The Big Apple

Ah, New York City. The place where you can feel like a honcho and cross the street with balls made of steel, but also feel completely insignificant among the teeming schools of bodies, each entering and exiting the subway on their various paths to and from oblivion. The sights! The sounds! The tastes!

Last week, my family and I jumped onto a plane to visit my brother, who is partaking in a summer fellowship at one of the medical schools in Manhattan. This plane was having trouble with one of its cargo doors, so I was tragically torn away from the seat that I took 2 hours to get acquainted with to board yet another trusty jet. During the announcement in which the captain was asking us to deplane, I was musing academically about how we, in a large metal capsule of steel and various engine parts, could possibly be afloat in the air. Funny enough, there was a woman one row back who was screaming the ears off of her poor 20-something year old son that didn't have so much as a clue about how to fix the cargo door of a commercial airplane. I imagine his mother was wondering the opposite. And by "opposite" I mean the absolute injustice that the crew would dare keep us waiting. The poor son looked about as flushed as the big apple we were meant to fly to. 

Not to keep you in suspense, but we got there, 7 hours and two cups of Minute Maid OJs later... 

Having spent a year abroad hopping from European city to European city exposed me to about as much cosmopolitan atmosphere as one really needs to get a grasp of navigating subways and landmarks, so being in NYC wasn't a sensory overload as I imagine it would be for some. I felt more at home, in fact. I love the towering skyscrapers looming over one way avenues, making four lane streets look narrow. The nonchalance of jaywalkers dodging equally-determined cars to get home brings a busy disorder to the strategically-designed grid.

Planning my trip at the butt-end of June meant facing the start of the notorious heat of the City. Though not comparable to the sweltering humidity in areas of East Asia, the temperature in New York City combined with the close quarters of your fellow sardines marching about in a can of sweat, loosed neckties and tourists was slightly less than comfortable. Hydrating is of the essence and the key to good travel in this season.

As many of you know, I strongly believe that tasting the city you're experiencing is equally as important as seeing or hearing it, so my brother obliged to taking me to partake in his favourite street food: halal chicken and lamb over rice.

Halal food is food that is considered palatable by people of muslim faith, and boy, is it tasty. Unlike the food carts that I'm used to seeing in San Diego, these carts actually differed in the way their fare tasted. One of the carts on Ave of the Americas was simpler than another closer to 2nd and 65th, which was far more aromatic and packed with earthy spices. The former, I would argue, is more tourist friendly, or westernised. Still very amazing. Possibly one of my favourite foods that I sampled in the Big Apple. 

My other food cart experience started with me trying to relive the quintessential patronage of the hot dog cart. I probably visited the wrong cart because it turned out to be a wrong decision. Or I suppose NYC has moved on to bigger and better things other than the American wurst. Bland and disappointing, the unexciting hot dog sadly stared me in the face as I regretted using precious stomach space and moved on to set my eyes on bigger and better things...

Meet Ippudo's ramen! Just looking at the broth here is making me salivate. The noodle house had a line outside the door before it even opened, but we happily jumped in, anticipating our taste buds to be floored. I was referred to this place by some friends, and seeing the queue just made the hype even more real. The ambiance of the restaurant was modern with Japanese flair, as appropriate: ramen is not just the name for the dehydrated instant noodles you can pick up from your local market or 99 Cents store-- ramen is a Japanese take on Chinese noodles and is frequently served with generous toppings of pork belly, green onions, bamboo shoots, mushrooms, etc... Sometimes the broth, which is made from luxuriously stewing the pork belly, is simmered for 60 hours, beckoning the richest of flavours. Topped with various accoutrements and steeped in a classic miso tinted broth, the homemade noodles makes Ippudo's ramen worthy of a bow.

My only bone to pick with the place is the price. Maybe Manhattan is just getting used to having the luxury of ramen houses. Maybe I'm just spoiled in SoCal that getting an expensive bowl of ramen will cost you $9. Spending $15 on a bowl is a splurge. 

On to dessert!

To satisfy the sweets-sectors of our taste palettes, we bounced around the notorious haunts: Amorino for spectacular gelato, Magnolia's to take a whack at the cupcakes and lemonbars, Veneiro's for their house cannoli, Milk to sample their famous crack pie, Quickly's to partake in Taiwanese boba and Laudrée for the colourful little miracles known as macarons. 

I like macarons. Enough to have gone on a quest to make them myself and Laudrée, the original macaroner, of course, is going to be the best I've ever had. Not only that, but it was a way for me to check my own cookies against the original. Result? I'm not doing bad...

I do have to warn the casual foodie, however... expect to drop around $70 for a box of two dozen macs. They are the most pretentious little cookies on the face of the planet. Every time I make a batch, I stare at them as if I'd just birthed a baking tray full of little children, each meticulously carried and had their guts piped into them. 

In the middle of our trip, we were fortunate enough to swing by Hillsong's Salvation Army Theatre for a Sunday evening service. So was the rest of NYC. The queue to get into the building stretched down the street and wrapped around the block! To my good luck, Banning Liebscher of Jesus Culture was speaking that night. Contain myself, I could not. That, and the great worship, completely made it worth it. 

Ah, the shopping in the Big Apple... not that I'm not constantly surrounded by shopping centres, markets and malls wherever I go (come to think of it, it would be a MASSIVE challenge to travel somewhere and not be faced with commercial commerce). Madison, Fifth, Union... all areas loaded with flagship stores. From Japan's Uniqlo to Britain's TopShop to H&M to Gucci to Chloé, your senses and wallets will be absolutely bombarded with summer "sales," and this is all outside of Sak's Fifth. Do note, however, that these shopping districts aren't your basic indulgences. Manhattan is Manhattan. Unless you're dressed the part with your Louboutins and Hermes handbag, don't expect to be paid a terrible lot of attention to. Frankly, I'm alright with this. I don't need someone to tell me what I can afford and what I need to sell my Civic to buy. Nonetheless, still a more comfortable experience than in China where my friends and I nearly got punched out for haggling. 

For those not interested in looking like a tourist whatsoever, you can take on the disposition of a flaneur, or more casually, a people-watcher. Central Park is ideal for that type of travel, as it stretches on forever, contains both tourists and locals, and is a moderate escape from the heat that's neither a store nor a museum.

Like London's Hyde Park, Central Park boasts many statues, that of the whimsical and the memorial type. From Alice in Wonderland to Balto to European royalty, the Park's got it all. Not to mention the zoo, a castle and various bodies of water in which radio-controlled sailboats, ducks, and algae can be found. 

You might ask about Times Square, and to that I would say, only for a quick picture and a thousand dollars would I ever go there again. The Square is a cocktail of electronic billboards advertising, well... advertisements. Everything from plays to vodka to banking. Krakauer would be proud of how far the spectacle has come. It's the Genghis Khan of nightmarish constipations of tourists in their socks and sandals, waving sad and beaten city maps in vain efforts to brush the humidity from their sunburnt sarcophaguses. You may be surprised at how small or how big it actually is, depending on your ability to be fooled by cameras, but that astonishment will wane quickly to be replaced by your frustration of the crowds, milling about like armies of blind ants going in every which way they please, or don't please. (I honestly think the trouble is that people walking around the area realise that every direction they head in is one they don't want to be going in, but in frustration they change their route, making yet the same mistake again.) Nonetheless, it is a frustrating site, topped with cheesy costumed characters whose trademarks are about as real as maraschino cherries.

A tourist site that I could sponsor more than a trip to Times Square would be the NBC tour at 30 Rockefeller Center. Not entirely sure of how popular the tours were, I was able to reserve tickets for an afternoon that very morning via phone. The tour is led by NBC pages, who have gone through a notoriously competitive process to land the most thankless job in the company. Despite how strenuous various articles and interviews make the job sound, I believe there's much more glory at the end of the tunnel for these hardworking pages. The tour takes you through various studios, depending on the day and season during which you visit and at the end, you're privileged to a special surprise in which the pages select two volunteers from among your group. I will leave the surprise for you to discover, but my youngest brother and I were picked from among the bunch. If you're not familiar with tv/film production, it will be quite the experience. Even if you are, it's still a fun activity to partake in, so when the page asks for volunteers, raise your hand. If you're shy, all the better!

I'd like to end the entry with something I applaud NYC for: their subway system. Being from LA, where the public transit system has much room for improvement, the subway is a breath of freshly circulated and exhausted air (as bad as that sounds, it was actually meant as a compliment). The convenience at which I was allowed through the subway transit wasn't as much as that of London, but the wee bit of extra walking never killed anyone... I think. I missed having a person at every single tube entrance and exit directing and redirecting tourists towards the correct line, but NYC, I suppose, expects everyone to be wearing their big boy and big girl pants to man up and figure it out. Nonetheless, the lines are simple enough to figure out--the one aspect that may take getting used to is figuring out which lines are local and which skip stops. Regardless of this, subway maps are still a mountainous feat of design expertise. Truly. 

Could I live in Manhattan? Short answer, yes. I love the cityscape. And being in my younger years, I think I'd be able to handle it better now than later (physically yes, financially no). There's something to be said about being able to pat yourself on the back for making it in such a fast-paced rhythm, and feeling how small you actually are amongst the world's population is easy, as long as you're not given to feeling too insignificant. Living and breathing around that many people every day is humbling, but dangerous in some ways, as you have no choice but to somehow forget that the bodies around you are significant. Rationalising the existence of others allows our minds to cope with how small we are, but it has proved to be one of the most destructive and lethal defaults in the history of humanity. That being said, the fact that NYC, among other enormous metropolitan cities, thrives in light of this just demonstrates that there is goodness in the world. 

A Trip Down History Lane...

So we finally arrived in Berlin at 11:00 at night, just enough time to take the U-bahn (Berlin's version of the metro/underground) half way to our destination. Tragic. At midnight we got kicked off the U-bahn. Luckily we figured out how to catch a cab to our hostel, St. Christopher's (which is a really good one, if you ever are looking for a place to stay in Berlin).

In the morning, we had the hostel-provided breakfast and went to hunt for a free walking tour (these tours are ACTUALLY free and can be found is most major tourist-attracting cities; the guides are trained and very passionate historians and are paid by tips collected at the end of the tour). We stopped at the Brandenburg gate to scope out the tour.


There were quite a few people waiting for the tour so they split us up among several tourguides, some that spoke in Spanish others in French, others in German, etc... I was really impressed that they were so well prepared and organised for a free service!

The free tour was incredibly extensive and lasted a good couple hours. Not only that, it was incredibly well-led and interesting! Our tourguide, George, took us all over the main city (be warned, a lot of walking is done, but it's worth it!)

One of our first stops was this stunning memorial:

The tour also takes you to part of the remains of the Berlin wall, Hotel Adlon (where many presidents have stayed and where Michael Jackson held his baby out of a window), Checkpoint Charlie, the university, various monuments and memorials, the old Nazi headquarters, where Hitler is actually buried (what a surprise!) and other pieces of history. The stops are brief, but the tourguides are thorough and well-educated to tell you what you need.

Hotel Adlon (and our guide, George, with crazy-cool facial hair!)

Checkpoint Charlie, the most well-known crossing point through the Berlin Wall

Berliner Dom (Berlin Cathedral)

Nazi Headquarters

Nazi Party mural: crazy stuff, eh?

Everything you need to know about the city was basically covered on the tour; it's an excellent way to whet your appetite if you're a history nerd like me. After getting a dose of the city's past while looking at the places where these things actually occurred, even the map started to look different to me.

Trying to understand the history of WWII in relation to the city and the German people was something I'd also wondered about and even that was covered in the tour. It wasn't just the Jews and the Roma people that lived in fear of the Nazi regime; normal German civilians did too! They were forced to join or become the enemy of the party. It was amazing to see the city become a symbol of good's triumph over evil (even though the good comes with kitschy gift shops and parades of fat tourists, it's still a much better step forward that what could have been). Little did I know that a few months later I would be stepping into Austria's Auschwitz, an area of Europe that received tenfold the amount of collateral damage from the holocaust. The free tour was a priceless introduction to the tour I took in the concentration camp at Auschwitz and Birkenau. So much emotional and spiritual dimension was added to my study abroad experience thanks to a few hours lent to history. It made my trip to Europe worth much more.

Oh... you were probably wondering what that last picture was... let's have a look at it again:

Hitler is buried there... yes, underneath a parking lot. George, our guide, told us that nazi-loyalists have tried to recover his remains; the UN knew this would be happening, so they decided to rest Hitler in an inconspicuous and rather unglorified area. Speaking of unglorified, locals walk their dogs to this lot to let their canines do their business.

Following our tour, we hit the city for some foodventures! I'll let my fellow foodies have a look at my documentation here, and spare everyone else the delicious details. ;)

Berlin, like other major cities, is home to tons of awesome museums! I got my fix of Sandro Botticelli and really eclectic musical instruments in the museum districts. There's even an "island" in the middle of the city called "Museum Island," home to the Pergamon, Bode-Museum and Altes Museum.

I was a fan of the Gemäldegalerie because they had this and other Botticellis:

The Musikinstrumenten was quite the interesting place. Filled with crazy pianos, guitars, see-through violins, it's an Eden for the musical nerd.

How would you even begin to play that?!

In a more obscure part of the main city is another great museum, the Jüdisches Museum. This one's about Jewish culture and the people; there are details about the holocaust, but the exhibits choose to focus on the entire history of Jewish people as well as what life is like today for them. Observe one of my favourite parts of the museum: the assorted yarmulkes!

Yes, they have a Friends yarmulke... WIN.

Now, no trip to Germany is complete without sampling some of the country's beer, right?

This wheat beer is frequently mixed with lemonade (or what we in the U.S. would call lemon Minute Maid) and that's probably why I liked it so much. (Want more about German food?) It was light in body, but had an excellent wheat taste, not too heavily tasting of alcohol either.

And of course, what is a visit to a European city without hitting up their chocolate shops?

Fassbender and Rauch was the main chocolatier in Berlin, claiming to be the "World's Largest Chocolate House." For the scoop on the different wursts/sausages, you'll have to hit my food blog. :)

Stay tuned for more Europe!

Barcelona, Espana!

Blogging Location: The flat, listening to Christmas music, because that's what I do... in June. And all 11 other months.

So after arriving in Barcelona in the evening, we headed off for our hostel, which turned out to be quite charming. We stayed in Rambla's Home, a hostel past La Rambla, one the liveliest streets, if not THE liveliest street, in central Barcelona. Our hostel actually looked like a home and the staff were very nice. It looked EXTRA comforting because for some reason it took us an hour to navigate our hostel, despite the fact that it was close to where we were dropped off. :-/ Nonetheless, it was a great hostel. Probably one of the best I've stayed in all year. I recommend it.

First of all, let me tell you: I LOVE the Spanish accent. The simplest way I can explain it is that their 'j' sounds isn't like the Mexican 'h' but more gutteral... YouTube it. They also speak with a lisp. So it's not "barr-sa-loh-nah," it's "bar-theh-loh-nah." :) Muy adorable! Did I mention that a huge part of my Easter trip was to learn some lingo? As a good ol' Californian (or as some say, "Mexifornian") I know a wee bit of Spanish so I tried to practice as much as I knew how. Of course, my vocab mostly consists of gracias, por favor, hola, donde esta...?, hace frio, and as an avid shopper, who could forget?: cuanto cuesta (rough translation of "how much does this cost?").

On our first whole day, we set out to explore the city; what made such a huge difference was that we were traveling with our friend that had been to Barcelona 3 times prior to this trip, so she knew her way around and even got to finding some hidden jewels of Barcelona, including restaurants, bars, and sales! The weather was mostly overcast, but we had an occasional spot of sun and a drizzle of rain. It was warm enough for me to walk around in a t-shirt and flip flops, and you won't believe how exciting this was for me, having lived in and survived an unusually snowy English winter. Our first day, we visited one of Barcelona's most famous landmarks, La Sagrada Familia. This Roman-Catholic church has been under construction forever and still is. So many styles have been mashed onto it's structure that it's impossible to label its architecture. It's a Frankenstein of works that's quite a magnificent site.


For lunch, we visited a little restaurant behind La Rambla called Romesco and tried our hand at some local food, which included rabbit, salmon, trout, and sheep's brain. Yes, you heard right. (I'll cover more of this on my food blog over the summer.) Afterwards, we went for a stroll to find L'Ovella Negra, a bar that was said to have amazing sangria. And BOY was that true. As one that doesn't like the taste of alcohol at all, I have to say this was easily the best sangria I've had and the fruit was delicious! :) Naturally, I turned just as red as the sangria...
While we were still set on food, we decided to crash the local market, which was gorgeous! One of the most beautiful markets I've ever seen; the fruits, vegetables, sweets, breads and fish and poultry was laid out so tantalizingly. However, this was not what we came to the market for... we came for the freshly squeezed fruit juices. In the late afternoon, these juices went on sale for less than half price. A cup would normally run for 1-2€ each, but in the early evening the prices could drop by half easily. These aren't your normal fruit juices either... Some of the flavours consisted of coconut-blackberry, mango-passion-fruit, strawberry-papaya, guava-coconut, kiwi-banana, etc... I'm a sucker for tropical fruits! Some of us got as many as 8 cups that day. :P



For a night out in Barcelona, we went to see was a bar called Chipito, where they served all sorts of crazy shots. All of their recipes are secrets; the bottles behind the bar have their labels covered by number placards. For example, one was called the "Harry Potter" and they poured the shot, put a slice of orange on top, chucked a LOAD of sugar on top, sprayed the entire thing with something edible, yet flammable and lit the whole shot on fire. The bartender then took a shaker and ignited little sparks all around the shot, blew the flame out, had the customer eat the orange and then drink the shot. Another, called the "Boyscout" was similar, but instead of adding an orange slice, they gave a skewer with a marshmallow that could be roasted over the flaming shot glass. I wasn't allowed to take pictures here, but it was quite a fun place.

The next day we all met up at Mc Donalds. I know, all Mc Donalds' are the same around the world... but no! They aren't... My favourite difference between some of those in Europe and those in America are the "gelat cafes," which is coffee with soft serve in it! Amazing. Anyways, while a couple of us were ordering these, one of our friends' entire bag got nicked! She didn't get pickpocketed, her bag was lifted without notice. Throughout my travels, I've noticed that whenever "Barcelona" or "La Rambla" is mentioned in hostels or amongst fellow travelers, there is always a groan, maybe a chuckle and a shake of a head. The mere mention of either names always triggers memories of gypsy* theft. Despite the setback, we headed for the American Embassy where she was able to get a replacement passport within a couple hours.

After all that, we headed for Park Guell, a park full of architecture designed by Gaudi. Even his house is there. Anyways, it looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss book. Honest. It was pretty wicked.




I apologise for the significant lack of photos here... lo siento! I did not format my memory card before I started snapping and ran out of space just after Barcelona... oddly enough a 4 gig memory card was only 12€. I don't know how much it should be, but where I'm from, that is DEAD CHEAP. Onwards!
It was our last night in Barcelona so we decided to go all out on some snack-age. We went to a restaurant and ordered some churros con chocolate and the Spanish version of creme brulee. We headed back to our hostel just in time for free paella y sangria night! Yes, every Thursday, Rambla's Home does cooks paella and makes sangria for her guests. Awesome. We had a hankering for more of L'ovella Negra's sangria, so back we went and toasted to a good trip in Barcelona!


At about 4AM, we woke up to get to the bus station; flying budget airlines boasts one addition disadvantage to the obvious ones... they always fly out of airports that aren't really in the city's main airport. We were to fly out from Girona instead of Barcelona. Getting to the bus station, we made our coach by God's grace. Due to unfamiliar metro lines and poor planning, we arrived late to the bus station and missed our 5:45am bus. The next bus was at 7am and we were going to be late for our flight. Now, I don't know where this bus driver came from, but around 6:11am, he came up to us and asked us if we were headed for the airport. Si! Oddly enough, there was no bus scheduled for 6:20am, but because of this miracle, we made our Ryanair flight to Rome! PTL!

A Really Cool Layover...

Blogging Location: Good ol' flat... next to my watercolour set and while waiting for an episode of Modern Family to fully load (hilarious show, by the way... my new fave.)


It's a GORGEOUS day in Leeds, sitting at about the low 70's in temp; it's actually warmer here than in some parts of CA. Who'dve thunk? Oh, and the sun sets at 9:30pm. WILD.
Anyways, I'm sorry for not blogging as much as I thought I would this week; I've been just relaxing before the exam-week to come. Here goes...

So from where we left off in Amsterdam, my friends and I had to get to the airport for a morning flight; this involved leaving the hostel at 5am to get to the train station and eventually the airport. Kind of a pain in the butt since we had no clue of our way around Amsterdam! The city centre is enormous and we'd only been there for a day and a half. In addition, it was there that I learned that if I want to know my way around a place, I've gotta be the one doing the navigating. (Yes, I learn the hard way.) After quite a stressful time, we got to the train station and the airport and took off for a day in Geneva, Switzerland.


So when we booked the trip, my friend Tatiana and I realized that we could either a) spend the night in the Liverpool airport or b) spend a day in Geneva; both options were the same price! Neither of us had been to Geneva, so why not? When we arrived in Geneva, we got off the plane and just on the tarmac we could see gorgeous mountains capped with snow! A massive Swiss flag nearby helped the ambiance as well. In the city centre, a short train ride away, we walked around with the help of city maps planted every few corners.
As we walked out of the train station, I saw a small blond guy with a beard waiting for a cable car that looked oddly familiar. "Hey Jesse," I said incredibly casually as if I'd seen him every day of my life. He turned around rather surprised. Ha! So it WAS my Social Communications TA! He's been a TA at Leeds, and while not British, but Canadian, he's put up with my professor (who constantly takes jabs at North Americans-- both Americans and "fake Americans"/Canadians) for quite some time. Anyways, it turns out he was just touring Switzerland for Easter Break. Cool. For those of you that know me pretty well, it's not unusual for me to run into a teacher/TA/professor in another country.
The highlight of the city for me was Lake Geneva, a lake in the centre that had a massive fountain called Jet d'Eau. Not only was that amazing (spouting at about 450 feet in the air, but the water was beautifully turquoise and clean! If you got close enough and the wind changed direction suddenly, you could end up in the splash zone and look as if you just got off the Log Ride at Six Flags.




It wouldn't really be fair to give you a summation of Geneva based off of what I saw, but it seemed a nice little city. There was a University and a lot of the public transport consisted of cable car and buses. Intercity transport is all trains. The city is a mix of modern buildings and some older-looking buildings. It didn't have a lot of sites, but was a nice place to be.
So apart from feeding the swans, getting ice cream, and just going for a mooch (walk), seeing a clock made out of flowers, we also went to check out St. Pierre's Cathedral and indulged in some Swiss hot chocolate! :)




Next, we took a lovely ride on a train to a trainyard by accident in our attempt to get back to the airport, but luckily we had enough time to get shunted back to the station, catch another train and make our connecting flight. Praise the Lord! And now off to Barcelona!

Fun fact: Switzerland has 4 spoken languages: Swiss-German, German, Italian and French. In Geneva, we got to practice a little French. Lots of 'merci beaucoup's and 'sil vous plait's.

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Blogging location: Ruminating on memories in the good ol' flat... and ignoring my coursework... a little. Also sporting spectacles... There's a story to this for Lisbon. But that's later.


The canals in this city are gorgeous. The Dutch houses are also really quaint and the staircases are rather treacherous because of how small and tall they are (imagine only being able to fit half your foot on each step). The Dutch are supposedly some of the tallest people in the world, so houses have high ceilings, making the staircases even longer, steeper and more scary to climb.
Unfortunately, Amsterdam does have it's reputation (I will get to this soon). The city centre seems to lack even the tacky traditional culture. Everywhere I looked, the restaurants and stores all were themed with some other culture (for Australia, I guess they couldn't think of anything or couldn't sell vegemite to the local community, so they just have ice cream shops called "Australia"). I rarely saw anything Dutch! It was so different from the other places I'd been before. We had to rummage through the city to find local markets that sold cheese to get our Dutch on. Anyways, enough of globalisation...


Cheese
Cheese, glorious cheese.
My favourite souvenir from this entire trip has actually been from Amsterdam and it is the spade-shaped tool you see in the photo above... a cheese slicer! It says "Holland" on it, so that justified me buying it. That and we needed it for lunch because we went downtown on one of those cheese booths at a street market and we had nothing to eat it with. We bought two types of cheese, one spiced with cumin and another with various herbs such as parsley and oregano (hey, we're in Amsterdam, so that might not have been all the "herbs" put into the cheese... but I didn't feel funny afterwards, which is a good sign).
How was the cheese, you ask? Delicious! Europe in general has amazing cheese, and I'm a huge fan, so I figured I'd try cheese everywhere I could. The cumin cheese was half way in between a cheddar and brie texture, so more difficult to slice, but just as delicious as the herb-cheese.


The Redlight District
It was what I thought it would be. The street was just like the others with street lamps, but the rest of the night was illuminated by fluorescent glows of a seeping red, neon green, tacky purple and electric blue. We popped over on a Sunday night, which was relatively empty, but we did see the prostitutes sitting in the windows (I had seen an art exhibit earlier this year in London where a couple remade the Redlight District out of mannequins). Most of them were texting on their Blackberries. A few were gyrating and doing their thing, but for the most part, Sunday night wasn't a busy one for anybody. What hit me was actually looking into the eyes of these women: they're real people. I know this is obvious, but remove yourself from the computer monitor and go there yourself to get a grasp of the reality. Are eyes not the window to the soul?
These women selling themselves are just like me and just like you. They have families-- they didn't just pop out of the ground. They have friends-- they weren't made in a factory. They're people-- they go grocery shopping and pay bills just like everybody else. If you saw one of these girls in a convenience store, having no idea of her job, and she asked you for the time, you would tell her it was a quarter-to and not think anything else. These women have histories before and after you've spotted them in their windows, regardless of how quickly you look away. What separates us from them is how they see themselves and their bodies.
I actually had the opportunity-- whether this is a good or bad one is your decision-- to see a man stop at a window to watch the lady in the window beckon him forward, contemplate for a while, and then march straight into one of those buildings. My stomach twisted itself and jerked a bit. Something about the way he strode through that door seemed very inhuman. If you had seen him walk into a library that way, it would have made you wonder what sort of books he had in mind. A lot about this wasn't right and I didn't just feel that way because of my conscious. The aura was all wrong. Somewhere along the line something went wrong in the way we humans have decided the acceptable level of respect with which to treat each other and ourselves.

On another note, more sites!
We went and saw the Van Gogh Museum the morning after our evening peruse around the town and it was fantastic even though there wasn't a student discount... Highly recommend it.
"... to paint 'what I am not yet able to, in order to learn how to do it'" - Van Gogh


We also ventured to the Anne Frank House (not her actual house, but the house that she and her family hid in during the Holocaust). While the house has been preserved extremely well, Otto Frank, Anne's father requested that the rooms be left empty of any original furniture. Some of the photos that Anne pasted to her bedroom walls are still there and the height markings that her mother made of her and her sister are there as well. Unfortunately, photos could not be taken inside the museum.


Well, anyways, that's about all I have time for at the moment. I'm leaving for Poland early tomorrow, so I have to catch some shut eye. I will probably add more to this entry, but I just wanted to post something for you to read. ;)
Thanks for the continued prayers!
Toodles!
RxW

Stranded

Blogging Location: A hostel in Lisbon, Portugal, using the free computers and internet. God bless them.

Stuck!
If you read the papers or watch the news, you'll know that there's been a massive air disruption in Europe caused by the Icelandic volcano Effyjavybooboo: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TRAVEL/04/18/iceland.volcano.europe.flights/index.html?hpt=T1
So my flight to Liverpool was canceled today and I rescheduled for a week from today, but there's a problem: class starts tomorrow. SO my friend and I are launching our own escapade to get back to Leeds within about a week (at least that's our goal). We'll be taking mostly buses as they are far less pricey than trains and staying in hostels along the way. The plan at the moment is to get to Paris and take the chunnel back to jolly old England and finally the train to Leeds. The first step is a bus to Seville... from then on, there's nothing planned. This is probably the least planned I've ever had my life, so as exciting as this sounds, it's pretty scary for someone as semi-type-A as me. Nonetheless, I have faith in Jesus to get us back safely and on His watch with plenty of stories to tell.
If I could ask for you guys to pray for safety and a speedy return for us, that would be amazing!

You never know what temporal days may bring
Laugh, love, live free and sing
When life is in discord
Praise ye the Lord*

Yours Truly.

*"Paperthin Hymn," Anberlin

A Quick Hello!

Hey everyone! Gruezi! Guten tag! Hola! Hallo! Bonjour! Bonjourno!
Just wanted to say hello from Lisbon, Portugal. I'm on the last leg of my Easter break travel before I go back to Leeds. It's raining like El Niño here, but it's still nice to be in a place where I don't need my coat. I do need an umbrella though. :P I should go buy one soon.

Anyways, it's been crazy living out of a suitcase for 4 weeks. I feel like George Clooney in Up in the Air (a fantastic film, by the way-- so is Shutter Island, but that's another story). I've been flying 1-3 times a week and have been documenting my meals closely for my food blog (see sidebar for link). For a preview, I've seen the Roman Coliseum, been to a Viennese Opera, stayed in jail for a few nights (don't worry, it's not what you think), strolled past the Red Light District in Amsterdam, slept in an airport, ate street food (not roadkill-- distinct difference), biked lakeside along Luzern, etc... Lots of prayers have been answered as well, big and small. There's much more for me to tell you, but that will have to wait till after! I may abandon some coursework in Leeds to blog completely, but I can't abandon my essays completely, so no promises on my conciseness. Hope every one of you have had amazing spring breaks and what not! Lisboa waits for no one!

See you on the other side,
rXw

P.S. Stoked to eat some pastels. ;)

Hasta La Vista, Baby!

Blogging Location: Flat, packing at the mo'

So let me catch you up a bit...

.:London Fashion Weekend:.

Look at me participating in mass consumerism...

I will admit, so I can get admitting out of the way, that London Fashion Weekend was not what I thought it was going to be on several counts... It was definitely a shopping experience as they claimed it would be. I expected everyone to be extravagantly well-dressed, enough to make me feel bashful, but for the most part, not everyone were fashionistas. I saw a lot of Uggs (thank goodness there were no Crocs) and I do believe I saw a couple girls in sweatpants... /shock
The catwalk wasn't as professional as I expected either. None of the designers were announced with the outfits modeled. Odd. And as much as I love vintage clothes, I didn't pay money to see outfits from 40-odd years ago. Show me something new!
Don't get me started on the gift bag that came with the ticket... Let's just say the contents were similar to an easter-egg hunt in the Costco consisting of samples from the beauty aisle. They did throw in a little bottle of Bailey's, which I can't complain about... It's one of the few drinks that actually taste decent to me...
Now, on the other hand, LFWE was pretty fun for shopping; plenty of labels-- although not as many high end ones as I expected, not that I could afford it-- I noticed that for certain stalls, a lot of the clothes were 'rejects.' I'm kind of a village idiot, but I know the difference between 'style' and 'oopsie.'
I bought a couple pieces, one from Ella Moss and one from Buddhist Punk, both of which I got at ridiculously good discounts, so I can be fairly happy with that.



Some photos at the catwalk:





After the crazy extravaganza, my friends and I went for an asian-food run. A couple of the girls we were with had Chinese food the night before, so we went with Japanese (ironically, the entire staff was Chinese). But the food was good and I got my sushi fix.


All in all, it was worth the trip to London, but I think it's a one-time thing. I'm quite satisfied shopping at thrift-stores, thank you.

.:Birmingham:.
It took about 4 hours by coach to get to Birmingham, but it was definitely day-trip worthy. Why? We went to CADBURY WORLD!
Cadbury is England's main chocolate maker, probably at the same level as Hershey's in the US, but it tastes SO much better, hence our trip to the theme park. (I'd like to say that half my English experience has been Cadbury, but I don't think my program would like to hear that much...)


It was about £10 to get into Cadbury World (with student discount, yes! I LOVE being a student!), but we got about three full-size bars of chocolate, which were considered "samples," like it's NO BIG DEAL. They were delicious. While not a factory, Cadbury World had a lot of demos for how they make their chocolate. No photos were allowed in those parts to keep the secret recipe... I CAN tell you, however, that they did not mix their chocolate by waterfall... and they put a glass and a half of milk in their bars.
The park started off with a history of the discovery of cocoa-- well, more like the theft of it from the Aztecs. Anyways, they had a cool set up with wax Aztecs and Spaniards, fake trees, fake giant snakes, etc... Since it's a one-way self-guided tour of a park, the next bit was chocolate's history as a sweet confectionary. They had little hologram shows and the like to explain things. Corny, but cute.


Finally! An English gentleman!-- oh, wait, you're made of plastic.


Ever been on that Bug's Life attraction at Disney CA Adventure? The one that scares the flying crap out of you with the special 4-D, invasive effects? There was something like that at Cadbury World. You get shaken, jolted, mixed, heated up and nearly melted, but they made their point. Next up! There was actually a little ride! Imagine the Alice in Wonderland ride at Disneyland mixed with the Peter Pan ride and the Winnie the Pooh ride. They had these little characters that were meant to be cocoa beans. The drawings of them were adorable, but as models they were... less cute. Look, you can even get your picture with one:

How cool is that guy's jumper?

.:Leeds:.
So I usually only write about traveling because I assume that's what everyone's interested in... but I DO do work... I just turned in an essay and a workbook yesterday before the end of term, and boy did I slave away. I'm enrolled this semester in Social Communications: Processes and Effects, Processes of Performing 2: Text and Image and Technique and Improvisation, Forensic Psychology and Film Music. Unlike last semester, I'm actually enjoying all these modules. Though Forensic psych is a 10am class and they don't take roll, it's cool enough for me to get up for.
In terms of flat life, I'm in a self-catered accommodation, so been doing a lot of cooking on my own. Lots of experimenting... I'm not going to go through all the dishes and desserts I've been creating, but I have to share this photo:

My flat mate Laura buy bananas from the local farmer's market (don't ask me where the bananas come from-- there's AIN'T enough sun in England to grow anything... except mushroom, which grow in the dark...) and for a pound, you can get about 20-30 bananas. Yeah, that's a lot. So we made banana cream pie! And we had leftover egg whites, so I whipped the living daylights out of them and made a meringue topping. Great. :)

.:TTFN:.

So in regards to the title of my blog... I'm leaving Leeds for a month! Just when the weather has started to get warm (when it's above 50*F here, that's warm). Oddly enough, I've gotten so used to the cold that anything above 55*F gets me to break out in a sweat when I'm walking to uni or town. I think my pores have put on their own little eskimo jackets... must ask them to start changing for the next season.
Where am I going, you ask? Look for the select dots:

Anyways, the weather doesn't look so great for where we're heading... It looks like rain and cold every where, but it will be great nonetheless. I'm going to be completely honest though: I'm DREADING being exhausted... One gets little to no sleep in hostels, not to mention walking and sightseeing all day... but I'm going to definitely pray for energy and sustenance! And gonna hope I catch all my flights and trains and such... if I miss one little flight, it's a crazy domino effect of disaster!
Anyways, if anyone could spare any prayer for safety that would be fantastic!
Talk to you in a month!xx

-Raech