To quote the great Patrick Johnson: Holy fucking shit balls.
I have nothing else to say after just spending nearly two hours trying to book plane tickets for various travel around Europe. At this point, I'm not sure if I could come up with a less enjoyable process of booking tickets, even if I was being held at knifepoint in a Moroccan alley (more of that to come later).
In two hours, I have booked (attempted, at least) five different flights on four different airlines. Each one of course required me to reenter all my information, and three of them required trying multiple different credit and debit cards, as each airline has its own master Roulette wheel to determine which cards it will be accepting on any given day. To make things even better, my flight on Transavia (a Dutch airline -- the entire transactions of which were conducted online, in Dutch, with great help from Google Language Tools) decided that it would be fun to charge my card twice, even though, as directed, I did not try to refresh my page or navigate away at any time. Lucky for me, this double charge was just enough to send my bank account into the negative. Now, due to no fault of mine, I have an account balance of -$123.
I am looking forward to the overdraft fee from the bank almost as much as I am looking forward to the struggle of trying to recoup my $600 from an airline that conducts all of its business in Dutch. I also look forward to my cell phone bill, which will probably have higher numbers than I was planning on after being put on hold for a couple of minutes on an international call. All this and more to come in the next few days -- stay tuned!
On the bright side of things -- and it is a significant bright side -- I am in the process of hammering down some of the best three weeks of travel I will ever see.
My three week midterm break starts on October 11th, at which point I will begin a week-long trip to Sweden and Finland with my architecture program. I'm looking forward to seeing more of Scandinavia, and after seeing some Finnish design in my 20th Century Danish Design course the other day, I think that Finland may be the last great hope for impressive Nordic architecture.
Following that week of travel, I will be returning to Copenhagen to meet up with the ole Pops. We're planning on one day for me to drag him around Copenhagen via bicycle, and then shuttling off to elsewhere in Europe. In this case, Elsewhere is Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, where over the course of a few days we will spend time in Munich, Geneva, Zurich, and Vienna. I'm really looking forward to it.
On October 25th, I bid my dad farewell as he flies back to the states, at which point I will be hopping on a train (or two, or three) to Prague. I'll be meeting up with some Middlebury friends in Prague, and crashing on couches there from Saturday, the 25th through Tuesday, the 28th. On Tuesday I fly to Madrid via Dublin, hopefully arriving in Spain in time to see my friend die (not literally, we hope) on his 21st birthday. A couple days to see the city and let him recover from his hangover, and then on Thursday (or Friday, depending), a group of us are flying from Madrid to Marrakesh, Morocco. In Morocco I hope to have some exotic food (hopefully not "exotic" as in, "diarrhea-inducing"), enjoy a favorable exchange rate for the only time in a four month period, and successfully fend off any would-be rapists of my female friends. Finally, on Sunday we all hop a camel and get back to Europe. I'll be flying to Copenhagen via Amsterdam.
And that, assuming it all goes off without a hitch, will be my big European (and African) adventure for now. Perhaps in the remaining weeks of the semester, as I finally get some rest and maybe even save some money, I'll be able to do a couple of long weekends to Amsterdam, Berlin, or Brussels, which are all still on my list. In the meantime, that's still a pipe dream, as -$123 doesn't buy too many train passes.
And for more ramblin' guys, I've been listening to a lot of Steve Martin to pass the time here. He's probably my favorite comedian (if you know me well enough, you probably see where I get my particular brand of humor), and since I can't resist embedding YouTube videos into posts now that I've started, here:
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"It was scary in the beginning, when we started writing about what we felt," Shinoda says. "But once we realized we weren't the only ones who felt that way, once we saw the audience was coming along with us on that, it freed us up. We wanted to be a little more descriptive, instead of just going 'fuck' all the time. We wanted to go into detail." Adds Bennington, "In between the letters of the word fuck -- that's where we go. That's where we dig deep."
Linkin Park, in Rolling Stone
Well, excuuuuuse me!
Steve Martin
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