A little late on this since last night ended up being a late one. Most of the day I spent wandering around Bruges, which is gorgeous. I'm not sure how much there really is to do there, though, so it was mostly a walking tour of the city. The train ride was less than an hour on both ends and without incident. When I came back to the hostel, I was completely unsurprised to find that my roommates for the night were all German. We chatted for a while before I left to check out the big atom thing in the north of town. It was cool to look at, but I wasn't going to pay to go up there and it didn't have much else to see. I'm penny pinching a little since my next week or so of travel seems like it's going to be extremely expensive, especially because the Berlin marathon has driven hostel prices higher than I've ever seen them. Amsterdam hostels aren't coming cheap either despite no obvious pressure forcing up prices. Anyway, I biked back downtown to have a thrilling dinner of the reliable grocery store sandwich and prepared to meet up with a group of people from Hostelworld's group chat. It was a blast - we stopped by a local brewery (whose offerings I frankly wasn't very impressed with) and got a few drinks before heading across the street to a karaoke bar. The group was maybe 10 or so of us, coming from all over the world. Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Australia, England, Switzerland, Mexico, Texas, and probably a few more I'm not remembering. Coincidentally, there was a guy there from western Mass, and when he suggested we kick off karaoke for the night I proposed a duet of "Under Pressure". This was probably the best thing I could have possibly said - he took off his overshirt to reveal a tank top, which in conjunction with his mustache, made him look almost alarmingly like Freddie Mercury. I took Bowie's part and our wavering, hoarse performance (it was very loud and we'd already been talking over the noise for a few hours at this point) was hugely successful mostly because of the enthusiasm and showmanship we had, but also earned a weird amount of praise from these college aged Irish girls who for whatever seemed to think I'm a genuinely talented singer (I actually think I'm ok usually, but this was far from my finest moment). After a few hours of this, including a reunion with the Mass guy where decided to rep some local talent by doing Noah Kahan's "Stick Season" - apparently hugely popular in Europe, I've heard it in public multiple times already - we called it a night. Except those Irish girls from earlier invited me to a different bar with them, and not knowing when to say no, I went over and spent the next hour and a half getting my ear talked off about every slight they'd ever received from ex boyfriends and then how frustrating it is that most people don't understand that Ireland isn't a single unified country. I don't think I said more than about five consecutive words in that whole time; they really wouldn't shut up and evidently my responses of "wow..." or "damn, how could he" or "yeah, the British suck" were sufficiently cathartic since they just kept going until I left. Was I that annoying in college?

I'm actually in Rotterdam now just dropping my stuff off at the hostel. I don't expect tonight's post to be too interesting since frankly I'm not sure what there is to do here and it's not an especially attractive city.