Well the first one anyway. Had a great St Pat’s night out with Killian, Paul and Stuart last night drinking many pints of Guinness. Felt a little worse for wear this morning but otherwise it was a great night. For those that don’t know I have got a job and life is settling down to a good routine here. I am working for a company calledLastminute.com. The work involves rebuilding their currently quite ordinary intranet system and replacing it with something else. I have been working for two weeks here now and so far it’s pretty good. Looking forward to that first pay day though.
Well things are progressing over here. I have gotten a place to live in clapham, the taj mahal it aint but its pretty decent. I have a new phone number (prepaid sim card) so if you want the number email me at matt@yurisko.net and I will give it to you. My next mission is to get a job which hopefully won’t take too long. Saturday I spent the day with Ben down in his home town of Rochester. It is quite a nice town and it felt like it was worlds away from the city of London. We went and had a look at Rochester castle which was pretty impressive, the inside is basically hollow as the wooden floors have collapsed long ago but you can see what a fantastic building it would have been.
Well I am here in London, Don’t have much battery life on my laptop and haven’t found a power point in this coffee shop yet. I am staying at a hostel in Clapham which I have booked for 3 nights, Hopefully going to meet up with Ben Holland tomorrow (old friend) afternoon which should be good. The hostel is a little on the dirty side but it’s not too bad. Louise and Dave spent last night at Dave’s Aunty’s house and they will be at a hotel in London for the next 4 nights so I might go and do some touristy things with them.
We are now in Brussels having spent the last 2 nights in Ypres (Ieper). Ypres was really great, we took the Thalys train from Paris up to Brussels and changed for a smaller intercity train to Ypres, after wandering around a bit we finally managed to find our way to the main square and found ourselves a budget hotel to stay at. Ypres is in the Flemish part of Belgium so none of us had much of a clue with the language, most people speak English though so we got on quite easily. The first afternoon we had planned to get out to the war graves cemetery and look for Francis Gilbert Dowling’s grave but it was a bit too late by the time we went to hire bikes etc.
Well I am in Paris now. It’s not nearly as cold as Chamonix, even though it about 5 degrees it actually feels warm enough not to wear my huge ski jacket. I am in a McDonalds using their free wifi at the moment so the battery is draining fast. I have managed to finally upload some photos of Japan. All the access points near where I have been staying have been commercial and horribly expensive, ie 10 Euro for 1 hours access. We walked through the Louvre today and I found it really interesting, Lots of Egyptian stuff to look at which was good and of course the Mona Lisa and the Venus Di Milo, both of which I thought were horribly overrated.
Well it’s my last day in Chamonix. I honestly don’t know if I will ever see anywhere as picturesque as this place has been. Since I still haven’t found a decent place to upload all the pictures you can make do with this site Yesterday was the best skiing yet, the clouds disappeared and the sun came out which took some of the chill off the air. We decided to go to Brevent rather than Le Tour and it didn’t dissappoint. Fantastic runs, most of which were a fair bit more difficult than Le Tour. We did lots of runs on the blue runs there and then went up to the top of Brevent for lunch.
Yeah well I thought Japan was cold. I was very wrong. Lyon was absolutely freezing, almost cold enough to convince me to grow a beard. The flight from Japan to Frankfurt was horror, as to be expected. Frankfurt airport was pretty much a blur as I was that tired. I did however turn on my phone and come to the discovery that global roaming was blocked. This did not make me happy. Anyway that’s all sorted now thanks to mum and her mad phone skills. Next up was a small flight to Lyon and a hike through the snow to meet up with Louise and Dave at a hotel in town.
I have had an interesting couple of days here in Tokyo. Monday was a bit of a write off as I generally felt crappy from the flight. I did manage to take a walk up the road a bit til I stumbled across the tokyo dome where the baseball games are played. Took a ride on a really big ferris wheel type thing so that I could get a look at the city from altitude. It really is a massive place. Had an afternoon sleep and felt a bit better so I spent a few hours walking around shibuya that night.
Well I have arrived in Japan and made my way to the hotel I am staying at. Took a little while to get my head around the crazy train ticket machines but I got here in the end. I havent been able to get any mobile coverage here as the phone network is incompatible with our mobiles. Also I cant find the apostrophe key on this keyboard so excuse the lack of decent punctuation. Anyway I am going to go try to find some food and maybe check out shibuya today. I am pretty knackered so I dont think I will be doing terribly much.