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Michelle's European Adventures
| | England | France | Austria/Italy | France Again | Still France | Catastrophic Event | |
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Ryan, Nen and I drove around Europe in our little VW van Grenache. We hit Oxford, London, Dieppe, Paris, Innsbruck Austria, Mantua Italy, the north west Italian, the French Riviera, Avignon and Montpellier France. Nen and Ry continued on in France but I had to get back to Canada. They spent a couple more months living in the van and working in Britain. I've included my letters home to people as the best explaination of my adventures. |
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Hello to all from London, I'm here in London with my brother Ryan and his wife Nen. I got to England on Wednesday afternoon and made my way over to Oxford where Nen & Ryan were staying with their friend Dave from Prince George who is going to New College at Oxford University on the Rhoades Scholarship...schwanky. We walked around a bit and I managed to get a hold of Jess who was on 1st session SS in the kitchen. I got to stay with her that night and then all three of us were able to stay with her for the next two nights. Dave's girlfriend Krista joined us and took the floor space at Dave's which meant that Nen & Ryna had nowhere to stay. We spent four nights in Oxford in all. It's a really cool town, like a college town but the buildings were built in like the 1400's! Often there is a heard of students heading off somewhere at night in their formal dresses and tuxes. I've never seen more tuxes in my entire life put together as I did in the few days in Oxford. We got to walk around a lot and see the Thames and free museums and lots of very busy people, everyone walks like they're on a mission from God. We went to EvenSong one night at the New College Chapel (and I use the word Chapel here as in a miniature version of a cathedral sort of a way, not like a country chapel like we have in North America). It's the daily evening service and consists mostly of sung psalms. It was a-mazing! There's these little guys, all of about 7 years old, and they're unbelievable. The next night we got to go see one of Dave's friends Mark in the Exeter Chapel. Mark is also a Rhoades Scholar, he's from Winnepeg. Again, it was a-mazing! They did two requiems (Faure and some other guy who starts with an F but I can't remember his name) for All Souls Day. It's absolutely indescribable sitting in this phenominal chapel with all the stone work and marble and mosaics and gold leafing listening to this full choir (right down to a little four year old who was REALLY good) with organ accompaniment singing music written forever ago...my word, breath-taking. And already the fireworks for Guy Fawlkes day had started and were going off in the middle of the performance. Hallowe'en is no big deal here. Guy Fawlkes though, the fireworks start on about the 28th and go until Guy Fawlkes Day on Nov 5th (I don't think I'm spelling that right, it might be Faulks). He's this guy, Guy, that tried to blow up parliament and got caught, so now they do fireworks to comemorate the occasion. Oxford, being a college town, starts early and is very persistent with the explosives. The next day we headed off to London. I already had a return ticket so I headed off first and met Nen & Ryan at Victoria Station. We couldn't get a hold of the friend of our friend Tara who is living over here (did you follow that), so we decided to start walking around to see what we could see...the other side of the mountain. It's all pretty central so we managed to find Westminister Cathedral right away. The place...oh my gosh...I was dumb founded upon walking in. Outside is all red brick...ugly! But inside is practically all marble and mosaics. I don't know what they're called, me being an ignorant little girl, but there's the little nooks on the sides named after saints and that's where you go to pray to the certain saints. Some of them were so elaborate I just stood there in awe at the mosaic work. That's actually a pretty good sum up of the last couple of days is Michelle, standing or sitting there, stupefid and in awe. Then we walked over to the parliment buildings and Big Ben. We couldn't get into Westminister Abbey cause it was sunday and they don't let people in...something about worship time...I don't know! Then up the road to Trafalgar Square where we watched kids chase the masses of pidgeons and finally took a break to take our packs off. We felt like tourists for the first time. Nen said we have become what we normally mock. It's kinda fun. We walked back down the road and found the Palace Parks which lead to...you guessed it...the palace. Amazing how that works. Dad's right, it's all pretty unimpressive. Especially after the Cathedral. We were impressed with ourselves though because we didn't have any maps or had any idea what so ever where we were and we managed to find all that fun stuff on our own by just walking around. We finally got a hold of Janine who is the girl we're staying with while in London. When we got in she wanted to go for dinner then to church so we went with her. We went to the church that first started Alpha (if you know what that is). It was a really good service, with good contemporary music which I guess is really hard to find over here. Today we went and looked at VW Vans to buy, had some lunch on the fountain in front of Buckingham Palace and then headed back to Trafalgar to go to the National Gallery. (Anna-Lisa, I totally wished you were here) I fell in love with the two rooms of Impressionistic paintings. My visits to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the National Gallery here made me wish I had paid more attention in Western Civ class. So much of what I've seen I go, gosh that looks familar, I can't remember anything in particular about it though. Except for the Constable paintings, I took notice of the clouds. Miss Rowe (my teacher) always pointed out the clouds in the Constable paintings.
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Hello all from France, Bear with me as I try to get used to the French keyboard. We're in a little city called Nancy (get an atlas) just east of Paris. So to recap, we spent time in London. On our last day there we bought a VW camper van, complete with leopard print interior and an attic for me to live in. It's all of about 2 feet high in there. So we headed to Portsmouth to catch a ferry to France. I need to take this moment to say that my brother is my hero. The Clark children were unleashed on the poor unsuspecting inhabitants of London. I navigated and Ryan drove...through downtown London in rush hour traffic. The van was having difficulties because it hadn't been driven in a while so it kept stalling, it was rush hour, we were on the left side of the car and the right side of the road and it is a standard (shifting with the left hand). He did phenominally!! He is my hero!!! AND he had to deal with me trying to figure out the crazy roads in London. So we finally got into Portsmouth the next night after a quick stop in Swindon at their friends place to pick up their camping gear. It's a port town with tonnes of history. They're trying to clean the place up, so the area where we found to park on the side of the road for the night is a really nice area. It probably was really sketchy at one point but it's not anymore. We caught the first ferry in the morning. Bizarre ferry, it was more like a luxury cruise ship with rooms you could book and a theater and a pool and all sorts of craziness like that. We drove that afternoon to Dieppe and ended up parking right on the beach there for the night with all sorts of big campers where the people stared at us. I love Dieppe, it has this big old castle on a hill beside the downtown core that we got to romp around. It's probably a tourist filled nightmare when it's nice out, as it was it was really crowded. We woke up the next morning on Remembrance Day to all the church bells going off. It was beautiful. We went to the Canadian cemetery there. In 1942 6000 troops (5000 of which were Canadian, a couple of americains, and a bunch of British elite guys) tried to take back Dieppe from occupation, they failed. In two hours 1000 were dead and 2000 had been taken captive by the Germans. We then headed for Paris and found a camp site right in the city on the equivalent of Central Park. We walked....a lot, until we finally figured out the Transit system in Paris, which, compared to that of London, pretty much sucks! We even missed the last bus home so we had to wak through the park at 11 at night. I have never before seen so many hookers in my life!! Probably put all together all the prostitutes I have seen at any other time of my life, and it would be less than that one night. After that was when we tried harder to get the transit system. We climbed up to the second stage of the Eiffel tour ( I was all loopy from the height, I don't like heights). We walked around, we saw Notre Dame, the Louvre (London National Gallery is better if you ask me), all the big fun monuments everywhere. There was this guy in the back courtyard of Notre Dame who was drawing under a tree, he was really good. Universally Paris in my books. Now we're off again. If you don't already know this about me, know that I live for road trips. And now we're off on a road trip. (Get the atlas out) We've headed east and will be going through Strasbourg into Switzerland in the next day or two then over to Austria probably as far as Innsbruck then down towards Milan and then down to the Coast over to Nice. That's the plan for now, but we'll see how the roads hold up and whether I freeze to death in my little fiberglass attic with no one to share a sleeping bag with for body heat. I'll keep you updated as to whether we are able to stick to the route or not. Strasbourg was like being in Germany, only everyone spoke French. Good for me seeing that I'm no good at German. Ich bin spracken kein Deutsch is about all I know... 'I don't speak German'. |
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New Letter: I think I last left off in Strasbourg where we stopped for the afternoon after leaving Paris. We drove through Germany in an afternoon and headed up the Austrian alpes that night. We stopped on top of a pass that Grenache had some difficulty getting up (she's only got three cylinders working right now so it's a little slow going on the mountains). It was beautiful to wake up right in the mountains with snow. Michelle was not prepared for this portion of the trip though so I was more than just a little chilly. We headed for Innsbruck which is a cute little Austrian town, the only thing was that we came in on sunday morning. We knew that things close down pretty good over here on Sundays, something that I admire, but we weren't prepared for the ghost town that we hit. All of down town was silent where we got off the bus. It was a little weird. We did find people, quite a few people in fact, they were all walking around aimlessly window shopping, much like our selves. It was very odd. The one thing that we did come across that was so cool was this winter/christmas village thing it had a puppet show that the kids were all just eating up, and kiosks selling warm liquid whatever and candy floss. It was lots of fun. We headed out the next day intending to go to Italy. We got a little lost. One problem that we have discovered here is that the priciple of marking the highway name, direction or number is a little lost on the europeans. Particularly the direction. We took the wrong road and ended up a very steep mountain with a very nice ski resort up top, upon which we then blew the alternator belt because she was so overheated from the exertion of getting up the mountain. Did I mention that Michelle had not packed for snow?? We did get down to the next town where we could get someone to replace the part, YEAH! We hit the main highway finally, after going all the way back to where we had started from, we were that off on our directions. We spent the night on the side of the road in Italy. We're fond of pulling off on the side of the road. We're pretty self-sufficient and only need topped up on the water supply every couple of days, so much of the time we've just pulled over somewhere. Usually we can find somewhere quiet, but often what's quiet when we pull over is a little bit busier during morning rush hour. We went into Mantova (Mantua) for one of the most perfect mornings I have ever had. The city was old and beautiful and full of open squares. There was a guy playing a 12 string that you could hear for blocks. Most of the people around were these old Italian men, they were all standing around talking in groups like bunchs of school boys. On a side street we were passed by these two old guys on their bikes talking away. One of their chums came and passed from the other direction and without a break in conversation out rang "ciao" and then the conversation continued. There were some small produce markets on the street, the sun had come out to warm us up, the people were friendly and down right adorable...it was all pretty perfect. We then headed down for the Coast. We've decided never to speak of Genoa ever again.
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We woke up the next morning at the side of the road on top of this cliff right on the mediteranean. We were very excited. We drove through all sorts of small Italian and French towns all along the coast. We saw Monacco from a top a moutain. I love it. I find that I am totally at a loss of words to describe it all, yes, Michelle is at a loss of words. We made our way to this little town Sanary Sur La Mer, which is where our friend Davey's dad is originally from. It was another perfect morning. We walked around all the small and close streets which weren't even really big enough for cars to get through so it cut back on traffic. We had crepes, sat in the sun at a cafe and watched the cute old people walk by with their dogs in their hand bags (they do that a lot around here, we see several on a daily basis) while Nen & Ry had coffee and I wrote post cards, and then went for panaché (beer and lemonade) at Davey's favourite place to go and decided to stay forever. We hit the next town and went and played in the waves. All together another beautiful day. The next day, while looking unsuccessfully for an Internet cafe, we met two Canadians. You gotta love the Cdn flag on packs. I know that we're mocked the world around for doing it, but really, we never would have met them otherwise. They told us to go to Avignon, so here we are, waiting to fix the van. Tuesday I'll be heading to Montpellier which is about an hour or two from here in order to fly back to London. My flight leaves London Wednesday afternoon. I'm really looking forward to getting home to a real bed. As much fun as my little attic is, I'm looking forward to not having to climb on the counter to get into bed.
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Bonjour mes amis, Barring a catastrophic event, this should be the last mass transmission from over here. So I had every intention of writing more often than this, but we haven't been able to find a cyber cafe or anything of the sort since I last wrote until yesterday. We're in Avignon France. It's a really cool totally fortified city, there's a big ol wall that goes all around the city and then the rhone river goes just around that. We're at a camp site just on the other side of the Rhone, usually it's further away from the site, but they have had incredible flooding here so the camp is still covered in mud and debris. We're here until at least tomorrow, we're having to get some work done on Grenache (we named the van) and nothing is open saturday or sunday so we're here friday till monday. It's nice being back in French Land. I have decided that I am not supposed to ever speak German. This would be my third attempt at trying to really get a grasp of the language. After one day in Italy, my Italian was better than three days trying to speak German. it's not meant to be. It's nice to be able to at least have a minor grasp on the language where I can sort of converse verbally as opposed to using hand gestures and facial expressions (although I do have a friend who does that even in her native language...right särah!). Hooray for French. |
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New Letter: I'm alone in Montpellier in Southern France. So you remember "barring a catastrophic event...", I had some difficulties with my plans home...they've all been cancelled due to a strike by the Air Traffic Controllers. I have met my own personal Angel tonight and now I'm able to enjoy this city. Its downtown area is the most ecclectical place I've ever been. There'd be some little vegan hole in the wall run by a buddist monk guy with no teeth and a Smashing Pumpkins shirt, right next to a French cuisine restaurant with Maitre D and all. So that's about all from me on this side of the water, It's been a slice, Thanks for listening, -michelle |
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