Lisbon

I went to Lisbon from Thu 08.May to Mon 12.May.

I arrived late Thursday evening, grabbing a taxi to get to my hotel, which was some distance from the touristic center of Lisbon, but right next to the metro, so the distance was not a problem during the stay.

Friday morning I started off by walking around in Baixa.
At first I was surprised at the number of people selling fake sunglasses, jewelry and drugs on he street. There were people running around all the main squares, hassling tourists and trying to sell stuff.



I took the sightseeing-bus around town to identify the main sights. After spending a couple of hours on the sightseeing bus, I started walking the hill up towards Castelo de San Jorge. I had lunch at the Miradouro de Santa Luzia. Summed up, it had a good view, and crap food. i kept on walking further up to
Miradouro da Graca, getting a nice view of the castle. I walked down to the castle afterwards. It had a good view of the city, otherwise not too interesting. It was full of people selling stuff, and they charged for entry.

I spent the evening shopping at El Korte Ingles.

Saturday I wanted to go out to Belem.
I took the local bus to Belem, and looked at the outside of Mosteiro de Jeronimos. Unfortunately there was already a long line to get in to the monastery, as every guidebook on Lisbon lists this as a must-see. I decided to go check out the naval museum instead. Unfortunately, it was quite boring. I found it had too little about the age of discovery and too much of more recent stuff.


Next I visited the Belem tower and walked along the river to the monument to the explorers. I kept on walking to the restaurant area under the bridge. I had lunch at a Brazilian steak house a colleague recommended to me. Good food, but I felt a bit ripped off that the charged so much for the bread and olives that came with the table (probably 10 Euros off my bill or something)

I spent the afternoon shopping at the "Amoreiras" shopping center.
Now I was having a problem with my shoes. They had some seams near the front making them too narrow and squeezing my toes. I was really feeling all the hills in Lisbon at this point.


Sunday I couldn't really think of what to do in downtown Lisbon, so I took the train to Sintra, a small touristy town about an hour by train from Lisbon. I visited the Portuguese Royal Castle (Palacio de Pena). It had very nice architecture - lots of different styles.

I took the train back and went shopping at malls around the roundabout close to the hotel I was staying at.

Monday I just spent walking around downtown, killing time before taking the local bus back to the airport.

Overall I felt like Lisbon was a pretty city, but there wasn't all that much to do there.

Pictures are here

Skiing in Laax

I went on a ski trip to Laax between Mar 1st and Mar 9th together with Rune, Peter, Amy, Joe and Theo. We started driving from the Hague very early in the morning. Wouter was supposed to go with us, but he had car trouble, so he decided not to come with us.

The drive was pretty smooth until we hit southern Germany. We tried to beat the queues by driving several Umwäge, and by trying to use the traffic feature of the Navigation units in the cars to avoid the worst of it. Overall I don't think it helped us much. The road trip to Laax was supposed to take 9 hours. In the end we spent around 13, driving through Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein and Switzerland.

We were staying in a small family-run hotel, which was very cheap. We paid 722 Euro for a whole week for room and board plus lift passes. The food was OK, and the hotel wasn't out of the way compared to the other hotels around there, so overall it was a good deal.
One problem was that we had to take ski shuttles to the slopes every morning.This was less convenient than staying on the slopes like we did last year. Having to ride the bus probably took away half an hour of skiing on each end .

We were worried the first day as it was very windy, and they only kept the bottom pistes open. These had rotten snow and brown patches, so we accidentally did some mud skiing.
Luckily more stuff opened up on the next day, so we got to see more of the area. It turned out to be a fairly big resort, with lots of pistes at varying altitudes.


There was some hilarity with the naming of pistes and ridges in the area. Seemed like half the area was named something with "crap" in the name, so naturally everyone had to take a picture in front of the "Crap Bar".

Rune had to stop early on most of the days, because he had to do schoolwork (for his master's), but on most days the rest of us would wind down at the after-ski bars at the bottom of the pistes.

One nice thing about the Laax resort...they had bubbles on most of the exposed chairlifts, and the longest one actually had heated seats. This was a good morale-booster when it was foggy and windy everywhere.

We did a lot of traveling around the area, as someone in the group wanted to make sure he had run all the pistes (checked all the boxes, sort of). This was annoying, since we left some really good areas for crap ones just because these were areas we had not yet tried.

Weather-wise we had two days of bad weather, two day of gray so-so, and two days of extremely good weather. We had a perfect day on Thursday, and we spent all of it going down black pistes in the sun all the way until the pistes closed.

Lunch was always good. There were lots of very good food at the cafeterias - german style. Nothing like some bratwurst and beer to raise your spirits.


We moved beyond the cafeterias and ate at a "gourmet restaurant" on Friday . This was a mistake. They cooked our wine and didn't understand that this was a problem, their service was slow, but the food was excellent. Having imbibed lots of wine, we were really buzzed before going down towards the village of Falera. I'm not sure if it was the alcohol, or that we finally found our skiing legs, but the run was so good that we rushed back up to do one final run before the pistes closed. Truly a great day of skiing...

Memorably quotes:
"My buns feel happy!"


On the return trip we had decided to drive through France, through the Vosges, stopping in a small town called Epernay in the Champagne-district. We visited the visitor center of the Champagne maker called "Mercier" and got a tour of the cellars. In the evening we had dinner at a fancy restaurant, having a nice, if somewhat rushed meal (overzealous waiter almost hovering next to our table)

Next morning Rune and me drove back to the Hague, stopping for breakfast at a roadside cafe, rather than paying the 20 Euros that the hotel wanted to charge us...

Pictures are here

Washington D.C.

I went to Washington D.C. from Thursday 07 Feb to Monday 11 Feb to visit my friend Diana and to be touristy in the capital of the US.

As I had never been to the US before, and having heard lots of stories, I was somewhat worried about passing through customs and immigration. Turned out it was fairly painless, the only snag was having to declare exactly how many euros I was carrying. I know about the euro to dollar rate at the moment and all that, but sheesh!

Diana picked me up at the airport. She lived in a small town called Reston, about halfway between Dulles International and Washington D.C.
We had dinner at Diana's before going out shopping for cold weather gear. My internal body clock was telling me it was 02.00, so I was feeling very sleepy. I probably wasn't the best company.

Friday morning Diana drove me to the metro at West Falls Church before heading off for work. The metro into D.C. was very crowded, so much so that at one point it would stop running. The train wouldn't start moving again, and the train driver was screaming over the loudspeakers to get people to stop leaning on the doors. Living in Holland, this did not faze me...trams can be amazingly full here as well. I got off at Farragut West and started walking towards the White House. Diana had given me pointers on a standard "circuit" that some of her previous visitors had used when visiting Washington for the first time, so I had planned on walking that for the first day.

Walking past the White House, I was surprised that it was so small, and so close to the public sidewalk. I spent some time at the Washington Monument, trying to get a good picture. The size of the thing was very impressive, considering that it was built in the 1800's. The tours were sold out when I got there, though, so I didn't get to go into the monument. I carried on down towards the other memorials.



I walked down to the WW2 memorial, and past the reflecting pool to the Lincoln Memorial. The size of the Lincoln statue surprised me. I had thought it would be smaller. Next I visited the Vietnam war memorial, and the Korean war memorial. I continued the circuit around the small lake, stopping at the FDR memorial before ending up at the Jefferson memorial. I continued up the Mall to the US Capitol building. I didn't get to go inside, as there were no-one at the booth were they sold the guided tours. Maybe there were no tours that day... I walked back along the Mall, making a quick stop at the Museum of the American Indian. It was located in a fancy building, but the museum itself was fairly boring.

One thing I did find hilarious at the Mall was that they put small flags on the lawns around the monuments which looked exactly like the small flags you use to mark mines in a minefield. I'm probably slightly colored by the sort of work I do. While walking at the Mall I couldn't stop myself thinking what a great reference point the Washington Monument would be for artillery ranging.

I continued on to the Air and Space museum, spending a few hours walking around. It was a nice museum with lots of interesting items, although I was left with the feeling that they had prioritized presentation over information content.



At this point I was feeling really hungry, so I walked down to Chinatown to find some place to eat. I had a burger made out of buffalo at a specialty pub. I had never eaten buffalo before, so that's one more notch in the animal-counter. I felt slightly guilty for drinking Löwenbrau in the US, so I finished off with a Samuel Adams, just to taste some local brew (I was pleasantly surprised).

Before going back, I did some shopping at Macy's, although I was a bit confused as the sizes for clothes seemed to be very different from Europe. I took the metro back to West Falls Church, where Diana picked me up.

In the afternoon, we went shopping at Rei, which is a nice chain for outdoors equipment. I bought an amazingly cheap Mountain Hardwear soft shell jacket. During my stay over the weekend, I found prices for clothes in general to be very low. We finished off the evening by eating at Chipotle -a mexican fast food chain. Eating there was fairly unpleasant, since there were lots of screaming high school kids around us. I suppose hanging out at the mall is what they do on a Friday night.






Saturday morning we started off fairly late driving into Arlington to look at the Marine Corps memorial (aka the Iwo Jima Statue). We continued on to the Air Force memorial, passing the Pentagon on the way. After a brief visit, we drove on to Arlington National Cemetery, where american soldiers from all the wars since the civil war were buried. We walked around for a couple of hours, looking at the main monuments like the JFK memorial and the tomb of the unknown soldier. What I found most impressive about the cemetery is the size of the thing. It took a while to drive past it. Around 300.000 people are buried here. I wonder what they will do when they run out of room. Recycling plots is probably not very PC.

After visiting the cemetery, Diana took me on a small road trip to the outskirts of Washington D.C., and we had lunch at Great Falls Village. We walked for a bit in the Great Falls State park and looked at some rapids and some minor waterfalls.

Sunday morning we started off by driving into DC, parking at the Mall. I found it weird that it was so easy to drive into the very center of the city and find free parking. We walked over to the Spy Museum, which is one of the newer museums in DC. It's not part of the Smithsonian, so you have to pay 18$ to get in - expensive in DC, but if you compare it to prices at museums in Europe fairly normal. The museum showcased spy equipment through the ages and told stories about some famous spies. The museum wasn't all that big, so we finished it in about an hour. We made a quick run through the Natural history museum before walking over to the Botanical gardens. The botanical gardens weren't that interesting (I live in Holland, plenty more to see here...), but they were having a minor orchid exhibition, so I got some nice pictures from that. The gardens are probably more impressive in summer, when there's stuff also in the outside part.



We walked over to the Air and Space museum to watch an IMAX screening of "Fighter Pilot - Operation Red Flag". This was surprisingly cool. Good action-packed IMAX flick with some really nice shots. Better than the "Blue Angels"-thing they're showing at the Omniversum.

Later we drove back to Diana's place so she could pack for her trip to Whistler. We had dinner at a Korean barbecue place. I don't have all that much experience with eating with chopsticks, so I got some "Training wheels" for my chopsticks - a brightly colored orange plastic thing to keep my chopsticks apart. Hopefully I didn't embarrass Diana too much.

We finished the evening by going to a karaoke-place with private booths. This was the sort of place where you rent a booth with microphones and karaoke-equipment, and then you can sing without anyone else hearing how much you suck - which worked out for me...

Monday was the departure day, going back to Holland. We took a taxi to the airport, arriving around 10.00, which was a problem, as my flight wasn't until 17.55. I checked my suitcase and hopped onto the shuttle to the Udvar-Hazy Air & Space museum next to the airport. This museum had some fairly interesting exhibits, like the "Enola Gay" that dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, and a space shuttle. I managed to kill a few hours there before going back. I didn't see any of the IMAX movies as I had already seen the ones they were showing. I did try the "space walk" simulator. It wasn't a big experience. You put on some 3D-glasses, and get into a box, then they lift the box into the air and shake it for a bit while showing blurry pictures of the international space station.



I got back to the airport with the shuttle and went through the security gate without problems. Right behind me, though, they stopped a woman with a BIG folding knife in her purse. Scary stuff, good thing there's security checks...

I was a bit stressed out about not finding any "US-Visit" exit scan machines inside the terminal. According to the immigration and visa video they showed on the flight over it was mandatory to scan your passport before you exit the US. Information inside the terminal knew nothing about any terminals, so I checked out the homepage for tsa.gov on an internet terminal. Turns out they've stopped requiring that since may last year. I was fairly pissed at KLM for giving me outdated information on the flight.

Having never been to the US before, some things were strange to me. The way they organize their road signs is puzzling. They use lots of text on their signs, sometimes with some advertisement signs on top for good measure. I'm used to symbols instead of text on signs, and no superfluous signs.

Shopping was VERY different from Holland - customer service was good, they had a good selection of stuff for sale and the stores were not overcrowded. With the dollar to euro rate right now it was fairly cheap as well...

Overall, my first visit to the US was less hassle than I anticipated. I had a good weekend. It was nice to see Diana again, and Washington D.C. was a nice city.

Pictures are here

Trip to Vienna and Bratislava

In the extended weekend between Jan 31st and Feb 3rd I went to Vienna, to see the famous architecture of the Austrian capital.

I arrived in Vienna Thursday evening, checking into a rather basic hotel outside the ring.

Friday morning, I started off by going to see the Hundertwasser Haus, a colorful, artsy apartment block built as a protest against boring concrete tower blocks.I continued on to the center of Vienna, walking along the Kärtner strasse and seeing the Stephansdom and the opera building on the way. I watched the Hofburg palace complex from the outside, and made a quick stop at the "Schmetterlinghaus" to photograph some butterflies.They had some really big, tropical butterflies in there, but in order to keep the environment similar to the butterflies' natural habitat,they kept it fairly hot and humid in there (which shows up on some of my pictures).

I walked around in the center for a couple of hours, getting to see the major sights and a lot of the pretty buildings in Vienna. I spent a couple of hours walking around in the Museum of Natural History, which was fun, as it has probably been fifteen years or so since the last time I was in one. Especially fun to see a BIG chunk of salt crystals from Wieliczka, the mine I visited in September last year.

I finished off the day by doing some shopping, buying stuff like the Austrian rum - "STROH" and the famous Sacher-torte. The Stroh is for my collection of vile booze that will break anyone that gets too cocky during a session of heavy drinking. I seem to remember that the taste is quite overpowering.

In the evening, I had the feeling I had seen most of what I wanted to see in Vienna, so on a whim I decided to go to Bratislava the next day. This is not that difficult from Vienna, since it is only an hour away by train. The Slovak Republic is in Schengen as well, so I didn't have to worry about visas to go there either. The only problems were that they didn't use the Euro, so I would need to get some Slovak korunas, and I didn't have a map or a guide book. I found a big book store and bought a travel guide which included a really crappy map. The only problem was that it was in German. My German isn't that great, as I have not spoken much German since I had it in school when I was 17. In that respect, this was good exercise, and I spent an hour or so trying to piece together what the main attractions of Bratislava were.

Early in the morning on Saturday, I got on the train to Bratislava. The ATM at the station in Bratislava accepted my Dutch bank card, so there was no problem getting korunas. At the station in Bratislava I bought a "Kolbasa" for breakfast - a red sausage dripping red grease - it tasted different from what I expected, with a very smoky aftertaste. Since I had no proper map, I decided to follow road signs to "historic center". I walked in a very long half-circle until I managed to get to the city center. It was fairly cold and raining a lot at this time, and I struggled to find a shop where they sold umbrellas. It was hard to find anyone that spoke any English or German, but I managed to buy an umbrella, and I managed to get served in a cafe.

Finally, I found the historic center and the Castle. The castle itself was not that spectacular, although you have a very good view from the castle of most of the city.

I walked back to the train station and got on the train back to Vienna. There were trains going back every hour, so getting to and from Bratislava was fairly easy. I felt tired on the train back, having walked for almost seven hours straight. I was pretty pleased with myself going back to Vienna, having been adventurous enough to go over the border without speaking any of the local language. I still have a bunch of Slovak Korunas, though. Having to exchange currency sucks...

Back in Vienna, I looked at the Belvedere palace, and walked over to see the Karlskirche. The Karlskirche looked really spectacular from the outside, the inside wasn't all that interesting. (Perhaps I have seen too many churches in the last year to be impressed...). I also walked over to see the food marked, the Naschmarkt.

Sunday I took the metro to the outskirts of Vienna to visit the Schönbrunn palace. I found it to be not that impressive. The most interesting rooms were in the east wing, where you needed an extra ticket to enter. Being an imperial palace, I thought it sucked. The Dolmabahce palace in Istanbul for instance is way more impressive. Supposedly the palace gardens are nice, but this was February, so there wasn't much to see.

I finished my stay by visiting the Museumsquartier and having a sachertorte and some coffee at a cafe.

Overall, I found Vienna to be fairly boring. There were lots of nice buildings and supposedly lots of pretty parks. Only...the parks are not that pretty in February.

Pictures are here (Vienna) and here (Bratislava).

Berlin

Long weekend in Berlin from 16 Nov 07 to 19 Nov 07

I arrived late in the afternoon Friday, taking the airport shuttle from Tegel to my hotel at Alexanderplatz. The bus ride into town was very long and uncomfortable. I spent over an hour on the bus, and the bus was extremely crowded. I dumped my luggage at the hotel, and went out in search of some food before turning in. The weather was fairly cold, around 0 degrees Celsius, and it was windy. I walked along the "Unter den Linden" which was supposed to be one of the main touristy streets in Berlin according to my travel-guide. All I saw was lots of closed museums and old buildings. As I couldn't find a restaurant that was open, I decided to go back to Alexanderplatz and grab some junk food. I was quite cold at this point, so I decided to try to use the S-Bahn to get back. I spent almost 45 minutes waiting for a S-Bahn train that didn't show up. Turns out they were on strike. The annoying thing was that the loudspeakers in the station were still announcing the trains, so it took a while before I understood that further waiting would be fruitless. In retrospect I should probably have done some more research on which areas the restaurants were.

Saturday I had designated to be a shopping-day. I had decided to go visit the "Kaufhaus des Westens", which is biggest warehouse in Europe. I found it very nice, especially the delicacy section. I spent the rest of the day shopping on the KurfürstenDamm and at Potsdamer Platz. At Potsdamer Platz there was a snow slope advertising skiing areas in Austria, complete with Glühwein-stands.

Museum-wise I visited the Dali exhibition and Berlin museum (The story of Berlin). The Dali museum was very nice, much better than the one in Paris. The Berlin museum was also well worth the visit, lots of effort had been put into the exhibition.

I had designated Sunday to be my main touristy day for this trip. I started off by visiting the Pergamon museum. It contained archaeological artifacts from German expeditions to the Middle East. I was mostly impressed by the Ishtar gate and all of the Babylonian stuff (hadn't seen such things "in the stone" before..).

I walked over to the Brandenburger Tor - more or less the symbol of the reunited city. I continued past the memorials of people that had been shot trying to escape the DDR over to the Reichstag. There was a one hour line to get in, due to security inspections of everyone entering. Once I got in, I took the elevator up to the roof. On top of the roof there is a glass dome where you have a nice view of the city.

Next stop was the Checkpoint Charlie and the Mauermuseum next to it. There were some nice exhibits at the Mauermuseum, but the museum itself was really crowded.
Afterwards I walked over to the Jewish museum. The Jewish museum is located in a oddly shaped building, so much so that the building itself is the main exhibit. There's crooked angles everywhere, and the building is supposed to resemble a broken star of David.

On my way back to the hotel I had dinner at a Bavarian restaurant, where I finally tried the famous Schweinhaxe. I had heard from friends earlier how the waiters would try to kill you with meat. Turns out their explanations were not exaggerated - there was no way I was able to eat even half of it. They also served me proper Lövenbrau, which was very nice.

In the evening, in order to be touristy and get the full Berlin experience, I had the green beer - Berliner weisse mit schüss. Which was...interesting.

Monday morning, I started off fighting with my suitcase to make it accept all the stuff I had bought on my shopping spree on Saturday. Luckily, I managed to fit it all, but I was worried about whether the zippers would pop in transit.

This morning I went further east in Berlin, to see the longest preserved piece of the Berlin Wall -the East Side Gallery. Only a small part of it was preserved, and many of the pieces had been worn away. Also, scum had tagged over some of the pieces. Still, it was interesting to see what was left of the wall.

I took the U-bahn back to Mitte, and visited the "Topographie des Terrors"-exhibition, detailing the atrocities committed by the Gestapo and the execution commands during WW2.

Next I went to the Ku'Damm and visited the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gedäcthnis-Kirche - a monumental church damaged by bombing raids during WW2. Part of it is old and bomb-damaged, part of it rebuilt and very modern, with very special stained-glass windows and a strange altar.

I had a few hours to kill before going to the airport, so I decided to visit the famous Zoo and aquarium.

After a quick lunch I picked up my suitcase and went to the airport. It was a long bus ride to get there, but at least I had a seat this time. If I go back to Berlin, I will certainly be using a taxi rather than endure more hours of the TXL-shuttle.
Arriving at the airport, I had another surprise waiting: It was impossible to check in until 1.5 hours before the plane leaves. I was there two hours before, so I had to lug my suitcase around while waiting for them to open up the check-in. It was also hard to find places to sit, because of the layout of the airport. I managed to get a chair at a Starbucks. I sat there wondering how such a big city could be so amateurish in how they arrange their airports and airport links. Probably it has to do with the fact that they have three small airports rather than a big one, owing to the history of the place.

Overall:
Berlin was very good for shopping, there wasn't that many museums there. Signposting in general was bad, you had really look around to find direction signs in the U-bahn stations. I was also surprised by the sucky airport and communications to and from the airport.

Pictures are here

Paris

Since we had November 1st off from work (love those "Official Holidays"), I decided to go to Paris for the long weekend. I had never been to Paris before, so I was planning on doing all those touristy things.

I took the Thalys-train to the station called "Gare du Nord". The train ride itself was fairly unpleasant, very crowded and some kid puked a few seats away, so the whole carriage was smelling of puke and kids were screaming at the top of their lungs. That's what I get for traveling monkey-class, I guess, but since the train ride was already more expensive than flying, I wasn't too keen on forking out extra cash for an upgrade.

I was staying at a hotel called "Hotel Magenta" which was close to the Gare de l'Est railway station. This was not a very nice neighborhood. Every few hundred meters you would see hobos, and there were the occasional puddles of puke and urine along the sidewalk. The upside was that it was not very far from the metro station, and it wasn't too expensive.

I dumped my luggage at the hotel and took the metro to Notre Dame. I went inside the church and visited the treasury, where they had some nice artifacts. The afternoon I spent walking around in the Latin quarter.

In the evening walked around in Montmartre. I ended up walking past Moulin Rouge into the Pigalle neighborhood, which is not a nice place to walk alone as a guy. There were lots of people hassling me,and at one point an old woman grabbed my arm and tried to pull me into a club. Uncool.

Friday morning I decided to get the Eiffel Tower out of the way. I went over there by metro and found my place in line. An hour and a half later I was finally at the elevators. They closed off the top level because of overcrowding, so I could only get up to the second level. The whole site was very crowded, and you were walking in a line the whole time. It was a relief to get back down to the ground and away from the crowds.

Next, I walked over to The army museum and the dome church. The dome church is the burial place for some of France's war heroes, and at the center of the church you can find the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte. The army museum was very interesting, and well maintained. It had a very big collection of suits of armor, and some very interesting Great War-stuff.

I proceeded to walk through the touristy areas, the Champs-Elysees, Place de la Concorde, and the Rue Saint Honore. I made the mistake of having lunch at a cafe in this area. They had a very rude waiter who was very focused on clearing tables. He was almost tossing out people when they had finished their meals. I had never seen anything like this before. Eating in the most touristy areas is maybe not the best thing to do in Paris.

In the evening I went back to the Latin quarter and had dinner at a very bad Greek restaurant. I had bad food and bad wine, and spent forever waiting to pay my bill. Just another reminder to stay away from touristy areas, I guess...


Saturday I got up early to try to beat the crowds to the more popular places. I started out by going to the Sainte-Chapelle. There were no lines so early in the morning, so I could just walk straight into it. It was the most beautiful church I have ever been in.

Later I queued for an hour to get up to the roof of the Notre Dame. The lines are long because they don't let that many people up at the same time, which means that you actually get to see something once you get up there. I really liked the gargoyle viewing platform. The roof had a really great view of Paris, much better in my opinion than the view from the Eiffel Tower. There were also many interesting gargoyles up there. This was definitely my favorite spot in the city.

Next I took the metro to Montparnasse and had lunch at a very nice cafe. I received excellent service and they had very good food. I decided against going down into the catacombs that day as there were very long lines - several hundred meters.
Instead I took the metro to Arc du Triomphe. I walked up to the roof and watched the "Star" of roads beaming out from the arch. Of course there was a line to get up there, but it moved really fast, so I think I only waited for twenty minutes or so.


After the arch, I went by metro to Montmartre. I watched the crowds and walked around for a bit in the small streets. I visited the Dali museum, but it was not that nice. It sort of felt like those movie score cd's which say "music from and inspired by" with one or two tracks from the movie, and the rest just generic crap they threw in to fill up the album. Not worth the time or the entrance fee of 10 euro.

I took the metro back again to Arc the Triomphe and walked down the Champs-Elysees, doing some shopping on the way.

In the evening I walked around for a few hours in the Marais district and Les Halles. I ended up having dinner at this cafe with really pretty waitresses and really crappy food. Again I had a bad experience eating in the touristy areas...

I took the metro to Bastille, found a nice bar and had some nice drinks while watching the nightlife. Bastille looked like a lively area.

Sunday morning I took the metro to Catacombs, and managed to get there before a huge line had formed. The catacombs were pretty creepy - corridors full of skulls and femurs stacked to head-height forming walls and monuments.

After exiting the catacombs, I walked around Montparnasse to Pantheon. I went inside, and visited the crypt, where the famous French thinkers and statesmen are buried. I had lunch near the Jardin du Luxembourg.

Since I still had a few hours to kill, I went to the museum called "Metiers en Arts". It was an engineering museum, and would probably have been more interesting if I had been more geeky.

In the afternoon I took the Thalys back to The Hague. This time one of the toilets malfunctioned, smelling up the carriage. Good thing the train ride was only three and a half hours or so.

In general I liked Paris, and I will return, although I think I will go by plane the next time...
Pictures are here

Krakow

I went to Krakow with Lukasz in the weekend of the 21st of September to the 24th of September.

We flew with Sky-Europe from Amsterdam. The only remarkable thing from the flight was the amazing speed of the delivery of the English version of the in-flight messages. The words came at us like they were coming out of a fire hose, and it was utterly incomprehensible. It would probably have been better with a taped version of the messages.

We stayed at the Lemon Hostel in the center of Krakow. Very cheap, the room looked decent enough, although the walls were paper-thin. They also had some windows above the doors that would rattle like crazy every time someone was walking in the hallway outside. Across the hall from us were some really loud Greeks that would spend forever every morning getting up, chattering incessantly in very loud voices. This made it hard to get any sleep, as we would be partying every night until 3 or so, and the Greeks would start shouting around 8 in the morning.

We met up with one of Lukasz' friends, Paulina, and her boyfriend, Kuba. We walked through the main streets of Krakow, and then into a narrow alley, up some dark stairs, past some scary-looking dude with camouflage pants and a shaved head and suddenly we were inside this cool pub. We sat there talking and drinking for a couple of hours and met up with Sylwia, another one of Lukasz' friends.

We went to some other club(hard to remember those Polish club-names) and started dancing and doing vodka-shots. After a couple of hours Lukasz, Paulina and Kuba went to another club. A few shots later, the cherry vodka started to go to my head, so I found it best to leave for the hostel. Lukasz had given me the keys to the hostel and written down the address on notes stuffed in two different pockets. He had also sent me a SMS with the address. Obviously he was very worried about my navigational skills. What he does not know is that I have super-human navigational skills when I am properly drunk. It's kind of like a homing pigeon always knowing the way back. I walked back towards the hostel, and stopped to sample the local kebab. I always have less of a hangover if I snack on my way home, and this time I had the distinct feeling I might need a hangover-cure. Suddenly I received a SMS from Lukasz. I browsed through the SMS with my left hand, keeping a tight grip on the kebab with my right for balance when I heard someone screaming my name. Turns out, the club that Lukasz and the others had been in was right next to the kebab-shop, so we practically ran into each other on the way back. I wasn't the only one being drunk at this point, as the others tried to board a taxi to drive us the two blocks we had left to the hostel.

The next morning we had breakfast at a nice cafe called "Dynia" (If I remember correctly). The others tricked me into trying a Polish specialty for curing hangovers: a tall glass of beer mixed with Sprite. I'm not sure it helped all that much...

We started the day by walking around the city center up to the castle at Wavel. We went into the cathedral and down into the crypt to watch the graves of the famous Polish kings. We also went up into the tower to look at the Zygmunt bell, the biggest church bell in Poland, which is only sounded when significant events happen in Polish history.


We had a quick lunch at the market before going to Kazimierz - formerly the Jewish part of town, now mainly the entertainment-part of town. We had a stopover at a nice pub, downed some beers before going to an very nice Italian restaurant. From there we walked around until we found Sylwia's place. She was having a housewarming-party and naturally there were lots of vodka shots involved. After a few hours everyone went to a gay disco close to where Sylwia lived called Disco Plastic. We had the place almost to ourselves. It had a very nice party atmosphere with people dancing on the bar counter and lots of happy people drinking and dancing. We kept on dancing until four in the morning.


Sunday morning we woke up to the sound of the noisy greeks starting at 8 in the morning. We had breakfast at the same place, including the glass of beer and Sprite. It tasted better this day, maybe my hangover was worse?


We took a local train to visit the salt mines at Wieliczka. A miner guide took us down into the ground through a series of wooden stairs. We followed a very touristy route, complete with garden gnomes, salt statues and some hobo pretending to be the mountain king. "Stay away from my salt! Stop licking the walls!"

They also had a cathedral underground complete with a salt statue of John Paul II (The REAL pope according to my Polish hosts, not "that German guy"). The tour ended up in the gift shop - we had to queue up for the lifts up to the top floor to get back into the daylight. At the top we had to wait in a room for ten minutes before we could go outside without anyone telling us the reason why. Maybe they expected us to tip them or something?

We took a minibus shuttle back to Krakow and went to a very nice restaurant close to the market. The restaurant was serving traditional Polish cuisine and had many interesting dishes that I had not seen before. Here we also met up with Paulina's room mate Dominika. After a very nice meal, we went to a couple of pubs before ending up at a very cool club called Spokój. This club had a nice selection of booze, decent clientèle , 70's interior design and decent music (except for playing way too much U2). We met up with Sylwia after a while. Lukasz and I had a very nice time, drinking, talking and feeling the smoothness of the juice. We had a master plan of going to bed at 22.00 in order to get some sleep as we would have to get up at 04.00 to make our flight back to Amsterdam. With the pleasant company, and the drinking, we were having too much fun to be able to pull ourselves back to the hostel. None of us wanted to leave , and we ended up drinking until 01.00.

The flight back was painful, and in the evening I was really trashed, but it was totally worth it. Krakow to me was lots of nice clubs, gorgeous women, extremely cheap booze and decent food. It is definitely a city I want to go back to at some point.

My pictures

Lukasz' pictures