Getting there...

Well it's nearing the end of our trip (we fly out tomorrow...) and we're back in London staying the night at Steve and Kat's joint so we can get out to Heathrow early.
It's strange to think that I'll be back at work in 1 week from now... but I digress! There are tales to be told..

Lucy's rellies who kindly put us up in Seascale, offered to drive us up to Glasgow on the Sunday, with the dual purpose of meeting up with some more of Lucy's relatives who live just outside Glasgow. We took the backroads through Cumbria so as to see all the countryside which was stunning. We also stopped off at a few different remaining parts of Hadrian's Wall which has (over the past 2000 odd years) lost it's ability to keep the Scots on one side and the rest of the world on the other, but you can imagine what it once was like from the massive ruins, and it was well worth the visit.


Glasgow

Glasgow was our first stop in Scotland. It's a really cool city, full of life and craziness, and is a little more 'real' or 'grungy' than most other places we've been to... however the fact that it's "not as pretty as Edinburgh" (quoted from a local Glaswegian) is what makes it a cool place. There is a bit of a rivalry between the two cities, and I've heard from multiple sources that "the best thing to ever come out of Edinburgh is the train back to Glasgow". I choose not to take sides on the matter.

Glasgow definitely lived up to it's reputation as Britain's second best shopping destination (after London) and there were literally miles and miles (Sauchiehall st & Buchanan st for those who might find themselves wandering around Glasgow with too much cash one day) of shops and malls (including the oldest shopping arcade in Britain...maybe Europe) and it was hard not to go a little overboard with the spending. I swear I needed all of it!

We checked out the cemetery on the hill, which I reckon is the most awesome cemetery ever. The place was mostly used back in the day when Glasgow had a huge ship building industry and the cities merchants were just too rich for their own good. This accounts for a hill covered in massive headstones and enormous family mausoleums, all with a magnificent view over the city. There were the token drunk teens hanging out there too, but that's to be expected in any cemetery really.


We decided to take a day out of Glasgow, and took a one day bus tour out to the Lower Highlands (what the?) to see some of the countryside, which is like Cumbria's, but about 100 times better. The tour first took us to Stirling Castle, which is an ancient strategic fortification perched up on top of a rocky hill (is there any other way?) which overlooks the sight of many historic battles, some of which Mel Gibson was present.
The bus then took us to picturesque Loch Katerine for lunch, where I had to fight off the urge to order the Haggis...
The last stop on the tour was a Whisky distillery nestled at the base of some rolling hills, as all good distilleries should be. There were free samples involved...

Edinburgh

Edinburgh was the next, and last stop of our great adventure, and out of pure coincidence (not really) we had arrived at the beginning of the Edinburgh (Fringe) Festival!
The festival is a month of comedy, theatre, music, dance, and general craziness, and our hostel was right in the middle of it!
We spent a fair amount of time just walking around watching street performers perform and drama students make idiots of themselves, but also booked ourselves in for a few shows.
We ended up seeing two comedians (Reginald D Hunter, and Rich Hall) and the Soweto Gospel Choir, which were all great.


In between the festival craziness, we managed a day trip back down into England (just) to visit Alnwick Castle, which is one of the places where some Harry Potter scenes were filmed. This was definitely my favourite castle, and was pretty much everything you'd expect an English Castle to be. Also, it's one of the few castles that is still lived in (by the Duke of Northumberland & family), and some of the private residence was open to the public. No free samples here though... as if anyone needs so many antiques anyway!


We did lots of other stuff too but as you can imagine, I'm growing weary and I'll see most of you pretty soon anyway!

We have taken all up about 4 or 5 Cd's worth of photos, and I'll endeavour to put some more up here ASAP.

word out.

J

The road more (or less) travelled

Well it's about time for another rushed installment of (cue drumroll) "The Unofficial Europe".

I left off last time in Aix-en-Provence... I don't really have much to say about this place as it was not very interesting at all.

Nice

By this time the weather in France had been getting us down, so we booked 5 nights in a nice hotel in Nice, which is a "beach town" in the south of France. To our great surprise, the shit weather that had followed us for the past while, did not make it to Nice, and we managed to enjoy hot weather and sunshine pretty much the entire time there. We did a couple of sightseeing type things like visiting the old fortress on top of the hill (with a spectacular view), and explored the old town with its many markets and restaurants (one really good meal at a place named after Jesus).
Really though, we just spent heaps of time on the beach.
Nice's beaches can be described as a vast expanse of budgie smugglers, boobies, and a surreal walking style that comes from trying to navigate hot stones in bare feet, which has to be seen to be fully appreciated as I can't come up with an adequate description.
So we lay down on our bamboo mats (used to disperse your weight evenly over the rocky terrain) and got very, very burnt.

We happened to be there for Bastille Day (France's national holiday), which started off with a very uninspiring military parade, but ended up with a cool fireworks display over the bay, watched from the beach.

Lyon

We spent a night in Lyon as a stopover on our way back to Paris to catch the Eurostar to London.
It seemed like a nice place but we didn't really have enough time to check it out properly.

London

We arrived at London Waterloo off the Eurostar (which is an awesome ride), and met my cousin Stephen at who's place in West Hampstead we would be staying for the next 5 nights or so, and I can tell you that after Nice we were very glad to not have to pay for accommodation for a while!

I was glad to finally be in a country that takes breakfast seriously, and quickly became acquainted with local culinary delights such as meat and ale pies with Yorkshire pudding, and Cumberland sausage, just to name a couple.

Steve and his wife Kat had just gotten back from a whirlwind 15 day (I think) tour of Europe on which they had been joined by Kat's twin sister Amy and her fiancee Andy. So for the first 3 nights there was 6 of us all staying in the one apartment, and we got to know each other very well! We actually spent a fair amount of our first couple of days exploring London with Amy and Andy (as Steve and Kat were at work), which was great fun. Andy had popped the question about 5 or 6 days earlier while in Switzerland (I think...) and they were still all lovey dovey... congrats!

The list of things we did and saw in London is long, but some highlights include: National Museum, Downing Street (where the PM lives), 221b Baker street (where Sherlock Holmes lives), Westminster Abbey (where lots of dead monarchs live), Regent st, Leicester Square, Picadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, Mayfair, and lots of other Monopoly places. We waived at the policeman outside Margaret Thatchers house and he waived back! I don't know why, but it seemed cool at the time.

Westminster Abbey is definitely one of the coolest churches I've been to, and is highly recommended. It has flying buttresses on its flying buttresses!
We managed to catch the Tower Bridge over the Thames opening and closing while on a short cruise on the river, which apparently only happens a few times a week nowadays.

We happened to find ourselves at one point in the Baker Street Tube station, which is actually the oldest subway station in the world, dating back to 1863! Definitely worth a look if you like old style underground architecture. As a matter of fact I could have spent ages just exploring the tube stations, as some of the larger ones are really cool. e.g. Huge cavernous expanses with mazes of escalators extending deep into the ground... (We could be happy underground...)

We also went on a guided "Horror Tour", which took us around a bunch of Jack the Ripper related spots, which was pretty cool.

On a more soggy note, we got caught in a huge downpour (hear about the floods anyone?) whilst watching the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace (over-rated) and got absolutely saturated. I ended up having to buy a new pair of shoes as it took about 4 days for mine to dry!

Staying with Steve and Kat was really cool, as they took us to heaps of awesome bars, markets, restaurants etc. that we just wouldn't have known were there otherwise, and it was great to just hang out with people we knew for a while... and on a happy note, my liver is expected to make a full recovery!
London is probably my favourite city so far, and if you haven't been there, get off your arse and go!


Stewartby

On the Sunday afternoon we were picked up from Steve's place by Lucy's uncle Mick and his partner Patsy (much appreciated) and headed out to where they live in a little place called Stewartby, about an hour north.

While there we did an afternoon trip out to check out Cambridge, where Lucy promptly decided that she was going to try get transferred there for her masters! It's full of old buildings and lots of students and bicycles (surprise!), and is quite a cool place. Very cool actually.

We also did a day trip out to Bletchley Park, which was a secret installation during the 2nd world war, and was where all the code breaking of intercepted encrypted enemy communications went on. It's now a museum-ish place with lots of WW2 era collections, and military stuff.
The highlight (for me) was a working replica of "Colossus", which was the first ever computer. It was built to help break encrypted messages and is very cool. Unfortunately (and supposedly) the original was dismantled right after the war for security reasons...

Seascale

We are now in a little place called Seascale, which is on the north-ish west coast of England, in Cumbria, near the Lakes District. We are staying with Lucy's dad's cousin and his wife, Tam and Amanda, in an awesome house on top of a hill overlooking the ocean in one direction, the Cumbrian countryside in another (which is spectacular), and the first ever Nuclear power plant in the other!



Today our gracious hosts took us on a driving tour of the Lakes district including such higlights as Beatrix Potter's holiday house. The scenery is so amazing that it just has to be seen.

Off to Glasgow tomorrow!

We'll it's time for dinner so I must go.

I apologise if this post seems at all incoherent as I'm rushing due to hungriness!

Pics soon.

J

Finally!

The previous two posts now have photos!

Teh awesome

It seems once again that it has been too long between blog posts, but when you're only staying somewhere 3 nights and then moving on, it gets hard to find time to eat let alone write.

We've been about half a dozen cities since last post so once again I'm gonna have to keep it short-ish. Photo fascism has spread to southern France too so no photos yet.


Berlin.Was awesome. It's no where near as crowded as any other large European capital, which was a very nice change. A bit like Canberra in that respect, but that's about as far as the similarities go.
We stayed in a big hostel called St Christopher's, which was very conveniently positioned right next to a subway station, and on top of a bar/restaurant that had very cheap beer and food.

We did a free walking tour of the middle of town starting at the Brandenburg Gate. We saw a bunch of cool stuff like Hitler's Bunker... or to the untrained eye, a dirt carpark near some flats.

We walked down the 'East Side Gallery', which is the longest remaining section of the Berlin wall, and is covered in paintings from just after the wall came down.

I also bought a T-shirt. It's cool.


Koln (Cologne).

Our next stop in Germany was Koln. I'd heard wind that a wayward brother of mine(Jo) was passing through town that day, so we went to meet him. Actually he'd just been on planes and in airports for the previous 36 hours or so and had landed in Amsterdam that morning (the cheapest flight to Europe he could find), and had caught a bus straight over to Koln.
We had organised to meet my cousin Gaynor and her family in Koln that night for a picnic, as they live in a village close by. We were going to meets them as soonas we collected Jo, however, when Jo arrived - in the same clothes he left Aus in - he desperately needed a shower. He and I raced back to the hostel to get him cleaned up while Lucy went to meet the rels.
We ended up our night with a lovely picnic in the banks of the (Rhine?) river.

Only one night in Koln, then straight on to Rouen, our first stop in France.

Why Rouen you may ask? I've never heard of such a place! you exclaim. Well, it's close to Bayeux (but not to Mont-Saint-Michel - but that's another story), which has a very long tapestry of note, 70 metres in all. It depicts the events surrounding the battle of Hastings in 1066. Lots of horses and boats etc.

Paris was our next stop. I'll skip the descriptions of all the standard tourist stuff we saw, as you've heard it before, and if you haven't, Lucy will probably write about it anyway ;). Here's the list: Louvre, Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triumph, Champs Elysee's, Notre Dame, Moulin Rouge...etc.


We still had Jo with us at that stage, and he and I had an important pilgrimage to make just out of Paris, so we left Lucy at the George Pompadou museum and headed south.

The place I speak of is called Lisses. It's a small ordinary looking suburb on the outskirts of Paris which also happens to be the origin of Parkour.
Parkour you say? WTF is that? here's a nice definition from Wikipedia.org:

(Le) Parkour (sometimes abbreviated to PK) or l'art du déplacement[1] (English: the art of displacement) is generally an urban acrobatic activity of French origin, the aim of which is to move from point A to point B as efficiently and quickly as possible, using principally the abilities of the human body.[2][3] It is meant to help one overcome obstacles, which can be anything in the surrounding environment — from branches and rocks to rails and concrete walls — parkour can be practiced in both rural and urban areas.

Me and Jo and some other mates have been practicing Parkour for a while now, and Lisses is where it all started about 9 years ago with a bunch of bored teens with nothing but their environment to entertain them. One of whom grew up to be the black guy in the chase scene at the beginning of the recent Bond film.

Lisses is the setting for many videos showcasing the skills of the original (and best?) practitioners of Parkour, and I just had to go there to check out some of the famous spots.


We did find some of those spots and I tried my skills out, somewhat rusty after not practising for 2 months, but heaps of fun all the same.
We met 2 dudes at one of these spots, 1 of whom is a local, and has been training there for 8 years, with the pros!
Wish I could have stayed for longer and really explored, but oh well. Next time.


Mont-Saint-Michel

After a bit of screwing around, we finally made it out to the Abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel. As you may know, it's built (in true monk style) in a very inconvenient place. It's perched on a small island in the middle of a lagoon/marsh, and you used to have to make a dash for it at low tide just to get there. They have since built a land bridge which although very convenient, is screwing with the tides and sand movement etc, so I expect they'll put it on stilts at some stage soon.

Bordeaux

We didn't really do much in Bordeaux, except a truly forgettable wine tour.
We wandered around the city, which is quite nice, and marvelled at their newly built futuristic tram system.

Which brings us to Aix-en-Provence, our current haunt... so I don't really have much to say about it yet! The sun has finally come out though, and I'm looking forward to getting to the beach in a couple of days.

Word out for now.

And then...

I´m sitting in the net cafe section of our hostel in Berlin in which we recently arrived... and it seems that the internet/computer fascism has reached here also so no photos right now.

It has been a while since I posted last, but I assure you it´s not through laziness, but absolute lack of time. Since then we have spent time in Croatia, Budapest, Prague and now Berlin and we have just been flat out.

I´m not gonna write in detail about any of these places or I´ll be forever behind on my posting so I´ll give an overview of each destination.

Dubrovnik, Croatia.

A great little city on the very southern point of Croatia, the old town is built around a port and ocean life is what it´s all about. The old town is an immaculately preserved - execpt a few destroyed sections left that way since the troubles in the late 80´s early 90´s - Venetian walled city, and everything is built of these white shiny (marble?) bricks, which gets way too bright in the summer sun, but quite stunning none the less.

We took a walk around the top of the city walls (1.7 km´s) and took in some extraordinary views, and got to see some of the city that is off the beaten track.

We also took an afternoon boat ride out to Lokrum Island which is about a 15 minute ride from the old port in Dubrovnik. Lokrum is quite a small island which used to house a Monastery and a couple of other old buildings, which have all since been abandoned.


Now a bar/restaurant occupies part of the monastary, but the rest of the grounds are free to explore...awesome.
The rest of the island has a couple of beaches, an ocean-fed natural pool with a sweet rope swing (we forgot our swimmers that day... NOOOOOES!), and a bunch of areas set up for picnic-ing, sports, and walking to check out the other ruins and stuff of the island. We ended the day sitting under some nice trees on leather armchairs looking out over the gardens of the monastery to the ocean, with a cold beer. All in all, a good day out.

After out time in Dubrovnik, we set out by bus for Split, catching some unbelievable views of huge rocky mountains along the way. It´s only about a 205km trip but takes about 5 hours due to the terrain.

Split.

We had a great room in a hostel right in the heart of the old town in Split, which was a nice change from Dubrovnik where we had to catch a bus for 10 minutes to get to the good stuff.

The old town is situated in what used to be the "Dioclesian´s Palace" (800 years ago?), and as you can maybe imagine, is quite a cool place. It too is built from the same white bricks as our last location, and in my opinion was much better looking when the sun went down.
We managed to meet up with my cousin Steve and his wife Kat for breakfast/brunch one morning as they have been living in London for a while and were doing an organised sailing tour around the Croatian islands. It was great to catch up, but it won´t be too long till we´re crashing at there place in London anyway!
We took a ride out to Hvar island off Split (one of the most famous Croatian islands), but due to lack of organisation and public transport, it wasn´t quite as it could have been... but we had a swim which made it OK.

Zagreb.

We traveled up and stayed one night in Zagreb to break up the journey to Budapest. Due to a bum steer from a travel agent in Split we didn´t end up seeing the Plitvice Lakes which are about 2 hours from Zagreb as previously planned... but oh well... next time.

Due to the lack of accomodation in Zagreb we stayed in our first hostel dormitory, with about 6 other people. It wasn´t too bad, but the bathrooms were seriously grotty...you win some and you lose some I spose.

Budapest, Hungary.

We spent four nights in Budapest. We had booked a private room in a hostel, but when we got there, we were taken to a little apartment instead which we were assured was better, paid our money up front, and went to bed...
Unfortunately the apartment resembled none of the nice looking photos on the website, and didn´t even seem to have been cleaned since the last guests. Long story short, we moved apartments after two nights in the dump, and will be giving the hostel a very bad review on hostelworld.com.


A highlight from Budapest was getting to the impressive Parliament building, but finding out it was closed to visitors that day. There was however a dress rehearsal for a concert that night by an entire orchestra plus opera singers out the front of the building, which we sat and watched for abour half an hour, and was well worth not seeing the enterior of the building.

We also trekked out to a place called statue park which is in the middle of nowhere (just outside the city) where they have a collection of statues from the communist era. Very cool.
'OWZAT!

Prague.

Prague was awesome also! We did a walking tour around some main historical sites with a small group, which was meant to take 3.5 hours, but went on for about 5! It was great to be taken around by someone who really knew the city, and also meant that we didn´t have to figure it out by ourselves!

On our last night in Prague we went and saw Pirates of the Carribean. A nice break.

I also bought a pocket watch... it´s way cool.

Photos to come...

Edit: Photos up now!

laters

J

Since then...

I apologise to my loyal readers for not posting for so long, but we have been quite busy getting from place to place... but more on that later.

We spent 5 nights in Assisi which is in the Umbrian region of Italy. It's a very nice place... good for a relaxing getaway, which is what we needed. Unfortunately Lucy fell ill just coming out of Venice and was sick for the first couple of days in Assisi, and I caught it off her and was sick for the last two days and the trip to Croatia. Sickness aside, we managed to squeeze in a bunch of the things to do and see in the town, including checking out the fortress on top of the hill which was quite cool. The view from the top of the watch tower was an amazing 360 degree panorama of Umbrian countryside which has to be seen to be believed.

A mention must go out to the guys who ran the hotel we stayed in. Basically it was three young men, one who was in charge and organised the rooms and did most of the cooking for the restaurant below, another who was the waiter, and another who helped cook. The boss was very much into Celtic music and took every opportunity to play it loudly over the restaurant sound system... which was OK, but got a bit much as he did the washing up late at night and our room was right above the kitchen.
The other two were brothers, and were both a little odd, but their drinking on the job and trying to pick up american backpackers was always good entertainment.

Which brings me to the next leg of our journey, which I can assure you was not the finest. I was in the height of my headcold on the last night in Assisi and had slept all afternoon after a large pizza lunch. We headed downstairs for dinner, and I proceeded to order what turned out to be a very large pasta dish, and salad, and was forced to have some wine and Limoncello too...

Thus began one of the worst 48 hours of my life.

To cut a long story short, I went to bed feeling very average and with a very large lump of food in my belly (which in case anyone doesn't know, tends to lead to insomnia in my case).
So I didn't get to sleep until 4:30 in the morning, and had broken sleep until 5:30, at which point we had to get up to go catch a train (3 trains really)to Bari, which was to take us all day until we arrived at about 5:30 in the evening. It didn't end here though. In Bari we hung around for a few hours (and ate extremely dodgy food from the Bari ferry port) until we got on to the overnight Ferry which would take us to Dubrovnik, Croatia.
Now you might think that the story ended happily here with a nice relaxing cruise... little did we know that due to our frugal spending habits, the 'deck' tickets we had purchased for the ferry as they were the cheapest, literally meant 'deck'. The deal is, you get on the boat, stick to the public areas, and crash out where you can.
At this point I still hadn't slept apart from maybe an hour where the Italians across from us on the train weren't talking loudly as only Italians can. So that's a total of about 2 hours in the past 36 hours, plus being sick.

So there we were on the ferry. I quickly scouted around and found some nice padded benches arranged in the usual 'booth' style configuration, and some other Aussies joined us for a night of mixed emotions. We had a small glass of red - which was kindly offered to us by the occupants of the next booth - put on a couple of t-shirts, a hooded jumper (did I mention that the air conditioning was not adjustable and was blasting freezing air at us all night?) and got in our silk sleeping sacks (designed to keep you separated from dodgy hostel sheets, but surprisingly warm also), put on our eye covering devices (as the lights stayed on all night), and finally went to sleep.

Moral of the story is don't travel by ferry. If you do, don't be stingy and just shell out the extra 74 euros and get a cabin.

Anyhoo, we're both feeling much better now, and have just arrived in Split after spending a couple of awesome days in Dubrovnik.
I will report on these asap.

Word out.

J

Hello Venezia!

Well I'm gonna try to make my blog posts a little shorter as they take quite a while to write, and I'd rather be out and about! (plus we've got alot of stuff to organise for our next few stops).

We spent the last 4 days in Venice. It really is an amazing place. We started off being shown to our apartment by a young lady who spoke not a word of english, which made for some interesting conversation... but it worked out in the end. There was only 41 stairs up to the room this time, which was a nice change! The apartment was great. Pretty much smack bang in between the Rialto Bridge and St Marks Square (Piazza San Marco). There are no cars or even scooters in Venice as the streets are just too small and full of people, so you walk everywhere or catch a Vaporetto (water bus). We checked out a couple of museums including the Peggy Gugenheim collection which was full of Dali and Picasso and others of similar ilk.

Caught the ferry out to Murano for a day to check out the famous glassware that comes from there, and the glass museum of course. Lots and lots of glass. Everything from small trinkets and beads to massive chandeliers and sculptures. We managed to find a factory with an open door policy so we could have a look see at how it was all done.

We went to a famous Cafe in St Marks Square back in Venice. It's called Cafe Lavena and has been in the same family for hundreds of years. The service was excellent, as was the hot chocolate and beer (which is all we ordered), but the bill came to a small fortune, so do it for the ambience(live string quartet) and then don't go back again for a while!

Well thats a taste of our adventures in Venice!
We've just arrived in Assisi, so I'll post more when we've done some stuff.

J