I spent a few days back in Amsterdam crashing at Jen and Mark’s place and exploring the city while they were off at work. The first day was spent just wandering around the canal district. Apparently the “Venice of the north” has over 100km of canals and 1,500 bridges, but I didn’t check the validity of that factoid. What is interesting though is the layout of the canals. In the old part of town, laid out in the Dutch Golden Age of the 17th century, town planning decided to build a series of semi-circular canals which linked in at both ends to the harbour. The design was practical both for defence and transport of goods (beer was specifically mentioned a couple of times).
On my first day the weather was good, but it’s been pretty awful ever since. As a result, most of the rest of my sightseeing was indoors, though Amsterdam does have some cool museums. I checked out the Van Gogh museum, the Rijksmuseum and Anne Frank house. As well as seeing some of Van Gogh’s most famous artworks, it was really cool to see the transition of his work from his first ever oil painting, through mimicking of other artists styles and finally to his trademark style of expressive blobs of brightly coloured paint. I already knew of his mental illness, ear cutting off incident and suicide at age 37, but I didn’t realise that he only started painting at a late age and did most of his best known work in the last two years. He initially worked at an art dealership but left to do religious work, and was later largely supported by his art dealer brother, Theo, who worked hard to promote Vincent’s work both during his life and after his death.
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Tags: Amsterdam, Anne Frank House, Munich, Rijksmuseum, Van Gogh
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photos to come…
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I spent a little more time hanging with family, including some time with my cousin and his family as a working bee was launched to beautify their courtyard. Well let’s just call him my cousin, technically he’s my mum’s cousin’s son but that just gets too convoluted. Anyway he and his wife have a gorgeous 2 year old son who spent the day keeping us women busy as the guys were outside working in the rain. Little Colin was learning how to ride his walking bike and apparently the day after I saw him managed to do it all on his own. By all accounts he was as proud as punch. He reminded me that the best sound in the world is the gurgling laugh of a happy child. The second best sound in the world is the clink of ice cubes in a gin and tonic on a hot and sunny afternoon. Before leaving I also spent a day hanging out with some family friends who have twice done long trips around Australia and visited us both times. The first time was with motorbikes and the second with a campervan and kids in tow. They can’t believe an Australian wants to move to Germany when all they want to do is move to where I’m leaving. Funny how that works.
From Stetten I headed back to Munich to pick up some stuff I’d left at the hostel and discovered one of the inexplicable phenomena of backpacking: if you have a full bag, take some stuff out and leave it behind for a while then pick it up again, there is little chance that the left behind stuff will fit back into the bag you originally took it out of. Admittedly, some stuff was bits and pieces Brett left behind for me to carry, but that doesn’t account for the whole problem. I swear there could be a PhD thesis dedicated to the quirks of living out of a backpack and it would probably involve some quantum physics, elementary particles or other seriously complicated sounding scientific words. Anyway, I was left with an extra bag as well as my big backpack and daypack. I feel like a fool.
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Tags: Amsterdam, Munich, Pecha Kucha, Pfalz, rock climbing, Stetten
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We spent a week in Munich, checking out some of the neighbourhoods, picking couchsurfers’ brains and exploring some of the many cool corners of the city. It really seems like a place we’re going to enjoy living when we finally get it all together and “settle down”. I use quotation marks because one of the things that we love about the city is its proximity to places that we want to travel. Much to Brett’s delight it’s only an hour or so from the mountains, which should be great for outdoor activities in all seasons. Yes, that’s right, the Sydney girl is actually excited about going snowshoeing, cross country skiing and hiking on cleared paths (as long as there’s a log fire and mug of mulled wine at the end of those days). It’s also really close to some of the areas of Eastern Europe that we’re itching to explore.
Apart from all that Munich seems like a really liveable city. There is plenty of green space all throughout the city and the central area is compact enough to be able to walk to most places if you’re not in a hurry. Just about the only thing we’ve heard people complain about is the price of housing, with rent apparently being much higher than anywhere else in Germany. Other living expenses may or may not be higher, depending on who you talk to. Anyway it’s easy to see why people want to live there so we’ll just have to make it work.
On one of our days we took the S-bahn down south to a suburb we’ve heard good things about. It’s on the Isar River and seemed to have a lot of green space in the surrounding areas, according to our map. We fell in love with it, though this has been a bit of a theme for each area we visit in Munich. It was quiet, green and only 20 minutes from the centre of the city. To get home we walked for about 8km along the Isar and marvelled at how many other people were out enjoying the beautiful spring day. There were bike and walking paths everywhere and it seemed like everyone was out getting some exercise and having fun. The banks of the river were full of people with picnic blankets spread out, BBQs wafting enticing smells and crates of beer stored in the river to keep them cool. Further along we saw the nudist area, though it wasn’t discretely hidden away like I would expect. They were hanging out, in all their glory, just metres from the main path along the river. Some of them wandered around tending a BBQ but most of them just lay there avoiding tan lines.
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Tags: Munich, Neuschwanstein
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As it turned out getting to Belgrade wasn’t as simple as “direct train” would have you believe, but we felt a little of the old fashioned romance of train travel as we pulled out of Istanbul. We left from the same station that the Orient Express used back in the day. Our carriage was hooked on to a train that had different cars heading off in various directions along the way, but when we got to Sofia, Bulgaria, we were told that our little orphan carriage had missed the train we were meant to be joining on to. We had to wait until evening (another 10 hours) for the next train to Belgrade. Brett and I explored the station area, bought some supplies, then wandered around the sidings looking for our mobile home. We eventually found it and killed some more time before being bounced around like a ping pong ball by an engine driver who was obviously in need of shunting practice.
Eventually we arrived in Belgrade, at 5:30am, and once checked in (at 9am) we headed out to explore Belgrade. The city doesn’t really have all that many sights but the weather was beautiful and we joined the locals in making the most of it. Outdoor cafes and the beautiful park at the old citadel were great places to hang out and people watch. The young people are very fashion conscious and in certain areas you’d be forgiven for believing that nobody over the age of 35 lived in Belgrade. Apparently the nightlife is pretty lively on any night of the week but we weren’t really in the mood to head out drinking, though we did visit one eclectic little bar which gave us some inspiration for how we’re going to arrange our own strange collection of travel artefacts once we have a house. One sightseeing thing that we did do was the ethnographic museum which has an incredible collection of traditional costumes. We were also told that there was an area where you could still see some of the buildings bombed by NATO in 1999. It’s a strange thing to go and see when you think about it logically, but it had to be seen. Maybe its morbid fascination but I prefer to think of it as seeing traces of recent history that you usually only read about in the newspapers. As far as I can tell the buildings we saw used to be the Yugoslav Army Headquarters and the Federal Ministry of Internal Affairs and they’ve been left as a reminder of the past.
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Tags: Belgrade, Istanbul, Munich, train travel
