Haarlem and Amsterdam

So, I had a blast in Amsterdam and Haarlem!



Don't I look thrilled?

We stayed at The Flying Pig in downtown Amsterdam. For 16 Euro a night it was pretty good! Free breakfast, access to a kitchen, cats, a bar, good music, and a no-smoking rule for the individual rooms. I met up with Kyle, a friend from MSU who's studying in the Netherlands. We ...

- went to the Anne Frank house
- the Oude and Nieuwe Kerken ( old and new churches )
- the Rijksmuseum ( host to the Night Watch and a lot of Golden Age art )
- Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum
- the Hortus Botanicus



The New Church ^


The Old Church ^



^ Hortus Botanicus

and went to a few small bars outside of the downtown area with really great staff and patrons.

We also spent a few days couchsurfing in Haarlem with a family that kindly let us stay with them as we tore up their kitchen trying to make pancakes ( we cleaned up, don't worry ). We had gone on a day-long bike ride through the area around Haarlem ( countryside, farmland, small villages, the sand dunes, and the beach ) and on our way had stopped at a windmill that was still functioning and had a shopinside. We bought some diksap ( it means "thick syrup" or juice, really. Getcher mind out of the gutter ) and flour for making pancakes. However, all of our attempts to make pancakes were for nought, so the daughter of our host, gave us a hand. Staying with a family was a great way to interact with actual Dutch people that went beyond buying postcards. Klaas, our host, shared some of his family history, told us a bit about Dutch society post WWII, and so on. He asked us about regional differences in the USA and we talked a little politics. Much better than staying in a smokey hostel.





Unfortunately we didn't have time to go into the old St Bavo's Cathedral* in Haarlem. There's a giant organ that Mozart once played. The old St Bavo's was taken over by the Protestants and the Catholics built a new Church of St Bavo in the late 1800s. We didn't visit the inside of that church either, as it was closed. The Protestants stripped the churches bare of any iconology and painted them white wherever possible, because as a plaque in the Nieuwe Kerk said, "After all, what mattered in Protestant services was the sermon" ( apparently it wasn't so in the Catholic church. Note the sarcasm in my voice ). Whereas many people are now literate, folk from the Middle Ages relied on images in stone, glass, and on canvas to learn, remind, and meditate. So to us ( and especially anyone with a Protestant upbringing ) all of these images seem totally extravagant, unnecessary, and we likely don't know any of the figures or their symbols.


Our last day in Haarlem we went ice skating, but I have no pictures of that. We got hockey style skates which likely made it easier to balance, as they're longer. We spent the first 15 minutes on the central rink getting a feeling for skating again and then spent an hour or so on the outer rink. Alex noted that the IJsbaan ( ice rink in Dutch ) was next to the Eisenbahn ( railroad in German ).


On another related note, knowing German helped us get around a bit in the Netherlands and I even managed to eek out a few sentences in ( really bad ) Dutch.

It was an all-together wonderful trip :)



^ The route we took around Haarlem, roughly.

*For clarity's sake and thanks to a commenter, it should be noted that since St. Bavo's is no longer Catholic, it is no longer a cathedral.

Strasbourg

I went with my Art and Arch class to Strasbourg to see the Muenster and surrounding architecture of the city.

The Muenster from a distance


The tympanum of the main door.


Not the best picture, since I didn't get all of the tower in ( reminds me of those commercials awhile ago where a little old lady finally gets to go to Paris, has her picture taken in front of the Eiffel Tower, and you can only see the top half of her head in it ). Apparently, if you want to see a "typisch deutsch" city you need to go to neighboring Alsace. Fachwerkhaeuser abound there.



The Freiburg Muenster is heavily influenced by the Strasbourg Muenster. One day I'll go back and take some more photos and do a little comparison. Both have a Romanesque Querhaus or transept whereas the rest is Gothic and are a Church of Our Lady/Unserer Lieben Frau /Notre Dame.

One of these days I'll put on my fanny pack, sunglasses, baseball cap, and ill-fitting shorts and take my camera with me to the Freiburger Muenster. Until then, tschuess. I'm hard at work on my Art and Arch Hausarbeiten.

The Wonders of the Internets!

I found my old host sister from three years ago. My first trip to Germany was in the summer of 2003. I spent two weeks in southern Germany, mostly Bavaria, which is the Texas of Germany*. The first week we spent travelling to different cities and towns, including Oberammergau, Munich, and Salzburg ( in Austria ). The second week I spent with a host family outside of Ulm in a town called Illertissen. I had five host siblings, most of which were involved in music somehow. I spent a week with them and while that wasn't enough to improve my spoken German, it was enough to improve my listening skills. It was a great experience.

Well, thanks to the wonders of the German version of facebook.com I found my oldest former host sister. She's studying Music in Munich and invited me to spend a few days there. I'm pretty begeistert!

I also booked some bunks at The Flying Pig in Amsterdam at their beach hostel. While it's not exactly beach weather, it'll still be fun, and they've got a shuttle into the city for our convenience. While booking the bunks I got to thinking about what it would be like to surf in Germany/Europe and found a bit of information. I've seen river surfing in Munich before, but wasn't certain about surfing in the north. According to a few surfing sites, the coast is a bit muddy and it's best to go surfing off of islands, but the ferries can be expensive. Never mind the fact that I have neither a board nor a wetsuit. Still, it would be pretty fun.

* They have a funny accent, it's what everyone thinks of when they think of Germany/the USA, they're both a big state in the south, and proudly declare that they are a Freistatt, which, while having a more political meaning than "Lonestar" still conveys a feeling of independence.

Dublin

I'm officially going to Dublin, Ireland, for the week of St. Patrick's Day! We booked our tickets with Ryan Air. We're flying out on March 14th. :) It only cost around 25 Euro! Woo hoo. I'll see if maybe I can hang out with some people from couchsurfing.com during the day for a little meet-up or something.

And maybe I can have a proper St. Patty's dinner instead of horrible, horrible, cafeteria food. Blech!

Factoid of the day : I was due to be born on March 17th, but was late. I guess it's good I didn't turn out to be the type to be a participant of the Alcoholic Year in Freiburg, because that would mean spending my 21st birthday in Ireland on St. Patrick's Day. What a disaster that would be!

Speaking of disasters, a part of me laughs and a part of me cries about what happened in Boston ( I'm refering to the Mooninite Invasion ... ignore that it's FOX News ).

Hopefully ATHF The Movie will hit Germany, but I don't even know if the TV show airs here. I'll have to wait and see. The mayor of Boston is actually calling for a BOYCOTT of the movie. Like that's going to solve anything? Shifting the blame, much?

On a lighter note, the LED light technique sorta reminds me of Space Invaders, especially when you take into account that they're 8-bit figures *and* from outerspace. When I was in California we used to pass a Space Invader that was placed on a highway overpass.

So if anyone wants to get me the ATHF is the bomb t-shirt, you are free to do so ~_^

A Nation Remembers

Oh, and Happy Belated Groundhog's Day.