I successfully made it to Paris. I met 3 other stranded travelers and we all split a taxi to drive us a couple hours past the flooded tracks. From there I took a high-speed train direct to Paris. We were going to split car rental, but then I realized my license was here in Paris and not with me. This turned out to be for the best, because it would have been at least a 9 hour drive, not counting getting lost, and as it was I got to Paris around 7 in the evening.

My flight is tomorrow around noon. I have everything packed and ready to go. I hope my baggage is not too heavy, and I also hope that I will be able to carry my guitar on, which the British Airways site says is possible. Either way, I’ll be back shortly.

So my time in Europe has been extended a few days. My train yesterday from Nice to Paris got to Cannes, about 30 mins, and then was canceled due to flooding further up the tracks. So I walked around Cannes in the rain looking for a hotel and finally found one with a room around midnight. Hopefully I can make it back to Paris today or tomorrow, because my new flight is Friday.

Here is a quick shot I took.

A brief update from my time in Spain. I spent two days and a night in Barcelona, then headed to Valencia with Katherine to stay with a friend of hers who studied abroad at Georgia Tech last year. Her friend, Laura, had a beach condo and it was quite a shock for me to go from my apartment back to a place of normal size. Valencia was even cooler than expected. There was lots of cool architecture, a beach, and a laid back feel. Yesterday I took a train back to Barcelona, and I’m staying here until tomorrow morning because my roommate from Paris and her boyfriend are here in Barcelona as well. Then I’ll head to Marseille for two nights, Nice for three, and finally back to Paris for the last night before I fly out. I decided to go with beach cities so when I’m tired of looking around I can go relax by the ocean.

Due to technical difficulties I cannot upload the photo album at the moment.

Today is my last day in my apartment here. I was a bit surprised at how easy getting my stuff together was. Traveling with two suitcases means there just isn’t much stuff to have to throw in. I’ll certainly miss my window, as well as being able to open my door and see the Eiffel Tower. The eight flights of stairs won’t be hard to get over. Although the small size of the room does hold some charm, I look forward to rooms where I can stand up fully in any section with little worry of hitting my head. Overall, I’m ready to move on and move out of the room and Paris. I’ve stayed for almost a perfect amount of time. Hot summer days would be absolute hell in this room, as I learned a week ago when we had a random string of burning sun. Half of my friend group has already departed, and I think everyone has been ready to go home and find some familiarity.

Before I go home, however, I’m going to see some more Europe. Early tomorrow morning I’ll be flying to Barcelona, where I’ll spend one night and then head on to Valencia. Katherine has a friend who has a beach house in Valencia, and it sounds incredible. On June 8th I’ll head back to Barcelona, at which point I will… well, I don’t know.

I have a return ticket booked for that day to fly back to Paris, but I don’t have any real reason to come back to Paris. Since the ticket was only 14 euros, I’m likely going to just let it be. My old half-roommate from here in Paris will be in Barcelona with her boyfriend, so I may stay there for a couple of days. After that I will have no plan at all and will just have to be back in Paris by June 16 for my midday flight.

Essentially I will be doing the old show up at the train station and pick a random destination method. If it doesn’t look promising, I can always use the return ticket to Paris, but I would much prefer to seem some other cities in France. Or Spain. Or Switzerland. We’ll see.

Katherine just recently visited me and I got to do some of the touristy things that I had not yet done, as well as many I had. I’ll post all the pictures soon, but right now I’ll leave you with this shot of the Mona Lisa. Well actually of the people looking at the Mona Lisa, much more interesting in my view.

A little treat at London Paddington train station. That is most definitely a raspberry jelly donut.

I had a bunch of work when I got back, but things have let up so I’ve posted my pictures. I tried to tell some of the story of our trip in the captions.

Italy

After an exhilarating yet exhausting week of travel, my love for the automobile has been reaffirmed. To recap, this past week I flew from Paris to Milan, then from Milan to Rome, took a train from Rome to Venice, train back to Milan, and flight from Milan to Paris.

A key problem is that airports are almost never located in the city. When you fly into Paris you have to buy an eight euro ticket for a 30-45 minute train ride into the actual city. The London-Luton airport was the same way, with a twelve pound ticket. In Milan we took a bus from the Malpensa airport into the city which was five euros per person for a 45 minute journey. In Rome we needed tickets that were 8 euros per person for a convoluted journey to our camping hostel.

The trains usually take you right to the center of a city where you at least have immediate access to the metro, but trains can be slow unless you pay for extra for a high-speed train, as the six hour journey from Rome to Venice demonstrates. Another blemish on trains is that all of the stations charge you to use the bathroom, presumably to keep random people from wandering in and using them freely. On principle I am totally against this, and I am proud to say that not once have I paid for a bathroom in any traveling thus far.

Without hold-ups flying can be smooth and easy, but delays are a frequent occurrence. We flew EasyJet, which is a budget airline, and therefore did not expect too many frills or too much promptness. Each flight was pretty easy except for a delay leaving Paris. The only inherent problem with air travel is that you have to plan enough time to get all the way to the airport and get through check-in and security, effectively wasting three or four hours that you could have spent in the city if you were leaving by train. One definite positive about air travel is free bathrooms, which are usually kept nice.

The local modes of public transportation, the metro and the bus, can also be a frustrating mess at times. In Paris the metro is very efficient and has stops placed well all throughout the city, but most destinations require at least one if not two switches, which means 45 minutes is a regular travel time. The buses are great, but outside of peak hours the schedule can get erratic and leave you choosing between waiting 25 minutes for the next bus, which will then take 20-30 minutes to take you where you want to go, or hopping on the metro for a 45 minute ride. On the Italy trip we took many metro trains and buses, and they were of course helpful, but also a lot of trouble to figure out the directions and hours. To cap it all off, when we got back to Milan on our last night the entire city-wide public transportation system was shut down! Thankfully we had taken a train to the station where you can catch the bus to the airport, because otherwise we would have been standing in the hugely augmented line for taxis caused by the random disturbance.

All of this leads to my original statement. Put simply, I miss driving. Perhaps its American, or maybe capitalistic or individualistic or anti-planet or even anti-society, I’m not sure, but I have to admit my love for four wheels and freedom. Of course traffic is frustrating, and you do have to use energy and thought to drive, but it’s a small price to pay. Choosing when to come and go, deciding the direction (and driving straight there without extraneous stops), not making any switches, not having any bags checked, not worrying if you have the biggest water bottle known to man, stopping and buying food where you don’t pay triple the normal price, listening to music through speakers and rolling the windows down are but a few of the perks of driving, not to mention that driving itself is fun.

When all the costs for alternative means of transportation are added up, it’s hard to see a large personal savings. In my esteemed opinion, the best choice is a combination of car and bicycle. The bike offers all of the freedom of a car, albeit with less speed, more work, and a much smaller pool of destinations. This month in Paris I have decided not to purchase the unlimited metro pass and instead opt to try and use the bike rental system. I’ll certainly use the metro sometimes, so I’ll also buy some regular tickets. I’ve been paying 56 euros each month for an unlimited pass, and to use the bike rental system for a month will be about 20 euros. We’ll see how it goes, but as I save money and gain freedom I also look forward to going back to having a motored means of personal transportation. Thus ends my ode to the automobile.

This post is a step away from my travel posts. It also may be seen as a step away from relevancy, but I think I’ve stumbled upon an important point.

First and foremost, the ice maker is one of the greatest invention of the modern era. Cold beverages are nice, but extra-cold drinks are even better. What about when the ice melts and the drink gets watery? Drink faster! And then eat the ice and start over. When I live in the United States, as I have done my whole life up until a few months ago, I am a prodigious ice chewer. Many folks have tried to tell me along the way that chewing ice is bad for one’s teeth, or the enamel on the teeth, or something. But if it is good for dogs to chew ice then why not us? Perhaps that’s not my strongest argument, but ice chewing is a rollicking good time, and it’s a shame it has been shunned.

The main reason I bring up ice is to point out some effects it has that otherwise might go unnoticed. As an ice chewer, many times I get myself a cup of water with ice just so I can have some ice to chew. If the popular health advice to drink more water is correct, then ice directly contributes to an increase in my water consumption and therefore my health.

Another key area for ice is milk drinking. I’m aware that putting ice in milk is nowhere near universal, but I have recently realized that ice is the only thing that has stopped me from being what many would likely term a “heathen.” Here I use heathen to refer specifically to one who drinks milk straight from the jug. In the U.S. the gallons are a bit unwieldy and serve to discourage direct consumption regardless, but here in Paris I buy milk one liter at a time. Normally I would pour the milk in a glass with ice and fit in with all of the other non-heathens, but without ice to save me from my wretched fate I am exposed. Why bother with a glass if no ice is involved? Unfortunately I’m not enough of a self-conscious heathen to bother caring what it means if I drink milk straight from the jug, but if people believed in ice in this part of the globe then I’d avoid the dilemma altogether. We are lucky to have a strong country founded on ice in the U.S. that helps keep people believing that everyone else is normal. Without ice all heathens would be unmasked and society would likely disintegrate and the life of man nasty, brutish, and with drinks that are not cold enough.

Thus concludes my ode to ice.

After spending the last weekend in London, I was fortunate enough to travel again this most recent weekend. This time I made my way to Brussels. Someone I know here has a friend who lives in Brussels and is interning with the EU, so we had a free place to stay. Even if I had never left the apartment it would have been an excellent vacation. For starters, I could walk around the apartment with no worry of hitting my head. It also had a big screen TV with a fairly comfortable couch, not to mention a regular sized kitchen with a normal table as well. To top it all off, BBC2 was covering the Masters, so I got to watch some Masters coverage at night.

Brussels is a pretty cool city. Everything is in two languages there, Dutch and French. Many other things are also in English and German. The EU building is gigantic, as is the relatively famous Atomium. But perhaps my favorite part was the Grande Place, a square of sorts that is surrounding by beautiful buildings on all sides. Unfortunately I forgot my camera for the first day of sight-seeing so I don’t have a picture of that.

On Sunday morning we went to a small market near where we were staying and I bought a liter of what I was told to be “straight from the udders” milk by the girl we were staying with. I’ve never had raw milk so I can’t say for sure if that is what it was, but the milk was absolutely creamy and delicious, not to mention an excellent companion to the sweet and savory baklava I had with it.

The proud owner of fresh milk

I got back late last night and had to go to bed early in order to be ready for a medical visit this morning. To explain the situation, anyone coming to France and hoping to obtain a long-stay visa must not only jump through hoops in his home country, but must continue to navigate different levels of bureaucracy while in France. Upon arrival in France, one must register his place of residence and then wait to be summoned for a medical check-up. The medical check-up is the final step and if you are in decent health they grant you the official long-stay portion of the Visa. Having this is important for many reasons I’m sure, but the main one I know of is that students can actually get a discount on their rent here in Paris, but you have to be an official resident.

Due to my experience with all other things French, I was ready to be angry, frustrated, and full of impatience. These expectations were furthered when I showed up early for my 8:30 appt and realized that not only did they not open until 8:30, but about 40 or 50 of my new closest friends also had the same time. Preparing for disaster, I calmly listened to some Bruce Springsteen. I was fortunate enough to get towards the front of the line when they opened, and from there on I was actually quite impressed with the organization and speed of the operation. The whole thing took about an hour, and as an added bonus I got to keep the X-ray of my lungs. The ladies who put the official stamp in my passport even said I had unusual but nice hair and a bunch of other comments about my hair that I couldn’t even begin to understand, but they seemed to be having a good time so I went along with it.

Here is another shot out my window, but with a little twist

Those are some good looking lungs if you ask me

For those who were wondering, I did not see any werewolves in London.