Tale of Four Cities

My vacation started with a pretty long train ride to Salzburg, Austria. It was my first real, long train ride since goodness knows when, so I settled in with cosy sweaters, snacks, and music. I have to say...I had a pretty good time. We stopped in Stuttgart, where I got Red Bull and sausage, and then continued past the foothills of the Alps. I took maaany pictures out the window.

Salzburg is beautiful! I loved walking around and seeing the Baroque architecture and the castle up on the hill. My friend Caitlin met me there on her way back from Rome, and we saw most of the city and did a Sound of Music Tour with an Aussie girl from our hostel. It was Caitlin’s first time experiencing Austrian/ German culture, so I made sure to ply her with radler, weiss beer, weiner schnitzel, and she was a champ about always finishing her apple streudel.

We visited the castle for the view of the city (awesome, and worth the 10 euro for the "fun"icular). There was a terrifying swooping sensation in my stomach after taking off up the vertical track. Then we spent half a day riding around on a bus with a seriously non-sober tourguide who showed us how The Sound of Music was filmed in and around the cty. We got out to Monsee, in the mountains, where they filmed the wedding scene. It was also, incidentally, where I had some pretty tasty streudel.

I took the night train to Venice, which was a total nightmare (heh). My sleeping car was full of Germans, two of whom snored and kept me awake for the entire 7 hours. Add to that the cold and the damp, and I was about ready to hop on a flight back to Paris when I stumbled out of the train station in Venice.

The city was absolutely beautiful. But. I can’t really decide whether I like it. There are locals, contrary to what I’ve heard, but I don’t know what they do. Do they work in all the mask shops and restaurants clogging up the tiny passages? Do they all hawk birdseed to screaming tourists at San Marco? Because there are little to no businesses on the islands; it’s limited to some banks and maybe a government office or two. And then, there’s just not much more to do than stroll and eat. Every once and a while, you take pictures to keep things interesting. The shopping isn’t fantastic, the museums are few and far between, and everything is sort of dull (for example, we went to Murano by way of vaparetto, and after about 20 minutes I was ready to leave). I can't even begin to explain my fury toward the crowds of people. They STROLL and gawk, and if you need to be anywhere with any sort of time constraint, it's hard to do.

Maybe I’m getting jaded, but I wasn’t overly impressed after my initial shock about the city's beauty wore off.

The hostel was terrible, too. I slept on a cot for almost 50 euros a night, and the management didn’t speak English. The location was gold, though: 10 minutes from the train and 15 to San Marco if you didn’t get lost.

I had an amazing dinner with some PIP kids who met me in the city, and then I went to hang out at their hotel. We watched the European Music Awards live on MTV, and I started to feel normal again.

Then, after my friends had left, I decided to veto spending another long day in Venice and instead took a train to Florence. I’ve been once before, so this was my shopping and museum visit. It was very elegant and relaxing to not feel pressured about sightseeing. Instead, I stationed myself in line for the Uffizi (two hour’s wait), saw some Botticellis, took pictures of the Ponte Vecchio from upstairs, and then wandered around the streets with food until I found a pair of leather driving gloves I wanted. It was an extremely nice end to a long but well-deserved vacation, I think.

I took the train back to Paris, which took most of the day. I changed trains in Milan so I decided to try and see the city. I think I got about 10 minutes away from the station and then called it a day. It’s not an overly beautiful city, and it was Sunday. Everything was shut down. Plus, I got yelled at in Italian for trying to bust my way into a locked restaurant. Oops.

Pictures are going up (slowly) on flickr... and fear for your life. It was a long vacation with beaucoup photo ops.