the overstuffed backpack

I’m in San Francisco, and it’s fabulous! So fabulous that I’ve been here since Sunday and haven’t sat down to write an entry yet. I’m staying in the lower Haight, so I’m right in the middle of everything, which is great. The last two times I was in San Francisco I was either staying outside of town or at the edge of town, but now I am right in the city, complete with city noises and random screaming.

This place is, of course, fantastic. I’ve been blessed with good weather (it turns out the other 2 times I was merely cursed with bad weather - it’s normally great here!), and it’s so mild and sunny that I got sunburned yesterday from forgetting that UV rays exist here. Let’s see…the first day I was here I didn’t do much other than go to a bar that’s somewhat famous (don’t remember the name) and has about 60 brews on tap. I had some Schneider Weisse, which was delicious and light (my favorite), and the rest of the night was spent getting fed delicious food at Joy’s, with whom I am staying. Monday, I wandered around the Haight a bit, which I’d already been to but since it’s so close I figured it couldn’t hurt to walk around and admire the sights, and the sights were admirable indeed. I gave myself some nice sore legs, and then decided to follow it up yesterday with a 7-mile roundtrip walk down Fell through the Golden Gate Park. It was a gorgeous walk, although the main feature I was walking to - the redwood memorial grove - was disappointingly small. Still, redwoods are gorgeous no matter how you slice it, and there was much impressive flora and fauna to be seen. I don’t know the name, but there are these evergreen trees that gnarl and twist and dip in and out of the ground, almost as they were one massive organism. Those were my favorite. And of course, there were pretty flowers and ivy. I think if I lived here, I might actually pay attention to botany, because there’s just so much fabulous stuff that grows here in a mild climate that just can’t make it in the midwest.

The star of yesterday’s activities, though, was the trip to Google! Joy took me to Mountain View for lunch, and I got to eat a delicious free meal at 150 (a cafeteria that gets all of their ingredients from within 150 miles), tour around the main building, see the dinosaurs and flamingos in an uneasy truce with one another, see a model of SpaceShipOne, and see how utterly pampred the Google employees are. I’m jealous. There’s delicious free food everywhere, and by free food I don’t mean a few stale chips and some 2-liters of Diet Coke, but piles of fresh fruit of all kinds, wheatgrass shot stands, smoothies, and all sorts of organic hippie crap. There’s also a massage room and a swimming pool with a current and a park and…man, it must be nice to work there. Pampered indeed. There’s even a shuttle in and out of San Francisco so the employees don’t even have to drive to work. So jealous!

Today, I went down to Union Square and had lunch at a sandwich shop in Macy’s, and wandered around some of the stores for a while. I went into Anthropologie for the first time, which was interesting if overpriced, but on the whole it was mostly touristy boutique stores and I wasn’t terribly impressed. It’s very much a big-city feel down there, though, which is so distinct from much of SF as far as I can tell. SF sort of feels like, to me, a really sprawling neighborhood, more than a big city. All the other big cities I’ve been to had most of their attractions Over There in that one tourist area, but things are so sprawled and spread apart here because everyplace has something interesting worth looking at. Every time I feel like I’m getting a good sense of where things are, I’m given a new address that completely throws me and I have to look up directions and maps! At least I haven’t gotten lost yet…

Another quirk of this city is that I haven’t actually taken many pictures here, even though there are gorgeous things everywhere that I’d like to photograph. I think it’s because I think this city is just so freaking cool that I don’t want to seem like a tourist, so I can seem more like a local and thus one of the Cool Kids. In Europe and South America and a lot of American big cities, that’s more or less a lost cause for me, but here, I feel like I could almost blend in if I remember to recycle and abstain from jaywalking. I’m trying to overcome this intimidation, and yesterday I forced myself to take pictures at Golden Gate Park (though I was definitely too intimidated to take pictures at Google).

I think I’m getting the Authentic San Francisco experience this time.

So Tuesday was the big sight-seeing day for St. Petersburg. John oriented me, gave me detailed instructions and tips, and sent me off on my way since he had two English classes to teach that day and couldn’t really accompany me on my sight-seeing. Once I actually got to the subway stop down by the Hermitage, it was pretty easy to find my way around because everything is more or less built along the river. I started off my day at the Hermitage, which is an enormous palatial complex that includes the famous Winter Palace, and now houses various museums as well as the world-famous Hermitage museum. I was utterly stunned by the sheer opulence of the palace. I’m pretty sure that if the building burned down, a huge hunk of gold would be sitting in the ashes. They gilded everything. They even gilded one room entirely in gold - walls, everything! I don’t think I’ve ever seen such opulence in my life, and at this point I’ve been to some pretty ritzy places (though I bet Versailles outdoes it). The Winter Palace, built on the backs of Europe’s last remaining feudal system, made it really made it clear to me why the Russian peasants might maybe have wanted to revolt.

The museum treasures themselves were also amazing. Catherine the Great amassed quite the art collection and entire rooms were devoted to Reubens and Van Dyck. There were many portraits of many handsome tsars, princesses, and empresses, and there were elaborate clockworks and machineries of all kinds. There was even an enormous gold peacock-and-owl thingymajig that turned out to actually be a clock. It was really quite amazing and I walked around gape-mouthed much of the time.

After that, it was time to meet up with John for lunch, and we had some Russian sushi (it was delicious) and decided to climb up to the top of St. Issac’s cathederal, a stereotypically beautiful Orthodox church that afforded a fantastic view of St. Petersburg in every direction. And only 281 steps up. The number of steps remaining was painted encouragingly on every 10th step, and although I nearly quit at 271, I persevered, and the view was definitely worth it.

We then walked to the Kunstkamera, the ethnographical branch of the Hermitage museum. About 3/4ths of it is pretty boring. Dummies in costumes demonstrating the pastoral settings of various peoples of the past. Not even Russian peoples - Asians and North Americans and yeah, kinda boring. But the jewel of the collection is actually the First Scientific Collections of the Kunstkamera, originally set up by Peter the Great to collect curiosities. But not just any curiosities. It seems that he had quite the penchant for deformity, so there is deformity in spades. There are babies in jars! Dozens, maybe even over a hundred babies in jars with various deformities, ranging from one to four hundred years old. Siamese babies, parasitic twin babies, hydrocephalic babies, ancephalic babies, babies with harelips, babies with brain hernias bigger than their skulls, babies with missing or deformed limbs, babies with limbs sealed together, babies with flippers, omg babies babies babies in jars. Also, two-headed calves, scattered skeletons, a really great painting by Reubens showing an autopsy, and more babies in jars. They also had Peter the Great’s amateur dentistry collection as well as several dozen teeth that he personally pulled. I walked around with my mouth agape all of the time. My god, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it and I’m pretty sure I won’t ever see anything like it again. I thought it was really quite cool, sick soul that I am.

Needing a break after a display like that, I headed upstairs to the display that preserved what would be the Russian equivalent of the British Royal Society’s workroom, and delighted in simple machinations, centuries-old chemistry labs, and lovely little desks with quaint sextants and the like. The great Gottrop globe upstairs, though, was closed, and so was the astronomy lab. Boo.

I had a few more hours to kill, so I wandered around the buildings along the river and got a good close-up look at the Admirality (a navy at which sailors from many countries are still trained), some old buildings, and some other old buildings. I headed back towards to the subway station, and visible off of a side street was the Saviour of the Spilled Blood, the cathederal that marks the spot at which Alexander II was assassinated. He was kind of a big deal at the time because he was a pretty serious social reformer and did a bit to pull Russia out of the dark ages, so they built it as a memorial. It was erected in the late 19th century, and man, is it incredibly elaborate! It’s gorgeous. Utterly gorgeous. It’s built in the Russian orthodox style, with lots of domes and spires and bold patterns of color splashed all over, making the facade among the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. But then I stepped inside and instantly decided it was the most beautiful cathederal I’d ever seen, period (and keep in mind I’ve seen probably a hundred Italian churches, including Vatican City). The floor and supports were done in beautiful dark green and blue marbles, and every square inch above that was beautiful scenes from the life of Christ in glittering mosiac tiles, Byzantine-style. Lordy, it was beautiful. Really, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so beautiful in my life. I found myself a chair and sat and just gazed for a while, and I took dozens of pictures. Dozens! I found myself taking pictures I’d already taken just because it was that awesome.

The stupefying beauty certainly provided a nice contrast to the babies in jars, and after that, I figured it was more or less good to call it a day. John and I had dinner at a stylish neo-Russian restaurant, and I devoured a big plate of boiled potatoes garnished with parsley and lightly sauteed mushrooms, and they were utterly delicious. Also had some dark Russian bread, which sort of tastes like a very mild rye. As we walked back home, we stopped at a liquor store and bought some B22 bombers of cheap Russian beer and wandered through the streets, drinking and chatting until, oh, 11pm, and we got home will it was still broad daylight. The late sunsets kept messing with me, because I would forget how late it was and start talking too loud (hence disturbing the roommates) or contemplating further things to do that night.

Next was Peterhoff!

It was kind of a pain in the ass to get to Russia. (It’s always a pain in the ass, but this was more so.) I was lucky I didn’t opt for the train up from Tallin, because about a week ago Russia shut off train service through there. I did have a flight from Berlin to St. Petes, but since I was still in Prague, this meant I had to book an overnight train from there. Problem was, I didn’t find out until much, much too late that there was no overnight train. No. There is a train that drops you off in Leipzig at midnight, and then you sit and wait until the 4am Berlin train arrives. Oh, joy. (Actually, Joy left to head back home and we parted ways that afternoon, so I was on my own until Russia.) There was absolutely nothing open in Leipzig except the McDonald’s, and faced between my least favorite restaurant in the world and sleeping on a bench, I opted for McDonald’s.

Finally made it to Berlin, and then made it to St. Petersburg. However, there was a slight snag in the plan. The plane, as it turns out, is one of the very few that land in the domestic airport and not the international airport. Since the airport wasn’t specified on the ticket, John and I assumed I’d fly into international (international flights into international airports? yeah, I know, huge leap of logic). It turns out that since this was Russia nothing really works the way one thinks it should. So he wasn’t at the right airport. And absolutely nothing is in English…absolutely nothing at all! Nothing! Also, my dumb ass forgot to write down John’s address and phone number, so my first order of business was to find an internet cafe. This is harder than it sounds, because the airport is in the middle of nowhere and the taxis can’t be trusted not to fleece tourists, plus they don’t even speak English. After two hours of twiddling my thumbs, a bus to Pushkinskaya pulled up in front of me and my choice was made.

Having actually made it to the city center, I spent about an hour walking around bewildered, trying to find internet. No dice. I finally gave up and hailed a taxi and asked him to take me to the nearest internet cafe, and I got a taste of how terrible Russian drivers are. I haven’t seen anything quite like this since Peru. Most of the roads, even four-lanes, have no lines on the road, nor do the drivers attempt a facsimile of lines, and changing lines is a machismo game of chicken as far as I can tell. I originally didn’t put on my seat belt because I thought it was pointless because if I was going to die, I was going to die, and if the crash didn’t kill me the Russian hospitals would, but after a few minutes I reconsidered. I needed all the help I could get.

Finally got into an internet cafe and had my boyfriend call John, and John arrived shortly afterwards. At this point sightseeing was out of the question because it was late and I was frazzled, so we went to the corner store, got some cheap Russian beer, and hung out in his room until the sun set…well, no, we didn’t hang out until the sun set because it doesn’t actually get dark until after midnight (!) since St. Petersburg is so far north, but we hung out pretty late.

My first day was utterly incomprehensible and I was definitely feeling a little culture shock…it may even be more foreign than Peru was, I don’t know. It’s huge and dirty and smoggy and just oozing with character, so I loved it. My stay was about as authentic as it gets given that John’s hot water was broken for the first day and a half, and then he slipped and broke the toilet the second day, and then the cold water was broken the third day. If I’d stuck around for a full week I’m sure I would’ve gotten, oh, I don’t know, a police document check and a power outage or two, something like that.

More on St. Pete’s later… in the meantime, my Prague pictures and (ha!) Leipzig pictures are in the stream. Click on the photo below to go to just my Prague set:

All right.  I’ve written this fucking post twice, and lost it twice due to Internet Explorer issues.  I will simply say, succinctly, that I made it to Russia despite much trial and tribulation, and am currently doing just fine.  I will end this post before I lose anything else.  Gah!

So there were many sights to be seen in Prague, and many of them were well-concealed and hell to find.  Prague Castle was the big deal part of our trip, and can be seen a long way off, but we really liked some of the other stuff we did as well.  We visited the Museum of Communism (which is, ironically enough, squished next door to a McDonald’s).  Parts of Czechoslovakia spent the 20th century being taken over by Germany and annexed by the USSR and badly run by communists, so they’re rather understandably bitter about the whole communism thing, and this museum definitely had that slant.  It was a neat little museum covering ideologies and methods and trinkets, and it also featured a model of an interrogation room.  I approve.

After that we headed to the Å¡vando divaldo, which is a pretty important play theatre in Europe as far as these things go.  There’s performances every night, and as far as I can tell, they rotate through them pretty quickly.  They were the first theater in Prague to adopt English subtitling technology, but as our luck had it, there wasn’t a play with English subtitles available.  We got some tickets anyway, and armed with a two-page English summar, we saw Bomby, Prachy a Láska!, which was a truly oddball little play.  Truly oddball.  The summary was rather inadequate and I still can’t tell you what it was about.  The first half was set in Renaissance-era Italy and the second half featured the same characters as modern skinheads, and…weird.  Just plain weird.  It’s been years since I’ve seen a play, though, so the mechanics were very interesting to watch, from the minor actors doubling as sound effect drummers to the rope that someone swung in from the upper balcony onto the stage.  All in all, entertaining if comprehensibly weird.

After that we had a short little list of restaurants out of the guidebook that sounded neat that we wanted to try.  We spent about two hours in the pursuit of food, because it turns out Prague shuts down on Monday and food is nearly impossible to acquire.  We gave up at the Andel metro station, and out of starvation, went into a dodgy little pizza shop that was selling them for about 30 kroners a slice (about a buck or so), and omg, the four-cheese pizza was magnificent.  We stood around on the sidewalk and stuffed ourselves, and then we called it a very late night and headed home. 

The next day was our last day in Prague.  We had sort of a weird departure schedule in the evening and we just planned on goinng to Radost FX, one of the shortlisted restaurants that was closed, for lunch.  It was a magnificent little vegetarian place that I think I’ve already posted about.  After that we were just going to chill out and take it easy for the rest of the day, but I flipped through the guidebook and saw something that we missed that we definitely needed to see:  Strahovská knihovna - the strahov library - , or as the brochure puts it, the ‘royal canonry of premonstratensians at strahov’.  It featured two centuries-old libraries and a hall with chests stuffed full of curiosities.  The philosophical library featured gorgeous fifty-feet tall bookcases filled with hand-scribed books, and the theological library was a bit smaller but older and every bit as magnificent.  It was sexy.  Very sexy.  I snapped tons of pictures and they should be up in the photostream soon.

 I’m about halfway through uploading the Prague pictures.  I took so many pics in Prague.  So many.  Because it is pretty much impossible to turn the corner and not see something gorgeous.  It’s a very pretty city, with spires and domes galore, and although it was extremely touristy and kind of a pain in the ass to navigate, it was very charming and I’m glad I went, although I doubt I’ll go back.  As far as cities to revisit, Amsterdam is definitely on the top of my list here.

 There are further adventures, but in the interest of organization, I’ll continue those in another post…

Before I get into all that has happened in Prague, I thought I would give a quick refresher on what I have been eating. In Ireland it was fish and chips. Lots of fish and chips. Fish and chips of varying quality, but on the whole, excellent fish and chips. This is the Irish version of cheap food, and it comes to oh, about 12 dollars or so, and then another 5 dollars for a beer. Pricy. We did find a cheap place in Dublin that served me a huge plate of pasta tossed with mint pesto and chunks of parmesan cheese, and it was super, super good. The name of the place is Gruel, it is right by Parliament, and it is highly recommended on the yum scale.

Compared to Dublin, the rest of Europe has been super cheap. In Amsterdam, we found a great vegetarian restaurant that served us a fancy and delicious meal for about 15 euro - not bad at all considering I got a lot more for my food than in Dublin. We also ate frites - fries - by the bale, as they are extra yummy there. Breakfast was usually french pastries or crossaints, although once we had egg on bread, sort of like eggs florentine without the spinach. It seemed fairly standard Amsterdam breakfast fare. In Berlin there was the biergarten, which hosted such delicious and such cheap and such basic foodb that I couldn’t help but love it. There was also chocolate, and Germans know quality chocolate all right. I got some crazy floral truffles stuff that has proven to be delicious so far, and I’ve also sampled Joy’s gin and tonic dark chocolate bar, which was shockingly good. And beer. The bier is generally light, smooth, tasty and not at all bitter. I’d already had Erdinger, which I liked, and I developed an affinity for Crystal Weisse as well. Yes, Germany knows food.

The Czech are a very meat-and-potatoes people. As far as I can tell, their favorite dishes include fried meat with two types of pig on top. With a side of potatoes. I’m a vegetarian, but I allow myself exemptions to taste local foods, and I can testify that fried pork is every bit as delicious as it sounds, especially when it is layered with fried cheese. They are also fond of potato pancakes, which are more my style. There’s the general variety of street food - pizza, kebabs and the like - that are incredibly cheap and delicious, and this afternoon Joy and I splurged on a delicious vegetarian meal at this wonderful punky neo-Victorian vege restaurant. I had potatoes covered with spinach pesto and smothered with melted mozzarella. Oh em gee it was good and you best believe I will be trying to recreate it in my kitchen, oh yes.

Honestly, after having spent time in a lot of foreign countries eating lots of foreign food, I’ve concluded that there is no bad food in Europe, not really. The kinds of American restaurants and eateries that I would avoid like the plague for fear of the plague don’t really exist here. Okay, I wouldn’t buy one of those scary-looking Czech meals that can be had for about 50 cents, but I’m betting it’s not as terrible as it looks. Overall it is filled with utter culinary delight and I love it. I have a long layover in Berlin before I get home, and I plan on wallowing in chocolate, bier and bratwurst with a little street meat on the side. MMmmm.

A quick conclusion on Berlin: pretty much all we did after my last post is find the Reichstag and Brandenburg gate, and then we finished up at a biergarten. We totally didn’t recognize the Reichstag because we approached it at such an angle that the dome wasn’t visible, and then we kept walking to ‘find the Reichstag’, decided we were lost, turned back, and THEN saw the dome. Oops. Didn’t climb up, the line reached around the block. The biergarten was absolutely yummy and scrumptious. It was a lot like an outdoor picnic, with picnic tables, and bratwurst, and corn on the cob, and baked potatoes…and beer, very good beer. It was a nice end to our stay in Berlin.
It turns out that Prague is a lot more eastern European than the guidebooks give it credit for. A lot more. I assumed that there would be a lot of English, because many of the touristy European cities are, but … no, not so much with the English. Since Czech is a slavic language, there aren’t even any real root words or cognates to speak of, so it’s all more or less incomprehensible. In my desperate search for a laundromat, I headed straight to a greasy fast-food joint because it was nearly the same word given a few off letters with funny squiggles above them. Actually, my guide book even tells me that a few years back, when tourism started to get really heavy, the Prague officials decided to make it easier on the tourists to find things so they decided to print up a bunch of signs that would point to various attractions. However, there was a bit of a mix-up at the printer’s, and the signs were all printed in Czech…not English as originally intended. So while there are signs everywhere, they are more or less useless.
Our arrival here was interesting. We got ambushed by gypsies as soon as we got off the train. Since I have no compunctions about pushing toothless little old ladies dressed in funny clothes trying to talk to me aside, I was a few steps ahead before I noticed that Joy got surrounded, and one of them was trying to foist a (fake) Chanel bottle on her. I had been up since 5:30am and had no patience for this shit, so instead of trusting Joy to resolve the situation, I went up to the gypsy, grabbed the Chanel, put it on the ground and ran while they were distracted. Joy says they yelled some sort of
gypsy curse after us. Figures.
The curse doesn’t seem to be affecting us, however, unless it was a pox upon finding laundromats. Well, we totally missed our train to Prague and only got another ticket because the travel agent was nice and let us buy travel insurance rectroactively, but that worked out okay. By the time we finally found our hostel and We had a nice big Czech dinner. We split some deep-friend moravia cheese, I had a potato pancake stuffed with camembert cheese, and Joy had deep-fried pork layered with bacon layered with deep-fried cheese (OMG!), and we had two beers apiece. The bill came to $22 USD total. (It was like ten million czech kroners because they haven’t yet converted to the Euro, but it’s taken me a few meals to get used to bills being up to four digits. Food is extremely cheap, though, unless you’re right in the old city.

And in the old city we were today. We started off at the Muscha museum. It turns out that Muscha was from Moravia and although he did a lot of the art noveau french posters that he was famous for, he also did a lot of posters for the Czech independence movement, and so we got to see a whole other side of his work, which was really nice. There was an extensive gift shop with tons of beautiful prints, but I didn’t buy any because they cost an arm and a leg, and because I still have to lug my shit through Russia and I don’t want to crush anything. Still, it was nice.

From there we headed out to Josefov, the historic Jewish district of Prague. We didn’t do much other than look around. We decided not to go into the synagogues, but it was a very pretty district indeed. It was only a few blocks away from the Charles Bridge and Prague Castle. Man…Prague Castle is more than a castle. It is an enormous complex of buildings encompassing the Old Royal Palace (a lovely musty old buiding), the St. Charles basilica (a lovely musty old church), the St. Vitus Cathederal (a lovely huge elaborate gothic church celebrating the patron saint of epilepsy), the prison (a lovely musty old prison complete with torture instruments and a skeleton in a dungeon), the old castle steps (a not-lovely long way to walk) and other things that were awesome. I took a shit-ton of pictures, however, the hostel computer doesn’t really seem to allow for USB uploading. Well, I’m assuming it doesn’t, because it runs Damn Small Linux…cool, but somewhat limited.

Tomorrow’s another full day, so I’m going to head out now. Hopefully I will get some pics up sometime soon!

Here are a few from my photostream that I particularly like. Click on them and it takes you to the stream. There are a lot more pictures up, including (probably all) of the Berlin photos to date.

The y and the z keys are switched on this keyboard. Here we go…

I am in Berlin! So far it is nice. It’s definitely a bigger city than Amsterdam. In Amsterdam, we would look at something on the other end of the map and go ‘oh, okay, just 10 or 15 minutes of walking…’, but here, what looks like two blocks morphs into a sysiphean trek. Joy and I got up at the inhuman hour 4:15 in the morning, hopped a plane, and ended up here at around 9am, but it took us until noon to get ourselves settled into our hostel, fed, and ready to conquer Berlin.

This city is just filled with reminders of the warfare and conflict of the 20th century. It’s very heavily steeped in modern history, but it’s less old-world than Amsterdam due to being so heavily bombed out. There are a lot of modern high-rises and some interesting architectural projects (the music museum, for instance, is this crazy angled structure with a beehive facade). There might be an old-world section of town (around Reichstag maybe), but I haven’t seen it yet. We did, however, make it to the Tiergarten, which houses a number of museums including the Gemäldgalerie, which houses a great collection of northern and southern Renaissance pantings. As well as a room for tiny, tiny paintings of rich noblemen and politicians. When we were browsing, I pointed out a particularly ugly guy who had a kind of squished-in head, and Joy read the little information plate and said ‘oh! that’s Kant!’, which was good for a hearty laugh. There was a lot of great stuff there, but after browsing for a good two hours we decided it was time to move on. So we walked next door to the paper museum, which was full of documentation of 60s art projects involving the moving of hills and carving of mountains. It did exactly what it was supposed to do: make one consider the definition of art. I decided it wasn’t. Heh.

After that was the only short walk in all of Berlin, down Fredrichstrasse to Checkpoint Charlie. Checkpoint Charlie was the largest Berlin Wall border fortification, and there’s nothing there anymore, not even a building. Just a city block with a mural all around it. I think perhaps the reason there isn’t a de facto museum there is because since there is no building blocking the view, one can look all around oneself and see all the backgrounds in the photos, such as the American checkpoint and Cafe Adler and even the street signs. It was a very cool, educational, and touching experience. There´s an extensive photo-and-text memorial there, tracing the history of the Berlin Wall, complete with fantastic black-and-whites, a series of aerial photographs of the city taken every 5 years, and a very long series of aerial photographs following along the Wall, with East and West divided. East Berlin is very clearly crumbling and West Berlin is very clearly doing much better. Nowadays East Berlin is the cool part of town where all the sights are…ahh, time. It’s still pretty easy to tell where the wall divided the town, because in its place is a cobblestone path that (I believe) runs the entire length, and there are over 100 little memorials with little pieces of colorful, painted wall remaining. Like I said…reminders of recent history everywhere. The Germans won’t be forgetting history, and thus won’t be condemned to repeat it.
After that was a very, very long trek to Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin’s hip neighborhood according to Rick Steves. It did look very hip once we got there. Lots of young hippies with piercings and punks, and while it looked a little short on cute boutiques, it had this fantastic little Thai-Indonseian restaurant called Rice Queen, which we very hungrily ate at.
By then we managed to master the tram system and made it home okay. See, the tram map is somewhat misleading as to where exactly the tram stops are…it might say that this line and that line connect in the same place, but what it means is that you can get off this line and have to turn the corner and walk several blocks away to connect to the other line, and there are no signs to help us stupid tourists out. Another interesting thing about the public transportation system is that while it’s nice, extensive, runs often and is convenient, people drink on it.  Apparently a favorite pasttime of Berlin youth is to hole up in a tram car, get very drunk, and mock Americans. I feel like I’ve gotten the Berlin experience now, yes.

Today we’ve got a bit of a late start. We totally deserved to sleep in after getting up yesterday at dark-thirty, so we took our sweet time getting up and about. We’ll be hitting up more museums, and if we’re lucky, we might even finish off our evening in a biergarten!

My Amsterdam pics are up - check them out! I uploaded, and then realized too late that flash isn’t enabled on this browser, so a bunch need to be rotated. In the meantime, they’re over here…

Joy also has some pictures up here. I have more pictures of her and she has more pictures of me, for obvious reasons, but that means there’s a pretty decent photo pool between us.

Dublin was a bit of a hassle to start with.  James and I booked a hostel at the last minute - it wasn’t our plan but plans kept changing and changing - and the place we booked turned out to be a complete dive.  They didn’t have flushing toilets nor did they have cold water, and the bunks were incredibly cramped and crowded, and there was someone already sleeping in James’ bunk.  So we packed it in and stayed at an incredibly, incredibly overpriced hotel, but it was nearer the city center and offered a fantastic view of Parliament across the way.  The hotel was even so foolish as to place us in a room that you could crawl out of the window and get out on the roof ledge of, which was fun. 

Among the sights seen were the Dublin Castle and the Chester Beatty library.  I elected to skip the Book of Kells in favor of it, and I’m rather glad I did.  It’s filled with some of the world’s oldest religious manuscripts and scrolls and other goodies.  We also tried to visit the jail in which the original Irish liberators were executed, but after a lengthy walk to the other end of town, we discovered it closed.  It doesn’t seem like we got much done in Dublin, but it was a wonderful and laid-back time.

Also, it was a cool city, but it definitely had a different vibe than the rest of Ireland.  The pubs definitely aren’t the same at all, and while it’s a bustling big-little-city, and there’s definitely some stuff to do there, I was eager to get moving along.  So move along I did, and I parted with James and met up with Joy, and we headed to Amsterdam…

And what happens in Amsterdam stays in Amsterdam.   

In all seriousness, Amsterdam is fantastic.  It’s not at all what I expected. It’s incredibly old-world and gothic, featuring spectacular architecture.  There’s canals everywhere, and incredibly lush greenery, and it’s really absolutely gorgeous.  There’s only a few parts of town where it even feels like a big city - mostly it feels like a series of little connected neighborhoods.  The big-city feel kicks in whenever we have to cross a street, which is a serious challenge.  The streets are built in this weird layered method in which the trams are in the middle, the cars are outside them, the bikes are outside those, and pedestrians are outside those.  And the bikes.  Man! The bikes!  I knew there were bikes in Amsterdam but I didn’t expect it to be so completely taken over by bikes.  There are more bikes than cars, and the scary thing is that they totally don’t yield to pedestrians.  Once, we were crossing a road when the green turned red, and the bike went from a stop to charging right at us, not even waiting for us to cross.  The bikes are even more aggressive than the cars and it is frightening.  This is my third day in Amsterdam and crossing roads is still a hellish experience. 

If you can manage to get around, there’s tons to see.  Yesterday we spent a good chunk of the day in the contemporary art museum, which is filled with all kinds of crazy multi-media, abstract, conceptualist art.  You know, the kind that uncultured people like me laugh at.  There was actually some great stuff up, including a lightshow that featured a reverse rapture - material objects ascending to heavens as the occassional human body fell below.  Interesting stuff, really.  Today was taken up with a visit to the Torture Museum (also difficult to find), featuring torture devices from the Spanish Inquisition and beyond, with some pretty neat and insightful text to accompany.  We also went to the botanical gardens (fiendishly difficult to find!), and it was absolutely beautiful, particularly the butterfly greenhouse.  Both were well worth it, and neither are really on the city’s main tourist path.  Joy also had a list of off-the-beaten-path places to see from one of her friends, so we managed to acquire the greatest frites known to man and visit a non-smarmy coffeeshop.  We also found a Lush and an Ecco and other awesome stores and basically Amsterdam completely won me over.
Obviously, I expected that I’d like Amsterdam, but I didn’t expect to like it quite this much.  It’s really a nice city and Berlin is going to have a hard act to follow!  There are many awesome pictures, but alas, Amsterdam’s main downfall is that it is the most internet-cafe-starved city I have ever seen.  We pretty thoroughly canvassed Amsterdam by foot over the last few days, but only ever saw a few cafes, and this here cafe I’m sitting in is probably a good half mile away from the hostel, and they don’t seem to allow picture uploading.  Next time, I hope!  In the meantime, I completely caught up uploading my Ireland pictures, so head over to my photostream and browse through.  A highlight: