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In a contextual approach we start with whole, situated actions and break them into pieces purely for pragmatic purposes...it is the whole that is primary: useful discriminations and distinctions come second.
okay, several quick items: 1) these goofy british keyboards have the "shift" keys in strange places, so i'm rarely going to capitalize anything anymore. consider it all part of my european adventure. 2) i discovered that my hostel offers internet access for a pound per hour, versus the roughly 1.6 pounds per hour offered by burger king. there may not be any whoppers here, but i think my hostel is the better bargain. i was thinking of several jokes to make about the term "whopper," but all seemed highly inappropriate. 3) last night i ended up going to a couple of pubs and clubs with a bunch of people from the hostel. i like to refer to this activity as 'ubbing. love it. the night was mostly uneventful until i left one club with a couple of american women and dutch men, and some drunk australians ran into us claiming that they knew the drunk american women. the drunk american women claimed they didn't know them, but we followed the drunk australians anyway. that's just how things work in london. 
I am in Paris. I took the Eurostar train from London to Paris via the "chunnel" yesterday. I'm staying in a hostel in Montmartre, which is this cool old neighborhood of Paris. There are a total of 8 people in my room, but it's really two separate rooms with the door removed and there are only 4 people in each room. It's much less crowded than the London hostel I stayed in, and has more charm as it is an old hotel of some sort. After arriving yesterday I toured some of the major tourist attractions of Paris with one of my roommates. He is a young, Canadian journalist named Curtis. He's quite intelligent and we spent much of our time complaining about American politics, comparing Canadian politics to Canadian politics, discussing the "Blame Canada" song from the South Park movie, etc. Anyhoo, we checked out le tour Eiffel (the Eiffel Tower), strolled down the Champs Elysee, and looked at l'arc de triomphe. Neat. 
i am now in brugges, belgium and it is absolutely awesome. the city is a bit touristy, but it's incredibly beautiful. there are canals running throughout the town (a little like venice), gothic and medieval buildings everywhere, and cobblestone streets underfoot. the folks are very friendly so far, too. while i was waiting for my hostel bus outside the train station, a young belgian computer geek named bram overhead me asking about the hostel and offered to show me where it was (he was taking the bus there, as well). we began chatting, and as he was telling me about the great belgian beer, he stopped and said "wait a minute," dug in his backpack, and pulled out a bottle. "here," he said, "this is the best stuff." yes, apparently the belgians are so found of their beer that they carry it with them whereever they go. 
I'm in Amsterdam now, and it is fabulous. My last day in Brugges I rented a bike and rode it to the Belgian coast (to a town called Zeebrugges, about a 45-60 minute ride each way). I didn't really know what to expect, and at first I was disappointed because the first area I came across was a very industrial-looking port area. However, it was nice to be by a large body of water, and I took a brief nap on a bench looking out into the harbor. Then I rode my bike a bit further down the coast and found a glorious beach, with lots of sand. So I chilled on the beach for a bit before heading back to Brugges. 
i'm in berlin now, and they have a funky german keyboard with the "z" and "y" keys (amongst others) in strange places. this is greatly reducing my typing speed. anyhoo, i arrived yesterday around 6pm or so and just walked around town a bit. the hostel at which i'm staying is by far the nicest one so far. there are 6 beds in the room (which i share with a couple from england, another couple from somewhere else, and an undergrad from alabama who is in berlin for several weeks doing research for his senior thesis), and we actually have our own bathroom and shower! woo-hoo! most of the hostels simply have communal bathrooms shared by the entire floor (or even several floors). it's also very clean, quiet, and nicely located to many of the city's more interesting historical sites and whatnot. today i wandered around on foot to see the following sites: 
i'm sitting at an internet cafe in linköping, sweden right now. my conference ended today around 2pm, and since then i've just been hanging out with my friends jt and cyndy (from san fran). since my flight to london leaves at 6am tomorrow morning and leaves from a town between here and stockholm (i thought i was flying directly out of stockholm, but that's not the case), i've decided to just stay here for the day and then take the bus (at 3:45am...ick) to the tiny airport (about an hour and a half away, apparently). jt and cyndy are going to let me crash at their hotel room until then. my journey from berlin to linkoping was an absolute disaster. here's a summary:
i arrived in london yesterday morning. it turns out two people from the conference were on my same flight from sweden (heather, who is a doctoral student in clinical psychology at the universty of nevada, reno and her husband, who is a doctoral student in cognitive neuroscience at UC Berkeley), so we all hung out a bit at the airport and took the train from the airport to central london together. after arriving, i went to my friend javier's work, where he gave me keys to his flat and directions. i then went to his place, sat on his couch to rest for a bit (with the intention of getting lunch in a few minutes) and promptly fell asleep for about 5 hours. see, i had only had about 5 hours of sleep during the past 48 hours and was apparently quite sleepy. jav came home from work around 6:30, and i did my laundry at a nearby laundromat (launderette or something, as they're called here) while he made dinner. 
hi all - i'm at london's heathrow airport right now. my flight doesn't leave for another couple of hours (the "tube," london's subway, got me here faster than i thought it would), and i saw this internet kiosk and decided to get rid of some of these extra british coins. yesterday i explored london while javier was at work, and saw buckingham palace, took a really cool tour of the secret underground cabinet war rooms (where churchill and govnt conducted much of wwii operations), had a picnic lunch in hyde park, saw shakespeare's globe theatre, and just wandered around a bunch. when jav came home we had dinner at this little italian place by his flat and it was tasty. we talked about old school pals, our 10-year high school reunion (which he attended but i did not), and various other items of interest.