Couchsurfing Khabarovsk

Marjana was the first person I ever couchsurfed with. She lives in Khabarovsk with her husband who later taught us how to play backgammon. It was a good thing we had arranged to surf with her, otherwise Adam and I would've showed up to town, been tired as shit from a lack of sleep on the overheated train, and probably just wandered aimlessly around town until we were fed up with being dirty and tired and clueless and we probably would've had a terrible time.

Fortunately we got to have a rest, a shower, and a tour thanks to Marjana. We went into town and saw the American Corner where she works. It's an office in a beautiful old library filled with all sorts of American comforts like flags and books in English. She brought us to an auction in a run-down orphanage, and also helped us work out our onward train ticket which would've been a huge mess if we had had to do it on our own.

Original post for more details.

Gay Pah-ree

First, an announcement:

I have updated my France photo album on Picasa. I thought my recent jaunt through Paris warranted a few more photos being added, so as always, use the link above, or on the right-hand side.

Back to the regularly scheduled drivel:

I guess it was about time I made it to Paris. I'd never really been too drawn to the city - the hype of something always makes me skeptical rather than interested, but it's an obligatory stop on any traveler's itinerary at some point on the road, so I let myself get excited for it.

And a lovely city it is. I had a leisurely four days of strolling through parks and cafes. I didn't see much in terms of all-star sights, deciding it would be better to prioritize relaxation over ticking boxes on someone else's idea of a 'must see' list.

I didn't see the Louvre or any other museum. I didn't go to Versaille or see Montmarte or Sacre Coeur or drink wine by the Seine. I caught a glimpse of Notre Dame at night, and the tip of the Eiffel Tower sparkling from a distance. I didn't go up the Eiffel Tower though I did stroll through the Champs du Mars and marvel at the numbers of tourists crawling about, and wonder who in their right mind bought the anamatronic puppies from the dozens of hustlers who laid them out on their mats.

I did have some wonderful picnics in the sunshine. I was impressed by the Pere Lachaise cemetery. I think it's great when a place full of dead people can be cheerful and relaxing rather than grim and depressing. There were plenty of trees for shade, beautifully sculpted monuments to the famous and common alike. Jim Morrison's grave was not very thrilling though; a gated off grave unremarkable but for the former human buried underneath, and the morose looking lurkers smoking cigarettes and moping like they were personally hurt by Morrison's early demise for some reason.

And, for the first time in a year of travel, I spent a few hours brushing up on my videogame skills with a few hours of online deathmatches playing Halo 3. I don't think I'm exaggerating by saying I did quite well overall, for a man out of practice or otherwise. Domestic luxuries, a nice benefit of CouchSurfing.

Lots of wine, good weather, social and solo picnics, getting stood up by other travelers and not caring too much, a fun night out at a neighborhood pub and gay karaoke basement, a great CouchSurfing host and flat, and tranquility. I know I'll have to come back to Paris. Four days wasn't much but it was enough to make me understand why it's such a well-loved city. I'll be looking forward to my next visit a bit more.

CouchSurfing

That's Mihai making me breakfast before I set off for Milan from Munich. I stayed over at his place even though we just met the night before via the Internet. Shit, this sounds like it could be an irresponsible homosexual tryst, but it's just an average CouchSurfing story and completely platonic.

I've mentioned CouchSurfing at least a few times on this blog, but don't think I've gone into too much detail about it. It's a simple principle: a website that unites travelers. You stay with people on their couches/floors/spare beds for free and you can host people on your couch/floor/spare bed. I won't get into it much more, it might be boring.

When I recently hitchhiked from Germany to France, I stayed with a couple CS hosts along the way. It's kinda a hassle to organize this when you're hitchhiking without a phone since you don't know when you're going to get into a city you don't know, and you don't know where you will wind up after your last ride, but I made it work twice on really short notice.

This attests more to the great hospitality of the hosts I stayed with more than my resourcefulness. I was lazy and had only about a day to organize myself to stay in both Munich and Milan. I don't think I'd have the patience and endurance to couchsurf and hitchhike all the time like the good man of letters Jamie Maslin, who has done so from one end of the earth to the other.

Anyway, on a windy day in Germany I was sitting in Mihai's temporary apartment thinking about CouchSurfing and it (re-)dawned on me how fantastic the site and community are. There I was in Munich, sitting on a couch with a Romanian kid who just started a new job in a new country, chatting away about traveling and learning a bit about Romanian linguistic history.

I'd really taken CouchSurfing for granted, thinking that it should only be natural that I can meet people who are interested in my travels and would like to help me out with a place to stay and recommendations for things to do around town. That's what I would want to do for travelers, so that's what I expected.

The next night, the Polish truck driver that brought me to a gas station just outside of Milan insisted, without speaking any English at all, that he call up the host that had agreed to let me crash at her place at the last minute, and get her to pick me up so I didn't have to find my own way into town.

Antonella drove up and ferried me away, and brought me directly to one of the best meals of my trip at restaurant and indoor bocce hall that was tucked back off the street in the shade and bordered by train tracks. There was no menu and the meal was just freshly made pasta with a creamy sauce and the meat of some wild bird that was beyond her translation abilities.

It was the sort of place no one would ever find on their own, and it was cheap, atmospheric, and so goddamed tasty. And it was all enjoyed with a chat with someone who lived in the area, who had more to say to me than just how to get to the nearest metro stop, or where the supermarket was, or what time the museum closes.

CouchSurfing is great for saving money alone, but as I see more and more clueless backpacker tourists on the beaten path doing the same mundane shit in the same oblivious state around the "must-see" sites and cities of Europe, I've ceased to simply be appreciative of the hospitality and advice I receive from CS hosts, and am now truly grateful. It's natural to go somewhere and want to meet people who live there - surprisingly hard to do as a tourist - and very fortunate that there is such a website to make it happen.

Thanks to all the people who've hosted me and kept me off the streets, out of hotels, and brought me to places more interesting than museums and souvenir shops.

Hitchhiking: Germany to France

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It took me longer to get out of Berlin than I thought. Getting out of cities is hands down the most difficult part of hitchhiking. Fortunately, there is a site called HitchWiki that provides good advice.

Getting out of Berlin was actually easy, it just took awhile to catch the right train to the right spot. It was an easy walk from the train station to a highway rest stop where I got a ride after about five minutes with a slobby-looking guy named Stefan who spoke no English and incongruously drove a sleek, brand new VW.

At the next rasthof, I waited for about 30 minutes before I got my second and final ride. I think it only took so long because two hitchers were already there before me. They said they'd waited 90 hours at the last place they were at, probably because they looked like homeless ravers: random pieces of hair shaved, other pieces in dreads, random colors, baggy camo pants, piercings. I support people who want to look like cyber-clowns, but it's not conducive to easy hitchhiking. Having moved further down from their spot as is customary when arriving after other hitchers are already waiting, I got picked up five minutes after they hopped on a huge empty bus and passed them on the road ten minutes later.

An Italian guy named Moreno gave me a lift to northeast Munich. He ran some restaurants in Berlin, and was looking to open more. Avril Lavigne ate at one of his places the previous night, and was coming in tonight as well. He was a slight little guy and liked to talk with gesticulations. He had lived in America and loved the country, dreamed of going back there, and had thrown out US-bashing Germans from his restaurant. I got a train into the city and stayed with a Romanian CouchSurfer who just moved into town for a job.

The next day was kind of a bitch in terms of hitching. The road from Berlin to Munich was straight and direct and fast. No such luck getting from Munich to Milan. I had to go through two countries to get to Italy, and use several roads which meant several changes of rides. On the bright side, this is the sort of scenery I was dealing with:



That's looking into Austria from just over the Swiss border. Switzerland has the most stunning mountain scenery, and all I got to see was vistas through a window on the highways. If one is to actually go hiking through Switzerland, or hang out in some rural villages, I believe one may never want to leave.

All in all, it took me all day and nine rides to get to Milan. At one point I was dropped off at a Heidiland rest stop. They had an anamatronic Heidi show in a small tower, and a pen of bleating goats:




I was never fully convinced I'd get to Milan that day, but with crisp beautiful weather and Alpen mountains to look at, I wasn't too worried. It did start to rain while I was waiting near the Italian border. I went inside the rest area to wait out the worst of it and found that a last-minute host on CouchSurfing had said I could stay with her in Milan. Knowing I had a place to stay that night, I went out and stood in the rain until a Polish-Italian trucker who spoke no English gave me a lift. His kindness was overbearing, insisting to call the girl I was supposed to stay with, and arranging for her to come pick me up at a gas station outside the city. I didn't want to push her limits of hospitality, but after he got a hold of her number from me, there was no going back.

Fortunately, she was happy to pick me up in her beat up Panda, and after one of the most amazing pasta meals of my life at a neighborhood bocciofila club, I was happy to sleep after the long day of standing around surrounded by beautiful mountains.



My final day of hitchhiking involved figuring out how to get to gas station on the highway outside of Milan since there wasn't much good advice on HitchWiki. A quick ride with an orthopedic doctor brought me to the next big station where a couple picked me up and brought me down the coast past Genova. Turned out that the woman was into John Irving and was quite tickled to learn I was from the same town, and my father went to school with him. They were super nice and I offered her a tour of Exeter as known through Irving's books if she ever came around to the Boston area.

A young couple in a Jeep gave me a lift further on into France, past Cannes. At that point it really hit me that I had no idea where exactly to go in France other than Provence, which is a big region. Stephane wasn't answering his phone and I had no Internet access. So I sat around for a few hours, trying to call on payphones, and eventually just deciding to hitch further on, anywhere, since sleeping in the bushes at a highway rest stop didn't appeal much to me.

This is where my luck really changed. After a few minutes a French girl driving alone stopped. I learned later that Audrey was thinking, "You're driving alone. Why the hell are you stopping to pick up a hitchhiker?" Well it turned out that she was very interested in my travels and invited me to stay at her family's holiday villa in the countryside with her and her mother when she learned I had nowhere to sleep that night.

That's a story in itself: the place was one of the nicest houses I've been in, and I was served amazing food, and completely made at home with Audrey and her mother. After a day of lounging, good food, swimming, and strolls around the tiny old village nearby, I finally figured out where exactly to meet Stephane, and got driven into Avignon with Audrey. She wanted to see the festival that was going on. Turns out that was more good luck. We met up with Stephane together, and in the main plaza in Avignon, hoisting an enormous mug of beer, surrounded by happy crowds and street performers and musicians, I finally made it to a place that I didn't quite know I was headed to.

BEER!

The beer started getting really good roundabouts Prague. There started to be more body to the beer, more flavor, and a hell of a lot more options. I'm no beer snob: I drank Hite, Cass, and Max for two years. But after two and a half years of quantity in Asia, a guy can need some quality in his life.

I had some beer in Brno at the gothstel I stayed at, but I don't remember what it was or how good it was. Like I said, I'm not picky. I have neither the palate or terminology to discriminate a whole lot between beer.

My second day in Prague I went to the Czech Beer Festival with Paul and Brian. To be honest, I thought it would be a bit more showy and built up considering it was one of the biggest beer festivals in a country famous for beer.

There were four or five huge tents set up behind a small amusement park at the end of the red line. There were families, people with dogs, cover bands that sounded exactly like The Shark, and groups of rowdy Brits, but a lot of the tables were empty. It was also mid-afternoon.

The beer was substantial, and there were plenty of selections. Each tent had about a dozen on tap.

In Hannover, I think I mainly drank sparkling wine and juice that I was fed by a clutch of drunk Finnish students in town for a wood-technology exposition. Not what you'd expect in Germany, but hey, it was free. Besides, Belgium is supposed to be the beer country. Unless you ask the Polish, the Czechs, or the Germans.

Holland actually had some pretty good beer. It certainly wasn't Heineken or the generic Beer brand beer that was special, but Andy and I did get some good stuff.

I drank the zatte and the struis at the de Gooyer windmill brewpub. In Alkmaar, our CouchSurfer host Martine brought us to a pub with a big selection of Dutch craft beer. The pub, pictured at top, is underneath a beer museum. Andy and I went in during the day, but after being handed a ring of pages with translated captions and explanations, I couldn't bring myself to look at all the dioramas and photos and gave up and got my money back.

Belgian beer is indeed a thing to be cherished. Even an amateur palate such as mine can tell. We were taken out by Mieke, another host, to an interesting trio of bars in Antwerp.

First was Pelgrom, a cozy dungeon with low curving brick ceilings where I drank a Westmalle Tripel.

Next up was The 11th Commandment, bar that was fucking jam-packed with statues of Jesus, Mary, saints, and the rest of the crew. I was tickled by so many people getting drunk surrounded by so many religious images. The Rochefort 8 tasted especially good with an atmosphere of sacrilege. The 11th commandment, by the way, was to have fun. This is according to the bar, and basically contrary to the general idea of the first ten as far as I'm concerned.

Last was a more run-of-the-mill pub whose name translated to The Monk's Little Keg. Come to think of it, drinking very strong beer in the presence of piety might not be so sacrilegious considering monks make the best beer. This bar certainly had the largest beer list of the places we went.

The bad news is that it may be all downhill from Belgium. The good news is that I'm still in Belgium.

Sick, For Once

It had been about six and a half months of traveling with nothing worse than mild hangovers and early stages of colds that fizzled out when I finally started feeling bad. Not a bad run.

It was also right after Jamie and I got off the ferry from Kazakhstan and were standing around on the sidewalk outside Baku port, waiting for a couch-surfing friend of his to pick us up. We had no idea how long it would take, and as we were standing on the sidewalk the headache, bodyache, sorethroat, and general flu symptoms that had been minor enough to ignore started getting stronger.

A semi-truck stenciled with the seductive eyes of a woman pulling a hijab across her face turned in toward the port, and a young man walked by with a baby rabbit in a box, sheltered against the wind. Cars kept zooming by on the one-way street, and it seemed like our ride would never come.

It was early in the day still. I just wanted to shower in hot, hot water and go to sleep. Jamie was joking that he would get in nothing but a Benz or BMW, and that the each approaching luxury vehicle was bound to be ours.

When Jamil finally showed up, he was in fact driving a Benz. A slightly older model, but Mercedes nonetheless. I got my shower and got my nap, and woke up feeling good enough to head out of the house to have dinner downtown and hang out at his girlfriends apartment.

That was a mistake. The good feeling I had after the nap didn't last long. I suffered through dinner in a brick-walled restaurant by fountain square, and when we moved to his girlfriend's bohemian pad, I just took a nap on a mattress in one of the high-ceilinged, empty rooms while everyone else drank cheap wine, beer, and chatted by candlelight.

The next day I went out with Jamie, Jamil, his girlfriend, and one of her roommates on a little day excursion outside of Baku. I wasn't up for it, but felt I had to participate in some sort of social role since I was taking the hospitality of a stranger.

It was a bit exhausting but turned out to be a good choice. We made an unscheduled stop at a showy mosque on the side of a busy road, and waited forever for the girlfriend's roommate to finish taking pictures and asking questions. He was some sort of young journalist.

We made another stop to trudge across industrial wasteland to try to find a large sculpture of Lenin's head out behind some refinery. We didn't find it, but stumbled upon an old Soviet tank graveyard, and crept in past the rusty fence to take pictures, climb over the rusty hulks, and generally fuck around. We waited again for the journalist kid as he ran back to take more photos of shit he could've taken pictures of when we were there the first time.

We finally made it to our original destination: Qobustan, home to a bunch of petroglyphs carved onto ancient rocks in what used to be a verdant forest thousands of years ago, but what was now just rocks on a hillside. It was interesting, but underwhelming.

Then we went to see some mud volcanoes. The pressure of natural gas below the surface caused gray mud to bubble up to the surface and occasionally fart its way out in bubbles and burps. We tromped around for awhile, and I got mildly splattered with mud when I was standing downwind of one little volcano that Jamie threw a rock into.



The journalist kid was last to get the car once again. I hadn't been too keen on trudging all around the Azeri wastelands, behind factories and over dirt hills painted in rust and grays and browns, and his journalistic dalliances had took up a lot of time. Just doing his job, can't complain too much, but I was still sick and had plans to meet a friend for dinner in town that had to be delayed, and was tired and still felt miserable.

I was feeling better when I met Paul in fountain square, splattered with mud in the only pants and shirt I owned. I especially felt better when we decided to eat Indian food. God, that shit is good, and I hadn't had it for too long.

Paul was a champ and paid for the dinner, an outrageous $50 with a couple of beers each. We caught up on our travels. I last saw him in Yangshuo, and now here he was again, living in Baku for an engineering internship making more money on per diem allowances than monthly wages.

The next day, Jamie hit the road early, hitching back to London. I walked around the old city in a state of renewed flu misery while Jamil was out at work. I took in the old sights and tried to enjoy the beauty as best I could. The city was truly a sight for sore eyes after eight days in Aktau, even in my feverish state.

I half-napped in a public toilet, and walked along the promenade which is paved with stones that are exceedingly bright and painful in the sunshine. I went to the top of the Maiden's Tower, and took photos in the alleys of the old town. I did my best.

By the time I got on the train that night, after fearing Jamil wouldn't be home in time to let me in to pack up and make the train, I was ready to sleep. It was a Soviet train, with tiger-print benches and mattresses with a maroon floral pattern straight out of the Victorian era. I had a kupe cabin to myself. It was sparse and simple, but clean and and even had memory foam pillows. I really indulged myself and took two pillows since I had the whole thing to myself. I regret only that I wasn't well enough to drink beer by myself.



I fell asleep to the rocking of the train, and woke up near the Georgian border free of fever and sickness.

Hitching to India: The Hunt, Days 3, and 4

I woke up on the Lunar New Year to firecrackers going off somewhere in the morning, and went back to sleep since I had been out to the wee hours of the morning.

I did no active work trying to find boats. I thought I'd take a couple days off and see if anyone emails or calls me. They didn't. I think the boat situation is pretty hopeless.

I planned on going to the beach and relaxing. As I as putting on sunscreen on the fringe of the beach I got a phone call from a Chinese girl who I met the night before through some mutual CouchSurfing friends. Miraculously, my phone's microphone began working and I could actually talk to her.

We drove, along with Viktar and two other friends, to the southern cape to watch the sunset on the last day of the year. We went swimming on an empty beach in the dark, and we ate Indian food, and laid around on another empty beach, and saw a Russian tourist nearly get knifed by a crowd of angry locals for some unknown transgression.

The next day was equally productive. I met the Chinese girl - Sophie - again, and we saw the Green Hornet in 3D along with an Egyptian CouchSurfing friend. He was all bent up about the uprisings in Egypt, and he was trying to get out of going to the movie so he could go to a doctors appointment, but I just bought him a ticket so he didn't have a choice. Eight bucks per ticket; getting close to US prices. Well he liked it, I knew a movie like that would get his mind off things of reality like strife and uncertainty, and downer shit like that. I don't even know what's going on in Egypt, I should check the news sometime.

I took Viktar out for dinner. We had Egyptian food, coincidentally, and it was truly mediocre. I tried though. I got to bed around 5AM after laying around on the shadowy beach, eating pizza that was suspiciously similar to generic Pizza Hut pizzas, and embarrassing myself on a club's dance floor that was mercifully full of enough darkness and drunk people picking up hookers to notice how poorly I "dance".

It's tough work trying to hitchhike on a boat.

Hitching to India: The Hunt, Day 2

Today I scootered over to Chalong Bay for breakfast. I had some foolish idea I'd catch a bunch of boat owners in the cafes or on the pier, but the place was just packed with tourists milling about in life jackets and cramming themselves onto day charter boats.

Chalong Bay might be a good place to find a boat going towards Sri Lanka or India, but it's just a bay with a shitload of boats floating around. There are no docks to loiter on and try to talk to people, though there is a super long pier and an immigration office.

I had breakfast and waited for Viktar to come meet me, reading "Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found" for a bit of research for a country it looks like I'll never get to by boat. Viktar is the CouchSurfer I'm staying with, a Belarussian who's been working for a fly-by-night time share company that has started scamming its employees, not just the customers.

We went to Boat Lagoon, and I talked to a couple people there. They told me the same thing, I'm late by 2-4 weeks. Awesome news. I also began to theorize that the middle of the day is not the best time to hang around docks hoping to talk to people. That's probably when they're inside away from the blistering sun, or out doing fun shit.

Viktar went back home to sleep off a hangover before he spends tomorrow calling up the clients his company is planning to screw - pending payments - so he can screw the company since he was fired without getting paid. He thinks the company might send someone after him, so he's bailing from his apartment to stay somewhere else, but he's giving me permission to stay there, and possibly absorb the brunt of hired thugs who don't care who I am. I picture the opening scene in the Big Lebowski.

I went to the Royal Phuket Marina and found a middle-aged Aussie guy, shirtless with a sloppy barrel of a torso, lightly furred, deeply tanned minus the armpits, hosing down a rug. He's heading out to the Andamans, then Sri Lanka and India, but he doesn't want to take on crew.

"Need anyone to cook or clean or do the grunt work?"

"Nah, I've got a wife for that."

The silver lining is that there is at least one boat still heading west. He mentioned some friends going that way too, but also that they don't likely want to take on crew either.

I followed signs to a pier, but it was all local junk fishing boats, and all the roads and alleys leading to the various docks smelled like absolute shit and the water was full of trash. Not the place to catch a ride across a sea, that's for sure.

I drove to Kata beach and laid in the sun among whale-like Russian couples - I actually think I saw the fattest woman ever to wear a bikini - and topless beauties. Submersing myself in the warm Andaman Sea was like heaven closing around my body. The water is clear and warm and shallow and clean, and the sand is white and pure and visible beneath the water for hundreds of meters.

I realized I hadn't been on a beach for ages. I'm spending tomorrow on Patong Beach, apparently Phuket's version of Hampton Beach, because it's the closest to where I'm staying and I returned my scooter today.

Oh also, what I said in the last post about Phuket not being as bad as I thought: well I take that back after spending the evening on Bangla Road last night. It was like a riot in the bad neighborhood of hell. Entertaining for sure, but the sort of place that makes you glad humans invented nuclear weapons.

Couchsurfing Khabarovsk

Adam and I considered staying in Khabarovsk for just the day, and getting on another train the evening of the day we got in. Thank god we didn't; it would've been a miserable, tiring day.

Instead we reaped the benefits of Couchsurfing.org and took an early morning tram to meet Marjana. She speaks very good English and works at the American Corner, so we couldn't find anyone more suitable to host us.

We cleaned up and rested a bit. Adam nearly stayed in and just slept, but I thought that would've been a bad way to start things off with someone you just met and agreed to let strangers stay in her house. He got up and we headed out to town.

We got a nice tour around, it's a much more spacious and clean city than Vladivostok. A massive river runs along the side of the city near Marjana's workplace and next to a couple really impressive churches.

I really dig the gleaming Russian onion-dome look on churches here. We walked along the promenade after lunch, and walked around and around and around. I could tell Adam was dying, and I was pretty beat too.

We eventually got train tickets for the next day with Marjana's help. We would've been screwed without her, as we had to figure out our route: either straight to Irkutsk, or to Severobaikalsk, via Tynda and the Baikal-Amur Mainline. We decided on the direct to Irkutsk route.

The most bizarre aspect of our day and night in Khabarosk was the charity auction. Marjana has a Kiwi and/or Australian friend (it was strange, he never made clear where he was from, though he mentioned both places many times) who asked her to go with him to some charity event for orphans.

I've never done such a thing, and being guests we couldn't just say no, tired or not, so off we went when he came to pick us up at Marjana's work.

We drove to a super beat up and run down part of the city, to a derelict two or three story house with a bizarre playground outside of it. The jungle gym had logs hanging from it, and the fuselage of an old Soviet aircraft was just sitting there.

Up inside the house, there was a mini stage with chairs set up in front of it. A couple of Russian women were droning away about godknowswhat, the orphans, I assume. It nearly put Adam and me to sleep, but that would've looked real bad, as we were mentioned as being guest from America, and the orphanage recieved funds from the US government. They started auctioning off artwork and crafts made by the kids.

It's probably not right to insult the artwork of orphan children, but it was pretty undesirable stuff. A couple kind-hearted women were buying the things anyway though. I wanted to help, or buy something, but buying children's artwork to carry around didn't seem like a good idea.

There was an intermission, and various interludes of Turkish drums and Russian folk songs. I wound up paying 1000 rubles for a nice throw rug that I thought my mom would like. Keep your eyes on the mail, Mom. It's coming your way.

That evening, Marjana's husband Andrey cooked us spaghetti with meat sauce. For how simple the meal was, it was surprisingly delicious. Then he taught Adam and I how to play backgammon, which was perfect because I have a mini travel game set that has been entertaining us, and backgammon was the one game included we didn't know how to play.

In fact, it was a very good thing we learned, because the next day we got on a train and didn't get off for three days.

Epic Travel Song

I generally hate what's happened to the word "epic" these days. Somehow it got bastardized to mean "cool" or "awesome", as in hearing some frat boy say:

"Brah, I did the most epic kegstand last night!"

It's an insult to the original meaning of the word, and as such has almost entirely eliminated the grandeur and scale of what the word "epic" is supposed to mean.

I, however, intend to write a travel ballad that truly deserves the title of epic. My idea is to write a five or six line verse about each place I go to, or about each Couchsurfing experience I have. I figure this will give me between 2-4 verses per week. Over a period of six months, that's a lot of verses; I'm not going to do the math.

All right, a rough conservative estimate is somewhere above 50 verses. I'll sing them with my trusty travel guitar which I still can't play very well. I don't think anyone will notice though, because I can't sing very well either.

Now you may ask, how does such a song truly qualify as epic, in the classical sense of the word, beyond being extremely long? Well, let me answer you, as per the above dictionary definition.

• the song will pertain to a long poetic composition. I intend to maintain a regular rhyme scheme, perhaps similar to Poe's The Raven, though my song certainly won't be as good as that masterpiece.
• it will focus on a hero and a series of great events. Well I suppose I'll have to be the hero, unless Adam really starts kicking ass, then I'll have to write about him.
• it will be written in an elevated style. I possess a degree in English, so that automatically proves I've practiced reading and writing and speaking English a wicked lot, and I will compose this song with the most impressivist of my finely honed abilities.

But I'm not finished yet! Allow me to elaborate even further upon more elements of classical epics not contained in the pedestrian internet-dictionary definition:

• a lengthy catalog of ships, or warriors, or other stuff. I'll probably only be on a few different ships, and I doubt I will encounter other warriors as noble and fierce as Adam or myself, so I'll stick with cataloging Couchsurfing hosts and other notable characters I meet.
• repetitive literary devices. Classic epics such as The Iliad and Odyssey were originally oral poems and contained repetitive elements of composition to make things easier for Homer and his homies who would recite it. I'll probably run out of interesting rhymes and imagery, so I'll just keep reusing old stuff in new stuff.
• a trip to the netherworld. A bunch of classic epics see their heroes making excursions to the land of the dead. No promises on this one...