Rome

Sometimes you have to ask yourself the important questions, like did we fly and train all this way to stand in a queue, this is exactly the reason we didn't see Saint Paul's Basilica and why we got up before 6 to go see the Vatican. We got to the Vatican about one and a half hours before it opened and there was already a sizable queue. When we left however the queue had grown somewhat. After we had left the Vatican we were going to have a look at St Paul's Basilica and the queue there was even longer, see the picture below. So the moral of this story is if you are in Rome and it's July and you want to see the sites get up early.

When visiting Rome be prepared to be hassled by people trying to sell you guided tours, this is a way to short cut the queues. Whilst waiting to get into the Vatican we were approached at least ten times. One thing we both agreed upon was that we didn't want to go on any guided tours. We wanted to go through at our own pace and spend time looking at the things that caught our eye and skip the things that didn't. Although these tours would tell us things that we didn't know we both agreed that we would probably forget most of it and after a while of listening to the guide bang on about this and that we would have switched off anyway.

We both found Rome a little overwhelming, the first time you see an impressive gold statue on a rather high pillar or ancient building, it makes you go wow, but by the fiftyith its kind of passe, its hard to maintain a sense of awe. Take the Vatican museum for instance, its like someone has vomited great works of art, every surface is covered in great works of art, the walls, the ceiling and the floor, all painted, sculpted or tiled there just isn't anywhere to look to give your brain a rest. We did however get a good look at a Leonardo da Vinci, here again the crowds seemed to just go straight for the big name things which is good for us as we could get a good look at these works of art.

Leena suffered a little in the Roman heat, in fact we took to having a siesta. Our days consisted of getting up early, doing some sightseeing, having lunch then snoozing till about 5 and then going out for some more sightseeing and then finishing off the day with dinner and some of the local vino or beer, not such a bad way to spend a day really.

We went in search of a street named after Fibonacci but couldn't find it so we had to make do with this one.

Here are some more pictures of us in Rome.

Tombstones and old stuff

We're writing this as we rocket through France on a TGV at 320km/h, yeah baby!  Well we've just left Paris and we're starting to get citied out, Paris didn't really impress either of us and 2 days there was just about the right amount.  We are making some adjustments to our schedule so we get some time out in the countryside so we don't end up like that Paul Kelly song, wont say the name here I think my nieces are reading this.

Whilst in Paris we saw the Eiffel tower and visited the Louvre. The Louvre overstimulated both of us, there is just so much to look at. Near all the big attractions there were massive crowds, didn't get much of a look at the Venus de Milo or the Mona Lisa, what we did get a good look at were some Rubens and lots of Greek and Mesopotamian era statues, there was basically no one else in the rest of the museum, which was good for us as we could sit there and get a really good look at these works of Art.  The amount of antiquities there is staggering, more than can be taken in in one day, lots of little pieces that are older than civilisation.

Then to finish off our day in Paris we visited Pere Lachaise cemetery, where Jim Morrison is buried, this is something Leena has wanted to do for twenty years, last time she went to visit it (in July 1991) it was closed because celebrations of the 20th anniversary of his death got out of hand.  When we found his grave someone was having a "smoke", seemed kind of fitting really.  We then spent about 3 hours wandering around looking at the other famous people's graves, Oscar Wild is buried there and his tomb is covered in lipstick kisses and other graphity. Chopin's and Edith Piaf are resting there as well.  What struck Craig was that the monuments were like little houses, it felt like we were walking along a little street, see the pictures below.

Now with that behind us its on to the south of France and into Italy, big day of train travel today, 944km, this will be our biggest so far, but will have it knocked over by 2pm.

Dog poo and a room with a view

After the Stolen Camera -incident we were more than cautious in Brussels. We also had bias about the city itself, the city being "The European capital of thieves". This was actually forgotten by another fact which Leena remembered very well from her previous visit in Brussels; city's streets were covered with dog poo and you had to be very careful were you stepped on your foot. First Leena was slighlty disappointed as the poos seemed to be absent. How much had changed in nine years! Eventually this was only the first impression as we found out when we were strolling along the city streets and alleys. Poo here, poo there. Watch out the big one! :) But something had changed after all; there were new "dog poo circles" were you could take your poodle and do her/his business. Leena found this rather amusing until we found out there were no "Hauska koirankakkapussi" (biodegradable dog poo bags) nowhere in sight. Anyway, it was good to see some improvements in that area, perhaps initiated by The European Parliament.

OK OK, we did something else while we were in Brussels. And hey, Belgians love their beer and we wanted to give it a try. Eventually we visited 3 very different pubs/bars; first one was a must - A la Mort Subite. The name means 'instant death' but the beer wasn't that strong but rather good. Another great place we popped in was Delirium Cafe.

They had a phone book -like system for listing all their beers and until this date they served 2011 beers (one added to the list each year)! Being in Belgium, the capital of great beers, we decided we hadn't actually tried and tested enough local frosties. From our hostel's great map/guide leaflet we found an 'anarchist' bar near the hostel. This small place had been open on and off since 1968 luckily open while we were in Brussels. The leaflet guided us to try a beer called Duvel which we proved to be fairly strong, only modest 8.5 %. We decided that was the end of our Belgian beer testing challenge as we had to get up nice and early the following morning.

On the train once again! This time our route took us to absolutely picturesque City of Luxembourg. We spent there only a day but the city itself was so small that we could walk everywhere. We took a stroll around the city, wondered around the old fortress and under the bridge arches. It was such a beautiful, peaceful and well maintained place we could imagine all the people living there were happy. And happy they were; everywhere we went we were greeted by smile and happy greetings. We were a bit surprised to learn how good English everyone spoke (being French speaking nation). We guessed the reason was all the international bankers who had settled in the city. And saying that the place smelled like money - in a very good way indeed :) Fortunately we had a bit of time in our hands the following morning before take-off to Paris so we it was possible to sleep in and rest for a while. Now were on our way to Paris where we will spend our 1-year anniversary (not intentionally!).

Its been a while

Well its been a while since our last post but we have been very busy. First of all our time in London was a blast, the food there was really good and relatively cheap. For Craig London felt like a living museum, a monument on every corner and more historic places than you could poke a stick at. Once you can find your way around a tube station, this is more challenging than it sounds, it is a really good way to get around. Craig also caught below is some photos of our time in London.

The train trip from London to Amsterdam was going really well until we got to Amsterdam, it was here that Leena discovered her camera had been stolen, we think it happened in Brussels. This caused us to spend far too long in police stations to no end, after three visits we found out that we couldn't make a report, so we have to make the report when we get back to Brussels. We both decided not to let this ruin our holiday, so we are a litte more careful now.

We spent about 2 days wandering around Amsterdam, took a canal cruise, very boring Craig almost fell asleep, visited Anne Frank's house and went to the Vincent Van Gogh museum. Amsterdam seemed to be more of a party town, we both weren't in the mood to party, so this part of Amsterdam was lost on us. One thing Craig noticed was although there were a lot of bicyles and a lot of people riding bikes, there seemed to be far more just chained to anything that didn't move, it was like there were a lot of bikes but not so many riders.

Leena was very amused by the little cars that could drive on the bike path, pictured below. Just the sight of one would trigger a giggling fit. They can only go 40km/h and where ever they were parked they seemed to be chained up as well, it would be easy to pick one up and carry it away.

From 2011-07-07

We decided we needed to do a bit of organising, so we spent a bit of time back in our room plotting a course for the next 10 days, this took more time than expected, looking up train timetables, at this point we should mention that we bought an European train timetable back in Helsinki and it has proved very valuble, looking for accommodation, making sure we knew how to get to the accommodation before we booked it, ie. it was close to the train station. Then after we did all this to make our lives easier we wrote all this down, all in all a time consuming process, but now we are all sorted for the next 10ish days for accommodation and 2 weeks for train travel.


Now off to explore Brussels.

Nerding it up in the UK

Well Leena let me loose for the day so what did I do, well I went to Bletchley park. Now this is a fairly significant site because this was where the British did all the code breaking in World War 2. This is where the first digital computer was built and lots of other clever things. As I walked through the gates I sort of felt like I was walking on hallowed ground. Instead of me banging on about it you can read all about this here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bletchley_Park
and here:
http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/

What I will bang on about is how blown away I was by the shear brilliance of what they did. They had all this encoded data and just shear intellect to crack it. The machines they built were nothing short of shear brilliant, it was very humbling to stand close to recreations of these machines and watch them work. Below is some pictures of a bomb, used to crack enigma





This picture is a bit blurry because this machine was working at the time and there was a lot of moving points.

How they cracked the Lorenz code is awe inspiring and well worth a read.

The other thing that caught my eye was this:


Other interesting facts that I learnt was that Ian Fleming worked as a navel intelligence officer during world war 2.

Midsummer madness

We spent Midsummer with Leena's High School friends near Lammi, which is approximately 140 km north from Helsinki. About 6 months ago Leena got this wild idea to get together with all her best friends and suddenly Midsummer seemed to be the perfect time to do that. One by one almost everyone accepted the invitation (possibly because it was such a crazy idea!) and we started planning the weekend. Eventually 27 people (15 adults and 12 kids) located themselves into a shiny new house with private rooms, a common room, kitchen, playground and a private sauna right on the beach.

After three days of eating, drinking, saunaing, swimming (more like having a dip), playing games and karaokeing we felt exhausted but happy. Craig stayed up all through the Midsummer night, like a true Finn! I woke up around 6:30 am and went outside to look where Craig was. He was happily chatting with my friend's husband and "fishing". As you might suspect they never got any fish :)

All in all we enjoyed Midsummer enormously and hope we could bring this wonderful tradition to Australia as well.

From Lake Photos