Gronau to Munster, or, Breaking and Entering to Cathedrals...

Hmmm… I wonder what he does in his spare time between crazy trips…

Here’s a little insight:

Most of the time I spend just chilling in Enschede, but every now and again I get up to something a little adventurous… Like when Samantha, Mhairi, and I broke into an abandoned factory in Gronau, a neighboring German town on may 6th.


It’s about a half hour or so bike ride, about 12km away, and there are a bunch of abandoned buildings and factories strewn about. In fact, a lot of Europe houses abandoned and ruined buildings. It’s neat.


Anyway, we rode out bikes there, and proceeded to climb through a hole in the fence, and explore said factory. The girls had been there before, and had chosen to return with their cameras in order to create some photographic art; including Samantha’s idea of gathering dead pigeons and immortalizing them forever on film. With the girls otherwise occupied, I brought along a couple cans of spray-paint (silver and gold) and my trusty digital camera. I would suggest watching the videos, as they are rather amusing…

I put up a decent signature piece, and slung about a bunch of random phrases and words in the very un-native-to-Germany English language. 


Samantha’s pigeon shots turned out excellently, and can be seen HERE





Once we had romped the whole thing, we biked back into Gronau, grabbed a pint and some pizza, and then biked back into the Netherlands.

The day after (May 6th), I took a solo trip deeper into Germany, to Munster, where I had been eight years previous on my first expedition to Europe. Lets go to my travel journal:


It’s been eight years since I’ve been here, and I remember it all being a lot bigger :P It’s funny, the things you remember and the things you don’t from eight years previous… I went to two big cathedrals in town, that I had also went to when I was younger.


The merchant’s cathedral and the Bishop’s cathedral (the one with the bitchin’ astronomical clock), and I remember things like the layout, the major features like the organs, and key architectural features (ie, in the merchants cathedral, the columns are spaced progressively closer inside as you look forward to give the illusion that it’s longer than it actually is), and the general feeling of being in a cathedral, but I had forgotten the size differences between the two, all the little sculptures that ornament them, all the shrines, and that amazing contemplative state of consciousness you slip into when you hold a place like that in any sort of reverence. (heh, I love run-on sentences) Oh, and I swiped a few postcards of the bishops cathedral on my way out (hey, I’m already going to Hell, what’s a few postcards at this point).



…Anyhoo, I kicked it around town for a bit, found a sweet military store where I bought a little metal regiment insignia for the WWII German army scouts… Don’t know whether I’ll put it on anything or not before I get home… I don’t know how well that will go over in some of the countries around here…

Stay tuned, as next you will hear of the harrowing adventure to Berlin!

Amsterdam on Queensday, or, The Word Of The Day Is Amazing

Ok. First off, to those of you who actually check up on my blog, sorry for not updating anything recently… I’ve been busy. However, I’m sure I’ll post about everything soon… In the meantime, let us travel back in time to April 30th, 2008, and my travel journal…

So, today I made that holy pilgrimage that every stoner dreams of making. Today I caught the train to Amsterdam.


And, it also happened to be Queensday… That’s the day that all the trade tariffs are lifted, people sell stuff in the streets, serve booze everywhere, party like mad, and about a million outsiders (not joking, usually about 700,000 to a million extra people), descend upon the city. It was fucking madness!!! Every street and alley was crammed with people (mostly in orange, for the Dutch Queen Mother). Music was blaring everywhere, techno, ethnic, and Dutch, both DJ’d and live.

Vendor stalls were also everywhere; everything from brand-name blowouts to flea-market/garage-sale stuff. Not wearing any orange (I even had a Dutch girl point and comment), and not possessing anything orange, I bought Samantha an orange boa, and myself an orange tie, so that we might blend with the native peoples…

The food was phenomenal! Every corner and crammed street had the most amazing deep-fried or waffle-style or other amazing delectable’s… Ate like a king! Booze was sold openly on the streets, so Samantha and I spent most of the time wandering with cans of Heineken in our hands

The city itself is so amazing; I don’t even know how to describe it… Crazy jam-packed tall buildings, all super-crooked, with wicked little alleys everywhere, and canals all about. The red light district was cool, with all the hookers in the windows, and everywhere you look in the city there’s another coffee-shop! The tourist stores were full of the most amazing touristy stuff (sooo need to back and grab people presents from there!).

We wandered for hours and hours… Eating, drinking, shopping, smoking like crazy, and just taking in the sights of Amsterdam on its craziest day of the year. I’ve never really experienced anything like it, or ever been in a crowd so large… Like, the entire city! There was a carnival set up in one of the squares, so we rode the ferris-wheel, and had an awesome romantic moment, with a birds-eye view of the festivities.

Hit up a couple coffee-shops, bought myself a gram of the best white-widow I’ve ever smoked. Ate more delicious foods, like these little pancake-waffle thingies coated in butter and icing sugar…

Finally, when our feet could take no more, we headed back to the train station, and trained over to Uitgeest (20 min or so), and I’m now writing this at Sam’s friend Jessica’s house, where we’re crashing for the night…

Now for day 2:

So, the second day at Amsterdam was equally awesome! We chilled at Jessica’s for a bit in the morning, then trained to Amsterdam. Spent another day just wandering around the city… Bought a few small gifts, and found out that butterfly knives are legal. Now I just have to figure out how to mail/get it home… We ate, we wandered (Oh yeah, I’m in love with poffertjes, those little doughy waffle things I mentioned earlier… The ones covered in butter icing sugar, and at our behest this time, Grand Marnier), and Dutch fries.

It was fun, but we lost steam at around 10ish, and though we didn’t want to leave, with a two and a half hour train ride in front of us, we grudgingly caught the train out. Oh, special mentions of the day go to Excalibur, probably my favorite bar there. Total H.A. bar, it was full of weaponry, armour, and motorcycles… The only place so far I’ve seen with a neon budwiser sign. The other special mention goes to the super-fat, bloated, after-festival pigeons… The ugly little fowl were so fucking bloated they could barely walk, and it was all Samantha and I could do to not attempt stompin’ on ‘em… It was a great two days, the word of which was amazing.

So yeah.  If there's one city that I've ever been to that I would insist you see, it's Amsterdam.