Barcelona

Sorry again for the delay in posts, but my laptop finally gave up the ghost and we haven't been in one place for long enough to really use a computer.  At this moment we are in Barcelona where we have had a few very very interesting and exciting days.  We've eaten incredible food, hung out on some awesome beaches, gotten pickpocketed, and now we are on our way to Nice in France.  I hope that when we get there we'll have a computer and be able to provide a more substantive update but in the meantime we are safe and well and having tons of fun.  Miss you all!

Matt and Christine

Catching Raindrops

**Hey so my laptop just decided that it would be okay if it started charging again so you all get the posts that have been on here for the last couple of days!  This post was written by me (Matt) and the one below it by Christine, so please go ahead and read both if you have the time and just remember they were written last weekend.  More posts and pictures and things will be forthcoming so bear with us while my laptop returns to life!**

First of all, an apology. We never did get around to writing a post about Prague because we were simply enjoying it too much to take the time. Don't worry, a time will soon come for that. At this moment though we are lying in a green field outside of Berlin, reading books, listening to music, and generally enjoying living.

Getting here was quite a journey. We knew only generally where this music festival was going to be, but very little of how to get there or what we would then do was clear. We spent the night before our train left on the painfully slow computers of the Little Quarter Hostel in Prague doing our best to decipher the transportation directions. Directions, I should point out, that could only be found in German. Needless to say, the night before we left Prague I had some slight reservations about how the next day's journey would progress.

We jumped on a train from Prague to Berlin, about a five hour journey, and found ourselves in the main train station of that same city. I wish I had pictures to demonstrate, but this station is bigger than many airports and busier still. With only a vague idea of our destination, a town called Brieslang, we approached an electronic ticket terminal and apprehensively picked the English option. This was actually incredibly easily and we found a train going right where we wanted leaving in less than half an hour. Things went so well in fact that we purchased our ticket to Paris and we aren't even going there for another two weeks.

We caught our train, found our stop about half an hour later, and even found the shuttle stop that was supposed to take festival-goers to the grounds some six miles away. At this time we really thought we were some hot shit. Everything that we had figured out as we went worked out perfectly. All we had to do was catch this shuttle that was there specifically to get people from this very train stop(about fifty people in all) to the festival grounds. Easy-peazy we thought, there is a festival official, everything looked in order, this day had been a total slam dunk! Except the shuttle never arrived. We were initially told to just call a cab, but it turns out there was only one taxi for the entire town sooo... I still don't know what happened to it, but hey, we saw this cool sunset while we waited!

Eventually they got a bus out to us, we found the festival grounds before it got dark and were able to pitch our tent and catch some sleep. That was two nights ago and the time in between has been incredible. There has been awesome music, (mostly) awesome weather, and generally a very relaxed atmosphere. Last night we got to see one of my most favorite bands, Gogol Bordello. They sang, they played, they ran all over the stage and the crowd loved this unique music which can only be described as gypsy-punk. It was incredible.

Something about this place is magical. I write this from the ground of my tent as I watch the clouds float past out of the door. On the other side of a grove of trees to my left are several stages from which we can hear all types of music. All around me is a giant tent city with people milling about and generally enjoying a really nice weekend. People sleep in the grass, do more or less as they like, and everyone seems to get along quite famously. Oh, and the food is so much better than any sort of concert or festival I've ever seen in the states. It has made a great resting point after all the wonder of Amsterdam and Prague. By the time anybody reads this it will be two days from now and we will be in Berlin and hopefully knee-deep in our next adventure.

And so, to those of you half-way around the world, I implore you to do one thing for me. It matters not if you do it today or tomorrow, but someday take a second to slow down and catch a raindrop :)

Peeing in Amsterdam

Edited To Add: now that the computer is still holding on to life, I have some posts to update.  I wrote this one in Prague about Amsterdam.  We will send some more updates soon : )

Christine Speaking...

First of all let me make clear, I was asleep during Matt's post of the Intermission blog.  It is not me that doesn't know which floor I'm on, it's Matt!!  He keeps thinking were on the top floor when we are only on the second.  The kitchen is on the top and he keeps trying to go downstairs for food.  It's very amusing because he seems to have a really good sense of direction.  It turns out he doesn't, he just knows how to read a map really well. And somehow I have a very fine tuned sense of direction but am unable to read a map.  We have learned in the last few days of Prague how to make our two skills work together!  I can keep straight where we are facing and which side of the river we are on (and whether to go up or down) and Matt can figure out which square we are in and which street to take to the hostel or museum.  We are almost done with our time in Prague, but first I want to talk a bit about Amsterdam.

The last two days in Amsterdam were mostly spent in two amazing museams.  First we went to the Rijksmuseum.  Which was both a general museum for Amsterdam and included some great pieces by Rembrandt.  It was something being around art with Matt.  I'm not trained at all in art and Matt is.  The only familiar situation I was in was art in Paris with my aunt Liza who is an artist as well.  It opened my mind a lot; looking at brushstrokes and techniques instead of just the historical context of a piece.  It was really fun sharing my art history knowledge with Matt and in-exchange he made me much more impressed with the work of many artists.  Such as this one which is done with pen ink and is several feet wide and high.

We then hung out at a coffee place and watched people travel by.

We found a urinal for men that allowed three men to pee in it at once right in public.  Matt of course used it.

  And yes, dramawiz, we women folk do have to pay to pee, but since I'm so trained to pee whenever it is free I have actually not paid yet, and it's the particular man folk Matt that paid to pee once before discovering the very free urinals.  For those that don't know, due to the amount of deaths resulting from drunk men peeing in the canals (and falling in) there are now public urinals.  There were only female toilets after 300 women peed on a bridge in protest, but they were taken away again when heroin addicts started using them as hiding places.  Now that Amsterdam has really cleaned up their streets I think it's time to open the toilets back up, mostly so we don't have to enter a McDonald's and pay 50 euro cents to use a bathroom that is never cleaned.

We went to the Van Gogh museum which Matt will have more to say about later.  But mostly we just walked around and checked out the cool city and played with taking cool pictures.

Rain Delay

Sorry about the long wait in posts, but my laptop has suddenly decided that it no longer wants to be charged and I am concerving this last hour of energy for as long as I can.  The result of this is that three posts on here are delayed until I can figure out how to continue this from my cell phone.  Pictures may also, unfortunatly, be put on hold indefinatly unless I can fix this computer.

But as long as I have you here I'll give a quick recap of whats been up.  We were in Prague until thursday of last week and it was posativly beautiful.  Great buildings, interesting people, cheap beer, and mediocre food. We spent last weekend at the Greenville music festival outside of berlin and it was awesome!  Saw Gogol Bordello which is one of both Christine and I's favorite bands.  For the most part the weather was great, but the last night get a bit chilly in our tent.  The last two night have been spent in Berlin in an incredible hostel from which we have explored this sprawling, dynamic city.  Much to my shock, the best food isn't even German!  We basically spend all our time finding the various little Turkish restaurants and gorging ourselves on delicious, cheep, fresh food.  If you ever get a chance at a Turkish pizza you absolutly must take it.

I will try to get a bigger update as soon as I can, but in the meantime we are safe, warm, well fed, and having an awesome time.

I hope everyone back home is doing well and we miss you all.

Talk to you soon :)
-Matt

An aside for bicycles

Amsterdam is a beautiful, fascinating, and incredibly dangerous city. We wandered through idyllic avenues and wide canals. We sat under the greenest trees, saw some of the most incredible artwork, ate copious amounts of cheese, and had a near death experience about once every half hour. I will explain.

As Christine will surely attest to, the roads here are a little different. First of all, there are the trams. If you've ever been to San Francisco than you understand the unique pressures that trams add to the process of crossing roads. They travel fast, don't follow the same paths as cars, pop up where you don't expect them, and can be very... quiet isn't really the right word so much as they are sneaky.  Fortunately, they are big and easy to spot once you get some practice. 

 Second, street crossing isn't at all the same as in the States. There are crosswalks, but their use is purely optional. People cross at any point in the road that they think they can get across before getting flattened. The roads and sidewalks are also set up so that you can cross a third of the road or half of the road at a time and then have a safe stretch of raised land about two feet across to stand in the middle of the flowing traffic.  This is also relatively easy to get the hang of. 

The hard part is coming to terms with the idea of a city built around bicycles.

As you can see, there are more bicycles than people in Amsterdam. As you walk down any stretch of road you will see many many bikes propped against all surfaces. On the first day it was explained to us that any collision with a bicycle, be it by tram, car, or person, is never the fault of the bicyclist. There are more roads for bicycles than there are for anything else, and they aren't particularly well advertised. 

 As Christine exclaimed after almost being run down one afternoon, “they should really paint these a different color from the roads and sidewalks.” While cars and trams are at least big, bikes are slim and very hard to judge speed with. They don't just ride down the road, but in and out of parks, on and off the sidewalks, in and out of doorways, and sometimes it feels like they drop straight from the sky.

Simply put, Amsterdam has a bike culture in much the same way that Los Angeles has a car culture.  It's not that people make a conscious decision to ride their bikes everyday, its really just what you do and what has been done for as long as anybody is aware.  Bikes are even family vehicles

We never did get hit, but if you are in the neighborhood make sure you look both ways before crossing the street. And the sidewalk. And parks. And open doors. When you hear that characteristic “ring ring” its time to dodge and weave because in Amsterdam, any collision with a bicycle is your fault.  I think that just looking at us the Amsterdamers knew that we would never understand their bicycle culture.

Intermission

A new post with more info and all of my little observations will be coming as soon, but in the meantime Christine and I would like to let you all know that we are in Prague and it is beautiful!  The sun is shining, Christine doesn't seem to know what floor of the hostel we are on, and there is icecream on every single corner.  So don't change that dial, we will be back shortly :)

Somewhere in the Between

Matt talking with Christine adding bits in that look like this (C-words-C)

The past two days have been a blur. Flying went easier than anticipated; our planes left on time and the one stopover in Dallas was literally just short enough to grab a couple sandwiches and some snacks before we left for Frankfurt. We stumbled our way to the Frankfurt airport train station before 9am local time, figured out where to get international tickets, and booked the first train to Amsterdam just eight minutes before departure. We covered a massive distance in a short time with almost no hassle at all. It was bloody magnificent. After that we learned travel in Europe during peak tourist season would not remain so easy. You see, although it only took us eight minutes to get a train into Amsterdam it takes closer to three days to get one back out again.

We had hoped to spend two nights and then catch a night train to Prague but there were no trains available until the third night. Fair enough we said. We'll have an extra day to explore. And then we asked about getting a high speed train from Paris to Barcelona later in the trip and were informed that that train could only be booked from Paris. And apparently only with weeks of advance notice. Huh, allrighty then. How the #@?! are we supposed to manage that? I guess that's a question for a later date.

It took an hour, submerged in a dense jet lag fog, to actually talk to someone about those tickets and by the end of it we were pretty well worn out. Something like twenty hours of fast travel and light sleep takes a hell of a toll. To top it off we discovered that Amsterdam didn't adhere to the stated rules of heat and sunshine that were supposed to govern a summer Europe trip. It was rather distressing in fact to observe from the train north out of Frankfurt that people just gradually dressed in heavier and heavier clothing. Quite distressing indeed. As it turns out, it doesn't actually get all that cold here, even if it does rain on and off quite a bit. Oh, and we missed our tram out of the railway station and decided that we would simply find our hostel on foot somehow (C-It was a really sad look for us new tourists, we tried to get into 4 different doors and they closed progressively each time we attempted the next one-C). We had no idea in what direction it was. Or how far away it was. Nor did we have a map other than the one posted outside the train station. And ya know what? We found it anyway. Yes, we are that #@!?ing awesome.

(C-We went and took a 4 hour, woke up at 9 and because it was Amsterdam in the summer the light was still out! And we were able to get our act together and get food instead of going to bed starving. We found a little cafe with a funny waiter and great cheap food. Even better food for Matt when he remember he was going to eat meat on this trip and order a roast beef sandwich. We came back to the hostel and talked to some Canadians. We sent them though a bit of shock when we explained just how much public school was in America, and how much debt the average person keeps after school. One of the Canadians from BC had spent time in Quebec to negotiate and talk with the gigantic student protests. So tuition is a problem in Canada, and as we learned later the next day, a difficult thing for most students, it's just exceptionally bad in America.-C)

But that was all yesterday, before we had a solid nap plus eight hours of sleep. Today was a whole new ballgame. We got up at the crack of 8:30 and enjoyed a free breakfast of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and some tea/coffee. We finally got ourselves a map as well as the location of free walking tours. We decided to continue to travel by foot, made it across the city to the tour with just seconds to spare, and spent the next three hours being led by an awesome Irish guide who led us around a number of highlights and neighborhoods that gave us a confidence in where we were and where we were going. Also: free cheese! Cheese is big in this country as it turns out.(ha, when Liz and I went to Amsterdam, we searched for cheese on the advice of her aunt and never found it, I'm glad we found it this time. From what I can tell though the free cheese is something you can only find when not looking for it. Other travelers told us about it and were only able to gesture to half the map of Amsterdam. We found it quite by accident too-C) We found a cheese store that gave samples and offered a tasting with three glasses of wine for 12 euros which was promptly marked on the map for later usage. We later discovered a cheese museum with endless samples of at least two dozen different varieties of cheese which became a late lunch.

We wandered all about checking out the different neighborhoods such as Jordaan where coffeeshops and a laidback atmosphere dominated. We wandered the redlight district in the shadow of the oldest church in town (where sailors used to get their sins forgiven even before they had committed them just across the street). We saw a statue of a really big head. We had the most awesome and interesting conversation with a few locals where we got to compare cultures and politics and schooling and everything else that just blew my mind. We got lost for two hours and probably gave the absolute worst directions to another traveler (yeah, sorry about that, its my first day). We saw canals and leaning buildings and drunk tourists and were almost run over by bikes and trams at least five times an hour. It was exciting and welcoming and a great way to start this trip.

(C-The big head was dedicated to an author who's name escapes me, but I remember what he did. He lived in Indonesia during its colonization. He wrote about the horrible abuses and the best part is he changed the minds of the Dutch people on colonization. In my South African class I learned that the same thing happened to the British people when they discovered the true horrors of slavery. I think this is very different from today in the information age. It is easy to dismiss earlier people as crueler then today, but the reality is they didn't know what was going on, while we do. It definitely made me rethink the fact that I still buy cheap clothes from stores that have a very bad reputation of child labor and other abuses.-C)

(C-We learned much more about the Dutch during the tour. The man that led us did his own research had some really well thought out words to say about the Dutch history. He taught us the “through the fingers policy” the Dutch idea that if you followed three different rules you get to be tolerated in Amsterdam. 1^St: Don't make a lot of noise, 2^nd don't hurt anybody, 3^rd be good for business. This changed in World War 2. The tolerance turned from a profit making endeavor to just the first 2 rules. Jewish Dutch were being beaten up in the street, and the other Dutch went out in a huge strike that got promptly stopped by the Nazis. The guide stressed the significance of this strike, despite the loss; they went to help the Jewish people because it was the right thing to do, not because it made them money. This morality continues today. According to our guide and our first day experience, the Dutch each have strong morals, but they let others have their own different morals without judgment. This is why marijuana and drugs in general are not criminalized. While hard drugs are illegal, if a Dutch person gets caught using one, he or she goes to rehab instead of prison. Under pressure from the EU The Netherlands are trying to force drug cards for people to use. But this is under protest in Amsterdam, because no one here seems to want themselves or others under a moral microscope. They are protesting because, even though most of Amsterdam does not engage in soft drugs, they don't want to force morals on other people. It is really radical to consider, especially coming from some place like America where drug use is so harshly punished.-C)

When we couldn't get a train out of Amsterdam for three days at first I felt a bit trapped, but after today I'm honestly sorry that we're going to be leaving this wondrous place in just two days time. Yeah, I know, life is hard. We're stuck in one amazing city with lots of free cheese waiting to head to the next awesome city where I'm sure we will meet more incredible people, eat more awesome food, and see more amazing things. Its almost two in the morning here and I'm pretty well wiped out so I think I'll let this come to an end but I think I'll be back before long.

-Matt & Christine