Rock Concerts & Car Crashes

We got quite a late start catching the ferry from Moskenes to Bodø. After dinnering to Bodø we planned to stay at a camping and guesthouse place in the middle of nowhere, called Lusøy I think. Upon arriving there, though, we discovered a goddamn week long music festival taking place right exactly where we had planned to sleep. It was fairly late at this point and we couldn't keep going because we had to catch a ferry that didn't operate again until the next morning. We therefore had little choice but to join in the party. We couldn't enter the concert grounds because entry was something stupid like 600 crowns (~$A 120), but there turned out to be plenty going on outside. Specifically, most of the locals were getting so drunk that they couldn't even move, and we were getting offered beer and moonshine from all directions. I slept in the car at about 3:30, but Mike just stayed up all night. As a consequence, I had to do most of the driving the next day on our way to Trondheim.

When we finally arrived in Trondheim, we didn't have the address of our hostel, which was called the "Trondheim InterRail Center". We presumed it would be near the central train station, so we began trying to find that. The traffic conditions in the city were pretty bad. In particular, often there was only one traffic light visible when nearing an intersection and often that was in the opposite corner to where your car is. So at one point I'm rounding a corner, doing maybe 40, when the sun jumps into my eyes. I squinted and spotted a red traffic light at the end of the corner, just as Mike simultaneously yelled "Dude! Red!". I hit the brakes and we pulled up pretty sharply (but nowhere near locking them up) and ended up a foot or two over the line. Mike had time to turn to me and say something like "Be more careful, that wasn't cool", before there was an almighty squeal behind us and a car drove into the back of us doing maybe 30, 35 kph.

The car was pretty undamaged. The lower back panel would need replacing, but that's plastic anyway, and the underlying metal was bent a little. The car was definitely 100% driveable. We pulled around the corner and got the guy's details. Even though I'd driven a bit unsafely, it was of course pretty clear that it was his fault, what with us being stationary at a red light at the time of the crash. He also mentioned that this was his "third accident this year". To be fair, that doesn't necessarily reflect badly on him given the stunning driving we saw in the rest of our time in Trondheim. One time, we were travelling down a main road, when another guy moving in the same direction as us stops, slams it in reverse, and starts reversing down the road at us. Another time, Mike was approaching a red light at which several cars are stopped, when suddenly one just hallucinates that the light has turned green or something, and hits the gas and heads through the red. But my favourite is complicated enough that it requires an mspaint diagram:



We had tried to turn left out of the side road when we noticed the obstacle blocking our path. Mike tried to swing around in a U-turn as shown by the arrow. However, the car in front of us was blocking the turn - but they had space to move forward, which would enable us to make the turn. Mike hooted the horn and the driver of the other car turned around and acknowledged us with a nod. Then, she.... slammed it into reverse and started reversing towards the front of our car. Mike and I both just gaped at this for a second or two, after which Mike had the presence of mind to throw the car into reverse and move backwards. He later admitted that had there been a car behind us, he might well have hit it, because he didn't have time to check. Had he not moved when he did, I think there's a very good chance we'd have been hit, maybe 75 or 80 percent.

When we eventually made it to our hostel, we found it located in the local university student building, which was absolutely massive. The dorms were massive and kind of dirty and the bathrooms very limited and also dirty, but we didn't mind because it was a really cool place. The bar there was great. We hung out in a local guy's apartment, listening to his extensive music collection, then later I slept and Mike headed out on the town. When he finally got back at like 3:30, the door to the hostel was locked. Mike therefore decided to climb in an open window and found himself in a locked private bar, so he just helped himself to the party supplies in there and used the internet until someone came and let him out in the morning. Trondheim was a great town, maybe my favourite in Scandinavia.

After two nights in Trondheim we continued towards Stockholm, stopping for a quiet night in a nice hostel in Sundsvall. We hit Stockholm on the 8th, setting up camp in a very centrally located budget hotel.

Pining For The Fjords

The day after finishing the hike it was Lauren's 30th birthday. She wanted to go see a fjord, so we headed across the Norwegian border to Narvik, where we stopped for a spot of lunch and to acquire a cable. The Aygo's stereo is pretty basic, but one feature it does have is an auxilliary socket, enabling us to play music off our iPods while driving. Then we headed south into a nearby fjord, where we spent the day roaming around stunning scenery in awesome weather. That night we went to a restaurant in Narvik which had been recommended to Lauren. I had reindeer - it was excellent. Reindeer is a common meat up here, cheaper than stuff like beef and lamb which mostly has to be shipped in. Right at the end of the day, Mike somehow managed to put a nasty gash in his leg while climbing over one of those metal road-edge barrier things. This gave me my first ever opportunity to drive on the right hand side of the road, something Mike has been doing for months. The difficulty of piloting a manual left hand drive car on the right side of the road was exacerbated by the unfamiliarity of the car and the fact that I hadn't driven at all for two months, and I was off to a shaky start. The first right turn I attempted, instinct took over and I wound up on the left side of the road. Also, I kept hitting the windscreen wipers when trying to use the indicator, because they're on opposite sides of the wheel to normal. We did make it back to the hostel in Abisko, however, and I've gotten used to the road rules now. I don't like the car much. It's geared strangely, with first gear responsible for everything up to around 30kph, then second taking you up to 50kph and third all the way to 75kph or so. I have no idea what fifth gear is even for, since the car seems to top out at like 130. That brings me to the lack of power. The thing feels like it's powered by a hairdryer motor, and what power it does have is delivered only at a rev count of at least 3000 and preferably 3500. So if you change up and the revs drop to 2000, flooring it results only in the car emitting a low moan, like a cow in pain. At least it's fuel efficient, which is important when driving in a country where petrol costs about three times what it does in Australia.

The next day the girls caught the train back to Stockholm and Mike and I began our Norske trip. First stop was Tromsø, a northern university town built mostly on a big island, sort of like a kiddy version of Manhattan. (If you're wondering how to pronounce that o letter, it's sort of like the "u" in "gun", with a bit more length in it. Also, you roll the r's. So sort of like "Trrromsuuh".) It was here that we went to our first Norwegian bar. I've already alluded to the high prices in Norway; it's one of the most expensive countries in the world, much worse than the already expensive Sweden. Apparently it's because of the oil reserves - since they can basically dig money out of the ground, there's a big inflationary effect. A (metric) pint in a bar here will cost you somewhere in the neighbourhood of $A 13. Even for seasoned money wasters like myself, some of the prices are pretty jaw dropping.

In Tromsø we hiked up a mountain close to the town and got some pretty nice views. The rest of the time we spent planning the remainder of our trip. We decided to head to Lofoten for like 4 nights, then south to Trondheim and then across back to Stockholm to return the car. From Tromsø we headed south down a stunning scenic route recommended by a tourist guide. We stopped for some mini-hikes and suchlike and so, despite an early start, didn't make Lofoten in a day. We therefore booked a room at a guesthouse in Sortland, which was just the home of an old couple. The room was an incredibly cheap 250 NKR (~$A 50) and slept both of us, and the breakfast (65 NKR, ~$A 12) was completely insane. It covered a full large size table. There were rolls, bread, scrambled eggs, different types of cold meats, herring, some other unidentifiable fish thing, yoghurt, fruit, strawberries from their own garden, coffee, tea, orange juice, etc etc etc etc. Everything you can possibly imagine. After eating well there, we continued to Lofoten. I'm writing this on our last night here at a very cozy hostel in Stamsund. We've lazed around a lot, but also managed a hike to the tallest mountain on this island (about 730 vertical metres hiked) and a brief, embarrassingly incompetent stint in one of the free rowboats the hostel hires. Tomorrow we head south towards Trondheim, but will probably have to stop for a night again, most likely somewhere in Mosjøen.

Land Of The Midnight Sun

Other than prepare for our upcoming hiking trip, we didn't achieve much in Stockholm. Mike mostly spent the time sleeping and I didn't have the enthusiasm for anything except putting in a token appearance at the bar across the road from the hostel. I did manage to smash my head quite badly against one of the bunks, but stemmed the bleeding pretty fast. We also managed to see Transformers, a movie I had heard a lot of good reports of, apparently from people who saw a different movie than we did. Come the Saturday evening, we boarded our 18 hour train for Abisko in Swedish Lappland. Alana (Mike's ex-girlfriend) and her friend Lauren were to join the train in Uppsala, not far north of Stockholm. It was a long trip, but I had ensured sleep by acquiring a Valium from a Mexican prescription-drug fiend in our hostel room. It certainly did the job, but I felt pretty awful after waking the next day and probably won't try that strategy again. We didn't arrive in Abisko until the afternoon, so we crashed at the hostel there overnight in preparation for beginning our hikes the next day.

We awoke late on the Monday morning and then Mike spent some time mercilessly repacking the girls' ludicrously overpacked bags. I packed very light, anticipating good facilities at the huts along the way. We eventually got underway at something like 2pm, but the late start wasn't a problem since there's daylight 24 hours a day. To ensure good morale, Mike had acquired a team uniform for us in New York City:




I don't think I've mentioned this yet, but my camera took a knock in Ireland and doesn't work. More accurately, the shutter button doesn't work. The rest of the camera works great, but having no shutter button makes taking photos a bit tricky. I'm therefore reliant on Mike at the moment for my photos.

We walked through relatively flat terrain the first day. The path was very well defined, and through boggy areas makeshift boardwalks had generally been constructed. A German guy later told us that Norwegians referred derisively to Swedish walking trails as "motorways". We walked a long way, though - around 35km, all the way to Alesjaure, the second "hut" along the Kungsleden, or King's Trail. They call them huts, but really they're hostels, complete with bunk beds, pillows, blankets, cooking facilities, a shop and so forth. Weather was excellent throughout the day, bright and sunny, right up until we reached Alesjaure at past midnight.

The next day Lauren felt a little ill, so we decided to have a rest day. Alana, Mike and I took advantage of the sauna.The idea was that after sweating for a while, you ran out and down a hill and jumped in the river. The problem was that the hill was too treacherous to run down, and the river was shallow and carpeted with very slippery stones at the point where you were supposed to jump in, so it wasn't really possible.

Next day we left the Kungsleden to head towards our next hut, Vistasvagge. It was an 18km walk through a valley lined with imposing mountains and even a small glacier or two. There were some patches of bad weather, but it wasn't too bad overall. The lowlight of the day was Mike leading us down the wrong path and us having to traipse across a swamp to correct our course, whereupon Lauren and I were both stung by some insect. I think it might be some sort of deer fly. It materialises out of the swamp, lands on your lower leg, bites you, and flies off. The whole process takes about half a second. Then the surrounding area goes red and stings like crazy for a few minutes. Justice was inflicted about half an hour later when Mike got stung twice after we got back on the path. After we reached Vistasvagge, Alana spent the night getting taught magic tricks by some 11 year old kid, while the rest of us just relaxed.

The third day hike started off with miserable weather, but things cleared up a bit after a while. We had to get up at 6am because the plan was to hike 20km and catch a boat a further 12km down to Nikkolotka at 12:30. The hike was unfortunately through some pretty boring territory. Towards the end the weather closed in again and the boat ride was incredibly cold, as it was like being blasted with 40kph winds while saturated and cold. Things didn't improve when we got to Nikkolotka and discovered that we had the time of our bus to Kiruna wrong and it had already left. We had a hire car to pick up, so we all hitchhiked into Kiruna and reconvened at the hire place. After discovering we'd hired a manual Toyota Aygo, we headed back to Abisko armed with pizza and wine and spent the night in a hostel there.

I'll write about Norway later, but for now it's just important to mention that I have started suffering from travel fatigue. I think visiting more new places just because I can would be a waste now, so after we return the car in Stockholm, I plan to go to Helsinki to hang out with some locals Mike knows, and then call it a day and fly back to Adelaide from there.

England

This one's easy. Apart from catch up with Emma and Waitey, and Bonnie from Planet, (and lose a bunch of money playing poker) I did absolutely nothing. It was great.

I'm now in Stockholm (first impressions: great) with Mike, and we're about to go sort out car hiring and some other stuff.

Also, as always, my Ireland pics have been put up on my Picasa page. The shutter button on my camera is broken, so I might be relying on Wes for pics from now on.

Ireland

What do I say about Ireland? I liked it a lot - the people are friendly and there's an air of jovial optimism throughout, even in the once-troubled North. I could give a blow by blow description of the tour I went on, but that would miss the point, I think. The tour was more of an immersion in the existing pub culture of Ireland and the ties the country and its people retain to their often turbulent history. I had a good group and it was probably my favourite tour that I've been on so far.

A couple of highlights, though - the magical Aran islands, where I enjoyed the hell out of biking up and down the island. I might have to get hold of a bike when I get home. Being in Derry on July 12th and having the infamous Orange Lodge parade march right past us was pretty crazy - ten (or even five) years ago, going anywhere near the thing would have been suicidal. This year, the riot police were out, but looking bored, and the worst we saw was some young teenagers throwing stones at a couple of buildings. Having spent a bit of time in the region, my personal opinion is that, similarly to Palestine, the Republicans had a just cause, but destroyed my sympathy for then by randomly setting off bombs everywhere.

I'd like to return to Ireland in the future and maybe spend some time in Dublin, but I wasn't sorry when the tour was over - it's hard to keep up that pace for long.

Italy

I hope I don't offend anyone with this, but this would have to be my least favourite country in Europe, so far anyway. The beer sucks. The food, at standard price points, sucks. Almost everything is broken and/or dirty. The people are rude, to each other and also to customers in restaurants and bars. It sort of combines the rudeness and poor service of some of Eastern Europe with the high prices and rampant tourism of the West. I know a lot of people love it, but I'm not sure why.

Still, I'm having a fine time, thanks to the hostels I've stayed at, which have been good enough that it doesn't matter what city they're located in. I've been three nights in Rome already and except for sightseeing and eating I haven't ventured outside the hostel at all.

Backing up a sec though, Florence was OK, but after I got over the great view of the campsite I was at (up by Piazzale Michelangelo, which is a must visit if you go to Florence) there wasn't a lot to do. It was hard to work up the enthusiasm to go out to bars in town when the hostel was a nice place to socialise with other backpackers. One day, however, I did daytrip to Cinque Terre, a World Heritage listed series of 5 little fishing towns along the western coast of Italy. I hiked the two and a half hour or so distance between them and it was really nice there. A highlight was taking a dip in the Mediterranean at the northernmost village, which is the prettiest.

By the way, I uploaded all my photos from the trip so far here, including the Intrepid photos and the ones from Cinque Terre etc. No time to comment on them really, but I recommend taking a look at the Bled and Cinque Terre photos.

After Florence I headed south to Rome and have been here for three nights. St Peter's Basilica managed to be simultaneously impressive and dull. All religious art looks the same and I'm incredibly sick of it. If I see one more painting of Mary holding the infant Jesus I may set it on fire. The Colosseum was better, although due to the unbelievable inefficiency of, well, everything in Italy, the line took about 5 years to get through and I felt going inside actually somehow made the structure LESS impressive. The imposing outer wall is the best angle on it, I think.

Anyway, being in Italy was bad enough, and writing huge blog posts about it is definitely not how I intend to spend my time. It's American Independence Day today so no doubt the Americans here will be in the mood to party. I'm flying to Ireland tomorrow, next dispatch will probably not be till after the 8 day tour I'm doing, which ends on the 14th.

Bohemia And Beyond

I stayed up all night dinking in Krakow the night before my early morning flight to Prague. I'll go off on a quick tangent here about something I love and something I hate about Europe.

Something I love: not only can you, as in the United States, buy liquor virtually anywhere, but you can consume said liquor anywhere you like. Walking along the street, in parks, on public transport, whatever. As with pot in Amsterdam, seeing this policy in operation makes me wonder why people expend so much effort preventing other people doing it. I suppose at worst it might lead to some broken glass in the streets (although this wasn't in evidence), to which the European response appears to be "Wear shoes, then".

Something I hate: charging money to use toilets. Public toilets are bad enough - there's nothing worse than fumbling with change in an unfamiliar currency when you're busting for a piss. On my last night in Krakow, however, I encountered my first pub which actually charged to use the pub toilets. The attitude seems to be that they can charge me for their beer both entering and leaving my body.

OK, end of tangent. After my flight to Prague I was pretty wrecked. I had a hostel bed booked so I headed directly there. When I booked my flights to Europe, my travel agent repeatedly inquired whether I was going to Prague. "You must," she insisted "stay in Czech Inn in Prague". I dutifully booked it, even though hostelworld.com had several other higher rated hostels. This is the last time I trust a random travel agent over hostelworld. It's not that it was a bad hostel. It was very slick and newly furnished, but this concealed some fundamental problems, the most glaring of which was the location. The normal tradeoff for an out of the way location is a quiet hostel. Czech Inn accomplished the difficult feat of being nowhere near anything useful, yet still located smack on a main road. My room was on the corner of the hostel facing the road. Given the hot weather, closing the windows was unthinkable, so they were wide open. The effect was as if there was a highway through the middle of the room. The traffic noise was thunderous and made sleeping tricky. Nevertheless, after my flight from Krakow, I slept fitfully until about 3:30pm, effectively writing off my first day.

The next day I daytripped out to Kutna Hora, a little town an hour or so out of Prague. The attraction there is the Kostnice Ossuary, a church decorated by an artist with bones dug up from around 20,000 people earlier buried in the church grounds. There's a chandelier built of bones and a huge Hungarian coat of arms made from bones.

The following day was the 16th, the first day of my Intrepid tour. After wasting a bunch of time doing laundry at a very inefficient laundromat, I checked in at the joining point. I knew already there were going to be 9 people on the tour. "Ah," said the lady from the accommodation agency "you must be Christopher". I was about to ask how the hell she knew that, when the most likely.explanation popped into my mind, and I lead forward and scanned the list of people on my tour. Yep. All females other than me. But it turned out that they weren't all "girls". There's no age limit for Intrepid trips, but it still surprised me a bit to learn that we had three women in their 60s on the trip. The other five girls were all normal backpacker age. But given the loose structure of the trip, my contact with the older ones was minimal, which was lucky since one of them was a total pain in the ass. There was also a trip leader (a Hungarian girl) and a trainee trip leader (an English guy, so actually I wasn't the only guy around). All the five younger girls were cool. Three of them (Ruth, Alison, Julie) were quietish, one of them (Julia) was a party girl and the other (Annie) was sort of in between.

There's no way I'm writing a blow by blow description of the whole tour, so here's some random stuff in point form. Pics will have to wait till I have time to upload them:

- Prague was nice, but I didn't have that killer a time there. I think that was probably just because I didn't know the good spots to go; Julia, from the tour, said she had an amazing time there.

- Cesky Krumlov was pretty, but there wasn't a whole lot to do.

- Vienna was good fun - we went to some nice bars there - and the architecture is incredibly grandiose. I found it a little amusing - it feels like they still think they're head of some immense empire, instead of basically being Germany's sidekick.

- Budapest was great. I can see where it gets its nickname "The Paris of Eastern Europe". It's kind of a cafe society, and capital of a country with a strong identity. The "House of Terror" museum here, featuring the crimes of the Nazis and (mostly) the Communists, is really good. It cost 10 million to build. We went to a great bar that was a converted auto mechanic shop. It was very atmospheric. It's a shame a place like that in Australia would be shut down by some stupid health and safety law. We also got caught in the most insane storm in Budapest. It was a nice, sunny day, if a little humid. Then - wham! Out of the sky comes a huge, tropical-type storm. Hail got whipped into us by ferocious winds. Then the rain came, and it was like running along the bottom of a lake. We got completely saturated.

- Bled was amazing. The scenery and atmosphere in the town itself was brilliant, but the main thing was the full day adventure tour we went on. When I say full day, I mean it - 8am to 7:30pm. It's called the "Emerald Mountain Adventure" and involves getting driven around to different places in the Julian Alps. At some we hiked a little up mountains, at one place we went to see the spring source of a river, we went whitewater rafting, we swam under a waterfall, we jumped off a 12 metre high bridge into a river.... all for only 88 euro, so pretty good value. The Julian Alps are brilliant countryside and the Slovenians we met (admittedly in a tourist town) were the nicest people I've met in Eastern Europe. I was strongly considering quitting the tour in Bled and staying for two extra nights, but nobody would stay there with me, so I instead resolved to return later and have a good look round Slovenia, including the capital Ljubljana and the cave systems and so forth.

- Venice was pretty much exactly what I expected - a town thoroughly whored out to busloads full of middle-aged sightseers. The portion of the streets not occupied by slack-jawed Americans was covered with stalls hawking all manner of useless souvenir rubbish, plus immigrants thrusting roses into the hands of passing girls and demanding payment from their boyfriends. The Piazza San Marco and Grand Canal are worth seeing, though, so I think it's worth calling in to the place, but you definitely don't want to stay longer than a night.

I'm in Verona at the moment, having spent last night in a hotel here with Julie and Annie from the tour. Today I'm headed to Florence. My trip plan from there is: 27th-30th Florence (including a daytrip to Pisa/Cinque Terre, and maybe one to Sienna), 1st-4th Rome, then I'm flying to Dublin on the 5th and joining an 8-day Shamrocker tour around Ireland starting on the 7th. That finishes on Saturday the 14th, just in time for me to fly to London and go to a house party at Emma and Waitey's. Then I'm staying in London until the 19th, when I'm meeting Doecke and we're flying to Stockholm, where a day or two later we meet up with Alana and her friend Lauren and go hiking in the north of Sweden.

Poland

I'm not going to spend much time on Warsaw. My hostel was pretty average, located in a residential area miles from anything useful. There's no incentive to put hostels in a good area in Warsaw, I think, because there isn't a heap of tourism. Apparently Warsaw does have an old town, but I never saw it. I just took like an hour-long walk out to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising memorial. On the first night I went out to a club, which was actually really fun. The second night I just hung around the hostel drinking and chatting with a couple of American guys called Warner and Paul, who were coincidentally both travelling to Krakow on the same day as me, and staying in the same hostel there.

Krakow is entirely different to Warsaw. It's one of my favourite places on the trip so far. It's extremely touristy, but not ruined by tourists. The first thing I saw on arriving at Krakow was this:



It's a huge board that shows exactly what rooms are and aren't available in hotels all over the city. Pretty cool. After we made it to our hostel, which is brilliantly located in the heart of the old town, we headed out at night to check out the town, and were confronted with a massive open-air concert, complete with orchestra and choir, in the middle of the Old Town Square:




Apparently it was because it's 750 years since Krakow became a city. Who knew?

Krakow is an extremely pretty town. Here's some random shots I've taken since I've been here:









That last is my hostel's street. If you zoom in on the middle you might be able to see a little green/yellow/red striped sign; that's my hostel.

After seeing the open-air concert, I checked my mail. You might remember two English girls, Katherine and Lindsey, that I met in Paris. In a huge piece of randomness, I had an email from Katherine telling me that they'd just arrived in Krakow! I replied asking if they wanted to meet, and we arranged to meet up the next day. I met them the next afternoon and we checked out the royal castle and cathedral. We organised to do something called the "Booze Cruise" that night. It was supposed to be a three hour cruise down the river, with unlimited alcohol and a BBQ included. However when I headed down there that night, there was nothing going on. I somehow missed the girls, but it was the same deal for them. So after some email back-and-forth, myself, Paul and Warner all headed to their hostel just out of old town and drank at the bar there.

The following day I signed up for the afternoon tour of Auschwitz. Auschwitz is the German translation of the name of the Polish village it is located in, Oświęcim. It's actually three camps. The first, Auschwitz I, was a typical concentration camp. The second, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, was the largest Nazi camp and was the famous extermination camp. The third was a camp built closer to a work site so that weak prisoners from Birkenau would not have to hike a long distance before work. The Auschwitz museum is located at Auschwitz I. Only original buildings are preserved at Birkenau - there are no exhibits.

This is Auschwitz I:




The museum was quite confronting. After being gassed, victims would be stripped of personal belongings and had their hair shaved. Valuable belongings would be shipped back to Germany and the rest destroyed. Even their hair was shipped back, and (here's something I didn't know) textiles were made from it, for use in uniforms and so on. They had examples of the cloth there. When the camp was liberated, piles of personal belongings and hair that the SS didn't have time to do anything with were still lying in camp warehouses. These discoveries are exhibited at the museum. There is an entire glass-walled room piled high with shaved-off hair. There is a MASSIVE room containing 40,000 pairs of victims' shoes.

Some of the punishment cells are also open. I'll leave the details of that to people who want to read about it: go here and search for "block 11". It's hard to believe that all this took place a mere 50 years ago, and not in the Dark Ages.

There was also the opportunity to look through the only gas chamber and crematorium located at Auschwitz I. The others (at Birkenau) were all destroyed by the SS when they fled the camp prior to liberation by the Red Army.

After the museum we took the bus over to Auschwitz II-Birkenau. It's HUGE.



This is the platform where victims would come in via train. Those judged unable to work (a large majority) were immediately sent to the gas chambers. The others were housed in one of the Auschwitz camps and worked to death.



This is the women's camp at Birkenau, which for obvious reasons was a lot smaller than the men's camp, but even it is far too large to fit in shot. It consisted of brick buildings, unlike the men's camp which was mostly wooden barracks. Most of these barracks were burnt down and only the brick chimneys survive. Hopefully these next two images will give an idea of the scope of the men's camp:




More later, but this post is big enough already, I think. Tomorrow I'm catching a plane to Prague at.... 5:30 in the morning. The alternative was a 9-hour train ride, since the Polish trains are, ahem, not quite up to the standard of Western Europe.

Berlin

I didn't do much the night I arrived in Berlin, just some laundry, which as you can imagine badly needed doing after Rock Im Park. The next day I headed off to do the "free" walking tour. I put free in quotes because you have to tip the guides afterwards (unless you're a jerk, or hated the tour) and they have to kick about half their tips back to the company. So really it's more like a try before you buy tour. Anyway, it was really interesting and I'll definitely do their tour in London as well. Berlin is perfect for that sort of thing because so much has happened there historically. In fact, you would be hard pressed to name a city in Europe that has seen as much go on in the 20th century as Berlin (Moscow, maybe? I think Berlin is #1). Here's a few pictures from the tour:



This is the famous Brandenburg Gate, a symbol not just of Berlin but of Germany.



This is the memorial officially titled "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe", which is subtly different from "Holocaust Memorial". It's just a big area of concrete slabs, all the same dimensions except for differing heights. The artist deliberately made it vague and open to interpretation. Some people liked it; personally I found it a bit abstract. I liked the sculpture at Dachau better:



No prizes for guessing what this next one is:



Yep, it's a surviving section of the Berlin Wall. In most places, the Berlin wall was actually two walls, with a section in the middle called the Death Strip, which was guarded by armed guards, land mines, rabid dogs, zombies etc. This section was a single wall, because it was right next door to the main government building, which was - in an incredible piece of socialist bureaucratic self-parody - called the "Ministry of Ministries".



This is Checkpoint Charlie, although - like many things in Berlin - it's just a reconstruction.



This is some building or other that the last Kaiser built. I kind of like it, but it's generally considered an architectural failure. Apparently the Kaiser used to come out every morning and bellow "More statues of ze angels! More of ze columns! More flourishy bits!"



I couldn't fit this whole tower in shot. It's a giant television tower in East Berlin. The government there built it as a demonstration of the might of socialism. However - branching out from self-parody into comic analogy - they discovered they'd built it on swamp and that the thing was collapsing. Swedish engineers had to be secretly called in to stabilise the structure. After this was leaked to the press, Ulbricht had to resign as leader of the government. The East Germans promptly nicknamed the tower "Ulbricht's Last Erection".




This wasn't actually on the walking tour, but I made a special trip to go photograph it, as I think it's the most striking building in Berlin. This is the Kaiser Wilhelm church, which, like most of Berlin, was bombed during the war. The tower was left broken as a memorial to the futility of war.

That night I went on the pub crawl, which was a bit disappointing. We visited some nice pubs along the way - there was one very cool one with a hige beer garden - but the "nightclub" we finished up at turned out to be some shithole bar in the middle of nowhere which clearly only survived because of the pub crawl.

Next day I did very little during the day (just the aforementioned trip out to the church) but that night was the night Smashing Pumpkins were playing in Berlin. Doors opened at 7 and the show was to commence at 8, so having failed to secure a ticket, I headed along at 6 with a notice. On the notice was written "I need a ticket" in German and English, and then under that, the multi-lingual version, which was [sad face] + [drawing of ticket] = [happy face]. My translation of "I need a ticket" was obviously not very good, as everyone who approached me did so immediately in English. Later I saw other people wandering around with similar notices, reading simply "Suche Karte", or literally "Search Ticket".

While there I met up with Josh, a guy from Texas I had met at the hostel who was also trying to secure a ticket. While chatting we were approached by a guy who asked me if I just needed one ticket. I replied that I needed two. If he'd only had one, I'd have given it to Josh as he'd never seen the Smashing Pumpkins. However, the guy replied that he had two tickets! I asked how much, and he launched into a speech, saying he'd paid 60 euro for them because he'd gotten them off some website but now his wife was in hospital and they couldn't go so he was selling them. I asked again how much and he said just 60 euro. This was ripping himself off to such a staggering degree that I gave him 80 euro anyway (Josh later mentioned that he'd witnessed a girl pay 100 euro. I was willing to go to 150). We thanked the guy and he walked off. It was at this point that my brain replayed the conversation and I felt like an ass for not wishing his wife well. At the time my brain was simply filtering out anything that wasn't an answer to the question of how much he wanted for a ticket.

Anyway, we had our tickets and when we got inside, we were able to get a position in about the third row back. The stage was right up against the audience, so I was literally like 5 metres from the band. The venue was surprisingly small. I would say less than half the size of the Thebarton Theatre. It would have held 1,000 people at most, and that with the aid of an overhanging stand. Here's a very blurry pic taken with my camera phone, which should give you an idea how close we were and how small the venue was (given how small the stage is):



The band played for 3 hours this time, over an hour longer than the Rock Im Park set. Because they were playing to a fan crowd and not a festival crowd, they were able to add in some more obscure songs. Additions I remember were Drown, Hummer, an acoustic version of Rocket, Annie Dog and Home (from Machina II). Hummer is one of my favourite SP tracks, but I think my highlight was Drown, mostly because it was so unexpected. I can't say I enjoyed them as much as at Rock Im Park - that would be impossible given the different circumstances - but I still had an awesome time.

Next day I visited the Pergamon, a museum of antiquities. I'd been told they had an original gate from Babylon, which sounded amazing, but when I got there I discovered the gate is mostly a reconstruction. I quickly became pretty bored. Antiquities aren't really my thing anyway, and especially not when I have to keep checking whether they're actually mostly plaster reconstructions. I can see reconstructions of antiquities on the Las Vegas Strip. Anyway, after a while, I headed back over to Checkpoint Charlie, for no reason other than to buy a "You are now leaving the American Sector" tshirt, which I've wanted since I saw a guy wearing one in Paris.

That night we sat outside the hostel, taking advantage of the 1 euro beers. We weren't being very noisy, certainly not by Australian standards, but a little after midnight the police showed up and said they'd had a complaint. This was the exchange:

Fat German cop: OK, so these are the options. You can either quieten right down, or move inside. Or there's a third option, which is that we come back. But you don't want that, trust me.
Girl staying at hostel: We'd be arrested?
Fat German cop: Nono, it's just that I'd drink all your beer.

Thus warned, I decided the night was basically over and retired to bed to get some sleep before checking out the next day and jumping on a train to Warsaw, on which I am writing this post.

Overall impressions of Berlin were quite good. There's no question that it remains a somewhat broken city. 90% of it was bombed flat at the end of World War II and then after German reunification, a stack of East German businesses collapsed in the face of foreign competition. This dealt a powerful blow to the regional economy, from which it has not recovered. Unemployment is at 18%, and it is, as our exuberant tour guide put it, "a city that doesn't know what it wants to be yet". There's a sense of dynamism, though, and I'd be keen to revisit in 20 or 30 years and see what Berlin has managed to make of itself.

A final comment about Germany, as I'm now speeding through the countryside of Poland. It's something I forgot to mention about Rock Im Park. There were 40,000 people there, many of them camping in a huge tent city, with endless supplies of alcohol and aggressive music, for three days straight. In Australia, that sounds like a recipe for a riot. In Germany, not only didn't I see a fight, I didn't see any aggressive behaviour whatsoever. No pushing and shoving (except for fun in front of stage), nobody yelling at each other, nobody throwing bottles, nothing. It was impressive.

OK, so I wrote the above on the train from Berlin to Warsaw. When I got to Warsaw, I asked at the reception to confirm that they had Wifi, as advertised. "Technically,", the staff member explained, "we do. However, it doesn't work.". Hence the lack of blogging. I'm now in Krakow and will blog about that in a day or two.

Rock Im Park

Phew. Well, I guess I should begin at the beginning. I'm on the train to Berlin at the moment, so I don't have much to do except write a huge post. On Friday the 1st I caught a morning train to München from Salzburg. I had checked the timetable and seen that there was a train from München to Nürnberg every half hour or so, so I figured I'd just jump on the first train to Nürnberg once I got to München. However, I didn't stop to check what kind of train it was before hopping on. I will not make that mistake again. The trains listed in the Eurail timetable book were all ICE (Intercity Express) trains, which made the trip in about one hour. The train I was on somehow managed to take nearly three hours. Eventually it was over and I met Maria, her sister (Jenna), and 3 of their friends in Nürnberg central station. From left: Maria, Sarah, Jenna, Meg, Jamie.



It was absolutely pouring when we got there. The girls had planned to camp out at the venue, but looking at the weather they decided they didn't like that plan much anymore, so we went to the hotel I was staying at and luckily they had a big room available with 4 single beds and a couch. So the girls settled in and then we went down to the shops to buy some supplies. There was a cheap clothing store nearby, and deciding I didn't want to ruin my sneakers, I bought this pair of shoes for 8 euro.



Pretty pimp, huh? After a lot of messing about we eventually made it to the venue. They had strange rules about what you could and couldn't bring in - any drinks were ok, but they couldnt be in any kind of bottle, not even screwtop plastic. My Camelbak really came into its own, and enabled the girls to bring vodka in with them. I stuck to just buying some beers. We somehow managed to miss most of both Korn and Travis, and then the girls went to see Scissor Sisters, who I absolutely loathe. I wandered off to check out the Dance Tent, and found a little outdoor area where a DJ was playing classic hard rock and metal (RATM - Killing In The Name and Metallica - Seek And Destroy were played while I was there) so I got my rock on there for a bit. Then I went to see the last half of a German punk band called Die Ärzte who are wildly popular here. I would tell you how to pronounce that but I still don't know. Every time I would attempt it in conversation with a German person, they'd say "What?", I'd repeat myself, they'd say "What?" again, and I'd pull out the program and point to the name. Then they'd say "OHHHH, you mean...." and say what to my ears sounded like exactly the same thing I was saying. Anyway, they were OK. It was an odd experience having the frontman crack jokes in German and being more or less the only one in a crowd of about 20,000 not laughing. One of their best songs was played as an encore and was clearly one of their more popular. There were swastikas flashing up behind them as they played it, but I later confirmed with a girl that yes, it is an ANTI-Nazi song. After Die Artze finished the main stage was closed, so I walked to the S-Bahn platform and was happy to find that I'd arrived 10 minutes before the last train left, at 12:30am.

I awoke the next day and got up to the girls room to find them all shattered. One of them had got back to the hotel at 9:30 in the morning. They only had their hotel room for the night, so I let some of them shower and crash in my room while I went out with two of them to eat and look for a new hotel for them. After spending the whole night loading up on vodka and Red Bull and then in the morning taking some herbal pills which someone had recommended to her as giving an "energy boost" (i.e. chock full of stimulants) one of the girls had a panic attack, for the first time ever. Being experienced in these things, I walked around Nürnberg's old town with her for a while, talking to her, so I got to see a little of the city. After she'd straightened her head out a bit I headed to the venue by myself to see The Used, who weren't bad. Then I had nothing to do, so I went and checked out one of the minor stages, and caught some of a hardcore band called Lost Alone, who were actually quite good. Then I talked to some German lesbians for a while and then met up with Sarah to see Muse. I don't like Muse, so I can't tell you whether they were good, it just sounded like Muse to me. Some of the girls were fans though and later told me that they were good.

After Muse was Linkin Park, the first band I really wanted to see. I'm not a huge fan and wasn't expecting much, but actually they really rocked hard. They opened with One Step Closer - interesting choice to open with probably their biggest song, but it got the crowd immediately involved and meant I wasn't just waiting around to hear that. Other highlights for me were Papercut, Numb and Breaking A Habit... but as soon as they opened with One Step Closer, I was pretty sure I knew what they'd close their encore with. The first track they played after coming back on was quite a slow, melodic song that I didn't know, but then the lead singer said "Well, that's about it from us. Oh wait, Justin... you got anything you want to say?". In reply the guitarist simply started playing the intro to Faint and the crowd went berserk. Faint and One Step Closer are easily my favourites, so Faint was one of my highlights of the day.

After Linkin Park finished, I caught some of the White Stripes, but didn't pay much attention as I'm not a fan. I met Maria and we chatted until Evanescence hit the stage. Once again they exceeded my expectations. I'd been told that the singer's voice is studio engineered and that she can't sing in real life, but that isn't true. In fact, with both Linkin Park and Evanescence, my impression had been that a lot of their slickness was production work in the studio, but I was impressed with their ability to reproduce their sound live. Evanescence were a lot of fun, a very different vibe to Linkin Park, which was very energetic. At Evanescence people weren't really jumping around much, but the crowd was definitely into it anyway. Highlights were Bring Me To Life, Whisper, Call Me When You're Sober and the encore My Immortal. After Evanescence the day was over and we caught a cab back to our hotels and slept.

On day 3 Sarah wanted to get in reasonably early to catch some Scottish band called The Fratellis. Personally I didn't like them, but she seemed to love it. After that was 30 Seconds To Mars, which is the band of Hollywood actor Jared Leto. I figured they were only famous because of his celebrity and that they'd therefore suck, but they were actually good enough that I'll check out their catalog when I get home. Next up were Sydney act Wolfmother. I'm not a huge fan of them but I had to admit they put on a really good show and the crowd loved them. They seemed to have a lot of local support. After that was Kaiser Chiefs, who were decent but not that interesting. We tried to check out Papa Roach, but for some reason they cancelled at the last minute. There were some people in tears. We didn't figure out they'd cancelled until a band called Killswitch Engage hit the stage. They were one of those metal bands where the singer sounds like someone with a cold coughing their lungs up. We couldn't take much of that, so we wandered back to the main stage where I decided to go bungy jumping. I've always been a bit wary of it because of the possibility of messing your back up, but having talked to people in Interlaken who did it, I decided it would be OK. They had a big crane in the main arena, attached to a little platform, on which you got hauled to the top. After shelling out my cash (50 euro, compared to over 100 euro in Interlaken) I found myself at the top, staring out over the arena and Nurnberg in the background. It's a little daunting jumping into what looks like certain death, but I mentally shrugged my shoulders and just leant forward off the platform. Next minute I was plunging towards the arena floor. The drop passes very quickly and I felt the rope reach its limit and yank me back skywards. I didn't feel much stress on my body at all. It was fun and I might well do it again sometime, in some other setting.

During the second half of German band The Beatsteaks, who were good, Maria and I started to move into position for Smashing Pumpkins. I was pretty excited as I've been waiting like a decade to see them. The circle on my expertly drawn MS Paint diagram below is where we ended up.



So we had a pretty sweet spot when the Pumpkins hit the stage. They put on a really amazing show and I'm not just saying that because I'm a fan. Even the diehard Muse fans among the girls admitted that the Pumpkins put in the best performance of the festival. I had an awesome night. Songs they played that I know the name of that I remember are Cherub Rock, Today, Disarm, Tonight Tonight, Bullet With Butterfly Wings, 1979, 33, To Sheila, Stand Inside Your Love, Glass and the Ghost Children, Untitled, Tarantula and Doomsday Clock. Those last two are off the (unreleased) new album. Tarantula is the already-released single, and I only know the name of Doomsday Clock because Billy announced it. I'll take a look for a complete setlist on the net. It's hard to pick a highlight for me because I loved all the stuff they played, but I would have to say 1979. There are several different versions of BWBW that they play live, but the version we got was good, and I really liked the shortened version of Glass and the Ghost Children. Inamongst the well-known songs, they played several songs off the new album, which sounds really good. It sounds like a return to the straightforward rock approach of the Gish/Siamese Dream days. Also, I had been a bit worried that Billy's singing was getting worse, because I think the vocals on Machina tend to be a bit screechy. But Billy's performance of the quieter songs like To Sheila and 33 was excellent, so no worries on that front. It seems like the vocals are toned back a bit on the only album version of a new song I've heard so far (Tarantula).

When I was on the net briefly this morning I discovered that the Pumpkins are playing again in Berlin on the 6th. A set at a festival is necessarily a little shortened, so I'm keen to go see them again on their own terms. Tickets appear to still be available, so I'll see what I can do when I get to Berlin.

What else? Oh, Groove Armada were supposed to be playing at midnight on one of the smaller stages on the last day, but they didn't show, so I guess they cancelled. And um... I bought a pretty nice Rock Im Park t-shirt. Also, at the concert, you hand your ticket in and in return get a cloth wristband, which serves as your ticket for the rest of the event. They're washable and everything, so apparently some people just leave them on indefinitely. The idea is that people will come up and chat to you on trains or at parties or whatever if they also went to that festival. There were people at the event wearing as many as 5 of them, including ones from previous Rock Im Parks. I'm probably going to continue wearing mine until Prague and see if anyone talks to me about it.



OK, so I wrote all the above on the train and now I'm in Berlin. Hostel seems OK but a bit overrated, nowhere near as good as the ones in Munich or Salzburg. It looks like the Pumpkins gig here might be sold out, but I'm going to check at the venue tomorrow and I'll try to find some scalpers on the day of the event also. Wearing the Rock Im Park wristband has so far attracted one comment.

That's all I got. Thanks for reading!

Salzburg

Apart from Dachau, I also daytripped to Neuschwanstein from Munich; you can see those pics here. I didn't go inside it because when I was there they weren't running a tour for like another hour.

I also left my jacket in the bar overnight and when I checked with them and lost property in the morning - no dice. Guess someone pinched it. Even though I only bought it like a week before I left, this didn't annoy me until I realised I'd have to go clothes shopping to replace it, which is a giant pain.

I got into Salzburg yesterday and am staying in another really good hostel (I'm seeing a pattern here. Doing your research and booking in advance pays). It's a town of about 150,000 people right on the edge of Austria. Today I went to see the worlds largest ice cave, where water dripping through limestone creates ice sculptures in a cave inside a mountain. This is located in the Austrian Alps. Photography inside the cave was verboten, but there are some pics from the top of the alps here. There's also a castle in Salzburg, which I never got around to checking out, but that's OK. Plenty of castles to go yet.

Tomorrow morning I'm catching the train to Nuremberg, or Nürnberg as the Germans call it, for the 3 day rock festival Rock Im Park. The lineup is here. I want to catch Korn, The Used, Linkin Park, The White Stripes, Evanescence and Smashing Pumpkins. I'll probably end up seeing more than that since I'll be hanging out with Maria and her friends. I would have seen Machine Head if they didn't clash with Smashing Pumpkins, but don't particularly care. I like that Smashing Pumpkins are closing the festival, since seeing other bands after that would be anticlimactic.

Dachau