deutschland ist zau geil!

whatup, boys and girls? well, we're in germany. here's an elaborated point form summary (remember the aforementioned laziness!)of the trip to date since i left...

ottawa. thanks to mikey, we rocked out in the air canada elite lounge in ottawa before taking off, which meant as much cream of carrot soupd as we could eat. and perhaps almost as good were the free juices (MAD juices, son), cookies, fruit, nuts, beer for will, tv, and wireless internet. those elite members live crazy large. it's loco, and i likes it!

i was up for something like 40-ish hours straight. not fun. the bit of sleep i did get almost resulted in us missing our bus stop at gatwick airport. but the crisis was narrowly averted, and we made our way to...

köln. we made our way to radka and ollie's place after battling the autobahn with my rusty standard-transmission skills and two days without sleep, and didn't even crash. and we only got lost like 5 times on the way. haha... doh. we proceeded to sleep until almost 4pm the next afternoon.

when we first arrived in köln, we soon found out that they had run out of our reserved class of rental car, which meant a free upgrade to an opel meriva 1.4. what did that mean? it meant that we had a car that was big enough for us to put the back seats down and both sleep in the whip, full stretch. which is exactly what we did in...

hockenheim. i mastered (how cocky is that?) driving the autobahn on the way there, and we maxed out the opel at 183 kph. if we can find a nice downhill stretch, i'll try to one-up that shit, don't worry. we checked out camping in hockenheim, and after finding out that it's 35 euro per night, we opted for sleeping in the car, parked just outside the campingplatz gate. take that, herr ripoff! we bought mad food at the local lidl (rad little discount grocery store) and headed back to our roadside opel palace. we walked down the street and met a bunch of danes and crazy germans getting rowdy by the side of the road, so needless to say we partied with them until the wee hours of the morning. FACT: germans love to dance to shitty german techno-remixed american classic pop songs, and they truly suck at it. it's awesome! the highlight was the danes dancing around with a giant danish flag, smacking drunken germans on the head with it. so funny... and german girls who work beer kiosks are more or less just glorified hookers. the shirts come off within a matter of minutes and after that it's pretty much an outdoor strip club. silly germans. i love it! i didn't sleep again that night, and in the morning we were off bright and early to the hockeneimring for...

FORMULA 1. the porsche touring cars were pretty sick, too. dirty driving! on the very last lap the guy in second place full-on rammed the leader from behind, spinning both of them out. retarded... the F1 race was awesome, and we had just about the best seats we could have gotten for the price we paid. it was heratbreaking to see kimi's car break down on him (again). but good lord, i'd forgotten how amazing those cars sound. i'll repeat what i said last year, the EVERYONE should go to at least one F1 race in their lifetime. it's impossible to desribe how loud and fast those cars are util you see it in person. watching them fly around a corner 50 yards away from you at almost 300 kph is a genuine spectacle. unreal. so, after a 4 hour post-race nap in the opel, we headed to mannheim to check the scene there.

there was no scene there. so we headed to...

heidelberg. we got a hold of gab and after wandering for 45 minutes up and down zahringerstrasse looking for his place, we skipped over a block, which was of course named ringstrasse, which is of course the street we wanted to be on in the first place. sonofabitch. lesson learned. he showed us to our couch, which was actually a giant common room with its own kitchen and bathroom, and we crashed. oh, boy, did i crash. and that lovely sleep is where i'll pick up next time.

jh..

"...rasheed wallace!!"

trip part one, almost done.

i've only spent a grand total of just over two weeks in ottawa in my life, all of which was this summer and last. and yet it almost feels like home. of course, it helps staying with a best friend, and maybe that's why it feels so comfortable. a wise g once said something to the effect that "i could be sitting in a puddle and i'd still be happy". in at least some sense that's true of my best friends. i remember going on ski trips with brim and pushing the limits of the gas meter as far as we could before reaching the next town. we very well could have (and nearly did) run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, and i remember not really even thinking about the consequences. as long as it was the both of us, we would have made it through, and more importantly, we would have made it fun. that seems to be a characteristic of all of my best friends, that little else matters when we're hanging out. i think that's one of the best things in my life.

so maybe ottawa feels like home because a part of my home is living here. that being said, here's the week in abridged and somewhat censored review.

we went for a walk to parliament hill one night and stood on the steps of the bell tower, talking. then, in true canadian passive-aggressive fashion, the rcmp drove up to 15 feet from us, stopped and turned on the brights. no one got out of the car, so we just stood there. and stood there. and then got tired and sat down. the clock tolled about two dozen times over the hours, give or take, and we sat and sat and sat. and then the rcmp drove away. a small victory, made more sweet by the fact that he saw us walking away as soon as he left. take that, parliament jerks.

there's some kind of crazy bird species in ottawa that sounds like a mixture of an alarm clock, a cell phone vibrating on a table, and a baby screaming. it wakes me up every morning, and if i could see it i'd shoot it with a slingshot.

the humidity here is insane, as previously mentioned. so much that i tried writing in my travel journal with a mechanical pencil, and today i can barely read what i wrote. when paper is so moist that you can't use pencil, it's humid. effing humid.

mike and his friends bought a barbecue, so bbq's ensued, meat was eaten, and good times were had by all.

heat + humidity = nightly squishy runs. the strawberry banana was phenomenal, but it was soon replaced by orange, which was very good, but just not quite as good as its predecessor.

barbecues included, one of the week's highlghts was certainly mike's culinary genius. the kid cooks up a storm and it's all amazing. he's better than your mom. i'm not kidding.

with a huge park two blocks away, it wouldn't have been a summertime visit without 'Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius' worthy frisbee seshes in the suffocating heat. you know it's good when one of you ends up with a scratched back and grass-stained skin. dave eggers would have been proud.

i've noted several things about the o-dot: groceries here are incredibly expensive, ottawa drivers are terrible at driving, the ones from quebec are worse, the girls always seem better looking as soon as you're clear of your hometown's city limits, there are virtually no bugs here to speak of, laundromat dryers do little other than tumble your clothes around a bit and eat socks, provincial sales tax mostly goes to pay road construction workers to stand around and laugh at the mess they've created of the province's roadway infrastructure, and finally, french channels here change their programming to softcore porn every night at midnight, without fail.

in summary, a great week with mike in the nation's capital. his friends are awesome, the city is lovely, and we have as much fun now as we did in high school. that's a lot of fun. beacoup de fun.

i'm off to germany via london in a matter of hours. eating wurst until i'm sick, lederhosen, and bad german radio on the autobahn are so close that i can hear the techno beats now.

holler,
jh..

going, going...

gone.

ottawa is the most humid place i've ever been. that either means that i've never been anywhere really humid, or that ottawa is in fact really humid. either way, as uncomfortable as it is to sleep at night, it's awesome. even if only because it's a sign that i'm somewhere new, it's great.

there won't be any pictures up until i get back, but there should be plenty to post when i do. if you stop checking back here, i'll forgive you. just words for 9 weeks or so. i'll try to keep them entertaining when i put them out here.

i do have some music to kill the time for you, but i'll list the disclaimer first: none of it's actually finished. yes, i'm posting unfinished music for you to hear. i figured that it's better than nothing, and it'll provide me with incentive to actually finish it when i'm back.

the first was made purely as a joke, and that's how it shall stay. laugh at it, because it's meant to be funny. bad singing, bad electrobeats, bad news: you're pretty much fired.

thanks for the checkout,
jh..

i no longer handle stress like i was once able to; it used to be that i performed my best in stressful situations. these days i just find it hard to function. even my motor skills feel as if they suffer.

it feels like exhaustion.

____________________

i'm soon to leave. in fact, it's more a matter of hours than days. when i return things will be much as they are today, which is to say that they'll be quite different from how they were before my last birthday. change is scary, even if you know it's for the best.

____________________

it's not a good sign when you wish that you could fall asleep and wake up as someone else.

jh..

rise and shine

it's 8 am and i'm up. and this time i don't mean "still up from last night". i'm awake after having slept for a moderate amount during the night. like 6.5 hours of moderate. (when you sleep 9+ per night on average, even 6.5 is still a rather paltry amount, really. but moderation, like many things, is relative, so i'll not complain.)

word to the g and his homey in the ldn. much love.

jh..

if you get a chance, rent a documentary called 'freestyle'. even if you already love hip-hop, and especially if you "hate rap", you'll be amazed. and you'll never hear it on the radio, nor see it in any music videos. true, raw hip-hop delivered by people who are absolutely brilliant at what they do.

jh..