Beautiful Switzerland

Before we went to Switzerland we spent a few days in Munich sorting out our flat we are renting from a lady and everything. Since we will be in Munich for 6 weeks in September I will cover it in later blogs. All I will say is that Munich my dream city with delicious foods everywhere, and the people, men especially, wear leaderhosen around as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
Here is Santa on his holidays, also wearing leaderhosen, after having one too many steins!

The ad at the bus stop. He he.

Anyway, more on Munich later, this is the Switzerland post.

From Munich we went to Switzerland and the first place we went to was Bern. A very cute town. We just stayed here for 2 nights. There is not much to do here except look around. Everything is always shut! I think the Swiss are so wealthy they don't need to bother working anymore so they shops stay shut.

I took the next two photos out the window of the car as we drove along to Zermatt to see the Toblerone mountain, the Matterhorn.

Zermatt - the view of the Matterhorn. Damn clouds! In the photo below you can just see this little pointed hill to the left of the Matterhorn.

From Zermatt we drove to Lausanne, it was pouring with rain. So much that could hardly see.
The next day we had a look around and went to this castle, the Chateau de Chillon.

The view across the lake. After this we left Lausanne and drove to the Alps.

Our cold arrival in Lauterbrunnen, up in the Alps. You can just see the snow under the clouds.

The next day the weather was great! It must be our sunny influence. We have now had 4 days of rain in the 2 and a half months we have been away.

This is the view from our hotel window. You can see the tallest waterfall in Europe on the right.

The view looking back towards Lauterbrunnen. Everywhere you look is beautiful. These pictures are nothing compared to being there.

Little Heidi children picking flowers.

Going up the mountain in the cable car. We had to go up 4 different cable cars to get to the top. This is just the first one, about a quarter of the way up.

Almost at the top....

The view from the top of the Shilthorn, 3000m up!

And there's......

Hey! :(

Yay! The one and only clearing of the clouds while we were up there. Just enough to have a look. Apparently sometimes it is cloudy and cold in Lauterbrunnen, but when you get up here it is sunny and nice as you are above the clouds.

No high heels!! How you would have even got down from the cable car along the slate rocks to see this sign I don't know.

This is the building that the cable car comes into. There is a restaurant and a shop in it, but that is the only thing on the mountain. This picture was taken when the clouds opened up a bit. Sometimes we couldn't see it at all. Visibilty was about 5 meters sometimes. The above picture with the sign was where this picture was taken.

Coming back down the mountain and out of the clouds.

When we got halfway back down the mountain we decided to walk the rest of the way back to Lauterbrunnen, about a 2 hour walk. Unfortunately we saw a sign that pointed us to Lauterbrunnun so we took it - not knowing that it was the trail that took you through the forest and down some pretty steep bits. My foot is fine for walking around normally, but in street shoes and walking on uneven rocks made it a bit painful. It was a really nice walk even though it did take us 3 1/2 hours to get home. We were exhausted, we'd been walking the whole day.

It was really nice walking through the forest, no snakes or spiders, or leeches, or anything, just fairy toadstools. I'm sure there were fairies and elves and Gnomes in that forest!

There were so many different ones.

The day after our exhausting walk we drove to Lucerne, and went for a 1 hour cruise on the lake (lots of free cruises and stuff included with our Eurail pass). Except the town, which was really old and had the usual nice old buildings and churches, Lucerne looked a lot like Canberra! The lake was just like Lake Burley Griffin, although the little beaches were packed full of people sunbaking and going for a swim. I guess if you want to have th Swiss experience on the cheap just head to Canberra.

There were lots of swans around the lake (unlike in Canberra), and Chris fed them some bread from our lunch. He got bitten a few times in the process but he loved it!

PS. In my previous post I called the Trevi Fountain the Tivoli Fountain. Oops. We never went to Tivoli, it was just too hot.

Rome

I'm back! It has been very hard to find a computer with continuously working internet and a USB cable for a while now, but finally I have found one, so here is my belated Rome update. We left Rome about.... a week ago now and have been in Munich and Switzerland already, but that will come soon.
Anyway, back to Rome. Rome continued on from Venice and Florence in that it was very hot and exhausting to be walking around all day long trying to find things to see. Luckily our hotel was lovely with air-con that I was able to set to and artic type temperature to recover in.

The first thing I noticed about Rome was that there were an abundance of teeny little cars around, even smaller than a 2 person Smart car! Most cars in Europe are small, a Corolla looks fairly large actually when you see it. This little car, the Town Life, was one of the smallest cars I saw, and I really liked it. It was super cute, although I'm sure I'd look like a real fool crammed into it in Australia hooning down the highway at 120 German style (the tiny cars have no problems on the Autobahns here!). We also saw some new Fiat 500 models around the place, and if it came in automatic then I would be on the waiting list for it in Australia. It is so trendy! Out in Oz in 2008 apparently.
Here is the Colosseum. We waited for about... 1 hour at least to get in to see it, but it is pretty interesting. Did you know that not only did they fight and kills lions and tigers, but also hippos? I wonder how they got a hippo all the way to Rome though...?

This is the Tivoli fountain. There are lots of other fountains that in my opinion are just as nice, but no surrounded by hoards of people swarming all over the place. We didn't stay here long because it is just too annoying. Not only are there hundreds of tourists, many of whom only look at the fountain (or whatever it is) through their camera or camcorder the whole time, but there are also lots of really annoying people trying to sell little devices that make a cat sounds, or a clicking sound or all sorts of other crazy sounds. So, when you are standing at the fountain all you can see are crazy tourists and all you can hear is the various sounds of stupid things people are trying to see you. Meanwhile it is boiling hot and I just wanted to go back to the A.C.! The Spanish Steps were just as crazy as this. One of the best places we went to was a church that has the bones, yes, skulls and everything, of 4000 monks below the church in about 6 rooms. The bones are arranged like art or decorations, so skulls make up an entire wall of a room, and the little bones of the spine make a chandelier. It was really creepy actually. No photos were allowed, but I will see what I can find on the net. Luckily not many tourists know about this so it was fairly quiet.

See what I mean about the little cars! There are even little utes and TINY little buses going around the city that are the size of a van. So cute!

In Italy there are so many churches to go and see and some of them have fabulous artworks inside. This is the ceiling of one (I've forgotten the name, written it down somewhere). In this church there was also the scupture of Michaelangelo's Christ Bearing the Cross. Quiet too. :)

One day I found that there was a Valentino exhibition on at at museum so we went to have a look and escape the heat. There were dresses from the last 45 years and some dresses that celebrities have worn. I loved it. The funny thing was though that with some of the dresses it was pretty obvious that some other designers, such as Alex Perry, had just completely ripped off the design of some of Valentino's gowns and just put them into their later collections.

Red dresses:

White dresses:

Penelope Cruz, Cate Blanchet and Halle Berry's dresses:

We went to the Vatican 3 times, once to do a tour of St Peter's Basillica, once to go up the dome of the basillica and later do a tour of the Vatican Museum, and the last time to go to the post office. The last time took almost as long as our 3 hour tours we did! The moral of the story is that if you plan on posting something in Italy or the Vatican (using Swiss post) then remember to bring your own box along! You can't buy them anywhere!! And it is just so lovely to walk around in the heat dragging along everything you wanted to post while you look everywhere for a box.

Back to the Vatican though. You have to cross the river to get to the Vatican and there are several bridges you can use. This one is the Bridge of Angels. All the statues of the angels are holding something from Christ's crucifixion, eg. nails, or crown of thorns.

View of St Peter's Basillica. It is SOOOO big, but strangely you can see it until you are fairly close and as you get closer it seems to get bigger. You could fit the statue of liberty inside the dome though apparently. In later photos you can start to appreciate the size.

This is the view from the dome. We went to St. Peter's at about 8.30am both times and avoided the crowds, but later on it get really busy. In the photo you can see the line of people that goes from the bottom left corner of this photo allllll the way around next to the columns and over the middle behind the obelisk. Remember that they are all in the sun at it is about 38C.

The dome. It is absolutely massive. That is not painting, it is all mosaic.

In this photo you can seethe floor of the basillica and we are standing just above the writing. Everything is still mosaic, there are no paintings inside the basillica. To get an idea of how big this is on the right of the photo in the middle the man is writing with a quill. That quill is 7 feet tall.

Chris and a mosaic.

A small dome at the front of the basillica.

A Swiss guard. The guards are all from Switzerland and must be fluent in 4 languages (Italien, German, French, and English). They are pretty hot actually, even with the uniform! ;)

Everyday ate pizza at the shop around the corner from our hotel. I was too hot to eat much, but I'd have this for lunch, and another slice for dinner. This one had tomato, basil (I think?) and chilli. I also had quite a few Red Orange Fanta's. Fantas is not the awful stuff that it is in Australia, it is just like San Pellegrino, and really yummy. I am going to write to Coke and try to con them into giving it to us when I get home.

Well, that's it for Rome. We are in Munich again now, and are off to St Petersburg on Sunday, so I'll try and get back to update again before that. Who knows the state of internet cafes in Russia.

Venice and Florence

I wish I could say that we had a great time in Venice and Florence, but we did not enjoy our time there that much. From Nice, where I did not really want to leave after our nice days at the beach and comfortable bed with air-con, we got a train to Milan. That train was running late so we missed our connecting train to Venice, and had to wait for an hour. When we did get on the train it was PACKED! Everyone who had missed the train with us was on it, as well as the people who had booked that specific train, so it was twice as full as it should have been. We were squeezed on and had to stand in the aisle. Then an announcement came on that the train would be delayed for 10 minutes... and then another 10 minutes, and then another and another - Sydney style! What is more the airconditioning had stopped working, and there were quite a few French people on the train. What I mean by this, is that the reputation the French have for not having (at least) a daily shower and stinking REALLY badly is completely true. Chris had the luck to be right next to a total stink pot who didn't seem to have washed in 4 or 5 days, and didn't seem to notice. Where ever we have gone in France there has always been at least 1 stinker in close proximity to us. On trains there is usually one person who taints the whole carriage with their awful smell.
Anyway, we finally got to Venice, and that was the last of the French (except for the occasional tourist) and the French water.

I had the idea of Venice being a wet, rainy, flooded sort of place, but when we were there it was oppressively hot. Thankfully our hotel room had air-con, but once you walked outside in the sun you really wanted to just turn around and go back inside. Below is the Basillica of San Marco, and fortunately we did just get in to see it in the afternoon before it closed. We walked there once, only finding out we had forgotten to cover our knees (long pants/skirt only) so we had to walk all the way back home to change. The line is really long to get in too, Venice being entirely filled with tourists. Standing in the sun for 45 minutes did seem to take away quite a bit of the enjoyment of going inside. Never the less, it was a beautiful church. The marble floor inside is all cracked and pushed into all different heights, I assume from constant flooding. Even when we were there with the heat and no rain in sight, water had risen out of the ground in front of the basillica and pooled in front of the stairs outside.

We didn't go on a gondola (not for €100 or there abouts!!) but it was funny to see all the people who did in the evening and then get stuck in a gondola traffic jam. Here is one below, there must have been about 8 gondolas, 1 behind another trying to get through the canal.

We only spent 2 nights in Venice and there were many amazing churches, another one in the picture below. I think I would have preferred to be there when it is cooler, even if it is rainy and flooded.

From Venice we caught yet another train to Florence which was just as hot as Venice. The problem was here that our hotel had NO air-con, only a window and a fan. The problem was that the window let in heaps of mosquitos, but if you didn't open the window it was stiflingly hot. If you did open it you had to cover yourself entirely with the sheet so they didn't bite you all night. This meant that we were really hot anyway and my face still got bitten if I left it uncovered to breath. Even Chris was getting bitten (which I really loved) and he was loosing it, being angry that Florence is the one place in the world that mozzies bite him, and at how annoying the bites are.

Because of this stupid hotel situation we didn't have a great sleep, and on our second and last night we hardly got any sleep at all. We finally got to sleep at about 5 am and slept in until about 9. The Uffizi museum was somewhere we really wanted to see, but the line (again in the sun) to get in was about 2 hours long and we had to get our train to Rome at 2, so we decided to just miss it altogether. A shame, but I suppose not everything can work out on a long trip like this.

Below is a copy of Michelangelo's 'David'.

We did go in to the Duomo, a huge cathedral in the centre of Florence, and it was very nice (and cool). We walked up 414 steps to get to the top of the Campanile next to it and see the view of the city. You can see the top of the Duomo below and some of the view.

Here is the front of the Duomo and Campanile on the right.

Picture above the door, see above and below.

We left for Rome on Tuesday and accidentally got the wrong train, the Eurostar, instead of our slower, cheaper, local train. We didn't book the express Eurostar because the person at the booking office (some trains aren't covered by our Eurail train pass) said it would cost €40. When the conductor came around to us though and had to upgrade our local train ticket to the Eurostar though, it only cost us an extra €8, making it a total of €18! We still don't understand how the same train ticket would cost an extra €22 at the office, but we had a nice, cool, fast journey to Rome and we have a lovely cool hotel room too, with our own bathroom too.

So far we have been having a good time. I am eating mainly gelato and pizza, with a some pasta and granitas thrown in. Rome blog update coming soon... we leave here for Munich on Wednesday night.