Well, we've been back a week now. Work was as mind-numbing as usual. Since I haven't exactly seen any clamoring for a post about Whitby (or, "dear old Whitby" as Lynnea and I now like to call it) I shall, I think, put it off further. It's Sunday and I'm lazy and I just don't think I have a full post in me today.

Meanwhile, some things I learned from the trip (in no particular order):

1. I hate cobblestones.
2. French speakers are rather more intimidating to me than I might have expected.
3. Kippers are delicious
4. The middle ages was not a good time to live in Scotland.
5. Everything in Europe is very old, including the new stuff.
6. I really, really hate cobblestones.
7. British food is actually pretty good, but eating it for every meal is taxing.
8. As far as I can tell, you can't get bad food in Belgium.
9. Red Leicester is delicious
10. Cask ales are grand and all, but it rapidly gets difficult to tell them apart.
11. Cobblestones are made of evil.
12. The North Sea is rather windy.
13. I highly enjoy rail travel.
14. Haggis is made of love.

Matt on 10.11.09 @ 12:29 PM PST [link]  [1 Comment]

Well, we're back home. Blogging sort of fell apart at the end of the trip there... of course, what with no wifi in Whitby, no wifi in London, and an extra special kind of no wifi back in Brussels (the hotel booklet thing said that net access was 20 euro a day, but that there was wifi in the lobby. It turns out the wifi in the lobby was also 20 euro a day... what the heck?) it was a little hard to come up with a good way to update. I guess I could have written the posts out and posted them when I came by some internet, but after traveling that long, our enthusiasm was sort of falling off. (Oh, by the way, Lynnea was posting the trip as well, see her blog for more).

Anyway, the last bit of the trip just involved going back to Brussels for a day then back home. The second round of Brussels was a little bit easier than the first since we pretty much knew what to expect. We finally managed to make it to the Museums of Ancient and Modern Art. Saw a bunch of Rubens, some various Brueghels, a Bosch, and for you TMBG fans, several James Ensors. Among various other things. Of course, at that point in the trip we were a little overloaded with having seen stuff, so it was cool, but not awesome.

After that we wandered about the Grand Place area for awhile, ate some moules et frites for dinner (we of course had frites for lunch and frites the night before as well - one must eat all the frites one can in Belgium) then had a horrifically long flight back home the next day. Got in here at around 6:30 last night (3:30am Belgium time), managed to stay awake until about 9:30, and crashed.

I should mention the second hotel we stayed at in Brussels. Now, the first one we stayed at was the Four Points, which was a rather nice hotel room. The second one, on the other hand... I have never, ever, stayed any place that posh. It was the Mariott Renaissance directly next to the EU Parliament - apparently the rooms usually go for a standard rate of 500eu a night. 500 EURO A NIGHT. We got it for $105 a night through Priceline. How, I do not know. But damn that place was crazy nice. It was also bigger than our apartment.

Anyway, we're currently recuperating/unpacking/catching up on the world. I've still got a couple posts about the trip (especially about Whitby) in me, I should get them up in the next couple days. With pictures even. Honest!

Matt on 10.04.09 @ 03:39 PM PST [link]  [1 Comment]

Back in London for the night. There wasn't really any easily accessible wifi in Whitby (there's less open wifi in the world than one might think) but man what a fantastic town. We really didn't want to leave. In fact, I just wrote out half a blog post about it but I realized that I wasn't even coming close to doing it justice, and not all of my pictures are off the camera, so I think I'll have to devote a longer post to it when I have the time.

But: Dracula, ghosts, kippers, fossils, ancient ruins, fish n' chips, telescopes, and more...

Didn't get to do much in London today, just popped in to Harrod's, then had a really good curry. Back to Brussels tomorrow. Then one more day there and finally back home. Home doesn't sound too shabby just now.

Matt on 09.30.09 @ 03:36 PM PST [link]  [1 Comment]

Hmm, notice how these posts are getting shorter and shorter, and also less frequent? I'm pretty sure that's fatigue setting in. So once again, York is cool, not enough time here, etc. Today we walked around the entire (ok, well we actually missed a small section) city walls, did a bit of shopping (Lynnea found multiple cutie shops, as we call them), and went to the York Brewery. We were going to do a ghost walk tonight but the one we picked already had a crowd of 200 people or something like that (I guess it is saturday night after all) so we skipped it. That's just way too big a crowd for a proper ghost walk.

The York Brewery is awesome by the way. They're really friendly folks and the beer there is past tasty. Got a bit of swag from there, including a cool little jug/pitcher thing that I really hope makes it home. We really weren't sure we wanted to do a brewery tour (let's face it, if you know how to make beer, most brewery tours are not entirely fascinating) but it ended up seriously being the high point of the day.

Anyway, assuming we can find the right bus, we're off to Whitby in the morning. Don't know if we'll manage to find wifi there, it's a rather small town (13k or so), but you never know.

Now is time for the sleep.

Matt on 09.26.09 @ 03:12 PM PST [link]  [1 Comment]

No time for a full post... or at least no time for pictures. Once again we didn't have internet in Edinburgh (well, actually we found out as we were leaving that our B&B had internet down in the lobby and we didn't know it). Edinburgh was fantastic. We went on a few tours of the supposedly haunted vaults (didn't see any ghosts, but it was still creepy), saw the castle, the camera obscura, ate a ton of haggis.

By the way, haggis is absolutely delicious. I've got to try to find it in the states.

Anyway, mostly we just did tourist stuff, but it was a kick. The only disappointment is the scotch. It's pretty much twice as expensive in Edinburgh as it is in the states. So I didn't buy any and didn't even really drink any. Sad sad sad, but what can you do.

Anyway, we're on the train to York right now, hopefully I'll get a chance to post again later today.


Matt on 09.25.09 @ 03:15 AM PST [link]  [2 Comments]

(Currently writing this on the train from London to Edinburgh - free train wifi is awesome)

Aaaaa! Why the heck did people tell us that London wasn't any good?! London's quite possibly the best city I've ever been to in my life. I could totally live there, it's pure fantasticness. Instead everybody was just like, eh, London, don't know why you'd bother going there. So we only got a day and half there when really a week wouldn't have been enough. Hey, a tourist picture!



Still, even with only a day and a half we managed to squeeze in quite a bit. Saw Big Ben and the Houses of Parliment and Westminster (just the outsides, you understand), Trafalgar Square, a bit of the National Portrait Gallery, Hyde Park, a tiny fraction of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the British Library's treasure room (First Folio! Magna Carta! Codex Sinaticus!). Plus we had a pretty good curry, and quite a bit of pub food, and several pints of cask ale. Not too bad for a day and a half.



We've decided that we're going back for at least week someday, someday sooner rather than later I hope. The only two drawbacks were our horrible hotel (avoid the London House Hotel, unless you want to sleep in a small closet in a basement with a bunch of builders outside shouting at 7am) and the lack of easy to find free wifi. Which is why I'm posting this now.

Anyway, Lynnea's looking at me like "when is he going to let me use the laptop", so more later.
Matt on 09.22.09 @ 03:32 AM PST [link]  [1 Comment]

Well, last day in Brussels until we come back in a couple weeks to fly back home. And much to my dismay, we still didn't manange to get to any of the museums (We'll have to skip the day trip to Bruges and catch the muesums when we get back). But that's ok, we went somewhere better - Brasserie Cantillon! Hey, it's us in the Cantillon tasting room!



Now, it just so happens that my favorite beer pretty much ever is Cantillon Gueze. (It's sold as Cantillon Classic Gueze in the states, and it goes by Gueze 100% Lambic Bier over here). It's sour and funky and completely amazing. I often liken it to drinking a glass of cheese. The only possible problem with it is that it goes for about $16 a bottle back home.

So you can imagine that getting to actually go there was pretty darn exciting. Basically what you do is you pay 5 euro to get in and you're given a tour book and you give yourself a tour through the brewery, then you get a glass of the gueze and a glass of the kriek at the end. Sort of low impact, but it was really cool just to see everything. And let me also add that it smells fantastic in there.



The other perk was that if you want to take some beer home with you (or back to the hotel as the case may be), it's vastly, vastly cheaper than getting it back home. We opted for the case containing a 75cl bottle each of the gueze, the kriek, and the framboise which was about 14 euro. If you just wanted the gueze it was 11 euro for three. Fantastic.

Anyway, that's it for Brussels for now. Tomorrow it's on to London.
Matt on 09.19.09 @ 02:16 PM PST [link]  [2 Comments]