Ça Plane Pour Moi

Last night I drank kvas and had borscht and pelmeni for dinner. Hey, I'm back in Russia! Or rather, I found a Russian restaurant down the street from our Paris hostel and convinced Jenny we should go. Sour cream and dill, it's been three months and I've missed you!


We had a grand time in Strasbourg and Anne and Jonathan were awesome hosts. We got two days of being shown around wacky Strasbourg with tour guide Anne, and then one day left to our own devices whereupon we decided to go CRAZY and go back to Germany. We went to Triberg in the black forest, saw a waterfall, ate black forest cake which I didn't think I'd like but which was really, really good and then suddenly found ourselves back in France again. Bam! Goodbye Germany, for the 3rd time.

Strasbourg was indeed a wacky town. Each of the tram stops had its own music, one of which I swear was one of the sound effects from Mass Effect. There was also a giant statue of a giraffe in a suit, a whole square full of army tanks and a park with monkeys in it. It's madness! But good madness. We tried traditional Alsatian flams, from "Flams", and Anne also introduced us to the best kind of cheese. All up, a good time!

My Strasbourg photos are all up: here

We're now in Paris for a week, during which time we plan on doing heaps of stuff! This is the first city I can say I've properly returned to. At the same time it's familiar, but not like I remember it, except for some parts which are exactly the same. A strange feeling!

So far we've heard "La Vie En Rose" twice in the one day that we've been here. I plan on keeping count! However, I'm worried that if I hear "Non Je Ne Regrette Rien" I'm going to suddenly wake up on an aeroplane heading to Beijing and realise all of my Europe trip so far has been just a dream....

Back in the Confœderatio Helvetica

Alright! We didn't have any internet in Geneva (unless we sat in the right place on the window sill) and the upload speed was very slow in Heidelberg - but now we've come to Strasbourg where Anne has kindly let us use her internet and now I've uploaded photos a-plenty! "Best friends ever".

So I returned to Switzerland and Germany and both were great reunions. We headed to Geneva, where we excitedly went to do a free tour of CERN. They took us to see some of the ATLAS facilities - unfortunately we didn't get to go underground to see any of the experimental equipment but we did get to look through a window at physicists in their natural environment. Everyone looked very busy, either because they were putting on a good show for the visitors or because CERN scientists really are just very awesome and dedicated to their work. CERN was very space-age, as evidenced by their use of 3D TVs for educational videos, 60s pod-chairs and tabletop touchscreen computers like in Bond movies. I was definitely suitably impressed!

After our grand plan to head to the Palais de Nations was thwarted due to heading there on a Sunday, we went on a day trip to Lausanne which was brilliant! I think I liked it more than Geneva, really cool views of the lake and the mountains.
In Lausanne I had my new contender for favourite icecream on my trip - maple and walnut icecream. It was just like having icecream with maple syrup on it, one of my favourite treats from home.
I've now concluded that my top five icecreams are as follows:
1. Mövenpick Maple and Walnut icecream
2. Rice icecream
3. Batman/Catwoman icecream
4. Ben and Jerry's peanut butter cookie dough icecream
5. Ginger and cinnamon icecream

Sometimes I have really good icecream and then I make lists like this. But now the weather's taken a turn for the cold so it's looking like it's no longer icecream weather. Ah well, it's been good while it's lasted! Some other good things I've eaten over the past few days include:
- great Chinese from a restaurant called "Hungky" which also did 'phoenix feet' and had an entire section of it's menu dedicated to 'marmite dishes'.
- fondue, which I was waiting til after meeting up with Jenny to eat in Switzerland. Between us we consumed a lot of tasty cheese.
- $15 pho, which is cheap by Switzerland prices. Crazy Switzerland!
- German ravioli (which really did have sausage in it this time)
- more currywurst (eaten whilst watching a great countdown of 'best 90s videos')
- cornflake chocolate

And tonight we enjoyed a welcome return to baguettes, cheese and wine and homemade quiche. Cheers to Anne for tasty French food!

I am jumping backwards here but in Germany we went to Heidelberg for two nights, a university town (with the oldest university in Germay) with a cool castle. We were staying, pretty literally, in a pub/restaurant and drank some really good beer there. Hooray for Germany!

So here are all the photos of what I've been doing for the past few weeks:
France: here
Switzerland and Germany: here

I'm looking forward to checking out Strasbourg and then we have a whole week in Paris before flying out to Dublin on the 27th. Time's going fast but it's going good!

The Beast Without

So it turns out everything Gabriel Knight told me is true:





Same goes for Neuschwanstein except I couldn't take photos in there. There even was a cave with a hidden door! Whilst there wasn't a wolf mural, I'm still pretty solidly convinced that King Ludwig II was a werewolf. I wanted to separate myself from the group to look for hidden scrolls but I forgot to bring along my live dove to distract the guide.

My other Gabriel Knight-related pilgrimage around Munich was to King Ludwig's cross on Lake Starnberg, which I decided to rent a bike for. Best decision ever! Cycling around the lake was brilliant though I am paying the price for it today. After succesfully negating both my walking and my cycling muscles, I ended up taking it easy on my last day in Munich today and drank Hofbrau in the beer garden in the English garden in the sun. It was good!

Other non-GK-related times in Munich included going to the Deutsches Museum, possibly the most impressive museum I've been to so far (a claim I feel like I'm making for each new impressive museum I go to). This place was 8 floors of exhibits on every imaginable field of science or type of technology. There were interactive exhibits for almost every class experiment I've ever had to do in Physics, a massive boat room, a massive aeroplane room, robots, an office desk, three floors just on Astronomy, paper napkins, everything!
They don't want you putting photos from the museum online so to not tempt any museum wrath I haven't uploaded them, except for one thing which I wanted to show my brothers. Guys, check this out!

My Germany photos are now complete with Munich photos: from here!

Tomorrow I'm off on a long train ride. My original plan was to head from Munich to Amsterdam but I found myself with two extra nights which I'm using to stop over in some countries I didn't think I'd get to. First stop: Luxembourg!
I'm getting out of Munich just in time; today the tents started going up and the crowds started coming in. Whilst it'd be well cool to come back for Oktoberfest some day, turns out the week before is actually pretty wicked! It wasn't too busy but lots of places were already all decked out in preparation. And you actually see people wearing Lederhosen about the place!
Munich: brilliant.

Finally, ridiculous things I bought in Germany, or, awesome things I bought in Germany:



He bought his hat in Bavaria! Yes, in Bavaria, where the trees are made of wood!

(I'm going to be unstoppable in the next game of Diplomacy with this hat. Can we play on bus?)

Essential Munich viewing:

Danke fur den fisch

Friends and family, Berlin was a cool, cool city. I did a lot of walking around town, spent a whole day on Museum Island, saw some naked people in Tiergarten and ate a lot of currywurst. Currywurst is a truly great invention!
I succesfully stayed up to go out partying Berlin-style on the Friday, where places don't open til 11 and people don't start turning up til about 1-2. I saw a local band who were just like how I imagined Berlin bands to be but didn't think they really were: all side-parts and synthesisers and serious-sounding German vocals.

My hostel was Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy-themed and did actually have a library of Douglas Adams books, a wall of framed Hitchiker's cover variants and the vast majority of furnishings around the hostel done in some kind of space-age style. They also had good beer, and one day I suspect that they may have listened to the Stone Roses all day on repeat because they were playing when I left in the morning and still going when I came back much later in the afternoon. Then they changed to The Coral. Best hostel ever!


In other news, I also have my first inventory item required for Munich:



#computergamesarenotreallife

#actuallymaybetheyare


And also, on my last night in Munich I met up with Matt Smith!



aka. steed_peel, a longtime livejournal friend! Turns out we were both travelling around Germany at the same time and our paths crossed in Berlin. Small world, good times!

My internet here in Munich is brilliantly fast, so here are my Berlin photos.
Please be prepared for blog posts with even more Gabriel Knight references because I can absolutely guarantee that they're coming.

Ein Berliner

Today I found out that "Ritter" is German for "knight".

Heyyyyyyyyyy, that makes a lot of sense!

In other news, I'm really enjoying Berlin and here are some Hamburg photos!

A New Career In A New Town

I'm determined to stay up til 11:00 (and past it) tonight so I can go partying it up at an indie/britpop club in Berlin. And then wake up in time to go for a tour of the spy sights of the city tomorrow. Let's do this!

First impressions: Berlin is many times cooler than Hamburg. Also, my Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy themed hostel is just as awesome as I'd hoped!

Does the "25 Most Played" playlist update automatically on your iPod, or do you have to sync it to iTunes to get your new count? I listened to tons of "Low" on the train over here as predicted, and I'm curious about when the surely more listened to "Be My Wife" will overtake "Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five", the solid top for a while now.

Vicarious Friday beers = two posts in one day.

Don't Fear the Reeperbahn

"Predictable blog titles I wanted to use regardless."

Success! On my first day in Hamburg I was indeed mistaken for a German when a woman came up to me and asked me something frantic about the Hauptbahnhof. I understood one word, Hauptbahnhof, and apologised for not being able to help (in English).

Apart from the words everyone knows and the words that sound like English, I consider myself to have a reasonable German vocabulary thanks to popular culture. Here are some things that I know:
geschlossen - Chuck
schnell, "die Amerikaner, die kaempfen wie wiebe" - Indiana Jones
rathaus, schattenjäger - Gabriel Knight

If I have an excuse to use any of these, I will be happy. In the meantime I'm trying to pick up as much German as I can (with varying success), and am enjoying the words I've picked up that have pretty much remained the same in Russian, Danish and German (apotek, kartoffel).

Hamburg itself has been pretty different after Denmark! Kind-of dark and gloomy, sometimes in a cool way and sometimes in a shifty way. Maybe a good candidate for the Gotham City of Germany? I've been to see some Beatles sights, but have avoided the Reeperbahn at night without the company of friends. I went for a walk around town and enjoyed the buildings, and tonight I found another open-air cinema right in front of the Rathaus – but unfortunately I was not to continue my Scandinavian luck: Vicki Cristina Barcelona was dubbed into German!

Yesterday, on the advice of some friendly New Zealanders, I went for an afternoon in Lübeck – a town I knew nothing about but which turned out to be pretty cool! I didn't do much more than walk around and eat some ryvitas in the park, but it was a good place to do both of these.

Further thoughts of the day:
1.Inspired by the Danish, I'm thinking it would be cool to have my own customised bicycle. This could go hand in hand with Plan A: getting an apartment, but both of these depend on Plan B: working out what I'm going to do next year, something I've made no progress on. (letters don't necessarily correspond to priorities)

2.Sometimes I feel disproportionate levels of sadness when I see someone wearing an awesome t-shirt that I know I'll never be able to find for myself. This happened yesterday when I saw a guy wearing a shirt that had a huge black and white print of my favourite Twin Peaks promo pic, and underneath it in block letters “All For Nothing”. True words, my friend, true words!

Today I'm off to Berlin, where I'm going to listen to Low on repeat and try currywurst! Should be good!