Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Trains, planes, and automobiles pt II [or too many trains to Amsterdam]



How's the New Year going for everyone?
I kicked off 2010 by calling in sick to work on Monday. Then I forgot it was Tuesday, the only day I have to leave for work at 8:30, and I missed my first class. The beautiful thing: no one seemed to care in the least. Christophe practically scoffed when I mentioned I felt bad about it.
Vive la France!

So Germany for Christmas... It was the perfect combination of resting and having fun. I didn't want to leave. Especially not at 8am or at whatever god-awful hour I booked my first train. Someday I will realize I am not a morning person, and I will pay more for later tickets. This will be after I marry a rich man.
So with a heavy heart and happy tummy, I ate a final breakfast in Melsungen before the sun even rose. Franziska and her dad took me to the train station where I immediately got nervous about all of my connections.
A tip on booking trains: always familiarize yourself with the geography of the region you're traveling in before booking trains. The journey could have been shorter.
Then again, happy mistakes can often give you the most beautiful view.
In this case, I went on a little bit of a German tour before heading on to the Netherlands, you can see an approximation of the route here: Allie's convoluted German travel. But, I saw some of the most beautiful landscape in Germany. The train from Frankfurt to Köln was not ICE; it was IC, which meant it was quite a bit slower. Buuuuut, this train travels along the Rhine river, and if you ever have to travel from Frankfurt to Köln, TAKE THE IC TRAIN. It is hill-y with vineyard after vineyard after quaint village after castle. The sun even came out from hiding and shone on the fairy tale landscape. Unfortunately, my seat was on the inland side of the train, so I spent most of the journey craning my neck to see across my neighbor. I also didn't take any pictures. But, believe me, you, it was gorgeous. A feast for the eyes: I'm trying to figure out when I'll have to take a train from Frankfurt to Köln again, just to sit on the waterfront side of the train. But I digress.
I took the ICE train from Köln to Amsterdam, which was only slightly eventful. First this family kept sitting in all these other people's seats (including mine) thus backing up the boarding process. My seat was awesome, though, because it was a window seat AND by itself. I had lots of room to spread out. The train also stopped about an hour away from Amsterdam Centraal due to "fnadnf akdjnfjknd." The speakers cut out when he said it in English. The problem was resolved, but we ended up sitting on the tracks another 30 minutes because another train was stopped in front of us. The conductor said, "We are stopped. We don't really know when we'll move again." Awesome. But, we moved again not too long later.
In Amsterdam, I caught a local train to Baarn where my friend Victor lives. Baarn is 30-ish minutes from Amsterdam. It is also adorable. Small streets and quaint buildings. I think I will now stop using the word quaint, even though it applies to many things I saw. (Carolyn, you still use that word incorrectly.)
Victor picked me up at the train station, and we rode a car to his apartment, his very cold apartment, with the strangest (really just old and outdated -- sorry Victor, it is) heating and hot water system I've ever experienced. I was so glad to hang with another Memphis friend so far from home. We caught up and set up mine and Elvynia's camp in the living room then headed out to pick her up at the Amersfoort train station. Victor made a fabulous spaghetti accompanied by a Dutch cheese the name of which translates to "Old." We gobbled it up, formulated a tourist-tastic plan for the Netherlands, and crashed.

The 29th we rose early (11am) had some scrambled up eggs and headed out and up. North, that is, to the quaint (oops) Zaanse Schans. A quote from the website:
"This enchanting village has been lovingly established by relocating local houses,windmills, storehouses and barns to form a remarkable replica of a typical Zaanse village of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Apart from the cluster of windmills, characteristic wooden houses and delightful shops to visit there are intriguing traditional Dutch crafts such as wooden shoes, pewter and cheese making, several fascinating museums..."

Yes it is probably one of the most tourist-y locations in the entire country. And we loved every minute of it. There is a museum you have to pay for, and three that you don't have to pay for. Ignoring the advice of the welcome man, we skipped the obsenely-priced museum and headed straight for what he called the more "commercial" museums. Well, he wasn't lying, but we got to see someone make a wooden clog. With a handy whittling-y/carving-y machine, a wooden shoe was created in 5 minutes flat, before our very eyes. One man in attendance was wearing his own wooden shoes. Victor talked to him -- in Dutch so we made him translate afterward. Apparently he wears them everyday because he works with horses. According to horse-and-wooden-shoe man, they are warmer and more comfortable than regular shoes. We took his word for it and made a beeline for the Cheesefarm Museum, rumored (clearly printed in the brochure) to have cheese samples. Museum it was not. When you enter Zaanse Schans' Cheesefarm building, you see a glass wall with cheese-making-looking apparatuses (I really wanted to use apparati just then, but I looked it up. It's not the correct plural form) and some wheels of Gouda. There was no explanation. No helpful museum guide. Just some cheese behing a glass wall. Oh well, in the cheese store, many times the size of the museum, there were plenty of samples. And sample we did.
Next we went to the Sawmill Windmill. We paid €3 to get in and watched the least informative documentary on the making of a windmill. ever. Then we explored! We read about the history of the logging history, learned how to tell trees apart (look at the bark and leaves of course), and climbed up the windmill. It wasn't that tall, but it was cool to climb around in it for a bit. A good bit of climbing around is healthy.
We wandered around the area a bit more, then headed back to Baarn where Victor made Indonesian chicken and rice something. It was tasty. We met some of his friends in the next town, which was very fun. We made friends with these two guys -- c'est à dire that they sat down at our table and kind of forced their friendship upon us. Elvynia and I became Stephanie and Claire, and I tried to force the life story out of one of the guys. The other one was wearing a Yankees hat.
Then we learned a very interesting Dutch fact.
In bars, all over the Netherlands, there are bells. If you ring the bell, you have to buy everyone in the bar a drink, a tradition taken very seriously. Yankees fan did, of which we reaped the benefits.
It began to snow. On the walk home, Elvnia, Victor, and I enjoyed sliding in Baarn's cobblestone streets.

On the 30th we rose earlier and went to Amsterdam! We had every intention of going to a free piano concert at the city's concert hall, but we had to wait in a very long line for a parking garage. I entertained everyone by reading out of my Amsterdam guide book. I say "entertained." They might use a different word. Anywho, we parked at the 1928 Olympic Stadium, so we kind of saw that.
Here's what we did in Amsterdam: wandered freezingly through a market and bought freshly made stroopwafels, took a boat tour through the canals, went to the Van Gogh museum, ate Burger King, went to Electric Lady Land, saw a coffee shop, went to a bar, had a delicious dinner, played Jenga.
Stroopwafels are two flat layers of waffle-y deliciousness with syrup in the middle. The boat tour was heated and covered, and we learned more interesting facts. For instance, all along the canal there are low metal bars installed by insurance companies to keep cars from just driving on into the canal. Very often these metal bars are not effective. Victor also contributed his share of facts. Among the many sites, we saw the bridge where he met Dave Grohl one time. Elvynia took some awesome pictures. Here's one of them:


The Van Gogh museum was totally packed. But I saw lots and lots of his paintings, including Branches of an Almond Tree, Wheatfield with Crows, and Vase with 12 Sunflowers. I was quite happy.
We then met V's friend Krijn (?). I don't know how to pronounce his name. K took us on a roundabout tour of the city with the goal of reaching Electric Lady Land. Electric Lady Land, not only a Jimi Hendrix album, but also the first museum of fluorescent art. Basically, we paid a crazy French hippie €5 to take us into a basement to interact with fluorescent art. We didn't understand a word she said, and at one point she turned off the lights to get us out of the interactive exhibit. This same woman also has spent a great deal of her life living under a black light and has a plastic skull that she found on the street the day she heard that Jerry Garcia had died. We also saw some rocks glow under UV lights and some freaky pictures of animals genetically altered to glow. It was toally worth it.


(this picture also courtesy of elvynia... well, actually the crazy french hippie took the pic, but it was e's awesome camera)

There's lots more to say, but I'll leave off here for now.

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