Well, this is not going to be anywhere near long enough to come close to doing justice to my last few weeks of travel, but it will be better then nothing.
To summarize my travel since Italy:
back to Forchheim with family, experienced a real german beerfest, then met up with mr. Peter Cailloux in Prague and spent about 2 weeks seeing Prague, Czech Republic; Krakow, Poland; Lanzhot, Czech Republic (family); Bratislava, Slovakia; Vienna, Austria; then without pete, Topolcany, Slovakia and Parpizanshe(?), Slovakia (both family), then another day in Prague before going back to Forchheim to pick up my stuff and train to Paris, France; Girona, Spain; Barcelona, Spain; and in an effort to visit Pete in Porto, Portugal, I managed to get over to San Sebastian, Spain, and no further. So back Paris to spend the last few days, and I will be here until the 4th, when I go back to London and fly home on the 5th. whew.
Since a list of places isn't nearly as interesting as I had hoped, I guess I can tell some tales of my journey as well.
They will have to wait to the next post. Or rather, just ask me. I have stories.
I will be home 2:30 pm on September 5th, at Dulles airport, if you are bored and nearby, come say hi. I will be around the Baltimore/Washington area for a while as I look for a job and move to an apartment somewhere nearby said future job. If you want to see me, let me know via phone call, email, fb message, etc. I have a lot of people to see and things to catch up with, so contact me soon to get your time! That's all for now, and possibly the last entry. I don't think I will have a chance to upload more pictures until I get home, but expect a huge update soon, there's a ton more to go up.
Thanks for reading, if you still are.
Bye!
Sunday, September 2, 2007
Monday, July 30, 2007
Florence
The end of the Italy blogs, Florence details my adventures in the city and at the camp/holiday center of Camping Il Poggetto.
First day
Well, after a few days in Rome as hot as they were, I was hoping to get some relief back in Florence, but no luck. I got back to the city mid afternoon and did the wandering thing for a while, feeling more comfortable with the bus home and with the city itself, having already spent a few hours wandering a few days ago. I had my backpack with me, so I tried to keep the walking to shorter distances and took a few breaks to let the sweat dry on my back. Eventually I headed back to the camp to eat and see what the backpacker crowd looked like for the night. At the bus stop I heard a pair of English speakers and talked to them, finding out they were Canadian and traveling for a while after working in London and Dublin for a few months. I hung out with them for a while back at camp discussing travels and stuff. Later that night I met a Canadian guy who happened to be sleeping in my dorm room, who invited me to hang out with some other people he had met there. Altogether it was a group of 3 other Canadians, 2 other Americans, the guy, and me. Add a few bottles of beer, some wine, and a deck of cards and you get a good game of kings. Not the standard rules I was used to, but still fun. One of the American girls reminded me very much of Christie (from UMBC, if you don´t know who it is), which reminded me again that she isn´t going to be on the east coast anymore when I get back. Another stop for my trip out west next year...Anyway, fun night with fun people, in the morning I met the Kiwi girl they had been talking about, who offered me a ride into town that I managed to miss. Oops. I eventually made it into town with the Canadians and Americans, but we split up there to go our own ways, I had an Enoch to find. To sum up that search quickly, missed him again. Back to my day...I went to see the dome first thing (after a quick breakfast) just to be sure I didn´t miss it. It was definitly worth seeing, I loved going up. There are a lot of pictures I took, that aren´t online at the time I´m writing this, but will be up sometime soon. To get up you walk up inside the walls of the catherdal and then in the space between the inner and outer domes, just as the workers did when they were building it. In total, there are 463 steps (their count, not mine - I was too busy looking to count) from the bottom to the top. From the top you get an amazing panoramic view of Florence and the surrounding hills, and a spot to rest from the trip up. I have to reccomend the book "Brunelleschi's Dome" for those interested. Anyway, I enjoyed it a lot, and then continued on my day. I went on to see some other famous landmarks, including a stop at Piazzale Michelangiolo, from which you get a decent view of the city from the top of a hill on the south side of the river Arno. While I was up there I saw a fire in the distance on some hill to the east, and took a picture. Later on the bus ride home I saw a helicopter carrying a water bucket in this general direction, so I´m guessing this wasn´t good. I don´t remember what else I saw, except the famous bridge I walked over on my way back. Most of the bridge is covered in goldsmiths on both sides, and it´s old and famous. That night I hung out with a couple Canadians and a pair of Americans, some drinking and fun. There should be a picture here eventually, just wait. The next day was spent in an internet cafe and a hospital - don´t worry I´m fine - I just wanted to see if I had broken my heel or just bruised it. So a few hours of waiting, some 30 €, and a few rough translations later I find out it just soft tissue bruise. A wasted day as a tourist I guess, oh well. That night was spent with 5 English girls and an Austraillian girl at the camp, lots of talking about this and that, a bit of wine, and a good end to a crappy day. The next day I spent wandering Florence with the Aussie and a Dutch guy we met in the morning. I had a 7pm train back to Pisa and he had a 11pm train to somewhere in France, so we spent the day showing the Aussie the wandering tour of Florence, which is a great way to see the city and most of the famous landmarks without much effort. The trip back to Forchheim was a 20 hour trip, train to Pisa airport, fly to London, sleep in Stamstead, fly to Frankfurt-Hahn, bus to Mainz, train to Forchheim...and then to ANNAFEST! Woo-Hoo! okay, thats the end of Italy, hope to have the rest of the pictures up soon...Bye!
First day
Well, after a few days in Rome as hot as they were, I was hoping to get some relief back in Florence, but no luck. I got back to the city mid afternoon and did the wandering thing for a while, feeling more comfortable with the bus home and with the city itself, having already spent a few hours wandering a few days ago. I had my backpack with me, so I tried to keep the walking to shorter distances and took a few breaks to let the sweat dry on my back. Eventually I headed back to the camp to eat and see what the backpacker crowd looked like for the night. At the bus stop I heard a pair of English speakers and talked to them, finding out they were Canadian and traveling for a while after working in London and Dublin for a few months. I hung out with them for a while back at camp discussing travels and stuff. Later that night I met a Canadian guy who happened to be sleeping in my dorm room, who invited me to hang out with some other people he had met there. Altogether it was a group of 3 other Canadians, 2 other Americans, the guy, and me. Add a few bottles of beer, some wine, and a deck of cards and you get a good game of kings. Not the standard rules I was used to, but still fun. One of the American girls reminded me very much of Christie (from UMBC, if you don´t know who it is), which reminded me again that she isn´t going to be on the east coast anymore when I get back. Another stop for my trip out west next year...Anyway, fun night with fun people, in the morning I met the Kiwi girl they had been talking about, who offered me a ride into town that I managed to miss. Oops. I eventually made it into town with the Canadians and Americans, but we split up there to go our own ways, I had an Enoch to find. To sum up that search quickly, missed him again. Back to my day...I went to see the dome first thing (after a quick breakfast) just to be sure I didn´t miss it. It was definitly worth seeing, I loved going up. There are a lot of pictures I took, that aren´t online at the time I´m writing this, but will be up sometime soon. To get up you walk up inside the walls of the catherdal and then in the space between the inner and outer domes, just as the workers did when they were building it. In total, there are 463 steps (their count, not mine - I was too busy looking to count) from the bottom to the top. From the top you get an amazing panoramic view of Florence and the surrounding hills, and a spot to rest from the trip up. I have to reccomend the book "Brunelleschi's Dome" for those interested. Anyway, I enjoyed it a lot, and then continued on my day. I went on to see some other famous landmarks, including a stop at Piazzale Michelangiolo, from which you get a decent view of the city from the top of a hill on the south side of the river Arno. While I was up there I saw a fire in the distance on some hill to the east, and took a picture. Later on the bus ride home I saw a helicopter carrying a water bucket in this general direction, so I´m guessing this wasn´t good. I don´t remember what else I saw, except the famous bridge I walked over on my way back. Most of the bridge is covered in goldsmiths on both sides, and it´s old and famous. That night I hung out with a couple Canadians and a pair of Americans, some drinking and fun. There should be a picture here eventually, just wait. The next day was spent in an internet cafe and a hospital - don´t worry I´m fine - I just wanted to see if I had broken my heel or just bruised it. So a few hours of waiting, some 30 €, and a few rough translations later I find out it just soft tissue bruise. A wasted day as a tourist I guess, oh well. That night was spent with 5 English girls and an Austraillian girl at the camp, lots of talking about this and that, a bit of wine, and a good end to a crappy day. The next day I spent wandering Florence with the Aussie and a Dutch guy we met in the morning. I had a 7pm train back to Pisa and he had a 11pm train to somewhere in France, so we spent the day showing the Aussie the wandering tour of Florence, which is a great way to see the city and most of the famous landmarks without much effort. The trip back to Forchheim was a 20 hour trip, train to Pisa airport, fly to London, sleep in Stamstead, fly to Frankfurt-Hahn, bus to Mainz, train to Forchheim...and then to ANNAFEST! Woo-Hoo! okay, thats the end of Italy, hope to have the rest of the pictures up soon...Bye!
Friday, July 27, 2007
Some more about Italy
Ok, I think I need to do this in parts. This part will get me through at least half of Italy I hope. Next should finish Italy and then the back entries from Germany will begin. This is going to take a while, hope you enjoy the read.
One night in Florence
Ok, picking up where I left off last time, on my way to Florence. I arrived in Florence midday and spent some time looking for the bus station I needed to get to the campground I had booked for the night. After about 30 minutes of wandering and bad directions, I found the Tourist Information place, and they gave me a map (yay!) and good directions to the bus place. So I checked it out, got my ticket so I didn't need to worry about figured that out later, and wrote down the times for the bus line that went out to the camp.
Off to wander the city! Equipped with the tourist map and a few hours to kill, I began by wandering to the one thing I knew I had to see in all of Italy, the Dome. It might not
be so high up on everyone elses' lists, but I had started the trip reading a book about it's construction and the engineering used and all kinds of nerdy stuff, with a few fun stories mixed in. Anyway, it had been interesting enought that I have been looking forward to seeing it and being able to walk up it, just as the builders had some 500-600 years ago. It is not hard to find, besides being relatively close to the train station, it is also very big and very tall, so from any distance it can be seen above the buildings. I just looked and took some pictures from the ground for the day, since I had my bag with me still, and it was pretty hot. I took some pictures of other things nearby, like the amazing cathederal that happens to be attached to the Dome, which is known as Doumo or Santa Maria del Foire, or some something like that. Wonderful white, green, and red marble face, with an impressive bell tower right there too. In the same piazza is the bapistry of the church, with the famous "gates of paradise" facing the cathederal. More pictures, more wandering around the city leads me to see other interesting things, without having to try. I had some food (pizza or pasta, I forget now) and made my way back to the bus station, hoping to find people at the hostel/campground to hang out with.
Camping Village Il Poggetto
Well, it did say camping. I got on the bus at around 6 or so, and after an hour or so on the bus we finally got the th
e campsite. I didn't realize how far out of town it was when booking it, all i knew was that it was pretty cheap to stay at. The scenery driving out was very nice, in the middle of Tuscany and I couldn't complain about the long ride. After checking in and getting the speech about the camp and everything, I threw my bag in the room and went to enjoy the sun for a while. There was some stuff on 2 other beds in the room, so I looked around for other backpacker looking people, but the majority of the people there were families. I had dinner at the restaurant there (pasta with seafood - lots of good seafood like shrimp, squid, mussels, clams, and something else I think) before heading down for bed early. I had planned on going to bed early since I had recieved an email from Enoch early in the 
day saying he would be in Rome the next day, and other places in Italy for the next week. I decided to skip on to Rome the next morning early in an attempt to meet up with him for a while and just get to Florence on my way back. I ended up meeting the backpackers at this point, a couple from UW-Madison, who were pretty cool and I ended up having a beer with and discussing our travels. Eventually I made it to sleep, but up early enough to catch the 6:30 bus to the city and onto Rome!
Rome!
I made it to Rome at abou 9:30 am or so, and found an internet point (as they are known here) to see if Enoch had gotten back to me yet. No luck there, so I decided to get one of the hop on hop off bus tours of the city, since it is pretty big and spread out a good bit, and with only 2 days here I figured it was the best way to see a lot
and get around the city. I stayed on the bus a while, then got off at the Colosseum and took a tour, partly to get some info about it (I remember some from history class, but not much), and partly cuz the tour groups get to skip the line to get in, so I saved an hour or so there. It was pretty cool, fairly massive, and altogether an impressive structure for its time. After that, I decided to do some more tour bussing and caught the next one that went by. I stopped a few historic landmarks later to check the email, and as luck had
it, Enoch had emailed me and I had a place to find him at 4pm, which according to the computer clock was 1.5 hours away...unfortunately I realized that too late, as I had spent a little longer on the computer and by the time I got out and checked the time, it was 3:50, and I wasn't that close to the Pantheon. By the time I made it there, Enoch wasn't. Oh well, I took a look at the Pantheon and wandered back in the direction of the tour bus route to get back on there. More wandering and eventually ending up at the train station/metro station to end the day in the city.
Camping Fabulous
Well, despite the slight lack of atmosphere at the campground near Florence, I booked my Rome nights at another campground. Getting to this one involved riding the metro to the second to last stop, then bussing for a while. Not as pretty of a ride as the last one, it wasn't too bad in the end. As far as I could tell, busses in Rome seem to be free as long as enough people are there. Initially I didn't know how to pay for them, so I just followed crowds onto them and had no problems. Later I found out they use the same tickets as the metro, and just didn't worry about it, since no one seemed to care or check. Also, I don't know where to buy them coming back into the city since there are no machines at the bus stops or on the bus themselves. Anyway, I got to the campgrounds at some point, all I remember was that it was rush hour and the motorway was all backed up heading out there. Did the check in thing, got the speech, gave away documents that I usually wouldn't just give to strangers, etc. I got to my room, and was surprised how nice it was. A cabin with three beds, AC, a fridge, own bathroom, etc. I wasn' t sure if could expect other campers or not, but no one else ever showed up, so I had the room to myself. I settled in and headed over to the restaurant to get some food, exhausted from being up so long and doing all the traveling all day. I had an engineering urge and started drawing out concepts for a better wrench on the placemat, until that was interupted by food showing up.
Dinner was good, some pizza with wine. Rest of the night was uneventful and involved me relaxing in my room and playing with the AC.
Rome again!
The next day I headed back into town after sleeping in, and upon checking the email, realized Enoch would be doing Vatican City and some art gallery decided that would be a good plan for me as well. Well, thanks to the sleeping in, I managed to miss the entrance hours to the Vatican
by 30 minutes, and since the next day it was closed and I was leaving town, I had missed it totally. Oops. Well, St. Peters Square was nice, and part of the city I think, so I didn't miss all of it. Anyway, I continued on to find the gallery, and on my way got to enjoy walking through some gardens and saw some other stuff, nothing really special, just normal stuff that happens to be old and important for some reason. Eventually I made it to the Gallery, only to find out it had a 10€ entrance fee and I didn't even know what was inside, so I chilled in the gardens some more before finding my way back into the city. Wandering by a few more famous things and heading back to camp finished off the day. Dinner at camp was good again, this time I decided to try the seafood and pasta, given the good results at the other campsite. Similar meal, also very good! I wish you could get this back home. More engineeringness on the placemat, I think the wine makes me think that way. Maybe I can convince my boss to import Italian wine as a business expense? 
Rest of the night had more relaxing and nothing too interesting. Oh, at some point I bought a pair of plaid shorts in the city, simply because it was so hot out I was only wearing shorts and only had one pair of non-athletic shorts. Pictures will be added eventually.
My next day involved checking out and spending half the day wandering to see what was left on my mental "I want to see this" list of Rome, and then training it back to Florence.
One night in Florence
Ok, picking up where I left off last time, on my way to Florence. I arrived in Florence midday and spent some time looking for the bus station I needed to get to the campground I had booked for the night. After about 30 minutes of wandering and bad directions, I found the Tourist Information place, and they gave me a map (yay!) and good directions to the bus place. So I checked it out, got my ticket so I didn't need to worry about figured that out later, and wrote down the times for the bus line that went out to the camp.
Off to wander the city! Equipped with the tourist map and a few hours to kill, I began by wandering to the one thing I knew I had to see in all of Italy, the Dome. It might not
be so high up on everyone elses' lists, but I had started the trip reading a book about it's construction and the engineering used and all kinds of nerdy stuff, with a few fun stories mixed in. Anyway, it had been interesting enought that I have been looking forward to seeing it and being able to walk up it, just as the builders had some 500-600 years ago. It is not hard to find, besides being relatively close to the train station, it is also very big and very tall, so from any distance it can be seen above the buildings. I just looked and took some pictures from the ground for the day, since I had my bag with me still, and it was pretty hot. I took some pictures of other things nearby, like the amazing cathederal that happens to be attached to the Dome, which is known as Doumo or Santa Maria del Foire, or some something like that. Wonderful white, green, and red marble face, with an impressive bell tower right there too. In the same piazza is the bapistry of the church, with the famous "gates of paradise" facing the cathederal. More pictures, more wandering around the city leads me to see other interesting things, without having to try. I had some food (pizza or pasta, I forget now) and made my way back to the bus station, hoping to find people at the hostel/campground to hang out with.Camping Village Il Poggetto
Well, it did say camping. I got on the bus at around 6 or so, and after an hour or so on the bus we finally got the th
e campsite. I didn't realize how far out of town it was when booking it, all i knew was that it was pretty cheap to stay at. The scenery driving out was very nice, in the middle of Tuscany and I couldn't complain about the long ride. After checking in and getting the speech about the camp and everything, I threw my bag in the room and went to enjoy the sun for a while. There was some stuff on 2 other beds in the room, so I looked around for other backpacker looking people, but the majority of the people there were families. I had dinner at the restaurant there (pasta with seafood - lots of good seafood like shrimp, squid, mussels, clams, and something else I think) before heading down for bed early. I had planned on going to bed early since I had recieved an email from Enoch early in the 
day saying he would be in Rome the next day, and other places in Italy for the next week. I decided to skip on to Rome the next morning early in an attempt to meet up with him for a while and just get to Florence on my way back. I ended up meeting the backpackers at this point, a couple from UW-Madison, who were pretty cool and I ended up having a beer with and discussing our travels. Eventually I made it to sleep, but up early enough to catch the 6:30 bus to the city and onto Rome!Rome!
I made it to Rome at abou 9:30 am or so, and found an internet point (as they are known here) to see if Enoch had gotten back to me yet. No luck there, so I decided to get one of the hop on hop off bus tours of the city, since it is pretty big and spread out a good bit, and with only 2 days here I figured it was the best way to see a lot
and get around the city. I stayed on the bus a while, then got off at the Colosseum and took a tour, partly to get some info about it (I remember some from history class, but not much), and partly cuz the tour groups get to skip the line to get in, so I saved an hour or so there. It was pretty cool, fairly massive, and altogether an impressive structure for its time. After that, I decided to do some more tour bussing and caught the next one that went by. I stopped a few historic landmarks later to check the email, and as luck had
it, Enoch had emailed me and I had a place to find him at 4pm, which according to the computer clock was 1.5 hours away...unfortunately I realized that too late, as I had spent a little longer on the computer and by the time I got out and checked the time, it was 3:50, and I wasn't that close to the Pantheon. By the time I made it there, Enoch wasn't. Oh well, I took a look at the Pantheon and wandered back in the direction of the tour bus route to get back on there. More wandering and eventually ending up at the train station/metro station to end the day in the city.Camping Fabulous
Well, despite the slight lack of atmosphere at the campground near Florence, I booked my Rome nights at another campground. Getting to this one involved riding the metro to the second to last stop, then bussing for a while. Not as pretty of a ride as the last one, it wasn't too bad in the end. As far as I could tell, busses in Rome seem to be free as long as enough people are there. Initially I didn't know how to pay for them, so I just followed crowds onto them and had no problems. Later I found out they use the same tickets as the metro, and just didn't worry about it, since no one seemed to care or check. Also, I don't know where to buy them coming back into the city since there are no machines at the bus stops or on the bus themselves. Anyway, I got to the campgrounds at some point, all I remember was that it was rush hour and the motorway was all backed up heading out there. Did the check in thing, got the speech, gave away documents that I usually wouldn't just give to strangers, etc. I got to my room, and was surprised how nice it was. A cabin with three beds, AC, a fridge, own bathroom, etc. I wasn' t sure if could expect other campers or not, but no one else ever showed up, so I had the room to myself. I settled in and headed over to the restaurant to get some food, exhausted from being up so long and doing all the traveling all day. I had an engineering urge and started drawing out concepts for a better wrench on the placemat, until that was interupted by food showing up.
Dinner was good, some pizza with wine. Rest of the night was uneventful and involved me relaxing in my room and playing with the AC.
Rome again!
The next day I headed back into town after sleeping in, and upon checking the email, realized Enoch would be doing Vatican City and some art gallery decided that would be a good plan for me as well. Well, thanks to the sleeping in, I managed to miss the entrance hours to the Vatican
by 30 minutes, and since the next day it was closed and I was leaving town, I had missed it totally. Oops. Well, St. Peters Square was nice, and part of the city I think, so I didn't miss all of it. Anyway, I continued on to find the gallery, and on my way got to enjoy walking through some gardens and saw some other stuff, nothing really special, just normal stuff that happens to be old and important for some reason. Eventually I made it to the Gallery, only to find out it had a 10€ entrance fee and I didn't even know what was inside, so I chilled in the gardens some more before finding my way back into the city. Wandering by a few more famous things and heading back to camp finished off the day. Dinner at camp was good again, this time I decided to try the seafood and pasta, given the good results at the other campsite. Similar meal, also very good! I wish you could get this back home. More engineeringness on the placemat, I think the wine makes me think that way. Maybe I can convince my boss to import Italian wine as a business expense? 
Rest of the night had more relaxing and nothing too interesting. Oh, at some point I bought a pair of plaid shorts in the city, simply because it was so hot out I was only wearing shorts and only had one pair of non-athletic shorts. Pictures will be added eventually.My next day involved checking out and spending half the day wandering to see what was left on my mental "I want to see this" list of Rome, and then training it back to Florence.
EDIT: I forgot to mention I got my hair cut in Rome. There was a slight language barrier, but in the end, this is what happened: 
This is where this entry ends, and right before the next one will pick up. Check the photos link for a few more pictures, although I'm not caught up with them, they take so long to put up it goes slowly.
This is where this entry ends, and right before the next one will pick up. Check the photos link for a few more pictures, although I'm not caught up with them, they take so long to put up it goes slowly.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Italy
Okay, I know I have a lot to write about Germany, but that will wait till I get back there. This is not going to be a complete post about Italy, but it will be a start, and the pictures will be added in a few days when I get back...
Castiglioncello
Getting there wasn't much of a problem, although it took a while. I trained from
Forchheim to Frankfurt, then took a bus to the Frankfurt Hahn airport where Ryanair flys out of. Slept the night in the airport, but had the company of some Californians who were also flying to London the next morning. Yes, London. It was cheaper to fly to London then to Pisa then to go straight there. So anyway, we fly to London and onto Pisa, and 2 train rides later, I'm in Castiglioncello, a small village on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, and Carly is waiting for me. She showed me some of the town, dropped my stuff off in her room and then I relaxed while she was in dance class. After class, we went around and eventually made it out to dinner at some place she hadn't been yet. Good food, good wine, and good company (we had dinner with her roommates Kara and Teresita). Went out to an open air bar down the street after that, and had a few more drinks. I 
went home at some point (1 am I think) since I was tired from all the traveling, and illegally slept at Carly's place. The next day, Carly and I spent some time on the beach before she had class, and I did the internet thing for a while. I got my train ticket back to Pisa, where I had a hostel that night, and checked the timetable for the trains going that way. Unfortunately, when I showed up for the second to last train, it did not come...and neither did the last one. So I wandered around for a while, stopped back at Carly's but didn't stay since it would have gotten her and the roommates in trouble, and spent the night on the shore of the Mediterranean, which I enjoyed. Caught the first train in the morning that took me to... 
Pisa
Pisa apparently doesn't have too much to offer, except a tower that has been falling over for a long long time and a pretty church next door. So I looked around for a few hours and then got back on the train to goto Florence, where I would be staying the night. This is all the time I have for now, so it will have to do. Florence and more in the next post!
Castiglioncello
Getting there wasn't much of a problem, although it took a while. I trained from
Forchheim to Frankfurt, then took a bus to the Frankfurt Hahn airport where Ryanair flys out of. Slept the night in the airport, but had the company of some Californians who were also flying to London the next morning. Yes, London. It was cheaper to fly to London then to Pisa then to go straight there. So anyway, we fly to London and onto Pisa, and 2 train rides later, I'm in Castiglioncello, a small village on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, and Carly is waiting for me. She showed me some of the town, dropped my stuff off in her room and then I relaxed while she was in dance class. After class, we went around and eventually made it out to dinner at some place she hadn't been yet. Good food, good wine, and good company (we had dinner with her roommates Kara and Teresita). Went out to an open air bar down the street after that, and had a few more drinks. I 
went home at some point (1 am I think) since I was tired from all the traveling, and illegally slept at Carly's place. The next day, Carly and I spent some time on the beach before she had class, and I did the internet thing for a while. I got my train ticket back to Pisa, where I had a hostel that night, and checked the timetable for the trains going that way. Unfortunately, when I showed up for the second to last train, it did not come...and neither did the last one. So I wandered around for a while, stopped back at Carly's but didn't stay since it would have gotten her and the roommates in trouble, and spent the night on the shore of the Mediterranean, which I enjoyed. Caught the first train in the morning that took me to... Pisa
Pisa apparently doesn't have too much to offer, except a tower that has been falling over for a long long time and a pretty church next door. So I looked around for a few hours and then got back on the train to goto Florence, where I would be staying the night. This is all the time I have for now, so it will have to do. Florence and more in the next post!
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Forchheim and Italy so far...
Check the photo link for lots of new pictures from the last few weeks!
Alright, once again I have waited too long to update, and have more to write about then time or memory. Let's see what I remember.
Leaving Dresden and the trip to Forchheim
Our last night in Dresden was spent out partying at a "cheap party" which basically meant they
had 1 hour drink specials, starting with beer. We ended up drinking a lot and didn't leave til 4 or 5 am, which didn't do 
much for me packing or anyone getting much sleep before the 9am train I was going to take. I had bought a "Happy fun weekend ticket" or something like that for my trip to Forchheim, since it lets you ride all the local trains for a weekend day for 33€, for up to 5 people. Since I am only one person and Jeff and Jess were planning on spending a day training around anyway, they decided to hitch a ride with me to keep me company for the 5 hour ride to Forchheim, grab a beer and doener and head home with the ticket. Well, to start off our trip, the first train at 9 was full of bikes and there were already 10 or so displaced bikers waiting for the next one, so we checked the schedules and figured out there should be a train around 10:30 that will work, only to miss that for a reason that was yelled out in German, so who knows what actually happened. So we were pushed back to taking the 11am train, which is the same route as originally planned, just 2 hours delayed. Which worked fine for us, it would have gotten us to Forchheim about 10 minutes before I had told my relatives to meet me, if only the last train was on time. However, there was an accident or something that held up the train we were supposed to be taking was delayed. So, we go on another train to Forchheim, only to hear an announcement (German only) and find out that "the driver is missing", aka on strike, and we have to go back to the other platform and get on the original train, which was now on its way. So, despite planning to get to Forchheim 2 hours before I was going to meet my relatives, we arrived 45 minutes late. Good thing they were still there, since I had no idea where to go...
Forchheim
Georg and Yan met me at the train station on bikes and led me to Georg's house, about 4 km away. After settling down and saying hi to people I hadn't seen in about 8 years meeting some relatives for the first time, I headed up to Irmgard's where I have been sleeping and eating while staying here. She is the equivalent to my grandmother, but the relationship is more complicated than that. To be honest, I'm not positive of the relationship I have to anyone here, just that it goes back to my great-grandparents family (i think) on my mom's side. Anyway, Irmgard speaks no english, and I speak no German, except the couple basic vocab words to get along, so living there is interesting. I am out of time and want to get at leat a little posted now, so I will continue this later.
Alright, once again I have waited too long to update, and have more to write about then time or memory. Let's see what I remember.
Leaving Dresden and the trip to Forchheim
Our last night in Dresden was spent out partying at a "cheap party" which basically meant they
had 1 hour drink specials, starting with beer. We ended up drinking a lot and didn't leave til 4 or 5 am, which didn't do 
much for me packing or anyone getting much sleep before the 9am train I was going to take. I had bought a "Happy fun weekend ticket" or something like that for my trip to Forchheim, since it lets you ride all the local trains for a weekend day for 33€, for up to 5 people. Since I am only one person and Jeff and Jess were planning on spending a day training around anyway, they decided to hitch a ride with me to keep me company for the 5 hour ride to Forchheim, grab a beer and doener and head home with the ticket. Well, to start off our trip, the first train at 9 was full of bikes and there were already 10 or so displaced bikers waiting for the next one, so we checked the schedules and figured out there should be a train around 10:30 that will work, only to miss that for a reason that was yelled out in German, so who knows what actually happened. So we were pushed back to taking the 11am train, which is the same route as originally planned, just 2 hours delayed. Which worked fine for us, it would have gotten us to Forchheim about 10 minutes before I had told my relatives to meet me, if only the last train was on time. However, there was an accident or something that held up the train we were supposed to be taking was delayed. So, we go on another train to Forchheim, only to hear an announcement (German only) and find out that "the driver is missing", aka on strike, and we have to go back to the other platform and get on the original train, which was now on its way. So, despite planning to get to Forchheim 2 hours before I was going to meet my relatives, we arrived 45 minutes late. Good thing they were still there, since I had no idea where to go...Forchheim
Georg and Yan met me at the train station on bikes and led me to Georg's house, about 4 km away. After settling down and saying hi to people I hadn't seen in about 8 years meeting some relatives for the first time, I headed up to Irmgard's where I have been sleeping and eating while staying here. She is the equivalent to my grandmother, but the relationship is more complicated than that. To be honest, I'm not positive of the relationship I have to anyone here, just that it goes back to my great-grandparents family (i think) on my mom's side. Anyway, Irmgard speaks no english, and I speak no German, except the couple basic vocab words to get along, so living there is interesting. I am out of time and want to get at leat a little posted now, so I will continue this later.
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Prague, the best American city, and Dresden, the city that used to be as beautiful as Prague.
EDIT: pictures added after the fact, I am not going to bother fixing the text to make things sound right...and now I am out of time, so more photos will be added later.
Getting to Dresden
Ok, its been a while since I updated, so hopefully this will be a bit long. Since we left Darmstadt for Dresden, we have been enjoying some relaxation. We took trains all the way, which involved several transfers. We managed to either miss a stop, get on a wrong train, or something...and had to do an extra transfer somewhere to get back on track, delaying our arrival in Dresden about 30 minutes, to the dismay of Jeff and Jess who had come to the station to greet us with a sign. It was ok, since we were both enjoying the train ride to its fullest, me with a bottle of orange soda mixed with orange liqueur, Frank with his bottle of jagd bitter, a store brand jagermeister, and some cheap beer in plastic bottles. We met some interesting people on the trains, a pair of guys from Forchheim (where I have relatives I'm going to visit soon) on a weekend bike trip that showed us maps from radweit.de, which has really comprehensive bike maps of places in Germany. They told us of the wonderful smoked beers of the area in the near of Nuremberg, which I am looking forward to enjoying. There was also a group of women who were doing a 'girl's only trip' and were taking a train to make up for going the wrong way for most of the day, to the dismay of the hardcore biker of the group. We traded shots of jager and gummy candy for chocolates and an extra cheese sandwich they had. yum. All the bikers we meet on these trains seem to be fun people on interesting trips from all sorts of backgrounds, something that surprised me at first. I expected the majority of bikers to be younger people taking trips with friends. Frank had a not no friendly meeting with a young skinhead at a train station along the way, which is apparently uncommon, but not unheard of here in eastern Germany. I finished Brunelleschi's Dome, on the ride and now I want to visit Florence to see the marvel of engineering firsthand.
First look of Dresden
Getting off the train, we were a little unprepared, in the way it makes it a fun game to find where we needed to go. All we had was an address for Jeff's building, the international guest house that was a 10 minute walk from the Hauptbahnhof (train station just doesn't sound nearly as cool). Frank unsuccessfully talked to some cab drivers trying to get directions, but one of the people we had helped getting bikes on and off the trains was coming out and saw us saw me waiting there and asked if I knew where I was going, and after explaining everything, he said he knew exactly where the guest house was and offered to take us there. After a couple minutes of biking drunk, including Frank running into me, we arrived at the door of the guest house, to be greeted by Jeff and Jess, drinking on the rockgarden on the roof of the lobby. The guest house is a giant green tower, 17 stories of newly renovated socialist era apartments. It looms tall and bright, as a beacon for the international guests who get lost in the city and need to find their way home at night.
After getting things up in Jeff's room, we headed out to Neustadt (new city) where most of the pretty buildings are, a lot of them restored after the firebombing, which left most of Dresden as a big crater on the Elbe. While in Neustadt, we all got Doners (im too lazy to find the character, but the o is supposed to have 2 dots over it). Doners are wonderful food, made in shops that stay open late and are run by Turkish immigrants, and doners are very filling, and very cheap. Back to the city: Neustadt is separated from Aldstadt, the old city by the Elbe, and is crossed by several bridges,most of which are pretty, and add to the view. The area around the river has been reconstructed a lot, and so sitting on the bank of the Elbe, which is oddly just a large overgrown field that kids sit in groups and drink in, you get an idea what the city looked like pre-firebombing. (I really should upload some pictures...).
Other Things We've Done
In no particular order, but I will try to keep it chronological. The second day in Dresden, Jeff took us on a bike tour of the city, showing us some of the original buildings that survived, some buildings built in the GDR era, and the Zwinger, which is a castle-like building that has a nice big courtyard with green areas, fountains, and a relaxing atmosphere. We decided to take a 20km ride down to the next city down the Elbe, Pirna. The ride was good, there is a nice bike/pedestrian path that follows the river on one side and has big fields on the other side, with the occasional beirgarten or restaurant. My knee and hand did ok most of the trip, and are feeling much better now after several days of staying off the road. We got Doners in Pirna and relaxed by the Elbe for a while before heading back to pick up Alex (Jeff's big brother) from the Hauptbahnhof, since he was spending a few days here in Dresden before going back to visit Prague, where he lived for a while last year. That night we all went down to Neustadt for Indian food with Jess and Emily.
The next day began with Frank, Alex, and me going to the Mensa for Lunch with Jeff and friends. The Mensa is the cafeteria for the universities here. There are several Universities here, and several Mensas to go with them. However they are run separately to some extent, and you can go to any of the Mensas you want. They have several menu options, as any school cafeteria should. There is a menu outside the entrance, but all it really is good for is the pictures, since the writing is in German. The Alte Mensa is the closest one to the building where Jeff works, so that is the one we have gone to most frequently. To get the student price for our meal, we first tried the confusing group all paying together, which worked for the first few trips. Since then we have resorted to a slightly smoother approach of checking out one at a time and doing a handoff of the keychain (which has the RFID tag for Jeff's account on it). The other Mensa we went to one day was arranged in a very odd setup, with all the menu options on screens at the base of staircases, and you had to pick based on the picture, then go up the associated staircase to get in the right line. This makes for a whole pile of staircases and an overall feeling of poor use
of space to me. The lunches you get are fairly diverse, ranging from the standard and safe pizza (watch out for weird toppings!) or one of our favorites, the as much pasta/sauce/toppings as you can fit on your plate for a low 1.80 euro or something, to some completely unidentifiable stuff, like the plate of random things with sour cream in the middle I had today. Usually the food is pretty good, I would say slightly better then I'm used to for cafeteria food.
Back to what's been happening. The three of us went wandering around Dresden, seeing some of the more industrial side of the city. Stopped by the Netto (cheap local grocery store) to pick up some beers and wine for the night to come. The plan was to have some drinks and then go out and get ice cream when Emily came over. After the wine and hanging out on the rock garden for a while (followed by the elevator lobby after it started raining), the only people to go to the ice cream shop was me, Jeff, Emily, and our new friend Tom, an older man who happened to live in the same building who had joined us for some beer and such in the lobby. The rest of the group was left here, to eventually wander around to buildings under construction to have fun and then get doners. The ice cream with Tom group did just that, and got back and went to sleep on the kitchen floor, thanks to the 3 other people (Alex, Frank, and Debbie, Alex's friend from Prague visiting Dresden) filling up the room already.
The next day began as so many have. Sleeping in, meeting Jeff at the Mensa for some lunch, meeting some more friends at lunch, along with Terri, who we had met at a previous Mensa lunch. After lunch, more wandering around the city, which eventually led us to the shopping mall off of Pragerstrasse. More beer drinking and Doners for dinner. A relaxing night overall.
The next morning, Alex headed off to Prague, where we will meet him soon. For Frank and I met the gang for Mensa lunch again, came back and took a nap (rough life, I know). Another night of drinking, in the company of friends. We also went to the Aquarium at some point, which just meant beer was expensive. Another fun night, concluded with a dance party in Jeff's room, youtube will have the video soon.
Another morning, more sleeping in and then lunch at the Mensa, meeting another of Jeff's friends, Ray. The afternoon was packed with activities like finding an ATM and buying train tickets to Prague, then booking our hostel online. An otherwise relaxing afternoon, I spent some time helping Jess get in her room and straightening her key. Doners for Dinner on the way to the train station, mmm. A nice train ride, made more amusing with some drinks.
Prague
Ah, the best American city, in the words of Alex. We arrived at 9 or 10 pm in the middle of the city, with a map printed with hard to read street names, and then we realized we weren't quite on the map. Oh, and none of us speak any Czech at all. No worries, this is when things are fun. We managed to get to the hostel without much trouble, got checked in and found we had gotten a bit of an upgrade on the room, no 12 bed dorm, but instead a 4 bed room, with no one ever getting put in the 4th bed. We were off to meet Alex after getting our stuff settled, he was our nightlife tour guide since he had lived in Prague for a while a year ago. The first night, we were off to a club called Nebe, which happened to be a street over from our hostel. It was in the basement of the building, and had a good number of people dancing, and ok beer prices, for a bar/club. A good night of dancing and drinking was had by all. Pizza at a Turkish/Balkan Doner/Pizza shop up the street, which hit the spot.
The hostel (Chili Hostel, if you care) we were at served free breakfast, consisting of bread (rolls and sliced), along with various toppings - butter, jams, some weird meat spread, and best of all, spreadable cheese. Roughly the consistency of cream cheese, it came in several flavors, of which i have no idea what they were. To drink, there was the option of coffee, tea, orange juice (not like OJ at home, slightly tangier), and lemonade. yum. The rest of the day was spent buying books at the Globe bookstore across the street, then wandering to a park on an island to read and write in journals, etc. More wandering around the city followed, with much admiration of the beautiful architecture that is everywhere in the city, since it has never been involved in a serious conflict that didn't end somewhat peacefully. There are pictures to be added here. After wandering, we met up with Alex for dinner at a Czech restaurant, where Frank managed to talk his way out of paying some of the couvert charge for condiments. We then headed to Club Bordo for an Indie Czech concert featuring Road Side Mary and The Prostitutes. Interestingly, all the music is in English (the Prostitutes even had British accents), but all the talk between songs was in Czech. There was a DJ/dance party after the show, I was very tired by the end of it all.
Another bread and spreadable cheese breakfast at the hostel the next morning (
Saturday morning, if you are keeping track). Another day of wandering the city, I think this was the day we climbed a big hill on the west side of the river, got a glimpse of just how big Prague actually is. There are paths leading up the side of the hill, and a flower garden and some fields on top, along with a tourist area which includes the viewing tower and the Funicular railway, that simply runs up the side of the hill at a great incline. We were supposed to meet Alex for dinner at Bohemia Bagel, but we ended up at 2 different locations - He meant the original, THE Bohemia Bagel. Our hostel desk pointed us to a different one, and we never met. Dinner was delicious anyway, for those of you from Jacksonville area, it was very similar to Bagelmeister. For the rest of you, it was an American bagel shop where you could get all kinds of bagels with cheese, meat, egg, etc. They even had American sounding menu sections like "from the grill". We met up with Alex at his hostel after this, and we rushed off to catch some trams, a few rides on the underground, and walk around a while to find Blindeye, described as a grungy ex-pat bar in some review. Getting there, it seemed somewhat empty (it was past 10 pm at this point), so we all got drinks and talked to people at the bar. There was a large man, we found out his name is "Big Rock", and he is a band manager, cleaning up hotel rooms, making sure they get where they need to be on time, getting drugs for them, solving any problems they have. I can't recall any of the band names he dropped, but there were quite a few we recognized in the list. He also talked about his girlfriend, who is "displaced Czech royalty" with 4 castles that her family owns, one of which is hers. Yea... As the night goes on, so do the stories, and then someone noticed
there was a plaque on the bar that states:
BIG ROCK
is bigger then you,
and this is his seat.
I guess he did do something, even if it is simply being a very good regular customer. However, every attractive female who entered the bar the rest of the night made her way over to BR and gave him a hug and peck on the cheek. Make your own decisions. Anyway, we ended up staying out till 4 or 5 am, without anyone realizing it, which was odd. We let the hostel desk know we were going to stay another day, so we wouldn't have to get out by 10 am the next morning. He forgot to mention this to the cleaning staff though, which led to a funny language barrier situation when they came in to clean, and all 3 of us were still asleep. They didn't speak English well, we sure didn't have any idea what they were saying in Czech, so we all did the awkward we aren't going and we can't talk to you thing for a few minutes till they laughed and left. The rest of the day was spent wandering around some more, along with some more napping. The night was spent at Chateau Rouge and M1, two bars that were not particularly exciting, perhaps it was just an off night.
Back to Dresden
Our last bread and spreadable cheese breakfast! Then wandering off to the store to get some wine for the train ride back to Dresden. An uneventful ride, except maybe my adventure trying to open my wine bottle without a corkscrew (I later realized I did have my knife with a corkscrew in the bottom of my bag...) The cork was synthetic, which doesn't compress like real ones. After a few minutes of struggling (and making some progress) with my bike tool, the man in the next seat over offers his wine bottle opener after the ticket checker goes by, and we manage to solve the problem. When we got back to Dresden, we immediately went for Doners, even before we went home. The guys at this shop are great, they recognize us coming in now and seem to really enjoy the fact we are loud Americans speaking English instead of German. Anyway, the rest of the day was spent hanging out with people and enjoying ourselves.
Tuesday, after another MMMMensa lunch, Alex came back from Prague, and we all went out to
Katie's Garage in Neustadt for some good dancing and stuff. On the way there, we stopped at a chinese place for dinner, and Frank and I dipped out for a few minutes to get a doner before coming back to finish our dinner at the chinese place. yum. Katie's Garage played lots of good music, including Forward, Russia! that Jeff likes and a few I enjoy like Radiohead and the Dresden Dolls. We talked to some of the locals there and made some German friends to hang out with later.
Wednesday was the 4th of July, aka America Day. We celebrated by eating hot dogs while drinking some beer, and singing patriotic songs and such. We went out for ice cream with Tom...err...I mean Stephen, and Emily. On the tram ride home, we had a German offer to sing with us and another wish us a happy July 4th.
Thursday - a lot of nothing. Mensa for lunch, Frank was busy making preparations for his next leg of the trip (we are splitting up for a while so he can see some things that are of interest to him while I visit some relatives in Forchheim, Germany). I had a bit of a headache so I avoided drinking, but we all went out for donerteller mit pommes (basically a doner, but on a plate of fries instead of in a piece of bread).
Back home, we didn't do much else, an early and uneventful night.
Today! Finally. I'm feeling better. Frank got off for his 10 am train to Krakow, Poland(?). I spent a bit of time finishing this entry (I know I've waited too long to do this). Lunch at the Mensa with Jeff (the last one!) and soon I'm off to buy my "happy weekend pass" from the Hauptbahnhof. This pass is pretty cool. It is pretty cheap (33 euros) and it's good for up to 5 people for all regional trains all day. This means that Jeff and Jess will probably ride with me to Forchheim tomorrow, then spend the rest of the day training around till they get back to Dresden. In the end, it will cost the same if I had gone alone. Well, I want to get to the HBF and back before Jeff gets home from work, so I will leave you now. If I am bored and motivated later, I might try to add the pictures that should go with this post. Bandwidth limits are keeping me from putting all the pictures up.
May the Force be with you.
Getting to Dresden
Ok, its been a while since I updated, so hopefully this will be a bit long. Since we left Darmstadt for Dresden, we have been enjoying some relaxation. We took trains all the way, which involved several transfers. We managed to either miss a stop, get on a wrong train, or something...and had to do an extra transfer somewhere to get back on track, delaying our arrival in Dresden about 30 minutes, to the dismay of Jeff and Jess who had come to the station to greet us with a sign. It was ok, since we were both enjoying the train ride to its fullest, me with a bottle of orange soda mixed with orange liqueur, Frank with his bottle of jagd bitter, a store brand jagermeister, and some cheap beer in plastic bottles. We met some interesting people on the trains, a pair of guys from Forchheim (where I have relatives I'm going to visit soon) on a weekend bike trip that showed us maps from radweit.de, which has really comprehensive bike maps of places in Germany. They told us of the wonderful smoked beers of the area in the near of Nuremberg, which I am looking forward to enjoying. There was also a group of women who were doing a 'girl's only trip' and were taking a train to make up for going the wrong way for most of the day, to the dismay of the hardcore biker of the group. We traded shots of jager and gummy candy for chocolates and an extra cheese sandwich they had. yum. All the bikers we meet on these trains seem to be fun people on interesting trips from all sorts of backgrounds, something that surprised me at first. I expected the majority of bikers to be younger people taking trips with friends. Frank had a not no friendly meeting with a young skinhead at a train station along the way, which is apparently uncommon, but not unheard of here in eastern Germany. I finished Brunelleschi's Dome, on the ride and now I want to visit Florence to see the marvel of engineering firsthand.
First look of Dresden
Getting off the train, we were a little unprepared, in the way it makes it a fun game to find where we needed to go. All we had was an address for Jeff's building, the international guest house that was a 10 minute walk from the Hauptbahnhof (train station just doesn't sound nearly as cool). Frank unsuccessfully talked to some cab drivers trying to get directions, but one of the people we had helped getting bikes on and off the trains was coming out and saw us saw me waiting there and asked if I knew where I was going, and after explaining everything, he said he knew exactly where the guest house was and offered to take us there. After a couple minutes of biking drunk, including Frank running into me, we arrived at the door of the guest house, to be greeted by Jeff and Jess, drinking on the rockgarden on the roof of the lobby. The guest house is a giant green tower, 17 stories of newly renovated socialist era apartments. It looms tall and bright, as a beacon for the international guests who get lost in the city and need to find their way home at night.
After getting things up in Jeff's room, we headed out to Neustadt (new city) where most of the pretty buildings are, a lot of them restored after the firebombing, which left most of Dresden as a big crater on the Elbe. While in Neustadt, we all got Doners (im too lazy to find the character, but the o is supposed to have 2 dots over it). Doners are wonderful food, made in shops that stay open late and are run by Turkish immigrants, and doners are very filling, and very cheap. Back to the city: Neustadt is separated from Aldstadt, the old city by the Elbe, and is crossed by several bridges,most of which are pretty, and add to the view. The area around the river has been reconstructed a lot, and so sitting on the bank of the Elbe, which is oddly just a large overgrown field that kids sit in groups and drink in, you get an idea what the city looked like pre-firebombing. (I really should upload some pictures...).
Other Things We've Done
In no particular order, but I will try to keep it chronological. The second day in Dresden, Jeff took us on a bike tour of the city, showing us some of the original buildings that survived, some buildings built in the GDR era, and the Zwinger, which is a castle-like building that has a nice big courtyard with green areas, fountains, and a relaxing atmosphere. We decided to take a 20km ride down to the next city down the Elbe, Pirna. The ride was good, there is a nice bike/pedestrian path that follows the river on one side and has big fields on the other side, with the occasional beirgarten or restaurant. My knee and hand did ok most of the trip, and are feeling much better now after several days of staying off the road. We got Doners in Pirna and relaxed by the Elbe for a while before heading back to pick up Alex (Jeff's big brother) from the Hauptbahnhof, since he was spending a few days here in Dresden before going back to visit Prague, where he lived for a while last year. That night we all went down to Neustadt for Indian food with Jess and Emily.
The next day began with Frank, Alex, and me going to the Mensa for Lunch with Jeff and friends. The Mensa is the cafeteria for the universities here. There are several Universities here, and several Mensas to go with them. However they are run separately to some extent, and you can go to any of the Mensas you want. They have several menu options, as any school cafeteria should. There is a menu outside the entrance, but all it really is good for is the pictures, since the writing is in German. The Alte Mensa is the closest one to the building where Jeff works, so that is the one we have gone to most frequently. To get the student price for our meal, we first tried the confusing group all paying together, which worked for the first few trips. Since then we have resorted to a slightly smoother approach of checking out one at a time and doing a handoff of the keychain (which has the RFID tag for Jeff's account on it). The other Mensa we went to one day was arranged in a very odd setup, with all the menu options on screens at the base of staircases, and you had to pick based on the picture, then go up the associated staircase to get in the right line. This makes for a whole pile of staircases and an overall feeling of poor use
of space to me. The lunches you get are fairly diverse, ranging from the standard and safe pizza (watch out for weird toppings!) or one of our favorites, the as much pasta/sauce/toppings as you can fit on your plate for a low 1.80 euro or something, to some completely unidentifiable stuff, like the plate of random things with sour cream in the middle I had today. Usually the food is pretty good, I would say slightly better then I'm used to for cafeteria food.Back to what's been happening. The three of us went wandering around Dresden, seeing some of the more industrial side of the city. Stopped by the Netto (cheap local grocery store) to pick up some beers and wine for the night to come. The plan was to have some drinks and then go out and get ice cream when Emily came over. After the wine and hanging out on the rock garden for a while (followed by the elevator lobby after it started raining), the only people to go to the ice cream shop was me, Jeff, Emily, and our new friend Tom, an older man who happened to live in the same building who had joined us for some beer and such in the lobby. The rest of the group was left here, to eventually wander around to buildings under construction to have fun and then get doners. The ice cream with Tom group did just that, and got back and went to sleep on the kitchen floor, thanks to the 3 other people (Alex, Frank, and Debbie, Alex's friend from Prague visiting Dresden) filling up the room already.
The next day began as so many have. Sleeping in, meeting Jeff at the Mensa for some lunch, meeting some more friends at lunch, along with Terri, who we had met at a previous Mensa lunch. After lunch, more wandering around the city, which eventually led us to the shopping mall off of Pragerstrasse. More beer drinking and Doners for dinner. A relaxing night overall.
The next morning, Alex headed off to Prague, where we will meet him soon. For Frank and I met the gang for Mensa lunch again, came back and took a nap (rough life, I know). Another night of drinking, in the company of friends. We also went to the Aquarium at some point, which just meant beer was expensive. Another fun night, concluded with a dance party in Jeff's room, youtube will have the video soon.
Another morning, more sleeping in and then lunch at the Mensa, meeting another of Jeff's friends, Ray. The afternoon was packed with activities like finding an ATM and buying train tickets to Prague, then booking our hostel online. An otherwise relaxing afternoon, I spent some time helping Jess get in her room and straightening her key. Doners for Dinner on the way to the train station, mmm. A nice train ride, made more amusing with some drinks.
Prague
Ah, the best American city, in the words of Alex. We arrived at 9 or 10 pm in the middle of the city, with a map printed with hard to read street names, and then we realized we weren't quite on the map. Oh, and none of us speak any Czech at all. No worries, this is when things are fun. We managed to get to the hostel without much trouble, got checked in and found we had gotten a bit of an upgrade on the room, no 12 bed dorm, but instead a 4 bed room, with no one ever getting put in the 4th bed. We were off to meet Alex after getting our stuff settled, he was our nightlife tour guide since he had lived in Prague for a while a year ago. The first night, we were off to a club called Nebe, which happened to be a street over from our hostel. It was in the basement of the building, and had a good number of people dancing, and ok beer prices, for a bar/club. A good night of dancing and drinking was had by all. Pizza at a Turkish/Balkan Doner/Pizza shop up the street, which hit the spot.
The hostel (Chili Hostel, if you care) we were at served free breakfast, consisting of bread (rolls and sliced), along with various toppings - butter, jams, some weird meat spread, and best of all, spreadable cheese. Roughly the consistency of cream cheese, it came in several flavors, of which i have no idea what they were. To drink, there was the option of coffee, tea, orange juice (not like OJ at home, slightly tangier), and lemonade. yum. The rest of the day was spent buying books at the Globe bookstore across the street, then wandering to a park on an island to read and write in journals, etc. More wandering around the city followed, with much admiration of the beautiful architecture that is everywhere in the city, since it has never been involved in a serious conflict that didn't end somewhat peacefully. There are pictures to be added here. After wandering, we met up with Alex for dinner at a Czech restaurant, where Frank managed to talk his way out of paying some of the couvert charge for condiments. We then headed to Club Bordo for an Indie Czech concert featuring Road Side Mary and The Prostitutes. Interestingly, all the music is in English (the Prostitutes even had British accents), but all the talk between songs was in Czech. There was a DJ/dance party after the show, I was very tired by the end of it all.
Another bread and spreadable cheese breakfast at the hostel the next morning (
Saturday morning, if you are keeping track). Another day of wandering the city, I think this was the day we climbed a big hill on the west side of the river, got a glimpse of just how big Prague actually is. There are paths leading up the side of the hill, and a flower garden and some fields on top, along with a tourist area which includes the viewing tower and the Funicular railway, that simply runs up the side of the hill at a great incline. We were supposed to meet Alex for dinner at Bohemia Bagel, but we ended up at 2 different locations - He meant the original, THE Bohemia Bagel. Our hostel desk pointed us to a different one, and we never met. Dinner was delicious anyway, for those of you from Jacksonville area, it was very similar to Bagelmeister. For the rest of you, it was an American bagel shop where you could get all kinds of bagels with cheese, meat, egg, etc. They even had American sounding menu sections like "from the grill". We met up with Alex at his hostel after this, and we rushed off to catch some trams, a few rides on the underground, and walk around a while to find Blindeye, described as a grungy ex-pat bar in some review. Getting there, it seemed somewhat empty (it was past 10 pm at this point), so we all got drinks and talked to people at the bar. There was a large man, we found out his name is "Big Rock", and he is a band manager, cleaning up hotel rooms, making sure they get where they need to be on time, getting drugs for them, solving any problems they have. I can't recall any of the band names he dropped, but there were quite a few we recognized in the list. He also talked about his girlfriend, who is "displaced Czech royalty" with 4 castles that her family owns, one of which is hers. Yea... As the night goes on, so do the stories, and then someone noticed
there was a plaque on the bar that states:BIG ROCK
is bigger then you,
and this is his seat.
I guess he did do something, even if it is simply being a very good regular customer. However, every attractive female who entered the bar the rest of the night made her way over to BR and gave him a hug and peck on the cheek. Make your own decisions. Anyway, we ended up staying out till 4 or 5 am, without anyone realizing it, which was odd. We let the hostel desk know we were going to stay another day, so we wouldn't have to get out by 10 am the next morning. He forgot to mention this to the cleaning staff though, which led to a funny language barrier situation when they came in to clean, and all 3 of us were still asleep. They didn't speak English well, we sure didn't have any idea what they were saying in Czech, so we all did the awkward we aren't going and we can't talk to you thing for a few minutes till they laughed and left. The rest of the day was spent wandering around some more, along with some more napping. The night was spent at Chateau Rouge and M1, two bars that were not particularly exciting, perhaps it was just an off night.
Back to Dresden
Our last bread and spreadable cheese breakfast! Then wandering off to the store to get some wine for the train ride back to Dresden. An uneventful ride, except maybe my adventure trying to open my wine bottle without a corkscrew (I later realized I did have my knife with a corkscrew in the bottom of my bag...) The cork was synthetic, which doesn't compress like real ones. After a few minutes of struggling (and making some progress) with my bike tool, the man in the next seat over offers his wine bottle opener after the ticket checker goes by, and we manage to solve the problem. When we got back to Dresden, we immediately went for Doners, even before we went home. The guys at this shop are great, they recognize us coming in now and seem to really enjoy the fact we are loud Americans speaking English instead of German. Anyway, the rest of the day was spent hanging out with people and enjoying ourselves.
Tuesday, after another MMMMensa lunch, Alex came back from Prague, and we all went out to
Katie's Garage in Neustadt for some good dancing and stuff. On the way there, we stopped at a chinese place for dinner, and Frank and I dipped out for a few minutes to get a doner before coming back to finish our dinner at the chinese place. yum. Katie's Garage played lots of good music, including Forward, Russia! that Jeff likes and a few I enjoy like Radiohead and the Dresden Dolls. We talked to some of the locals there and made some German friends to hang out with later.Wednesday was the 4th of July, aka America Day. We celebrated by eating hot dogs while drinking some beer, and singing patriotic songs and such. We went out for ice cream with Tom...err...I mean Stephen, and Emily. On the tram ride home, we had a German offer to sing with us and another wish us a happy July 4th.
Thursday - a lot of nothing. Mensa for lunch, Frank was busy making preparations for his next leg of the trip (we are splitting up for a while so he can see some things that are of interest to him while I visit some relatives in Forchheim, Germany). I had a bit of a headache so I avoided drinking, but we all went out for donerteller mit pommes (basically a doner, but on a plate of fries instead of in a piece of bread).
Back home, we didn't do much else, an early and uneventful night.
Today! Finally. I'm feeling better. Frank got off for his 10 am train to Krakow, Poland(?). I spent a bit of time finishing this entry (I know I've waited too long to do this). Lunch at the Mensa with Jeff (the last one!) and soon I'm off to buy my "happy weekend pass" from the Hauptbahnhof. This pass is pretty cool. It is pretty cheap (33 euros) and it's good for up to 5 people for all regional trains all day. This means that Jeff and Jess will probably ride with me to Forchheim tomorrow, then spend the rest of the day training around till they get back to Dresden. In the end, it will cost the same if I had gone alone. Well, I want to get to the HBF and back before Jeff gets home from work, so I will leave you now. If I am bored and motivated later, I might try to add the pictures that should go with this post. Bandwidth limits are keeping me from putting all the pictures up.
May the Force be with you.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Frankfurt!
Ok, I will do a more complete update now. We are in Darmstradt, Germany now, which is just a bit south of Frankfurt, Germany. We took a train here from Eindhoven, Netherlands last night to make a few biking days into a few hang out in a city with a friend days. Our time in the Netherlands was very fun and interesting, most of it was spent in Amsterdam. We camped at Camp Zeeburg (zay-berg), which was outside of the city center and had decent accomodations. I don't remember the day to day stuff, but we went into the city everyday and wandered around looking at stuff. The city is very biker friendly, with bike paths next to or on every road, lights for bikes to cross busy streets, and laws that give bikes right of way over everyone else for the most part. This bike friendlyness was a common trend even outside of the city, as we saw when we left 3 days ago to head for Germany. In the country, there are clearly marked bike paths with directions and distances to various cities, some paths were completely separated from roads, some of the paths were actually on the roads, similar to a small 2 lane road at home, but the way the roads are marked is a bike lane on each side and a single lane down the middle for cars. Back to Camp Zeeburg. We met a few interesting people at the campsite over the 4 or 5 days we were there. There was a group of 4 Finnish guys who were in town for cheap and legal drugs, a couple from Germany who was in town for a music festival (the Roots festival), and a guy who actually lived down the street from the camp and just hung out there to meet people traveling. We hung out with the Finns for a few days, doing the sights of A'dam, playing some card games, drinking cheap store brand Pilsner, etc. Pekka, one of the Finns, will be in Prague later and we might meet up with him there. When we were leaving, we picked up a tent that someone left, presumably because of the rain that left everything soaked the morning he left. It is a little more weight and we had to get a groundcloth and stakes for it, but it is in good shape and a nice 3 person tent.
We left Amsterdam and started riding toward Frankfurt, Germany using a combination of 3 maps, one of the city, one of all of the Netherlands, and a third that had all of Europe, but only showed cities that had lots of hostels in them, which was somewhat sporadic. We had to guess which streets leaving the city matched to streets on the big Netherlands map, while using the hostel map for going in the general direction of Frankfurt. Thanks to the numerous bike signs showing us which direction to go to get to a bunch of different cities/towns and the big map that had most of those towns labeled, it wasn't hard to keep moving and make good time. We covered almost 70 miles the day we left Amsterdam, and ended up in a small town near Waardenburg. Looking for a place to camp for the night, we saw a man walking down his driveway on what appeared to be a farm house, so we pulled over to ask if we could pitch our tent in his yard. He was very nice, showed us where we could camp, showed us the water, asked if we needed anything, etc. He ended up coming back out to talk twice, the first time bringing hot tea which was very good with the pasta and tomato sauce we had for dinner, and the second time bringing out a bowl of fresh cherries. He is a real estate agent (not a farmer), but lived in an old farmhouse and had a slice of land that used to be part of the farm that his neighbor owns. It was a very nice night overall and representative of how nice people are in general over here. The next day we continued on towards Frankfurt, about 30 or 40 miles in, we decided to see if we could train to here to save a few days and spend more time visiting friends. We found the train station, got tickets, missed the first train since Frank was making a call, expecting trains to run a couple minutes late like back home, ran back about 30 seconds after the departure time and the train was gone. Apparently trains are on time enough you can set your watch to them. We talked to an attendent at the station, who used her cool pda to check the schedule and told us we could catch the next train that came in an hour, and our next connection also was on a regular hourly schedule, so we would be ok for that as well, but was unsure about the last connection, since it would be in Germany. We were ok after that, making all our connections without much trouble, and on the last 3 hour ride, we got in the bike car (they have special cars with large empty areas for bikes to use), and it was packed with bikes and a group of 8 ex-german military guys, all drunk and still drinking...Needless to say, it made the ride quite fun as we talked to them, they shared the rum and coke with us, we shared some apples with peanut butter and nutella with them, etc. It was somewhat disapointing when they all got off about an hour and a half before we did but fun overall in the end. When we finally got to Frankfurt, all we had was an address in Dramstradt of Frank's friend, and since it was so late at night, our only option was to take a taxi. The driver was nice, talked to us about the city and stuff, made the ride enjoyable. Apparently the Frankfurt airport is the second largest in the world after JFK, since Frankfurt is the financial center of Germany. Anyway, we made it to Dramstradt very late and just crashed after locking our bikes up. Yesterday we spent some time wandering the city while Laura (our host) was in her classes. I started writing this post and did some other online stuff, we saw some of the castle (not so impressive since they ran out of money while building it...), and just enjoyed ourselves. I like it here, the city is small enough you feel like you can see it all but big enough there are lots of things to see. There supposively is a huge chess set in the park with several foot tall pieces, I am looking forward to finding that and playing a match (sounds like something Hrabrowski would put in the quad back at UMBC). Theres also some theatre in town that I want to take a look at before leaving. After class, we met up with Laura for some good food at a local restaurant and picked up some drinks to start the night with. We headed out to party at a club/bar in town called 603 and partied till 4am I think. The party was still going after we left and continues until everyone leaves I think. We had picked up some chocolate at the store witht the drinks and it is wonderful and cheap, I am going to miss it back home. I really need to upload some pictures soon. I am growing out my beard again, mostly since it is easier then trying to keep it tame in any way while camping half the time. I emailed my Uncle Chris about the pain in my hand and he helped me figure out that it probably is trigger finger caused by putting pressure on my palm while riding. Nothing too serious, I am just going to watch how I am holding my hand, take some ibprofen, and ice it a bit. Thanks Chris! I am enjoying myself and meeting lots of cool people. Okay, this is all I've got for now. Hope to have pictures next time, along with more consistant entries. bye!
We left Amsterdam and started riding toward Frankfurt, Germany using a combination of 3 maps, one of the city, one of all of the Netherlands, and a third that had all of Europe, but only showed cities that had lots of hostels in them, which was somewhat sporadic. We had to guess which streets leaving the city matched to streets on the big Netherlands map, while using the hostel map for going in the general direction of Frankfurt. Thanks to the numerous bike signs showing us which direction to go to get to a bunch of different cities/towns and the big map that had most of those towns labeled, it wasn't hard to keep moving and make good time. We covered almost 70 miles the day we left Amsterdam, and ended up in a small town near Waardenburg. Looking for a place to camp for the night, we saw a man walking down his driveway on what appeared to be a farm house, so we pulled over to ask if we could pitch our tent in his yard. He was very nice, showed us where we could camp, showed us the water, asked if we needed anything, etc. He ended up coming back out to talk twice, the first time bringing hot tea which was very good with the pasta and tomato sauce we had for dinner, and the second time bringing out a bowl of fresh cherries. He is a real estate agent (not a farmer), but lived in an old farmhouse and had a slice of land that used to be part of the farm that his neighbor owns. It was a very nice night overall and representative of how nice people are in general over here. The next day we continued on towards Frankfurt, about 30 or 40 miles in, we decided to see if we could train to here to save a few days and spend more time visiting friends. We found the train station, got tickets, missed the first train since Frank was making a call, expecting trains to run a couple minutes late like back home, ran back about 30 seconds after the departure time and the train was gone. Apparently trains are on time enough you can set your watch to them. We talked to an attendent at the station, who used her cool pda to check the schedule and told us we could catch the next train that came in an hour, and our next connection also was on a regular hourly schedule, so we would be ok for that as well, but was unsure about the last connection, since it would be in Germany. We were ok after that, making all our connections without much trouble, and on the last 3 hour ride, we got in the bike car (they have special cars with large empty areas for bikes to use), and it was packed with bikes and a group of 8 ex-german military guys, all drunk and still drinking...Needless to say, it made the ride quite fun as we talked to them, they shared the rum and coke with us, we shared some apples with peanut butter and nutella with them, etc. It was somewhat disapointing when they all got off about an hour and a half before we did but fun overall in the end. When we finally got to Frankfurt, all we had was an address in Dramstradt of Frank's friend, and since it was so late at night, our only option was to take a taxi. The driver was nice, talked to us about the city and stuff, made the ride enjoyable. Apparently the Frankfurt airport is the second largest in the world after JFK, since Frankfurt is the financial center of Germany. Anyway, we made it to Dramstradt very late and just crashed after locking our bikes up. Yesterday we spent some time wandering the city while Laura (our host) was in her classes. I started writing this post and did some other online stuff, we saw some of the castle (not so impressive since they ran out of money while building it...), and just enjoyed ourselves. I like it here, the city is small enough you feel like you can see it all but big enough there are lots of things to see. There supposively is a huge chess set in the park with several foot tall pieces, I am looking forward to finding that and playing a match (sounds like something Hrabrowski would put in the quad back at UMBC). Theres also some theatre in town that I want to take a look at before leaving. After class, we met up with Laura for some good food at a local restaurant and picked up some drinks to start the night with. We headed out to party at a club/bar in town called 603 and partied till 4am I think. The party was still going after we left and continues until everyone leaves I think. We had picked up some chocolate at the store witht the drinks and it is wonderful and cheap, I am going to miss it back home. I really need to upload some pictures soon. I am growing out my beard again, mostly since it is easier then trying to keep it tame in any way while camping half the time. I emailed my Uncle Chris about the pain in my hand and he helped me figure out that it probably is trigger finger caused by putting pressure on my palm while riding. Nothing too serious, I am just going to watch how I am holding my hand, take some ibprofen, and ice it a bit. Thanks Chris! I am enjoying myself and meeting lots of cool people. Okay, this is all I've got for now. Hope to have pictures next time, along with more consistant entries. bye!
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