European Vacation Part 3

Following the format of the previous update, I'm just going to copy and expand on my bullet pointed travel journal, occasionally complaining about the unintuitive nature of formatting images in a Blogger post, since this is where we get to myself (and others) actually drawing...

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9/27/12

• Our last morning in Prague. Got up early for a false alarm saying our train to Ostrava left at 9 AM, when it actually left at 1 PM. Crawled back into bed after the mistake was realized.
• Woke up (for real) grabbed a cappuccino from a nearby coffee shop and an apricot-filled crepe from the little street market/festival that had been going just up the street from our hotel all week.
• Met everyone(-ish) and took a short walk to Rocky's, Prague's largest Irish Pub, for a round of hard cider before the train left.
• Took another very lazy, sleepy train ride from Prague to the small, border town of Ostrava. Hans, one of our party got ambushed by his family, whom he hadn't seen after living in the states for more than a decade, including two nieces whom he had never met before. They drove us to this beautiful lake-cabin-hotel.
• We settled in, put our stuff away, showered etc. Then Hans led us on the long walk to his parents' cabin.
• We were treated to a bottomless pot of homemade goulash and dumplings, nonstop trays of appetizers, a keg of some great, local pilsner whose name I could've sworn I wrote down, and three bottles of homemade slivovitz —a local liquor, almost but not quite entirely unlike rubbing fluid— to celebrate Hans' homecoming... and the lifting of the hard liquor ban.
• Aside from Hans, None of our party spoke more Czech than "Pivo, prosim," (well, and the dirty words he taught all his co-workers and then warned them not to use in front of his family), and no one there spoke any English, but we managed to have a great time and make our gratefulness understood.
• And then, for the first time in my life, I blacked out, and it couldn't have happened at a better time. The last thing I remember was Art telling Hans it would be a good idea to walk us back to the hotel, and suddenly I'm asleep in my bed. No extremely long stagger for me!
  

9/28/12

• No hangover for me, either. Must be something about getting blackout drunk on a very, very, very full stomach (it certainly wasn't proper hydration, that's for sure).
• We had, what I'm pretty sure is a pretty traditional central European breakfast at the hotel: Bread bacon, espresso, honey, cheese, mineral water, and of course, hair of the dog that bit us. The little bit of a hangover I had never stood a chance!
• After that, I headed out to the beach, deliberately leaving my camera behind so I would be forced to draw if I wanted to remember the scene. I whipped out some fancy markers that I had purchased for a class three years ago —and never used in that class— and put them to use on the mountains and forests across the lake from us.
• We headed into town to buy our train tickets back to Prague to connect with our Prague-Munich return trip.
• Is it weird that I regret not having my camera with me when I went to the bathroom in the Ostrava train station? Or the other couple times I regretted not bringing it into various public bathrooms? Sorry...
  • It was just so cool, though. They had normal urinal backs (the tall kind, obviously), but they all terminated in this communal, raised, tiled-in trough with a central drain. Little details like that are how you know you've walked into a Central European bathroom as opposed to, I don't know, New York or L.A. or... anywhere else. But no, I stupidly left my camera in the bus.
• Then, began our three-country-one-afternoon pub crawl. A time to check out the countryside of Central Europe, and complain about no longer getting Passport stamps.
  • Stop 1: Polski Cieszyn
    • Tyskie Beer at a cafe in a little plaza
    • A wonderful little exchange by two of our party:
      • Art: What town is this?
      • Wally: 3:30...
  • Stop 2: Slovakia, I didn't catch the name of the town.
    • Met one of Hans' friends who lived here.
    • Stopped at the "Jack Daniels Whiskey Bar" for beer and slivovitz
    • Grabbed dinner at the Restaurant on the Gate.
      • There, Gambrinus was the beer of choice, as well as even more slivovitz. I had what was, essentially a Chicken Cordon Bleu, while also picking at an extra plate that had apparently been delivered by accident.
      • Central Europe is really very cheap. It's kinda easy to miss in the Czech Republic or Poland, since they're not on the Euro, so you have to actively be running the conversion if you want to figure out how cheap, but Slovakia's on the Euro, and I don't think anyone's dinner was more than €5,00.
  • Stop 3: Back to Ostrava for a trip to the brothel and a couple clubs afterward
    • I don't know if this technically counts, since a lot of people went to bed instead of to the bar...othel
    • He who hesitates, gets to choose between the brothel's dregs and racking up a bar tab comparable to what an hour with a prostitute would've cost anyways. Now I know...
    • Probably the highlight of this leg of the trip: The brand of toilet paper dispenser in the bathroom of the brothel was "Big Willy: Der Super-Spender". Hilarious, no?
    • Cabbed to a couple bars in town. Grabbed a few beers and passed out back at the hotel.

9/29/12

• Had the poor fortune of getting on a very crowded train that teased us with vacancy for a stop or two. Right when everyone was getting comfortable, all the occupants crowded aboard to fill the train to bursting. 4 hot, crowded, hungover hours from Ostrava to Prague...
• Couple-hour 'layover' in Prague. Went out, wandered around for a bit. Stopped at McDonald's for lunch. Everyone grabbed a Royale with Cheese while incessantly quoting that scene from Pulp Fiction.
• Had a much more peaceful ride from Prague to Munich. Got back to town just as Oktoberfest was closing, so we had to contend with an U-bahn full beyond capacity with beligerant drunk people in lederhosen.
• Made it back to Peggy's, unpacked, repacked, groomed, and slept...

9/30/12

• To Innsbruck. Another crowded train ride, so crowded, in fact, that the morning train sold out and we had to get on the afternoon train.
• Chinese food in Munich while waiting for the train.
• I'd say the later train was worth it because it allowed the half of our party in the other compartment to meet our new, very temporary, party member: Danielle
  • Pretty girl, approximately my age, blinks 90 times a minute (and thus, reminds me of the Twilight Rifftrax, another point in her favor)
  • Highly recommends solo travel as a means to figure out what to do with one's future, so, valuable tip for next time across the Atlantic (or anywhere else outside of my normal chunk of Southeast Wisconsin), I guess.
• Wandered Innsbruck as a big group; saw the sight, grabbed cocktails at a rooftop bar.
• Left my camera with my luggage, foolishly.
  • Ergo, lots of kicking myself, as well as the decision to declare Innsbruck a vacation from being a "GAD Tourist"
• And then we headed to the B&B, which was gorgeous, and Art's friend Jen's family were awesome hosts.
• Dinner was pork, sausage, baked potatoes, and half a dozen different salads. I never really liked potato salad until I had it in Europe...
• The beer of choice was Zipfer, and it was easily the most easy-to-drink beer I had the whole trip, dangerously so...
• On the subject of easy to drink, Jen's family brought out homemade hazlenut schnapps and walnut schnapps.
• Three bottles of schnapps and countless Zipfers later, my omnipresent sketchbook was one of the top attractions, and I was more than happy to allow the interested parties to fill in a couple pages.
  • Other people drawing in my sketchbook is kinda awesome. It sorta... I guess... commemorates the people I was with, especially those I was only with briefly. However, it's also kinda sad because it's hard not to feel like there were more drawings by strangers in a couple hours than by the purported artist who's owned this sketchbook for a couple months now.
• Took a late night stagger around the grounds to see how beautiful they are on a cool, crisp night.
  • Anyone who accuses me of passing out outside is a dirty liar. I was awake until the moment I was checked up on and sent inside, looking up at the stars, reflecting on stuff, and just generally not being ready to join four guys in a bunk bed until I absolutely had to.

10/1/12

• The infamous "Breakfast in Austria, Lunch in Italy, Dinner in Germany" day.
• Woke up to breakfast at the B&B: Coffee, rolls, deli meats and cheese, orange juice, mango juice, cake...
• Hour drive to Italy, very hungover, missed the scenery heading in.
• Ate lunch in Brixen, Italy, so close to the Austrian border we had to order our ravioli and lasagna in German.
  • Ravioli unlike any I've ever eaten, the noodles were so thin, they were practically crepes.
• Wandered Brixen for a bit, checked out the churches and the miscellaneous sights. After a brief foray into the concept of keeping the break from being a "GAD tourist" going, I realized I couldn't help it and threw myself at every wall, cobblestone path, fountain, and pile of garbage I saw.
• Capped the trip off with the best gelato I've ever had.
• Sent our new friend on her way to Venice while we headed back to catch a train in Innsbruck.
• For some reason, in spite of practically having a whole car to ourselves, we decided to cram into one compartment and spend the whole ride back to Munich plugged into our assorted iPods, lip-synching and air-drumming to whatever we happened to be listening to (a whole lot of CAKE, in my case...)
• Dinner at Schneiter-Weisse. Great beer (Tap5: Meine Hopfenweisse, a thick, hoppy, bock), great pretzel soup, mediocre sauerbraten, and terrible news.
• It was at dinner that I learned I would be flying back on the second, not the third as I had thought.
• So, after dinner, the whole group headed out for cocktails at a quiet Mexican bar to send off myself and the others who would be heading out the next day.

10/2/12

• Got up early, crammed everything in my suitcase, got on a bus to the airport, and waited for my plane to land, let me board, and slowly suffocate me in a gigantic pile of humanity.
• All in all, a pretty miserable flight, crammed in the middle of so many people while at the peak of a nasty cold, but I did manage to leave my iPod on during takeoff, so that's a plus...

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Previous entries: Part 1 and Part 2.

European Vacation Part 2

Following my previous Europe post, it's now time to get into the stuff I didn't get around to emailing my parents (i.e. the last week or so of the trip). Without the constrants of "writing an email on my Kindle" (which, is, by the way, a massive pain in the ass. Gmail in the browser, once the message gets long enough to need to scroll, it has a tendency to jump all the way to the top if you ever try to move the cursor and be needlessly difficult to get your cursor back down to the bottom. In the email app, it's just impossible to find drafts or anything other than the Inbox), organizing those thoughts (i.e. converting bullet points to paragraphs) is a tricky thing to care about, so, I'm just gonna sorta transcribe my bullet points, throwing in some context here, turning fragments into sentences there, et cetera.

This post is where I discovered that it's a good thing my Blogger is my writing blog, and my art blog is WordPress. Trying to wrangle pictures into the position I want them in is a real hassle on Blogger. Apologies about the lack of visual aid, though, if its any consolation, most of my pictures were things your average person finds boring, like walls, or tile floors, or the one I really regret not getting: The dirt in Munich that was full of discarded bottle caps. Nothing says "Here's me in Prague," like a nearly-orthographic view of a cobblestone sidewalk...
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9/24/12

• Made it to Oktoberfest for real. Hung out at the Paulaner tent all day and most of the evening.
• Reason #672 that I didn't fit in with the group I was traveling with: They were all about grabbing steins; if I were going to steal anything it would've been the badass soup bowl with the lions on it.
• After a couple liters of beer, I decided I needed to go home, something about not being able to walk straight or stay awake or not feel nauseous. I grabbed one of our spare U-bahn tickets and, after making sure I knew exactly how to get home, left the tent. After a lap around the festival grounds, I staggered back to the tent, so, the good news is, I was safe and sound, and the search team could be called off. The bad news, though, is that it's a lot harder to claim I have a good sense of direction.
• So, to summarize our only real trip to Oktoberfest while I was in Europe:
• 1 almost-lost tourist
• 1 almost-fight
• 1 severe laceration
• 1 expectoration that night (at least one the next morning as well...)
• And, I'm going to take a wild guess and say 9 serious hangovers...
• We headed home in shifts, watched one of the last NFL games to be ruined by scab refs, and packed for our Czech Republic trip.

9/25/12

• Train ride from Munich to Prague, via a very short stop in Pilsen.
• Spent most of the Munich-Pilsen leg sleeping.
• The Czech countryside's kinda funny. It's full of quaint little villages, aside from the ubiquitous solar panels and satellite dishes.
• The ride from Pilsen to Prague was full of beautiful views; occasionally, I had to look out the window for them...
• After a short walking tour of Prague, I quickly came to the conclusion that my statements about how sexy Salzburg was were premature. Prague was easily my favorite city of the trip. It had all (or most) of the traditional beauty and history of Salzburg with the history and architecture and whatnot, but Prague had that extra layer of grunge —graffiti, crumbling façades, scary-looking back alleys— that all those years of environment art training taught me to find so sexy. Nothing quite like a city that shows its age, and Prague shows a lot of it...
• We grabbed dinner at U Vejvodu, goulash and dumplings.
• Then we went bar-hopping.
• First to the Blue Light, this dingy, little, poorly-lit jazz bar in which I spent what probably looked like a suspicious amount of time taking reference photos of its awesome, dingy bathroom.
• Second, to Hany Bany, which drew a lot of inspiration from the '50's and covered itself with Pulp Fiction memorabilia. 

9/26/12

• Our only full day in Prague, we did some of the touristy stuff, specifically Prague Castle & St. Virtus Cathedral. We also walked through the Jewish Quarter, but everything was closed for Yom Kippur, so we couldn't really be touristy there, just creepily shove our cameras through gaps in the fences.
• Unfortunately, my camera was dying during the self-guided tours of St. Virtus & Prague Castle, so I got about half the pictures I wanted (also, it didn't make it into the original email, but after the return trip from Salzburg, my camera leaped out of its holster at the Munich train station, so it was in a bad state even with a full battery). Then it died completely the whole time we were in the Jewish Quarter.
• We grabbed lunch at U Vejvodu's sister restaurant U Vltavy. The food was great, but the service was very, very slow. Here, where our group split up to conquer three of the five outside tables, we noticed that we were a large enough group we could easily take over a small restaurant.
• At our table, there was a plate of Wiener Schnitzel, one of Chicken Souvlaki, Smoked Ham & Bread Dumplings, and, in front of me, a giant pile of honey-glazed ribs. Probably the best meal that I payed for in Europe.
• Accross the street from us (and, all over Prague, especially the Jewish Quarter, it seemed) the buildings were all supported by these excellent reliefs, like Atlas-esque figures holding up balconies or animal-shaped buttresses. It was really cool and made me regret the death of my camera and the atrophy of my drawing skills. Then again, if I'd known the service was going to be as slow as it was, I might have started drawing knowing that I'd probably have filled up six freaking pages, while learning how to cross-hatch to boot, in the time it took them to raise the pig from a piglet, butcher it, and prepare it specially for us or whatever it was that was taking so dang long...
• After that, we headed back to the hotel to charge our cameras and whatnot while waiting for our newest party-member's plane to land. Then we did what any rational group of heavy-drinking tourists would do in a place where the alcohol is so cheap: Got a bunch of cans of beer and serving-size bottles of wine from a nearby convenience store and had a little party in the living room of the couple who popped for the nice suite.
• Once our... eleventh party member showed up, we finished our convenience store libations and went out in search of dinner, but not before picking up one more follower. We tried Hany Bany again, but found them way too crowded for a twelve-person table, so we headed back to U Vejvodu and pushed three or four tables together. By this point, our party contained two native Czechs, who put out the call and got us joined by another two...
• Since it was getting late, and since it was to be our last night in Prague, I went for something I haven't had since before my grandma died: Fruit dumplings (knedliky). I was offended to have had to order them off the dessert menu —seriously, potato dumplings full of fruit and covered in sugar. Who, in their right mind would put that on the dessert menu?— as, for this American of Czech ancestry, that had always been a main course, which I made abundantly clear, and was, thankfully, vindicated by every Czech at the table agreeing with me that it's not just a quirk of Wisconsin Czechs: Czech Czechs apparently eat them as entrees too.
• After everyone needed a break from U Vejvodu (and round after round of Pilsner Urquell, a fine beer, but it can't be all that you drink, especially when you're used to nursing IPAs, not slamming pilsners...), we lost probably half the party to sleep, and the rest of us moved on to find another bar.
• And we found Kozicka, thanks to our Prague-native guide. A cute little bar with a goat theme and a deceptively tiny upper floor. The basement is kinda massive. There's a noisy, cramped area near the bar for people who want to dance or shout their conversations or whatever. Or there's a couple quieter 'wings' where you can grab a table and drink in relative peace (depending on the relative peacefulness of your party...). After a couple more rounds of Krusovice, we called it a night.

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Okay, well, this is getting kinda long. Guess I'll stick Ostrava, Innsbruck, and Brixen in Part 3...

The novel of my dreams... literally

I often lament my lack of a tendency to remember my dreams. It seems like I'm surrounded by people who not only remember their dreams, but who, nine nights out of every ten, seem to have some new, vivid, and utterly insane dream to tell me about, either in private or on my Facebook news feed.

I've explored a lot of outlandish theories trying to make my lack of dream memory into something extraordinary. I wish I had some examples, but I did most of that exploration in my joke of a freshman writing class, nothing of which survived*. However, I now have a new theory: I don't really remember more than so-brief-they're-negligible snippets of dreams because my subconscious has a finite amount of dream memory that it was saving up for the insane, two-layer, matryoshka of a dream I had last night.

So, I was lying in bed this morning and reading. Regardless of time of day, I like reading in bed, but I can't really recall the last time I woke up and read in bed. Probably a long time ago. It was a thick paperback, engaging, but kinda weird. Feeling myself start to doze off, I put my finger down to make sure I didn't lose my place and kept reading. Then, I 'dozed off for a second' —though the evidence seems to suggest I actually woke up for a second— and when I woke up —for more than a second, this time— the book was gone. It wasn't on my pillow, where my finger had been keeping place, wasn't among the clutter on my bedside table. It just plain ol' didn't exist. It took me a few minutes to realize what had happened: I just dreamed up a novel.

It's too bad it didn't actually exist. From what I recall, it was a pretty interesting story, and, while I don't doubt my writing ability (my ability to focus on writing it, perhaps, but not my writing ability), I can't shake the paranoia that much, if not all, of its original charm, is lost in forgotten dreams.

So, here's what I do remember: It was sorta taking cues from that 'writer as an accidental god' genre, like Stranger than Fiction or Ruby Sparks. Zach (somewhat in line with that Batman the Animated Series Episode, I didn't read much in my dream about reading a novel. The only word I distinctly remember seeing in print is Zach's name, which is why I know it's Zach, and not Zak or Zack. I think my finger was on his name when I 'fell asleep') has written a very successful novel, and all his best friends are in it.

But then the honeymoon period is over. After everyone's initial excitement about his briliant debut novel, before too long, no one's talking about Zach or his quirky friends or his best-selling novel. As people stop finish the novel and talking about it, Zach's friends start to fade away, Back To The Future-style. When he realizes the correlation between his writing and his friends' existence, Zach scrambles to bring them back by writing a sequel, but he may have lost too much of them as they faded away...

*Wait, I think one of them was my subconscious being a massive coward after the months of nightmares that  "The Tale of the Dead Man's Float" episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark gave me in kindergarten and deciding that not remembering my dreams was better than remembering nightmares.

European Vacation Part 1: The Email Summaries

In response to a couple emails I sent describing my first half-week of experiences, it was requested —by my parents and Aunt, but a request is a request— that I write more of my experiences in Europe at the end of September/beginning of October. For starters, the two emails that I sent my parents detailing the days when I could reliably go home to the Internet and not be too pass-out drunk to handle a Kindle Fire, slightly edited from their original format to provide additional context/remove irrelevant family bits.

Summary:
Landed on September 19th in Munich. Flew home on October 2nd.
Nailed 6 countries: Germany, Austria (on two separate occasions), Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, and Italy
Peggy & Phil: My cousin who lives in Munich and her English boyfriend (who let all of us sleep on the floor of their apartment)
Art: My cousin, Peggy's brother, whose birthday we celebrated on this trip. Lives and works in Beaver Creek, CO, and many of our traveling companions were his friends from Colorado.
George: My brother

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To: Mom & Dad
Subject: Munich Days 1 & 2
9/20/2012

Hey. Just thought I'd give you a quick update. Miss you; love Munich so far.

Once we landed in Munich, we met some of the Beaver Creek crew outside the airport, shared a round just outside, and hopped on the bus for Peggy's. After we settled in, we grabbed lunch at Hofbräuhaus. I picked the scweinebraten (a slice of pork with a crispy skin sitting in gravy); Peggy got essentially Mac & Cheese made with spätzle (Käsespätzle), and Art had some of the best sauerbraten I've ever tried. After lunch Peg showed us around Marienplatz, then we picked up sandwich fixings to make dinner at Peggy's while waiting for Phil to get back from Nuremberg.

Today we grabbed döner kebabs from a street vendor while Peg was running an errand. Peg showed us the spot where they had to detonate a WWII bomb in the city (not the one in the potato field; this one was discovered slightly before that one while crews were demolishing an old night club to build something new). Then we took a leisurely walk through the Englischer Garten before making our way to an Irish pub just outside Sendlinger Tor to get drinks and appetizers while waiting for a couple more Beaver Creek-ers who had just landed and checked into their hotel. We stayed there to wait for Phil to meet us as well. Then Art led us to this great Afghan restaurant. It kinda reminded me of the Moroccan restaurant in Porto. We had some great appetizers: little crispy potato wedges and this amazing roast pumpkin. For dinner, I got Mantu, which are these sort of little meat pies made with filo dough and slathered in this spicy red sauce. Art got chicken kabobs with rice that was spiced kinda like pumpkin pie. We were crammed into this great little side room; though we were a party of twelve, and there was probably only room for about seven of us to sit comfortably. After dinner we made our way back to Peggy's just in time to get a text from George letting us know he was boarding and would see us soon. Then we took a couple shots of absinthe and toasted Art since, in Germany at least, his birthday had officially begun.

Also, and it's a good thing I wouldn't actually be able to use it for the next two weeks, but my phone would appear to have jumped out of my bag somewhere between de-planing in Dusseldorf and getting to Peggy's apartment. I've searched through all my bags and the floor around them to no avail, so we may need to hasten the "replace my phone" initiative.
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To: Mom & Dad
Subject: Munich Days 3-5
9/23/2012

On Friday we got up late and had breakfast and lunch at Peggy's. Then Art showed us around Marienplatz while Peg took the girls dirndl-shopping. We grabbed beer and brats at Victualenmart before discovering a place for döner kebabs just up the street. This began the long tradition of me not joining the guys every damn time they needed a döner kebab...

Afterward, we took a long walk to the Augustiner Brauhaus for Art's party. We had about 3 maß each and several rounds of pear schnapps. George finally showed up during the party. He and I both had the Bavarian Sampler platter, and that was my first time learning that bread on the table isn't complementary in Germany. Art got a set of lederhosen for his birthday, which he put on at Augustiner and wore through Oktoberfest yesterday.

Yesterday we went to Hauptbahnhof to get train tickets and döner. Then we went to Oktoberfest. We had a couple maß outside the Löwenbräu tent. Then Peggy took us to a show in which they challenge volunteers to sit on a spinning disc in the middle of a tent. After a couple seconds of letting centrifugal force eliminate people, they start throwing ropes and a big foam ball at the survivors to dislodge them. I volunteered (the first person Peggy brought to Oktoberfest to do more than just watch); I didn't last very long becausesome jerk used his foot to prevent me from sitting down all the way for more surface area. We left early to pick up some groceries before the stores closed for Sunday. We ate homemade piazza and a pot of pasta for dinner.

Today we went to Salzburg. We took a two-hour train ride through gorgeous countryside before arriving at the most beautiful city I've ever seen. We wandered through a little craft fair along the river, headed into a dozy little biergarten for lunch, walked through a crowded street festival and arrived at the funicular to go up to the castle. We spent a long time exploring the castle-turned-museum, then went back down. We ate dinner at a different Augustiner brewery, which had sort of a food court attached. Then we took a liesurely walk back to the train station through the royal gardens. Once back in Munich, Peggy had pizza and the Broncos game waiting for us.

Tomorrow, we return to Oktoberfest, then come home to pack for Prague while watching the Packer game at 2 AM local time and hopping on the earliest train we can muster to Prague via Pilsen.
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After these two points, we began traveling more, and, though I was still taking notes on everything that happened, I wasn't emailing at all, and was, in fact, barely on the Internet at all.

Continued in Part 2 and Part 3.