So I guess that's it then!

Thanks for tuning in, we're back home safe, jet-lagged in strange ways but otherwise fine. Poorer, but no complaints all around. It was a fantastic trip and we hope to do similar things in our futures, but who knows when that will be and where we will go. So until next time...or until I see you in person, bye!

What we learned

In Rome we learned an important lesson about navigation: always have a map. And second: don't ever give up,

Our hostel is in this picture, can you spot it?

It was also in Rome where we began to learn to harsh truth about Europeans and drinking; and I don't mean alcohol, just fluids in general, they don't seem to imbibe them. Meal portions are typical, but drink sizes are minuscule, there is no such thing as free refills (for the most part they don't do fountain drinks) and the drink is expensive to begin with (including water).

From there we quickly learned how best to plan train trips; a lesson taught by incessant buzz of a mosquito as I tried to get a nights rest on the floor of a train station.

Nice taught us how to wander around aimlessly searching for a place to sleep; a skill which has been used well in the time since. We also started to get an understanding of French cuisine: take any food (including from other cultures), apply french cook, add sauce. In fact, were fairly certain everything in France comes with a choice of sauces, including train tickets and automobiles.

Paris was quite a bit larger than we were led to believe, and was expensive. We did a lot of walking in Paris.

Spain? Well we entered and exited Madrid more than any other city on the trip, but never actually got to see it. It seemed haunted or something though, the one time we went out it was just about dinner time and every single store near the train station was closed. A mystery. We saw Barcelona briefly, and it was a confusing rush through what seemed a giant mapless maze. And then we were off to Portugal.

Portugal is cheap! Portugal is wonderfully cheap, and while we relaxed there we discovered some fine cuisine of our own; namely our tried and true traveler's sandwich, consisting, at a basic level, of a baguette and salami. We've also added cheese to it, and we had butter at one point. We even changed out the salami for some other mysterious meat, but it paled in comparison. This meal was cheap even here in Zurich! Supermarket eating is somewhat difficult in other countries since we couldn't read the labels to understand what things were or if they expired if not refrigerated. But we figured peanut butter was ok, we ate a lot of fruit, also some Chocolate-butter stuff. Essentially we discovered that anything we trusted to carry around in our bags and eat several days later was probably sugary and unhealthy (but not everything, salted peanuts, for example).

Lisbon also taught us that it is very possible that every train out of a city will be full for several days, which was important to know to ensure we made it to Zurich. Sadly it was learned too late to make it to Salzburg to see Lemuria.

Instead we went to Valencia which is an awesome city, look it up on google maps and you'll see how cool it is. Here we learned...about fish I guess, and other sea creatures...we had a pretty easy time in Valencia, where I ate a McDonald's hamburger for the first time in a very long time.

We got to see Paris again, bringing our total visits to 2, though it could never reach Madrid's 3 as we departed eastward, never to return.

Berlin likes beer. At ANY time of day, you will regularly see people walking down the street with an open beer in hand. This is also where we started to see an affection for bicycle travel among the natives. At the one restaurant we dined at in Berlin, the food portions were huge, though I can't know if this is indicative of the rest of the city. Anyway, the theme there was beer. We also witnessed some sort of inline-skating marathon which was fun. And the skaters seemed to enjoy their beer from water bottles, go figure.

Vienna was hot, apparently experiencing record highs soon after we left, but Vienna has really nice parks! The rest of the city isn't really anything special, pretty cool, but nothing compared to Paris or Berlin, but they have great parks.

Amsterdam is another city that looks awesome on a map; built on a series of canals and stuff, it's sort of spider-web like. The canals also make navigation a breeze, because if you miss a turn, you'll know because there's water in front of you. Oh, this reminds me, Europe doesn't seem to be particularly excited about labeling streets. This was more a problem in the further west countries than the more central ones, but none compared remotely to America's fantastic street signs. On a similar note, many European signs use little silhouettes and pictures that seems really weird looking. Take the walk/don't walk symbol for example; every country does it a little different, and some places seem to utilize cartoon anatomy to greater degrees than seem necessary or intuitive. On some signs in Italy the cartoon man's hands were'nt attatched to his body...or on this one he seems to be sneakily making his way to the white rectangle, I don't know why anyone decided that was the best way to represent a person walking to an exit.

"Cautiously approach white rectangle"

We also visited Brussels, where I determined that everything Belgium is famous for is unhealthy food. That's probably not true, but there were a ridiculous number of Belgian waffle and chocolate stores.

Back to Amsterdam, anyway, if you just want coffee, you'll have a hard time finding a cafe that will suit you. Other than that, the drugs and prostitution don't really get in the way of normal city life; it's not polite to smoke   weed out on the streets, and prostitution is restricted to certain areas (the red light district), on top of which, prostitutes seem to stick to brothels so you won't ever be solicited walking down the street (kind of, they try very hard to get your attention from their windows).

And then we discovered that Zurich, our last stop, was going to be incredibly expensive. We did some math, and the price of a margarita here is the equivalent of about $36, that's probably the worst we found. A Big Mac combo was equivalent to $14 USD. You probably get the idea, subway $5 footlong? How 'bout a 14CHF (16.8 USD) 30 centimeter?

Zurich

I don't remember uploading this, but Zurich!

Woo! My imagining of the end of a 70s Zurich montage!

Christian gesturing towards Zurich

Christian broke physics with a pile of CHF

A nice scene, but I'm not sure what the sign means.

Pictures from Brussels

Picture...from our daytrip to Brussels a couple days ago. We didn't actually take any pictures in Amsterdam for various reasons; when we arrived it was raining, that evening we went into town without the camera, the next day we were in Brussels and got back too late, and the next day we had our packs with us most of the time and I guess never bothered to remove the camera. It's ok, there wasn't much to take pictures of anyway, the appeal of Amsterdam is the city and it's people not any particularly good sights.

So:

Me, probably wondering what attraction it is I'm having the opportunity to see

Something delicious and Belgian. They are expensive and we ate them all. Sorry, no presents.

This is probably a notable building for a historic reason; we liked it because it's easy to find from elsewhere in the city.

I guess Brussels really likes it's naked peeing boy. As you can see, it was not naked when we saw it.

There were no pictures of the front of Christian's body, but several of his back as we walked down this street. I'm sure I had some artistic reasoning.

Almost to the end now

So, back in Brussels we had just finished up some delicious waffles and decided it was time to go. It took a few tried to get to the train station because I had utterly lost my sense of direction somehow, so we kept returning to the square we recognized and setting out in different directions. We got to the right platform and then proceeded to wait for the train, which we are pretty proficient at by now. Once aboard the train and seated, I was relaxing in the chair as other passengers scuffled around and put luggage in various places. Suddenly the Asian dude behind shouted "stop that guy!" and leaped through the line of people in the aisle. A couple seconds later he returned holding his camera. He explained that another man had helped him put his bag up, and then taken his camera, but when he ran to get it back the man had dropped it and fled. I actually saw a guy walking away down the platform who I thought looked suspicious and he matched the description when I talked to the almost-victim. So that was fun.

I also forgot to mention the exciting times on the train to Brussels! We were sitting behind a big group of Spanish kids, probably atound 18 years old maybe. They too were using passes, although for Europeans the pass is called interail. When the ticket checking lady came by, she gave them an impressive lecture because they hadn't been filling out the "Journeys Details" section, where you write the time and number and destination of every train bus and boat you ride on with your pass. The ticket isn't valid without it, I guess. Christian and I hadn't gotten such a lecture, because we've mostly been taking night trains that require reservation, so we had actual tickets, and on the few local trains we'd taken they hadn't even checked. But, being the intelligent young men we are, we'd followed the instructions and filled ours out, so when she got to us, she at first looked apprehensive as we handed over our passes, but as soon as she saw that we'd done it right, she was very relieved and waved our passes at the spanish guys as an example of how to do things right.

Anyway, back again to the return trip: we ran into technical difficulties of some sort. At one station we randomly stopped for a long time and tey never announced in english what was going on, though I gathered from other passengers that they had to fix something. Eventually we departed again, but it didn't last long, we found ourselves stopped again, this time nowhere in particular, and they did announce in several languages that there was a train broken down on the tracks ahead of us so we couldn't move...and they gave no hint as to how long it would take. I honestly don't remember how long it took. But even once we moved, we stopped at the next station for another extended amount of time, so we ended up back at Amsterdam Central sometime past 11, and got back to our hostel around midnight.

Going up to our room, I heard some exciting Dutch karaoke coming from the bar...if only we'd gotten back sooner...we immediately went to sleep.

We went out again the next day (yesterday) and took a tram to Vondelpark, which is a lovely place; its got ponds and little waterways and grassy areas full of picnicers and sunbathers and plenty of benches and tons of trees, and the paths were full of bikers and dog walkers. We ate a pitiful lunch there...our hostel was right in what seems to be the turkish district of Amsterdam, so all the markets sold turkish food, which we didn't know what to do with. Although, we did eat Doners a lot, christian ate one everyday and I ate two over the course of our three days (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doner).

On the way back to Central we found a random street market, like a flea market, but with interesting stuff. We poked around but didn't purchase anything. It was a good time consumer though, since our train didn't leave until the evening and we had nothing to do. We got to the station and still had nothing to do.

So we got onto that train eventually. It was a rough ride though, the seats were uncomfortable and there was a passenger in our car who had the most ridiculously loud snore I've ever heard. I eventually just played loud music to fall asleep to, and that worked ok. There was also a huge storm partway through, though I was asleep at the beginning, it was loud enough to wake me up. Our train was stopped at a station and didn't move until the storm let up.

And so we eventually arrived in Zurich...somewhat rested and knowing that we are screwed because Zurich is an incredibly expensive city. Exactly how expensive, we would not find out until later, but first we had to find our hostel. We failed to correctly follow the directions we had, so we went back to the tourist office at the train station, where the lady behind the desk proceeded to tell us how to get to some random hostel before we'd even told her where we were trying to go. It was amazing, she heard us say hostel and immediately directed us the complete wrong way without stopping to let us correct her. Rather than try that again, we took the map and I used that to easily find the place.

We walked over, dropped off our bags at the luggage room and went out to bide time until check-in, pretty normal stuff. We went down to zurich's shopping district and were appalled at the prices of things...those of you who will be meeting us back in California, be prepared to feed us, that's all I'm saying.

Anyway, we came back to the hostel early and ate some food, and then checked-in as soon as it was ready. So here we are. Sitting around. So, basically, we'll be flying back in 2 days, and we can't afford to do anything in Zurich.

More Amsterdam, and a trip to Brussels

Yesterday we got up late and got on a train to Brussels. At first we planned on taking a train from Brussels to Bruges, but it was around 3pm by the time we got to Brussels and we didn't want to lose more time to trains, so we spent the day there. At first we wandered the area around the central station and I got sandwiches at the only food place I've ever been to that didn't seem to have food; I'm fairly sure I got the last two pieces of bread and they seemed to be telling me the only meat they had left was chicken. After that we made our way toward a tall pointy building and found the touristy area. Apparently Belgian things are all sweet, we had belgian waffles and belgian chocolates. We also saw a fountain of a naked peeing boy dressed up to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Ukraine becoming independent, so that's interesting I guess. We didn't really research what we would see in Brussels, so we saw things and didn't know what they were; like a gold-colored statue of a possibly dead man built into a door that everyone wanted to touch, that one perplexed us a bit.

Godamnti...70% of my post just got lost because I got unconnected to the internet and the auto-save feature wasn't working...then I tried to post and it all got deleted.

So...in summation, as I explained in the lost post, I'm in a hurry. So goodbye..

Now serving: Amsterdam

Woke up this morning before dawn to witness a lightning storm in the distance outside the window. The foul weather continued for a while, with a fair amount of rain spattering the windows. Eventually the rain became a drizzle and the lightnings ceased. We got off the train and waited for a few minutes for our next one, luckily under the cover of the platform's cover, because a little rain continued to fall. This was at Hannover, from which we grabbed a train to a smaller stop called Hilversum, where we got our train to Amsterdam Central. There was an awesome map machine in the station, where you could put in a Hotel/Hostel or a street and it would print a map with directions. Sadly, our hostel was just off the maps edge! So we had to wing it, using the instructions from online that we still had, and took a bus. The rain was coming down on us fairly well by a California standard, so we broke out the rain gear. We checked-in, and were informed that the room wouldn't be ready until 2, so we put our bags into the baggage room and went back to the bus stop hoping our hour long bus ticket would still work, but after waiting twenty minutes decided it was too late and went across the street where we were perplexed by a menu. Luckily a friendly fellow customer explained to me what was going on with the Doner Kebabs and Turkish Pizzas. Both christian and I ended up getting Chicken Doner Kebabs (which happens to be what the helpful guy had gotten). They were surprisingly delicious and I don't know why they aren't popular in America, given what they are; a handful of greasy shredded meat and sauce with some letuce and that kind of thing.Then we came back to the Hostel and waited in the Lobby for the room to be ready.

Once we cleaned up we went out into Amsterdam to wander around. We got 48 hours of bus ticket, so that's helpful. The food in Amsterdam is really varied, there's lots of different regional food restaurants, like Thai, Indian, Mexican, Italian. The streets would have gotten me lost a lot, too, but there are these handy canals everywhere to use as landmarks.

I also had time to upload pictures from Vienna! So here you go:

A butterfly, as seen in the butterfly house

I forget the name of this thing, but the other side was under construction so there weren't any good angles

A nice grassy rest

Summary of Vienna

The downtown area isn't big, but it was a little confusing and so we had a hard time navigating at first; a large part of this problem was that we didn't find a map, so we were using the one in my tourist book. Once we got our bearings though, it was a nice enough town. My day was sparsely punctuated with delicious cold treats, from an Eiskaffe (ice cream and coffee, basically, though mine was chocolate and Christians was coffee), to some gelato later in the day, a blended mocha drink here at this McDonalds as we head back to the train station, slowly. Vienna has some museums, but we were too tired for them; we did enjoy its parks, though, which have lots of trees and grass and a ton of benches lining the paths. It was just too hot and humid to be walking around, so it really wore us out. It was fun though, and there are some cool things here, the quintessential leisurely cafe, where etiquette requires that you linger and have deep thoughts after your drink is done; being in a hurry is prohibited. Anyway, we are in no hurry. Our train's leaving in a little less than two hours, so we'll get over to the train station at some point. Anyway, that's all I got for now.