Children of Germany

Photos are here.

And here.

I SWEAR they're after me.

And yet, I'm so happy right now that my sunburn and the knee that was just murdered by the edge of the bed aren't flapping me at all. I just stepped into the best hotel/hotel room in the world, and today has been bash-your-head-on-a-wall- because-you-can't-believe-it amazing.

A few final brief observations about Amsterdam:

1. I lurved it.
2. Take people seriously when they say watch out for the bikes. AND I almost got my ass handed to me by a tram or two. So, yeah, transportation there... watch it.
3. Trekken means pull, duwen means push (thank you, dude outside the Apple store, for both helping and embarassing me). Dutch is a silly sounding language, but I picked up a bit. Seinfeld subtitles didn't hurt anything: Roken = Smokin' (as in, "that's awesome")
4. I felt safe in Amsterdam. Maybe partially because I avoided walking around with a map unfolded in front of me like some sucker tourist.
5. One car a week ends up in a canal.
6. The houses lean because the wood pilings they were build on are settling or rotting. (If you're into 90° angles and parallel lines, Amsterdam will drive you batshit crazy.)
7. Canals are 3 meters deep.
8. Wind farms are popular in the Netherlands and these new windmills are GINORMOUS.
9. I really, really lurved it.

So, welcome to Germany, Pamela. You are a kid magnet.

I went from Amsterdam to Köln (Cologne) yesterday, where I switched trains and headed for Koblenz. This girl... maybe around 14, gets on and starts talking to me in a very, very loud voice while she's shoveling some sort of candy into her mouth. I tried to tell her I didn't speak German... she kept on talking. I said it louder, and she kind of cocked her head to the side and asked me another question. I said again that I don't speak German, and she finally gave up. Later, a man, then a woman, then another man boarded the train at different times, After sitting next to the girl through one stop, they all moved. I imagine she was spewing some insufferable crap about candy or something... either way, I was quite glad I had a get out of jail free card. Still, she stared at me for most of the train ride. You know that feeling when you're being stared at but you can't look at the person? Yeah, it was like that. Thank goodness for interesting scenery.

(Spent the night in Koblenz in a not so great hotel that smelled all through the night of whatever it was the family that runs it had for dinner last night. And it was not a good smell. It didn't have a shower toilet, though! Koblenz is a wierd place... old buildings mixed with new because, apparently, it got the hell bombed out of it in WWII. It's at the confluence of two major rivers, so I can understand why. I had "Schnitzel Einstein" for dinner, and woke up at 4 am.)

So, I got to the dock this morning to get on my Rhine boat, and beheld a sight that would haunt me for the rest of the morning: about thirty 11 or 12-year-olds waiting to get on the same ship as me. At first they were mellow. But as the morning wore on, they went slowly crazier and crazier until I thought their game of tag was going to end in some weird middle school lemming-like activity where they all go crazy nuts and just run off the end of the boat. Luckily, my iPod charged during the night, and I only had to hear their shrieks (of excitement, not of drowning) between songs.

The Rhine cruise was almost excessively pleasant. As in, "this is so pleasant and I'm seeing so much quaint crap that I might have to have a barf." Fortunately for me, I love pleasant, quaint crap, so I did not have a barf. I saw Roman walls and a bazillion medieval castles. I have waaayyyy to many photos. I'll try to edit some out for you. But I doubt I've got time for that.

By the by... if Dutch is a silly sounding language (don't get me wrong, I loved hearing it), German has some HILARIOUS words. The word fahrt is everywhere... abfahrt, einfahrt, everything. I guess it means drive. Also, one of the stops on the boat ride, Assmannshausen had me in peals of laughter. I guess we know where Cosmo Kramer lives. Or where proctologists come from.

SO! I got off the boat in St. Goar and hoofed (I mean panting, sweating, muscle-burning, questioning life kind of hoofing) it up the hill (um, small mountain) to Rheinfels Castle. I had thought myself a sucker for a moment [read: many moments] for not paying the €5 for a cab while trying to will myself up that hill, but it was magical when I got up there. It must be some low-grade version of what mothers feel after they've gone through living hell to give birth to a child, but once they see the kid it all melts away. Rheinfels is AMAZing. You'll see a ton of photos of it if you look at the pics. I was up there for nearly an hour, and the only thing that made me wish I'd paid for a cab was that I felt too rushed to get back down. The place was almost empty. I definitely chose the right time of year for this.

I had checked my bag at the local TI, and so had the Brazillian girl (probably a little younger than me) that had asked me if I was going to the castle before we got off the boat. I also saw her up at the castle. When we were both stuck outside the TI because the person working there was half an hour late coming back from lunch and our boat was 10 minutes from leaving, we bonded. She and I spent the next hour talking on the boat. Her name was Maria, she was from Brazil but living in Michigan. It's funny how not talking to anyone for a few days will make you appreciate simple conversation.

Anyway, when we got back on the boat, we got on with a billion Japanese tourists and a billion teenagers. These teenagers were LOUD.

So, you see, they're after me. All of 'em.

Maria got off the boat in Bacharach, and I stayed on. My hotel for the night is in Mainz (pronounced Mah-eentse... I've been corrected several times). At Bingen, I figured I could catch a train that would get me out of another two and a half hours on the boat (I'd been boating a grand total of about 6 hours already, and apparently there was nothing good left to see) and that's just what I did. I wouldn't have even landed yet if I had stayed on the boat.

My hotel is so lovely, and so beautifully close to the hauptbanhof (main train station) and yet isn't loud. My room is awesome... my bed is larger than a twin... and there's a bathtub. GUESS WHAT PR IS DOING AS SOON AS SHE'S DONE WITH THIS!

Today was incredible. Not just because I saw some incredible things (which I totally did), but because I am really enjoying the travel part of this whole thing. I've got the wanderlust in me somewhere, and other than my beloved road trips, I can't believe it's taken this long to really come out. I feel like a hermit crab carrying her house around with her, and I'm adoring it. Remind me I said that in two weeks when I just want to get the hell out of Dodge.

Loves and ever-present 5-story buildings,
pr

p.s. I don't know when I'll next have internet access. It could be a while.

p.p.s. I know all the stuff I said about teenagers does not bode well for my future plans. I think it's because I don't have any say over what these kids do that they drove me crazy. So, yeah, good luck with all that, PR.