Everything Amsterdam

So what can I tell you about Amsterdam that you don’t already know? Everything you’ve heard or read about it is probably true. A little bizarre at times but very true; 900,000 people, 1.2 million bikes, 362 windows in the red light district, ??# “Coffee Shops.” If you have to ask if it’s legal, odds are it probably is. Everything was pretty much just as I thought it would be except the whole paying for sex part. You would think that it would be the same, but something about it was just a little off. But when in Rome, right? Ok ok, I am just messing with you. It was the same and it was great.

The night we got into town we found a satellite sports café and sat down to watch some college football. Since we had missed the annual Thanksgiving pigskin classics we felt we owed it to ourselves. We watched the ACC and SEC conference championships until about 2 in the morning while the rest of the bar watched their Futbol. We had almost three days to spend in Amsterdam so we weren’t really in a hurry to do anything. We started the next day with a walking tour of the city and then followed it up that night with our same tour guide around the red light district. The whole idea behind the district started back in the day with sailors coming into port there and needing a little company. Since then it has just kind of stuck for one reason or another.

After spending an afternoon walking around Amsterdam you quickly learn that you have to be alert at all times, which can be a little tough when spending an afternoon walking around Amsterdam…One thing is that bikes rule the road there. The order of supremacy goes bikes, trams, cars, pedestrians, and then tourists. Just imagine there being 1.3 bikes for every person. This means that, at all times, there is more than one bike out there to run you over. And they don’t stop. They give you a few rings of the bell and then a few more rings as they get closer but at no time do they contemplate using brakes. After the first couple of hours I had accepted the fact that by the end of Amsterdam one of us was bound to get curbed by a Dutchman. In the end we were lucky enough not to be humiliated via bicycle/ tourist collision but got way too close for comfort plenty of times. They even have parking garages for bicycles. Its ridiculous.





The next day we did a little more sightseeing. We visited the Anne Frank house in the morning and then went to the Van Gogh museum that evening. Both of these were well worth the Euro spent. The WWII stuff just keeps getting more real with every stop, and we haven’t even been to Berlin yet. They have the whole storefront and annex where they families went into hiding preserved and have turned it all into a museum. The Van Gogh was great as well, with the largest collection in the world and it had more than just paintings. Each section was split up by the different parts of his life and told you a little more about why he did what he did, like cut part of his face off. For the rest of the afternoon we just rented some bikes and rode to the outskirts of the city just to see a little more than the typical museums and coffee shops and stuff like that.



That night we were back at the hostel having a few drinks at the bar and we noticed something that seemed a little strange. There was cat sitting next to me. Not the figment of my imagination kind of cat, but a real one. When we checked into the hostel they had warned us that because they city was building a new metro line there had been a serious problem with mice all over the city. It appeared that the solution most people had found was to get a housecat. Normally, in any other city, this resolution would probably work just fine. However, believe it or not, cats that sit in smoke filled bars and coffee shops in Amsterdam don’t do much more than their counterpart owners. Real productive environment these places have. I will say that I never saw any mice anywhere in the hostel so maybe they were having the same problem and it all just balances out.



Overall, I enjoyed Amsterdam. The weather was awful for most of our time there and at times I felt like I was walking around an oversized carnival what with everyone covered head to toe in their marijuana leaf clad paraphernalia. I mean come on, we get it. I am sure most of them were tourist but still the whole pot thing is just a little overkill. They should just ban all the gear that goes with being a pothead instead and save everyone from looking like a jackass. On a positive note, I remember the Dutch were always the best to have on tours back in Paris; one because they were incredible bike riders, and two, they were just really cool people. They held true to their reputation. No real run in-s with the locals here. Everyone was generally very helpful except the one guy who called Texas “the worst state in the Union”. Had he been worth the energy, or appeared to have been able to put up even the most pathetic argument, I would have stuck around to prove to him otherwise but it was too early in the morning and I had a train to catch. Oh and I was just joking about the whole paying for sex thing.

Oktoberfest 2012?

Munich, Germany. My favorite place in Europe so far. That being said I'm gonna go ahead and address the one thing that I know you are thinking. It’s the Beer. As fratty as it sounds and as much as I don’t want it to be, it is the beer. Its not necessarily the taste, which is fantastic. Its not the variety, because there are lots of beers everywhere. Its not even the fact that it has been the one place we spent more money on beer than anything else. For me, it’s the whole attitude of the place that made it so great. And that inevitably, in my opinion, is traced back to the beer. Theres just something about walking into on of those Bier Gartens and immediately feeling a little more like a local. Before you even have a chance to sit down you can’t help but feel like you have something in common with everyone in the place. That’s a feeling you don’t come by often when traveling from city to city and you just can’t deny that it’s the beer.

Each night that we spent in Munich, we ate at a different Beer Garden. Each of these beers has been around for ages and these giant beer hauls are like their home bases where people have been dining and drinking for centuries. Our first night we ate at the Augustiner Keller and that’s when I knew I would like Munich. We got sandwiched at this long picnic table in the middle of the restaurant between a bunch of older German men. A bit intimidating at first. I mean this is what they do, this is what they are known for and here we are stuck right in the middle of it all. We don’t know the rules or even if there are rules. What’s the right way to cheers and when? We couldn’t just sit off in the corner minding our own business like we could in other cities; we were part of it all now. It almost felt like we sat in the middle of a big family dinner and just didn’t want to screw up. However, we spent the next 2-3 hours carefully dissecting each others conversations and listening to their experiences and trips to America; Las Vegas and Malibu of all places, and had an absolute blast with them.





The next day we went on a tour of the city and got a little background on Munich and it’s history. Very interesting place with a pretty dark past. Much of the city was destroyed by Allied bombers during WWII so many of the things we saw were reconstructions of the originals. That afternoon we went out to BMW world and took a tour of their main production facility right there in Munich. This was aaamazing. We saw a BMW basically go from what begins as a roll of steel to the finished product. The robots and technology used to build these cars in unbelievable. No pictures were allowed inside the plant but we got a few of BMW World which was this huge interactive display on their cars and technology. Below is a picture of their corporate headquarters. They built it back in the 70's for the Olympic Games that were held in Munich. Its call "The Four Cylinder"...



That night we would go to the world famous Hoffbrau Haus for our second go-round with the beer hauls. There are no tables and chairs in the Hoffbrau, or many of the beer hauls for that matter, just a bunch of picnic tables so we had to search around a little while for a place to squeeze in. Of all the people in all the beer hauls we could have sat next to we end up next to a couple from Dallas, Texas. They live about 5 minutes from Graham’s parents and have friends in Texarkana. As much fun as the Germans were the night before it was nice to have a few Texans to share travel stories with. Again its just part of that atmosphere these places have. No matter where you sit, odds are you are gonna leave dinner with more friends that you sat down with. Had I been anywhere else it would have been a little inappropriate to be having dinner conversation while continuously wielding a stein of beer bigger than my face. Better yet, that this woman I was talking was doing to same.



The next day we took a tour of Dachau. This was the site of one of the first and longest lasting concentration camps under the Third Reich. I’ve seen quite a bit of stuff in the last 4 months of my travels but can only think of a handful of things that generate the same reaction that Dachau did. For instance, Normandy. I don’t think its just because it was a concentration camp, but more because its something that we have all read and heard so much about and for me I guess it just never really took on a true sense of reality. For the first time in awhile it wasn’t just the palace of some dynasty from so long ago that it almost seemed like a fairy tale. Seeing this all first hand was very real. The memorial was setup by the survivors of the camps about 25 years after it was shut down so it was all very matter of fact and vividly descriptive. This was the only gate that you could get in or out of the camp through. The words on the top say, "Work will set you free."



Overall, like I said, I loved Munich. The history was the most interesting to me. The people were the friendliest to us and overall I just felt like I could have stayed a lot longer.I even liked the food. We had it all; Schnitzel, Pork Knuckle, Bratwursts, etc. Still hurts to know that I was so close to Munich during Oktoberfest and didn’t make an appearance. Something tells me that might change sometime in the future...

Sounds like a plan

Our last night in Budapest, after getting out of the caves, we went to dinner with a couple that we had met in the hostel; Denelle and Calem. They had joined us for our Thanksgiving feast the day before and were the ones that had the original idea to go caving. Throughout dinner we went through the typical travel conversations about where we each had been and what still lay ahead on our respective journeys. At the time, Graham and I were planning on heading west to Austria for a couple of days. Turns out, Denelle and Calem were doing the same, however they weren’t headed for the quite the same place as we were. Our original plan was to head over to Vienna and check out all the palaces/castles etc. and see all the other touristy things that it had to offer. By the end of dinner we were convinced to do otherwise. They were planning on going skiing, they just didn’t know where yet. It’s so easy to get call caught up in travel mode that all you think about it seeing he famous sights and not even thinking about the other possibilities that are around you, especially the ALPS. On top of that, we were ready from a break from all the cathedrals and things we had been running in and out of at each stop. That night back at the hostel we scoped out all the local ski resorts around Salzburg to find a place that we could take a good day trip.



We got up at 5:45 a.m. and caught a bus to catch a train to catch a bus all to get to Obertauern ski resort by about 9:00. We were really just winging to the whole trip so one missed bus or late train could have messed up the whole day. However, we got there just in time to get rentals, passes, and for the lifts to open up. One little detail that was out of our control was of course the weather. The forecast, you could say, was a bit of an understatement predicting “light snowfall”. Once we got on the mountain there was a complete whiteout. Now, originally snow skiing was never part of our travel plan so it goes without saying that snow skiing gear wasn’t on top of our list either. We had sunglasses, which I think we all know how well that goes over in a snow storm and gloves that were good for strolling around town on a cold day, again not for a snow storm. All four of us were equally under prepared so we just quickly decided there would be no bitching about anything because after all, we were in the Alps. After lunch, which was wurstel & some spicy cheese stuff, things started to clear up a little so we could actually see what we going down, which was nice, which was the Alps.



That night we got back to the hostel in Salzburg dead tired so unfortunately we missed the nightly showing of “The Sound of Music.” Im not kidding. The place we were staying shows it every night at 8:00. Apparently people come to Salzburg for this reason alone, to see where they filmed the sound of music. All over town you can see tours being advertised that take you to all the different scenes from the movie. As thrilling as that sounded we decided to explore a little on our own the next day. Again, we climbed up as high as we could to get a good view of the city. In Salzburg, it would be from one of the famous fortresses from the 15th century. With a couple days of fresh snowfall all over the city it was a pretty awesome sight. After lunch we went and visited the birthplace of Mozart and then caught a train onto our next stop. No Sound of music stuff.