bruin619
Michael McDonald/ EJ Stoike Joined: June 25th 2008
Logged in: December 19th 2009
Logged in: December 19th 2009
Travel Blog Posts
Very quickly...after rome we decided to head out to Corfu (Greece) in order to escape another extremely hot (although beautiful) Italian city. Here we hoped to be able to have a beer on the beach, not walk up any stairs, and just relax. We accomplished our goals. After taking an overnight ferry from Brindisi (italy), we arrived at the famous pink palace at around 6am, tired and beat up. We then learned that breakfast and dinner were included in the price (not to mention 1 euro beers) and we suddenly became energized. In short, this place would never exist in America!! Anyway, we are heading back to brindisi now...hope to be able to update soon but will be back in the 619 on sunday. Good times!!... read more
Catching up from the last few days...the Cinque Terre was a rousing success as we welcomed the region's laid back atmosphere as a much needed contrast from what has been a furious pace of sightseeing, day tripping, and pub crawling. On our first day we decided to take the five town (5-6 mile) walk from Rioggiamore (our town) to the northern most town of Monterosso where we hoped to find some sandy beaches and sunbathing Italian beauties. Although our guide said that the trail was meant for all ages, after about the second town we were left gasping for air from the combination of oppressive heat and alpine-like inclines. We were pissed! We carried on, however, only to find that the trail on got worse with each successive town (the views were nice though) and the ... read more
It turned out that EJ was not able to go sky diving on our last day in Switzerland due to the fact that the trips were completely booked. It was, without a doubt, the nicest day that we had there weather wise and there were parachutes opening above us all day. After leaving Gimmelwald, we headed back to our previous hostel - Balmers- in Interlaken and used all of their facilities free of charge...we then hung out for happy hour and then headed off for the train station at around 10:30pm for our overnight train to florence. Arriving in Florence (at the train station on the outskirts of town - not the main one), I thought we had just arrived in Baghdad after a night of "shock and awe" bombing...trash, beat cars, the smell of urine, ... read more
Picking up where we left off, canyoning was a lot of fun although we had to cut the day short (it was supposed to be 8 hrs total) as it was raining and the water levels were getting too high (we only got about 5hrs total). It was still pouring when we arrived back at Balmers, completely exhausted, where we had to make arrangements in order to reach our night's lodging in a town called Gimmelwald. After taking a bus, train, and a crazy ass moutain lift we arrived at "the Mountain Hostel", 4500 ft above sea leavel, at around 6pm. Surprisingly, the place was packed...mostly young people but there were some older rick steves worshippers too. Due to the fact that our views were blocked by fog we just hung out at the hostel (in ... read more
Switzerland
We arrived in Switzerland after having taken 4 trains (7 hours total) from Munich to Stuttgart, to Zurich, to Bern, to Interlaken - it was an unintentionally fun day as we boarded the two best trains we have been on yet (very luxurious) and, of course, the scenery coming into Interlaken was something like we have never experienced. We stayed at the famous Balmers hostel where we found a ton of Americans and non showering Canadiens. It was very much like summer camp as they had bbq's (12 dollar burgers...ouch!) and a very outdoors enthusiast crowd. Having been exhausted from the "step your game up" nights in Munich, I decided to keep it a little more mellow - only heading to the hostel's "Metro Bar" for a few minutes (very much like a night in TJ ... read more
Sorry I got cut off...anyway, the haufbrauhaus was even better than we expected...an oooompah band played hits all night and the halls were filled with drunken americans and japanese tourist groups (honestly, the bathrooms here smelled worse than any other that we have utilized). The next morning, we got up at around 9am to the sound of pouring rain (the area outside of the tent was complete mud) and headed out to our hostel, just around the corner from the main train station. Here we met up with our boy Rich (a ruffian university of Wisconsin grad student that we met up with in Prague who is basically on the same course as us)...we then boarded the two hour train to Fussen, a town southwest of Munich, in order to check out the famous Neuswanstein castle. ... read more
Simply stated, Munich has been awesome. Quite easily the best city that we have visited thus far! We arrived two days ago with Lionel Ritchie's "all night long" playing on my i-pod...looking back, I cannot help but laugh at the symobolism as this was about how long we stayed at the haufbrauhaus our first night!! (sadly, it closed at midnight). Anyway, after our arrival at the main station we headed out on the number 17 tram in order to find our lodging: "The Tent". Although EJ thought that we were going to sleep in the dirt, we were surprised to find that the circus tent that we would be sharing with 200 other people did in fact have wooden floors! Here we were given five blankets each to protect us from the pouring rain that pounded ... read more
Well...we visited Vienna. It was a nice city, one that we will surely visit again...when we are about 62 (as this seems to be the median age of its tourists). When we first arrived, we were concerned that a day and a half would too short of a time frame to properly see all of the cities sights...we were wrong! Our first night we ventured into the old city square to check out the St. Stephens cathedral and adjacent Hofburg palace in order to get a head start. Immediately after coming out of the subway we were rushed by Turkish men dressed as Mozart trying to get us to come see one 'his' concerts...no thanks. Having arrived at both destinations, we were at a loss as to what to do next, it was over the top ... read more
What up with it. Just arrived in the fine town of Vienna this afternoon (it is much hotter here than expected) after three hurricane days in Prague. Looking at our map on our first night, we discovered that we could take in all of the town's sights by embarking on one of the many pub crawls that were offered at our hostel. Arriving at the designated "meeting" place (here the first hour of beers are on the house!!) with a few others from our floor, we found that what we were really on was nothing less than a dude crawl (the fliers did not advertise this!). It was still fun though. Prague has been the only city that we did not set an itinerary for so we basically took a tram down across the river to ... read more
They are called doners (don-ners). They are cheap. And delicious. These miracles provided us with the greasy nutrition to power through the Berlin streets. Basically a man shaves off a mysterious cured meat (goat, etc..) into a pita and throws a sauce and some veggies on it all for about $3. Amazing. Berlin was a very interesting city, one that we liked more than we expected. EJ and I being interested in history, Berlin had a ton of sights to see even if most of the original buildings were blown up in WWII. They rebuilt a lot of them with the same burned out stones so many of the buildings were rather unsightly. The divisions between the eastern and western regions of the city are still very noticeable although there is a ton of construction in ... read more
