Friday evening I took the train to Zurich to meet up with Jens (fellow backpacking comrade from Imperial). After such a draining I wasn't much interested in chatting so I just collapsed on the floor of his flat (been doing the collapsing thing a lot lately). Woke up the next morning and we caught a train south toward the Italian Lakes that sit near the Swiss border. We took off our packs inside one of the train cabins and closed the door... the train wasn't all that full in Zurich. However, as we traveled the train became increasingly crowded - but not in our cabin. I had my flute (yes, I am working on teaching myself another musical instrument) and was filling the air with sweet melodies (well, not exactly... I was practicing pieces that will be sweet melodies once I master them). Not a soul chose to enter our cabin. At first Jens protested to my playing, but once he saw the effect it had he would urge me to play even more whenever we stopped at a station and new passengers boarded. So we eventually made it to Lugano where we caught a bus to Menaggio where we caught a ferry to the peninsula town of Bellagio in the centre of lake Como. The sun was setting as we were crossing the lake and it lit the mountains with the most awe inspiring shades of red and orange that I have ever seen. We wandered around the village core for a while and in spite of the fact that this place is rather remote (ie only tiny windy roads make it there) there were a tonne of tourists (and this was November!), I would hate to see the place in the summer time, it must be a bloody zoo! So we had a fantastic dinner (I had a brilliant calzone - so brilliant that I had to take a picture) and retired to a small hostel rather early as Jens was getting rather ill from some sort of throat infection. Actually the place we ended up staying at was option #2. The directions that we had for the cheapest hostel in town took us winding through dark alleys for some time before we actually got to the place and were informed that it was closed since it had no heating (and it was certainly cold enough for heating to be a necessity). We were woken the next morning by stupidly loud church bells at some ungodly hour and wandered off to the Villa De Melzi and Villa de Serbelloni both of which Bellagio is famous for. Serbelloni was closed for the season and Melzi was open for the last day of the season... at least that's what the tour guide said. When we got to Villa de Melzi at 9am, which is when all the signs said it was supposed to open it was all closed up. I was really annoyed that the main attraction was closed after coming all the way down to this stupid little town. Negamatt (my evil alterego) took over for a bit and I started planning ways to sneak in to the Villa's gardens (which could be seen through the fence and were really neat looking). Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending upon how you look at it) there was barbed wire in all of the places that I would have crawled or climbed through to get into the villa. So thirty exasperating minutes later Jens and I turned to leave. And that's when we noticed this little old lady wandering up with a big key (like the sort of key that would open a big gate). Anyhow, I got to see the Villa afterall... and you know what? It really wasn't worth it. Sure it had some very nice gardens, but nothing that was truly fantastic. I took a bunch of photographs and will post them soon, they will speak for themselves. We caught a boat out of Bellagio to the town of Como. Along the way we passed countless small towns, all of which had some really incredible looking villas (I don't know why Melzi gets all the press). One town was Cernobbio, which has particularly significance to me since I actually stayed in its main villa when I was seven years old - the villa de est. I didn't have time to actually go over and see it first hand, but our boat passed right in front of it... I remembered it being a heck of a lot bigger and much more remote. It has this floating pool that sits out on the lake, and I have memories of that being way out in the middle of the water... and in fact it just sits right by the shore. Funny how memories from our youth can so easily distort proportions. We made to the town of Como, caught our train and nine hours later, just a bit before midnight I dragged myself back to my place in Geneva.
Ok, this was good fun. I hopped on board the Geneva/Paris TGV on Saturday morning and blasted off... Well, at least that was the way things were supposed to be. The French TGV's are the fastest trains on the planet, sure didn't seem all that fast to me for the first hour. We slowly drifted our way through the mountains to Bourg en Bresse which is not that far away in terms of mileage. We then stopped and I thought "fastest train indeed, what a joke". Suddenly the conductor's voice said in a perfectly cordial tone "S'asseoir si vous plait" which for you non-french speaking readers means "sit down please". There was a thirty second pause during which everyone sat down and grew silent and then woosh! We were really moving for the rest of the trip, easily 200 miles an hour, probably more. I sat down to do the calculations and from Bresse to Paris it's about 420 miles, and it took about an hour and fourty-five minutes to get there... quite speedy.
So I met up with my friend Nick, a native Parisian (who now lives in eastern France) and I thought, "great, he's a native, I don't have to think or plan any further - he knows this place" (this is the reason why visiting people who are natives of a city is so nice... at least this is the way it is in theory). He got all turned around on the underground system and we ended up going in the wrong direction on several occasions. To make matters worse, all of the hostels were fully booked for the evening. So I turned to my trusty green guide only to discover that it tells you to reference the green guide "paris edition" for details on accomodation... NOT VERY USEFUL! Fortunately, Nick had a list of places to call and we eventually found a hotel for 800 french francs a night (80 pounds, 120 dollars, 200 swiss francs)... and considering that this was the only place that had anything left we took it. Not bad really considering it was across the street from the Luvre (the tourism target for Saturday) and a full breakfast was included. Anyhow, I digress from the neat stuff... like the Luvre. People say that you cannot see the Luvre in a day... and they are right if you are interested in random junk collected from around the world. However, if you have specific interests in the Rennaissance, the Dutch Golden Age, and the shift from Mannerism to the Baroque and Roccoco then the Luvre is a piece of cake to see in a day. I knew they had the Mona Lisa, and yes I suppose it is nice (actually I like the background far more than I like the portrait) but the really great works were in the hallway leading up to the Mona Lisa. I couldn't believe it, masses of tourists were crowding into the Mona Lisa room and walking right by four astounding works by Leonardo. I can only remember names of two "The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne" and "John the Baptist" but they were all astounding. The awareness of light and the detail with which the mountains in the distance are drawn in both is just unbelievable. What I found most striking was the use of darkness in "John the Baptist" - this is very much like the techniques used by Rembrandt van Rijn nearly two hundred years later! Anyhow, it was a brilliant experience. The Dutch Golden Age and German Rennaissance collections were soso. The Vienna Art gallery had a much better collection for these periods. Amusingly, the Luvre, perhaps the best known museum on the planet was half the price of the Vienna art museum, sigh... what is with Austrians and money!
Nick took me over to a really good brasserie in the Latin Quarter for dinner, I had a traditional dish that was basically a meat and tomato stew that you poured over noodles. It was really unusual but very good. The restaurant had quite a menagerie. Several cats kept wandering back and forth under our table. I'm still not used to having animals in public eating locations.
Versailles on sunday was brilliant, although I was a bit disappointed by the limitations of the non-guided tour. If you opt to go through the castle on your own without a guide you actually see a seperate part of the catle that those that pay for a guide. Hey, I got to see some really cool stuff, like Louis the XIV's bedchamber and Marie Antoinette's chamber, but I only was allowed to enter the far corner of the hall of mirrors where the treaty of Versailles was signed at the end of world war I... really aggrevating, I wanted to get a much better look at it but the security guards became quite disgruntled when I lifted the rope and made my move towards the path where groups tours could go. After I saw the main chambers I made my way to the gardens and they were just fantastic. I've got lots of pictures so I will leave it to them to convey the splendor.
There have been quite a few experiences in my life that were unbelievably unpleasant but are now stupidly funny to look at in retrospect. This past weekend will be added to that list. Why well here's the story:
I boarded my night train bound for Vienna in Zurich armed to the teeth with kit intended to help me get to sleep (if you read my brussels saga below you will likely remember that I could barely sleep on the train). Anyhow, once I handed over my passport and tickets to the train's concierge (you typically do this on night trains) and got to my "bed", more like a padded plank really, I got out my ear wax and blindfold. It worked brilliantly, I could barely here the train whistles, the rumble, etc. And the constantly flickering lights from passing stations were not a problem with the blindfold. I woke up feeling great, noted that we were running twenty minutes late for Vienna and I thought "aha! its a late Swiss Train, they DO exist" (the swiss are very arrogant about the fact that their trains are ALWAYS on time). So I got all my stuff together and after another ten minutes I wandered to the front of the train car and asked the concierge how late he was expecting us to be. He looked at me and said, we are not late. And I said, "yes we are, we were supposed to be in Vienna nearly 30 minutes ago," and then he said the words I really didn't want to hear "we were in Vienna thirty minutes ago." I said "Aack! the train continues? Where are we going?!?" "Budapest." he replied. I said "But I don't want to go to Budapest! Why didn't you wake me!" (by now he had my ticket out) and he said, "you cannot go to Budapest, your ticket is for Vienna." "I know that, I don't want to go to Budapest" "You CAN'T go to Budapest, you will have to pay extra for this." "BUT I DON'T WANT TO GO THERE!!!" The neural synapses finally relayed this information to his brain and he said, "You must get off at the next stop if you do not want to be fined." So an hour later I was in the bustling metropolis of Hegyeshalom in Hungary (oh, goody). I had an hour and a half wait for a train going back to Vienna so I thought, well, I've never been to Hungary before, might as well make use of the time.
So I wandered off from the station in search of coffee. No coffee. I found a bakery and as I stepped in and heard the people inside talking I realized that the chances of anyone speaking a language with which I was even mildly familiar were quite low... and I was right. Through some elaborate hand waving and grunts I was able to get some tea and what I think was some sort of honey bread. Then there was the problem of currency, I had swiss francs, french francs, british pounds, american dollars, and Austrian shillings but a big fat ZERO in terms of Hungarian currency. I offered my credit cards - no good. So we eventually settled on two of my dollars as a reasonable exchange.
I eventually did make it into Vienna (Border patrol from Hungary into Austria, and EU country, was total hell). The sniffer dogs and guards boarded the train and searched everything. It took a good quarter of an hour just to have the train checked and I had to pay for a ticket from Hegyshalom to Vienna (hard to talk your way out of a situation like mine when you are on the border of Austria and Hungary and speak neither Hungarian or German). I arrived in Vienna at 1:30pm and went straight to the tourist office. The lady there spoke english (hooray) but kept trying to book me onto bus tours of the city (grrr). Little did I know that this was to be a theme of the day, Vienna is obsessed with draining its tourists dry of all their money. I eventually bought a guide book from the tourist office and went off into Vienna to find my own way without there help. I walked to Schonbrun Palace, where the Austrian emperors lived. The site was impressive, as was the entrance fee. But much more impressive than the palace were the gardens. They had a Labyrinth (which they charged additional fees for) and there were warning signs for arrogant tourists to be careful as the labyrinth was deceptive and that getting lost for hours was a real possibility. Children were not allowed in without adults. And I thought, me get lost? Hah, yeah right, that sign is only for whimpy tourists, not for durable fellwanderers like me. I got lost. I got really lost. I eventually climbed a tree to get a view of where I was so I could plot a route out. It was a tremendous blast. I also went to the Roman ruins at Schonbrun and really wanted to go the emperor's menagerie and the butterfly gardens, but time was running short and I wanted to get into the old section of town before museums started closing.
I wandered over to the underground station and made my way to the old town (after ten minutes of deciphering the underground system, which was all in german). I saw the central Cathedral (stunning, although you had to pay little phones for information), I climbed the zillion stairs to the top of the Emperor's tower (got charged for this too), and visited the Art Museum (brilliant Ruben, Rembrant, and Bosch collections) - there was also a great series of paintings of faces that were contructed impressionistically from all sorts of random objects (like fish, fire, foods, etc) it was weird but really interesting. I made it to the Emperors Palace in Vienna proper and came to the conclusion that this was a waste of my time. Shonbrun was much more impressive and the exact same emperor stories were presented in both. I ran to the Clock museum, which the guide book said was really cool, but they were closing when I got there. So I wandered over to the Motzart memorial and had good fun in the adjacent park where monuments to all of Vienna's musicians are.
As the sun set I made my way back to the centre of old town and found a restraunt that served authentic austrian food - lots of brat wurst. I met up with a really nice Norwegian couple at the restraunt and they invited me to join them at winery that was serving "autumn wine" an austrian wine that is only available for two weeks out of the year. We chatted for a long while, they couldn't believe that I went trekking through central Norway in April. When I explained that I was with a bunch of british students they immediately nodded there heads and said "ah, yes the british would do a silly thing like that." And then they said "why didn't you stay in Ireland for school" and I said "I'm american" and a look of shock passed over there faces. "Umm, what? Did Americans murder your parents or something?" and they simply said "no, you are just very different from other americans that we have met". I don't know what they had been exposed to in the past, but whatever it was, it wasn't positive.
So I got back to the train station late at night and traveled back to Zurich where I met up with IC friends for breakfast. We really wanted to get a bit of walking in but the weather was horrid so I went back to Geneva by around noon.
Friday, 7:30pm
Got to the Geneva train station and boarded a train to Basel. I was given special instructions for finding and catching the night
train, but the sheet was all in German and the most I could work out was NachtZug meant night cabin or night train, but all the details...
forget it. Why was there nothing in French?!? I don't know, maybe the train conductor thought I deserved to suffer.
11pm
Basel, being in the German speaking section of Switzerland has all of its signs in German... imagine that. And with the time being
11pm on a friday, there were very few people around. In the waiting room I quickly discovered that English and Spanish were not going
to help me at all, time for my French to shine. One of the blokes waiting around on the streetcorner (apparently waiting for someone)
explained to me that there were TWO Basel train station and that one was just on the other side of the French border. Considering the
fact that my night train for Brussels was leaving at 1 minute after midnight this was not the news I wanted to hear.
11:15pm
Following directions scrawled in French on the back of my novel (Dune... very good) I ran at break neck speed through the streets of
Basel in search of this other train station. I actually found it and then made the not so swift move of entering through the big red
doors marked Non Entre Pas (French for No Entry). The doors automatically opened for me and then automatically closed behind me. I
wandered through what must have been very large passport check rooms for daytime use, they were totally vacant, and even worse was the
fact that all the doors on my side were locked and the auto door had no sensor on my side. So I thought, "to hell with this" and
through all of my weight into prying the auto doors open so I could get out. Good thing no guards were around. Finally I found a small
group of people that were gather inside a small series of gates. There were no signs, there was no train, just people waiting. So I
waited, talked with them (Spaniards on vacation), discovered that I was in the right place, and rapidly got bored. So I poked around
a bit, found a phone, and used what would have been ten minutes of nothingness for "catch-up" conversation with Charlie fom UCD... aside
from my parents phone number, his is the only one I know by heart (although dialing the "T" "H" at the end was a bit of a challenge since
German phones swich the letter keys around). But I digress...
Saturday, 12:01am
The night train arrived, I got on board, was crammed in a room with four other people, and attempted to go to sleep. I tossed and turned
and probably actually got some sort of sleep around 5am. Honestly, I'm really not certain. All I know is that the exhalations of the
deep breathing fellow across from me were in exact synchonization with the ticks of my watch.
6:45am
I got off the train feeling rotten and was not pleased to discover the land draped in a thick mist. I wandered around the station
for a while trying to find a cash machine, got lost (briefly), and eventually followed signs to the information desk... which was closed
but incidentally had a cash machine next to it! I grabbed some maps from the Info Desk (english maps were all out, so given the option
of German, French, Nederlandes, and Luxembourgish I am sure you can guess what I picked. Found my way to the metro, figured the system,
out, and got myself onto the next available metrorail to old town.
7:30am
I wandered through an area called La Grande Place and was mesermerized. These are the grand buildings that are the stuff of fairy
tales... take a look at my photos (soon to be posted) Lots of fog though, and with the streets relatively vacant I got bored of taking pictures of old
buildings and started hunting for the tourism office.
8:30am
After wandering past several amazing Rennaissance and Gothic cathedrals (and going inside when the option was available) I found the
tourism office.
8:45am
Noon
1pm
2:30pm
4pm
6pm
8pm
9pm
10pm
11pm
Sunday, 5:50am
8am
I got off at Bern and ambled about aimlessly until the Geneva train arrived. Got in to Geneva a couple hours later, found my way home,
and collapsed. Sure, I had left on a friday and returned on a sunday, but for all practical purposes it had really been one very long,
very good day.
Map of important sites in hand, I started my journey in search of the peeing statue - what the office described to as a "must see". I
got there, and sure enough in the middle of this little plaza was the statue of a boy urinating. Funny... yes. A "must see"... not so
sure about that. I made my way towards the art museum and stopped at a street cafe once I was out of tourist central for a bit of
breakfast. The food was nothing special, just eggs and toast, but the company was. The Belgians, at least the ones I met, were quite
a talkative bunch. And they all thought my mangled french with its traces of costa rican, american, and english accents was "adorable".
They were really nice and kept offering to buy me food. It would have been great to just sit there and be fed all day, but I had places
to go and really couldn't be bothered to be called adorable for the whole bloody day. So I bid them well, and made my move.
I walked to the Palace of Justice, neat photograph. I saw the oldest jewish temple in Europe (according to my tourist map)
on the way and when I tried to get inside I found a note on the door in german that something about "closed due to violence"
I think. Really a shame.
I visited the Royal Palace, big building, guards with machine guns, and no entry. What was really
cool about this place was "le jardin du dieux" the Garden of the Gods. When I first walked in I didn't really realize the pluralization
of god, and then as I was wandering around started seeing these odd statues that clearly had nothing to do with the Catholic faith I realized
that the garden was themed after the gods of the greeks. Each seperate garden was themed to a different diety and had that god's statue
looking over the area. This was great fun to go through.
I went to the Museum of Musical Instruments and while I was impressed by the collection I thought the presentation terrible. All of the
labels were in Nedralandes and German, which was a problem. However the audio presentation that came with entrance to the museum and was
really needed to enjoy the galleries was abominable. It activated the type of sound that the instrument I was standing in front of made.
I had no control over what I wanted to hear and to make matters worse, the system worked really poorly and the signals got crossed all the
time. Meaning, there were some instruments that I wanted to hear and couldn't, and some instruments that kept playing even when I was
far away from the exhibit! The glockenspiel was particularly annoying, my headset locked onto the sound and it followed me through the
harps, drums, and accordions.
So I wandered to the far off reaches of Brussels to the Natural History Museum. The
museum is not world famous, but I had finished all the stuff I really wanted to see and was in the mood for a walk so I went. I really
questioned my decision to go there until I made it to the top floor. Everything up until that point had been poor in design and far too
heavily aimed at "fact transmission". Belgium has a strong presence in Antarctic research, it is one of the founding members of the
Antarctic research coalition (I did not know this) and the entire top floor of the Natural History Museum there is dedicated to the
flora, fauna, and geology of the Antarctic. The displays and halls were built to make you feel as if you were there and did a really good
job of teaching through story telling, interaction, and fact. Too bad it was on the top floor, which was quite out of the way.
I came back to the centre of town and found a festival in full swing! The central tower was opened for tours... apparently a rare
thing and got to meet the Brussels burgomaster (he shook my hand!).
Dinner. I treated myself to a nice dinner at a restraunt that made specifically Belgian cousine. I ordered cheese fondu, onion soup, and
crepes for desert. Really great... although I had a minor fondu issue. It wasn't what I thought it would be. When I think of fondu I imagine
a pot of boiling cheese and bread and this is mighty different from what the Belgians think it is. I was served fried cheese balls, they
were weird but tasty... in an artery hardening sort of way.
I wanted to blow the rest of my Belgian currency so I used the rest of it drinking Belgian beers at different pubs, good fun. As I was
doing this I wandered past the peeing statue where the festival seemed to have settled itself. And get this, they had hooked up beer
tanks to the statue and it was peeing beer! I'm serious, I have photos to prove this. There were actually people climbing up onto the
statue to fill their mouths with the statue's pee. I couldn't believe it.
Crawled back to the station and while aimlessly looking for a way to lose the last of my belgian currency I caught a thief stealing from
the store. They gave two beers that I was thinking of buying for free, which still didn't solve my problem of having left
over Belgian currency!
I boarded the train and discovered that I was one of 4 people in the entire car. I shared a cabin with this really nice girl named
Irene who is a student and University of Zurich. We could have taken seperate rooms, but we hit it off so well that sharing seemed
much more pleasant. And considering the fact that neither of us had much luck sleeping it was nice to have someone to talk with.
The train go into Basel, all the typical Swiss border procedures were gone through... id checks, passports, drug sniffing dogs. We didn't
have to get up though. The great thing about sleeper trains is that you give the conductor in charge of your car all of your visa,
passport, and border details and he/she deals with the border guards for you whilst you sleep (or don't sleep in Irene and my case).
The train continued on to Bern.