Your foot bone's connected to your...

Body bone? It's crazy how quickly one small malalignment will grind your body to a bloody pulp. See exhibit A above (I think...I'm blogging via email so it's hard to say where things will show up). Anyways, I hurt my ass-legs (so named because they are useless, all they do is hold up my ass) running around Hamburg with a gigantic backpack on. The result was a whacked knee that led to a pulled hamstring and a gnarly blister. And both on opposing legs! I swear I would not have survived if I were born in the dark ages, my body is a Trabi. I give my thanks to modern technology.
Buuuut there are better things to discuss than my benjamin button body, like the trip from Amsterdam to Hamburg (and Hamburg I will leave for another post [by the way, sorry for using so many parentheses {but isn't this super meta!}]). :)
So we left Amsterdam in a rush. The night before had been reserved for a sinful evening in the redlight district and we woke up hung over and 20 minutes to checkout. After that, we figured we would catch a regional train out to groningen, in the northwest portion of the country, because it was partially on the way to hamburg and home to a 50,000 student university. Unfortunately, poorly demarcated routes led us to leeuwarden in Frisland and 60 miles in the opposite direction. So we traveled back to groningen and immediately out to Leer, a small city in northwestern germany and the end of the line for trains traveling out of the Netherlands.
In Leer, we had a two and a half hour layover before we could catch a train out to Hamburg. So we did what any german would do...we got some pastries and beer and chilled out near the tracks. Eventually we wandered into town and found a remarkably Nebraskan, vaguely 70s era, pearl street-esque, bizarroland town. Because I'm me, I forgot to take any photos besides two of a non-american store called New-York (for a similar phenomenon cf. Old Chicago) that sold the most utterly european clothing. Here are the exhibits B and C. In the. First, note the designer capri shorts and neon fannypack of the mannequin, and of lesser significance, note the weird tourists in the periphery. Second, take a gander at the t-shirt image. It's a soccer shirt, with a half-nekkid anime character, before what I surmise to be an African flag. New-York indeed!
Anyhow, we made it out of Leer to Hamburg, stopping once to transfer and grab some schokolade and trinken. Long story short, we got off at the wrong Hamburg exit, ran to catch a train that we were shewed away from (whence the knee problems), creeped onto a second train, scotch had a spider on his face, made it to the hostel, had a drink with the locals, and fell sound asleep.
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