. The people, the sights, the food - it was all fabulous. Kyoto was my favorite place that we visited, and I really hope we can make it back over there again someday.

Domo Arigato

2010-03-24T00:02:00.000-07:00

Thank you, Japan, we hope to meet again someday. We arrived back home today and were faced with 10am when our brains felt like 3am. Jet-lag is a funny thing. We took a power nap/coma just before noon and are now wiiiide awake at midnight. So it goes. It will work itself out.

We loved our Japan trip. It was fabulous. I wasn't able to blog as much on this trip because we were actually out doing things so much, and we couldn't very well hold back our dynamic duo duo (two duos, get it?) by sitting in our room all day on the internet, no matter how much I may have wanted to. And because we did so much, I have that much more to say about our trip. Instead of furiously blogging during the trip, I did instead take scrupulous notes and have many a blog entry topic composed in my brain and my journal. Everything from taxi drivers, to food, to toilets will be discussed in the upcoming weeks, along with the highly anticipated pie charts on how we busted the budget. It seems we are far less discerning with our cash when we're with friends...

For now, feast your eyes on the latest pics from Kyoto. We were in Kyoto from March 9-16 and it was the place we stayed the longest and did the most activities. It also worked out to be my favorite place, fancy that. I have, like my blog, neglected to post many photos from the trip. I have not, however, neglected to take pictures. 15GB or so after leaving SFO, I have a few memories to post to the internet. Please stay tuned for more info and pics/videos on Japan even though we're not actually in Japan anymore. Maybe I'll try to go to sleep now...

Sumo

2010-03-20T03:45:00.000-07:00

Thursday we attended the last few hours of the sumo wrestling tournament held in Osaka every year. Apparently there are 6 Grand Tournaments each year (3 in Tokyo, 1 each in Osaka, Nagoya, and Kyushu) and the same 800 or so professional sumo wrestlers compete in these tournaments, getting ranked and re-ranked each time. The basic idea is that the tournaments are 15 days long and each wrestler competes in one match per day against a different opponent. The person with the best record at the end (wins versus losses of those 15 matches) wins the tournament.

Upon entering the gymnasium, it took us a while to find our seats and figure out what was going on. Once we finally got seated in our cheap seats, we watched for about three hours of continuous wrestling matches, or “bouts”. The funny thing about the seating arrangement in the arena was that the cheapo seats in the back were regular flip up chairs like at a movie theater, with a pillow strapped to the top for added comfort. The expensive seats, closer to the wrestlers, were big pillows on the floor. The floor was tiered so that each row could see over the one below it, and the separate “boxes” of seats were separated by metal bars about 6” off the ground, so that you're not just bleeding over into your neighbors little seating area. Each “box” of seats held 4 people (hence had 4 pillows). I was glad we weren't sitting there, that seemed far more uncomfortable to me (here's a picture of the "expensive" seats).

When we went by the ticket checker on the way in, we received a little booklet containing some information about sumo wrestling as a tradition, its evolution into a modern sport, the rules and rankings, and about all the little intricacies and rituals they do during the bouts. It was all quite interesting and helped to understand what we were watching. The wiki article is also pretty comprehensive if you'd like more info. Here are a couple of the big boys waiting for a taxi after the match. The taxi was noticeably lower to the ground after they got in...

The layout of a match is this: a man with a fan announces the next two contenders in a weird singing voice. Then the two dudes get up onto the little 18' square x 2' tall platform and the ref, dressed in a big silk get-up, mediates a bow between them. Then they begin their ritualistic preparation for the actual fight. They each stand in a corner (adjacent corners, incidentally, rather than opposing corners) facing outward toward the audience, clap their hands in front of them once, and raise their legs up in the air one at a time and stomp them on the ground. This is the classic sumo move that you would imitate if you were a kid. They then take a little towel, wipe their face and sometimes their arms or body with it. From a little pouch on the floor, they grab a small handful of salt, turn toward the ring, and toss the salt onto the sandy floor of the ring. Then they enter the 15' circle in the center of the platform, face each other, crouch down on tip toes with their feet out 180 degrees apart and glare at each other for a second. Then they stand, move back a step, and crouch again with their feet flat and place their fists on the ground for a second.

They look at each other and stand up again, turn to face the audience, and saunter back to their respective corners while slapping their arms and bodies as they walk. They do the towel and salt thing again in their corners. They step into the ring again and do the crouching bit. They can do this over and over as much as they want as long as they keep it all under four minutes.

Apparently, before 1928, the wrestlers could continue this ritual preparation indefinitely. In 1928 a 10 minute time limit was imposed, which was later reduced to 7 minutes, then 5, and finally 4. We're getting less patient as time goes on, apparently. I don't blame them; there's only so many times that these repetitive motions are interesting to watch.

They usually do this prep a few times, during which the crowd gets more and more excited. People start yelling more, and sometimes a bit of a cheer goes off when the wrestlers finish glaring and start to walk back to their corners. When the contenders are finally ready to go, they get down in the steady crouch position, hesitate for a second, then run at each other full force. Most matches were over in a matter of seconds – you have to be careful not to look away during the less exciting part lest you miss the action. The “moves” are mostly executed by pulling or pushing on the opponent's waist bands, though a lot of face pushing and general man-handling seems to go on before then. Here's a quick video to show what happens:

The goal is to make your opponent either touch the ground with anything other than his feet, or push him out of the ring. If either of those happen, the match is over. Like I said, it usually goes pretty quickly; the longest match we watched was probably 30 seconds (they stopped to rest in a nice little hug for a bit, like ultimate fighters or boxers often do).

We all found it to be quite interesting to watch and were really happy that we went. It's such a strange and unique sport and the way each match was over so quickly was sort of refreshing. Alana and I agreed that we liked it better than any sporting event we've ever watched in our own countries (or any country, really). The matches start at like 8am and go all day – we didn't like it so much that we wanted to watch for 10 hours, but the last 3 hours were very cool. The order of the matches in a day goes worst ranked to best, so the last three hours have the biggest and best guys and the seats tend to fill up at that time. The very best guy was in the last match (he won) and I took a video of the last 3 minutes of that match. It's a bit long, but here it is if you're interested. Go sumo!!

Walk Like a Geisha*

2010-03-14T19:06:00.001-07:00

It is estimated that only about 1,000 real geisha currently practice this traditional art in the entire country of Japan, and unless you have big bucks to spend, you're probably not ever going to get more than a glimpse of one. To summarize the wiki article (linked above, it's quite interesting): geisha are artists who are trained in dance, song, and other forms of entertainment to be able to entertain guests. The misconception about them being prostitutes comes from people making stuff up since the institution is so secretive.

The Gion district of Kyoto is apparently the most geisha-tastic area of Japan; the most prominent geisha can be found here. Geisha is plural for geisha, by the way, so work with that. We've seen a total of eight-ish geisha in our time here, and apparently they're all fake. The real geisha only come out at dusk and walk briskly to their destination. The many other geisha walking around are people who pay to dress up like geisha and take pictures. But since they're commonly Japanese girls, they look real to me. See? They look nice, I think:

The point is, we realized that you can pay to dress up like a geisha and take pictures; Alana and I thought that sounded like a fabulous idea. We found this really nice website for a place in Kyoto and went to stake it out. I figured they would be booked up since they have a reservation form that talks about reserving weeks in advance, but the lady said she could squeeze us in at 5pm that day! We were super excited.

Arriving back at 5pm to start or geisha journey, we spent the next two hours in a little house with very short doorways being primped and prepped as geisha. This is the tale of what happens behind fake geisha doors.

We were brought into a locker room and told, in broken English, to strip down to our undies and put on a little robe. There were lockers to store our stuff and they gave us a tiny cute wicker basket to put our camera and locker keys in to take with us. There were some other Japanese girls in the tiny room who were taking their makeup off; they had just finished their geisha experiences. Upon noting my confusion on how to strap the robe on (you had to put the rope through a hole in the side of the robe...more complex than necessary), one of the girls came over to help me secure my robe. When she wrapped the rope around me the right way it barely met again in the front. I could not tie a bow like I was supposed to and instead had to tie a tiny knot. Damn tiny clothing. Robed (or, partially robed for me), we proceeded across the hall to the makeup room.

We were each sat on a stool next to each other facing a mirrored wall. We each had a girl to make us up. They began by putting a little netting over our hair to secure the hair down. Next, some baby oil went on our faces and necks, followed by some wax which the girl said was makeup base. After that they used big, flat, semi-circular brushes to lather on white paint to our faces and necks. Back of the neck, chest, neck, chin, and bottom half of the face were covered in about 30 seconds. They they used a slightly pinker color on the forehead, eyes and cheeks, though the colors looked the same when I opened my eyes. Next they took a big puffy thing that looks like what you use to apply powder (like over your foundation makeup) and slapped our faces and necks with it to make a nice even look to get rid of the brush strokes.

We were ghost white and it was weird. They then used some pink blush on our eyelids and below our eyes. A lot of this is very subtle but ends up with a very nice look; I was surprised at how intricate it all was. Then came the red eyeliner along the bottom of our eyes, then red, brown and black eyebrow pencil, then black liquid eyeliner along the top of the lids. My girl asked me to smile (closed mouth smile) and painted on my bright red lips. Mascara on the top lashes and we were all geisha-faced.

Next came the hair. I had been wondering how they did this since all the hair in pictures seemed to look real. But it can't be real, and they certainly can't do that hair style with my blond wispy hair. They took some hair on the front of my head out of the hair net and put a huge, heavy black wig behind it. They use some thread to weave the wig into my hair on the top of my head so it was a bit more secure. The thing is heavy and uncomfortable, just for the record. But now we both had wigs on with our own mismatched hair sticking out the front. The girls put some wax in our front hair and started to comb it back over the wig behind it so that our hair blended with the wig. That's how they make it look real, good thinking. Here's a shot of me as the girl is doing this, I call it my Cruella Deville look:

After our hair was done they sprayed it black (for both of us, but I assume they had to use more on me) and we were sort of unrecognizable at that point. They then led us upstairs to another mirrored room where we picked our kimonos. I got there about two minutes before Alana and I thought the girl was just going to pick one for me. But she motioned me to choose so I pointed to a blue kimono. The girl made a face. I shrugged and told her to pick for me. She pointed to a red one and said it was nicer. I said ok and she started the process of putting it on me while I stood in front of the mirror. Alana came in shortly after and picked another red kimono; I felt a bit bad because I knew she had wanted red in the first place and now we both had red ones. Oh well. Now we're Best Geisha Forever.

The process of putting on a kimono is long and tedious and involves being wrapped in many, many layers and having many strips of fabric tied around you to hold each layer a certain way. It's sort of ridiculous how much fabric is used, how much the configuration covers the female form (I was just a cylindrical blob by the end), and how heavy the uniform is. I quickly rescinded on any previous desires I had to be a geisha; between the wig and the kimono I would not stand a chance. And they didn't even put us in the platform sandals that normal geisha wear, thank goodness.

When we were done with the kimono they added a few things to our hair (I sat on a stool so the girl could reach, as pictured above) and then we were taken into an adjacent room to take pictures. Kane and Marc arrived at this point and started taking pictures with their cameras as we posed for the professional pictures. A woman and a man handled posing the both of us; there were two rooms where the pictures were taken and we alternated taking pics in each. We each got four poses and were instructed where and how to stand for each of them. It was pretty cool. Marc and Kane got some pics while we did all this too, seen below (click to enlarge).

Next we were taken to a little tiny garden in the middle of the building and were told we could take our own pictures there for ten minutes, which was really awesome. We posed and the boys snapped pics for longer than the allotted time and we got some decent shots. Good geisha and goofy geisha pics were taken, see collage below and click to enlarge.

Then the boys were sent out to the waiting area and we went back into the kimono room where we were de-burritoed, then down to the makeup room where our wigs were removed. We then went back to the locker room to take off the makeup and wash out the hair dye. Note: they use baby oil to remove makeup here and I'm not a huge fan of that. My hair dye would not come out all the way, so I put in a ponytail and went back out to the waiting room (after getting dressed). In the waiting room they gave us a little booklet of our pics (4-5x7s each and 1-5x7 of the picture we took together) and we paid our moneys. For the dress up, the four picture poses, one pose of us together, and one of all four of us (they let the boys get in one also) it was US$140! Expensive, yes. Worth it, totally.

Most fun thing ever. I love fake geisha dress up.

*The title was originally meant to be a play on the song "Walk Like a Man" by the Four Seasons, but now that I look at it, it works more with "Walk Like an Egyptian" by the Bangles. Interpret as you wish.

Superstar

2010-03-12T00:57:00.000-08:00

Geisha? Yeah, they're all right. They turn heads walking down the street; some people snap pictures. But what do the Japanese people really want? Who walks the streets like a real superstar, glittering with a constant barrage of camera flashes? Who do the hordes of schoolgirls squeal over and back into corners like a frightened fox? He is tall, he is white, he has the coveted ginger look that is so rare in these parts...the one, the only, the infamous Marc Fairbairn.

We, just mere mortals, are privileged enough to be allowed to walk with him around, in public. Alana is the lucky lady who gets to hold his arm walking down the street -- a position envied by thousands, perhaps millions. Marc Fairbairn: the man, the legend, the future.

---

Yesterday we took a trip out to Kinkaku-ji, or the Golden Pavilion, one of the premier sights in Kyoto. This attraction is flooded with visitors both native and foreign on pretty much any day of the year, says our guidebook. Yesterday was no exception, the path around the temple and through the gardens was pretty solid with people the whole time we were there. Surprisingly, most of the visitors appear to be Japanese, and a great many of them are school kids, assumed to be on field trips. It is these kids who seem to be intrigued by the four of us more than anyone else we've encountered so far.

Walking through the grounds of this pavilion took us maybe 30 minutes. During that time we received countless sly looks, stifled giggles, and many, many "hello"s from passing schoolkids. Maybe they just wanted to practice their English on the token whities around? Maybe they were from more rural areas where westerners aren't seen as much? Maybe the four of us are just the goofiest people they've ever seen? I'm not really sure. But what is certain is that they liked one of us far more than the rest. Marc Fairbairn was an instant celebrity.

Lots of the kids were eying Marc, but only one girl had the cajones to actually approach him and ask for a picture. She spoke little English aside from the words "hello" and "picture", so it was not clear what she wanted initially. She pointed to her camera and Marc thought maybe she wanted him to take a picture of her with her friends. As her group of giggling friends progressively surrounded him after the initial contact was made, it became clear what they wanted. They wanted him and him alone in as many photos as could be snapped before he ran away.

The three of us scattered like ducks from a gunshot, leaving Marc all alone to bear the brunt of his popularity. He stood there red-faced and laughing as they took his picture in a flood of camera flashes. He tried to escape but they insisted on more. The three of us were laughing so hard that I thought we might die. Then he pulled out the coveted move - he held up two of his fingers in a peace sign. A roar of glee erupted from the girls and the cameras flashed like he was Michael Jackson. What can I say, the man knows how to work a crowd. After he was sufficiently blinded by flashes and embarrassed enough to last a lifetime, the crowd finally calmed down and we were able to approach our superstar of a friend again. It was pretty much the funniest and best thing that's ever happened ever, I think. I love Japanese people almost as much as they love Marc Fairbairn.

Karaoke

2010-03-10T05:39:00.000-08:00

First, please look at my Osaka pics that have been posted to Picasa, if you haven't already seen them from Facebook. Ok, now do continue.

We're in Kyoto now, in the south-west-ish of the country, and actually only about a 40 minute train ride from Osaka. The cultural capital of traditional Japan, Kyoto is a lot less fast paced than her hyped-up sisters Osaka and Tokyo. Or so they say. And I don't disagree, I just don't really care at the moment because we've discovered something more packed with culture than any puppet show, dance performance, or geisha dress-up booth. We found the karaoke.

What is karaoke in the States? It's a bar, often a crappy one, that hires a guy or gal to come in on Friday nights with a microphone/speaker setup and a teleprompter that scrolls song lyrics. The patron drunkards sign up to sing their songs of choice on said apparatus and the rest of the audience is subject to this abuse, responding in whatever way they see fit. Lots of people like it, but it's pretty much an exercise in embarrassment for me. I don't want that. I don't like strangers even being near me, much less listening to me pontificate my favorite B-52's hit and missing all the high notes. In my country, I keep the singing to myself in the privacy of my own car, thank you very much.

But what if you could just do karaoke with only your own friends? What if you could get rid of all those strangers and sing to your heart's content in the comfort of, say, your own living room? Well, it is nice having someone to bring you drinks and food while you hang around, and my living room isn't actually all that exciting. How about this: you can rent your own personal little room that's decked out with a sprawling leather booth, a big table, adjustable mood lighting and temperature, and you get your own personal flat screen with touch screen remote to choose your karaoke songs at will? Yes, this is what I want. And there are speakers and microphones set up so you can sing yourself hoarse with your own group of buddies while still in the privacy and comfort of your own little sequestered area, not bothering or being bothered by other people who want to sing songs and drink drinks all night too. This is not a made-up place, this is the karaoke house in Japan.

Let's not forget about the Little White Phone perched handily on the wall of your private room. The Phone is what makes this whole deal go down; you can pick up said phone at any time and order whatever it is that you want. There are extensive menus for drinks, appetizers and desserts, all of which you can request be delivered at your convenience, provided that the Japanese lady on the other end can decipher your foreign tongue and you can figure out the menu since it is mostly in Japanese. It is FABULOUS. It's the pinnacle in entertainment as far as I'm concerned: a private activity that's fun and unique which you can't do at home, all at a reasonable price.

We opted for the "Premium" karaoke room (oh yeah, that's how we roll) since there was no wait and it was only marginally more expensive than the "Standard" room. It costs about $8 per person per hour and you can buy in half hour blocks. You get one soda free and you can buy as much other stuff as you want (though it's not required). And, at this particular establishment, the entire building was karaoke rooms; it's like a hotel but for karaoke. Twelve spectacular floors of karaoke splendor. The first many floors are for the "Standard" rooms (scoff) and the last four floors or so are "Premium" rooms, though I'm not sure what the difference really is. All I know is that we were on the 8th floor away from all the riff-raff and in sweet karaoke heaven. Below is the hallway outside our room:

Most of the staff spoke English really well so we actually had no problem. And the one girl who didn't speak English called in another guy who painstakingly translated the entire free soda menu onto a piece of paper so that we could choose our free drinks in an educated manner. I. Love. These. People.

The hours flew by in our awesome karaoke lounge, we sang song after song with and without microphonic aid (we'd mostly end up all singing together). Bohemian Rhapsody. The Sweater Song. Superstitious. Love Shack. Devil Inside. Faith. We Built This City (on Rock and Roll). Sussudio. Sweet Caroline. The hits kept coming until about 2am when we called it a night and took a cab home. The cab experience here is an entirely other blog entry, but also fabulous, as expected. I think we might have to have another karaoke night before our time in Japan is up. Best idea ever. If I can stand the loss of dignity, videos hopefully will be up soon.

Arcades and Arcades

2010-03-07T00:29:00.000-08:00

We've stayed in Osaka for two nights now, and have mostly been wandering around the nearby arcades during the day since it's awesome there. A clarification needs to be made for Americans: there are two different kinds of "arcades". The normal ones that we call arcades I will henceforth refer to as video arcades, or video game arcades. We all know what these are about; they're stocked with a bunch of stand up video games where you put your quarters in and control your little guy with a joy stick.

In Australia and the UK, and apparently Japan, they use the word arcade to describe a covered walkway that typically houses a shopping area. The wiki definition describes it more as an architectural term for the space, but I have always encountered it like a way to describe a retail zone: an enclosed passageway between buildings that house shops and restaurants. Sometimes they are one block, sometimes many. Maybe you already know the term, but I first figured it out when we were in Australia*.

The ones we've been hanging out in here in Osaka are a huge labyrinth** of passageways with a zillion shops, restaurants, slot machine arcades, and video game arcades. It's really fun to walk around and everyone is friendly and not threatening at all. You know how you're sort of always on guard for thieves or people trying to sell you stuff or troublesome kids when you walk in a large crowd in the States? Well, I am at least. And yes, I group those pushy people trying to sell me hand cream in with thieves; I hate them equally. Groups often make me nervous. I find that I don't feel that way here. And it's not because I'm way huger than everyone here (on the contrary, the Japanese are far taller than I had expected) or because there is no crime at all, but I think it's just a different feel here. Kane even mentioned how he isn't scared to have me out of his sight here like he is in every other country we have been in (isn't he cute?). There's just a really peaceful and calm vibe here. Everyone seems to respect everyone else and it makes a really comfortable atmosphere. I think that's my favorite part about it here, we'll see if I continue to experience Japan this way.

Anyway, back to the arcades. So, shopping arcades and video game arcades. They're both quite an experience. The shopping arcades can be described in photo format fairly well, so here's some pics of the shopping arcades that we've been walking around in:

They're wide and tall and have tons of neon signs, flashy lights, and things to tell you what's on sale where. People pass out fliers in some places, but they're not pushy and they often don't even offer them to us since we are fairly obviously foreigners (and I assume that they assume we don't know Japanese). They're fun to walk around in and there's plenty to look at (and buy/eat).

The video game arcades are a whole other experience. They have sliding glass doors and when you enter those doors, you're suddenly in a state of sensory overload. Every game screams it's song or ring or beeping and the sum of all the machines is deafening. It's hard to tell in the videos, but you sort of have to yell to hear each other in the video arcades. Please, watch a video or two:

The games in them are often strange and very involved - think of many different variations of the game Dance Dance Revolution. The craziest games we have originate here, and they really go to town in their own video arcades. There are also some "normal" games (note when I discover Super Mario Brothers in one of the videos), a bunch of gambling machines, and a whole lot of "claw" machines where you try to grab a prize with the claw. No idea why you would want to play that game (so frustrating!), much less why there would be 50 different choices of them, but maybe they're quite popular here. Some of the prizes are hilarious: I saw a two foot long beef jerky machine, a fondue set machine, and a cigarette machine! Marc and Alana's favorite game is the drum game:

Still having fun - hoping for a bit less rain in the coming week though. We head to Kyoto tomorrow which is only about a half hour train ride away, and we're looking forward to it!

*I remember the first "arcade" I ever saw; I made us run across traffic to get to it only to discover that it was full of stuffy shops instead of awesome video games. Damn you, British nomenclature, you got me again.

**Upon being corrected by spell check on the spelling of the word "labyrinth", I submit that the letter "y" in that word is entirely superfluous.

Welcome to Japan!!

2010-03-04T23:05:00.001-08:00

And welcome to my 200th post on this blog! Yeay!! We arrived in Japan yesterday evening and are LOVING it so far. Everyone is so friendly and kind and courteous!! It's just so comfortable feeling here, I like it a lot so far.

Having said that, let's discuss the troubles encountered on the way over here. Really, there was only one problem though we're not entirely sure what the cause was. We've narrowed it down to either the in-flight meal or the motion of the airplane. You can probably guess what happened: I was once again hovered over a plethora of tiny baggies yacking my guts out on the airplane. Lord forbid a trip occur without this happening, I hope this met the trip qualifications and I'm in the clear from here on out. Always fun.

About two hours into the flight we were served our "dinner" (it was 2pm), and it was yummy. Kane and I got the vegetarian special which means that we get served first and we get delicious (as far as plane food goes) Indian food. We scarfed it up because we were hungry. I was fine for the following four hours or so of the flight, during which we watched The Blind Side (Saundra Bullock, it's a good movie, heartwarming, etc.) and This Is It (Michael Jackson movie, very boring, not nearly as cool as I thought it would be). About two-thirds the way through The Men Who Stare At Goats (George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey: funny, strange, quirky) I started to not feel so well.

I had a bit of a headache and my stomach felt yucky. I tried to sleep it off, but it wasn't working. A couple hours later, I'm utilizing the sick baggie in the seat pocket in front of me as the bathrooms were full at that exact moment. I was hoping I'd feel better after the release, but no such luck. Two baggies later we've landed in Tokyo. Hooray.

I thought that being on the ground would make me snap out of it. But it didn't. We waited for about an hour and a half for Marc's flight to arrive and I didn't feel any better that whole time. Hence why we possibly suspect the food. Kane wasn't feeling great either, but his stomach is stronger than mine so he required no baggies, thank goodness. Unfortunately, the (literally) five minute bus ride to our hotel had me fumbling through my shoulder bag for any plastic container. I found a ziplock baggie (never thought I'd be so happy that the airport requires my 3oz. toothpaste to be in a baggie) just in time and quietly yacked my last yack just as we pulled up to the hotel. Sheesh.

The hotel was awesome, despite tripadvisor claims to the contrary. Spacious, well furnished, and free dinner and breakfast! Awesome. I just had miso soup for dinner, it soothed the achin' tummie.

Today we had another travel day, but this time it was leisurely and mostly on trains (or wandering hopelessly around train stations). We took the bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka, which is like riding a regular train but in fast forward motion (it goes about 100 mph). This evening we met up with Alana, who miraculously was able to find our hotel by herself with no assistance and limited map printouts. Kudos Alana, thank you for joining us.

The four of us now intend to bumble all around this area of Japan, eat tons of food, laugh at ridiculously translated English signs, and generally try to enjoy everything about Japanese people and the weird crap that they do. Here's to Japan, it's awesome here!

Bags Are Packed

2010-03-02T21:59:00.000-08:00

My bag is indeed packed, and, as the song suggests, I'm ready to go. It's not every day that I wake up and fly to Japan, but tomorrow will be that day.

This is by far the least prepared we've ever been for a trip. No, we did not learn the language, not even a little bit. We don't really know what we're going to do there or what we'll see. I am aware that most Japanese people don't speak any English and, no, I'm not quite sure how we'll deal with this.

The things I do know are that 1) All of our hotel rooms offer hair dryers; 2) It's supposed to rain while we're there; and 3) The exchange rate is just under 90 Yen to the dollar. These things are important in that order.

Ok, I'm partially kidding, we have hotel reservations: Tokyo for one night, Osaka for three, Kyoto for eight nights, Osaka again for another three, then back to Tokyo for three nights. We also have travel insurance, a bunch of Yen (ordered from Wells Fargo, so fun!), and we made sure they actually do let Americans in without a visa. We have a guidebook and we know that it's improper to stab your chop sticks into your rice. I think these are enough to get us started.

We are packing light, despite the inclement weather we are faced with. I am actually almost entirely packed into a carry-on suitcase. You read correctly: I, a woman, am bringing only a carry-on bag to travel in Japan for three weeks. That's how I roll. Kane is taking my backpack (and graciously carrying my 2nd pair of shoes and our bathroom bag), which is to be our only piece of checked luggage. He will have a day backpack, while I have a shoulder bag and a camera. Oh, the joys of carrying all your crap around with you. Gee, I've missed traveling...

The 11.5 hour flight commences at 12.15pm tomorrow; we arrive in Tokyo some amount of hours and days later. The internet is promised to be plentiful in this foreign land, so I should hopefully have some bloggular tidbits along the way. Catch you on the flip side.

No Fruit in California

2010-02-23T09:51:00.000-08:00

Last Thursday Kane and I made the six hour drive up to Ashland, Oregon to see Kane's mom. Rhonda was very happy to have us for three (and a half) days and provided us almost as much food as she did chores. We mostly relaxed around the house (with our computers, thank goodness), ate good food, watched movies, and did some things around the house that Rhonda needed help with. It was fun, and it was good to see Rhonda and help her out. After all, I have stolen her handyman, I suppose I can loan him back now and again. ;)

On the way into Oregon on Interstate 5, one is greeted with an inconspicuous "Welcome to Oregon" sign. Good. Sounds about right. I felt welcome.

On the way into California coming from Oregon, the "Welcome to California" sign comes with a bit of backup. A few miles down the road from the sign is a checkpoint. My first instinct is to roll my eyes and complain about useless government spending at this sort of thing, I'll be honest. I mean, they're checking for fruit, but the only way they check is to ask, "Do you have any fruit?".

No, I don't have any fruit. And if I did, I probably wouldn't tell you because I know you will take it and waste it. And because the fruit I might be carrying is undoubtedly from a grocery store in Ashland and is imported from the same South American country as the fruit at the grocery stores in California.

It just seems to me like a station such as this cannot possibly be effective against fruity intrusions into California (there's a joke about Jon in there, but I'll leave it alone). It's an "on your honor" system! Those don't work, not even for children! But alas, this article claims that this place does a good job.

Granted, the article is from 1997. Also granted that it's in the government's best interest to say that their programs are working, so who knows what's true. But the article points out that it's mostly certain exotic or rotting fruits that carry the critters that mess up our beloved California agriculture, and the "border patrol" can be relatively effective at catching these folks.

It states that the people who most often bring in the harmful stuff are those who have been traveling a while. People who are road tripping or truck driving or whatever and are coming from different states and have been on the road for some time. They can tell by the color of the dirt on your car, apparently, if you're a qualifying vagabond.

Whatever is going on at the California Fruit Border Patrol, I hope it's working to protect our crops, that it's not wasting our tax money, and that it continues to only waste but a minute of my time with each crossing. But they can keep their gloved hands off my Fujis, I'll tell you that.

The Bug Hath Bitten Again

2010-02-09T13:44:00.000-08:00

News on the travel front hath decreed: we're going to Japan!

You may remember hearing (reading) the names Marc and Alana - our two awesomely awesome* friends from Australia (who, incidentally, aren't Australian) in previous posts. They had plans long ago to take their 2nd trip to Japan (they liked the first one a lot). We had wanted to go with them, but they were due to go just after we got back from Europe, so we figured it wouldn't work.

Then, they ended up with other plans and postponed their trip until March. We figured being the hard-working and dedicated contributes to society that we are, that we'd be gainfully employed by then and hence, it wouldn't work.

But since the time approaches for their trip and we find that we are neither as dedicated nor hard-working as we thought we were, we find ourselves with much free time and left over Australian money in our Aussie bank accounts. Money + free time + awesome friends = plane tickets to Japan.

Last week we finally made the official commitment and bought plane tickets. On March 3 we take a direct flight from SFO to Tokyo (eleven and a half hours of pure joy!) and on March 23 we return on a flight that is two hours shorter and has us arriving in San Fran approximately 6 hours before we leave Tokyo. Crazy jet stream madness can be held accountable for the large differences in flight times, and the date line can be held accountable for the time travel.

Since M & A have already done the Tokyo thing, they wanted to spend time in the south. Since we're mostly there to see them (though we did want to go to Japan too), we're going to plan most of our travels for Osaka and Kyoto, with day trips to other interesting nearby sights. At the end of the trip, M & A will go back home to Melbourne and Kane and I will spend three extra days seeing what Tokyo is all about.

Time to dust off the old backpack, but some travel insurance, and resurrect the blog for March! Prepare thyselves!

*That's how great they are; they require redundant adjectives.

My Only Souvenir

2010-01-29T11:24:00.000-08:00

I realize that I did forget something in the post about spendings. During the entire trip, I bought one souvenir for myself, excluding magnets (I get a magnet from each city or country).

I’m not one for fancy clothes or elaborate jewelry (ok, I lied, I did buy a silver chain in Poland also), or useless trinkets. In fact, I actually hate nick knacks. If you haven’t noticed, I like getting rid of things and, on the flip side, I hate clutter. As cute as they may be, I don’t want random chotchkies filling every counter top and shelf in my house. I want everything bare and clean. Nothing useless, nothing just for show, no clutter.

In practice this isn’t as easy to abide as it sounds, I end up with little things that were gifts or things that I made or something from when I was a kid. But I try to avoid the clutter like they’re harboring buboes*. This trip around Europe was no exception to the rule, I did not purchase figurines, coin trays, scarves, photo frames, or anything that would end up sitting around my house unwanted but unable to be let go because it was Purchased In Europe. I followed this rule religiously, and, really, without effort…until I saw Sebastian.

He was at a tacky souvenir store in Dublin, Ireland. I was mostly just walking around and scoffing at the ridiculous-ness of the items for sale there – a whole store with Irish souvenirs of all types! Pencils, mugs, shirts, bookmarks, wallets, hats, towels, cheap jewelry, magnets, thimbles, photo frames, embroidered sweaters, flashlights, doormats, chocolates, and on and on and on. In the mess, on the bottom of a shelf in this hugely tacky store, I fell for Sebastian. He looked up at me with his googly little eyes and I held his tiny, green, spherical body in my hand, and I knew I could not put him down.

Sebastian is a green, rubber piggy bank shaped like a little portly pig. He has a removable snout so you can get all your money out**, and he’s got three little green clovers on each side of his bum. He’s the cutest thing ever and I took him home to my country to have a long and fruitful life with me. Now he holds my change in his belly and I see his cute face every day on my counter. I love him dearly and I’m happy that he’s the only souvenir that I have from our trip to Europe. See? How could I resist:

*Yeah, I made a bubonic plague joke, go 1300’s!
**This is beginning to sound like a nursery rhyme…and I like it.

On Coffee

2010-01-25T18:54:00.000-08:00

C-O-F-F-E-E, coffee is not for me. That's a song we used to sing in 4th grade choir class (remember, Alicia?) and maybe I've been brainwashed.

I haven’t been drinking coffee. I had thought I might start since I was drinking quite a bit in Europe, and even a bit in Australia. I was having a cappuccino or mocha nearly every day toward the end of our trip; Italy is the place for coffee. It was delicious – a sweet treat for me in the morning, yum! And I was even growing to not hate the taste of the actual coffee that was thrown into my delicious hot milk and chocolate. So I thought I might be changing.

In New York I had a couple Starbucks’. But those are expensive and they always burn my mouth. Always. Why would I want to buy a beverage that I can only drink a half hour after I receive it? My first morning at mom’s house she made me a delicious mocha. And I thought, this is it, I’m going to start drinking coffee every morning.

But hearing her grind the beans this morning, I realize that I’ve only drank a few coffees in the last 2 months. It has not become a daily habit, even though I have plenty of time for it. I don’t crave it at all, and I don’t want to make the effort, even in lieu of not having to be anywhere at any time.

I still like a mocha every once in a while. But get rid of all that chocolate and cream and the coffee alone has nothing to offer me. And I’m glad for it – I don’t want any habits or foods that I “must” eat/drink every day. I guess coffee isn’t in the cards for met yet, and that’s just fine with me.

The Devils are Saved?

2010-01-22T11:09:00.000-08:00

Since our visit to the island of Tasmania in December 2008, as documented on the website I made, I have been keeping my eyes peeled for any advances made on the plight of the Tasmanian Devils.

You may remember from my previous blog post about Tasmania that the Devils' population has been declining steadily since 1996 due to a horrific facial tumor disease that is spreading wildly throughout the population. Scientists estimate that over 60% of the devils on the island (the only place where they can be found in the world) have died since the disease was discovered.

The disease is relatively unusual in that it is a fatal cancer that is transferable to other members of the species via biting; they bite each other when fighting over food, territory, or females. When the disease is contracted, tumors begin to grow on the animals' faces until they (the tumors) become so large that the animal cannot eat or drink. They (the Devils) perish in less than a year via a slow and awful death of starvation from this disease, and until now, scientists have come no closer to finding a cause or cure.

This article that I saw the other day in the New York Times claims that scientists have now found the cause of the cancer and can begin to create vaccines which might save the species. Until now, scientists had estimated that the entire species would be decimated in the next 5-15 years, with full extinction to follow. The only effort that could be made was to sequester healthy groups of Devils in sanctuaries and facilitate breeding programs to keep the numbers of tumor-free animals diverse enough to sustain a healthy population.

This new research may be the key to the Devils' survival, though only time (and a heck of a lot of money/research/testing) will tell if these new findings are all they are hoped to be. In researching this a bit, I found that multiple other findings in the past few years had provided hope of a cure, but nothing to date has worked. Also, a few websites that discuss the Devil problem don't seem to mention these new findings yet - so I'm not sure exactly how promising they are.

Regardless, I'll still keep an eye out for my cute little native Australian marsupials, and am happy to see that a group of determined and concerned citizens and scientists are dedicating their time and resources to helping this worthy and unique species.

Prediction

2010-01-18T13:56:00.000-08:00

Today I found my estimate for our Europe budget. Before we left Australia, we were trying to get an idea of how much $$ we would need for 3 months of travel in Europe. In Australian dollars, we had estimated this:

$5000 for flights
$4000 for car rental
$1500 for diesel
$9000 for accommodation ($100/night * 90 nights)
$4500 for food ($50/day * 90 days)
$1000 for rail passes
$1500 for ferries and misc. transport
$5000 miscellaneous
=AUD$32,500 total (for both of us)

Using the exchange rate that we got when we bought our Travel Credit Card from Australia (AUD$1 = €0.55), we budgeted €17,875 for 90 days of travel. In reality (refer previous post), we spent €16,362 for 106 days of travel. Granted, we were trying to be conservative in our estimates, but kudos to us for actually being conservative and not spending more that we thought we would. And yes, my arm is hurting from patting myself on the back so hard.

Additionally, I'd like to point out how close we came on some of those figures. Here's a list of how much we budgeted (first in AUD, then in Euros), and how much we spent.

Flights: Guessed $5000 = €2750, Spent €1880
Transportation: Guessed $6500 = €3575, Spent €3560 (!) (including car rental, parking, EU rail passes, ferries, all subways/trams/etc)
Diesel: Guessed $1500 = €825, Spent €600
Accommodation: Guessed $9000 = €4950, Spent €4965 (!)
Food: Guessed $4500 = €2475, Spent €3070 (oops)
Misc: Guessed $5000 = €2750, Spent €2285 (including activities, other, and stuff)

And, mind you, we were estimating for 90 days and we actually traveled for 106 days. Booya. We win!

Europe: The Low Down

2010-01-14T22:45:00.000-08:00

Clearly the last month of complete bloggular silence has been for a good reason. Obviously I've been doing research, manipulating numbers, and deriving complex equations, in order to provide you with the data analysis promised so many months ago regarding our three and a half month trip around Europe. Remember that? When we were in Europe? I do. We worked for a full year to save for it. And now it's all gone.

From the data analyzed, I conclude that traveling is not cheap. It is, in fact, heinously expensive, even on the tightest of budgets. Not that we didn't already know this, as we do have some experience in previous budget analyses from our Great Australian Road Trip. So, I ask you, are you ready for the information, the results of the complex analysis, the low down?? Of course you are.

And this time, I'm in 3-D - booya. Beginning on July 9, 2009 and ending on October 24, we had 106 days during which we spent €16,361. Using an approximate conversion rate, that's just over US$24,000. That's US$226 per day of travel (for both of us). And since that's approximately how much I make in a day of work, travel appears to be the opposite of working in more ways than one.

But really, how much money is this above and beyond the spendings of normal life at home? For example, we spent almost €5,000 (US$7300) on accommodation over 106 days of travel. That's an average of €46 (US$68) per night (counting all 18 nights of free accommodation at Jon's house toward that average). When we lived in SLO, our monthly rent was US$1650, which comes to about $55 per night to live there. So, in all our traveling, we were still only paying an equivalent of about US$2000/month rent - not unlike a decent apartment in any big city. Granted I wouldn't say that the places we were staying could all be considered "decent", but the fact remains that we weren't spending so much more than we would have on rent living anywhere else.

Unless you count living at my mom's house, in which case we were clearly wasting our money like fools. FOOLS!

As for food, the other major expense of (and best part of) living anywhere, we did end up spending a bit more than normal while we were on the go, as opposed to stationary living. Which makes sense; there are no trips to the grocery store to save money when you're in a hotel every night. You'll be happy to know that my meticulous record keeping for the past two years has given me a good idea of how much we do spend in our daily existence. From that data, I can tell you that we spent an average of AUD$30/day on food while living in Australia, just about half of which was spent on groceries, the other half on "out" food.

Now, because the exchange rate for Australian dollars to US dollars has been on the fritz for the last two years, this converts to a very subjective amount of US dollars per day spent on food. Since the conversion is about AUD$0.92 to every American dollar at the moment, let's say that AUD$30/day is about USD$28/day.

On our trip, however, we were racking up the receipts and spent a whopping €3,067 (USD$4,500) on food in 106 days. This averages to USD$42 spent per day of travel on food items, which is almost exactly 1.5 times the documented amount of money we spend on food living our "normal" lives. And I actually don't think that's doing too badly - see how good we were? I would have thought that eating out for every single meal of the day would jack up the food bill at least two or three times normal, but apparently we are that good.

It's worth mentioning also that we made an effort to stay at places that included breakfast in their accommodation deal. This saved us time in the morning since we didn't have to forage around the city to find an acceptable morning snack, and it saved money (in my opinion) because it didn't allow for us (me) to spend some exorbitant amount of money every morning on whatever I wanted just because it was the closest place or I got too hungry or I was just being a brat.

For the 106 nights we spent in Europe, 18 of these nights were spent at Jon's house (breakfast included, yeay!) and 42 nights were stayed at hotels with breakfast included. This meant that for only 46 nights, less than half of the mornings, were we required to start the day by looking for a restaurant or cafe. So, technically, our "food" budget owes our "accommodation" budget a few bucks for the savings provided by the beauty of the bed 'n breakfast.

Side note: this was the very best included breakfast on the whole trip, three cheers for the Full English Breakfast:

Food and accommodation accounted for about half of our total spendings, and both of those can actually be reasonably justified against normal living patterns. The real killer was the transportation. It's something that we spent a whole heck of a lot of time pouring over before the trip. Train Versus Car: The Ultimate Battle. I could post a blog entry on just that, I swear. And maybe I will, since I have a lot of info on that matter, but suffice it to say for now that our rental car, parking fees, road tolls, ferry rides, tram tickets, train, metro, and subway rides accounted for a total of €3,560, or USD$5,233, worth of costs (note that this does not include flights). That accounts for 22% of our total spendings, and made it possible for the rest of the money to be spent, yeay!

Let's see about real life. In Melbourne, we spent approximately (very approximate) AUD$6 per day on transportation. We took the tram to and from work every week day, and then again sometimes on the weekend. We rented cars a few times, and we paid for some of our friends' gas and parking fees when they took us out. I'm not including vacations in this tally; this is just regular day to day working life (without owning a car). Now, owning a car in the US, I have no idea what the daily average for transportation costs would be - including the cost of the car, maintenance, gas, registration, and insurance. I'm sure it's more than $6 a day to live with a car, but I'm pretty sure it's not $50 a day like it was for us to travel.

That's right, we spent an average of USD$50 (€34) per day on transportation for 106 days of travel around Europe. Would the train have been cheaper than a rental car? Maybe. But then we wouldn't have had the flexibility of travel, and in my opinion, would have had a lot more stress (I don't mind driving, but communicating at a train station can get sticky - not everyone agrees with me). So, transportation certainly turned out to be a formidable foe.

As for the remaining 30% or so of our spendings, a third was spent on flights (€1880 / US$2760), another third on activities (€1690 / US$2480) and the remaining third split between diesel (€600 / US$890), "stuff" (€480 / US$700), and "other" (€115 / US$170).

There were actually only 4 flights total: Melbourne to Munich, Munich to Rome, Munich to New York, and New York to California, and I think they were relatively reasonably priced (and way better than a round-the-world ticket). Activities were all the touristy things we saw/did on the road. While we were always trying to be frugal, these were some of the most fun and interesting things we did on the trip. "Stuff" was used to denote anything we bought for ourselves or as a gift along the way, and mostly consisted of magnets, pharmacy items, clothes and accessories (undies, hats, sunglasses), books, and gifts for our families. "Other" was used to mostly as a catch-all for things that didn't fit into any other category - prepaid cell phone, Skype charges, pay toilets, laundry, and mostly ATM fees.

You may notice that we only spent €600 on diesel on our trip. That's US$890 for 10,700 kilometers (6,650 miles) of driving. It cost us under $900 to drive the equivalent distance of across the United States and back - you can see that our car wasn't a Ford Explorer. In my Explorer, I pay about $0.18 or so per mile driven and a 6,000 mile trip would cost about $1,100. In our little Renault Clio III, we paid approximately $0.13 per mile, and that's considering that the price of a gallon of diesel would cost about two or three times more than a gallon of gas costs here. Diesel is more efficient, and we got a good number of miles to the gallon - yeay for fuel efficient cars.

And that's it. Now you know all about how much money we don't have anymore. And the bad news is that we haven't even been replenishing the supply so far. But that's a far less exciting story for a far less enthusiastic audience. Thanks for reading all about the financial side of our trip, this entry has been really fun for me at least. Now that you're at the end, can you think of anything I missed?

Think Happy Thoughts

2009-12-11T10:50:00.000-08:00

The button had been sitting there all along.

The little rectangle marked "Submit Application" faced us down every day, and we waited until time was almost up to push it. But we did. We pushed the button that would end our struggle with the UC Berkeley online application and sent the damn thing in. It's over. It's out of our hands now.

Since we got back a month and a half ago, we've been working on our applications for the UCB Full Time MBA Program (master's in business administration). Kane and I both want to move up to management-type roles in our engineering career and we've decided to pursue this goal in style.

Style takes a lot of work, apparently. In addition to asking multiple choice questions about every aspect of our lifestyle and history (name, dob, education records, employment records, ss#, test scores, gpa, place of birth, country of residence, address, phone number, family history, ethnicity...I'm surprised they didn't ask what color my fingernails are painted), there were also six "supplementary" questions (short answer, essentially), four 250-word essay questions, one 500-word and one 1000-word essay, plus two 500-word optional essays (I took the option).

Then we had to get two letters of recommendation from previous employers (you know they love that), upload our resumes, and send in official transcripts and GMAT test scores. Not exactly a walk in the park.

But, I suppose that's what happens if you want to get into one of the most competitive programs in the country. They receive approximately 4000 applications for 240 spots every year. Hence the request in the title.

Would it be possible for anyone reading this to think a couple happy thoughts for a moment for Kane and me? We really would both like to be admitted to this program and, as you can see, the chances are slim. But we put a lot of effort into the application, we're qualified, and we're ready. Now, it's all left to the Powers That Be: the UCB MBA Admissions Committee. Think happy thoughts!!

How It Feels

2009-12-06T22:53:00.001-08:00

How does it feel to be back? People love to ask us this. It feels...fine. Actually, in a weird way it feels like we never left. Getting back into the USA groove took about five seconds for me and Kane. It's like starting all over and picking up right where we left off at the same time. So, I guess it's a bit hard to describe, but in a lot of ways Australia seems like a faraway dream.

And I suppose the "faraway" part isn't all that untrue, time-wise as well as physically. We were last in Aus in early July and we stopped working at the end of May, so it has been a while since we were living that life. But even one week after being back from traveling it felt (to me) like all that time in Europe was just Dorothy in Munchkinland. It was real, it was great, I have pictures to prove it happened, but it seems so long ago.

And now I live in limbo. No job, staying at mom's house, no real life to speak of yet. But I don't give myself too hard of a time about it yet since I'm still playing catch-up with this life and the people who I lovingly ditched for two years.

Thinking about it more, I'm going to revise my "how does it feel" answer to say that it feels good. Great even. Everything here is so easy compared to anywhere else simply because I know it like arithmetic flash cards. Australia is a superb place and we could easily be very happy making a life there. But I know this place like a first language - there's just an ingrained understanding that makes it unique from anywhere else I'll ever go.

So, that's how it feels to be back, in case you wanted to know.

So,

2009-12-02T09:49:00.000-08:00

So, we've been back in the States for a month. And I haven't been updating this blog as promised. Surprise, we're not traveling anymore and our lives aren't nearly as interesting. Well, I still have blog entries lined up for posting, but I thought I should at least give an update for the time being instead of being painfully silent on my precious blog.

One month back and what have we done? Well, not a whole lot I guess. I feel like we're productive but it's hard to make the argument. I try not to let myself sleep all day, I have a to-do list, I get things done. I do not, however, have a job, have another place to live (we're at my mom's), or have my grad school application finished. So, it sounds like we're not making much progress. But I assure you, we're trying.

So what have we been doing? I get this question a lot actually, and I usually have to fumble with an answer since the reality is that putting stuff on Craigslist and organizing my mom's garage just doesn't seem like it's a month's worth of dedication. We have been spending a lot of time purging stuff: our own collection of pre-Australia goods (read: junk) stored away in mom's basement, mom's impenetrable fortress of debris from previous decades that seems to multiply when cabinet doors are closed, and now we're attacking the even more massively endless supply of clutter stored in the extensive bowels of Holiday Bowl.

Yep, I've happily started poking my nose into the family business and now I'm bringing Kane with me. I worked one day with Dad paying bills and cleaning up the office, and now I've stumbled upon a new task that's a perfect fit: sorting out the huge mass of crap stored in the many closets and rooms of the bowling alley. I enlisted Kane to help since we're pretty much professional junk sorters at this point. You have a room full of stuff? We'll sort, purge, recycle, and organize the whole lot for ya, quick as a cricket.

We've also spent some time taking trips to see friends and family: we've been down to SLO, up to Oregon, and out to Pacifica, Concord, San Jose and Buffalo Bills with folks we haven't seen in two years or more. And, I've made friends with my niece, isn't she cute?

I've also been looking for jobs, doing home improvement at mom's house (removing wallpaper, painting, installing new fixtures (Kane)), interviewing with New York Life (I didn't take the job though), starting a new blog (will notify when ready), filling out UCB grad school application, and, as mentioned, putting an inordinate amount of stuff onto Craigslist to be sold. It's actually quite an effort.

So, that's been our life so far. Still on the list: get a job, turn in grad school app, sort and purge more of my useless stuff, continue to work with Dad at the Bowl, start helping Jane with some of her organizational needs, continue the fight to improve mom's house, do my Australian taxes, get health insurance, go to the dentist, call AAA, finish this blog, change light bulbs, get rid of the VHS tapes...

Favorites

2009-11-13T13:21:00.000-08:00

So, now that we’re safely home and into super-extra-boring, money-saving-lifestyle mode, it’s time to reflect and discuss The Trip which we’ve just disengaged from and get down to the nitty gritty. We were traveling Europe for four months; what were the highlights?

It’s true that I took over 5,000 pictures, a couple dozen horribly choreographed videos, and spent an inordinate amount of time scouring the internet for the best deals on a hostel in our next location. But amongst all the grimy hotel rooms and mediocre restaurants, there were some serious bright spots. Not to make our trip sound terrible or anything, I just like to be sarcastic. You should know this by now. Anyhow, I’ve thought long and hard about what I found to be the very best experiences from our extensive trip (that is to say I’m trying to remember what the heck happened) and I thought I’d tell you a bit about it.

Let’s start with the obvious: best locations. We traveled to over 27 cities in 15 countries in the span of 3 ½ months and I would say that my very favorite cities were (in no particular order):

1)Hallstadt, Austria: Gorgeous, tiny lakeside village tucked into the Austrian mountainside. Peaceful, old-fashioned, and seemingly straight out of a fairy tale.
2) Prague, Czech Republic: Urban yet clean, tourist-oriented yet charming, beautiful and fun, Prague is an unexpected treasure in the ex-communist territory of eastern Europe.
3) London, England: Classic, metropolitan, chock full of history, monuments, and other silly English things. The “on the beaten track” part of Europe that will still never be boring to me.
4) Edinburgh, Scotland: Extremely simple city with all the necessities of the big boys but with less fuss and bustle. If the weather were better I may have never left.
5) Paris, France: Just a fine city over all, Paris didn’t hold true to any of the stupid clichés that I had expected. Impressive with its hard-hitting sights but still quaint and unique on a micro scale as well.
6) Cinque Terre, Italy: The amazingly old-fashioned Disneyland-style villages that you might see in an Olive Garden commercial even though Olive Garden certainly has no roots here. Painfully rustic but immensely beautiful and relaxing.

Other favorites include Salzburg (Austria), Dublin, Rome, and Florence. It really is hard to choose, there were just so many places with plenty to appreciate, each with a pointed uniqueness that makes them hard to compare to each other. Plus, it's a really subjective thing to say "I liked this city" or the opposite since each person's experiences are different and we were only in each of these places for a few days, you know?

Do you really want to know something though? Do you want to know which places we went that I liked the least? Of course you do, here you go:

1)Vienna, Austria: Way too much glamor for not much actual substance. If I want to shop I’ll go to Paris, people, you gotta have something cool to show me.
2) Berlin, Germany: I think it’s actually a really cool city but we were a bit overwhelmed by the confusion and underwhelmed by the explanation of the sights. I would certainly try again though.
3) Amsterdam, Netherlands: Dirty, low-life, deep fried. That’s how we saw Amsterdam. Not Holland’s best side I don’t think. Next destination please.
4) Belfast, Northern Ireland: Not really a bad city but just a bit dreary and not a whole lot to do. Pretty dang cold and rainy too, at least when we were there. They’re up and coming though, watch them for the future.

What else? South-west Germany was the prettiest landscapes, Budapest's baths were the most uniquely fun activity, London felt most like home*, Paris had the best pastries, Italians were the nicest people. Although, interestingly, New Yorkers are pretty nice too. But I might be cutting them extra slack since I was so happy to finally be in my own country again.

Universal truths in the First World: Starbucks and McDonald's. Additionally: Asian people own gift shops and Middle Eastern people sell things on the sidewalks. I'm not stereotyping them, they do it to themselves, I swear. Also, Che Guevara paraphernalia is the most ubiquitous souvenir item in all of Europe. You can get a Che Guevara magnet in any major city in Europe, that is what I have learned. There are also Che playing cards, pens, t-shirts, post cards, or thimbles** which you can also buy just about anywhere. Thank goodness for capitalism and thank you Che for somehow managing to be the latest poster boy for it, even though I'm pretty sure you spent your entire life fighting against exactly that.

Since we've gotten back we keep being asked, "So what was your favorite part of your travels?". This questions is too broad - can you please specify slightly so that I don't go on and on with a response? Even "What was your favorite city in Europe" or "What did you most like about Australia" or "Are French people actually stinky" would be easier for me. Either way, if you're reading this, you've already had some of these questions answered so the point is a bit moot.

Eat, sleep, walk, carry, think, dodge, and of course spend. That was the name of the game for the past 4-5 months and, though it was great, I'm glad it's over. It is rather exhausting living out of a suitcase, always having to plan the next few days of your life, and never staying in one place long enough to make good friends, develop a favorite hang out spot, or eat home-cooked food. Not that it wasn't worth it - it totally was - but these are the things that you don't really consider when you dreamily envision traveling the globe. But they do compound quickly when you're away from home for more than a week or so.

Anyway, I'm apparently rambling, so, I'll stop here. If you have any questions (if anyone still reads this) I'd be happy to post a response in the comments. Or, god forbid, you could speak to me in real life about it. But no pressure there, I know it's a lot of commitment to make a phone call, that's why I don't just do it. =)

*It was pretty much no contest - they speak English and they have black people, so that's as close to CA as you're gonna get in Europe and that's all there is to it.
**Ok, I may be making up the whole Che thimbles thing, that probably doesn't exist. Che baby spoons though, for sure.

Che photo courtesy of the internet. Thank you internet.

Motel 6

2009-11-06T23:12:00.000-08:00

Ok, I’ve been distracted. This blog is supposed to be for our epic world travels, but, I’ve recently had an experience and have nowhere else to deposit my mindless ravings. And after all, this is indeed related to travel. So, let’s get to it.

On Wednesday Kane and I made a trip down to San Luis Obispo to see some friends and pet our excessively grumpy cat. I hadn’t really thought it would be a particularly special trip but it really turned out to be. We only stayed one night, but it was like a true homecoming for Kane and me. Not to say that coming home to the Bay wasn’t, but we really had an established life down in SLO before heading overseas and reconnecting with the people we saw daily was different than just coming home to family. Family has to love you no matter when you come home; our SLO crew doesn’t have to give a crap if they don’t want to. But they do and boy are there some fine folks down there. We met up with our old Woods friends (and brought the doggies some presents), had a volleyball reunion with our old crew (they’ve gotten to be amazing players, by the way), were reminded how big of an attitude our cat has, were finally introduced to Eric’s new special lady, and were treated to sushi* by Thom and the old Ella Street gang. We were truly in high spirits.

And in harmony with our super reunions was a glorious place that I had previously taken for granted. I had written her off as just a crappy motel for people who were too cheap to stay at the Embassy Suites or the Comfort Inn (i.e. me and my family) and completely overlooked how extremely and superbly clean and adequate Motel 6 is. Yep, Motel 6. I do not use the word "adequate" in an insulting way at all - on the contrary - I use it to describe exactly what the word means: "as much or as good as necessary for some requirement or purpose; fully sufficient". Fully sufficient - exactly.

In five months of traveling, I honestly tell you that this is exactly what we were looking for. We wanted the basics for as cheap as possible. 1) The room is a reasonable size: not "spacious" but more than enough room for two persons to move around and access their luggage. 2) The bathroom is a reasonable size: again, not large but big enough that you're not required to shower, pee and wash your hands all from the same spot. 3) It's clean: crisp sheets, painted walls, vacuumed floors, spotless bathroom - is it really that much to ask? 4) It's sufficiently quiet: no overbearing nearby common areas and decent separations between rooms/floors. And, with all that, can it still be cheap? It can indeed, says Motel 6.

It doesn't sound that difficult to find a place that has a bare-bones room for a low price, believe you me, it is. You're either in a b&b or a decent motel for (easily) over $100/night or you're in a hostel of questionable character for about half that (or more). And even if you find a good deal, you end up sorting through a zillion tripadvisor.com reviews trying to tell who's got the "real" insight into the place and second guessing your choice the whole way though.

Motel 6 offers consistency. They're clean, they have 24 hour reception desks, they have freaking custom made Motel 6-themed bedspreads. It's nothing special and I don't need it to be for $41/night. I ask for "reasonable", "adequate" and "cheap" and, by George, Motel 6 leaves the light on for me**.

*Oh good god, we’ve been waiting so long for some California sushi…sorry Australia, it’s just not the same.

**I should be getting paid for this promo crap, shouldn't I?

Sky Mall

2009-11-01T07:46:00.000-08:00

I kid you not when I tell you that the Sky Mall catalog was my in flight entertainment all the way back from New York to California. Kane and I had separate flights (he flew to Seattle) and there were no personal TVs on Delta's finest (surprise). Fortunately, we customers are granted something far more exciting than a choice between Two and a Half Men and Journey to the Center of the Earth; the Sky Mall catalog provides more than just useless crap to the people who have everything.

I honestly spent hours just flipping the pages of this magazine, happily skipping over the opportunity to review the emergency procedures for a Boeing 747. If we're going down, I don't think my knowledge of the proper crash sitting position will help much; I'm sure kicking and screaming will suffice, no further research is required. But Sky Mall, however, did deserve my attention. I read description after colorful description for completely ridiculous and utterly useless goods (and services!). My Stephanie Meyer book would have wait; the literature in the Sky Mall catalog could not be ignored.

I think the best way to convey to you my feelings on the many items offered in the Sky Mall catalog is just to pick a select few and review them with you. Like any retailer of fine goods, Sky Mall is also fully available online, god bless them. Let's get started.

Do you love the crust of a home-baked cake? Are you tired of putting up with slices of a homemade chocolate brownie that don't have the delicious crunchy edges? Well, you need suffer no longer, Sky Mall offers the Edge Baking Pan: a pan with a snake shaped void so that every piece of your baked goods has at least two yummy crispy sides*!
Next up is another kitchen-oriented item that can save you time and paper! Oh, well maybe not paper since it can also print - this is a Voice Recognition Grocery List Maker. I don't know about you, but I am sick and tired of the simplicity and ease of writing my grocery list on any scrap of paper laying around. I have been waiting for a device to wrestle with such that this inane task can be turned into something adequately high-tech and complicated. I mean, you can even manage two separate lists simultaneously on this device! I wonder if they provide technical support when you go insane from using it?
Still in the kitchen but moving to the pantry, I pose this quandary to you: Are you overweight but you freaking love cookies? Well, have I got the diet for you! This is the Hollywood Cookie Diet that lets you eat as many cookies as you want and still lose weight! Nevermind that you need to eat a cookie instead of a meal and that these aren't just any cookies, they are "packed with fiber, protein and 13 essential vitamins and minerals" so I bet they're only slightly less delicious than mom's. But, it says that Debbie lost 5 pounds in 3 days, so it must work, right?
Let's move now to your watch management strategy. What, you don't have any form of watch management currently operating in your life? Shame on you. Fortunately, Sky Mall is here to help. To prevent you from drowning in the sea of watches you no doubt own and have flung carelessly all over your home and office, SM offers the very civilized and sleek Watch Storage Case. Stop losing watch after watch every day and instead catalog them by color and date purchased in your new extremely unnecessary organizer! Anal retentiveness not included.
Into the bedroom - oh la la: do you lay on your bed at night, trying to read a book or do your taxes and you are just profoundly uncomfortable? And yet you don't want to acquire any more pillows or simply move to into a nearby chair? Well, SM offers an item for you - an extremely bulky yet only marginally more comfortable Superior Comfort Bed Lounger. You know it's good when they had to put the words "superior comfort" in the title. After that, the thing just sells itself!
Are you cheesy? Do you think really ridiculous and childish things are neat? Are you a redneck? If you answer yes to any of these questions, you may be interested in these new Superman Returns Cufflinks. Because even though SM is fairly certain that anyone with the desire (read: nerve) to wear these most certainly would never be wearing a suit, they sell them with a bold face anyway! Clever, Sky Mall, very clever.
Now, do you like the president? Maybe you voted for him and the day he won was the best day of your life. Maybe you cut out every article in every magazine and newspaper pertaining to Mr. Obama and his family and you keep a scrapbook as if he were your own dear son. If President-stalking is your style, you may be interested in this framed artist's sketch of The First Couple. Sky Mall understands that sometimes you just need to be closer to someone famous, even when the police just don't get it. Now the Obamas can grace your mantle or bedroom wall, replacing many of your actual relatives who just aren't as pretty or interesting.
As a refreshing interlude, let's explore some of the "health and wellness" items on offer at SM. These are some of the most entertaining products, I have to say. The massage section alone provides nearly endless comedic fodder. For example, the Head Spa Massager looks like an item direct out of the movie Tron. "For all your futuristic head-gear needs. Borg laser eye-sight sold separately."

Then there's the Vibrating Head Massager, which, except for the picture of the woman ecstatically demonstrating the item, one would have no idea what to do with this thing. Looks a bit like something out of War of the Worlds or the little gadgets that chase people in Fahrenheit 451. I'm gonna not put that near my head, thank you very much.

Another massage must-have on SM is the Mobile Massage System which not only looks like an attacking amoeba-like space alien, but the product description appears to be for another item altogether. Not really selling it here, guys. Though I'm sure, gauging from all the other spectacular items for sale, it's top notch.
One more self-improvement item is the Endless Pool Swimming Machine. We've all seen these advertised on infomercials and I don't even think they're too terrible of an idea, but I just cannot imagine making a $21,000 purchase from the Sky Mall catalog. Seriously, not my first choice of places to buy my high-end never-to-be-used exercise equipment. But maybe that's just me.

And now for my favorite health and wellness item and perhaps my overall favorite SM catalog item: The Personal Infrared Sauna! This gem of an invention uses "in-floor radiant heat to help improve the immune system by increasing the blood flow, starting at the feet". It improves your immune system to sit in a particleboard box in your living room - who would have guessed! And as an added bonus, you do not look at all ridiculous assembling or using this miracle in modern technology! I do hope they include instructions to help you get in and out of the thing; it doesn't exactly look user friendly. It does look a little like something the Nazis may have used, but maybe I'm just being outrageous.
Ok, so you weren't sold by the massage amoeba or the sauna box, but have a look at this item. What do you get for the person who has everything - it's an age old question, right? Well, how about an Executive Health Evaluation?! From what I can tell, this is a $3,500 doctor's visit. Granted, it's a "5-star treatment" at one of their "beautiful, contemporary centers", but I'm really not seeing how this can cost so much. Oh, I see, maybe because "benefits may include: decreased risk of age-related disease, improved muscle tone, and sharper thinking"? I'm pretty sure eating an apple may include these benefits also, but I'm no doctor. Start forking out the cash, friend.

So what if this "person who has everything" is smart, maybe a bit geeky? You're pretty sure they won't use the exercise equipment and they won't appreciate the Superman cufflinks (what a shame!). Maybe they have an entire wall of their house just empty and waiting for something heinously huge and non-artistic to fill the void? In that case, the Largest Crossword Puzzle in the world might do the trick. I've just gotten really bored of crossword puzzles that were on normal sized paper that can be completed in manageable setting. I'm pretty sure I want to adorn my home or office with an oversized tribute to my intellectual superiority and to stand in front of this shrine day after day to complete a puzzle which no mere mortal could finish. I am great and I would like all the friends I don't have to make note of this when I don't invite them over to my house. Nice khaki pants, crossword puzzle model man, and good choice at turning your face away from the camera.
Ok, you could see how I could go on and on here. This catalog just provides so much amusement that I just could not contain myself. I was going to continue with discussions of the Skyrest Travel Pillow, which, though it is actually quite a practical solution, would be hilarious to see on an airplane (see the picture on the link). Or the A Christmas Story Leg Lamp, for the dude who's way too obsessed with that movie to the point of being creepy about it. Or the baffling 6 Piece Puzzle Mat, because a regular roll-up mat is just too uncool. This catalog is just chock full of ridiculousness and it's freaking great.

Side note - if you happen to own any of the items that I have mocked, please do not take offense. I actually thought twice about buying the Marshmallow Shooter because I firmly believe that marshmallows should have the capacity to be projected across any given space at any given moment. We all have and love ridiculous things, it's ok to laugh about it. I mean, someone's gotta buy this stuff right?

*Kane actually wants one of these, he hates the undercooked center of a brownie.
Note: All photos courtesy of the Sky Mall website: www.skymall.com

These Vagabond Shoes

2009-10-30T08:58:00.000-07:00

I finally did it: I bought new shoes. I got them at a DSW in New York and I threw away my old Nikes that I’ve had for about 5 years. You may recall me complaining about the old shoes once or twice (or, if you’re Kane, 1000 times); they were so worn out that they were becoming quite useless. They still had the parts that allowed the shoe to physically hold onto my foot and I think that’s the only reason why I still wore them. The underside was so worn down that little flaps had formed that scraped when I walked. Water could get in from the bottom and holes near the toes on top. The inside heel was worn completely away and a piece of whatever’s-inside-a-shoe would flip over and stab my heel every time I put my feet in. It was getting to be ridiculous.

I had refused to buy new shoes in Australia because they are heinously expensive as compared to the States. I tried to buy shoes before we left for Australia, 2 years ago, but ended up running out of time before I found any I liked. I also tried to purchase some on our visit to California last year, but again could not find any I liked. I was being too picky, I will admit. And I paid for it with increasingly decrepit shoes. But alas, DSW provides.

I didn’t want to buy anything in NY because it would just mean I’d have to carry it back to CA, which I thought was sort of silly since there’s pretty much all the same stuff for purchase here. So I restrained myself in the block-long Macy’s. But if I replaced my old shoes I wouldn’t have anything additional since I would just chuck them on the spot. Flawless logic - let’s buy things.

After searching through the mile-long row of women’s athletic shoes at DSW, I became painfully aware that my feet do not fit into “normal-sized” women’s shoes anymore. At least not athletic shoes. I used to wear a size 10, but apparently not anymore. Either the shoes are smaller or my feet or bigger but either way, it’s not working. Apparently it’s inconceivable to the DSW at Union Square that a full grown woman would have feet this large. My feet are so ridiculously oversized that I must be some sort of rare phenomenon - like big foot (ha) or a yeti, minus all the hair on the feet.

Kane finally suggested that I just skip over one aisle and try on some men's shoes. He pointed out that there really isn't much difference between men's and women's athletic shoes except that the women's ones are smaller (detrimentally so, apparently) and sometimes have pink on them. The men's shoes weren't so bad, really, except that I ended up having to buy a size that really did look like it should only fit on a man. My shoes are shown to the left.

I wear a men's size 9.5 in Asics shoes. A European size 43.5. Seriously, ogre in the house.

I decided to get Asics because they make gel shoes. It's new (ish), it's high tech, it's super comfy. I tried on some Adidas and they felt nice. So did the New Balances. But the Asics gel shoes were a step above (pun certainly intended). They made the others feel like a slab of cardboard under my tender feet; the gel felt like walking on a fluffy feather bed. Plus, Kane mentioned that his dad swears by them. Not that his dad "likes" Asics gel shoes, but that he indeed places his right hand onto the shoes and swears. Maybe that would be "swears on them", but whatever. The man is serious about his gel. And I don't argue with an ex-All American Wrestler when it comes to athletic shoes - I just hand over my credit card.

My Little Town Blues Are Melting Away

2009-10-26T11:58:00.000-07:00

I would like to start by saying that hanging around this city for three full days had the Frank Sinatra song stuck in my head indefinitely. I felt like such a goober walking around singing that. Here, you can have a listen to the inside of my head for the last few days:

But on to more interesting fare: Our Three Days In New York City. We arrived in NY on Oct 20 after an eight hour flight from Dusseldorf (following 2 hr layover and flight from Munich) without personal televisions. If making someone sit in a ridiculously small chair for eight hours with no entertainment available isn’t a crime, it should be. But instead of pressing charges, we paid good money for those seats.

Fortunately, the plane arrived at JFK at the agreed time and our luggage came through, which I suppose were the main parts of the agreement. The flight landed at around 5pm, we had our luggage an hour later, and two or so hours after that we were finally in Manhattan approaching our sad excuse for a hostel. It was a long day.

But we were jazzed; we were back in our home country and only a few days away from being really home on the West Coast. I’ll talk about home later, now it’s time to discuss New York. I’ve technically been to NY when I was about 12, but I think that hardly counts since I don’t remember much, wasn’t in charge of anything we did, and had no concept of the layout of the city. Plus, I don’t think I had quite the introspective capabilities to analyze foreign lands (yes, I’m considering the east coast foreign – it is!) based on their customs and social practices when I was a pre-teen. I did know how to identify a crazy person though, and it’s true that they are still here.

New York City is a truly interesting place. It seems that when you smoosh a million or so people onto a tiny island things just go a bit nuts. Population density is proportional to insanity, I have found (I can make a chart if that would help). And NY is no different; it may, in fact, be the leader of the pack. More crazies per capita than anywhere I’ve ever been, that’s for sure. And I don’t just mean homeless people in your face or drunk teen-agers shouting on the streets (though I’m sure these can be found aplenty), I mean normal people like you and me that waltz around the city with a crazed glint in their eye.

They look normal, they’re dressed pretty standard, but they’re shouting obscenities into a cell phone in the middle of a Starbucks. Or, they look like they’re on their way to a business meeting, but instead of toting a briefcase, they are carrying an axe. Ok, I made that last one up, but you get the idea; these people are just a little off. Which does not mean they’re not friendly. Indeed, no, most of the people we encountered were extremely nice and helpful, offering subway advice and directions like we were old friends. Of course, some people are just surly jerks, but, welcome to the world, right?

My favorite normal-slash-crazy person we saw was a woman standing on a street corner. She was dressed in business attire with a long beige overcoat on. She had well-kept light brown hair, left down and reaching slightly below her shoulders. She wore makeup and carried a leather briefcase. She looked completely normal except that she was standing at a street corner waiting for the light to turn with her mouth completely open and a ridiculous, over-the-top surprised/shocked look on her face. It looked as though someone had just been murdered across the intersection in front of her white-collared eyes.

Turning to look where she was focused, there was nothing to be seen. Kane and I looked at each other. Maybe she just remembered something; she left the iron on at home or whatever. Glancing back after we passed her, she remained in the same position. It was as though she was catatonic. It was ridiculous and beyond speculation of an explanation. Which seems to be what a lot of New Yorkers are going for: you really need to be a freak to stand out amongst these folks.

Aside from the droves of people in New York, which can be a site unto themselves, there are also a billion noteworthy landmarks and attractions to see. Good ones too. We really didn’t even scratch the surface in only three days, but we did the NBC studios tour, went to the top of the Empire State Building, strolled through Central Park, were visually overwhelmed by Times Square, viewed the Statue of Liberty from the Staten Island Ferry, wandered down Wall Street, stopped by the big empty space that is Ground Zero, and had lots of classic New York and American foodstuffs in between.

The first two days we were there the weather was gorgeous: sunny, warm, t-shirt time. The day before we left, Friday, the weather turned and we were caught out in the freezing windyness all day, much to my dismay. Overall, however, it was an excellent visit and I was glad to be re-acquainted with a city I visited so long ago. I would happily visit again, preferably in the early fall or late spring when the weather is likely to hold.

See the rest of our pictures of NYC here.

On Saturday, Kane and I boarded our respective flights to the West Coast, finally! I arrived back in Hayward at 4:45 with Dad waiting at the airport to pick me up, and Kane landed in Seattle at just about the same time, spending one last week visiting a couple friends and his momma in Washington and Oregon.

So, that was it, that was the trip. I will be further blogging regarding the aftermath of this whole extravaganza; spending totals (with charts included – you can’t wait!), summarizing musings, reflections, and our new life on the rebound. So, stay tuned for the epilogue, even though the pictures probably won’t be as exciting.

Pizza-athon

2009-10-23T13:57:00.004-07:00

As we headed to Italy in late September, Kane made a pact with himself. He vowed to eat as many pizzas in our three week trip as he possibly could.

Let me back up and tell you that Kane loves pizza. He loves all pizza, be it American, Australian, Italian, or frozen. Bread, tomato sauce, cheese. His very favorite is Margherita pizza, but I think he'll eat just about any kind happily. We had “pizza Fridays” in Melbourne where we would patronize his very favorite pizza place ever, Medici, on the ground floor of our building. I would wager that he could eat pizza every day for eternity and still have a huge smile on his face on the millionth bite.

So, in the land where pizza was invented (if not perfected), Kane vowed to gorge himself.

We were in Italy for 20 days, but the first and last were the travel days in and out, so we're only really counting 18 full days of Italian tourism. And therefore, 18 days were available for pizzas to be consumed by Kane. His initial goal was to have a 3:2 ratio of pizzas to days, meaning 3 pizzas every 2 days, or 1.5 pizzas a day average. It was plain pretty soon that this would be very difficult. I will take the blame and say that if I weren't there to fuss over food and insist on not constantly eating pizza, he probably could have done it. My digestive system, however, is not as resilient as his; I need other kinds of food too.

And so, over the 18 days we were walking, talking, and eating Italian, Kane consumed a whopping... 25 pizzas. Yes I photographed every single pizza he ate just so that this collage could be made. Isn't it impressive? Isn't it gorgeous?? I think so. Kane drools at the sight. You may notice that only 24 pizzas are shown in the picture, which is because one night he ate two identical pizzas from the same take away place (he was hungry), and I only took a picture of one of them since they were the same. It makes the collage neater, so it worked out.

And, he actually came quite close to his 3:2 goal; only 2 more pizzas and he would have been on target. I'm proud of him anyway. As for Kane's single favorite pizza? The winner, the champion, the best pizza in the world?? Margherita pizza, Medici's Restaurant, Melbourne, Australia. Go. Freaking. Figure.

Venice, and That's a Wrap

2009-10-21T08:19:00.003-07:00

On the 14^th we took an arduous train journey from Cinque Terre back through Florence and over to Venice. We only spent one full day in Venice, but it was a nice end to our tour through Italy. The only unfortunate part of the deal was that central Europe has been hit by an episode of “early winter” with which follow symptoms including record low temperatures, unexpected snow fall, and incessant complaining.

Since Venice is in the northeast corner of Italy, bordering Switzerland and Austria, it was definitely affected by this unhappy bout of cold. No more capri pants and t-shirts for me; I had to whip out all the defenses I had with me, which weren't plentiful. It did not deter us (much) though, we still took our day and walked all around Venice. Over bridges, through alleys, into pizzerias.

See Venice pics here.

Venice is a nice town. I think its entire purpose at this point in its long history is to exist completely for the amusement of tourists. I'm pretty sure any semblance of the original culture is gone, replaced by a hundred thousand souvenir shops and exorbitant prices. That said, the place still retains its uniqueness. Obviously it's a city built on water; it's ancient, it's got a maze of canals, it's littered by bridges. Besides it being seemingly entirely occupied by tourists, it's still a comfortable place. It's clean, vibrant, and has an air of richness about it that I think even the most travel-weary can enjoy. I think it would actually be one of the easiest places to visit if you were making a trip across the pond; it's like Europe 101.

One thing I found endearing (that could also possibly be interpreted as infuriating) is that it is simultaneously extremely simple and completely impossible to get around this island. What I mean by that is that the whole place is a tightly woven web of very old alleyways and canals. There are no cars. No streets are at ninety degrees from each other. There is no grid, no order, no rhyme, no reason. If you want to walk around, you just start walking and pretty soon you'll have gotten around – easy as that. If you want to visit somewhere in particular, however, good luck.

Kane and I have excellent senses of direction and we had maps and there was no way to get anywhere (except the train station, thank goodness, that's a straight shot) in a timely or direct fashion. The streets are at all kinds of angles so even the keenest sense of direction is easily thrown. You constantly find yourself in dead ends, either facing a building or a canal. The street signs are perhaps even more minimal than in the rest of Italy because they apparently don't think it's worth the bother to label tiny alleys, even though that's the only kind of roads there are.

I found that if you're willing to just go with the flow, it's totally fun and extremely entertaining to just meander around for hours at a time. If you're trying to get somewhere on a schedule, you might be better off jumping in a big canal and swimming there because at least the waterways are marked on the maps.

Another interesting thing about Venice are the exports. I don't mean sugar cane and coffee beans or whatever, I mean all the junk at the souvenir/nick knack shops. We've been all around this continent and you typically see the same old crap wherever you go: post cards, magnets, scarfs, t-shirts, candy, etc. Some places will have a particular type of local craft (read: junk) that's on offer, very rarely is it impressive or tempting for me to buy.

But Venice has approximately a billion shops selling almost exclusively masks or glass goods. Apparently it is a local tradition to make glass (I guess it's called Murano glass) and they have really gone wild with the concept. Entire stores are filled with colorful glass figurines, ash trays (or change trays, as I like to use them), beads, necklaces, clocks, vases, and on and on. And then another ton of stores are devoted entirely to theatrical-looking masks. Glittery masks, porcelain masks, masks with hats, masks with huge noses. I'm not sure why this is the case, nor am I sure what one does with one of these masks (I did see one Asian woman trying them on over her face, which I found funny). They were pretty though. I think some of them had a mounting such that it can hang as a wall decoration, but most of them looked life-sized, like a person could wear them. Where? For Halloween or something? I may never know. But it's ok, they were pretty to look at.

So, we had fun for our short stint in Venice, and then we boarded our longest train ride of the trip (7 hrs total) from Venice to Munich. It was better than flying though, I can say that. We spent three days sitting around in Jon's apartment, vegging out appropriately, and then spent our final day in Munich hanging out with two of our friends from Australia, Damien and Grace, who are now picking up where we're leaving off and traveling all around Europe. It was so awesome to see them and we hope they can come visit California next year! Now we're off to NY to three final days before returning to the West Coast!!

A Little Slice of Heaven

2009-10-17T02:34:00.012-07:00

No, I'm actually not talking about food this time. Not a cake nor a tart nor a pie of any sort. You don't believe that I would call something "a slice of heaven" if it weren't covered in chocolate ganache, do you? I don't blame you; you know me well.

But alas, it is actually a national park I speak of. And it's different than any national park you might know in America or Australia. We're not talking rivers and grassland, camping and bird watching. We're talking about five tiny, centuries-old villages perched along a mountainous stretch of the Mediterranean coast in northwestern Italy. We are talking about Cinque Terre.

Cinque Terre (pronounced cheen-kway terr-ay) means Five Lands and refers to the five villages that were built by hand into the hillsides over the centuries, documented back to approximately 500 AD. More amazing than just the villages themselves are the crops that have been painstakingly terraced into the hillsides; their main yield being mostly grapes for wine, as far as I can tell. These hills aren't exactly of "rolling" caliber, however, they are steep, forbidding cliffs that are literally being held together by the crops growing on them. It would have been quite a feat to build.

Which always makes me wonder - why did these people plant crops and build villages here? You see this time and again in human history: groups of people overcoming massive obstacles in their locale of choice for what seems like no real reason. Couldn't these people suck it up and move their stuff down the coast a few miles where the mountains aren't so heinous? I suppose in a lot of cases it's literally impossible to understand all the reasons that went into these types of decisions. Makes the world a more interesting place, doesn't it?

Ok, I digress. Back to it. The villages themselves are a bit like Disneyland. The pastel painted, boxy little structures all crammed together with laundry lines dangling from the windows are totally out of travel magazines and story books. Even walking through the towns I was amazed that it was real.

I think if you look up "quaint" in the dictionary, you may find a picture of one of these adorably run-down, ticky-tacky buildings with a cuddly, squishy, shawl-clad Italian woman out front selling fruit to passersby. I bought a pear. I restrained the urge to hug this woman and her half-toothed grin. I can now see how fairy tales were created.

On a related note, these people actually use the phrase "Mamma mia!". I giggle with delight each time.

There are hiking trails that lead between the five towns and all up in the hills (mountains, really) behind, and the whole area is a national park and, more recently, a UNESCO World Heritage site. All this helps preserve the area just the way it is - no roads for cars, no new buildings, limited tourist traffic (though there are plenty of tourists, I assure you), etc.

Let's start with the furthest town southeast, Riomaggiore. We stayed in this town in a tiny apartment up a ridiculously steep staircase (no elevator) down a teeny little alley. Picture this with all the cuteness possible and no worries of thieves or even beggars. It's all the old-world charm without the burden of social degradation attached. See why I say heaven? Here's Riomaggiore as seen from the peninsula outcropping near the marina:

As for the rest of the towns, they're all pretty similar until you get to the northwest most city, Monterossa, which is more beach-y and modern. It's also less awesome, in my opinion, but we weren't there for too long, so, hard to say. Anyway, here's a one-pic summary of each of the towns:

Manarola:
Corniglia:

Vernazza:

and Monterosso:

As for a favorite village, I would have to say that they seem to all have their charms: Riomaggiore was the perhaps the most photogenic while Manarola appeared to have the most bustling main street. Corniglia seemed to be the quietest and Vernazza had the best piazza on the marina with umbrella-covered restaurants a-plenty. Monterosso was the best if you like beach bummin', but we don't so there wasn't much for us there. I would probably say that Vernazza would be my fav, but they really were all so, so cool.

For the full gamut of pictures, including a couple from our quick stopover in Pisa*, please see the Cinque Terre Picture Album. Next (and last) stop: Venice!

*I would like to note that the faulty foundations under that stupid tower was the best thing that ever happened to Pisa. If that tower were straight and plumb, no one would have ever heard of Pisa, much less bought any overpriced sandwiches from the millions of surly vendors on the main drag. Not that I'm bitter or anything.

Smells Like Florentine Spirit*

2009-10-15T00:42:00.013-07:00

Florence is the Yin to Rome's Yang. It's Italy's San Luis Obispo where Rome is its Los Angeles. It's civil and clean and upscale. It's small and homey and easy to navigate. We spent four relaxing nights in an adorable B&B on the first floor (Americans call it the 2^nd floor) of an old stone building by the river. We did not wake up to cars honking and people yelling. We instead awoke to the smell of cappuccino and the murmur of our fellow guests having their breakfast down the hall.

We walked around the town each day and it was pleasant and comfortable. The weather was beautiful most of the time and the city is extremely inviting. The city itself has less than half a million people which tones down the pace of life already, as compared to the metropolises we've already encountered (Rome, Naples). I'm not sure exactly why Florence is so much more calm and clean than cities in the south, but it seems to be just the way it is. Our friend from the language class described the different regions of Italy as all being extremely different; it's quite a phenomenon.

Before we go any further, may I direct you to my Florence Photo Album to go along with this entry.

The main site in Florence is the Duomo (Dome) of the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore, a huge cathedral with a gigantic brick (yes, brick!) dome completed in 1436 and engineered by Brunelleschi which was the largest of its kind at the time, and still the largest masonry dome in the world. Huge engineering feat and all that. And it's still standing there, the tallest structure in the city, its enormous unreinforced brick dome held together by ancient timber tension rings. Yep, the thrust (pardon the engineer speak – thrust just means outward force) of the dome is taken out by concentric wood beams tied sloppily together with iron fittings. I have no idea how that's possible, but apparently they were a lot more efficient at engineering back in the day**.

We trudged up the mildly terrifying 483 steps to the top of the Duomo and had a grand old time elbowing other tourists (I aim for the German ones) for some spectacular views of the city below. Fun! And, our hotel was so close to town (about 15 minute walk down the scenic riverside) that we were able to head to the room for a mid-day rest whenever we wanted. Quite a change from our endurance-challenge in Rome.

We spent the rest of our time wandering around the streets (safe, clean, pretty), looking in shop fronts (expensive), eating (pizza, gelato, no change here), and seeing the few sights. There actually are quite a few things to see in the city, but they're not exactly Rome caliber. Aside from the Duomo, we walked across the famous old bridge, Ponte Vecchio, lined in jewelry shops; we strolled the piazza adjacent the Uffizi Gallery and photographed the replica David statue standing in the original's spot; we hiked up the hill to the southeast of the city to view the city from above at Piazzale Michelangelo (the Wiki entry has a rad panoramic - my pic below is just ok).

We even paid outrageous admission to see the real statue of David in the Archeological Museum in the north of the town. It really is an incredible statue; we were adequately impressed. Other than that, we really didn't do a whole lot and that was fine for us. Our trip is winding down and so are we. It's time to be done with these shenanigans. But not before just a few more stops...Cinque Terre on the northwest coast, Venice in the northeast, Munich one last time, and then a brief stop in New York City before we are reacquainted again with the smiling faces of our California (and Oregon, for Kane) friends and family.

*It's a play on words of the Nirvana song Smells Like Teen Spirit. It was hard to come up with a pun for the title since "Florence" and "Florentine" don't rhyme with much anything. Other candidates were: A Florence by Any Other Name, and Eggs Florentine. If you can think of a good one, I'd be curious to see; please leave a comment.

**Now we would use steel for such things; it is far better in tension than wood, as you might imagine. And it degrades far less easily.

Picture Ketchup

2009-10-14T13:16:00.005-07:00

Not ketchup, silly, catch-up! I run out of titles for these posts, you know? Gotta change it up a bit, keep you on your toes.

The point is that I've been blathering on about all these wonderful things for the past couple weeks but have been hoarding the visuals all to myself. They're all mine! You can't see!! Ok, yes you can. And here you shall.

Let's get caught up. Way back when, we were in Switzerland and then stopped through Munich to catch a glimpse of Oktoberfest. Remember these things? Well, here are some pictures so you can see.

Switzerland and Oktoberfest Pictures

Where after that...oh yes, we flew over to Roma. And took a respectable amount of pictures there, as deserved. She's such a pretty city, if you look over the beggars and around the dog doo. Pictures, coming up!

Rome Pictures

Next stop was a little detour down south to Naples where we dodged some serious garbage-ridden streets and made it over to the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Feast your eyes on these pics!

Pompeii and Herculaneum Pictures

Ah, there. Now we're just about caught up. At this very moment we've just arrived in Venice after spending four days in Cinque Terre and four days before that in Florence. So, we're not exactly caught up, are we? No, but we're getting there. Shortly I will tell you tales of Florence with visual aides ready and waiting, and then I will describe the wonders of beautiful Cinque Terre before, finally, revealing all there is to know about Venice*! The blog finale awaits!

*By "all there is to know", I mean all that I know. There is a significant gap between the two that I thought would be prudent to tell you about. We do live in a very litigious society, you know.

Let's Talk Pompeii

2009-10-09T07:51:00.012-07:00

Do you like really old stuff? How about volcanoes? How about time travel?? Well, if you like the first two, have I got a couple places for you to see! If you like the third then read a damn book or go watch Star Trek or something. We're talking old ruined towns here, not Picard's journey back to the 19th century*, and Pompeii and Herculaneum are certainly world-class.

So, brief, relatively accurate historical summary: in the early centuries B.C. there were people around Mount Vesuvius and they were living the life. They built their little stone cities, they partied on the beach, they oppressed the women and slaves, or whatever they did for fun back then. Then, in 62 A.D. there was a gnarly earthquake that knocked a lot of their neat little un-engineered buildings down. They started to put them back up, but just 17 years later in 79, Mount Vesuvius threw a huge hissy fit and rained ash and pumice down on all the surrounding little towns killing everyone around and burying everything under tons and tons of volcano goo.

Fast forward to 1700 years later when someone accidentally finds these buried towns and begins unofficial excavations. A bunch of cool stuff was pillaged from the sites for the next many years and then real excavations started in the mid-1800's. Even today both sites are still being excavated, and a good chunk of Herculaneum is trapped under the modern day city with no apparent plans to unearth it.

Whew! Ok, so there you go. Obviously, the cool thing about these places is the way that the volcano's ashes covered the cities, preserving them almost perfectly for so long. Pompeii was buried below 12-60 feet of ash and mud and Herculaneum below around 60 feet (though there appears to be some discrepancy - get it together Wikipedia editors!) and besides the burnt remains of any organics (wood, people, food, clothes) and the structural collapses from the weight of the debris, most everything else in the city remained intact underground for 1700 years.

During the extensive excavations, they have found all sorts of pottery, tools, statues, frescoes on the walls, and mosaic tiled floors, in addition, of course, to half of all the buildings (the bottom half, typically) revealing the exact layout of the towns' streets and structures. The archaeologists seem to know the purpose of each of the buildings (houses, stores, brothels, etc) and, often, who the owners of the residences were. It's pretty amazing.

If you've never heard of Herculaneum, it's basically just another town about 10 miles away from Pompeii that suffered a similar fate. The place is far smaller but even better preserved. The cool thing about Herculaneum is that it wasn't initially in the path of the volcano's main pyroclastic flows so many of the houses filled up with ash and debris before the wind shifted and the real poo hit the fan. Therefore, many of the structures were all nicely supported by this debris and many of the roofs didn't collapse. So there's a bunch of buildings almost entirely in-tact, roof and all. It's so cool!

Also, since the initial stuff that rained down on Herculaneum wasn't a bagillion-gillion degrees, it didn't entirely destroy every piece of wood in the place. It singed most of it to hell and certainly killed all the people no problem, but there are still some of the wood beams in place that were there 2000 years ago. Now that is rad.

On Sunday, after taking longer to figure out the stupid train system than we actually spent at the site, we finally made it to Herculaneum for a mid-afternoon visit. It was a beautiful day, as seems to be standard in southern Italy in October, and the place was stunning. This site is far smaller than Pompeii and is therefore a bit more manageable. Though I think I still could go back ten more times and find something new each time. It's a maze of cobbled streets with a grid of ruins all around it. But, as I mentioned, some of the structures are almost completely in-tact. Click the collage to see it larger:

Plus, since it's totally a tourist thing, it's cleaner and quieter than any place around**, which was a nice change from hanging out in Naples. Loved it, would highly recommend.

Monday we took the same train (less difficulty this time - we're pros now) further down and walked around the sprawling ruins of Pompeii. The place is 164 acres, 2/3 of which is excavated (or so they tell me). It's massive. You might imagine, knowing our patience levels, that we did not see every building . And, to be honest, by the end they sort of all look the same. But still, super awesome ruins, beautiful surrounding area, and most excellent prehistoric brothel ever (complete with stone beds - ouch!).

I'm really glad we decided to do one site each day instead of cram them both together one after another. They really are both worth a good look. Apparently there are three smaller sites around there too which we did not have time for. I certainly would not mind returning someday to do it all again and stop by the smaller ones as well.

So, until next time Pompeii, I hope you can stick around for another few years so that we may meet again.

*As seen in the last episode of Season 5: Time's Arrow. I wasn't hating on Star Trek nerds, I was just pointing out that this is not today's topic.

**There was definitely a barrier of garbage bags that built up on a street between the ruins and the train station such that we were able to skirt the garbage on the way down but had to find an alternate route on the way back up. These people have a serious garbage problem.

Naples: Love It or Hate It

2009-10-07T09:13:00.009-07:00

Naples belongs in a category by itself. It should not be in Italy. It should be in, say, Thailand. Mexico maybe. I had thought Rome was chaotic and dirty. Rome's got nothing on Naples.

After arriving by train (another topic altogether - everything's a fiasco in this country) on Saturday (the 3rd), we wound our way though the city on foot to find our hostel. The hostel was about 2km or so away from the train station, so I estimated that we could handle the 20-30 minute walk with our bags. We soon found that our bags were the least of our worries.

The place looked like a war zone. People (often African or middle easterners for some reason) have rickety tables displaying all types of junk for sale - crappy knock off sunglasses, belts, cell phones, jewelry, umbrellas, watches, corded home phones (must have apprehended these from 1985), etc, etc - that line every sizable street and piazza. The traffic is complete chaos and I'm terribly surprised that cars are able to move at all. Pedestrians and scooters do whatever the hell they want. Helmets are loosely suggested (though I sort of wanted one even as a pedestrian). The movement of the cars is only limited by their size and the speed at which they can accelerate.

And, more noticeably, there is garbage everywhere. Graffiti covers every available surface. I was suddenly very aware that we were both carelessly dressed in flip-flops and in constant danger of stepping in broken glass (which seemed to cover the entirety of the ground surface quite evenly), dog doo, or any number of other kinds of filth (tossed sandwiches, rotting donuts, syringes). It was heinous.

I feared that only cut-throats or the desperately poor (i.e. cut-throats) would live in these conditions, but, surprisingly, the people looked rather normal. Most of the other folks out for a stroll were well dressed with combed hair. They appeared to have homes and showers and cash. I'm not exactly sure what is going on in this town that normal people would choose to live in third world conditions and we didn't stay long enough to find out. I heard rumors about things to do with the mafia, but like I said, we didn't pry.

After our first run through the town, however, I started to get used to it. The very worst parts are right next to the train station and as you venture further out in the city, it mellows out a bit. And though it appears that thieves and hooligans would be waiting around every corner to mug you, we never actually felt threatened, even at night. I think we fly under the radar with Kane being a relatively large man, the two of us always being together, and neither of us appearing particularly well-off (no jewelry, plastic watches, blue jeans, dirty shoes). Anyway, we were able to enjoy ourselves despite the initial fright.

I found myself continuing to swing wildly between hating and loving the place during our 3-night stay. I would become very tense walking down the streets with men offering me iPhones out of their jacket pockets, but then I would be so happy to find an excellent pizza place. I would be completely fed up with the lack of clarity at the train station* but then feel completely content browsing the peaceful nearby ruins of Herculaneum. It was definitely an odd experience.

My final conclusion is that Naples itself is actually a really cool town. I think it has some sights to see and could be quite fun. Unfortunately, we only booked our two days there to see the nearby archaeological digs of Herculaneum and Pompeii, and spent the rest of our time in Naples deciding whether it was horrible or not. Maybe another time, Naples.

*The train station is under construction, as if an Italian train terminal needs further confusion. The day before we left, I stood in one plaza and could see four different signs pointing me four different directions to the restroom. And, unlike in the US, there were not actually bathrooms all four directions. In fact, I couldn't find any of them (the signs appeared to be circular) and had to use the nearby McDonald's (at least some things are constant the world over). Everything at the train station was roughly this difficult.

Rome: The Sights

2009-10-05T10:15:00.018-07:00

No, we do not mean Rome, Ohio. Or even Rome, Indiana. Weather.com, I would like to suggest you get your act together. Sorry, needed to vent.

There are a million things to see and do in (the real) Rome. Undoubtedly, a person could stay a year, nay live there their whole life and not see all the sights Rome has to offer. Needless to say we had not the time nor the patience to “see it all”. We did manage to hit up the Big Ones though. Please refer below for a numbered list followed by a witty description of each sight.

1. The Vatican. This place is a doozy. It's got the immense St. Peter's Basilica on the one side and then gracefully encased in the remaining walled-off area there are gardens and buildings and, more notably (and accessibly), the Vatican Museums, ending in the infamous Sistine Chapel. Basilica: cool. It's giant, it's got light flooding in, it's epically decorated*. Museums: boring. So much stuff that nothing looks spectacular compared to all the glam around it. It's hot, it's crowded, we had no guide. No photos allowed in the Sistine Chapel and if you take one, you get harasses like you're an 8 year old who just stole a candy bar**. It just wasn't for us.

2. The Colosseum. You know, the old Colosseum thing? In Rome? On all the post cards? Cool place, very neat. They need to get it together though with the people offering tours who flag you down outside the place and negotiate you into their tour. It feels like they're conning you even though they're really not.

3. Palatine Hill and The Roman Forum. This is all the excavated ruin stuff just next to the Colosseum. It's sort of a smattering of parts of buildings from 2000-3000 years ago. It's really cool stuff, but again, there aren't any signs so you have to either know what's there already, have a guide, or not really care what you're looking at. We were in group 3 and had a good time.

4. The Pantheon. Old, simple, free. What's not to like?

5. Trevi Fountain. Iconic fountain in old town Rome. Apparently one of the first non-religious commissioned art projects in Rome, or at least that's what I think our new friend from the language class told us (she's a professor and author of Art History). Very pretty at night.

6. Spanish Steps. In my opinion, not really one of the more exciting sights in Rome, but for some reason very famous. Nice place for a sit down on a hot day or to do some people watching. Also, just near our language school which made it (the school) easy to find.

This along with countless hours strolling the backward, mish-mosh of streets that they use for a downtown, which is a sight in and of itself, really. Rome is the only major modern city I've ever seen that didn't, at some point, bulldoze all the nonsensical cobbled alleyways built a thousand years ago and install a more organized system of streets. Some towns in Germany or England will have the cute little preserved "Old Town" area of town where gift shops and ice cream stands linger triumphantly, but they certainly don't use these areas as the living, breathing heart of their city. Rome doesn't seem to mind.

So that was Rome. We took a zillion pictures that I still need to sort through and post to Picasa, but that will have to wait. Off to other parts of this crazy country!

*Apparently they didn't have Ikea back then. Too bad for them, they had to use more than just allen wrenches to construct the thing.

**Paraphrased dialog between random stupid tourist and security guard:
Security: Mam, you're not allowed to take pictures in here. Do you want to be escorted out?
Dumb tourist shakes her head.
Security: Because if you take pictures in here, you will be made to leave. Do you understand?
Dumb tourist nods.
Security guard meets up with other guards and continue to loudly "SHHHH" the hundreds of people crammed in the room together.

A Whole New Language

2009-10-04T14:42:00.006-07:00

I'd thought of taking a language class in Italy a while ago, when we were planning this trip. Once I realized we'd have a few weeks here at the end of the trip, I thought the opportunity was perfect.

I looked up a few language schools around the country and found a nice looking one in Rome. We were originally intending on starting in Venice and working our way South through Italy, but since many of the schools are in Rome, we decided to start there and train North.

We registered for a relatively expensive (in my opinion) one-week long class at Italia Idea language school right in the heart of Rome. People typically register for longer than one week, but we didn't have the time to stay longer. We started last Monday, attended four 3-hour classes (and one relatively useless city tour and cultural orientation - they were in Italian), ending last Friday. We were wary of doing this for a few reasons: a)It might be a waste of time since you can't learn very much of a language in only one week; b)The school might be total crap and not be enjoyable or helpful at all; c)The class might be paced too slowly or too fast and be very frustrating.

Also, it was a bit pricey and you know how I hate wasting money. But, after a week of class with 3 other people (2 Americans, 1 Aussie, all girls) and one excellent teacher, we learned a good amount and had some fun. We are far from fluent, but I can count to one hundred*, ask how much something costs, greet people, etc. We got as far as all that plus learning the indefinite and definite articles, learning plural and singular nouns, and some random vocabulary based mostly on restaurant menus and items in the room with us (table, chair, window, etc).

It really was a solid intro to the language (it's very similar to Spanish, by the way) and it gave us a nice focus for a week, which we haven't had for a long time. Our schedule was such that we woke in the mornings for breakfast and internet in our hotel, did some sight-seeing for a few hours (usually a different sight each day; there are many in Rome), and then made it over to our class at 3:30, usually having dinner afterward around 7.

We had five very full days with lots of walking (and sweating - it's still warm down here), learning, and picture-taking. Io amo Italia!

*I can never remember the number for 17 because it's far too long of a word and doesn't follow the same rules as all the rest of the numbers. (Diciassette is seventeen in Italian - but I cheated to tell you that)

In-Flight Italians

2009-10-03T13:39:00.005-07:00

Our flight from Munich to Rome last Sunday (Sept 27) was not exactly our first time on an airplane. It was, however, our first time on a flight to Italy. I had not expected anything different than any other flight I've ever been on, but that's where I was wrong. This flight was full of Italians.

Even though the flight was leaving from Germany, most people appeared to be speaking Italian rather than German. Though it is hard to tell since Italian appears to be spoken at a far louder volume than other languages.

To start, the people milling around terminal were rambunctious. I thought there were just some larger groups of people together and that they were excited to go wherever they were going, so they were a bit chatty. Fine, no big deal. Unlike other trips though, this continued throughout the entire flight. It was like a damn family reunion on the plane. There were at least half a dozen people standing in the aisles for the entire duration of the flight so as to be able to chat with their friends or family or whatever. For all I know, these people didn't even know each other and they were just very happy to meet. It was like going to the library and getting stuck there with a group of bubbly high school kids decked out in Prada and D&G. No one else seemed to notice.

So, we continued to read our books and doze off for the duration of the 2 hr flight, ignoring the animated chatter taking place all around us. We chuckled as the surly German flight attendants had to repeatedly ask each Italian, one by one, to move so they could maneuver the drink trays down the aisle.

But the best part came right at the end of the flight. We had descended through the clouds, the sun having already set, and were approaching the runway just like normal. The cabin was a bit quieter since everyone had been forced back into their seats. As soon as the plane successfully touched down onto the runway, everyone went nuts. Huge applause, whistles, and cheers filled the cabin. Like we just won the damn lottery or something. It really made me think about how excitable these people really are. The flight landed like it was supposed to and they act like it is the best thing that's ever happened to them. I can only imagine what would have happened if the flight attendant had rolled the drinks trolley over their toes or something – I picture extravagant gesticulation and animated arguments. Because I don't think it's fair to imagine that they would be so exuberant over a plane landing and not equally "animated" if someone accidentally gave them a flat tire.

Anyway, the joy continued; a raucous round of applause was given as the first of the luggage started spewing out of the conveyor belt in the baggage carousel. I can't even imagine having that kind of energy. They're a bit like children. They are loud, impulsive, and generally happy. I am relatively quiet, introverted, and most certainly sarcastic. Two different approaches to life, eh? Well, let's see if I can't learn something while I'm here..."when in Rome" and all that.

Lucerne + Oktoberfest = Final Stretch

2009-09-30T00:53:00.009-07:00

Hello. Welcome back to our continuing adventures around Europe. Thank you for joining me. I realize that it probably gets a bit tedious to read about every walking tour we've taken in every major European city for the past three months and I would like to thank you for your dedication and interest thus far. And, since I shouldn't make assumptions, I would like to thank you for being here now and reading about this intermission in our trip.

That's a bit like what this week was: an intermission. Or maybe a 2^nd intermission since it isn't exactly the halfway point anymore. Six days spent between the big attractions of Paris and Rome, where we didn't do very much except a bit of walking and a lot of watching Season 3 of House, M.D.

Last Sunday (the 20th) we arrived in Lucerne, Switzerland and stayed for three nights in a really nice dorm-turned-hostel. We didn't do too much during our two days in Lucerne, mostly because I'm not sure if there really is much to do. We walked around the town, enjoyed the cute shops, strolled the river banks, and ate some local “traditional” bakery fare (see pic of Kane posing happily with these foods; it wasn't as bad as he is making it look).

It was nice; it was relaxing. We didn't get to see much of Switzerland, but it appears to be a fine place. There are no homeless people. Drivers are habitually and extraordinarily accommodating to each other and pedestrians. All signs and labels are in three languages: German, French, and Italian. And since most people seem to speak at least some of each of these languages, it is not uncommon to find most people knowing a good amount of English also. They're like Germans but without the attitude and with large amounts of disposable income. I suppose being rich probably would put you in a good mood. Can't fault the Swiss, can you?

After our tiny stint in Lucerne, we dropped our beloved car off in Strasbourg and caught a train over to Munich. We had our little Clio III for 70 days and put exactly 10,667 kilometres (6628 miles) on her. She was a fine car and we treated her well. She will be missed.

After our goodbyes, we said hello to Jon, yet again, as we bunked down in his house in Munich for four nights. We spent one day getting serious about Oktoberfest, staking out a table in one of the tents early in the day with some of Jon's friends. While they planned to stay all night until closing (11pm), Kane and I were quite ready for a nap around 5pm after being there for over four hours.
Kane managed to drink two liters of beer during that time (they are sold in liter glasses, a bit more than a quart, and way, way too much for me) and he was down for the count. The burly security personnel who so kindly encouraged us to remove ourselves from the table we were occupying at 5pm (by picking up the ends of the benches we were sitting on and growling angrily in German) left Kane no other choice but to guzzle the last 1/3 of his 2^nd glass. Which pretty much did the trick.

Twenty minutes after leaving Oktoberfest Kane was unconscious on our air mattress in his undies. He remained this way for three hours, getting up to pee twice. At 8pm Jon came home unexpectedly early, which worked out since I thought I might starve to death shortly thereafter. Kane arose with an early onset (albeit mild) hangover and we had pasta with our House. At least one of us got to receive the full Oktoberfest experience, eh?

The next two days we spent mostly sitting around in pajamas with Jon*, finishing up Season 3 of House, and screwing around on the internet. We did make it back to Oktoberfest just to walk around and take some pics and we also went to see the movie District 9 at the English language movie theater. All three of us enjoyed the movie. And, I even got all our hotels booked for Italy; I am sparing no expense at this point. But don't tell Kane that.
Which brings us to now: the final stretch. It is Sunday the 27^th of September and we're on our way to Rome (upon writing; now we're in Rome). We will spend three weeks touring around Rome, Naples, Florence, Cinque Terre, and Venice before returning to Munich one last time to see Jon and collect all of our stuff (we keep leaving select items there so that we don't have to carry unnecessary things on each leg of the trip) and heading to New York.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the end! It's been a long journey and we're pretty ready for it, but we're also looking forward to Italy. Kane has set ambitious pizza goals that he will need to work hard to achieve. We are taking an Italian language class for five days in Rome. Our accommodation budget has gone heinously over allowance. This will be a good end to our epic Europe travels.

*Yes, Jon does have blue hair. Isn't he so hip and alternative?

Best Decision of the Trip

2009-09-28T14:49:00.005-07:00

It started to get bad in London.

We knew this trip would be expensive and we tried to organize a budget that was tight but realistic. We thought we cut ourselves enough slack, but the UK was throwing everything off. One meal out would spend all the money allotted for an entire day's food. Forget buying a beverage; cokes and spirits are outrageous and not worth it. Every activity costs about twice what we had anticipated (example: a half hour ride on the London Eye costs £17! That's about $27 USD or $36 AUD per person – ridiculous!). I was spending hours upon hours, day after day searching for our upcoming hotels to find places that were under budget but weren't completely horrible. We were getting very bogged down.

And then we went to Ireland. Ireland, though thankfully on the Euro instead of the stupid Great British Pound (doesn't seem so Great to me), is even more expensive. Our first night we had “gourmet” hamburgers for about $20 AUD each ($15 USD). A non-refillable coke in a restaurant, say 12 oz, will run you about 4-5 Euro ($7 or so USD or $8-10 AUD). We were freaking out. The trip all but came to a stand still.

We were eating at grocery stores and still breaking the budget. The hotels were all over budget no matter how hard I tried, and I was getting worn out looking so hard. Fortunately there isn't much to do in Ireland, so our budget for “activities” was doing ok. But still, we were stressed.

And so, in Cork, we decided to forget it. We had been discussing it pretty much constantly for the past week or so. What do we do? Do we just spend more money? Should we just forfeit eating the food we want to and staying in nicer places to save? On the one hand, we already have the money, it's not like we're racking up the credit card bills; we had, in fact, saved it specially for this. On the other hand, we didn't need to be traveling so luxuriously; we could cut back on the restaurants, hotels, desserts and just see what there is to see.

I remember specifically having a conversation with Rhonda about it (Kane's mom) over Skype and discussing how we should be spending more and worrying less. What I was saying was true, but I was essentially arguing against myself. Then, in the restroom at the Jameson Distillery outside Cork, I made a decision.

The decision was not to go crazy and spend it all, but to spend more and stop worrying; to listen to my own arguments. Our collective anxiety over this was really destroying the fun of our trip. Eating at restaurants, staying at cute hotels, and nibbling fancy desserts are my favorite things to do. We're not hardcore travelers; it's not worth it for us just to be in a place. I want to enjoy the tastes and sights of a new city without eye blinders and handcuffs stamped “BUDGET” on them. The concern for money was significantly inhibiting our enjoyment and I was done with it.

I would still try to find budget accommodation and we wouldn't eat at five-star restaurants or anything. But we would not freak out when dinner cost $60 AUD, which is what a normal meal with no frills costs at a decent restaurant in Ireland.

It was amazing how quickly the change happened. Kane embraced it right away too, he's good about stuff like that. We'd both been mulling over what to do and when I concluded, not illogically, that we either need to sacrifice more money or more enjoyment (and only one is replenishable), he was right there with me. We were enjoying ourselves more already.

This might be one of the reasons I enjoyed Paris so much; we were encumbered by nothing in a wonderful city. And that's why we're here, not to save for a plasma tv for when we get back to the US. We can save for the rest of our lives (and we probably will), but for the next month, we will SPEND and we won't worry!

Incompatible

2009-09-27T14:07:00.004-07:00

You know we spend every moment together. Kane and I have pretty much spent 24 hours per day, 7 days a week for the last 5 ½ years at a distance of no more than 20 feet from each other. We live together, we work together, we have breakfast, lunch, and dinner together. We go to the gym, volunteer with the cats, and wash our cars together. Obviously, we're pretty damn compatible. Either that or we're using up all the time we're supposed to spend together for the rest of our lives before we even turn 30, and will be breaking up in the next couple of years. But since that explanation doesn't really make any sense, I'll stick with the compatible thing.

The other day, however, we discovered something. We were on a four hour train ride from France to Germany with nothing to do and motion sickness a constant threat. Neither of us wanted to read and it's a bit crap when one of us bogarts the computer. The only two-person card game we know besides Go Fish (Speed) has gotten tiresome.

Were there any little games on the computer that we could play together? Indeed there was: pinball. I took the left Shift button and he took the right; we each had a flipper. We took turns launching the ball into play. And here is where the differences between us shine like a hundred-watt eco-friendly light bulb.

Kane is patient, calculating. He likes to hold the flipper up when the ball comes down the side chute so that he can stop the ball and put it back into play at his leisure. He will let the ball bounce off his flipper, thinking it is going to bounce over onto mine where I would have a better shot, and let it accidentally fall down the middle. He pushes the flipper one single time just as the ball lands where he wants it, always aiming each shot toward whatever area of the board is lit up for bonus points.

I mash the shift key like it's got a cockroach under it. If the ball is somewhere in the vicinity of my flipper, including heading for or currently touching Kane's flipper, my flipper is flapping wildly. I smack the ball away the second it touches my flipper, regardless of which direction the ball might fly.

I'm a spaz. Kane is a damn guru.

When Kane does the thing where the ball bounces off his flipper and down the gutter (he stopped doing this after a while when he got the hang of how the physics of the game worked – thank goodness) rage rises in me as though he's just slapped my mother across the face*. How could a person possibly be so patient?! We played probably 20 games before tiring. Our scores increased steadily during our practice and we actually seemed to be working well together despite our radically different techniques.

I like to hit the ball as hard as I can** all the way up to the top of the board where it pings around for a while, giving us extra time on a play. Kane likes to follow the lit up arrows on the board to activate extra points. We ended up with a high score on one round of about 1,600,000. This is a good score, trust me. Kane played alone for long after I was sick of the game and in about an hour of solo play, he never broke a score of a million.

And so, I conclude, the sum of our talents is better than one of us alone even when we seem completely incompatible. Isn't that cute?

*He would never do that.

**I could not get away from the idea of this being an actual pinball machine that responds to how hard you engage the flipper, when, in fact, I'm fairly certain that the Shift key only flips the flipper at a set speed when you hit it.

Paris

2009-09-23T16:34:00.015-07:00

Ahh, Paris. We did well in Paris. We spent 5 nights there but, unlike London, we actually got out and enjoyed the city to the fullest. It felt like we walked a million miles – our feet complained as such. But that didn't keep us down, oh no.

Before I get into the thick of Paris, I'd like to make mention of our trip over to France. We took a 19 hour ferry from Roslare, Ireland to Cherbourg, France. This was our 3^rd ferry of the trip (with automobile in tow, of course) but it was by far the longest. It also by far had the least access to the internet. By which I mean that there was no internet. Nineteen hours overnight on a rocky boat with no internet - not exactly a paradise. The kicker was that the website quoted about €120 (US$175 or so) extra for a room for the night on-board, or, you could not pay anything extra and receive a luxury chair in which to sleep (read: struggle) the night. You can probably guess which option we went with.

We had pumped ourselves up for it – it's just like being on a plane, right? But once onboard, one look at the sad, salmon-colored attic on the ship where our seats were hidden away and we ran crying to the on-board concierge. Apparently, for those of us who are horrified by our overnight seats and are suddenly willing to pay any price for a room with a bed, they have mercy. It was only €53 to upgrade from our chairs to a room. Four fold-up bunk beds (no room mates though), a tiny bathroom, no windows, and everything made of the same smelly plastic as on an airplane – totally worth it. And so we slept normally and both managed to restrain from vomiting even during the rough patches of water. Crisis averted. Welcome to France.

So, back to Paris. We drove straight there from Cherbourg on the 15th; about a five hour drive. We spent 4 glorious days treading up and down every adorable alleyway. Here's the rundown of our visit:

Day 1: 1pm: Free walking tour. Our tour guide was a totally adorable Aussie girl who reminded me very much of Jolene. She introduced us to all the best sights around town, witty commentary included. 6pm: Meander around the Louvre for a couple hours when admission is cheaper on Wednesdays – score one for the discount! 8-9:30pm: Wander around the city in search of a famed falafel stand that apparently does not exist. 10pm: Settle on pizza and salad dinner near our hotel which was delicious.

Day 2: Leave hostel almost too late to make the 2pm Monmartre tour with the same tour guide from the day before (we really liked her). This is a famous artsy district of Paris where people like Van Gogh used to hang out. Now it's mostly cutesy boutiques, people hounding you to draw your portrait, and restaurants aimed at tourists. Still cute though. 4pm: re-walk most of the Monmartre district looking for a cute place for dinner; settle for pizza and salmon with french onion soup and a crepe from a stand afterward.

Day 3: First sunny day! See the sights in depth that we only passed by on the first day's walking tour! Climb the 284 steps to the top of the Arc de Triomphe, photograph the Eiffel Tower from the gardens out front, soak up the Gothic architecture of the inside of Notre Dame, and have a stroll through the famed and funky Pompidu Centre. Find cute, casual cafe in the middle of the Latin Quarter in which to feast on a gigantic tuna sandwich and delicious slice of quiche. Follow it up with a strawberry tarte and, of course, a crepe at the end of the day.

Day 4: Drive out to Versailles but decide that we're not excited enough to actually pay to go in the Palace of Versailles. Yeah, that's how we roll. Have a little lunch in Versailles, enjoying the warm sunny day. Drive back to the hostel for a nap and some reading. Take to the streets again just before sunset and stop by my favorite tart shop (chocolate tart tonight) and then on to enjoy the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe lit up for night time. Return to hostel at 1am!!

Those were our four fantastically fun* days in Paris. Tally this onto my top 5 list; Paris knows how to show a girl a good time.

On a more cultural note, I would like to state for the record that Parisians are a bunch of fine, friendly folks. We had no problems with people being snooty or refusing to speak English, and everyone we encountered was very friendly and nice to us. I know the French have a bit of a reputation for being jerks to foreigners, but as far as we experienced, they have long since turned over these obligations to the Germans.

Additionally, not to hate on Germany constantly, but I would also like to mention that French is significantly easier to read and understand than German. When looking at a restaurant menu, French (like Spanish or Italian) actually looks very similar to English. There are so many common cognates that menus and signs are often about half-understandable even when I don't know any of the language.

This is a huge contrast to German where the only cognate we have readily found is “tomaten” for tomato and "milch" for milk. Other than that, very few words look the same and most words have their modifiers crammed together with the nouns to form huge, unwieldy words that further intimidate the non-native speaker. As an example (in English), they might say something like Cheeseburgerbaconavacado instead of separating the words out to be less confusing. Probably a bad example, but you can see where I'm going and why that would be even worse for me and the three words of German I know.

Anyway, to summarize: Paris is fun; French is a fine language; French people are quite personable; I love pastries (from previous entry but I'm not getting over it any time soon). Please have a gander at the rest of our pics from Paris.

Next stop (well, the stop has already been made, but I need to post about it) Switzerland, then Munich for a few days to drop off some of our crap with Jon and Oktoberfest it up. Then, the final stretch: three weeks in Italy!

*I love alliteration and I hope you do too.

Patisserie

2009-09-21T13:04:00.005-07:00

This is my new favorite word. And my new favorite place. Patisserie. It even sounds beautiful, if I can say it correctly. We were in Paris for four days and I'm pretty sure the only site my eyes really took in were these lovely shops. Eiffel Tower? Arc de Triomphe? Louvre? These do not hold my interest*. But tartes, pies, croissants, cakes, coulis - these are why I like French people so much. They know how to deliver, oh yes they do.

Patisseries are everywhere in Paris. They adorn every block. They are truly appealing places all by themselves with their artistically displayed and well-lit offerings, cute seating areas, and cozy entrances. My main questions is: why are they not everywhere? Paris is certainly unique, but there is nothing holding these establishments from, say, the upscale streets of Berkeley or Fitzroy. I will submit this request to the powers that be; this needs to change.

Fun fact from Wikipedia: "In France, [patisserie] is a legally controlled title that may only be used by bakeries that employ a licensed maître pâtissier (master pastry chef)". They really are serious about this stuff. Fortunately, so am I.

And let's not forget the Creperie. Sometimes situated as an odd outcropping tacked onto a streetside restaurant, other times parked as a stand-alone kiosk in high-traffic (i.e. tourist) areas, the creperies in Paris are ubiquitous. As they should be. I can see why Parisians are such happy people, how could they not be with a sweet supply like this?

*We actually did go to these Parisian favorites and had a great time too. Just needed to drive my point home about the desserts, you know?

Ireland

2009-09-18T12:40:00.014-07:00

So, apparently we call the entire island Ireland*, including the Republic of Ireland (the bigger one to the south that uses the Euro) along with North Ireland (the smaller area in the north that is part of the UK). The confusion never ends. But our trip there did!

We arrived in Belfast via ferry from Scotland (2 hrs, internet access on board, excellent) on September 1. We had a rainy, cold two days and three nights in North Ireland during which we took a bus tour around the city (screw a walking tour in this weather), and made a trip out to Giant's Causeway which is the only UNESCO heritage sight and the most popular tourist attraction in North Ireland (and is, incidentally, worth a visit).

On the 4th, we headed down into the Republic of Ireland, which we duly named Regular Ireland. As in, "Where is this place? In North Ireland or Regular Ireland?". And whatever the question was, the answer is probably Regular Ireland since there is far more down here to look at and eat. We spent three days in Dublin, which was not nearly enough but was still certainly fun.

During our travels we have encountered many cities (obviously) and a select few of them just jive with us right away. Dublin is one of these cities. Compact, easy to navigate, friendly, full of restaurants; this is a good place to be.

It is, however, an expensive place to be. We realized this almost immediately and were dismayed to find that this trip just keeps getting more expensive. I thought London would be the height of overpriced lunches and hot chocolates, but I was mistaken. Ireland takes the cake, or perhaps, the beer, as it were.

But moving on from our continual and mildly obnoxious fear of spending our own money, we had an excellent time in Dublin. We met up with my cousin Monique's husband's sister, Maria (a diagram would help, wouldn't it?), who graciously showed us around the city and gave us handfuls of advice on where to go's and what to do's. She's an exceptionally intelligent, interesting, and sweet person and we clicked immediately (at least Kane and I thought so...). And she helped with quite a few recommendations for foods, bars (yep, we went in bars!) and activities around the city. We could certainly spend some more time there; a way cool city indeed.

Then it was over to the west coast to stay in a town called Galway where we did a bit of relaxing and made sure to hit up the magnificent Cliffs of Moher as a day trip. The weather had turned sunny and (relatively) warm and we were happy as seahorses (clams are over rated - and rubbery).
Our last stop in Ireland was the best - Cork, in the south. We had a really great experience in Cork for these reasons: 1) The weather was sunny and warm; 2) Our hotel was plush and had a great view and I got it on sale; 3) The entire region is very beautiful. Granted, 2 of 3 of those reasons were circumstantial, but we won't complain. We spent our days kissing the Blarney Stone at Blarney Castle, taking in the famous views along the Kerry Ring Road, and becoming master whiskey tasters at the Old Jameson Distillery. We meandered through the odd little town of Cork, bought some new books, read, used the internet to our heart's content from the comfort of our hotel room (this is key), and even ordered room service. A truly luxurious end to our stay in this gorgeous country.

Please view the rest of our Ireland pictures here, which shows a bit more thorough run down of our trip through Ireland. For now, we've braved the 19 hour ferry directly from Ireland to France and are enjoying the lights and sound of beautiful Paris (say: Pair-eee)!

*Map courtesy of http://www.teachersparadise.com

Back in Time: Edinburgh Fringe

2009-09-17T11:43:00.007-07:00

Let's step back in time for a few paragraphs...to about a month ago when we were in Edinburgh, Scotland. You may recall me discussing our excellent experiences in England and Scotland along with the differences between the terms "United Kingdom", "Great Britain", and "England". Ring any bells? If no, the wonders of bloggular technology will allow you to be whisked back in time and read all about it. Either way, it is a fact that I mentioned the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, albeit briefly, in my exposition about this part of our trip and I had meant to expand a bit.

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is noted as the world's largest arts festival. It is a city-wide jubilee, if you will, of theater, dance, comedy, music, and anything else you can conceivably do on stage (don't use your imagination too much). To give you a feel for the monstrous size of the event, Wikipedia informs us that "Fringe 2009 sold 1,859,235 tickets for 34,265 performances of 2,098 shows in 265 venues, over 25 days, for an average of over 74,000 admissions and 1,300 performances per day. There were an estimated 18,901 performers, from 60 countries."

So, 1,300 performances per day. Not too shabby for a city of just under half a million. As you might imagine, this thing takes over like Oprah in a bakery. The city is bursting with people passing out fliers, signs pointing to hundreds of venues, and thousands upon thousands of visitors who travel from all around to be entertained by the plentiful performers. And, as luck had it, our visit happened to coincide with all this madness.

I originally thought this might be a bad thing since this festival drives up prices of everything from hotels to happy meals, but I now realize that this may be the best time of year to visit Edinburgh. The city is alive day and night. People are everywhere and are frolicking in a festive kind of way rather than bustling in a business-as-usual fashion. The vibe is electric. Street performers coax you from around every corner. The smell of food fills your nose, the call of street-side vendors fills your ears, and tiny, colorful 4x6 fliers for every kind of show imaginable magically appear in your hands. Artists, actors, mimes, acrobats, comedians - they all converge into one tiny city for three short weeks as the rest of us scurry to gorge ourselves on the open buffet of revelry. It's quite an experience.

Though the "big" shows are sold out far in advance, Kane and I had our eye on a couple shows that we wanted to see. We bought tickets just before they sold out for Stephen K. Amos and then, in typical Kangie style, scoured the internet for someone with extra tickets to Jimmy Carr who was willing to part with them at a reasonable price. And so, we saw these two fine British comedians one night after another, with good seats to boot.

Stephen K. Amos also played at the Melbourne Comedy Festival earlier this year (which we attended heavily) but we were not able to acquire tickets to see him there. He also frequents one of our favorite Aussie shows Good News Week, so we had high hopes for him. Jimmy Carr is relatively famous (mostly in Britain but also some in the US) and was performing in a larger theater that was sold out far in advance. They were both pretty funny, but I have to say that Stephen was the better of the two in my opinion. He had a very personal show and I think, since this was one of his last shows of the festival, he was winging it a lot that night. He even said so. There were some really classic lines and I even got to be made fun of for being an American (I had to cheer when he asked if any Americans were there...).

Jimmy Carr's show was definitely good; it was a very planned, regimented show where you could tell he had everything (except the one hysterical heckler-laugher in the audience) very well rehearsed. Though he did deal with crazy laughing lady quite well, so he can obviously hold his own with the improv. He does happen to be more prone to dirty, uncouth jokes which, though they can be funny, tend to not appeal to me as well. He was still very good and Kane and I were really happy to have acquired tickets.

But, as for my very favorite part of Stephen K Amos's show? I wish I could find a video of it on the interwebs but YouTube is failing me...his intro was two girls doing Beyonce's 'All the Single Ladies' dance (if you don't know it, it's been excessively parodied by the likes of SNL and everyone else on the internet) during which he joins the dance as his segue onto the stage. It was unexpected and hilarious. He was brilliant. Here's a random clip of him since I couldn't find one from the actual show we saw:

And, unfortunately, that was it for our Edinburgh Fringe experience of 2009. I highly recommend visiting this fine city at any time, but the Fringe was definitely a special treat. Yeay for the arts!

On an Unrelated Topic...

2009-09-15T13:39:00.002-07:00

My friend Alicia kindly offered to let me post on her blog, and my guest post has been published! I thought I'd brag all about it on my own blog so that everyone can read something that I wrote that is not pertaining to travel or Australia or my bodily functions. Granted, it is still completely and totally about me, myself, and I - so do not fret, it doesn't deviate from your standard reading too terribly much. Someday I will learn to write about thing that actually matter.

Anyway, please check out her blog (it's a good one - she is a damn good writer, what with Masters degrees and all) and check out my article about how I hate to run! Yeay!

Glendalough

2009-09-10T14:01:00.003-07:00

Glendalough is a tiny town about an hour and a half south of Dublin. It was a real find for us as we drove across the country to get to our next destination, Galway. It is an old monastic site with an old stone church, a stone tower, and lots of old graves. It was really photogenic and just had a really cool feel to it; hence it gets it's own (albeit brief) blog post. The collage above includes some of the best pics of the small area. Ireland is so pretty!

Healthy Irish Diet

2009-09-08T06:44:00.008-07:00

I drank an entire pint of Guinness beer. By myself. Under no duress except that it was free, which is, actually, significant duress for me. It was absolutely repulsive and I am totally amazed that I was able to do it. I hate beer. And, unlike most college students, I refused to rid myself of this innate distaste in my early 20's just so that I could be cooler at parties. I'm not cool and I'm ok with it. No need to torture myself to try to disprove it.

But, in my old age I'm getting quite adventurous. Keep in mind that this is more beer than I have ever drank in my entire life combined. You probably know that I rarely drink anything - it's just not worth the time, effort, or money to me - but never, ever have I drank a beer. But I did it and I hope Ireland can be proud of me because that was almost certainly the last time that it will ever happen. Ever.

On a more enjoyable but even less healthy note, Kane and I finally tried the infamous, the coveted...deep fried Mars bar*. This is where you take a candy bar, batter it in the same stuff that your fish (as in fish 'n chips) is lathered in, and deep fry the whole thing. It sounds a bit gross - and it is, a bit - but mostly it's just a melty ball of chocolatey goo covered in a thin layer of donut. Definitely good, but don't think I'll make a habit of it.

Needless to say, we're having a grand old time in Ireland and they're treating us well (or, at least, just like they treat everyone else). More later!

*A Mars bar is what we in America call a Milky Way.

Sharing with Strangers

2009-09-05T03:17:00.010-07:00

There comes a time in every budget traveler's trip where the coveted double room is not available. Where the cost of a real hotel is far too high, and/or the desired town is fully booked. At some point, to save money, a room must be shared with strangers.

Depending on how much money you're trying to save, you may have been sharing rooms all along. Kane and I are far too old for this. We are not 18 anymore. We want our privacy even if it's in a bite-sized room with bunk beds. It's still better than sharing with strangers.

But, here in Dublin, we have arrived in our first quad-share situation. We have a lot of stipulations for the rooms we book (parking, free wifi, under $100AUD/night, etc) and sometimes we have to compromise. Lord knows I would prefer to compromise on price and just pay up the yin yang, but my frugal friend Kane leans toward a less luxurious solution. And so we sometimes stay at less-than-desirable locations.

We won't do a 20-share room with who knows how many drunk children trickling in at all hours in the night. We will, however, go for a 4 or 6 person mixed share room. We've done it before and it isn't so bad. Yesterday we met one of our room mates: a nice Aussie boy (from Sydney) who is traveling around Europe, not unlike us except that he is solo and has many tattoos. Fine with me, seemed like a perfectly nice guy. We have yet to meet our other room mate, all I know of him is that he crept in not long after we went to sleep and put himself quietly to bed. Yeay for nice room mates.

But having nice room mates does not necessarily mean that all room-sharing problems are solved, though we can certainly not be thankful enough for this good fortune. There are still some...bodily function related issues that make room sharing difficult.

Let's face it, Kane and I have been dating for 6 years; we can keep our hands off each other for three nights. But as for unpleasantries such as...how do I say...well, passing gas - each person must do what he or she feels fit when controlling his/her bodily demands in such a situation.

Let's not be shy about it: I've had bad gas for the past 3 days. I'm not sure why but it's not been pleasant. I'm not usually so gassy, but I was dreading the 4-person share room based on this recent affliction, hoping it would pass (no pun intended) in time. And the worst of it did. But last night I still sat in my bunk bed faced with a dilemma.

To fart or not to fart, that is the question. How long can a person hold in gas of ever-increasing pressure? If I were out to dinner or in a public place, sure, I'd make the effort. But all night in my own room? Even if there are other people, need I kill myself for them? I know Kane's answer already: you do what you gotta do. For me it's not so black and white. Not only are his flatulents typically without odor, they are often silent. And even if he does choose to expel a classic whoopee cushion sounding toot, he works the "it had to happen, just ignore it" angle. Which generally works when you're a boy and there are no lasting effects of your indiscretion.

I, however, am a woman. A dainty soul. Ok, maybe not so dainty, but surely no stranger expects to be accosted by a smell so foul from a girl so well-mannered. And how unfortunate would it be to come home to your room after a night out and be forced to dwell in a smell that peels the paint? Here are my options as I see it: 1) Hold everything in, no matter the cost; 2) Let it out of your body but hold it in, sealed for all of time, inside your comforter*; or 3) Let it all the way out.

I'll be frank - I chose against pain for myself and shared with the others. When we went to bed our other two room mates were still out. Therefore my hopes were that one of these three would happen to the expunged gasses: a) They would sufficiently dissipate such that they could not be detected by others by the time they arrived; b) These kind strangers would not have the very keen nose** that I have and would simply not notice the odors that I have bequeathed onto them; or c) They would assume it was Kane. Now, I'm not proud of that last one, but who would you think dealt it - the tidy, small, blond girl peacefully sleeping on the lower bunk or the skin-headed, full-bearded brute of a man folded into the top bunk? Sorry honey, you're guiltier looking than I am for just about anything. But I still love you.

After all the inner turmoil (again, no pun intended though these are getting good) on this personal conflict, I finally fell asleep. Our room mates did come home throughout the night and I will never know if they detected any uncouth smells, or if so, if they would have attributed them to any earthly cause. Whatever the case, I did awaken to a...fully disclosed view of the front side of one of our room mates across the room, so I figure that we're probably even. Ah, the joys of sharing a room.

*This action has a contemporary nomenclature: it is known as the Dutch Oven. Doing it to yourself is probably not the most common of ways to administer this form of punishment, but the fact remains. This is a blog for learning too, remember.

**I have what is known in our family as "The Sommer Nose", which, aside from being bigger than the average nose is also very keen to detect scents. I have noted on many, many occasions being able to smell something that others around me can't. I think Kane's sense of smell (and vision, for that matter) is particularly dull, so I seem even more gifted around him. Haha, I'm better than he is at something! I say that lovingly as I typically live a bit in his shadow (literally and figuratively) as he is: taller, faster, stronger (the obvious), better at math, better at test taking, faster at getting ready in the morning, more patient, more frugal, less irritable, more flexible (not actually physically, I win in that department), more frequently rational, better at reaching high shelving and changing light bulbs, better at making things, fixing things, and troubleshooting, better with computers, cats, and fitting into small spaces, sleeps more soundly, regulates body temperature better, flips pancakes better, rides motorcycles more confidently, folds shirts more neatly...

England & Scotland

2009-08-31T11:29:00.022-07:00

Ahh, the land of our fathers. Actually, my dad was born in Oakland, California, but no matter. We arrived in England on August 16th and have been happily communicating with the friendly locals* and reading every sign in sight ever since. I hadn't realized how crippling it is to not speak the language of a country you are in - travel has surely been kinder in the land of English. Here are some pictures for your weary eyes of England and Scotland. Also, I updated our previous album to include a dozen (a baker's dozen, to be exact) pictures from Belgium at the end.

First, let's sort out some nomenclature, shall we? Apparently this is often as confusing to the locals as it is to us foreigners:

England: a country in Great Britain. English people live here and they talk funny.
Great Britain: the island that houses most of the occupants of the United Kingdom. The countries that reside within the island of GB are England, Wales and Scotland.
The United Kingdom: a sovereign state comprising of Great Britain (England, Wales, Scotland) and Northern Ireland, along with a few islands in between.

I'm sure these terms will continue to be misused over time, but at least someone knows the difference. And so, we arrived in England/Great Britain/The United Kingdom.

We began our stay in London proper; five days in a hotel in Kensington, a western suburb of greater London. Now, I've been to London before and had a completely different experience with my mom in 2003 (I think?). In that case, neither of us were seasoned travelers, we were only on a 10 day stint and so weren't so heinously crunched for money**, and I don't recall knowing a whole lot about what exactly one is expected to do on vacation in London.

Having said that, I think that my mom and I were significantly more productive on the tourist front than Kane and I were. We also likely spent a lot more money, so there you go. Anyway, since Kane and I had 5 days on hand and also had no bookings for anything further on our impending trip, we took this opportunity to bunk down and book some stuff.

You may notice that I describe a lot of our time being taken up by planning the next phases of our trip. It's true, this does take a lot of time. It's a bit ironic to think that we travel all around just to arrive in one place so that we can hook into the internet to book the next, but we try to make sure to do a good amount of sightseeing to make it all worthwhile. We could, conceivably, just waltz up to each town, have the tourist office find us a hotel and stay until we're ready to move on, but since we have a car (and hence need a parking space), require internet (because we're junkies) and are trying to stick to a (relatively) strict budget, the online booking thing is really a godsend.

So, though we did spend a good amount of time in London booking accommodation for the rest of England and Scotland, we did also manage to get over to Windsor Castle, the Tower of London, a comedy show (with Jon since he was in town for work), and a walking tour around the city. We also ate some really excellent food; the rumors about English food being bad are completely false in my opinion. Despite Jon's persistent and insistent loathing of this city, I quite like all that is on offer in London and find it a great place to visit.

One thing that I hadn't remembered about London though: it is huge. London proper has over 7.5 million people (compared to 3.8m in LA, though their total metropolitan population is about the same at around 12-13 million) and sprawls for almost 700 square miles (compared to LA's 500 square miles). And, unlike LA, their public transport system - the beloved London Underground, or Tube - actually services most of this vast sprawling city.

So when we booked our accommodation, we just wanted to be somewhere near a tube station knowing that if we were, we could access anywhere in London with just a short ride. Which is true. But we did, however, sorely underestimate the scale of the city a bit when we were locating our hotel on google maps and calculating approximate distances to London's greatest attractions. Let's just say that we often felt as though we were spending more of our time on the tube than in the places we were trying to get to. If I had to make a little comic of our trip to London (which I have been known to do), it would be a picture of two bleary eyed people crammed on a very hot and stuffy subway train for 16 hours a day only stopping briefly to get out, take a picture of a statue, and continue on chanting "MIND THE GAP". If only I had a scanner.

After London we took a bit of a break. We spent 3 nights in a tiny town near Bristol in West England called Shepton Mallet. This place is so small that it doesn't have a Wikipedia entry (imagine!). We only stayed here to: a) get away from the ridiculously high prices of London; b) station ourselves near other calling attractions such as Stonehenge and Bath; and c) kill time until the hotel in central England that had a kick-ass dinner-bed-and-breakfast deal was available.

I have been to Bath and Stonehenge before with my mom (though she and I did not show up in time to see the Roman Baths in Bath, an occurrence about which she is still peeved) but still had a fine time exploring again. The weather while we were at Stonehenge was just as bad as it was last time I was there, so my pictures are pretty much exactly the same and not terribly impressive. Go figure. Bath was nice, though the actual Roman Baths were not nearly as exciting as my mom had imagined - pretty much what we had seen peering through the railing from outside was the best part of what you see from inside. I took some pics for you anyway, mom.
After Shepton Mallet, we spent a further 3 nights in a town called Sheffield where absolutely nothing is going on except for a super nice hotel out in the countryside with a really good deal for three nights with breakfast and two dinners at their super fancy restaurant. You may have read my entry relating our experience of the first night at dinner here, but despite that bout of anxiety, we had a really nice time. We did some further planning and booking, acquired the coveted Ireland guidebook that we couldn't find in London, and spent a day doing our laundry (read: finding a place to do our laundry). We accomplished (nearly) nothing and had a great time doing it. The only pictures I took were of the hotel, haha.

After our bout of luxury, we crossed the border into Scotland. Scotland is a wonderful place and Edinburgh (pronounced Eddin-burr-uh) is the center of the wonder. We happened to be here during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which, despite making prices and availability of accommodation despicable, is a really fun time to be in this city. Edinburgh itself is a really nice city that I loved from our first steps into it. It's easy to navigate, the main center straddling a huge mound where the castle and old town reside and it's a huge center for arts, shopping and commerce and has a really lively, fun vibe to it.

Since it was time for the Fringe Festival, there were street performers everywhere, people handing out fliers for shows, booths selling crafts and clothes, and a general convivial atmosphere. It was excellent! We hit up 2 festival shows (will post later) and spent the rest of the time exploring the city via an Underground Tour, a walking tour, a guided tour of Edinburgh Castle, and eating (we did try the haggis, though ours was vegetarian! it was delish!). Aside from the weather, Scotland has been a real highlight to our trip so far.

And, Scotland is also home to about a zillion medieval castles and abbeys in various states of disrepair and re-repair! We planned to go to a few, but the woman at the first place suggested that we get a saver pass to go to as many castles as we want in three days within a five day period, so we decided to take her advice since it was already going to save us money on the castles we had already planned to visit. And since we could go to as many as we wanted during those three days, we went and saw seven total! It was pretty cool and totally worth the money since we basically got 7 for the price of the 2 we originally wanted to see. I have plenty of castle pics on the Picasa, do enjoy.

And so that's it for England and Scotland. Tomorrow we take a ferry over to Belfast in Northern Ireland where we will spend a few days and then head down to Dublin. The adventure continues, thanks for reading!

*Until we crossed the border into Scotland, at which point we communicate via a very specific pattern that begins with them saying something in a garbled, yet adorable, Scottish accented English, me pausing and asking "what?" and them repeating the rambling mush of speech until I can translate into Regular English.

**In fact, by some miracle of sale prices and/or poor judgment, I recall that my mom and I flew business class over to Heathrow in 2003. I can't even imagine such a fortuitous turn of events anymore; how have I become more frugal over time?

Bogans Abroad

2009-08-24T14:28:00.018-07:00

Bogan: Australian and New Zealand English slang, usually pejorative or self-deprecating, for a person who is, or is perceived to be, of a lower-class background. According to the stereotype, the speech and mannerisms of "bogans" indicate poor education, cheap clothing and uncultured upbringing. "Bogans" usually reside in economically disadvantaged (often outer metropolitan) or rural areas. The term is the regional equivalent to the North American "redneck", "hillbilly", or "white trash". (wiki reference)

Well, that's us for this segment of How Kane and Angie are Doing in This Part of the World. Hello and welcome. During this episode, we will explore the different ways in which this particular couple can be both class-less and undignified in a place that requests both. Please, sit back, relax, and be entertained by our adventures in not-quite-being-good-enough.

We arrived today at the much anticipated Whitley Hall Hotel in Sheffield in central England. If you look at that website you may notice that it's a particularly elegant and high class hotel, certainly far beyond the meager reaches of our budget. But alas, in my epic (and ongoing) search for "a really good deal" at "a super nice place", I have found the 3 Night Combo Offer: a room and breakfast for three nights with dinner for two nights for £200 (=$330 USD, or $395 AUD). Quite a steal if the place is all it's cracked up to be. Which, in fact, we have found, it is.

So, we're excited to be in the nicest hotel room we've been in for three months (and perhaps ever?) and very eager to try the quality cuisine. One problem: the hotel recommends "smart/casual" attire when in communal areas, particularly at dinner. Let me just unzip the "smart" section in my backpack...oh, I'd forgotten, I only packed blue jeans and t-shirts. Mild panic sets in; what are we to do to conceal our true heathen nature?

Kane needs a haircut. He's grown into a shaggy dog with perpetually mushed hat hair and his attempt at an Australian haircut (the image is sort of what he was going for, minus the racing stripes) is really probably not what this facility is looking for in its clientele. So, he decides to save us from his shame and cut his hair. But not into the waste basket - what will they think of us?! In an episode of well-poised self sacrifice, he crouches over the toilet to cut his hair such that all evidence can be flushed away - see we are classy!

So now Kane's hair is buzzed and we're dealing with a bit of a skin head rather than a party boy, but at least his scraggly beard might be seen as distinguished. If he only wore glasses to set the whole thing into a sort of bohemian style then we might really be in business.

I'm a mess. The only pants I have are my stretched out, baggy, mayonnaise and ice cream stained blue jeans. This is day two of this particular pair of tattered Victoria's Secret undies*. My shoes are the New Balance tennis shoes that I've had for about four years now. They are so tattered that the inside heel has worn down to reveal whatever it is that makes up a shoe and now folds over and stabs me every time I put them on. I fear that water can now get in from the underside of the soles as the tread has worn down to a completely different color (I like to think of it as the "warning" color of the shoe, like the end of the receipt roll on a credit card machine). My only nice shirt - a long-sleeved, simple black cotton blouse - I had the foresight to leave at Jon's in Munich when we were furiously trying to "drop weight" for our trip. I shower, blow dry my hair, and wear a liberal amount of makeup in a sad effort to reconcile my shortcomings.

It seems to work; they do not refuse us from the dining room. Granted, almost everyone is dressed nicer and seems to be more dignified, but we make an effort to discuss important topics (engineering, polo, how cute the peacocks in the front garden are) and hold in any bodily functions that try to escape.

The setup is this: acquire a drink (not included, those sneaky bastards) from the bar, wait in the sitting room where you will be provided a menu and your order will be taken. Then you will be called to the dining room when your food is ready. It was odd but good. Coming into the dining room, we were seated at a four person table but with a place setting for only the two of us. With a million forks and knives and glasses and everything. Somewhere along the line I have picked up that you are to work from the outside to the inside when a multitude of silverware is provided, which worked quite expertly at this particular encounter.

The decor was elegant but not stuffy: subdued taupe paisley wall paper, wall mounted lamps, tastefully patterned curtains drawn back to reveal adjacent rooms. The chairs were sturdy dark wood with plump inset cushion, and the tables were flawlessly set on crisp white tablecloths. A small square vase with a single carnation graced each table along with a tiny flickering candle, clearly placed only as ambiance as the artificial lighting in the room was ample. It surprised me that almost all the tables were full; warm, pleasant chatter filled the room over the quiet melody of appropriate, yet not horrendous, background music.

We received our starters, which were excellent: a tomato, red onion and goat's cheese tort with pesto garnish for me, and salmon chorizo on a warm broad bean salad for Kane - delish! For our mains we both got the Shetland salmon on a tomato and kalamata olive nicoise - we could not resist ordering the same thing. Dessert presented many sumptuous choices (and by that I mean that I wasn't sure what many of them were), I got a chocolate "tear" which was a little ribbon of chocolate filled with orangie-custard and a scoop of bourbon ice cream (it's better than it sounds), while Kane got an artistic cheese plate.

Kane's cheese plate was just what he always wants for dessert: he's doesn't have much of a sweet tooth**. There were four slices of different types of cheese, three sticks of celery, a small bunch of grapes, a glob of fruity chutney, and two slices of french bread. It was like a whole other dinner! He slowly sampled each of the cheeses and then turned to me and said, pointing to the final slice of cheese that appeared softer than the others, "This kind of cheese is actually butter". And we proceeded to laugh at ourselves for a long while. He did not eat any more of that particular cheese.

We finished our excellent dinner without incident (didn't break anything, offend anyone (that I know of), or say anything particularly (noticeably) inappropriate) and headed back to our room. Waiting for us was a complimentary bottle of Australian sparking wine (they know how to make us feel at home) and small jug of port. These were actually in our room before dinner, but it was only after that we had the dedication and tenacity to tend to them.

And with that, we split (choked down) the bottle of delicious (horrendous) wine and chased it with (plugged our noses and chugged) the handsome (foul) port. Just because we aren't classy, doesn't mean fancy drinks will be wasted on us; we were once college students after all, and the spirit is not lost. This was actually the most wine I have ever consumed in my life, not only in one sitting, but in my entire life combined. I have never had more than a sip, followed by an appropriately dismayed scrunched face. But, there was no one to pawn it off on and nowhere to save it for later, and it was free, so I stepped up and made the appropriate sacrifices. Not only am I classy, I've grown quite mature as well, even for a bogan in England.

*Do not judge my repeat underwear wearing until you yourself have traveled for months on end. And if you have done such traveling and still frown on me, well, just keep quiet.

**Which is always a sore disappointment to me as I drool over any form of pastry, cookie, cake, chocolate, candy, pudding, brownie, tart, parfait or gelato.

Heaven with Groceries

2009-08-21T13:50:00.005-07:00

Traveling is a search of sorts. A search for knowledge, for understanding of different cultures, for experiencing unique places and new people. It is a search within yourself to find what it is you really seek in life, what makes you happy. It is often this search, this unknown, that draws us to travel around spending our hard earned cash all over this grand planet.

With over two months of continuous travel under our belts, in addition to our innate unflappable nature, we are rarely surprised anymore and not often wooed by our findings. This is a bit of a sad conclusion being that we have sacrificed so much to be here, but every feeling and every reaction is both lesson and revelation in itself. And besides, when it's all over and we're back to the 9-5, we'll forget (or laugh about) the dingy hotel rooms, the frustrating conversations with somber Germans, the infuriatingly yet insistently unlabeled roads, and we'll remember the funny, the tasty, and the beautiful moments of our trip, which there have been many.

We have spent the past 5 days in London, re-acquainting ourselves with polite people who speak English. In a city so enormous (7.5 million), it's very difficult to separate the good from the bad and find the Milk Duds* in a sea of Raisinets**, if you will. In a city like London (or LA, or NY, or Sydney, etc) there are undoubtedly and indisputably great restaurants, fun attractions, entertaining clubs, and great hang outs. The difficulty is in finding these gems amongst the white noise that makes up the rest of the metropolis. And that's where I try to get sneaky. I studiously carry a Lonely Planet guidebook to help locate decent restaurants and places to stay. But really, lots of people do that. I scour the internet for leads on the best values around town, the nicest hotels for the cheapest price, the best veggie restaurants. I try hard to find the really good, truly unique things that a city has to offer (that I would enjoy).

But still, we often have to make choices based on nothing at all. We find ourselves in a district not serviced by our loyal, if limited, guidebook. We end up without access to the internet*** for some time. And in these trying times, we have to choose what to do based on studying menus, scrutinizing decor, and interrogating personnel. Under these conditions, we cannot expect any better than hit or miss as we try to make educated decisions. Sometimes, however, a place will jump out at us. We will just be walking down the street and be suddenly bowled over by the sheer magnificence of a restaurant, store, or building. Sometimes we stumble, like blind children, into a place even more awesome than any internet review could have made us believe. This is exactly what happened to Kane and me three days ago in the suburb of London called Kensington.

Passing a Whole Foods store on the way back from lunch, I casually suggested that perhaps I might acquire some dessert-type item from this well-known and loved establishment. Kane concurred and we proceeded to wander into what could possibly have been the best place I have ever been.

The automatic doors under the familiar and comforting Whole Foods logo whoosh open at our approach revealing the bread and bakery section of the store. These people obviously have experience at grocerial warfare – my defenses were down. On the right was a variety of solid, sturdy, light-colored wood tables with stacks of beautifully displayed freshly baked loaves of bread. Mozzarella cheddar, rosemary garlic, pecan raisin, sourdough; all laid out as though you just finished baking them in your own kitchen. On the left was a sort of wooden dresser, its shelves bursting with heavy wicker baskets filled to their brims with freshly baked cookies: chocolate chip, white chocolate macadamia, lemon sugar, oatmeal raisin. Tables flanked the dresser and were adorned with giant muffins, croissants, and rich chocolate brownies. These treats were arranged exactly how they might be at a Christmas pot luck, so accessible and fresh looking that it was very difficult to restrain from simply reaching out and eating one of each. The brownies had a free sample tray: infinite cubes of the deepest brown that convinced me to buy a brownie for myself even though this is a treat I would never normally choose.

As we entered the store further, we were confronted with dozens more rambling displays of the finest foods: the fresh salad bar, the mix-your-own muesli bar, the grind-your-own peanut (or other nut) butter area, the freshest fruit from around the world, vegetables fresh cut on site in nice little baggies ready for your steamer or grill. There was a fresh dipped chocolates case that would make Mrs. See bow her head in shame.

Possibly the best part of the store was a tiny corner blocked off by sliding doors. Inside this small, bright room was a temperature controlled cheesery with heaping blocks and rounds of fresh cheddar, brie, gouda, blue, and probably any other kind of cheese you could possibly imagine. Some chunks were already broken off and wrapped for you to take, but for the rest, customers must ask the designated cheese manager, tending to this area religiously, to slice off a requested amount of their choice.

This was a store for kings and queens and yet I was allowed in. I, in flip flops and $5 earrings was allowed, nay encouraged, to meander around this grocery heaven munching on free samples and throwing whatever I wanted into my hand basket. It was truly amazing. I could find no down side to the existence of this facility except that some of the items are imported rather than local. The products were amazing. The floor was immaculately clean. The displays were awe-inspiring. The check-out line was non-existent due to an efficient, Fry's-like array of 15 or so registers, color coded with a display screen at the front to direct you to the next available cashier. The employees enjoy additional health benefits and stock options (there was a sign saying so).

I take back any complaints that I have previously submitted about capitalism because it has clearly spawned a place far above anything I could have imagined. A place that rights the wrongs of others. A place of peace and prosperity. The most awesome place I've ever bared witness to: Heaven with Groceries.

*Don't actually look at the nutrition information; what do you expect when you eat a Milk Dud?
**What this website neglects to tell you is that Raisinets are gross. You can have all mine, mom.
***I'm still waiting for internet to be available at all times and in all places because being without it is some kind of crime. Especially while traveling.

Amsterdam

2009-08-20T14:17:00.005-07:00

We arrived in Amsterdam on Wednesday the 12^th after a long day. We woke up in Berlin at 6am, drove to Hamburg to make the 11am tour of the city, got lunch, headed to The Netherlands around 4pm arriving at our Amsterdam hotel around 10pm. We were tired, to say the least.

We had 2 days in this city that is so beloved by everyone and we wasted more than half of the first day holed up in our hotel room trying to book a hotel for London. We will arrive in London on Sunday* and have had no luck finding an acceptable hotel as yet (we did search quite a bit in Berlin also). But, at this point we were down to the wire and HAD to find something. My conclusion is this: reasonably priced, decent hotels do not exist in London. They do not.

I found an excellent website whereby you can find a person who has a home or business with an extra parking space in London and you can pay to “rent” this space for some period of time. If you know one thing about London it's that parking (and driving, really) is not possible; think of San Francisco but with no parking lots. Good freaking luck. There actually are parking lots but they cost something like 25 GBP per day, which is like $50 AUD or $40 USD. I'm thinking that this doesn't fit into our budget. Anyway, we found a place for the car (25 GBP for a week) and were then free to look for a hotel in the city center, yeay!

Oh wait, the only hotels in the city center are a) expensive (say $200 USD min per night in like a Motel 6 sort of situation), b) really, really crappy (with user feedback like “worst place I have ever stayed", or, "whatever you do, do not stay here for any reason”), or c) not actually anywhere near the city center. And most places seemed to be a healthy combination of two or three of these. So, we spend all damn day in Amsterdam looking for an exception to these apparent truths, compromising more and more of our requirements as they day went on.

After approximately 6 hours of searching (at this point I would have paid any amount at all for a hotel where you didn't have to wade through a sea of used needles to get to the bathroom) we settled on a hotel just outside the city that had reasonable user feedback (no mention of heinous smells or contracting scabies) and was only about twice our budget. This was not a good day and, surprisingly, it didn't get much better even after we finally completed this ridiculous task.

So, we were free of homelessness for another week. We had long ago missed the day walking tours, but the night time Red Light District tour was still possible to make. So, we took the train into town and paid for a tour of the infamous red light district of Amsterdam. The tour was fine: prostitutes in storefronts, porno shops, gay bars; nothing can really surprise a person who's been to San Francisco and Vegas.

After the tour we walked around a bit looking to get some food. The city center is huge and it's completely swarming with people at all times. Narrow cobbled streets are overflowing with men, women, and children (yep, kids too) and the whole place is filthy. There is garbage everywhere; it's nasty. We stopped at a kiosk for some fries served in a paper cone that seemed to be very popular, but they were gross and stale and the man covered them in an obscene amount of “garlic sauce” which turned out to be very similar to Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing, which I hate. So Kane choked them down and I was just sad. I got an OJ so I wouldn't go to bed with a completely empty stomach, but, thus far, I was unimpressed with Amsterdam.

Our 2^nd day was a bit better. We made it out to the day walking tour, which was better executed than the tour the night before. We found the nicer part of town where the respectable people go and some attempt at cleaning had taken place since the night before as the trash that littered the town squares had been noticeably minimized. But really, I'm not sure what I was thinking going to a town known for prostitution and pot smoking, neither of which really peak my interest. It's not that I conceptually have a problem with either so much as I should have realized the people and behaviors that these activities draw would be disagreeable to me. Even though retirees and children abound, the whole area has a seedy feel – at least right in the city center and red light district. I don't think this needs to be the case, but it is.
And the place was packed. It was like being at Disneyland – every street for like a 5 mile radius was completely flooded with people. I was amazed especially since they didn't all seem to just be there for the pot. What are these people doing? There's tons of shopping, but if you want shopping don't you want to go to Paris or something? I was baffled, but I did know that the hordes of people helped to dwindle my already-minimal enjoyment of the place. If I were to do it again, I'd probably skip good old Amsterdam and leave it for the people who appreciate it.

P.S. - Please do check out my pics, however, for Germany, Prague, and Amsterdam (see last entry for the former 2).

*Yes I realize that I'm quite behind on the blogging. I wrote this entry in the car on our way from Amsterdam to London and we've been in London for 5 days now. I will try to catch up in the next week, provided we have reliable internet.

Prague and Berlin

2009-08-15T23:52:00.010-07:00

I'm behind on the blog a bit since I try to write while we drive and not while we're at each location. Don't be deceived into thinking that we're spending this precious time exploring each undiscovered city morning till night, rather, I just don't want to waste valuable time on the internet when it's available. Which, of course, is not to say that we don't get out and about in each place we visit – that would be silly – but we tend to spend mornings and evenings at the hotel, often even being productive and booking upcoming destinations, searching for attractions we would like to patronize, and communicating with friends and family. It keeps us going and keeps us sane so that we can continue the adventure day to day.

Ok, so, last week we left Jon in Krakow and Kane and I continued on to Prague in the Czech Republic. I did not actually know much of anything about Prague except that it's very popular nowadays and supposed to be very pretty. Good enough for me. When I say Czech Republic to people at home, they may envision a filthy communist country ravaged by war and entrenched in cultural crisis. Many people still think of Czechoslovakia as one country and don't know a whole lot about the two separate countries, Czech Republic and Slovakia. Granted, I don't know much either, but country-splitting does seem like there still may be some political instability present. Which may be true, I have no idea, because you can't tell from being in Prague. I will say this: Prague is the best city I have seen on this trip so far, and maybe ever.

Prague is a huge city with an expansive city center. Most of the city has been rebuilt since WWII but somehow they managed to do this as gracefully as I have yet seen. This is the Europe I was longing for. Screw Paris. Cobble stone plazas, open cafes, gorgeous parks, museums, bridges, vistas; a truly decent city. We were there 2 full days (3 nights) and, as often happens to us, we didn't have a lot to do. We're trying to travel cheap, which rules out majorly expensive attractions, we're pretty lazy so we don't usually hike around for the entire day, and we're a bit lame so we don't drink at night. So...what do we do over here? Well, we walk around until I start to complain, eat in nice (hopefully cheaper) cafes, play cards, ogle the pastries (me), take pictures, and generally just try to get a feel for each city. Prague is perfect for this. You could walk for days through scenic passages to rolling hilltops. There are millions of cafes, zillions of tourist shops, around every turn is a stunning river vista, antique building or inviting plaza. The food: good. The people: nice. The language: Czech, but since none of the tourists speak Czech, everyone speaks excellent English.
The weather was warm, we found a cafe with free soda refills (perhaps the only one in Europe...no amount of cobbled streets can beat the American out of me), we meandered through the enormous castle grounds. I could have done this for days. A truly inspiring, relaxing, and beautiful city. If you're heading this way and you're anything like me, pencil Prague into your itinerary no matter what you think you know (or don't know) about the Czech Republic.

From Prague, we moved to Berlin. Which was a totally different experience. While Berlin was also mostly destroyed in WWII, it's been rebuilt in a far less inviting, personal way. Instead of feeling like another person in the family of residents and visitors in the town, Berlin felt (to me) like I was a tiny ant thrown into a huge maze. The scale of the city is such that I rarely knew where I was, except that I was always surrounded by enormous museums and monuments. The arrangement of the sites doesn't have a proper flow to it and, though we went on a walking tour, I never really felt like I knew where to go next.
It's a city with a profoundly interesting and important history, but being there was like watching 40 seconds of Lord of the Rings and trying to discern why it's such a good movie. It almost seems like you could learn to appreciate the location more if you weren't in it. It needs a step back, some perspective. And because of this, I had an ok time in Berlin, but it wasn't my favorite place. Some of the sights were certainly cool: Holocaust memorial (see pic to the left), Berlin Wall, the Nazi architecture that still remains. The history is so much more interesting and tangible than the city itself that seeing the city is sort of a mash of confusion: on one street there is a beautiful pre-war concert hall across the street from a gigantic Nazi building (now the German tax office – ha) next to the Berlin wall. The tour guide described this as a great example of the layered history of Berlin, which it was, but really it just seemed to me like a city that has been destroyed so many times that it hardly has an identity anymore.

Don't get me wrong - I don't really dislike the place as much as I feel like I didn't much experience it in 2 days. I just don't feel like that's possible to do in such a short amount of time, and, frankly, you'd probably need to live there or know someone who does to get the real experience. That's just my two cents on the matter.

After Berlin we headed to Amsterdam where we spent two days. This blog entry will follow, but for now, have a look at some pics from Prague, North Germany (Dresden, Berlin, Hamburg – we were only in Dresden and Hamburg on the way to/from Berlin), and Amsterdam.

Auschwitz

2009-08-10T10:41:00.009-07:00

Last week Jon, Kane and I all visited Auschwitz Concentration Camp, about an hour drive east of Krakow, Poland. I had been looking forward to this part of our trip in a morbid sort of way, mostly because this is an attraction that is meaningful. As much as I love cafes and museums and castles, I was looking forward to a real monument where something definite and tangible happened, however horrible. It wasn't exactly what I had expected, and not for reasons I could have foreseen. Side note also pertaining to last blog entry - pictures now available for Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland (including Auschwitz), click here.

First of all, this facility reportedly receives one million visitors per year. I believe most of these visitors were there the same day we were. Ok, not really, but the place was packed. I had envisioned, like an Imax movie theater, the reception and ticket buying area would be equipped to handle throngs of visitors. Instead it was woefully unequipped with only two ticket windows in a small lobby with a line of people that choked the whole room. I wondered if they were trying to give us the full, historically accurate arrival-to-Auschwitz experience complete with unruly crowds of confused people who don't speak the same language. If so, I experienced the desired effect (sans impending doom).

After fighting our way to the ticket counter and paying our money, we were sent to waiting area "A" to receive our headphones and receivers for the tour. My first question, since I've been to Alcatraz with a broken audio tour cassette player before (ok it was a while ago): how can we check if these work before the tour starts? The answer was that you can't. I had a sneaking suspicion that one of our apparati would fail us in the first frantic minutes of the tour, and I was right. Kane's receiver didn't work. So, while Jon and I tried to listen to the first part of the tour, Kane rushed over to the counter where the workers were not prepared in the slightest to handle such a ridiculously unforeseeable problem, eventually replacing his unit with a working one. And so we were off.

The tour started in Auschwitz I, the smaller, original facility. Our group was about 30-40 people with one guide who spoke into a microphone which was projected into our headphones via receiver units. This was a nice strategy since it wouldn't have been quite the same experience had the guide been yelling so that we could all hear her. Auschwitz I appeared to be mostly in tact – the two story brick barracks still line the gravel streets surrounded by double barbed wire fences and interspersed wooden guard towers. It didn't feel particularly creepy to me, but I did see how it would work effectively as a prison.

Many of the barracks units have been turned into displays for different aspects of the lives of the prisoners. We saw examples of their living quarters, washrooms, pictures taken during the war, prisoners' belongings that were stockpiled by the Nazis, and the punishment barracks. The special punishment barrack consisted of the Wall of Death where people were executed, the poles where people were pole hanged, and an underground area where there were special cells for starving people to death, keeping them in complete darkness, and forcing them to stand indefinitely. There were also standing cells at Dachau – a person was forced to work throughout the day (manual labor for 10-16 hours) like everyone else, then, instead of being allowed to sleep, they were forced to crawl into a tiny stone chamber sized such that you can only stand in complete darkness for the night. Many people suffocated or died of exhaustion after a few days of this. I think that was one of the most gruesome pieces of evidence still remaining.
Interestingly, the part of the tour that saddened me the most – more than seeing pictures of the prisoners faces or the gas chamber – was the display of the belongings of the prisoners. During WWII, when you were sent to Auschwitz, you were told to bring necessities and not allowed to bring valuables. People packed what they thought they would need for – what? Well, they never imagined what would greet them when they arrived, of course. So they filled their suitcases with clothes, shoes, toiletries, food. Like anyone would. The Nazis, supremely organized and efficient as they were, stole those belongings, sorted them into giant piles and reused what they could for their campaign. When Auschwitz was liberated (along with all the other camps as well), the allies found entire warehouses filled with shoes. Or pots and pans. Or human hair.

There was one picture of a pile of hair combs. For some reason that hit a chord with me – everyone brought their combs; they would surely need to comb their hair wherever they were going, right? How could anyone anticipate otherwise? Every social norm that we have ever been taught tells people to keep groomed, to look tidy. Instead, their suitcases were left on the arrival ramp to be emptied, sorted, and fed back into the machine of the organization who would take far more than just their belongings. In addition to the picture of the combs, there was also a large pile of brushes, a room with 40,000 shoes in it, a giant room filled knee high with pots and pans, a hallway with hundreds – hundreds – of prosthetic legs, a room with human hair from what they estimated were thousands or women, and dozens of tins of shoe polish. There were also hundreds of suitcases labeled in neat handwriting with the owners' names, birth dates, and addresses. The Nazis had everyone label their bags supposedly so that the prisoners could find their belongings again when they left.

The other people on our tour were a notable distraction from all this, to us at least. Two women brought microscopic dogs in stylish, pink carrying cases. Is it really necessary to bring your dog for this? Is there not some irony in bringing a caged animal into a concentration camp? Another family thought it was a good idea to bring their two toddlers. They dragged them, whimpering and screeching and running in circles into each and every exhibit, folding and unfolding the stroller each time. Why one of the six adults in that family could not 1) calm the particularly agitated child and/or 2) wait outside the “please maintain a respectful silence” exhibits with said children is beyond me. I'm sure their tiny brains really learned a lot from their educational visit*.

The second part of our tour consisted of a jam packed, belated bus ride to Auschwitz II – Birkenau, the much larger site 3km (2mi) away. Now we didn't have our little headphones anymore and we had to strain to hear our soft-spoken guide over the pair of squealing children. Here we visited the toilet facilities and sleeping quarters that were still standing with the guide (at which point one woman's cell phone went off despite earlier requests to turn off phones), then saw what's left of two of the four original gas chamber/crematoriums. This place was the real death factory; some 1.5 million men, women, and children were killed here, most directly upon arrival. Pregnant women and children were the first priority to the chambers – they were of no worth as laborers to the Nazis.

The four gas chambers at Birkenau were mostly destroyed after the Nazis blew them up in their haste to cover their tracks just before the war ended. The one that was in tact was the smaller facility at Auschwitz I, which we visited during the first half of our tour. This one was relatively small in capacity, not much larger than a house but with low ceilings, no windows, and plain concrete walls, ceiling and floor. The crematorium is attached adjacent. We walked through in silence, as requested, only distracted when the Asian tour guide with the group in front of us decided this was a great place to continue explaining things to his group. The “silence please” signs were certainly not in whatever language they spoke, but surely he, as the guide, would know this is a quiet zone? My eyes were starting to hurt from rolling them at all these ridiculous people.
So, after a good four hours, we were all Auschwitz-ed out. And with good timing since it was just starting to sprinkle. After a not-as-crowded bus ride back to Auschwitz I, we made our way back to our car and meandered back to our hotel for the night. I found it to be a really great experience that could have only been improved if the facility itself was better equipped to handle the volume of visitors present and if the visitors themselves stopped acting like they were visiting Disneyland rather than a former Nazi death camp.

*To Adele: No, I do not hate children. Just those who I encounter that are not related to me or my friends, especially when they are screaming.

And Then There Were Two

2009-08-06T08:46:00.013-07:00

Today concluded our week and a half trip with Jon. We took him to the Krakow airport at 5:45am (thanks for the going away present, Jon) and now we're back on our own again. Having Jon with us for 11 days was a really good kick start to the major road trip part of this vacation. A third person, if you can stand their constant presence for this long, makes any activity more fun, adds depth (if not assistance) to decision making, and, best of all, reduces the cost of shared items. Mostly we invited Jon to save a few bucks. Kidding, of course. There are few people in the world who Kane and I can stand in such a constant supply, too bad our stint as the Three Musketeers had to end. But we hit up a lot of sights, had a lot of laughs, and covered a fair amount of ground in the week an a half since we left Germany. Let's recap since I haven't really been providing much bloggular insight into this part of the trip thus far.

We left Munich on July 25 heading for Salzburg in Austria. We only spent one night there and the town was really nice. They have a kick ass castle, even amongst the relative hordes of castles that plague this land. And we happened to catch some sort of festival occurring downtown, passing by two night time performances in different plazas of the town. We weren't terribly interested in the opera performance or the symphony, but it was still cool to see everyone out at night and events taking place.

Next stop was Vienna which was probably our biggest disappointment of the trip. Vienna is a decent city with a snazzy, upscale downtown, but we just didn't really jive. First thing we noticed consistently about Vienna: it smells. Curious scents waft unexpectedly from all parts of the city. It wasn't clear why or if we were just walking down the wrong alleyways, but the place stank. Next to annoy was the prices of everything and anything in that city. Everything was expensive. Again, not really sure why, Vienna is no better than the other big cities we've seen, but everything was significantly more expensive than anywhere else so far. And lastly, Vienna is mostly known for museums and art galleries, etc. We perused the choices and nothing really struck our fancy. We weren't even able to make it to the Technology Museum which had a chance of being interesting. There was an excellent vegetarian restaurant and our bus tour of the city was nice, but overall, not the coolest place. Oh yeah, I am happy to report that the famous chocolate cake Vienna is known for, Sacher Torte, is good.

After stopping in Bratislava, Slovokia (nice town, pretty uneventful, excellent garlic soup) on our way over to Hungary, we spent three full days in Budapest. We all thoroughly enjoyed Budapest, mainly because the weather was hot and they have a plethora of public baths to patronize. This is apparently a major tourist attraction (the locals partake enthusiastically as well), even though I didn't really know much about it before arriving. There are dozens of baths throughout the city and we hit up three during our stay. I wasn't really sure what to expect, but basically these facilities are just large complexes with many swimming pools. And since they are so popular, they are not disused, run-down, and filthy like the ones typically found in the States (ie The Hayward Plunge). The first place we went to was the best: three large outdoor pools, one cool, one warm, and one hot, and a series of indoor rooms with smaller pools of varying temperature with many sauna rooms attached. It was fun to explore and since it was not overrun with children, we were actually able to enjoy ourselves. We also did a walking tour and a river boat cruise in Budapest, but, aside from the baths, didn't explore a whole lot else. The food left something to be desired though, I should note.

Which brings us to our final destination of our trip with Jon: Krakow, Poland. On Sunday the 2^nd we drove through Slovakia again to get to Krakow in the south of Poland where we spent our final three days. Krakow has been my favorite place so far. Initially, the city looked sort of like Budapest: old buildings, not terribly well kept, narrow streets, nothing very special in the general look of the city. But I quickly realized that in the area we were staying and in the city center (about 20 minute walk apart) there were throngs of cute boutiques and cafes tucked into these old decrepit buildings. I wouldn't say the place was upscale, but many of the individual shops were. It was sort of a weird juxtaposition. But it was so likable: the people all speak English (happily) but don't assume you're a tourist, greeting you initially in Polish then switching easily so that we can understand. The streets are lined with tables spilling from cafes, full of people at seemingly all hours of the day and night. The stores sell cute clothes, shoes, cloth, pastries, etc. Everything is about 2/3 the price it would be in Germany/Australia/The US. It was excellent.

We mostly milled about in Krakow, enjoying the outdoor cafes in the city center, meandering in the downtown shops, having ice cream and smoothies and playing cards every night at a tiny bar/cafe near our hotel that quickly became our favorite. A truly great vacation spot for us; I would recommend Krakow to anyone. We did take one day and do a complete tour of the nearby Auschwitz concentration camp, which I will discuss in another entry. Pics will be forthcoming as well...I've taken so many it's hard to pick out the ones to post on my Picasa. But it shall be done! Now time for a nap in Prague.

Bad Decision

2009-07-28T12:09:00.016-07:00

Today I made a bad decision. I don't often make bad decisions; I typically pride myself on this aspect of my personality. Excusing circumstances when no educated guess can be made (such as which restaurant to have lunch at in Vienna which turned out to be bad yesterday) I try to weigh options, pose logical solutions, and think practically and objectively about the outcomes of the choices I make. On vacation, it's far easier to make bad choices since every place is new (and, in this case, foreign) and you just don't know what to expect. In this case, I was just plain being an idiot.

No, I was not drunk. I don't drink often and I have yet to drink on this trip at all, save a shot of Bailey's on the plane (it was free!). Today we went to the permanent amusement park in Vienna to have a look around. Our original intent was to ride the 100 year old ferris wheel (sorry mom) and see if there were any other rides that look fun. Which there were. Two rides piqued our attention: a river rafting-style ride (similar to Rip Roaring Rapids at Great America for the Bay Area residents) and a super spinning tea-cups-on-crack style ride. Kane isn't a huge fan of rides so Jon and I decided to patronize the spinning-pods-on-spinning-tenticles ride. This was my bad decision of the year.

As a child I always loved roller coasters and to the best of my knowledge I still do. I also always like the teacups rides which are the ones where you sit in a pod that spins on a platform that spins attached to a central apparatus that spins. It's dizzying madness and it's always made me very happy and appropriately disoriented. This ride was just like a teacups ride but it also went upside down. Apparently this makes all the difference in the world.
The ride starts right side up. And so I started laughing. Fun! It starts to invert. Wooow, crazy more fun! We're all the way upside down. We're thrown around up and down. Which way are we facing? Is that the floor? I feel vomit-ish. I close my eyes. Laughter turns to moaning. Groaning, really. We slow down.
To Jon I say, "Oh thank goodness, I don't think I could have lasted much longer without throwing up"

Jon's response is a notable silence...

We start to spin backwards. We do the whole thing again backwards, though it doesn't really matter because being tossed around in a clothes dryer is pretty much the same no matter which way you're facing. It finally stops. We stagger off. I think I feel better, but this is just the beginning of my sickness. I think I was in shock. Cold sweats followed by hot sweats. I can't walk. Sitting hurts. I check to see that a garbage can is within projectile vomit range. Talking hurts. Jon is ok. I am a wreck.
I collapse onto a bench. At least I have the smell of cotton candy and children to help ease the pain. A half hour later I'm ok to walk to another bench thirty feet away. We forego any other rides; I am too fragile to engage in anything further. The thought of a train ride makes me shiver. A soda helps me regain composure. We continue the day without further incident; a salad a couple hours later and I was good as new. Apparently I'm too old for upside-down-triple-spin rides.

My first words after stepping off that hellish ride? For fans of Anchorman..."Milk was a bad choice". And indeed it was a bad choice.

Ice Caves

2009-07-27T01:38:00.011-07:00

We went to ice caves in Austria today which has inspired this entry that is relatively unrelated to both ice and caves. They have instead, as the apex of a series of similar experiences throughout Germany and Austria, inspired a rant about these people who refuse to give out information. And I don't just mean because I can't read the signs in German anymore, I mean there are often no signs and no one tells you crap. I will explain.

Yesterday we arrived in Austria and had a very nice day and night in Salzburg. Today we were scheduled to drive to Vienna and stop at a couple attractions along the way which included salt mines and ice caves. The salt mines were really cool, but that's not the point of this blog entry. We arrived at the ice caves just after 3pm. Our guidebook said the last tour was at 4pm, so we were happy to have made it in time. Our guide book also said that the tour was €9. Upon arrival and after deciphering the sign posted, we were informed that the actual cost, including the gondola ride up the monstrous mountain (which would have taken hours to walk up) was no less than €26 each. To translate, that's about $38 USD or about $50 AUD. Per person. What does this include? Well that's part of the surprise; they don't really tell you. Gondola ride up, ice cave tour, gondola back down. Sounds pretty simple I guess.

We take the insane gondola ride up, ears popping. We land on a massive mountain and get a tour group number. The man tells us that the entrance to the cave is a 15 minute walk up the hill so make sure to be there on time for our 4pm tour. Ok, we can do that. We start to walk toward the entrance of the cave. What no sign or personnel told us is that the “walk” up to this cave is a heinous 45 degree slope mountainous climb in direct sunlight on an 85 degree day (well I suppose we could have figured the temperature on our own). With no water or bathrooms at the top. Oh, cool, I wanted to strain my quadriceps today. What if we were with someone elderly? Or handicapped? Or just lazy? Incidentally we were with someone lazy; two someones in fact. Jon and I had a complain fest; why were we not told of this obstacle? And better yet, why doesn't the damn gondola take us all the way up here? You think I came here to hike? I digress. The day was beautiful, the view was gorgeous, and we were about to see a freaking ice cave. On we went.

We get to the cave entrance and see that tour number 5 leaves in 15 minutes. It's already 4pm and we're in tour group number 6....so we're not really sure what's supposed to happen here. People start to go into the cave for tour group number 5 and fortunately Jon, who understands German, overheard some people asking about tour group 6, to which the guide replied something like, “yeah, this is the last tour so you better come with us”. God forbid we get a proper announcement or any indication in the language that we speak, even though supposedly the tour is in both English and German. So we follow this double sized group into the cave. The group is so large and unwieldy that we can't get anywhere near the guide and are instead fighting through a crowd of people at each turn. I don't want to be with this many people unless a band is playing at the front of the place, ok? But, it's a good cave, I'll give it that. It was enormous and well lit and full of ice as promised. It was, of course, quite cold (freezing actually), but we were warned about this which makes all the damn difference in the world.As the tour began, we noticed that the guide was not repeating anything in English as our last tour (at the salt mines) had done*. So, even though they had told us that the tours were in both English and German (which we assumed to mean at the same time) they apparently had sent us off on a German only tour. Even though I bought the tickets in English. Where is the disconnect here? Can you people throw me a bone?

The funniest thing was that as we entered the cave everyone was stopping at a little unlabeled machine to get a ticket. I asked Jon, “what are these tickets for?” but he hadn't heard the guide say. Jon procured a ticket through the masses but it said nothing on it. A ticket with no text. What? Kane and I passed through sans ticket hoping that it wasn't like the ticket to get out of the ice cave or something. Via Jon's translation, there was supposedly no mention of this ticket for the entire tour. (Incidentally, there was also no mention of when or how this ice cave was discovered way up in the middle of an Austrian mountain.) Anyway, upon exiting the cave, there was a similar mad rush to another machine where one was to insert his/her previously aquired ticket. It apparently printed some text on the card or something, but we never really found out since Jon's ticket wouldn't go in. Yet another enigma.

So, what I'm noticing is that they don't sign things very well here (roads excepted, thank goodness). No warnings, no explanations, no instructions. You move forward, pay your money, and hope everything works out to your satisfaction. And if it doesn't, too damn bad. I suppose it's because I come from a land where that same ice cave would have had 150 warning signs, a liability waiver, an extensive informational pamphlet, six foot continuous guard rails, and required helmet rentals (fully sanitized, of course). Better yet, we Americans might have just knocked down the mountain to install a Black Angus Steakhouse and reassembled the ice cave at a more convenient location like Vegas or Gilroy. Maybe we baby our citizens too much but these people don't even seem to know what babies are**. So, if you're a sensitive soul like me, know that there is much laughter, incredulous sighing, and confused discussions to be had if you choose to travel around central Europe.

*At the salt mines, the guide would say a ten minute shpeal in German followed by the English “translation” of about one sentence worth of heavily accented information. For some reason I felt like we were getting left out a bit. Jon verified this.
**Although, someone did, for some reason, think it was a decent and appropriate idea to bring their baby to the ice cave. Wow, how surprising that a baby is going to wail and cough the entire time he's being dragged around a place that's as comfortable as a walk in freezer. What a truly excellent idea. At least idiocy exists internationally even if signs don't.

South Germany

2009-07-24T08:19:00.009-07:00

This past week we've done a bit of a road trip around the South parts of Germany. It's been generally good and fun and scenic, though we have had a few problems. Actually, we have had one problem: we do not speak German. None at all. We don't read it or write it or understand it in any measure. This has been our main obstacle during our time here which we have overcome with a combination of cowardice and avoidance (and, when we have the time, a German to English dictionary). Let's just say we have been eating a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in our hotel rooms. Ok, this plan was also to save money (yes, we're cheap and unable to communicate – come travel with us!) not just to avoid the German menus and surly restaurant attendants. Though it was a satisfactory solution to both of these obstacles.

Let's discuss the positives since I tend to dwell on the negatives because they are more entertaining and, let's face it, sarcasm does become me*. Germany is a beautiful place. At least the parts we've seen at this time of year. I understand it gets all snowy in the winter (probably also very pretty, but in an “Oh, you don't like to ski? Well then go freeze your ass off anyway” sort of way) and I really don't know what happens in the fall and spring except that I imagine it's something like between summer and winter (gold star for deductive reasoning!). The landscape is never ending hills of green, green, green – trees, forests, meadows, fields, crops, vineyards, and on and on. Just driving around is a real treat.

My favorite thing about the towns we visited was the part of each town called the 'Altstadt' or Old Town which is typically the original area of the town filled with buildings built anywhere from 200-600+ years ago and often surrounded by a big stone wall (and sometimes a disused moat!). This part of the town is typically the tourist center where shops, cafes, and landmarks abound. They are as picturesque as they are delightful** to wander around in. We had the pleasure of exploring the Altstadt areas of Nuremberg, Heidelberg, and Freiburg, which were our main three destinations on this trip.

View Larger Map

The first two cities also have really nice castles overlooking the towns and I would say that Heidelberg Castle (Schloss Heidelberg) has been the highlight so far. Now mostly ruins, this castle was built over a span of 300 years starting in the 1400s and then mostly destroyed by wars in the 1600s and a fire (from lightening striking the bell tower – so Back to the Future!) in the 1700s. Only one part of the castle was rebuilt in the 1800s and we took an excellent tour of the whole thing (in English).

We spent the last few days of this trip exploring the Black Forest in the south west corner of Germany – an area heavily influenced by the French and Swiss due to the close proximity. The Black Forest is really beautiful; an entire region of mountainous greenery with tiny, quaint towns nestled into the valleys. For most of one day we just drove all around, stopping at a waterfall here, a lake there, and lunch at a tiny town in between. And, this is one of the few places where it's actually easier and nicer to have a car than to take a train. We could have asked for better weather since it rained most of the time, but I guess that's why everything's so green! See the latest round of pictures here.
Now we're back in Munich to pick up some cargo (mainly Jon) before we head off to Vienna, Budapest, Krakow (Poland), and then Prague over the next 2 weeks. The adventure continues!

*I am aware that sarcasm is said to be the lowest form of wit, but I also find it to be the highest form of intelligence.
**Yes, I used the word 'delightful', what are you gonna do about it?

Munich

2009-07-18T02:07:00.017-07:00

Welcome to Europe. We flew into Munich last Friday the 10th and have been dutifully relaxing, sightseeing, and hanging out with Jon for one solid week. This is my first time in Germany and Kane's first time in Europe altogether. So, we had (and still have) a few things to get used to. Let's start with the basics:

They speak German here. This was something I had obviously known in an abstract way beforehand, but not really thought about. We were in Australia before; tons of new stuff to get used to but you can always ask someone about it. Now we're sort of on our own when we're not with Jon. Menus, road signs, tram ticket machines - all in German. Though most people secretly speak English, it's embarrassing to ask them to. We're getting by but it's an interesting, and often frustrating change.
They drive on the right. Hallelujah! Well, sort of. We, obviously, have been conditioned by years of driving in the US to think on the right side of the road. We had only minor problems in Australia, but some things really are just ingrained. Other things, however, we've only experienced while driving in Australia. Example: roundabouts. I am not used to going counterclockwise in a roundabout. This is odd. We are dealing with it.
It's summertime in the northern hemisphere. The sun rises at...some early time in the morning before I'm awake. It gets dark after 9pm. It's warm and, often, sunny. This is what I'm talking about.

And for some smaller points that are thought provoking and sometimes baffling:

They do not serve tap water at restaurants. Not as a norm at least. If you ask for water you get disgusting bubbly water. Everyone else drinks beer, soda or juice. It's ridiculous.
They do not keep their milk refrigerated at the grocery store. In the store aisles, milk comes in little 1 liter boxes which are not refrigerated. Nothing is wrong with this, the milk is boiled or whatever and then sealed, but it's still odd at first.
People don't smile here. You know when you walk down the street and make eye contact with a stranger and you each give a little half smile to indicate that you are mutually friendly people even though you don't know each other? They don't do that here. Sometimes they stare sans smile (love the alliteration, don't you) but rarely a smirking stranger for no reason.
There are very strict noise laws. In Munich, you cannot be loud or disruptive, even in your own home (provided that it disturbs others), after 10pm (till 6am) or on Sundays. This includes loud music, mowing your lawn, hammering, and possibly even running your washing machine. It does not seem to include the heinously loud and frequent police sirens reminiscent of the Nazi era. Those can go anytime they want.

Other than taking in the oddities that make Munich the place it is, we've been sightseeing rather dedicatedly. At least for us. Here's a rundown of what we've seen so far:

Saturday - Gay Pride Parade. They know how to queer it up here.
Sunday - Tollwood Festival. I don't know what it was a festival for, but there were adequate amounts of people, beer, stalls of food, and nick knacks. It was good.
Monday - Walking Tour. Free walking tour of Munich with a little bit of history and a lot of standing in the sun. Got to see a bit of the city though.
Tuesday - Nymphenburg Palace. Big mansion from the 1600s. Pretty nice.
Wednesday - Day at Jon's house to plan and book our next week of travel around south Germany. Also bought a GPS.
Thursday - Pick up the car and tour at Dachau Concentration Camp. Acquired the car with no problems, Dachau was interesting.
Friday - Neuschwanstein Castle and Hohenschwangau Castle. The first one is the really famous German castle that the Disney castle was based on. They were both nice but I had expected more for some reason. No idea how to pronounce the latter.
Saturday (today) - Deutsches Museum. Apparently it's huge and very in depth...unleash the nerds!

And that's been our stay so far; here are the pics that made the cut. We're having a nice time and the weather has been warm and sunny for most of the time, though it decided to start raining yesterday and today. We leave tomorrow (Sunday) for our five day road trip around south Germany and return to Munich next Friday.

Spendings - The Dirt

2009-07-06T16:45:00.009-07:00

Yeah, you want to know the dirt on our trip, don't you? You don't care about the Sydney Opera House or Kakadu National Park. You think our pics are mediocre and just browse through them as you peruse your usual internet sites. You scoff when I mis-spell things or trip over a punctuation mark. You are overwhelmed when you log on after two weeks and I have 17 new posts that you will never catch up on and, frankly, don't much care to read. I mean, they're boring. Documentation of the day to day activities of traveling - come on! Write something interesting! Make something up if you have to, right?

Well, this entry is for the prying minds, the curious cats, the chatty Kathys. This one will tell you all about the bottom line, the real deal. So, the question remains: how much money did we spend on this trip around Australia? You already looked down, didn't you. The pie chart is just too tantalizing to resist - I know better than most*. Well, you may as well look now if you haven't already:
Let's analyze, shall we? We left June 8 and got back July 4. That means the trip was 26 days** long, which translates to $317 per day for both of us, or $158/day each. It sounds expensive, doesn't it? It was, damn it, that wasn't a trick question. Regardless, if you are acquainted with Kane and me, you are aware that we are relatively frugal. Not so frugal that I would resort to, say, camping or eating at McDonald's, but we're certainly budget conscious. As evidenced by the very existence (and accuracy) of the pie chart.

I don't have a lot of excuses; this country is expensive. I was impressed to see that almost a quarter of our expenses were for activities - I had not realized we had paid so much money for tours, cruises, etc. The bulk of our activity money was spent on: Fraser Island Tour; two Whitsunday Island boat/snorkeling tours; Reggie Watts tickets; the Australia Zoo; Great Barrier Reef Cruise and Snorkeling tour at Port Douglas; and two river cruises in Kakadu. To be fair, the Fraser Island trip was a two day deal that included one night accommodation and food and accounts for about a quarter of the activities costs. I just need to take deep breaths and keep saying the "once in a lifetime" mantra to keep calm with these ridiculous prices.

Transportation and accommodation were the next two big hitters - we rented a car for the entire trip which was just plain expensive and also very nice. It cost an average of $64/day for the car, but a lot of that was because they charge you a whole lot extra for pickup one place and drop off another - not really sure why. Accommodation averaged out to about $62/night which is about as good as you'll get here. We stayed in hostels most nights; got nice hotels in two places for 6 nights total. Totally worth it. Plus, you have to account for the fact that we weren't paying rent during this, and our rent here was $2173 a month. So, really, we were saving money on accommodation as compared to the past year and a half. Like how I worked the numbers there?

Food is probably where we could have saved the most money - we ate out almost every lunch and dinner. We tried not to go to super expensive places, but a standard meal for dinner here is typically between $20-$30 per plate which just racks up a huge bill really quickly. We did almost every breakfast in our hostel/hotel with cereal and powdered milk which probably saved us a few hundred bucks. Flights were the next offender, exacerbated by the trip to Darwin. Could have saved a few hundred bucks each if we had just come back to Melbourne from Cairns.

The stragglers are gas, stuff, and other. I was impressed that gas was such a small chunk of our spendings; we spent $513 driving 5719km (=3800 miles) for an average of about 33 miles to the gallon per Kane's calculations. Note also that gas here is between $4.60 and $5.60 per gallon (though it's sold in liters so the price doesn't sound so heinous). "Stuff" just means random crap we bought which mostly consisted of a bag I acquired and towels we purchased to replace the ones we left at a hostel, in addition to books, magnets, drug store supplies, internet, laundry, post cards, etc. "Other" was a category that I see was not used correctly as it also includes laundry and internet. If I cared more, I might fix that. I think we'll live.

So there you have it. You now know how much poorer we are from this trip around Australia. It was good times; can't really put a price tag on experiences and all that, right? I'll just keep telling myself that as I mourn my bank account. And that wasn't even the start of our troubles...Europe will surely trick us out of the rest of the money we have so dedicatedly saved up over the last year. Sigh. Save, save, save...spennnnndddd!!!

*I freaking love pie charts. In case it wasn't clear in the body of the post.

**I'm not counting July 4 as a day on the actual trip since we arrived back in Melbourne at 7am.