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Published: October 1st 2008
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Austria!
Prize-winning Austrian cookie. 2 weeks of sorting through my photos (I took close to 4000 on the trip!), organizing them, putting together slideshows, deleting some that didn't turn out, choosing the best to be uploaded to the web, and so forth. If you want to see the best shots (and you DO want to see the best shots, I hope!), you can find them at
http://picasaweb.google.com/LPPerrott/BestOfEurope2008#. These are in high resolution, so you can happily view them full-screen instead of the small versions you've been seeing here!
As promised, I also have some random trip statistics and other fun stuff that you may or may not be interested in; but let's start with the cookies. Everyone is interested in cookies.
Despite visiting 19 different European countries, I only managed to sample cookies in 12 of them. Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Liechtenstien clearly need to make their cookies more readily available if they want to get on the official World Cookie Ranking. (Either that Or I needed to spend more than 6 minutes in Liechtenstien, but we'll ignore that for now.) For the other 12 countries, the ranking ended up looking like this:
2/10 - Slovakia
(highly skewed, since this is based on grocery-store cookies alone. Every other country's rank is based on bakery cookies.)
4/10 - Faroe Islands
6/10 - Norway
6/10 - Hungary
7/10 - Iceland
7/10 - Finland
7/10 - Germany
7.5/10 - Poland
8/10 - Italy
8/10 - Switzerland
8.9/10 - France (one of the best deals I had on cookies, but just not tasty enough to truly score a 9.)
And the winner of the official European Cookie Ranking:
9/10! - Austria! *Wild applause*
9/10 though it was, that still didn't get top prize on the official World Cookie Ranking. Dad's home made cookies scored an amazing 9.8/10! Canadian cookies are clearly unbeatable. Especially dad's.
Speaking of cookies, I started to run into a problem towards the end of the trip about what actually defines a cookie. It actually becomes quite a conundrum. I mean, if you make a cookie big enough, it's almost a small cake. Or if you add a bunch of oats and nuts and so forth, it can turn into a granola bar. Then there's the Kit-Kat problem: at what point does a wafer cookie with chocolate become a chocolate bar? It's all
very confusing. In the end I adopted a fairly loose but randomly applied definition for cookies. The winning Austrian one was very nearly a granola bar, but it was really really good, so I counted it anyways.
What else can I talk about? I guess there's always Engrish. Most of Europe seems to be pretty good compared to some of the "Engrish" signs you see from, say, Japan or China. However, there was the odd one that really caught my eye. Here's a collection of some of the better ones.
"The guide will be happy to identify the species of any rocks you might find."
(From a Norwegian brochure on guided hiking) "Please leave your values at reception"
(Sign in a Vienna hostel) "Family area with compartments for children"
(Sign on board a Swiss train) "Pickpockets! Keep your purse in the eye!"
(Sign at a Swiss train station) Makes me wonder... in your eye or their eye? Whap!
The whole trip - naturally - ended up being a hiking holiday. I hiked all or part of 38 out of 94 days! And that includes the days I flew to and from
the continent. I managed to get to the top of no less than 52 mountains and other minor summits (some were pretty wimpy indeed) in 8 different countries: 14 in Iceland, 3 in the Faroe Islands, 17 in Norway, 2 in Slovakia (one on the border with Poland), 4 in Slovenia, 4 in Italy, 3 in Austria, and 5 in Switzerland. I'm not sure what the total distance I walked in doing all that was, but my elevation gain was 44,171 metres - roughly the equal to climbing Mt. Everest from sea level 5 times.
It was also half a camping holiday and half a hostelling holiday. I'm really glad I had my tent while in Scandinavia, where I used it about 2/3s of the time. Once I got out of Norway though, the tent turned into extra weight for the most part: I used it only 6 days in the entire second half of the trip. Still, 41/94 nights spent in it made it worth it!
As previously mentioned, I visited 19 countries to some degree (20 if you count Canada, which you could when you consider I got to see a part of it I've never
seen before: the inside of Toronto's Pearson International Airport). Some of those countries I blasted straight through without stopping, and others I only visited a very small corner of, but at least I can say I've been to them now.
And... I think that's it!
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Floppers
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A Safe Return
You had an amazing experience; I am so happy for you! And I am also glad you have returned home safe and sound. After seeing the pictures of Switzerland cookies I have decided that I MUST visit that country. Yummy!