Archive for September, 2010

Leaving Luxembourg we began the drive over to Munich. We were planning to drive through the Black Forest but being under time constraints we didn’t actually get to see much of it. It actually reminded me of the National Forest just south of Sheffield – not a lot of trees but plenty of farmland.

We arrived in Munich to find that the hotel didn’t actually have twin rooms – only double rooms. This made for a rather intimate night (by intimate night I mean rough animal sex – but what happens in Munich, stays in Munich).

We headed into town to find the Hofbrauhaus, a legendary drinking establishment in the heart of Munich. They served giant beers and had a band plus the food was pretty good and the gift shop was open until late into the night allowing Kieran to buy a stein.

Interestingly, Germany really look down on jaywalking – and there is just something weird about watching drunk people patently wait for the light at a crossing that you just can’t imagine in the UK.

It’s just a shame we were a week too early for Oktoberfest.

Still, that is really just an excuse to come back at some point.

We headed out from Amsterdam and down the motorway as far as Belgium before taking off to smaller roads to drive through one of the national parks. There was of course a quick stop off to buy some Belgian chocolate too!

Heading through southern Beligum and into Luxembourg was a fantastic drive as we headed up into the hills and the rolling countryside opened up.

We eventually made it to Luxembourg city shortly before talk and checked into the Mecure hotel which was of excellent standard – once of the nicest we stayed in despite it only being £50 per night for a twin room! As far as we could tell everyone comes to Luxembourg in business during the week and the weekends are just dead.

We headed for a wander round to take some photos of scary trees once we checked in and eventually found ourselves eating at a rather upmarket Chinese restaurant which produced some reasonably nice food.

Breakfast at the hotel was very nice too – there is just something awesome about eating chicken for breakfast. And with hindsight the €5 we paid for a pint of beer the night before was actually pretty reasonable given what we would later pay.

As some of you know, myself and a few friends recently hit the road for a bit of a trip across Europe. I didn’t want to blog during it because I wanted to actually enjoy it, or at very least spend the time trying to de-stress from all the traveling. But now I’m sat in a villa in France with a recently liberated internet connection, I thought I would write a bit up about our adventures.

We took the ferry over from Hull to Rotterdam which was a nightmare – I didn’t manage to sleep the whole night and there is just something depressing about being sat in a bar, which isn’t open, by yourself at 5am in the morning. Still I managed to come away from the casino £1 up so all is good.

Having arrived we headed up to Amsterdam for our first night. Amsterdam is a fairly boring place in the day – it’s basically London, it’s dirty, there is lots of litter, everyone speaks some degree of English and it’s full of traffic.

However by night Amsterdam really comes alive. The Red Light District was amazing, I don’t have any photos of it as I didn’t fancy taking my camera round there at night for fear of it getting swiped but it looks pretty much like this picture someone called Laura took.

The cafes were great as well. Not only can you just go in there and order a joint but they also have interesting quirks such as the cat sat on the bar that we found – with a notice saying “please don’t give our cat cannabis – it already get’s stoned enough!”

Another real bonus of Amsterdam is that it was the only place in Europe in which we saw a KFC!

They also seem to love Argentinian steak houses of which there seemed to be hundreds. As a consequence we decided to give one of them a try – it was no River Plate but it was very nice none the less. As was the little cafe we found for breakfast the next day.

A big thank you to everyone who joined us in Leeds this weekend to make Sunrise Conference 2010 a huge success! Throughout the weekend we had an array of talks, seminars, workshops and discussions on a variety of topics – everything from leadership and organisation to marketing, the meaning of life and transhumanism! You can see photos from the event on our Facebook page and the conference website for full details.

On Friday we were down at the University of Leeds 2010 staff fair to promote the Humanist Chaplaincy at the university.

As you probably know, atheists are currently celebrating Stephen Hawking announcing there is officially no god.

I was on BBC Radio Leeds talking about it earlier. It went pretty badly, to be honest, I could have spoken a lot better and we ended up discussing what evidence I would require to believe in god rather than talking about Hawking’s new book. Never the less it’s always an experience and it’s great to get a mixture of view points on the show which BBC Leeds are always really good at.

You can listen again for seven days on the BBC website, it’s about 38 minutes in.