The Cougar Patrol

Went to the New Yankee Stadium last night for the first time, and sat in one of the luxury boxes. Free beer and hot dogs are never a bad thing. Below are some shots of the interior. I dont know what the final score was, all I know is that it was Wooderson 9, Yankees/Aramark 0 in the alcohol department.


The Golden Ticket!

Front Door of the stadium. We entered directly to the left.

Ah, Bangkok. To say that this was possibly the most uncomfortable 24 hours in my life would not be an overstatement. Unfortunately, it was a very sober 24 hours, which probably made it all worse. Go figure.

This is really a story best told in two parts.

First, the filth. Oh God, the filth. I have never smelled a worse smell than the collective stench that permeates the Bangkok air. It is truly otherworldly. It is bad. Imagine the hot breath of Satan. Then realize that I wasn’t even over there in mid-summer. It was that bad.


This is the sidewalk. The booth to the right are set up so the back of the booth faces the street. Hence, you can’t get to the street except at corners and crosswalks. On the left are actually buildings and stores. The path to get through is one person wide. One Asian person wide. I was a bit to big for this, and it took me like 2 hours to make it anywhere on foot that day.

So, I decided to go to Asia. There were three stops; Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Koh Samui.

The first stop in HK was a bit of a whirlwind, but I managed to knock out a large number of cool site along the way. So, without further ado, let’s get started.

This is the building from Dark Knight. It’s currently the tallest one in the city, but will soon be surpassed by one across the harbor. It dominates the skyline of HK Island, as you’ll see in another photo.

Berlin was the last stop on the tour. It is also the stop where I probably got the most done Of course, you really feel like you’ve accomplished a lot when you arrive in a city at 5 in the morning and are told you can’t check into your hostel until 2 in the afternoon.

I got into the station early and upon reaching the hostel, dropped off my bags, so there were a full 8 hours to kill before check-in. Fortunately, the guy behind the desk had some good ideas on things to check out. Any dark looking pictures are from this early morning tour.

The first stop on the tour was the Berlin Wall. Well, part of it, at least. It’s something like 160 miles long, or was, at least, before they started pulling it down. There’s still a few long sections standing, so I went to check them out. The good thing about seeing it at 6 am is the utter lack of tourists. I’m sure the fact that I was in a very, very seedy side of East Berlin helped that fact.

The East Side Gallery is this first section that I visited, and today it’s famous for beign the graffiti epicenter of Berlin. This is the only part left that’s over a mile long. Sort of appropriate that I saw it on a gray morning.

Along the day’s route, there were more individual sections with the more well-known graffiti works preserved on them.

In areas where the wall was completely destroyed, there is a commemoratory line in the street demarcating the original route of the border. It’s pretty interesting to see what landmarks this line runs in front of.

By this point, it was still about 7:20 in the morning, so I hopped onto a train and rode into the city center. After swinging by the Brandenburg gate (more on that later) I headed over to the government center, where the parliamentary buildings are located. These are pretty much brand new buildings, since the Soviets had the presence of mind to bomb the area to the grounf in 1945, and never really got around to fixing it up while the wall was up (the wall cut through the area). The top of the Reichstag has a giant glass dome that allows you to both look down into the parliament chambers (the US would NEVER do something like that) and it also has a ramp that takes you up to the top for a panoramic view of the city. Being up this early, I was 20^th in line, and I was told later the wait can be up to three hours. Go me.

Elsewhere in the city, there is a sign marking the spot of Hitler’s bunker. It was bombed out by the Soviets as well after the war. To get a feel for it’s importance, you should watch the movie “Downfall”, which I reviewed over at FlickFool.

A very cool museum I visited in Berlin was the Pergamon. I was told that if there’s only one museum you have a chance to see, see this one. I thoroughly agree. It’s main attractions are the altar of Babylon (yeah, THAT Babylon) and the Ishtar Gate, which was the main gate to the city. It was a very cool thing to see, seeing how it’s over 3000 years old. The Ishtar gate (in blue) was a no-photos area, but I’m crafty and snapped a quick one.

After the Pergamon, I visited one of the palaces of the royal family. This one is called Schloss Charlottenburg. It was massive, and pretty well done, even though they had to fix it up as it too had been bombed to the ground in WWII (noticing a pattern here?) The grounds were very scenic, and as you can see this day had some of the best weather I encountered on the entire trip. It was definitely a nice place to visit. The photo of the gardens is one of the better shots I took on the trip.

Ah yes. Booze. I got to Berlin on a Friday morning, so I had three nights to party. I did so. You can drink anywhere in Berlin. On the train, on the bus, walking down the street. Anywhere. It was great.

I met a few Aussie chicks along the way enjoying their last hurrahs before getting too old to be single anymore. They were a bit of fun.

This is the Brandenburg gate, which is the equivalent to the Arc de Triumphe in Paris. It’s neat to look at for the most part. While the wall was up, the Gate was stuck between the two walls that formed the “death zone” between East and West Berlin. If you set foot inside it, you’d get shot at, and the guards would let the dogs loose on you. Sounds like fun. For 28 years, no one went near this thing. It looks like they fixed it up since then.

This is the Holocaust memorial. It’s pretty non-descript, but it’s size makes it a pretty powerful place. It sits next to Hitler’s bunker, where the old Reichschancellory (Nazi HQ) was located.

Here’s Checkpoint Charlie, which was the gate that led from East to West Berlin during the Cold War during the Cuban Missle Crisis, tanks faced off here about 50 feet from each other.

This is the largest church in Berlin, the Berlinerdom, with the Fehrensturm tower behind it, which is the tallest structure in the city.

This is the Sate Opera house. I got to see the State Orchestra perform Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony this afternoon, while sucking down some German beers and enjoying a brat. Yeah, Berlin was a fun stop.

Yes, I went out with the Aussie chicks on the last night, and no, nothing happened. Awesome. Perfect ending to my trip.

Ok. I left Stockholm after striking out three consecutive nights. At least I was able to hit up a bar on a Sunday night. The next stop was Amsterdam.


And then I left Amsterdam 3 days later. Here are some pictures.


First up, Amsterdam has tons of canals. I mean, TONS. When you are feeling, um, off your game (yes, yes, that’s the ticket!) and you find yourself on the, um, wrong side of town, and the map you have doesn’t list any of the tiny alleys and streets in the surrounding area, which might just happen to be a place you don’t really want to be in, well, these canals, they just go and make your day worse. Walk the wrong way down one of those unlabeled alleys with a 26-letter-long name, and you will be considerably lost. I’m usually awesome with maps, but I ended up being lost for 3 HOURS a mere 6 blocks from my hostel thanks to these canals.










It was pretty historical though. Not getting bombed in WWII means that these houses were all like 400 years old, which explains why these houses are leaning over pretty badly.







They have a lot of churches in Amsterdam, so I stopped in one of them to get the view of the surrounding area. 250 steps later, I had some nice aerial shots. Notice the weather, it was like that the whole time, basically.









Here’s all the bikes I was talking about. These things are parked on top of each other, I bet there were 5,000 in this parking structure alone.

Things of note on this stop:

- Redheads everywhere, and none of them were the gross ginger-kid types, but full on, perfect hottie redheads.
- Chicks on bikes. There’s really no better way to stay in shape than by riding a bike every where. And there must’ve been like 300,000 bikes in the downtown area.
- Art. Art is good. They have lots of it in Amsterdam. And if you show me a book, I might even be able to identify some of it.
- I made it out alive. This is a very, very important fact.
- Also, the Dutch chicks, they were cool for the most part. My A game didn’t make it out of Amsterdam-Schiphol, but that’s ok, it was a fun time anyways. Especially the chick who cursed me out when I hit the brakes on my bike.

At this point, it was onwards to Berlin, the last stop of the tour.

Stockholm was the next stop on this summer’s magical mystery tour, and if you thought I wasn’t going to walk around that city rocking out to a continuous loop of ABBA and Ace of Base on the iPod, then oh, how wrong were you? Because it was awesome. After a post-trip review of the photo album I’m going to have to be honest and say that, no, this is not some of my finest camera work. In fact, it was pretty damn sloppy. The one saving grace is that at this point, without the Wingman along to take photos with his extra slim pocket camera, I was forced to hit the bars with a camera in my pocket. Anyhoo, the first photo above is possibly one of the top ten I’ve taken in my lifetime. A nice little sunset shot of one of the clearest skies I’ve ever seen in my life. The extreme northern latitude made for some crazy sunsets, here and in St. Pete and Helsinki as well. If it had been closer to June, it would’ve been light till roughly, well, all night, with only a few hours where the sun was below the horizon.

Anyways, moving right along. There was an amusement park with roller coasters right on the harbor in Stockholm. Obviously, I was going to go there and ride them. The giant space shot tower was great, as it gave me a rather nice view of everything in the main harbor area. And it was scary as hell, too.


A little ways in from the amusement park was the Vasa Museum. The Vasa is a 380-year-old sailing warship that sank on it’s maiden voyage about 15 minutes after leaving dock by capsizing when the wind hit it. Basically, it was poorly built. It sank pretty quickly, and since the harbor was freshwater, it was preserved perfectly for 300+ years, before they raised it and restored it. This was by far the coolest thing I saw in Stockholm. It should be your first stop if you ever visit the city. Here’s some photos of it, it’s stored in a gigantic closed building with low lighting, so I couldn’t get any good shots of it. Here’s a link to more information and pictures of the museum.

One morning I took a fast boat tour around the archipelago to the east of the harbor. With 14,000 islands, the archipelago is rather large. It’s certainly a nice place to own a home, but I imagine it gets a bit cold in the winter.

Remember what I said about clear skies? Yeah, I have seriously never seen cleaner, bluer skies in my entire life than I did in Sweden and Finland. Maybe it’s the cleanliness of the environment or the location on the planet, but it just seemed so fresh and beautiful outside for these two segments of the trip. I’d love to have a house there for the summer time, to be honest.


This is tennis player Bjorn Borg’s summer house. Not too shabby. Being an athlete certainly has its perks.