Munich, Paris and a Whole Lotta Bad Luck

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The bus ride from Lauterbrunnen to Munich was a big one, but at least we had two interesting stops.
The first was in Lucerne, a city in central Switzerland. We had an hour break here, which I used to wander down the river that runs through the middle of the town. I've really come to grow to like rivers since I've been in Europe, and I always seem to like a town more if it has a big, winding river running through the middle of it. On this particular river were a couple of bridges dating back to the middle ages. Walking down the wooden bridges, you could look up and see series of medieval paintings that told various stories - most of them relating to the plague or some other skeleton-causing disaster.
The second stop was in Liechtenstein - the fourth smallest country in Europe, and sixth smallest in the world. Some quick facts about Liechtenstein:
It is the only double-landlocked country in Europe (which means it's the only country where you have to travel through at least two other countries before reaching the coast).
It has more registered businesses than people (something to do with tax-evasion i think).
It is the world's largest supplier of dentures.
Before its army was decommissioned, the 50 soldiers it had were sent off to a war and managed to return with 51 soldiers (the friendly Liechtenstein soldiers befriended a solider from another army and returned home with a new recruit).
There wasn't a whole heap to do in its capital, Vaduz, but it was a nice spot to have a lunch break - looking up at the Vaduz castle - and now, I have been to 3 of the 4 smallest countries in Europe. The last one remaining, San Marino, did not completely evade me though. I did drive past the tiny little country earlier on in my trip when going from Venice to Rome.
Finally, for the third time in my trip, I arrived at Munich. Having gotten to know the city relatively well by this stage, I decided to skip doing anything touristy for the one night I was there and settled on grabbing a kebab from across the road and a couple of beers from the hostel bar - after all, nobody makes beer like the Bavarians.
In the morning it was another early rise, and I was off to Paris. That day turned out to be the start of bad things to come. I was originally only planning to spend the night in Paris before catching the bus to Valencia in Spain, spending a week on the southern Spanish coast and then flying back to London for another week or so. But when I went to book the flight I had decided on the night before (which then was 60€) I discovered it had gone up to over 200€ overnight! And because I didn't really have the time, money or patience to do two overnight buses to and from Spain, plus another one to London I had to say goodbye to my Spanish plans. Shattered as I was I decided to treat myself, and managed to score a last minute ticket to that night's Moulin Rouge. Somehow I wound up in a great seat, for a lesser price than what most paid, and bore witness to a fantastic show! The Moulin Rouge really did give new meaning to the word extravagance - it was full of flair and way over the top, but in a way that made it seem more authentic.
The next morning I got up earlier to try and secure the next bus to London. Having been to Paris before, there was not really much point in me wasting anymore precious time and money when there was still plenty of things to do in England - so I was once again shattered when I found that the next available bus wasn't for another 4 days! A little dismayed, but not completely disheartened I looked to the bright side - at least I'd have more than enough time to do the things I didn't get round to doing the first time through, Paris is a huge city after all. So over the next four days I spread out as many of the sights as I could think of. They included:
The Louvre - I never made it to the Louvre the first time round, because it just happened to be closed on the day I planned to go. Luckily this time round I had plenty of time to make sure I went and I was definetly not disappointed. The Louvre is absolutely enormous. Someone told me, and I've no idea how true this is, that if you spent one minute looking at every piece of artwork the museum has to display, you'd spend the good part of a year going through them all. It did certainly seem that way, I had to pick and choose the exhibits that I thought would interest me the most or I wouldn't have made it out by closing time. The Mona Lisa didn't live up to its hype (for me), but then again I wasn't expecting it to - I never really did see what all the fuss was about. The Venus de Milo was also a bit of a let down, but I supposed they were displaying it around some of Michelangelo's sculptures so it is a bit unfair comparing something 2000 years old with the work of Michelangelo. But overall, the seemingly limitless amount of art and the huge variety of pieces from everywhere on the globe definetly fulfilled the museum's reputation as one of the best in the world.
The Palace of Versailles - The 17th century royal palace was pretty much what I was expecting it to be - an enormous, over-adorned building full of Renaissance art (mainly portraits of the Royal family) and expensive furniture. But don't get me wrong, it was great. You could really get a feeling of the lifestyle the rich used to have back then. I spent a good few hours looking around all the rooms the palace had on display - and that was only a small portion of the palace. The highlight, though, were the palace gardens. To say they were big would be an understatement. They extended out in all directions behind the palace, and were full of manicured hedges, water fountains, pathways and a huge cross-shaped canal. I spent the rest of the day strolling through the gardens, watching people paddle little boats in the canal.
Père Lachaise - The most visited cemetery in the world. I didn't go here the first time around because I didn't like the idea of turning a cemetery into a tourist attraction, but with nothing much better to do I thought it wouldn't do any harm as long as I was respectful. The cemetery is full of people famous through history (mainly French), but there only three that I knew - Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde and Chopin. Jim Morrison's grave was a small, tucked-away, regular-looking grave and I thought that was great. It meant there was nothing to do but pay your respects (which I did by singing a rendition of "Light My Fire" in my head). Chopin's grave was a little more elaborate, and was covered in fresh flowers. Oscar Wilde's grave was by far the most lavish grave I saw all day. It was a huge, artsy-looking monument covered from top to bottom in lip-stick marks and graffiti messages. Their intentions were good, but the graffiti destroyed the feeling the think the monument was trying to get across.
The rest of the time in Paris was spent doing the usual thing I do when I'm not busy sightseeing, going for long walks through the city streets and ambling along the river. Whilst the River Seine is nothing special to look at, the things around it are, especially the great views of the Eiffel Tower.
Sunday night marked the last night I was going to spend in Europe (and though I didn't know it at the time, the last time I would sleep in a bed for the rest of my trip), so I commiserated the event by going out to dinner and ordering some Escargot. Fifteen minutes later out come 6 brown snail shells that contained 6 bright green, slimy things that I deduced were the snails. Fortunately, I worked out their bright green colour was due to the garlic butter seasoning, and not because of some grave genetic mutation. With a calamari like texture and a garlic flavour, they didn't taste as bad as they looked, although one particularly big and juicy one made me squirm a little.
By 10 o'clock Monday night I was on the bus heading to London. If I had of still had my iPod, the Clash's 'London Calling' would have been the theme song for the trip, but on account of it being stolen half way through the trip I had to settle on 'Loud, Annoying Noises' by 'The Snoring Guy Sitting Next to Me'. Because I was stuck listening to that tune for the whole bus ride, I was depending on the ferry ride for some sleep. I thought that, being the 3am ferry, I'd have no problem finding a nice, quiet corner to take a nap, but apparently I thought wrong. I was stuck with bright lights, and loud PA advertisements for the whole ferry crossing.
I got into London at 5am, and set out to find an internet cafe that would be open. Before I checked into a hostel I wanted to make sure my travel agent had secured me a flight for sometime in the next couple weeks. After two hours of searching (to no avail), I spotted a sleeping bum and couldn't get over just how appealing it looked. So I found a nearby spot and curled up to pass the next couple hours until an internet cafe opened up. (Travel tip: As far as sleeping on the streets go, the homeless are the experts. So if you find out where they spend their nights, you know you've come across the Hilton of the street-sleeping world)
Ironically, it just so happened that the next internet cafe I found turned out to be a 24-hour one! Then, to continue with the stream of bad luck I'd been having, I opened an e-mail from my travel agent to find a message I was that I did not enjoy reading in the slightest:
"Dear Ben, The only available flight between now and some outrageous date a month away is 9:35 tonight! You have two choices - starve to death in London with the little amount of money you have remaining, or cut your trip short and fly home tonight. Good luck with that one sucker!"
Okay, maybe I paraphrased a little, and really my travel agent was lovely and great help throughout my trip.
It was a tough decision, considering I didn't really have a choice - I just didn't have the money to last it, especially with London's prices. So after the initial shock, I started to realise - this was the last day of my trip! How was i going to spend it? What was I going to do? Where was I going to go? First things first, I had to get rid of my bags. I wasn't going to get much further with them on my back. Coinciding with my bad luck streak, it took two hours to complete that task. I went around to three different train stations, but I just couldn't justify parting with ₤6.50 for just a few hours of storage time. So I settled on a trick I'd figured out whenever I had to sleep outside for the night. I went into the biggest and busiest hostel I knew of in London - the Generator. The trick worked a treat - I began the check-in process, then "realised" I didn't have any cash on me and asked if I could just put my bags in their storage room while I ran down and got some cash from a machine. By the time I'd be coming back there'd be someone else behind the desk, or considering how busy the hostel is, they wouldn't remember me anyway.
After that I just couldn't decide how to spend my last day. In the end I went down to the Camden markets for a bit - unleashed a bit of currency I wouldn't have any use for after that night - and then spent the rest of the day doing the one thing I loved to do in any city - just wandering the streets blindly, heading nowhere in particular, and just watching the locals go by.
It was then off to Heathrow airport. I'd forgotten about dinner when I decided to get rid of all my GBP, but at least British Airways have good in-flight food. I had to repack my backpack and change into the most comfortable I had (this involved putting on a clean T-shirt, I pretty much lived in my cargo pants for the whole trip anyway). Of course, because the ball of bad luck had gained too much momentum rolling down Sucked-In Hill, the flight home was one big, long bad dream that started on Monday night and didn't finish until lunch time Thursday, when Dad picked me up from the airport. The bad dream included very little sleep, delay after delay, a missed connection and once again, a crying baby!
So I'm home now, (I bet you weren't expecting that when you started reading - I sure wasn't when I started writing this blog!) but it's good to be back. Plus sides:
I came back with a couple week's worth of cash instead of nothing at all, I don't have to slug it out in one of the most expensive places in the world with hardly any money, I'm back in time for the Reel Big Fish concert and there was something else... Oh yeah, friends and family and all that sort of stuff!

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Photos

Vaduz Castle
The views from up there would pretty much cover the entire country - pretty good place for a king to be!

Sacre Coeur
Just because I didn't get a photo of this church on my first trip to Paris.

Louvre's Upside-down Pyramid
The site of the holy grail, according to Dan Brown.

Eiffel Tower by night
Once every hour after sunfall the tower puts on a 10 minute light show.

Mona Lisa
Why are 200 tourists allowed to be be snapping flash photos at this thing every minute the museum is open, but there's hardly a painting in all of Italy you are allowed to photograph, flash or no flash?

Some painting
I really enjoyed this painting, the dark theme was just so different to the vast majority of paintings of angels and baby Jesus.

Sphinx
This big, bad boy was taken straight out of Egypt, along with the rest of the exhibit.

Venus de Milo
Quite a sculpture, considering it's 2000 years old.

Chateau de Versailles
The Versailles Palace from behind.

Versailles Gardens
Stretching out as far as you can see...

Jim Morrison's Grave
"James Douglas Morrison, 1949-1971, ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟΝ ΔΑΙΜΟΝΑ ΕΑΥΤΟΥ" Which I've since found out is Greek for "True to his own spirit".