I’m pretty much tired of typing these mini-books, so I’m gonna keep this one short and sweet.

Today begins like most other days on a 2 month vacation…coffee and a croissant. Speaking of which, I’ve started to enjoy getting just an espresso instead of w/ milk. Although, I still enjoy the taste of coffee, when you have to pay double and sometimes more to get milk, espresso starts to make more sense. Just a couple of sips and your all done, the only problem with this is that Eli still hasn’t made the switch, so I ended up waiting for her to finish hers. Oh well.

After breakfast, it’s a short metro trip to the Arc de Triomphe. A few pics later and a bit of confusion on how to actually get to it, we were on the “island”. About 10 streets all intercept at this point, so it’s a HUGE roundabout with the Arc sitting right in the middle. We climb up, snap some more pics of the city, and we’re spent.

A stroll down the Champs-Elysees and we’re back down by the museums. We were going to return a book Eli bought at the Louvre because the back cover was all fucked up, but they are closed on Tuesday, so that didn’t happen.

Off to the Orsay Museum….While this place is no Louvre, its size is nothing to squawk about and it houses mostly 19th century French art. This basicily means impressionism shit… It was nice to see all those famous pictures you seen in postcards, prints, and history books. You know… starry night by van Gogh, Monet’s self-portraits, Degas’s ballerinas etc.

Onward to the Rodin museum….sculpture park plus 10 or so rooms of mini-sculptures made this a nice quick visit. Well, also because the place was closing as we were about half-way through the rooms. Notable works here were the famous thinker, and its mini-version, the gates of hell, again with a mini-version, and also the walking man.

After they kicked us out, we tried to squeeze a little bit more out of our museum pass and visit Napoleon’s tomb, but alas, we were about 5 minutes too late and the last entry had already happened. Oh well.

A quick 10 minute walk back to our hotel and a visit to the grocery and we’re eating a cheap dinner tonight.

Tomorrow will be interesting. We’re trying to make it to palace Versailles, but the French transit union is going on strike, so getting there might prove to be problematic, if not impossible. Hopefully, they can take care of whatever they are striking for, because we need to get to the airport the next day to fly home.

Fingers Crossed. Sorry no pics, only 3 minutes of time to post this one.

Arrival…checked into the hotel close to the Eiffel Tower…thanks to Peter’s mom….it’s my birthday present and man it’s a good one.
As soon as we dropped off our things we went to explore the city…the Eiffel tower area in particular and went to dinner. On every hour the Eiffel tower lights up with millions on sparkling lights….this lasts for about 8 minutes…meanwhile tons of people try to sell you miniature light up Eiffel towers, or the gypsy kids ask you if you speak English to get you to read something….Peter’s response is the best, “No I don’t speak English, but I’m working on it.”

We stopped at a bar on the way home and met some French dude and watched soccer together. Two French teams played each other.

Day 1 – Oh la la

Breakfast, and off to do a walking tour of the city.
We started at Notre Dame Cathedral, took a picture in front of Hotel Dieu ( I was born in Hotel Dieu in New Orleans, which doesn’t exist anymore)…..I had to take a pic…next we headed over to the Deportation Memorial (memorial to the 200,000 French victims of the Nazi concentration camps), we stopped at Place St. Michel and then Sainte-Chapelle (all the stain glass you can handle). This was originally built for Louis IX to house the crown of thorns….it’s only shown on Fridays during lent…..too late for us. The next stop was the Palais de Justice and then the Conciergerie (former prison, which held the likes of Marie-Antoinette and other famous people.

We took a nice stroll on the Seine River and wandered over to the Louvre. This is the most intense museum I’ve ever been too…there is so much to see you have to almost have a game plan to check out the stuff you do want to see. I can’t even mention the highlights because there are so many. Most people know the Mona Lisa is housed there. I was here ten years ago and it seems like they have made a bigger deal of the Mona Lisa recently…it may have to do with the “DaVinci Code.” There are signs pointing to the direction of where it’s located and it’s incased in a giant wall and roped off (this was not the case ten years ago…..it was incased in bullet proof glass like it is currently, but that’s about it).

Another highlight….Peter let a major one rip in the Louvre, it seems like he’s on a secret mission to fart loudly in all the famous museums…..I was mortified and quickly walked away. I’m surprised he didn’t leave streaks in his wake.

Many hours later….we had to leave it was too much. I bought a book, so I could read up at a later date and we headed off to dinner. Highlight of dinner; Peter’s fried goat cheese, yummy. After our tummy was full we headed to the Eiffel Tower. It’s nice at night…the whole town is lit up and there are less people. Peter and I made out on all the levels on the Eiffel tower. Our pics can’t do it justice, but we tried.

After a full day we basically limped back to the hotel….our feet and legs were killing us….sometimes you really don’t notice how much you walk.

Arrived in Switzerland…and man its cold. We did our hike to find a place to stay and on the way we passed a public park with sculptures of cows…..Peter corrected me and told me they were real. So the whole park was filled with cows. You can hear them walking around dinging their cow bells. Apparently it’s too cold for them in the winter, so they bring them down from the mountains and they chill in the park…quite odd, but the locals don’t think anything of it….I want to pet the cows.

We checked in…the hostel is nice and clean and then we went to dinner…had some local Swiss food…..hash browns, with Swiss cheese and a fried egg….yummy.

Day one…naked men and snow

Its cold….did I mention that? All the mountains are closed. The weather has taken a turn for the worse and it’s snowing. This is good for the locals, they plan on opening the lifts in a week….hmmm everything is foggy and it’s cold, we don’t have warm enough clothes…I put on many layers.

Since we can’t see any mountains we decided to take a day trip to Thun….it’s a nice village with a castle. On the way to the train station I had to buy a hat and scarf.
Thun was nice, the castle was closed and it was too cold to walk around, we tried though. We saw a snowboarding competition…that was cool.

Back to Interlaken….hmm…we decided to go to a local spa (it was included with the hostel)….apparently the Swiss take this seriously. There’s a whole process that includes taking a breath of fresh air, drinking a beer etc…I’m not kidding…it was on the brochure. We just went into the hot tub. It smelled like eucalyptus leaves and there was a neat waterfall massager. We also did the foot tub spa. There were some other spa things, but there were so many naked men I didn’t know where to look. I’ve never seen so many naked men in one room besides in porn.

We stopped by the casino on the way back and they were filming something, so we got free bratwurst and just walked around getting lost. Apparently in the off season they use most of the casino to host events. One room had a group of people from Asia with a guest singer, another room had a Swiss band playing and some other room had a magician. Weird stuff.

Oh BTW at dinner I had a few chilies and then combined with the spa it cleared my sinuses…I think I found a cure….hahaah.

On the way back to the hostel Peter and I pet a cow….she didn’t like it too much. I like cows.

Day 2…snow, rain and Swiss cheese

Hmm the weather is the same so we decided to head to Zürich. The weather was worse there…..rain and wind….eeeekkk…..we could barely walk anywhere.
Someone told us about a big wine event at the harbor…that sounded good. On the way we saw someone roaming the streets dressed like the Easter bunny…I was jealous…he looked warm.

The wine event was awesome…..4,000 different types of wine from everywhere and you hop from boat to boat to sample the varieties. This is the biggest wine event in Switzerland and has been going on for 53 years….needless to say we had too many samples to remember and got a little toasty. My favorite wine all night was a South African white wine.

We made it to the train and headed back to Interlaken….we were pretty drenched when we returned (it’s a bit of walk from the train station). Went to dinner to warm up and I finally had my Swiss cheese fondue…yummy….

I’m still cold and I’m trying to warm up my feet.
I think Switzerland is probably beautiful in the right weather…..we’re just unlucky….we‘ll be back some day.

Tomorrow we head to Paris.

Here are some of Peter’s WTF photos from Switzerland…

We began our day with breakfast at the only place serving it.. “The Blue Marlin”, which also doubles as the only bar open past 8pm. Not bad, we had some bacon and eggs which have been sorely missed throughout our trip.

On the day prior, I had noticed someone in a Saints jacket, so of course I grabbed his attention and sure enough, he was from New Orleans. Kooky. Anyways, we had just chatted for a few minutes yesterday, but we ran into them again this morning at breakfast, so this time the chat lasted a few more minutes. Come to find out they are doing some of the same hike we are. We finish up breakfast and head on out to the trail.

The first hike and the longest from the city we were staying in, Vernazza, to the next, Cornelia was the best by far. About an hour and a half, with LOTS of stopping to take photos, look at the scenery, and just take everything in. We met our New Orleans friends about a 1/2 way in, and finished out the trek with them. What do you do after a nice uphill hike? Well drink some beer of course…so we found a little cafe and ordered a few colds beers. Our friends were a bit exhausted from hiking, so they set out for the bus to the next city, while Eli and I hoofed it. This hike was short and sweet, about 30 minutes and pretty much downhill. It had some nice stops by a rocky beach, and some old train tunnel.

Arriving in the next town, Manarola, we stumbled upon what would be our next mini-adventure. A few people yet saw the day before swimming around in the harbor and jumping off of rocks were here at this next town as well. Of course this town had a much larger rock and it looked alot more exciting, so we were up for it. Eli went first, then I couldn’t resist so I followed. I ended up with a big rush of adrenaline and a soaking wet pair of boxers. I decided that I didn’t want a wet pair of jeans as well, so I ended up free balling it for the rest of the journey.

We hiked to the next city, watched the sunset, and caught a train back to Monterosso, which was one city past ours because most trains don’t stop at our town. Low and behold we find our New Orleans friends again on the train. We had an hour to kill before the train back to Vernazza so, you know what happens next, yes, more drinks.

Back at Vernazza, I get some new boxers and we head to dinner. After dinner, guess who we find? Yup. More drinks, more drinks, and then finally more drinks up near their room. By the way, when we showed them our room and told them how much we got it for, they were pretty disappointed in theirs…hehehe… O well.

Tomorrow we leave for Switzerland, where its freezing cold…. brrrrr

Really that was our day. We took 5 trains and a bus. We found a train to Genoa and thought what the hell….we’ve spent most of the day on a train anyways and it would bring us closer to Cinque Terre.

On the last train to Genoa we met an Italian dude. Peter offered him some wine and we were instant friends. He didn’t speak much English…so we all tried to communicate in Spanish, Italian and a little English. As far as I could understand he said his family is in the mafia (he mentioned Martin Scorsese films as reference) and is traveling to get away from his life in Naples. He said it was too violent. He also said he has our back from people on the train. Hhhahahah he rocked. When Peter went to the bathroom he left the compartment…he wouldn’t stay with me by himself out of respect to Peter….hahhah interesting guy. He never told us his name.

Arrival in Genoa midnight…..we stayed at a place I found online and it basically sucked. Go me. The bathroom was so nasty we refused to take showers and my pillow was full of lumps…nasty. We didn’t get much sleep.

The morning after (isn’t that a movie title)

We headed to Cinque Terre to the city of Vernazza. We took one step off the train and were bombarded by a man named Francesco about a place to stay. I’m not one to deal with train station solicitors, but the more we said no, the more the price went down. Some locals hanging out told us to look at the room and that Francesco was ok to deal with….so we thought what the hell. Anyways, the place rocked, it was an apartment with a kitchen (including coffee), a big room, fabulous bed, nice bathroom and the real winner was the washing machine. We got the whole place for 40 euros a night…what a steal and we could clean our stinky clothes.

That done we checked out the city and I have to say Jamie’s explanation of Cinque Terra; “it’s like living in a postcard” is dead on. Wow…and wow. Our pics can’t do it justice.

The Cinque Terra is five cities on the coast….most people hike to and from the cities or take a train. We like to hike. We decided to hike to the fifth city, Monterosso and well…we took the wrong trail and went straight up the hill. Figures eh?
We saw some interesting things…a graveyard with photos of the deceased on the gravestones, a creepy chapel that was locked and gated off and each turn on the road had a shrine with scenes from the life of Jesus. Hmmm.

A few hours in we had to head back; the sun was starting to set. We made it to the water’s edge to watch the sun sink and then headed to a bar for a drink until the restaurant opened. There are only two restaurants open in the city. This particular city has 500 people living here and it’s the off season so there isn’t much going on which is kind of nice.

We had a nice dinner and planned to go back to our place and drink a bottle of wine….but we crashed. I guess we needed a lot of sleep from the Genoa experience. Plus, the next day would be full of hiking. We plan to hike to all the cities.

We had a time set for the vineyard Chateau Pape Clement. Instead of taking a wine tour (which was full anyways and expensive) we booked our own and figured out our own transportation. This included a lot of walking, a metro and then a lot of walking. It was worth it to get a good view of the neighborhoods.

The vineyard was sweet and we were the only ones on the tour that didn’t speak French, good thing out tour guide translated everything into English for us.

Highlights about this vineyard were, the first pope from France, Pope Clement V, (and the first Pope of Avingon) owned this vineyard in the beginning (hence the name). He loved vino. Now some rich dude owns it and 35 other vineyards.
It was interesting to see things left over from when the Pope owned it (when we died he gave the vineyard to the church and then in (some date I can’t remember) it was sold to other owners). There was a chapel, leftover medieval art, a fake tomb of Pope Clement and a few other creepy things.

We had a few tastings after the tour, we didn’t buy any bottles since we bought two the day before and we really have no good way to carry things other than our back packs.

We headed back to the city to figure out what to do since we are stuck here.
Museums are always a good option in my book
First we hit the art museum and since it was so late in the day (at least I think that’s why) it was free….score. It housed the typical paintings, but I did get to see a Caravaggio painting I had never seen before. Also, there were some interesting French painters I had never heard of.

The next stop was the archeological museum and it was free too…woo hoo. It must be a special museum day. This was interesting to look at but it was all in French, so I’m sure it would have been better if we could read everything. We could only guess.

We also stopped into a gothic cathedral…quite impressive. (put the name here).
On the way back to the hotel we heard a band down an alley and decided to investigate. Some band was putting on a concert on the street corner…they were good, but I couldn’t understand anything they sang about. They sounded a little like the Beatles. Sweet! And again it was free. Two dudes had a dance off. One danced crazy like he had roaches in his pants, the other looked like he combined tango with salsa…it was interesting and they were completely smashed. The cops soon showed up and the party was over. We got to hear about 6 or 7 songs before the cops showed.

Since we have to get up at the butt crack of dawn for our train we decided to get groceries and eat in. We’ve eaten out every night on our trip, we’re ready to make our own food (never thought I would say that). Plus, we have two bottles of vino…heheeehe.

Tomorrow will be a full day of trains and then we stop in Nice, France only to sleep and then in the morning we head to Genoa and the Cinque Terra in Italy.

I’m sure I’ll start combining the little French I know with Italian….I mixed Spanish and French together in France….hahhah….Just when you get the hang of it, you have to change….hahah sounds like life.

After a frustrating morning at the train station, we were trying to leave on a 2:30 train to Nice, but it was all full. Well, not really, I found out that our rail pass doesn’t really matter. The only save so many seats for rail pass holders, which is crap, so the kind lady at the ticket counter offered us 2 seats @ 120 euros a pop. Thanks, but no thanks. Anyways, my French train experience only got worse later in the day, I’ll get back to that later.

Train Lady Take 2

After we got back from our vineyard excursion, I went to try and book a train for tomorrow. This was quite the ordeal…

#1 These people speak almost no English.
#2 They don’t care about helping you.
#3 They lack ANY problem solving skills.
#4 Monkeys could do a better job than them.

So, the first thing I asked for was just a timetable of all the trains leaving from Bordeaux, unfortunately this kinda of thing doesn’t exist in France. I’ve seen these kinda of tables all throughout Europe from the tiniest to the biggest stations, but not here. Ok, so scratch that idea. I try and book the same train the next day and its “Completo” as well, so I try to explain to the lady that I just need to go east on ANY train, she tells me the next train is Thursday, 5 days from now. GUH.

Thinking that she was new or something, I decide to try a different ticket person. Uh…not much luck here either. So I problem solve on my own, I just picked the next closest city and asked for a train there… Viola, it’s available, plus we can even connect to Nice from there and get there at the same time. You would think these people would think of these kinda of things, since all they do ALL day long is sell tickets. But no.

Rant Over.

WTF:

We squeezed in one more tourist stop, the Gulbenkian Museum. This has a nice mixture of cultural arts ranging from paintings, furniture, sculptures, pottery and more. I think Peter likes these museums better than just painting museums.

We took a 4pm train to Bordeaux, France. This was an extremely long train….4pm-7am….hahahahha. Since it was a night train we booked a couchette but there were two other people in our cabin, one man from Africa and a lady from Brazil. Funny thing was the man only spoke French and Portuguese and the girl only spoke Portuguese, a little French and a little Spanish. Neither spoke English. It was interesting trying to communicate. We broke out a bottle of wine and then we all went to dinner and drank some more. It’s surprising how much you can understand when you can’t really communicate.

At dinner we all drew maps pointing to which cities we were from and where we live currently. It was an interesting map to say the least. We also met a woman at dinner from the Canary Islands; she spoke 5 languages….shish.

Arrived on the border of France 7am and switched trains and arrived in Bordeaux at 10:30 am…..we were so tired. It’s hard to sleep on a train….to much jerking, plus Peter and the other guy took turns snoring…hahahah. Good thing I had ear plugs.

We found a place to stay right by the train station…it’s nice and has a bad ass shower. Hey, it’s the little things that count.

We explored the city, set up a vineyard visit for the next day, did a wine tasting at a wine store (bought a few bottles too), and went to a carnival in the city center. Peter and I rode the Ferris wheel. I haven’t ridden one in a loooong time.

We met some French people who asked if we were Americans after they heard us speak….I braced myself for something rude and was surprised to find that they were excited and asked us where we were from etc. etc. Odd…not what I expected in the least.

Parts of this city remind me of New Orleans…the river for one looks like the Mississippi river…muddy and churning. If you squint the horizon looks like New Orleans on the river walk.

Today is a holiday, All saints day. Not that big of a holiday, but it comes with perks. Many monuments, galleries, etc are free from 10:00-14:00, woot. So our whirlwind tour of Lisbon continues…
Breakfast in the hotel. Not too much going on here just coffee and bread. Again, its free, so can’t really complain.

Free Tourist Stop #1: Monastery of Jeronimos
Neat place, 16th Century Architecture, they had a special 500 year anniversary exhibit that was pretty interesting. It had a timeline of the last 500 years of history in 3 sections.
* History of Lisbon
* History of Portugal
* History of The World
It was an interesting way to present a historical timeline.
Free Tourist Stop #2: National Archeology Museum
Um…Old stuff..egyptian, roman, etc… The only real memorable thing from here was a full size reconstruction of an ancient sauna.
Free Tourist Stop #3: Tower of Belem
Neat castley type thing, it guarded the entrance to the city from the river. Complete with canons, moats, drawbridge, etc.
Free Tourist Stop #4: Boat Monument
Nothing to say about this thing, just a big monument.

So with the free stuff out of the way, we had lunch and made our way back to the city center. Lurking high above the east side of the old downtown, which is where we are staying, lies the Castle of St. George. We decide against taking the bus to the top and hoof it. Good idea, its not too bad of a climb, and we get to stop at a church on the way up, I don’t remember the name our much about the inside, but I do remember that it was big, and Eli put a Euro in our of those little boxes that begs for your money. I gave her a funny look, and she said “We’ve been in so many churches, and enjoyed so much art work inside, I figured I’d donate something.” Good point, we’d probably been in 30+ churches. The only ones that stick out in my head still are St Peters in Rome and St Marks in Venice. Those two were simply amazing places. Anyways…up to the castle…Um.. tiny line here(20 minutes), so we grab some ice cream and sit it out. Once we’re in, we stroll around for some spectacular views of the city and the river. We walked around the castle grounds for an hour or so, climbing to the top of some of the towers, taking pictures, the usual. When we were leaving Eli’s generosity bug hit her again and she gave guy playing guitar in the center of the courtyard a euro. I don’t know if it was because she took a picture of him and her conscious told her to, but it was well worth it. As Eli said, he made the atmosphere much nicer the whole time we were there.

After that, it was time to research of trains for the next day. So we grabbed the laptop and went out scavenging. It took some time, but we were finally successful. We strolled into a 5 star hotel on the outskirts of downtown, and perfecto, free wifi. So we ordered 2 beers, and sat on the couch in the lobby.

We got up early to have breakfast on the train….(one of the perks of having 1st class on a train…not that we had a choice between 1st and 2nd). It’s hard to pour coffee on a train. It really takes some talent.

We arrived at 8am, made a friend from Canada and we all jumped on a bus headed to the center of town.

Our hotel/pensione is clean  we checked in took a nap (sleeping on trains is more like napping on a train), then went to explore. Of course we found the steepest street in the city to walk up. But we weren’t even out of breath because we are hard core walkers now (heehee).

We found the Institute of Port Wine and since Portugal basically started port wine, we had to try some. We sampled from an early port wine, a 10 year, a 30 year and a 40 year old port wine. I have to say with age it tastes better…so the 30 and 40 year old win. We also tried a white. Port wine is pretty strong and well Peter and I basically stumbled down the steep hill. We saw a store that had port wine from the 1800’s for sale and it cost around 1,000 Euros.

Portugal doesn’t celebrate Halloween as the US does so we decided to find something going on for Halloween and we heard about a death metal show called Moonspell that was doing a “special” Halloween show, so we thought what the hell…I like death metal and hey that’s the only thing Halloweeny going on in the City so we bought tickets.

We went back to the hotel to get ready and drank some of our Spanish vino. I made my eyes real scary and wore the snake necklace Peter bought me and off we went to eat dinner. Peter actually ordered a whole pizza to himself and ate most of it. I was shocked…his food habits are changing  We ate at an outside restaurant so we could people watch and the only costumes I saw were people who were going to the death metal show and few generic costumes like a ghost, and a witch (and I really do mean one person).

Ok…so the death metal show was interesting…there were two opening bands and the first one made fun of Bush and political events. My fav. Song of his was…“George Bush, Bin Laden, One Love, One Family.” That was basically the song.
In between bands we saw a dude whip it out and piss right on the floor where he was standing…that was a new one and that I remember more than anything else….hahahahah.
Moonspell had quite the entrance. There were chicks belly dancing and the singer came out with a big cow head staff and some demon type of visuals in the background. We couldn’t understand anything he said or sang about except one where he talked about the devil. It was an interesting night to say the least, but I see Halloween is catching on over here….hopefully in a few years it will be huge…but I still had a great night. A death metal show on Halloween in Portugal….you can’t beat that (heehee).