4-30-09 Frankfurt

This is it - our last full day on the Continent. We had competing priorities - to try and squeeze in as much fun as possible in our final moments, and to try to stay rested and not ruin a good time by being tired and sore. This is a delicate balancing act, one which usually errs on the side of the former.

An internet review of our hotel said that the free breakfast was only cornflakes, so we opted to pay for a nice sugary breakfast at Starbucks. Here as usual, we try our best to speak German, but the staff always act annoyed and switch to English. My pronunciation could use a little work but Natasha's sounds perfect, and yet people act like they cannot understand us. We'd like to practice and get better but people seem intent on forcing us to speak English.

In Frankfurt we found the Film Museum, which happened to be having an H.R. Giger exhibit. We saw tons of antique cameras, special effects, the original robot from the silent film Metropolis, and of course, the Giger exhibit.

Outside we found this giant Euro sign, which we understand to be outside the official bank of the European Union.
Also, the architecture of this mall, called the MyZeil Centre, was intriguing. We found out later that it was designed by the Italian architect Massimiliano Fuksas. The windows apparently have to be cleaned by workers using mountain climbing gear to get inside these strange "tunnels" that snake through the building.
Natasha found her favorite copy yet of Alice in Wonderland in a small bookstore over the river. It was a little expensive, so we decided to see if we could find a more reasonable one somewhere else. We saw a Turkish restaurant on a boat moored to the side of the river. As the day wore on, we were not having much luck finding bookstores, and the ones we did find did not have copies of Alice in Wonderland. Finally we decided to go back to the store, only to find that it had closed 90 minutes earlier. This put a damper on the day.
Once again we had walked ourselves sore, but it was worth it. We returned to the hotel.

4-29-09 Oslo to Frankfurt

We bid goodbye to fair Norway today. My Norwegian friend had given us a 50 NOK bill when he visited us in Seattle, so we returned the favor by leaving him a US dollar (which is only $1 compared to about $7 that 50 NOK is worth, but we did our best). Most of the day was spent in uneventful travel - a walk to the train station in Drammen, then a train to the Torp airport, an easy flight to Frankfurt, a long bus ride to the Frankfurt train station, and then a short train ride to the hotel.

One thing about the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof is that they have a really large store that sells nothing but magazines - but magazines in dozens of languages and on every subject imaginable. As is common in Europe, the pornographic magazines are on full display and well within the grasp of anyone who might want them.

We found to our surprise that our hotel is right on the edge of Frankfurt's red light district! In fact, there was a strip club and sex shop right next door. This didn't affect our stay at all, because Frankfurt's sex industry is legal and tightly regulated, and therefore doesn't make for the same seedy and crime-ridden environment you might find elsewhere.

Our Frankfurt hostel room had a private shower and free wifi. Whatever else a room has, those two things make it a king's mansion compared to some of the places we've stayed in. They even have paper towels (something I hadn't seen in many weeks)!!!

4-28-09 Oslo

I've heard many things about Oslo over the years, some good and some bad, but everyone will agree on one thing: this place is expensive. More on that later.

It was a relatively short train ride to Karl Johan's Square in central Oslo. This is near the centers of government and major universities. We happened to be there while some Canadian dignitaries were visiting, so Canadian flags were raised all along the main street in front of the palace (Norway has a king!) and parliament building. Throughout the day we would catch glimpses of fast driving limosuines with police escorts, but we never did figure out exactly what was going on.

Our first stop in Oslo was their National Gallery, where several paintings of Norway's best known painter, Edvard Munch, are held. This one of the places that Munch's famous painting The Scream keeps getting stolen from (the other being the Munch Museum, which we did not visit). We got to see their Scream (multiple copies exist) as well as The Day After.

I can only speak for the time I was actually in Oslo, so perhaps it isn't like this all the time, but Oslo repeated a pattern we noticed in Europe: the farther south you go, the more reckless and chaotic everything is, and the further north, the quieter and more orderly things are. Oslo was a big city, but it wasn't crowded with people or traffic. People drove relatively slowly and didn't honk at each other as is the case in most other big cities I've been in, both in the US and in Europe. I could get used to this.

Now, the expense. Although eating at McDonald's in every country had thus far failed to be a rich cultural experience, we couldn't just stop at the last country. We found one nearby and had a relatively simple meal. The food was exactly the same as it was everywhere - except for the startling difference in price. We had double cheeseburgers, small fries, and small sodas, which would run about $8 in the US. When we looked at our reciept and converted the currency, we found that we had just paid over $20 for the same meal!

Next, we had ourselves a little adventure. My friend was at work in Drammen, and he was supposed to call us to arrange a meeting place somewhere in Oslo so he could show us around. Unfortunately, Natasha's phone died, leaving us with no way to contact him. We tossed a few ideas around, and one of us half jokingly suggested that if we could find a Mac store we could borrow their charger for a few minutes. Lo and behold, there was a Mac store right next door to the McDonalds.

We went in there and found the iPod Touches on their charging docks. The docks are universal, meaning they will charge an iPhone if you have the right insert for the dock. Luckily, if you remove the iPod insert, you can just sort of sit the iPhone on the leads and it will be unsteady, but will charge. We pretended to fumble with it for a few minutes before a salesperson asked us if we needed help. We then stalled him as long as possible, asking about the charger. When he said they didn't have docks with a first generation iPhone dock insert, we stalled him longer asking where we could find one. He proceded to give us very complicated directions in broken English, which we had him repeat for clarification several times.

By the time we got out of there, the phone had been charged just long enough for a few minutes' conversation, which we used to get ahold of my friend and arrange a meeting time and place. We had just enough time before he would arrive to go to the Resistance Museum. This was a small museum dedicated to Norwegian resistance to the Nazi invasion and occupation during WWII. It contained several dioramas and historical artifacts, including a sculpture of WWII rifles all bound together, pointing at the incoming visitor as if to drive home the peril of the time.

After this, we met up with my friend. We were supposed to meet up with another friend of mine from Anarchy Online, but he turned out to be busy with work. My friend's plan was to go bowling, either in Oslo or Drammen. We looked for a place to bowl in Oslo, and found one - in the basement of the Hard Rock Cafe. The entire room was lit with screaming black lights and flourescents, and the "bowling" turned out to be a kind of virtual game where you roll a real bowling ball down half a lane and then a computer figures out which pins you would have hit and displays it on a screen. It was noisy, crowded, and expensive. We decided to go back to Drammen instead.

Why is there a statue of a tiger in front of the train station?

We took the train back to Drammen and went to the bowling alley. My friend promptly beat us in two games, then beat me at air hockey as well (which nobody has ever been able to do consistently. Amanda comes close!). As we were leaving, Natasha and I were shocked to discover that two games of bowling for three people came to $60!!! Norway is a great place, but if you visit, come loaded with cash.

Also of note, we discovered a soda that is excellent, called Villa Champagnebrus (which is a kind of carbonated vanilla drink, tastes similar to scotch&soda but not quite the same thing). Later on, we visited a Norwegian import store in Seattle to see if we could find this stuff, but the lady there said that whenever she tries to order it, they only send her boxes of expired bottles. She can only get it when she goes to Norway personally around Christmas. A shame we won't be around here then.

4-27-09 London to Drammen

It was time for us to leave Isles behind for this trip. We had to board a bus to the airport around 5am. We changed some money at one of the relatively expensive places in the airport, and enjoyed a short and easy flight to the Torp airport in Norway. At the airport, we saw the duty-free shop (selling mostly alcohol) but the lines were too long and we didn't really need anything that badly. We ate something that resembled a hot dog at the airport before continuing our journey.

From Torp, we caught a bus to a train station that was little more than a few benches by the tracks, and boarded the train which took us into the town of Drammen. We had picked Drammen because we were able to stay with another friend of mine from Anarchy Online, which helped us with the otherwise unbearable cost of living in Norway. My friend was still at work, which left us wandering in Drammen with our luggage for a few hours until he got off.

We crossed a bridge into Drammen's shopping district, found a few malls and a few bookstores. I bought a Rubik's Cube (I knew my old one was wrecked and I needed something to keep myself busy), which I paid the standard obscenely high price for. Natasha found yet another bookstore while I waited outside, trying to remember how to solve the cube.

My friend finally got off work and met us back near the bridge. We dropped our stuff off at his apartment and then we ate some lunch at Subway (which is exactly as it is back home, as far as I could tell). He then took us grocery shopping, where we bought some fascinating Norwegian products such as Trollbrus (a sugary strawberry soda-like drink) and some chocolate with a very high milk content which my friend had introduced us to when he visited Seattle a few months earlier.

Video game nerds may be interested in this item, a replica of Cloud's sword from FFVII, which my friend imported from Canada:

Back at his apartment, we Skyped his girlfriend back in Vancouver, BC, and ordered a pizza for dinner. A local pizza place calls their sausage and pepperoni "Stars and Stripes." Over pizza, I had a chance to read their version of Calvin and Hobbes, dubbed "Tommy og Tigern":

4-26-09 London Day 5

In the morning we took a short visit to Buckingham Palace, which is widely denounced in the tourism literature as an underwhelming experience. Today, at least, there was a marathon going. Other than the historical significance of the site, the literature is quite right. There isn't much to do or see here.

Since the British drive on the wrong side of the road, they are compelled to point out to tourists which way they should look for oncoming traffic (and this really does help, trust me, as it is not so easy to reverse years of ingrained behavior):

After that we went to the Tate Britain, to see one of Natasha's favorite painters, John William Waterhouse. We were disappointed to find that they only have one and it was on loan. There was plenty of other interesting stuff to see, including...Rothko. I've tried and tried to appreciate this type of art before, but time and time again I am left in dismay when I see it. To someone without an art history background, these appear to be simply shapes on a canvas. I must confess I have little formal art education, so perhaps I'm missing something important, but I think I understand what this art is trying to convey, and I still think it is shallow and self-indulgent. It seems more like a big joke that everyone is in on except me. Nevertheless, I keep trying my very best to give it a fair shake.

Later we saw 4 bookstores on one street in the Theatre District (London's version of Broadway). We finally found cupcakes at a coffee shop, which weren't very good compared to those back home but hit the spot anyway.

4-25-09 London Day 4

Today we visited the British Library, home to some of the world's greatest literary treasures. We were able to see the Gutenberg Bible, some of the original Magna Carta documents, originals of the Brontës, Woolf, some of Leonardo da Vinci's sketches, old Zoroastrian religious texts, very old copies of the Qur'an, and the King's Library, an enormous collection of 60,000 books owned by English kings.

Unfortunately, three of the things we came to see, namely Beowulf, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and most importantly, the originals of Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland, were on loan. This had happened to us a few times already (see Florence Day 2 when Machiavelli's tomb was covered in scaffolding) so it was a little easier to bear, but still disappointing.

Attached to the Library was the British Library Centre for Conservation, where old and damaged books are taken to be restored and stabilized for storage, exhibit, and loaning. Tours were by appointment only, so we had to be content with their 1 room "museum" which had plenty of interactive exhibits, videos of restoration techniques on loop, examples of restored works, information about sources of damage and repairs made, and more. For a book geek, this is a playground.

Parting ways with the British Library, we headed down to Bloomsbury to check out a small bookshop called Collinge & Clark, that served as the backdrop for a British TV show we like called Black Books. We arrived at the store (which was closed, thankfully), and found it to be unassuming, small, and specializing in antiquarian books. We got some shots of Natasha out front just for kicks :)

Earlier I promised a bit of info about the street names in London. The thing about London is that street names can change without warning, often from block to block. As we were trying to navigate our way to the British Museum, we walked down one street that changed names 4 times in 4 blocks. My hypothesis is that they have more famous dead people than they have streets, so they rename streets midway to fit more of them in. But I digress :)

In the British Museum we found the Rosetta Stone, the Parthenon friezes, and much more. Normally the museum carries a preserved corpse from Northern England, called the Lindow Man, who is suspected to have been killed as a human sacrifice in a Druid religious ceremony. However, like Chaucer and Beowulf, he too was on loan that day.

That night, we decided to try the pizza place near our hotel. The pizza was average. What was exceptional was the dessert - the menu had a warning that the "Chocolate Challenge" was for two or more people to share, and the price wasn't terrible, so we decided to go for it. This is what we ended up with:

If I recall correctly, this has chocolate cake, chocolate syrup, vanilla ice cream, layered with more syrup, whipped cream, chocolate discs and more syrup. We finished about 2/3 of it. I could have continued but I was sure that I would have poisoned myself in the process. Be warned, America is not the only place where hedonism takes on fantastic proportions :)

4-24-09 London Day 3

Today we were set to see Romeo & Juliet at the Globe Theatre. Knowing we had to stand in the cheap seats throughout the entire production, we decided to take it easy most of the day. We visited a few bookstores in the shopping district, one of which was the largest in the UK (called Waterstone's). We might have actually bought something if they carried used books (which I have sworn to buy exclusively whenever possible). We then went to the post office to ship some of our excess baggage back to ourselves - mostly guidebooks and souvenirs. This cost a fortune, as you might expect. After everything we've done on our trip, this little bit was enough to exhaust us, so we went back to the hotel for a midday nap.

We got to the Globe Theatre just in time. The actors and actresses were amazing - this night was the debut for the girl playing Juliet! She messed up one line but did a fantastic job otherwise (so far as I know, as I am not a theater critic). We stood through the intermission, which happened very late in the play, after Romeo's banishment and the beginning of their plan to reunite him with Juliet. Our bodies could not take the punishment of standing in place in the cold for any longer, so we left the play early.

I had a headache when we got back to the hotel, so we went to the drugstore for some pain medication. I was able to buy 100 ibuprofens for 0.35£!!! That's like 50 cents or so! Some things about Europe are just so much better than they are in the US.

Tired and hurting, we opted for a little comfort food at McDonalds, even though we had already gotten our once-per-country visit out of the way. We ordered a sandwich called the "M," which was basically a beef burger with a hard bread bun. It tasted OK, just a little bland because of a lack of condiments.

4-23-09 London, Oxford

Today we took a bus out to Oxford to see the campus and museums. The bus had wifi on board (probably via satellite or something), which worked after some trouble. To our chagrin, we noticed that the camera battery was dead. If we were going to have any pictures in all of Oxford, they would have to be cellphone pics :(

When we got there, we wandered into a cafe to get a drink and noticed that the place had an Alice in Wonderland theme! This is one of Natasha's favorite books (along with the illustrations). Oxford is where the books were written by Lewis Carroll, so the town has some of the history embedded in it. This place even had Alice themed desserts such as "mad chocolate cake."

We paid to get into Christ Church because somewhere in that place was a stained glass window that had Alice in Wonderland pictures in it. Many famous people have studied there, including John Locke. Eventually we found the window - a shame the camera battery was dead, for my cellphone does not do well in low light and far off targets. This is as good as it gets:

We tried to go to the Oxford library but we didn't want to pay the exorbitant fee they wanted for entry and a tour. Instead we checked out some free exhibitions and bought a few postcards at the gift shop. In this picture, Natasha proudly demonstrates that women are allowed inside (which was not the case in Virgina Woolf's time, for instance):

Next we wandered around in a 4 story bookstore for awhile. They had some antiquarian books, which I always like to look at (but would never want to own!). After this it was lunchtime. It was then that I tried the only food item that I really hated in all of my trip - a pasty (the 'a' pronounced as in 'cat'). This is a food that goes back to the days of the industrial revolution, when miners had to eat their lunch down in the mine without washing their hands. The "handle" on the outside was so that they could hold the thing with their dirty hand and eat the rest of it, then toss out the part they were holding without eating (too much) coal or dirt. Anyway, mine was truly awful - I may have just gotten the wrong kind, because Natasha liked hers. I had what was supposed to be lamb & mint, something I absolutely love back home. Instead it tasted like...unsweetened spearmint on potatoes and I couldn't taste any lamb. Yech.

After lunch we went to the Science museum, where we got to see old microscopes, compasses, gloves, chemistry sets, and things like that. They had a glass-framed chalkboard on which Einstein had written one of his equations for a lecture, so we got to see his handwriting in the flesh. While we were there, a teacher was taking a group of boys in school uniforms through, explaining things, but mostly what Einstein's equation was all about. This was really intriguing until he ended his lecture with something about how science is still interesting even though it is eclipsed by theology. Those poor kids will have a tough go of it in the modern world.

After that, there was still the Natural History museum - dinosaurs! They didn't seem to have any real dinosaurs, just casts made from molds of real ones, but they were still awesome. They had a life-size T-Rex skeleton looming over the place! Around the walls the entire history of life was displayed, starting from the trilobytes, winding around the entire room to end up at modern man.

We couldn't stay long, however, because we were worried that the Oxford University Press would close, and it was nearing 5pm. We hurried down to the Press only to find that it isn't open to the public, and their small Print museum is open by prior appointment only. Not only that, but the bookstore that the Press runs is a few blocks away (very close to the Science museum, we had missed it by only a block or so) and was closed.

Still, it was an exciting day. We took the bus back to the hotel, which by now had working internet. For dinner we decided to try the famous fish & chips - Natasha *hates* fish and I don't normally care for it, but, when in Rome...

Natasha managed to actually eat some of the fish, and I ate most of my portion. We were given too much :)

4-22-09 Nottingham to London

I don't know if I've let on to this much, but I'd been sick with a cold this entire trip. It was today that I finally woke up without cold symptoms. No more carrying medicine around with me everywhere I go!

We noticed that all the tables in the cafe downstairs have steak sauce bottles on them, each of which touts itself as the perfect accompaniment to all breakfast foods, including eggs, bacon, and everything else. Really? 

The owner of the hotel apparently screwed up our books, and we had to pay for an additional night's stay in cash on the spot because they had only charged our card for one night, and the card reader was back at her main office and not at the hotel. Can you imagine something like this back home? Truly an adventure.

The train ride to London was easy, full of scenery, and relatively short. When we got to London, we were greeted with something we had been warned about - transportation workers on strike. The Underground line to our hotel was shut down for that day due to the strike, so we had to take a roundabout passage, switching lines and going a little out of the way. Not too bad though. We were told to expect more strikes, especially in France, but this was the first one we'd come across.

Finding our hotel was a little troublesome, as we had forgotten to write the address down, and London street names can be a pain (more on this later). When we finally got checked in, we found to our surprise that, for the second time on our whole trip, we could expect to have wireless internet in our room. The first time this happened was back in Munich, and as I mentioned before, that connection was almost unusably slow. Fate being what it is, the hotel's internet connection was down and wouldn't be repaired until the next day. No worries, though, I was basically caught up on everything by then, having learned to get everything done quickly whenever I got the chance.

We went to Westminster Abbey. Outside, there was a huge protest (completely filling a fenced-in open square about the size of a city block). There were cops everywhere. The protest was apparently related to violence in Sri Lanka. Some of the protesters were on a hunger strike. At this point I didn't know much about the Tamil Tigers, only that they were a rebel group fighting the Sri Lankan government for sovereignty. When I did look this up later, I found to my horror that the Tamil Tigers are listed as a terrorist group, and have an abhorrent record as the first group to use suicide bombers, and the first group to use women as suicide bombers, as well as a host of other atrocities. Without more information, I'm not going to delve into that much, suffice to note that it is hard to imagine what the Tamils must have suffered that would justify such horror.

On a lighter note, we noticed on a British TV show that ice cream cones here come with a little chocolate stick in them. We finally found out that this is called a "flake" and that it tastes a little like old cake frosting. Not my thing.

We took a short boat tour across the Thames river. On the boat was an amusing tour guide who kept things humorous as he pointed out sights along the river. He used what I think is the funniest euphemism for prostitutes that I've ever heard: a lady of "negotiable affection." Too funny.

The HMS Belfast

The Tower Bridge

As part of our mission to eat at McDonalds in every country, we tried some from the store in the train station. I was expecting them to call the fries "chips," but alas, in true American style, they were called fries. They tasted exactly the same too. So did everything else. Be warned if you ever go to Europe, eating at McDonalds is not a cultural experience anymore.

4-21-09 Nottingham & Eastwood

I felt a little adventurous this morning, so I opted for the (in)famous British breakfast. This one is a milder form (no blood sausage or blood pudding, thankfully), but Natasha still found it unappealing. It's just baked beans and some other relatively normal breakfast foods! Tons of protein!

Today was our D.H. Lawrence day. For those that don't know, he's a post World War I writer who emphasized nature and emotion in the midst of a dirty and calculating Industrial Revolution. He is one of Natasha's favorite authors. We took a bus out to Eastwood, the town of his childhood, where they keep several commemerative sites in his honor.

We saw a museum set up in the house where he was born, which was stocked with several items from the period. The guide gave us some idea of what life was like for a family back then - dirty, cramped, cold, and rough. We thought we had been roughing it by not having our own bathroom - this would be a whole new idea of roughing it. Think of four kids sharing half a bed, the other half rented out to a vagabond. It escapes my imagination.

They also had a heritage museum that was dedicated mostly to the way of life during the Industrial Revolution. Eastwood used to be a coal miner's town, which greatly influenced everything about life there. We found out about the wages, injury rates (1 in 5 was put out of work for several weeks due to an injury some time in their career) and more.

We had tea & coffee at the White Peacock (named for one of DHL's novels). 

After this, we took the bus back to Nottingham, but not before stopping at the IKEA store on the way. Technically there is an IKEA close to Seattle, but we've never bothered to visit. After a quick browse, we hit up their Swedish cafe, and tried some Swedish cakes (two were great, the other had a green frosting that tasted like death). I also tried some lingonberry soda. Not bad!

The University of Nottingham is home to archives of DHL's work, so Natasha wanted to see if we could get access to some of it. We went down to the university library and tried to get in. Turns out the stuff is spread out over multiple campuses, and we didn't have time to get to them before they closed. Still, it was interesting to check out a British university.

We knew now that the whole town of Nottingham shuts down early, so we made it to a Chinese restaurant, ate dinner, and then went back to the hotel to call it a night.

4-20-09 Paris and Nottingham

After a relatively long stay in Paris, it was time to move on to Britain. We had been putting off mailing our postcards until today, and the few hours between breakfast and the bus to our airport were the only time we would have to mail them inside France. The post office happened not to be open yet, so we had to wait about 30 minutes outside. While there, an Egyptian man hailed us and tried to practice his English with us for awhile. He was pretty aggressive and liked to put his face really close to yours (which I hear is typical of Arabs? not sure) which was uncomfortable, but still, it was a neat experience.

The flight to Nottingham was only 45 minutes long, probably the smallest amount of time I've ever spent on an airplane. The flight was really cheap too - Europe has several small airlines (such as Ryanair) that fly to and from small, rural airports for prices in the 10€ to 20€ range. I wish they had this in the US.

On the bus from the East Midlands airport to the town of Nottingham, we passed a nuclear power plant - the first I've ever seen in my life.

We decided to take it easy today. After checking into our hotel, we wandered around for just a few hours. Downtown we found another Muji store. Nottingham is a relatively small town, so we were surprised to see one here. We went to the tourism office to get bus directions for our destinations the next day. We got back to our hotel and relaxed for a few hours, then left again to try and find food and some toiletries that we were running low on.

Lo and behold, this entire town shuts down at 5:30pm. Except for a few pubs, every place of business in the area was closed between 5:30 and 6. Unable to find anything open except for fast food places, we returned to our hotel.

Back at our hotel, we noticed that the building had a lounge with a television in it. We happened to catch the British version of Nigella Lawson's cooking show, which is kilometers beyond its American counterpart in sophistication. At this point, we were very tired and not very hungry, so we decided to save a couple pounds by going to bed early without dinner.

4-19-09 Paris Day 5

Today was our day to check out some historical sites related to some of our favorite French philosophers and other writers living in Paris. We happened across an outdoor bird store as we left the subway station, which was really neat. We then took a short walk around Notre Dame cathedral, and made our way to the left bank of the Seine, where some booksellers sell books from small metal boxes attached to the stone wall beside the river. One of these sellers had a really neat drawing of a cat posing as William Blake’s God. It was a little too expensive and would have been difficult to transport, or else I would have bought it.

From there we visited the Shakespeare & Co bookstore, which has a rich literary history. We then found the two cafes frequented by Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, and many others. These were the Les Deux Magots, the Cafe de Flore, and the Brassiere Lipp.

After this, we visited the Cimetière du Montparnasse to catch a few more famous tombs. These included Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Charles Baudelaire, Samuel Beckett, Man Ray, and many more.

After this, we had a few hours before our scheduled rendevouz with my old friend from Anarchy Online. We decided we would try to interact with history a little by eating lunch at one of those famous cafes we saw earlier. We picked the Les Deux Magots. This turned out to be the most expensive meal of our entire trip (and all told, in all of my recent memory). We were charged 6.50€ for a single drink - a simple glass bottled Coke Lite (what they call Diet Coke in Europe). Our lunch ended up costing 30€ for two drinks and two simple sandwiches. These people know how to milk tourists with an intellectual bent.

Finally, the time arrive to go and visit my old friend. When I started playing Anarchy Online in 2002, Erik was one of the first people I met and befriended in game. We had played together on and off throughout the years. I'd never heard his voice in person (all chat being done via typing) and hadn't spoken to him in a few years, neither of us having played the game in a long time. Still, we were both excited to finally meet.

 We got to his apartment and met his wife, children, and friends. The adults spoke very good English, so we had no problems striking up conversations. Erik's little boy Milan (about 6 years old) was a blast to hang out with. He only knew a few words of English, and didn't seem to understand that I didn't know French, so he would go on and on and I could only chuckle and try to figure out what he was saying. By the end of the night he was dressed in a Batman costume and challenging everyone to swordfights with his Sabre-Laser (pronounced sab-ehr las-ehr, French for lightsaber). Natasha tried to fake death in order to stop the fighting, but Milan repeatedly insisted in rapid French that she was only hurt, which took us several minutes to translate.

Erik cooked us up some barbeque chicken and had us drink some Pastis (a liquor flavored with anise, which I am not keen on, but drank to be polite) and some delicious red wine. I don't drink very often, so this was enough to keep me toasty for the rest of the evening. We stayed up until almost 11 talking about politics and gaming and all manner of things. This was probably the best night of the trip for me. The whole experience was mindblowing.