This past week Frank, Amy and I got to tool around for a few days in my favorite city, Florence. It was a little strange being back three years after I studied abroad there. Things had changed–my favorite internet cafe BeeOnline was closed (We miss you Nadir!)…my favorite sandwich place The Oil Shoppe has gotten somewhat commercialized …the sandwich shop where the owner conspired with a thief to steal my cash has opened up a fancier shop (BOO!!)…and the cafe with the snobby Italian ladies that made me feel so horrible has closed down (YAHOO!). But overall Florence is just as extraordinary as I remembered!

The first night we were there we went to a bar called the Red Garter. It was karaoke night which sounded like a blast to all of us, so we went inside and ordered a shuttle of Heineken which is basically a mini-keg you can bring to your table. At first we were the only ones there, but then a tour group of about 30 college students came in which livened up the place a bit. Then the karaoke started. Let me tell you, this guy that ran the karaoke must have had some sort of complex because he proceeded to turn down every singer’s microphone, turn up his own backup vocal microphone, and turn up his guitar, so you couldn’t hear anyone singing but him. It was like his own little one man show.

So Frank gets up there to sing “Another One Bites the Dust” and tries to use the karaoke man’s microphone but he’s not having it. Frank is screaming this song and you can barely hear him so we keep telling the man to to turn up his mic. He turns it up for about 3 seconds and then it’s back to just karaoke man.

My friend Amy and I decide to go and sing a song, but they didn’t have Technotronic’s “Move This” so we had to look at the list. The karaoke man scrolls through the entire list in about 3 seconds so that we can’t actually read any of the songs listed. Another thing, he doesn’t even have lyrics to a lot of the songs, just the music on his iTunes. We finally spot Haddaway’s “What is Love” (From the Saturday Night Live skit) and we start joking about how it would be so funny to sing that one. All of a sudden we hear the music start playing for “What is Love” and we figure, OK he must have overheard us mention the song and this is the one we are doing. Then we hear karaoke man start belting out “WHAT IS LOVE! BABY DON’T HURT ME..” and we look at each other like what the hell is this guy doing? He then points to us, and then points off the stage, telling us to get off! He stole our song! What is this guy’s deal? So after his song, Amy and I sang “Bohemian Rhapsody”, and Frank and our new friend Julia Goolia sang “Hey Jude”. Then we said to hell with this egotistical karaoke man, and had a dance party of our own in the next room.

OK so I know I’ve taken a little hiatus from writing lately, my apologies. My good friend Amy came to visit for a week so we went traveling through Italy, Germany, and Austria…and not to mention I’ve been sick for three weeks with an evil cold/cough that doesn’t seem to want to evacuate my body. So during one of my past hacking fits Frank decided that he couldn’t stand it any longer and that he’s bringing me to a doctor. I don’t have insurance here or anything, but Frank does, so we think maybe someone will sympathize and give us a break.

So we look up a doctor for general medicine online and find there is one just in town that has a consultation hour from 5-6 where you don’t need an appointment. We take the bus into town, walk up a few flights of stairs into this tiny little apartment with a private practice. We are greeted by the receptionist with a roll of the eyes and then she firmly says “no” as she peers over her glasses when she finds out I don’t have insurance; but the doctor comes out and starts asking what the problem is. Of course I have little idea of what is being said, so I just sit there trying to look like I need help. They tell us to go sit and wait and they will figure something out in a few minutes.

Cut to an hour and half later, where Frank and I are still sitting in the waiting room, seeing patient after patient walk in the door and be seen. We are just about to call it quits when the lovely secretary comes over to us and gestures to us that the doctor will see us now. So Frank and I walk into the doctor’s office and he starts feeling my lymph nodes and looking down my throat. Pretty standard I think. He doesn’t take my blood pressure, temperature, health history, or anything else which I found strange. He tells me to sit down on a chair and he comes over with what looks like a golden pen. He takes my hand and starts-no joke-STABBING the pen into my thumb, just on my cuticle…which by the way, if you’ve never experienced HURTS LIKE HELL. Then he stabs the other thumb and leaves a throbbing red indentation when he’s finished. Then he tells Frank to tell me to swallow. Uh what? Apparently it was supposed to help my throat.

Then it only gets worse. He proceeds to dig his fingers into my back, my stomach, the underside of my wrist to which I thought my vein was going to burst from the pressure…and then he moved to my ears. At first it felt like he was just doing a pressure point on my ear which wasn’t so bad, but then he started just wiggling my ears like crazy and then it felt like he was going to rip them off!! He told Frank to tell me to breathe, and asked if I could breathe easier. I thought, yeah, breathing doesn’t hurt anymore, but my f-ing cuticles and ears are throbbing with pain!!!

Then he said my sickness was not severe and that I should come back if it gets any worse. Whatever happened to listening to my lungs with a stethoscope?

Frank said it reminded him of the time his friend Jake was visiting him in Graz, Austria and needed to see a doctor. The doctor that time was very helpful, but had some weird practices. The first thing he did was put a plastic bowl over his head that was chained to the wall. The bowl had a bunch of red lights in the inside which basically made him sweat a lot. Frank peeked into the next room and there was a guy just staring at a red light with a fog machine blowing fog into his face. Let’s just say doctor visits here aren’t the same as back home.

One thing that led to some confusion on our last trip was the absence of signs. The metro in Budapest often didn’t have posted signs saying which direction the subway went, so we took our best guess and jumped on, hoping we were going the right way. In one instance while we were leaving the Széchenyi thermal baths we jumped on the metro and one stop later came to the end of the line, so we obviously had gone the wrong way. We ran to the other track, and as we were coming down the stairs we saw three ticket checkers standing there. We tried to explain we just made a mistake and jumped on the wrong way and had only gone one stop, but they just kept pointing to the ticket machine and shaking their heads. There was no ticket counter open to buy an additional ticket so we were screwed. Then out of nowhere, an agitated young Hungarian woman stood up for us and started to yell at the ticket checkers saying (in heavy accented English) that this is not our fault and that “the rules are stupid!” She took out her purse, shuffled through her wallet, and pulled out two new tickets that she then gave to us–while rolling her eyes at the ticket checkers. We kept telling her it wasn’t necessary but she insisted.

Zagreb had their fair share of sign issues too. Let me just start off by saying our first few hours in Zagreb were horribly frustrating because for some godforsaken reason we hadn’t written down the address of the apartment we were staying in. Obviously this is a huge mistake when you are in a foreign country without a city map and have little chance of meeting anyone who speaks English to help you. I will also add that it was raining and a lady from the train station gave us directions which led us in the exact opposite direction of where we needed to be. So I thought maybe I’d call someone at home to see if they could go online and look it up for me, but then all I heard was an error message in Hungarian. Then I stepped in a huge puddle of water which filled my shoe.

Eventually an old man must have taken pity on us because he ran over to us and handed us a pocket map of Zagreb. Things were turning around after all! The only problem with the map was that every street was spelled differently from the actual street signs by at least 3 or 4 different letters. (which we didn’t realize until we were walking in circles). How were we supposed to know that Gava ut = Gajeva ulica? Anyways, we finally found an internet cafe after a few hours of walking in the rain with water filled shoes and soaking giant backpacks…just before ripping each other’s hair out.

Today Frank got chased by a gas station worker in the street after he unknowingly plugged their toilet. The angry worker ordered him to go and unplug it. When Frank returned to go unplug it he expected a plunger, but this was not the case. There stood a lonely toilet brush. I won’t go into further detail. Then when Frank was finished and was walking out, the man insisted they go look at the toilet together to make sure it passed his final inspection. When the guy went into the bathroom Frank made a break for it and heard the gas station attendant shout after him. He, quite understandably, will never be returning to that gas station again.

So Frank and I started off our second excursion with Budapest. It was an 8-hour train ride from Klagenfurt, long but not unbearable. We get into town, stop at an ATM to get forints (the Hungarian currency) and buy a three-day travel card. Groups of ticket checkers are at virtually every validation point in the metro, so there are no free rides here (not that I would try, I am still traumatized from the last close call). We walked to our room that we had booked online which was right next to the breathtaking Parliament building. Our room was basically an apartment, with a kitchen and bathroom all connected. It was super clean and everything looked fairly new, so we were congratulating ourselves on our selection. We decided to relax for a bit before going out on the town after the long train ride so we turned on the TV. There was a show called “Szexy or Not?” where girls and guys come out in bathing suits and a set of three judges rates them on their “sexiness factor”. Wow.

So then we took the metro into the city center and got a few drinks at a viking themed bar. They had aquariums everywhere and the walkway to the table was a koi pond with plexiglass over it which was pretty cool. At around midnight we took a long walk back to our apartment, checking out the city some more. We finally get to our apartment, Frank turns the light on and freaks out at what he sees.

“COCKROACHES!!!” he screams while running inside to smash as many as he can as they are scattering across the room. So here Frank is, frantically moving beds and bookcases around the place, cornering the cockroaches and smashing them while I am just sitting there in utter disbelief at the turn of events. When Frank has killed all possible roaches, I calmly say, “Frank. Call your mom. Right now. Use my phone, I don’t care, call her.” Our motto is, whenever in doubt just call Ronnie. So she tells us what we should do and then we get word there is a possibility of bedbugs where cockroaches are…so then we start inspecting the sheets and feel even more creeped out. So we slept fully clothed with the light and TV on hoping no cockroaches would be feeling bold enough to come out in the light.

The morning came and we called the apartment owner at 7am. He apologized sincerely and said the apartment had had a roach problem a few years ago, but never since. He offered to come pick us up right away and take us to another larger apartment in the city center. We were angry, but he was being very understanding which was nice. So we get dressed and pack up our bags again and get ready to leave. I put on my huge backpack and Frank looks at me in horror. He yells and starts stomping a cockroach that had fallen on the floor onto its back (possibly from my backpack?). I freak out and throw down my backpack and what do you know, two more cockroaches come crawling out of it! At this point I figure they must be crawling all over my body considering I had just put on clothes from that very backpack so I’m dancing around flailing my arms trying to get them off of me. We start dumping out my backpack, fully expecting hoards of cockroaches that had set up a colony in my bag the night before to come barreling out. No more came out, but we shook out all of my clothes and backpack to make sure.

Then the doorbell rang and it was the apartment owner, Mauritus. What a great time for him to show up. The other apartment he brought us to turned out to be really nice and in a prime location so we were happy, even though my skin still felt crawly. Lesson learned: clean rooms can still have cockroaches!

Our last leg of our Germany/Belgium/Netherlands trip was to the smaller town of Aachen, Germany. It took awhile to find a place to stay, but eventually found a cheap hotel. We saw the Cathedral that was built for Charlemagne in 792 making it one of the oldest cathedrals in northern Europe. Along with the treasury next door, they house Charlemagne’s remains in a vault along with some of his bones in ornate golden relics. They also had crowns, robes, jewelry and other cool old stuff on display.

We ended up eating dinner at a tapas bar. (I know…Spanish food in Germany?! Sacrilege!) Frank ordered a Long Island at the end of the night and our server said “Be careful!” the next three times he came to our table. They had a bathroom attendant at this restaurant, which means when you use the bathroom you are encouraged (expected) to leave a tip. Now I’m all for tipping people when they extend a service, but I don’t see how sitting on a chair and pointing to a bathroom stall merits anything except a “thanks, if I couldn’t have told which stall to go in you would have really come in handy”.

The breakfast spread in the morning consisted of processed cheese singles, bologna loaf with mushrooms and a shriveled apple in a fruit basket, so we grabbed a piece of bread and coffee and hit the road. Our eleven and a half hour train ride back to Aachen was pretty uneventful until the last 2 hours when four intoxicated and rowdy Swedes joined us in our train cabin. They all had giant packs and skis so our cabin was pretty crammed. We didn’t know what language they were speaking at first and didn’t think they knew English until they ordered more liquor from the drink cart guy so we introduced ourselves. They were probably our age or a year younger and they were going on a skiing trip to Austria for break. It was one of the Swede’s birthdays, so his friends bought him a bikini and he started to put on the bikini over his clothes and waved at people as they walked by the cabin and posed for pictures. Of course the first thing they had to know before we started any conversation was if we support George W. Bush or not, which is something I have encountered a lot while meeting new people in Europe. Frank and I happened to have a bottle of vodka in our bag so we took that out and sent it around the cabin while we talked to the Swedes about politics, Europe, and not surprisingly the drinking age. It was an interesting, albeit random way to end our excursion.

Back to Amsterdam for my second time, the land of canals, coffeehouses, and the Red Light District. Through the internet we rented an apartment from a pleasant man named Nelson who owned an antique shop. He gave us a key to our cute apartment, a map pointing out important spots, and a Mars bar. Wow, I loved Amsterdam already.

February is a tad bit cold to be spending the day outside, but overall it is a stellar time to visit Europe because there aren’t tourists swarming every last corner. We visited a few coffeeshops: Barney’s, Baba, and the Grasshopper and we walked through the Red Light District which was at times both uncomfortable and hilarious. Amsterdam’s new slogan is “i amsterdam”, which is a push to reduce the size of the Red Light District and to give the city a better reputation. It was funny to see how they were rolling out this strategy because every few “windows” in the red light district were transformed into clothes windows. So as we were walking down the street it was like whore…whore…khaki pants…whore…whore…suit jacket. Not gonna lie, I’m not sure how effective that strategy is going to be.

The next day we went to the Van Gogh museum and did an audioguide tour, and also walked around Dam Square and found a grocery store. We try to find grocery stores in every city so we don’t spend so much money going to eat all the time, so we got stuff for sandwiches and some tiramisu. The next day on our way to a coffeeshop we saw this bum-looking guy get arrested in the middle of the street. He was dirty, had messy grayish hair and a bushy unkempt beard. He seemed pretty nonchalant about the whole deal like maybe it had happened (a few dozen times) before? Anyway, a few steps ahead was a middle-aged woman with a large camera snapping photos with a very distraught look on her face and was crying out passionately in Dutch about the situation, which we couldn’t understand. Frank and I walked by and looked confusedly at each other and threw out ideas on who she might be…maybe she was a reporter? A homeless advocate? A friend?

We decided to stay in Amsterdam an extra night because we got such a good deal on the apartment and didn’t want to leave just yet. Frank went out and bought me a scarf and went to a bread and cheese shop and bought some pesto cheese that was really tasty. We had a TV in our room with a lot of English channels so we ended up watching random shows like The Fresh Prince, 3rd Rock From the Sun, Larry King, and the Weakest Link and quizzed each other on German and Italian vocab. That night on an evening stroll through the city, we walked around a corner and Frank saw a giant bird standing behind a tree. He goes, “Whoa look at that bird!” and I go, “What bird, that duck?” pointing to the duck in the canal, and he goes, “The bird standing right in front of us!” and at that moment my eyes fixated on the giant white crane not five feet away from us looking wet and sleepy. Just another reminder that sometimes we don’t “see” what our eyes are actually seeing. Then we let the bird be. When we checked out the next morning Nelson sent us off with more chocolate bars. What a guy. On our way to the train station I picked up some juice which I thought was grape and for the third time I got stuck with putrid johannisbeere which is something like red currant.

We were going to buy tickets to Aachen, Germany at the ticket machine but they seemed really expensive so we decided to go to the ticket counter and see if we could get an under-26 discount. They used the “pick a number and we’ll call you system” and it was horrible. We picked C149 and they were only on C100 when we walked in. We had about an hour to catch the train and we cut it close. And it turned out the tickets were more expensive at the ticket counter because of the “booking fee”. Figures. Well, with no time to waste we bought the ticket and boarded the double decker train. Me, Frank, and my johannisbeere juice were off to Aachen.

The rumors were true. Brussels was filled with waffles, chocolate shops, döners, and beer, the things dreams are made of. On both nights we went to Delirium, a bar that offers over 2,500 different types of beers. They have everything from light to dark, fruity, strong, dark, hoppy, anything you could want in a beer. We sampled a bunch of different types, one getting spilled on Frank’s pants. I had to do charades with a bartender in order to get paper towels since we couldn’t understand each other (Picture me calling over the bartender, pretending to tip over a beer and then fake sopping it up, then raising my eyebrows to see if she got it. She didn’t. Instead she ran over to another bartender, did the same charade).

The second day in Brussels we ate waffles and saw the statue “Manneken Pis”, which is Dutch for “Little Man Peeing”. I was surprised at how small the fountain was. They even have a museum of the Manneken Pis dressed up in different clothes which to me is a little strange. Then we went to an ancient art museum which seemed to be more like Renaissance art than “ancient” art, but it was all right. The Royal Palace was closed, so we were only able to take pictures of the outside. We went to a park and walked around the city, sampling chocolate shops as we went. After eating at an Italian restaurant, we headed over to Delirium to try more new beers. Frank left to get us a drink and next thing I know a Belgian dude is spitting game at me and I stop him mid-sentence and say “Sorry, I speak English, I’m with my boyfriend.” And he says “Sheet” and walks away.

The next day we headed to Antwerp, Belgium, the world capital for diamonds. To save money we stayed in a dorm-style hostel called “Den Heksenketel”. The stairs to our room were like climbing a winding ladder. There weren’t lockers or anything to put our stuff in so we felt a little uneasy about the security of the place. We walked to Het Steen “the stone”, a castle which is Antwerp’s oldest building that controlled access to the river. Then we sat out on the boardwalk to people watch and to see the ships go by. We walked along the main shopping street, The Meir, bought some postcards, and then drank a few beers at the Celtic pub by our hostel.

We retired to our bunk beds in the hostel and wrapped our valuables in our jackets and stuck them under our pillows for a sense of security. I probably could have done without that because I barely slept the entire night. The bunk beds were so squeaky you were woken up every time anyone moved and there was a snoring man that kept most of us up that night. I seriously think you should be banned from hostels if you snore like a giant. In Poland, Frank and I were in a room next to a supersnorer and it sounded like he was chopping trees down from dusk til dawn. In the morning we packed up our things and were happy get out of there. We stopped at the grocery store to buy some bread and cheese for the train ride and ran like hell in order to catch our train to Amsterdam…only to find out it was delayed. It was OK though, we were off to the Netherlands!

Brussels Main Square:

I was really excited for the trip to Belgium since I had never been there, even after hearing mixed reviews. I figured, how can you go wrong with a place that is famous for waffles and beer? We arrived in the Brussels train station, bought a far too expensive map there to orient ourselves, and made our way through the center of town to our hotel. It was neat to see that all the signs are in French and Dutch, so I tried translating the French using my Italian, and Frank handled the Dutch using his German. After walking around the city for a bit, we scoped out the restaurant scene. I was a little leery of the places that had servers outside the door trying to lure people in. Part of me thought it was just them working hard, and part of me thought how come they need to beg people to eat at their restaurant?

Eventually we got away from the touristy part and figured we were in the clear. We walked by one place and took a look at the menu they had posted outside. A man quickly came out of the door, speaking good English and I thought he was going to ask us the time or something. Instead he flew into selling-mode and started charismatically telling us that the restaurant had anything we wanted and would take good care of us. After a few indecisive looks back and forth between Frank and I, we shrugged our shoulders and figured, hey this guy seems nice and we are hungry. It can’t be THAT bad.

Rule #1 when traveling: Never go to a restaurant where they have to lure you in. Ever.

So we sit down and realize this place is a Moroccan restaurant, La Marekesh it’s called. We are given a few different menus, in different languages, so we are trying to decipher what one dish is by clues on the other menu. We think, hey this is kinda cool, it’s run by a Moroccan family, they’ve got Moroccan music playing, lanterns on every table, we are having a cultural experience. It’s about halfway full, so someone’s got to like it here, right? Cut to Petey, the 15-year-old Frankenstein looking busboy, who we gathered was the younger brother with a few screws loose. He nervously walks to our table, sets down a bowl of bread, walks away, and gets praised from the other servers like he just conquered Everest. We figure the bread was leftover from someone else’s table or from the night before because it is stale. It takes about 30 minutes to get a beer, but we’re relaxed. We are in Europe; things move a little slower here.

Thirty minutes later we order. I ended up playing it safe and getting chicken while Frank figured we are in Brussels, the land of mussels, and goes for it. After it taking an hour to get our meals we’ve turned from forgiving tourists to antsy critics. The food was lackluster to say the least. In Frank’s words…”the mussels tasted like sandboogers.” The music that was so exotic and pleasant has now turned to Celine Dion “My Heart Will Go On” and has started to skip…and skip…and…Do they not hear the skipping?! By this time, the restaurant was full because our English speaking doorman buddy had lured in table after table. We wanted to scream out at the people who came to sit down “Keep walking, go! GO!! We’re already too far in this thing to be helped, but save yourselves!!” By now we’d been in this place 2 hours. They had roughly 12 tables that we could see..not to mention a whole other room of tables…and one server.

Since it took so long to get our main course we debated even asking for dessert, but since it was included in the meal we figured dessert can’t take that long to prepare. We should have realized by then that rationality does not apply to this restaurant, but no, instead we ask for our dessert. Forty-five minutes later after multiple dirty looks and putting on our coats and taking out our money Ali, our server, brings us dessert. When he brings us the dessert he just says “Sorry,sorry…about the time”. He offered us a free drink but we were too irritated to accept, we just asked that he bring our bill. Now, in a normal situation, you would think that a server, after neglecting its guests over and over, for almost three hours would get right on that. Well 20 minutes later, during which time Frank and I consider walking out, Petey nervously delivers the bill. The bill was 40 euro (~$60) with no discounts. We couldn’t let Marakesh get away with taking over 3 hours of our lives, so we each put down a 10 and walked. Whew.

(Added note: We saw the doorman the next night on our way to the bar.)

We left on our 10-day excursion on Valentine’s Day. Frank’s brother-in-law Brian dropped us off at the train station since he and his family were visiting from Italy, which was nice because we were lugging our giant backpacks filled to the brim. We validated our rail passes and boarded the train to Munich which was only about 5 hours away. To pass the time we played cards and Buzzword and ate Cheetos that Brian and Frank’s sister Monique had brought us from the navy base. Once we got into Munich, we checked into our hostel and took the subway to the city center, Marienplatz, with its giant town hall and glockenspiel. We set off to find somewhere to have dinner and we stumbled upon one of the many Augustiner Brew Houses scattered throughout Munich which are big, traditional German restaurants serving big beers and hearty meals. Our table was right next to a group of Italians so we had a fun time trying to decipher what their conversation was about. The table behind us brought their scruffy dog with them too (people bring their dogs with them everywhere here). I had the best Jägerschnitzel with spätzel to date, and of course we finished the meal with some raspberry schnapps (German schnapps is different from American schnapps; here schnapps is basically any clear form of alcohol–similar to vodka–and in fruit flavors). We then took the subway back to our hostel and enjoyed having a television, excited that it had CNN in English and MTV since we don’t have TV back home.

The next day we went to the Deutsches museum of science and technology ans saw exhibits on hot air balloons, airplanes, biology, musical instruments, physics, and astronomy. We went on a simulator ride outside the museum which is one of those rides where you are in a chair watching a movie and the whole chair starts moving to make you feel like you are in the movie (like the mystery mine ride at the Mall of America…actually I think it was the exact mine ride I had been on in the 7th grade!). Then we took the tram around the city and found another Augustiner Brew House were we decided to have a long lunch. I thought I was seeing things when I went to the bathroom because after I flushed the toilet, the seat started rotating in a circle…apparently there is a cleaning mechanism where a nozzle washes the seat after every use. Never seen that before! Then we went to the Hofbräuhaus, which is a famous brew hall in Munich…complete with long wooden tables, pretzels, and heavy, liter mugs of beer. There aren’t individual tables, instead you take a seat on a bench of a large table and meet the people you are sitting with. Frank and I met a couple from Pennsylvania that flew into Munich for the weekend, a Greek couple, and a group of Germans in business suits who were celebrating after a hard day at work so we did a million toasts.

The next morning we ate the free breakfast downstairs in our hostel, packed up our enormous backpacks, and set off to the Hauptbahnhof (Main train station). Once again, Munich did not disappoint! Now we were off to Brussels…