...
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!
"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!
posted by JMP at 6:00 PM
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