Keukenhof

This time of year, between Leiden and Amsterdam, is a big outdoor area where tulips and all sorts of other flowers are grown in groups and designs. It's pretty cool to walk around and see them all, even though probably 25-30% of the tulips hadn't opened up yet. I took a bunch of pictures so I'll just let them do the talking....er writing.

What area in The Netherlands is significant without a windmill?

These discs were pretty cool to walk on. They are really solid and don't move at all, but it's still cool to walk on them through the lagoon.

LL did not think they were as cool as I did, but she did pose for a picture before being very happy to hit dry land again. It was kind of funny because all I could think about was how it would just absolutely RUIN your day if you fell in. It was a solid 30 minute bus ride from Leiden and a little chilly.

Here are some orchids that were on display in a building on the grounds.

Here's a real tree hugger. Ha!

These tulips have sort of a rag like quality to their edges...very cool.

And this vendor was selling herring with pickles and onions either on a bun or without. With a bun thank you. And it would have been nice to have some mustard. The woman was appalled at the thought, but I'm telling you, if you had some good spicy mustard that would have been salable in the U.S.!

Leiden Pictures

It's hard to organize how the 10 day trip to three cities, but since I've already posted Berlin pictures, I'll just move along the time frame and save separate entries for the tulips and some more differences and observations.

We left Berlin and flew to Amsterdam and from there we took the train to Leiden. Oh yeah, I already wrote about that. Sorry. Here's some pictures then!

Here are pictures of the koi pond at the Holiday Inn in Leiden. Yep, a koi pond. And with turtles! Very cool. You can see them in the picture.

And here's a picture of the bikes all racked up near the Leiden train station. There were three or four more sets just like these around the station. Sooo many bikes.

We ate right down the canal from this windmill in the center of Leiden. While looking at this serene view, I had another La Chouffe beer, which is awesome, and had the cheese stalk that I wrote about last week.

Here's LL on the bridge over the canal with the windmill in the background.

This machine is at each bus stop in Leiden. The left column is the line and the right column is when that bus is arriving. But then there's this crazy camera looking thing with two hands up in front of it. I have no idea what that's for. Anyone know?

In one of the stores in Leiden, V and D, a department store of sorts, they also have a huge selection of chocolate eggs. Just awesome looking. Why didn't I buy a mess of them??

On our last night in Leiden, LL's workmates took us out to a restaurant along the beach.

Here's another view of the beach. It was fairly chilly and for some reason our gracious hosts thought we'd want to head down, through the sand, to the waters edge. Not sure why. Maybe they are used to it be cold or like sand in their shoes. The food was good though and I had another La Chouffe beer! It quickly became my favorite, widely available European beer.

Tomorrow, Kuekenhof!

Post holding

Going to download some pics today while catching up and will post in a bit.

Welcome to Leiden, it's not Amsterdam, but it ain't bad

Yesterday we flew to Amsterdam and then took the train to Leiden. We're at a slight language loss here as opposed to Germany as neither of us speak Dutch, but I spoke some German. In fact, if you ask someone if they speak English, they almost seem offended as they say "Naturally."

After landing and hauling our luggage through the airport to the train station, we went to buy tickets. Unfortunately our credit cards don't work here like they did in Berlin. Here they require some kind of chip in their cards. Crap. That means we have to pay in cash for everything. Our first task was to buy train tickets. It was only a 15 minute train ride to Leiden, a fact we forgot when we went to buy tickets. A second class ticket is only 5 euros and a first class ticket is 9 euros. So we decided to buy first class tickets because of our baggage. Stupid us. First, you can't find first class on the trains. There's no separate train or even a place on the trains that looked any different from the other areas. So we got suckered. And again, it was only a 15 minute ride!! What were we thinking? We weren't. Our credit cards has just been rejected, I had just gotten robbed converting dollars to euros at the ANB in the station, and we were sort of tired. If that's the worst thing to happen to us on the trip, we'll be lucky!

We passed some tulip fields which were really pretty, but a picture would have been hard as the train moved pretty quickly and the fields are somewhat narrow and long.

Once in Leiden, we took a cab to the hotel and found out there is a quick bus ride we can take for 1.60 euros each way. Nice. It runs about every 30 minutes though, which is not as nice. A bit of shocker after being in Berlin and never having to wait more than 2 minutes for a train.

Our first impression: SOOOOOO many freaking bikes!!! Everywhere!!! And they are worse than cabbies in Chicago as far as driving recklessly goes. Then you throw in pedestrians and cars and it's mayhem. You don't know if you're walking on the sidewalk, bike path or street half the time!! We actually walked down one street just because cars weren't allowed down it just to take one variable out of the equation!

Then my internet on my phone didn't work. I had cell coverage and could call and text, but no internet. Fortunately I fixed that this morning over a breakfast call with ATT International. I'm good to go.

We sat outside at a corner cafe near the train station and on a canal and had a beer, french onion soup (with cheese stalk) and a club sandwich. We got the soup just because we wanted to see what a cheese stalk was. Turns out it's a bread stick with cheese flavoring. It was sunny, but sneaky cool. A little breeze was blowing so it was warm if you were walking around and in the sun, but sitting made it cooler. Not far away was a windmill that garnered the attention of many a tourist, almost all of whom happened to be Japanese while we were sitting there. It's fun when people live the stereotype.

Speaking of which, we're staying at a Holiday Inn here in Leiden! The bed is softer, but not super soft, there are wash cloths, and it's a hotel that could be anywhere in the US. I like it!!

Because I have to use Laura's computer here (internet is not free anywhere in the hotel and she can expense it), I can't upload pictures. Maybe in Amsterdam.

Just the Pictures

Here are some pictures from the trip so far:

Dinner on the Lufthansa flight. Just amazing. Throw in some scotch and coke or wine and it was tasty.

One of the things I love about Berlin: pretzels everywhere. Dad, you said you wanted me to bring you a pretzel so here you go!

This beer garden is where we went on day one. It's only a few blocks from the hotel. If the weather were warmer, I would have spent a lot of time here no doubt.

Here's what we had: hefe-weizen beer, schnitzel, and potatoes served with some horseradish and cranberries. Delicious.

One side of the Berlin wall. This was the side that previously would have had mines on it. This side also just had graffiti on it. The other side had some good art work on it like the next picture.

This was the most compelling art work on the wall to me. Every 10' or so would be another design.

The Brandenburg Gate.

Umm, an old church? Yay, maybe I wasn't paying attention on the boat tour when we went by this one.

I thought this was a church, but it turns out to be the city government offices for Charlottenburg. I actually went inside and, as you would expect, people were waiting to be served. Ha!

I was on the west side of town because I wanted to visit Rogacki's deli. Anthony Bourdain went there on his Berlin trip. Pretty cool place.

Here's Rogacki's from street level

And this is what I got! It was the special and looked to be $5 euros. The potatoes were awesome. The fish was good.

And the curly thing in the container was herring! It was marinated in Krautern, whatever that is, but it was pretty tasty. Unfortunately I was full from the fish special, so I only ate about half of it.

Later on in the day, I sat outside and had this apple strudel with vanilla ice cream and tiny coffee. Actually, that's the standard size coffee which is unfortunately, small.

Checkpoint Charley! Actually there is a Checkpoint Bravo and Checkpoint Alpha also, but Charley got all the publicity.

More observations

One thing I failed to mention was that my 3 day pass on all public transportation cost 22 Euros or about $30. It's not a great deal by any stretch, but since the trains, above and below ground, trams and buses are all included, I would recommend it if visiting here for 3-4 days. A single 2 hour trip is 2.5 Euro I think, so I'd go through at least 3 of those a day if not more.

Nobody here wears baseball hats. Not necessarily hats with baseball logos, (duh, they don't really play baseball over here) but any kind of baseball style hat. I just took the train across town, walked several blocks, came back and probably saw three hats the whole time. That's just odd. I have no idea why it is.

Thank goodness for Starbucks. Not for the quality of the coffee, though it is good, but for the quantity. For 2.3 Euros, I can get a 16 oz cup of coffee. You can't get near that for twice the price at any coffee shop around here. AND I can get it to go!! Nice.

All you English types out there, come ride the trains here. You'll notice there are gaps between the train exit doors and the platforms. The Germans though realize this and don't need to be reminded to "mind the gap" at every stop. Get with the program England.

Our hotel doesn't have any wash clothes. Why? LL said her hotel in Paris didn't have them either. I sure hope that isn't common in Europe, though it would explain the cleanliness issue that I often run into with the residents. Though I have to say, that has not been the case with this trip. Granted, it's not hot or even warm, so maybe all of the stink is just hibernating.

Mind you, I'm having fun over here! I just like to point out some things that are positive and negative about the places I visit for the benefit of those who can't/haven't been here. For example, remember my entry on Mackinac Island?

One other thing I really like is that there are fresh, warm pretzels just about everywhere for .65 Euro (about $1). Just delicious.

Some Berlin observations

To take up where I left off: I was sleeping. If you haven't been to Europe, there are several quirky things about life over here. First, for the most part, if you want non-smelly water, you have to buy it by the bottle. For some reason there are people who buy carbonated water and drink that which means you have to ask for the non-gassy kind and the restaurants don't bring you water for free. And ice cubes are somewhat of a technological break through over here and even McDonald's doesn't autmatically put it in their drinks. Yeah, the people are just strange/behind the times, but that's the charm of visiting a foreign land.

The hotel rooms are small, though ours is a good size. If on a scale of 1-10, wood is a 10, the beds are about 8.5. I've never slept on harder beds than in Europe and that includes camping when sleeping on the ground. The first few hours I slept, there were so many pressure points on my bed that I seemed to have lost circulation in virtually every part of my body at some point. My trapezius muscle HATES the bed here. Every morning I wake up in agonizing pain.

For being a touristy town, not as many people speak English as I expected. Fortunately I know a tiny bit of German and can get us by. Unfortunately, if you start to speak German, you'll get a tidal wave of German sentences thrown at you by the very helpful folks who were willing to help you in the first place. Then I basically have to say that I didn't understand any of that and that we should try again, possibly in English. Ha! It's a fun game we play.

There's more graffiti in Berlin than in the worst ghetto of New York. It's just a fact. Why? I have no idea. The buildings aren't terribly old here, because of the wars I would suspect, so maybe that has something to do with it. I'm not sure.

The public transportation system is pretty sweet. Instead of cutting train and bus service in Chicago to save money, they should INCREASE service and try to raise revenue through better service. If you knew a train or bus was coming every two minutes, you'd be a hell of a lot more likely to take it wouldn't you? I know I would. That's the situation here. And you can get everywhere. It's great.

More observations tomorrow!

The trip over

So we got to the airport on Friday and there was virtually no line at the KLM counter. Great! There are four KLM employees helping people and two or three people ahead of us in line. Only they are moving anywhere. One guy finally finishes and the KLM person says "Have a nice day." To which he responds, "You've just guaranteed it isn't going to be one." Uh oh. We finally get to the counter and the flight is cancelled. Mechanical problem with the plane. Not OUR plane, but another plane so they took OUR plane and gave it to someone else. Nice. Not to worry though, says the counter person, we were able to book you on other flights. Flights? Oh, yes, we didn't know you were booked together, so LL, you're booked on Air France through Paris and then to Berlin all at about the same time. Mr. Sutton.....you're going through Minneapolis with a four hour layover there, then to Amsterdam and then to Berlin and you get in sometime 24 hours from now. WHAT??? So the travel agent for LL's work who booked the flights originally was called and she hadn't been told about the cancelled flights, which I guess normally happens. Fortunately she was able to get us together on a Lufthansa flight to Dusseldorf and then a connecting flight to Berlin. Let me tell you, there is no way our original flight was going to be this awesome. All the movies that were up for best picture plus several more were available for viewing at any time. The plane was 80% empty, so you could sleep anywhere you wanted. Food was brought around almost constantly and the first drink cart offered free scotch, gin and wine!! The scotch and gin ran out, but the wine was available for the whole flight. It made me pine for the days of a regulated, subsidized airline. Sigh..... Unfortunately I only got about an hours worth of sleep since the flight left at 5 our time and was about 7 1/2 hours. I normally don't go to sleep until close to midnight, so it was tough for me to actually get some shut-eye. Unfortunately it was about 10 a.m. when we got to the hotel, which was 3 a.m. my time and I was officially trashed. The first thing we did was sleep for four hours. More tales to come tomorrow!

Made it to Berlin!

Just wanted to let everyone know that we made it to Berlin fine and dandy. More details on the flight and trip so far in a bit.

I'm off like a cheap suit....or a prom dress...tis the season!

Flying into Amsterdam, then a morning flight to Berlin (1 hour layover I think). After a few days there, we head back towards Amsterdam, but actually stay in Leiden near The Hague. Then to Amsterdam proper and then fly home from there. Hope to send posts and pics!!!

It's just a muscle

So let's say you somehow manage to strain your trapezius muscle (the muscle on your upper back behind your shoulder). And let's say that you're taking a long flight to Europe tomorrow. Do you: A) rest it, take ibuprofen, hydrate and get a quick massage orrrrrrr B) do those things (except rest it) and then go lift weights at the gym? Yep, I opted for the latter. (Un)fortunately, many of my exercises do not focus on the trapezius, so it really didn't impact my workout very much. There's one exercise that is focused on the trapezius, so I just skipped that exercise. The reason I really wanted to work out is because A) it's been effective as of late and B) I'll be traveling for a week and I'm not sure how much working out I'll be doing.

There's also no sure way of knowing how much internet access I'll have, so blogging could be sketchy. I'm going to bring a computer and there is wifi in the hotel in Berlin, but it's 10 Euros a day. They have a business center though, so I'm hoping I can access the internet (free) as needed from there.....and some beer gardens that I have in mind (Schleusenkrug and Prater Garten).

Anyone been to Berlin and have a must see? Not so much in the museum realm of things, but more along the beer garden, deli (like Rogacki) or other such fun place that locals might attend often. Locals don't go to the museum....at least in their own towns. Isn't that true?

Freezing in NY

First off, I want to wish Amy Freeze good luck in her endeavors. Amy was the meteorologist for our local Fox affiliate for four years before they inexplicably didn't renew her contract. She also came out to do the weather during the Bears homes games, so I saw a lot of her, not to mention the studio tour we went on. Good luck in NY Amy!!

Our softball manager put up the stats for the year so far and I just had to post this particular picture (thanks for the snapshot Benny Baseball). Yep, it shows yours truly as leading the team in triples! Probably not going to be the case for long, especially since I don't play again until May. Maybe I had two triples all of last year, so this is really a rare event.

Topic-less

As I sit here at the computer with a one quarter full glass of Oregon pinot noir having just watched a Blackhawks loss in overtime, I am topic-less. More often than not I have topics at the ready, but not tonight. Maybe I'll talk about Berlin.

Next week, LL and I will be in Berlin and then Amsterdam, so today I devoted some time to researching the public transportation system and beer gardens. The east and west Berlin public transportation system was only connected within the last decade, but apparently it's pretty awesome. We'll see. We're big public transportation people when we travel, so we'll definitely give it a workout.

Well, that's about it. The wine is almost gone, so it's off to bed.

Some softball news

So there was some softball news from this weekend. Though I had more church classes on Saturday, the team had a maximum of two games and if they won at least one, they would be playing on Sunday. They did indeed win one (1-1), so we started with batting practice at 8 a.m. in Joliet, which is about an hour away, so Sunday morning was indeed an early morning.

The day started off cold and windy and stayed that way while we were playing our three games. Yep, we went 2-1 on Sunday for a relatively nice tournament, though we lost our last game 10-9 and should not have lost.

Fortunately though, my batting streak continued! With a huge sample size of four games, I'm 13 for 14 in the first game of the day. Not too shabby. Our team has gone 2-2 in those games, so we weren't playing bad teams. Actually, I'm not sure what the reason is other than I can make sure I'm completely ready for that first game, but then a bunch of other things come into play for the rest of the games that can influence success. On Sunday though everything continued clicking and I was 9 for 10 for the day with my second triple of the year. Not too shabby.

Late to the party

Recently, too recently to mention, I've started online banking. Yep, welcome to the new millennium Mr. Sutton. There wasn't a reason that I wasn't doing the banking, other than the attraction of the status quo. My banks were late in communicating the availability and when it comes to electronics, I'm not an early adopter....that doesn't excuse the 5-6 year delay in joining the crowd.

So far it's been pretty easy and as I add vendors to the various bank accounts and banks (condo building bank account and my personal account), it should get easier. There are no stamps involved and I can set up recurring payments very easily. Now almost all of my expenses either get paid by direct withdrawal, automatic credit card charge or online banking. Good stuff. Working smarter, not harder!!

Outback Steakhouse has a new way of cooking their steaks: Wood Grill. So instead of the grilling in butter and seasoning, they add just salt and pepper and grill it over wood (I'm guessing). So I told them to hold the salt and pepper too and then add the blue cheese crust. Yum. And their sweet potatoes are pretty tasty too. Unfortunately I had their blue cheese and pecan salad, thinking it had less sodium than the Caesar salad and I was wrong. Damn. Interestingly, the Aussie Fries they server have less sodium that all of their salads and not by a little...by a ton! Only 100 mgs of sodium in the fries while the house salad with ranch has 675 (very little sodium in the ranch dressing oddly enough). And blooming onions, while not good for you in any sense of the word "good", are very tasty....especially when they are free!!