Over the holidays I went to an island in the North Sea called “Sylt”. Its an island like no other I’ve been on before, where the entrance fee is nearly 70EUR if you’re driving a car. The short ride to the island has no bridge for cars, but has couple of train tracks instead where you get to pay for the luxury of sitting in your car while a train totes you a few kilometers towards the island. Not sure where the logic in that is, but it sure does bring in some money for someone (it was actually built in 1927, so I can understand why no one would want to spend money to build an expensive bridge when you’ve got a perfectly good train connection … maybe that’s what they’re saving up for).

The island is known for being expensive (which isn’t exactly true, since most of the food and drink was priced normally, and I bought a cool jacket for 5EUR) and a place where famous people can congregate for holidays (it actually reminds me a lot of Ocean City, MD). I didn’t see anyone famous, but I did see lots of sand dunes. I was there for New Years, which was really nice since the weather was being kind to us that day.

The houses there have a different type of roof, something like a thatch-roof that they still use today to maintain the style of the island. Seafood there was absolutely great, I ate at a place called “Gosch” most of the stay. It was pretty good, even though it’s a chain, and it’s not too expensive. Made me want to eat more seafood now that I’m home.

Now that I’m not there, I learned a bit more about it from Wikipedia that I wish I had known while I was there. There is a walk-in grave that dates to 3000BC in Wenningstedt that I could have checked out, as well as a “heathen-cult place” called Tinnum castle (Tinnumburg) which is really just a wall about 8 meters high in a circle with a diameter of 120m dating from the 1st century BC. Neat, anyways.

I think that Sylt would be a great place to go in the summertime because of the really nice beaches. For some reason, I don’t like beaches with small waves nearly as much as the rough, watch-out-for-the-undertow types. On the days that I saw it, it certainly was of that type.

After Sylt I headed to Holland to check out Amsterdam and meet my friend Joel from Maryland (he was there with his girlfriend) since he spent New Years there.

I was surprised by a few things in Amsterdam – first, absolutely everyone spoke English by default. I wasn’t there long enough to even have the experience of someone speaking to me in Dutch. Secondly, I had no idea that there were so many canals throughout the city – and since I’ve never been to Venice or any place similar, this was a totally new and interesting thing for me to see. I even took a boat ride around the canals of the city for a measly 6EUR to get a better look at the house-boats and interesting architecture.

The houses there are extremely narrow, as my friendly automated tour guide explained, because at one time the houses along waterways were taxed based on their width. So people, being cheap like they are, made extremely deep, narrow buildings which led to some interesting side effects. Like narrow, steep stairways (which I am sure contributes to the overall number of stairway accidents there) and absolutely no way to move furniture inside these narrow habitations. So many of the houses have a big hook or pulley up near the top for hoisting large objects through the windows of each floor. Some of the building faces are even leaning outwards in order to make it easier to wrestle the furniture in.

So Amsterdam was interesting, and has many museums and other such cultural goodness. I went to the Van Gogh museum, but that was all I had time for. Of course, I also witnessed a couple of the other typical things of Amsterdam – the coffee shops and the red-light district.

So that was my New Years! I’ll put some pictures up in the gallery and add some links here when I actually do it.