Travelling

Wow, I've managed to avoid posting anything for a while. Probably because not much is happening here. This city turns grey in winter - grey sky, grey buildings, grey ground (the product of snow + dirt), and grey people. Most folks spend their time bundled up, rushing from one pub to the other to meet friends around a warm table and reminisce about the previous warm season with a pint. This strikes me as quite reasonable. Cold weather = warm pub w/beer. Hot weather = cool restaurant with margarita. maybe our two countries aren't so different after all. On a different note, my friend Ben has been travelling through Eastern Europe for about a week and a half. He's done several things very well on this trip: 1) Has come east. Western europe is like Disneyland, generally really expensive and boring. The east is grittier, weirder, and definitely has way hotter chicks. 2) He travelled to see friends, and saw the places on the side. This is the best - you travel alone, but you have a friend as a tour guide in every city. I need to meet some people from Moscow and Istanbul now. 3) Copious alcohol consumption. That's understood 4) His trip was about 2 weeks. This is the right amount of time for living out of a backpack. Anything after this and you start to smell permanently like wet dirty socks. And believe me, there's nothing worse than being in a stuffy hostel room full of twentysomething backpackers, and waking up at 5am, gagging because the air is so thick with the smell of wet, dirty socks.