tale of the tape...

so i'm back... i'm here, alive and well. for those of you who ardently follow this blog, please acquiesce to allow me a few more moments in summary.

facts
cities dwelled in: 10
countries stayed in: 7
kilometers traveled (via plane): 3,500
kilometers traveled (via train): approx 2,231.6
kilometers traveled (via automobile): not many, but i thought it fit
friends traveled with: 6 (Hil, LBB, J.Reis, Jono, Eling, Ailin)
items lost: 2 (sunglasses, hil's beverage sack from pamplona)
number of currencies used: 4 (pound sterling, euro, swiss franc, czech krone)
hair grown: pictures say a thousand words










awards
best pizza: milan (small family-owned pizzeria)
best beer: brussels (Leffe)
most improved bicycle rider: Eling Yang
best mass transit system: Berlin
most frequent poster: tie (lynn and kathy)
most interesting city: tie (prague and berlin)

why brussels???!?!?!?!?

some of you might be asking yourself, why are you goin to brussels??? i had the exact same question, so i answered myself. i said, "joe, it's the headquarters of the EU and an emerging business center of the 21st century - plus i like strawberries and waffles, especially together." that seemed to be a great reason for me - oh yea, there's also the part about it costing a BUNCH less to fly in and out of brussels than any other european city. appeal to the money, always appeal to the money. little did i know that it is also a major location for designer chocolates. if you're like me, you prolly didn't even know there WAS such a thing as "designer chocolates" - but they got'em.

so the only thing i ever heard about brussels was that they had this HUGE model of an atom. we checked it out and it was alright, but not worth the 3hour line of people. so appease yourselves with this ground view. after visiting the "Atomium" or whatever it's called, we headed back into town to grab some eats.




right across the street from the belgium waffle place (which they're called brussels waffles over there) was a belgium fries place. now, i had never heard of belgium fries before. but EY assured me that they were a tantalizing treat for my tastebuds. so we had them, in my opinion they're just fries in a paper cone holder. but i'm just a stupid american, so what do i know.



after this quick pit stop, we decided to wander the streets a bit. our attention promptly became focused on a group of people takin pictures on what appeared to be a random street corner. so obviously, we flocked to the group. what we saw BOGGLED my mind. apparently everyone was worked up cause there was a little bronze statue on the wall peein into a small fountain. EY seems to think that this statue is world famous, but i'm gonna argue that until i see the proof on google. so we went up to take a look at this peculiar tribute. turns out it was even more absurd on this day cause he was wearin a scout uniform. thinkin hard back to all the attractions we'd seen that day, EY and i remembered seein a gaggle of kids all wearin weird hats and had kerchiefs tied around their necks. turns out there's some sort of world scout jamboree in brussels at this time and the statue was dressed to commemorate this. so i also took a pic of a model of how the statue shoulda looked just for reference purposes. there was also a story about "le petit julien" and how he came to be. what it boils down to is that his parents were shoppin at the local mall and lost him (like that ever happens). apparently they said he wandered off under the clothes (yea, i've heard that one before). as he was tryin to find his way back home, he himself made a pit stop. well, his dad was actually lookin for him and caught up at this moment. findin this extremely funny, the father wanted to eternally torment his son by makin this a lastin image for everyone in the city to see. for some reason all the brusselonians (??) seem to love this kid and feel a connection with him. silly belgians...

i want to ride my bicycle

i want to ride my bike... so eling and i decided the best way to check out the city was on a bike tour. we figured we'd get a good glimpse of all the important sites in the city, little did we know that we'd get a veritable history lesson spanning everything that involves WWI and the cold war. i really recommend the Fat Tire Bike Tour in berlin (they also have tours in barcelona and paris - and yes, maybe i accepted a bribe or two to mention them in my blog)... so the whole trip was full of sweet pics and useful tidbits of history, so i'll only post a few special ones in this space.

this is the first main stop i liked, here are fathers of communism (and yes, it's located in east berlin, somethin like Marx and Lenin square - go figure)... just to show you how large these two figures were i climbed up to the standing figure and showed it off. yes, i'm standin on one set of shoulders and barely come up to the other guys head. don't try this at home, i'm a trained professional - i'm even givin the thumbs up. and for those keepin score at home, eling might have had a little help gettin on his shoulders.

so the whole premise of this thing is to follow some dude and 20 of your newest friends around on matchin bikes for 4 hours - stopping every 10-20min to hear random facts and historical insight. this piece to our left is the last standing sniper tower. it's not necessarily in the exact spot (they moved it 20 yards so they could put up an apartment building) and it's not the only "lookout tower" but the last sniper tower. one soldier would man the tower with the instructions to shoot to kill. kinda a big responsibility for the 19 year olds that were up there.

so after the wall came down, the city planners had the big feeling that berlin was going to grow to the heights it had been before the wars. so since a lot of east berlin lay in ruins (thank you communist building plans), they knew they had to expand. they decided to go with the theory of "build it and they will come", well they built it - but no one came. so one of the main squares (postdam platz) is populated with "fake buildings" that are just scaffolding covered by paintings. it's a great way to create advertising space for a city in such a poor fiscal situation like berlin. take a close look at this storefront to your left. even passing by this at night i couldn't tell. in fact, looking at it now the only way i can tell (besides the fact that there'd be no other reason to take this pic) was the lights sticking out of the wood frame windows.

in case you were missing your celebrity and historical buildings, i thought i'd post this pic of the famous aldon hotel. in case most of you think you've seen this hotel before, you have. but the last time you saw it michael jackson was danglin his baby by the ankles off one of the balconies. yea, thought that'd interest you. go 'head, check out youtube. just search jacko baby window and you should get a great view of this hotel in action. oh the events that people remember.

ok, so my fearless travel companion for this portion (you might remember the lovely eling from the statues above) may or may not have much experience on a bicycle. trusted sources put in her scouting reports that her previous road time is about 30min to an hour. so going on a 4 hour trip was an experience. and you know what, she battled through it and came out on top. yea, she might have gotten scraped up a bit, but she took that lickin and kept on kickin (just like beyonce and those stairs). so this pic is a shoutout to her mad biking skills and the fact that she has an uncanny ability to remind me to phone home. oops... forgot to do that. i mean, jaws was never my scene and i don't like star wars. HI MOM!!! :)

ich bin ein berliner

... no dad, i'm not REALLY a jelly donut. but anyway, this is the part of my fantastic voyage where i end up in berlin. yes, it's a place deep in history and architecture - well, maybe not architecture seein as how most of the city was destroyed in WWII. but then again, most of the buildings are brand new since the wall came down... so some of it looks nice. so eling and i went on a bike tour monday afternoon. so i'm gonna break up this city into two posts, this one will cover random junk i that's not on the bike tour - the other will cover the bike tour. enjoy.

so we started off our personal tour sunday night with a walk around checkpoint charlie. turns out our hotel was only about 3 blocks from the thing, so we went for it. at the top, you can see a picture of eling and i in front of the concrete bags and stand. i'm not sure if this is even a legit shack, but it's where everyone takes pictures. the famous "you are leaving the american sector" sign is standing on the sidewalk to our right. again, not sure if it's legit - but it's the best they got.

so the last time i came here (prolly june-july 1990) they didn't have all this fancy stuff up and they hadn't officially taken down the physical wall (now there's a scant 1.3km left of it at various points in the city). anyway, when the 4 of us were walkin down the wall, we took it upon ourselves to grab a stray length of rebar from the ground and take a few baseball swings at the good ole wall and knock piecies off it. i still got mine at home, i know rico does and i'm pretty sure li'l lynnie has hers somewhere safe too. after all those wallpeckers came through (that's what the locals call people who chip away the wall, get it.. .woodpecker - wallpecker) this is what some parts of the wall actually look like. not that beautiful.

so throughout the city, there's a demarcation where the wall used to be. two sets of coble stones so you can easily identify where it was. so eling and i took it upon ourselves to take the most touristy photos we could think of. the whole "i'm in east berlin, i'm in west berlin" set of pics. enjoy. it's amazing that i can hop and forth between communism and capitalism so easily.

here i am defiantly stradling the border and showing that there is no east berlin, there is no west berlin - there's only german beer.

so our evening jaunt took us through a few of the highlights of the city. this is the brandburg gate all lit up for the beautiful sunday evening. this is one of the main symbols of germany, all those pics you see of the people standing on the wall and looking over was taken here, cause it's the only place that the wall was wide enough to stand on. there's prolly some historical context here too, but i just like the winged lady being led by 4 horses on the top.

as we kept going, we also passed the main opel dealership in the city (for those of you that don't know, opel is gm's brand over in europe). rico, you need to get the product development people off their asses. really. they're puttin THAT in a showroom??? might as well just put in a trabant or something.

berlin's flag contains a bear on a white flag with red borders at the top and bottom (i think somethin like the name of the city originated from bear in some language - or that may just be a complete lie). but either way, a few years back unesco wanted to raise some money. so they had about 15-20 of these statues made up and painted different ways and then auctioned them off. apparently those bears are kinda famous, being toured around the world at times - no clue why. but anyway, the city began craftin a bunch of these plastic bears throughout the city. it costs a bit of money, but you can get these painted for a price to the city (anythin to raise money). personally, i thought this bears thoughts were in the right place - so i joined him, coincidentally wearin the same colors.

the remainin pieces of the wall that haven't been torn down comprise a set of murals called the "eastside gallery". it's a beautiful stretch of about a kilometer, so if you have a chance you should really check it out. i have too many pics to put them up here, but i'll give you a teaser with this one. cause, all in all we're just another brick in the wall.

czech please!

so now i find myself in the lovely, lovely medieval town of prague... ok, it's not SOOOO medieval, but there's still some remnants... like this pedestrian bridge over here, i mean really... who has pedestrian bridges anymore. who cares if it's a UNESCO world heritage site (it's the Charles' Bridge for those keeping score at home). but i guess it is pretty cool lookin from afar. i'll give them that one. so we all met up (myself and the sisters yang - eling and ailin) on thursday afternoon and made our way around the city. the one thing that stands out in my mind about this place is that although the map they give you tends to make you think that this place is HUGE, it's really not. strange thing is that we couldn't find a single scale on any of the plethora of maps we had. but hey, less walkin for us then.

anyway, so we're strollin around the city the first night and notice this funny lookin sculpture (yea, no clue?!?!?) in the middle of one of the squares. obviously, this little piggy needs help landin on the cement. so bein the generous guy that i am, i add an extra hand. cause that's what college kids do, and optimus prime always told me to stay in school. this square was filled with tons of random pieces of art (if you want to call them that), many of which i didn't understand so i'm not gonna bore you with their pictures here.

so you might remember the walk up window i mentioned in milan (of course you do cause you're memorizin every single word that i type), but anyway - they called it a "take away window" but i think the czech have somethin with this whole "McWalk" term... it's catchy, short and goes with their overall naming scheme. i'm gonna write mickey d's and see if we can get that portal renamed over there in milan on corso buenos aires...

so there's this cool thing in prague called - well, i'm not really sure what it's called but everyone just calls it the mini-eiffel, so when in rome... but it gives a great view of the city. as you see yours truly gazin upon the land... "the finest wine and cheeses to all my subjects!"

and yes, the reason they call it the "mini-eiffel" is cause allegedly the top of it is as high as the top of the eiffel tower - that is if you count the mountain we climbed up to get there... but hey, who am i to argue... i can barely speak the language (and by barely, i mean not at all).

so here i am with my lovely travel companions for this section of the trip (yes, the ballyhooed sisters yang). eling will be joinin me both at school in the fall and for the remainder of my trip. keep her in your prayers. thanks. and for those regulars, the playoff beard is comin in great and the hair is actually startin to show signs of collacs (gonna have a lovely alfafa point comin out the back of my head real soon). grand, just grand.

so on our journey back down said large hill, we spotted more than a few trees. as we're all curious young youths, we thought we'd investigate to figure out what type of trees these were. so after a great j.reis impression, i was able to garner a few fruits from this tree. although they look really weird, it appears that this is actually a pear tree. that might be quite obvious to some, but i'm an engineer not a botanical genius.

so after the long day of climbin up and down the hill with the orders from our lovely drill sargeant (who refused to take the tram and MADE us go up there), we were all tuckered out and ready for some relaxin touristy stuff. we (and by we, i mean eling) decided to go to the marrionette show. apparently marrionette's are one of the historical things that czech people do - or so all the marrionette shops in the city streets would have us believe. anyway, we decided to go see don giovanni (which i'm pretty sure is the only script being played in town, but at a few theatres). i thought this would be a good way to cross both opera and puppet show off my list of cultered things i have to do in my life. not a bad move, eh, two birds - one stone, foreign country. now none of us actually knew what the storyline was and didn't want to pay 10 euros for a program so i conversed with the south african dude next to me and we decided it went somethin like this: guy A meets girl, guy A is in love with girl, guy B comes in and steals girl from guy A, guy A and guy B fight (probably sword fight), guy A gets girl. that's pretty much the premise of every piece of work, right? well, turns out we were a little off - but still quite close. i'll leave you on your own to figure out the actual plot. for the record, this was a pretty cool little show. the puppets - sorry, marrionettes - are about 4 ft tall and move quite well for someone with wood for bones. the people runnin them are pretty darn good and there appears to always be some instances where things don't go exactly to plan, which is great comic relief.

so after that lovely two days of touring prague (which is all you really need for the entire city), we decided to use our third day to find a laundromat and do laundry. wonderful, wonderful times. but we did actually find what they called an "american style laundromat" somewhere in the north end of the city. it was run by an american dude and frequented by american travelers. so we had that goin for us, which is nice...

and all is organized by the swiss...

well, jono and i arrived in zurich from milan mid-afternoonish on monday (i think - days are still blurring together). anyway, we went out and explored the city. not much to talk about that everyone doesn't already know about. zurich is very clean, very well organized, trains run on time (almost to the second, in fact). so we embarked on our quest to find a local eating establishment that had a decent view. while on our way, we kept on seeing these print ads for swiss milk. according to their ads, the reason swiss milk tastes so good is because the cows do yoga. yea, i don't get it either. but maybe if our cows did yoga, our milk would taste better. for the most part, i don't really like milk in europe. bad experiences over the last 15 some odd years, but that's just me. but this ad intrigued me, so i went out on a limb and decided to try some of this so called "yoga milk"... and i'll be honest, it's the best milk i've ever had in europe. now that statement by itself that's kinda like sayin you're the best kickboxer in belgium, but actually it was pretty good. ain't got nothin on guernsey's, but still good.

so the city of zurich is set up on a river that feeds into lake zurich. the area around the river and into the mouth of the lake (which is called the zurichsee in german, so i might refer to it as a sea at some point throughout here) is pretty nice. the one thing that stands out is that although there seem to be a few tourist boats passing along the river, you also see a lot of swans swimming leasurely along the edges. the funny thing in this is that the river is apparently so clean that the locals often swim along side the swans. you can really see this near the mouth of the sea as they have a 15meter structure in the water that the kids tend to jump off of for fun. silly swiss... but to get out there, you have to swim. and instead of jumping off the ledge nearest the thing, some of these kids decided to take a dive off the top of the bridge we were standing on. this kinda looks funny, cause one second you're standin next to some dude - then a few seconds later he takes his shirt off, hands his wallet to his friend and jumps in. silly swiss... after watchin all this for a long time, i don't really have much that left itself in my memory besides this.

it was nice out the entire time in zurich, so i took advantage of it by layin out on a bench near the lake or a park at the top of the city and catchin up a bit on my readin (yes you smartalecs, i CAN read... thanks).

so as i was gettin ready to leave, i noticed an interesting piece of artwork in the zurich train station. talk about pickin yourself a winner.

back to the homeland

my time in milan can be summed up in 4 words - italian chicks are HOTT!!! (and yes, they're so hot that both t's are required)... but since you don't pay me to only write 4 words, oh wait you don't pay me at all.... hold on a second here... but i digress, since you don't read these things to only see 4 words, i figured i'd delve into my time there a little more descriptively...

so my time in milan started off at this train station... and if i didn't see this with my own eyes, i woulda swore it was some cgi'd visual effect in the latest die hard movie (what is he, 58 now?????) but this was an awesome piece of architecture about 7 stories high and spanned almost an entire city block, just breathtaking... (and i'm done with the architectural portion of this tour, follow me right along this way to get to the hypocritical sarcasm you've grown accustom to)....

so i met up with JonO at this large train station and we began our way around the city, but since neither of us did our homework on where to go, we were a little corn-fuse-ed as to where to go. so we went with tried and true attractions like mickey d's... who knew they had "walk thru" ordering here... anywho, here's our lovely lovely meals that we enjoyed, cause after all - when you're in a city known for good meals and great food, why not be a typical american and chow down some golden arches...

after receivin a call from the center of all knowledge, we had an idea of what we wanted to see. we were told to head down to the massive cathedral, people watch and venture in and out of the stores. now, this covered street here is the place to be. it has all the main shops of all the main fashion designers in the world. fun times to go in and pretend like we had enough money to buy this stuff. but we also saw a few "unusual" street performers. i.e. my first opera street performer and my first violinist street performer. absolutely breathtaking. after that we headed out into the square to people watch. and boy was our information correct. the place is such a tourist attraction that EVERYBODY and their brother walks through that court. we sat down at a sidewalk cafe and prolly overpaid for a liter of beer and a panini, but we made up for it in the ecletic mix of people walkin past us every minute... fine grandma, i'll put up a pic of the cathedral d'duomo... apparently it's really big in some circles... some might even say it's absolutely breathtaking...

but after watchin the people and hangin out, jono and i realized that our lovely hotel room was lackin certain necessities - a shower curtain (or even an edge to the tub), a fridge, air conditioning and a tv that worked... so we decided to kick back and cool off with some local brew.

the remainder of our time there was spent walkin the city lookin for the cheapest knock-off soccer jersey's we could find. and i'll admit, we did a good job. oh, and just so "some people" don't go harassin us - yes, we also stopped by the big park in the center and few other local landmarks...

and yes, i think both of our lastin memories will be wakin up in the middle of the night sweatin to death cause we didn't have a/c and it was like 98 degrees over there... we'll definitely be glad to get to zurich where it's both cooler and we have a decent hotel.

oh, and milan wins, so far, for the best pizza award... absotutely breathtaking.