Venice

On June 6, 2013January 26, 2020 By StevenIn International Travel - Europe9 Comments

After all the pictures this week of water where there really shouldn’t be quite so much water, I thought it would be nice to show a place where the water is supposed to be there.

In early May, my sister took a birthday trip to Italy, and we started in Venice. I met her in Venice and we did touristy things together. The weekend was intensely busy, so I’m not going to write a blow-by-blow travelogue for this one, I’m just going to talk a little bit about each of the pictures I’m posting here, in no particular order.

The airport in Venice is on the mainland, not on the island of Venice. To get to the island, you can take a water taxi, a vaporetto (a sort of water bus,) a train, a land bus, or a taxi. Wheeled vehicles can’t go past the very front edge of the island, so the most direct way to your hotel is a private water taxi. It’s pricey, but it’s really worth it. Plus, you get views like these. The first one is looking back at the airport, and the second one is my sister enjoying being in Italy.

I refer to Venice as an island, but it’s actually roughly 118 small islands connected by canals and tiny bridges. The one famous snaking s-curve of canal that everyone knows is the Grand Canal- this is what everyone thinks of when they think of Venice, and it looks like this from sea level.

We took the water taxi to the hotel, dropped our bags off, and headed immediately to the Royal Garden near near Piazza San Marco, which is a lovely little garden and a great place to stop for some peace and quiet.

Piazza San Marco is the largest open courtyard space in Venice. There’s a couple of giant pillars facing the sea- they used to execute people there by hanging them between the pillars. There’s also an enormous bell tower that you can climb.

These long white buildings were originally official offices for the people who ran Venice.

The Basilica of St. Mark is hugely impressive. The Doge’s Palace sits off to the right.

Inside the Basilica there are tremendously ornate mosaics with real gold inlaid into the tiles. It’s pretty stunning to see.

Near the Basilica is a recently restored astronomical clock.

You can climb the bell tower for a small fee, and the views of the island are fantastic from the top. For example:

Back on the ground, there’s a small canal where you can see the Bridge Of Sighs in the background. It’s the enclosed bridge in the background of this next picture. You can’t walk across it from the outside, because it connects the Doge’s Palace with the prison building next to it. You can see it from the inside on a special tour, though.

Two very common things to see in Venice- Gondolas and street musicians. There was street music everywhere.

In every city I’ve visited, there are street performers and buskers also. These people pose for pictures. Taking a picture of them without tipping is considered rude… oops!

The docking posts with stripes or colors are privately owned. The ones without are “anyone can park here” tiers

This is the stairway at the hotel we stayed in. The office, check-in desk, and breakfast room is at the top of these stairs. Our room was pretty near the bottom of these stairs. We did a lot of climbing in Italy.

The famous Rialto bridge is one of the larger pedestrian bridges in Venice. This one spans the Grand Canal, and it’s wide enough to have shops in the center of the bridge itself.

This is a Vaporetto, or water bus. There are several different lines that cover getting around Venice quite nicely.

Our hotel was in one of these buildings, right on the Grand Canal. I’m still not entirely sure which building it was, though.

The gondolas were very nice, and they were all uniquely ornamented. It takes three months to build a gondola- they are custom made out of eight different types of wood, fitted for the specific gondolier who will be rowing it. The metal ornament at the front is usually a counterweight for the gondolier standing at the stern of the boat. Because each gondola is balanced for the specific gondolier, if the gondolier gains more than about 10 Kilo, he will need a new boat.

Have you ever been on a gondola? Was it in Las Vegas, or Venice?

Will this post stirrup your emotions? Neigh!

On May 13, 2013April 30, 2013 By StevenIn International Travel - Europe13 Comments

March was, for me, an insane travel marathon. Four countries, eleven trains, five flights (two of them trans-atlantic), two long car rides, and numerous hotels- all in a period between March 19 and April 5. During that time, I realized something that I had never really given voice to before now- travel for me is all about the food.

This realization came to me when we got back from the second trip to Zurich. Yes, I went twice. In less than five days. I didn’t mention that previously because the second trip was for work. One of our colleagues from the Florida office came to Zurich, and she traveled back to Regensburg with us afterward so that she could see a little bit more of Europe while she was on this side of the Atlantic. That Friday, while a small group of us were walking around the Altstadt, my personal tour-guiding spiel sounded a bit like this: “This is one of the two Irish pubs in town. Over here, right past $IMPORTANT LANDMARK, is a great Italian restaurant. Here’s another giant church, and near it, one of my favorite places to have breakfast.”

I didn’t realize it until that moment, but my mental map of Regensburg is almost entirely comprised of food.

That wasn’t even the first food-related observation I had that weekend, either. During the second trip to Zurich, we went out to a lunch with our customers at a super-fancy restaurant in what used to be a ship-building yard. How fancy was the restaurant? When we walked in, someone took our coats and put them on a hanger. The hand towels in the bathroom were rolled fabric hand towels, not paper. The menus were actually made of iron. (Insert heavy metal joke here.)

During that meal, I ordered this:

The steak in the center of this plate is wrapped in Serrano ham. The stuff surrounding it is delicious baby onions and strawberries in a strawberry-pepper sauce.

The steak in the middle? It’s Pferdefilet. A horse meat steak. And it was delicious.

This isn’t the first time I’ve (knowingly) eaten horse meat. The first time was at an Italian restaurant in Berlin last September, as a pizza topping. But then, I’ve never been squeamish about unusual food, unless I can see it’s original form. When I was in Hong Kong, I ate kangaroo meat, jellyfish, Thousand Year Egg, and fugu. I didn’t get squicked out until the restaurant staff brought out a duck with the head and neck still attached.

The only thing I didn’t eat from the plate pictured above was the ham and the flower. I don’t really like ham all that much, and I wasn’t interested in the flower even though it was edible.

It’s important to remember that while all of these foods might seem unusual to an American, they’re not all that strange to a local. People have eaten horse-meat all over Europe for centuries. There are even special butchers just for horse meat in some countries. The other things I listed above from my Hong Kong trip? None of them is unusual to the restaurants that serve them. (The kangaroo meat was in an Australian restaurant, by the way- you don’t see too many kangaroos in China.)

What’s the most unusual food you’ve eaten?

Easter Weekend 2013, Part Four: The Rhine Falls

On May 9, 2013May 30, 2020 By StevenIn International Travel - Europe7 Comments

The Friday and Monday surrounding Easter weekend this year were public holidays in Bavaria. Since I had a long weekend, I decided to do a whirlwind tour through Strasbourg France, Freiburg Germany, Zurich Switzerland, and the Rhine Falls near the Swiss-German border. The last stop on my whirlwind weekend was at the Rhine Falls!

On Easter Monday, the first of April, I boarded this adorable little Regional Express train from Zurich’s main station to Schaffhausen, in Switzerland. After a 40-45 minute train ride, another short bus took me from Schaffhausen over to Neuhausen am Rheinfall, to go check out the Rhine Falls, Europe’s largest waterfall.

When I was planning the trip, I discovered a nice restaurant directly overlooking the Falls, Schlössli Wörth. I made a reservation for lunch a few weeks in advance, and it’s a good thing I did, because the restaurant was completely booked when I arrived. The restaurant is in this structure. The docks are shared with tour boats that go directly up to the falls.

All of the tables in the restaurant line the outer ring of the building, and have great views out toward the falls. My table had a fantastic view.

This is what I was looking at while I ate. I couldn’t stop staring out the window. I’m extremely happy that the sun came out for this part of my trip.

My meal was amazingly good, also. This is a fillet of perch with saffron-butter over risotto. It was so good, I had a glass of wine. I almost never drink wine. This restaurant is a little pricey, but it was well worth it.

After treating myself to a nice lunch, I got on with the business of being a tourist at the Falls. From the shore, it looks very impressive. There are several different tour boats that go on different paths near the Falls.

I chose the yellow boats, which go to an outcropping of rock in the middle of the falls. You can climb up a winding stair to get a higher vantage point, with the waterfall on either side of you. The only way to get to this point is by boat. Here’s the boat.

In this photo, you can see one of the boats approaching the rock with the stairs. This shot gives you a sense of the scale and size of the waterfalls, since you can see tiny people on both the boat and the rocks.

“We’re headed right for the Falls!”

When we reached the tiny boat ramp at the base of the rocky outcropping, I was hilariously amused to note that standing off to one side, waiting to get on the boat to return to shore, were a pair of Mormon missionaries. The Mormons have been my constant companion as I tour all over Europe, Their little plastic name badges (Elder Smith, Elder Cunningham) are a source of bemused comfort now. But I digress.

The stairs are actually quite narrow and the entire structure is much smaller than it looks. It felt a little too crowded while I was there, and it was difficult to get good pictures from the stairs without other people in the frame. That didn’t stop me from trying, though.

Since I’ve been on the Maid Of The Mists at Niagara’s Horseshoe Falls, this seemed like a bit of a smaller waterfall to me. Still, it was damned impressive. I like waterfalls as much as I like tall places and trains. Now I need to see Victoria Falls.

What’s your favorite waterfall?

Easter Weekend 2013, Part Three: Zurich, Switzerland

On April 29, 2013May 30, 2020 By StevenIn International Travel - Europe12 Comments

The Friday and Monday surrounding Easter weekend this year were public holidays in Bavaria. Since I had a long weekend, I decided to do a whirlwind tour through Strasbourg France, Freiburg Germany, Zurich Switzerland, and the Rhine Falls near the Swiss-German border. I’m going to write about them one at a time, though. Next up is Zurich!

Sunday morning, I grabbed an early train from Freiburg into Zurich. If you arrive by train, you will find yourself in one of the busiest train stations in the world, with nearly three thousand trains a day. Hanging overhead in the main hall, you’ll see L’Ange Protecteur by French artist and sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle, a French sculptor. I hadn’t heard of her sculptures, called Nanas, until I saw this one. There’s a bunch more in in various places around Europe.

In front of the train station, there is easy access to the street tram system, and from there you can get almost anywhere else in the city. The street directly opposite, Bahnhofstrasse, is a very busy and fairly well known shopping street. I spent some time in the evening walking down this street trying to find the source of a tantalizingly delicious smelling food smell- I never figured out where it was coming from.

I took the tram to the Rathaus stop in order to see some of the more well known sights in Zurich, and that let me out in front of this building:

From there, it was a very short walk to most of what I wanted to see. First I walked up the hill to Lindenhof. This is a hill in the middle of the city, with a really spectacular view. Apparently it used to be a Roman fort, but honestly, this is Europe- what wasn’t a part of an old Roman fort? You can see Grossmünster, the church with the two dome-shaped spires on the right side there. That’s the next place I walked.

Grossmünster was a very impressive structure. I didn’t know until after I was gone that you can actually climb the tower. Blast! I missed a chance to go into a tall thing! I’m sure I’ll be back there in the near future, though.

The door of Grossmünster is ornate and fascinating.

Grossmünster is quite pretty inside, also.

Across the river from Grossmünster is a courtyard area that connects shopping streets (and the climb to Lindenhof) to Fraumünster. There are a lot of clocks in Zurich. I wonder how often one of them is wrong.

Inside Fraumünster there are four glass windows which were painted by Marc Chagall. You’re not supposed to take pictures of them from inside the church, so pretend you didn’t see this.

After a busy day of seeing churches and not climbing them, I stopped for lunch in a tasty place called Cafe Odeon, which has apparently been open for more than 100 years.

I had the Rösti, which is a common food in Switzerland, a fried potato dish which is somewhat similar to hash browns. In this case, I had it with fried eggs and a some vegetables. It was quite delicious.

Easter graffiti! I saw this while I was walking to where the Jacob Coffee Museum is. Unfortunately, the Coffee Museum is closed for renovation. The information I read said that it would be open in March of 2013, but it was most definitely not finished with renovations. Oops!

While I was walking to yet another closed attraction (stupid holiday weekend), I saw this lovely flowering tree. Someone tricked this plant into thinking it was already springtime.

The aforementioned closed attraction- This is the Polybahn, a 19th century funicular that goes steeply up and down one of the hills near the center. I like funiculars, naturally, but this one wasn’t running. Stupid holiday weekend.

That was the bulk of my sightseeing for the day. I went back to the hotel room for a little while to shake off a headache in the late afternoon, and didn’t go out again except for dinner, a little more wandering, and some dessert. Dessert was this amazing piece of apple pie at Hotel Schweizerhof’s Café Gourmet, a nifty little place for a snack across the street from the Bahnhof.

Have you been to Zurich?

Easter Weekend 2013, Part One: Strasbourg, France

On April 22, 2013May 30, 2020 By StevenIn International Travel - Europe14 Comments

The Friday and Monday surrounding Easter weekend this year were public holidays in Bavaria. Since I had a long weekend, I decided to do a whirlwind tour through Strasbourg France, Freiburg Germany, Zurich Switzerland, and the Rhine Falls near the Swiss-German border. I’m going to write about them one at a time, though. First up, Strasbourg!

I’ve been trying to perfect the art of packing light for my travels, and I think I did very well on this trip. For a four day, nine train journey to all of the aforementioned places, this was my entire pack, including my DSLR.

I arrived in Strasbourg around 9pm, and made my way to the hotel first to drop off my belongings. I stayed at the Hotel Cathedrale, and was quite surprised when I arrived to see just how close the hotel was to the Cathédrale Notre Dame. The entrance to the hotel is just across a courtyard from the Cathedrale, which made my sightseeing the next day quite easy to plan. Since I arrived into town quite late, I grabbed a quick dinner at The Dubliner’s Irish Pub, a few blocks from the hotel. I saw the pub on my walk to the hotel, and while I wasn’t in the mood to try local cuisine right away, I know I can always count on tasty food in an Irish pub. Plus, this is a great way to start the holiday weekend:

Walking back to the hotel from the pub, I snapped this picture. The entranceway to the Cathedrale is just like one of the large churches I saw in Barcelona, very typical of the time period in which it was constructed.

The hotel also had a variety of gargoyles around the elevators and stairways, to watch over you and protect you while you slept. I slept very well.

The next morning, I had the hotel breakfast (not bad), and walked out to find the nearest tram station. From there, I went back to the main train station, because it has an amazing glass dome in front, and I wanted to get a picture.

From there, I made my way back into the center of town, partially by tram and partially on foot. You can see the tram in the background of this picture of a rather pretty town square.

This building was on my path back to the center of town, and I was utterly fascinated by the giant barrel in front.

After my walk back toward the hotel, I finally went into the Cathedrale. It’s enormous- you can get a sense of scale from the people in this photograph.

Inside, the arched roof is amazing.

I’ve noticed memorials to fallen American soldiers in various places around Europe- it’s rather strange (but heartwarming) to see tributes to Americans in all these other random places.

Inside the Cathedrale, there is an astrometric clock that was built in 1838. There are various moving pieces on the quarter and half hours. At 12:30, there is a “procession of the Apostles” on the upper level, and the mechanical roosters even crow. I’m really not sure how they reproduced the sound of a rooster using mechanical means in the 1800s, but it’s there.

The upper level is Christ- the Apostles move past him at 12:30. The lower level shows mankind at different ages, walking past Death. You can see the old man figure to the right of death in this photo.

In the courtyard outside the Cathedrale, street artists try to get tourists to stop for a sketch. I saw a lot of these on Charles Bridge in Prague, too.

For a small fee, you can also climb up the 332 steps to the tower platform if you like to see things from tall places, which I really and truly do. Here’s what the view is like on a mostly clear day:

Climbing back down the other side, there are some nifty gargoyles keeping watch. I especially liked this fellow:

After the tower climb, I was good and hungry for some lunch. I went back to a place I’d spotted earlier, La Crepe Gourmande, on a side street a short walk from the Cathedrale. I had “Galette Paysanne,” which is a buckwheat crepe or pancake with onions and bacon inside. Oh, and an egg on top. It was delicious.

After lunch, I took a boat tour on the river, in these glass topped tour boats. The audio portion is available in many different languages, including English. The tour goes through two locks, which is a fascinating experience if you like transportation technology as much as I do. The tour went past the ARTE headquarters as well as the European parliament, neither of which are pictured here because I didn’t take very many pictures from the boat. I did get a few nice shots, though, and they follow this one.

Also, since it was a sunny day a lot of people were out on the banks of the L’ill river. People were reading, walking, holding hands, picnicking. It was a nice day for that sort of thing.

All that was left after my day of sightseeing in Strasbourg was a nice dinner- I went to Cafe Rohan near the Cathedrale, and had some local Alsace cuisine. I had Baeckeoffe in a crock pot, which is a beef, lamb and pork stew cooked with potatoes and carrots. It was delicious, and hearty- I’m glad I didn’t skip the regional food entirely while I was in Alsace.

Have you ever been to Strasbourg?

Whimsy. Tacos. The DMV.

Category: International Travel – Europe