Christmas came early, kids. You thought I had forgotten about this bitch. You were wrong. My ASUS bit the dust two weeks into my trip, just as I hit the end credits of the Game of Thrones season two finale (thank you Scott and Krista, cause that show fucking owns). But since I love you all so much, I just parked my ass at a greasy computer gaming cafe for the express purpose of updating you all on my life. With great focus, Red Bull and drum and bass I'm resisting the temptation to join the crowd playing Magic: the Gathering to translate my notes from my Ipod onto here. I might even get through my world's-best-beer and Antwerp entries today. You can save any awards until I get home.

Let's pick up with the second week. This week the Parliament is holding its plenary session in Strasbourg. All the members and most of the assistants are there. I am not. Neither are Mr. Zeller's assistants Jan and Joanna, and they tell me I can hole up in his office for the week and basically stream the session, read articles and chill. But I was looking forward to soul-crushing clerical work! The office itself is pretty dope: top floor, and Zeller has all sorts of cool shit from Central Asia, travel guides to the Congo and Taiwan, dictionaries for Deutsch-Polish, -Japanese, and -Bulgarian, plus lots of other shit. I also notice some reports from the election monitoring he did in Algeria, Tajikistan and the DRC. Guy gets around.

Tuesday starts off boring, but the Strasbourg plenary has a pretty sweet debate. The European Parliament is interesting in that it faces the challenge of reconciling 753 members and the dozens of national parties they represent into coherent political groups. To this end the various MEPs coalesce into ideologically-based groups and coordinate policies along these lines. Thankfully the guy I'm working for is sane and a member of the centre-right European People's Party, which is also the biggest group. As you'd expect most of the parliamentarians are happy to jerk each other off about how harmoniously end-of-history their European integration project is, but about one in ten is an asshole Euroskeptic. Most of these guys are Brits and fucking funny, too. The best one is Nigel Farage, who leads a UK party that basically demands tearing up every multilateral treaty the country has ever signed. Smart guy, too. His speech this day was brilliant. Check it out.

I typed up a huge polemic on the merits and drawbacks of the EU back when I thought I'd be updating this every couple days, but it's taken me a half hour to type all this shit so I'm just gonna move into the second sweet five-day weekend in a row. I had long ago bought a ticket to the Netsky show Friday night, because who doesn't like Belgian drum and bass live in the sweetest venue in Brussels? Searching for other random nearby concerts, however, I stumbled upon something far sweeter. Judas Priest, finishing their last ever world tour. In London. On Saturday. Ten minutes and way too many euros later and I have a ticket, a round trip on a train and two nights in a hostel with a 24-hour bar in the basement. I really hate Europe.

There's so painfully little going on at the Parliament that they give me Thursday off, too. Who said the Germans aren't merciful? I hit the Cantillon brewery for some epic lambics, basically beers that are brewed using only wild yeast from the air and are stored and age like wines. Much more on them in a future entry. Friday arrives and I head down to the Ancienne Belgique dead in the old town heart of Brussels. This is the guy's homecoming show, so he brings out the big guns: a live band with a keyboardist, a drummer on a Roland kit (this could have been you, Eric Chiang) and an MC. Five Duvels and two hours of insane drum and bass later I can't hear anything except my heart in my ears and I look like I just got out of the pool.

No rest for the wicked and I'm fighting my way through British customs early the next day. Black woman at the counter gives me the business about not having a copy of the receipt for the hostel I booked online or my flight back to Calgary fucking two months later. Am I visiting England or East Germany? The bitch's best efforts still can't stop me from showing up at the Hammersmith Apollo just as the first opener heads on. Decent enough. Saxon follows them. Old school New Wave of British Heavy Metal dudes that I never listened to, but they have some crunchy riffs. Pretty impressed. Spot a guy inexplicably wearing an Oilers jersey. I guess failure transcends continents. The lights go down, I chat with a British dude about dirty continentals and it's time.

The Metal Gods come out with all guns blazing. Immediately rip into some classic British Steel before spreading out into all eras of Priestly goodness. Even standing at the very back of the sweltering arena I'm still covered in goosebumps. Rob Halford is ten times better than he was at the 2005 show, nailing every high note on Painkiller and all the rest. This can't get any better. Then come the first few notes of The Sentinel, the best Priest song of all time. Fuck it, the best metal song of all time. The best song of best song time ever. Rocked out like I was in the first row, and in a couple months if you really squint you'll be able to see for yourselves, because just before the last song the drummer comes up and announces they've been filming the show for a DVD. I drop twenty euros on probably the coolest fucking band shirt I own at the merch stand and head back to the hostel to get lit. Fifteen-year-old me would be so proud.

Pretty normal college kid tourist shit for the rest of the weekend. Made it till 5 am that night drinking with some beauties from Chicago and some other kids. Walked around the city until my ass was too chafed to continue and fleeced some Hungarians at poker for twenty whole pounds. Pretty sure there was a Sunday, too. Who knows. Do you really want to read another three paragraphs about the fucking zoo? Check out the sweet pics I'm about to facebook. Please.

EDIT: Even Batman needs Robin sometimes (no homo). Big ups to my boy ET for suggesting the Cantillon tour, because apparently the quiet satisfaction of knowing it himself wasn't good enough.