August 7

We wake up at 12. We get breakfast and then bike all the way to the Flying Bison brewery in order to do our workshift for the Ol'Moth. They dont have any work for us, so we just drink some beer samples and go back to the Moth. Pat tells us that we could paint the walls of the Moth as a workshift but Bekha thinks we need the approval of the house first, so we just end up studying and reading on the roof of the Moth the whole afternoon.

At 6 pm, we decide to go to the free Capoeira classes in LaSalle park. We find the Taekwondo class and we start working on it as we thought it actually was capoeira. The korean language and the Taekwondo logos on the outfit of the other students slowly lead us to realize that we were not in the right place. So we keep search for the Capoeira class all over the park untill we're about to give up and finally end up finding the class exactly at the same location where the taekwondo class was.
We meet the professor Marcello and the other students. They all have a portuguese nickname, so Lyyli eventually becomes known as "comboio" (train) and Jeremy as "acabo" (finished) for no real reason. The class is pretty fun, we learn how to do the Jinga and then we do the Ronda. Both are really nice but fucking exhausting.

After the class, we go looking for parking meters at the marina in downtown and we find a few of them in a good spot without any cameras around. we decide we are gonna go back there someday in the night in order to take one apart.

Back to the Moth, we make some delicious white chocolate blueberry brownies, then we leave for the Seneca Casino in Niagara, with the goal of making $200 profit.
Lyyli cannot get in because she didnt bring her passport and the stupid NY laws prevents any foreigner from getting into the casino without an official passport. So she decides to go home while Jeremy stays to play poker. She however cannot get into the last bus for Buffalo because it did not have the bike rake and the fucking driver refuses to let her bring the bike inside. So she comes back into the casino only to find out that she could actually get into the poker room because there is no security there. Jeremy is still playing and we decide to stay there until we make $220 profit. Afterwards, we try to go home, but there are no buses and the taxi wants $60 which we are not willing to give him. So we go and explore the casino but there is nothing to do, so we end up back into the poker room which is basically the only place where we can sit. The plan was to hang out there playing our extra $20 until 6:30 to catch the first bus back home. Everything was going well, until some weird sleepy black guy come to our table and starts playing blind. Jeremy has 2 Jacks in his hand and decide to play him for $100. Unfortunately that guy had a full house, so we sadly leave the table. We go back to the bus stop and some guy from that last table offers us a ride to Buffalo.

We get back to the Moth around 7, and we start watching a movie in the living room till we pass out..

August 6

We wake up at 1 pm and make a very nice breakfast with a lot of bacon, which we somehow end up eating until 3 pm.

We then go to the Buffalo Art Center and try to get in for free by claiming that we are Buffalo State visiting students. The cashier however want us to show our student ID's otherwise we have to pay $4. We cannot afford that, so we decide to leave, but the next guy from the queue says that he's gonna pay for us (supposedly his dad was one of the main contributor to the current art installation of Hutchet's artworks). We consider it a succesful infiltration, albeit legittimate, and we get in to check out Hatchet's works. Some of his works are very good, mainly the ones related to the moebius shape, some are fairly okay, mainly those consisting of sculputures made with random metals from the scrap yard, and the others are either boring or not so cool as they merely amount to blend and meaningless modern design shapes.

After our cultural journey, we decide to go study at library of Buffalo State University. As Jeremy was hanging around looking for something to eat, he finds out that he could get free food in the student cafeteria by just claiming to be a visiting scholar from Berkeley and by confusing the cashier with his own confusion. Lyyli decides to try an alternative technique and gets into the cafeteria through the exit door, eat some food, grab some brownies and leaves from the exit door without ever talking with the cashier.

After long hours of very productive studying, we go to Wegman to buy brownies and ice cream and we end up spending almost one hour eating candies at the Wegman's candy bar.

At midnight, we get into the Buffalo cemetery in order to do some parkour. The idea was to adjust the concept of parkour from an urban setting to more dangerous and virulent setting such as a cemetery. We basically run around and slalom along a bunch of graves, jump over them or escaladate them whenever they are too high, and, most challenging, we try to get onto the roof of those weird little house that are reserved for the very rich dead people. The darkness contribute to rendering our task much more difficult and hazardous, mainly because we cannot see the multitude of small little spiders trying to attack us as we try to climb the grave stones. After two hours of strengthenous parkour, we conclude that this is a very interesting form of exercising, much more fullfilling than any work-out at the gym, in spite of the fact that it is so fucking exhausting.

August 5

We wake up at 9 am, we eat brownies and breakfast with Pat and we finally depart for our daily journey to Toronto.

Pat tells us about how he is involved in an attempt to improve the city of Buffalo by gathering and organizing voluntary work from the community. He says he's working with some people from west Buffalo, a very poor black neighborhood with a lot of abandoned houses, and that he managed to get a lot of people involved in some restauration projects, but that the city refuse to let the work starts. He also tell us that he wants to turn the abandoned train station into a green house, yet the city refuse to give them permission to do so because they wanna keep the train station until someone is willing to pay a lot for it. He bring us to the abandoned train station and give us a small tour. The train station has been abandoned for over 30 years and is really huge and somewhat beautiful in its decadence.

We then go to meet his friend (Cousin Kelly) who is a sculptor that specialize in carving wood out of actual trees from the ground rather than mere pieces of wood. Cousin Kelly is a crazy half native american with a slight expression of schizofrenia who tell us all about his theory on how every 3600 years a comet hits the earth and new cycle starts. He mentions the fact that the piramides of ghisa were originally located at the equator so that there would be no shadow, and they have been subsequently moved. The difference in latitude from the equator was evidence that the whole earth had been tilted of its axis, and the only way this could have happened was if some huge object, such as a great comet, had came to hit the earth, burning off one side of the earth and throwing the gravitational mechanism off. By the same token, the view we have of the stars had been modified by that event, thus leading to the current misinterpretation of the constellations. Other major events such as the great floods were also caused by the great comet. Cousin Kelly explained us how lactose intollerance that first appeared in the human blood during the middle ages was created by the waters of the ocean invading the death sea. He concludes that our ancestors are alien rather than monkeys, because there are lots of descriptions in the petroglypths that describe the earth as being the 7th planet of the solar system, which only works if we look at the earth from the order direction, eg. if we count from Pluto. In spite of its obvious flaws, the story was very interesting for a little bit. Although Cousin Kelly wouldnt stop talking, we eventually managed to leave for Toronto.

Pat has been driving for 2 long hours, while Lyyli and Jeremy were sleeping most of the time. We arrive in Toronto and we park in front of the weed Park (the Park where people go to buy and smoke weed) after a cop from the parking enforcement told us that since our car has a USA license plate we should keep any ticket we get as a mere souvenir.

We walk around Kensington, get coffee, check out a bookstore and check out the weed-coffee shop where people can smoke their own weed although they cannot buy it. Then we go to china town and buy a tons of cheap chinese pastries, as well as a disgusting dried bacon stick which mainly consists of fat.

We meet Pat's friend who taught english in Korea and Pat asks a Rasta in the street if he has any weed (or Ganja, as he called it). The Rasta says yea, but only because he called it Ganja and not weed. He says to meet him in the weed Park in 10 minutes. We go there and wait for him while eating the $1 rotten mangoes that Pat had previously bought in Chinatown.

Jeremy and Lyyli then decide to go to Younge street in order to get fake IDs. We walk there and after a bit of research, we found 3 shops selling 'souvenir IDs' as they call them. We decide on the shop which offers the most realistic IDs, with a transparent mark that lights up under the radar and a magnetic strip that can be read by the scanner. They also provide a fake university ID. Lyyli gets a Quebec ID and is henceforth to be known as Lyyli Allen.

We then go to the Marriott Hotel in order to rest or to sleep, but then we decide to get to the top of a tall building instead. As we try to infiltrate the building, Pat text us saying that he's at the University of Toronto where there is an event with free food and free beer, so we give up on the idea of escalating the building and we heard towards the university. The university is very beautiful, but as we reach the location we find out that the event is almost over and there is no more drink and no more food available, except for a bunch of cookies.

We meet up with Pat and we start walking towards the lake because we dont really know what else we could do. As we were walking by downtown, admiring the beautiful skyline of Toronto, we decide that it would be fun to try and infiltrate it the CN Tower, which is supposed to be the tallest structure in the world, or at least it used to be until the Burj Dubai surpassed it in 2007. First, we politely ask whether we could get to the top of the tower for free instead of the usual $23 per person. They politely tell us that it is not possible, so we ask whether, alternatively, it would be possible to get to the top for free by walking through the 1800 steps that the tower is mode of. They say that it is theoretically possible but that it is only allowed twice a year for some special occasions and that they colud not make an exception for us. Regardless of what they say, we decide to try and get there anyways. The main problem was that we could not identify where the stairs were, so we start exploring all over the tower in order to find a weak spot. The security is however very high and after all our investigation and infiltration skills, in the end we only manage to get past the metal detector, wich we would have passed anyways. At last, we realize that our only chance is to set up a fake reservation for the rotating restaurant at the top, so that we can get up and then leave without eating anything. We call in order to make a reservation under a fake identity, but unfortunately the restaurant was already all booked. We finally decide to acknowledge the fact that it might be time to give up our this mission.

We are all very disapointed, so we decide to infiltrate the baseball game instead. Indeed, while we were trying to get to the top of the CN tower, Pat's friend had gone to see the Yankees vs Buffalo baseball game, so we decide we could surprise him with our unexpected presence.
We tried to enter through many gates but all the time the little security guards would ask us for our tickets and then ask us to leave the premises. Finally we manage to get in as Jeremy runs through a closing door while the security guard was distracted.
We watch the game for a while, while we are eating the left overs from the chinese pastries that we had bought earlier. After a while, we decide to leave because the game was getting fucking boring to watch and no one cares about baseball anyways. On the way out, Pat asks at some burger stand whether they were gonna trash anything. They say yes, so Pat asks them whether they would give it to him. They say no, so Pat just takes some plate lying on the display which had 3 deliciously looking mini-burgers and starts running away. Some fat angry chinese girl employee however comes after him and get the plate back. Yet another big disapointment.

So we decide to get and get a drink before leaving back to Buffalo. We walk back towards Kensington where the car was parked and we stop into a bar with a very cool band playing. We get two $20 rounds of some very tasty beer which makes us kinda dizzy.

As we drive back towards Buffalo, we get stopped at the frontier where Jeremy finds out that he has an order of protection against him from someone that he doesnt even know of. The frontier officers finally decide to let him in anyways, although they take away the rotten mangoes from Pat.

August 4

Janel calls at 9 am and says she's leaving, so we keep sleeping till 1 pm. We get breakfast and we hang out chatting in the kitchen until 3 pm. We work a little bit in the living room and then we decide to go work out at the YMCA with a free day pass. We work out there for 2 hours, then we play basket ball and then go back to the Moth. The Ol'Moth is having a general meeting, we arrive as it is almost over but just in time to get the dessert. We decide to go study at the Buffalo State University library but there is no free Internet available, so we go and ask for a guest account. As the library is about to close we decide to just go back to the Moth, we make brownies in order to be able to eat them tomorrow morning before leaving for Toronto and then we watch a movie about the Hollocaust entitled "The boy in the striped pyjamas" about a little german boy who is the son of an SS and who befriends a little jew and hangs out with him accross the barbed wire. In the end, the little german infiltrates the concentration camp and gets killed along with the other jews.

August 3

We wake up at 1 pm and we eat breakfast till 3 pm. We start studying at the Moth and we eventually end up exploring the roof of the house which is a very nice place to hang out.

Around 7 pm, Janel and Dan come to see the Moth. Lyyli gives them a little tour of the house, and both Janel and Dan seem to be very impressed by the architectural style of the house.
Lyyli brings Janel and Dan to Amhearst because Janel wanted to check out what Lyyli had described as the best Korean restaurant of Buffalo, or maybe even of the whole United States of America. Jeremy decides to stay home, perhaps because he doesnt like korean food. In fact, the korean food was really authentic and delicious, just like a real korean restaurant. Lyyli and Janel decide to drink some soju in the name of the good old times in Korea and they try to introduce Dan to it, but Dan does not seem to appreciate soju as much as he should. We eat a lot but then we have to go back to the Hyatt because Janel had to submit some work before midnight. We decide to check out their gym, but then we realized that we were too full to exercise and the gym was pretty lame anyways. So we just hang out at the Hyatt for a while, mainly trying to set up an ad-hoc connection because Janel iPhone and her computer, but we miserably fail because AT&T had supposedly disabled this feature on the iPhone and Janel did not want to jailbreak her iPhone. So we eventually give up and we decide to go to Checkers for a $6 pint of beer. Janel and Dan do not seem to enjoy Chekers as much as Lyyli had expected, but we nevertheless hang out there for a while, enjoying our last evening together in spite of us being so fucking tired.

In the meanwhile, Jeremy was desperately trying to find Obama who had jumped out of the window of the RV. Finally, after hours of research, he finds out that our neighbors had taken her, and they give Jeremy a moral lesson about how the RV is a bad environment for a kitten. Lyyli gets back to the Moth around 2 am and we go to sleep in a very wet pigpen because it had been raining a lot.

August 2

We wake up and go get breakfast at the Moth. Lyyli works on her thesis in the living room while Jeremy works on his logic for tutoring. Jeremy goes and meet Ayoosh to teach him some logic, while Lyyli gets dinner at the Moth.

Around 7 pm, Janel and Dan call Lyyli and tell her that they just arrived at the Hyatt Hotel in Buffalo where they gonna stay for two days. Janel is Lyyli's best friend from Detroit, they met in Korea something like 5 years ago and they have ever since made a deal that they would be travelling together around the world at least once a year. Dan is Janel's boyfriend. He is a journalist but also work as a photograph and is very interested in the urban exploration of abandoned buildings, which is probably why he decided to come along with Janel to Buffalo, as rumors say that Detroit and Buffalo are two very similar cities.
Lyyli goes to meet them at the Hyatt in downtown and gives them a short tour of downtown Buffalo while looking for a place for them to eat. Lyyli desperately tries and convince them that Buffalo is an horrible city, but for some unexplicable reason, both Janel and Dan seem to actually enjoy it, perhaps because it reminds them of a better version of Detroit. Because everything is closed in downtown, we end up at the Anchor Bar on Main street, which is supposedly the original place where the Buffalo wings were first made. Dan is not so happy because he is vegetarian, but Janel nevertheless decides to try the spicy Buffalo wings in order to find out whether they are really that much better than in other places. She doesnt really seem to enjoy them so much, so we decide to drink wine instead, in order to forget about it.

We then head back towards Allentown as it is the last day of the infringement festival. We go to Nietsche's where there is the final celebration of the festival and we meet people from the Moth who tell us to go check out the fire show of Krystle and her friend in the park. We go get a bottle of wine to drink in the park while watching the fire show but the show is over as soon as we get there so we decide to go back into the bar to drink our wine. Jeremy joins us and then Hallil comes too. As is usually the case, Lyyli pass out for about 15 minutes. We then all go hang out outside of the bar, where we meet the crazy looking bum (who wasnt really a bum) who gives us a lot of information about the urban exploration of the city of Buffalo.

June 12

As soon as we wake up in the morning, Christie starts suffering from an extensive craving for coffee, somethig that we had in fact not seen in a while. Christ indly tells us where is the closest Starbucks located, and after Christie has changed into her jogging outfit, she tries and convince everyone to come along. This is how we finally all decide to go for a healthy run to Starbucks, which, according to Chris' description, was supposed to be very close, although it was actually much further away than we would have ever gone. So we all change into our own jogging outfits and start running, except for Triet-ly who takes a bike and goes scouting the Starbucks by herself. Christie nominates herself as the leader of the crew, and starts running as fast as she can followed by the rest of us. Matt follows her closeby, while Lyyly and Jeremy just run behind, using Tomatha as an excuse for being slowed down. Jeremy in fact had the bad idea to bring Tomatha along, convinced that she would be pretty happy to go for a long walk accross the semi-arid land of New Mexico. Yet, he soon found out that Tomatha is not such a good runner as she is a good attacker. Indeed, as we stop for a little break at some point perhaps about 2 miles away from the point of departure, we notice a long path of blood foot-steps behind us. This is how we realize that Tomatha had been running for a long while without complaining about the fact that her paws were bleeding pretty bad. And Jeremy obviously did not notice a thing until now. So we realize it's probably time to stop for now, and we all gather at some random coffe shop in a shopping center on the way to the Starbucks, except for Triet-ly who had obviously been much faster than us with the bike and was probably already at the Starbucks pretty far away, waiting for us without any idea of what had just happened here.

We take our coffees, and decide to wait for Triet-ly to come back with the bike so that we can bike home and grab pigpen, since Tomatha is obviously unable to walk home in this condition. Triet-ly does not however seem to be found, we call the Starbuck, where the employees reckon seeing her but tell us that she has already disapeared by now. Eventually, Triet-ly comes back to where we are. Lyyli takes her bike and rides back to the house, followed by Christie who runs back after her, in order to grab pigpen and bring it to the coffee shop in order to drive Tomatha back home.

As Lyyli and Christie come back with pigpen, they find Jeremy and Matt playing chess, while Triet-ly is doing her usual stretching exercices on the ground, with Tomatha looking at her with a mixture of envy and disdain. While waiting for Matt and Jeremy to finish their game, Christie and Lyyli join Triet-ly in her stretchnig exercises and realize for the first time that most of Triet-ly's exercises, albeit apparently non-sensical, were actually based on some solid physical constructs.

Then Jeremy and Christie go shopping for some presents for Chris, this very nice girl who was hosting us all in her housing-sitting mansoin. As they didn't find anything that Chris may actually enjoy, they come back with a bunch of groceries with the plan to make her a very nice meal to thank her for her amazing hospitality. So we all get back home to Chris, where we meet the 3 other friends of her with whom she was having a study session. Triet-ly improvises herself as a cook and makes some delicious pasta lunch which everybody loved and ate very very fast, while Jeremy was focusing on the dessert, as he introduces his new specialty: the banana-berry-truffle dessert, an amazing mixture of chocolate, berries and bananas. Then as we get ready to go, Triet-ly realizes that we will never make it in time for her plane from Washington DC on the 14th, and she absolutely has to attend a dancing workshop on the 15th. Jeremy and Lyyli think that we could find her a plane to hitchike, but Triet-ly seems sceptical about that eventuality, so she finally decide to take a rideshare for the next day from Santa Fe to Berkeley.

And we therefore go to Santa Fe. On the way, we encounter one hitchhiker who looks like a mixture between a hippie and a bum. He asks us whether we are going to the National Rainbow gathering in Cuba. We tell him we are not, and that we actually had no idea the Rainbow Gathering was going on anywhere close to where we are. Jeremy starts telling us about this one time he went to a Rainbow Gathering and how cool it was, and how it is a little bit like burning man but in the forrest as opposed to the desert, etc.. and we consequently consider the possibility of going there after we go to Taos.

We keep driving, enjoying the boring landscape on our way, until we arrive to downtown Santa Fe. We kindof wanna go out and party, especially since this is the last day of Triet-ly who is gonna leave us tomorrow, but we don't really have any idea where to go or what to do in Santa Fe. So before going out and enjoying the nightlife, we decide to park somewhere in the center and to have dinner and get drunk inside the RV before adventuring ourselves out. Not only is it much cheaper than going out, but it's also definitely more fun. After a few beers and a gigantic bottle of wine have been successfully ingurgitated, we realize we are all pretty drunk, except for Matt who has given up on alcohol long before the begining of this road trip. We start to feel a little bit claustrophobic inside of pigpen, so we decide to get out of the RV and we start walking around and wandering around randomly into the street of downtown Santa Fe. The city surprise us for having a pretty nice downtown, in spite of the first impression we had when we first drove accross the city. The citiy seems to be very lively for a friday night, and we run into a bunch of potentially cool people, we keep walking down the streets without any precise objetive in mind, patiently waiting for the Tao to decide for our faith and to eventually let us know what should be coming next..

And once again, as is usually the case, Matt decides to create some interaction with random people in the street and consequently engages into an interesting discussion with some random bums who were playing guitar in the middle of the street. One after the other, we eventually all stop there in order to talk with them. Lyyli and Jeremy are very eager to let them know about the fact that they are still unable to play the guitar in spite of their former 3 months-long pact which ultimately consisted of playing 1 hour of guitar everyday, while Matt and Christie, who cannot play any kind of instrument either, were just rambling about music in general. Triet-ly, who really could not care less about any of that, just doesn't give a fuck and keep playing with Tomatha in the street. Then somehow the discussion completely derives into a new topic, something about dogs, and Tomatha obviously becomes the new center of attention. Jeremy starts telling the whole story of Tomatha to our new friends, ranging from the necessary adoption in order to avoid her being killed at the pound, to the recent serial killer tendencies she has been developing along the way. And naturally, the more Jeremy talks about her, the more the bums seems to enjoy the dog, until one of them suddenly asks Jeremy whether he would be willing to give her to him. Jeremy instinctively does not want to give Tomatha away, but circumstances require so. In fact, because of the yes-pact that Jeremy had engaged into, Jeremy has to say yes to everything, no matter what the nature of the question is. Besides, Jeremy was aware that Tomatha would probably never be accepted into any kind of pound and would probably end up being killed or killing another dog, so giving her away to that bum was probably the best thing he could do, both for the well-being of the dog and for our own well-being. We thus bring the bum back with us to the RV. We grab all of Tomatha's stuff and we give everythig away to that lucky bum, who immediately walks away back into the streets of Santa Fe together with his beautiful new dog.

As Tomatha leaves us with her new owner, we stay and we hang out on the bridge just next to where the RV was parked, an interesting bridge where we encounter 6 crazy people in a row, that would all stop and talk to us for some reason, including that angry man that really wanted us to accept his help and was gonna kick our ass if we wouldn't let him give us a place to shower and other stuff.
As we were about to leave in order to find a better parking for the night, Matt finds out that the back tire of the RV is completely fucked, so we start looking for a Wal-mart with a tire service in Santa Fe and we go to the Wal-mart parking lot to go to sleep. We all pass out asleep, except for Jeremy and Triet-ly who decide to take exctasy instead of going to sleep and spend the whole night exploring the beautiful surroundings of the Wal-mart parking lot..