Finally in Europe!

The Queen Mary 2 docked at Southampton, UK early on Monday morning. From there, me and Mang-Git hopped on a bus to London. Since we were only going to be there for about 6 hours, we checked our bags at St. Pancras station (8 pounds/bag! that's highway robbery) and set out to find Platform 9 and ¾ and London Bridge. And yes, we did sing the song all the way to London Bridge, although we were a bit disappointed that it was a lot smaller than we anticipated, and that it did not show signs of falling down any time soon.

At about 6pm, we took the train to Brussels and checked into our hostel which was called 2GO4, or something like that. It's not really a place I would've jumped at booking if I just passed it on the street or something (located in a quieter part of town, and we actually passed a woman letting her daughter pee on the street right outside the entrance), but it got really good reviews on Hostelworld. It also had a really quirky interior:

Me and Mang-Git booked 2 beds in a 14-bed co-ed room and luckily had a lot of really cool roommates. Everyone was about our age and from all over the place - Australia, China, Hong Kong, Mexico and the US. So even though I didn't sleep well that night, we were in good company when we grabbed breakfast the next morning before catching our next train from Brussels to Cologne.

Anyway, so we finally arrived in Cologne, nearly a week and a half later after taking every means of transportation known to man except plane. At the Hauptbahnhof (the main train station in Koln city center), we met up with my roommate's friend, Josey, who is nice enough to let us stay at her apartment before we found our own place. Josey took us to her place in Deutz to drop off our stuff, then took us grocery and phone shopping. Before coming home, we stopped at an apartment that I think is Josey's friend's friend's girlfriend's place. It's really nice, right off the Rhine river and next to the Hauptbahnhof, which is where I would need to change trains to go to work every day. We're hopefully signing for it today!