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Now, I had never been to Paris. So I was really looking forward to wine, wine, cheese, wine, cheese and some more wine. However, my host Zach is a bit more of a Coke, Coke, McDonald's, Coke, McDonald's and some more Coke kind of a guy. In retrospect, perhaps, I should have set some more realistic expectations.

I got in earlyish on a Friday afternoon. For that evening, Zach had suggested going to a friend's restaurant to meet a couple people. Sounds good to me! However, we get to the restaurant and a couple of Zach's amis seemed to have multiplied to ten or so of them. And all of these Frenchies agreed upon two things: They liked to drink Heineken. And they really, really loved hamburgers. They loved hamburgers so much, in fact, that they ordered a hamburger for me. They said, "Why would you want wine and cheese and pate? This is the best hamburger in Paris!" Okay, mon frère, I is from a little place called the United States of WEKNOWBURGERS and, even though your country has some of the best goddamned food in the world, something being the so-called best hamburger in Paris, even if it is a 100% true statement, probably means very little. I should just end this paragraph here because you know how it ends. I didn't get wine, cheese or pate. I got a mediocre hamburger. I know you already guessed that. But I had to continue the paragraph so I could tell you everybody ate their burgers with knives and forks. MON DIEU!

The next morning, Zach already had plans to take part in something called the Beret and Baguette Bike Ride.

The startpoint of the ride was at the Eiffel Tower. I was sans bike so we picked me up a fancy CityBike right outside of our apartment. CityBikes are bike rentals you can find in many, many cities in Europe. The bikes are sometimes crappy but completely rideable when needed. It was a great early morning adventure to bike through the streets of Paris to the Eiffel Tower. When I got there I rewarded myself with pastry. Note the bereted boys in the background.

After a couple hours of hanging out with the bereted and baguetted biking folks gathering for their ride, I was getting a bit antsy. It was almost 10am and I hadn't had a glass of wine yet! Thank god, my new best friend Chris showed up to remedy that. Well, this was really the first time we met but it was pretty much instant bestfrienditude. So I bid Zachary Franzen adieu, then Chris and I ventured off into the city to stir up some shit.

We started off on a mission to find me a hoodie as I made the mistake of dressing lightly for the chilly morning. Then, we got a tad sidetracked with some cafe coffee drinking and crepe eating. Next, our wanderings took us out amongst throngs of tourists. The famous Notre Dame Cathedral was just right across the way but the line to get in was a couple blocks long. So I was going to just have to be content with some nice exterior photos.

My new partner-in-crime Chris was not having that though as he decided to eff that line and cut in front of everybody. Even though it seems kind of dickish, it actually is a very European thing to do to completely eschew a line. I have been cut in front of many a time waiting in line for something. Rather, I have elbowchecked many a person trying to cut in line in front of me many a time. Nobody elbowchecked us though and we strode right on through. Suckas.

Well, Chris is a man-about-town and he, unfortunately, had to leave me to do some of his requisite about-towning. He pointed me in the direction of a worthwhile walking-around area and we parted ways. At this point, it was just before lunchtime and I really needed to make up for the burger fiasco from the night previous. I came upon a pretty nice little area with tiny streets lined with bistros. I would tell you what this area was called, but my gin-soaked memory fails me. Now, choosing a restaurant for what is your only lunch for your short Parisian weekend involves a lot of discerning assessment. After circling a good five block radius, I got really good foodie vibes from a certain establishment. The prix fixe menu looked promising and the decor was nice and didn't seem forced. It was suspiciously empty however that turned out to be just because it was a little early yet. Just after I was seated and working on my wine and olives, the place started to really fill up. I spent the next two hours there eating and drinking. To start, I had the aforementioned olives, then some amazing house-made pate and onion confit, followed by sausage and pommes frites, and finished off with this insane chestnut chocolate pudding whipped cream concoction. It was so fantastic that after every bite of food and drink of wine, I just wanted to high five somebody.

I met up with Zachary later that day and we spent the rest of our evening rabblerousing our hearts out. We hit a houseparty thrown by another American ex-pat where I met more Americans than I have in my entire time in Vienna. Chris was also in attendance as well as another one of my new Parisian homeboys, Kyle. After hours of imbibing on the things kids worldwide imbibe upon at house parties such as this one, we caught the last Metro train home and called it a night.

The next morning, before we had to Le Metro it to the airport, Zach and I tried to get in a bit more sightseeing in the few hours we had left. We killed two birds with one stone and headed over to the Champs-Élysées which conveniently ends with the Arc de Triomphe.

By the skin of our teeth, we made it to Charles De Gaulle in time for my flight. For a few moments, it seemed like Volcano Eyjafjallajokull aka Volcano I'manasshole was looking to keep me in gay Paree for one more night. Every single other flight to Vienna had been cancelled up to that point. I could not have that. When I am in the direction of leaving somewhere, I want to keep heading in that direction. Thankfully, Mr. Volcano decided to do me a solid and allowed my plane clearance to take off.

Au Revoir, France!

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It is really a shame that I was such a cripple (oh, lighten up) for this whole trip. I vacillated from five minutes of "This discomfort is completely manageable!" to "I will never ever get better ever again." And when you have back problems, everybody wants to tell you some dire tale of lifelong chronic pain. Even when that tale is told with a British accent, it is not cute. Here's a tip for all the people of the world: Somebody's very present tale of woe is not your segue to tell any story other than one that ends in puppy dogs, rainbows and chocolate bars. Please retweet.

We took a taxicab from the train station to the inn where we were staying. It was pretty super duper. The property had an attached garden. Before we departed the next day, we decided to take a saunter through it. We had already brought our bags down so we asked the innkeeper if she would watch them at the front desk while we took a walk. She obliged ,however, she then inquired as to whether we had any sort of problem with frogs. "Frogs? No, not really. I like frogs," I said. Then we actually went to the garden and realized she had omitted a detail in her strange frog warning. These frogs was doing it. Or as my mother as a child used to describe cows mating, "Oh, look. That cow is giving the other cow a piggy-back ride!" And I welcome the clarification we're guaranteed to receive in the comments from said mother.

The rest of this day involved a cab ride back to the train station, train to London, long cab ride to another train station in London, train to Warwick and then a car ride to our B&B in Stratford-upon-Avon. This was a day that all the drugs in the world could not save. When we got to the second train station in London, I was pretty much ready to call 999. Somehow by the grace of Vicodin, I made it all the way to Stratford.

We were there for two nights. I know I'm sounding like a whiney broken record, but I didn't really do anything of substance for those few days. Stratford is known for being the home (and death) of Shakespeare. When we originally made plans to stay here, we were going to do all the requisite touristing about town. The next night, we did make the short walk into the town center for some dinner which involved a walk by Shakespeare's alleged birth house. Had I been a bit more mobile, I would probably have hit the theater there to see a play and then also gone to see Stonehenge which is supposedly a bus ride away and partaken in a bit more of the scenery at a pub or three. However, whine, whine, complain, complain, woe is me, I didn't do any of those things because my back is a jerk.

Before we took off the next morning, we had our last deserved breakfast which is, in name, 50% of the agreed deal. And I felt that because breakfast was included, I had to partake in everything that was offered to me. This involved a nice appetizer of a bowl of granola with milk. Followed by a full English breakfast and a pitcher of fresh orange juice. The B&B lady visited with us a little as she brought us our heavy plates filled with scrambled eggs, sausages, rashers of bacon, cooked tomatoes, mushrooms and toast. I don't remember what I said but knowing me it was some sort of kiss-ass compliment about how much I love English breakfasts. She then responded with a diatribe how the British are the only ones that do cooked breakfasts. On and on, she went. Now, I do love English breakfasts because I do love breakfasting, however, she has obviously never heard of the American institution of IHOP. Call me when you have fruit-and-whipped-cream-topped-cheesecake-stuffed pancake stackers in your full English breakfast.

We took the train back into London. We had one more night there before leaving for Vienna. I had really hoped by this last night, I would have been recovered enough to take in a few sights. However, all the traveling about England really threw a wrench in my progress. So we just got a nice hotel room at the InterContinental in Mayfair and we stuffed our faces with BBC and room service. BBC America provides a nice sampling of what you can get but nowhere near the breadth and depth of what there is to be had at the source. Highlights were some hare-brained Andrew Lloyd Weber casting a production of Wizard of Oz American Idol-y show, this awesome game show Mastermind (?) and a marathon of this reality show to see who the could host the best dinner parties. It was all pretty great and made me a lot less sad I never got to try and make those guard guys at the palace place laugh.

Don't worry, England. I'll be back. And I'm going to rip shit up properlike. Promise.

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Armed with my drugs (read: PRESCRIBED drugs) and a request for a wheelchair, I headed to LAX Saturday evening. Now, reserving a wheelchair was something I had never done before. And it was really surprisingly easy to do (just call your airline a few days before your flight), completely free (excluding a tip which is up to your discretion) and totally worthwhile. After checking in, I was directed to wait in a little cordoned off disabled person's corral where at about five minutes before my flight was about to board, I was picked up by my "driver." I don't want to say it was worth throwing out my back to have the opportunity to have an excuse to be wheelchaired at lightning speed through the airport in front of every line through secret doors directly to my seat on the plane, but it was definitely the silver lining of the week.

The flight was a Vicodin, Soma and a glass of white wine induced blur. And when we finally did get to London, my brain didn't even necessarily put together that my wheelchair reservation included a wheelchairing through Heathrow. It was a nice and welcome surprise. I was picked up by an Ali G sounding youngster who went above and beyond his duties. He whizzed me through the miles-long airport, through customs, got my luggage, brought me to an ATM, helped me purchase the right train ticket to get into London and dropped me off on the bench to wait for it. And he refused to take a tip which he greatly deserved. So Booyakasha and Respek to you, young man. Thank you.

I made my way to our hotel and crashed in the room. I was still in a pretty deep drug-fueled, jet-lagged travel coma when Alex arrived a few hours later. That night was uneventful. Some dinner was involved. More sleeping ensued. Let me just point out here that this was my first ever trip to London, England or anywhere in the United Kingdom for that matter. We had three days in London and I was still naively hopeful that I could get some touristy sightseeing checked off my list in the morning after a good night's sleep.

Our hotel was really in a great location right on Trafalgar Square. Jetlag woke me up pretty early. When Alex roused, we made our way outside to go track down a nice full English breakfast. We surprisingly had a very difficult time finding a decent place to eat in our area. It was a bit before 8am and it seemed a lot of places weren't open yet. From this situation, one could surmise that London isn't as crazy about breakfast as we are in the States apparently. Finally, we had to settle on this chain that was right next to our hotel. I don't know if it was just an off day for this place, but they appeared to be opening their doors at the same time as they were receiving deliveries for the day and didn't seem to have any sort of back loading dock type entrance. So as we entered the restaurant, we were followed by carts of groceries. Unfortunately, it seemed that we beat the arrival of the potato truck so we were unable to have hash browns. We should have taken that as a warning sign for the quality that was to come. The breakfast was cold and blah. The coffee tasted like burnt dirt. However, I am smart enough not to judge the whole of England on this shitty franchise's version of their breakfast. Better breakfasts were to come.

After that bold jaunt through our temporary neighborhood, I spent the rest of the day convalescing in bed. However, that night we had reservations at Gordon Ramsey's Boxwood Cafe and I refused to miss it. It ended up being well worth it. We had their Monday Supper which was three courses with an amuse-bouche to start. I can't remember everything I had but I do remember I chose a Shepherd's Pie as the entree. The food was all fantastic. And my body managed to even keep it together until the middle of the second and third course. I popped some pills and carried on. I'm a star!

The sum of my sightseeing these three days were as follows: Seeing Buckingham palace on the way to the Gordon Ramsey restaurant. Well, let me say first Alex pointed the palace out to me and then a few blocks later, I see a fancy building and I ask the cab driver what it is and he answers, "Why, that's Buckingham Palace." This makes me wonder how much of what Alex says is really the truth. We also went to the National Musuem in Trafalgar Square. And we ate a great English breakfast in a crypt below a cathedral. That was pretty awesome. So that was it. The rest of my time I spent on the bed watching BBC which really ain't nothing to shake a stick at. BBC is great hotel TV watching.

Stay tuned for Part Two of our adventures...

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We finally got all of our paperwork in order in December. The big hold-up was a document from the LAPD which due to a comedy of errors was about three months late in getting to me. That is another story. Might I add, it is very difficult to have customer service issues with some place like a police department because of the looming fear that they will just put a warrant out for your arrest if you give them any lip. However, I did manage to get it resolved with healthy doses of patience, persistence and sweet-talking. This technique works in a lot of situations by the way. I should hold a workshop.

With all the documents in hand, we got up at the crack of 7am to go to the Austrian Office of GETTINGSHITDONE. I think we took two different trains and a street car to get there. We arrived about 15 minutes before it opened and we joined about thirty other people already in line. Once inside, we had to wait in line to get a number to go to another floor to sit in a chair and watch for our number to show up on a video screen. I kept myself busy by pretending it was a really slow game of Keno.

Finally our number came up and we were called in to the office. The scene that played out next was something out of a movie satirizing government bureaucracy. Or at least that's how I remember it in our head. We were in a small windowless office sitting across from a bit older than middle-aged Austrian Frau with a face that looked like it hadn't smiled since the third grade when she found an orange in her stocking on Christmas morning. We told her what we wanted and she told us what she wanted... She wanted me to get the hell out of her country. Okay, that's not she said, but seriously sometimes when people speak to you in German, no matter what they say, it sounds just that mean. Anyhow, one key piece of information that had eluded us the entire time we were preparing to get this residence permit is that there is a yearly quota for these types of things. And it was December. She pretty much said to come back at the beginning of the year to try and sneak in on that year's quota. The quota, by the way, as far as I understand it is 60! Sixty people. First I thought I misheard it but then I kept hearing it again and again. What I don't know is what that number 60 applies to. Is it 60 people from the U.S. in Austria? Is it 60 residence permits total? Is it 60 people with razor-sharp senses of humor, hypnotic green eyes and bunions on both sides of both her feet? They had really weird questions on the residence permit application.

So now, in the beginning of the year, I returned to Los Angeles. And two days after I got back into town, I dragged my jet-lagged self to the west side to visit the Austrian consulate. I have to say that this was a much easier venture then the travails in Vienna. I had to wait about five minutes, we spoke in English and it was relatively painless. She took my application, made sure I had everything in order and reminded me of that sixty-person yearly quota. I said, but I am here on the first business day of the year! I got no reasonable response to that because I don't think there was one.

It is now the end of March and I have heard zero news about this application. After I applied, my mother who fancies herself a bit of a soothsayer, said February 10th was the day I would hear the great news about my approved application. I called a couple weeks after I visited the office. She called back and left a message basically saying that to not even inquire again until March. I called back on the 1st of March and she returned my call again saying that she hadn't heard anything and I would probably be best to visit the Austrian offices when I get back to Vienna. Sigh. I am but a pawn in their games.

I will be back in Vienna on Sunday and probably go to the offices next week. I have no expectations of anything coming of this. I'm sure they've already picked their sixty witty, green-eyed, buniony American ladies and I just didn't make the cut. I guess I'm just going to have to scour the streets of Vienna to find one of these doppelgangers and make sure she has a little "accident" so I can open up a slot. Or I can just wait until Alex and I get married. Let's just see what happens first.

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So after the wasted Christmas Eve, the decent Christmas Day and maybe a day or two of recuperating in between, we headed off to Prague in the Czech Republic. The train to Prague is about three hours. Here are a couple things about Prague that are good to know. They don't use Euros. And they don't speak a language you can even hope to decipher. Well, maybe I am stereotyping you, but if you are anything like me (and that's decently awesome), then good luck with reading or eavesdropping Czech. When the young train ticket-taker came by, we asked him to teach us a few key words. I don't think I mentioned this before, but in my opinion the number one most important word to learn in any language is the word for "Excuse me/Sorry." In German, it is "Entschuldigung." In Italian, it is "Scusi." In French, it is "Pardon." And in Czech, as we learned, it is "Promiňte." Closely following that in importance are the words for "Thank you," "Please" and it's always nice to learn your "Hi's and Bye's." I can't remember those words. And in full disclosure, I had to look up "Promiňte" just to make sure I had the spelling right. Even fuller disclosure: I did not.

The train trip was uneventful. When we arrived to Prague, we managed to navigate to our hotels via public transportation relatively easily. Also, in a stroke of lucky coincidence, using Hotwire we managed to get booked at the same hotel that CJ and Mather were at. For those unawares, Hotwire is a travel site where you can search hotels (among other things) via location, star ratings, amenties, price, etc but you can't find out the name of the hotel until you actually make your purchase. I love it. And you usually get pretty good deals. They are not paying me, I swear. (But if you read this Hotwire, why don't you throw some more hotdollars my way.) Anyhow, our hotel was right on the river. And for whatever reason, we got a room upgrade. It was a round bed, mirror on the ceiling and white tiger short of being the master bedroom of a Czech drug kingpin pimp. We were ballin'.

Later that night we ventured out with CJ and Mather into the city center. We went to supposedly one of the oldest pubs in Prague. You sit down, they come over with a tray full of Jagery type of shots and you take a few, then they come over with a tray full of beer and you take a few, then the shots again, then the beer, and so on and so on. It's like a Brazilian churrascaria but replace the meat swords with alcohol. I took a gander at the all-too-familiar menu and it was kind of the beginning of the end for me then. At that point, I came to my breaking point with the food of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. No offense, Hapsburg! Fighting the urge to storm out, I played it safe and ordered sausage and kartoffelpuffen. Alex thought he was playing it safe but he ended up with something that looked like a beef sundae.

After dinner, as we were walking around the city, I was just exhausted. Prague really looks a lot like Vienna. The architecture is very similar with the differences being the tops of the buildings. And as aforementioned the food is the same Grandma's food I had been eating for three months. There were just more people. More tourists. It was basically just a dirtier version of Vienna. And I'd rather just be in Vienna. That was when I went on vacation strike.

The next day, CJ and Mather wanted to take the train to go see a bone church two hours outside of Prague. I woke up, opened one eye to look at Alex and said nope, then I turned over and went back to sleep. They were gone for the whole day. And I could care less. I lived it up! I used the free internet in the lobby! I had a decent Ceaser salad in the hotel restaurant! I took a bath! On a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is gazing upon plague-infested bones and 10 is ballin' Czech drug kingpin style, my day ended up being a strong 9.5.

We left the next day. It was a short trip. Perhaps Prague really didn't get a fair shake. Or perhaps Prague didn't step it up enough. I don't know. I would like to blame the circumstances leading up to this trip for my poor impression. And I'd like to give Prague a second chance, but I don't know if that will happen. We might be forever starcrossed. And if you're some Prague person reading this, cut me some slack. You're telling me that you never went to the U.S. or something on a crosscountry tour and after seeing Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Chicago, you just weren't having Des Moines? And if you're some Des Moines person reading this... I don't know what to tell you, I can't imagine your city being anything other then a snoozefest. Good job on the gay marriage thing though! I don't know how to end this paragraph. I'll just end it right here.

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