I'm in Vienna now, but I thought I'd finish transcribing my earlier entry on Bolgona and Venice from my journal. Derek showed me how to change the crazy Austrian keyboard to normal at our old internet place in Salzburg (hence my last entry involving normal spelling) but I can't change it on this computer, so..... Sorry you have to read through the ys and zs. When we last left off, our heros had just arrived in Venice and had dropped their bags at their hostel.... For the afternoon we did whate we do best--wandered. Eventuall we hit a point wehre we [View Full Entry]

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I know I never finished my previous transcribing of the last entry that I started on the train, but I've just simply loved Salzburg TOO much to let it go any longer without talking about it. I've been on the internet every day since arriving here, but my time has been preoccupied with other things. I've been trying to enroll as a candidate for the UVic Senate elections so I can hopefully serve another term when I get back, but it's been a little tricky since, obviously, I'm in Europe. Luckily, my personal assitant (aka my dad) is a huge help [View Full Entry]

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So, I'm finally back to the land of reasonably priced internet (though still not cheap) and I prewrote a huge blog entry on the train today, but we've run into a snag. I'm getting used to my punctuation keys being in weird places, but now the actual LETTERS on the keyboard have been moved around! This Austrian ke<yboard has the Y and Z keys switched up, which is causing major slowdowns to my typing. AHHH it's SO annoying! Ok, I can't take this. I'm just going to type as if they're in the normal spot. I'm sure you'll be able to [View Full Entry]

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I thought I'd seen it all, until I came to Venice and found out that standard internet prices here are $12CAN per hour!!!! OK, no. That's not happening. I get 15minutes free at my hostel and that's it, so it will be a few days before you hear from me. Sorry! Plus my photos suck because it's really foggy here. Oh well. Bye for a while! [View Full Entry]

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So, yesterday Derek and I got up as early as we could manage, packed up our bags, and transferred everything to our new, wonderful hostel (Allessandro's Palace Downtown). Then we scooted off on the Metro for the Vatican. As I mentioned before, it was free that day since it was the last Sunday of the month. I expected it to be a bit busy because of this, but I was no where NEAR prepared for the crowd we were to encounter! When we got to the entrance of the museums, we encountered a line that stretched completely down the road and [View Full Entry]

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Hi there! A very happy Jess, reporting in. Unfortunately, however, these Italian keyboards are the strangest I've come across yet in my travels, and are greatly impeding my typing ability. As a result, this entry might not be as detailed as I would have liked, because I have much to tell about! I've only been in Rome for a couple of hours, but so far it's great. The buildings are ancient and incredible, but still really nice. We found Athens to be a bit run down, which we weren't expecting. Granted we were staying in a really, really bad area of [View Full Entry]

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Well, Derek and I reached a new low today. We were kicked out of a children's playground. Hey, how would we have known there are playground guards in Athens? Why can't big kids have fun on the swings, too? It was rough. This very angry security guard yelled at us "THIS PLAYGROUND IS FOR CHILDREN ONLY!" And we were kind of like, "oh, uh, sorry about that," and began to gather up our things, but he kept at it. "How old are you?" "HOW old are you??" he demanded. We were trying to ignore that question but we could tell he [View Full Entry]

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Wow, so, I'm actually in Athens. I didn't really think I would get here, at least not this early in my life, but here I am. It's really incredible to be tromping through these ancient, ancient sites with the remains of centuries of different types of civilizations at my feet. And January is definitely the best time to be here! Everything we are interested in is still open (though maybe on reduced hours) the weather is perfectly fine, and there is almost no one at the various attractions, which I assume are jam packed in the summer. The Acropolis was a [View Full Entry]

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Although I've really enjoyed my time in London, it seems like it's been full of us continually encountering obstacles and having to figure out a way to overcome them. We've been doing pretty well at coming up with solutions thus far, but it's getting a bit tiresome. First we had to find that internet cafe to book our hostel online before we could check in. Then there was the bed bug incident. Then yesterday we realized that it was becoming pretty much impossible for us to book a reasonably priced Eurostar ticket so that we could take the train from London [View Full Entry]

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It occurs to me that I devoted the majority of my last entry to greatly lavish praise for the hostel we are staying here in London. It was so clean, so reasonably priced, so full of everything we could want! I knew it was too good to be true---and it was. Last night Derek and I hit the hay pretty early after a big day at the London Science Center (more on that later). Derek appeared to be out pretty much immediately, but I stayed up for a couple hours reading about the halarious adventures of Bill Bryson in Britain. I [View Full Entry]

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