Eurotrip ´07 - June 17 - Germany + Beer = Brent In Love...Part 9/10

(Originally published June 17, 2007)

(Pictured: Cinderella still lives here. At least that's what my magical glass of beer told me.)

So Tuesday afternoon we rolled into the happenin´ town of Munich, home of Oktoberfest and the world famous beer gardens. I looked in the mirror, gave myself the once over, and........promplty headed to Pizza Hut for some stuffed-crust pizza. Exotic cuisine indeed! That night Slim and I headed over to the Augustinerkeller Beer Garden. The entire garden is situated outside under these massive chestnut trees, but low and behold after a couple of hours it started to pour. We were forced to take refuge under some kind German folks´ private table and tent. Slim also saw this as the perfect time to steal one of the famous one litre beer mugs that you get your beer in. Not the easiest thing to smuggle out, but we managed just fine.

The next day, we decided to see what Munich had to offer via the guided walking tour. Much like Berlin, much of the city was bombed to the ground during World War II. Unlike Berlin, there isn´t much here in the way of cool shit. Munich is famous for beer. Period. The one positive of the walking tour was that we stopped for a beer break, where I promptly did away with an ice cold litre of Germany´s finest ale. That night, we decided to check out the world-famous Hofbrauhaus. We took our seats, ordered up some brews and Bavarian cuisine (basically a million different varities of sausages and jumbo overly-salted pretzels) and started to let the good times roll. We were already a few beers in when some friendly German folks set-up shop beside us. On the other side I was socialzing with some American executives from Bausch and Lomb who were well on thier way to catching me and Slim for drunkness. The one American dude pulled out his company credit card and ordered a round for everyone (nine of us at this time!). Pretty nice gesture considering it cost over $80 and was the equivalent of ordering twenty-seven beers back home in one shot! Needless to say we closed the place down and had a walk home that neither of us can recall (all we know is we smoked two cigars, which were missing from our package, and we somehow made it to bed!).

Thursday, the 14th of June, we were a hurting unit. Slim wanted to visit Dachau (imprisonment/concentration camp) on the outskirts of Munich where over 206,000 people where imprisoned between 1933 and 1945. About 25% of the prisoners (Jews, homosexuals, gypises, POW) died here, although the gas chambers were never put into use (although they are there and just as equally eerie to see regardless). It was quite the harrowing and humbling experience, although it is good to see Germany face its dark-past and pay homage to those who were lost in some of the darkest days of modern humanity. On the way back, we ran into a couple (Chris and his girlfirend) who we had been chilling with the day before, That night, Slim and I made our way to our third beer garden in three nights, this time the Chinese Garden, which is located in the Englischer Garten (larger than Hyde Park and Central Park). Long story short, we ate and drank some more big beers and stumbled our asses back to the hostel.

Friday, we took a day trip a couple hours out of Munich to visit Neuschwanstein Castle, or as most people call it, the Cinderella castle. It is this beautiful castle cut into the side of the Alps, that was the basis for the castle in the animated movie Cinderella, and also appears as the backdrop for the Walt Disney Logo as we now know it. That night, we got back kind of late so we made another pilgrimage to Pizza Hut before closing out the night in our hostel´s bar, which was pretty poppin´.

Saturday, we hopped on a train and arrived in Heidelberg, Germany a couple of hours later. Heidelgerg is home to one of the other famous castles in Europe, as well as the oldest university in Germany. That afternoon, we just visited the castle before doing some souvenir shopping. It was here that I made the purchase of a lifetime in the form of Das Boot! Anyone who´s seen the movie "Beerfest" knows what I´m talking about, and I can´t wait to get home and test this puppy out! For dinner, we decided to check out the Hard Rock Cafe. They were serving cheap cocktails all night, which led to us staying there, getting pretty hammed all night and chilling with some local university students before retiring to our residence. Sadly we were just too gassed to hit up the local clubs. Damn I´m getting weak at my old age!

Today, we were back on the trains, this time our stop was Cologne, Germany (home of the famous Eau De Cologne). On the train, I was constantly being harrassed by this baby who would just randomly pop up in between my seats every couple of minutes. Good thing I am also easily amused and we got along together just nicely playing ball and such. Sadly, the place where cologne was invented was closed, so we headed over to the chocolate museum. It was way better than the other chocolate museum in Barcelona, and I am still in awe that they put that many millions of dollars into building a chocolate museum. But hey, as long as dumb tourists like me keep showing up, the chocolate shall flow like gold! Tonight I shall take it easy as tomorrow will bring the toughest test of all for my health...Amsterdam for four nights.

Anyways, I hear some German draught calling my name! Stay classy!

Eurotrip ´07 - June 12 - The Communist Party. Good Times...Part 8/10

(Originally published June 12, 2007)

(Pictured: Prague at night. Some of the oldest architecture in Europe, as Prague was one of the only major European cities not bombed during WWII.)

So our first night in Prague was pretty uneventful. Like most cities that we end up spening multiple nights in, we basically just went to the convenience store, bought a bunch of beer and proceeded to get loaded in a public park. God bless Europe and their lack of "open alcohol in public" laws.

Sunday we were propistioned by a couple of our roommates, Veemer and Anaan to go on the walking tour of Prague. Being the good sports that we are, we naturally said yes and the four of us perfectly straight men were off on a date. The tour in general was pretty shitty, mostly due to the guide´s poor English. But he did take us to all of the major tourist sites, such as the Charles Bridge, Prague Castle, Old Town Square, and the John Lennon Wall. During the tour, Slim met a couple of American girls, and we all agreed to meet up that night and go to some big 5-storey club. Early in the evening, I went to play some poker but the game never started up so I went back to the hostel and was greeted by Slim and the one and only Cindy who had arrived from Vienna. They were boozing it up on the patio, and were quickly joined by myself and a collection of other characters from the hostel. That night our posse of about twelve or so made it to the club (a little late, due to excessive patio drinking = fucked Slim over with the not-so-impressed-Americans) and danced the night away to ridiculously cheezy early 90s dance music and some crazy 80s pop music. Best workout I´ve had since the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Sidenote: Later that night, after the bar, Slim and some other dudes were propositioned to go to a midget strip club (no joke!), where you could get it on with the midgets or watch them indulge in midget sex.....I definately would have gone in, but hey that´s just me!

Monday we were back hard on the tourist trail after one of the rougher nights of our vacation. During the day Slim, Cindy, and I hit up the Museum of Medieval Torture (no explanation needed) as well as the Communist Museum (I think our British mate was rather bored to tears). That afternoon, I wanted to go the Museum of Sexual Instruments, but no one would go with me, so I shall just have to wait until Amsterdam for the live sex shows instead.

Tuesday, June 5th, I for some ungodly reason was put in charge of giving Cindy a walking tour of Prague and trying to remember information from a tour I never paid attention to in the first place. Let´s just say my tour was a little rough around the edges....That night, Slim, Cindy, Veemer, Anand, myself and some others did our own version of a pub crawl. First we wanted to go get shit-faced on the swan boats and paddle boats but they were closed, so we had to settle for a bunch of pubs instead. Thanks to Veemer (and his ridiculous smuggling skills), I was also able to get my first taste of some Amsterdam bud, which I rather enjoyed as I had not smoked since our first weekend in London. Talk about a layoff and a half! Thank God for Ivy League graduates and their awesome drug smuggling skills.

From Prague, we caught a rather lengthy train to Budapest, Hungary. We had to take four trains that day, but we made it! Upon arrival, we were greeted by this crazy-ass hostel (Backpackers), where we stayed in a Bob Marley themed room. Needless to say, that night Slim and I chilled in the hostel bar with a bunch of others and just drank our faces off and smoked some delicious tabacco out of their inhouse hookah pipe (I´m trying to get ready for alll the Turkish people in Germany).

Our first full day in Budapest we decided to check out some of the sites with our new found buddy from the night before, "Seattle" Abe. The three of us checked out the Museum of Terror (former head of the Hungarian Secret Police, really creepy, but awesome and informative), Heroes´Square, some churches and other related shit, and then we went to the thermal baths for the remainder of the afternoon. The thermal baths were pretty amazing. They are all these pools and tubs that are naturally heated by the thermal spings in the ground and reach "hot tub-like" temperatures. There was a large contingent of gay American men there who were saying some pretty freaky shit to each other (hey I eavesdrop) and I almost burst out laughing a few times, but then realized that that may not be the most politically correct thing to do. That night, Slim, Abe, and I decided to hit up this place we had heard about from some of the others called the Mongolian Grill. It was an all you can eat and drink (booze) buffet from 5pm till 12:30am. We were the first people to arrive there that night for dinner (about 5:30pm) and a couple hundred patrons later, the last to leave when they closed the doors. Not surprisingly, it was a bit of a sloppy walk home that definately involved a stop for some more beers from the gas station! In the end though, we got our monies worth and that´s all that matters when you´re partaking in the sport of buffeting!

Friday, young Slim and I decided to go our separate ways for the day. He had made the decision to go caving (where you crawl around in these caves on your stomach, or something to that effect). I, on the other hand, decided to try my hand at the sport of cable-boarding. Cable-boarding, is like wakeboarding, but instead of being pulled by a boat, a cable pulls you around the lake. Needless to say it was quite difficult and I never managed to make it more than sixty feet before I would have this spectacular crash. I think it´s fairly safe to say that my athletic skills have waned significantly over the last few years!

Saturday, was for lack of better words, a fucking nightmare! We spent over twelve hours on trains to try and get to this small German town called Rothenburg Ob Der Tauber (don´t quote me on the spelling), where we would only be spending one night. Because of train delays, we missed the last tour of the day and were therefore relegated to parouse the streets of the ancient walled medieval city on our own for a couple of hours before complete nightfall set in. So yeah, that day really was a complete write-off. Ah well, life goes on.

The next morning we were back on trains (way too common of a theme) and headed for the buzzing metropolis of Berlin. Our first night in Berlin was pretty uneventful as we just tried to find this bar called Dr. Pong´s, which advertised itself as a ping-pong bar. Needless to say, it had closed down recently (and I had wasted three hours of my life I will never get back) and we were left to walk around the streets of Berlin and get drunk the old-fashioned way: by stopping at every take-out store on our journey and purchasing a bottle of some quality German ale. Beer rocks!

Yesterday, June 11, ws a little more productive from a "doing-some-tourist-shit" standpoint. That night I am pretty sure I was attacked by bedbugs as I am completely covered in these fucking bites and I am itchier than a Sasquatch with crabs. In the morning, I went out and got my second European haircut. Again, I had a bit of a communication barrier, but all in all it seemed to turn out okay, that is if your idea of okay is looking like Hitler´s long lost cousin. That afternoon after Slim arose from his beauty sleep we made our way over to the Berlin Zoo, home to Europe´s largest collection of animals. Seeing as how it was about forty degrees Celsius out, every animal was indulging in nap time, and I couldn´t really blame them as i was sweating my bag off and eating copious amounts of ice cream. Following the inner-city safari, we went on a four-hour bike tour of Berlin. We took in all of the major sites in East and West Berlin (ie/ Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, Museum Island, etc.) and were even subjected to a park full of men all sunbathing naked. That was special, in an Elton John kind of way.

Anyways, we just got in to Munich today and are going to be spending four nights here. Beer garden capital of the world , and home to Oktoberfest. I may have just found heaven on Earth. To the beer gardens I go!!!!

Sidenote: Make sure you wish your old man a Happy Father´s Day this Sunday you goons.