Hi forever

The end.
We're home now, debriefed, deprogrammed, and over the jet lag. You'll be thrilled to know we've got 384 pictures we're just dying to show you.

Me llamo Dorkina. ¿Como se llama usted?
Barcelona is my very very favorite. It is Eric´s close second to Amsterdam.
We were walking down the main drag on Friday night on our way to go drinking at a bar that´s decorated like a faerie wood (the guidebook said it had gnomes too, but the guidebook is a liar) when we saw a marching band. And papier-mache pigs and dragons with flares attached. And drummers and bagpipe players and fireworks. We thought wow, they really like their weekends here. But it was actually the weekend before the big city festival.
Our excellent three-course meal for two with wine in Paris cost €80.
Our excellent three-course meal for two with wine and coffee in Barcelona cost €13.91.
We finally rode the fucking funicular, and after that the ferris wheel on the mountain above the city.
We drank a lot of the super-strong local beer.
We saw the Buzzcocks in a train station. The Barcelona kids pogoed. We were too tired to do anything but sway and blink.
Eric peed in the Mediterranean. We swam there too, but in a different spot.
And tomorrow we have a very long flight home. I am sad, but as Eric pointed out, we´ve had a vacation from the tedious stuff (work, heat) but also from the good stuff (friends, cat, Mi Madre´s breakfast tacos).
So we´ll see everyone soon.
Bye.

Let´s take the train, I said. It´s the hotel train! It´s more expensive than flying, but it´s the traaain. It´ll be fun! Train!

Ugh. We got about two hours of sleep apiece. And the conductor who rapped on the door continuously at 7 a.m. to give us back the tickets that we didn´t even need anymore while I scoured the compartment for my pants? He must have come straight from hell.

The day was saved when we remembered about the siesta. Holy shit, the siesta is great.

But before we could take one, we had to wait for our room. So we went to the wax museum. It was very stupid, although the room where put Bill Clinton, Rommel, Hitler, and Arafat together is not to be missed. The display with Princess Di and Mother Theresa holding hands was pretty good, too.

I am too tired to do the rest justice. But it´s pretty great here, and we can afford the beer, unlike Paris (nine euros for a Heineken?!). And we were both petrified by the tiny 300-step spiral staircase with one side open in the Segrada Familia. Maybe it´s there to put the fear of god into you. If so, it didn´t work, but we were meek (and sweaty) afterwards.

Tomorrow: Cable cars, and at long last, the funicular.

Bye, Paris
In four hours we'll be on an overnight train to Barcelona. Whoo. Whoo. So it's so long, Paris, and your stupid €1.80 bottles of perfectly decent wine and your no-good really stong espresso! Good riddance to your lame-ass beautiful works of art and completely worthless desserts, especially the revolting raspberry-flavored one that was shaped like a pig with a little curlycue tail and a happy smile and was the cutest thing I have ever bitten the head off of. Yeah. Bye.

Nobody told me they put tiny strobes on the Eiffel Tower. They scared me at first. Gaaah! Blinky! Actually, the Eiffel Tower itself kind of scared me. We cowered before it as we picnicked in the park. Then we approached it carefully and took a few pictures. Then we ran away.

This is my new favorite thing.

And I want this.

But I absolutely could not deal with the straddle toilet.

!!!! !
the shift key doesn't work on this computer! no periods or capitalization for me today! how liberating! and enthusiastic!

paris is huge and amazing and smells like urine! so far we have been busy little tourists and have hit a number of the major sights (louvre, picasso museum, catacombs, d'orsay, champs elysees, concorde, versailles, 10-year-olds drinking wine and smoking cigarettes, huge unexpected street rave, quarreling drunks at the metro station entrance outside our hotel window, etc), but we still feel like we've only seen a little tiny bit of it-- but we still have a day and a half--

je ne parle pas francais
is a phrase we don't really need since our matching deer-in-the-headlights expressions say it more eloquently; and even when we act like boobs no one seems to
mind; really our etiquette lapses seem to almost please people; probably because they fit with the stereotype of the big blundering bozo americans; so we're getting along dandy even with non-english-speakers with our hello-goodbye-please-thank you-sorry! oh, sorry--one carafe of house red, please-

a travel tip from joolie and eric:
before you sit down at a cafe for a nice light meal and some wine, make sure your seats aren't directly in front of a stoplight at a busy intersection on garbage day; unfortunately by the time the garbage truck pulled directly in front of us, spewed diesel fumes in our faces, did its trashy business, and executed a tricky eight-point turn that almost took out a city bus we were laughing too hard to move tables; the broken ceramic shards in the street that hit me in the shin when a car ran over them were just icing on the cake-

tomorrow: notre dame, rodin museum, and the laundromat, because we are getting ripe!
!
!
!

Hey! We are in Paris! So far we have just had lunch and walked around, getting our bearings. It takes us less time to walk to the Louvre from our hotel than to walk past the monster building. And I cannot find the apostrophe key and so am deprived of contractions.

We were the power team for our last day in Amsterdam. In 8 hours we:

Went to Anne Frank House;

Toured the Sexmuseum (incredibly lame except for the flasher robot that sort of collapses into itself after it closes its trenchcoat; basically a look at Spencer*s Gifts through the ages);

Visited the Rijksmuseum (some cool stuff but mostly a lot of commissioned group paintings of the regents of the local orphanage or show-off burghers and their rosy wives and shit like that; half of it was closed for asbestos removal);

Looked for a gallery featuring art and toys made by the mentally challenged (closed forever);

Browsed a really cool comic shop; and

Did our level best to use the last of the pot before we left The Netherlands (failed).

We spent yesterday in Brussels. It was dirty and elaborate and very beautiful. Manneken Pis is the dumbest thing I ever walked two blocks to see. Later, Ben*s super-nice friends took us on a quick walking tour and then for mussels and beer. Really good beer.

And in a minute, we're (hey, I found it!) going to have dinner and wine. So. We're having lots of fun and are continually amazed by every little thing ("Hey, Eric, lookit to where they got Coke Light instead of Diet Coke, hyuck, hyuck, hyuck! This-here toilet gots a chain flush, haw haw! Boy howdy! That there building is over 800 years old!"). And that's about it for now, except that a bar very close to our hotel has Junkyard.

Tomorrow: We actually go into places.

P.S. Rick Perry is a gaping butthole.
P.P.S. Larry: We did go to the court, but Milosevic had the day off, the courtroom was closed, and our friends were busy, so it was sort of like a tour of the pre-renovation era Reagan building. The bikes were great, though.
P.P.P.S. Hi to everyone.

Let op! Drempels.
We just got back from visiting Ben and his girlfriend, Ava, in The Hague. It's real purty there, which is why it wasn't so bad when we got horribly, horribly lost on our rented bikes there. We made a day of it and rode through a park with swans and deer and then in big confused and confusing circles for three hours. Finally we found our way and did not die of starvation, as we'd feared. Also, I bought really tasty chocolates in the shape of owls and hedgehogs.

Now we're back in Amsterdam, staying in a hotel that is way too swank for our purposes. The purple leopard-print carpet really adds a touch of class.
Speaking of class, the Red Light District was 7,854 times more depressing than I ever dreamed it could be. What's the fun of walking down a street with hookers in the windows when you're not even supposed to gawk?

Oonce, oonce
There is techno music everywhere. The bakery, the pancake restaurant, the antique store. Everywhere except this Internet cafe, which is blaring mariachi music, and Ben's new tiny old-man neighborhood bar, where they played Kylie Minogue and Madonna. Oh, yeah, the church bells by their apartment play "New York, New York," by the hour. No one knows why, but it's cool.

Hollandspoor
Just kidding. The Van Gogh museum was great. More museums tomorrow; and maybe a boat tour. Although all the people on the boats look sort of trapped and stunned, so maybe we'll just take the trams. And then Brussels.

Bye.

We saw the best anthropomorphic hot dog ever on the beach. More later.

Amsterdam: The land of the double vowels
We are amaazed and amoosed:
We poop on a shelf;
Eric gets too stoned (oops!); and
We oompa just a little.

Did you know you can cross the North Sea in three and a half hours? It's awesome! Did you know 500 British motorcyclists in full gear can also cross the North Sea in three and a half hours? It's disturbing!

Eric vastly underestimated the strength of his first coffee shop purchase. He had a little meltdown at the ATM machine. Tee hee.

We also underestimated the entertainment value of Kaizers Orchestra. So, like, if Stomp! were actually cool and Tom Waits wrote the music for it and then someone translated the lyrics into Norwegian*, then that's about what we saw last night. I especially liked the singer trying to get a room full of Dutch people to sing along in Norwegian. It didn't work.

We sorta accidentally got really drunk last night, too. We'd been drinking half-pints all night and for our last round Eric bit the bullet and asked for two full pints. They misunderstood and we got four pints. Tee hee hee hee hee hee pass out.

Today we pretty much squandered, which was great. It was a lovely day so we had a picnic in the park. A lot of people were in the park this afternoon, and a good percentage of them were sunbathing in their underwear. We ate Indonesian food next to an American couple who talked about Verizon wireless billing rates for the entire meal. I hate them. They made me hate them. But the food was good. Also, we walked around a lot. Amsterdam is everything they said it would be, although the drug tourists are a little weird and pathetic. Maan.

Tomorrow our friend Ben is coming to play with us, and then we'll spend a couple of days with him and his girlfriend in The Hague. After that, we'll come back here and do the museums and see the capital-C Culture, instead of just the fun riffraffy kind. We'll probably rent bikes, too.

This is worth every single Saturday night I worked until 4 a.m.

Choo asked why we didn't touch the Rosetta Stone. Well, it was displayed behind Plexiglas. (It's people like you.... We bought you an Underground map anyway!)

Ok, more later. Eric says hi. The stupid %$# computer at the last stupid #$%* ripoff Internet place crashed before he posted, so the world is deprived of his first-hand account of the past two days forever. $#%@ers.

Love,
Joolie

*This is one of the 174 reasons I am not a music writer. If you can correctly guess the other 173 by September 10, I'll buy you the trashiest ashtray I can find in a Red Light District souvenir shop.

The very best of London:
The British Museum. Eric liked the mummies, the amputation saws, and the golden ram. I was partial to Samuel Johnson's dictionary and the 18th-century etchings of maladies like gout and vomiting.
The Tate Modern. Eric liked Dali's lobster phone. I liked the video of the naked man punching himself until he passed out.
Laughing at all the weird shit in grocery stores. (Bwahahahaha! Look at how they spell "cod-flavoured!")
The nice hotel receptionist who took pity on us at 1 a.m. and let us stay at his posh place for super cheap when our kind of crappy hotel locked us out on our first disorienting hour here.

The robot drink trolleys, alas, were nowhere to be found. My backpack is holding up beautifully, and the color (colour! hahahahahahaha! stupid.) is growing on me.
Tomorrow: Boat train to Amsterdam! And then we'll oompa 'til we die.

Confidential to Roone and Dan: You're both a douche. Happy?

Bye! Love, Joolie

Hello! This is day two of our VACATION! My feet are tired, I have had my fill of beans and peas (bangers and mash...bleah), and the English are nice but too numerous. My god, they're everywhere! I have seen some of the coolest stuff ever! Mummies! Fake limbs! Gilded Rams! Shrunken heads! Modern art! Lorries! Doubledecker buses! Why, I have inhaled more soot than... most...kinds of...people...that inhale a lot of soot...erm. At any rate the food here veers wildly from delicious to vaguely disturbing. The beer is excellent. The best Boddington's ever, according to Joolie. I'm still looking for a place that serves beans on pizza... Sadly, I may have to wait 'til next time around. I AM currently working on my fake English accent, so be forewarned. Hope all of you peckerwoods back home in Austin are having a good time with all of your 90+ degree weather. I have only seen the sun twice since our arrival. Big ups yo! Hugs and kisses to all! €ric

P.S. Just to prove that we are in England here's a £ for y'all.

We will not let you go.
Oh. My. God.

We're about to put the fun back in funicular!

Backpedaling old man
Eric allows that maybe not all the food there has beans or peas, and even if it does, it's possible I could just ask for them on the side. I'm glad to hear it, because I'd have to smell the vomit too.

Mean old man
Eric is on an extended campaign to convince me that all food in London has either peas or beans in it. He'll get his when I get hellaciously drunk on the ferry and throw up in his lap.

Here's what I have:
Plane tickets.
A passport picture in which I am grinning maniacally.
A hideous backpack that buckles across my waist. The guy at Whole Earth Provision described its color as "vitamin yellow." Whether that refers to the actual vitamin pills or the eerie glow of your urine after you take them is not clear.
Maps.
Fistfuls (yes, fistfuls!) of printouts.
Comfortable walking shoes.
Only the vaguest and most abstract idea of where I'm going, despite an itinerary that's been analyzed to death, resurrected, and then analyzed again.
The ability to say "My name is Joolie," and "Please, Mr. Beefhead, where is the beach?" in French.
An unpleasant, creeping suspicion that I am a massive dork. The bad mouthbreather kind.

Bye forever in two weeks.