A Wee Jaunt to Edinburgh, Scotland

may 30 -1 June, 2009 

Destination: Edinburgh, Scotland

Population: 500,000

Preface: Many a fun séjour has been taken before this trip on Pentecote to Edinburgh, that has not been documented in this blog, for this I give my sincerest apologies. Suffice it to say that around Paris there are many many exciting sites to see and events to take part in. 

As for Edinburgh- a little break right before finals on a 3 day weekend. Left mid-day Saturday so I had ample time to sleep in, take a little run in the Luxembourg gardens, and go to a bookstore and buy some travel reading and the latest version of the Economist before heading out to Charles de Gaulle for the flight. Once in Edinburgh, I got right on the trail of exploring. My hostel happened to be literally int he city center, at the heart of everything, and it was  anice big hostel with a huge common room/kitchen basement, tv, couches, wifi, great ambiance and very friendly staff. Everyone in Edinburgh was super friendly though. Impressions of the city overall before delving into details: 1. everyone is really friendly, 2. the city is actually not htat big at all, at least not the tourist section of it, there was the main street and a few back streets, a couple castles, lots of parks, but really it wasn't overwhelming they have no metro althought hey are installing tramways which made for lots of construction, but its a "manageably sized" tourist city if that makes any sense, nice and not too overcrowded but still bustling with activity, wide streets, ample eateries, a little culture a statue here and there. It's also one of the oldest "modern day skyscraper" cities, in the medieval time they built up instead of sideways as they were building on seven hills so the building turn out to be fourteen stories high in the old town with these closes, little alleyways with steep steps and great names, taking you from the top of the hill to the bottom. But now with the streetways that wind and descend and rise slowly on an incline it's much harder to discern where the hills stop and where they begin, you can take a close with hundreds of steps and be out of breath only to discover the next day there was a street slightly on an incline that you could have taken and avoided the hassle. Anyways, other impression is that things weren't too tooexpensive, granted you were on the pound and the conversion pound euro is pretty good right now, but living seemed to be quite reasonable. and other impression: the Scottish are way too proud of their bagpipes and kilts. Not only were there tourist trap excursions with guides in traditional dress at every corner, but even locals were out in full force for a wedding, for a parade, for the fun of it potentially? I saw a lot of kilts and heard a lot of bagpipes. 

Okay back to play by play. So I get there, I have this little map, and the first thing to do is walk down High Street, aka the Royal Mile, downwards towards Holyrood Palace the house of the Queen when she visits for one week a year. Guess what? This was the week she was there! Which meant it was closed for visitation, but still cool. It was a pretty palace with lots of grounds, built in the 15th century Mary Queen of Scots lived there, Jmes V her son completely restored it, and...I don't know it's just there, it has this new additional part called the Queens gallery built in 2001 which has artwork and a nice café and gift shop. And there's an old abbey that used to be the site's main feature. Across from it find the new Scottish Parliament built in 2004, it looks very very modern/retro using steel and metal and wood and it's not the best design in my opinion, it also cost ten times as much as previewed, but it's there and you an get a free tour now which I sadly didn't do. Also in this area is HOlyrood Park, this huge open greenery with soccer fields and running tracks and people flying kites, and just next to it are the Salisbury Crags and Arthur's Seat, this extinct volcano that is now walking trails up to Arthur's Seat, seat of Arthur and the roundtable and all the myths. So the land was a volcano, then it was frozen over  by glaciers (which went over the entire city and were over a mile high) and the Glaceires melted and formed the lochs and went into the sea and the earth is still rising in Scotland after the weight of the glaciers was removed millions of years ago! Arthur's seat was absolutely beautiful, a steep climb but the views were breathtaking you could see out to the Atlantic ocean and from the top you could see far out in to the distance of Edinburgh. It was really really windy at the top and hard to get down without falling on the gravel, me wearing sandals didn't help the matter, but it was a great sight and climb nonetheless. That accomplished, I wearily trudged back to the city center, St Gile's Cathedral right on high street, great renaissance architecture, for a ghost tour at nite. I was told I had to go on a ghost tour in Edinburgh. Granted, I might have chosen the wrong one, but we didn't talk about ghosts that much at all. We talked about life in the medieval ages and how they'd do public floggings and tortures at the  Mercat Cross (Mercat being gallic for Market) on the weekends to entertain people, how even today public elections have to be announced from the Mercat cross its inscribed in Scottish law, we talked about how people would empty their buckets of waste from the top stories of their high rise apartments and call out Gardiloo )a derivative of the french prenez garde de l'eau)  before chucking the bucket, and how all that waste flowed down into the city lake because the pavement was made from the ignatius rock of the volcano so it didn't absorb anything, and how this lake was subsequently the city's water source for most of the middle ages (problematic no?) and it was drained and is now the Princes Street Gardens (very, very well fertilized as our guide said) and from that the drinking of whisky was preferred since the water was so horrible. umm, we also covered the St Gile's cemetery (which is under a carpark now) and then we went into the underground vaults which are these chambers underneath South Bridge, initially designed to be a market but not waterproofed so it turned out too difficult to conduct business in them and they were vacated, leaving way for prostitution, gambling, and houses of ill repute to fill them , including bodysnatchers who sold corpses to the local medical school via the dark and dim proceedings/dealings under the bridge. They were then filled in completely around Napoleonic times and not excavated until the late 1900s, and now tours go through them and tell ghost stories of eerie sightings in all of the various rooms. I would have liked to know more historically about the vaults and more historical ghost stories (ours were all since 1996 when the tours started going down there) but it was interesting to get to go in the vaults and learn what little I did about them. Apparently the walls are made of mortar and rock of course but also oyster shells which were ground up and put into the walls to make them stronger. That done, I headed back to the hostel and settled in, getting very little sleep because of snoring roommates -unacceptable and intolerable! then I woke up, ran around edinburgh which was pretty fun I ran down Queen street to the National Archives and then down to Queens Street Gardens, which are these huge gardens that are private and covered in growth so you can't really see inside, then during the day I took a tour of the Highlands and the Loch Ness! again I learned one million things that I will probably soon forget about the Scots and their history and the highlands versus lowlands and the masascre of glen coe (we visited the glen) and all of the lochs in scotland and how there's only one lake (loch means lake in english) and how the queen has a summer house up in the highlands somewhere and we passed Dune castle the castle filmed in Monty Python, it has coconuts to clack with for visitors, and we saw Hamish the highland coo (cow) who as it turns out is actually a vegetarian for as huge and imposing as he seems, and the highland coos used to be black but the scots bred them to be orange in line with a change in taste, and they don't have any protective shell/skin for the winter which is why they have an extra coat of fur which makes them super-furry for warmth. And we passed Stirling castle and probably some other castles and learned about Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites who were the closest anyone came to overthrowing the king from Scotland in 1745 but he was crushed for various reasons and after that wearing a kilt, speaking gallic, all the traditional nationalist stuff was banned and there was a massive exodus of scots out of scotland and the territory is still underpopulated and in some regions, like the Isle of Skye for example, never reached the population it had in 1745. But the highlands, essentially most of northern scotland, really were pretty empty, beautiful but very little human life. Our final destination was Loch Ness, way up north, where we looked for the loch ness monster! So the loch ness monster was first recorded in 545 by Saint Columba who was in Scotland to convert everyone to Catholicism, he saw the creature and blessed it and that's recorded in the Vatican archives. Then you get various reports of the creature/species and in the 1930s the infamous photo of the dinosaur like head was published in the local newspaper, taken up in the UK paper and then seized by the international press where the idea of the monster entered into the universal imagination. Monster is an inapropriate title because the creature has never actually been recorded as having harmed or threatened anyone or anything. So the loch ness is one of the biggest lochs, 24 miles long with 3 trillion cubic tons of water which is more than all of the water in the UK and it's big enough to fit the world population three times over in it, which means its huge, also the bottom 30 meteres are covered in mud and the visibility is so poor most research teams can't get any work done, meaning the creature remains a mystery. There was a boat tour on the loch and it has sonar on it that has recorded over 700 sightings of objects over 6 meters in the last 17 years, although they can't tell if they're living of dead like tree trunks so it's not really a form of proof, just more speculation.  So the tradition and the beliefs continue. One of the locals just got his degree from MIT and he claims to have proof that the monster exists but he says he won't publish it because he doesn't want loch ness to be invaded by scientists and to take away the mystery (from all of my lore and movie watching I thought this already happened but I guess not?) So we were there only for an hour and ahalf, not long enough to see the monster unfortunately, but I know she's out there. And then we came back and stopped in Dunkeld to see one of the earliest cathedrals built in Scotland in this little prairie next to a beautiful river known for salmon fishing in this quiet little town of Dunkeld, and returned home by nightfall. Tired, I just walked around a little, saw parts of the New Town and walked into the Old Calotn Burial ground where David Hume is and theres this huge obelisk and a turret which I htink is now part of the governor's house just next door, but on the skyline they are pretty noticeable and then I get to the cemetery and there was no one there and it looked pretty unkept. Also went to St Andrew;s square which is this little park with the lawn covered in people during the day. Tried Scottish tablets, candy essentially mde of butter, milk, and sugar, and not good at all, and Cadbury chocolate, a must anytime you go to the UK, and stayed away from cornish pasties which were their version of fastfood and haggis, because I know that I wouldn't like that at all. And anytime I leave paris I automatically miss baguettes and cheese, so of course for lunch the next day I found a baguette place and got a sandwich, yum. I already know that will be a hard adjustment come August. 

Oh also this weekend happened to be the weekend of the Edinburgh marathon, so the next day I saw tons of people with their white shirts from the marathon and heard everyone talking about their times on the bus to the airport and in the common room of the hostel. But anyways, last day in Edinburgh-start off early go to Calton Hill where they have various monuments not really well arranged around the hill and a walking path that was made to access the newly built penitentiary built into the hill back in the 1800s, no longer in operation. The National Monument in the shape of the Parthenon is up there the columns are standing tall, except they ran out of money to finish it so it's really only some columns in the front and a few on either side with an open back. The monument oddly enough is to the soldiers who fought in the Napoleonic Wars, interesting choice for the grand national monument. Oh sidenote one cool thing on the tour from yesterday, we passed this tiny tiny cemetery in the middle of nowhere lowlands and President Eisenhower's relatives were buried there, apparently his mother's ancestry descends from the Scottish lowlands. And also we talked about the movie bravehaert and its historical faux pas, and I guess the lowlanders didn't wear kilts back then it was just a highlander thing and the guy who is named Braveheart, the king in the movie, in real life was just a solider with a cool nickname. And they didn't paint their faces that was the ancient ancestors the Pecs (who disappeared with no traces and no good reason for disappearance back in the day). Okay but final day in Edinburgh, see Calton Hill, pack up my stuff, walk down to Grassmarket and Westport where there were lots of bars and restaurants, its the cheap going out district at night, walked up George IV bridge where I saw the Elephant House, a pub known for hosting JK Rowling as she wrote harry Potter on napkins and looked out the back window towards Edinburgh Castle, and I walked up to the castle which is on top of a big hill and had lots of different parts, the 1 o clock cannon which fires everyday at 1 and used to be used to tell shippers when it was high noon, the crown jewels are there, there are the dungeons and the apartments of the royalty and all that jazz. Also did a little shopping in the Princes Mall whcih was half empty but the stores they did have were cute. And with plenty of time to spare I headed to the airport and came back to paris, only to find news reporters from everyinternational channel you can think of in the airport filming themselves on tripod cameras reporting the disappearance of an AirFrance flight from Rio to paris last nite which, as I write this, still hasn't been found and is the largest crash in AirFrance's 75 year history.  Very horrible. As for Edinburgh, however, I loved it, the town and the surroundings and everything, a great little sojourn into Scotland.

Day trips around Paris

When the coming and going in Paris becomes too chaotic, what better way to relax and return to the natural beauty that is the French countryside than a few day trips to the towns around Paris? All of these were taken at various times in the past couple weeks (had to wait until the flowers were in bloom!)

1. Chartres.  The little medieval town of Chartres reminded me a lot of the south of France and Aix, minus the fountains. A very small downtown area with cute little stores, amazing boulangeries, a couple larger squares with cafés, Roman obelisques, flower beds planted here and there to add to the charm. Situated on a hill, you could walk down these uneven steps past the famous cathedral and get to another part of town off the beaten path with a little man made canal and cute houses built in the style of those of Alsace-Lorraine (with the wooden beams intersecting on the outside of the molding/paint) that had the appearance of emerging right up from the water. The main reason to come to Chartres is to see the cathedral, the cornerstone of town literally, connecting the two sides, and symbolically. The one standing today has parts of its original that was built in 1067 (that's really really old even for a cathedral) and it is known because it has the most stained glass windows of any cathedral in the world with 176 panels. Of these, there are a few originals that were put up in the 1200s, the three large windows above the entrance and one gorgeous upright window of the Virgin Mary where she is shown wrapped in a brilliant blue colored cloth. Most of the windows were restored in the 18th century but they were all beautiful to look at. The cathedral is a UNESCO world heritage site (one of the originals, inscribed in 1979) and it is where King Henry IV was crowned king in 1594. It is one of the first cathedrals in all of Europe to use the gothic architectural style. Originally built in the Roman style, a fire in the 1300s brought the possibility (and need) for renovation, which came in the form of flying buttresses, Gothic style arches (ogival) rounded that come to a point at the top, and more ornate supporting columns and detail work. Chartres cathedral then became a model for all cathedral builders in France and England. The other interesting part of the cathedral that was new to me was the presence of this "labyrinth" in the middle of the central nave. by labyrinth, I mean there was a design made on the floor that resembled concentric circles with various paths and connecting lines, and in the middle there was a large circular plaque that used to have names inscribed on it. Apparently labyrinths such as these were common features in the Medieval period cathedrals, this one was started in1200, and it is meant to be a spiritual journey and a state of mind that you put yourself in while walking around the cathedral, finding yourself closer and closer to God and Jesus if you are on the right path. Right, so anyways, it was a huge cathedral and very nice, since it was one of the first to transition from Roman to Gothic style there was not a whole lot of light coming in which made it hard to see the beauty of some of the windows, but it definitely gave the feeling of going back in time.  That was the higlight of Chartres. Oh also, the many day trips also made me realize how many train stations Paris has, as literally each trip left from a different station. On the way to Chatres we passed these fields and fields of little yellow flowers that stretched on for  miles, and the yellow was this beautiful electric yellow with the flower bulb hovering a foot or two off the ground but there was enough color and we were going fast enought o give the illusion of a field of yellow, like yellow grass or something. In french they're called corzas, I dont' know the translation. A nice addition to the trip nonetheless.

2. Giverny: last weekend we went to Giverny, to the Northeast of Paris, the home of Claude Monet and his famous waterlily pond. Again the town was nice, this time it was not really even a town just a street really with very very few inhabitants, no stores, the one café with homemade ice cream and one hotel. We walked along the main road (Rue Monet wouldn't you know) and found the one church and the one cemetery with his family tomb, we also apssed this house with these giant sand sculpture statues, one of a viking ship and the other of the last supper which were very cool and very randomly in the middle of this tiny town. They don't disintegrate in the rain or any weather condition and they were pretty impressively detailed. Next to this house there were some public gardens which were beautiful, the flowers had just come into bloom and whatever landscaper designed the layout of having big tulips surrrounded by the little white bulbs , varying the height and size and colors of the flowers to make it really interesting, did a great job. We finally made it to Monet's house and after starting in the gift shop (the tour direction makes you), we entered his private gardens which were even better. There were rows and rows of flowers and each bed had two main colors, two shades of pink or purple or red or yellow, and there was greenery framing each bed and basically it all looked perfect, right out of a catalogue. We walked along, entered his two story house which was pretty nice and looked right out onto the gardens, I remember it had this giant traditional kitchen with copper pots and pans hanging along the wall, including a special crepe pan, and a big wooden table with a huge slab of thick wood. We had to take an underground passage to get to the Japanese garden and the waterlilies, which was like entering another world when you stepped into that part of the garden. Bamboo shoots were everywhere and weeping willows over the banks of the this lake, with a little canal on the side, and the waterlilies I think must not have been in season yet because they were a surprisingly awful purply color, they looked dead to be honest, but apart from that the ambiance was great, we saw the famous little bridge and took lots of pictures, and there were some giant buses of bight pink flowers and white flowers that caught our eyes (excuse my lack of technicality as I have no idea what the proper names of any of these flowers were).  And that was basically Giverny. Very very beautiful and very very small, also the train dropped us off at Vernon which is 4 km away so we took a bus to Giverny although you could have rented bikes and ridden along the pretty hillsides which I would have liked to have done. 

3. Chantilly: Chantilly is another little town, it's bigger in the sense that it has more residents than Giverny by far, maybe equal to that of Chartres not sure, but it's much more spread out, no tiny little winding streets. It has a large forested area that was nice to walk in and a fairly large canal with ducks and coots (those black ducks with white beaks, not found in North America), on the edge of the city. But the actual reason to come to Chantilly is to see the castle! There's the giant castle built for a duke I guess, and it is surrounded by lots of acres that were used for the horses, now it has a horse racing track and these magnificent stables that look like they could be a chateau themselves, really they were amazing stables. The castle itself was beautiful, there was a lake (not a moat) running around the front and you crossed a bridge to go through the Gates of Honor, and up the path to see the chateau on the left hand side and on the right the hunting lodge and to your immediate center the main part fo the French gardens wiht a big pond and statues and sculpted bushes and all that jazz. Problem was, they are mid-renovation of the gardens, by mid I mean they have a long long way to go and they wont' be finished until October! Which means when we went all of the statues in the middle garden were covered in trash bags, and there was that orange tape up everywhere roping things off and none of the fountains had water in them, so it was kind of a let down, although we liked the castle itself very very much. The pond in the front had these weird amorphous fish that were really scary, they kind of slithered around the water and I thought they were eels, and the tops of their backs came just a tad about water level so the way the light reflected their scales they just looked creepy and they didnt really move like fish normally do, and they were pretty big. Just a tangent. As for the gardens, in the center there were the French gardens, to the left the English gardens, and to the right a big Park (ironically called the Little Park) with pathways and random statues inside, we did see two huge bucks which was cool and which gave credibility to the signs saying 'Beware of wild animals, they can kill'. Oh there was also a hameau (hamlet) basically a mini mini mini village of two or three houses and a little manmade stream running through , with a little water mill and all that was the inspiration for Marie Antoinette's hamlet at Versailles. In the back of the park was this big body of water called La Cascade, the waterfall or, cascade, but it turned out just to be a big lake which again was sadly disappointing. The redeeming part of this park was the kangaroos that we saw in the menagerie near the sport field (also a random addition). But there were 20 wallabies enclosed in these chicken wire fences that were so cool to look at! They didn't really hop, they looked more like dogs with big fat mouse tails who moved like monkeys if that gives any sort of visual picture, and they were prety small and a dark brown color not a tan color like I might have guessed, but still definitely cool. That was pretty much Chantilly. It is also the town were Chantilly creme (whipped cream essentially) was invented, but it wasn't hawked as a local treasure to the extent that  I would have expected, I mean we walked around the town a little and didn't see any souvenir stores or signs for Chantilly cream, so unfortunately we didn't get to try the real thing straight from the source. Oh well. 

4. I think I already talked about Vaux le Vicomte? The castle built by Nicolas Fouquet, inspiration for Versailles, reuntied Le Notre, Le Brun and Le Vau, the three greatest architects/sculpteurs/landscapers of the time, and Fouquet was then sentenced to death for some thing having to do with his funds but really to put him and his influence out of the way. That was thefirst day trip. Now all that's left on the list is Normandy beaches and Fontainebleau, two of the more well known day trips. 

Final stop: Stockholm

Stockholm! A huge huge huge city with lots of big islands ontop of that. Stockholm was nice, stil cold, but very sunny and the bay areas were all very pretty, there just was not a whole lot of cultural history to see apart from the Nordic Museum which showed how people of Sweden and Scandinavia lived throughout the centuries which I did not go to. They did have their own Tivoli Gardens, the sign even called it that although it's proper name is Grona Land, that opens in a week. On Djurgarden there were lots of walking paths and museums, Skansen, which is like a zoo and botanical garden all in one, and the Old Town was on its own little island (Gamla Stan) with little souvenir shops, lots of ice cream stands (remember though, it's like 0 degrees celsius), and the Royal palace and Rikdagshuset, which I think was thte parliament building but not too sure. In any case none of the brochures had walking tours to do so I didn't end up learning very much about what I was seeing, and even though I enjoyed the city it didn't really offer that many exciting options for travelers I thought. I did go to the Icebar, which I know find out is in every major city includign Paris so it's not that special, but that was a cool concept, you put on moon suits these grey things to stay warm and can only be inside for 45 minutes. I did learn, though, that the famous IceHotels are up in Sweden's northern parts, and they melt around the end of April and flow into the rivers and they are rebuilt each year. You can also see the Northern Lights from the north of sweden, not, however, from Stockholm. Anyways, there weren't as many green areas as in some of the other major European cities (on the main island), they had one nice park right on the end of the water Kungstradgarden, with some fountains and again mroe ice cream shops, but the rest of the downtown area was again huge glass hotels and conference centers, and lots and lots of shopping malls. The Swedes know how to shop, in Paris we don't have such malls even! So basically I walked around a lot and tried to stay warm. The guy at the coffee shop was interestingly enough from Seattle and he moved there after he married a Swedish girl on study abroad. So not a whole lot else to comment on in Sweden-yes there were a lot of blonds, no, I didn't particularly notice any amazing cleaniless that's absent in other cities, and I tried to find Swedish pancakes around but I think you had to go to a nice restaurant to find them, in any case they weren't sold as specialties everywhere, althoguh oddly enough there were little hotdog stands EVERYWHERE and they wre called French Hot Dogs, which is odd because the french themselves never eat hot dogs. So after a few days exploring Stockholm I boarded a flight way too early on Sunday morning and made it back to Paris, and I am really glad to be back! 

Warming up to Oslo.

Destination: Oslo, Norway and the fjords.

Next stop on the journey through Scandinavia was Oslo. I passed through Goethenburg/Göteburg, Sweden on the way and was pleasantly surprised to se a bustling metropolis there, with an excellent shopping mall right next to the train station, and a kroner that went much further than the danish one. Sadly, this was not the case in Oslo. I arrived in Oslo late at night so I got some quality sleep and then started off a fresh new day in the frigid cold of Norway. Norway, so I learned, is a fairly new nation. It got its independence in 1905 from Sweden, before that it was under the rule of Denmark although it had a form of governmental administration of its own, for a major part of the 1600 and1700s only 3% of the land was cultivated so it was actually impossible for the territory to exist on its own footing without funding and supplies coming from an outside source, hence its subjugation over the years. I really was not impressed at all by Oslo, it did not have any cool architecture or sculptures, it was on a sea/body of water but again the landscaping or use of the intersection between water and earth was not very aestheticall pleasing, nor were there giant ships even that might be cool just to see the shipping industry in progress. compared to other European cities it differed in that it seemed much more of a skyscarper city, comparable to cities in the United States. There were lots of big conference centers, 20 to 30 stories, with glass windows like you'd see in Chicago even, just not arranged in a grid layout and by far not as imposing or numerous. Even their old fortress, Akerhus, typically European and built into the cliff, did not stand up to any other fortresses I've seen around. From there I walked along the pier, saw the Nobel Peace center and the city hall (which was a square brick building with an ugly metal design attached to one side like a lapel pin), down to Aker Byrgge which is a big shopping area on the pier, then up to Oslo university and Slottet the Royal Palace and the park around the palace-again unfurnished  or really planned out in any way. Along the way in one of the squares I saw a bunch of people protesting against Sri Lankan war crimes which was interesting, it seemed to be an Indian population and they were by all means peaceful- unlike in France where every protest is accompanied by police here there was no authority surveillance. I continued the walk through a residential area to Vigeland sculpture park, which was probably the bset part of Oslo. It's not really a sculpture park because the main portions of the park are just grass and trees, but the middle walkway had a bridge of sculpture figures and a fountain with large sculptures in the center and then a big tower designed by the same artist (Vigeland), and his work was great. Most of it was just human figures, lifesize, made out of either bronze or marble (I think), unclothed, and in varying positions of life. The first figures on the bridge were babies and they grew to children and became old men and women by the end, but the positions that Vigeland sculpted were very real and personable, expressing key human emotions and natural beauty. So that was good. I also went over to the other side of the bay where there's a lot of museums in this hilly and wooded part of Oslo, there's the Kon-Tiki museum (kon-tiki was the boat used in the 1950s by an explorer from Norway who tried to prove that the Polynesian islands may have been settled by people coming from the east, specifically Peru, rather than from Euro-Asian peoples as the main theory says. He used only technology they would have had back in the day and successfully landed in the Polynesian islands, but most anthropologists still consider his theory to be fluff and highly unprobable. There was also the Fram museum, displaying Norways strongest viking hsip that has sailed farthest North and South in the world, and the Norwegian maritime museum, again centered around Norwegian naval feats. While all of this was interesting, it was really not my favorite types of things to learn about. I would have liked to go to the Edward Munch art museum (he painted the scream) but unfortunately I did not make it there. The next day I did the "Norway in a Nutshell" tour that the country so heavily advertises to see the real beauty of the fjords. A long, long 24 day but very worthwhile! We took a train to Myrdal and then another line, the steepest tracks in Europe, through the fjords down to Flam, where we boarded a riverboat fjord cruise and went through the fjords to Gudvungen, then took a bus to Voss and then a train to Bergen, a city in the west of Norway, and took an overnite train back to Oslo. The fjords were definitely amazing, very pristine, clear air, there were thinwaterfalls trickling down everywhere and we stopped at one that was a 500 foot freefall and the sound of the water hitting the rocks was deafening as it was the only sound around, apart from the squawking of gulls that followed our cruise. On the way to the fjords we went through snow white outs and a lot of people on the trains were going skiing. Along the fjords there were places where you could not even see the sky, except directly above you,  but it felt like you were in the middle of a giant container trapped on all sides by water, air, and the steep steep cliffs. Then on some flatter parts of the fjords there were tiny villages with maybe seven or eight houses, the tour tape always pointed out the churches that were built in the 1200s and 1300s, and one of the towns had no direct road access and had its own school until the 1970s, completely self sufficient. Bergen, the final town we went to, was also very very pretty a lot like little resort towns anywhere, cobblestone streets and little shops on a winding path and a giant green park with lots of runners in the middle, quaint but at the same time a moderately sized village, I would have liked to spend more time there but was unable to. So that was basically Norway-excellent nature, not so excellent cities. On to Sweden!

Copenhagen, Denmark. The Oldest Monarchy.

My first real trip away from Paris this semester! 

Classes on Fridays and real research homework makes it difficult to travel this semester, plus everything's more expensive going out of Paris, but for spring break I'm off to Scandinavia! And since these posts take me forever and a day to write I will try to be quick about it. I start with Copenhagen, Denmark, the world's oldest monarchy (Kingship from 904 still exists today). Honestly, I was not a huge fan of Copenhagen, except for two parts: Nyhavn and Tivoli. But in chronological order, I got there early one day, found my hostel, and started by leaving the city to take the train to Helsingor up north and see Elsinore castle, the setting of Hamlet! Built in the 1500s its a classic example of Renaissance architecture. Having seen vaux le vicomte the day before I was not very very impressed, but I will say that the setting is superb-it sits right on the coast with waves splashing up to the breakers, fishermen trying their luck and a great view across to Sweden with all of the boats and ferries churning up the water in front. In the casemates of the castle is a statue of this guy whose name escapes me, but legend has it that he will rise up and defend Denmark should her sovereignty ever be threatened. The castle has lots of land around it- amoat and then these grassy banks that put it in the hole so its shielded by these manmade hills-like most fortresses I suppose, but nowadays they even have a picnic area and there's lots of families that come to sit on the rocks and watch the waves go by or show their kids around. From there I passed up Copenhagen and went southeast to Mälmo, Sweden, just 35 minutes from Copenhagen by train and over a giant bridge. They advertise Malmo as a must see when visiting Copenhagen but I really didn't see anything amazing there- they have a fairly ugle red castle/fortress in a not well laid out park, a city center with cafés in the likes of parisian cafés, and this new industrial area that's supposedly known for its architecture but it seemed like a lot of construciton to me. Anyways, then back to Copenhagen. Walking tour of this "chic hip" area that did not live up to its name. Next day: walking tour of the sites of Copenhagen: saw city hall, Stroget the  main shopping street, the courthouse, the old medieval city limits and the "museum district", the royal library, amalienborg palace the palace of the queen and the changing of the guards (which took forever and involved a lot of standing around), Kongens Nytorv square with the theatre and lots of mansions around it, the royal playhouse built right on the pier, this old fortress/park in the north with the Little Mermaid statue (whose sister is in Warsaw and who I saw there!) , the King's Garden with the King's palace, the Round Tower-oldest astronomical center in Europe dating from the 1600s, the university district and Latin Quarter. Around the train station there's this big movie theater that's bright pink and stands out a lot it's very retro-ey cool, art deco but at the same time it looks like it could be in Florida, and there are 7-11's everywhere!! They've taken over Scandinavia it seems. But there were also a lot of swans and ducks in all the lakes that were just floating around, and a fair amount of bikers, and it was beautiful and sunny all the time. Prices in Scandinavia in general are outrageous, everything's super expensive, and I can't really tell you what Danish food is because I didn't see any places that advertised selling danish food that weren't fivestar suit and tie sitdown restaurants, which is not on my itinerary. A lot of the museums are free and I visited the National Museum which was nice, it had an interesting exhibit on Egyptian amulets and Danish history from 1660 in which I learned that Denmark's king used to be elected by its parliament but after the wars with Sweden in which Denmark lost Scania (the lower portion of Sweden) and lost Norway as a territory, the government voted to reform and make the king hereditary and give him all the power and he wrote up the new constitution-talk about a step in the wrong direction? But it worked for them I guess. I also visited Christiania Free Town, this hippie commune with graffiti everywhere, weed, Tibetan prayer flags hung everywhere, and general chaos. It just looked like a rundown area/shantytown a lot of it, with unfinished huts and sheet metal for roofs, overgrowth, generally not well laid out property, stray animals running around. When you left the main entrance the sign said "Now entering the EU".  But my favorite parts of Copenhagen and why I would return were: 1. Nyhavn, this main canal with lots of old wooden boats stationed there and their masteres cleaning them up and just shooting the breeze with each other, and these colorful rowhouses with little bars and outdoor eateries (expensive, but fresh seafood and candles and little colorful lights to enchant the visitors) which generally made it a nice, upbeat atmosphere, and 2. TIVOLI! Tivoli is this really old amusement park and gardens that opened in 1843 I want to say, the entrance was built in 1890 and it inspired Walt Disney and it's the third most visited amusement park in Europe (I guess thats not saying much, but anyways) and it just opened April 8th so by luck I got to go and it was amazing! First off, most everyone there was native Danish, so it was cool to see the little kids run about and the elderly women being pushed in wheelchairs, I could imagine them reminiscing over the rides they went on there when they were kids. It's right in the center of the city and jam packed with things to do-and it's not commercialized like Disney but it reminds me of old time classic amusement parks-it had a pirate boat restaurant and Chinatown and Egyptian hieroglyphic trash cans and this Arabic/Middle Eastern land and then the gardens and a lake right in the middle of it all with boats and fish and ducks and flowers everywhere, this giant white palace like the Taj Mahal in the center and a Chinese theater stage and all of the games were really unique and colorful and super cute, it was really just one of a kind and lovely. I think the rides were generally aimed towards a younger crowd than the likes of those who frequent our six flags for example, but still I'd go at any age just to marvel at everything there and sit in the gardens with ice cream (oh yeah, everyone here likes ice cream a lot). So that was Copenhagen. One more thing, everyone says Scandinavia is really clean, I guess its supposed to be related to it being a modern day socialist based country and having the state take care of everything. My view: yes, its clean, but not so clean that its miles above other countries. First off it was not nearly as crowded as a city like Paris or Chicago say, second off there were "dirty" parts just like anywhere else, basically, I wouldn't say one of its feature characteristics is cleanliness. Next stop: Norway. 

What Happened to Paris?

Yes, yes, we're all asking what I've been up to for the past....4 months I guess it has been. Well, short answer, I've been having a real settled life in Paris. As I mentioned earlier that these posts are for me, I can assure  myself that I've not forgotten the exciting events that have passed, I do indeed have another journal-esque creation that I keep apart from this blog, in private, but we may as well say a few words about life in Paris. Unlike Aix, life is not as wild and crazy and sleepless as the south of France proved to be. In Paris I go to school at Sciences Po, one of the top liberal arts universities of France (although the term liberal arts doesn't exist here), which means I actually have real work to do that takes up time and takes up ridiculous amounts of patience in the awful library trying to find resources and not get suspensions on my card for returning books late....but I'll save the complaining for another time. Suffice it to say that I will never take a real library for granted again. But so, Paris has classes, a lot of homework, long rides on the metro, and I live with a family, a woman and her 15 year old daughter in the 15th and we eat dinner together every evening. On top of this I busy myself with learning german on saturday mornings at Cité Universitaire, going to the Club Med gym around the corner everyday, going to yoga class in french, and exploring Paris! It's an awesome city once you get used to life here and get to know your way around- I end up spending a lot of time in the 6th and 7th arrondissements where my school is, and the 15th where I live. What gets me are the little, quirky things: the 50 centime used books that you can rifle through in front of Gibert Jeune or the other giant booksellers across from the Cluny medieval museum or the St Michel fountain, the little hut in Jardins du Luxembourg that sells the most colorful candy you've ever seen, bottles of cider, and cups of hot coffee, the band of ten native americans playing their wooden flutes and drums in the metro and singing at the top of their lungs, looking more like they're in concert than really asking for money, the millions of Jean ValJean's that get on the metro car and rationally, calmly tell their story of living on 37 euros a month and needing just a few centimes for bread until their cases get through social security, pulling at the heartstrings and adding how they know we're all good people with hearts who would help a friend in need. I can tell you the exact time the metro starts and stops everyday of the week- miss the metro once when you're way far from your house and you won't miss it again, and I can tell you where to transfer from the red to the yellow line and that the 14 is my least favorite line because it's so far underground that all of the stops have this fishy, sulfury smell that everyone turns their head from left to right to see if it's just them who has noticed. You can go to a different café or brasserie everyday for months and never hit them all, and they all have different specialties- from the places that give you the cream and the coffee or chocolate base in two separate cups and let you mix them together in your personally desired proportions to the places with diablo menthe (lemonade and mint syrup) to the places with the best chocolate cake ever invented. The little café right across from school, for example, is reasonably priced and reminds me of a 1950s american soda shop, the glasses they give you are just like you order milkshakes in back home, with the long spoon included. Apart from this there's the millions of bakeries with pastries and bread that seriously beat anything you've ever had-hands down, LaDurée's macarons in all of the colors of the rainbow, and the little crepe stands right as you come off the metro that fill the air with smells of nutella and lemon and sugary delight. And after living there for a month, I went from exploring all of the known monuments to the lesser known museums to the little spots that are in the back of the guidebooks, the parks and the cemeteries and the winding streets behind Montmartre and Montparnasse. We've been to concerts and dance parties and eclectic bars and soccer matchs at Stade de France and old black and white films in the little hole in the wall theaters of the Latin Quater and had fondue parties and bought skinny jeans in the vintage shops and flea markets and had espressos where Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises and picnics in front of the Medici fountain in Jardins du Luxeumbourg under the sunshine. Sometimes you arrive at the metro only to find a sign that the stations in the area are on strike but no worries, it will be over in a few hours and it will still make front page headlines-strike showed breakthroughs, how about another one same time next week? Students and the Sorbonne created a new sorbonne 14 (there are 13 of them really) and held classes in the metro to protest rising costs of school, professors gave lectures in one of the main squares so everyone could learn, Sorbonne students literally took over my school and hung banners from the second floor and threatened school property-it's as close to 1968 as this generation will arguably ever come. I've tried the French school of philosophy and attended a philosopher's night at the café that all the greats sat around at, and for only 5 euros I got to hear that "erotic imperatives' are still a hot topic for minds above the age of 25, in France just as well as in America. I've rode the metro far and long enough to know that even at 5:50 am, only twenty minutes after service starts, every French woman who hops on will still be fully make-uped, dark thick eyeliner and all, sporting three inch heels, black tights, a chunky sweater over at least two other black, white , or grey underlayers, and have the hair "done" in that messy chic way that boggles the minds- is it from the wind or is it set in place like that? And that rule from middle school- don't stare at the french guys because three seconds eye-to-eye and he'll think you're down for a night in his bed, has no truth to it even if you wish it did, and you would wish it if you saw the crazy amount of well put together and well dressed men walking around the streets of Paris. Speaking of which, PDA is even worse in the city of love than it was in the south of France. Hmm, what else? It's hard to sum up such a long period of time. That's pretty much it-I have a "tandem" partner and we meet up for coffee every Friday to speak in French/English and share stories of our respective lives, I have a list of day trips from Paris that I've started to tackle- first up was Vaux-le-Vicomte castle, masterpiece of Le vau, Le Brun, and Le Nôtre, and it was gorgeous, next on the list is Chartres where the veil that Mary swaddled baby Jesus in is held and glorified to this day (its still on the the most visited pilgrammage cities), the metro is still the best place to know "what's going on" with all the advertisements that change nearly everyday, I'll never ever be sick of crepes, I'm currently obsessed with Sucre-Citron, we went to a bar that served us drinks in baby bottles which was so weird that it was cool, we still get to rock out to 70s American tunes in the grocery stores and see the newest art collections for free on special days, learn from experts in their fields-journalists, ministers of state, members of the Assemblée Nationale, and say s'il vous plaît and merci hundreds of times of day. There's always exploring to do in Paris, and it's always a good time.

Strasbourg/Alsace Lorraine, France

Strasbourg, France

Region: Alsace-Lorraine

Population: 272,000

Just to confirm, Strasbourg IS part of France. Yes, it may have changed hands four times in a mere fifty years (the first half of the twentieth century) between France and Germany, never best friends on the world  map, but since WWII it has been a proud member of the Alsace-Lorraine region of France and its population has profited or suffered, as you see it, from the hand of French leadership. 

So I'm here for a few days, just passing through really and killing time before I get settled in Paris. Weather: cold, rather dreary, subpar. Strasbourg itself is really nice, very "cute" would be the best word to describe it, with the houses with wooden beams reinforcing the structures and sort of the entire top half of the house jutting out like a bay window, all painted in pretty pastel colors. There's two rivers bordering the main little island of the city center Strasbourg that form a look similar to the canals of Amsterdam, I saw a bateau-mouche today giving tours along the L'Ill. There's a little region called La Petite France right near the train station, which itself is a great modern creation of glass curved in an almost spherical shape, like a map of the world made into a ball (the maps that stretch the world into a more oval shape). I'm staying a few kilometers outside the city near a park great for running and in a region that seems mostly populated by people of Arab descent. Coincedentally there a tons and tons of Doner Kebab and Halal places like in Germany, but we are right on the border. My final leg of the train journey went from Offenburg, in Germany, to Strasbourg, took all of twenty minutes like any streetcar ride and didn't require any passport check. I did see Polizei and Police marching the platforms together at one point, good Franco-German cooperation at work. So in Strasbourg I walked around a lot just to see the city, of course there's a giant cathedral (very very well and ornately decorated with saints around the front archways and the steeple is built either in a strange fashion or with a strange material, it has the appearance of being very transitory and airy. Passed the main square, Kleber Square, not too pretty as far as main squares are concerned but it has a FNAC and Galerie Lafayette and nice little boulangerie-patisseries, the whole town has lots of bookshops (although after being in Germany I realize that I hate the setup of French bookstores, they have no "bestseller" or "new" section where you can easily find free reads) They still have pretzels here but also baguettes, so its a mix of both worlds, they have these little mold cakes called Kaughelhopfs or something with powder sugar that are popular but they really are just like bread with raisins inside, not sweet enough for my sweet tooth. And also prices, like in all of France apparently, are up again. Alas to be back in Germany. Anyways, I continued on the tour to Gutenberg Place, where they had litlte second hand booksellers with their tents and tables, a little statue of Gutenberg, and then moved on up the town to the university, which takes up a lot of space. There was a big sign out front of the main building saying the school's slogan (It's unique) with an addition (...and on strike!). Back to France. I wonder how long they've been on strike. Saw lots of swans in the river which were pretty but then saw a few grazing on the grass right near  me and rememberd how mean swans really are, the town is known for cigognes (storks) and at all the little souvenir shops they sold the little stuffed animals. Saw the old Jewish quarter, didn't really know they had all that many Jews before but I guess they did and the  main temple was burned down in Kristillnacht, there's a little memorial bench on the spot and a new  main temple that looks more like a giant stone building than a house of worship, except for the wall of golden jewish stars standing out on Avenue de la Paix. Walked up the avenue to bordeaux place, where there was just a big tram stop and not much to see, and walked back. Found a nice cafe in the heart of the Old Town called La Rive Gauche, with internet which I've been sincerely missing in the past few days, and enjoyed my cappucino while getting some work done. The next day I walked up even further out of the old town to the European Institutions, that is to say the European Parliament and the Council of Europe (which is not actually part of the EU but sort of a stepping stone towards EU membership, they deal with human rights and things of a cultural nature.) I think I got a pretty nice feel for the town, stopped in the big mall (Les Halles), in the mall and in all the little shops there are tons of sales going on for some reason, although I can't recall learning that now is sale-time in France. Apart from that I've been profiting now from my wifi access at the hostel to catch up on movies, emails, and finish reading my 1049 French book (it's done yaya!!) As much as Strasbourg used to be German, it seems pretty familiarly French now to me. Tomorrow onwards to Aix to use up just three days until "life" starts up again, I'll get to visit my friends and go to the famed IPN hopefully, maybe even O'Shannons Bar. I almost feel like it's too soon to return as I just left no more than two months ago, but I'm sure I will have tons of fun. Goodbye from Strasbourg!

HALLO Regensburg, Germany!

Regensburg, Germany

Population: 130,000

After a thirteen hour train ride which involved me getting on my connection train in Vienna with one minute before departure, I arrived in Regensburg, Deutschland!! (another UNESCO heritage site fyi because it's classified as the only medieval town actually left/not rebuilt in Germany). It's a very cute town, I'm staying with a friend from school and hearing all about his study abroad experience so far, which is similar in set up but very different in reality from mine, makes me realize how much I loved the little cozy tight knit group we formed in Aix and all the debauchery involved. So here I've been hanging out with this study abroad group who are already making up slang German/English phrases (straight up directly translated for example), yesterday night I shared my cooking skills and we had fmaily dinner of rataouille and crepes which is always an excellent activity and a delicious one, and I've generally been chilling and relaxing with a little touring on the side. Chilling would be dinner, hanging out with the kids from Vanderbilt and other schools, I'm going to see the university tomorrow and see how different it is from the US/France, we watched the Office and went grocery shopping and I'm sure the weekend will involve some sort of going out, the class is going on a trip to Munich on Saturday and I'll be tagging along. One thing, they have to take the bus to get to each other and to school because it's kind of a far walk which seems inconvenient to me even though I know it's not all that inconvenient, I jsut appreciate the density of shopping and housing packed into the small space of Aix more now.

As for Regensburg, it's cute as I said. Cobblestone streets, mostly pedestrian, the main street Maximilianstrasse has these light poles that glow at night but the entire pole glows a soft light it's not jsut a streetlight, there's lots of little shops that are kind of random (skateboard shop, very kitschy home furnishing, a gem shop, etc) that are fun to look at, there's not a whole lot of touristy shops that sell postcards and the like, but also the streets are very wide (compard to Aix I guess) lots of space, the platz/squares are big/vast, and all the old medieval houses and pretty because they're multicolored but if you get rid of the color they're pretty simply designed architecturally, stucco or plaster and then windows with a solid color trim, no balcony or little flowebox or ornamentation really, but it works for some reason it looks nice when youline all the houses up. So you can just walk through the old town admiring the streets and the shops , the city is right on the Danube and there's the Stone Bridge uilt way back in the 12th century that's famous with a great view onto the city, there's a famous place for bratwursts right on the bank, the Old Town Hall is a must see, Porta Praetoria, a gateway dating form 179 AD made out of giant blocks of stone (it's really ugly and randomly built into a plaster white wall of the medieval age so it doens't seem like an amazing thing to see...) and there's the giant St Peters Dom (Cathedral) that is sort of the centerpiece of the town, the two spires you can see from anywhere in the city and its a very imposing, well, cathedral, like any other really. Also near the train station there's this big park with the House of Thurn and Taxis, a museum but also just a royal residence, then there's a ton of other churches around the area all Protestant, but curiously I went in one and it's the pretty green color on te outside like the houses but inside it was very bare, white walls not really arched or vouted and with little decoration. Kebabs are equally important here as they are in Poland, maybe a little less here but still it's the fast food of choice, they do also have two mcdonald's in the heart of the old town of this city which beats Aix by a lot, (two), and there's another giant modern shopping mall connected to the train station which is walkable distance from the Old Town (Altstadt). None of the students have ovens, sadly, because thinking back I think we used our oven a fair enough amount. And here they have giant giant grocery stores like in America (not France) and people seem a lot more to carry themselves more comparably as Americans than to the French, apart from emphasis on boots for girls which isn't unique to any country they don't have a "style" like the french do, but for all that from what I've seen they're more understanding and helpful with learners of the language, there's not scoff, scorn, attempt to speak English as there would be in French. There's a big cultural pull here, ballets, theatre especially, and they speak a regional dialect that's apparently more like slang and has different words than the German people have learned in school in America so it's a little hard to adjust. In sum, it's a nice little town, and very very good for study abroad, even if Aix was better (in my biased opinion of course).

And in conclusion after having spent a week there, the town really grew on me. Lots of little book stores, great bars with live music that we went to that were very chill (and the novel Piratenhole, home of the "Touch Down" giant cocktail drink for eight people to share (we finished it yum!!). We did a lot of cooking and it was really fun, made ratatouille and quesadillas and pizza and pasta for dinner and on Saturday we went to Munich, where I had just been one month ago, and we walked around, ate at the Ratskeller which is the kitchen in the basement of the Rathaus (Parliament/Town Hall). It was expensive, four euros for a bottle of water? but a good little snack and we had a cute little old man as our waiter. Then we walked around some, did a little shopping, and to avoid the cold hung out in the downstairs part of the metro and had our "dessert." Back in Regensburg we visited the inside of the cathedral and the Neufpallkirche, I attended one of their intensive language classes on Friday and their professor seemed really nice, he gave them Kinder eggs which is always a good sign, one day we were walking around and there was this dumpster and some guys were gutting an old Doner Kebab building (which the Germans are obsessed with if I haven't already said) and they were throwing out everything from tables to pictures to beer glasses. We took a set of water glasses and beer glasses which are actually really nice, a great little happenstance find. Also watched a lot of movies (Good Will Hunting, the entire Bourne series, some Office, etc) and just took it easy. All of the kids in the program were really fun to hang out with. pretzel bread grew on me, as did the carbonated apple juice that is oh so popular there (they also have potato pancakes around, sauerkraut and bratuwrsts of course, and for some reason black and white cookies?), I went to the Arkaden mall and shopped around (prices are way cheaper there than in all of France it seems, alas....) learned that Schneckl means snail and also cinnamon roll, we went out to eat "American' bagels on Sunday morning when everything else was dead because they can't sell anything but food on Sundays (as is the case in France), we went to an Irish Pub one day with live music written by the three guys playing guitar and it was a fun experience, had some cider, visited some of the other apartments that were nice and made friends with the residents there because up to now the people in the program haven't really mixed with Germans or international students yet, tried in vain to watch the Superbowl, and everyone in the program practiced their German from time to time. One of the fun things to do was to translate literally american slang (eg straight up. word.) into German and throw those little phrases in to conversations. A very fun week in Regensburg, and I loved having the tour guides who were living in the town show me around and take me out. Now I have one week left until Paris and real life starts, I will go to Strasbourg and Aix and restart speaking French!!

Back to Europe: Poland!

New Journey Begins.

Start: Warsaw, Poland

Population: 3.35 million

Warsaw is a city that was 85% destroyed in World War II. It is the capital of a county that has been partitioned off, to the point where it once ceased to exist, four times. It is a city of which over half of the permanent inhabitants were not born there, where the largest and most prominent building in the skyline and in the heart of the city is still the Communist Palace of Arts and Culture, where hardly anyone speaks English and yet there's a "Coffeeheaven" on every corner, where there's a veritable underground city beneath the streets around the train station and the major center square. Compared to other major cities it has many similarities- an urban area, one metro line, congestion of the roads and smog and noise and highrises-but it has its own very unique history, a mix of Jewish remembrance and partisan resistance to nearly every takeover it has sustained, that make it a place to add to a list of dream places to visit. Mybe not mid-January of course, but I had no other time to go. Anyways, I get there at night and just check into my hostel, which is so far the best hostel I've had for the entire year, cute orange circly art deco print layout for common room with a giant tedy bear, comfy couches and pillows, rooms painted in multicolored stripes very welcoming, homey, big bunk beds with high ceilings and rooms were only half full or less so there was a modicum of privacy which was nice. Anyways, set out to see the city the next day. Morning train to Malkinia then taxi to Treblinka concentration camp, of which nothing remains you just walk around the fields and there's the large rock monument in the shape of big doors almost in the center, I was, no exaggeration, the only person there, apart from the one woma at the little trailer type setup entrance and the taxi driver stayed in his car and waited for me to finish to take me back otherwise I would've had no way to get back to the train station. Back in town I walked around the Palace of Science and Culture, hard to miss, right in front there's this huge building that looks like a warehouse made out of sheet metal or some non-permanent structe that has tons of little kiosks like a mall inside but the shops are littler, lots of clothes and shoes and really really cute pairs of boots. Kebab stands are everywhere in this city, people are obsessed (same in Krakow only there at least they had falafel too, my preference). They also sell a lot of these baguette halves cut lengthwisie with cheese/onion/bratwurst on top. Walked over to this statue of a palm tree that is in the mimddle of a busy intersection, representing the lost Jewish community of Warsaw, it's called "view from jerusalem avenue" or something like that, then walked up the popular street Nowy Swiat which led to the old town, pas the university gates, the church of the Cross, "Cockroach Milk Bar' this famous millk bar which are these places where you can get a two course lunch really cheap, left over from the communist era, walked past the royal palace and new government buildings, lots of other churches, go tto the old town which was very very cute and pictoresque, a pink royal palace, winding roads with designs on the sides of buildings, red brick frontier wall surrounding, mermaid stautue in the center of the main suqare, the mermaid being the town mascot/symbol, snow was lightly falling, I go to coffeeheaven for a cappucino and sit and read, walk over pass these cool statues made out of really thin metal that look like horses with wings get to the former Jewish ghetto area, see the statue to heroes of the ghetto uprising, umschalgplatz where the jews were rounded up and sent off to Treblinka and Auschwitz, on parts of the street where the ghetto wall used to be there's black bricks that say Ghetto Wall 1940-1943 to show the boundaries (the ghetto was huge!)

The next day take the morning train to Lodz, try to find the old ghetto/Jewish museum end up finding nothing, no maps of city and no one speaks English or if they do they say a little and really don't speak any, so it was ironic when I got completely lost in this city I walk into a tanning salon (solarium as they call it, much more professional) and I ask if the woman speaks English and she says "of course" as if everyone does (not not not true!) So I walk around, find a little square with a statue and a little christmasy tree otherwise it's just a dirty city, residential lot sof little kids going to school, overcast not great, muddy, there's a funny vintage clothing store (aparently Warsaw invented vintage clothing) and a cute little hsopping street that was ard to find with statues of musticans on the sidewal, I bought a pair of nice shoes which was a plus, got lost, finally mde my way back to the train station, in Warsaw went and explore the "Stalin Town" buildings with old communist socialst realism architecture, then headed back to the hostel.

Day 3 woke up late, was going to go to Gdansk but I decided it was too far, instead I walked tot he train station then found a giant mall next to it and walked around there, found the only left part of the ghetto wallwhich is hidden in between these two residentail buildings in a decent part of the city in the middle of this courtyard, I don't know how anyone could ever find it it's not marked on the map or anything, walked boer to the Museum of the Warsaw Resistance for the warsaw uprising (Aug 1 1944) very good museum, then up to Jewish cemetery (closed on Saturdays saw the big red wall surrounding it) little plaques of where the ghetto wall used to be were over there as well. Walked over to the Old Town aain (a UNESCO site!) then down to the university library which is this new building made of steel, brick, glass, very retro greens and purples, then back to hostel home base done exploring Warsaw! Weird drunk Welshmen in hostel room came back at 6:20 am!! That's our financial adviers= that's why the economy's tanking.

Little things about local culture: in Malkinia and the little towns outside of Warsaw there were lots of little old people riding their old bikes around and lots of shrines (Catholic) in front of people's houses, but not makeshift ones actual little mini buildings maybe ten feet hight but made out of plaster or whatever you make houses out of, with these multicolored ribbons hanging off the sides, I think they were primarily built during one of the world wars when people couldn't go to church to pray. Pierogis are big here so i read but i never actually saw a place selling them, in Willy Brandt park over by the old jewish ghetoo they're going to build a museum of history of the polish jews, on the ghetto wall two bricks have been taken out and one i in Houston the other in Yad Vashem Jerusalem, the interncontinental hotel in the heart of the city ha a huge hole int he middle of it to allow daylight into neighboring buildigs, there's a night bar bus across the street= only open at night, the palace of science and culture is known as stalin's wedding cake, built 1955, loved and loathed symbol of communism, the house of the party (communist party HQ) is now ironically the stock echange, the column in old town is of Zygmunt III Vasa, warsaw's oldest secular monument erected 1644. Mermaid legend: Once upon a time 2 mermaid sisters swam to the shoes of the Baltic sea from their home in the depths. One swam further north and sits ona rock at the entry to the port of Copenhagen. The other swam to Gdansk then up the Vistula River. She came to rest outside Old Town Warsaw, she liked it so much she decided tos tay but she was disturbing the fishermen and their nets so they decided to capture her, but when they heard her beautiful voice singing they decided they liked her and let her stay, a rich merchant came and captured her to put her on show, a young farmhand son of a fishman came and freed her from captivity, and the emrmaid swore that if the residents of the city were ever in danger she would protecct them always (that's why she has a sword and shield).

Krakow, Poland

Population: About 1 million

Next day (sunday, Jan 25) onto Krakow via train. Get to Krakow, check into hostel that's right near the trains tation (which is again connected to a gigantic mall, this one bigger than anything I've yet seen in Europe, then explore Old Town Krakow. I like Krakow ten times better than Warsaw already. People speak English, it's a smaller city so less congested/urbany and more of its unique characteristicis come out, it hasn't been rebuilt as much so all of the mediveal era walls are still there and the bastian/citeadel/prison and it's very beautiful and peaceful, streets are clean and there's no strange people lurking out at 5 am (not that there were in Warsaw either actually, Poland seemed like a safe enough place from what I saw) and it was just a different type of city. Get there, put my bags down, and walk out into this park where there was thisbig circular building with little pointy turrets on top like a crown all made of red brick, that used to be a prison/mini entrance gate to the city, behind it is the real entrance to the medieval era city called Florian's Gate, this beautiful white stone gate with big doors and inside there's one main street but two little streets on either side, wide pedestrian avenues with christmas decorations still up, and at the very end of the boulevard you can see through the fog the spires of the cathedral in the main square, where there's also this huge huge building with lots of arches/voutes and there are little shops set up inside , wooden toys and furs and Krakow shot glasses and lots of souvenirs with dragons on them because the dragon is the symbol of the city. There's also a bell tower in the main square and this circular white building with an oxidized green copper roof that I think is a church structure of some sort. But returning to Florians' gate, there was a seller of art with these pictures of many colors spreead out three time the height of a man and at least thirty times as wide, this huge colossol wall of art outside that was very pretty, and then you walked down the main street and saw all the doner kebab shops but also these little stands like popucorn stands i guess int he US but here there were little old ladies in aprons or cloth dresses selling bread donuts (Dobra Kena) from 1.30 zlotkys (polish currency, three and a little equal one euro) and they were seriously everywhere, and everyone on the street had one in their hand eating it too. As you passed the main square and kept walking down the main street yo uhit Wawel, the symbol of all Polish culture and history so the sign says, it's this big fortress/castle that has been built and rebuilt over the centuries on top of this hill and is still int he midst of reconstruction, where the duke of the region lived and it had support of the Austrian monarchy and its essentiall y a big complex, with imperial rooms, a cathedraol, and lots of other rooms. It reminded me a lot of the castle in Slovakia that I saw, the same layout. It was full of tourists and looked right out ont ot he Vistular river. I climbed down and walked along the river to another church , following the route of Saint Stanislaws in his yearly pilgrammages or something like that, then over to Kazimierz which is the old jewish quarter right at the southern end of Krakow. Unfortunately this was a huge disappointment because the entire area is in ruins, run down clearly poor, but more than anything you can't tell it's the old jewish quarter there's no signs or markings and certainly no jews live there now, it was the only part of the city really to have graffitied walls and it was just not a place you'd go to visit. There was the old synagogue in the middle of it which is still there and I think functional, it had wroutght iron fences with little jeish stars welded in, but the building itself couldn't have been further from what you'd consider a temple to look like, it didnt look like a house of worship at all really, also no jewish bakeries or falafel stands like in the Venice Jewish quarter, as small as that was, no schools, nothing, it was beyond run down actually parts of the streets were dug up but the construction had stopped, lots of auto parts places and junkyards and there used to e a tramway line running through that part but it doesn't run there anymore. So out of Kazimierz, back to main krakow, I go to the mall for a little, find this traditional market that is kind of like the one in Warsaw in that it's a bunch of little stands but they are made out of this cheap building material its not in an actual building, like little kiosks all set up next to each other in one square yard. Next day I spent the entire day at Auschwitz-Birkenau, first at Auschwitz I where the barracks are made of brick and are still there and it reminded me of Theresienstadt because it looks like a miniature town almost, with streets and buildings and such, not like theo ther camps where they looked like summer cmaps today or if the barracks are just outlined in rock they look like fields. Then I walked the 3 km over to Auschwitz II-Birkenau (after getting lost and walking at least 1 km in the wrong direction, then having to walk back) and I was surprised and the sheer size of Birkenau, it was huge!! 5 crematoria, and they were in the process of expanding it back in the fields, they had this huge sewage plant to manage the camp and each square of the camp had barbed wire around it so it was cut off in to litlte sections, and it just went on forever there were at least 75 barracks in total, and the train tracks ran straight through the main camp gates (which had non saying over them like in other camps). So I learned a lot and saw a lot that day and probably walked at least 6 miles, who knows how many kilometers, but I was dead tired when I got back and then just stayed in the hostel and did work/packed up to head off to Germany the next day. The other thing that you are supposed to see if you go to Krakow are the Wielzcieka Salt Mines that are sort of a day trip out of the city but they've been in operation fro 900 years and form an important part of the economy over there, I didn't get there but I saw pictures and they're supposed to be beautiful, like caves with diamonds or really sparkly jewels on all the walls. So I'd definitely return to Krakow and reommend anyone and everyone to go visit.

New Year's Barcelona.

UNFORGETTABLE. Lights, champagne, sangrias, invisible fireworks, dancing, music, beach, palm trees, chocolate and churros. Nuff said.

Pics: http://photo2.walgreens.com/share/p=35951231179397298/l=25791739/g=3230505/cobrandOid=1009/otsc=SYE/otsi+SALB