Lol

I'm a fox

Dr. Tourniquet(professor's headshot located here), was absorbed in very important gravitational science late on the morning of November 28, 2007. The professor was interested in whether or not a glass of water would tip over and spill if pawed at repeatedly. His hypothesis was that the laws of physics exist, so the glass would tip over. The scientific instincts his Ph.D. in Pawing and Fluffiness Science gave him yet again did not fail. The glass of water, half full and left on the kitchen table overnight, did eventually topple and spill its contents over the table and, due again to the effects of gravity as Dr. Tourniquet deduced, all over the kitchen floor. Dr. Tourniquet's lab assistant, "Grippy" White, was called in to take care of the mess, as the professor needed to publish his results on Slashdot immediately and respond to any subsequent flames his work received. Dr. Tourniquet will continue his important research in other science and social fields. Cat Tech Press will soon be publishing Dr. Tourniquet's "Fire: Does it burn stuff?" and "The Usefulness of Abstinence-only Education in Public Schools." Reviews of these works are, as always, expected to include generous petting and cooing.

ps. Who signed me up for the L.L. Bean Catalog? I didn't order it, but it came addressed to me at my Santa Fe address, which I think maybe three or four people know.

Part two: Permanent time

When the cats got out a few weeks ago, Greg wasn't worried at all. He calmly stated that the "cats always come back." He was right, the escape was temporary. But I stirred that postulate about cats around in my mind like it was a pasta-late.* I let it cook for a few seconds. Greg's sententiousness ended up sounding like poetry. This happens when I start reading poetry again. I've been going back to the Romantics lately, mixed in with a few old issues of Poetry Magazine. Not to mention it's a significant time in my life right now, so I pay more attention to off-hand statements that can be twisted into something moving. The game's changed, son, as some of my coworkers have told me recently. That's a pretty good statement itself, even if it's clichéd. It packs three ideas into four words. One, that life is a game; two, that said game has changed in some way; and three, that I am your son. It's not the only cliché I overheard at [THE CAT FACTORY] (more on the factory later). One of my overnight coworkers uncapped some canned wisdom that I thought people only said in movies and bumperstickers: "Life's too short to be angry, you know. You just need to have fun with life." I didn't balk. turn my nose up, or squint my eyes and stare down my nose when I heard this. At 12:30am on a Wednesday night, two hours into a night shift, and thinking about all that has happened over the past year, it made sense. It felt nearly poetic: the right words at the right time. I don't totally agree with the optimist's equation of life=fun+good. I still have my east coast cynicism out here in burritoland. But it's nice to keep in mind occasionally. Like when I'm having fun hiking at Tent Rocks, I can say, Oh look, I've discovered life! which is what you can do with dead stones in Go. I've started playing Go with Greg's as my sensei. Learning to play Go well is one of the most challenging things I've done, and I am not done at it. But more on that later. There's a great poetic phrase that captures a prime Go strategy. It also sounds totally awesome. A few games into my training I made some n00b moves, trapping some of my stones. I thought they were done for, going to be captured and taken to Go Gitmo, but Greg told me to "Make life from these dead stones." Seriously he said this, and I laughed. It's a real phrase used in Go books, and it's perfect, I'd say: poignant and charmingly metaphorical. So I've started using it. It's poetry to be used everyday.

There's more poetry. I told a friend about something that had happened to me a while ago and they said their "heart would have broken into a million pieces" if it had happened to them. I felt a little taken back when I visualized that while thinking about what had happened to me. It's not a startling phrase by itself, but at the moment it was said, it felt unusual, like poetry. I had another friend tell me some very important things that I won't repeat here, but it was great to hear that person say it, and it felt like poetry too. Poetry that isn't written down, doesn't last long, and maybe you forget it, but at that moment you hear it, or see it, experience it, whatever sense it comes to you by, it changes you a little.

I used to think of poetry as a permanent thing. It would last for the ages and transcend time. I wanted that permanence myself. Lately though, I've been thinking a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions isn't always permanent. I think i always knew this too. I went through some old writing of mine and I found something similar in one of my many scribbled manifestos. I'm writing a new one now. One of the tenets is to stop desiring something permanent and enjoy the passing for now, and if something less temporary comes along, like a career, a great city I want to live in for the rest of my life, or, gosh gee even a girlfriend, take it up when that pizza comes to your door. But I'm not seeking anything lasting right now, except some sense of personal growth. This is fallout from my European travels, where nothing was assured. Experiences were had as they came. Those phrases I wrote above, they don't mean so much to me now as they did when I first heard them. But I took them to be something grand when I first heard them, and it felt great to do so. It doesn't really matter if those cats don't come back.

*Good one bro!

PS: i'm going to be updating again this week,! I have a backlog of posts, mostly better written and clearer then this one! But did you see that pasta-late joke? Classico! You can have it if you want. Bust it out at Italian math parties, right after you make a Fibbonachi sequence sex joke. All the mathematicians will love you and feed you extra cannoli, I guarantee it. And Shazam! there are now cats in my room, and one is playing imaginary whack-a-mole with his paws and the other thinks my bed is a fierce enemy. Well, the cat's right, the bed has been attacking my back relentlessly for weeks now. But this is my war, cat, so step down.

Part one: Pocket time

I've taken to keeping dice in my pocket.
Not yet, actually: I've taken to thinking about keeping dice in my pocket. I've stopped keeping my hands in them, except on those cold days I make the fatal decision to forget my gloves, so now I can fit other things in besides my hands. So I don't have this pair of dice yet, but I'm going to get some from someplace sometime before I head off to the great somewhere out west. I forget where and when I had the idea. It was probably when I had a hot head and went off driving somewhere toward the mountains. I remember one reason for carrying dice: you can always play a game with someone, or if you're alone, entertain yourself with a friendly guessing game. And you can make bets against yourself if you're really clever.
I think what got me thinking about carrying dice is that they are permanently optimistic. If you roll a die, you are mathematically certain to have a 100% chance of not getting a zero. This is with your typical six-sided die, of course, if you have nerd dice it is a different story, probably one with dragons and hot dark elves. That's fine, I like all kinds of dice, but never getting a zero is a friendly idea. No matter what you roll, even if it's not the number you wanted, you still have something, numerically speaking. Sure, you might lose all your money and maybe your toes if you're in deep trouble, but if you're in an alley trying to roll an 8 and you get a 4, you can always console yourself by thinking "At least I didn't lose my child's college fund by rolling a nothing at all! I have a four! That's a nice number! Maybe I'll call it my lucky number!" And your life would change slightly for the better: now you have a lucky number! Think of all the things you can do with a lucky number! Silver lining, guys. Only chumps and snotty mathematicians would call zero their favorite number. You have big-nose four, and no money. You better fucking hold onto that number.
I'd say dice are nice. Knowing no matter what you'll never end up with nothing is incredibly positive. Maybe not to Zen Buddhists, but for people like me who like things, it's nice to always know you have a positive integer on your side. I'm rolling dice right now, dice as big as a Chevy S-10 going across the cornopolis of the midwest. I'm moving to Santa Fe, and I don't know what I'm going to get, but I know it's not going to be a zero.
--------

I wrote this a few weeks ago. Now I'm in Santa Fe, with no dice, but I do have two axolotls, two cats, a farfisa organ, two friends, a couple of mountains, and no job yet. I don't have sweet zero out here, and I still have plenty in Maryland. And tonight, we eat pizza. It's pizza night at the yet-to-be-named house of Anne and Greg and Scott. We're starting traditions already.

A poem

In German,
laundromats are called
Wascherei
and they are
hard to find
in Berlin.

It's almost
as hard
to find a
Wascherei
as it is
to find
a reason that
anything should be anywhere
in particular,
while it's not
as hard
to find smelly clothes
in my backpack.

Five Hours in Berlin

And I've already seen a poster advertising a Depeche Mode Party. I took a photograph. I had a sleepless night on two airplanes, and a five hour layover in the Madrid Airport, which is the worst major airport in the world. It feels like an elementary school that was built in 1956, but then someone decided to put people conveyer belts in maybe in February of 1986. The tiles on the floor are an ugly fake mica, and most are cracked. The entire place is dusty and dark. As far as hubs of mass transportation in Spain go, however, it's average. The Barcelona train station was just as bad. I barely recall the Madrid train station. But I'm in Berlin now, running on adrenaline and coffee, staying in the Green Eggs and Ham Hostel, right off Torsstrasse on Novalisstrasse. Tomorrow, I am apparently cat sitting, as Eric has a friend that needs a cat sitter for a convenient few days.

So my European journey begins again. I felt vigorous when I stepped out of the Berlin-Schoenfield Airport. In the sky were clouds. I hadn't seen clouds in eleven days. The air was refreshingly cold. All the prices for sandwiches were in Euros. There were sandwiches readily available. Berlin has almost too many sandwiches. I need to go eat some right now.

Morrocan Sunshine

I met a guy at the Oasis Hostel in Lisbon a few weeks ago who had just come from Morrocco. He spent about three weeks there, traveled up and down the country, was invited into a Berber mudhut, bought two rugs when he hadn't even planned on buying one, and all in all had a great time. So much happens in Morrocco, he told me, that you almost lose track of it all. "The entire time I was in Spain, and I was in Spain for a long time," he told me, "I filled twelve pages of my notebook up with stories. In Morrocco I wrote forty pages."
The most recent story I have? My face is probably sunburnt. It's going to hurt tomorrow, maybe even tonight while I try to sleep in my seven dollar room in the Ville Nouvelle. I was burnt when I walked about a half a kilometer from the Bab Bou Jeloud, one of the main entrances to the Fes El-Bali Medina to the Merenid tombs. The tombs are old and crumbling, like the dead dry snail shells I saw stuck to a lampost by the highway on the outskirts of Montpellier. You touched these shells and they cracked into dust. The tombs didn't fall apart when I touched them. Brick is stronger than snail shells. The sun is stronger than all of them, though. It lasts forever in the sky, longer than the smell of the tanneries, longer than the call to prayer I hear five times a day here in Morrocco. And it'll last on my face for a few days now, all the way to Marrakesh.

I uploaded a few more photographs. I included one photo of my new outfit. Oh and if anyone wants to spring for a flickr pro account for me, that'd be awesome of you! I reached my 200 photo limit. I can still add more photos, but old photos, mostly froù Santa fe, will be hidden from view. I don't want to apply for a pro account while I'm away, so some photos might go missing until I can get a pro account.

Morroccan Cyber Boutiques

In the Tangier bus station you have to check your luggage, have it weighed, and then pay a few dirham to have it tagged and carried to the bus. It's unusual, and obviously a way to give jobs to people in a country with a twenty percent unemployment rate. The only bad part about it is that I was confused at first, and wasted a few minutes speaking broken Spanish and Arabic to the bus driver after I tried to put my luggage on the bus myself. He eventually figured out that I'm new to Morroccan bus customs and pointed to the luggage counter, and I was promptly escorted by a wrinkled woman, her old eyes nonetheless very bright in the Tangerine noontime sun, in a burqha to the counter itself. Two Japanese girls were talking to the guy running the counter. They were more reluctant to go with the flow of the Morroccan bus system and timidly persisted in asking questions about where their baggage was going. The Morrocan man, in exasperated English, raised his voice and quieted the girls with this definitive statement: "All the Japanese that come here, they do not trust us Morrocans." Morrocan Postulate Number One. Well, I trust the Morroccans mostly, but I don't trust their internet boutiques. If there's a necklace in some back alley souk in the medina and the shopkeep claims it is made of amber and camelbone, you can still bargain him down, get a low price, and if it's not real qmber and camelbone you still have a cheap necklace from Morrocco. I tried to recharge my cell phone at a cyber cafe and I got an error message from the cell phone company claiming there's been fraudulant activity reported from my IP address, so they refused my credit card. who knows what's running on the computers here, but I had to buy a ticket from Madrid to Berlin before the prices jumped. I bought the last ticket at the low price, and I'm checking my accounts for any suspicious activity. Really though, this is the only danger I plan on meeting in Morrocco. Otherwise, I'm buying silver and camelbone necklaces for two euros and a half filled cigarette lighter. The guy wanted 15 euros for it. It's not even real camelbone and silver anyway.

In Morrocco

Three days in Morrocco and I've already:

Bought two Morroccan outfits
Seen too many donkeys, dogs, and cats to count
Received a lesson in Morroccan traditional pharmaceuticals(ASK ME ABOUT ORANGE BLOSSOM OIL SOMETIME)
Been married and divorced
Been led to the Kasbah in Tangier by a swarm of children
Drank so much Mint Tea
Been really confused by Arabic keyboards.

I really like it here.

Slight Change

There's little time to blog. I'v been going out, tasting port, listening to Fado, seeing castles, sneaking into huge Portugeuse rock festivals, and changing my travel plans. Morrocco isn't out of the itinerary, but it's being delayed while I visit Andalucia. So, Sevilla, Granada, and then Tangiers, Fes, Casablanca, and Marrakesh if I feel the time is right, then Lithuania. We'll see how it goes. There will be more blog in the future soon, but for now I'm still catching up. I'm still alive and kicking so don't fret until you become sore, and maybe look at some new pictures I'm uploading while I compose some awesome blogs to describe the past week. But for now, please consider the following Zen Koan. To ask if there's an Irish Pub in Lisbon is like asking HEY GUYS IS THERE A HARD ROCK CAFE ON THE MOON HUH? Or maybe HEY GUYS IS THERE AN ARCADE IN THIS LOURVE HERE BECAUSE I REALLY WANT TO PLAY TEKKEN 5 IN FRONT OF THE MONA LISA CAPS SLUT.

Footnote to a Spanish Keyboard

I don't know if I hate the French Keyboard or the Spanish keyboard more. In France (and Belgium and likely countless places), they use keyboards that don't folow Qwerty. It's awerty or something. Like the old keyboards from elementary school kids would switch the keys around on, except the A in the wrong position actually types and glory be you're doing important stuff on the internet and not programming infinite loops in basic for kicks. So half the time we paid for WORLD WIDE WEBBIN on this continent was spent deleting the typo that would not be so on were we graced with an American keyboard. But we got used to it after awhile, and by the time we were in Spain we were pressing the wrong keys all over again, because you see, in Spain, keyboards make sense again. Except for how awesomely in reach these characters are: ñ ªº€Ç?¡. Some don't even require the shift button! But the Spanish keyboard is devious because the apostrophe key, while in the same place as on the American keyboard, is a different, uglier apostrope, the ´ instead of the ', and i've been using it all along and I hate the way it looks on my blog. At least it's completely obvious that I have to be careful with a French keyboard. Spanish keyboards have a false sense of security because if you squint hard enough, they look just like American keyboards. And my fingers respond by thinking the vertical apostrophe, straight and ferocious as an attacking ferret, is in the place it should be, but it's not, it's by the zero in the number row, all the way up there near keyboard heaven(which is where the blessed function keys live their eternal lives peacefully and idly), and just far enough that it hurts my ring finger to reach for it, but not physically, only emotionally, because my finger knows that this friend of mine, my friend that is always there to help me when I need some contraction, is in someplace unfamiliar, tricked out of its proper place by this Spanish keyboard, a keyboard that only knows deceit and treachery.

SCOTT´S CULINARY ROMP THROUGH EUROPE, MADRID EDITION

I admit I get a little enthusiastic sometimes, and sure it might be embarassing, but I mean it when I´m enthusiastic. Sometimes, I think my enthusiasm is warranted, like, for example, when I´m sort of pissed that I ate so much meat on this trip in a country that has so much meat in it that I like to imagine half the country has scurvy, despite obvious empirical knowledge that scurvy is not plaguing the fair people of Spain and knowing that there is no correlation between eating too much meat and having scurvy . . . FOR NOW. So I´m enthusiastic because I´ve been craving me some delicious vegetarian cuisine, and knowing that imagine how happy I was when walking around my new digs in Madrid(Cats´s Hostel! I know, it´s perfect right?) post-Sean and Scott Roughest and Toughest European Tour 2007, sponsored by Maoz Vegetarian, I saw a green sign with the outline of a woman in black holding a platter, and the words Vegetariano, Macrobiotico rigth beside her. This place is ´La Biotika,´ right at the corner of Amor Del Dios and C. St. Maria, and it´s a place to get enthusiastic about. Like most restaurants in Europe, there´s a menu of the day at La Biotika, and when I had lunch there today, this menu consisted of the starters of vegetable soup and salad, the latter of which was topped with walnuts, almonds, and a sesame sauce. The soup was mild, with a little spice at the end, and so hearty it was almost creamy. I saw the chef, a very friendly dude, cut the parsley fresh and top the soup with it. The platter was Bulghar wheat, creamed pumpkin, and green beans with tofu, arranged in a trinity in the center of the plate. At first, I thought the portions were somewhat small, but they were actually quite filling, so much so that I barely had room for desert, which was red tea and honey with an orange cake topped with kiwi and coconut shavings. Every part of it was delicious, and at the excellent price of €8.60, I felt like I was getting a really good deal. Besides the food, the dining space itself was refreshingly modest. Most of the vegetarian restaurants I´ve been to, including some in America and one in Montpellier called Tipti Khali, have eastern themed decor or some style that reminds you you´re having an alternative food experience, and frankly, it´s kind of tiring. La Biotika looks like any cafe, even having an easily visible window to the kitchen where the chef lays plates for the waitress to take. There´s nothing in the decor reminding you that you´re wise and possibly Asian(I´m looking at you, Great Sage) for eating vegetarian, leaving the focus entirely on the food. And you know, food tastes better when you´re not feeling patronized by the room.

Oh yes, Sean left, and he´s long safe in Baltimore by now, and I´m here across the Atlantic for another six weeks. I´ve gone nearly 36 hours on my own in Europe, but I´m still composing the Official Blog of my Thoughts on what the next six weeks will bring, and how the past five weeks have changed me(hint:only somewhat) so, stay tuned. For now though, I´m split between reflecting and planning for the hectic month ahead. I bought a round trip ticket to Lisbon today. I´m riding the night train tomorrow and I´ll wake up on Sunday to a new city, a new country, and a new month. I´m still trying to figure out how I´ll get to Morrocco, and I´m not evening worrying about Lithuania for now. And that feels great. I feel unrushed. Not less nervous about everything, not less awkward, just not in a hurry, not anxious about where I´ll sleep or how I´ll get places. Those questions always get answered, and nothing will be ruined no matter how they´re answered.

In Madrid

I broke my vegetarianism accidentally for the first time, for a total of maybe seven times I have broken my vegetarianism on this trip. Sean often buys meat from supermarkets, and I´ll occasionally have a little taste, mostly out of curiousity for what European meat tastes like (It´s unsurprisingly familiar). I broke my vegetarianism in Carcassone to try a regional speciality called Cassoulet, which is a casserole dish composed of a hunk of duck, a gratuitous sasusage, and white beans. It was hella medieval, served in a heavy clay bowl, but it was a taste of France. Today, the restaurant we went to near the Reina Sofia museum had a good menu del dia, and we entered this placed called ´la sede´despite some apprehension I had for the slick industrial chic design. Think decadent ikea catalogue. The meat snuck into the dish I ate, though I´m sure it wouldn´t have seemed so sneaky to someone who read Spanish, but I ate it, becauseÍ´m on vacation, and hey, it´s european cusine.
Also, I slept in my first bed last night, after five weeks of camping.

Plans

So here are my plans for the post-Sean part of my trip, the Rough and Tough travel experience a la carte. I´ll spend three days getting my gumption in Madrid, then head to Lisbon for some nights. I was considering going to the running of the bulls in Pamplona but I´m leaning towards forgetting it because it´s going to be stupid packed in that tiny Navarre town. I mean, sure, it´s going on while I´m here, but I don´t want to sleep in the fields of Pamplona while I´m at the Fiesta. Instead, I´ll head down south to Morrocco, Marrakesh and Casablanca. I know, I thought I was only going to be on one continent too. Well, Maroc is cheap and it´s not far south of Spain at all. It´s only a two and half hour ferry ride from Algercias(or some town called something similar) to Interzone, and it´s under thirty euros. I´m thinking of flying to Marrakesh on a budget flight and railing my way up the coast though. Then I´ll ferry across and spend some time in Granada, see the Alhambra, then head to Seville for a few days. I might stop by Toledo, but most likely, I´ll catch a flight from Madrid to some place where I can take a flight to Vilnius, Lithuania. This is where my plans are kind of sketchy, however. Cheap flights can be had from Germany to Vilnius, but getting from Madrid to the German airports for cheap might be a problem. I do want to see Vilnius though, for family reasons(it´s the most significant ethnic background I have) and just because I´m interested in the town. They have a breakaway republic in Vilnius called Uzupic that has it´s own constitution. One of the articles of the constitution is that everybody has a right to love, pet, and take care of ´the cat´. It´s not said what cat they are talking about, but it is clearly a cat of LEGENDARY PROPORTIONS. This cat has power to sway the law! This is clearly the town I was destined to drink coffee in. I´ll get to Lithuania somehow, and not by train because like hell I´m passing through Belarus with a transit visa. Even if somehow I don´t end up in Lithuania, I´ll bide my time somehow, maybe cycling through Spain or actually visiting Italy. I´m forgoing the Italian adventures in this trip even though I had planned to spend a significant amount of time in the country before. I have many thoughts on this matter, most of which have only been thought of while I´ve been traveling and are UNDENIABLY based on the EXCELLENT travel skills I have learned in my first five weeks in Europe. Based on the experience points I gained in Europe (I´m seriously at level 60 right now and still quickly rising) I have a very good explanation of why Italy isn´t where I want to go on this trip, but I´ll save it for a more focused blog. So after Vilnius I´ll probably travel to either Slovenia or Prague, depending on what I´m in the mood for, then possibly visit my friend Eric in Berlin, but that hasn´t been completely sorted out yet. After all that, I´ll catch a cheap flight to London or book it on a train and arrive just in time to sleep in the airport for a night before getting on my flight back home. Sounds good to me for a sketch!

Incomplete thoughts by the Mediterranean (in Barcelona)

I got my feet wet in the same water Odysseus swam in, and even when I don´t plan on giving my feet a little bath in the Mediterranean, if I´m sitting on the beach next to Sean with a bottle of Sangria between us, I can´t help but stand in the inches high waves on the Spanish edge of that very long sea. Really, the beach itself smells, looks, and feels like Ocean City, the beach that´s sharpest in my memory, except serious incidents of historical importance happened on these waters I´m sitting by now, and some of these incidents didn´t even happen in reality, but only in the voice of poets long ago. To be fair to the O.C., I guess some cool stuff happened on the Atlantic Ocean too, but nothing as cool as Odysseus stabbing a cyclops in the eye. And let´s be honest about our old crabby Maryland beach now, nothing of real historical importance ever happened in Ocean City, besides some dude maybe eating the world´s best funnel cake, and even that´s a stretch. I hear the cakes are better in Chicago.
Beaches are seductive, and I don´t think it´s because of the semi-nude figures switching from cavorting and lounging. It´s the rhythm of the waves. Like other seductive things, the power is in the rhythm that can´t be perfectly kept, because it´s consistantly broken by spontaneity. Chaotically joyous, it keeps your interest, tempts you to understand it, and when you´re convinced that the waves are breaking just in this certain way, a tall one rises in the distance unexpectedly. So you grin, drink some sangria, eat a pistachio, and console yourself that it´s okay to never understand the sea because probably Jacques Cousteau never really understood it either. Then you resume trying to understand the sea because there´s nothing around you that´s quite as captivating as it is, not even the pretty blond girl with long hair that billows in the wind. She´s standing in the water getting her feet wet, looking at the milky distance of the same sea Aeneas once sailed, and probably understanding it better than you are.

In Disneyworld

Or the dusty 13th century version of it. There's just a huge castle right here north of the Pyrenees, and they call it La Cite, but you can call it that castle in Carcassone that has three too many shops that sell metal swords that actually can't kill you except from blunt trauma. Not to mention terrible t-shirts that have inexplicable statements like "Good Girls go to Paradise; bad girls go to Carcassone." To do what? Eat nutella crepes while listening to some ex-hippie talk about mead and point out the holes castillians poured hot oil out of?

Well, yeah, because Carcassone is the best place we've been on the trip so far. It's even got good Indian food.

Internet time is up!

Where to

We leave Montpellier in an hour, no less than an hour now, only 50 minutes. Sean has only eleven more days in Europe, ten if you go by his system of not counting the 28th, but I'm counting it, because thinking that there's eleven more days of traveling with a friend is better than ten. But the truth is that in exactly eleven days I'll be coming back to my hotel room in Madrid, missing a tent and my constant companion of five weeks. Then, I'll be on my own. I'm not even sure where I'm going to go after that. I had planned to travel through Italy for a couple weeks, then I'd take a ferry to Croatia and a train to Prague. But I'm not sure if I want to go deeply into Italy anymore. Portugal sounds fine, as does Morrocco. And most surprisingly, I see Lithuania in my travel future. It's easy to get to and has some personal meaning to me since my grandmother's side of the family on my mother's side is from Lithuania. It's the strongest ethnic heritage I have. Besides wanting to see Kafka's grave, Fellini's grave, the Uffizi gallery in Florence, and visiting Eric in Berlin, my plan is open, and really, visiting Eric is the only thing I really want to do, everything could slip away and I'd still be satisfied with my travel plans. The road really is open, and it really does feel free.
Sean and I hadn't planned on visiting half the cities we ended up in. Bruges, Rotterdam, Antwerp, and Beaune were all places we decided to visit en route. My time alone in Europe is going to be the same, I think, unless anyone wants to give me suggestions.

nine blogs in three weeks and a few days. Not bad!

So a disaster struck,

but it struck a few weeks ago in Antwerp. I just never blogged about it. Compared to the other two unsteady times(11 sleepless hours in Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam and a tentless night on a cold hillside in Paris) it's really not that bad. I just corrupted my memory card in my camera. There's this Cybercafe right outside the Grote Markt in Antwerp that lets you load photographs through a card reader. I used this card reader but forgot to unmount the removable disk in Windows Explorer before I pulled it out of the card reader. I even though I should probably unmount before I pull this out, but I thought it could just be unloaded hot since it was a card reader. Boy was I wrong. I lost all the Amsterdam photos, my first London photos, and some Rotterdam and Antwerp photos. Bummer. There were some good ones too. Thankfully, I could format the card in my camera and I was able to use it again. So, more photos, but some are lost forever. C'est la vie.

In Montpellier

A not bad at all vacation idea for the attention-span limited set would be to book a flight to Paris and arrive early on a Saturday morning. Immediately leave Paris in the dust of a slow-moving train to Dijon(get a window seat), then book a train to Lyon, and then one more to Montpellier. Don't take the TGV trains because they're too fast. You'd reach Montpellier in an hour or three. You don't want that. You want a single day of seeing the most beautiful countryside in France, maybe in all of Europe. You'll pass by countless villages perched on hillsides, vinyards and even Nuclear power plants. And don't worry about missing your daily instake of Church steeples. France has got your back. Catch a night plane out of Montpellier and you'll be back with minimum jet lag and plenty of time to paint a picture of all you've seen out the train window called "Paris to Montpellier on a single canvas" or just call it "Sans titel" if you want to be cool. Maybe compose a sonnet sequence about the way the sunlight in France looks through the clouds. Either way you'll only spend maybe a grand total, and have a grand day in france.

The snails all play when it rains.

It rained too much recently. Our poor tent was a waterbed for most of the morning and a leaky one at that. This is only the most recent water trouble we've had to face. We were baptised by rain water in damp Amsterdam. The rain flap that covers the our tent was never waterproofed properly, so on through two rainy A'dam nights Sean had some Water Tortue going on all night long. In Rotterdam we faced our first European thunderstorm, and that's when we made the brilliant decision to duct tape our tent. We used a roll and a half of duct tape, covering all the seams on the rain flap so it looked like silver lightning was streaking down the ceiling of our tent. We did this in Antwerp, and by the time we set up our tent again in Bruges one of the tape streams was limply hanging from the rain flap. We shrugged it off. Bruges was pretty dry considering it's the rainy season and the city is right by the coast. A different, more severe tent problem was pitched in Bruges though. One of our tent poles broke. This happened just as we were packing our tent in the morning, about six hours before we needed to catch a bus in Brussels. This ain't no thang to Sean and I, of course, because we're the roughest and the toughest in Europe. We're also the luckiest. Our campground was only 400 meters away from an adventure/outdoor store. We made clear the path straight to this store, hustling in the roughest and toughest way. We found some tent poles with the help of a bespectacled clerk who could only speak a little bit of English, which she told us when we were explaining our situation with far too many words than was necessary. The poles cost 10 euros each, so we bought two, a much cheaper option than buying a new tent, which rang up at 75 euros.
The next time we successfully put up our tent was three days later and five hundred miles or so later in Beaune, where we had our second thunderstorm in Europe. In those three days we probably gained 30 rough and tough levels though, since we slept in two strange places and carried our heavy packs on our back for much too long. That's for another blog though. What I really meant to say in this blog is that there are many snails in Beaune, and they all come out after it rains. We counted at least ten or so, some curled up in their shells, other poking around slowly. I've never seen live snails before. They were new and beautiful.

We're in France

There was a broken down bus, a broken tent, unhelpful cops, and a night on a Paris hillside. Our first sight of Paris when we stepped out of the metro was the Arc d'Triumph, it was not much of a triumphant night, but the next day we stayed with some people we met over the phone that same day, and now we're in Beaune. More later.

New Photos

New photos up on Flickr. Check them out. We're in Antwerp now and the city is gorgeous. Unlike past days, our two days in Belgium have been dry. Maybe it will stay dry now that we've finally waterproofed our tent. We used a cheaper European kind of duct tape called Handy Tape. We've also seen it called Power Tape at a place in Amsterdam. They don't have ducts in Europe I guess, or they just don't tape them.

Antwerp is the first city that really felt like a European city. It's twisty and old, with a towering Cathedral and lots of restarutants with Medieval Fonts on their signs. It feels a little like Busch Gardens, which is a terrible thing to say, but that was the closest I had been to Europe before this trip. There was even a Brass Band Parade yesterday at Groteplein, the Antwerp city Center. I'll be on the lookout for huge rollercoasters named after mythical beasts.

The most important location in Amsterdam

It isn't a train station, a museum, a Maarkt, or a Church. It isn't a coffeeshop, a brothel, or a cafe. It's a house boat, one of many on the canals and rivers that snake through the city. But this houseboat doesn't have unique art or grass on top of its roof. What makes this houseboat unique and obviously very special to me is that it is filled with cats.

De Poezenboot

I have theories about destiny, but I never knew these theories were true, until now.

Composition Studies

Blogs don't form well under pressure when I attempt them. They're not diamonds or these delicious waffles that we ate at the Albert Cyupmaarkt(?) . These are called stroupwaffles I believe, and they are made using crispy, thin waffles, though they're really more like pancakes made on a griddle I guess, since they were brown and flattish. You take two of these pancakes and you perform a secret. The secret is to add delicious syrup. You spread a dallop of syrup on one waffle and stick the other on top. Then you eat and hope it the syrup doesn't get over your clothes. But you hands inevitably end up being the sweetest things after this snack. More so than the sex museum, a slightly awkward walk past neon lit windows with girls dancing, more so even than spending a spacey afternoon in a coffeeshop, this is Amsterdam, a sticky delicious mess that probably costs too much, but whatever.

16 seconds left on the net gotta go

Amsterdam

That thermal underwear that I took out of my pack on Tuesday Night would have been useful this morning. The temperature was about 60 degrees F, and Sean was even colder than I am, despite being a little bit hairier. I'm in the Bibliotheek right now, where internet is free, as it should be forever and ever. It's a little bit past the statue of Anne Frank and this store called A Space Oddity. Classic rock forms a central motif for much of Amsterdam. We passed by the Pink Floyd Coffeeshop and two coffeeshops called The Doors. There's a flourescent light museum called Electric Ladyland. I have exactly five minutes left on this computer. I'll recount a story that is likely the quintessential moment of my existence. I was napping yesterday afternoon in the tent we set up at Camping Zeenburg. Sean was awake. I muttered in my sleep "Sean you did really well with those sandwiches."Sean was perplexed. "What? What sandwiches?" he replied. "What did I say"I somnastically replied. ""You complimented me on the sandwiches." "I don't know what that means, Sean, but you did really well with those sandwiches," then I promptly rolled around and fell back asleep. I don't remember any of this happening, but Sean related it to me when I woke up. Maybe it didn't really happen, but, honestly, it's the kind of thing I would say when I'm asleep.

I haven't left yet

I have not left yet.