Category Archives: Travel

So Journey

Berlin, its been great

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We arrived at Berlin Hbf just half an hour before the ‘tourist info’ place closed for the day, which was convenient because we didn’t exactly know where we were going. We knew the hostel was in Kreuzberg, somewhere, and we knew the address. All we had to do was find Spreewaldplatz…

An U-bahn(/S-bahn/tram) map was helpful though, we got exactly where we needed to be and found our hostel much easier than locating the one in Amsterdam, plus in the dark.

The room we’re in this time is much bigger than the Amsterdam hostel as well, and only has six other people we don’t know sleeping in there with us, rather than eight. Woohoo! It’s got a great location though, and cheap beer compared to everywhere else we’ve been(not compared to the rest of Berlin though).

The hostel isn’t far from the Tempodrom, either, where Jack White played Tuesday night. Bailey just picked up her ticket when we stopped in London last, we were a bit worried, as I had had mine sent to Switzerland, but Bailey’s didn’t come by the time we set off for Paris… but alas, we got both tickets, made it in time, drank over-priced beer, and observed how hippie-ish the opening band First-Aid Kit appeared even though they’re from Sweden…)

Jack White played with his all-male band for this show(he decides at breakfast whether it’ll be the girls or boys that night…)songs off his new album, of course, like “Love Interruption,” “Missing Pieces,” “Sixteen Saltiness”, and “Trash Tongue Talker”(which Jack said was like his ‘Thriller’) but he also played The Dead Weather’s “I Cut Like a Buffalo”, and Racontuers’ “Steady As She Goes”. White Stripes’ “We’re Going to Be Friends”(a real hit) and even “Seven Nation Army” at the end there, which I was really not expecting and I don’t think he still plays it in America these days.

We were already standing pretty close, but something like a mosh started at one point, and I was forced into the line of people behind the ones clinging like glue to the railing in the front of the stage. It was a pretty swell deal.

What a finale to a journey like this, I was singing and skipping all the way back to the U-bahn, and even then.

We awoke today, and went the Lidl to buy muesli, yogurt, and milk. We had the best breakfast ever yesterday morning right next to the hostel, but we’re about out of Euro, so it was back to the supermarket.

It was raining, and a little chilly, so we ran to the East Side Gallery so Bailey could at least see the Berlin Wall while she’s here. “Us running in the rain along the wall symbolizes our whole trip,” Bailey said. I don’t know exactly what she meant by that, but we both started running a little faster.

We hadn’t wanted to spend more Euro, but the Chicken House is literally right around the corner from the hostel, so we had to have a last ½ chicken and chips before the final packing began.

Alarm’s set, bags nearly packed now.

All that remains is my sheer terror of the Frankfurt airport, my personal purgatory—Will I find my gate in the limited 90 minutes I have to transfer? Navigate my way through those ups and downs, links und rechts, miles of maze in –only- an hour and a half?

Outlook not-so-good, anxiety settles in.

 

 

I learned that bars in Italy have both coffee and alcohol. The toilet flushers and light switches are different in Europe. The converters are different in Ireland and the UK than in Germany and France, and everyone speaks English but its cooler if you speak something else, too.

 

I’m going to miss public transportation, and constant change and motion forward. The quick pace I’ll keep close. And I’ll not let the American summer burn my skin too red of what I’ve come to appreciate in the pale of Europe.

Windmills, Bicycles, & Red Lights

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We walked from uptown to downtown and got lost among red lights, found the most delectable chocolate waffle ever, and wandered back to our hostel where some guy from Australia said “Unload your shrapnel”, in front of a pile of change on the bar counter, then used to buy 24 shots, which six of us shared and finished(red, green, red, green) in less than two minutes.

The next morning we had the most delicious Wild Salmon bagel just around the corner of our hostel. We took a tram to Amsterdam Central, where we then caught the free ferry across the river to catch Moonrise Kingdom(the new Wes Anderson flick) at the Eye.

The Eye(http://www.eyefilm.nl/en) is unlike any movie cinema I’ve seen before. They don’t even sell popcorn. It’s a pretty classy place really, show great films, and actually call themselves a ‘film institute’…except in Dutch.

We learned that café’s have coffee and “coffee shops” don’t. Tweedy’s, Rookie’s, Blues Brothers…the coffee there won’t be anything special(What they do have will indeed be ‘special’ though..space cakes, etc). Bulldog, however, has fantastic hot chocolate espresso(one bar for “coffee”(not coffee) and one bar for drinks), and I think that’s all I can say about that…

Before we caught our last international train ride of the trip, we walked through the Van Gogh Museum. I just feel so much more cultured now! No but really, we’ve seen so much art the past few weeks.

Amsterdam’s a cool city. From what I remember.

How We Ended Up in Prison, Oh and Freemasonry

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Didn’t expect to find myself in the Cork Gaol(their spelling of “jail” – pronounced the same), but there I was. Real-human-sized creepy looking mannequin-type characters were set up along the walk through the old gaol, to show how things used to be, like. (In Cork, you say “like” at the end of the sentence, like. Not like in the middle, like Americans do.) Every one of the fake-woman’s names in that gaol was Mary. Makes sense, as Mary’s the most common girl’s name in Ireland(thank female representation in Catholicism). Some of the scenes of the fake-people were rather brutal—a guard whipping a little red-headed boy for instance (only redhead in the whole gaol, as well).

We got out, and headed to St. Fin Barre’s Cathedral. This was my favorite of all the Cathedrals we’ve been to the past few weeks, just beautiful. Two nights before, some one had thrown a rock through one of the stained-glass windows—not like those can ever be replaced.

In front of the choir, there’s a plaque dedicated to the memory of the only Lady Freemason in Ireland, Elizabeth Aldworth(initiated 1712). There are apparently many links between this cathedral and freemasonry, even today it’s “Alive and well.”


We went to the Loch, a lake in the center of town with swans and ducks. The sky actually cleared for us to enjoy a warm walk around the lake.I made sure to get enough of that Irish liquid luck in me before flying out, think I tried a fair amount for three days there:Guinness, Murphy’s(more popular than Guinness in Cork, Guinness is more a Dublin stout), Beamish, Kilbeggan Irish Whiskey, Carlesburg(beer of the soccer team), Bulmer’s(cider…like tangy apple juice), Jameson(in a delicious Irish coffee), and Powers.

Guinness on tap in Ireland is worth the trip to Ireland.

 

The Gift of the Gab

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“The gift of the gab”, they call it, eloquence. That’s what you get for lying on your back, twisting your neck down and pressing your lips where thousands other lips have been. Well, my picture came out blurry the first time, so I kissed the Blarney Stone twice. Twice more eloquent, or does it backfire and the two cancel each other out?

What you don’t hear about Blarney Castle, is the tunnels. Tunnels and a poison garden. We hadn’t expected the mud-slicked eerie corridors beneath the castle to be open for exploration, but a few of them were, and we would’ve gone farther in if only I had dawned muck-friendly clothes that morning.

But the poison garden was swell, even in the rain. There was a sign for “cannabis” talking about how it actually wasn’t harmful, though I didn’t recognize any cannabis plants behind it. Either the kids had swiped it all or season’s not ripe for weeds yet. Also in the garden was salvia, a hallucinogen Mexican shamans have used(and also kids these days) and Hawaiian woodrose(another plant that makes you see things), among many others. Despite the title of the garden, most of the little signposts actually talked more about how –not- harmful the plants were, the positive affects and all that. Pretty interesting, but it was raining (usual for Ireland) so we bailed.

After Blarney, we headed back into town to ring the bells at St. Anne’s in Shanndon. I attempted Amazing Grace, and Bailey played When the Saints Go Marching In.

We spent the evening pub to pub, and found ourselves in The Corner House folk pub with Kilbeggan irish whiskey and more live blues. It was only their 4th show though, and you could tell. The girl’s voice was great, but she kept her eyes closed the whole time and the band wasn’t fully meshing like you need to, to groove with the blues.

We asked at the next pub what time the buses stop running, and they told us 11:40(yeah, Cork is pretty terrible with public transportation), they also told us to come back if we missed our bus.

Welp, we missed the bus. It stopped ten minutes before we got there. Luckily, another bus was going near where we wanted to be and the driver said he’d take us to the Bishopstown Pub anyway, right where we were the night before.

We didn’t make it to mass the next morning, but that’s okay because only older people go during the week, and we had gone the morning before. That makes third week in a row we’ve gone to mass this trip, also in three different countries (Vatican, France, now Ireland). Felt right going to a solid Catholic mass held in Ireland, something natural about it, like red heads and the color green.

Skipping Stones in Skibbereen

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On our way to Skibbereen, we stopped by seventeen stones in a circle, rare but there are a few of them found in the countryside of Ireland. This one was Liagchiorcal An Droma Bhig, or Dromberg Stone Circle. We couldn’t make it to Stonehenge this trip, but this was free and less traveled by.

The cottage was right on the coast. Green hills rolling into the sea. Peaceful. Quaint. No condos thrown up and stacked like Tetras on fire.

“If you go out into the water, and keep going that way, you’ll hit America,” she said. This is the Atlantic, there’s nothing in between it.

We went for a three-mile walk along the coast and up the hills, past some cows and some goats, and back down for dinner. Potatoes, carrots and broccoli, salmon and red wine.

Apple pie followed dinner, and then Bailey and I walked to the one pub nearby, the Skibbereen Eagle, for a pint of Murphy’s, we’d heard that was more popular than Guinness down in these parts. Guinness is a Dublin thing. We found the pub as expected – a couple farmers down the end of the bar.

In the morning we went into the town of Skibbereen to book our hostels for Amsterdam at a pub with wifi.

We walked to St. Patrick’s, a gorgeous church, altar-ornamentation even made by the local people hundreds of years ago. I knelt and prayed a while, and then we headed to Time Traveler’s bookshop. They had a book of letters of Anton Chekhov which I wanted, but it was pretty big and my bag’s already pretty heavy. They also had a bunch by Emile Zola, and some tiny falling-apart books I’d never heard of.

We headed back to the cottage. Bailey and I walked down to the water to a beach of flat-frisbee rocks – to our delight, perfect for skipping. We skipped stones until dinner (chicken and potatoes, veggies and beans), and then drove on in to Cork again.

First thing, we asked for the pub. The oldest one in Ireland was just down the street from us, called Bishopstown Pub.

The table next to us was full of kids who just finished exams. It was a bit weird seeing 18-year-olds in a bar, as you’ve got to be 21 in America, not exactly freshly finished with high school. One of them called me out on drinking stout. Apparently girls don’t drink stout. But they were drinking Budweiser. Haha.

The pipes, the pipes are calling…

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The first destination we set off for in London was Camden Market. We got tube tickets and caught the Victoria line to London Victoria and then the Northern line straight there. After sufficient haggling, we each came out with a dress. I also found the leather jacket I needed. The original price was insane, more than the one I’d been eyeing through the window in Florence. But it’d been marked down a bit, plus I had a straight up I’m-not-spending-more-than-this limit. (The limit was backed by the literal amount of pounds I had in my wallet.)

We walked all over mad Camden town, seeing all sorts of people dressed all sorts of ways. We got some Chinese food(I hadn’t had it in ages) and a crepe for kicks. The crepe was all sorts of can’t-even-compare-to-Paris horrible, but not unexpectedly so; we enjoyed it for the nutella and bananas. I still don’t understand why good crepes can’t exist outside France.

We began to wander a bit outside Camden town and as we were walking over a bridge I stopped. “I hear a guitar,” I said to Bailey, and went over to the side of the bridge to try to find the source of the music. I recognized “High and Dry” by Radiohead, but it was a woman’s voice singing it. And it was beautiful. I was about to hop over the side so I could tell her this when Bailey said she saw a guitar case across the river. There was a sidewalk there, so there must be a way down.

We walked around the block to the stairs down to the river walk. We made it down, but I saw a woman with a guitar case walking in our direction. She had packed up and was heading out.

Her name was Adeline Addruse and she sings under Regent’s Park Road Bridge every weekend.  Busking is illegal if you don’t have a permit…but you can’t get a permit for busking.

“It’s not busking if you don’t leave out a tin, or your guitar case open for money, and I don’t.” Addruse said. She does it just to sing and get back into music.

Eighteen months ago her son Cassidy was born, and that’s when she realized life’s too short. She quit her job as and insurance broker and is now a self-employed baker, who plays and sings under a bridge every weekend.

Addruse wants to do music, and is working on getting out of the self-sabotaging mindset so many people find themselves caught in. Yeah, she wants that 1700 pound Martin so she can record her music properly, but she doesn’t need it, at least—that’s what she’s trying to convince herself.

But she’s been doing music on weekends, and after she puts her son to sleep at night.  She asked if I knew of Tallest Man on Earth, see he’s just one guy but has a ‘band name’ rather than goes by Kristian Matsson. He’s quite a storyteller with his words and music. I asked what she’d go by. She said “Meet George Brown”.

When she was five, she wanted to be a boy called George Brown. That’s why—Meet George Brown.

I told her it works.

I told her of my traveling, and she told me of a guy who travels the world using and gaining miles from his credit cards. Chrisguillebeau.com

She had dinner waiting, and we had all of London to see, so kept walking along the river, and she walked the way we came. We made it to the locks, and found ourselves right in the heart of Camden again, but Addruse had mentioned a view of London worth seeing nearby, Primrose Hill, and we set out to find it. It wasn’t hard, just walk towards the green, and up. We did, and found a bunch of others there, too. Some runners, some readers, some folks on holiday or just enjoying the evening.

We thought about heading back, but passed a corner with a sign that said “Blues all night.” I can appreciate some blues.  We decided to stop in for a beer.

One beer turned to two(the music was –really– good), and then the rest were bought for us, by a guy from Japan, some guys from Brazil…we met some cool people that night, and enjoyed good music. Made me a little homesick, I guess I never expected to find myself at a blues bar in London, but there we were, and it was awesome.

The over ground trains had stopped running by the time the bar closed. We wandered around searching for buses, eventually finding one that took us back to Crystal Palace. It was a bit late.

We made it, though, and woke up with enough time to pack and get tickets for a bus-ferry-bus ride that night to Cork, Ireland. Leaving from the bus station near London Victoria at 7 p.m. that night, and arriving in Cork the next morning, 10:55 a.m.

The bus ride was the longest I’d been on. Rough on the neck. I read while it was light out, and a little into darkness. Then all that could be done was sleep (not so comfortably). The ferry had couches to stretch out on, but they tended to be by the windows, which meant it was freezing. Of course, all our clothes were inaccessible, in the bottom of the bus. The couch was nicer on my neck, but I wore the leather jacket I bought in Camden town the whole way, and I was still cold.

But the ferry made it to port, and the bus made it to Cork, and we were picked up at the station by Bailey’s relatives, and went back to the house for tea and bread (“Bread makes you fat?!” – yes, yes it does, trust me I’ve had a fair lot of it…and will certainly be running hardcore when I get back to the States). We showered away the bus-feel, and I read a bit on Skibbereen’s history(the potato blight, the famine) before we packed up the car and headed to the cottage there.