So it's been a week since I've written. That means I have a lot to say!
Saturday I did go back to the Uffizi. Gentileschi's "Judith Beheading Holofernes" was supposed to be in there, but I had yet to see it. I kept asking, "Dove l'arte di Artemisia Gentileschi?" I continued to not be able to find it. I had this vision of me stomping around the Uffizi asking every single worker, "Dove l'arte di Artemisia Gentileschi?" just over and over again. BUT it turns out there is a door that has always been closed, every time I've gone, and her art is behind there. It is also with like ten other paintings with dripping bloody bodyless heads.
I spent a happy solitary evening with only me! I watched Singing in the Rain, which I rented from the Obblate library.
Sunday I was seriously thinking about going to Vinci, but I couldn't figure out how to get there. I also didn't want to get there only to find out the museum was closed because it's Sunday. So instead I went to the Palazzo Pitti and finished off the entire Palentine Gallery.
Now, both the Palazzo Pitti and the Galleria degli Uffizi used to be Medici palaces. I would like to know why both of them have so many flights of stairs! Clothes used to be way heavier. How could a woman in one of those dresses ever climb so many? It's like ... 4 flights to get up into both galleries! Then at the end of the Palentine Gallery, a sign invited me to take the Grand Staircase down. This grand staircase is in fact 6 flights of stairs. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. What were those Medici trying to prove anyway?
Monday I had also thought about going to Assisi to see Giotto's frescoes, but decided I had way too much to do. The apartment was a total mess and I still had to pack. My laundry had been hanging out to dry for hours, but it was still wet when I left Italy. I had to hang it in my closet and hope for the best. Everyone here in Florence dries their clothes by hanging them out the windows. Now apparently there is a law that makes it illegal to do this in Italy (at least, that's what the tour guide in Sienna said.) This law just must not apply at all to Florence, or they may just not care enough, but they are definitely not following it. The problem I've had so far is that every time I've hung my clothes out to dry, it's rained. It didn't rain Sunday or Monday, but they were still wet. Apparently, this is supposed to be efficient and fast and they love the smell of fresh air in their clothes. I.E. dirty city air caused by smog pollution, which even the Florentines have been protesting lately.
I've been mixing up my languages lately. The other day I ordered a cup of gelato. I said, "Vorrei il bicchere da two euro." Not due euro, but two. The other day when my Italian teacher asked me my birthday, I gave her the date in Spanish. Then last Tuesday when I got on the bus to the airport I said, "Scusi, รจ l'autobus per la aeropuerto?" Just in case you were wondering, the Italian word for "airport" is "aeroporto" not "aeropuerto."
In l'aeroporto, I was really bored. The airline wasn't sure that if the flight was leaving from Florence or from Bologna. I don't know how you don't know that kind of thing, but it was eventually established that it was leaving from Florence.
I arrived in Amsterdam and I was a little nervous. I didn't tell anyone at home, because I didn't want people to worry, but I flew in alone and there was no one in Amsterdam yet. But Everyone was friendly and every body spoke English! The city was so beautiful, not skeezy at all! My directions to my hostel were terrible... I got lost for two hours. But finally some nice British people showed me the way on their google phone and I got there. There was a big beautiful park next to it called the Vondelpark, and I actually walked in there for a while (not willingly... the hostel people told me to walk through the park to find the hostel.) It was really safe and really nice and I didn't feel unsafe at all.
Unfortunately, that night people had sex in the room I was sleeping in. It was a 14 person room. They couldn't have chosen a less public time? It was really awkward, and their sexual enjoyments didn't end after sex. THEN THEY GOT UP AND LEFT THE ROOM! They weren't even staying in the room, or even the hostel as far as I know! The next morning I woke up and two other girls were sleeping in the bed, because it was THEIR bed and two random people had sex in it.
I already feel like I've been writing forever. Do you feel like you've been reading forever?
Renee arrived Wednesday morning. I went and met her at the train station and we tried to figure out how to get to Munich. We hadn't been able to find anything cheap the week before, and so Renee figured maybe we could find it cheaper at the actual train station. We couldn't. We tried everything... we looked at buses, planes, and other trains. But we'd already booked our hostel in Munich and our train ride home. We finally just bought the tickets and went to the hostel.
We took the tram. Now, public transport in Italy is Terrifying. It took me until two weeks ago to convince myself that I was not going to die in a bus crash. The streets are narrow, the buses practically scrape the cars they're driving past, and the drivers drive a little too fast for comfort. But this tram was easy and safe feeling! It was fantastic.
We didn't do a lot on Wednesday. We accidentally wandered into the Red Light district. It was a wrong turn and I realized we were the only girls on the street and then we saw women dancing in windows. Whoops.
We also bought Bagels! I had a bagel with cream cheese and smoked salmon. They don't have bagels in Italy.
There's a big market on one of the canals that is all flowers. It's full of tulips. I thought about buying some bulbs, but then I thought maybe you can't bring flowers like that back from EU? So I didn't.
But that is mostly Wendesday. We bought dinner from the grocery store (Chinese spicy noodles!) and tucked in early.
Thursday was a much busier day. We went on a free walking tour of Amsterdam and learned some pretty interesting things. For example, pot is actually not legal in the Netherlands at all. They just have a policy that since it's not hurting anyone, they're not going to do anything about it. Coffee shops are where you can smoke pot, and everyone knows that. If you want actual coffee, you have to go to a cafe. The number of coffee shops in Amsterdam has gone from over 400 to about 250, and only 9% of the actual population smokes it. The rest is just tourists. The prostitutes have some sort of weird union. Also, the Dutch people are the tallest people in the world. Then we just learned a whole bunch of stuff depending on where we were... like about Anne Frank and a lot of random stories about urination that you probably wouldn't hear on a tour not led by grad students. For example, there are these green things all over the city - they're public male urinals. But back in the 70s, women decided they were tired of having to pay for the toilets and they demanded their own public urinals. The city didn't agree, so a whole bunch of women went to the biggest bridge in the city, hiked up their skirts at the same time, squatted down, and peed all over it. They told the city that if they didn't get public urinals, they would do it on every bridge in Amsterdam - and there are over a thousand bridges. The city gave in, but it still didn't work out because that was back when heroin was big and the junkies would go get high in there and sometimes assault the women who came to use the bathroom.
Now they advertise concerts and things like that.
After the walking tour, we went to the Heineken Experience and learned how they make beer and stuff like that. It was fun. They had kareoke games and pictures machines and a sort of ride. The sort of ride reminded me of the sort of ride in Jurassic Park in the science lab.
We went back to the grocery. I got little premade weiners and that cheese that sorts with the word "Port" and ends in another words that costs like 8$ at home. Here it was less than 2€! We pubcrawled that night and spent most of it with these really nice German guys we'd met on the walking tour. There was this crazy Romanian guy named Alexander (Aleksandar?) - that's relevant, I promise. The crawl was a lot of fun. We danced a bunch and Renee found a French man and we both got t-shirts.
The next morning I went to the Van Gogh museum alone. It was pretty spectacular. The third floor had UNEXPECTED ODEON'S! Nothing of his really strange stuff, but still fantastic!
I went to meet Renee and she was a little late so I got Burger King. I had really been craving a burger... but it didn't taste like anything and wasn't very good. So we're sitting inside and the Romanian guy walks up and we end up eating with him. It turns out he's not crazy when he's sober.
We ran into people we've seen everywhere. People from Renee's Barcelona hostel were in our Amsterdam one. We ran into people in the Heineken museum. We ran into people on the Munich trains. The idea that Florence is really small has changed into, Europe is really small.
Oh my gosh, a whale couldn't fit this entry into his stomach.
When I was done eating, Renee and I went to the Anne Frank house. They kept it exactly like it was. The Nazis removed the furniture, so there's no furniture. Anne pasted these pictures all over her walls, and they're still there. It was really moving and I almost bawled. There were videos of her father and her best friend talking about what Anne was like. It was really incredible.
Bought dinner from the grocery again. This time I found HUMMUS! It was Sabra brand too! They don't have this stuff in Florence! (Which, btw, is really weird to me, since Italy occupied Greece for a while... why is there so little Greek food?) So I ate hummus with little weiners and it was the best idea I've ever had. We hopped on our night trian to Munich, which was super comfy, and when I woke up I had hummus and croissants. It was such a luxury.
I also drank like 2 cartons of Tropicana orange juice in Amsterdam. So many things that I can't have here! It was so fantastic!
We went to sleep in the Netherlands and woke up in Germany. And surprise... Freak Snow Fall! It's very unusual to have snow this time of year in Germany, according to a nice German man who looked like Robin Williams. We went to the castles of Hohenschwangau and Neuschwanstein. Neuschwanstein was built by King Ludwig II of Bavaria and it was the castle Disney based the Cinderella castle off of. Or Sleeping Beauty's, but I think it's Cinderella's. We met five American moms and they were so nice! We stayed with them all day. It was such a comfort to be with American moms! One of them gave us crackers lol. We talked a lot and had such a good time. Neuschwanstein was pretty cool. You have to buy guided tours, and they kind of suck, but the castle made up for it.
It started snowing SO HARD as we tried to leave. I was just covered in white.
We went to the Hoffbrahaus for dinner. It's a big beer hall .Renee got these white sausages that you peel the skin off of and eat with spicy and sweet mustard. I got four frankenfurtters and egg noodles. It was pretty good. I liked her's better and she liked mine better. The sweet mustard tasted like a mild version of wasabi to me.
Sunday morning we went on another free walking tour. We learned a lot. For example, the Hoffbrahaus was the home of the Nazi movement. It's where Hitler gave his first speech to the NSDAP. It's a smaller hall on the 3rd floor. The house doesn't advertise it at all. Munich doesn't advertise it's involvement in the war at all. It didn't even want to be part of it. On November 9th, 1923 the Bavarian leaders gathered together in a beer hall (I think still the Hoffbrahaus, but the guide was a little confusing) and discussed separating from the rest of Germany and becoming it's own country. It could totally do this - it's rich, has all the culture (any typical German culture you can think of... that's Bavarian) and it has a constitution already prepared for the the day they do decided to separate. However, Hitler found out about the meeting to discuss separation and he tried to take over, because if Bavaria separated, how could he ever spread the Nazi message to the other German states? This is when he failed and was sent to prison, but think of how different it could have been if Bavaria had succeeded. We also learned a lot about biergartens and culture in general. It was really interesting, and we ran into our moms again! We wanted to go to dinner with them, but they were leaving that day for the Black Forest.
Immediately after the tour, we went to the concentration camp of Dachau. It was cold, but after a while I stopped thinking about that, because what is it to be cold in three layers of clothing when so many more were significantly colder than I? I couldn't decide if it was more inappropriate to take pictures or more inappropriate not to take pictures, so I settled on a middling amount. I didn't want to make it look like I was ignoring history or something. Right as I was leaving, there was a woman bent down on the ground. She asked two people to help her find her glasses' lens. I and three other people heard her, and we all helped her look in the snow. It made me feel nice to know that even though thousands suffered and died there, people could still be kind.
That night for dinner we went to a different bierhall - the Augustiner van Stuben, or something like that. It was less touristy and more delicious. I got a soup with beef balls and handmade swabian ravioli plus a mixed plate. It was a giant delicious potato ball, a sort of hamburger thing that was really tender, a pork chop, and a mushroom cream sauce. OH MAN it was so good. I ate every last bite.
Last night I fell asleep in Germany and woke up in Italy. I've been gone so long (at least it feels that way) and I had to struggle to remember all the Italian I know. Amsterdam and Munich were absolutely beautiful and I could have spent a much longer time there. I wish I could go back. Maybe some day.
Traveling Europe the hostel way was really fun. We met so many cool people.
Last Note: The German word for Munich is "Munchen." So... does that make them Munchkins??
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