Tel Aviv wipe out and other news.
I have been in Israel with my father and my sister for almost two weeks now. On Tuesday at 4pm I get on a flight back to Amsterdam, a fact that I am really happy about. I think I chose the right city because I miss it so much and I’ve only been away a short while.
My latest film obsession is Sucker Punch. I watched it a few days before I left on my trip and the soundtrack has been on repeat constantly. The soundtrack is great, the costumes make you want to be a badass fighter chick, and the story line is intriguing, it got a lot of bad reviews, but I am completely in love with it. Go see it if you have the chance.
My time here in Israel has helped my quest to lose some weight not at all. We eat bread all the time with dies of all kinds. Eggplant mostly. Yummy. Also there is this creme puff which consists of a marshmallowy substance coated in chocolate sitting on a graham cracker. Delicious.
My photography has been keeping me company. Indeed I missed my good friend Nikon. One of the funniest things to happen to me on the trip almost resulted in me losing my camera to the elements. I took it down to the beach and decided getting a photo of the waves breaking over the rocks would be superb. I set myself up for the shot, and waited for the perfect wave. I saw a big one coming and looked throughout the viewfinder. Right as I snapped the shot I realized the wave was a lot bigger than I had estimated. All I managed was a shout and to turn around and shield my camera with my body. The wave smashed over me and soaked every bit, even my camera. My friend from college, Patrick, who lives here for studies saw me scamper off the rocks, soaking wet and screeching about how I hoped my camera was okay. It survived, an amazing feat, and even got the picture of the wave as it demolished me. It’s quite a funny photo that I will post when I get back.
There are as many cats around as I remember there being. A sure sign I’m a tourist is that I’m the only one who stops to try and pet the sweet fuzzys.
The apartment we are staying in is two blocks from the beach, but very tiny. My father snores and my sister coughs so I have to chose the lesser of two evils when make my bed for the night. The past few nights I have been sleeping on the floor in the kitchen on a mattress. I took a photo, and that is another picture you shall see when I return home.
I will surely write more on a later date. Right now my mind is empty.
Darlings! So sorry for not updating. Indeed it took someone from couchsurfers to remind me I even had a blog. Bad me. Let’s get funky.
I no longer work on the pubcrawl. I love them dearly and it was a brilliant experience, but I wanted more stable work where I could hide indoors during the soon to be hideously cold winter weather. Everyone keeps warning me about how cold it’s going to be in a month or so but I’m remaining stupidly optimistic. What I mean by this is I can’t be arsed to go coat shopping. Come October I will be paying a ridiculous price for a mediocre coat because I waited so long but, there you have it. Procrastination is a bitch.
Tangent over; back on subject. I have a new job! I work at a bar in the absolute center of Amsterdam. It is a tourist trap for sure which means tips galore and lots of good times. I adore the girls I work with and it feels good to be behind a bar again. I have been neglecting my camera quite a bit lately, though, and for that I am sorry. I promise to take a stroll tomorrow with it for the weather promises to be good and a friend swore to wake me for a day in the park.
My blackberry mysteriously died one morning and I had a brief moment of panic in which my racing mind thought up many nasty things to say to my phone. Such as, “curse you, you unreliable piece of shitty machinery. I knew I should have gone droid!” but then it booted right back up and has been a dream since so I still love my little crackberry. Sometimes the red light starts blinking alerting me I have a notification. If it isn’t a text or a facebook message, suddenly I have a moment where I think, “this must be what my parents feel like when I start talking about new electronics… welcome to the dark ages, Jacquelyn.” I invited all my girls from work into a blackberry group on my phone and then was subjected to a novel length chat log entirely in Dutch. I gave up even trying to understand it after the second sentence.
My Dutch is awesome now. I’m a total pro. Just kidding.
I have a new place. Living now right at the end of Vondelpark. I love my room. It’s huge and sunny and so happy always. =) I still don’t own a bike, but I’m working on that!
So I’ve been observing the small differences and every once in a while one hits me that completely cracks me up. One such episode occurred earlier today and I have to share it with you all.
Supermarkets here are extremely different. Besides boasting the largest pudding aisle known to man (yeah I don’t know why, but these people love their Vla as it’s called here) it is also incredibly difficult to find things we consider normal staples. For example; Salsa. Where the hell is my salsa!? I ended up making quesadillas the other night with salsa I made from scratch. Everything I cook now is coming from scratch because of the strange change of ingredients.
I decided to make pancakes for my two Menno’s (I’ll explain that later) and as everyone knows, I make awesome pancakes with banana, chocolate chips and cottage cheese. After half hour of trying to figure out what cottage cheese was in Dutch so they knew what to buy, we encountered another problem.
Neither one knew what chocolate chips were. I began listing food that has chocolate chips in them; chocolate chip cookies! muffins! uh, pancakes?
I eventually showed them a photo on my ipad.
They still didn’t know it. The identical looks of polite confusion on their faces was so adorable and baffling to me. HOW CAN SOMEONE NOT KNOW CHOCOLATE CHIPS?! So, Holland bans the nasty nutella with trans fat and they don’t have one of the most common staples to any pastry.
GO HOLLAND!
Amsterdam
One day walking the streets and I’m already more burnt than from the day I lay in the sun at the lake in Germany. This city is amazing, to say the least, though it is quite dirty. I guess that is the price you pay for tourism.
My first day here, I convinced a fellow hostel guest to roam the city with me. We decided to hit up Vondel Park and have a picnic before calling it an early night. What followed was three hours of searching for a supermarket. It seemed as though the Dutch didn’t believe in grocery stores, just food vendors and coffee shops. (which there are plenty of by the way) after our visit to the park, we finally happened upon a supermarket where we bought bread for 0.50euro and cheese for 1euro. We took our feast to Dam Square and enjoyed the 9pm setting sun.that’s right, the sun doesn’t fully go down here until around 11pm. Talk about a mindfuck.
Luckily I was able to sleep well, only disturbed once when the serial killer in the bunk beneath me began to snore and woke me up.
The following few days have been intense. I can’t remember a time in my life when I was so exhausted. A part of me wants to surrender and go back to a more familiar city. That part is small, however, and is completely run by my exhaustion. Twice now I have participated in the pubcrawl and both times it was great fun. Like Panama, the party nights are Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
The strangest thing about Amsterdam is possibly the most obvious. The weed. Here, you can buy weed over the counter at almost any place you walk into. People roam the streets high and laughing. Always, I’d heard about friends getting lost while under the influence. I thought I was above that until last night found me and a fellow couch surfer in a part of the city we didn’t recognize, clutching pastries (a white chocolate waffle for her and a chocolate muffin for me) and trying to determine if going left or right would lead us to our destination. In the end, a man with a samsung galaxy tablet saved us by locating the street we needed. If you think this city is confusing, you don’t know the half of it.
Today, there has been a steady downpour and though I was supposed to go out and hand my resume to bars hunting, I have been forced to put a halt on that. The registration office told me they didn’t have another appointment until two weeks from now. I need to find the tax office and try and get a temporary working permit, but my cell phone keeps telling me things in Dutch that I suspect have something to do with a low balance. My cell phone, a hideous pink orb from the early 2000s, beeps in the most annoying fashion at every alert.
Well guys, it’s time for this trip to get a little funky.
Bright and early tomorrow I will be on a train to…
AMSTERDAM (crowd hoots and hollers in excitement)
Settle down people… So I arrive and head to my first hostel right smack in the red light district “the white tulip hostel” then I will be couchcurfing for a few nights before heading to my next hostel “Aivengo hostel”.
If all goes well, I will start work the following week. Apparently Amsterdam is very big on alternative housing. Here, you can rent an apartment for an undetermined amount of time. How? Real estate companies let people live in the apartments while they are empty and looking for long term tenants. Yes, this means if you live in a smashing apartment in the center of the city you will probably find yourself out on the hunt for a new place in under a month, but some of these places stay vacant for years!
Also, there are tons of restaurants and bars that give discounts to couchsurfers. Which means, not only do you get to hang with the cool people, you can eat with them too! Everyone loves a 3euro vegan meal…
So, goodbye Germany. You have been lovely and I will miss you, but don’t think I won’t visit. I’ll be back like the terminator!
My interview kit.
Let’s make this blog more fun!
Aka; here’s a video to laugh at.
Cheers!
So right about now, as I approach my third week in Freiburg (goodness, has it been so long?) I have decided to share some of my travel plans and methods. I will be providing you all future travelers with some excellent links that have helped me greatly.
-I mentioned Eurolines to everyone who reads this blog and I hope I made clear how excellent of a service it really is.
-I found, through a German website a link to what I think would be a fabulous adventure. I hope to give it a try, and if not, have someone else try it for me. It seems like such fun! Basically you book a blind flight for 30euros and once you receive your confirmation, it tells you where you are going! Totally fabulous.
https://www.germanwings.com/skysales/BlindBooking.aspx?culture=en-GB
-This website helps me to see all possible connections of trains I can take to any given destination. It outlines it clearly and also finds the best prices!
http://www.raileurope.co.uk/default.aspx?tabid=101#divBasketTotalLink
-Make sure to change the language to English when you navigate this site. You won’t be sorry. It, much like the site above, is a fare finder. The difference being it found me trains that were near impossible to find. There are tons of trains that try to charge you an arm and a leg for travel and unfortunately those are usually the easiest to find.
http://jizdnirady.idnes.cz/vlakyautobusymhdvse/spojeni/
-If you feel like traveling leisurely and stopping to work in the cities, then check this site out for sure. It allows bed and breakfasts, hostels, organic farms, and even just ordinary people to post when they are searching for workers. You are guaranteed a place to sleep (usually some sort of food too) and you work anywhere from 2-5 hours a day on the days you have to. There’s some awesome opportunities on it.
-Another way to travel is to do it for free! Yep, check out this next site which lets you sleep on someone’s couch or spare bedroom in a foreign city. A lot of the people on the site are super friendly and welcoming; eager to show you around their city. Totally worth signing up if you want a different traveling experience.
-The last hint I’m dropping for now is a site that allows people to put a room in their house up for rent for a few nights. It is like a paid version of couchsurfing but you still get the intimate city experience because your guide is your host.
http://www.airbnb.com/?af=73699&c=Airbnb&gclid=CIWzjviZ_qgCFYm-zAodFGc3Sw
Happy hunting!
I arrived at Kaya’s at ten in the morning only to find out she had been emailing everyone trying to figure out if I was alive. Apparently I was supposed to tell her what time I was arriving to the train station instead of just showing up at her door. Oops.
Not ten minutes later, she informed me that we would soon be leaving on a bike ride. A bit far, she said, but nothing too bad and if I really didn’t want to go, I didn’t have to. Naturally I was eager to spend time with her so I readily agreed and after a much needed shower we were off to her friend’s house where the group was meeting.
All her friends were super nice and welcoming. We checked out the new artsy things they had done in the apartment, then looked at a map. I thought Liam said 13km and I had a mini spazz attack. That was farther than I had ever gone on a bike, and I hadn’t been on one since around junior year of high school. Then I heard him mutter, “not 13km…30km!” I was in absolute shock.
We set off at a relaxed pace, which I was thankful for. We stopped to buy food and look at a flea market and also to see a little zoo. The ride was mostly flat except for a few overpasses that of course seemed to grow in size the further on we plodded. 20km in and I was shocked that I wasn’t burnt from the sun yet and that even though I was sweating, it was only a little bit. We took a small break and I noticed that no one else was even the slightest bit damp. “What are you, some sort of alien freaks of nature?!” Kaya responded, through laughter, that no one had ever called her that before. Especially for not sweating.
It was all good, though, because later I got teased for taking too many showers. Apparently once a day is too much. The lake, once we found it finally, was beautiful and I took a nap which Dominique (a guy) decided would make for a lovely unappealing photo. They all took a dip in the ice cold water and after we lunched, three of us took the train back while the rest biked.
Dominique and I prepared a dinner of salad and falafel for everyone. He forgot the salt in them, and everyone proceeded to tease him for hours. It has even now become somewhat of an inside joke.
