Amsterdam

Leaving Bremen, we spent a night in Groningen, the colourful, canal-filled student town at the centre of an otherwise rural and quiet province in the northeast of the Netherlands.

The Canadian Grand Prix was on that night, and to Dan's great delight our private room was equiped with a television. I took a little walk to explore the centre, ringed with canals. A few of the buildings are pretty, the museum is a mass of adventurous architecture and colour. And I found the red light district by accident - it's much more discrete than the one we'd see in a couple days. But after my wanderings, I too had an early night.

On Monday morning, we grabbed a train and within a few hours we'd crossed half of the tiny country and arrived in Amsterdam.

We has intentionally split our four nights between two hostels - Monday and Tuesday aboard a little barge in the harbour, Wednesday and Thursday we decided that to get a taste of the city's wilder side, we would stay at a hostel in the red light district.

The boat - the Avanti - had tight quarters, but was cute and well-kept. Our twin cabin had bunks that were half the width of the room, and ran the entirety of its length. Which makes the cabin sound roomy - let me assure you that at roughly one and a half metres wide and two metres long, it was not.

But we did fit in - Dan literally just barely fit into his bunk - and the staff (crew?) was very helpful and friendly. It was great to try something new after the dozens of hostels we'd been to over the past months, and at €56 was one of the cheaper (and I bet cleaner) private rooms in the city centre.

In the first two days, we explored the city centre and its extensive canal network by foot. We checked out the Van Gogh Museum - expensive, but it was nice to focus the day's learning on one artist and his immediate peers. I am sure I retained more this way than I usually do in my scattered veering around museums. It helps that I enjoy Van Gogh and his enthusiasm for colour. We also wandered through the Vondlepark and went to the Heinekin brewery. Which is pricey and at times a bit campy, but the tour shows you very comprehensively how beer is made, and includes three beers. Sold!

We didn't party as such while staying on the boat - past the Heinekin brewery we only had a couple of beers on a patio to celebrate the sunshine. We did buy a piece of 'space cake,' and then spent the evening crammed into the bottom bunk watching Arrested Development in an agoraphobic huddle. When we did get up to the kitchen to make our cup-a-soups, we found ourselves watching This Is Spinaltap.

Our second hostel was the infamous Bulldog, known primarily as a well-established chain of coffeeshops throughout the city. Remembering that in the Netherlands, coffeeshops serve soft drugs along with a caffeine hit. The hostel itself has been around for twenty-odd years, which often would mean worn-out facilities, but here means that they have the management of stoned-out backpackers down to a science. Our room was clean and blissfully removed from the racket of the bar, smoking wasn't allowed in the rooms.

We briefly explored the heart of the red light district once we got to the Bulldog. It's everything you assume it is: scantily clad ladies in windows who would like to get to know you better... biblically. They stand in pretty underthings under red lights, some smiling, some on their cell phones. The window is actually a door that opens into a small room containing a bed and little else (it also has a discrete panic button for the prostitute's safety. There are advantages to a legal sex trade). Closed curtains mean business.

Wednesday night was the Stanley Cup final. We had heard from another Canadian in the hostel that a bunch of people were planning to watch the game at a sports bar nor far away. We had a nap, and then around one in the morning, we set off. Fortified by kebabs (with questionable meat in Dan's, we discovered later) we found the bar. Turns out that no one in Holland really cares about hockey - the gaggle of Canadian and American tourists that had gathered were unceremoniously booted out at 3. Which is fine except that I had just bought a round of beer and we weren't warned... anyway, probably best that we went home. After stopping for frites and mayo. Obviously.

The next day we woke late, and spent most of the day wandering around the canals again. The architecture in Amsterdam is so pretty. The houses are thin, no more than three or four metres usually, but rise upwards at least three, often four or five stories. There are few alleys. In a city of canals, space is precious, and so the houses are shoved up against each other.

The peaked roofs are often hidden by a false front that contains a pulley for swinging furniture through the massive windows. So that nothing smashes into the walls, many of the street-facing walls lean forward at a conspicuous angle, as if craning over the bricked streets to see the swans floating down the canals.

Amsterdam is an interesting city. I think the novelty of the sex and the drugs would wear off quite quickly for anyone who stayed for long (with the exception of a few time-battered hippies we saw who have in all probability been in the same haze since the eighties). The Dutch are actually known to be a generally conservative bunch. Just because they have decided that a person should be allowed to smoke dope or hire a prostitute does not mean that they themselves wish to do so all the time, or even at all. It just means want the right to make the choice.

In fact, apparently a law is coming into effect soon banning the sale of legal soft drugs (meaning weed, hash and truffles/mushrooms) to non-residents. Amsterdam doesn't want to be known as the city of drugs anymore, and having witnessed the mayhem of stoned tourists in the city centre, I can't really blame them. The city has so much else to offer - why specialize in getting the rest of the world blazed?

That said, it's fun to smoke a joint without feeling like a criminal. The trick is to not get so wasted that you abuse the priviledge, or miss out on the delights of a beautiful city.

S.

You Don't Speak German!

I was playing with the Google Translator app on the tablet at some point between Berlin and Hamburg when I made an alarming discovery.

When traveling in a country where we are unfamiliar with the language, which would be most of them, we had tried to ensure that we could at least manage a botched version of the basics: hello, yes, no, thank you, two beers please, can I use your toilet, and the ever-necessary I'm sorry, I don't speak German/Portugese/Spanish/Italian.

It is on this final point we were having difficulty, although we had no idea. For weeks now, when someone addressed us in German we would shake our heads and say, apologetically but with moderate confidence, some of the few German words we had mastered:

"Sorry, nein sprechensie Deutsch." "Sorry, I don't speak German". We had heard and understood this somewhere in our travels and now used it many times a day.

But nearly every time, there would be a pause, and then the Germans would cock their heads and say, "Bitte?" rather quizzically. Which means, "excuse me?"

We would repeat ourselves, assuming poor pronounciation, at which point they would either give up entirely or recommence in English.

What I discovered with the translator was that in fact to say, "I don't speak German," you say, "Keine spreche Deutsch."

It turns out that for weeks we had been saying, "YOU don't speak German!" with bad grammar, to boot. Which explains all the "bitte" nonsense.

Sorry, Germany. Anyway, on with the story.

After our flurry of touristing in Berlin, on reaching Hamburg, we were ready for a change. So our first evening in town, exploring the waterfront (street beers in hand, of course) accidentally turned into racous night out.

We managed to make it cost-effective by buying beers from kiosks. Hamburg's notorious red light district, just north of the river in St. Pauli, is entertaining enough to just wander. Tragically I lost my dollar store sunglasses, although why I wore them in the first place is still unknown. We left the hostel after dark. I blame the tequila-beer. Always blame the tequila-beer.

Half drunk and peckish, we stumbled into the Portugese quarter (surprise!) and delighted, feasted on shrimp and olives and bread. Good lord do I miss Portugese food.

Jan, who we'd visited in Frankfurt, was in Hamburg for work, so we met up and had a fantastic breakfast at a café near our hostel. Afterwards we got transit passes for the day - in Hamburg, an all day pass is also valid for the ferries, so we spent most of our final afternoon taking various ferry lines across the river and into the interior of the port.

We weren't quite ready to leave Germany, so we decided to spend the weekend camping in Bremen, near the Dutch border.




A massive park stretches five kilometres north from the centre of town, full of paths and canals and forest. Our campsite was on the north end of the park, so we rented bikes and enjoyed our commutes, rather than busing back and forth.

Bremen's medieval centre is preserved, largely because during the second world war, there was a port just north on which the air raids were focused. The two churches at the centre are twelve and eight hundred years old, respectively. Under the larger of the two, there is a display of bodies that were mummified by the extremely dry conditions in the church's crypt. Cool, albeit slightly creepy.

We ate 'goodbye Germany' currywurst in the main station on Sunday morning (yes, morning.) and then we were off to new adventures in a new and even more confusing language: time to break out the Dutch!

S.

Berlin (Go Go Trabi)

We rolled into Berlin at the beginning of a sweltering holiday weekend, so to save some cash, we stayed in a suite at a cheap hotel on the south side of Schöneberg. No problem staying away from the action of Mitte and the Tiergarten, though - Berlin's transit is efficient and prompt.

In our five full days in the city, we saw a couple touristy sites or museums each day. I am not the type to pack my days with lists of 'must-dos,' especially as the city was in the thralls of a heatwave.

Berlin is massive - so even taking the subway system from place to place, we ended up walking for hours through the centre, with its massive buildings and its scars from decades of turbulence, left as a reminder.

The longest remaining portion of the famous Berlin Wall now forms the East Side Gallery - a stretch along the river that is covered in murals and graffiti. In other parts of the city, notably heading west from Checkpoint Charlie, the line of the wall is denoted by a double row of bricks that slices through streets and through neighbourhoods. In East Germany, the wall was backed by a wide kill-zone and then by a smaller interior wall, all guarded by watchtowers and spotlights. So there were, at the collapse of East Germany, large portions of the city centre that were veritable wastelands - entirely undeveloped. For us this was most shocking in Potsdammer Platz. Empty at the breach of the wall, it's now a commercial hub full of modern glass buildings.

Here are the highlights of the touristy stuff, for me:

We did a tour of a ruined Nazi flaktower, dug out of the rubble by the Berlin Underworld society. Definitely recommended. The building itself is massive, hidden under a pile of its own rubble that is now a park. The tour explores the safe sections of the building, and is an interesting foray into the city's war-time mentality.

Checkpoint Charlie, the famous gateway between the two Berlins, takes just a moment to see, but the associated museum, Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, would take days to thoroughly explore. It's a scattered, but fantastic collection of information and exhibitions on the Cold War and on the wall itself. Especially interesting were the stories of escapees (and the tragedy of the would-be escapees). The ingenuity and variety of escape methods is astonishing: people shoved themselves into car compartments, tunneled; one man lowered his son over the wall with a pulley.

The DDR museum is smaller, and displays the strange quirks of life in East Germany. Also excellent, and cheap.

And on the subject of East German life: Trabi Safari will give you a guided tour of East Berlin while you drive your very own Trabant, or Trabi: the East German shitbox. Ahem. Car. East German car.

A Trabi in its natural state - broken.

The cars form a convoy and rattle around the streets spewing fumes bad enough to make me lightheaded after an hour and a half of Trabi fun. The tour itself was decent and really demonstrated the physical divide of the city during the war years. But the highlight was obviously driving the Trabis. We both got to drive, and both managed to get it into fourth gear, which is super fast for a Trabi. And ours didn't break down - our tour leader's car did. Ten minutes into the tour. Apparently this is pretty normal.

Lastly, the zoo. The Berlin Zoo is the oldest zoo in Europe. It's tiny compared to the Toronto zoo, far more compact, but still with lots to see. We spent a great half-day wandering around, enjoying the nature after four days of war history.

Recently, we spent a day with a woman who spent ten years living in Berlin, moving away only a few years ago. She told us that, having lived in the city through its second decade of reunification, the city has transformed itself again - but not for the better. The first decade was full of creativity and excitement and the energy of a city forging a new identity - rising from the ashes, if you will permit me the cliché.

But the past few years have seen Berlin commercializing itself. The unique quirks of a city struggling to unite the experience of both east and west are being smoothed into a western, cosmopolitan city. The public spaces that she loved, left empty by the wall, are now filling with condos and office buildings. The rent is high, because the city is now a desirable place to be, but the jobs are not following suit.

So for us, visiting for the first time, the city was incredibly interesting. It has a history and a resilient character that we found captivating. But here is the question: now that commercialism has harnessed the creative energy, can Berlin retain its unique flair, or is it set to become another European city with an exploited soul and a faded hipster vibe?

S.

Frites and Kölsh: Brussels and Cologne

 On the last Thursday in May, my parents left us at the hotel in Brussels. When we re-planned our trip following the Schengen revelation, we decided that at this point, we would strike out immediately for Cologne, opting to spend the time in Germany rather than Belgium. But in the three months we've now been travelling, we've learned that here and there it is essential for our mental and physical health to take breaks, to linger and to relax from the constant pull of European sightseeing. (Hard life, right? Don't hate me. I saved hard for this!)

So now in Brussels, both recovering from nasty colds and reeling from three weeks of motion through the alps and through Normandy, we decided to stay another night, and then another and another. After five days, we found that we'd fallen in love with the lively, charming city we'd planned to practically skip.

The only truly touristy thing we did was to explore an old-fashioned lambic brewery at the Musée Bruxellois de la Gueuze, where we were pleasantly surprised by the sour, but delicious gueuze beer. The brewery itself still uses largely original equipment, and still relies on naturally occurring yeasts to ferment and flavour the beer in a unique way. Highly recommended if you're in the area.

Past this, we wandered the twisting, patio-lined streets, admiring the gorgeous buildings from afar. We drank alarmingly strong (and shockingly delicious) beers in brew pubs. We were in town on the weekend of the free jazz marathon - so all of these lovely streets stayed alive long into the nights. And we slept with earplugs, because Brussels knows how to party.

Finally, when we were stuffed to bursting with waffles and frites and moules and frites and beer and chocolates (and frites. I love Belgian frites with mayo SO much), we grabbed a Eurolines bus into the Rhineland.

Here's the thing about Belgium and Germany: you can drink on the streets, in the parks and in any public space. Technically you aren't supposed to drink on public transit, but no one really cares. Kiosks (variety stores) all have bottle openers next to the cash so that you can pull back on your quart right away. And they sell shot-sized bottles of Jagermeister. Although you see the occasional smashed bottle or drunken stumble, this freedom certainly doesn't breed drunken rioting.

We were discussing tactics on hiding our cans for some covert street drinking during the jazz festival in Brussels - a kiosk owner laughed at our conversation and shared this little detail. No need to sneak.

The result? Breakfast beers! Park beers! Beers while wandering the streets! It was all very exciting for us oppressed (and extra-classy) Canadians.

Once we got to Cologne, we met up with Stefan, my friend from school, and his new friends Laura and Jasmine. We spent about eight hours drinking kolsch, the local brew, in the park by the Rhine, catching up and plotting bathroom visits (tricky when the park has no public toilet!).

We shook off our hangovers the next day (I definitely did not envy Stef having to work in the morning) and went out to explore more of this fun, welcoming city. We climbed up the 509 steps of the enormous Dom, Cologne's cathedral, which houses the world's largest in-use bell. Size is, in fact, awfully important when it comes to bells... it rang while we were in the stone passages directly beside it.

So let me tell you this: do not drink the night before you plan to climb church spires.

From the top, the view is unlike that of most of the other European cities we'd seen, Cologne has big, wide streets and modern architecture rather than a tight, congested medieval core. As we were soon to learn, old buildings in Germany are rarer than elsewhere - as in Cologne, many cities were entirely rebuilt after being severely bombed during the war.

Cologne from the top of the cathedral

From Cologne, we grabbed a train to Frankfurt-am-Main to meet Dan's friends, Jan and Daniel for dinner. We only spent a night, in the red light district near the train station - more hilarious than dangerous. Dinner was delicious, in the student area just few U-bahn stops away.

And thankfully, as the e-coli scare ramped up and we were avoiding salads, we were back in the land of my beloved currywurst.

S.

Normandy: Exploring the Wars

The wall of the Norman fort in Caen

We continued our adventures with my parents, heading out of Paris on a Sunday morning.

Juno beach was peaceful when we made our pilgrimage on a late May afternoon. We'd stayed in Caen the night before and made the short drive to the coast. The sand was bright and inviting, shifting gently in the Atlantic breezes.

Although the image of absolute chaos, of bodies strewn over the beach while bullets and shells flew overhead is difficult to place in this now quiet and pretty stretch of beach, the reminders are everywhere. The sand is slowly covering the big, squat German bunkers that line the whole coast, but these imposing structures are easy to find and explore. Tanks and big guns now form memorials to the soldiers who struggled up the beach to liberate Normandy.

Sunken bunker near Juno Beach

We took a tour at the Juno Beach Centre led by a Canadian history student through the nearest bunker and down onto the beach, and spent an hour in the extensive museum.

We went down the coast and found the remains of the Mulligan harbour, which my Dad swam out to touch in the eighties, and wandered around a coastal battery. We found the small town where the 1st Hussars, his regiment since the 70s, was decimated a week after the landings in the push towards Caen, and we finished the day at a Canadian war cemetary - incredibly well kept and beautiful.

And that was the easy day, history-wise.

You want to know what kind of tank this is?
I have no idea. You can ask my dad though.
He's a tank savant. He drives them, he loves them,
he will tell you all about them -
whether or not you are pretending to listen.
Dad, you're the best.
Sorry I'm bad at listening about the tanks.
Update: he says it's a Churchill.

We had an easy night - kebab for dinner, my Mom's new favourite food, and after a game of euchre (so nice to play something other than rummy!) we went to bed early.

The next morning we took off north from Caen for a veritable scavenger hunt of war sites. First to Dieppe, just up the coast, to stand in the wind under the huge, steep cliffs, and to see the slippery stone beach where so many Canadian soldiers died in a botched raid in 1942.

We found the British WWI cemetery in Boulogne sur Mer on a mission to find the grave of Edward Hunter, Grandfather of family friend Carol, and then after stopping to admire the white cliffs across the English Channel, we drove on to Dunkirk to see the beach from which the British evacuated in 1940.

Tired, but determined  we drove south from Dunkirk to Vimy. As you approach the town, the Canadian war monument is visible on the ridge for kilometres, its freshly restored white marble easy to pick out among the forests surrounding it.

We barely made the last tour of the site, led again by a Canadian student. I'm glad we did - its the only way down into the tunnels. We toured through a tunnel (one of a massive complex) and saw a few rooms, and returned to the surface through the exit used on the day the battle began, where the soldiers stood nervous and primed for combat.

We wandered the reconstructed trenches until the site closed, and then spent some time at the monument, enjoying the fact that we were on Canadian soil, for Dan and I the first time in two months.

We drove from Vimy across the northern border and through the flat Belgian countryside right to Brussels - by the time we found the hotel and parked the car, it had been 14 hours since we'd left Caen.

The Butte de Lion: the only hill in Belgium, as far as I could
tell. It's man-made.

We spent the next day at the battlefield in Waterloo, climbed the Butte de Lion and visited the former headquarters of both Wellington and Napoleon, then had the best burgers I've had in months at a little restaurant in Waterloo. My parents left the next morning to return to Paris to end their trip.

So for those of you who know my Dad, I think it was pretty much a dream vacation for him. He was a reservist in the 1st Hussars for much of his life, and a peace keeper with the UN force in the Golan Heights. He is a military history re-enactor and a police officer. He is, at heart, very much a soldier, and so to visit these places is to pay homage to his brothers in arms.

For me, these sights would have been interesting in their own right. But with my Dad at the wheel as tour guide and interpreter, offering explanations and insights and taking us to these incredibly moving sites that we'd have otherwise missed - for me, this made the experience so much richer.

S.

Reconstructed trench at Vimy Ridge