my journeys in europe... (pre-robocup)

this is going to be a boring, overly detailed chronicle of my trip to london and bremen, germany for the robocup world cup 2006. so i flew out with andrew friday the 9th... we took a red-eye type flight, which was kind of terrible because sleeping on planes is never very fun. i read a lot of the brothers karamazov. the highlights of our trip were the very long customs line, the little boy licking the railing in the customs line, and having to carry our luggage and the computer moniters all over the tube and a temporary bus because of "engineering" along the tube line.

anyhoo... andrew and i were very tired by the time we got to london, but that day we managed to see the tower of london, where they imprisoned and executed various traitors (including some queens as well), the london bridge, and shakespeare's globe. we also got to walk along this cool pedestrian footbridge.

the next day, after seeing some things with the group, andrew and i did some sight-seeing on our own, which included the big ben, the houses of parliament, westminster abbey, and buckingham palace. we saw the CUTEST parade of old men who were former guards to the queen. (it was so so so so cute.) we also went to picadilly square and realized there was nothing fun there. we also walked through a park--hyde park, maybe?

that night, we once again got no sleep as we spent that night in the airport... it was not that fun; i don't like getting no sleep much. it was all right though; i got to read some papers. the next morning we took a plane to berlin, at which point we realized we had too much lugguage to see the city. it was all right, though, as we got to see some of the city on the train. i greatly enjoyed using my german dictionary.

after spending a few hours at the most pimped train station ever in berlin, we finally got on a train to hamburg. this train was a lot of fun because the seats slid down and we could sleep on them. i didn't get much sleeping done, because as soon as i fell asleep jie started tickling me. after hamburg, we went to bremen...

...in bremen, we discovered the most pimped out dorm rooms ever. which was very nice. i was very very tired and slept very much the first night--very fortunate, as i did not sleep very much the rest of the nights. once again, we were somehow a day late for setting up. a bunch of us ended up sitting on a grassy knoll for a long time while jie, kristina, and alex attended some sort of mandatory meeting about which we had not been told. we made all these elaborate plans to meet up with the others of our group who were arriving later, but it turned out they were all unnecessary as we ran into them as we were leaving to carry out the plans.

the next few days involved setup, work, work, little sleep, work work watching robots. the other leagues there included the aibo, mid-size, humanoid, robocup junior, and robocup junior dance. this entry is becoming quite long, so i am going to start a new one...