More touristy fun.... Our arrival in Rome was livened up by our slightly lunatic hotelier, Andrea. His attention span was a few seconds long and he loved to sing... We continued our very touristy travels here, visiting St. Peters (very impressive, even when it feels like you've visited a thousand churches already), the Vatican museums and a few old buildings. Everything was vaguely familiar from my art history lessons... We enjoyed watching the flocks of birds flying over the city at dusk...they would create the most beautiful patterns as they swarmed, twisting and turning to catch [View Full Entry]

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Florence... We basically just did the tourist thing here....visiting the churches and galleries and eating overpriced (but delicious) food. If you book a cheap hotel room in Florence, don't believe the 'breakfast included' part. Ours was a coffee straight from a machine, a drinking box of orange juice and a twinkie. Fine Italian cuisine.... The best part of Florence was borrowing the hotel's bikes and riding through town. Narrow cobblestone streets and italian drivers take on a whole new meaning when you're part of the traffic pattern. ...and the pizza in Italy really is spectac [View Full Entry]

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Italy! We arrived in Genova late in the evening, dead tired from riding the trains out of France. All we wanted was a cheap, decent place to rest our weary bones. Of course we didn't have anywhere to stay, again. We wandered around for close to an hour, visiting a few places near the train station that were listed in our guidebooks. They were universally full, expensive or both. We eventually found a complete dive of a place, but at least it was a bed. Funny that after six months of travelling in South America and Asia, one of the worst [View Full Entry]

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Hey, this place is pretty sweet....too bad we have to leave! We had planned to spend a few days hanging out in Provence before moving on to Italy. Our timing was a little off though. We were landing in France a day before a massive strike by the rail workers. The media was warning that this was not going to be one of their 'usual' strikes, and was going to hit the entire country. We arrived in the little town of Arles, France in the late evening due to our little hiccup that made us go to the Barcelona hospital. We [View Full Entry]

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Spain.... The entire country felt a little like a stopover...we hadn't researched Spain much, so we basically arrived without a plan at all. Madrid was made special by Duilio, a lighting designer that we met for the first time there. We had a great time touring the town in the late evening with him, sampling Tapas and drinking just a little beer. We hopped a train to Barcelona, drawn there by many recommendations from travelers everywhere. We loved the place. There is a very positive energy in the city, with lively streets at all times of the day and none of [View Full Entry]

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Alright, so it's the middle of June, and we're finally posting our pictures from last seven weeks of the trip. We've been telling ourselves to get on it and finally finish the blog for a long time now....we've just been really, really lazy. So here's a whole whack of blog entries coming your way, without much more than Andrew's witty captions... Thank you for being patient! Jen and Andrew Greece - At long last we arrived in Athens after travelling for a couple of weeks from Oslo with this destination in the forefront of our minds the whole time. We were [View Full Entry]

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Santorini What an awesome break.... It was not exactly the typical week spent on a Greek island. We arrived on Halloween in the late afternoon. In Santorini, the tourist season winds down at the end of September. October is their shoulder season, and at Halloween the place basically shuts down for the winter. It took us a lot longer than usual to find ourselves a place to stay. We were harrased (as usual) when getting off the boat by the hotel touts, but we didn't get a good vibe from anyone. We eventually picked a guy in town who was a [View Full Entry]

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Budapest (and Hungary for that matter) was yet another one day, two night stop on our push to Greece (I - Jen - was desperately in need of an island getaway and some serious downtime at this point!). We arrived by train from Vienna (an easy 6 hours - I love European travel), and immediately found our way to the Malev Hungarian Airline office to sort out our flight from Budapest to Athens. Although we had confirmed our plans over the phone a week earlier, it wasn't as simple as we had thought... but thanks to a very nice ticket agent [View Full Entry]

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Our trip to Austria was just a quick stop in Vienna....loved the city. We happened to be there for a 'bank holiday', so we were in luck with everything but the weather. The wind and rain didn't stop everyone from getting out into the streets and touring through the military display that was presented in the main square. Given the world war two history of Austria, we were pretty surprised to see the military propaganda machine out in force, with no hint of shame.... We only had time to spend a little while in Vienna, as it was only a quick [View Full Entry]

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We arrived in Germany after three weeks in Scandinavia. We'd had a bit of a break in Copenhagen, two nights alone after spending six weeks with family. We were so touristed out, we didn't even take one blog worthy picture in Denmark. Our first stop in Germany was Hamburg. We were meeting up with Laura, who worked with Andrew last summer in Ottawa. We toured around Hamburg for the day and then stayed at Laura's place in the little town of Hildesheim. After three very relaxing nights, we had to head south, continuing to head in the direction of Budapest, our [View Full Entry]

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