Ok, this will be short because I'm running out of time, but I had another awesome day today. I spent the whole day with my roommate at my hostel, who's this 34 year old mormon elementary school teacher, and we just had such a good time doing everything and being goofy. We started out walking around forever looking for the old Jewish quarter, and did a little tour there. Then one of the new york girls wanted to buy new shoes because she was going on a date tonight with a random venice guy she met yesterday, so we all did some shoe shopping, then me and the mormon went to the beach and walked along with our feet in the water and talked for a while, then we sat and ate gelato, then we people watched and walked around a lot, and then ate at a cute little completley non-touristy restaurant right along the water, and then rode the boats around at night for a while, and just got home after being out for 14 hours straight. Now we're home and crazy sweaty and off to try to not suffocate in our crazy crazy hot little room.

p.s. I do get the comments emailed to me and absolutely love them, so keep them coming guys!

I LOVE VENICE!!!!!! Absolutely love it to death! I got here late last night, as in my train got in around midnight, and then I had to walk to the bus depot, and take a bus to my middle of nowhere hostel thats not actually in venice at all. (Turns out when you find a super cheap hostel in a city where everything is normally booked way in advance, there may be a catch . . .) So right when I got here, I met these 2 girls from NY, and ended up hanging out with them til 4 in the morning or so, and they are so so hilarious! We had such a great night, and they changed their reservations for the next couple nights so they are staying here with me more! Then I dragged myself out of bed at a normal time this morning (running around for the past 3 days super intensely on very little sleep for 2 nights in a row is starting to hit me I think), and did as much of venice as I could. I spent a lot of the time just jumping on one of the boat bus things, and getting off wherever it looked pretty. I love the boats! I never realized that Venice is all canals and no cars or roads or anything, and everything is so so so pretty! And its virtually impossible to find anything to get besides pizza and gellato, so no complaints there! I sat on one of the bridges over a canal today and took my shoes off and let my feet dangle over the edge while eating gellato and listening to an accordian player walking around playing "that's amore". Now if thats not italy in a nutshell, I don't know what is! Tomorrow I'm planning on going up to the old Jewish quarter, where the first Jewish ghetto ever was and apparently there are some cool old synagogues and musuems up there. And I'll probably ride the boats a lot and eat some pizza too!

ahhh nice! Let's see if my brain isn't completely fried from laying in the sun the past 2 days to write something legible here . . . I left Paris early Thursday morning, and actually figured out how to validate my ticket and get on the right train to Lyon on my first try! I really really liked lyon. It pretty much felt like a smaller, cuter, nicer Paris where people spoke no Enlish. Luckily, walking around exploring the city for a day doesn't require you to actually talk to anyone, so the language thing wasn't too big an issue. When I got off the train, the first thing I saw on my way to the tourism office was a big castle-y looking building on top of a really tall hill/mountain that overlooked the entire city. Of course, after I found my hotel and dropped off my backpack, I decided I wanted to go to the top of the mountain. Deciding to be cheap/tough (and not realizing that my all day metro pass included the funicular!), I decided to walk up instead. Word to the wise: if a place offers a funicular to get up the top of a mountain, take it! My legs were on fire and I pretty much wanted to die before I made it up. It really didn't look that steep when I started, but man on man was it! However, once I got to the top and bought myself this incredible mango popsicle thing, the view was incredible and totally worth the burning quads! Other than that, I pretty much just walked around the city exploring places that looked cool, a pretty good day overall. The next morning, I caught another early morning train to Nice. (Vuvs- I started that Jodi Piccoult book you sent me with a couple days ago, and finished it on the train and completely loved it! And I found out that English books here are crazy expensive, but I may splurge for one before my next train anyway.) The view from the train was absolutely magnificent. We went through mountains and along oceans, and it was really sunny outside which made everything look even prettier. Then I got to my hostel (and I'm actually really excited to be out of paris hotels and back into hostels with other backpackers!), and went straight to the beach. Judging from the 5 other people in my hostel room, it sounds like a common reaction to nice is to be thinking that its overrated and kind of cheesy and a little trashy on the whole walk to the beach, but then you get to a clearing where you can actually see the beach and boardwalk and a good chunk of the coast, and its absolutely beautiful! Bright blue water and white rocks coming out and just incredible-ness! At night, I went back to my hostel and met my roommates who had all been out earlier, and then a Scottish guy, an English girl, and I all went out to dinner in this strip of outdoor bars and restuarants. The French team was playing then, so all the restaurants brought out TVs and put the game on, and the entire row was just packed with people going crazy. Each place was using a different broadcast or something that was a couple seconds different, so each time France scored or something big happened, you could hear groups of people freaking out in different clumps all down the road. The English girl was also really into the world cup, so me and her got all caught up jumping and clapping and singing (at least grunting whatever syllables it sounded like they were all singing without actually understanding anything!) and that was all a ton of fun. Today I came back to the beach early in the morning, passing through an incredible market on my way. The strip that had been all bars and outdoor restaurants the night before was now turned into a market, with all sorts of super cheap fruits and flowers and meats and breads and pretty much anything you could imagine. It completely put our soulard to shame big time! So I bought a whole bunch of fruit for 1.5 euro, and have been laying on the beach for the past 4 hours with it. I figured 30 minutes at the internet cafe and a quick lunch is enough of a break from the sun (and the sunburn that I already feel on my face when I crinkle my nose, despite putting on a million layers of sunscreen I napped from a french woman who left the little last big of her bottle at the beach when she left yesterday!). Ok, thats it from here. Tomorrow morning on to Milan, then in the evening continuing on to Venice for a couple days! Back to the beach for me!

wow, i've completely been sucking at updating this! anyway, i've been doing too much to get it all down in the 30 minutes i have at this internet cafe, but i'll do my best. Pretty much, since the last blog, I've hit most of the major touristy things, took over an irish pub with 3 other americans for the US/Italy game (and ended up going out with a random bunch of UVA kids afterwards, 2 of which were from mclean and knew Laura Warren!) and took day trips to Versailles and Rouen, both of which were cool but in very very different ways. After missing my first 2 attempted trains to Rouen yesterday (turns out I was reading the arrivals board instead of departures . . . oops!), I finally got there. Lizzy -- you were right about it being straight out of beauty and the beast! I had to hold back from bursting out into song about needing much more than this provincial life more than a few times! The past 2 nights I've just been completely exhausted from everything, and I found out the shocker this morning that if you stay in for a night and sleep late the next morning, you won't be exhausted anymore! who knew? So today, I finally figured out how to get my train tickets from Nice to Milan to Venice to Florence to Rome, which was one of the things that had been stressing me out the past few days. Oh, and this morning I attempted to do laundry for the first time in france, and had such a blast figuring out the machines in the laundramat with this awesome french woman. Lets just say both of us were very dramatically acting out spinning washers and dryers and such, just cracking up and being goofy! speaking the same languate is completely overrated! Then I went to Saint Chappelle, which is this completely breathtaking old church made almost completely from incredible stained glass windows. It quite possibly may be my favorite thing in paris now. Then, it was around 4ish, and I decided to have my first (and probably last) real french meal, at a place that advertised "cuisine traditionelle" or something like that. I ordered a glass of wine and what I thought was a big salad with different types of cheeses on it. Turns out it was a little salad, with 4 huge wedges of cheese, and a basket of different types of breads. The cheeses were brie, mozzarella, blue cheese, and some cheese that was sharp and crumble-ly and almost too salty, even for me! anyway, it was all incredible, and i think the people walking past could tell how excited i was and a freakish amount of people stopped to say bon apetit or some variation. After that, I strolled along some small alleys that were packed with cafes and bars and shops, all of which were playing the world cup game with great happy hour deals. I think I finally found where the french people go to watch the soccer games. Then, while strolling through an alley of pubs and cheesy tourist shops, I completely unexpected emerged directly in front of Notre Dame, which is such a bizarre experience to stumble into. Now here I am, and I think next I'm going to this big icecream cafe that was showing the soccer game, and they had happy hour specials on this delicious looking sorbet/fruit bowl thing, so yay for world cup happy hours at icecream shops! Tomorrow is my last day in Paris, and then its on to Lyon for 1 day, Nice for 2, and then a whirlwind tour of Italy. Woohoo!!!

I'm an American in Paris!!! And as qbout half of the letters in the keyboard here are in the right place and half of them are random, this will have to be short as i use all my internet cafe time to fix typos. Let's just say ... days in Paris: 2. Number of bread/cheese/wine picnics under the Eiffel tower: 2. Not a bad little ratio!! Anyway, I figured out the train ok, it's just one of those absolutely unexplainable experiences to get off a train in a foreign country, and not know the place or the language or a single person there. So, I get to my hostel, and find out I can't check in for a couple more hours, so I decide to go exploring. I find a cute little Parisian cafe/coffee shop, and proceed to sit down at a table. The guy comes over, and I ask in my best French that I've been practicing in my head if he spoke English. Upon receiving a real quick "non!", I started to panic. However, he started listing things on the menu, and once he listed cafe au lait, I quickly ordered that as the one thing I recognized. I explored Monmarte for a while, and climbed all the steps to the top of Butte Monmarte, where you get an incredible view of the entire city; (and my guidebook made tons of witty jokes about the best way to get "up the butte", with that phrase in bold each time. After that, I took the metro to the Eiffel tower. I found a little market, and bought some wine and cheese and bread, and right when I left the market to have my little picnic, it started pouring. So, I ran to a table under a big umbrella in front of a tourist stand that sold crepes and icecream, and started to have my picnic there. I started eating, and this random guy who worked there came over and started staying stuff to me in French. I assumed he was telling me I couldn't eat outside food there, but this french guy at the umbrella next to me told me he was just asking if I would move to his umbrella so they could use mine to cover the tv they were bringing out to watch the soccer game on. Of course I agreed, so I ended up having a wine and cheese picnic in front of the Eiffel tower while watching the world cup!! Does life get any better? The french guy ended up giving me some basic french lessons in exchange for cheese, so maybe I can get around a bit now. Tonight I did wine and cheese again in front of the eiffel tower with the Canadians from my last hostel in London, so it was nice to at least hang out with so,e quasi-familiar english speakers. And today I went to the Pompadou center, which was just asesome. And all the hostels in Paris fill up real early in the summer, so I'm staying at a cheap hotel, which isn't fancy at all, but I get my own little room and bathroom, so I get to keep my own little shampoo in the shower and my little toothbrush on the sink for the next 3 days. Yay for unpacking a bit!! I'm just about out of time, but I'll update this when I can.

Sorry it's been forever since I posted, but here's goes . . . or maybe it's just that a couple days can feel like forever when you're travelling, who knows? Anyway, I'm still having a complete blast, and am so happy I'm doing this this summer. Don't remember everything from the past couple days, but here are the highlights: On saturday, Maggie's dad was here, so I got to meet up with him in his super fancy neighborhood for lunch. Then I caught the end of the first England game in a pub, and people were going nuts! They were all standing and overflowing into the streets and just having an awesome time. Later that night, me and the giant went out with the British girls, and had such a fun time! And one of the girls drove us to the bar in her teeny little european car, so I got my first official ride as a leftie shotgun, which is just weird. Then super early the next morning, the giant and I went on a bus day trip to Stonehenge and Bath. Both were incredible! On the way back, me and the giant were starting to irritate each other, so we've completely split ways since neither one of us felt like fighting with someone we've known for a week. So last night I came to my last hostel in London, which is near London bridge. I love moving from hostel to hostel every couple days! I feel like I've gotten to live in every cool region for at least a couple days now. Yesterday I did the London Eye, which is pretty much a ginormous ferris wheel that you can see everything from, and then walked up to Leicester square to check out how the half price tickets work (I'm going to try to see a show tonight . . . Aunt Carol -- I'm shooting for Billy Elliot, but that wasn't one of the choices for yesterday. We'll see what they have today), and then I stopped in a little pub for lunch and to watch the Australia/Japan game. I totally thought it was all little Japanese girls in the pub for most of the game, and those girls can make a lot of noise! However, I found out in the last 10 minutes (when Australia had an incredible comeback scoring 3 goals in the last 10 minutes!) that there were actually quite a few Aussies in the pub too, and they went NUTS! There were aussies dancing in the streets wearing the flag and singing and just going completely crazy! It was great! Then I came back to my hostel, and watched the US/czech game in the bar there with a whole bunch of American backpackers. Not the best game, but a good time anyway. After that, I actually did laundry for the first time, so clean clothes feel very refreshing. After that, I was sharing a room with 2 sets of 2 Canadians, and the 5 of us decided to just stay in and not get dressed up (its about a million degrees here and we were all just sweating like crazy) and get a couple bottles of cheap wine and play fun drinking games. The 5 of us were such an unlikely 5-some (one super punk girl with bright green hair and lots of tatoos, one gay former druggie, one jewish pre-med guy, one guy from some teeny fishing town or something, and me), but we seriously just all clicked awesomely, and had one of the greatest nights! Let's just say it ended up with me and the gay guy drunkenly karaoke-ing to a whole new world! Anyway, the 4 of them say we have to go out again tonight, but I want to see a show and see the British girls one more time before getting to the trainstation at 4:45 tomorrow morning to go to Paris! I love this!

Yesterday was the best day ever! ok, well maybe not ever, but definitely my favorite in London. After I took Riss to the airport, I came back to the hostel, and finally moved to a new hostel. This one is right near Notting Hill and Hyde Park, so there are pretty gardens and everything right around it, and I haven't explored this neighborhood of London yet, so I'm excited to check it out. Then I took a bus to STA travel (and, for the first time ever, the bus I got on actually went where I thought it was going to go!) and bought my rail pass and my ticket to Paris for next wednesday. Then I got lunch at a cute little sandwich shop and sat and people watched for a while, and then took to tube over to the Tower of London, which was incredible! They have the guys dress up in the traditional guard costumes and do tours of the whole place, and the guides are so enthusiastic and hilarious and everyone gets really into it! After the tour, I went and saw the crown jewels and all the old armor and weapons and everything. Then, I walked along the Thames river, and crossed London bridge to get to the tube stop. I didn't get to enjoy the bridge too much, because this was right at 6 pm so it was packed with business men in suits and I thought if I stopped to take a picture or look around, I'd get stampled real bad. Then I took the tube up to northern london, and met up with the british girls for dinner. These girls are so much fun! I'm completely in love with all of them! and we also have plans for tonight (one of the girls has a crush on the partner at her office, and they're all going to a pub to watch the world cup, but she doesn't like soccer at all, so she told me to come along and be the gap between girls and soccer and then also give her my opinion on the crush!), and I think we may have made plans to go out saturday night too. After dinner, the giant came over and met up with us to go to a couple different bars in the area. All in all, a fantastic day and night! I think I'm going to take it kind of slow today. I've been feeling like I may be getting a bit sick, and one good night sleep could send it away, but I keep running around too much. And the world cup starts this afternoon, so I'm completely stoked to watch in a crowded pub with everyone going nuts! I think this travelling alone thing is going to be such an incredible summer! Maybe it'll hit me how scary it should be once I'm in a country where they don't speak English, but until then, I'm loving it!

*Revised plan for real!* I just took Riss to Heathrow airport, and she's probably going through all the security craziness as we speak, and then heading back to boston. As for me, I'm staying in London til next wednesday, and then going to Paris and starting my europe train pass from there. I'm super excited! I packed the essentials into just my backpack, and I'll find somewhere to leave my suitcase in London, and then head out to wherever I end up. The giant is staying in London for the same time as me, and then we'll both head to Paris on the same train, and maybe do parts of france together but then probably split up because we want to do different countries. (and after knowing this kid for 4 days, who knows how i'll feel about him in 4 weeks . . . i've been known to be a bit fickle every now and then!)

Anyway, yesterday was me and Riss's first day of being tourists. We started out at Buckingham palace and then went to the Queen's gallery, which has lots of portraits and jewels and random furniture from various royaltys' houses. Then we had a long lunch at a pub (p.s. I love that it's completely acceptable to drink beer at 2 pm on a wednesday here . . . even the old women next to us were!), and then met up with the giant for the afternoon. Oddly enough, while walking past Buckingham palace, I ran into Matt Seiler from wash u., and he's just travelling through Europe with a friend this summer, so we traded contact info and may meet up to go to the beaches of Croatia, which I've heard are unbelievable. Small world, I guess! Now that I know I'm only in London for another week, I'm kind of feeling like there's not enough time to do everything I still want to do. Tonight I'm going out with the Jewish girls we met a couple days ago, so they said they'll show me more cool spots. And tomorrow the world cup starts, and this country is ridiculously obsessed with soccer and I love it! The paper released a survey that said that 28% of Londoners are planning on calling in sick to work when England has games. Every ad and store window and pub sign is about the English team, entire newspapers are published everyday just with more soccer news, it's absolutely crazy! And I think I'm going to take a 1-2 day bus trip to Bath too, which has stonehenge and hot springs and apparently a lot of other stuff that I'll find out when I get there. and there are a couple major tourist sites I have to hit before I go, so I'll probably be running around like crazy between now and my 4 am train to Paris next wednesday. That's all from here . . . I'll give you all the revised life plan as it changes, probably tomorrow it will all be completely different!

Change of plans! Sorry I've been bad about updating this. Me and Riss spent a couple days looking for apartments together here, but we had completely different styles of going about this and ended up driving each other completely crazy, so we decided to get individual apartments (or flatshares as they call it here, where you basically just get a room in someone else's apartment) near each other instead. So we did that yesterday, and I found a cute little place in an apartment with an English guy and 2 Spanish girls, and its in a real good neighborhood that I like a ton, but Riss couldn't find any apartment that worked for her. So Riss came home really sad/frustrated/homesick, and is considering going home early (but I think she's gonna stick it out!), and so kind of because of the possibility of Riss leaving and kind of independently, I decided I'm just going to stay in London for another week or so, and then just travel around Europe trying to see everything between now and august (yes, like my parents told me to do all along . . . maybe they are right every now and then!) . That way, I'll just move into a new hostel for the next week and Riss can move into the place I found yesterday, and it works out for everyone!

Besides that, I'm still having a fantastic time in London! Everybody here is so nice, and I'm starting to feel really comfortable with the city and figuring everything out. We've been hanging out with our giant a lot, and he's an awesome guy to explore the city with. The other night, me and the giant pretty much spent 5 hours just walking around the city and hopping on random free buses and getting off wherever they took us, and flipping coins to decide which way to turn, and just exploring the city like that. I think today I'm going to start being a real tourist, and go to Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London and all those kind of things.

If anyone has cool ideas for cities I should definitely get to while I'm here, let me know! I'm planning on at least making it to spain, france, and Italy, and then ending in the Czech republic when Lizzy and David get there.

Ok mr. daddy with your apartment comments, we went apartment ('flat') hunting all day yesterday. Granted, we didn't find anything that worked for us, but we got to explore about a million different neighborhoods of london and really get an awesome feel for the city and what we want and such. One other important thing we learned is that the tube (metro) map here is not to scale at all. The mayor did that a while ago to trick people into thinking the suberbs are closer than they are are moving out there. So anyway, we fell for that yesterday and set up two flat viewings in a neighborhood that seemed a bit out there but not too far, but after a long tube ride followed by a 15 minute normal train ride, we got to a suberb that pretty much only had a gas station and a carpet store, and decided it probably wasn't for us. Either way, we were both in good spirits through the entire day, and I just stopped by the newstand on my way to the internet cafe and got a whole new ginormous book of classifieds that comes out everyday, so we'll do it all again today!

As for last night, it was awesome!!!! It turns out the outlet in our hostel room doesn't work, and I needed to charge my cell phone so I can call apartment people all day today, so while Riss took a nap, I went down to one of the lounges in the hostel and plugged my phone in under the toaster table and just sat there to make sure nobody took it. While I was there, I made friends with an awesome giant from New Jersey (as in 6'7"!), and he said he was travelling alone and felt weird going out by himself, so I told him to come out with me and Riss. He turns out to be absolutely awesome (Jamey-- if you're blog-stalking me, he reminds me a lot of you!) So the 3 of us went to Leicester square, which apart from being one of the yellows on our british monopoly I've played for years, is an awesome area with tons of bars and pubs and street musicians and a big merry-go-round, so we went to a couple bars there. As we were running to get the last tube home, we ran into this group of 5 british girls, and somehow in the elevator we became friends with them and they insisted we come out to a different neighborhood with them. So, for some reason they had to split up (I think one of them had a car somewhere or something), but me and Riss and Matt (the N.J. giant) went off with two of them. I swear, these two girls (Rachel and Sabrina) are the exact british versions of me and Riss, and we absolutely loved them! We had such a fun night, just sitting in some Cuban club talking with these girls and their friends. We exchanged numbers, and today they're going to take us to the Jewish neighborhood to look for apartments there b/c they say that's a really fun neighborhood to live in. (oh yeah, they're all Jewish too, and super cute, so we officially have friends in london!) Ok, kudos to you guys if you made it to the end of this massive post, keep the comments coming, I love them!

So, it turns out me and Riss may not be the most efficient job hunters ever. After the orientation yesterday, we went to a cute little sandwich/burger place for lunch. I found out that in London, you apparently don't always get what you think you ordered. Anyway, my beans and breakfast sausage was surprisingly good, even if it wasn't quite the burger I was shooting for. After that, we split up because Riss was exhausted/jet lagged and I wanted to keep 'job hunting'. I found one super cute sports bar/pub in an awesome neighborhood that was all decked out for the world cup, and I gave my resume there, but after that I was a bit less productive. At the next pub I went to, there were a couple postal workers at a table having some beers, so they told me to come over for a beer. Never being one to turn down free beer, of course I said yes! In the course of talking to them, they started recommending other pubs and bars around the area. One of them volunteered to walk me to the next one (after he stopped in to work b/c they were all supposed to be working but had taken a 3 hour break . . . apparently that's normal here?), so this guy ended up walking with me around the area to a couple different pubs. At each one, I would walk in, ask if they were looking for any more employees, they would say no, and the postal worker would buy me another beer in that pub. So, it ended up being a great afternoon, although no job yet! After that, I navigated the tube all by myself and came back and met my little sis Liz at our hostel, and hung out with her for a while. I bought her phone off of her, so I'm beginning to feel a bit more like a real person here. Then me and Riss went out for the most incredible Indian food ever, and came back to the hostel to pass out for the night at promptly 9 pm on our first friday in london. Are we cool or what? Anyway, the goal for today is to try to find an apartment as we have to be out of our hostel at 10 am tomorrow . . . wish us luck!

We're in london!!!! Me and riss got in last night, and the nicest woman in the world helped us find our hostel, and everything's incredible so far! we ended up being put in a room with these 2 cute australian boys, so the four of us went out together last night to the bar in the hostel, where it was karaoke night. the combination of some really awful karaoke and amusing australian accents kept us entertained for the night! now we're going through an orientation, and then starting the job search all day. hopefully we'll find something before our 3 day reservation at the hostel runs out! wish us luck!