The Netherlands

We stayed in The Hague in The Netherlands, which (random fact) is actually the capital of the country.

The hotel was the nicest we stayed in, one of the cheapest, and it even included breakfast. I missed this hotel (a lot) when we moved on to our London hotel...but I'll get to that in the London post.

We only had one day in The Netherlands, but we made the most of it. We started out our day in Delft, which I would describe as the quintessential Dutch town. It has quaint narrow streets with little shops, canals with bridges arched over them and houses built right on the canals with doorsteps just a couple inches above the water level.

I'm thinking these people deal with regular floods...

This is Jason and I in the Delft city center with the "new church" in the background.

We were going to the Royal Delft factory (on foot) and got caught in a sudden rainstorm, so we ducked under a tree and I took this picture to memorialize it. I'm pretty sure that's one of the buildings of the university in Delft.

We started our tour of the Royal Delft factory and learned how the pottery is made. Royal Delft has been around since 1653, but only acquired the "royal" part of its name in the past century when it was granted the title by the Dutch royal family. You can check out the Royal Delft website if you'd like to see the kind of pottery they make.

As part of our tour, we got to see a painter who was hand painting a piece of Royal Delft pottery. I thought it was pretty amazing that in 2013, they still hand paint pottery. I guess that explains the price... If the painter makes a single mistake, the piece is ruined and can only be sold as a "second", which is noted by taking a chip out of the maker's mark on the bottom of the piece of pottery.

Taking the factory tour at Royal Delft literally means that you get to tour the factory. We were on a self-guided tour and simply told to "stay within the yellow lines". Pretty trusting, considering the factory is filled with expensive pottery.

This shows the progression a piece of pottery goes through before it's ready to be sold.

Here you can see pottery in various stages of drying.

And this is where they store all the molds for making the pottery.

This is us outside the factory. In Delft, it had finally cooled down below 90 for the first time on our trip (not an exaggeration), so I was able to pull out the long sleeves and cardigans I had packed and that were taking up precious space in my backpack!

Royal Delft has been in this factory since about 1900. Before it was known by the name Royal Delft, it was called "De Porceleyne Fles", which you can see on the front of the building.

We left the factory and stopped by one of the larger canals in Delft to take a picture.

We hopped on a train in Delft and decided to go to Amsterdam...because...we felt like we should at least be able to say we were in Amsterdam. We walked around a big block near the train station and saw lots of interesting things, including a shop that sold "magic mushrooms". We decided it was best to keep moving past that shop...

This is pretty much the only picture we took.

Just outside the central train station in Amsterdam, there was a bike parking ramp. I wonder what it's like when everyone gets off work in the evening and is trying to get their bike? Is it Amsterdam's version of a traffic jam?

Back in The Hague, we stopped by the International Court of Justice, housed in the "Peace Palace".

The building is celebrating it's 100th anniversary. Unfortunately, it's not really open to the average tourist, but the outside looks cool.

This is a church in the center of The Hague that we walked past to get back to our hotel.

And as we were leaving The Hague the next day, we had a little predawn walk through Chinatown.

We took an early morning train to the airport...and we were headed to London!

If you missed any of my previous posts, make sure you check out what we did in Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Munich, and Luxembourg!

Trier, Germany and Luxembourg

On our way from Munich to Luxembourg, we stopped in Trier, Germany for the afternoon. Trier is right on the Germany/Luxembourg border and was once an important Roman settlement.

We saw the Porta Nigra, or the "Black Gate", built by the Romans.

This is Jason standing in front of something built by the Romans that still stands today. Pretty cool, right?

And here I am with a cute elephant. Trier and Luxembourg both had these elephants all around the city center, each one decorated in a different way. We later learned from our friends that a business, group or individual will decorate the elephant, the elephants tour around the world, and then they're auctioned off for charity.

This is a picture of the city center in Trier. I don't think you can find a more picturesque German town than this one.

Besides having some really cool Roman structures, Trier is also known for being the birthplace of Karl Marx. Note Jason standing in the lower left of this picture. He refused to turn around for the picture.

This is a bridge originally built by the Romans and still in use today. While I'm hopeful work has been done on it to keep it structurally sound, it's amazing that it's being driven on by cars in the 21st century! 

Getting from Munich to Luxembourg is not the easiest trip. We had a couple different transfers and it was our longest train ride yet. 

But it's made much more difficult when you're trying to visit friends who live in a tiny village that no one working in train stations has ever heard of. 

And the person in the trip center at the train station can't understand very much English. And your German, while good enough to order food, understand billboards and read Harry Potter, is not adequate to explain that the automatic ticket/trip planner machines don't have your friend's village listed as an option. 

Ah, good times. 

 We made it to our wonderful hosts' home, the Hurst family, (with yet another train transfer between Trier and the village) and were met by them at the train station. 

We had a fabulous home-cooked dinner (with at least 5 different types of meat- Jason was excited) that tasted WAY better than any of the food we'd had so far on the trip.

We stayed up much later than we were used to because who wants to go to sleep when you can talk to friends you only see once every few years? 

And the next day, we had the best tour guides in all of Luxembourg.

We saw the castle at Vianden...

That we rode up to in a chair lift because who really wants to walk all the way up that hill? 

Those two girls are Moira and Megan Hurst. For those of you who don't know, I met Megan and Moira when I went to Luxembourg on a missions trip in 2005. We've kept in touch and visited each other and Megan was even the maid of honor in my wedding.

This is us with the castle in the background...

Me with Megan (left) and Moira (right). 

Of course we had to try out the stocks in the castle. 

I think Jason looks pretty comfortable there.

We left the castle, had lunch, and then drove to Luxembourg (the city). Megan and Moira showed us around and pointed out their favorite places to get macaroons, ice cream, coffee and hang out with friends. It made me wish we had a "city center" to hang out in...but we really don't have anything comparable. 

Luxembourg has a royal family...not a king/queen, but a grand duke. This is Jason and I in front of the palace.

Jason and I with part of the city of Luxembourg in the background.

Megan, Moira and I.

Jason actually took good pictures with me in Luxembourg...I think it was because there were other people with us and he didn't want to make a fuss! Megan and Moira, you should have traveled with us the whole time! 

We stopped by the American cemetery in Luxembourg and walked through the graves a little bit. It's amazing how immaculate the cemetery is...the grass is absolutely perfect, the crosses are completely white...it's incredible.

General George Patton, a famous WWII general, is buried in Luxembourg.

Later that evening, Jason and I went for a walk along the Mosel river (forms part of the border between Luxembourg and Germany) with Megan and her dad, Graham. There are vineyards planted all along the banks of the river...this is a picture of a cluster of grapes.

This is Jason and I standing in front of a vineyard, with more vineyards in the background. The river is down in the valley somewhere.

The next day, Sunday, we went to church with Megan and her mom, Cecille, and I was able to see a few of the people, including the pastor and his wife, whom I've kept in touch with over the years.

We had a quick lunch with the Hursts and then Megan and Moira took us to the train station. It was so hard to say goodbye...but we were off to more adventures in The Netherlands!

Munich, Germany

Muenchen, as it's known in German.

We spent our time on the day we arrived at the Dachau concentration camp which is about a 20 minute train ride outside of Munich.

It was hot and we had (thankfully) locked our backpacks in a locker in the train station. 

So, Jason acted as our camel. Note the water bottles in his pockets.

What a good sport! 

Going to Dachau was by far the most educational part of our trip...and also the saddest. Seeing where thousands of people lived, worked and died made all those history classes seem so much more real than a textbook ever did.

This first set of pictures is pretty depressing...but I promise the next set is much happier. So, bear with me (or at least scroll down) and I promise it gets better.

At the entrance to the camp is the famous quote "arbeit macht frei"..."work will make you free". 

Once inside the gate, there is a huge open space where the guards used to make the prisoners line up for a type of roll call every morning, in all weather conditions, sometimes for hours on end.

This building was kind of the "nerve center" of camp, it's where the guards would stay and it was through the gate on this building (the "arbeit macht frei" gate) that the prisoners would march when entering the camp. 

This room was where the prisoners were forced to strip and shower upon entering the camp.

This was part of the wall surrounding the camp...obviously has not been maintained.

These foundations, filled with gravel, outline where the barracks used to be that housed the prisoners.

This is a guard tower, not that dissimilar from what you would see surrounding a prison today.

A ditch like this ran all the way around the camp and would have had at least some amount of water and sludge/mud in it. If a prisoner got too close, they would be shot. Reportedly, some prisoners would purposely run into this area to end their suffering.

This was an execution range. The small trench in the foreground was used for blood drainage.

The crematorium.

This is a bathroom inside the barracks prisoners would have lived in. So much for privacy.

Imagine sleeping in bunks like these...

This is Jason walking down a hallway...the doors off either side are small cells that would hold "special" prisoners or prisoners who were being punished with isolation for some reason.

Ok, enough with the sad concentration camp pictures. I'm incredibly glad we went, but I was grateful for the happier things we saw during the rest of our time in Munich.

We found our hotel, just a couple of blocks from the train station. This was where we learned not to stay near train stations...we had to walk past a couple casinos, strip clubs and...ahem...adult stores to get to our hotel. 

This hotel was also the smallest we stayed in on our trip and the only one without a deadbolt lock.

It figures.

So this is me showing just how small the "closet" was in our room.

I'm not sure what you could fit in this closet...but it certainly wasn't a useful size. 

The next day we went to see Munich's famous Glockenspiel that's built into the "new" city hall. 

"New" in Munich meant that the building was over 150 years old. In the States, that might mean the building's on the National Registry of Historic Places! And we certainly wouldn't call it "new".

This is the Glockenspiel. The figures move around the music a couple of times a day. A huge crowd gathers and everyone oohs and aahs. 

Next we went just down the street to the Frauenkirche where Jason, who has a thing for clocks, found a gigantic grandfather clock.

There's a black footprint in the church that's purportedly the devil's footprint. If you are standing in this footprint, you can't see any windows in the church other than the one in the front, which was covered with a screen at the time the footprint was made a couple of centuries ago. The devil was gleeful that there was no light in the church, but then took another step and realized there was light flooding into the church from windows he didn't see at his previous step. And he stormed out of the church with such force that he created a wind, and that's why there is always a wind whistling around the church towers. 

So, this is probably the worst "important" picture that we took on the trip. Not only was I not smiling, Jason didn't zoom in very well and he got the camera strap in the picture.

Great. 

Well, at least the story's good.

These are the towers of the church, the far one was under construction, so that's the shielding you see in the picture.

We walked to another outdoor food market,  though it wasn't as big or as good as the one in Vienna.

And then we hopped on the subway and toured the Olympic Stadium. You can see it in the background of this picture...

This is a closer shot of it. Pretty cool, right?

And this is Jason and I standing under a random section of the structure. The picture above is the main stadium, but this little part we're standing under wasn't housing a stadium...it was just hanging out.

We went to the top of the Olympic Tower and had a great view of the city. We were right next door to BMW headquarters (the tall building) and the museum (with the giant logo on top).

And this is us on the tower.

It was another hot day, so we shared a blueberry slushy. 

And promptly got brain freeze and blue tongues. 

We walked over the BMW World, where the company displays all its latest prototypes and technologies. 

May I just say, they have some pretty awesome stuff.

And the building that houses it all isn't bad either.

I got to sit in a Mini Cooper. Jason didn't want to because it wasn't a "guy" car.

But he was willing to pose with this one, a prototype they had on display.

To cap off our day, we went to the English Gardens. 

I had no idea Munich was such a surfing hot spot.

The surfers all hang out and wait for their turn on the rapids formed when this river goes under a bridge. 

They attracted quite a crowd.

We had to stop for one of our regular iPad map checks on our way back to finding the city center and our hotel.

 And this cool building (not sure what it is) was across the street from where we stopped to check the map.

And so ends our time in another city in Europe. Next up, Luxembourg!