{"id":11875,"date":"2005-06-22T22:20:00","date_gmt":"2005-06-23T03:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theandiamo.com\/logwp\/?p=11875"},"modified":"2023-03-24T22:21:20","modified_gmt":"2023-03-25T03:21:20","slug":"usually-i-go-over-the-water","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theandiamo.com\/logwp\/blog\/2005\/06\/22\/usually-i-go-over-the-water\/","title":{"rendered":"Usually, I go OVER the water."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Leaving London for Brussels on the Eurostar train (aka the &#8220;Chunnel&#8221; train) is a pretty interesting thing. First, the train is super-quiet and super-steady, unlike the noisy\/shaky &#8220;tube&#8221; subway trains you take everywhere around London. Second, the train makes it way quietly out of London and through the English countryside, into a benign-looking tunnel that eventually takes the train more than 150 feet below the bottom of the English Channel! You&#8217;re in the dark tunnel for what seems like a day (but it&#8217;s only about an hour and a half), and you come out of it in France. Bada Bing, Bada Boom, you&#8217;re across the English Channel.<br \/><a><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is the 2nd time I&#8217;ve taken this train across (and below) the English Channel, and it still confounds me how the whole thing is possible. Yet it is. Here&#8217;s to modern engineering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, now I make my way to Brussels where I will continue my trek across the Old Continent. If the last five days are any indication of the tone of things to come, I gotta say it&#8217;s all quite intriguing to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The last couple of days and nights in London have been pretty action-packed and filled with new faces. Steffenie and I got to hang out quite a bit, and she has continued to evolve into quite the friend. I even mentioned to her that our friendship has developed quite an &#8220;edge&#8221; during this visit, which I enjoyed immensely. Seems like the cynical and acerbic sides of our senses of humors meshed quite well, and resulted in some very entertaining discussions regarding our respective &#8220;cultural&#8221; differences. I hope she enjoyed that banter as much as I did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Same thing happened with Rosie, I got to know her quite a bit better since our time in Utila, and really enjoyed the time we spent. Her boyfriend Scott, an Aussie, turned out to be an incredibly nice guy who I&#8217;m sure to want to hang out with again somewhere and sometime soon. After meeting these people&#8217;s circle of friends, I realized that I now know so many more people in London than I did just a few days ago, which is great. I&#8217;ll need to come back in September on my way back to the states, so it&#8217;ll give me another opportunity to see these people some more before moving on. All these new people you meet along the way make a trip like this so much more interesting than looking at museums or tourist attractions, I&#8217;ve always felt that way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Oh, and can&#8217;t forget about Maike and Juliane, two Germans I met at a hostel bar, and ended up hanging out with for a while as well. Juliane works in England as an Au pair, boning up on her English speaking abilities. Maike&#8217;s a schoolteacher who was in town for the weekend from Hamburg visiting Juliane. They were staying at a hostel around the corner from where I was staying. We ended up meeting up and hanging out at the West End one evening, then the next day we had lunch at a great Indian restaurant before they had to head out of London.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So now I&#8217;m in Belgium for a while, meeting up with yet a whole other bunch of people I know both here and in Holland. Surely I am bound to meet a whole slew of new people through them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And that&#8217;s ok with me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Leaving London for Brussels on the Eurostar train (aka the &#8220;Chunnel&#8221; train) is a pretty interesting thing. First, the train is super-quiet and super-steady, unlike the noisy\/shaky &#8220;tube&#8221; subway trains you take everywhere around London. Second, the train makes it way quietly out of London and through the English countryside, into a benign-looking tunnel that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theandiamo.com\/logwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theandiamo.com\/logwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theandiamo.com\/logwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theandiamo.com\/logwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theandiamo.com\/logwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11875"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theandiamo.com\/logwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11875\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11876,"href":"https:\/\/theandiamo.com\/logwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11875\/revisions\/11876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theandiamo.com\/logwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theandiamo.com\/logwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theandiamo.com\/logwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}