Metz, France

Don't go here. It's boring.

I'm still not a fan of the French.

OMG It's the girl from Amele

Luxembourg, Luxembourg

OMG GO TO LUXEMBOURG. DO IT NOW.

Luxembourg is seriously one of the most beautiful cities I have ever seen. It's located on a valley of sorts and when I was there, it was all misty and wonderful. It's a great city for walking and there's lots of cool stuff to see. I was only there for a couple hours, but I wish I could have spent more time there.

What did I eat?
Spaetzle with lardons at the Christmas market.

They are like really thick boiled noodles. Lardons are really fatty bacon. It was delicious.

Brussels, Belgium

Brussels was another city in which I never really knew where I was, but I just kinda found myself in places I wanted to be. I arrived on an early train and diddlefarted (is there a hyphen in there somewhere?) for a couple hours trying to find my hostel. As it turns out, once again googlemaps is not sufficient to solve the streets in Europe. The hostel was located on Elephant Street, which wasn't where my map said it was. I found it, eventually, in the middle of the Muslim neighborhood.
First thing I noticed was Belgium is weird. It's just weird. There are all sorts of public art things, and close to the center, there is a really creepy children's carousel. It would have given me nightmares when I was little.

The main square is really beautiful, but really busy. When I was there it was filled with Russian tourists, who later in the day, I helped order waffles.

Found the He-Pisser. Spent over an hour finding the She-Pisser. They are both unsatisfyingly small.
Brussels is smelly. Like, non-stop sewer smell.

The Palace of Justice is as grand as the name, but just like everything else you want to see in Europe, it' under repairs.
Went to see the EU. In front of one of the buildings is a chunk of the Berlin Wall as well as a pretty Soviet looking statue of a woman thrusting the euro to the heavens.
MUSIC MUSEUM-SECOND COOLEST ONE I'VE BEEN TO. The coolest one is in South Dakota. This one was nice, but it left me wanting. It covers rather well the earlier musical instruments, but leaves modern innovation and non-western instruments lacking. Their section on electronic instruments is left in a corner in the basement. But, nonetheless, they had a Boehm bassoon, rothophones, original Sax-ophones, Saurrusophones, clarinets with automatic throat tones, Schaffer-system flute/clarinet/oboe, and an ondes-martenot. COOL.

The metro in Brussels was designed by a 2 year old. It's a spiral shape with multiple lines overlapping for multiple stations. There were like 4 or 5 stations in the center that shared the same 4 lines. How impractical!
Saw the Atom.

What did I eat!?!?!?!
BREAKFAST

Waffle with Nutella!!!

LUNCH

Waffle with Vanilla!!!

 DINNER

Waffle with whip and Nutella!!!

Sorry Body

Amsterdam, Netherlands

I decided before the trip that Amsterdam was one place I wanted to spend a couple days in. I'm glad I did as I was able to complete everything on the list.

During the first day, I completed the list of places I wanted to see. The second day was devoted to museums and shops.

It really only took walking a couple blocks away from the train station before I noticed the scent that would haunt my stay in Amsterdam. You know what it is, and it is literally everywhere. It's almost not possible to walk more than 100 meters without seeing/smelling one. Coffeeshops. They don't sell coffee. Good news: You eventually get used to that rancid smell.

If it can have a bike chained to it, it will have a bike chained to it. There are so many bikes in Amsterdam. I bet it's a rather healthy society, but more than that, it's kind of annoying. They take up a lot of space when they aren't being used. Part of me thinks that most people have multiple bike locked up around the city, and they just use the one they are closest to. I even saw a barge moving down the shore full of dead bikes. Sad.

Because Amsterdam is so 'popular' among college aged people, it's difficult/expensive to get a hostel within the city limits. I chose to stay in The Hague and train in for free (Eurail). Spartacus was playing in the background in the train station, signs of a good day.

During day 2, I chose to visit the Anne Frank House, the Sex Museum, the Pot Museum, and the Cat Museum. I also took a stroll through the Red Light District.
The Anne Frank house is expensive and it takes a long time to wait in line, but it's worth it. I think just about every student in the States has either read the book or seen a production of the stage play. It's a completely different experience to walk in and actually see the place where those events took place. It's also quite the downer. I'd recommend stress eating afterwards.
The Sex Museum is a tourist trap, but a cheap one. It's mostly just full of old porn and dirty mannequins. There's also a life-size Marylin Monroe complete with skirt/air vent. There's nothing there that's actually historically relevant.
The Hash Museum was interesting. It's really small so I think the main reason people go is for the free samples. I did not partake, but the Russians who were there did. There was also one guy who was trying to convince the man operating the vaporizer that pot really as a horrible, horrible thing and that he should try to redirect his efforts to getting it banned. This man also brought his young child into the museum with him. Sometimes people confuse me.
The Cat Museum features cat art with a couple live cats. That's just about it.

Experience I'll never forget--I had accidentally found the Red light district. I was just walking around in the evening. I was unsure of exactly where I was, but I was making my way back to the train station. All of a sudden, I hear this tapping noise. I turn around and lo-and-behold, a rather busty, black prostitute is tapping her long fingernails on the glass, inviting me in. I booked it. Hookers are scary.

What Did I eat?
Kombucha- Fermented, non-alcoholic sweet tea. Bubbly and delicious.

Fries- Oh yeah

Copenhagen, Denmark

Copenhagen got off to a great start when my train from Sweden was delayed about one and a half hours, which really meant that I purchased too much junk food in the train station. It was really just the beginning of the poor dietary choices on this trip.
 I met a really nice Finnish woman on the train who was also an linguist studying Slavic languages. Her concentration was Czech and Bulgarian. We chatted/geeked out for a good hour before trying to sleep. She was also traveling on an Interrail pass (the European variant of the Eurail pass) so she was able to answer some questions for me.

One of the things one has to deal with with when arriving in a city for the first time with just a poorly scaled google map is getting lost. A lot. From the rail station I managed to find the major downtown shopping street just fine, but after that, everything I saw was really just happy, dumb luck. When I was looking for the palace, I managed to accidentally Kastellet and The Little Mermaid (actually really little, who knew?). Either way, I managed to find everything I wanted to and then some.
Denmark is another one of those countries with just absolutely horrible exchange rates to the dollar and everything is ridiculously expensive. I had wanted to spend no more than $20 that day; I ended up spending closer to $30 or $35. Whoops. Thankfully, Denmark was the last in the string of 3 hellishly expensive countries.

Back to getting lost. Copenhagen doesn't have that big of a city center but the for half of it the streets are on a grid, and the other half the streets are all sorts of crooked. Transitioning between the two sections makes for confusing times. Copenhagen is really just a nice city to walk around. Beautiful buildings, surrounded by water/canals, nice people.

One of the interesting things I saw in Copenhagen was Christiana. Christiana is a breakaway neighborhood which was established by a group of squatters. What it's known for is the free dealing of marijuana and hash. Because of this, and the legal status of such substances in Copenhagen, photography inside the community is forbidden. There are only a couple of walking streets lined with kiosks, but the 'compound' is larger than I thought. You wouldn't believe the amount of pot these people have. First, almost everybody in there is smoking something. Second, there were some kiosks with probably pounds of marijuana stacked in piles. Because it was a community with lots of druggies, there was plenty of drug-induced graffiti. Awesome.

So what if I only ate pastries today?

Stockholm, Sweden

Nightmare on a Boat
From Riga to Stockholm, I took an overnight ferry/cruise liner and being the frugal person that I am, I chose to purchase the cheapest tickets. Poor choice. They happened to be located on the lowest possible deck; the car garages were higher up than I was. Also, I got the pleasure of having a roommate. He was a Russian making his way back to Sweden where he had a job. From the first minute, it was very noticeable that he was three sheets to the wind. It started with small talk, then proceeded to invitations to the on-board banya, and then to the bar, and then to go talk with ladies, and then to go get food. Honestly, I just wanted to sleep. He, however, just kept drinking. One beer down. Two beers down. Three cans later he, again, asks me to accompany him to the banya, or to the bar, or to the banya. I'm trying to sleep at this point, and I try to make it clear that I plan to go to sleep, and not wake up until we're in Stockholm. Defeated, he leaves the room. I finally start getting some sleep.

That's the backpack bty

And then we hit actual open water. Holy crap winter seas are choppy. Had I been drinking, I would have gone all Linda Blair on that room. The boat seemed to lunge up at least 30 feet every 30 seconds or so. The nausea sets in. I put in my MP3 player and rode it out.
Cut to an hour later. It's now about 3:30am. Roommate comes back, even drunker. The booze plus the waves are making it impossible for him to stand. He crashes into the bathroom and proceeds to paint the walls, and probably himself, with puke. He eventually makes his way back to the beds. I'm now glad I chose an upper bunk. He spends the rest of the night sitting, holding his head, weeping softly.
This is karma for something, I just know it.
After a few more hours of sleep, I leave the room with all my things, and move to one of the decks for some pretty amazing views.

Traveling to Stockholm by boat is definitely something I'd recommend. The last 45 minutes of the journey take you through some narrow waterways with small, cute houses lining the shores.

I spent most of my time in Stockholm on the central island Gamala Stan. The island itself is comprised mostly of narrow, weaving streets and cute little shops. The streets are so narrow, you wouldn't expect cars to drive down them, but I guess occasionally that happens. I think the thing I liked most about Stockholm was how the city is a series of islands, and how open that makes the city feel. Except in Gamala Stan, the city is really open and you get to see lots of sky. It's also surprisingly quiet.

Later in the day, I tried catching the free IKEA bus to have some 'real Swedish food', but I was there on a Monday and the bus does not run them. I wasn't the only one disappointed; there were about 5 people waiting. After that I made my way to the island to the south of Gamala Stan. It was already dark, so I just walked. It seemed like a cool place to be; lots of little stores, restaurants, interesting (read:drunk) people walking around. In the distance you see the world's largest dome at the end of the street. I wish I had time to get closer, but at night they project different colored lights on the outside. Looks awesome. The water around the islands, plus the architecture, plus all the lights make Stockholm a really beautiful place at night.

Banda Tompten

Stockholm marks the beginning of the Eurail portion of the trip. I had purchased the 15 day, 22 country ticket and I needed to activate it. Luckily, the lady at the counter validated it wrong, marking it for one day ahead of when it officially should have been. So, I ended up getting 16 days out of the ticket #winning.
Biggest Surprise out of Stockholm? The Trains. They look kinda old, kinda sketchy from the inside, but they are really comfortable and about 100x faster than Russian trains. It took me awhile to get adjust to the speed when we first left station. Also, every seat has it's own outlet so I got to charge my camera batteries on the way to Copenhagen.

FUDS!!!!
EXOTIC ORANGE FANTA-- It tastes like gay. Not the 'rejection, heartache, loneliness, surrounded-by-crazy' gay, but the 'glitter, sparkles, ABBA, brunch-everyday' gay. YUMMY

Riga, Latvia

Or, "How Chris Learned About Exchange Rates"

$10 worth of fun!!!

 So to be honest, Riga wasn't really an important part of the things I wanted to accomplish on this trip. It started out as the way I'd get to Stockholm. By the end of my time in Riga, I was glad I went.

I arrived in Riga somewhat late; I had just enough time to find the hostel before it got dark out. The hostel I stayed at was 9 euros a night, which was a pretty good deal. Again with the slow off season tourism, I only had one roommate. He was a Frechman by the name of *insert something French here*. I don't remember. Either way, he also spoke Basque which we talked about for quite some time. If you didn't know, Basque shows up regularly in linguistic coursework. For dinner, I found some Bacon Ramen in a grocery store. Sounds like the most amazing food on the planet, right? Wrong. It was gray water with funky noodles. Poor Form, Latvia, Poor form.

The next day, I woke up bright and early. By the way, for some reason I completely forgot that it was Christmas day and it took me by total surprise that the streets were empty for the better part of the day. There's something fantastic about walking around in empty streets. It felt as though the city were mine. I could move around the streets without paying attention to traffic lights or crowds.
I found my skyscraper, the Latvian Academy of Sciences, and after that I made my closer to the center. The map I printed out had a few sites marked on it, but I definitely didn't research enough. Unfortunately, because it was Xmas, the ONE museum I wanted to see was closed. I, however, would get a chance to visit the Occupation Museum later in my trip.

Fish, mayo, potatoes, cheese, apple, beets...YUM

I managed to visit all the marked sites within a couple hours, leaving me the rest of the day to do whatever. This early on in the trip, I was still strictly budgeting. The thing about Latvia is that the Lat is one of the worlds most highly valued currencies. It's pegged somewhere around .53 lats to the dollar. So when you walk past a McDonald's and see what looks to be a $4 Big&Tasty (sadly, my favorite McDonald's sandwich), it's not really a $4 sandwich--it's an almost $8 sandwich. Sad Day. Around lunch time I felt the need to find an open grocery store. I managed to find one on the other side of the river and there I had a glorious lunch of white chocolate, bread, and a tub of Herring in a Fur Coat, my favorite salad. And all of that cost just $3!


You should know that I also collect coins, usually 1 of each type from each place I have been. With Latvia, there was no problem finding all the coins, The problem from how much money it was. Every coin amounts to almost $9! That, and as I was boarding the boat, I noticed that I had a lot of extra change left. I figured out that one of the more fun things to do was to see if I could spend all of whatever remaining change there was. Didn't matter on what, just so that I didn't have anything I didn't need. That's how the Lion Bar happened. A lion bar is the love-child of a Kit-Kat and Paula Dean. Take a kit-kat, roll it in caramel, toss it in puffed rice, add more caramel, then chocolate and you've got it.

Tallinn, Estonia

My first destination was just a simple overnight bus ride to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. For some reason, most likely strained relations between Russia and ex-Soviet states, there is no longer a train going from St. Petersburg to Tallinn despite the short distance. The bus route takes you through some back roads, most unpaved, which are probably not fit to have a top heavy bus on them. There were multiple times during the short journey where I was jarred awake by that darned inner ear.

One of my least favorite things in the world is border control. This one was not that bad. The Russian side of things is pretty normal. They take your documents (Passport, Visa, Migration Card, Registration), give you some dirty looks, stamp a bunch of things, and hand you back your passport, visa, and sometimes your registration which is useless at this point. The border control on the Estonian is just fantastically convenient. The border guard comes on the bus, takes your documents, and returns them with stamps. You can practically sleep through it. Also there are castles at the Narva border crossing. It's quite the cool welcome.

I arrived in Tallinn probably around 6AM which meant I got old town to myself for a couple hours. Well that's not exactly true; there were a few drunks still puttering about.

Regardless, Old Town Tallinn is quaint as hell. Narrow cobblestone paths and streets, lots of interesting buildings, lost of interesting shops, definitely completely different from Russia. It was simply enough to walk around. The nice people offering me spiced nuts made Tallinn feel kinda like Disneyland. That, and everyone spoke English. It was kinda disappointing.

Tallinn has, allegedly, one of the best Christmas markets in Europe. I was impressed. There were all sorts of booths, most selling some handmade crafts and some form of mulled wine. Because I have never tried that wine before, I decided to buy some of the non-alcoholic kind. The sign said "non-alcoholic" but what it really should have said was "Lots of added cognac". And that's how I got tipsy at noon and almost got lost finding the hostel. 

Like wine, but tastes even grosser

Hostel Shenanigans
Being the off-season, I was one of 3 people in the hostel. Within 15 minutes of arrival, I began to hear something reminiscent of an Herbal Essences commercial coming from the room next door. Then, while I was making myself some tea in the kitchen, a half-Indian, quarter-British, quarter-Dutch man comes in all a flutter, complaining about his stolen luggage from the last hostel he was staying in. He says, "I had 30 pieces of clothing in that bag, plus a smart phone, and a brand-new dildo. I didn't even get to USE it yet".
Well, Good to know.

So I finally have a Backpacking across Europe Story

So before coming to Russia, I got this crazy idea in my mind that because I would be over here, it would only be convenient to do some traveling. Initial brainstorming sessions resulted in a rough plan visiting somewhere between 13-14 countries. The final result? 19 Countries in 33 days.

I managed to plan about half of it before my break began, but after that I ended up adding a couple destinations. All throughout the planning process, I got a lot of "Oh My, you won't have time to do anything", or "You'll be going too fast". Well, yes. Fast was the goal. While I was traveling I realized that many people go on vacation and either spend a lot of time in the hotel or do dumb things like lay on a beach all day. Since I was essentially going to spend a month being homeless, I decided to take the time most people waste and put it toward seeing cities.

The entire trip was solo travel out of a school backpack. For most of the destinations, my phone was non-functioning and save for a few hostels, I was almost completely off the grid.

Part of the planning process included finding out what I wanted to see or get out of each location. I printed out some maps so that I would at least have a rudimentary way to know where I was.
For the most part, I am very satisfied with my trip. Of course there are places I feel I should return to someday, but I think I spent a decent amount of time in each place to get a feel for the city.

Map Below: The various colors are pretty much meaningless. I think they originally started out as marking all the different currencies I'd be dealing with.


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