That beer is the size of your head

We actually got up early today, and so did the rest of the family; the house was a flurry of activity.
We were sent off with hugs, promises of future hosting, and a big bag of breakfast pastries. Finn got us onto the right bus using his entire family's transit passes, then sat and fussed about not getting to the station in time. We raced off and ran for Platform 1 at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof... to find that it hadn't arrived yet.
When it did, we sat down in comfy seats, waved to Finn as he chased the train down the platform, and had just enough time to make another American friend before a Korean family chased us out of their reserved seats. We moved-- and it happened again. I'd lost faith in the reservation system after the Great Amsterdam Train Debacle and these trains hadn't required them, so we ended up camping on the floor again until Leipzig. The rest of the ride was nothing special and we arrived in Nuremberg a little after 4.
Kim was waiting and took us out to her car (first car ride in Europe!), where we miraculously loaded our backpacks into her tiny sedan trunk and drove to another parking lot. And then, sightseeing.

Nuremberg is very brown.
Apart from a few oxidized copper roofs (once brown), every building is some shade of khaki, chocolate, fawn, chestnut, mustard, rust, or just plain brown.

We wandered into an old Gothic church, which was not nearly as old as it looked-- it had been destroyed during the second world war but completely reconstructed from copies and measurements. Lots of northern European-style icons and pained-looking saints in a dark and dusty cathedral.
Then we wandered out into the main square which was completely full of tents and craft shops and the occasional pen of sheep.
It was quite hot out, warmer than any other city we've visited so far. So of course the second sightseeing destination featured a lot of walking uphill, to the old castle complex which I'd never heard of before. It was built on a rock outcropping and the way up is VERY steep. But it does have the best view of Nuremberg.
We came back down, spun the ring at the golden fountain that guarantees you'll come back to Nuremberg, poked around the commercial district for German chocolate, and then got slushes at the American Restaurant That Shall Not Be Named.

Noting the lack of public toilets all over Europe, we ducked into a department store for their bathroom and got our first look at "modern" Bavarian festival wear. Apparently the national costume of dirndls and lederhosen has made a comeback in the last five years (presumably as pride in national heritage is decriminalizing with a new generation). The lederhosen are beautifully embroidered, though they look very warm to wear, and the dirndls are delightfully tawdry and over-color-coordinated. The little aprons are purely decorative, the outfits come in every color and pattern combination imaginable, and the tiny peasant blouses underneath are actually half shirts and cropped above the stomach. You can get nicer ones at specializing stores, Kim told us, but they're quite expensive.

From there, we wandered back to the car, from which commenced an exhilerating introduction to the Autobahn: a half hour of white-knuckled handhold gripping as we rocketed down the freeway, covered by deceivingly nonchalant chatter with our speed demon driver. It was a little fun; it was also mostly alarming. 180 km/h is the fastest I've ever been in a motor vehicle-- how are there no Germans in NASCAR?
We dropped off at Vim's workplace first to meet him, a collections of warehouses and garages that house enormous, movie-villain-esque, tree-moving machines. Humongous scoopers and diggers, big enough to move a redwood. (Their company moves trees.)
He is tall and Dutch and speaks great Englsh (with a fondness for the word "stupid"). After we smiled and shook hands, Kim loaded up again and we arrived at Vim's lovely family house 3 minutes later, and were shown our accommodations.

It's a camper.

The bathroom isn't hooked up but we are free to come in and use theirs, and there's a double bed plus a couch/ lounge area for Aaron.
We were also graciously offered the use of their pool by Wim's mother. Andie and Aaron accepted and swam with Kim, while I just stuck my legs in and took pictures of the chickens running around us.

Later, we went to their little village beer festival, if village is the right name; Kim used another term, because people don't like the teensy-unimportant connotation of "village", even if that's how big it is.
It was a complete kitschy carnival, with rides and food stands and booths, but not swarming in children-- and everyone fully committed to getting drunk. Everything was very authentically Bavarian, with every other person in either lederhosen or dirndls; my doner kebab even had sauerkraut in it. (It's not supposed to-- it's Turkish.)

Kim and Wim dressed up, too. (Wim's participation came after some amount of begging by Kim, though he's too tall to wear the accompanying suspenders and he kept called the matching shoes "stupid"; Kim's dress set was brown and blue and very pretty. She told us that the apron tying is a code: knot it on your left hip if you're single, the right if you're taken, and in the back if you're widowed.
We were given enormous tankards of beer (or Radler, a lemonade shandy) and expected to finish them. The beer tent has live music on a stage at one end, which enthusiastically played German songs, American karaoke numbers, and the sporadic Bavarian drinking song, which everyone else seemed to know by heart.
The front was full of younger youth all standing on their picnic table benches and singing along-- Kim said they were 15-year-olds and had a curfew, so they had to party early.

We ate, walked around, the boys played shooting games, we declined the spinning whirly thing, and then stood around at the bar and had another drink: the "girly" one called a spritz, sparkling wine mixed with bitters. (Tastes more like orange Fanta with vodka in it.)
Drinks downed, we went back to the tent with a few more Kim's friends and were swept up into a precariously-balancing mosh pit that was now standing on the picnic benches. Andie and I knew most of the English pop songs, we smiled and clapped through the rest, and Aaron went to go hang out with some friends Wim introduced him to. We met up later, when everyone else decided to have white wine (Andie and I were trying to turn down things at this point) and discovered that he was quite popular. People had been buying him more drinks for the last hour and he'd been obliviously accepting them and teling stories.
I passed him my water bottle, but I think the damage is done. Tomorrow will be interesting.

When it became clear that we three were exhausted and begging off more drinks because our early train tomorrow, Wim called their designated driver to come take us home.
We showered and fell into bed, but not before I accidentally broke their sink tap. It's the strangest thing I've ever tried to turn on.

Schwan lake

We were out of ideas for what to do today, but decided on "the lake" over brunch. (I still don't know the name of it.)

We stopped at the Berlin Hbf to get our train tickets settled, since I'd only booked them through Berlin; Andie wanted a human to help us with the rest. We stood in a line for a half hour, then created another half hour delay ourselves as we subjected the poor, patient man at the help desk to our travel whims. We knew what days we wanted to go and where, but he had to find the schedules and click through every reservation individually-- and then I got confused about the plan between my 5-day ticket and Andie and Aaron's 6-day, and we had to shuffle things again. (I thanked him for his patience during one computer wait, and he answered that this would be a bad job for someone who wasn't.)
So now, we have reservations (required) for each train throughout Italy, the correct number of Eurail Flexipass days in which to use them, and extra tickets for one short Italian leg (me) and a sleeper train back to Paris (Andie and Aaron). It's done.

Finn was at the end of his patience with us after this hour of scheduling drama but we still needed lunch supplies, so he ushered us to the train station supermarket for food (since the train station is practically a mall). We loaded up a few bags of picnic fare, then took another hour of multiple trains, buses, and walking to arrive at a large park that surrounded a lake. Finn wanted a paddleboat rental, so we sprung for one, and then pushed off. Out on the lake for a picnic.

We had bread and pretzels and yogurt (WITH spoons, Finn remembered plastic spoons) and paprika-flavored chips (they taste like barbeque, but less sweet) and cookies and gummies and sodas, plus Finn's personal Leberkase supplies and Aaron had an enormous chunk of cheese. Finn also brought a beer, but no bottle opener, which led to an experimental 10 minutes of trying to whack the cap off against various boat surfaces. The boys sat in the back of the four-seater paddleboat actually paddling, while Andie's and my seats didn't have pedals... so we had a lovely time. We just sat and ate.

We got all the way out to the center of one arm of the lake and then drifted closer to shore while eating. We finally moved when we got close to a family of swans: two adults and about 5 cygnets. The boat turned and we left them alone-- or thought we had, before one adult separated and started swimming after the boat.
The boys paddled a little harder. The swan did, too.
We didn't know what to do about this, except try to get away from it; swans are big birds that can pack quite a punch, and though we weren't sure how we'd made it angry, everyone was silently remembering that tv show "When [insert animals] Attack". The evil swan chased the boat for 5 minutes solid, gaining the whole time as Finn and Aaron became increasingly more frantic and paddled faster-- sitting in the back of the boat, they'd be the first targets. Amid their hilariously panicked calls to either abandon ship or fight it off with a pocket knife (and they were funny, Andie and I couldn't stop laughing), I tossed a piece of pretzel over the side. The swan immediately stopped and went for the bread.
It had been trained to follow tourists until they fed it. The attack subsided.

We (read: Aaron and Finn) ended up paddling around the stretch of the river for a full two hours, then booking it back to the dock when we realized time was almost up before we'd have to pay for the three hour mark. We got a little turned around coming home (a few false starts and one wrong bus) and met Rolf and Rena at an Indian restaurant around 8. It took forever to get our food, which turned out to all things Andie recognized and gave her approval for-- I'm told it was good. Then we went over to an ice cream shop across the street which displayed pictures of the biggest, most decadent and exotic sundaes I've ever seen. We stuck with small cones.
After thanking the parents for dinner, w split off to go to another supermarket for marshmallows and last-minute chocolate gifts; then came home, lay around for a while, and made rice krispie treats. We've finished all of our laundry, now to fold and pack it away in the morning-- when we leave.

The circuit

In some strange twist, I have become our early riser.
Today, it was 10:00. (That's a new record.)

We went biking again today, with more confidence and poise than Tuesday's adventure. Lovis is packing today to leave early tomorrow morning, so Jack and Liam managed to find Finn's house on rented bikes and tag along with us for most of the day.
(And by "day", I mean after 1 PM. That's when we always seem to leave; today we waved off Rena and Anne who went to go get Anne's wisdom teeth out in the morning, and were still there when they got back.)
We rode to some large government buildings/ memorials/ churches, mostly to photograph them, because Finn didn't really know anything about them. He could find just about everything, almost like he was going off of a list, but there was no tour guide spiel.
(We threatened to fire him as a guide. He threatened not to take us back home.)
So, lots of biking, lots of pictures, all day long. Not much else to tell.

When we wound up our sightseeing, he took us by a supermarket for food and then out to the old East Berlin airport. The airspace is now public, with acres and acres of flat land and runways. We saw kites, kitesurfers, rollerbladers, runners, countless bikers, and the occasional nudist hiding in the tall grass. (No, seriously.) I don't think I've ever seen such a huge horizon of public park space; between the fields and our bikes, Andie said she felt like we were in one of those farm-kid-makes-it-big movies, like October Sky-- maybe we live in Iowa and work at a diner called the Chuckle Hut.

We finally found some trees without people under them (clothed or otherwise) and shared a picnic lunch. When people got bored, they took turns riding Finn's racing bike and flinging around a frisbee with various degrees of skill. Jack and Liam went off to their own evening plans and we went home ourselves.

The first hour of any return is usually eaten by technology. In the time you would normally sit and rest for a while, we each find an electronic device and vegetate. We only move later, when someone finally looks up and asks what we're doing for dinner-- or in this case, that they feel like cookies. Andie decided that we should make cookies, and inspired everyone to walk down to the supermarket to find premade cookie dough (which we all sort of knew was a fruitless endeavor, but it was something to do). Instead, we found a large and interesting selection of ice cream, and we left with Magnum bars to eat on the walk home (and raspberry bars for Anne and her swollen face). Cookies abandoned, we decided to watch a movie. Warm Bodies has its moments, but perhaps less of the intended effect when you watch it with all the twitches and sluggishness of streaming online.

We went to bed earlier than we have all week, only slightly after midnight. Maybe this will start retraining us back into a normal circadian rhythm.

Antiquities

We left late again because we woke up late, and Andie and I refused to leave unless Aaron took a shower.

We also had to wait another half hour because Finn's friend Milan, was going to join us-- a fellow foreign exchange kid from his same year at Norcross. We took the train out to the Egyptian museum, after a few false starts (a large museum complex = lots of chances for wrong museums/entrances).

I always forget that it was Europeans that first started the Egyptian excavations (and subsequent artifact abuse from their seeming expendability, like using ground mummy as a medicinal). The Neues Museum left me awed and annoyed, by turns.

I was bugged by the slightly condescending feel of the exhibit halls, which also felt unfinished and out of order. European archaeology has more of a base in history under the umbrella of "antiquities", and I felt a lot of the explanations were lacking in people details; it's more of a things-to-put-on-a-shelf heritage rather than in-depth studies of the artifacts themselves. (Though to be fair, the contexts in which most of them were removed was well before "archaeology" was ever codified, and without solid excavation notes or consistent methodology, their details are probably tapped out.) The Egyptian artifacts are grouped thematically, not by period, which also makes me scatterbrained trying to put together items that were dynasties apart.

I also don't think the Amarna Period deserved its own exhibit upstairs. I mean, you kind of have to build something around the Nefertiti bust, which resides here-- it's an absolutely spectacular piece-- but it gives a disproportionate amount of attention to a mere 28 year era, among the 3200 that ancient Egypt survived. Egyptian culture, particularly that surrounding the pharaoh, tried to appear monolithic and unchanging for the sake of ruling legitimacy, but that wasn't the case overall. Things did change-- and I saw no mention at all of the intermediate periods, or even an acknowledgment of Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms. Add to this the neutral-to-complimentary wording in a hall dedicated to Heinrich Schliemann and his butchering work on Troy, and I was slightly put out.
(Schliemann's Trojan excavations-- though that may be too generous a term-- are one of archaeology's greatest embarrassments, since he tore through countless valuable layers of the city to reach the bottom, and then misidentified most of them. He did dig it out, but now his finds are all suspect because he didn't use the correct methodology, and those parts of the site are spoiled for future study.)

But there are so MANY artifacts, and such large and grand pieces that the inconsistencies are all forgiven. (Well... mostly.) This museum has a few Roman and German history halls, and started with a Cypriot collection. But everything else on three floors is Egyptian, including the bust of Nefertiti (no photography allowed).
In short, I don't think it's curated well, but the collection is VERY impressive.

I lollygagged through most of the museum and completely lost the other kids, but I really shot myself in the foot when I wandered out an exit and couldn't get back in or signal the group where I'd gone. They eventually figured it out and came outside, but not before we were all starved and running for the first food stand we saw. (Döner kebab, loaded up with vegetables and tzatziki in huge, toasted pita pockets.)

Finn insisted on taking us to Alexanderplatz, another Berlin mall, just to prove that German malls did get bigger than the tiny underground one we were at yesterday. (He made sure we knew this, he said it three times.) We found our other tour group half-- the Brits and friend-- outside the mall and walked over to the Berlin Wall Memorial together.
The memorial is a section of the removed wall with accompanying excavation sections, informational plaques, and mini-exhibit effect as you walk along where the wall used to be. It focuses mostly on the building period and the escapes that were staged from the East to the West during that time and later through tunnels. You can tell which is the East; all of the remaining houses that were close to the wall had their windows bricked up on that side, since jumping from them had been a popular escape tactic.

Everyone was tired out after walking and couldn't decide what to do next, so we split up. Finn and Milan and us three headed off to the East Gallery, which is the artist-decorated sections of remaining wall. It's a huge, graffitied expanse of colors and styles (pictures to come), where every artist gets a section about the size of a billboard. When we walked around the back, that side is decorated with photos of other famous dividing walls: Gaza, the Korean DMZ, Israel, and others.

We went home after that, but would not admit defeat to an early bedtime, so we played German board games for a few hours after that; Finn has this one that's a version of Trouble, but the playing piece colors are all hidden (all black, as witch characters). It makes for a very mixed-up, aggravating, ill-thought-out drinking game.
"This is why we burn witches." -- Finn
Aaron and Milan and Finn then left to hang out at a friend's house and we went to bed.

Berlin by bike

We accidentally slept in until 10:30 today. This has been a problem the whole trip thus far; it gets light so early that I can't gauge the time at all. 6 AM outside looks like 9, which looks like 11.
So we struggled out of bed and Finn ran to the neighborhood bakery for a huge selection of pastries that we couldn't possibly finish. Not that we weren't encouraged to try, since Finn kept pushing the donuts and his mother kept handing us cherries and peanut butter. Sightseeing was also discussed: apparently we were going to bike Berlin today. I helped clean up the kitchen and went to change into biking-appropriate clothes.

We left the house much later than planned because we had to assign and adjust the bikes; Finn's parents and sister graciously planned for us to borrow theirs, so seats had to be lowered and tires checked, and a demonstration was required of me to prove I wouldn't tumble off.
Then we went. And it was terrifying.

Berlin has a stunning array of accessible bike lanes and paths, and bicycles are at the top of the traffic food chain; both cars and pedestrians actively try to get out of their way. You can go for surprisingly long distances at high speeds without having to dodge a single thing or stop... which is extremely disconcerting, to those of us who a) have been taught a fear of getting close to multi-ton cars and b) have no idea what they're doing on a bicycle. The last time I rode a bike was a good eight years ago, with no practice since. The experience reminded me most of kayaking lessons, where most of your forward momentum is provided by sheer panic. Finn led, and led quickly; Andie and I had to chase the boys the whole way, with occasional stops for us to catch up with them.
I had a tough time.

5 minutes in: "Are we anywhere close?"
15 minutes: "I'm bleeding."
25 minutes: "You're sure this isn't part of the Tour de France?"
Arrival: "...And how long until we need to get back on these things?"

Anxiety aside, I didn't fall off and I didn't run into anything (minus one close encounter with a tree), but I cut my leg on a pedal and I don't balance well. The other cyclists whizz around you in the bike lane, confident in their road superiority--which doesn't help if you're already wobbly. Those poor passersby pedestrians never knew how close they came to being collision targets this morning.
For a better illustration of the Carrie-bike relationship, I direct you here.

We were racing to get to the Reichstag, the parliament house, because they book visiting hours by reservation. We arrived at 12:45 for a 12:30 appointment, but somehow still got in. After a security check and metal detector scan, you're let into the building and elevators up to the upper dome. It's a giant glass structure striped by walking ramps up to the top level, all narrated by a very dry audioguide who has no idea what direction you're looking as it tries to tell you about the skyline features of Berlin.
The more interesting story is that the observation dome sits directly over the parliament chamber and is ingeniously engineered with alternative energy devices. A large mirrored funnel in the center reflects light into the chamber, the open top circulates the warm stale air out, and there's a rain-catching well under the opening that channels rainwater to heat or cool the building. The huge shade shape is... well, a sunshade, cutting the cooling costs of the building.
We poked around and admired the view from the roof of the Reichstag and compared notes about the tour; Andie was impressed with the language used, calling the Nazi regime the "National Socialist reign of tyranny" and the Holocaust Memorial in honor of the "murdered Jews". Strong, condemning terms.

Finn took pity on me when we left and just walked the bikes over the Brandenburg Gate, which is just around the corner. We took pictures and chatted with three recently acquired members of our group: two British boys and a girl, a friend of Finn's. As usual, I didn't catch names. (I did later: it's Lovis, with friends from her foreign exchange trip in England, Jack and Liam.)
From there, we went to the Holocaust Memorial. It's an entire city block of concrete stelae, just huge rectangles set up in a perfect grid that create a blind-corner, labyrinth effect among the tallest ones. Each square inch of concrete is supposed to represent so many deaths.
We appreciated the composition for a while, then wandered in. I started an extremely irreverent but geographically genius game of tag, with everyone running around corners into each other, lying in wait, or accindentally jumping out at perfect strangers. (At least we weren't the tourists climbing on the columns.)

When everyone got tired and wandered out, Finn took us to the nearest mall for lunch (~3 PM). He and Andie got Leberkäse, which are large ham loaf sandwiches, very authentically German with a small bun and lots of brown mustard. I was too hungry and jumped for the imitation Chinese place that smelled the best. (It didn't taste that way.) We walked around the mall and ran into another of Finn's friends (a lovely, dark, slim girl, though I never caught her name), and then all decided to go out to the park.

The park in question is the Tiergarten, the second-largest park in Berlin. It's mostly trees and bike paths, interspersed with open fields, fountains, ponds, and memorials. Finn, Andie, and I biked slightly ahead and somehow managed to completely lose Aaron and the rest; we stopped at a pond just past the German composers memorial and waited, laying out and talking while Finn tried calling them. They never found us. Instead, we were summoned to the next planned sightseeing stop: the Siegessäule, the Berlin Victory Column.

This thing is a memorial to the Franco-Prussian War, or so we gathered from talking to several Germans who really had no idea about it. There are bronze bas reliefs all the way around the pedestal (some of them still damaged from WWII shelling), a small museum in the bottom level (that runs out of things to tell you and starts in on other large world monuments), mosiacs in the middle terrace, and enough stairs to put a lighthouse to shame. They spiral up and up, with a small landing every few flights that taunts you with a single chair. The top is heavily fenced in and extends barely three feet out, so everyone was climbing over each other to rotate around and get photos of Berlin from every possible angle.

We walked back down, parted from the group, and Finn led us back to his house at a somewhat slower, if no less wobbly, pace.
He said we were going to a friend's house for a barbeque, so we stopped in at supermarket for raw meat (apparently that was the polite-guest thing to do). We then showed up at a complete stranger's apartment (Finn had never actually been there, either) and were ushered through to a decent-sized patio with a table set and small grill-- and next to no light. Someone got out tea lights later, but we spent most of the evening squinting at our plates. The brother of the apartment owner was visiting and had worked as a chef for a few years, so the food was excellent. We mostly sat at our end of the table and tried to make small talk until Lovis and the Brits showed up; then we had a whole English-speaking side of the table, which Aaron took to with a will. The night eventually devolved into the Germans talking among themselves and Aaron and the boys showing each other things on their phones. I was so tired. We finally left after 1 AM, right as I was on verge of throwing plates at anyone who would've asked us to stay longer, and went straight to bed.

Guten tag, böser zug

We left for the Sloterdijk (slow-ter-dayk, maybe?) station bright and early, which gave us a full 45 minutes at the platform to sit and do nothing. The train arrived at the exact time specified online, which allows for about 4 minutes to load everyone before it takes off again. You have to be ready.

We got on and were quite gratified about its improvement over the Megabus; not only did the seats recline, but there was legroom, tray tables, and luggage racks to spare. We had a nice ride-- tickets checked, everything fine. The trouble started when I looked at our integrated Eurail schedule and discovered that we needed the passes for the next leg, starting at Bad Bentheim... and which hadn't been activated. You need someone official-looking to stamp them and put in the start/ end travel dates. The usher on the train said we had to do it at a ticket office for free or on the train itself for €50. The ticket window it was.
We pulled into Bad Bentheim already backpacked up, and then jogged/ bounced/ jazz-ran for the ticket window inside. We threw them at the surprised window person, who stamped them all in 3 minutes flat for us to jog back... while the train sat and waited patiently for another 15 minutes afterward.

The next interruption came when were told that there was a delay in the schedule due to a slow train in front of us, and we would be 20 minutes late. The conductor did apologize, but everyone got a little anxious and started looking at their itineraries. We ended up missing our connection (which we had reserved seats on) at Hanover by 15 minutes-- they couldn't hold it for us. German timeliness would not allow it.
We had to wait another 45 for the next train to Berlin, which everyone and their mother tried to get on, resulting in another delay while they politely asked people to get off the overcrowded train and wait for the next one. (We were having none of it, with people to meet and dinner reservations-- but that's what the rest of the Amsterdam backpackers were probably thinking, too.) It eventually left, and we crouched and sat and camped out on our claimed section of floor all the way to Berlin. Four hours.

So, the math:
     20 minute delay to Hanover
     45 waiting for the next Berlin connection
+ ~30 expectantly looking at other people to get off our train
3 tired backpackers with bruised coccyges arriving at 6:00 instead of 4:12 and very happy to be there.

Finn was there, smiley as always, and he herded us down the escalators and out to the nearest tram. We bumped our way on, backpacks preceding us, and spent the ride talking like the loud Americans we'd been trying to avoid looking like the whole week previous. We didn't care.
We followed Finn to his house, up stairs, and to his family's apartment. It's small in the common spaces but with large bedrooms, so the three of us fit well into Finn's room; we would be staying there, and Finn would camp out in the living room. There are plants everywhere and little balconies to put them on, with a surprising amount of greenery for the limited space. Our yard at home was severely put to shame by a square 10 feet of potted plants, plus ivy growing up the front of the building.
His father, Rolf, got home first and we all said hello and chatted. His English is great. He said Andie looked the same as she did the last visit, 4 years ago, and made her laugh. His mother, Rena, got home next. She's currently taking an English correspondence class and is trying really hard, so what she doesn't know how to say, we act out or ask Finn or just giggle over. (Giggles are my first language, I can understand her fine.)

They took us out for dinner at a walkable nearby restaurant, where we puzzled over the menu together (all the English ones had been given to an enormous table of South Korean tourists behind us). I tried the schnitzel.
Schnitzel is a large piece of meat. (Most of German cuisine involves large pieces of meat, we're learning.) Specifically, it's a slice of pork that has been breaded and fried. This comes with a large side of fries and a light beer you've never tried, either. It's a whale of a calorie count, but I did my best.

They walked us back to the house, all the while pitching activity ideas for our stay and admiring the gardens, and we turned in early.

Amsterdam à la afternoon

Plans got off to a late start today.

We knew there were two other backpacks and accompanying people in our room yesterday, who never appeared... until 4 AM. They came in and tried to be quiet, but I woke up anyway, and didn't get back to sleep for hours; one of them snored like a foghorn. It was like he was going to swallow his own sinuses, the sound was barely human. At one point, I saw Andie get up, walk across the room, and listen to make sure it wasn't Aaron making that noise-- because then, we could have done something about it. (Probably stuffed an entire pillow up his nose.) But there's nothing for it with strangers. I went for earplugs.

Our phones aren't holding charges when we try to plug them in, so everyone's alarms weren't working. We trusted the sun to wake us up at a reliably early hour like it had in Paris, but that tactic plus the interrupted night didn't work at all: we finally got up after 1 PM. Whoops.
And in a panic, too, realizing that we'd lost half a day of the one we had left to sightsee. We'd seen something about a morning walking tour, but that was right out; the best we could do was maybe pay for an afternoon one or try to walk it ourselves. As we jumped out of bed and started running for our clothes, the snoring boys woke up and were frustratingly pleasant, becoming much harder to hate when they were nice and funny and Finnish. (They're both high school graduates like Aaron, and work at "Finland's equivalent of McDonald's".)

We finally got out the door and eating things, and decided to hit the Van Gogh museum and then try for a canal cruise boat tour we'd seen at the front desk. We got turned around a few times in the maze of streets and took one detour to the Bloemgarden: the Flower Street.
The museum is next to a few others, making a huge complex of green space, sculpture gardens, and lawns that looked like they'd drawn half the city's population. We made it over to the museum, bought tickets, and proceeded to lose each other over 4 floors of Van Gogh pieces. The exhibit was very well done; it's called "Van Gogh at Work", meaning the evolution of his styles, and that's how it progresses. All of his works are ordered chronologically, interspersed with pieces by his contemporaries that he copied/ admired/ felt influenced by, a few of the actual model items from his still life's, and generous explanations about the thought processes and communications behind the pieces. I was impressed.

The dock for the canal cruise was completely across town and on some obscure road that we didn't locate for half an hour-- though shockingly enough, me and my map reading pulled it out in the end and found the place right before the 5:30 boat left. We jumped on, plugged the free headphones into the the audio tour machine, and trundled along in a wide yet surprisingly nimble tour boat for an hour, listening to a perky "native Amsterdam" couple tell us about their city. The captain really knew how to milk the photo ops, between Anne Frank's house and the "Seven Canals" view. We even saw the original location of the Dutch East India Company.

We got off and headed to a supermarket to get dinner things, ate, and then Andie managed to download a walking tour onto her phone. We visited all the buildings the canal tour hadn't covered and headed back to the hostel, feeling satisfied with our Amsterdam endeavors.
There were two more people in the room tonight, a brother and sister from England (another girl!). They and the Fins invited Aaron to come hang out with them in the lobby for cards and drinks, so Andie and I went to bed early.