Amsterdam and Versailles

The next weekend was Amsterdam. I was really excited about this for a few reasons (in no particular order). 1) Queen's day (Koninginnedag). Basically, this is a huge party in the streets (and canals) with EVERYBODY wearing orange. 2) Last weekend of travel. 3) I got to visit Vincent again (my French roommate from sophomore year). 4) I'd get to see a couple of my friends who'd be there for the festival as well. The only thing I was kind of bummed about was because it is such a huge festival, I wouldn't get to see the real Amsterdam; rather, I would see the super crowded Amsterdam, which meant I couldn't see all the normal touristy things (i.e. museums, Anne Frank house, enjoy city without people everywhere, etc.). While this proved to be the case, it was still most definitely worth it. I would honestly go back there every year just for this festival - it was that good.

Friday, I met up with Bill, one of my friends from Georgia Tech and met a bunch of his friends. Friday night was Queen's night, so we did normal Queen's night activities... So Saturday was Queen's day. I don't know why they do it that way, but whatever. It was packed, as you will see below. There was stuff going on everywhere - it took us literally 10 minutes to walk about 100 yards in some places. Music, dancing, eating, drinking, people selling stuff in the streets, free concerts (one by Armin van Buuren, aka the #1 DJ in the world for the past 4 years), people partying on boats in the canals... you get the picture. It was great. And there was the incident with the Portuguese dude that talked a lot and the nice Russian guy. Anyway, the following day, we basically just relaxed, and on Monday, I returned to Metz to take my two finals on Tuesday and go to Paris on Tuesday night.

LOTS OF PEOPLE

Even at the concert...

So, in Amsterdam, bikes are a very important mode of transportation. How important, you ask? Well, you can easily get run over by bikers in the city. Don't believe me?

Finally, in the city, they had a bunch of random urinals. These are placed all over downtown. Apparently they used to have girl versions, but they don't anymore... [2014 update: couldn't find this picture to update]

Anyway, since my flight was on Thursday and I hadn't been to Versailles yet, I decided this was the perfect opportunity to go. The gardens are beautiful and both the palace and the gardens are ridiculously huge. You'll have to go there to fully appreciate what I mean. People get lost there. They have golf carts you can rent. That was basically it for the trip. Thursday morning, we took the train to CDG and flew home. One cool thing was that in the US Airways terminal at CDG airport, they had two PS3s for people to play while they're waiting for their flights. Unfortunately, I didn't notice this until 5 minutes before my flight boarded, but I thought it was a pretty cool idea.

This is the Château de Versailles. Bad picture, I know. But, in order to get all of it in one picture, I had to go this far back (and I still missed some of it). Unfortunately, there was random construction going on right in front..

Paddy's Day and (the rest of) SB '11 Part Two

Sorry I'm a little behind on updating, a lot of things have been going on and I've also been really lazy lately; that means this post is going to have a lot of random stuff in it.

After my last post, I was headed to Dublin, Ireland (more like Metz -> Paris -> Cherbourg -> Rosslare -> Dublin) for St. Patrick's Day, or as the Irish people call it, Paddy's Day. There were a few things that happened once I got to Ireland:
a) Information overload. What do I mean by that? Well, being in a country that doesn't speak English, you generally start to tune everyone out unless they're speaking English, and if they are, you assume they're talking to you. In Ireland, they speak English, which really took a second to get used to.
b) English is awesome. I miss not having to think about what I'm going to say before I'm going to say it.
c) Irish people are really, really nice. And they have cool accents.

But first, the way over there was pretty cool. Our ferry was named the Oscar Wilde (the guy who wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray). We also got to watch the sun rise over the English Channel.

We ended up getting to Dublin at like 4 PM on Wednesday and spent a little while walking around and stuff, as well as meeting the people in the place we were staying at (friend's friend's place who's studying abroad at the University of Dublin). Thursday, St. Patrick's Day, was pretty entertaining. There was a huge parade (which was kind of annoying to see because it was extremely crowded) and the city was completely packed. We explored the city for a while and found out that most Dublin's old city (castle, old city gate, etc.) don't actually exist, even though they mark them on the map. And at night, the city was even more packed.

green beer - this was disgusting

The next day we woke up and took the train to Kerry, Ireland (that's where our flights left from). On the train there, I talked with a random Irish dude for like an hour, which was really cool. Anyway, we arrived there at around 1 PM and ate and stuff, then explored the city. We walked to a castle there called Ross castle, which is like two miles outside the city, took pictures and stuff over there, then came back. The others had a plane that left earlier to Amsterdam, but my plane to London didn't leave for a little while later, so I went back and explored the huge park they have. After exploring the park (which was really pretty), I was walking past the shops and... I ran into 3 people from GTL there! (Note: If this doesn't sound that cool, let me explain why it was. We ran into each other in a random shop - not at a tourist destination. Also, it was in a relatively small city, in a different country, where neither of us knew each other was going. If it still doesn't sound cool, I hate you.)

After that cool coincidence, I got on my (first) RyanAir flight to London (got there Friday night). One thing I can say about London is that it helped me understand where we got a lot of our mentality from. They do a lot of things differently than mainland Europe. I wish I could give an example but I kinda forgot why since I took too long to write this post. Anyway, since I've been there before, I wasn't really worried about doing that many touristy things (although I still did a few). It was mostly to visit people there since I was already so close by. While I was there, I visited Vinesh, a family friend from Atlanta who currently works in London, Sarung, who came to visit at the same time, and a relative, who lives in London. Here are a few cool pictures I did take while I was there though.

It was also cool that in Dublin and in London, on the streets, it told you which way to look for oncoming traffic.

Metz
So it's definitely a new era in Metz, and I guess I understand why people like Metz in the summer. It's warm all the time and the sun actually comes out! In fact, inside downtown, there are fountains turned on, flowers blooming, etc. so it isn't as depressing as during the winter. Also, it's kind of weird to me that they have a different daylight savings time here (we didn't hit it until March 27).

Updated Tentative Schedule:

March 31 - Brussels, Antwerp, Amsterdam

April 7 - Interlaken

April 14 - Croatia

April 21 - Rome, Cinque Terre, Zurich

April 28 - Amsterdam

May 4 - Paris

May 5 - Atlanta

Next post: Munich

Paris, Part Deux

This post is going to be short because I've had a lot to write about lately, and this weekend wasn't all that interesting. I went to Paris and met up with one of my friends that's studying abroad there now. I decided that I think Paris is a little overrated. I mean, it's definitely still a cool city, but not nearly as cool as people say it is - I always build up really high expectations for big cities, and the cities I am most impressed with are ones I didn't even expect to be going to (i.e. Lisboa, Berlin). Anyway, I got to see a lot of the things I missed last time such as Notre Dame, the Arc de Triomph, the catacombs of Paris, Champs Elysees, Napoleon's tomb and the army museum, the Jardin du Luxembourg, the Pantheon, and a random bird/flower market. I still didn't go to Versailles, but I think I'm going to save that for another time; I'd rather go in warm weather than cold. Also, we tried to go to Sainte Chapelle, a church with supposedly amazing stained glass windows and such, but got rejected twice because of closing times. Finally, we walked around a lot, which is really fun to do in Paris because there's always something cool to see around every corner - a statue, a monument, a fountain, or something.

I also went to Pierre Herme, a world renown patisserie to get their world renown macarons. They were delicious. I also got three bloody noses, which was fun. I think it's because the room I was staying in was really stuffy and I just kept irritating it in random ways.

One thing that was interesting to me that has never happened in any city before was the following: We got seated at a table of four with two people... with two other random people. It made for an interesting dining experience (especially when I got my second bloody nose of the weekend, but I don't think they noticed). This happened twice.

Okay, picture time:

Notre Dame

Me outside some random gate thing (Palais de Justice)

Jardin du Luxembourg

The Pantheon, it was really cool and a bunch of famous people (mathematicians, scientists, etc.) were buried here. I like architecture a lot I've realized, and this was definitely a cool building.

A church after Saint Sulpice, the patron of Paris or something.

Arc de Trimoph

This is how big it is...

This thing is outside the Eiffel Tower, and it says peace in a bunch of different languages (I think). It does not have any Indian language, I don't think.

The catacombs

and finally, the sun rising in Paris.

Now that I'm caught up, it's time for me to fall behind again! Prague, Dublin, London coming up!

Paris

I'm going to go ahead and start off by saying this was probably the biggest failure of a trip so far, but in a good way (well, some good ways). Not that it was a bad trip or anything, but rather that it could have much more closely lived up to its potential. I think it's partly because of what I didn't get to see (due to time and other factors), the high expectations I had for the city, as well as some random events that happened throughout the time there that probably shouldn't be included in this post.

We started out the train ride thinking of stuff to do in Paris, using a combination of guidebooks and stuff we already knew about the city. The guidebook suggested going to Chinatown during the time period of Chinese New Year and, to our pleasant surprise, the day we left happened to be Chinese New Year! Unfortunately, by the time we checked in, ate, and looked around at Sacre Coeur, it was pretty late and nobody wanted to go check it out anymore, so we decided we'd do it sometime in the next couple days (which ended up not happening).

On Friday, we took the same free tour that we took in Berlin. It was pretty good, but I think the Berlin one was better, probably because the city has a really unique history. Afterwards, we ended up eating a little, seeing the Eiffel Tower, and going out that night.

The next day, we went to get train tickets to head back and found out that the only available tickets were for Sunday at 10:39 AM, which was a lot earlier than most of us wanted to return. I think it was partly because the lady hated us because we were tourists. With some trains (like the TGV, which is pretty much the only train that runs directly from Paris to Metz), you have to make reservations to ride the train, and they only have a set amount for Eurail pass users. You cannot find out whether or not these reservations are still available any other way (as far as I know) other than to ask the people at the counter. So, we tried to find out which trains were available for Sunday and Monday, and she flipped out. We spent most of the remaining day at the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower at night, which was pretty cool. For those of you who don't know, my sophomore year, one of my roommates, Vincent, was a foreign exchange student from Paris; so, Saturday night/Monday morning, I went to his place, which was awesome because I hadn't seen him in like a year and a half. Since the train was earlier than anticipated and I still hadn't seen everything I wanted to, I woke up early to go see the Arc de Triomphe but, unfortunately, when I arrived at the train station to switch stops, I found out the line I was supposed to get on was closed. I ended up going back to Vincent's for a little while and left to meet with people before we went to the train station.

Next time I go to Paris, there are a few things I'd definitely like to check out:
Versailles
Arc de Triomphe
Notre Dame
Champs-Elysse
Orsay Museum

Wait, so why was it bad in a good way? Well, now I have (get) to make another trip to Paris, which I can't complain about. Also, I figured out more things about planning trips and such to remember for the rest of the semester!

Sacre Coeur and the view from there

I'm pretty sure in order to be a cool European city, it's a requirement to have a river flowing through it...

Trees that reminded me of Hanukkah candles

Eiffel Tower during the day...

...and at night.

And the view from the second level?

The Louvre

Other cool scenes from the city

Weekend Picture Count: 175
Trip Picture Count: 948

PS: Watching the Super Bowl in France was really weird. French commentators + no American commercials. I'm pretty sure the commercials here the entire time were blooper reels from NFL games.