(photos will be added when I'm back in Canada) We're in Ireland. Conor's homeland. Home also to rain and all things green. Conor's parents met us in Rosslare where our ferry docked after crossing both the English channel and the St. George channel in the Irish Sea. It's been a nice change of pace, being able to relax yet still see the country a bit with the help of Conor's parents. We've been staying in Tipperary, a cute little Irish town where Conor's parents grew up in and around. We visited the Cliffs of Moher on the west coast of Ireland [View Full Entry]

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Once we left the beauty of Cinque Terre, unfortunately, things got less pretty for us. We headed to Milano hoping to get a night train to Barcelona but being so deep into summer, the train was full. Spain is the bottleneck of Europe as there are only two ways to get in by train, one on the west coast and one on the east. If you don't get bookings early enough then you just won't get on the train and you're trip drastically changes from what you thought it could be. We got on a train to Nice so that [View Full Entry]

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Right along the Lingurian Sea lies five colourful villages set into the cliffs, they call it Cinque Terre. Our first day in Cinque Terre we decided to hike across the five villages. We started at Riomaggore (the most Northern village) and hiked along the coast, but after the temperature felt like 40 degrees we stopped at the fourth village (Vernazza) for a swim. We liked it so much that we stayed for the rest of the day, leaving Monterosso alone (the fifth). The water is crystal clear, even from the footpaths you couls see little schools of fish in the [View Full Entry]

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We arrived in Naples in the dark of night where it gave off a feel of being very creepy, sketchy and dirty. In the bright light of morning the feeling hadn't changed. Naples is a dirty city, where everything is coated with graffiti - the subways, the trains, and walls everywhere. I mean no space left to graffiti. It's a city where if you hear someone running behind you, you immediately grab your camera and wallets before they can be stolen. Turns out it's just someone out for a jog. We visited Pompeii yesterday -- the ruins of the eruption of [View Full Entry]

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We spent the day in the Vatican City, guarded by the Swiss gaurds, with its own postal service, money, laws, and population of about 800, it is the smallest country in the world. With its own power it is not subject to anyone/anything else, it can operate as it sees fit. We were determined not to take a tour because they can hold you back and you just feel silly following someone waving a colourful stick in the air. But after seeing the line-up to get into the Vatican Museums (Sistene Chapel) wrapped around the block, we succombed quite quickly. [View Full Entry]

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Picture this: the sun is setting as you walk across the Tiber River on a bridge that's been there for over 1500 years, you hear a man playing saxophone in the background hoping for some generous hands, you're feeling full with gelato, and you smell the Tiber - a potpourri of seaweed and outhouse, you see old Roman ruins everywhere you look - so common that most aren't even labelled, and best of all you're walking along with someone really special to you that can tell you the history of it all. That was our first night in Rome. That [View Full Entry]

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Ciao, We took a train from Interlaken to Milano and after having been kicked out of our seats twice because we had no reservations (it wasn't required but there was no way of knowing which seats were reserved, so we sat in the corridor for 4 hours), we finally arrived on the island of Venice. Venice itself is made up of 118 islands which are divided into 6 districts, all connected by bridges. You either walk or you take a boat to wherever you want to go. There weren't too many places that Conor and I were interested in seeing other [View Full Entry]

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From the lowlands of the Netherlands to the mountainous terrain of Switzerland: we've made enough money to continue our journey. We left Amsterdam early on the 15th toward Lille, France, where we were first able to use our Eurorail passes which Conor's sister helped us purchase from back in Toronto and sent to us in Amsterdam (you can't buy them in Europe, otherwise citizens would just get the same dicounts...yay for dual-citizenship). That day was a day of discovering how our passes worked, rushing to trains, making last minute decisions of where to go and doing this successfully. We did. [View Full Entry]

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Bonjour a tous, Our first Euro excursion took us to Paris for the weekend. Three days off of work was exchanged for three days in Paris with Parisian people doing Parisian things with their Parisian friends. It was beautiful. Andre, his friend, Conor and I left for Paris on Thursday evening and arrived around 12pm. We took a quick drive around the city; the Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower, L'Opera, and Paris streets at night. Our first morning began in a typical fashion, with the consumption of baguettes and croissants, and talk of what we would do that day. We walked [View Full Entry]

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After six months of travelling we have made it to our final Continent. Europe. Our flight from Beijing to Amsterdam had a stop over in Moscow. Our Russian flight was filled with fun times with the Russians next to us, having shots of Vodka that slithered down in an awful way for me but must have been great for the three Russians as they shared a few litres. We were also lucky enough to be the only ones travelling on to Amsterdam so our luggage was sent when it was convenient for them...the next day on the next flight to [View Full Entry]

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