Party People

Round 4...



Hello again! Well, my last week and a half in Holland was going to be a slowly progressing movement from hostel to hostel, slowly wending and winding through the various smaller towns and regions that I wanted to visit. But in that inevitable way of things and suchlike, what I ended up doing was staying happily fixed in Utrecht and branching out on daytrips to the abovementioned small towns and regions, for the belowmentioned reasons.

1. Free cheese.
   
2. Good people!
   
3. Free cheese.
   
4. Holland has a chronic (relative to NZ) lack of backpacker hostels (i.e. precisely zero in most places south of Rotterdam), and I have a particularly well-nursed dislike for hotels now after living out of them for almost a year... I'm also a cheapo backpacker.
   
5. And hey, Utrecht is one cozy, gezellig town!
   
6. Free cheese.
   

So let me see... After our critical pub crawl I felt it was time to again do a little more exploring of some new regions of Holland. My next stop was a visit to the country's political capital, Den Haag (The Hague if you're not a try-hard like myself), to take a wander through the MC Escher museum and of course check out the beautiful architecture, fountains, and girls that seem to exist in this country in more abundance than cheese. Later went to Scheveningen (there's a tongue twister in Dutch that involves a sheep sleeping somewhere on Scheveningen... I forget the precise words though) beach for a tour with my newly appointed tourist guide that I'd previously picked up on a park bench somewhere in Leiden. (hi Marion!)

After a couple of happily chilled out days wandering around Utrecht, chatting with homeless people, drinking endless streams of beer and devouring cheese-toasties like they were about to go out of fashion (huh, chea, yeah right!) it was Saturday, and time to venture back into the depthless depths of Amsterdam for Project Mayhem: a techno party buried in the feral docklands across the canal behind Central Station; 4 music zones and one beer zone playing hard techno all night and into the morning, with the obligatory psychedelic light and laser shows, strange men in white suits tending to a thousand screaming computer monitors, double decker buses and belly dancers, gyrating mannekins and a screaming 18 foot tall robot, all housed within a single enormous boat-building warehouse.



Two of my more publicly viable photo's, the dudes that held the party also have some great ones, check out this panorama of the dancefloor.

---

Well, seeing that I am now heartily sick from/of cheese, I feel it is time to move on (for now!)... So after hopping on a dodgy bus to Slovakia and parting with a little pocket-money, I successfully navigated my way to the odourless town of Cologne (Köln to some, Colon to yet others), Germany. I'm not sure how long it took us to cross the border, but suddenly the road-signs stopped making sense and the roads became a lot more pushy, so I figured I could add another flag to my blog, and write a little about the past week or so.



Here in Cologne I'm staying at a friends house (hi Birgit!) which makes a nice change from the 22 snoring people and the 44 hungry bedbugs that shared my previous accomodations with me! So far I've wandered through the university and checked out the massive church tower, as well as taking pause to check out the Salvidor Dali Museum... But now it's Friday evening again... time to take my leave from this computer!



Until next time... Tschüß!