My travels yet again
Greetings all,
Still surviving my travels, I decided to send an update a little sooner this time, in an attempt to reduce the length of these documents.
In Budapest I stayed at a guest house, which was a flat with no one else in my room at the time, so it was nice to have some space. Budapest is both very ugly and attractive, it has many dirty and ugly modern buildings and many gleaming white grand structures that make you think of Prince of Persia, all crammed in together. It also has a strange bus system with over head power which appears to have all the disadvantages of trams with none of the advantages. Instead of providing pedestrian crossings they provide passages underneath the roads. Often these contain shops, toilets or even whole shopping centers in a hidden underground city.
Vienna is filled with impressive Gothic buildings, but probably the highlight for me was walking over a lake (perhaps I'm easily amused). From Vienna I went straight to Rome, which is a truly remarkable city. It is amazingly green, and a short trip out of the centre it quickly becomes quiet and beautiful countryside. In the city centre there is a population ratio for locals:tourists:police of approximately 6:3:1. I have decided that no one in Rome eats bread, because there are no bakeries and I only found one supermarket selling this rare food.
I took a ferry from Italy to Patras, which had more 'assistants' than passengers. Their job appeared to be telling you were you shouldn't go, which appeared to be most of the ship. Despite the reasonable interior, the engine pushed the ferry along with all the grace of an unbalanced washing machine.
The Greece rail network runs the loudest lumps of graffiti on rails, though there is clear evidence of EU funding improving things. After a long coastal trip I concluded that there is no such things as beeches in Greece, the water just meets the land. I also found that while the buildings are very homogeneous with off white walls and terracotta roofs, the occasional Greek breaks free from the mould and paints his building completely pink.
Athens feels like a big market, with traffic in the middle of everything. Surprisingly it is still less chaotic than Rome. After spending hours attempting to locate a tourist information centre, I gave up and asked some police. After some initial confusion, the police decided they didn't know about this 'information' thing, but they gave me a map of the city they had in the glove box.
After a very long return to Italy I arrived in Venice. Here I proceeded to visit every dead end in the city at least once, half of them before finding my hotel. Venice is the most unique city I can imagine, possibly because no one else would want to build a city like that. There isn't actually a lot to do in Venice, which may account for the large numbers of toy shops.
Due to snow, delays, confusions and trains not going where they claimed to it took six (6) trains for me to get from Venice to the hostel in Zurich. At least I had a lot of opportunity to look at the maze of tunnels, bridges rivers and cliffs in Switzerland. It's like a model train set with all the props put onto the one area.
I am beginning to feel this trip is a little too long. I look forward to seeing you all again soon.
Bruce
Still surviving my travels, I decided to send an update a little sooner this time, in an attempt to reduce the length of these documents.
In Budapest I stayed at a guest house, which was a flat with no one else in my room at the time, so it was nice to have some space. Budapest is both very ugly and attractive, it has many dirty and ugly modern buildings and many gleaming white grand structures that make you think of Prince of Persia, all crammed in together. It also has a strange bus system with over head power which appears to have all the disadvantages of trams with none of the advantages. Instead of providing pedestrian crossings they provide passages underneath the roads. Often these contain shops, toilets or even whole shopping centers in a hidden underground city.
Vienna is filled with impressive Gothic buildings, but probably the highlight for me was walking over a lake (perhaps I'm easily amused). From Vienna I went straight to Rome, which is a truly remarkable city. It is amazingly green, and a short trip out of the centre it quickly becomes quiet and beautiful countryside. In the city centre there is a population ratio for locals:tourists:police of approximately 6:3:1. I have decided that no one in Rome eats bread, because there are no bakeries and I only found one supermarket selling this rare food.
I took a ferry from Italy to Patras, which had more 'assistants' than passengers. Their job appeared to be telling you were you shouldn't go, which appeared to be most of the ship. Despite the reasonable interior, the engine pushed the ferry along with all the grace of an unbalanced washing machine.
The Greece rail network runs the loudest lumps of graffiti on rails, though there is clear evidence of EU funding improving things. After a long coastal trip I concluded that there is no such things as beeches in Greece, the water just meets the land. I also found that while the buildings are very homogeneous with off white walls and terracotta roofs, the occasional Greek breaks free from the mould and paints his building completely pink.
Athens feels like a big market, with traffic in the middle of everything. Surprisingly it is still less chaotic than Rome. After spending hours attempting to locate a tourist information centre, I gave up and asked some police. After some initial confusion, the police decided they didn't know about this 'information' thing, but they gave me a map of the city they had in the glove box.
After a very long return to Italy I arrived in Venice. Here I proceeded to visit every dead end in the city at least once, half of them before finding my hotel. Venice is the most unique city I can imagine, possibly because no one else would want to build a city like that. There isn't actually a lot to do in Venice, which may account for the large numbers of toy shops.
Due to snow, delays, confusions and trains not going where they claimed to it took six (6) trains for me to get from Venice to the hostel in Zurich. At least I had a lot of opportunity to look at the maze of tunnels, bridges rivers and cliffs in Switzerland. It's like a model train set with all the props put onto the one area.
I am beginning to feel this trip is a little too long. I look forward to seeing you all again soon.
Bruce
posted by Bruce at 4:32 am
2 Comments:
Heh. Sounds pretty damn awesome. Hurry up and loot the damn place so we can have you back.
The police with the fully automatic rifles are putting me off (I still don't see how these are any use).
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