Thanksgiving in Amsterdam

I spent 5 days in Amsterdam recently, including Thanksgiving. Myself and Devon went, and two of our friends from the states came over and met us over there. One of them
was actually a childhood friend of mine from when I used to live in Southington, CT. He lived down the street from me and after I moved away in the third grade, I never heard from him or talked to him again. Then about a decade later I was at a friend's apartment and overheard someone mention Southington. I interjected that I used to live there, and wouldn't you know, it was my old childhood friend from down the street, and so we quickly became friends again. Anyways, I thought it was a neat story. On to the pictures, if you haven't seen Galway yet, scroll down.


Bikes are THE method of transportation in Amsterdam. They're literally everywhere, and there's even bike "parking" as you can see here. You have to pay close attention to where you're going to avoid getting hit by one. Luckily, we had a collision-free trip, but there were certainly a few close calls.


There's lovely central station. Sorry about the guy's head, I didn't realize it was in the picture until I got home and uploaded it to my computer


Here's the outside of our hostel. Looks kinda small and sketchy, huh? That backpack you see is Cosgrove walking in.


But then, here's the inside! It was a really cool hangout place, we came back here most nights and hung out with random people after everything else had closed, and they also serve free breakfast here in the morning. It was voted one of the top 3 hostels in Amsterdam - so even though it might look a little sketchy on the outside, it was actually a really nice place to stay. Sorry about the blurry picture, low light conditions!


This is where we would have stayed if we had money to blow.


I took this picture before I knew what the building was. We were later told by a local that this was the "old church". Apparently there's also a "new church" (probably Nieuw Kerk, and old church would be Oude Kerk if my dutch is right. which it probably isn't). We never actually found new church. You can see the construction going on in the foreground, there was tons of this all over the city. Devon made the joke that the Netherlands' national bird is the construction crane.


From what we gathered, this is some sort of famous playhouse, although I can't tell you why or what it's called. I took the picture figuring that maybe one day I'd find out.




Nothing of importance to point out here, these are just a few shots of the scenery walking around Amsterdam. The city is literally just tons of bridges and canals. I was told that Amsterdam is composed of 70 islands, more than 50 miles of canals, and over 1000 bridges. The discovery channel has been assuring me for years that the Dutch are excellent engineers, I guess it's a longstanding tradition...


This is what the buildings in Amsterdam are like. They're squished right up next to each other, with no alleyways in between (like every rule, there are exceptions, but generally speaking). As a result of this cramped style, the buildings have a "front" but most of them have no real sides, they just blend into each other. Some of them have settled like this one and leaned forward or backwards, so you can sort of see the faux front they've tacked on. Maybe I was a bit too quick with that "great engineers" comment...


That's looking down into the famed redlight district. If you look closely (maybe click to see a larger version of the picture), you can see the red lights down on the left side of the canal. That's as close as I dared to get when taking a picture of the redlight district - rumor has it that there are bouncers walking around who don't like pictures being taken, and won't hesitate to snatch your camera from you and toss it into the canal.




This is the Royal Palace in Dam Square. It's where the kings used to hang out, but now it's mostly just used for ceremonial purposes and entertaining foreign dignitaries. They run tours and we were going to go in it, but on the day we tried, there was something going on in there and it was closed to the public. I had the same problem with Buckingham Palace in London.


This is just looking down a random street. This was at the edge of the "shopping district" (or so I've chosen to deem it). If you walk deeper into this so-called shopping district, it becomes packed - literally difficult to walk in some of the narrower corridors.


I'd like to direct your attention in this picture to that big, teal-ish colored thing on the right hand side of the photo. Doesn't that look like a giant freight boat coming in? We had all thought it was a huge shipping frigate that was docked, and so I took this picture thinking it would be cool to capture that in the background of some of the scenery. We later found out when we got closer that this wasn't a boat at all, that's the edge of a science museum (called NEMO). In my defense, the science museum was actually made to look like a giant boat, so I'm not completely retarded.


This is a picture of your standard coffeeshop, these things were scattered around everywhere. Unfortunately, they don't allow pictures inside... which seems to be the norm for Amsterdam actually. It's a very unfriendly place to photographers. No pictures in the redlight district, in coffeeshops, or inside of any museum / historic building (in the name of preservation).


This coffeeshop was called the "Pink Floyd". A Floyd fan would recognize that Umma Gumma sign above the door - it's the name of one of their earlier albums. Every other album that they play in here is by Pink Floyd. Pretty cool idea for a coffeeshop if you ask me. Too bad I wasn't allowed to take pictures inside, it was actually really neat. The walls, ceilings, and floor were all painted and there were plasmascreen TV's all over the place. The channel they were set to when we were there was showing reruns of the recent F1 racing season, so needless to say I was happy with the programming.



These were taken outside of the Anne Frank house. Devon and I had been here before, but our two friends from back home hadn't and wanted to go. It's really nothing much to look at from the outside, if it weren't for the lines and signs, it would look just like any other building in any other place in Amsterdam. Looking at that first picture - the Anne Frank house is the one with black doors, between the candy-cane awning and the steps.



You weren't allowed to take pictures inside, but I tried to discretely snap this one anyways. I had to do it quickly, so that's going to be my scapegoat for how horrible it turned out. This is actually the bookcase that hid the secret passage to the Frank family's hiding place. You'd expect the hiding place to be sort of like an attic, but it was actually nicely furnished and looked like any other part of the house (i.e. painted walls, separate rooms, etc.).




This is outside of the Van Gogh museum. I'm not really one for Van Gogh, but everyone else wanted to go so I tagged along. Admittedly, it was pretty cool even though I'm not a fan of the guy. It wasn't just Van Gogh, they had a bunch of his paintings and even more of his unfinished sketches, but there were tons of other artists featured in here as well.



Again, you couldn't take pictures inside, but being the rule-breaking bastard I am, I snagged this one. All of his paintings look kind of like an 8 year old's watercolorings to me. Everyone says, "oh - but it's about his use of color!". I don't get it. Good thing I'm not an art major, I guess. I had a minor epiphany for about 30 seconds and sort of understood why everyone liked Van Gogh while I was there... but then I lost it and returned to my previous mentality of, "No, this guy sucks. I'd rather look at a Rembrandt." That said, it was still cool in there. And they had a Rembrandt, so wish granted for me.


I saw these guys as I was heading to the train station to return to the airport and leave, and snapped the picture. Speaking of the picture, sorry for the blurriness. I had to pull my camera out of my backpack and they were going at a pretty speedy trot, so I didn't have time to adjust the settings and take a better one. Anyways, five minutes later a humongous line of what appeared to be highschool students walked by me. I didn't put two and two together at the time, I figured the police were just on a drill or patrolling or something, and I figured that the students had just gotten out of school or were going on a field trip or something of the sort. It turns out that the Dutch just passed some legislation that changed the school hours, and the students were rioting. Not like smashing and looting, it was peaceful protest, but the police were around to make it stayed that way. Supposively a few trains were delayed because huge groups of students were standing on the tracks to stop them as part of the protest, but mine had no troubles - I made it to the airport safe and sound, and more importantly, on time.

So there's Amsterdam round 2 - with more pictures as promised. I'm off to Rome, Italy tomorrow - and will try to get pictures of that up before I go home. I also intend to take pictures of my student residence and a sort of "day in the life" before I go home - showing you guys where I work and my walk through Dublin everyday. So stay tuned.

Galway

Wow, long time no post. Sorry about that. I don't have an excuse, I'm just lazy. But without further ado:

A few weekends ago I went to Galway. Unfortunately, we got there Thursday night and so only really had full days on Friday and Saturday. On Friday we did a bus tour of the Galway area, and on Saturday we ventured off to the Aran islands and rented bikes (which proved to be a big mistake, but it was an adventure). Pictures and text:

First stop on the tour was a placed called Aillwee cave. It's a huge cave formation that was discovered by a farmer in the 1950's and kept a secret until the 1970's (if memory serves, this is why I should have posted this all up a little sooner)

There's me outside of the cave. Incase you couldn't tell, the background has nothing to do with the cave, this is looking away from it out towards the country side.

The picture doesn't do a very good job of conveying it, but this is a limestone waterfall of sorts. Water was only trickling down the wall, but they say after a rain the trickle turns a lot more intense. It looked a look cooler in life, you could see the water erosion, my camera doesn't do very well in dark caves.

There's a nice stalagmite (and if you look behind it, you'll notice some stalactites)

And here's what this all looks like from the outside. Not a very obvious cave, eh?

The place was actually huge inside, my camera just didn't really keep up with the darkness so only a few pictures turned out to be postable. The loop of the cave we walked only took about half an hour, but I guess there are spelunkers who have ventured in thousands of meters. Apparently, it used to be underground river passageways (which made everything really smooth. it felt almost man-made in that regard).


A random castle and random church (respectively) along the way. No real significance to these, they were just around when I happened to be armed and ready with my camera.

Next stop was a dolmen, which is a stone formation used for the ritual disposal of a corpse after death.


I guess what happens is that a corpse was placed on the top of the stone until it decomposed, and then once it was reduced to bones, the bones were buried underneath. This particular dolmen doesn't have any particular significance, but it's over 2000 years old and they said they have found the remains of 30-some-odd different people underneath of it. I guess maybe I shouldn't be smiling in that picture...

I don't think they had this last time we were through here!

Next stop was the Cliffs of Moher. We happened to pass through Doolin, a small town me and the family spent a night in when we visited Ireland 6 years ago.





This wasn't my first time at the Cliffs, I had also visited them when I came here on that vacation, but they didn't fail to impress a second time. Very serene (despite the intense winds and hundreds of other tourists all around).

That concluded the bus tour, mostly. On Saturday, we hopped a bus to a ferry to the Aran Islands. We rented bikes there, which turned out to be a huge mistake because the maps we had of the island weren't very clear, and so we didn't really get to see many of the attractions (which I suppose is okay, because there really aren't many). Also, these were the worst bikes I've ever been on in my entire life. My butt literally hurt for 2 days afterwards. I guess they're trying to promote a crime-free island by showing people what it's like in prison.
Just a random shot of the coastline, I thought it was somewhat picturesque...

And this one pretty much sums up what you can expect to see on the Aran Islands... horses, grass, and rocks... not to say it's not pretty.
So anyways, we biked around, went the wrong direction like 5 times, and finally came to a stretch of beach that's famous for having tons of seals along it. Fate would have it that it was high tide, and that's when seals like to hunt. So there was not a single seal in sight. I didn't take a picture because I figured, why try to document and remember the disappointment? Anyways, a local who was around told us that the seals wouldn't be returning for about another 2 hours, so due to time constraints (i.e. our ferry would be leaving before then), we had to scratch that. Erin and Kathleen weren't having any more of the bikes and so they headed back to town, I was determined to make it to Fort Dun Aonghas - which was the one place I really wanted to see in the Aran Islands. You can google it to learn more, but basically it's an old fort that's built right into a cliff face, so it literally drops straight off into the sea. It's pretty cool, but difficult to describe, so google it and check out a picture if you're interested.

Aannnnddd, this is as close as I made it to Dun Aonghas (that's it up there, off in the distance). Once I got there on bike, I had about an hour and 20 minutes until my ferry left, and it was about a 40 minute bike ride back to town. You couldn't ride your bike up to the fort, you had to walk up. The people at the admissions area said it was about a 20-30 minute walk, depending on how fast you took it. So if I went, I would've gotten up there only to have to turn around so that I wouldn't miss my ferry. Oh well, atleast I got to see it from a distance and enjoy the bike ride back at a more leisurely pace...


Here's a random shot on the way back...



I happened to pass by a few horses on the way back that seemed interested in me. They were real friendly, I went to take some pictures of them with the landscape in back, and they both just walked right up to me. My guess is that they're just used to tourists giving them food and so have learned that it pays to be friendly...

So that's it for the Aran Islands. It probably sounds pretty crappy, but it was actually really nice. It was relaxing to just bike around and see the cottages and landscape and whatnot. Sunday morning we tried to do some shopping in Galway (the girls wanted random crap, I figured maybe I could find some things for Christmas) but, as it turns out, the shops are mostly closed on Sundays. We still wandered around town and just took it all in before heading back to Dublin on an afternoon train. Here's a random shot of what the city is like...


And so that does it for this installment. Sorry it's so late in the coming. I'll get my Thanksgiving in Amsterdam up tomorrow, and then Thursday I'm off to Rome so I'll have some more pictures. Consider yourselves lucky if you see those before I get home (but i'll make an effort... maybe...)

London

Okay - London, as promised. It was a great trip, although very tiring! (more on that later.) I think I tackled most of the big "touristy" things and it was definitely the most beautiful city I've ever seen in my life. America just doesn't compare with some of these European places...

We arrived on Thursday evening and spent the night hanging out with the people who were kind enough to house us. Luckily, Allison and Kathleen had friends in London and so we got to stay with them free of charge! Good thing too, because London is expensive enough without having to pay for a hostel. Anyways, we were out and about all day Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. We had a morning flight back home on Monday.
The World Series was on while we were in London, and so we found ourselves staying up into the wee hours of the morning watching it on the internet. As you can probably guess, we were exhausted from it. As a result of the lack of sleep, the days sort of run together in my memory, so these pictures might be out of chronological order (although they're mostly proper...) On to the meat and potatos - caption under picture:


That's me in the center of Picadilly Circus. Now, I had heard the name 'Picadilly Circus' dozens of times, and heard stories of people proposing there, etc. so I kind of glorified this place in my mind. It's actually just a fountain in the center of like a 7-street intersection. Really not much to see... but the area surrounding Picadilly is really cool. Lots of neat shops, gigantic T.V. screens hanging from buildings. It kind of reminded me of Times Square. Anyways, here's me infront of the fountain in Picadilly Circus



Buckingham Palace, and me in front of it. Not much to say here. I unfortunately didn't get a picture of the changing of the guards because I didn't get to see it. The Saudi Arabian (president?) was coming for a visit so the security was very high and the guard-changing ceremony was on hiatus. We got asked to vacate the premises shortly after snapping these photos.


These guys were waltzing down The Mall - which they closed off (that's the major road leading up to the Buckingham Palace) before the Saudi Arabian (president?) came. Apparently the English like to have security with class.


A park right next door to the palace. I believe it was called St. James Park. We weren't kicked out of the park, but there were police officers all over the place since the Saudi Arabian (president?) was coming by.


No significance to this - just a random arch down the street from Buckingham Palace. It has a name, but I didn't catch it. These things were all over the place... the English are big fans of the arch I guess.



Two shots of parliament. This building was HUGE - these two pictures don't even come close to representing how huge this place was. And it was ridiculously ornate, too - as you can probably tell. That's Big Ben you see in the left of the second picture.


There's the most famous clock in the world - Big Ben. I had no idea this thing was attached to the Parliament building, I was always under the impression that it was free standing. Pretty cool at any rate. Unfortunately, you weren't allowed to go in Big Ben or the Parliament building - only view from afar.



There's the Parliament building again from two other areas. The first one is from a random bridge, and the second shot is from Westminster Abbey (which I'll get to.)
We did these two things on day one - also not pictured is the National Gallery. It was a crazy art museum with all kinds of famous paintings in it - the building itself was practically a work of art. Unfortunately photography wasn't allowed, so I don't have any pictures to share, but it was really cool. Read about it here if you're interested.



These are the front and side entrances of Westminster Abbey, respectively. Unfortunately, they didn't allow photography inside so these next pictures are a little lackluster since I had to sneak them. There were only a few places where priests and employees weren't walking around, so I didn't capture a fraction of what I would have liked to. The abbey was ridiculous, everywhere you turned it was jam packed with tombs, memorials, paintings, etc.







Incase you didn't catch the sign - that last picture is the oldest door in England. Amazing, I know. I had to take a picture of it. Built in approximately 1050 AD. Sexy.
The outdoor looking area is from a cloister within the abbey. I have a couple more pictures, but I had to take them so fast to avoid being caught that they didn't come out very well. It really was unbelievable in there though, I think I hung out in the place for somewhere in the region of 2.5 hours.


This is the London Dungeon. It's kind of like a year-round haunted house and more. It was pretty cool. I didnt get any pictures the inside because it was completely dark, so nothing would have come out very well. Basically, you just go room to room and they put on shows in each one about various gruesome ways people died from the renaissance through present day. The Bubonic Plague, the Great Fire of London, Jack the Ripper, various other killers, ways in which people were tortured, etc. Every room has its own little "show" and there are people that pop out at you or try to scare you otherwise in between as you make your way through the rooms. There's also rooms in which the floor, ceiling, and walls are all mirrors (talk about disorienting)and other "fun-house" type things like that. It was pretty cool.



This is Tower Bridge. It's the fanciest bridge in London. I guess a lot of tourists (understandably) mistake this for the London Bridge. Truth be told: the London Bridge is actually the plainest, lamest bridge in the city. And that's not even an exaggeration. The only notable thing about the London bridge is how unnotable it is. The Tower Bridge is the nice one though, and there's a lot of cool things around it. Sculptures, fountains, fancy buildings, shopping, etc. I have pictures of a bunch of them, but nothing is really worth posting (unless you want to see random buildings, etc. In which case - let me know.)


I thought this was interesting, so I hunkered down and took a photo of it. This is actually just a little tiny drainage canal coming from.. .. well, somewhere. I couldn't track down the source because it disappears under ground eventually. But it runs for at least several hundred meters down the middle of the sidewalk like this before disappearing under ground again on the other side. Oh, and you'll notice one of the towers of Tower Bridge off in the distance.


A ways down the river from the Tower Bridge is the Science Museum (that glorious building you'll see in the first picture). That ferris wheel contraption you see is called the London Eye. It's basically a big ferris wheel that slowly revolves (it takes about half an hour for one complete revolution) and gives an amazing view of the city. I had really wanted to do it, but unfortunately the weather just wasn't worth it. It was cloudy, drizzly, and foggy the entire time we were in London and I'm told the view kind of sucks in those conditions. Considering it cost the equivalent of $30 USD, I abstained. That second photo is of a street performer. These guys were all over the place along the river between the science museum and tower bridge. I took a picture of this guy because he dressed up like a Winston Churchill statue, and actually stayed so still that birds were landing on him.

We went to this really high-scale department store called Harrods on Sunday. This place was nuts. Everything from clothes, to food, to toys and electronics. And it was all incredibly expensive and high end. They had an entire room of gourmet chocolatiers. I would have gotten some to bring home, but I asked one of the employees and they said that the chocolate would get 'stale' by Christmas time. Sorry guys. I didn't get to take many pictures because the place was packed, so most of the pictures would have just been people. Curiously enough, the only two pictures I got were in the Fish Market. I guess it's because not many people buy fish in a department store that I managed to snap these shots...



That first one is a FISH FOUNTAIN! That's right. Those are real fish, and they must have inserted tubes in them or something, because some of these fish were squirting water. You can't really tell in the photos, but the top two fish were misting. It was pretty funny. The second picture is just a crazy shark kind of thing. I know, it's weird that the only thing in this place I took pictures of was fish. I thought the same thing when I reviewed my photos. As long as we're on the subject though: In Europe, the seafood section of a grocery store is called the "Fishmonger".




And what photo-documentary would be complete without some of my car pictures!? (Don't worry, I'm sparing you the Aston Martin, the Lamborghini, and the Audi R8 I took pictures of). You really can't tell what's going on in that first picture, so I'll explain it. A bus is sideways in the road, trying to do a K-Turn, and blocking traffic. I have no idea how he ended up in this predicament, but it was pretty funny to watch. It took the guy about 5 or 10 minutes to "Austin Powers" it out of the middle of the road. He would back up about a foot, crank the wheel, go forward about a foot, crank the wheel, back up about a foot.... over and over again until he finally made shimmied himself back on track with the road. The jerk in the taxi who pulled up next to him didn't make life any easier. Speaking of which, that's what every taxi in London looks like. They all look like old gangster cars, if you ask me. That second picture is an electric car recharging at a public recharge-o-meter. I've never seen this before, so I had to take a picture. I spotted a few of these "recharge-o-meters" (I don't know what they're actually called) around the city. Pretty neat.


And I'll leave you with this to give you an idea of the kind of architecture that's prevalent here. This isn't anything fancy, none of these are landmark buildings. This is just looking down an average street... pretty nice, huh? I thought so...

Anyways, that's it for my London pictures. Unfortunately, I didn't snap any pictures of Covent Garden or Leicester Square. Covent Garden was just a big enclave of shops, street performers, food, etc. Leicester Square was in the theater district, and there were a lot of plays and shows going on there. Kathleen ended up going to one (she's into theater) but the rest of us held off because they were so expensive. There was a lot of other stuff to do around Leicester Square too though: shops, food, London's chinatown, etc. All in all, it was a really good weekend - and since I got free lodging, it really wasn't even all that expensive!

Tomorrow, after work, I'm leaving for Galway. Tentatively, we're going to be doing the Aran Islands and then a tour of the Burren and the Cliffs of Moher (which I've already seen, but nobody else has, so it should be fun). So stay tuned for the next installment.