Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Eurotrip 2008, pt. V: Amster-damn…
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.
This is the church from the inside. It was rather large. And I didn’t spontaneously combust upon entering, either.
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.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Eurotrip 2008: Stockholm is Abba-rific
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.
This is tennis player Bjorn Borg’s summer house. Not too shabby. Being an athlete certainly has its perks.
So that was Stockholm. It was a lot of fun, and I’d gladly go again. The bar scene was nuts, especially on Sunday night, when I ended up with 3 other Australian guys at a club at the Royal Opera house. That was by far the coolest bar I went to on this trip. That I can remember. Friday night was a blur, all I remember is waking up with two unopened beers in my pocket, a pack of opened yet unsmoked cigarettes, and rather dubious headache. Good times. and I'm pretty sure we went to some club like you'd see in a eurotrash gangster movie.
Friday, September 19, 2008
Eurotrip 2008, pt III: Rudolph tasted good.
We woke up at 5 am on the last day of our
This was the only train ride we took on the trip that occurred during daylight hours, so we got to see a bit of the Finnish countryside. I have to say, it’s a pretty nice place. I definitely got that rustic feeling from seeing the farms and fields pass by the window. The border guards weren’t too friendly though.
This is the main train station, pretty neat architecture. Also, it was like one block to our hotel from there, which was nice.
This is the main church in downtown
The steps out front seemed to be quite the gathering spot, and reminded me a lot of Kennedy stadium in
They were setting up for the annual music festival, which was supposed to be a huge party. It was obviously taking place the next day, when we were leaving. Awesome timing, huh? Even worse, they were doing the Red Bull Flugtag the next day. Yeah, I got to miss that. Sweet.
The Organ inside was the only decoration they had. I guess Lutherans have this rule about no fancy shmancy stuff in their churches. Oh well, can’t please everyone.
This is Rudolph. He tasted yummy. Seriously, eating reindeer meat was a highlight of this trip. It’s very tasty.
Here’s a good shot looking back from the fort towards the inner harbor area. At this point, we’re on the
The big attraction we went to see was Suomenlinna/Sveaborg, and old Swedish fort from the pre-Napoleonic wars era designed to fight off Russian advances on Finnish soil, which at the time was part of
This is the only submarine remaining in
We got to go exploring through the tunnels of the fortifications for a bit, which was pretty fun, although there were a lot of tight spaces. Still it was a nice day to be out on the island and seeing the sights, including the church, which was under construction. They even had a brewery.
This is one of the large ferries the crosses the Baltic, I* considered taking one to
It was a really, really beautiful day. The skies were about as clean and as blue as I’ve ever seen. I’m not a pro photographer, but this shot of the clouds I think captures the sunset pretty well. I suppose it would’ve been nice to have a few more days in town to enjoy it, but
Later on, we ventured to Icebar, a bar made completely out of ice, where the temp is below 32 F. Yes, it was cold, More importantly, Yes, it was awesome. The whole thing was made out of ice. Gotta love it.
Finally, we visited the Church of the Rock before leaving for the airport the next morning. It was carved out of solid granite, and is pretty impressive on the inside. Quite the tourist attraction, too.
That was pretty much it for
