I read on  Matt’s facebook that he was headed out to Oktoberfest in Munich and it reminded me of our journey there. Two years ago Dee, Karen, Steve and I went to Munich and Oktoberfest. What an amazing time!  We wore out our drinking arms lifting the 1 liter and stared in amazement the beer garden ladies holding 5 in each hand! We had some of the best food there, pulled wild boar on a bun, goose with dumplings and weisswurst. Plus the rollercoaster – 5 loops that happen so fast your stomach doesn’t have time to get rid of all the liquid you just drank. The Germans know how to eat, drink and party!

Luckily Dee told me today that Vancouver actually has it’s own Oktoberfest party. Tickets are $30 held at Deutsches Haus Restaurant.. which sounds like a legit German name. It’s held by the Vancouver Alpen Club and should be a good time. It may not have a parade like New York‘s Oktoberfest, but it sure is closer!

Make sure to check out our post Our dream Oktoberfest experience. It made it onto our top 10 list of most memorable experiences of 2009.

Prost!

Prost!

Are you doing anything for Oktoberfest this year?

Tripbase started a great project a few months back. Or, that is at least when we were nominated by 1000 fights to join in. Maybe it’s been around for longer? None the less, it’s about time we finally took part!

The project is meant to connect travel bloggers together and give them a chance to show off some of the amazing content from their sites by sharing 7 links.

Scott and I have been running Dream a Little Dream since April 2008! That’s 3 years!! We’ve been around off and on for the last year. But still, choosing 7 links in the following catogories have been quite a challenge. We have tons of posts from a long time ago we love and didn’t get much exposure due to being a new site in the travel world. On the flip side however, all of our more recent posts are just at such a higher calibre due to everything we’ve learned in these past 3 years to create better content and get more exposure.

Anyways, after much hard thought here is what we came up with:

OUR MOST BEAUTIFUL POST:
Christmas ornaments from our RTW trip

http://dreamalittledream.ca/christmas-ornaments-from-our-rtw-trip/

We’ve seen some beautiful things across the world but nothing quite compares to grouping all those beautiful memories together on our Christmas Tree to ensure they last a lifetime!

OUR MOST POPULAR POST:
Banksy vs the Bristol museum

http://dreamalittledream.ca/banksy-vs-the-bristol-museum/

If we look at our site stats this one post gets the most hits day in and day out. This paticular exhibit ended a long time ago but still Banksy continues to pull in the numbers for us. It really is quite remarkable how popular street art is.

OUR MOST CONTROVERSIAL POST(s):
1. Cairo from a women’s perspective 2. The Valve Sound System Show Down – Epic Fail 3. Netherlands soft drug policy – is it working? 4. Contemporary Museum in Vienna: Mak

1. http://dreamalittledream.ca/cairo-from-a-womans-perspective/

2. http://dreamalittledream.ca/the-valve-sound-system-show-down-epic-fail/

3. http://dreamalittledream.ca/netherlands-soft-drug-policy-is-it-working/

4. http://dreamalittledream.ca/a-contemporary-art-museum-in-vienna-mak/

Okay, I cheated and listed 4. What are you going to do about it? The reason I listed 4 as we don’t really have any posts that have caused any heated discussions or debates. It was really hard to figure out exactly what of our topics is controversial to people. Thus, I’ve chosen 4 topics which I think can lead to a variety of opinions if people actually commented or is a touchy subject.

OUR MOST HELPFUL POST:
How to care for a second degree muffler burn in Thailand

http://dreamalittledream.ca/how-to-care-for-a-second-degree-muffler-burn-in-thailand/

Step by step instructions on how to care for one of the most popular injuries that can happen on the tropical islands of Thailand.

A POST WITH SUCESS THAT HAS SURPRISED US:
AK-47′s and naughty squirrels

http://dreamalittledream.ca/ak-47s-and-naughty-squirrels/

Just a simple post about our time in Riga, Latvia that continues to soar high in our site stats. Maybe it’s the title that is causing all the attention. Guns and naughty things. Yup. That has to be it!

A POST THAT DIDN’T GET THE ATTENTION IT DESERVED:
Scott the hero

http://dreamalittledream.ca/scott-the-hero/

An epic and heroic tale of how Scott saved the day after crashing our scooter and causing me to get a second degree muffler burn. Complete with crash video!! How can this not be popular??

THE POST WE ARE MOST PROUD OF:
Our Canadian Thanksgiving experience in Germany

http://dreamalittledream.ca/our-canadian-thanksgiving-experience-in-germany/

We are proud of that entire day that ended with the great success of that amazing meal!! May not be as interesting to others but to us this was a very special moment during our travels. In the top 5 for sure.

Okay, we hope you got to read something from our site you might of missed before. Thanks for reading!

Here are our 5 nominations to other travel bloggers to share their 7 links. Be sure to check them out in the following weeks to see what they shared. It was hard to pick as there have already been so many nominated. Check out this list to see the others.

1. iStopOver
2. The Departure Board
3. Lives of Wander
4. Dan’s Adventure
5.  Across and Abroad

It was an almost brisk and beautiful autumn day in Baden-Baden, Germany. We were taking a peaceful stroll through the park, admiring the fall colors and crunching the leaves. I remember thinking to myself how I missed our cats and just then we hear a meowing in the distance and turn around. Up the hill was a wee cat running towards us like a scene out of Baywatch, it’s run turning from a gentle pace into a speedy race. He finally reached us and screamed out:

“Oh my god, I can’t believe I found you guys!”

He acted just like we knew him and it’s been years since we seen him. Full of purrs, desperate need of pets, and wanting to play. We didn’t have the heart to tell him we had no idea who he was.

So we gave him pets..

And played some twig games.

As you can see, he was extremely happy for all this love and attention.

And then the next thing we knew… he vanished back into the forest. Never to be seen again.

Wonder what that was about?

Luckily for once we can announce no total failure! Just lots of changes. Read On:

It’s nice to have some down time to plan things out. With such a busy travel schedule all summer there wasn’t a lot of extra time to do planning ahead of where we’re going to next. So now with a nice break in travel and generous relatives letting us stay at their place until we can easily figured out where to go next. With a strong and free Internet connection, access to a fantastic espresso machine and fresh groceries in the fridge, it was the perfect time to sit down and figure things out.

We had a general route figured out earlier to go through Turkey, Egypt, India and then on to Thailand and the rest of Asia. But we didn’t know the costs of travel and accommodation so it took some time to decide what we’d do next. One thing was we spent more money than expected in Europe, with the Euro to Canadian exchange rate being poor and sticker prices being the same or more as back home. Sandwiches in Ireland were €9, beers were often €5-€7 and so on. Basically, we paid the same money as we do back home on things as we did in Europe, which with anyone’s vacation plans that is not what you expect. One tends to travel to places that are cheaper then home. It wasn’t something that we had prepared for, I thought things would just be a bit cheaper. Apparently I was wrong.

We very much wanted to visit Istanbul and see the open-air markets. And go to the Valley of the Kings and view the inscriptions. See the Taj Mahjal and experience the crazy city of Mumbai. But we had to ask ourselves where we really wanted to go, and SE Asia was an area that we just couldn’t miss since it’s an area of the world we have been dreaming about for years. With a clear direction we could start making a plan of where to go and ensure the costs while traveling. With the great exchange rate the Canadian dollar gets in Asia it was looking to be a very easy place to go to on a now very tight budget.

Dee once again used her magic and managed one awesome surprise. While we were looking for the cheapest airline tickets to Bangkok she somehow found some random site we never used before with her amazing Google search skills and low and behold there was an Egypt Air flight out of Frankfurt that had a layover in Cairo that was cheaper then any other flight option on the net. After some investigation we managed to turn that layover into a 6 day stop over in Cairo! The one thing I had really wanted to see this trip was the Pyramids (especially after I saw the movie Zeitgeist), and when it was scratched off our list due to funds I was quietly disappointed. But now after seeing the chance to stay in Cairo and see the Pyramids we booked the flights right away, with the great bonus of it being the cheapest way for us to get to Bangkok!

I really don’t think we would have found this flight unless we had the time to wind down and do some searching while resting. I’m glad that Dee managed to do some good searching on the net and found it! So now our Itinerary looks something like this:

Cairo – 6 nights

Thailand – 60 – 90 days

Cambodia – 15 – 20 days

Vietnam – 20 – 30 days

Laos – 15 – 30 days

Europe has been great, but really it’s similar to life back home. I’m excited to explore something new in Asia, where both language and cultures are extremely different.

And this ends our tales from Europe!! Hope you can enjoyed them and you can look forward to some upcoming exciting posts from our culture shocking time in Cairo, Egypt!!
Off we go to Cairo!! 

Happy New Year everyone! This year has been amazing for both Dee and I. We’ve managed to suspend our jobs (Dee permanently!), got our apartment rented out, possessions all packed and hopped on an airplane to explore the word! We’ve seen and done some pretty frickin awesome things and written about most of it. So here it is, what we think our top 10 things we did this year traveling.

The DVS top 10 of 2009

Fall was apon us in Germany and it was getting so cold to us that Dee bought herself a new toque and just couldn’t pass up this Hot Chocolate!

There are somethings we miss about home. Our friends and family of course, but also the little things you start to miss on the road, soft pillows and beds, unpacked bags and most importantly, home cooking and spending the holidays with family. We’ve just come back from Utrecht and are staying with Dee’s relatives Barbara and Artur in Baden-Baden again. They previously had planned to visit family up in Hamburg and were leaving for a week just as we came in, giving us an apartment to relax in by ourselves. And with Thanksgiving upon us, we decided to make a Thanksgiving Dinner for us to enjoy as just the two of us, helping with the homesickness we were starting to experience.

Beautiful Baden-Baden in the Fall

So we were off with our ingredients list to the large supermarket, after finding there are no turkeys in downtown Baden-Baden. When we got there it was some tough going trying to find everything we needed in a giant supermarket with everything labeled in a foreign language. We mostly had to rely on the images on the packages rather then the words. After grabbing all the small ingredients we needed we arrived to the frozen bird section and our hunt quickly turned to a let down. Nothing looked like a turkey and all the frozen birds had images of ducks and geese on them. However Dee spotted a frozen turkey breast package stating,

“Well we can always get this to fill in the craving gap, not as great as a whole turkey but at least its something!”

I think Dee could spot the disappointment in my face on having to go with a Plan B so she said,

“One moment, let me use my eagle eye super power and see if I can spot any of those frozen birds saying the same German word as on this package. I’m assuming this word means Turkey!”

Magically she saved the day and spotted the only turkey amongst all the other German labeled frozen birds… and what a turkey it was!

We cooked up a roasted turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, dumplings, gravy and lots of fresh buns from the bakery. Sitting down to our self made feast we ate our way through the dinner happy with a bit of Canadian cooking. The turkey turned out fantastic as we had cooked it upside down, and of course all the fixings on the side made it fabulous. After resting and watching a movie, we broke out the apple pie with some ice cream on it. It was a great way to spend Thanksgiving miles away from home!

The perfect results!!! SO GOOD!!

Not at all to our surprise, they were interested and we shortened our time in at Oktoberfest so we could squeeze a day in Berlin to attend this walking tour before they had to fly back home to Canada. The day was overcast with a chance of rain so we all packed our rain gear excited for what we might see for the day. They say each tour is tailored to the needs and general interest of the groups, and we were hoping that it would only be us 4 in the group so we could direct it our way! Thankfully everyone on the tour was in the same mindset as us.

For our tour we were taken to various areas of the city with amazing graffiti work, squat houses, skate parks and awesome art spaces. The artwork we saw is some of the best graffiti work we have seen and all the pieces we saw got a bit of background about the artist and sometimes their intent as well. Half way through the tour it started to down pour rain. We felt great being so prepared but others on the tour came with nothing and got soaked.

There is so much good artwork all over the city, we asked about it. Apparently in Berlin it’s illegal to graffiti, but unlike other cities there’s no law in place forcing building owners to cover it up. Because this usually costs quite a bit of money the building owners don’t paint over it, leaving much of the artwork up. It’s interesting because most of the graffiti was artwork, not some squiggles on the wall that is just vandalism. Almost like an equilibrium has formed between building owners and artists; paint crap and we’ll cover it, but make it worthwhile and we’ll leave it alone.

Check out some of our favorite photos from the day below:

If you come to see this one at night the astronaut actually looks like it is carrying a flag due to the car dealerships flags and it’s lighting located just in front.

This piece and many more bright and colorful images just like it were painted by various artists all on the first floor area of an apartment building that had a large problem with violence and gangs, to the point that people were scared to leave their homes. A campaign was done to clean up the area with art. Many of the images of the people on the walls of are ones who live in the building or who have died, or just random images of faces that make you think. Low and behold the idea worked! There hasn’t been any problems at the base of this building since and for the most part other artists have respected the area and don’t cover up the work with their own.

I could describe everything we saw and learned this day about Berlin that most people never learn or bother to get to know, but it would be quite an epic post. So, in short I’ll say this: After spending 1 day on this tour we want to go back to Berlin one day to experience it some more and sign ourselves up for some of the other tours that Alternative Berlin offers. They are a great bunch of locals that LOVE their hidden side of the city but thankfully of willing to share it with those who are interested.

So if your into grafitti and other underground scene related things, check them out at www.alternativeberlin.com and spend a day with them. You won’t be disappointed!!

Check out the rest of our pics from the day at our flickr album or by clicking on a thumbnail below:

Welcome to Oktoberfest!!!

It sounds a bit crazy when you really think about it. A beer festival…

Mmm… Wild Boar…

Any beer drinker out there has heard the legend of beer Shambhala – a place that only comes out once the days get a bit cooler and the yeast has time to ferment and become the nectar of the gods. Where beer comes in 1 liter mugs carried by a buxom blonde with 6 in each hand. A place that has all the beer friendly food you ever need, Weisswurst (White sausage), pretzels and pulled wild boar sandwiches are just a small sampling.

Our German Lunch

And don’t forget the beer tents! There are big tents and small tents, all made of wood and put together before the big event. The small tents are more catered to food with seating of 500 shoulder to shoulder which have a calmer but joyful atmosphere. It was one of these that had the smallest lines when we first arrived so we took the chance and set down to some of our first liter beers and schweinshaxe, a ham with the bone in German delight. Biting into this made us all feel truly German, with no where else to be we sat and drank and enjoyed the great company of each other ordering one round after another.

Inside one of the largest tents

The large beer tents could hold upwards of 10,000 people and it really was like a crazy drunken German party. There were groups of people standing on tables singing their own tunes, some other large groups were finishing off their 3rd and 4th liter beers, and everywhere everyone was smiling and having a good time. We found that there weren’t really any differences between the various large tents. Aside from the type of beer they serve all the giant tents are just a massive amount of people getting drunk and having good times.

Think this is a good idea?

Once we had enough drinks we decided to take on the challenge of rollercoaster’s. As you may know from our previous post, we knew drinking and riding was a big problem to the Brits. Now we had a first hand show at the old German Iron Stomach, and have to say we were never stopped once for an “essential cleanup”. Even on the rollercoaster that had 5 rings like the Olympic Circles, we were scooted on and off with efficiency.

We spent two days at Oktoberfest drinking and riding roller coasters. I felt that our Oktoberfest experience was super fantastic and lived up to all of my expectations before we even hit the evening of day one… It was then that needing to sit down with our beers in an outdoor beer garden we experienced something that will make us remember our Oktoberfest experience forever…

Some lovely ladies from Belgium we met…

And their great husbands!

The outdoor beer garden was packed, and we had just gotten off the big roller coaster, feeling quite tipsy and dizzy. Feeling the need to sit we kindly squeezed into the tight seating at a table filled with some random people, I can say I never expected what would happen next. We were chatting with some ladies who were dressed up in traditional German dresses. Their husbands were also dressed up in lederhosen and all of them were there on a company promotional trip from Belgium. We ended up talking with these ladies for over an hour. Our original plan then was to have one beer and leave in the search for some dinner, but the moment we started making motions to each other to head for dinner is when they order us all another round and asked if we wanted to come along with them to their company dinner in one of the tents. A couple of their employees were not able to attend at the last minute so they had some extra seats that were already reserved and paid for.

Our amazing dinner!

It took a couple of seconds to register this random act of kindness. That these people were inviting us to a free dinner, here, at Oktoberfest!! This is the sort of stories you dream of experiencing. We graciously accepted and were on our way for a treat. Inside one of the food tents we sat down and had even more beer and then magically the food appeared on giant platters. Out came half a dunk for each person, with Kartoffelkloesse (potatoes dumplings), gravy and sweet red cabbage. Desert came around with an assortment of apple strudel, cheesecake, and crepes and a tray full of schnapps. Then just as our stomach felt like they were going to burst, more beer was ordered, another tray of schnapps went around the table (however half of it landed on Steve’s lap) and a cheese and fruit platter appeared!

The long table of great Oktoberfest friends… and yes the night was starting to get a bit fuzzy by then!

We all really do have to say thank you to Ellen and Imre, you were very generous and great hosts, as felt as if we were eating a Christmas dinner with our German family back in Canada. If we don’t find a Christmas dinner during our travels in Thailand we will just have to think of this glorious meal we already experienced. Thank you and to your Company!

The aftermath…

So that was our Oktoberfest, it really is the Shambhala of beer drinking greatness. Nothings better than going on some rides, eating delicious food, drinking fresh beer from the beer making capital, and spending quality time with old and new friends.

Check out the rest of our photos at our flickr album here or by clicking on a thumbnail below:

And there is oh so many more to go!

Well, as some of your might of noticed… Scott and I are EXTREMELY far behind in our blog postings. Our anniversary in Venice was on August 5. That makes this blog 2 months behind. Holy crap!

We have been some busy travelers. But now we have slowed down to an almost halt. Our friends have flown back to Canada and our Eurail passes have expired. So, we are back in Baden Baden for awhile and staying in my relatives guest apartment which has a constant internet connection. (something we didn’t come across too often in our travels)

It’s now time to immerse ourselves in a bunch of good for you R’s. Relax, Recharge, and more importantly research! With Europe now a been there done that concept it’s time to figure out our next leg of adventures. Shall we go to Eygpt? India? S.E. Asia? All would be nice but Europe really took a bite out of our budget…. thus why we have taken a mandatory pitstop so we can really look everything over and make some smart decisions.

Guess what this means for you the reader! It means we are also going to take this down time opportunity to catch ourselves up on this blog. So stay tuned for great stories, photos and video coming up real quick.

Some topics to tap your finger and wait for:

• Getting Creeped out in Vienna
• Mountain Climbing in Prague
• Pumping Muscles in Brussels
• Participating in our own “Tour de France”
• Our thoughts to Gordon Ramsey, Jamie Oliver, and Steve Jobs
• Essential Clean Ups in London
• A Sanctuary that Belongs to the Cats
• Oktoberfest Insanity
• The beautiful under belly of Berlin
• and so much more!!

Family is great

10 things we liked about Baden-Baden

1. French wine is good! – In Canada we drink a lot of red wines, mostly from BC or Australia and have never really liked white wines. The whites we found were generally very sweet or very dry, not somewhere in the middle. We ended up drinking a lot of French white wine and enjoyed it very much. Defiantly going to be looking for more whites while in Europe, it’s nice to drink in the hot summer months.

for shame bakers in Canada

2. Black Forest Cake from the Black Forest. – What is the shit we get in Canada, imported from China? It’s not even in the same league. If you are a baker and read this – and make Black Forest Cake in Canada – you should be ashamed of yourself. FOR SHAME. Not even close. Use real cherries. Real whip cream. And cocoa for the cake, not chocolate. Add in a bit of cherry schnapps and there you have it. Seriously, the stuff we get in Canada is crap. CRAP! This also applies to Black Forest Ham.. it is supposed to be SMOKED not baked. Stupid bakers and deli. Bite you in the face!

3. Aperitif & Desertif – I have never experienced this before, something before dinner to settle your stomach, perhaps a schnapps, champagne or grappa. Then wine or beer with dinner. Then something after to help with the digestion. Why do we not do this at home? You better believe I’m going to have the full setup when we get back.

4. Family spoils you.- Deidra’s family in Baden-Baden, Artur and Barbara, really went all out and spoiled us. They were fantastic hosts even taking us to France for dinner one night. It was nice to have a real bed to sleep in, shower that was clean and relaxing porch to sit and read a book. Thank you for taking us to the Dr to have Dee’s foot looked at and everything else. It was just the right amount of down time that we needed.

5. Yes or No – I (Scott) have now found a new phrase for use with my wife. The relatives are German and speak fantastic English, but sometimes things get lost in translation. So when Artur asked Dee if she would like something, and Dee’s answer was “maybe” or “I’m not sure”, Artur would ask “yes or no?”. The clarity that resulted was fantastic. No mis-understandings, presumptions or reading between the lines. Simple.  This is perhaps the most important 3 words I’ve learned in my life! Every man should learn and repeat for a happier life.

6. Weissworst – The beautiful white sausage is a Bavarian specialty, and we hope to eat lots of it when we go to Oktoberfest. Cut the skin off and enjoy, it’s full of flavor.

7. Breakfast – In Canada breakfast is usually a bowl of cereal and your off. In Germany we enjoyed breads, cheese, meat, coffee, hard boiled egg, yogurt, fruit and jams. A new way for us to eat breakfast when we’re back in Canada, much more nutritious and filling.

8. Looking forward to retirement – When we can slow down and enjoy life, the aperitif’s, walks, shows and such. Hopefully finding a place in BC as nice as Baden-Baden (maybe with a hot spring nearby?)

9. Baden-Baden Casino. – This Casino was built in the mid 1800’s and is one of the oldest in Europe. The classy old décor and quality tables puts the casino’s in Vegas to shame. Almost like they were made in China and imported. There were fewer tables in side with lots of seating and room to enjoy the atmosphere, not so much concerned with the dollar amount per square foot of space versus the overall prestige of the house. It seemed you went there to enjoy the company of others rather than just to gamble. Plus the dress code was a jacket and tie for gents, evening attire for the ladies.

10. Baden-Baden baths – These baths have been in use for over 2000 years, first by the Romans and later by Europe’s famous. The baths themselves are made out of marble and have several pools and span over several buildings. There is a nude and clothing side, but when we went there it was gender specific nude so we donned our swimsuits. Very nice and well done, though I think the hot springs in Radium and Ainsworth in British Columbia are still my favorite.