After I wrote my blog post for yesterday, I ended up going out with Spencer, Aiden, Naseem, and Ahona to Bulldog Coffee Shop and Bulldog Cafe. The difference between a coffee shop and a cafe is that marijuana is sold at coffee shops, while alcohol is sold at cafes. Marijuana can be smoked in both, […]
amsterdam day three
Today I decided to go to Keukenhof with Aidan, a Canadian guy from Toronto. We got tickets online for €35 each that included transportation to and from Keukenhof and the price of admission. We left Amsterdam around noon and got to Schiphol Station where we then waited for a bus to take us to […]
amsterdam days one + two
Yesterday, I had an all-you-can-eat breakfast at my hostel in Brussels for €7,90 around 10AM then checked out and went to the Bruxelles-Zuid station around 11 to catch an 11:45 train to Amsterdam. I was initially unsure if my Eurail pass would cover the train since I hadn’t purchased a Thalys reservation and was led […]
belgium day two
This morning I met Irene, a Korean exchange student studying statistics at a university in Lithuania. Her English wasn’t particularly strong, but we decided to get Belgian fries and go to Bruges together. She was very excited to try this new kind of potato (감자 “gamja“), and to her merit, it was quite good. We both got […]
belgium day one
This morning I woke up in London for the last time in a while. I checked out of the Astor Museum Hostel around 10am, got breakfast in the basement for £1, then headed over to St. Pancras Station to catch the Eurostar train to Brussels. Much of my day was spent in transit, but it […]
london day four
Today was a relatively mild day. I talked with some of the people who work at the hostel and they recommended that I go to the Portobello Market, so I did. I took the Underground to Notting Hill Gate which got me about 10 minutes away from the Portobello Market, a roughly mile long stretch […]
london days two + three
Yesterday I woke up pretty early, ate breakfast at the hostel, and tried to find my way towards the Tower Bridge. On the way I stopped at St Paul’s Cathedral which is absolutely gorgeous from the outside, but left after finding out they wanted £18 to walk around inside of the cathedral and went in […]
london day one
I arrived in London around 9:30AM, roughly two hours later than scheduled due to plane maintenance issues in San Francisco. I rode the Underground from Heathrow to central London, successfully located the hostel, dropped off my big pack around 11, and then wandered to the British Museum which is only a stone’s throw away from the […]
and so it begins
I’m sitting in an ergonomic-looking orange chair in the international terminal of SFO, waiting for my flight to London. I’m with my dad, who will be leaving for Malaysia within the hour. It’s nice to have a bit of familiar company before I embark on a solo backpacking trip across six European countries.