Arrived in Koln – or Cologne in Germany for those who don’t know where it is, and stayed a night at the Weltempfänger Backpacker Hostel which is 3 subways stops or a 15-20 minute walk into the center of the city. Before I talk about the hostel, I will backtrack a little – we woke up the final morning, packed up our tent (Tarks had already left to see his mum in Paris for a night) and then went to Dachau – our last concentration camp that we would see. We had the intention of just going and walking around it and just looking – rather than reading everything like we had done at the previous other 2 camps (Buchenwald and Mauthausen). The film at Dachau was the ‘best’ part – containing a lot of gruesome and insane images of people in the camps. But on the whole, it was more of what we had seen before – but we had only seen 3 camps in the whole of our trip, Mauthausen and the death stairs was the most influencing by far.
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| Bye bye Dreadlocks! |
We had lunch at a small Chinese restaurant opposite the gate of Dachau, which was unexpectedly excellent. Great food, large portions and delicious. I forget what the name is, but you can’t miss it if you are parking in the Dachau car park. – oh and cheap too – 6 euro for drinks and food.
We headed to Koln (German spelling kind of), and then got hit by constant traffic jams… the autobahn that was designed/built back just before the war times might have been a good idea, but the traffic we constantly hit was incredible – just on the road – not in the city or anything, and for 100’s of kilometres at a time. To give you an idea, we travelled 500kms in 9 hours, and that is on a road that has no speed limit!!! It was a frustrating day.
So back to the hostel, it was ok I guess. The rooms were horribly hot, to the point where the doona that was provided was thrown to the floor, the café and reception area was the same place and quite small, but for a stop over for 1 night, it was good enough. The next morning I went for my first run for pre pre season (a 30 minute jog)around the city of Cologne, stopping at the irish pub (Jamison’s) to see if they had the AFL grand final on – to which they only had a reply at 12.00 that afternoon. So on I went through a park, saw a guy with a huge telephoto lens taking pictures of all the trains going past on a bridge – strange, but I obliged and snapped my own photo of the trains too.
Into the inner city of Cologne, we visted the Gestapo prison and museum, which was very interesting – I didn’t even know that it existed! It had personal accounts and incriptions on the walls of the cells about what happened in the prison. Awful.It also had a large amount of information about Koln and the political situation there in the 30’s and 40’s. We obviously went to the Cathedral climbed the 533ish stairs with everyone else – an amusing thing was how unfit the general public was, they were puffing and panting and sweating etc. It was heaps of stairs, but come on! No need for preseason if we were playing against the general public! The views from the top were nice – but a disappointing thing was the fact that there was graffiti everywhere at the peak. We went down the stairs – fighting the masses of tourists that were coming up, and went to watch a street performer (doing the same stuff that was being done in Sweden) and then picked mark up at the station. We then walked to the car, and headed off to boxmeer.
We arrived in boxmeer to wouters house for dinner at about 5.30. Was nice to see him and our old town after about 2 months of being away, and another month before that. The south Africans that have inherited our house came along and had dinner with us, which was excellent (chicken casserole). We stayed until latish – having a very entertaining chat with the boys and Wouter. We then went and caught up with Koen and Koen at a party before heading back to Koen’s house where we stayed for the next few days.
The next few days we didn’t do a lot really, but I managed to find a couch surfer that would accept us ‘Kwok’ who seems nice. I also sent a few requests to London and further north. To couch surf properly, and with a group, it is very very time consuming. Hours and hours are spent wading through profiles, and trying to find a suitable host – then they have to accept you!! It really has quite a bit of luck involved. I guess if it is meant to be then it is meant to be – I just make the chances bigger to find someone to stay with. Saying that – we have met some amazing people – I hope that UK is nothing different. A funny but annoying thing happened with our visa – we got sent our ‘visa to pick up letter’ in late july, which by this time, we were in Norway. The visa offer ‘expires’ after 2 months if you haven’t picked it up. So technically, we were illegal as we arrived back to Holland on the 1st of October. So we drove to immigration fearing the unkown – would we have to wait another 2 months for another application, would we have to leave and reenter? All the previous were incorrect – we just walked in, showed our letter, and picked up our Dutch residency card – not bad that it is now October! The main reason that we were worried was that in order to get into England, you can’t be in Europe without a Visa for more than 3 months. It is fine around mainland Europe, as there are no/slim border checks.
So we are now on the way to England – I’m sure we will get battered with poor weather, but it will be interesting to see what things are like as we have such an English influence in Australia.
We arrived at the port - and the stupid customs officer gave me 1000 questions on if we were going to be working in london or not, ridiculous. I came here to holiday, not to work - although some more money at this point would be nice, but not enough time to do that now!
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| I thought this was interesting |
On the boat - nice enough weather with some odd waves and with Wifi on the boat, twas a nice touch.
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