On homecoming

Hello all! Sarah and I are heading home in just 3 days, and we are so excited! We'll be pretty busy, lots of travel, so I'm not sure if/when we'll get onto the Internet... so I thought I would post this now. It pretty well sums up how we feel! This is "America for Me" by Henry Van Dyke.

'Tis fine to see the Old World and travel up and down
Among the famous palaces and cities of renown,
To admire the crumbly castles and the statues and kings
But now I think I've had enough of antiquated things.

So it's home again, and home again, America for me!
My heart is turning home again and there I long to be,
In the land of youth and freedom, beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.

Oh, London is a man's town, there's power in the air;
And Paris is a woman's town, with flowers in her hair;
And it's sweet to dream in Venice, and it's great to study Rome;
But when it comes to living there is no place like home.

I like the German fir-woods in green battalions drilled;
I like the gardens of Versailles with flashing foutains filled;
But, oh, to take your had, my dear, and ramble for a day
In the friendly western woodland where Nature has her sway!

I know that Europe's wonderful, yet something seems to lack!
The Past is too much with her, and the people looking back.
But the glory of the Present is to make the Future free--
We love our land for what she is and what she is to be.

Oh, it's home again, and home again, America for me!
I want a ship that's westward bound to plough the rolling sea,
To the blessed Land of Room Enough, beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.

On the Irish

We are in Ireland, and I don't have much time, so this will be brief; but I just want to say that Ireland is pretty much great. We're in a pretty small town, Portstewart, which is kind of a resort town. There are lots of golf courses around, right on the sea, that are just lovely. There's some sort of festival going on this week, we missed a free folk orchestra concert last night because it was cancelled, as well as a sand-castle-building contest that was over by the time we arrived; but we are at the library now where we have had no trouble hearing the karaoke...

I really like Ireland and wish we could have more time here. We leave tomorrow; of our "four" days in Ireland, we've spent one and a half days, probably, travelling. Not quite so fun... and tomorrow is an almost-all-day travel day as well. But the scenery here is so beautiful that it's hard not to enjoy just sitting on the bus and looking around. We went to the Giant's Causeway today (in my opinion, a nice hike, but really not all it's cracked up to be. Better than the Mona Lisa, though!). We have had no trouble finding anything here because the people are so incredibly helpful. Several bus drivers have made sure we were getting to where we needed to go; one older man at the bus station just came up to us and told us all about the buses and how to get around; and everyone is just so friendly and helpful and great. It's a refreshing change from the generally indifferent people in France. I guess it's been more than a week since we left there, so maybe that's a bad contrast. People in Bath and the Cotswolds and Wales were nice enough, but they don't come near how nice everyone here is. We're off to Scotland tomorrow, but I do hope to come back to Ireland someday--with a car! Trains and buses have their charms, but they can only get us so far.

We will be home now in less than a week, and we're getting more and more excited. I think we'll both be able to appreciate home better, now that we realize how much we miss it. We are both really enjoying our time here, especially being able to speak to people! The only problem is that often people have such thick accents that we can't understand what they're saying--we know they're trying to talk to us, but it often takes quite a while to figure it out!

Love to all~

On Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

Yes folks, that is a word. One single word, in fact... it's Welsh. On our train ride from Conwy to Holyhead, where we caught a ferry to Dublin, we passed through Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. This train station is very small but has a very long name... it means "The church of St Mary in the hollow of white hazel trees near the rapid whirlpool by St Tysilio's of the red cave." How's that for a name? I wonder what would happen if we gave places names like that in Minnesota...


(Matt, we didn't go to Cardiff... sorry!)


So we are now in Dublin, Ireland, and it is raining. I think it has rained in every country we've been in--and in a lot of countries, it's rained almost every day. We experienced Paris not as the City of Light, but as the City of Light Rain, until the last two days we were there, when the city turned into an inferno. However, as it turns out, we haven't had it bad at all--check out the news for info on flash flooding in Great Britain. Much of the flooding is happening in the Cotswolds, where we were before Wales. One of the couples we met in our B&B in Bath (they were from Boston, actually) are, as far as we know, staying in Stratford-upon-Avon, which is currently underwater. Who knows what happened to them. According to my latest check, the rain is headed to Scotland and Northern Ireland, where we are off to tomorrow--pray that we won't get stuck!


So we are in Dublin, and we just had an amazingly Irish experience, so I better tell y'all about it. We wandered around Dublin for the morning, seeing some sights, trying to do some shopping, etc., but this afternoon we decided to go to an evensong service at a cathedral just a few blocks from our hostel. (Neither of the cathedrals in Dublin have been Catholic for I don't know how many years, hundreds I think; but the big church that is Catholic is not allowed to become a cathedral.) So this is where it gets really Irish: We went to St Patrick's Cathedral, which is supposedly on or very near the site of the well where St Patrick baptized his new converts; we were sitting in the Guinness family pew (I kid you not, there was a plaque); and the organ interlude was the tune popularly known as "Danny Boy." I was pretty amazed, let's be honest.


Tomorrow we're heading to the Anterim Coast of Northern Ireland (back onto the pound... not exciting), where we are staying in a small town about two hours outside of Belfast. We'll see Belfast tomorrow, but we're mostly hoping to get some small-town Irish experiences, since we had the big-city Irish thing here in Dublin. Of course they are in two different countries, but we just aren't able to get out into the country here. Travel in Great Britain without a car is not that easy--the train system is actually kind of terrible. But, we were able to successfully flag down a train when we were leaving Conwy yesterday! It was pretty exciting--you have to stand at the station and hope the conductor sees you and stops. (Actually, the fact that the train stopped had nothing to do with us, after all; there were passengers getting off at Conwy--but we'll pretend it was our wave that did it!) We'll be training into Northern Ireland, then bumming around Belfast for a few hours and bussing our way to Port Stewart. May the luck o' the Irish be with us!

On English speakers and general delightfulness

We are in the British Isles, and it is a glorious thing. We understand the salespeople and the train announcements, we can read the signs (except street signs, because they generally don't exist), we know what we're ordering at restaurants, and there is much rejoicing.

I'm sitting in a library in Conwy, Wales. We've been here only about an hour, but we dropped our bags at our B&B and went off to find some tea, discovering to our disappointment that they don't actually speak Whale here. We both really enjoy the afternoon tea tradition; Sarah has been contemplating retiring to the British Isles in order to indulge in said tradition. (Personally, if I were about to start grad school, I probably wouldn't be planning my retirement quite yet.) But we both really like being in English-speaking territory, so these last two weeks will be probably our favorite part of the trip. It's fortunate that we're enjoying ourselves so much here, because we are also both quite homesick, I'll admit it, and if we were somewhere we didn't like as much as this, we would be tempted to call it quits and head on home.

We have a nice, relaxing few days planned out, and we will try to get to some Internet again soon to let you all know about them. I don't have much time left, so I will sign off for now; love to all at home!

On water and such

At midnight last night, or this morning, whichever, there were fireworks going off everywhere for Bastille Day... we were already in bed so we only heard them, but tonight we are going to see fireworks at the Eiffel Tower! So fun.

It is soooo hot here, at least here in this Internet cafe. In the city it is warm, but mostly just really humid. The Metro gets pretty stuffy, but everywhere else it's not too bad in the shade. We are trying to drink a lot (not always fun when we have to pay for the toilets), but we are at least able to find free water fountains to fill up our bottles. The water here is good... not famous like in Rome, not something the locals are proud of like in Venice, but nice and wet. I wanted to mention the Venice water when we were there, but I forgot. We saw the Grand Canal yesterday at Versailles, which made me think of it. The canals in the real Venice are actually kind of gross, with all the boat traffic and such... lots of garbage in the water as well, and it smells kind of funny. Sometimes when the water was murky enough, and the garbage was floating just so, it looked like something out of a Salvador Dali painting, which I thought was fun. The water here that we've seen is not so dirty. Right now we came from the Luxembourg Gardens, which have some great people-watching, and the tiniest pond ever. I could probably spit across it, but there were kids of all ages out floating their toy boats and just having a blast.

We don't have much time here so I will sign off for now, and wish you all a very happy Bastille Day! (Look it up if you don't know anything about it.)

On Paris and City Smells (again)

Bon jour!
We are already halfway through our stint in Paris, which is hard to believe. Tomorrow we're finishing up sightseeing in Paris, then Saturday we are visiting Versailles and celebrating Bastille Day! It's I think like the 4th of July, but we're not entirely sure what all goes on. We know there's a parade on the Champs-Elysees, and we're hoping for fireworks! How cool would that be!

Today was our big museum day... but we only hit two museums after all, instead of the three that we had planned at one point. We started at the Musee d'Orsay, and after a lunch break hit the Musee du Louvre. I'm not even going to lie, we were in the Louvre for like an hour and that's it. We like art, really we do, but that's a LOT of art. Apparently we have a very high capacity for overstimulation. We saw the Mona Lisa (which is only famous because the king Francois liked it; it's a nice painting, but really no great shakes), the Venus de Milo (also not as amazing as it's made out to be), and the Winged Victory (I did like that one a lot). We also saw lots and lots of other things as well, of course; it's the Louvre--you can't really avoid seeing lots of art. After our museums we walked through the Toulieries gardens and down the Champs-Elysees. We actually went and sat in the McDonald's (cheapest seats we could find) to write postcards. Let me tell you, we felt classy.
I also wanted to make a quick note on city smells, which I commented on in an earlier post. We are discovering new city smells, especially in the subways, which make me laugh. Parisian subways, in the morning during rush hour, smell like bread! There are little stores actually in the subway where you can buy baguettes and doughnuts and such... and they smell amazing. The Belgian subway was even better--it smelled like waffles! Isn't that the greatest?

We are paying through the nose for this Internet time (2 or 3 times more expensive than anything else we've seen in Europe) so I will sign off for now. Love to all at home--we miss you!

On Paris and night trains

Bon jour!

We are safely in Paris, although it was a disaster getting here; the disaster is not quite over yet, either. There was a bit of confusion about our reservation at our hotel-hostel thing, but we're working it out. The Hipotel Atlanta, or something like that, is in Chinatown and run by this crazy French Chinese lady who spoke almost no English but somehow understood everything we were saying to her. Our six nights there should be interesting. This is our longest stay anywhere; it's exciting, but also kind of sad that six days feels like an eternity because we haven't been in one place more than three or four days in weeks. Once we get some sleep we will be in fine form, I think.

Sleep is not something we have had a lot of recently. We had to take a 5:26 train to Munich two days ago, so we were up at 4 am! Anyone who knows how much of a morning person I am not might be surprised to hear that I actually enjoyed it quite a bit and was wide awake. Last night was not quite as nice; we took a night train to Paris, leaving Munich at 9 pm and arriving in Paris just before 7. We booked our tickets only a few days ago, so the beds were full. We ended up having two non-reclining seats across from each other--both the middle of three in a hot, airless compartment. Neither one of us slept much. I will be fine, as I'm much more used to not sleeping or eating regularly; it's harder for Sarah. (By the way, if you want a better idea of exactly what we are doing in more organized detail, check out Sarah's blog.) Anyway, we are glad to be here, regardless of how we arrived. We're going to have a relaxing day today--maybe even go to the cinema (it's discount day) as our brains are not quite functional enough to hit the museums just yet.

Love to all!

On side trips and barbarians

Hallo from München!
That´s right, we´re in Germany.

Not in our itinerary, but when a tour of the lavender fields in the south of France fell through, we headed over to Germany for a whirlwind visit and will spend an extra 2 days in Paris. Let me tell you, though, side trips are exhausting. We didn´t have any idea what was in Munich, besides beer halls, and had no idea how to work anything at all. We made it, though, and we´re going to the famous Neuschwanstein Castle tomorrow (made famous by crazy king Ludwig who built it, then even more famous by Disney who was inspired by it). I´m pretty excited to see this fairy-tale place, and it will also be really nice to spend almost a week in one place. We were lucky enough to be able to basically extend our reservation at our Paris hostel. We have done some Internet searches and I think our castle visit will be fairly smooth... all in all, a successful side trip.

On a different note, the more we travel, the more I realize that Sarah and I really stand out from the locals (as well as from the Asian tour groups, who often outnumber the locals). In Colmar, where we were last night, a lady pulled up in her car and asked us where some Rue

was, in French of course. I thought she was crazy for thinking we were locals, but decided to take it as a compliment. Of course we couldn´t tell her where to go, but we answered politely (in English) that we were from out of town. It was nice... sort of. Ten minutes later we were standing helplessly in a self-service cafe, looking absolutely helpless. A table of young men were not even trying to cover up the fact that they were laughing at us.

We really do seem like barbarians sometimes. I´m wearing two shades of navy that do not work together at all--and one of them is a sweatshirt. We picnicked on the train on the way here... we had a baguette and some salami, neither of which did any favors for the leather.

My time is up... more later!

On food, family, friends, and running

Ever had a salad with Italian dressing? In our experience, a salad with Italian dressing means a salad with no dressing. Oil and vinegar are generally on the table, but nothing like the Italian we get in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Actually, I really like the plain lettuce. The food here is amazing, no surprise there. However, it really is kind of all the same. There’s really good pizza, pasta, sandwiches (which are pretty similar to what we had in Spain… what is it with Europeans and ham??), and, of course, gelato. But really, there’s not much else. At dinner tonight I overheard the British ex-pats one table over lamenting the lack of variety. The lady was saying that there’s no variety in food or people or something else that I can’t remember. But she was right—while you can definitely tell who the tourists are and can DEFINITELY tell who the American tourists are, pretty much all the people here look the same. A little variety in how much time they’ve spent at the beach, perhaps; some blonds, some with darker hair; but really not much else. And the food is good everywhere, but it’s also basically the same menu everywhere. I could really go for some beef lo mein right now. All of you back in the US, our melting-pot culture (or anticulture, according to a book I finished not too long ago) is far from perfect, but appreciate the variety we are blessed with. More on what this lady was saying in a later post.

We have been traveling as a family of five now for a week. There are some huge differences between traveling with two and traveling with five. We are sleeping much less, eating much more, and spending a lot more time doing each thing we do. The third explains the first, and a college student budget explains the second. As far as the time we spend, it is most obvious when we have to use the WC—I think a linear addition to the number of women in line leads to an exponential increase in the amount of time the whole process takes. (I was on the math team...although I had more scribal duties than solving duties, right, Matt?)

We spent Saturday in Venice. We’re actually staying on Lido, another island right next to Venice. The main island of Venice looks like a fish, and Lido looks kind of like a lid that is set on top of the fish. Lido is apparently where locals come to go to the beach. The whole place seems to be set up for spring break. So Saturday we went into the main island, mostly. We visited Murano, the famous glass-making island, and watched a really really cool glassblowing demonstration. Of course, we tourists were just amazed as this man crafted some beautiful vase out of molten glass, but he was probably bored out of his mind. Funny how something so ordinary to one person is so incredible to another person… kind of like how one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, I guess. Anyway, we met my friend Liz from Northwestern on Murano! She is studying Italian at a university in Urbino (I have no idea if that’s how it’s spelled) for the summer and trained up here with a friend for the weekend. It was so good to see her. After the glass factory we took the vaporetto (bus-boat) back to Venice and just wandered around for the afternoon. We saw San Marco, of course, and let’s be honest; you wouldn’t want that many pigeons in the entire world, let alone in one piazza. We had a couple of interesting pigeon experiences today—one watching probably fifty nasty, dirty birds basically swarming a boy who was not much taller than a pigeon himself, the other Sarah’s reaction to a pigeon pecking her foot: punting it. Can you blame her? Pigeons are so temptingly football-shaped.

On a separate note, running! In Venice I saw more runners than probably just about anywhere else... doesn't that seem strange? They were all in a park, though, not in the typical canal-filled area that you would normally think of when you think of Venice. We sat in the park for a while, and ate dinner a block off it--a cute little neighborhood, called San Elena I think. Anyway, it made me miss running! I didn't even bring tennis shoes, because they would take up way too much space in my pack, we walk everywhere so we get plenty of exercise, Sarah didn't want to run with me and I didn't want to try to go running in strange cities by myself... plenty of reasons. Plus, once we got here, we found that Europe is definitely not runner-friendly. The streets are narrow and full of cars and bicycles, not to mention often being cobblestones or very uneven pavement. So that's one thing I'm very excited to get back into once we get home.

Our time in Italy is almost up; we head for Switzerland in just a couple of days, and Mom, Dad, and Marie will be gone just a few days after that. Sarah and I have been in Europe now for three weeks. It’s hard to believe that it’s been that long, but three weeks really isn’t that long at all. We’re flying through each day—experiencing a lot, taking in a lot, and probably forgetting a lot. It really has been interesting to experience these other cultures, even if tourists are their own subculture. I think, looking back over these three weeks, it’s safe to conclude that (a) I love traveling, (b) I love traveling in Europe, (c) I love traveling and living in the cities the most, and (d) I would not want to live in either Spain or Italy. Even with that tiny summary, I know I have learned a lot.

Ciao!