Europa!

Well, not Europa--Europe! Although the 1/2 billion mile journey to Europa would be interesting...

So, my girlfriend, Eri, was in Germany for an internship at the Max Plank Institute for Plasma Physics near Munich, so I decided to take a vacation. I was in Europe from Dec 15th to Jan 3rd, and these pictures are from the trip.

Packing for our trips.

Some things to note: near the end of the trip, Eri's camera disappeared. My camera is pretty mediocre ($60 on ebay), so hers had all the good pictures. So there's a lot of missing material.

Also, while we were in Italy we used something called couchsurfing.com. I would call it a cross between Ebay and a personals site. Basically, it's a way to stay with random people across the world for free. There's a rating system that keeps people honest, and it's much safer than you might think.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the pictures.

Pisa, La Spezia

After just a couple days in Germany, we were on a train to Italy. Originally we planned on taking a one-way flight to Rome, but we missed our plane. Fortunately, the train ticket we bought for the return trip was a round-trip ticket, so no money lost.

Traveling in style--2nd Class style. The long-range trains were mostly empty, so we had a 6-person cabin to ourselves.

A random train station we passed. Our route took us briefly though Austria.

Pisa Central station.

The view out from Pisa Central.

So in Pisa we stayed with Fabio, a 25ish computer science major. Another couch surfer from Dutch Belgium named Oswin was staying there as well. Oswin had just learned some recipes from his girlfriend's mother (chicken paella and seafood with shrimp), so he cooked for us that evening. Some of Fabio's friends came over and we hung out for a while, but we got bored when they started drinking some strange drink involving vodka, raspberry syrup, and tabasco, so we left to see the Leaning Tower. We got there at 2am, took a look, and then headed back (about 30 minutes walk). At night there's a fence so you can't get very close, but it's just a tower that's leaning. Plus the cops were there.

Back on the train again, heading to La Spezia on the northwestern coast.
Outside the train station. Here we stayed with Mattias, a 30ish art critic. His parents own an apartment downtown (where he grew up), but they moved out to the country and he mostly lives in a house with his wife. But he hosts couchsurfers at the apartment.

La Spezia is the nicest place we visited in Italy--lots of open walking spaces, pretty clean, not too touristy. Our favorite part of the city was the huge, open-air covered market that was open every day. It was a cornucopia of fresh fruit, vegetables, cheese, meat, seafood, and bread.

Yes, that's a cured whole pig's head.

This guy was extremely nice and enthusiastic. He didn't speak much English and Eri doesn't speak much Italian (and I speak none), but it didn't present a problem. We asked about the salamis, and he cut some down for us to try. We ended up buying four kinds of meat for our snacks and sandwiches. All of them were really good, especially good was a salami that had olive slices in it. He even gave us a little gift mug with candy in it. The real reason for going to La Spezia was to hike Cinque Terre, five old towns by the sea that are connected by trails. We took a train to the northernmost city (Monterossa) and hiked south.

The trail winds through a series of farms and vineyards that must be hundreds of years old. The scenery was beautiful, and the weather was perfect--at some points we were in t-shirts!



Coming into the town of Vernazza.

At one point there was a few bags of catfood and some dishes with a sign that said something about "no one cares about these cats. Please feed them," or something. Eri, ever the cat lover, stopped and fed them, gave them some of our water, and talked with them for a bit.

After eating lunch outside of Vernazza, we hiked towards Corniglia. There's a beach down from the main trail that Eri wanted to go to, so we left the beaten path and climbed down a ways. When the sun started to go down, we decided to head back, as the trail was somewhat overgrown. We decided to try and take a shortcut, but the way we went was extremely overgrown and difficult. We had to scale a few terraced rock walls, and we were constantly getting stuck by prickly vines. Just as darkness closed in, we made it back to the main trail and headed to Corniglia.

The next day, our plan was to head to Florence, but Eri realized that she forgot her Nalgene bottle in Pisa. So we took a train there and tried to contact Fabio. He wasn't in, so we sat by his doorstep and had a snack. After an hour or so he got back and was glad to see us. He was leaving the next day to visit his parents, so we helped him finish off his remaining food (lunch pictured above).

Florence, Venice

After Pisa (again), we took a train to Florence.

Eri was pretty tired from all our travels, but that's a great thing about traveling by train.

In Florence we met Emmanuella, an architect-turned-designer in her mid-thirties. She picked us up from the train station in her brand new Honda Jazz and showed us around a bit. Traffic in Florence is crazy. CRAZY. All the cars are tiny hatchbacks, and the roads are excessively narrow. To make things worse, people on scooters drive inbetween the lanes. After her yoga class Emmanuella cooked us some interesting pasta with bacon, eggs, and cheese--I think it was called carbonera.

We took a look at a wine cellar, but everything was kind of pricey there. You can get a good bottle of wine in a grocery store in Italy for under $2.

A reproduction of Michaelangelo's David.

The famous bridge filled with Jewelry shops.

Please do not "lie down, camp, or behave in a indecent way." The latter was difficult for Eri, but we managed to escape apprehension.

Florence's famous Duomo.




A door made from golden plates.


Two guys playing Christmas music on sax and accordian. I woulda jammed, but I didn't bring my ax.

Before leaving for Venice, we stopped by a cafe and had some really good Gnocci with Pesto, and Eri had a (real) cappucino.

A view of Venice from outside the train station.

The buses in Venice are actually boats called Vaporettos.

A bustling street in Venice.

We had some trouble finding our hostel in Venice, but after asking a few people we found it. The street layout in Venice is crazy--each street is only a block or two long, has a different name, and is at a different angle.

We found a nice restaurant and decided to have our one expensive meal of the trip. We had canalonis w/ meat sauce, spinach tagliatella w/ swordfish, and potato porchini soup. I think the total was around 50 euros.
The next morning we took the vaporetto to San Marco to see the cathederal. After wandering around for a few hours (the pictures of which were lost) we took the train back to Munich.

Munich

Munich is one of the most comfortable big cities in the world. It's over a million people, but it still retains some of that small-town Bavarian charm. It's culturally rich but modernized, and it has a great transportation system (two levels of subways, trams, buses).

After returning from Italy, we spent the week surrounding Christmas in Munich, housesitting for one of Eri's colleagues. Standing in front of the royalty's former summer palace. I bet they'd be pretty pissed now if they knew it was open to the public.



A view of Marienplatz from above. We climbed a tower in the nearby Peterskirche to get a better view, although it was really foggy that day. Marienplatz is the main city center in Munich, and during Christmastime it's filled with vendors and shoppers. Although it's nearly empty in the picture, a few days before it was completely packed with people.

Just off of Marienplatz is Augustiner, which is one of Munich's oldest breweries. It was founded in 1328 by monks--actually, the name Munich (or München, as they call it) is from the German word for monk. The city was originally founded by monks who brewed beer, probably in the 8th century. At the restaurant we had pumpkin soup, hazelnut soup, and schweinebraten--baked pork, with a piece fried pigskin on top. Quite tasty.

The Bavarian parliament building.

In Germany, they love their schwein. Eri may have taken this a little too much to heart.

Late one night, as we were taking a stroll a giant came out of nowhere and grabbed Eri with his white, plastic-looking hand. Apparently he was under the impression that one of his pigs was being harassed... But a few liters of beer and everything was cleared up.

A random cathederal. There's a lot in Munich (southern Germany being historically Catholic and northern being more Lutheran).

I'm not sure what this building is, but the reflection is cool.

I had lunch one day at a Turkish deli.

The Isar River runs through the southeastern part of the city.


Funk! RIP James Brown, 1933-2006.

Note: Crazy Geisha Sushi Bar.

A view of the Deutsches Museum from across the river. It claims to be the world's largest museum of science and technology. It's filled with sailing ships, planes, space suits, and numerous exhibits on physics, chemistry, mining, and dozens of other topics. Plus it's free to the public from 4-5pm. Unfortunately, we lost all the pics of the inside.

The only picture that remains is one from the musical instrument collection (which is extensive). It's a Bass Sax ("Tubax") made by local instrument maker Benedikt Eppelsheim. I tried to visit their factory, but sadly they were closed for the holidays.

Other activities with lost pictures:

We attended the midnight Christmas Mass at the Frauen Kirche. For Germans Christmas officially starts on midnight, when the baby Jesus appears in mangers. We stayed for some of the music, but it was really packed and we didn't want to stand there for hours. We went back the next day for some more music, which started with an interesting organ piece but then moved into more boring mass music. Eri actually fell asleep, so I figured it was time to go.

We also visited the Pinotech, a Modern Art and Design Museum. We thought it was supposed to be free, but I think we just slipped past the security guards. There was a large collection of Surrealist and Dadaist art (Eri's favorite), which was pretty interesting. There was also a large exhibit involving different colored flourescent lights arranged in various ways. I thought it was, for the most part, uncreative and pretty stupid.