Bath, Bed, and Beyond

Sometimes your world stops making sense. Sometimes you lay awake at night while visions of another life drift steadily across your consciousness. Sometimes you really need to get away from it all. Sometimes you need to cross an international border silently in the night. Of course, sometimes you just need to get laid.


No job, no direction, and a malaise generally relegated to reptiles in winter slowly take hold. The cure: a three month solo trek through Europe. Thus begins the epic story of one young man's struggle to find the world's best mug of beer, despite the fact that he doesn't drink them. Our story begins somewhere inside the cavernous Heathrow Airport of London?

I am desperately looking for a urinal, before accepting my fate and using the loo. Despite this seemingly insurmountable obstacle I managed to soldier my way onto a bus headed for the city of Bath, thus paving the way for the witty title of these ramblings. Bath is a beautiful city whose lovely architecture - composed almost entirely from a cream colored limestone that is mined in the surrounding area ? made for a worthy first stop. Here I would see the first of several thousand cathedrals which dot the European countryside. As a Jew I haven?t spent much time in churches, though my understanding is they are quite popular with several million of the world?s inhabitants. I assume this has something to do with all the free guilt they dole out.



I toured the city and generally settled in to my new life. Almost immediately I began meeting Canadians, a trend that would continue throughout the length of the trip. Despite the fact that many Canadians don?t learn how to walk until they are eighteen, having spent the better part of their lives on ice skates, they are remarkably able travellers. That evening I went to a pub called the Pig and Whistle (little known fact: pigs can't fly but they can whistle) where a local patron challenged me to a game of foosball. He had no idea what he was getting into. Over the past six years I had honed my foosball skills while working as a Web Designer for an eCommerce company. Working is probably a loose term, since I spent a good chunk of my time at the office foosball table working on my wrist shot. Okay, maybe the business plans for some of these companies left something to be desired, but I if I were you I wouldn?t challenge a laid off tech worker to any bar games. Suffice to say, I annihilated my opponent in five back-to-back matches and was swiftly elevated to the status of Greek God. Now it's important to note that the English don't actually worship Greek Gods so I was treated with the deference normally reserved for mouldy cheese.



My second day in Bath I wandered the Roman baths which give the city its name. The crumbling ruins spoke of a time when bathing nude with women was an accepted practice, instead of grounds for expulsion from my local gym. After the ruins I joined a free walking tour where I met a lovely girl named Amy. Our guide was a bit dry so we spent much of the tour talking amongst ourselves before going off and grabbing a bite to eat. I learned that she was attending school in England and she learned that I am deathly afraid of sock puppets. However, we were both from New York. She had a bus to catch back to school so we traded email addresses and said our goodbyes, neither of us expecting that our paths would cross again.



I was soon off to London myself. London is a special place, where the dollar is as weak as your Grandmother and goods cost twice as much as in America. I spent my time visiting many of the notable sites but not spending the money to actually go inside any of them. It's amazing what you can accomplish in a day on foot. I visited Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, Parliament, Westminster Bridge, Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery (where I breezed by notable works from Monet, DaVinci, and Picasso), the British Museum (an amazing collection of history's unearthed refuse), Shakespeare?s Globe Theater, London Bridge, and finally the Tower of London. Whew! A real highlight was seeing the actual Rosetta Stone, a piece of chiseled rock that contained not only the key to unlocking the secret of Egyptian hieroglyphics but a really ripping recipe for lentil soup.



My energy spent, I hopped a late bus to Cambridge and met up with an old co-worker of mine, Val Agostino, who is running the European operations of my former employer. Val and his lovely wife were nice enough to house me, feed me, and tour me around the city. Cambridge is gorgeous. The universities are brilliant displays of architecture and a photographer's dream. The landscaping literally defies description in its clean-cut precision. All in all a beautiful place to live. I also got to see our European office, which had a surprisingly large amount of alcohol in it. Those darn eCommerce companies never change. I promised Val I wouldn't blab but I'm pretty sure the only thing they do there is drink. So now I am in Paris and I'm sitting in an internet cafe in Montmarte down the street from the Moulin Rouge. I've been here for two days now, but that is a story for a different day.