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europe, here i come

in a couple weeks K and i are going to visit some of her family in europe. we’ll be going to london for a couple days then over to norway for about a week. i’m quite excited. i’ve been to europe before, a couple years ago. my then gf and i visited 7 cities in 14 days in a whirlwind tour. it was a lot of fun and very cool to get to go over there and see the sights and whatnot. going to so many cities in that short of a timespan seemed like a good idea before we went, but i think by the time we were done we both kind of wished that we had a bit more time in some places and that a couple of the other places we visited weren’t all that great.

that said, i’m really looking forward to spending some actual time in another country. unfortunately we only have 2 days in london, but that’s better than the last time i was there where i only spent about 2 hours in the city, between a train over from bristol (where we flew in to) and a train through the chunnel to paris (where our first “real” stop on the vacation was).

K has family in both london and norway, so we won’t be paying anything to stay over there. her family also owns a condo in barcelona that we’ll have to visit sometime too. it’s totally awesome having a gf that has family in europe i’ve decided.

preparing to travel isn’t all that stressful to me. K finds it exhausting and she gets pretty wound up before we’re even ready to go. she’s already starting to freak out a bit about the few tasks we have to get done here before we go (having mail stopped, getting someone to come by and water our plants, exchanging some currency, etc). i find that i get more calm as the depature date approaches. i try to keep her grounded and focused though, so i guess we make a good team that way. her seriousness in the planning also helps to balance out my seat-of-the-pants-ness.

marek is going to stay with my p and m, which is also going to save us a good bit of $$. because he is so large, if we board him he requires his own “kennel run” which basically means he gets a little enclosed yard and crate to sleep in. this runs about $125 per night at the vets where we board him, so that alone would almsot double the cost for us. i figure this is the one and only time my mom and dad will be willing to watch him, so what better time than when it’s most expensive? next time we’ll have to leave him at a friend’s house (they already volunteered and i told them we have a wedding in alabama this winter so they’ll def be keeping him then)

this time around we’re going to take our phones with us. this is nice becuase last time i made, i think, 2 calls home and they cost me almost $100. we have iphones (on at&t of course) which is good because they actually work over there. of course it sucks because we have to pay international roaming charges. i’m sure i won’t be talking on the phone very much, but it will be nice to be able to have someone call me if necessary and to call back home without having to use my credit card or one of those ripoff international calling cards. but, that said, we cannot use any data over there as that is where they really rape you. the guy at the at&t store said under no circumstances should we use data, as the rates are set by the carriers over there, and some of them are like $1/MB (YIKES!)

lamely, i think one of the things i look forward to is deciding what clothes i’m going to take and packing it all up. i should probably check the expiration on my man card and make sure it’s still good… oh, and reading. for some reason i always love to read on trips. i think i read 3 books last time i was in europe (but we did have a lot of train time to read in. doubt i’ll get that much reading done this time around)

so anyways, i guess i’ve rambled on enough for now. if any of you have been to london or SE norway (we’re staying in a town called halden) and you have any suggestions on stuff to do/see please let me know.

wish me luck!

2009: 08/04
CATEGORY: Life
Travel
TAGS: at&t
boarding
europe
Family
halden
K
london
marek
norway
Travel
2 comments

how not to spend your memorial day

or how i learned that the emergency vet is the home of the highest highs and the lowest lows.

we had marek’s mom jasmin visiting us for a couple days this weekend while her owner was out of town. she’s a great dog and a good visitor (aside from peeing in the basement on sunday before i took her home)

here they are chilling out on my friend’s deck while i was waiting for K to get out of a haircut appointment on saturday afternoon.

everything with marek was great until sunday night when he got sick. this isn’t all that uncommon as he likes to eat every goddamn little piece of shit he can find on the ground, including rocks (see this pic of him chewing on a rock in the backyard), sticks, leaves, cigarette butts, grass, flowers, tree branches that are low enough for him to get at, etc etc etc. occasionally these things make him throw up. no big deal. he’s a big dog and doesn’t have too much of a problem getting stuff up.

well, sunday night (technically monday morning) at 5am he threw up again. i got up to clean up one pile as he made another pile in the bathroom. K was cleaning that one up and noticed little specks of red in the yellowish mucous that he puked up. we didn’t think too much of it as it could’ve been tree buds or flower pedals or whatever he ate up during the day coming up. then, monday morning around 930 he puked again, and again there were little red things in there, something that looked like flesh to me. this worried us both greatly so we decided we’d better get him checked out in case he ate a screw or something else sharp that was cutting him up inside.

we found the info on what i think is the only emergency vet in the city and gave them a call. they told us that if we thought he had blood in his vomit we should definately bring him in. so we loaded him up in the car and drove over there. when we got to the emergency room it was probably about 1/3 full. there were a lot of people sitting around just like they do in the human emergency room; kind of dazed, stunned, or otherwise bored.

of course marek was a hit there (as he is everywhere we go) so we got the question “what kind of dog is that?” from about every person that came in after we were there (and a couple of times from the people that were already there when we arrived). K and i are used to this question as we get it everywhere we take him so it was no big deal.

we sat in the emergency room for about 2 hours before we got to go back and see the vet. this gave me some time to make the observation above, that the emergency vet has the full spectrum of emotion from extreme happiness to extreme boredom to extreme sadness. we saw a couple of people that were there because their pets were being put down. one man carried his dog in crying. he went into an exam room right next to the waiting area and we didn’t see him again, or the dog. we also saw people picking up their pets, all fixed up, or on their way to being fixed up, so very happy that their pet was ok. the worst thing was a woman who came in hysterical about her cat. they put her in the waiting room, and while she is sitting there with her father (a clearly weird dude) and another guy i assume was her boyfriend/husband, the cat stopped responding in it’s crate. the nurse came running over and grabbed the crate to take it to the back rooms and i heard her ask “do you want us to perform CPR if we can?” which i found… startling. i don’t know. it was upsetting i guess. and i’m not even a cat person.

so after sitting there we take marek back to see the vet and she checks him out and asks the usual vet questions (what do you think he ate? what does the vomit look like? whatever) and we answered them. she then took him back to have x-rays to make sure he didn’t swallow anything that was hurting him. about 30 or 45 minutes later we got to go back to the room and the vet told us that there wasn’t anything showing up in the x-ray, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t something there (how reassuring, right?) so we would just have to take him home and give him some meds and keep an eye on him. so he got an antibiotic, a thing to soothe his stomach, and, get this, pepcid ac that we bought at the drug store. apparently pepcid ac works just as well to control acid buildup/reflux in dogs as it does people.

so anyway, we took him home and watched him the rest of the day. he got sick one more time yesterday evening around 730 but has been good since. we gave him his first dose of meds last night and he kept those down. this morning he ate some food and got more meds and he seems ok. K went home to check on him at lunch and let him out (poor guy has some nasty diarrhea) and he seemed fine and ate some more.