Blogs from Andorra, Europe - page 11

Andorra 2007 After a delayed flight, we missed the only bus that day from France into Andorra, causing us to hire a car and drive. Andorra is a great place for a cheap skiing holiday while in Europe. When we arrived at our apartment there was very little snow, which had us a little worried about the logistics of skiing on a mountain with little snow. Luckily that night, by pure luck it snowed, and snowed bloody heavy! We were ecstatic, we could ski......when I said "we could ski", I mean that there was snow, so technically we had the potential to ski. However for the first hour or two on the mountain, I am not sure what we were doing was actually classed as skiing. I think a better description would be falling down the ... read more

Andorra is a super small country nestled between Spain and France. We figured that we might not ever make it to Andorra in the future so why not see it now! We headed to a small ski down called Arsinal. Unlike the Spanish coast, the tourist ski season had not yet begun because there was no snow. It was just really cold! We had a hard time finding a place to eat on the first night so we had our good old sandwich in the room dinner. Of course this was accompanied by a fine bottle of wine! The next day our goal was the hike to the tallest mountain in Andorra. The trail was supposedly very close to our hotel but we were not able to read any of the signs. We saw some hikers ... read more

I hope youve been practicing your Catalan. Yes, the only country in the whole wide world where the official language is Catalan. But its OK, French, Spanish or English will get you around - no worries!! Another interesting thing is, that out of the population of around 80,000, Spanish make up 37%, Andorran 34% and French, around 15% - the Andorran population is outnumbered by the Spanish. **** Yes, nestled neatly between Spain and France - two of Europes' biggest countries- is one of Europes smallest. Many Europeans like it here because of the shopping. This is because there is no tax on alcohol, cigarettes, and most electrical goods. In fact its like a big duty-free one shop stop. Andorra La Vella (the capital city) is packed out most days as tourists drop in for ... read more

Well today we collected all our ski equipment, we put the kids in ski school and met our ski instructor to start learning to ski (or try to!) we had a lesson for around 2 hours, just learning the basics, the weather was quite warm, to be honest I was really tired, today was a very long day, and we just about made the gondola on the way back at 5pm, we was all very tired and looking forward to dinner. After and nice shower and some food we all got pissed in the bar.... read more

Due sono i motivi che spingono un forestiero a viaggiare ad Andorra: sciare o fare shopping. Io sono un cesso sugli sci e odio fare shopping. Eppure… Andorra è un Paese di dimensioni lillipuziane, 40 chilometri in tutto dal confine sud (quello con la Spagna) a quello di Pas de la Casa che la separa dalla Francia. Quest’ultimo si trova oltre i 2000 metri d’altitudine e, contrariamente a quanto accade per quello spagnolo, rappresenta una vera barriera fisica. I collegamenti da e per Andorra sono conseguentemente buoni con la Spagna ma quasi inesistenti con il vicino d’oltrepireneo. Partendo da Carcassone e non disponendo di auto privata bisognerebbe viaggiare prima fino a Tolosa, 100 chilometri a nord-ovest, per poi sperare nello sporadico servizio bus e coprire così altri 200 chilometri in direzione sud. Poco pratico. E così ... read more