My first post

I don't know... at first I was pretty ambiguous about this whole thing. It was what I always wanted to do, yeah, not necesarilly Europe but a big... a big Thing. An It, and I would remeber It for years to come. It was about having a big memory.
But I was pretty ambiguous about it. Even after I got the ticket (four months ago? Five?) I got a small excited feeling but even then. Not a big deal. Then about two week before it was time to leave I got scared. Like, dead scared. Very nervous. So much to be done. So much could go wrong. Or, even worse, nothing could go very right. It could be ho-hum. When you embark on a trip like this ho-hum is even worse than thunderous disaster. At least with @I got mauled by a bear who pushed my bike off a cliff and then the bike was broken and this beautiful girl helped me out but she turned out to be a banshee, or bainsidhe or however the hell they spell it here and ate fucking ATE both my eyes and also Spencer and now I'm blind, oh and also somebody stole my debit card and emptied my account mom please send money so I can come home and also a guide dog because I'm blind now and deaf that's another story (ad nauseum)...@, at least with that, with THAT you've got a story to tell. But if you just bike around and nothing happens, and you get home and your friends and family and enemies come up to you and say @Well?!@ and you just sort of shrug.
Well that's much much worse.
Incidentally, all the keyboards in Europe seem to have the quotation mark key switched with the @ symbol, which is very annoying. I'm leaving the quotations as @ for this email because I find it funny. I now feel much sympathy for Sarah, whose keyboard in Morocco must be an indecipherable labyrinth of strange arcane symbols. Though it does make her emails funny to read (@How's Eurpoe@ indeed.)
So I was on the plane from Newark, slightly happy to be getting the annoying plane ride part done, but still scared that everything would be rather ho-hum. I had recently traveled to Newark, and have traveled elsewhere in the States, and was always dissapointed by how SAME everything is. I always expect to get off the plane in Newark or Pennsylvania or India and breath a different air and have strange blue or purple skinned people greet me with strange and ultimately very attractive accents to their flawless english, which hints at the bilinguality (its a real word now!) of another, mysterious tongue of which I have never heard.
But its always just a fat guy offering me another cheeseburger.
Well...
In all fairness, the dissapointing SAME of my last travelscapade probably lowered my standards. But getting off the plane in Dublin, which from the air I could already see was a different kettle of fish, as I have seen written here on no less than three occasions already and its only the 1st day, I must happily inform everyone that it is wonderfully DIFFERENT. At least insofar as human beings and the things they build around themselves can be different from one another. Everyone speaks with a lovely if very hard to understand accent. I am actually expecting it to be easier to understand people in Greece. We will simply talk for two moments, then realize that we don't understand one another at all, and that will be our understanding. Here, we both jabber at each other for awhile, fully aware we both speak the same language, and terribly unhappy that, despite that, very little shit is sticking to the opposing wall.
But then, understanding really (and I don't speak for Spence here) not the purpose of this whole thing. Rather the opposite, I think. I like to think of that Weezer song Holiday, the line that says @they don't speak a word of truth, but we don't understand anyway@. We may not get a damn thing anyone is saying to us the whole time, but that someone is attempting to communicate in an utterly foreign tongue, which has behind it a body that has been fed and raised on a different... place, is tantalizing and very worth every bit of trouble. This is a frontier. Maybe not for the world. People have been here before.
I've never been here before.

-Rhys

PS - Oh yeah! Basics. Its a @log@ after all. We are in Belfast today, as of the 1st of June. Our plan is to eschew our second night of reservation here in Belfast and head immediately to Dublin to spend until the fifth, when another plane will take us to Athens. The Belfast Hostel is small and cramped and we love it to death. It reminds me a lot of college.