Paris, Paris, Paris, Paris, You're not in Paris!

Cause I'm in Paris.

Me and Chris have been hanging around Paris, keeping it real, kickin it old school, and staying fresh.

Those things take a lot of time and effort, so this post won't be very long.

How about a Parisian Haiku?

We are in Paris

There is nice weather today

Me and Chris speak French

Stockholm is SOOO last weekend!

Stockholm is a great city and I recommend anyone go there if the chance arises. This is another trip thats better told in pictures, so here they go!

I took a night train for the first time, VERY Harry Potter! (going to see that in London when it comes out by the way, awesome 22nd birthday I think!)

Here is the room, I couldn't get a better picture cause its really small! But there are six beds, and there was only two of us, which is awesome cause it got damn hot! (I think that it had to do with the train car being several decades old!)

I guess to make up for the hotness!! :0 they had a bunch of tiny boxes filled with water, strange...

My bunk, complete with safety net!

I couch surfed for the first time, and here is the couch, it was in a nice Swedish guys apartment, very small but in a great part of town.

I checked out a Swedish war history museum, it was really cool. Outside they had all of these cannons, which are hundreds of years old. I guess they are war trophies that the Swedish had won over the years. And from that great history class, they are Bronze, which is why they are green now, and they are really expensive, which is why they are displayed as trophies and not iron cannons. The More You Know!

Inside they had a bunch of guns which people might recognize, and the famous people who used em, neat!

And while they didn't have a caption on this gun, I'm sure that everyone knows this is the gun used by all of the Stargate teams! Including the most famous, SG1!

The City Hall of Stockholm is where they give out the Nobel prizes (except for peace, that is given out in Oslo, and the Swedish hate the Norwegian for giving one to Obama, they feel he didn't deserve it and that it has reduced the value and prestige of all Nobel prizes, which may or may not be true, but come on, really)

The wall in the city hall chamber, reminds you of some game.... which was invented for 70 years later...

This is the city hall chamber, with the Tetris walls. The architecture of this room is bad ass, the ceiling is supposed to represent both an upside down viking ship and an old viking hall underneath the night sky!

Probably the coolest thing in Stockholm is the Vasa war Galleon, which sank a full 20 minutes after it was finished in 1627. They raised it up in the the 60s, and put it in an old dry dock and built a museum around it. Its gigantic and is 95% original, and has been restored fully. Its very impressive! I could have put up dozens of pictures of it, but I didn't...

Ahhhhhh!!! Dead people! Ya, unfortunately, the ship wasn't empty when it sunk.

(PS, the new walking dead tv show is going to be sweet, see, even Olaf here is smiling!)

And i guess they felt that the governator was appropriate to put in the Vasa museum too, ya ok....

And the classic lunch in Sweden, Swedish meatballs and potatoes with gravy and that weird berry jam you get from IKEA, but much better!

I don't know who this statue is of, but some Swedish person decided to fit that lady with a pig mask. And believe me, that mask is larger than life and very good quality, more than just paper mache, someone went through a lot of trouble to do that, which is awesome!

This is a chest that used to hold the royal jewels and stuff. Its cool cause its 300 years old and has a really intricate spring loaded locking mechanism. I really hope you enjoy this picture, cause I got in shit for taking it. No cameras in the treasury, Opps! I bet I was the only person they stopped taking pictures of the empty chest, when there is treasure everywhere else!

This is the Swedish Kroner, 8-1 for Canadian dollars, and its even worse than the Norwegian Kroner. Just look at those different shapes, and yes, the 50 is almost a square!

The changing of the guard is a HUGE tourist attraction, something I failed to remember, and got suck in a huge crowd with a bike... but the marching soldiers and marching band were pretty cool. It was in an enclosed hemispherical space behind the Palace and the music echoed off the stone buildings a couple times so it sounded really cool.

Some guards marching around the palace.

This is the Royal palace, its huge and doesn't look like much from the outside, but the inside is pretty spectacular, but pics aren't allowed :(

Here is the great result of globalization. The first advertisement I see in Stockholm is how many Mcdonalds there are in the historic center, how depressing.

So, hope you enjoyed this post, sorry for the delay, my research is getting good, and I am still rather lazy.....

But my 14 hour bus ride to the airport leaves in a couple hours. I still haven't packed. Where are you going, you ask...

PARIS for 10 days!!!

Tupperware Gaurantees and: "Norway, Return of the Jet Lag"

This is a quick post before I make my trip to Stockholm, I am really excited to take the night train, cause it saves me 2 nights of paying for accomodation, and I get to... sleep on a train!!

So here is a piece of tupperware I found in my place.

Now, don't get me wrong, guarantees are alright, but 30 years?! For tupperware? Come on, who do you acutally think will call out that guarantee 30 years from now? Considering that that label is about to come off, and this container is a couple years old, max, and there is no brand on it, if the label comes off then you don't even know what brand it is. How would that conversation go, "Um Hi, tupperware supplier, I, uh, I found this tupperware in my parent's attic, the lid dosen't fit anymore, and uh its kinda stained, and half decomposed, could you replace it?" Phone response, "Sure, as you know, we have the longest guarantee in the universe for tupperware, all we need is you to mail us the tupperware, complete with the crappy label that was on it at the time of purchase, and the original receipt, signed and dated at the time of purchase." Guy on the phone, "Uh, yah, well as you can imagine, I don't have those, and the shipping is more than the cost of a new tupperware, so I'll just go to walmart..." So if anyone has some spare time at work, you could call up rubbermaid and ask how many people actual use that guarantee approaching 30 years...

I'm pretty happy about the title, I think its witty, I hope you get it. So we all know that Empire was bad, and no one really expected it to come back after Luke distroyed the first Death Star. But, Vadar did get away and Mr. Lucas wanted more money, and we know what happened. Now why does this matter, well Jet Lag is evil, like the Dark Side, a distabilizing force of distruction. Here's my story.

So I was pretty tired when I first got here, and for a couple days was kinda out of it, like I said before, you don't realize how bad jet lag is until you don't have it. And I did a lot of important things in the zombie state I was in. One of them was getting my student smart card so I can scan into all of the buildings and such (foreshadowing..). Right after taking my awesome photo, I had to do a very important step. Now for a couple of weeks, I wasn't able to use my smart card, and I couldn't figure out why, and it was becoming more and more frustrating. I couldn't get into my lab, get into the building (which closes at 3), get into the metallography lab, use the library, etc. This resulted in me being trapped outside for an extended period of time, waiting for someone to open the door... All the while, thinking of why it wouldn't work.

So after asking many people what to do, with no solution, I went back to the card office. Upon entering the office and approaching the desk, I see it. Its the little keypad that I put in my pin code for my card so it would work! Ya, there was nothing wrong with my card, I just wasn't using it right. That evil jet lag prevented me from remembering that I set up a pin for my card. Its not like I just forgot, I saw other people use their card to let me into places, entering their pin and going, "hmm they have a code, I don't..." It just wasn't in my memory. My Luke Skywaker(with the robot arm) was that pinpad. I didn't even need to speak to anyone, I just face-palmed and returned to my office.

Whew, glad that's over.

Now here's some photos I wanna share.

A sunset at 10:00pm by my place.

For some reason this rusty pully was in the middle of that parking lot at student residence, and made for a cool picture.

These are a pair of locks that were on a fence outside of Oslo Gardemon (the airport) by my bus stop. Again, kinda weird but a cool picture.

And finally...

Evil, evil three pronged forks!! These were promptly thrown into the metal recycle bin outside my house, gross!

//Guess this post isn't so short after all...

Brussels is Awesome!

I made my way to Brussels over the weekend, it is a pretty cool city.

In comparison to Amsterdam, it has a very different atmosphere. Old Amsterdam is pretty much maintained for rich people and tourists, whereas Brussels was pretty destroyed in WW2 and the old sections weren't really kept, so it is mostly just a functioning modern city. IT does have plenty to see, and I spent a good 1.5 days being entertained.

I got a new computer at work with a gigantic screen, so its easier to upload pictures now, so I will show you a bunch now!

This is the Atomium from the 1958 expo, they refurbished it in the last couple of years so its hella shiny now!

Here's me in front of the Basilica de something...

I could have taken the elevator, but that wouldn't be any fun.

Look what they have done to this poor dinosaur, I guess that is supposed to help attendance at their museum...

The SS logo is a skull, kinda disturbing.

Here's a Nazi uniform

The triumphal arch, which was built in 19 something to signify the independence of Belgium, it has the German flag hanging from it cause they won the day before, thats how much they like football!

Throwing out garbage, Brussels style!

Here's death on a tomestone, whith a bed sheet over him... and its all white marble, pretty bad ass!

Heres probably the most famous Brussels statue other than the Grand Place square, its a little boy peeing, and they dress him up, ya ok...

Here are some restored guild houses(the Nazis bombed the hell out of em)

I don't like how this is spelt.

I found Tintin! Pretty awesome!

Now this one is a very special picture for me, its my first view of a nuclear cooling tower in operation, on the top 5 things I saw in Brussels for sure.

The disgusting interior color scheme of Ryanair, but its alright cause you can pick whatever seat you like, so while everyone rushes toward the center, I sit at the end and get to leave the plane first :)

This is a view of the side of Grand Place, the whole square is shiny cause all of the buildings are gold painted!

I took a video panorama of the square, just cause photos wouldn't have been enough.

Apparently the first hostel I was at wasn't very popular, so I moved to the Van Gogh, which is in a building that Van Gogh used to live and work in, yay...

I met some really cool people, two Canadians, one from Toronto who has made Sweden and now mainland Europe home, and a Montrealer. There were two girls from California and Lithuania who hung out with us too, and made me pasta! My roommate for the night was an American on leave from Afghanistan, his job is to fly around Apache helicopters, way cool!

Until next time...

Amsterdam take 1

This post comes straight from the Flying Pig hostel in downtown old Amsterdam!

Amsterdam's pretty awesome, as one would expect. The best thing I probably did was go on a free tour walking around the city, our guide was an Aussi of course, and pretty good. Joe (our guide) showed us a bunch of really cool things, and went into a bunch of the history of Amsterdam too, he knew alot about the city, which was awesome.

I've got some pics I'd like to share below:

They do have some cool tags, like everywhere, but this one is really common. The three X's have been associated with Amsterdam for hundreds of years, and no one really knows where they came from exactly. But they are put with skulls quite often, and are found on lots of things all around town, like light poles, man holes, buildings, bike racks, buses, clocks, pretty much everything.

Here's the pipe organ in the 'New Church' which is actually hundreds of years old. If you can see the people for scale, this thing is huge, and really impressive when its open! Those people were practicing for a concert that night, so the atmosphere inside the church was amazing!

We also listened to the 'guardian of the pipes'( no kidding, thats his title) play a concert, and realizing that the organ is 300 years old, its awesome that it could have been built.

This is a view from tallest church tower in the city, and it specifically shows the Anne Frank house. Can't see it? Well was meant to be hidden. It is the small black triangle above the black building in the front, about 40% in from the left of the picture, connnected to the white house with a triangular roof.

I had to take a picture of this sign!

The bricks on this building failed and is condemned I assume, but they put paintings on the windows, pretty cool.

So the buildings here lean, and usually there solution is to straighten the floors, and then forget about it. Here's the eventual conclusion! Notice how the building next to it is still occupied, even though it, itself is using the failed building to support itself.

Here is an excellent view of the variety in the buildings. The heights, design, and width vary, with no standards, its amazing!

O yah, did I mention the buildings lean? Check this one out, thats crazy!

Like I had before, the Amsterdamians had a really cool system of identification. They had cartoons on the buildings showing what the purpose was. Here's a really complex one, and in color. Obviously its been restored, but i think that they should bring this back!

This is a picture of what I have dubbed, the 'Wind Clock' cause I'm pretty sure it shows the wind direction, like that is really important or something...

So the big party night (you gotta have one of those in Amsterdam!) we started it at the hostel, as they had pretty cheap pitchers. Robyn, Me, and our new friend Matt (an Aussi) headed out to the red light district after a short while. And you all know whats in the red light district, ladies fo Sale! You can't take pictures so I can't show you unfortunately, but we did learn some valuable lessons.

For starters, the starting price is 50 euros, and then rises with increasing complexity, just be creative to imagine what that means...

We saw many people partaking in these services, and cheering when buddies came out to their friends, or awkwardly dashing away. The gross part is the turnaround, right after someone leaves, they are back to work, eying up people, gross!

Annnnd, you can get rejected if she doesn't like you, which is awesome, imagine how humiliating that would be!

An interesting fact is that the narrower the alleyway, the better the merchandise gets, which is why the ladies bordering on a little square with public urinals were sick and the ones in the 3 foot wide alley were jaw dropping! Hooker shopping was a great way to spend a night in Amsterdam!

Heres a funny story, we bought some food from the grocery store, including a bottle of wine. We didn't have baskets on our bikes so we split up the food and each put some under the spring holder things on the front of the bike. Now I had the wine and it was pretty secure for a couple hours. Later on in the day, I guess it had come a little loose. So going over some bumps in the middle of an intersection, the wine slips out of the bag, an shatters on the bike forks, splashing wine and glass all over me, and exploding on the ground, glass and wine everywhere! Now its not like I was going to stop and pick up all the wine and glass, with cars and bikes and people everywhere in the intersection, so I did the next best thing, started laughing hysterically and pedaled really fast to get out of there!! Cause come on, it was like this wine just exploded at my feet... in Amsterdam!!! It was really funny at the time! :)

Things I'll remember about Amsterdam:

Canals everywhere, pretty cool.

Cool old people who'll talk to you forever if you let them.

Really bad street performers.

Bikes everywhere, parked, in pieces, and all rickety and crappy.

Tourists everywhere, the places without tourists are way better!

Leaning buildings and awesome architecture.

Too much ice cream!

The best cheese in the world, and its cheap!

O of course, naked ladies in the windows and pot absolutely everywhere!

This is just part one, part two should hopefully be better organized...