Zooming all the way back to London,


Well, my flight was cancelled. Apparantely the door on the plane did not close properly in Vancouver yesterday and my plane never made it back to London today. Therefore, upon arriving at the airport, I found out that my plane had been delayed for 23 hours till 3PM tomorrow. Thankfully, they fed me for free, gave me a free phone card and paid for a cab to my brother's house and back tomorrow morning. So here I am sitting at my brother's while they watch Big Brother, enjoying a lovely evening in London. Part of me does not care, especially when I learned that I may be entitled to financial compensation under EU law for this, which would be fantastic.

Another amazing thing happened today. I found a flat in Amsterdam and agreed with the owner upon moving into it. This flat is amazing; a dream come true. It is owned by a local guy who decided to move to Africa for two years, so I am essentially housesitting on the cheap until he gets home in December 2007. The place is luxurious. It has everything and more I could have ever hoped, and is right on the Prinsengracht in the Jordaan, a upscale-chic neighbourhood. If this all works out, and it seems it will, it will confirm that in some ways, I am the luckiest guy in the world. It is just a house, but it signals the start of a new life and that means a lot.

Now back to the last of the trip. The guys are still in Berlin, and from now on, please visit Fisch's Journal to find out what shenanigans they are up to. They are heading to Hamburg shortly, before venturing up to Scandinavia for trips to Copenhagen and Oslo. I am jealous, but I will make it there eventually. The last two days in Berlin was filled with sombre reflection and crazy partying. We walked around more, visiting the Reichstag, a horrible modern art museum called the Hamburg Bahnhof that was housed in a gorgeous old train station, a few Jewish memorials including the oldest Jewish cemetery in Berlin and the only synagogue not destroyed by the Nazis. It was used as a storage facility, apparantely. In addition, we walked through the Tiergarten, a gorgeous park smack dab in the middle of the city centre and walked through the Hofptbahnhof, a gigantic train station that was redesigned for the World Cup.

At nite I saw Jason Collett and Amy Millan one night, which was lovely at a really weird venue called the Postbahnhof. In addition, we met a lovely German music journalist called Alisa who we partied with on my last night in Berlin. We tried to go barhopping, but the first bar we went to took ages to serve us and our bar hop turned into a crawl, which turned into going to two bars. Still, it was lovely.

In addition, I ate a bunch of Falafels, some delicious and some horrid, did more walking around Berliner Toursiting. On our last day, there was a big city-wide party outside the opening of the train station, in which a horrible German cover band, playing shitty American pop poorly headlined outside. They played the Stones, Uncle Cracker and Peter Gabriel, among others while many enthusiastic German fans lapped it up. It was horrible, yet horribly funny at the same time. I remember this one women just givn'r in front of us, air guitar and all. I wish I could have taken a picture. I did take one of the train station though, and the party outside.

I did not shower in Berlin though. Our hostel, way in the East end of the city had communal showers, and all their furniture was outfitted by communist army surplus. I showered the first night, but a security guard came in to the shower while I was soaping to tell me that showering after ten was strictly prohibited. Also, he did this in German. That was enough showering for me in Berlin.

I guess that is it for now, even though I feel I left stuff out. I am going to publish some pictures after this post as well.

peace-