Monthly Archives: March 2010

There can’t possibly be any tort law in this country.

The entire transportation system is an accident waiting to happen. Cars, pedestrians, bikes, trams, trucks in total anarchy. I get the feeling that anything goes although I did see a guy get busted today after zooming his motorcycle through a pedestrian area.

Today there was a crew tearing up the street which was just one lane. The Dutch don’t pay someone $30 an hour to hold a flag and wave everyone around. The cars just drove up on the sidewalk to get around it. And the people and bikes just got out of their way.

Bob and I both had to watch for a minute to make sure we were understanding what was happening.

Also every restaurant has the bathroom in the basement and the stairway is practically a ladder.

A great day although a tad long and food deprived. It was sunny! And probably hit 45 degrees! All the Dutch people were sitting in the sun smoking cigarettes and smiling.

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More on the hotel. It’s like a design experiment. It’s called citizenM. The first floor is like a giant lounge with all kinds of tables, chairs, couches, TVs, work areas and food/bar. We’ve spent our evenings there before going to bed and it’s nice. I guess it’s not so much a tourist hotel as a business traveler hotel.

The room has it’s own computer thing where you can set up your lighting, music, window shade and so forth.

Last night at midnight the alarm went off. All the lights came on and the sound of stampeding elephants. I’m not making this up. I woke up and was thinking: what the hell? It can’t be morning yet. I waited for Bob to deal with it and finally elbowed him because he was sleeping through it. This morning I figured out how to turn it off so there won’t be a repeat performance tonight.

Also you can pick the color you want for the toilet and shower pods. It is the world’s tiniest room but we like this place.

One more big day tomorrow. More museums and I’m sure lots of wandering around completely lost.

We practically sprained our arms patting ourselves on the back for picking such great hotels on the Internet and then we arrived in Amsterdam.

This the most tragically tiny hotel room in the world. I’m trying to take photos but it’s so small I can’t get back far enough. It doesn’t have a closet, it has a towel-rack thing where you can hang your coats. There is one shelf that’s big enough for three of Grandma’s knickknacks. There’s a drawer under the bed where Bob could fit his suitcase after he took out the extra pillows and towels.

At one point Bob was trying to find something in his suitcase and I had to sit on the toilet to get out of the way.

However all was forgiven when Bob discovered the giant TV screen above the bed with about 100 channels of free grown-up movies. We already saw a clip that involved two girls frolicking on a speed boat. So yeah, the world’s smallest hotel room with the giantest TV.

The trip is still going great. We had a great time in Hamburg and got lots of time with Tante Irmgard.

One of our cab drivers asked about our trip and we explained what we were doing and he said: Oh the relatives tour.

The relatives tour ended this morning.

We arrived in Amsterdam at 3pm and found the hotel, ditched our stuff and then went into town and got our local public transportation passes and some museum tickets. We found a fantastic meal and have returned to the hotel.

The only bummer is the weather. The weather is wearing me down. I knew we wouldn’t have great weather on this trip at this time of year but I didn’t anticipate that we’d be lucky if it hit 40 for a high during the day. I’m always cold. My feet are cold. My hands are cold. We’ve been lucky on precipitation. We’ve missed a lot of the worst of it until today. Cold hard rain. I had to wring my hat out. Yahoo weather tells me that the rain stops after today. Yay.

This hotel has free terminals so I might check in again but we have two full days in Amsterdam and then I go to the airport first thing Thursday morning.

Bob is waiting for turn so I’m off for now.

Happy Birthday Mom.

Every time we get over-confident that we know what we’re doing we screw up.

We took a train from GAP to Munich. An ICE train from Munich to Würzberg. Our itinerary said Würzberg to Bad K. Except I guess we were in the wrong car and the train did a saucer separation and we were on our way to East Germany. Bob asked the conductor and he sent us on another train back the way we came and then we transferred to another regional train. What’s that? 5 trains?

We arrived and took a taxi to Tante Hilla’s. Since we were late she had rounded up a neighbor to drive to the train station to look for us. The cab driver pulled over and she came over and told him where he should park. He pulled to a different spot and he unloaded us and she came over and showed him where she wanted him to park.

I was intentionally vague with Hilla about where we were staying but by the end she had to find out and had already phoned them and informed them she was local and her niece was coming and to prepare the best room and so forth. I should have recognized the look on the guy’s face when I told him my name.

We have a lovely room and I slept through the night for the second time since we arrived. My dysfunctional sleeping has made the jump over to the new time zone perfectly.

We’ve had a great time so far and I am well fed and drink a half gallon of beer a day. I bought some Prinzen Rolle and put them in mz hat and then got crumbs in my hair. The drawback to packing a small bag is I don’t have room to carry all the cookies and candy I want.

Hilla asked if we wanted to go to dinner or if we wanted Rouladen at her house. Of course I wanted her cooking but I didn’t want to be too much trouble. “I already made it,” she said.

We’re taking a break here and then a rest at the hotel and then over to Hilla’s. She wrote down the instructions for the bus including writing a note we can give to the bus driver so he knows what to do with us.

Tomorrow we’re off to Hamburg.

Current Weather Conditions.

The German keyboard is laid out all different and I’ve had a few liters of bier and it took about 15 minutes to type that URL so there will be no more URLs in this post.

We arrived at Schiphol Airport Friday morning and waited a few hours before catching the train to Düsseldorf. At the time I was mad at myself because this was supposed to be a big money saver and now we were wasting so much time sitting around. But it turned out okay. We had good adventures and were forced to stay awake and stand on breezy train platforms

I forgot the first thing we do everytime we get off the train in a new city: get completelz lost.

It was the train station’s fault. They had a giant map with a red dot that said you are here. It should have said: turn around and go out the other door and you are here.

We finally found our hotel and the desk guy directed us to a fabulous restaurant and we ate our weight in wurst and potatoes and returned to our room and I fell asleep at 7:15 and when I finally woke up it was light outside and I got up to check my watch and it was 8:10. Our plane was taking off at 10am.

Team Pam and Bob sprang to action, shampooed, packed and were at the front desk in 30 minutes. The cab arrived 5 minutes later and we were in the terminal about 20 minutes later. We zoomed through check in and then to airport security.

This is the most organized, efficient country except for local airport security. The weekday business travelers at PDX would eat these people for lunch. We could have gotten 100 passengers through in the same time it took 2 dozen to get through in Düsseldorf. And we didn’t even have to take our shoes off.

Flight was delayed 1 hr 40 because of huge snowfall in Munich. Then we got out of the gate and had to turn back because of technical problems. Then the technical problems were fixed. Actually the Captain’s exact words were: hopefully the problem is fixed. Just the confident speech I want to hear before take-off. Then we had to get back in line for take off. Then there was a delay unloading the luggage.

We finally got to the train station and then another 45 minutes for our regional train.

But we got here finally. yay. All the Neuner girls are taller than me now. Luis nicely pointed out that he wasn’t but I’m sure when I see him in August that will have changed. There’s lots of snow and it’s pretty.

This rearranged keyboard has reduced my typing to about 15 words a minute so I will stop here. Possibly more later.

Fox Tower, downtown Portland.

Did you read that Americans only clean their refrigerators once or twice a year?

If they meant, take out the crisper and cheese drawer and shelves and scrub out everything with water and baking soda, then yeah I only do that once or twice a year.

But they mean throw out all the old ooky stuff that no one ate.

I do that every week. There is nothing past date in my refrigerator, ever. There is no container in the back with an unidentified substance covered with mold.

The food lives in there. Why wouldn’t you want it sparkling clean?

Right now it’s almost empty and I scrubbed it out this evening. You could do heart surgery in there.

* * *

Our dryer has been broken for a long time. If there’s any time on the dial and the dryer door is closed then it would be on. So you had to turn it off using the dial.

Today I threw some stuff in and turned the dial and it didn’t work. I was opening and closing the door and turning the dial around and around. I thought it was broken.

Finally I hit the “push to start” button and it worked. So now broken is fixed.

* * *

I’m all packed. I’ve been working on traveling with smaller bags. On this trip I’m not even taking a backpack in addition to my main bag. Just one bag small enough to carry-on. Eventually I’m going to get it so that all I travel with is my ID and a ziploc bag with a single tube of moisturizer.

Scan of crappy 1990 photo of me and my sister at Berlin Wall

My computer has been acting like a jerk lately. I did extensive research (3 seconds of googling) and apparently have a kernel panic problem. Am in the process of providing my kernel with some sedatives. Relax and be cool, kernel.

I read that Blogger isn’t pulling the plug on FTP until May 1st now. Yay! One more thing I can put off for later.

Scan of crappy 1990 photo of me and Tante Hilla on the bank of the Elbe River.

I hate this part of trip preparation. The part where everything is still all chaotic and unconfirmed. Travel arrangements that I thought were solid have fallen apart and solving the problem is a huge time suck. I’m anxious and leaving myself notes everywhere.

Bob bought me a new bag and I’m doing a trial run on packing but then half the stuff I wanted to take was dirty so now I have laundry in. What I really want to do is crawl in bed and try to finish this paperback that I foolishly started last week thinking I could finish it quickly. I don’t want to take a half read book on the trip but I hate to leave it sitting here for two weeks.

I already picked my books for the trip. I’m only taking 2. Both have been sitting around here forever. A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe, 787pp. mass market paperback and A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin, 807 pp. mass market. The Martin one is part of a series and it would probably be smarter to bring the second one of these but I’m not doing it that way.

Bathroom prices in what was then Yugoslavia but is now Slovenia.

I was going to do a whole week of old trip photos and travel notebook snippets but I think I’d better use my time for getting organized.

The photos in this post are from a 1990 trip to celebrate my cousin’s wedding. I don’t think I have a travel notebook from that trip. Hard to believe but if I have one I don’t know where it is.

I found my notebook from my 1997 trip which was a one year anniversary trip with my sweetheart and I’m going to include an excerpt below.

At this point, I’m looking forward to the actual trip part, when you get on the plane and everything is in motion. You can’t worry about it any more.

Meanwhile, I need to try to fix a hotel reservation.

Menu in Postojna. We went to these caves. I remember thinking that Yugoslavia must not have tort law because the caves were a giant lawsuit waiting to happen. There was this roller coaster-like ride through the caves and I swear if you sat up too much your head would have been taken off.

Excerpt from 1997 travel journal. I chose a boatface related item.

Backstory: we took a tour from Hamburg, Germany to a resort island called Sylt and then took a ferry to Denmark. (Aug 21, 1997, as in original)

We get on the ferry and it’s like this cramped packed dining room — hot with people smoking and eating meat. Is that a recipe for vomit or what?

I don’t know how to find things and walk around the boat which can I bitch? Why the f#@!!ing hell are there no maps. I’ve yet to see a map of our ferry route — not like I’m driving — but I’d like to know. Anyway. I’ve found a great seat on the top level outside. Fresh air, cool breeze, view of the wake. I am happy.

It is unfortunately very gray. Sky and water meet in a blue-gray blur at the horizon. I can’t see what would not doubt be a fabulous view of Denmark. … I can now glimpse a tiny stretch of dune. [note: am I writing this on the ferry out on the deck?] A narrow bit of sand and shrubs.

We go to Sonderberg-captirol, I think, and then to another ferry and then 2 hrs. home. Then I hope that’s the last of the boats on this trip.

There are some great photos of this trip but they’re downstairs somewhere and I can’t go dig around right now.