Pardon The Interruption...

Forgive me for three things...

1) Interrupting the NTG Travel Diaries - a number of people have told me recently how much they're enjoying them, so many thanks for that, my beloved NTGers!

2) Taking forever to get the NTG Travel Diaries written and posted - I take great care in pretty much everything I put up here, and it has been a busy few weeks.

3) Co-opting the name of a popular ESPN sports talk show for the purposes of my blog. My apologies to fans of Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser, for this post has nothing to do with them.

I have been sort of bogged down with the general stuff of life lately, so I wanted to check in briefly and fill you in on the recent happenings.

First off, the job... Turns out that I'll be looking for work again in a few weeks, since my company is likely to dissolve. I've been getting my edit reel together, and it's more or less finished. Now comes the arduous task of pavement-pounding to find that next stop along the road to independent wealth. However, my health coverage situation is a little tricky... I'll need to stay here for at least the month of June to make sure my benefits cover the aftermath of my upcoming surgery.

That's right, kids... JMP is going under the knife! Why, you ask? Well, I'll tell you with one photo of my throat (which some of you may consider to be gross, so be warned)...

CLICK HERE if you dare...

See those two large, pinkish-red masses in the very back of my throat? Those are my ludicrously enormous tonsils. See how they basically block off my entire esophagus, making otherwise-simple things like breathing and swallowing rather difficult?

So after June 15th, they won't be there anymore. It's a tonsillectomy for JMP, and from what my doctors have told me, the recovery is none-too-pleasant. When I met with the Ear Nose & Throat specialist last week, he laughed - actually LAUGHED - when I opened my mouth. "I look at big tonsils for a living," he quipped, "and those are the real deal!" From what he tells me, tonsillectomy recovery means ten straight days of "the worst sore throat imaginable" (his words), which I'll spend hopped up on various narcotics which barely make the pain bearable. I tried to keep a sunny outlook on this during my meeting with him. "Well, hey, at least I'll be able to catch up on a lot of movies." To which he replied "even your favorite movies won't be enjoyable, going through this." Thanks, dude. But at least he's more straight-forward and direct than any other doctor I've seen in recent memory. I respect a guy that can look a patient in the eyes and say "I do not envy your situation, as far as recovery goes."

The other consolation is that Ana (by the way, I have a girlfriend again... I seem to forget mentioning this type of thing on NTG until a couple months after-the-fact) has agreed to nurse me back to health. And regardless of what the doc says, ten days of hanging with her, drinking tea and milkshakes, sinking into the couch in a pill-induced stupor, watching movie after movie after movie... that sounds fine by me. Of course, I might be singing a different tune when I'm going through it...

BUT, something else that will get me through it is The World Cup! It begins June 9th and lasts a straight month, so I'll be mixing those games in with the movies. Plus the fact that it's baseball season (which makes me happy anyway) means that I'll have those games to watch too. I've been to two games so far this season, both of them landmarks for me since they were firsts for two epic types of games: last week I got to a Yankees/Red Sox game (many thanks to Michelle, and her clients who cancelled!), and Sunday night I made my first trip to Shea this season for Mets/Yankees. The hostility at both games was outstanding, but the Subway Series game took the cake. In my section alone, I saw at least 4 people forcibly removed by security, and the tension was thick from the second I got on the 7 train to get out to Flushing.

This was my view from section 21 of the upper deck:



And can someone please tell me why Kevin Reese has a black eye in his team picture?



Okay, that's enough of my babbling about recent haps... I'm sure I'll be typing at you more regularly from my convalescent bed (or rather, couch).

Now, back to the NTG Travel Diaries!


*****N*T*G*****

Never hesitate to comment!

The NTG Travel Diaries!!! #4

DAY 4: BONN, GERMANY

"So, when are we getting ice cream?"

***************

This was a decidedly more low-key day than any of the trip so far.

I suppose any good vacation has to have a mix of activity and down-time, and this morning was the down-time. We wound up sleeping until around 1, and ate a very slow, lazy German breakfast once we got stirring. The German breakfast is essentially rolls and butter (which they call Brötchen), and we ate them with good orange juice, some Nutella, and a hard-boiled egg. I have determined that I don't really like hard-boiled eggs.

After breakfast, we didn't do much but walk around the neighborhood where Anna lives. We walked through the University square into a big open-air walking area called the Fussgängerzone, and found a great ice cream shop. Fischer and I had been craving ice cream since we got there, and it was all we could think about for much of the day.





The ice cream in Germany is great, a little different than American or Italian ice cream. It's more creamy, and melts more easily when you eat it, and every flavor is very defined. In short, it's ludicrously good. We sat and ate our ice cream near Bonn's City Hall.



After that, we wandered aimlessly a bit, and walked past the post office we had visited the day before. I didn't mention in the last post, but we has a ridiculously long post office experience involving Dutch stamps and postcards the German postal Service deemed too large to mail. So we had to snap it for posterity.




A funny story Anna relayed to us, concerning that statue on front of the post office... The statue has stood before that building since the early 1800's, when the building was a castle (and long before it was a post office). A number of decades back, the Queen of England came to visit Bonn, and she stayed in the master bedroom of that castle, which overlooks the plaza below. When she arrived, she threw open the curtains to find herself staring directly at Beethoven's back. Apparently, whoever chose that room for her didn't realize what an insult it is to show the Queen your back. Needless to say she was a tad offended.

By then it was nearly dinnertime, so we hit a grocery store to stock up. Fischer was amazed at the variety of sausages and salamis offered in German grocery stores. That dude loves salami.



That night after dinner, we met up with a bunch of Anna's friends at an outdoor bar. Despite the cold, it was nice to sit outside and drink our two-for-one drink specials (obviously a big draw of that place). One of Anna's friends was an avid joke-teller, so he shared a few of his best with us, and asked us if we had any. I'm not much for retaining jokes, but Fischer's got a few standards, so he crossed the American/German joke-relations barrier very smoothly. After a bunch of jokes and a healthy amount of kölsch and whiskey sours, we headed home to Anna's. The day was short and sedate, but it still managed to be exhausting.

Not too exhausting for some more beer and Fischer's card tricks in Anna's kitchen, though...




***************

NEXT POST: Our final day in Bonn, the long-awaited visit to a true German Biergarten, and CASTLES, CASTLES, CASTLES! Did I mention there were castles?


*****N*T*G*****

Never hesitate to comment!

The NTG Travel Diaries!!! #3

DAY 3: AMSTERDAM/BONN, GERMANY

"Ich hab' ZU VIEL betrunk! ZU VIEL!!!"

***************

Consciousness came early again this morning...

After the biking adventure of the previous day, you would have thought that I was exhausted and wanted nothing more than to sleep, but when Fischer and I got back to the hostel, I felt like having a drink and writing a little. I went to the basement cafe at the Pig and slowly sipped a Jameson while I journaled and wrote postcards. I got down there around midnight, and hadn't paid much attention to what was going on around me, but before I knew it it was nigh on 3am, and no one else was there except for a couple making out by the television, and the bartender. I talked with him awhile, he was an Irish guy named Owen who had worked there for about 5 months. He said the bar was closed, but he gave me one of the staff beers and we drank and talked for awhile. Then I watched some TV on the cushions next to the makeout couple, who didn't seem to mind my presence. I watched a snooker game on the Amsterdam equivalent of ESPN... I knew snooker was some kind of billiards game, but I had no idea it was so complex. Those snooker masters are precise, man... I wound up getting to bed around 4:30, which is actually pretty common on a lazy weekend night at home, and that's kinda what it felt like so I just rode that vibe.

We got up around 9, since we had to return the bikes by 10 to avoid an additional day's charge. After Fischer and I returned our faithful chariots and bade them farewell, we walked around a bit and set out for some food and general sightseeing. The plan for the day was to leave early afternoon and head to Bonn, Germany to meet his friend Anna. The two of them had worked together at The Exploratorium in San Francisco, but Anna had very recently (as in, about a week before we'd possibly be in Germany) moved back to Bonn, where she had grown up. So Jon called her, and she arranged to meet us at the train station in Köln*, about 20 minutes from Bonn.

[* - I'm going to make this note right now... Blogger does not do well with umlauts. I discovered this trying to correctly type the name of NYC chaos rapper Dälek awhile ago, and Blogger made my life a living hell. Just so you know the deal, we spent a good amount of time hanging out in Köln, and there will inevitably be some web-gibberish in place of the ö every time around.]

On our stroll, we took in our last Amsterdam sights. Among the list of things it would probably have been cool to check out but didn't was the Film Museum:



C'est la vie. It's on the list for next time. We also passed this outlandish outfit that looked like what Elton John would wear to a garden party:



The morning was brief, and we very shortly found ourselves on the way to Centraal Station to head to Germany. But that was not before we observed this bizarre little scene...

Right across the street from us, the police were stopping a lot of bike riders and seemed to be interrogating them. We couldn't tell if they were being given tickets for something, or if the cops were just asking them questions, but it was strictly bike riders, and there were about a dozen cops there stopping them. They didn't stop every single person that went past, though, so we were wondering what the criteria for stoppage were...



It remains a mystery to this day, as our bus arrived shortly thereafter. We made our way to Centraal and got on our train to leave the land of abundant greenery and even more abundant prostitutes...

Farewell, Amsterdam...



So chalk up a visit to Holland, a country I had never experienced, in the NTG Travel Diaries. What did I learn?

Besides the "minus = plus" debacle at the Frites stand, I also learned that the Dutch, by and large, listen to horrendous music. ESPECIALLY in the coffeeshops! In nearly every coffeeshop we visited, they played this completely lifeless, boring, innocuous techno that amounted to little more than pointless background noise. Come on, Amsterdam! Give me some rock and roll! When I'm chillin' with a cup of tea in a coffeeshop, I want to hear some Zeppelin, or Guns N' Roses, or Sabbath, or SOMETHING other than the shit you guys are playing. Even the Doors Palace (remember, NOT located at 46 Singel) wasn't playing the Doors! What the fuck is that? I also have learned that I like the general vibe and layout of Amsterdam, but a return visit to Holland would be spent more wisely investigating the outlying towns, and would DEFINITELY include a bike trip to the islands along the country's northern coast. Look to the future...

***************

We arrived at the train station in Köln, and after a ludicrous and lengthy exercise in the operation of German payphones ("Ohhh... you have to dial 0 every time... Thanks, Germany!"), we got ahold of Anna, who told us we should get back on the train and meet her in Bonn. So that we did.

Anna very kindly offered to put us up at her place, which was just fine by me. The hostel was cool, but for this leg of the trip, it was nice to be around natives rather than strictly tourists like ourselves. We dropped our stuff in her room and she gave us a tour of her apartment, a nice-sized two bedroom she shared with a friend of her boyfriend (who was off studying in a far-off land... England, I think). Plus, she baked us a cake! Good, delicious German chocolate cake.

It was still the middle of the afternoon, and gorgeous outside, so we walked around her neighborhood and she showed us some sights. Her friend Christine dropped by as well... She works as a tour guide around Bonn, and had just gotten off work, so she had some helpful visual aids to share as well as tons of historical tidbits about some of the places we saw.

Here was our first view of the Rhein*:




[* - The Americanized spelling is Rhine, but for blogging purposes I'll stick with the original German, Rhein.]

After the tour, we went back to Anna's for dinner, which she prepared for us; spaghetti with tuna, and the most delicious new beer I've had in recent memory: KÖLSCH!



Man, this stuff is so good. Kölsch is a type of beer, produced mostly in/around Köln. It's light, like a pilsner, but it has a lot of body and flavor. Most importantly though, it is a SUPER-smooth beer, very easy to drink, which makes it dangerous. Deliciously dangerous.

We finished dinner and went to meet Anna's friend Jasmin (pronounced "yaz-meen") for a round of German barhopping. We waited for her train...



...which was well worth it, because when she arrived, the first thing she did after saying hi was hand me beer. I knew I was going to enjoy this country!

Here's the story on Bonn/Köln: you can openly drink on the street, no paper bag or anything. Beer is delicious (like I said, it's mostly kölsch) and very cheap; a large bottle at a bodega or falafel restaurant is 2 Euros, typically. So the night consisted of walking from bar to bar to bar to bar to bar to bar...... ad infinitum...... But, we couldn't just drink at the bars. No, no... Anytime we left a place, Jasmin would duck into a store and buy us more beer, for the walk to the next place. Even if that place happened to be a block away, which meant we had to pound what we had left before going into the next place.

We started out playing fussball at a place whose name eludes me... We played doubles, myself/Fischer vs. Anna/Jasmin. They trounced us, but they're German so I didn't feel too bad. Then Jasmin and I teamed up, and we were unstoppable. I hadn't realized how much fun fussball is, especially at a crowded bar in Germany where everyone is drinking kölsch and smoking hookahs.

After that place, it was just an endless series of bars... The night became blurry very quickly...





One of the places we stopped in had the ultimate in pinball entertainment: Medieval Madness. Pinball aficionados such as Fischer and my good friends Andy Shal and Ben Hill count Medieval as their favorite game. We each played a few rounds, Fischer being the most dominant player. As much as I enjoy it, my pinball skills are little better than dismal.





After a particularly unlucky lost ball, Fischer paid his respects to Medieval...



...and we set off for the next place. On the way, we (of course) stopped for more beer, and made a shocking discovery: in Germany, they sell Jack & Coke in a can. No really, look!



Fischer and I contemplated a purchase...



...but ultimately decided against it. And then at some point, Fischer had a pair of glasses on his face. I never quite found out whose they were.



I don't know whether it was the glasses or the massive alcohol intake, but Fischer decided it would be opportune to pee in public. By the looks of it in this picture, he's miraculously standing on his own stream...



The next place we stopped in, for some reason, had a poster in the mens' room for Big Mama's Haus 2, in German of course...



I'm pretty sure the basic translation of this is, "justice is fat." I'm not kidding.

More drinking, more drinking, more drinking, more drinking......






The end of the night devolved into Jasmin trying to force-feed Jon and me more beer, and me yelling in German about how I had already had plenty. I was glad to get to use the German language in constructive ways while I was there.

Finally we started making our way back to the train station. The whole time we were out, we seemed to be walking aimlessly through this alien city, and I had absolutely no concept of how near or far the train station was. But Anna and Jasmin thankfully knew what they were doing, and they found our way there. On the way, we asked a guy to get a picture of the four of us, and I made use of Pentax's self-timer:



Eventually, we made it up to the right platform after milling around the station for a good hour, using the bathroom and getting food at a McDonalds. The fries made me miss my neighborhood Crown Fried Chicken back in Harlem. Fischer took an unplanned siesta while we waited...



After what seemed like another hour, the train arrived, and we finally rested our weary legs and tried not to fall asleep on the way back to Anna's...



Thus ended our first day in Germany. The only way I could have consumed more beer was if I bathed in it.


***************

NEXT POST: A relaxing day of lazy strolls, delicious ice cream, and of course, more kölsch!


*****N*T*G*****

Never hesitate to comment!

The NTG Travel Diaries!!! #2

DAY 2: AMSTERDAM

"It's exactly like Nashville, what with all the canals, and... Dutch architecture."

***************

Waking up in a foreign country is interesting, especially if it's your first morning, you forget that you're actually there, you've been asleep for about 10 hours after being awake for about 36, and you're awoken by a combination of pigeons right outside your window and the shrill cell-phone ring of one of your hostel-mates. It went off around 8:30am, and it took me a second to get my bearings and realize that previous day had not been some bizarre figment of my imagination.

After the phone was silenced, the six of us (myself, Fischer, and the four Australian travelers who occupied the other four beds in our room at the Pig) all just laid there silently in the slowly brightening room, listening to the pigeons coo insistently, the way only pigeons can. After a minute, the one Aussie burst out "Is it having a fucking orgasm?" We all laughed, and were all officially awake at that point.

I got cleaned up, and Fischer and I grabbed a perfunctory breakfast in the basement cafe. [NOTE: File this under "Lessons Europe Has Taught Me": Nutella is delicious!] After some basic research online and in Fischer's ubiquitous travel Bible, Let's Go Europe!:



...we embarked on our activity for the day: BIKES.

One of our roommates, Gemma from Australia, was free for the day, and when she saw the opportunity to explore the city with two strapping young Yanks, how could she resist? [Actually, the friend she was traveling with was being quite boring and sleeping most of the time, so Gemma was looking for an excuse to bail anyway.] The three of us made our way to the nearest bike shop. It's remarkably easy to find a cheap bike rental in Amsterdam; we found a deal for 10 Euros a day, and it was a true 24 hours so we didn't have to return them until the next morning. This guy was asleep at the bike shop, snoring away contentedly...



I guess they don't really need a guard dog at a place like that. A few short minutes of paperwork, and we were set for the day!



Mine seemed like a pretty standard Amsterdam bike: a Gazelle, sturdy and strong, with a hand-break, pedal-break, and little "chingy" bell on the left handlebar.




I half-took these pictures as a means to remember what my bike looked like in case I forgot throughout the day and couldn't find where I parked it. There's a lot bikes around. Thankfully, I didn't need them for that purpose.

So, I've already remarked on the prevalence of bikes, but I have to say at least a couple words about convenience. Amsterdam being as condensed and crowded as it is, the choice to get from point A to B is basically 15 minutes on a bike, an hour on a bus/tram, or two hours in a car. Consequently, bikes are the way to go, and after only a day I'm convinced they're the best possible way to experience the city. I suppose the best means of understanding chaos is to become a part of the chaos yourself.

Beginning near the shop, we started riding around some of the side streets, getting used to how the bikes handled and discovering the free open urinals Amsterdam has so kindly provided its residents and visitors:



Yep. Just a hole in the ground surrounded by a spiral of thin green metal. You can't get more convenient than that...

Speaking of convenience, this is another handy little thing we discovered... Just about every residential building has a large hook protruding from an abutment on the roof.



The use for this? Given that their staircases are so narrow, moving furniture up and down them is nearly impossible, so every building is fitted with a hook on a long winch of cable. Movers attach the furniture to the hook with ropes, and pull it up the front of the building, and others pull it through the large open windows. Those Dutch... They're a clever bunch...

A big draw to Amsterdam for flower enthusiasts is the Dutch tulips. This whole block was taken up by various flower shops and booths, many of them displaying gorgeous arrays of tulips:




Many places also had bags of tulips bulbs for planting, including ghostly black tulips, which I had never seen before. But they do exist, so much so that a post-WWII plan by the Dutch government to oust any remaining Germans from Amsterdam was called "Operation Black Tulip." The official name for the flower is "Queen of Night" (although for some reason I wound up not snapping any, so you'll have to take my word that they're real).

I also really liked this array of cacti, which I like to call "Wile E. Coyote's Nightmare":



And they also had some seeds for other plants for sale there too...

The bikes allowed us to cover a lot of ground, so we wound up seeing a number of various sights around the whole city. After the flower shops, we made our way to a zoo, but didn't feel like paying the 16 Euro entry fee. After that, we found a cool botanical garden, but again opted to not go in. Fischer's travel guide directed us to this brewery...



...which was closed. And it's too bad, too... I was looking forward to trying a Paasij.

Fairly close to the brewery, we happened upon this monstrous monolithic structure...




It is known only as NEMO, and its purpose for existence was unclear to us. No doubt it is some kind of museum, but again we opted to not go in. Instead, we trudged up the dakplein (or roof, to Dutch people) for some spectacularly gray views of the city.







[* - NOTE: I have no Idea who Wim T. Schippers is, but he's got a cool dakplein.]

In tandem with the views, the highlight of the roof was the panoramic display seen here...



The board shows a wide view of the entire field of vision just beyond it, pointing out every building, structure, or general object of interest, with information on the designer, when it was constructed, and some other basic facts. It made me wish something like this existed at a lot of vista points around the world... But then again I'm a nerd for this kind of stuff. The display also inspired me to bust out Pentax's video capabilities. Here I am filming Fischer, who's filming me, and a bit of our philosophical diatribe... Pay attention for a brief cameo by Gemma and a group of Dutch school children...

VIDEO: "It's a lot like Nashville, wouldn't you say?"

All that dakplein climbing made us hungry, so we made our way to Centraal Station (again, not a typo) and had some Frites. It was here that I learned the aforementioned lesson about "minus" meaning "plus." While I sat and pondered this mathematical quandary, a bird landed right on the back of my bike and just waited for me to snap him.



Interestingly enough, the birds here actually sing in a different language than American birds. I know I sound crazy, but it's true. And don't even get me started on German birds... They sing in techno samples.

Next, we wandered around the Amsterdam Sex Museum, where I surprisingly took no pictures. Can you believe that? I mean, it was just what you'd expect the Amsterdam Sex Museum to be like... very sanitized, not seedy in the least and yet unabashed in showing what they're showing, and crammed with tourists. Pictures just seemed like an afterthought there... It was a lot like Amsterdam on the whole, being trapped in some living cartoon.

As the afternoon wound down, we sat and wrote postcards over a cup of tea in a coffeeshop, and then Gemma had to get back to the hostel to prepare for her flight to London that night. The three of us rode back and said our goodbyes, and then Fischer and I set back out to make use of the remaining daylight for bike-riding. We didn't have a path or goal in mind at first, we just rode around aimlessly, enjoying the air and the act of riding bikes. Truthfully, it made me feel like a kid again. This was the single best and most fun street we rode down:



[* - NOTE: Did you spot Fischer's favorite sign?]

Once we swung our bikes to a halt at the end, Fischer asked "Wanna ride up and back again?" Hell yes!

The light had all but drained from the sky, so we hitched the bikes to a bridge, grabbed some falafel for dinner, and then made our way into the famed Red Light District. Honestly, we got there a little early, and there weren't many people around yet, so it didn't live up to my expectations. Thankfully, we took some time to relax and watch soccer in a bar, have a few beers and talk about the day and life in general. By around 11, the streets were livelier, and the neighborhood seemed more like it deserved the reputation it garnered.

It really is like some bizarre extension of Disney Land. The District is very clean and well-kept, and of course packed with tourists. There are dozens of theaters offering live sex shows, each with a barker outside touting his show as the hottest and best value for your money. Lining every street are tiny apartment-fronts with large glass doors, each adorned with a red neon light. Behind each window is a woman dressed in lingerie or a bathing suit, and they simply stand there. If you make eye contact, they might wave, or tap the glass, or beckon you to come to their door. It is completely effortless to have sex there if you agree to the price, and yet the whole time I walked through the streets, "It's A Small World After All" could have been playing in the background. In short, it was just plain strange. And out of respect for the ladies of the night, I took no pictures (most windows have a small "No Foto" decal on them anyway).

But if you really must see what it looks like, do a Google Image search for "Amsterdam Red Light District."

HERE, I even did it for you.


***************

NEXT POST: We depart Amsterdam for Bonn, Germany: The land of castles, Huey Lewis, and my new favorite German beer!


*****N*T*G*****

Never hesitate to comment!