amsterdam, netherlands
not exactly a female friendly place, hookers in windows, drug dealers everywhere, and hordes of stoned guys. it is very touristy as well it seems that every american has to hit here. i really am kinda ambivalent to the city but i have been having fun because im hangin out with my brother and jason. it is really different even going out with them when there are no girls around, really strange place. really relaxed... i think i enjoy the cities with a lot of energy more, like paris and berlin. anyway scottie is in europe, proclaiming he is going to move here, we will see him tomorrow. the parents are rolling down and then we head down to hossegor so the next couple of days should be really fun.

berlin, germany
went and walked along the wall today, it was really amazing. they have turned parts of it into a graffiti gallery. it is really interesting because they have given sections to different artists from around the world. the place is pretty heavy because even now, fifteen years later, the difference in development is pretty distinct
reynnie, jason and i are heading to sweden tonight. we have been in budapest, prague and berlin the last three nights. its been fun to go back to the cities with them because i get a new perspective, especially in terms of the nightlife. we usually knock a few back and wander around the city at night. we have been finding that as easy as it is to meet people you always find that you never meet local people. i think that is a little disconcerting. the traveling, hostel crew kinda sticks together. not that there is anything bad with that because we are meeting people from all over the world but we are definitely not seeing the cities in full. i feel like the local people dont try to do the traditional stuff. they just do what is convenient. they dont eat traditional dishes often, or go see the sights, they see a whole different scene. a much more eclectic mixture of the world influence on their own culture. they eat kebaps and chinese food, see american movies and listen to american music, and they dress in the latest in fashion. i think to really see a city you have live there. the tourist stuff sets up the basis, but to really understand a culture you have to spend time in it. i realize that this is entirely redundant, but to anybody who has traveled, there is definitely an instant in which you realize this.

so we have split up from gemma. she went back down through turkey and we flew out to budapest. it was really cool to have met her. she is super independent, traveling alone, knows what to do all the time. i think that jason is going to stay with her in london right before he goes home. she might also come to la right before she goes home. i think she is definitely one of the coolest people that we have met so far.
we walked around budapest today, which was really fun because i had been here before so it was nice to have someone to walk around with today. we are about to go out tonight, have a few beers and then get up and go to prague.

so i finally made it to istanbul. it is very different than i had thought it was going to be because i pictured a much more strictly islamic city, but it has such a large diverse population that it isa very cosmopolitan city. the only thing that is very islamic about the city is the daily prayers (five daily) that are sent over the public address speakers. it was really weird to hear that all over the city for twenty minutes at seperate times in the day. walking through the grand bazaar was really fun because of all the people haggling you. they constantly come up to you saying "my friend, my friend, i have good deal for leather jacket" to which we'd reply that it was too hot for a leather jacket and then theyd say "oh, but my store is air conditioned, very nice to have a jacket." it is the easiest place i have ever seen to bargain with people. you can get stuff knocked way down if you are any good at bargaining. afterwards we went to the blue mosque. i like seeing mosques better than cathedrals because they actually understand that to charge an entrance fee is a bit sacriligious. they make you take your shoes off and stay in one section but i can handle that. the mosques are really beautiful as well. saw belly dancing last night after all the walking around. it was quite an experience, the belly dancer was really beautiful which made for a good experience.
its been a relief because traveling the last few days has been pretty difficult. until last night i had either slept on the floor of a boat or in a seat on a bust for 4 of the last 5 days. now its going to be beds from here on out, unless something unexpected happens. reynnie, jas and i fly to budapest tomorrow then we are to make our way up to see peter in sweden.

yesterday we spent in mykonos which was a really beautiful island. we couldnt find accomodation though so we decided that it would be best if we just left for turkey. we had a bit of bad luck on two accounts, one mykonos is the island to party on and two our ferry, scheduled to depart at 1:40 didnt leave until 4 so we missed our boat to turkey and subsequently we will not get in until tomorrow morning in istanbul. not a big deal though, it could be worse than spending a day on the beach in samos. i really dont think that anybody will be losing and sleep over us. what will be nice though will be to finally get a bed to sleep in. we have had to sleep on ships on three of the last four nights and it looks like we will be on a bus tonight as well. and with exception of last ferry none of the ferries had seats so we were sleeping on the ground. not exactly the way some people like to travel but it gets us from point a to point b. by the way my shoes smell, im going to wash them once i get to hossegor, france.

so last night went pretty well. we were walking about and then we stumbled on a bachelorette party. they were a bunch of irish girls that were having the wedding in santorini. jason ended up doing a little dance for the bride to be, which was nothing short of hilarious. i ended up talking to a girl that had a boyfriend that was roughly 6'10''. so that didnt work out well. we did however find friendship in a stray dog (mans only friend i guess) and he followed us all the way home. jas named him spartacus. off to mykonos today, working our way to turkey...

so we got in on the overnight ferry, crap seats but it was so beautiful. the highlight of the whole thing has to be the picture of reyn with an amstel at sunrise. it was a similar night to his birthday but with just jason, gema and me. we are in santorini which is incredible the cliffs right to the ocean and the crystal blue water are amazing. well tonight might shape up to be a big night so...

last night was awesome, jason in a style similar to our good family friend DT, sparked up a debate on fate v. free will. jason is much more theologically inclined than i am so he took up the fate argument and i was definitely the free will argument. it was interesting, especially for me because jason made by far the most logical argument i have ever heard for fate, that said i still completely disagree. it is for personal reasons because i find the idea of fate too claustrophobic for me. anyway he decided it was like arguing the inverses of 1 and thought that it was just a different perspective on the same idea.
off to santorini

august 16th athens, greece
jason and reyn are here, should be fun. going to santorini tomorrow. havent had enough time to stir up any trouble yet, but all in good time

so i never figured the whole online journal think out until lisa let me know so heres the beginning, two months into the journey. so i started in budapest, which was daunting because not many people speak english and i didnt have any accomodation. thanks to a polish kid named kris, i was able to get settled. from budapest i went to zurich, then paris to meet leslie barrie. we hung out there a few days and then met up with kevin mccoy. after a few good nights in paris leslie and i went down to pamplona for the fiesta de san fermin. it was definitely the biggest party i have ever been to. when i got up in the morning to run with the bulls people were still spilling out of the bars. running with the bulls is really fun, the best part is once you are inside the ring and they rerelease smaller bulls with their horns capped back into the ring. i ended up doing the shotgun which consists of kneeling right in front of where the bull charges out of the gate. its really an incredible experience because you cant see the bull because you are ducking so all you have is the noise of the bull running at you. then it goes quite for half of a second and you hear the bull land on the sand in the arena. i touched the bull a few times, but i have to say that the coolest thing i saw was a spanish kid do a flip over the charging bull...twice. i had a lot of fun there because the people are so friendly and the whole scene is really cool. after a couple of days i dropped leslie off at the train station (ran with the bulls again on my way back to the apartment) and i headed off to portugal. i was really looking forward to portugal because i heard that the surf is good there, however, when i arrived i found that there was absolutely no surf. it is a beautiful place but after that dissappointment i had to leave. so i went down south through faro to try to get to morocco. i had a very difficult time doing it so i just stayed in ayamante and then sevilla. i had good time in sevilla, went to see a flamenco show with a czech family. it was really cool because the girl spoke four languages (czech, spanish, english, german) and wasnt too hard on the eyes either. i left for barcelona the next morning. i had a really good time in barcelona. i met these sicilian kids, two spoke english and one spoke spanish, so when we went to dinner there was a mixture of italian, english and spanish being spoken. we walked down the rambla after that and went into the courtyard where everyone parties. that place is really laid back, but its a bit dodgy as well. i went through all the parks the next day trying to find a place that my mom had been thirty years ago. barcelona is a very beautiful city. that night i tried to get a train to venice, but they were sold out so i went to paris on the overnight. stayed there for a few hours, enough time for me to go get the most amazing raspberry tarts on the face of the earth. i then got on a train to interlaken switzerland. that is a really beautiful place. got up the next morning and went skydiving in the alps, which was incredible. its so surreal that you have a hard time getting scared. its so outside the realm of comprehensibility that you are somewhat unfazed. that said, it has nothing on surfing. later that day i went to milan, italy. i really liked that city even though it is not as traveller friendly as some of the other places. its really interesting city, but you have to be a high roller or know the in crowd to really get to know the city better. in the afternoon i took a train ride to venice. that is an incredible city. the entire city center is without a car, everything is on the canals. i really felt that it was not a good place to travel by yourself because its just a bunch of couples (rightfully so, its incredibly romantic). the one redeeming thing was i walked into a bar and they were playing 'the notwist' so i ended up talking to the bartender about music. the next day i walked around the city a bit more and then i went to paris for the tour de france. i got to see lance win his seventh and final tour. it was cool being there for a part of history but i will say that it isnt the best sport to watch because you wait forever just to have the cyclists fly by for two seconds. its one of the only sports that i think are better watched on television. that night i took a train to copenhagen. i was staying just outside the town in these old army barracks and got lost because when people give you directions you cant understand the street names. copenhagen is a lot of fun because they have a lot of live music and they have beer gardens everywhere. you can just sit and have a beer in the middle of squares at 11 in the morning. so then i headed up to stockholm to see peter the lovable swede. he was his typical self which meant crazy. i played a bit of golf with him and i beat him every day. it was disconcerting for him because he has been practicing and i hadnt played in four months. going out in uppsala, with peter was a lot of fun because i went to all the student bars with his buddies jan, karl and linus. the last night i was there was so much fun, we got some good grub, went to a club met some girls, then we went to peters place and he played guitar while everyone sang (when i say everyone i dont mean everyone, i didnt because most of it included old swedish ballads and strange classic rock songs, not the typical ones). then i went to oslo norway. that place is almost as cool as stockholm but not quite. the scene there is really young too so there are a lot of good places to go for live music. i went to the fjords in flam the next day. it was incredible, thousand foot cliffs on either side with water so pure you can drink it. the other cool part was when i was out kayaking on the fjord i saw freshwater porpoises and a rainbow which made it even more special. after kayaking around i went back to the train station and went to stockholm on the overnight. stayed there because i couldnt get a ferry to helsinki. i found a good hostel. it was an interesting experience though because the gay pride festival was being held in the area and the hostel i was at was the unofficial host of it. i didnt hang out with the girls because they gave me dirty looks for being a guy and i didnt hang out with the guys because...well they gave me other kinds of dirty looks for being a guy. not to worry though i went to a bar that had live music and proceeded to get hit on by 55 year old women so that was cool. next morning i got a ferry to turku, finland. it wasnt really a ferry it was more like a cruise ship. i stayed in turku for a night then went to helsinki and got a ferry ( a normal one) to talinn, estonia. the whole place was booked in the hostels so i got ripped off for private housing. the place i stayed in was exceptionally dodgy as it was a russian satellite suburb. the cities in the baltic are really nice downtown but they show their russian past outside in the suburbs. that said, talinn is so much fun. the people speak english pretty well, the beer is not too bad and the girls are really beautiful. i didnt stay out late because i didnt want to walk back to my apartment drunk at night. got a bus overnight to riga latvia the next night. riga is even more extreme than talinn, the suburbs are really really depressing. the people even look more melancholy. i decided to skip vilnius lithuania and go for the trifecta. instead i spent a few days in warsaw and krakow, poland. warsaw is a very electric city. its very young and hip, the people are fun, speak a bit of english and the town is really fun. its interesting because it was completely leveled in WWII and so the old town isnt old, its just rebuilt in the same fashion. krakow was virtually untouched so i had a different experience there. it is a much smaller town, much more touristy than warsaw, so didnt like it as much. although the trip to aushwitz was once in a lifetime and one of the most eyeopening things ive ever done. it made me appreciate my jewish friends and family a lot more. i made it back to krakow with a different perspective on inhumanity... i feel i should take a breather after that before i start up again just to give it some respect. ok, so after krakow i went to prague, which is the cheapest coolest city around. people speak english, are friendly and the beer is cheap. i went to berlin after next. berlin is super cool because it is by far the most unique of the european cities. most european cities you go to are narrow cobblestone streets in the interior with some old churches and littered with cafes and bars. but berlin was different. because it was occupied by the russians for so long, east berlin went highly undeveloped, so when the wall fell they decided to celebrate their future (lets face it the last 100 years and germany havent been much to celebrate, so it might be by default) and the building are exceptionally modern, something i would envision that would come out of the book the fountainhead or would be designed by people from the taliesin architecture school (frank lloyd wright inspired). all the buildings are clean and efficient. it is a beautiful city. that night i went out in berlin, which is awesome. i hung out with some american girls and we went to an absinthe bar. im not a big fan of absinthe, but figured i had to since i was here. its definitely better at the bars because there is this whole procedure with a sugar cube, fire and water ( and who doesnt like fire). so i didnt feel all that great the next day(surprise, surprise) but i ended up making it to my plane to greece which is where i am now on august 15th. greece has a bad reputation among travellers for it being dangerous, dirty and the worst cab drivers ever. i have so far avoided all but the filth. its is true it isnt clean but what it lacks in cleanliness it more than makes up for in liveliness. i look forward to spending a few days here and especially picking up reynnie and jason tonight. okay so im sorry that i had to rush through the last few months but hey, better late than never.
breene