Barca! (Jeremy)

Anyway, we successfully got to Barcelona Wednesday morning and had ~48 hours until Becky’s plane left. We made fairly good use of the time, walking around much of the downtown area: seeing the various Olympic sculptures and structures left over from 1992 (I think), ancient architecture including the Gaudi cathedrals, the busy shopping district, and various parks. The most exciting event however, was the European soccer championship game the first night we arrived. FC Barcelona was playing Manchester United in Rome and everyone was very excited. We were told to go down to the central Place de Catalunya to see a public viewing of the game (rather, we were told to be careful if we decided to go…). So we got there a bit before the game started and despite a rather big screen and some live music, people just seemed to be passing through. After some confusion, we ended up following the vast majority of the people who were headed down the famous Las Ramblas towards the sea. Once we got close, we realized that there was an even bigger public viewing in another public area. We, along with tens of thousands of others, traversed the bridge over to this area and packed in like sardines to see a huge jumbotron showing the game. By this point, we were a few minutes late, and Barcelona had already scored one goal.

For the rest of the first half, we watched at a poor angle, pressed against the huddled masses yearing for a better view, but were able to move up quite close for the second half. Barcelona proceeded to score another unanswered goal and we crowned the champions. Needless to say, everyone was very happy about this and we got swept up in the enthusiasm as well as cheers in catalyn that we did our best to follow (I think we got the one that went “beep-beep beep-beep-beep beep-beep-beep-beep Barca!”). Making our way back downtown, we joined the hundreds of thousands of fans that converged on Place de Catalunya from all corners of the city for a good ol’ fashion riot. Things were mostly under control, with the possible exception of people throwing fireworks down on the ground in the middle of the mob of people, requiring everyone to quickly push away so that no one got hurt when it went off. Otherwise, everyone was happy and nothing destructive appeared to be happening. Police had closed off most of the downtown streets and appeared to be ready just in case with lots of those black riot vans parked around, but for the most part, they let everyone celebrate. After navigating the riot downtown, we moved out to non-closed streets which were full of cars honking and celebrating. One truck had a couple trombonists, lots more had people hanging out of windows. One guy was just standing in a public fountain throwing water on passing cars with his hat. All in good fun.

(Image below is lifted from a Daily Mail article about the riots. Possibly a copyright violation to use it here, but it's a good example of what we partied through.)

the smell on the bus (Jeremy)

The next day, we were off to Marseille where we bummed around, realized that we hadn’t printed off the required tickets when we asked about where the bus left from and got that squared away. Marseille, at least in the touristy areas near the train station, wasn’t as sketchy as I had expected, and we found an internet café and Laundromat to pass the time.

Bus travel in Europe turns out to be approximately the same quality as bus travel in the US – not particularly appealing, but gets you where you need to go. Our bus experience was made worse by a smelly mess someone had left on several of the seats towards the back of the bus. I quickly grew accustomed, but Becky was really bothered by it. At a stop about 4 hours into the 8 hour ride, the bus driver came back and cleaned it, which helped a lot. I’m also a heavy sleeper, so while I felt like I woke up fairly often, I apparently slept through most of the stops, people talking loudly, and other distractions according to a sleepy and bleary-eyed Becky.

[Note from Becky: Jeremy passed out before we even hit the highway, that jerk. The smelly mess was not simply a bad smell - it was an overpowering, makes-you-gag-and-want-to-die smell. It was like 100 diapers covered with cleaning chemicals and left to bake in the sun. Words do not describe this smell. For the first 4 hours of the trip, the people around me spoke high-speed French over my head, sprayed perfumes and assorted aerosols every ten minutes, and generally kept me awake. I finally fell into a restless sleep around 2 am with a piece of mint gum pressed to my nose to block out the stench. All in all, quite an experience. ]

The people on the bus weren’t quite as sketchy as typical greyhound riders, and included such highlights as a super-worried Korean girl who, to make sure she made it back to the bus, sprinted across the parking lot at the gas station we stopped at about 15 or 20 minutes before we left again. Also, an American girl apparently made the mistake of assuming the bus would be exactly on time and needed to make a plane in Barcelona fairly soon after we were supposed to arrive. We got in ~half an hour late, so I don’t know what happened there.

Romance, Engagements, and Tex Mex <3 (Jeremy)

The next day, we went back to Cassis, this time with the intent of walking along the trails outside the touristy downtown. We stopped by the supermarche and put together a picnic lunch of baguette, cheese, veggies, fruit, and cookies, and set off. The hiking was neat. There are these large rocky outcrops into the sea with trails along the top and sides that can be walked/scrambled along. One of these paths along a somewhat harrowing trail, at times right on the edge of a steep drop towards the sea, led us down to the water so that the rocks we were walking on just slowly disappeared into the water. From there, we could look out to sea on one side, back into an inlet on the opposite, up the rocky face of the outcrop we had been hiking, and across the inlet opening to another mountainous outcrop. It was warm and sunny and picturesque.

So I felt like the moment was right and pulled out the box I had been surreptitiously keeping in my pants pocket the last few days. Down on one knee, I revealed the ring and asked Becky to marry me. She smiled brightly, nodded, hugged me, and let me put the ring on her finger. We returned back the trail, and went down to an inlet beach with a swimming area buoyed off where we swam, ate our picnic lunch and napped in the shade.

Note from Becky: Jeremy neglected to mention the other fantastic thing that happened this day. After 2 weeks of craving Mexican food and not being able to find any in Europe, we discovered chips and salsa ("Tex-Mex" brand, no less) in the Marche U supermarket and devoured them as a late night snack. Delicious!

Travel Chaos, Camping, Beaches, Sunburns! (Jeremy)

The next day had even more travel stress. We got on our TGV train with just a couple minutes to spare and were dropped off in Marseille just after noon. We had looked online for camping near Marseille and found what looked like a good place in the town of Cassis (pronounced Cassi, accent on the ‘i’). Their website said that they didn’t take reservations more than a day in advance and didn’t require them, so we figured we were good to just arrive. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. On what appeared to be a holiday weekend (ascension day?), Cassis was packed with tourists and the campground was full. A series of endless signs lead us to the Office of Tourism down by the waterfront (beautiful, but hardly noticed in our stressful state of mind) where we got maps of the area and phone numbers for hostels and camping nearby. There was a hostel not too far from town, but their office was closed until 5pm, so we walked around in search of a “supermarche”. At 5, I called them and through some broken French/English determined that they were “complet” or full. Having exhausted the non-hotel lodging options in Cassis, we walked back to the train station and called up the various campgrounds nearby. All of them except for one said they were full and the single available one closed their reception sooner than we could get there.

At this point, we decided to try to find wifi, as nothing seemed to be available anywhere. Marseille was close, but sketchy and I didn’t want to be caught wandering the streets after dark, so we went to the next sizable town, Toulon. We found some spotty wifi and delicious guiness there, and with no good options presenting themselves, we were weighing the options of staying up all night on a caffeine bender, taking an overnight train somewhere, or camping in the woods. We were both fairly tired, and without any caffeine or unbooked trains going anywhere, we went back on the train to La Ciotat, the town with a few campgrounds and some acceptable looking forests for squatting if need be.

We arrived there just after dark and made our way past a couple of the full campgrounds that we had called. These had individual spaces marked out and angry-sounding signs telling wayward travelers that they were not welcome, so we kept walking. About an hour later, we passed the campground that closed their reception, but had spots available. This place looked nice, and didn’t have assigned spots, so we figured we could just camp anywhere. That is, if we could get by the security guard by the gate… He looked like he wouldn’t let us in though, so we continued another 100m or so towards the dark and scary forest before turning around and figuring we would try some broken French saying “We have a tent. We called this afternoon.” And hope he let us in. By the time we got back, he had disappeared though, so we just walked around the gate and found a nice grassy spot to make camp.

This turned out to be for the best, and we stayed at the campground in La Ciotat for the next 3 nights after that one (we paid for the rest of them). These days sort of run together, but we went to the beach in La Ciotat one day (I burned my legs and Becky burned her feet – yay for paleness). We tried to go to the last day of the Cannes film festival only to realize it would cost 6 euros each way for reservations if we could get them and we would only have 3 or 4 hours before we would have to come back, so we decided to figure out to get to Barcelona. This led to another travel-stress related episode with a ticket counter attendant telling us that there were “no trains” over and over when we would ask questions that required more subtle answers. It went something like this:

Us: We want to go to Barcelona on Tuesday or Wednesday this week. Can we make a reservation?

Her: (Long pause while playing with the computer… ) On Tuesday, there are no trains. (Stares at us, then the screen, then us) No trains.

Us: What about Wednesday?

Her: (Long pause while playing with the computer… ) On Tuesday, there are no trains. (Stares at us, then the screen, then us) No trains.

Us: (again) Wednesday, Mercredi.

Her: (Long pause while playing with the computer… takes out calendar and points to Tuesday) No trains.

It was awesome. After a while we got her to check Monday trains and I think Wednesday too, although I’m not sure. She eventually found a train that would have left early the next morning (Monday), cost 22 euros to reserve and would have used a fast train to go directly from Montpellier to Barcelona. We left saying we’d think about it, and went in search of wifi or an internet café to try to figure it out on our own as the next morning would have been really difficult with leaving the campsite and we’d be getting to Barcelona 4 days early. Plus, I was anything but convinced that the ticket counter attendant was searching all the options. We didn’t need a single fast train from Montpellier to Barcelona. We could use the free regional trains and even stay a day somewhere along the way if we needed to, and this is impossible to search on their system.

Anyway, we eventually found an internet café hosted by an American who spoke French fluently, but with an incredibly distinct American accent. And we spent 2 hours trying to figure out how to get to Barcelona. We thought that it was possible to navigate the regional train system, but it was difficult to say how far we would get each day and may have ended up in a small town without any inexpensive accommodations. So instead, we went with an overnight bus going from Marseille to Barcelona Tuesday night and booked our hostels for the following nights in Barcelona. Although this ended up costing more, we knew we could make it, had a rough plan for the next week, and felt fairly settled and secure in our plans.

Paris (Jeremy)

The next day took us to Paris where we had booked a budget hotel within walking distance from the downtown attractions for two nights. We dropped our stuff off and went to see all the normal touristy things. Notre Dame, the Eiffel tower, the Egyptian obelisk, some arches, etc. We stopped by a bookstore and bought a couple children’s books in French (“Charlie et le Chocolaterie” for me, and “Harry Potter et le Chambre des Secrets” for Becky). Our spoken French was good enough to get around pretty well with whatever level of English cashiers, waiters, etc had. The notable exception was when we tried to order some pasta in a box (yummy, and should be in the states) and just continued to say “Oui” when asked about “fromage” because we were trying to order the pasta with “4 fromage” sauce. We ended up with cheese filled ravioli in parmesan cheese sauce with parmesan cheese on top. Cheesy! Still tasty, but not what we were trying to get.

In the evening, we got a couple cheap bottles of wine and joined the many other couple and groups of friends out on the lawn in front of the Eiffel tower to wait for dark and the subsequent tower sparkling (is this common knowledge? I had no idea there were sparkles!) Fairly tipsy, we made our way half-way back before giving up on walking and taking the metro with the help of an English-speaking passerby. The next day was more site-seeing, walking down to the Champs d’Elysees and the Arc de Triumph, searching in vain for fruit stands in central Paris, and a fancier sit-down dinner.

We decided that we wanted to go to the south of France along the Mediterranean next, so the following morning… (the train ride ended, now I’m at a campsite in Arcachon and it’s a few days later) Anyway, the following morning we went to the train station and waited in an exceptionally long line to make our reservation for the fast train to Marseilles only to find out that all the trains for that day were fully booked. This is not something we expected and begs the question, “how do people go on spontaneous European adventures if train rides need to be booked in advance?” So without knowing what to do, we walked to a different train station (the one we were at only provided fast trains that needed reservations, while the slower TER trains that do not require seat assignments left from another station) There, we figured out that we could go to Orleans or Tours, neither of which sounded particularly appealing, so we went back to the first station in search of a train reservation for the next day.

Fortunately, two trains to Marseille still had open seats for the following day, and we made our reservation (only 3 euros, so far better than the 100+ euros that it actually costs to take one of these trains without a rail pass). Then there was the requisite stressful searching for internet access so we could find lodging for the night. By the time we did that, walked an hour to the hotel, awkwardly pulled up our reservation page in the hotel lobby so that the receptionist could see our room type reservation, and got checked in, it was 6:00 pm and laundry+ Indian food rounded out the last day in Paris. Lesson learned: make train reservations in advance!

Omaha Beach, Caen (Jeremy)

The next day, we made our way back to the train station early and got on a train to Bayeux, which had buses to the d-day beaches. We just missed the bus we wanted to take when we arrived, so we explored Bayeux for a couple hours, which has a big cathedral and a bunch of shopping, etc. We took the next bus out to the American cemetery next to Omaha beach and went through the Museum there, walked down to the beach, and through the cemetery. Becky’s observation “It’s too pretty” pretty much sums up the sentiment. It was hard to imagine how a beautiful beach like that could have been the scene for such a violent battle. The museum was really interesting and walked though all the planning, equipment, aftermath, etc in addition to the battle details.

We caught the bus back to Bayeux a few hours later and took a train to Caen, the largest city in the area with direct trains to Paris, our next destination. Caen is where I became really frustrated with the lodging situation ( I think becky was frustrated with it from the time we left Dublin). The problem is that a lot of places don’t list their openings online, so making an online booking can mean overpaying by a lot, but if you just wing it, places end up being full and/or more expensive. Plus, we tried the youth hostel, which doesn’t advertise that it’s only open from June 1^st, on one side of town, and then walked for an hour or two trying to find the other budget hotel we had seen online which turned out to be way way way out of the way. We weren’t even close when we gave up, took the metro back downtown and started going to all the small 1-2 star hotels that weren’t online. The one-star places were all full so we had to settle for paying too much after a very stressful search. We decided to plan a bit ahead from then on.

St. Brieuc, Rennes, Salad Burger (Jeremy)

The next day, we got up early, had our first baguette and jam breakfast and inherited the remainder of the very large loaf of bread as we were the last people out. We found a “laverie” and did laundry before making our way to the train station. Our train turned out to be a bus, but we were off to St. Brieuc. Along the way, I decided that I wanted to see the Normandy beaches, so were figured we could go to Rennes and then from there up to the beaches along the Channel. This day happened to be a Sunday, which we quickly learned means that nothing is open, few trains run, and society generally stops functioning. This resulted in a rather lack-luster walk around St. Brieuc while we were waiting for the next train. One of the very few places actually open was a fast-food joint interestingly named “Salad Burger”.

Before long, we were off to Rennes, which was nice. A much bigger city, more things were open. It was also nice and sunny, had some small street goings-on like an Alsace tourism event with free samples of soft pretzels, and lots of hotels around and about. We found a plug and wifi in a Quick (another fast food place – often the best places to find wifi and open plugs, as opposed to cafes which are more often seated outdoors and not particularly easy to enter without purchasing stuff we may or may not want) and found the cheapest hotel on the edge of town and made reservations for that night and set off to find it. Despite poorly shown google map placement, and with a bit of stressful where-is-this-place-it-can’t-be-farther-we-can’t-have-missed-it, we found the hotel 20 or 30 minutes before the desk closed. Notably, there was no good way to get to this hotel by foot, so we had to jump over a grassy ditch each way. Lots of fun with packs on!

First day in France (Jeremy)

Hmmm… so it’s been awhile since I’ve written anything. We were in France… then Spain for a bit, and now I’m waiting for a train to go from Cerbere to Narborne back in France. That’s it. Done.

More details, eh? Alright, I’ll do my best. The last update was from around the time we were coming into the harbor in Rosscoff, France. Just a side note on ferries: they’re pretty rough. The floor was hard, the rocking pretty intense, and the whole experience fairly exhausting. Plus, it looked like the ground was rocking back and forth for the rest of the day…

Anyway, we got there, successfully skirting shark attacks and other maritime perils. After getting our passports stamped, smelled by the most disarming and friendly Labrador drug dog, and completely confused when the customs officer said something friendly about being from near Chicago (Illinois place of birth on my passport), we stepped out into the town without any particular direction or purpose. We stopped by the casino and lost two euros quickly before making our way into town in search of the train station and some food. Rosscoff turned out to be quite the tourist town and we were quickly surrounded by the various creperies, boulangeries, patisseries, etc, etc that once expects in small French towns. (random note: my train is travelling right along the Mediterranean interspersed with vineyard covered hills. It’s sunny, 24 C, and beautiful)

We didn’t yet have any destinations in mind besides eventually Paris, and Barcelona in two weeks, but Rosscoff is pretty near the northwest corner of France, so we were looking to go east. The next train left the following day, so we decided to make camp in town somewhere. Nothing particularly notable happened, but a couple interesting details are included to fulfill the reader’s potential curiosity. For those of you only looking for sensationalism, scroll down to the section entitled “The unusual affair involving Becky, the llama, and the windmill”. Anyway, when we eating tasty baguette sandwiches, we made friends with a passing dog who took our “Bonjour chien!” to mean “Nous voulons te donner nos sandwiches!” He looked up at us with adorable, hungry eyes and just stared and stared… it was sad, but we didn’t want to feed him since we were sitting right outside the store. Eventually, after a couple sneaked morsels, he decided to pursuit other opportunities and went along his way.

There was camping in the area, which was going to be our plan for a place to stay. The first camping sign we saw showed that at least some camping in northern france didn’t start until later in year though (it was maybe 60F, so that makes sense). We then fell back on the Auberge de Jeunesse (youth hostel), which was on the nearby Ile de Batz. A short ferry ride (which cost way too much and didn’t advertise prices, and was therefore assumed to be free or fairly cheap) got us to the island and we ended up at the hostel where we were sold a (fairly useless) hostel membership card and a night’s stay. We made the most of our ferry tickets by exploring the island which has a lighthouse and quiet farming town along the ocean.

Wicklow Way: Day 3 and leaving Ireland (Jeremy)

By this time Jeremy’s legs were pretty shot (I really should have exercised sometime in the last 6 months…) and our food supplies were low, so we decided to head for the nearest town with a train station, Rathdrum, about 14 km away. Spirits high with the prospect of automated transit and Christmas-themed sing-alongs, we got into Rathdrum just 45 minutes before a commuter train to Rosslare harbor arrived and we were there by late afternoon. Weirdly, we never figured out how to pay for the train ride. Other people appeared to have tickets, but there was nowhere to buy them at the station and nowhere to buy them on the train, so we just walked on and walked off a few hours later.

It turned out that the next ferry to France didn’t leave until the next afternoon (Friday), and there was nothing to do within 5 or 6 miles so we found a cheap guesthouse and veg’d out until our ferry boarded the next day. We walked a bit along the coast, but it was pretty cold and Jeremy’s walking muscles not fully recovered, so there were lots of card games played.

The ferry left pretty late, and there was some intermediate confusion as to whether we were going to Rosscoff or Cherbourg (we didn’t really mind either way as we hadn’t made any reservations or anything) which required them to reorganize cars for quite a while. Our seats were quite nice though, and until late, it looked like we would have a whole room to ourselves. Unfortunately, the reclining capability left something to be desired and everyone made camp on the floor around the room. We woke up to the ship on the high seas rocking and rolling enough to make us a bit woozy and walking up and down stairs quite difficult.

As I’m writing this, we’re about an hour and a half out of France, where we will have our first non-English adventure. It was good that we started in an English-speaking country, because just getting around the hostels, maps, trains, buses, etc, was challenging enough. Now that we’ve gotten our feet wet, we can dive in and see how our limited French serves us as we make our way through the country.

Wicklow Way: Day 2 (Jeremy)

The next day, we took off down the trail again. We were tentatively headed towards Glendalough, which we thought might be a bit far (~8 hours of walking). The first part of the day was great. We walked up over a 150 meter waterfall and then entered the Wicklow Mountains proper where we were walking inside a cloud for a couple hours. At some points we could look in all directions and not see more than 25-50 meters. It was pretty surreal and the closest thing to compare it to would be falling through clouds while sky diving (although much more slowly).

Our sore muscles from the day before combined with a constant drizzle that started up in the early afternoon turned the day a bit south and the last few hours of hiking weren’t much fun. We tried to keep it light-hearted by singing German folk songs, but ultimately were just hoping for a town to pop up around each bend. After what seemed like forever, the trail turned downhill towards buildings and we found a hostel in Glendalough between the various monasteries and monuments that litter the town. Another 20 minute walk found us a real restaurant that, partially due to our hunger (we had only had Clif bars since breakfast), served the best ravioli ever!

Wicklow Way: Day 1 (Jeremy)

Our next few days in Ireland were spent getting from Dublin to the Ferry port at Rosslare Harbor. We set off by bus to Marlay Park, where the Wicklow Way, a mountainous, 7-day trek through south-east Ireland, begins. With the help of an old Irishman who guessed from our somewhat confused looks and large packs that we were headed that way, we found the park and started following the path. Every time there was a choice of which way to go, our best friend, “hiking man”, would show up on a post to tell us which way to go.

The first day of hiking was really nice and we got plenty of picturesque views of the Irish countryside and many, many sheep. The day started off a bit balmy, but the sun quickly broke through and it turned into a very pleasant day. We were aiming for Knockree, where there was supposedly a hostel and a B&B. A lack of signage meant that we overshot it though, and ended up ~5 km farther along the trail. There was a sign for a B&B in 1.5km, so we aimed for that, but realized that the sign must have been wrong after walking for quite a ways. We asked directions from a mum walking her dog and toddler “to kill time between tea time and bath time” and she pointed out the original Knockree hostel we had missed up on a hill that didn’t look too far away. So we backtracked, cut through some fields with horses grazing along our path, and finally found the hostel where we proceeded to raid the free food bin in their kitchen and watch British game shows.

Dublin

Hello World! This is our first blog entry chronicling our trip to Europe and Morocco between graduation and real life.

So we left Newark airport Sunday evening May 10^th, and got into Dublin early Monday morning after a fitful red-eye flight. We spent the day, surprisingly awake, in Dublin, walking around the city and seeing the sights. After successfully navigating the bus system into center-city, we found our hostel after some wandering, some staring at maps, almost knocking pedestrians over with backpacks, and pushing a nice old man down the street in his wheelchair (he asked us to!).

Quote : Old man: Wher’ya from? Us: America Him: Well… we all have problems.

We did some normal touristy things like looking at old castles and statues as we wandered. We tagged along with a big tour group through the Viking and Medieval section (Old Dublin??) and were entertainingly shown a viking’s hut/animal shelter by a charming red faced lad. Our guide was also quite adamant about the Irish government’s apparent disregard for tradition shown by their paving over of the best preserved Viking settlement in downtown Dublin. After breaking off from the tour, Becky pretended to be a knight, as shown below!!

We then went over to the Guinness Brewery for their self-guided tour, which was pretty cool. You get to taste the roasted barley, get talked at by the somewhat awkward master-brewer, and have a nice fresh pint in their 8^th story 360 degree view “gravity bar”. Our lack of sleep combined with alcohol made us retreat to our hostel and surrounding streets for the evening. We ended up playing cards when we were suddenly and unexpectedly surrounded by German high-schoolers. They were starting to sing German folk songs and asked us to join in, so we did! In addition, we sang “Blowin in the Wind” with a slightly incorrect English translation, which was fun. And that was our first day in Ireland.