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So, I'm sitting here on my couch in Amsterdam. It's a Thursday night and I'm wondering what to do with myself.

The other day I thought about how I hadn't updated my travel blog in ages, and I resolved to write an entry on the plane on the way back from Zurich. Unfortunately I forgot to charge my laptop battery before I left and I was damned if I was going to type up an entry on my iPhone, so I read an eBook instead.

Read "Machine of Death". It's good.

There has been a massive gap between the last post and this one, so I'm not sure if I should try to catch up or if I should just skip to now. I think I'll do St Anton now, since it's fresh in my mind, and maybe I can skip back to where I kick Justin's arse in go-karting at another time.

So the story, for me, really begins on Thursday night. Some of my Amsterdam friends and I went to see Tron: Legacy at the cinema. We were fully expecting it to be awful and our expectations were proved to be well founded. But seriously, have you watched the original recently? It's pretty awful too. It was pretty though.

Anyway after Tron finished Chloe and I decided to go for some drinks. I had had two cans in the cinema already (as one is allowed to in this great country) and we had a good chat and a bunch more. Around midnight we decided, like sensible people, that that* was enough for a school night and Chloe went home. I, however, had noticed that we were about two doors down from Nota Bene. This is a bar to which I was taken by a lovely Dutch bartender lady on my first night in Amsterdam. I haven't seen her since and I hoped I would run into her there. Amazingly, the bartender recognised me and gave me a free shot when I got in there. I made some new friends at the bar and a couple of hours later I staggered off home with about 2% of my brain functional.

The next thing I knew it was two o'clock the following afternoon. Thankfully I hadn't made any promises to deliver software development services that day, so I wasn't in trouble. I had fixed a friend's internet the previous evening and had been carrying my laptop around during the aforementioned events. I was extremely relieved to see it lying on my bedroom floor beneath yesterday's crumpled clothing. It was at about this point that I noticed the window had been open all night and that it was about two degrees outside. According to my flatmates I had left my bedroom door open too and so the whole lower floor of the partment was fairly well chilled. Sorry about that guys. This was clearly not my finest hour. Later I discovered that in my stupor I had scrawled a couple of fairly illegible lines from "Piano Man" on the whiteboard in the foyer of our building... only the whiteboard marker didn't work so I had - resourcefully I thought given my state and the hour - used the permanent marker that's in my laptop bag for labelling CDs. That stayed there a full week while I was in St. Anton and had to be removed with bathroom cleaner and a firm hand.

That evening, despite my better judgement, I went to Coco's to watch the rugby between England and Wales. Coco's is the Australian bar in Amsterdam and although I knew it was a really terrible idea given that I had to be up at 5 the next morning to get my flight to Zurich, there were going to be some cool people there and I thought knocking back a couple of Cooper's Pale Ales wouldn't hurt. I got home at one and completely failed to sleep at all between then and when I got up again at 4:30 to go to the airport. So that was the start of my holiday.

*Valid usage of the same word twice consecutively in two consecutive sentences. Do I get some sort of grammar award?