Bus Trouble (aka Murphy’s Law in Action)..

SO.  

It has been exactly a week and a day since we embarked on our European road tour (we flew from London to Berlin and picked up our tour buses there) and to put it mildly, the buses are having a rough start.  Our drivers, one who speaks very limited English and one who speaks none at all, have been lost en route to a destination three times so far.  Our driver (the one who speaks no English) actually pulled over to ask pedestrians for directions over the weekend..  Not a good sign.  We collectively long for the days on the US tour bus, which was like a palace on wheels compared to what we have at the moment, and our driver, Whitey, who had a bad-ass GPS system that basically made it impossible for us to get lost.  

Anyway, aside from that, one of the drivers (again, sadly, ours) backed his bus into the other one yesterday in Paris in the parking lot.  He didn’t see one of the cargo bays wide open and backed up into it, causing not only a broken cargo door on that bus but some nasty lacerations to the rear driver’s side to ours.  ”Ahem.. Hands at 10 and 2, check your mirrors, proceed with caution”..  Guess this guy never got those lessons.  

And finally, on our way from Paris to Lyon last night, our bus straight up broke down.  It was an estimated 7-hour drive and we pulled over and stopped about an hour and a half into it.  I had just fallen asleep in my bunk, so I woke up easily when I noticed that we weren’t rolling anymore and that the engine had been turned off (which happens quite frequently, ask anyone who has had experience with life on a bus).  At first I thought we were stopping to refuel and tried to fall back asleep, but after 15 minutes of symphonic snoring from the adjacent bunks and mounting curiosity I wandered downstairs and up to the front of the bus, where I saw this:

 

Not what you want to see out in the middle of nowhere at 4:00 in the morning.  What really kind of frightened me a little was when the driver who spoke a little bit of English asked me if i had a “how do you say..  the top for ze wine?  in ze bottle?”  Hmm.  ”A cork?”  I asked.  ”Yes!  Ze cork..  do you have one?”  Unfortunately, I did not have one of these on my person..  and was thus unable to help them uh..  repair the tour bus.  They are at the mechanics today, hopefully they are all drinking tons of wine over there and have plenty of corks to fix the problem.  We’ll see..

‘Dam tourist..

I spent one of my days off in Amsterdam doing the tourist thing..  hitting some of the more popular attractions in and around Centraal Station.  First we hit the Van Gogh Museum, which I had been to back in 2001 but has since acquired some new works, and which I really didn’t mind visiting again.  The museum is 4 floors and is relatively compact, with paintings and sculptures by other influential and relative artists of the time.  There are plenty of Van Gogh’s more visually familiar works (a few of his self-portraits, some from the sunflowers series, etc.) but the one that caught my eye was “Almond Blossom” from 1890.  Upon hearing news of his brother Theo and his wife having a baby, Van Gogh painted this one for his newborn nephew..

After the Van Gogh Museum we hit “Das Rembrandthaus”, the house that the famous Dutch painter and etcher Rembrandt lived in between 1639 and 1658.  Most of the rooms have been recreated to emulate what they were like back when he occupied and worked in the house, and there was a demonstration on how Rembrandt used copper plates and india ink (made from crushed, burned bones and oil mixed together) to produce his etchings.  This is the facade of the house..

I realized as I was looking at some of his original etchings, all of which demonstrate an amazing display of detail, that I had used one of his works as a pen and ink exercise in high school.  The work was called “Beggars at the Door of a House”, I’m sure I still have it somewhere too..

We also toured the Anne Frank House, where she and 7 other family members and friends hid in a secret annex from the Germans for 2 years from 1942-1944.  Similar to the Rembrandt House, most of the structures inside the rooms are original and intact, although Otto Frank, Anne’s Father and the only eventual survivor after their betrayal and discovery, requested that the house remain unfurnished after the Germans had removed everything.  Even though it was a recreation, it was incredible to see the “actual” moving bookcase that hid the stairs leading up to the secret annex..  and the quotes from Anne’s diary placed on the walls throughout the house were sobering.  It was a really interesting experience..