Brussels

Brussels is gorgeous but I missed the European Parliament tour. I could have waited three and a half hours for the other one but opted not to on account of the rain and the nothing-else-to-do-in-that-area. I also couldn't find NATO. Stupid hiding NATO. So basically, today, I went to the European Parliament, found out there was no tour for three and a half hours, looked around the lobby thinking to myself, So this is the European Parliament, walked back outside and snapped a picture. It was generally anticlimactic, unless you take into account the picture snap.

But yesterday in Brussels was pretty great. The town square is absolutely amazing, and I just sat there for a while looking around at it. I also went to a beer museum, a chocolate museum and an art museum, and seriously, is there anything else in the world that matters? (I'll hit the sex museum in Amsterdam)

The beer museum itself was pretty poorly planned. It's just this brewery you walk into and watch a video on a big screen. The catch is, whoever gets there first gets to pick the language, so I sat there and watched this half-hour video in French. Then after everyone walked away I decided to put it on in English, got bored and left. But at that point there was a whole crowd of French-speaking people whom I'd condemned to watch an entire video in English. I felt a little bad, but then I went to get my free sample of beer and all was well.

A jolly old chocolatemaker did a demonstration at the chocolate museum, and there were free samples there too, which is important. After that I got a Belgian waffle, which they eat here as snacks instead of breakfast.

The art museum was called the Musees Royauz des Beaux-Arts, which translates into Fine Arts Museum, I think. It was pretty small because they were renovating a whole wing, but some of it was cool. Louis Artan de Saint-Martin had some pretty amazing seascapes, where the movement of the water is kind of mystifying. In a painting by Prosper de Troyer of a seamstress, you could see all of the seamstresses movements through this series of geometrical shapes and color. I guess those were two of my favorites.

I'm noticing that in the modern art section of just about every museum they have a corner of neon lights, a sort of stack of brightly colored shelves mounted to a wall, and strings. I really don't get it. But the modern art section of the museum was the one being renovated, so most of it was closed off.

Last night I drank a lot of Belgian beer. It was 2 euros for a pint, which isn't bad at all, but my buzz went away pretty quickly when someone in the bar fell to the ground and started having a seizure. It was really strange.

On that note, I'm going to head to the train station and go to Brugges. Maybe it isn't raining so hard anymore...

Munich/Dachau

So I'll start with Munich, and then end on the depressing note...

First of all, I would like to mention that last night I got carded. In Germany. Where the drinking age is 16.

Yep.

But it didn't turn out all bad -- the woman trying to card me didn't know English, so she enlisted the help of some guys sitting nearby to translate for her, so I knew that they knew English, so I had people to talk to. I was at this beerfest thing, which I absolutely can't do justice to in writing. But I'll try. First, imagine a big school cafeteria, just a room full of long tables lined up against each other. Now imagine that someone replaced the little milk cartons at that school with liters (that's right -- I said liters) of 12-percent-alcohol beer.

It was pretty great. There was a band playing German music, and about 15 percent of the people there were dancing on the tables and singing. A couple of girls were doing this elaborate swingy dance, and a little old man joined in, and they just went along with it, swinging him around between them.

Anyway my two new friends turned out to be this really nice gay couple, one from Germany and one from France. The one from France said that most people in France hate Americans, and that it's not just an isolated thing like the faction of the U.S. that eats freedom fries instead of french fries. He said he was surprised I didn't figure that out after three days in Paris. But I kinda did. I just hoped maybe I was running into a lot of mean people, but that it wasn't the norm.

I accidentally started an argument between them when I mentioned that I'd gone to Dachau. The French one had really wanted to see Dachau, but the German one didn't want to go at all because he didn't want to think about it. His argument was that other cultures and nations aren't forced to constantly relive their predecessors' mistakes, so it isn't fair to make Germans relive it. I think it's amazing that there's still so much guilt there, even two generations later.

The argument got pretty heated I think (they apologized and then started arguing in German for a few minutes), but I think it ended up OK because at the end of the night the German one bought the French one a chocolate heart to wear around his neck that said, "Someone loves me" (in German, of course). He also bought me a chocolate that says "Someone's thinking of me," but the French one said his chocolate was better and we traded. So now I have a chocolate heart saying, "Someone loves me" from a gay German guy. It's pretty great.

Now Dachau...

The front gate the prisoners all had to pass through on their way in says, "Work will set you free," probably part of the guise the Nazis put on for the media who toured the facilities. But the tour guide said it could have also been just to taunt the prisoners.

The rooms were really amazing to see... the furniture inside the rooms is actually a re-creation, because after the war the rooms were used by non-prisoners and spruced up. After the those people left, former prisoners said they had to change it back. So there were three different types of rooms: the first was what the rooms were like before the war started. It had three levels of beds, all spaced out. The second type of room, right after the war started, had the same beds, but pushed together in pairs so they could fit four or five people in two beds. They also eliminated the ladders leading up to the second and third levels. The third room was all bed. Just a bunch of beds all pushed together with no space in-between. People just piled on top of each other, with no room to breathe or anything.

The gas chambers there were all set up, just like the ones in Auschwitz and the other death camps, but as far as anyone knows, they were never used in Dachau. No one's sure why. But they did use the incinerators, which were in the room next to the gas chambers to make for easy access. In front of the incinerators were hooks mounted along a strip on the ceiling. They used to hang people there, right next to the incinerators, and then they could just drop the bodies into the ovens.

I'm not sure what else to say about Dachau, except after that I can't imagine what it'll be like in Warsaw and Auschwitz...

So I'll jump back to Munich for a minute. Before the drunken night (and it was a very drunken night -- two of those massive 12-percent-alcohol beers will *kill* you), I went to the Pinakotheke Modern. The Pinakotheke actually has three different museums, but I got distracted on my way there by another museum with all this gold and then spent too much time in the Pinakotheke Modern and then it was closing time. So I didn't do everything I wanted to. But the modern one was really interesting -- it was mostly modern art but not all (they had a Rembrandt exhibit and a Picasso room). It also had a lot of weird shit, like a room full of flourescent lights with a warning on the outside to only stay in there for five minutes or wear sunglasses. I'd like to know who stands in a room with a few flourescent lights for more than five minutes. Then there was one artist who had at least two paintings with dogs sliced in half. It was very strange.

On that note, I'll sign off. Right now I'm in Brussels, and in two days I leave for Bruges. After that, Amsterdam, which I hear has (among a few other things) a cat museum.

Munich

Today I went to the site of the 1972 Munich Olympics. There wasn't much in the way of a memorial for the Israelis who were killed, but being in the stadium was pretty surreal. It doesn't look anything like it did back then... the rubber track is covered in some kind of protective covering and the field is half-blanketed in snow but, well, it was still the Olympic stadium. On the way to the stadium I walked past the pool, where Mark Spitz won five gold medals that year, I think it was.

I also took an elevator up the Olympic Tower, which is the highest point in Munich. You can look down and see the Olympic stadium right below you and the entire city in the distance. While I was at the top, I also spent too much money on this...

See, I'm patting him on the back.

So do you guys think I'm the only one who goes to Germany and has my "picture taken" with Bill Clinton? Because that's the goal.

Before Olympic Park I went into a bunch of cathedrals. The cathedrals here are amazing... they feel different from the ones in England, France and Ireland -- they seem to have more color on the walls and ceilings (whereas in England, France
and Ireland the only color is in the stained glass).

Anyway I've got two more days in Munich, except tomorrow I'm taking a day trip to Dachau to see the concentration camp, so that'll probably take most of the day. That leaves Sunday for the art museum and the science museum in Munich.

All right. It's dinner time. Peace.

Leysin

So today I went snoeshowing in the Swiss Alps. (which are absolutely beautiful... from the train you can see the Alps and the lake right up against each other, like two worlds colliding. Or something.) Anyway I shoeshowed for about four hours, and spend at least two of them lost. I've finally become competent at reading maps (I had to - the people in France didn't want to help direct me at all), but this newfound skill does not come into play when there are no road signs on the trails or landmarks on the map.

But despite my utter lack of direction there and a few unfortunate and terrifying instances of wandering into the ski slopes and nearly getting steamrolled, it was absolutely amazing. Switzerland is such a gorgeous country. People say we have everything in the L.A. area with the beach and the mountains for hiking and the slopes for skiing, but we have nothing like this.

Tomorrow I'm going to Munich, but I have to change trains in Zurich anyway so I'm going to spend the day there. I'll be a little sad to leave Switzerland I think. Obviously the museums in London and Paris are amazing and wonderful, but accounting for the rest of it (the landscape, the culture, the general feeling you get somewhere), I think Switzerland's been my favorite country so far.

That aside, I'm sure Munich will be awesome.

Lausanne

I finally saw the crazy people art museum today, also known as the Musee de l'Arte Brut. Some of the stuff was pretty damn amazing... some of the stuff could have easily been in the Tate Modern or the Pompidou -- in the end, I guess, all artists are at least a little crazy.

One guy carved these intricate designs into the wall of his room while he was in solitary confinement. He used the broken end of a spoon. Then there was a woman who went crazy after her kid died and stayed up all hours of the night using a pen to draw on this massive piece of fabric. She covered the entire area (I estimated about 40 or 50 feet long and 10 feet tall) with women's faces mixed in with this architectural design.

One man created these wooden carvings that looked like little rooms or buildings, and he liked movement so he gave them all moving pieces, like windows or doors that open to little wooden people standing inside. Seemed like an interactive exhibit to me. It wasn't. And I got yelled at in French.

If I hadn't already been reprimanded I most certainly would have played with another wooden exhibit -- these Erica-sized Eiffel-Tower-like structures with moving parts that allegedly make all different sounds when you touch them. The artist was blind and he used the sounds made from the moving parts to figure out when he was done. I really wanted to play... but I was too scared o' the little old lady.

Other artwork looked like it was done by little kids who had just discovered crayons. One woman used toothpaste. One dude thought spirits created his art through his hands and that he wasn't personally responsible for it. But he was also the only one I noticed made a concerted effort to sign each picture neatly at the bottom right-hand corner.

So that was that. I also went to a cathedral and the Olympic Museum, but the cathedral was a cathedral and the Olympic Museum was nothing particularly exciting. Although I did get a photo of the spikes Lasse Viren wore in the 1976 Montreal Olympics. But Brian's the only one who will appreciate that.

Tomorrow I'm going hiking in the Swiss Alps, and the next day I'll make a four- or five-hour stop in Zurich before heading to Munich.

Bern

So I didn't go to the museum I mentioned in my last post, because apparently everything here is Lausanne is closed Mondays. Instead I went to Bern, so I'll check out that museum tomorrow before spending Wednesday hiking in the Swiss Alps.

Anyway Bern is a really interesting city, with light rail lines running all over the place to the point where trolleys, cars and pedestrians all seem to share the same roads. So you can conceivably be hit by three different modes of transportation all at once. It's like a fun game.

The other fun game I played was sitting in on a Parliament session and seeing if I could decipher anything at all as the people all spoke in German. In the 45 minutes I spent there, I understood a total of two things: "Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science;" And that's because the dude said them in English. I also thought I caught the word 'communist' in there somewhere, but I'm not sure.

Despite my complete lack of understanding of what was going on, it was still interesting to be in there. The room itself is actually very small (but so's Switzerland), and it has sculptures on the higher parts of the wall near the ceiling. It occurred to me that it'd be fun to see Congress in session (not on CSPAN), and I also decided the U.S. government should follow Switzerland's lead and conduct business surrounded by sculptures with boobs and major nippelage. Give Teddy Kennedy a little something to look at.

But I digress.

I mostly just wanted to see the place anyway. I actually thought I was in line for the tour, but all the signs were in German and French and by the time I figured out it wasn't a tour the Parliament was already in session.

The rest of Bern was really pretty (although it's got nothin on Geneva). It's got a fountain of an ogre eating small children too, which I thought was good stuff.

Now here's the bad stuff:
Bern was founded in the 12th century by a dude named Berchtold, and was named after the first bear that Berchtold hunted there. So the bear has become a sort of mascot there, and to commemorate it they have a place called the Barengraben. These "Bear Pits" are just a cement hole in the ground that houses brown bears, who have been reduced to literally begging the tourists above for scraps of food. They literally drop to a sitting position and press their paws together to beg. The cement hole has a few shrubby plants and a horribly dirty smaller cement hole with dark brown water. It's completely wrong to keep them there like that. And the other tourists were oohing and ahhing and taking pictures and teasing them with scraps of food. They ddn't get it.

On that note I'll wrap up, because I want to hit nytimes.com before I go to sleep so I can read up on the Bush administration's latest missteps, as I've been completely detached from American politics.

But bare in ,ind the next posting will have to be less depressing -- I mean, I'm spending tomorrow looking at the artwork of schizophrenics. It'll be great.

Paris/Geneva

DISCLAIMER: I am currently on a computer in which the q and a are switched, the z and w are switched, you have to hold down shift to type numbers, the m is where the semicolon is supposed to be and the comma and question mark are where the m is supposed to be. And I just realized you have to hold down shift to make a period. And I can`t find the regular apostrophe anywhere. In short, this post will be likely be wrought with typos, and will be severely lacking in the grammatical correctness that generally defines my writing.

That said...

I passed a newsstand with USA Todays the other day, and realized the NCAA clearly doesn't know I'm gone and started the NCAA tournament without me. And on top of everything. they gave UNCW the highest seed in school history. And I missed it.

But I did see the Eiffel Tower, so at least I have that.

So the Catacombes:

In 1810 the bones from Paris’ overflowing cemeteries were exhumed and stacked underground through about a mile of tunnel. The mile of tunnel is now known as the Catacombes, and visitors can shell out €3 to walk through. Everything is stacked so specifically, with arm and leg bones lined up perpendicular to the wall and the skulls forming very neat rows in the midst of that.

Anyway there are a lot of gaps in the skull rows, which means visitors have been smuggling these 200-year old skulls out with them. We saw that there were no cameras or security of any sort, so it seemed like it was almost too easy to steal the bones. And then we reached the exit.

“Open your bags,” a uniformed man said suspiciously as we made our way to the door.

That’s when I noticed the two skulls and a femur sitting on the table behind him.

That’s right – three people had tried to steal bones by 10 a.m. on that day alone. I love to think about how those discoveries went down (OHMIGOD how’d that get in there??? This place must be haunted!)

Anyway we went from the Catacombes to Musee d’Orsay, which, despite its modest exterior (especially compared to the crystal-looking pyramid that is the Louvre) was amazing. Obviously the Monet stuff was phenomenal and the Van Gogh stuff was great, but I kept getting drawn to Camille Pissarro’s work, and I’d known almost nothing about him before. Impressionism is so amazing to me, because after all ,y years of art classes I still can’t comprehend how the artists make it work.

I know I already wrote about the Eiffel Tower (but did I mention you cqn purchase what I’m sure is a wonderful meal up there for the bargain price of just €40?), so I’ll move on to...

GENEVA

I’m in love with that city.

It’s like this international melting pot of people and cultures, and everyone I met was amazingly nice (and knew at least some English). I got lunch at this sort of outdoor cafe on a little pier jutting out on to the lake, and then sat down at one of the cafeteria-style tables to eat. Well apparently, everyone says “Bon Apetit!” every time someone new sits down.

And the lake itself was gorgeous. It was a kind of hazy day, but instead of making the scenery bland it created this pastel-like effect, making the lake and the houses and buildings on the other side look like artwork instead of real life. Plus since it was a weekend, everyone in Geneva was out for a lakeside stroll. I can’t even imagine what that place is like in the summer, but I do know that I want to go back and jump off those diving boards, and go waterskiing.

Before the lake I went to the Red Cross museum, which was basically a huge maze of old photos with information boards scattered throughout. Near the beginning of the museum, there was an entire rool filed with card catalogues (I think it said all the cards stacked together would take nearly a half-mile) that chronicled the prisoners of war from WWI. The museum also talked a lot about what led up to the Geneva Convention, and how the condition of the the victims in the Battle of Solferino led up to it. There were quotes from the Geneva Convention all around, and of course the United States military doesn’t violate these things. Ever.

From there I was going to make it an all-political day and go to Europe’s U.N. headquarters, which used to house the League of Nations. But it was Sunday and they don’t do weekend tours until April, so I settled for a picture of the front gates.

LAUSANNE

I arrived in Lausanne tonight and tomorrow I’m going to the Musee de L’Art Brut, an art museum featuring the works of psychiatric patients and incarcerated criminals, and I’m more than a little excited.

I’ll let you know.

Paris/Geneva

Well I've got about 10 minutes and a really weird keyboard so I'll make this quick. Yesterday I started my day walking amongst the dead in the Catacombes... really, really strange. I have a good story that I'll have to remember to post when I'm on a keyboard where the z and y aren't switched and all the symbols in weird places (typing is taking me forever). I climbed to the middle deck of the Eiffel Tower (it was just €3, where it would have been €11 to go to the top) and got an amazing view of the city. I also went to Musèe d`Orsay and saw a lot of Monet stuff.

Now I'm in Geneva, headed to Lausanne very soon. Geneva is absolutely gorgeous. I want to come back in the summer someday and jump off one of the diving boards into the lake.

Well my time's almost up and this was a pretty pointless post. More soon...

Oxford/Stratford/Paris

There's a lot to cover here, so I'll make subheads so you can effectively skim for which city you're interested in. Note to Brian (who hasn't posted any comments since I've been gone -- what gives?): This is mostly for you, because you'll want to read the part about Oxford.

PARIS
Well I've been wandering around Paris all day, and so far I've seen the Louvre and the Notre Dame Cathedral... from here I'm going to the Centre Pompidou and the Picasso Museum. This place is confusing as all hell, and I *really* wish I'd spent more than half an hour with that learn-French-book-and-CD set I got. All I know is how to count to 10 (but I still can't understand when they're telling me a price, and how to say "Do you speak English?" for which the answer, almost every time, is "Noon."

Anyway the Louvre is amazing -- I hate that I don't understand the little descriptions next to the paintings, because that's usually one of my favorite parts of an art museum. So after looking around for about an hour I went back downstairs and shelled out the 5 euro for an English audio tour. Of course the tour doesn't cover every painting, and didn't have descriptions for most of what I was interested in.

The Mona Lisa is in this small-ish room, behind glass, a rope and a parade of security. In the midst of all that, it seems very, very small. The largest painting in the museum, "Les Noces de Cana," is on the wall opposite the Mona Lisa, and it takes up almost the whole wall it's on. It's huge and detailed and intriguing, and everyone in the room crowds in front of the barrier on the opposite wall, as the security guards scurry around the crowd reminding them in every language to please put their cameras away. It's all pretty strange.

The Notre Dame Cathedral is gorgeous, but it's about the fifth or sixth cathedral I've seen so far and I don't know what else to say about it. Except that they charge 5 euro to light a candle. It's on the honor system -- just drop the money in the box and take a candle, so I wonder how many people cheat the church. I like to think about that.

STRATFORD-UPON-AVON
This place really knows how to capitalize on Shakespeare. They charge money to get everywhere (Shakespeare lived near here, so he most certainly would have walked on this square of sidewalk: Pay 2 pounds to pass.) That aside, it was pretty cool being there. I saw Shakespeare's birthplace and his grave, different houses he and his family members lived in, and the church he was baptised and probably married in. That's where his grave is, and they charge 1.50 to get past a point in the middle of the church before the grave. So I told them I was 14 and got to go in for 50 pence. That's right. I lied to a little old lady in a church. And I'd do it again.

During the day I went on a little self-guided walking tour of Stratford, and toward the end I still had plenty of time to kill before The Crucible so I wandered into the Butterfly Farm, which says its the biggest butterfly farm in the world. The brochure made it look all exciting, and the sign had drawings of pretty butterflies all around. I walked into the lobby/gift shop, and saw that it was 3.99 (for a child, 'cause I'm 14, you know), more than I wanted to pay for anything but I was already in there and I had all this time so I shelled it out.

I stepped through the passageway into the butterfly farm and a massive insect came flapping violently directly toward me. Which is when I realized I'm *terrified* of all insects, even the pretty ones. But I'd already paid. So I huddled my head in my arms and made my way through the little path, making very screechy girly noises when exceptionally large butterflies came dashing toward me all the while trying to evade the others just sitting on the path. It was horrifying. Although I had enough good sense to avoid the Arachnoroom, which boasted it housed the world's largest spider (seriously).

At night I saw "The Crucible" at the Royal Shakespeare Theater (they weren't showing any Shakespeare plays). It was about the Salem witch trials, and was really well-done. As the girls were rolling around the stage acting like they'd been possessed by spirits it all seemed utterly ridiculous that this happened at one time and that so many people were executed. But there's a line in there that's "You're either with us against us," nearly word for word, and the judge in charge of putting these people to death reminded me a little too much of, well, you know. The play would have been even better if it weren't for the obnoxious class of high-school kids in the entire area in front of me. One had a cell phone go off toward the end, right before death. The ringer was that song "You had a bad day."

At the bus stop to go back to the hostel from the theater, and drunken English truck driver decided my idle waiting was an invitation to talk. After about a minute of talking (and him figuring I was from the U.S. from my accent), he said, "I'm just gonna be blunt: I got the best blow job of my life in New York." He proceeded to suggest maybe he could get a California blow job too. I like that there are icky people everywhere. Makes me feel more at home.

OXFORD
Well, most importantly, I stood on the track where Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile. It's so ordinary (actually pretty crappy... it's this old, worn rubber track that looks like it needed replacing about 50 years ago). Of course when Bannister ran on it, it was little pieces of cinder, which makes the accomplishment that much more amazing. There's this tiny little sign that says "Site of the first sub-four-minute mile" or something like that -- I have no doubt that people walk by it every day without noticing it at all. A mini-shrine with a photo of Bannister crossing the finish line, some cinder from the track and the stopwatch used to time it sits behind some glass inside the athletic building, but you technically can't get through the gate into it unless you're a student (they let me look, anyway), so I'm guessing it doesn't get many visitors. So there was that.

Other than that, I walked around to a bunch of different colleges, went inside, saw the quads, etc. A lot of them charge non-students to walk onto the campus, but I had a student showing me around, which was cool because he also was able to tell a lot of stories about the different colleges. One of them allegedly has the oldest college quad in the world, but rumor has it some guy saw an older one in Morrocco which makes this one just the oldest in Europe. Another college has deer just chillin' in their little area in the middle of campus. Eventually the deer are served to the faculty in the dining hall.

I also ate in a dining hall (looks like the one in the Harry Potter movies) and had a beer in a the pub where Lewis Carroll and C.S. Lewis used to meet and read their stories to each other. The drinking age there is 16 and I was carded. (but I have been getting child's tickets to everything in England, so I guess I can't exactly complain.

CONCLUSION
So that's it (or a fragment of it, at least). In conclusion, in the last few days I've stood on the track where the four-minute barrier was broken, drank in the pub where Lewis Carroll and C.S. Lewis used to hang out, saw a play on the stage where Shakespeare's plays were performed right after he wrote them (and where he acted), been asked for a California blow job by a creepy English truck driver, and been scared shitless by butterflies.

London

I would like to begin by extending my congratulations to Becky (or as she now likes to be called, Dr.-Fatty-to-be). She just got into NYU for grad school, and will eventually be a doctor of theater education. But I digress.

London's been amazing; I only wish I had more time here, but I leave today for Bath (maybe) and then Oxford (definitely). I'm still deciding whether to do Bath, because while it's easy to get there from here, I'd have to take three trains and a bus from there to Oxford and I don't know that I want to do that with my backpack. So I'm deciding. Either way, I'm going to hit the Science Museum today before I leave London.

In my two full days here, I went to the National Gallery, Westminster Abbey, the British Museum, the Tower of London, St. Paul's Cathedral, the Tate Modern and two shows in the West End. The Tate Modern is really like no museum you've ever seen before... it was essentially designed to draw hoardes of non-museum-goers (that's right - I made up a word). It has windows everywhere, many overlooking the River Thames and many just looking down into rooms of people a floor below. So if you want a break from the art, you can sit anywhere and just watch other people looking at art. The museum was completed in the last few years, and has been credited with drawing a generation back to museums, I think. And the place was packed.

The first exhibit there was a room full of white boxes. It was incredibly strange. Apparently some woman made hundreds of white molds of cardboard boxes and then just stacked them into these massive walls to create a sort of maze. Here it's art, but I like to think about the fact that on the street corner, she'd be the crazy box lady. I still think she's the crazy box lady.

The exhibit I really liked was of Thomas Schutte, who made sculptures of sort of awkward and disfigured heads with varied looks on their faces, wrapped them strangely in scraps of his clothing and then tied them together in pairs. Then he took pictures of them from different angles, which were up on walls in the room (with some of the sculptures in the middle). They are supposed to represent corrupt politicians, in Germany I think, but I couldn't help but see the Bush Administration scheming against everyone.

Yup.

Well I've got to wrap this up soon, so I'll move on to the National Gallery, which was also amazing but in a traditional sort of way. There were rooms full of paintings depicting biblical scenes and also mythology, plus it had a few rooms of impressionists like Van Gogh and post-impressionists. They even had some paintings by Diego Velazquez, which was cool because I studied him in high school.

Tower of London: Took a tour given by a beefeater (apparently that nickname stems from the old days when they were some of the only people who could afford to eat beef, and people were very bitter about this), and he talked mostly about death and execution. Lots of kings and royalty being beheaded and then placed on a stump. Now I don't believe in capital punishment, especially in the absence of due process, but the thought of slicing off the heads of certain people in modern times following their indictment amused me a little.

St. Paul's Cathedral: You can seriously stare at the ceiling for hours. And once you stop doing that you can climb up something like 500 winding stairs to the top (they have little benches to take breaks in the middle) and see London from way above everything. You can walk around it 360 degrees, but the other people up there were much happier to stop at the doorway and clutter up there.

British Museum: There's really nothing British in it, but there are lots of artifacts from ancient cultures, and pieces of what were once giant statues. There was a stone arm that was literally bigger than me; it's hard to imagine how big the entire statue was. They also have all these headless statues, because apparently the heads fell off over the course of hundreds of years... although I think it's fun to think that the ancient cultures enjoyed constructing these massive statues with no heads, like they spent so much time on the bodies that they just figured, 'Eh, I'm gonna stop now,' right after the neck.

Shows: Stomp and Dancin' in the Streets. Neither had a plot but you can only get so much at the half-price ticket booth.

Well according to the timer on this computer I either have four minutes left of 39, so just in case it's four I better post this thing.

Cork/Canterbury

Two days ago in Cork, after going to the Cork Municipal Gallery and the Cork City Gaol (I guess that's how they spell 'jail' here, or how they did when that thing was built), I went to a pub with the UCC women's soccer team. The pub allows you to order pizza from a specific place into the pub, and then the pizza's half-price. So we got three large pizzas for like 20 euro, which was cool because a) the pizza wasn't worth more than that and b) I didn't pay anyway.

Anyway. We were talking a lot about the education system in Ireland, which bases college admission exclusively on one test. Nothing else -- grades, extra-currics, etc. -- matters besides this one test, which covers seven subjects (English, Irish, I think math, and then four others of your choosing). Before taking the test, you make a list of your top 10 choices of schools and majors (except they call majors 'courses'), and you get into them based on your score. You have to go to the top choice that you get into, and from there you're locked into studying that area. Each course has a certain number of points out of 600 you have to get, so things like medicine and dentistry are the highest, and things like a certificate in fish farming are on the low end.

What's interesting is the girls I was talking to all felt like it's a good system (of course they all got into UCC, which is one of the top three schools in the country), and that our system is weird. I asked about the class issue, and if they have a problem here with the test being catered to the upper-middle class (like the controversy with standardized tests in the U.S.), and they said they don't have that issue at all.

OK I've got eight more minutes on this pre-paid computer, so I'll talk about Canterbury before I get booted off (but I still think this college stuff is fascinating.. there's a lot more I didn't go into).

The Canterbury Cathedral is amazing. The oldest part dates back to the 1100s, but about 300 years later the rest had to be rebuilt because of a fire. That's about the time they figured out that Gothic arches (the kind that come to a point at the top) can hold more weight than rounded ones, so they were able to build it much higher the second time around. Since some of the earlier cathedral survived the fire, you get this mix of Norman and Anglo architecture under the same roof, which creates a pretty amazing dynamic.

The cathedral also has two stained-glass windows that were designed by a Hungarian Jew right after WWII, and if you look really closely you can see a tiny swastika on a padlock of a prison door on one of them. The guy who made it is buried in the cathedral's memorial garden.

Well I got distracted by a dog and now my time's almost up. I'll write more from London.

Cork, Blarney

I kissed the Blarney Stone today... didn't want to, but the little man helping people kiss the Blarney stone made me do it.

But the castle is amazing, albeit a lawsuit waiting to happen (has anyone ever sued the Blarney people for slipping off a rock and cracking their head open?). Plus at the top you get this amazing view of the area, which is all hills. Very steep hills. And I walked up all of them today. And it's only 3.45 p.m. (apparently there's no colon on this keyboard... it has an @ there instead)

On that note, I'm going to go relax a while before heading to the pub tonight to watch a soccer match. The people I'm staying with are very excited about this particular soccer match, so I am pretending to be too.

Onward...

Dublin/Cork

So Dublin was cool... Last night I saw a comedy show at a pub and got back to the hostel by around 1 a.m. In a room of 10 people, only two got back after me -- I beat the two American girls by like 10 minutes. It's really strange -- everyone gets in early at night and wakes up before 8 a.m. Then they loudly dig through their stuff. Which means I wake up before 8 a.m. It's fantastic.

My first crisis has been averted -- Bank of America decided to put a hold on my account (I told them before I left that I'd be using my card in Europe but the woman yesterday explained that just because they put a notation on my account doesn't mean the automated system that puts holds on accounts understands it. I'm hoping this doesn't happen again.)

So in Dublin I did the National Gallery, Temple Bar, a few pubs, walked up and down the Liffey, the Dublin Writers Museum, and was going to do the Guinness Storehouse tour but read in my tourbooks and heard from a few locals that it was a waste of 9 euro, so I just walked around the outside, took pictures, and drank lots of Guinness in pubs. It's so much better here. Seriously.

I also found out that a friend here's dad is a senator in Dublin, and she asked if I would have been interested in him showing me around the government buildings. Yes. But now it's too late, because of lots of things, namely the fact that she's in the middle of finals and I have a flight to London in a day and a half. She said she'll try to work something out, but... yeah.

So my first day in Cork has been pretty lax. The train was delayed and I didn't get in till around 2:15 p.m., and didn't get back to her place and settled till 3 p.m., and most things close at 5 p.m. So I did the Cork Public Museum, which had a lot of historical artifacts, but I knew very little about Irish history short of the potato famine, and I still know very little about Irish history short of the potato famine.

Tomorrow I'm going to see the Blarney Stone, and also check out an art gallery in downtown Cork. I also might swing by the workplace of a very hot Irish guy I met at a restaurant last night. Given the fact that I look like absolute crap, smell bad and have very fluffy hair, I was very confused about him talking to me. And given the state of the hostel showers (or at least the two I've stayed in so far... one where you had to hold down the button to keep the water going, and the other that barely dribbled water), I've also determined that for the next three months, I'm going to have very hairy legs.

Right now I'm in a cafe at University College Cork, which has an absolutely beautiful campus. It's sort of a mix of old and new buildings, and green hills with little houses as its backdrop. It's a nice change from the metropolitan feeling of Dublin. I'm also clearly taking advantage of the free Internet I get with my friend's password.

Now I'm going to figure out the bus schedule for Blarney, and book hostels in Canterbury and London. I'll write more at some point...

Dublin

I'm on my second day in Dublin, and so far everything's running pretty smoothly, my drunken stumble from a pub across town back to my hostel last night notwithstanding. I went to the Dublin Writers Museum on the first day, and other than that just did a lot of walking around. The city's separated by the River Liffey, and I somehow crossed it without realizing it and got very confused about where I was last night -- that's when I was sober, so finding my way back proved incredibly difficult, even with a random guy on the street I turned into my makeshift navigator.

Today I went to the National Gallery, which was amazing, and I think I'll go to the National Museum later, if I have time. And then the Guiness Storehouse. But honestly after last night I don't want to think much about beer. I bought my first two Guinesses in the pub, and then these two guys I started talking to ended up buying the rest. I've determined that people here are much smarter... they didn't even walk away when the conversation turned to politics.

So. So far I've had Guiness at a pub in Dublin, been to a museum and a gallery, and walked approximately nine million miles.

Tomorrow I'm taking the train to Cork, where I'll be for two days before going to Canterbury. I'll write more when I can -- I'm sure you're all waiting with baited breath.

Here goes...

Well, I leave at 5 p.m. today for Europe. I'm starting in Dublin, then probably Cork and Galway, before getting a flight to London. I'll try to keep this thing going as I travel, so keep checking it if you are interested (or if you just want to make sure I still exist and haven't gotten lost somewhere in Europe).

For everyone who sent me their addresses (Josh, Sara, Kevin, Inez, Toni, James, Aviva, Audrey, Kim, Cady, Becky, Lisa), I'll try to send out postcards when I can. For everyone who didn't, will you be missing out on my tokens of wisdom.

Wish me luck...