I'm in the Instant Sleep hostel in Hamburg, listening to the wind of an impending storm rattle the windows. I was here 3 nights ago, on my way to the Hurricane Festival in Sheeßel, but I'll get to that. Let's see, I've let myself get a little behind on the journal writing. I'm going to have to break with the format a little bit.

June 17th: Got into Galway in the early afternoon, and got into Sleepzone, the hostel where Kirstin and Teresa were supposedly staying. I spent sometime wandering around the town and grabbed some food. I went back to the hostel and sat around reading for a while. After that I went to the grocery store. It was in a slightly different part of town than I was in before, and it was quite different; it was basically a few strip malls that wouldn't have looked out of place anywhere in America, while the part I'd been earlier was your standard European winding cobblestone roads lined with shops. After coming back to the hostel, I ate some of my food out of boredom (I wasn't quite hungry). I ended up talking to some guys in my room after that. After a while, with people coming and going, it became clear that there were more people assigned to the room than beds. Being the most recent addition to the room, I was the odd man out. It turned out to be a good thing because I got moved down a floor, which meant less stairs. Also, while I was waiting at reception, I ran into Teresa. She and Kirstin were about to go to get some food and go see some music. I happily joined them, although I definitely wasn't eating at that point. We went to eat in the restaurant part of the pub where the band was supposed to play. The band was quite fun. It started with just two guys, one on acoustic guitar and the other on keyboards. They were joined later by a banjo and an accordion. There were also some dancers that joined in for a few songs. The dancers were two girls, looking about high school age, and a boy of about 10 or 11. Despite their age, they were very good. The little boy in particular had this shit-grin on his face the whole time, particularly when he was doing a solo part. We left there and went to a different pub with another band. We stayed for a few songs and then went to a club because Teresa was wanting to go dancing. We stayed there the rest of the night.

June 18th: Got up, planning to get a ferry to the Aran Islands to see some of the ruins and stuff, but one look out the window made me change my mind. It was cold, rainy, and windy, not the kind of weather you want to go to a deserted island a few miles off the coast. So, having no particular direction in mind, I decided I might as well go catch up with Kirstin and Teresa in Tralee, where they were heading that day. The train ride was a bit excessive, I had to change twice, and the first leg went almost all the way back to Dublin (look at a map, you'll see it's well out of the way). Called the hostel from the train station and the manager, a very nice guy named Ender (at least I think that's his name, Irish accents can be tough), personally came to pick me up. Amusingly enough, before I even asked, he told me that my friends were already there (they knew I was coming and had already asked if I was there). The hostel was really neat, it was a rather large building that seem to house a lot of stuff besides a hostel, including a preschool. It's amusing to get up in the morning and walk past a room where a standardized test of some sort is being given. I spent most of the evening hanging out with Kirstin and Teresa. We went to get groceries to cook dinner, planning to go to the small store near the hostel. A very nice old woman stopped and gave us a ride (she was leaving choir practice at the hostel). She drove us into town, pointing out places of interest along the way. Being dropped off in town meant a wider grocery selection, but it also meant getting a cab back because we didn't want to walk the couple miles back carrying groceries. Our very late dinner consisted of a potato bake of some sort, with ground beef and all sorts of vegetables.

June 19th: Got a late start on the planned bike ride, I think we left around 1 or so. Before leaving we rented bikes from Ender the manager. He took us out back and found a few bikes in a large shipping container (like the kind you see on cargo ships). Unfortunately, only two of them had working brakes. There was one other one sitting on the patio, but it had a baby seat attached to it, so Ender drove me to his house (only a couple minutes away) where he had more bikes. I waited for a while for him to look for the key to his shed. He couldn't find it, so I was stuck with the baby seat. I didn't really mind, I thought it was rather amusing. It was somewhat annoying because I kept hitting my heels on it from time to time. So we finally headed off, stopping at the tourist office to get a map. We had decided to head to Fenit, a town about 10 km away. We were originally considering Dingle (about 60 km round trip), but after hearing that it was rather hilly, we changed plans. This turned out to be a good plan, the ride to Fenit was plenty. The ride went a little slow, because heavy winds were slowing us down. Also one of the bikes was apparently very hard to ride (the girls switched off with it, it was to small for me). After several stops that were as much to admire the scenery as for resting, we made it to Fenit. We grabbed some food at a small grocery and went to picnic on the beach. It was really nice, we stayed there for an hour or two before heading back. When we got back to Tralee, I stayed in town to use the internet, and the girls went back to the hostel. I made my flight reservation to Hamburg for the following night, to make an attempt at getting to the Hurricane festival over the weekend. The ride back to the hostel felt particularly hard, I think my muscles had decided they were done for the day while I was sitting down. Once I got back to the hostel, we had the leftovers from the previous night for dinner.

June 20th: Pretty much a travel day. After the three of us got a ride to the the bus/train station, I said goodbye to Kirstin and Teresa, as our paths wouldn't be crossing again on this trip. Before I caught my own bus, I went to the post office and mailed a bunch of books back to the states. My back muscles were thanking me profusely for this; I was carrying around 5 books I was done with but didn't want to get rid of (2 km). I caught the bus to Kerry (where the airport was) and got off at the closest stop, about a mile from the airport. Halfway there, some guy stopped (unsolicited) and gave me a lift the rest of the way. I waited in the airport for about 3 hours. In retrospect I should have stayed in Galway longer, but I had been kind of hoping to see Kerry in that time, not realizing the airport wasn't near there. Ah well. After the flight I had a 2 hour layover in London. It was much cheaper to fly to London then connect, than to fly straight to Hamburg. When I got into Hamburg-Lubeck airport at around 10:45, I discovered that this airport was in the town of Lubeck (I had assumed that was the name of the airport, not the town it was in), which turned out to be 70 km from Hamburg. Since I had missed the last bus to Hamburg, my only option was the train. An airport employee was nice enough to give me a ride to the train station. He was just happy to have someone to practise English with, which wasn't hard for me because he spoke English rather well. Once at the train station I briefly considered staying the night in Lubeck, but decided it would be cheaper to stay in Hamburg as it looked like (from the guidebook) I couldn't make it to any of the hostels in town before reception closed (there was one in Hamburg with reception open til 2 am). Once I got to Hamburg, I had to take a cab, because the subway was closed for the night. I finally arrived at the hostel at 1:30 am, where the staff were rather amused at what I'd had to do to get there.

June 21st: So I woke up wondering if I should make the attempt to go to the festival at all, seeing as how it was raining heavily outside and I still didn't know if I could get tickets. I went online and tried to find any reference to it being sold out or if there was a limit on tickets. Didn't find any, but half the stuff I found was in German, so I still didn't know for sure. By this time it had stopped raining and the sun had come out, so I figured what the hell, I'd come this far... I went to the train station and found the train to Scheeßel, which was leaving about 10 minutes later. Right before the train arrived announcement was made in German, but I thought I heard Scheeßel in there. Everyone around me turned around to the track behind us, so I asked a guy standing there if this was going to Scheeßel, which it was. He and the girl next to him happened to be going to the festival as well, and I happily found out that you could buy tickets there. When I got off the train, I saw them again and followed them to the festival grounds (about a mile walk). The guy's name was Philip, and he said although he was only staying the one day, he had some friends who were camping that I could at least stash my pack with. When I got to the grounds, I realized that I didn't have enough money for the full weekend pass, just barely enough for one day. I could have walked into town (about 2 miles away) to find an ATM, but that would have meant leaving Philip, and subsequently a possible lead on a place to sleep. So I bought the one day ticket, knowing it would cost about €10 more to pay per day. This left me with about €2, which was just enough to buy meager dinner consisting of fries. I followed Phillip to his friends, and they showed me a common tent where I could leave my bag. I knew I was taking a bit of a risk here, but I didn't really have much choice. Apparently the common area had been set up by some people who worked for an online magazine of some sort (never got the url). I hung out with Phillip's friends for a while, all of whom spoke decent English. After waiting for the rain to pass, I went into the concert grounds. (note: I don't talk about the bands I saw here, if you're interested in the bands, I have a separate review of the festival here.) We caught the end of Skin, before heading into the tent area (there were two stages, the main one, and a smaller one under a tent) to see a German band called Blackmail. This is where I separated from Philip, and didn't see him again after that. I didn't stay in there for long, only a couple of songs, and then I went back to the main stage to see Apocalyptica. After that I kept hopping back and forth for a few hours to see the different bands. It was set up nicely so that you could actually see every single band if you wanted, you just had to miss the beginning or end of a set during the overlap. At the end of Seeed, I pushed my way to the front of the second section (there was a walkway about 75 feet from the stage, separating the crowd), to get a better view for Björk. I spent the next 3½ hours in the same spot, until the end of Massive Attack's set, when I left to go see the Bosstones. I spent about 15 minutes in the moshing part of the crowd before I was utterly exhausted (keep in mind this is about 1 am and I'd been on my feet all day). When the shows were done I walked back to tent, praying that my pack was still there. It was still there, although it looked like someone had thrown it aside looking for something. None of the guys I had talked to earlier were there, so introduced myself to one of the guys who was, and asked if I could crash there. 'Crash' turned out to be a poor choice of words, because in his limited knowledge of English (slang, at least), he interpreted that to mean I wanted to destroy the tent. After I clarified my meaning in plainer language, he was much happier and told me no problem. They then of course gave me a beer and I sat talking with them for a while, which was no easy feat since their limited English knowledge was compounded by the fact that they were all very drunk. After a while, I decided to go pass out. I layered on about 5 shirts because it was getting rather cold and I had no sleeping bag. I grabbed a piece of cardboard to cover the grass a bit, and went to sleep using my pack as a pillow. I woke up about 2 hours later (about 4 am) due to the fact I was too cold to sleep. I got up and walked to the bar area, which was still going full steam (I think it finally closed around 8 am) to warm up some. Once I stopped shivering, I went back to try and sleep some more. Before I could fall asleep (although I'm not sure I actually could have), one of the guys who worked for the magazine, came in and asked if I was ok. I guess he wasn't expecting to find a shivering American in the tent. I explained my situation and we sat talking for a couple of hours. About 6:30 am, he went back to the bar area, and I went back to sleep, this time using a sleeping bag that he suggested I use. I never figured out whose sleeping bag it was, but it was still there for me to use the next night.

June 22nd: Finally getting up around 10:30 or so, I walked into to town to remedy my cash flow problems. After grabbing a quick breakfast I walked back to the grounds. I went into the concert area and dozed for a while in the shade, not really being interested in the bands in the first half of the day. I normally would be interested in seeing new ones, but I was too tired. I could also hear the main stage from my vantage point, just not see it. I got up to watch Asian Dub Foundation which was interesting, before going back to rest. Finally, I went into the crowd in the front during Millencolin, the band before Counting Crows. At the end of their set, it became clear they did not share an audience with Counting Crows because almost everyone in the front left, and I was able to get right up near the stage. I stayed in more or less the same spot for the next 5 or 6 hours, almost all of it standing, to watch Counting Crows, Underworld and Radiohead. Hard work :) When the show were over, I went back to the tent, and went to sleep without incident.

June 23rd: Woke up around 9 or so and headed back to the train station to catch the very crowded train back to Hamburg. I went back to Instant Sleep where unfortunately it was during the lockout period. I caught up on some email, and then walked to a nearby park. I left there when some guy tried to sell me drugs (at least I think, he was, he spoke only in German) and several other sketchy looking people showed up. By then I was able to get in to the room, and get a sorely needed shower. I did a load of laundry and took a much needed nap. I went out and treated myself to what turned out to be a huge sushi dinner (had trouble reading the German menu). Later on I went and explored the Reeperbahn, if only because there's a Tom Waits song about it.