££££ondon

You think New York's expensive? Some Londoners fly to New York once a year to buy their new wardrobe. It's cheaper to buy them in the States, even when you add in the plane ticket.

Upset at the latest T fare-hike in Boston to $1.25 for a one-way ride? Try out the £4 one-way ticket on the Tube (~$7.80).

London is prohibitively expensive. My best friend here in Spain, Alex, told me he had two equal 'vacation budgets.' One was for 6 months of day-trips to Spanish towns, carnivals, fairs, bullfights, and accompanying friends to Morocco to buy rugs. The other was for 1 week in London.

British pounds themselves don't travel far in London. American dollars might as well be 1932 German Marks - you'd need a wheelbarrow to buy anything with 'em. Becka paid $12 for £4 at the airport despite my warnings not to exchange money there (in her defense, apparently Heathrow Airport has neglected to put in ATMs). That's a $3 to £1 exchange rate for those of you keeping score at home. That's incredibly ridiculous.

A weak dollar is one thing. The dollar's weaker than the Euro, but in places like Spain, the prices are adjusted accordingly. A beer might cost €1.20 here. That's still less than $2 for a 12-oz Bud light. But having the quantity of currency demanded be the same will just about ruin you. What costs $1 for me often costs £1 in London, effectively halving my money.

An example to illustrate. A regular french fry at a Burger King (something I regrettably had to order while waiting for Becka to arrive via the tube) might cost me $1.25 in the states. It cost £1.25 here. So I paid about $2.40 for my fries. And that's the way it is with most products. You're paying the same number, but it costs twice as much to you.

This, of course, means one of two things. Either you don't do anything in London, or you hemmorhage cash. We chose the latter.

Our hotel was just down the mini-times square ads on the left

Not without some resistance, however. We stayed in a cheap hotel, sacrificing en suite toilets and showers (meaning we had to phone reception to ask for towels and an unlocking of a shower stall, not quite the quaint bed-and-breakfast experience) for location (quite literally in Picaddilly Circus) and price (although I'd hate to see the $60/night rooms...). And I managed to nail 4 of the quite famous (and fully free) museums, seeing the Rosetta Stone (British Musuem), some Picasso/Dalí modern art (Tate Modern), fake dinosaur bones at the Natural Science Museum (seriously - a huge letdown), and a portrait gallery of all the monarchs/famous people of English history.

Some of the bleeding was expected. £15 to see the Tower of London, £10 to see Westminster Abbey, and £15 to see Coriolanus at Shakespeare's Globe theatre were all planned expenditures. But some of it was not. Like the $17 bagels we bought on our way out.

That's right. $17 for two plain bagels with cream cheese. If you took me to the best Jewish bagel shop in NY and told me that they're the most expensive bagels in the world, I'd guess they might be about $5 a pop. $10 total. And maybe I would've paid it, just to try the "best bagels in the world."

But what we had surely were not at the top of any Zagat survey or Michelin guide. I even think the place we went to was a chain. Becka was starving and ornery and we just thought we'd stop at the bagel/donut shop right outside our hotel. I remember noting that the donuts were £1.50 and I thought that was a bit high, but well within the range of acceptably inflated London prices.
Becka and I both decided we'd do bagels and cream cheese instead, figuring they'd be about the same. When we noticed she wasn't reaching into the big basket of fresh bagels and tub of smooth cream cheese, we started to be concerned. She grabbed for a bagel from the display shelf that was fully made up with cream cheese and lettuce. I gathered that we would be getting that, sans lettuce. But I was slightly confused why they didn't have fresh bagels and cream cheese when they advertised it outside.

Becka was similarly dazed and forgot to mention she didn't want hers toasted. When they came back in cheap wax paper bags, I admit I hadn't thought through what they could cost. If the donuts were £1.50, it should have been conceivable that the bagels were £2.50 or even £3. Then I would have been thinking that £5 was too much and might have refused them. When she proudly announced £9.90, a full $10 over what I could even think of overpaying, I could have said, "I'm sorry, I didn't ask for a dozen, just one bagel" and left rather dramatically in protest over the high price. Instead what I did was more or less say, "Ok, thanks. Here's your money. Shall I drop my pants and grab my ankles too?"

Truth be told, London was a great time and seeing Becka was worth whatever expenses we incurred. We did a much better mix of touristy things (mentioned before) and spending time together than we did in Paris or Venice, which were maybe a little too amped up with tourist destinations and checklists. Slowly, I'm learning how I need to travel, one little trip at a time. Soon it will be time to put it all into use, as I leave in a little more than three weeks for the Grand Finale.

Well, I should go to make sure I still have money in my bank accounts after the hit I took in London. Hopefully, I'll have enough cash saved up for the seven week trip. Or a week in London.

Grand Finale update

Here I will be listing the plan, as it is formulated, revised, and ultimately accomplished, of the Grand Finale of the Great European Adventure.

The plan is to make two circles of the continent, the first going west through Switzerland and Austria and circling through Germany to Paris, and the second going through the south of France through Italy and up though Belgium and the Netherlands to England, Scotland, and Ireland.

Time frame:
June 22 until early August 11

Destinations:
definites
Spain
France
Italy
Switzerland
Austria
Germany
Czech Republic
England
Scotland
Ireland
Belgium
Netherlands

Day to Day Plans
date doing what during the day
Thu, Jun 22
Fri, Jun 23 last day in Cadiz
Sat, Jun 24 Cordoba
Sun, Jun 25 Toledo
Mon, Jun 26 Toledo, train to Barca
Tue, Jun 27 Barca
Wed, Jun 28 Barca
Thu, Jun 29 Barca
Fri, Jun 30 Interlaken, canyoning
Sat, Jul 01 Luzern
Sun, Jul 02
Mon, Jul 03 float down Cesky Krumlov river
Tue, Jul 04 Cesky Krumlov, train to Prague, Prague
Wed, Jul 05 Prague
Thu, Jul 06 Prague
Fri, Jul 07 Berlin
Sat, Jul 08 Berlin
Sun, Jul 09 Berlin
Mon, Jul 10 Louvre, Notre Dame. Café du Pax, Opera at night (8:00)
Tue, Jul 11 Orsay, Mt St Michel
Wed, Jul 12 Mt St Michel, Paris Plage?, Louvre until 9:45
Thu, Jul 13 Versaille on bikes, nice dinner
Fri, Jul 14 Avignon
Sat, Jul 15 train to beach, beach
Sun, Jul 16 beach, other things
Mon, Jul 17 Monaco (car museum, aquarium, casino)
Tue, Jul 18 train to Cinque Terre, one or two villages
Wed, Jul 19 Cinque Terre, train to Pisa at night
Thu, Jul 20 Pisa, train to Florence
Fri, Jul 21 Florence
Sat, Jul 22 Florence
Sun, Jul 23 train to Roma, Roma
Mon, Jul 24 Roma: Vatican and Coloseum
Tue, Jul 25 Roma
Wed, Jul 26 Salzburg (Staier & Faust 7:30pm)
Thu, Jul 27 Hallstatt salt mines, ice caves
Fri, Jul 28 Amsterdam
Sat, Jul 29 Amsterdam
Sun, Jul 30 Brugges
Mon, Jul 31 get to London, tidy up things in London
Tue, Aug 01 Stonehenge
Wed, Aug 02 Bath
Thu, Aug 03 Shakespeare's home
Fri, Aug 04 Oxford
Sat, Aug 05 fly to Glasgow, Glasgow
Sun, Aug 06 Stirling (Braveheart battle scene)
Mon, Aug 07 Edinburgh Fringe Arts Festival
Tue, Aug 08 Edinburgh
Wed, Aug 09 St. Andrews
Thu, Aug 10 fly from Glasgow to Dublin
Fri, Aug 11 Dublin to JFK

Top 10 Chokes

1. Purchasing $6500 worth of rugs from a Moroccan bazaar
2. Not showing my girlfriend the top 2 sights in my hometown during the three days she was here
3. Forgetting everything I read about pickpocketers and trying to push and kick the distraction (who was pulling on my dad's pants' legs) instead of holding onto wallets.
4. Paying $17 for two bagels with plain cream cheese in London

London, part 2 of 3

Of all the cities I'll visit during this whimsical year of travel, London has got to be the one I visit most. I've flown in or out of London 14 times already, but that's hardly a reasonable measure of my time spent here. Which is currently a total of two afternoons and one evening.

All of my connecting flights to the states have been through London save one, and I've even made London a connection between Andalusia and Venice (check your europe maps to see if that makes sense). But I've only visited London for one day before today. I went to visit Elisabeth from my teaching English course in Brighton and we made it up to London for a day, but didn't do much other than meet a myriad of friends of hers and spend the day searching for a costume for a dress up party where you had to dress up as something ending in '-st.' (for the record, I eschewed the typical artist/buddhist/florist routine for 'hidden cost').

So this is my first real London as a destination. And I likely won't see much. Despite what seemed to be a short flight (3 hrs + the hour saved when you go back in time), I wasn't able to set out on the tourist trail until 4:20 and didn't get to my destination, the Natural History Museum, until 4:40. Since Becka and I have decided we won't be doing museums (she doesn't like them enough and I don't want to be burdened by someone who doesn't like them enough), and London's chock full of great museums, I tried to fit them all in today.

I saw two. And one sucked. The Natural History Musuem had a number of great, well done exhibits, particularly on dinosaurs. But they used fake casts instead of real fossils (which are all in NY. And many of their facts were wrong (I did, after all, receive a citation and an 'A' in a class called Dinosaurs! at an Ivy League school). So that dampened the thrill. But I made up for it in the National Portrait Gallery, a symposium (not sure if I'm using that word correctly and don't have time to look it up to be sure although I did have time to write that whole sentence explaining such) of portraits (some famous) of many Britons (all famous) throughout the years with accompanying explanations as to who they were and why they were famous. Great consolidation of my British royal history. Enjoyable.

Which brings me to the three lessons I learned today:

1. Trust your guidebook. It said the Natural History Museum should be skipped, and it was right. It said that the National Portrait Gallery would be good and it was.

2. Don't fret about missing connections or, in general, the little things. My taxi driver told me that the only thing you should really worry about is dying. B/c then, you've really lost. But when you miss a bus/train/plane (the first was my mishap today), it's not the end of the world. Besides, I had a great conversation with a taxi driver as a result. I learned that his whole family's military and one of them works in top secret chemicals for the americans. And he told me how to keep your windows from fogging up in your car (wipe them with water-less soap) and water from sticking when it rains on the outside (wipe a potato on it).

3. I can't remember and I have 2 minutes left on internet, so I'll write it later

Obviously if it didn't come back to me in three days, it probably wasn't that important...

What makes awkward people awkward?

My second roommate moved out yesterday, which inspired this blog delving into the subject of awkwardness. She was a lovely roommate - clean, polite, willing to share food and respectful of my habits and wishes. She returned to Wales yesterday after I helped her lug her 50 lb bag and 25lb backpack to the bus station at 6:30am. I was sad to see her go but not because I will be lonely - I prefer to live alone - but because I couldn't have had a better roommate from a compatibility perspective.

The quirky thing about her was just that - she was quirky. Better put, she was awkward. I've been around plenty of awkward people in my life, notably in upper level math classes in high school (although there were a few at Dartmouth, as well). I've always thought of myself as a compassionate and patient person and I generally get along well with them. But I can't help but feel awkward as well.

What types of things does an "awkward" person do, you might ask? The most notable thing, to me, is the complete lack of fluidity in a conversation. Typically, a conversation with an awkward will go like this:

Awkward: Hiya.
Me: Hello. How was class today?
A: A bit exhausting really. (2 second pause in which Awkward appears on the cusp of saying something) I'm probably going to go straight to bed.
M: Why was it so exhausting?
A: Oh. (Another 2 second pause) I'm not sure really. (1 second) It just was.

Now what do you say to that? In hindsight, it seems like it'd be really easy to say, "Oh I'm sorry, can I get you a cup of tea" or "Yeah, I have days like that sometimes" but for whatever reason, at the moment, I'm speechless. I seriously can't think of anything to say.

That's really unusual for me. Typically I do very well in scripted conversations like "how was your day" or "what's your name/where are you from." But the remarkable thing about awkward people is that they make me awkward too. I can't think of anything to say. And I hate uncomfortable silences (although not as much as Rawson Daniel, who will make up ridiculous excuses like having a class at midnight to leave a conversation after 1/4 second of silence) so I often just try to disappear before the silence gets too long.

In addition to the stagnated conversation flow, awkward people exhibit other common characteristics as well. One in particular is clumsiness and the tendency to get oneself into awkward physical situations. Within 5 minutes of meeting her Alice swatted a full glass of water halfway across the room while making a wildly uncontrolled hand gesture. Her first laundry experience ended in her opening the door to the washer while it was still in cycle, causing a sudsy flooding of the bathroom and kitchen. She says it's quite common of her to be like that and I would agree with that statement. The question is why is she like this? Is it genetic? Is it a learned reaction to society?

There's a number of facebook groups dealing with the subject, and given the healthy number of members, awkwards tend to know and accept that they are awkward. The group "Holy Shit I'm awkward!" has the following description:

You stare at the ground to avoid premature eye contact, you trip over yourself, you can never decide whether or not to say hi to someone when you see them for the third time that day, you laugh at your own jokes, you don't know when to cross the street, every conversation you have has an uncomfortably long pause, and worst of all, you always point it out.

Without really having data to back this up, I'd guess that awkward people tend to also be quite bright. That may be not true, but it certainly seems that it is. Alice is very bright, as were every awkward person I met at Dartmouth and in high school.

I have this theory that we're all given equal amounts of abilities and disabilities. It's as if every possible trait - from height to kindness, metabolism to faithfulness, willpower to boob size were scaled from 1-100. The sum total of everyone's traits would be the same number. The reason that some people are more successful, liked, or happy than others is generally due to the culture's relative value placed on their good traits. So someone with the intellectual capacity of a fruit fly can be wildly successful if his society places value on size and he's 6'9", 315 (NFL offensive linemen). Likewise, someone who 3,000 years ago would have been devoured in his youth by a formidable beast because of his lack of physical strength can become famously successful (Bill Gates). The assumption would be that being awkward is another trait, and some people get more of it than others. I just wonder if there's a society where awkwardness is an advantage...

But I don't really know. And I got tired of searching for answers on google. So I'm going to rather awkwardly end this entry without having really said anything or concluded it properly.

musings on baseball

So I'm watching the Astros game - fourth straight after midnight start this week for me - and I heard this comment by the Milwaukee broadcasting team:

"You know, Andy Pettitte's a guy, just like Chris Capuano, who doesn't throw very hard..."

The comment continued, but what I noticed was this comparison of a 176-win, 4 time world series champ and a guy with 27 career wins. I've noticed this a lot while watching other teams' announcers. They compare another team's star to their mediocre product. It's as if someone said, "Pujols, just like Geoff Blum, seems to thrive when he's behind in the count." I don't care if Blum's a decent player. I don't care if he really does hit better when he's behind in the count. You don't compare Pujols to him. You can compare him to Pujols. But don't compare Pujols to him. He doesn't deserve it. Neither does Chris Capuano. He can be compared to other greats, but they can't be compared to him as if he's some sort of standard bearer.

This, in a way, is homerism. There seems to be quite a bit of homerism - that is, favoring your own team to the point that you appear stupid to a knowledgeable fan- in sports these days. It's not limited to regional or local media either - ESPN has apparently hired a whole slew of Yankees or Red Sox fans to write, talk about, or otherwise waste my time on info about 'the greatest rivalry in sports'. Bill Simmons, Jayson Stark, the list goes on. These guys don't apparently know that other teams exist.

(Just for the record, Pettitte was just compared to Rickie Weeks and his 440 career ABs, which is about 2/3 of a full season)

Simmons and Stark, among others, frequently act as if no other teams exist than the Red Sox and Yankees. ESPN constantly runs features about Ortiz, Jeter, Manny, or Damon's latest hairstyle instead of actually reporting significant news.

Currently, the ESPN rumor (unsubstantiated, of course) is that Clemens will definitely sign with the Red Sox or the Yankees. Whether that happens or not remains to be seen, but they're the only major media outlet that suggests that the Astros are out of the running.

To me, the Astros have to still be the favorite. They've fulfilled the three requirements Clemens asked for:

1. Competitor, with a reasonable chance to make the playoffs (2nd best record in baseball)
2. Offensive team that isn't going to get shutout in 9 of his starts (averaged 9.8 runs per game in last 5 wins)
3. Had a starter go down with injury (Backe may be out of the year)

They obviously offer the hometown benefits he's enjoyed the last few years, and I have to imagine that business-savvy Drayton McLane will match any salary because of the marketing opportunities/franchise value increase that Clemens brings. I have to believe that because no news has been made, Clemens is just playing the same game the Texans are playing with Reggie Bush - try to leverage his salary with interest in other teams (Clemens' interest in NY, Bos, and Texas)/players (Texans' interest in Mario Williams)

But I could be wrong. After all, I'm probably no better than any of these other homers...

Domesticated

You know you're in a good relationship when you actually enjoy cooking breakfast, cleaning a turtle tank, and driving 45 minutes away to go to a bead store, and you're a guy. But that's the beauty of not seeing your girlfriend but once a month: everyday tasks are actually enjoyable. Moreso when you've been traipsing around countries not knowing where your next meal will come from (dramatic way of saying "eating out") and having to pay just to breathe (hello, UK).

She even surprised me with a free dance lesson (she'd found a coupon in a newspaper) and then I surprised our dance instructor by claiming to know that Germany was in Europe. Apparently "likes to learn complicated dance moves" doesn't really intersect with "knows basic geography." Go figure.

So we had a good time. We went to Jordan's (the best pizza I've ever had) twice, like we always do (even if I'm only there for 2 days) and drank Blue Moon and Sam Adams Summer Ale, cooked apple chicken sausages and watched Astro games. She made a steak dinner for me. Basically, Becka made a convincing case for what I'm missing back in the states.

I'm rather inclined to rule in her favor: I'm currently looking for consulting jobs in and around NYC, and you have to like my chances of finding work there of all places.

But I've got to get back there first. Currently, the Grand Finale has just experienced its third stage of growth and currently is over three times its original size at 7 weeks in length. I've bought my return ticket for August 11, so now I've just got to fill in the gaps.

I'm thoroughly excited about the journey and trying to squeeze the most out of it without overwhelming myself. I'm worried that travelling everyday will wear me out, but being alone, I'll need to see more and relax less. I'm trying to balance checklist sightseeing with genuine vacation, and that's hard to do.

As much as I'm looking forward to my adventure, I can't help but get excited about the little things that await my return: getting a car, finding an apartment, and of course, doing the little chores and errands with my dearest. Call me weird. But at least I'm happy.