Stockholm

Due to some time issues with trains in Germany (they do exist), I got to Sweden a day later than planned, but after a great night's rest in a Hamburg business hotel comped by the DB.

My first night, I sprang for a pricy bunk in a converted ship. The idea was cool and it was a pretty comfortable hostel, but the novelty of sleeping on a ship wore off very quick. So someone better like these pictures...

From my bunk

View from the ship at night

That first night, before I had given up on finding reasonably prices in Sweden, I wandered downtown looking for a place to eat. After an hour I hadn't found anything under 20 dollars and had resigned to starve. I did find a bar with 4 dollar beers and decided it was as close as I'd get. After ordering a beer, I noticed every Swede was glued to a projection screen of the Swedish national soccer team's Euro qualifying match against Netherlands, a World Cup finalist. The Swedes were underdogs, but needed the win to qualify and were the home side.

I found a spot near the tv between two locals, one in his 60s and one about my age. At first, they were skeptical about sharing their bar shelf with an American basketball player. By half-time I'd proven that I knew a little about the game and that I was rooting for Sweden and they warmed up to me.

Sweden came from behind to win 3-2. Much celebration and many cheers' ensued. After the game the older Swede walked me back to the pier because I hadn't found a free map yet and was rather disoriented from my failed food search.

He showed me the exact alley where the Swedish prime minister was assassinated in 1988(?).

The guy's name is unspellable unfortunately, but he did tell me it meant "peace lover" in Slovak, his native tongue. I asked what brought him to Sweden and he gave me his entire (but wholly intriguing) life story. In 1968, when he was 19, he went to Sweden by himself to visit a girl. While he was there, the USSR invaded Slovakia. He was sentenced to a year and a half in prison for traveling abroad, but never served time because he didn't go home. His grandfather served five years for not turning in all his savings from his fur factory to the communists. His father also served time for a small offense.

This man's story was especially interesting because I just from Berlin, where we heard stories about families separate for years by a Soviet wall. Also, in Prague, we went to the Museum of Communism which traced the history of the USSR's involvement in Czechoslovakia.

I moved to a slightly cheaper hostel for my final two Stockholm nights. It was still 35 dollars, but had free pasta you could cook for yourself. I did.

Mauer Park flea market

Acting on a tip from Rory, who's studying in Berlin, my mom and I went to the Mauer Park flea market on Sunday, our last day in the city.

I've been pretty proud of my pack job. Many of my fellow travellers have had bigger backpacks than mine, which has been a small source of pride. Whenever my teammate Ryan and I would travel or go home for break, we would compete to see who could pack lighter. I think I picked Ryan up from the airport last spring break and he had checked a bag, which a true light packer would never do. he hd some excuse, but it wasn't good enough to remember.

The last few days in Berlin were pretty gray and wet, however, and I began to rue my last minute decision to ditch my extra sweater on the way to the airport back in Burlington. With a week in Scandinavia on the horizon, I knew I needed another layer. The Vikings levy pretty serious taxes for their welfare state, so an impulse buy sweater would cost a pretty penny.

After scouring the grounds Mauer Park for a couple hours I was about to buy a screen printed sweatshirt from a Berlin local designer when I saw a huge Pelle Pelle sweater in one of the second hand alleys. I'm a sucker for random stuff like that-a second hand Pelle Pelle sweater in Berlin?-so I had to have it. At a price of four euros I couldn't even haggle. Also, if I decide I hate it, maybe I can probably sell it for 100 krona in Stockholm since everything's so expensive there. But by all accounts, the Swedish are very stylish, so who knows.

Pelle Pelle

I also snagged a watch and a shirt for my bro's birthday. Happy birthday Tom!

Content with my haul, we headed out the side of the market and noticed a crowd gathering around an outdoor stage. We followed and discovered Bearpit Karaoke, which was definitely an experience and a more uplifting way to end our trip than all the Holocaust and Berlin Wall history we had been absorbing.

Emceed by a funny Irish guy, the karaoke wasn't great, but it was entertaining and a very unique scene. There may have been 3,000 people in the crowd and another 500 within earshot playing awful basketball, juggling or just hanging in the park. I was expecting some impressive singers because I couldn't imagine going up in front of that audience unless I knew I was good. Or at least knew the words. I learned that other people are much more willing to fail or look like a fool in the name of good fun.

Some of the crowd for karaoke

The crowd favorite was probably an older German guy named Detlef (shouts to my Seattle crew) who sang a rousing German version of Praise the Lord. And gave a remarkable amount of bows afterwards. There were some flops, each met with the proper amount of sharp criticism from the host. Aside from Detlef, there were singers from Boston, Belarus, "Gay" Paris (his own emphasis) and a random guy in a king costume who seemed to have gotten lost on the drama club annual outing.

I had a lot of fun and have a lot of respect for them all going up in front of a large audience to do something they're not very good at. Kinda like Alex Rodriguez!

Wroclaw

We ended up in Wroclaw by geography alone. It was right smack in-between Krakow and Berlin and we didn't want to do ten hours straight on a train.

The university city really surprised us. The old town center was our favorite-over Prague and Krakow (Berlin's doesn't exist). We found an incredible restaurant right on the square named Lwowska. I had pork ribs and perogies. There's been some pretty stiff competition, but I can confidently state that it was the best meal of the trip- so far.

Halfway through our meal we heard a commotion on the far corner of the square. It got closer and closer and turned out to be a type of protest. There weren't too many people but they were plenty pissed about something. About what, we had idea, but we figured it must have been pretty controversial because they were followed by many police officers in riot gear. We forgot about it a couple minutes later because the perogies were so damn good. Maybe ten minutes later we heard commotion again, but it was noticeably louder, more coordinated and more peaceful. Judging by the rainbow colors and signs reading WrocLove, we guessed it was a gay pride rally. We then surmised that the previous group was the anti-gay rally.


After wandering the city for a few hours, we crossed back through the main square. As I reluctantly was checking the map, we heard the now familiar sound of Polish free speech. This group was bigger than the other two. Some of the group was rowdier than the previous groups and some were more peaceful. I should have been able to tell what they were protesting at that point, but it wasn't until I saw the mass of green clothes, dreads and Bob Marley flag.

Guess which rally

I'll leave you to make your own conclusions about the most important issues to young people in Poland.

Auschwitz-Birkenau

An hour and a half outside Krakow, the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration/extermination camps provide an uncomfortable reminder of the vicious crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis.

Entrance to Auschwitz: "Work will set you free

I'm not sure I'm capable of explaining my reaction to the camps (can anyone?) so I'll try to explain the lasting images that will stick in my head probably for the rest of my life. As depressing as the place is, I highly recommend seeing it. I don't think I'll ever go back.

In Auschwitz, they had several collections of things that were taken from prisoners, each more and more dehumanizing.

Books-take away their education, entertainment and concept of an outside world.

Eyeglasses-take away their sight.

Hairbrushes, toothbrushes, shoe polish brushes-take away their ability to control their appearance and basic sanitation.

Human hair- take away their personality. There was a display the width of a basketball court of human hair. In one hall, pictures of male prisoners lined the left wall and female prisoners lined the right. The inmates were almost indistinguishable by gender.

They also preserved the punishment barracks to show the different types of torture employed-suffocation, starvation, standing for days on end, arm breaking, more.

There was a wall between two Barracks that used to be used for firing squads before the gas chambers were developed. The Nazis found that the firing squad was too inefficient and personal. They wanted something of greater scale and with no human contact.

Our guide told us that the guards at the gas chambers often made the prisoners believe they were taking a shower. They would tell the prisoners to take off their clothes and remember where they left them, but they obviously never got to collect them.

The last and most chilling image that's etched into my memory are the fingernail scratches on the walls of the gas chamber.

Praha Hooliganism

During high school and college I grew into a bit of a soccer fan. I played the game growing up but gave it up before high school. At MMU and Swarthmore I loved going to games and cheering and jeering (always very respectfully). In Prague, I may have met my match.

I went to a game with Jordan, Pete, Jake and some other guys from their program.  I've been to rowdy pro matches before, most notably a match in Argentinawhere things were so heated that they locked the home fans in the stadium for a half hour so the visiting team could get out of the city safely. I still think the Prague game was rowdier because it was between the two top teams in the city, AC Sparta and SK Slavia Praha, and the crowd was pretty evenly split between the two sides.

As we circled the stadium looking for the ticket office, we noticed that we were most certainly in the outskirts of town and this was not the Swarmore-Haverford game. From the metro station we could hear the chants and although my check is awful I'm fairly certain that they weren't saying "safety school." There was a fairly impressive police presence, half in SWAT gear (again, not the SWAT gear that shows up to Swarthmore games) and half on horseback. In the process of finding the ticket office, we saw five fans forceably removed, each still screaming his allegiance while being carried out by ten officers.

Once we got inside the stadium and saw what the non-delinquent fans were doing, I got to wondering what the other fans could have done to get thrown out. We were a little late and were surprised to even get into the game, so we took whatever tickets they gave us, which ended up in Slavia Praha's section, which was the away team since the game was in Sparta's stadium. When we got to our section, we couldn't even get to our seats because everyone was standing and it seemed like fans from other sections came to our section because it was the rowdiest Slavia section. We went to the section directly below and were surprised to find the first ten rows from the field completely empty. We took a row and quickly realized that there was a stream of spit, beer, trash and potentially piss coming down from the second deck.

For the second half, we relocated to a sheltered section and were able to focus more on the game. We couldn't figure out who to root for or how openly to cheer. We were in a Slavia section, but were right next to the Sparta section. The language barrier also complicated things. Jordan, self-described as a "Swattie for life", was proudly wearing a Garnet Swarthmore hat until he was yelled at by a Slavia fan and we realized that Sparta had practically stolen our logo. Pschh...safety school...

All said, it was one of the few soccer games where I didn't constructively criticize refs or make comments relating to any player's family members. I am looking forward to going to a soccer football game where I can safely join in on the hooliganism.

Mini-toberfest

After the Alps, we were understandably pretty high on Salzburg. We all had plans to continue on to Munich for Oktoberfest and were expecting a nice quiet night to rest up for the worlds biggest party. Salzburg surprised us though. The little city didn't go down without a fight.

We went out to a great traditional Austrian restaurant and ate in the roof beer garden. Halfway through my first-and still my best- schnitzel, the city erupted with fireworks.

After dinner we walked down to the center of the old town to see what the commotion was about. We stumbled into Salzburg's version of Oktoberfest. It was obviously miniature and slightly tame in comparison to Munich's version, but no less the experience.

Since there was only one tent, every type of recalled was under one roof. Oktoberfest has its college age tent, its American tourist tent and its local tents. We arrived during the peak of the night- tables packed, festive singing and red-faced Austrians. We ordered the customary liter beers and were lucky enough to find some space at a table. On one side of us, there was a group of older couples who we enjoyed trying to talk to. The language barrier was a little strong but they loved it when we pretended to know the words to the songs and the women thought it was hilarious when I stood up on the bench and towered over them.

Nice Austrian bunny ears

On the other side of us, we had a group of three middle-aged guys who clearly had been at the tent since breakfast. The first spoke no English, which wasn't a problem because after introducing himself he promptly put his head on the table and passed out. The second spoke no English as well, which was a problem because he went back and forth between giving me elaborate handshakes- think the type of celebration handshake baseball players do in the dugout- and challenging me to box and arm wrestle through drunken sign language. The third guy DID speak English, which was a problem because of the things he was whispering to Dana.

Guy #2

When the music ended, after one last Prost, the older group left. We stuck around a little longer, but as the English speaking guy got creepier, we learned that at an Austrian party, you gotta go home when the music stops.

The next day, Brinton and Dana headed off for the big leagues, Oktoberfest. I scrapped my far-fetched plans of spending a half-day at the festival and catching a 5 am bus to Prague to meet my mom. Instead, I caught a train to Prague a day early.

Austrian Alps



Dana, me and Brinton-Untersberg, Austria

 Brinton, Dana and I woke up in Salzburg with no plans. Dana pushed pretty hard for the Sound of Music Tour, but luckily it ended up being a bit too expensive. We looked at some of the advertised options on the back of the free map from the tourist office and settled on taking a cable car up into a mountain in Unterberg, a neighboring town.

Like my mother and grandfather, I am sensibly cautious about heights. My sister and grandmother would each call this "scared of heights." I was a linguistics major for a semester, so I think I would know what it's called. This past summer, I took a cable car up Jay Peak in Vermont with my family, elevation 1176m, and did great (in comparison to my dog and my mother), so I was pretty sure I'd be all good.



Clouds caught on one side of the mountain



It wasn't until I was in the cable car that I really realized that these were the damn Austrian Alps and we were headed for a 1972m peak. About 5 minutes into the cable car ride, we reached what I thought was the end of the cable line. I would have been happy to get off there because it was plenty high and would probably get some cool pictures. I was also slightly concerned that we were in such thick clouds that we couldn't see the cable even 5 feet ahead of us. So much for nice views or sensibility.

Five minutes later a second peak appeared and I was pleased when the car started to slow down and we were able to get off.  On the Salzburg side, the views were very impressive and the skyline was still dominated by the Salzburg fortress miles away. On the opposite side, we couldn't see much because of the thick clouds.

After a quick hike to the highest point, we decided to hike down the opposite side to get to the famous ice caves. It was an impressive view once we got out of the clouds. By the time we got to the ice cave, we decided that if we took the 45 minute tour, we would have been cutting it really close to make the last cable car back down the mountian. As impressed as we were with the views and terrain, we were fairly certain that we didn't want to sleep in the Alps.

Patu Patu to Salzburg

On my first night in Vienna I met Steve and Claire who are road tripping around Europe in a van before moving to London. Like most of the people I've met in hostels, they were Australian. I can't decide whether this is because every young Aussie is in Europe right now or because Aussies are remarkably friendly. Probably both.

Along the way, they have picked up many hitchhikers and are used to having an extra body in their van every once in a while. By the end of the night, Steve had recruited four of us to come along on the drive to Salzburg, a smaller city along the German border, conveniently close to Munich's Oktoberfest but just far enough away to have reasonable accommodation prices.

In the morning as we left the hostel, I was struggling to picture the van. Steve described it as a converted Ford Transit that several groups of friends have driven are driven around Europe over the years. I asked Steve if the six of us were going to fit. He assured me that there would be no problem. While six passengers would be their personal record, the van who goes by Patu Patu Bang Bang (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in Samoan) has seen more.

So we had Steve driving (on the right side!), Claire in the middle and fellow Aussie Brinton riding shotgun. The Americans, Dana, Ian and I, were in the back-sometimes on the floor, sometimes on the couch/fold out bed, sometimes sitting up, sometimes lying down, sometimes reading, sometimes gazing out at the Austrian countryside.



Aussies up front

 

Cargo/´Living quarters



Patu Patu was riding great with her(?) new Croatian diesel pump. The back window was a collage of stickers from auto repair shops around Europe- a testament both to her resilience and territory covered. I asked Steve how many kilometers she had racked up over the years, but he didn't know.  The odometer resets at 100,000km and someone along the line lost count of how many times it had started over.



With a Salzburg city bus and a SmartCar for comparison



Blog is alive

I'm not giving up, I promise! I've got some good stories to share/places to write about but I can't do them justice without the pictures I've been taking.  Since I last posted, I've visited Salzburg, Prague, Krakow and Wroclaw.  My mom met me in Prague and we have been travelling together for the last week.  Berlin is our next stop (and last for mom, who flies home in a week), but we hit a minor bump in the road this morning.

We got up at 6:15 this morning to catch the train to Dresden, a 4 hour trip. We got to Platform 4 right on time and got on the train. I remembered reading in my travel books that sometimes there are multiple trains at a platform. This was an important train and the Wroclaw station was undergoing major renovations and things were confusing and Polish, so I decided to double-check with the conductor. I stepped  off the train and asked in English if this train was going to Dresden. He gave me the International Facial Expression for "I don't speak English you damn American who assumes everyone speaks English," so I said "Dresda?" and pointed to the train. I have no idea if Dresda is how you say Dresden in Polish, but it felt right and I went for it. He said something in Polish that I didn't understand, so I gave him the thumbs-up sign and got back on the train.  I have generally used thumbs-up to mean, "I don't know what is going on but am going to pretend like it's all good. Please stop me if I'm doing something wrong," which I'm just assuming everyone understands. the conductor responded by pointing at the train and saying a few Polish words before returning to his phone. I interpreted this to mean "Of course, we'll take you wherever you want to go. If you say Dresda, then Dresda it is. Also, nice beard. You look wise and classy."

I may need to reevaluate my hand signals. That was the wrong train. Thirty minutes later and several miles in the wrong direction, the same conductor came by to check our tickets, stamped my ticket, looked at my mom's ticket and told us we were on the wrong train via translation from a Polish guy in our compartment who thought this all was hilarious. He's headed for the Russian border without a visa and I'm not exactly rooting for him. Seemed like a good guy though.

I'm chalking up this travel error to two things, both food related.  I neither ate breakfast this morning nor ate a kebab during my time in Wroclaw.  I've had one in every city I've stopped in, even Linz, Austria, where I had a 30 minute train layover.  I just ate breakfast and will likely correct the kebab mistake at the train station before we leave.  This unexpected extra time in Wroclaw gave me some time to upload pictures and I'll catch up on the blog from Berlin.