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!