Snowwwwww!!

Wie geht’s!

Now the first time I’d seen proper snow was in Dublin, and I have to say that this experience isn’t exactly as memorable as I wish it had been. I awoke one morning in my freezing hostel that had no shower to discover my roommates saying ‘Oh wow, it’s snowing out there! I haven’t seen snow for like a whole year!’ Little did they realize how exciting this sentence was to me. Without hesitation I ripped on as many clothes as I could and ran outside. To my disappointment, the snow was a dark brown, and just looked like strange mud. It was awful and my excitement went from level 200 to 5.

In Belgium, there was no snow. It was cold enough and it rained a lot of the time, but no snow.

Then I arrived back in Hamburg, where I’d already spent a lot of my trip so far. The reason I came back was for the Christmas and New Years period. I can imagine that apart from the cold and snow, a British Christmas wouldn’t be much to write home about, especially if I didn’t know anyone there. Sonja’s family in Hamburg was the closest family I had available at this stage, so I decided to utilize this opportunity.

It was most definitely snowing here. I could see white everywhere, and even in the city, on the roads and footpaths, it was still a lovely crisp white, not this sludgy brown rubbish I had to endure in Dublin. On that note, it was a couple digits colder than what I had experienced in Ireland too. Ouch.

I arrived at Sonja’s place and after 10 minutes, her parents had left for the weekend and since Sonja was at university, I had the house free to myself for the next three hours. After soaking myself in some bubbly German water and ridding myself of all the rubbish (Beer, Irish take-away, the general smell of Amsterdam after my stop-over and the stagnant smell of sitting on a bus for 18 hours), I spent the remainder of my time alone to marvel at the beauty that is snow.


Sonja came home and we immediately went outside and played in the snow. The river next to her house was frozen over and there were ducks sitting on top. Where the snow had fallen on top of the ice, you could see little bird footprints all over the river where they had been walking over the ice.

I don’t know how I can possibly express how cool the snow really is, and the Christmassy feeling you have throughout the whole winter. The Christmas carols actually make sense now.

Despite all the Christmas feeling and Christmassy stuff that was around, I still hadn’t done anything typically German and since I was in Germany, and that was the reason I came back, I wanted to start straight away. Gina is Polish by birth, and didn’t move to Germany until she was in her 20’s, so the family still carries on many Polish traditions as well as German. One thing particularly Polish is a kind of Christmas ‘biscuit’ or mini-pastry called Chruściki.

With Gina’s help, we mixed, rolled, cut, crafted, fried, drained and garnished the best Chruściki the world has ever seen. Instead of baking them, you deep fry them.


Before cooking, the dough is pretty flexible and tough and can therefore be crafted into lovely little shapes and patterns, but only one is traditionally used, and where we didn’t stuff up, that’s the shapes that we ended up with that you can see in the pictures.

The Chruściki themselves aren’t hugely flavoursome, so we had to absolutely drown them in icing sugar, but in the end, they were still bloody brilliant.



On another day, we took it upon ourselves to find the best and cheapest, dodgiest sled in Hamburg. Apparently the most fun and fastest sleds available are the old wooden one’s that are still popular from whenever sleds were first invented. Because of that, they can cost up to and over €50, roughly $70. A student and a backpacker can’t just throw this kind of money around and therefore we were subject to some of the cheaper alternatives. We managed to find something that looked like a crappy plastic shovel that the sign attached claimed was a sled for €3. There was also the upgraded edition which was a blue construction that looked far safer, but as fragile as an egg. I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of even sitting on the thing, let alone riding it down a hill. That was about €15 I think.

Sonja knew of the perfect hill and so we trudged up there with both ‘sleds’. About half way I realized how unfit I’ve become over the past year, having not undergone any form of exercise more strenuous than walking around and lifting one litre beers. A couple times I felt like throwing up and we hadn’t even reached the hill yet.



Needless to say, when we started sledding, no amount of tiredness could have stopped me from running up the hill each time to whizz down it again. I freakin’ loved it!




The bigger blue sled (Our sheet of warped blue plastic) had two little handle things, which if you pulled, would dig into the ground which, in theory, should work like breaks/steering. In reality, they done nothing but sometimes shoot you even more off course, or would just make the entire craft flip over. It went pretty fast too.

Our plastic red shovel wasn’t quite as fast, but was a lot more fun. It was harder to stay on, there’s was nowhere to stick your feet, and if there was a 10% chance of being able to steer on the blue one, there was no chance on the little red sled.

My excitement and fun was too extreme for me to realize that I almost had no feet left due to the cold and freeze factor, I had been sweating, but this was now starting to freeze too and absolutely everything on me was covered in snow. After Sonja started complaining about not being able to feel her feet anymore, I reluctantly admitted that it was indeed probably a good time to head off.


This is just one of many snow escapades we had over the course of my time again in Hamburg, but alas, most of my experiences were right there in the moment, and my fun can’t simply be put into words. In the next blog, my mind is opened once again to the world of public nudity in the German sauna’s as we visit the ever so popular public swimming pools/fun parks.

Tchüss!

In Bruges

Hoi/Bonjour,

Leaving Dublin with a passport and UK working visa in hand, I made my relitavley short journey to Belgium. Since before coming to Europe, I'd always wanted to come to Belgium, and this seemed like a perfect time as any. My knowledge of the place was that it's bloody small and they make good chocolate and great beer. On the way there I learnt that Belgium is famous for the good old waffle too. In my head, waffles were always a completely Amercian thing and I didn't see what all the fuss was about.

I flew to a small town just outside of the capital, Brussles, where I had to find my way to Brussels train station, then I had to get on a train and make my way to Bruges (Brugge if spelt like a local). Before arriving, I had no clue what language they spoke, and while I was there, my brain suffered severely with some people speaking French, others speaking Dutch and absoultely no-one speaking English. I'm sure everyone could speak all three though.

I made it to the Brussels train station, where the majority of people were speaking what I think was French. I make this assumption due to the fact that everyone was an asshole to me because I was using English. I wanted to get out of there as soon as possible so I jumped on the next train to Bruges which took a staggeringly outragous 1 hour (To get from almost on end of the country to the other).

I nearly wet my pants with excitement of my arrival into Bruges. The houses were cute, the people all seemed to be happy and the beauty of the city itself made it's mark in the form of a smile on my face that didn't go away until I reached the hostel (Which took about another hour).

The dumb tourist look must have been smeared all over my face, because two local chaps stopped me in the street and asked if I was lost. I didn't know where my hostel was, or what it was called but somehow they managed to point my in the right direction. I'd never met friendlier locals in my life, and for a second I thought they were going to just drop me off at the front door and check me in to the place.

My hostel was above a bar - The cheapest bar in Bruges mind you. It had almost 40 beers avaialable, each with a special glass of it's own. By my luck, I managed to get a 20 bed dorm to myself.

The closest place for food was next door and it sold...Not much, so I had boiled eggs and some kind of sweet tasting bread for dinner. I found one bottle of milk in the shop, and when I went to buy it, the chap behind the counter asking if I really wanted to buy it. I asked if it was just fresh milk, and when he told me yes, I said that I definitely want to buy it. To complement my sweet bread and boiled eggs for dinner, my milk turned out to be a sour, salty and watery white substance that almost made me cry. It wasn't enjoyable at all.

Before long, I met a couple Aussies, as expected and before long we were all sipping down some beer - or brilliant tasting poison as I'd rather call it. On average, a beer in this bar was about 8.5 bloody percent, and try me, the one's out of the average circle went WELL above that percentage. Because of this, the flavour was also quite different to the standard pilsener or lager. It was such a flavour that you had to drink it at about half the speed, so in theory, you should get drunk any faster fom drinking this as opposed to standard beer. You'd be wrong! After two beers, I could feel the effects and after three, you couldn't shut me up. I wasn't planning for a big night, just a couple to meet some bar flies, but bloody hell, a couple does a good job.



The story behind this beer and the stand (Which makes it look more like a scientific experiment rather than a beer) is that the inn keeper who brewed the stuff, specially made this construction for the men transporting carraiges with horses, and so this could be tied on and they could take the beer with them. Not only does it look cool, it's a lovely beer too!

Waking up feeling not too bad the next day, I found myself walking the streets of the city buying chocolate potatoes, chocolate truffles, chocolate liquer and waffles with hot melted chocolate drizzled over it. You wouldn't believe how messy a waffle with choclate can be. I don't know how it covered so much, I could have sworn there wasn't even that much chocolate on the thing at the start. It was sooooo good though. I took some snaps, bought a few souvenier beers and returned to the hostel, eagerly awaiting the next 30 beers I was yet to try.


Tonight was much the same, just with less people who more more annoying unfortunately. We ended up in a different bar, drinking different beer with a lot more locals. We had an American who fell asleep into his beer, which resulted in it tipping over onto his crotch. Not happy Jan.

Another night sleep in a completely empty dorm allowed me to have a brilliant sleep before I had to start my treacherous journey to Hamburg the next day. Leaving at 3pm and arriving in Amsterdam at 8pm only to leave again at 11pm and arrive in Hamburg at 10am the next morning. The Amsterdam to Hamburg leg of the trip was definitely the more painful one of the two. Buses...

More details of my return to Hamburg to follow.

Hiya!!!

So after Oktoberfest, the four of us all returned to Hamburg to stay with Sonja. While here we managed to see a concert from The Cat Empire, explored the city and a day before I was due to leave Hamburg to visit a friend in a city called Cologne, I managed to lose my passport. This is perhaps one of the biggest mistakes of my life and I've learnt a life long lesson from this experience.

Firstly, I needed a passport again and to do this I needed to travel to Berlin. I needed to somehow prove who I was by supplying all these documents - i.e birth certificate and birth certificates of one of my parents. Luckily, my parents were smart enough to ask if there was a better way than sending over their original documents. It turned out that they could just get the documents verified at an Aussie post office and a photocopy could be sent over to Berlin. Luckily I had my passport with a drivers licence and a couple bank cards on me, that proved to be very helpful. Another rule though, was that you have to have a contact that can sign a recent picture of you saying that the person in the photo was actually me. This person, as the rule was written, had to have known me for at least 12 months and either had to be an Australian citizen, or have an internationally recognised full time job. Firstly, who, when travelling, would possibly know anyone for at least 12 months? To me, this is a ridiculous and stupid rule that is insanely easy to by-pass. Luckily, Callum was still hanging around Europe and could easily come and sign then picture for me, but I have an endless amount of travelling friends who I've met on the way, who may have only had a couple days contact with me, but would have all signed the picture in a heartbeat. Bloody pen pushing idiots. All in all, it took me about a month and a half to get my passport back.

Then I was faced with the next challenge. I couldn't get back into the UK without a valid permit or visa. That was in my old passport, so I somehow had to transfer my old visa in to the new one. I ended up in Dusseldorf, the 5th or 6th biggest city in Germany trying to get my visa put into my passport. It was here that I realised that I was an illegal immigrant. When an Australian flies into a Schengen country (I'm not going to bother explaining in full detail, but there is a thing called the Schengen region which involves all the major European countries, Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Greece etc...) they get a stamp in their passport, which allows the traveller to spend 90 days in a 180 day period in the Schengen region. This stamp is the Schengen visa. Because I lost my passport, my stamp was lost, and all I had now was a blank Australian passport. This, to a police officer, makes it look like I never legally came in, it's as if I sneaked in. The next problem is that unless I could prove that I did in fact get a stamp in the first place in my old passport, there is nothing they can do for me except "Stay out of trouble and don't let police catch you". Great advice Germany!! They said that if I had have photocopied the page which had the stamp on it, maybe they could have helped me.

With this information, I decided that I would flee the country as soon as possible to go somewhere I was allowed - Ireland (Which is neither in the UK or Schengen region). I flew to Ireland, and within a month had my old visa, in the new passport. This experience took me about 2 months to sort out, making the entire ordeal about 3 to 3 and a half months long. Bloody hell.

With my visa and passport in check, I was free to find a job. I decided not to find a job just yet as it was about a week until Christmas, and in the best case scenario, I would find a job before then, and I would be working Christmas day, Boxing day, New Years Eve and probably New Years day too. In the next scenario, I would have been sitting in a hostel, upset about not having a job, upset about not having a lovely family Christmas and I probably would have had pasta or a pizza from the supermarket for my Christmas dinner.

Because of this, I found myself back in bloody Hamburg to celebrate a German Christmas, a Polish Christmas and the German New Year - They call it Silvester.

I won't elaborate on my ordeal of getting the passport and visa back, but in that time I found myself starting in Hamburg - Berlin - Cologne - Hamburg - Cologne - Hamburg - Cologne - Dusseldorf - Cologne - Hamburg - London - Dublin - Kilkenny - Cork - Dingle - Dublin - London - Bruges - Hamburg.

Bloody hell.

In the next few blogs, I'll speak of my return to Hamburg, which took me through Belgium, highly alcoholic beer, Christmas, New Years, lots of nudity and most importantly, heaps of fun.

Peace!