So I guess that's it then!

Thanks for tuning in, we're back home safe, jet-lagged in strange ways but otherwise fine. Poorer, but no complaints all around. It was a fantastic trip and we hope to do similar things in our futures, but who knows when that will be and where we will go. So until next time...or until I see you in person, bye!

What we learned

In Rome we learned an important lesson about navigation: always have a map. And second: don't ever give up,

Our hostel is in this picture, can you spot it?

It was also in Rome where we began to learn to harsh truth about Europeans and drinking; and I don't mean alcohol, just fluids in general, they don't seem to imbibe them. Meal portions are typical, but drink sizes are minuscule, there is no such thing as free refills (for the most part they don't do fountain drinks) and the drink is expensive to begin with (including water).

From there we quickly learned how best to plan train trips; a lesson taught by incessant buzz of a mosquito as I tried to get a nights rest on the floor of a train station.

Nice taught us how to wander around aimlessly searching for a place to sleep; a skill which has been used well in the time since. We also started to get an understanding of French cuisine: take any food (including from other cultures), apply french cook, add sauce. In fact, were fairly certain everything in France comes with a choice of sauces, including train tickets and automobiles.

Paris was quite a bit larger than we were led to believe, and was expensive. We did a lot of walking in Paris.

Spain? Well we entered and exited Madrid more than any other city on the trip, but never actually got to see it. It seemed haunted or something though, the one time we went out it was just about dinner time and every single store near the train station was closed. A mystery. We saw Barcelona briefly, and it was a confusing rush through what seemed a giant mapless maze. And then we were off to Portugal.

Portugal is cheap! Portugal is wonderfully cheap, and while we relaxed there we discovered some fine cuisine of our own; namely our tried and true traveler's sandwich, consisting, at a basic level, of a baguette and salami. We've also added cheese to it, and we had butter at one point. We even changed out the salami for some other mysterious meat, but it paled in comparison. This meal was cheap even here in Zurich! Supermarket eating is somewhat difficult in other countries since we couldn't read the labels to understand what things were or if they expired if not refrigerated. But we figured peanut butter was ok, we ate a lot of fruit, also some Chocolate-butter stuff. Essentially we discovered that anything we trusted to carry around in our bags and eat several days later was probably sugary and unhealthy (but not everything, salted peanuts, for example).

Lisbon also taught us that it is very possible that every train out of a city will be full for several days, which was important to know to ensure we made it to Zurich. Sadly it was learned too late to make it to Salzburg to see Lemuria.

Instead we went to Valencia which is an awesome city, look it up on google maps and you'll see how cool it is. Here we learned...about fish I guess, and other sea creatures...we had a pretty easy time in Valencia, where I ate a McDonald's hamburger for the first time in a very long time.

We got to see Paris again, bringing our total visits to 2, though it could never reach Madrid's 3 as we departed eastward, never to return.

Berlin likes beer. At ANY time of day, you will regularly see people walking down the street with an open beer in hand. This is also where we started to see an affection for bicycle travel among the natives. At the one restaurant we dined at in Berlin, the food portions were huge, though I can't know if this is indicative of the rest of the city. Anyway, the theme there was beer. We also witnessed some sort of inline-skating marathon which was fun. And the skaters seemed to enjoy their beer from water bottles, go figure.

Vienna was hot, apparently experiencing record highs soon after we left, but Vienna has really nice parks! The rest of the city isn't really anything special, pretty cool, but nothing compared to Paris or Berlin, but they have great parks.

Amsterdam is another city that looks awesome on a map; built on a series of canals and stuff, it's sort of spider-web like. The canals also make navigation a breeze, because if you miss a turn, you'll know because there's water in front of you. Oh, this reminds me, Europe doesn't seem to be particularly excited about labeling streets. This was more a problem in the further west countries than the more central ones, but none compared remotely to America's fantastic street signs. On a similar note, many European signs use little silhouettes and pictures that seems really weird looking. Take the walk/don't walk symbol for example; every country does it a little different, and some places seem to utilize cartoon anatomy to greater degrees than seem necessary or intuitive. On some signs in Italy the cartoon man's hands were'nt attatched to his body...or on this one he seems to be sneakily making his way to the white rectangle, I don't know why anyone decided that was the best way to represent a person walking to an exit.

"Cautiously approach white rectangle"

We also visited Brussels, where I determined that everything Belgium is famous for is unhealthy food. That's probably not true, but there were a ridiculous number of Belgian waffle and chocolate stores.

Back to Amsterdam, anyway, if you just want coffee, you'll have a hard time finding a cafe that will suit you. Other than that, the drugs and prostitution don't really get in the way of normal city life; it's not polite to smoke   weed out on the streets, and prostitution is restricted to certain areas (the red light district), on top of which, prostitutes seem to stick to brothels so you won't ever be solicited walking down the street (kind of, they try very hard to get your attention from their windows).

And then we discovered that Zurich, our last stop, was going to be incredibly expensive. We did some math, and the price of a margarita here is the equivalent of about $36, that's probably the worst we found. A Big Mac combo was equivalent to $14 USD. You probably get the idea, subway $5 footlong? How 'bout a 14CHF (16.8 USD) 30 centimeter?

Zurich

I don't remember uploading this, but Zurich!

Woo! My imagining of the end of a 70s Zurich montage!

Christian gesturing towards Zurich

Christian broke physics with a pile of CHF

A nice scene, but I'm not sure what the sign means.

Pictures from Brussels

Picture...from our daytrip to Brussels a couple days ago. We didn't actually take any pictures in Amsterdam for various reasons; when we arrived it was raining, that evening we went into town without the camera, the next day we were in Brussels and got back too late, and the next day we had our packs with us most of the time and I guess never bothered to remove the camera. It's ok, there wasn't much to take pictures of anyway, the appeal of Amsterdam is the city and it's people not any particularly good sights.

So:

Me, probably wondering what attraction it is I'm having the opportunity to see

Something delicious and Belgian. They are expensive and we ate them all. Sorry, no presents.

This is probably a notable building for a historic reason; we liked it because it's easy to find from elsewhere in the city.

I guess Brussels really likes it's naked peeing boy. As you can see, it was not naked when we saw it.

There were no pictures of the front of Christian's body, but several of his back as we walked down this street. I'm sure I had some artistic reasoning.

Almost to the end now

So, back in Brussels we had just finished up some delicious waffles and decided it was time to go. It took a few tried to get to the train station because I had utterly lost my sense of direction somehow, so we kept returning to the square we recognized and setting out in different directions. We got to the right platform and then proceeded to wait for the train, which we are pretty proficient at by now. Once aboard the train and seated, I was relaxing in the chair as other passengers scuffled around and put luggage in various places. Suddenly the Asian dude behind shouted "stop that guy!" and leaped through the line of people in the aisle. A couple seconds later he returned holding his camera. He explained that another man had helped him put his bag up, and then taken his camera, but when he ran to get it back the man had dropped it and fled. I actually saw a guy walking away down the platform who I thought looked suspicious and he matched the description when I talked to the almost-victim. So that was fun.

I also forgot to mention the exciting times on the train to Brussels! We were sitting behind a big group of Spanish kids, probably atound 18 years old maybe. They too were using passes, although for Europeans the pass is called interail. When the ticket checking lady came by, she gave them an impressive lecture because they hadn't been filling out the "Journeys Details" section, where you write the time and number and destination of every train bus and boat you ride on with your pass. The ticket isn't valid without it, I guess. Christian and I hadn't gotten such a lecture, because we've mostly been taking night trains that require reservation, so we had actual tickets, and on the few local trains we'd taken they hadn't even checked. But, being the intelligent young men we are, we'd followed the instructions and filled ours out, so when she got to us, she at first looked apprehensive as we handed over our passes, but as soon as she saw that we'd done it right, she was very relieved and waved our passes at the spanish guys as an example of how to do things right.

Anyway, back again to the return trip: we ran into technical difficulties of some sort. At one station we randomly stopped for a long time and tey never announced in english what was going on, though I gathered from other passengers that they had to fix something. Eventually we departed again, but it didn't last long, we found ourselves stopped again, this time nowhere in particular, and they did announce in several languages that there was a train broken down on the tracks ahead of us so we couldn't move...and they gave no hint as to how long it would take. I honestly don't remember how long it took. But even once we moved, we stopped at the next station for another extended amount of time, so we ended up back at Amsterdam Central sometime past 11, and got back to our hostel around midnight.

Going up to our room, I heard some exciting Dutch karaoke coming from the bar...if only we'd gotten back sooner...we immediately went to sleep.

We went out again the next day (yesterday) and took a tram to Vondelpark, which is a lovely place; its got ponds and little waterways and grassy areas full of picnicers and sunbathers and plenty of benches and tons of trees, and the paths were full of bikers and dog walkers. We ate a pitiful lunch there...our hostel was right in what seems to be the turkish district of Amsterdam, so all the markets sold turkish food, which we didn't know what to do with. Although, we did eat Doners a lot, christian ate one everyday and I ate two over the course of our three days (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doner).

On the way back to Central we found a random street market, like a flea market, but with interesting stuff. We poked around but didn't purchase anything. It was a good time consumer though, since our train didn't leave until the evening and we had nothing to do. We got to the station and still had nothing to do.

So we got onto that train eventually. It was a rough ride though, the seats were uncomfortable and there was a passenger in our car who had the most ridiculously loud snore I've ever heard. I eventually just played loud music to fall asleep to, and that worked ok. There was also a huge storm partway through, though I was asleep at the beginning, it was loud enough to wake me up. Our train was stopped at a station and didn't move until the storm let up.

And so we eventually arrived in Zurich...somewhat rested and knowing that we are screwed because Zurich is an incredibly expensive city. Exactly how expensive, we would not find out until later, but first we had to find our hostel. We failed to correctly follow the directions we had, so we went back to the tourist office at the train station, where the lady behind the desk proceeded to tell us how to get to some random hostel before we'd even told her where we were trying to go. It was amazing, she heard us say hostel and immediately directed us the complete wrong way without stopping to let us correct her. Rather than try that again, we took the map and I used that to easily find the place.

We walked over, dropped off our bags at the luggage room and went out to bide time until check-in, pretty normal stuff. We went down to zurich's shopping district and were appalled at the prices of things...those of you who will be meeting us back in California, be prepared to feed us, that's all I'm saying.

Anyway, we came back to the hostel early and ate some food, and then checked-in as soon as it was ready. So here we are. Sitting around. So, basically, we'll be flying back in 2 days, and we can't afford to do anything in Zurich.

More Amsterdam, and a trip to Brussels

Yesterday we got up late and got on a train to Brussels. At first we planned on taking a train from Brussels to Bruges, but it was around 3pm by the time we got to Brussels and we didn't want to lose more time to trains, so we spent the day there. At first we wandered the area around the central station and I got sandwiches at the only food place I've ever been to that didn't seem to have food; I'm fairly sure I got the last two pieces of bread and they seemed to be telling me the only meat they had left was chicken. After that we made our way toward a tall pointy building and found the touristy area. Apparently Belgian things are all sweet, we had belgian waffles and belgian chocolates. We also saw a fountain of a naked peeing boy dressed up to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Ukraine becoming independent, so that's interesting I guess. We didn't really research what we would see in Brussels, so we saw things and didn't know what they were; like a gold-colored statue of a possibly dead man built into a door that everyone wanted to touch, that one perplexed us a bit.

Godamnti...70% of my post just got lost because I got unconnected to the internet and the auto-save feature wasn't working...then I tried to post and it all got deleted.

So...in summation, as I explained in the lost post, I'm in a hurry. So goodbye..

Now serving: Amsterdam

Woke up this morning before dawn to witness a lightning storm in the distance outside the window. The foul weather continued for a while, with a fair amount of rain spattering the windows. Eventually the rain became a drizzle and the lightnings ceased. We got off the train and waited for a few minutes for our next one, luckily under the cover of the platform's cover, because a little rain continued to fall. This was at Hannover, from which we grabbed a train to a smaller stop called Hilversum, where we got our train to Amsterdam Central. There was an awesome map machine in the station, where you could put in a Hotel/Hostel or a street and it would print a map with directions. Sadly, our hostel was just off the maps edge! So we had to wing it, using the instructions from online that we still had, and took a bus. The rain was coming down on us fairly well by a California standard, so we broke out the rain gear. We checked-in, and were informed that the room wouldn't be ready until 2, so we put our bags into the baggage room and went back to the bus stop hoping our hour long bus ticket would still work, but after waiting twenty minutes decided it was too late and went across the street where we were perplexed by a menu. Luckily a friendly fellow customer explained to me what was going on with the Doner Kebabs and Turkish Pizzas. Both christian and I ended up getting Chicken Doner Kebabs (which happens to be what the helpful guy had gotten). They were surprisingly delicious and I don't know why they aren't popular in America, given what they are; a handful of greasy shredded meat and sauce with some letuce and that kind of thing.Then we came back to the Hostel and waited in the Lobby for the room to be ready.

Once we cleaned up we went out into Amsterdam to wander around. We got 48 hours of bus ticket, so that's helpful. The food in Amsterdam is really varied, there's lots of different regional food restaurants, like Thai, Indian, Mexican, Italian. The streets would have gotten me lost a lot, too, but there are these handy canals everywhere to use as landmarks.

I also had time to upload pictures from Vienna! So here you go:

A butterfly, as seen in the butterfly house

I forget the name of this thing, but the other side was under construction so there weren't any good angles

A nice grassy rest

Summary of Vienna

The downtown area isn't big, but it was a little confusing and so we had a hard time navigating at first; a large part of this problem was that we didn't find a map, so we were using the one in my tourist book. Once we got our bearings though, it was a nice enough town. My day was sparsely punctuated with delicious cold treats, from an Eiskaffe (ice cream and coffee, basically, though mine was chocolate and Christians was coffee), to some gelato later in the day, a blended mocha drink here at this McDonalds as we head back to the train station, slowly. Vienna has some museums, but we were too tired for them; we did enjoy its parks, though, which have lots of trees and grass and a ton of benches lining the paths. It was just too hot and humid to be walking around, so it really wore us out. It was fun though, and there are some cool things here, the quintessential leisurely cafe, where etiquette requires that you linger and have deep thoughts after your drink is done; being in a hurry is prohibited. Anyway, we are in no hurry. Our train's leaving in a little less than two hours, so we'll get over to the train station at some point. Anyway, that's all I got for now.

Vienna, and the FUTURE!!!!!!!

We're only going to be in Vienna for today, to see their downtown and drink their coffee. Tonight we get on a complicated train ride to Amsterdam! We couldn't book tickets from Amsterdam, but I'm told we can reserve online, so we're about to check that out, and if that fails, we'll just stay in Amsterdam until a train to Zurich can take us away, but we'd like to spend two nights in Amsterdam and two in Zurich. Then we'll be flying home!

We're in Paris! Again!?

Here's something from Berlin!

Berlin!

As usual (and half-expected), our plans changed once we got to Berlin. There were no trains to Amsterdam today or tomorrow. So now we are going to Vienna tomorrow night, and we've got a hostel in Berlin tonight. From there I make no concrete predictions, but we will arrive in Vienna on the morning of the 22nd, and we will still want to get to Amsterdam before heading to Zurich. With less than a week left, we plan to get an itinerary for the next few stops soon to make sure we don't get cut off from Zurich when the time comes. But for now, we are relaxing. The laundry service (which we are extremely grateful for) at this hostel is supposed to take less than 24 hours...so, I guess that's good. We'll be checked out before our laundry gets done, but whatever. Tomorrow we'll probably go take pictures of some sights or something before we get back to the train station in the evening.

Pictures, Lisbon and Valencia

Here I am in a Paris McDonalds! We've got tickets to Berlin tonight, probably won't get to see Lemuria after all...but from Berlin we'll probably head to Amsterdam and then south, wind our way around until we have to be in Zurich. Anyway, here's the pictures:

Lisbon at night

(It was taking way too long to upload, so I only got through one. I'm gonna see if I can resize them or something really quick.)

(The problem was further compounded by the fact that I was actually using a nearby KFC's wifi, which aparently only let me have internet for one hour, but now I've managed to get onto the previously stubborn McDonalds network! So I'll try this again! Hopefully my battery lasts...)

Christian's new hoody

The Ciudad de las Artes y Ciencias, in Valencia

This is a Cuttlefish, this is for you, you know who you are.

Jellyfish...!

Dolphins

Several more dolphins

Moving on again...again

In Valencia there is a museum complex called the Cuidad de las Artes y Ciencias, which is made up of a bunch of different buildings. We went to the Oceanografic, which is a aquarium with sections representing different oceanic regions. It was pretty good, and relaxing. The ticket was expensive though, and we might have just said "screw it," but we'd already agreed that we weren't going to walk all the way there just to turn around because of the price. There was an IMax theater too, and a ticket for a show was only 2 euros on top of our aquarium ticket, so we got that too. While we were looking at some fish or something, we heard a big crowd clapping and chanting, so we checked it out and found that a dolphin show was starting soon, so we sat and watched that. It was pretty cool too.

Once we finished our tour of the ocean, we went across the street to eat. We found a McDonalds and figured it was the cheapest we could find, so we ate there. Then we went back to L'Hemesferic (spelling?) to watch something about big ocean creatures. They actually started the wrong show at first, which was a similar one about big flying creatures. As it turned out, it was basically a National Geographic tv show in which they made up CG underwater dinosaurs based on bones. I didn't really pay much attention, for reasons I'll get to, but it was 3D and (using some, but not all, of the dome-screen). They provided these absolutely rediculous "headphone" things for english, and only one of ours worked, so I let Christian use it and I fell asleep, so I didn't see most of the show, and the rest I only heard in spanish.

We trekked back to our room to sleep, and I slept very well. In the morning we got up late and packed up to check out. Then we went out into the city to find a supermarket. We were going to ask the Hostel desk, but it was incredibly busy and we didn't remember to ask until we had left, so we decided to just find one ourselves. I tried to use a clever method of scoping out the general direction of stores by looking for people with bags of groceries, but that didn't really point us anywhere and in the end we found a bug grocery store just by luck.

Then we walked back to the train station, where there was plenty of internet, but I didn't upload any updates or pictures. We found power outlets to charge stuff, so I transferred pictures from Christian's camera. We had a snack/lunch of uncooked cheese and spinach tortellini. Yum!

Now We're going to Madrid...again...on a fancy hgih-speed train with power outlets, so I figured I'd typre this out while I charged my compy. This will be our third time at the Madrid train station, and hopefully our last. We'll get on our expensive train to Paris later this evening and sleep in beds all the way there. Once we get there though, who knows where we'll go next. With luck we'll find some way to get to the obscure German town we want to get to before the evening of the 20th. If not, we'll probably just do more of the same, but in new cities. We have to be sure not to get stuck anywhere though, because we are getting close to the end of the trip and need to be in Zurich in a little more than a week. How time flies when you are running around, lost, having a confusing but fun time.

(And now I'm posting this from Madrid! I intended to upload some pictures, but the uploader is going far too slow here, but we've got some nice night shots from Lisbon and pictures from the aquarium and other parts of Valencia)

Expensive Day :(

Well, we escaped Lisbon out to Madrid. From Lisbon, Madrid was as far as we could plan. We were hoping to get to Salzburg, Austria to see the band Lemuria, but once in Madrid the tickets were too expensive for us so we headed down to Valencia, because there's a kick-ass aquarium, planitarium, sciencey place here. Once we got here though, we tried to organize our trip out of spain to the east only to find that the same problem applies to all trains for the next half-dozen days, no seats available, only beds. We decided to stay the night here in Valencia, and we are taking a sleeper train to Paris tomorrow in beds, which will be cool, but it was pricey. It's disappointing, yeah, but we might be able to catch this band for Christian in another stop on their tour in a couple days, its just a matter of getting to Germany. From here we can only book trains as far as Paris, so from Paris we will maybe go to Brussels or something, because the place the band is playing is small enough that its not on the map. We won't be able to find it until we get to Germany, probably. So that will be interesting.It might end up being kind of a mad dash from station to station, but we can handle that. For now we're just going to relax, hit up the oceanarium tomorow morning and then get back into train station mode.

Even More Pictures! And words too.

So, here we are in our second hostel in Lisbon!

Here's a couple pictures from Paris and Barcelona:

Now back to Lisbon: yesterday we had a delicious lunch of french rolls and butter and salami. There was a supermarket right next to the hostel we were in. It was so cost effective we had an eerily similar meal for dinner, but this time with mozzarella cheese and some mysterious meat that they put on paninis a lot.

We mean to join the hostel-offered trip in the evening to listen to Fado, but we accidently slept through the departure time..

Kinda like this, except without me awake to take a picture.

So that was all yesterday, this morning we got up and went to the hostel reception desk to see if they had any suggestions for a place to stay tonight. She was incredibly helpful, going as far as contacting other hostels in the area via secret hostel chat and finding us a place across town. So we ate our complimentary fresh cooked scrambled eggs and toast before going back to our room to relax until closer to the check-out time of our first hostel (noon), which coincidentally was the check-in time of the other.

So we marched across town and checked in to the next place, waited for a while for the cleaning lady to finish up and then dumped our stuff in our new room and heading back into the city. We went to a ruined church turned museum called Convento do Carno (I thought it was a convent judging by the name, but it was a church). It had been wrecked by the big earthquake back in...like 1775 or something and never finished being rebuilt. So it's got some skeletal arches and no ceiling. There were archaeological pieces from all over, including some mummified children.

Then we walked up the big hill to the Castelo de S. Jorge (the big castle). The castle itself wasn't very interesting, just empty walls, but it offered a great view of the city.

Then we went down and had a late lunch at a restaurant. Christian got Swordfish Steak and I got Pork Portuguese. My pork was very good, one notable part of the dish was that several whole cloves of garlic where mixed into the dish, which I found interesting. Christian liked his food too. All in all a very satisfying day.

Now we're back at the hostel again. We plan to go out when its dark to take pictures at night (but knowing us we'll probably fall asleep by accident). We'll probably have to eat, too, but there's an even bigger supermarket near this hostel, so dinner won't be expensive.

More Pictures!

The Louvre (and the weather)

Me comparing facial hair with this chap

Us in a fancy mirror

Mona Lisa...can't get very close between the security and the crowd

Lafayette, from American history!

Another post is coming within the hour (or so)

Catching Up, getting stuck in Lisboa

So, here I am at the Hostel computer. I´ll just fill in some gaps really quick. So back in Paris we checked out of our hotel and headed off into Paris to spend the day until our train left to Barcelona. We went to the louvre, and there are plenty of pictures to come from that. We also took a lot more pictures of the Eiffel tower, but the sun was setting too slowly and we had to catch our train, so no night shots (sorry Christian).

I forget what I put in the last update, so we got to Barcelona and in order to get to Lisbon we had to get a train to Madrid and as a result we didnºt have long in Barcelona. We spent our 4 or 5 confusing hours there finding the Sagrada Familia and getting back. We went to Madrid on a super fancy 300km/h train with a movie playing (in spanish, called No Controles) and it was nice. It rained a bit on the countyside that we sped past, I saw one lightning bolt. It was a very pretty ride. We had to hop on a local train from one station in Madrid to another and then went out to find food before our night train left. It was only, like, 8pm, but everything was closed...so we had to eat at the burger king in the station. Then we got on th train and I slept all the way to Lisbon.

Once in Lisbon, we tried to secure travel back out, only to find that all trains were booked until the 16th. So, we will be here for a while. We walked into the city center and started poking around for a place to stay. The first couple places were all full, but we got a map of the area. Then, at one hostel they pointed us to their sister hostel in which there was a double free for tonight. So we got that, then wandered Lisbon all morning waiting for the room to be available. It´s a nice enough place, the people are very friendly, but it doesnºt feel very modern. We still need to secure a place for tommorrow night, but that shouldnºt be too hard, I hope. Anyway, no pix because this isn´my computer, but maybe soon you´ll get some more. Bye!

Barcelona briefly

Alliterative, huh? So last night we slept on an overnight train from Paris to a place called Latour de Carol on the border of spain, and then took a local train into Barcelona. Once in Barcelona we lined up another trainride out of town, which we would have to be on by 5, so we only got about 5 hours in Barcelona. We somehow found the Sagrada Familia, which was probably partly by luck because we could not find a good map or directions. The place was incredibly crowded, theres some kind of student thing going on in Barcelona we think.

Now I'm at the McDonalds in the train station, getting ready to go again. No pics for now, sorry. First we take a train to Madrid, and then an overnight to Lisbon, and hopefully I'll report in from there!

Today's Paris Ranging and a bunch of pictures

After checking into our hotel and depositing our packs, we headed out into the late Paris morning. We walked for a long time, basically all the way across town, and saw lots of cool stuff along the way before taking a bus back. 

Finally moved and uploaded some pictures, so here's a little gallery:

Nice outdoor Market, where we got that bread/cheese/tomato thing previously mentioned.

The coast from Nice

Some memorial at Nice, there's a couple years  carved on the sides.

Antique shop in Nice specializing in clocks, not sure if this is the picture of it Christian preferred or not, but whatever

At the laundromat...the second time

Leaving Nice

Notre Dame, Paris

Arc de Triomphe, it's very large

That one tower thing in Paris, we accidentally found this  photo opportunity trying to find a bus back to the hotel!

The view from our room isn't bad either, nothing exciting but we are on the 5th floor. The room is tiny, but the bathroom is nice, so I think I'm gonna go take a shower. Tonight we are going out again to take night pictures,  I plan on uploading them before we leave the hotel tomorrow morning.

Paris, Morning still, expect more

Got a hotel, a bit pricey but he did give us a nice discount. We've got WiFi in our rooms finally, so expect big things. Unfortunately the electrical outlets aren't working...so we'll have to see what's up with that.

Paris, Morning

After doing laundry we went and napped at a park thing with a big fountain/pool. Unfortunately some evil pidgeon saw the gap in our defense and crapped on Christian's towel...so we went back to the laundromat for a while. After that we ate at a very satisfying restaurant which gave us free bread and unlimited side-dishes. The sauces were quite good, I guess you get sauce on everything in France. Then we went to the train station and got on our train. Slept pretty well and now we are in Paris deciding what to do. Either Barcelona or Berlin from here, whichever has a better train option. Basically we look at the map and pick destinations that are far enough apart so we can sleep on the trains overnight. Anyway...

Yeah, I got free internet here in the train station, but only for 20 minutes. So no pictures for now, but we'll keep scanning for WiFi throughout the day.

Yesterday and Today, Nice, France

Took a train from Rome to Livorno, just because. Once we got there we poked around for a bit, but decided that we should just go to Nice. So we went to the ticket window to figure the route, 4 train rides and a total travel time of around 9 hours. We boarded the first train at 20:13 and it took us to Genova Brignale Station. The train was a little delayed, but not enough to make us miss our next one, a short 6 minute ride from Genova Brignale to Genova Piazza Principe. Unfortunately the signs on the platforms were broken, so we thought that the train on the platform we were waiting for our train on was not our train....which it was. We poorly kept track of time, as well, and now found ourselves stranded; with no train to catch up to our schedule we would have to make a new one. Also there was this guy who had kept trying to talk to us on the train, trying to ask us something as if we could help him, but he was not very communicative and only spoke italian. Eventually he was just saying/asking "polizia" a lot, which we weren't sure how to answer. Unnervingly, we continued to see him all night as we waited for the next train to P. Principe.
Once in Piazza Principe, it was late and we we're tired. The next train to Ventimiglia we could grab wasn't until 8, so we slept at the train station. There were at least a dozen other backpackers sleeping nearby, all inside this little moveable barrier that surrounded the station cafe's tables when they were out. As it stood without tables, it served as a good windbreak for us sleepers. We were essentially sleeping on the cold stone ground, and I swear I was plagued by a lone demonic mosquito the whole night and morning. Around 4:30 the cafe started to open and the sleepers gradually scattered away. We ate some bread and honey breakfast (the last of the bread) and found ourselves with yet 3 hours to kill. We wandered around outside the station, but had to go back to get Christian some semi-substantial food from the cafe.
The train to Vermiglia was a mess; it was a compartment train and we'd reserved seats, but during the confusing boarding sequence we couldn't figure out which they were, so until the first stop we stood near the bathroom at the end of the car. The narrow hall was filled with people sitting and every compartment was full, there were several people standing at either end of every car as well. Anyway, we went back and ousted some people from our seats, which I kind of felt bad about because I wasn't able to communicate anything beyond pointing to my ticket so they knew it was my seat. One person who we displaced was a girl who was probably about our age and I understood that she was getting off at the next stop or so, but I wasn't able to communicate that she could keep the seat until then, since I was going all the way to the end of the line and would have plenty of time to sit.
The rest of the ride was restful, and when we arrived in Vermiglia we were told that we could treat the train into france as a hop-on hop-off free kind of thing with our europasses, so we were happy that our expensive tickets were finally doing more than just getting us discounts (huge discounts, albeit). I was out of cash at this point, and when I tried to use an ATM outside the station it didn't work, and Christian's card faied as well,that worried us.
The train to Nice stopped at probably every stop, so it took a little while and there was lots of moving baggage around to balance comfort with fitting newcomers in. We got into Nice at, maybe 11? And, using my tourbook, tried to find a place to stay. We went into a really lovely little shopping area close to the water, and started our search. The first place we went was full, but the lady at the desk was quite helpful and pointed us toward some larger hotels. So we went from hotel to hotel, checking the prices, but it was futile because as it inevitably turned out they were always full. But we pressed on, there had to be at least one room left in the city right? I was feeling a little empathy fro Mary and Joseph, hoping I wouldn't have to sleep at the train station again. Luckily neither Christian nor I is pregnant. We found a promising 1 star place for cheap, but the desk was litteraly chained shut and padlocked while they (I believe) were taking lunch. We decided to get lunch and then come back. We saw a subway nearby and when we saw the size of the drinks we were astonished and had to eat there. No free refills, but typical medium drink cups is progress. Also of note, the Termini Station Nestea ploy had worked, because both Christian and I drnak that with our sandwiches.
The promising place was full too. Damn.
We wound our way back toward the station, and found a 2 star hotel that had a very large sign and a big building. We had mixed hopes for it, on one hand the well placed sign probably attracted lots of businiess, but it also appeared to have many rooms. The price was pretty much within our range on the sign outside so we went in. No rooms upstairs, but we got a nice little basement room. Compared to our hostel in Rome this is fantastic though, our own bathroom and our own room, towels, sheets, bedlamps and everything!

This morning we got up, packed up, left our luggage in a luggage room and checked out. We went and reserved some reclining seats on a night train to Paris tonight and spent the morning in Nice's touristy area. Got some flat bread thing with oil and cheese and tomato and we ate grapes and everything was great. France so far has been much friendlier than Rome was, also nicer looking overall (though Nice lacks majestic ruins and churches). We are currently doing laundry, and we couldn't figure our how the machines worked until a french guy helped us out, he didn't know english and all we could say was "merci."

Haven't uploaded pictures since that McDonalds though, but we might get online later today or something. Anyway, if not, I'll report in from France!

August 8, Before leaving Rome

8/8 This morning we got up and packed up and dropped off the keys at the Hostel desk. We headed out to burn the hours until our train leaves at 3:45. We walked down to see the Pantheon, and we're certainly glad we had time to fit that in, since we'd intended to swing by several times but never did. Entrance was free, which is always nice, so we spent a few minutes wandering inside. Afterwards we sat in the shade by the fountian outside for a long time, ate a small gelato and rested. Then we made our way back to Termini Station. We found a supermarket on the way to the pantheon as well, which was great, we bought bread and honey and some snacks; we'll be sure to pick up more substantial food at another stop, but once back at termini we had a little picnic and I read a book while Christian pretended to be asleep. While filling our water bottles Christian even got to give directions to a spanish speaking woman, so that's cool. Right now I'm writing this on wordpad because there's no internet here at this McDonalds, where we are charging our electronics and moving pictures onto the compy from the camera.