Busted?

Amsterdam

So ... Amsterdam. Where to begin. Well let's start with the bikes. They are everywhere. Once you get to the canals Amsterdam seems like a giant Vancouver Island. Anyhow after getting reasonably close to where one of the information booths is I went for a walk to find the office. Lisa stayed with the car as it was said in Lonely Planet that smash and grab theft is rampant and foreign cars are a fav target. So I wandered around for a little bit trying to find the tourist office. and walked and walked. Something is amiss here. Turns out I walked past it twice. So having secured a room in a hotel on the Keizergracht (emperors canal) I must say this: The tourist office is never ever wrong. So with accommodation out of the way our first stop was the Van Gogh museum.



This is a great gallery. Considering how popular it is it never feels too crowded. For the the first time in a while Lisa and I decided to not get suckered into buying the audio guide and just strolled around. Man did this guy pound out a lot of paintings in only 10 years. On top of the paintings there was a great deal of Vincent Van Gogh biography thrown in as well. In addition to Van Gogh the museum also displays works by many of his contemporaries most notably Paul Gaugin who was Van Gogh's roomie for a time. After spending a couple of hours with Vincent we headed down stairs to a display of Egon Schiele who I had never heard of. And now I know why. He did some wierd stuff. He was doing a great deal of erotic art around the turn of the century. He also felt that artist should not be subject to the same constraints re: laws as the rest of society. As such he felt he was persecuted quite a bit. I mean hey why are the fuzz hassling a guy who likes to keep naked young girls around his pad? What WERE they thinking? Anyway there was also some performance art kicking around. I think that they were supposed to be real life representations of his paintings. I can't possibly write a description that will do it justice other than to say it was odd. After that it was on to the interpretive dance. With all apologies to interpretive dancers and interpretive dance fans ... What a waste of time. It is not and never will be interesting.

So after that it was decision time. We could go to the Rijksmuseum which is one of the top 10 collections of Master paintings or look for dinner. Now we have seen a lot of old paintings on this trip thus far. They have been beautiful and I am thrilled at having seen them. However they all have a few common themes. 1) Jesus or Bible related imagery 2) Executions and battles (sometimes biblical) 3) Portraits of 15th and 16th century rich folks. I hate to classify these paintings as seen one seen'em all. But here we are.

I've tried to keep meal descriptions to a minimum but dinner deserves a shout out. We had the BEST indian meal we have ever had. SO good. Who knew butter chicken could taste that good? We booked tickets for an english language comedy show the next night that was supposed to be really good and headed back to the hotel.

With Lisa down for the day I went out to wander the canals. They really are beautiful. I walked first throught the Jordaan district. This sort of the Yaletown of Amsterdam. It was originally a working class district but is now the hippest place to live in Amsterdam. Supposedly there are many "hofjes" or hidden private gardens in the area. Sometimes if you are brave you can poke your head in if the gates are open to have a peek. I was not brave. I am sure they are very pretty though. After that I wandered over to encounter one of the most bizzare experiences of my life. Amsterdam's famous (or infamous?) Red Light District. You read about it. See it on TV. You are still unprepared for the weirdness. Girls!Girls!Girls!Girls! Frankfurt has nothing on this bad boy. The funny thing was that it snuck up on me. One minute your enjoying a nice stroll through the canals and then BAM! Hookers in a window. I pictured it being really contained with signs like "Warning Red Light District Ahead. May contain scenes of a graphic nature". No such chance. It does sort of ease into it though. So the best thing about the Red Light District was the tour groups. Nothing funnier than seeing a bunch of 60 something British tourists walking around mouths agape.

Day 2

Time for the obligatory bus tour. This one was really quite good. They covered the history of the canals. I didn't know that many of the canals had been filled in. They also showed us many of the houseboats that line the canal (more on these later). Some of the house boats are quite posh and go for up to 500,000 euro. The highlight was a trip to a diamond company. Gassan Diamonds. We got to see cutting and polishing in progress. Then we had an opportunity to learn about diamonds types and see some crazy rocks with the opportunity to buy them at bargain basement prices! 3 carat river colour brilliant cut very very slight inclusions can be yours for ...... 48,700 euro. You can't beat that!

Afterwards we took a 1 hour canal cruise. I had really been looking forward to this. However high expectations got the better of me again. It was really kinda boring. All the buildings we'd seen before and the views were not that spectacular. Just my two cents.

http://www.boomchicago.nl/

These guys are hilarious. If you are in Amsterdam I highly recommend checking them out. They are a group of Americans who do a show that is part scripted part improv and all funny. We had opted for the dinner and a show package and when we sat down at our table there was a very cool guy from Texas who we chatted with for the hour and a half before the show. He was pretty cool a young hip guy who voted for Bush. Made for some interesting conversation. It was here that I witnessed something I never thought I would see. Someone getting busted for smoking weed in Amsterdam. Wow ... what a mind blower. This old guy who was sitting right next to us during the intermission whipped out a HUGE joint and starts puffing away. Now I',m all "hey it's Amsterdam" but a couple minutes later this guy comes up and asks him to stop just before the waitress gets there to say the same thing. That was all but it was certainly unexpected.

Turns out incidentally that weed is NOT legal in Amsterdam or Holland. It is merely tolerated. So what that means is this: you can carry less than 5g worth. That's considered enough for personal consumption. Any more than that you are a trafficker and you are in trouble. Unless of course you are a coffeeshop operator then it's cool. Magic Mushrooms on the other hand are totally legal in any amount. Go figure.

Keukenhof

On the way out of Amsterdam we made a stop at Keukenhof which is a giant garden. It wasn't quite tulip season but it was still nice. Here we bought about 300 bulbs that will come to us in the fall. Our garden is going to rock next spring.

Ich bin ein Berliner redux

Berlin, Germany Day 2

Well given our plush a-one swank accommodations Lisa decided to sleep in while I went out for a stroll and some shopping. My one and only stop was the Hugo Boss store. I finally got to buy my suit!!! I walked in just as they were opening and was pointed in the direction of the suits. This was a lovely experience after Munich were I was more or less pointed to the Big and Tall section with nose in the air. Wanks. Although mental note ... dust off elliptical machine at home. After some wandering around the store for a bit someone finally came out and was suitably apathetic about helping but after a while he got into it and i ended up leaving with a suit two shirts and two ties. Excellent.

After that it was time to get Lisa and sample the Berlin public transit system. Crazy. The system map was so hard to read! after a while we had it sorted and were on our way. First stop the Berlin Natural History Museum. The higlight here is the full reconstruction of a brachiosaur. It should be noted that this place is alot like a zoo ... that doesn't move. They have hundreds of stuffed animals native to Germany and elsewhere including a Tasmanian Tiger that lived at the Berlin Zoo in 1938. They also have a huge geological collection. Who knew rocks could be so neat! (simmer down Dev). Some of them were so colourful that if you saw one you'd think some jack ass painted that rock.

http://www.berlinerfernsehturm.de

This is the giant TV tower built in East Germany. now we almost didn't make it up this thing. Not because of claustrophobia. Or fear of heights. No ... the line was an hour long. Understandable as it was a clear day as most of our trip has been ... touch wood. So we queued and waited ..... and waited .... and waited. After spending a good 30 minutes I had decided that having waited this long it would be a waste to NOT see the damn thing now. SO I went in search of water to wait it out. When I asked the "treasurer" for some money a fellow in front detected our most un-teutonic accent and was desperate for english conversation. And so we spent the rest of the wait chatting with forgotten name American guy. He was from Seattle. He had spent a week in Prague and made us jealous. The view from the top was indeed quite a sight to see. It was interesting to see the expanse of East Berlin compared with that of West Berlin. What awful awful architecture. Awful.

We have definately noticed that we are getting tired quicker now, During our first week we would be up and out, doing something at 8 am and then all day. Now we are getting more tired and will sleep in until 9 and start the day at 10am and only hit 3 things a day as opposed to 9.

Hameln

On our drive out of Berlin before we reached amsterdam, we thought we would spend the night in the town of Hameln, just south west of Hannover, it is the village where the story of the pied piper took place. We arrived at around 3:00pm and took forever to find the altstadt, once we did we walked in to the main square, saw the piper, saw the painted trail of rats and then decided we had seen enough of Hameln.

We pressed on until we reached the small Dutch town of Deventer, just a place to stop really. But now we are in Holland, isn't that veird?!?! Well not really. Lot's of people live work and visit Holland each year. What is noticably weird is Dutch drivers as opposed to their German counterparts. I have been spoiled. Germany is the greates place to drive. Being in Holland makes me feel too much at home. Speed limits? Bah!!! They also have photo radar!! They need some BC liberal political action here. Well that's it from Amsterdam. Will report more later.

Ich bin ein Berliner!

We arrived in Berlin at about 1 in the afternoon yesterday and parked in a kind of legal parking spot in the middle of the 17 der Juni Strasse. There were others doing the same but it is weird parking in the median of a six lane street.

Our Hotel is so nice. It is a Art Themed hotel and every floor is decorated with a contemporary german artist. Our floor is Helmut Mittedorf and he is interesting anyway. Our hotel is so nice infact that it is almost hard to leave the room, but we are right in the Mitte section of Berlin, on Freidrichstrasse one block from Unter den Linden Strasse and 750 metres from Brandenburg gate. (We are staying in the equivalent of the Sutton Place Hotel in Vancouver) Nice.

If Berlin was still divided we would be in East Berlin and this would be a very different trip. The wall ran right in front of Brandenburg Gate before it was torn down.

Brandenburg Gate

We hopped on an open top double decker bus and took a city tour of Berlin. There is so much here. We saw Potsdammer Platz were all the concert halls are, tonnes of international embassys including the new one that Canada is building. We saw the line made in the road where the wall used to be. It has mostly been torn down now. We saw the Reichstag, the German Parliment building and so much more.

CheckPoint Charlie

After our bus tour we walked back to the place where the international crossing of the Berlin Wall used to be, Checkpoint Charlie. There is a monument dedicated to the 191 people that were killed trying to escape East Germany, two fields of Crosses with the persons name and occupation on each. They have recreated some of the wall for effect. In the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, they showed all the creative ways people used to escape, or try to including a homemade hot air balloon, hiding in a hollowed out surf board, a lowering harness made out of seatbelts and a kayak that was used to paddle out to open ocean and then get picked up by a Danish Freighter. Incedently, the man who kayaked out was denied offical leaving Visa because his wife had escaped earlier and the government's official reason was, "we will not give your wife the privilage of having her husband back after she fled."

This picture was taken before the memorial went up, because you would be able to see it in the background of the above picture.

Some one else wants to use the business centre, he has been lurking behind me for a while, so I will sign off now and write more later.

-Lisa