Now the Disco Machine lives in Munich and we are all friends

So... firstly, forgive me for not blogging for a while. Over the next few days I'll bring you up to date with my adventures.

Secondly, spent a few more days in Berlin. Drove to Frankfurt Oder on the border of Poland and had lunch. Then drove into Poland - because I could. It was dark and crappy, so didn't stay long before we headed back to Berlin. I did manage to get a couple of cool stamps in my passport. The next day, picked up the Australian girls again and this time we headed north and drove through a bunch of little towns. It snowed all day! Yes - After almost 29 years on this planet, I have finally seen snow! Got back to Berlin and proceeded to get more than a little drunk on cocktails.

Next stop, as the title of this entry would suggest - Munich.

Drove all the way from Berlin (6 hours) on the Autobahn (cool) and stopped for lunch in Leipzig. Pretty boring place. Arrived in Munich around 7pm and checked into hostel and slept. So tired. The next day I slept in, so I missed a tour I wanted to do, but ended up walking around town all day. Interesting place. Had an early night (determined to get up early) as tomorrow was New Years Eve.

Caught the walking tour and ran into 2 guys (Charlie and Chris) from Adelaide (they are still good people despite this fact) and also met a Tasmania couple (Stewie and Cat). The walking tour was pretty crap. There is this company called 'Sandmans New Tours'. I took their New Amsterdam Tour, New Berlin Tour, Sachsenhausen Tour and they were all excellent. This tour fell down because, well, how do I put this nicely... The guide SUCKED.

Afther the tour the 6 of us headed to the Hopfbrauhaus for a late lunch/early dinner. Wow. Okay - first thing you gotta know is that they bring you beer in Steins (see below). This is a Litre of beer! Really good beer, too. Pretty impressive thing to see is the waiting staff bring out 12 of these things at a time using only their hands. As for the food... don't go their if you don't like pork (in fact - just don't go to Germany or Austria at all if you don't like pork). I had half a pig on my plate and it was expectional.



The six of us then decided to head out to Tollwood, the huge park grounds where they hold Oktoberfest. Sadly, Oktoberfest doesn't run in December (who'd of thought?). Happily, there is an enormous NYE party held here. We ended up in a Marquee tent with an all-girl rock band and a lead singer with a voice like gravel belting out 80s rock classics. She did a fair impersonation of Bon Scott too...

As bad as the music was (and it was pretty terrible) we had so much fun. The Germans know how to have a good time and they are completely unashamed of showing it. People of all ages, dancing, singing drinking and generally having a great time. It is really quite contagious and ended up dancing away until the very early hours.

All except one German lady. The Marquee tent was packed and everyone was a little drunk, so it stands to reason that drinks are going to get spilt. Stewie accidentlly split like 3 drops of beer on this cranky lady's jacket and she went off her brain. We (attempted) to calm her down and eventually her muttering died away to nothing, until... Charlie spilt a tiny bit of beer on her jeans (I mean, one drop only!). Well. She went completely psychotic. She stands up, yelling her head off and pushing and shoving at our group, cursing and causing all sorts of problems. Her friends (or at least, the people with her) were all a little embarrassed by her episode. All in all, a big German lady in a rage... priceless.

As you can imagine, nothing happened on New Years Day. Everyone was ridiculously hung over and not in the mood to talk.

Next day, Stewie, Cat, Anth and I headed out to the town of Fussen, where we visited the famous Neuschwanstein castle. This is the one that the Disney copied for their famous catle logo (see below).

For only the second time in my life, it snowed! Infact, it snowed all day. Awesome. And thanks to Stewie, I also had my first ever snow ball fight!

Spent another night in Munich before heading off to another country. Try to update you on that one tomorrow.

You'll find me in a Berlin bar

Just arrived in Berlin after a 6 hour train ride from Amsterdam. Got to the hostel and was pleased to discover that it is really nice! After staying in some rather dubious hostels, it's refreshing to be staying somewhere good.

Being around Christmas time, I planned to spend 10 days in Berlin so that I wasn't travelling right in the middle of the holidays and I am not sorry for it. Berlin is incredible. This city is a vibrant, lush, evolving study of culture, history and humanity. I love the Germans. In school, I remember asking the question 'Do the Germans openly teach their children about the history of their country?' and I remember the skepticsm with which the teacher replied. I would have to say now that that is unfair to the Germans. They memorialise everything. For example:

Below is a picture of a memorial to the massive book burning that occurred in the plaza where this memorial is underneath. It is a single room full on wall to wall, floor to ceiling, empty shelves as a reminder of what happened here. On the other side of the plaza is a makeshift book stall, open 365 days a year, selling a selection of books that were known to be burnt here.



So much to see here, so rich in history. The Brandenburg gate is awesome, particularly at night. The Holocaust memorial is controversial in design, but I like it - and the museum below it was tragic, in the proper sense of the word. The remants of the wall are a reminder of insanity and checkpoint charlie is a joke (not the real location - just a photo op for the tourists).

I met up with Luke from Australia and some of his travelling companians for Christmas. After 6 days of clouds, Christmas day was actually a nice sunny day! With days of continuous cloud cover, a clear day is worth a hundred back in Australia. On Boxing Day, I decided to hire a car and Anth. Driving around and out of Berlin was a little insane, what with the steering wheel being incorrectly located in the passenger side, maniacs driving on the wrong side of the road and the gear-shift being on my right. Too many times my left hand hit the window, a reflex as my left went to change gears...

We picked up some Australian girls we'd met a few days earlier and we drove to the little town of Wernigerode, located almost exactly in the middle of Germany. This little hamlet is nestled in a small valley, but it's most striking feature is huge castle circa 12th Century that stands on the mountain looking over the township. Much of the interior of the castle has been preserved or reconstructed to the time of of Otto Von Stolberg-Wernigerode.

I think I could live in a castle.

After the castle we had a glorious dinner in a tradional German restaurant in wonderful main square of the town. It was so beautiful and preserved, it looked like a movie set, or one of those fake ye-olden townships you get in theme parks. Actually, it kinda looked like the town of Duloc from Shrek!

I have the car over the next few days and aim to see some more of Germany before driving down to Munich on Friday. Blog you later.

In the port of Amsterdam...

So - left Belgium the other day for a few nights in Rotterdam and then onto Amsterdam. What can I say about this city...?

Rotterdam is not pretty. Not even remotely. Possibly the most interesting thing to see in Rotterdam are these bizarro houses called the 'cube' houses. Someone, somewhere thought, wouldn't it be cool to build houses in the shape of a cube standing on it's point. Clearly, no sane people were nearby to correct this stupid idea and there you have it - Cube houses.



I'd love to tell you more about the place - but that's about all there was to see. I wouldn't put it on my list of must see places before I die... I did meet up with some people and had a great night out at a bar in town. So, at least the people were pretty good value. I also visited a world famous coffee shop - excellent.

Amsterdam on the other hand is very beautiful. There city is covered in these amazing canals. People live on houseboats or live in the small and somewhat dodgy houses throught the city. Actually, the houses are all built on this swampland. Years ago, if you wanted to build a house they would landfill a section with whatever debris they could find - ships, wood, junk, rubbish etc and use that as the 'land' to build upon. They then sunk these huge wooden logs into the newly created 'earth' as a foundation and built a wooden house on top. Now these supports are all rotten and virtually gone and as a result, the houses are all crooked, sinking and flood etc. In Australia, these places would be condemned! The bricks on the houses are all a facade and just bolted onto the wooded frames. If a house gets too unsafe they do this trick called 'seaming' where they just poor concrete between their house and next doors house to make it more stable!



This place is just cool. Imagine a town where sex, prostitution and soft drugs are all tollerated and out in the open. Conservatives will have you believe that this is the decline of civilisation, morally corrupt and a degenerate society but in reality you get one big, free, bohemian society where people tollerate others and is safe to raise your children.

These people have it good. If you stop making a big deal out of something - it just ceases to be an issue. People walk around and it really doesn't matter what they are into. I stayed in the heart of the Red Light district. On Friday night I was out till late drinking some some American girls I met. I walked back to my hostel at 4am without any fears for my safety. You can't really say the same for similar districts in other cities. You would not walk alone there in the middle of the night. Even the dealers of more hard-core drugs (Charlie boys) that stand around in the district are respectful. They are so open about their vices that there is even a school directly opposite the infamous "Window's".

There's heaps to do in Amsterdam. Went to the Anne Frank house, where she and her family went into hiding during the German occupation of The Netherlands. You actually walk through the rooms where they lived - even through the secret bookcase entrance... It was kind of sad.

Everyone in Amsterdam rides bikes. It's totally crazy. Couples on a date ride out for the night. Some dude attending a black tie function was riding there on his bike. Parents pick their children up from school on their bikes. If they have more than one child, they have this big wooden box at the front of their bike that they pile the kids into - crazy! Outside the main train station is a bike rack - the size of a carpark. It has three levels and would easily hold 100,000 bikes - and it is full.

Liked Amsterdam a lot. Would easily live here for a while. You can see the couple of photos I took posted on Flickr.

Favourites....

Hiya,

There are now heaps of photos on Flickr for you to look at if you are so inclined. I have sorted them into collections. There is also a new collection called "Favourites" which is a small collection of the best photos I have taken (according to me).

They are repeated in their relevant collections - I just think these are good to look at.