Well, I’m back in the Can now.  Not quite sure what to make of that.  Back to work also.  I had a good time.  Didn’t update this blog nearly as often as I perhaps should have.  Meh.  I didn’t even write about Berlin, Stine, Denmark, Sweden and Denmark again!  *sigh*  Well I did take notes manually so perhaps one day I’ll write it up here.  Just in case the imaginary people who read this care.

Bye now!

Well, city of beer anyway. I really hope I can come back here when Oktoberfest is on. That would be the win! Yeah, this post is really late, like the other ones. Meh, I don’t really have an excuse, I’ve just been bumming around for the past couple of weeks anyway. Well, I’m doing it now. Word.

I caught a train to Munich from Koeln. It was pretty nice. The German ICE (InterCity Express) trains are actually quite nice. More comfortable than a plane and more convenient. No fucking around with airport security and all that shit. So around 5 hours on the train later, I was in Munich, the world capital of Beer!

Once again I had forgotten to note where my hostel was in relation to the train station and as a result I had to find a net cafe to look it up. There was one not far from the station, nice. Looked it up, turns out my hostel was really close to the station too. Only a few minutes walk to the hostel and I checked in. This hostel was not bad, more expensive than before. I believe I was paying 25 euros per night here as opposed to ~20 in Koeln. Meh, at least here I got all the nights in the same room. There was a bar thing downstairs at the hostel, bit expensive but I got a free drink voucher when I checked in (pretty small though).

One interesting highlight of my first night in Munich, the fire alarm in the hostel went off at 4:50am. Not my favorite method of awaking in the morning! Everyone rushed outsite into the early morning half-light. The fire department showed up shortly and rushed into the building. Everyone shuffled around for around 20 minutes before it was announced as a false-alarm. How about that? Went back to sleep.

There was technically free breakfast at this hostel but it finished at 10am and I missed it most of the 5 days I stayed there. It was pretty crappy anyway, just toast. What kind of hearty breakfast is that?

I went on several tours and such whilst I was in Munich:

• Free bicycle tour
• Free walking tour
• Visited Deutsches Museum…(not technically a tour)
• Beer tour!

The bicycle tour was pretty cool. We had these California cruiser style bikes which only had back-pedal brakes, old-school! They were a bit annoying to control but the hang was got of fairly easily. It was a bit weird at first because no-one here in Europe ever wears a bicycle helmet, except maybe in the Tour de France. I think it’s generally a bit safer to be riding here though because there are a lot more bikes and people generally watch out for them in cars.

We rode around some of the city sights such as the state opera, the royal residence ( for the now defunct royal family of Bavaria), the Hofgarten (royal garden), the Bavarian State Chancelry, the Englischer Garten (there was a nudist meadow in there but it was too cold for nudists that day aparently) and to the Chinese Tower beer garden where we proceeded to drink a famous Muenchner Maß (1L stein!) of beer.

On the way back from the beer garden we passed by the famous Muenchener river surfers! Yes, you read that correctly, even though the nearest ocean is > 500km away you can still surf in Munich. There is a standing wave in the Eisbach which people surf on, it’s really cool.

I also went on a free walking tour the next day. It wasn’t quite as good as the biking tour I thought, mainly because we had to walk everywhere. For this reason it havd to be concentrated more in the city centre so we didn’t have to walk too far. Even then, I thought we spent a little too much time walking. We saw a lot of the same stuff so half the time I wasn’t paying attention. Still, it was nice.

The next day I decided to get some culture into me. I’d heard from the free biking tour that the Deutsches Museum was awesome. It’s “the world’s largest museum of technology and science” according to Wikipedia. It was awesome, they were right. I wish I had more time there. Unfortunately I only got there at 12:00. I really should’ve gotten there at 9:00 to get in a really full day, there’s so much to see. I made the mistake (again!) of underestimating how much there was and what I wanted to see. I really had to rush it in the end. The problem was that everything was fascinating so I spent a lot of time at the beginning looking at things and didn’t have enough time at the end. Why did I leave aeronautics until the end?

I could go on about this place for ages, but I probably wont. This blog post is long enough as it is. I will just say that this place is amazing and if you ever get a chance to go, you definitely should! There were steam engines of all types, internal combustion engines, power plants, power tools, universal milling machines and laser cutters. There was a computer science and electronic engineering section covering from the first mechanical calculation devices, slide-rules and such to automata, analogue computers, relay computers, the first transistors and logic gates, mainframes, mini-computers, archaic storage (core memory, drum memory, mercury delay lines!) supercomputers (a Cray 1, take that Paris Museum of Inventions!) and more! Yeah, it was good.

I also visited the astronomy section which was pretty awesome but a bit small. I have a feeling I would’ve liked it much more in my youth. Still it was good.

I then visited the maritime and aeronautical sections. Both of these sections were massive and supremely awesome. I wish I’d have managed my time a little better and had more time to spend in here. I spent too much time looking at steam engines (well, can you blame me?)! The maritime section had all manner of boats and watercraft (as would be expected) from early canoe to sailing boats, powered boats and even and original WW2 U-Boat! There were some cool diving suits too.

The aeronautics section was the coolest and unfortunately (due to bad time management) was the one I spent least time in! I kept getting side-tracked by sections like hydraulic engineering (which I would’ve liked to view for more than the 5 seconds I did) and scientific instruments (lots of old clocks and such). By the time I’d made it through maritime I only had around 35 minutes left before the museum closed! This section was so amazing, there were just planes everywhere! Just sitting there in the middle of the room, a plane, and 50 others. All sorts, jets, gliders, jet fighters, helicopters. They even had a cross-section of a 747. There were jet engines in various stages of dismantlication so you could see their guts. There was even an original V2 rocket in the middle of a spiral staircase! Sorry about all the pics, there was just so much to see.

I could’ve spent half the day in here. There was a whole other section on early flight which I didn’t really get to see As you went further upstairs it transitioned into rockets and such. The museum was closing very soon as I got there so I really didn’t get to see as much as I wanted. There were satellites and rocket engines, not sure how many of them were real but they looked majorly cool. On the way out I hurried through the early flight gallery. It’d have liked to have spent much more time there (story of the day really) but they were announcing the closing of the museum for the day so I couldn’t linger.

It was raining when I left the museum, how nice. Walked over to Marienplatz because I was going on a beer tour and that’s where it started from. This tour I had to pay to go on. To this point I’d been utilising free tours (they rely on tipping) and such because I’m such a poor backpacker. I figured, however; that being in Munich, this was too good of an opportunity to pass up, a beer tour man!

The tour guide was a fairly jolly Munich local so he knew a thing or two about beer. We went around to a beer hall and tried some wheat beer, it was pretty nice. We then went to a micro-brewery/beer hall to see the brewing process in action. The brewery was quite fascinating really, to see how they go through the process and turn mere barley into tasty Muenchener bier. We were given several samples of different styles of beers brewed at this particular brewery. They were quite nice, albeit a little small (the free samples were 100ml). On the tour were a bunch of cool mexicans, they were really nice people. They told me I should go to Mexico, I may comply.

After this we headed over to the famous Hofbräuhaus beer hall where we remained for the rest of the evening. This is the most famous (well, definitely one of the) beer hall in the world! It’s massive, filled with people sitting at tables with massive 1L steins (Maß) of beer and eating much meat (pork, wurst and such). Everyone ordered beers and drank them with much jovial conversation and laughter. It reminded me of Oktoberfest in Canberra with bigger glasses, more atmosphere and less drunken yobbos. Nice.

I didn’t really do much in Munich apart from these things. It was cold and raining alot Unfortunately for me, the weather’s been pretty rubbish here whilst I’ve been in Europe.

Well, that’s it for now. I’ll try to write another disgustingly late episode soon.

Peace…

After Paris, back on to Koeln. This time to stay for a few days on my way to Muenchen. I could’ve gone directly but I think it was cheaper this way. Plus, I get to see the Dom, w00t. Koeln is pretty nice, one of the bigger cities in Germany although I didn’t really see that much of it. I pretty much spent my three days there hanging around the hostel drinking Koelsh beer and surfing the nets. Free wireless at a hostel is not good for tourism!!

I did go to the Dom (cathedral) and man is it impressive. Flying buttresses everywhere, and you all know how much I love flying buttresses!

The inside was equally as impressive. Nice columns and high vaulted arches. Stained glass windows everywhere. Marble floors with complicated mosaics everywhere.

There were lots of creepy sarcophagi lying about, presumably containing old dead important church people.

I wasn’t particularly impressed by the organ in this cathedral, Notre Dame was better.

I went up into the spire of the cathedral, I think it was around 2€. I had to ascend this narrow stone spiral staircase some 500 steps to the very top. The walls were covered in graffiti of the ilk “We were here”, etc. Occasionally there were some mildly witty and insightful ones. Interestingly, a lot of anarchy symbols.

Halfway up were the bells. They were big. Wouldn’t have liked to be around when they went off. The fellow there who controlled (or guarded, who knows?) the bells from his little hut had some nice big earmuffs. Smart.

Continued up the tower, more steps, tiring. Finally to the summit. It was a really nice view from the top. You could see all of Koeln, spread out before you. The Rhine snaking off into the distance. More graffiti up here, way more. If I’d have known, perhaps I’d have brought a pen. Oh well.

I took lots of photos of all of the different graffitis, not present here.

I pretty much spent the rest of my time in Koeln drinking cheap german beer, going to pubs with crazy British people and eating falafels. I believe I stayed three nights here before catching a train to Munich. More on that later.

w0rd…

Ok, I’m going to try to be a bit more brief on this one. The last post got a little out of hand.

Stayed 5 nights in Paris, w00t… That is all.

Ok, a longer post than that.

For the first two nights in Paris I stayed in the derro-est hostel ever known to man, It was called Friend’s Hostel Paris, don’t ever go there. I think I booked it because it was cheap, the rating was 54%, why didn’t I take heed? Feel free to peruse some of the reviews left on hostel world. Last time I don’t read those I can tell you that! Tiny rooms with too many beds packed in, dodgy looking reception guy, only one key for each room, no lockers or anything, dooodgy! Must’ve been situated right outside the dodgy-est metro station in paris too (Barbes Rochechouart), lots of people trying to sell you cigarettes and getting into wild gesticulating arguments with eachother. I was going to take a photo but I really didn’t want to get my camera out!

On the first afternoon we went to see the Eiffel Tower (as you do). Jay and Lucy were situated in another (much more pleasant) part of town so we met there. I must say that I have been quite impressed with the Paris Metro system. Maybe I’t because I’ve never really used a proper metro system but it was great. Trains every 4 minutes, easy to follow signage. It was really easy to get around, especially after I bought a unlimited weekly pass for 16 euros, well worth it.

The Eiffel tower was really big. Bigger than I thought it would be. It’s really quite imposing when you’re standing directly below it. We thought about going up but the lines were about 2 hours long and the price ranging from 4 to 12 euros depending on where you disembarked. Meh, I’ll do it when I’m next in Paris.

The plaza thing directly below the tower was full of tourists and people trying to sell expensive, low-quality souvenirs to the tourists, and some buskers. Not bad though.

We left to get some food, then it started to rain

Next day, to the Lourve. I wanted to see me so antiquities and some arts. I did indeed do just that. The Lourve was pretty damn cool. Lots of very old things, and arts. I liked the arts. We checked out the ancient Egyptian stuff first. Lots of old hieroglyphics and papyrus and such. There was a real live (well, it was once) mummy too, awesome. I was glad, but a little disappointed when it didn’t come alive and start chasing us.

We went by the Objets d’Art Islamic (or some such). Lots of plates and rugs and things. There were some nice swords and daggers too, nice.

Of course we had to see the Mona Lisa. It’d be a bit of a shame to go to the Lourve and not have a look. I hear it’s underwhelming. Had to go through the gallery of Italian artists to get there. Really there were a lot of paintings of Jesus and saints and angels and such. Not my bag really. I did learn a thing or two about religious iconography though. Of course, you can’t take photos in that gallery so you’ll just have to use your imagination. It looks like this by the way.

Had a look at the Venus de Milo too. It’s supposed to be pretty famous. It wasn’t bad.

After the Lourve, Jay and I left Lucy and went to a museum of inventions, it was teh win! We didn’t have enough time at all though. The place was way bigger than we though and we spent too much time looking at the scales and old-school scientific instruments and not enough time looking at the computers (CRAY anyone?) and steam engines and such. *sigh*

That evening I decided to sample the local fine wine (2 euro for a bottle!). Long story short, woke up the next day very sore and sorry for myself. Plus, I had to switch hostels and walk around for several hours whilst severely hungover. Watch out for people from Brighton. They’ll “have this town”!

Random awesome warning I saw on an electricity box thing:

Anyhoo, also went to the Arc de Triomph, w00t. The roundabout that surrounds that has to be seen to be believed. I can’t believe they don’t have way more accidents.

Oh man, this is ending up just as long as the other one! I’ll try and make sure that I post more often from now on! I promise!

The next day Jay and I went to Lisses, the home of Parkour. We left Lucy behind, shopping in Paris. She wouldn’t have liked it anyway. It was totally awesome. We went to the Dame du Lac first. You might recognise it from several PK vids containing David Belle. Well, it’s got a fence around it now. We were too pussy to climb over and touch it. We didn’t want to be arrested or anything. I was going to climb around the fence where it joined the lake but a little of it gave way and almost had me in the drink! Man, that water was fetid and gross! So, some photz:

Walked around there for a bit, Jay decided to do a bit of PK. Some precisions:

Jay doing a precision in Lisses!

We walked around for a bit and found the staricase. THE staricase!

So we hung out there for a while. Met this guy from Slovakia (I think). He was pretty cool. After a while this guy came over, he was a Lisses local! We talked to him for a bit even though he didn’t know much english. I think he said his name was Alexander? He started training, he was so awesome. He’s been training for 8 or so years, with David Belle etc. Quite unexpected and just plain hoopy.

Here’s him jumping effortlessly to the roof from the staircase. Not easy by anyone’s measure (well, I guess by Lisses measures!).

So anyway, awesome time in Lisses. Sorry, this post is becoming abortive. I need to finish it and It’s 1am and I’m tired. Lah, went to Notre Dame and Sacre Coure the next day. Saw the Eiffel Tower at night, pretty. Left Paris, went back to Koeln. Seeya next time folks.

Meh, that is all…

Yeah, my post titles aren’t as hip and cool as Jay’s. Get over it.

Well this is the first of my posts done on thew actual trip. I really haven’t been able to get to the internets yet long enough to write. I thought that wouldn’t be so. What can you do?

So I left the Can on last Friday arvo and caught the bus to Sydney. Stayed overnight there and then onto the airport. 9 hour flight to Taipei, not so fun! The seat backs had screens in them which you could use to watch shows and movies and such, scrubs and top-gear, lolz. You could also view the current location, speed, altitude, heading, etc of the plane. Pretty cool if you’re bored (oh I was!). The guy in front of me had his seat reclined for most of the flight though so I had to view the screen from an inch in front of my face!

Had to hang around at the airport for two hours before my next flight came. Taipei airport smells like an old school, don’t go there, it’s a bit decrepit and the communist party scares me. I thought I’d be arrested for my seditious thoughts or something. On the plus side, I saw some awesome communist propaganda!

Next flight was from Taipei to Bangkok. Not quite back-tracking but annoying none the less. Three hours for that one. I think by this time it was around 12:30 am aus time so I was getting tired.

Now Bangkok airport is nice, much nicer than Taipei, yay capitalism! Had to hang around there for a couple more hours. I think by the time the flight finally left it was 6:30 am aus time! I was tired and only managed to sleep a couple of hours on that flight. So I arrived in Amsterdam at 10:00 am Sunday, Amsterdam time (8 hours behind the Can) pretty tired. Had to trek across Amsterdam to Amstel station to catch my bus to Koln. I must say, the trains are really nice. I thought I was in first class accidentally but not so, nice wide seats. On my way I stopped into a McDonalds, it is true, they asked me if I wanted mayo, weird (PS in France they do call it a Royale, not callin’ Jules [pulp fiction] a lier but I had to see for myself).

The bus station was in a really derro part of Amsterdam, it was a little weird. I had to wait there for an hour or so, watching the weirdos who were going to get on this bus with me. All I can say about this is, if you can help it, don’t take a bus in Europe, take a train. This thing stopped at like, every single town between Amsterdam and Koln, couldn’t believe it! 5 hours man! It’s like 200km!

Jay, Lucy and I had organised to meet up with Gaynor (cousin), Fenton and their children for a picnic by the Rhein. So We did, it was quite nice. Their children are much older and larger than I remember though. Guess that’s what happens. After that we went back to our hostel but first passed a real german Bier Garten. Got some Koelsch, a pint, it was nice. Lucy got a giant wurst, LOL.

The next morning we caught the train from Koeln to Paris and then to Rouen. You’d think that Rouen would be on the way to Paris, not so. We had to stop off in Brussels and get on a different train, we couldn’t get the Thalys all the way from Koeln so we had to catch the ICE to Brussels and then the Thalys to Paris. Dudes, you can get a beer from a vending machine in Brussels! A fracking vending machine! That is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen!

Long story (well not really) we transfer in paris to a train to Rouen. A couple more hours on the train and we’re there. Not much to say about Rouen, fairly nice town, not very used to getting tourists I think. There was a subway, woot. We totally got lost on the way to our hotel and Lucy was freaking out a little. I knew it would be right. In the end we asked some french lady and she knew enough english to put us right, word. Our hotel was pretty nice, three bed private room. The manager guy seemed a bit dodgy. There was free wifi though. Unfortunately I didn’t discover this untill our second night which was spent being really tired and having to sort something or other out on teh nets. There was a reason I didn’t have time to post, really…

First evening in Rouen we wandered around a bit trying to find somewhere to eat. We ended up going to a resturaunt in this really old (well to an Aussie) part of the city, all 17th century buildings. It looked like you imagine a medieval town to look like. I felt like I was in the middle of Monkey Island, nice…

That was nice, little expensive but I guess that’s what you get.

The next day we took a day trip to Bayeux, of tapestry fame (you know the one that depicts the battle of hastings in 1066). Caught the train from Rouen to Bayeux, another 1.5 hours or so I think. On the last leg (20 mins from Caen to Bayeux) we met two Canadians (Raynor and Loni) and an American (John, I think). We talked to them for a while, they were pretty cool. Raynor and Loni are from Saskatoon, Seskatchwan! Try saying that 10 times fast. John went off to do a D-Day landing beaches tour. Raynor and Loni were going to spend the night in Bayeux and then go on to Paris the next day. They didn’t have anything else to do so they acompanied us to the tapestry. Now Bayeux is a lovely little town. It reminds me much moreso of what a small little medieval town should look like. There are tiny little cobblestone streets and old school buildings and houses everywhere.

To top it off there is a great big cathedral smack bang in the middle. The French do love their cathedrals, there were two within spitting distance in Rouen. Got a youth discount in to see the tapastry (yay international youth card) so it was only around 3,50E (man, they use commas here instead of decimal points, weird). There was a little film thing about the tapastry in 20 mins so we went in to see the tapastry first. Lucy said it was long, but man, it /is/ long! Around 70 metres! It’s just so amazing, this thing was made almost 1000 years ago and It’s still going awesome. The whole lot was stitched by hand (obviously) and it is very intricate. So much effort went into making it, I wonder if they knew it would last this long? You all probably know, the tapestry depicts the Battle of Hastings in 1066 (and the events that proceed this) which results in King Harold being slain and William the Conqueror (formally William the Bastard, I think he made an improvement). We got a free audio tour which describes the tapastry whilst you are going along. Very useful since it wasn’t very obvious (to me at least) what was going on.

We went and was the short movie after seeing the tapastry. It just gave a little context into the story and how the tapestry was made and has been kept to this day. Pretty cool.

After the tapestry We went then to a small resturaunt thing for lunch which served oven pizza and chips which were rather crappy. Unfortunatly we didn’t know until after we had ordered!

We left that crappy resturaunt and wandered around trying to find some museum which we got free entry into ’cause we saw the tapestry. We found the cathedral instead. Man I just love the architecture of these things! Flying buttresses are the most awesome architectural device ever invented! We went in there and checked it out, it was pretty damn cool. There was a gigantic organ on the back wall which I made a joke about, sigh.

The inside of the cathedral was awesome. Man, I want to live in one of these things! Just amazing. The columns were all intricately carved and, well, everything was! The windows were all stained glass and looked really cool. Meh, I’m not very good at describing such things, but it was nice…

We were still hanging around with Raynor and Loni at this point. We finally found that other museum we had entry into. It wasn’t particularly intersting. Mainly just paintings by renound local artists. One thing that was super awesome was the lace. They had some very impressive examples of hand-made lace on display. I had no idea how lace was made before that day but I now have much more respect for laciers (name?). They have a pattern which they stick pins into and wind fine thread around the pins in such a way that lace is produced, don’t ask me exactly how but it is impressive. For some reason I don’t have any photos

We chillaxed with beers in a nice little cafe near the tapastry place. Chatted for a while with the Canadian ones. I swapped a AUD$2 for 2 Canadian dollars (a toonie), woot.

Walked back to the train station, said goodbye to our new Canadian friends (we exchanged facebook info though) and caught the train back to Rouen.

Had dinner in a mexican resturaunt near our hotel. I had some nachos, aww yeah. Lol, they were serving Fosters, I decided to have some. I find it deliciously ironic that the first fosters I ever drank was in a mexican resturaunt, in France.

Alright, that’s where I’ll have to leave it for now. More later…

w0rd.

Well, I sit here and write some blog words here.  I am about to embark upon my great odyssey to the land beyond.  It be the night before I leave for the sydney town wherupon I shall travel some further distance to some place I know not about.  I think I may quit while I’m ahead there.  Coherence seems not to be my strong point at the moment.  Lolz, so I think I might go and pack, or go to sleep and finish my packing tomorrow.

So, Auf Widersehen und guten nach mein freunden!

Lolcats!