Leeds me to it!

Alright, only 8 (or so) days since I last wrote in my blog- I'm doing much better than last time! The problem, though, is now that I've more or less settled-ish for the time being (wow, what a precise statement) my blog entries are going to be a lot less colourful than they have been in the past. In fact, they might even resemble something (gasp) normal!!! So, to avoid that I will have to stir up as much local chaos as I can.
Since I last wrote not too much has happened. I have too little memory to pin-point exactly what happened each day since then, but I can regail you with the highlights of my past week. Last week I had Wednesday and Thursday off, and Friday I had a late-shift at work, so this gave me the chance to force Nikki to book Friday off so we could go party it up in London on Thursday night. On Wednesday I took the bus to the nearest large city (Kingston), which is a very adorable city on the Thames river. I spent the day walking through the shopping area, walking along the river, and getting yet another over-seas cell phone (hopefully my last). In the evening I ducked into the McDonalds to use their bathroom without buying anything (bwah ha ha) and who should I see but my dear friends Nikki eating french fries? "What the hell are you doing in Kingston?" I asked, bemused. Apparently Nikki had been working at a school near Kingston that day (she's a sub teacher and moves around a lot) and had come to the city do to a bit of shopping. Delighted by the providence of seeing each other so randomly, we decided to go to dinner at an adorable Italian restaurant in the city centre. After that I took the train back to Cobham, arriving late, and then went for drinks with Tytti and Dave (who work at the Inn).
The next day I also had off, and I spent the morning dyeing my hair and being otherwise slovenly, before I finally got off my ass and headed out. I went to meet Nikki at Wimbledon station, and whilst waiting for her I went to the most kick ass used book shop ever and bought really amazing European vintage postcards! Yippee! After that Nikki and I went back to her place, made dinner, split a bottle of wine, and then headed out to a pub in Soho to meet up with her two friends (whose names escape me, because I suck at names). We shared drinks and a few hours of conversation, then her friends went home and Nikki and I went off in search of this bar that was supposed to have a live 60s covers band all night, but they wound up ending super early, so we went and took out our frustrations by hitting up a chippery, then heading back to Soho in search of another bar. We went to a super swanky downtown bar and had a drink before waiting in the freezing cold rain for the bus back to Nikki's place. The next day we went back to Wimbledon so Nikki could show me the coat she wanted to buy, and then I finally had to take the train back to Cobham and go to work.
The days passed as per usual once again with working, reading, watching telly (it's wierd having a TV again, and kind of disquieting), and going to the local pubs. Oh yes, I said pubs, because we found another pub that was secretly hidden away and now have 2 choices for our nights out (oh small towns). Then for my Wednesday, Thursday days off this week I decided to go to Leeds and stay with my friend Mike who I met through couchsurfing. Leeds is a crazy city full of malls that is 4 hours north of London. Beside it (where Mike actually lives) is Jewsbury, which is a city-town that has the highest Asian population in England. Over 50% of the inhabitants are from Indian or Pakistan. About a half hour north of that is the gorgeous and super historic city of York, which has one of the oldest intact castles in England (10th century) and used to be the Northern capital of England where many wars were fought and many kings and queens lived at least part-time.
On Tuesday night at work it became apparent that I would finish work early, so in the interest of not waking up at ridiculous oclock to catch my 8am bus in central London, I took the train to Nikki's place after work, and then left in the early morning from her place. I arrived in Leeds in the early afternoon, and while Mike was still at work I walked around the city. There are some nice buildings and churches, but much more new development than I'd like to see in an English city, and I was honestly the most impressed by a rad comic shop I went to where the cleric gave me a free comic magazine showing all the comic shops in England (I'm in trouble now!). When Mike finished work I met him at the train station and he took me to his place where I met his roommates, then we headed to a nearby town and went to a Thai restaurant for dinner. Then Mike was trying to show me this cool rock site called "the Cow and Calf" but the half hour drive took about four hours due to getting insanely lost. Normally this would suck, but Mike in the hilarious Scottish way was cursing to high heaven through frustration, and I couldn't stop laughing. Eventually we made it to the Cow and Calf, just in time for it to be completely obscurred by fog, but cool in an eerie way. After that it was relatively early to bed due to tiredness.
The next day my intention was to go explore Jesbury when Mike was at work, but it was miserable outside and I hadn't been lazy for a while, so I stayed inside and shared my time between reading and chatting with one of Mike's roommates, Kim, who was home for the day. When Mike came back we headed out to York and walked around for hours. exploring the gorgeous cobblestone streets, old buildings, gorgeous Cathedral, ancient castle, and historic city wall. We ended the night by hopping a fence and climbing on the city wall for a very cool walk along the wall's platform. After that we dashed back to Mike's place to grab his roomies and head to the grocery store to buy food and a whole bunch of booze, and made dinner whilst drinking copious amounts and listening to good tunes. The next day I had to get up at 8am and enjoyed a nice and deadly hangover for my 4 hour bus-ride to London and subsequent train-ride back to Cobham; only returning to a normal state in time for work that evening.
More days passed as always, and then today (Sunday) at work I found out by about the mid-afternoon that I have tomorrow off, so since Sunday always ends relatively early (no dinner shift) I high-tailed it to Nikki's place, where I am now, so that tomorrow I can rock London again. Also tonight when I arrived it started snowing in London for the first time since I got here. Nikki and I went for a walk, through snow-balls, slid on the icey streets, helped some poor blokes push their car up a hill, and got some baileys and whiskey to make boosey hot-chocolate. What a good night!

Catch-up and release

Well, I haven't written here in about 15 days, so this will be a bloody long catch-up blog. I know everyone who reads this is just drooling over all the elaborate details I include of my travels, but you'll have to forgive me for sumarising my last 15 days or so as briefly as I can (although I'm quite shit at being brief). Geez, Idon't even know where to start. Well my last days in Hamburg were spent doing more sightseeing and getting to spend another day with Sandra. I visited the dowtown and the red light distrrict some more times, checked out the harbourfront some more, went to the spice museum, a really posh English Language cinema, the student-boho area, the biggest and oldest cemetary in Hamburg, and a bunch of other stuff that is apparently eluding my mind right now. Before leaving Hamburg Iswitched CS hosts for a night and spent a night at a man named Jörg's house. It was really amazingly fab to spend the night at his place, because he took me to a super posh spa where he had a pass and I went swimming and had a sauna and a steam. Sauna's are a huge part of German culture in the big cities, especially in Hamburg, so it was realy great to go. I felt very pampered and relaxed. Then afterwards we went back to his place and he´cooked me dinner and we had a bottle of gluwein. I really enjoyed spending so much time in Hamburg and getting to know the city. It is really unique in that it has 2 lakes in the middle of downtown, and a river. There are more canals in Hamburg than Venice, which makes for a really crazy city layout. In my frantic search for work I stopped only applying for work in Germany and began sending out resumes to everyone and their brother. I finally (FINALLY) found a job at a fancy litle Inn in Cobham, England. It's a small town South-West of London and the Inn is very historic (over 150 years old) and beautiful and had just lost of bunch of staff, so they were anxious to get me there right away and I booked a flight on the 8th from the Hamburg-Lubeck airport to the London Stansted Airport. The morning of my flight I woke up early to double-check all my luggage and then took a train to the Hamburg train station, then a train to the Lubeck train station. The thing about buying tickets from the cheap flight airlines is that you never fly from the major airports, and the "Hamburg Lubeck" airport was actually an airport outside of Lubeck, which is a town almost an hour outside of Hamburg. I had time to kill before my evening flight so I did a bit of sightseeing in Lubeck, which is a really adorable German town. At the Lubeck train station I had my last glass of German Gluwein then took a train to the airport.
I took a plane to the Stansted airport outside of London and went to the customs desk (like everyone) to get through border patrol to the UK. The guard at the patrol desk asked all the standard questions and I gave my usual answers ("where are you planning on going?" "oh well you know, just taveling around" "when do you plan on leaving" "I'm not sure yet, I'm just sort of adventuring around" etc).' I got worried when he started asking more and more questions, and then called over another customs officer to ask me questions as well. They eventually said that they needed to know more things and they asked me to wait to be interviewed by another customs officer. I tried not ot panick, but when they brought me into a "holding room" (aka: jail) where a customs security officer expained what would happen in my questioning. Over the next 5 hours I was detained, questioned, had my bags searched and some of my posessions temporarily confiscated, was fingerprinted, questioned, and made to wait in the holding room for a long time (aka: purgatory). The customs security officers were really nice and gave me tea and a sandwich, and the customs officers were pretty much Satan and questioned me about the most outlandishly invasive personal things, and made me feel more criminalised than I've ever felt in my life, including when I was doing things that were actually illegal! The worst thing was that this one walrus of a woman who kept questioning me would say over and over "you know, we're not trying to punish you for being young and impulsive, but..." and it took all of my willpower not to yell at her, "that's EXACTLY what you're punishing me for!" After 5 hours of detainment and questioning I was informed that I would be rejected from the border (on the grounds of not having prvided enough information about my travels and not having a return ticket home to guarantee I would be leaving the UK) and placed on a 6:30am flight back to Hamburg. Until the flight I was forced to stay in the holding room with the other rejectees. Around 2 am I crampedly curled up on the bench and tried to sleep a bit, but there was a South Afican man who was detained (I eventually found out) because he had forged his passport, and he kept yelling about the injustice of him being detained and fingerprinted and trying to argue his way out of there ALL NIGHT! At 6:30 I was put on the plane back to Hamburg via the Lubeck termnal and arrived there having no idea where to go or what to do. I took the bus back to Hamburg proper feeling dazed, tired, and thouroughly pissed off. My only comfort was the realisation that I did the exact opposite of the Beatles and was ejected from the UK to Hamburg instead of the other way around (only I wasn't arrested). I eventually made up my mind that the only way for me to stay in Europe for longer was to work, and I would get my shit in order and try again to get through the UK border so that I could work at the job that was lined up for me (by the way, by this time I had talked to the Assistant Manager at the Inn, Fiona, and told her what was going on so they knew not to expect me right away). I found an internet cafe and managed to book a flight to London (another 50 Euros wasted) but it wasn't until the next day, and after all this giant wasting of all my non-money I decided I couldn't afford to stay in a hostel for the night and would instead just stay awake (again) instead. I did some research into different flight companies that fly from Europe to Canada to find the cheapest possible flight home. You can only stay in Europe for 3 months out of 6 and the UK for 6 months out of 12 and both hose times simultaneously end around March 28th, so I looked for a ticket near then. I bought a return ticket to Canada from London (March 26th) for actually a pretty good deal, and then spent hours printing out banking information, tickets, emails from friends in the UK, and other such proof that I wouln't secretly immigrate to the UK and drain all their resources (or something). I spent the majority of the night in a Kebab restaurant chain-drinking coffee and writing delusional thoughts in my journal. The next morning I dragged my haggard carcass onto the bus to the airport, and when through all the motions of the flight again. At the UK border I presented my portfolio of documents suggesting that I am a lovely person and not a terrorist and this time I (FINALLY) got through. The airport was really crowded and I had to wait in line for over an hour for a bus to London holding my giant backpack on my back the whole time (groan, death), then I took a bus to the London train station, then a train to Cobham. The Cedar House Hotel sent a taxi to the train station to pick me up. The hotel was in chaos because they were holding a wedding (then dinner then dance) and had to people call in sick and were understaffed in the first place. Despite the fact that I hadn't slept in 3 days and was legally dead, I went to my room (small but nice) to shower and change, and then worked from 3 to about 10:30pm at which point I actually did die. Since then Ive been working at the restaurant at the Inn, getting to know and make friends with the other staff members, and explore the adorable town of Cobham where the Cedar House is. Some fun facts: The Cedar House Hotel was built in 1450 and is beautiful and old and very fancy. Cobham is a really precious old town that kind of reminds me of an historic, British, more adorable Gravenhurst. It is located in the Surrey County (South-West of London, near Kingston), which is famous for being the most posh county in England and has a very uppity native accent. The Cedar House Hotel has a small staff of really great people that I'm enjoying spending time with . My new friend here named Tytti is staying at the hotel too, and she's a gyminst! Cool! I've had 2 days off so far, and have spent them visiting London, seeing some sights, and hanging out with Nikki again (yay). When cruising around the Covenant Garden market area looking for used bookshops, I found the London China town! It was right smack dab in the middle of Chinese New Year's, so the place was all decked out in lanterns and streamers. I was really excited to walk around the place and eat in one of the really deceently-priced-considering-it's-London-Restaurants. I liked it so much that when I came back to London on my next day off with Tytti and Goshka (2 girls from the Cedar House) and two of Tytti's Finnish friends in town for the day, I took them to China Town so we could all have lunch there. London has FANTASTIC Chinese food! I also had dinner the first night with Nikki at an amazingly cheap and great Indian restaurant in the southern (aka:more ghetto) part of London. The restaurant is BYOB so we bought a bottle of wine to go with dinner, then pigged out on yummy curries and naan. I got to see Big Ben at night for the first time; it's so pretty all lit up and gothic looking. Basically I've done a lot of great London exploring on my days off, and on my days on I've spent time hanging around Cobham and reading one of the many books I purchased in London. I love that I don't have to worry about carrying everything on my back right now so I can buy as many books as I damnwell please. The most exciting bit of news, however, is that today I managed to get a Cobham library card so that I can come to the library (like right now for instance) and use their internet, and also borrow books. I've borrowed some books on England so I can read up about my surroundings and decide what I want to visit on my off days of adventuring. So, despite my harrowing peril at the UK border, I'm actually the most settled I've been this entire trip, and will be living and working in my cute little Inn, and still managing to adventure around as much as possible.

We interrupt this blog for breaking news!!!

2 things:
Firstly, I now have a return ticket to Canada. I'll be landing in Toronto's Pearson Airport on March 26th at sometime in the evening I can't be bothered to remember right now. No, I don't have plans for when I come home.
Secondly, I have an address!!! So all you lovely people that I'm sure have been writing me letters whilst you weep over my absense can actually mail them to me! The address is below, so copy it down and mail me letters. Mail them now! Right now!!!

Kendall Malchuk
c/o The Cedar House
Mill Road
Cobham, Surrey
United Kingdom
KT11 3AL

A Pirate´s life for me

Once again, I haven´t updated this in a while, so here goes another long episode of the wild and crazy adventure that is my life. On boxing day Nikki and I actually maanged to get up super early, get the good breakfast, shower, pack, organise our stuff in luggage, and be otherwise very industrious before sitting down to the consuming task of smoking the rest of our weed. Here´s a tip: don´t get high before doing anything improtant. After some time in the smoking room, we went to the train station to inquire about trains to Hamburg, because I still didn´t technically have a plan for what I was doing that night. The train was crazy expensive, so we had to negotiate the ridiculously complicated (when high) metro sytem in AMsterdam, to get to the bus station and inquire about bus prices. The bus was half the cost of the train, so I bought a ticket on the spot, and we wentback tothe hostel to spend our last hours together. We spent them in the smoking room. Good times.
I departed for my 3pm bus, and then spent the next 8 hours sitting on the bus, listening to music, reading the Scarlet Letter, and sobering up. It´s kind of sad that in 3 days I reached a state where it was really wierd to not be high. Oh wait, did I say sad? I meant awesome!
Anyway, when I arrived in Hamburg, I stil hadn´t heard from my friend Sandra who lives here, so I found a hostel to spend the night. I made buddies with the reception guy, and we went and got food at a restaurant in Hamburg´s giant and wicked red light district. I had a baked potatoe and he taught me some German words. The hostel was really clean and nice but had a creepy, sterile, hospital-like vibe that really freaked me out, so thenext day I stored my stuff at reception and went to an internet café in search of better conditions. I emailed about a million couchsurfing requests, and stalked Sandra a bit more. I fianlly got a hold of her, and we met up for coffee. Sandra is anotehr one of my German friends that I met when she was working at Taboo in G-Hurst. It was SO good to see her again, and we had a big run and hug moment when we first saw each other at our predetermined meeting point. It turns out that Sandra is still brand new to Hamburg and hadn´t been able to find a place, so is stayig in very cramped staff housing at the moment andcan´t take in a guest. She kept saying she felt so bad that she couldn´t tkae me in, but I was like, "dude, no worries, I´ll figure it out" and as fate would have it, I got a response from a German fellow with a couch to spare, and had somehwere to go that night. So long creepy sterile hostel! Hello crazy German apartment with a bathtub on the balcony! Oh yes! Sandra and I spent some hours together catching up and then I met up with my new CS host Jens. He gave me a driving tour of Hamburg, then took me to his crazy apartment where we hung out and watched movies. Hamburg is a really crazy city. It´s very historical, but giant patches of city were obliterated in WWII, so it also has lots of newer development areas. It´s a very chaotic mix of new and old, industrious and seedy, quaint and noisy. It has the largest, most historical, and most famous harbour in Germany and is definitely a pirate city. Ya´rr!
The next day I searched all the Beatles in Hamburg sights online and did a homemade Beatles tour. I saw the clubs they played, the apartment they lived in, and the neighbourhood they used to hang in. All very, very exciting for me! Another Bealtes pilgrimage. After that I wandered the red light district (which is bigger than Amsterdam´s and Paris´) and then scooted over to the harbour to watch the sunset. Sunsetover nothing but harbour as far as the eye could see- very magical. Add a cup of glüwein in my hand (which I did add) and it was friggin fantastic! Then I met up with Sandra and a friend of hers for late dinner in the red light district. After that we poked around some pubs to see if I could drum up some work, then back to Jens´flat for more movie watching. He has a huge projection screen in his livingroom so it was like being in a private theatre. Very cool.
The next two days were spent almost entirely at the computer sending out resumes like rapid-fire. I am in super huge need of income right now and I´m trying my ass off to find work. Not surpirsingly, this was incredibly boring and monotonous, so I decided to take the bus to Berlin for New Year´s eve to give myself a little break and a lot of fun.
A little information: Berlin has one of the world´s largest New Year´s eve parties. They close down about 8-10 city blocks, erect 3 huge stages, put up party tents, bar tents, and close to a hundred vendors of food, drinks, drinks, drinks, and random stuff. It is fucking crazy! I met a German man and his Mother on the bus to Berlin that were heading to the party, so they helped me find my way there. On the walk over more and more people joined the huge group all walking to the main event. Germans are obsessed with New Years and also very obsessed with fireworks, and all of New Years Eve day and night everyone, everywhere was setting off fireworks in the streets. As they were walking, people would light fireworks and just drop them on the road behind them. I´ve never seen anything like it! Or heard anything like it! It sounded like you were walking through guerilla warfare. Crazy Germans!
I arrived at the big street party (finally) and started pushing my way through the crowd (between glasses of glüwein, of course) to get to the main stage for the big countdown. It took an hour for me to get within eyesight of the stage, and at the countdown I was smushed into a bunch of people and still not quite at the stage crowd. At midnight there was about 15 minutes of fireworks, which were beautiful, and then I finally made it to the main stage and got my dance on. I made friends, lost friends in the crowd, drank glüwein, bought chips, bumped into strangers, danced, danced, danced. I did a tour of the rave tents, drank more glüwein, and had a crazy night. At 6am I took a cab to the bus station for my 7am bus back to Hamburg. I had a broken sleep on the bus and arrived at 10am in Hamburg, bleary-eyed, cold, smelly, and tired. I stumbled off the bus and my first daylight sight of the new year was "fuck you" graffitied on a bus sign in front of me. I laughed heartily and took it as a sign of something very cosmically funny.
I took the subway to Jens´place and picked up my (heavy) bags, then took the subway to central station to go to my new CS host´s place. Unfortunately on the way over I lost my directions my new host Andreas´house. I had the address and phone number and nothing else. I called from a payphone, but the German phones are crazy expensive and I got cut-off before I could get the directions down. I eventually had a lightbulb moment, and sought out the tourist office, where they looked up the road, printed me a map of the area, showed me the subway stop to go to, and were otherwise awesome. I finally made it to Andreas´house at about 2pm, dumped my stuff on the floor, and collapsed. He had a polish-german couple staying with him for one more night, and they were in hte guestroom still sleeping off the effects of partying. He was really hungover and I was half-dead, so after talking for a bit, he went back to bed and I napped on the couch.
Tht evening I met the couple staying there when they eventually got up, as well as Andreas´neighbour. The day was spent recovering, chatting, then eating yummy homemade pizza. The next morning I got up early and did some sightseeing with the couple before their afternoon train home. We took a ferry (hilariously covered in Jagermeister adverts) to the beach and walked around. We also walked around the historical Storage City that used to be a seperate country from Germany so that people could ship lots of goods and store and sell them without paying taxes. Sneaky German pirates! The couple took off for their train and I went to the Mseum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg central to see the Lichenstein exhibit they had going on. The museum is incredible! Loads of different exhibits, big enough to be awesome, but small enough not to be overwhelming. I loved it! On the way back to Andreas´ place I picked up some food for dinner and a big bottle of glüwein. Andreas remember me professing my love of glüwein and also bought some whilst I was away (haha). So after I spent a few hours online looking for work, we cooked, drank 3 litres of glüwein between the two of us (oh my poor liver), cooked food, and watched a movie on Picasso.
The next day, after sleeping off the glüwein, Andreas and I went to a big outdoor fleamarket that they have in the artsy area of Hamburg on Saturdays. After poking around for an hour or so, we warmed up over coffee, then went to the Parliment building dwntown so I could see it. It´s a beautiful, old, ornate building, covered in statues and detail-work. Then went to an Indian supermarket to get curry fixings and a rice cooker for Andreas. When we got back to his place Andreas felt a cold coming on and laid down whilst I cooked curry and read a wicked book he loaned me. I spent the rest of the night looking for work online, then reading. The next day Andreas felt like absolute death, so I set out alone to go sightseeing. I went to the famous Hamburg tunnel- underwater walkway- and walked around it for a while. After that I poked around downtown, then went out for coffee. When I got back Andreas was sequestered in his room for the rest of the night, so I cooked, drank tea, and finished reading the book.
Today after breakfast and such I´ve come right to an internet cafe to check emails, find a new place to stay, and look for work. Adreas´computer is in his room and he seems upset that he has to host someone while being sick, so I´m trying to make myself scarce right now.