So today is going to get a short entry because it was mostly a travel day. We did, however, do some important stuff today, #1 being finally having a real swim in the Mediterranean! We started the day with a trek to the local “Chinese Store” (apparently a genre around here, as that’s what people called it everywhere) that had everything in the universe at decent prices, including adaptors for a fifth of what we had paid for them the night before : ( I nabbed some decent-looking long shorts, an “athletic” shirt and some sandals and was ready to take [View Full Entry]

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So Barcelona is large, but is still surprisingly walkable like it seems all European towns are. We started the day heading to the famous Los Ramblas street/market. This place had by far the most street performers of any place I’ve ever been, including any place in New York or Los Angeles. Most were not very interesting, but some stood out. A pair of people, one draped completely in white, one in black, would randomly pop out and frighten people (always fun). One was a man painted completely in white who sat on a toilet statue and made crude noises with appropriately [View Full Entry]

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The trip to Carcassonne was quite an adventure. We headed out at around 5pm from Avignon, and found that the French trains were having another of their wonderfully selective (read: only us) strikes so the train we wanted wasn’t running. So, we had to take a bus to the high-speed train lines to catch a train that didn’t arrive until 3 hours later. Great. At least the station was nifty, all futuristic and such. And we somehow met the same honest peddler-- “can you give me… three, five, seven euro for beer tonight?”—we met on the train from Nice. The train [View Full Entry]

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Avignon is a really great example of a Medieval city. The first one I feel I’ve seen, with its great wall-driven planning and architecture. And the color of the place is so refreshingly uniform it’s amazing. I probably wouldn’t say that normally, but after spending a month in the Life/Monopoly/Risk color schemes of the rest of Europe it’s actually quite nice, if just for a change. Even from a distance, Avignon looks like a convincing storybook castle. And as the town takes shape, the character of the walls in complimentary contrast to the fortified buildings inside m [View Full Entry]

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So we decided to cancel our second night in Nice and try to move onwards to Avignon. On the way, we saw the most densely populated country in the world, and also one of the smallest—Monaco. This is the second microcountry I’ve seen on this trip, and is of course very different than the Vatican. The entire thing is secluded from the world, with mountains around two-thirds of it and the other third on the Mediterranean. And about two thirds of it is hotels, if not more. High-end cars, yachts, etc. are in higher concentration here than anywhere else I’ve seen, [View Full Entry]

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I will preface this entry by saying the Nice was not what I was expecting. Nevertheless, we ended up seeing some unique things that made this day worthwhile. Nice is known as a vacation spot for summer vacationing French. This is due largely to its proximity to other nice beaches and its weather, but certainly NOT for its own beaches, which are cold and rocky. So we did not get to swim here. We did, however, get to explore the town. Which is very toursity, but in a different way than the other touristy places I’ve been. This is for native [View Full Entry]

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So Annecy started out quite badly, with us having to call all our reservations and try to push them back because the French train strike will keep us from heading out to Nice today, and with us wandering the town for a couple hours before finding our hostel on the top of a hill in the rain :< However, after waking up, the city more than mde up for the bad start. Annecy is known as France’s Venice, due to its being built on the edge of a canal, and the comparison is pretty accurate. The buildings have the same colorful [View Full Entry]

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So apparently the train people are striking right now in France. That made getting to Annecy more difficult and more expensive than it should have been. We ended up taking a bus. So we got to spend a little more than 4 hours in Geneva. Geneva itself is a very modern city. I actually liked that bout it, unlike I did for Lucerne, probably because I was expecting that here. And the old town in Geneva is far more “quaint” than the supposed one in Lucerne. Right when you get in Geneva, the first thing you see is the huge fountain [View Full Entry]

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I repeat: Lucerne is nowhere near as “quaint” as the guidebooks would have you believe. Once you get past that, which took us a while, it’s a fine city. We set out to see the “old city” of Lucerne, which is supposedly the finest instance of modern mixing with new. In reality, it’s far more new than old, but you can still find traces of the old with the city walls and random narrow alley/street. Getting to the old city brings you through the famous covered bridges, which are splendid, being lined with flowers and having illustrative paintings every few ste [View Full Entry]

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Sorry my entries are getting so late, but as you’ve probably guessed traveling with someone means I have less free time that I should spend on writing ;) I have a 9 hour train ride tomorrow (the 12th) so I should be able to catch up then… We decided to use today to travel to Grindelwald, which is close to Interlaken but higher up in the mountains. It’s actually in its own valley, completely secluded and surrounded by mountains. We took a local train company’s train through some really pretty scenery unlike anything I’ve seen in the USA (although I could [View Full Entry]

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