HEY EVERYBODY!


it's so good to be back. this week has been busy: cleaning the apartment, fixing all the things that my roommate broke and never bothered to fix, shopping, studying all the food specs for work, writing emails, setting up my computer etc...


yes, so first thing i did was move. i'm now living on seymour and nelson, 7th floor, just one block east of granville's club district and in the heart of downtown, sharing with matt, a friend from highschool. it's a fairly new building with a gym and theatre and lots of fancy security measures. we have these special key fobs that scan devices at all the doors and only let us move through the building into authorized areas, like our own floor and nobody elses...it's annoying.



My New Toy

i bought a new laptop at future shop for the golden price of $1800. it's a gateway, thin and light notebook, intel centrino 1.7ghz, 60 gb hd, 1 gig ram, dual-layer dvd/cd burner, etc...


while i was buying my laptop, matt got bored and decided to buy a new panasonic 42" plasma HDTV. so now we have that, with rogers 250 channels of satellite HDTV and it's sweet.


i started my first shift back at work again last night. i was nervous for the first half, but by the end of it all, to was back to normal. it's weird to feel like the new guy in a restaurant where i worked 6 years, longer than every other employee, save for two. i'm serving a bit this week and then back to bartending this weekend at the earls on fir street and broadwar in kits.




that's pretty much all that's been going on. i'm typing away like crazy as much as possible, getting my trip into words. i'm hoping to write and sumbit some articles to a few papers here and maybe even put it all into book form over the next few months. we'll see what happens. by the way, it's called: "Death By Travel"


i miss my linda, all the way over in sweden. there was a time when stockholm was a 2 cent, 1 hour ryan air flight from me, and now it's a good $800 and 15 hours away...

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home, home at last. after 30 hours of no sleep, i arrived early thursday morning in vancouver international airport. my mom and sister met me and drove me back to their house.


i am now here. and feeling excited about what's happening next. i phoned linda in sweden and talked for a bit, called up mike and matt as well. it seems, i've got a lot of shit to organize over the next little while including:


1. get an apartment downtown
2. move downtown
3. get a job downtown
4. claim my travel medical insurance for my rabid dog bite
5. repack and organize all my boxes of crap left at my parents' house to collect dust over the last two years
6. visit and talk to everyone i've missed over the last two years
7. take some time to relax in vancouver
8. go shopping for new clothes
9. buy a laptop
10. buy a cellphone
11. buy a digital camera
12. reorganize my website
13. organize and post all my remaining photos
14. finish my travel journal


and a whole lot of other shabunga...and those above aren't in any specific order if you're wondering...


so forgive me if i'm a bit lax on the posts over the next week or so until i get my life straightened out...

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---the ice age is coming, the sun is zooming in
engines stop running and the wheat is growing thin
a nuclear error, but I have no fear
london is drowning-and I live by the river
now get this...
london calling, yeah, I was there, too
an' you know what they said? well, some of it was true!
london calling at the top of the dial
after all this, won't you give me a smile?---


the clash --- london calling


london baby, yeah!


and here i am, the last city on the trip before home. i'm staying with matty and karen (from greece) at their flat in north ealing. spent my first night here at the pub, watching england win the ashes. fuckin' cricket and wickets and guys with mohawks...i had no idea what was going on...




yesterday, i headed downtown. i've been to london twice before and have seen all the major sites already. everything here costs a pretty penny so i wasn't about to go and see everything again. started at st. paul's cathedral, a massive domed monstrosity, that reminded me of l'eglise du dome in paris. then headed across the 'millenium bridge' towards the south bank of the thames and south to the 'british airways london eye.'




now this was new. a giant ferris wheel almost 30 stories high, it dwarfs new york's 'statue of liberty' and is the tallest structure in london by far. the $30 admission fee was a bit much for a a single amusement park ride. it goes round once and you ride in these clear plastic bubble-like capsules with views of the entire city, sometimes reaching 60 km or more away on a clear day. and yes it was a clear day, and i got some amazing views....but $30, you dont even get a souvenir.


from 'the eye' i headed across 'westminster bridge' and towards 'the parliament' and the famous clocktower 'big ben.' featured in many movies including this shot from anne rice's 'queen of the damned' with the vampire lestat and the vampire jesse at the end of the film.




just behind big ben is the luxurious and dripping wet with history 'westminster abbey.' and they charge you an arm and a leg for it too, $12 to see a church! anyways, the abbey covered in carvings from floor to the giant vaulted fan ceilings, there is stain glass galore, and the tombs and grave stones of hundreds upon hundreds of famous historical figures, kings, queens, poets, artists, writers, knights, religious leaders...etc. it's featured a lot in a little book that maybe some of you may of heard of called 'the da vinci code.' it's only sold about 36 million copies as of august 2005...




from the abbey, i walked to 'buckingham palace', poked around a bit and left. it doesn't impress me as much as it did when i was younger, mainly because of my deep misunderstandings of why the royal family still exist in this day and age and why they get to live in a giant palace and do nothing all day while millions of people are starving and dying. and we pay them to do it, the english, the canadians, the australians...yep, we pay them!!! all they had to do was be born. ridiculous!


off through 'st james park' past 'trafalgar' to see the thronging masses cheering the coming of the ashes in a giant parade, then 'leicester square' with it's statues of shakespeare and other famous poets and surrounded by theatres, then 'picadilly circus', the neon capital of london, 'convent garden' for it's shopping and home.


london, baby, yeah!

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according to sources back in korea, my old hood, i'm very slightly featured on a giant billboard above an overpass advertising for this years 'yang yang salmon festival.'


if you've been reading my blog for awhile, you might remember when i headed out with some friends to the yang yang river in korea to catch live salmon with our bare hands for about 20,000 korean won each. there were photographers everywhere, raswan and i even recreated our catches for a television news crew. we were all featured in several national korean papers the next day. yes, it was good. famous in korea.


and now, they've taken one of last years photos and are using it in an advertisement for this years festival...



Raswan and Melvin posing above their advertisement...

hmmmm...looks like you can see Ras, Dustin, Melvin and Soutthida just fine...
wait, who's that bald guy behind Ras' right shoulder...yep...that's me...


here's another photo of everyone...and this time you can actually see me...

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A NIGHT AT 'The Bot'




wednesday night, belfast, northern ireland vs england in an all out battle. i met up with an old friend kellie, of strawberry hill earls fame, whom i had mysteriously run into months earlier in murphy's bar on santorini island in greece. after some drinks at her house we headed by taxi downtown to the well-packed 'botanical inn' for some big screen 'football' (it's soccer dammit!) action. the place was crowded and it was hard to enough to move, let alone get drinks or make it across the swarming masses to the toilets. downstairs they were showing the republic of ireland (south) vs england and upstairs northern ireland vs england.


see 'england suffer humiliation in belfast'

one goal was all it took to win and the place erupted into joyous singing, pints of guiness and carlsberg sloshed happily over sweaty drunken shirtless football fans...a camera recorded the action...i'll never forget it. the floor felt like it was about to cave in, there must've been a couple of thousand people in the place...
my favourite was the shirtless guy who had a gigantic england coat of arms on his back from neck to ass and a giant fluffy tiger covering his upper right bicep and only one tooth...he was cool!


anyways, it was my last night in belfast, i headed bcak to dublin, watched 'the 40 year old virgin' (hilarious!) at the savoy and then caught an early morning flight to bristol in england.


get this: the total cost of the flight 14 euros, total cost of taxi to airport 20 euros, total cost of my excess baggage weight (an measly extra 5kg)...a whopping 35 euros!!! frick! it would've been cheaper for me to buy two plane tickets, one for me and one for a blow up doll who amazingly posessed 5kg of luggage that she had stuffed into my bag...stupid excess baggage charges...pleh!



The Roman Baths, Bath

anyways, from bristol i caught a train to bath and am staying with my mom's cousin, kieran, and his wife shiela, at their house near the city. bath is one of my favourite places in england. it's an old city, first settled by the romans, who built elaborate baths to conatin the water that flows from a natural hot spring. the streets are small, there's an enormous abbey made of more stained glass than stone, a few nice parks and some great architecture. all the older buildings are made of a special yellow stone, quarried nearby.



The Royal Crescent, Bath

i'm here until monday and then off to london...

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if you're viewing this site with mozilla firefox, then it's thrown all standards out the window and will not look the way it's supposed to...

i'm not a fan of mozilla...so support bill gates and use explorer, it's the only way to go...

oh yeah, and netscape sucks too...

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Wicklow Hills, Southern Ireland

dublin, ireland. met up with my mom's friend bernadette and her daughter, phoebe, who live just outside dublin city and stayed with them for a couple of nights. we went south of the city to glendalough and wicklow, driving the back country roads of ireland, through the yellow bushes, lavender, and purple heather and out across the boggy marshlands. the low fields and valleys were surronded by small hills, the coned sugarloaf mountain, and grazing sheep. every now and then we came across a lake, or stream, stained brown like tea from the bogs.


many of the scenes from braveheart were filmed in this very area. glendalough is an ancient monastery, in fact it was once a small monastic city, home to st. kevin, who built several small churches around the lake in a small valley.



Glendalough Monastic City

headed out for a night on the town with phoebe, first to mcdaid's pub, just off grafton street in the shopping district and the following night to spy bar, a trendy upscale nightclub for one of her friend's going away parties. phoebe's currently performing in shakespeare in the park, doing 'a comedy of errors' western-style in st. stephen's green and i went and watched the performance.


Newrange Megalithic Passage Tomb

i'm now in belfast in the north. family friends made the two hour drive down to dublin and picked me up, stopping at newgrange and knowth, two megalithic passage tombs along the way.


Falls Road Bobby Sands Mural


Shankill Road Mural

i've just come back from a tour around belfast on an open-roofed double decker bus, round most of the sights including the shipyard where the 'titanic' was built and northwest of the city to the catholic falls road and the protestant shankill road. these two roads have been the staging grounds for much of the violence between the national catholics and loyalist protestants in northern ireland. many burnt out shopfronts, crumbling houses, smashed in windows, paint strewn houses and graffiti along the way, though the situation has been improving recently.

if you want to read more about what's going on in northern ireland, click here.

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NEW ORLEANS IS SINKING MAN...


--My memory is muddy what's this river that I'm in
New Orleans is sinking, man, and I don't want to swim--
swim...
swim...
swim...


The Tragically Hip
New Orleans Is Sinking

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