Welcome To My Lair

This is for my mother who has requested some photos of my 'digs', as she calls them.

The End and the Start

NUMBERS:

Planes: 16

Trains: 9

Buses: 13

Countries: 11

Cities: 34

Postcards: 35

Days: 101

Famous festivals:
2 out of 3
(La Tomatina and Oktoberfest. Running of the Bulls, maybe next time)

Years of planning:
6 (not constant, obviously)

Scars: 1.
It adds character though, makes me look really dangerous and mysterious, like James Bond, or Robbie Williams.

Number of times pickpocketed:
0 (surprising)

Number of hospital visits:
0 (more suprising)

Strange characters met:
Many. Coco Gold takes the cake.

Lovely new normal friends:
Lots and lots! Looking forward to seeing some again, and although I may not see some ever again, I will look at their Facebook status' and smile.

Cities I Missed:
A lot. Too many.

Memories: (all alone in the moonlight). Heaps and heaps. Some of them are classics, like looking out at Paris from
the top of the Eiffel Tower, some are hilarious, like Joni's burp, some sad, like the many many beggars we saw, some freaky like Sophie's sleep talking! She has no idea she's doing it, but more nights than not she would talk, ranging from "oh cool you should go there" to "NO NO NO GET OUT GET OUT" which is not something you want to wake up hearing in a slightly dingy hostel. Kanye West & Jay-Z blew my
mind! Harry Potter World! So many. However, all of the memories are very special and I'll never forget them. So soppy!

Favourite place/s:
Paris. San Sebastian. Lisbon. Barcelona. London.

Least favourite places:
Don't be silly!

(Siena)

Score out of 10 for choice of travelling buddies:
10. Claire, Soph and Joni were the perfect people to travel with, and the memories from our adventures will always be in my heart! Claire, I missed you for the rest of the trip, and think you would have loved lots of the places I went after you left. If you wanna go travelling with me again, I'll check my diary and see what I can do. Also you'll be proud to know I think we went to every possible H&M in every city we went to.
JB and Corn, you made my birthday amazing, you pretended to laugh at my jokes, and even though I think a third of my lungs are clogged up with methane from your bodies, I had an amazing time, and am really jealous I'm not going to Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague and Vienna with you.
Also, a huge thank you to Mary, who we stayed with for free (!) in London, who took a week off work to show us the sights, which proved she should be a tour guide, and who was just genuinely lovely and spoilt Claire and I!

Food score out of 10:
10 + 10 + 10 + 100000000.
I split the food memories into two, with dairy and without dairy. With dairy was inevitably better, it included French Camembert cheese eaten underneath the Eiffel tower, about 15kg of gelato, good proper fresh cows milk chocolate, and, my favourite, macarons. Favourite foods places include: Laudree in Paris, Jamie's Kitchen in London, and Helmut Newcake, the gluten-free bakery in Paris. Without dairy was a lot healthier, at one stage I had turned into a rice cracker. Seriously. A bit got stuck in my leggings on the back of my thigh? Sophie laughed. I hurried to the bathroom. I did get increasingly jealous of Sophie and Joni's obsession with Frozen Yoghurt. I should include beverages in here as well, we developed an unfortunate habit of waking up in the morning having drunk the whole bottle of vodka we'd planned on splitting over 2 nights. Sigh.
This trip has made me realise I want to do something with food! Alas, my dream of travelling food writer is out as I'm restricted to lettuce and soy milk, but I do have something else in mind!
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ENGLAND
London. Manchester. Birmingham.

POLAND
Krakow.

ITALY
Rome, Venice, Florence, Siena, Orvieto, Pisa.

GERMANY
Munich.

SPAIN
Valencia. Madrid. Barcelona. San Sebastian. Ibiza.

CROATIA
Split. Hvar. Mljet. Dubrovnik. Korcula. Makarska. Brac.

SWITZERLAND
Lauterbrunnen. Lucerne.

PORTUGAL
Lisbon. Lagos.

FRANCE
Paris. Bordeaux. Nice. Avignon.

MONACO
Monte Carlo.


I can't believe it's over, I left Perth about 3 1/2 months ago and it seems like 2 weeks! But it's not actually over, I'm in my uni dorm room right now, but will save all that for another post. Also, even though the travelling is over I think I'll still keep doing the blog. I like it, and it's good practice, and my audience just bloody loves it. Or so I tell myself. I promise not to start writing about boring stuff like how the bus driver pointed out that my shoelace was undone. <-- that didn't happen.
X

Munich

My last stop, Germany! We had 5 nights here, a long time for us, and our day were spent doing very different things:

MUNICH EXPLORATION
Munich is a very cool, modern city with plenty to see and do. (<-- yes I do write for Lonely Planet). But seriously, it's a mix of really modern technology, transport, gadgets etc, then you'll see some elderly German men in their lederhosen. The German people are very efficient and punctual, and we met / encountered a mixture of really lovely, charming helpful people, and very brusk, rude ones. I put it down to the fact we speak no German when people aren't friendly to us, which is fair enough, but having said that almost everyone speaks quite good English here. So here are some things we did:

• Watched German locals surf the rapids of a river in a park. It's hard to explain this but I've included lots of photos. We couldn't figure out if it is harder or easier than real surfing, but I think you'd have to be pretty brave to get in there, the water is going so fast!
• Walked through the city centre about 5 times, which is shopping central. There are 4 H&M's within 500m of each other.
• Went to a huge open air food market, it was full of people drinking beer, and you could buy all the Bratwurst, cheese, cold meats, fruit and veg and flowers you could want.
• Saw the Munich town halls, the bells that ring throughout the city are pretty impressive. And loud.

DACHAU
This was the second concentration camp I've visited, and I found there to be a vast difference in how the camps were treated after the war between Auschwitz in Poland and Dachau here in Germany. Dachau was a work camp rather than an extermination camp during the war, although of course many many people died at Dachau, 30,000 people is a conservative estimate. The buildings and landscapes of Dachau were vastly changed after the war, and before the 1972 Munich Olympics. Heaps of trees were planted, all but 1 of the prisoners barracks were torn down, the insides of the barracks were removed, as were all the kitchens and facilities. It's obvious why the government did this, but it is a shame, especially compared to Auschwitz which is almost untouched. Unlike Auschwitz, we did an organised tour for Dachau, which I thought really added another level to the visit, having someone who knows a lot and who can answer your questions. An interesting piece of information we learned was that Dachau was split into two sections, the camp itself and barracks for the SS. The SS barracks have never been open to the public, and are now used as training facilities for the police. I saw something that really upset me during the tour, two middle aged men climbed over the rope and posed smiling next to the cremation ovens, laughing and taking photos. A lady stepped in and told them how disrespectful they were being, but they shrugged her off and kept laughing. It was hard to believe anyone could act like that, especially 50 year old men. Besides that incident, I 'enjoyed' the visit. I put the word enjoyed in inverted commas because I know it's not the right word to use, but I cannot thing of another. Maybe, I found it interesting and worthwhile.

MY BIRTHDAY
So because I'll be in London on my actual birthday, October 1, and wouldn't have many people to celebrate with, we celebrated it on Friday 21st September. I had such a good day, the girls put in a lot of effort and carted my gifts all throughout Europe! So I woke up to them jumping on me and throwing balloons around, then went down to breakfast where there was a Soy Mocha Frappe waiting, and a whole pile of gifts! They got me: robot tea strainer (Avignon), elephant phone holder (Avignon), bicycle bell (Avignon), hot water bottle wearing a jumper (San Sebastian), tin of english breakfast tea (San Sebastian), MAC face powder (Lisbon), Nougat (Barcelona), Gaudi style elephant statues (Barcelona), and a card with a baby elephant the size of it's mums foot (Lagos). They picked up on my love of elephants, and as it turns out a lot of the presents they bought while I was with them. Standing next to them. One situation Joni faked a stomach bug and 'went back to the hostel' but in fact bought me gifts. I'm obviously not as observant as I think! So we spent the day shopping, had a delicious picnic in the park that included gluten and dairy free chocolate cake, then went out for a nice dinner and Joni read out a speech, which I was glad only a few ears could hear! I had such a good day, and am very thankful to the girls for making it so much fun.

OKTOBERFEST
We had two very different days at this craaaazy festival! The first day it was so miserable, raining really hard and was freezing. For some reason the hotel receptionist (Wolfgang- no joke) told us to go at noon as we'll get in to a tent no worries. Not true. We stood in the freezing wet weather for ages trying to get in, when we realised it wasn't going to happen and that my toes were about to fall off we left! However, the second day more than made up for it though: the sun was shining and it was only a bit cold, we all wore extra cardies and left at 7.30am to get in nice and early! We easily got into the HB tent which is the 'tourists' tent, so we got a table, made some friends, played some card games and drunk! Well everyone drunk but me for the first 5 hours because of the wheat in beer- I took some photos with some steins anyway. About an hour before we left though the beer wench (correct term) told me I could order wine! So I did! So I drank 500ml of wine, then we went exploring around the festival, I went on the big drop while Sophie's palms got sweaty just watching, we all got some sugared nuts then went home and had a really good snooze after a long, fun day.

I'm in my hotel room right now, the other two have already left for Paris! Teary goodbye this morning, but only a few as I'm seeing them in 2 weeks. Its day 101 of my trip, and my flight to Manchester is this afternoon, I'm just packing and realizing that a) my trip is over and b) I'm moving to London! I'll do a trip re-cap in a few days once I've adjusted, and I need to post a picture of all the postcards I've bought, I got one from every country! Until then! XX

Switzerland!

We spent a total of 3 nights in the very beautiful country of Switzerland; the land of chocolate, mountains and, as we learned, the land most protected from invasion. During the drive into each country our bus guide gives us some background info on each country, and I found Switzerland's to be pretty interesting so I found out a few extra facts:

• Its neutral status has resulted in a paranoid Switzerland, it is rumoured that all tunnels leading into the country are lined with explosives in case of invasion.
• Similarly, every person has access to an underground bunker they can hide in in case of invasion.
• I knew the Swiss spoke either German, French or Italian depending on the region (we were in the German) but there is also a fourth, Romansh, that is spoken by only 0.5% of the population.
• The Swiss eat 10kg of chocolate each a year.
Anyway, onto my adventures.

LAUTERBRUNNEN
We knew this town was tiny, and we were only staying for one night so we didn't have very high hopes for it, especially after our 10.5 hour bus ride, but we were so wrong! Just the drive into Lauterbrunnen was truly breathtaking. The road we drove on was surrounded by huge, steep mountains, some of which were covered in snow! Lauterbrunnen is right in the middle of a valley surrounded by mountains on all sides, so it was quite cold so we layered up, which was funny as we were on the beach getting sunburnt only 4 days ago! It is a tiny, one street town but there is plenty to do, mainly hiking and catching trains to the top of mountains and seeing snow, unfortunately couldn't do any of this, so we just had dinner (pork steak) and took photos of the picturesque surroundings and some sheep.

LUCERNE
We were sad to leave Lauterbrunnen after only one night, but Lucerne is so beautiful we were pretty happy to be here. We spent the first day looking around Lucerne's old and new towns, we saw the Lion monument (dedicated to the Swiss Guard who died protecting the king and queen during the French Revolution), walked along Lake Lucerne, Sophie stopped a young girl from pick pocketing an elderly woman, I bought a scarf (which is a big deal after our double summer), and we marveled at the views of the mountains across the lake. These views were amazing... at the time. After we climbed a mountain the lake views were a bit less impressive! So the mountain was Mount Pilatus and it took us almost the whole second day to climb! It has the world steepest train in all of Europe, and is an impressive 2132m. We climbed as high as we could, 1416m, which took about 3 hours with lots of water/food breaks and photo taking, then got the cable car up the last section to the top. The last section is sheer rock face so you can only really climb it if you're Bear Grylls. So we stood on the top of a mountain in Switzerland and I tried not to embarrass myself with ooing and aahing. It took us a swift 1.5 hours to get back down, and we treated ourselves to some chips afterwards.

Tomorrow we go to Munich, which will include such things as visiting the Dachau concentration camp, having a fake birthday, going to Oktoberfest and, for some unknown reason, staying in a 3 star hotel! I'm really looking forward to the next 5 days, and also to getting to the UK on Monday.Danke schön for reading!

The view from the bus driving into Lauterbrunnen

Falling off railing in Lauterbrunnen. Note the amazing Swiss house in the background.

Sheep in Lauterbrunnen. They had black faces which has finally solved the riddle of where black wool comes from.

The shoes we had to wear in the hostel. Odd socks optional.

A swiss church.

Half way up the mountain. 

The cable car I half wished we'd just caught up the mountain.

Memory. Annie v Joni. I won.

Even though Switzerland is so modern and forward thinking, they can still advertise cigarettes!

Mount Pilatus pre-climb.

All I saw the whole way up.

All Joni saw the whole way up.

Snow capped mountains off in the distance.

I took this right up the top while we were in the cable car, a tiny house!

The view from a rooftop restaurant in Lucerne.

Swan in Lake Lucerne.

The Lion.

The top!

Hey.

Sheep on Mount Pilatus.

Postcard.

That's a brontosaurus mug right there.

Tee hee.