Victor's Adventures

04/06 - back home

2008-04-07T00:30:00.000+02:00

today we had to go back home, unfortunately. before our flight we planned to go do some karaoke and check out akihabara some more but the karaoke place was closed. we went around akiba shopping where keegan got ripped off on some of his purchases (not much, but costly when u have no money left). after shopping, we wanted to go back to the udon place from 2 days ago but they also weren't opened.

going through customs and immigration wa pain free but the flight sucked. we had no personal entertainment system this time, and the seats were very uncomfortible. the good thing was the flight seemed fast, the food was decent, salmon, and our luggage made it to vancouver.

our stop over in vancouver was 6 hours 30 min, which sucked and we couldn't get on an earlier flight.

04/05 - Tokyo

2008-04-07T00:21:00.000+02:00

Today was the last full day in Japan, which meant frantically running around and buying stuff. We started by heading back to the temple district and hitting up the souvineer shops there for people. I bought a yukata there for my self as well. originally i wanted 1 that was black with red and white clouds, very similar to the atansuki ones (naruto) but got a normal one instead. I also loaded up on food and snacks to bring home. Japan has a bunch of differnet kitkat flavours.

the next stop was to go to akiharbara, the tech and anime district. there was tons to see here, lots of anime stuff, computers, airsoft...ect. here we did some more shopping, getting mini food for steph and some other stuff. i went back to yodobashi camera, where i bought my laptop to get stephs stuff and found out how my membership card worked. 13% of my laptop purchase was designated as points and each point was 1 yen to spend, so i had 15000 yen to spend for free. finding this out, i picked up a zoom attachment for my camera, so sweet!!!

after shopping we went around the trainstation to listen to the various street preformers. Dima found 1 preformer he likes from his trip last year and talked 2 her for a bit, pretty cool. after a while, a cop came by and everyone stop and all the preformers hid, it was really weird, stupid cops. after meeting up with keegan, who went off on his own to shop, we checked out the preformances some more. keegan fell in love with 1 of them, so dima and i got her cd for keegan and she wrote a nice message to him.

we went to a cheap place for dinner, which had udon, rice, and fried oysters for 600 yen, not bad. afterwards we went to ueno park to check it out at night. it was so busy there with many people having picnics and getting hammered there, was interesting.

04/04 - Tokyo

2008-04-04T17:36:00.000+02:00

Today was a heavily sea themed day, with some sky thrown in. we started the day bright and early by going to to tsukiji fish market, the worlds largest fish market. we woke up at 5 and got there about 6am. the activity around the market was frantic and was very interesting to see. when we got there, the tuna autions were over, but we saw many people preparing the blue fin tuna they just bought.

The various fish on display in the market was impressive, with many things i had never seen before. one of the cooler things were whale steaks. keegan and i wanted to buy some to try, but it was 1.3 kg and would have cost about $30. we settled for some sashimi instead.

upon leaving the market area, we went to line up at sushi dai, a sushi restaurant highly recommended to us. the restaurant only sat 13 people, so the line up moved slow and we waited for about 1 hour 30 minutes before our turn, but it was worth it. we got the chef special, 10 pieces, plus a roll and egg roll and miso soup. you could pick anything at the end to top it off. the first piece was blue fin tuna toro which was amazing. it literally melted on your tongue and the fat content was very high. the second piece was something called hobo, but i don't know what it was. the third peice was golen eye snapper with was also very good. we then got some miso soup and tehn surf clam, which was fresh, different from the frozen stuff back home. it had much more flavor. the next peice was sea urchin which was amazingly smooth, very good and probably my 2nd favorite overall. we then got bonito, which was pretty good and nice to see in sashimi form instead of flake form. the next piece was spanish mackerel which was amazingly tender and my 3rd favorite. we then got shrimp, tuna rolls and clam rolls, and an egg roll, which was slightly sweet, very good. the last of the 10 was sea eel with was awesome fresh. for my bonus i went for another peice of toro since it was so good. as we left the restaurant, we walk to another market to eat some fresh unagi and snacks.

we met back up with dima, who didnt want to eat, and eached to tokyo odaiba, a man made bay. the main reason to go here for us was to go to muscle park and do the ninja warrior/sasuke course. before doing that we checked out the man made beach which was nice.

the ninja warrior course consisted of 4 stations. the first was the hand bike, the 2nd was a finger ledge, the 3rd was a pull up later, and the last was a bar slide. the first station was pretty each and did it no problem. the 2nd start required you to travel horizontally and vertically along a 3cm finger ledge with our falling, i couldn't do it. the 3rd stage, ytou had to do a pull up then remove the bar from the peg and place it onto the higher ledge, i got it higher, but lost my grip and fell. the final stage required you to hold on a bar and which suspended. push your way also parallel bars to the end then swing to the safe area. i got to the end no problem but lost my momentum and couldn't swing far enough to the save area. keegan and i both passed and failed the same stages and had very similar times, both under a minute. it was fun, but expesnsive or i would have kept trying.

we then walked to the toyota city showcase and history collection. it was an exibit about toyota stuff with all their models, a auto drive car course and some attractions. we saw a movie ride with moving seats showing a couple laps around toyotas speedways, it was neat. the classic car collection had cars from various makers and times.

keegan and i then went to tokyo tower to take pictures of tokyo at sunset and night. tokyo is huge and the tower was a great place to take pictures. while on the tower we felt a slight swaying sort of like a small earth quake. dima, who was at the hostel, said we felt the same thing as well, so it might have been a small one.

we went to a local noodle place for udon dinner. the cook/owner was really nice and we taked about his store and travel. he gave us a bunch of free food, which was very nice of him. i had to the fried tofu and egg udon. the cool part is the noodles were hand made and really good.

after dinner we went to the roppongi district to take some more night pictures before heading back home.

04/03 - tokyo

2008-04-04T17:11:00.000+02:00

Today was our first day in Tokyo. This is also my 3rd time trying to type this so i will resort to point form reporting out of frustration. the first time, my ipod decided to delete my note and the second time, as i went to post, there was an internet error and it erased it.

- last night in capsule hotel was interesting, but hot and stuff. neat novelty but not something i'd do often.
- went to new hostel to drop off stuff and pick up keegan's friend.
- went to asakusa district to see temple, sonsoji.
- many interesting stores for souvineers and food. ate yakitori and fresh rice crackers.
- went to ueno park to see sakuras, very pretty.
- many japanese passed out by trees with empty bottles of sake around them.
- keegan's friend left, we went to shinjuku. dima got origami book for yukari, i got last volume for my FMP manga. keegan got clothes and pens.
- keegan and i went to imperial park to see gardens and sakuras. very pretty.
- went to dinner near ueno station for sushi, conveyer belt style, similar to sushi boat.
- 136 yen per plate, 2 peices.
- good and fresh, tuna, eel, ikura, maguro, other fish i didn't know.
- had 14 plates.
- went to hostel early as we planned to wake up very early next day to go to fish market.

- if this post doesn't work again, i will just skip it.

040/02 - tokyo

2008-04-04T17:07:00.002+02:00

Today we went to Nikko and Tokyo. Coming into Tokyo station was pretty neat as the amount of people, trains and activity were much more then anything we've seem so far. From Tokyo we took a train to Nikko, famous for their temples, tombs and mauseleums. We first dropped off our bags at the trainstation day locker. It took a lot of work fitting all 3 bags in 1 locker but we somehow managed.

On the walk to the temples we came across a guy selling charcoal grilled fish on a stick so we ate one, not bad. We first came up to shinkyo bridge and eventually to the shrine area. One temple was closed for a traditional rice eating ceremony but we didn't see it.

The places we saw were rinnoji temple, toshogu shrine, taiyuin temple, and futarasan shrine. The temples and shrines here were covered in gold leaf and intricate carvings and also had a strong Chinese influence. It was really cool to see. One of the more famous carvings here is of 3 monkeys covering their ears, eyes and mouth. We ate some cheap soba at the temple.

Back in Tokyo we checked into our capsule hotel. The "room" is pretty much a torpedo tube with bed, tv, and some other stuff.

We walked around akiba first and Dima found the same street singer as last year, which was neat. Next we went to Yodobashi Camera so I could buy a laptop, it was one of the harder experiences in my life. No one spoke English so asking about duty-free and return policy was tough. Eventually we spoke via altavista translator. The laptop is Japanese only so Dima is going to make it English for me.

We went to shibuya next to walk around and see the busiest pedestrian intersection in the world. Its crazy how many people are in Tokyo. We found a little ramen store there for dinner. It was probably the best ramen I've had and the broth was a milky white color, good stuff. After wandering around a little more we headed to our capsules as we had to meet keegans friend the next morning.

04/01 - kamakura and yokohama

2008-04-04T17:07:00.001+02:00

Today was a travel heavy day so we didn't get to see much.

I slept really well the night before as the futons and heated floor were a good combination. We started the day with breakfast at the ryokan which was pretty good, like the dinner before. We got a hotpot type thing with we first used to fry a lightly oiled and salted fish and then heated up a broth of tofu, mushrooms and seaweed. we had some pickled veggies, fish paste rings, miso soup, rice, chowamushi (steamed water egg) and some red olive like thing in sugar. The fish and chowamushi were really good. We did a quick hike around the area, taking pictures before checking out.

The next couple hours consisted of a gondola ride up the mountain, train down the mountain and multiple train transfer before we ended up in Yokohama. After checking into your hostel, we go on to another train to go to Kamakura, a town about 30 minutes away.

Kamakura is famous for the 2nd largest buddha in japan (first being the one we saw in Nara) and a couple other temples. We first went to see the buddha and got to go inside of it, which was interesting. Afterwards we went to hase temple, which had japan's largest wood carving, and a nice view of all of kamakura. after wandering around the town a bit longer and buying souvineers, we headed back to yokohama.

In yokohama we went to the downtown area to see if there was anything to see. None of hte buildings looked particularly interesting at night. They had japans tallest obervation deck, but we decided to pass on it. We found a pokemon center in the mall which sells everything pokemon related, which was also pretty interesting. Dinner in that area seemed pricy, so we went back to our hostel area to find a place to eat. We found a fast food place that was very cheap and i got a salad, miso soup, a big bowl of rice , and hotpot sytle beef for \490. not back.

we were all pretty tired from all the train travel, so we went back to the hostel afterwards. The room was pretty interesting. It is pretty small but is tatami mat covered. It has a thin futon to sleep on, a tv, fridge, and balcony. Also, the toilet is really cool. Like all japanese toilets, it had the butt washing spray, but this one also had a fan/drier and a sink on top. neat.

Tomorrow we are going to take a day trip to Nikko to see teh mauseleums and temples and stay in a tokyo capsule hotel.

03/31 - hakone

2008-04-04T17:03:00.000+02:00

Today was our ryokan day in Hakone, but before that Keegan and I had a little more exploring to do in Nagoya. We didn't have to catch our train until 11 so we got up earlier and went on a walked.

The first place we went to visit was Osu Kannon temple, a Chinese style temple in Nagoya. It was pretty quiet there and we watched the priest catch up on blessing the various charms he had accumulated the day before. The other thing we wanted to find was some of Nagoya's speciality foods. Kishimen, a flat udon soup was on the top of our list as we couldn't find a place open the night before. We popped in a few places but they were all closed. We gave up and went back to the hotel to pick up Dima and go to the trainstation.

At the station we hunted down a few of the other foods, tempura rice rolls and uiro steamed rice cakes. The tempura were like onigiri but with tempura shrimp in the middle. Uiro is as it sounds and is sweet. Satisifed with our selection we made our way to the train platform. I walked around the platform and found a noodle stand which had kichimen. I grabbed keegan and went back to the store. We had 3 minutes to order, have them prepare, and eat before our train arrived so we gave it a shot. We ordered at the vending machine, found a place to stand an about a minute later it was in front of me. I wolfed it down as fast as possible, burning my mouth along the way and only had the raw egg left when the train arrived. I quickly slurped it down and ran for the train just in time. Keegan took had last bit with him on the train in a cup. It was pretty good, much better then regilar udon and sorts of like how fettucchini compares to linguine.

The train to the ryokan was pretty interesting as it had to go up a mountain. It did this by going up a bit and back tracking up the next line, zig zagging up the mountain. Its like leafing down the mountain when snow boarding. When we got to our stop we got into a private gondola which brought us to our ryokan. Our room was pretty nice with an entry room, food prep room, washroom, main room and sitting and storage room. All the wall dividers were slidding paper doors and the floor was tatami mats. The floor was also heated.

The ryokan has 4 public baths, 2 indoor and 2 outdoor. They rotate between men and women so we went to the big outdoor one first. We had it to our selves but took turns jumping in and covering up with buckets. The water was 40-50 degrees and was very refreshing. After about 30 minutes we went to the large indoor bath and repeated our entry procedure. Afterwards, dima and I taught keegan how to shave. Dima and I explored outside for a bit which keegan soaked in the outdoor bath longer.

We got back at 6 and got ready for dinner which was an impressive feast. We were first brought a personal hotpot with beef, carrots, mushrooms, cabbage, udon, vermincelli, and bamboo. While that was cooking we were given a sashimi platter, salad, appitizers, and egg dish, and plum wine. The sashimi had tuna, shrimp, yellowtail, and 1 other fish and was extremely fresh. The tuna melted like butter. The appitizers consisted of a tofu cube, shrimp, fish roe wrapped in imitation crab deep fried, and clam. The salad was a scallop and veggies in a honey mustard sauce. The egg dish was thin scrambled eggs in a broth with a pink sauce which I don't know what it is. Next came some stewed veggies, including bamboo, gailan, glutton and carots, and a tempura dish. The tempura was eggplant wrapped in tofu skins and deep fried, a veggies bulb, which looked like a Brussels sprout, and shrimp with a multi-colored seaweed thing. Lastly we were brought sticky rice with an underwater plant in a broth, and strawberries and grapes as well as a large container of rice. The meal was very good and the plum wine at the end, which was very sweet like a desert wine, was a great way to end the meal.

After dinner the main room was arranged into a bedroom with futons. Keegan thinks they are the greatest thing on the world and the heated floor really adds to the comfort.

In the evenning keegan and I went to check out the last couple baths, a smaller inner and smaller outer bath. The small outer bath was very interesting and was carved out of rock and overlooked the river. The cold rocks sa night was a good contrast to the hot water. We then went to check out the large outer bath but it was gated. We hopped the gate and relaxed in the bath for a while before returning to our warm futons.

03/30 - Nagoya

2008-03-30T18:39:00.000+02:00

Today was a relatively calm day in nagoya. The weather was rainy, so that wasn't too fun. we got in a settled at around noon and dima went off on his own. Keegan and I made our way to the Toyota industry and technology museum and tried to take a
train there, only to find out no trains went there. Of course we found that out after stepping into a train. After a 30 minute detour we were back where we started.

we walked to the museum, which was actually a pretty neat museum. Toyota has it roots in the textile industry and had a large section based on that, with many interactive displays, which was pretty cool.

the car section talked about how toyota cars started and had information about the research towards metals, which was neat. there were replicas of the first toyotas, demonstrations on metal forging, casting and stamping and many interactive displays ranging from the engine, transmission, all the way down to the glass and bumpers. It was very in depth and really neat to see. The only negative was we wanted to make a small model car, but they only get junior high kids do it.

There was a technology land where we played in a wind tunnel and hovercraft and some other sciecey thing, but the musuem closed at 5 and we had to leave. we had planned to take a look at nagoya castle but spent too much time in the musuem.

we walked over to midland towers next to go to the observation deck and meet up with dima. Unfortuantely, it started rains adn the observation deck is open air, so we got pretty wet. The view was preety cool, with the nicest being twisty building and the jr towers. We started till dark and keegan and i found a unagi restaurat.

The restaurant specialized in eel, which is a nagoya specialty. There was an instruction guide on how to eat, which was interesting. The first step is eat eel and rice. the 2nd step is to added some spring onions and eat some. the final step is to add some broth. I prefered eating it plains but the broth was neat too.

after the eel keegan and i went looking for some other specialities, a flat noodle and miso udon. Unfortuanately, noodle restaurants closed early, as they are primarily lunch, so we found nothing. We went to th convieniance store and bought some ice cream bars and sake instead.

The sake was not back, similar to rice wine and the bars were chocolate and milk tea flavored, which was good. on tv they were showing some eating contest with was crazy. The women ate like 60 plates of tampura, 50 plates of udon, 30 plates of steak...ect.

03/29 - Kobe

2008-03-30T14:08:00.001+02:00

Today we went to Kobe and stayed in a hotel, which was a nice change
from hostels. The first stop in Kobe was the disaster reduction and
human renovation institution museum, which were two totally different
museums. The disaster reduction museum was about the 1995 earthquake
and how Kobe recovered. It started off with a movie simulating the
earthquake from various points in Kobe and even simulated the floor
shaking. Afterwards you walked through a recreation of the streets
after an earthquake, which was really neat. As we walked through, a
guide came and was explaining everything to us with was very useful.
There was also this cool touch screen map, like google earth, that
showed danger regions for tusnamis. We were shown models on how
buildings have changed to be earthquake resistant, the coolest of
which is building the structure on a floating platform on rollers.

After we were done with the earthquake museum we went to the connected
museum, which was weird. I think the overall theme was to appreciate
life and had movies to calm you down and displays about the circle or
life. We played this weird drum game where you had to hit theme
sensors to the beat of the music.

The next stop was the maiko prominade under Akishi kaikyo bridge which
was an tunnel thing under the bridge, which is also the worlds longest
suspension bridge. It was pretty neat and a different view of the
bridge.

We then went to city hall to go to the observation deck. Kobe is
pretty big but we went during the day so it wasn't as pretty.

Afterwards we went to eat dinner at a buffet restaurant. The best
stuff they had were little cubes of Kobe beef so I ate a bunch of
that. We were only allowed to eat for 90 minutes which we used in its
entirety. That probably wasn't a good idea as I felt really full
afterwards.

Dima and I made a quick stop at meriken park to see the earth quake
memorial and take pictures of the port tower, maritime museum, and the
oriental hotel. Near the park was a huge double decker highway which
seemed pretty dangerous to have in an earthquake zone.

On our way back we got a bit lost but a local guy walked with us back
to the jr line.

03/28 Toyota-Kyoto

2008-03-29T00:36:00.000+01:00

Today we went on a factory tour of Toyota factory in Toyota city. It
was a little bit of an adventure getting to place and we had take a
private train to get to the city. On one of the trains, we asked a passenger if it stopped at a particular stop, which they said yes. a couple minutes later, she gave us a piece of paper she wrote with all the stop names in romanji and kanji. Then this business man took the paper and wrote in the times it would stop there. They were really nice and totally unexpected. We also walked through the
restricted toyota factory area to reach the meeting point in the
exhibition hall, which we didn't realize until later.

The exhibition hall had a showroom containing the newest models, both
toyota and lexis, as well and displayed for safety, environment and
production.

We started our tour at 11 and went to the welding factory and
assembly. Our guide was very cute, which was nice. In the welding
plant we saw 8 different models being made, and learned about the
process. Toyota only makes enough cars to cover orders to reduce usage
of materials and have very little inventory storage. The spot welding
spot was very cool with 4 robotic arms welding various points of the
car body. Another neat thing about the building was it had solar
collectors to redirect sunlight of the interior lighting. Also, the
welding sparks/spladder is collected and recycled.

In the assembly factory, the parts all come together. Unlike the
welding factory, the assembly factory consisted of primarily human
worked. The doors are the last thing to be assembled, to give more
room for the interior installations, which was neat.

Back at the exhibition hall they demonstrated the Partner Robot and i-
unit. The partner robot was a robot with artificial lungs and lips and
could play the trumpet, which was cool. The i-unit was a personal
vehicle which color transform, was ultra mobile and electric powered.
They did a demonstration driving around and looked neat.

At the hall a English teacher and her students used us to practice
English and asked us ours names, home country and favorite Japanese
food. I used my iPod sketch function to write my name. It was pretty
cute.

Some other interesting things i learned during the tour, the company founder is toyoda but he named the company toyota because to write toyoda takes 10 stokes, and only 8 for toyota, 8 being a lucky number in asian countries. also, the town was originally called korowmo town, renamed to toyota in 1959 because of the factories in the region.

When we were walking back to the train station, we took the same route back but were stopped by security asking for ID this time, which we explained to them we were tourists. It was kind of funny.

when we got back into Kyoto, Dima did some shoppig and then went back to the hostel while Keegan and I went to find food. We walked down some alleys and found a small noodle house. The inside was a little sketchy looking but the food was really good. We had nabeyaki, a udon soup with a bunch of narutos, shrimp and chicken, it was really good and all prepared fresh.

Back at the hostel we talked and drank with some of the other tourists and then called it a night.

03/27 Kyoto

2008-03-27T22:55:00.000+01:00

Today we biked around Kyoto, a trip that lasted about 12 hours and
covered about 40 km.

After a quick trip to Nijo castle we rode to daitokuji temple, which
was a large complex with many shrines. From here we went to kinkakuji
temple or the golden pavillion. This was a 3 story building covered in
gold leaf. The first floor was like a palace, the second in a samurai
style, and the top like a zen temple. On the roof was a phoenix.
Unfortuately we couldn't go inside but it was very beautiful. Also,
the ticket for entry looks like anti-spirit paper in animes.

The next stop was Ryoanji temple, famous for the rock garden. The
garden consisted of 15 rocks and white gravel and is said to invoke
meditation. It was pretty simple and I guess your suppose to ponder
lives misteries. The temple also had a unique tsukubai, water basin of
stone. It has the inscription "I learn only to be content" meaning It
is more important to be spiritually rich then materially rich.

After a bunch more biking we stopped by ninnaji temple and tenryu-ji
temple. I had some cold soba for lunch which was pretty good. biked
back to the city and stopped by by the imperial palace park just
before sunset. In the park was a large fully bloomed sakura, which was
pretty.

As it got dark, we headed to the train station to get information on
tomorrow's trip and to check out the observation deck. The train
station was pretty cool and have to go up to the 11 floor to get to
the top, but Kyoto doesn't have many tall buildings so there was not
much to see. The tallest building, Kyoto tower could not be seen as it
was on the other side. The train station also had a sky walk over the
station which was neat. For dinner dima had a big $12 burger
consisting of 2 patties, bacon, ham, and an egg. I wanted 1 also but
they ran out of patties. I had an ELT, egg lettuce tomato, which was
pretty good. They had to cut off the crusts of the bread to toast it,
but gave them to you still since you paid for it, kinds neat.

Biking was pretty fun, considering I haven't rode a bike in about 5
years. I thought I was going to wipe out bad considering the last 2
times I rode a bike I wiped out and broke the bikes but everything
worked out. I guess its true you never forget how to ride a bike. It
was also fun weaving in and out of traffic, both people and cars.
Also, you can ride of roads and sidewalks, which made the trip faster.
The only downside is it feels like my butt is bruised from all the
riding.

03/26 Kyoto

2008-03-27T00:51:00.001+01:00

The first thing I noticed about Kyoto is the train station is really
neat. There is an observation deck and sky walk at the top but we
didn't explore yet. The other general thing about Kyoto is there are a
million shrines and temples and seeing the sites require a log of
walking.

After dropping off our bags we went to grab some food. I grabbed some
rice and curry which was really good.

It took about an hour to reach our first destination, kiyomizudera, a
large temple in the mountains famous for its pure spring water, said
to have healing powers, and love stones. If you could walk from one
stone to the other without looking you would find love sooner then
later. In the markets they had a special creampuff called kiyomizuzaka
yatuhashi syu with sakura cream. We also had some tamba beef buns.

We next tried to get to the silver pavillion, a shrine at the north
end of the city and ran into some other sites along the way.

The first was korai-ji temple and higashi otani mausoleum. After a
little more walking we reached maruyama park, which was nice with
sakuras and water. At the park there was a street performer so was
doing juggling and magic who was pretty good and got a large crowd to
watch.

After some more walking we passed konkai-komyoji temple and a mountain
with the character "big" printed on it before arriving at the silver
pavillion. Unfortunately, the temple was closed as it had taken around
5-6 hours to walk there. Near the temple was a small shrine with many
lit up lanterns whiched looked very nice at night.

For our walk back we wanted to take a look a the district Gion, the
geisha district. It rained for most of our walk back which wasn't
nice. After about an hour to two we reach Gion but all the geishas
were already inside the restaurants working.

We found a ramen and gioza shop for dinner before heading back. It was
a long day of walking, around 18 km, but probably the best way to see
kyoto as shrines are everywhere.

03/25 Osaka

2008-03-25T15:32:00.000+01:00

We started the day off by going to Osaka Castle and the surrounding
park. Like in Nara, the sakura tree were beginning to blossom and the
skies were blue. The castle only resembled a castle on the outside and
contained a museum and observation floor inside. The history of the
castle was quite interest since I don't know much Japanese histoy and
focused on the man we unified japan and his family's fall from power
one generation later.

After the castle we headed over to Osaka Bay to take a look around
there. The first island in the bay was sort of a ghost town but we found a
free ferry to get to another island. This area was Tempozan and had
some large ferris wheel, which we got on. The view was pretty cool and
seeing all the overpasses in Osaka was neat. We walked around the
market there for a bit and found some awesome engrish shirts but they
were expensive.

We headed back to Dotonbori street for dinner and went to a place to try fugu (puffer fish). It was a tad pricy, so no one else had it but me. The first course was thinly cut sashimi. The fish was fairly chewy and had the texture of a mushroom. The taste was not very store either, also similar to a mushroom. After a while, your tongue gets a slight tingly sensation, but other then that, nothing much happens. The meal also came with fugu deep fried, which made it lose the tingly property, and in raw chunks for nabe (hot pot). When cooked in the hot pot, it became over cooked very fast, resulting in a tough fish. Overall, the sashimi was the best and was something interesting to try, but not worth it to try often.

After dinner, we found a manga store that had a bunch of Full Metal Panic manga, which i picked up. Hopefully i can find the whole series.

Tomorrow we head over to Kyoto for a couple days and get a tour of a toyota factory soon, so should be interesting.

03/24 Nara/Osaka

2008-03-24T15:42:00.001+01:00

The day started with a trip to Nara, a city and hour from Osaka famousfor shrines and temples. I had to pick up some pocky to feed the deerand I was set to go. Once in Nara, we made our way to Nara Park, wherethe famous shrines are. Along the way we found a MOS burger, a Japanese burger joint, similiar to the one they show in Prince ofTennis all the time. I tried the spicy MOS burger which was prettygood and assembled nicely, unlike the squished stuff from Canadian fastfood places.

The first thing we say was the 5 story pagoda, a large tower. Aftersome pictures we emcountered the first of many deer "shika". Nara Shikamaru, of naruto fame makes a lot of sense now. I feed the deerpocky and leaves which was pretty cool, the deer are so friendly.After a while of playing with the deer we eventually made our way tokasuga shrine, a large Shinto shrine. We decided to not enter and justwalked around, taking pictures as we went.

After bumping into random shrines all over we got to the big one,todaiji temple. The temple is huge and is the largest wooden structurein the world. The original temple was 66% larger but it was destroyedby fire twice. Inside the temple is a varicana Buddha. The length ofthe head alone is 5 meters. It was very interesting and huge!!!

The other cool thing about Nara Park was the Sakuras were beginning to bloom, making the park very pretty. They ranged from white to various shades of pink. Hopefully by the time we get to Kyoto the sakuras around the temples will be in full bloom.

After leaving the shrines we had some takoyaki, and pasteries beforereturning back to Osaka.

In Osaka we first went to the area around the second downtown ( yesOsaka has 2 downtowns) and spent some time in yodobashi camera, alarge electronics store. I really want to buy an ultra mobile pc,maybe in Tokyo. I also saw the macbook air for the first time but Ilike the lenovo x300 more. Also, the cellphones they have here arecrazy unfortunately they don't work in Canada (especially on Rogers).

The next location was the Shin-Umeda City building's floating gardenobservatory. It was a platform suspended between 2 towers, 40 storiesin the air and had a 360 degree view of the city. Osaka looks amazingfrom there at night. After taking a bunch of pictures we headed outfor some food. We found some kushikatsu style food near our hotel,which is breaded and deep fried stuff. We randomly picked chicken,pork, sausage, meatballs, peppers, fish, scallop, mushroom, andcheese. It was good and cheap. We also picked some random street foodwhich was kelp, octopus, egg, and fish cakes stewing in soup.

03/23 Osaka

2008-03-23T18:29:00.000+01:00

Today we finally checked into a hostel with internet so i can finally start writting. I was told Osaka was a good food city and it hasn't disappointed yet. We have 3 days here, so we decided to just wander around for the first day. The first thing we did was stop by a noodle store and picked up some Tsukimi Soba, buckwheat noodles with a raw egg, for lunch. It was pretty good and only 290. Afterwards we spotted a takoyaki stand, the first of many. These were much better then anything back home, and extremely hot. I popped one in my mouth and pretty much burned my entire mouth, but it was so good. After various other snacks, we found ourselves at Shitennoji Temple. The neat thing was there was a festival going on as well, which made the place very lively. After some overservation, we figured out it was the day for locals to be blessed by the monks. The other good thing, was all the food. Here we had okonomiyaki (cabbage pancake), an egg/batter crepe, and taiyaki (fish shaped cake seen often in anime). Everything was very good, and we felt lucky to find the taiyaki as they only seem to be found during festivals. Also, the okonomiyaki was much better then from hiroshima.

After exploring all the temples and shrines in the area we kept walking and found many more shrines, the biggest of which was Isshinji Temple. They were doing the blessing ceremonies here a well. I was a little disappointed in the lack of kimmonos but i'm sure i'll see more in kyoto.

After more walking we stumbled into Den Den Town, which is Osaka's Akiba. It was pretty neat being surrounded in Otaku culture with the abundance of models and figurines. I was able to find some mini food for steph here.

After more stumbling, we walking into Bic Camera, a huge electronics store. I am really tempted to by a small travel laptop here, but i will wait till tokyo to see what my funds are like. One neat thing they had was a 3d tv, which while interesting , seemed inpractical. The vast amount of selection is crazy with 500 different mice, and hundreds of different laptops, cameras, and tv.

After more walking, we hit Dotonbori street, a huge street focused on food. We visited some landmarks here, such as the giant robotic crab (kani doraku crab) infront of the crab restaurant Kani Doraku. It was too expensive to eat there. There is also a large 8 floor building, Kuidaore, with each floor being a restaurant featuring a different type of food. we also didn't eat here. Instead, we ate more takoyaki, okonomiyaki negimayo and ramen from Kinryu Ramen, a popular place. You ordered from a vending machine, which spit out a ticket and then you exchanged it for your meal. it was pretty good. after some more wandering, we found the Glico man sign, a famous neon sign for the Glico candy company.

Tired from a long day of walking, and planning to go to Nara tomorrow, we headed back. Of note, we found a lot of Fugu restaurants and will try some before we leave. hope it's not deadly.

Blog is back

2008-03-23T04:19:00.000+01:00

Hi Everyone,

I have been writting on my ipod as i have travelled but the lack of wifi has prevented me from uploading it, but i finally have something up. I will try to get pictures up later. Enjoy

03/22 Hiroshima

2008-03-23T04:18:00.001+01:00

The day started early by catching a train to Hiroshima. The firsttrain was soldout but we were able to find seating on the walkontrain. We transfered trains at Hakata ANC bought some buns from thebakery at the station. After checking into our hostel we walked overto the peacepark and atomic bomb mesuem. The centerpiece of the parkwas the remains of the government building and the cenotaph. Afterwalking through the park and through the victim memorial we enteredthe photography exhibit in the atomic bomb exhibit. The exhibitdisplayed photographs 2 months and 2 years after the bombing atHiroshima. The A-bomb museum had information on the events leading upto the pacific war, the bombing, the aftermath, and the recovery. Itwas a thought-provoking exhibit similar to my travels to Auchiwitz.One of the sadder stories was Sadako Sasaki. She was a little girlthat got lukemeia and started making paper cranes in the belief thatif she made 1000 cranes she would be granted a wish and live. Afterthe peace park we went to take a look at Hiroshima castle. After a fewpictures we headed to hondori street, an outdoor market. I found amanga store there and bought an issue of shonen jump for ¥240. Iwanted to buy all of full metal panic but they didn't have it all. Wewent to a random place for dinner and ordered okonomiyaki, pizza,tofu, and a chicken and egg stirfry. The okonomiyaki wasn't very goodas it was all batter, hopefully they are better in Osaka. The tofu wasin evaporated milk but did not have much taste. Surprisingly the pizzawas pretty good and different. It had chicken, spinich, cheese,mustard, and tobasco sauce. The beer was also pretty good. Afterdinner we went back to the peace park for some night shots beforechecking out our hostel. It was pretty cool and ryokan like withtatami mats and futons to sleep on.

03/21 Nagasaki

2008-03-23T04:17:00.000+01:00

We arrive at kagoshima at 9:35 and quickly looked for a taxi, as ourtrain was leaving fairly soon and we needed to activate our trainpass. We didn't have time to do much at Kagoshima but did get to seeSakurajima, one of Japan's most active volcanos. A quick"Kagoshimachuo eki onegai shimasu" later and we were off. Aftergetting our railpasses we headed to our first train. To get toNagasaki, we needed to take 3 trains. Keegan fell in love with thefirst train attendant but it was not meant to be as we switched trainsquickly. The train attendant on the next train didn't do it forkeegan. Between the 2nd and last trains we found a noodle shop on theplatform so we gave it a try. We ordered udon with minced chicken for¥290. The last train brought us from Tosu to Nagasaki, which wearrived at 2:50. Our hostel was very close to the trainstation soafter a quick stop we were off to the Nagasaki Peace Park.

In the park was the "Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall for theAtomic Bomb Victims". The central theme was water as after the bombingsurvivors flocked to the area in search of water at the springs. Manypeople dies at the springs from the radiation. The central hall has 12pilar of light to stmbolize peace and a giant registry has the recordof all casualities.

Afterwards we headed to the centrl peace park where many statues were.Dima did his usual girl watching there. While leaving the peace parkwe found a bakery that had castellas, a portugese pastery.

The next place we went to was dejima, which was a man made island forthe Dutch settlers. Near there was a market were we had some streetfood called inohoyaki which was like a pancake sandwich with Japanesemayo and veggies and meat. The specticle bridges, cemetery/shine, andkofukuji temple were also checked out. For dinner we went to a randomplace and pointed at random items. Dima doesn't like that kind ofeating but it was 2 against 1. We had tempura, seaweed, fried fishpaste, lotus root and dima had fried chicken. Our hostel closed earlyso we had to go back soon. At the hostel we just chilled on the commonroom talking to the other travellers.

03/20 Ferry to Kagoshima

2008-03-23T04:16:00.000+01:00

Today we boarded the ferry to go to Kagoshima. We woke up at 5 am tocatch our ferry. We left the hostel at 5:45 and got to the terminaljust before the 6:30 boarding time. Upon leaving Naha we made a briefstop at (blank) and (blank). Our "room" consisted of a large room withmats , blankets and pillows for about 70 people. There is a restuarent(which is open sparsely) a store and of course vending machines. Theride was very rocky, good thing i don't get seasick. Dima on theotherhand does and felt like death. Keegan also felt the affects ofthe sea but was able to cope with it by listening to music/Japaneselessons and sleeping.
After getting some medicine and sleeping it off Dima was ok. For lunchI prepared some ramen and spam with some okinawan beer. Dinner wasvery improvised and consisted of instant curry mixed and rice fromrice balls mixed in my ramen bowl. Most of the trip was fairlyuneventful as there is not much to do on the boat. Keegan and Dimaslept lots while I blogged the last couple days on my iPod touch. I'mgetting pretty good at typing on it now. The long break also gave me achance to backup photos and reencode videos to divx to save space. Ontv we were able to watch some sumo action as well as go. Dima and I upearly to check out the sunrise, which was pretty nice, but the roughseas made it difficult to take a good video. In the morning a littlekid called me a Baka for eating my seaweed like a brontosaurus.

03/19 Naha Okinawa

2008-03-23T04:15:00.000+01:00

Today we decided to explore the north park of Okinawa. After slowlydriving up north via local roads we found the toll expressway and offwe went. The toll was ¥800 but probably saved us 2 hours. The firststop was the Okinawa churaumi aquarium. The highlight here was agigantic tank which had 3 whale sharks. We went on a tour were wecould see above the aquarium which was pretty neat. We proceeded todrive up north to the northern most tip of Okinawa called hedo misaki.Along the way, the scenery was amazing with beaches, blue water and the sky starting to clear up. Medo misaki had large cliffs and crashingwaves, it was very nice but also very windy. We decided to drive backdown to Naha along the scenic/free road. This allowed up to enter arandom hotel and use their beach. The water wasn't too cold so it wasswimmable. I only wadded in but keegan went all out. We had to returnthe car by 630 which came down to the wire due to traffic. We returnedthe car just in the nick of time. We decided to head back to the mainstreet for dinner. We found a place that had taco rice and also hadsome okinawa soba. Taco rice is rice, lettuce, salsa and cheese in aKorean iron bowl, sorts like a Mexican bim-be-bop. After walking themain street for a little longer we retreated to the hostel to get somerest.

03/18 Naha Okinawa

2008-03-23T04:14:00.000+01:00

The first thing we needed to do today was get a car. After gettingsomeone to call we were able to get a car which was a small Mitsubishicolt. It took Dima some time to get used to driving on the left sideof the road, and especially the switching of the blinker/wiper. Wequickly made a stop at the ferry terminal to get tickets and were onour way.
Our first stop was the former japanese navy headquarters shelter. Itwas a series of underground tunnels and chambers. After a quick stopfor lunch (rice balls, fried potato and ninja popcorn) we drove to ournext stop, Okinawa world cave park. At this point it was raining veryhard but we headed underground so it was ok. The cave system was veryinteresting with the highlight being this massive stalagmite. Also inOkinawa world was a glass blowing demonstration, rock sugar making,rattlesnake awamori and druming. We also got fakes drivers licencesfor kids. The next stop was the peace memorial park and cornerstone ofpeace. The was memorial to the war dead with soldier's names inscribedin walls. Talking to the japanese travellers later we asked if theyhad negative feelings towards americans due to the war and the a-bombsand thought their response was very interesting. They admitted thattheir government at that time was bad and admitted fault. I thoughtthis was interesting and much different then in Germany where you gotmore of a sense that the people were not open to talking about it andin a way tried to hide it.

On our way back we saw on our gps a beach so we went to check it out.What we found was an abandoned restuarent and beach. It was prettyspooky. We found a supermarket which we went to buy food for the ferrytrip and picked up stuff to eat for dinner. I got a sashimi platterfor ¥680. The grocery store had 1song on loop which got prettyannoying. Along the drive we came across the himeyuri monument whichseemed to be deticated to someone and was very popular as many peoplebought flowers. We wanted to go to Mihama American village for thesunset but it was too late so we went back to the hostel to put awayour food. At night we went for a drive and ended up in the americanvillage which contained some American stores and brands. We went tothe sega arcade there which was neat.

03/17 Naha Okinawa

2008-03-23T04:12:00.000+01:00

Today was our first full day in japan. We arrived in Naha at around9pm and to our hostel at about 10. The flight over was pretty good.Air Canada has a new in flight entertainment system so I watched beemovie, no country for old men, dan's life and some tv. The food wasalso pretty good with chicken risotto and beef stirfry noodles . Uponentry into Osaka we had to go through customs which involved afingerprint scan and photo ID. It was pretty painless but took quite along time. After picking up our luggage we checked in to the flight tonaha and were off. We were pretty lucky to not encounter any delays orlost luggage. After getting to the hostel we talked to the staff for acouple hours and hit the sack.

The first thing we did the following day was visit the main street,kokusai street. This street had many shops and restuarants. Wewandered into a cookie/candy shop first. The neat thing about japan isthere are lots of free samples so we bought some snacks which I thinkare made from ume/ube. Also on the main street was the local marketwhere we could try the various local produce. Some of the interestingstuff was this seaweed which looked and tasted like caviar. We boughtlunch here from a vender who made bento boxes. Mine was rice, ameatball, saba, veggies and a soup. I also got thing thing theresembled a rice hamburger with seaweed, egg,rice and SPAM. Aftereating we took the bus to Shurijo Castle which was a large complex inNaha. I don't know much about it since the info was in Japanese, everything I learned about it was done after by reading a guidebookthe tourist info center gave us. After this, we walked to ShikineanImperial Garden. Along the way we came across a cemetery park whichwas quite interesting. The gardens were nice but the sky was overcastso the photos were not as nice. There are vending machines andconvienient stores everywhere so grabbing snacks are easy. We got thiscustard fruitcup for a buck which was very nice. We walked into arandom restuarent for dinner and had Goya chanpuru , rafute and nabe.The first is a bitter melon, loved by the people of Okinawa, friedwith egg and tofu. Rafute is stewed pork belly and nabe is a hotpotconsisting of veggies, noodles, and fatty pork. We returned to thehostel early since we needed to arrange a car rental, which proveddifficult as they would not insure gaijins. After visitng severalplaces and calling some more we were told to try again in the morning.Our room consists of a bunk bed, floor matress, tv, fridge and privatewashroom. It was small but ok for us.

Long Trip part 6: Frankfurt, Germany

2006-05-22T19:47:00.000+02:00

I'm finally at the final destination of my long solo trip, Frankfurt. Interestingly there are 2 Frankfurts in Germany, Frankfurt am Main and Frankfurt an der Oder, each named after the river they are near and with the former being the more known one. The purpose of going to Frankfurt was 2 fold, first, it was the cheapest place to fly to that I could train home from, and second, I had maked it off on my travel map as a place I had visited since I had a stop over here when I first came to Europe (I was desperate to fill in that map). So I could edit the map or actually visit the place, so here I am.

Frankfurt doesn't really have a whole lot to see and do. It has huge events (see auto show) and a massive airport, but for a tourist point of view, there isn't a whole lot. Factor in the fact at museums are closed on monday and it's more or less a wash. The city lacks a lot of the old architecture I like mainly because the second world war happened and the place got bombed to hell, luckily for me, some things survived. Nowadays, the place is a huge banking place and businessy.

Upon getting to Frankfurt, the first thing I did was get my train ticket back to Switzerland. 42€ to Basel, not too bad. After that I check in to the hostel and did a quick walk around and then it started raining so I went to the internet cafe to start the Egypt planning. Up until now, I was not involved in the planning at all, and I like to know everything that's happenning, so away I went. After a couple hours of that, it was off to see the city.

The only real interesting part of town is Römerberg, the former old city. Since 80% of the city was destroyed, most of it was built in a modern style, Römerberg was the exception, showing what the city once looked like, a stark contrast to the skyscrapers nearby. So highlights include the old Römer (town hall) and the catherdral (Dom). This was the coronation sity of Holy Roman Emperors from 1562 to 1792 and one of the few structures still standing after the bombing raids. After walking by all the skyscrapers it started raining like mad so I retreated inside. Looking at my guide, I found out that was more or less all to see and back I went, planning the next trip.

The next day, I caught the 6:07am train back to switzerland. The trip will take 8 hours to get back to baden, but leave me plenty of time to pack/clean/move/get scrubs and 24...ect

Its been an interesting trip travelling alone, and I think I learned a bit more about myself, but it's just more fun with others. Bring on Egypt!

Long Trip part 5: Göteborg, Sweden

2006-05-20T18:20:00.000+02:00

The ferry ride from Turku to Stockholm was pretty uneventful. This time there was no one my age at all. After watching the Finland hockey game I took a look at the Viking Buffet and wondered how hard it would be to dine and dash, so I figured, lets try.

Step 1, walk in unnoticed grab a plate load it with beef and norwegian salmon, check.
Step 2, walk away when done, check...

...except I got a little greedy and went back for some more. As I was eatting the next plateful the waiter asked for my ticket this time, I told him I thought we paided when we were done eatting and then paid for the meal, which was no biggie as I was planning to pay for it anyways, and just wanted to run an experiment. The food was pretty good, lots of salmon, shrimp, roast beef, fruits, deserts, swedish meatballs...ect but my appetite has shrunk considerably (i'll have to build it back up when I get back to Canada).

The rest of the night was uneventfully and we docked in to Stockholm at 6:30, after 9-10 hours at sea. I proceeded to take the train to Göteborg; this trip almost 5 hours. When I got there I didn't really have much desire to do/see anything, my only reason for coming here was there is a cheap flight to Germany from here, and thus bringing me 1 step closer to home (and Egypt). The weather was very rainy as well, which didn't help my mood. After a walking around the town I decided to call it a day, the 15 hours of travel made me pretty sleepy.

My hostel was another crappy pick, chosen for the cheap price more then anything. It was like the Ryanair of hostels. First, it was extremely far from the town it was advertised for, needing an hour bus ride and 10 mins of walking to get there. Second, it is located in the middle of nowhere, which is good and bad, there is a nice little hiking region around there which was nice and I went for a run. Third, it was total no thrills, and they required you to clean your room (floors and everything). On the plus side I did get my own room, which was unexpected as I booked the dorm bed (cheaper). The hostel wasn't too busy either, 1 interesting greek fellow and that was about it.

The next day I went out to check some of the sites, the usual really. Some big church in the center of town (Oscar Fredriks Kyrka), the "fish church" fish market, an old war fortress (Skansen Kronan), the old part of town (Haga) and a museum (world culture meseum, it was free). I remembered Felix telling me how these chocolate balls (chokladboll) where really good, so since I didn't go to the jaza buffet he suggest, I figured I should hunt this one down. It was pretty good but no much chocolate, more sugar then anything. After some more wandering, it started raining so I headed to the mall for some cover. The mall was more or less like any mall in Canada, just with more beautiful swedish girls).

On the last day, I first set out to look for my hat, i think i left it at a store the first day i was here. Unfortunately, like most things, it was closed on Sunday, darn. The whole sunday closing thing is annoying, luckily today is my designated travel day so there isn't a whole lot planned. There is only 1 airport bus for each flight so I had to get there super early and wait there for 2 hours, fun. After flying to Frankfurt hahn (2 hours out of Frankfurt). I got there at round 7pm and found a German girl there that was sleeping there for the night as well, which was nice, as it´s pretty boring waiting there all night. It was nice having someone to talk to for a while. The airport itself was decently big, unlike the ones in sweden which were shacks on the side of the road, but the seats there were horrible bucket seats so you had to sleep on the floor. I got up early and took the 6:15 bus to frankfurt arriving at 8am.

The tail part of my trip has been a little boring, mainly cuz I didn't go to these placed with too much I wanted to see/do and partly because I had so much fun in Riga. I think I'm burned out from travelling as well (especially alone), but I'm really looking forward to Egypt and Canada.

All in all, the scandanavian countries were beautiful and calm, but outside of going to clubs (see expensive) there wasn't a whole lot to do.

Long Trip part 4: Helsinki and Turku, Finland

2006-05-18T14:57:00.000+02:00

The trip over to Helsinki, Finland (Suomi!) was pretty interesting. I took the Viking Ferry from Stockholm and it was a 15 hour journey. The ferry was interesting and resembled a cruise ship, only with everything costing extra and the fact that you don't need to book a cabin and can just sleep where ever (what I did). They had a bunch of , with really good food, but it was 26€ for the buffet, a casino, pub, karoke lounge, nightclub and even a small sauna area. They were playing the Canada-Finland game at the lounge so it was nice to watch. The crowd was very pro-finland, but we wasted them, I wish I had my Canada Jersey on. On the ferry, I met some other people that didn't get cabins (2 guys and a girl from Columbia, 1 guy from Germany) so we chilled for a bit (see drinking beer). Later on in the night a crazy amount of Finnish girls (on their way back from a school trip or something) stopped by to talk. It was good fun until security took away our alcohol (apparently you can't drink on the boat),but not before I tried some Finish vodka stuff that tasted like licorice (similiar to Sambouka (spelling) from Riga, but stronger and sweeter, so we decided to go to the club for a bit and stuck around till 3, but the music was horrible and I couldn't stand it anymore. I tried to stay up to watch the sunrise, but I passed out at around 5 (i think sunrise was at like 5:30). We arrived at Helsinki at 10 in the morning (and they didn't stamp my passport :( ).

Helsinki is much colder and quieter then Stockholm, so there wasn't a whole lot to do. After locating the hostel, we (the german fellow tagged along for the day) took a ferry to the island forturess Suomenlinna (Fortress of Finland or something, the swedish name is Fortress of Sweden, interesting). After that I more or less just wandered around the city looking for the tourist sights. There was the Helsinki Cathedral, Uspenski Orthodox church, and another neat church called Temppeliaukion Kirkko. This place was carved into the rock or something adn the walls are all rock, it was interesting. A quick obervation or Helsinki, it has to have the highest concentration of McDonalds in the world. walking 10 min in the center, I saw 10 different McDonalds. Helsinki is also damn expensive (Finland as a whole). We just took it easy for the night (couldn't find a club or anything) and drank a few beers by the cathedral. I learned a cool trick on how to open a beer bottle with a lighter (something we were wondering in Russia). Good stuff.

The next day I just wandered around the city until it was time to catch my train to Turku. I wanted to go to Turku mainly cuz that's where Kipper is from. Talking to the finnish girl in Riga (she lived in Turku but was out travelling at this time) she told me the city was famous for 2 things, hockey players and beautiful women. A pretty accurate statement as I came to the city because of a hockey player, and the women looked very swedish (a good thing). Turku is apparently the oldest town in Finland, and once the capital of Sweden. The train was really nice with a conference room, electrical plugs for computers and stuff, built-in radios, and seats that recline a lot. It was really comfortable. The trip too around 2 hours and I was in Turku at 4. Everything was more or less closing at this time, so I just took pictures of the sites and looked into things to do the next day. Walking around the city, I saw some weird art stuff, like a large web covering a cave, and the Fibonacci Sequence on the chiminey stack of a power facility. Along the river there were some neat things in the föri, a free ferry to send people across the river, more art stuff like the "whale tail", and a lot of old boats. There was a large 3 mast sailing ship called the Suomen Jousten (Finish Swan), another sailing ship called the Parkki Sigym, and some random military boat (Tykkivene Karjala). At opposite ends of the river are Turku Cathedral, and Turku Castle (creative naming). I caught the Canada-Slovaki game on tv so that was good, awesome 3rd period.

On the last day in Turku, I had planned to see the cathedral, castle and a museum. The cathedral was pretty plan inside. It burned down, along with the rest of the town 100-something years ago so I guess they didn't bother making it too nice. I also checked out a museum that was ruins of the old town which was pretty interesting. It also held a modern art museum which was weird. They had some mechanical art display so it had random moving stuff, like vibrating cubes and tilting bookshelves. The castle was a long walk away and I got lazy so I decided to go back to the hostel to sleep for a bit, probably due to lack of food (sweden=expensive, ferry food = expensive, finland = expensive). I figured I should at least try some traditional finnish food (we looked in helsinki, but it was crazy expensive) and looked for a place to try reindeer. I found a boat resturant called Svarte Rudolf (with a name like that, they better have reindeer....they did) and tried the braised Reindeer; it came with Lingonberries (I can say I tried something swedish also now). It was hard to define the taste of it since it wasn´t 1 large hunk of meat, but it seemed sorta like a cross of horse and veal. It was pretty good. After the meal I realized I ate dinner 2 hours earlier then I wanted to (damn hunger induced hallucinations). With a few hours left before the ferry, I went back to the hostel to see if the hockey game was on.

At 9 I went to catch the ferry to go back to Stockholm and from there, Göteborg.

Long Trip part 3: Stockholm, Sweden

2006-05-13T23:44:00.000+02:00

I originally thought that I arrived in Stockholm much later then I actually did, so I didn't book a hostel for the first night (I was planning to sleep in the airport). I arrived at 6pm, didn't want to stay at the airport for that long, and the airport was really small with no good areas to sleep. For this flight, I flew with Ryanair, and I must say, Easyjet is much better. Ryanair seems to fly to places nowhere near the actually city. The airport I went to was over an hour away by bus, shitty.

When I got to Stockholm, I immediately wandered around the city looking for a hostel to stay for the night eventually stumbling across one. Afterwards, I just walked around town taking some random pictures, not knowing what was what. I didn't go out for the first night since I was really tired from the travel and a little warn out from all the partying in Riga. So far Stockholm is a beautiful city, especially the old city. The weather has been nice as well.

The next day I wandered around the old town, Gamla Stan. Here I saw the Riksdag and Riksbank (parliament and big bank). This area was sitting on a platform that was suspended in the above the water by 15,000 wood logs. The problem was that sometimes the logs would not be total submerged underwater and could rot. To combat this problem, they were in the process of moving the lake or something to keep the logs underwater. I needed to get a ferry ticket to Helsinki, but the office opened later so I went to check out the Nobel museum first. It was pretty neat and explained why/how the Nobel prize was created and well as some interesting facts here and there. For example all the prizes but the peace prize are given out in Stockholm, with the peace prize given in Oslo, Norway. The reason for this is that Sweden and Denmark were in a union at the time. Since there are too many winners and the muesum was quite small, the focus was more on the creativity of the winners rather then the winners themselves. The central area had large video auditoriums that should little clips about all the winners. At the back was a Einstein exhibit with a cool video art thing called "Luna park" which was some weird representations of Einsteins theories. The ferry to helsinki was pretty cheap (ferry + nights sleep = 285 SEK). After that I went to see the New Royal Palace (the old one burned down) and stumbled across the changing of the guards, which was pretty neat. There was lots of music and horses and stuff. Around there was the Royal Cathedral (Storkyrkan) which has the famous sculpture St. George and the Dragon. There were a few other museums around like the Coin museum with an example of the largest coin in the world, and the Royal Armoury which talked about the various kings of Sweden as well as the Sweden/Norway union. After walking around the large park area (Djungården) it was time to go back the the hostel. The interesting thing about this hostel is that it's a boat (Everything time I see a boat, I can't wait till the cruise). It's not to big and doesn't rock so much, so it was nice. No one at the hostel wanted to go to a club and I didn't want to go alone, so that sucked.

I didn't have much time in Stockholm on my last day as I had to go to the ferry ín the afternoon. I decided to explore a different island of Stockholm (Stockholm = a bunch of island connected by bridges). On this island was Katarinaberget with is a like a pedestrian elevator that get people up ontop of a hill quickly. There were some other nice buildings such as the water tower (Mosebacke Vattertorn) and some churches (Katarina Kryka). Here is also the jazz bar that Felix told me to go to for sunday brunch, but since it was on monday that I found it, it was too late.

I'm off to Finland for a couple days now and looking forward to it. Overall, Stockholm as been a nice city but it would have been nice if others were here to check out the night life, o well, next time.

Long Trip part 2: Riga, Latvia

2006-05-12T01:33:00.000+02:00

After the long bus ride I was a little tired so I pretty much chilled in the hostel. In the hostel I meet up with a bunch of guys Wally (canadian), Francis (aussie), keith (american), andrew (british), Alisa (Finnish) and paul (brit).

Since I arrived fairly late all the tourist places were closed, so we just chilled around and watched the hockey and soccer games. After that we decided to head out to the clubs but at some point I fell asleep and woke up the next morning, damn.

The next night I went quickly to try to get tickets to the evenings Canada/Latvia hockey game but unfortunately it was sold out, damn, it woulda been amazing, but more on that later. I decided to buy a ticket to the Russia/Ukraine game instead (manly cuz I wanted to see Ovechkin and Malkin play).

After getting my ticket, I went to the central market which was quite interesting and got a bunch of pasteries for 0.30 lats (0.60 cdn). After that I did the whole tourist thing, seeing all the buildings and such. St. Peters is the tallest one, i think so I went up to the top to get some good shots of the city. There were some other churches including St. Johns and Dome Church. After some other random architecture shots I went to the hostel to grab my Canada Jersey and walked to the stadium. Amazingly I was the only Canadian Jersey around, so that sucked a little, but the Lats didn't cause any trouble (it was before the game). On the way to the game I asaw the Freedom Tower (every time I see that word makes me want to go on the cruise more and more, damnit, august can't come soon enough) and a Russian Orthodox cathedral. The atmosphere in the game was disappointing, as the attendance was around 40%, but they were pretty loud. The Russians really took it to Ukraine, winning 6-0. Ovechkin played an alright game and got a goal and an assist. He wasn't the biggest impact player, but was pretty dangerous whenever he was on the ice. His goal was off a deflecting for the point. Malkin impressed me a lot more then AO did. He's gonna be an amazing place and plays a complete game. Very sound defensively, strong on the puck, good passing and vision and played with heart. In one sequence, he brought it in the zone, passed it off, recovered the puck twice and set up a good scoring chance. The kid can play. The russian goalie wasn't so good, always playing it safe and covering up the puck, but Ukraine never really threatened. Overall it was nice to see the young guys play.

After the game, I went back to the hostel and meet up with the guys. We decided to chill in the hostel and watch the game from here. After ordering 2 giant pizza's for 2.25 lats each we settled down for the game. This game was nuts and I really wished I could have attended. Canada opened up a 4-0 lead quicking (big props to Crosby) and never looked back. The funny thing about the game was that it had to be delayed twice due to the fans complaining and throwing stuff on the ice. The first time was with 2 minutes left in the first, with Canada up 4-0 after the ref called another penality on Latvia (there was like 8 pp chances for Canada in the first). They called the first period early, did the zambonie stuff and played the final 2 min then the 2nd immediately. Canada took it easy in the 2nd only scoring once but turned it on again in the 3rd scoring 3 in the first 2 minutes. After another Latvian penality, the crowd got worked up again and the players were sent back to the dressing room while they fixed things up. One of the Latvian played had to talk to the crowd though the PA system to get them to calm down. The Latvian's also had the weirdest/funniest chant going, "Fuck you.....Latvia", gold. After play resumed Canada scored immediately on the pp and ended up winning 11-0. Many were complaining that Canada should have taken it easy, but in all honesty, they did. 9 of the goals were on the PP so not much you can do there, when it was 5 on 5 they didn't push too hard. I think they said about 17 lats were thrown on the ice in coins (35 canadian) as well as a shoe and a cellphone (and a bunch of random crap). On a side note, the cheerleaders at the hockey games are SO pretty!! It's so hard to concentrate on the game with them dancing around. Crazy Europeans.

We went out to a club (Essential) afterwards and on the walk there, the Lats were cheering everywhere (I guess losing 11-0 is a good thing here). Wally was being an ass as usual which was funny, making fun of them all and such. Good times all around. The club was pretty nice and played good music (house?) but was damn expensive so we decided to leave a while later. A quick note, Latvian/Estonian/Finnish girls are very pretty.

On friday I go up earlier then the other guys and too a walk around, checking out some monuments and places, like the Swedish gate. Nothing too spectacular. Afterwards the guys went to get tickets to the USA/Finland game. I wish I coulda went too but I had spent my money elsewhere, more on that later. After checking out the Central Market, it was off for my fun activity of the day, the firing range. I went with 6 Brits to this place that just looked like a shack, but was like a huge underground bunker. In there we got to shoot a pistol (not sure which one), an AK47, and a shotgun. We had 8 shots for each gun. I think I was a little nervous and used my wrong eye to aim for the pistol, so they were all along the side of body target (5 points each) instead of center mass (10 points). With the AK47, it was set on single shot and my aim was much better, with all my registered hits to center mass. It didn't have as much kickback as I was expecting. The final gun was the Shotgun, this thing had a ton of kick, and my shoulder/bicep is still hurting (i think it slipped from my shoulder during shooting and was using my bicep as a brace. I managed to get the nicest shot the the day, a shotgun blast to the left side of the face :)

All in all, I got 150 points. I was hoping for better, but it was still fun and they let us pose with the guns afterwards. A bunch us us (me, paul, analisa) stay in the hostel to watch Finland just beat the shit outta USA. Afterwards, the guys that went to the game came back and most of us went to a pub to grab a drink. I tried some local shot called Sambouka (spelling?) which tasted like licorice). When I was there I met Mike Comrie and Kyle Calder (play for team canada) which was quite fun to chat win. Comrie was pretty quite, but Calder and his buddy were lots of fun. They offered to give me tickets for the Sunday Game but unfortunately I'm gone tomorrow which sucks. They also wanted me to come with them to the club, but we had made plans with some of the other guys to go to another place, so we didn't go. My Flames mojo was pretty low at the time (maybe cuz of the alcohol) but they were quizzing me on Flames numbers, and I couldn't remember them (i suck). I just couldn't remember Lundmark, and Juice's number, I got simon though (upon further checking, I did get Lundmark, they had it wrong). Not as good as Leslie's world championship experiences, but pretty sweet.

After the pub we headed over to a local club for some drinks and dancing. The group consisted of Wally, Andrew, Francis, Paul, Alisa and Me. It was pretty wicked there and we stayed till sunrise and called it a night. I love Riga!!

On my last night, I originally wanted to check out the Occupation Museum (have to do 1 museum) but I got up pretty late. When I was about to leave, we found out Wally had lost/thrown away his passport (he was headed home in 2 days) so we had to get that stuff straightened out. Crazy guy. After that we pretty much just did the usual sitting around, talking, chillin. Was definately a much different trip then most of my other ones. As I finish this post, I'm off to the airport to Stockholm. In my crappy planning skills, I found out I arrive at 6pm (much earlier then I thought) and didn't book a hostel, so it's gonna be chill at the airport and sleep there night. O well, at least I can do some planning for the rest of the trip. See you all in Stockholm.

Long Trip part 1: Tallinn, Estonia

2006-05-10T20:31:00.000+02:00

I went out on my long solo trip with my first destination as Tallinn, however, the adventure started before I even left Switzerland.

When I got to Basel I found out that my flight was delayed for a little over an hour, being in no hurry (I was sleeping in Berlin that night anyways) I didn't really mind. I sat down to organize my stuff (and write all my travel info in my black book just incase I lost some stuff later) and reliazed that my flight from Gothenburg, Sweden, to Frankfurt, Germany later in my trip was booked wrong. Apparently, I booked it for Feb 21st instead of may21st, thus pulling my first "Tommy" of my travels. In a panic, I go to the pay internet kiosk and hammer away at the thing. Then, over the PA system, it's time to board my flight, crap! I managed to finish all the booking and boarded the flight (gonna cost me an extra 60-70 bucks, crappy). Luckily I found out in time and had a cheap solution around it. Upon arriving in Berlin, I found that my favorite sleeping spot was already taken (damn Easyjet delay) so I had to find another one, which wasn't too hard).

The next day I flew to Estonia and all was well, after dropping off my stuff in the hostel (the most solitary place I have ever been in, not only was I the only one in my room, but the only guest in the whole hostel) I went to walk around. The first day I just randomly walked around taking pictures and the second day, I took the audio tour to see what everything was, so i'll kinda combine those days together.

some general info of the city. The old city consists of 2 parts, Toompea, on a hill where Estonia was run, and lower city "all-inn" where merchants and stuff were. These were 2 seperate cities for a long time.

Some of the sites of the city:

Kiek in de Kok
This is the canon tower used to defend the city. The old city was walled up and heavily fortified. The walls were around 16m high and 3m thick. This one was the biggest tower, 36m tall and beat the crap outta the Russians many times. The name is low german for "peek in the kitchen" since it was so tall the soldiers could see into the peasents kitchens through the chimeny.

Danish King's Garden
On this spot, the Danish had just took over Tallinn, the Estonians started fighting back to take it back by tricking the Danes by giving them free booze (works everytime). The Danish king looked to the Heavens to find a sign for confidence, a red flag with a write cross fell from the sky. The Danes pushed the Estonian's back and this flag eventually become the flag of Denmark. It's also on Estonia's small coat of arms.

Toopea Fort and Tall Hermann
The fort was the old castle here. It eventually got remodelled to be more of a palace but has some fort elements till. The most noticible is the tallest tower, Tall Hermann. It's 45.6m tall. The Estonian flag first flew on top of the tower in 1918 but 1940 the Soviets swept in and put their flag up, in 1941 the Germans removed the Soviets and the Estonian flag was restored, but this lasted only 1 day, as the next day, the German's put up their own. After WW2, the soviets came back and put theirs up. This lasted till 1989 when the country gain independence. Every night the flag is lowered to the national anthem. An interesting fact is that the anthem has the same melody as Finlands.

Aleksander Nevski Cathedral
Orthadox church, part of the Russification of Estonia. 11 bells with the biggest being 15 tons.

Luhike jalg and Pikk jalg
"Why does Tallinn walk with a limp? Because it has 1 long leg and 1 short leg". This a joke commonly told (so I read) and the 2 streets, Luhike jalg (short leg) and Pikk jalg (long leg) are named. These 2 streets are the only steet connecting the 2 former cities (Toompea and Lower city). Interestly the 2 cities didn't always get along and there are large gates to block off the path (with shooting holes and everything).

St. Nicholas Church
This church was up before the city walls and this doubled as a defence fortress. The floor is a little below the ground outside to provide cover and the windows were originally small. After the wall was put up it was converted into a more conventional church.
One interesting thing about the church is the mummy inside. The Swedes were attacking the Russians. Tsar Peter 1 pannicked and left, leaving the foreign Duke Carl Eugen de Croy in charge. The russians were beaten bad and the soliders blaimed the foreign leaders and started killing them. de Croy turned himself into the Swedes, and they let him live in Tallinn freely. He accumulated a lot of debt, but always said his rich relatives would pay if off. 1 day he suddenly died and they refused to bury his body until his relatives came to claim the body in which they would get the money he owed back. No one ever came and they threw his body in the crypt. About 100 yrs later he discovered that his body had mummified (due to high alcohol in the blood). He was put on display in the church and the church charged admission to see him. This went on for 80 yrs until he was buried.
Inside St. Nicholas's is the painting "Dance of death" which I touched on in my Edinburg entry.

St. Olaf's Church
At on point this was the tallest building in the world at 159m. It is now 36m shorter after it was struck by lightning and burned. The legend of this church is that they were having a tough time trying to find a builder but some one eventually stepped up but asked for a lot of money. He later had a counter offer, if anyone could guess his name before the church was done, it would be free. The church was built fast and no one could get his name. The night before it was to be complete, someone followed him home and heard his wife singing to their child "tomorrow, Tuuletallaja will bring home gold for you". The next day, as the builder was placing the cross on the top, a villager yelled " Hey Tuuletallaja, it's a little crooked". The builder was stunned and fell to his death. When the villagers ran to the body, a frog and a snake came out which proved he was actually the devil (why would the devil build a church? I hear stories for the devil building churches also, most notibly in Munich as well).

Guild houses
Lots of those here.

Another interesting story. Every year, on an Autumn night, a small gray man will come out from the lake and ask the guard "Is everything done building?" Like most cities, something is always being constructed or built, but if everything is ever done and he asks, you must say no or from that moment, the water in the lake will rise and destroy the city. The legend probably originated since Tallinn used to be lower and thus the water could reach the town.

Another interesting note, motorcycles drive on the side walk here (also in Riga).

I also checked out the new city a bit and they have a nice beach. The sand is white and very fine. That night I went to the bar to watch the hockey game, but they showed the fin/czech game instead of the can/usa game, o well, it was pretty good and damn cheap. On the topic of food, I left my extra euro's at home so don't have much spending money (closed my swiss account, said it would take a couple weeks to get the money transfered to canada.) so I have to watch my budget. The first night's ratio consisted of 1.30 cdn (as did the last night).

My final day I took the bus from Tallinn, to Riga. The trip was 5.5 hours long and was fairly comfortable. The border check was pretty neat and I got my latvia stamp now (score!). Hopefully I can get my canada/latvia hockey tickets. I'll write about Latvia next time, cheers.

My last weekend in Baden

2006-05-06T23:01:00.000+02:00

I'm still not coming home for about a month, but with all the travelling coming up this was my last weekend in Baden. On friday night a bunch of us (Jacqui, Evan, Crispin,Felix, Travis and I) went to Zurich to hit up a nightclub called Rote Fabrik (which I have just butchered the spelling). The club played a bunch of old-school hip-hop which was really good. Those who know we know I don't/can't dance, so it was gonna be an interesting night. On the way there Jacqui hooked me up with some drinks to loosen me up (much needed) which was cool. When we got to the Zurich HB, there was a beach volley ball thing going on which was kinda cool, but it was guys playing. There was a ton of drums and stuff out as well, so Evan rocked out on them for a while, it was totally random and cool. We got in the club at around 11 and after a while I started feeling the beat and getting into it and had a blast. Maybe I should go clubbing a bit more often. I didn't really try to talk to/pick up any one and bombs horribly when I tried but o well, 1 thing at a time. 1/2 of the group left at around 1 and shortly after they left and MC and headliner DJ came out and was playing a good selection of songs (I didn't know any, but it was creating a sweet atmosphere). We partied there till around 3 and started to walk back to the main trainstation to get home and got home at around 4:40, was definately a fun night. Unfortuately Jacqui's camera disappeared that night, so that really blows, hopefully it'll turn up.

On saturday we were originally going to go go swimmbad (outdoor swimming pool area) but it was closed so we eventually went to play some b-ball. At the trainstation in Baden they had some celebration thing going with Karoke and a mech. Bull. We wanted all the praktikants to come and do a spur of the moment karoke concert but couldn't find everyone. We were gonna form a boy band with matching clothes and dance routine and everything...too bad. At the b-ball courts some swiss kids challenged Travis, Naveen and I where we promptly crushed them. On the rematch we started screwing around and so it was a bit closer, but still remarkably easy. After that we went to Zegelhau to meet up with everyone to go on a bbq. The group consisted of Felix, Kahn, Berfu, Henrick, Keegan, Travis, Krispin, Jacqui, Lindsey, Evan, Pat and I. We didn't have much food and it was short notice, so Felix and I had another adventure in cooking, where we took a soya sauce chicken we had earlier, and added some pickled veggies and tons of parmasian and cooked it over the fire with a frying pan. It turned out damn good (2 for 2 on the adventures in cooking this week). After chilling for a bit we called it a night and went home.

Earlier in the week Felix wanted to make a cake for no reason, so we did that. We made a Blackcurrent/mint tea cake with Maple nut crunch and maple glaze. We infused the cake batter with mint tea but boiling milk with tea bags and using that for the cake. We had some Black current surup as well. It surprisingly turned out really good (especially the glaze, i'm gonna eat straight glaze more often now).

All in all a good week. On Sunday a bunch of us went to the zoo for a bit. It was pretty nice, but seemed small.

Later that night I flew to Berlin to start my 17 day tour of Estonia, Latvia, Sweden, Finland, and Germany.

A swim in Baden

2006-05-04T23:56:00.000+02:00

Last night we went out to the beer gardens to meet some of the new praktikants. When that closed we proceeded to go to Pickwicks, the local english pub. The thing is Pickwicks has a fountain infront of it and it's tradition to get thrown in before leaving. I had just missed the mass dunking the week before due to my trip to Edinburgh-Barcelona so I knew I was going in. Olivier had come back for a week for some work thing so when he was about to leave Vance and his posse pounce throwing him in. Vance, knowing I hadn't gone it yet targetted me next. I didn't mind going in but figured it'd be more fun to put up a struggle and make them work for it. I think I put a decent struggle but didn't want to kick and flail too much incase I took out someone's teeth. I had a good hold of Vance's leg and was trying to force him in with me, but with my feet off the ground, I didn't have much leverage and eventually in I went. Afterwards we threw in Vance and Tommy and a few others. All in all a good night.

Moscow, Russia

2006-05-04T23:54:00.000+02:00

Excitement, amazement, danger...this trip had it all!!

Before coming to Moscow, I heard so many thing. Everyone said it was going to be expensive, it was going to be a hastle to get into the country. My co-worker told me to leave the airport as fast as possible as people get killed there and I read stories about priests beating up random people in the streets. For the most part this was far from the truth.

Aside from the visa costs, the price of things in Russia were quite decent, very compariable to Canada. Getting into and out of the country was surprisingly hastle free and getting to and from the airport was effortless. It was also quite peaceful there aside from 1 incident, but more on that later.

One thing that I did hear before coming that was true was the impressive metro stations. Many of them were all in marble, had nice stained glasses, chandiliers (i butchered that word) and nice carvings and designs. They were also very deep underground, probably to double as bomb shelters back in the day or something.

I started my journey on friday night, taking the free night train to Geneva airport to spend the night. Like my previous trip there, I made a b-line to the full length leather couch and made myself at home. The next day I met up with Vance and Warren on the airplane. I had opted to save 100 CHF and fly from Geneva instead of Zurich. Vance spent the night in the Zurich airport and Warren in the Zurich trainstation so I think my accomodations were a little better. The flight was good, it was nice to not fly easyjet for once and get food and drinks and chocolate (although I slept through the chocolate).

After getting into the country we headed straight for the hostel. We found a super cheap shuttle bus to take to the city and Vance randomly decided to get off at a stop, luckily there was a metro stop there and it was easy to find the way to our place. Since I was travelling with people other then Keegan, we went for lunch right away (apparently I'm the only person on the trip that doesn't need to eat).

We found a nice little cafe and ordered some stuff. I got a russia soup and the first of many russian beers (Балмика - Baltika)

Since we arrive fairly late, we decided to just wander the city and not really plan anything. We spotted the first of many Orthadox churches (onion dome roofs). When we got there we spotted more and until we were left standing infront of St. Basil's Cathedral in Red Square.

In red square, Vance saw a matrioshka dolls set with 10 of Russia's leaders and had to get it. I told him to wait it out and shop around but he was determined, so I got one as well to lower the cost a little. The leaders in order are (Vladimir Putin, Boris Yeltsin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Leonid Brezhnev, Nikita Khrushchev, Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, Tsar Alexander, Catherine the Great, Peter the Great).

After some more random walking we saw some pretty big monument of a ship or something, we weren't totally sure, it was kinda random.

As we were walking back to the Red Square we came across the Cathedral of Christ our Savior. Stalin had originally destroyed the original (made by Nicholas I) to construct this huge new one but Khrushchev abandoned those plans and turned it into the worlds largest indoor swimming pool. The water vapor was starting to damage stuff in a near by museum and it was converted back into a cathedral.

We eventually made it back to Red Square and found it surprisingly quiet at night. After a few pictures we called it a night as we had a long day of travel.

The next day we got up early to check out Lenin's Tomb. The line up was fairly long but it move quiet quick and before we knew it we were infront of the man himself.

I was thinking of some elaborate scheme to take a picture in there, but they didn't allow camera in at all and have metal detectors and the whole 9 yards, o well. Inside was pretty dark with a Russian guard at every corner. It also look like a mirror reflection as all the guards looked identical. The man himself looked pretty waxy and was a very short guy. The presentation was really something, but you could stay long as the guards pushed you along right away. After exiting the tomb you walked past a wall where other leaders are buried, such as Stalin.

The next destination was the Kremlin which consisted of 4 churches/cathedrals, 3 palaces a large bell and a canon (among other stuff). I've never seen such a large number of churchs in such a small area. The churches were all pretty neat and the orthadox cathedrals are definately much different from those in western europe. The walls and ceils are just totally covered in wall painting with very vibrant colors.

On display was also the Tsar Canon, a 5.34 metre long thing weighing 40 tons. Much larger then the big one in Scotland.

Another gigantic thing was the Tsar bell, which is 6.14 metres high, 6.6 metres in diameter and 200 tons. It apparently fell when it was being raised.

We went to the armory museum in the Kremlin to see the faberge eggs. We also saw some amazing carriages and thrones. Unfortuately my pictures of the eggs sucked, but heres 1 from the gift shop.

After finishing most of the Red square sites we head off to a Market to get some souvineers. Warren wanted to buy a bunch of fox fur hats (he bought a rabbit one earlier) so we decided to attack that together to get a good deal. We found a stall and the guy asked how much we paid for the one warren was wearing and I told them 400 Roubles (it was actually 700). This proved to be a good starting price as he said we got a great deal and it showed him we were experienced shoppers (far from the truth). We eventually got 5 fox hats (1 for me, 4 for warren) and he threw in a free rabbit hat for us. I think we did alright.

We also bought a buch of matrioshka dolls and headed out to dinner. We found a Ukranian resturant which was great as Vance proclaimed he was 1/4 Ukranian and then proceeded to screw us by ordered the most expensive beer for all of us (it cost more then the meal, damn you!!). Vance felt pretty bad about it but o well, it happens.

Since we had a nice time at Red Square the previous night, we pick up some beered and headed there to chill for the night. Picking up our new hats we went out for the night.

At Red Square, we meet some really cool people there. We talked to 1 couple for quiet a while which was really interesting. We had a little trouble with the language barrier but it worked out. When they left we talked to another guy who told us Russian beer was only fit for the floor (this time I was having Каинское упьтра and Сибирская корона, the second one apparently being Syberian Corona). He then asked us if we wanted some vodka and left to get some. I wasn't expecting him to come back but it was a nice gesture, so far everyone been really friendly in Russia. Eventually a police officer casually strolled over and told us no beer which is understandable since he didn't want a mess in the red square, so we called it a night.

The next day was a very eventful day. The first place we went was the VDNkH, which was the Socialist Economic Achievement Area. Pretty much it a area showing all the amazing stuff to prove that comunism worked. It was totally over the top and great. For some reason the guide books barely mention this place which was a little weird. Before we got there, we saw this huge titanium tower for the Cosmonaut musuem which cool Russian carvings. Soviet stuff is great as everyone is dipicted as very strong and proud. Stike a pose!

In the VDNkH there were 50 amazing building of various styles all packed into a 2km by 1km block. To top it off there was a golden fountain and a aerospace displace to show the amazing comunist system at work. Inside these buildings was, as Warren put it, "a poignant juxtaposition, a motley assortment of vendors and small shops and the sounds of vibrant capitalism". The area was just amazing.

Afterwards we went to Victory Park which was a huge area with, on 1 side the Triumphal Arch for 1812, and a huge spire for WW2.

I think there was some celebration or something as there was a huge crowd there.

Afterwards we made a stop at the world's busiest McDonalds near the Red Square. It was pretty neat and had to get a Big Mac there. On a side note, the Ice cream there was damn cheap, 6 Roubles.

That night we went to a Russian Circus which was amazing. We got seat in row 9 and could see everything. The first act was a bunch of monkeys dressed in Human clothes dancing around and stuff, the usual stuff. Afterwards, there was a 2 person trapeeze show which was aright followed by a bunch of clowns and then dogs doing tricks. After that, the cool stuff started. First was a crazy juggler. When we first came out I thought he was just a raver in an awesome costume then outta nowhere he pulled out a bunch of balls to juggle. The costume had like 6 pockets all over carrying ball and he was so smooth it grabbing and places the balls there. There was 1 sequence where he's grab a ball from a pocket on his leg and let another one drop in there, it was crazy stuff. Next was a really well done clown act involing throwing around a light (the illusion of it at least). The next act was a cool act where they used a sea-saw thing to launch people high in the air doing flips and stuff and landing ontop of a human tower, it was crazy. Afterwards they pulled off out these huge stilts and where launching people as well. They were going damn high and doing crazy flips and stuff. To one-up it even more, they pulled out a bigger launcher and bigger stilts to go higher and flip more. It was sweet. We thought it was over after that and proceeded to leave and found out it was only an intermission, awesome!

The second half started off with a 6 person trapeeze act which was cool. 2 of them seemed really young. The ending part of the act was that 1 dude went to the roof and did a sucide dive head first into the net, it was pretty crazy.

Afterwards there was a fire eating act while they took down the safety nets and then a roller skating thing. Next was a really good clown act that really got all the kids involved where they were throwing imaginary coins into a bag and you could see and here it enter the bag. It was great for the kids. The next act was this 1 crazy no-spine dude who was on a 2-handed or 1-handed hand stand for the whole act and doing crazy balancing and stalls. It was sweet. The last act was the tiger tamers which was nice for the kids. It was great to see a circus again and had a great time.

After the circus we went for some Georgian/Azerbaijan food which was interesting. The waiters spoke no english and just stood there not giving us any time to look at the menu. We couldn't communicate with him to give us more time and just randomly picked some food to eat.

After the meal we picked up a drink for the way home and proceeded to head to the hostel as Warren had to pack his things. As we turned off the main road to the small steet towards our hostel, we heard some one yell stop, creud drawing below.

At first I thought it was a cop telling us to not drink and I turned to see 1 huge Russian guy and his friend who was about our height. The dude then yells "Money" and it strikes us this dude is trying to mug us. Vance and I are standing there trying to comprehend the situation when without any delay, Warren (who from here on out will be refered to as Braveheart) replys "Fuck you!"

"no, Fuck you! Money!", the russia dude reply quickly followed by Braveheart's reply,
"Fuck you!"

At this point the guy takes a swing at Braveheart, but Braveheartstays up. Vance and I spread out to surround the dude and I also keep an eye out for the guys friend.
The dude sensed he wasn't in control and then went and takes out his gun. Vance and I instantly thought it was fake, but who knows. He never pointed it at us, so we figured he was bluffing.

The Russian turns his attention to Vance now and Braveheart takes the oportunity to get closer to the main street to call for the police. The guy trys to take a swing at Vance and lands a glancing blow. Braveheart, seeing an openning throws his Fanta bottle at the guys head which stops him for a sec. Seeing this we proceed to run back to the main street towards people to get outta there. The whole situation took about 1-2 minutes but everything slowed down. We were all happy we got out safely and that we never panicked at all. We took an alternate route to the hostel as we had enough for the night. At the hostel we talked about the whole thing and Vance and I both thought of using our beer bottles to hit hte guy but figured if he didn't go down, it would have escalated things and we were both saving it for like the worst case senerio.

On the last day, Warren had a earlier flight then us and took for for hte airport right away. Vance and I had a little more time so we went to check out the inside of St. Basil's.

After that, we just roamed around the streets, got another cheap ice cream and went to catch the train for the airport. Unfortunately we missed the train by 1 minute and had to wait another hour for the next one. When we got to the airport, we were surprise how easy it was to go through customs and security (had this cool full-body scan thing though), much different then what we were told. Upon landing in Geneva, I left to take the train, while Vance proceeded to fly to Zurich. I got home at around midnight, ending one hell of a trip.

"Chinese" Food with V3

2006-04-28T16:33:00.000+02:00

Last night was Judith's last day at work and so we went to a "chinese" resturant for dinner. It was about twice as expensive as back home but it was pretty good (something dishes were authentic enough). Felix and I tried to keep it as traditional as possible and got Margareta and her husband to join us and share dishes (rather then have everyone eat 1 thing). We got the steamed sea bass (wasn't sea bass, just some other fish), tofu hotpot and chicken and Cashews. It was pretty fun overall teaching them how to use chopsticks and making stuff up to mess with them (IE, if you stab something with your chopsticks (rather then pick them up) you have to scream to release your chi, that's why we practice chopsticks so we don't have to yell), wonder if any of them will follow with this new tradition. All in all a pretty fun night.

Long Trip #1: Edinburgh and Barcelona

2006-04-27T17:13:00.000+02:00

I finished my work term a little before everyone else, so I did this leg of my travels solo. For this trip I flew from Geneva to Edinburgh, and then from there to Barcelona, before flying back in Basel and training it back home. The trip started off with a patented airport sleep, this time in Geneva. There's a sweet website, www.sleepinginairports.com, which give you good places to sleep and ratings. I found the 1 leather couch in the airport and got a pretty decent sleep outta it. The airport also has free internet, so I did some investigating of my stops before hand. Not bad at all.

The first stop was Edinburgh, Scotland. The weather, like usual, was rainy/gloomy for most of it, but there were a day or 2 of sun, so that was quite nice. Travelling in the UK is always expensive due to the currency, but luckily there are a bunch of free museums to see, so that helped a lot. The first day was more or less a museum day bouncing from free place to free place. Nothing too worth noting really. After walking around the old town and seeing all the monuments, churches...ect, all the free attractions were depleted. For dinner I went to a pub to try some haggis, and it was surprisingly pretty good, much better then I was expecting. Like most of Edinburgh, the pub I was at is supposely haunted, but more on that stuff later.

The second day I decided to take a small excursion. Trips to Loch Ness were available but a little expensive for me, so I took a quick trip to Rosslyn to see the Rosslyn Chapel, recently made famous by the Da Vinci code. This building was really cool as pretty much every spot inside and out was sculpted with a ton of different symbols and such. It was a huge mess of Christian and Pegan symbols and some say has links to the Knights Templar.

One of the more famous stories is the Master Pilar and Apprentist Pilar. The story goes that master completed 1 pilar and left to seak inspiration for the second pilar. The apprentist wanted a pilar of his own and sculpted the last pilar. When the master returned, he saw the pilar was completed and when he heard his apprentist did it, he hit the apprentist with a mallet across the head, killing him. Elsewhere in the chapel is the carvings of the master and apprentist, with the master positions so it is facing the apprentist pilar.

Another neat thing is the 7 corporal works of mercy and the 7 deadly sins carvings. Greed and Charity were placed in the wrong place however.

Throughout the chapel, there at 103 greenmen scattered about, which is a pegan symbol.

Finally the roof is carved with Stars, and various flowers. The amount of symbolism present was quite impressive.

After returning back to Edinburgh I checked out Holyrood palace and the parliament and then climbed Arthur's Seat, the remains of a volcano. From here you can get a great view of the city.

The first thing I did the next day was check out the Castle. Edinburgh castle is huge and visable from almost everywhere and pretty neat inside. There were gates and canons everywhere as well as the honors of scotland (jewels), although they weren't as cool as england's ones.

After the castle, I stumbled across "A taste of Scotland" which had a bunch of free food and alcohol so that turned into my lunch/dinner. After eating more haggis, shortbread, cakes, black pudding, ice cream it was off to the drinks. Here I could sample a ton of different whiskies which was nice. They had a whiskey flavoured beer as well, which was weird. An interesting fact is that the most popular pop isn't coke but something called Irn-bru. It kinda like cream soda but fruity. Kinda different stuff. O yeah, all you can eat fudge also, yum. The next thing I checked out the Real Mary King's Close. Basically when they decided to build the city hall type building, they built it on top of some existing streets so they kicked everyone out and blocked it off. We got to tour the underground streets and it was all presented by guides as if it was during the time period that the street functioned. The area is also said to be haunted by a few different spirits, the most famous being Anne. During a TV show, a Japanese psychic said she felt the spirit of a little girl that was alone (probably left behind by her parents if she had the plague and didn't want it to spread to the rest of the family). The spirit was supposily sad it lost her favorite doll and every since there, people have been bring dolls and toys for her.

When it got dark I went on a ghost walk in the underground vaults. In one particular vault a poltergeist was supposed to be present. The men were split up from the women and childen and lined up on seperate sides of the room. Apparently it likes to attack woman and kids. I didn't see or feel anything, but did get some scratches, eh, who knows. On the tour I met some girls from Canada so we grabbed a few drinks. My night ended with another airport night to get ready for the flight the next day. The airport was not as nice to sleep in as Geneva, but o well, all good.

When I got to Barcelona, the first site I went to was the Casa Batllo, an apartment complex designed by Gaudi. The designs were really cool and all inspired by nature. The large window in the front resembles the bones in your hands and the balconies look like skulls.

The building had a strong under water vibe to it as well in the general design as well as lots of designs which seemed to be taken from nature.

There is a large central chamber that allows light to flow into the building. The roof is pretty wacky as well with need forms for the chimenys.

For lunch, I headed to a tapas bar and ordered some snails and squids. yum. After lunch, I headed to Pable Espanyol to see buildings of various time periods in Spain.

After a couple hours there it was off to the Sagara Familia for some night pics.

The next day I went to the Sagrada Familia right away to go inside. The outside have 2 massive facades, 1 showing the nativity and the other the passion (no clue what they are).

There is also 12 towers, 8 which are completed (i think). From where you were allowed to go, you could walk up 90m up (426 steps). The thing began construction in 1882 and probably won't be done for a while as its about 50% right now.

The design of the thing was really cool, definately worth checking out.

Afterwards I went to check out the beach for a bit and then to Parc de la Contadella which was like Prince's Island park, i guess.

I checked out the gothic section next and along the saw saw Barcelona's Arc de Triomf. In the gothic quarter is a large Cathedral, but it cost money to go in so I didn't bother. It was free a little later, but I forgot to go back. The next step was down Las Ramblas to do some shopping for people (here's a hint E, I got you something from here). I found a food market around there as well, so I got some fresh fruits, yum. I ended off the day with another Gaudi creation, the Parc Guella and Gaudi Museum. The park was pretty neat and had to famous lizard fountains and stuff.

Apparently the rain water from to roof is funnelled through the support columns into an underground reservoirs for the fountains, neat design. The museum was in Gaudi's house and was pretty conventional, which was surprising. I was expected the most wacky designs there, but I guess he didn't take his work home with him.

I decided to take a day excursion the next day and went to Monserrat to go to the Monestary there. The monestary is located on the top of some mountains, which was cool.

The basilica there was quite nice and you were able to walk up to the virgin mary shrine which was neat.

Near the monestary was also Santa Cova where it's said the Virgin Mary appear...ect. It was a small church thingy on the side of a mountain. After that I took a funicular to the top of the mountain for some stunning pictures of the valley, it was damn nice.

On the way back to the city I made a quick stop over to the football stadium for FC Barcelona and it just happened that the team was finishing practice and were boarding the bus to the hotel, so I saw some dude named Ronaldinho get on the bus, word the the street is he's good.

The final day I went to yet another Gaudi structure, La Pedrera, which was another apartment complex. Apparently it was the last civil project he did or something like that and thus the most complex designs and stuff but I thought the casa batllo was much cooler. Still you could see the evolution of his designs from building to building, which was nice. They had a museum thing showing a bunch of models and stuff which was nice and the roof was nifty again. I really like the control of light in his building, woulda been a cool place to live.

After that I had to go home so I raced back to the airport to fly home, thus ending my first solo travel. Next up, Russia.

Hike

2006-04-18T11:08:00.000+02:00

Well, the power in the whole city got cut and erased it all, damn, o well, time to write it again.

For Easter, we decided to go Hiking in Switzerland. The group consisted of Shane, Evan, Tommy, Keegan, and I. We originally wanted to go in the Alps but the snow would have been a meter deep, not good for walking without snow shoes. Luckily Evan found a sweet trans-swiss trail that goes across Switzerland (north to south) in 31 days. Our plan was to do 6 days of the plan in 3 days (2 day hikes per day).

We started our journey off Thursday night taking the free train to Porrentruy. We arrived at 11pm and proceeded to do some night hiking to get a head start as well as to find a good place to setup our tents (city camping isn't good, high chance of getting caught). We settled down for the night at 1am. The spot we camped on was on a pretty severe slope so it was tough to stop from sliding. It wasn't too cold but Tommy was freezing (he wasn't wearing much originally) and assumed the fetal position for much of the night. The fact that we had 3 people (Tommy, Keegan and I) in a 2 person tent meant not much room, and coupled with Tommy's position we were forced into a 3way spooning session all night, fun stuff. When we woke up, we found that our tent has slide a foot or 2 down the mountain, cool. We got up pretty late (10am) and started the first leg. This section of the hike would take us to Porrentruy via Fréteux, Les Chainions, abd Seleute . The journey was 18km and was easy since it was mainly downhill.

It took around 4 hours to complete. The town of St-Uranne was really neat since it was one of Switzerland's medeval towns.

We found out they had a bat cave near by, but all the bats would still be sleeping so it wouldn't be too cool. We did see 1 bat flying around though. After lunch, we started on our second day hike of the day, this time to Soubey via Tariche, Le Champios, abd Les Moulins. This hike was 15km and was all across level ground. We pretty much followed the river Doubs for the whole Journey.

The trip took us around 3 hours. We decided to setup our tents just outside the city and to get a lot of sleep since the next day hikes would be much tougher.

We got up early the next day (8am) and started hiking at 9. This nights sleep was a little worse for me since the land we were on was very lumpy and was forcing me towards to wall of the tent. This caused water to seep in and soaked my sleeping bag :(

Evan and Shane took off first and we never saw them till the end. The plan was to do the hike to Saignelégier first (through Lobchez, Passerelle de Clairbief, Moulin Jeannottat, and Les Pommerats), then hike to St-Imier afterwards. The first leg was 13km and was very tough since there was an uphill of 700m.

To make matters worse, my left foot was really hurting and I couldn't put pressure on it at all. After borrowing some tape from Tommy, I taped up my foot so there would be no motion in it and started on the walk. I needed a walking stick to get by, it was tough. The hiking path we were on got flooded by the high river and we had to take a detour up a hill. The beginning of the hike was also really muddy which sucked. We managed to get lost a few times missing signs and all but it was ok. 1/2 way up the uphill section it began raining so we went into the woods for shelter. It became clear that with the weather and my foot, we wouldn't be able to do the 2nd leg that day (good thing since it was 19km uphill again. Since we knew we'd only do the one leg, we decided to take it easy and wait out the rain a little. We proceded to build a fire in the forest and cooked our meal. It was pretty relaxing and warm and killed about 2 hours.

The rain finally died down a bit and we reached the town of Saignelégier at around 5. We walked to the train station and found Shane and Evan waiting there. They had also come to the conclusion to cut the hike short since the weather was gonna get worse and worse and the next section would be in the really snowy region (not fun).

So we only managed to do 3 day hikes in 2 days but it was really fun. Unfortunately we didn't get to make it to our destination of Neuchâtel but it was a fun trip. The scenery wasn't as magnificant as those in the alps but it was quite nice and was a fun little adventure.

Last day of work

2006-04-13T13:19:00.000+02:00

Well, today is my last day of work.

I finally finished my final report as well as my technical note. I got a swiss army knife as a parting gift, score!

Tonight we're (Keegan, Shane, Evan, Tommy, and I) are going camping. We're gonna go 3 to 4 days somewhere in Switzerland (Jura region, I think, near France).

Should be fun.

Krakow

2006-03-30T23:53:00.000+02:00

We left Baden Wednesday night and flew into Berlin, where we setup camp for the night. We nabbed our usual comfy benches in the corner and called it a night. We got up at around 5 to check in for our flight to Krakow, but our flight ended up being delayed for an hour, o well, no big loss. When we got to Krakow, we headed down to our hostel then back to the old city center. The first place we came across was the main square (Rynek).

It's the largest medieval in Europe, apparently, but it didn't seem so large since 1/2 of it was under contruction. Near the city center is St. Mary Church.

Every hour, a bugle player players from the top of the tower and abbruptly stops mid-song, since the sorry goes he was struck by an arrow in the middle way back in the day. It was pretty neat that they carry on this tradition. The inside was really spectular, but I didn't take any pictures (i'm turning soft), since they said no. Here's a pic i found on the net though.

Also around the main square was the town hall tower, and St. Adalbert's church, the oldest historic building in the city. We found a little covered market which had a but of local crafts such as boxes which was kinda need. We proceed to walk towards the river and found the cheapest doners I've seen so far (the average 6Zt here, appox 1.50 euro). We ran into a few other churches, the Church of SS Peter and Paul, and St. Andrew's Church. We eventually reached Wawel Hill, which has the Royal Castle and Cathedral, but it was closed when we got there, so we just walked around and took some pictures.

We slowly made our way back up to where we started and found the Florianska Gate, and The Barbican. The gate was part of the fortified wall which once surrounded Krakow. It was 3 km long and had 47 towers, 8 gates, and a moat. Today it's just a small section of wall with a tower or 2. The Barbican was a defensive bastion. It was located outside the wall, surrounded by a moat and had 130 loopholes and 7 turrents.

We stayed around the area and grabbed dinner at a medieval styled resturant called Szlacheckie Jadto. They had this one dish that was served on a big sabre, but it costs too much. Instead we settled some some tradtional polish dishes. For starters we had oscypek w skonupce z zuramina (smoked sheep cheese w/ cranberry) and kapusniak zwyczajny w/ kociofkn (sauerkraut soup). The cheese was really good and was fried in a light batter. The soup was ok as well. For meat we had warkocz z poledwiczki z boezniakami (pleat of tenderloin w/ mushrooms served in creamy sauce and onions, with Krakow-style potatoes) and zrazyzawijane po radziwiffowsku (beef rolade radziwiff style). The mushroom sauce was the best part of that dish but they charged us for tap water, grrr...

After dinner we walked around the old Jewish Quarter (Kazimierz), back through Wawel and then called it a night.

The next day we went to the concentration camps Auschwitz and Birkenau. They were located in the town of Oswiecim, about an hour and a half away. We were gonna go there by bus but just missed it and had to take the train. When we got there, they showed a brief video about the liberation of the camp and then went on the tour. We started our tour in Birkenau (Auschwitz-2), which was build because Auschwitz was too small. It was planned to be around 40 acres but only 1/2 was built before the liberation.

At this camp, most of the mass extermination took place. The mood of the place was very dark and gloomy and the weather seemed to match the mood as it was gloomy, overcast and rainy, very fitting. The size of the camp was absolutely huge and really but into perspective what happened.

We saw some of the facilities the prisoners used, such has the washroom facility and the sleeping barracks. There were only 3 washroom buildings for the entire camp, and prisoners were only permitted to used them for 5 minutes in the morning and 5 minutes at night, so most of the people had to find their own places. The barracks had rows for 3 level bunk beds, with over 5 people on each bunk. There was no flooring and the only source of heat was a chimney in the center. They buildings we infested with rats, insects and disease, it was very disturbing.

We were then shown the train tracks that brought the prisoners and victims into the camp. A special connection was built from the main railway line to bring them directly to camp. From there they were split into groups of women and children, and men. They were then split in to the strong and the weak and the weak were sent to the gas chambers.

Birkenau had 4 gas chambers and crematoriums. They were all destroyed and only the ruins remain. The two biggest could fit around 2000 people. The prisoners were told they would go take a shower and were sent to the first underground room, the changing room. It was designed like a changing room with numbered hooks for clothes, and benches. They were then led into the showers where Zyclone B, hydrogen cyanide, filled the room. The final stage was into the ovens of the crematorium. The ruins had a very errie aura around them. After a quick stop at the memorial site, we were bused back to Auschwitz.

At Auschwitz we first went through the main gates, with the saying "arbeit macht frei" - Work brings freedom. This was used in many concentration camps around Europe.

The conditions here were much better then in Birkenau, since the buildings and Barracks here were originally for the Polish Army and were modified. We went through some exhibits about the mass executions, jails, and belongings. There were huge displays with piles of human hair (used for textiles) and shoes, it was a sight that really put things into perspective.

We were then shown the Death block, which was like the prison inside the prison. At the basement were 4 types of cells and being sent there usually meant you weren't coming back. The first cell was the starvation cell in which you were locked there until your died. There is a story of a Polish Priest which switched placed with another prisoner and died in place of that man. The next type of cell was the suffocation cell. Here the cell was blocked off with very little air and prisoners were locked in until they died. The third was a standing cell, were 5 prisoners would be locked in a cell 1m^2 for the nights, then sent to work in the day. Unable to do work, they would be executed. The final cell was a regular cell. Beside the death block was the wall of death were the executions took place.

We were next lend to the first gas chamber. It was much smaller then the others but still intacked.

In it, the large shower area and the furnaces were reconstructed.

The German's stopped using this chamber when Birkenau was constucted and it was converted into a bomb shelter. The furnaces were removed to hide evidence of the horrors taking place there, but the metal was found and reconstructed. After walking around and seeing some other exhibitions on the gypies and the War in Poland, we took a bus back to Krakow.

When we got back we went to grab some food and tried a few more Polish dishes. This time we had pierogi (ruskie = cheese and potatoes, z miesem = with meat) and some soups zurek (a soup soup with sausages) and barszcz (red beat soup, based on boarch). Afterwards Keegan had some bigos staropolski (sourkrout and sausages).

We walked around the center a little more, picked up some Polish Vodka (ZUBROWKA) and headed home after a tiring day.

On saturday, there was a bunch of free museum things so we went to check thouse out first. We went to the city of Krakow culture and history thing as well as the theatre but it wasn't so interesting.

Afterwards we went to the Gestapo cells which was pretty crazy. There were 4 cells with a ton of writting on the walls from prisoners.

The next stop was the Wielickzka salt mines.

This place was pretty cool. The mines extend down to 327 metres underground through 9 levels and has about 2000 with a total capacity of 7.5 million cubic metres. Unfortunately I spent most of my money on a bottle of vodka to take home, so we had to go on the Polish tour (english tours cost more). The tour starts with a decent of 64 metres to the first floor. In there we went to the Nicholas Copernicus room.

It was basically a large room with a carving in the middle. Since the tour was in Polish, I didn't get too much info. The chamber were all quite massive and if you licked the walls, they would be salty (the section I tried wasn't too strong though).

The next room was the first chapel on the tour, called the St. Anthony's Chapel. It has some carvings of some saints and an altar. After a few other rooms we decended to the next level, now at 90 metres.

We eventually came to St. Kinga's Chapel which was absolute HUGE! It was 2 floors with the lower floor 91 metres below ground. The space was created after the removal of a huge green salt block. The block was over 54 metres long, 18 metres wide, and 12 metres high. Afterwards miners and sculpturers made all the displays and sculptures.

We then came across the first of a few underground lakes which was pretty neat to see. And eventually ended up in the Stanislaw Staszic Chamber, located 124 metres below ground. This chamber was originally 50 meters high but it was filled up a little and is now 36 metres high.

After the tour of the mines we went deeper to a small museum which had various salt crystals and models of machines used to bring the salt to the surfaces.

At the end of it, we were 136 metres below ground (a little over 1/2 the distance I bungee jumped). We then took a neat elevator up to the top.

The elevator consisted for 4 carts one on top of the other and each carried 9 people. It was pretty neat and pretty trippy as it shook a lot on the way up. After the salt mines we took the bus back to the city.

The next stop was Schindler's factory, made famous by the movie Schindler's List.

It was closed when we got there but the security guard there let us in and gave us a tour. He was really helpful and informative and told us all about what happened and such, it was quite an experience. After some photos we went to Schindler's office to sign the guest book and headed for dinner. Being low of funds we went for some perogies and then headed to the airport for a good nights sleep.

We woke up early to get our boarding pass (#3 and 4) but then went back to sleep. When we got up to check in there was a crazy long line and we barely made it onto the plane (group A priority seating doesn't mean anything when your the last 2 people on hte plane). We flew into Berlin and had half a day to kill there.

This gave us a chance to see some stuff we missed the first time around. The first place we went to see was the Topography of Terror display. We walked by it the first time we were in Berlin, but we were on a walking tour and didn't have time to read all the stuff. It was basically about the Gestapo building and stuff located there and had nothing about the Berlin Wall (even though a section of the wall is located there). There was a temperary exhibit on the Nuremburg Trials which was really intersting. There's a cool quote made by the American Prosecutor summerizing the defence of some Nazi memebers on trial, it's took long so i'll just post the picture.

Afterwards we went to Potsdammer Platz to see it in the day time, but since it was sunday, all the stores were closed again, damn.

VW had some interesting driving simulators though, so we played with those for a bit.

Afterwards we went to the East side Gallery of the Berlin Wall to see some of the more colorful graffiti that was painted on the wall.

It was pretty neat since we missed it last time. I tried to break off a piece of the wall to take home but it was tough and I only managed to get some small pieces. O well. After a kabab for dinner we headed to the airport and took our usual sleeping spot.

We flew home the next day in time for a 1/2 day of work, good times.

On a quite side note, Sunday was the Anniversary of Pope John Paul's death. He is from Poland, so we thought there might be some special stuff happening but we left early Sunday so we weren't able to see if anything was going on. The only thing we did see was a photo exibition on the Pope in the middle of the park. It woulda been cool to see if anything special happened.

Ireland

2006-03-21T19:00:00.000+01:00

I went to Ireland last weekend so here's my report.

It was a pretty hectic week, come back from Lisbon at 1am monday morning just to take off to Ireland Wednesday evening. For this trip it was just Keegan and I.

This was also the first trip that we flew out of Geneva, so we needed a 3 hour trainride to get to the airport. We flew into Belfast fairly late and slept in the airport when we got there. It was quite good as the couches were padded and warm, and we had the security looking over us the whole night. Much better then the other nights, but more on that later. We took a bus for Dublin the next morning at got there around noon. The first place we checked out Dublin castle.

The original castle was destroyed a couple times, most notibly during a fire. They tried to save all the records (marriages, land ownership..ect) in the record tower so they decided to blow up parts of the castle to prevent the fire from spreading. They succeeded in saving it, but ended up blowing up the rest of the castle, good stuff. We took a quick tour inside and saw some pretty neat stuff such as a huge throne.

Afterwards we headed over to Kilmainham Jail which was used for all the prisoners during the revolts and revolutions. The place was really interesting and the guides told the stories of many different prisoners. It was definately a good place to check out. The main hall looked a lot like what I picture alkatraz to be like and the solitary cells in the basement are pretty crazy.

Afterwards we were taken outside to the execution yard. There were 2 spots marked by crosses where it took place. 1 was right by the gate where james Connolly was killed. In Irish law the prisoner has to be able to stand in front of his executioner but he was show in the leg and was dying of gangrene and was unable to stand. They sat him on a box and shot him anyways, which angered a ton of people.

That night we headed to a pub to get some food, drinks, and look for a place to stay (we didn't have a hostel). We went to this place they brewed a bunch of their own beer (and carried like a million other kinds from all over the world) and they had some good house beers. I grabbed the Porterhouse XXXX Stout and keegs had the Porterhouse Red.

For food we had some Irish stew and some Meat and Potatoes dish. We tried our "Oktoberfest" strategy to score some housing but no luck this time and left at 2am to go for somewhere to sleep.

Here's where we slept for the night.

and here's our room

yup, that's right, we did the "homeless bum" strategy and just rolled out our sleeping bags there. It was actually pretty comfortable and warm but we got kicked out by a random security guard at 6am. Urban camping was fun though. Later in the morning we went to the Jameson Distillery for a tour. They selected 4 people for a whiskey tasting and I was luckly enough to get picked, score!

The tour was ok, but everything was models and not the actually production stuff.

For the tasting there was 3 irish whiskeys (Jamesons, Powers, and Paddy's). Everyone did the safe bet and picked the Jamesons, except me; i chose the Power. Luckily for me they are all distilled under the same parent company so I was safe for now. It has a sharper taste so I liked it more. Next as a Scottish whiskey (Johnnie Walker) and american (jack daniels). I liked the scotch the most but got pressured into choosing the local one.

Afterwards we went to check out the parade. Nothing to special, just the usual bands and floats. It was quiet backed though.

The next stop was Trinity College to check out the Book of Kell which is some original manuscript of the bible or something. It was pretty colorful and looked like a picture bible, but old.

The last stop of the night was the Guinness Brewery. We picked a wicked day to go as they were giving away free samples of Oysters and beer. 30 oysters and some beers later we went on the tour.

At the end of the tour we did a guinness pour contest to see who could do the perfect pour.

We didn't win as we both over poured. Keegan's is the first from the right, mine is the 2nd.

We got to drink our glasses, so ovepouring was a good thing. Slainte!

We took the bus back to Belfast that night.

The next night we took a day tour up to the northern coast of Ireland. On the drive there we saw the cranes used to build the Titanic. They're named Sampson and Goliath and are the 2nd and 3rd largest in the world.

We took the scenic route along the coast which didn't disapoint.

The first stop was a old rope bridge called the carrick-a-rede rope bridge. Unfortunately it was too windy and they didn't let us cross it, but area was very beautiful.

We stopped for lunch at the town of Bushmills and made a quick stop to the Bushmills distillery for the people who wanted to go (we passed to spend more time at the other locations).

We made a quick stopover to see the Dunlace Castle. It was abandoned after part of the castle fell into the sea.

The last stop was the highlight of the day. It's a place called the Giant's Causeway which is an area with all these hexagonal shaped rocks all over. It was really cool to just wander around the area and was such a peaceful area. We were jumping around the rocks and I went to jump across this stream that feeds into the Atlantic and at the last minute figured it was a bad idea but slipped on algae and fell. Oops, my 2nd time swimming in the Atlantic in a week, not bad, and I manage to cut up my legs every time as well :) Check out some pictures and Wiki it if you want to find out more.

We got back to Belfast in the evening and we went for a walk around the town. One place we walked by was the Europa Hotel, which is in hte Guinness book of records as the most bombed hotel in the world, interesting title.

We eventually walked (accidentily) to the sketchiest region in town, the Falls Street and Shankhil street (one is Catholic one is Protestant). Its more or less the areas where most of the fighting took place. It was pretty creepy there with a bridge all covered in barb wire, political grafitti all over and a primary school all decked out in wire screens, metal doors...ect. We even saw an armored police car driving around. Crazy stuff.

We somehow got sick and felt pretty crappy the last day so we took it pretty easy and just went to Belfast Castle and the Cavehill area. We wanted to walk up the hill but just didn't have the strength.

After chilling in the castle for a bit we headed to the airport to go home. After a long flight and train ride, we got home at 1am and then right back to work the next day. All in all it was a pretty sweet trip.

Nothing planned for next weekend but the weekend after that is Krakow, so looking forward to that.

Lisboa

2006-03-15T01:09:00.000+01:00

I went to Lisboa, Portugal last week, so here's my report.

The first day was pretty short as we got there late at night. We went to the hostel and then ventured out for some food. I had portugese egg tarts (castel de nata), and some charcoal bbq'ed chicken. good stuff.

The next day my group (Me, Keegan, and Preston) meet up with the other group (Travis, Kevin, Mike, Warren, Rebecca) to go check out the flea market. While we were waiting, some dude tried to sell us drugs, interesting.

We eventually made it to the flea market and walked around a bit. There wasn't much good stuff there ,but near by was the panteao nacional, so we went inside to take a look.

Their was some coffins and stuff inside and had an amazing view of the city from there as well.

Afterwards, we went for some lunch. I had baccalao assao (grilled cod). After lunch we split up and we went to the st george castle (castelo de sao jorge).

The castle was pretty cool, as it was just the exterior (walls and fortifications and stuff). It was also high above the city so it offered a great view.

We took it easy afterwards and just took the tram around to see the city (Rebecca broke her leg earlier). One of the neat things we saw was an elevator in the middle of the city. It lead to an old building that was destroyed by the earthquake a whiles back. We didn't know it was free so we didn't go on it.

While waiting for the others to arrive, we wandered around and found a church like building but it was heavily fortified, was neat.

For dinner we went to this place to have all you can eat grilled meat (8 euros). It was really good (haven't had lots of meat in a while) and the owner was really cool. He taught us a bunch of portugese and made us play guitar for him and stuff.

The next day we went to the elevator and old building and then walked around the waterfront. Another slow and relaxing day. We met up with the guys afterwards and went to the monestery (mosteiro dos jeronimos).

After that we went up padrao dos descombrimentos (discovery tower) before heading to belem tower.

At this point 1/2 the group had to fly back home while we went to the local soccer game to watch Benfica (home team) vs naval.

The minute I walked in, I realized my yellow shirt looked exactly like the other teams jersey, not good, so I promptly took it off, better safe then sorry. The home team was much better and had a ton of scoring chances but couldn't capitalize and the game ended 0-0, but was still exciting. Our seats were 4 rows from the field behind the net, it was pretty cool. The stadium was huge, and held over 50,000 people and was pretty full so it had great atmosphere.

The last day in Lisbon, we went to the town of Almada to see the big Christ statue. It was like the one in Rio but smaller. We took a ferry to the city so that was pretty cool.

Afterwards, we meet up with Travis and Warren and headed to Cascais to go to the beach. The beach was pretty small but was really nice.

The Atlantic water was fairly warm as well. We played some frisbee and swimming. There was this one rocky area i tried to get in but it had some strong currents to threw me into a bunch of rocks. It was pretty cool and I escaped with just a few cuts, all good.

After a day of relaxing we got on the plane and headed home, thus ending our trip to Lisbon.

Bowling with V3

2006-03-10T11:35:00.000+01:00

Last night we went bowling with some of our co-workers. Fun times all around. Felix and I really sucked while our group leader and our co-workers husband (he's from V1) cleaned house. Here are some pics.

Andreas getting ready.

My super shot. I pretty much throw it as fast as possible and usually end up spinning to the group in a blaze of glory. It worked 1 outta 2 times, not bad :)

Jens, the pro bowler in our game (we were the crappy group)

group shot of the other guys. From right to left: Johan (Super Pro Bowler), Christian (group leader, pro bowler), Nils, Tarek, Thierry (Felix's boss). My boss didn't come.

Felix's amazing shotput action.

Margarita's Strike.

Here's our final score. Felix and I were playing for low score. The rules, get the lowest score, but you have to hit something each turn. Gutters and misses count as 10. It was down to the wire as Felix has a 22 point lead going into the 8th, but 4 gutters to my 1 proved to be disaster for Felix as I manage to win by 1. Picking up 19 points on my last frame, all seemed lost, but with Felix picking up a big 7 and unable to hit anything the the last ball, I prove Victorious!

On a sad note, even when intentionally playing low score bowling, someone that wasn't in our game beat us, infact, she won both high score and low score bowling, crazy stuff! (she had 132). On the other lane, someone got 112 for the win.

Technically, strikes should be worth 0 points but that was too hard to calculate at the moment. Also, With Felix's strike his next 2 balls were a 6 and a gutter, so that frame should of added 26, but it was too much work at the time and we decided that on strikes, gutters and misses would be ok toward counting on that frame (but would still count as 10 point on their individual frames).

Anyways, that's all for my, will be in Portugal in 4 hours, and write about that when I get back.

fasnacht pics

2006-03-08T19:39:00.000+01:00

Pics from the autoshow

2006-03-08T19:26:00.000+01:00

My weekend

2006-03-07T17:42:00.000+01:00

How was everyones weekend? Mine was interesting, quite a wide range of activity. Saturday started off pretty relaxing. We went to the thermal hotsprings at 2ish. I went with Keegs and Henry. The place consisted of 2 pool areas, 1 inside and 1 outside, as well as some relaxation areas, massage places, and a sauna. The outside pool was really sweet since it was snowing outside, looks like the japanese baths you see in anime. They also had a massage circuit kinda thing were you stand in the pool and move from station to station after the bell. Each station had a water jet at different areas to massage you. We were gonna stay till 6 but as we were about to leave, Felix showed up so we decided to stay till 8 so he didn't waste his time. We left at 8 and walked home (Felix being an idiot walking home in sandals and no shirt with like a foot of snow everywhere.).

At night we went to Vance's and Lindsey's birthday party. It was good times all around. We also found Vance's secret stash of educational movies. Sorry Vance, it had to be done. We got home at about 2:30 ish since I had to get up early the next day. Happy birthday to both you guys.

On sunday I went to the auto show in Geneva. I went with Bernard, Travis and his friends from work and we meet up with Ty, Kevin, Owen, and Ryan a bit later. First we took a look around Geneva. Since it was Sunday everything was closes, but we just walked around the lake, it seemed like a cool place. The auto show was huge, with 7 large halls full of cars. I think it was probably 4x larger then Calgary's and they had pretty much every company there, from Lada to Maybach. I spent the next 5 hours wandering from booth to booth checking out the cars and taking pictures. There were a lot of custom-tuner cars here which was cool as well and a lot of 1 of a kind cars, something you don't see in Calgary. Another cool thing was all the concept cars they had on displace. 1 cool one was this Nissan thing that the seating areas could rotate, so you never had to reverse, just rotate and drive. Pretty cool. All the super cars were there as well, from Ferrari, Aston Martin, Lamborgini, Porsche...ect. I spent a ton of time in the BMW showcase and one of the guys there gave me a full run down of hte M5 and M6. Was really cool. Now, if I only have 160,000 CHF.

The only thing i was disapointed about the autoshow was that there wasn't much free stuff being given away just bags and brochures. It was sorta funny seeing all the people trying to get all the bags, I think 1 lady had 50. Felix came at 5:30 and quickly found he had no interest in cars. We did quite a bit of train hopping to get home since there were a bunch of train delays. We got home at 10:30 ish.

That night I went out again. Over in Europe, Carnival has been going on for some time and one of the last ones was the parade in Basel. Unfortunately it was at 4am. I went to Vance's place at about 12 to meet up with everyone and we went to Zurich at 1 to pick up a few more people. I went with Vance, Tommy, Jacqui, Adrienn, Richard, Alain, and a bunch of Jacqui's co-workers. The trainride there was pretty entertain, we got a ton of "swiss-looks" from the locals because of our discussion topics, those crazy swiss people. We got to Basel at around 3:20 and headed off to find a cool spot. The parade consisted of a bunch of people in custumes playing the Picalo and drums or holding large colorful signs (like mini floats). It was amazing how packed the town was, considering it was 4 am. The masks that people were wearning where pretty cool, lots of weird deformed stuff. Woulda freaked me out as a kid. We got home at 7:30 on Monday, just enough time to get 30 mins of sleep before my workday. Pretty hectic day, with lots of travelling: Baden, Bern, Geneva, Olten, Zurich and Basel all in a day. That's pretty much my weekend, hope everyone else's was good. Pictures to come later. Comments always welcome. Peace

Live on CBC

2006-02-26T19:32:00.000+01:00

Apparently we were shown many times during the CBC broadcast of the Olympic hockey game. Every goal or nice play, they'd pan the crowd in our section. Here's the best bit, the camera flew over our heads, just before the puck drop.

OLYMPICS!

2006-02-22T20:30:00.000+01:00

On sunday we got up pretty early and drove down to Milan. The drive took about 4 hours (took small roads in switzerland instead of the main highway). It took longer but we saw some nice scenery along the way. When we got to Milan, everything was closed so we just chilled and took it easy. Italian roads were pretty confusing and the drivers were pretty crazy so it was an interesting experience. It took us about an hour to find our hostel so that sucked, but we eventually got there. The hostel was pretty cheap considering it was during olympics tim. We played a bunch of hacky-sack and went to sleep pretty early to prepare of the next day.

day 2
We drove to Torino on Monday and decided to leave really early. This proved to be a good idea since it took us an hour to find how to get outta Milan (too much pointless driving and not looking at a map).

We eventually got there and decided to walk around while we waited for Mike to come in by train. The first place we went to check out was the Sponsors village. It has some interactive displays and a skating rink and stuff like that. Was kinda neat.

We then went to the medal plaza before heading to the main station to pick up mike.

The drive to Oulx (where aerials was) was pretty expensive with a ton of tolebooths and stuff but it was easy to find the location. We had to cram 4 people in the back of our car (golf) but it saveed money ,so it was ok.

For the tickets, we all had standing tickets but Alisha got hers later and could only get a sitting ticket so it took some luck and work to all be together. Some one there was nice enough to give us a free standing ticket, so that was nice, we just had to sell the sitting ticket. We eventually sold it for 20 euros (lost 2o euros overall) but o well.

From Oulx we had to take a bus to the top of the mountain where the jumps were. It was pretty nice up there but a little foggy, and the weather was warm.

The Canadians were so good in beginning, ranked 1-4 and were placed 4-7 after the first jump. The top 12 qualify so we were looking pretty good. Unfortunately, our second jumps weren't as good and only 2 of the 4 made to the medal round. Over all it was pretty sweet to watch. Some of the wipeouts looks brutal but they all got up like nothing happened, so that's nice. Got all the canadian jumps on video and most of the spectular wipeouts :D

The moguls was also located here and looked pretty cool.

After skiing, we tried to make it back for womens medal ceremony for hockey, but we parked too far and just missed it. We took some pictures of the Olympic stadium, hockey arena and torch and turned back to drive home to Milan. WE go back to the hostel at around 2ish ready for another day.

The drive to Torino on tuesday was much better was it only took 5 minutes to get out of Milan (the wonders of a map). We decided to check out a few non-olympic stuff. The first was te shroud of turin (cloth jesus was buried in). We stumbled across the church it was in, but we couldn't see the real clothe, just pictures.

Afterwards we went to check out the official olympics store to buy some stuff, unfortuately they have absolutely nothing (no mascots or anything). Along the way we checked out the medal plaza again. We wanted tickets to see but we had to go home early so it wasn't possible. The concert for that day was Avril Lavigne.

We also stumbled across the Mole Antonelliana, so that was nice.

As we were walking around, we ran into the Omega stand and they had a bobsled, so we had to get a picture there.

Afterwards, we checked out sponsers village and found a cool 8 person foosball table. We meet the other Canadian here as well (Tommy, Lindsey, Vance, Bernard, Richard).

The game started at 4:30 so we got to the area at around 3.

I was all decked out with a jersey, flag cape, hair dye, and face paint. It was tons of fun.

We were seated balcony, behind the czech net twice. (saw all 3 cdn goals, first cz goal). The arena was small, only holding 11000 but lively.

In the first period, St Louis had a breakaway, went top corner but goalie got a piece. Richards got the first goal with a wrist shot past vokun (he sucked), assisted by iggi.

The neat thing about international hockey is that there are cheerleaders, interesting.

Our second goal was on the pp, with St. Louis banking it from about the goalie. I got a good video of the whole play.
Afterwards, we got a building wide "lets go canada, lets go" chant going so that was nice.

The 3rd goal was the result of some good work down low. The puck squirted out to Pronger who wired it home.

Kinda wished the score stayed like this from then on.

The Czech got 1 back in the 2nd on a 5 on 3 and 1 more in the 3rd but it was the Brodeur show as he had a number of spectacular saved to perserve the win. He had a sweet glove save that we got on video. In the 3rd he also had an amazing save where he reached back and stop it with his stick, good stuff.

Iggi had some a good chance down low when we charged to the net but couldn't lift it up, hope we gets 1 next time.
We hemmed them in for last minute and didn't let them get a chance to pull the goalie and the game ended 3-2.
Mccabe still seemed useless, taking a bunch of stupid penalities. He hasn't done anything offensively with no points and has the most penalities and I think the worst +/- on Canada. Shoulda brought Phaneuf. I also didn't like us sitting back on the lead but luckily it didn't bite us.

Afterwards, we got some pictures of the flame and headed to Canada house.

We got a bunch of free flags and hung out with some Canadian there but couldn't stay long since we had to drive back to Baden, so we took off.

On the way to the car, we saw the fireworks, so that was a nice touch.

On the way home we missed 1 exit and the new route set us back 3 hours. It sucked. We finally got to switzerland but our route home was snowed in so we had to backtrack, costing us another hour. The new route took much longer and total trip took around 10 hours instead of 4. We got home at 6am, just intime for a quick nap and to get to work at 9. Overall it was really sweet, I wished I coulda stayed there longer, but there's always 2010. GO CANADA GO!!

Mustache Competition

2006-02-16T17:35:00.000+01:00

As you call tell from my pictures, I haven't shaved for a while. The reason for this is we (the praktikants) are holding a mustache competition. Pretty much you have to see who can keep it the longest. You must shave your beard often so you only have a mustache (i've been lazy and forgetting to do this lately). The winner gets nothing (don't know why i'm still doing this.)

It started out with 16 people but within the first 3 days, 2 of the only people that can grow a stache. It's been about 6 weeks now, and it's down to the final 3 (yea me!).

Here's Devon's artistic impression on what the end result could look like (in in black). Cheer and remember to rock the stache!.

THEY'RE HERE!!!!

2006-02-03T21:05:00.000+01:00

Chinese New Years Part 2

2006-01-30T23:11:00.000+01:00

We got around to making courses 2 and 3 today. Keegan made the soup and I whipped up some fried noodle action. All in all, it was fun making it all, and much cheaper then the 120 CHF price tag at resturants.

cheers

Chinese New Years: Peking Duck

2006-01-29T23:19:00.000+01:00

Today is Chinese New Years, so we figured we'd go for Peking Duck, unfortunately, it cost 120 CHF here, so we figured we'd do it ourselves. After getting the ingredients and a quick read, we were off.

The first step was the massage the duck to lossen the skin. After that you had to inflate the duck with air. Here's Keegan blowing the duck while Felix gropes it.

Once it was all inflated we had to set it for a while. The frozen duck we got had a hole were the neck and butt was so we had to plug it all with clamps from work. We inflated it with a hydration tube for a water bottle and used a balloon to keep it inflated while some air leaked out.

After a quick dip in some water, vinegar, rice wine, and corn starch, we had to hand dry for a couple hours. We decided to speed things up by using the de-humidifier in the laundary room.

While we were waiting we whipped up a quick snack. Congee, fermented bean curd, bean sprouts fried with salted fish, mixed veggies, and salted duck eggs.

We had to cook the duck more or less hovering in the oven (not on a pan), so we suspended it with wires.

We also had to make the pancakes for it.

Next a quick bath in hot hot oil to crisp up the skin. Keegan has the headlamp on cuz our oven lacks a light and we needed to get the duck outta there (got a few questions about that).

Felix was feeling left out.

The duck is done.

Here's the first course. We had no cucumbers so we used carrots.

A complete one.

yum!

Unfortunately, we were too tired to make the other courses, so we'll do it tomorrow. We did manage to make an original bread creation. Those who don't know what Yakitate Japan might not get this, but here's Japan #73: Fried bread filled with congee (which we added red bean paste to it afterwards). Yum.

We also prepared some red bean paste to make red bean cakes from our co-workers. We also made some soup. yum.

We'll, that's all from me. Hope everyone had a good year of the dog and all the best in the new years.

My new watch

2006-01-29T22:58:00.000+01:00

A couple weeks ago my watch ran outta batteries, so I figured, what the heck, lets get a new one. I was planning to pick something up before I left so after looking arrive i settled for the Tissot T-Touch.

The thing is pretty cool, it has a touch sensor built into the crystal to select 7 functions. Date, Meteo (air pressure), Altimeter, Chrono, Compass, Alarm, and Thermo (temperature). I figured since I'm spending a bunch, might as well spend a bit more so I got it in Titanium rather then steel (wow, it's light). Its pretty sweet and the compass is the coolest thing ever. The two hands line up 180 degrees from each other and the minute hand points north, it's sweet.

So my swiss shopping is offically done :)

On a side note, Happy Chinese New Years. A post on that is coming soon.

Berlin

2006-01-25T20:13:00.000+01:00

day1
I spent the weekend over in Berlin. It was a pretty nice city with some really cool architecture (since it had to rebuild pretty much everything). The weather was damn cold though, but it's alright. The first thing we went to check out was Brandenburg gate, one of the more famous symbols of Berlin. Along the way we stumbled across the Auto Gallery and saw the fastest car in the world (fastest production vehicle), the Bugatti Veyron. It was pretty nice, but i've seen nicer looking cars but since it's can go over 400 km/h, gotta give it some props. We eventually got to brandenburg gate and took a few pics before going to a few museums.

On a quick side note, after the unification, most of the stuff adopted was West Berlin stuff, but the East managed to keep 1 thing, the walking/no walking pedestrian lights.

Along the way to the first museum we ran across a few sites. The first is the neue wache, which is a memorial to victims of war (they're tomb of the unknown soldier).

The other was the berliner dom, which is their big church.

The first museum we went to was the Pergamon museum. It was located on museum island which is a collection of 5 museums built in old prussian buildings. Inside the museums they had a bunch of ancient building (original and recreations) such as the ishtar gate and the Pergamon Altar.

After that we went to the Jewish Museum. This was definately one of the cooler museums i've been in, but more for the architecture. The museum is 2 building, 1 normal, old style building, and 1 cube. From the outside they don't look related at all and you enter through the old building and go to the cube via an underground tunnel. The underground area was really cool, it's made up of 3 axies, the axis of exile, terror and continuation. The axis of exile leads to an area with many displaced blocks to symbolize the displayment of the Jews as they fled. The axis of terror led to the holocaust tower. The tower was an empty vertical column where everything is blocked off and there is no lighting or anything. It's meant to symbolize the hopelessness as you can't interact, or see anything outside. The path leading to the tower is also sloped at a 12 degree angle to throw people off as well. The last axis leads to the museum. The museum was designed by Daniel Libeskind would won the redesigning of the World Trade Center site and has some really trippy stuff. The museum also had a bunch of neat techy stuff like a really cool like a nice 3D movie thing and book that you blow on and the text appears on a computer screen.

The next day we decided to hit up some palaces. The first one we went to was in Berlin and was called schloss charlottenburg.

It was like all the other palaces i've seen in Germany, not to say it was bad but was just more of the same thing so it doesn't have as much of that "WOW'' factor.

We took a quick break to find some World Cup stuff but I couldn't find what i was looking for. Along the way we saw the old semi-destroyed church, Gedachtnis Kirche. It as been restored to be safe but kept the ruined look as a reminder of the horrors of war.

Afterwards we took the train to a Potsdam, a small town south west of Berlin. In Potsdam there is a park with a bunch of palaces and nice buildings and stuff. The first building we saw was St. Nicholas church near the train station. After a short bus ride we got the the park.

here's the dragon house.

The orangery palace.

An old windmill.

And schloss sanssouci.

Since the buildings were closed when we got there I don't know much about the history.

When we got back to Berlin, we decided to check out some of the sights at night so we headed over to brandenburg gate.

Afterwards we went to the Dome in the Reichstag. The Reichstag was the building that was set on fire and started Hitler's rise to his dictatorship. He blamed the fire on the Communists and the rest is history. They rebuilt the building and added a cool glass dome at the top in which you can get a good view of the city.

Keegan's boss recommended a tea house to visit for dinner called Tadshikische Tesstube. There was a exhibition from Tajikistan and they left all their stuff behind and the resturant took it and used it as their theme. The food is mainly Russian and has many teas from around the world. We had some soup, tea and desert there. The atmosphere was really cool there and was an ideal place to just sit and chill. The hot tea was also a nice break from the cold.

On the last day, Keegan wanted to go into the Reichstag (where the parliament meets) so we managed to talk our way in.

Afterwards, we went on a walking tour to check out some of the stuff we missed. The first thing was the hotel adalon, which is the hotel that Micheal Jackson did his notorious baby dangle.

Next we walked by the jewish holocaust memorial which is a whole bunch of various sized concrete blocks. The weird thing is that the bunker Hitler spent his last moments at is practically right beside the memorial. The bunker has been destroyed though and there's no signs or anything for it.

One of the most known (good and bad) things of Berlin is the Berlin wall. It was put up by the soviet in 58 hours and encircled West Berlin to keep the East Berliner out and Western culture from leaking into the East. Sounds weird that it encircled West Berlin but you have to remember that Germany was split into American, British, French and Soviet regions. Berlin was in the Soviet region and everyone wanted a part of it, so Berlin was split in to 4 as well. Most of the wall is gone now some some sections still exist (and are very bland).

Another famous landmark is checkpoint charlie, one of the 3 checkpoints along the wall. This one is a recreation as the original is in some museum. By the checkpoint is the famous sign stating you are entering or leaving the US zone.

Another big event back in the day was the Nazi book burning. It was in a square by the University and 20 thousand books were burned. At the site is a window which you can see empty bookshelves. The bookshelves can hold 20,000 books. One interesting fact is at the University there was a guy that was writting a play about the Spanish oppressing the Jews and one of the quotes is listed here. I'm took lazy to give the exact translation but it's roughly "they started burning books and then soon, people". Some crazy foreshadowing kinda stuff.

After the walking tour we went to alexanderplatz to take a look at the TV tower as well as the surrounding area.

There was also a massive foosball thing built, but they had no ball so we couldn't play, but it woulda been awesome.

After a quick trip to the olympic stadium to look for World cup stuff (finals are played here, still didn't find what i was looking for) we headed back for dinner.

After dinner we went to Potsdamer platz, which is the modern section of Berlin with lots of flashy lights and building and stuff. One of the cooler areas was the Sony center.

After checking out the area a bit we head to the airport to get some sleep before flying out early the next morning. We got back at around 10ish and go to work at around 11. All in all it was a nice trip and Berlin is a great city.

till next time.

Skiing in Davos

2006-01-15T22:00:00.000+01:00

Hi all,

Just back from going skiing in Davos (Gotschnagrat). It was really fun. I started out on a red run (medium difficulty) so that was really tough since it was my first time, but after a couple huge wipeout and getting some pointers, I got the hang of it ok.

I didn't bring my camera since I probably woulda crushed it or something, but I got some from the others.

Me on skis

My wacky co-workers from V3

Hotpot dinner

2006-01-13T00:19:00.000+01:00

On tuesday we had a couple people over to do some hotpoting (is that a word). It was really weird doing it without tay but we'll do it when i

get back :)

Anyways, it turned out pretty well and was a good time. Pics below.

Paris

2006-01-13T00:18:00.000+01:00

For Dima's last trip in Europe we went to Paris. Our trip started off by getting to the airport in Basel at around 11:30 and sleeping there for the night (flight was early next morning and the train wouldn't have made it in time). We actually found a pretty good place to sleep. 2 leather benches on the top floor with no one around so it was ok. I think this flight was the first time i've slept through take off, about an hour in i woke up (didn't know i was sleeping though) and told dima the planes been delayed for so long (since i thought he hadn't moved yet). Needless to say, he thought i was nuts.

After arriving at Paris we dropped off our stuff at the Hostel (managed to get the whole room to ourselves) and headed off.
The first place was the Paris Catacombs. It used to be some underground passage for the people but when the plague hit there wasn't enough graves for newly dead so they removed all the old bodies and threw then down in the catacombs. There's about 6 million bodies here, it was definately an experience. They used the bones and stuff to decorate a bit, but it was quite interesting.

After the catacombs we took a quick look at the Eiffel tower before deciding to save it for later.

We went to check out a few churches next, Sacre-Coeur and Notre Dame Cathedral. Sacre-Coeur had a nicer interior but i couldn't get a decent picture, they got mad at me a lot. Notre Dame was much nicer outside but a little plain inside (no hunchbacks though).

The next stop was the Louvre (free enterance). We didn't want to spend too much time here (i'mm be back in paris in 2 weeks or so, so i'll do it in more detail then) so we just ran to the biggest attractions, the Mona Lisa and the Venus di Milo. They were guarding the Mona Lisa so we couldn't get a good picture, but we tried.

After some pics of the louvre, we were off.

The next stop was the mini statue of liberty that's here in paris (apparently there are 3). On the way there we say hte Eiffel tower blinking like crazy, so we took a pic. We later realized it does this every hour for 10 mins.

after checking out the statue of liberty we called it a night and headed home.

We go up nice and early the next day to go to Versailles. It was busy but pretty nice. The only disappointing things were the hall of mirrors was under restoration, so only 1/2 of it was shown, and the fountains weren't turned on. It was still a nice palace (cool place to live).

I had a big craving for Viet-Noodles (Pho) and managed to find a place here, so we got some. Not as good as calgary but it was good enough.

After getting back to Paris, we went to hte Arch de Triomphe. The this was pretty big and we walked around it for a bit but didn't go to the top, maybe next time. The tomb of the unknown soldier is also here.

At night we walked around the Champs de Elysees for a bit.

Along the way we found a cool Toyota concept car store. It was pretty cool, had all these neat cars and stuff.

In another car dealership we found an xbox360, so we played that for a bit. Maybe i'll get one when i get back.

We also saw a huge LV store was a pretty big line just to get in, crazy stuff. We also saw a ton of nice cars, ferraris, lamborginis (a suv/hummer thing), aston martins...ect, was sweet.

After a couple more pics of hte Eiffel tower we went to check out the Bastille (the Prison where the villagers stormed, store of the french revolution or something like that). The prison isn't there anymore though, just a pilar.

after getting some french crepes we wandered around and eventually got home.

On our last full day we first went to Euro Disneyland, or Disneyland Paris, whatever the name is.

There was a wall with a bunch of celeb handprints like Bruce Willis and Johnny Depp, so Dima and I added ours to the wall as well :)

We actually didn't go in to Disneyland, just wandered around the edge trying to get in for free (was 2 expensive) but we were there long enough to get the disney experience :).

After we got back to paris, we took more pics of the tower (common theme) before climbing up.

We opted to walk up instead of taking the elevator since we're poor (it was much easier and shorter then I thought). We walked up to the first 2 floors before taking a lift to the top (can't walk it or I would have). The view for the top is nice but it was pretty foggy so it wasn't as good. It seemed pretty high but considering i'm bungee jumped this height, it didn't seem so bad. We stay until after dark to get some nice pics before heading down.

The last place we went to check out was Place Concorde and La Defence (business sector, place where grand arch is) before heading to the airport to sleep there for the night (didn't want to pay for another night).

The airport wasn't as comfortable as Basel but we made do, but we did see a concorde (not flying). We caught the plane home and it was straight to work for me.

Italy stop #6-7: Venice-Milan

2006-01-10T09:31:00.000+01:00

On Saturday morning, we trained it to Venice.

After a quick stop in the hotel (that's right, not a hostel, we're moving up after buying gucci and ***** bags), we went wandering around. After a quick stop in a Museum (last one of the trip) we went to Realto Bridge (famous one) and randomly wandered around town.

In a dramatic contrast from our housing, we had the least classy new years every. First up, New Years Dinner at Burger King. Yup, you read that right. It started raining the mad so we just stayed and chill here for a while (i think a lot of people we're doing it as well).

When it got around time, we went to San Marco Square to get ready for the celebrations. Unfortunately the fireworks and all that was cancelled this year (problems last year) so we had to rely people bringing their own. Also there was no countdown, we just waited for the church bell the ring. And to show how unclassy new years was, check out our toast.

We couldn't stay out too long since the last bus left really soon, so we stayed out as long as possible and took the bus back. I guess all the running really got annie's blood going as she was totally hammered and couldn't walk once she was on the bus (that's one powerful 1/2 cup of prosecco (italian sparkling wine)). IT took about 2 hours to get her from the bus stop to the hotel (was rather dangerous, had to cross the highway, across a path between the highway and hte river...ect) It was rather comical though, was good laughs all around the following day :)

Everything was closed on Sunday since it was new years so we just wandered around Venice taking pictures here and there. We went in San Marco Church, it was crazy, so much gold and stuff everywhere.

The rest of the day was just more pointless wandering around.

We decided to give a resturant 1 more chance and went to this place to get pasta and pizza. It was so crappy it's safe to say i will not be going to an Italian resturant every again. We saw them take frozen pizza/pasta from the freezer and pop it in the microwave. All they did was reheat grocery store frozen food, what a crappy place!!! We ended up paying the entire bill in coins to vent our anger (so many 1 and 2 cent coins!!) so that made me feel a little better.

On Monday we took a nice nice train to Milan so that was a nice ride. We only had a few hours in Milan so we walked to the big church as well as a grocery store to load up on cheap pasta and stuff to bring home.

The train out of Milan was late we figured it would throw our whole train transfers outta wack, but it all worked out luckily. When we go to the first Swiss city, we had to go jump off the train to get customs stamps (For the Gucci bag and my bag), buy tickets for Annie and Dima and run back to the train we just got off). We barely made it, but it was so delayed from being in Italy (every thing is slow in Italy, trains, people...ect) we thought we'd miss out next connection. We go to the switch point 10 minutes late buy just as we arrived we saw the next train we had to run to so we bolted from our train and just made that one (it's nice how everything works out nicely once you get to Switzerland but turns to #$^# when in Italy). After 1 more last minute transfer we were back home.

All in all it was a pretty nice trip. Some places (Rome, Venice, Pompeii) were nicer then others (Naples, trains) but it was a nice balance. I think I'm more or less done touring Italy now but will do 1 more (probably Rome a but more then up to Turin for the Olympics, can't wait to watch the Hockey game, gonna rock!). It was also a sweet trip since Dima was here. Help tune down the homesick feeling.

Well, that's it for now, I wont have this posted till I'm back from Paris, but o well, all good. Later

Italy stop #5: Florence

2006-01-10T09:29:00.000+01:00

We only had Friday in Florence so we tried to do as much as we could. The first place was the Uffizi museum. The most famous picture there was hte Birth of Venus which we managed to take a sneak picture of two (20) of.

We also checked out some famous bridge

Afterwards we went to see the most famous statue in the world, Michelangelo's David. Again we weren't supposed to take pictures but I'm pretty resourceful and got a bunch as well.

With all the Museum stuff done we went to the shopped asked of us from family/friends. Annie needed a Gucci bag for her cousin and I went to find a purse for my mom. It was crazy how much stuff was and it made me feel super poor. I can't believe people pay so much for this stuff, o well. After stops in Gucci, Prada, Fendi, Ferigano (spelling?) and some other places we finished all our stuff.

Annie found the bag she needed and I found a good present for my mom (I'll wait till my mom gets her present so I don't want to give it away).

After that we went hunting for an artist to get a painting for my dad. We finally found one and called it a day.

Italy stop #4: Pisa

2006-01-09T21:54:00.000+01:00

When things started warming up we started walking to the leaning tower of Pisa. It was pretty neat since the last time I was here it was being restored and couldn't go up. There was a cathedral there was well which was quite nice. It was snowing quite heavily when we got there which was a little unusual but o well, it cleared up pretty quick. The ticket up the tower was pretty expensive but we figured we probably wouldn't be here for a while so we went up. The view was ok, not much to see in Pisa but it was all good. Check out our kickass tour guide video lead by Dima, it rocks.

Dima's tour guide video streaming
Dima's tour guide video

When we got back down we did the usual pisa cheesy pictures, it was fun :)

Afterwards we took the train to Florence and walked around for the day.

Italy stop #2-3: Naples Pompeii

2006-01-09T21:36:00.000+01:00

We arrived in Naples Monday night and overshot our trainstation so we had to get off 1 stop late. The place looked so sketchy, total ghetto style. every window in the station was broken, hte roof was full of holes (and leaking since it was raining). Was weird. The city was also just building a metro system so it had to use regional train as its transit system so it took forever to catch a train back.

We got up early Tuesday to go to Pompeii. Pompeii was an ancient city that was wiped out when Mt. Vesuvius errupted and covered the whole place in ash and stuff. The city is huge and is still under going excavations. There were a ton of building ruins, as well as artifacts. Almost all the wall frescos were taken out so they could be preserved so had to find a museum to see those. We walked around the whole area till it closed (4pm, not enough time to see it all).

When we got back to Naples we hunted down a resturant called "Da Michele" which they say has the best pizza in the world. They had 2 flavors, margareta and marinara. The were pretty big and fairly cheap (4.50). They were pretty good and vey Italian style but I think I'm too used to the meat lovers and stuff and none of them had any meat. Either way it was filling and good.

Back at the hostel we meet a man from Ireland so we talked to him for awhile (we're going there for St. Patricks day so went to get info). I learned so much about Guiness so I'm all set now. Apparently, the proper way to pour a guiness is to fill it about 85% full, wait 5 minutes and top it off with a lot of foam. If it's a good glass, the foam top will last the whole beer. Also, the foam is key in telling if the pub is a good or not. You look and see if all the glasses has a good foam cap or not. If they don't, then the glasses are dirty since any oil will kill the foam cap. It was pretty interesting and I'm totally looking forward to Ireland now.

On wednesday we went to the National Archaeological Museum to see the wall fresco and stuff from Pompeii. They were really nice and had a really neat style (mosaic).

Afterwards we Ate some Sfogliatelle (some pastry we were supposed to try since it was special to the area). It was some flaky pastry with Ricotta cheese inside. It was pretty good but expensive. Afterwards we went to 2 castles, Castle Dell Ova, and Castle Nuovo. Ova had a museum thing there with some neat stuff (the iron door that has a canonball from a ship back in the day) and Nuovo was big and could just wander around the whole place (free).

We decided to try to find a good pasta place for dinner and ended up at "Da Mimi" as it was recommended by the tourist info guy. It was really good but the portion was fairly small and it was pretty expensive (the dish was fair priced but so many hidden fees). We pretty much gave up on resturants after that since they were too expensive and we weren't getting much from them. I had Calamarata con vongole e calamari (calamarata pasta with clams and calamari). It was really good thought :)

That night we took the "Train from Hell" (or TFH as it will be refered to from here on). We had to take a nighttrain from Naples to Pisa but the ticket guy didn't reserve us seats, so we figured we'd be ok, boy were we wrong. The TFH was fully packed with no seats at all free. Dima and I went to the section that 2 cars join together to get some room but boy was that a mistake. Italian smoke like crazy and aways do it in the connection points so we had no air at all, we finally gave in and went to the corridor in hte train. Since there were compartments, but aisle was super small. We had to sit on the cold floor the whole night, which wouldn't be too bad, but every 2 minutes someone would walk by to go smoke so you had to stand up to let them pass. (damn Italians). So we stood all bunched together till about 5 am when we had to get off at Pisa. The trainstation at Pisa had absolutely no heat, so it was freezing and we had to wait till around 10 for the Tower of Pisa to open so we tried to get some sleep there, was not the best night of my life.

Italy stop #1: Rome

2006-01-09T20:22:00.000+01:00

Hey everyone, sorry for the big delay on the blog. Had to go through about 3000 pics and do some touching up and photostitching on them. Anyways this is gonna be a long post since we were in Italy for about 10 days, so lets go.

We started off Friday night by taking the night train from Zurich to Rome. It was pretty sweet since we got beds (Dima and I took the top bunks, Keegan and Annie in the middle bunks, and 2 other people on the bottom. It was definately the nicer of the 2 night trains we took, but more on that later. Unfortunately for us, it was an Italian train and thus had to be late the mandatory 20 minutes (1 hour in our case).

We finally arrive at around 1pm ish in Rome and the first thing we went to was the Vatican Museum to see the Sistine Chapel, amoung other stuff. Unfortuately for us, the Museum closed at 1:30 and therefore we didn't make it in time (stupid delayed train). So, since we were around the Vatican we took a quick peak in St. Peter's Basilica (formerly the lastest christian church or something). It was really nice in there with a lot of nice sculptures, including the Pietà, sculpted by Michelangelo. The dome (and possibility the whole church) was designed by him as well.

We quickly went to the hostel to drop off our bags before return back to the church. This time we went to get our Tickets for midnight mass with the Pope. after we wandered around and went to find some food. I had some cannelloni with veal off some tourist menu but the portions were small and had all these extra fees, so that sucked.

We returned at about 7pm to line for to get in the church and the line was already like 800 people long or so. We waited in line until about 11:30 when they let us in. The line at the end was HUMONGOUS!! It stretched around the whole church a couple times.

It was my first service so it was pretty neat I guess. Probably would mean a lot more to a religious person, but was still cool. I was surprised they let people take pics and movies and stuff during the whole thing, so I took that my my advantage and recorded as much stuff as I could. They sang O come o ye faithful in latin or something, don't know if that's a normal thing or not, but it was the only thing I recognized during the whole thing (about 2 hours long). At the end the Pope and the his minions and stuff went to the Nativity display (which we were sitting right beside) so got a good view (and photo/movie) of the Pope. He was like 5 feet away or so, was interesting.

We got out at around 2 and proceded to walk home (no more transit). Along the way we passed by the St. Angelo's Castle.

The streets were totally empty so it was kinda weird. We eventually got back to the hostel at around 4am where some crazy Italian lady started yelling at us when we walked into our room (we didn't even make any noise). She then grab some kid to get them to translate to us or something, but they both only spoke Italian so it was rather comical watching them trainslate from Italian to Italian to us. After that we went to sleep when we were woken up at around 7 but that crazy lady again when she just started yelling and screaming and stuff. Italians are messed up people.

Sunday was a lazy day since everything was closed (being x-mas). We pretty much just spent the day walking around seeing all the free ancient sights. On the way to the first place Keegan almost got pickpocketed as he noticed his strap around his key was hanging out of his pocket. We got off and started searching people around us to see if they succeeded in taking anything, We grab one guy (which we think was trying to steal stuff) but he ran for hte next train and go in just as the doors were closing. Luckily nothing was missing but sucked that the dirty bastard got away (so far the people of italy suck). The first site we went to was the Trevi Fountain. This thing was friggen huge so that was cool. They said if you throw in 1 coin it garentees a safe return back to Rome and a second coin grants a wish. Personnally I tihnk it's a ploy to get some extra spending money, but I did it anyways (not that anyone can buy anything for 2 euro cents).

We also saw the Spanish Step, which are supposed to be very beautiful but there was construction near and no flowers (only during spring and summer) so it was just a fancy staircase.

We wandered into a few churches (there's like a million of them in Rome) and eventually got to Plaza Veneiza which has the Tome of the Unknown soldier and some government building (you could tell by the protesters near it). The old City was near here as well but that was being saved for the next day and it was getting dark so we went back to the hostel for a bit. There was some crazy American girl going crazy there when she found out she blew all her money and didn't have enough to go to some other places and started flipping out, I guess it wasn't a very merry x-mas for here.

The whole day did not seem like christmas day at all since there was no family around (and I opened all my presents early, thx for the Jersey and swiss army knife :) ). We decided to sleep early since we didn't get much the previous night and had to wake up early.

On Monday we headed for the old city and got in to the Palitine/forum before it opened (and therefore got in for free). It was nice having the whole place open to just us and let us take a ton of pics. Circus Maximus (charot races, christian execution place) was here as well. The forum was pretty much the hangout place for everyone back then. There were aquaducts and stuff around as well.

The next stop was the Colosseum. We bought our tickets and went in (unfortunately the ticket covers Palitine/forum so we ended up paying for it all in the end, darn.

The Colosseum was pretty neat and we learned a bunch of interesting facts such as:
- What we see isn't the outer wall, there's a white line around the place that marks the old outer wall, but it collapsed during an earthquake a long time ago.
- It was the first retrackable roof building in the world. a couple hundred people would raise a cloth cover when needed. It was needed for rain as well as ventilation (people smelled bad then, people dying smells bad, and they all ate raw onions and garlic).
- The small rectangular windows at the tops was for people to spray flower pedels and perfumes to kill the smell a bit.
- Women weren't along to sit and go to the wash room, had to go off the top of hte building (ewww).
- Gladiators couldn't kill unless the emperor said yes or no. Emperor usually listed to the crowd. If that was fairly mixed, the virgins would have the say (since they were pure and stuff).
- Gladiators got their name because the sword is called a Gladius.
- It only took 15 minutes to seat all the people (15000 or something like that).
- Michelangelo stole all the seats to be used in the building of St. Peter's Basilica (Pope place).

After getting a bunch of pictures we wandered around the forum a little more as well as around Plaza Venieza.

Afterwards we went to Plaza Nuova where the ancient track was as well as where they held boat races back in the day. Now theres a nice fountain there.

We also went to St. Pietro Church to see the Moses sculpture by Michelangelo as well as some other church (St. Maria Maggiore).

On the way to the train we saw a Lamborghini Murcielago so we took a bunch of pics :)

We took the train that night to Naples thus ending our time in Rome.

Day trip to Matterhorn

2005-12-23T18:33:00.000+01:00

Ok, I only have a few hours before I have to go to Italy and I don't wanna have to do this writeup and Italy when i come back, so here it is, short and sweet.

-went to Matterhorn (mountain), in Zermatt (town)
-town on swiss/italian border
-train there was expensive, took about 4 hours.
-Took 3 cable cars to get to top of the mountain. It's about 4400 feet high
-Highest rail or cable car station in europe
-was pretty cold
-nice view
-wanted to go skiing down it

here are pictures

dima and keegs in cable car

Matterhorn

view from top

group shot

inside glacier

cool flower ice sculpture tihng

ok, that's all for now

HAVE A MERRY X-MAS EVERYONE AND I'LL TALK TO YOU ALL IN THE NEW YEAR!!

Mind the gap: London

2005-12-22T11:33:00.000+01:00

Hi all. Back from my trip to London. London was really sweet, with tons to see and do. The only problem is everything is bloody expensive. O well.

We started on Thursday flying from Basel to London and arrived at around 12am. Being the penny pinchers we are, we set up camp at the airport for the night (score, free accommodations).
London has like a million (well, 5) airports so it’s a little of a hassle to get from the airport to town (especially since I arrive at 1 airport and Dima at another) but o well.

We woke up early Friday and took the 5:45 bus to London and arrived at around 7. Walking around London early in the morning without much sleep can be damn dangerous as we almost got ran over a few times (since they drive on the wrong side of the road, thus making you look the wrong way for traffic) but we managed to make it out alive. After a quick stop at the hostel and tourist info center we started our exploring and kill some time till Dima arrived. On a quick side not, buy a day/3day pass when your in London, so much to see and do and will make your money’s worth easily. It’s kinda expensive, but like I said, you make your money back and it’s worth it.

The first stop we can to was Trafalgar Square.

The main reason we came here was for the National Gallery (Keegs likes art, figured Dima would less, thus, do it before he arrived), but we stumbled across something much cooler, Canada House. Canada House is the High Commission in London (embassy, but for countries in the Commonwealth).

canada house

It was pretty cool to get a quick taste of home, and they had some free internet to check on Dima’s flight (not delayed yet).

After a quick note in the guest book, it was off to the Gallery.

The Gallery was pretty nice with some famous paintings there (Virgin of the Rocks, by Da Vinci (it was in Da Vinci code, that’s all I know)) and some other stuff (Rembrandt’s self portrait).

We found another Sunflower painting by Van Gogh another sunflower pic. Using Keegan and my super sneaky picture taking skills we got another one (take that British Museum).

After getting through about ½ of it, it was time go to another airport to pick up date. Quick check at Canada house to see if it was delayed or not (wasn’t) and I was off. The trip to Gatwick airport was much easier (express train) but like twice the price, o well, can’t expect to save money in London. I got to the airport to find the flight was delayed 10 min, no biggie. 5 min later delayed another 10 min. This more or less went on for another 2-3 hours so that was brutal, but at least I caught up on my sleep. Eventually the commie arrived and it was off to the hostel again.

We got back to the hostel to find out Keegan didn’t pay for it yet, so we did that and went to drop off our stuff in the room. Here’s another thing where Britain is backwards, you have to “lock” the door to unlock it, and “unlock “ it to lock it (like the motion to normally lock a door would unlock it). So not knowing this, we locked it from the outside and when the door closed we were locked it. We wanted to climb out the window but a 4 story fall wasn’t too ideal, so after 10 minutes of yelling we broke the door (o yeah, who’s the man now). We went to complain about how the door doesn’t lock and blamed it on the people in the room before and then took off to meet Keegs at the British Museum (I’m not paying a damage fee).

We got to the museum pretty late so most of the exhibits were closed but we got to run through only some of the Egyptian and Greek stuff. Luckily the Rosetta Stone was still open for viewing, so we got the check that out. (Stone used to decode hieroglyphics).

There was a pretty cool Crystal Skill form Mexico as well.

After the museum we decided to check out Westminster at night. The first stop was Big Ben in the Parliament. Quick fact, did you know Big Ben refers to the Bell inside and not the clock? Second quick fact, did you know it’s not the biggest clock face in Europe? The biggest is in Zurich.

Across the Thames was the London Eye (or British Airways Eye or something). It looked fairly nice at night, but is a rip off to go on (like 20 pounds, unless your disabled then it’s free for you and your helper, our conscience was too strong to try that).

We made another quick stop back to Trafalgar Square to take a few pictures before heading to dinner.

On Saturday, we went to the Portobello Road/antique market. It was located in the Notting Hill region (apparently there’s a movie from here also?). It was pretty neat with a bunch of old stuff.

Afterwards we went to Buckingham Palace to watch the changing of the guards, unfortunately so did a couple thousand other people so we didn’t get a great stop. We never say the actual changing of the guards, but saw all the guards marching and a bunch of the military band and stuff like that, it was pretty neat (and long, took an hour).

The next region we hit up was Greenwich. The region was pretty nice, like a small English town and didn’t seem too touristy. The first thing we saw there was the Cutty Sark, an old wind powered boat. It was pretty cool.

We also check out the National Maritime Museum and Queens House (an old Victorian style building that used to house one of the older queens, as well as a school for medicine and some other stuff). The Museum was pretty neat with a bunch of stuff to see (and free).

The last stop in the region was the Royal Observatory. The Prime Meridian is located here and was pretty neat to see.

After leaving Greenwich, we decided to go to St. Paul’s Cathedral. Normally entry is like 8 pounds, but we went during Evensong (spelling?) so it was free, but had to stay for the service. I managed to take 1 covert picture inside but felt bad go to a service to take pictures.

Afterwards we went across the Thames on the Millennium bridge to check out the Globe Theatre.

Around that region had a Santa festival thing, and there were a bunch of drunk santas everywhere. It was funny. They stormed the Tate modern art museum and party and stuff but got kicked out by security. It was amusing to watch it all. Since we were in the Tate, we decided to take a quick look around (I like how things are open late here). Once again I discovered I don’t understand modern art at all and most of it seems like stupid things made with drunk, high , or both.

On our way out we got some free coffee coupons, so we went around the Picadilly Circus area to get it. Picadilly’s was kinda neat and was like a mini Time Square in NYC.

While we were there, we say a double decker bus (new one unfortunately) that was going to Abbey Road and decided to hunt down the street sign from the Beatles album cover. The ride on the bus was fun as we had to top to ourselves and it drove along Oxford street which had a lot of lights and stuff. Was cool.

We eventually found the location that the Abbey Road sign was from, but learned that it was replaced with a normal sign and stuff after it was stolen a couple times. O well.

We managed to just make the last tube train home for the night and went to bed.

On Sunday we went to see the Tower of London (the only site we paid to see). It was well worth it as well. Along the way was the HMS Belfast, so that was kinda cool.

Also near the Tower of London is Tower Bridge. We wanted to go to the top or watch it raised, but it was too expensive and wasn’t scheduled to be raised till Wednesday.

We waited around for the Tower to open and went in to take a look.

One of the towers in the complex was Bloody Tower. It was originally called Garden tower or something, but the new name stuck due to the crimes committed in the tower (mainly the murder of 2 young princes by their uncle).

The main tower is White Tower and it as the first tower to be built and where royalty and stuff lived. It now housed the museum stuff for the armory.

Around the ground are 6 ravens. The story goes that there used to be lots and they would crap everywhere and fly everywhere so the astronomer (it was locked here originally) got annoyed and told the king to get rid of the birds or him (thus the observatory was moved to Greenwich). Eventually they got rid of the birds but kept some because of the Legend that if the Ravens left the Tower and monarchy would fall. To this day they have 6 at all times (and a couple in reserves for backups).

The Bell Tower is also here and it gets its name because of the bell in the tower (pretty self explanatory). The bell would ring 1 hour before executions so the town folks could gather (football wasn’t invented yet).

The most Important thing in the Tower is the crown jewels. They were amazing and had like the worlds 3 largest diamonds in they (or something like that). The display of the main jewels were under pretty tight security, so we couldn’t take pics (that and Keegs flash went off and they kept watching is) but Keegan got a picture of the Crown of India.

After the tower, we went back to Westminster to see Westminster Abbey, unfortunately it was closed on Sunday and we couldn’t see the inside.

After another picture of the Parliament we were off to our next stop.

The next place was Downing street, where the Prime Minister lives, but all you can see is a gate, so nothing much.

On the way back we found the Princess Diana memorial walkway but there was nothing too special as well.

The last thing on your list to do was track down an old double decker bus (the one with the pole in the back). We went to monument to track it down and found the monument. Not sure what is’ there to honor.

After some jay walking/running through traffic, we managed to board an old bus. It was pretty cool and we had it all to our selves.

Later that night we went to The Maple Leaf pub (Canadian themed pub). They tape Hockey Night in Canada, so I was able to watch a game (flames game wasn’t on tv and they didn’t show highlights :( ). We watched the Sens kill the Leafs 8-2 so that was cool.

Afterwards we took the bus back to airport to sleep (save a couple bucks) and flew back to Switzerland the next day and went straight to work. Ahh..the life of a praktikant.

Anyways that’s all for now. On Wednesday Dima, Keegan and I went to the Matterhorn (famous mountain in Switzerland), inspired the Tolberone bar shape and stuff like that. I’ll have the post of that before I’m off to Italy (Friday). Take care and leave me a message :)

Ice Skating with V3

2005-12-09T10:21:00.000+01:00

Hey everyone,

Last night we went on a little group trip to the skating rink. It was nice to put on some skates, I think the last time I did was with Dima and E over a year ago. Luckily for me it's like riding a bike so it was easy. As for my co-workers.....not so much.

We more or less just skated around for a couple hours (there were some team doing hockey practice that i wanted to join, darn). At the rink there was also a foosball table so I played a game there. I beered my co-workers (they scored but only 5-bar, that doens't count) but didn't tell them that, they were newbies at it :)

Afterwards, we went to some place for food (pizza). All in all it was pretty fun. Pictures below

self pic of me

From left to right, me, Thierry, Judith, Andreas, Felix, Thorston, Andreas.

me and my double axel

the landing

On a side note, Dima's here in 1 week (4 more working days from this post). Can't wait.

Cheers

Xmas around here

2005-12-09T10:02:00.000+01:00

Hey everyone,

Back for a quick update on things over here. The xmas lights in Zurich went up a couple weeks ago, but they are very disappointing. They just have a bunch of white tubes (think florence lights) hanging down the main street, that's it. I heard they are supposed to show patterns and all that but I've never seen it yet. On the bright side, the haptbahnhof (main trainstation) is pretty nice. It has a xmas market inside and a huge crystal tree (don't have a good pic of the tree, i'll get it from keegs later. Here are some pics.

On the 5th, there was a celebration in another town (Kussnacht am Rigi) called klausjagen (Chasing the Klaus, a.k.a. Santa). It's basically a thing to chase away bad spirits (not sure what santa has to do with this, but santa is like a church person, not a north pole person, so it's kinda religious). At around 20:15 all the lights go out in town and the procession starts. The first part is a bunch of people with whips constantly cracking them. I'm amazed that not many people get smoked by the whips since it's pretty dark and the crowd is close. Following the Whips are a bunch of people carrying iffeles. Iffeles are hats with candles inside, made to look like stained glass in churches. Following these are klaus. Once he passes, a band comes by and then 700 people with bells come by. Finally 180 people with horns made from bull horns make their way down the route. Inbetween all the groups are a lot of people just walking as well. It was pretty neat to see and was really loud. There was also a person that walked by giving bread. apparently if you get bread, then you've been good. If you've been back, they throw you in a sac and carry you off (don't think they kidnaped anyone though, but it's popular at partys to do that to some kid).

Check out the pictures below.

whip

Iffeles

Klaus

band

bells

horns

fact of the day...

2005-11-29T14:21:00.000+01:00

Shaving your own head is hard.

Denmark, with a short stay in Sweden

2005-11-22T14:16:00.000+01:00

Hey all, I’m back from my trip to Copenhagen. This time I went with Preston and Jem, and their friend Meridith. We left Thursday night so when we got there it was pretty late and not much to do. We checked into our hostel around 11 and just walked around a bit. We helped some girl fix her bike, so that was nice of us :) The weather wasn’t too bad for me, just t-shirt and sweater, but Jem was freezing a lot of the time (she’s from Australia).

The second day was spent walking around the city, checking out all the sights. From our hostel we first went to the Radhus (town hall). Along the way we ran into the Hans Christian Anderson statue (famous writer, wrote little mermaid…ect).

We then headed north towards Chirstiansborg castle. This is now the Danish Parliament. It didn’t look too nice from the outside with all the construction around it and we didn’t bother going inside.

Christianborg castle

The next stop was to Nyhavn Canal, which is a nice little harbor thing with some places to eat and it had a mini x-mas market. Along the way we went by the Royal Theatre as well as some nice x-mas displays infront of stores and hotels.

There was also a nice outdoor skating rink, but it wasn’t ready for use yet, too bad. We eventually got to Nyhavn and looked around a little bit. H.C. Anderson used to live here as well (building 67).

The next stop was to Amalienborg castle to watch the changing of the guards (they leave Rosenborg castle at 11:30 and get here at 12. It was pretty similar to changing of the guards everywhere else. I think the royal family lives here.

Across the castle was Frederikskirke Church. It’s nicknamed the marble church because of the dome.

Just north of this church was Gefion Fountain and the little Mermaid. As everyone says, the little mermaid isn’t too spectacular, but still one of those things you have to see. It was donated to the city after the Carlsberg beer guy saw the Little Mermaid play. The statue originally had feet instead of a fish tail, but that was later changed. Also, the head and an arm were stole before but they were replaced.

The next stop was the Round Tower. There is an observatory ontop of it, and it has a good view of the city, but being poor travelers, we didn’t want to spend money to go to the top.

As we were walking around, we found a Candy factory and got to take a look at them making a bunch of hard candies (and a few samples to try). It was pretty neat. The think the Danes really like sweet things as there are a lot of candy stores.

We then went to Rosenborg Castle but it was closed and the armed guards stop us from going any further (the barracks are right beside it). The crown jewels are stored here.

For a little snack we ate some æbleskiver by the Nyhavn canal. It was basically a pastry/dumpling thing made with apples and served with jam and sugar.

The main highlight of the evening was a visit to Tivoli. It’s basically a small theme park and gardens and stuff in the middle of the city, but during Christmas time is all decorated. It was really nice there and very Christmas-y. Europeans seem to embrace the Christmas spirit a lot more then North Americans.

We walk around till it was about to close and went to call it a night.

On Saturday we took the train to Helsingor to see Kronborg Castle. At the trainstation we found some good Wienerbrod stænger (a.k.a. danish). Danish are actually form Denmark, who knew? :)

Here’s the castle. It’s famous for being the location in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It was also important to the Danes back in the day since they could control trade into Europe from there and charge a tax to get in.

This is also the first castle I’ve seen with a moat (2 of them actually)

We first went to the casemates to see where the soldiers would stay. It was pretty well designed with lots of curved ramps for horses to move as well as easier to defend (since it’s curved, attackers have a smaller field of vision).

There’s also a statue of Holgar the Dane. Legend goes that if Denmark is ever in danger, he will awaken to defend the country (although a Viking warrior might not fair so well against modern weapons).

The castle itself was pretty cool. It was nice to see a more medieval castle and not the usual glamorous ones.

As I stated earlier, this castle inspired the setting for Hamlet. There have been a lot of plays and stuff staged here.

The cool thing with Helsingor is that Sweden is so close (the town of Helsingborg)

We took a ferry there, only took 20 minutes.

Sweden didn’t seem too different from Denmark. The language is pretty similar and everything was more or less the same. I did’t want to exchange any money there, so I didn’t get any Swedish Kronors. Some stereotypes seemed somewhat true, while others did not. There were a lot of blonde haired people there, but I didn’t see any IKEA’s (wasn’t in the city long, and probably had to go out of city centre) and it was impossible to find any Swedish meatballs (thought they’d be everywhere).

In Helsingborg we went up Karnan tower. It was a watch tower for the town or something like that.

After walking around for a bit we took the ferry back home. It was getting dark and the sky looked really nice.

When we got back we went for dinner, and being low on cash, found a cheap all you can eat pizza and salad place (not very Danish).
Everyone was fairly tired when we got home so we rested in the hostel for a little while. Preston, Jem and I played a bunch of speed (card game). It was fun but Jem was too good and slaughtered us, she didn’t fair too well 2 on 1 thought :) OWNED!

Since the girls are HUGE Harry Potter fans, we got tickets to see the new movie. It was my first movie in Europe and just as expensive as in Switzerland. The nice thing was there was no intermission in the movie (as it’s very common in Europe) but the seats weren’t stadium style, but it was stuff good. Also, no superman trailer, that sucked. The movie itself was pretty good, but having not read the book, I have nothing to compare it to.

We walked around a bit and headed home for the night.

On our last day we went to a town called Roskilde. It was about 30 minutes west of Copenhagen by train and was a nice small town.

The reason we went there was to see the Viking Ship Museum. This town was an important port town during the time and it had a very interesting defense strategy. There were 3 currents that flowed into town, so they submerged boats to block off 2 of them leaving 1 line free. This line had many turns so it was difficult to navigate, therefore, buying time for the town to gather the soldiers. They had a system of fires on various hills to alert the town of any danger. 5 ships that were used in the blockade where discovered a couple years back and became the centerpiece of the Viking exhibit.

There was a place to dress like a Viking so we figured we might as well do it. Preston took all the cool stuff so I had to wear some little kid’s tunic and it looked sorta like a dress :( it sucked.

We went back to Copenhagen and walked by the Guinness world records. It was too expensive to get in, but at least we could see how tall the tallest guy was (not so much taller then me)

Afterwards we went for some lunch. I tried to find stuff as Danish as possible, so I got Weinerbrod and smorrebrot (Danish and open-face sandwich).

Here’s a funky church (has a cool tower thing).

The last stop was to Christiania. This was like an anarchist neighborhood, exempt from the city laws and stuff like that. There’s a lot of weed usage there and the people live in houses that they built themselves. It was interesting since it was so different then the rest of town.

When that was all done we headed to the airport for the flight home. We flew on SAS, but they didn’t have anything special. Was a pretty short flight as well.

Well, that’s about it, don’t think I’m gonna go anywhere till Dima comes, so peace out for now.

Free Meat

2005-11-10T09:54:00.000+01:00

Cool, found free meat at the grocery store.Not much for eating but good for soups and stuff, so that's cool :)

Halloween

2005-11-01T09:12:00.000+01:00

Hi everyone,

Well, this weekend we had a halloween party. I didn't know what to go as and didn't want to spend any money on it, so took me a while to come up with something. Then I started talking to frungy about her getting an ipod and it all clicked. I got a fridge box from the Polish and a bunch of supplies from work and poof, it was done....

here are some more pictures

me

Vance as a zombie with a tophat

Travis as a christmas tree (with working lights, best costume ever)

Shiraz as the Phantom of the Opera

Tommy as a girl

Warren and Richard as Ash.

I'll post more pictures later, i borrowed these from Jacqui (thx for the pictures)

Sitting on an Instant noodle goldmine

2005-11-01T09:11:00.000+01:00

Well, after 3 months, my mom's parcels finally came in, and holy crap there's a lot of instant noodles there. I can cook now, but thanks mom :)

Camping in Switzerland

2005-10-31T12:17:00.000+01:00

Hey everyone,

Well, this weekend we went renagade camping again. This time it was Keegan, Kelan and I. We left on friday night to Arth, which is a small town close to Luzern. It was about an hour train ride so pretty close, and free (gotta love Gleis Seben). So we got to the town about 9:30 - 10:00 ish and walked to the end of town into to woods to find a good spot to set up the tents and finally found a spot on a hill beside some farmers and ranchers. The spot was covered from view with trees and the darkness of night and fairly flat considering it was on a side of a mountain. When we setup the tent we just laid outside, the weather was perfect, pretty warm, no wind and clear skies. There wasn't much light pollution so you could see a ton of stars, and there were a lot of shooting starts, satelites and I think a planet. The view of the town from across the lake was also pretty nice. It got a little cold at night (didn't have a sleeping bag, so just clothes and jacket) but I managed some how. Also sounded like there were people walking by the tent at night, but that could just be my paranoid mind at work :)

We woke up a little before sunset so we could take down the tent before anyone could see us and went on to our hike at Mt. Rigi. The place were we slept looks pretty cool in the morning, it was all misty and by a mountain, looked sorta spooky, fitting for halloween.

From town we took a Train up to the top of Mt. Rigi (1800 m). The view from there was really nice as you could see a lot of mountains, the swiss alps, and swiss country side.

The original plan was hike to Rotstock (a peak) and then down the mountain,

But half way there we decided to take the train to another town at the bottom, Vitznau (we had a day pass and wanted to get our money's worth).

The train was pretty old and the view down was really nice with big lakes and mountains. It was a lot like banff i guess.

We eventually took the train back up to were we started, then Hiked over the Hotstock. From there we hiked to another train station to catch a cable car down to the bottom to another town (Weggis). The cable car was pretty fast and had these cool drops, made your stomach jump :)

From Weggis we took a boat to Luzern. The boat was pretty nice and Luzern looks really nice at night time.

From there we took the train back home to get ready for the halloween party, but i'll save that for another post. All in all it was pretty relaxing, not very intense of a hike but the senery was nice and camping was fun. Next time i think we'll try winter camping.

When I can track down some Halloween pics i'll post them. later

drinking at work,,,,,,the good kind.

2005-10-25T11:33:00.000+02:00

Well this week marks the last week my boss is gonna be here (too a job as the head of a research center in Germany), so we had a going away party today. Was sorta weird breaking out hte booze during work hours but these Germans sure love to drink :)

It's a little crappy cuz i had a cool boss, we'll see what the new guy is like (he seems more strict and less fun though).

My bosses friend is going through this thing on making a cake almost every day for my boss'es last bit here, so that's kinda nice (mm..cake).

For my work, nothing really changes, still doing hte same projects and all that, so i guess it'll just be the same as usual.

ok, back to work

GOODUCKEN!!

2005-10-22T22:28:00.000+02:00

Gooducken

Do you guys remember that kids song or book or something where there's a spider and a cat eats it, and a dog eats the cat and it keeps going with bigger animals (or did I just make this crazy story up?). Well, it inspired us to make a Turducken. Unfortuately we couldn't find a turkey, but found a goose and ended up making a Gooducken.

Basically you take a Goose, a Duck and a Chicken and debone everything (took a long long time) so your left with 1 peice of meat per bird. Then you shove the chicken inside the duck, and then shove that inside the goose. We also flavoured each bird different. The chicken had fondue cheese inside it, and was flavored with tandori chicken powder. The duck was favoured with honey mustard, and the goose had a bunch of herbs. You let it bake on low heat for 10 hours and poof, you have a gooducken.

It surprisingly tasted pretty good, but the meat wasn't solid enough so we couldn't get a solid slice of the bird.

The bones we used to make congee as well as the soup base of rice noodles. That's a lot of food from 1 meal :)

yum

Random stuff

2005-10-22T22:26:00.000+02:00

Hey everyone,

Just a few random pictures I found and figure I'd post.

Here's what happens when you lock your passport in your desk and lose the key (don't worry, it wasn't mine, it was Felix's). The drilling didn't even do anything to the lock, the lock got caught on the drill bit and it ended up tearing the lock out of the desk :D

Here are some pictures from our thanksgiving meal.

We had pasta with a white wine cream sauce, baked chicken, mash potatos, mixed veggies, and beef and leek soup. The sauce for the pasta didn't turn out too well since we had to add flour to thicken it and added too much. Eventually we just added a lot of flour, turned it into dough and bake "sauce-bread". It tasted really good surprisingly.

updates and random thoughts

2005-10-17T10:14:00.000+02:00

Hi All,

I've been neglecting this site a bit lately, so I added some new stuff and will add more as soon as I get ahold of the pictures.

Expect posts about the office ipod nano, office kitchen, and chocolate fondue in the future.

I finally updated the map at the top to include the places I've been to, Unfortuately, the europe map I got didn't think Turkey was European enough and since I'm too lazy to photoshop it in, it'll just be in letter form. Same goes for Santorini.

On othernews, all anime fans out there, you must read the full metal panic novels (this means you frungy :) ). They are really really good, but slow to come out since someone has to translate it. But after reading The End of Day by Days (which yours watching as The Second Raid), I've decided to rewatch the series from the beginning. So I finished watching Season 1-2 this weekend and after the last episode of season 3 (out this up coming weekend), I'll start on the second novel. I think i'm a nut.

On other obsessive behaviour, I rewatched all of scrubs for fun (good show, they must air new episodes soon..), and I am now sick of chocolate (after pulling a Keegan) and downing like 50 bars in a couple days.

Well, that's enough of my rambling for now, peace out.

Brussels

2005-10-17T10:12:00.000+02:00

Hey Everyone, finally found time to write about my weekend trip, this time to Brussels, Belgium.

For this trip we took the train friday afternoon and got there in the evening. Not much to do then except check in to the hostel and walk around during the night to get a feel for the city.

Brussels is an interesting place; on one hand, it's a ultra modern city with all these new buildings and stuff, and on the otherhand, it's has all these old qualities. A pretty good mix.

On saturday we got up fairly early and first went to the Grand Place. This place is one of the best perserved old european town centers. The buildings here are amazing. When we went they were setting up a scarecrow festival (some weird ones out there) but last month they cover the whole square with flours to make a carpet, it's crazy!

The next landmark we went to see was the Manneken Pis, which is the statue of the little boy peeing. It's pretty famous and can lead to some creative (and bizzare) photos.

While we were walking around we stumbled upon a chocolate demo, we wanted to do those huge factory tours but you needed a group of 20, so this was the closest thing we could work out in a short period of time. They just showed all the steps from the bean to the bar and had some samples and demo of how to make the chocolates, so it was pretty neat.

We also say the Atomium which is a building/structure in the shape of a crystal atom. Unfortunately it was under renovations so we couldn't go inside.

Brussels also has a thing for comics there. The walls of many buildings have paintings of comics on them and they have a museum of European Comics (ie. Tin Tin).

After a long day we just walked around checking out the city, trying to find a good place to eat. Here's another cool building, it's the stock exchange.

For Dinner I got the Mussels from Brussels (mmmMMmmM)...
It was basically a big pot of mussels in a white wine sauce, good stuff. I had some Belgium Waffles but they we're as good as the ones in Luxembourg. The beer was ok, i think i picked a crappy brand since everyone keeps saying belgium beer is the best, I found Oktoberfest beer better.

At night we went to the big church/cathedral thingy again, it was pretty nice inside.

We decided to call it a day after that.

On Sunday we didn't have too much time until we had to catch the train and most things we're closed so we just wandered around. the first place we checked out was the Botanical Gardens. We had come there the night before but there was a rock concert being held there, so couldn't get in. It's was alright, lots of green.

We walked to this big park and found the Parliament and some free museum for a Art Nouveau Architect but they didn't show much. Afterwards we went to a museum about the history of Belgium and some underground castle thing under the parliament.

At about noon we had to catch our train to go home, so we picked up a few Turkish Pizzas and headed towards the trainstation. Continuin our theme of Parliaments, we stumbled across the UN parlament on the way to the train. It was quite nice, but they wouldn't let us inside.

When we went to catch the train we were surprised to find Vance, Richard, Bernard, Tommy and some of their friends on the train. Apparently they were coming home from Amsterdam but it was weird to bump into people like that. For the rest of the trainride home, Vance taught me all about the X-men and their similarities and differences in the Ultimate universe. Weird stuff :)

Migros Challange

2005-10-16T15:38:00.000+02:00

So we were walking around in Migros (like Swiss Safeway) and for a "All you can grab chocolate for 5CHF" bin, so Felix and I decided to have a challenge to see who could fit in more, the bags weren't so big, but with some careful planning you can fit in a bunch. I ended up getting 898 grams and 42 pieces in mine. Felix got a bit over 800 and 30-something (I rule). Kelan saw what we were doing and got her in on it also, but she wasn't as skillful and came in 3rd. Fun times. I've never seen the checkout counter ladies so disgusted (well, except for our 2 for 1 super stuffed fish buffet plates at work :) )

oktoberfest pics

2005-10-16T15:36:00.000+02:00

Hofbrau

Inside Hofbrau

the Solvenians

cool hat

group pic

german guys

lightning

OKTOBERFEST!!

2005-09-26T14:47:00.000+02:00

Hi Everyone

we'll, just came back from Munchen (Munich) and it was a blast. We went to Oktoberfest (Wiesn in German). It's pretty much like the stampede but with 14 huge tents for drinking.

We left Baden on saturday so we could take advantage of the Schones-Wochenende-ticket (good weekend ticket), which is 30 euros for unlimited travel in Germany for up to 5 people. WE only had three people (Keegan, Felix, and I) but we picked up a couple from Spain to split the ticket with us, so it only cost 6 euros/person to get there. We left pretty early to get there as soon as we could, so we left Baden at 6:24 and arrived at Munich at 12 (i was really tired cuz I stayed up all night watching batman begins (really good movie)). The first thing we wanted to do was get inside a beer tent, not knowing how difficult it was. It turns out we went on "Italian weekend" when all the Italians come to drink and also the busiest day of the whole festival. Apparently they let people in the tents at 8 and 9 and then closes off entry (like 5 people / hour in).

We found the Hofbraeu tent and stood in line. The tent is pretty big, it houses 6,896 people inside and 3,022 people outside. It only took about 2 hours of wait to get in, so we were pretty lucky, although waiting in line was pretty fun. All these drunk people would try to get in and would get thrown out (literally) by security. Drunk people are funny. Once inside we found a table (some how) and got a beer (8 euros for 1 litre). The atmosphere inside is amazing, so vibrant and cheerful, lots of singing and dancing (and drinking).

So we pretty much stayed here drinking, talking to people and having a good time for a while. We met some people from Pakistan, Finland, slovenia, Italy and Germany and it was really nice cuz they kept refilling our beer for us (free beer, sweet). Keegan some how got an Oktoberfest hat so that was cool, i think the drunk Slovenians got it for him. The beer mugs are also very cool. Pretty heavy and very durible (a must since you toast people every 5 minutes or so). They had this toasting/beer song that they played a lot so that kept the atmosphere and drinking going, was cool.

The beer-maids were also quite inpressive, they'd carry 10 1-litres mugs of beer at a time from table to table, that's a lot of weight.

after about 4 litres and 7 hours or so we decided to go and find Felix (he didn't come in the tent since he didn't want to wait). Apparently he had grabbed a mug and was hiding it from the cops (100 euro fine for stealing them) by blending into a random group of germans. When we found him they invited us to go bar-hopping so we did.

So we pretty much went from Bar to bar until they were all closed (4am). These Germans are crazy they can drink like non-stop, I stopped drinking since I wasn't feel so good but had a few shot with them afterwards. It was pretty neat to see all the small local bars that they and had some messed up people there, was a neat experience. With no more bars to go to they showed us this club but they didn't have enough for the cover fee and we decided to call it a night.

We had no place to sleep (impossible to get a hostel in such short notice) but one of the guys invited us to sleep in his flat, so that was really nice (cheap trave land free accomodations is good). We got there and they drank some more (they're crazy i tell u) and ended up going to sleep at 6.

We woke up at 11 and decided we had enough drinking and went to check out hte Deutsches Museum. The museum was huge!! (30 km of walking) so we couldn't see it all. It was like a haven for engineers of all types with Electrical engineering exhibits, mechanical stuff (turbines, motors..ect) and various stuff like that.

We saw this wicked Electical demonstation with like 1 milion volt open air arcs and stuff like that. One of the coolest thing was they shot 300KV (i tihnk) arc through glass and it sparked all insides the glass pane, looked so cool!

There was also a nice aeronautical, human body and space exhibits.

There was a Einstein exhibit which was really cool but we didn't get much time to see it since we had to catch our train home.

For the train ride home, we couldn't find 2 people to split the ticket with so it ended up costing us 10 euros/person, o well still good.

Overall, the trip was really fun, met a bunch of people, was cheap (about 25 euros spent for travel, food, accomodations, entry fee (i bought a stein for 18 so my cost as more)) and have lots of good memories and souvineers (i got 4 1-litre mugs, 1 was for a friend tho).

Oktoberfest ended next weekend, but I won't be going again. Right now it seems like we will go to Belgium next weekend.

I'll post some pictures tonight or something, we I upload them. Have a good day.

vic

Turkey/Greece Pictures

2005-09-22T10:52:00.000+02:00

Hey,

Finally got around to uploading some pictures, enjoy.

DAY1

At dinner

DAY 2

Aya Sofia

James Bond

Blue Mosque

Topkapi Palace

tree

diamond

dinner

me

DAY3

Cistern

Bazaars

Turkish Bath

DAY4

Galata Tower

Mosque

Fortress

Maiden's Tower (James Bond site)

Guard at Palace

Blue Mosque at night

DAY5

Greek Island

Infront of Room

Sunset

Night

DAY6

Santorini

Our View

Akritiri

Red Beach

Cat

Hidden Church

Sunset

DAY7

Volcano in Santorini

Inside the Athen's Anthropology Museum

Akropolis at night

DAY8

Akropolis

Ruins

Parliament Guards

DAY9

Ancient Cemetary

Original Olympic Stadium

Temple of Olympian Zeus

Gate

New Olympic Stadium