have you ever called tech support for your computer or other high techy item and got a help desk guy/girl with a foreign accent? If your answer is yes, watch this. If not, watch it anyway!
http://www.chintan.net/conan.wmv
Saturday
do try this at home
Left brain, right brain.
While sitting, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles. Now, while doing this, draw the number "6" in the air with your right hand. Your foot will change direction and there's nothing you can do about it.
Got this as a forward, so instead of sending it to everyone's inbox, I'll just leave it here for those who want to read it.... :)
While sitting, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles. Now, while doing this, draw the number "6" in the air with your right hand. Your foot will change direction and there's nothing you can do about it.
Got this as a forward, so instead of sending it to everyone's inbox, I'll just leave it here for those who want to read it.... :)
Sunday
VENICE
The real Venice that is! We took the Nachtzug ("night train") which departed on Friday night around 11pm. We slept in bunk beds that were shared with 4 other strangers (6 bed compartment), but that's because that's what we paid for.
The more private you want, the more it costs. For our set up, we paid only 39 euros each one way (not "based on round trip" like airlines do), so it was a total of 156 euros for both of us. Not bad when you consider it's transportation and motel in one. Also, this was a discounted rate (for only 6 seats) so the price is normally over twice as much.
The beds are not the most comfortable thing, but at least you get clean sheets and a blankie! The compartments have only beds so there's not much room for anything else. You definitely don't want to bring your children unless you want to pay for a private 2 bed compartments (89 euros per person each way, discounted rate) but even those you don't have that much room, but you do get a private toilette and shower.
The train guy woke us up about 30 minutes before arrival, for teeth brushing and peeing time. There's only 2 sinks and 1 toilette in each caboose so you inevitably wait in line, or option 2: stand in front of your compartment, look out the window at the scenery of ghetto Italy passing by, take quick glances over at the line every so often, and then when the line is gone, make a mad dash, which is what I did. We arrived in Venice about 6am so we had the whole Saturday, got a hotel room for Saturday night, spent all Sunday in Venice also, and then took the night train back at 11pm. We arrived back at home around 7:30am (our train was 40 minutes late), showered, and started our Monday. Now that's a full weekend!
Here are some highlights of our Venice visit. I've started to put the pictures small on the blog page (to speed up loading) so if you want to see it bigger, just click on it.
This is on the island of Murano, off of Venice island. They're famous for glass making so the tourist shops are full of glass items, from jewelry, to picture frames, to sculptures, to chandeliers. On these islands, there are no roads, cars or motorcycles. Since the streets are made of water, everything is by boat, and to cross the street, you are limited to bridges (no jay walking here!) You can see here an old man's vegetable & fruit stand on his boat. I thought this was a cute scene :).
This inside the glass museum on Murano, a glass chandelier hanging from your stereotypical, yet still pretty, painted ceiling.
On the island of Venice, typical apartment homes with colorful underoos hanging about.
Public transportation use boat "buses." These are the floating "bus stops" and you can see part of St. Marks Sqaure in the background (the famous part of Venice, that I didn't know about until I got there!)
What's a trip to Italy without a gondola ride? Check out these tourists undocking. Meanwhile, JP and I are on a bus, trying to pull into the bus stop, so the bus drivers are frequently honking their horns at the gondolas for being in the way.
A quartet of gondolas ridden by a group of Asian tourists! They had a singer, but you can't really see him. If you look closely, you can see his arms sticking out on either side of the standing paddling guy on the very right (bald guy with black & white horizontal stripe shirt).
Along the Grand Canal, a cool looking building.
Walking through Venice is a rat maze. The map wasn't much help so we got lost a lot.
Let me give you an idea of what most of Venice look's like. When people decided to build on this place a long time ago, there was no thought of backyards, neighbor cushion or grid patterns. Someone built an apartment building. Then the next guy built another apartment building about 5 feet away, but made the building an L shape. Then the next guy built another different shaped building. If you look from an arial view, it's almost like tetris. There are some open squares where there's room for gatherings, and some wide walkways where there are shops, but not many!
On Sunday, it was raining. But like many tourists from faraway lands, we had to put up with it and still do our touristy things outside. No, I wasn't code in a skirt. The temperature was still warm, so mix that with rain and you got humid conditions, perfect for creating sticky feeling skin and plenty of mosquito bites.
Yes, people were on Gondolas even when it was raining. People traveled thousands of miles to visit Italy, so a little rain was not going to stop them!
Here's a cool looking church.
This is on the back side of a hospital. These boats are the ambulances.
A picturesque scene along the Grand Canal.
A closer look of the church from the previous picture. We skipped going into a different church in order to visit this one, but there was no entrance here! That really sucked because it took about 30-45 minutes to get anywhere due to the buses having to stop a lot, and the other church was probably almost closing, so we couldn't go back.
So instead, we just took a picture of ourselves.
And the sun coming out, looking towards St. Marks Square from this church's steps.
A nice sunset.
Another shot of the Grand Canal, with a big bridge in the background. The bridge is another major tourist attraction and has shops on it. The area in front of it is crowded with retaurants serving over priced food, which we ate at! (doh!)
The night scene of the Grand Canal, from the big bridge, facing towards the over priced restaurants. Most of the restaurants' seating is outside along the canal so at least we get a nice "romantic" view. :)
Along the boardwalks of Venice are street entertainers (what else is new). Here we have some South American looking people playing native sounding music (sorry, no sound clip available).
And yes, we did see one metal looking guy moving like a robot.
Those street vendors....look closely at this picture and you can see this is a fountain...
This is at St. Mark's Square. Plenty of Bert's (of Bert and Ernie) friends around.
Yeah, I want pigeons swarming around and eating off of me too....
St. Mark's Square, a big square.
On the side of the square, there are little orchestra bands playing classical music. Their goal is to get you to sit in the chairs in front of them and pay a lot of money for a small tiny glass of water. Of course, there were plenty of people content to stand and listen. There were 3 bands playing, 2 next to each other and one on the other side of the square. So as soon as one takes a break, you just move on to the next one! Actually, around the corner was another one of these playing jazz, but I don't like jazz, so we didn't listen to that one. This is high class street entertainment!
This is a church in the sqare. You can see that the ground is slowly flooding because of high tide! The polar ice caps are melting!!! The greenhouse effect is not just a figment of the scientists' imagination! (or maybe it is and we're in their dreams...)
I found this on the internet that shows pictures of when it's really flooded, although it wasn't this much when we were there. http://www.veniceonline.it/HighTides/HighTides.asp
And if you're really interested, Nova has more information about it: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/venice/
Ciao!
The more private you want, the more it costs. For our set up, we paid only 39 euros each one way (not "based on round trip" like airlines do), so it was a total of 156 euros for both of us. Not bad when you consider it's transportation and motel in one. Also, this was a discounted rate (for only 6 seats) so the price is normally over twice as much.
The beds are not the most comfortable thing, but at least you get clean sheets and a blankie! The compartments have only beds so there's not much room for anything else. You definitely don't want to bring your children unless you want to pay for a private 2 bed compartments (89 euros per person each way, discounted rate) but even those you don't have that much room, but you do get a private toilette and shower.
The train guy woke us up about 30 minutes before arrival, for teeth brushing and peeing time. There's only 2 sinks and 1 toilette in each caboose so you inevitably wait in line, or option 2: stand in front of your compartment, look out the window at the scenery of ghetto Italy passing by, take quick glances over at the line every so often, and then when the line is gone, make a mad dash, which is what I did. We arrived in Venice about 6am so we had the whole Saturday, got a hotel room for Saturday night, spent all Sunday in Venice also, and then took the night train back at 11pm. We arrived back at home around 7:30am (our train was 40 minutes late), showered, and started our Monday. Now that's a full weekend!
Here are some highlights of our Venice visit. I've started to put the pictures small on the blog page (to speed up loading) so if you want to see it bigger, just click on it.
This is on the island of Murano, off of Venice island. They're famous for glass making so the tourist shops are full of glass items, from jewelry, to picture frames, to sculptures, to chandeliers. On these islands, there are no roads, cars or motorcycles. Since the streets are made of water, everything is by boat, and to cross the street, you are limited to bridges (no jay walking here!) You can see here an old man's vegetable & fruit stand on his boat. I thought this was a cute scene :).
This inside the glass museum on Murano, a glass chandelier hanging from your stereotypical, yet still pretty, painted ceiling.
On the island of Venice, typical apartment homes with colorful underoos hanging about.
Public transportation use boat "buses." These are the floating "bus stops" and you can see part of St. Marks Sqaure in the background (the famous part of Venice, that I didn't know about until I got there!)
What's a trip to Italy without a gondola ride? Check out these tourists undocking. Meanwhile, JP and I are on a bus, trying to pull into the bus stop, so the bus drivers are frequently honking their horns at the gondolas for being in the way.
A quartet of gondolas ridden by a group of Asian tourists! They had a singer, but you can't really see him. If you look closely, you can see his arms sticking out on either side of the standing paddling guy on the very right (bald guy with black & white horizontal stripe shirt).
Along the Grand Canal, a cool looking building.
Walking through Venice is a rat maze. The map wasn't much help so we got lost a lot.
Let me give you an idea of what most of Venice look's like. When people decided to build on this place a long time ago, there was no thought of backyards, neighbor cushion or grid patterns. Someone built an apartment building. Then the next guy built another apartment building about 5 feet away, but made the building an L shape. Then the next guy built another different shaped building. If you look from an arial view, it's almost like tetris. There are some open squares where there's room for gatherings, and some wide walkways where there are shops, but not many!
On Sunday, it was raining. But like many tourists from faraway lands, we had to put up with it and still do our touristy things outside. No, I wasn't code in a skirt. The temperature was still warm, so mix that with rain and you got humid conditions, perfect for creating sticky feeling skin and plenty of mosquito bites.
Yes, people were on Gondolas even when it was raining. People traveled thousands of miles to visit Italy, so a little rain was not going to stop them!
Here's a cool looking church.
This is on the back side of a hospital. These boats are the ambulances.
A picturesque scene along the Grand Canal.
A closer look of the church from the previous picture. We skipped going into a different church in order to visit this one, but there was no entrance here! That really sucked because it took about 30-45 minutes to get anywhere due to the buses having to stop a lot, and the other church was probably almost closing, so we couldn't go back.
So instead, we just took a picture of ourselves.
And the sun coming out, looking towards St. Marks Square from this church's steps.
A nice sunset.
Another shot of the Grand Canal, with a big bridge in the background. The bridge is another major tourist attraction and has shops on it. The area in front of it is crowded with retaurants serving over priced food, which we ate at! (doh!)
The night scene of the Grand Canal, from the big bridge, facing towards the over priced restaurants. Most of the restaurants' seating is outside along the canal so at least we get a nice "romantic" view. :)
Along the boardwalks of Venice are street entertainers (what else is new). Here we have some South American looking people playing native sounding music (sorry, no sound clip available).
And yes, we did see one metal looking guy moving like a robot.
Those street vendors....look closely at this picture and you can see this is a fountain...
This is at St. Mark's Square. Plenty of Bert's (of Bert and Ernie) friends around.
Yeah, I want pigeons swarming around and eating off of me too....
St. Mark's Square, a big square.
On the side of the square, there are little orchestra bands playing classical music. Their goal is to get you to sit in the chairs in front of them and pay a lot of money for a small tiny glass of water. Of course, there were plenty of people content to stand and listen. There were 3 bands playing, 2 next to each other and one on the other side of the square. So as soon as one takes a break, you just move on to the next one! Actually, around the corner was another one of these playing jazz, but I don't like jazz, so we didn't listen to that one. This is high class street entertainment!
This is a church in the sqare. You can see that the ground is slowly flooding because of high tide! The polar ice caps are melting!!! The greenhouse effect is not just a figment of the scientists' imagination! (or maybe it is and we're in their dreams...)
I found this on the internet that shows pictures of when it's really flooded, although it wasn't this much when we were there. http://www.veniceonline.it/HighTides/HighTides.asp
And if you're really interested, Nova has more information about it: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/venice/
Ciao!
Friday
money money money
I just ran into something cool....this web page shows you images of money bills from all over the world. Click on the "my travel wallet" link below, pick the country, and click on the "view currency" button to see the pictures.
An interesting note: while most countries use people faces on the front of their bills, I found a few that use animals. Check out South Africa's! It's cute :).
Seems like the US is the only country in the world that doesn't use a lot of color. How boring are we??? (oh, I would barely call that color on the new bills!) Even the poor small countries have cooler looking money than us! I-M-H-O!!!
My Travel Wallet
An interesting note: while most countries use people faces on the front of their bills, I found a few that use animals. Check out South Africa's! It's cute :).
Seems like the US is the only country in the world that doesn't use a lot of color. How boring are we??? (oh, I would barely call that color on the new bills!) Even the poor small countries have cooler looking money than us! I-M-H-O!!!
My Travel Wallet
Thursday
the terminal
I recently found out that the Tom Hanks movie, The Terminal is based on a true story (with some Hollywood flare of course). The real guy is from Iran and has been stuck in the Paris airport for 10 years! The short story is that he was kicked out of Iran for his political views and received refugee status in Belgium but lost his documentation. His ultimate destination is England, and finally got the papers to allow him to move there recently, but mentally, the airport has been his world, and won't leave it right away, so he'll be going through some therapy.
Read the details to this story here! It's worth it! http://www.snopes.com/travel/airline/airport.htm
Read the details to this story here! It's worth it! http://www.snopes.com/travel/airline/airport.htm
Monday
WENDELSTEIN
Wendelstein is our local peak at 5,600 ft. JP, Ralf and I took a hike up, while many lazy people took the tram or gondola to the top. Ok, I admit, I took the tram up one time, but it was just for the experience ;).
From where we started, we ascended about 3,000 ft (equivalent to a hike a little longer than to the top of Yosemite Falls), so we were dead tired when we finally reached the top! A great benefit of German hiking is that there is always food on the way (because some mountains will have several farm houses that serve food), and/or at the top. Food is always a great motivator, and you know how German like to eat. If not, you do now!
Here's a brief pictoral of our hike. You can click on any picture to see a bigger version.
JP and Ralf putting on the sunscreen
On the way up...
I got pricked by this stupid flower! At first glance, it looked cool because there was no stem! It's just a flower stump! The petals looked silverish, like metal so I decided to see what it felt like and found out that the petal ends were sharp! Then JP started laughing and pointing at me, "Ha ha! I was waiting for you to do that!!!"
We were tired at this point but only a third of the way up. We could finally see the goal and it looked really really far.
A pretty flower along the hike
This is at the top of Wendelstein. There is, you guessed it, food! And you can see all the little people having lunch. There's also a radio broadcasting station which is the building and dishes on the top left part of the picture.
Sitting at a table with a nice view, JP was definitely ready for lunch too.
To the right side of the eating area is a cool small church. Imagine having to hike up here every Sunday morning!
On the way down...
A view of the great Kaiser Mountains along the hike.
You can probably see a running theme of activity here. Mountains mountains mountains, which I love anyway so I don't mind. Do I miss the ocean? Sorta, but not that much. Probably because I never spent much time by the water, despite living minutes away from ocean! I was just your semi-typical 9-5 LA transplant...
From where we started, we ascended about 3,000 ft (equivalent to a hike a little longer than to the top of Yosemite Falls), so we were dead tired when we finally reached the top! A great benefit of German hiking is that there is always food on the way (because some mountains will have several farm houses that serve food), and/or at the top. Food is always a great motivator, and you know how German like to eat. If not, you do now!
Here's a brief pictoral of our hike. You can click on any picture to see a bigger version.
JP and Ralf putting on the sunscreen
On the way up...
I got pricked by this stupid flower! At first glance, it looked cool because there was no stem! It's just a flower stump! The petals looked silverish, like metal so I decided to see what it felt like and found out that the petal ends were sharp! Then JP started laughing and pointing at me, "Ha ha! I was waiting for you to do that!!!"
We were tired at this point but only a third of the way up. We could finally see the goal and it looked really really far.
A pretty flower along the hike
This is at the top of Wendelstein. There is, you guessed it, food! And you can see all the little people having lunch. There's also a radio broadcasting station which is the building and dishes on the top left part of the picture.
Sitting at a table with a nice view, JP was definitely ready for lunch too.
To the right side of the eating area is a cool small church. Imagine having to hike up here every Sunday morning!
On the way down...
A view of the great Kaiser Mountains along the hike.
You can probably see a running theme of activity here. Mountains mountains mountains, which I love anyway so I don't mind. Do I miss the ocean? Sorta, but not that much. Probably because I never spent much time by the water, despite living minutes away from ocean! I was just your semi-typical 9-5 LA transplant...
Sunday
KUFSTEIN
Kufstein is an Austrian city right on the border, that is only a 20 minute train ride from our little town of Raubling.
If I look like I'm cold, it's because I am! It was windy, but also pretty. Behind me is Kufstein's castle along the Inn river.
I've been finding that just about every town that has a hill has a castle on it.
The touristy shopping walkway. Very cute.
There was a little shop that had jerky, but they were not ordinary strips of jerky. They had a pork leg jerky!
We decided to explore the castle (for a fee of course!), but instead of taking the tram up, we walked up the stair path to be as authentic of the time as possible. :) So on the way up, here is a view out of one of the windows.
A view of the Inn River from the top of the castle.
There was a museum in one of the castle halls, and this particular exhibit was cool. Under the glass floor is a geographic model of Bavaria. It was a little freaky standing on the glass because I was expecting the glass to break at any moment. Glass just doesn't feel as solid as an opaque floor, you know what I mean? (jelly bean?)
Walking down one of the narrow, steep stair corridors in the castle
After the castle, we decided to hike on the foothills of the Kaiser Mountains. We first rode up on a one person ski lift. I had never seen one before (do they exist in the US??) and it was a little scarier than a 2-4 person lift. I don't know why, but it was.
The view behind me on the lift.
We'll probably head back sometime during Christmas. We've seen pictures of how pretty the castle gets when dressed for the holidays surrounded by snow. Can't wait!
Bis später!
("see you later", pronounced bees-shpate-er)
If I look like I'm cold, it's because I am! It was windy, but also pretty. Behind me is Kufstein's castle along the Inn river.
I've been finding that just about every town that has a hill has a castle on it.
The touristy shopping walkway. Very cute.
There was a little shop that had jerky, but they were not ordinary strips of jerky. They had a pork leg jerky!
We decided to explore the castle (for a fee of course!), but instead of taking the tram up, we walked up the stair path to be as authentic of the time as possible. :) So on the way up, here is a view out of one of the windows.
A view of the Inn River from the top of the castle.
There was a museum in one of the castle halls, and this particular exhibit was cool. Under the glass floor is a geographic model of Bavaria. It was a little freaky standing on the glass because I was expecting the glass to break at any moment. Glass just doesn't feel as solid as an opaque floor, you know what I mean? (jelly bean?)
Walking down one of the narrow, steep stair corridors in the castle
After the castle, we decided to hike on the foothills of the Kaiser Mountains. We first rode up on a one person ski lift. I had never seen one before (do they exist in the US??) and it was a little scarier than a 2-4 person lift. I don't know why, but it was.
The view behind me on the lift.
We'll probably head back sometime during Christmas. We've seen pictures of how pretty the castle gets when dressed for the holidays surrounded by snow. Can't wait!
Bis später!
("see you later", pronounced bees-shpate-er)
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