galavanting can be tiring

So I think I've finally recovered from my week-long trip around France and Poland. It was tiring, but worth it. If you're reading this, you may want to grab a snack or something, cuz you may be here for awhile! This post is pretty long. Here are some of the highlights of my vacation:

Rachelle and I left Bordeaux at 5:30am to take the train to Paris. Consequently, we had to take the bus de nuit at 4:30am to get to the station on time. Here was where our adventures began. The bus driver was driving like a maniac the entire time: I don't exactly know where he had to be or what schedule he had to keep, but that bus hardly slowed down until it stopped to let us off. If you've ever seen Harry Potter 3 when Harry is riding the night bus, you'll have an idea of what this ride was like. And to make matters worse, it was a doubly-long bus joined by an accordion-type middle and Rachelle and I were facing the back end, watching the accordion compress and contort while a pile of pamphlets flew and slid around everywhere the entire time. We both got off the bus feeling a little ill... not a great start to a holiday.

We arrived in Paris without much mishap (and thankfully the Paris night bus to the airport 2 days later was a calm and comfortable ride!), and spent our first day, Rachelle's birthday, at Versailles, which was beautiful but packed with tourists. Later we found a restaurant that her godsister had recommended to us to try, saying it was "the best restaurant in Paris." I don't know if Chez Gladine was the BEST restaurant in the city, but it certainly was the restaurant that gave you the most bang for your buck! Rachelle ordered a salad for 6€ and got a huge metal mixing bowlful of it. It was amazing! We also ended up sitting beside a mother and daughter from Australia (the mother was visiting the daughter in France), and had a really good talk with them, so now if we ever go to Australia, we'll have a place to stay! (Can I just say I love traveling and making connections like this?)

The second day in Paris was good too. It was bright and sunny and we visited the Eiffel Tower, Sacré-Coeur, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Champs-Elysées, where we attempted to track down the Starbucks but failed. That day we were also super-tired already so we ended up going back to our hostel around 7ish and going to sleep really early. After all, we had to wake up again at the crack of dawn to catch our night bus to go to our next destination: Krakow!

We arrived in Krakow after a smooth Easyjet flight just before noon. Although we were both hungry and tired, our first task was to take a bus from the airport to the Old Town to find our hostel. Luckily a lady at the info desk explained to us, in English, how to get there. I guess I didn't quite realize what I was getting myself into, going to Poland, and Rachelle thought it was funny how stressed out I was about not being able to speak the language. But this was the first situation I've ever been in where I felt absolutely helpless when trying to communicate. At least in France I knew enough French on my arrival to get by. Here I had to depend on a little phrasebook and people's abilities to speak English. Nevertheless, I forced myself to learn several words: thank you, hello, excuse me, yes, no, and English. Just the basics. I never thought I would long for the familiarity of France so much!

Despite the language barrier, our time in Krakow was amazing! The city is beautiful, with clean buildings painted every colour you can imagine without looking too tacky, and it feels small, even though it has a population of 800,000. We spent the majority of our time in the Old Town, which is surrounded by the Planty, a park which was formerly a moat, and contains two castles, a huge square that's existed since medieval times, and tons of little boutiques, souvenir shops, and restaurants, most of which thankfully had menus in both Polish and English. Whenever we could, we ordered perogies and cabbage rolls and sausage. We thought it was funny that the Polish always tried to translate "perogies" into English, by describing them as "dumplings filled with..." or "pockets like ravioli filled with...". I guess we can't just assume that everyone will know what perogies are. Us Winnipeggers are used to eating them, but I guess others aren't. My favourite type we ordered was blueberry perogies with cream drizzled on top. We had these for dessert and we're going to try to replicate them this summer when we're both back in the Winnipeg.

Our second day in Poland, we caught a bus going to Oswiecim, the town where Auschwitz-Birkenau is located. There we went on a 3-hour tour of both parts of the camp. Although I've studied a lot about the Holocaust over the years, I learned some new things while touring the camp, as our tour guide was extremely knowledgeable. It's hard to describe what I felt going through a place like that, but mostly it was just really surreal, because I've seen so many pictures and images of it and it was a really strange feeling to be there for real. It was emotional, but I'm really glad that I went. It was something that I've wanted to do for a really long time and it's not something that I would have the opportunity to do every day. Although the camp was such a place of death, it was good to hear about some of the stories of resistance and triumph, and we also watched a short video filmed while the camp was getting liberated. These images and stories gave us hope. While we were in Krakow, we also found out that Oskar Schindler's factory is a museum now, but when we tried to visit it the next day we found out it was closed for renovations. We still took pictures of the outside of it though, as that place also carries a message of hope and life.

All in all the Krakow part of our trip was really awesome. I forgot to mention that we stayed in an absolutely amazing hostel. It was super clean, and we had our own private bathroom and shower, comfortable beds and a little table, chairs, and a wardrobe in our room. We also had a radio that played lots of classical music and Polish hip-hop and we shared a little kitchen with 2 other rooms. They'd even put candies on our pillows for when we arrived! We actually didn't want to leave Krakow to go back to Paris, but alas, we had to.

Our last day back in Paris was spent relaxing as much as possible. We visited the Père Lachaise cemetery and saw Jim Morrison and Edith Piaf's graves, and other than that we didn't do much. The next morning I left early to catch my train to Arles and Rachelle flew back to Korea.

My stay in Arles lasted just one night but I was there for almost 2 full days. Arles is a little city in Provence, a province in the south of France. There are tons of Roman ruins there, and I bought a pass to visit them all. It was pretty cool and really relaxing to just have some down time exploring a new city. Arles is also a really cool city, and it's easy to see why van Gogh and other painters found so many subjects to paint there (and by the way, I have Bonnie to thank for helping me find this city!). I visited a few places where he painted some of his famous works, including "Café Terrace at Night" (which inspired me to go to Arles in the first place) and "Starry Night over the Rhone." I loved Arles' narrow, winding streets whose old buildings opened all their colourful wooden shutters out onto the streets. Both days I was there were warm, sunny and beautiful. One of my favourite things that happened there was on the first day when I bought a huge pizza from a pizzeria and I took it to eat by the river. There were no fewer than four people who walked by and wished me "Bon appétit!" I love France! I also went to a market on Saturday which was massive. I bought a bunch of things, including a 1/2 loaf of bread, a new kind of cheese, some fruit, etc. and made myself a little picnic. For dessert I bought 2 lavender-- yes, that's right, lavender--- cookies. They grow a lot of lavender in Provence, so it's a specialty of the region. It may sound gross but the cookies were delicious! They tasted the way lavender smells, with just a hint of sweetness. Mmm!

Below are just a few of the many pictures I took on my trip: The first 2 are self-explanatory. The third one is the main square in Old Town Krakow and the fourth is a bird’s eye view of the city. The fifth one is me pretending to ring the bell in the bell tower of Wawel Castle, one side of which you can see in the next pic. The seventh picture shows a random little castle just outside of the Old Town in Krakow. It reminded Rachelle and me of a Paper-Bag Princess castle. The last 5 pics are in Arles: a street, the Roman Amphitheatre, the Café la Nuit (look at the bottom right-hand corner and you’ll see a copy of van Gogh's original painting), me and the Rhone River, and finally part of the remaining ramparts, which used to encircle the entire town.

So there you have it! Bye for now!