A tourist in the city I live in and Southwest England

England and london

The length of time between this post and the last one is in no way respective of the actual length of time between the trips and events that are depicted in the following.  In actuality, the events in this post begin IMMEDIATELY following the end of the last post.  

fade in.

The scene opens on a train from London to Salisbury, a small town a couple hours outside of London.  Two people, a male and a female are sitting next to each other as the train blazes past a train traveling in the opposite direction.

Tessa: Did you just eat that entire baguette?

Andrew: Yep.

end scene.

Salisbury was smallish, about the size of my hometown, but more interesting and had fewer suburban homes and walmarts.  On this part of our adventure we stayed in Bed and Breakfasts (4 in 4 nights), and our first was in Salisbury.  We were in Salisbury about 18 hours before heading to Cornwall. While in Salisbury we…

1. Celebrated Britain's Mother's day. (Free bottle of wine? Yes please.)

2. Saw an original copy of the Magna Carta (Published in 1215, only 4 copies still exist today.

3.  WELSH CAKES

4. Streamed the St. Louis Blues game live. (They won.)

and 5.  Rented a Vauxhall Astra.

Our adventure continued to Stonehenge, a quick 15 minutes north of Salisbury.  Stonehendge is old, and it ROCKS!!!!!! (get it?)  Stonehendge is now known to be a landing platform for aliens from distant worlds whom originally contracted humans to build it for them.   The humans were paid in sheep, that is why there are so many sheep in Great Britain.

Somewhere in Cornwall was our destination.  We ended at another bed and breakfast, walked to the sea, ate at a pub, walked back in complete darkness, chatted with our hosts (call me anytime, Alice), went to bed, woke up, ate full english breakfast (delicious and somewhat nutritious) then squeezed all our luggage back into the tiny vauxhall and made our way.

We stopped off at Land's End (the most westerly point in England), I found where the Top Gear episode that started at Lands End was filmed, then headed for B&B number three (that just rhymed).  My least favorite B&B, it smelled kind of like a nursing home.

Tintagel Castle is supposedly one of the birthplaces of King Arthur.  It was built centuries ago built high on a cliff overlooking the sea.  I like cliffs, and I like exploring so this was probably one of my favorite stops of the trip, and afterward we got ICE CREAM!  Oh, history lesson, King Arthur wasn't PHYSICALLY born there and that is because he is  not real (c'mon guys, he hung out with a WIZARD, and everyone knows magic isn't real.).

Our final B&B was more like an Inn, but tomatoes toMAHtos.  My parents got a sea view while Tessa and I overlooked some ugly courtyard with empty kegs and dirt everywhere.  We hustled back to Salisbury, caught the train for London, and our Whirlwind adventure of "Thomas Hardy Country" as my Mom would say, but Normal people would call it southwest England, ended.

Tessa was in London for 2 nights, but my parents stayed for 5.  I won't go into detail about each and every thing we did (happy?) but I'll give you the main points.


While Tessa was there:

1.Billy Eliiot: The first of 3 shows I saw in the west end while my parents were in town.  A fun musical based on the movie.  The actor playing Billy was brilliant.

2. In a forest, Dark and Deep: 2 person play starring the one and only Dr. Jack Shepard from Lost. I had to constantly repress the urge to scream "WE HAVE TO GO BACK!!!"

3. London Eye: for those of you that don't know, it's the huge ferris wheel thing.

4. Walks through Westminster.

5. Brindisa's chorizo roll: one of the best sandwiches I have ever had.

6. Tower Bridge and Tower of London

After Tessa left:

1. Les Miserables: This was the first time I had ever seen this, even though my mom has probably seen it some 15 times.  Brilliant.  The story, the music, the actors, the set.  I could have done without the lady next to me singing along, but it didn't ruin the experience.

2. Byron: An american style burger place that I have been dying to go to since I got to London (but didn't want to foot the bill myself). Delicious.  I miss good burgers.

3. Hyde park, a little shopping, Arsenal finally winning a game, and a lengthy bus tour capped off the trip.  While they were here I was as much a tourist in London as they were even though I (currently) live there.

They day after they left (less than 24 hours later) I was in Spain for my last long (more than 4 days) adventure of my semester abroad.  Currently, I'm making my way towards Madrid (via a 5 hr coach ride), having already been to Granada and Malaga.  And in less than 2 months I will be making my way back to the U S of A.  Where has this semester gone?

Paris

PARIS

My last post ended as I was chunneling towards Paris, France with my Mom, my Dad and Tessa.  Since then I have returned from Paris and continued my adventures in England, but this post is not about England.  This post is about Paris.

We arrived in Paris around 7pm, and after an interesting train station experience we made it to our living arrangements for the next three nights.  The apartment was on Montmartre in northern Paris, but far enough away from Sacre Couer and the busy square at the top to still be quiet. But boy, was it cozy.  Too small for 4 people if I do say so myself.  Perfect for 2, too small for 4.  Herve, the man we were renting from, took us on a walk to show us the area.  He was very helpful and his english was just good enough!  He had some good stories too.  Apparently, Picasso and Pissaro, while living in Paris, had lived on the top floor of the building in which we were renting an apartment.  When they went out, and got too hammered to climb up the stairs of the building to the top floor (there was no lift), they would rent the apartment that we were renting. Prettfy effin' cool.

After the walk, which was incredibly helpful, we had a little snack, settled down, and went to sleep.  The next morning started early with the most awkward shower I have ever taken.  This is because the shower was tiny, and the shower head was handlheld.  You had to half sit half stand to bathe, it was a process, and whenever someone used water elsewhere in the apartment, even if it wasn't hot water, the shower water would turn to ice in a fraction of a second.  That really kept me on my toes.  Afterwards we headed up Montmatre for breakfast and coffee, then our day and adventures in Paris began!

We took the metro to the Tuileries and walked through them towards the Louvre.  Although it was early in the spring, there were still flowers in the Tulleries, but i'm sure if you were to see them in full bloom it would be spectacular and beautiful.  The weather could have been better too.  Cloudy and 50 is not my optimum sightseeing temperature.  We reached the Louvre, took photos (required outside the Louvre), and went in to get our tickets.  Being a student at UCL, I got in free!  We started wandering through the halls of the huge museum, admiring and appreciating the priceless paintings and sculptures.  Now I like art, but I don't know enough about artists and their styles, influences etc. to feel like I came away with something REAL from that experience.  I had a great time and liked a lot of the art and collections (maybe a few too many religious pieces), but I just felt like I wasn't educated enough to TRULY appreciate what I was seeing.  There were a couple more famous paintings I recognized, and of course Mona is chillin' in her own little room and large group of phototakers around her (I think I took a picture with 15 people taking photos. a new personal best.).  From the Louvre, which also houses multiple Starbucks and an Apple star, we went to lunch and then to Notre Dame.  Notre Dame (Know-trah Dahm) was crowded, but magnificent.  Much more stunning from the outside than inside, but that is just my personal opinion.  The inside was PACKED with people.  One thing that gets me sore (I'm currently reading Catcher in the Rye, hence the use of 'sore' in this context.),  is the exploitation of historical and even religious buildings for monetary gain.  I'm not religious, but placing vending machines, where you can buy souvenir coins, at every corner in the cathedral seems wrong to me.  I know places like that cost money to upkeep, but there has to be a classier way of making money than that.  We left Notre Dame, walked around a little, got our bearings, then headed to the Eiffel Tower.  We didn't go up, but we did get to see all the people selling trinkets run away when the police came up, so that was a treat.  We took the required photos, admired it's greatness (it really is cool and to see it in real life, close up, it really was something), then headed back to Montmartre before dinner.  I will say one thing about the food we had in France and then not mention it again.  They food was amazing, and that might be an understatement.  Most of places we went were recommended by this book we had, but even the ones that weren't recommend were out of control good.  ALL THE FOOD WAS TOO GOOD.  They know how to cook, and eat,

The next day started at the catacombs (after breakfast of course).  This is a kind of tomb for people that died.

I have never seen so many human bones in my life.  It was eerie, creepy and interesting at the same time.  This was one of my favorite places in Paris.  There weren't tons and tons of tourists, like the other places we went, which was a breath of fresh air, and I took some cool photos.  After the catacombs, we had lunch, I almost had an anxiety attack and found our way to Mussee d'Orsay.  This museum houses much more impressionistic art (more my style than all those religious paintings).  I was more familiar with a lot of the artists here: Van Gogh, Monet, Manet, etc.  I actually recognized some of the paintings here.  I also recognized the high powered automatic rifles that the French  soldiers were holding outside the museum (Thanks CS 1.6.  B-4-1, if you are interested in what gun it was, and if you aren't using binds, noob.).  Our last full day ended by marching up steps to Sacre Couer on the top of Montmartre, dodging all the bracelet makers.  There were TONS of people there watching the sun set over Paris.  My trip to Paris was capped off with a delicious crepe and a view over a beautifully lit-up city.  We left the next morning after breakfast (2 free baguettes!), and channeled back to London before we caught another train, 3 hours later to Salisbury, England.  That began the next chapter of this 12 day adventure, but that elicits another blog post.

I bought a kindle recently, and have been reading books I have always meant to read.  So I will leave you with an excerpt from one of the books I have recently finished.

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to always tell the difference." - Serenity Prayer (I read it in Slaughterhouse Five, hehe)

Amsterdam and Bruxelles

First of all I would like to apologize for the HUGE delay in between this post and my previous one.  March became pretty busy with classes ending, coursework being due and friends visiting.  Since Wales, I spent most of my time in London, going to class, writing papers, finishing lab reports, getting sick, etc.  The past 5 days, however, were spent abroad.  On Saturday the 26th, I ventured from London, through the chunnel, to Brussels, Belgium.  I traveled with 5 friends I met here in London, 3 of whom also go to UCL.  

I woke up prior to the crack of dawn (5am) to shower, finish packing, and catch a bus to St. Pancras train station.  I arrived with time to spare, but some of us didn't.  After some security fast-tracking by the kind Eurostar security staff, we all made the train in time.  OFF TO BRUSSELS!  The train was uneventful, but I did get to go UNDER the English channel in the "Chunnel Tunnel" as the train manager called it.

Our train was a little late to arrive, but when we did arrive we began our adventure in Belgium.  A long walk from the train station took us to Grand Place which is a major attraction in Brussels.  It is a huge open square surrounded by old, majestic buildings, and filled with tables for restaurants and people selling flowers.  We found our hostel nearby, but needed to check in at an alternate location.  We ventured fourth, eventually finding this location, dropped our bags off and went to go find waffles.  Belgian waffles in Belgium did not dissapoint.  I went for a waffle with bananas and nutella (a boat load of nutella. She loaded that stuff on, but I wasn't complaining.).  They supplied you with a little miniature plastic fork which didn't make things easy and I eventually took a more hands on approach as I felt like I could not eat this treat fast enough.  After waffles, we took a seat at a nearby cafe to enjoy a coffee and figure out our plans for the evening.  The hostel supplied us with a map with white font and a neon orange background.  As you can imagine it was pretty difficult to read, but it worked out in the end.  We decided to try and find this creative street with some stuff that sounded pretty cool (a robot chicken comes to mind, but I can't remember exactly. Maybe an electric waterfall?), but we ended up only finding closed shops (it was a saturday), a little square, and prostitutes (WOO!).  We kept walking.  We found the main shopping drag, which seems to go on forever and a supermarket IN a mall before checking into the hostel and figuring out dinner plans.  CHEZ (shay) LEON was apparently the place to go for Mussels in Brussels, which we decided was the thing to do, and we couldn't have been more right.  Mussels, cheese, snail butter (sounds gross, but let me assure you it is NOT, and a little garlic comprised my dish.  My trip was quickly becoming a tour of food, but once again I was not complaining (but my waistline might be).  Post-'Mussels in Brussels' we headed to Celtica, a bar with 1 euro bottles and 2 euro pints. YES PLEASE.  After being used to the outrageous prices of pints in London, to get a pint for 2 euro felt like Christmas.  We waited around for my boy Stuart Innes's live acoustic stylings, but he sucked, so after plenty of dollar beers we headed back to the hostel, but not before an order of famous fries.  It is customary to put mayonnaise on your fries in Belgium and Holland, but I opted out of that (I tried it later and was actually really good. Their mayonnaise is completely different than mayo in the states.) and went for a garlic sauce.  The fries hit the spot and I went right to sleep.

The next morning started EARLY once again.  It was daylight savings time in Europe, so we needed to be extra careful and make sure we woke up at the right time in order to catch our train to Amsterdam (which had to be no more than 24 hours after our arrival in Brussels, because of how our train tickets worked.).  There was a little mix up initially, we thought it was 7am when it was really 6am so instead of being late we turned out to be extra ambitious and we ended up catching the first train to Amsterdam for Leg 2 of this adventure.  Our walk to the train station took us through Grand Place again, but it was much different this time around.  Since it was barely 7am on the day of daylight savings, there were about 10 people (including us) in the huge open square.  It is probably one of the coolest things I have seen on this trip.  The sun was rising and it was just so cool seeing two completely different settings: the bustling, busy mid-day and the desolate early morning.  We continued to the train station, through a market being set up, and onto the train. Onward to the Netherlands!

We arrived in Amsterdam around 11.  This train was much slower and made many, many more stops, but the Belgian and Dutch countrysides were beautiful.  After arriving we decided to walk to our hostel again, even though our directions told us to take a tram.  This gave us an understanding for the city and allowed me to form the following first impressions.

1. Let's start with what everyone knows: Marijuana is legal to sell, distribute, and use (not in public, but in "coffee shops").

2. The people of Amsterdam really, REALLY love their bikes.  There are way more bikes on the road than cars.  They don't have parking garages for cars, but they do have parking garages for bikes.  I'm not kidding.

3. Amsterdam is gorgeous.  The city is similar to Venice, but in a much more organized fashion.  There are many canals filled with tour boats and canal buses.  Ok so it isn't that much like Venice, but it has a lot of canals.

We found our hostel after much walking and map consulting and set our bags down.  The stairs were super narrow and steep, and the hostel was just what I expected for 14 euro a night.   We ventured fourth, hungry (believe it or not), and continued our food tour-- I mean adventure.  Pannenkoeken, or dutch pancakes, are a speciality of The Netherlands, so that's what we went seeking.  After a helpful local pointed us in the right direction, we happened upon "Pancakes!" for our first taste of food in Amsterdam.  "Pancakes!" set the bar pretty high, too high in actuality.  For those of you that aren't too familiar with pannenkoeken, it is a huge plate sized pancake (similar to a crepe, but thicker) and can be sweet or savory.  I went for savory as it was lunchtime: cheese, tomato and bacon.  This, to date, is the best pancake I have ever had.  It was perfectly crispy on the outside, the bacon was one with the pancake, but crispy at the same time and the tomatoes were juicy and delicious.  Afterwards, we headed back to the hostel to check in, ended up napping and we met our bunk roommates, a lovely couple from Melbourne who were traveling the world (literally) for, get this, AN ENTIRE YEAR.  They were so nice and very cool.  Bridget and Olmo were their names.  From the hostel we met back up with the rest of our group, and formulated evening plans.  We wandered around Amsterdam, enjoying the scenery and each other's company before deciding on dinner.  After dinner, Greg and I went to find a place to watch the Kentucky v. UNC game (Greg goes to UK) while the others turned in for the night.  After a very exciting game (I never though I would be able to watch march madness, live, in Amsterdam.) we headed back to the hostel for some shut-eye.

The next stay started pretty late in the morning, but started with a nice pancake from 'Sara's Pancake House.'  Sara was actually the one to make our pancakes, and while they were good, I didn't like it was much as my previous one.  From there, we went to the Anne Frank house.  This is the house that she kid in for two years during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.  It is also where she wrote all? of her journal.  This was really amazing, and really well done.  They had descriptions in each of the rooms with videos from people that knew or worked in the house with the family.  The original, movable bookshelf was there along with the original wallpaper in Anne and Margot's room.  The original red-checkered, diary was also on display.  It is such a tragic story and to see the house was really breathtaking and thought-provoking.  After this depressing shock to our system, we did some more exploring before dinner.  That night we why wanted to find a place to watch a little live music.  Across from the hostel was a little bar that promised live music every night. PERFECT. We watched the B-Funk jam session for a few hours before walking across the street to the hostel from some shut eye.

My last full day started with a pancake (believe it or not), and after that we went to THE HEINEKEN EXPERIENCE, which is located at the brewery which was formerly used to brew the world famous Heineken beer.  This was pretty cool.  We learned the history, went through a simulation where we got 'brewed' into beer, and, of course, received some 'free' samples at the end.  A couple people even gave us their tokens, so instead of only getting two samples we each got three!  We kept of this afternoon buzz b heading to another bar before heading to a little italian place for dinner (delicious but expensive).  My last night ended with traditional dutch fries (Vlammse fries), with ketchup and mayo (i'm serious, it was good.)

My last day felt too rushed and I didn't enjoy it as much as I should have.  My flight flew out of Amsterdam-Schipol at 240pm, but I didn't know what train to take to the train station or what train to take to the airport, but I still wanted to see the Van Gogh museum.  No pancake this morning, which is upsetting, but I feel like 3 was sufficient.  The Van Gogh museum was very cool.  They have the largest collection of Van Gogh paintings in the world, and it was interesting to see his style grow and develop.  They did a good job explaining his techniques and influences in a lot of different pieces.  I would have liked to spend more time there, but I needed to make it to the airport in time.  It ended up being really easy, and I got to the airport about 20 minutes earlier than anticipated.  Too easy.  I had an amazing time in both Brussels and Amsterdam.  I could not have asked for better food, adventures and company.

At this very moment, I am on my way to Paris, going backwards at 120 mph and typing a blog post like a champ.  My family is around me and I couldn't be more excited to continue my adventures.  Sorry that this post is so.damn.long.  I won't be mad if you didn't read all of it, or if it took you a couple tries.  Thanks for reading!!  I promise my next post will be sooner and not so lengthy.