European Adventure

We are back in Munich after an amazing stay in Greece. Now we also have some time to post some of our pictures (Click on them to make them bigger):

Bullfight Stadium in Madrid:

Here we are in front of the Monaco – Monte Carlo Casino (the Casino in some of the James Bond Movies):

Next we had to stop the Leaning Tower of Pisa from falling over (like all the other tourists):

And here we are in the Colosseum in Rome:

And here in Venice we had to take a gondola ride:

These are all the pictures for now!

Andreas & Corey

Wow, we haven’t really been writing lately! Sorry about that. What have we been doing since Barcelona? Well, Nice came after that, and was a little smaller (a relief) but absolutely beautiful–especially the promenade along the shore with a stone beach. We also stopped in Monaco as a trip, and saw the casino and all the fancy cars out front. Amazing!

From there was Florence. We had a little trouble with our hotel there, but ended up in a better place, so it worked out. We saw the duomo, David… and pretty much everything else to see! Gorgeous, romantic, and pretty clean too. We were there for about a day and a half, and then on to Rome!

Rome was…crazy. So far it was the most crowded with tourists. It also involved the most walking in the shortest amount of time that I think any two people have ever walked (only there for a day and a half again). Does not result in happy feet, btw. We saw all that we had time (and energy) to see, but we definitely could have used more time to see even more. We got guided tours for the colosseum and the Vatican, which was pretty expensive, but worth it we thought. We also met some pretty cool people in our hostel, and it’s always good to have a good hostel experience .

Now we’re in Venice, and it’s so amazing. You think you kind of know what to expect, but with all the canals going through the entire city it’s different than any other place we’ve been so far. Also cleaner then i thought it would be, but WAY more shopping and souvenir places than probably all the other cities too. Pretty much all the things to see here are churches, which we’ve seen by now, and the rest of the experience of Venice comes with walking around and shopping! And getting a gondola ride of course, which is fantastic (and so romantic ). Now we’re just going to hang out until our night train to Munich…and then off to Greece!!

We just finished our second day in Barcelona. It was actually our first full day here. We started with a great breakfast at our “very awesome” Hotel. After that we started sightseeing. We went to several plazas and churches. At the big cathedral we were turned down because they had a specific clothing requirment that Corey’s tank top and very short shorts didn’t meet. We decided that we are going to come back properly clothed tomorrow so we can go inside. After that we went to the Picasso Museum, however we didn’t know that it is closed on Mondays. So we decided we would walk down the street to the arc de triomf. This of course didn’t take very long so we went next door to the Zoo. This zoo was actually amazing because they had a very wide selection of animals and also because they didn’t really cage a lot of them in. I am of course only speaking of the ones that aren’t very dangerous. The Zoo was so much fun that we didn’t even realize how fast the time went past. After the Zoo we went for a nice walk at the “La Barceloneta” which is the harbor area. We ended up eating a big grilled seafood platter at one of the restaurants in the harbor. This basically finishes up the day because we finally are in tune with Spain and their eating habits (I mean the whole lunch at 2 and dinner starting at 8). Tomorrow we are planning on going to the Cathedral again to actually see the inside, the Picasso Museum and the Sagrada Familia. So another very busy day but all together a very good finish for Barcelona.

Last night we went to Flamenco and we were looking for the Hard Rock Cafe…which we found thanks to Nike wireless! So today we went to hard rock and andreas got his obligatory shirt . Right now we’re sitting in the train station getting ready to go on our way to Barcelona!! Our tickets work, which is always good, and hopefully we have a smooth ride.

Madrid is definitely really cool. It’s gorgeous! The best stuff to see are probably the buildings, and the palace and museums are awesome too. It is really big, but I think three days is a little too much since there doesn’t seem to be much more to do here. The weather’s been really good to us, warm and mostly really sunny which is great. We’re pretty much beat by this point though, which probably doesn’t say much for us…so hopefully we build up some stamina because we’re just starting! Avila was supposed to be our day trip today, but no one checked the train schedules so we didn’t make it out there. We’re going to see flamenco tonight, and then we’re heading to Barcelona tomorrow afternoon!

The people: pretty much keep to themselves, and very individualistic
Culture: When do they eat? Where do they eat? What do they eat? Only people we’ve seen eating an actual meal have been tourists.

Finally the blogging is working via iPod app, so here we go Madrid!

After about 3 days of planning we finally came up with our outline for this trip:

May 2010

June 2010

The Page references in this outline go to the document from eurail.com which has all the train schedules in entire Europe on it : http://www.eurail.com/downloads/eurail/eurail-timetable-2010-trains-europe.pdf

I have also attached the word document that has all the information including the cutouts of our train connections.

Europe Trip Calendar

Everyone,

We thought we would start our blog with our flight schedule, because now that we know how much time in Europe we have we can plan the rest.