Patrick and I arrived at the main train station to board a train to Berlin. There was hardly any explanation on how to use a Eurorail pass, so I didn’t know what to expect. …

Day 4, we took the subway into town and wandered into an alleyway that gave me the crepes. Strawberry and Nutella crepes, to be exact — and they were incredible. Afterwards, Patrick and I attended the RIJKS museum, which had an incredible model boat room and more paintings than my…

Day 3 began with fine art and dignity. It didn’t end that way. I saw the Van Gough museum with Rachel and Patrick, which was great. Van Gough is an incredible painter, and that’s an opinion I would maintain even if he hadn’t cut his ear off to prove it…

Day 2, we took a bus to the city center. Central Amsterdam was a mass of beeping trolley cars, red double-decker busses, compact cars, packs of bicyclists, and hoards of tourists. The skinny store buildings slouched slightly over the street — not slanted enough to worry about immediate collapse, but…

Travel blogs of today are too romanticized. They say traveling builds perspective, expands horizons, changes lives, and other flowery language that’s more generic than the average sidewalk. They’re the blogs that feature pictures of backpackers looking over mountain vistas, people with arms stretched above their heads, silhouettes in sunsets, or…

Donald’s Twitter posts are strategic political narratives condensed into one hundred and forty-one characters. Every word and phrase has distinct meaning, which Donald carefully hinted at many months ago when he announced, “I’m very highly educated — I know words, I have the best words.” …

Modern problems require modern solutions. Child Spirits: Don’t spend time trying to be scary, because most people will find that endearing and get depressed when they can’t pinch your cheek. Instead, do normal kid stuff and watch people piss themselves. Roll a ball down a flight of stairs. Stand idly…

After spending a sunny week in Portugal, I was out of clean laundry and desperate to find a laundry machine. After searching the two square mile radius on a map, Patrick and I found five laundromats, so we put on our sandals and embarked. We spent all afternoon walking around…

It was a beautiful day in April, and Obama was set to speak Colorado University’s Norlin quadrangle (an absurd name for a rectangular field). I got in line an hour early, but it wasn’t early enough. The line spanned nearly half a mile, weaving in and out of the college…