Day Thirty-Six: Parks And Procreation

7/21/15, 8:31 AM CET

Because of jet lag, we woke up at 5AM today. And since we were pretty hungry, we decided to go ahead and venture the city the first opportunity we could, which was at 7AM since the trolleys don't start until around that time.

We ate at a small restaurant called Pippers, which specialized in selling miniature sandwiches. And trust me, I mean it when I say miniature.

I could make a really easy joke about this, but I think that's Nevin's job.

The restaurant itself was REALLY cute too. I don't think you could tell, but everything here was also very tiny.

Even the sun is tiny in here. Crazy, huh?

Has a really nice, homey feel, I think.

Afterwards, we entered the NEMO Science Center, which had very cool interactive stuff and, surprisingly, no references to Finding Nemo. One thing it did have though, was this cool particle accelerator learning zone that taught kids about what the Large Hadron Collider was accomplishing. As part of the exhibit, they had a room that used some of the new particles from the LHC to WARP SPACE AND TIME.

Oh and to show you just how liberal Amsterdam is, they had a section on teen sex. And it's just as funny as it sounds.

They had a "French kiss simulator"

Yep. Basically how it works.

And the crown jewel of the museum's sexhibits? This:

Oh god, and I just had this talk with Sam's parents too.

Inside, they had booths showing what I can only imagine to be video demonstrations on how to have sex (I'm not sure since it's all in Dutch).

Then again, I heard suspicious slapping noises in there...

But the best part? These guys.

There's just so many to choose from!

I don't know what to pick!

I think I'll have one of everything.

Except this one.

The museum exhibitors probably had as much fun naming these as they
did modeling them.

The view from the top was also very cool. Joby seemed to enjoy it.

The science building, I mean. Not one of the positions.

That's a Chinese restaurant in the ocean, not a landmark or anything.

Very nice.

Later on, we went to the Amsterdam National Library. It had a REALLY pretty looking interior.

Man those are some crazy balloon animals on display.

This is actually the children's section of the library.

But we didn't go to this IKEA-esque library to check out books on the Flying Dutchman or anything. We actually just came here to eat from their rooftop restaurant.

I didn't eat anything fancy. Just a pizza with sliced tomatoes, mushrooms, and some third unknown leafy stuff that I didn't know what was called but decided to slap all over the surface of my pizza for kicks.

They're not even garnish at this point.

Through a combination of the food coma, jet lag, and secondhand marinara smoke from all the potheads in here, I got SUUUUUPER tired today at around 3PM. We were buying tickets for a canal cruise and during the time that we were at the tourist center, I flat out fell asleep on the bench that I was sitting on. Mouth agape, drooling, snoring, totally asleep.

Then when we went on the actual canal cruise, I think our tour guide thought I was one of the most attentive people on that tour because of how frequently I was nodding (off) to his questions.

I got a few pictures though.

A pretty (and all-natural, 100% organic) canopy.

They look like they're looking at the camera, but they're all asleep too.

Canal with seven bridges. Or something like that, when he said it was
famous in Amsterdam, I snapped a pic and went to sleep.

Later, Megan and I got horribly, HORRIBLY lost in Vondelpark, which is Amsterdam's equivalent of Central Park. But with 600% more weed. Which may or may not be a good thing, you decide.

Tell you what, there is not a SINGLE place to pee in this entire park. Actually, no, scratch that, there were several urinals scattered throughout the park, but no way in hell was I gonna use those. I didn't take a picture of it, because taking pictures of urinals is weird, but I want you to imagine a plus sign.

In each quadrant of the plus sign is a place where a person could pee. Except instead of peeing on a corner or something, you'd have to stick your dongle in a little bowl-shaped thing, approximately waist-high and presumably designed to carry the male urinary organ.

Two problems:

One, everyone's peeing in the same collective hole in the center of the four-corners urinal.

Two, like Ivan's mother, IT HAS TOUCHED THE KONKEY DONGS OF EVERY SINGLE MAN THAT HAS USED IT BEFORE YOU.

So I held it in. I took these pictures of the park too. But more importantly, I held it in.

Take note of the piano street performer in frame too.

Pretty island thing in the middle.

That island in the center of the lake...

Reeks of marinara.

The only thing I didn't really like about the park was that it was
RIDICULOUSLY crowded.

But it did have this wedding-esque gazebo in the middle.

This is me, right after I got to use the bathroom later that day.

RFotD: Tycho Brahe, famous astronomer, actually died from holding in his pee during a dinner party.

Day Thirty-Five: Where Is Everyone?

7/20/15, 1:50 PM CET

Amsterdam is beautiful.

"Aww thanks Michael, so are you."

We landed here in the afternoon today, and since we were too tired to do anything major, we largely spent today around our hotel area, just relaxing and seeing the sort of stuff our hotel had to offer. Conveniently, we were right next to the metro station. And I mean LITERALLY right next to the station. It's a two minute walk from the hotel to the train station, and that's accounting for the time it takes for me to walk down the stairs.

So for the most part of today, we were looking at the shops and food places in the station. We ate at a pasta shop called Julia's.

Based on how the ravioli they served scalded my tongue
twice when I ate it, "Julia's" probably means
"burn in hell" in Dutch or something.

Apparently, tea is free here, all you have to do is get a cup of boiling water, which is basically free anywhere.

So since it's free, I plan on raiding every single location of it's free tea packets, starting with Julia's.

At least, I think it's free. It was on the condiments rack, so I just took them.

Afterwards, we looked around and took pictures of the area around the train station.

Man, I just got here and already, Amsterdam wants to Sloter my Dijk.

Sorry, train station, but I'm in a committed relationship.

Mama and papa Evangelista.

Notice something about the pictures yet? I took these pictures at around 7PM. San Diego at that time would still be in full swing, with hobos roaming free, Chipotles being eaten, and boba being drank, but in Amsterdam?

Nobody's out. It's incredible. Seriously, it looks like a ghost town in some places, take a look.

If you squint...

You might be able to see...

Will Smith walking a dog and killing zombies.

I could seriously get used to this. No people. No stress. So calm.



Oh, and I don't know if I've introduced this little guy before, but meet Joby:

Hello, Amsterdam smokestack!

He's the stuffed monkey that I've decided to bring along for my trip. Have you guys seen Amélie? If not, there's a part where she steals her father's garden gnome and gives it to a friend to travel with it and take pictures of the gnome in front of famous landmarks to try and persuade her dad to travel the world.

I'll be doing something similar, but instead of persuading my dad to travel the world (he already is), I'll be doing it to make sure a certain someone gets to see the places I see via proxy.

So yeah, you'll be seeing more of Joby as my trip progresses. See you guys soon!

RFotD: Stuffed monkeys gain a surprisingly large amount of curious glances from passerbys.

Day Thirty-Four: A Plain Old Plane

7/19/15, 5:45 PM CET

I am very unimpressed by KLM airlines.

If you read last year's entries, you might remember how my mind was ABSOLUTELY BLOWN by the amount of features that was in the economy section of Korean Airlines. Here's a link in case you haven't read it yet, but in summary, they had a USB port for you to charge your stuff, a coat hanger, and even a built in cup holder. Seriously, if that's the kind of quality we got in economy class, imagine how crazy FIRST CLASS gets it in Korean Air.

Anyway, past airline experiences aside, KLM offers much, much less.

They only have a simple, no-frills attached monitor...

Although it did come with a pretty handsome background image.

A boring remote...

Worse than calculus lectures.

And that's about it. I mean don't get me wrong, it's not awful, it's just I was banking on getting an electrical outlet or something so I could use my laptop on the plane.

They did have a built-in phone on the remote, which I guess kind of makes up for the lameness of their economy seats.

Who are you gonna call with this though, there's
nothing strange in this plane's neighborhood.

I would have been okay with this very average plane. I would have had no issues with this plane at all. But they put something in the seats, something unspeakable that made this flight go from "ehh" to "super lame."

Oh hell no.

For those of you who don't know, this is the bane of every frequent flyer who doesn't want to deal with crappy headphones. This is a custom headphone jack. Three prongs, with the sole purpose to prevent passengers from using their much better, standard-sized, non-lice ridden headphones.

Bastards.



Same day, 6:19 PM CET

...Actually, scratch everything I said because fifteen minutes after I wrote that, they gave us these cute little disposable headphones.

They're cute, huh.

Look, they cup right to your ears!

Ignore my ugly, ugly face.

And if you don't want to deal with free stuff, they also gave you an adapter!

You'd think that since their headphones are also standard
3.5mm size, they would just do away with the adapter entirely.

I guess this flight isn't so bad at all.





RFotD: I still like Korean Air better.

Day Thirty-Three: Californians Encounter Their Worst Fears

7/18/15, 11:07 PM PDT

If there's any stereotype that's true about us Californians, it's the fact that we are the exact opposite of extremophiles. Our bodies are only designed to survive in very very very specific conditions. The temperature has to be between 70 and 79 degrees inclusive, the sky has to be blue and cloudless, and there has to be either a beach or an In-N-Out within twenty miles of us. Or we all shrivel up and die.

So when Zeus throws this shit at us, we have no idea how to react.

"WHY IS THE SKY CRYING?"

Our infrastructure was just as scared of today's thunder, lighting, and sky piss as we were. As we drove to Target, pretty much every stoplight was either broken or turned off completely, and it didn't stop when we got there.

When we were buying stuff, it actually BLACKED OUT inside Target. But only for like... fifteen seconds or so before their backup generators or something kicked in and some of the lights turned back on. The registers took FOREVER to boot up, so even though we were only buying like 10 things, we waited for a whopping 20 minutes in a four-person line.

But we got a three dollars off coupon and I got to talk to Chamberlin and Theresa while I was there, so it was worth it.


Afterwards, I played with 3DS Max some more (I'm trying to model out an Animal Crossing house), went to Angela's house with Kayla and Christina, and went to Chris' birthday party at Manna BBQ, a nice little restaurant where you order raw meat and you're supposed to cook it yourself on a grill that they provide.

I went with these handsome people here:

The Chopstick Crew™.

The only people in our group that can drive by themselves.

Daniel was just happy to be here.

And of course, the birthday boy himself:

Look at his excellent profile.

The food is actually really good. Despite the fact that my cooking level is so low that I still burn shrimp, we surprisingly did not get salmonella or food poisoning. We probably got a bit of E. Coli, but that's not a huge deal.

"Whatevs man. This kbbq's good."

So remember how our infrastructure hates thunder and lightning? Midway through our dinner party, guess what happened.

...The Lakers beat the Supersonics??

It blacked out AGAIN.

But we didn't care. We didn't care that the vents turned off. We didn't care that half of the restaurant left because of the smoke.

We kept eating our food.


Actually, no. We did more than just eat our food. We ordered MORE. And god damn it did we enjoy it.

Look at that expression of pure happiness on Ivan's smug, smoggy face.

Eventually the lights did turn back on, but not before half of our group went crazy from smoke inhalation and the other half flat out DIED from carbon monoxide poisoning.

But before we all died from breathing in the toxic fumes of the Korean barbecue, we still got to sing Happy Birthday to Chris, accompanied by the workers of Manna.

Happy birthday Chris!





RFotD: We also went to Yogurtland afterwards, but nothing really happened there except for overeating.