Finish of Germany - and onto england (on boat - way too slow for pictures)

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.

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 1^st 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!

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. 

Snowboarding

I will skip a little forward to our time snowboarding. – Hintertux – Austria. The home of the glacial skiing that we were string to do (in summer-well not really summer, but it’s the equivalent of boarding in march in Australia! So we arrive around 6-7.00 and a nice meal at the local hotel (Calzone!) and then went to bed – with the alps in the window of our hostel room. Breakfast was at 7.30 in the morning, which was good, because we had to be made to get up. Meat and cheese rolls with copious amounts of coffee followed. Eagerly we drove the 6 minutes up the road to the base of the slopes to get our board and boots fitted, buy our lift tickets (2 days hire, 2 days lift tickets cost us 42 and 67 respectively – considering that in Australia a ticket costs you $95 for 1 day!!!  Up the mountain we went – I made a huge error in the clothes that I wore, Heacy jacket, vest, thermal and t-shirt – all under my rain coat… Makes for not very comfortable boarding when the temp is 8 degrees. We tried to find funky a lesson – but alas, they were not running lessons over summer. So we had to try and teach him, which was difficult – it is very taxing on your legs trying to teach someone for a long period of time, plus that we didn’t have waterproof clothing didn’t help when we tried to rest in the snow. But watching him try and start (Oh I forgot – he can’t board) made you realise how far that me and mark have come since we started. Some hilarious crashes, not in any part help by the part of the mountain that was open was the really steep parts. Lol, so learning on a extremely steep slope is not a good idea. But by the end of the 2 days he could get down the mountain at least. I forgot just how sore I could get from snowboarding, the day after our first day – the 3 flights of stairs to our room were just torture.  After the second day my old knee was giving way, and my inside leg was ‘done’. We left tired and sore, but the snow at times was awesome (at others it was icy and very dangerous) and we had heaps of fun.

While snowboarding we got to look at these mountains

We took off the next morning to see the Disney castle (called Neuschwanstein) or something like that. It took us 3 hours to drive there, and what a disappointment it was. The castle was not that cool, the place was overrun by tourist busses and obviously tourists. We didn’t want to pay the grumpy car attendant his 8 euro, and we certainly didn’t want to pay the 12 euro to get into the castle. We did get a few pictures, but I think that this castle is more famous because Disney adopted it as it’s logo, not because it is a cool castle. The castle between hamburg and berlin was much better.

We left quite quickly and headed off to Munich, we were staying at camp weisen. Basically a camp purely set up for people going to Oktoberfest. It was a tent city, with a massive line of portable toilets and showers that were  horribly dirty. (if you have plans to go – don’t stay in a tent city) even if you hire a caravan – you had to pay 100 euro to use your own toilet!!!!!  That night we went to a famous beer hall, basically a huge hall set up with tables like a restaurant. (which is what the tents at octoberfest are setup like also) Food was so so, and we went to bed early – still sore from the snow. What we were not ready for that night was the temperature!! It was cold – really cold, we hadn’t been camping for a while, and wow…. The last night we stayed there,  I was wearing 2 jumpers, a vest, a thermal and my sleeping bag and blanket – still cold. We met some really cool people in munich – some girls from Bulgaria, some students from Switzerland, some doctors from Austria on a 1 week holiday, a rich drunk western german idiot from Singapore, and many other people that were really friendly. We also went to the Munich duesches museum(which is a science and technology museum) (under recommendation from cuthy) which was thoroughly enjoyed by me ( I think tarks liked it – Andrew didn’t go) and we learned about nano technology, other new crazy ideas, there is a company in germany that is solely based on research, they have over 4000 scientists, and invest billions of dollars  a year on researching things.

The museum also had huge exhibits on planes, rockets, space, geology, computers and miniature technology, food and other things.  The newer sections of the museum are clearly better than the older sections. It is due to be finished being upgraded in 2012.

Glossglockner

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We got up early (2 days in a row!) and headed off to the Glossglockner road (a road that goes over the mountains in Austria - built just after the war to try and create jobs and raise revenue for a country that was hit hard by the economic downturn. Anyway - it took us about 1.5 hours to get to the base of the road - at which point we had another snow fight, and then paid the 29 euro (yes - expensive) to get through the gate. We were slowly greeted with amazing views, I will put a few pictures up - the long steep road, with tight corners, with 30something turns over the whole road. We stopped at the top - in the snow mind you, to a panoramic 360 degree view that was amazing. We stopped there for a fair while, had some food and drinks, and then headed off to the glacier itself (the height of these mountains we were on was about 2200 to 2800m) We went to the glazier - very touristy, but it was very nice view. We kinda walked down towards it, but decided against it. We left to go home, as we had organised to do a bike ride with Stefanie and Benno at 5.00. So we had to go back. Although this post was short - it was an amazing road, with crazy good views. We arrived back pretty tired - so andrew didn't come on the bike ride. Benno and stefanie had multiple bikes (like 8) in the their basement so we used theirs. Much better when the bikes are good - we could go much faster. It was about 10kms to the lake - we did it easy, through the forest, across farm land - was a good nice ride. We met benno down at the lake, had dinner and then rode back. That night we found out we couldn't stay to watch the footy, so I spent the night trying to find a place to watch it. 

Benno Stefanie mark and I

Bam.. Take that Andrew!

Hallstat, Lake Konigssee and Mauthausen-Gusen (more pictures tonight)

We cooked tuna casserole!

I have added many photos today. Tried to format them the best I can.

View from the cable railway (hallstat)

Lake behind lake koeingsee

Linz

 We arrived in the town of strohiem, approximately 30 minutes north west of Linz.  – apologies if I spelt that wrong. We met our host – Joseph, who immediately cooked us up a nice meal of cold meat, tomatoes, pickles and cheese. A drink later and he took us off down to the street of linz to meet some of his friends at a nice establishment in the city center. We talked about various things – mostly global issues such as climate change, how to solve the worlds energy problems – all the important things. It made me look up solar energy on the net. They are planning to build a huge solar plant in Africa, as well as a big one in NSW. The one in Mildura is big – but not huge.

Anyway – there is no solar paint out yet, there is only thin panels that are flexible L

The worlds deserts receive enough energy in 6 days, to meet the worlds energy needs for 1 year!

Now… why are we spending trillions of dollars on defending ourselves from ourselves? At the same time as finding faith in human kindness through couchsurfing and traveling, I am losing it by learning about the stupidity of the human race also (see later when I talk about a work camp).

We moved on to another place, danced for a while with the locals.. and then went home. The next day was friday – my sore throat from the day before had flared up again (but this time only for 2 days!) so I went down to the supermarket armed with my newly learned german. Of course reading the back of medicine/pharmaceuticals isn’t my forte when reading English, so I had little chance in German. So I took a random guess, anyway – at the checkout to my surprise the man was about 80 years old and scanning groceries. He was sitting down, looked very content, scanning each item with care and concentration. I managed to get through the transaction with either him knowing I wasn’t Austrian and therefore not speaking much, or he wasn’t the talkative type; But I nailed the goodbye and hello and do you want a bag. J

Anyway – back up to watch the hawks win against Sydney – have managed to watch most games this year – even though being away from home, I think I have watched more games this year than last year. Joseph then helped us get 4 new tyres for our car (well 2^nd hand tyres) which we desperately needed, especially if we are going to be driving in the mountains. We had a problem with these later – but that is another story.

We then went to an abandoned castle which gave us great views of the surrounding hills, and the green lush fields of eastern Austria. We also trekked through a goat field with deer and geese – but that’s another story. We then went to the football (soccer) to see a Linz Vs Linz game (lask Vs somebody else)

It was very strange to see that people took it so seriously! The crowd was CRAZY.. people complain about the crowd behaviour at the AFL – well this was a totally different atmosphere. Mind you before I describe this – it was a 2^ND division game!!  We arrived to people drinking beer on the street which is not so strange now after being in Berlin. Then we were subjected to a thorough pat down, then walking through the masses of people – mostly drunk to find our seats, we were stopped by a fight – well more like a brawl. 8-9 people just going at it, a quickly glance around to see the security guards not really concerned about it.
Welcome to Austrian 2^nd division! So we walked past the fight once it petered out, and found our seats next to the opposition – who were just as crazy, except that they were fenced off by a huge net, and fences so you could not get in/out. Add to that about 50 fully armed police standing at the top where the fence was at it’s weakest. Cage the animals… it will be fine. During the game itself – various flares were let off, and a player was hit by flying things. The game itself – crap, poor quality, not worth going, but nice to see what crazy football fans are like.

We went home – sleep.

The next day was after a late start the day we were going to the Arts electronica museum. This is not a museum! It is a place with lots of current information about various technologies that are relevant to life now – eg: Bionic eyes, ears, hearts, as well as exhibits on brain function and other things. Interesting, I put the brain hat on and got my brain waves monitored in order to write words on the computer. It works! I was impressed.  We left there -–had some good kababs and then hooked back to see Jospeh’s house which he was renovating. We met his friends there – which were very nice, funny and good to talk to, and went back to his house for dinner with his friends. We were then treated with goulash and another nice meal! A very nice evening spent – comparing photos of countries that we had been to. Joseph was somebody that I liked very much, always good for a joke, and helped us out very much.

I forgot to mention – one of the nights (the first night) I was inundated with mosquitoes. I think everyone has heard the high pitched wining of the mosquito near their ear. Well I woke up with 2 bites, and big ones at that. So it was on, light was on and hunting them down. 2 were killed immediately, and thinking job done, went back to sleep. Well… I was wrong. Another bigger one lurked, which I saw later – it took me about 30 minutes to get him. I even googled about how to catch mosquitos in the night. I have a theory that seems to work  for me, hear it – light on, then wait 2 minutes, then light off, wait about 4 minutes then light on, and they will be moving in for the killer bite (in some countries anyway) But I nailed him – at 6am!!! I didn’t get much sleep – but the nights were easier after that.

Will continue another day.

Linz

We got out of the car park ok, and then headed back to see our host at the farm. We got home rather late - and some exercise in his exercise room (well just some roller situps) and we to a local downtown pub for dinner. The strange thing about this pub was it was all cold food. So we had an array of cold meat, bread, grated horseradish, and a salad roll. We had some weird apple drink with it too - like mineral water - just apple.

We then tasted some wine from his winery which was very nice - (they only make 500 bottles a year!) so they spared a taste for us which was nice of him. We then went to bed - day of Vienna. The next morning was leave morning, but firstly we had breakfast and while doing that we were speaking to Herman's mother (the one with no English at all). We spent maybe 3 hours trying to talk to her - with the aid of a dictionary, my computer with some helpful lonely planet guide language, and lots of actions. It was a really good experience, she was nice, helpful and we asked and talked about things such as speeding fines, food, coffee, if we have kids, family, etc etc. We learned alot cause we couldn't just skip to english to explain ourselves. We left her - saying our best goodbyes in german, and headed off to our next destination - linz - where we are currently. The countryside of austria in the east is quite flat and open - very similar to the countryside in eastern germany - surprise surprise.

I will update this again later - but for now, in Linz - Austria!

Leipzig, Saxson Swiss, Prague and Veinna

 The day after we went to the concentration camp, we took a day of watching the football finals – hawthorn Vs Geelong – which turned out to be not that cool cause hawthorn got smashed. The boys were getting sick at this point with colds and coughs, which was annoying for everyone, I guess it is my fault cause I got sick first lol. In the afternoon me and mark had organised to go canoeing along one of the canels in Leipzig. I forget the company name now, but it was easy to find on the internet if you are in the area. (cost us about 5 euro an hour). We paddled for about 3 hours – carried the boat up a few small waterfalls, up a few loch’s and through a stretch of very nice scenery – felt like we were in a forest, except that we were in the middle of a city with 500,000 people (ish). We first realised that we were not in good shape for canoeing for tow reasons. We could paddle for any longer then 2-3 minutes without getting tired, and that our canoe was twice as big as other people that were paddling “professional” boats – they were wooping us. But it was fun and nice to get out. We arrived back a little bit late - but it was no problem.

My phone ended up on the ground when we left, (realised this when we arrived at the house) and went back to check out the car park – which luckily it was still there on the ground (by the way it wasn’t me who left it there!)  We then went looking for dinner – ate some food, - got lost cause the GPS couldn’t find it’s way around a stupid roadbloack! So about an hour was used trying to get home/find dinner. We got back and went straight to bed. The next day we were heading to Dresden.

View of Saxson Switzerland national park - the river Elbe

We got up lateish – tried to wrk out where we were going to go bike riding – frustrating trying to organise things! Grrr.. But we left Andre’s house – haven’t had a good time all up, pity that we could speak to his parents (lack of german). We arrived in dresden, had a look through the city – which was really nice. Well set up, nice buildings, and overlooking the Danube river, with paddle steamers tooting on the river. There was a market where we had some dinner there, and attempted to order food – my goodness we were bad. I ended up getting a huge plate of curryworst, with potatoes in a bowl and some other vegies… I then got a pancake with just sugar!! Wow… The girl had no idea what I wanted – amusing. We went back – had an early night staying at a hostel.

The next morning we watched the next final of footy – a little too much footy I think, but oh well, the rugby was on too. We then took off towards the Saxon Switzerland national park. Not bad not bad. It is basically a park next to a river, with a few castles overlooking the river – one called bastei and the called – I forget now, but it is a castle. We had ice cream there, had a look at the castle market, and then headed off to prague. The park was worth more than how I described it – but the views should speak for itself. I should mention the massive walk that we did up the stairs – due the the ‘she’ll be right’ mentality…..

We arrived in prague – via the ch’ republic and found out that we didn’t have the maps for eastern Europe for our GPS – but n problem I had already preloaded the maps for the gps, and I had a decent amount of the city center mapped. But alas… the difficulty was that all the roads are one-way… making it really hard to look ahead and to find our hostel.. it took us over an hour from entering the city limits, to finding and parking at our hostel.. woah – oh and a pullover by the police, who asked for a fine ‘indonesian’ style – to which we couldn’t pay because we didn’t have any kroner with us – so they “let us off” stupid corrupt police in developing countries.

Prague - the cathedral

The next day we took the free tour around prague – very nice city, lots of old buildings, and the tour guide was very informative. We then went to the communism museum. Very interesting – we didn’t know much about communism at all – apart from a few discussions that we had with andre about living in eastern Germany. What might be some interesting information is that the Russians invaded prague and basically occupied the country for a long long time (some 20 years) as well as a bunch of other countries. (might be common knowledge for other people – but I had no idea). They had pictures of the riots as well as a video of the riots where thousands of students got beaten by the police, and how the propaganda from the political ‘parties’ influenced everyone from speaking out against the government or any mistreatment that might have occurred. This is very similar to what is going on in china currently.

The next day we left prague to go to Vienna, and stay at a farm out of town (about 30 minutes dirve) a very lovely area where they were farming potatoes, wine, sugarbeet, wheat, and other crops that I can’t remember. Our drive wasn’t such a good one, but we got there pretty tired. After a short chat to Herman – our couchsurfing host, he went back out to work on the farm, and we went to bed, sleeping for about 10 hours.

Our host near Vienna was Herman – a nice guy that was living on a farm with his family and 2 sisters that had been to (funnily enough) Australia as well – working on farms in Australia. His parents did not speak a word of English – well almost (maybe hello…), so it was amusing talking to them – our germna has improved a little from being with 3 german hosts so far, but that night it didn’t help at all.

The next morning was Vienna morning, Herman woke us up early (good on him!) gave us a very nice Austrian breakfast of – yes you guessed it meat and bread and cheese – with some really tastey homemade jam and grape juice. He had also organised for one of his friends (Stefanie)to show us around the city – one of the decisions that would prove to make the day very enjoyable.

Picture of ..ahh the meal

Into the city – we did the park and ride thing – park at a train station and take the train into the city. We met Stefanie outside stephan’s dom cathedral at 10.30 which we went inside – and wow it was busy – and not that impressive, but only 10 minutes inside there was enough time. We then met a very enthusiastic Stefanie which was cool to have – an Austrian (born in Australia) showing us around the places that we went. – The university, parliament, hitler’s speech place, and others… Vienna is full of art, but unfortunately we didn’t go into see any of the paintings – not that I really wanted to see them, but I guess if I was with some people that were into art – I would have gone and enjoyed myself. We went to the famous palace, and then went back to Stefanie’s place and cooked a traditional Austrian dish for lunch.

500grams of flour, 4 eggs, Milk – beat with beater until mixed, then push through a grater into a bowl – then boil for a few minutes – then add in fried bacon and onion and add to the mixture that is on the stove. Leave for a bit longer, mix in some cheese and then it is done...- see picture for finished product! It tasted a little bit like pasta. We stayed and chatted for a while, then left and went to the main shopping strip for some shopping, and on the way we stopped at the post office for Andrew to buy some stamps. Funny story – I try and learn as much as I can remember with languages from the country that I can (dutch I was lazy – but I still learnt more then other boys) but Andrew buying stamps was very funny – bordering on rude I guess – from our point of view. Anyway – what happened was ( I will translate what she said)

Girl In german “ Hello – how can I help you”
Andrew” Can I have some stamps”
Girl rolls eyes – “ya” *goes to get stamps
Andrew “can I have 5 stamps of these” *points to the package of stamps that hold 4 individual stamps.
Girl “ no”
Andrew – leaves the store

Now – I explained that maybe she thought that he meant can I take 1 of the stamps off another book – leaving him with 5 indivual stamps. (he wanted 5 books of 5) but just amusing that he didn’t even try 0- and was annoyed at her that she didn’t understand him!   Keliling dunia mengalamani kebudayaan! Ya very funny. 
In saying that – we did have a fair bit of hostility towards us from some Austrian salespeople that didn’t want to deal with our poor german.  But we were at least having a crack.

Anyway – we left via the metro past the symphony that was playing/busking in the street – also the major cultural attraction in the city – which we didn’t go to as well. But we arrived back to our carpark which turned out not being a car park! Well… it was a impound lot!! It looked like a carpark to us when we started there! So we had to manufacture a way out by driving over a gutter and a garden bed to get out of the “Car Park” amusing – but we were lucky that it wasn’t surrounded by a big fence..