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| Our hostel is in this picture, can you spot it? |
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.
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?
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.
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| "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?
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| Zurich |
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| I don't remember uploading this, but Zurich! |
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| Woo! My imagining of the end of a 70s Zurich montage! |
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| Christian gesturing towards Zurich |
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| Christian broke physics with a pile of CHF |
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| A nice scene, but I'm not sure what the sign means. |
I thought the "guy cautiously approaching the white rectangle" was actually a guy running to the bathroom. But I guess you were in Europe, not Asia, so perhaps mad dashes to the bathroom weren't so common...
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