Paris (the second day)

One day of glorious weekend sushine was enough to ask for on a late November weekend, thus we were greeted with horizontal rain and gale force winds upon wakeup at St Christopher's Inn on a lazy Paris Sunday. We didn't care. Paris is Paris! and when you're travelling with reunited americans, the Europe is Europe! attitude takes over. I can't explain it but it's something like Europhilia on triple espressos. I'm not complaining; I led the pack.


We'd finished off the night before at a cozy and grafittied, specialising in Sangria, student bar called 'Le 10 Bar', on rue d'la Odeon, somewhere in Paris's boho Quartier Latin. The quarter is a mess of cobbled, narrow streets and tiny pavements. V. cool. But with the sangria going straight to our heads, we stumbled home and made a less than early start the next day.

at Marché aux Puces de St-Ouen...lots of dead animals, funky smells, avante garde street performers and interesting clothing choices


After waiting out the rain with extra large hot chocolates and various tastes of market fayre, we marched endlessly towards le tour eiffel, taking a series of ridiculous photos.



The beauty of travelling with very-good-at-what-they-enjoy amateur photgraphers, is that you see places in a totally different light. Lights, angles, viewpoints all begin to throw themselves in front of you. I was actually excited to see the Eiffel Tower for the third time in my life.

That, and seeing Nasim's face when the hunkering tower of metal snuck into the skyline was pretty priceless.


beauty in a reflection in a puddle
and then this

After our highly nutritious dinner of Bastardy, crisps and fromage, I left Nasim and Jason at the hostel to return back to London reality. It would be romanticly american to say that I gazed longingly out past the french countryside, sideways beret clad composing poetry about the delightful weekend I had.
In reality, I passed out as soon as train wheels hit the track and woke up abruptly at St. Pancras station.

Paris! (day one)

I'm not sure why i've posted an exclamation mark next to the title of this entry. Paris and I are not intimately acquainted with one another. I don't consider myself a parisophile (i'm sure there's a word for this). But this funny thing happened when Nasim, her friend Jason and I ventured for a weekend away at the end of November.

I started to see its appeal.

And maybe it was eurostar, the delightful city centre to city centre high speed train that takes you from Kings Cross St Pancras to Gar de Norde in 2.4 hours--that's barely a nap. Or maybe it was Montmartre. Or maybe it was the rekindling of emotions and memories of study abroad days long gone by.

The last time I was in Paris I got something of an authentic experience by staying with Elodie, my good friend from my Edinburgh days. In fact, my blog's birth documented that trip as my first on this here blog space. Those were the days of bad formatting and no captions. And now, it seems i've come full circle. So maybe it's got very little to do with Paris and more to do with being a grown-up, whatever that is.

Regardless, the three of us eurostarred it in arriving late on friday night and I came back sans travelling companions late sunday night in order to get back to that slog I call work. Nothing remarkable happened. But it was europe. Real, live, people are not speaking english europe.

We ate. We drank. We got lost.
And since Nasim and Jason had never been before, we did every single i'm a tourist walking in paris thing known to man. Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Eiffel tower again, walks on the Seine, crepes, Montmatre, etc. I tried to be super cool with my pink fuji camera sandwiched between my photographically clad friends with multiple zoom lensed Canons. I am happy to admit that my photos don't look so bad.

Montmartre
I've finally figured out how to simultaneously pronounce both r sounds in this city borough. It's expensive. It's touristy, artisty and bohemian. my favourite!






Notre Dame




Along the River
something french, salmony and delightful
restaurants on the touristy left bank
Shakespeare and Company, an amazing, albiet expensive, english bookstore near Notre dame

Chain Bridge


day two to come!

Auschwitz-Birkenau

In the middle of our Krakow wanderings we made the haunting and humbling trek to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Amidst other european tourists snapping and smiling away, I felt like papping the place was beyond disrespectful. I took only these three photos to aid my teaching of 'The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas' and stood shaking for most of the rest of the day.

At first glimpse the work camp, standing eerily quiet, looks like a college campus and halls of residence during the quiet summer months. From the outside, the buildings are uniform and ordered. Inside, each block has been turned into a memorial for a different country or ethnic group. Lots of people walk around with that similar glazed look. It's awful.


The sister camp to Auschwitz, Auschwitz-Birkenau, the extermination camp, lies 1-2km up the road. The sheer size of Birkenau is daunting. Its proximity to nothing is also scary. The atrocities that took place are unspeakable. And anything else I say will just sound even more cliche.
train tracks leading into nowhere. nothingness.

What else can I say?
We went to Auschwitz to remember.
And hopefully I can pass that remembrance on in one way or another.

Krakow (the good stuff)

MINOR DIGRESSION
So it's the eve of the eve of the 2011 Virgin London Marathon and for the first time in as long as I can remember, I am home. Doing nothing. Listening to music that will go on my 'pump you up' playlist. So it's time to blog the rest of my October half term travels as well as update my ventures through Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Tuscany.

Though it doesn't seem it, I do indeed work. Students go to school the same number of days as those in the USA, just on a different timetable. It's more like a year round schedule--for me this means I get a week break every six/seven weeks and a much shortened summer holiday. I guess I mention my school schedule because I've been feeling increasingly guilty for the amount of travelling i've been doing in the last year. I could be saving for: retirement, a flat, adulthood. I should be sitting in my london flat during term breaks pondering the deeper meanings in my life. But I find that when I spend vast quantities of alone time in London, I think. And thinking leads to melancholy. Melancholy leads to sadness. Sadness leads to crying and crying is just no good.

So instead I travel and travel and travel. I love it. It gets me.
And until I find another hobby that makes me feel the same way, then it's onwards and upwards with my suitcase, passport and ticket!

BACK TO POLAND
Here's the rest of a few places in Krakow's old town. From what I can remember, the weather was pretty brilliant, for the most part. We had one afternoon of rain and chose to spend it sitting under an umbrella or in the basement of one of Krakow's many beer caves/cafes. Seeing as I'm lacking inspiration, i will leave it at that and let the pictures speak for themselves.

in the old market square
Cafe Camelot, with its amazing oldy worldy atmosphere, beautiful chocolate concoctions and perky waitstaff



insanely huge and beautiful restaurant in a cave




random side of the road effigies to religion
winding road leading up to Wawel Castle
something out of a picture postcard

in the Jewish Quarter, Kazimierz, where the city's Jewish population numbers around 500, a staggeringly smaller number than pre-WWII



good free jazz in a cave!

in total, we spent six days in Krakow, which was definitely enough time to see what we wanted. We only had a chance to scratch the surface of cafe and bar life and didn't even venture into the realm of techno music and nightclubbing. But Krakow really was something. Cheap and beautiful. Friendly and tasty. two enthusiastic thumbs up.

Krakow (the beverages)

As is often the case, and despite warnings during study abroad to 'not find the cheapeast flight and then take it because you'll end up in the sticks', we ended up in the armpit of Poland because of a cheap ryanair (damn you michael o'leary!) deal to the sticks. So imagine our relief when, after four hours of finagling at Europe's third dodgiest transportation station (only in comparison to Coventry Pool Meadow and Glasgow Queen Street), we arrived into a sparkling Krakow Glowny Station on a sparkling October afternoon.

Would you believe me if I told you that Krakow has beautiful food? And that you pay a third of the price of that anywhere in Western Europe? And that it's a gorgeous city? What a relief.

day/evening one involved mostly food and beverages, hence the beverage tour, though we didn't drink all of this in one day:

Paul, Paolo, Paola, depending on the day, drinking his beer in the oh so masculinely Polish manner

orange hot chocolate at Cafe Camelot

Zubrowka!
Polish flavoured vodka
drinking hot beer with a straw in a jazz cave in the heart of the city





Halfheartedly, I wish I could report that we did lots of exciting adventure-filled and crazy things in the course of the week. We did not. Unless you count eating and drinking. It's the first holiday in a long time that I stayed in one place for longer than two days, watched the pace of the world slow down and investigated the nooks, crannies and posh alleyways of a medeival city without my usual sense of agressive wanderlust.

It appears i have begun to heed the advice of a young but wise anglo-italian when he said 'relax yourself, fool!'. Indeed.

Katowice

is the armpit of Poland.




the most notable happenings during our 3-hour, very unnecessary stint in the armpit:

1. passport control
me: handing over my passport and grinning like an idiot

border guard: looking very eastern european and flipping through my passport 'i cannot let you in to poland'

me: 'um! what!' thinking i just got off a hot pink airplane to fly to the buttcrack of a nation in the middle of nowhere

border guard: 'no place for stamp.'

me: sweating it out as i'm thinking okay, fair point, i need to get more pages in my passport 'uh?!'

border guard: waiting for roughly seven minutes and drawling before busting out an impish smile 'okay, i find one more place!'

2. Crawling on the public bus from the airport to the city centre to get the train to Krakow only to watch the direct minibus to Krakow zoom right past you

3. Looking for something like platform 2 and 3/4 that leads directly into a bricked up wall while old Polish men point and gesticulate rapidly into the air, a Polish tramp begs you for zloti you don't have and you contemplate if Warsaw is within walking distance from Krakow because at least there's a train going there and it's got to be better than Katowice