I feel like every blog post starts with an apology for it being so much after the actual happenings, so this time, I won't apologize, I'll just say that i'm lucky to be putting this up before I go home, which is way too soon.
A photo to start:
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Happy Thanksgiving!
24.11.2011 |
A couple of weekends ago I went to Paris with my roommates, and one adopted one. We Celebrated thanksgiving, with a whole Turkey, gravy and cranberry sauce on thursday night then right after, just as the food coma was setting in, we hopped on an overnight sleeper train to Paris. Twelve hours later, Hello Paris! One easy metro ride later we ended up at our Hostel The 3 Ducks. We took off almost immediately to go explore, we met our friend at the eiffel tower, and went around to a lot of the attractions around paris. Notre Dame, Champs Elysees (Christmas Markets!!), with the Arc de' Triomphe at the end, all that good stuff. It was extra cold and oh so rainy, but we did our best to take advantage of our first day in Paris. I kept getting little flash backs to when I was 9 years old and there with the whole Sherrow clan when we raided Paris for my Grandma and Grandpa's 50th wedding anniversary. That night we went out to dinner at a fondue restaurant where there was writing all over the walls, people climbing on top of the tables, wine out of baby bottles - weird, a rogue fondue spoon, and all around shenanigans. It was a strange dining experience to say the least, but really fun.
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Notre Dame
25.11.2011 |
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The ferris wheel set up for the Christmas Markets
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One great thing about paris is that you get free entry to most museums, and discounts at lots of the monuments with your passport with a student visa. So we hauled our way out to Versailles on saturday morning, about an hour from downtown Paris, and got in for free! This place is enormous, it has some huge and crazy rooms and so much artwork its insane. The audio tour was free, Mom you would have loved it. The palace was beautiful, and packed with so much history I was a bit overwhelmed, but I enjoyed it so much, because I feel like that was a once in a lifetime visit. We were there on a day when there weren't SO many tourists, and we could actually see the rooms without too much obstruction, the hall of mirrors was actually visible and not so crowded, unlike when my friend went two weeks before. Another amazing thing about Versailles is that it isn't just a palace, but it is a whole garden complex. This is pretty much treated nowadays as a huge park, but there are some other smaller buildings from the same era as the palace there and they are just as decadently furnished as the palace. I could have spent the entire day here, but we had to get back to meet our friends.
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The Grand Canal at Versailles
26.11.2011 |
That night we got all dressed up and went out for a boat tour on the Siene river, seeing the city from the river at night was such a treat, the tour explained a lot of the history of paris and where all the important stuff happened way back when. After the tour we ate a lovely 3 course meal at the foot of the tower on a river boat restaurant. We got a sweet deal on the meal and the tour so it was great to be cheap but fancy in Paris.
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The Eiffel Tower in te Fog at Night
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The next morning my friend and I got up extra early to walk around and watch the city wake up. we walked through the park by the tower, and along the river for a while. There is this really amazing building somewhere in paris that is a living wall. The entire street-side wall is a garden basically, with ferns and mosses, and succulents, and loads of other green plants. It was so green and amazing and beautiful I just wanted to stare for a long time, so I did, for a bit. I wish I had a good photo, but the lighting that morning was crap, so just use your imagination, a vertical mossy forest floor. Watching the city wake up was great, and I wish I could have walked around for another three hours, but there just isn't enough time in the day, and we had to meet friends at the Louvre at 9.
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The Vertical Garden
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First off: the Louvre is HUGE, if you ever go there, have an idea of what you want to see before you get there, otherwise you will have such a hard time getting to everything, and someone will ask you later did you see the Mona Lisa? And you'll be like Shit that's in the Louvre? That place was so big I couldn't find it... How disappointing will that be? So since I was with a friend who had been there, and knows a thing or two about art history we laid out a plan before starting and I got to see most of what I wanted. Not everything but quite a bit. My favorite part was the Ancient egyptian section. I am in an Eyptian art and archaeology class here, so seeing all of the things that I am learning about in school was such a treat. I could look at carvings and see more than just people, but the meanings behind the tablets and who the gods are and what they mean. I even got a bit of a wild hair and ran my hand along hieroglyphics. I broke rule #1 of museums: don't touch anything! Worth it.
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Structure of the Eiffel Tower
27.11.2011 |
After exploring the Louvre, we climbed up the Eiffel tower. But we only got up to the 2nd deck because the lines to get to the top were too long and we had to catch our train home. The view even from the second deck was still fabulous and the fog had cleared for us for a few hours so we could see a good distance. It was too bad that we were there only for three days, there is just so much to be done, and it was impossible to get it all done in the time we had. Regardless the whole trip was packed with adventures and so much good bread, crepes, and pastries. The french are very serious about their pastries.
The week after paris, I sadly did not take any photos so I can't remember what I did, probably just normal school stuff, I think I did something school related at some point, maybe...
Really the next thing I remember I was on my way to Malta with my friend Mike! It's like a great dream, where all of a sudden you go from one cool place to another. Our main reason for going to Malta was to go scuba diving. We are both certified, and decided when we forst met that at some point in the semester we would go diving. And it actually happened! We got into Malta on friday evening and after an insane bus ride to the north end of the main island we were in Buggiba. I thought drivers in Mexico were bad, then I thought Italian drivers were bad, but Maltese drivers top it all. The roads are narrow, the bus is a jointed city bus and they drive like they are trying to outrun a growing chasm in the earth that might swallow the bus at any moment. To top it all off put this whole situation on the left side of the road, yeah, scary. But we lived. We checked in at the dive shop to confirm our dives for the next morning. The shop was nice, and the owner was very generous, he gave us a ride to the hotel in the dive shop truck, and told us where all the good places to eat were. The hotel was nice, and WAY cheap. We stayed for 3 nights for 27euros each and the room had a kitchenette, so we could make our own food, and two beds, and free towels, and absolute luxury when you are used to paying for them at hostels. We went out to dinner that night and dined on frogs legs, rabbit, and lampuki (a local white fish.)
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Frogs Legs
2.11.2011 |
Our dives the next morning were fabulous. We went to the Island of Gozo to dive their blue hole, canyons, coral gardens, coral caves - both without a speck of coral, then on the second dive we went down the blue hole, out through the Azure Window (look it up and be jealous), through the chimneys out to sea for a bit then back into the cave on the inside of the blue hole. I didn't bring my big camera, cause we were shore diving, and there wasn't gonna be anyone on shore looking after our stuff and I didn't want to risk it getting stolen. So I have no photos from the dives, but it really is just as, if not more beautiful as all the photos say. Mike was a great dive buddy, the viz was good, not as clear as it could have been, cause of rain a few days before, but still better than the NW. We walked around a bit, to the top of the Azure Window, we jumped in the blue hole, looked at all the shallow water critters, and sand dollar fossils in the limestone coastline.
That night we ate another great and inexpensive dinner then went out for drinks, and walked along the shoreline for a while. It as so nice to be in a warm place with clear warm waters. We were absolutely exhausted from diving so we called it a night pretty early and hit the hay.
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Buggiba at night
3.11.2011 |
There is this really cool town in the middle-ish of the island called Mdina (no I did not forget a vowel) which is basically a walled fortress town with really narrow streets, where everything is made out of limestone. There were some beautiful colors of doors and shutters that contrasted with the beige limestone all around. Great for pictures. We wandered there a bit then into Rabat, the city next door, and through the valley between Rabat and the next town over. It was a great walk through what might have been farmed fields, but we weren't sure. Almost all of Malta is crisscrossed with shoulder high limestone walls, and other limestone structures. It is not so surprising then that as it turns out, the island is almost entirely made of limestone, and they use it for everything. The island has a lot of cliffs which when viewed from the air, make it look like it is popped out of the sea with some strange photoshop technique. After Rabat we bussed it to St. Pauls bay to take photos of the colorful lampuki boats and met a lampuki fisherman who told us his whole story about growing up on Malta during te war and what it is like to be a fisherman there. We also went to the town of Qawra (nope not missing a u either) and walked around all evening. We ended up sitting out on the point at the end of Qawra and watching sunset. It was beautiful, and the rock that the point is made out of made me feel like I was in the movie UP when they are walking across the stone at the top of the cliffs, really cool and unique.
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A door to nowhere, Mdina
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Lampuki fisherman with his son's boat
4.11.2011 |
Malta is a really inexpensive place, with beautiful waters, very nice people, and a funny language. I think that I would compare it to Arabic mostly, but it also has a little bit of other languages thrown in. The good thing is though that almost everyone speaks english, so it is really easy to get around.
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The Flight Home
5.11.2011 |
