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Zachariah Gossman
A 25 year-old post-student but pre-career American male with a newly spoiled lust for travel. Zachariah
Travel Blog Posts
June 17th 2008
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 on the beach. We booked our tickets and headed out to Sitges, a town near Barcelona which we were told had good beaches. We weren’t disappointed. While the water was a bit cold, the beach ... read more
June 16th 2008
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 inappropriate gestures (one has to wonder how he got the huge set-up out there) that drew huge crowds while the extravagantly-dressed dancers next to him were ignored (how depressing that must be for them). Possibly ... read more
June 15th 2008
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 had no empty seats, even though we paid extra to reserve seats (I couldn’t bring myself to kick the old lady in my seat out). It did thin out after we went through Marseilles, thankfully, ... read more
June 14th 2008
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 makes you feel like whispering “Camelot” in an awed voice and then complaining that it’s only a model. But it isn’t, so that would be silly. No, Avignon is real, and is really nice. We started the day by visiting ... read more
June 13th 2008
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, and possibly the world. We started by trying to find a place to store our luggage, since Monaco is all about the vertical thing and would thus be unfun to traverse with our bags. Unfortunately, ... read more
June 12th 2008
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 tourists far more than it is for foreign tourists. So the stores and such focus more on actual art and furniture and clothing and housing than they do on souvenirs and excursions like at the ... read more
June 11th 2008
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 and crowded feeling on the edge of the water. However, the comparison is really only true for the part of town right on the canal. After that, it becomes more of a mountain/lake town like ... read more
June 10th 2008
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 in the middle of the lake. It can apparently get to 500 meters at times. Right now, they have a huge soccer ball positioned above the fountain, assumedly in honor of the current Euro games. ... read more
June 9th 2008
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 steps on the inside that tell the city’s history. It’s also overflowing with tourists so we hurried on to see the old city. We tried the same random walk here that’s worked so well during the ... read more
June 8th 2008
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 guess Montana and/or Colorado might be similar, if I’d ever been to those States). And into the valley, which is oppressively huge and is sprinkled with houses here and there like God took a salt-and-pepper ... read more
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