So here is my travel journal from my backpacking trip to Europe. It's more involved than my day log stuff that's already been up the site. There has been some complaining (you know who you are) that my daylog was rather boring and that it focused too much on the details of transportation. I can't promise that this is less boring, but's there's certainly a hell of lot more of it. Occasional parts of the journal have been omitted to protect the (not-so)innocent. These parts really weren't that common, but hey - use your imagination. Keep in mind that this is a journal and things like punctuation, sentence structure, paragraph breaks, grammar, and spelling may or may not been a part of the writing process. Not to mention my almost criminal use of parenthesis. Like my pictures, the writing is quite erratic as far as consistency of content. The journal style kind of mutates over the course of the trip. Read at your own risk.
 4/28 Cincinnati 4/30 Paris 5/02 Paris 5/03 Paris 5/04 Bayeux 5/06 Toulouse 5/07 Barcelona 5/08 Barcelona 5/09 Madrid 5/11 Salamanca 5/12 Salamanca 5/13 Barcelona 5/14 Portbou 5/15 Narbonne 5/17 Nice 5/18 Venice 5/20 Naples 5/21 Rome 5/22 Rome 5/24 Florence 5/25 La Spezia 5/26 Lucerne 5/29 Interlaken 5/30 Interlaken 6/03 Amsterdam 6/04 London 6/06 Salisbury 6/09 Nottingham 6/11 Edinburgh 6/13 Kyleakin 6/15 Dublin 6/17 Dublin 6/23 Hamburg 6/27 Brussels 6/29 Berlin 7/01 Prague 7/02 Munich 7/03 Munich |
4/30 - Paris, France I'm sitting in the Notre Dame cathedral listening to organ music.  The music is quite nice, very ethereal and spooky. With an organ that size though, I'd really like to hear something loud and violent. So obviously I made it Paris in one piece. Yesterday I took the train from the airport into the center of Paris, all the while marveling at the ridiculous amounts of graffiti in the more industrial outskirts of the city. I chose the Latin quarter as my starting place and went to look for a hostel. After skipping a hostel that Jim Morrison apparently stayed at, I ended up at the Young and Happy hostel. I spent the day killing time walking around until the lockout period was over (11-4) and then crashed out for a few hours(didn't get much sleep on the plane). After that I hung out in the common area for a while and then ended up at a bar with some people staying at the hostel. Today I'm doing the requisite tourist stuff. -- So the Louvre was great. I went because I figured I had to see the famous stuff like the Mona Lisa. Surprisingly, I enjoyed it a lot more than I was expecting, particularly the paintings. Aside from the general beauty of them, I was noticing clever details and nuances from periods that I thought had nothing more than Christian imagery (oh yes, even I can be really closed minded sometimes). The various artifacts from various cultures didn't thrill me nearly as much (I think this is the sort of thing I usually associate with museums - thus my dislike). Anyway, I'm probably going to check out a couple other museums and I'm considering going back to the Louvre cause the battery died in my camera and there's other pictures I want to take. Crazy, eh? So, after all that high culture, I decided I needed some high sugar American pop culture - X-Men 2. I had been worried about being able to see it while in Europe, and there it was, opening 2 days before the American release. Fun movie, worthy sequel to the first one. It had the added amusement of having french subtitles. -- Weather is off and on rainy. I'm doing an incredible amount of walking, slowly figuring out the layout of the city, but still getting lost several times a day.
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