Row On Row

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I'm in Portugal, and a few things have to be said before I delve into this blog:

1.Porto is beautiful.
2.I have a sunburn.
3.You can buy bottles of wine in the grocery stores for $0.89.

There is much to be said about Porto, but there is also much to be said about the past two weeks! We have been blessed with the presence of our two guest bloggers, Dennis and Alison, sharing their perspectives of Europe with you. I should fill in the gap between our entrance into Germany and where we are now.

We pick up from Berlin, where our visit was extremely educational. We learned an absolute ton about WWII and communist Germany - it was incredibly humbling to be in Berlin, a city that wrote much of the history of the 20th century. I know that Tim blogged about Berlin, so I will move us into the latter part of our Germany visit.

From Berlin, we drove to Cologne - about a 6 hour drive. It was rather cozy in the backseat, where I spent most of the car rides, and usually slept. There's just something about car rides that makes me sleepy. Cologne lies on the Rhine, and is very beautiful, although it was pretty chilly. During our time in Cologne, we went to the Birmingham City Orchestra (on tour, of course), toured a beautiful church, climbed the church tower (my dad and I did it twice to warm ourselves up) and just walked around the town. We were in Cologne because Alison has a couple of friends who live about an hour's drive from the city, and we went up and visited them one day. A major plus for Cologne was that it was the first hotel that Tim and I stayed in, and was such a treat. We were used to apartments and cooking for ourselves... it was definitely a nice excuse to go out for dinner!

Bruges was the last official stop on my family's tour through Europe. On the way there, we stopped in Brussels and showed my family the main sites - it was neat to go back to a place we had been only two weeks before. By the time we got to Bruges we were all pretty tired - the drive took an hour longer than it should have because there was a big accident in a tunnel while we were leaving Brussels - and if you have ever been to Bruges, you will know that it is a bit stressful to drive through it. The GPS kept trying to take us down one ways the wrong way. Adding to the confusion was the fact that my parent's B&B was undergoing renovations on the outside (that were supposed to have been down two weeks earlier, but that's Europe for you) and we couldn't actually tell that we had found it... but at the end of the day, we made it.

Tim, Ali and I stayed in a hostel - my very first hostel. Before we left Canada, a lot of people commented that they couldn't believe we would be traveling for four months - that it would be exhausting. It really hasn't been that way, mostly because we have been staying in places for 4-7 nights, and staying in apartments. But if we had been staying in hostels? Now that would be tiring. Don't get me wrong - our hostel was great because it was clean and had a decent breakfast, and there was a bar attached with 1 euro beer from 9-10pm, but it was loud. However, the walls were paper thin, so you could hear everything. We were in a room for 4 people, thank goodness, but I did wake up with our roommate (unwillingly) the day she got up to catch up her 6:30am train. I felt like I was back working at a summer camp, bunking with a bunch of strangers. Very fun, but not very restful.

The most educational and moving part of our trip to Bruges was our day trip into Flanders Fields. I went into the day knowing very little about WWI, and was privileged enough to be right where all of the action was. We went to two different museums (one about Passchendale specifically, and one about WWI in general with a focus on Ypres), visited preserved trenches, stopped at what looks like a pond but is actually a crater from a bomb, walked through cemeteries for the Commonwealth and German soldiers (including the site where “In Flanders Fields” was penned), and checked out a personal collection of WWI artifacts - like live hand grenades. I had never understood the cause of WWI, and I still don't think I quite get it, and was very frustrated with myself that day because I couldn't see why this war had happened in the first place. It didn't make sense; nothing flowed. In retrospect (because I am now reading an unrelated book that is opening my eyes a bit), it is likely because WWI doesn't have a very clear-cut story-line. It's hard to pin down a direct cause, since there were so many elements involved. Sometimes you just have to accept that things happen that make little sense. 'Because' doesn't always work when trying to explain history.

It's hard to explain what it's like to stand on a ridge, looking at another ridge, and imagine soldiers who didn't know what they were getting into, or why they were fighting and cold and miserable, killing each other.

Sarah

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Photos

Tim LOVES cats.
Actually, he doesn't like cats much, except when they love him. And this cat (Zoro, the cat of my parent's B&B) LOVED Tim.