Afterwards, we went to find a flea market called Saint Ouen but once there, a guy at an Ibis hotel told us the market is only open three days a week. So we went into a grocery store and got Orangina for me and gummy candies for Jason. By the way, a quick calculation and I estimate Jason has eaten about 5.5 pounds of gummy candies during the trip. He is able to eat a quarter pound of gummy raspberries and 1.5 liters of coke as a meal in about 5 minutes. Astonishing. I have my own problems as well. I am a huge fan of Orangina and France has it everywhere, so every time we walk by a kiosk or market, I buy an Orangina. At the market near the flea market site, Jon found 4 Orangina flavors and Jason found his favorite berry gummy candies. It was life-changing for both of us.

Well I’m going to wake up Jason Bear so we can go find our final Paris meal. Tomorrow, we are on planes all day and will be home around 7 PM PST. I’ll attempt to do a quick update later this eve to wrap things up.

After the Tower, ate lunch in Kebab Hawkers Alley at a small Asian lunch spot. It was very inexpensive, and there was a lot of it, two key elements to surviving in the money vacuum that is Paris. After lunch, we finally collected our bags from Gare de Lyon and headed to our new hotel. Once checked in, we headed back out to see the Arc de Triomphe. Last year, I was too tired to walk to the top but we did it this year and the view was fantastic. I had expected the view to be similar to the lower level of the Eiffel Tower, but it is completely different. It highlights the grandeur of the Champs Elysees and seeing the Eiffel Tower from a different perspective was nothing short of magical.

After the Arc, we ate a sit down dinner at a horrible tourist oriented restaurant. The bill wasn’t too bad, but the food was awful. Dinner was done around 11:00 PM and we headed back to the hotel to grab a few things and a map. We intended to see Paris at night and we needed to know where we were going. We went to a bar I walked by last year called Footsie. The name is a play on the London FTSE stock exchange. Drink prices change every 3 minutes based on patrons purchasing them. There are reader boards with the prices. Overall, the concept is beyond cool but their execution causes the idea to fall short. The way they have it set up, drink prices really do not change and without that aspect working for them, the bar is fairly boring. I can see something similar working in the U.S. with a few tweaks.

After Footsie, we scrambled to get to the Metro before it closed at 1. We went to a seedy area of Paris called Pigalle, where there were a ton of neon signs advertising non-family-oriented shows. With the Metro closed, we had to walk back to the hotel. After getting lost several times, we got back to our beds around 5 AM. We’ve been a little tired all day J.

Day 4 post to immediately follow.

The moment we got there, he was speed walking and running all over the place. His first stop was getting a map so he “could plan out our day.” If I hadn’t known him before, I would swear I had joined the Big Brother program and was taking my Little Brother out for a special day. We started with a roller coaster called Space Mountain Mission 2. The warning sign said it was a high-speed roller coaster with 360 degree inversions and sudden drops. I am not a fan of theme parks and roller coasters fall into that category but I played along and in the end, it was a fun departure from the usual activities we’ve been doing for the past few weeks. I’ll consolidate Disney Day with this simple summary:

• There were millions of kids everywhere (including Jason).
• People were dancing all over the place to super happy music and songs blaring through the PA system. Click Here for a video of the insanity.
• Jason was like a kid seeing his first candy store and then being told he can have whatever he wants and as much as he wants all day long.
• Not all Parisians are the Spawns of Satan I met when I got here last as this great guy at the train station offered to buy us tickets because we had insufficient coins for the machine. He was even super nice when we came up short with euro bills to pay him back.
• Disney is a business that aims to get your money and they are good at it. I feel like we robbed them by spending less than 100 €.

That night, we got back around 10:15, fifteen minutes after the train station baggage check closed, so we headed back to the hotel to wash the clothes we were wearing and get some rest.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Jason that nicely summarizes our Disney excursion: “This day was a miracle.”

5 minutes off the train, and we had the elation we had when we arrived in Berlin. Like the entire trip, we had no place to stay and a bunch of gear on our backs. This time, we dropped the bags off at a train station and wandered the city. We settled on a hotel on the outskirts of the central city, but still on the main metro lines. It was cheaper than the hostels (as is the case with most big cities in Europe) and has a fantastic petit dejour (breakfast) in the morning and a nice ensuite bathroom (this is key so we can wash Jason’s stinky shirts). Since our arrival, we’ve pretty much been running around having tons of fun and living the carefree Parisian life. We haven’t even picked up our bags from the station.

On day one, we took the metro from our hotel to Notre Dame and wandered into another Mass, this time for Sunday evening. The difference was drastic. At the Vatican, it was really difficult to get into Mass, and tourists were kept in a closed off area very far from the altar and spectators. At Notre Dame in Paris, there were tourists walking all over the place, up and down the aisles and making all kinds of noise. Candles were sold for 2-5 Euro, camera flashes going off everywhere, and the whole thing seemed kind of scummy. It just felt inappropriate to be wandering in front of the Parisians as they attended their Sunday eve Mass.

After a handful of pictures and spending a few moments in the plaza in front of Notre Dame, Jason and I did a dumb thing and walked to the Eiffel Tower. By the time we got there, the sun was setting and we got to see the Tower light up. It was great as the lights did their little flashing dance as the sun set. Afterwards, I grabbed us a few frommage crepes and we did an even dumber thing and walked back to Notre Dame. Earlier in the day, I introduced Jason to French crepes with a frommage et jabon crepe. He has looked for them everywhere since. The walk back from the Tower was pleasant as the reflecting lights on the Seine prompted many photos. We also spent time in the chaos of the small streets near Notre Dame. There must have been over a thousand people packed in this tiny area I now call, Kebab Hawkers Alley, at midnight. Look at all those people wandering this little street at midnight on a Sunday! And you could not walk 5 feet without someone shoving a kebab or a pizza or a pizza with kebab on it in your face. By the time we got back to the hotel, we realized we had walked over 20 miles that day. We’ve been averaging 13-14 miles per day, and the 20+ was absolute murder on the legs and feet. By the time we made it back to the hotel, we both collapsed within minutes of getting in the room.

That was day one. We’ve just completed day two and I’m gonna grab some sleep and update tomorrow on it. It was a day of us running around and standing almost the entire day. And to put it succinctly, I think it was the greatest day of Jason’s life. He was freaking out all day long, ladies and gentleman.

Moving from Grindelwald to Gimmelwald was a simple matter of a few short trains in the mountains. We arrived in Lauterbrunnen and took a cable car up to a staging area where we took a 5 minute train on a steep cliff to Murren. Once at Murren, we hiked to Gimmelwald, a small village in the Alps. Gimmelwald has a few small hotels with only a few rooms, a hostel that sleeps about 26, and a small restaurant. There is a market/grocery store that has three items: cheese, dried meats, and some bread. But the town is on the slope of arguably the most beautiful place on the planet. It is blatantly overwhelming to be in the Alps. We dropped our stuff off at the hostel and spoke with a few hostel squatters who had been there for weeks. Our next move was to rent bikes because there were trails everywhere. We headed back to Murren and were lucky to find a shop open. Murren and Gimmelwald are nothing like Grindelwald. There are very few tourist services and much of the village’s commerce is closed until July. The bikes we rented were brand new and we were pretty happy about that. Our next move was to hit the local coop for some picnic lunch. Picnic in the Alps. I feel guilty even writing it.

After the picnic, we went back to coop to buy dinner supplies to store at the hostel. Dinner was to be Gimmelwald sausages and sauerkraut with local Interlaken beer. We then set out on our ride down the mountain. To put it mildly, it was awesome! The trail led us all the way around a mountain we had been gawking at all day. We passed many streams and waterfalls we had taken countless pictures of across the valley. We also passed a ton of cows which ran with us and followed us around. Those cows were super fun and I have a ton of ridiculous pictures of cows now. At the bottom, we rode a flat area along a river back to Launterbrunnen. Somewhere along the way, Jason managed to lose his camera so we rode back and miraculously found it in a field. We got the last cable car back up to Murren after a short burst of chaotic panic while we rode around the train station on our bikes trying to find some way to buy cable car tickets. We even ended up hopping through a train about to leave the station to get across some tracks to get back to the cable car. By the time we got back to the hostel, it was dark and the place was jammed. Apparantly, it is the also where the locals of Gimmelwald hang out. We made dinner in the kitchen and took care of some housecleaning issues related to gear organization. Jason passed out and I blogged a little. In the sleeping area, Jason and I were assigned to beds right next to each other. And I mean, RIGHT NEXT to each other. By the time I got into the sleeping dorm, Jason had pushed my mattress/pad halfway off the bed, and was lying near the middle. It was a cozy night.

The next morning, we awoke to a crystal clear day and the view from my window is pictured here. I didn’t even care about the previous night’s discomfort. Waking to the Alps in a tiny hostel with a breathtaking view makes one wonder why we spend so much time in meetings and chasing the weekend and I found myself plotting the logistics and what kind of life I would really have if I moved here. It is that amazing and I encourage everyone to visit that place at least once in their lives. We showered, took the bikes back, and made our way towards France.

We intended to hangout in Burgundy and play with wine and cellars. But renting a car proved impossible (apparently, everyone else had the same idea). So we went to Dijon by train and spent the night there. Dijon tries to be a very chic town and much of its architecture is modeled after Paris. It even has a mini Arc de Triomphe. After a night in Dijon, we went down to Beaune, a town known for wine and gastronomy. I had already been to Beaune and our experience there was very similar so I will not rehash it here. If you want to know about Beaune, find last summer’s post about it and replace the names: Eric, Brianne, and Brian with “Jason” and you have our Beaune time. After Beaune, we planned to go straight to Paris, but the trains were full. So I named two towns we both knew nothing about and let Jason pick.

We ended up in Montbard, which is a seductively quaint little French town in the middle of nowhere. Tourism is minimal here, so no one speaks English. Our hotel is only 30 EU per night and we had a 4 course French dinner with a nice bottle of regional Burgundy Pinot Noir for only 20 EU. Ordering was an adventure and a lot of guessing, pointing, and smiling occurred from everyone. I made sure to order escargot so Jason could try it. Here’s a fun story… While in the Alps we were discussing world cuisine and escargot came up. We then ran into a snail and Jason was super excited to see one “in a shell.” I was as puzzled as you are and explained that snails usually have shells. His response: “well, we’ve seen a ton of them, but none with shells.” My dear readers, all day we had been calling out “slug” as we passed slugs to avoid stepping on them on the trails. It took me a moment to connect the dots, but I explained to Jason that we were calling out “slug” to avoid stepping on “slugs” and that snails were different and naturally had shells. Jason’s response: “touché.” Do you all understand what Jon is going through now? Ok, story time is over (I had Jason’s reluctant permission to share J).

Montbard was awesome and a great introduction to France. We have tickets for tomorrow’s train to Paris, our last stop on a marathon run through the highlights of Europe. Updates tomorrow or Tuesday!

UPDATE for Jason’s Mom & Dad: We are in Paris and the most hilarious thing that happened today was when we were exiting a subway station and I (Jon) walked through one exit door in a quick flamboyant manner and Jason walked through another in the same way. But the door didn’t open and he started panicking and made a significant commotion trying to get out. The door was transparent so I could see the whole thing. I almost fell on the floor laughing. He then walked through my door, and 2 seconds later, a small woman casually walked through his. It was classic.

Grindelwald is very touristy. As we got off our train, we saw about 100 Japanese tourists. Grindelwald must be a national holiday destination for Japan because they had their own special tourist office, their own bank, and restaurant menus were in German, French, English, and Japanese. Our hotel was cheap and very comfortable. That was the only cheap thing in Grindelwald. Food, beer, and wine were so expensive that we considered eating grass with the cows. We had a thunderstorm move in were advised to not go hiking in it. Thunder in the Alps is a treat in of itself. The lightning is very bright and the thunder bounces off the mountains so each lightning session lasts for several rounds of earth-shattering lightning. A local told us we could walk to the base of a glacier even with the rain and lightning, so we put on our rain gear and headed out. Within 5 minutes, it was clear and completely sunny. Our walk to the glacier had cows, deer (fawns to be exact), goats, cats, and all kinds of company. The picture with the big rock and the white clouded blue sky was taken during our walk to the glacier.

Once at the glacier base, we decided to hike up to a viewing point created several years ago. To get there, we had to walk up 500 stairs. But they were not ordinary stairs. They were logs split down the middle and attached to a rock face. Each one was like 3 stairs and Jon and Jason were tired when they reached the top. The glacier (called the Oberer Gletscher) runs down a canyon and the special thing about the man-made view point is a suspension bridge that is a bunch of wood planks held up by about 4 cables that allows you to cross the canyon. Think Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. After playing around at the glacier, we headed back and Jason took a nap for a few hours while I scoped out a place to eat that was under CHF 30 per plate. That night we ate Rosti and enjoyed being in Grindelwald. The next day, we were headed to the tamer, less tourist-driven areas.

After visiting the church and Corsica, we quickly walked through the gallery of pope tombs where we saw the tomb of John Paul II and then headed out of the Vatican to find food. Another three-bite meal for Jason, followed by him sitting there awkwardly waiting for me to finish eating, and we went back to the hotel for showers (again). That evening, things were fairly mellow. Once dark, we walked near the Colosseum to see it at night. It was as I suspected – the same as in the day, but with lights that rotate colors. Jason went to bed and Jon walked around Rome for an hour before going to bed as well. By the way, for a young guy, Jason sleeps more than anyone I know. He needs MINIMUM 8-9 hours of sleep in order to simply function at the most basic level the next day. Anything less and he is a zombie and constantly falling asleep in random places. If he gets 10-12 hours, he is more alert and better able to help out with planning and deciding things. It astonishes me that he would sleep half of an entire day on a regular basis if he could. Anyway, I’ve come to realize he is mostly along for the ride, but I do wish he had done a little bit of research so that he would have more preferences about cities and sights that interest him.

DAY 3 in Rome was Jason and I spending 4 hours at the train station trying to plan our exit from Rome. Once our bags were stowed, we went to the Vatican Museo to see the Sistine Chapel and other goods. Once there, we realized we only had a few hours and virtually ran through the enormous museum. The Sistine Chapel was fantastic, and its specialness was further punctuated by the guards constantly yelling at the tourists to stop taking photos and “shushing” them to be quiet. After the museum, we got on our train and headed to the Swiss Alps. We spent three days in the Alps but I am too tired to blog that tonight. For Eric: the clouds parted in Murren for two whole days. You have to go back someday. It is seriously the most beautiful place on the planet.

Thanks for reading and I’ll update at the next opportunity.

With barely any sleep, and feeling like we ran through a fountain of sweat, we took two quick showers and headed out to find some cheap food. 15 minutes later, we ran into the 1,929 year-old Colosseum. It looks just like it does in the pictures. It was mobbed by tourists but a spectacular sight. The area surrounding the Colosseum was surrounded by tons of people hawking everything from garbage to tours. We avoided them all and headed in with the corny audiotours stuck to our heads. The inside was mostly gutted and clearly aged, but the massive size really conveyed the formidable events that used to take place.

Following a few hours wandering the Colosseum, we walked to the Pantheon. I expected the outside to be grander, but it is quite a plain looking structure on the outside. On the inside, one can’t help but spend the first five minutes staring up at the inside of the dome. We were wondering how the water was accounted for when it rained (if it ever does in the oven known as, Rome), but found a conspicuously placed drain right below the opening at the top. The inside is very peaceful, even with all 9 billion people gawking and pointing up with you.

After the Colosseum and Pantheon, we walked back towards the hotel and Jason got his first real Italian dinner. I cannot recall what he ate, and I’m sure he has no idea, because he eats food as if the world is going to end within 15 seconds and the only way to save it is for him to devour every edible crumb on the table before those 15 seconds expire. I have never seen anyone eat like that. Recalling 9 months ago, I once saw Jason eat a ½ pound burrito in 4 bites in 3 minutes. True story. We passed out within seconds of getting into the hotel room.

1:50 AM here and Jason has been asleep for 2 hours, so time for me to catch up. I’ll go over more of Rome tomorrow. We’ve got 7 more days in Europe and I’m 4 days behind in the blog L. I’ll endeavor to make a massive update tomorrow.

The next day, we awoke to thunder storms and rain. No hiking for us. Remember who is here with me… Jason discovered that a zoo existed in Innsbruck, and so we stuck our bags in a locker at the train station and headed to the zoo. The zoo is supposedly the highest zoo in Europe and after the climb to get there, I believe it. Those bears and snakes have an incredible view. I won’t bore you with the details. It was a zoo. By the time we were finished dodging kids and looking at helpless caged animals, the sun had come out and we decided to walk a few of the trails and enjoy the weather. Streams, little bridges that crossed ravines, and occasional rain showers created a fantastic mild hiking experience in the Austrian Alps.

Dinner that night was simple. Innsbruck is in southwest Austria, right near the border to Italy, which means the food is a combination of German and Italian. There was even pizza with brats on it. Of course, kebab stands were on every street corner. I should say something about kebabs here. In my European travels, I have noticed that each country has its own pronounced junk food. Germany has wieners and kebabs, Poland has perrogi and kebabs, Austria has pizza, wieners, and kebabs, France has crepes and kebabs, Switzerland has crepes and kebabs, and Greece has kebabs, and well, kebabs (it is their food after all). Notice a pattern? The entire EU has adopted kebabs as the universal snack food for Europe. I’m sure there is some town somewhere named “Kebab” where they serve nothing but kebabs. So back to Innsbruck, where Jason and I did indeed have kebabs for dinner on our last night there. And for my Swiss 2008 friends, the Austrian kebabs are the best so far.

After an early dinner, we were out of things to do. We had walked 13.2 miles that day and really weren’t leaping for joy at the prospect of an evening hike. We had 6 hours to kill until our night train at 11 PM. Jason asked the tourist office what there was to do in Innsbruck after 5. The response was: “you could go to tourist pubs. Or, you could go to student pubs…” So 7 pubs and 5.5 hours later, we found our train and headed out of Austria.

Our destination was to be Venice, but we made a slight detour…

In old town, we walked straight to a pub we found in a brochure that looked like a local’s hangout called Paul’s Stub’n. It was tucked away in a tiny alley. The only way we knew something was going on inside was the sounds of people speaking languages foreign to us. We snaked out way up a bunch of stairs and found the garden. The prices were great and the food was amazing. Jason got his first experience ordering from a menu that had no English. We pointed to two things on the menu and the food was awesome. Jason had some kind of chicken dish that surrounded a potato smothered in a cream sauce. Mine was a potato pasta dish that had about a block of strong cheese melted over it and served in a cast iron skillet. It also had about a cup of little fried onions on top. Delicious! The salad was the best part. And it was only about 6.30 EU.

Today, we got up and went to the castle that towers over Salzburg. It was a typical castle with a museum inside and a horde of tourists, though not nearly as bad as I saw last year in August. The castle tower had a magnificent view (we had to take a funicular to even get to the castle base) and copious amounts of pictures ensued. Right now, we’re off to Innsbruck, the base of the Austrian Alps. The Alps!!! We plan to hang out there a few days to do some house cleaning and relax after the chaotic departure from Poland. This will not be our only time in the Alps. We are doing the Swiss Alps and probably the French Alps as well.

In case you have not noticed, we skipped Hungary and Slovakia. Hungary was skipped due to a time crunch and the fact that we simply needed a day to recover after Ania got us annihilated at a bunch of local’s bars in Krakow. Speaking of Ania, Ania is a friend of Chelsea, who is the girlfriend of a classmate of ours. In exchange for hand delivering an interesting fiction novel and card to Ania, she agreed showed us around. Jason and I were not fully aware of what that meant, but we should have been suspicious when Chelsea’s email to Ania told her to be gentle on us. When we got to the first bar, Ania immediately told her friends to not order us shots. That kind of tells you how the evening went overall. Suffice it to say, Polish vodka really is awesome and cheap, and the beer really is stronger than what Ania referred to as, “American crap.” They are not messing around there. The Dizzy Daisy hostel can thank Chelsea and Ania for providing them with an extra day from Jason and Jon as we needed a bed and a ton of water the next day. Hanging out with Ania and her friends was a fantastic time and it was great being as close as we could to being a local for the night. Poland is a fun country with lots of history and, sadly, suffering. The people are more weathered and hard, compared to other European countries I have visited, but they also know how to lead simple and rewarding lives.

We’ve also skipped Bratislava. It came down to another night train and us being stuck in Krakow for yet another day. A little thinking and we had the time recovered by skipping Budapest, and I realized if we skipped Bratislava, we would have 3 extra days. Add in one of our buffer days, and I’m going to push us into Italy after Austria. I love Italy and am drooling at the chance to see Venice and the northern lake country. More updates soon!