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Articles Tagged ‘Africa’

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What happens in Amsterdam…aaah…Stays in Amsterdam?

Friday, December 1st, 2006

Hello everyone! I apologize for the lack of posting in the past week. For some strange reason they like to switch the letters on the keyboard in Holland, Belgium and France…cruel Joke. The only way to type is to pretend you are a chicken and peck at the keyboard with one or two fingers…with what I have to pay for the internet…I decided against it. You have all been great as I am still getting tons of emails. I am glad that people are still reading the blog and keeping up. I only have 2 weeks to go and I will do my best to make them as exciting as possible. I am now back in the friendly confines of free internet land, Barcelona. Let me catch you up on the hap…hap…happenings of the past week and a a half.

So on tuesday the 21st I flew from Barcelona to Amsterdam. All the people you meet who have in your travels who have been to Amsterdam tell you all the stories about the red light district, the drugs etc…but you dont quite believe it until you see it… well like Davey Jones from the Monkees used to sing…”When I saw her face…Now I’m a believer.”

The face was a young lady dressed in the bare minimum standing in a window lit with red lights as I wandered down the street with a map in my hand that was held inches from my face looking for my hostel as i pretended not to notice her…Welcome to Amsterdam, i thought. As I walked further down the street I realized she was not the only one, there were lots of ladies, young, old, skinny, fat, white, black…you name it! The ultimate form of window shopping I guess.

I checked into the Hostel and had a wander. Looking around it really amazed me how everything was as people said. It is funny how you see “Coffee Shops” everywhere. If you want coffee however you go to a cafe, if you want weed or hash you go to a Coffee Shop. These places offer everything and anything under the sun except for hard drugs. You can go in and ask for a menu and they have all kinds of crazy names for the marijuana…this is all secondhand information, i dont actually know this from my own experience.

One night I was having a wander around and a young man stopped me in the street and said:

“Do you know where the Red Light District is.?”

Now keep in mind, when he asked me this the street was littered with people. I was walking through crowds of people and this guy had a radar lock on me from like 10 feet away and when he approached I hadnt the faintest clue of what he was gonna want. Now I must have gave him the impression that I am a guy who knows where to go to pay for sex, surely I hope not. He tottally caught me off guard and I think I mumbled something and pointed behind me…quite strange.

The next day me and Lee, the guy I was traveling with, ran into a Canadien guy named Alex in the lobby of our hostel. He seemed like a nice enough guy at first, that is until he started talking. Before I make fun of this guy I want to say that I am not quite sure if he was actually retarded or possibly had something wrong with him. If that is the case I apologize in advance to him but I have to make fun of him regardless.

Lee made small talk with him by asking him where he was from. This question completely baffled the guy and I swear he didnt know the answer at first.

“Aaah…Canada? Alberta?” He said with a look of confusion!

Lee, being from Australia asked him what side of Canada it was on.

“Aaaah…East Coast… yeah…East Coast?”

I knew right then and there this guy was either higher than a kite or quite possibly the stupidest person I had ever met.

We agreed, with some hesitation to go and get a beer with him. We followed him to an Irish bar that he said he know of and all three of us sat down and ordered a couple of pints of guinness. He was asking me about my travels and I had mentioned to him I had been to Africa and because of his inability to know where he was from I made a specific point of saying I was in the country of South Africa, his response:

“Oh, South Africa…you mean like Morocco, or Tangiers?” He said this with some new found geographical confidence.

“Aaah, no…” I said. “South Africa…in the south of Africa.”

“Oh…you mean like Ghana.” He said as if he was apologizing for mentioning Morocco and Tangiers, like he should have known.

Once again I informed him that he was incorrect and that he would not be a contestant on todays showcase showdown.

“South Africa is the name of a country…it is in the southern most part of the continent of Africa.”

I was making hand gestures as if that would help but pretty much knew that even if i had a map and Nelson Mandella standing next to me it would not have mattered. After I spelled it out as clearly as I could he gave me a look of disbelief and confusion, like the look he probably makes at work when someone had just told him they wanted to supersize their extra value meal. Luckily I turned away and managed to strike up a conversation with another American guy across the bar. After we finished the beer me and Lee both looked at each other and knew what the other was thinking…this guy is a wierdo. We told him we were gonna get a bite to eat and that we would meet him later at the hostel. He told us he was gonna take a walk. We ducked down a side alley and got a bite to eat. After we ate we decided not to walk up the main street by the hostel so that we didnt run into him again. Sure enough we hit the side street and who walked right by us without noticing, yup, you guessed it, Alex, the wierd Canadien guy. I guess it was kind of hard for him to notice us as he was doing a wee bit of window shopping if you know what I mean. When we went back to bed late that night he was sitting on the computer in the lobby and asked us where we went. A quick, “oh sorry we looked for you” and then we went to sleep.

The next day we managed to see him and his dad on the street but once again passed without him noticing…phew! We were on our way to the Heineken Experience. Heineken beer was started in Holland and for 10 Euros you get a nice little tour of their factory along with a few cold ones and a nice little souvenir…not quite sure what the souvenir is but someone is gonna get it as a gift.

Overall I would have to say that the Amsterdam I saw was not very appealing. I mean if you are into Sex and Drugs, then it is your place. The tacky souvenir shops selling some of the most unusual items and the coffee shops are a wee bit much after a few days. I am sure that once you get out of the touristy areas the city itself probably has tons to offer and is probably really quite beautiful, unfortunately I didnt get to see that. 3 days was enough for me and It was time to move on…next stop…Brussels!

Posted in Netherlands | 2 Comments »

Gagnonius the Travel Warrior!

Monday, October 2nd, 2006

I want to give you all a little insight into the days I spent traveling from South Africa all the way up to Aberdeen, Scotland. I awoke on the morning on the 28th of September. My things were packed and I was ready to move on. My flight left at 1055 a.m. I arrived at the airport shortly after 9 in the morning with what I assumed was plenty of time to make my flight. I walked inside the international departure terminal and took a quick look at the lines as they zig zagged all over and thought there was no way I was making my flight. I took a look up at the board to see the massive array of destinations all around the world that people were waiting to go to. I asked a few people in what looked to be lines where they were going and non of them where where I was going, Congo, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, oh boy! I manged to find my line and waited patiently as it slowly inched forward. After a few minutes I was asked by a lady working for the airline I was on to take a quick detour to the first class desk to check in since I was traveling by myself. I must have had a stockpile of Karma as I was very happy by this latest development. I checked in, proceeded through immigration, collected another stamp in an already full passport and headed to the gate with time to spare. I spent the rest of my South African Rand at the shop and boarded the plane. My Gulf Air flight was destined for Bahrain. Bahrain lies in the middle of the Persian Gulf just off the coast of Saudi Arabia. I would have a 4.5 hour layover there before getting to London. The flight to Bahrain was about 8 hours. We cruised up and over the east coast of Africa before crossing over Saudia Arabai and touching down on the tiny little island nation of Bahrain. I walked around the airport a few hundred times and looked at the duty free shops until I was blue in the face until my plane to London departed at 130 in the morning. The flight to London was pleasant. I had an emergency exit row seat with loads of legroom. From Bahrain the plane headed north over Iraq and across Europe to London. It was quite strange to fly over Iraq and look down and see the lights of some of the cities. A country that is always at the center of war and controversy and that always seems so distant and far away was now lying about 35,000 feet just below me. At 630 in the morning we finnally touched down in London’s Heathrow Airport. I proceeded to immigration and was asked every question imaginable by the officer on duty. In the end he knew more about me than anyone should ever know and I’m not quite sure what he would do with that information but it got me into the country so i guess it was necessary.

My flight to Scotland wasn’t until 8 P.M. that evening but I figured I could get on an earlier one without a problem…bad idea. I first thought my flight to Aberdeen was out of Heathrow but upon closer inspection of my receipt realized it was out of Gatwick and not Heathrow. I then had to board a bus to Gatwick Airport which is about 90 minutes away. Upon arrival I was told by the woman behind the counter that there was only one other flight to Aberdeen that was already full and because of the restrictions on my ticket couldn’t get on it anyway even if it wasn’t full.

I was pretty much in for one of the longest days in airport history. I pretty much felt like Tom Hank’s character in the movie, Terminal. I wandered aimlessly around the departure lounges and duty free shops like a zombie as I had been without sleep for quite a while. I watched BBC news at a pub about 500 times and pretty much knew everything about what was happening in and around the United Kingdom. I then memorized every single announcement made over the public address system and was saying them quietly to myself as they were being broadcast to the airport passengers. it was such a long day I honestly don’t know how I managed to not go crazy. When my flight to Aberdeen finally touched down it had been almost 36 hours of straight traveling, out of this world. So as great as traveling is and seeing all these amazing things is keep in mind that getting to these places is not exactly that exciting. The worst part about traveling sometimes is the actually traveling. Would I have given those two days back to be sitting in traffic or be at work? Absolutely Not. You take the good with the bad and move forward.

I will leave you now with this one completely random thought. For some reason the country of Ghana a small nation on the coast in eastern Africa got into my head while I was sitting in a dazed state at the airport. Perhaps I saw the country being named in a newspaper article or on the news or something but it made me think of this. Are people from Ghana called Ghanarians?

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