I knew it would be a bummer have to work on the 4th of July and miss all the regular Independence Day fun, so to make up for it, I took my 4th of July holiday on Friday and headed out to a 4-day music festival near the Belgian city of Werchter on Thursday afternoon with a bunch of Shell buddies. Not much for fireworks (except for Rammstein, of course), but what could be more American than rock n' roll? Yeah, ok, so apple pie and baseball come to mind, but cut me some slack here k? We invented rock, so [View Full Entry]

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...and I'm spent. It's been a long day. I have no idea why I'm working on this blog instead of passing out in a bathtub full of cool water. Today, Ton (the same Dutch colleague who toured a bunch of us around Rotterdam) took Dale and me up north near Amsterdam to the cities of Weesp and Muiden for a 10-mile hike across the countryside. Along the way: a fort city and a medieval castle...."ooooooh", "ahhhhhhhh." The weather was awesome...right in the 70s and tons of sun, which seemed like a good thing at the time. My wicked farmer's tan and [View Full Entry]

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Victory! Another crushing blow of defeat was dealt out to fellow Cloister patrons last night as the mental giants of team ESSP scored bewildering 57 points, easily crushing the nearest team by a margin of 17 and the weakest team by a margin of 25. Ok ok, enough for the headline news style of blogging..even I'm annoyed. So yup, another great quiz night. Do you know what day the US Declaration of Independence was signed? Nope..not the 4th of July. Apparently it's the 2nd of August. See, I'm learn [View Full Entry]

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So it's been almost 2 weeks since my last entry. Terrible, I know, but I've been overcome by the strange new sensation of being busy at work all day. Working all week has the side effect of making me tired and lazy when I get home, so the blog suffers. But it's the weekend now, I've had a good 10 hours of sleep, so here' s an update! Lemme try and work backwards here, for the sake of my own memory. If you're good and read all the way down, you can see pics of everything I've described. Hey! no skipping [View Full Entry]

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What can I say, now that I've had a taste of combining blog entries into one big lazy smogasbord of adventure, I'm hooked. Besides, stop being so selfish...wouldn't you rather me have a good time than spend a bunch of man-hours chronicling it for just for you? The answer to that one was yes, by the way. Anyways, another good weekend hanging out, but with no travels on the agenda. Friday was chill, just some beers at the English pub called The Fiddler and then on to a dance club called Havana. The usual suspects included Eugene, Geoff, Shruti, and her [View Full Entry]

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Ok, as I'm having a really hard time getting caught up with these journals, I'm just gonna start with now and work my way backwards, so that way you can at least get some up to date information and I can feel like I'm not so far behind. Be forewarned that the quality of my entries may suffer; I may resort to Laffy Taffy level humor. So, for a quick recap of this past week: Thursday June 2nd: I've started a European branch of the 'Thursday Poker Night's at Brian's Place' franchise which turned out to be a mixed bag of [View Full Entry]

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We started off the second day at the Tower of London, where a quirky Yeoman Warder (aka Beefeater) took us on an entertaining and educational tour of the city's castle; home of the Crown Jewels and the place of execution many a royal traitor. The stories were really quite interesting and I found out that nursery rhymes such as Humpty Dumpty, Three Blind Mice, and Mary, Mary Quite Contrary all have roots in England's history. I'd tell you more about the stories, but I forget the details and I'm getting tired of typing. The Crown Jewels were of course impressive; the [View Full Entry]

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After a night in Nottingham, Kat and I jumped back into the right-handed go-kart of death known as our rental car and trekked it back down the M1 to London. My mission, which I chose to accept, was to pilot the tiny 4-banger straight into the automotive beehive that is London center, navigating to the well-hidden underground return point of National Car Rental. I'm happy to report the mission was a flying success. Note the triumphant picture of me with the completely intact rental car. YES! I rule! Next, we paid off one of the luggage handlers at a nearby hotel [View Full Entry]

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I had been dreading the trip to London from the moment Kat revealed the travel situation: fly into London Luton, drive a rental car to Nottingham to visit her grandma, then drive back to London center to drop off the rental. Seems simple enough right? Ah..the devils in the details. The rental car is right-hand drive with an engine displacement smaller than your average 7-11 Big Gulp, the transmission is manual and intended for operation by my left hand, and on the way to Nottingham and back, EVERYBODY IS DRIVING ON THE WRONG FRICKIN' SIDE OF THE ROAD! So there you [View Full Entry]

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One of the most prominent tourist attractions in the Netherlands is the Keukenhof (pronounced 'co-ken-off'), which is a sprawling garden park replete with an assorment of tulips and other flowers, artful landscaping, ponds and fountains, not to mention other family attractions such as parks, petting zoos, and even a hedge maze. Kat and I devoted the better part of our day to the 40 minute ride from Leiden and back and to touring the gardens and soaking up all the natural beauty. Unfortunately, mid May is late in the tulip season, so we were unable to see the tulip fields surrounding [View Full Entry]

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