Grindelwald, Switzerlandb

Copenhagen - Last Day in Europe

Today was our last full day in Europe. We leave tomorrow morning at 9:00am. I've got to say that I am sad to be leaving, but at the same time I really can't wait to get home. I'm very tired of walking everywhere. We did a rough calculation, and I think we walked somewhere near 100 miles in all the places we visited. I need a new pair of feet after this trip.



Copenhagen is a little different then I expected. I can tell that this is a very multicultural city. I understand that in recent years immigration has been at very high levels, and it shows. Copenhagen, which means "merchant's harbor", started as a Viking fishing village and started to grow in the 12 century. It has been consistently ranked as one of the best places to live, and somewhere I read that it has the happiest people in the world. I don't know about that, but it is a clean and well organized city. Even in the "bad" pat of town where our hotel is by the station it is still pretty nice.


This morning we started out by walking down to a part of town known as Christianshavn, a working class neighborhood. While we were there we temporarily left the European Union far a while to visit the Freetown of Christiana. This place is not for everyone, or more people for that matter. Back in the late 70s this area was an abandoned Danish military base that some squatters started to inhabit. Over time they set up their own commune separate from the Danish government. Since then there have been attempts to "normalize" the area, but the resident, which now number over 1000, have put up a resistance. In just the last few weeks there have been a few incursions by the local police that have been meet with violent protests and fire blockades from the residents. Walking though this area it felt very much like it was inhabited by artists and eccentric non-conformists. I wouldn't say it's my kind of thing, but I am glad that there is a place like this and I support their efforts to remain independent.


Next we took a harbor ferry over to the main part of the city and checked out an old fortification and current military post called the Kastellet. While we were there we also stumbled upon the top tourist attraction in Copenhagen, a little statue on the shoreline of The Little Mermaid from the story by Danish author Has Christian Andersen. It was very small, and I don't get while it was so special.



We walked back though the Amalienborg Palace, home of the royal family. We saw some of the guards doing there thing. This was also in the upscale part of town and there were lots of consulates there. We walked back though this street called Strøget, full of tourist shops and overpriced food. Every city we went to in Europe had some street like this, which looked like they just funnel all the tourists down it and get them to by a bunch of crap.



So after buying some stuff in stores we headed back to our hotel for a quick nap. In almost every city we have been in we have had a late afternoon nap to recharge our batteries from all the walking. Then we just headed out to a local restaurant for pizza and some beers at a bar and now we are just getting ready to head out in the morning. It has been a fun trip. We learned a lot this time around. The next time I come back to Europe I will do things a little different, but overall things went surprising as planned. The only changes usually ended up working out well anyway. Well, we will see everyone when we get home.

Frankfurt to Cologne

Alright being the car guy I am this was the highlight of my trip. Of course, besides all the beer cause I am a beer guy as well. We hopped on the autobahn again and headed up to Cologne Germany to experience everything it has to offer. Yeah that was cheesy. On the way we stopped by Nurburgring. This is a racetrack that is now used for public use. They used to use it to test new cars. It was nothing like I had expected. This was the real deal. For 19 Euros, you take your car on there and drive it as hard as you want. When we got there Mercedes was testing there brand new SLR Mclaren's. HOLY SHIT!! These cars about about $1 million bucks a pop. They were all over the place.


So we weren't able to drive until later on that evening. So we decided to get to Cologne and check into our hotel explore a little bit while we still had the car. So we got there and checked in. We then went to the Dom. This cathedral was spectacular.


After we were done there, we had to go back to Nurburgring and drive the track.
I got to take the BMW 525 on the race track. Guess Europcar never knew we'd put there car to the test. The tires were smoking after the first lap around the track. I will post a video of the lap around the track. What an amazing experience. I think I'm going to take up track racing now.

While racing around the track there was a porsche and a lamborghini that past me. This was the real deal. There were so many nice cars there. I think next time I'm coming back with my car.


From there, we drove back to Cologne letting the adrenaline die down. Because we had to come back this screwed up our plans a little bit. We had to end up taking the car back to the airport. We had no idea how we were going to get back to the hotel. We finally figured out partially how to get back halfway. The from there we walked.

The night in cologne was fairly mellow. We had to get up early to catch our train to Amsterdam.

Amsterdam

We arrived in Amsterdam by train from Cologne yesterday. It was raining a little when we first arrived, but our hostel was close. I'm learning that whenever the hostel is close to the train station that also means it is right in the middle of the red light districts. Our hostel in Amsterdam is called St. Christopher's and it right in the middle of all this rather seedy stuff. When you are here you learn that a coffieshop is where they sell the marijuana, and the cafes sell the alcohol. I have been intrigued for some time about how The Netherlands manages to have soft drugs and legal prostitution and still have a functioning society. They look at it this way. If you accept that people are going to do it whether legal or not, why not make it at least safe? Thats exactly what they do. As we walked the streets, especially at night, we would see police on motorcycles, horse, and foot patrolling the streets every few minutes. But they are looking for drug dealers who sell hard drugs, and leaving the coffeeshops alone. I've never felt so safe because I knew the cops were out there to protect us and not hassle people just having a good time.





Amsterdam is not just all drugs and red light district. As we walked just a few blocks in almost any direction we would find nice homes on beautiful canal streets where people lived and were coming and going just like anywhere else.



In the morning we set out for the museum district on the south side of the town. The first place we stopped was the Heineken Experience, where they showed how beer is made. To me, it felt just like we were in one big beer commercial. On the up side though, they give you three free beers with the turn. Fisrt museum I've ever been to where they serve alcohol.

Next stop was the Vincent van Gogh Museum. I'm not really that knowledgeable about art, other than I know good stuff when I see it. I don't know if I came away liking Van Gogh or any of his contemporaries more when I left or not. I do know that the life of Van Gogh was compelling. I guess thats what adds to the mystique some of our greatest artist. I've included this video where I think Don McLean's song "Vincent" sums it up pretty nicely. And you can check out some of his great works.

Prague

I know I'm behind but I'm trying to catch up. I need to write a little bit about my time in Prague. Prague was an awesome city. There was so much history in that city. From the cobble stone streets to the Prague castle. It was a much different setting than we were used to. Our hotel was very nice except for the fact that we had to use the internet down in the bar.


During the day, we ended up running into a couple guys we had met on the train from Munich to Prague. They too were in Munich for Oktoberfest. They are actually from Tijuana so we had something in common. So we ended up going out that night to a couple places to get some drinks.


We walked around the next day and got to see the whole city of Prague. We went to the museum of communism and saw the astronomical clock. We ended up meeting the TJ dudes again for some more drinks. While we were waiting I had a beer in the middle of the square.


On the morning we left Prague, we decided to get some Micky D's for breakfast. We were amazed at what came with the typical value meal.


I will post more later.

Anthony

Berlin to Frankfurt via "The Autobahn"

I gotta say this was one of my highlights of this trip for those of you who know me. We picked up the BMW 525 yesterday morning in Berlin. What a sweet ride. We even had the voice activated navigation system to guide us everywhere. We hit quite a bit of traffic coming out of Berlin. This was not how I envisioned the autobahn. Once we finally got out of the mess, I finally got to open it up.

For such a big car it had some pick up. Not like my car of course. I was able to get it up to some friendly speeds though. You do the math conversion.


The countryside out here in Germany is amazing. Everything is so green and up in the hills you can see what looks to be rundown castles. There are still quite a few castles lingering around here in the countryside.


It just amazed me how fast these people drive. They just cruise down the autobahn doing 200 km/h like it's nothing. I LOVE IT! On the way we found some friends in another BMW and another guy in his Mercedes that wanted to have some fun. I will see if we can post the video. We had a little fun chasing each other down the autobahn. The Mercedes sounded like it was going to tear the road up. Needless to say the BMW's couldn't keep up.


Once we got here we sat down for a few minutes. It was about a four hour drive. We stopped in a little town on the way to get something to eat. We decided to go to an Irish pub a couple block's away. Got some food and a couple beers. Nick had coke also. We then walked around the city a little bit till we decided we are tired of walking.

Prague to Berlin

I know im a little behind on this. The train ride was good. I slept most of the way. I had to catch up cause Nick snores like a freight train. So I spend most of the 5 hour ride up sleeping and resting my sore feet.

We arrive in berlin in the evening and went to buy 48 hour a pass so we wouldnt get another damn fine for not having a ticket. We arrived at our hostel and theres a bunch of little umpa lumpas running around. It reminds me of my trip back in 8th grade. We went out and got some food because with all this walking im always hungry. We wanted some greek food. Go figure they think gyros are made with pork. I dont think they know what theyre doing. Oh well. It was good.

The first full day here in berlin we spent walking across the whole city. We saw all the cool sights and took a crap load of pictures. We had dinner at a mexican place at check point charlie. I got nick to drink some more beer. Nick thought he was getting a carne asada burrito from alvaros and boy was he wrong. He ended up with steak and potatoes. We then ventured off to find potsdamer platz. One of the main centers here in berlin. We found the 8th wonder of the world. Another hofbrahuas. Another liter of beer was defenitely needed. This place was so cool. We managed to find our way back to our hostel and on the way found a little place in the train station with what we thought was a pizza. It wasnt but is was still good. No it wasnt carne asada fries but it did the job. Next stop we are finally getting our car and get to drive the autobahn. I'll have videos of me doing the posted speed limit. :) yeah right. I cant do that back home. well have some good vidoes and pics though. Well post as soon as we can.

Anthony

On the train from Prague to Berlin with my friend Kurt

When I travel I always like to bring a few books to read. I had to make some difficult choices this time around because I only had limited space in my travel backpack. The first I chose was Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, a book about skepticism and science as a way of seeing the world.

The second was Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man Without A Country. That’s a pretty good title to describe how I feel sometimes too. It’s a short book, about 145 pages, and I read most of it on the four hour train ride from Prague to Berlin. I got into Vonnegut only a few weeks ago after a friend of mine said I would enjoy him. The first of his books I read was Slaughterhouse-Five, which deals partly with the fire bombing of Dresden Germany by the Allis in the last days of World War II when the British RAF wanted to test a new bomb to see if they could destroy a whole city. Good for them! In one night of bombings they killed more then 160,000 people, more then either Hiroshima or Nagasaki on their own. Why don’t we learn about this in history class?

I didn’t know about Dresden until I read Vonnegut’s book, written in 1968 I think, three weeks ago. He came out with A Man Without A Country in 2005 when he was 82 and just a year before he died. He says he used to be a funny man, because laughter is what we use as a self defense mechanism against the pain of life. But by the time he made it to 82 he didn’t think he could be funny anymore because the pain was just too much. He felt that people have just stopped caring anymore, and that we are all doomed. I’m starting to see his point.

On the train to Berlin we crossed the border of The Czech Republic and Germany. About twenty minutes from the border crossing we stopped at the Dresden Central Station. I got out for a few minutes to breathe the air and think about what Kurt had told me about the place. There were lots of tourists in Prague and there are lots of tourists here in Berlin as I write this from my hostel room. Who goes on vacation to Dresden?

A walk though Berlin or The continuing struggle

This morning we got an early start at 7:00am and had breakfast downstairs in our youth hostel. This place is pretty fun because there are a lot of energetic young kids traveling here. I wish I had done this sort of thing when I was younger. I doubt I would be complaining quite as much about how my feet hurt. After breakfast we had to walk over a mile with our large bags full of laundry from the last 5 days. That took a little longer then we expected so we got a late start on the sight seeing.

We have a 48 hour metro pass that lets us use any of the forms of public transportation in the city. We took two subways up to an area at the west end of a large park which I think is called Tiergarten. As we started walking west we discovered that we happened to be walking though Berlin on the same day they were having a 42 km marathon. This was pretty neat to see in its own right, but proved difficult to get from place to place.

We walked all the way down the Straße des 17 Juni past a bunch of statues of dead guys. We took pictures of them. After about two miles we turned north and saw the Germany government buildings. These buildings use a lot of glass windows in them, more then other government building I’ve seen. I read somewhere that they did this after WWII to symbolizes transparency in government, as a contrast to the secrecy that once did so much harm to their people. They have even retrofitted the old Reichstag building with a clear glass dome that the people can walk around and see right into the parliament chamber. I like this idea very much.

Then we came to the Brandenburg Gate. The marathon that was going on passed right though the center arch. That was really cool to see these runners passing though it. It was smaller then I though it would be though. Once we got to the east side we were on the famous Unter den Linden which used to be on the East Berlin side. I was trying to imagine what it much have been like back in the cold war when this was a divided city. How could our governments do such a horrible thing to these people? Wall suck, always have, always will.

As we continued further down Unter den Linden we were approaching Alexander Platz and the Fernsehturm TV Tower. You could tell how during the cold war each side tried to represent their respective ideologies with architecture. The East was very minimalist and functional, with lots of square concrete buildings and a tall angular tower looking down on the West. On the other side they had all the signs of capitalism with flashy streets lined with expensive shops. Since the wall has come down though, I don’t know that the people are much better off. Now they have McDonalds and Starbucks on every block. You call this an improvement?

At one end of Alexander Platz there is a very small and modest monument. It is of a sitting Karl Marx and standing Friedrich Engels. I knew about this statue and was anxious to see it, being very curious about the subject matter they wrote about, but something there surprised me. Around the stature of the two men were eight steel obelisks with about 10 or so small picture on them on both sides. When I looked at the pictures I quickly realized that these were not famous leaders or military generals, but everyday nameless workers, farmers, protesters, artist, mothers, fathers, children, and so on. These were real working class heroes, to quote John Lennon, and they are indeed something to be. I realized that this was a monument to us all and the struggle goes on….

After a quick bite to eat at the train station we headed over to the East Side Gallery. This is the largest remaining section of the Berlin Wall. It has since been used as a giant canvas for artists to express themselves. I apologize that I have no pictures for you yet, and words will just not do it justice, so I will stop using them now.

Just arrived in Berlin

We got into Berlin about 6:00pm today. Had a pretty nice trip from Praha. Tomorrow we need to do some laundry in the morning then we are going to head out sight seeing. I really want to see the Branenburg Gate and the Pergamon Museum. I'm going to try and fine us an internet cafe that will let us upload a bunch of pictures. We have about 250 MB of them for you all. Thanks everyone for all the comments. It's fun to hear from everyone at home as we go along the way. It sure is nice over here though. Every turn we make we find something new and surprising. Bye for now. Nick

Day two in Munchen

Again, it was raining cats and dogs here in Munich. Suprisingly enough we didn't have any hangovers. We learned that they don't put any preservatives in any of their beer. Guess the German's drink it quick enough to where they don't need it. We headed over to the BMW museum.


Those damn German's can sure make an amazing automobile. Maybe I will by my M3 now. We toured the BMW museum and walked around olympic park where the olympic games took place back in 1972.

We will post pictures when we get to Berlin. We have some shots of where they assemble all of the cars and load them on the trains for transport. I think my buddy Jeff has purchased every single car they've ever made.

From there we went to the Deutches museum. This was an interesting museum. They had more things to look at than you could shake a stick at. We got to see a lot of interesting aeronautical things as well as electrical and IC engines.

After the visit to the museum, we had about 5 hours of time to kill before our overnight train to Praha. We walked around and went back to the hotel to send some emails. We then went and got dinner at an italian place and I had another beer and Nick had another Coke. Typical Nick.

We learned a very valuable lesson riding the underground subway system in Munich. HAVE A DAMN TICKET ON YOU AND DON'T RIGHT NEXT TO THE GUARDS! Our hotel told us it was free to ride the U-Bahn to Oktoberfest so we figured to ride it for one stop it shouldn't be a problem being that we have walked about 10 miles every damn day. Nope. We sat right next to three of the guards. As soon as we sat down I guess we had tourist written all over our face. They showed their badges and asked us for our tickets. We played dumb and it didn't work. We both got hit with a 40 Euro fine. That's $60 each. Could have done without that. This was right before we shipped a package full of stuff back to the United States. Oh well. Like and learn.

First day in Prague

We arrived by overnight train in Prague at 9:00 am. We started off at the train station and were a little confused about how everything worked from the start. Prague is definitely the most different from the States then any place we have been so far. Not as many people speak English. The first restaurant we went to the waitress spoke none at all. This was a very good thing though because when we first got there I could tell she was frustrated, but as we ate we also studied our translation book. By the end of the meal we were able to say things like please, thank you, and good. Every time we used a new word she would smile. I felt that she had a better impression of us when we left when we got there.



Then we walked around town and just explored the streets of Prague. Every street we turned down we just saw more amazing old buildings. All the streets here are cobblestone and very old. At one point we turned down an ally for a moment to look at our map and when I looked up I saw a plaque that said it was the home of Johannes Kepler. Kepler has always been one of my favorite astronomers ever since I did a report on him in seventh grade.



Just down the street from there we saw the Astronomical clock and the Old Town Square. It was huge and overwhelming. I've got a lot more to post, but we are just getting ready to head out for the night. I'll finish up tomorrow.