Alex at GTL Summer 2007

Rome was a blast! I got to see so much stuff. We got there around 10:30AM Saturday and dropped our bags off at the hostel. By the time we got to the hostel and got everything taken care of it was about 11:30. We headed off to Palatine hill which is where the old roman forum is and where Romulus and remus were said to have been raised and founded rome. There were lots of old ruins dating back several thousand years. It was very impressive and possibly one of my favorite places to visit. It was truly amazing what they could build without engines or electricity! After that we trucked off to the Coliseum! It was just down the street from palatine hill. Again it was truly amazing what they could build 2000 years ago! After that we grabbed some panninis from a street vendor and walked to the circus maximus where they used to have chariot races. Kind of weird because this was just a park now with people running and sunbathing, still a few ruins left though. After that we trucked off to one of the top 5 gelato places (we got to visit all 5 at least once over the 2.5 day trip). From there we took a tram to the Pantheon which was stupendous!! The dome in the top was incredible! After the Pantheon we got some more gelato and walked through the shopping district with all those fancy stores (I don’t know what ones were there I didn’t pay attention) and to the Spanish steps, why they are called the Spanish steps I don’t know really… I guess they were built in the Spanish style or something. After that we walked up to the Bourghese Art Gallery where we bought tickets to see it on Sunday (you have to buy tickets 24 hours in advance). After that we went back to the hostel to clean up a little bit. After cleaning up we went to a cool pizza place and got some tasty pizza. After pizza we went to the trevi fountain and hung around that area for awhile (there are tons of bars, and gelato places there) after awhile though we decided to walk to Saint Peters Basilica (about 2 miles away but you could see it from the fountain) We walked all the way there and saw some cool things along the way, like a neat street festival and the Roman TV awards… We were then told (incorrectly) that the Metro was closed by the Police so we ran to find a bus and got on the first one we saw, not really knowing where it went, it went to the train station and from there we caught the metro to our hostel… go figure.
The next morning was a little more relaxed than the other days had been. We went and saw the Capitoline museum (lots of really cool sculptures). After that we went to the Piazza Navano which is a famous square in Rome and where 2 of the top 5 gelato places are located. So we had some gelato and lunch and then headed off to the Bourghese museum and the park that it is in. We walked around the park for a long time and dipped our feet in a huge refreshing fountain. Then we went to the museum. It was incredible, there were so many paintings and sculptures in this little museum, it was very impressive!! After that it was dinner time and the guide book recommended an Indian restaurant only a few metro stops away so we did that, the food was amazing!! Some of the best I have had and cheap too!! (A huge plate of curry, rice, naan, beer and 2 samosas was 10 bucks!) Top notch! After that we went back to Trevi fountain and got more gelato and then headed back for the night.
Monday there was a little miscommunication in wake up times got a little confused (I was in charge of making sure everybody was awake at 7 but I thought it was 7:30…) Needless to say we got to the Vatican a little late… And paid the price. We waited nearly 2.5 hours in line!!! But the wait was worth it! The Vatican Museum was amazing!! Think of all the paintings that could be bought by one of the richest groups in the world (the catholic church) over a span of roughly 2000 years! It was amazing! At the end of the journey was the Sistine chapel. It was truly something else! We spent almost 1.5 hours in the room looking at the paintings. We had a great book that explained each one in detail. After the Sistine chapel it was off to Saint Peter’s! I had seen it on TV plenty of times but it is just soooo huge and soooo amazing!!! There aren’t even words to describe it. We went up into the dome and then on top of the dome and had the most amazing view of the city!! After that we went and grabbed our bags and headed to the train station. It was really cool, in our couchette were two teenage aussi girls and their dad and a guy from Wisconsin and then us so we all spoke English and had a blast on the way back!!

We left for Switzerland around 5 Thursday night. We got to Interlaken around 10 on Thursday night, we had this great hostel which is the oldest private hostel in Switzerland called Balmers. We had canyoning planned for Friday at 8AM so we just went to bed but the other people in our room had other plans for us and came back at 2 and kept us up FOREVER Needless to say we woke up tired and cranky Friday morning but SUUUUPER excited for canyoning. Canyoning was CRAZY fun. You take about an hour bus ride up to the start where it is a 20 minute hike to the canyon. They go over all the guidelines with you which pretty much scares the crap out of you, they pretty much say do exactly as I tell you on each jump, and one little mistake could kill you. The first jump was the biggest, you take a 65 foot drop off a waterfall!! After that the fun started because after you jumped the largest jump of the day everything else seemed easy enough. One of the hardest of the day was a 5 foot jump to a slide where you slid down. Another was a slide called the corkscrew which literally flips you over and if you don’t put your arms just right it breaks your nose (I avoided the broken nose and took a nasty bruise on my arm). After awhile you started to have fun with it doing some twists and turns on the way down (being 6’3” prevented me from doing some of the flips like the other people) about ½ way down we got to do a 183 foot rappel (rope assisted descent) over a waterfall. This was truly amazing because you were in freefall for about 100 feet until they started to brake you from the top. We spent a little over 4 hours going down the canyon and it was truly amazing. At the end they gave us some beer, bread and cheese, just what the doctor ordered! After the drive back we walked back to the hostel with a guy from UNC and U of M (GO BLUE!) changed and went down to the main square in the town (after eating a couple of tasty kebabs of course). The weekend we were there, there was the Nissan Outdoor games which consisted of every awesome sport that I dream of doing! When we got to the main square they had a bouldering (rock climbing short technical courses without ropes) contest and warm up runs for the mountain bike jumping competition. This was really impressive because these guys weren’t just doing a little bar-spin, they were doing backflips, 360’s on full blown mountain bikes (not that little trick bike you had when you were 10). I pretty much stood in amazement until my friends pried me away so we could see the airshow. On the schedule it showed there was an airshow but we had no idea what to expect. Well it starts out with two base jumpers jumping out of a helicopter and starting LITTLE ROCKETS ON THEIR FEET!!! They shot across the sky like little bullets doing little tricks!! This was incredible! There were also paragliders doing flips and spins as well. It was crazy. After that we went back to the hostel to watch a rugby game… or so we thought, it ended up being Saturday night not Friday… but it took us an hour to figure that out. So we went into the lounge of our hostel. Now this be noted, apparently our hostel was the place in town, not just for tourists either, locals even came there to party, there was a bar down in the basement and a lounge on the ground floor. We all grabbed a few beers down at the bar then came up to the lounge where somebody was rockin out on the piano and we all sang along until they kicked us out at 11 and we went off to bed because canyoning kind of killed us. The next morning we “slept in” until about 8 and literally went off to the races. We decided to watch the whitewater kayaking in the morning and this was a great decision. We got right up next to the kayakers as they paddled between the rocks and over a nice “little” waterfall(in comparison to canyoning it was small). After we had seen enough around noon we decided to catch our shuttle bus back into town, which was a 6 mile drive away. Well little did we know that the last bus left at 11:30 and no more were coming until 1:30 and at this point we were starving and wanted some tasty food. So somebody told us there was a train station just a little ways (it ended up being about 2.5 km) down the road. So we hiked to the train station and caught the next train back. All in all we got back about 30 minutes faster than if we would have taken the bus… Lunch was tasty again (more kebabs) and we went and sat next to the lake and took a little nap. After our naps we went to go watch some more mountain bike jumping before the rugby game. We hung out and watched mountain biking for awhile and then headed back to the hostel bar to check out the rugby game. They created a new happy hour for the rugby game so of course we had to indulge, for about 1 US you could have a pint! Tasty! The game was great because it was the Aussies vs the kiwis (Australians vs new Zealanders) and the bar was 50/50 split between the two and it was just one big party. After dinner we were in the mood for some kebabs so off we went and then after kebabs we went back to the main square for the video competition of the outdoor games, they were amazing! After that there was a little party with lots of drunk outdoor people so I had a blast! Since there is a countrywide noise curfew we had to shut down at 12 and we asked one of the trashed locals (note at this point I was truly 100% sober) where the party was going to? His response “ BALMERS, the party is at BALMERS MATE” So we went back to Balmers and we stayed in the bar for a bit, then piano for a bit then off to bed by 1. We got up the next morning at a glorious 7:30 am to catch a train up into the swiss alps to do some hiking. It took one transfer to get all the way to where we were going but the view was spectacular!! We really enjoyed the hiking and atmosphere in our little swiss town. After a few hours of climbing up the mountain we headed back down to Interlaken for our departure from that amazing city. The city must have been just as sad to see us go as we were to see it go because it started to pour just after our departure from the station. The train back was uneventful and we got our last kebab of the trip in Strasbourg.
It is necessary to add a few foodie points about Interlaken: 1. Yes I had lots of Kebabs but this is because they were the best kebabs I have had in all of Europe. 2. The water in interlaken was to die for! They had ‘water fountains’ that were what we could just a fountain and they were all over and this was straight from the mountain springs and 100% safe to drink!

This was my first two day weekend since arriving in France and I was feeling a little worn out from all the long distance travelling so I decided to take a shorter trip and go visit my friend, Travis, who was working in a small town of Peage de Rousillon and living in the smaller town of Annonay, France. He decided that there wasn't two days of stuff to do in Annonay so we met in Lyon on friday where we walked around and saw the town. That night he thought he was meeting his friend at a bar in Lyon so we waited for about an hour in this bar and sent numerous text messages to his friend only to return to the hotel and a text message explaining that travis was mistaken on the meeting date and time, it was saturday night. The next morning we went up to the large basillica on the top of a large hill in Lyon, went to a FNAC (a french version of Bestbuy) where we spent a good bit of time trying to find an electrical adapter for travis. Then we headed to Peage de Rousillon to get Travis' car, which is a manual delivery van with no rear view mirror (because there is no rear window). This was pretty fun to watch Travis drive since he still has not mastered the stick shift yet and it is in the Rhone Alps region in France where there is no shortage of large hills, round-abouts, and large hills with round-abouts. Needless to say there were a few stalls but we made it there safely. That night we walked around and got some tasty pizza before our night began. We decided to go do our own Annonay pub crawl. We had some really good and really bad beers, a very drunk bartender gave us some licorice flavored liquor, and a lot of funny or weird people. We of course never got drunk because we were too cheap to buy that much beer and spread this out over a course of 4 or 5 hours. The next morning we got up and tried to find a place where travis could throw away his trash and then we headed back to Peage de Rousillon where I caught my train back to Metz.

Sorry I have fallen so far behind in posting. The weekend in Marseille was awesome. Emily and I left on thursday night and arrived in Marseille early morning on Friday. When we arrived we went to the hostel with a "24-hour reception" which was closed. So we walked along the water for quite a long time. We went back to the hostel around 11 and they were open this time. They were very nice explaining that they had just finished renovations on the whole hostel at 3AM and since our train was late figured we weren't showing up until later and went back to bed. We rested at the hostel until my good friend, who is interning near Lyon, France this summer, met us at the hostel. After that we went down to the Vieux Port which has been a bustling port since the Greek empire. There is a vieux fort to go along with the vieux port and we got to go up into the fort and check it out. There was an amazing church on the top of a hill in Marseille but since we were feeling a little cheesy we took a little gas powered "train" (a gas powered tourist trap) up to the top for a couple euros each. We saw the church and got to ride the train with 50 obnoxious teenagers who were chanting something in French that we couldn't quite understand (despite all three of us speaking good french). That night we went out to dinner at a really cool tapas place that was suggested by the owners of the hostel. This hostel, by the way, was the coolest place we were all weekend. The staff was soooo friendly, they all spoke GREAT english and even helped us learn some new french and practice it. They also called the tapas bar to let them know that a couple of americans were coming over! After that we were exhausted so we just went off to bed. The next day we took a boat out to an island off the coast, about a 20 minute ride and spent the morning and early afternoon eating some mussels, walking along the beach and exploring the island. This trip had a lot of interesting experiences involved with it. The first was the first beach we found had about 5 or 6 dead birds washed up on the shore, we assume it was due to the high winds but we couldn't be sure. The next was my brilliant idea to pick up a piece of cactus. I carefully procured this piece of cactus from the ground, being careful to avoid the thorns, well the whole thing was covered in thorns so my hand became covered in thorns which Emily and Travis thought was hilarious. It was rather painful though. That night we went to a wine bar where we had some pretty good food and great wine.
The next morning we walked around Marseille for awhile until Travis had to catch his train and Emily and I went off to the beach. We spent the afternoon at the beach until it was time to head off to Avignon.
I finally had my dream come true on the train to Avignon, we got to ride a TGV (train a grand vitesse: train of high speed) which really was fast, on our "slow train" the time from avignon to marseille was about 1.5 hours, the TGV did it in 30 minutes. It was sooo smooth and comfortable. Our hostel in Avignon was nice and the first evening we were so tired from Marseille we grabbed some food and went off to bed. The next day we got up early and went to the Palais de Papes (palace of the popes) which is where the French popes lived for several hundred years during the church's more troubled times. It was spectacular how they managed to spend all of their papal money, mostly gold things or wars. After palais des papes we checked out the next door church and the walled part of the city, this pretty much covered everything in the city. At this point it was around 4 and our train didn't leave until midnight so we did what all smart people do in this situation, go to a movie, in french, without subtitles. We saw pirates of the Carribean 3 which was good but despite our impeccable french skills, I think we still missed a few things. After the movie it was dinner and then off to the train station where we played cards and chatted to other people from the Tech program before we got on our train back to Metz.

So this last week and a half has been really busy!! Last week I had a ton of work plus planning for my Paris trip with Emily!!
Thursday morning I got done with class at 10 and ran back to my room threw everything into my bag and dashed off to the train station. I took a train from Met-Nancy which is about 45 minutes south of Metz (and no closer to Paris) and then a larger (yet somehow slower) train from Nancy to Paris which took about 3 hours. Once in Paris I took the metro(subway system) (which I am now the master at navigating) to meet Emily at the hostel. That night we explored our neighborhood and went to bed early so we could see more of Paris the next day. The next morning Emily wakes me up at 6AM to go explore the city!! We got to the Louvre just before it opened and there was only a short line. Since neither Emily nor myself are really big on art, we did the whirl-wind tour of the Louvre, we saw the basics: the mona lisa, madonna on the rocks, the venus-di-milo, etc etc. Interesting that there is much Italian art in a French museum. After that we walked through the gardens by the Louvre, to the place de la concorde and then down the Champs Elysee to the Arc du Triomphe where we climbed the 287 stairs to get to the top where there is a beautiful panoramic of the city. After that we ate at a cute little cafe on the champs elysee and went back to the hostel and went to bed. After waking up from a short nap we went to dinner at a nice little italian restaurant where the food was delicious, they treated us right and even gave us a free after dinner drink!! After that dinner we were stuffed and sleepy so we went off to sleep.
We got up early again and trucked off to Notre Dame!! After finding Notre Dame and taking all of its glory in we went to the hotel de ville and saw the architecture. After seeing the classic architecture of the Hotel de Ville it was off to the Centre Pompidou to see the "modern" architecture. There we were lured into getting drawings done of us by some artists. They were pretty neat looking so we paid them. After that I was hell-bent on finding this amazing ice-cream place we had when I was in Paris last time. After about 20 minutes of wandering the ile-de-la-cite we managed to find it and it was just as amazing as I remembered. After our ice cream I sent us out on a voyage, this was no simple voyage more like a journey like that from the "Odyssey" we walked through the Quartier Latin and we saw 2 Starbucks across the street from each other!!! In Paris!! Continuing this epic journey we walked to the Luxembourg Gardens where we saw the parisiens in their natural habitat (taking naps, smoking, floating little boats in the fountains, letting their dogs poop and not cleaning it up, writing existensialist poetry, etc) but this was no time for us to brush up on our Jean Paul Sartre, we had to continue our space odyssey. We headed to the Hotel des Invalids which is where napoleon is buried and there is an army museum, but our voyage to the Eiffel Tower would not afford such luxuries as to see the body of our beloved leader, we had to continue on, some men being left behind! We finally stumbled upon the champs de mars which is the park that leads up to the Eiffel Tower. After trying to track down somebody to take our picture we walked up to the beast. We waited in line for about an hour and a half to buy our tickets then another 1/2 hour to take the elevator to the second floor (there are three floors and 2 elevators one takes you to the 1st and 2nd floors and the 2nd takes you to the top floor) after taking a quick look on the second floor we jumped in ANOTHER line to wait for the next elevator to the top floor for another 1/2 hour or so. When we finally got to the top, the weather had turned bad and we only took a short look around before heading back down (and waiting in another 45 minutes of lines) to head back to the hotel. That night we just had kebabs and went to bed!!
The next morning we got up and checked out of our hostel. They let us keep our bags there while we walked around that day which was perfect. We jumped on the metro to the Sacre Coeur and the district of Montemartre it was wet and rainy so we just took some pictures, had some lunch, saw the "moulin rouge" (the place the film is based off of) and headed to the train station back to metz.

During the week, I showed Emily around Metz while still staying on top of my work. Until thursday when we took off for Marseille...