AmsterDamn That's Cool! Pt. 1

Cologne gave us a nice, relaxed start to our trip. Our next stop, Amsterdam, kicked it into high gear.

Seriously, this city is COOL. Many, many, many travelers already know this. It isn't exactly a well kept secret. Amsterdam is, after all, the city of a gillion bicycles, legalized marijuana, crazy early 20th century artists, and retail-style prostitution. Seriously, how much cooler can you get?

We rolled the dice on accommodations when we headed from Cologne to Amsterdam, and really weren't sure what we would be able to find. Happily the tourist info drones were able to find us a hostel along a canal (which really isn't optional) just a stones throw from the Red Light District. Classy!


Okay, so this isn't a picture of our hostel, but the hostel looked exactly like it. Canal in front, narrow tilty houses on either side, bicycles everywhere, squinty Glen glowering at the camera...

The thing that struck us immediately as we started walking around were the columns of buildings. Amsterdam embodies the concept of vertical living. The flats are crammed together, one butting immediately up against the other, with hoist beams at the top so that large objects like furniture can be lifted in through windows instead of through the impossibly narrow staircases. I love those hoists. I wish we had hoists here just so that I could say "hoist" more often.


Hoist!

The houses tilt into the street and away from the street. They lean against one another for support. To hell with building codes! These houses are going to sway in any direction they see fit, and the humans can just work around them. There is something clausterphobically charming about it all, as though the city crammed as much cuteness into as small a square footage as possible. They're positively Falstaffian, drunken and merry and smiling.



Be wary, lest a house fall on you.

Really, the whole city evokes that lovable, complex character. It's smiles and oddities make no effort to conceal its equally cheerful radicalism. This place has been a brewing vat of economic, social, and artistic reform for much of its history. They embrace the gritty along with the elegant, a fact that was visually apparent while we were walking the canals in the evening. Nighttime windows in the Red Light district were as likely to reveal a beautiful apartment with crystal chandeliers as they were a gyrating prostitute.

Really, the best place to get a feel for these weird juxtapositions was the Red Light District. Marked off from the regular streets by knee high posts with red lights around the top, this largely pedestrian area is remarkably clean and polite. Yes, there are sex shops all over the place. Yes, at night the ground-floor windows open to reveal scantily clad women selling their...*ahem*...wares. But there were also sights like this:



Not half bad, eh? It was a remarkably nifty place to be in, with more of an easy going boho feel than a sexually seething stewpot.

That being said, the prostitutes in windows were hilarious. Most of them were in bikinis or lingerie sets with furry boots (!) or strappy heels. Some of them were putting on a little pouty performance for potential customers. We walked past three side-by-side windows, each with a girl sporting a typical "naughty XYZ" type outfit. They were tapping on the glass to attract attention and waving at passers by. It made me think of a fishbowl, and I wanted to see if there was some way of sprinkling nibblies through the top of the glass panes. Funniest of all were the Ones Who Don't Give A Damn. These ladies lounge about in the most unflattering poses, chain smoking and yammering on their cell phones or to one another. I imagine that the ones who put in more of an effort got more customers.

In about 90% of the prostitute windows you can see an industrial type bed, usually with a satin spread in some lurid jewel tone, and the hip-height sink used to wash the customer's junk prior to servicing. We did see the occasional transaction - a customer would go to their door, words would be exchanged, then the lady would yank the curtains shut. Yup, that's right folks! The deed is done about five feet away from the sidewalk. You can't hear anything - those windows are as sound-proofed as they come. One evening we even got to see a customer being rejected! He was at the door talking with the prostitute, who looked supremely unimpressed. She leaned with her elbow against the door jamb, pursing her lips and shaking her head "no no no". Eventually the rejected customer shrugged and walked off, and the lady returned to her window. I would love to know what his business proposition was.

The tourists' mental picture of the Red Light District is usually intimately (har har) tied to legalized marijuana sales. This is somewhat misleading: there are many stores outside the Red Light District where you can buy weed as well. Indeed, the whole of central Amsterdam is peppered with "Coffeeshops" where you can pop in for an afternoon pick-me-up of a cappuccino, a joint, and maybe a hash brownie if you are feeling peckish. Seriously. Coffeeshops are NOT to be confused with Cafés, where your frothy latte will be accompanied with a regular scone-with-jam, with nary a bong in sight.

During our second day after a rather afternoon of sight seeing, we were walking along one canal that had about six coffeeshops along a stretch no more than 100 meters long. People were hanging out on the coffeeshop patios, chatting amicably. We peered in through windows hazy with smoke scum to see remarkably pleasant little establishments, and [POST EDITED FOR ADULT CONTENT].

Needless to say we were really hungry. Although Amsterdam now has a reputation for being the destination for the finest Indonesian food outside of South West Asia, we were hoping to find more typically Dutch-type fare. Our search took some time, however this was not due to any difficulty in reading the menus; being in prime tourist territory, there were more signs in English than in Dutch. There were also more western themed bars, Indian restaurants, and Argentinian steakhouses than eateries with the fish-and-salt packed Dutch fare. We prevailed, eventually settling on croquettes and really good beer. But really, if you want to find traditional Dutch food, head to the towns outside of Amsterdam. It's worth the bus fare.

More Amsterdam to come!

Redux: Köln - Part 2

You really didn't think that I'd stop at Köln Part 1, did you?

You did? Well, I suppose I can't lay any blame after taking so long to get this post going. But posts shall be delivered, and this is part of the delivery.

Cologne is known for its cathedral. It appears, however, that it is not known for much more than its cathedral. This is a shame, because it is a lovely, chilled out place in which to spend a few days.

Glen and I attended an evening mass at the cathedral, to get an even better feel for it, and afterwards wandered out in hunt of food and drink. You see, in Germany, you are allowed to drink openly on the streets.

Allow me to repeat that: German laws permit people to drink on the streets.

For Canadian prairie-born travelers, this is a novelty that bears noting. How often have you been out on a walk, or on a pick-nick, or at a similar event in a public place and thought "it's such a lovely day/evening! A nice glass of wine/beer would be excellent right about now! It's a shame we can't have a responsible drink out in public." It seems, however, that the prudish, puritan spirit of our pioneer forbears is still alive and well as our legislators feel there is no way for people to be allowed to have a drink out in public without becoming slavering, foolish, drunken hooligans.

Do you know what was distinctly absent in Cologne, and just about everywhere else in Germany*? Slavering, foolish, drunken hooligans. This may be because the German liver is capable of filtering massive amounts of alcohol and rendering the booze to an inert state. It may also be because they often drink to enjoy the taste of their fine brew rather than to get staggering drunk.

Anyway, back on topic: we went questing about for food and drink, and did a bit of sightseeing while we were at it. Cologne has a beautiful riverfront where the general population goes to relax.



We came across many open-air restaurants, street musicians (including a particularly wonderful jazz band with a New Orleans feel playing in a square next to a fountain), and our first sample of lovely European buildings.



They're so narrow! And tall! And pink!

The city was conspiring to make us feel like we belonged there. We even found gnomes. Gnomes! Gnomes in stone!



And if that wasn't enough, there are also remnants of Roman colonization in the form of a beautifully preserved mosiac dining room floor (peered at through the museum's windows), and this gate arch which is on the same square as the cathedral:



Among all these fantastic sights, we did find our street food and drink. In fact, we found much better than that - we found an entire wine festival!




We started off with food - Glen had his first wurst of the trip and I tried frickadeller. The latter often translated as 'meatball', but it's more of a beautifully spiced and fried ground meat patty. We rinsed our hasty and tasty food down with wine (of course). Being in Germany - and at one point in history, in the Roman Empire, we did as Germans/Romans do and hunted through the stalls for some sweet white wine. We found it. We drank it. It was heavenly; sweet without being syrupy, tooth-achingly cold, and served in a proper glass. The stalls all had a wine glass deposit system which ensured that we could enjoy our vintage in a nice fluted glass instead of a plastic cup. The abomination of the plastic cup is usually what you can expect in any sort of outdoor beer garden in Edmonton. This was much classier.

After wandering around the wine stalls for a bit, we decided to meander back to the hotel via the riverside walk. Glen felt it only appropriate that we do this while sipping our first Beer Out In Public. A quick stop in a convenience store provided said beer, and the nice fellow at the counter was quite amused that we found drinking on the street to be so novel. We chatted briefly about our trip, and he told us that "Cologne is where you find real Germany. Laid back, know how to relax...not as busy as Berlin. People there rush around to much. People here just like to sip a beer and relax by the riverside."

They do indeed. So did we. Next time we find ourselves in this town, we'll take a little longer, wander a little more slowly, and spend a couple more days poking about and enjoying the riverside.

That night we slept solidly, ate another fantastic breakfast in the lovely little grotto room, and attended the guided English tour of the cathedral (detailed in the previous post). Afterward, our packs went back on our backs, and we hopped a train out of town.

On to Amsterdam!


*With the exception of the nightclub areas of larger cities. Predictably, there were a few revellers staggering out of the bars, but not nearly as many as there are on Edmonton's Whyte Avenue on a Thursday night.

Redux: Köln - Part 1

It is true: I have already blogged about Köln, aka Cologne. This time, however, I can put in our own photos! This is sufficiently monumental to warrant revisiting the Cologne post, so here we go:

Cologne was our first stop after landing in Frankfurt. As soon as the airplane landed, we bee-lined to the airport train station, avoided getting ripped off by some random guy trying to sell train tickets he "couldn't use", and had the nice man at the DeutchBahn (DB) help us with purchasing our tickets to Cologne. We were far too confused to figure out the train ticket booth at that point, so standing in line and waiting for a human being to process the transaction was worthwhile.

Two and a half hours after getting off the train, we were in Cologne. It was there, in the bustling Cologne hauptbahnhof, we first encountered a singularly intoxicating thread that wound through our entire trip.

Bread.

The Germans, like most Europeans, treat bread with the love and respect it deserves. They have bakeries everywhere, and in that train station alone we ran into at least three, all pulling fresh loaves, buns, pretzels, pastries, and other dough-based wonders out of their ovens. We were very hungry. The sandwiches at the third bakery didn't stand a chance.

Our B&B was only two blocks away from the train station. We passed two more bakeries on our way there.

The B&B (called 'pension' in ze deutch), was a delight. It was quiet, comfortable, clean, and the staff were helpful. The delicious and ample breakfast was served in this delightful, grotto-like room which had an equally pretty garden patio out the back door:


We arrived in Cologne in the early afternoon, and after a power nap (and some blank, frog-eyed staring at the wall) to fight off jet lag, we headed out to explore the city's main attraction: the Cologne Cathedral. It is one of the best examples of gothic architecture in Europe, Glen had studied it in art history, and we were determined to do it justice.

The cathedral, just off of the main square and smack outside the main train station, is huge. From the exterior it is an imposing mountain of black stone that dominates the centre square. Ancient stone weathered black contrasts sharply against new stone used in restoration. It creates an odd, mottled look with the occasional white stone against the black, and new white statues flashing alongside their original patinaed mates. It is a marvel of columns, spires, statues, and stone lace.

Did I mention that it's huge? Our impression of the outside was as follows:



Oooooooohhhhhh....

Impossibly, it feels even larger from the inside. We had quite a bit of time to explore the interior, as we attended mass there that evening and the following morning took a guided tour of the church (thoughtfully provided in English). This place is a marvel of architecture. It was started in the thirteenth century and was not completed until the late 1800s. When the construction on it began, the architectural innovations being developed at the time allowed it to accommodate huge windows that flooded the interior with light. The delicate columns and arch ribbings soar up and up and up, making you feel like a tiny inhabitant of an immense, light-filled forest. It is beautifully meditative.



The art on the interior is just as magnificent. We were fortunate enough to be there during the exhibit of the Rubens tapestries, which are only on display three weeks out of the year. I found the medieval statuary around the central nave and altar to be the most interesting. The ones nearest the congregation look grayed and somewhat dull, which is due entirely to the pancake-like layer of dust on them. Apparently the previous building master was concerned that any dusting would remove particles of original paint, and simply let the dust build up. Fortunately, the current building mistress has more sense. All of them are being cleaned and restored. The statues that have been properly dusted glow with beautiful, lifelike tones and ornate details on their robes, which are just barely distinguishable under the dust on the statues that have not yet been cleaned.

The remainder of the cathedral was bursting with the expected stained glass, tombs, statues, and mosaics. The item that attracts the most attention, however, is the reliquary holding the supposed Bones of the Magi. This sucker is big and gold. Really gold. The majority of the reliquary is made of gold plated silver, studded with precious gems:




The faceplate, however, is not gold plated silver. It is solid gold. A big, big hunk of solid gold (with the exception of the bits which are covered in MORE precious stones):



Really, you can never have enough precious stones.

We spend a considerable amount of time crawling around the interior and exterior of this place, and loved every minute of it. You'll simply have to wait until the next post to read about it!

Necessity creates a change in format!

Oh, isn't that just the most nonsensical and exciting title you've ever read? It is true, however. We are now back at home and barely posted a single thing in this blog while we were away, but I promised travel stories. So help me god, I shall deliver on that promise. It will just be a little different from the way I originally intended.

Originally, I meant to post updates and photos of our travels while we were traveling. That was what I did while we were in Australia and New Zealand, and I wanted to do it for Germany. In New Zealand, we brought Stowaway (our laptop) with us. Even when I was not able to get a WiFi internet connection, I was able to compose blog posts and then publish them once I was online. Stowaway did not get to come to Germany with us, as we were not about to lug around a laptop for a trip less than a month in duration. This naturally resulted in a limitation of the frequency and ease of blog posting.

As Western Europe is generally well-connected, I figured this would not be much of a problem. Sure, I would have to pay for internet access in cafes and at hostels, but it wouldn't be overly expensive. Sure, I probably wouldn't be able to upload many photos, but I could fill in many of the gaps with links to other websites. Moments of blogging could be snatched here and there in the wee hours spent awake thanks to hostel snorers, and we could hit internet cafes while doing laundry or waiting for train connections. It seemed like a good plan.

It seemed like a good plan in theory.

In reality, we did not have as much spare time for blogging as I anticipated. Despite hostel snorers, we jammed so much into each and every day that sheer exhaustion (usually) resulted in an okay night's sleep. Thanks to a large supply of underwear, we didn't need to do laundry as frequently as anticipated, and the German train system is so very efficient that we spent hardly any time waiting for our train connections. All of this cut into the time I anticipated having to update the blog.

Most surprising, however, was that internet access was not as readily available, as cheap, or as reliable as I thought it would be. While most hostels, B&Bs, and hotels did have WiFi, you needed your own device to use them. If hostels had computers available for use, there were precious few of them. In general, internet access was remarkably expensive. One euro would get you anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes (a couple internet cafes were cheaper, but more difficult to get to on our squeezed schedule). Moreover, the connections were usually terrible. In our Amsterdam hostel the connection was so bad that in 15 minutes I was able to send out a grand total of one email and pay off my Visa via online banking. It was a complete waste of a euro!

So the end result was one ridiculously sparse blog. Excuses, excuses.

Now that we are safely ensconced in my mother-in-law's basement (bless her for putting up with us while we move into our new house), we have constant access to good, fast internet. Our photos have been downloaded, and I again have the occasional spare moment in the evening to think about the trip.

So I have decided to blog the trip, but as a retrospective. Really, all travel blogs are retrospectives of recent activities. This will just be more retrospectivy than usual.

It will be fun, though. I can provide stories with context! I can add colour and foreshadowing! I can write posts while sitting around in my underwear while listening to Captain Tractor and drinking entire pots of coffee!

So let the retrospective begin, reader. Even though I did put in a couple of posts about our activities, I shall do it all again. We start at the beginning, my friends. Next stop: Cologne!

Dresdin love!

I love Dresdin!

This affection was started even before we arrived, as we started off with a two-hour canoe ride through the charming canals of Lübbenau in the Spreewald region. It is very genteel - calm water covered in ducks, bordered by the garden lawns of residents who frequently set up stalls to sell beer, wine, sandwiches, and strawberries to those paddling on the waters. It was gorgeous (all credit for this side trip goes to my brother and his wife, who suggested it to us).

That afternoon in the Spreewald meant that we were happily relaxed when we arrived in Dresdin. Dresdin is lovely; we found a wonderful, spotlessly clean hostel in a super-funky district that is just a 20 minute walk from the historic centre. The historic centre itself is a marvel of reconstruction considering how thoroughly it was bombed in 1945. The place is once again beginning to drip with Baroque. As you may have figured out, neither Glen nor I are fans of Baroque style architecture and decoration. We do acknowledge it to be very impressive, however. The Grünes Gewölbe (Historic Green Vault) is worth every penny of the 10 euro entry. We also had a look at the Volkswagon Transparent Factory, which was quite cool. It did not, however, make me want to purchase one of their Phaetons, which carries a price tag of over 101,000 euro.

The area immediately around our hostel is really nifty. There are hidden couryards all over the place, each with wonderful independent shops on the street level and apartments above them. There are a large number of Turkish immagrants here, so there are also a representative number of Shisha bars. At night the scent of the shisha wafts out of the store fronts to smack you in the face as you walk by.

Incidentally, we are likely walking by with a beer in hand. You can drink on the streets in this marvellous country. A nice bottle of wine is about 3 to 4 euro. It is going to be difficult to accept the cost of booze back at home.

Today is our last full day here, so I'm hammering out posts while waiting for our washing to be done at the laundromat. If you plan on heading to Dresdin at any point, stay at Hostel Louise20. It is very reasonably priced, quiet, and spotlessly clean.

Enough blogging for now. Time to shove the laundry into the dryer.

Classical ruins and tropical islands

Berlin is one of those huge cities where owning a car would be like having a giant albatross around your neck at all times. It is bustling, crowded, and under the operation of traffic laws that would stymie any Edmontonian (hell, any Canadian) driver.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

The place is packed, and I mean packed, with classical treasures from Rome, Greece, Egypt, Babylon, and other locales. The Pergamon Museum contains several rooms in which major archetectural features have been reconstructed, including the Ishtar Gates, the Pergamon Altar and the full-size frieze that surrounded the Pergamon temple, a Roman gateway, and a Hellenic courtyard. The scale of these exhibits is mind-boggling. That is in just one of the five closely-spaced museums in this area. Another one houses the famous Nefertiti Bust. She causes a great deal of trouble, as there is such a fuss of visitors around her that you have to reserve a time to enter the museum itself, lest the building be mobbed around the clock.

There were other sites we visited - the Marienkirche being one of our favourites, as well as the Berliner http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifDom (which is an impressive and rather revolting Baroque contrast to the cleaner medieval lines of the Marienkirche. We dragged our karate buddy Sean on walks that spanned several hours. That is the standard type of touring that Glen and I do, but it appears to be tortorous to the uninitiated. I think that Glen and I have simply grown accustomed to it. The walking isn't much of a negotiating point or a matter of stubborn cost-saving for us, it's just what we do.

Berliners seem to have an ongoing obsession with beach culture. As a way of paying homage to this, as well as to give our heads a break from non-stop sightseeing, we stayed overnight at Tropical Islands, an ultra-cheesy and somewhat overpriced holiday trap about an hour south of Berlin. It is the ultimate expression of brainless entertainment - utterly devoid of anything that requires you to think, and quite enjoyable for it. It is an escape in a manner similar to how Las Vegas is an escape. Just turn your mind off, boggle at the weirdness of the architecture, and let yourself drop into the fantasy. While marinating ourselves in the various pool yones, we also discovered that we rather like the Sauna treatments. Being hotboxed for 15 minutes in a room that reaches a hellish 80 degrees celcius while strange, minty scents are distributed by a towel-whirling attendant is surprisingly revitalizing. So too is the procedure of dousing yourself in cold water and then rubbing yourself down with handfuls of ice after you emerge from the slow-cooker. As an added bonus, your skin is baby-soft afterwards.

And before you ask, the answer is yes - I do still like to eat lobster.

Interlude

Crivins, is getting internet access in the hostels ever expensive! I have exactly two minutes left to type this, therefore content will be sparse.

To sum up:

I like raw herring with onions.

Berlin is covered in monumental archetecture and is obsessed with ice cream.

Hostel bunkmates often fight nocturnal battles that cause the beds to rattle fiercly. They cannot help this.

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