I left Amsterdam. Was very sad to see it go, because its an amazing city and i met some very cool people there. I took a train to Cologne. Poor Cologne, it never had a chance. The night before I left Amsterdam I stayed up all night talking to an Irish girl called Kim on the couch in the lobby of my hostel, about everything under the sun. And then in order to get to Cologne, I had to get 4 trains, each lasting between 30mins-1 hour. I was so tired, and missing Amsterdam, and then I got off at the wrong station in Cologne and had to walk for two hours in the rain. To find that my hostel was right next to the train station I failed to get off at and my room was right next to the tracks. No sleepytime for Jess. Needless to say it wasn´t the most fun I´ve had here so far. But I took a long walk around the city the next day, and i think maybe if I ever went there again I wouldn´t hate it. Maybe.
My train to Berlin was a lot easier, and my hostel easy to find. However, i arrived to find my room was in the basement of the hostel, and there were 29 other people in it. I have since moved to a hostel on a boat on the river Spree next to O2 World, a huge ugly concert hall in the middle of avant-garde Freidrichshain and Kreuzberg. But I am less than 50 metres away from the East Side Gallery, the longest surviving stretch of the Berlin Wall. I´ve been on quite a few tours of Berlin while I´ve been here, and I´m picking up little bits of German, which is cool. I find it fun to try and translate things I have no business translating, and imagine they say weird and wonderful things when in reality its more like `fish and cheese´or something like that. On Sunday I woke up to find that the huge Fete de la Musique was on, a giant free festival with performances all throughout Berlin. I ended up participating in an experiential performance art kinda thing involving lots of paper hearts and LOVE for everybody, run by this artist called Oliver, and spending the day with some German uni students writing on Oliver´s installation-poster and listening to very good music played by an indie rock band, a gypsy band and a plain rock band near a little cafe in a park in Kreuzberg. Lots of fun.
While I´ve been here I´ve eating so many felafel kebabs its insane. That and Vietnamese noodles. They are very cheap here, and there are stalls everywhere that make the felafel fresh in front of you. Anyway, I´m planning to go to a music and theatre festival near Berlin this week called Fusion, which sounds like it should be awesome.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Things I´ve learnt while traveling...
1. When you bring so few things with you, it is important that the things you do bring are beautiful and you enjoy them. Otherwise you will get tired of seeing them everyday.
2. Travel doesn´t need to be meticulously planned, and it often turns out better if it isn´t.
3. Travel is not a competition.
4. One of the few ways we actually learn anything is by simply observing.
5. People you meet while traveling are generally friendly and normal, and have more in common with you than you think. The only thing holding you back from talking to strangers is fear of what they´ll think of you.
6. The ability to read people is a useful necessity when traveling alone. Not just for security reasons, sometimes just to avoid being stuck in a boring conversation.
7. Language barriers are molehills, not mountains. And fun to overcome.
8. Being able to judge other people is hard. Harder is being able to judge yourself.
9. Loneliness happens. Sometimes its necessary, like being stuck in a room with yourself until one of you wins.
10. Age is a construct; some people fit the mould better than others. The most interesting people you meet while traveling are those who ignore the mould entirely.
11. You can always leave.
Now read again, substituting the world `travel´ for `life´.
2. Travel doesn´t need to be meticulously planned, and it often turns out better if it isn´t.
3. Travel is not a competition.
4. One of the few ways we actually learn anything is by simply observing.
5. People you meet while traveling are generally friendly and normal, and have more in common with you than you think. The only thing holding you back from talking to strangers is fear of what they´ll think of you.
6. The ability to read people is a useful necessity when traveling alone. Not just for security reasons, sometimes just to avoid being stuck in a boring conversation.
7. Language barriers are molehills, not mountains. And fun to overcome.
8. Being able to judge other people is hard. Harder is being able to judge yourself.
9. Loneliness happens. Sometimes its necessary, like being stuck in a room with yourself until one of you wins.
10. Age is a construct; some people fit the mould better than others. The most interesting people you meet while traveling are those who ignore the mould entirely.
11. You can always leave.
Now read again, substituting the world `travel´ for `life´.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Carcassonne, Avignon, Paris, Amsterdam
So I left La Barraque last Monday, catching a train from Auch to Avignon, stopping at Carcassonne on the way. Remember the photo of the quite small backpack in one of the first posts? Here's where that comes in handy. I wanted to visit La Cite, the medieval city outside the modern town of Carcassonne. i read a book with a lot of Cathar history that was set there, and it seemed really interesting.
Mistake 1: Not hunting around well enough for a locker to put my bag in. That thing was heavy, schlepped around a city on a hill.
Mistake 2: Not checking how far the ruins were from the train station before I left. It was a lot farther than I thought.
Mistake 3: Going in the middle of the day, when the only language you won't here in the Cite of Carcassonne is French. There were a LOT of tourists.
All in all, the site was pretty interesting, if extremely touristy. People hike up to this medieval city to eat fish and chips in a restaurant on the sidewalk and buy plastic souvenir swords. The church was beautiful though, as was the view. Anyway, I was only there for a few hours on my way to Avignon.
That is a nice town. Its a walled city, so you get the contrast of stylish 10 year old apartments set into medieval stone ramparts. I was staying at a hostel/camping ground on an island across the river from the main city, so there were beautiful views of the church, and the Palais des Papes, which was briefly the papal seat of power a few centuries ago. The last day i was there I went for a walk to Villeneuve-Les-Avignon which is not too far from Avignon. There were cool walks to do along the canal that encircles avignon, and into the gardens of an abbey (I never managed to find the actual abbey, but the gardens spread out for ages and were gorgeous) and I walked through a park where they were installing some sculptures made by local art students into the grass.
Anyway, TGVs are fast, so it took me less than three hours to get from Avignon to Paris, where I stayed in the same hostel I did the last time, and met a bunch of French Canadians, and we all went and took a picnic dinner and ate in front of the Eiffel Tower, watching it all lit up, and the light show that happened every hour. I left for Amsterdam at an ungodly hour in the morning (the definition of ungodly being too early for breakfast, which is included free in most hostels) and arrived at around 11am. I've been in Amsterdam for a while now, and I've been on quite a few free tours, which are really good, and visited the Rijkmuseum, Van Gogh museum and Anne Frank House.
Anne Frank House is one of the best places I've been so far. I've read the book, and seeing where the Franks actually lived, in such cramped quarters, was really interesting. But the best parts were the video interviews with Miep, a helper who smuggled food to the Franks while they were in hiding, and collected the parts of Anne's diary, and Anne's friend Hannah who saw her for the last time in a concentration camp, and her father Otto. Otto's interview was very emotional to watch, and you could tell how passionate he was about spreading his daughter's legacy after his entire family was killed. I was very affected by the house, and if you're ever in Amsterdam go visit it.
I love Amsterdam's bicycles, and the tram system. Roads in Amstersdam are very complex, and there are very few that cater just for cars. Most have a pedestrian footpath, a bike lane, and a tram line which may or may not be used by cars and bars as well. Crossing the road is an experience. I'm staying next to the beautiful Vondelpark (try saying that out loud and with a German accent) and its a 10 min walk to Dam Square, where there is beach volleyball going on at the moment, and heaps of street artists. Its a very lively city, especially in contrast to the car-oriented cities in Aus and the US which can often seem like robotic ghost towns. In Amsterdam EVERYONE cycles. Old, young, with children (the most I've seen is three kids on the one bike), with dogs (I saw a huge golden retriever on the back of one bike) brightly coloured. But all the bikes are pieces of junk. This is because the average Amsterdammer goes through about 30 bikes in a lifetime, and around 40 000 get stolen every year. But its a very small, flat city, which makes it a perfect place ofr cyclists.
Anyway, there's a free concert in the Vondelpark, which is where I'm off to now. Ciao!
Mistake 1: Not hunting around well enough for a locker to put my bag in. That thing was heavy, schlepped around a city on a hill.
Mistake 2: Not checking how far the ruins were from the train station before I left. It was a lot farther than I thought.
Mistake 3: Going in the middle of the day, when the only language you won't here in the Cite of Carcassonne is French. There were a LOT of tourists.
All in all, the site was pretty interesting, if extremely touristy. People hike up to this medieval city to eat fish and chips in a restaurant on the sidewalk and buy plastic souvenir swords. The church was beautiful though, as was the view. Anyway, I was only there for a few hours on my way to Avignon.
That is a nice town. Its a walled city, so you get the contrast of stylish 10 year old apartments set into medieval stone ramparts. I was staying at a hostel/camping ground on an island across the river from the main city, so there were beautiful views of the church, and the Palais des Papes, which was briefly the papal seat of power a few centuries ago. The last day i was there I went for a walk to Villeneuve-Les-Avignon which is not too far from Avignon. There were cool walks to do along the canal that encircles avignon, and into the gardens of an abbey (I never managed to find the actual abbey, but the gardens spread out for ages and were gorgeous) and I walked through a park where they were installing some sculptures made by local art students into the grass.
Anyway, TGVs are fast, so it took me less than three hours to get from Avignon to Paris, where I stayed in the same hostel I did the last time, and met a bunch of French Canadians, and we all went and took a picnic dinner and ate in front of the Eiffel Tower, watching it all lit up, and the light show that happened every hour. I left for Amsterdam at an ungodly hour in the morning (the definition of ungodly being too early for breakfast, which is included free in most hostels) and arrived at around 11am. I've been in Amsterdam for a while now, and I've been on quite a few free tours, which are really good, and visited the Rijkmuseum, Van Gogh museum and Anne Frank House.
Anne Frank House is one of the best places I've been so far. I've read the book, and seeing where the Franks actually lived, in such cramped quarters, was really interesting. But the best parts were the video interviews with Miep, a helper who smuggled food to the Franks while they were in hiding, and collected the parts of Anne's diary, and Anne's friend Hannah who saw her for the last time in a concentration camp, and her father Otto. Otto's interview was very emotional to watch, and you could tell how passionate he was about spreading his daughter's legacy after his entire family was killed. I was very affected by the house, and if you're ever in Amsterdam go visit it.
I love Amsterdam's bicycles, and the tram system. Roads in Amstersdam are very complex, and there are very few that cater just for cars. Most have a pedestrian footpath, a bike lane, and a tram line which may or may not be used by cars and bars as well. Crossing the road is an experience. I'm staying next to the beautiful Vondelpark (try saying that out loud and with a German accent) and its a 10 min walk to Dam Square, where there is beach volleyball going on at the moment, and heaps of street artists. Its a very lively city, especially in contrast to the car-oriented cities in Aus and the US which can often seem like robotic ghost towns. In Amsterdam EVERYONE cycles. Old, young, with children (the most I've seen is three kids on the one bike), with dogs (I saw a huge golden retriever on the back of one bike) brightly coloured. But all the bikes are pieces of junk. This is because the average Amsterdammer goes through about 30 bikes in a lifetime, and around 40 000 get stolen every year. But its a very small, flat city, which makes it a perfect place ofr cyclists.
Anyway, there's a free concert in the Vondelpark, which is where I'm off to now. Ciao!
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