This Thanksgiving, I am thankful for America, for my new friends, my new life, my old friends, my cat who I miss immensely, and whichever roommate bought ice and kept it in our freezer.

[F]or happiness-project purposes, Tolstoy is particularly fascinating — both because he wrote so extensively about happiness and because he made and broke so many resolutions himself. Spectacularly… Tolstoy wrote these rules when he was eighteen years old:

Get up early (five o’clock)

Go to bed early (nine to ten o’clock)

Eat little and avoid sweets

Try to do everything by yourself

Have a goal for your whole life, a goal for one section of your life, a goal for a shorter period and a goal for the year; a goal for every month, a goal for every week, a goal for every day, a goal for every hour and for evry minute, and sacrifice the lesser goal to the greater

Keep away from women

Kill desire by work

Be good, but try to let no one know it

Always live less expensively than you might

Change nothing in your style of living even if you become ten times richer

The festival was awesome,though it was too bad Snoop couldn’t play. We saw some good European bands and being at a music festival felt like home.

The ride from the Hague to Noordwijk is beautiful. 20something km along the sandy coast, it’s fantastic and feels like another country.

Noordwijk has a nice beach and was enjoyable. That night was crazy. I met a 7 foot tall Dutch psychobilly bruiser and a lot of Australians. That night was fucking crazy.

Saw the ESA Space Expo and rode to Leiden. Then we got kicked off the train to Amsterdam because we weren’t allowed to have bikes with us between 4:30 and 6:00. But we got to Amsterdam and found our houseboat and it’s great.

Watching soccer here is really fun.

Generally the girls wearing stripes are prettier.

Couple more days in Holland then onto Belgium.

I’ll miss this country.

My iPod takes video and I’ve been having fun with that.

Well, we got bikes. And we biked to Haarlem. And Haarlem is amazing.

We found a huge, old church and a great farmer’s market with delicious food.

However, we could not find our way out of the city and towards the Hague.

So after about 30 km of pointlessly cycling around beautiful Dutch countryside, we went back to Haarlem and got a train to The Hague.

That is where we are now. In the train station I saw a bunch of veterans of some kind, a member of the Dutch military and a UN peace keeper.

Tomorrow we were supposed to see Snoop Dogg but apparently the police aren’t going to let him play anymore? Well fuck the police. We’ll see other stuff though. And Soon we see the Peace Courts. The Hague is a different kind of a city but I like it so far.

Sucks that the US lost, we watched it in the bar in our hostel. Everyone from the US was bummed and everyone from Germany was stoked but considerate.

This is a good country.