Lausanne

We visited Lausanne much earlier on in our trip, but never got around to posting pictures from it, so here are a few old photos.

We saw a place on the map labeled Chocolatiere and described as a chocolate tower.  I thought this would be a great place for Marty because he loves chocolate. Well we get to the area and found this structure. We were both disappointed because when we climbed to the top we didn't find any chocolate.

We played a fierce game of checkers but Marty won. Yes, this is a chess set but I haven't learned how to play to chess yet, maybe this year.

We came upon some Roman ruins near our hostel. It's awesome how you can just be walking along and stumble upon things made so long ago.

Lausanne is the Olympic capital as you can see from the train station. While we were in Lausanne we went to an Olympic museum.

We had to try some Swiss chocolate since we didn't get any earlier.

Amsterdam

Earlier in our trip, we were unable to visit Venice due to some travel booking problems, but Amsterdam actually has more canals than Venice (and I hear that it doesn't smell as bad), so this kind of makes up for it.

Amsterdam has a policy of tolerance.  Basically, they tolerate anything as long as it doesn't cause violence, doesn't draw too much attention, and is profitable for the city.  This may explain some of the things that you know to happen in Amsterdam.

We visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam as well, but don't have pictures as they aren't allowed in the house.

We were told that sometimes in the winter these canals freeze up and citizens can ice skate to work.

In Amsterdam, 40% of traffic is bicycles, and the bikes are king of the road.  We thought it would be the perfect place to do some bike touring.  It was a lot of fun, but there are so many crazy cyclists out there, we were actually more worried about getting in a wreck with another bike than with the cars.

You might notice that the houses in the picture below appears to be leaning forward.  Here is the complicated explanation for that: In Amsterdam, houses used to be taxed based on their width, which led a lot of people to have very narrow houses that are quite tall and long (the narrowest house is no bigger than the door frame).  Since the residents didn't want staircases to take up the entirety of space in their narrow houses, they built very steep staircases.  The canals used to flood frequently, but moving merchandise up the steep and narrow stairs was too difficult, so they used a pulley system to bring the goods to the attic.  With strong winds in Amsterdam, a heavy load that was being lifted up to the attic could easily smash some windows on the way up.  To counter this, the houses were built leaning forward, with a wooden door to the attic at the top of the house.  Then in the event of a flood or large home purchase, items were hauled up the pulley and brought safely into the roof.

You can see the leaning houses in this picture, as well as some pulley systems sticking out from the top of the house

These are the free shades I got as a prize from the Heineken brewery tour.

This is a photo from our evening canal cruise.

Berlin

After a 2-day stay in Poland, we came through Germany again, this time stopping in Berlin for a few days.  In the more orderly north Germany, we appreciated the expansive public transit system and made heavy use of the S-bahn and U-bahn trains.  During our stay there, we took a walking tour (one of our favorite things to do in each city we've visited), toured an underground nuclear bunker, learned about Germany's history at the Deutsch Historisches Museum, and surprisingly ran into two of my college friends!

The Brandenburg Gate - after Napoleon's defeat, the goddess on top was changed to Victoria and the square was named after Paris so that this monument could represent "Victory over Paris"

A remnant of the Berlin Wall that was never destroyed - where the wall was taken down elsewhere in the city there is a path of inlaid stone showing where it ran

This is a glimpse of the haunting Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.  As with most of the WW2 and Holocaust memorials, it is a solemn place, but I couldn't help but be annoyed by visitors eating ice cream on the memorial and jumping from stone to stone. 

What are the chances that we would come across two people in Europe that we know by sheer chance?  I saw Jason and Meagan Deaner at the German history museum and we got dinner together afterwards.

Prague

After leaving Munich we made our way to Prague.

Prague Astronomical Clock (this is the oldest one still working). It keeps track of the position of the sun and moon, the months of the year, and the current name day being celebrated.  

This was an exciting marionet show of Mozart's Don Giovanni. It was definilty an eastern European experience.

Tyn Church behind old town square. This has alternated between a Catholic and Hussite church.

Old Jewish Cemetry - When they ran out of space in the cemetry and were unable to buy new land, they had to add new layers of soil and additional tombstones. The cemetry has a total of 12 layers of graves. (This is also said to be where the idea for Berlin's Memorial to the Murderd Jews came from, see picture in future post.) 

75 foot tall working metronome. This replaced the massive monument to Stalin after it was destroyed.  

View of St. Wenceslas Square. This was the sight of numerous political protests when Prague was under communism.

It took us some time to find kolaches but we eventually did!

Bavaria

After Salzburg, we spent a few days in Munich.  We also visited Dachau concentration camp while we were there, which was the first concentration camp and meant to be a model for future camps.  It was a very solemn and contemplative place to think about some of the darkest parts of human history.

Holocaust victims read the promise "Work makes you free" as they enter the camp.

This is a memorial to the victims of Dachau.  In the background you can see some of the reconstructed barracks.

We craned our necks along with the other tourists to see the glockenspiel do its thing.  This is a view of the Rathaus (or town hall) from Marienplatz square in Munich.

As this was only about a week before the olympics started, we thought it would be fun to see the Munich Olympic park from the 1972 olympics.

In Munich, home of Oktoberfest, everything has something to do with beer.  It is laced throughout their history.  The beers are very large here also.  We were told that in the Hofbrauhaus, maybe the most famous beer hall in the world, they only have one size of beer.  If you order a 1-liter beer, they will smile and bring you one.  If you order a 1/2 liter beer, they will laugh at you and then bring you a 1-liter beer.  They even have a beer purity law, the Reinheitsgebot, that was instated in the 1500s to ensure higher quality beer.

The High Life in Vienna

We are way behind on blog posts.  We haven't found many opportunities to move photos off the camera's memory chip (and we've been too busy enjoying Europe!).  So we finally have a chance to post some pictures.  We were in Vienna a couple weeks ago, here are some of the things we saw.

You can't go to Vienna without hearing some classical music.  We saw the Vienna Mozart Orchestra in the historic opera house.  They played a medley of Mozart music, and they also dressed the part.

We had standing room tickets only, but we read that you are free to search for better seats.  Here's a view from the amazing box seats Shawna found us!

St. Stephen's Cathedral in the center of Vienna's old town.

Nice pic of the pipe organ inside St. Stephens.



We had to try sacher torte, a chocolate cake invented in Vienna.  We bought some at a fancy chocolate store and they wrapped the cake up in so many boxes I thought I would never find it.



In Vienna, citizens like to enjoy the best of life, be it food, music, etc.  This seems to extend even to their Toilets.  This is the "Vienna Opera Toilet, with Music!"

Salzburg

We visited Salzburg, Austria for a couple of days.  It is a beautiful town established near salt mines (hence the name) with a castle that has never been taken by force.  Here are some of the sights we saw.

Tasting Austrian brews at the Stiegl brewery.

"The hills are alive...", this is sound of music country.

Lake and house from the Sound of Music. We took a SOM bus tour.

Picturesque countryside outside of Salzburg.

View of Salzburg and Salzburg castle from the Mirabell gardens. (I think this is about where our friends Jett and Kelly got engaged)