Well, the vacation is "officially" over, being that I'm sitting in mi casa watching golf on my own TV and sitting on my own couch. Unofficially I still have to travel back to the airport to pick up Anthony and Bobbi and my own luggage that seemed not to make it on the plane I came in on... Delta/KLM = Shit.
Our day started out early because we had a 10am flight back to Oregon. When we went to check in, Anthony and I couldn't get a seat from the kiosk so we had to wait in another line, while Bobbi was able to get a seat assignment so she was pretty much ok to go. Since we wanted to have seats together we tried to get that and they told us that the flight was overbooked and that Anthony and I may not even be able to make it on the plane. This is one of those things that make me think, WTF, when I buy a ticket on a plane 8 months in advance. After talking to a person on the plane, I found that they'd overbooked the plane by about 30 people. Perhaps I need to work in the airline industry to figure that out, but to me that makes no sense at all??? So, Bobbi and Anthony ended up staying another night in Amsterdam, I think... And I ended up trading her tickets and getting a flight home. Big thanks to Wendy for picking me up and waiting so long while I had to deal with "missing luggage" along with 10-30 other people who's baggage also didn't seem to make it. Seriously, wtf. The only baggage I carried on was my netbook and Ipod so at least I have that.
Big thanks to Jasper, whom I let borrow my home for a few weeks since he started some new work in the area. He left a nice 6-pack on Drop Top on the top shelf of the fridge and the first thing I did was pop it open and remember how much I like our Oregon beer. While I'd definitely say I've had some good beer over the course of the past 6+ weeks, the beers brewed in Oregon have easily become some of the best beer a person can possibly get. Perhaps if it's only the fact that there's a beer for everyone here. Needless to say, my eyes lit up and I got a big grin on my face when I saw some Drop Top in the fridge. It's fitting that my first meal back in the states was a frozen pizza I'd left in the freezer and a good beer, a nice welcome home as far as I'm concerned. :-)
I'll be updating the blog some more in the next few days so I can add some pics and put in some stuff that may not have made it into the blog while we were traveling. Right now I just kinda want to sit around and not do anything the rest of the day, and hopefully blow off some jet lag a bit.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Back in Amsterdam to finish out the 6+ week trip to Europe
I'm sitting here in an extremely bad ass hotel room where I will finish my time in Europe. I'm ready to get back home, but I'd definitely be ok if I had to stay here another month or two...lol. All good things must come to an end though so I'm sure I'll deal with it. I do still have 4 nights here to get into as much trouble as I possibly can, so I'm sure I'll have at least some fun before heading back to good old
Oregon.
Last night in Dublin I got to hang out with an old Irish acquaintance, Sandra, who I worked with long ago at Intel. We went to the "Oldest Pub in Ireland", as they said it, established somewhere around 1176 or something like that. That's probably many many pints ago...haha. We had fun chit chatting and drinking until it was time to close the bar, where myself and Jason were able to catch a ride from Sandra, Thanks for that again... and I figured I'd also call it a night since we had to wake up fairly early to catch a flight from Dublin to Amsterdam. Prior to going over to that bar, we checked out the Guiness factory. The "Guiness Storehouse" is the biggest tourist attraction in Ireland, which is easy to see by how streamlined they make the tour of the factory. It reminded me of what I didn't care much for in Prague, the massive amount of tourists, mostly Americans. It was a cool thing to do, because who could possibly go to Dublin and not check out Guiness?
Not much else to put here but I figure I can post a picture or two from the past few days in Ireland.
Click or copy and paste for better version. http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4085/4837981910_c5293d2ea1_b.jpg
Click or copy and paste for better version... http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4087/4838017866_298a3c5664_b.jpg
Oregon.
Last night in Dublin I got to hang out with an old Irish acquaintance, Sandra, who I worked with long ago at Intel. We went to the "Oldest Pub in Ireland", as they said it, established somewhere around 1176 or something like that. That's probably many many pints ago...haha. We had fun chit chatting and drinking until it was time to close the bar, where myself and Jason were able to catch a ride from Sandra, Thanks for that again... and I figured I'd also call it a night since we had to wake up fairly early to catch a flight from Dublin to Amsterdam. Prior to going over to that bar, we checked out the Guiness factory. The "Guiness Storehouse" is the biggest tourist attraction in Ireland, which is easy to see by how streamlined they make the tour of the factory. It reminded me of what I didn't care much for in Prague, the massive amount of tourists, mostly Americans. It was a cool thing to do, because who could possibly go to Dublin and not check out Guiness?
Not much else to put here but I figure I can post a picture or two from the past few days in Ireland.
Click or copy and paste for better version. http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4085/4837981910_c5293d2ea1_b.jpg
Click or copy and paste for better version... http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4087/4838017866_298a3c5664_b.jpg
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
West Coast of Ireland, the town of Doolin.
So today we are heading back to Dublin for one last night. Since we haven't checked out Guiness yet, we're heading over there after we check into our hostel. The plan after that is to hang out with another person that I once worked with from Ireland, in Ireland's oldest pub. So by the end of the week we'll have been top Ireland's highest, smallest, and oldest pubs...lol.
We are on the way back from Doolin now, where we actually had some clear weather to check out the Cliff's of Moher that I mentioned previously. It was windy and cold on the edge of the rocks but it was pretty cool to see a different view of the Atlantic for once. I think I got a few great pics that I'll be sure to post up at some point... I know I've slacked on posting any pics at all lately, but I'm sure that'll give me something to do later on down the road when I'm back in Oregon. I'm not into showing people unedited pictures too often, so I usually keep them to myself until they look good enough for me. I drove the first couple hours from there and it'll probably be the last time I get to haul ass on tiny, winding roads in a right hand drive car on the wrong side of the road, so I guess I'll have to make it back just to experience that again...lol.
Last night we went to a pub in Doolin that's fairly well known named Gus O'Connors Pub and we had some pretty amazing food and got to see some really good Irish music. The band was about 6 guys sitting around a table filled with beers and instruments. You could get the feel of the people there actually being regular Irish friends of the bar because they all knew the songs and would jump in and sing a song every once in a while. The best was some really old guy with a big white beard, one leg, a crutch, and a voice that could make anyone smile when he started singing. He sang some old ballads, some that he most likely made up himself, a few that other people knew...etc. He was definitely the highlight of the night as far as I was concerned. His story-telling in the form of song was amazing and funny all at once. A few others sang songs too but he made my night.
When we went to the pub in Galway a couple nights ago and watched some other live music, it's really cool to see a crowd shutup when they're supposed to, this also happened last night in Doolin. When a person just starts singing randomly, with no music at all, people start "shhh-ing" for people to shut up and the next thing you know, all you hear is the person's voice that's singing, while looking at everyone fully engulfed in the story that the singer is telling. A girl in Galway sang a song that was practically amazing with not a single instrument to accompany her, and the dude that did it in Doolin was cool but he was faced away from us so we could hardly hear as much, but still heard enough to get the gist of his song. Very cool stuff, it's one of those things that you don't really get at Irish festivals or Irish pubs across the USA... it was very cool, and we all thought the same. As Anthony put it, "Dude, we're in a pub on the coast of Ireland, drinking beer and watching a one-legged guy belt out some awesome music with a great band, cheers."
We are on the way back from Doolin now, where we actually had some clear weather to check out the Cliff's of Moher that I mentioned previously. It was windy and cold on the edge of the rocks but it was pretty cool to see a different view of the Atlantic for once. I think I got a few great pics that I'll be sure to post up at some point... I know I've slacked on posting any pics at all lately, but I'm sure that'll give me something to do later on down the road when I'm back in Oregon. I'm not into showing people unedited pictures too often, so I usually keep them to myself until they look good enough for me. I drove the first couple hours from there and it'll probably be the last time I get to haul ass on tiny, winding roads in a right hand drive car on the wrong side of the road, so I guess I'll have to make it back just to experience that again...lol.
Last night we went to a pub in Doolin that's fairly well known named Gus O'Connors Pub and we had some pretty amazing food and got to see some really good Irish music. The band was about 6 guys sitting around a table filled with beers and instruments. You could get the feel of the people there actually being regular Irish friends of the bar because they all knew the songs and would jump in and sing a song every once in a while. The best was some really old guy with a big white beard, one leg, a crutch, and a voice that could make anyone smile when he started singing. He sang some old ballads, some that he most likely made up himself, a few that other people knew...etc. He was definitely the highlight of the night as far as I was concerned. His story-telling in the form of song was amazing and funny all at once. A few others sang songs too but he made my night.
When we went to the pub in Galway a couple nights ago and watched some other live music, it's really cool to see a crowd shutup when they're supposed to, this also happened last night in Doolin. When a person just starts singing randomly, with no music at all, people start "shhh-ing" for people to shut up and the next thing you know, all you hear is the person's voice that's singing, while looking at everyone fully engulfed in the story that the singer is telling. A girl in Galway sang a song that was practically amazing with not a single instrument to accompany her, and the dude that did it in Doolin was cool but he was faced away from us so we could hardly hear as much, but still heard enough to get the gist of his song. Very cool stuff, it's one of those things that you don't really get at Irish festivals or Irish pubs across the USA... it was very cool, and we all thought the same. As Anthony put it, "Dude, we're in a pub on the coast of Ireland, drinking beer and watching a one-legged guy belt out some awesome music with a great band, cheers."
Monday, July 26, 2010
Read the previous "It's been awhile" post prior to this one.
So now we're on the West Coast of Ireland, in a TINY town called Doolin. I've spent the last couple days driving the Irish countryside in a ultra-compact Nissan Micra (A fitting name once you shoe-horn the 4 of us into it with our baggage...lol. Ah yes, there are now four of us, Jason, an old friend of Anthony's from New Mexico decided to join us for the last couple weeks of our trip in Ireland and Amsterdam. Along with Bobbi joining us in London, we now have a full carload of folks where ever we go.
So to back track a bit, I went to Scotland after visiting Joseph in Northern England. I was only in Scotland that one night and when I got there it was pouring rain. So, I didn't see much of Edinburgh at all other than our hostel and a few bars we decided to stop in, or wherever we went to eat. It sucked not to be able to see more of the city but oh well, no biggie, one out of the ton of cool European cities isn't gonna kill me. Anthony and Bobbi got some pics that I may see about posting up later from there. The one thing that happened in Scotland, was that I left my nice REI waterproof jacket downstairs in the hostel and it was nowhere to be seen after that, damnit. I didn't really need a jacket for most of this journey anyway, so oh well... less to carry.
We took a train from Edinburgh to the coast of Scotland before hopping on a ferry to Belfast, Northern Ireland. We were going to stay a night there but decided to just head on to Dublin, another two hour train south from where we were. I can't say enough about how beautiful the landscape is here in Ireland, and every bit of the UK that we traveled through. Everything is green, rocky, and livestock is in every field you look at. If it's not a pasture and it's a big green field, it's probably a soccer field. Or Irish Football in some cases. A different game that I've seen a little bit of that I think is pretty cool. It's a mix between rugby and soccer, but closer to the rules of Australian rules football for anyone who knows what that even is. There was a huge game in Dublin that would have been cool to see in real life, but it wasn't in the plans, since we had people to meet up with and beer to drink.
When we got to Dublin, we went over to the Temple Bar area of Dublin, (pretty much the place to go drink beer) and saw an 80's cover band called Delorean play on a stage about the size of my couch, which was cool. Europeans tend to love 80's and 90's music, so the place pretty much went nuts all night. The bar we were at is called the Porterhouse and they do make a bunch of their own beers, so I pretty much tried all the reds, ambers, stouts, and porters... before being shitfaced and making my way back to the hostel and passing out.
Our second day in Dublin, we met up with Jason Zenotti (sp?) from New Mexico. He's also worked in Oregon a bit, I think, so a few people may know him from work, but I'm not sure who all would. We walked around a bit that morning, did a walking tour of the center of Dublin, and then me up with Jason later on in the afternoon. Where we then ended up finding food and another pub or 3 to drink at. Another long night of drinking and we all ended up at the hostel again, nothing spectacular that night, well, nothing I can think of right now.
The following night we met up with some Intel Ireland folks that Anthony and Jason have known over the years and we hung out with them for a long time. Aiden and his g/f Shawna were a blast and could hang with my beer consumption so at one point everyone else made their way back to their hostels and we hung out for a few more hours visiting another pub after the first two we sat at all night. They had to wake up at some point so they made their way home around 2am, when I decided I needed to do my own little pub crawl and caught 4 other pubs on my way to my hostel... yay, another night of getting home and passing out only to wake up and say, "cool" when I find myself actually laying in my own bed...haha. I realize at this point that anyone reading is sure that I'm a total alcoholic, but frankly, I'm in Ireland, what do you expect? I'm sure when I get back to the states I'll have at least a day or two where I won't have any beer or wine at all... until then, I'm on vacation in Europe, so keep those judgements to yourself at this point...haha.
The next day/night we met up with some other folks from Intel Ireland, Tom and Kiera, Mike, Xavier, and I think there was someone else but the name is not coming to my mind right now. All very cool people who knew different places to check out, so imagine what happened next... We started drinking, crazy huh? haha. We went to about four different pubs, including the smallest pub in Ireland, where we were the only people there for the most part... any more and we may not have fit...haha. The night progressed like the rest in Dublin, drinking beer, telling stories, and just being happy.
The next day Tom and Kiera and their kids met up with us at Hertz where we rented a car so we could check out the west coast of Ireland. That day we picked up the car and I took the wheel of a right hand drive car in a place where everyone drives on the left side of the road. I'd be lying if I said I haven't always wanted to do that though... so we rented the car and I jumped at the chance to drive, it's a 5-speed too. It took a few minutes of getting used to shifting with my left hand and driving on the "wrong" side of the road, but after awhile I seem to have figured it out pretty well. Thankfully, because once we got out of the city, the streets turn into some of the tiniest roads I've ever seen. Luckily, I was following Tom and it was cool to have him as a sort of training wheels for when I had to drive everywhere on my own. I'm convinced I'd have crashed at some point in a roundabout because they actually drive the opposite direction in them than we do in the US... Had I been driving without him in front of me, I easily may have made the mistake to turn right instead of left into the roundabout.
They took us up to the pub called Johnnie Foxes Pub. http://jfp.ie/ It's touted as the highest pub in Ireland, and they had some amazing lamb shank that I ate because the rest of the menu was almost exclusively fish in some form or another. You could feel how old the place is while sitting there. After that we made our way to Glendalough, in the Wicklow Mountains to check out a cemetary before heading off towards Galway, on the west coast. Big thanks to Tom and Kiera for all the hospitality, I'll have to send you guys some pics of your kids because I got a few good ones of them after they stopped being shy towards us...lol. This was one of the more picturesque cemeteries I've been to, so hopefully some of my pics come out alright from it.
After that, we trekked across all of Ireland in our tiny little car to Galway. Home of the Galway Races. We find out we're in this town on the first night of the biggest week for this little town. The Galway Races is the largest racing event in Ireland. Comparing to what we have in America, it's their Kentucky derby. Though, as their biggest racing event, they see it as our Daytona 500 or Indy 500... so you can imagine the town was PACKED. We went to some random Irish pub that had some great live music playing and tons of people packed in. I really liked the place because I finally found a spot at the bar where I didn't have to go far to get a drink and I had a good view of at least two of the band members and some fun people dancing next to me. Good times indeed.
We woke up this morning and headed a few hours South to where I'm sitting now, in Doolin. A TINY little town next to the Cliffs of Moher. http://www.cliffsofmoher.ie/
It's a quaint little town who's only reason for being a town is probably for the tourists to have somewhere to go when they come to see the cliffs. We didn't make it up there today, well, we didn't stop at least... because it was so foggy out and it costs about 10Euro to park, and we didn't want to waste our money. So now I'm sitting here waiting for 730pm to come along so we can all head down to the pub about 70 feet away. Not sure how this night will end yet, but I know it'll be starting in about an hour...lol. I guess that's about it. I had so much stuff I'd like to have remembered to put in the blog, but I think we'll have to sit around and brainstorm so I can remember some stuff the next time I post.
So to back track a bit, I went to Scotland after visiting Joseph in Northern England. I was only in Scotland that one night and when I got there it was pouring rain. So, I didn't see much of Edinburgh at all other than our hostel and a few bars we decided to stop in, or wherever we went to eat. It sucked not to be able to see more of the city but oh well, no biggie, one out of the ton of cool European cities isn't gonna kill me. Anthony and Bobbi got some pics that I may see about posting up later from there. The one thing that happened in Scotland, was that I left my nice REI waterproof jacket downstairs in the hostel and it was nowhere to be seen after that, damnit. I didn't really need a jacket for most of this journey anyway, so oh well... less to carry.
We took a train from Edinburgh to the coast of Scotland before hopping on a ferry to Belfast, Northern Ireland. We were going to stay a night there but decided to just head on to Dublin, another two hour train south from where we were. I can't say enough about how beautiful the landscape is here in Ireland, and every bit of the UK that we traveled through. Everything is green, rocky, and livestock is in every field you look at. If it's not a pasture and it's a big green field, it's probably a soccer field. Or Irish Football in some cases. A different game that I've seen a little bit of that I think is pretty cool. It's a mix between rugby and soccer, but closer to the rules of Australian rules football for anyone who knows what that even is. There was a huge game in Dublin that would have been cool to see in real life, but it wasn't in the plans, since we had people to meet up with and beer to drink.
When we got to Dublin, we went over to the Temple Bar area of Dublin, (pretty much the place to go drink beer) and saw an 80's cover band called Delorean play on a stage about the size of my couch, which was cool. Europeans tend to love 80's and 90's music, so the place pretty much went nuts all night. The bar we were at is called the Porterhouse and they do make a bunch of their own beers, so I pretty much tried all the reds, ambers, stouts, and porters... before being shitfaced and making my way back to the hostel and passing out.
Our second day in Dublin, we met up with Jason Zenotti (sp?) from New Mexico. He's also worked in Oregon a bit, I think, so a few people may know him from work, but I'm not sure who all would. We walked around a bit that morning, did a walking tour of the center of Dublin, and then me up with Jason later on in the afternoon. Where we then ended up finding food and another pub or 3 to drink at. Another long night of drinking and we all ended up at the hostel again, nothing spectacular that night, well, nothing I can think of right now.
The following night we met up with some Intel Ireland folks that Anthony and Jason have known over the years and we hung out with them for a long time. Aiden and his g/f Shawna were a blast and could hang with my beer consumption so at one point everyone else made their way back to their hostels and we hung out for a few more hours visiting another pub after the first two we sat at all night. They had to wake up at some point so they made their way home around 2am, when I decided I needed to do my own little pub crawl and caught 4 other pubs on my way to my hostel... yay, another night of getting home and passing out only to wake up and say, "cool" when I find myself actually laying in my own bed...haha. I realize at this point that anyone reading is sure that I'm a total alcoholic, but frankly, I'm in Ireland, what do you expect? I'm sure when I get back to the states I'll have at least a day or two where I won't have any beer or wine at all... until then, I'm on vacation in Europe, so keep those judgements to yourself at this point...haha.
The next day/night we met up with some other folks from Intel Ireland, Tom and Kiera, Mike, Xavier, and I think there was someone else but the name is not coming to my mind right now. All very cool people who knew different places to check out, so imagine what happened next... We started drinking, crazy huh? haha. We went to about four different pubs, including the smallest pub in Ireland, where we were the only people there for the most part... any more and we may not have fit...haha. The night progressed like the rest in Dublin, drinking beer, telling stories, and just being happy.
The next day Tom and Kiera and their kids met up with us at Hertz where we rented a car so we could check out the west coast of Ireland. That day we picked up the car and I took the wheel of a right hand drive car in a place where everyone drives on the left side of the road. I'd be lying if I said I haven't always wanted to do that though... so we rented the car and I jumped at the chance to drive, it's a 5-speed too. It took a few minutes of getting used to shifting with my left hand and driving on the "wrong" side of the road, but after awhile I seem to have figured it out pretty well. Thankfully, because once we got out of the city, the streets turn into some of the tiniest roads I've ever seen. Luckily, I was following Tom and it was cool to have him as a sort of training wheels for when I had to drive everywhere on my own. I'm convinced I'd have crashed at some point in a roundabout because they actually drive the opposite direction in them than we do in the US... Had I been driving without him in front of me, I easily may have made the mistake to turn right instead of left into the roundabout.
They took us up to the pub called Johnnie Foxes Pub. http://jfp.ie/ It's touted as the highest pub in Ireland, and they had some amazing lamb shank that I ate because the rest of the menu was almost exclusively fish in some form or another. You could feel how old the place is while sitting there. After that we made our way to Glendalough, in the Wicklow Mountains to check out a cemetary before heading off towards Galway, on the west coast. Big thanks to Tom and Kiera for all the hospitality, I'll have to send you guys some pics of your kids because I got a few good ones of them after they stopped being shy towards us...lol. This was one of the more picturesque cemeteries I've been to, so hopefully some of my pics come out alright from it.
After that, we trekked across all of Ireland in our tiny little car to Galway. Home of the Galway Races. We find out we're in this town on the first night of the biggest week for this little town. The Galway Races is the largest racing event in Ireland. Comparing to what we have in America, it's their Kentucky derby. Though, as their biggest racing event, they see it as our Daytona 500 or Indy 500... so you can imagine the town was PACKED. We went to some random Irish pub that had some great live music playing and tons of people packed in. I really liked the place because I finally found a spot at the bar where I didn't have to go far to get a drink and I had a good view of at least two of the band members and some fun people dancing next to me. Good times indeed.
We woke up this morning and headed a few hours South to where I'm sitting now, in Doolin. A TINY little town next to the Cliffs of Moher. http://www.cliffsofmoher.ie/
It's a quaint little town who's only reason for being a town is probably for the tourists to have somewhere to go when they come to see the cliffs. We didn't make it up there today, well, we didn't stop at least... because it was so foggy out and it costs about 10Euro to park, and we didn't want to waste our money. So now I'm sitting here waiting for 730pm to come along so we can all head down to the pub about 70 feet away. Not sure how this night will end yet, but I know it'll be starting in about an hour...lol. I guess that's about it. I had so much stuff I'd like to have remembered to put in the blog, but I think we'll have to sit around and brainstorm so I can remember some stuff the next time I post.
It's been awhile since I updated...
Most of the early parts of our trip included long journeys on trains to our next destination, which made it easy to write a recap of everywhere we'd previously been. Since I haven't traveled much by train since, well, long enough to start writing for an hour or two, I haven't had time to do much on the internet... other than put up a new FB status every once in a while.
With that said, since the last time I updated I've been to Northern England to visit a friend from high school. Visited Edinburgh, Scotland. Took a train and ferry from Scotland to Northern Ireland, and then down to Dublin, we stayed in Galway last night and tonight we're in a tiny town on the coast called Doolin. It's a tourist place because it's very close to the Cliffs of Moher, but it was rather foggy today so there was no way to see anything, and it didn't make sense to pay money to park and not see anything. So, we're going to hang out in Doolin tonight and see if we can see the cliffs before heading back to Dublin.
Ok, so I have some time because everyone's tired and felt like napping or whatever, I figure this is a good time to start typing for an hour or two.
Dewsbury, England (previously written on the train to Scotland and copied from wordpad)
A small stop in the middle of Northern England where an old friend from high school lives, Joseph Wood. I graduated with his brother, Sam, but I got to know Joseph pretty well due to playing soccer with him his freshman year. Myself and Sam played offense and my brother Richard played defense with Joseph... so as one can imagine we all knew each other quite well in those days. It was cool to be traveling overseas and meet up with another person I know, especially when it's someone I know from Jamestown, TN where I pretty much grew up.
Joseph married an English woman named Kat (Sp?) who he met in school while he was at university in Manchester, I think. She's now a pastor at a church in Dewsbury along with Joseph being a deacon there. ( I think I got that right, if not, hopefully he can let me know and I'll fix any errors...lol) So he now lives in Northern England and I decided to take a day of my trip to swing by to visit him and his wife. I was greeted by a stop at the grocery store and a nice hot meal when I got to their place. This always gets an A+ from me, so yeah, they treated me exceptionally well and I'd like to say thanks to the both of them for being so awesome to me for the day I came through. I also saw a few British comedies that I'll have to find online at some point. We sat around and had some good new beers I'd never tried before, including a different Guiness that I liked... So yeah, thanks again for letting me hang out and do laundry while getting a great night of sleep. :-)
I got my ticket to Edinburgh, Scotland and I'm now on the train there. My bank waited until 4 weeks into my trip to decide to put a hold on my debit card, luckily Joseph gets Vonage service and gets free calls to the states so it didn't take me too long to get my finances back in order. The day started out looking perfect with sun and beautiful clouds all the way through England, but as I just got into Scotland a few minutes ago, I see fog and I expect rain. Which I'm actually fine with since I'd like a tad bit of rain sprinkled into my trip just to keep away those blazing hot days we've went most of our trip with.
Anthony and Bobbi are already in Edinburgh so I plan on meeting them there at some point in the day when I get there. Perhaps they'll be able to just tell me what the coolest part of the place is and I'll check it out, since I won't have too much sightseeing time here unless they decided to stay another day. Luckily, like Oregon, the sun will set really late here considering how far North we are situated. It's a pretty stunning view to be in a train along the edge of the North Sea in Scotland and England. The whole countryside on this leg of my journey has been fairly amazing the whole time I've been on this train, so that's really cool.
With that said, since the last time I updated I've been to Northern England to visit a friend from high school. Visited Edinburgh, Scotland. Took a train and ferry from Scotland to Northern Ireland, and then down to Dublin, we stayed in Galway last night and tonight we're in a tiny town on the coast called Doolin. It's a tourist place because it's very close to the Cliffs of Moher, but it was rather foggy today so there was no way to see anything, and it didn't make sense to pay money to park and not see anything. So, we're going to hang out in Doolin tonight and see if we can see the cliffs before heading back to Dublin.
Ok, so I have some time because everyone's tired and felt like napping or whatever, I figure this is a good time to start typing for an hour or two.
Dewsbury, England (previously written on the train to Scotland and copied from wordpad)
A small stop in the middle of Northern England where an old friend from high school lives, Joseph Wood. I graduated with his brother, Sam, but I got to know Joseph pretty well due to playing soccer with him his freshman year. Myself and Sam played offense and my brother Richard played defense with Joseph... so as one can imagine we all knew each other quite well in those days. It was cool to be traveling overseas and meet up with another person I know, especially when it's someone I know from Jamestown, TN where I pretty much grew up.
Joseph married an English woman named Kat (Sp?) who he met in school while he was at university in Manchester, I think. She's now a pastor at a church in Dewsbury along with Joseph being a deacon there. ( I think I got that right, if not, hopefully he can let me know and I'll fix any errors...lol) So he now lives in Northern England and I decided to take a day of my trip to swing by to visit him and his wife. I was greeted by a stop at the grocery store and a nice hot meal when I got to their place. This always gets an A+ from me, so yeah, they treated me exceptionally well and I'd like to say thanks to the both of them for being so awesome to me for the day I came through. I also saw a few British comedies that I'll have to find online at some point. We sat around and had some good new beers I'd never tried before, including a different Guiness that I liked... So yeah, thanks again for letting me hang out and do laundry while getting a great night of sleep. :-)
I got my ticket to Edinburgh, Scotland and I'm now on the train there. My bank waited until 4 weeks into my trip to decide to put a hold on my debit card, luckily Joseph gets Vonage service and gets free calls to the states so it didn't take me too long to get my finances back in order. The day started out looking perfect with sun and beautiful clouds all the way through England, but as I just got into Scotland a few minutes ago, I see fog and I expect rain. Which I'm actually fine with since I'd like a tad bit of rain sprinkled into my trip just to keep away those blazing hot days we've went most of our trip with.
Anthony and Bobbi are already in Edinburgh so I plan on meeting them there at some point in the day when I get there. Perhaps they'll be able to just tell me what the coolest part of the place is and I'll check it out, since I won't have too much sightseeing time here unless they decided to stay another day. Luckily, like Oregon, the sun will set really late here considering how far North we are situated. It's a pretty stunning view to be in a train along the edge of the North Sea in Scotland and England. The whole countryside on this leg of my journey has been fairly amazing the whole time I've been on this train, so that's really cool.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
London
So, the England leg of our trip started on Saturday the 17th when we decided to fly in on a 2 hour trip from Berlin, instead of taking the train to Holland and then take a ferry over, and then take another train we'd have to pay for once we're in England since they don't take the Eurorail pass that we've used our whole trip. So instead of traveling for an entire day+ we should have only been traveling for a couple hours along with some sitting time in the airport.
Well, it didn't quite work out that way... and it f'n sucked. We got to the airport in Berlin a few hours early since it was too damn hot at our hostel and we figured we may be able to find an earlier flight if we asked. It woulda cost us double what we'd paid already so we decided just to wait on our flight that we'd already booked. We sat at the airport for around 4 hours prior to our departure, but I bought internet for around $10 for 2 hours, bleh. At least it gave me something to do for a while... Anthony just fell asleep, like always...haha. We pretty much just took up some nice and comfy chairs at Starbux so at least we were pretty comfy.
Then we flew into London... To Heathrow Airport. FYI, there's a reeeeally long line at immigration/customs to get into this country, apparently a ton of people come here and get turned away. I now know one such person, but we'll get to that later. Anthony and I get through customs and immigration in around an hour... they even gave us a piece of paper to give to the person we talked to so they could track it, even the girl at the booth said that was a long time. Yay. We get ready to leave but don't really know where our hostel is in regards to Heathrow, so we find out where that's at and it's a whopping 2.5 hour trip to the hostel from the airport along with 3 changes we'd have to make. Well, by this time it was around 1030pm anyway and we knew we'd have to be back early in the morning to pick up Bobbi, Anthony's g/f for those who don't know that. We decided to just spend the night in the airport rather than try our hand at figuring out London at midnight and then having to wake up early. I guess we saved a few bucks too...lol.
So, we stay in the station, along with a few other people littered around sleeping, we found a spot where Anthony fell asleep and I sat there with my ipod. I decided to go over to this little cafe type of thing, Costa... it's like a Starbux in England, tons of them everywhere. I was glad to, because they had really comfortable seating and food and drinks that I was happy to have access to all night/day, and it was needed. After an entire night sitting in this cafe area, we expected Bobbi's plane in at 1040am-ish. But knowing full well how the immigration line would be, we expected her no earlier than 11-1130.
So Anthony goes to wait for her at the arrival gate for what seemed like ages... I heard both of their names over the loudspeaker but I was far away from Anthony and couldn't leave our bags, so I figured I'd wait til he was in shouting distance and tell him that his name was announced to call information. Bobbi actually got detained at immigration because the chick interviewing her didn't like her answers to some simple questions. For instance, as a girl, NEVER say you're coming to see your b/f in England. Tell them you're here on vacation to see some friends or something, but don't say anything about a b/f or g/f because they don't like that... Bobbi was fingerprinted, photographed, and put in a room for a few hours and we had no real way of doing anything. Luckily, Anthony finally had the opportunity to talk to the people at immigration and Bobbi and a few hours and a ton of stress later, she finally came out the arrivals gate... probably about 4-5 hours after her plane had arrived. She took it pretty well though it seemed. The stress pretty much threw any jet lag out the window...lol We hung out with a person I kinda knew previously who actually mentioned getting detained coming into the country and then getting sent back to the US on the same plane she arrived on an hour later. They are a bit ruthless here in the UK it seems.
So we traveled our 2 hours to a nice hotel in South Woodford via "The Tube"... London's famous underground rail system. You can pretty much get anywhere in the city via the Tube, so that was cool. That night we kept it pretty low key but having some pretty much American food at this place called The Harvester. It was good, but almost the same as going to Applebees... the menus seem fairly similar as far as I can tell. Then we walked over to a pub around the corner that I really liked. Though we couldn't stay there long since pubs in England close at 1030 on Sundays, 11pm most of the week, and midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. When you're like us and used to being in places open all night... like Berlin, Munich, Prague, Budapest...etc... that was kinda crappy. The place we ended up at, had good beer, a cool owner that I talked to who said he's never met an American that liked real football... so he was a good buddy right off the bat. Sitting there hearing a bunch of folks yell at eachother in English was really fun too...lol. There was a rather wild bunch there when we got there, at one point a girl was kicking another dude in the nuts and that made everyone laugh... I imagine they're good friends, they seemed to all be having a good time at least...haha.
Yesterday we checked out some parts of London, but I'll be the first to admit, I really didn't see much of London at all, so I reckon I gotta go back at some point. :-) We went to Buckingham Palace and caught the end of the Changing of The Guard, snapped a few pics... then walked over towards Big Ben where I took a few pics and decided I needed to get off my feet. I told Anthony and Bobbi that I was meeting up with a person at a bar a few Tube stops away so they went and did a few more touristy stuff then met up with me a few hours later. The person I met was Christy, someone I'd never actually met but kind of knew from a message forum that I was on some time ago. She was the only person on my Facebook that was in London so I asked if she'd be down to hang out and show me a cool place or two, and we met up at a little pub near her school. On the way to that pub, I took the tube stop right next to the bar and the elevators had this huge line so I decided to take the stairs... I actually didn't see the sign that says "only use stairs in an emergency"... That sign was there for a reason...haha. I seriously felt like I walked about 20 floors of a building on a spiral staircase. I wondered why NOBODY was taking the stairs. They literally, just kept going and going and going. I actually think I almost died...haha. This guy at the top looked at me like I was crazy and said, you didn't read the sign did ya... to which I replied, I dunno, what sign? He laughed and pointed at the same sign and I was like, Dude, no shit. Then made my way across the street where I ordered a beer and a huge glass of water while I waited for Christy, hoping she didn't show up until at least half the sweat I had going on went away...haha.
Anthony and Bobbi made their way to the pub and we drank there for a bit before heading off to eat some Thai food. Anthony and Bobbi took off back to the hotel since Bobbi was pretty drained, she was still stuck with a bit of jet lag so that was understandable. Me and Christy went off to a bar that actually had live music going on and they stayed open late. We pretty much got drunk listening to Karaoke with a live band, which was cool... those brits were all singing really well, so that was cool. We hung out long enough for me to not be able to take the tube home, so Christy helped me find a bus and we said our goodbye's and c ya's and I was off on a bus hoping I'd be awake when the bus got to my stop. I think the bus got to my stop around 4am. I got off the bus and started walking, but I was on the other side of the station that we came into every time, so I walked a direction hoping the street I was on would intersect and it never did. So, it shoulda been a 25 minute walk to our hotel took me about an hour and a half since I walked in a big ass circle before finding out I had to go over the footbridge at the station to come out on the side that I actually knew. I walked into my hotel this morning at 530am with the sun already shining. The hotel dude had to unlock the door and all his said was , "good morning sir." My reply was, yes, it's definitely the morning, thanks. I went upstairs and crashed for a few hours and woke up around 9am and tried to sleep some more but I didn't wanna over sleep so I kept waking up... typical.
I'm now on a train to Dewsbury, which is up in Northern England, to visit an old soccer teammate and friend from high school, Joseph Wood. He lives in the UK now where he married his wife and he said he'd give me a place to stay today if I wanted to visit. So I'm heading there and Bobbi and Anthony already headed off to Edinburgh, Scotland. This train has free wifi but I don't have an english address to use it... bleh. So this will be another blog where I used wordpad to write and just copy over to my blog, like most of my train rides.
Well, that's London in a nutshell, I think tonight I'm probably just gonna have a low key night hanging out in Dewsbury. Laterz folks.
Well, it didn't quite work out that way... and it f'n sucked. We got to the airport in Berlin a few hours early since it was too damn hot at our hostel and we figured we may be able to find an earlier flight if we asked. It woulda cost us double what we'd paid already so we decided just to wait on our flight that we'd already booked. We sat at the airport for around 4 hours prior to our departure, but I bought internet for around $10 for 2 hours, bleh. At least it gave me something to do for a while... Anthony just fell asleep, like always...haha. We pretty much just took up some nice and comfy chairs at Starbux so at least we were pretty comfy.
Then we flew into London... To Heathrow Airport. FYI, there's a reeeeally long line at immigration/customs to get into this country, apparently a ton of people come here and get turned away. I now know one such person, but we'll get to that later. Anthony and I get through customs and immigration in around an hour... they even gave us a piece of paper to give to the person we talked to so they could track it, even the girl at the booth said that was a long time. Yay. We get ready to leave but don't really know where our hostel is in regards to Heathrow, so we find out where that's at and it's a whopping 2.5 hour trip to the hostel from the airport along with 3 changes we'd have to make. Well, by this time it was around 1030pm anyway and we knew we'd have to be back early in the morning to pick up Bobbi, Anthony's g/f for those who don't know that. We decided to just spend the night in the airport rather than try our hand at figuring out London at midnight and then having to wake up early. I guess we saved a few bucks too...lol.
So, we stay in the station, along with a few other people littered around sleeping, we found a spot where Anthony fell asleep and I sat there with my ipod. I decided to go over to this little cafe type of thing, Costa... it's like a Starbux in England, tons of them everywhere. I was glad to, because they had really comfortable seating and food and drinks that I was happy to have access to all night/day, and it was needed. After an entire night sitting in this cafe area, we expected Bobbi's plane in at 1040am-ish. But knowing full well how the immigration line would be, we expected her no earlier than 11-1130.
So Anthony goes to wait for her at the arrival gate for what seemed like ages... I heard both of their names over the loudspeaker but I was far away from Anthony and couldn't leave our bags, so I figured I'd wait til he was in shouting distance and tell him that his name was announced to call information. Bobbi actually got detained at immigration because the chick interviewing her didn't like her answers to some simple questions. For instance, as a girl, NEVER say you're coming to see your b/f in England. Tell them you're here on vacation to see some friends or something, but don't say anything about a b/f or g/f because they don't like that... Bobbi was fingerprinted, photographed, and put in a room for a few hours and we had no real way of doing anything. Luckily, Anthony finally had the opportunity to talk to the people at immigration and Bobbi and a few hours and a ton of stress later, she finally came out the arrivals gate... probably about 4-5 hours after her plane had arrived. She took it pretty well though it seemed. The stress pretty much threw any jet lag out the window...lol We hung out with a person I kinda knew previously who actually mentioned getting detained coming into the country and then getting sent back to the US on the same plane she arrived on an hour later. They are a bit ruthless here in the UK it seems.
So we traveled our 2 hours to a nice hotel in South Woodford via "The Tube"... London's famous underground rail system. You can pretty much get anywhere in the city via the Tube, so that was cool. That night we kept it pretty low key but having some pretty much American food at this place called The Harvester. It was good, but almost the same as going to Applebees... the menus seem fairly similar as far as I can tell. Then we walked over to a pub around the corner that I really liked. Though we couldn't stay there long since pubs in England close at 1030 on Sundays, 11pm most of the week, and midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. When you're like us and used to being in places open all night... like Berlin, Munich, Prague, Budapest...etc... that was kinda crappy. The place we ended up at, had good beer, a cool owner that I talked to who said he's never met an American that liked real football... so he was a good buddy right off the bat. Sitting there hearing a bunch of folks yell at eachother in English was really fun too...lol. There was a rather wild bunch there when we got there, at one point a girl was kicking another dude in the nuts and that made everyone laugh... I imagine they're good friends, they seemed to all be having a good time at least...haha.
Yesterday we checked out some parts of London, but I'll be the first to admit, I really didn't see much of London at all, so I reckon I gotta go back at some point. :-) We went to Buckingham Palace and caught the end of the Changing of The Guard, snapped a few pics... then walked over towards Big Ben where I took a few pics and decided I needed to get off my feet. I told Anthony and Bobbi that I was meeting up with a person at a bar a few Tube stops away so they went and did a few more touristy stuff then met up with me a few hours later. The person I met was Christy, someone I'd never actually met but kind of knew from a message forum that I was on some time ago. She was the only person on my Facebook that was in London so I asked if she'd be down to hang out and show me a cool place or two, and we met up at a little pub near her school. On the way to that pub, I took the tube stop right next to the bar and the elevators had this huge line so I decided to take the stairs... I actually didn't see the sign that says "only use stairs in an emergency"... That sign was there for a reason...haha. I seriously felt like I walked about 20 floors of a building on a spiral staircase. I wondered why NOBODY was taking the stairs. They literally, just kept going and going and going. I actually think I almost died...haha. This guy at the top looked at me like I was crazy and said, you didn't read the sign did ya... to which I replied, I dunno, what sign? He laughed and pointed at the same sign and I was like, Dude, no shit. Then made my way across the street where I ordered a beer and a huge glass of water while I waited for Christy, hoping she didn't show up until at least half the sweat I had going on went away...haha.
Anthony and Bobbi made their way to the pub and we drank there for a bit before heading off to eat some Thai food. Anthony and Bobbi took off back to the hotel since Bobbi was pretty drained, she was still stuck with a bit of jet lag so that was understandable. Me and Christy went off to a bar that actually had live music going on and they stayed open late. We pretty much got drunk listening to Karaoke with a live band, which was cool... those brits were all singing really well, so that was cool. We hung out long enough for me to not be able to take the tube home, so Christy helped me find a bus and we said our goodbye's and c ya's and I was off on a bus hoping I'd be awake when the bus got to my stop. I think the bus got to my stop around 4am. I got off the bus and started walking, but I was on the other side of the station that we came into every time, so I walked a direction hoping the street I was on would intersect and it never did. So, it shoulda been a 25 minute walk to our hotel took me about an hour and a half since I walked in a big ass circle before finding out I had to go over the footbridge at the station to come out on the side that I actually knew. I walked into my hotel this morning at 530am with the sun already shining. The hotel dude had to unlock the door and all his said was , "good morning sir." My reply was, yes, it's definitely the morning, thanks. I went upstairs and crashed for a few hours and woke up around 9am and tried to sleep some more but I didn't wanna over sleep so I kept waking up... typical.
I'm now on a train to Dewsbury, which is up in Northern England, to visit an old soccer teammate and friend from high school, Joseph Wood. He lives in the UK now where he married his wife and he said he'd give me a place to stay today if I wanted to visit. So I'm heading there and Bobbi and Anthony already headed off to Edinburgh, Scotland. This train has free wifi but I don't have an english address to use it... bleh. So this will be another blog where I used wordpad to write and just copy over to my blog, like most of my train rides.
Well, that's London in a nutshell, I think tonight I'm probably just gonna have a low key night hanging out in Dewsbury. Laterz folks.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
About to fly off to London from Berlin...
So Berlin has been a bit of a vacation from the vacation for me up to this point. I took the 2 hour tour of the city the second day here and I didn't do much else other than sit around the hostel and drink beer the last few days. It was a good way to rest up my feet and hopefully not screw my right foot up anymore than it already is. It still hurts but it seems the swelling has went down a bit.
We've met and hung out with a lot of cool folks here in the hostel, so in a way, it was just as cool as going out to a bar every night... There were a few people here as long as we have been, but for the most part, it's a different crowd ever day. This hostel is huge, so tons and tons of people from all over, but lots and lots of groups of students from other parts of Germany it seems, I just hit on the teachers though...haha. If I ever came back here, I'd make sure it was a bit earlier in the year so it wasn't so damn hot... The place doesn't have any AC, and it's been around 90 degrees most of the days here. The only good thing that's come of it being so hot is of course, as I mentioned previously... the women don't wear much clothes and being in a coed dorm where everyone sleeps in as little clothes as possible on top of their covers has been pretty cool. :-p Last night we were 2 of 3 guys in a 10 bed dorm and our new friends were mostly Finnish 20 yr old college chicks, all hot of course. My next trip to Europe will include Finland and Sweden for sure...haha.
We got really drunk again last night... imagine that. As we talked about not drinking much earlier in the day, that ended up not being the case, once we grabbed the bottle of vodka and a bunch of beers, we were well on our way to another long night of drinking. I blame it on all the people we find to hang out with here, you just end up getting round after round of beer or vodka mixed drinks. I chose Orange Fanta as my mixer for a drink or two last night, good stuff. It's day #30 of drinking for us. Yay.
I got up this morning to take a shower and there was a guy who must've partied a bit too much last night. He was passed out snoring full blast on the floor of the shower room. It was pretty awesome to see actually. He was right in the doorway so I couldn't close the door to the bank of showers... so anyone walking by could pretty much see in. I didn't care to wake him up so I just hopped in the shower and figured "oh well" if anyone would be walking by in the next little bit...haha. So I take my shower, step over the drunk kid again and start walking to the room. I decided I wanted more people to see the humor in this, so i pushed the door open to the shower room so people walking by would also be sure to see someone so passed out in the position he was in. Cuz I'm such a nice guy. lol
So tonight we fly to London for a night in a hostel there before picking up Anthony's g/f Bobbi tomorrow afternoon. We'll be in London for a few days and then I'm gonna go hang with some other acquaintances in northern England while Bobbi and Anthony head to Scotland, where I'll meet up with them a day or so later. I figure the two of them will need some alone time anyway. Temps are supposed to be around mid 60's to lower 70's for the rest of our trip... I'm actually looking forward to being able to wear a pair of pants again and not sweat when I get out of the shower... woot.
Well, it seems like Anthony's laundry is done so we're about to leave the hostel and head to the airport for a bit. I'm on the fence as far as how much I like or dislike this hostel. It definitely has ups and downs but I think I'd stay here again in a month where it's not so hot. Out of the hostels we've stayed in, I think this was probably the one with the most really young people, but that was offset by a decent amount of people our age too, as I mentioned, I just hit on their teachers...haha.
We've met and hung out with a lot of cool folks here in the hostel, so in a way, it was just as cool as going out to a bar every night... There were a few people here as long as we have been, but for the most part, it's a different crowd ever day. This hostel is huge, so tons and tons of people from all over, but lots and lots of groups of students from other parts of Germany it seems, I just hit on the teachers though...haha. If I ever came back here, I'd make sure it was a bit earlier in the year so it wasn't so damn hot... The place doesn't have any AC, and it's been around 90 degrees most of the days here. The only good thing that's come of it being so hot is of course, as I mentioned previously... the women don't wear much clothes and being in a coed dorm where everyone sleeps in as little clothes as possible on top of their covers has been pretty cool. :-p Last night we were 2 of 3 guys in a 10 bed dorm and our new friends were mostly Finnish 20 yr old college chicks, all hot of course. My next trip to Europe will include Finland and Sweden for sure...haha.
We got really drunk again last night... imagine that. As we talked about not drinking much earlier in the day, that ended up not being the case, once we grabbed the bottle of vodka and a bunch of beers, we were well on our way to another long night of drinking. I blame it on all the people we find to hang out with here, you just end up getting round after round of beer or vodka mixed drinks. I chose Orange Fanta as my mixer for a drink or two last night, good stuff. It's day #30 of drinking for us. Yay.
I got up this morning to take a shower and there was a guy who must've partied a bit too much last night. He was passed out snoring full blast on the floor of the shower room. It was pretty awesome to see actually. He was right in the doorway so I couldn't close the door to the bank of showers... so anyone walking by could pretty much see in. I didn't care to wake him up so I just hopped in the shower and figured "oh well" if anyone would be walking by in the next little bit...haha. So I take my shower, step over the drunk kid again and start walking to the room. I decided I wanted more people to see the humor in this, so i pushed the door open to the shower room so people walking by would also be sure to see someone so passed out in the position he was in. Cuz I'm such a nice guy. lol
So tonight we fly to London for a night in a hostel there before picking up Anthony's g/f Bobbi tomorrow afternoon. We'll be in London for a few days and then I'm gonna go hang with some other acquaintances in northern England while Bobbi and Anthony head to Scotland, where I'll meet up with them a day or so later. I figure the two of them will need some alone time anyway. Temps are supposed to be around mid 60's to lower 70's for the rest of our trip... I'm actually looking forward to being able to wear a pair of pants again and not sweat when I get out of the shower... woot.
Well, it seems like Anthony's laundry is done so we're about to leave the hostel and head to the airport for a bit. I'm on the fence as far as how much I like or dislike this hostel. It definitely has ups and downs but I think I'd stay here again in a month where it's not so hot. Out of the hostels we've stayed in, I think this was probably the one with the most really young people, but that was offset by a decent amount of people our age too, as I mentioned, I just hit on their teachers...haha.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Back to Germany, hanging out in Berlin
So I know I haven't updated this blog so much lately, hell I wasn't even online for a day and a half due to long traveling and not really wanting to pay a Euro for internet for an hour...wtf. Today I paid 5 Euro for 24 hours, since I don't plan on doing anything other than sitting here nursing an aching foot.
My right foot started hurting while we were walking around in Amsterdam the last couple days we were there, it's now swollen up like a baseball is inside it but I can't see any bruising or anything that would indicate it being broken anywhere. I am just sitting here keeping weight off of it in hopes that it's only aching due to the shoes I've worn the entire time I've been here. I don't think Nike Airmax are the correct shoes to wear... I think sandals woulda been a better bet to at least where some days, it's been a hot bastard for most of our travels...lol. I've yet to see a doctor and would rather not, so as Anthony is out doing a walking tour of Berlin, I'm sitting here in the common room of this huge hostel we're staying at. Let's hope it's not actually broken since I don't want to wear a cast for the last couple weeks of our trip.
Yes, only a bit over two weeks left in Europe, the time has flown it seems. Lots of fun and after discussing this earlier, we've drank every single day of our trip thus far. No, not just a beer here and there, but at least 3-6+ drinks a day...every day...haha.
I know that one reason for this is that EVERYWHERE you go, beer is cheaper, and colder, than sodas or even water in some cases. If you get a soda, it's fairly warm, and God forbid you want ice, it's like pulling teeth some times. We can't find an ice machine anywhere, so we're exhausting our resources of where to get free ice near our hostel here...lol. I've had more Heineken than I'll ever admit to anyone, it seems like everywhere you go, they have other stuff on the menu, but then tell you that they're out, and Heineken is all you can get... Other than Germany of course, lots of good lager beer here, but I do miss the occasional Drop Top or Drifter from Widmer. Oh, and for what it's worth... THE most expensive beer EVERYWHERE???......Corona. How funny is that? It's seriously the most expensive beer we've seen in our travels, and since they don't sell in .5L bottles, it's even worse because you only get around .3L bottles for the price of half liters of other beers, like our regular 12 ounce bottles in the states.
Alright, so the trip to Berlin from Amsterdam absolutely f'n sucked. We get to the station around noon, take a trip to the Central station in Amsterdam, then catch the train to another city in Holland. After we change trains, we are an hour or so into that trip when they mention that the train is stopping in some other little town due to lightning strikes and tornadoes the day/night before. So, they tell us that no trains are going into Germany... Oh crap.
We get off the train with a ton of other people, really, a whole lotta people traveling back to Germany the day after seeing the Dutch play the final of the World Cup. They tell us that we're going to take a bus to a city in Germany and go from there to wherever it was that everyone was going. So we wait for around an hour and a half, see one bus, that takes a fraction of the people there, then wait another half hour for the second bus... at which point I was like, dude, we're not going to make it to Germany today...lol. Then about 4 buses roll up and we hop on, and take a 2.5 hour trip on the roads of Holland into Germany. I guess it was a bit of a welcome thing to some extent though, we had yet traveled anywhere long distance other than by train. Not to say I liked riding the bus... it was still a bus and the dude next to me kinda stunk a bit...lol. We have first class tickets for the train system for a reason, it's been really nice too...lol.
So, we get off the buses, sit around and wait for a train to Hannover, where we need to change trains again to Berlin. We lucked out in Hannover though, we got off our train and thought, oh cool, that train right there is heading to Berlin... let's go!
So we hop on the train that just seemed to be waiting for us only to find out that the train had no conductor and was going to be running a bit late anyway... like an hour an a half. WTF. Luckily, our part of that long wait was only for 30 minutes since the Conductor made it by cab to the station. The entire train system was pretty much hosed in Northern Germany that day, I looked at the boards where all the departures and arrivals were and everything had *** next to it along with how late they'd be. The funny part of that of course, was that it was an extremely beautiful 80 degree and sunny day out... I was waiting to see crazy thunderstorms but saw nothing of the sort the entire time in our travels. That morning we were going to wash laundry before taking off, but it was drizzling and I didn't feel like walking 2 miles in the rain to wash clothes. Instead, we walked a few hundred feet to the train station and started our day on the rails/roads. I imagine if we did our laundry, we'd have stayed in Amsterdam at least one more night since the rails were so hosed, they probably wouldn't have let us leave to get stuck in the middle of nowhere. So, about 13 hours later, on a day when we should have been only traveling for about 6 hours... we made it to our hostel in Germany.
The first night in this hostel was probably the most miserable night of sleep I'd had since Heidelberg, for the same reasons... Extremely hot and humid with no AC and the window was only able to be cracked a little bit. We are in a mixed dorm, that night there were 5 guys and 3 women... nobody was bashful about sleeping in their underwear on top of their covers... there was just no way to survive wearing anything more than a little. It helps that all three women in our room are pretty hot too...haha. :-)
The second night in the hostel was much better, after getting everyone in our room to sign a waiver that they wouldn't jump, or throw anything out the window, we were able to open it up. That helped a lot, I also made sure to be as drunk as possible when I went to sleep... just to make sure I'd pass out...lol. It's weird here, most of the hostels we've been in have been with people traveling from other countries... this one of course, is the exception... everyone here is from Germany. Mostly kids traveling to Berlin to party it up all night...etc. We've noticed big groups of youngsters 17-20ish tops, with a few chaperons, but everyone is still drinking etc... so other than telling the kids to shut up or quiet down at times, they're not having to chaperon too much, it seems. I've talked to a few folks here and there, but it's almost too big of a hostel with big groups of people that know eachother already, so it's been different than the ones we've been to prior to Germany. The one in Munich was a bit like this, but at least there we still met people from other parts of the world. I'm pretty sure I recognized a few English guys I knew from Prague this morning when they were checking in.
I know 4 of our roommates checked out today so hopefully the new ones are pretty cool. We have one guy from Bulgaria who doesn't speak a word of English or German, getting him to sign the paper saying he wouldn't jump out of the window was like playing charades with a blind guy... it wasn't working. The Brazilian couple were trying and thought he spoke German, but it wasn't even that...lol. at least German I could have somewhat got it figured out. So I ended up drawing a stick figure and a window and putting an X over them while handing him the paper to sign... so he finally did, and last night our window was opened... Thank God. It was much more bearable.
So I think we have two more nights after today here in Berlin and then we're off to England to pick up Bobbi in London. (Anthony's g/f who's totally going to die if she doesn't see him soon)...lol. ;-) We'll spend the first night in a hostel in London, then probably a hotel for a few nights so Bobbi can get her internal clock converted to Europe time. Perhaps we'll do what we did when we got to Romania... travel for 26 hours and go out til 3am and get shitfaced...haha. Ok, maybe not. But I won't count that option out. :-) It'd be pretty awesome if my foot decided not to be screwed up anymore before we leave Berlin. *Crosses fingers
I have got out to see at least a bit of Berlin since getting here though, we took an open top bus tour of the city yesterday that was pretty cool. It was a way to see the place and not have to walk much... at this point I'm ALL about that. I do feel bad but told Anthony I'd rather not keep him from checking the city out, so he's out and about today doing a walking tour for 4 hours or so, and I think he mentioned going to see some concentration camps tomorrow too. I'll probably sit around on the internet watching hundreds of youtube vids... unless my foot feels better, but I won't hold my breath on that.
I've been looking at the prices for taking the ferry to England from Holland on Saturday, and by the looks of it, we may end up just flying from here instead of having a full day of travel. It will cost a bit more, but in the long run it makes sense... just looking at time tables for trains and the ferry to England.
While I'm thinking about it... I've been meaning to put this in the blog for a while but it never comes to mind when I'm on here...lol.
If you ever travel to Europe, one of the first things you want to do is get a handful of Euro's in case you have to go to the bathroom somewhere. Seriously, in train stations it costs about .40-.70 Euro to use the bathroom. Kinda like paying 50 cents to a buck to take a piss in the US. And that's practically everywhere in Europe. Oh, in Amsterdam there are the random pissers situated all over, where you just walk up, take a wiz, and hope you can find somewhere to wash your hands later. We have telephones on the corner, they have a little wide open place to piss... brilliant if you ask me.
That's one of those things that would be too shocking to see in the US because Americans are scared of stuff like that...haha. Earlier I saw a city bus with a topless woman on it. As an American I find it funny, but again, it's stuff like that which is totally normal to people in Europe. It's awesome really. You get a feel for the way the US tries to sensor everything as much as possible because it'll turn us all into villains... If that were the case, why are Europeans not nearly as screwed up as so many Americans...haha. Ok, we all have crazy bastards, but it's not like people here are doing any more crazy or dumb stuff than people in the US are.
Anyways... I'm sure I may edit this later on due to complete boredom since I'm doing nothing else...lol. But that's about all I have to say now.
My right foot started hurting while we were walking around in Amsterdam the last couple days we were there, it's now swollen up like a baseball is inside it but I can't see any bruising or anything that would indicate it being broken anywhere. I am just sitting here keeping weight off of it in hopes that it's only aching due to the shoes I've worn the entire time I've been here. I don't think Nike Airmax are the correct shoes to wear... I think sandals woulda been a better bet to at least where some days, it's been a hot bastard for most of our travels...lol. I've yet to see a doctor and would rather not, so as Anthony is out doing a walking tour of Berlin, I'm sitting here in the common room of this huge hostel we're staying at. Let's hope it's not actually broken since I don't want to wear a cast for the last couple weeks of our trip.
Yes, only a bit over two weeks left in Europe, the time has flown it seems. Lots of fun and after discussing this earlier, we've drank every single day of our trip thus far. No, not just a beer here and there, but at least 3-6+ drinks a day...every day...haha.
I know that one reason for this is that EVERYWHERE you go, beer is cheaper, and colder, than sodas or even water in some cases. If you get a soda, it's fairly warm, and God forbid you want ice, it's like pulling teeth some times. We can't find an ice machine anywhere, so we're exhausting our resources of where to get free ice near our hostel here...lol. I've had more Heineken than I'll ever admit to anyone, it seems like everywhere you go, they have other stuff on the menu, but then tell you that they're out, and Heineken is all you can get... Other than Germany of course, lots of good lager beer here, but I do miss the occasional Drop Top or Drifter from Widmer. Oh, and for what it's worth... THE most expensive beer EVERYWHERE???......Corona. How funny is that? It's seriously the most expensive beer we've seen in our travels, and since they don't sell in .5L bottles, it's even worse because you only get around .3L bottles for the price of half liters of other beers, like our regular 12 ounce bottles in the states.
Alright, so the trip to Berlin from Amsterdam absolutely f'n sucked. We get to the station around noon, take a trip to the Central station in Amsterdam, then catch the train to another city in Holland. After we change trains, we are an hour or so into that trip when they mention that the train is stopping in some other little town due to lightning strikes and tornadoes the day/night before. So, they tell us that no trains are going into Germany... Oh crap.
We get off the train with a ton of other people, really, a whole lotta people traveling back to Germany the day after seeing the Dutch play the final of the World Cup. They tell us that we're going to take a bus to a city in Germany and go from there to wherever it was that everyone was going. So we wait for around an hour and a half, see one bus, that takes a fraction of the people there, then wait another half hour for the second bus... at which point I was like, dude, we're not going to make it to Germany today...lol. Then about 4 buses roll up and we hop on, and take a 2.5 hour trip on the roads of Holland into Germany. I guess it was a bit of a welcome thing to some extent though, we had yet traveled anywhere long distance other than by train. Not to say I liked riding the bus... it was still a bus and the dude next to me kinda stunk a bit...lol. We have first class tickets for the train system for a reason, it's been really nice too...lol.
So, we get off the buses, sit around and wait for a train to Hannover, where we need to change trains again to Berlin. We lucked out in Hannover though, we got off our train and thought, oh cool, that train right there is heading to Berlin... let's go!
So we hop on the train that just seemed to be waiting for us only to find out that the train had no conductor and was going to be running a bit late anyway... like an hour an a half. WTF. Luckily, our part of that long wait was only for 30 minutes since the Conductor made it by cab to the station. The entire train system was pretty much hosed in Northern Germany that day, I looked at the boards where all the departures and arrivals were and everything had *** next to it along with how late they'd be. The funny part of that of course, was that it was an extremely beautiful 80 degree and sunny day out... I was waiting to see crazy thunderstorms but saw nothing of the sort the entire time in our travels. That morning we were going to wash laundry before taking off, but it was drizzling and I didn't feel like walking 2 miles in the rain to wash clothes. Instead, we walked a few hundred feet to the train station and started our day on the rails/roads. I imagine if we did our laundry, we'd have stayed in Amsterdam at least one more night since the rails were so hosed, they probably wouldn't have let us leave to get stuck in the middle of nowhere. So, about 13 hours later, on a day when we should have been only traveling for about 6 hours... we made it to our hostel in Germany.
The first night in this hostel was probably the most miserable night of sleep I'd had since Heidelberg, for the same reasons... Extremely hot and humid with no AC and the window was only able to be cracked a little bit. We are in a mixed dorm, that night there were 5 guys and 3 women... nobody was bashful about sleeping in their underwear on top of their covers... there was just no way to survive wearing anything more than a little. It helps that all three women in our room are pretty hot too...haha. :-)
The second night in the hostel was much better, after getting everyone in our room to sign a waiver that they wouldn't jump, or throw anything out the window, we were able to open it up. That helped a lot, I also made sure to be as drunk as possible when I went to sleep... just to make sure I'd pass out...lol. It's weird here, most of the hostels we've been in have been with people traveling from other countries... this one of course, is the exception... everyone here is from Germany. Mostly kids traveling to Berlin to party it up all night...etc. We've noticed big groups of youngsters 17-20ish tops, with a few chaperons, but everyone is still drinking etc... so other than telling the kids to shut up or quiet down at times, they're not having to chaperon too much, it seems. I've talked to a few folks here and there, but it's almost too big of a hostel with big groups of people that know eachother already, so it's been different than the ones we've been to prior to Germany. The one in Munich was a bit like this, but at least there we still met people from other parts of the world. I'm pretty sure I recognized a few English guys I knew from Prague this morning when they were checking in.
I know 4 of our roommates checked out today so hopefully the new ones are pretty cool. We have one guy from Bulgaria who doesn't speak a word of English or German, getting him to sign the paper saying he wouldn't jump out of the window was like playing charades with a blind guy... it wasn't working. The Brazilian couple were trying and thought he spoke German, but it wasn't even that...lol. at least German I could have somewhat got it figured out. So I ended up drawing a stick figure and a window and putting an X over them while handing him the paper to sign... so he finally did, and last night our window was opened... Thank God. It was much more bearable.
So I think we have two more nights after today here in Berlin and then we're off to England to pick up Bobbi in London. (Anthony's g/f who's totally going to die if she doesn't see him soon)...lol. ;-) We'll spend the first night in a hostel in London, then probably a hotel for a few nights so Bobbi can get her internal clock converted to Europe time. Perhaps we'll do what we did when we got to Romania... travel for 26 hours and go out til 3am and get shitfaced...haha. Ok, maybe not. But I won't count that option out. :-) It'd be pretty awesome if my foot decided not to be screwed up anymore before we leave Berlin. *Crosses fingers
I have got out to see at least a bit of Berlin since getting here though, we took an open top bus tour of the city yesterday that was pretty cool. It was a way to see the place and not have to walk much... at this point I'm ALL about that. I do feel bad but told Anthony I'd rather not keep him from checking the city out, so he's out and about today doing a walking tour for 4 hours or so, and I think he mentioned going to see some concentration camps tomorrow too. I'll probably sit around on the internet watching hundreds of youtube vids... unless my foot feels better, but I won't hold my breath on that.
I've been looking at the prices for taking the ferry to England from Holland on Saturday, and by the looks of it, we may end up just flying from here instead of having a full day of travel. It will cost a bit more, but in the long run it makes sense... just looking at time tables for trains and the ferry to England.
While I'm thinking about it... I've been meaning to put this in the blog for a while but it never comes to mind when I'm on here...lol.
If you ever travel to Europe, one of the first things you want to do is get a handful of Euro's in case you have to go to the bathroom somewhere. Seriously, in train stations it costs about .40-.70 Euro to use the bathroom. Kinda like paying 50 cents to a buck to take a piss in the US. And that's practically everywhere in Europe. Oh, in Amsterdam there are the random pissers situated all over, where you just walk up, take a wiz, and hope you can find somewhere to wash your hands later. We have telephones on the corner, they have a little wide open place to piss... brilliant if you ask me.
That's one of those things that would be too shocking to see in the US because Americans are scared of stuff like that...haha. Earlier I saw a city bus with a topless woman on it. As an American I find it funny, but again, it's stuff like that which is totally normal to people in Europe. It's awesome really. You get a feel for the way the US tries to sensor everything as much as possible because it'll turn us all into villains... If that were the case, why are Europeans not nearly as screwed up as so many Americans...haha. Ok, we all have crazy bastards, but it's not like people here are doing any more crazy or dumb stuff than people in the US are.
Anyways... I'm sure I may edit this later on due to complete boredom since I'm doing nothing else...lol. But that's about all I have to say now.
Friday, July 9, 2010
Added a few days to Amsterdam
Heineken Factory.
A picture in Amsterdam, notice all the bikes...
So yesterday we added a few days to our trip in Amsterdam, which will make this leg of the trip around 7 nights here. Today has been a day of nothing but sitting around watching old sitcoms on tv. It's about 4pm and I've yet to leave the hotel. We added the days to Amsterdam due to wanting to be here when Netherlands plays Spain in the World Cup. Other than being in South Africa to watch the game, I figure this to be the best place on earth to watch the game anyway, so why not. Had Germany won their semifinal we'd have been on our way to Berlin, instead we pushed Berlin off a few days to stay here. We're going to be there for 5 days starting Monday.
So, I had my birthday, nothing too exciting happened... we walked the Red Light district and checked out some coffee shops... I've still never been high and don't plan to start, though it's pretty cool how abundant it would be if I wanted to. The red light district is kinda neat though... it's a tourist spot for sex and you see practically everything there, quite funny actually. From the family with two little children walking around, to the little old tourists with cameras around their neck, to the 16 year old kids walking around trying to get some for the first time. It's like going to a strip club with everyone in the world that would normally not go to one. We also checked out the Vincent Van Gogh museum yesterday, so that was pretty cool.
We are staying about a 15 minute train ride from downtown in a place called Zaandam, it seems to be a big shopping type of place. We found a good pool hall that's not too expensive, they have more snooker tables than anywhere I've ever seen. Last night we hung out with a bunch of folks at a bar that we randomly found on our way back to the hotel from shooting pool. We traded emails with them and plan to meet up with them again for the game on Sunday. I don't remember most of last night though...lol. We went to the pool hall with a 1.5L apple juice bottle filled with Monster and Vodka and ice. We drank that down before we got to the pool hall and had a bunch of Heineken there before heading to that other place and drinking our first pitchers of beer, 3 of them. I'm pretty sure we had a damn good time last night, but again, I don't remember much of the last bar...haha. It seems like the two days surrounding my birthday were the celebrations more than the birthday itself.
I'm not sure what we're doing today though, I imagine we may just go shoot pool and have a few drinks later on, as I said, it's just been a nice day of chilling out and not doing anything thus far. It's much needed is a bit of an understatement.
I haven't updated the blog much the last few days, but there hasn't been too much to update, so nobody's missing anything. We've just done a lot of walking around for the most part, oh, and had some pretty damn good Thai food yesterday.
A picture in Amsterdam, notice all the bikes...
So yesterday we added a few days to our trip in Amsterdam, which will make this leg of the trip around 7 nights here. Today has been a day of nothing but sitting around watching old sitcoms on tv. It's about 4pm and I've yet to leave the hotel. We added the days to Amsterdam due to wanting to be here when Netherlands plays Spain in the World Cup. Other than being in South Africa to watch the game, I figure this to be the best place on earth to watch the game anyway, so why not. Had Germany won their semifinal we'd have been on our way to Berlin, instead we pushed Berlin off a few days to stay here. We're going to be there for 5 days starting Monday.
So, I had my birthday, nothing too exciting happened... we walked the Red Light district and checked out some coffee shops... I've still never been high and don't plan to start, though it's pretty cool how abundant it would be if I wanted to. The red light district is kinda neat though... it's a tourist spot for sex and you see practically everything there, quite funny actually. From the family with two little children walking around, to the little old tourists with cameras around their neck, to the 16 year old kids walking around trying to get some for the first time. It's like going to a strip club with everyone in the world that would normally not go to one. We also checked out the Vincent Van Gogh museum yesterday, so that was pretty cool.
We are staying about a 15 minute train ride from downtown in a place called Zaandam, it seems to be a big shopping type of place. We found a good pool hall that's not too expensive, they have more snooker tables than anywhere I've ever seen. Last night we hung out with a bunch of folks at a bar that we randomly found on our way back to the hotel from shooting pool. We traded emails with them and plan to meet up with them again for the game on Sunday. I don't remember most of last night though...lol. We went to the pool hall with a 1.5L apple juice bottle filled with Monster and Vodka and ice. We drank that down before we got to the pool hall and had a bunch of Heineken there before heading to that other place and drinking our first pitchers of beer, 3 of them. I'm pretty sure we had a damn good time last night, but again, I don't remember much of the last bar...haha. It seems like the two days surrounding my birthday were the celebrations more than the birthday itself.
I'm not sure what we're doing today though, I imagine we may just go shoot pool and have a few drinks later on, as I said, it's just been a nice day of chilling out and not doing anything thus far. It's much needed is a bit of an understatement.
I haven't updated the blog much the last few days, but there hasn't been too much to update, so nobody's missing anything. We've just done a lot of walking around for the most part, oh, and had some pretty damn good Thai food yesterday.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Watching soccer and getting hammered in Amsterdam for my 30th birthday
Ugh.
So last night we hung out with a few hundred Dutch folks to watch one of the biggest soccer matches for their country in a long long time. We went to this Irish pub after a guy we met on a train a couple of days ago mentioned it was a good place to watch. Our table was in a prime location due to getting there 2.5 hours prior to gametime. In which time we had a plate of nachos and some beers. Yeah, another day of only two meals, and one happened to only be nachos, we're dumbasses I know. The difference in this day and many others, as of late, is that last night I was drinking Guiness and Anthony was drinking Murphy's Red... both much more potent than the lager beers we've had a ton of lately.
Throw in an Irish carbomb that the guy at our table got us, and you have a mix for two really drunk Americans in downtown Amsterdam. At one point I was walking and Anthony was behind me, and a few minutes later he was nowhere to be seen... so both of us, drunk off our asses, had to figure out our way home on our own...lol. I had no real problem other than walking straight...haha. Anthony on the other hand took the train the wrong way at first, then had to make his way back... but he rolled in around 45 minutes after me, so it wasn't that bad. He wanted to go out for a bit more and I was like, no way... I'm pretty wasted.
So, I remember all of my night at which point I turned 30. I have yet to rethink my life or change anything now that I've reached the big 30. People say things change when you turn 30, but nothing seems different to me. I guess we'll see.
The agenda for today is nonexistent, we'll go downtown and find another pub to watch the Germany game and see where we go from there. Perhaps we'll even eat some food at some point today...lol
So last night we hung out with a few hundred Dutch folks to watch one of the biggest soccer matches for their country in a long long time. We went to this Irish pub after a guy we met on a train a couple of days ago mentioned it was a good place to watch. Our table was in a prime location due to getting there 2.5 hours prior to gametime. In which time we had a plate of nachos and some beers. Yeah, another day of only two meals, and one happened to only be nachos, we're dumbasses I know. The difference in this day and many others, as of late, is that last night I was drinking Guiness and Anthony was drinking Murphy's Red... both much more potent than the lager beers we've had a ton of lately.
Throw in an Irish carbomb that the guy at our table got us, and you have a mix for two really drunk Americans in downtown Amsterdam. At one point I was walking and Anthony was behind me, and a few minutes later he was nowhere to be seen... so both of us, drunk off our asses, had to figure out our way home on our own...lol. I had no real problem other than walking straight...haha. Anthony on the other hand took the train the wrong way at first, then had to make his way back... but he rolled in around 45 minutes after me, so it wasn't that bad. He wanted to go out for a bit more and I was like, no way... I'm pretty wasted.
So, I remember all of my night at which point I turned 30. I have yet to rethink my life or change anything now that I've reached the big 30. People say things change when you turn 30, but nothing seems different to me. I guess we'll see.
The agenda for today is nonexistent, we'll go downtown and find another pub to watch the Germany game and see where we go from there. Perhaps we'll even eat some food at some point today...lol
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Who's following this blog? Let us know.
I've had fun writing about our journey thus far, and I've heard some good stuff on my facebook about people reading it... I just thought it'd be cool to see who all is checking out the blog. So respond to this blog with a comment and post who you are... or if you need to, who you'd like to be in another life...haha. I'm just bored doing laundry in Amsterdam, while stealing some wifi from somewhere, and thought it'd be a fun way to see who's keeping up with us. :-)
You don't have to sign up to leave a comment, so just click on the comments button at the end of this post and leave a name or something.
You don't have to sign up to leave a comment, so just click on the comments button at the end of this post and leave a name or something.
First night in Amsterdam
So we got into Amsterdam around 5pm last night. We should have got in a bit earlier but our train ended up breaking down a few stops from the city, so we caught another one and we made it a bit late... amazingly enough, these are the only hitches we've been running into on our entire trip thus far.
On the train from Brussels, we were seated next to a guy from Wisconsin, who's staying in a houseboat here in Amsterdam for a month. He gave us a heads up on a few places to go while we're here... mainly a good place to watch the World Cup game tonight... which is awesome considering the Netherlands is playing Uruguay tonight, it should be epic. We told him we'd probably see him there or give him a call if we needed some better directions.
So when we got in last night, we made our way to the hotel and just walked to find a place to eat... and it seemed like Everything was closed...wtf. We found a good spot and from there we found out a cool place to shoot some pool. We've actually played in some awesome pool halls in our travels thus far, so that's been nice. The place we were at, had 7 snooker tables and they kept pretty busy on them, which is something you'd never see in the states, practically anywhere. After pool we got back to the hotel and our first night was actually nothing to really write home about... but I just did soooo... yeah. :-p
Today the first order of business is to find a place to do laundry, then we'll get all touristy for a bit and go watch the game later. It's 11:15am now and about time we get the day started, so with that said... I may update this later, or I may not... depends on how the rest of the day goes. While reading a book a few minutes ago, the quote of the day said: "If you've never taken drugs recreationally, don't start here." I'm still on the fence, as almost everyone that's ever known me, knows full well I've never been into any of it... but I'm in Amsterdam where many drugs are, in fact, legal. As the saying goes... "when in Rome..." I guess we'll see.
So, if I don't make it back to blog again because I smoked a joint and did some shrooms before getting naked and running out in front of a train at full speed... thanks for reading the blog. lol
On the train from Brussels, we were seated next to a guy from Wisconsin, who's staying in a houseboat here in Amsterdam for a month. He gave us a heads up on a few places to go while we're here... mainly a good place to watch the World Cup game tonight... which is awesome considering the Netherlands is playing Uruguay tonight, it should be epic. We told him we'd probably see him there or give him a call if we needed some better directions.
So when we got in last night, we made our way to the hotel and just walked to find a place to eat... and it seemed like Everything was closed...wtf. We found a good spot and from there we found out a cool place to shoot some pool. We've actually played in some awesome pool halls in our travels thus far, so that's been nice. The place we were at, had 7 snooker tables and they kept pretty busy on them, which is something you'd never see in the states, practically anywhere. After pool we got back to the hotel and our first night was actually nothing to really write home about... but I just did soooo... yeah. :-p
Today the first order of business is to find a place to do laundry, then we'll get all touristy for a bit and go watch the game later. It's 11:15am now and about time we get the day started, so with that said... I may update this later, or I may not... depends on how the rest of the day goes. While reading a book a few minutes ago, the quote of the day said: "If you've never taken drugs recreationally, don't start here." I'm still on the fence, as almost everyone that's ever known me, knows full well I've never been into any of it... but I'm in Amsterdam where many drugs are, in fact, legal. As the saying goes... "when in Rome..." I guess we'll see.
So, if I don't make it back to blog again because I smoked a joint and did some shrooms before getting naked and running out in front of a train at full speed... thanks for reading the blog. lol
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Belgium, Rock Werchter
I got tickets to this massive rock fest a few months ago when we were trying to figure out stuff to do while in Europe. It was pretty awesome. Tons of people, I heard that yesterday it may have been over 1 million people through the gates. The venue was pretty massive, with spots of shade being sought after like a Wii at Christmas time a few years back. It was a pretty hot day, but the breeze REALLY helped. I bought a cool hat in Germany the other day, and when I got back to the hotel I threw it away due to being so dirty and not able to be cleaned...lol. I guess I'll find another hat when we get to Amsterdam later on today.
A snippet from Alice in Chains to show a bit of how huge the crowd was... It was even bigger for Them Crooked Vultures and Pearl Jam.
You may have to copy and paste the links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBK0PUZMqLU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpSmK2srbPU
We also found Red Bull in a bottle, which I'd never seen before. Oh yeah, in Belgium, people just throw their trash down... It seems to be a really dirty place because of this, we found it strange actually... how dirty a place like this is. So one way to fight that at the concert, they offered a free ticket (u can buy beer, food, soda, etc with tickets) So if you brought 20 cups or bottles up to the bins, you got a ticket... as you can imagine, there were a ton of people picking up trash. It was a pretty brilliant idea.
A snippet from Alice in Chains to show a bit of how huge the crowd was... It was even bigger for Them Crooked Vultures and Pearl Jam.
You may have to copy and paste the links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBK0PUZMqLU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpSmK2srbPU
We also found Red Bull in a bottle, which I'd never seen before. Oh yeah, in Belgium, people just throw their trash down... It seems to be a really dirty place because of this, we found it strange actually... how dirty a place like this is. So one way to fight that at the concert, they offered a free ticket (u can buy beer, food, soda, etc with tickets) So if you brought 20 cups or bottles up to the bins, you got a ticket... as you can imagine, there were a ton of people picking up trash. It was a pretty brilliant idea.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Germany to Brussels today
So it was game day in Deutschland, and it's amazing. Even in Brussels where I am now, vuvuzelas and car horns are blaring into the night after huge wins from Germany and Spain. In Heidelberg, every car was flying a German flag, faces were painted, everyone was ready to party from the beginning of the day til the end, especially with the results as they happened. I've been to Neyland Stadium on game day before, and there's the sea of Orange and white that's always there, that didn't really compare to what we saw today... I mean it, every single person wore their German pride, some even dressed in actual flags, now that I think of it.
We screwed up our scheduling a bit but wanted to see Heidelberg castle this morning so we wanted a late train out, that was before thinking about the 4pm game against Argentina. We saw most of the first half in a bar at the station, but didn't get to watch the rest, though we got score updates every time Germany scored. We got to the platform in Frankfurt just in time for the game to actually end. As I posted in someone's FB status, you'd think a train crashed it was so loud, again... amazing.
We arrived in Brussels for the last few minutes of the Spain vs Paraguay game and when that one ended, pretty much all the Espana flags in Belgium came out, along with all the Spaniards screaming, honking, and waving them insanely. I would have never known there is such a large amount of folks from Spain here, but apparently their are many... same with Germans for the most part.
Last night's hostel was ridiculous in regards to sleep. It was around 80 degrees out all night, and humid as a summer day in Tenn. It was sick, I think I slept a few minutes of the entire night. We actually got a hotel in Brussels, extremely posh I should add... so I'm hoping to get a great amount of sleep tonight. Though, I think I'm on the border of being sick, so let's hope a nice night in a hotel can fix that a bit. I think I'm running a fever so I told Anthony I'd pass on going out tonight, since I know tomorrow's gonna be a big day.
That's about all for now I guess, gonna try to get some sleep... It's just past midnight on July 4th, so happy 4th of July to everyone back home.
We screwed up our scheduling a bit but wanted to see Heidelberg castle this morning so we wanted a late train out, that was before thinking about the 4pm game against Argentina. We saw most of the first half in a bar at the station, but didn't get to watch the rest, though we got score updates every time Germany scored. We got to the platform in Frankfurt just in time for the game to actually end. As I posted in someone's FB status, you'd think a train crashed it was so loud, again... amazing.
We arrived in Brussels for the last few minutes of the Spain vs Paraguay game and when that one ended, pretty much all the Espana flags in Belgium came out, along with all the Spaniards screaming, honking, and waving them insanely. I would have never known there is such a large amount of folks from Spain here, but apparently their are many... same with Germans for the most part.
Last night's hostel was ridiculous in regards to sleep. It was around 80 degrees out all night, and humid as a summer day in Tenn. It was sick, I think I slept a few minutes of the entire night. We actually got a hotel in Brussels, extremely posh I should add... so I'm hoping to get a great amount of sleep tonight. Though, I think I'm on the border of being sick, so let's hope a nice night in a hotel can fix that a bit. I think I'm running a fever so I told Anthony I'd pass on going out tonight, since I know tomorrow's gonna be a big day.
That's about all for now I guess, gonna try to get some sleep... It's just past midnight on July 4th, so happy 4th of July to everyone back home.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Munich pics
Me and beer.
Random pic with an Australian guy who beer toured with us.
Yeah, not drunk I am.
Augustiner beer garden. Practically a beer factory and drinkery rolled into one...haha
Anthony posing with our drunk tour guide. ROFL.
One of the tour guides who was off duty that night... he was creepy to us. He was a really touchy and feely Irishman that was piss drunk...lol. Then we had a few Mexican dudes who were cool, one here is doing a shot of tequila, with another Canadian next to him, it was a fairly young crowd, but lots of fun.
Random Australian and Canadian chicks we hung out with at the hostel, another late drinking night after a beer garden crawl.
The sign in our hostel elevator... This didn't happen at any time while I was there, but it woulda been funny.
Random pic with an Australian guy who beer toured with us.
Yeah, not drunk I am.
Augustiner beer garden. Practically a beer factory and drinkery rolled into one...haha
Anthony posing with our drunk tour guide. ROFL.
One of the tour guides who was off duty that night... he was creepy to us. He was a really touchy and feely Irishman that was piss drunk...lol. Then we had a few Mexican dudes who were cool, one here is doing a shot of tequila, with another Canadian next to him, it was a fairly young crowd, but lots of fun.
Random Australian and Canadian chicks we hung out with at the hostel, another late drinking night after a beer garden crawl.
The sign in our hostel elevator... This didn't happen at any time while I was there, but it woulda been funny.
Germany...
Munich... a great city that we only saw about 3% of...lol.
I'd say we both drank our weight in beer while in Munich and we definitely did a lot more eating. There are fruit stands scattered all over and everything is perfectly fresh. Food is done the same way, little bakeries all over that make practically the same stuff, even food at the trainstation is better than most places that I'd go to eat in the states.
We're now on the train to Heidelberg to check out a castle or two. This train seems to be much faster than those we've taken in the past, and the power outlet actually works so my ipod and netbook are gonna get a nice charge on this 3 hour trip.
The hostel we stayed at in Munich was probably the one we disliked the most, though it didn't suck so it's not that bad. They just seemed to nickle and dime everyone to death, 1 euro here, 1 euro there...etc. They did have a couple pool tables and free wifi so life was still fine with me there. We didn't see much of Munich because we made it somewhat of a rest day, compared to the rest of our trip thus far. Well, it was a rest day until about 430 when we went to the train station to get our trip for today figured out, along with cashing in some American money for Euro's. I would suggest to anyone coming to Europe, in any country, don't bring any American money, the exchange rates and fees absolutely suck ass and ATM's work just fine. I get a $5 fee when I use my debit card in an ATM but I get the same if I go to Wells Fargo in Portland anyway, so to me it's not that bad, I just limit the times I actually pull money out.
Our first day in Munich was spent at a beer garden and at another place or two for a beer, nothing special after a long day of travel. Our second wasn't too adventurous either until we went on a Beer Garden Crawl... kinda like a pub crawl in most places, but at beer gardens instead, for the most part. We checked out the Oktoberfest Museum for some good old fashioned history about Munich, beer, Oktoberfest, and crazy kings.
When we started the "beer challenge" as it was called, we met at the trainstation where we ended up with 25 people all eager to drink beer... 18's the legal age to drink there, and a good amount of the people on the tour were closer to that age than mine. Over the course of the night, we learned a song, drank a metric ton of beer, met a lot of cool folks from all over the world, and just had a good friggin time. We got pretty hammered on the great beer of Munich and ended up sitting around our hostel with a couple women from Canada and Australia until going to sleep around 3am or so.
I find it amazing how many people we've met from Australia and California actually... it seems like a good bet that every english speaking person we come across is from one of those two places. Apparently, Aussie's don't care much for being on such a small continent, so they travel an insane amount between college and work life. This has been the case thus far at least.
As we waited for the beer challenge to start, we stood around watching everyone in their own little cliques only talking to people they knew. By the end of the night, everyone was good friends and taking pics with eachother and having loads of fun. The tour gave us two free beers and a shot of Jaeger, which was only a half shot if you ask me, but it was free so I'm not gonna complain. Only one or two of the kids on the tour got shitfaced and acted a bit rediculous, but he was a fun piece of entertainment more than a typical drunk bastard that we'd normally come across in times like that. Our tourguide was from Australia but lived in Canada until recently, so he had a funny accent that was a strange mix of words at times...cool guy though. Another guide ended up hanging with our group, but he had definitely been drinking prior to meeting us... by the end of the night we were talking about how awkward he was and that he's pretty damn gay due to the amount of touching he was doing over the course of the night. He passed out and we took some pics of him, so it was ok...haha. One Canadian girl belted out the star spangled banner for us at one point, she had her face all painted up for some reason or another, an interesting character to say the least.
Munich is a well oiled machine. Everything seems to be the pinnacle of efficiency, the public transport is by far the best I've seen, even having an awesome trainstation. Trains are scheduled to leave at 11:42am and if you're not on it at 11:41:59am, you're not getting on. In other news, we're sitting on the train across from some very attractive Korean girls, i'm just saying. One of them is wearing shoes with a Ford patch on them.
So up next is Heidelberg for the night and then off to Brussels Belgium. Where we will be going to Rock Werchter, a huge rockfest that I bought tickets to a few months back... it'll be the first days of our trip that we'd actually planned when we were still in the States. Then it's off to Amsterdam where I'll turn 30... so looking forward to that, of course. :-)
I'd definitely suggest Munich to be a stop on anyone's trip to Europe, if only to see what a beautiful and efficient city it is, and if you can hit up a beer garden, that's nice too...lol. The beergarden we spent most of our time at last night, seats around 8,000 people and it's only the 3rd largest in the world... the other two were around a kilometer away. There are ladies bringing beer to your table or you can go through a line and get your own. People will pick up the empty 1 liter glasses and pretty much stack them on a table for this little truck to come around and pick them up and take them to be cleaned. We had some awesome pretzels, even ate the rest of one that was sitting on the table...lol. We ripped the ends off and ate the rest...lol. We had a good laugh at that later on, perhaps you just had to be there. You'll see the size of the liter glasses in the pics I post, they're freaking huge... and awesome, and heavy. I give mad props to the women who carry them around 8-10 at a time, most people couldn't do it for a couple minutes, much less hours at a time. I know my mom used to do it, so I'll giver her a hi five for that next time I see her.
Alrighty then, I'll probably update again after Heidelberg but it shouldn't be too filled with stories of craziness since we're only there for a night before heading to belgium. We got some fun pics in Munich with Anthony's camera, but mine never left the hostel locker I stored it in.
I'd say we both drank our weight in beer while in Munich and we definitely did a lot more eating. There are fruit stands scattered all over and everything is perfectly fresh. Food is done the same way, little bakeries all over that make practically the same stuff, even food at the trainstation is better than most places that I'd go to eat in the states.
We're now on the train to Heidelberg to check out a castle or two. This train seems to be much faster than those we've taken in the past, and the power outlet actually works so my ipod and netbook are gonna get a nice charge on this 3 hour trip.
The hostel we stayed at in Munich was probably the one we disliked the most, though it didn't suck so it's not that bad. They just seemed to nickle and dime everyone to death, 1 euro here, 1 euro there...etc. They did have a couple pool tables and free wifi so life was still fine with me there. We didn't see much of Munich because we made it somewhat of a rest day, compared to the rest of our trip thus far. Well, it was a rest day until about 430 when we went to the train station to get our trip for today figured out, along with cashing in some American money for Euro's. I would suggest to anyone coming to Europe, in any country, don't bring any American money, the exchange rates and fees absolutely suck ass and ATM's work just fine. I get a $5 fee when I use my debit card in an ATM but I get the same if I go to Wells Fargo in Portland anyway, so to me it's not that bad, I just limit the times I actually pull money out.
Our first day in Munich was spent at a beer garden and at another place or two for a beer, nothing special after a long day of travel. Our second wasn't too adventurous either until we went on a Beer Garden Crawl... kinda like a pub crawl in most places, but at beer gardens instead, for the most part. We checked out the Oktoberfest Museum for some good old fashioned history about Munich, beer, Oktoberfest, and crazy kings.
When we started the "beer challenge" as it was called, we met at the trainstation where we ended up with 25 people all eager to drink beer... 18's the legal age to drink there, and a good amount of the people on the tour were closer to that age than mine. Over the course of the night, we learned a song, drank a metric ton of beer, met a lot of cool folks from all over the world, and just had a good friggin time. We got pretty hammered on the great beer of Munich and ended up sitting around our hostel with a couple women from Canada and Australia until going to sleep around 3am or so.
I find it amazing how many people we've met from Australia and California actually... it seems like a good bet that every english speaking person we come across is from one of those two places. Apparently, Aussie's don't care much for being on such a small continent, so they travel an insane amount between college and work life. This has been the case thus far at least.
As we waited for the beer challenge to start, we stood around watching everyone in their own little cliques only talking to people they knew. By the end of the night, everyone was good friends and taking pics with eachother and having loads of fun. The tour gave us two free beers and a shot of Jaeger, which was only a half shot if you ask me, but it was free so I'm not gonna complain. Only one or two of the kids on the tour got shitfaced and acted a bit rediculous, but he was a fun piece of entertainment more than a typical drunk bastard that we'd normally come across in times like that. Our tourguide was from Australia but lived in Canada until recently, so he had a funny accent that was a strange mix of words at times...cool guy though. Another guide ended up hanging with our group, but he had definitely been drinking prior to meeting us... by the end of the night we were talking about how awkward he was and that he's pretty damn gay due to the amount of touching he was doing over the course of the night. He passed out and we took some pics of him, so it was ok...haha. One Canadian girl belted out the star spangled banner for us at one point, she had her face all painted up for some reason or another, an interesting character to say the least.
Munich is a well oiled machine. Everything seems to be the pinnacle of efficiency, the public transport is by far the best I've seen, even having an awesome trainstation. Trains are scheduled to leave at 11:42am and if you're not on it at 11:41:59am, you're not getting on. In other news, we're sitting on the train across from some very attractive Korean girls, i'm just saying. One of them is wearing shoes with a Ford patch on them.
So up next is Heidelberg for the night and then off to Brussels Belgium. Where we will be going to Rock Werchter, a huge rockfest that I bought tickets to a few months back... it'll be the first days of our trip that we'd actually planned when we were still in the States. Then it's off to Amsterdam where I'll turn 30... so looking forward to that, of course. :-)
I'd definitely suggest Munich to be a stop on anyone's trip to Europe, if only to see what a beautiful and efficient city it is, and if you can hit up a beer garden, that's nice too...lol. The beergarden we spent most of our time at last night, seats around 8,000 people and it's only the 3rd largest in the world... the other two were around a kilometer away. There are ladies bringing beer to your table or you can go through a line and get your own. People will pick up the empty 1 liter glasses and pretty much stack them on a table for this little truck to come around and pick them up and take them to be cleaned. We had some awesome pretzels, even ate the rest of one that was sitting on the table...lol. We ripped the ends off and ate the rest...lol. We had a good laugh at that later on, perhaps you just had to be there. You'll see the size of the liter glasses in the pics I post, they're freaking huge... and awesome, and heavy. I give mad props to the women who carry them around 8-10 at a time, most people couldn't do it for a couple minutes, much less hours at a time. I know my mom used to do it, so I'll giver her a hi five for that next time I see her.
Alrighty then, I'll probably update again after Heidelberg but it shouldn't be too filled with stories of craziness since we're only there for a night before heading to belgium. We got some fun pics in Munich with Anthony's camera, but mine never left the hostel locker I stored it in.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Pics from Prague
Some random pictures from Prague, I hadn't looked through Anthony's memory card yet so these are just the ones from my camera. I'm sitting at the window of our hostel room in Munich, Germany. We were going to go south to see Ludwig's castle, Neuschwanstein (sp?), but we made today a rest day, where we won't walk to typical 10 miles a day we have been. My feet are sore and it's almost unbearable to walk at this point... so I'm giving the feet a day off, well, the first part of the day at least. Then we're doing a beer garden tour later tonight.
We hung out at a beer garden for awhile last night and got a few pics of our 1 liter beers that are bigger than my head...haha. I figure I have easily lost 10-15 lbs on this trip so far, but I'm sure that will change now that we're in Germany... our typical one meal a day was tripled yesterday. Walking to our hostel and seeing all the fruit stands and little bakeries made me happy enough to almost giggle.
The cheap part of our journey has come to an end though... Germany is not eastern Europe in the slightest. So we're having to think about money before sitting around drinking 50 beers a night...haha.
This was the top of the huge amount of steps we had to ascend to get to the castle on top of the hill... not too bad, we only had to stop once to catch our breath...haha. I saw an old lady with a walking cane go up them while we sat at the bottom drinking a few beers, when I saw her I knew that there was no way I couldn't go now.
The World Cup viewing party went on every day, we watched part of a game there but ended up leaving because it was so hot and we watched the game somewhere else.
I was told I don't have enough pics of me on the blog...ok, fine.
Beer is always served with a lot of head in the Czech Republic. This was a typical pour. These were some of our more expensive beers, at around $3.50 a piece because it was in a tourist infested area. All glasses have a .5 liter mark on them so they fill it up to that and the head just fills the rest of the glass. Good stuff I tell ya.
We hung out at a beer garden for awhile last night and got a few pics of our 1 liter beers that are bigger than my head...haha. I figure I have easily lost 10-15 lbs on this trip so far, but I'm sure that will change now that we're in Germany... our typical one meal a day was tripled yesterday. Walking to our hostel and seeing all the fruit stands and little bakeries made me happy enough to almost giggle.
The cheap part of our journey has come to an end though... Germany is not eastern Europe in the slightest. So we're having to think about money before sitting around drinking 50 beers a night...haha.
This was the top of the huge amount of steps we had to ascend to get to the castle on top of the hill... not too bad, we only had to stop once to catch our breath...haha. I saw an old lady with a walking cane go up them while we sat at the bottom drinking a few beers, when I saw her I knew that there was no way I couldn't go now.
The World Cup viewing party went on every day, we watched part of a game there but ended up leaving because it was so hot and we watched the game somewhere else.
I was told I don't have enough pics of me on the blog...ok, fine.
Beer is always served with a lot of head in the Czech Republic. This was a typical pour. These were some of our more expensive beers, at around $3.50 a piece because it was in a tourist infested area. All glasses have a .5 liter mark on them so they fill it up to that and the head just fills the rest of the glass. Good stuff I tell ya.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Now in Germany
The Prague blog... written on a train to Munich. We just got to our hostel and are about to grab some beer soon.
Ok, so I know I didn't update this at all while we were in Prague, but we kept pretty busy while we were there and I didn't like sitting around on the netbook while there was beer to be drank. Prague was another stop where we pretty much held to a strict liquid diet, as people say, Czech beer is good... I'll give them that, but it's not really anything to write home about. Personally, Anthony and Cliff both make better beers... but telling the Czech's their beer isn't totally awesome would probably open up another war or something crazy like that, so I'll just say, the beer was good enough. For the most part we drank Budweiser and Pilsner Urquell... Not the Bud we get back home, but the actual original Budweiser that was started here in the Czech Republic, they taste nothing alike. Beers are served with a huge head on them, but the glass usually has beer up to the .5 liter mark so it's ok... Apparently some of the American folks don't like that much head... once I figured it was supposed to be that way, it was cool with me.
So, our first night in Prague, we get in late because trains don't know how to be on time, ever. So our train left Budapest an hour and 30 minutes late, which got us into Prague around 11pm. We decided to see if we could find something to eat but again, only one meal that day since everything close to the place was closed or no longer serving food. Unlike the states, when it's late, bars stay open and serve alcohol, not food... they know their role it seems. We went to this place called music and blues bar... A joint owned by some old dude who was hanging out with his wife at a table, with another couple Englishmen sitting at another table. We had just went to an ATM to get some Czech currency and picked up 3000 Czech Koruna, the exchange rate is around 20-1... so 3000 Koruna was around $150, we both picked up this much and now have some left over, for 3 days in Prague, I figure that's pretty good.
The bar we went to, that was practically empty, and had no actual music anywhere in the vicinity... was actually a pretty neat place. The walls had framed pictures of the Beatles, BB King, and many other big artists that have come along.... along with a few instruments hung up on the brick. So, we stopped in there looking to find the Candle-light type of place in Eastern Europe, we've still yet to find it. Since we'd just left the ATM, and each had 3 1000 Koruna bills, we ordered our beers, the choices were Light or Dark...lol. When we went to pay with a 1000 Koruna bill the bartender/owner of the bar said he couldn't make change. So now you've got us staring at two full beers after an entire day on a train thinking, shit, we can't even drink... :-( But the guy was cool and said to have the beers, so we did. We sat there for awhile and when we left we told him we'd be back and we tried every day for the next three days to see if the place was open at all, and it never was again. We can't say we didn't try to hook the guy up, we really just wanted to pay what we owed and buy the man a beer for showing us the hospitality. I think our good karma is still intact enough though, even though we never did pay the guy back, since we tried so many times to do so.
After that we went back to the hostel, a huge one... pretty much a big ass party every night. Prague is a young person's party city, in every way. Kids can drink beer at 16 and hard alcohol at 18, so as one can imagine, the bars will have a much younger clientele in some cases. Our room was filled with 3 English guys, a guy from Amsterdam, and as funny as it sounds... A guy from Tennessee, Franklin, TN to be exact. Random, I know. We got in fairly late but sat on the porch of the hostel drinking budweisers for 30 Koruna, about $1.50 for a half liter, 22 ounce beer. Pretty good deal if you ask me... The hostel sold them out of a fridge that you just pull it out, pop the top off of it, and throw the guy working there a few coins... it was a sweet setup. That night we pretty much sat around in the outdoor party area drinking with people from pretty much EVERYWHERE. One guy we hung out with was an Englishman, who lives in Australia, who is in the end of a trip from China, to Russia, through Poland, and through other parts of Europe, before going to Greece and catching a plane to the UK to see his family he hasn't seen in ages. I thought our train trips were long, but he was catching trains that his ticket would say shit like 29 hours of travel time on one train...crazy.
We are now on the train from Prague to Munich, Germany... a 6 hour trip which is why I'm blogging the hell out of some stuff right now...lol. The Czech countryside is a beatiful scene from the train, Anthony's passed out again, imagine that.
Our first full day in Prague was spent doing all the touristy shit that the city has to offer, which is cool except for the fact that the only people we ran into, were tourists... which I don't care much for. Everyone pretty much spoke english there too, so no language barrier again. The hostel had a bbq for free, so as you can imagine, all the kids who are traveling with a small amount of money were there for some free sausage and rye bread. There were a ton of English guys, bunch of Americans, two Swedes, a few women from Canada, some Germans, and a few other people littered in here and there from all over... After the BBQ we went to have some real food, 2nd meal of the day if you add a sausage on a piece of bread together with a kabob we had earlier in the afternoon...lol. The only day in recent memory where we've eaten more than one meal. :-) Then we went to this bar that a bunch of people from the hostel were gonna meet up at... It's a karaoke joint, owned by a guy from Indiana, and the bar is ran by a big, crazy bastard from Amsterdam. I think it'd be a cool place if you want to feel like you're back in the states... because everyone there was a regular and were from the US. When the hostel crowd left the hostel and made their way up to the Blind Eye tavern, we were pretty beat so we ended up leaving... it seemed like too young and loud of a party than we wanted to deal with after the looooong day of sun and walking we'd endured up to that point. It was beautiful weather, but when running around in the hilly, cobble-stone streets of the city, can make it unbearably hot. We did get to a huge stairway that goes up to a castle... when we started up the stairs from Hell, I looked to my left and saw a quaint little pub/restaurant with two rocking chairs and a table in the shade. We decided to have a beer... or two. It ended up being a great spot. We saw all the tourists come around a corner and almost every time say, "shit", "oh God", "noooo" and pretty much all those other words that describe something you really don't want to do.
We stared at this lady with a paper hat on her head for a while and thought it would actually be cool to have one...lol. We decided we had no need to look that cool though...haha.
Our last night in Prague, we hung out with the dude from Tennessee and went to a local beer garden that was absolutely packed. We ended up at this smaller beer-garden, part of a restaurant that was connected to the big garden. After finding 3 chairs and a place to put them, we started to drink beer, and lots of it, while watching the Spain - Portugal match on a big screen. Myself and the other Tennessee feller made friends with a couple German ladies while sitting there, both very nice and quite attractive. We sat with them for a bit before going out separate ways and making our way back to the hostel. Where we sat around drinking with a new bunch of budget travelers than the previous night. I made very good friends with a beautiful French girl named Lorene, she'll probably be that one chick I'll remember from this trip that I would love to be able to meet again but most likely never will... oh well. We drank til 4am and woke up at 8am this morning to catch the early train to Munich... saying I feel like complete crap is probably a big understatement...haha.
The English guys we met ove the course of being in Prague, all said that the Czech people were always rude to them and didn't like to speak much english at all... after being around them for a few nights, I found them pretty loud and obnoxious (like I hear Americans are some times???) but for the most part, really cool and nice to all of us at the hostel... other than the loud part...haha. They always went on pub crawls and came back around 5am or close to it... sleeping with the window open, they usually woke me up before they even made it off the street to the hostel. Most clubs there don't even open until 1am... all the way through the week. I figure the person who wants to party and go out to clubs every night would be in heaven if they went to Prague.
Our last day, we took a trip on the train to the town of Kutna Hore' where we checked out a big cathedral and "The Bone Church" it was cool and nice to get away from the city a bit.
AND THEN IT HAPPENED.
We're waiting for the train back to Prague, when Anthony and this other guy look at eachother and are like, "holy shit, Anthony?" "Chris?" Yeah... no shit. We'd talked about this the previous day actually... The fact that we haven't ran into anyone we knew yet... since it's been my experience in life to run into random people I know in the strangest of places. So there we are, on a train platform, in a city the size of Forest Grove, OR or Jamestown, TN... and Anthony actually meets someone he knows there. The world is indeed, a really small f'n place. We sat with Chris and his wife on the train back to prague in awe that we would run into someone from the US that we actually knew. They were on their way to Vienna and Budapest and I told them how awesome of a time I was sure they'd have, since Budapest was the coolest place on earth as far as I'm concerned...haha.
While also on that train platform, I was sitting on a bench and a bird was situated above me and decided to piss right on my arm. After being all pissy for a while and using a bottle of water to wash my arm off, we moved to a different bench with no pigeons over head... We did however keep an eye on that little bastard in case he decided to screw with me again. Fast forward about 20 minutes, we're waiting on the train, and these two couple come and sit on the bench next to us... the one with the pigeon above....yes. So, we decided that we are bastards and didn't warn the people that they could possibly be in a pigeon-shit zone if they're not careful. So, we didn't warn them... and I said, watch, the hot one is totally gonna be the one that gets shit on... and then yes, a few minutes later Anthony looks up and says, oh shit, it's turning around... so we start giggling a bit and then see it happen again. Right on her hat, like napalm bird shit covering everything in site...haha. We tried not to laugh but we played it off like we were looking for another one above us.
My final thoughts on Prague:
I thought it was waaaaay too touristy for me, they are fixing a lot of issues with big buildings and bridges, which caused me to get fairly crappy pictures quite a bit... I didn't like that much at all. It is a beautiful city though, I think I'd go again, but I'd still be sure to hit up Budapest first if given the choice. The hostel we were in was probably my favorite part of being there, the common areas always had people around to chit chat with, and everyone was friendly... along with being able to grab a beer and sit around for really cheap. I don't have anything bad to say about Prague, but I thought I'd like it more than I did.
We just crossed into Germany, a place I once called home as a toddler, it's cool to be back. It'll be nice to be able to understand some of the people here, unlike everywhere we've been thus far.
We're now off to Munich, where we have two nights booked at a hostel, then a night in Heidelburg, then two days in Belgium, including the Rock-fest I'm sure I've told most people about... then off to Amsterdam for my 30th birthday. This is the first time we've actually been all booked up for more than a day or two since we started the journey, it's kinda nice, but now it seems like we're a bit limited if we find a place we'd like to be in longer. I'm sure we'll deal with it fine.
Ok, so I know I didn't update this at all while we were in Prague, but we kept pretty busy while we were there and I didn't like sitting around on the netbook while there was beer to be drank. Prague was another stop where we pretty much held to a strict liquid diet, as people say, Czech beer is good... I'll give them that, but it's not really anything to write home about. Personally, Anthony and Cliff both make better beers... but telling the Czech's their beer isn't totally awesome would probably open up another war or something crazy like that, so I'll just say, the beer was good enough. For the most part we drank Budweiser and Pilsner Urquell... Not the Bud we get back home, but the actual original Budweiser that was started here in the Czech Republic, they taste nothing alike. Beers are served with a huge head on them, but the glass usually has beer up to the .5 liter mark so it's ok... Apparently some of the American folks don't like that much head... once I figured it was supposed to be that way, it was cool with me.
So, our first night in Prague, we get in late because trains don't know how to be on time, ever. So our train left Budapest an hour and 30 minutes late, which got us into Prague around 11pm. We decided to see if we could find something to eat but again, only one meal that day since everything close to the place was closed or no longer serving food. Unlike the states, when it's late, bars stay open and serve alcohol, not food... they know their role it seems. We went to this place called music and blues bar... A joint owned by some old dude who was hanging out with his wife at a table, with another couple Englishmen sitting at another table. We had just went to an ATM to get some Czech currency and picked up 3000 Czech Koruna, the exchange rate is around 20-1... so 3000 Koruna was around $150, we both picked up this much and now have some left over, for 3 days in Prague, I figure that's pretty good.
The bar we went to, that was practically empty, and had no actual music anywhere in the vicinity... was actually a pretty neat place. The walls had framed pictures of the Beatles, BB King, and many other big artists that have come along.... along with a few instruments hung up on the brick. So, we stopped in there looking to find the Candle-light type of place in Eastern Europe, we've still yet to find it. Since we'd just left the ATM, and each had 3 1000 Koruna bills, we ordered our beers, the choices were Light or Dark...lol. When we went to pay with a 1000 Koruna bill the bartender/owner of the bar said he couldn't make change. So now you've got us staring at two full beers after an entire day on a train thinking, shit, we can't even drink... :-( But the guy was cool and said to have the beers, so we did. We sat there for awhile and when we left we told him we'd be back and we tried every day for the next three days to see if the place was open at all, and it never was again. We can't say we didn't try to hook the guy up, we really just wanted to pay what we owed and buy the man a beer for showing us the hospitality. I think our good karma is still intact enough though, even though we never did pay the guy back, since we tried so many times to do so.
After that we went back to the hostel, a huge one... pretty much a big ass party every night. Prague is a young person's party city, in every way. Kids can drink beer at 16 and hard alcohol at 18, so as one can imagine, the bars will have a much younger clientele in some cases. Our room was filled with 3 English guys, a guy from Amsterdam, and as funny as it sounds... A guy from Tennessee, Franklin, TN to be exact. Random, I know. We got in fairly late but sat on the porch of the hostel drinking budweisers for 30 Koruna, about $1.50 for a half liter, 22 ounce beer. Pretty good deal if you ask me... The hostel sold them out of a fridge that you just pull it out, pop the top off of it, and throw the guy working there a few coins... it was a sweet setup. That night we pretty much sat around in the outdoor party area drinking with people from pretty much EVERYWHERE. One guy we hung out with was an Englishman, who lives in Australia, who is in the end of a trip from China, to Russia, through Poland, and through other parts of Europe, before going to Greece and catching a plane to the UK to see his family he hasn't seen in ages. I thought our train trips were long, but he was catching trains that his ticket would say shit like 29 hours of travel time on one train...crazy.
We are now on the train from Prague to Munich, Germany... a 6 hour trip which is why I'm blogging the hell out of some stuff right now...lol. The Czech countryside is a beatiful scene from the train, Anthony's passed out again, imagine that.
Our first full day in Prague was spent doing all the touristy shit that the city has to offer, which is cool except for the fact that the only people we ran into, were tourists... which I don't care much for. Everyone pretty much spoke english there too, so no language barrier again. The hostel had a bbq for free, so as you can imagine, all the kids who are traveling with a small amount of money were there for some free sausage and rye bread. There were a ton of English guys, bunch of Americans, two Swedes, a few women from Canada, some Germans, and a few other people littered in here and there from all over... After the BBQ we went to have some real food, 2nd meal of the day if you add a sausage on a piece of bread together with a kabob we had earlier in the afternoon...lol. The only day in recent memory where we've eaten more than one meal. :-) Then we went to this bar that a bunch of people from the hostel were gonna meet up at... It's a karaoke joint, owned by a guy from Indiana, and the bar is ran by a big, crazy bastard from Amsterdam. I think it'd be a cool place if you want to feel like you're back in the states... because everyone there was a regular and were from the US. When the hostel crowd left the hostel and made their way up to the Blind Eye tavern, we were pretty beat so we ended up leaving... it seemed like too young and loud of a party than we wanted to deal with after the looooong day of sun and walking we'd endured up to that point. It was beautiful weather, but when running around in the hilly, cobble-stone streets of the city, can make it unbearably hot. We did get to a huge stairway that goes up to a castle... when we started up the stairs from Hell, I looked to my left and saw a quaint little pub/restaurant with two rocking chairs and a table in the shade. We decided to have a beer... or two. It ended up being a great spot. We saw all the tourists come around a corner and almost every time say, "shit", "oh God", "noooo" and pretty much all those other words that describe something you really don't want to do.
We stared at this lady with a paper hat on her head for a while and thought it would actually be cool to have one...lol. We decided we had no need to look that cool though...haha.
Our last night in Prague, we hung out with the dude from Tennessee and went to a local beer garden that was absolutely packed. We ended up at this smaller beer-garden, part of a restaurant that was connected to the big garden. After finding 3 chairs and a place to put them, we started to drink beer, and lots of it, while watching the Spain - Portugal match on a big screen. Myself and the other Tennessee feller made friends with a couple German ladies while sitting there, both very nice and quite attractive. We sat with them for a bit before going out separate ways and making our way back to the hostel. Where we sat around drinking with a new bunch of budget travelers than the previous night. I made very good friends with a beautiful French girl named Lorene, she'll probably be that one chick I'll remember from this trip that I would love to be able to meet again but most likely never will... oh well. We drank til 4am and woke up at 8am this morning to catch the early train to Munich... saying I feel like complete crap is probably a big understatement...haha.
The English guys we met ove the course of being in Prague, all said that the Czech people were always rude to them and didn't like to speak much english at all... after being around them for a few nights, I found them pretty loud and obnoxious (like I hear Americans are some times???) but for the most part, really cool and nice to all of us at the hostel... other than the loud part...haha. They always went on pub crawls and came back around 5am or close to it... sleeping with the window open, they usually woke me up before they even made it off the street to the hostel. Most clubs there don't even open until 1am... all the way through the week. I figure the person who wants to party and go out to clubs every night would be in heaven if they went to Prague.
Our last day, we took a trip on the train to the town of Kutna Hore' where we checked out a big cathedral and "The Bone Church" it was cool and nice to get away from the city a bit.
AND THEN IT HAPPENED.
We're waiting for the train back to Prague, when Anthony and this other guy look at eachother and are like, "holy shit, Anthony?" "Chris?" Yeah... no shit. We'd talked about this the previous day actually... The fact that we haven't ran into anyone we knew yet... since it's been my experience in life to run into random people I know in the strangest of places. So there we are, on a train platform, in a city the size of Forest Grove, OR or Jamestown, TN... and Anthony actually meets someone he knows there. The world is indeed, a really small f'n place. We sat with Chris and his wife on the train back to prague in awe that we would run into someone from the US that we actually knew. They were on their way to Vienna and Budapest and I told them how awesome of a time I was sure they'd have, since Budapest was the coolest place on earth as far as I'm concerned...haha.
While also on that train platform, I was sitting on a bench and a bird was situated above me and decided to piss right on my arm. After being all pissy for a while and using a bottle of water to wash my arm off, we moved to a different bench with no pigeons over head... We did however keep an eye on that little bastard in case he decided to screw with me again. Fast forward about 20 minutes, we're waiting on the train, and these two couple come and sit on the bench next to us... the one with the pigeon above....yes. So, we decided that we are bastards and didn't warn the people that they could possibly be in a pigeon-shit zone if they're not careful. So, we didn't warn them... and I said, watch, the hot one is totally gonna be the one that gets shit on... and then yes, a few minutes later Anthony looks up and says, oh shit, it's turning around... so we start giggling a bit and then see it happen again. Right on her hat, like napalm bird shit covering everything in site...haha. We tried not to laugh but we played it off like we were looking for another one above us.
My final thoughts on Prague:
I thought it was waaaaay too touristy for me, they are fixing a lot of issues with big buildings and bridges, which caused me to get fairly crappy pictures quite a bit... I didn't like that much at all. It is a beautiful city though, I think I'd go again, but I'd still be sure to hit up Budapest first if given the choice. The hostel we were in was probably my favorite part of being there, the common areas always had people around to chit chat with, and everyone was friendly... along with being able to grab a beer and sit around for really cheap. I don't have anything bad to say about Prague, but I thought I'd like it more than I did.
We just crossed into Germany, a place I once called home as a toddler, it's cool to be back. It'll be nice to be able to understand some of the people here, unlike everywhere we've been thus far.
We're now off to Munich, where we have two nights booked at a hostel, then a night in Heidelburg, then two days in Belgium, including the Rock-fest I'm sure I've told most people about... then off to Amsterdam for my 30th birthday. This is the first time we've actually been all booked up for more than a day or two since we started the journey, it's kinda nice, but now it seems like we're a bit limited if we find a place we'd like to be in longer. I'm sure we'll deal with it fine.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Pics from Budapest
lol, view from whee we stood at a random and free Rod Stewart concert.
Heroes Square.
Random wedding photos being taken, the bride and groom looked incredible.
A labyrinth we checked out under Buda Castle.
Nikki, one of our roommates... the wtf look is due to the weird lady with the wig who can barely be seen on the right side of the pic.
Death, chillin on a park bench.
A pic of the Danube River, separating Buda from Pest.
The typical breakfast for us.
Heroes Square.
Random wedding photos being taken, the bride and groom looked incredible.
A labyrinth we checked out under Buda Castle.
Nikki, one of our roommates... the wtf look is due to the weird lady with the wig who can barely be seen on the right side of the pic.
Death, chillin on a park bench.
A pic of the Danube River, separating Buda from Pest.
The typical breakfast for us.
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