More Chevron Scarf! And a question....

Okay, so my simple project has been a little more of a pain in the butt than expected. Which is not so surprising, I guess. I am a bit of a fiddler, I think. I mean, I can't just leave these things alone and so I had to rip up my scarf and restart it so that it would be a tighter weave. I don't know if you can see the difference, but check this out:













I am now knitting it with Susan Bates size 5 circular needles. Who cares? I don't know, but now you know what I'm knitting with. Very exciting.

So, I'm not exactly that far with my quick project. As you can see:













I think that I'm liking it now. I have a bad habit of not liking things that I make and then giving them away (to people who want them -- no I'm not that evil!). The fiddling is worth the while some times. I'd rather not end up with something that I don't like, especially given how much I LOVE the yarns that I'm using for this scarf. I just hope that it flattens out more.

NB: Oh, and another note on this scarf: knit it for a couple of inches before you decide anything on it. One of the reasons I went to a bigger needle to begin with (which I have downsized from now) is that it looked like it was puckering in strange places. I assumed that this was because of the tightness of the gauge. Not so. It was simply the shaping that occurs from the increasing and decreasing in this scarf, which I would have known sooner if I had just knit further in the pattern to see how it would lay. I mean, I think I knew that was what it was from before, but I could see after a few more inches that it didn't look as strange as I thought it did. I'm liking the tighter knit much better.

Now, my question, which has nothing to do with this scarf: I am going to some places in Europe in a couple of weeks and I'm wondering if any of you know of cool yarn happenings or stores in any of the places that I'm going to. I'm going to be in Dublin (one of you gave a suggestion on this, which is awesome and which got me thinking about this question in the first place), Stockholm, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Paris. Ideas? I'd love to hear them.