pffft, aiming is for pansies!

So yeah, sorry for not posting earlier on me surviving 'S&S Part Deux: Paris'! Was pretty great going around in Paris seeing stuff and lounging on terraces, and making fun of the French of course. We kept the latter at acceptable levels though, and to be perfectly honest almost everyone was really nice...much nicer than I remembered last time I was there.

Took some silly pics too, about me 'discovering' the Eiffel tower. There was a running gag about me never seeing where the Eiffel tower was even though it's huge, just so you know. I partially kinda trashed Satis and Shiny's stay in Amsterdam with a combination of a late/intoxicated night in Antwerp, their jet lag and travel fatigue but Shiny seemed to hate Amsterdam anyway so...I don't feel too bad! Honestly though, it sucks a little that the jetlag hit so hard when you guys were there, but whaddayagonnado. Not like just booking two days for getting over a jet lag is a much better decision.

Did you do or see a lot of stuff while in Frankfurt still?

And as for my French...I felt kinda bad that it 'stalled' a few times in Paris, and funnily enough I had a pretty vivid conversation with my cab driver to the train station later that went a lot better. It's the switching languages out of the blue that's the stinger, it goes well enough in my mother tongue but gets tricky in acquired ones. Train trip back to Brussels was smooth as shit btw, Thalys train ftw. 1.20h from Brussels to Paris, that's crazy cool.

I'm tempted to plan a trip to the US now but the whole EVIL EMPIRE PERSONAL DATA CONTROL thing is still something I can't get over. Maybe I'll pretend I'm a terrorist and get shipped to Gitmo with no customs. And totally curious about the pics! Too bad we didn't take any in the Kulminator, or at least I think we didn't.

Also, things we more or less established:

- European cities are riddled with bikes jumping out of nowhere to run Satis over
- American food is a lot saltier in general
- European bacon sucks balls compared to US bacon
- Public transport in big cities is for the poor and criminal in the US
- Actually walking around in cities is not very normal in the US, let alone walking around after dark/at night
- Tipoing works very differently in both continents
- People are fat as hell in the US
- In general, things are smaller in Europe. Smaller cars, stores, restaurants, bars, probably hotels too.
- In Europe, you generally have to ask for the bill. In the US they'll just come over and ask if you want it.

Some of that may be tragically cliché. But true nonetheless.

We had a great time in Europe. Shiny thoroughly enjoyed herself, even though it was her first time across an ocean. you never know how people will react their first time in a totally different environment. Canada doesn't really count... it's like a suburb of the US.

We spent some time sorting out the pics that we want to post and now it's up to me to upload them all and get them labeled and everything. That may take awhile... Shiny and I both of class tonight, and work during the day. The weekend we mostly spent drinking and recovering from our most recent bout of jet lag. Thankfully, that's mostly manifested in us just waking up a bit early (7am or so), so it's not too big a deal. The negative is we both start getting tired a bit earlier than we'd like (~8pm).

We went back to frankfurt and did a bit of shopping, but not really much more. Shiny was pretty much unable to do any further walking, so we took it easy, hit some bars and restaurants, etc. The final day was a little hectic... I had us jump the wrong s-bahn to get to the airport, but we figured that out fairly quickly (thankfully people are very friendly in Germany). I then almost had us jump a tram to the wrong terminal . Figured that out, back-tracked, then checked our luggage. Despite the various misadventures, we still ended up at the gate for our flight probably 1 1/2 hours early, which is fine. However, they were enough to stress Shiny out enough she had to take some happy pills.

The flight back was largely uneventful. Some German family with 5 children managed to have a kid crying/screaming the entire 10 hours, though luckily they were probably 10 rows in front of us, so not ridiculously loud where we were. We then breezed through customers (I smuggled in a pack of cigarettes by accident... oh well), got our bags, and met my mother, who then took us home. Good times were had by all.