Arrived in Amsterdam at around 6:00pm on Thursday night, raining again but truth be told, we've been lucky with the weather as it hasn't affected anything we've wanted to do yet and it's been raining all through Europe during most of our time here, we just seem to miss the bad weather.
Went for a walk to have a look around the city and to find the Van Gogh museum and check opening and closing times etc, we were already booked on another cycle tour around the outskirts of Amsterdam that started at 11:00am, so we wanted to make sure that we could fit the museum in around that tomorrow. Turns out that we shouldn't have been worried, the Van Gogh museum is open until 10:00pm on Fridays, so we had plenty of time to visit after the bike tour. We had some dinner, decided to get Mexican and it was pretty good.
Once we'd managed to get completely lost not far from the Van Gogh museum (I was actually taking us in completely the wrong direction when we asked for directions), we headed back towards the hotel, it was around 10:00pm so we decided to take a walk through the red light district which was not far from where we were staying, on the way there we found an Irish pub, run by a Dutch girl of course, so we sat down for a Heiniken or three. Now that we were suitably liquered up, we wandered into the red light district, found lots of drunk pommy guys, about a 10-1 ratio of guys to girls (no surprises there!!) and everything else you hear about Amsterdams red light district, it was interesting to go for a walk, the whlole concept of the girls standing in the windows like manequins is a bit weird, but we did manage to see one young gent make his choice for the evening and go on inside, much to Carols disgust.
We wandered back to the hotel and went to bed, only to be woken at about 6:30am to the sounds of the workers banging around on the scaffolding that was surrounding our hotel, nice Friday morning alarm clock that one ;-) We still managed to stay in bed until around 7:30 and by the time we got up and moving we didn't leave the hotel until about 10:00. We headed off towards the cycle tour, arrived there at 10:25(too early again!!) but it worked in our favour this time, as one of the girls in the shop did tell us that if we wanted to eat something on the 4 hour cycle tour we should go and grab something, as there wasn't really a lunch stop on the tour. I think they should put this in the write up of the tour, as our Berlin cycle tour took us to the beer garden where you could a least purchase lunch.
Anyway we went off to find the bakery that the girl pointed us at, sat down for a coffee along the way and then bought a couple of baked goods for the cycle tour.
At the begining of the tour I was selected as the "ass man", which makes me the person who has to stay at the back of the group to make sure that no one falls behind, I'm pretty sure that I was selected because I was taller than most and wearing a blue t-shirt that was easily recognisable, making it easy for the tour guide to pick where the back of the group was, anyway I was given a free beer at the cheese "factory/farm" for my troubles and I didn't mind riding along at the back.
The tour was really good, just like the Berlin tour the guide was extremely knowledgeable about the Netherlands and Amsterdam, so we got a really good history lesson on how the Netherlands came to be and why Amsterdam was built where it was, which wasn't really a great place to build a city by the sound of it, given that it was pretty much a smelly swamp! Anyway the building of the city and the infrastructure that they use to keep the place dry is really interesting and well worth hearing about. We also discovered that it was gay pride week in Amsterdam while we were here, and that the main paradce was happening on Saturday afternoon, it was a pity that we were booked on the train from Calais to London on Sat afternoon, as the parade would have been worth hanging around for.
After about 2 hours of riding through the Dutch country side we had our stop at the cheese farm, which was a small family run farm that makes cheese(yeah I know you already got that) and clogs (or wooden shoes as the Dutch call them) it was a short but interesting tour and they had beer for sale (see earlier comment about me getting one for free) and Carol and I were able to eat our baked goods, while about 40 other hungry cyclists drooled. Our guide had actually brought along some raisin buns "just in case anyone was hungry", not surprisingly these dissapeared quite quickly, and no Carol and I didn't take any even though they looked really nice ;-), from the cheese farm (sounds wrong but so does cheese factory) we headed back through the country side and heard a little more about the Netherlands and Amsterdam.
After the tour we headed off for the Van Gogh museum, but along the way we stopped at the "last minute ticket" shop to see iof there were any bargains for shows that night, we picked up tickets for a comedy show, more on that later. The Van Gogh museum was amazing, even for a hethen such as myself, you still have to admire the art work in there and the people who were painting it, quite an amazing collection of art and a really good way to get an understanding of not only Van Gogh but also the way art was changing during the era he lived in, like I say, fascinating, even for me!
We spent a good two and a half hours in the museum and then headed off for the comedy show. It was a cabaret style show so we were able to get there early and have dinner at our seats(table) and as seats weren't allocated getting there early for dinner meant that you got to pick where you sat which was good. We had a reasonable meal, not the best meal we've had while on holidays, but not the worst either and waited for the show to start.
It turned out to be an American comedy act called "Boom Chicago", which was a little dissapointing when we first heard that as we we're attempting to see a local show. We needn't have been dissapointed as the show was actually local, although the entire cast was American, they've been hosting shows in Amsterdam for a number of years and are part of the scenery there, so local I guess is what you make of it. The show was excellent, it was a mix of pre-rehearsed skits, which were very good, and improv which in general was even better, we really enjoyed the show and I'd recommend a visit to it if you're ever in Amsterdam with an evening to spare.
So that was our Amsterdam experience, we had a good time and may go back to spend more time in some of the other museums if the opportunity arises.
Pictures from our time in Amsterdam
Sunday 7 August 2011
Berlin - Day 2
Up a bit late this morning, but didn't need to rise too early as we'd booked in for a city cycle tour which kicked off at 11:00am and as the museums didn't open until 10:00 we couldn't visit a museum beforehand. We left the Hotel around 10:00 and walked to the meetingplace for the tour, got there at 10:25 which was too early so we walked around the corner and sat down for a coffee.
The cycle tour was an excellent way to get a potted summary of Berlin, WWI WWII and the cold war and how it impacted Germany and particularly Berlin, we visited Checkpoint Charlie, bits of the Berlin wall, Hitlers bunker the holocost monument the Brandenburg Gate and quite a few other lesser known attractions around Berlin.
First up were some of the older Berlin buildings (or where they used to be standing anyway) because of Germany's multiple changes from moinarchies to capitalism and socialism, quite a few of the important buildings were torn down as different groups came to power as they weren't particularly fond of keeping reminders of the previous rulers. The original Berlin Palace was one such building, and all that remains of it today are the stables and one Balcony where the Russian who conquered berlin pronounced Germany to be a socialist state.
Next up was a pair of churches built opposite one another, one was a protestant church and the other was a christian church, both look exactly the same and stand on opposite sides of a square that's about 100m wide, they were built by the ruler at the time who had to build both so as not to upset either group. The Humbolt university was next, it's situated in a group of buildings that have been used for a large number of things pver the years, but are also on the site of the "book burning" carried out by the Nazis, there's a monument built under the main square, which is a set of pure white empty bookshelves underground, which can be seen through a perspex window which is in the middle of the square (on the ground) so you look down into the empty bookshelves, there's enough shelves in the monument to hold all of the books that were burnt.
We left Humbolt museum and headed for checkpoint charlie, unfortunately we didn't have time to go into the museum here, which I think I would have enjoyed as it's full of successful and unsucessful escape attempts which would have been interesting. The checkpoint itself was a little dissapointing as it doesn't look anything like it used to, I guess it's a bit hard to have a functioning city and leave some of this stuff too much intact, it was of course designed to stop anyone passing through and is now in a busy part of the city as it's quite near the city centre. From there our guide took us to show us part of the Berlin wall that's still standing, first impressions are that's it's not quite big enough to keep people in. But that's before you understand the fact that there was also an inner wall on the Eastern side, along with quite a number of additional "deterents" to ensure that the East Germans stayed put, we then went to an area where you could get a better sense of how much blank space the East germans had on their side of the wall to make sure they had a clear shot at anyone trying to escape, it's pretty daunting really. From there we headed off to see Hitlers bunker, which now of course is a car park with no real indication of it's existence except for one small sign. The German government has made the decision not to make this any kind of tourist attraction as they're a little worried that the extreme right might turn it into a shrine or mecca of sorts, quite understandable really, the rumour is that they've only erected the sign to stop the local residents from getting visitor at their doors asking where exactly the bunker is. Funnily enough the area around the Bunker now houses a Mosque, a gay sauna/spa and some Jewish run shops, all of which I'm sure would please Mr Hitler no end.
From there we went to the Holocaust memorial, which is quite a sobering place, just to know that you're standing in/around a memorial that's dedicated to such misery and pain is quite an experience, worth a visit and I'd probably like to go back there and spend some more time walking around as we weren't there for very long. From here we headed to a much happier place, not only did we cross into West Berlin, but we headed for a Beer Garden for some good ol German fair, and of course a liter of beer. From there we headed to the victory monument, which the Germans erected after beating the French (yeah I know not really all that hard one would argue now!), interestingly, Hitler had the monument moved just before WWII as part of his planned remodelling of the city "Germania" which was going to be the captial city for the whole world once he was finished (history shows that he wasn't that far off getting there either). From here we went to the Brandunberg gate, which is an impressive structure and is now surrounded by a number of foreign embassies, although I didn't spot the Aussie embassy. This was pretty much the end of the cycle tour, I'd recommend it for numpties like me who knew very little, it would probably be good for those of you who know a little history as well, the cycling is actually minimal, it just means that you get to see more things as you get there a little faster, the guides are really knowledgeable and quite good fun as well.
Once the cycle tour was over we decided to walk back to checkpoint charlie to have a look at a holocaust museum that was nearby, this was very interesting as it showed a more in depth view of exactly how Hitler came to power and the stages that we went through during his quest for world domination, we didn't have enough time to view this properly either, and by the time we called it a day we were absolutely buggered! We walked back towards the Hotel and stopped for a bite to eat along the way.
We found Berlin to be a great city, I'll definitely be back to have a better look around and the general "vibe" of the city is also really good, it's a really friendly city and you seem to always feel safe walking around, it's also quite spread out, quite a bit of that is due to the east west split and the berlin wall as quite large areas of Land were left barren after WWII so the East Germans had a good view to protect their side of the wall.
Some pictures from our travels around Berlin
The cycle tour was an excellent way to get a potted summary of Berlin, WWI WWII and the cold war and how it impacted Germany and particularly Berlin, we visited Checkpoint Charlie, bits of the Berlin wall, Hitlers bunker the holocost monument the Brandenburg Gate and quite a few other lesser known attractions around Berlin.
First up were some of the older Berlin buildings (or where they used to be standing anyway) because of Germany's multiple changes from moinarchies to capitalism and socialism, quite a few of the important buildings were torn down as different groups came to power as they weren't particularly fond of keeping reminders of the previous rulers. The original Berlin Palace was one such building, and all that remains of it today are the stables and one Balcony where the Russian who conquered berlin pronounced Germany to be a socialist state.
Next up was a pair of churches built opposite one another, one was a protestant church and the other was a christian church, both look exactly the same and stand on opposite sides of a square that's about 100m wide, they were built by the ruler at the time who had to build both so as not to upset either group. The Humbolt university was next, it's situated in a group of buildings that have been used for a large number of things pver the years, but are also on the site of the "book burning" carried out by the Nazis, there's a monument built under the main square, which is a set of pure white empty bookshelves underground, which can be seen through a perspex window which is in the middle of the square (on the ground) so you look down into the empty bookshelves, there's enough shelves in the monument to hold all of the books that were burnt.
We left Humbolt museum and headed for checkpoint charlie, unfortunately we didn't have time to go into the museum here, which I think I would have enjoyed as it's full of successful and unsucessful escape attempts which would have been interesting. The checkpoint itself was a little dissapointing as it doesn't look anything like it used to, I guess it's a bit hard to have a functioning city and leave some of this stuff too much intact, it was of course designed to stop anyone passing through and is now in a busy part of the city as it's quite near the city centre. From there our guide took us to show us part of the Berlin wall that's still standing, first impressions are that's it's not quite big enough to keep people in. But that's before you understand the fact that there was also an inner wall on the Eastern side, along with quite a number of additional "deterents" to ensure that the East Germans stayed put, we then went to an area where you could get a better sense of how much blank space the East germans had on their side of the wall to make sure they had a clear shot at anyone trying to escape, it's pretty daunting really. From there we headed off to see Hitlers bunker, which now of course is a car park with no real indication of it's existence except for one small sign. The German government has made the decision not to make this any kind of tourist attraction as they're a little worried that the extreme right might turn it into a shrine or mecca of sorts, quite understandable really, the rumour is that they've only erected the sign to stop the local residents from getting visitor at their doors asking where exactly the bunker is. Funnily enough the area around the Bunker now houses a Mosque, a gay sauna/spa and some Jewish run shops, all of which I'm sure would please Mr Hitler no end.
From there we went to the Holocaust memorial, which is quite a sobering place, just to know that you're standing in/around a memorial that's dedicated to such misery and pain is quite an experience, worth a visit and I'd probably like to go back there and spend some more time walking around as we weren't there for very long. From here we headed to a much happier place, not only did we cross into West Berlin, but we headed for a Beer Garden for some good ol German fair, and of course a liter of beer. From there we headed to the victory monument, which the Germans erected after beating the French (yeah I know not really all that hard one would argue now!), interestingly, Hitler had the monument moved just before WWII as part of his planned remodelling of the city "Germania" which was going to be the captial city for the whole world once he was finished (history shows that he wasn't that far off getting there either). From here we went to the Brandunberg gate, which is an impressive structure and is now surrounded by a number of foreign embassies, although I didn't spot the Aussie embassy. This was pretty much the end of the cycle tour, I'd recommend it for numpties like me who knew very little, it would probably be good for those of you who know a little history as well, the cycling is actually minimal, it just means that you get to see more things as you get there a little faster, the guides are really knowledgeable and quite good fun as well.
Once the cycle tour was over we decided to walk back to checkpoint charlie to have a look at a holocaust museum that was nearby, this was very interesting as it showed a more in depth view of exactly how Hitler came to power and the stages that we went through during his quest for world domination, we didn't have enough time to view this properly either, and by the time we called it a day we were absolutely buggered! We walked back towards the Hotel and stopped for a bite to eat along the way.
We found Berlin to be a great city, I'll definitely be back to have a better look around and the general "vibe" of the city is also really good, it's a really friendly city and you seem to always feel safe walking around, it's also quite spread out, quite a bit of that is due to the east west split and the berlin wall as quite large areas of Land were left barren after WWII so the East Germans had a good view to protect their side of the wall.
Some pictures from our travels around Berlin
Tuesday 2 August 2011
Prague
After arriving in Prague around 5:30pm we checked in and went for a wander around, we were immeadiately drawn towards the Prague castle as we'd been told that it was a spectacular landmark, after getting a little bit lost in the streets of Prague, and stumbling across the usual array of churches and historical land marks we found the river. We had emerged from the city at the wrong bridge, but no matter, we could see the Charles bridge from where we were and we could also see the castle. We were in fact closer to the entrance to the Castle than we would have been if we had crossed the Charles bridge as originally planned, so we climbed up to the castle to have a good look around.
The Church in the middle of the Castle(or maybe it's the original city?) is amazing, it's scale is hard to fathom and the ornate features that adorne it aren't really captured by the photo's we took. We spent a good hour walking around the church (or maybe it's a cathedral given it's size), we also tried to take some photos of the gargoyles that were placed along the back of the church, but by this time the light was fading so they really didn't work out well.
On the way back to the hotel we managed to get lost in the streets of Prague again, so Prague has turned out to be the hardest city to navigate, for us at least. Once we'd worked out where we were and found our way back to the hotel, we called it a night.
Out of bed a bit late on day 2, all of this holiday stuff is tiring, I'll be going back to work for a break! We wandered off to find the Astrological clock in the old town square, which we'd walked past on our way home last night without realising. Found the clock and arrived when an Irish tour guide was giving a very theatrical description of the clock and some of it's history (which may or may not be true).
After the astrological clock, we headed towards one of the many national museums located around Prague, only to find that it' was closed on Mondays, so we headed for the Charles bridge, the bridge is pedestrian traffic only and as such it's littered with various buskers, artists etc, which gives it quite a nice atmosphere, from there we headed along the edge of the river in the general direction of the technological and agriculture museums. On our way we discovered the "weeing" fountain that you'll see some photos of, as well as the Frank(or Franz) Kafka museum, we spent a good hour and a half in the Frank Kafka museum, it was really quite well done and interesting.
We sat down for lunch after the Kafka museum, consumed the "small" 500ml of beer and continued on our way to the technilogical museum, unfortunately when we got there we discovered that Mondays is obviously the day that all of the government run museums are closed.
We headed back into town and as we'd walked quite a few miles today, we parked ourselves in a cafe and watched the world go by, quite a nice way to finish the day of in Prague really ;-)
For dinner we headed for a nice looking restaurant, only to find out afterwards that the restaurant is on the Michelin guide as one of the best restaurants in Prague and that the Chef is a celebrity Chef with his own television show. The food was very nice and the service was exceptional, although I must say that the apple strudel that I had at the beer garden in Salzburg was better than his (in my opinion anyway).
Off to Berlin tomorrow, looking forward to some of the sights there.
Prague - Day 1 Pics - The Prague Castle
Prague - Day 2 Pics
The Church in the middle of the Castle(or maybe it's the original city?) is amazing, it's scale is hard to fathom and the ornate features that adorne it aren't really captured by the photo's we took. We spent a good hour walking around the church (or maybe it's a cathedral given it's size), we also tried to take some photos of the gargoyles that were placed along the back of the church, but by this time the light was fading so they really didn't work out well.
On the way back to the hotel we managed to get lost in the streets of Prague again, so Prague has turned out to be the hardest city to navigate, for us at least. Once we'd worked out where we were and found our way back to the hotel, we called it a night.
Out of bed a bit late on day 2, all of this holiday stuff is tiring, I'll be going back to work for a break! We wandered off to find the Astrological clock in the old town square, which we'd walked past on our way home last night without realising. Found the clock and arrived when an Irish tour guide was giving a very theatrical description of the clock and some of it's history (which may or may not be true).
After the astrological clock, we headed towards one of the many national museums located around Prague, only to find that it' was closed on Mondays, so we headed for the Charles bridge, the bridge is pedestrian traffic only and as such it's littered with various buskers, artists etc, which gives it quite a nice atmosphere, from there we headed along the edge of the river in the general direction of the technological and agriculture museums. On our way we discovered the "weeing" fountain that you'll see some photos of, as well as the Frank(or Franz) Kafka museum, we spent a good hour and a half in the Frank Kafka museum, it was really quite well done and interesting.
We sat down for lunch after the Kafka museum, consumed the "small" 500ml of beer and continued on our way to the technilogical museum, unfortunately when we got there we discovered that Mondays is obviously the day that all of the government run museums are closed.
We headed back into town and as we'd walked quite a few miles today, we parked ourselves in a cafe and watched the world go by, quite a nice way to finish the day of in Prague really ;-)
For dinner we headed for a nice looking restaurant, only to find out afterwards that the restaurant is on the Michelin guide as one of the best restaurants in Prague and that the Chef is a celebrity Chef with his own television show. The food was very nice and the service was exceptional, although I must say that the apple strudel that I had at the beer garden in Salzburg was better than his (in my opinion anyway).
Off to Berlin tomorrow, looking forward to some of the sights there.
Prague - Day 1 Pics - The Prague Castle
Prague - Day 2 Pics
Monday 1 August 2011
Austria - Salzburg
We left Venice pretty early and headed for Salzburg, we decided not to take the toll roads for the entire drive from Venice to Salzburg so we spent the first couple of hours travelling through the Italian countryside which was nice.
One of the first things you notice as you head out of Italy towards Austria is of course the huge mountains that are appearing in front of you, which reminds me of something that we've notice all throug this trip, they're very good at building bridges and tunnels in this part of the world, the roads are just as amazing as many of the other things you see, just because of the engineering that's required to build roads through the terrain here.
We had lunch on the road not far from the Austrian border, we've eaten at the roadside "fast food" places on quite a few of the days that we've been travelling, it's been a real eye opener to go from McDonalds or KFC to roadside diners that have panini's, stroganoff, pizza, pasta etc these seem to be all through Europe and are a much nicer way to break you're trip, you can even sit down and have wine or beer with your meal, which most of the locals seem to do.
After crossing the border we stopped for an afternoon coffee break, and the first thing we notice is that everything in Austria is spotless, this theme carries on for our entire stay in Austria, it's very clean and you always feel safe here.
We arrived in Salzburg during the afternoon and walked into town for a quick look around, we stumbled onto Mozarts house and some very nice architecture, once we'd been wandering around fo a couple of hours we found a reasonable looking Restaurant and sat down for some dinner. Carol had a pork leg and I had goulash, both were very nice, and went well with the local beer, we then shared an apple strudel for desert which was excellent(OK, so I ate most of it).
On our second day in Salzburg we headed for Hellbrunn palace, which is a palace built by an Arch bishop who liked the idea of playing practical jokes on his guests, so he setup a number of "trick" fountains designed to get his guests wet, either while eating at the table or while visiting various attractions that he had scattered around his garden. The tour was really good, and we only got a little bit wet (the tour guide seems to enjoy his job and likes to get everyone at least a little bit wet).
We then toured the Palace itself and the museum which is also on the grounds, it has a good historical view of Austrian cullture which was also good to see.
Once we finished up at Hellbrun (by now it was raining quite heavily so if you were on the fountain tour now you were getting wet and it had nothing to do with the fountains!) we headed back into the centre of Salzburg and hiked up to Hohensalzburg, which was the original city of Salzburg and the main fortress which was used when the city was under seige. We spent the rest of the day in here as there was an aweful lot to see, by the time we left here we were pretty much done for the day, so we headed back down into Salzburg (the castle is on the hill above the city), had a quiet beer and headed back to the hotel.
We needed to do some washing to keep us in clean clothes so we headed off to the laundromat and ran into a nice couple (Aussie lad and Kiwi lass) who had just arrived in Salzburg. Dane was a pilot from Hamilton Island and was keen on heading out to "Hangar 7" tomorrow morning, which I hadn't heard of as yet, it's a hangar with a collection of Dietrich Mateschitz's(the Red Bull guy) toys, such as panes F1 cars, motor bikes etc. This sounded like something I'd like to have a look at so we offered to pick them up in the morning and give them a lift out there (it's about 3k's out of Salzburg and they were travelling by train).
We enjoyed a couple of hours at the hangar(I'm sure this is as close as I'll ever get to an F1 car), dropped Dane and Bridgit back in town and headed for Prague.
We really liked Austria, very friendly people, very beautiful place.
Some pictures from around Salzburg
One of the first things you notice as you head out of Italy towards Austria is of course the huge mountains that are appearing in front of you, which reminds me of something that we've notice all throug this trip, they're very good at building bridges and tunnels in this part of the world, the roads are just as amazing as many of the other things you see, just because of the engineering that's required to build roads through the terrain here.
We had lunch on the road not far from the Austrian border, we've eaten at the roadside "fast food" places on quite a few of the days that we've been travelling, it's been a real eye opener to go from McDonalds or KFC to roadside diners that have panini's, stroganoff, pizza, pasta etc these seem to be all through Europe and are a much nicer way to break you're trip, you can even sit down and have wine or beer with your meal, which most of the locals seem to do.
After crossing the border we stopped for an afternoon coffee break, and the first thing we notice is that everything in Austria is spotless, this theme carries on for our entire stay in Austria, it's very clean and you always feel safe here.
We arrived in Salzburg during the afternoon and walked into town for a quick look around, we stumbled onto Mozarts house and some very nice architecture, once we'd been wandering around fo a couple of hours we found a reasonable looking Restaurant and sat down for some dinner. Carol had a pork leg and I had goulash, both were very nice, and went well with the local beer, we then shared an apple strudel for desert which was excellent(OK, so I ate most of it).
On our second day in Salzburg we headed for Hellbrunn palace, which is a palace built by an Arch bishop who liked the idea of playing practical jokes on his guests, so he setup a number of "trick" fountains designed to get his guests wet, either while eating at the table or while visiting various attractions that he had scattered around his garden. The tour was really good, and we only got a little bit wet (the tour guide seems to enjoy his job and likes to get everyone at least a little bit wet).
We then toured the Palace itself and the museum which is also on the grounds, it has a good historical view of Austrian cullture which was also good to see.
Once we finished up at Hellbrun (by now it was raining quite heavily so if you were on the fountain tour now you were getting wet and it had nothing to do with the fountains!) we headed back into the centre of Salzburg and hiked up to Hohensalzburg, which was the original city of Salzburg and the main fortress which was used when the city was under seige. We spent the rest of the day in here as there was an aweful lot to see, by the time we left here we were pretty much done for the day, so we headed back down into Salzburg (the castle is on the hill above the city), had a quiet beer and headed back to the hotel.
We needed to do some washing to keep us in clean clothes so we headed off to the laundromat and ran into a nice couple (Aussie lad and Kiwi lass) who had just arrived in Salzburg. Dane was a pilot from Hamilton Island and was keen on heading out to "Hangar 7" tomorrow morning, which I hadn't heard of as yet, it's a hangar with a collection of Dietrich Mateschitz's(the Red Bull guy) toys, such as panes F1 cars, motor bikes etc. This sounded like something I'd like to have a look at so we offered to pick them up in the morning and give them a lift out there (it's about 3k's out of Salzburg and they were travelling by train).
We enjoyed a couple of hours at the hangar(I'm sure this is as close as I'll ever get to an F1 car), dropped Dane and Bridgit back in town and headed for Prague.
We really liked Austria, very friendly people, very beautiful place.
Some pictures from around Salzburg
Thursday 28 July 2011
Venice Day 1
Well after a poor night sleep due to the large amount of noise just outside our hotel room, we set off to explore Venice. We had a good day and basically made our way towards the Piazza St Marco which is one of the major Vanice attractions, on the way we visited the Guggenheim museum, being the complete twat that I am, I didn't realise that there were multiple Guggenheim museums around the world, I had a vague understanding that one existed in America, and I believed that it was in New York, but apart from that I knew nothing. I now know that Peggy Guggenheim collected a very large amount of modern art and began exhibiting the art quite a long time ago, she also had a daughter who was an artist, who typically for an artist died young from depression related problems (overdose of her medication).
I have to admit that for a large part of my tour around the Guggenheim, I was wondering what ot was all about, and in general I have decided that modern art is from artists who like myself suffer from a short attention span, meaning that they either can't finish what they start (much like me) or get distracted(much like me) by other things during the creation of a piece, and include the distractions into the piece that they are working on.
Either way, to me art that has to be described to you to be appreciated is missing the mark, but as usual on this trip, I know very little and much more important people than myself have already decided otherwise, so I'll leave you to make up your own mind.....
Once out of the Guggenheim we continued on to the Piazza St Marco, and discovered that the square (or plaza) had been overtaken by a fashion show and some major construction works, so we took some photo's and had a good look around, but we moved on quite quickly due to the large crowds and lack of photo opportunities.
On the way back from the Guggenheim, we discovered a little art gallery that had a very strong opinion on American culture, see photo's of Mr R McDonald and Ms Wonder Woman and Batman for an idea of what I mean. Funny thing was that as we walked into the courtyard with the scuplture of Sir Ronald's head in someone else's hand, a large group of USA citizens followed us in, "oh that's not nice" and "what's that all about" were the phrases being uttered, so I felt compelled to mention that it was the venetians opinion on American culture, meanwhile Carol was telling me to shutup and 2 british tourists thought it was very funny. The citizens of the USA still didn't seem to understand, or didn't hear me as I didn't have an American accent, either way I thought I should at least try and clear up their confusion.....
After "the incident", we moved on to have some lunch and discovered a cafe that was serving 1L beers, so I had one of those (of course) and we eventually moved on to have a look at the Rialto bridge, this once again was covered with banners advertising various things, so we didn't take any photo's, but the Bridge itself was impressive and worth a look in itself.
Overall Venice is a lovely city for a visit, tomorrow morning we're planning on rising early to head across town to photograph the Sigh bridge and we might take some piccies of some of the other sights as we come back, once we're done with that we'll head off to Salzburg.
I hope you're all enjoying the blog, talk to you soon, Richard and Carol
Pics from our day in Venice
I have to admit that for a large part of my tour around the Guggenheim, I was wondering what ot was all about, and in general I have decided that modern art is from artists who like myself suffer from a short attention span, meaning that they either can't finish what they start (much like me) or get distracted(much like me) by other things during the creation of a piece, and include the distractions into the piece that they are working on.
Either way, to me art that has to be described to you to be appreciated is missing the mark, but as usual on this trip, I know very little and much more important people than myself have already decided otherwise, so I'll leave you to make up your own mind.....
Once out of the Guggenheim we continued on to the Piazza St Marco, and discovered that the square (or plaza) had been overtaken by a fashion show and some major construction works, so we took some photo's and had a good look around, but we moved on quite quickly due to the large crowds and lack of photo opportunities.
On the way back from the Guggenheim, we discovered a little art gallery that had a very strong opinion on American culture, see photo's of Mr R McDonald and Ms Wonder Woman and Batman for an idea of what I mean. Funny thing was that as we walked into the courtyard with the scuplture of Sir Ronald's head in someone else's hand, a large group of USA citizens followed us in, "oh that's not nice" and "what's that all about" were the phrases being uttered, so I felt compelled to mention that it was the venetians opinion on American culture, meanwhile Carol was telling me to shutup and 2 british tourists thought it was very funny. The citizens of the USA still didn't seem to understand, or didn't hear me as I didn't have an American accent, either way I thought I should at least try and clear up their confusion.....
After "the incident", we moved on to have some lunch and discovered a cafe that was serving 1L beers, so I had one of those (of course) and we eventually moved on to have a look at the Rialto bridge, this once again was covered with banners advertising various things, so we didn't take any photo's, but the Bridge itself was impressive and worth a look in itself.
Overall Venice is a lovely city for a visit, tomorrow morning we're planning on rising early to head across town to photograph the Sigh bridge and we might take some piccies of some of the other sights as we come back, once we're done with that we'll head off to Salzburg.
I hope you're all enjoying the blog, talk to you soon, Richard and Carol
Pics from our day in Venice
Back to Florence to see David
Hi All,
Fairly short blog today as most of the day was spent travelling from Rome to Florence or from Florence to Venice.
Anyway, we had a relatively late start again today, can't seem to put my finger on why, but it may have had something to do with the beer and wine consumption, we did manage to rise at around 8:30am anyway and after breakfast, checkout and walking back to where the car was parked we were on our way by about 10:00am, back on the highways, watching the locals refuse to drive within the lanes, we had a short stop for lunch bewteen Rome and Florence and arrived on the outskirts of florance around 1:00pm. We parked the car paid for parking and walked to the bus stop. We managed to have a conversation with a local to figure out which bus to catch and jumped on. The driver wasn't intereested in taking any money and neither was the ticketing machine, it would seem that you should purchase a ticket before you get on the bus, andvalidate the ticket once on the bus, only about 10% of the people who got on the bust did anything about validating a ticket, and the driver didn't seem to care whether you had a ticket or not, so I'm assuming that it's a random check that happens once in a while and it didn't happen on our way into Florence so it was all good.
we got off the bus about a block from the accademia (where David is standing) and wandered down there. Once there we found 2 CLEARLY marked lines (it will become clear why that's important later), one for the people who had booked a time, and one for the people like us who had just shown up. We could tell from the length of the line that we were in for a long wait, but we wanted to see David so we went to the end of the line and waited. I was estimating about 1.5 hours worth of waiting, but after about an hour we were at the front of the line, it was at this point that the Americans started to appear, each one(or group) and there were multiple, showeed up at the front of the line and asked the Italian guard where the line was and how long they'd have to wait, the couple in front of us spoke a little english so they tried to help out, but in between Americans we managed to expose ourselves so it bacame our job! much to my disgust we had to explain the whole thing to each of the STUPID Americans that showed up, as I mentioned earlier the two lines were clearly marked in english, so much so that Carol and I, who aren't particularly seasoned travellers managed to read the signs and walk to the back of the line without having to push in between the people standing in line and ask dumb questions.
Before being identified as english speakers who understood what was going on because we could read, we even watched one american put on disgusted look when the Italian guard managed to convey to them that he didn't speak english, I could only stand back in awe and imagine the same person if an Italian dared to approach them in their home town and speak to them in Italian, asking for directions, I can only imagine how they'd react if the roles were reversed!!!
Anyway, after surviving the onslaught of people who couldn't read, we entered the Acadamia, the art was amazing(sorry no photo's allowed, so the photo I took from outside 2 days ago is the best we've got), but rest assured that it's worth standing in line and even worth dealing with the stupid people!! David is a massive figure, and funnily enough, even though apparently his proportions are very accurate, I would think his hands and feet are a bit too big for the rest of him, but what would I know!!!
Once we'd wandered around the museum for a couple of hours we headed back to the car, and as we still didn't know how to get a bus ticket we walked, only took about 40 minutes and was pleasant enough even though it was sprinkling rain.
Back in the car and a roughly 3 hour trip to Venice, pretty much without incident apart from the usual can't possibly drive in my lane and my own issues with understanding the speed limits......
Got to Venice and parked the car, was asked the leave the keys in it by a young man in a white shirt who looked official anyway, hopefully we'll still have a car when we leave Venice!!
Hotel was easy enough to find, I'll give you the run down on Florence after dinner, it's been a good day and we've enjoyed ourselves again.
Hope this finds everyone well, talk to you all soon, Richard and Carol
A Couple of Photo's from Florence - sorry none from inside the Academia
Fairly short blog today as most of the day was spent travelling from Rome to Florence or from Florence to Venice.
Anyway, we had a relatively late start again today, can't seem to put my finger on why, but it may have had something to do with the beer and wine consumption, we did manage to rise at around 8:30am anyway and after breakfast, checkout and walking back to where the car was parked we were on our way by about 10:00am, back on the highways, watching the locals refuse to drive within the lanes, we had a short stop for lunch bewteen Rome and Florence and arrived on the outskirts of florance around 1:00pm. We parked the car paid for parking and walked to the bus stop. We managed to have a conversation with a local to figure out which bus to catch and jumped on. The driver wasn't intereested in taking any money and neither was the ticketing machine, it would seem that you should purchase a ticket before you get on the bus, andvalidate the ticket once on the bus, only about 10% of the people who got on the bust did anything about validating a ticket, and the driver didn't seem to care whether you had a ticket or not, so I'm assuming that it's a random check that happens once in a while and it didn't happen on our way into Florence so it was all good.
we got off the bus about a block from the accademia (where David is standing) and wandered down there. Once there we found 2 CLEARLY marked lines (it will become clear why that's important later), one for the people who had booked a time, and one for the people like us who had just shown up. We could tell from the length of the line that we were in for a long wait, but we wanted to see David so we went to the end of the line and waited. I was estimating about 1.5 hours worth of waiting, but after about an hour we were at the front of the line, it was at this point that the Americans started to appear, each one(or group) and there were multiple, showeed up at the front of the line and asked the Italian guard where the line was and how long they'd have to wait, the couple in front of us spoke a little english so they tried to help out, but in between Americans we managed to expose ourselves so it bacame our job! much to my disgust we had to explain the whole thing to each of the STUPID Americans that showed up, as I mentioned earlier the two lines were clearly marked in english, so much so that Carol and I, who aren't particularly seasoned travellers managed to read the signs and walk to the back of the line without having to push in between the people standing in line and ask dumb questions.
Before being identified as english speakers who understood what was going on because we could read, we even watched one american put on disgusted look when the Italian guard managed to convey to them that he didn't speak english, I could only stand back in awe and imagine the same person if an Italian dared to approach them in their home town and speak to them in Italian, asking for directions, I can only imagine how they'd react if the roles were reversed!!!
Anyway, after surviving the onslaught of people who couldn't read, we entered the Acadamia, the art was amazing(sorry no photo's allowed, so the photo I took from outside 2 days ago is the best we've got), but rest assured that it's worth standing in line and even worth dealing with the stupid people!! David is a massive figure, and funnily enough, even though apparently his proportions are very accurate, I would think his hands and feet are a bit too big for the rest of him, but what would I know!!!
Once we'd wandered around the museum for a couple of hours we headed back to the car, and as we still didn't know how to get a bus ticket we walked, only took about 40 minutes and was pleasant enough even though it was sprinkling rain.
Back in the car and a roughly 3 hour trip to Venice, pretty much without incident apart from the usual can't possibly drive in my lane and my own issues with understanding the speed limits......
Got to Venice and parked the car, was asked the leave the keys in it by a young man in a white shirt who looked official anyway, hopefully we'll still have a car when we leave Venice!!
Hotel was easy enough to find, I'll give you the run down on Florence after dinner, it's been a good day and we've enjoyed ourselves again.
Hope this finds everyone well, talk to you all soon, Richard and Carol
A Couple of Photo's from Florence - sorry none from inside the Academia
Wednesday 27 July 2011
Rome Day 2 - Vatican City - bah humbug!
Sorry if the title of blog offends, but having the Catholic Church ask for $106 Euro or approximately $160AUD for the two of us to enter is a little offensive in itself.
Before we'd arrived at the vatican we'd already looked up the ticket purchase and decided that although we'd both like to see the sistine chapel, that was more than we we're prepared to pay.
I must say that the main square at the front of the Vatican city is very impressive, including the main road leading up to the square which is very wide for a street in Rome and very weel kept in comparison to many others. Unfortunately there were some works underway around the front of the Vatican so some of the buildings were shrouded by scaffolding and hessian, and there was one "naf" as Carol put it, 60 foot high picture of Pope John Paul the 2nd hanging on one side of the square. So although it was all very impressive, it was also a little discomforting to see the absolute extravagance of the place.
Before we made it to the Vatican, we had started the day quite late, mainly due to some over indulgence of our own on the previous evening, but once up and going we walked the city from one end to the other again, and I swear by the end of this "holiday" we'll both have massive calves due to the sheer number of kilometers we're covering on foot. Anyway as usual I digress, on our travels during the morning we "found shit" which is the phrase we've coined when we stumble upon things we weren't really looking for, and because we took a less than direct route to the Vatican, we managed to find some very interesting things, we stumbled upon the Italian parliament, and even took photo's of the building without being arrested or shot at, you'll also see a picture of the tall skinny thing that's in the square (or Piazza as they're called in Italy, see I am learning something) I attempted to take an "artsy" photo of it where the sun is just peaking around the edge of it, nice eh?
Once we'd finished being nervous while taking photo's with about 15 Italian police standing around doing what they do best (smoke and talk on their mobile phones) we kept on heading in the general direction of the Vatican, the next thing we "found" was the Castel Sant' Angelo, which was originally someones tomb (Hadrian was the blokes name), he was a Roman Emperor at some stage and was keen enough to build this massive structure to house his corpse. Pretty nice digs to, with a great view of the Vatican (which of course wasn't there when he built the thing!!) As the Catholic church moved in there and used it as a fortress for quite a while after Hadrian died, there was an amazing amount of lavish decoration done (anyone else noticing a theme here?), pretty amazing to look at anyway, and they even had a recreation of one of the popes bedrooms.
Once we'd spent a few hours wandering around someones tomb and then headed off to the Vatican for a while, Carol wanted to check out the Trevi fountain again, to hopefully get a bit closer to it and maybe get a better photo, so we walked all the way back across Rome to find the same massive crowd that was there yesterday (not surprising really!) so we decided to visit our favourite cafe and drink 660ml bottles of beer again (nope we didn't learn). It was really nice watching all of the different people head to and from the Trevi fountain, as well as watching the various Statues attempt to extract money from the tourists. We even struck up a conversation with a belgium couple, where between their English and Carol's German we managed to have quite a good conversation.
Eventually we decided that we should stop drinking beer and get something to eat (after 3 bottles each!) so we went back to the hotel, changed and went looking for a nice restaurant, we found one not far from the Hotel. I had a steak, which I think will be the last one in Europe, as although it was really well cooked, it was expensive and wasn't a great cut of meat, I'm assuming that we're just spoilt in Australia and meat is soo expensive over here that this is more the norm unless you head to a REALLY expensive restaurant. Carol had a really nice spaghetti dish and we also found a nice bottle of Shiraz.
Anyway that was day 2 in Rome, tomorrow we head back to Florence to have a quick look at David's bits and then we're off to Venice....
Rome Day 2 - Vatican City and Castel Sant Angelo
Before we'd arrived at the vatican we'd already looked up the ticket purchase and decided that although we'd both like to see the sistine chapel, that was more than we we're prepared to pay.
I must say that the main square at the front of the Vatican city is very impressive, including the main road leading up to the square which is very wide for a street in Rome and very weel kept in comparison to many others. Unfortunately there were some works underway around the front of the Vatican so some of the buildings were shrouded by scaffolding and hessian, and there was one "naf" as Carol put it, 60 foot high picture of Pope John Paul the 2nd hanging on one side of the square. So although it was all very impressive, it was also a little discomforting to see the absolute extravagance of the place.
Before we made it to the Vatican, we had started the day quite late, mainly due to some over indulgence of our own on the previous evening, but once up and going we walked the city from one end to the other again, and I swear by the end of this "holiday" we'll both have massive calves due to the sheer number of kilometers we're covering on foot. Anyway as usual I digress, on our travels during the morning we "found shit" which is the phrase we've coined when we stumble upon things we weren't really looking for, and because we took a less than direct route to the Vatican, we managed to find some very interesting things, we stumbled upon the Italian parliament, and even took photo's of the building without being arrested or shot at, you'll also see a picture of the tall skinny thing that's in the square (or Piazza as they're called in Italy, see I am learning something) I attempted to take an "artsy" photo of it where the sun is just peaking around the edge of it, nice eh?
Once we'd finished being nervous while taking photo's with about 15 Italian police standing around doing what they do best (smoke and talk on their mobile phones) we kept on heading in the general direction of the Vatican, the next thing we "found" was the Castel Sant' Angelo, which was originally someones tomb (Hadrian was the blokes name), he was a Roman Emperor at some stage and was keen enough to build this massive structure to house his corpse. Pretty nice digs to, with a great view of the Vatican (which of course wasn't there when he built the thing!!) As the Catholic church moved in there and used it as a fortress for quite a while after Hadrian died, there was an amazing amount of lavish decoration done (anyone else noticing a theme here?), pretty amazing to look at anyway, and they even had a recreation of one of the popes bedrooms.
Once we'd spent a few hours wandering around someones tomb and then headed off to the Vatican for a while, Carol wanted to check out the Trevi fountain again, to hopefully get a bit closer to it and maybe get a better photo, so we walked all the way back across Rome to find the same massive crowd that was there yesterday (not surprising really!) so we decided to visit our favourite cafe and drink 660ml bottles of beer again (nope we didn't learn). It was really nice watching all of the different people head to and from the Trevi fountain, as well as watching the various Statues attempt to extract money from the tourists. We even struck up a conversation with a belgium couple, where between their English and Carol's German we managed to have quite a good conversation.
Eventually we decided that we should stop drinking beer and get something to eat (after 3 bottles each!) so we went back to the hotel, changed and went looking for a nice restaurant, we found one not far from the Hotel. I had a steak, which I think will be the last one in Europe, as although it was really well cooked, it was expensive and wasn't a great cut of meat, I'm assuming that we're just spoilt in Australia and meat is soo expensive over here that this is more the norm unless you head to a REALLY expensive restaurant. Carol had a really nice spaghetti dish and we also found a nice bottle of Shiraz.
Anyway that was day 2 in Rome, tomorrow we head back to Florence to have a quick look at David's bits and then we're off to Venice....
Rome Day 2 - Vatican City and Castel Sant Angelo
Tuesday 26 July 2011
Florence - Rome - Colosseum
As the Accademia (where David is standing) and at least one other museum who's name escapes me were closed today, we decided to modify our travel plans and head off to Rome this morning, as we have to travel back past Florence on our way to Venice, we'll leave Rome early on Wednesday morning and spend the afternoon in Florence.
Major bummer for today was that I managed to scratch the car trying to follow the GPS instructions to turn down a really (no really really) small street. A quick check of the website revealed that the insurance has $0 excess, so now I'm a bit less worried, I did of course have visions of having to pay a $1500 excess for the rest of the trip to Rome though, so we were both very relieved once we had checked the insurance.
While travelling to Rome it became apparent that the Italians, even more so than the French, have decided that the lines on the roads are only for decoration, it seems to be a national past time to drive along the lines rather than between them, this was on a 3 lane highway at speeds of 130km/h. French and Italian car makers should also remove the indicators from all of the cars they sell over here as it's a WOFTAM (waste of .... time and money) attaching them to the car, they're seldom used and on more than one occaision the wrong one is flashing when the car changes lanes (or moves from following one white line to a different white line).
We've now also discoverd that we shouldn't have driven the car into the centre ot Rome or Florence as they have LTZ's or low traffic zones, the hotels have sorted this out for us though, as you can bring the car in if you're staying overnight, but you're supposed to give prior warning....whoops! Kn owing this now we'll have to leave the car on the outskirts of Florence when we go back there, so we'll be packing the backpacks with the laptop and iPad so that we're only leaving clothes behind for the theives that will target our red numberplate. (yes the red number plate means we're tourists! something to do with us owning the car when we're not residents of Europe, clearly identifies us as having no idea which is probably why no-one has hit me yet)
Once we arrived in Rome and found the hotel, I took the car to the "special" car park and handed the key over to someone i've never met and walked away! hopefully it really is a carpark.
We then set off to find the Colosseum and found quite a few land marks along the way, the Military museum is really impressive. I've posted a photo taken from our hotel balcony that shows how close we are to the military museum.
The colosseum is awesome!!!!! it's absolutely amazing to see what the Romans built a very very long time ago, I apologise for the photo's as they really don't do it justice, for anyone who planning on visiting Rome, I have some advice "bring a wide angle lense!!" most of the sites you visit are very big and you don't have the room to stand far enough back to take a decent photo, the Camera we bought in Singapore is coming in very handy as the digital SLR has a lense on it that generally doesn't give a wide enough shot. All of the monuments and historical places are crammed in amongst the rest og the city, meaning that you don't get to stand back to take a photo!
Once we'd trekked in and around the colosseum we headed off towards the Trevi Fountain, which was soething that I knew nothing of but Carol was keen to see, once we got there I understood, it's and amazing piece of sculpture, and was definitely worth the walk. Once we'd finished taking some photo's ofthe fountain we walked about 20m and decided that it was time for some beer, so we sat down at a Cafe and ordered some "large beers", which resulted in 660ml bottles of Astro Nazzura showing up ;-), all good.
Once we had managed to drink 2 of these each we wandered (not in a straight line though) off to find some dinner, quite close to our hotel we found a restaurant that looked OK, so we went inand sat down for dinner. Carol tried her second Rissotto in Italy and to be honest I liked this one better as the Rice didn't leave an after taste in your mouth like the first one did, I tried a Spaghetti Bolognese which was really good. We decided that it would be a good idea to have a bottle of wine with dinner, which we paid for this morning, but at the time we enjoyed it.
Overall we had a good first day in Rome, the city is beautiful although not quite as clean as Paris and we're still having a blast, although all of this culture is really quite tiring and our legs are going to be massive after all oft his walking!!
Photos of the Colosseum and Trevi fountain and other Rome places
Major bummer for today was that I managed to scratch the car trying to follow the GPS instructions to turn down a really (no really really) small street. A quick check of the website revealed that the insurance has $0 excess, so now I'm a bit less worried, I did of course have visions of having to pay a $1500 excess for the rest of the trip to Rome though, so we were both very relieved once we had checked the insurance.
While travelling to Rome it became apparent that the Italians, even more so than the French, have decided that the lines on the roads are only for decoration, it seems to be a national past time to drive along the lines rather than between them, this was on a 3 lane highway at speeds of 130km/h. French and Italian car makers should also remove the indicators from all of the cars they sell over here as it's a WOFTAM (waste of .... time and money) attaching them to the car, they're seldom used and on more than one occaision the wrong one is flashing when the car changes lanes (or moves from following one white line to a different white line).
We've now also discoverd that we shouldn't have driven the car into the centre ot Rome or Florence as they have LTZ's or low traffic zones, the hotels have sorted this out for us though, as you can bring the car in if you're staying overnight, but you're supposed to give prior warning....whoops! Kn owing this now we'll have to leave the car on the outskirts of Florence when we go back there, so we'll be packing the backpacks with the laptop and iPad so that we're only leaving clothes behind for the theives that will target our red numberplate. (yes the red number plate means we're tourists! something to do with us owning the car when we're not residents of Europe, clearly identifies us as having no idea which is probably why no-one has hit me yet)
Once we arrived in Rome and found the hotel, I took the car to the "special" car park and handed the key over to someone i've never met and walked away! hopefully it really is a carpark.
We then set off to find the Colosseum and found quite a few land marks along the way, the Military museum is really impressive. I've posted a photo taken from our hotel balcony that shows how close we are to the military museum.
The colosseum is awesome!!!!! it's absolutely amazing to see what the Romans built a very very long time ago, I apologise for the photo's as they really don't do it justice, for anyone who planning on visiting Rome, I have some advice "bring a wide angle lense!!" most of the sites you visit are very big and you don't have the room to stand far enough back to take a decent photo, the Camera we bought in Singapore is coming in very handy as the digital SLR has a lense on it that generally doesn't give a wide enough shot. All of the monuments and historical places are crammed in amongst the rest og the city, meaning that you don't get to stand back to take a photo!
Once we'd trekked in and around the colosseum we headed off towards the Trevi Fountain, which was soething that I knew nothing of but Carol was keen to see, once we got there I understood, it's and amazing piece of sculpture, and was definitely worth the walk. Once we'd finished taking some photo's ofthe fountain we walked about 20m and decided that it was time for some beer, so we sat down at a Cafe and ordered some "large beers", which resulted in 660ml bottles of Astro Nazzura showing up ;-), all good.
Once we had managed to drink 2 of these each we wandered (not in a straight line though) off to find some dinner, quite close to our hotel we found a restaurant that looked OK, so we went inand sat down for dinner. Carol tried her second Rissotto in Italy and to be honest I liked this one better as the Rice didn't leave an after taste in your mouth like the first one did, I tried a Spaghetti Bolognese which was really good. We decided that it would be a good idea to have a bottle of wine with dinner, which we paid for this morning, but at the time we enjoyed it.
Overall we had a good first day in Rome, the city is beautiful although not quite as clean as Paris and we're still having a blast, although all of this culture is really quite tiring and our legs are going to be massive after all oft his walking!!
Photos of the Colosseum and Trevi fountain and other Rome places
Sunday 24 July 2011
Monaco - Florence - what road rules
After securing the Monaco lap record we set the GPS for our Florence hotel and set off, about 1.5k's into our trip to Florence(yes very much still n Monaco) the GPS decided to play silly buggers and sent us into some of the very back roads of Monaco, when the GPS said "turn right" we looked up the street we were turning into and Carol and I said "WTF" in unison, the streets of Monaco are all narrow, but this was ridiculous and about 1k later we weren't able to turn the direction the GPS asked us to as someone had parked a car on that street and there simply wasn't enough room to drive up that street.
After a few more hairpins and sharp turns we arrived back on the same road that the GPS had taken us from about 5mins beforehand, and I swear it woiuld have been a 30sec trip up the main road!! As we were nearing edge of Monaco the GPS had one last trick for us, asking me to keep right we then drove straight past the required left hand turn, and had to drive about 1K before being able to turn around and go back, no real damage done but a bit frustrating all the same.
Once on the freeways we were off and running, and apart from the very confusing speed signs and changes in speed limits it was all good, I'm fairly sure that I was either 20kph below or 20kph above the speed limit most of the time, but no one else seemed to care either, with people in the right lane travelling at about 70kph and people in the left lane travelling at about 140kph. While I'm at it, lane markings are purley a guideline in Europe that shouldn't be followed in most instances, the number of people that drive along the dotted white lines like they're following the black line on the bottom of the pool while swimming needs to be seen to be believed, the Italians are also much less patient that the French, if you're in the fast lane when they come up behind you, you should pull over immediately, whether there is a car beside you or not, so the bird came out of it's cage a few times, much to Carols disgust.
Believe it or not we did make it to Florence unscathed(physically at least) in time to see Cadel win the Tour de France, which I thoroughly enjoyed, excellent to see that once they stop everyone taking the gear(yes I mean drugs), the race is a much closer affair, with anyone of 5 or 6 riders having a chance to win this year depending on their form on any given day.
Once we watched Cadel we headed off to explore Florence, I have to say that this is the first time that I've really felt that we might get robbed so far on the trip, we walked through the train station and I really believed that several groups of people were looking for people to rip off. Once surviving the train station we walked to several Florence land marks, the buildings here are stunning, but the city is generally grubbier than Paris.
At one point we walked past the turn off to the "Accademia" where the statue of David is, but found another square with some amazing buildings which we'll work out the origins on the "net" when we have a minute. We also found the amazing church that you'll see a number of photo's of before heading back to "Accademia" only to find that it was closed. While I was taking a photo of the front door, it opened to let the staff out and I noticing that I could see "Davids" bollocks through the door, I snapped a photo, what I didn't know at the time was that this was as close as we'd get to "David" as when we enquired as to tomorrows opening time, the staff member said "no" and pointed to the sign on the wall which clearly stated that Monday was his day off!!! So we'll have to see if we can "drop in" on David on our way to Venice after our visit to Rome.
We've now had some dinner, about 2 bottles of wine and a small glass of Lemon spirit which was "on the house" by the Trattoria where we ate. So please excuse the even worse than usual spelling and grammar, but I'm blaming the alchahol, and if it's better than usual then maybe I should drink more ;-)
Photos of Florence
After a few more hairpins and sharp turns we arrived back on the same road that the GPS had taken us from about 5mins beforehand, and I swear it woiuld have been a 30sec trip up the main road!! As we were nearing edge of Monaco the GPS had one last trick for us, asking me to keep right we then drove straight past the required left hand turn, and had to drive about 1K before being able to turn around and go back, no real damage done but a bit frustrating all the same.
Once on the freeways we were off and running, and apart from the very confusing speed signs and changes in speed limits it was all good, I'm fairly sure that I was either 20kph below or 20kph above the speed limit most of the time, but no one else seemed to care either, with people in the right lane travelling at about 70kph and people in the left lane travelling at about 140kph. While I'm at it, lane markings are purley a guideline in Europe that shouldn't be followed in most instances, the number of people that drive along the dotted white lines like they're following the black line on the bottom of the pool while swimming needs to be seen to be believed, the Italians are also much less patient that the French, if you're in the fast lane when they come up behind you, you should pull over immediately, whether there is a car beside you or not, so the bird came out of it's cage a few times, much to Carols disgust.
Believe it or not we did make it to Florence unscathed(physically at least) in time to see Cadel win the Tour de France, which I thoroughly enjoyed, excellent to see that once they stop everyone taking the gear(yes I mean drugs), the race is a much closer affair, with anyone of 5 or 6 riders having a chance to win this year depending on their form on any given day.
Once we watched Cadel we headed off to explore Florence, I have to say that this is the first time that I've really felt that we might get robbed so far on the trip, we walked through the train station and I really believed that several groups of people were looking for people to rip off. Once surviving the train station we walked to several Florence land marks, the buildings here are stunning, but the city is generally grubbier than Paris.
At one point we walked past the turn off to the "Accademia" where the statue of David is, but found another square with some amazing buildings which we'll work out the origins on the "net" when we have a minute. We also found the amazing church that you'll see a number of photo's of before heading back to "Accademia" only to find that it was closed. While I was taking a photo of the front door, it opened to let the staff out and I noticing that I could see "Davids" bollocks through the door, I snapped a photo, what I didn't know at the time was that this was as close as we'd get to "David" as when we enquired as to tomorrows opening time, the staff member said "no" and pointed to the sign on the wall which clearly stated that Monday was his day off!!! So we'll have to see if we can "drop in" on David on our way to Venice after our visit to Rome.
We've now had some dinner, about 2 bottles of wine and a small glass of Lemon spirit which was "on the house" by the Trattoria where we ate. So please excuse the even worse than usual spelling and grammar, but I'm blaming the alchahol, and if it's better than usual then maybe I should drink more ;-)
Photos of Florence
Monaco - you just have to ask why
Monaco is a very strange place, it has some amazing architecture and landscapes, mainly due to it's location, where the vertical distance almost matches the horizontal when travelling north south(or towards or away from the marina). This landscape necessitates external elevators, and some amazing bridges and tunnels. But in general the whole place feels a bit bizzare, where you're either disgustingly rich (about 1% of the people here) or you're trying to rub shoulders with the disgustingly rich in the hope that it will somehow rub off.
The boats (or yacths or ships, don't ask me what to call them!!) are absolutely ridiculous, it's probably worth a visit just to see the extravagance that exists, but there isn't much else to bring you here in my opinion.
Carol and I drove the Formula one track(only because Carol said I had to, and there's a photo just to prove it), I'm sure I now hold the lap record for a Renault Megane 1.5 Diesel, as I was really flying around there, I only took out 2 small children and 1 granny, a small price to pay for the lap record in my opinion ;-)
We did visit the royal palace and went on the tour, it was very good and really gave you a good understanding of how the principality of Monaco came to exist, unfortunately photo's weren't allowed, as there was some amazing artefacts in there as well as some really nice architecture and Decore, so you'll have to come over and look for yourself!
We did have a nice meal, and Monaco feels really safe and is quite clean, 1 day was plenty though, so after rising late on the second day and the afore mentioned laps(yes there was actually 2) of the F1 track we headed off to Florence.
Monaco pics
The boats (or yacths or ships, don't ask me what to call them!!) are absolutely ridiculous, it's probably worth a visit just to see the extravagance that exists, but there isn't much else to bring you here in my opinion.
Carol and I drove the Formula one track(only because Carol said I had to, and there's a photo just to prove it), I'm sure I now hold the lap record for a Renault Megane 1.5 Diesel, as I was really flying around there, I only took out 2 small children and 1 granny, a small price to pay for the lap record in my opinion ;-)
We did visit the royal palace and went on the tour, it was very good and really gave you a good understanding of how the principality of Monaco came to exist, unfortunately photo's weren't allowed, as there was some amazing artefacts in there as well as some really nice architecture and Decore, so you'll have to come over and look for yourself!
We did have a nice meal, and Monaco feels really safe and is quite clean, 1 day was plenty though, so after rising late on the second day and the afore mentioned laps(yes there was actually 2) of the F1 track we headed off to Florence.
Monaco pics
Saturday 23 July 2011
Vive Le Tour
Today is Tour de France day, we're off to Alpe d Huez to watch the guys suffer up the last climb of the Tour, today is the day that the Tour will be won or lost as it's the last chance for the Schleck brothers to put enough time on Cadel to be safe in tomorrows time trial.
After a basic breakfast at the very basic hotel we headed into Grenoble to find some supplies to take up the hill with us. We found a bakery, purchased some Pizza slices, a baguette and some croissants, we then found a deli "fromagery?" and bought some brie to go with it, finally we also found a fresh fruit shop and bought some bananas and apples.
Off we went, initial plan was to head into Modane to try and catch up with the "tour caravan" before the start of the race, and then head back to Alpe d Huez to watch them come up the hill. It became apparent fairly early in our travels that we weren't going to be able to manage that in the alotted time, so we cut our losses and headed straight for the mountain.
We arrived in the small village at the bottom of the mountain (sorry not sure what it was called) by about 10:30 and there were people everywhere, but we managed to find a park with some local help (after we drove into his backyard by mistake). Since we had about 6 hours to kill, we sat down at a Cafe/Bar and had some coffee and then a beer each, at this point we decided that we should head on up the hill as we were'n sure exactly how long it was going to walk up there.
At the bottom of the hill we spotted a food van selling beer, so we bought 4 to take with us, stopped the man from opening them so we could carry them only to realise 2 mins later that they were'nt screw caps and we didn't have a bottle opener!!
We walked for about an hour or so and arrived at the town of Huez (less than half way up the hill), we sat down on some steps beside ahouse and had the baguette and brie and of course a beer each (managed to use some aussie ingenuity and open the bottles with the edge of the concrete wall nearby).
Once morning tea was over we continued walking(more like climbing) until we reached the 9th hairpin (counted from the top down) and found a shady spot to setup camp. Not exactly sure how far there was left to get to the top, I suspect around 5-7k's but I could be wrong.
It was only about 1:30pm when we reached that point, so we settled in for a 3.5 - 4 hour wait. I thought that this was going to be really boring and drag on, but although there are "only" 198 riders that start the Tour, there are at least 600 cars that go with them. The steady stream of people and cars kept us amused while we waited, and about 1 hour before the riders arrive the "caravan" comes through, which consists of the sponsors vans and trucks throwing stuff at you, such as caps, bandanas, key rings, food, and other assorted bits and pieces, we managed to score some schwag which was good, but the kids running around picked up the majority of stuff that was thrown.
Then the riders arrived, Contador (booo) was in the lead, followed by Sanchez and Rolland, and behind them the group containing Cadel and the Schlecks, AWESOME, before this stage Cadel had a 3 min lead over Contador and was within 1minute of both Andy and Frank Schleck, if he stays with them to the top he's pretty much won the Tour.
We find out through some multi lingual Dutch or Norwegen guys (or maybe they were German) that Cadel had finished with the Schlecks and had only lost around 30 Seconds to Contador, one good time tiral and the tour was his..excited doesn't come close to describing me once I found this out.
So we watched and cheered on the remainder of the riders, even scored a bottle from one of the Saxobank riders, and then headed on back down the hill. On the way back down we realised just how far we had walked up the hill and I'm here to tell you that it was a loooong way.
Reached the bottom of the hill around 7:30pm to find the worlds biggest carpark, holly traffic jams batman, because of the traffic, we sat in a cafe Carol had a coffee and I had a softie and I'm not exagerating when I say that the traffic didn't move, in fact the traffic didn't move for the next 3 hours, some people sat in their cars, some lay on the road beside their cars, others sat on their cars, but no-one moved!!
After going on a bit of an excursion with the GPS to try and find a backroad out of town, Carol and I determined that there were only 3 ways out of town and they were all at a standstill, so we parked the car again (9:00pm at this stage) and walked back into the centre of town to find something to eat, neither of us were particularly hungry, so we had Ice Cream for dinner walked to the outskirts of townb to survey the situation and went back to the car at 10:30pm. When we got back to the car we had decided that we would have a nap and start the trip later, but just as we were deciding that the traffic moved and as we were leaving via the quiet side of town that headed east we managed to get out of town in about 30mins, I pity the people heading west they must have been stuck in the traffic for hours.
When we left Alpe d Huez we had 2 options, head west with the traffic towards the tollways to head for Monaco, or head east on a more direct but more intersting route through the french alps and pyranese. Much more interesting as we discovered, the GPS was showing 320k's but 5:50 travel time, bollocks I thought, couldn't possibly take that long. Well an australian who hasn't driven around the french alps before has no idea just how f'n big these "hills" are and of course how many your going to have to cross to get where your going.
You see when picking the route I hadn't really thought it out, and hadn't realised that we'd have to traverse the French alps and the Pyranese to get to monaco this way, which is why the GPS said go the other way and use the tollways, even though it was about 200l's longer, it would have been faster (barring the traffic that was there anyway)
About the time we were traversing our 3rd or 4th mountain (I don't really remember when one stopped and another started except that you go up and then down and then up and then down) we really found a big mutha, we took a photo of a sign that said we were 2.5k's up but we actually passed a couple more before we finished climbing and we finished so close to 3k's up that it's splitting hairs to say it was less than that. Not only were the mountains really big, but the roads were very narrow and not well marked, and at 1:30am when you're a bit tired from walking up and down one of these mountains, it would be better to go the other way. I suspect that I would have enjoyed the drive if it was daylight, but it wasn't much fun at this time of the night.
We did make it to Monaco safe and sound, at about 3:45am!!! went to bed and that was the end of an excellent and eventful day, I'll map the route so I can see exactly where we went but a brief view of the map shows that traversed many, many mountains.
Tomorrow (today of course as I didn't sit up and write this) has been declared a rest day!
A couple of Photos from Alpe d Huez - enjoy I know I did
After a basic breakfast at the very basic hotel we headed into Grenoble to find some supplies to take up the hill with us. We found a bakery, purchased some Pizza slices, a baguette and some croissants, we then found a deli "fromagery?" and bought some brie to go with it, finally we also found a fresh fruit shop and bought some bananas and apples.
Off we went, initial plan was to head into Modane to try and catch up with the "tour caravan" before the start of the race, and then head back to Alpe d Huez to watch them come up the hill. It became apparent fairly early in our travels that we weren't going to be able to manage that in the alotted time, so we cut our losses and headed straight for the mountain.
We arrived in the small village at the bottom of the mountain (sorry not sure what it was called) by about 10:30 and there were people everywhere, but we managed to find a park with some local help (after we drove into his backyard by mistake). Since we had about 6 hours to kill, we sat down at a Cafe/Bar and had some coffee and then a beer each, at this point we decided that we should head on up the hill as we were'n sure exactly how long it was going to walk up there.
At the bottom of the hill we spotted a food van selling beer, so we bought 4 to take with us, stopped the man from opening them so we could carry them only to realise 2 mins later that they were'nt screw caps and we didn't have a bottle opener!!
We walked for about an hour or so and arrived at the town of Huez (less than half way up the hill), we sat down on some steps beside ahouse and had the baguette and brie and of course a beer each (managed to use some aussie ingenuity and open the bottles with the edge of the concrete wall nearby).
Once morning tea was over we continued walking(more like climbing) until we reached the 9th hairpin (counted from the top down) and found a shady spot to setup camp. Not exactly sure how far there was left to get to the top, I suspect around 5-7k's but I could be wrong.
It was only about 1:30pm when we reached that point, so we settled in for a 3.5 - 4 hour wait. I thought that this was going to be really boring and drag on, but although there are "only" 198 riders that start the Tour, there are at least 600 cars that go with them. The steady stream of people and cars kept us amused while we waited, and about 1 hour before the riders arrive the "caravan" comes through, which consists of the sponsors vans and trucks throwing stuff at you, such as caps, bandanas, key rings, food, and other assorted bits and pieces, we managed to score some schwag which was good, but the kids running around picked up the majority of stuff that was thrown.
Then the riders arrived, Contador (booo) was in the lead, followed by Sanchez and Rolland, and behind them the group containing Cadel and the Schlecks, AWESOME, before this stage Cadel had a 3 min lead over Contador and was within 1minute of both Andy and Frank Schleck, if he stays with them to the top he's pretty much won the Tour.
We find out through some multi lingual Dutch or Norwegen guys (or maybe they were German) that Cadel had finished with the Schlecks and had only lost around 30 Seconds to Contador, one good time tiral and the tour was his..excited doesn't come close to describing me once I found this out.
So we watched and cheered on the remainder of the riders, even scored a bottle from one of the Saxobank riders, and then headed on back down the hill. On the way back down we realised just how far we had walked up the hill and I'm here to tell you that it was a loooong way.
Reached the bottom of the hill around 7:30pm to find the worlds biggest carpark, holly traffic jams batman, because of the traffic, we sat in a cafe Carol had a coffee and I had a softie and I'm not exagerating when I say that the traffic didn't move, in fact the traffic didn't move for the next 3 hours, some people sat in their cars, some lay on the road beside their cars, others sat on their cars, but no-one moved!!
After going on a bit of an excursion with the GPS to try and find a backroad out of town, Carol and I determined that there were only 3 ways out of town and they were all at a standstill, so we parked the car again (9:00pm at this stage) and walked back into the centre of town to find something to eat, neither of us were particularly hungry, so we had Ice Cream for dinner walked to the outskirts of townb to survey the situation and went back to the car at 10:30pm. When we got back to the car we had decided that we would have a nap and start the trip later, but just as we were deciding that the traffic moved and as we were leaving via the quiet side of town that headed east we managed to get out of town in about 30mins, I pity the people heading west they must have been stuck in the traffic for hours.
When we left Alpe d Huez we had 2 options, head west with the traffic towards the tollways to head for Monaco, or head east on a more direct but more intersting route through the french alps and pyranese. Much more interesting as we discovered, the GPS was showing 320k's but 5:50 travel time, bollocks I thought, couldn't possibly take that long. Well an australian who hasn't driven around the french alps before has no idea just how f'n big these "hills" are and of course how many your going to have to cross to get where your going.
You see when picking the route I hadn't really thought it out, and hadn't realised that we'd have to traverse the French alps and the Pyranese to get to monaco this way, which is why the GPS said go the other way and use the tollways, even though it was about 200l's longer, it would have been faster (barring the traffic that was there anyway)
About the time we were traversing our 3rd or 4th mountain (I don't really remember when one stopped and another started except that you go up and then down and then up and then down) we really found a big mutha, we took a photo of a sign that said we were 2.5k's up but we actually passed a couple more before we finished climbing and we finished so close to 3k's up that it's splitting hairs to say it was less than that. Not only were the mountains really big, but the roads were very narrow and not well marked, and at 1:30am when you're a bit tired from walking up and down one of these mountains, it would be better to go the other way. I suspect that I would have enjoyed the drive if it was daylight, but it wasn't much fun at this time of the night.
We did make it to Monaco safe and sound, at about 3:45am!!! went to bed and that was the end of an excellent and eventful day, I'll map the route so I can see exactly where we went but a brief view of the map shows that traversed many, many mountains.
Tomorrow (today of course as I didn't sit up and write this) has been declared a rest day!
A couple of Photos from Alpe d Huez - enjoy I know I did
Thursday 21 July 2011
Paris - Grenoble
Today was basically a travel day, we had to travel about 650k's from Paris to Grenoble so we could head off to Alpe d Huez tomorrow to watch the Tour. Left the hotel around 9:00 after having some brekky, the car was where we had left it and surprisingly didn't have a parking ticket. When we'd arrived 2 days ago, the advice from the Hotel manager was that the parking ticket "paper" was onyl 11 Euro's and to buy parking card was 10 Euros plus we had to top up the parking every 2 hours. So she said park it there and you'll be unlucky to get a ticket, if you do you only get one per day and it's 11 Euros, so that worked out rather nicely.
Managed to get out of Paris without causing or being involved in an accident, the GPS had said that the proposed route involves tolls, we went with it anyway figuring that there would be a way to pay, just after going through the first toll gate, which only dispensed a ticket and didn't ask for any money, we found a place that seemed to be connected to the toll road, so we pulled up and I went inside to ask what the options were.
"Paarlerview anglaze" I said in my finely honed french accent, "no" came the reply, hmmm this was going to be fun. After much pointing, gesticulating and general confusion, we(Carol had come in and joined the fray after about 15minutes, hard to say whether an additional english speaking person helped or added to the confusion though) left the office with a "thing" to stick to our windscreen that will take lots of money off my credit card whenever I go anywhere near a toll road in France. We did manage to gather that we would need to use the Ticket at the next toll gate and use the thing afterwards. 31 Euros was the cost at the next toll gate "holy f'n what the f was that" or similar may have been spoken by Carol, I of course was much more accepting and calm.
Interestingly for a country where people seem to have no understanding that road rules even exist, let alone follow them, the freeways have speed limits of 130km/h, French people become very polite on freeways, nobody sits in the left lane (that's the fast lane) and in general they don't tail gate. I was happy with the higher speed limit as it shortened the trip somewhat.
Once we arrived in Grenoble and checked in (yes the hotel was booked for the correct day) we watched the last hour or so of the Tour for the day, not a great day for Cadel but he still looks the goods as long as he can keep the status quo tomorrow, he did put in an amazing ride to peg back over 2 minutes of Andy Schlecks 4:24 lead over the last 15k's though, with no help from anyone else.
After watching that we decided that we should find something to do before dinner, so we found some information on a place called Lac Monteynard which sounded like a good spot to see some good scenery. That turned out to be the understatement of the century, Lac Monteynard is in the middle of some pretty big hills (we are in the French Alpes for those not paying attention) and the Scenery from all angles of this place were stunning, the Drive was amazing in itself, and not only because I managed to be on the wrong side of the road on more than one occaision!! There's some attempts at photo's of the scenery here, but I'm pretty sure that we're not doing it justice.
Oh and a footnote, I'm not sure that I've managed to mention that the food is amazing in France, we've been eating in restaraunts mainly and it doesn't seem to matter what you order or how much it costs, it's always really well done.
Paris - Grenoble
Managed to get out of Paris without causing or being involved in an accident, the GPS had said that the proposed route involves tolls, we went with it anyway figuring that there would be a way to pay, just after going through the first toll gate, which only dispensed a ticket and didn't ask for any money, we found a place that seemed to be connected to the toll road, so we pulled up and I went inside to ask what the options were.
"Paarlerview anglaze" I said in my finely honed french accent, "no" came the reply, hmmm this was going to be fun. After much pointing, gesticulating and general confusion, we(Carol had come in and joined the fray after about 15minutes, hard to say whether an additional english speaking person helped or added to the confusion though) left the office with a "thing" to stick to our windscreen that will take lots of money off my credit card whenever I go anywhere near a toll road in France. We did manage to gather that we would need to use the Ticket at the next toll gate and use the thing afterwards. 31 Euros was the cost at the next toll gate "holy f'n what the f was that" or similar may have been spoken by Carol, I of course was much more accepting and calm.
Interestingly for a country where people seem to have no understanding that road rules even exist, let alone follow them, the freeways have speed limits of 130km/h, French people become very polite on freeways, nobody sits in the left lane (that's the fast lane) and in general they don't tail gate. I was happy with the higher speed limit as it shortened the trip somewhat.
Once we arrived in Grenoble and checked in (yes the hotel was booked for the correct day) we watched the last hour or so of the Tour for the day, not a great day for Cadel but he still looks the goods as long as he can keep the status quo tomorrow, he did put in an amazing ride to peg back over 2 minutes of Andy Schlecks 4:24 lead over the last 15k's though, with no help from anyone else.
After watching that we decided that we should find something to do before dinner, so we found some information on a place called Lac Monteynard which sounded like a good spot to see some good scenery. That turned out to be the understatement of the century, Lac Monteynard is in the middle of some pretty big hills (we are in the French Alpes for those not paying attention) and the Scenery from all angles of this place were stunning, the Drive was amazing in itself, and not only because I managed to be on the wrong side of the road on more than one occaision!! There's some attempts at photo's of the scenery here, but I'm pretty sure that we're not doing it justice.
Oh and a footnote, I'm not sure that I've managed to mention that the food is amazing in France, we've been eating in restaraunts mainly and it doesn't seem to matter what you order or how much it costs, it's always really well done.
Paris - Grenoble
Paris Day 2 - The Lourve
Day 2 in Paris started a little later than originally planned, I guess the long hours on the previous day got to us a bit, so we didn't get going properly until around 9:30. After looking through the Photos from the previous day I decided that we weren't taking anywhere near enough photos, so we set out to rectify that quick smart. We headed off in the general direction of the Lourve, stopping at pretty much anything to take photos, we also stopped in a Cafe to have a coffee (sorry cafe creme ;-)) and watch the parisians make a mokery of the road rules for a while.
The architecture in Paris is simply amazing, it doesn't matter wher you go or what you're looking at, it always seems to be worth looking at, we have also noticed that the Parisians in general, get up late, go to work late, always make time to sit down and have a coffee, always make time for lunch, and eat dinner late before retiring late, seems like quite a good lifestyle to me, I'm not really sure how or when they keep the country running, but it seems to be doing just fine from the outside looking in.
Anyway, all of our coffee drinking and photo taking meant that we didn't arrive at the Lourve until around 11:30am, at which point we discovered the longest line I have ever seen, or didn't see as it turned out, because the end of the line was completely out of sight from where we were standing, so we trundled off to the end of the line and got ripped off to the tune of 10 Euros by "Jumbo Jumbo" along the way, so yes it was a long walk.
The line actually moved very quickly so about 30mins after joining the line we were in the Lourve, and considering my estimate when spotting the line was 3 hours, we were pretty happyabout that.
We grabbed the map of the Museum and picked a direction. If like Carol and myself, you have never been to the lourve, there are two things to remember, 1 - it's very, very big and 2 - you'll need more than 1 day to have a good look around, and did I mention that it's BIG!!
Put simply the place is amazing, the collection of historical artefacts is never ending, and although some is more intersting to brain dead sloths like myself, there is plenty that is interesting even if you're not a history buff, and if all else fails you can watch the Americans compare everything to something in America and of course it's better in America.
We did the tourist thing and had a look at the Mona Lisa, from about 20 feet away and behind about 100 people, it is a bit of a pity that there isn't a better organised line to see the old girl, as you have to be keen enough to tread on some small children and poke the odd granny in the eye if you want to get closer, well that or get out of bed before the Parisians, which shouldn't be difficult really.....but I digress.
We also had a look at more Egyptian, Greek and early european artifacts than I would have imagined possible, and of course the building itself is stunning, not to mention that they've been using the building (or parts of it anyway) as a museum since the 1800's (I'm pretty sure that's what I read somewhere anyway).
When we got tired of the Lourve (it's physically exhausting, did I mention it's BIG), we headed off to find Notre Dame, it was quite a bit further away from the Lourve than we expected, since we we're already buggered from the Lourve it would have been nice if it was closer, but we made it anyway, predictably there was another line, and it was moving quite slowly so we didn't go in, but amused ourselves watching people pretend to be Quasimodo.
So we took some piccies and headed towards our hotel, stopped at a pub and drank 2 pints each while we watched the final 40k's of the Tour d France for the day, this resulted in getting lost on the way back to the hotel as our sense of direction may have been impared, bit we eventually found our way home.
I've posted quite a few photos from the day as there were heaps, you'll notice a few where Carol is playing with the new Camera, making panorama's andeven one where she told it to make up a water colour.
Paris Day 2 - The Lourve and Paris pictures
The architecture in Paris is simply amazing, it doesn't matter wher you go or what you're looking at, it always seems to be worth looking at, we have also noticed that the Parisians in general, get up late, go to work late, always make time to sit down and have a coffee, always make time for lunch, and eat dinner late before retiring late, seems like quite a good lifestyle to me, I'm not really sure how or when they keep the country running, but it seems to be doing just fine from the outside looking in.
Anyway, all of our coffee drinking and photo taking meant that we didn't arrive at the Lourve until around 11:30am, at which point we discovered the longest line I have ever seen, or didn't see as it turned out, because the end of the line was completely out of sight from where we were standing, so we trundled off to the end of the line and got ripped off to the tune of 10 Euros by "Jumbo Jumbo" along the way, so yes it was a long walk.
The line actually moved very quickly so about 30mins after joining the line we were in the Lourve, and considering my estimate when spotting the line was 3 hours, we were pretty happyabout that.
We grabbed the map of the Museum and picked a direction. If like Carol and myself, you have never been to the lourve, there are two things to remember, 1 - it's very, very big and 2 - you'll need more than 1 day to have a good look around, and did I mention that it's BIG!!
Put simply the place is amazing, the collection of historical artefacts is never ending, and although some is more intersting to brain dead sloths like myself, there is plenty that is interesting even if you're not a history buff, and if all else fails you can watch the Americans compare everything to something in America and of course it's better in America.
We did the tourist thing and had a look at the Mona Lisa, from about 20 feet away and behind about 100 people, it is a bit of a pity that there isn't a better organised line to see the old girl, as you have to be keen enough to tread on some small children and poke the odd granny in the eye if you want to get closer, well that or get out of bed before the Parisians, which shouldn't be difficult really.....but I digress.
We also had a look at more Egyptian, Greek and early european artifacts than I would have imagined possible, and of course the building itself is stunning, not to mention that they've been using the building (or parts of it anyway) as a museum since the 1800's (I'm pretty sure that's what I read somewhere anyway).
When we got tired of the Lourve (it's physically exhausting, did I mention it's BIG), we headed off to find Notre Dame, it was quite a bit further away from the Lourve than we expected, since we we're already buggered from the Lourve it would have been nice if it was closer, but we made it anyway, predictably there was another line, and it was moving quite slowly so we didn't go in, but amused ourselves watching people pretend to be Quasimodo.
So we took some piccies and headed towards our hotel, stopped at a pub and drank 2 pints each while we watched the final 40k's of the Tour d France for the day, this resulted in getting lost on the way back to the hotel as our sense of direction may have been impared, bit we eventually found our way home.
I've posted quite a few photos from the day as there were heaps, you'll notice a few where Carol is playing with the new Camera, making panorama's andeven one where she told it to make up a water colour.
Paris Day 2 - The Lourve and Paris pictures
Tuesday 19 July 2011
Plane flights and Paris
An accumulated 14 Hours on a plane wasn't lots of fun, but we made it and even managed to get our passports stamped as we went through Finland! bummer was that we didn't need to get them stamped when we came into France as we didn't pass through customs in France, once you're in Europe, you're in Europe it would seem.
Flights were good, Finnair seems to have more legroom than Qantas, probably because every Finnish male we saw was around 6'4"
Landed in Paris after a 2.5 hour flight back from Helsinki, welcomed by pouring rain, managed to get lost in the airport no less than 3 times looking for where we needed to be to pickup the car, but eventually got there after a couple of mildly confusing(for everyone concerned) phone calls.
Picked up the brand new Renault Megane, stalled it trying to leave car park and then proceeded to head for the wrong side of the road while exiting the carpark, I swear that the office staff at Renault Drive are not expecting to get the car back in one piece after that display of awesomeness.
The car lease company had given us instructions on how to get to the nearest petrol station as the car only has a smallamount of fuel in it at pickup. So we punch the hotel address into the GPS and off we go, handily the GPS was guiding us right past the petrol station anyway, so that was easy or so we thought, pull up at the petrol pump, jump out and start filling the car, nope nothing happening, as this pump had a credit card slot I tried putting a card in there, nope still no luck, looking around I realised that the other pumps didn't have card readers so I assumed that this pump was for a special card and moved to another pump, not easy as the petrol station was crowded. Pull up at pump #2 try again, still no luck, then a womans voice comes over the loud speaker, speaking french of course, I look up and the woman behindthe counter is waving her arms in the air, this isn't going to be as easy as I thought, so I head into the building and there are lots of people standing around looking confused, it's at this point that I realise that no-one is putting any fuel in any cars, Carol starts asking questions and it turns out that the computer system is broken, so no fuel.
So we use the GPS again, and ask it to find us a petrol station nearby, it takes us off the main road which is nice, but remember it's still raining heavily, and I'm still getting used to the combination of being on the wrong side of the road, having the gearstick on the wrong side(yes it's manual) and having the blinkers and the wipers reversed, I indicated more than once trying to get the wipers going. So the GPS takes us on a bit of a journey, and with only about 1k to go, tells us to turn the wrong way down a one way road, so after doing 2 laps of a long block to check that we really couldn't go where it was telling us we pick the next petrol station and head off, finally we find a petrol station that works and fill the car, there was much rejoicing.
Once that was done we reset the GPS to the hotel, and after another 2 or 3 wrong turns we were on our way. Next up was a traffic jam on the main highway into Paris, GPS pops up and tells us there's a traffic jam and it's got a faster way to the hotel, we select "go for it" and we're off through the back streets of the outskirts of Paris, it's at this point that I realise that everyone who said "parisians just park anywhere" is telling the truth, there was a double or triple parked car to negotiate at least every 200m, and most of the time it was more like every 100m, but we were making good progress and the parisians are very used to you driving at them on the wrong side of the road, due to all of the double parked cars, so I fit right in ;-)
With about 2k's to go to the hotel, I open my big mouth and say to Carol, if this GPS takes me anywhere near the Arc de Triumphe, I'm bailing out, I've read that you're not insured on that piece of road and I'm not planning on having an accident on my first day, although we'vealready had several near misses, not all of them my fault either. About 5 seconds after I open my mouth, we look up and we're driving straight down Charles de Gaul ave, straight for that bloody roundabout. So I pike, make a right turn, go about 2 blocks and make a left, and for the next kilometer or so, every time the GPS says turn left, I swear at it.
We do manage to avoid the Arc de Triumphe and have a relatively uneventful trip to the hotel, we park the car and head on in only to find out I've booked the hotel for the wrong dates!! Nice one Rich, lucky for us the hotel has spare rooms and we're fine, yes I have checked the other bookings and they're fine so I don't know what brain fade caused that one.
So after our eventful trip into Paris we head off to find some food, haven't eaten for about 8 Hours so we were getting a bit peckish, once that was sorted we headed off for the Eiffel Tower, it really is impressive in real life, and we managed to walk up to the second level, about 600 steps I think, took plenty of Photos of course and from there we wandered along the North bank of the Seine, finding a couple of closed Muesums along the way.
That'll do for now, I'm off for brekky and then we're off to the Louvre.
Pictures from Day 1 in Paris
Flights were good, Finnair seems to have more legroom than Qantas, probably because every Finnish male we saw was around 6'4"
Landed in Paris after a 2.5 hour flight back from Helsinki, welcomed by pouring rain, managed to get lost in the airport no less than 3 times looking for where we needed to be to pickup the car, but eventually got there after a couple of mildly confusing(for everyone concerned) phone calls.
Picked up the brand new Renault Megane, stalled it trying to leave car park and then proceeded to head for the wrong side of the road while exiting the carpark, I swear that the office staff at Renault Drive are not expecting to get the car back in one piece after that display of awesomeness.
The car lease company had given us instructions on how to get to the nearest petrol station as the car only has a smallamount of fuel in it at pickup. So we punch the hotel address into the GPS and off we go, handily the GPS was guiding us right past the petrol station anyway, so that was easy or so we thought, pull up at the petrol pump, jump out and start filling the car, nope nothing happening, as this pump had a credit card slot I tried putting a card in there, nope still no luck, looking around I realised that the other pumps didn't have card readers so I assumed that this pump was for a special card and moved to another pump, not easy as the petrol station was crowded. Pull up at pump #2 try again, still no luck, then a womans voice comes over the loud speaker, speaking french of course, I look up and the woman behindthe counter is waving her arms in the air, this isn't going to be as easy as I thought, so I head into the building and there are lots of people standing around looking confused, it's at this point that I realise that no-one is putting any fuel in any cars, Carol starts asking questions and it turns out that the computer system is broken, so no fuel.
So we use the GPS again, and ask it to find us a petrol station nearby, it takes us off the main road which is nice, but remember it's still raining heavily, and I'm still getting used to the combination of being on the wrong side of the road, having the gearstick on the wrong side(yes it's manual) and having the blinkers and the wipers reversed, I indicated more than once trying to get the wipers going. So the GPS takes us on a bit of a journey, and with only about 1k to go, tells us to turn the wrong way down a one way road, so after doing 2 laps of a long block to check that we really couldn't go where it was telling us we pick the next petrol station and head off, finally we find a petrol station that works and fill the car, there was much rejoicing.
Once that was done we reset the GPS to the hotel, and after another 2 or 3 wrong turns we were on our way. Next up was a traffic jam on the main highway into Paris, GPS pops up and tells us there's a traffic jam and it's got a faster way to the hotel, we select "go for it" and we're off through the back streets of the outskirts of Paris, it's at this point that I realise that everyone who said "parisians just park anywhere" is telling the truth, there was a double or triple parked car to negotiate at least every 200m, and most of the time it was more like every 100m, but we were making good progress and the parisians are very used to you driving at them on the wrong side of the road, due to all of the double parked cars, so I fit right in ;-)
With about 2k's to go to the hotel, I open my big mouth and say to Carol, if this GPS takes me anywhere near the Arc de Triumphe, I'm bailing out, I've read that you're not insured on that piece of road and I'm not planning on having an accident on my first day, although we'vealready had several near misses, not all of them my fault either. About 5 seconds after I open my mouth, we look up and we're driving straight down Charles de Gaul ave, straight for that bloody roundabout. So I pike, make a right turn, go about 2 blocks and make a left, and for the next kilometer or so, every time the GPS says turn left, I swear at it.
We do manage to avoid the Arc de Triumphe and have a relatively uneventful trip to the hotel, we park the car and head on in only to find out I've booked the hotel for the wrong dates!! Nice one Rich, lucky for us the hotel has spare rooms and we're fine, yes I have checked the other bookings and they're fine so I don't know what brain fade caused that one.
So after our eventful trip into Paris we head off to find some food, haven't eaten for about 8 Hours so we were getting a bit peckish, once that was sorted we headed off for the Eiffel Tower, it really is impressive in real life, and we managed to walk up to the second level, about 600 steps I think, took plenty of Photos of course and from there we wandered along the North bank of the Seine, finding a couple of closed Muesums along the way.
That'll do for now, I'm off for brekky and then we're off to the Louvre.
Pictures from Day 1 in Paris
SIngapore Day 3
Well we went out on our own today and had a look aroundSingapore, funnily enough that mainly involved shopping. Bought a new camera to take around the rest of the trip, managed to get it about $100 cheaper than it was in Aus as well as getting an extra battery, so that was good. For those who care it's an Olympus SZ-30MR, there was also some clothes shopping involved, which Carol found more interesting than I did, but I did buy some new shorts as well ;-)
After the shopping we decided it was time for a sit down, so we headed down to Raffles Hotel for a couple of drinks and to throw some peanuts around, for those who don't know Raffles in Singapore has unshelled peanuts on each table, as you eat them you simply throw the shells on the floor, kind of weird walking around in there crunching around on Peanut shells.
Once we'd spent a small fortune on a couple of singapore slings and a beer we headed off to the singapore flyer to get a birds eye view of Singapore.
Before we headed home our hosts took us out for dinner at a renowned seafood restaraunt for some signature Chilli Crab, very nice but very very messy. Then it was off to Paris!!
Singapore photos and Carol's play with the new toy where it "draws"
After the shopping we decided it was time for a sit down, so we headed down to Raffles Hotel for a couple of drinks and to throw some peanuts around, for those who don't know Raffles in Singapore has unshelled peanuts on each table, as you eat them you simply throw the shells on the floor, kind of weird walking around in there crunching around on Peanut shells.
Once we'd spent a small fortune on a couple of singapore slings and a beer we headed off to the singapore flyer to get a birds eye view of Singapore.
Before we headed home our hosts took us out for dinner at a renowned seafood restaraunt for some signature Chilli Crab, very nice but very very messy. Then it was off to Paris!!
Singapore photos and Carol's play with the new toy where it "draws"
Sunday 17 July 2011
Eating our way through Singapore!
What a place... sooo much food and OMG these Singaporean people can sh op!
Having a great time being shown the sights of Singapore , Pannida is an excellent tour guide. We went to the top of the Marina Bay Sands Resort , this place has 2600 rooms. Breath taking from the top, with a 360* view over Singapore.
We have been non stop eating, which seems to be a national past time of the Singaporean people , that along with shopping. I don't think I could have ever imagined just how many shopping centres there are here. You could visit one a day for a year and not cover them all!
We are going it alone tomorrow and going to explore Singapore on our own as our wonderful hosts have to return to work. Dinner tomorrow night at the East Coast... chilli crab before we fly out for Helsinki tomorrow night at 11.30pm , perhaps not a good choice before an 11hr flight but apparently a must have whilst we are here.
Some pictures of the Marina bay sands hotel and the Singapore flyer
Having a great time being shown the sights of Singapore , Pannida is an excellent tour guide. We went to the top of the Marina Bay Sands Resort , this place has 2600 rooms. Breath taking from the top, with a 360* view over Singapore.
We have been non stop eating, which seems to be a national past time of the Singaporean people , that along with shopping. I don't think I could have ever imagined just how many shopping centres there are here. You could visit one a day for a year and not cover them all!
We are going it alone tomorrow and going to explore Singapore on our own as our wonderful hosts have to return to work. Dinner tomorrow night at the East Coast... chilli crab before we fly out for Helsinki tomorrow night at 11.30pm , perhaps not a good choice before an 11hr flight but apparently a must have whilst we are here.
Some pictures of the Marina bay sands hotel and the Singapore flyer
Saturday 16 July 2011
Made it to Singapore
Off to a good start as our flight out of Canberra was delayed. Not really an issue as we had 7 hours to kill in Sydney anyway. Once we landed in Sydney we went into town and decided to watch the final Harry Potter movie, enjoyed the movie, not sure about the 3D thing, didn't really add much to it in my opinion.
Headed back to the airport about 2:30 to catch our 3:50 flight, got a bit of a shock when we walked into the airport at 2:55 to see that our flight was due to board at 3:05, was really happy to see that there was no line at customs so we made it in plenty of time.
Had a good flight, sat next to two Canberra boys who were off to ride 4 of the TDF stages, they're also going to be on Alpe-d Huez to watch Cadel climbing to victory ;-)
Landed in Singapore at 10:30pm local time, took a while to clear customs, Steve and Pannida were there waiting for us, made it nice and easy for our first trip into another country.
Steve's place is really nice and has a great view over Singapore. Spent yesterday morning at the botanical gardens, had a nice breakfast there, sat down with a local lady, 80yrs young but looked about 60, walks down to the gardens every morning for a cup of coffee, she had spent 50years in England working, now retired in Singapore.
After the gardens we spent the rest of the day in the centre of Singapore at the shops, that is until Steve and I got sick of shopping and headed to the Marriot bar to have a couple of beers and watch the world go by, very civilised.
Headed down to Marina Bay sands in the afternoon, watched the "practice" session for Singapores national day, complete with Jet flyovers, other military displays and fireworks.
A couple of pics from Singapore
Headed back to the airport about 2:30 to catch our 3:50 flight, got a bit of a shock when we walked into the airport at 2:55 to see that our flight was due to board at 3:05, was really happy to see that there was no line at customs so we made it in plenty of time.
Had a good flight, sat next to two Canberra boys who were off to ride 4 of the TDF stages, they're also going to be on Alpe-d Huez to watch Cadel climbing to victory ;-)
Landed in Singapore at 10:30pm local time, took a while to clear customs, Steve and Pannida were there waiting for us, made it nice and easy for our first trip into another country.
Steve's place is really nice and has a great view over Singapore. Spent yesterday morning at the botanical gardens, had a nice breakfast there, sat down with a local lady, 80yrs young but looked about 60, walks down to the gardens every morning for a cup of coffee, she had spent 50years in England working, now retired in Singapore.
After the gardens we spent the rest of the day in the centre of Singapore at the shops, that is until Steve and I got sick of shopping and headed to the Marriot bar to have a couple of beers and watch the world go by, very civilised.
Headed down to Marina Bay sands in the afternoon, watched the "practice" session for Singapores national day, complete with Jet flyovers, other military displays and fireworks.
A couple of pics from Singapore
Thursday 14 July 2011
Only one sleep to go!!!!
Well here we are sports fans, one more sleep and Rich and Carol are off to Europe, well Singapore for a few days first and then Europe.
I left work about 3 hours ago to come home and pack, and to date I've done no such thing. I've managed to ring the car lease company to tell them that we're still coming and spend some time on the Qantas and Finnair websites trying to see if I could book some seats.
Found a trap for newbies as the Qantas website wanted to charge $20 to book any seat at all, while the Finnair website was happy to "reserve" my Qantas seats for free, we'll see how that goes when we check in tomorrow morning.
The Finnair website did want $79 to "reserve" exit row seats, so we've given that a miss at least for the trip over, may change our minds and book the exit row seats for the return trip as soon as we land in Singapore, we'll see how we cope with the cramped seats.
Well I'm off to find something to do other than packing, procrastination is the name of the game, pretty sure that's what a holiday is supposed to be all about anyway.....
Just to try out the picture thing, I've posted a picture of the pre-packing carnage
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I left work about 3 hours ago to come home and pack, and to date I've done no such thing. I've managed to ring the car lease company to tell them that we're still coming and spend some time on the Qantas and Finnair websites trying to see if I could book some seats.
Found a trap for newbies as the Qantas website wanted to charge $20 to book any seat at all, while the Finnair website was happy to "reserve" my Qantas seats for free, we'll see how that goes when we check in tomorrow morning.
The Finnair website did want $79 to "reserve" exit row seats, so we've given that a miss at least for the trip over, may change our minds and book the exit row seats for the return trip as soon as we land in Singapore, we'll see how we cope with the cramped seats.
Well I'm off to find something to do other than packing, procrastination is the name of the game, pretty sure that's what a holiday is supposed to be all about anyway.....
Just to try out the picture thing, I've posted a picture of the pre-packing carnage
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