Good-bye heatwave, hello cool weather and fun adventures.  After 42 coats of paint this week, I need a break.

Next to our hotel was a large store which sold clothing, furniture, and housewares.  Or at least that’s what I saw displayed in the window since Ron Russo refused to step foot in it on account of the name (and the fact that I threatened to photoshop him next to the name):

What really excited me about this trip was that we did two side trips outside of Amsterdam, so that I finally got to see what the Netherlands is truly known for, namely tulips, windmills, and clogs.  Our first stop was the gorgeous Keukenhof Gardens, only open two months out of the year.  Since it had been a cold spring, the gardens weren’t in full bloom but still beautiful nonetheless:

Slavic cultures scare their children with the Baba Yaga, a witch who lives in a hut standing on chicken feet.  I almost fell over when we came across it in the gardens:

The next day we went to Zaanse Schans, a sort of Dutch Colonial Williamsburg.  I had expected it to be cheesy but it was actually pretty cool.  (Though the cheese shop was cheesy since it was wall-to-wall cheese that made me wish I was a cheese person like Ron Russo, who elbowed his way through a gaggle of Russion grandmas to get to all the samples.)

The highlight of the town are the windmills, which have been preserved in their original state:

Each windmill produces a different product like oil, mustard, or pigment for paint.  Going inside was quite the treat, to see the various gears and whatnots working:

I really enjoyed the clog factory where we watched a pair of clogs get made in three minutes using special machines (as opposed to about three weeks the old-fashioned way):

Of course the three-minute clogs were very basic, unpainted with no frills.  The exhibits in the clog factory not only showed the history of clogs in Dutch life and culture but also unusual ones, like these clog rollerskates and iceskates:

And then there were some uniquely decorated ones like these “Dutch Fisherman Fantasy”:

Ron Russo won’t admit it, but I know they were his favorites.

Probably not.  But this was my first time climbing and I’m so glad I did.  The views were amazing and the workout I got from all those stairs was not too shabby.  But I really loved that there were various “exhibits”, images of the tower from yesteryear, and this fake elevator operator:

One of my favorite spots in Paris is the Rodin Museum and Garden.  Since Ron Russo and I had recently been in the Philadelphia Rodin Museum, we skipped the indoor museum itself and strolled through the gorgeous garden which has numerous statues.  There is also a lake with a lovely view of a derriere:

Then on to underground Paris, to the catacombs, where I hit Ron Russo with 300-year-old bones and released the Bubonic Plague on us:

But lest we get too dark and dreary, here is some fun stuff, like this French version of Operation:

And what is probably the creepiest advertising campaign for Orangina - sexy, bikini-clad animals like a giraffe and this zebra:

But it was at the Pere Lachaise cemetary where we snapped Ron Russo’s favorite photo.  While looking for the graves of Jim Morrison and Richard Wright, we came upon this unfortunate fellow:

Now you can think about your own name and realize that it’s really not bad.

The hotel that Ron Russo and I stayed at in Paris was called Mr. Bed City, located on the last stop of one of the metro trains, pretty much off the map.  It was no-frills, barely bigger than my living room, with a bathroom so tiny that I could pretty much stretch my hands out and touch two walls.  Not that we minded very much because the whole point of the trip was to get out and enjoy Paris, not hang out in a hotel room.

The first day when we got there we took a very long nap, and with the six-hour time difference my sleep cycle was completely thrown off.  I woke up at 2:30 in the morning unable to fall back asleep because my brain was convinced that it was 8:30 in the evening.  About half an our later Ron Russo also woke up and we lay there in the dark, talking, and tossing and turning.  Other than the occasional sound of our voices it was completely quiet.  Then, at about 3:15 AM, we heard a noise.  The single noise turned into multiple noises and for about the next half-hour or so we listened to a headboard banging, and a woman whose vocal range went from high-pitched shrieks to animalistic guttural groans and everything in between.  In the dark and somewhat disoriented we could not even figure out where it was coming from.  At first I was convinced it was from the opposite wall, then it seemed above us, then above us and one room over, until finally Ron Russo put his ear to the wall right behind our heads and said, “Umm, I think they’re next door to us”.  I too put my ear to the wall and it’s as if I was right in the room with them.  Eventually the monkey sex stopped and we finally fell asleep too.

The next night I woke up about 3:00 AM as my body and brain still had not adjusted to the time change.  I tried to go to the bathroom quietly and not stir too much but Ron Russo still woke up a few minutes after me.  So again we lay the dark wondering when we were ever going to fall asleep and stay asleep when, at precisely 3:15 just as the previous night, the headboard banging, screaming, growling, and moaning started up.  It was so loud and intense that the only thing I could think was what the hell is happening in there?  After about five minutes of lying there and occasionally giggling, Ron Russo turned to me and said, “You know what?  She must be getting it in the ass.  Why else would she be making all that noise?”.

People, you know how everything just seems more intense and surreal at night?  So here I was in the middle of the night in Paris in crappy little Mr. Bed City, I am half out of it because I can’t get adjusted to this time zone, and like clockwork there is butt-fucking going on in the room behind me.  I started laughing hysterically which made Ron Russo laugh which made me laugh even more so there we were lying in the dark laughing our asses off.  And I guess if we can hear moaning and groaning from across the wall, they can hear laughing and giggling because all of a sudden everything went dead quiet in the other room.  The fornication apparently ceased and finally Ron Russo and I had nothing to laugh about.  Eventually we fell asleep, and when I woke up the following night at 3:00 in the morning (thankfully the last night of broken sleep), not a sound was to be heard.

We never did find out who the noisemakers were, but we were eyeing everyone in the breakfast room suspiciously.  Maybe Paris really is the city of love.

I don’t think I’ll be going online too much and there’s a good chance that I won’t post anything till I get back.  In the meantime, here’s just a bit more from Costa Rica from a super-procrastinator.

The town of La Fortuna was by far my favorite.  It was two main streets, a church, a park, and the volcano in the background.  The park was a great place to relax in the evening, eat ice-cream, and watch families and couples stroll around:

The highlight of the trip for me was doing a canopy tour, aka ziplining, through the trees and over valleys:

The last zipline was 1 kilometer long (!!!) and done “superman” style.  At first it was so close to the ground but as soon as you passed a bit, a huge valley fell out beneath.  It felt absolutely like flying and was probably the most exhilirating experience of my life.  I can’t even begin to describe how beautiful it was.  I took a photo of Nadine, the German girl we’d met on the bus, as she was about to take off:

Flying out of Tamarindo to San Juan, we were at a teeny-tiny airport.  When our cab driver pulled off the main road and drove along a dirt road only to drop us off in front of a single open-air building we thought it was a joke.  Then these funny planes came in for a landing:

I was scaring Ultra that this was ride back to san Juan:

Actually, our plane was a 12-seater:

There was also another plane from a different airline that took off right before ours.  We kept waiting and waiting until finally we were informed that we were over the weight limit and that our bags couldn’t go with us.  The real reason we were over the limit (which the pilot later confirmed to me and Ultra on the side) is that there were two really huge passengers on our flight.  It was either them or the bags so off we finally went bagless.  (Luckily our bags arrivied later that night because we had a 6:00 AM flight the next morning.)  Ultra and I snagged the best seats, right behind the pilots so we got to see all their instruments and then the approaching runway:

Even Ultra, who is scared of heights, loved the plane ride.  I would definitely do that again.

Ultra and I took a day-trip up to the Cano Negro area near the Nicaraguan border.  On the way there we stopped by a restuarant whose owner has been breeding iguanas for years and boasts an incredible iguana tree:

Once we got to our destination, we took a boat ride along the Rio Frio and it was just teeming with animals and an amazing variety of birds.  At first it seemed like there was nothing much there but our guides used their eagle-eye vision to spot so many creatures.  They’d stop the boat and point into the trees or along the water while us gringos looked around confused.  Then, finally, we’d see a vulture in a tree, or the creepy big eye of a caiman with the rest of it’s body submerged.  In a few spots, the caimans were out sunning themselves:

I was paranoid about monkeys after having run-ins with two different ones on two different continents.  Luckily, they were all pretty far away in the trees so I didn’t make it three-for-three.  We saw white-faced capucin monkeys and heard the wild grunts of howler monkeys, which sounded like they must be big as apes but were fairly small in reality:

Birds were everywhere and by the end of the day, we were pretty good at recognizing what kind they were.  Of course by now I’ve forgotten their names so I can’t identify this one, but it’s pretty cool how it has a fish in it’s beak.  We watched it bang the fish on the tree and manipulate it around till it finally had it in a good position and down the hatch it went:

One of the coolest things I saw that day was, again, something that I would never have recognized.  It looked like lumps of bark on a tree but was actually one of the smallest species of bats.  They hung, asleep, in size order and shivered slightly when we made too much noise:

But the animal that I was most hoping to see was the sloth.  I had seen some on TV recently and they were so freakin’ cute.  Also, I always tell Ron Russo that if he was an animal, he would be a sloth.  (When he reads this he’s gonna say, “Really librarian, really?  You just had to write this?”.  I guess I did because documenting farts is just not enough.)  Our guide Jamie had spotted a lone sloth in a far away tree but it looked like it could have been a beehive or some random lump.  Using his binoculars I was able to see it better but it was still pretty lumpy.  Jamie said that the chance of seeing more was pretty slim, but then on the drive back he spotted two more in two nearby trees, one of which had a baby.  I saw them really clearly through the binoculars and it just made my day.  Unfortunately, my photo still looks like a lump:

Besides animals, Costa Rica has beautiful and exotic plants.  I have no idea what this one is but it’s really cool:

The walk through the cloud forest near Monteverde was amazing even though rain poured the whole time.  It was so quiet and pristine and almost other-worldly.  There were no animals, just plants, trees, green as far as the eye could see:

Our trip from La Fortuna to Monteverde included a shortcut by boat across a lake:

By the end of the trip we were ready for some sand and sun.  Our homebase was Tamarindo, aka Tamagringo, which was disappointing.  It was all dirt roads and neon lights with U.S. franchises and the subtlety of Vegas.  Even the beach was so windy that we literally had to wrap ourselves in our towels and sarongs because being pummelled with thousands of grains of sand hurt.  The next day we went with two Germans to nearby Playa Conchal, where the wind didn’t blow and trees along the shore offered shade.  On our last day in Tamarindo, we skipped the beach and snuck into a fancy resort where we lounged about reading books and swam in the pool.  It was also a nice place for a photo:

And then we came back to the snow - WAH!

• San Jose is nothing special and we got out as fast as we could, though not before we spotted a lady of the night in red ruffled undies
• when I went to open the door to our room in San Jose (after midnight, since we got in late), I found two people sleeping, one of whom was startled awake by a stranger entering her room in the dead of night
• our real room was 2  1/2, yeah as in two and a half
• took the local public bus to La Fortuna, which took 2 hours longer than expected and broke down half way but I guess that’s what you get for $2.00
• have been having rather rainy weather so unable to see lava flowing down the volcano but enjoyed an evening in the hotsprings, with giant slides
• took a boat trip on the Rio Frio and saw anazing animals including caymans, lizards, sloths, turtles, tiny bats, many species of birds, and two species of monkeys
• glad to report that I was not atacked by the monkeys
• arrived in Santa Elena today and went ziplining through the cloud forest canopy.  never felt more alive in my life, flying hundreds of feet through the air at high speeds, seeing the lush green below
• tomorrow it’s on to hanging bridges and a night walk through the cloud forest to see creepy crawlies
• and then it’s BEACH TIME

Yeah, so good to get away from the snow.

I booked a hostel in San Jose for the first night since we will be arriving there about 10 p.m. but after that we have a loose itinerary.  We want to head out to La Fortuna to the Arenal Volcano, next go to the Santa Elena-Monteverde area where the Cloud Forest is, and finally make our way to the West Coast and just relax on the beaches.  Because we have been booked anything in advance we’ll be able to play it by ear and spend an extra night somewhere that we particularly like, or shorten our stay somewhere else.  Our one big splurge was booking a flight from Tamarindo on the West Coast back to San Jose the day before we fly home.  Some things we want to do are ziplining through the trees, doing a suspension bridge tour, seeing all the gorgeous and colorful animals in the rain forest, warming up in the hot springs, and just relaxing by the water.

I’m hoping that after a few days my very very rudimentary Spanish will kick in, kind of like it did in Peru.  For some reason, I mainly remember food vocabulary and can only speak a bit in very simple terms like “me hungry now”.  Ultra’s Spanish is a bit better, though I’m sure we will be speaking English 99% of the time anyway.

GeekHiker had asked me a while back about difficulties with language while traveling, and I’m finally going to answer that question.  I can honestly say that I’ve really never had any problems because English is so common in all corners of the world.  Whether in Japan, Morocco, or Sweden, chances are good that a random stranger on the street will know at least some English and be able to help you.  Even if the first or second person you ask doesn’t speak English, most likely the third person you ask will.  And generally, people are very nice and actually go out of their way to help you.  I’ve had people walk me to my destination even though it was completely out of their way.

The other thing about language and traveling is that where there is money to be made the local people of the country will learn English and probably other languages, enough to get by.  If you need to buy a souvenir or food or find a hostel for the night you’ll have no problem being understood.  Even in smaller towns, anyone that relies on tourist money to make a living knows that the more foreign languages they can speak the more they’ll have the upper hand over their competition.

And when all else fails, and there are no English speakers to be found, do not dismiss the power of miming.  You don’t need to find an English speaker when you have a map and someone can point you in the right direction.  I suspect that there are some universally understood gestures like turning an imaginary steering wheel for transportation or moving your hand to your mouth to show that you’re hungry.  It’s often the silly, half-mimed, half-broken-English conversations that will be the most fun and will give you the most satisfaction when you and this total stranger from another part of the world realize that you can understand each other.

PS - Though I always have ambitious intentions of posting regularly while away, the reality is that it will probably happen rarely, if at all.  And I’ll be catching up on everyone’s lives when I get back.  Cheers.

One of the first things you have to understand is that my love for travel is probably part genetic and part coping mechanism.  In high school I dreamed of being a squatter, falling off the grid, and roaming around the world with nothing tying me down to it.  It seemed like the only way to be free.  I never believed that a lot of money is essential for travel but obviously you need some.  I got a job when I was 15 because by then I already conceived of this plan to traipse around Europe’s hostels, and at $4.00-a-week allowance from my parents there was no way to accomplish that.  A few months before graduating college, I bought an open-ended ticket and still had four grand in the bank.

My original plan was to go by myself, but then Ultra said she wanted to go too.  She had money for a plane ticket and not much else, so the four grand for me became two grand for each of us.  We figured we’d have to find a way to make it last, and we did (even had a decent amount left over).  I left NYC at the end of May (skipping my college graduation because I couldn’t wait to get started on the adventure) and returned in mid-October having visited about 15 countries.  We went around with our belongings on our backs and a guidebook in our hand, taking overnight buses, arriving half-asleep at 6:00 AM in places like Amsterdam and Edinburgh, often off the map, trying to find a hostel.  Wherever we could, we crashed on couches of friends and family, usually staying longer than anticipated and finally doing laundry.  Fallafel became the staple of our diet because every city had a Middle Eastern section, with cart food galore.

We walked all day long, seeing museums, churches, monuments, bridges and chilled in plazas and squares.  In the evening we would often collapse.  It wasn’t glamorous, it wasn’t Paris Hilton, we weren’t clubbing or having drinks every night but we were laughing our asses off.  And it was freakin’ memorable.  In Prague, our “hostel” was in a school on an island in the Vltava River.  The gym had been filled with loads of bunkbeds and one night an American guy hovered over my bed as I was drifting off to sleep and drunkely called me a bloody bloke, in a bad British accent.  I told him to shut up, turned over, and went to sleep.  In Budapest a drunk older Polish guy kept coming into our room and looking very confused.  In Berlin, our hostel was a giant circus tent where you laid out your sleeping bag wherever there was room.  I woke up early one morning to find the sleeping bag next to me gyrating.  I guess the nerdy boy who occupied it got lucky.  We also happened to be in Berlin on the weekend of the Love Parade.  Thousands of club kids trek to Germany every year for this crazy parade/rave and we stumbled across it.  Kinda like how we stumbled across the Pope in Paris.  He had been saying mass at Notre Dame and we saw him through the throngs, riding in the Popemobile.

In Dublin we were expecting to stay with our friend’s brother Daragh who we never met.  It turned out he was between residences at the time so we all stayed with a family that he knew.  The mother lived by herself in the basement after her husband, who was a conductor in an orchestra and had a penchant for cross-dressing, ran off with one of the violinists.  Her kids lived upstairs.  There was a punk rock daughter who was 90% blind, watched TV through a jeweler’s loop, and had a shaved head except for ten skinny braids that reached her butt.  Her brother was a skinny nerd with a red nose; Ultra is convinced he rearranged out underwear as it was drying.  There was a dog named Tess who reeked so much that you smelled her before she walked into a room.  The neighbors had a parrot that imitated Tess’s bark.  The Chinese take-out was the best I ever had in my life and we ate it every day for two weeks, after which Daragh always wanted to hit the pub.  One night he was so drunk that he let me pour candle wax on his bellybutton and rip the hairs out.  He said he wondered at work the next day why his belly was stinging and had a red splotch.  Ultra used to tease him and sing, Daragh has a girl’s name Daragh has a girl’s name.  One day he almost left her in a sheep meadow because he was so annoyed.  When the three of us finally got the boot from Casa Nutty, we went to the suburbs to stay with Daragh’s parents.  One evening he showed us the video of his sister’s crazy Vegas wedding, Elvis impersenator, strung-out maid of honor, and all.  We had to promise that we’d never tell his parents that he showed it to us.  Yeah, good times.

Whoa, I seem to have veered slightly off course.  I guess my point is that you don’t need a lot of money to travel.  You just won’t be staying in a luxury suite and eating lobster every night.  You might instead be eating fish-n-chips in a park talking to a half-crazy hobo.  As for dealing with the language barriers, I think I’ll save it for another post because this one is already out of control…

The one place that I ended up in quite accidentally was the Tate Modern.  I had been walking along the Thames when I realized that I was passing by the Modern.  On a whim I popped inside for what I figured would be an hour tops, and ended up going floor by floor for almost three hours.  There was so much inspiring and exciting art to see.  Cubism, Surrealism, animation, pop art, old Bolshevik propaganda posters.  I felt like Alice in Wonderland.  I even managed to sneak in a few photos, including this cool installation by Jeff Koons:

Art was literally everywhere, from this awesome display of photos from Bob Dylan’s 1966 tour:

to the British Library which had an amazing exhibit of 19th century photos from around the world, as well actual cameras from the 1800s:

Other things I’d never seen on my past visits were the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre:

the home of Sherlock Holmes:

and The Clink Prison Museum, which was the original “clink”:

I made sure to walk around my favorite neighborhood, Camden Town, which is like NYC’s East Village.  Ultra and I had stayed with friends in Camden Town back in 1997 and were in love with all the tattoo parlors, squatter kids, and Dr. Martens stores.  As with the East Village, Camden Town has cleaned up and become super-commercial, with way more stores and vendors than ever.  But it will always have a special place in my heart:

I’d never been to London in the winter.  Luckily for me it wasn’t too bloody cold, but the sun did set at 4:00 P.M.  The downside is that I don’t much care for walking around in the dark and my camera doesn’t take the best night shots.  But the upside was that the city was lit up and gorgeous.  Everything made me smile, from this marquee of Priscilla Queen Of The Desert:

to decorated buildings on trendy Oxford Street:

But my favorite night spot was hands-down the London Eye:

It shone against the dark sky so beautifully and reminded me why it is I love to travel so much.