Part 3: Muiderslot and Madurodam
In this episode, we went to Amsterdam some more, to a nature reserve, to Marken Island, and to Texel Island.
Please note this is a coffeeshop, not a café. What’s the difference, you may ask? You get coffee at a café. At a coffeeshop you get weed. (This was not something either of us knew back then, but we weren’t interested in coffee either so we didn’t go in lol I just took the picture for the shop name)
In this episode, I went to the windmill museum Zaanse Schans, my First Ever Real Castle, Muiderslot, and to the tiniest Dutch city, Madurodam.
This is a boardgame called Lionheart and it’s basically Warhammer Lite crossed with chess.
Our next trip was to the Zaanse Schans, a windmill museum on the Zaanse river, the heart of the wind-powered industrial area in days gone by. There are eight restored windmills here, and a number of village buildings
According to my salvaged fb albums, we went to Vienna next?? I thought it was later in the trip, but I don’t remember the order of anything specific. My friend Leslie had been at a summer piano camp in Salzburg, so we got a really good deal on train tickets to Salzburg through the Treinreiswinkel (which no longer exists and it’s really sad because they were super awesome), and then I found out that I had miscommunicated and she was actually in Vienna. So Tharash went and got train tickets for Vienna which was twice as expensive (being last-minute) and I felt guilty about it for years (that was a good chunk of change for us poor uni students, and he could have put that towards a new PC at some point). He, of course, forgot about it until I mentioned starting to get over it a few years ago. All in the past now.
Most of the pictures here are from Tharash, a turnabout from the usual picture ratio.
My first time seeing the Alps. We had taken a sleeping car on the way down and in second class that meant sleeping in a room for 6 people. I think there were at least four, including us. It felt a little weird.
Back in 2012, I went on my first solo international trip to visit my friend in his home country of the Netherlands. That was also back when I was on facebonk, so naturally I uploaded all my pictures there. I didn’t think of writing a blog post about it.
But I’ve quit faceborg, and the details of this trip really should be here along with all my other trips, so here we go. This having happened an entire decade ago, things are a bit hazy, especially the order that they happened in. Also my old camera was having a few issues, so if you see any weird glitchy things happening in a photo, it’s the camera’s fault. I didn’t take as many pictures as I would now, because I only had a limited memory card. At least I didn’t have disposable film cameras, can you imagine!? Only having 24 (or whatever) pictures before the camera’s full?
I went for 4 weeks in August of 2012. Which is a bit excessive, especially considering it was in the middle of my Master’s degree, but 1) I’d never been to Europe before, and 2) I wanted to spend a lot of time with my cool relatively-new friend. Continue reading
Photo by MH
Photo by MH
Photo by MH
We got on an express bus to connect with the train that went to our final ‘away’ destination, but it stopped just outside of town because of a malfunction? It was pretty weird, especially with how the bus driver chose to deal with it – by pulling into a gas station and yelling at other bus drivers, trying to get their attention so they would… stop and help him? somehow? Anyway, eventually he got back on with someone else who just made him drive the rest of the way, idk. Then we took a tiny little train (almost a glorified tram rather than a train) that ended in the village of Neuffen. You look up, and you see the castle. Continue reading
Tübingen – Schloss Lichtenstein
We had to get up early this day, as we were going quite a long way. You see, the Rhine and the Danube actually begin in sort of the same area, an area that has some really amazing limestone formations. It was pretty cold that morning, especially while we were waiting on the platform at Sigmaringen to take the final train on to the tiny train stop at Fridingen. (I know there was a heat-wave on in southern Europe, but it most definitely was not anywhere we were; temperatures rarely got over 25 Celcius, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if the temperature that morning was closer to 15-18 where we were.) We glimpsed Sigmaringen Castle on our way by, but it hadn’t quite made our list of “top castles to see” so we didn’t mind that we weren’t seeing more of it. Continue reading
Today was pretty exciting, we were going to Lichtenstein Castle! Which is kind of like Neuschwanstein lite. We decided to go to this one because, being smaller and less famous, it would probably have fewer tourists. We were probably right?
First we had to take some buses. The train was out to the first town we had to connect at, so they were running a train-replacement bus. The connecting bus parked in a weird spot so it left without us, but we got another one. It runs down these rather narrow valleys with little towns, and the castle is prominent above the town to stop at. We were walking up, there’s a hiking trail, the beginning of which is a little difficult to find but once you’re on it there aren’t a hundred different routes to choose from. There was an option to go down another trail to see a spring or something, but we decided not to – it would have increased the amount of uphill walking we’d have to do after, and taken more time that we wanted to spend at the castle. So we continued upwards. The trail became extremely narrow, just a ledge on the side of a very steep hill, which was not great for my increasing paranoia about falling off. I don’t have great balance, and I think about earthquakes a lot, especially apparently while I’m on the side of a steep hill. Continue reading
Okay so the last post was excessively long and I’m going back to Europe in 10 hours so let’s upload some blogs without pictures just so I don’t give myself another two weeks to forget what happened in the summer. I’ll add pictures when I get back, and will probably edit the text more too. EDIT: pictures added!
Little villages in the hollows
The next destination on our list was Tübingen. The train station was not that impressive upon debarking our train, but the brand new not-even-finished bus loop outside sure was! It appeared to have as many platforms as letters in the alphabet. In fact, Tharash suggested it had too many platforms/buses, given how difficult it was to figure out which was the correct bus. The good news if you were anywhere else in the city was that like 98% of all transit passes through the bus/train hub by the Neckar River (which is a much smaller river here than in Heidelberg). But the bus station was really aesthetically pleasing, and they have little symbols to help you identify which bus you want, and scrolling boards saying how long until the next bus at every platform. I was also shocked when we actually got on the bus, because it had a ticket machine on the bus. Now that’s living in the future. (As of this writing, my hometown has FINALLY FOR THE LOVE OF FRIES rolled out a contactless payment system for fares, so my hometown is thinking about joining the 21st century as far as public transit is concerned. Now to turn one of those parking lots downtown into a proper bus station, and we might get somewhere.) Continue reading
Technically this starts in Trier but I figured Trier’s post was long enough already without shoving Koblenz into it as well. (edit: and this still has 250 pictures in it, I think I’m going to break up Tübingen even more than I planned T_T) I carried out my resolution to eat all the tasty things at the breakfast buffet this morning, and I had a croissant with Nutella as part of that omnomnom. Then we got on an earlier train than originally planned, and travelled back northeast to Koblenz. There we went for a walk, putting our stuff in a train station locker again, navigating our way around the confusing, loud, in-the-way car infrastructure in order to get to the old part of town and specifically the point at which the Mosel meets the Rhine, where there is a huge statue. We caught a train back from the old town area to the Hauptbahnhof where we had left our stuff (at the old town station there’s no ticket gates even, you just walk onto the platform, it’s amazing), and had a little bit of a snack, although the lady at the bakery misheard me and got Tharash a cappuccino instead of a tea. Oh well. Off to Heidelberg! Continue reading
Happy holidays! And spoiler alert for my FFXIV fanfic! Nero tol Scaeva (right) is a smug, arrogant, ambitious, brilliant magnificent b*stard, hells-bent on becoming the greatest engineer the world has ever seen (frustrated by being seemingly effortlessly thwarted at every turn by his rival since college). Vivienne Urselmert (left) is a cold, angry, stubborn, emotionally-constipated antihero who suffers grievous hardships in silence and slaughters monsters without mercy. Together, they are a match made in… something, considering he started out as a villain and she was very much trying to kill him at the time. After she blew up his boss’s base, he had nowhere to go and began wandering aimlessly, looking for advanced ancient technology to tinker with, occasionally ping-ponging off of the heroes and usually sort of helping them. He woos her sarcastically and she snaps back defensively, until those rare moments when one or another of them drops their walls (shockingly, often Nero first) and does or says something sincerely genuine. Apologies if it still doesn’t make sense to you, but it makes me laugh so I drew it. Continue reading