bjj_travel

Almost at an end...

2008-02-26T17:40:15Z

Ah the train.

I pull out the rest of my Euros at an ATM and convert it all to Czech currency (I'm still not sure how to pronounce it).

We go over to Platform 26 (of 36) and discover that our train goes to Prague, and to Hof. It stops about halfway there, splits in two, and the two halves go their seperate ways.

Seeing no staff about, we take an educated guess at which half we want to be on and climb aboard.

The train isn't as nice as some of the others we have been on, but is okay. Divided into compartments of six seats each, we pick a fairly empty one and sit down next to a young guy, early twenties. He is reading a German translation of a Ghost in the Shell Manga and reminds me of a German lMichael who is aware of the role vitamins and minerals play in a healthy diet.

We settle in for a long six hour train ride and pull out books and in Ken's case, iPod.

A fat, disheveled man who might be drunk comes into the carriage and sits down opposite the comics guy. He tries to strike up a conversation with the kid. I don't understand any of it, but at least three times in the next 20 minutes the fat guy will look over, start a conversation with "Ah, Comix" and the kid will answer in short sentences finishing the conversation as quickly as possible. I'm not unsure that the same conversation didn't take place each time.

Two more people join us, filling the compartment. Every time I look up the guy opposite me and one seat over is staring in my direction and smiling. I read my lobster book intently.

The fat guy drinks 3 beers over the next short while (bearing in mind each beer is probably a half litre) and sniffs snuff from something that looks a little like a zippo. At one point the kid offers him a tissue, he is sniffing about every second and a half. He also takes out a knife at one point for no reason that I can recall, and then puts it away again after a minute.

The kid gets off after a few more stations, and then the smiling guy, and then the other guy, leaving Ken and I alone with the fat man, who by this stage has fallen asleep. He alternates between a sort of moaning/slurping combo that would sound for all the world like he was masturbating if you couldn't see plainly that he wasn't, and occasional bouts of sniffing. Very occasionally while asleep he sings parts of Cyndi Lauper songs under his breath. He also occasionally wakes up, looks around, and then falls asleep again almost immediately.

At one point during all of this, a blonde ticket collector who is maybe in her early thirties and kind of hot, comes through and checks our tickets. Remarkably the bizzare set of tickets we have seem valid.

The fat man eventually wakes up, staggers off the train, and Ken and I share a smile that turns into fits of laughter after we are sure he's gone.

The train travels on. At one point I step into the corridor to takes some photos out the window. There are a couple of Asian girls in the compartment about two down signing Karaoke style along with an ipod or similar.

We get to the stop before the train is supposed to split and the train stops.

A few minutes pass...

A few more...

Not a lot happens for some time...

The ticket woman, looking a little harried, comes past our compartment and explains in not too bad, but incomplete, English that we have no engine and she hopes we will be going again in 30 minutes. The words she uses leave me with the mental picture that the driver has uncoupled the engine and just driven off without us, and the 30 minutes sounds like the sort of 30 minutes that really means an hour or more.

We tell her that we have nowhere else to go and settle in to eat some of the food we bought with us. Salami and cheese, and the toughest Rye bread I've had in years.

We sit and eat and appreciate the view out of our train window. (There is another train about 2 meters away, but the ticket woman has chosen that spot to stand and have a cigarette)

Eventually we begin moving again.

Sadly at some point our ticket checking official is changed for a guy who looks like a young Roger Daltry, but who speaks very poor english, and while undeniably hot, just doesn't do it for me. At one point we have a conversation about where we are going that I think basically amounted to us both saying the exact same thing, but not understanding each other for a good two minutes.

After a while the train stops and the Police get on for random passport checks.

Neither we, nor the Asian girls, who I think are Korean, are deported, I can't say for certain about anyone else, but I think the ticket collector is probably okay. Actually he returns to tell us that at the next stop we are to change to the train on Platform 2.

The train stops in Plzen at about 11pm and everyone gets off. We all head over to platform 2 and get onto a train that is heading for Budapest. It is the same basic layout as the previous train but it has a decidedly 1960 housing commission thing going on with the furnishings. The sort of train where the Stasi come up to you demanding "Papers!".

We ask the Korean girls if they mind us sharing the compartment they have taken. They pretend not to speak English, which I find quietly amusing since I know for a fact that at least one of them can. I heard her talking to the blonde conductor much earlier in the day. Ken and I converse loudly about the state of the train, and the low likelihood that we will make it alive to Prague. Everything has a distinctly beginning of Half-Life 2 feel to it. The train starts moving. City 17 here we come.

I finish off my book, and we play, "try and figure out where the hell to get off the train to avoid ending up in Budapest"

You're in a maze of concrete railway stations all alike.

Eventually, having decided that we aren't going to rape and kill them, the Korean girls ask where we are going, and when we reply Prague but that we have no idea when that is; one of them gets off at the next stop and asks how long to Prague.

Next stop apparently.

We arrive in Prague at about midnight.

Prague doesn't have a little Tourist Info place that books hotels for you (not that it would be open at this hour). What it does have is a dodgy looking man in an ill fitting denim jacket saying "You want hotel?!" in broken English. "How many nights?!".

The trip to this point has been missing something, and I suddenly realise what it is.

And no point have I felt like I was going to die.

I was tired up until now. Now I feel alive.

It's after midnight, I'm in a foreign city, I can't even make a pretense of speaking the language, and I'm carrying around a small fortune on my person. Back alley knifing here we come.

The dodgy looking guy leads us out of the station and through the streets. Pointing out where to get money changed and where to eat and so forth. Other dodgy sorts come over and give us cards for strip clubs. The walk to the hotel takes about 10 minutes, and provides little in the way of opportunities to practice BJJ.

Oh well. I guess we get to live after all.

The hotel is pretty good if a little pricey. Our room overlooks the Erotic City supermarket, and we will later realise the hotel is next door to a strip club.

It now being after 1am, we crash.

The view from the window:

Close up:

I wake up, have a shower and breakfast.

We go for a walk through the city and take in the atmosphere.

It is indeed a beautiful city. It marries the quaint, old buildings and cobbled streets of Amsterdam, with the Soviet Bloc dirtiness of Berlin. I prefer Amsterdam myself, but Ken seems to like it.

We wandered around for most of the day, had some lunch (Mmmm, pork knuckle), and then a bit of a rest before looking for a net cafe.

Ken's flight is tomorrow morning at about 7am.

Mine is the day after at a more reasonable hour, so now we're going to go have some dinner, maybe hit a bar, and then I have a day to kill in Prague by myself.

Oh, we went by the Kafka museum, which has an animatronic pissing fountain:

Filthy monkey stole my orange...

2008-02-25T09:29:19Z

Okay, I gave it to him. But he was still filthy.

And I got to watch bears fight.

And lions get fed.

And there was this one psycho monkey that kept beating up the other monkeys.

Und ein eisbareun!

And a small child wave his empty hands at some goats and say "Nichts nichts nichts" at them alot.

and ants! Hamburg Zoo has ants. Enclosed behind wire mesh. That'll stop them going any where.

Real, no foolin' ants:

Apparently this pile contains ants:

So, I left the zoo, did some shopping and finally managed to get a tshirt that just say "Hamburg" on it. I picked up a book called "consider the lobster" or something similar. A collection of essays and the like from a guy whose name I can't remember. It covers a wide range of topics, the first essay is about the time he spent one year covering the Annual Adult Video News Awards, kind of the Oscars but for porno. There is the unabridged version of an article he wrote for Rolling Stone about following McCain around on the campaign trail for the Primaries he lost to Dubya in 2000.
I also never expected I would enjoy reading an almost 60 page review of an American English Usage Dictionary, but there is one in there, and I was annoyed I had to stop reading it halfway through to go and catch my train to Munich.

I SMSed Ken from the train, and by coincidence he was due to arrive in Munich Hbf about 20 minutes before me, so I settled in for the evening.

The train seat I had booked turned into a bed by flattening out and joining with the seat opposite and a bed folded down above it so the person in the opposite seat could have a bed too.

As I sat, looking at my feet up on the seat opposite, I thought to myself,

"this isn't going to work is it?":

And I was right, it didn't really. There was a small hidden hole behind one seat I could kind of jam my feet in, but the seats were quite hard and lumpy and the train lurched around like it was trying desperately to derail itself, and we kept stopping at new towns and people would get on, and make quite a racket turning their chairs into beds, and I think the old guy in the next compartment was drunk or senile or both.

Needless to say, I didn't actually get any sleep.

Anyway, I arrived at 7am on a Sunday morning in Munich. A time so early for a Sunday that not even the railway shops are open.

Ken and I went and had a coffee, locked our bags in a station locker, and decided that since the ticket office and the tourist info place didn't open for another three hours, we should go for a walk.

The city was dead.

We walked until we were fairly lost, not seeing too many other people.

Fuck stopping traffic in Picadilly circus for 10 minutes, film all your zombie/end of the world movies in Germany on a Sunday.

We eventually made our way back to the station and found that the only time we could book a train to Prague was at 4pm the next day, and so we did. It cost about 50€ for both of us.

An Aside:
The train system here is stupid. Sometimes a trip of just over an hour can cost 7€, sometimes over 50€, the overnight train with "bed" cost over 100€ and there was no saving for booking in advance, the train to Hamburg, booked a similar amount of time in advance was half price.
Now, a train trip into another country, of a similar duration to the overnight one, is costing under a quarter of that.

My original advice for anyone else thinking of taking the trains in Germany was going to be, "get a Bahn card and then book everthing at least 4 days in advance".

I've changed my mind, it's now "go to a ticket reservation window/booth and ask how much the journey you want to take will be. If the answer is more than 50€, decline and try another booth. Keep trying, eventually the craziness will work in your favour."

To get an idea of what that craziness entails, we don't actually have a ticket to Prague.

We have two tickets from a town just inside the Czech border to Prague, and we have a ticket that my limited German tells me allows me and up to four other people to travel around Bavaria during certain hours, and not on weekends or public holidays, to allow us to get from Munich to aforementioned small town.

Anyway,

we booked a hotel through the Tourist Info place and managed to walk over there before the fax of the booking had finished coming through. The room was nice and clean and cheap, and breakfast was included, although there was this creepy out-Cherub and Gingham a devonshire Tea house thing going on with the decor. We wandered back to the station, ate something, got our bags from the locker and went back to the hotel.

bjj_travel @ 2008-02-23T10:49:00

2008-02-23T10:35:06Z

On a PC with no USB ports, so no pictures this time.

Not that much has happened, and that I have taken many pictures since last post.

I went to BJJ, more spider guard. similar format to the previous night but no guard pass thing, just rolling at the end. Got one or two taps, didn't get tapped. We all worked the advanced sweep from the previous night, which I now understand is a kind of recovery from a failed De La Riva sweep, and it makes sense that it is a bit funky looking.

I took some photos but the camera started to fog up, so most of them aren't very good.

The guy I had been practicing sweeps with sat out a round during the rolling and took some photos of me being crushed under the side control of one of the big guys.

There was a cute girl from Atlanta who works in Hamburg in the class. I was going to ask her if she wanted to do something after class, but I think she left while I was having a shower.
Curses.

I was feeling a bit too worn out for a bar or the like, so I caught the train back to the Hbf and started walking back to the hotel. I stopped for a kebab on the way home. Hamburg has the best kebab joints so far. Everywhere has had them, even Monchau had two that we saw.
Each town's kebab shops have subtle or not so subtle differences from the town before.
Hamburg's kebab shops are big on meat on a stick cooked over coals.

I walked down the Red light district, since it more or less goes:
Porn store - kebab shop - porn store - clothing shop or sports bar - porn store - green grocer : repeat

and picked the one that had the most irony. It was called "For families" (or maybe like the gay bar the other day, it was more important info than their actual name) and I sat down at the bar in front of the grill where a man who looked disturbingly like Vanderlai Silva sans head tattoos served me a mixed grill. Tasty.

Now I have about 10 hours before my train to Munich leaves.

I will wander over and get some more blood oranges for the trip, and maybe hit the nude woman bookstore (not what you think. The local Borders equivalent has the shilouette of a nude woman as their logo, I can't remember the name though, starts with a T maybe), they have a half decent selection of English novels. I'll need something for on the train. I doubt I'll sleep the entire time. Who knows though.

I'd also like to get a Hamburg tshirt or something, but Hamburg seems completely devoid of the Tourist shops that were a dime a dozen in Dusseldorf, Amsterdam and Berlin.

A shame, because if any city is crying out for an "Ich bin ein..." tshirt, it's Hamburg.

I think I'll have to get one printed up when I get home...

Girl, I got something to put in you, I got something to put in you...

2008-02-22T17:31:33Z

I arrived at Hamburg and stepped off the train.

The first thing I noticed was that Hamburg smells.

And not a good smell.

Berlin has these manhole covers with holes in them, and evey time you walk over them if you happen to be breathing in at the time, you are assualted by the overwhelming smell of feces.
I'm not sure why the holes are there, probably so that if it gets really cold, rather than the pipes freezing and exploding, the icy water can expand out the holes in the manhole cover like some sort of rancid feces slurpee.

Anyway, Hamburg smells like a low key version of that.

Everywhere.

Actually, I've decided since that it's not that bad. I'm no longer noticing it, except near the train station, so either I've got used to it, or it's just the train station that smells.
Or a combination of both.

So, I get off the train and head up to the ticket reservation area, and book a rather expensive ticket to Munich late on Saturday night, arriving Sunday morning.

I then go to the Tourist Info place to book a hotel, we've had good luck with these places before. I ask the woman for a hotel, give a price range, and she looks stuff up. She tells me there is a hotel nearby that is a bit more expensive than I have asked for, but it is near a lot of bars and restaurants and is a good hotel. I agree, forgetting than 20€ extra a night is less reasonable an increase than it sounds to my used to dealing with Australian dollars ears, and fork over large amounts of cash for a booking for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights.

Some of you may have noticed a small issue within the previous two paragraphs. I didn't.

I head off for the hotel and check in. I walk around the area that the hotel is in and check it out. I jump on an internet cafe PC and double check the time of the first BJJ class I wanted to make. It is in about an hour and a half, somewhat earlier than I had thought, and so I leave the Internet cafe to try and get there in time.

I realise I have no idea where I am, have no idea of the address of my hotel, have left the map of Hamburg the tourist info people gave me on the counter at hotel reception, and it's raining. I strike out in what I feel is probably the direction of the hotel, and come across somethign I recognise before too long. I go back, get my stuff, walk to the Hbf and figure out which train I need to get to get to Zanshin Dojo.

At approximately 5pm there is a train through the Hbf on the line I want about every 2-3 minutes, so soon enough I am sitting comfortably and wending my way towards Bahrenfeld station, Google maps printout in hand.

I walk to the Dojo and up to the front desk. "Verstehen Sie Englisch?" aside, I explain to the girl behind the desk that I am in town for a few days and want to do some BJJ. She gets me to fill in a waiver/disclaimer and then asks me if I have some identification. I give her my drivers licence and she takes it. In return she gives me a locker key, and points out the change room. Then she asks me to wait. I do so, and she returns in a minute or so with a Gi for me to loan. Apparently they don't expect me to wash it, just hand it back afterwards.
She then gives me a drink bottle with the Dojo logo on it, and tells me I can have as much as I want from their drinks bar. (they have a setup with a variety of cordial type flavours, fortified with vitamins, and a bunch of waters, filtered, still mineral, fizzy mineral, and oxygen infused, whatever that is).

I ask how much I have to pay.

She tells me not to bother.

The class is about to start and the instructor (Carlos Feirera, a Gracie Barra black belt) comes over and introduces himself. I explain my situation and he welcomes me, and class starts. There are maybe a dozen people, 4 or 5 blue belts, the rest white.

We do a fairly standard BJJ warm up of running laps of the dojo. There is a kind of paired situp/crunch thing that we do that I haven't seen before.

Then we move onto technique. They are working spider guard. The class is split into two groups based on experience. I elect to go with the less experience half, and we then drill one move for 15 minutes or so. It is a sweep I have been taught before by Murray, but the additional practice is welcome, and it certainly seems like something I will use more than the other sweep that the more experienced group were doing. At least until I have a lot more experience with spider guard.

After that we do the standard winner stays in guard passing thing, starting from spider guard.
I do fairly well, I passed first time in and then defended my guard a half a dozen times before fatigue and a big guy got the better of me. I passed next go, after a little confusion about what my oppenent getting to turtle meant (it was a restart from spider guard rather than a pass) and then had defended once or twice before the round ended.

We then moved onto rolling. I had two rolls (Carlos pairs people up) both against big guys. I ended up underneath the first one and was able to defend until we were told to stop. The second time I was underneath for a while after a failed triangle, before an armbar attempt and some wierd muscling against my attempt to pull my arm free led to me being on top in a reverse mount with kind of a triangle. From there I got a kimura grip and got the tap from the straight armbar from that grip. I was about to throw up at that point so we stopped and after that round class was over. I thanked Carlos for a wonderful class. He introduced me to a guy in the class who would be travelling to Melbourne later this year. I gave him my email address, showered and left.

I went across the street to Lida, kind of the German version of Aldi, if only Aldi weren't already the German version of Aldi, and bought some food before heading back to the hotel.

After eating I decided that I would see if I could find a bar. After walking around the area around the hotel, I discovered the Tourist Info lady was right, there were about a dozen bars close by.

A dozen gay bars.

Well done Tourist Info lady.

Okay there were two bars that weren't flying little rainbow flags out the front. One was called "For Men Only". Either that, or they considered that information deserving a bigger font that the actual name of the bar, it doesn't really matter.

The other was called the S.L.U.T. club:

Now the SLUT club might not be a gay bar, but according to the little flyer out front that sits in the glass box normally reserved for a restaraunt's menu they have a number of theme nights each month, including -
Cocksucker Club
Leather Night
Fuck all the Rest
an Evening of Ass Fisting
and so on.

The lack of a 2 for 1 Happy hour on Vaginal Penetration Fridays, leads me to believe the absence of the rainbow flag is a mere oversight that will be corrected shortly.

I wandered around Hamburg back towards the Hbf and found a few bars that held no interest (a lot of bars showing football in this town, or maybe there was a big match on, who knows), and found the equivalent of the Red Light District. Hookers in Germany sure do look cold, I'll bet they wish they had little rooms with windows.

I gave up and went to bed, actually quite tired from my BJJing.

I woke up the next morning, had a quite nice, but not worth what I'm paying breakfast, and went for a walk.

I realised my mistake with over booking the hotel and after talking to reception I went to the tourist info place and altered my booking. With my refund I went shopping and bought a nice new black pair of Nike Free. Man my feet are comfortable now. Why didn't I think of this earlier?

I looked around Hamburg, went to the Art Gallery, became seriously dissapointed with the amount of praise and artistic credibility that is applied to Andy Warhol, had my belief that modern art is a load of bollocks reinforced, and saw some lovely old paintings that looked like they took some actual skill to create in the other section of the gallery. There was special exhibit of some guy that painted a lot of nudes. There are a lot of strategically placed items in paintings that increase the tits to crotch shot ratio in an unacceptable direction. I was thinking becoming an artist seems to be a good way to convince women to take of their clothes in front of you, but maybe I will become some sort of cat burgalar/artist that breaks into galleries across the world and paints out the strategically placed items instead.

After that I walked some more and bought some fruit.

Even tastier in non juice form:

I had a bit of a rest and then came here to post this.

Now it's BJJ time again...

bjj_travel @ 2008-02-22T16:48:00

2008-02-22T16:25:11Z

So we get back to the hostel and the British guys are sitting around in the smoking area of the bar looking a bit worse for wear. They have about an hour before they have to leave to catch their plane, and are already about 6 drinks in. I have a few drinks with them and we chat for a bit before they head off for the airport.

Ken arrives back at the bar some time later and we sit and chat for a while. In the mean time I seem to have drunk the cute bartender's entire supply of tonic over the last two or so days, with some of Ken's help. He tried to order another vodka and tonic at one point only to be told I had just had the last of the tonic, and she suggested bitter lemon instead.
He tried it and liked it, I decided it was a bit too sweet, so for my next drink I asked for a gin, bitter lemon, and bitters.

She had never heard of bitters and had no idea what it was, but I was able to point out the bottle behind the bar. I missed it, because I was tasting my drink to see if it had enough bitters in it, but she put a drop of bitters on her finger and tasted it. According to Ken, the look on her face was comedy gold.

Ken decided he was tired and went to bed, leaving me at the bar, and a table of scandinavian skinheads as the only patrons left in the bar. I chatted to the bartender until the bar was closed and her shift was over.

The next morning Ken and I went to check out the Jewish Museum on the recommendation of the bartender and the British teachers.

It wasn't too bad, but I think it and the holocaust memorial are just too much of the same thing in the space of two days.

The Architect that designed the building apparently smokes crack while designing buildings, which leads to a few interesting spaces within the building, but those are far more outweighed by the stupidity that ensues in other parts of the buildings. 1 room whose shape defies any naming convention seen outside of a third year university mathematics subject is more than enough for any building, seventeen whose size and shape render them useless for anything other than leaving them as an empty space for you to stare at bare concrete as you walk through to the next useful bit of the building is, in my opinion, overkill.

There is an interesting art piece dedicated to all the innocent victims of war which is made of metal faces that clank as you walk across them. The bare concrete walls of the area they are in lend an eerie echo to the sound.

One art please:

Faces:

There is also an interesting area with a grid of concrete pillars that sit upon a sloping surface, walking between them is quite disorienting, as they visually tell you that up is a different direction to what your sense of balance says.

We met up with Thea later in the evening and went out for dinner. I was promised wild boar in chocolate sauce by the Lonely Planet guide. It did not seem to be available. I want Ken's money back. After dinner we went back to the hostel and sat in our room drinking. We had the window open and could hear the people in the bar below watching the football. Especially everytime someone scored. The guy sharing the room with us got back a little later and Ken talked to him about finding IT jobs in London or something. I was falling asleep by this stage. Too many late nights.

The next morning we had breakfast and checked out. Ken and Thea were going to head to Leipzeig to check out the Goth Industrial scene or something, but their bus wasn't 'til much later. I had a booking for the 1pm train to Hamburg so they came to the station to see me off. We had a coffee and looked around the station before I boarded the train and was rocketing my way across the countryside at 230 km/hr towards Hamburg.

Next door to Berlin Hbf is a beach resort themed bar, I'll finish this entry with a photo of the Noahs Ark they have in the sand out front.

Note the pool behind it:

bjj_travel @ 2008-02-21T10:00:00

2008-02-21T09:06:52Z

This entry contains stuff about the holocaust. Not expecting anyone to be upset, but now you know...

I woke up feeling a little worse for wear and staggered down for breakfast.

Thea had met a British teacher, whose name I missed, and was having a conversation with her about what sights she seen in Berlin and about living in London. She suggested we check out the East Side Gallery and the Jewish Museum.

We wandered back down to the Holocaust Memorial and checked out the information center beneath it.

It wasn't what I'd describe as "good", but it was certainly interesting and worth seeing.

There was a section that described the events leading up to the holocaust and what was done during.

There was a dark room that had letters and documents from people who had died in white illuminated panels in the floor.

There were other sections that detailed Jewish families and how they were affected, who survived and who didn't, and various stories from people who had survived the camps.

I found the most moving part however to be the "Room of Names", a dark room with three slabs of plastic in the middle that could be sat on. On each wall was projected the name of a victim of the holocaust, along with the year of birth and death, if known. A brief description of the person, where they were born, what they did for a living, when and how they were captured or otherwise caught up in events, and how they died. The description was first in German, and then done in English, and then the name changed and you heard the description for the new person, and so the process repeated. Each person's description lasted less than a minute (about 25-30 seconds for each language).

You could sit in this room for six years and still not have heard the name of every victim of the Holocaust:

(Well, assuming they had the information on all of them, but you get the idea, the scale of the thing is just...)

bjj_travel @ 2008-02-20T14:43:00

2008-02-20T14:17:48Z

Ken awoke early to go meet Thea at a train station and I slept in for a bit before heading off to Berlin Hauptbahnhof (the main train station) to book a ticket for Hamburg on Thursday. (Tip for new players, booking a ticket a few days in advance can save you up to half the cost of the trip).

I walked up Fredrichstrasse and around the curve north of the hostel to see what was there. After I'd had my fill of industrial estate I decided to catch the train to the station. I ended up having to catch a train back to the station near the hostel (Freidrichstrasse) and then change for a train for Berlin Hbf.

Berlin Hbf is enourmous:

There is a level below me with the train tracks:

and two levels above me that stretch as far as the eye can see, with shops either side.
Well. Maybe not as far as the eye can see, but it's big.

I booked my ticket for Hamburg (about 40€) and was wondering what I should do next, thinking maybe lunch, when I spied this ad:

I thought to myself, a seafood restaraunt, here?

These Germans know how to build a train station.

Could this be the best thing I've seen in Berlin so far?

All these thoughts and more were swirling through my head when I spied the location of the eatery in question. I made my way over, and as I did, my whole world collapsed...

Take away fish in bread:

Take away fish in bread. They sold take away fish in bread!
Lies! How dare they despoil the image of the beautiful crayfish on their logo with this filth.
Herring fillets in a roll.

Not feeling much like a herring sandwitch for lunch, I resolved to find somewhere that sold bratwurst or similar and so I hung my head, and trying desperately to forget what might have been, I walked around the corner pillar at the end of their shop...

And that's when I saw it. It's radiance and beauty burned my eyes. I wept tears of joy at the sight before me.

There was a part two of the fish restaraunt around the corner.

A part two with leather seats and a full bar:

I stumbled to the counter and in broken German I ordered two Scampi from the Scampi grill, and a becks. I sat in a booth at the far end of the restaraunt, took a few photos, and then leaned back and marvelled at this pinnacle of German engineering. A seafood resaraunt in a train station.

My scampi arrrived after scant few minutes.

Tasty:

Afterwards, I strode outside the station and into the drizzling rain, refreshed by my experiences within.

The station from the outside:

(the little things with the hats are ads for iproving the insulation of your house or something)

I walked south hoping to find something near the station worth exploring. Soon I hit the Reichstag however, and having got my bearings without finding anything, I returned to the hostel.

Thea was there, but not very talkative. I caught up with Ken eventually and discovered that she was barely acknowledging his presence. We went for a walk and got some Sushi for dinner. I got a deep fried sushi thing, which was interesting but not fantastic (A roll that had been crumbed and fried so the breadcrumbs were cooked but the fish in the middle still raw, before being cut into slices).

Deep fried one is at the back:

Take that d-rob:

on the way back we stopped in at a supermarket.
Mocking me, it had an entire display rack of chap sticks:

We got back to the hostel. Thea had calmed down somewhat, had a chat with Ken, and things seemed okay.

I'll finish off with a few random photos.

Foggy Berlin. With Berlin tower in the background. The draw distance in this game sucks:

A mobile bratwurst vendor with backpack mounted grill:

bjj_travel @ 2008-02-19T12:14:00

2008-02-19T11:43:40Z

Sunday in Berlin.

We decided not to walk very far today.

We awoke and decided to go get some breakfast. After walking for a while we came across the German Natural History Museum and decided to check it out.

A lot of interesting relics from slighty before the roman empire, a fair amount of medieval stuff and so on. The whole thing a is very interesting chronological look at the history of Germany. If you're me at any rate. If you're someone that wanders around not paying attention to where you're going and whether on not you're actually supposed to go behind that exhibit and out the other side, rather than following the arrows on the floor the other direction, well. If you're some like that, let's call our hypothetical innatentive friend, um, Ken. If you're like Ken, then Germany is a crazy place where upon adopting widespread use of the printing press, Teutonic knights in ceremonial armour under the command of Keiser Wihelm shot down British air planes while they firebombed Dresden. If only you could find the part of the museum detailing how in 2036 Germans will invent the first time machine.

Unfortunately, although cameras were allowed in the museum, mine had run out of batteries and my spares were in the Hostel, so no photos :(

Ah, trying to shop in Berlin on a Sunday.

I wanted to buy three things.
- A chapstick. (the cold weather is treating my lips poorly)
- some batteries.
- a pair of scissors.

Ken wanted to buy a book.

Everything is shut on a sunday in Berlin. Everything, except the museums, apparently.

On the way back I looked for some batteries. we eventually managed to find the one newsagent-y type place that was open and hadn't sold out of batteries.

We then decided to find a supermarket and buy something cheap for dinner.

We walked the entire length of Fredrich Strasse and found not a single supermarket that was open, nothing even vaguely close.

After walking almost all the way back, when we got to the train station near the hostel, Ken decided that he needed to pee. It usually costs money to use public toilets in Europe, especially in train stations, about $1.50 a go. (Implementing the Kepler protocol is expensive, but the no exploding policy must be maintained at all costs.)

While Ken was in the bathroom, I noticed that a shop in the train station was open. A health food type shop. I went in and after some searching managed to what I believe to be a beeswax based chap stick. I bought it and went looking for Ken, finding instead a bookstore, and then many other stores, all open. And a supermarket.

Despite the long queues at the checkout we went in and bought some stuff for dinner.
So many types of salami to choose from.
So many unusual cheeses.

When we left we noticed there was now a line to get in to the supermarket:

I also got a pocket knife so that when I got back to the hostel I was able to make some alterations to my lone glove from the old pair.
I was sick of taking my right glove off to do things requiring manual dexterity:

It was relatively late and we were tired, and Ken was dreading the imminent return of Thea, and the ensuing exploding, so we retired to the room and made sandwitches for dinner.

There was a Checkpoint Charlie

2008-02-18T16:59:27Z

he didn't crack a smile,
though it's no laughing party, when you've been on the murder mile,
only takes one itchy trigger, one more widow, one less white nigger,
Oliver's army is here to stay, Oliver's army are on their way,

and I would rather be anywhere else than here today...

So we arrived in Berlin, and that song has been stuck in my head the entire time.

We arrived late in the evening on the train from Dusseldorf and accidentally got off at Spandau, which Ken aptly describes as Berlin's Dandenong. We wandered around "Spandau Plaza" for a bit, got some coffee, I got some new gloves (I had lost my right glove), and we caught the local train into FredrichStrasse Station. We rocked up to a Backpacker Hostel that the Lonely Planet Germany guide book recommends and got two beds. The place isn't too bad, well and truly better quality than the previous hostels, and the room isn't too much more expensive.

Ken makes his bed:

We were still quite badly affected by the previous night's drinking. I sat in the bar and stared vacantly at the bartender, who looks a lot like Diane Franklin, but with straight hair, and drank a lot of water. (http://dianefranklinfan.blogspot.com/)

An American called Tom came in to the bar and I chatted to him for a bit, before calling it quits for the evening.

We awoke the next morning and went for a walk down the street until we randomly hit Checkpoint Charlie.

The less famous sign:

We had a look at the info wall that details the history of the Berlin Wall and the assosciated politics. Then we continued our walk. We had another Doner Kebab on the way. My German is now at the point where I can order two kebabs, one without tomato (Ken is a freak), but it's useless for more or less anything else.
Well, other than telling all the random German people that ask me for directions "Mein Deutsche is nicht sehr gut". I think I've been asked for directions three times so far today. Of course my German isn't that good, it might be "Hey foreign guy, you fly is undone", but it's gotten up to 3 degrees today, so I think I's notice.

Anyway, our walk continued until we arrived at the Brandenburg gate, and beyond that, the Reichstag.

Brandenburg Gate:

You can't see them in this shot, but there were two of those guys that paint themselves white and pretend to be statues here. Only they had a German and an American military uniform on. An odd look, to say the least.

The reich, the reich, the reich is on fire:

Our wandering also took us past a memorial for the Jewish dead, which was confusing for a while, as it isn't really sign posted particularly well, and so was just a load of concrete blocks at first.

Memorial:

So, after a somber walk through the memorial we went across the street and ate strudel, and Ken bought an Orange and Cola flavoured drink, mostly "because it was there".

Not as vile as you'd think:

After that we wandered back to the hostel, and then walked down the street and had all you can eat chinese for dinner.

There was a Bundesliga game on the big screen at the hostel when we got back. Ken flaked out and went to bed.

The only people not watching the game were myself, three hot German chicks who spoke no English (or at least pretended not to), and Tom, the American from the other night.

A black guy came over and started trying to chat up the German girls. He was trying to impress them with his ability to speak German. I watched on, not understanding a thing, but admiring his work ethic.

Tom threw in the occasional comment about what was being said. It was interesting watching the body language shift back and forth as they became more or less impressed with what he was saying or doing.
In the end he managed to give them his phone number and then they laughed about him after he left.

I decided at that point to call it a night.

In Berlin.

2008-02-17T18:05:07Z

I'd really like to post an entry, but this internet cafe is fucked.

They have a stupid system whereby you have to get stuff off external devices (Cameras, flash memory, etc) uploaded onto the PC at the front desk and access it via the network.

I suspect I will be charged for the 30 minutes I've just spent watching the idiot behind the counter try and get my pictures off my camera in various ways, and fail.

I'll post something in the next day or so hopefully once Internet competence has returned.

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard

2008-02-15T11:52:50Z

Lala-lalala,
Warm it up,
Lala-lalala,
The boys are waiting

So, I got drunk and threw away my luggage...

Well, perhaps that's a little misleading. Throwing away my luggage has nothing to do with getting drunk, I'm just sick of carting it around.

I also didn't throw all of it away, I'm keeping the little detachable pack part.

This is what I'm now travelling around Europe with:

Also, technically, I haven't actually thrown it away. I considered posting it back to Australia, but it was going to be too expensive. Chris is going to take it back to London and bring it with him when he comes out in September.

I have been thinking about this for a while now. Pretty much since the first day I arrived actually. I did at one point have a workable plan that revolved around another hip bag, and buying cheap clothes to throw away after one or two days, that dispensed with the backpack entirely, but I bought a couple of Amsterdam t-shirts that I want to keep, so the plan has changed slightly.

Anyway, back to the drinking story.

It was Chris' last night in Germany last night so we went out for a meal.
I had Mustard soup, potato pancakes, and then "Japanese style" mussels.
(steamed mussels with a soy sauce based soup with onion and bean shoots, liberally covered in horseradish, which has the interesting effect that if you put your face into the steam coming off the bowl it blinds you temporarily.)

Mustard soup:

Potato Pancakes:

Anyway, we had a few beers with dinner and then decided to go to a bar.

Chris picked a cocktail bar called Mississippi that had some dance/house music playing. At one point early on in the proceedings the song milkshake was playing, and it's about the only song I can remember specifically, which explains my ramblings at the top of the post somewhat.

Anyway, the drink I am drinking in the picture below is a Jumbo sized Long Island Iced Tea.

Long Island Iced Tea is Loooooooong:

My cohorts ham it up for the camera:

Look at them, sitting there with their pansy little regular sized cocktails...

So, I had the aforementioned LIIT, a Zombie, a Mai Tai, and I've forgotten the fourth one, it might have been a Hurricane, it came from the section of the menu titled "Strong" at any rate. We sat in the bar drinking, chatting, and watching "World Sexy Games" or something similar. It seems to be a show where hot chicks with large breasts compete in the sort of games you'd see on something like "It's a knockout" except rather than scoring points anytime a contestant got knocked off something or whatever would normally score their opponent points, they lost an article of clothing. Actually, they were only wearing a loose sleeveless top and panties to start with, so it was more a three losses and you lose the game type thing. Did I mention that most of the games involved a lot of bouncing up and down.

After that, we staggered back to the hotel, well a block or so past it, realised, turned round. We had been required to leave the key at reception whenever we left the hotel, and none of the people behind the desk in this family run establishment spoke any English except the woman who is there at 9am. We convened a strategic meeting outside the hotel to discuss who would go up and ask for the key. It was determined that as long as Ken would "shut the fuck up" while I walked up and said the room number in German, and nothing else, we would probably be okay. I had a few practice runs and then walked in the front door, strode up to the desk and was handed the key without having to even ask.

We got up to the room. I stripped off, fell into bed, got up again almost immediately, staggered to the bathroom and proceeded to fill the toilet with Japanese style mussels.

At some point after that I seem to have got back to my bed and passed out there. Ken informs me that after I had passed out, Chris got up and threw up as well. Ken did not throw up and wishes he had.

I woke up at about 8:30, had a shower and after informing the others that if they didn't get up they'd miss breakfast, I staggered down to breakfast. The woman who serves the breakfast speaks some English, which is good, because when I got down there she started asking me stuff in German.
I kind of stared at her blankly, tried to process it, realised it was never going to happen and strung together "mein deutch is nicht sehr gut und Ich haben sehr fiel to trinke gestern nacht" which more or less is literally "My German is not very good and I had very much to drink yesterday night" which caused her to start laughing and ask me in English if I wanted some coffee.
She was amused by my state for the rest of the morning. Probably also amused by the fact that what I said will have had appalling grammer and wrong tenses probably use the wrong genders or something.

Ken and Chris feeling seedy:

Chris came down and had some breakfast, I went up to the room threw some painkillers down my throat and lay on the bed wishing for the peace only death can bring. A while later Chris came back up and shortly after that so did his breakfast.

Ken wisely skipped breakfast.

The breakfast woman waved to me on my way out of the hotel, wished me a good day, and then laughed some more.

It's almost 1pm and I still feel like shit, dizzy, like I'm still drunk, and I suspect my headache will be back with a vengance once the aspirin wears off.
The cigarette smoke in here isn't helping matters either.

Today Ken and I head off to Berlin to meet up with Thea and Chris is catching the train to London.

I'm looking forward to being able to sit back and get some sleep on the way.

I'll leave you now with a poster we saw on the street. It looks like it should be advertising a show in Amsterdam. Anyway it amused us:

Ach meinen auto

2008-02-14T18:31:51Z

This is the third post today, you probably want to skip down and read them in order.

So, having turned in for the night, I am woken at 1:15am by a knock at the door. A woman informs me that the Polizei want to talk to me about my car.

I get dressed and head downstairs to find someone has smashed in the window of the car and made off with one of the bags. (I had decided I really didn't need anything beyond my toiletries bag when we were parked at the edge of town, and Chris and Ken had followed suit, not wanting to cart their bags all the way across town. When I moved the car later, no one could be bothered getting their bags out)
Of course the bag that was stolen was Thea's.

I spoke to the Police, gave them my details, they had already been talking to Ken and Chris via the hotel owner.

Not much else to be done, we returned to our rooms.

A short panic later I was re-united with my passport. I had given it to the Police, and then put it down outside when I got distracted.

After a short while of tossing and turning I went back to sleep.

The car the next morning:

I woke up at about 7:30 and decided to go for a walk around town, in hopes that Thea's bag and the relatively valueless contents had been dumped nearby.
Unfortunately that was not the case.

I took a few shots of the frost covered town while I was out:

A chapel/shrine to a local saint at a guess:

I returned to the hotel about 9, slightly frozen (I must buy a hat, and a new set of gloves, I lost my right glove), made sure the others were up and went to have breakfast. Chris commited another crime against breakfast, this time Strawberry yoghurt on museli:

He'll get his, he ate an entire tub full of Gastro:

We took a brief walk up to the castle and looked out over the town:

before returning to clean the broken glass out of the car and setting off for Dusseldorf to take the car back to the rental place, not being able to do much else with it.

Now I feel like I'm playing GTA, I'm doing 150 km/hr on the wrong side of the road, in a car that has been broken into, with a man in a ski mask in the back seat:

Did I mention I'm doing 150 km/hr:

and that people are still overtaking me.

It's also very cold when it's 1 degree outside, the car is doing 150, and you can't wind up the window.

We arrived back in Dusseldorf, got a bit lost, I got a bit frazzled in the car (sorry Chris), since we had temporarily misplaced the map of Dusseldorf,
and driving around a city on the wrong side of the road, with no idea where you're going, when you can't read the road signs, is no fun at all.

We got back to the rental place. The woman behind the desk didn't seem to care that the window had been smashed. I guess my credit card will tell me how much they don't care in the long run.

Of course, with Thea's luggage gone, now that we were back in Dusseldorf, Ken found what he needed:

A suicide booth.

All in all, not the most fun part of the trip, but I did enjoy the afternoon/evening in Monschau quite a lot. And I am glad I got to tool around on the Autobahn, even if it was in a small Nissan buzzbox.

Of course, what I am most annoyed about (assuming the hit to my credit card is not too severe) is that because we needed to return the car to Dusseldorf we missed out on going to Wonderland Kalkar, which was the activity we had planned for the afternoon.

http://www.kernwasser-wunderland.com/

Wonderland Kalkar is of course, a nuclear reactor that has been turned into an amusement park...

Such a sleepy little town

2008-02-14T18:03:12Z

We arrived in Monschau.

We did a lap of the road winding round through town before parking the car at the car park on the outskirts and wandering into town.

Monschau is a sleepy looking little town in a mountain valley, and I have been here once before, when I was about twelve. I don't remember a great deal about the town from that time, but when I was here almost 20 years ago, this is what happened to the car my mother was driving:

I was in the back seat with my sister, neither of us with seat belts on.
I ended up with a bump on my forehead, my sister a black eye, and my mother probably the worst off of us all with a giant purple welt where the seat belt was.

Anyway, my defining memory of that time and place really has little to do with the place. My attempts to find the location of the accident or even the spot pictured in the photo bore little success, although it did confuse the young woman in the tourist office.

Some of the town:

Ken decided there was a bizzare wicker man style cult in town and warned us not to decide to go walking in the woods at night:

It reminds me of somewhere like Olinda for some reason.

The green building on the left is the hotel we stayed at, just on from that, the tourist office:

The hotel's website is http://www.alt-monschau.de

Check out the "mit eigenem Fahrzeug" link on the left for the google maps view of Monschau.

We got a single and double room this time, and I grabbed the single to escape the snory twins:

We moved the car to a spot out the front of the hotel and then decided to have some dinner. Very few of the people in this town spoke much English at all, the girl in the Tourist Office and the guy who ran the hotel had a decent amount, but the waitress at the hotel had little, and the older woman who worked there and was possibly the owner's mother spoke none at all.
I had fun trying out my limited German and Ken got to point at stuff some more, fun was had by all.

We all had the Monschau special Steak, which was an extremely well cooked fillet steak (medium rare to perfection, they seem not to ask how you'd like it done in Europe, at least the bits I've had steak in) with a mustard sauce, and chips and salad. Chris and I had the soup of the day (vegetable) for starters, while Ken tried the Escargot:

I had one, they're nice, a bit like cooked oysters in texture, and coated in garlic and butter. I'd eat oysters for preference but I'd definately have them again.

After dinner, we went for a walk around town:

Then Ken found a nature walk track and suggested we follow it.

Ken, You fool! You ignored your own advice. We're out in the woods after dark, if anyone is becoming the year king it's going to be you...

Luckily, no deranged cultists siezed us for use in their dark rituals, and we got some nice shots of the town from up the side of the valley looking down:

We returned unharmed, if a little frozen, to the hotel, and turned in for the night.

Join us for tomorrow's journal update, in which we see how the mysterious "Monschau Curse" affects another generation of my family and see the damage done to my car...

Eine Klienes Auto

2008-02-14T17:30:41Z

So, we walked to the station where we knew there were a few car rental places. We asked at Hertz and Eurocar, only to discover they had no cars available. We enquired at the station about Public Transport to Monschau, and discovered that we could take a train to Aachen, and then a bus to Monschau.
We decided to try our luck at the low budget looking German rental company (Siktz or something). Not wanting to disappoint Stewart I strode up to the counter and in my best German I said "We wollen ein auto meiten!". The woman behind the counter said something that was basically which one of the hundreds of cars we have available did you want to rent. Take that Hertz and Eurocar.

In the general vein of spending as little as possible that has been the norm so far, we opted for a small car, a Nissan Micra or something.

A Small car:

We worried for a moment that we weren't going to be able to fit in, but we crammed mine and Ken's packs into the boot, put Chris' suitcase on the back seat, and put Thea's case on Ken.

It's all good:

After a confusing few minutes we were out of the car park and onto the roads of Dusseldorf.

After a few panicky minutes I was getting the hang of driving on the right side of the road, and we were going the right way down a one way street for a change.

A few minutes later and we were crossing the Rhine and heading towards the autobahn, I was starting to get the hang of things, it was just like Grand Theft Auto, and we were all looking forward to hitting the autobahn and going a fast as we could:

Turns out 10 km/hr is a fast as we could go.

Good to see that they have the South Eastern Arterial in Germany too...

Actually, after about 5 more minutes we discovered the roadworks that were holding up traffic, got past them and got onto the autobahn.

We headed for Aachen, a little over 50 km away.

At this rate we should be there in 20 minutes:

Cruising down the Autobahn:

The autobahn is a little bit crazy, but mostly works well. If someone is going faster than you and you are in the left lane (the faster lane) you are expected to move over for them. Aside from the fact that people will come screaming up behind you and then match speeds at the last possible minute.

The little Nissan can only manage 160 km/hr and people were still coming up behind us at a relative speed such that if I were a pedestrian and you were coming at me that fast, I'd be diving out the way. The Nissan felt a little unstable at 150 or more, so I tended to do 140 for most of the trip.

We got a little lost and confused when we hit Aachen, but while we were driving through the city center we spotted a bus for Monchau and tried to follow it. We lost it at some lights, but as we tried to catch it we started to see road signs to Monchau, and so we followed those instead, at least until they started to have Monschau crossed out on them. This was a little worrying, but we persevered.

Turns out there were road wroks on the road to Monschau, cutting off the 258 (or whatever highway number we were on). We did a few U turns and some driving down alleyway sized streets, detoured around and got back on the 258.

I had joked with Ken about going to Belgium, since it was only about 5km further on from Monschau. We would later find out at the map in the Monschau tourist office that due to the curved nature of the border and the relative positions of Aachen and Monschau, that we had just been.

And so about 4 in the afternoon we arrived in Monchau...

Dusseldorf

2008-02-13T11:02:25Z

We arrived in the "party city" of Dusseldorf yesterday.

Out the train window:

We caught the Hi-Speed international train and the trip from Amsterdam to Dusseldorf took about 2 hours.

Disembarking in Deutchland:

After booking a hotel through the Tourist Info Office we wandered over, checked in and dumped our bags. Chris hung his coat in the closet behind the door, and I bumped him with the door entering the room. I turned around in time to see Ken almost kill him coming through the door after me (Ken is carrying alot of Thea baggage at the moment).
Chris got knocked into the closet, and since I had taken my camera out to take a photo of the room, I was able to catch this shot of Chris coming out of the closet:

After that we wandered the city streets, looking for some of the fabled party atmosphere that Ken's guidebook had promised.

Canal in the middle of the City:

We wandered through the old town and down SchadowStrasse, before deciding to find a place where we could have something to eat. The guidebook suggested there were restaurants along the Rhine so we headed in that direction.

We wandered along the Rhine as the sun went down, taking in all that the "Party City" had to offer, which was mostly 14 year olds hanging out at the river side. Wooo.

Further down the river seemed to be an industrial area so we turned around and headed back the other way.

Oddly lit industrial plant, or Brotherhood of Nod PowerPlant?:

Boats on the Rhine at night:

The Rhine Tower, worlds largest digital clock:

Heading back we passed the famous Old beer hall which seemed to be the only place anything was happening, and found a traditional looking restaurant run by three older German women. I tried to get by without using any English, and did okay. I managed to get us a table for three, a couple of beers, and Potato soup and Pork Shoulder, mashed potato and Sauerkraut, with only minimal pointing at the menu. Chris used his half remembered high school German to order Pork Fillet in Cognac Pepper sauce with roast potatos. Ken made hand gestures and grunting noises and the bill arrived.

Chris has finished eating:

We went back past the Old beer hall to see what was going on, but it was a sausage fest, so we decided to turn in for the night.

Awoken at 4am by the buzzsaw twins, I read the rest of my war porn novel, and eventually got up to have breakfast.

I had a few bits of meat and cheese:

Chris had chocolate flakes which he covered in Yoghurt:

He seemed pleased with his crime:

We've stopped in an internet cafe on our way to rent a car, then we're going to drive to Monschau.

Farewell to the triple X city.

2008-02-12T08:03:22Z

Today we head off to the station and will try and catch a train to Dusseldorf.
One of the most amusing things about Amsterdam is that it really is the triple X city:

No, this is not some sort of sex University, where you can earn a Bachelors degree in Applied Pornographics (although I wouldn't exactly discount that possibility), it is the University of Amsterdam's official logo in all it's XXX glory.

The city of Amsterdam's crest from ye olde times was a shield with three X's down the middle vertically, and so that XXX motif is on everything from churches to garbage trucks.

Here is a selection of things I took shots of, that have the XXX logo on them:

A hotel:

Another Hotel:

A Council vehicle:

A garbage truck:

A portable road work sign:

A manhole cover:

Another drain access hatch:

Souvineer shop sign:

and another:

the crest:

the city's flag:

A post stopping cars from driving on the footpath:

A garage door:

Other minor news:

Chris and I went and had dinner at hot waitress cafe, but she wasn't there.

Ken's Yuri Geller like powers are developing nicely:

We were walking down the street the other day and I looked up and Nimrod was following us. He was trying to keep his face hidden behind a map in classic spy fashion, but I'm sure it was him:

You see alot of gay flags and marijuana in this city, but together in a delivery truck?

The sex museum, we didn't go. Chris said he wanted to check out some museums, I'm not sure what his problem was:

bjj_travel @ 2008-02-11T15:08:00

2008-02-11T14:09:03Z

Today Thea is organising to head back and do some job interviews and Chris has gone back to Utrecht to try and get some shots from the tower, cunningly avoiding his date with the waitress of destiny by doing so.
Next time gadget, next time...

That left Ken and I to go for a quick walk to get a map of Germany and figure out where we're off to next. Four hours later we arrived back with a map of Western Europe and a Lonely Planet guide that is missing the section on Dusseldorf.

I am also sporting a rather fetching five hooker coat, that I got on sale for two hookers.
(Ken has somehow aquired the information that the going rate for a hooker is 50 euro, he claims it's in the Tourist Guide book the city gives away free, the end result of which is that the hooker is now our measure of currency for large transactions in much the saame way as rockpapershotgun.com use the Peggle as a unit of download size)

See my vest, see my vest...

fetching, no?:

Now we're back and just kicking about the hotel while we wait for Chris to get back from Utrecht.
Dinner at a certain cafe methinks...

Random Photos

2008-02-11T09:23:56Z

This is the third of three entries submitted one after the other. Might want to read them in order.

Here are a few random photos I took over the last few days - enjoy

Three level bike rack:

Canal in Utrecht:

Street in Utrecht:

Bicycle with Ablative Baby Armour:

Canal in Amsterdam:

Canal bridge in Amsterdam:

Canal boat:

Some buildings in Amsterdam:

Cute Chicks on Bikes, no mobiles though:

Duck Habitats which line some of the canals:

Rox-aaaaannnne

2008-02-11T09:23:42Z

The Redlight District:

Is much less interesting than you'd think:

As Ken is want to say "If there is anything dodgy or mysterious looking in Amsterdam, it just isn't..."
For example, I spied on one of our walks a place called "the Amsterdam Dungeon".
S&M club? Fetish Leather store? Brothel that specialises in whipping?
I found out later from a brochure at our hotel that it is, in fact, a horror themed theatre restaraunt.

Mostly the redlight district consists of a bunch of little windows/glass doors into rooms with red lights either side of the window. Assuming the red velvet curtain isn't drawn because the room is either unnoccupied, or there is business transacting within, there will be a bored looking woman in a swimsuit or similar attire who might be watching TV or eating, or just standing there waiting to make eye contact with someone. If someone pays any attention whatsoever, they tap on the glass and try and get you to come over. It's all a bit sad really, and very few of the women are actually that good looking, although Ken assures me that based on the previous night they went along (before I arrived in town) that on a Sunday evening "the B team is definately switched in".

Window in the Redlight District, daytime:

We ended the evening by going to a bar, having a few rounds of beer/wine/vodka and then headed back to the hotel lobby, via a kebab joint, to drink the Korean alcohol I got at the Duty free on the way over.

Culture

2008-02-11T09:23:22Z

Monday morning. Yesterday we got up late, maybe midday and Chris, Ken and I went for a wander to take in some culture, while Thea did some job application stuff or something.

We had a rather nice anti-pasto for lunch at a cafe. Chris later told Ken and I that he thought that a) the waitress was cute, and b) she was making eyes at him.
We soundly beat him and have press ganged him into going back today and asking her to dinner.

After that we went for a walk down to the Anne Frank Museum, passing this on the way:

There was a large line of people at the AFM, and so we decided to give it a miss.
Instead moving on to the Rejksmuseum:

It contains a large number of paintings and other artworks (a lot of worked silver) and othrer historical bric-a-brac. It also contains a machine for sending video greetings over teh interwebs. All museums appear to have one of these machines actually.

There was a painting of a Dutch Aristocratic woman whose name I can't remember. Her portrait looked eerily like Rachel Holkner.

There were no cameras allowed in the Museum so you'll have to make do with a photo of an Arch that lead into the gardens outside the museum:

We then moved on to the Van Gogh Museum:

It was okay, but I think a) I was a bit painting-ed out by that stage, and b) it started with his early works and moved on chronologically through his career, which led to a lot of "I could paint that" early on.

There were no cameras allowed in the Van Gogh museum either. The thing that perplexes me however is that when I went to pass through the security checkpoint at the entrance, I was asked to give them my camera and mobile (Ken and Chris had put theirs in their bags at the coat check, I had no bag) and then step through the metal detector.
The metal detector beeped three times, and the guard gave me back my camera and phone and said "have a good day". I'm not sure what they're trying to achieve.

Ken had told me there was an upcoming Kickboxing Tournament. We walked past a poster for it during the day. Apparently it was the same night we hung out with Thea's friends. Oh well:

Near the Rejksmuseum was the only frozen water I've seen, outside of a bar, since I left South Korea:

We walked back to the hotel after that and collected Thea. We decided to go to a nearby restaraunt that did traditional Dutch food, for dinner.
I had pea and Sausage soup and Staampot (or something) for mains. Chris had the same main, with onion soup. Ken had black pudding, and something that sounded like hodgepodge, but spelt more Dutch, for his mains. Thea had a mysterious fish, the elusive SalmonTrout, for her main.

After that we went back to the hotel. Thea was sleepy, so she went up to the room and Chris, Ken and I decided to take in what the city night had to offer...

Concert Addendum

2008-02-11T08:21:21Z

Federhead shirtless, just for Emma:

Utrecht to Amsterdam

2008-02-10T17:34:47Z

We wandered around Utrecht for the morning. Chris wanted to go up in the Tower in the middle of town, which would have been cool, but it was all booked out with private tours until 5pm.
We found a supermarket eventually and I bought some deoderant and stuff (all the things that are now confiscated as weapons of terror at the airport).

We wandered around town and then had coffee. It was apparently a fairly sunny day, which meant that the outside of the cafe/restaraunt (a fairly large establishment) was a sea of chairs all facing the sun, full of people just sitting in the sun, drinking their coffee.

We had doner kebabs at a place that Chris alleged had the best kebabs he'd ever eaten. It was good, but not that good. Fairly amusingly, a young guy and an old guy were behind the counter, and neither spoke much english, enough to order three kebabs and get something vegetarian for Thea. They had a rather loud and animated conversation while they made the kebabs. I understood only two words that kept cropping up, Malaka and Skata. Mostly the old guy calling the young guy a Malaka.

We wandered around town for a while more before returning to the hostel to grab our bags, and wandered to the station and caught the train to Utrecht. We accidentally got on a first class carriage, but by the time we realised the train was moving and we decided to just stay put and play dumb. Luckily no ticket inspectors turned up and we made it to Amsterdam.

Chris and Ken stealing first class.

There is a chocolate store, a bit like Koko Black, that has various franchises about the place, one of which is at the Utrecht station:

I had suggested we see what we could get in the way of a hotel when we got to Amsterdam. After consulting the "Hotel info" near the station, we ended up at a nearby hotel called the "Tourist Inn", which is more expensive than the hostel the others had stayed in previously, by maybe 50%, but we now have a four bed room and shower/bathroom all to ourselves.

Chris in our room:

According to Ken our new hotel has the safest stairwell in all Amsterdam:

That evening Thea had arranged to meet an old friend and so we went and hung out with him and his friend at a small bar called the Hash Hotel (which doesn't actually sell Hash, despite the name). We spent the evening drinking and chatting to a few other people that were there, a guy from New Zealand and his German partner, a professional dancer, who have both been living in Amsterdam for about 8 years. The bartender was great value, and as far as I can tell runs the bar as a place where he can chat to his friends of an evening while he mans the hotel desk.

We went to get some kebabs afterwards and the girl (I think her name was Caroline) convinced him to have a go at riding her bike. She giggled madly as Ken wobbled away into the night and then a police car passed us and she broke into a run calling after him "Ken Ken, no stop" before giving up with an "Oh well, he is gone" and returning to giggling uncontrollably.

Apparently although we have not seen one bike helmet, we have seen three people on one moped, two guys riding mopeds side by side and having a long animated conversation while they ride, countless people smoking and or using a mobile phone while they ride, and other seemingly unsafe practices which are all apparently fine, ride a bike without any lights on at night and the cops come down on you like a ton of bricks...

After our kebabs we parted ways and began the long walk home.
After deciding Thea didn't know where she was going and that we should pull out Chris' GPS thingy, and then realising Chris couldn't read his GPS, we backtracked and walked the much shorter walk back to the hotel.

Of Goths and Bicycles

2008-02-09T09:26:33Z

Okay, so it's almost 10am local time.

I survived the concert, which was okay, but really not my style of music. Probably not a waste of 17 euros.

Firstly though, A few photos that belong in the last entry that I didn't have time to upload:

A sign at Incheon Airport:

The english text says: "We are sorry for inconvenience. This traditional culture experiencing zone is under construction for renovation".
There were a couple of others that were for simply for "stores" which leaves me wondering what a cultural experiencing zone is.

Someone sleeps across the four middle seats of the plane:

Just off the plane. You can see where I spilled the Sesame oil sachet from my bibimbap on myself:

Ken, at the airport:

Carbs in grease, topped with grease:

A bizzare Ad at the train station, which is sensbily, part of the airport:

The best photo Thea would let me take of her:

It's Euro Chris, just like regular Chris only 50% more suave and sophisticated:

The hostel room (there are more beds out of shot than in)

My bed is the far top one. The bed of the man who snores like his life depends on it is directly below that *no, not Ken, there is someone worse)

A few photos from just walking about:

horsie.

clocktower.

Bicycles.
There a bikes everywhere.
Seriously.
And crazy people riding them, with no helmets, talking on mobile phones, and paying no attention to the road.
And they have right of way. They have right of way over cars as a matter of law, but they also have right of way over pedestrians in the way only a person on a vehicle who knows they won't actually kill you if they hit you can.
Chris has a fetish for European girls on bicycles talking on the cellphone, it needs a name.

Speaking of bikes, one of the funniest things I've seen in a while is at the end of the concert, the doors opened onto the street and goths poured out, then most of them got onto bicycles and rode away into the night.

Speaking of the concert, one of the best aspects was to play "spot people who look like someone from Melbourne". There was a number of people pointed out over the course of the evening, some notables include the guy who physically looked like TMatt, and the guy who looked like Eccles from behind, but there was a clear winner.
When he walked in I said to Chris and Ken "there are two guys here in dresses, that guy there who just looks like a goth, and the guy who just walked in that reminds me of Yuri".
It turned out to be somewhat prophetic as the guy spent the evening dancing up to groups of people who would ignore him as he danced at them, and various women looked upon him in distain.

I have video footage of the point where he jumped on stage and danced at Rotersand, and was promptly thrown off stage.

Otherwise it was Gothic and Concerty, and I have some video and other photos on the camera.

On the walk home we encountered this store which Ken insists is for all your 24 hour Labrador needs:

He continues to insist this, despite my constant arguments otherwise.
I have given up arguing that there was no evidence of actual labradors on the premises and have changed my tack to that it couldn't possibly be for all your 24 hour needs, since it was closed when we walked past. He remains unfazed.

Just a quick one

2008-02-08T16:09:04Z

Ken met me at the airport and after a quick meal of fries in mayo, the national dish of netherlands or something, we caught the train to Utrecht. Once there we bumped into Thea in the shopping center, where the station is, who was waiting for Chris.

We walked over to the Hostel that we are staying at for the night and checked in. We only have an hour or so before the door opens for the concert we are going to. I have technically been awake since 11pm last night local time so it will be interesting to see how I fare. I did manage to get a few hours of lying across four seats with my eyes shut in this flight, but it wasn't sleep.

I think Thea is insisting we drink some beer before the concert, so I guess I better go.

It begins.

2008-02-07T13:17:21Z

So, here I am, in my hotel room in Incheon, which is Seoul's version of Tullamarine. The hotel is in the middle of nowhere and it is a balmy -2 degrees outside, which is kind of discouraging me from going for a wander to see what if anything is happening around here. It kind of looked like industrial estate on the drive here anyway.

The flight was pretty good, if boring. About 11 hours in the air all up. The plane was pretty empty. If that happens again, I'm definately being one of the people who grabs a vacant set of four seats in the middle so I can put the handrests up and lie down.

Airline Korean food is actually pretty good.
I had fried rice with BBQ chicken for what was effectively lunch, and something called bibimbap (pictured below) for the dinner analogue.

I read 2 1/2 books on the flight, and then stopped and stared at the wall for the last hour or so because I was sick of reading.
The plane (an Airbus 330 I think) was pretty lo-tech, only the one central screen, none of this pick your own movie business.

There were three films shown during the flight:
The Grand Chef (or something similar): A Korean film about two rival chefs who are both the grandson of each of the two apprentices of the royal chef. He cut his hand off when the Japanese invaded rather than cook for them or something. Anyway, there is a competition to determine who will inherit the Royal Chef's legacy and the two heirs enter the competition which ends up being a giant kind of Iron Chef with a dozen rounds or so, with the added twist that they are told what the special ingredient for the next round is and have to procure it themselves, which leads to additional wackiness like trying to convice the best charcoal maker in the country to divulge his secrets, only he's now a prisoner in solitary confinement. Oh and the bad rival chef's goons beating up the good rivals friends to steal their charcoal, and the good rival chef killing his pet cow he had raised since he was little for the beef carving round.
Good but wierd.

Mr Magorium's Magic Emporium: Kid's film, I stopped watching after about 10 minutes.

Didn't catch the title: An odd film. A musical, set against the backdrop of American involvement in Vietnam, using mainly songs by the Beatles. The main character Jude is British and comes to America to find his estranged father and falls in love with a girl called Lucy, who is too caught up in the student revolution to return his feelings or something. I stopped watching because, well the initial songs weren't very good and none of the main actors have very interesting voices. I did put the headphones back on when the visuals got wierd and I was paying attention which led to me catching such moments as:
The section where there is a war montage with the americans dropping exploding strawberries on vietnam to the tune of Strawberry fields forever (Jude is an artist and is creating something with strawberries when he, forget it, don't ask).
The scene while Lucy's injured soldier brother is in hospital being tended to by seven hot nurses dressed in the sort of nurses uniform you find in SexyLand rather than a hospital, while they sing a Shoop Shoop version of "Hapiness is a warm gun" while vietnam casualties in hospital beds rotate around the room and a chaplain dances like a whirling dervish in the middle of them.

Some photos out the window of the plane:

There's a beautiful sunset behind the wing, the plane just never banked far enough that I could get a decent shot.

The Korean Coastline.

Some city lights.

Anyway. I landed and made my way through customs to the information desk, where the travel agent had led me to believe I would introduce myself and be taken to a hotel that was included in the cost of the tickets, organised by the airline because there was no connecting flight until tomorrow.
Apparently this was not the case and I very quickly found myself bundled into a taxi and driven to a hotel where I find myself now.

I have grown tired of watching the Starcraft channel, and so K1 is on in the background and I'm typing out this.

Oh I almost forgot, I wore my BJJ Pan Pacs tshirt today and so I got to talk about BJJ and get congratulated on achieving my blue belt by the customs agent who frisked me for contraband aerosols and sniffed me for explosives (technically he has a machine for that).