drumroll please

For some reason, my pictures from Berlin are refusing to load. I'll have to have NC take a look at my blog later tonight to see if he can fix that.  But as it is November (and Thanksgiving is quite disregarded in Italia) it is the start of the Christmas season.  so for now...

Laura Grace’s 20^th birthday and Christmas wishing list:

Books: (preferably used paperbacks)

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

White Heart by Heather Rose

Writing Down The Bones by Natalie Goldberg

Cloudstreet by Tim Winton

Selected Poems of T.S Eliot

The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Any Human Heart by William Boyd

The Bride Stripped Bare by Nikki Gemmell

The Girls in the Velvet Frame by Adele Geras

To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Zara’s Perfume

Gift card to a yoga studio (for this summer!)

Piano lessons (also for this summer!)

Scented candles 

shampoo and conditioner

a calligraphy kit

Dark Mexican chocolate

knee high leather boots with a bit of a heel

New Glasses (with a new prescription... my old one is dead)

A Polaroid camera with film (available at flea markets and online from etsy)

An iphone (i might just have to save up for this over the summer, but i figured there was no harm in asking)

Brussels, Belgium

Amsterdam part two

I didn't just take pictures of the pretty houses or streets... they literally all looked like this.

craig being craig. probably trying to not get run over by a bicycle.

One of the amazing shops. Aren't the colors fantastic?

pretty cool lamp thing.

So this is one of those plastic fish that curl up when you hold them and according to how they curl, you look at the little paper that comes with them and it tells you "how you are feeling."  As if you couldn't figure that out by yourself.  But the funny thing was, that i picked it up and we watched it curl and then consulted the chart which  informed us i was "in love." oh what a sweet romantic moment. haha. whatever. then craig picked one up and according to the chart craig was feeling "dead" haha. 

craig outside of the mac store... aka machouse. guess how we kept emailing our parents? thank god for macs.

The carnival which was going on for the weekend in one of the squares. from this picture you dont really get the idea of how tall these rides were. they were VERY TALL. like taller than all the buildings. which are really quite tall. craig offered to buy me a ticket for the super high swings after we found out i got accepted into Oxford as a celebratory gesture, but i declined, thinking i would probably either faint or throw up.

So instead we bought fries! with MAYONNAISE.  there are lots of weird food tastes i have tried while traveling that i know i will take with me for the rest of my life no matter where i am.  For example: bangers and mash, fries with mayo, australian burgers which have pineapple, beets, bacon, eggs, cheese, lettuce, tomato, mayo, and ketchup on them, pancakes in lemon juice and sugar instead of syrup. Espresso and truffles? idk i guess they're good. haha  Mostly i've learned how much more i value my meals when im eating with friends.  New friends, old friends... meals are really not meant to be eaten alone.  They taste particularly good when you are in the company of starving, young twenty-something, travelers, with good stories, jokes, and a pack of cards.

cheap coffee and french fries= celebratory lunch for my Oxford acceptance. hey when your poor, food becomes a luxury.

one of the biking and walking only streets. where there were cars here, they were very well behaved and stopped for pedestrians. which was a nice change from italy.

yeah we didnt actually eat here.

Craig's normal face. 

They had trams in amsterdam. Trams are so useful. they should really have them everywhere!!

Craig and I went into many many toy stores.  It took craig a while to figure out the marble drop toddler toy... but once he got it we were in the store for like 15 minutes.

A cute bar.  This is how it works in amsterdam. coffee shop= smoke shop, coffee haus= actual coffee shop or cafe, bar= cafe, and idk it gets confusing, now that im thinking of it its hard to remember all the correct names.  Anyway we came upon this particular place after we had been wandering for a while and i REALLY REALLY had to pee, so craig went in and bought an espresso while i darted to find a bathroom in the back.  The thing about amsterdam is that they have awesome outdoor urinals for guys, they are just kind of these tall green cylinders that you walk into and pee into a little hole thing in the cylinder. idk exactly. but its to keep people from peeing on the streets.  Amsterdam apparently has a town website where the people vote every week for things they don't like or want changed.  And apparently the number one thing that Amsterdamers consistently don't like is when people pee into their streets, buildings, or canals.  So Amsterdam instituted these free (it sounds logical but really nearly all bathrooms in europe cost 50 euros cents to go into) public urinals.  They have them on nearly all the street corners and then on the weekends they bring in portable ones as well which just go in between the permanent ones.  These are not full bathrooms, keep in mind, not like a port-a-potty, they are like all out in the open, no walls really, its rather amusing.   They originally had public bathrooms for women as well, but back in the 70's too many creepy people were doing drugs in the womens bathrooms so they shut them down.  Now that all the heroin addicts have died they are thinking of re-opening them.  For craigs sake i hope they do... he can't afford to keep buying a coffee whenever i have to pee. haha

If you are our parents, you may know, that craig and i ate soup everyday for lunch and dinner that we were in amsterdam.  We found this place, soup enzo... an organic soup cafe kind of place that had like ten soups everyday, and everyday there were new soups. Craig and i tried to save them and bring them home to eat over rice for a more rounded meal but often we ended up just sitting down on the steps right outside to eat our steamy soup. 

Our favorite flavors: Chickpea Curry, Gorgonzola and Potato, Corn and Avocado, Spicy Beet,  Forgotten Vegetable, Pumpkin Mint, Leek and Potato, and chicken with coriander.

expressing my happiness.

craig just being a copy cat.

we will probably get some of these as prints. not this one. haha.

a windmill!!

downstairs in our hostel  Btw that is a Van Gogh poster on the wall.

downstairs in our hostel again... they played the best music 24/7. never heard a single song i didn't like. i very seriously considered asking them to print off their play lists, but it would have been impossibly long since we were there for six days and i never heard the same song twice.

I love these cars. Craig says i could probably get one in the US for fairly cheap because they are old and no one wants them.  personally i find them full of character, and rather adorable.

Near the VanGogh museum.

More Enzo soup... sigh. I miss it so.

They had these lights every ten feet above most of the streets, they lit up with little white christmas lights at night so you were never walking through the dark, you were always walking under the glow of twinkling little lights.

people really use their bikes in all weather, so they aren't very extravagant bikes, simple and old most of them and many are decorated with little personal touches.  Several also have two saddle bags over the back wheels made out of leather or plastic to hold all their things while the speed around the city. and amsterdam is perfect for biking practically entirely flat with no hills at all!  bikers only worry is to lock up their bikes.  Locals love to play a game called "throw the random bike into the canal"  so everyone double locks their bikes.  Every year something like 20 thousand bikes are pulled from the canals.

Lots of white swans in all of the canals.