Researched Urban Planning

For whatever reason, last night I couldn't fall asleep. I hate just lying there and not doing anything. I didn't particularly feel like reading so I figured I'd look into grad schools. The way I see it, the time I'm not spending exploring or working I should spend productively and now is as good a time as any to figure out what I might be trying to do late July. Yeah ... I really have no idea what I'm going to be doing much less where I'll be doing it once the voyage across Spain is done.

For the last six months to a year I've basically had my mind set on trying to get into the UN working to promote literacy. Working at ING has shocked me out of that. I'm fast realizing that I really really really don't want to work in a large company/organization/whatever. I want a group of people small enough that everyone could sit in on a meeting, except I hate meetings. The way I figure it, if you want to talk about something, go talk when you first think of it, don't plan for a meeting in a few days. I understand the need for them if you've got people working in different things on different schedules but that's my point, I don't want to have to deal with that.

So I started looking into something else I'm pretty interested in: Urban Planning, which from what I can tell is planning out how cities should work/be designed/change to meet the future. I've found quite a few places that seem to have good programs at a decent price. San Jose State's is by far the best deal and throw in the fact that if I went there I could probably live ridiculously cheaply with my dad and that's a winner. I'd really like to go somewhere new though. Today is going to be about researching what they have available in Europe!

Quit Shaving For A Month

I lived in hostels for about a month, a little over actually I think. Hostel showers aren't exactly roomy and often don't have hot water for very long. It's pretty cold over here so I've been wearing pants all the time and I don't really have anyone to look especially good for anyway. All of that combines into a very good reason not to shave my legs for a while. And here's what it looked like after that month:

Spring has arrived in Brussels and I'm figuring I may want to wear skirts soonish and I have my own shower now that has plenty of hot water so I decided to shave today. Silky smooth:

It is surprising easy to just stop.

Went To Walden Pond

For a good five to ten years of my life I truly believed that I wanted to live alone for at least part of my life. There was a small part of me that wanted to go off, buy some land somewhere, build a house, start a farm and live completely self-sufficiently and never have to interact with the world. It wasn't so much "oh I hate the world and don't like people" as it was "there are so many problems in the world that it would be easier to just slip away from them instead of having to confront the fact that I don't know how or don't have the power to fix them". The other larger part of me realized that was a rather unrealistic dream especially because before I was able to do any of that I'd have to make enough money to actually have the capital to get started. Anyway, up until a few weeks ago, I longed to have a place of my own that was just mine, and not mine in a creepy Gollum-y my precious way, just something that no one else had claim to, a place to hide away from other influences, I don't know.

In coming to Brussels I have completely cut myself away from my normal social circle. And the fact that I am living alone and that I am only here for 10 weeks make it really difficult to form a new circle. I'm living in one of the biggest cities in Europe and, most of the time, I still feel completely alone. I used to believe that I could and, moreover, wanted to live alone. If Brussels does me no other good, it has taught me that I can do it but that I never ever want to again. I'd always thought I was a solitary creature but I need some degree of personal connection and I'm afraid I just don't have the time to do that while I'm here.

Ironically, or fortuitously, depending on how you look at it, one of the books I brought with me is Thoreau's Walden. I may not have gone off into the woods and lived alone for two years but I feel like I've come pretty close.

Had A Minor Miracle Smashed To Pieces

I went grocery shopping earlier today and had a little mishap. When I've gone the few times before, I'd always seen people buying fruit or vegetables, you know the ones where you are paying by weight but today was the first time I did that. My minor miracle involves the cash registers here. In all the grocery stores (or at least this one that I've been to a few times) the employee sits down while they are swiping your purchases. There is the normal vertical barcode scanner and there is a bit of metal perpendicular to that that I assumed was the weighing machine thing like we have in the states. What was so miraculous about this to me was that the metal bit opens up and that's were the cash is kept. It just seemed so cool that the scale was the top for the cash drawer. Turns out they don't have scales at the registers here, whoops. I had to go take my bananas back to a scale and they have a screen where you have to find the item that you are weighing and it prints out a sticker that tells the employee how much you are supposed to pay, not quite so miraculous after all.

On a completely different note: this morning I saw this guy on the metro. I'm going to call him "Purple Scarf" because well, duh, he wears a purple scarf. I saw him last week too. He gets on at the same stop as me and makes the same connection at the same stop as me. The first time I saw him, we were in the same ... I just realized I don't know the word for it, maybe it's 'car' but the same segment on the train, anyway we were in the same one. I'm still get used to riding a train while standing up so I have to hold on to something while it is moving. And what really intrigued me about him is that he was just standing there, not holding on to anything, it's such a dorky thing to be intrigued by, well he's also pretty good looking, to me at least. Anyway, totally by chance, we ended up in the same segment thing on our second train. Oh and he gets off at the same stop as me. And I saw him again this morning. It was crazy! The chance that I'd recognize someone from a week ago and that they would be on the same train again. Awesome! Another funny/random thing: there is a newspaper printed for the metro, creatively titled 'Metro', but it is printed in two copies, one in French and one in Dutch. The french one, the title is in green and the dutch one, in blue. So you can tell someone's native language (or you can assume their native language rather) based on the color of the title on their newspaper. (Purple scarf had a green one!)

Found My Patch of Green Grass

Since I've been in Brussels, I've formed a sight-seeing routine. After work I usually go for a walk around wherever I'm staying for an hour or two and get to really know the area. Weekends I spend like a normal tourist and go see all the tourist traps. Yesterday I went up to Laeken which houses mini-Europe, the Atomium and the royal Palace among other things. I did all the touristy things for a bit and then got distracted by some interesting side streets notably, Avenue des Robiniers. Bordering this street on the southern side is a wonderfully magnificent park.

While I was walking around in it, completely overwhelmed with amazement, I realized that I could see myself settling down in Brussels. And that thought absolutely terrifies me.

I am really afraid of settling down. When I was a kid, my mom moved us around a lot because she was studying at various places. We didn't move as much as some people, namely some military families, but it was always just when I was really starting to get comfortable in a place, when I was starting to really put down roots in a place, that we would pack up and move. So there is at least part of me that is just really afraid of being in one place for the rest of my life because it is just something so new to me, something that I don't understand. But at the same time, having one place to be home, to be mine has been one of my most profound desires, I guess. It's something that I have held on to but the thought still terrifies me even now that I'm 23 and out on my own. 

Anyway, I've found, for the first time in my life, that I can actually see myself in this city for the rest of my life. Even after a day to turn this over in my head, that sounds so final that I want to run away from it. As I was walking around in this garden I saw myself there 5, 10, 30 years on down the road. 

I walked down through the neighborhood south of the park and when I saw this street I suddenly just knew, like I have never known anything in my life before that when I'm ready to settle down, it's going to be in Brussels and that when I'm ready to have a family, I'm going to raise my kids here. You know when you're watching a movie and there is a couple that falls in love and they just know, they don't have any reason to explain it or any rationalization, they just know, that's I feel about ending up in Brussels. It wasn't even that I decided that I want to live here, it just hit me that I'm going to. 

When that came to me, I was throughly terrified because I am in no way ready to stay in one place for a long time; I want to see everything and learn everything and ... I don't know, just see the world. And there is no way in hell I'm ready to have kids but I realized walking around this area, that I don't have to be ready yet but when I am, I want to end up back here. For the rest of the day, and even now when I think back to it, I had a feeling of really intense calm, like everything was right with the world.

And the kicker of it all is that, I'm pretty sure that no matter how many other cities I see in the mean time, I'll still want to live in Brussels. And that is a completely new feeling to me, believing that I won't find greener grass anywhere else in the world. 

Moved To A New Hostel

I've finally found a permanent place to stay (I can't remember if I've already mentioned that) but it isn't available until the 24th of March so I'm staying in a hostel until then. The hostel I'm staying at now is pretty awesome, oh I just realized I never really said anything about the last hostel I was at.

The Grand Place Hostel was awesome, right in the middle of everything, and by everything I mean all the tourist-y crap, which don't get me wrong, was really nice. The hostel had just opened up, I'm pretty sure the day I arrived was it's first day open. It was about 20 yards from the Grand Place which is pretty much tourist central and about 300 yards from the Central Station which made getting to work ridiculously easy. There are pictures up on facebook so you can check it out if you like.

Anyway I moved to a new hostel on Sunday (the old one had a seven day maximum stay). This one is definitely not centrally located but in two days it's already given me such a different perspective on Brussels. It's in a much more residential area called Koekelberg. Again, it is ridiculously close to a metro station, about 90 yards down the block and it's right next to the Godiva factory/building. I've been told not to try Godiva as it is shit compared to any other Belgian chocolate, which based on the first impressions after a few samples is fabulous, chocoholics dream! Apparently pralines were invented in Brussels or Belgium, I can't remember. Here I get a free breakfast (toast, cereal, tea/hot chocolate) in the morning which has proved to be quite useful and economical. And there is a kitchen so I can cook myself dinner instead of going out to eat. I've been keeping track a bit of the difference in spending: (including the price of the hostel per night for each place) while I was staying at the first hostel I was spending about fifty euros per day. At the current hostel, I've gotten it down to about thirty euros per day. Epic savings win.

Had A Culture Day In Brussels

Today was my ‘culture day’. I went to four different museums. The morning started out with the Musical Instrument Museum. So amazing, it was absolutely fabulous. The battery for my camera ran out before I got to brass instruments and my spare was in the coat check so I couldn’t get any pictures of those which kind of sucks but it was really awesome. You got a pair of headphones and walked around and in front of most of the displays there was a numbered circle, you stood on it and there were selections of music played on those types of instruments that automatically played on the headset. There was one that really stood out for me, it was on an alphorn I think. It was just a long horn like you see in cartoons about the Swiss Alps but the music. It sounded like a cross between a French horn and a flugelhorn and seems to have all the versatility, not versatility exactly but exactitude I guess of a valved instrument. Then another one came in and they were harmonizing perfectly. I was just so surprised that someone could have so much control over something that is totally based on embouchure on an instrument that wasn’t manufactured really. I had lunch at a restaurant right next to the museum, Ciabatta mania. It was really good. You can order freshly pressed juices, I got grapefruit.

After than I went across the street to the Royal Palace of Beaux Arts which is combined with the Magritte Museum. It was pretty cool, there were a few things that really caught my eye. One statue called After the Deluge or something like that. I was absolutely enthralled by it. I must have circled it for ten minutes straight and then came back to look some more half an hour later. Then I went to the Magritte Museum which was interesting. I really wanted to see a certain painting but they didn't have it, at least not on display.

They had something else that was pretty cool and related to that one, oh btw if you don't read French and have never heard of that painting before the caption is translated at "This is not a pipe" because it is a painting or image of a pipe but is not itself a pipe, yay surrealism. At the beginning of the exhibit there was a sketch of a pipe with a caption that translated to "This is still not a pipe", funny but I had really wanted to see the original. 


Oh and random slightly related tangent. Being a student/under 26 in Europe is fabulous! There are sooo many discounts. The instrument museum was only four euros and the double pass for the Royal Palace/Magritte Museums was only three. Amazing!


After I'd had my fill there, I walked back down through the Jardin du Mont des Arts and on the left is the  Royal Library of Belgium so of course I had to go in. They have a museum inside the library on the history of books for free so I went to see that. It was fascinating and they used modern technology seamlessly when presenting everything. At the opening the had touchscreen monitors up on the wall where you could flip through background information about language and the written word. I'm not sure why I didn't take any photos in there but I didn't. I may have to go back so I can.


I wanted to go in and just browse through the books but apparently it isn't a public library and you have to have a pass in order to go in to the actual part with books. That dampened my spirits a bit.


Then later I had planned on going to this Jazz bar to hear some live music I'd heard was going to be happening. I figured I'd go out and have dinner first and head over for a drink to go with the jazz. I got there (l'Archiduc, apparently it's famous) around 7:30 and the band was starting to pack up, I'd already missed the show. I left and walked around trying to find some other place with live music to no avail. You'd think it'd be a lot easier to find something in a downtown but I guess I just wasn't in the right area.

Grew Up A Little

So yesterday and tonight I went out wandering because I think that is the best way to get to know a city, if you follow a guidebook you really only get to see what they tell you to see and I want to see everything, even if it isn’t all that interesting or the safest area in the world, but anyway as I was out wandering it got to be around dinner time. Both nights right as I was getting pretty hungry I happened on a restaurant that looked good; looked good to me implies that it has a cool name, it looks open, there are a decent amount of people in there already eating and on the menu posted outside there are at least two vegetarian options. Yesterday, it was Les Chapeliers on Rue des Chapeliers just off the Grand Place. I ordered a vegetable pannelloni or something like that. It was basically shredded carrots and cabbage (I’m not actually sure if it was cabbage, it could have been endives which seem to be very popular here) wrapped in pasta and drenched in the most amazing cheese sauce I’ve ever had. It was about 5/6^th cheese and the rest was tomato, absolutely fabulous. I’m not the biggest fan of cabbage but with that much cheese just about anything will taste good. And I had a half liter of, I think it was the blond Maes, but I’m not sure. I asked the waiter for a recommendation and he said something really fast so I’m not sure. It’s funny generally when I have beer and food together the tastes just completely don’t mix. Usually, the beer comes out first so I have the taste of it without the food flavor interfering. Then the food comes out and the mixture of flavors just clashes for me. This time, the flavors clashed but it wasn’t in a bad way. I’ve yet to have a bad experience with Belgian beer (and on that note: Kriek. Remember that word. Seriously. For people who saw me at any point last fall around Thanksgiving you may remember how I raved about Trader Joe’s Pumpkin Ale. This is similar in that the flavor is so unique but it’s like fifty times better. It’s a cherry beer apparently. Framboise is the raspberry equivalent. I don’t think it’s as good, it’s decent but not omg, orgasmically amazing like Kriek).

Tonight I was out wandering in the St. Gery/St. Catherine area which is kind of northwest of la Bourse (the old stock exchange building) and I stumbled upon this Thai restaurant, Luna de miel (Honey Moon). I’m not sure what street it’s on but it’s pretty much right across the street from la Bourse. I got just your basic Pad Thai. It was fabulous, spicy as hell but superb. It was a huge plate, not so much that I felt sick afterward but enough to really fill me up and I didn’t have a very big lunch and it was only 10 Euro! And the atmosphere was wonderful in a muted kind of way. It was decorated in deep oranges and reds with pods of tree trunks clumped together that sprouted 2x4s as branches. I don’t how to describe those but it was really neat. I’d have to draw a picture or something.

The thing that was nice about these two nights was that what I ended up ordering was exactly what I wanted but I didn’t even know what I was craving. Yesterday, after work I went out for a walk southeast toward the center of the city and Avenue Louise (which on first impression is really overrated) and ended up getting ridiculously lost. I think I left my hostel around 4:30pm. Around 5:10 I decided that I wanted to head back. I still hadn’t found a permanent place to stay instead of hostel hopping and that was really frustrating me so much so that I couldn’t enjoy just being out exploring a new place. I planned to go back to my hostel and do some more emailing/calling/sleuth work until I came up with something so I turned down a street that I thought would get me back. Apparently I’d walked a LOT further than I thought: I’d walked almost to the Shuman area (I take the metro to work; it’s about a 14 minute ride with six stops before I get off. Shuman is the stop before mine, so I’m guessing it’s a good two miles away from my hostel at least). I hadn’t walked in a straight line, anything but in fact so I’m guessing after I decided to turn back I ended up walking about 4 miles. It was starting to get dark, I was in an area I’d never walked around, I didn’t recognize any of the street names so I had no idea where I was or even which way to go, I was tired and hungry and just upset with the whole not having a place to live situation. I just wanted a place to sit down, have a good drink and good heavy food. I ended up finding it right around the corner from my hostel. Which was nice because, lightweight that I have become, I was a bit buzzed after that half-liter.

When I was walking down the Mont des Arts I couldn’t help thinking about this whole situation. They say that it’s on trips like these that you really learn about yourself, your strengths and weakness, who you are and grow immensely as a person. Last night, I felt like this trip was too much for me. I just couldn’t deal with it, I wasn’t ready for everything that I have had to deal with. I felt like an utter failure because it felt like nothing was going right. Generally, up to this point in my life, I haven’t worried about much of anything all that much. I’ve tried not to plan too far in advance because the way I see it you never know what is going to change in the future and you can’t plan for everything so why worry. And generally, things have fallen into place for me. Not worrying about anything worked. Things just went together without much help from me and I didn’t have the added stress of worrying about whether or not they would. I’m coming to realize on this trip that life doesn’t always work out so nicely, that sometimes you need to have a plan and then a back-up plan as well for when things don’t work out so well.

Fell In Love

I never thought it would be possible but I have fallen in love … I am completely, head-over-heels in love with Brussels. I think I could spend the rest of my life here and never get bored or restless which happens rather often for me (usually after I’ve been in one general neighborhood for two years or so I start to get restless and want to move to somewhere new and if I don’t the feeling will go away eventually but it will come back with greater intensity and more frequently until I do something about it). It’s just so interesting here. You have a building from the early 19^th century sharing a wall with a very modern minimalist one, you have people conversing in three or four different languages in the scope of one conversation, you have a monument that was built to commemorate the Belgian civilizing mission in Congo and graffiti promoting anarchy. And from what I can tell all of this is continually evolving and changing and melding. Brussels has taken practically everything I’m interested in (the interaction between people [anthropology], the interaction between governments [international relations, the EU], architecture, the influence of language on culture, French, art, city planning and conservation) and put it all in one place where I can easily, well maybe not easily, soak it all up and just kind of study it. It’s absolutely fascinating. Right now, I just really don’t understand how people know which language to use when. Belgium has three official languages but not really. The country is basically split in two: Flanders and Wallonie. Flanders speaks Dutch and all official documents and whatnot are done in Dutch. In Wallonie, it’s French. It a few cantons in the southeast, it’s German. And in Brussels, all three are official but places are only required to do it in Dutch and French. But usually businesses, from what I can tell, try not to give preference to one of the languages by using it, so they use English instead. It’s crazy! I love it!

Cleaned Up A Bloodsmear

So last night I fell asleep around nine and woke up at one in the morning and couldn’t for the life of me fall back to sleep so I lay there dozing. The two girls I’m sharing a room with came in around three or so. They had gone out to see a band play (one of their friends is in the band) and came back completely drunk. One girl was already passed out and the other was trying  to get her into bed which, really stupidly was the top bunk. There was another bunkbed completely open that I would have put her into on the bottom but whatevs. So around six in the morning the passed out one falls out of bed and hits her head on the floor, and get this … sleeps through it! Her friend tried to get her awake and sitting up and then realized she was bleeding. Around that point I ‘woke up’ out of my doze, realized she was bleeding and helped out a bit. I cleaned up the blood that was on the floor and got her sitting up while her friend went down to call an ambulance (that is a really weird word). The paramedics just left with her and they are taking her to the hospital. In a terrible way, it’s kind of nice because this is the normal time I’d be waking up and now the room I’m in is empty and I can lounge around in the morning like I like to. Again, absolutely terrible of me. 

Finally Got Reliable Access To Internet

So after a few weeks of not having very good access to Internet, now I do, yay! I wrote about a few things in a word document some days so I'm going to try to post those according to the day I wrote it (note: the dates these are published under are the days I wrote them. I am uploading them on 3/15/11 just in case you wanted to know) and then maybe eventually I'll get around to days 2 and 3 of Paris, no guarantees though :/

I have reverted to my ‘normal’ sleep schedule, the one I follow when I have no normal social interaction besides between nine and four in the afternoon: fall asleep around eight thirty or nine and wake up around four thirty or five. Going to sleep isn’t so much a problem but waking up that early in a hostel is difficult to say the least. I don’t want to get out of bed and wake any one else up but I can’t fall asleep again because I’ve already gotten nine hours of sleep. I end up dozing for a few hours and in those hours I’ve been having the weirdest dreams.

Last night, and I don’t remember even a tenth of the details now, I dreamt I was with band people and there was a monster attacking us for some reason. We were in a city that is a lot like Brussels, small and narrow streets but fairly clean and we were trying to escape the monster. For some reason, we only had access to one car and it was a stick shift. Only Emily could drive it but the monster was trying to chop off her hand every time she shifted. So we put a mitten on her hand and she sat on it and we tried to outdrive this huge thing, I think it was insectoid, without leaving second gear. There was more to it but I don’t remember anything else except it was really really important that Emily’s hand not get cut off b/c she needed it to shift except she wasn’t using it. Dreams are weird.

I had one the night before too that involved band people in some crisis situation again and I’m pretty sure Emily was heavily featured in that one as well. From what I remember it was a cross between band, Eureka and Ender’s Game. Alison and Tess from Eureka were in it. Tess was pregnant and me and Alison were talking her though some emotional problem about it she was having and all the while there was some crisis going on, I don’t remember what now, but we were in a space station that looks how I imagine the one in Ender’s Game looks like. We were in a huge room that housed smaller fighter type ships (kind of similar to a Y-wing from Star Wars but not entirely) and tons of band people were running around getting to their ship to go out and fight something. I remember being internally frustrated about having to console Tess instead of helping with whatever was going on. And I think the my conscious part of my brain was thinking why is she pregnant because she isn’t on the show and oh shit pregnancy is fucking freaky.

I wonder what tonight will bring.

Ate Lunch Next to Sacre Coeur

After I checked in to my hostel (which was really decent. If you ever need a hostel in Paris you should check it out Caulincourt Square Hostel. They were really well priced and it included a free breakfast if you woke up early enough and free internet) I walked around looking for a park to eat in which was surprisingly hard to find. For some reason, I had the idea that there were little parks hidden everywhere in Paris and that it would be really easy to just happen upon one, not so much the case. Anyway, I had packed some food for the plane but didn't end up eating it because there was a vegetarian option for the hot dinner so I ate that for lunch because I didn't want to waste it (that was a rather convoluted sentence whoops). So I walked around trying to find somewhere to sit down and just take everything in while I ate. I was pretty sure a waiter would get mad at me if I tried to eat my own food at a cafe table on the sidewalk so I didn't want to do that and I was making my way down the hill from my hostel. On that note, for some god awful reason I had it in my head that Paris would be flat (I guess Davis has spoiled me a bit in that regard), not the case at all, quite the opposite in fact. Walking around those three days was a damn fine workout. I got myself a bit lost, because that is the best way to be in a new city! and looked right when I came up to some intersection and saw an unbelievably tall stairway. I'd say the rise in elevation was at least 50 yards (funny side note: when I picture distances in my head I usually compare it to a football field and how many eight to five steps it would take and convert that into yards, lawl) and through a gap in some buildings I could see the Sacre Coeur. So I went up that way, and ate lunch at this park that is right by it. A misty rain had started by the time I got there.

The Sacre Coeur is literally at the top of this huge hill and from the front facade of the church looking out over the city, on a good day I'm sure you could see for miles. That day wasn't a good day so I could see maybe a 100 yards or so. I went back and explored the hill for a while. There is a square two blocks away from the church that is filled with touristy stuff, artists selling paintings, musicians, restaurants, gift shops, caricature/portraiture artists and the like. And the architecture there ... omg it made me drool, absolutely gorgeous. There were a few museums that I'd passed but I didn't go into them, meh. I prefer exploring stuff on my own and just seeing it in its natural habitat to having it presented to me altogether.

Well I think that is the conclusion of Day 1 in Paris. Kind of uneventful towards the end. I think I fell asleep around 6pm because I was just so tired from not sleeping on the plane and then slept until 10am the next morning or so.

Flew To Europe

So I haven't posted in a while because, well, me being me I forgot to pick up a plug adapter before I left the States which then meant that my laptop ran out of power. Anyway, so I'm in Brussels, well actually I'm in Lubbeek which is about 20km outisde of Brussels, right now. I'm staying with my boss and his family until I find an apartment but I'm getting way ahead of myself and I'm starting in the middle instead of the beginning where things aught to start.

Surprisingly, I wasn't nervous at all about this trip in the few days leading up to it. I'd prepared myself well enough, had everything printed out, had scoped out places I wanted to go, written an itinerary, and all that good stuff. I waited until the day I was leaving to pack so I could lay everything all out and figure out what I wanted to leave behind and what I was missing (I also took pictures of everything I brought so that in the unlikely case that my luggage was lost I had evidence of what was in it). The minute I picked up my luggage from the carrousel in Paris I realized I'd packed way too much. I should have bought a suitcase half the size of the one I got and only brought what I could fit in that and my backpack (oh yeah, I got a full on backpacking backpack so I have it for when me and some friends walk across Spain later this year!).

Anyway, the flight was decent. Before I left I read up on how to avoid jetlag. The most important thing, it seems, is to stay hydrated. And after that, it is to adjust to the new time zone as quickly as possible. Since I was arriving in the morning most places recommended to either get a full sleep on the plane or stay up all the next day and go to sleep at 10pm at the earliest. It had been my intention to do the former but I couldn't fall asleep on the plane so I watched the movies instead; it was sooo cool because they had a screen for every seat and you could choose what movie you wanted to watch. I watched Easy A which I'd been wanting to watch forever and something else that I don't remember now, meh.

I got to the Paris airport, picked up my luggage and attempted to find the RER (kind of like the metro but it goes further outside of Paris) that would take me to Gare du Nord. I seriously walked in a circle for about 20 minutes because the elevator that led you there was only marked on one side and I kept missing it. I left my huge suitcase in a luggage locker in the Gare du Nord and then attempted to find my hostel. I had looked at a map before I left to familiarize myself with the route I'd need to take to get there. On the map, what looked like 1 block actually corresponded to about 10 or 12 so what looked like it would take about 20 minutes took quite a bit longer. I got a little bit lost in the process. There were maps of the city around and I knew where I was supposed to end up generally so I tried to follow those until I got there. The street my hostel was on wasn't actually on the map though oh and on that note: it took me about 30 minutes of walking around to figure out how the streets were labeled. They don't have street sign poles on the corner; instead there is a plaque mounted on the building at the corner. I would walk to an intersection, not be able to find the sign and then turn a random direction hoping it was mostly right. And about half the times I did that I was right at the correct intersection and if I'd taken the other street I would have gotten there. I ended up going to a Starbucks across the street from the Moulin Rouge and using their internet on my iPod to pull up a map and I followed that to get to my hostel. I think I got to the train station about 9am or so and I didn't get to the hostel until 12:30.

Anyway, I'll continue the update later as I have a lot to write about still and I don't particularly feel like typing anymore, lawl.