On The Road

I’ve posted a few things here and there when I was in London so I’ll just post a few pictures and summarize that part of the trip.

First of all, London is really really expensive. The British Pound kicks the US Dollar’s arse, plus they have a high cost of living.

When we got to London we got in to Waterloo station and then caught a train to Weybridge, which is outside of London to the south. We used a train company called Southwest Trains that has the same colors as Southwest airlines but as of yet I can’t find any link, just an odd coincidence. So we go there Wednesday night and on Thursday (Thanksgiving) we just hung out during the day and Carter and I attempted to make some pumpkin pies (the first day without miles and miles of walking) and then went and saw Wicked that night. Earlier that day a friend of theirs from back in Washington who is a nanny in Switzerland flew in and so she was hanging out with us too. (more…)

On our last day in Belgium we decided to leave our lovely hotel in Brussels and go to Leuven. We stashed our stuff in a locker at the South train station in Belgium and headed off. The only information we had on the city before we arrived was that it was supposed to be a college town.

When we got there we left the train station and saw a large spire in the distance and just started walking towards it. It turns out that is was the town hall and the tourist information office is there. We picked up a map of the city with a walking tour printed on it for €1.00 and started walking around the city. Oh, I forgot to mention that there are about eleventeen hundred million kids ranging from middle school to college age wandering the streets. Why they weren’t in school I don’t know.

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There are just two more cities to post pictures from (Leuven and London) but I’m tired and still need to pack my bags and get a shower and some sleep.

I’m going to the airport tomorrow with my fingers crossed. I thought the plan was to leave on Tuesday which would work but tomorrow’s flights (Monday) don’t look as good. I can’t seem to update my listing with US Airways so hopefully the ticket agent will be nice and helpful and I’ll be able to get listed on this flight even though there is a good chance I won’t make it. If I don’t… well, this won’t be the first airport I’ve slept in, just the first one outside of the U.S. and I’ll get a chance to get on the really open flights to Philadelphia on Tuesday.

Hopefully there won’t be anymore posts until later in the evening on Monday (East Coast Time) otherwise you can picture me sitting an airport for 24 hours waiting for the next flight hoping security lets me sleep there cause I will have no where else to go.

So after we had to check out of the hotel that Nu Skin was paying for we checked into a ‘three star budget hotel’. This place was awesome (please read the sarcasm in that). We had to go up to the second floor and then down a hallway, turn left then right and go down until you see a small door on the left, open that and duck down through it and at the end of that hallway was our room. I’m dead serious, that’s how we got to our room and I’m even leaving out a few small details. When you walked in the room the smell of stale smoke just about knocked you over. We got there in the morning and decided we didn’t want to hang around. The guide book we had basically described the area as the run down part of town that not even the government wants to put money into because it’s a lost cause. So we went to the train station and went to Antwerp.

Antwerp is a really nice city. The train station is what you would think of when you think of an old European train station. We went to some cathedrals and a fort on the river that the Canadians used to defend the port during WWII. There is also a tour that takes you under the city into the old tunnels used for the sewer system but we didn’t have enough time otherwise we definitely would have gone on it. Anyway, we hung out there for the day then headed back to Brussels, got our evening Waffle, and tried to hold our breath the whole night so we didn’t get too much second hand smoke from our room.

Since I’m going to the airport tomorrow I figure I should get some more pictures posted. One day we went north into the city of Brugge. It’s a really cool little town in the state or province (whatever) of Flanders. I was hoping Flanders Field would be there but that’s a little bit away in Ypres. One of the cathedrals there was built in the 11th and 12th century, that’s way older than the U.S.!

K, here’s the rest of Brussels:

Carter, Jeron, and I decided to hop on the metro to a different part of the city. We decided to get off at a stop that had lots of transfers to buses and the tram figuring that there would be stuff to do there. We didn’t exactly call that one right. There wasn’t too much to do, it seemed mostly residential and mostly Muslim. We found a place to eat and Carter ordered by pointing at stuff behind the counter and saying ‘yes’ and I just ’same thing’. Belgium doesn’t have as many English speakers as The Netherlands so at times it would be nice to speak some French but in this case it didn’t help. Jeron learned French in Quebec so it’s not quite the same and he ordered a ‘hamburger’ which turned out to be anything but a hamburger. It was absolutely disgusting. Then we went home and had our nightly waffle to finish the evening off.

Behind the hotel we stayed in was the ‘Mexican Square’ and there was this big statue of Don Quixote and Pancho Villa… we think. It was really out of place but it was kinda cool.

Some ride mopeds, some ride bikes, but this is definitely a good way to get around the city.

If you don’t have a quad to drive around you could just do awesome parking jobs like this guy.

Here’s Brussels:

Looking from the upper city down towards parts of the old city.

I have no idea what Carter and I were doing… but it’s in Brussels.

Another cityscape in the evening. The spire from the building on the Grand Place is visible in the distance.

Well, I’ve got more to post, but we saw We Will Rock You last night and now we’re going to go and see if we can get tickets to the Lion King so I’ll post more when I get back.

I still need to post more pictures from Belgium but here’s a quick pic from my Thanksgiving.  We’re not actually having Thanksgiving dinner until tomorrow but I thought it was interesting that instead of the traditional Thanksgiving day movie I went and saw Wicked in London.  It was really good and since the weather was nice we walked around for a while afterwards.  Also, I was able to make pumpkin pies today because Carter brought some pie filling over and his sister did end up finding a place here to buy the stuff.  The lack of Crisco created the biggest problem so we’ll have to see how they taste tomorrow.  Anyway, here’s all of us out front of the theater.  It’s me, Carter, his sister Jenny (behind him), her husband James, and Carly (sp?) who is a friend of theirs from Tacoma but she is a nanny for some royal family in Geneva.

Moving along in my journey, here some pictures from The Hauge. (Den Haag in the freaky deaky Dutch) I was only here for a few hours so I’m only going to post a few pics.

The Peace Palace. After the establishment of the Permanent Court of Arbitrations, Andrew Carnegie donated $20 million to build the Peace Palace. It is now home to International Court of Justice (which I don’t like) as well as the PCA. It’s a very cool looking building but you can’t really get too close to it.

Without getting too far into the story of foreign Christmas traditions I will just quickly summarize the Dutch traditions. In the Netherlands good ole Saint Nick is named Sinter Klaaus (sp?) and he is in fact the former bishop of Turkey and currently resides in Spain. Yeah, I know, it seems a bit too exotic but thats what they say. Santa has also enlisted the help of six to eight black men. No exact number, just six to eight. These helpers were slaves until around the 1950’s when it was decided that it would be better if they were ‘friends’. So around town and on TV you can see these white guys painted in black face. It’s hilarious. Here are a couple pictures, sorry if they’re blurry but I took them on the move. For a very funny and more complete story of the odd Dutch Christmas traditions see David Sedaris’ book Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.

I think this connection might let me upload a few pictures so I’m going to pace myself and start with just Amsterdam. (I’m in Surrey England right now after taking the EuroStar through the chunnel.)

I’ll make this simple and just put a picture with an explanation. I’ll do my best to arrange them but the web interface doesn’t really let me do what I want sometimes and it’s too late at night to fight with it.
Here’s some canal pictures.

This is me going up a set up stairs in the Anne Frank house. This was a pretty cool museum and it really is the house that she hid in with her family. You also get to go through the house and then behind the bookcase and up the stairs to the hiding place.

This was a really cool outdoor art display I found on my first night there. It was a bunch of areal pictures of interesting looking things from around the world. Most of them had to do with the environment or poverty. In this picture you can only see about a third of the display and there are pictures on both the front and back of the displays.

Outside of the Van Gogh museum. This place was really cool. It’s the largest collection of van Goghs in the world. I rented the headset for the audio tour and it was pretty dumb, it didn’t tell any new information and kinda told you how to look at the paintings which I think is stupid. Everyone sees what they want to, IT’S ART!!! The collection was impressive but all of the frames have glass in them so sometimes it was hard to see the texture really good, but still definitely worth it.