The sun is shining, but the ice is slippery

In Paris I got very excited when I saw this much snow:


But now we're in Dublin and there's this much snow:


It's not just snow, it's mega-snow! It's a very exciting time for me. A cold, exciting time.

So far I'm loving Dublin: I've drunk some delicious Guinness, ate beef pie and when "Going Underground" came on in the pub we were in last night I stuck two thumbs up right in Jenny's face.

As it turns out we made a bit of a mix-up with our flights and are flying out of Ireland a day later than we thought. Woops! This unfortunately means we get one day less in the Lake District but on the plus side, one more day of Ireland! No complaints here!

Charles the Gaul

Tonight is our last night in Paris and I'm celebrating by playing my "Ridiculous French" playlist (assorted songs which vary between sensible and very tenuous links to France) loudly on my laptop whilst Jenny tries to peacefully write in her journal. What a great roommate I am!

During my time in France I successfully managed to: buy things in shops, order in restaurants, give directions to strangers and navigate a particularly complicated job at the post office all in French, without being replied to in English (whether because I succeeded so well at French or because the people I were talking to just didn't want to speak English I will never know). Proud of myself! (particularly considering that upon arrival in France I felt like I'd forgotten everything I'd ever learnt)

I am also proud of myself because tonight I tried mussels for the first time, ordering them as my final meal in a French bar. They were curry mussels, they were very tasty and I ate them all up. Success!

My French success is in great juxtaposition with the most brilliant Paris scene that Jenny and I witnessed:
We were walking along and we saw a guy walk up to a policewoman and say to her, in a very strong southern USA accent "Eiffel Tower?"
Then, when she looked at him blankly, he said much louder, "EIFFEL TOWER?" whilst doing an "it's this tall" gesture with his hands.
The policewoman looked at him completely stoney-faced and said without cracking, "je ne comprends pas". She definitely must have known what he was saying. Greatest policewoman ever!

Our time in Paris has been pretty mega-busy! I bought a museum pass and we went to a lot of places, some which I'd been to before but all of which were grand to revisit.
It would take a long time to go through them all but here are some of my favourite things that have happened in Paris:

- we went to the catacombs, which are deep underground tunnels filled with the bones of many Parisians, all stacked in there after they decided to clear out the city's cemeteries for health reasons in the 18th century. They were the greatest!


- we caught the first snow of the season (we think) whilst wandering around Père Lachaise cemetery! The first snow we got was quite confusing as it was semi-snow, semi-hail but today we got definite flakes. I was mega, mega excited. Jenny was cold!
I am much more of a cold weather fan than Jenny, who is not so much, as evidenced in a quote from today: "I think the cold is making my gums recede"

- tracking down Hotel Chevalier:


- Jenny chasing pigeons in Montmartre:


I have a ton of photos from this week which probably have a lot more detail about what I've been up to! Now all up: here
That link starts at the end of my Strasbourg photos, which I realise I didn't all make public when I thought I did. Woops! Now they're all up for real!

Last night we went to see Harry Potter - in English, but it still had subtitles in French. Turns out that in French "wand" is "baguette". The very serious scene where Voldemort was going on about how he needed another baguette and would anyone like to give him a baguette was the greatest thing I've seen in a long time!
(also, for some mysterious reason Snape is renamed "Rogue" in French. Sneaky old Severus Rogue!)

I have strong suspicions that my Italian talking watch may be aquiring an intelligence of its own. For two mornings in a row it's suddenly started spontaneously playing music when I'm trying to be quiet and not wake up the other people in my dorm. Is my watch attempting to sabotage, or brighten up, my mornings?

Tomorrow we're flying to Dublin, and I'll return to countries where I'll be able to read every sign, understand background conversations and understand everything on the menu. Woah! It's going to be a crazy change.
Goodbye Paris and mainland Europe! I've enjoyed being stuck behind your language barrier and having good times for the past 4 months.

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....

1664 Forever

Today we went on a tour of the Kronenbourg breweries in Strasbourg.

Was the best part of this:
a) the fact that the tour was in French and I was able to follow along for most of it?
b) the fact that afterwards we got to try a lot of beers for 4.50 euros?
or
c) the cardboard stand-up I discovered in a corner display case.

Correct answer:



This may in fact be one of the greatest things I've ever seen.

Translation of the caption: "I love my wife. She buys Kronenbourg in six-packs."

It's George Lazenby, so does that mean his beer-delivering wife is Diana Rigg?
I just can't get over the astounding awesomeness of this ad. Hooray for the 60s, hooray for Kronenbourg!

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!

Skumps!

Today I went to Rennes-le-Château on a quest for the holy grail and I totally found it:


It was so easy, it was just lying on the path around the village! Maybe everyone has just been overcomplicating things with their conspiracy theories?

I also found out that, blocky 3D graphics aside, Gabriel Knight 3 took a lot of liberties with its depiction of Rennes-le-Château. None of this spot-on Munich business of the second game, turns out Gabriel Knight 3 was all "let's put in a hotel! Let's put in a giant fountain!"
That said, the things they did recreate were spot on and very, very cool (the church, Tour Magdela).




Whilst some things were indeed lost in blocky translation:




There was even a lone cat wandering around the village, which I would have used to make my cat-hair moustache but I was all out of masking tape. I bought a t-shirt with one of the texts from Le Serpent Rouge on it as the best approximation to a Gabriel Knight t-shirt I could find. It smells like an arcane bookstore!

This wasn't the only fortuitous discovery I made in an arcane bookstore:


It was a pretty great pilgrimage and, Gabriel Knight holy grail conspiracy theories aside, the views were awesome! Aude is my new favourite part of France.

Tonight I've convinced Jenny we should watch Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to top off our grail day (and investigate the accuracy of Venice). I wish I had a Euro for every time I said the phrase "cat hair moustache" to Jenny today. I am the best travelling companion ever.

In other news, Toulouse was short but good. I have many more photos of Toulouse and Marseille but they can wait til another day. Now we are in Carcassonne and are sleeping in a castle. Seriously, in a castle!

Being older, being Italian

Hello! Since I've last written I'm now 24 and I've been to Venice. Both excellent things!

The rest of Rome went well! We'd heard that the Vatican museum was free on the last Sunday of the month - which was conveniently when we were in town - hence we excitedly headed over there. We'd read that we should "arrive early to avoid queues" and made it over there about quarter of an hour before the museum's opening time which we thought was pretty good. Surprise! The queue was already around the block, along three angled walls around Vatican City and into the courtyard. It was a rainy morning, straight after the change from daylight savings, and some of these people must have been queueing for a long, long time!
We hopped onto the end of the queue and figured we'd see how it went in half an hour.... then another half an hour.... then we hit that point where we'd been queing for long enough we figured we may as well stick it out. In the end we ended up queing for just under three hours. No reward is worth this!



Actually, it turned out it was - the Vatican Museum was crazily impressive. We couldn't really stop to look at anything too long as it felt like we were constantly being pushed along by a crowd of people, but every room we went into was brilliant. Those Popes ended up with some amazingly good stuff!
This experience pretty much summed up my main impression of Rome by the end of it: crowded and crazy (Marzipan ravioli!).

After Rome we went to Venice which was, surprisingly, less crowded and, even more surprisingly, exactly like it always looks in movies. Ah, Venice!
Being able to celebrate my birthday with Jenny and Ben and Alicia was grand. They surprised me at breakfast with the most Italian of birthday cakes, a chocolatey version of that Italian Christmas cake with Pope candles on it. So good!

Jenny got me a Doctor Who Travelling Companion book, the ultimate combination of Doctor Who and travel which is going to bring me so much fun on the train. Ben and Alicia got me an Italian talking watch which reads the time in Italian and can also make a rooster noise and play music. Be prepared, my watch is definitely coming on Buss for plenty of Italian fun!
To top off my exciting morning of cake and present-opening, my Mum had sent me a package of treats from home: some of my favourite Australian goods to stave off homesickness. Weetbix, Freddo + Caramello, Dilmah tea, ginger nuts and 2 minute noodles. I'm going to be feasting Australia-style!

I spent my birthday wandering around Venice with not too much idea of my bearings, eating more cake, eating icecream, having a pigeon on my head, eating dinner by a canal and going for beers. It was a grand old day!

We spent the rest of our time there seeing some old art (at the Doge's Palace) and some modern art (in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection), generally wandering around town, having good wine with Ben and Alicia and taking water taxis (the poor man's gondola). Ah, Venice!



I have a whole bunch of Italy photos, including a whole bunch of Venice canal photos, now up here!

We took a night train out of Venice and after an early morning change in Dijon and an unexpected change in Lyon (which was one of the towns I went to on French trip - the first European city I've returned to!) are now in Marseille. It's sunny as its south of France reputation would suggest and it smells mysteriously like Vietnam (both Jenny and I concur on this point but we've been completely unable to pin the smell down). Since here we've eaten some great bread and some great Moroccan food and I've been gradually recalling my French, enough to have full conversations in shops even if it's still a bit sketchy. We also finally found a cinema showing The Social Network in English, a quest of ours since Greece, and I really enjoyed it! Another good discovery about France: the trailer quota is amazing (even if all the ones we got were dubbed).
Tomorrow we're going to Toulouse and then to Carcassonne, both of which I'm very excited about. Hooray for France! Liberté, égalité, Orangina.

I'm not 100% sure but I think someone in my hostel could be trying to work out the theme song to The Office on guitar!

Tricks and Treats

In Santorini I found myself with two books to exchange and quite happily changed them for what I believed were the first and second books in the Foundation trilogy. I was excited to read them after having studied the trilogy in the science-fiction history unit. It wasn't until after almost finishing the first and being keen for more that I discovered Second Foundation is the third book in the trilogy. Come on, what kind of sneaky trick was that? Or for a better question, who leaves the first and third books from a trilogy in a hostel book exchange?

Today another string of strange events happened!
First, I needed a haircut and hence braved an Italian barber. Haircuts already make me nervous, so the many unknown quantities of not knowing the barber or speaking much Italian made me even more nervous than usual. But it turned out I didn't need to worry! With my minimal Italian and the barber's minimal English I actually got a pretty good haircut. Hooray! Now I am well Roman.

Next, Jenny and I met up with Anne in Rome. What is this madness? Turns out Anne and her friend Mark were holidaying in Rome at the same time as us! I don't know what was stranger, unexpectedly meeting up with them here or realising that we'll see them again in a couple of weeks. European madness!

Thirdly, for lunch we went to a restaurant with no English translations on the menu. Luckily Mark spoke pretty good Italian! I was keen for some ravioli and from the menu Mark gathered that the ravioli option was, perhaps, 'with sausage sauce'. Sounded good.
The ravioli we got came in a sort of tasty bolognaise sauce. Maybe the sausage was inside? Nope! Inside was marzipan. Or at least, something that tasted very much like marzipan!
And this was how I ended up having marzipan ravioli with bolognaise sauce for lunch. Hands down winner of the craziest thing I've eaten on my trip so far.

All up Rome has been going well! We weren't able to get tickets to Burke and Hare at the film festival but we did head out of town to see Pompeii yesterday. Pompeii was very, very cool. Like Delos, much bigger than I expected and like Knossos, much greener than I expected. It's cool how much it still feels like a town, rather than a cluster of ruins (which was what I expected). A mega day getting out to Naples and back, but a good day!
It was also cool heading to another place that I studied a lot in history and it reminded me that at one point in time I knew the difference between the four styles of Pompeiian artwork. Apparently my brain thought this would never come in handy and promptly forgot it. That was a foolish move, brain!

Between the four styles of Pompeii and Foundation I feel like I'm getting a lot of value out of my history degree at the moment!

After a lot of messing around I've finally gotten the rest of my Greece photos uploaded: now up from the bottom of here
If you look at the photos from the main page some are in a confusing order, but they're all as they should be from that link!

Tomorrow I'm going to be having a spooky Halloween at Vatican City and then it's Venice round the corner! Yesss.

Θεσσαλονίκη - Χανιά

Hello! It's been a while since I've written anything as I was trying to save up all my Greece stories and photos for when we finished travelling around Greece. As it turns out that's actually a lot to cover! But here are the places in Greece I've been to and what I thought of them:

THESSALONIKI
Thessaloniki I didn't get much time to see as I was just there for a night in between Sofia and Athens. As a result, the guy at the desk of my hotel suggested that the best way for me to see the city in my few afternoon hours would be to take the city's tour bus. I waited for the bus for an hour, learnt about "Greek time", enjoyed some Mediterranean Herb flavoured chips and realised that you feel pretty old seeing a city through the window of the bus (at least when that thought crosses your mind of, "hey, I'm kind-of seeing the city but I don't have to walk around!"). All up, I enjoyed walking along the waterfront to get to the bus the best!



ATHENS
Athens took a long time to get to due to trains running on "Greek time" and when I got there it wasn't what I expected. I'd heard a lot of stories from fellow travellers about how Athens was dodgy and dirty: but what I saw was clean, white, sunny (til Jenny got there!) and awesome. I ended up really loving Athens, tying with Heraklion as my favourite place in Greece I visited! On the day before Jenny got in I climbed Lycabettus Hill, the tallest hill in Athens, where I could see for miles and miles, and then walked around the National Gardens which were also really cool. As mentioned, Jenny and I then did a lot of sightseeing in the rain which dampened our clothes but not our spirits! We didn't end up making it to the National Museum that day due to unexpected metro delays (ie. an entire section of the track being missing), but we did have some brilliant kebabs, possibly the best kebab I've ever had! According to the bag they came in, the place we chose had been around since the 20s, which was a fortuitous "next kebab place we see we're getting one". A good choice!

In Athens I also took the opportunity to do ridiculous things like this:


(reference point)

MYKONOS
Mykonos was also not what I was expecting! I hear that Mykonos is some kind of "party island", but when we were there we didn't see any of this famous "party". Instead our pension was in a quiet, beachy area and when we headed to the main town it was also not too crowded. This was a good thing! It meant my first impression of the Greek islands was a pretty chilled out and peaceful one. We'd mainly headed to Mykonos as a means of getting to Delos, which we did indeed get too and this was very, very cool. I couldn't get over the fact that a) they've preserved the ruins of almost an entire town and b) that they've managed to keep the island free for the archaeologists to work on it. I was expecting a small site by the port, not realising that an entire town really means a lot of ruins! We rambled around it for a good couple of hours and it was good fun.



SANTORINI
After two nights in Mykonos we had two nights in Santorini. Santorini I will remember for what seemed like a particularly crazy day! We'd planned on: heading to Fira, the main town, which was close to our pension and then heading to Oia to see the sunset, something which is apparently good to do. After wandering around Fira for a bit I had a great idea - to walk to Oia! Looking at the map, I enthusiastically suggested to Jenny this would be "at the most" a 40 minute walk and would save us a bus fare. Woops! Turns out it takes 2 hours. On the walk there we picked up a mysterious dog companion which walked with us for probably over an hour and practically led us to Oia. It was walking ahead of us most of the time and kept looking back to make sure we were still following. Thanks, Dog! We made it to Oia, checked out the nice houses, and then found our "good spot" for watching the sunset. Luckily we headed there early as it turned out this was a lot of people's "good spot" for watching the sunset!

So on one side you've got this peaceful view:


And on the other side this:


After watching the sunset we had a great plan to catch the bus back to Fira, go for dinner and head back home. Surprise! Even though this was peak tourist time because everyone had gone to watch the sunset, there wasn't a bus for an hour. We sat in a cafe near the bus station with not enough jackets, tried to nurse espressos for as long as possible to fight off the cold and then realised that the TV was wackily showing a countdown of "Top 5 breast grabs". Some were from movies, some were from real life. They should expand that and make it a 20 to 1!
By the time the bus finally came a good number of tourists had accumulated who wanted to catch it. At first I was concerned that we wouldn't all fit on the bus. No worries! After they'd filled up all the seats they stuffed us into the aisles, until the bus was completely packed with squashed in tourists. The bus then proceeded to make its speedy way back to Fira around precarious Greek road bends. It was genuinely a very crazy, and very scary experience. Legs felt a little bit wobbly when I stepped off that bus and felt thankful that I'd survived. The wine was extra good when we finally made it to a taverna for dinner.
My evening then concluded its craziness by being invited up to the bedroom of our pension owners - they had concluded I was a technical person and wanted me to fix something on the internet for them. I ended up composing an e-mail to hostelworld, being patted on the back lots by George whilst the wife was hanging around in the bed nearby. All up, a strange day.

HERAKLION
After Santorini we headed to Crete with no idea of where to stay in Heraklion - a surprisingly big town that has surprisingly no internet presence. We were very relieved to find out a place we'd read about in Lonely Planet had cheap rooms and turned out to be pretty good! It had a very jungly rooftop bar. Heraklion was kind-of like a mini-Athens and turned out to be one of my favourite places we went to in Greece for that reason. Whilst there we headed to Knossos, where I didn't see any minotaurs but did enjoy making fun of Arthur Evans and seeing the ruins. After Delos I was expecting a bigger site, forgetting that a 'palace' (loose term) compared to a town would be much smaller. Still great, anyway!

CHANIA
Chania was our second stop on Crete and was also good. We took our time wandering around here as we'd planned to head to the Samaria Gorge but it was already closed for the winter, so we had heaps of time to see the town.
Here is a sad story from Chania! We found a t-shirt shop which sold a lot of cool internet-style shirts, where I found a shirt that said DOS and had a picture of a record on it. Oh man, best fake Exit to DOS shirt ever! But they only had it in XL! Ahh, sad times!

I ate lots of tasty Greek food and downed Mythos beer, retsina and ouzo, though I've got to say that the moussaka and pastitsio I had were not as good as Mum's, and the Greek beans I had were not as good as Dad's. Tasty food but after a few tavernas I do miss home cooking! Also, there was a fly in my pastitsio. I picked it out and tried to pretend I didn't see it because that was one of the better taverna meals I'd had to that date! Jenny and I frequently chose places based on Greek Salad Index, ie. the price of their Greek Salad on the 'extortionate to surprisingly reasonable' scale. The best things I had were veal giouvetsi, and another awesome veal dish from a slightly Turkish-influenced place that was a tomato, raisin and pine nut stew with tons of Greek yoghurt on the side. Tasty stuff! We also had a surprisingly good run of getting free shots of spirits and desserts from our last few tavernas. Hooray!

I've been working on uploading my Greek photos - I've got a lot so there's still a few to come! But for now you can see them here (and I'll add more to the same album hopefully soon)
For anyone who's looking at Jenny's photos as well as mine - surprise! We have heaps of similar photos. You have been warned!

Travelling with Jenny has been going good so far, although she did ask me:
"Can you play any musical instruments?"
A friend indeed!

We've now succesfully made it to Rome where it turns out our arrival has coincided with the Rome International Film Festival! So here are some famous people who will also be in town whilst we're here: Martin Scorsese, Shah Rukh Khan. I should invite him to Venice so we can celebrate our birthdays together!
We're definitely hoping to make it to at least one film in the film festival, ideally the Burke and Hare screening with introduction by John Landis, though it's quite possible tickets have already sold out. Hopefully we can get into something! I will break out my fancy "jumper" again.

You know what's crazy? All of a sudden it's less than a week til my birthday. How did that happen? But in awesome news, Ben and Alicia from Vodkatrain are going to be in Venice at the same time and me and Jenny, so all of a sudden my birthday's going off! I hope there are one or more of the following in Venice for the big day: catacombs, vampires, speedboats.

We have 5 nights in Rome before then, which is the longest I've spent in one place for a long time, possibly since Munich. Lots of time to try and learn to, as they say, be Italian!

Atlantis

This was what the weather was like in Athens yesterday, before Jenny came:



And this has been the weather today:




GEE THANKS JENNY.

Just kidding! We're having a ball - we may have gotten soaked walking around the Acropolis but it was still cool. Currently having a pit stop at the hostel before attempting to use our soggy Acropolis tickets for further sightseeing - then lastly, the National Museum, where it won't matter if it's raining.
Getting drenched and updating blogs, "classic travelling"!