On Travel, PSP, and FKK/Sauna Clubs

This is not going to be a long blog post. Or at least, it's not going to be long by my standards, which means it's probably still going to come off as a little bit long, but not overly long. It's also only tangentially related to gaming in that everything I've done is getting in the way of what I want to do on my free time, but you might find this interesting anyway.

Anyway, so to preface: Right now, I'm in Germany for a business trip. Up until I got to the warehouse I'm setting up and realized that, "Holy shit, I'm good at my job!" I didn't really understand why it was worth my employer's money to spend thousands of dollars to ship me to a country halfway around the world from our head office, but I played along because hey, free trip to Europe for a week.

I was told not to worry about a thing, just to get my passport ready and head over. When I asked about the outlets (since I planned to bring my PSP and laptop), I was informed that the hotel I was to stay at had international outlets and I didn't have to worry about picking up an adaptor before I went.

More fool I. Last minute changes necessitated a last-minute hotel switch. Which would be fine and wonderful, except that this place, while nicer, with larger rooms, and basically a better hotel overall, doesn't have adaptors on hand for clients like my previous hotel did.

I didn't think it'd be a big deal to find an adapter here. You may take this moment to laugh bitterly alongside me.

For those of you who view Europe as the evil bastion of non-North American-ness that it is, feel free to take a look at the outlets:


On the left is the outlet, which looks like something I'd plug a damned oven into. In the middle is a typical EU plug, resembling a torture device. On the right is my useless, useless plug for my laptop.

It wasn't until last night, fully half-way through my trip, that I was able to pick up a converter which works. I finally have access to my laptop and PSP, three days after they died and a day after I had to read Jim Butcher's Dead Rites for the fourth time in a week to stave off the boredom.

I'm staying in Mainz. It's not a large town and there's not a lot to do, especially when your ability to speak the local language is limited to what you remember from freaking Rammstein lyrics and South Park, neither of which is a good source for conversational German.

Hell, just having my PSP was kind of like gaming life support for me. The fact that until last night I didn't have that was horrible. I didn't even sleep much, because I'd bought Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep specifically for this trip and planned to play it start to finish. I did a straight run-through of Terra's portion of the story in one freaking sitting.

Now it's Thursday afternoon. Technically, I have the day off because it's Corpus Christi day here, which is a holiday. Stores are closed, nobody's working, and basically I should have a day to myself. Instead, in a few short minutes I'm going to be abducted by the warehouse manager of the branch office and we're going to go look at some German castles and crap, and I'm going to take pictures with my new digital camera, which was ludicrously cheap for the features it offers.

No, seriously. The thing is a 14 Megapixel camera which can also record 1080p video, and it has the added bonus of taking triple-A batteries instead of an internal one and can also take SD cards up to 32 gigs. Of which I bought one for fifteen freaking Euros. And for which the entire package still cost less than sixty euros.

But to be honest, if I had the choice, I'd be curling up with my PSP, a ludicrously cheap bottle of quality rum (you can buy freaking single malt scotch here for about twenty Euros, which is ridiculous to my over-taxed and used to it Canadian mind), just because I've not touched a game for that long. I want to dive into the Ventus portion right now, and maybe Save Aqua's third of the game for the flight home.

Yeah, I know, boo for not being more of a tourist. But on the bright side, touring German castles and hitting up Frankfurt for some of the nightlife tonight was me arguing my hosts down from visiting a god-damned brothel, which still lands me in the win department as far as I'm concerned.

On an unrelated note, I redesigned my blog banner. That's my eye, taken using my new camera. And I had to reduce it to like 33% size to fit it there. My new camera is probably one of the highlights of this trip.