A parting shot

That is it. My 65-day jaunt around Europe has now come to an end. I had a great time, but I was also starting to miss California and was glad to be home.

London-San Francisco

Late in the morning, I took the tube to the airport and caught my flight home. It was a clear day and I got to see some spectacular glaciers on the east coast of Greenland. I was sitting next to a Kiwi who was headed from London back to Auckland. Now that is a long trip.

The London Eye

Before my flight home, I went and did one last touristy thing. I went and rode the London Eye ferris wheel beside the Thames. The views were very cool. It was nice because there were only a few people in my car so you could walk around to all of the sides. It would be awful if it were packed.


After the eye, I looked for a pub where I could enjoy one last pint and a pie for lunch, but it was still too early and all of the pubs were closed.

Ripped off

On Wednesday morning I went to change my remaining Euros into Pounds. I went to a currency exchange in Paddington station. I have never gotten so ripped off in my life. I think with the poor exchange rate they give and the commissions and fees they kept about 20 of the 80 euros I was changing. I should have just gone to a British ATM, paid the $3 fee and brought the extra euros home.

Munich, Germany - Basel, Switzerland – Milhouse, France – Luton Airport, England - London, England

My flight for tomorrow was out of London and I had to get back there. The easy way to do this would have been to fly from Munich to London. Unfortunately since it was Oktoberfest, the flights out of Munich were super expensive. I had one day left on my Eurail pass and I used it to take the train to Basel which is on the border of France Switzerland and Germany and fly back to the UK. I had to switch trains in Manheim and only had an 18 minute layover. My train from Munich was 30 minutes late arriving. I went to the platform and the train I needed wasn’t listed. I went and checked the monitors in another part of the station and it said my train was an hour late. I went back to the platform and a train had just arrived. My train was supposed to be an ICE and this one was just a regular train. The sign said it was going to Basel, so I hopped on not knowing if I would make it all of the way to Switzerland. Luckily everything worked out fine.
The train ride up the rhine valley was very nice with castles and vineyards on the hillsides. I arrived in the swiss Basel train station with plenty of time before my flight. There is a border between France and Switzerland within the train station and there is another station in the German part of Basel. Despite being such an international city, they only accepted swiss francs, so I had to convert some Euros to buy dinner. I took a bus to the airport (in Milhouse, France) and got on my Easy Jet flight to London Luton Airport without a problem.
It was a clear night and I could see Paris in the distance from the air. Paris is enormous. I picked out the Eiffel tower and it looked like a tiny spec compared to the enormity of the city. I think we arrived in London around 10pm with the time change. British Nationals were given first priority in the customs line so everyone else had to wait. It was at least 30 minutes of waiting in line before we got through. London Luton is not really in London. It is about an hour’s drive to the North. I had to take a bus which cost 10£ to get into London proper. There was construction on the motorway too so it took even longer. Later I discovered that if I had taken a series of trains from Munich, I actually could have gotten to London a little faster than flying after the customs delay and the bus ride.
I think I got to the hostel I was staying at around 1am. I stayed at the Astor Victoria Hostel, which was the same one I stayed at near the beginning of my trip. It was like coming full circle.

In the morning before catching my train out of town, I went back to the beer tent from the night before and bought a beer stein. I figure that since I am flying home tomorrow I can finally collect a heavy souvenir. At 11 in the morning, the tent looks very different than it did the previous night.

German Efficiency

I spent the night at Matthias’ house. In his bathroom there are water meters that show exactly how much water you are using. When you flush the toilet or turn on the sink, the gauge starts spinning. I wonder if the intent is to make you feel guilty about excessive water use. This goes along pretty well with the German stereotype of being very efficient.

There was this machine that looked like an airport x-ray machine that takes in the dirty beer steins and spits them out clean.

Oktoberfest lived up to my expectations. It was basically a huge party inside the tent with everyone drinking, dancing and having fun. There is a band inside the tent playing all types of music and everyone gets up and dances on the benches and tables. It was a lot of fun.

It was pretty crowded inside the tent we chose and we didn’t get a seat right away, but we were able to get served. It helped to be there with a local. The beer was very good although at the end of the night your hand hurts from holding such heavy beers all night.

Oktoberfest

After wandering around town all day and seeing most of the main sights in Munich, I met up with my German friend Matthias and we headed to Oktoberfest. Oktoberfest is basically a big carnival with beer tents, food vendors and rides. Obviously most people come for the beer.




A beer tent. I think there are about a dozen different ones each operated by a different brewer.


Inside of one of the beer tents

Theatinerkirche

This is the Residenz palace and the adjoining Hofgarten.

Hofbrauhaus

I ate lunch at the Hofbrauhaus and had my first giant beer of the day. It was tasty.

Art?

This piece of art? was a couple of robotic arms that moved around and did stuff. One arm every few minutes would pick up a cup of water and dump it on the sidewalk where people were walking by. I waited to see if anyone would get wet, but most people noticed something was up before they walked onto the wet spot.

All around Munich were these painted lions, kind of like the cows in Monaco, but not a complete ripoff of the cows in Chicago. This was one of the better ones.

There were lots of buildings in town that had obviously been rebuilt and had their facades painted to look like they had elaborate relief work, when in reality it was just a flat wall. Here are some examples

Town Hall

Munich was heavily bombed along with the rest of Germany during WWII. Much of it has been rebuilt in the old style and looked very authentic. Other things were not so faithfully reproduced. This is the town hall on Marienplatz. At noon there are little figurines that come out of the clock and dance around.

Munich

Arriving in Munich after being in Italy and the South of France for a few weeks was a big culture shock. Everything, the people, the language, the weather, the architecture, was very different than it had been only a few hours earlier in Italy. I made my way to the Marienplatz which is the central square in town. It was way too early to see any sights, plus it was really cold, so I sat in a coffee shop for an hour or so and caught up on my journal. The pastries I had at the coffee shop in Munich were excellent and rivaled what I had eaten in France. After I felt a little more awake I found a newsstand and bought a little tourist book about Munich so I would know what to go see.

Pavia-München (aka Munich, aka Monaco)

I took the night train to Munich. Unfortunately I had to catch the train not at it’s origin in Florence, but when it stopped at Verona after midnight. I took two trains from Pavia through Milano to get to Verona and then I had to hang out for a while before the night train arrived. This night train was much less comfortable than the one I took from Vienna to Venice. It had about 8in less leg room which made it hard to sleep. It also arrived in Munich at 6:30 in the morning which only gave me about 6 hours of semi-sleep and was far too early to do anything touristy once I got there. I wish I could have slept for a few more hours on the train in the station.

It rained most of the day on Sunday in Pavia. We toyed with the idea of going into Milan, but Matt isn’t all that fond of it and I think after being bombarded by so many cultural treasures in the last two weeks in Italy I would have been a little disappointed. The only thing that is apparently worth seeing is Da Vinci’s Last Supper. Unfortunately you need to make reservations well in advance to see it. We ended up going into the main part of Pavia for the day only to discover that everything is closed on Sunday. My time in Pavia ended up being a bit of a let down due to the weather and the transportation problems. Matt was a good host, there just wasn’t much to do. It was good to have some rest before my next adventure, Oktoberfest.

Pavia

We wandered around Pavia a bit in the evening and had a nice dinner. It did turn out to be an above average food day, but it could have been a lot better.
Matt by the covered bridge in Pavia:

Stuck in Modena

(picture)
After lunch we caught the train towards Bologna further East. In Modena the train stopped in the station and an announcement was made that there was a problem with the tracks ahead. We sat there for at least an hour before we decided that it wasn’t going anywhere. Matt went and argued with the guy at the ticket counter for about 15 minutes in order to get a 2euro refund on the unused part of our fare. Eventually we caught a train to Milano and then another one to Pavia. It ended up being a long day of travel without much sightseeing.
We later found out that there was a big MTV festival in Bologna which we would have seen had we gotten there. The train that was stuck was packed with high school aged Italians on their way there. Italians dress extremely fashionably pretty much all of the time. The newest fashion in Italian men’s haircuts is the mullet. Almost all of the younger guys on the train had full on mullets. I kid you not. It was pretty funny. Maybe this craze will be sweeping the U.S. sometime soon.

Turtles in a fountain in Parma

Parma

On Saturday Matt and I decided to go visit Parma and Bologna. I was excited as I hoped that it would be a good gastronomical day. We caught the train to Parma and strolled around the town a bit. It was a nice colorful little town. We saw some of the sights and more importantly had Proscuitto di Parma sandwiches for lunch. They were delicious.
A few shots of Parma:

Names

I still haven’t figured out why European cities have such different names in different languages. It makes trip planning unnecessarily complicated. In Nice I bought a train ticket to Ventmille not sure if it would be arriving at the same station as Ventimigilia in Italy where I needed to catch the next train. When I bought the ticket from Vienna (Wien) to Venice (Venezia) I learned that it is Venedig in German. The worst was when I tried to buy a ticket from Genova to Monaco while I was in Monterossa. There was some confusion as to where I wanted to go after I told the lady Monaco. Eventually she said “Monte-Carlo?” and it was resolved. I found out later that Munich (Munchen in German) is Monaco in Italian. Not confusing at all.

Waves

I had about an hour to kill in the border town of Ventimiglia between trains. There was a little street fair going on and I got to sample some more excellent Ligurian foccacia bread. I walked over to the water to say goodbye to the Mediterranean and was shocked to see waves. Little waves, but waves nonetheless. Too bad I didn’t have my surfboard.

Nice - Pavia

Today I headed back into Italy to meet up with my friend Matt in Pavia. The weather had turned bad and there was intermittent bad weather. I think I was lucky to have nice weather during my four consecutive beach days. The trip was fairly uneventful. Matt met me in Pavia and we just hung out at his dorm the rest of the day since it was raining. By this point in my trip I was starting to feel pretty worn down. I’d been on the move for about two months and I was no longer as eager to be out running around all day.

Villefranche Sur Mer

Later in the day I went to Villefranche sur Mer which is located between Nice and Monaco. This beach is in a little harbor surrounded by high cliffs. It was very scenic and probably my favorite beach of the day. The beach was all public. I swam and floated around for a while in the water. The water in the Mediterranean was probably about 75 degrees which was nice, but not as warm as I had expected.
As mentioned previously, the Mediterranean is like a lake. That is a bit of an overstatement because I’ve seen lakes with bigger waves. At one point in the later afternoon a few rogue waves suddenly washed up maybe 20ft onto the beach. Lots of people were sunbathing right next to the water and they all got wet. It was pretty funny. Those were the only things resembling waves all day.

Juan les Pins

I went to another beach a little closer to Nice in a town called Juan les Pins. This was also a sand beach and was recommended by a guidebook I had. It was nice as well, but about the same as Cannes with most of the beachfront being private.

Cannes

The first stop was Cannes. The beach was sand here although 90% of it was private (you pay 20 euros or more and they give you a chaise lounge and an umbrella). There are two little public sections at either end of the main beach.
I’d given it plenty of chances in the last few days, but today I decided that going to the beach on the Mediterranean is really boring. I’m so used to going to the beach in California and going surfing, playing in the waves, playing volleyball, playing horseshoes, drinking beer etc., but here the only thing you can do is sunbathe. There is no fun to be had at all. Even going swimming is boring. The Mediterranean is like a lake. The only redeeming factor is the topless women, but even they are not as abundant as I had hoped. I would choose the beach in SoCal any day over the Med. I spent a few hours in Cannes before I moved on.

The French Riveria

Thursday would make it four days of going to the beach in a row. My time on the French and Italian riverias was turning into a little vacation within my trip. After so much frantic traveling I was getting a little worn down too. I got an all day train pass for the region and set out in search of better beaches than Nice.

Hostel Nice Camelias

I stayed at the Hostelling International Hostel in Nice. Like the other HI hostels I visited it was cheap, modern and conveniently located. Not too much else to say about it.

Niçoise Salad

For dinner, I ventured out in search of a place where I could find a niçoise salad. After eating, I remembered that I don’t really like nicoise salads all that much. I guess the sacrifice was alright for the opportunity to eat a niçoise salad in Nice. Nice is really bustling with foreign tourists, especially Britons. I heard a lot of English spoken in my two days here.

After a few hours in Monaco I hopped on a train to Nice, which is in a different country, but it is only a few minutes away. In Nice I made my way to my hostel, dropped my stuff off and headed to the beach once again.



The beach in Nice is devoid of sand, it is just rocks. I had been warned about this in advance, but it was worse than I expected. Lying on rocks is not very comfortable.



It did have this little artificial patch of sand, but it was dumb looking. It was getting late in the day, so I hung out for a while and watched the sun set before heading back to the hostel.

Some sort of regatta going on outside of the harbor.


Last time I checked, Luxembourg doesn’t exactly have an extensive coastline


There was an outdoor cow art exhibit in Monaco with cows spread throughout the city.




The grocery store in Monaco had these digital price displays. I wonder if they can change the prices between when you pick something up and when you pay for it?

After leaving the casino I walked around the formula 1 race track which for a normal person would have been boring, but for me was cool. Here is one of the more famous turns.

Grand Casino

I wanted to go into the casino at Monte Carlo and at least play a round or two of cards just to say that I did. The casino didn’t open until 4pm which is very different from the 24 gratification you can get in Vegas. A little after four I waited in line with a bunch of cruise ship tourists to get in. They scan your passport and make you pay 10euros to get inside. I reluctantly agreed to pay only to discover once inside the casino that the only thing you could do was play slot machines. I wandered around a bit and was impressed by the classy décor. One room (the Salon de L’Europe) had a card table and I went in and wandered around before some guy ran up to me and told me the room was closed. I asked him if there was anywhere I could play table games and he said not until 9pm. Although disappointed, I had the great idea to go ask for my money back since there was nothing to do inside the casino. It worked and I got my 10 euros back after getting to wander inside the Monte Carlo casino. I think I prefer Vegas.

Valet parking at the Grand Casino in Monte Carlo. This has to be the best valet job in the world.


Mercedes, Maseratti, Mercedes, Volkswagen, Ferrari. Which does not belong?

Let’s play again. Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche, Opel, Mercedes. Which does not belong?

Lady Moura

This yacht in the harbor was ginormous. Turns out it is the 6th largest yacht in the world and is owned by a Saudi businessman who is also a UT alum. Check out yachts number 2 and 4 on this list. I guess if you want to date Paris Hilton your family has to own a huge yacht.

A view of the Monaco harbor