i am currently in hamburg, germany, the town is nothing special, pretty typical. Tomarrow i leave for berlin, previously i was in amsterdam, as you can probably guess it was amazing, but not for the reasons you assume, yes the coffeeshops are alot of fun, and they smell much better than the coffeshops in america, but also the city is gorgeous, the city is built with a canal every 3 or 4 blocks, so there are tons of beautful canals. Also the city streets are owned by bicycles, there are way more bikes then cars and everyone just rides there bikes everywhere, the atmosphere to the whole town is very relaxed and chill, lots of outdoor restaurants on the canals, and most of the people are very friendly. Before Amsterdam i was in London, and boy does london suck, the town is very very americanized, it felt very very similar to chicago, there are also way more foreigners than british people in London, they are alot more fashionable than us though.
This is a pretty awesome/weird experience, my days are spent wandering foreign places just looking, i am not sure what i am looking for, generally nothing specific, i am just trying to see as much as possible, generally on days with lots of wandering i walk about 15 - 20 miles, the most i walked in a day was 22 miles, other day are usually 7- 15 miles depending how much mass transit i take. This trip also puts you in such a weird place mentally, 90% of my day is alone with my own thoughts, the other 10% is generally spent talking with another traveller going through the same experience, often i have found they are very talkative, and don't want the conversation to end and they keep talking and talking, not that i don't enjoy talking with these fellow travelers, i do, it just seems like they need it more. I did have one amazing conversation with a Russian man named Andrei, we meet at la Chouffe a bar in amsterdam, the bar was perfect i had been roaming amsterdam all day looking for a bar or coffeshop that was right, that had the right vibe, that i could finally stop roaming and relax, i was also having a very bad day cause my new beautiful 60gb ipod fell in the amsterdam canal while i was fiddiling with the shitty key to my rented bicycle. This bar also had varda, a beautiful airedale terrier, a type of dog i want to get on my own, the place was perfect, anyway Andrei was the first person so far that i really enjoyed talking with. At the end of the night when we said goodbye, he told me that before tonight he did not like America or Americans, but after he met me he now likes America and Americans.
