It’s Christmas in Heaven
There’s great films on TV
The Sound of Music twice an hour
And Jaws I, II, and III.

Last Friday, Smalley totally dressed me down for wishing someone a Merry Christmas. I told him I thought we were supposed to say that, and he was like, “You’re supposed to say ‘Happy Holidays.’ It fosters an environment of religious inclusion.” I got a news flash for you, Smalley: It don’t make no difference if you tell them “Happy Ass Day.” They’re there to get a Christmas tree, not a holiday tree.

O Tuesday Night
The stars are brightly shining
It is the night to watch TV and play cards.
Fall on your knees
And do a jigsaw puzzle
Just stay inside tonight
It’s half past nine.

The widely-recognised symbol for Amsterdam is the three crosses XXX, which despite a natural inference by most people doesn’t refer to the city’s sex industry, but to the three big dangers which have always made the people of Amsterdam shake in their clogs. They are Flood, Fire, and Venereal Disease. Officially the last one is Pestilence but we all know that this is just window dressing.

The Dutch are a strange people who appear to be waging a never-ending battle against the sea. Reclaiming land is a very slow process; first you have to pump out all the water and then leave the land to dry for umpteen years before building on it, only to have the bastard probably flood again if you stuffed up somewhere, or if God just felt like it. I’m positive this determination in the face of such futility is part of what gives the Dutch their unique sense of humour and their famously liberal culture.

The drive through the Dutch countryside took us along vast levees with seemingly countless windmills toiling away, pumping all that sea farther out to sea. Indeed the highway is noticeably below sea level. Windmills are all of the modern electric ‘aeroplane propeller’ variety these days. If you strain your eyes you can spot maybe one of the old-school mechanical windmills left standing as a historical item.

Amsterdam’s nightlife district is, I have to say, Man Kingdom. Not so much because of the ladies under the red lights—although there is that—but mainly due to the omnipresence of the open-air urinals. That’s right men, you can pee standing up in public. There’s a ninety degree angle partition that gives you just enough privacy if you lean into it. It’s a much more liberal city you might say, with the legal marijuana in coffee shops, served in dozens of varieties, au naturel as well as in all manner of biscuits and gâteaux. Seeing it be sold with such impunity and to not have murder and mayhem result makes you wonder what all the fuss is about back home, assuming you weren’t wondering already.

The nightlife was exciting with an impressive array of venues, and on this Saturday night literally every one of them was packed to the gills with people. Most of us wound up at Paradiso, the historic multi-level music venue where the highlight of my evening was slipping and falling flat on my arse whilst managing not to spill my glass of Heineken.

The stay in Amsterdam also featured the obligatory trip to the cheese and clogs place (pictured), a rather delightful cruise through the canals, and a cabbie who managed to fleece us good despite having a GPS unit that gives you explicit directions to the desired place.

Amsterdam is so far my favourite city in Europe, even beating Paris of which admittedly I didn’t see as much as I would have liked. From here it would be a non-stop drive through Belgium, back to the port at Calais and a trip back across the channel that seemed far too soon after we had come the other way.

We perused a shop with hundreds of steins on display, including some expensive ones with chunks of the Berlin Wall perched atop them. I purchased a glass mug and a plain grey stein, both with the brewer’s logo HB, remembering fondly the Munich hopera house.

We partied the night away in the hotel bar, just a few locals and a lot of Australians. It was definitely the most fun of the little towns we stayed in, and indeed was the only little town we stayed in. Also, it was the night that one of the girls got a rather stubborn case of lockjaw, leading to a hospital trip and a series of events that got me locked me out of my hotel room for hours. Good times.

Of course everyone is keen to get to Berlin. This is a city that was essentially a big smoking crater at the end of the War, and although the city and country have come back reminders such as the ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in the Breitscheidplatz still exist, deliberately left there as a warning about the horrors of war. Today, this plaza and the precinct around it is a thriving shopping and commercial area, of course filled with Christmas markets at the time, and filled with people at all times. Indeed, I spent most of my day shopping in this area and taking in the Christmassy vibe.

My Berlin experience was non-stop. I was busy enough shopping to completely miss the bus pick-up to go to dinner, and had great fun getting to the address by good old-fashioned map, foot, and train. Taxis are for chumps.

Apparently from dinner it was straight onto our pub tour, so running down the road to buy deodorant, and changing in to some of the clothes I’d just bought, we embarked on a walking tour of clubs that were mostly empty except for us, the exception being the Sophienclub, where there were also people from another Contiki tour, and some actual locals. Songs that still stick in my head from pubbing and clubbing on this trip come from such insidious sources as the Pussycat Dolls, Nelly Furtado, and the Black Eyed Peas featuring Fergie. After nearly walking into the paths of a taxi and a tram, and helping a very pissed Californian search in vain for her jacket, I decided to call time on a very varied and satisfying day in Berlin.

The final stop on the road to Amsterdam is Hamburg, which I took in a great deal while frantically searching for Internet access to remedy an alarming bank imbalance. It turned out to be in an electronics store metres from the central train station where I’d started. But it had certainly helped me see a lot of this harbour city in the short time that we had to spend there. The hotel was a fair way out, and the group used this evening as a rest (yeah, meaning drinks in the hotel bar) between two exciting cities.

Things are pretty expensive in Swiss francs. We could only spend lunchtime in Liechtenstein—some ate at the Christmas markets, others made a bee-line for the kebab-in-a-bun place we’d heard about. Yes, when in Liechtenstein, our tour manager has a little kebab place he likes to go to. Apparently the Germanic people do not eat hummus.

We then had to high-tail it to Lucerne, Switzerland, as the last lift up to Pilatus is at 4:30pm, and there is no other way to get up there. Pilatus is a mountain that would be great for skiing and all kinds of winter activities, but the bulk of it is blanketed by tall trees and protected by some kind of heritage listing that prevents them from being knocked down. Thus, apart from Swissco (a conference room they converted into a nightclub for the two Contiki tour groups on the mountain) there was sweet Fanny Adams to do up on Pilatus. We descended during the following day to Lucerne, where people bought a lot of watches, army knives, chocolate, and other Swiss accoutrements.

Lucerne is a beautiful old city divided by a river. The most historic bridge is the Kapellbrücke, a 14^th century covered wooden bridge that some brat with a cigarette burned down a few years ago, requiring that most of it be rebuilt. Perhaps the lesson is that wooden bridges are not a good idea, but I guess this is a risk they are willing to take.

Smö

Munich is well known for its annual Oktoberfest beer festival. P.J. O’Rourke once wrote of our “dainty little” beer glasses back in Australia, “hardly enough for one serving of fish-fry batter back where I come from”. For those who do prefer their beer in huge increments, the Maßkrug is a whole litre, and it really is possible to drink several of them in one evening without feeling any ill effect. There is probably an explanation of moderate alcohol content or something like that.

Of course, the hopera house was totally packed, and there simply weren’t 50 spare seats for us, so I ended up eating and drinking elsewhere, and squeezing into the hopera house much later on for dessert.

Sadly, it was only an overnight stop in Munich. So, apart from my first taste of German drink and traditional cuisine, which were both delicious, the sight-seeing was brief, and I was unprepared for an evening as cold as a well-digger’s bum. So it is definitely high on the list of cities to return to soon.

Smo

Austria is the home of classical music and the birthplace of Mozart. Austrians are celebrating this, the 250^th year since the birth of Mozart, with great gusto, Mozart memorabilia and snacks flying off shelves like that brilliant simile that didn’t occur to you until long after you’d already pressed “Publish” on the article. Our first night in Vienna comprised a delightful Mozart concert performed by a company of skilled, yet easygoing, musicians and dancers, delivering a solid set of the familiar Mozart standards punctuated by moments of comic relief and audience participation.

You notice a lot of changes passing into the ‘Germanic’ countries from a place like Italy. The quality of food, drink, and service take a giant leap upward. Toilets have seats again. And buildings and infrastructure are generally newer, on account of Austria and Germany getting bombed back into the Charlemagne age at the end of WW2. Vienna is one city that chose to rebuild in the pre-war architectural style, so it’s both old and new at the same time.

The ubiquitous Christmas markets always have sausages, glühwein—a warm, spicy wine served in a mug—and other traditional holiday food and drink, plus a broad selection of craft, toys, and other knick-knacks for sale. In any major German or Austrian city, there is a Christmas market (Weihnachtsmarkt) in literally every conceivable public space, bottlenecking major pedestrian thoroughfares that you’d like to get through at more than ten metres per minute. Your attendance at, and enjoyment of, Weihnachtsmärkten is therefore not open to negotiation if you live in Germany or Austria.

The full day in Vienna, I slept in, missed breakfast, missed the daily briefing of where and when the bus was picking up from, and lost my map. I caught a train to a station that looked reasonably central and then walked around arbitrarily until I randomly spotted an Australian pub, where I requested a Coopers and a map. At schnapps tasting I bought some absinthe and learned about the large schnapps factory that was obliterated by the Allies and is now a small schnapps factory. We wandered around Vienna looking for a decent place to drink and settled on The Duke, a pub run by a couple of Scottish dudes with no Austrian beer at all.

Our journey toward Germany took in the rain-soaked town of Mondsee, where we saw Christmas markets, and unfortunately a lot of scaffolding in the way of the altar at St. Michael’s, the church made famous by The Sound of Music apparently—I haven’t seen it.

Smo

Venice is quite pleasant in the wintertime—I had heard stories of how bad the place smells due to the stagnant water in some of the canals, but I think the cool weather probably kept the odours to an acceptable level. For some reason I had initially opted out of the optional gondola ride and dinner, in favour of doing my own thing, but I came to my senses upon arriving in Venice, realising that it isn’t the best place to freestyle. It is a place where you want to do the standard touristy activities like gondola rides, because there isn’t much else to do. After all, it is a bunch of islands and semi-submerged old buildings situated a decent ferry trip from anywhere. It was great fun selecting a range of wines in the town, then cruising around the canals drinking the wine and exchanging cups of it with the other gondolas.

My innate skepticism (not outright rejection, though) of standard touristy activities, combined with my preference for quiet reflection over posing for photographs every 0.1 sec, earned me the title of ‘grinch’ in this city. Kym, I am in your debt—really.

The Piazza di San Marco, featuring the basilica and its campanile, is probably a good candidate for one of those lengthy and expensive restoration efforts I’ve heard so much about. It is a natural meeting place for people and pigeons. Millions and millions of them. Temporary wooden platforms around the place showed that the town was in a state of readiness for an upcoming flood. Or they get flooded all the time, and they are always ready.

Smo

Once you cross the threshold into the Vatican City, you are technically entering a sovereign country, of which the Pope is a sort of monarch. We didn’t see the Pope at the Vatican, as he probably had the good sense to be in bed at that time. But we did get a very informed guided tour of the museum and the Sistine Chapel, which looks magnificent in its post-restored state. Centuries of neglect had blackened the paintings covering the walls and ceiling of the chapel, including Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, and much effort and money had to be expended to restore it. Small sections have been left uncleaned as a sort of historical record.

I felt somewhat conflicted walking around Saint Peter’s Basilica, the largest and most significant church in Christendom. The building is like a massive work of art with exquisite painting, sculpture, and masonry in every direction, and impossibly tall ceilings. Whilst certainly impressed, all I could think of was how much it all must have cost, and how the church could have built things many, many times more useful with the money.

We saw the Colosseum, the Vittorio Emanuele II memorial, the Spanish Steps, the Pantheon, the Trevi Fountain, and drank a beer on a red carpet outside a restaurant. We had dinner at a place called Pizza and Beer, where we ate tube pasta, chicken, and apples, and drank wine. I had got more tourist-y value out of Rome than the other cities so far, and I was sad not to see Mario anywhere, but there is always next time.

Smo

When a Contiki bus arrives in a city, it almost seems as though the local boganry has been pre-warned that a lot of foreign talent is going to be present at a certain bar/club at a certain time. Florence’s sausage-magnet was called Space Electronic Discoteque, where admittedly some pretty good DJing was going on, but I felt little motivation to do anything except get drunk. Italians do things differently, whether it be the toilets without seats, men’s much more grabby flirting style, or the way my credit card didn’t work when it was time to pay for my drinks.

To the best of my recollection, the morning after involved a trip to a leather goods store called Leonardo’s, followed by some free time and a walking tour of the town. The massive Santa Maria del Fiore along with its tower and baptistry are a spectacular sight in their three colours of marble: red, green, white. There is the Ponte Vecchio (old bridge), and that museum containing the statue of David that we didn’t have time to go into, outside which are likenesses of every Italian you’ve ever heard of—Dante, Galileo, all four ‘Ninja Turtles’, the list goes on—all of which either were born, or spent the best part of their careers, in or around Florence.

People travelling in Italy often remark upon how dirty they believe the country to be. As true as this may be, cut them a little bit of slack. A single statue in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence cost the city €1 million to restore after it was broken. One statue. Think about how much of Italy could do with that level of restoration, or at least a quick blast from a Kärcher. There is just not enough time or money, and meanwhile there’s all this great food and wine to be had. It is simply not an easy task.

I also had some gelato.

L

He knows when you are sleeping
He knows when you’re on the can
He’ll hunt you down and blast your ass
from here to Pakistan.

Grandma got run over by a reindeer
Walking home from our house Christmas eve
You can say there’s no such thing as Santa
But as for me and grandpa we believe.

Put on your yarmulke
Here comes Hanukkah
So much fun-ukah
To celebrate Hanukkah
Hanukkah is the festival of lights
Instead of one day of presents, we have eight crazy nights.

Mr Hankey
The Christmas poo
He loves me
I love you
Therefore vicariously he loves you.