Dansk Musik

Wow, I just realized that this blog has been in travel mode for the past three weeks... I'd say it's time to get back to Denmark and some of the things that have been going on here.

I think under the About Me section it says something about "music enthusiast" (who writes this cheesy stuff, anyways? Oh, wait...). Regardless, I do love me some music and have done my best to listen to some of the good stuff here. Below is a small playlist of some of the popular songs in Denmark. Also, I couldn't find Odd Collection on Grooveshark so I linked one of their videos below - I LOVE these guys, and have seen them perform a couple of times. If you like their sound, also check out PUAF //.

Dublin In Pictures

All my life, I have had this romantic vision of Ireland: it would be charming but not kitschy, clean but not pristine, rainy but not torrential, old but not deteriorating.  I don't want to be melodramatic or mislead you, but for me, all of my dreams came true.  I am in love with Dublin, Ireland, even though my time there was entirely too short.  Dublin was the last city that I visited while on my two week travel break, and despite all my best efforts to stay well-rested and energetic, we were all dragging when we arrived in Ireland.

I honestly don't know what to write about the city.  I'll just show you what I loved most.

I love the colorful doors on an otherwise boring brick building.  Also, blue is so much more original than red!

Sunset on the first day (blue skies!) 

Maybe aimed at tourists, but the band was a lot of fun

Nighttime view of the Samuel Beckett Bridge in the distance (right) and the Convention Centre Dublin (left)

Statue of William Conyngham Plunket, during the rain

View of the city from St. James Gate

Nollaig Shona Duit - "Happy Christmas to You" in Gaelic

Amsterdam's Finest Dining

Sometimes, I discover new things.  Occasionally, I really like these new things.  Rarely, these new things can be described as life-altering.

In Amsterdam, I discovered two such rare things.  People, meet Wok to Walk and Maoz.  W2W and Maoz, meet the people.

Wok to Walk is an ingenious Asian-inspired dining establishment, with one location handily positioned on the same street as my hostel (dangerous).  You have the ability to customize a dish - choosing the noodles/rice, meats, vegetables, and sauce - that is then cooked in front of you.  Just take a look at their menu and you'll see that this is the kind of place you can visit again and again to try out a variety of options.

Trust me.  I WOULD KNOW.

Wok to Walk is the place to be at 11 at night

And then there is Maoz.  Thankfully, there are currently Maoz locations in the States, namely on the East Coast and Berkeley, California.  The next time I get to D.C.... I will need my fix.  Maoz is a vegetarian falafel restauarant.  You choose to make either a salad or pita, and then have free reign over a salad bar loaded with different vegetables and salads.  Maybe this description doesn't do Maoz justice, but it's the best I can do.

Ohh, yeah.

I am seriously considering opening a Wok to Walk wherever I move after I graduate, just for a little money on the side.  I promise you it would be profitable.  Any potential business partners, just let me know.

Amsterdam, A Rapid-Fire City Tour

Look, I know that Amsterdam has a reputation for easy access to certain things.  I also know as well as you do that college students going to Amsterdam on a travel break are pretty transparent in their motivations.  What you may not know, though, is that there actually is a whole other city outside of the Red Light District!  And the city is beautiful, charming, friendly and cozy!  Sit down if you're feeling faint, I know it can be a bit shocking.

Possibly my biggest regret of my travel break is that I did not spend more time in the real city of Amsterdam, instead opting to sit in coffee shops and along the canals.  However, I did work in one solid, packed day of sightseeing, which was great.

After starting off a little later than expected, a friend and I went to the Anne Frank Huis on Prinsengracht.  Magically, we beat the lines, paid our €8.50, and started climbing the leg breaking stairs.  I wish that I could say that the Anne Frank Huis totally enhanced my perspective on the book, or was really touching.  It wasn't.  It is a place to say you have been, worth maybe €3 and a few pictures.  As is, pictures are not allowed and Otto Frank never wanted furniture placed in the house - it is therefore very hard to actually picture how the Franks lived when they were in hiding.

Exterior of the Anne Frank House

The one major positive of the Anne Frank House is its close proximity to a certain establishment.  No, not an "establishment" (get your mind out of the Red Light District) but a place that specializes in...

PANCAKES

Enter The Pancake Bakery, established in 1973.  With a three page, double columned, 18" long menu, baby, you've got options.  The Bakery is famous for it's "international pancakes," 18 sweet or savory pancakes with ingredients taken from the country that inspired the recipe.  For example, a Greek Pancake is filled with lamb gyros, tzatziki and a feta/olive salad, and a French Pancake has apple, raisins, vanilla ice cream, Cointreau and whipped cream.  These are not your Mama's pancakes (but Hi Mom, yours will always be my favorite).  I had a banana Nutella pancake, but I was with people who had the apple and cheese, the Egyptian and the Belgian.

That's a larger-than-normal sized plate...

Another cool part of the restaurant is that they put big pots of syrup on each table so you can heap on as much as you want.  The syrup was a cross between molasses and caramelized simple syrup.  Super fun to play with, as you can see.

Don't kill me

Refueled and refreshed, we started the trek over the to Van Gogh Museum.  Again, there are no pictures allowed - really cramping my style! - but trust me when I say that it was SO worth the time and money.  The permanent collection possesses more than 200 of Vincent Van Gogh's paintings, 500 of his drawings and more than 750 letters.  Also on display were some of Paul Gauguin's works.

Outside of the Van Gogh Museum are the famous I Amsterdam letters.  Yes, I took pictures.  No, they aren't cute.  Settle for a wide view of strangers struggling to climb! (Looking at you, white "a")

To wrap up the day, we went to the Heineken Brewery.  I do not want to say too much now, because I have plans for a future compare/contrast post about some of the breweries I have visited while being in Europe.  Suffice it to say: Heineken put a lot of money into creating a multimedia-focused, advertisement-laden museum/brewery.

Heineken Horsies! 

Requisite beer

I thoroughly enjoyed my time exploring the city of Amsterdam, and if I could go back, would see even more museums and real neighborhoods.  And eat more pancakes.

Amsterdam and Canals

Amsterdam has been called the Venice of the North on several occasions, a nickname referring to the numerous canals cutting through the city.  Spanning these canals are picturesque bridges, arching over the water and covered in small cobblestones, crossed by pedestrians and bikers alike.  Looking out from one of these bridges, you see narrow, long streets winding parallel to the canals, with houses along those car- and tree-lined roads.  Many of the buildings are from the late 15th and early 16th centuries, quirky and characteristically narrow.

This is the Amsterdam of fairytales and storybooks, still preserved and enjoyed today.

The streets are narrow, with buildings lining each side and sometimes literally leaning in towards the street.  Maybe people got the nickname wrong... some of these buildings make me feel like Amsterdam may be the Pisa of the north.

The buildings themselves have several architectural details that make them uniquely Amsterdam.  Normally, there are three or more floors above the ground floor in an canal house.  The floors are all linked by stairs that have been lovingly nicknamed "leg-breakers."  Why?  Due to space constraints, stairs have very little depth, which make for really steep staircases.  As a result, you end up hitting your shin on each step if you try to ascend the stairs normally.  Yeah, those bruises aren't going away any time soon.

The tops of buildings along the canals have gables.  A Dutch gable is an architectural detail at the top of the front of a building that hides the unattractive pitched roof behind and can be used to date a building.  For example, a "neck gable" tells that the building was constructed sometime between 1640-1790.

As a result of both the steep steps typical of canal houses and narrow hallways, many of today's modern necessities cannot be transported into apartments via staircases in Amsterdam.  People obviously are not going to do without their couches and widescreen TVs, and just as city dwellers of the 18th century were unwilling to do without their chairs and armoires.  That's where the gables begin to serve a purpose: if you look closely, you will see the hooks on beams that stick out from each gable.

Whenever it comes time to get rid of an old sofa or move in a new bed, a rope is slung through the hook.  From there, a good ol' pulley system comes in handy as the piece of furniture is literally hoisted through the air, up the front of the house, to the apartment.  I didn't get a picture of anything actually being lifted, so I'll redirect here.

 

Finally, let's talk about Amsterdam's slouchy houses.  Honestly, at first I thought they all just had bad posture!  Jokes, but really: many of the buildings along the canals lean to one side, into the building they are next to.  This is not because of faulty engineering; instead, it is because of the very ground the houses are built on.  The ground in Amsterdam is, for the most part, swampy and wet.  Houses were built on wooden piles that had been driven into the ground to support the weight of the buildings.  Over the years, any of the wood that stuck out above the ground rotted, and caused the houses to be weakened on one side.  So, simply:

Exposed wood --> Rot over time --> Saggy casa!

Fun fact - all of the houses except the one second from the left have the neck gables I was talking about before

Prague, It's What's for Dinner

In Denmark, the typical formation of a sandwich is open-faced, with some sort of spread and meat on top of a dark, dry, dense rye bread.  It is called a smørrebrød, which literally translates to butter and bread.  In Prague, my friend and I went exploring and discovered these delicious sandwich-things, which resemble the typical Danish smørrebrød.  One had some brie spread + brie + more cheese (heaven help the lactose intolerant) and another had potato salad, turkey and pickle.  All together, lunch cost a grand total of ~ $1.80.  Believe people when they tell you Prague is CHEAP. 

A typical dinner in Copenhagen for one person costs somewhere between $50 and $150.  If you really want to go all out, the world's best restaurant, Noma, is conveniently located in Copenhagen and offers a lovely seven course meal for around $1000.  In Prague, however, a meal at a normal restaurant goes for $5-$10.  Taking full advantage of the fact that I could actually afford to go out to eat in Prague, I wasted no time seeking out some real, authentic Czech food.  

Enter goulash.  And bread dumplings.  And Becherovka.  Goulash is your basic roast meat in a thick brown gravy, complete with some onions and paprika.  Bread dumplings may be the heaviest white bread concoction ever, created specifically to soak up some of the gravy and expand in your stomach to epic proportions.  Becherovka... well, according to Wikipedia it's "flavored with anise seed, cinnamon, and approximately 32 other herbs."  According to Ashley, it tastes like licorice pumpkin pie shots and BURNS going down.  The people I went to dinner were casually sipping it (sipping!) like an after dinner coffee, whereas I pawned mine off on a girl conveniently celebrating her 21st birthday (No, here's to you, Carrie).

Unlike many other cities, the market place is alive and well in Prague.  All of the days we were in the city, the main square near the clock tower was transformed into a bustling market place, selling baked goods, meats and mulled wine.  While it was fun to walk around the square and see what was being offered, it definitely was marketing towards tourists and prices were hiked up.  

How cute is this little future pyromaniac?! 

One morning, the three of us took off on an off-the-map adventure, following the advice of some locals who told us about a "real" market.  Supposedly, this was a home-grown farmers' market that was a good place for an unconventional lunch or some souvenirs.  After walking for over an hour, past the Prague Castle and into a working class Czech neighborhood, we found a small park with a square in the center.  There, more than 30 tents had been set up by locals who were selling everything you could imagine: fresh fish, fresh meat, home brewed wines, spice mixes, vegetables, cheeses... the list goes on.  I had a field day.

For the record, 13 Czech Koruny is 70¢.  How was I going to say no to a poppyseed roll?  I am Czech, after all.  And it was flaky and homemade. Alright, force me.

Prague, Where Religion Rules

Well, officially the Czech Republic is a parliamentary republic, but in Prague, it feels as if churches are the kings of every street and square.  I am not certain that there are enough saints in the book to name every church in Prague… after all, several were actually named after Jesus.

The Church of the Infant Jesus of Prague

Another notable church is St. Vitus Cathedral, mentioned before as part of the Prague Castle compound.  The interior is at once gothic and beautiful. 

The Strahov Monastery, or Strahovský Klášter, is a large monastery perched at the top of a large hill overlooking the Castle and the city below.  Founded in 1140, the Church of the Assumption lies within the walls (as does a brewery, but that’s another story). 

Prague also has a good-sized Jewish Quarter that receives many visitors each year.  The Old-New Synagogue, or Staronová Synagoga, is the oldest preserved synagogue in Central Europe, dating back to the 13^th century.

I was walking through the streets on Wednesday when I literally stumbled upon the crazy-bright Jerusalem Synagogue, or Jeruzalémská Synagoga.  Hidden along a side street, I do not even see it on the (overloaded) tourist map I picked up.  The outside is fascinatingly decorated, because many of the arches and striped designs are more reminiscent of Islamic décor.  The sign said that the synagogue had closed until next April – kind of a bummer, because given the exterior I can only imagine what the inside looks like.

Many of the churches and synagogues in Prague either charge a fee to walk inside or strictly forbid photography.  For that reason, I only have one contraband picture from the Infant Jesus of Prague, shown above… Should I have declared that in customs?   

Prague the Pretty (Packed)

Interesting the difference 250 miles can make.  Berlin feels like a western European city, resembling London or New York in many ways.  English is routinely spoken, and foods like schnitzel and sausages are familiar.  Prague, however, is another place entirely.

One of my friends said that Prague felt like a fairytale land, and with backlit churches and brightly colored buildings with red roofs, I can see how she felt that way. 

Whereas many European cities have been overhauled, rebuilt and reorganized, Prague maintains the same street pattern it had in medieval times.  This means that whereas a map will say, “Oh yes, Kanovnicka goes straight for a good 0,3 kilometers,” in reality you have to twist and turn at least three times, choosing whether to go left or right to stay on the street.  Still, it is worth the confusion and searching to find some of Prague’s well-preserved sights. 

The astronomical tower, or Staromestská Orlojem, was created in the 15^th century.  Between the hours of 9 a.m. and 9 p.m., the 12 apostles circle around the clock.  The tower has a combination of a calendar board containing zodiac signs and an analogue clock. 

The Prague Castle, or Pražský Hrad, was founded in the 9^th century and has been developing continuously for the past 11 centuries.  There are several different parts to the compound, not the least of which are the large entrance gate and St. Vitus Cathedral. 

The Charles Bridge, or Karlův Most, was founded in 1357 by Charles IV.  There are two huge towers on each side, and more than 30 Baroque sculptures line the bridge.  Rumor has it that during the construction of the bridge, eggs held much of the mortar together… feel safe, millions of tourists who make the trek across the footbridge each year.

Charles Bridge with the Prague Castle in the distance

My only complaint about Prague was how many tourists there were in the city.  It was almost impossible to go anywhere without people speaking English and talking loudly.  Still, night or day, crowded or empty, the city is a sight to see.