Europe Posts

Back in high school I signed up to take English Literature, which for me at the time was a rather unusual departure. One of the reasons I decided to take the plunge was due to the rather passionate sales pitch by the teacher at the time, Mr. Chadsey. As it turns out, it was one of my most enjoyable courses ever, and many of the poems and prose I read at the time has stayed with me throughout most of my adult life. One play we read at the time was The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. Due to the controversial (at least at the time) life of Oscar Wilde, the play didn’t get performed much while he was alive. But it’s become a bit of a classic since that time, and he’s now recognized as an important playwright. It turns out that Oscar Wilde was Irish, something […]

One of the first items I try to tackle whenever I hit a new country is to get a pay as you go SIM for my iPhone. If you are on a budget it’s something that you may not want to do, but I find having data on my phone invaluable for various reasons. Last time I was in Ireland, I opted for a Vodafone SIM card for my iPhone. I remember at the time it was reasonably priced and gave me 100MB or so of data. Since I was going to be in Ireland for a month though, I wanted to have more data. I look at Vodafone’s pricing, but it started at around 40 Euros for the month for 1GB worth of data. A friend of mine recommended O2 instead, so as soon as I arrived in Galway I went down to the O2 office to price out […]

Last year while in Paris I decided to head down to the Louvre, one of the finest museums of art in the world. While there are several masterpieces there, one of the most valuable paintings in the world in also displayed inside the Louvre: The Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa, or La Gioconda, is a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, and is thought to be a painting of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo. Part of the painting’s appeal is the beautiful Tuscan background and the enigmatic pose of Lisa in the painting. Prior to viewing it last year, I decided to do a quick Google search to read about the Mona Lisa’s history. One interesting tidbit of information that I found was that another version of the Mona Lisa had been recently discovered by a museum in 2012. The owners of this painting previously thought that the […]

I left Vancouver approximately five weeks ago, and headed for Malta via Paris. My ultimate goal was to end up in Serbia, but I thought I would stop and visit two friends of mine that I met in Kuala Lumpur last year: Krisztina and Debbie. Here’s a summary of my one-week visit to Malta. Despite all the travel I do, I actually really hate flying, and would say I have a mild phobia. To counteract that, I usually have a bottle of Ativan (anti-anxiety medication) with me on the plane. For short haul flights (generally less than an hour or so), I typically don’t bother, since I’ll end up feeling a bit loopy after the plane lands. But anything over that amount of time and I usually pop a pill to calm my nerves on the plane. That’s why for the most part I generally stick with bigger name schedule […]

Voted the #1 most unsanitary tourist attraction in the world several times, I managed to visit the Blarney Stone back in March and give it a little smooch. Apparently I now have “The Gift Of Gab”. So if I talk your ear off with eloquent speech, you now know why. It’s actually kind of awkward to kiss it as you have to learn all the back and lower yourself down. But, I somehow managed to pull it off.

Surprisingly, I actually was tired enough to go to bed sometime around 10:30pm Helsinki time last night. The last time I got any real sleep was Friday night back in Vancouver, so after 15 hours of travelling, I was pretty hungry and exhausted. I just didn’t have the strength to go find food when I got here, so I popped a couple over the counter sleeping pills and went to sleep. Unfortunately, although I did sleep pretty well, I was up around 5:30am waiting eagerly for the 6:30am breakfast to start. Having just gotten back from eating, I feel well enough to finally do my first real blog entry out here. I’m staying at the Radisson Seaside hotel here in Helsinki, which is actually a pretty nice hotel for a decent price. A full buffet breakfast is included with the nightly room charges, as is wireless internet access (although it’s […]