Venice

For our next few stops (Venice, Rome and Paris) we would be visiting places that I had been to when I was in university.  It was fun to revisit these cities because this time I feel like I saw a lot more of them and I also had a greater appreciation of how awesome they really are.  Plus i got to show Patrick around a little bit since it was his first time in Europe.  So on to Venice:

We arrived in Venice early one morning, walked right by our terribly marked hostel and wandered around for an hour before backtracking and finding it.  Our hostel was a rather strange place, on our first night there as we sat in the common room chatting with other travelers we were told at 10:30 that we could either go out to the bar or go to bed but we weren’t allowed to stay up talking.  It was so strange.  I felt like I was 10 years old and back at Girl Guide camp.   Once we eventually found the hostel we set about exploring Venice without our backpacks.

We pretty much spent our visit just wandering around the city seeing what we found.  It’s such a great city to just get lost in, which is exactly what we did one night.  During our stay there we walked all over the main islands, I definitely saw more of Venice this time around.  One of the cool things they do in Venice is that since there are so many old churches they use some of them for art exhibits and things like that.  So in our wanderings we stumbled across a couple of cool exhibitions.  My favourite was all about violins, they had violins and other string instruments on display from as long ago as the 1500s.  They were really cool.

One of the most disappointing things was seeing the bridge of sighs.  The bridge of sighs is this really old bridge connecting the palace with the old prison.  And the last time I saw it it was really beautiful.  This time not so much, check out the picture below.  It turns out that this shoe company or whatever it is, is paying for the restoration of the bridge and some other buildings, so they got this primo advertising spot.  It was terrible!  And I don’t think it was such good advertising either, because despite knowing the good work the company was doing I certainly am in no rush to go out and buy their shoes after seeing this.

Sorry it’s sideways, I’m having trouble getting it to flip.

Vienna

After saying bye to Allie and Dave we left for Vienna. There’s a really convenient four hour long bus between Prague and Vienna, so we took that rather than the train. The best part of Vienna was Ruthensteiner’s which was the awesome hostel we stayed at. It was definitely the nicest hostel I’ve ever stayed at. The first day that we got to Vienna we had to find a bookstore because I left Heart of Darkness on the train back from Kutna Hora so I needed some new reading material. After the bookstore we went back to the hostel and played chess on the giant outdoor chess board. That’s right the hostel has a giant chess board and yes, we are such nerds that we spent our first afternoon in Vienna playing chess.

We spent the second day just wandering all over Vienna. Even though it was a bit of a rainy day we saw lots of really beautiful buildings and gardens. One of the coolest things we stumbled upon was the Parliament. It had a really great free visitors centre with all sorts of interactive activities. We also found this amazing Italian church completely by accident that had a huge mosaic of The Last Supper made out of tiny tiles. I’ve come to the conclusion that the greatest things to see are the things that you just find by accident because you have no expectations for them.

The third day we spent at Schloss Schonbrunn, which is this huge palace on the outskirts of the city. We spent about 5 hours just walking around the gardens and the grounds, which were really gorgeous. But the best part by far was the maze/labyrinth. In the hedge maze Patrick and I decided to take different routes and race. Unfortunately he beat me but it was still really fun. There were also all these games you could play on in the children’s park.

That night we set off on an overnight train ride to Venice. We shared our cabin for part of the ride with this really interesting Romanian woman, who kept telling us how happy she was to meet us and talk to us. She told us all about herself and how she had all this money and all these things and yet she still wasn’t happy. So that’s why she was so happy to meet us, because we were young and “simple” and in love. She was actually pretty sweet, and it was cool to talk to somebody whose life is so different from ours since most of the people we’ve met in the hostels are fairly similar to us.

Munich and Prague

    We’re in Rome now, leaving for Paris tomorrow and I realized that I haven’t written in quite a while.  Somehow time seems to have sped up in the last couple of weeks and our trip is drawing to a close already.  We only have a couple more weeks now.  So here goes the sum up.

Munich

    Munich was cool.  Of course the main reason that we went was for Oktoberfest, which was much crazier than I expected.  It was much more of a fair than I thought it would be.  There were even carnival rides and games.  We did our share of drinking over-priced liters of beer in the gardens, although we didn’t actually get into any of the beer halls since they were all at maximum capacity.  It was still a lot of fun though.

     I would actually like to go back to Munich twice: I’d like to go once again during Oktoberfest, only this time with a group of friends, and then I’d like to go again when Oktoberfest isn’t going on because the city is actually pretty cool.

    While we were there we did a free walking tour of the city.  The tour company was called Radius Tours and the guides just work for tips.  We saw some really interesting historical parts of the city that we never would have seen just by wandering around.  We also saw what is apparently the second most overrated attraction in Europe – the Glockenspiel, which is basically a clock tower with these figures that move 3 times a day.  I must say it was really not as impressive as the ooing and ahing crowds would lead you to think.

Prague or the Exploding Wine Incident

Our next stop was in Prague where we met up with our friends Dave and Allie!  Yay, for a full week we had friends to play with.  For the first few days the four of us shared a room at a hostel and then for the last few days we stayed at their new apartment.  The first night as we walked around the old town we had some wine that was pretty so we decided to buy a 2 liter plastic bottle.  Unfortunately, we didn’t finish the bottle that night so we took it back to the hostel.  Well, 2 nights later in the dead of the night we were all suddenly awakened by a loud explosion.  It turns out that the wine had been fermenting in the bottle and had built up so much pressure that finally it blew!  And it was quite the explosion, the entire room was coated in red wine and it even shredded some plastic glasses that were in the same bag as the bottle.

    Apart from the explosion though, Prague was great.  Since we were staying with Allie and Dave we got to feel more like locals than tourists, and we got to eat some really great (and cheap) food at local restaurants.

  We also spent one day taking a day trip to Kutna Hora where we got to see a nice little medieval town, some beautiful churches and the bone church – a church that is decorated with the bones of about 40,000 people who were buried in teh local cemetery.  It was pretty creepy.  I’ll post some photos later.

Next time I’ll write about Vienna, Venice and Rome.

Photos

Uploading photos has been a bit difficult since we’re dependent upon finding a decent internet cafe, so I haven’t gotten around to posting any on here yet.  But as of today I’m pretty much up to date on facebook so here are the links for my fb albums.  Hopefully this will work.

Album #1: China

Album #2: Russia and the Trans-Siberian journey

Album #3: Germany

Goodbye Berlin!

Well, tonight we leave Berlin and head off to ze Oktoberfest.  Yeah! I still think Berlin is a really fantastic city and would gladly spend more time here.  Last night was a very interesting night.  We saw the two extremes of Berlin.  First, since it was Thursday night and the museums are all open late here on Thursday nights we went to the Pergamon Museum which is on Museum Island.  That’s right, there’s a whole island of museums.  The Pergamon is a classical antiquities and Islamic antiquities museum, and it was hands down the best museum I’ve ever been to.  It was fascinating and the artifacts they had there were unbelievable.  They have entire city gates from a city in Turkey from the Roman times, the Ischtar gates from Babylon and the Pergamon altar from the 2nd century BC.  The audio guide was included in the €10 admission price and it gave fascinating background information.

Then, later in the evening, since it was Thursday night and Thursday nights require the consumption of some beer we went wandering around looking for a bar.  What we found was the Tacheles galleries, which Julian (our cabin mate from the Trans-Mongolian train) had recommended.  The Tacheles Galleries are basically this big 6 story building covered entirely in graffiti that has been transformed into an art space, complete with several bars and an outdoor beach like sand filled courtyard from which they projected old silent movie onto a nearby building.  I’m not going to lie, I felt pretty out of place there but it was definitely a pretty cool place.  And it was also kind of more what I had expected of East Berlin.  So yeah that was our evening of extremes.

Today we decided to spend the day at the Berlin Zoo.  It was a very cool zoo, probably one of the nicest I’ve ever been to.  My personal favorites from the day were: 1) the okapi (if you don’t know what an okapi is it’s probably the coolest animal on the planet so look it up) and 2: the 5 day old baby orangutan.

After the zoo we headed to this internet cafe so I could look up the directions to the hotel in Munich for Oktoberfest.  Which is when I realized that in booking the hotel I made a colossal mistake.  Our hotel was not, in fact in Munich, but was in some random city at the other end of Germany!  I have no idea how I did that.  So after some mad scrambling we found alternate accomodation that is actually cheaper, although definitely much less comfortable.  Oh, and we booked our tickets to Prague for Monday afternoon where we will be seeing Dave and Allie! Yay!

I Love Berlin

That’s all I can say – I love Berlin!  This city is awesome, and yes I realize that I love it so much because it is in contrast to Moscow, but honestly there is nothing bad that I can say about this city.  First: The people are awesome.  It seems like every time we pull out or map someone stops to ask how they can help us.  Everyone is amazingly friendly.  Also they’re all so well dressed, I can probably count on one hand the number of people that I have seen and been like what are you wearing?

Second: The city itself is so beautiful.  It’s very clean and you know when you’ll come around a corner and just find the most amazing buildings.   There is so much to do here, there are something like 170 museums! Every neighbourhood we’ve gone into is just awesome.  Today we went to this cool little English used bookstore that I just loved, it seemed like such a community.  The man running the store seemed to know all the other customers.  The history here is fascinating too.  The first day we visited checkpoint Charlie, saw what little is left of the Berlin wall and visited this really interesting outdoor museum about the nazis called the Topography of Terror.

Third: The beer is awesome! That is all.

Potsdam

Yesterday we went on a day trip to Potsdam, which is a small city outside of Berlin.  The whole city is actually a UNESCO World Heritage  site.  When we got there we rented bikes which was a great move because it meant that we got to travel all over the city.  I think that over the course of the day we rode about 15 or 20 km.  Not sure exactly because the route we were following was supposed to be 18 km or so but of course we kept getting off track.

Moscow

We arrived in Moscow at 4:40 am.  It kind of sucked because after spending four days on the train we then had to kill about 5 hours before we could go to the hostel.  So, we hung out in the train station for an hour or so and then hopped on the subway.  Unfortunately the subway has pretty much no English and Russians aren’t particularly helpful but we figured it out eventually.  When we came out of the subway at our stop the first thing we saw was a pack of about 5 or 6 good sized dogs just trotting down the street.  I was so mad that I didn’t have my camera ready.   We had read about this diner called the Starlite Diner that was supposedly awesome near our hostel so we set out to find that and have a good American style breakfast.  After wandering around in the dark for about an hour we found it, and it totally lived up to its reputation.  First greasy breakfast in a year and a half! So good!  We ended up eating there every morning that we were in Moscow.

Finally at 9 we could go to the hostel, but when we got there they told us that check-in was at 12 so we just dropped our bags and headed out to the Kremlin.  Still no shower!

At the Kremlin we bought tickets for the Kremlin and the armoury.  It was incredibly expensive – like almost $40!  But it was cool.  In the armoury museum was a ridiculous amount of gold.  It must have been nice to be a Russian royal.  I think the coolest part though was the room with the carriages.  They were so gorgeous and ornate.  They also had a room with some of the dresses.  Oh, and we saw the Faberge eggs.  The unfortunate part was that you weren’t allowed to take any photos.  The Kremlin itself was also really cool.

In the afternoon we just kind of wandered around exploring a bit.  In the evening though we had some excitement as we walked back to the hostel after dinner.  About a block from our hostel we heard a bang as we walked by and a car across the street burst into flames.  Patrick of course grabbed his camera and ran across the street.  We figure it was a mafia job of some kind cuz really nice expensive cars don’t generally just burst into flames.  He got some really great shots.

The following day we went to Red Square to see St. Basil’s cathedral.  It was awesome, just as cool looking as in all the photos.  Then we went on a walking tour that was in the lonely planet book.  It was about a kilometer and a half long and we saw like 10 churches in that time!

We decided to fly to Berlin the following day.  After the train to Moscow we needed a break from trains.  Also by flying we just avoided a lot of headaches with border crossings and visas, and we gained an extra day or two in Berlin.  Moscow was interesting and pretty and it was exciting to feel like we were finally in Europe, but all in all I’m glad to be out of there.  The people in Russia were just generally really unfriendly.  And I didn’t realize it at the time but I was tense and on edge the whole time that we were in Russia.  They say that the people make the place, but the people in Russia made me just want to leave.  Now we’re in Berlin and loving it!  But more on that later.