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In Berlin I met up with Palme, DaFred and Uncle Milty, and also once again with insane guy. I guess I will upload some pics from that event later on.

I noticed skint updated his blog, so I had to conform.

I’ve just been on a trip for more than a month! It was real fun, we went by train through all of eastern/southern europe, mainly passing by big cities. Though on some occasions we visited some small spots on the map too. The main example being 2 Mai, in Romania. It’s on the black sea, very close to the bulgarian border and it’s maximum cool. Or very warm actually.

First week we went through Berlin and Krakow and ended up in Slowakia at a lake I forgot the name of, but it’s at Liptovsky area. It was quite picturesque there, with high mountains, green grass, nature, and ofcourse tiny villages with tiny people. The camping we stayed at was bollocks, stupid girls taking care of administration too lazy to change small change for slowakian dollars so we could take the bus to the nearest train station. We had to resort to dutch people on the camping.

After Slowakia we went through a 24 hour train route via Bratislava and Budapest to Bucharest/Bucuresti. On the train to Bucuresti were drunk people and they caused some trouble. Let’s say we didn’t dare to sleep. Bucuresti was plain ugly, with many poor areas, wild dogs and flats looking like ruins. We challenged the odds by venturing into the poorest part of the city, called Ferentari. It is estimated that 80% of the population there is made up by squatters. It was indeed very poor and dirty there. No roads, only sand. And it smells.

After that we went to the black sea. We camped on the beach next to a 24-hour bar. It was really nice, we met up with lots of people from Romania. There were no foreign tourists there, except for ourselves ofcourse. From 2 Mai we went to Istanbul. Also great, and very hot. And they’re kind, they offer you carpets, water pipes etc. for small prices. Like I am in need of a carpet? Whatever, they try anyway.

The last 2 weeks of the trip we spent in Sofia and Budapest. In Budapest was the Sziget Festival, which was pretty much what I expected from it. Cool music, especially on the smaller stages. Though on the main stage I enjoyed the gigs from The Killers and Die Ärtze. Also we occasionally heard some songs from big bands like Iron Maiden and Sex Pistols, because our tent was about 150 metres away from the main stage. Iron Maiden sucked though.

Now I’m back, and bored. Next week I kick off with my new studies in musicology. Until that time, I’m at home playing guitar. On my shite acoustic. And I don’t have money to buy a new electric.

I have a relationship with ice tea. I’ve been a devout drinker of this beverage since age of 6. At that time it replaced my love for another beverage called Rivella, some silly dutch soft drink. I discovered the typical glass it came with it restaurants and the obligatory piece of lemon that was floating in it. It stuck on me. In each and every restaurant or café, I would order ice tea.

Some joints forgot to put a slice of lemon in my ice tea. It saddened me. It was my trait to empty the glass within a minute or two, then move on to the lemon, and it final dispair chew the icecubes to little chuncks that would melt easily in my mouth. It was my trait, and I would hardly differentiate from it, if only for those bad, bad places that didn’t serve liptonice.

Besides my usual nicks, among those the all time favourite being teajay, some nicknamed me tijsthee, which translates to tice-tea, or tijs-tea, whatever you like. But then I discovered beer, and I now hardly order ice tea at places anymore. But at home, we sometimes have ice tea, when my beloved parents go to the cheap super market and get home with a shitload of C-brand ice tea in tetra packs. It’s bad, with all the sugar. But I can’t get my hands off it, until it’s all gone down the drain. Last week’s score: 6 packs of 1.5L ice tea. And I was trying not to drink that sweet stuff even!

No, this is not about the american preliminary elections, sheesh! I wasn’t even aware of that event until the daily news of 20:00.

From the moment I woke up (granted I snoozed through the alarm some 30 minutes, but that was planned), this day felt like an immediate success. I started off with some series of push ups and a good shower. I was really in a 100% fit shape mood. At university I experienced the thrill of an actually interesting lecture about aboriginal tasmanians. Afterwards I lunched with some fellow students and we had some talk for a good part of the midday hours.

I got home and went to work on a secret new levelpack on elma. But then I realised I should take full advantage of my training mood of these days lately, and I went out to do a jogging session. For the first four kilometres I had it kinda tough, since I haven’t been running for about two to three months. I wasn’t really doing slow speed with some 11-12km/h, but I felt this stupid ache at the bottom of my feet.

After this, I decided to take a break with some stretching. I stopped at a picknick table and stretched some and even did a twenty push ups on the table. I loosened my shoelaces, which resulted in far less pain on my feet.

The rest of the running course went swell, I was even topping at 14 km/h for a short while, which is quite on my old level, and I felt confident in my abilities again. I even managed to push out another short loop in the course at the end, so I could add 1500 metres more to the total distance. I ran about 11 kilometres, not counting the 1400 metres of slow jogging to my usual starting point.

After the shower at home I also loosened my legs and trained the arms on our rowing machine for some 5 minutes. Then I pushed some weights and did another round of push ups. I closed this Super Tuesday with a grand diner, oh it was good, my mother’s a cook of worth! I really needed the calories anyway after this day of exercise.

I got a neat pocketknife from my mother two days ago, it has a fullsize fork, spoon and a beer opener with it too. I’m so ready for my summer holiday now, I can’t wait!

At the moment I’m attending university in Amsterdam. I’m doing a bachelor in history, and it’s pretty cool. But lately I have this feeling I won’t be able to keep studying this subject for another 3 years. It’s due to my evergrowing interest in music and music theory that I’ve come to think about studying musicology. I’ve tried it once this year, but it was all about world music in Amsterdam. My interest goes out towards the western classical music and stuff like that.
It might just turn out that I will be doing musicology next year, right now I say the odds are 70% for musicology. I will be doing this year through though, and god knows how we’ll end up. Heck, I might just revise my old plans of doing two studies at same time. To be continued!

So much happened, but I won’t tell! I ripped the bridge of my guitar and I ordered a new, better and fixed position one. It’s been almost 2 weeks, and I can’t stand not being able to play my electric for so long..

I recently started doing push ups and other small muscle exercises. My arms are weak and need to be pushed into STARKdom.

Buckethead is my favourite artist of choice at the moment. He rules in the coop.

This sunday I participated in a running event. It’s exactly 10 miles, and there were 35,000 people attending. I had just started training again 3 weeks ago. Before that I was on an hiatus since the beginning of April, when I injured my toe. And back then I never ran any more than 7 km’s.

So this sunday it was my first kind of competition, and well, it was exciting. The crowd, the supporters on the sideways, it felt like one big parade. The temperature even went over some 25 degrees celsius, so that was rough. I ended up with a time of 1:35:04, which is okay. Next year I’m aiming for 1:25 though!

OK, so writing about Prague isn’t going to work out - would you even care to read that? I might put some photos up in some time.

For now, I might just tell you a bit about past month. Last time I wrote here it was August, holiday still, quiet and boring perhaps. I changed education now, from High School to University, and it’s way different.

First of, the work I need to do, has multiplied. At least at school it wasn’t exactly compulsory, so I didn’t do any homework whatsoever the past 6 months. Right now, there’s stuff you gotta do, and else you get kicked out of the classes and almost immediatly are disallowed to do exams for the particular subject. Now that’s some motivation!

Secondly, I have less. Less lessons, more efficiency, but somehow weeks go by at lightyear speed. Good thing is that I haven’t been bored at all up until now. Bad thing is, I don’t really get around to play the wicked elma, which is then again maybe a good thing after all. It’s kinda old fashioned to quit while going to university, so let me be a follower then. The fact that I’ve been banned - for some funny reason - also makes it less plausible for me to get caught playing for more than 5 minutes daily.

Thirdly, the stuff is far more interesting here. I only had true problems coping with maths before, but I’m now exceptionally content with the stuff I’m studying now. No fuss about physics, stupid books, equotations, chemistry practices or literature studies. Just history, for the sake of science and not for the sake of trivial learning. Ofcourse, still I have to do lots of exercises, essays, and all the stuff you’d dislike at high school. Difference here is though, that all of that is more or less in relation to the stuff you easily connect to, that is, personally speaking, history.

On the 26th of July I finally went on a trip, together with my mom and my dad. On the first day we drove to Nürnberg, Germany. It took us far too long due to traffic jams, and by the time we arrived we were done for it for the day. We had some dinner at the old centre (was okay, pizza too thin though) and nothing more.

The next day I had some walking exercise with my dad through the centre, we walked around the old city wall and stuff like that. My father was lucky enough to remember the youth hostel where he had slept roughly 37 years ago, when he was 16, and on his own on a trip through europe.

On the middle of the day we went back to the hotel we were staying at and packed our baggage in the car. Then we drove towards the Czech border and finally arrived in Plzen, our next stop on our trip. The hotel in Plzen was not that easy to find, there was no map given and the instructions were in awful english and not correct on top of that too. But with some proper portion of luck we managed to find it, after a while.

And Plzen really was something different. More of that later!