Amsterdam to Prague - 2007-06-21 - Entry 938

We got back a while ago from hiking around from the Prague Castle. And then we went back out and did a little bit of grocery shopping and sitting in a lawn. We got jelly for putting in our yogurt tomorrow. We decided we should eat that stuff fast because our fridge doesn't actually refrigerate. This entry from our last morning in Amsterdam / first night in Berlin is pretty long so I'll give it it's own meta-entry. Maybe soon I'll get some pictures uploaded and make an entry for them.

2007-06-15 (Friday)

I had a pretty cool dream last night. I'm not sure how it started out. I think I was walking across some university campus with a group of folks as part of a longer journey across Germany. We had stopped at this convenience store in the middle of a square, and I remembered walking out of the place really tired...

I woke up to my taxi driver telling me that this was my stop , and my bill was 40.37.. It seemed a bit much for the short drive to the other side of campus where A-Day was waiting for me . But I knew taxis were expensive. How did I end up in a taxi? I must have been so tired and sleepy that I sat down in one just because it was a soft place to sit.

So I paid the bill, got out, and A-Day was there giving me this look like 'how stupid are you?'. I tried to explain that I didn't mean to take a taxi, that I had done it in my sleep, but he didn't buy that.

Later on I was walking through some tunnels and along roads, and eventually came to this city-like area that was somehow connected with the production of Star Trek TNG. There were these white dome or bean shaped buildings with a lot of paths around them, usually separated by canals. Often I would have to find a tunnel to get from one building to another. I was hanging around this place a lot, and I learned my way around and discovered shortcuts that could get me in and out of town quickly, or directly to the grocery store in the center.

While I walked along the paths in the town I noticed that the sky was being covered in clouds and getting very dark. I overheard some people talking about this being the end of the world. I'm not sure how it was supposed to end, but it made a lot of sense at the time. But I wasn't worried.

[other stuff here]

I was back at the grocery store. It was like a warehouse inside. I remember something about highways and airplanes (Guardian Legend corridor-style views of the planes flying along/over the highways). I met some other folks in there who came along with me for the rest of my journey.

There was a gate that I was trying to get through out of the town. But it was guarded by a bunch of Russians. I think to get by them I had to do something tricky like coming through a tunnel behind them while they were looking the other way.

Leaving th at town to the west, we walked along a dark cobblestone path with a stone railing, behind which was a ravine and vine covered fores t. Since the sky was blacked out by the coming storm all the streetlights were on, and the way they lit up all the foliage was very pretty. We were having to climb over walls and fences to get where we were going. It was kind of neat.

At the end I was on a boat arriving in Chicago. When it landed I got off and found A-Day there waiting for me. It was good to see him.

Sometimes on the train we run into Americans. You can tell because they say stuff like "fuckin shit smells like ass LOL" all the time.

On the train to Berlin I thought about leaf blowing algorithms .

After much time on the train we arrived in Berlin. We had no idea where our hostel was other than somewhere in the region of 2 U-Bahn stations until we found some Sidewalk Express internet terminals and google mapped it up. We wanted to find a U-Bahn station and get tickets but ended up walking all the way to the hostel, which wasn't really that bad a walk.

We met 2 o f our possible 3 roommates - a couple of girls taking a weekend here from Denmark. That's only 8 hours away by train, making it 'nearby' by our standards.

We also discovered that there's a Blue Man Group show tomorrow at 15:00. , and we plan to go see that. Our roommates went to some electronica 'concert' tonight.

I took a shower. Showers here have curtains that go down to about 3 feet above the ground. So you get a good look at showerers' legs.

We went and bought sorbet and pasta stuff at Lidl (It's like Aldi but open longer) and got lost on our way back while our sorbet melted.

The kitchen at Meininger hostel is a 'doesn't cook your food' kitchen. We made a mess out of jelly, A-Day made gross mis-cooked spaghetti, and I made the microwave make lightning.

A-Day called the cheese we bought from Lidl "the worst food I've ever eaten". As I told him that I couldn't handle his spaghetti, he told me about Kayla's brother, who, if he were to eat spaghetti that wasn't perfect, would immediately vomit. Also there was a friend of Sky's who would throw up if you talked about having hair in your mouth.

A-Day tried to wash his laundry by putting it in the drier. Now he's outside talking to some Navy guy from some town in northern Germany.

He won't stop. And the guy keeps smoking more cigarettes. He's gone through about 10 already. What the German guy says is all interesting but the way A-Day keeps going gets really annoying. He talks to these random people as if he already knows all about how they live and says "that's very good" to everything, while making that stupid smiling nodding gesture. He thinks he's soooo sophisticated because he talks about swing dancing and drugs and things that are "very beautiful". :P

A-Day: So, all the politicians in Europe are perfect, right? (makes an 'I'm so interested in talking to you' face)
German: No, actually some of them suck.
A-Day: That's very good. (smiles and nods)

After 3 hours of this I had to leave and go back to the laundry and crap we left in the kitchen that he seems to have completely forgotten about.

Meanwhile it rained pretty hard outside for about a half hour. Somehow this flooded the basement of the hostel, but the kitchen floor is raised about 2 inches above that of the hall full of water, so it didn't get into any of our stuff. Some rude Russian guys came to clean it up.

I have moved my clothes to the drier. All of A-Day's stuff is still sitting here as he left it about 5 hours ago.

It's friggin' 3:30 AM. Maybe the idea is to stay up until breakfast so they won't wake up the roomies. I am waiting for my laundry to be dried.

That was a pretty sweet waterfall coming out from under the bathroom door earlier. Ooh, and just now a nice thunder. I will work on putting away some of these dishes we used.

2007-06-16 (Saturday)

My throat still hurts from drinking the wrong way yesterday. I dumped too much in my mouth at once and it tried to come out my nose. I wouldn't think that getting water in my nose could mess me up so much. Eating food seems to help.

Now Malte is giving us a tour of the government area in Berlin. We went past the Reichstag and the wall of constitution (I really like the German constitution). It's neat except when A-Day starts talking a lot.

Malte took off to meet his girlfriend and A-Day and I went down to BlueMax to watch Blue Man Group. I guess that's their own dedicated theater. It was a pretty awesome show. I especially liked the musicians up in their boxes to the left and right above the stage. With their stick man suits and lighting effects they just looked totally sweet.

After the show we went to the train station and internetted and fretted about having to buy tickets to Prague because Eurail doesn't cover Czechland. But they weren't too bad - 65. for both of us to get in and out. We also booked rooms in Rothenburg and Munich.

While we walked through the park I sort of wished I was by myself. Then I realized that I could just do what I would do if I were by myself and A-Day would come along. I wanted to go get ice cream (to soothe my throat), so I took off towards where I thought I had seen a guy selling it. And we got ice cream and walked around the park a bit more and by the Reichstag again.

After we got back and started having sandwiches A-Day tried to make friends with some Mexicans by telling them that I was crazy and grumpy all the time. Being already tired of him being a douchebag, I threw a magazine at him and called him a dick and left. I rode around the subways and looked in the Free Berlin booklet I had to try to find a dance club. Also these weird guys that I met on the subway that I think were gay told me that I should check out Watergate, which was the same place recommended by the book for trance and other electronic stuff. Unfortunately it was a bit early still for clubbing (22:00; they said a good time to show up might be 1:00 in the morning), and by the time I actually found the place I had sore feet, my sore throat was still around, and I didn't feel like sitting around for another hour waiting for them to open up and try to go in all by myself anyway. So I headed home. I got a little bit lost. In one subway station someone passed me with their cell phone going thump-thump-thump-thump. It reminded me of a very specific Daft Punk song. Several seconds later the rest of that song started to fade in. I was surprised that I had recognized it just from the bass drum as played through a cell phone.

2007-06-19 (Tuesday)

I had a dream that me and a group of friends had started our own country and that I had been elected king. We were building a lot of scaffolding and wooden ramps, and I was thinking about what should go into the constitution. I was so happy to be king. I was going to make this country so awesome.

We walked through the Tiergarten and the Holocaust memorial on our way to the bike tour on Sunday. Apparently you're not supposed to run around *on top* of the stones, but we did for a while. The meaning we came up with was that like the holocaust, jumping around on the monument is fun and games at first, but as you go deeper it gets really scary. We also ran into our roommates on 2 separate occasions in completely different parts of Berlin. The bike tour was weird at first, but the guide told us a pretty awesome story at the end while we sat in this funny sand lot in east Berlin and we all tipped him 10..

We both wanted to go to Watergate after that, but it turns out they're only open Wednesday, sometimes Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. So we walked back to the hostel instead.

On Monday we rode the S-Bahn (the S-Bahn and U-Bahn each go both above and below the ground - the difference seems to be that S-Bahn trains have individual seats with high backs rather than benches and are somewhat more spacious inside) way up north to see Sachsenhausen. That place made me pissed at George Bush. All that standing was making my back and legs hurt. I layed down near the Russian barracks for a while until one of the administrators came by and told me not to do that.

After Sachsenhausen we meant to go check out the Reichstag, but first get either pizza from the biergarten in Tiergarten that we had stopped at during the bike tour or a sandwich from Subway (not to be confused with the U-Bahn itself, though the Subway I had in mind was, as it turned out, at Potzdamer Platz, which we had passed through on our way downtown with Malte days earlier, at which time Malte mentioned that Subway sandwiches here were different here than in the states and that we might like to try one). By the time we got to the biergarten the pizza place was closed, so we figured we should head straight to the Reichstag rather than trying to find a Subway, since the Subways would probably be closed by then anyway. Reichstag was pretty neat. There were good views of the city from the top, and a cool mirrored elevator. I almost lost my camera batteries while going through security.

Leaving Berlin, now. A-Day thinks he left his journal at the Berlin hostel while we were doing laundry until 4 in the morning. As we left the kitchen (where the laundry is done) I heard beards chirping. It was disheartening. I meant to get some sleep.

On our Praha-ward train we have a small room with 6 seats all to ourselves. It's very quiet in here and it's easy to doze off while watching the trees fly by out the window. There's a trace of that cigarette-smoke-in-the-furniture smell, and it all reminds me of when I was very young, staying at someone's house on a summer afternoon. Usually there wouldn't be a whole lot to do there (I remember Becky had a Smurf house, and Ellen had this thing you could pour rice through) so I'd occupy myself by thinking about railroads and castles and drawing mazes. If I was at a house with other kids around we'd sometimes end up in the backyard and have to swing for a while (I remember being at Joann's neighbor's house, and them arguing about whether or not it was possible to swing so high that you'd go over the bar), sometimes they'd play with random toys in their basement that I didn't know what to do with (I remember Joann yelling "Dan is a boy, stupid!" at one of her friends once (just before getting in trouble and then we all had to go home), but I didn't really mind playing with barbies if that's what they had there. And once we went to Fizz's house and wanted to play with boxes with him, but he told us to get our own boxes and we left). Maybe those other kids also were bored a lot of the time. We all watched a lot of TV. But at other kids' houses it was usually Nick Jr, which I never liked.

Video games were usually fun--at least the good ones. Mario, TGL, --> --Zelda, and so on.

As I think back it seems like most of my memories from back then (until I was about 12 or 13) are of me being bored unless I was drawing mazes or playing video games or making stuff on the computer. But as I think about it more I remember that there were a lot of times that it was exciting to be outside doing other things. Like running around at Elver park as the sun was setting before the fireworks, or at the Access to Independence picnics where I'd explore the playground and that crazy shelter building (also around sunset). Anything happening around sunrise or sunset or during a storm seems to be exciting. Especially if we're going to have a picnic.

I'm not mentioning building snow forts or sand castles because I feel like those activities fall more under 'making stuff' than 'just feeling good to be alive'. Having to make stuff to feel like I'm spending my time well is what I've been trying to get away from, since it doesn't keep me happy the way it used to.

Now that we've crossed the border into Czechland we're riding through an area that looks just like a scene built around a model railroad. Lots of mountains and houses with red roofs and railroad going right along the river and through tunnels.

I just realized that this is the first country we've come into not knowing a single word of their language.

2007-06-20 (Wednesday)

Last night we wandered south through Prague until we found our hostel. This city is pretty much a maze of pedestrians. All the wandering and going through tunnels and over bridges and through sweet places reminds me of dreams I've had.

We wandered around with Isabel from Canada looking for a bar. We all got beer, she got soup, and A-Day and I got onion rings, all for about 8$ (160 CZKs).

Back at the hostel I took advantage of the free and currently unused internet to copy more of my journal up to the last day of Amsterdam.

I had a dream that we (A-Day and I, at least) were living in this big dorm building with showers in round outcroppings in the corners. There was a neat garden maze outside, and a river. We were on a plane t that was mostly like Earth except it was mostly land instead of mostly ocean. The people there tried to make a really shallow ocean by digging down about a foot all over, but the water just soaked into the ground and they all sighed. Later on Hitler was trying to be my friend, but it was hard for him because I just kept talking about what a crappy guy he was.

Today A-Day and I subwayed over to Prague Castle and checked that all out. A-Day bought a ticket (and used said ticket) to go inside the cathedral. Meanwhile I dozed off on a bench. After he came out we wandered around a bit and soon I had to use the WC, but we were no longer near one. There was a cool green ravine near the castle, and a tunnel deep under the road we had been on earlier, and some guys playing tennis. A-Day wanted to watch them play because they were playing doubles and that was intense, but I still had to find a WC. Finally we came back to the castle and I found one. Then we walked homewards through the park to the south and became hungry and thirsty. We stopped at a little restaurant under the tower and ate a grilled fried cheese sandwich with ketchup. The ketchup was very important to that sandwich, and the sandwich probably would have been better with more ketchup.

We came back to the hostel finally, did some shopping for jelly, met our new roommate from DC who will only be here for one night, and I've been drinking tea and typing up my book journal entries into my LJ meta-entries (I call them that because they are entries about entries that I have already written) and copying pictures from A-Day's camera onto this machine and uploading them to photobucket. I got off for a bit now to let another guy use the computer for a while.

OMG I'm caught up!

There is no more journal to copy! What I am typing now is new and real-time. Here are some pictures from lately.

Sidewalk Expressing up some bookings for Interlaken at Berlin Hauptbahnhof

Our private room on the train.

A-Day napping.

Lunch.

Pretty mountains.

Railroad work.

Model-esque.

Bridge.

Our first look at Prague.

Wandering through the maze that is Prague sidewalks on our way to Atlas Hostel.

Soft drinks at the local Albert, at 13 CZK per 2-liter bottle. That's about 60 US cents. But don't take pictures in the grocery store because someone'll yell at you.