Edinburgh

I absolutely fell in love with Scotland. I've already looked into moving here and what all I need to do with Kirby so he can come too.

Walking out of my hostel the first thing you saw was the castle sitting high up on a hill. There is a pub every five steps and steak and ale pie is amazing. I went wandering down rose street and found a pub that looked fun. There were two guys sitting by me so I asked them where were some good places to go. It turns out they were brothers and their friend kerry came and met them! She was so much fun. We went to a bar called Jekyll and hydes and the inside was all dark and had creepy things in it. The bathrooms were even hidden behind bookshelves! The older brother got wayyy to drunk so they had to take him home. They walked me home but before we got there we jumped the fence into the park next to the castle!! It was such an amazing view!

The next day I just went walking around Edinburgh. I did the free walking tour that they had there and learned all kinds of interesting history. I even tried haggis! It was actually kinda good. We got to see the place where jk Rowling write the first two harry potter books Also we saw the cemetery where she mix and matched names to make some of the characters. One of the guys from the walking tour was staying at my hostel and a bunch of us were going to do the pub crawl.

The pub crawl was a lot of fun. I met a group from Austin Texas! I hung out with them most of the night. We got to the last bar and I remember looking up and no one was there from the pub crawl! I had been dancing with an Irish guy who ended up proposing to me. I wish I could have remembered his name! Somehow I made it home and the next day was rough. I apparently hit my head on something pretty hard because one spot really hurts.

My last day in Edinburgh was pretty lazy. I just walked around for a while and did the scotch whiskey experience! You go on this little ride and see how they make scotch and you get to taste one. There are four areas that produce whiskey so I tried the one that is sort of fruity. I got the gold ticket package thing so at the end I got to taste one from each of the four. It was hard to drink them! I really liked one that was very smoky. It tasted like I was drinking barbecue. They have the worlds largest collection of scotch there it's something like 3400 different bottles. Some of the bottles were really cool looking like chess pieces or golf bags.

I was so sad to leave!! I am dying to go back but money is running out so I have to start heading towards Ireland.

Norway

My flight to Oslo was super interesting. We had to emergency land near Milan with only one engine! It was already a bad day on its own and that just made it worse. When we were finally let off the plane, I went straight to the bar and started throwing back beers. I tried to call my parents because I was freaking out but they didn't answer which is probably good as I would have started crying.

Anyways, we made it there about three hours late and my dads cousin and her husband picked me up at the airport. They were so amazingly nice! It was such a good five days.

Friday night when I got there we had dinner and didn't do a whole lot. Saturday, thorstein took me into tonsberg with his granddaughter Jenny and we saw a replica Viking ship that a bunch of volunteers had made by hand the way Vikings used to make them. They were giving tours and rowing it out into the river. You could tell they weren't professional towers because they weren't all synced up and oars kept hitting each other! Thorstein's son Paul was looking at a house to buy so we went and looked at that. There is an old fort near the town and we climbed up the hill and went inside and up to the top. There was such a gorgeous view of the city and part of the fjord. That night, we went out to dinner with three other couples to this really nice place on the harbor. It was pretty good and I had mashed potatoes for the first time in months so I was happy! I felt like such an adult with all of them haha. They all came back to Claudia's house and she had made this peach pie thing which was really tasty. I feel like even more of an adult because I've been drinking tea AND coffee.

On Sunday, we took two of Paul's kids, Jenny and Adrian, out to a lake. Jenny is four and Adrian is 7 I think. The three of us ended up playing in all of the sand and we dug this awesome canal/moat thing. There were some other kids there and they saw what we were doing and they came to play too! It was probably one of the most fun things I've done on this whole trip. And none of them could speak English. When I had first gotten there, Jenny would run away from me because she's shy I guess. After we left the lake though she had to sit next to me and always be around me. She's so adorable! When we got back home, Thorstein started grilling and we had an awesome dinner with pasta and potato salad and lots of meat! Yum!

Monday we went into Oslo and had lunch with their daughter missy. She does research stuff at the hospital there so we ate in the cafeteria. She was just so sweet! She invited me to come stay with her for a few days in Oslo but since I was leaving on Wednesday from an airport back near tonsberg I said no because I didn't think it would be enough time to actually do anything. After we left the hospital, we drove through downtown Oslo and went to a really famous park. We also got to see the Viking ship museum! The ships had been buried because they were graves for Hugh ranking people from back then. There were a lot of interesting things that the found buried with them. They even have pieces of cloth that survived for thousands of years and you can still sort of see whats on them. It was a small museum but pretty cool. We stopped and got some fro yo and saw the castle that is there. I had no idea that they still had a king! He doesn't do much so I guess he is like England's queen. There is so much cool stuff here that I want to buy! I've decided when I get into Ireland I will start throwing clothes away and making room and just start buying souvenirs and stuff. So if you want anything let me know!!

On Tuesday I didn't do a whole lot. I wanted to soak up the last bit of relaxing I could before I rush through three countries in a month! On Wednesday I fly to Edinburgh and I'll stay there for two nights before going to Inverness and down to loch ness. I'm hoping I can go diving or take a really cool boat cruise on the lake. I've been dying to go here and find Nessie since I was a kid! I cant wait to be there!

After that I think I'm going to London for three or four days to meet up with some friends I've made on the trip and then on to Ireland for two weeks and then home!

Outlook

Most helpful lesson learned so far: check your shoes for giant spiders after leaving them outside the tent all night.

It had to be one of the biggest freaking spiders I've ever seen and it had the egg sac thing on its butt. I had to scream for one of the boys in a tent near us to come save me. Of course he tried to put it on me and then he had to go show all of his friends because boys are weird. Then he set it on a big ant hill and I guess was hoping they would battle to the death. Boys are weird.

The festival has been absolutely so much fun! It's just a giant party for four days straight and I've seen some very interesting things/people. It's rained since Thursday and today is Sunday and it's actually been a gorgeous warm day so everyone is down on the beach. They have the big inflatable things to play on in the water and I'm really bummed I never went out there.

During the day when the festival isn't going on they have a lot of stuff down on the beach. They have djs playing at two different stages and good and drinks everywhere. On Friday we were down dancing at one of the stages and it just started pouring down rain. I had the best time dancing in the mud and rain! We met some girls from Scotland that were living in london so we hung out with them a bunch. Everyone at this festival is from England.

We were sitting on the beach hanging out when this guy came and sat by us. He was trying to hide that he was doing some type of drugs. When I told him I was from Texas he just went off on how much he hates Americans and all this bs. I got so mad because he was being such a jerk. Like I'm not saying oh I hate you because of where you're from. Strangely that's happened a lot from more English people than I would have expected. It's really annoying how many times that's happened now.

There was a group of guys next to us that broke three or four tents in like two days. One tripped and almost impaled his neck on some part of his tent. They were hilarious. They just kept doing beer bongs the whole time. I think everyone was well annoyed with them by the end because they were a bit obnoxious.

The actual festival took place in an abandoned fort and was so cool! They had stages in a moat, in the fort, in dungeons and in the harbor area. The music was all dub step and reggae and like drum and bass type stuff. I'm sure Bianca got annoyed because I would be like oh what's this I like this all the time. One of the walls on the fort was on fire and the fire would get bigger depending on the music. It was awesome!

Bianca just slept all during the day which was annoying because I wanted to go out and play. I finally just started leaving her which always ended in trouble because no one was there to watch me so I drank a lot of beer.

Since it rained so much our shoes got absolutely disgusting that I just left them at the campsite when we left. Poor toms.

There was one night that was just not a fan of me. I fell all in the mud and then we were standing under a tent to get out of the rain, they had a wood beam holding up part of it so it didn't collect all the water. This guy jumped up to hit the tent and the beam fell and hit me right in the head. It was rough.

We danced so much that my whole body is still sore and in pain. We stayed camping an extra day because Bianca couldn't be bothered to get up and move ever. It's really been annoying with her because she never wants to do anything but sleep and she doesn't listen to anything I say. We finally left the campsite and we were going to catch a bus to Zagreb but I was looking at flights to anywhere and they were all seriously expensive except for one from pula to Oslo. So now on Friday I am flying up to Oslo for five or six days and I get to meet my dads cousin that lives there.

Budapest/Zagreb

We didn't do anything in Budapest except sleep which was really sad. Everything there is incredibly cheap but we were exhausted. We woke up early and caught a train down to Zagreb. It was he most frustrating thing ever! We were going to take a bus but got to the bus station and they didn't go to Zagreb so we went to the train station but it turned out to be the wrong train station so we had to go find the right one. Oh the adventures of traveling.

I think I'm a little bit screwed on trying to get back into the eu. Being from the us we can only travel in the eu for 90 days without a visa. I never went through customs on landing in Rome but I forgot that they stamped my passport in Bari before the cruise so I thought I wouldn't have a problem. We crossed the border to Croatia and all of these customs people got on to stamp passports and stuff. So we will see what happens when I try to go back in!

We went to the red hot chili peppers concert on Wednesday the 29 with a guy that works at the hostel we stayed in and his gf and one of his friends. otherwise we would have had no clue how to get there! It was so awesome. I really wished that I had listened to more of their music because I hate going to a concert and not knowing all of the songs. It was a lot of fun and after it was over we met some of their friends that were drinking down by a bridge. A little bit strange but still fun. They were drinking something disgusting with like a potato or a pear or something at the bottom. I tried a tiny bit and every time they passed it to me after that I just acted like I took a sip because it was grosss!

We caught a bus early the next morning to take us to pula for the outlook festival!!

Amsterdam/ Mystery land

My first music fest was freaking awesomeeee!!!!!

I was going to meet Bianca (the Aussie I met in Rimini) at the hostel but we both ended up getting on the same tram!

The hostel we stayed in was absolutely disgusting. In the middle of the night I heard a mouse running around in our room and some other girl actually saw it. Also we watched the guy clean the room and so there are blankets covered by a duvet. Did they change the duvets?? No of course not why would they ever do that. I swear I'm ending up with liceaidsrabies. I sent my mom a message freaking out because I didn't want to die in the night because a mouse was eating me. She thought it was hilarious and told me to get over it!! If it was her she wouldn't have even checked into this scummy place! Ughhhh it was so groosssss.

Anyways, we survived the night and Saturday was mystery land! Dub step type stuff is definitely not my kind of music but it was so fun! We tried to find liquor bottles to sneak in with us so we didn't have to pay for drinks. How ridiculous, you can smell pot everywhere you go but heaven forbid if you want to buy some small alcohol bottles to sneak in. The only time we even went into a coffee shop was to ask if they knew where we could find liquor. We ended up just getting some airplane bottles. She was brave and got four absinthes and I just had two tequilas.

We had to take a train and then a bus to actually get there and by that time we were covered in sweat. She had her bottles in her back pockets but when we got there they were actually patting people down so we threw them in my rain jacket and then we saw they were patting those down as well. Miraculous they only patted us down and didn't check my jacket so we got super lucky! I wish I had taken more pictures but the main stage was covered by this giant tent that looked like a circus tent. It was the coolest place! The had all of these balloons at the top of the tent that they let fall at the end of the night They don't actually take money so you have to buy these little token things to pay for stuff. We got ours and bought some coke for our drinks. We made it all the way to the front by the dj!! It was so cool!!
Bianca started throwing back her absinthe and ended up completely trashed. It was raining all day and we were in flip flops and she kept falling in all the mud. It ruined my buzz but I got her semi washed off and got us both tacos and her some water and we made our way back to the front for more dancing. We danced and sweated like pigs for 8 hours. It was amazing. We had the best time and are now even more pumped for outlook which is in Croatia. Also we have tickets to see the red hot chili peppers in Zagreb on Wednesday!! Everyone should be insanely jealous.

Oh, while I was getting us tacos this guy was like um is that your friend? Good luck. I gave him her last absinthe which she is still asking me if she actually drank it. Oops.

When we were leaving the festival we got on the wrong train and ended up way out of the way and we couldn't get a cab and no more trains were running. It was scat for a minute. Some local guys tried to call us a cab but they wouldn't come. We had talked to a security guy about how to get home but he left. When he came back he had found a cab! Thankfully we weren't the only stupid ones to get on the wrong train so we split it with these two Swedish girls. We made it back to our disgusting hostel safe and sound. It's probably cleaner to have slept on a bench by the train station.

On Sunday we spent most of the day figuring out how to get to Croatia from Amsterdam. It was such a pain. We finally picked a flight to Budapest and we are taking a bus from there to Zagreb. So we are on the plane right now and I'm excited for a night in Budapest!!

Oh!! I bought my first tent!! It was only 10 euros and I'm so excited. Not so much to use it because I don't think I've ever camped so I'm a bit nervous. But it will be absolutely amazing again. This week is going to be one of the bests! I'm bummed to think about coming home at the end of sept but I'm also excited to see my little man. And the rest of my family and everyone!

Oh I forgot about this morning. the only thing I actually wanted to do in Amsterdam was the Heineken experience which ended up being awesome. You walk through these rooms talking about how the beer is made and they have this giant room with the big kettle things. I tasted wort which is water and barley. It was kinda sweet but weird tasting. Then you go on this "ride" where you go through the process of becoming beer. It was pretty interesting. Then you can make your own label for a beer but I doubt it would make it for the next month. Either as an emergency beer or it would just break. Let's face it I'm really clumsy. One room had a tasting. So they gave you a beer and they talked about it and then you drank it! There was a really cool like party room with two walls made out of bottles. They give you this wristband at the beginning and you can either get two free beers with it or learn how to pour a beer and drink that. So I now have a certificate saying something about I can officially pour a beer. Yay me. Bianca doesn't like beer so she had one and I got to have the other so yay for three beers on an empty stomach!

we made it back to the hostel, printed off our boarding passes and took a train to Eindhoven where the airport is and are now on the plane!

Brussels

Brussels was ok. We didn't do a whole lot there but we did find a Mexican food place! Sadly the queso they had was like nacho cheese. Yuck. I think we were pretty tired so we went to bed early and when we woke up in the morning we met the guys in our room who were from Cyprus and Canada. They were pretty awesome! Erin went to do laundry so the three of us found a kebab for breakfast. When Erin was done we all went to the delirium cafe which has over either 2000 or 4000 beers I can't remember which. They have a list of all their beer and it is literally the size of a novel. So many awesome beers! I had one that was called cookie beer. It was ok but I definitely could not have more than one. We saw the statue of the little girl peeing. The little boy peeing came first hen the girl and now they have a dog. It's kinda weird. We had some Greek food for dinner that was good. We went and saw the Atomium that was built for the worlds fair in the 50s I think. We didn't go up in it because no one wanted to so I'm putting that on my list of things to come back and do.

We went back to the delirium cafe that night with a big group of people from the hostel. They were mostly nice. There was this one Australian guy who was just a giant jerk. I have met loads of awesome Aussies and he absolutely sucked. He kept saying how unfortunate it was that I was from there and could I even find certain countries on a map and could I name the Australian states. I wanted to knock him out. Erin had to get up early for her train to London so thank goodness we left early because that could have ended horribly.

Sorry the story about Brussels is pretty boring.