Saturday, May 2, 2009

Frankfurt: The End

Our last two days in Europe were spent in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany. Unbeknownst to me, I booked a hostel in the Red Light District :O Prostitution is legal in Germany and Frankfurt is a big town for travellers and the like, so there were "Eros Centres" (legal brothels) and strip joints everywhere. It made for some interesting sights!

Grayson and I walked along the Main river that flows through Frankfurt


and saw an interesting sculpture in front of the Museum of Communication (though I would have thought it was some Modern Art museum) he's a tv-robot-samurai!

We went to the Museum of Filmmaking and saw the entire history of film (with no English descriptions!) and a bunch of work by the Swiss artist HR Giger (Google at your own risk) who was on special exhibition for the design work he's done for many movies, including Alien and Species. They also had some of his paintings and drawings and furniture designs.

Here is a poor picture of a recreated camera obscura in the museum, the view is the river outside the front of the museum...we could even see runners jogging across the wall, upside down!


Frankfurt is also the home of the European Union bank, commemorated with a huge Euro sign in front of the building. Why isn't there a big dollar bill sign on Wall Street?


We also walked around through other parts of town and found this crazy mall that looked like it had a hole through it, and that ended up being this tube of glass that moved through the whole thing, it was some of the craziest architecture ever!


View from the front...is it a hole?


View from the inside...no, it's not a hole, it's a long cylinder of glass moving through a mall. Okie-dokie!


And for Jenny, a German copy, finally!


Following our last day in Germany, we got on a train and hung out in the airport for three hours, then sat on an airplane for ten hours (but I finally got to see The Reader and Slumdog Millionaire, Lufthansa is awesome) and then we arrived in SUNNY Seattle! Don't worry, it's back to rain today, and the rest of the week apparently, but it was certainly nice while it lasted. And Grayson and I are still working on getting our sleep set straight. All in all an insane, huge, amazing trip with far too much for my brain to process. I adored Europe and can't wait to return! (And see more, with longer time in each city! By the time we got a city figured out we were gone for an entirely new one. Kept things interesting though.)

Norway

We flew from London to the Land of the Vikings, or, an airport a couple hours outside of Oslo, Norway. We stayed with a friend of Grayson's in a town called Drammen, and spent a day in Oslo, the capital. Norway is a lot like the Alaska of Europe, and it was the first time we saw overcastness on our whole trip. Clearly, Europe was ready for us to return to Seattle :) We went to the National Gallery that had paintings by Edvard Munch (including the Scream), and also to a museum commemorating the resistance efforts of the Norwegians during WWII, when they were occupied by the Germans. That museum was in the middle of a huge fortress overlooking the harbor. Another crazy thing about Norway is how expensive it was. People tell you this all the time, but we really had to experience it ourselves to believe. $20 for McDonald's double cheeseburgers, small fries and soda for both of us. $30 for a little copy of Alice in Wonderland. $60 for three people to play two rounds of bowling. Free for me to cry as our budget was wiped out by lunch time. On to a few pictures:

Grayson hugging a huge tiger statue in Oslo

Oslo town hall - we were there on some special day, as there were Canadian flags everywhere...

Oslo harbor


Norwegian bookstore with an awesome awning!

Norwegian Troll soda


Norwegian Troll candies - these tasted like caramel snot. No joke.

Calvin and Hobbes in Norway is "Tommy og Tigern," or "Tommy and Tiger"

Crazy bridge in Drammen, Norway

My new favorite drink that will be impossible to find! Villa (pronounced Wee-la in Norwegian), the "champagne soda," it tastes like subtle cream soda.

Thursday, April 30, 2009

London

From Nottingham we took a train to London, where on the first day we saw Big Ben, Parliament and Westminster Abbey (where Queen Elizabeth's tomb was!). We then took a boat ride along the Thames river.




The next day we went to a recreation of Shakespeare's Globe theater and saw Romeo and Juliet. It was SUPER awesome, and despite being a tragedy, the actors were really funny.



The next day we went to Bloomsbury and saw the British Library, which holds the Magna Carta, the Gutenberg Bible, a piece of paper written by Shakespeare and one of Virginia Woolf's handwritten notebooks containing Mrs. Dalloway. After that we went to the location of my favorite British show ever, Black Books. Then we went to the British Museum, which among a million awesome things had the Rosetta Stone. NUTS!



The next day we went to Buckingham Palace. After that we mostly milled around.


Here's a helpful sign to remind tourists which way to look when crossing the road:

Nottingham

After Paris, we flew to Nottingham, which is in central Britain, mostly to see the birthplace of one of my favorite authors (D.H. Lawrence) but also to see a bit of smaller-town, country-ish English life.

Nottingham, home to Robin Hood
Align Center
Grayson had a traditional English breakfast (blech!)

We read some funny Brit papers

Went to the town of Eastwood to see some DHL stuff, including his birthplace museum:


and went to my first ever Ikea, where we ate some exotic Swedish cakes.

You'd think our first time in a country that speaks English would have been a little less foreign, and it mostly was, but around Nottingham, which is in the Midlands, the accent was so thick I sometimes couldn't understand people!

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Overdue/unsorted pix, Part 3, Paris

Holy crap, I don't even know where to start. Paris was AMAZING. We had the most number of days there than any other city and it still felt like too few. We even got to meet with a friend of Grayson's and some of his friends and family, we talked politics, living in cities, and ... children! It was actually pretty funny because we got to play with his very young son, and his French was running circles around me. AND he could speak some English! Quelle tristesse! (How sad!)

One of the cafes that cool people hung out in during the 30s, including Einstein!
Grayson looking existential in front of Albert Camus' favorite cafe in Paris. I ate a croque monsieur here and a seven-euro soda!
Shakespeare and Co., the bookstore started by an American in the thirties where Hemingway and James Joyce, among a million other amazing writers hung out.
The green boxes belonging to the left bank booksellers, they had amazing old books and postcards.


Notre Dame!Me as Quasimodo in front of Notre Dame!

Awesome metro stop, one of the few remaining originals.
Grayson got his haircut in French!

The Amelie cafe in Montmartre!
Moulin Rouge!
The view from Sacre Coeur!
Sacre Coeur itself, atop the Montmartre hill...

The Seine!
Napoleon's tomb!
Banana nutella crepe at a cafe!
A new view of the Eiffell Tower!
Space Needle wannabe!

Grayson has a head growth!
The Louvre!Lady McLadington
The obelisk that stands where Marie Antoinette became a head shorter on the top! :O


We walked from the Louvre, through the Gardens, past the Obelisk (at Place du Concorde) up the Champs-Elysees to the Arc di Triomphe,
Where we saw them rekindlee the flame of the unknown soldier...
Grayson's friend's kid, with boundless (even the camera couldn't stop it) energy!