Getting to Know Exhaustion

Day 12 (April 16th): BRUSSELS, Belgium
Belgium sucked; we hated almost the entire time we were there. (Slightly ironic for Adam, considering that Brussels provided more comic book stores in a city then any other country we've been to.) Our lack of enjoyment wasn't the fault of the country itself, per se, but more a combination of bad circumstances: for some reason nothing in Brussels opens much before noon; this is a northern european city -the capital city of the E.U. - and we were there on a non-holiday Monday. It probably didn't help matters, then, that we arrived at 6am. Complicating matters was the train union strike the Belgium had organized for that day, that no one had informed us of. After hours and hours of waiting, we were finally able to explore a couple of open stores before catching the first train of the day out of the country.

Day 12 (April 16th): LUXEMBOURG CITY, Luxembourg
Luxembourg is not a big country, and it really only has one major city - the capital - which really isn't that big (at least compared to the other cities we visited). Having realized this, we were prepared to spend less time in this city than others. Fate took this to heart. By mid-afternoon the Belgian train strike we reaking havok on the entire euopean train network - especially in its neighbouring countries, so we decided to forgo our immediate plans to visit the Netherlands, and to try to return to Italy - Venice, specifically. Unfortunately, this left us a mere hour in Luxembourg: half was spend eating at a Quick resturant (kind of like a French take on McDonalds), and the other half was spend at the post office.

Night 12: DIJON, France
This is where all of our best laid plans fell to pieces. Every travel office we visited told us that we could get a night train from Dijon to Venice, but that we wouldn't be able to reserve seats on that train until we got to next station. So we spent the whole afternoon criss-crossing train stations, heading south to Dijon. We finally arrived there around 8pm, and were promptly told that seats on the train we wanted could only be reserved 24 hours ahead on time, and we would have to wait until the train arrived to see in there would be space for us. We grabbed a quick dinner - doner kebabs (actually the best of these either of us had ever tried) - and then set about waiting for the train to arrive. At 1am (very, very late because of the Belgian train strike) the train finally arrived and we were informed that there was no space for us. The station master suggested waiting around and trying stand-by again the next night (by then we had passed the 24 hour cut off for reserving seats on the next train). Understandable this sounded like a stupid idea to us. After a restless night sleeping on the floor of the train station, we took the first train south the passed through Dijon the next morning.

Day 13 (April 17th): CHANTELY, France
Chantely was as far as we could go in France without reservations. (Our train passes allow unlimited travel in every European country, but we have to specifically book seats on any train the crosses an international border.) Thankfully, the station had room on an evening train heading to Milan - in Italy and only a few hours from Venice. We made the necessary arrangments and then spent a lovely afternoon in this beautiful little town in the French Alps. We shook the nonsense of the previous day and managed to get back to seeing new things and enjoying ourselves in foreign cultures - the whole point of our trip.

Maybe a little too optimistic...

Night 13: MILAN, Italy
The Belgian strike fall-out continued! Our French/Italian train SOMEHOW got delayed by two hours and we didn't arrive in Milan until almost midnight. No more trains were running out of the city, the station was closing, and no hostel or hotel had any spare room. This almost disaster, though, surprisingly ended up being quite nice. Even though the trains had stopped, Milan hadn't. The city was still in full swing - restaurants and tourist stores were open, buses and trams were zooming everywhere, people were walking around patrying and generally having a great time regardless of the time. The atmosphere was infectious, so we decided to take in the sights of the city. We went to the famous churches, took pictures of cool buildings, window shopped in the enpensive fashion district and had a lovely meal of panini and coke at a cafè in the central park.

Day 14 (April 18th): VENICE, Italy
Easily THE city that we had to see on our trip to Europe, Venice had some high expectations to live up. The city didn't dissappoint in the least. The cannals were as thin and numerous as expected. The roads and alleyways were more labyrithine than imaginable (even with sign posts and our expert memories and navigational skills we were pathetically unsuccessful at re-finding a delicious pizzeria). And the number and variety of Venitain masks kept Troë in a constant state of euphoria. Definitely a wonder of a city, and worth everything it took to finally get there.


Day 15 (April 19th): PARIS, France
At this point we decided to cut our losses. We'd been most everywhere we wanted to go, and there was room for us on an overnight train to Venice to Paris. Our lucky streak continued when the coach station gave us directions to a nearby hotel where we were able to leave our bags for less than we'd paid for a bottle of Coke in some cities. So our last day on the continent was a lazy care-free day in Paris with literally nothing weighing us down.

Day 16 (April 20th): LONDON, then TEIGNMOUTH, England
Our overnight to London arrived earlier then expected, so we took in the dawn with a nice stroll through Hyde Park on our way to London'd Paddington train station. A number of seemingly random train changes, and saw us arrive in peaceful Teignmouth by noon. Seaside British air, and a couple of fresh pasties, envigorated us enough to tackle the hike to John and Ronnie's.

After two and half weeks of living out of a back pack, it's nice to finally be somewhere we can call home.