I've covered a fair bit of ground since I last posted, all the places listed in the title in fact.
Rotterdam is a very cool city, many interesting new buildings although they do seem to love the rather naff Euromast a but too much. I went on a boat tour of the harbour (Europe's largest) which was good but rather windy.
Amsterdam was a fun place, when I arrived on Friday the whole place seemed to be full of English tourists which wasn't great. But I met some cool people at the hostel (where I think I got bitten by bedbugs). I went to the Hague on Saturday, the sun was shining so I headed north a bit to the beach for the afternoon - a week later the thought of sitting on a beach seems bizarre since it's so cold and wet.
Cologne has a big Dom, they love it, they put the outline of those two towers on everything. Apart from the Dom, there isn't much else there.
Frankfurt is Europe's Manhatten apparently. There are some tall buildings there but I think it's rather a generous comparison. For a big city it still felt like quite a small town. While I was staying in Frankfurt I did a daytrip to Heidelberg, it's very pretty apart from the area around the train station, which wasn't a great first impression. The castle there was pretty impressive but they bizarrely out a museum of German Pharmacies inside, not sure what the link is between old castle and the chemists.
Bremen is very small but it's the home of the Becks brewery which do tours. They don't actually drink Becks in Bremen, they have their own local version Hakke Becks, which we got to try in the rather generous tasting room at the brewery.
Hamburg is probably a really interesting place, shame I didn't see much of it. I ended up spending too much time trying to find somewhere to stay the second night as it was a German holiday - Reunification day so everywhere was full. Of course everything was also shut on the second day as well as they all celebrated, so I didn't see many sites. I did see their parade, which was lame and each German state had a tent and beer hut and they all raced eachother in dragon boats, Saarland won.
Berlin's a really cool place. So far I did a tour which covered all the major sights and went over a lot of the history. Today I went to the Sachenhausen concentration camp, which was an interesting experience.
In a couple of days I'm off to Leipzig then Prague for a few days.
Monday, 6 October 2008
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