Favourable Exchange Rates

If somebody on the street asks to buy a cigarette off me, I usually just give them a cigarette. If some people on the street offer to give me a beer for a cigarette, well....

Nightlife

Charlotte and Tyler are here! I showed them the winter wonderland/nightclub district near the hostel, where all the bars were packed. And all the chairs on the street were packed:

... because it turns out that the soccer game the high Australians invited me to watch was kind of a big deal. Fortunately Tyler and Charlotte passed a nice quiet street-corner cafe on the way to find me, so we went there to catch the rest of the game. And to have smoooooooth Belgian beers. Yes indeed.

Leaving the World

Amsterdam! Which I've been left to explore on my own for 36 hours. Few photos of this period have turned out to be postable. But here's one of the surprising store names:

And here's a store that I've seen _as often as McDonald's_ in the entertainment districts:And here's the bar-hotel-coffeeshop I wound up at later in the evening. Someone from Amsterdam, tell me this is a place where the hipsters go. I walked by not thinking about it, and suddenly it was like an alarm went off. A hipster alarm. I went in. To investigate.

Loyalty Rewards

I got this latte for free, maybe because I spend more time at this cafe than some of the employees. Also, at Transcend 'latte' doesn't just mean you spent too much for that coffee. It means you spent too much for that coffee and it's f*cking delicious.

Collector's Edition

Saw The Muppets again! This time with Chris and Olivia. We stopped by Indigo afterwards, in case we needed a toy version of Kermit the Frog encased in carbonite. Or in case we needed to actually play yahtzee, presumably by rattling dice around kermit's empty shell.

Farewell for now

Antti Arppe's been recalled to Finland to share his quantitative linguistics goodness with the home country, but I'm sure I'll get to see him again. Until then, I'll have to make do by telling anybody who interviews me that they should hire him instead.

Like a Star on High

After weeks of panicking, 24 straight hours of collecting, writing, revising, printing, and photocopying, two buses, a train, and the bleak, impossibly muddy sidewalks of south Edmonton's industrial park wasteland, suddenly there it was: the place I could take my job application at 4:30 pm to get it 3000 kilometers away by the next morning. I almost wept.