The Road

So some of you might be thinking, "well Chris is back from Europe now, guess that means the blog's done." WRONG, this is a travel blog, meaning that I will be chronicling all of my travels across this great globe of ours. I'm sure this must make some of you giddy at the prospect of hearing more of my experiences around the world, so to give you a taste of what you're in for I'll give you a list of my current travel plans.
*I'll be headed to Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, the Grand Canyon, Santa Barbara, and San Diego this summer.
*Possibly next summer I plan to go on a cross country road trip with my two best friends.
*Another possibility could be living in a Buddhist monastery near my university once I graduate, to center myself before I head out in to the full world of a responsible, independent adult.
*At some point I plan to work on a plantation in Hawaii with one of my best friends, who's father owns the plantation.
*There is talk of the volunteers from CCS meeting up for reunion at one of the volunteer's homes in Southern Mexico on New Years, but this is still uncertain.
*Teaching English in Japan for a year, I'm not sure when.
*Work as a tour guide in Berlin for a year, also unsure when.
*UK and Ireland.
*Egypt.
*Brazil, Costa Rica, Peru, Galapagos.
*Australia and New Zealand.
*Canada.
And so with this list I announce my travel lists. From now on, every place I visit will be added to the new "Places Seen" list (sorry, this does not mean I'll put your house on the list). In addition, all current ideas of places I would like to visit will be put up on the new "Places To Be Seen" list (but this is subject to change over time). Now you know what is in store, stay tuned!

Time to Leave It All Behind and Face the Road

It took all my self discipline to not start typing out all the lyrics to Bohemian Rahpsody. Well fokes, this is the end of this travel chapter. All this traveling turned out a lot more expensive than my parents and I thought. But also on top of that there was just too much stress behind me not knowing if I'd have enough money to last me the next week. So now I will impart to you various tips just in case you end up in the places I've been. Let's start with Vienna since I haven't written anything about my time there yet.

Vienna:

*Hosel Ruthensteiner is by far the best hostel I stayed at during my entire trip. The staff and other hostelers where all friendly and sociable. The facilities were in top shape and the rooms were spacious with comfortable beds. The downsides to the place are that the showers are push button, a lot like the sinks in public restrooms, where you push a button and get a certain, but unknown, amount of time before the water flow just stops. But the showers do have hot and cold water so that's a plus. The other downside was that you had to provide your own sheets or pay two euro extra to rent some out during your stay.

*Definatly check out the Schönbrunn palace, you can easily get there by the subway and it's absolutely amazing. There are statues of Greek gods in the garden accompanied by a small zoo and a hedge maze. In addition there is a magnificent fountain with a large hill behind it and at the top of this hill is something that looks along the lines of the Brandenburg Gate.

Prauge:

*The Czech Republic uses the crown as it's currency instead of the euro. Five crowns converts to something close to twenty US dollars, so traveling around here can be relatively cheap compared to the rest of Europe.

*Prauge is a wonderful mix of the old and the new, the beautiful and the ugly. You'll see magnificent cathedrals and castels, confusingly modern architcture, and depressing remnants of Soviet architecture.

*DVDs in the Czech Republic have no country coding. For those of you who don't know, DVDs have an encoding that makes it so that they will only work in DVD players from the same country. This is done in an attempt to hold back piracy since movies are released in different countries at different times. But DVDs in the Czech Republic don't have this encoding, so they will work in any DVD player, so buy away, they're cheaper than back home!

Berlin:

*I highly recomend the Wombat's hostel in Berlin. There are Wombat's hostels also in Munich and two in Vienna, but I didn't stay at any of them so I can't really speak for those. But the one in Berlin is awesome, it's attached to a resturaunt that will serve a pretty decent all you can eat breakfast for 3.50 euros. There is also a bar with a sun terrace on the seventh floor. On top of all of this the most beds you will have in a room is six or possibly eight.

*It will take you a very long time for you to see everything in Berlin and, since there is so much constrution going on in Berlin, most likely once you have seen everything there will be something new that's been built for you to go see.

*The housing market is very low in Berlin, something around half of the apartments in Berlin have no one in them. This means you can get a really nice place for really cheap.

*The 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is coming up and for the occasion all the artists who painted murals on the longest stretch of the wall, and whom are still alive, are being flown in to repaint the murals because of the large amount of graffiti that has been put up over the murals (while I was there I even saw a girl who had her friend take a picture as she wrote her name on the wall). So go see how it is now before it changes forever.

Amsterdam:

*Amsterdam is small, you'll never need to catch public transport anywhere, you can probably see everything you want to see in two, possibly three days.

*Most people come to Amsterdam for the weed and hookers, if you're one of those people then you'll love the place, but because of this most fellow travelers in your hostel won't be extremely sociable unless you want to share a bowl.

*Amsterdam was, in my opinion, one of the most boring cities I visited. If I could do this trip over again, one of the many things I would change would be that I wouldn't go to Amsterdam. The Netherlands is amazing and the Dutch are generally likable people, but Amsterdam isn't much like the rest of the Netherlands and you won't likely meet many Dutch people there.

Now I have some general travel tips for people going through Europe:

*BRING A LAPTOP. It may be yet another thing you have to keep a close eye on, but it will make your life so much easier. Most places offer wi-fi and of those places a majority of them offer free wi-fi. But witout a laptop you'll be paying an arm and a leg if you're trying to keep in contact with people back home via the internet. Plus, something I wish I had known, it is next to impossible to find computers available to the public that have MS Word.

*Bring a cell phone. Things are so much easier if you can just pick up a cell phone to call home, make a reservation at a hostel, or meet up with a friend. Yes there are pay phones, but I can speak from experience that they are a major pain in the ass.

*Use the subway. With the acception of Amsterdam, I used the subway in every city I went to. You can buy day passes that allow you to take all the public transport for twenty-four hours and usually ends up paying off. The public transit runs mostly on an honor system, in that they don't check you for a ticket every time you get on. So yes you can get away with quite a few free rides, but there are also people under cover who will randomly hop on the transit and ask everyone to show their ticket and if you don't have one then you are SOL, the stupid tourist line doesn't usually work.

*Book your flight with the flight company itself instead of a booking agency. Changing a flight is much easier when there is no middle man.
*Pocket change is much more important in Europe. The one and two euro comes in coin form and when you go to a ticket machine for the train, subway, tram, or bus many of the machines will only take coins and not take bills.
*There are many passes you can buy that allow you to travel on all forms of some sort of transit for a certain amount of days or a certain amount of time. I thought to not buy the Eurail Pass because I was told that unless I was hoping from place to place very frequently that such a pass would be too expensive and paying for the trains at the station would be much eaiser. But the trains themselves cost amounts up in the double digits usually if you want to go from one country to another, so I ended up using Eurolines buses for my whole trip. I wish I had bought the pass they sell because it would have saved me a fair bundle, the pass costs about the equivalent to four bus trips and I could have used the pass much more than four times.
*Night buses and trains can be great, you get a night of sleep without having to pay for a hostel. Trains are even nicer in that they have sleeper cars occasionally which is quiet the nice change from a seat on a bus. But I was told of some girls who took night buses and woke up with a stranger groping them, not all trains are like this and it doesn't occur frequently, but it is a risk that occurs for female travelers.
*A towel is very valuable since most hostels will not provide you with one, but make sure that it is fast drying because you don't want to have a wet towel rolled up in your pack, that is unless you like the smell of mold on all your clothes.
*Bring a padlock because not all hostels provide a lock with the locker they give you for your pack.

I'm sure there's more, but currently nothing comes to mind. At this point I see this trip as a good experience, but there are many things I wish I could have done differently that would have made this trip more enjoyable. I now consider Europe checked off my list and I will travel else where before returning to Europe, though I do plan to someday return. But when I do I plan to have plenty of money saved and I will be willing to tavel in a more comfortable, touristy, luxury style of travel. This hostel traveling isn't exactly my thing.

Ninety-Nine Red Balloons

Okay, so sorry for the long period of time with no updates, but this is the first time that I've reallz had enough time to update since my last post. Sort story for those of you in a rush, Berlin was amazing and right now I'm in Prague and I'm loving it.
Now for those of you who are still reading, the rest of the story. I stayed at the Mitte Backpacker's Hostel (in a 32 bed dorm) for three nights. The huge dorm wasn't so bad with the snoring, I got a pretty good sleep, but it was the smell. Nearly every bed was filled for the time I was there, mostly wiht people who really need to shower more often, and their smelled exuded and mingled into one seriously funky dorm. That wouldn't have been so bad if there had been any sociable people but really everyone was there either to sleep or they were in a group and only associated with people in that group. The bar that also served breakfast in the morning was a really cool place, but it was hard to enjoy when you were always sitting there silently eating your food.
Every day I went on a tour in Berlin. I felt it would be good for me to do the touristy things for aa bit and then the non-touristy things and then compare the two and Berlin was going to be designated for tourist stuff just because there was so much to see. I went on my tours with this cool company called Sandeman's, but really everyone just knows it as the "free tours group." With that being said, they offered free tours. I found the company in Amsterdam from the hostel I was staying at and found out that they actually do tours all over Europe. They also hire people specifically from Western, English speaking countries so that tourists feel like they are being led through the city by another tourist, which to a degree they are. Not all of the tours they offer are free, there's just the free tour and then others they offer which you pay for. So first day in Berlin I went on the free tour, then the alternative culture tour, then the Potsdam tour, then the concentration camp tour. During the time I spent with the tour guides I started talking with them about what made them become tour guides and if they are able to pay for their stay in Berlin with the money they make from the tours. They said they made a good enough living and so now I'm thinking that some time, a few years from now, I'll come back to Berlin and give tours myself.
On the free tour I met a very friendly Aussie couple who were, ironically, staying at a hostel called Wombat's. I later ended up going to stay at the Wombat's hostel which I really liked more than the Mitte Backpacker's Hostel. Also on the free tour we saw what might have been a wedding at a fountainin the middle of Museum Island (an island between two rivers upon which the major museums of Berlin are built, pretty self explainatory). Everyone gathered around the fountain had a red balloon with what looked like a peice of paper, probably with some kind of wish or something written on it, tied to the balloon and then everyone let the balloons go to the winds. I don't know if there were exactly ninety-nine of the balloons, but there were a lot, they were red, and I was in Germany and so I felt the song reference was needed.
Along with the tours I also visited the Pergamon Museum, which is a reconstruction of an ancient greek temple. This obviously has close to nothing to do with German history, nor does the reconstructed gates of Babylon, but it was still really cool to see. Unfortunatly I did not get to see the Berlin bears, the Berlin Zoo, the Memorial Church, German Parliment, or my german relatives. You might say I missed out, but I say I just have another reason to go back there.
Now I'm in Prague staying with my good friend Ondrej. Prague so far is awesome and Ondrej is making it all the more enjoyable, my time here in Prague doesn't feel as touristy as Berlin did, here I'm doing what most locals do at my age; hang out, watch movies, drink beers, and watch the game. It's not some amazing thing that would warrant pictures that you would bring back home and show in a slide show to everyone, but it's fun and it's the closest to what you could call a genuine experience in a foreign country, something which every tourist seems to be persuing.

*Note*My spelling might be a slight bit worse in this post, something due to spell check not working the same when you're working on a computer that knows Czech. If the spelling errors are too much for you, don't let me know and just stop reading.

Holiday In Cambodia

I wouldn't be surprised if there actually was a holiday in Cambodia because it seems everywhere I go there's a public holiday. Usually that would be a good thing, but not when you are a backpacker who doesn't even know how the country works on a normal day. So yesterday was Queen's Day in the Netherlands, a holiday to celebrate the dutch queen's birthday. But it's actually the queen's mother's birthday because the current queen's birthday interferes with some other holiday. And like most other holidays, Queen's Day doesn't have much tradition other than everybody partying and getting extremely drunk. One of the people who worked the desk at the hostel told me about Queen's Night, which isn't anything official but you're basically supposed to start drinking heavily the night before Queen's Day and then maintain a drunken stupor through all of Queen's Day.
I didn't participate in this tradition though and so I was sober enough to realize that it really stinks to celebrate a holiday with no one you know to celebrate it with. I ended up roaming all day, I had already checked out of the hostel and so couldn't go back to hang out there, so I walked from one live performance to another. I had nothing to do until 10pm that night which was when I was supposed to catch a night bus to Hamburg, luckily some friend Dutch people randomly struck up a conversation with me, first asking me what I was doing in Amsterdam on Queen's Day alone. They were really friendly and talking and walking with them helped kill about four hours before they had to leave.
So after an uneventful wait for the bus to Hamburg, a dull bus ride, a boring wait in the Hamburg bus station for a bus to Berlin, an equally dull bus ride to Berlin, and a quiet subway ride through Berlin I arrived at the Circus Hostel. The place looked really cool and like a place I would really enjoy, too bad they were full. I come to find out from the people at the desk that there is a holiday nearly every week of the month of May in Berlin, meaning almost all hostels will be booked, cost more, and almost all other businesses will be closed. Luckily they were able to direct me to the Backpacker's Hostel, which would have felt like a much shorter walk if I didn't have the giant pack on my back. At first I was extremely annoyed because I couldn't find out where in the world the place was, but then I found it tucked away around the corner of some nondescript buildings. I climb the stairs, unsure if I'm going to the right place, but then I open to the door to the hostel and instantly my worries melt away. The place is brightly painted, modern art all over the walls, couches litter the reception hall, and awesome music is playing on the speakers. They give me the key to my room, which turns out to be a 32 bed dorm, but I don't even care because at least I have a place to sleep tonight.