OK in Norway

Hey everyone...

Just wanted you all to know that Allison and I are just fine and enjoying our time in Norway (even though it is EX-PEN-SIV). Photos and stories will be up when I get around to it, but for now we're going to enjoy our vacation.

Check back in a week or so.

Thanks.

Items to Declare (Berlin).

I honestly didn't get out as much as I should have during my stay in Germany's capital. Reason for this include coming down with a head cold, trying to save money, trying to save energy, and finish up classes for the semester (for the most part).

Some things I did notice though:

If you're ever in Berlin while there is a soccer game, make sure you wear good shoes the next day. Apparently it's common practice for the hooligans to break bottles in the streets.

We were a little surprised when we thought we were going on the Mauer museum (the museum commemorating the Berlin wall and the separation of Germany during the cold war) guided tour, and found out that we were being given a lecture by a gentleman who spent nine years as a Stasi (the East German secret police) political prisoner. No one had any idea that that was what we were going to be seeing. Well worthwhile, to be sure, but a bit of a shock when we realized what was going on.

Rampant individualism going on in Berlin...I'm not impressed by much when it comes to people dressing up and looking stupid for fashion and their own ego's sake, but, I have seen some impressive styles in Berlin and dos create it's own culture...I guess that's what happens after a cold war and repression...people just go nuts with freedom. Kinda fun to watch (although, out of context (like in the states), I wouldn't be impressed).

On to Norway...and the wife(ish)...seriously, I've been thinking about seeing this woman again for about three months, and am honestly a bit nervous about the whole thing...but I'm sure everything will work out and everything will be great. She's the only one who could get me to use a smiley face. :)

Travel Advice

Apparently part of the Customs check for mail going out of Italy is to have a large person beat the hell out of the package with a baseball bat.

Berlin on a Bike.

To be honest, I was not excited about taking a bike tour through Berlin for four hours.

I was sure that someone was going to be hit by a car...not to mention I have to make plans and get plane tickets for the last two weeks (which I was able to do for fairly cheap...$150 Berlin to Oslo, $55 Oslo to London).

...but the bike tour was excellent. If you are ever going to be in Paris, London, Barcelona, or Berlin look up Fat Tire Bike Tours and have a great time...the tour guide was pretty knowledgeable but still not utterly weighing people down with fact after fact. A good time.


The oldest church in Berlin (1200's or so).


By the way...I'm staying in what used to be East Berlin...some of the monuments have been left up....BUT I SWEAR I'M NOT A COMMUNIST.


Checkpoint Charlie.


About as close to the Wall as i wanted to get.


The last Sniper Tower in Berlin.


The monument to the Murdered Jews.


The first Soviet Tank to enter Berlin.


A monument to Otto Von Bismarck's consolidation of power which pretty much paved the way for a unified Germany...until the Cold War, anyway. Side note: When U.S. troops occupied this section of Berlin they didn't know what to call this monument, so it - officially - became known as "chick on a stick."


The Riechstad: Germany's Parliamentary Building.


The Berliner Dom: The world's largest Protestant Cathedral.

Nothing to do with Europe....

Sorry, but I'm getting political again...

http://therealmccain.com/gibill/

If you want to, please sign, if you don't want to...I understand. I've never seen a petition ever do anything either.

Prague to Dresden, Dresden To Frankfurt; Frankfurt to Burg Eltz (Round Two) and back; Frankfurt to Berlin

I’ll be honest; I’m getting tired of traveling. I have a pretty high capacity for spending time going somewhere (especially on a train), but the constant barrage of having to be on the move is starting to get to me. I starting to wonder if I’ve used up all that good karma that I built up driving the old ladies to church in the taxi…oh well, the wife(ish) is coming soon: she’s all the karma I need.

It might seem redundant to have gone back to Frankfurt, maybe even a waste of time, but I have figured out how to get to Burg Eltz castle in the meantime and being that I missed it last time I was in the area, it was calling to me, like, “You know where I’m at, you know how to get here, why not come and visit. You might never get a chance to again.”

As always the Siren song wins every time.

Stayed in Frankfurt for the night and headed out the next day to find this place. Leaving the rural train station after arriving in the small town, I started with the map that was displayed at the station…the thought did occur to me at the time that the map might not be to scale, but I figured that I might as well go since I had come all this way.



The map was not to scale…and the first route I took ended up taking about two and a half hours going up through the foot hills of the Rhine Valley only to plateau on a vast prairie farmland with expansive fields.



The deceptively distance-less signs kept on pointing the way, and on and on I went, through the farmlands and back onto a different hiking trail. I eventually found it, and it was amazingly well preserved due to never having been sacked or destroyed. The reason for this fact as near as I can tell is that it’s such a pain to get to and in such an un-strategic spot that no one ever felt the need to try and take it.







It was fun to see, but the tour was all in German (which I had been misinformed about), and I was realizing that I wasn’t going to get back in time to get as much homework done as I wanted.

On the two hour hike back to the train station the karma completely seemed to putter out as the downpour began.

Soaked the three hour train rides back to Frankfurt were less than enjoyable.

Now I’m on the train to Berlin. After seeing all the recent history in the Czech Republic involving the Holocaust and the end of the Cold War, I’m ready to slow down on the history…oh wait…Berlin…the center of conflict and contention in the world for the last half of the 20th century…whew. I’ll make it, and please don’t take this to mean that I’m not happy and blessed to be here, I am; however, ready for a little bit of normalcy with the wife(ish) in an English-speaking, Dollar-using, Mt. Dew-producing country.

“Mama, I’m coming home.”
-Ozzy Osborne

Items to Declare (Czech Republic)

-First off, there is a reason why Czech people drink more beer than any other nation in the world per capita...they make the best. I don't want to sound like some boozy spring-breaker whose out on a whirlwind party through Europe, but I would like to address this fact:



I would always notice with students, sailors, soldiers, and whoever else had made it over to Europe for what ever reason, that they would always scorn American beer (the wife(ish) included). I always thought it was some kind of vague snobbery (no offense). I was wrong, because, between Germany and the Czech Republic, I am ruined for (North) American beer. I almost wish that everybody...non-drinkers included, could at least have half a taste of this stuff, because it really is as good - and better - than everybody said it would be.

-If you know to look for it, you can see signs that this used to be a Communist state all over. Some of the most beautiful architecture in the world is in Prague, as well as the Brutilist tenements that were so typical of Warsaw pact countries. On top of that, you can see it in the older people...maybe it was the neighborhood we were staying in being a bit cheaper, but there were more disabled people than I am used to seeing on an average street...legs lopped off, mental problems, and all kinds of crutches, limps, and skin problems. It says more to me about the transition and people all of the sudden not given the support by the government that they had before, but maybe I just noticed it more here because I was looking for it. Who knows.

-It's interesting to be in a place where the water is truly suspect. I've never been in a situation where I bought bottled water for the pure fact that the municipal water may have more pollutants than I want. This might be just my ignorance, but Prague is part of "The Dirty Triangle" and I didn't feel like taking any chances.

The Sedlec Ossuary at Kutna Hora

heh heh heh....creeee-p.

OSSUARY
/ossyoori/
• noun (pl. ossuaries) a container or room for the bones of the dead.
— ORIGIN Latin ossuarium, from os ‘bone’.
-Compact Oxford English Dictionary































Sweet Dreams...

*The Museum of Communism*

I’m not a communist. I just want to make that clear. I’m sure Bill O’Rielly will already be calling when he finds out that he lost to the wife(ish) and I don’t feel like giving him anything else to yell at me about.

First, for those of you who were oblivious like I was about the history of the Czech Republic, a quick rundown about communism in this fine country:

First the Nazi’s were defeated by allied forces and the Soviet Union took over the Eastern Block.

Then, in 1969 (a turbulent time everywhere, I guess) a student burned himself in protest of communist control which was getting more and more corrupt; this lead to there being a strong underground for succession.

After that, in the eighties...as economic support from the Soviet Union faltered and discontent rose, Vaclav Havel, declared independence from the Russians. This was known as the Velvet Revolution (as it went of fairly smoothly…you know, for a revolution).

So now today, if you go a few blocks south of where Havel made his speech you will find the Museum of Communism…right next to a McDonald's, a Mango's cloathing retailer, and a casino. My, how the times, they do change.

I wouldn’t say that the museum is exactly non-biased…I agree with them, but there were a couple things that I would have put differently had I been writing the descriptions, but hey, they won their revolution…it’s their history. They get to write it.

Besides they had the best post cards I'd seen in Europe:

"Remember back to a time when America was the voice of Freedom."
and
"We didn't have any toilet paper in the factories, but it didn't matter since there was no food either."
and
-two Soviet guards look on- "Don't let us catch you going to any other museums."

*Terezin and Puppets.*

08Apr08



Tried to write this last night, but I was officially exhausted (emotionally and physically). So here we go now:

I saw a concentration camp yesterday.



It wasn’t officially labeled as a “death camp,” but plenty of death happened at Terezin: the fortress and associated town (formerly a Jewish Ghetto) are still there and in pretty OK shape.



The bus let us off on the first stop of the tour: the Small Fortress (The Large Fortress being the actual town). The first thing seen is the first Christian and Jewish cemetery.



From there we went into the Small Fortress which the Nazi’s had converted for their own use…I believe that it had been built in the 17th century.





Sparse as it was on room, there was plenty of feeling and our wonder of a tour guide related what each room was used for and who was contained in it:



The Jewish Barracks


The only light in the torture cell



The doorways to the solitary confinement cells (none of which had light)


Gavrillo Prizzi’s (I might have the English spelling of his name wrong, but anyway...the guy who shot Franz Ferdinand and started WWI) cell. This was before Nazi occupation, but interesting nonetheless.



The hospital with the only source of heat that existed for the prisoners…pretty much put there to satisfy a Red Cross committee that investigated the concentration camps for human rights abuses…after the show that they were given at Terezin by the Nazi’s the Red Cross was satisfied.


The sight of the only break-out of Terezin…notice how the ledge has been knocked away, that was done by Nazis.








The Execution Grove






After that…we went into the town of Terezin, where the Jewish Ghetto museum is…a lot of it devoted to the children of Terezin.

…and the tour ended up in the Jewish cemetery, and the furnaces where countless bodies from those that dies of exhaustion to those that were shot for sport were burnt.

It’s hard to relate what it’s like to see all of it, and I don’t mean to minimize what happened, but the only feeling that I’ve ever had that I could even relate was my experience going to the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis (in the same hotel that Martin Luther King Jr. got shot in): just this feeling of utter revulsion, while the urge to keep looking, learning, and the need to report to others what’s there, keeps your eyes open and your ears listening.

A hard, yet important, day.

If that wasn’t enough, another student and I had made plans to go to the Marionette Opera that night…a rollercoaster day if there ever was one…

First, for all I was talking up Mozart a post or two ago, I don’t know all that much about opera and I didn’t really get a chance to read up on the one we saw: Don Giovanni.



It was quite interesting, and I’m glad I had my first exposure to opera like this, because I don’t know if the real thing would have held my attention like this did…

First, each scene was broken up by a Mozart marionette that got more and more erratic as the show progressed…after intermission, it came out drunk, spilling wine (water) on the audience and getting confused and conducting the audience rather than the (imagined) orchestra…he then proceeded to pass out and start snoring and the puppets on stage would notice it and make a big BANG on the beat and Mozart would wake up.

Then, there was the part where the devil (a full human in a an outfit…so as to be a good two feet larger than the marionettes) came out and took Don Giovanni to hell…all the while the puppeteer who was controlling Don Giovanni was trying to get the strings back.

At the end, one of the puppeteers started to look at his watch (all you could see was his hands…and then came on stage and acted like it was time to go while the puppets continued to sing on and on…finally sweeping up the stage as the last character finished up.

It’s always hard to retell a joke or something you saw that was funny and I’m sure this is no exception, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, whereas I’m not sure if I’m interested in ever going to see “real” opera.



A topsy-turvy day to be sure…and this post isn’t as in depth as I had hoped it would be, but even remembering it is making me tired…hope you understand.