How many countries have you been in today?

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Cause I bet I've been in more. Now equipped with a ghetto-fabulous, have-more-pages-added passport, the real travel has begun. But I left off in Belgium, so I'll work my way back.

The night of the second day in Belgium was interesting, to say the least. We went to a Congolese restaurant out on one of the metro lines on Brussels. It took a little while to find, because for all it's benefits, lonely planet does not give good directions. When we finally found the street with all the restaurants on it, we picked one that looked as inviting as possible, and sat down. The only problem with this plan was that we don't speak whatever language was predominately spoken (I don't know what language is spoken in the Congo), and my passable French only got us so far. The woman at the restaurant pointed out what was being made, because not all the food was being cooked because there weren't enough people in the restaurant. I knew the words for some food, but wanted to try something that wasn't going to be bland. When I pointed to what I wanted, the waitress gave me a look, and said, "are you sure". In my ignorance, I, of course, nodded in the afirmative, because what could possible go wrong. Kira, on the other hand, safely trusted my translation and got the chicken and plantains. The food took forever to cook and when it was brought out, I was given a bowl of green mush. I'm serious. There's really no better way to describe. It smelled like fish, didn't keep a shape other than the bowl, and wasn't served with anythign I was supposed to eat it with other than a food. It looked like it had once upon a time been spinach but it didn't taste or even remotely smell like it. I ate a little bit of it and my plantians, but I couldn't stomach eating the rest. When we got back the hostel, Kira and I immediately looked up what pondu was on the internet, and it sounds much less harmless than the stomach ache I actually had when I got home.

The next day we packed up our stuff, had breakfast, and checked out. We left out bags at the hostel and took the metro over the the palace with plans to walk back. We walked past the huge statue of Leopold II and towards the palace with a very ornate garden that looks like it was put there as a fill in for a moat they no longer need. I shouted at the palace that any royalty that would like to come outside and make me into a princess, that I was just standing there, but no one came. Kira didn't seem surprised by this. But it did set up a rather amusing trend for the Dutch, and Danish monarchies (though sadly pictures of the new Danish princess are everywhere in Copenhagen and she just happens to be beautiful. How am I supposed to compete if all the princesses are already gorgeous? ok, done) From the palace we walked to St. Catherine's Square, on the way passing a huge rubber ice dragon, which was meant to be a haunted house for the kids on as part of the Christmas fair that was going on in St. Catherine's. We walked around the fair, got some cotton candy, which was fabulous especially because it wasn't in Russia, considered going on the the huge €8 ferris wheel that was blasting the stones "Paint it Black", but didn't. We caught the metro back to our hostel, grabbed our bags, and made our way to the bus station to catch the bus back to Amsterdam because there was a train strike in Belgium on Monday.

Tuesday in Amsterdam was our first full day there, which was fun and partially boring because it was Christmas, but nothing was really open and we didn't really get as good a feel for the city til later on. We went to the Anne Frank House, because that was open, and that was really interesting. The house is preserved basically as the Nazis left it when they ransacked the place, so there isn't really any funiture, but there are some remnants of Anne Frank's life there with the people she was living with in hiding. It's a very sad museum, but one that I think is very important to see. One of the best parts of the museum is a room at the end where all the museum goers pile into arena style seating and watch minute long clips on the problems with human rights, freedom of speech, press, and religion all over the world and then vote on whether or not those were the right choices made by the governments. It's interesting to see how the people the room vote, because the electronic tally just shows number, no who pushed what box, but also how this group compares to all other visitors. After a morning of rather heavy history, we walked back towards our hostel, and on the way stopped at a movie theater and saw Enchanted. It was really cute and really fun and really awesome because it was an American movie in English with Dutch subtitles and it wasn't dubbed. That was really the best part.

Wednesday we got up early to go to the consulate to have pages added to my passport only to find that the consulate is closed the day after Christmas too. So we waited in a cute little cafe near the Van Gogh museum and met up with the German girl who we had met the night before in our hostel and went to the museum. We spent a good 2.5 hours walking around the museum, inlcuding the exhibition on what Barcelona was like in 1900. From there we walked through Vondelpark, which is a huge open park in the middle of Amsterdam with a pond and people biking all over the place and then to Febo's a chain that sells fries with some of the wierdest sauces on them, though the Dutch tend to prefer just straight mayonaise, though you all know how I feel about that. They also sell just about everything else in a vending machine, including things that looked like spring rolls and hamburgers. From there we walked back the movie theater and saw Eastern Promises, which was good, but probably awesome again for its use of the English language, though they did speak some Russian, though not very well, it was still fun. After the movie, we went and got noodles from one of the take out places near the dam which was really yummy and makes me love and miss all the ethnic food from back home that definitely does not exist in the heart of St. Petersburg.

Thursday we woke up early again, though this time to check out of the hostel and and to get to the consulate where they actually were open. While we were waiting for the consulate to add pages we walked through some of the more interesting neighborhoods of Amsterdam, including the Red Light District, which is kinda amusing at 1 in the afternoon. There were still women standing in windows, but very few of them were attractive, either because it was early in the day or because when men come their under some sort of inebriation. It's kinda one of those places you have to say you've gone, but it's not really all that interesting once you're there. From there we walked to the Stedeijlk Museum, which is a modern art museum under renovation so only part of its collection is viewable. I wasn't a huge fan of the stuff from their permanent collection, but they did have an awesome exhibition of Andy Warhol's stuff, mainly film and video, which was really cool and seemed to fit in very well to the whole vibe of the city. From there we trammed it back to the consulate, having taken only three days to figure out the tram system in Amsterdam, picked up my ghetto-fabulous passport, and walked back to the center for some fries in Brazilian sauce (I don't know, but it tasted good) and then onto the train.

The train from Amsterdam to Copenhagen was fourteen hours long and went deep into the heart of Germany before turning towards Denmark. Considerinly the length of the journey, it should've been more interesting, but really it was just a long train ride during which I didn't really sleep because every time the train turned I thought the train was going to tip over. That could explain for any incoherancies in the writing right now.

When we got to Copenhagen, we got a map from the tourist info office and took ourselves on a little walking tour of Copenhagen. It was kind of a cold and grey day, and the whole city seemed like it'd be a really awesome place to come back to in the summer. We walked from the train station to the palace, saw the changing of the guard, walked through the huge park to the north, saw the famous statue of the little mermaid, which I didn't think was that cool, the old Copenhagen fortress, then back down for lunch, past the round tower, Trinity Church and to the National Musuem which has huge displays of ethnography exhibits and old artifacts from all periods of Danish life. It was a pretty cool museum but it closed about an hour after we got there so we didn't get to see much.

After that we got a train to Malmo, and arrived the station in Malmo only to find that it was cold and there were no buses to the airport anymore until 5:30 in the morning. Sadly we sat outside for a longtime before we figured that out, and finally we gave in and took a taxi the airport, which cost a lot more than I'm comfortable typing. Regardless we're here and we're here for the night, basically, because check-in for our flight doesn't begin for 6 hours. At some point I'll find a place to crash, but hey, this is the life of a backpacker right?

As always,
From Europe With Love

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Photos

Food from a Vending Machine in Amsterdam
Every kind of food, including hamburgers.