I got into Dublin at around midnight, and met up with Kenji. It was great to catch up seeing I hadn’t seen him for a couple of years. Was excellent to reminisce about uni, soccer and all the crazy stuff we used to get up to when flatting together. He is working as a field engineer at Intel in Leixlip, just out of Dublin. Leixlip is where the original Guinness factory was, apart from that it’s pretty small. He is staying at a Bed & Breakfast and was able to get me a room for 50 Euros for the week. That [View Full Entry]

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First thing in the morning we found a nearby internet café to check to see if our booking for ‘The Last Supper’ had been accepted, unfortunately we left it a bit late and didn’t get one. We went back to the hostel and I checked out because it was my last day. We bused into town, and decided to check out the Milan Duomo, (Milan’s main church), It is a fascinating building with an equally fascinating history, dating back to 1386. Check it out here if you want: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duomo_di_Milano). We spent quite some time in here, especially because it was r [View Full Entry]

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We were gonna get an early train, but couldn’t be bothered in the end so had a bit of a sleep in until checkout. Our train got delayed for some reason so we went to a café in town with Tamara. We said our goodbyes to her (Thanks heaps for everything Tamara), and made our way to Milan. Once we got into Milan we struggled a wee bit to work out where we had to go, they really haven’t labeled their underground system that well. They have signs but they are few and far between. Once we deciphered it all, we [View Full Entry]

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This day was almost an action replay as the previous. We got up, bought some more pizza and juice, but traveled to a different lake, Lake Molveno. The bus rides out to these lakes provided great scenery, there were vineyards and fields of corn everywhere. Lake Molveno was just as pretty, if not prettier, than Lake Garda, with a fantastic backdrop, plenty of skydivers, and a quaint little village. It was a bit colder than the day before so we passed on swimming but skimmed stones for probably close to an hour. Before getting a bus back we sore the greatest [View Full Entry]

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We woke up and struck up a conversation with Tamara, the girl at the reception desk. She was a local but spoke excellent English and had traveled all around NZ. She recommended that we take a trip to Lake Garda, about an hour away. We went to a local supermarket and got a couple of massive bits of pizza and some cartons of juice for a good deal and then got a bus out to the lake. It was a warm day and the water was warm so we went swimming and just lay in the sun for most of the [View Full Entry]

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We hadn’t sorted out where we were going to stay for the next night or two, we had thought about going to Verona, so tried to find something there online. We couldn’t find anything so ended up deciding on going further North to a place called Trento. A decision I am glad we made. Brendon phoned up and booked us into the hostel there. We checked out of our Venice hotel and trained to Trento, the countryside was beautiful with lakes, mountains and vineyards everywhere. Kind of felt like we were somewhere around Queenstown or Wanaka back in NZ. Once we [View Full Entry]

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The hotel we were staying at had free breakfast, so we were excited to see what we would get, unfortunately it was ham rolls! After brekkie we bused back out to Venice, we walked for miles all over the place, at one stage we were trying to get to a certain bridge, and one wrong turn took us all the way back to where we had started. It probably didn’t help that instead of a map, we were playing rock, paper, scissors to see which way we would turn. We sat in Saint Mark’s Square for a while, reading about the [View Full Entry]

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Got up early and bused to the train station. We only just got on the bus because it was packed with travelers from the hostel. We had a bit of a yarn with some Scottish lads and then caught a train to Venice. We had booked a hotel to stay in over the internet, and it proved difficult to find, firstly because the directions to get to it were a bit of a mission to decipher, and secondly because someone (Brendon) forgot to write the actual name of the hotel down. But Brendon managed to sort it out, by using the [View Full Entry]

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We woke up and had ham and cheese rolls for breakfast, boy did we eat a lot of ham and cheese rolls, in fact we had them for breakfast, lunch and tea that day. We caught a bus into town, and walked around the town, before finally finding a spot of grass for lunch. It is amazing in those cities how you can go miles and miles without seeing anything remotely green. It was with hesitation that I agreed to walk up the Asinelli tower, which is just under 100 metres high, especially because the Garisenda tower next to it is [View Full Entry]

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I left the Lakes District on the 4th and trained down to London where I stayed with Pecky (Aaron) and his wife Shannon. It was good to catch up with some familiar faces and reminisce about how crap our Avon soccer team was from the year before (we lost every game). (Thanks guys for letting me crash on your couch and for introducing me to soft shell crabs, possibly the best food I have ever eaten). Anyway, on September the 6th I left for London's Stansted airport a fair while before I was supposed to fly out. I stopped at a [View Full Entry]

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