Yearly Archives: 2015

You Are In A Maze Of Twisty Little Passages, All Alike

Just as we left Albany, the pouring rain actually began falling, as the rest of the group promised as they decided to leave and not even try camping another night. It wasn't at all how I'd hoped this would go; I barely managed to keep the last meetup together, and this time we only explored one place before falling apart, albeit on mostly good terms. I didn't really care anymore though, we were still trying to explore, and it doesn't rain underground. I'd gotten decent directions from one of the cavers I met last month on how to see the…

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#troating

Stuck in Szczecin with far fewer options than we'd expected, it became time to do something extreme. What it was, we weren't quite sure, as we frantically Googled and asked around for any possible ways out of there. It seemed from what the information booth would tell us, that the only ways out of the airport itself were on a plane further east, on a train further into Poland, or in a cab, so we called one, and bought yet another bottle of cheap whisky at the duty free despite it being only 11am, chugged a few shots each, and…

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Auf Wiedersehen, Berlin!

After we finished exploring, we spent the rest of our brief visit to Berlin on the tourist trail seeing some of the actual landmarks, starting from the Alexanderplatz to Berliner Dom, a cathedral nearly destroyed during the war and rebuilt back to its original Prussian glory: Opposite there was a museum of some sort that we didn't have time for, but should probably have gone to... but our destination, if we could even find it, was the Berlin Wall. Crossing back into the former West Berlin, we passed through Checkpoint Charlie. First, a picture from 1964, when my mom was…

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Don’t Fence Me In

Once I got back from my Beelitz adventure, Ben was ready to see the city, so we got on the U-bahn and went to Charlottenburg for dinner. After a little bit of going around in circles, we decided on (delicious) Vietnamese food, then circled around some more looking for a massage parlor that made themselves nearly impossible to reach, "Good China Massage". We both tried multiple times to call and make an appointment, but neither their English nor my German came anywhere near understandable, and all she would do on the phone was repeat "Güüte China Maßßadge" at us (we…

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Betreten Verboten!

Just as one should expect by now for Team Fail, things were off track even by the time I woke up. Ben was sick and not really planning on going anywhere, and it was supposed to be our exploring day. I normally can't stand exploring alone, not in the least because it's never gone well for me before, but he insisted I give it a try, so I did, going to the easiest place I knew of, Beelitz-Heilstätten. Beelitz is about an hour away, for one thing, in more or less middle of nowhere Brandenburg, but with this being Germany,…

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Who Ate My Train?

There was at least one positive to our bonus days in London: sunshine! Something not often seen in a British winter, and which we had yet to come across in four days in the city of fog. We tried to set off on another day of sightseeing, finally smart enough to take the train instead of bothering with the bus anymore, just to find that the trains weren't stopping. Two of them blasted through the station at full speed, failing to make the Tulse Hill stop, with announcements counting down the minutes then apologizing for the cancellation of the train…

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