Brisvegas Adventurers

So we left Dublin quite a time a go and since then have visited the following places while with my parents:

Paris - France
Vienna - Austria
Prague - Czech Republic
Bratislava - Slovakia
Budapest - Hungary
Salzburg - Austria
Drove through Germany for a day
Innsbruck - Austria
Brig - Switzerland
Lucerne - Switzerland
Montreux - Switzerland
Venice - Italy
Lucca - Italy
Monte Carlo - Monaco
Cannes - France
Several towns of the Provence area in France: Antibes, Biot, Grasse, Gourdon, Tourettes and Saint Paul de Vence
Avignon - France

So lets go over that whole trip a little more!

Spending another few days in Paris was great, we got to see the Eiffel tower at night with its spectacular light show every hour and went to the top again but this time we used the lift the whole way up....

Eiffel Tower by night

The next day we powered over to Versailles and saw the palace that King Luis and Marie Antoinette used to inhabit until they were dragged out of by an angry mob and beheaded in the center of Paris for their poor leadership and whimsical manner towards the people. The size of the palace is outstanding and took us a good 2 hours to only do a small portion of the rooms and another 3 hours to get a paddle boat in the giant canal within the gardens and visit Marie's private estate and village.

All of us standing in the gardens over looking the grand canal

Versailles Villiage

4am the next morning we got up to fly to Vienna for some breakfast and a hot cup of coffee! With breakfast done we set out too see what Vienna had to offer. After brisk walk around the 8km scenic route we head back to the hotel to get changed for a classical music concert. The second day saw us finishing off some off the other sights including a street designed and built by a group of artists, known as the Kunsthaus. Leaving Vienna by car we head off to the Czech Republic and Prague.

Vienna Palace

Mum and Erika having something to eat from a small market stall.

Art house designed and built by a community of artists.

Prague for the second time was much better, the weather was more favourable and we were doing it in more style with a car and in nicer accommodation. Our first visit was very restrained as we knew we were coming back and I am glad we left things to do! We went with a guided day tour which was great, the whole idea behind doing a tour rather than taking yourself is you get a history lesson as you go and get a few glimpses of the city that you would have missed by yourself. We were staying near the Prague castle and Dad even managed to get directions from one of the guards!

City of 1000 Steeples

Astronomical clock, if you can find someone who can read it correctly it should display the time to the exact minute and has been running since the 14th century.

Charles bridge and the Castle

Dad asking for directions, the guy cracked a smile at that one!

Bratislava was very odd place and you could see that is was trying very hard to get itself up-to-date with modern infrastructure and some new building projects but it was still very much a small town, despite it being the capital of an entire country. We only stayed for a few hours and had a giant schnitzel but that was all we could really find to do there....

Budapest! Now this place was amazing, the Danube river flows through the city splitting it into two sides, Buda and Pest. I would have to say that this is one of the most beautiful places I have been to and it is a city - but only at night! The massive floodlights lighting up the cities monuments and buildings reflect off onto the river and the result is spectacular. The stay here was much too short and I did not even get to climb up any stairs!

Budapest by night

Here is some more of Budapest

And more!

Shanty village planted next to the highway just out of Budapest

Now this post is taking a real long time to put together so I am going to have break it up and finish the rest of the details once we reach Spain. To leave you here are a few more photos...

Innsbruck

Venice

Neuschwanstein Castle

Durnbach War Cemetery in Germany from WWII

The trike I rode around Switzerland

Stairs, holy light shade Batman! We must have climbed 10's of thousands of stairs since first arriving in London up till now. They should have that as a tourist brochure - love stairs? COME TO EUROPE, we have shitloads.

So we are currently sitting in the common area of our hostel which is a 3 minute walk from the Moulin Rouge, fancy that hey! The street which it is on is pretty dodgy, full of strip joints and the like.

The street we are on is very nice though, full of little shops and a lovely little bakery which has the best Quiche I have ever eaten, there is also steamy hot bread sticks any time of the day which is very cool and tasty and cheap (which is very important). I made a €4 dinner tonight which everyone sitting around us was envious of in both terms of quality and price. The standard fare around us was canned food and fried eggs...

After Scotland we popped into a little town called Bath which was terriffic but bloody expensive, so after a few cruisy days and a comedy club evening we decided to get into cheap territory, ANYWHERE but the UK. A microwaved slice of Quiche and some cashews was all it took to go from Western England to the heart of Belgium - Brussels.

Sweet lordy lord it was cold there, we got about a reasonable amount on the first night as there were some South Korean guys sharing our room who were on a mission from their Government to see the entire city in one night. We left them after we visited the statue of a little boy taking a wizz, Manekin Pis to be exact. There are several legends aorund the origins of the kid but I think he was just a little shit taking a wee in the middle of the city and not some grand saviour!

We also popped into some other towns while in Belgium, Bruges and Gent which were both awesome places and the tour guide we went with was very cool and looked exactly like my uncle! Crazy stuff, so after having a cosy lunch in front of an open gas fire we finished off the tour and had a bit of a snooze on the way home on the bus.

So with some time to burn before Amsterdam we chose to head off to the only logical place when you have spare time, PARIS. Arriving in a country with a strange language was very daunting in Belgium but that was quickly forgotten here in Paris and we were cruising the metro with the best of them and eating some French sticks before you could say Yoplait (its French for yoghurt).

So after climbing to the top (with some slight assistance from a high speed lift) of the Eiffel tower in some seriously crazy winds and below zero temperatures, we rested. With the rest done and Erika calmed down sufficiently from the staggering height we pressed on to the bus straight back to the heated hostel. We had a nice little walk around the vicinity of the hostel looking for dinner, well it wasnt that nice but it was exciting all the same. Finally setteling on the finest piece of Quiche I have ever encountered and some bread sticks along with some water and ham on the floor of our room, it was great fun (being serious there too!).

Coming to a close today we went and visited the Lourve (pronounced luve) which was mind blowing. The place is so huge and is on such a grand scale, nothing I have seen in Australia comes close to being a single room of this place. Around 7 hours later we completed about 70% of the place but I blame the fact of me solving the Da Vinci code on not getting around to the other 30% of it. But I know the secret tunnels now so I can sneak back in if I need to.

Tomorrow we do other stuff but I will tell you about that later on. We have access to the net alot more that one would think so send us both an email every now and then! Look forward to our next post from either our last day in Paris or Amsterdam (if we remember what the internet is from there).