(no subject)
i'm currently at my hostel in budapest and not down for an update, so i'm just going to post the 2 mass letters i've sent to my friends. sorry heather, whitney and eric as you've already gotten these.
#1
hi again. i say again to the 3 people that that last letter actually sent out to. amsterdam clogs your mind and so at the time it didn't really matter that i was just guessing on most of the e-mail addresses. i'm currently in munich, its 12:23. i took the overnight train to munich, so i got here at 7:45 this morning. i wish i had just stayed in amsterdam as i can't check into my hostel until 3pm, but at least it was free to sleep on the train. i put my luggage into storage and headed off to oktoberfest this morning, but as its raining and i'm wearing sweatpants i decided to stop in and hang out inside until i can change or until the weather lets up. it looks like i wrote a novel, but i have tons of stories i didn't mention. but if you want to be taken off this e-mail list just let me know.
my flight here was the most peaceful one i've ever taken, so i was pretty sure i was going to die. didn't however, and found my first hostel pretty easily. checked in and went out to explore. because i'm a ridiculous stereotype the first thing i did was stop into this coffee shop, Easy Times Cafe, near the park where i was staying. inside it was mostly locals, and they were playing reggae music and watching kung fu on a large screen tv. it was magical. 5 minutes later this 23 year old Allad from whales came and sat with me. he was travelling alone on holiday for 3 days and we decided to walk around and go to museums together. we hung out all day and although we had a lot in common and he was pretty funny and nice, i was still pretty bored. i went back to my hostel and found that my roommates were in the shower together giggling. made me laugh. they were nice teachers from the czech republic, and told me about how they keep getting lucky by meeting american girls. i passed out at like 10:30 and woke up at 10:30 the next morning.
met up with Allad and we went to the van gogh museum and the old heineken brewery which are the only famous places i went worth mentioning. the heineken factory was 10 euros and they gave you 3 free drinks and a free beer glass and you got to be on a simulated ride of what it would be like to be a bottle getting filled with heineken. pretty spectacular. Allad was leaving the next morning, so we went back to my hostel to hang out at the bar there (which was a fantastic place to go), and after he left i ended up meeting the coolest people ever. there were these two people, Ben and Vera, from australia who are going to work in london now, and so they and two of their mates drove around in a van for the past 3 months before ended up in england. i also met a couple guys from birmingham england, and all of us and another guy from australia went coffee shop hopping the next day. after some point i decided to check in to my other hostel (which happened to be on the street we were hopping on) and got ridiculously lost, as there are 2 coffee shops with that name but only one of them is a hotel and i thought it was the other one that i was staying at. so i ended up circling the city several times after everyone gave me correct directions and i thought they were leading me astray. tired and pretty sure i was just going to go to sleep when i got there, i checked in.
both hostels i stayed in were really nice. the first one was a double room but two people stayed in the other bed. it had a good meeting area and was basically like a big party. the second one was cleaner. i had a room with 10 beds in it. when i got in, lots of my roommates were sitting around talking. so pretty immediately we all decided to go down to the bar and smoke. I immediately clicked with these 2 canadians brian and paul, and this italian claudia who were staying in my room. i'm not sure how i managed to pull it, but everyone i was with ended up buying me all of my drinks and food for the night and the next day. i got so trashed, but i'm pretty sure it's impossible to say 'no' to free tequila. the next morning this girl kelly was australian and lived in the room and was gloomy as hell decided that we were hanging out all day. i'm not sure, but i think she was hitting on me. i've never been in that situation though, and perhaps aussies are just very friendly. brian hated her and so he left me hanging for the afternoon, and it was really weird how all day she kept talking shit about him. like little vacation drama right off the bat. and i had just met these people the night before. we found the city market which was incredibly crowded as it was a saturday afternoon. she insisted on buying me lunch and beer, and we went back to the hostel to hang out until my train. she changed into a skirt and sat uncomfortably close to me at the bar, but luckily we ran into brian and he saved me.
i went to the train station to get my ticket and then had 2 hours before i had to leave, so i walked down and found a coffee shop to send me off. i bought a joint and smoked with these irish guys who were sitting next to me. one of them told me all about places to go and about ireland. he looked like colin ferrell and all i wanted to do was look at him, so i just nodded at everything he said even though i couldn't understand him over the music, his accent, or my high. they helped me find my train, and here i am now.
its really easy to meet people. katy is coming tomorrow morning for 3 weeks and i'm thrilled, though definitely sure that even after she leaves i'm not going to get lonely. i've been having great luck, where everything i need is always right in front of me. i'm really glad to be here, but miss you all terribly. let me know how you're doing. whodey.
-christen!
#2
hi friends. i'm currently in vienna, waiting for the train to budapest. so much has happened since my last letter. europe is crazy but so so much fun. i'll briefly go over the highlights since my last update:
munich - met 3 californian dudes and this irish guy while waiting to check into the hostel, and we decided to head over to oktoberfest. it was raining and we couldn't get into a tent so we drank in the freezing weather and met crazy drunk germans. decided to try to go to the hofbrauhaus, and since we were all foreign we didn't really have a grasp on how the subway system works. so as we're trashed and running up the down escalator, right before i reach the top i completely fell and started to go back down. everyone just laughed at me and we continued on our journey. we couldn't get into hbhaus so we ate at this restaurant next door. all around munich there are these lion statues, like the pigs in cincinnati or the cows in zurich, and the guys were like 'i want to ride one', but quickly came back because they said they were afraid they were going to break. i was sure they weren't though so i went to go show them, and as soon as i tried to get my leg over the lion i fell again and like flipped over, and the guys got it on video camera. we went back to the hostel bar which was ridiculous amounts of fun, and it was one of the californians birthdays and they had a litre chugging contest, which he won, and the prize was free jaeger shots for an hour for him and his friends. regardless to say oktoberfest was sweet, everyone in munich drinks like a fish, and pretty much everyone who stayed in our hostel saw the video footage of my spill on the lion.
next day katy got there, we oktoberfested again, hostel barred again, fun night. next day oktoberfest was over and we went on a munich pub crawl, as our reasoning was 'we're in germany, its okay if all we do is drink' (which has now been changed to 'we're in europe' and is our living motto). the pub crawl was ridiculous and i'll have to show you pictures to get into it. but at one place our group ordered four 5 litre buckets of liquor, at another place i did a shot called a gas chamber, i made a million new friends and i left munich very hungover.
prague- we got to cheap, cheap prague, checked into our hostel with shared showers, walked around for a while, and headed to the hostel bar. met this cool lumberjack from england, and then this american who was there with his german and swedish friends. they were the coolest people ever and quickly became our new best friends. we learned lots of german words, discussed the upcoming david hasselhoff/ice-t hip hop album, and had so much fun. the next day katy and i wondered off into old and new town for 12 hours or so. prague is the most beautiful place i've ever been. its the only city in europe that was never bombed during a war, so everything is SO old. every alley you look down is gorgeous, which is very misleading as you find yourself at a dead end after thinking you're going to find something really cool. we walked the palace gardens and ran into these people holding owls which they let us pet, and then told us all about different birds of prey. later that night we went on ghost hunt through the city, which ended up being really scary because everyone kept jumping out at us. back to the bar, we did LOTS of absinthe shots with our new friends, and i got into a fight with these guys from chicago and minnesota about the bengals. later that night a couple of our friends went to get food, so i went upstairs to my room, and when i got back a couple of my friends were talking by the door of the bar. apparently there was this czech guy who was born in vancouver but lives in LA who was there and was a crip (as in the gang), and didn't like the swedish guy's shirt, and therefore threatened to cut him and got out his knife. there was crazy confusion for a while, and then a few of us were sitting in the lobby and the crip was there, and this really nice guy from hong kong who bought us all drinks were talking and all of a sudden the crip slammed the chinese guy's head into the wall and started strangling him. some english guys pulled them apart eventually, but it was so weird to see. this girl, ally, who was staying at our hostel and then met us at our hostel here in vienna told us that its because the guy from hong kong was in a gang in china and thought that he deserved more respect and thats why they got into a fight, but who the hell has ever heard of a crip from canada? it was ridiculous to say the least.
we left for the train station in prague, where no one is nice to you and the man at the food counter tried to rip us off and none of the information booths speak english or give information. we couldn't find our train on the station schedule even though it was in our eurail timetable. finally i was able to find someone who told me that our train was on platform 2. so we waited until after our train supposed to leave, and FINALLY we found someone who told us that the train leaves from the other train station. so we went there, delirious, and staked out a good compartment on the next train that left for vienna. we got this lush place, and then these two guys with tiny dogs who didn't speak any english sat with us so we just talked about them for a long time.
vienna- got to the train station at 10:30, and in our delirious state bought a tram ticket from our station, subenhof, to subenhof. its uncool that they let you do that. but our excuse for anything is 'we're stupid americans, no one is going to yell at us' and so far thats been true. got to our hostel at 11pm and went to the bar because we were supposed to meet this guy scott from the bronx who we met in prague there. instead met this guy from la, ryan, and these australians and a couple south africans. when the bar closed ryan, the australians, and katy and i went out to check out the bars. we found one called pandoras box which was the sketchiest fucking place i've ever been. got there and katy went to the bathroom and got offered money for sex. the australian guys were like 'um peacing out' and left right as we got there. ryan went up to the bar and i was sitting on this broken couch alone and this guy from vienna who i think told me his name was cootie told me that he felt that we had a cosmic connection but that the us is very far for him to come visit me. he wouldn't leave me alone, even after ryan was like 'stop talking to my girlfriend' so we moved and he tried to follow and ended up passing out on the couch next to where we were sitting. next day we walked around, i'm not nearly as into vienna as i am any other place i've been to yet. met up with ally at the bar last night, but other than that it was pretty low key. our australian friends were going to this bar that had a 10 euro cover, plus whatever it would be for the cab fare home since the subways close at 12 here, so we decided to call it at night. we were spoiled in prague because of teh cheap prices, so we didn't want to pay. also my voice is almost completly gone, and its been called sultry, sexy, like i should work for a 900 calling place, and like i'm an 80 year old woman who has been smoking her whole life, so hopefully that clears up soon.
budapest for the next few days, then italy.
now you:
tell me
one funny thing you did this week
one thing you're excided about
one thing you learned this week
anýthing else you want to.
miss you love you whodey
christen
#1
hi again. i say again to the 3 people that that last letter actually sent out to. amsterdam clogs your mind and so at the time it didn't really matter that i was just guessing on most of the e-mail addresses. i'm currently in munich, its 12:23. i took the overnight train to munich, so i got here at 7:45 this morning. i wish i had just stayed in amsterdam as i can't check into my hostel until 3pm, but at least it was free to sleep on the train. i put my luggage into storage and headed off to oktoberfest this morning, but as its raining and i'm wearing sweatpants i decided to stop in and hang out inside until i can change or until the weather lets up. it looks like i wrote a novel, but i have tons of stories i didn't mention. but if you want to be taken off this e-mail list just let me know.
my flight here was the most peaceful one i've ever taken, so i was pretty sure i was going to die. didn't however, and found my first hostel pretty easily. checked in and went out to explore. because i'm a ridiculous stereotype the first thing i did was stop into this coffee shop, Easy Times Cafe, near the park where i was staying. inside it was mostly locals, and they were playing reggae music and watching kung fu on a large screen tv. it was magical. 5 minutes later this 23 year old Allad from whales came and sat with me. he was travelling alone on holiday for 3 days and we decided to walk around and go to museums together. we hung out all day and although we had a lot in common and he was pretty funny and nice, i was still pretty bored. i went back to my hostel and found that my roommates were in the shower together giggling. made me laugh. they were nice teachers from the czech republic, and told me about how they keep getting lucky by meeting american girls. i passed out at like 10:30 and woke up at 10:30 the next morning.
met up with Allad and we went to the van gogh museum and the old heineken brewery which are the only famous places i went worth mentioning. the heineken factory was 10 euros and they gave you 3 free drinks and a free beer glass and you got to be on a simulated ride of what it would be like to be a bottle getting filled with heineken. pretty spectacular. Allad was leaving the next morning, so we went back to my hostel to hang out at the bar there (which was a fantastic place to go), and after he left i ended up meeting the coolest people ever. there were these two people, Ben and Vera, from australia who are going to work in london now, and so they and two of their mates drove around in a van for the past 3 months before ended up in england. i also met a couple guys from birmingham england, and all of us and another guy from australia went coffee shop hopping the next day. after some point i decided to check in to my other hostel (which happened to be on the street we were hopping on) and got ridiculously lost, as there are 2 coffee shops with that name but only one of them is a hotel and i thought it was the other one that i was staying at. so i ended up circling the city several times after everyone gave me correct directions and i thought they were leading me astray. tired and pretty sure i was just going to go to sleep when i got there, i checked in.
both hostels i stayed in were really nice. the first one was a double room but two people stayed in the other bed. it had a good meeting area and was basically like a big party. the second one was cleaner. i had a room with 10 beds in it. when i got in, lots of my roommates were sitting around talking. so pretty immediately we all decided to go down to the bar and smoke. I immediately clicked with these 2 canadians brian and paul, and this italian claudia who were staying in my room. i'm not sure how i managed to pull it, but everyone i was with ended up buying me all of my drinks and food for the night and the next day. i got so trashed, but i'm pretty sure it's impossible to say 'no' to free tequila. the next morning this girl kelly was australian and lived in the room and was gloomy as hell decided that we were hanging out all day. i'm not sure, but i think she was hitting on me. i've never been in that situation though, and perhaps aussies are just very friendly. brian hated her and so he left me hanging for the afternoon, and it was really weird how all day she kept talking shit about him. like little vacation drama right off the bat. and i had just met these people the night before. we found the city market which was incredibly crowded as it was a saturday afternoon. she insisted on buying me lunch and beer, and we went back to the hostel to hang out until my train. she changed into a skirt and sat uncomfortably close to me at the bar, but luckily we ran into brian and he saved me.
i went to the train station to get my ticket and then had 2 hours before i had to leave, so i walked down and found a coffee shop to send me off. i bought a joint and smoked with these irish guys who were sitting next to me. one of them told me all about places to go and about ireland. he looked like colin ferrell and all i wanted to do was look at him, so i just nodded at everything he said even though i couldn't understand him over the music, his accent, or my high. they helped me find my train, and here i am now.
its really easy to meet people. katy is coming tomorrow morning for 3 weeks and i'm thrilled, though definitely sure that even after she leaves i'm not going to get lonely. i've been having great luck, where everything i need is always right in front of me. i'm really glad to be here, but miss you all terribly. let me know how you're doing. whodey.
-christen!
#2
hi friends. i'm currently in vienna, waiting for the train to budapest. so much has happened since my last letter. europe is crazy but so so much fun. i'll briefly go over the highlights since my last update:
munich - met 3 californian dudes and this irish guy while waiting to check into the hostel, and we decided to head over to oktoberfest. it was raining and we couldn't get into a tent so we drank in the freezing weather and met crazy drunk germans. decided to try to go to the hofbrauhaus, and since we were all foreign we didn't really have a grasp on how the subway system works. so as we're trashed and running up the down escalator, right before i reach the top i completely fell and started to go back down. everyone just laughed at me and we continued on our journey. we couldn't get into hbhaus so we ate at this restaurant next door. all around munich there are these lion statues, like the pigs in cincinnati or the cows in zurich, and the guys were like 'i want to ride one', but quickly came back because they said they were afraid they were going to break. i was sure they weren't though so i went to go show them, and as soon as i tried to get my leg over the lion i fell again and like flipped over, and the guys got it on video camera. we went back to the hostel bar which was ridiculous amounts of fun, and it was one of the californians birthdays and they had a litre chugging contest, which he won, and the prize was free jaeger shots for an hour for him and his friends. regardless to say oktoberfest was sweet, everyone in munich drinks like a fish, and pretty much everyone who stayed in our hostel saw the video footage of my spill on the lion.
next day katy got there, we oktoberfested again, hostel barred again, fun night. next day oktoberfest was over and we went on a munich pub crawl, as our reasoning was 'we're in germany, its okay if all we do is drink' (which has now been changed to 'we're in europe' and is our living motto). the pub crawl was ridiculous and i'll have to show you pictures to get into it. but at one place our group ordered four 5 litre buckets of liquor, at another place i did a shot called a gas chamber, i made a million new friends and i left munich very hungover.
prague- we got to cheap, cheap prague, checked into our hostel with shared showers, walked around for a while, and headed to the hostel bar. met this cool lumberjack from england, and then this american who was there with his german and swedish friends. they were the coolest people ever and quickly became our new best friends. we learned lots of german words, discussed the upcoming david hasselhoff/ice-t hip hop album, and had so much fun. the next day katy and i wondered off into old and new town for 12 hours or so. prague is the most beautiful place i've ever been. its the only city in europe that was never bombed during a war, so everything is SO old. every alley you look down is gorgeous, which is very misleading as you find yourself at a dead end after thinking you're going to find something really cool. we walked the palace gardens and ran into these people holding owls which they let us pet, and then told us all about different birds of prey. later that night we went on ghost hunt through the city, which ended up being really scary because everyone kept jumping out at us. back to the bar, we did LOTS of absinthe shots with our new friends, and i got into a fight with these guys from chicago and minnesota about the bengals. later that night a couple of our friends went to get food, so i went upstairs to my room, and when i got back a couple of my friends were talking by the door of the bar. apparently there was this czech guy who was born in vancouver but lives in LA who was there and was a crip (as in the gang), and didn't like the swedish guy's shirt, and therefore threatened to cut him and got out his knife. there was crazy confusion for a while, and then a few of us were sitting in the lobby and the crip was there, and this really nice guy from hong kong who bought us all drinks were talking and all of a sudden the crip slammed the chinese guy's head into the wall and started strangling him. some english guys pulled them apart eventually, but it was so weird to see. this girl, ally, who was staying at our hostel and then met us at our hostel here in vienna told us that its because the guy from hong kong was in a gang in china and thought that he deserved more respect and thats why they got into a fight, but who the hell has ever heard of a crip from canada? it was ridiculous to say the least.
we left for the train station in prague, where no one is nice to you and the man at the food counter tried to rip us off and none of the information booths speak english or give information. we couldn't find our train on the station schedule even though it was in our eurail timetable. finally i was able to find someone who told me that our train was on platform 2. so we waited until after our train supposed to leave, and FINALLY we found someone who told us that the train leaves from the other train station. so we went there, delirious, and staked out a good compartment on the next train that left for vienna. we got this lush place, and then these two guys with tiny dogs who didn't speak any english sat with us so we just talked about them for a long time.
vienna- got to the train station at 10:30, and in our delirious state bought a tram ticket from our station, subenhof, to subenhof. its uncool that they let you do that. but our excuse for anything is 'we're stupid americans, no one is going to yell at us' and so far thats been true. got to our hostel at 11pm and went to the bar because we were supposed to meet this guy scott from the bronx who we met in prague there. instead met this guy from la, ryan, and these australians and a couple south africans. when the bar closed ryan, the australians, and katy and i went out to check out the bars. we found one called pandoras box which was the sketchiest fucking place i've ever been. got there and katy went to the bathroom and got offered money for sex. the australian guys were like 'um peacing out' and left right as we got there. ryan went up to the bar and i was sitting on this broken couch alone and this guy from vienna who i think told me his name was cootie told me that he felt that we had a cosmic connection but that the us is very far for him to come visit me. he wouldn't leave me alone, even after ryan was like 'stop talking to my girlfriend' so we moved and he tried to follow and ended up passing out on the couch next to where we were sitting. next day we walked around, i'm not nearly as into vienna as i am any other place i've been to yet. met up with ally at the bar last night, but other than that it was pretty low key. our australian friends were going to this bar that had a 10 euro cover, plus whatever it would be for the cab fare home since the subways close at 12 here, so we decided to call it at night. we were spoiled in prague because of teh cheap prices, so we didn't want to pay. also my voice is almost completly gone, and its been called sultry, sexy, like i should work for a 900 calling place, and like i'm an 80 year old woman who has been smoking her whole life, so hopefully that clears up soon.
budapest for the next few days, then italy.
now you:
tell me
one funny thing you did this week
one thing you're excided about
one thing you learned this week
anýthing else you want to.
miss you love you whodey
christen