So Shannon and I just finished up our brief tour of Amsterdam, and I think it's probably best we did keep it brief. It's a shame that so many travelers only see the one small part of the Netherlands, especially when a good part of feel seeing Amsterdam is the equivalent of seeing the whole country. We would have loved to do more around the country, but travel times, budgets, etc. just didn't allow it. So, my apologies to all the Dutch out there and those who sympathize with their plight of being seen only as a bunch of pot-smoking-prostitute-pedaling-party-happy folk. I know that's not the case, but it's all I had time to take in.
And what did we do and see? I'd like to think we did it all, but there's far too much to ever do, and much of it I would like to avoid from ever being written down on any kind of permanent record of mine, be it a travel blog, government file, or even a cocktail napkin that might fall into the wrong hands. I will say though that we spent far too much money one fun evening out, and took in one of the live sex shows you so often hear of and think to yourself how you'd never lower yourself to watch something like that. Well, it's probably best you don't, cause while it was fun to do, I don't think the "shock" or "comedy" of the event was enough to cover it's nastily high ticket cost (and yes, I do feel the ticket price was indeed the "nastiest" part of the evening).
So what else about Amsterdam was there? Well, we saw lots of the canals, Anne Franks's house, a comedy show put on by a bunch of American improv comedians, and we went to a jazz club. I'm not sure if it was the area we were in, or if this is just how Amsterdam works, but there is a bucket-load of American tourists around town. Of the 8 other people in our dorm room, 7 of them were from the US, and I think all of them were on their first trip outside the US (or at least North America). Even the comedy show we watched was all about Americans visiting Amsterdam and figuring out the "Dutch" ways of things. Now, I know I don't want to sound prejudiced here, because every nationality could in some way be catagorized negatively on the way they travel (loud party girl? Aussie. Talking about football and being drunk? British. Naked and middle aged on a beach? German. I'm sure I've put myself in countless Canadian stereotyped situations), but when you're surrounded by a mojority of one nationality (that isn't native to that country), and there's plenty of jovial mockery already taking place of this nationality, it's hard not to jump on board and start mocking as well. Two obese people talking about how hard it is to walk around town? Silly Americans. Can't stop talking about the legality of pot and the obscenity of sex for sale? Silly (probably christian) Americans. Can't stop saying things like "yeah it's good, but in America we do it like this." Silly Americans. I dunno, maybe I'm just a jerk.
(To be fair Shannon and I met plenty of great Americans, so it's not just rude but incorrect of me to speak like this of the whole traveling population. I suppose it just makes for interesting blogging).
On our way out of town, as we headed to catch our bus to Paris, Shannon and I met a Belgian guy, who was filming a promo or application video for a reality TV show he was trying to start. Basically, the guy wanted to meet up with random travelers and travel along with them, filming them as they went and trying to get some interesting drama or humour out of their experiences. The guy unfortunately had already found a person or two heading east to Germany, and not our direction. We were pretty sure if we didn't already have $400 invested in buses and hotels we would have turned tail and hopped on board with the gang he was assembling, and I'll be heart broken to see his show on air one day and think "that could have been me!"
Traveling Tangent - Tipping
Over Christmas, I got into a slight argument with my brother over the notion of tipping. He felt it was a positive thing, and I felt otherwise (though he may just have been trying to goad me into a ridiculous argument for fun). Traveling though has further asserted my position that tipping is a terrible way to reward behaviour. Take this example:
You're at a crowded bar, you push and jostle your way to buy a beer, and after being overlooked a dozen times by the bartender, you finally get your drink.
The next day, you realize you don't want to leave the town your visiting, but it's too late to change your bus ticket. You head to the station and the nice guy behind the counter bends all the rules in place to get you a new ticket.
Who should be tipped?
I'm personally pretty tired of throwing money at folks who get tipped because their "supposed" to be, yet have no way to thank and subsequently encourage great service and work from others. And so, I've basically stopped tipping on this trip, saving us $100-$200 so far. No change in the service we get, though I'm sure a few servers have been a little peeved at us. But I mean really, do I need to start throwing money around so strangers I'll never see again feel a little better about themselves? Not on this trip.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Breaking Down The Wall
So here we are, hanging out in Berlin. Most times I've written on the blog have detailed several spots Shannon and I have reached, but I think (other than from back in Korea) this is the first time we've stayed put for some time while on the road. In fact, we've been in Berlin for nearly 2 weeks, and I can't think of many other places I'd have liked to stay at for this long. Maybe some small town surf location in Indonesia, but I think Shannon would lose her mind in boredom there, so Berlin is probably still the best bet.
Our good friend Kris put us up for the first three nights here, which helped get a better feel for the city, though I think if you shadowed a local for weeks on end you'd still miss out on so much here. From "pay what you like" wine bars to abondoned shopping malls turned art slum turned night club, we've done our best to see it all.
Un-Yon! Un-Yon! Un-Yon! Un-Yon!
One of the strangest yet coolest things we saw was a local soccer game. It's a tier III team, which Kris described to me as the equivalent of a small town WHL hockey team, so not very prestigious. The fans however refuse to see it that way, and their stadium holds something like 10 or 15 thousand people. They cheer like madmen, not a single person doesn't wear the right colours for each game, and they have their own hooligans - the guys who enlist themselves into the position of beating the tar out of hooligan fans from the opposing teams. Oh, and when their stadium needed renovations, the fans took it upon themselves to donate time and fix it up on their own.
We caught the game where they were poised to move up to league II, which is much closer to being the equivalent of the NHL at home. They won, and so Shannon and I rushed the field at the end of the game, chanting "Union!" (pronounced un-yon in German).
The Art House (not sure if that's the actual name of it) was another pretty snazzy spot we saw. The srory I'm told is that it used to be a shopping centre, then was abandoned sometime in the communist era. Artist and other squatters settled in, turning it into a 4 level concrete graffiti-filled flop house. As the neighbourhood became more trendy, it got harder and harder for the vagabonds to stay put there, but they managed to get their stuff together well enough to turn it into a mixture of night clubs, bars and music lounges, along with a few art studios set up to keep the art guys in business. It's a little freaky moving floor to floor in what could be a rapist's favourite hangout in any other town, but once you get over the concrete graffiti interiors and toilets that have only occasional smatterings of useable light, it's quite the kitschy place.
We also made sure to hit pleny of the more traditional tourists sites, from museums and historical sites (like Nazi bookburning locations and plenty of Soviet east-west sights), plus we watched a Brahms concert performance at the Konzerthaus by the Konzerthaus symphony members. We stuck out a little bit in our backpacker-formal attire, but no one seemed to mind too much.
So yeah, Berlin's a pretty cool place. Walking along the remaining parts of the old Berlin wall, seeing some of the eerie artifacts from the Nazi era, walking through the train station at night seeing the strange mix of anarchists and punks - it's hard not to get into this place. Our next stop is Amsterdam which I'm sure I'll have plenty of fun things to say about as well, though I have a feeling it will be a little less culture-oriented, and a little more night-life related. Hmmm, should be fun.
Our good friend Kris put us up for the first three nights here, which helped get a better feel for the city, though I think if you shadowed a local for weeks on end you'd still miss out on so much here. From "pay what you like" wine bars to abondoned shopping malls turned art slum turned night club, we've done our best to see it all.
Un-Yon! Un-Yon! Un-Yon! Un-Yon!
One of the strangest yet coolest things we saw was a local soccer game. It's a tier III team, which Kris described to me as the equivalent of a small town WHL hockey team, so not very prestigious. The fans however refuse to see it that way, and their stadium holds something like 10 or 15 thousand people. They cheer like madmen, not a single person doesn't wear the right colours for each game, and they have their own hooligans - the guys who enlist themselves into the position of beating the tar out of hooligan fans from the opposing teams. Oh, and when their stadium needed renovations, the fans took it upon themselves to donate time and fix it up on their own.
We caught the game where they were poised to move up to league II, which is much closer to being the equivalent of the NHL at home. They won, and so Shannon and I rushed the field at the end of the game, chanting "Union!" (pronounced un-yon in German).
The Art House (not sure if that's the actual name of it) was another pretty snazzy spot we saw. The srory I'm told is that it used to be a shopping centre, then was abandoned sometime in the communist era. Artist and other squatters settled in, turning it into a 4 level concrete graffiti-filled flop house. As the neighbourhood became more trendy, it got harder and harder for the vagabonds to stay put there, but they managed to get their stuff together well enough to turn it into a mixture of night clubs, bars and music lounges, along with a few art studios set up to keep the art guys in business. It's a little freaky moving floor to floor in what could be a rapist's favourite hangout in any other town, but once you get over the concrete graffiti interiors and toilets that have only occasional smatterings of useable light, it's quite the kitschy place.
We also made sure to hit pleny of the more traditional tourists sites, from museums and historical sites (like Nazi bookburning locations and plenty of Soviet east-west sights), plus we watched a Brahms concert performance at the Konzerthaus by the Konzerthaus symphony members. We stuck out a little bit in our backpacker-formal attire, but no one seemed to mind too much.
So yeah, Berlin's a pretty cool place. Walking along the remaining parts of the old Berlin wall, seeing some of the eerie artifacts from the Nazi era, walking through the train station at night seeing the strange mix of anarchists and punks - it's hard not to get into this place. Our next stop is Amsterdam which I'm sure I'll have plenty of fun things to say about as well, though I have a feeling it will be a little less culture-oriented, and a little more night-life related. Hmmm, should be fun.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Czech This Out
There's so many ways to spin the Czech Republic's name into a witty title, but I think I took the best, least embarrassing way and didn't try to make anything too goofy. The country (or at least Prague) is filled with cheesy shirts saying things like "Czech Me Out", so it seemed a little fitting that I do my best to fit in.
So, after our stint in Romania spent chasing stories and ghosts of Dracula and Vlad Tepes, Shannon and I caught the train to Krakow, in Poland. We made a rather sudden and drastic change to our original plan - originally we had planned on traveling west from Romania through Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia, then traveling north into the Czech Republic. This plan, nice as it was, meant lots of short little stops, with 2-3 nights per city in what both of us felt was more of a "check that one off the list" kind of travel, rather than making the most of our time on the road and visiting places we really wanted to see. And so, we went north to Krakow so that we could see Auschuwitz.
Krakow itself is a pretty fantastic city, with plenty of that eastern-European medieval feel to it. Of course, I'm sure there's a proper way to describe this kind of big-brick pre-war architecture, but I'm completely clueless on how best to do it. I suppose it's best to think of large open squares with plenty of church towers, horse and carriages, and lots of cobble-stone roadways.
An hour outside of town is Auschuwitz, the largest of the Nazi concentration camps. It was a trip well worth the time and effort, though it's impact was extremely diminished by the hordes of high school students on field trips that same day. Most of the most imporant sights were within the basements of buildings or in crowded bunk-bed rooms, meaning you had to fight for each inch of space amongst gangs of pimply-faced boys and overly-perfumed girls, all of whom took as little notice as possible of the savage history that surrounded them and gave most of their attention towards each other or to making fun of the historical situations. I suppose I shouldn't be too hard on these goofy young kids - after all, I hardly would have been any better at their age, but it certainly took a lot away from such an emotional and significant site. Anyway, by the end of the day we managed to get a little "alone time" from the damn wiener kids and give some real appreciation for the magnatude of how many people died there. Since visiting Auschuwitz and talking about the concentration camps, I'm amazed at how many people have family so directly affected by what happened in Poland (and other places) so long ago.
After Poland, we caught a train to Prague, which prior to visiting, and even now I suppose, I knew/know so little of. I think Prague is part of Bavaria, that beer-drinking culture part of the world in both Germany and other countries, where the folks seem to be a little larger and the leider-hosen a little more out there. And based on the touts trying to sell you things, classical music sure has some strong roots in Prague.
You know, you can always get a pretty good idea of what a place is about based on what people are trying to sell you. In every town, on any busy street, there always seems to be someone out handing flyers to people or wearing a sandwich board, telling you what's for sale and what you should be visiting. I think I learned more about the Czech Republic in this way than any other, and from this, I think I would size the country up as being very into classical music, big on it's beer, proud of its communist heritage, and full of people who love making glass souvenirs. If there is anyone who disagrees with this, take it up with the tourist folks trolling the streets of Prague.
We're in Berlin now, which is one kick-ass town, and I'm pretty happy to be here. I'll take a bit more time to write about Berlin later, which I should be able to do this week, as we're staying a few more days and soaking it up as much as possible. After that, it's Amsterdam, then London, Iceland, and back to Canada. It's getting close to the end, and while I'm certainly not ready to leave, it has been getting a little tiring at times being on the road. Earlier I mentioned how most of my clothes have been somewhat destroyed from backpacking, well now I'm noticing my whole body falling apart on me. Well, not falling apart, but melting away. I've lost a few pounds on the road, but I certainly haven't lost any fat. So instead, I've developed arms that look more like fingers, and a chest that most 12 year olds would scoff at. By no means was I a monster coming out of Korea, but 6 months in the gym followed by 6 months lifiting beer mugs makes for one bad before-and-after photo spread. Fortunately the tabloid types and there "who let themselves go this month" magazine spreads won't be doing a special on me, but its something I've certainly noticed myself, and I'm looking forward to remedying back in Canada.
So, after our stint in Romania spent chasing stories and ghosts of Dracula and Vlad Tepes, Shannon and I caught the train to Krakow, in Poland. We made a rather sudden and drastic change to our original plan - originally we had planned on traveling west from Romania through Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia, then traveling north into the Czech Republic. This plan, nice as it was, meant lots of short little stops, with 2-3 nights per city in what both of us felt was more of a "check that one off the list" kind of travel, rather than making the most of our time on the road and visiting places we really wanted to see. And so, we went north to Krakow so that we could see Auschuwitz.
Krakow itself is a pretty fantastic city, with plenty of that eastern-European medieval feel to it. Of course, I'm sure there's a proper way to describe this kind of big-brick pre-war architecture, but I'm completely clueless on how best to do it. I suppose it's best to think of large open squares with plenty of church towers, horse and carriages, and lots of cobble-stone roadways.
An hour outside of town is Auschuwitz, the largest of the Nazi concentration camps. It was a trip well worth the time and effort, though it's impact was extremely diminished by the hordes of high school students on field trips that same day. Most of the most imporant sights were within the basements of buildings or in crowded bunk-bed rooms, meaning you had to fight for each inch of space amongst gangs of pimply-faced boys and overly-perfumed girls, all of whom took as little notice as possible of the savage history that surrounded them and gave most of their attention towards each other or to making fun of the historical situations. I suppose I shouldn't be too hard on these goofy young kids - after all, I hardly would have been any better at their age, but it certainly took a lot away from such an emotional and significant site. Anyway, by the end of the day we managed to get a little "alone time" from the damn wiener kids and give some real appreciation for the magnatude of how many people died there. Since visiting Auschuwitz and talking about the concentration camps, I'm amazed at how many people have family so directly affected by what happened in Poland (and other places) so long ago.
After Poland, we caught a train to Prague, which prior to visiting, and even now I suppose, I knew/know so little of. I think Prague is part of Bavaria, that beer-drinking culture part of the world in both Germany and other countries, where the folks seem to be a little larger and the leider-hosen a little more out there. And based on the touts trying to sell you things, classical music sure has some strong roots in Prague.
You know, you can always get a pretty good idea of what a place is about based on what people are trying to sell you. In every town, on any busy street, there always seems to be someone out handing flyers to people or wearing a sandwich board, telling you what's for sale and what you should be visiting. I think I learned more about the Czech Republic in this way than any other, and from this, I think I would size the country up as being very into classical music, big on it's beer, proud of its communist heritage, and full of people who love making glass souvenirs. If there is anyone who disagrees with this, take it up with the tourist folks trolling the streets of Prague.
We're in Berlin now, which is one kick-ass town, and I'm pretty happy to be here. I'll take a bit more time to write about Berlin later, which I should be able to do this week, as we're staying a few more days and soaking it up as much as possible. After that, it's Amsterdam, then London, Iceland, and back to Canada. It's getting close to the end, and while I'm certainly not ready to leave, it has been getting a little tiring at times being on the road. Earlier I mentioned how most of my clothes have been somewhat destroyed from backpacking, well now I'm noticing my whole body falling apart on me. Well, not falling apart, but melting away. I've lost a few pounds on the road, but I certainly haven't lost any fat. So instead, I've developed arms that look more like fingers, and a chest that most 12 year olds would scoff at. By no means was I a monster coming out of Korea, but 6 months in the gym followed by 6 months lifiting beer mugs makes for one bad before-and-after photo spread. Fortunately the tabloid types and there "who let themselves go this month" magazine spreads won't be doing a special on me, but its something I've certainly noticed myself, and I'm looking forward to remedying back in Canada.
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