kickin' it euro

Switzerland

Max — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:49:03 +0000

So we’ve come a long way since our last posts, and Mitch tried to catch you guys up on what we’ve been doing, but there was just too much. So my job is to tell you all about how amazing Switzerland was to us. Starting with Bern. Sadly the computer I’m on is not letting me post any pictures, so maybe I’ll post some stock photos in the mean time.

So this is Bern:

Bern

Inside Bern

We stayed there for two days, and as of right now it currently sits atop my list of favorite cities visited on this trip, and could just be the most underrated capitol city in the world (they have a statue of an ogre eating children!!). We were able to rent bikes for free for four hours and get a great feel for the city, which pretty much all looks like the picture above. It definitely was not the most exciting city we have visited so far, but it was completely different from anywhere we had been, and was a perfect way (although sadly we did see Hancock here) to start a really great week in Switzerland.

Next we went to Interlaken, a touristy town in between two beautiful lakes and completely surrounded by mountains. We stayed there for three days, taking day trips each day to different surrounding areas.

The first day we took a train up to Schynige Platte and got a great view of Interlaken on one side, and the Junfrau mountains on the other. Here is Interlaken:

Interlaken from Schynige Platte

And here is the view of the Jungfrau from our train:

Jungfrau

Then we went into the Lauterbrunnen Valley to Gimmelwald and Murren, two small towns where there are no cars, barely any people (the population of Gimmelwald is 150) and you can only get to them by cable car. So we went up there and hiked down. This is a picture of the valley:

Lauterbrunnen Valley

The next day we went to Grindelwald, another amazing little town in the middle of a different valley. We split up in this town, I went for a hike up to Bachalpsee Lake and Grindelwald First, and the other boys walked around the city and played mini golf.

So I bought a one way ticket at about 4:00 in the afternoon and took a very long but beautiful gondola right up to the top of the mountain, with a plan to walk down and catch the 10:20 train. Here is my gondola:

My Gondola Ride Up To Grindelwald First

Once I reached to top of the mountain it was only an hour to Bachalpsee, a couple of lakes pretty much in the middle of the mountains. Here it is:

Lake Bachalpsee

This place was absolutely gorgeous, and I had a very hard time leaving. I ended up staying way too long and had to do a four hour hike down the mountain in a three hours in order to catch the train. It was a tough hike but definitely worth it.

After Interlaken, we tried to go to Lucern, but on the way Marc got a ticket for having his shoes on the seats of the train, and we were unable to find any place to stay once we reached the city. Also it was a lot bigger than we expected, so we decided if we were going to be in a big city we might as well be in Zurich. So we moved on to Zurich:

Zurich

We knew absolutely nothing about this town but it ended up being really great as well. We stayed there for two days and then split up with Marc; we went off to Munich, while he went off to Venice.

So now we have you guys almost caught up. I think I will put Mitch in charge of Germany (Munich and Berlin), and I will make a Slovenia (where we are right now) and Austria post tomorrow night.

Some more Spain, a little France, and Switzerland and Germany

Mitch — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:23:33 +0000

So we haven´t posted for a long time… our last real post was when we were in Granada. Since then we´ve left Spain and traveled through three more countries. A quick recap of what we have done since then is Madrid, San Sebastian, Pamplona, Barcelona, Nice, Monaco, Bern, Interlaken, Zurich, Munich, and now Berlin. Rather than trying to write about everything we´ve done i’ll try and do a quick run down of things.

Madrid: We spent two nights in Madrid which turned out to be better than expected. We had heard from people that Madrid was a city you could miss but we’re definitely glad we stopped. Max and Marc met two locals one night and made it to some super secret bar.

San Sebastian and Pamplona: Our first night in San Sebastian was a sleepless one. We ended up arriving a night earlier and decided to sleep on the beach. The problem was it’s impossible to be a bum in San Sebastian because everytime we tried to sleep we were told that we couldn’t sleep there by one of the 50000 police officers roaming around.

The next night we went to Pamplona for San Fermin (running of the bulls). Once again it was a sleepless night because people stay up all night and party and then run from the bulls at 8am. We didnt run but we watched the people come running in from the stadium.

Barcelona: We stayed two nights in Barcelona. The highlight was Gaudi’s La Sagrada Familia which was amazing and offered a great view of the city as well.

Nice: Nice was a nice change of pace. We stayed at the Sweidan´s apartment which had amazing views of the bay. We relaxed for a few days which was much needed. We also visited Monaco for a day which was really cool.

Ok, I´m running out of time. I know we´re still way behind but we´ll try and update more in the next couple days. I uploaded more photos to my web album so there should be some new ones in there.

-Mitch

update

Mitch — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:19:56 +0000

quick update since we havent posted for a while. zs and ys are backwards on the computer so thats whz this post will be a little weird. were in switylerand now. we spent two nights in bern and now were in interlaken for one more night. after that its on to zurich and then to germanz. the internet is reallllllz expensive here so thats it for now.

Blog Updates!!!

Max — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 11:54:08 +0000

This post is just to let all of you know that we have updated the blog a little bit. We had about 6 hours to wait for a train to Madrid due to a miscalculation (we were looking for a train time that only exists on Sundays) and used it to format the site a little bit and also to add some things. We uploaded all our pictures so far and put links to them on the right side of the page. We also added a couple of posts and added some pictures within previous posts. We´re off to Madrid, Enjoy!

Granada

Max — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 11:35:00 +0000

Here are some pictures of our three days spent in Granada:

View of La Alhambra from Plaza de San Nicolas

Taking Pictures of the View from La Alhambra

Inside La Alhambra

Around Granada

More of Granada

Video of Euro 2008 Celebration

Marc — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 10:50:12 +0000

This is a little video of the celebration after the game in Sevilla. It was crazy and this really doesn´t do it justice. Basically, you had to be there.

-Marc

Random Morocco Photos

Mitch — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 11:39:44 +0000

Quick Photo Post from Morocco:

Fez Tanneries

The White Pools To the Left Are Filled With Pigeon Poo Used to Soften Up the Animal Skins Before the Dying Process:

Gross

You can hear Max contemplating the plight of the workers in this video.

Chefchaouen Sunset

Marc Chefchaouen

Max and Caspara in Fez

Me in Fez

- Mitch

Sevilla

Mitch — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 20:26:18 +0000

Alright… we´re back from Morocco and have keyboards that work (well keyboards that we can work). To recap, we arrived to Sevilla on the 28th. Upon arriving, we realized we had no information on any hostels because we forgot to look it up before we left Lagos. It was around noon and about 95 degrees and getting hotter. We decided to walk to one of the hostels recommended by our book and we made it there about 45 minutes later. The hostel was quite a change from our previous two. It was formerly a convent and was very quiet and relaxed which was a nice change of pace. Now on to Sevilla and its beautiful sights…

Sevilla

Walking Around Sevilla

One of our favorites was the air conditioned electronics store. Sevilla is home of siestas. In the afternoon, most of the shops and restaurants close down and everyone goes to nap for a couple of hours because of the long days and intense heat. After visiting the electronics store and walking around Sevilla, we ate dinner at a tapas bar. The food was really good even though we weren´t exactly sure what all of it was. We walked around a little more after dinner and went back for the night.

The Royal Alcazar Palace

On our second day in Sevilla we visited the Royal Alacazar Palace. The photo above is a picture of the entrance. While the palace itself wasn´t the most impressive, the gardens located on its grounds were amazing.

Marc in the Maze

There was a pretty sweet hedge “maze” in the gardens. We could only find one entrance/exit so I´m not really sure if it was actually a maze.

The Gardens

Another view of the gardens…

Gardens

The gardens had a lot of shade which was a nice escape from the heat. There were people spread throughout lounging in the gardens.

After the gardens, we went back to our hostel and did as the locals do and took a siesta to prepare for the match. Luckily, our second night in Sevilla was the night Spain played Germany in an attempt to become the Champions of Europe.

The Game

A photo of the bar we watched the first half of the game from. As you can see, we were pretty far back. At the half we decided to find a bar with a better TV and more Spanish people. The first bar was filled with mostly English speakers.

¡Campeones!

Mitch and I celebrating

Ole Ole, Espana Campeones! We found the right group of people for the second half as they knew exactly where to go after the victory.

Before

The celebration in the beginning…

After

The celebration once everybody made it down…

Marc in the Fountain

When walking back to the hostel, we saw a group of Spanish kids in the fountain. They asked us if we were German. We said, “No! Espana!” and they said to get in to the fountain to prove it. The reason Marc is the only one in the fountain is because right as he got in, everyone jumped out because the police came flying around the corner and everyone else noticed and jumped out. He managed to get out in time and everything turned out fine.

The party continued long into the night but we headed back around 2am because we were heading to Tarifa in the morning. Sevilla was an amazing city with very nice and relaxed people. My time on the computer is running out so that´s all for now but we´ll try and blog more throughot the trip.

-Mitch

Chefchaouen

Max — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 19:35:43 +0000

Okay we made it back to Spain completely safe, so moms you can now breathe a huuuuuge sigh of relief.

Mitch is going to write up a Sevilla post, and I was put in charge of talking about Morocco and hopefully supplying you with some pictures.

So the first place we went, not including Tangier where we arrived on the ferry, was Chefchaouen, a small town in the mountains with a beautiful maze like blue and white medina pretty much all looking like this, but with more people and shops lining the small streets:

The Medina

And this is a view of the town from a hill we climbed to the top of at sunset:

Chefchaouen

Anyways, we hung out in this place for a night, and I think it would be unanimously considered the best night we had in Morocco.

We had taken the bus to this town with two Norwegian girls(we ended up staying with them for our four days or so in Morocco and having a lot of fun with them) that we met coming out of the ferry. We all wandered around the city after finally finding our hostel, and while exploring the medina, we found an art exhibit filled with really nice paintings (you can see one in the picture above) by a guy that kind of looked like a Moroccan version of my dad when he still had his mustache. We looked around for a while not really thinking we would buy anything and he ended up inviting us to a cup of mint tea to try and sell us some paintings.

So we sat down with him for a bit and the two Norwegian girls we were with ended up getting Henna tattoos from him, and before we knew it he had invited us to dinner.

So the five of us, along with him and a few of his friends, ended up moving a little ways up the medina into this small room filled and lined with carpets and rugs to eat a home cooked Moroccan meal. The meal didn´t come for quite some time and we ended up talking and watching the artist and his friends play the drums for hours.

Here´s a picture of them, the artist is on the left:

The Drum Circle

We were with them from about 6 to 12 before the food finally came. But it was definetely worth the wait. The picture might not look too appetizing, but it was one of the best meals I have ever had.

Home cooked tajine, which they said was way better than any restaurant tajine.

Home Cooked Tajine

We used our hands and pieces of bread as our forks and thoroughly enjoyed the meal we had waited so long for. After the meal we said our goodbye´s, Marc bought a small painting, and we left the next morning for Fes, the most different place you could ever imagine from Chefchaouen. I couldnt have imagined a better way to get a feel for what the real people of Morocco are like, and no experience came close to this throughout the rest of our time in Morocco.

My time is running out in the internet cafe so I´m going to stop now, but I´ll try and post about the rest of Morocco, we ended up staying in Fes and Asilah, tomorrow or something. We saw quite a different Morocco in these places, both good and bad.

We leave for Granada tomorrow, and hopefully we´ll have a lot of good stories for you from there.

-Max

morocco

Mitch — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:44:18 +0000

in morocco

their keyboards are weird

was in chefchaouen yesterday; small and very nice

just got to fez which is a lot bigger

will post more when there is a normal keyboard

-mitch