cuponoodles

July 29, 2006

Our train ride into Paris went without a hitch though, with our tickets being overbooked, we had to take what empty seats we could find. Hiro found a seat, but I had to sit on a fold-out seat near the luggage compartment. Though there wasn't an arm rest there was plenty of leg room.

We got into Paris and found our hostel with little difficulty. Since check-in wasn't until 3:00 pm we dropped off our backpacks in a luggage room and headed out to see the bohemian area of Paris known as Montmartre and famous for being home to artists such as Picasso, Van Gogh and Matisse.

The Moulin Rouge was only a few blocks down from our hostel along with numerous sex shops and strip clubs in the Pigalle district. My favorite sex shop sign was one in bright red neon that read "SEXODROME," but I was too scared to go in. I heard, however, that most of the stores were rather tame on the inside.

We had a quick lunch and spent some time catching up with the world in an Internet cafe. We spent the rest of the day just recuperating in the hostel and meeting a number of fellow backpackers whom we hared wine and stories with.

Fellow backpackers included a brother and sister pair from New Jersey who shared the same ages as Hiro and I, with the sister being older, a Gonzaga law student who was a refugee from a terrible unsanitary hostel (The Friends Hostel), a college student from Indiana and his former exchange student pal from the Netherlands and two 18-year-old kids from Greece. There are also many other names I can't remember.

I went grocery shopping with Adam and Tiffany, the brother and sister from New Jersey, and bought some pasta to prepare for dinner, but we ended up just eating the bread and meat we bought and shared the wine with everyone in the hostel.

July 28, 2006

Things started out smoothly as we took a bus from London to Antwerp. The bus boarded a ferry at Dover where we sat back and enjoyed the voyage to Calais. From there we rode for a few more hours until we were dropped off in Antwerp on the side of a city street.

We were supposed to meet my friend Amber at the bus station and stay with her and her boyfriend at his apartment. However, as we circled the block it didn't appear as though there was an actual bus station building, just a drop-off.

I asked a woman at a youth hostel booking office if there was another bus station in town, but she said that the bus drop-off point was the only one.

So, Hiro and I waited for a little over an hour, worried that during our walk around the rather large block we had missed Amber. Finally, we decided to try to find an Internet cafe and check my e-mail to see if Amber had sent us any new information. I had already tried my phone card in Antwerp to call her cell phone, but either it didn't work or I couldn't figure out how to make the phone work and all I got in response was an automated message in Dutch on the phone. I had tried calling Amber earlier in London, but for some reason I couldn't get to her voice mail.

Anyway, apparently there is only one Internet cafe in Antwerp, and it was closed. We kept looking for one and even wandered around the Jewish quarter of town, walking by Hasidic Jews and little boys with Yarmulkes riding bikes. We ended up at the central train station where we bought tickets for Paris and then we decided that we should find the other train station listed on our tickets so that we would know where to go in the morning. We wandered around another part of town looking for any sign of a train station, but we couldn't find it, so we finally asked someone where it was and they pointed in a direction opposite of where we thought it was. It ended up being a short 15-minute tram ride.

We took the tram down to the station and then asked a ticket attendant if there were any hotels around the station, but he said there weren't and suggested we go back we came to central Antwerp.

Exhausted, we contemplated sleeping outside the station, but ended up taking the tram back to the center of town and got a room at the Hilton (Later we found that Amber had picked up another friend at that train station only half an hour after we had left to go back to the center of town!). Since there were no regular guestrooms available, the front desk upgraded us to a junior executive suite at no extra cost (150 euros). We watched Belgian TV and took hot showers and reflected on our adventurous day in Antwerp.