Volume 4: Pete in Europe Part 9. A young balding mans journey through 10 countries and back
Day 20 – Lucerne to St Goar
This morning Aalok was 2,099 metres down the 2,100 metres of Mt Pilatus on the train when he realised he’d left his money belt and passport in our hotel room. He did well to contain the panic that’s sure to come from realising your passport is missing, and that you’ve just happened to have lost it on a Mountain where there’s only two ways up and that each is a one hour return journey increasing the chance of the tour bus leaving you behind. Thankfully, the hotel staff had discovered it in our room and had it sent it down on the next train meaning only a delay of 30 minutes. No one was too fussed by the delay, the first for the tour, and while we waited we sweated out 19 days of alcohol by playing soccer in the car park.
Whilst on a somewhat lengthy drive to St Goar I couldn’t help but notice that Germans should never be late for an appointment, they drive so damn fast. The good old days of the autobahn, where you could attempt to brake the sound barrier in your Datsun 180B, are gone with the speed limit now set somewhere in the vicinity of 130kph. That 130kph is seen by the Germans as a guide only and most drive like they are trying to outpace a low flying jet aircraft.
For lunch today we all enjoyed some of the local cuisine. It was a small restaurant, with big golden arches out the front, which served things called “Big Macs”, “Cheeseburgers” and some sort of potato fried in France. It was the first time I’d eaten at McDonalds all tour which was a run I was pretty happy with, but I had embraced enough local culture and found it was time to taste a little of home.
We reached the small town of St Goar in the afternoon, where we enjoyed a nice cruise on the Rhine. Todd B and I originally estimated it to be a 2 beer cruise, but as it turned out it was 3 beers long. It was a pleasant ride as we enjoyed a cigar and a few beers looking at the many castles that lined the hills surrounding the Rhine. There were so many castles I can say with good confidence that I’m sure the local homeless people of the region would have lived in cardboard castles. An interesting fact learned on the cruise while listening to the commentary was that there was a building in the hills that was a church at the front and had a bar at the back. In fact, after service the priest would nip around to the back and serve the patrons. I tell you this, it’s the closet I’ve ever been to joining a major organised religion and it’s the closet thing to a sign from god to me saying he wants me on his team.
Before dinner we did a “tour” of the Montag beerstein and knife center, which by coincidence just happened to be owned by the same guy who owned the hotel and the teddy bear store. It was there I discovered a 35 litre stein built to hail a beer king who according to legend could drink an entire barrel of beer in one sitting. The respect I felt towards that beer king was similar to another famous king from history, Dr Martin Luther King. It was from the Montag beerstein and knife center I purchased a 125 euro stein with a piece of the Berlin Wall on it, which I was informed was limited to only 5,000 (probably a day). Fellow tourers questioned whether the piece of the wall was real, but I told them you could tell it was from the wall because it had real blood on it. The guy giving the “tour” also banged on about the great teddy bear controversy, where to this day the Americans claim to have invented it, while the Germans say they invented it. Naturally, the Americans on tour said it was them, with the bear named after Teddy Roosevelt, while I sat back and found the discussion as about as interesting as a small freckle on my left butt cheek.
After dinner I found Todd B sitting at the hotel bar with a look of disgust on his face. When he told me to taste the beer he had just purchased I understood why. My natural response was to say aloud “No wonder they lost the war”. It was after that I decided to stop mentioning the war in Germany, as I hate it when people give me a hard time about my football team losing Grand Finals, which I figure is a similar feeling.
After that horrible experience, we partook in another, at some wine testing in some small underground winery (the building was located underground, they didn’t sell their product on the underground black market). The 4 samples of white we were offered somehow managed to each taste worse then the previous one. When I got to the last sample, which tasted like something that had left one of the exit holes of a diabetic cat, I was left with no other option but to say “Ein wine is da shisen”.
After that delightful experience, we headed down to the river where there looked like some sort of festival underway. To make this the greatest tour ever, it turned out it was a wine festival. We did a few shots of something extracted from the Apollo 13 fuel tanks and then sat by the river and watched a great fireworks show. At the time, the wine festival wasn’t pumping enough for us, so a large number of people went off to bed, while a handful of us went looking for a pub. It was around 11pm at the time and we were disappointed to find all establishments were closed. Left with no other option for alcohol fuelled madness, we headed back to the wine festival where I thought it was going to end with a quite, early night, just as I thought when I entered the small town. How wrong that assumption turned out to be!
Like everything else on tour, it turned out to be better than anyone could expect. It was night a handful of us knew we would talk about whenever we met again post tour. It was a night I would tell people about when I got back home and receive a “so what stare?”, which was disappointing given that I thought it was one of the weirdest and funniest nights of my life. All tour when I had heard a techno beat in a song, I had tried to replicate it through human beat boxing. It was after a few bottles of wine, and after the band had left the stage after their first set, that my fellow tourers egged me on to grab the mike and start beat boxing. As it was raining, and everyone had gathered undercover on the stage, the short walk to the mike proved to tempting. I switched the mike on and then proceeded to confuse and entertain the locals through my unique beat boxing skills. The funniest thing was a few locals in their early 20’s who started bopping their head in time with the beat and in approval. I then proceeded to work the crowd with “Anyone from Deutschland in the house!?!”, “Anyone from St Goar in the house!?!”, before finishing with “Danke sehr St Goar!”. The band came back a little early from their break, and with a look of surprise and fear in their eyes, but welcomed us all to sing along with the rest of the songs. Mojo ceased the occasion and sung a solo song while the band played for her. We spent the night singing and talking to the locals, with some fine woman named Martina buying us wine. I caught up with the lads who had been bopping along to my solo and we got talking about the tours next stop in Amsterdam. They informed me the coffee house to go to was called “Pink Floyd” and while there I should sample some of the local product called “Silver Daze”. I was now starting to feel like a bastard for mentioning the war so much as the German people had been nothing but friendly in welcoming us into their country. During the night yet another picture of me with head in Mojos breasts was taken. I could just see her showing her pictures when she got home: “This is a picture of Pete’s head in my breasts at St Goar, here in Munich, and here again in Lucerne…”. I got so drunk that night I was ordering wine in Italian.
For some reason we left the festival that night, I can’t remember why, and headed back to my room. When it appeared to everyone in my room I was about to fall asleep, they politely left at which time my head crashed onto a pillow and I drifted off for a pleasant nights sleep.
Day 21 – St Goar to Amsterdam
Today we would make our drive to Amsterdam, a city that prides itself on tolerance of everything. It was that tolerance that would lead to me learning the Dutch word for “shithole”. That word is “Amsterdam”. Okay, that’s a bit harsh as there are some nice areas of Amsterdam, but my first impression of Amsterdam was the red light district. Apparently the locals hate it and you can’t blame them. Fat, bald, stoned tourists looking for 50 euros of loving is ugly. That last sentence basically sums up the red light district and I’m sure can be found in literature prepared by the Amsterdam tourist commission. For the first time since Paris I had actually felt unsafe when walking the red light district. There’s just something unsettling about the smell of ganga coming out of every second store and guys on every second street corner asking if you’d like Coke (I’m tipping they were talking about the drug because none of them asked me if I wanted a Pepsi).
After a reasonably long drive we made it to our hotel, situated some distance out of the city centre (was usually drunk when I entered or exited the city so I can’t give a distance, all I know was that it was around 30 euros by taxi).
Our first real taste of Dutch culture was spent at a cheese and clog making tutorial in a small shop. I had constantly misheard our tour manager talking about the tour beforehand and thought that we were going to see a cheese and clock making session. For some reason I was somewhat disappointed, but I’m sure not as disappointed as the girls who had misheard the tour manager say cheese and cock making (not that I can imagine a cock making lesson, which I suppose would include an egg or freshly hatched rooster).
My time spent in the city that night also showed the Dutch hadn’t learnt the main concept with fast food is the fast bit. A few of the people I choose to hang with that night ordered the traditional Dutch meal of fries and mayonnaise. The time it took for people to get served led me to believe that they were actually waiting for the potatoes to develop from a seed into a fully matured potato, at which time they were removed from the garden at the back of the store, peeled, fried and served with mayonnaise. Apparently the Dutch approach to tolerance extends to toppings on fried food.
After dinner at the hotel, 36 of the group consented to go and see some traditional Dutch entertainment; namely a live sex show. As I had participated in every other activity on tour with great gusto, I don’t know why I was so surprised to find myself dragged onto the stage to be part of the act. I was pulled onto to stage with my adopted brother of the tour, Todd B (or I should say in his case, he jumped onto to stage), along with fellow tourer Glenn and some local I hadn’t had the privilege to meet before we found ourselves on stage dancing with a half naked woman. Her show concluded with all of has having to take a bite of a banana being held in a certain part of her anatomy (yes, the part of the body you are now thinking of). This made me a little nervous, not because I was having a “banana split”, but I’d heard my mother was allergic to bananas and I only wanted one part of my body to swell that night, not the whole thing. Thankfully I discovered I don’t suffer from the same allergy, not that being on stage as part of a live sex show is the ideal place to learn such a thing. The highlight of the show for me was watching some guy dressed as Batman being pleasured by some woman who looked liked she enjoyed the experience as much as working a normal 9 to 5 job. I would’ve asked her how she was feeling but her mouth was full for the duration of the act. It also got me thinking about whether she was in some sort of union. You could just imagine their protest chants: “What do we want? Less blowjobs! When do we want it? NOW!”. As I watched the cape crusader receive thanks for rescuing a maiden in distress, Bear turned and seeing me with a grin from ear to ear asked me what I was thinking about. I calmly told her I was thinking of doing my taxes. To cap what was already a weird night, the MC came over on the speakers and said “Quiet please Contiki”. If the guy had followed that with “New balls” I would’ve thought I was at the tennis. Apparently these live sex show places have important audience standards they like to keep while two people are on stage fucking each other.
After the traditional Dutch show, we went to a traditional Dutch museum; the Erotic museum. Which of course, turned out to be very educational and bought back memories of school excursions to museums. We decided to start at the top floor of the museum and work our way down to the ground floor. While that seemed like a good idea initially, it was soon proven to be a bad choice. When we first arrived on the top floor, my little group were the only people there. After everyone in my group cracked up laughing at something happening behind me, I was soon pointed by Bear in the direction of a fine fellow who had chosen to privilege us with his company by whacking off in the corner while talking on the phone. Myself, I’d never found the phone service which tells you the time of day that exciting, but each to his own. I greeted this fine fellow with something along the lines of “Oh my god, that’s f#*king disgusting”.
That night we also went to the Bulldog coffee shop, which much like all the other coffee shops in Amsterdam didn’t appear to be selling much coffee. The Bulldog is the equivalent to any of the big US franchises, with Bulldog coffee shops all over the city. We all enjoyed some of the “local product” that night, which also turned out to be the quietest night of the tour by no coincidence.
After the “coffee”, a small group of us decided we wanted to go to a club. Aalok, as the unofficial nite spot tour manager, suggested a place called “Escape”. I should have known something would go down that night when all the patrons were forced to go through a metal detector at the entrance. As a rapper from south central Los Angeles would say, the “da sh#t went down” at about 1:30am when about 150 cops raided the place. From there on there would be no music, no drinks, and no hope of getting out inside of 1 and half hours. The DJ was originally speaking in Dutch, then finally in English said “Anyone who is foreign, don’t freak out”. To make things worse, a lot of the people I was with still had their “local product” with them from the coffee shop. The “local product” had made Brad H paranoid (and had given him the gift of the gab, or to put it more bluntly, the ability to talk a lot of annoying sh#t that eventually pissed me off to the point that I told him to “shut the f#*k up” in no uncertain terms in the taxi ride home) and he was starting to freak out about his “local product”. Essentially every one that night dropped their “local product” onto the floor. It was a night when the cleaner would’ve got higher than a low orbiting satellite. The problem for Todd B was that he also had a small chest ring in a similar small bag in his pocket and accidentally dropped that on the floor instead of his local product. Surrounded by cops, who I’m sure were in possession of surgical gloves enabling them to do body cavity searches, he was naturally apprehensive about picking up his chest ring from a floor that was now covered in about two inches of the “local product”. Bear, who must have been filled with the false confidence that comes from sampling the “local product”, eventually picked up the ring for Todd B.
After taking 1 and half hours to move the 10 metres to reach the exit, I was relieved to feel the fresh air on my face again and to not be surrounded by hundreds of people I’d never met who I’m sure would have been more than happy to put their “local product” or more hard “imported product” into my pockets. The irony of taking 1 and half hours to escape a club called Escape had not escaped me. As AJ was someone who freaked out in confined spaces, we made sure we got her out well before the rest of us. So Bear and Nic (who along with AJ were best mates before the tour) were freaking out when they couldn’t find AJ when they got out of the club. As it turned out AJ had been taken upstairs for a chance to catch her breath and get a glass of water. When she returned to the ground floor the cops didn’t buy her story and sent her to the back of the queue. So as it turned out AJ was the last of us to escape Escape.
We eventually got back to the hotel at 4am at which time I promptly crashed into my bed and to sleep.
Day 22 – Amsterdam
After the drama of last night, I chose to sleep in after coming in so late that it was early and as such missed the bike ride through the Dutch countryside. Having only slept about 80 hours in the last 21 days it was hard to convince my body, in particular my ass that still had memories of the mountain bike ride in Hopfgarten, to get up before 9am. Besides, I enjoyed some extreme sports in the shower that morning as the floor was so slippery I had a number of near death experiences and chances to break various bones in my body.
Today most of us headed off in the morning to see Anne Frank’s house. She was originally born in Frankfurt in 1929 but her father had decided to move his family to Amsterdam as Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist party had begun to ramp up the anti Jewish rhetoric. When the Nazis, led by the brown eyed, brown haired, one testicle Charlie Chaplin wanna-be who according to his own “logic” should have exterminated himself as he was far from being part of the blue eyed, blonde hair, two testicle having Arian super race, occupied the Netherlands in 1940 they step by step drove the Jews into a corner. On July 6 1942, Otto Frank (Anne’s father) decided the only safe option for his family was to go into hiding in a secret annex above a warehouse in his office building. For 25 months the family hid in the annex with a number of other people, in which time Anne documented her thoughts in what is now a famous diary. Some asshole betrayed the hiding place and on August 4 1944 the people who were living there were deported to concentration camps. All but Otto Frank died in the concentration camps. In something that makes the whole story somehow more of a tragedy, Anne died just one month before her camp was liberated. Needless to say my tour group was quite and sombre as they tried to take the whole thing in.
After visiting the Anne Frank house, a small group of us walked aimlessly for a while before deciding to head for the one-eared-overrated-nut-bag museum (surprisingly not known to the greater community as “The one-eared-overrated-nut-bag museum”, but the known as “The Van Gogh Museum”). The walk thankfully took us far from the red light district and into a park where we decided to have breakfast, at 12:30pm. I decided to go with what was called a “traditional Dutch waffle”, as I hate the non-traditional Dutch waffle that turns its back on the proud history of the Dutch waffle. Even though the Dutch pride themselves on being able to speak a minimum of 25 languages, I was still surprised to see all the signs displayed by the vendors in the park all written in English.
After breakfast and my delightful traditional Dutch waffle, we made our way to the Van Gogh museum. Apparently Van Gogh in his youth worked as an art dealer with Goupil & Cie, where he worked in The Hague, London and Paris, coming daily into contact with diverse forms of artistic expression. It’s a shame he never seemed to learn anything from all that art he would’ve seen. In the museum I saw the “Sun Flowers” for at least my second time Europe, stared at it, and couldn’t help but think I’d vomited things more creative. Van Gogh was a bloke who seemed to have an obsession with painting empty chairs, which goes to explaining why he cut off his ear because he probably got sick of hearing people say “but it’s just a chair?!?”. I did, however, eventually find some Van Gogh paintings that I could tolerate, but couldn’t understand how a bloke who had no idea of depth perception and no ability to paint things in 3 dimensions could ever be considered great. A pretentious art critic will tell you that’s what makes him a genius, but it just reminds me of something you would see on the fridge of someone with young children who like to finger paint at kindergarten. At one place in the museum I saw a Rembrandt hanging next to a Van Gogh and couldn’t help but feel embarrassed for the Rembrandt family to have his great work hung next to something that didn’t even deserve to be put on someone’s fridge.
From the Van Gogh museum we rode a tram back to near our tour group meeting point for later in the day. In an attempt to feel like I was back in Melbourne, I was tempted to not pay for the ticket. Aalok and Brad H headed in one direction, while Mojo and I headed for some more learning; this time at the sex museum. Thankfully all the patrons had their pants in the upright position. An interesting fact about Amsterdam is that buildings are taxed on their width, which of course leads to people building tall skinny buildings. The problem you get with building tall skinny buildings is that there is no room for an elevator shaft and the stairs between floors would be better called ladders. This fact meant that few people in wheelchairs would have ever had the privilege of seeing the erotic and sex museums. The world’s a cruel place, first it takes their ability to use their legs, then takes their ability to become well educated individuals by removing any chance of them seeing the erotic and sex museums.
From there, Mojo and I went to “The Grasshopper” to sample some of the “local product”. On our way there we bumped into Todd B and Bear who had proudly purchased the local newspaper that had the raid on the Escape nightclub on the front page. 13 arrests had been made for possession of the “imported product”, with the club being shut down for at least a month. Disappointingly, we couldn’t see ourselves in the photo on the front page.
After dinner we headed for a cruise along the canals of Amsterdam. I took the liberty of trying to get my head into as many pictures as possible. I just love playing my own version of “Where’s Waldo”. Although, in my case its probably something along the lines of “Oh sh#t! Pete’s in picture again”. The free drinks on the cruise, mixed with the 2 “local products” I shared at the Grasshopper and the bottle of wine I polished off with Todd B on the balcony at the hotel before dinner, really started to kick in about the end of the cruise. After the cruise around half of us headed for a nearby bar, while the other half went back to the bar at the hotel. I chose to do the former as I wanted to spend my last night on continental Europe on the town. During the tour I had spent so much time with my head in Mojo’s breasts that I felt obligated to give them a name; “Thelma and Louise”. Tonight Mojo said I would not be getting better acquainted with Thelma and Louise that night as I had bruised them in over zealous forays into what was my happy place on tour.
The bar closed at around 1am, at which time we went back to the hotel and I crashed into my bed. Which turned out to be a bad thing as I missed out on the Helen and Sally catfight. Helen and Sally had come on the tour as friends and had intended to move in together after the tour. The boys on tour had tipped the fight would happen on the first day of the tour. Helen and Sally hadn’t been talking to each other for days and when one of them said something to the other as hostile as invading Poland, hair was pulled and drunken women were thrown across the room. This killed the mood of the night for those present, but for poor Brad H it also killed any chance of him hooking up with Helen. It didn’t, however, stop him from swapping spit with Paige. From what I heard of that night, Brad H had been trying his luck with everything that moved, and probably some things that didn’t.
While others got caught up in the emotions of it being their last night together and expressing those emotions in various ways, I slept. Apparently I was snoring so loud that people could hear me from outside the room. It was proof that I was in the room for Aalok (roommate in Amsterdam), but no matter how loud he knocked on the door I didn’t wake up. Which was a problem considering I was the one with the only key. Eventually he gave up, went down to reception and they let him into the room.
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