It was December of 2018 when, not even two months after moving to Germany, I decided to take a few days vacation before Christmas and do a short backpacking expedition. This whole trip was hastily cobbled together at the last minute; originally I was going to visit my parents over Christmas and stop in Amsterdam on the way, but when they told me I didn't need to visit since they're so out of the way for me now, I still wanted to drop by Amsterdam and so planned a different trip involving that city. I wanted to visit the UK and get some of that English brown ale I liked so much, and I knew that it was possible to ride a train through the Chunnel, and after learning that such a train ride would depart from Brussels, the itinerary became Amsterdam-Brussels-London. While buying the tickets I may have given the departure and arrival times some cursory glances, but was more interested in the prices, honestly. And it was my desire to be cheap that led me to get rooms in hostels, something I'd never done before.
So Saturday morning, December 15, I did one last weightlifting session at the gym, finished what little packing I hadn't done the night before, and started the trip. The long journey began not in any kind of vehicle but with me doing a ten-minute walk to the bus stop nearest to where I lived then. Bus to the nearest train station, and then a quick S-Bahn ride to Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof.
As much as I like train travel, I was still more used to flying at that point in time, and it's hard to shake the habit of getting to the station super early. I only needed to be there ten minutes before departure, really; there's no security lines or anything like that at a train station (for the vast majority of trains, that is; there are notable exceptions as we'll see in a couple of days). Instead I wound up standing in the cold for something like 20 minutes.
There would be a series of three trains to take me to Amsterdam, and the first one was a high-speed ICE train. Many of the bigger European countries have high-speed rail networks, and one of the biggest is Germany's ICE (InterCity Express), which connects all of the country's big metro areas and a few in neighboring countries. The first train ride was a short 50-minute ICE ride from Stuttgart to Mannheim. According to the display screens, the train was actually zooming along at 250 km/h at one point, which is about 150 mph.
After being deposited in Mannheim it was another short wait until my next train, which would spend over two hours carrying me to Köln (or Cologne as it's known in the English-speaking world). Now, this train was not an ICE or anything else high-speed; this was just a standard EC (EuroCity), which was little different from the trains run by Amtrak and NJ Transit back in the States. Interestingly, this train was operated by the Swiss national line SBB; according to its plan, its route that day started in Zürich, stopped in Basel, and then spent most of the rest of its route in Germany. There was a pair of railway-published travel magazines there by my seat which were of course in German and I flipped through them a bit. I should've kept them, since one had a lot of articles about Swiss ski resorts and I could've picked up some ski-related vocabulary that way.
After all that time spent chugging along on the EC, I finally stepped off at Köln to hop on the third and final train: another ICE whose final destination was Amsterdam Centraal. And unlike that first one, I'd spend another two hours in it. Overall, ICE is awesome, and it's the kind of train I only wish I could ride from San Antonio to Dallas, or up the California coast. Don't, however, make the mistake of thinking it always cruises at 250 km/h; anytime I saw the speed displayed on the Köln-Amsterdam train, it never got much higher than 150. (90 mph...that still blows the Coast Starlight's doors off) The seats were comfortable. The ride was pretty smooth. It has a bistro car, where you can go get something to drink or have a small meal, and this is where my only complaint lies. I looked at their menu and saw lots of appealing sandwiches and salads, but when I asked for one I was told that, when it came to food, they didn't have most of the stuff on the menu! Just two different kinds of pizza. That's not very common, though; I've ridden many more ICE trains in the year since then and their restaurants were better stocked.
During all these train rides, I brought along a book to read, a weighty tome I'd been recently slogging through, James Michener's "Iberia." It's a huge collection of travelogues, published in 1968, compiled from all the years the author spent living and traveling in Spain. I could write several pages about it, but that's a topic for another blog. All I'll say is that throughout all of this week's train and plane trips I knocked out something like a third of it--the chapters "Córdoba," "Las Marismas," "Sevilla," "Madrid," and about half of "Salamanca." Sometime soon I'll have to do my own Spanish travels and thanks to this book I have an idea of what I want to see.
The ICE pulled into Amsterdam sometime around 20:30, well after nightfall. I'd already been through Amsterdam once in 2013 and had seen nearly all there is to see, so my only plans were to have a light dinner somewhere in the station, hit up some bars and try some beer, then find my hostel. Dinner ended up being a chicken sandwich at Burger King. Then after escaping the sprawling train station I found myself on a pedestrian only street, Niuwendyk. A Dutch friend in San Antonio had once recommended I try a brew called Hertoch's Jan; sadly I couldn't find this in the places I went, and I asked for it. In the first bar I actually ended up having two Belgian abbey-brewed beers, Affligem Duppel and Affligem Trippel, as well as an Irish Coffee which has recently become my favorite liquor-based drink. At another bar I had some Amstel (not Light!). Then it was off to find the hostel, which wasn't quite easy.
Hostel Princess wasn't exactly in walking distance of Centraal station or Niuwendyk, where I had just been, so I got on the first tram I found that was going in the general direction. Trams in Amsterdam have a unique characteristic I have not seen elsewhere. Like many other trams, they're twice as long as a bus and can bend in the middle, but also in the middle there's a desk at which is seated a guide who announces all the stops over a mic and can helpfully answer your questions. There is also a big map of the tram system on the wall behind the guide. The guide on this particular tram showed me where we were headed and where I should step off.
So I stepped off at one point, and then wandered in the bitter cold, with snow falling on me, in a nearly-abandoned urban jungle, occasionally consulting the map on my phone, which still more or less worked even though outside of Germany I have no internet access without WiFi, because I don't want to pay for data roaming. But I finally found the place! Like in any dense downtown, the entrance was at the top of a short easy-to-miss stairway sandwiched between a couple of storefronts. But the door was locked, and luckily the Hotels.com confirmation email was the the last thing I'd looked at with my phone's email app, so even without internet access I could read the email and call their phone number and get let into the place.
This was the first hostel I'd ever stayed in my whole life, so I didn't really have anything to compare it to. But it was more or less what I expected, and pretty similar to others I would stay at during future trips in the coming months. I stayed in a small room with several other guys in bunk beds. I was too tired to do anything else so I just hung my coat up, slipped my shoes off, and went to sleep in my assigned bed which was the top bunk. As I drifted off I tried to remember when I last slept in a top bunk; I think it was my first week in Iraq in 2010.
And that name, Hostel Princess. I don't know about you, but to me "Hostile Princess" sounds like a great band name...or a female DJ's stage name...or a riot grrl singer's debut album.
I woke up at some indeterminate point early Sunday morning, December 16, in my bunk at Hostel Princess. After climbing down to the floor and making sure I had all my possessions, I walked downstairs to the lobby counter which was still manned. There was another guest there frying something (eggs, maybe) but I thought it would be easier to just find something outside. After checking out (which was just telling the person at the desk that I was done) I left the place. Outside there were two guys hanging around the door, one of which was a stoner or something who seemed to follow me for several steps, until I sped up and crossed an intersection. Eventually I found myself in a place called De Koffiesalon where I had some coffee to wake me up, and then after that I found my way to Starbucks where I had a breakfast consisting of yogurt with nuts, dried fruit, and granola. So it's still Sunday morning, the city's mostly dead, and my train doesn't leave till 12:25. What to do?
I took a tram back to the general area of the Centraal station, walked back down Niuwendijk, and pretty soon found myself in an Irish Pub across the street from the bar where I was drinking Belgian abbey ale the night before. The only other person in the place was the bartender, who was Irish and planning to move soon. First, I had a beer; I can't remember what it was except that it was not Guinness, probably a Smithwicks or Kilkenny or something like that. I also had an Irish Coffee after that. The Irish bartender and I talked quite a bit about stuff like music festivals--I told him about Electric Forest and Lightning in a Bottle--and beer, specifically how craft beer seems to be exploding everywhere.
I also mentioned to that bartender that I had been to Amsterdam before and been to pretty much everything, like the Van Gogh museum, except the Anne Frank House because of the long line. He said it wasn't worth it. It's a total tourist trap, he said, because not only did Anne Frank not live anywhere in the house that now bears her name, but "the c*nts who turned her in" are the ones making money off that house.
Eventually the time got closer to noon and I had to finally depart the Irish pub and get back to Centraal. I had a nice salad for lunch at a Starbucks in the station, then boarded my train for Brussels.
To be continued...
Other articles in this series:
