Shtastny Novy Rok

Shtastny novy rok. Bonne annee. Happy new year.

It's been a busy two weeks, as I was on vacation in northwest Europe. Spent a couple days in Amsterdam, one in Den Haag, two in Bruges, and a few in Paris. All in all, a fantastic trip.

Amsterdam - a very modern city: clean and efficient. Bikes rule the road - they're EVERYWHERE. Locals ride bikes the way LA'ers drive cars. They have the highest priority of any moving traffic, and if you're in their way, although the "ding ding" sound of their bell is gentle enough, you had best move to a pedestrian-only path. The other thing that really struck me about the locals was they had a focus and a determination completely unseen in Prague. They stepped with calculated efficiency. They city has a whole lotta water too... I had no idea there were so many waterways and bridges there.
The weather wasn't great, but it wasn't bad either. Warmer than Prague, generally cloudy with the occasional light rain... but that didn't prevent me from snapping plenty of pictures.

If you make it out there, I highly recommend the Van Gogh Museum. The Anne Frank House and the Jewish Historical museum added a somber tone to the trip, but following that with a tour of the Heineken Brewery wasn't a bad idea. There was also a nice exhibit at FOAM, a photography museum.

Den Haag (The Hague) - Den Haag was only okay. Nothing that special. Granted, I was there on Christmas Eve, but it didn't look as if there was much to do in any case. I say this having seen practically the whole town. Now, I am not an expert cartographer by any means, but I am used to grids on a map having one letter per column and one number per row (of course, you can invert that). The map I was given - from the official tourism office - had one number per row, but 2 letters per column. Okayyy, I thought, maybe they have two letters per box for a finer detail. That's an interesting approach. But, as it turns out, the 20 letter headings were scrunched into the first 11 columns, leaving the other 9 columns letter-less. Meaning that when I trekked for about an hour on foot to location M7 on the map, I had really travelled way out of the city to location B7, and had to trek back. An hour later, I made it to the hostel at M7, which was when I realized I was four blocks from my original starting point.
The next morning I was able to make it to an MC Escher museum and the Peace Palace (though the Palace was closed). The Escher museum was real cool - it even had a virtual reality exhibit which allowed the user to explore his paintings in 3D. Very neat. Each room in the museum had a very wildly-shaped chandelier - everything ranging from a cello to a skull.

Bruges (Brugge) - this town was fantastic. My friend Jessica recommended it to me, describing it as "a whimsical little town...very old worldish... quaint and european feeling," which turned out to be a very accurate description. Gorgeous place. Hard to take a bad photograph - many bridges over reflecting water, colorful architecture. And the food and drink - incredible. I've heard all about how great Belgian chocolates are, and when I moseyed into this chocolate store, I thought, "Ok, let's see what the fuss is all about." I walked out saying "Holy crap! That's AMAZING!!" Exact same thing goes for Belgian beer and Belgian waffles. If you like sweet food and / or beer and / or photography, I highly recommend this town.

Paris - And of course Paris. All I can say is wow, what a city. Paris quickly jumped to the top of the list of my favorite cities. The people were incredibly nice and very patient with my broken and horribly-accented French. The sights were amazing, the food was incredible. No complaints at all about this leg of the trip. Experienced the expected (and over-hyped!) French snobbery just once, as everyone I spoke to was incredibly accommodating - whether I was asking for directions, or a recommendation on where to get des pains aux chocolats.

Of course, having recently read The DaVinci Code, I had to scope out the Louvre for places described in the book, including the inverted glass pyramid:


Also, my roommate visited Paris a couple weeks ago for her job, and she told me that the Eiffel Tower glitters every hour on the hour. Fortunately, I got to the tower at about 10 minutes to the hour, so I was able to record it:


For anyone who's interested, I posted some other pictures from my trip here.

So all in all, it was a fantastic trip. I arrived back in Prague with enough time to crash and unpack before celebrating New Year's.
My friends and I left the bar around 10 to midnight to go up this nearby hill for a good view of the city below and the offical fireworks. However, I don't thnk we ever saw the "official" fireworks. Given the lack of open container laws, and the apparent lack of firecracker laws, firecrackers were being set off in every direction all around (and directly over) us. Add in some sledding on a homemade sled dubbed "The Filthy Dingus" and you have one highly enjoyable New Year's.
Here's Ben posing with the Dingus.


I will say this one last bit about my travels. I was extremely happy to leave the Czech language behind, with its zahoranskeho's and zmrzlina's. However, getting off the bus in Amsterdam, I was pretty disheartened to see Scheepmakersstraat and Derwindermakerlaan. Fortunately I could get by on English there, as well as in Den Haag and Bruges. However, after a few days of re-learning my French, and getting pretty good at it, I return to Prague to find that my brain wants to speak French, not Czech. "Merci" is so much easier than "Dekuje." And even if you don't speak a lick of French, you can see a sign for "L'Academie Nationale de Musique" and know exactly what it is. Not so much here. Back to the world of sentences without vowels: strc prst skrz krk (meaning "put a finger through your throat").