More from Warszawa

I'm in Thailand now, but let me post some more pictures from Warsaw, courtesy of the talented Majewskis (pronounced Mah-Yev-Ski).

Courtesy of Magdalena Majewska © 2007:


Queen of the World!


Taggin' up Old Town.i


Little kids playing in a fountain in an office park. "So villagey."


Swingin' Jenpa.


"I hate it!" - Maj. "I love it!" - Maciek.






Me and the Warsaw mermaid...something to do with the mermaid swimming up the river and founding Warsaw...

Courtesy of Maciek Majewski © 2007. No reprinting without permission!!! :












I loved these displays of armbands. It's cool because they look like people just tore any red and white fabrics, put them on and went to fight. It just represented to me that you don't need money and uniforms to create an army...just shared passion. And I think those are the only wars worth fighting.


Jenpa at the grave of the unknown soldier. One of the guards smiled at me when I said "Thank you" in Polish.


Polish Uprising Museum.


Pierogi-rogi!




Look behind Magda.


Beautiful thunderstorm.

Warszawa

"When we get back to the States, we gonna tell 'em about VARSHAVA!" - Wu Tang Clan


Me and Maciek in front of City Hall.


Old Town. This is actually not the original Old Town since that was blown to shit by Nazis. Most of this city isn't original. It's really sad.


Cute little buildings in Old Town.


We went to the Warsawa CCA (Centre of Contemporary Art) where Magda used to work. The exhibit was on the blocks, or those Communist-looking apartment buildings that are just stacks and stacks of homes that look exactly the same. Like the ones in Seoul. Those are called blocks. The exhibit was great.










Then we walked around some park where the peacocks are. The bad thing about visiting people and having a friend show you around in a foreign country is that you never really know what things are called or how you got there versus when you are alone in a country with a tour book, you're really aware of where you are at all times. When you're with a friend, you can just trust that they know where you are.


Peacock mating ritual. The girl peacock seemed really disinterested.


We went to the Wu Tang Clan concert on Thursday night. It was held here, which is a really tacky ugly building, but it's a small venue and there's a lot of outdoor space to drink and hang out. It was pretty cool.


Wu Tang Clan took 2 hours before they finally came on stage. It really sucked. Then they did a 90-minute set. Anyhow, right before Wu Tang took the stage, I had the brilliant idea of pushing through the crowd to get to the front. But then Wu Tang hit the stage and the crowd went CRAZY. Especially since these guys were standing around for 2 hours waiting and the place wasn't air conditioned. Thing is, I'm 5'3 and I wear flats now since I live in London, and Polish boys are way taller than me. I seriously almost died. Magda saw the pure panic on my face and we decided to move to the way back.


Much safer from back here.


Concert was okay. I'm not a Wu Tang fan or anything and neither is Magda. We just thought it'd be fun to go. We couldn't go to the afterparty though because Magda forgot her I.D. and they wouldn't let her in without it.


Here's me at the Warsaw Uprising Museum.

My cameras been acting up the whole time I was in Warsaw so I didn't get many pictures. The ones above are just mine, but I'll put up some pictures from Magda and Maciek later. For now though, I'm in London about to get ready to go to Bangkok tonight. :D Keep posted for my round the world trip.

#1 Plane Spotter

Czesc! Dziendobry!

Greetings from Poland! I'm visiting my friend Magda and her family in Warsaw this week. I've been here for two days, and so far, me and Maj are doing what we do best...sitting around and being lazy. :D It's fantastic.

I arrived on Sunday, and Magda was still in Venice so her sister and brother picked me up at the airport. I met her sister Agnes in London a month ago (and LOVE HER!). Magda's brother Maciek's friend Adam was also visiting from the States. So Maciek is a very interesting young man. He's in college studying to be a pilot and he loves planes and music and taking pictures. So Adam and Maciek taught me about this thing called plane-spotting. They go to the airport and watch planes land and take-off and take pictures and listen to the radio feed and discuss planes. "It's like fishing," says Maciek.

So Adam and Maciek were going to the airport to plane-spot and I went with them because I wanted to see these nerds in their natural habitat.


Here's the plane spotters, Maciek and his Polish plane spotter friends (also all named Maciek), Adam, and Agnes. We're in back of the airport runway area behind a barbwire prison-like fence in this crazy wooded area. I felt like a terrorist sitting back there watching planes.


Maciek, super plane spotter. Maciek goes to pilot school in Florida.


And he got me hooked!


LOT Airlines plane. LOT is the Polish airlines. Magda's father used to be a pilot for them. Magda's mom was a stewardess back in the day for PanAm. Cool, huh?


British Airways...what I fly!


I think this was my best plane spotter picture.


Me and Agnieszka.


Maciek and Adam. They don't have girlfriends because they plane spot for a hobby, but once they're pilots, I'm sure they'll be platinum members of the Mile High Club.


Me and Agnes got sick of the plane spotting real quick since it was so hot, so we went to city center. Here is the Palace of Culture, built by the Soviets when they occupied Warsaw after WW2. Warsaw's a pretty ugly city because 84% of the city was destroyed during WW2. It's actually really sad because from the pictures at the museum, it looks like it used to be a beautiful place. But now there's all these overly modern buildings mixed in with remnants of Soviet buildings.


Here's me in my room in the pantry. Just kidding. Agnes would say "Oh, Jenpa is cute puppy. She can live in our pantry." So we set up this little thing as a joke for Magda when she got home from Venice that evening. YAY! Magda's here!

So I've been here for a couple days. It'll be awhile before I get pictures up again since my cameras acting up and so I have to get the pictures from today from Magda and Maciek later. But so far, Warsaw is REALLY hot and Polish people don't believe in AC for some reason. There is no AC anywhere! So I'm practising for when I get to Korea, where Isis, the crazy Afghani woman, also doesn't have AC. WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?! But Magda's family has a beautiful house in the outskirts of Warsaw and we sit outside in the garden and drink beers and wine all night so it's not as hot.

More pictures and stories later! I swear I saw more of Warsaw than the airport.

Iraq Casualties

I heard from my sister today that someone we knew in high school died in Iraq. He wasn't anyone I knew that well. He was a year below me in high school and he was on my bowling team. He was a great bowler! And protected me when Anthony (aka Binoo) would get mad at me in his competitive rages because I was such a shitty bowler.

I looked him up on the Iraq casualty list, and I was shocked by how high the number has gotten. As of today, 3,611 young men and women have died in Iraq in a bullshit war instigated by a fucking idiot named George Wanker Bush. And a lot of these casualties are recent. Why are people still dying? Didn't we win, Mr. Bush? It's infuriating!

http://www.icasualties.org/oif/BY_DOD.aspx

Each one of these names is someone who has a family and friends who care about them. Each one of these names represents a young man who enlisted in hopes of a better future for themselves or a dream to better the world by serving their country. NONE of these names deserved to die in a war instigated by greedy tycoons sitting pretty at Haliburton.

It's been almost 6 years since 9/11 and we're still living in a world of terrorism. And gas prices are still soaring. And obviously Iraqis don't want us there if they're still shooting at us. What are we fighting for?!

BRING OUR TROOPS HOME! If you're American, VOTE!!! And if you're not, vote in your own country for politicians who will stand up to the fascist Bush regime. And if you're one of my friends who live in Communist China and can't vote, build your country so you can throw America off it's high pedestal. And if you're under 18, don't enlist! (That means you, Jason.)

R.I.P. Shinwoo Kim

Leaving London

I'm leaving London. See if I'm coming to a city near you on my Round the World trip! And stay tuned on my updates.

Tomorrow, it'll be exactly one year since I left for Shanghai and started this website. It's been an interesting adventure...thanks for coming along with me.

Back to The Alchemist

I remember receiving a letter from the American publisher, HarperCollins, which said that: “reading The Alchemist was like getting up at dawn and seeing the sun rise while the rest of the world still slept.” I went outside, looked up at the sky and thought to myself: “So, the book is going to be published in English!” At the time, I was struggling to establish myself as a writer and to follow my path despite all the voices telling me it was impossible.

And little by little, my dream was becoming reality. Ten, a hundred, a thousand, a million copies sold in America. One day, a Brazilian journalist phoned to say that President Clinton had been photographed reading the book. Some time later, when I was in Turkey, I opened the magazine Vanity Fair and there was Julia Roberts declaring that she adored the book. Walking alone down a street in Miami, I heard a girl telling her mother: “You must read The Alchemist!”

The book has been translated into 56 languages, has sold more than 20 million copies, and people are beginning to ask: What’s the secret behind such a huge success? The only honest response is: I don’t know. All I know is that, like Santiago the shepherd boy, we all need to be aware of our personal calling. What is a personal calling? It is God’s blessing, it is the path that God chose for you here on Earth. Whenever we do something that fills us with enthusiasm, we are following our legend. However, we don’t all have the courage to confront our own dream.

Why?

There are four obstacles. First: we are told from childhood onwards that everything we want to do is impossible. We grow up with this idea, and as the years accumulate, so too do the layers of prejudice, fear and guilt. There comes a time when our personal calling is so deeply buried in our soul as to be invisible. But it’s still there.

If we have the courage to disinter dream, we are then faced by the second obstacle: love. We know what we want to do, but are afraid of hurting those around us by abandoning everything in order to pursue their dream. We do not realize that love is just a further impetus, not something that will prevent them going forwards. We do not realize that those who genuinely wish us well want us to be happy and are prepared to accompany us on that journey.

Once we have accepted that love is a stimulus, we come up against the third obstacle: fear of the defeats we will meet on the path. We who fight for our dream, suffer far more when it doesn’t work out, because we cannot fall back on the old excuse: “Oh, well, I didn’t really want it anyway.” We do want it and know that we have staked everything on it and that the path of the personal calling is no easier than any other path, except that our whole heart is in this journey. Then, we warriors of light must be prepared to have patience in difficult times and to know that the Universe is conspiring in our favour, even though we may not understand how.

I ask myself: are defeats necessary?

Well, necessary or not, they happen. When we first begin fighting for our dream, we have no experience and make many mistakes. The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.

So, why is it so important to live our personal calling if we are only going to suffer more than other people?

Because, once we have overcome the defeats – and we always do – we are filled by a greater sense of euphoria and confidence. In the silence of our hearts, we know that we are proving ourselves worthy of the miracle of life. Each day, each hour, is part of the good fight. We start to live with enthusiasm and pleasure. Intense, unexpected suffering passes more quickly than suffering that is apparently bearable; the latter goes on for years and, without our noticing, eats away at our soul, until, one day, we are no longer able to free ourselves from the bitterness and it stays with us for the rest of our lives.

Having disinterred our dream, having used the power of love to nurture it and spent many years living with the scars, we suddenly notice that what we always wanted is there, waiting for us, perhaps the very next day. Then comes the fourth obstacle: the fear of realizing the dream for which we fought all our lives.

Oscar Wilde said: ‘each man kills the thing he loves’. And it’s true. The mere possibility of getting what we want fills the soul of the ordinary person with guilt. We look around at all those who have failed to get what they want and feel that we do not deserve to get what we want either. We forget about all the obstacles we overcame, all the suffering we endured, all the things we had to give up in order to get this far. I have known a lot of people who, when their personal calling was within their grasp, went on to commit a series of stupid mistakes and never reached their goal – when it was only a step away.

This is the most dangerous of the obstacles because it has a kind of saintly aura about it: renouncing joy and conquest. But if you believe yourself worthy of the thing you fought so hard to get, then you become an instrument of God, you help the Soul of the World and you understand why you are here.

Paulo Coelho
Rio de Janeiro
November 2002

Translated by Margaret Jull Costa

London Bomb Scare

So you've all probably heard there was a bomb scare in London, and it wasn't a very big deal, but I got a few IM messages from my cousin last night so I thought I'd let you all know...the bombs didn't go off. I'M OKAY!

Yeah, if they did go off...I still probably would have been okay. I'm a mile away from Piccadilly, and I don't think car bombs have that big of a radius. I'm not in danger. I don't go clubbing out here because the scene sucks and I still haven't been able to quite master drinking and walking. So there would have been no reason I'd be at Haymarket at 2am. The whole situation didn't even impact me in any way because I'm so bloody lazy I wasn't even on the Tube until dinnertime and by then the Piccadilly line wasn't closed anymore. I did pass by the Haymarket yesterday, and the street was still blocked off, but other than that, business as usual.

TERRORISM IS SOOO 2001. I wish they'd find something new to do.





P.S. (Anyone who knows Julie) How fantastic is it that the bomb was found in a green Mercedes?

Stockholm

Sorry I lag with the blogging, but my travel blog entries are harder than you think! I have to upload the pics, then re-download the vertical ones I want to use because for some reason, blogspot can't seem to properly show them, and then I have to write and look up in guidebooks where I've been...it's exhausting. BUT...I love to do it, because I love ya'll.

So I arrived on Stockholm late Saturday afternoon. Everything was closed though, because it was Midsummer's Day, the Scandinavian celebration of the longest day of the year. It kind of sucked because Midsummer's Eve is celebrated in Sweden on Friday night and Midsummer's Night is celebrated in Denmark on Saturday night, so because of the way I arranged my trip, I actually missed out on both, but still, being in Scandinavia for Midsummer's weekend is pretty amazing, so I can't complain. Like the concert I went to at Tivoli was part of the Midsummer celebrations and stuff. Midsummer is great up there because it's daylight about 20 hours a day. In Cali, only the Playboy Mansion celebrates Midsummer's, and it's not really the same since even on Midsummer's we have only like 15 hours of daylight since we're closer to the equator. Still, it must really suck in Scandinavia in the winter when they only have like 4 hours of daylight.

I took a little walk around the center of town and I met a fellow London traveler named Johnny and we went over to TGI Friday's which was one of the few places open since it's an American restaurant. We met two other Americans who were in Stockholm on business. Both were actually from Cali, and one of the guys, Frank, is my age and from San Bernardino, which is near where I'm from, and I was just cracking up because he sounded SO SoCal and it was just nice to meet someone from home. It made me really homesick!


Me in Stockholm on Midsummer's. It wasn't so much raining as it was misty. It's a strange kind of rain that they have a lot in Stockholm.


Me and the guys at TGI.

The next morning, I woke up super early and went on a boat tour of Stockholm out to the Feather Islands. Stockholm is made up of all these islands and there's a bunch of islands out in the Archipelago. The tour guide told us that a huge percentage of Swedes in Stockholm have boats so they can sail out the islands in the summer. Sunday was just GORGEOUS and I got lots of pictures:












Me with the May Pole. On Midsummer's, Swedish girls dance around the May Pole.


The island we stopped on used to be used by the founder of Absolut as his restaurant.


Beautiful day.

I asked the tour guide where was the best place to get Swedish food. She said that Swedes don't really eat Swedish food on a daily basis, only on special occasions, other than the meatballs and that the best place was probably Ikea since it's where Swedes go to get cheap and yummy meatballs. So after the cruise, I met up with Johnny and we trekked to the outskirts of town to the HUGE Ikea.


Me at Ikea!


Johnny at Ikea!


I thought these carts were awesome. Maybe they have them in the States, too.


Swedish meatballs! They were yum. One thing about eating at Ikea that's not the same as the States was that you buy a cup for the drink machines and you get the choice of soda, juice, or BEER. Yes, free refills of Swedish beer.

We walked around Ikea, which was fun, and a good way to burn off the food. Didn't buy anything cuz I doubt I'd be able to take a bookcase with me back to London.

The Swedes are responsible for some really cool things. Like Ikea and H&M and Volvo.


Volvo dealership. I saw a Volvo limo driving around here. No joke.

Then I took a boat to another island of Stockholm, Djurgarden, to sightsee.


The Vasamuseet, which is a museum about this warship from the 1600's that sank off the coast of Stockholm, never actually even making it off to sea. But because the water is brick a brack, half salt and half fresh, the boat was able to be discovered and restored in the 1960's and now it sits in this museum. It's really amazing and the museum is just so well put together.


Me in front of the boat.


I took a lot of pictures of the boat, but because of the dim lighting inside the place, it's really hard to capture. I'll just put a couple up, but really, you have to go see this for yourself. It's really amazing how intricate the design is. War was actually really beautiful back then.



I bought this stupid pass called the Stockholm Pass that gets you into all the different sights and free transport and what not, so I just started going into everything so I'd get my money's worth, but at the end, I realized it was a rip-off because no one can do that much in a day. Also, I ended up losing the pass on my second day, so it was really a waste.


So I went on this boat museum thing because it was included and in front of the Vasa Museum.




Me on the boat.


Then I went to this place called Skansen, which is an "open-air museum" of a "miniature historical Sweden." In the guidebooks, I saw pictures of people dressed up in old-fashioned clothes and stuff, so I thought it'd be fun like Colonial Williamsburg.


BUT...there was nothing miniature about this place at all, except this miniature map. It was enormous! About twice the size of Tivoli and lots of hills. Great thing about Copenhagen was that it's so flat.


Also, by the time I got there, most of the exhibits were closed. This farmhouse was one of the few open.


And there was this lady sitting inside. And she wasn't in character. She was actually pretty dull. And she said none of the people here are in character since they aren't actors and it's not part of their job. :( I went to a couple other exhibits and same story...so I was really disappointed. I didn't come here for Swedish history lessons! I thought people would be really funny and in character. Com'on DANCE MONKEY DANCE!

So I head back and after resting, because my feet fell like there were about to fall off, I met up with Johnny and his friend to go to a bar called East for drinks.


Me and Johnny.


Me and Bronco, who I renamed Tree because he's a foot taller than me so whenever we're walking around together, I felt like a tree was following me.

The next day, I went to Gamla Stan, which is the Old Town of Stockholm.


I went to the Changing of the Guard, which was hilarious because the guards look like space robots with metal penises on their heads.


They had a marching band escort them.


Hehehe...


Alien attack on the royal palace!


Me at Kunliga Slottet (Royal Palace). I realized I'm sick of royal palaces after this. I mean, every freakin' European city you go, there's another royal palace. And really, other than Versailles, they aren't that great. I'm done with royal palaces! No more!!!


The only slightly interesting thing at this royal palace was an exhibit on the Crown Princess Victoria. She's 30 years old and is the next heir to the throne because they passed this law in 1980 saying she'd inherit instead of her little brother. Kind of sad for the little brother, but she seems like a really nice princess. She's not the typical Swedish blonde, but she's pretty in that "I play volleyball" kind of way. Better than the American "princess" Paris Hilton...


Me in Stockholm.

After the palace, I went shopping! Sweden's great for shopping because the people here are into cheap, understated clothes. Although Swedish women would probably look good in a garbage bag. There's an H&M every 5 steps, but I discovered H&M sucks regardless where you are. But there's a lot of other great shops. My favorites in Scandinavia are those useless knickknack shops they have. In Copenhagen, there was a store called Tiger where everything was about £1. I bought a T-shirt there, but Magda took it and has been wearing it all the time now. But there was a place in Stockholm called Lagerhaus that was useless crap heaven. Love it!

So that was Stockholm. I won't be traveling for awhile. I start my internship on Monday and so I'll be rooted in London for the next couple of months until I pick up and start on the Asian leg of my world tour. :D