Also known as my mass emails from the rest of my trip put all together.
I arrived in Stockholm completed exhausted from my (inevitably last minute and disorganized) departure from Edinburgh. Thankfully, the weather was exquisite in Stockholm, sunny and unseasonably warm, and Maya's family home is in a beautiful neighborhood outside the city centre, full of adorable houses and lilac trees, so we spent a good portion of our time lounging in the sun and getting some much needed post-exam rest. Of course, we also did the touristy thing in Stockholm, exploring the Old Town with its beautiful historical buildings and very dull castle, the South Island with its adorable boutiques WAY out of our price range, chic cafes and fantastic vintage shops, and of course the city centre - with an inevitable H&M on every block. I hadn't known before arriving that Stockholm was actually a series of islands, and it was so nice to be close to the water all the time. Of course, courtesy of Maya we also had the inside scoop on cool little restaurants with great lunch specials and fun bars to while away the evenings. I also celebrated my birthday in Stockholm, with shopping, soy icecream cake, a lovely bottle of wine Luc brought me from Paris, and a screening of Pirates of the Caribbean 3 (with Swedish subtitles).
The overnight ship ride (or mini cruise) from Stockholm to Tallinn was hilariously fun. We had a nice cabin with a sea view, courtesy of Helen's ever elusive and generous mother (who we never ended up meeting in Tallinn - we'd just get back to the flat, and there'd be something new there waiting for us). The cruise boat had everything I'd dreamed and more - an overpriced buffet, tacky live dance show, karaoke and a little night club playing obscure Europop... it was really really fun.
Tallinn is a stunning city. It has an amazing Old Town with a very distinctive flavour, especially the stone towers with red pointed rooves. There weren't as many tourists as I'd expected, either. We had some good weather, some unbelievably hot weather, and one day of constant drizzle in which the wandered the deserted streets of Old Town - it was so misty and empty that it felt as if we'd wandered back in time. Other highlights included the amazing restaurant Helen took us to, called the Garden (Aed in Estonian), which served incredible vegetarian food and this carob-halvah cafe that was to die for; Tallinn's new art museum, which was super cheap and had a stunning permament collection, ranging from 18th century landscapes to Soviet propaganda to some crazy modern stuff; the rooftop of Helen's apartment building, where we lay watching the stars and listening to Leonard Cohen; and of course LADY'S NIGHT on Wednesday night, with free entrance to a terrifyingly entertaining club called Club Hollywood. Oh yeah, and I also got all my hair chopped off - it was getting on my nerves. So now it's super-short, a la Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby.
Janet and I have spent the last day and a half in Riga, which is much prettier than I was expecing. It also has an exquisite Old Town, including a fantastic old cathedral (originally built in 1211 when the Teutonic Germans came and forcibly converted the Latvian pagans) where we went tonight to hear an organ concert. Yesterday we wandered for about six hours, just taking in the great mix or architecture from a variety of periods, ranging from the crumbling remains of the medieval town wall to brightly coloured art nouveau buildings with fantastically sculpted doorways. Today we visited the Latvian National Museum of Art and the Museum of Occupation, which were striking contrasts from one another: one chronicling the development of a
disinctively Latvian artistic vision, the other showing how various super-powers have tried to crush Latvian culture throughout the past century. Tomorrow we move on to Vilnius in Lithuania, and from there are travel plans are uncertain - but I'll be sure to keep you updated.
***
Last I left off I believe we were about to depart Riga for Vilnius. We ended up having quite a bit of time in Lithuania, just because the overnight bus we wanted to take to Krakow only left once a week. So on top of getting a chance to explore Vilnius - which is an amazing city, if it is sort of Church heavy even for my tastes - we also go to do a couple of wonderful day trips.
First, Vilnius. It has a huge old town, so plenty of cobbled streets to wander, but unlike more popular tourist destinations the buildings aren't all spruced up, so in a lot of places you can really see the signs of age and wear. This was particularly the case in Uzupis, an unofficially independent republic on the other side of a stream, signified by a statue of an angel and their own consitution, translated into three languages and posted on mirror-like steel on the side of one of the area's many decrepit but beautiful buildings. Our first night there we headed to the only vegetarian restaurant mentioned by Lonely Planet, which turned out to be the basement of a former Duke's palace, and the one remaining hall, augmented by tarps
and wooden beams. There was a makeshift stage on one side where a local rasta band (doing Polish covers of Bob Marley) were performing. We had cabbage curry. It was hilarious. The first daytrip was to a small town about 40 minutes from Trakai,
called Vilnius. What drew us there was mention of a tiny religious sect known as the Karaim. They're a late offshoot of Judaism that developed post-Islam; originally Turkish, they eventually moved into the Crimea. Then, in the 14th century, Vytautas the Great of Lithuania brought them to Trakai to guard his castle, and they built a community and settled there. They managed to avoid much of the devestation of the Holocaust because the Nazis considered not ethnic Jews but later
converts to the religion - and there they continue to live, in their small traditional houses, with their temple and their ethnographical museum and a restaurant serving their traditional food (mostly cabbage-stuffed pastries, surprisingly little Turkish influence). There are 260 Karaim in the world, and the majority of them live in Trakai. We spent a wonderful day there exploring the small town, which also included the aforementioned castle, and a great old Russian Gothic Church with a 12th century Byzantine icon of the Virgin Mary.
The second day trip was to see the Hill of Crosses, which is exactly what it sounds like. In the countryside outside a town called Siauliai the Lithuanian people have erected a hill bristling with crosses - thousands of them, huge crucifixes hung in turn with countless tiny crosses and tangles of rosaries. The day we went was astoundingly sunny and warm; from where the bus lets you off it's a 2 km walk through farmers fields, and the sight of the hill rising up in the distance, dark against the perfectly blue sky, was one of the most breathtaking things I've ever seen. We spent hours exploring the hill, which despite its increasing fame is still surprisingly un-touristed (outhouses and no refreshement carts in sight) - the beauty and
variety of crosses was truly incredible. On the way back we missed our bus and decided, instead of waiting an hour and a half for the next one, we would brave the walk back. It turned out a bit longer than we thought - over 15 km through some intense summer heat - but the sight of the Siauliai town church's steeple rising in the distance was like a beacon, and I've never been so happy to taste water in my life!
After Vilnius we took an overnight bus to Krakow. I have to admit, I didn't know what to expect from Krakow, but I fell in love with the city so thoroughly that part of me is considering learning Polish and moving there! It's an excellent balance of the old and the new, with plenty of culture and history and a never-ending supply of stuff to do. We explored a variety of museums - from Jewish history to art galleries to an archaeological museum featuring displays of traditional Polish dress since 50000 BC (here's a hint: it involved a lot fo fur); we also lucked out in being in town for the celebration of the town's 750th anniversary, which was marked by lots of free outdoor concerts. On our first night we saw a symphony orchestra play in the middle of the town square against the background of ancient churches; on our last night we saw a performance of Yiddish and Hebrew music in Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter that was devestated by the Holocaust but has since been experiencing something of a revival, including turning several of the Synagogues into museums - but the fact that the small district contains six or seven Syngagogues serves as a chilling reminder of the bustling community that once existed there.
Speaking of chilling: we also took a day trip to nearby Auschwitz and Birkenau, and experience for which I have still not found the words. It was, to say the very least, deeply disturbing and upsetting; the most memorable was the collections of Jewish murder victims' possessions collected by the Soviet troops who freed the camp, from the warehouses where the Nazis were storing them. The museum now displays them in huge cases: thousand of baby shoes, tangles of eyeglasses a metre high, an entire ocean of suitcases... it only began to give an idea of the scale of the crimes that occurred there. Our trip has been an interesting combination of fun, and sobering education; all of the countries we've passed through thus far lived
under Soviet rule throughout the Cold War, and many of them were also victims of the Nazis, and signs of their hard past are visible in varying degrees, depending on how thoroughly Western capitalism has managed to infiltrate the cities. Riga, for example,.still showed a certain Soviet bleakness and poverty in its outskirts, and Krakow's Jewish quarter remains largely empty, mostly a student neighborhood now with a lot of Jewish theme restaurants.
We did another, considerably lighter, day trip in Krakow, to visit some incredible salt mines that date back 900 years and are the source of the city's early wealth. They've been open to tourists for several centuries now, and are quite breathtaking, featuring vast chapels full of bas relief Bibilical scenes carved entirely from rock salt; there's also a beautiful crucifixion carved from a single huge tree, and in perfect condition despite being 400 years old because the salt preserves wood. The air in the mines is also restorative, and I believe must be responsible for my finally kicking the cough that had been doggin me since Riga.
The last thing I'll mention about Krakow is Janet and my discovery of a Polish art nouveau artist who led us to the most beautiful church either of us have ever seen. The artist is Stanislaw Wyspianski, and he was a turn-of-the-century artist who did much to revive a sense of Polish national art - he was a real Renaissance man, writing plays and designing the sets and costumes, designing furniture, making architectural proposals for the city... but he's best known now for his work in local churches, particularly the stained glass. He was responsible for the entire interior decorating scheme of the Franciscan Basilica: the walls are covered, floor to ceiling, with patterns in bright colours evoking nature and the elements, in accord with St. Francis' well-known love of nature; there are abstract patterns resembling flames of peacock feathers, as well as huge flowers climbing the walls, varying from sunflowers to roses to lillies and more. The ceiling is decorating with huge snowflake-like stars. But the most astonishing is the stained glass windows. They are massive, brilliantly coloured, and astonishingly lovely; at the front atlar there are several depicting flowers and trees, while the two central ones show the blessed Salomea and St. Francis himself receivng the stigmata; at the back of the church, above the doorway, is an image of God the Father in the act of creating, which is so beautiful I must have spent 15 minutes staring at it slack-jawed. I feel sort of bad for the rest of the churches I've yet to visit, because I'm afraid in my mind they'll all pale next to this one.
I'm leaving out a ridiculous amount of stuff, but it is all dutifully noted down in my journal against danger of forgetting, and if anyone wants a more detailed account you'll just have to wait until I get home!
Last night we took an overnight bus to Budapest, and today had a relaxed time exploring the city and getting our bearings... as well as chilling at the oldest cafe in Budapest with some excellent made-from-scratch lemonade. Our plans for the next couple of days in the city include a canoe trip down the Danube, the curative waters of authentic 16th c. Turkish baths, and if the budget allows perhaps a little Klezmer music. Today we ate at the Budapest branch of Godiva's, which was both super-cheap and comfortingly like home, complete with background Indian chanting and statues of ganesha on the walls.
***
Well, where did I leave off? Oh yes, Budapest. We had a wonderful but overwhelming time exploring the city - compared to some of the other places Janet and I visited it is intimidatingly huge with a vast number of things to see. For one thing, it's a combination of Buda and Pest, and both cities have their own sets of attractions, and a very different feel to them. Buda feels much older, and is more picturesque with its high heels and sweeping panoramic views. It also has a castle, the oldest church in the city, and some very cool subterranean labrynths that we explored, much to our terror. Actually, it was pretty pathetic how scared we were - but the tunnels were really poorly lit and full of eerie sound effects like beating hearts and whistling wind - so creepy! Pest, on the other hand, reminded me quite a bit of Paris, with its wide boulevards and excellent shopping, along with a vibrant nightlife. I've totally started sounding like a travel guide. What's happening to me?
Anyway, highlights of our time in Budapest included: eating fried bread with sauerkraut, a local specialty, on high stools in the Central Market; getting caught in a thunder storm in the main city park and hiding out on ping pong tables along with a bunch of local kids; drinking wine-and-water, another bizarre local speciality, in a tiny garden bar with no sign and NO other tourists; and above all, the canoe ride on the Danube. It poured rain for about the first thirty minutes until we were all complete drenched, and then cleared up enough for us to gradually dry out. Our guide, a local guy whose name I can neither pronounce nor spell, drove us up North past the ruins of an old Roman fortress to a place roughly translated as the Roman Beach, which was where we cast off. From there we canoed upstream for about an hour and a half until we reached this
tiny island that was a total Soviet throwback, with the cheapest bar in the universe - beers for about 50 cents Canadian. Our guide drank wine-and-water and ate fried bread. I'm not kidding.
Okay. So Budapest was brilliant. From there we went to Vienna, which I expected to be kind of similar what with the whole Austro-Hungarian influence and the Hapsburgs and all, but besides a little bit of overlap in late 19th century architecture, the cities had a completed different feel. Vienna was much younger and cooler than I expected, with tons of local music and great bars, and a fantastic cafe culture where you can sit around sipping espresso for hours without anyone frowning at you. They also LOVE sidewalk cafes, so the cheapest falafel stand has a few little tables and chairs out on the sidewalk where you can dawdle over your meal and people watch, which was our main activity whilst there. My other favourite things about Vienna were Opera, Klimt, and vegetarian food. At the Staatsoper (the huge ornate opera house built in that ubiquitous Baroque frilly-manner) students can line up to buy last-minute unsold tickets for only 10 euro. I went to the opera two of my three nights in Vienna, and saw Les Contes d'Hoffmann and Othello, both of which were incredible - and both times I had amazing seats which normally would have cost a fortune. Getting the tickets involved standing in line for an hour and a half, but it was fun to chat with the other students and opera fans - in line I met two girls from Montreal studying to be opera singers, who explained to me the different types of sopranos. On my second night I also met a lovely German Swiss guy who gave me a tour of the operahouse during intermission, including the little-known terrace that, unlike the balcony, affords a lovely view of the city and isn't swamped with wealthy champagne-sipping Viennese people. But I digress.
Vienna, being the home of Klimt, also contains a number of his most famous works, including the Kiss (housed in the Belvedere, a Versaille-esque former palace-thing with fancy ornamental gardens and an impressive collection of Austrian art) and the Beethoven Frieze (in the Secession House, an early Art Nouveau building that has kept up its dedication to emerging forms of art, and also housed some incredibly strange modern exhibitions, like a room full of some guy's used clothes). For those of you who don't know, I loooove Klimt. So that was also good. Finally, because this section on Vienna is getting really long, there was an impressive availability of beautiful fresh fruits and vegetables at a huge open-air market, and lots of Asian
supermarkets thus offering up lots and lots of tofu. Janet and I made a huge stirfry our last night there, and I'm really glad we did, because both tofu and fresh, cheap vegetables are foreign concepts to Florence.
Janet and I parted ways in Vienna, and I continued on toward Italy solo - but I'm happy to say so far I've had no shortage of interesting encounters with friendly co-travellers. On the bus from Vienna to Salzburg I met a lovely woman (also German Swiss - is this a sign?), and then on the train from Salzburg to Innsbruch I met a Canadian woman of Italian background who was also continuing on to Florence; Lisa (that's her name) and I ended up spending quite a bit of time together in Florence, and even exchanged emails because I promised to visit her next time I'm in Toronto. But once again I'm getting ahead of myself.
I spent one day in Salzburg because it sounded fun and was on the way - and it's a really adorable little town. Nestled in a valley in the midst of the Alps, it's one of the most stunning places I've ever been - and it finally afforded me the Medieval frenzy I've been longing for all trip. There's an ancient fortress perched up on a hill above the town, an impressive climb, but completely worth it, because it turned out that Sunday was some sort of children's festival featuring craft booths, performers, food stalls and all sorts of old-fashionedy music and dress. The kids were even dressed up in makeshift tunics with wooden swords! It was great. The stalls sold my new favourite, fried bread with sauerkraut, but I decided to give it a miss this time. The other fun thing about Salzburg was seeing all those familiar sights from the Sound of Music in person - including the convent where the movie begins. My hostel had really decided to play into this connection, because when I got back there in the evening they were playing the movie on a big screen TV, which is apparently a nightly tradition there. Apropos of nothing, the hostel's free breakfast included miso soup. Strange but delicious.
Okay, on to Florence. Today is my fifth and final day here, and I've had a great, if occassionally frustrating, time. For one thing, it is SOOO hot, and so crowded with tourists, that the main part of the city is pretty much intolerable during the day, so I've been saving most of my explorations for evening, when I can get a gelato and stroll through the streets listening to straight performers and dodging the guys trying to sell me knock-off Louis Vuitton purses. My hostel, which used to be a 15th century convent and still has the airy and spartan look of one, is quite cool (in the literal sense, shady and pleasant) but I still have to take at least two showers a day. I'm looking forward to Croatia, and more specifically the beaches - in case you can't tell, my trip thus far has been packed and thus exhausting, and I'm looking forward to lying on a beach with a book for a while.
I spent one entire day at the Galleria degli Uffizi - seven hours in total, which was exhausting but completely worth it. It's an
astonishing art collection, and was sort of like walking through an art history course come the life, but it's also a manageable size, unlike the terrifying vastness of the Louvre for example. The best part was that the massive hordes of tourists got tired after the first section and disappeared, so once you got past the Botticelli there were barely any crowds any more. I had the Caravaggio rooms practically to myself! Uffizi is the only thing I paid to go into, because everything in Florence is SO expensive and they don't have student discounts. Instead I've been spending my days wandering and getting hopelessly lost, which I've found is the best way to find unexpectedly beautiful and tourist-free parts of a city. One afternoon Lisa and I went walking and stumbled across this exquisite street in the Oltrarno (the southern side of the river, with much fewer tourist attractions) called the Via San Leonardo, which winds all the way down from the top of a hill, affording great views of the city, to the river bank. It took us about three hours in total to find it and then walk all the way down it, but it was indescribably beautiful, and full of locals walking their dogs, playing in the parks, or gathering in their gardens for big family parties. The best things always seem to be where the locals are, and the tourists aren't - for example, today I stumbled across a little panini shop where everyone was speaking Italian; they were sitting on the curb drinking tiny glasses of red wine, and getting refills from the shop, that was little more than a wooden counter. I took it as a good sign and decided to get lunch there, and for 2.50 ended up with the most delicious sandwhich I've ever had.
Yesterday I also did a day-trip to Sienna, which is stunningingly beautiful, and also quite charming one you get off the Piazza del Campo and away from the tourists. My favourite part, other than the simple (and free!) pleasure of the views, was the Basilica di San Lorenzo, where I saw the mummified head of St. Catharine. That was quite the experience. Today I was planning on another day trip, perhaps to Bologna, but the Italian train workers have gone on strike, so instead I did a little more wandering, finally found somewhere with some decent fresh produce, and decided to send another mass email.
***
Well, I'm sitting safe and sound in my Dad's place in Kemptville, so obviously I survived the duration of my trip, though it was not without incident! Indeed, the last stretch of my trip was definitely the most eventful, even if I spent the majority of my time in Croatia lying on beaches in the insane heat.
After Florence I went to Trieste, which may be one of my favourite cities that I've visited, for three reasons. It was beautiful, it had hardly any tourists, and I got plenty of chances to use my Italian. The hostel was a good 20-minute bus ride from the city proper, right on the water, with balconies in all the rooms that provided stunning views of the sun setting over the bright blue Adriatic Sea. The whole street into town was lined with a walkway that, during the weekends, was swarming with the whole city's population, lying on towels and sunbathing the day away, or jumping right over the edge into the water to cool off. You could swim absolutely ANYwhere. I could have spent my whole time at the hostel without even seeing the city itself. The city was definitely worth visiting, though. It has, at different times, belonged to a variety of countries. It was once the primary port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so the port and surrounding areas are incredibly Hapsburgian, with big ceremonial squares and huge blocky baroque buildings, as well as beautiful 19th century cafes every bit as fine as those in Vienna, serving even better coffee. However, as soon as you walk a little beyond that, you enter a real Mediterranean city, with winding streets, narrow stairways, and all the red clay rooves and white stone churches your little heart could desire.
My simple enjoyment of the city was complicated by the fact that, on a bus ride out to the hostel, someone stole my wallet. However, rather than this being a trip-ruining sort of fiasco, it turned out to be only inconvenient - and the inconvenience was largely on the part of my father! The hostel not only let me leave town without paying (I promised to come back on my way through to France), but an employee there even gave me some money so I wouldn't be completely destitue on my way into Zagreb! I also had to go deliver a police report, and of course Trieste being a small town the carabinieri (Italian police
officers) spoke nary a word of English, so I had to deliver the report entirely in Italian - a fun test of my grasp of the language.
I was actually only without money for about 48 hours, because Dad sent me a Western Union transfer right away. I arrived in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, the day after my wallet was stolen, only to find out that it was a national holiday and EVERYthing was closed. I was hot, sticky, exhausted, hungry and stressed, but my hostel (when I eventually found it) was wonderfully clean and relaxing, and I managed to buy myself some dinner with the money from the hostel in Trieste. My second day in Zagreb, after I'd picked up the money transfer, was a little more enjoyable, though I have to say that, by and large, I wasn't enchanted with the city. It was a little too Austrian, a little too bleak, and didn't have anywhere to swim. I did enjoy the Strossmayer Gallery of Old Masters, a beautiful old building with an impressive collection of largely Medieval religious art that, when I visited it, was completely empty.
I took an overnight train and then a bus to Dubrovnik, which was well worth the extra travel (it was a good 13 hours from Zagreb in total). Dubrovnik is a beautiful city, with a lovely and unusual old town, an exorbitant quantity of beaches, and several surrounding islands where you can go hiking or swim some more.
As you may be able to tell, I spent most of my time in Dubrovnik on the beach. There were so many that I could go to a different one each day, and every one had a different character - some were big and busy, packed with kids, others tiny and shaded with older folks reading and chatting. The weather was exquisite, hot and dry - it was so hot, in fact, that it melted the glue in the spine of my books, and all the pages kept falling out! I spent most evenings in the old town, a triangular walled city made entirely of glossy white stone, all the buildings topped with red clay tiles; the heat faded away after dark, and the streets were full of people wandering around, eating gelato, watching the street performers or sitting on benches watching the moon reflected on the sea. This was definitely the most relaxing part of my travels, and the part that felt most like an actual vacation. On my final day I took a boat out to Lokrum Island, a nature reserve not far off the coast, with botanical gardens, peacocks so tame they'll eat out of your hand, and an inland salt-water lake fed by an underground cave.
After Dubrovnik I spent two days in Split, where the highlights were the sand beach (Croatia has pebble beaches because the Adriatic doesn't provide enough of a tide to ground the rock down to sand, but on this beach they'd imported the sand from elsewhere), the hostel (Al's place, a tiny 12-bed establishment owned by an eccentric British ex-pat who loved to take us all out to local bars and regale us with tales of his equally eccentric life), and Diocletian's Palace. In the 3rd century the Emperor Dioceltian built himself a summer resort in Split, and it was never really knocked down. Instead, later invading civilizations built around, in and on top of it, turning courtyards into neighborhoods, building walls into archways, and converting the
Emperor's mausoleum into a cathedral. I was also here for Canada Day, which I celebrated in style with another Canadian and two friendly Swedish girls, twins named Rebecca and Frida. The other high point of Split was receiving an email from the hostel in Trieste informing me that my wallet had been found! The thief had of course taken my cash, but left all my ID, my drivers license, and my bank cards - and since I was passing back through Trieste anyway, I could reclaim them without a problem.
It was just as fun reclaiming my wallet as it was reporting it stolen, if not moreso - the carabinieri were again incredibly friendly and easy-going, and kept me around chatting long after the paperwork was done. I was a little freaked out upon arriving to find out that the hostel was full - but I almost immediately met a friendly Czech woman named Radka who suggested me find a cheap double room in town. This turned out to be a great idea - we found a little room in an older Italian woman's apartment. The owner, a lovely lady named Claudia, spoke not a word of English, and once again I got to really push my grasp of the language, since Claudia insisted on lengthy conversations. We got along really well - I can't express how exciting it was for me to finally see the fruition of two years of study, just in the form of being able to get to know someone who, otherwise, I wouldn't have known at all. Also, she kept cooking for me because I was doing everything wrong. And when your named is Claudia and you live in Trieste, you are completely allowed to tell me how to cook pasta.
The rest of my trip went by in a total blur. I spent a few hours in Venice (I've never been a big fan of Venice, too crowded and too touristy, and this didn't do much to change my mind), before catching my overnight train to Dijon. I spent a day in Dijon, which is an absolutely charming town. Unfortunately I never did get a map or travel guide to Dijon, so I can't give you any details - I spent most of the day wandering through a series of picturesque streets, charming parks and scenic squares, and cafe-hopping whenever I go tired from carrying my massive backpack. In the evening I took the train to Lyon to meet back up with Janet and stay with her for a couple of days. Unfortunately it was pretty much pouring train the entire time I was in town so we didn't have the chance to see much of the city - which is to say, Janet didn't have a chance to show me much. She did take me to a very cool place called Ground Zero (or possibly Grrrrrnd Zero), an empty office building outside the city given over to avant garde artists mostly of the musical persuasion, where we drank 2 euro beers out of plastic cups and sat on the bare concrete floor to listen to experimental performers. It was intriguing, to say the least. On Sunday morning we went to a fantastic outdoor market where we bought beautiful, fresh fruits and vegetables (Lyon is sort of the culinary mecca of France, which is saying a lot) and made ourselves a huge stirfry. Janet also took me up the funicular to see the world's most ridiculously opulent 20th-century cathedral, with a great view of the rest of the city.
My final stop before heading back to Edinburgh was Paris, which was the best place to finish my trip because I really do love that city. I took the opportunity to see some things I'd never seen before (the Orangerie where Monet's Water Lillies are housed, the Musee de Carnavalet, dedicated to the history of Paris, and much more of both the Marais and Montmartre) as well as to return to my old favourite (Notre Dame, the Latin Quarter, and my favourite falafel stand in the world). I only had about a day and a half, but I enjoyed every minute of it!
My last two days in Edinburgh were also a lovely chance to say goodbye to the city - though it was a real shock going (even gradually) from the heat of Croatia to the chilly, rainy weather of Scotland. I stayed with Helen at her HUGE new flat, and we spent lots of time wandering the city, as well as visiting the museum and seeing Dolly (stuffed), and having my last authentic vegetarian haggis with neeps and tatties at a pub in the Grassmarket.
There's not much to say about my trip back to Canada except that it was long, gruelling, and sort of vaguely depressing the whole way. I was constantly stressed over my drastically overweight baggage and making my connecting flights, but the moment I walked through the gates in Ottawa and saw my friends and family waiting for me - my stress headache disappeared in a minute and coming back to Canada suddenly seemed like a really good idea.
Now the real world is slowly starting to sink in, in the form of job searches, insurance claims, apartment hunting and laundry, none of which I particularly enjoy. Well, apartment hunting's not too bad.
So there you have it. The epic that was me in Europe. I would like to make some pithy or insightful remarks to wrap this up, but I think I've already said too much, so I will leave you here.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
what I've been doing when I should be studying
1. Getting a haircut and then taking way too many pictures of myself.
2. Attending crazed hippy fertility festivals where I'm near-immolated by people dressed almost exclusively in body paint.
3. Going up to the Highlands (the Highlands of Scotland) to visit old family friends and taking too many pictures of their chickens because I like chickens. No, not to eat. I think they're very photogenic poultry.
4. Soup.
5. Falling a little more in love with Edinburgh every day, and feeling a little bummed that I'm leaving in about two weeks. And that I'm wasting my final time here studying, and procrastinating studying, in my bedroom. Nonetheless, very excited for the months of travel to come: and for the count down to seeing my friends and family!
2. Attending crazed hippy fertility festivals where I'm near-immolated by people dressed almost exclusively in body paint.
3. Going up to the Highlands (the Highlands of Scotland) to visit old family friends and taking too many pictures of their chickens because I like chickens. No, not to eat. I think they're very photogenic poultry.
4. Soup.
5. Falling a little more in love with Edinburgh every day, and feeling a little bummed that I'm leaving in about two weeks. And that I'm wasting my final time here studying, and procrastinating studying, in my bedroom. Nonetheless, very excited for the months of travel to come: and for the count down to seeing my friends and family!
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Easter Travels or How I Distracted Myself From Not Being Able to Eat Chocolate for Fourty Days
I just (as in two days ago) got back from a 10-day trip to Ireland, Paris and London, that involved a little bit of everything and was therefore both extremely fun and extremely tricky to pack for. I think it finally got through to me exactly how valuable light packing really is. For my travels this summer, it's going to be two tank tops and a pair of shorts, I swear. And no underwear. Underwear is for losers.
Okay, all slightly disgusting kidding aside, it really was an amazing trip. I started off doing to Downhill Hostel with Anna, one of the other exchange students from Carleton. We spent a couple of days hiking around in the beautiful spring weather, getting our shoes very muddy, cooing at the fluffy frolicking little lambs, and taking an excess of pictures of the gorgeous countryside. We spent the evenings at the hostel, chatting with the owners William and McCall, playing Scrabble, drinking the local whiskey, and having a vaguely wholesome good time. The hostel was incredible: hardwood floors, stained glass windows, a view of the ocean from our dorm room... definitely the most beautiful hostel I've ever been to. It should be an expensive hotel, but the owners used to be backpackers themselves, and they love the backpacking culture. The result? £10 a night lets you stay in one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen.
Friday evening we took the bus down to Dublin, since both Anna and I have friends there, and managed to cram an amazing pub/club/bar crawl into our six hours in town. The best part was the incredible bar Anna insisted we go to, that had a tiny dance floor with a great DJ, and the best cocktails I've ever had in my life. They make a mojito to die for, seriously.
For the rest of the pictures of our Ireland adventures go here and here.
The next stop was Paris, where I arrived on very little... okay... NO sleep, around 10 in the morning. I was spending four days with my friend Luc (also from Carleton) who's on exchange to the Sciences Po university there, basically sleeping on his floor for free because I'm a professional moocher, and seeing a little more of gay Paris. The weather was exquisite the whole time I was there, so it was sort of a toss-up between basking in the sun and going into museums, but we struck a pretty good balance I think. I got to see some of the stuff I really wanted to but hadn't gotten around to on previous trips: the Sainte-Chapelle, the Rodin museum, and the inside of St. Sulpice, to name a few. In the evenings we cooked elaborate meals in his tiny flat, drank a lot of really good red wine (like the bottle of Chateau Neuf des Papes that we got for 11 euro at the grocery store!) and had long conversations about everything we'd seen during the day. Luc is the only person I could have a 45 minute conversation with about the socio-linguistic implications of the use of the word "actually." It was awesome.
The rest of the pictures are here. I really hope you like statuary.
On Tuesday night (that's April 3rd, I think) I took an overnight bus to London. It seemed like a really good idea at the time. Only cost 35 euro, and I would save the cost of a night of accommodation as well. Turns out I was terribly, terribly wrong. Okay, it wasn't actually that bad, it just resulted in another sleepless night and another period of 40-hours-awake, which definitely take their toll. The problem with the bus was 1) I was sitting in front of the chattiest old British couple in the universe, who just never shut up, and 2) they made us get off and on various times, for customs, to get on the ferry (which was inexplicably FULL of teenagers at 3 in the morning), etc. By the time I arrived in London (and hour and a half late) I was dead to the world. When a creepy guy followed me out of bus station and told me that I was beautiful (I was actually dirty, tired, rumpled, make-up-less and very grumpy) I thought I'd hit my breaking point. Fortunately a lovely vegan breakfast at this great diner called Eat and Two Veg, and the presence of Jessie's parents, managed to pull me out of my fug and put me in the mood for some sight-seeing. On Wednesday and Thursday we visited (and climbed) St. Paul's, saw the changing of the guard and the Rubens ceiling at Whitehall, went shopping in Harrods, on Old Bond Street and on Oxford Street, and enjoyed some of the loveliest, sunniest weather. They left Thursday evening to go join Jessie in Tanzania, but slightly later that day Helen arrived for phase two of my London trip. We visited the National Gallery and the Tate Modern, shopped in a few too many bookstores (Helen is one of the few people I know who will tolerate and even match my obsession with bookstores), and experienced the London nightlife in all its sweaty, crowded glory. We got an average of no sleep per night, though our hostel was quite central and full of very friendly people, and by the time we got on our evening train back to Edinburgh, we were pretty much dead to the world.
The rest of the pictures of London are here.
Well, that was pretty much it for Easter, except for the incredible Easter Feaster we had on Sunday (we meaning me, Darcy, Helen, and a group of Canadians who dominated the conversation entirely with Canadian-type stuff like canoes and Stan Rogers and Quebec). Edinburgh is in the throes of a gorgeous spring, and I am either still exhausted from my trip or coming down with something, because I cannot seem to make myself wake up before noon to enjoy all this amazing weather! It's actually time to start revising - well, it was time to start yesterday, or this morning. But it's really REALLY time now. So I'm going to go read some Nietzsche and dream of travels to come.
Okay, all slightly disgusting kidding aside, it really was an amazing trip. I started off doing to Downhill Hostel with Anna, one of the other exchange students from Carleton. We spent a couple of days hiking around in the beautiful spring weather, getting our shoes very muddy, cooing at the fluffy frolicking little lambs, and taking an excess of pictures of the gorgeous countryside. We spent the evenings at the hostel, chatting with the owners William and McCall, playing Scrabble, drinking the local whiskey, and having a vaguely wholesome good time. The hostel was incredible: hardwood floors, stained glass windows, a view of the ocean from our dorm room... definitely the most beautiful hostel I've ever been to. It should be an expensive hotel, but the owners used to be backpackers themselves, and they love the backpacking culture. The result? £10 a night lets you stay in one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen.
Friday evening we took the bus down to Dublin, since both Anna and I have friends there, and managed to cram an amazing pub/club/bar crawl into our six hours in town. The best part was the incredible bar Anna insisted we go to, that had a tiny dance floor with a great DJ, and the best cocktails I've ever had in my life. They make a mojito to die for, seriously.
For the rest of the pictures of our Ireland adventures go here and here.
The next stop was Paris, where I arrived on very little... okay... NO sleep, around 10 in the morning. I was spending four days with my friend Luc (also from Carleton) who's on exchange to the Sciences Po university there, basically sleeping on his floor for free because I'm a professional moocher, and seeing a little more of gay Paris. The weather was exquisite the whole time I was there, so it was sort of a toss-up between basking in the sun and going into museums, but we struck a pretty good balance I think. I got to see some of the stuff I really wanted to but hadn't gotten around to on previous trips: the Sainte-Chapelle, the Rodin museum, and the inside of St. Sulpice, to name a few. In the evenings we cooked elaborate meals in his tiny flat, drank a lot of really good red wine (like the bottle of Chateau Neuf des Papes that we got for 11 euro at the grocery store!) and had long conversations about everything we'd seen during the day. Luc is the only person I could have a 45 minute conversation with about the socio-linguistic implications of the use of the word "actually." It was awesome.
The rest of the pictures are here. I really hope you like statuary.
On Tuesday night (that's April 3rd, I think) I took an overnight bus to London. It seemed like a really good idea at the time. Only cost 35 euro, and I would save the cost of a night of accommodation as well. Turns out I was terribly, terribly wrong. Okay, it wasn't actually that bad, it just resulted in another sleepless night and another period of 40-hours-awake, which definitely take their toll. The problem with the bus was 1) I was sitting in front of the chattiest old British couple in the universe, who just never shut up, and 2) they made us get off and on various times, for customs, to get on the ferry (which was inexplicably FULL of teenagers at 3 in the morning), etc. By the time I arrived in London (and hour and a half late) I was dead to the world. When a creepy guy followed me out of bus station and told me that I was beautiful (I was actually dirty, tired, rumpled, make-up-less and very grumpy) I thought I'd hit my breaking point. Fortunately a lovely vegan breakfast at this great diner called Eat and Two Veg, and the presence of Jessie's parents, managed to pull me out of my fug and put me in the mood for some sight-seeing. On Wednesday and Thursday we visited (and climbed) St. Paul's, saw the changing of the guard and the Rubens ceiling at Whitehall, went shopping in Harrods, on Old Bond Street and on Oxford Street, and enjoyed some of the loveliest, sunniest weather. They left Thursday evening to go join Jessie in Tanzania, but slightly later that day Helen arrived for phase two of my London trip. We visited the National Gallery and the Tate Modern, shopped in a few too many bookstores (Helen is one of the few people I know who will tolerate and even match my obsession with bookstores), and experienced the London nightlife in all its sweaty, crowded glory. We got an average of no sleep per night, though our hostel was quite central and full of very friendly people, and by the time we got on our evening train back to Edinburgh, we were pretty much dead to the world.
The rest of the pictures of London are here.
Well, that was pretty much it for Easter, except for the incredible Easter Feaster we had on Sunday (we meaning me, Darcy, Helen, and a group of Canadians who dominated the conversation entirely with Canadian-type stuff like canoes and Stan Rogers and Quebec). Edinburgh is in the throes of a gorgeous spring, and I am either still exhausted from my trip or coming down with something, because I cannot seem to make myself wake up before noon to enjoy all this amazing weather! It's actually time to start revising - well, it was time to start yesterday, or this morning. But it's really REALLY time now. So I'm going to go read some Nietzsche and dream of travels to come.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
My Immediate and Inevitable Come-Uppance
So last night, during A Touch of Zen, I managed to spill the contents of my purse all over the theatre floor. I scrambled around in the dark and piled everything back in, but apparently I missed one very important item.
This morning I woke up, got dressed, and was about to head out for the gym, when I realized that my wallet wasn't in my purse. Wherever could it be? Why, on the theatre floor, of course. I waited until noon, when the theatre opens, and called to ask if a wallet had been found... but no dice. The very sympathetic-sounding-but-useless young man took my name and number and promised to call if anything turns up. That was two hours ago.
Now the question is: how long do I wait before I start replacing things? My wallet held my credit card (with no available credit, so no worries there), my Canadian bank card, my student card, my ISIC card, and my Driver's License, to name a few. It also held the rest of the film tickets for the Chinese Film Festival, so I guess I won't be seeing the rest of my exciting cinema. I start traveling for Easter break as of March 28th, at the latest, and I can't function in the rest of Europe without either my credit card or my Scotiabank card, because my Bank of Scotland card doesn't work outside the U.K. My plan is to wait until 4:30, call back to see if anyone has turned anything in at that point, and if not begin the long, costly, and totally irritating process of replacing everything I've lost.
This is completely what I get for gloating.
This morning I woke up, got dressed, and was about to head out for the gym, when I realized that my wallet wasn't in my purse. Wherever could it be? Why, on the theatre floor, of course. I waited until noon, when the theatre opens, and called to ask if a wallet had been found... but no dice. The very sympathetic-sounding-but-useless young man took my name and number and promised to call if anything turns up. That was two hours ago.
Now the question is: how long do I wait before I start replacing things? My wallet held my credit card (with no available credit, so no worries there), my Canadian bank card, my student card, my ISIC card, and my Driver's License, to name a few. It also held the rest of the film tickets for the Chinese Film Festival, so I guess I won't be seeing the rest of my exciting cinema. I start traveling for Easter break as of March 28th, at the latest, and I can't function in the rest of Europe without either my credit card or my Scotiabank card, because my Bank of Scotland card doesn't work outside the U.K. My plan is to wait until 4:30, call back to see if anyone has turned anything in at that point, and if not begin the long, costly, and totally irritating process of replacing everything I've lost.
This is completely what I get for gloating.
I Saw Maggie Cheung (and other gloatings)
All right, just a general update because nothing deeply exciting has happened of late, just a lot of the general pleasantness that is my life. First off, in case there's anyone I know who I haven't told yet, it is fully spring in Edinburgh. There are crocuses everywhere, and daffodils, and buds on the trees... and tons of rain, of course, but I'm coping by reading Ottawa weather reports.
This week there's a Chinese Film Festival happening this week in Edinburgh, and Maya, Helen and I have bought week-long passes, six films for £12. On Sunday we got to see the exquisite Maggie Cheung, in person, introducing the even-more-exquisite In the Mood for Love and the most entertaining part was how completely different she looks in person. I mean, she was still stunning, but wearing an oversized t-shirt, baggy carpenter jeans and a paper-boy cap, she sort of looked like a 13-year-old tomboy.
Tonight we saw a three-and-a-half epic that you all must search out immediately, called A Touch of Zen. It was sort of a precursor to Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon except made in 1969 so secretly hilarious. Or not so secretly. The best part was the super-monk who saved the day and made the main villain go insane. Also, the fact that the review referred to one scene as "the flight of the Buddhists."
In fact, my life in general has involved a lot of cinema lately. There are two really good independent cinemas in Edinburgh that play a lot of international and local films - pretty much non-American, with a few indie or artsy exceptions. Last week I dragged Helen and Maya to see I'm Your Man, a Leonard Cohen documentary that completely counts as international cinema here because I'm totally not in Canada. It completely reinforced my abiding passion for all things Cohen, and also went some way toward legitimizing my country of origin to my much-cooler-than-me European friends. It's an uphill battle.
(I like to pretend this is still what he looks like... mmmm...)
Finally, Easter is upon us, which means a three-week vacation (or revision period) - two weeks of which I'll be spending traveling. I'm going up to Northern Ireland with my friend Anna to spend a few days at the Downhill Hostel, which is at the Norther-most tip of Ireland, on the longest beach in Ireland, with access to a nearby stable where you can arrange to go riding on the beach. After that, I'm going to Paris to visit Luc, my compatriot in nerdiness, with whom I will hopefully spend some more time in the Louvre. He's also been in Paris since September, and knows all sorts of hidden sides of the city that he's going to show me. Finally, I'm going to London to visit with Jessie's parents (who I have secretly adopted as my own) before coming back up to Edinburgh to study and pretend to be a real student for a while.
Well, that's it for me right now. Really the whole post was to brag about seeing Maggie Cheung in person. The rest is just incidental.
This week there's a Chinese Film Festival happening this week in Edinburgh, and Maya, Helen and I have bought week-long passes, six films for £12. On Sunday we got to see the exquisite Maggie Cheung, in person, introducing the even-more-exquisite In the Mood for Love and the most entertaining part was how completely different she looks in person. I mean, she was still stunning, but wearing an oversized t-shirt, baggy carpenter jeans and a paper-boy cap, she sort of looked like a 13-year-old tomboy. 
Tonight we saw a three-and-a-half epic that you all must search out immediately, called A Touch of Zen. It was sort of a precursor to Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon except made in 1969 so secretly hilarious. Or not so secretly. The best part was the super-monk who saved the day and made the main villain go insane. Also, the fact that the review referred to one scene as "the flight of the Buddhists."
In fact, my life in general has involved a lot of cinema lately. There are two really good independent cinemas in Edinburgh that play a lot of international and local films - pretty much non-American, with a few indie or artsy exceptions. Last week I dragged Helen and Maya to see I'm Your Man, a Leonard Cohen documentary that completely counts as international cinema here because I'm totally not in Canada. It completely reinforced my abiding passion for all things Cohen, and also went some way toward legitimizing my country of origin to my much-cooler-than-me European friends. It's an uphill battle.
(I like to pretend this is still what he looks like... mmmm...)Finally, Easter is upon us, which means a three-week vacation (or revision period) - two weeks of which I'll be spending traveling. I'm going up to Northern Ireland with my friend Anna to spend a few days at the Downhill Hostel, which is at the Norther-most tip of Ireland, on the longest beach in Ireland, with access to a nearby stable where you can arrange to go riding on the beach. After that, I'm going to Paris to visit Luc, my compatriot in nerdiness, with whom I will hopefully spend some more time in the Louvre. He's also been in Paris since September, and knows all sorts of hidden sides of the city that he's going to show me. Finally, I'm going to London to visit with Jessie's parents (who I have secretly adopted as my own) before coming back up to Edinburgh to study and pretend to be a real student for a while.
Well, that's it for me right now. Really the whole post was to brag about seeing Maggie Cheung in person. The rest is just incidental.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Up in the Highlands (the Highlands of Scotland)
It has been a completely nuts month (or two), and I have this distinct feeling (in the form of two essays with every-approaching due dates) that it isn't about the calm down any time soon. But nuts=fun (or in Cosette's case asphyxiation and possible death, but you know what I mean), and it was also completely amazing to have my friends come visit me and remind me why I actually do want to go home at the end of this year, instead of abandoning my frigid subzero homeland and adopting a fake accent.
So. Adrienne arrived to visit on January 25th. Cosette arrived on January 29th. Adrienne left on February 5th, Cosette on february 15th. In between those times, many wacky adventures. You can fill in the details yourselves.
All right, kidding. Adrienne and I had a low-key, relaxing visit. She took a yoga instructor course over the summer, so gave Anita and me informal yoga classes in the living room (resulting in a very nasty case of fore-arm carpet burn). She also kicked my ass into healthier living, particularly by throwing away my jumbo back of white pasta and buying about 10 pounds of tofu. We had a couple of dinner parties/potlucks at my flat, which was a nice way to introduce her to my friends; also, we played charades. Seriously. And the best part about a party full of international students is that a whole bunch of them have never even heard of charades, and teaching 20-year-olds to play charades is hilarious. Or painful. Whatever.
Shortly after Cosette's arrival was the weekend of Maya's birthday, which turned out to be a mob of Canadians set loose on Glasgow. There are advantages and disadvantages to travelling in large groups. There were, I think, nine or ten of us there (and about eight of those were Canadians, strangely enough); so on the plus side we brought the party wherever we were going. On the downside, making decisions with that many people is very tricky. There was a lot of getting separated, text messaging, wandering, etc. However, the real reason we were in Glasgow was for two concerts - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah on Saturday and the Decemberists on Sunday - and both the concerts were amazing successes. CYHSY was a kind of moshy, sweaty, beer-throwing type of gig (weird British fact #314: at concerts, people line up for ages to get a pint of beer, only to throw it across the crowd, drenching everyone in beer), and at one point Cosette asked a guy in front of us to stop being so tall or something, and he decided that meant we were best friends forever, and kept putting his arms around us, and we were RIGHT at armpit level, and he was totally drenched. So that was... sanitary.
The Decemberists concert was absolutely perfect. The audience was much calmer and more sober, and there was room along the edges, on these raised platforms, to both see the performers and dance. There were even more of us, because my friend Sam (Cosette was amazed that I have any male friends at all) came over Sunday evening. We ended up splitting up, because some of us - me, Maya, Helen, Adrienne, Cosette and Sam - wanted to stay on the sidelines where we had a good view and room to dance, while the rest wanted to get into the thick of things. The Decemberists are totally incredible performers, too, with tons of audience interaction/mocking, which I always love. That was pretty much the best gig I've ever been to, and I think everyone else really enjoyed it - it's always stressful trying to find things to do that everyone will enjoy, and while Cosette is the absolute most laid back person in the universe (except when it comes to sandwhich size) sometimes I really get the impression I'm slowly torturing Adrienne by forcing her to leave the house. But I think she had fun. I hope.
Anyway. Sunday night was all downhill from there, because we just missed the 11:00 bus back to Edinburgh, so we caught the midnight, which got us back to our flat by about 1:30, at which Adrienne spent about an hour and a half cooking various meals, from scratch, to take on the plane with her. We lay down for about an hour, then I walked her to the bus station to catch the shuttlebus to the airport. I ended up going to sleep at around 5 in the morning, half dead. Very traumatizing.
A key advantage to having a friend much cooler than me (i.e. Cosette) visit: everyone likes me more because of her. So Darcy, this lovely girl from London who I'd been hanging out with a bit, started hanging out with us way more, and Anita also went from shy and evasive to completely extroverted and fun. I'm drawing a total blank on the events of Tuesday through Thursday here. I know we walked around the city and explored a bit more, climbed Arthur's Seat about a thousand times because Cosette was SO pleased with this big seat in my backyard, and of course I went to the dreaded class. Cosette came along to my art history class a couple of times, and was thus proof positive that it is the absolute worst class ever.
But the real adventure, of course, was our wacky advenuture in the Highlands (of Scotland - not Tibet). It was me, Cosette, Darcy and Helen. We left Thursday night on a bus to Inverness, the capital of the Highlands (meaning the only place in the Highlands with tofu and an H&M, quite the cultural mecca). We spent the night there in this cool hostel, made cool by its astonishing proximity to the bus station, and its really huge and well-equipped kitchen that allowed us to go buy the makings of real food instead of choking our arteries up with pub lunches all weekend. We went that night to this great bar/pub called Hootenany, which is amazing because it has live music every night. There's trad (Scottish folk music - I swear this will catch on) on the first floor, and then something for the younger crowd, like blues or jazz or rock, on the second floor. As those who know me well will anticipate, we spent most of our time on the first floor. I just really like fiddlers. And the local organic beer was amazing.
Friday morning was all travel. We took the bus from Inverness to Ullapool, a little fishing town on the West coast, where we had a quick breakfast at a totally charming little cafe, then caught the ferry out to the Isle of Lewis. It was a length ferry ride, almost four hours in good weather, but a gorgeous view, with the ocean and all the craggy islands and snow-capped mountains in the distance. We arrived in Stornoway, the only real city on the Island, a little after one. We'd been debating renting a car all the way over, because freedom like that on a scarcely populated island is invaluable, but we were worried about price, and about our driving-on-the-wrong-side skill. Also the availability of automatics, because everyone in the UK seems to drive standard, which is dead to me. It turned out to be completely easy. The rental guy was even in town when we called him, and picked us up at the bus station and drove us to the airport, and it was £30 for two days, which is how much the bus would have cost the four of us anyway, so the only additional expenditure was gas, and this is the longest sentence in the world. Yeesh. Anyway. Cosette opted to drive first, and then turned out to adore driving our snazzy little french car down the winding, empty Scottish roads, so she did all the driving - which was fine with me, because I really don't want to be responsible for the deaths of anyone, let alone my friends. Or some innocent sheep.
So, in brief, the Isle of Lewis is incredible. And incredibly empty. There are these incredible sights, like the most intact standing stones in the UK, which are more impressive than Stonehenge but never visited because they're so hard to get to, and a great old Bronze Age tower that you can climb like a jungle gym. Lack of tourists means these incredible things are just open to visit whenever you feel like, and they don't have to worry about damage as much so you can really just climb all over them if you want. Lack of tourists also means there isn't really an established youth hostel; instead there's this thing called the Hebridean Trust, where basically the community chooses a building and a local person to be the warden, and that's the hostel. In this case it was in a reconstructed Black House village, black houses being stone cottages sunk into the ground to keep the wind out, with no windows and thatched rooves. We arrived before dark along winding roads that led us right to the edge of the Atlantic, and there was the little squat collection of black houses amid craggy hills, wandering sheep, and the ocean right there in the background - so beautiful. Of course, we had to wander around knocking on doors to find the warden (or in Cosette's case, just ask ANYONE who happened to be driving down the road if he was the warden... oh that Cosette...). During this knocking exercise we also managed to find out where the shop was - referred to as "the shop" because there is one on the entire West coast of the island, and it was really great that we had a car because it was about two towns over. Question: what makes these clusters of houses count as towns if they have neither shop nor pub? Don't ask me. We drove down to the Butt View Shop (possibly the other reason she called it "the shop" was the super-embarrassing name), where we bought carrots and potatoes and barley and made a huge vat of soup in the surprisingly well-equipped black house kitchen. I added the entire bag of barley, and it gradually absorbed all the water throughout the evening, until our soup was actually a pot of barley with a couple of carrots if you knew where to look. Still living that one down. The only downside of our incredibly cheap, beautiful and atmospheric hostel was its shocking level of coldness. We spent the evening drinking pot after pot of tea and doing vodka shots in between to keep warm - and when we went to bed we stole all the comforts off all the other beds (we were, shockingly, the only youth visiting the Isle of Lewis in February - who knew?) and made ourselves giant cocoons, and then wept softly whenever we had to get out to evactuate some of that tea. Fucking tea.
The theme of our trip was actually things being surprisingly convenient. All of the travel went smoothly, the car rental was almost too easy... on our way back from the Isle of Lewis on Saturday, the weather was really bad, so the ferry ride took way longer, but the bus connecting from Ullapool back to Inverness waited for us. Also, besides that choppy crossing, the weather was great, chilly but clear; it rained for maybe five seconds in Inverness, but it was while we were having lunch. Saturday night we got back to Inverness, made ourselves another health-tastic dinner (tofu stirfry and rice this time), then went out to (where else?) Hootenany to hear an incredible Scottish fiddler.
Sunday continued the theme of astonishing convenience. We slept in a bit, and when we woke up realized we'd missed the only convenient bus out to Loch Ness, which was really disappointing. So we had breakfast and went to the bus station to double check; the second we walked in, an old man named Jim walked up to us and asked if we were trying to get to Loch Ness. When we said we were, he said he was a tour bus driver and they were about to leave but there was still room for us. So we hopped onto Jim's tour bus, which took us along the shore of Loch Ness to a dock, where we got onto a boat that took as down the length of the lake right up to the remains of Urquhart Castle; then Jim picked us up again, took us to the Loch Ness 2000 exhibit (complete with videos, cool thematic rooms, and a gift shop with every imagineable representation of Nessie, stuffed), then back to Inverness. My (and possibly everyone's) favourite part of Jim's tour was his running monologue. Jim, you see, is about 100 years old, and has lived near Loch Ness his entire life, so his commentary was mainly about his wacky youthful adventures, like going across the loch to get drunk at the new Hotel and then rowing back across pissed. Oh, Jim. Once again, travelling in low season proved fruitful, because Loch Ness is usually packed with tourists, but there were maybe six other people on the tour with us. No luck finding the monster, but we faked it plenty, and caught THAT on camera, which is close enough.
The rest of our day in Inverness was very indulgent. We had lunch at the poshest place in town, where the servers were very unimpressed with the fact that we only ordered water and kept asking for refills of the bread basket, but the food was delicious. Then we went to Primark (the cheapest shop in the universe, where you can buy shirts for, like, £2, and where I got a fantastically piratical belt that everyone else in the UK has but I really don't care, it's SO piratical, and sidenote I was just invited to a pirate-themed party, so yay me!) and then walked around town a bit. Inverness is a really lovely place, with the River Ness cutting right through the middle, and lots of churches and great old pubs. There was a lot of talk about going to some obscure little pub and drinking with salty old men, but of course when it came down to it we went right back to Hootenany, where four old men were singing traditional Scottish ballads, and we got totally trashed on red wine.
Monday morning we caught the bus back, and then pretty much spent the next couple of days recovering from how much shere geographical distance we'd just covered in four days. Cosette and my final adventure together involved an evening climb of Arthur's Seat. We'd decided we wanted to see the sun set over it, which as it turns out is a terrible idea because you see the sun set (in our case, covered by clouds), and then have to climb back in the dark. And just to add bad decisions to bad decisions, we took a route we'd never taken before, which turned out to be very tricky, especially in the increasing dusk. However, we would have been just fine, Cosette being tough and me pretending to be tough so as not to embarrass her, but a family of tourists had followed us down, and got stuck on one of the trickier parts, and the mother started freaking right out. Like, shrieking uncontrollably. Then when we got out of their range of vision, they called us back and asked us to help them. So then, not only did we have to find our way down, but we were also responsible for the welfare of this family; and because we had to wake for them to inch along, it got completely, pitch black before we managed to get down. We did manage it, though, in one piece, with a very grateful family, and much bitterness on our part. Then we went to Darcy's and ate a chocolate cake I'd made and watched Muriel's Wedding, and that made everything better.
The excitement level in my life has gone WAY down since. For one thing, the excursions up Arthur's Seat have been waylaid by all the rain. The whole time Adrienne and Cosette were here, the weather was perfect, with blue skies and mild temperatures - but of course the second Cosette left it turned back to typical Scottish weather, which occasional patches of blue broken up by much grayness and rain. It's raining right now, and I'm supposed to do my laundry today, but I really don't want to go out in that rain. Yech. My main source of excitement now is essay-writing. And looking forward to Easter break at the end of March, because Darcy is going to take me on a mini-tour of England (I think London, Bath, and possibly Brighton).
Oh yeah, I also have new flatmates, and I'm getting along pretty well with them. Last night we made fajitas together and then played card games all night, and had a blast. They're both very sweet, definitely not the partying types, but for an evening in they're a blast. So, in conclusion, the Canadians took all the excitement back home with them, and life is back to normal. The end!
So. Adrienne arrived to visit on January 25th. Cosette arrived on January 29th. Adrienne left on February 5th, Cosette on february 15th. In between those times, many wacky adventures. You can fill in the details yourselves.
All right, kidding. Adrienne and I had a low-key, relaxing visit. She took a yoga instructor course over the summer, so gave Anita and me informal yoga classes in the living room (resulting in a very nasty case of fore-arm carpet burn). She also kicked my ass into healthier living, particularly by throwing away my jumbo back of white pasta and buying about 10 pounds of tofu. We had a couple of dinner parties/potlucks at my flat, which was a nice way to introduce her to my friends; also, we played charades. Seriously. And the best part about a party full of international students is that a whole bunch of them have never even heard of charades, and teaching 20-year-olds to play charades is hilarious. Or painful. Whatever.
Shortly after Cosette's arrival was the weekend of Maya's birthday, which turned out to be a mob of Canadians set loose on Glasgow. There are advantages and disadvantages to travelling in large groups. There were, I think, nine or ten of us there (and about eight of those were Canadians, strangely enough); so on the plus side we brought the party wherever we were going. On the downside, making decisions with that many people is very tricky. There was a lot of getting separated, text messaging, wandering, etc. However, the real reason we were in Glasgow was for two concerts - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah on Saturday and the Decemberists on Sunday - and both the concerts were amazing successes. CYHSY was a kind of moshy, sweaty, beer-throwing type of gig (weird British fact #314: at concerts, people line up for ages to get a pint of beer, only to throw it across the crowd, drenching everyone in beer), and at one point Cosette asked a guy in front of us to stop being so tall or something, and he decided that meant we were best friends forever, and kept putting his arms around us, and we were RIGHT at armpit level, and he was totally drenched. So that was... sanitary.
The Decemberists concert was absolutely perfect. The audience was much calmer and more sober, and there was room along the edges, on these raised platforms, to both see the performers and dance. There were even more of us, because my friend Sam (Cosette was amazed that I have any male friends at all) came over Sunday evening. We ended up splitting up, because some of us - me, Maya, Helen, Adrienne, Cosette and Sam - wanted to stay on the sidelines where we had a good view and room to dance, while the rest wanted to get into the thick of things. The Decemberists are totally incredible performers, too, with tons of audience interaction/mocking, which I always love. That was pretty much the best gig I've ever been to, and I think everyone else really enjoyed it - it's always stressful trying to find things to do that everyone will enjoy, and while Cosette is the absolute most laid back person in the universe (except when it comes to sandwhich size) sometimes I really get the impression I'm slowly torturing Adrienne by forcing her to leave the house. But I think she had fun. I hope.
Anyway. Sunday night was all downhill from there, because we just missed the 11:00 bus back to Edinburgh, so we caught the midnight, which got us back to our flat by about 1:30, at which Adrienne spent about an hour and a half cooking various meals, from scratch, to take on the plane with her. We lay down for about an hour, then I walked her to the bus station to catch the shuttlebus to the airport. I ended up going to sleep at around 5 in the morning, half dead. Very traumatizing.
A key advantage to having a friend much cooler than me (i.e. Cosette) visit: everyone likes me more because of her. So Darcy, this lovely girl from London who I'd been hanging out with a bit, started hanging out with us way more, and Anita also went from shy and evasive to completely extroverted and fun. I'm drawing a total blank on the events of Tuesday through Thursday here. I know we walked around the city and explored a bit more, climbed Arthur's Seat about a thousand times because Cosette was SO pleased with this big seat in my backyard, and of course I went to the dreaded class. Cosette came along to my art history class a couple of times, and was thus proof positive that it is the absolute worst class ever.
But the real adventure, of course, was our wacky advenuture in the Highlands (of Scotland - not Tibet). It was me, Cosette, Darcy and Helen. We left Thursday night on a bus to Inverness, the capital of the Highlands (meaning the only place in the Highlands with tofu and an H&M, quite the cultural mecca). We spent the night there in this cool hostel, made cool by its astonishing proximity to the bus station, and its really huge and well-equipped kitchen that allowed us to go buy the makings of real food instead of choking our arteries up with pub lunches all weekend. We went that night to this great bar/pub called Hootenany, which is amazing because it has live music every night. There's trad (Scottish folk music - I swear this will catch on) on the first floor, and then something for the younger crowd, like blues or jazz or rock, on the second floor. As those who know me well will anticipate, we spent most of our time on the first floor. I just really like fiddlers. And the local organic beer was amazing.
Friday morning was all travel. We took the bus from Inverness to Ullapool, a little fishing town on the West coast, where we had a quick breakfast at a totally charming little cafe, then caught the ferry out to the Isle of Lewis. It was a length ferry ride, almost four hours in good weather, but a gorgeous view, with the ocean and all the craggy islands and snow-capped mountains in the distance. We arrived in Stornoway, the only real city on the Island, a little after one. We'd been debating renting a car all the way over, because freedom like that on a scarcely populated island is invaluable, but we were worried about price, and about our driving-on-the-wrong-side skill. Also the availability of automatics, because everyone in the UK seems to drive standard, which is dead to me. It turned out to be completely easy. The rental guy was even in town when we called him, and picked us up at the bus station and drove us to the airport, and it was £30 for two days, which is how much the bus would have cost the four of us anyway, so the only additional expenditure was gas, and this is the longest sentence in the world. Yeesh. Anyway. Cosette opted to drive first, and then turned out to adore driving our snazzy little french car down the winding, empty Scottish roads, so she did all the driving - which was fine with me, because I really don't want to be responsible for the deaths of anyone, let alone my friends. Or some innocent sheep.
So, in brief, the Isle of Lewis is incredible. And incredibly empty. There are these incredible sights, like the most intact standing stones in the UK, which are more impressive than Stonehenge but never visited because they're so hard to get to, and a great old Bronze Age tower that you can climb like a jungle gym. Lack of tourists means these incredible things are just open to visit whenever you feel like, and they don't have to worry about damage as much so you can really just climb all over them if you want. Lack of tourists also means there isn't really an established youth hostel; instead there's this thing called the Hebridean Trust, where basically the community chooses a building and a local person to be the warden, and that's the hostel. In this case it was in a reconstructed Black House village, black houses being stone cottages sunk into the ground to keep the wind out, with no windows and thatched rooves. We arrived before dark along winding roads that led us right to the edge of the Atlantic, and there was the little squat collection of black houses amid craggy hills, wandering sheep, and the ocean right there in the background - so beautiful. Of course, we had to wander around knocking on doors to find the warden (or in Cosette's case, just ask ANYONE who happened to be driving down the road if he was the warden... oh that Cosette...). During this knocking exercise we also managed to find out where the shop was - referred to as "the shop" because there is one on the entire West coast of the island, and it was really great that we had a car because it was about two towns over. Question: what makes these clusters of houses count as towns if they have neither shop nor pub? Don't ask me. We drove down to the Butt View Shop (possibly the other reason she called it "the shop" was the super-embarrassing name), where we bought carrots and potatoes and barley and made a huge vat of soup in the surprisingly well-equipped black house kitchen. I added the entire bag of barley, and it gradually absorbed all the water throughout the evening, until our soup was actually a pot of barley with a couple of carrots if you knew where to look. Still living that one down. The only downside of our incredibly cheap, beautiful and atmospheric hostel was its shocking level of coldness. We spent the evening drinking pot after pot of tea and doing vodka shots in between to keep warm - and when we went to bed we stole all the comforts off all the other beds (we were, shockingly, the only youth visiting the Isle of Lewis in February - who knew?) and made ourselves giant cocoons, and then wept softly whenever we had to get out to evactuate some of that tea. Fucking tea.
The theme of our trip was actually things being surprisingly convenient. All of the travel went smoothly, the car rental was almost too easy... on our way back from the Isle of Lewis on Saturday, the weather was really bad, so the ferry ride took way longer, but the bus connecting from Ullapool back to Inverness waited for us. Also, besides that choppy crossing, the weather was great, chilly but clear; it rained for maybe five seconds in Inverness, but it was while we were having lunch. Saturday night we got back to Inverness, made ourselves another health-tastic dinner (tofu stirfry and rice this time), then went out to (where else?) Hootenany to hear an incredible Scottish fiddler.
Sunday continued the theme of astonishing convenience. We slept in a bit, and when we woke up realized we'd missed the only convenient bus out to Loch Ness, which was really disappointing. So we had breakfast and went to the bus station to double check; the second we walked in, an old man named Jim walked up to us and asked if we were trying to get to Loch Ness. When we said we were, he said he was a tour bus driver and they were about to leave but there was still room for us. So we hopped onto Jim's tour bus, which took us along the shore of Loch Ness to a dock, where we got onto a boat that took as down the length of the lake right up to the remains of Urquhart Castle; then Jim picked us up again, took us to the Loch Ness 2000 exhibit (complete with videos, cool thematic rooms, and a gift shop with every imagineable representation of Nessie, stuffed), then back to Inverness. My (and possibly everyone's) favourite part of Jim's tour was his running monologue. Jim, you see, is about 100 years old, and has lived near Loch Ness his entire life, so his commentary was mainly about his wacky youthful adventures, like going across the loch to get drunk at the new Hotel and then rowing back across pissed. Oh, Jim. Once again, travelling in low season proved fruitful, because Loch Ness is usually packed with tourists, but there were maybe six other people on the tour with us. No luck finding the monster, but we faked it plenty, and caught THAT on camera, which is close enough.
The rest of our day in Inverness was very indulgent. We had lunch at the poshest place in town, where the servers were very unimpressed with the fact that we only ordered water and kept asking for refills of the bread basket, but the food was delicious. Then we went to Primark (the cheapest shop in the universe, where you can buy shirts for, like, £2, and where I got a fantastically piratical belt that everyone else in the UK has but I really don't care, it's SO piratical, and sidenote I was just invited to a pirate-themed party, so yay me!) and then walked around town a bit. Inverness is a really lovely place, with the River Ness cutting right through the middle, and lots of churches and great old pubs. There was a lot of talk about going to some obscure little pub and drinking with salty old men, but of course when it came down to it we went right back to Hootenany, where four old men were singing traditional Scottish ballads, and we got totally trashed on red wine.
Monday morning we caught the bus back, and then pretty much spent the next couple of days recovering from how much shere geographical distance we'd just covered in four days. Cosette and my final adventure together involved an evening climb of Arthur's Seat. We'd decided we wanted to see the sun set over it, which as it turns out is a terrible idea because you see the sun set (in our case, covered by clouds), and then have to climb back in the dark. And just to add bad decisions to bad decisions, we took a route we'd never taken before, which turned out to be very tricky, especially in the increasing dusk. However, we would have been just fine, Cosette being tough and me pretending to be tough so as not to embarrass her, but a family of tourists had followed us down, and got stuck on one of the trickier parts, and the mother started freaking right out. Like, shrieking uncontrollably. Then when we got out of their range of vision, they called us back and asked us to help them. So then, not only did we have to find our way down, but we were also responsible for the welfare of this family; and because we had to wake for them to inch along, it got completely, pitch black before we managed to get down. We did manage it, though, in one piece, with a very grateful family, and much bitterness on our part. Then we went to Darcy's and ate a chocolate cake I'd made and watched Muriel's Wedding, and that made everything better.
The excitement level in my life has gone WAY down since. For one thing, the excursions up Arthur's Seat have been waylaid by all the rain. The whole time Adrienne and Cosette were here, the weather was perfect, with blue skies and mild temperatures - but of course the second Cosette left it turned back to typical Scottish weather, which occasional patches of blue broken up by much grayness and rain. It's raining right now, and I'm supposed to do my laundry today, but I really don't want to go out in that rain. Yech. My main source of excitement now is essay-writing. And looking forward to Easter break at the end of March, because Darcy is going to take me on a mini-tour of England (I think London, Bath, and possibly Brighton).
Oh yeah, I also have new flatmates, and I'm getting along pretty well with them. Last night we made fajitas together and then played card games all night, and had a blast. They're both very sweet, definitely not the partying types, but for an evening in they're a blast. So, in conclusion, the Canadians took all the excitement back home with them, and life is back to normal. The end!
Monday, January 15, 2007
A New (and very late) Top Ten List:
THE TOP TEN THINGS ABOUT MY WACKY CHRISTMAS ADVENTURE
10. Erotic Supermarkets
I guess this one is relatively self-explanatory. The first one we saw was in Prague; we were fascinated because it seemed to be cleverly disguising itself as a regular supermarket, possibly to lure in regular customers, who would then make impulse erotic purchase: "Well, I needed baking soda, but I guess I could pick up some flavoured lube while I'm here." Hm. But they kept turning up, like, everywhere. All the way across Germany, at least. So apparently people in Eastern Europe like to mass-purchase their sexual paraphernalia.
9. Climbing Things
This is going pretty low on the list because I'm not a fan of the actual climbing bit. But, as Leah very astutely put it, the best part about going up is being up. And there's a lot of up to be in Europe. Highlights include the Castle and the Fortress in Prague, and of course our hostel in Koblenz... I do love a view, even if it's a sweaty, gasping view.
8. These Giant Pants
My secret highlight of Bayreuth. Don't tell Leah. Bayreuth was a very small town in Eastern Germany (not the Soviet occupied bit, it just happens to be on the East border, right near Prague). Its highlights are a university and the fact that Wagner lived there for a while. There's a nice-ish park as well. If I was a better person the highlight would have been the fact that we were couch-surfing there and got to meet some local German youth, or that Leah had the opportunity to visit the place of her birth... but let's be honest. It was the big freaking pants. Look at them! They're huge! To give you a sense of proportion, that's an average-sized skirt to the left of them.
7. The German Fascination with Sausage
I kind of thought it was just a cultural cliche, like Canadians with maple syrup and Scots with haggis. You know, just not as big a deal as anyone outside the country thinks. But I was wrong. Sausage is HUGE in Germany. There are sausage shops and sausage stands and sausage-themed advertisements - it's like cheese for the French. Case in point:
6. These Really Aggressive Peacocks
So, continuing in my non-chronological fashion, on Christmas morning Leah and Janet and I decided to visit the Chateau Vincennes and have a wander 'round the gardens. The Chateau was a bit boring - I mean, very Chateau-esque, but not very pretty, and not really ruined enough to appeal to me (see entry 3). However, it turned out the Botanical Gardens (or something) were open and free on Christmas Day; seeing as it was cold, we spent our afternoon running from greenhouse to greenhouse, looking at really really old Bonsai trees and photography exhibits and stuff. The Bonsai trees almost won out for #6, because some of them were hundreds of years old, and looked like evil gnomes, but the peacocks were still better. They systematically hunted us through the gardens, chasing us into the greenhouses and then waiting outside the doors for us to emerge. At one point they even hid in a nearby shrubbery to fool us into a state of false comfort, and then leaped out at us when we least expected it. New Christmas Tradition: being attacked by peacocks. It's totally catching on.
5. Hostels in Fortresses
This in inaccurately pluralized, but I refuse to change it. It should actually be, that one hostel in a fortress. I booked our hostel for Koblenz (a really boring town in Western Germany at the junction of the Reine and Mosel rivers) over the phone, without getting an address or directions, because I knew it was the only hostel in town, and I figured, how hard could it possibly be to find it? Well, we lucked out, because a kindly old lady who happened to speak very good English overheard us discussing it at the train station, and offered to help us find our way there. Still having no idea where it was, we followed her blindly onto a bus that took us across the river and up a very high hill. Finally she told us to get off, pointed down a dirt road, and told us it was a 20 minute walk in that direction. And off we went. The hostel was called Ehrenbreitstein, and all the signs were pointing toward an Ehrenbreitstein FORTRESS, no mention of hostel, but we continued on our blindly trusting way. At least I did. Leah was suspicious the whole time. Finally we got to the giant gates of the fortress, where we were stopped by a uniformed security guard. "Youth hostel?" I asked in my best stupid-girl-tourist voice. He nodded and ushered us into the fortress... where we proceeded to wander for about half an hour, across moats, through tunnels, over bridges, until another guard stopped us and asked us if we were lost. "Youth hostel?" (the German for youth hostel is, like, twenty syllables long and I refused to even attempt it). He pointed us toward the south wing of the fortress, which, as it turned out, was the youth hostel. Actually, it was a former barracks, turned into a youth hostel, complete with 3-foot walls, the most endless hallways in the universe, and one of the greatest views I've ever seen. We could look directly over the Reine; one morning it was foggy, and it looked like we were literally on top of the clouds. Turns out we were extra lucky to find that kindly German lady - or be found by her, rather - because the regular route to the fortress involves a twenty-minute vertical hike, which would have been pretty much impossible with our 20kg bags. Still, exercise justifies the eating of more German chocolate. My other favourite thing about climbing things.
4. Accordion Orchestras
Another false pluralization, but go with me. Leah and I were wandering through on of the sixteen Christmas Markets in Berlin when we thought we overheard the sweet strains of accordion music. "Is that 'It's Raining Men'?" Leah asked with a mixture of horror and delight. Of course we had to find out. Lo and behold, a youth orchestra consisting almost entirely of teenage accordion players. Who would've thought there were enough teenage accordion players in the WORLD to make up a whole orchestra, let along in one city? Of course, they were playing a selection of slightly-out-of-date pop hits, but they were actually really good. It may have just been the gluhwein speaking, but I thought they were AMAZING.
3. Ruins
As you may all know by now, I'm a sucker for a ruin. That's why I am now in love with a little town called Trier. It's really really not-famous (the opposite of famous, even) - when we told some German girls in Berlin that we were headed there next, they gave us looks of absolute horror and said "There's NOTHING there." But they were so very, very wrong. Trier is the oldest town in Germany, former seat of the Holy Roman Empire, and thus is action packed with Roman ruins. There are three baths, an amphitheatre, a gate, a bridge, and a villa. So many ruins! And the best part was, because there were, like, NO tourists, there was also no supervision, so we could climb stuff and touch stuff and generally act like kids in a giant, ancient, Roman playground. Which we did. I've come to a realization which might have deep psychological implications: I like ruined stuff more than I like stuff that's still in one piece. What does this say about me? Definitely nothing good.
2. Midnight Mass at Notre Dame
On a more serious note, this was one of the most incredible experiences of my life. We actually didn't stay for the mass proper (several reasons: the metro stopped running before it was over, it was two hours long, none of us speak Latin, none of us are Catholic), but we were there at the stroke of midnight. The giant front doors swung open and the procession walked in with their incense and beeswax candles, and the bells started ringing, and choir broke into "Adestes Fideles." It was a definite goose bump moment. There were people there from all over the world, and it really struck me how effectively religion can bring people together, when all you seem to see these days is how it rips countries apart. It was a really beautiful moment, and was definitely worth being away from home for Christmas to experience it.
1. Christmas Markets
Once again, Leah put it best: "I'm starting to forget that Christmas is a time and not a place." That's because Christmas IS a place, and that place is Germany. You see, the Germans came up with this really fantastic idea, where every Christmas you drink a lot of mulled wine and eat chocolate and gingerbread and candied almonds (and sausage, of course, except not) and put up really giant Christmas trees and fill the streets with choirs and bands and have parades of schoolchildren carrying paper lanterns and set up skating rinks and make sure that it all takes place in the squares in front of really beautiful old churches or cathedrals. Trust me on this: it's a really, really good idea. There is no such thing as a bad Christmas Market. I am bringing this tradition back to Canada. Except it's going to be year-round. And there won't be any sausages. I'm pretty sure my heaven would be a sausage-free Christmas Market, where there are never lineups for the gluhwein and the Ferris wheel is free. Also, in German they're called "christkindlmarkt" which is great.
10. Erotic Supermarkets
I guess this one is relatively self-explanatory. The first one we saw was in Prague; we were fascinated because it seemed to be cleverly disguising itself as a regular supermarket, possibly to lure in regular customers, who would then make impulse erotic purchase: "Well, I needed baking soda, but I guess I could pick up some flavoured lube while I'm here." Hm. But they kept turning up, like, everywhere. All the way across Germany, at least. So apparently people in Eastern Europe like to mass-purchase their sexual paraphernalia.
9. Climbing Things
This is going pretty low on the list because I'm not a fan of the actual climbing bit. But, as Leah very astutely put it, the best part about going up is being up. And there's a lot of up to be in Europe. Highlights include the Castle and the Fortress in Prague, and of course our hostel in Koblenz... I do love a view, even if it's a sweaty, gasping view.
8. These Giant Pants
My secret highlight of Bayreuth. Don't tell Leah. Bayreuth was a very small town in Eastern Germany (not the Soviet occupied bit, it just happens to be on the East border, right near Prague). Its highlights are a university and the fact that Wagner lived there for a while. There's a nice-ish park as well. If I was a better person the highlight would have been the fact that we were couch-surfing there and got to meet some local German youth, or that Leah had the opportunity to visit the place of her birth... but let's be honest. It was the big freaking pants. Look at them! They're huge! To give you a sense of proportion, that's an average-sized skirt to the left of them.
7. The German Fascination with Sausage
I kind of thought it was just a cultural cliche, like Canadians with maple syrup and Scots with haggis. You know, just not as big a deal as anyone outside the country thinks. But I was wrong. Sausage is HUGE in Germany. There are sausage shops and sausage stands and sausage-themed advertisements - it's like cheese for the French. Case in point:
6. These Really Aggressive Peacocks
So, continuing in my non-chronological fashion, on Christmas morning Leah and Janet and I decided to visit the Chateau Vincennes and have a wander 'round the gardens. The Chateau was a bit boring - I mean, very Chateau-esque, but not very pretty, and not really ruined enough to appeal to me (see entry 3). However, it turned out the Botanical Gardens (or something) were open and free on Christmas Day; seeing as it was cold, we spent our afternoon running from greenhouse to greenhouse, looking at really really old Bonsai trees and photography exhibits and stuff. The Bonsai trees almost won out for #6, because some of them were hundreds of years old, and looked like evil gnomes, but the peacocks were still better. They systematically hunted us through the gardens, chasing us into the greenhouses and then waiting outside the doors for us to emerge. At one point they even hid in a nearby shrubbery to fool us into a state of false comfort, and then leaped out at us when we least expected it. New Christmas Tradition: being attacked by peacocks. It's totally catching on.
5. Hostels in Fortresses
This in inaccurately pluralized, but I refuse to change it. It should actually be, that one hostel in a fortress. I booked our hostel for Koblenz (a really boring town in Western Germany at the junction of the Reine and Mosel rivers) over the phone, without getting an address or directions, because I knew it was the only hostel in town, and I figured, how hard could it possibly be to find it? Well, we lucked out, because a kindly old lady who happened to speak very good English overheard us discussing it at the train station, and offered to help us find our way there. Still having no idea where it was, we followed her blindly onto a bus that took us across the river and up a very high hill. Finally she told us to get off, pointed down a dirt road, and told us it was a 20 minute walk in that direction. And off we went. The hostel was called Ehrenbreitstein, and all the signs were pointing toward an Ehrenbreitstein FORTRESS, no mention of hostel, but we continued on our blindly trusting way. At least I did. Leah was suspicious the whole time. Finally we got to the giant gates of the fortress, where we were stopped by a uniformed security guard. "Youth hostel?" I asked in my best stupid-girl-tourist voice. He nodded and ushered us into the fortress... where we proceeded to wander for about half an hour, across moats, through tunnels, over bridges, until another guard stopped us and asked us if we were lost. "Youth hostel?" (the German for youth hostel is, like, twenty syllables long and I refused to even attempt it). He pointed us toward the south wing of the fortress, which, as it turned out, was the youth hostel. Actually, it was a former barracks, turned into a youth hostel, complete with 3-foot walls, the most endless hallways in the universe, and one of the greatest views I've ever seen. We could look directly over the Reine; one morning it was foggy, and it looked like we were literally on top of the clouds. Turns out we were extra lucky to find that kindly German lady - or be found by her, rather - because the regular route to the fortress involves a twenty-minute vertical hike, which would have been pretty much impossible with our 20kg bags. Still, exercise justifies the eating of more German chocolate. My other favourite thing about climbing things.
4. Accordion Orchestras
Another false pluralization, but go with me. Leah and I were wandering through on of the sixteen Christmas Markets in Berlin when we thought we overheard the sweet strains of accordion music. "Is that 'It's Raining Men'?" Leah asked with a mixture of horror and delight. Of course we had to find out. Lo and behold, a youth orchestra consisting almost entirely of teenage accordion players. Who would've thought there were enough teenage accordion players in the WORLD to make up a whole orchestra, let along in one city? Of course, they were playing a selection of slightly-out-of-date pop hits, but they were actually really good. It may have just been the gluhwein speaking, but I thought they were AMAZING.
3. Ruins
As you may all know by now, I'm a sucker for a ruin. That's why I am now in love with a little town called Trier. It's really really not-famous (the opposite of famous, even) - when we told some German girls in Berlin that we were headed there next, they gave us looks of absolute horror and said "There's NOTHING there." But they were so very, very wrong. Trier is the oldest town in Germany, former seat of the Holy Roman Empire, and thus is action packed with Roman ruins. There are three baths, an amphitheatre, a gate, a bridge, and a villa. So many ruins! And the best part was, because there were, like, NO tourists, there was also no supervision, so we could climb stuff and touch stuff and generally act like kids in a giant, ancient, Roman playground. Which we did. I've come to a realization which might have deep psychological implications: I like ruined stuff more than I like stuff that's still in one piece. What does this say about me? Definitely nothing good.
2. Midnight Mass at Notre Dame
On a more serious note, this was one of the most incredible experiences of my life. We actually didn't stay for the mass proper (several reasons: the metro stopped running before it was over, it was two hours long, none of us speak Latin, none of us are Catholic), but we were there at the stroke of midnight. The giant front doors swung open and the procession walked in with their incense and beeswax candles, and the bells started ringing, and choir broke into "Adestes Fideles." It was a definite goose bump moment. There were people there from all over the world, and it really struck me how effectively religion can bring people together, when all you seem to see these days is how it rips countries apart. It was a really beautiful moment, and was definitely worth being away from home for Christmas to experience it.
1. Christmas Markets
Once again, Leah put it best: "I'm starting to forget that Christmas is a time and not a place." That's because Christmas IS a place, and that place is Germany. You see, the Germans came up with this really fantastic idea, where every Christmas you drink a lot of mulled wine and eat chocolate and gingerbread and candied almonds (and sausage, of course, except not) and put up really giant Christmas trees and fill the streets with choirs and bands and have parades of schoolchildren carrying paper lanterns and set up skating rinks and make sure that it all takes place in the squares in front of really beautiful old churches or cathedrals. Trust me on this: it's a really, really good idea. There is no such thing as a bad Christmas Market. I am bringing this tradition back to Canada. Except it's going to be year-round. And there won't be any sausages. I'm pretty sure my heaven would be a sausage-free Christmas Market, where there are never lineups for the gluhwein and the Ferris wheel is free. Also, in German they're called "christkindlmarkt" which is great.
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