Days on the road (total this year): 163

I’ve been home for over a month now, but it’s been a hell of a trip! 5 months and 12 days, 5 countries (6 if you count Scotland, 7 if you count Québec…), 13 cities, 3 conferences, 1 folding bike and a lot of old and new good friends. See for yourself:

I cannot wait to travel again.

Philadelphia, one of the many places I’ve been to recently.

This is the usual first sentence of the post about how I suck at blogging and how it has been ages since I posted anything. Now that I got that over with, let’s see what I have been up to in the last 65 days:

• I stayed in New York for two weeks. Went to some House parties with Lola and had awesome food with Jill.
• Hopped on a train to Montréal to hang out with Cat, Bob and Simon for about a month.
• Attended a couple of PodMtl meetups, despite my inabbility to speak french.
• Travelled to Toronto on VIA1 (first class train – veredict, the service is great, the wifi is a complete joke), attended Podcamp Toronto, stayed in town for an extra couple of days with Steve and Jeanine, and saw the city with Dani and Lily.
• Was around for Bob’s 40th birthday party.
• Caught a bus from Montréal to Philadelphia, and stayed there with Linda for two days.
• Headed back to New York, met my mom’s cousin and then boarded a plane to London, to meet two friends.
• Been in London for 3 weeks so far. Met a bunch of people at the hostel, attended a few Tuttle meetups and registered for Social Media Camp London.
• Got inmensely irritated at the shitty wifi at the hostel, and eventually found a lovely cafe to go work at.
• Got tickets to Morrissey at the Royal Albert Hall in May (about friggin time I saw him live!)
• Something else I’m probably forgetting.
• Posted a lot of photos of everything on my Flickr.

So yeah, I’ve been a bit of a busy bee. And now that I have updated my blog I won’t feel bad if I want to write about other things. Such as, say, my latest obsession:

Aren’t they a beauty?

The Brompton. An extremely light and portable folding bike. Biking is a great way to get around London, and one of these I would even be able to take back with me on a flight. Win win situation, except for the £600+ they cost. The lovely chaps at Velorution let me test one, the bastards. They knew I’d fall in love with it. Now I’ll have to get one. Got a few extra quid I can borrow?

Snow over the Jersey City rooftops

Well, technically, hello from New Jersey! I’m at my friend Lola’s place in Jersey, about 20ish minutes away from Manhattan on the PATH. Have I mentioned I actually love the PATH? I love all subways, probably not as much as these fellas, but I do.

It’s so cold and lovely here. Yesterday it snowed all day, and it was gorgeous. I guess the weather doesn’t hate me after all! The sun is out today but everything is still covered in white and looks absolutely beautiful. We’ll see how much I still enjoy it when I get to Montréal and its real snowstorms…

I don’t feel like a tourist here anymore. I haven’t spent that much time here in all my trips combined, but I’ve spent enough time to be past the “oooh look at that! *snap photo!*” thing. It’s the same with Montréal, with the difference that I only speak half of the languages there. So now my routine is get up early-ish, work in the morning, do something in the afternoon/evenings if there is something to do, work if not, have supper, go to bed not too late. I don’t feel like I’m missing out if I’m not out there all-the-time.

There are some things that I do have to do whenever I’m in NYC. Number one: eat! No, seriously. This city is a wet dream for food lovers (and it’s even better if you have a foodie friend like Jill as a guide!). There’s any kind of restaurant you can imagine. The other day I had this huge bowl of amazing ramen with Jill and a friend of hers, in a place somewhere in midtown. Which brings me to the other thing I have to do when in the city: the Nokia Flagship store on 57th ave.

I just happened to be around, but I would have gone eventually anyway. Lots and lots of Nokia toys to go play with! I tested a 5800 and an N810, and I really really really wanted to like them, but it pains me to say that I was not impressed with either. Bummer, because both were in the “I may actually buy this” price range. But what pains me even more is that I ended up going to the 5th ave Apple store around the corner and played with an iPod Touch… and I actually liked the thing, very much. I don’t want to like it! There are many things wrong with it! But one thing is true, and it’s that no one can get even close to Apple when it comes to UI and ease of use.

But enough with the geek toys, there’ll be plenty more about it later. I’m trying to upload at least a photo every day to my Flickr account, so that will probably get updated much more often than this blog. I’ll try to keep this place from growing cobwebs and dust bunnies but I also know that I’m more of a shutterbug than a… um… keyboardbug.

(By the way, if you’re wondering what’s with the “days on the road” thing at the beginning of the post, it’s that one of my goals for ‘09 was to travel as much as possible. Let’s see if I can make it happen!)