Stockholm- End Scene

We had to catch a boat by 4:30 on Monday, so we just wandered around Stockholm, enjoying its beauty on a sunny day. While looking for a scarf for Kathleen's brother (scarves are the thing to have to support your favorite football team) we went into some weird little store and found these awesome, cheese-a-rific American flag wrist-bands. We had already bought Nike headbands to wear for our team costume, but since Jason is the only one who looks good in a sweatband, these turned out to be the best purchases of the trip. No sneak previews though... you have to wait until Munich to see their awesomeness.

Cruisin' Together (like that Huey Lewis song from Duets)

We had no idea what to expect from the ferry/cruise from Stockholm to Riga, so Kathleen and Jason were the perfect guinea pigs to try it out (insert evil laugh here). Turns out it is a fairly large cruise, nice in a way that I imagine Atlantic City to be nice. We had a nice little cabin for the 4 of us, a restaurant, entertainment, dancing and most importantly- a duty-free shop. They say do not open stuff on the ship, but there are no regulations, um, at all, so everyone does and it turns into a crazy party boat. Some people had a little too much fun:



There was some pretty funny entertainment (actually it wasn’t terrible compared to our last real cruise), but we made our own entertainment on the dance floor:



We never knew Kathleen was so good at the Pop and Lock!!! (Note: Not sure that is the actual name if the dance move, if you happen to know the real name, let me know, it has been driving me crazy!)


My favorite part was winning a bunch of money at the slot machines without having any clue what I was doing. But then I lost it with Blake’s help just as fast as I won it, so oh well. All in all, the cruise was a success- but the ridiculous of it all can not be summed up in this blog succinctly enough, so you will just have to make me take you on one when you visit. :)

Riga- We would never be the same again

The boat arrived in Riga at 11 am the next morning and so we had all day to do whatever there is to do in Riga, which is more than we thought. On the cruise we talked with a couple Latvian dudes who were on their annual trip to Stockholm. We asked them what they did in Stockholm and their answer was “eat McDonalds.” Which is weird, because there are many, many, many McDonalds easily found in Riga. We should know, we ate at one.

(hey, we were hungry and weren’t ready to face the language barrier quite yet!... Don’t look at me like that! Do you speak Latvian? Yeah, I didn’t think so!!!) The city is really cute though, there are tons of parks, cute old buildings, cute old buildings being torn down:

We mainly just wandered around the city, checking out churches and points of interest. Kathleen was looking through a paper that was for English speakers and found an announcement for a free ticket to a semi-final match between Riga and Skonto (another Riga based team). We decided, hey, why not? It’s free. So we wandered over to the stadium through some sort of sketchy areas of town, thinking the roar of the stadium would make it obvious to find. Well, 40 people do not make a roar. Yep, semi-final match between a cross town rival, and nada. So we walk up, I show some enormous bouncer a newspaper clipping and he says, “we don’t take this.” Before I can object, a more reasonable looking (and by that, I mean normal human size) interrupts and says that they do indeed take these. Well I keep walking, forgetting that I had everyone else’s coupons, and not thinking that they needed them since the stadium was only about 2% full, and I hear Blake, Kathleen, and Jason all yelling at me. Apparently the huge bouncer was not about to let them in without a coupon. Blake tried to alleviate the situation by joking with the bouncer, “I think there is plenty of room in here.” Yeah, bad idea Blake. I thought Blake was going to die. We are pretty sure the huge bouncer had a thing against Gingers (aka- Red heads, aka- Blake). After many a Ginger-head jokes, and one of Jason’s random tangents about how he likes to eat shredded ginger (the food, not, ewww), we came up with the best name ever for the over-sized bounder.... “The Ginger Shredder.” So we find seats (there were plenty!), already 30 minutes into the game with Skonto up 2-0. We were afraid we missed out on all the action, but Skonto, my most favoritist team ever kept on being awesome and finished 5-0. Skonto!!! (Clap, clap, clap) Skonto!!!

After the game we grabbed a beer at a bar that was completely decked out in frogs. No, really, all frogs. How weird is that? From the urban legends you hear about Eastern Europe, I suppose it could have been worse! (I luckily have never seen the movie Hostel that my parents mistakenly watched once.)

Oktoberfest… here we come!

The next day we caught a plane and after much delay (well, it was fun delay, but lets be honest, Stockholm and Riga were just a delay for the destination of destinations) we arrived in Munich! And now, without any further ado, I would like to introduce to you, Team Chokengruppen! (Don’t even bother asking about the name, all I can say is that the best things in life are free…):

We found our hostel and didn’t waste any time getting to the beer tents. We arrived around 4:30 or so and it was already packed. We went a few beer tents and we were starting to get frustrated because we could not find a place to sit. Finally, at Hafbrauhaus, we found a table with 4 older guys representing the British Isles. There were 2 Welshmen, 1 Scottish guy, and a British dude. They were all hilarious. Slightly perverted, but funny. Lucky for me, it was made clear from the beginning that Blake and I are an item, so Kathleen got most of the crap from the guys. Bossman (that’s what we called him) was all about Kathleen:

The whole thing is just crazy. The tents are jam-packed full of drunk people, who prost (cheers) and sing and stand on tables.

Blake and I tried the traditional Schweinhaxen, which is, as the old British dude yelled out across our table, “Pork Knuckle!!!!” It tasted sooo good!

I was wearing my Swedish soccer jersey, and every time I went anywhere, people would scream and point at me, Sweden!!! I ended up chatting with a few of them in Swedish, which was pretty cool. It was hard to explain to everyone that I am American, but I live in Sweden, and that I am not Swedish at all, but in fact mostly Irish, German, and Lithuanian. It blew their minds! Most of the night we all just talked to random people that were in proximity to us or that stopped and talked to us because of the wristbands, or a t-shirt, or whatever. Jason became good buds with a cute German couple that are “seriously” going to come visit him. Here are a few pics and videos that hopefully capture this atmosphere better than I ever will:

Everyone loved our American wrist bands, which again, we bought in Stockholm. I think my favorite pic of the night is Blake having a moment with one of the neo-nazi Germans who kept telling him to be proud of his heritage:

After about 5 hours, some of us (you know who you are...) had had enough, and because we didn’t want to pass out around some scary Germans, we decided to call it a night.

The Neuschwanstein Castle Disaster

Since we are civilized people and because we appreciate our livers and all that they do for us, we decided to do some sight-seeing and see more than the inside of the beer tents on Thursday. Blake had gone to the Neuschwanstein Castle last year, and I saw pictures and really really wanted to go this year. He had gone with a tour group last year, but thought it might be more expensive and that it would be easy enough to go on our own. We got a somewhat late start, but hopped on a train before noon. We are on the train for about an hour, and we get to some random stop and almost everyone gets off, but Blake said that last year he didn’t switch trains, so we stayed put. Over an hour later, we get to the last stop on the train and find out that we should have switched trains an hour ago when everyone else did. Opps. So we had to get back on another train, explain why we didn’t have tickets for that train, and take it back to the stop we missed an hour or so back, and wait for another train to take us to the castle, which then was another hour on a train. We finally got there a little after 4 pm, it was rainy and foggy, we were pretty tired from being on a train all day, but at least we were able to book a tour for the castle before it closed. So we walked up a pretty big hill, but it felt good after sitting on the train all day. The castle itself is pretty amazing. It was built by a crazy King, it was never officially finished, it was used as a model for the Disney World Castle, and it is set in a beautiful setting surrounded by mountains. Here is our group after the long journey:

The best part was that on the way down we stopped and got some Glühwein (hot spiced wine).

We had checked the time that the last train was leaving from Füssen (the closest small town to the castle) and we were very close to missing it, which would have meant staying the night in Füssen with none of our stuff. We then had to take that an hour back to where we transferred to get to the train that took us back to Munich. Because we were rushing around missing trains and running to other trains all day, we hadn’t eaten all day and it was already 8 (except for Jason trying a hot dog from a vending machine:)

So we ran around some small German town during our 30 minute stop looking for food. Luckily we found some Chinese Buffet which was able to satisfy all our respective dietary restrictions. So we filled up some take away containers and ran back to the train station, and finally, we were on our way back to Munich.

We had originally planned to hit up Oktoberfest again Thursday night after getting back from the castle, but that was when we thought we were going to get back around 7 pm. We didn’t get back until after 10, but we tried anyway. As we were walking to the fairgrounds, we noticed there were many, many drunk people heading towards us, away from the fairgrounds. Turns out Oktoberfest ends at 11 pm, and it was almost 11 pm. So we didn’t get to go to Oktoberfest that night, but we did see what few people get to see- the close of a night at Oktoberfest sober. It was pretty amusing. We were pretty exhausted from the frustrating day anyways, so we went back and just decided to watch a little German TV. This pretty much sums German TV up:

After we got bored with boob/word search game, we found a little tofu guy (Note: We are just guessing it was tofu, other guesses include a loaf of bread, what's your guess?) that didn’t make any sense to us (it is all in German, which turns out, we don’t speak):

So the day didn’t go as planned at all, but somehow we still managed to have fun with it. And that kids, is the real lesson here.

Rally Time

We had already seen Oktoberfest in the evening, but we had yet to see it in the morning, and after our losses the day before, we knew we had to rally big time. Oh, and how.

So we headed over to the beer tents and got our first beer before noon:

The tent was a lot less crowded, but it wasn’t as lively either, since the band doesn’t start till later. So we had to make our own entertainment. I had remembered to bring the playing cards with me, and so I suggested we play the easiest drinking game ever, “Screw the Dealer.” So we started playing, much to the amusement of the Italians to our left and our right (we were later told that this was “Italian Week”). Jason turned out to be the Dealer and got a little ahead of us and got laughed at a lot:

The next game we invited the 2 Italians to our right, Marco and Diego (whose names alone were doing nothing to reduce the Italian stereotypes) to play with us. They embraced our American stereotypes as well.

After a couple of beers, we felt we had now sufficiently seen Oktoberfest, so we headed off to see the city. I definitely don’t recommend sight-seeing after a couple of beers, but we had already committed to this, so there we were. The old part of Munich is pretty cute. We walked up a large tower to get a good view of the city:

The rest of the afternoon was a blur (for me) as we did a lot of walking before we had to catch a train by 6 to get to Frankfurt. I think I was hungover by the time we got to the train station, which is a weird feeling.

Last and Certainly Least, Frankfurt

It’s not that I didn’t like Frankfurt, I actually did like it, it just kind of paled in comparison to all the cool stuff we had just done. The city is a mix of old and new, except that the old is pretty new because the city got hit real heard during WWII. So they recreated “old town” so it kind of has a fake feel to it.

We kept to our usual m.o. and just kind of wandered around the city. We caught a beautiful sunset at the top of Main Tower:

After the sunset we went to find authentic German food. Unfortunately for Kathleen authentic German food is in no possible way vegan. And on top of that, authentic German places don’t speak English and we don’t speak German, so when we tried to ask if Kathleen if she could bring outside (vegan friendly) food in, our waiter could only say enough English to yell, “Well I cant help you lady!” and run away. Eventually another waiter came over and brought Blake, Jason and I the meat and dairy we were craving, and then Kathleen had the best falafel of her life after our dinner, so all was well.

Blake and I had to catch a super early flight the next morning (Ryan Air gets us again with their low, low prices but inconvenient airports!) so we just reflected on our awesome trip in silence on Saturday night. Or packed and hung out like normal people, your pick.