The EuroTrip: Part Deux

Because I anticipated law school being three years of, well, hell...I decided that I should take a nice trip with my friends. After a lot of ridiculous planning (check out the itinerary), I ended up spending three amazing and life-changing weeks backpacking across Central Europe with Tom, Kevin, and Brian. Here was our schedule:

22nd-23rd: Stuttgart, Germany
24-25: Amsterdam, Netherlands
26-28: Berlin, Germany
29-31: Prague, Czech Republic
1-2: Vienna, Austria
3-4: Mayrhofen, Austria
5-6: Milan, Italy
7-8: Geneva, Switzerland
8-9: Interlaken, Switzerland
10: Gimmelwald, Switzerland
11-13: Munich, Germany


Now, each place was fascinating enough to fill up an entire blog entry, but I simply cannot put all of it into words right now. For now, I will just post some photos below with descriptions, and gradually update this post over the next week or so.

STUTTGART, GERMANY

Stuttgart is a beautiful city in the southern/central area of Germany. They had awesome bakeries, a really cool park (The Schlossgarten), and an awesome Mercedes-Benz museum. We stayed with Tom at the University of Stuttgart. The highlight was definitely our soccer game with the Germans, followed by dinner and drinks at the biergarten in the Schlossgarten. This marked the beginning of my newfound love for European beer.

Palace and plaza in Stuttgart city centre.

They had some sort of event/exhibit in honor of the World Cup, with bears representing each country in the world. This is me and the Portugal bear.

Brian and the American bear.

We played an awesome soccer/football game of Americans versus Germans. As expected, we were thoroughly demolished. They outscored us by about 15 goals. Still, in the end, we decided to play "Next Goal Wins," and I scored the winning goal! In all, I had 2 goals, 2 assists, 0 goals allowed, and about a million turnovers.

AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS

Everyone knows about Amsterdam. It's a city of immorality, drugs, sex, and Indonesian food. Our hostel was in the Red Light District, which certainly made things interesting. In the windows, you could see women in bikinis, and there were pornography stores in every direction. I didn't care much for the inner-city. It felt like an amusement park to me. Instead, we took some time to travel outside of the city centre and get a more "Dutch" experience.

Drinking gourmet coffee in Amsterdam. From a machine. In the train station.


Wandering the streets of Amsterdam in search of our hostel.


The Sex Museum. It was lame.


This is crazy. You put money in the slot just like any vending machine, and out comes burgers and fries and other greasy nonsense. How does the South not have this?


See, this is what you SHOULD do in Amsterdam. Tom and I rented bikes for a day, found a map, and went searching for windmills in the outskirts of the city. It was fun, except the basket on the front of my bike was about 246 lbs.


Windmills in the suburbs of Amsterdam.


Playing with the gizmos and gadgetry at the NEMO Museum. Look! I'm in a bubble!


This was embarrassing. Facing head-on, I thought this glass hemisphere was concave and not convex, and then I proceeded to bash my face right into the glass. Tom managed to take a photo of it while laughing hysterically.


One final photo on our way out of the city. In all, Amsterdam was a little too sordid for my tastes.


BERLIN, GERMANY

Never would I have guessed how much I'd love Berlin. I think the city gets a bad rap because of the whole Holocaust and Iron Curtain thing. Still, the history is fascinating, and it's so valuable to be able to actually observe the reunification process succeeding in the city. The East and West sides clearly have different atmospheres, with the West being more modern and commercial. Still, the East is progressing right along. In fact, I think I enjoyed East Berlin more than the West side. Overall, things in the city were cheap, the locals were nice, the S-Bahn (subway) was efficient, the food was good, the beer was amazing, and the sightseeing was incredible. Prost!

Brandenburg Tor, a gateway dividing East and West Berlin. Our !FREE! city tour started here.


The Berliner Dome!


Here are some pieces of the Berlin Wall outside of Potsdamer Platz. The Platz is a nice and modern shopping area in West Berlin. You can find these pieces of the wall scattered across the city.


Top of the Reichstag. The Reichstag is the main seat of government. The view from the top is surreal. I'm smiling because I just finished drinking a delicious Milchkaffee.


The Holocaust Memorial. It's design was very ambiguous, and apparently meant to be that way. Germans are very regretful about the atrocities committed during World War II and the Holocaust. I was amazed with how well they have come to terms with their mistakes and misdeeds.


Me looking fierce until the tower in the center of Berlin's main park. Tom and I walked to the foot of the tower and did what we do best: Took a nap.


Checkpoint Charlie: Gateway to the American Sector during post-war occupation. It's now a haphazardly-put-together museum, but the history is quite interesting.


Another delicious beer. I know they have Paulaner in the U.S., but it tastes WAY better in Germany.


In Germany you can carry open containers of alcohol out in public. It was common to see people walking on the streets or heading to work with a beer in their hands, as if it were a bottle of water. Here, Tom and I bought some Becks and drank it on the side of a riverbank overlooking the new ultramodern Berlin Hoptbanhof. It was our version of pregaming before the bar crawl.


Our tour group organized a bar crawl one evening. We met a really nice couple from Norway, and their English was flawless. We got VIP passes at several bars, and Tom somehow managed to go up to the bar and get us beers without paying. Twice. Berlin is awesome.


Best part of the evening: Doners! It's a pita/bread type substance, covered in meat, cabbage, lettuce, and smothered in three delicious sauces. I think the meat is from a mixture of beef, lamb, chicken, squirrel, and camel. Or was it llama? Anyway, they were dirt cheap in Berlin. This one was 2.50, but we found some for 2.00, as well. We came to the conclusion that, strangely, the cheaper they were, the better they tasted.

Prague, Czech Republic (and more) coming soon....

The EuroTrip

(to follow The Ties That Bind)

Quick Quiz: How do you get two hundred high school students, forty parents, a handful of instructors, and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of instruments from Los Angeles to Prague?

Well, the correct answer looks like this:

During Spring Break of my senior year, my high school band did a concert tour through Prague, Budapest, and Vienna. Since we weren't able to secure 250 seats on one plane, we were separated into six different groups. Over the course of 24 hours, the La Canada High School Band was dispersed in airports all over the world, with layovers in Minneapolis, London, Paris, Munich, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt. The amazing thing is, we all managed to make it to Prague in the end. Except for one kid...some freshman flute player. He was probably dispensable, though.

Anyway, this may have been the most dysfunctional and disorganized trip ever imagined. Many, MANY mistakes were made. Even though there were forty parent chaperones, there was essentially no actual supervision taking place. Minutes after my group arrived in Prague, I had learned that a group of orchestra girls had already been seen bar-hopping through the Czech Republic nightlife. They returned to the hotel late that night, only to be greeted by several flummoxed parents in the lobby. The 'rents discussed punishing the girls and sending them on the next flight back to California, but decided to let them off the hook. My theory is that the parents were actually more lenient because they themselves were also drunk at the time. Whatevskis. Mistakes were made. Apparently all was forgiven.

Our trip to Prague consisted of a concert performance in a nice auditorium, and then some unsupervised free time in the heart of the city. At our concert, we finished with our arrangement of "America the Beautiful." This was not a good idea. At the time, the Europeans did not look to kindly on Americans because of Afghanistan and terrorism and whatnot. Most audience members grimaced or covered their ears, while a few even stood up and walked out. Yeah...we made sure to suggest removing that song from our repertoire.

That evening, we returned to the hotel to find several 20ish year old Italian guys hanging out in the lobby. It didn't take them long to focus their attention on Amanda. They were blatantly and shamelessly flirting with her, but the language barrier proved problematic. My friend Elena was fluent in Spanish and tried to translate, but I don't think she was too familiar with trashy flirting and raunchy Italian slang. When the girls went back to their room for the evening, the Italians started slipping notes under their door, inviting them to hang out with them. They declined the invite, and after a while, the messages stopped.

While all the kids were loading the buses the next morning, Elena and I walked back into the hotel to grab Amanda, who was returning her room key. I was telling Elena how relieved I was that our experience in Prague had gone relatively smoothly, save for a few small issues. For the most part, everyone was innocent, well-behaved, and stayed out of trouble. Our conversation came to an abrupt halt when we walked through the lobby entrance, only to find Amanda full-on sucking face with one of the Italian Stallions. Elena and I froze, quickly processed our shock, and did what any good person should do when their friend is being macked on by a foreign stranger. We ran away. And, uh...left her there.

A few minutes later, Amanda emerged from the lobby with her hair slightly disheveled, and a strange look of pride slash denial. We made fun of her accordingly. Yes, mistakes were made. But no harm done.

This is where the EuroTrip began to veer off the path of innocence and onto the path of ineptitude. Our next task was to get all of these people from Prague to Budapest. Fortunately, we could all travel together by train. How quaint. How fun, isn't it? To travel through Europe by train? We'd be like wizards heading to Hogwarts! I think everyone imagined it would feel like that. Well...it definitely was not like Harry Potter.

First off, we were herded into a dilapidated Prague train station and basically told to sit and not move for several hours. When we entered the train, we were surprised to see that it did not have roomy cabins with dessert carts and chocolate frogs and horrible young British actresses. Each cabin was about the size of a bathroom stall, and contained six bunk beds. Believe me, once you managed to crawl into your bunk, it was foolish to try to escape. My situation was particularly difficult, because Eric, a nearly-blind freshman, was in my room and made a mess of everything. All I could do was try to fall asleep on my bed (slash wooden plank) and hope to wake up in Hungary.

At some point in the middle of the night, probably just moments after I was eventually able to fall asleep, I was startled by slamming on our cabin door. Suddenly, several men slid the door open and stepped into our minuscule room dressed in camo, with huge rifles, shouting at us in some Slavic language. We all freaked out and stared at the men, absolutely petrified. When they realized that we couldn't understand them, they just asked us, "Passports? PASSPORTS?!!" I told them that we didn't have our passports, and that the parents were keeping them, and then readied myself emotionally to be shot down on the spot. Fortunately, they merely grunted angrily and walked out the door.

After a while, students began to filter out of their cabins to figure out what all the commotion was about. No one knew what was going on, but the soldiers seemed to have come and gone. The only thing we knew was that it was unlikely that anyone would be getting any more sleep.

As we were departing the train, I could tell by everyone's faces that no one had slept much. Everyone looked beaten up and downright miserable. On top of that, the Budapest train station was the trashiest structure I had ever seen, and I feared it would collapse on us at any moment. As I maneuvered my way through the Hungarians and their MASSIVE HANDS, I heard one of our chaperones yelling behind me.

"Eric?! Where's Eric?!" Yes, apparently our quasi-blind freshman friend had wandered off alone in the crowded train station, and his mom was spazzzzing out about it. She grabbed my arm and scolded me for not keeping a watchful eye on him, and then sent me to find him. After about a minute, I saw him standing by himself on one of the nearby walkways. I asked him where he wandered to, and he said he just felt like walking around. Odd. Meanwhile, his Mom was screaming like a psychotic witch, and could be heard clearly from our walkway.

"Why didn't you walk back when you heard your mom screaming?" I asked him.

"I dunno. She screams all the time." Um...Weird. Were these people always this dysfunctional, or was the absurdity of this trip just amplifying it? Meh. It was just a simple mistake, I thought. All was soon forgotten.

Our performance in Budapest was by far the most disastrous. It was in an elegant indoor theatre, with a large backstage area. All of the students walked backstage to put their instruments together. I was in charge of setting the stage for each group, but I noticed that although I was placing the correct number of chairs, there didn't seem to be enough butts sitting in them. I checked the rooms backstage, only to find dozens of high schoolers sleeping on the floor. So, not only did I need to set up the stage, but I had to physically wake up each student and push them on stage.

On top of that, merely being on stage did not necessarily solve anything. Sure, the chairs were filled, but it doesn't do any good if everyone is falling asleep while performing. Each time a student had more than four or five measures of rest in the music, chances were they'd be fast asleep halfway through them. I even saw Amanda nearly drop her flute while dozing off on stage. Apparently, when that Italian sucked all the saliva out of her throat, he sucked out all her energy, as well.

To make matters worse, we still continued to perform the National Anthem, despite my admonishments to forgo the piece. Not only that, but one of our bus drivers insisted that she sing along with us, and her raspy American voice resonated painfully throughout the theatre. As I glanced from the stage to the audience, I saw the woman wailing "the rockets red glare," then saw the band members looking quite irritated that her cacophonous howling was interrupting their naps, then watched as the European locals once again produced angry faces and walked out of the theatre. The worst part was...I was so tired that I couldn't even roll my eyes anymore. Oh well. Mistakes were made. Hungary probably wasn't the most important political ally anyway.

We left for Vienna the next day. After the train debacle, we were glad that we'd be traveling by bus. Still, the ride got off to a strange start. Since we had left the city, we had been caravaning in dirt back roads alongside old and abandoned houses. After about an hour, we lost sight of the bus in front of us. The road started to narrow into one small lane, and the dirt road gradually transitioned into, well, just dirt. We came to a halt when we saw a large vehicle driving in our direction. This was a little worrisome, since there was no way it could get around a huge double-decker bus on such a small road. Nevertheless, it continued toward us, until it stopped just a few inches in front of us. When I looked inside, I could see all of my classmates - literally just inches away from my face. They looked as shocked as I was. Now, two buses in our caravan were stuck facing each other on a dirt road in Middle-Of-Nowhere, Hungary.

After some evasive and impressive maneuvering, the buses all turned around and we headed in the direction from which we came. After another hour, we were once again driving through downtown Budapest. What happened? Did we drive to Vienna in the completely wrong direction? Why were we in the same place we started TWO HOURS after our initial departure? Mistakes were made...and who knows what caused this one? BUDAPEST: You can check out whenever you want, but you can never leave.

We finished the three-hour drive to Vienna five hours after we first left Budapest. That evening, we had our first meal that didn't consist of salty chicken! Instead, they served us random meats, substances, and roughage, all completely fried in batter! At this point, everyone was in better spirits. The trip had been so poorly planned and disorganized that we all finally found it hilarious. Even the parents were in better moods slash completely drunk. One chaperone came up to me with her camera and showed me a photo of her and the four orchestra girls that were busted on the first night.

"LOOK! IT'STH ME AN' THE NAUGHTY GIRLS!" she slurred drunkenly. Way to go, parents. We need more Mormon chaperones.

After dinner, we drove back to our hotel. Well...almost. For some reason, the buses stopped about a mile away from where we were staying, and the parents and drivers made all 200 of us get out and walk through a cornfield unsupervised in the pitch black in a STRANGE FOREIGN COUNTRY. When we got back to the hotel, the parents were all in there laughing and smiling. Why did we have to walk back?

"It was all a joke!" another drunk parent grunted. Um...what? A joke? How is that funny?
Meh...whatever...mistakes were made. I still wanted more Mormons, though.

During our final night, Mrs. Hamre asked me to plan some sort of activity, basically to prevent anyone from getting into trouble. My friend Colin coordinated a complex boy band song and dance routine for us, along with three of our friends. Everyone crammed into the lobby and watched me make a fool of myself as I rocked out to "Bye Bye Bye" and "I Want It That Way."

As I embarrassed myself thoroughly, everybody finally seemed to forget about the frustration of the trip. Sure, it had been poorly organized. Sure, all of our performances were near-disasters where I had to physically wake my friends up to go onto the stage. Sure, that bus driver had an egregiously heinous and wretched voice. Nevertheless, in the end, we did experience three uniquevEuropean countries and cultures. We may have been hindered by one problem after another, but we survived.

Mistakes were made, but what can you really expect when you're one of 250 travelers in a group? After splitting everyone up once again into six different groups, spreading ourselves across the world, and flying back to Los Angeles, it seemed that everyone had made it back okay. Actually, I'm not positive about that one flute player...but...who really cares anymore?

As we were preparing to leave the baggage claim, Ben, a cellist, was looking slightly perturbed.

"Where's my cello?", he asked. We watched as one of the airport Mexicans carted over a cello case. He apologized, saying that the cello had been damaged after being RUN OVER by an airplane on the tarmac. The case seemed fine, but when Ben opened it, his $20,000 cello was indeed smashed into millions of pieces, absolutely destroyed beyond repair.

"It was a freak mistake," the worker said. Yeah...mistakes were made. It figures that the worst one would happen just before we were all home and safe. Curse you, Los Angeles Mexicans! Curse You!!!