Friday, July 1
So, the rest of Amsterdam. On Tuesday, I met up with Glenn (my mom's cousin) and his fiancee Alissa for dinner with the Greats (great aunt and uncle, Missy and Chuck), who, coincidentally, were in town at the same time as me. We met at the hotel for drinks, and then disembarked in a beautiful canal boat set up with a dining room, making stops at various restaurants to have food run across the street and deposited through the window. Several members of the team at Chuck and Glenn's company, Network Hardware were there, and they were all very fun and interesting to talk to. It was pouring rain outside, which made the boat even more cozy and enchanting. All-in-all, a truly singular experience!
Since the Australians left, I've been hanging out with Kai and Andre, from Bad Oeynhausen, Germany, in town for a 2-day mini-vacation. We went out for pizza, and saw the Source Code (the new Jake Gyllenhaal movie) in the Pathe de Munt theater, which was cool, although I was distracted by trying (failing) to read the Dutch subtitles.
We walked through the park, where they have these found-item racks where people can clip up lost keys, earrings, hats, cards, and even a condom (although I don't know that the owner would necessarily want that back...)
We were bewildered by the street signs and their potential meanings.
We were (I was) excited about the big red bike sign.
Also, have I mentioned that there are bicycles everywhere here? Because there are.
The following is my process of getting from Amsterdam to Berlin, ready? After a genuine clusterfuck situation at the train station in which you were assigned a queue number that then appears on a screen, letting you know that it's your turn to talk to someone and indicating which ticket/information desk to go to... but only after a 2-hour wait, I gave up and decided to go back to the hostel to buy my EuRail pass online, only to be met with the sinking realization that in order to do this, you have to provide a shipping address so they can mail it to you. It's almost like they expect you to have already made travel arrangements BEFORE you show up in a new country - crazy, right?! As fate would have it, my new German friends were leaving to hitchhike back home on Thursday morning. We talked about it, and came to the consensus that while they might be less likely to get picked up with 3 people instead of just 2, any potential difficulties that arose would be outweighed by the benefit of having a female in the group. So we set out for the A1 around 9:30 that morning. By 12:30, we had made it about 5 km (3.1 miles). Finally, we were picked up by a 40-something-year-old business man in a fit of nostalgia for his free and easy youth. He dropped us off at a rest stop about 20 minutes out of the city, but it turned out to be basically just a hotel with a popular cafe for business guys to have lunch meetings before going back to the office, which was, incidentally, not in Germany. We had just started to flirt with the idea of scoping out potential camping spots when a guy in a delivery truck pulled over and offered to take us to an actual gas station out of town where road-trippers and truck-drivers might stop. From there, it was pretty smooth sailing. Over the next 80 km (50 miles), we were driven in short legs of 10-20 km by a British businesswoman with a German husband, a pair of electricians in their company truck, and a Moroccan guy driving a moving van full of "documents" who, as a parting gift, gave us a large nugget of his own homegrown weed with such a ceremonial flourish that you'd think he was handing over his firstborn. Each time, we would get dropped at a prominent gas station off the freeway, where we parked our butts, drank wretched coffee, thumb-wrestled, and hassled unsuspecting motorists. I downright pity anyone who crossed our line of sight with German license plates. Finally, an enormous asthmatic man who looked rather like Santa Claus in a suede vest and a chain-mail necklace piled us and our bags into his tiny two-door hatch-back and deposited us just behind the border to Germany. At this point, it was about 6:30 pm, and Kai and Andre only had about 150 km (93 miles) to go til Bad Oeynhausen. I, however, still had to go another 400ish km (250 miles) til Berlin. In a stroke of luck, Kai and Andre found a guy who was going straight through their city, all the way to about 100 km (62 miles) outside Berlin. His name was Stefan, and he didn't speak any English, but via K and A, we communicated that he could take me right into the heart of the city. The boys said that from what they could tell, he seemed upstanding, but took down the license plate number anyway and told me to call as soon as I got dropped off, which was nice. Stefan turned out better than any of us had hoped for, and dropped the guys off right at their front door around 8:30 pm. For the remainder of the trip we alternated between 180 km/hr autobahn-style driving, and 40 km/hr traffic jams. The single and only uncomfortable part was driving for 4 hours in dead silence, save for Stefan occasionally pointing out the window to indicate a specific city or landmark we passed. We reached the city limits around 11:30 pm and he ended up driving me all the way up to the exact address where I was supposed to meet people, about a hundred km out of his way.
So all in all, despite our slow start, once we got the ball rolling we couldn't have asked for a more successful hitchhiking trip. And to think - none of us even had to take our shirts off!
So, now I'm in Berlin, but I'll go into that later.
So, the rest of Amsterdam. On Tuesday, I met up with Glenn (my mom's cousin) and his fiancee Alissa for dinner with the Greats (great aunt and uncle, Missy and Chuck), who, coincidentally, were in town at the same time as me. We met at the hotel for drinks, and then disembarked in a beautiful canal boat set up with a dining room, making stops at various restaurants to have food run across the street and deposited through the window. Several members of the team at Chuck and Glenn's company, Network Hardware were there, and they were all very fun and interesting to talk to. It was pouring rain outside, which made the boat even more cozy and enchanting. All-in-all, a truly singular experience!
Glenny!
Since the Australians left, I've been hanging out with Kai and Andre, from Bad Oeynhausen, Germany, in town for a 2-day mini-vacation. We went out for pizza, and saw the Source Code (the new Jake Gyllenhaal movie) in the Pathe de Munt theater, which was cool, although I was distracted by trying (failing) to read the Dutch subtitles.
We walked through the park, where they have these found-item racks where people can clip up lost keys, earrings, hats, cards, and even a condom (although I don't know that the owner would necessarily want that back...)
We broke the rules (See the "Please do not sit here" sign directly under Andre's ass)
We were bewildered by the street signs and their potential meanings.
We were (I was) excited about the big red bike sign.
Also, have I mentioned that there are bicycles everywhere here? Because there are.
The following is my process of getting from Amsterdam to Berlin, ready? After a genuine clusterfuck situation at the train station in which you were assigned a queue number that then appears on a screen, letting you know that it's your turn to talk to someone and indicating which ticket/information desk to go to... but only after a 2-hour wait, I gave up and decided to go back to the hostel to buy my EuRail pass online, only to be met with the sinking realization that in order to do this, you have to provide a shipping address so they can mail it to you. It's almost like they expect you to have already made travel arrangements BEFORE you show up in a new country - crazy, right?! As fate would have it, my new German friends were leaving to hitchhike back home on Thursday morning. We talked about it, and came to the consensus that while they might be less likely to get picked up with 3 people instead of just 2, any potential difficulties that arose would be outweighed by the benefit of having a female in the group. So we set out for the A1 around 9:30 that morning. By 12:30, we had made it about 5 km (3.1 miles). Finally, we were picked up by a 40-something-year-old business man in a fit of nostalgia for his free and easy youth. He dropped us off at a rest stop about 20 minutes out of the city, but it turned out to be basically just a hotel with a popular cafe for business guys to have lunch meetings before going back to the office, which was, incidentally, not in Germany. We had just started to flirt with the idea of scoping out potential camping spots when a guy in a delivery truck pulled over and offered to take us to an actual gas station out of town where road-trippers and truck-drivers might stop. From there, it was pretty smooth sailing. Over the next 80 km (50 miles), we were driven in short legs of 10-20 km by a British businesswoman with a German husband, a pair of electricians in their company truck, and a Moroccan guy driving a moving van full of "documents" who, as a parting gift, gave us a large nugget of his own homegrown weed with such a ceremonial flourish that you'd think he was handing over his firstborn. Each time, we would get dropped at a prominent gas station off the freeway, where we parked our butts, drank wretched coffee, thumb-wrestled, and hassled unsuspecting motorists. I downright pity anyone who crossed our line of sight with German license plates. Finally, an enormous asthmatic man who looked rather like Santa Claus in a suede vest and a chain-mail necklace piled us and our bags into his tiny two-door hatch-back and deposited us just behind the border to Germany. At this point, it was about 6:30 pm, and Kai and Andre only had about 150 km (93 miles) to go til Bad Oeynhausen. I, however, still had to go another 400ish km (250 miles) til Berlin. In a stroke of luck, Kai and Andre found a guy who was going straight through their city, all the way to about 100 km (62 miles) outside Berlin. His name was Stefan, and he didn't speak any English, but via K and A, we communicated that he could take me right into the heart of the city. The boys said that from what they could tell, he seemed upstanding, but took down the license plate number anyway and told me to call as soon as I got dropped off, which was nice. Stefan turned out better than any of us had hoped for, and dropped the guys off right at their front door around 8:30 pm. For the remainder of the trip we alternated between 180 km/hr autobahn-style driving, and 40 km/hr traffic jams. The single and only uncomfortable part was driving for 4 hours in dead silence, save for Stefan occasionally pointing out the window to indicate a specific city or landmark we passed. We reached the city limits around 11:30 pm and he ended up driving me all the way up to the exact address where I was supposed to meet people, about a hundred km out of his way.
So all in all, despite our slow start, once we got the ball rolling we couldn't have asked for a more successful hitchhiking trip. And to think - none of us even had to take our shirts off!
Road-weary travelers outside one of Holland's scenic truck stops.
So, now I'm in Berlin, but I'll go into that later.
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