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elwenI guess the trend that's been going on for a long time now is not so much that I am less of an online journaller in spirit, but that I write all these entries in my head and less often make it to the computer to preserve them. Maybe I need less of the self-validation that comes from having the words immortalized? Or I'm just too busy and lazy. :P
But it's somewhat unsettling, especially since I just read a section of the social psychology book for class today that talks about how you reconstruct your memories and how inaccurate that can be.
Anyways, yeah. I went to Europe over break. We spent an afternoon in London, then flew to Venice and bussed around Italy a lot, then went to Switzerland, spent two days in Paris, went to Brussels, and ended in the Netherlands. The first thing that struck me was that you really do need to take your time when visiting countries so steeped in history. I guess I knew that from the start. My desire to go to Europe -- mainly England -- was kind of misinterpreted by my dad, I think. I wanted to go see the countryside, and castles, not drive around London and go to the British Museum to see, of all things, Chinese art. We had lunch in Chinatown, too. And this is why I hate Chinese tour companies. It's a lot like how, whenever my relatives visit, we tend to take them to San Francisco's Chinatown. I still do not understand this interest in flying more than 10 hours just to see some other place's pale imitation of where you came from.
Anyhow, I don't want to go through a laundry list of the places we visited, and it's been a bit long for me to do so anyway. There were a few things I wanted to talk about, though.
I guess the first thing people ask is, "What was your favorite city?" I liked Amsterdam. Possibly this is because it was the last place we visited, I don't think so. We took a cruise through the canals, and I just really liked the feel of the city. The canal-front houses were very . . . quaint, I suppose you could say. They were neat and orderly, but still retained their individuality. The canals made the city feel more open and fresh, I think, in contrast to Venice's canals, which were all narrow and made the place feel claustrophobic. [It's kind of scary. I went to talk to Flagan about my senior thesis, and he asked me about Europe, and when I said I liked Amsterdam, he started telling me about the good universities in the Netherlands and suggested that I consider a postdoc there. o_O I wasn't that serious about it!]
In general, I didn't notice any huge differences between Europe and the US. I'm pretty sure they're there, but they're not something you see as a tourist who doesn't get much contact with the population. The only thing I can comment on is the bathrooms. I guess paying for a bathroom is not entirely an alien concept; there are coin-operated bathrooms in Santa Cruz by the Boardwalk. But rather than posting a price, in a much larger percentage of our bathroom stops, there was simply someone sitting at a small table in front of the bathrooms with a plate. Apparently the concept was that you were supposed to "tip" them for the use of the bathroom. I had several points of confusion about this. First of all, we always paid before we went in. Aren't tips supposed to be based on quality of service and hence given afterwards? A more pressing issue was that I never quite figured out how much it was appropriate to pay. I think my dad settled on approximately the lowest price we had seen specified. And I suppose you probably also see the . . . um, some kind of economic thing where there's no incentive for people to pay. Apparently this was a problem sometimes, because the tour guide told us about how McDonalds didn't get enough tips and so they switched to having a combination lock on the door, which you had to ask them for while ordering something. But none of the McDonalds we went to actually activated the locks, which confused me even more.
So yeah, that was something I probably spent way too much time thinking about during and after the trip. Maybe it has something to do with obsessing over small amounts of money, which my dad keeps accusing me of.
Our tour guide was . . . interesting. When my sister and I were able to check his facts, it seemed to us that he made up blatant lies about history. Like how da Gama sailed around the horn of Africa and then went to China. Sadly, I can't remember more examples, but I promise you they existed. He also tended to overestimate the amount of time we were being given to visit something and underestimated the amount of time spent traveling, which I never got to complain about, which still kind of bothers me. This was exacerbated by the fact that my brother turned the trip into a bathroom tour -- maybe that's why I had so many thoughts on the subject -- so any drive that was longer than announced tended to turn ugly. Since it was a Chinese tour, the guide spoke in Cantonese and English, but in spite of being from Hong Kong, his English was less than impressive. For me, the most memorable line was about how people in the Netherlands speak "Hollish". So yeah, that was our tour guide.
I think that was most of the thoughts I really wanted to get down -- I have a warped sense of what's worth remembering, yes, I know.
Anyway, on to pictures! I keep promising to install Gallery and upload pictures "later", but I think I've finally recognized the reality that it'll be a long time before that happens, so at least here's some evidence that I was actually in Europe. Scenery will have to wait, since I figure you can find those elsewhere anyhow.
With my sister in front of St. Paul's Cathedral, where Diana and Charles were married. There's this statue of lovers, and you're supposed to kiss in front of it to make your love eternal or something, except they didn't, or so the story goes.
In front of Tower Bridge. I include this mainly because Tower Bridge is gorgeous. The tour guide had this story about how Americans came and looked at it and assumed that it had to be London Bridge because it was so grand, and so they bought London Bridge, which turned out to be much more boring. And so the London Bridge there now is actually a new one put there after the first one was shipped in pieces to the US.
At the top of Mt. Titlis, the highest peak in Switzerland (?) or something. [No glasses because they were fogging.] I blame all my troubles on this day. Immediately upon reaching the summit, we had to climb 5 flights of stairs, which did not suit my lungs very well. Then there was the cold, of course. When we came back down, I had a sip of limoncello, this 80 proof drink that the tour guide had mentioned that my aunt had bought to try. I had a headache the rest of the day, and that night was pretty miserable. I didn't help that the hotel kept the heater extremely high, and so we slept with the window open (while it was snowing) and traffic sounds all night. For the rest of the trip, I was congested and had a cough, and that lasted until I got back to Tech, upon which I promptly caught the much nastier sick that downed me the first week of term. So I blame the mountain for making me sick initially, which made me more susceptible to the flu thing.
Plus, while I'm sure the sights from the cable cars are quite stunning in the summer, pure white just isn't that interesting. Titlis has bragging rights on this rotating cable car thing that I think is the stupidest idea ever. If you cram 100 people into a round thing, not very many of them are going to appreciate the fact that they are in fact turning around slowly. My sister and I did manage to stand near the window on the way down, though, but, like I said, there wasn't anything to see. We did amuse ourselves, though, by writing things like "Frodo lives" and "ZOMG" in the frost. XD
Night on the Champs-Elysees in front of the Arc de Triomphe. The rest of the tour group went to see a show at Moulin Rouge, but my sister and I had no interest, and the tour guide suggested that my brother not go, they dropped my dad and us off at the Champs-Elysees for 3 hours. I'm impressed that my dad and my brother actually survived, even considering that my sister and I aren't that obsessed with shopping. I think we only visited the Swatch store and Sephora. We came back to see the Arc the next morning with the entire group, but I like this picture better. It feels more alive and real. Only with crappier lighting.
You can't visit the Netherlands without seeing windmills.
Oh yeah, two more things I wanted to say.
My dad was talking to a young couple, who was considering visiting Japan. At first he suggested that I tell them about it, but before I had a chance, he launched into the story of how my grandparents went and thought it was boring because they just saw temple after temple after temple. [And yes, Kyoto can be really boring like that.] But the husband countered that visiting Europe was just church after church after church. [Or cathedral, or basilica, or whatever the differences are.] And it's really true. There's the Duomo, and there's St. Peter's, and there's Notre Dame, and they all look the same to me, too. At least the temples are all incredibly different in character.
Speaking of churches, though, it was interesting and weird to visit St. Peter's Basilica because I had finally got back to finishing the Hyperion Cantos, and they talk about it a lot. Even to the point of traveling through the catacombs underneath and coming across the supposed remains of St. Peter. Of course, this is after they had transported a big chunk of the Vatican to the planet Pacem before the Earth got swallowed up by a black hole.
But it's somewhat unsettling, especially since I just read a section of the social psychology book for class today that talks about how you reconstruct your memories and how inaccurate that can be.
Anyways, yeah. I went to Europe over break. We spent an afternoon in London, then flew to Venice and bussed around Italy a lot, then went to Switzerland, spent two days in Paris, went to Brussels, and ended in the Netherlands. The first thing that struck me was that you really do need to take your time when visiting countries so steeped in history. I guess I knew that from the start. My desire to go to Europe -- mainly England -- was kind of misinterpreted by my dad, I think. I wanted to go see the countryside, and castles, not drive around London and go to the British Museum to see, of all things, Chinese art. We had lunch in Chinatown, too. And this is why I hate Chinese tour companies. It's a lot like how, whenever my relatives visit, we tend to take them to San Francisco's Chinatown. I still do not understand this interest in flying more than 10 hours just to see some other place's pale imitation of where you came from.
Anyhow, I don't want to go through a laundry list of the places we visited, and it's been a bit long for me to do so anyway. There were a few things I wanted to talk about, though.
I guess the first thing people ask is, "What was your favorite city?" I liked Amsterdam. Possibly this is because it was the last place we visited, I don't think so. We took a cruise through the canals, and I just really liked the feel of the city. The canal-front houses were very . . . quaint, I suppose you could say. They were neat and orderly, but still retained their individuality. The canals made the city feel more open and fresh, I think, in contrast to Venice's canals, which were all narrow and made the place feel claustrophobic. [It's kind of scary. I went to talk to Flagan about my senior thesis, and he asked me about Europe, and when I said I liked Amsterdam, he started telling me about the good universities in the Netherlands and suggested that I consider a postdoc there. o_O I wasn't that serious about it!]
In general, I didn't notice any huge differences between Europe and the US. I'm pretty sure they're there, but they're not something you see as a tourist who doesn't get much contact with the population. The only thing I can comment on is the bathrooms. I guess paying for a bathroom is not entirely an alien concept; there are coin-operated bathrooms in Santa Cruz by the Boardwalk. But rather than posting a price, in a much larger percentage of our bathroom stops, there was simply someone sitting at a small table in front of the bathrooms with a plate. Apparently the concept was that you were supposed to "tip" them for the use of the bathroom. I had several points of confusion about this. First of all, we always paid before we went in. Aren't tips supposed to be based on quality of service and hence given afterwards? A more pressing issue was that I never quite figured out how much it was appropriate to pay. I think my dad settled on approximately the lowest price we had seen specified. And I suppose you probably also see the . . . um, some kind of economic thing where there's no incentive for people to pay. Apparently this was a problem sometimes, because the tour guide told us about how McDonalds didn't get enough tips and so they switched to having a combination lock on the door, which you had to ask them for while ordering something. But none of the McDonalds we went to actually activated the locks, which confused me even more.
So yeah, that was something I probably spent way too much time thinking about during and after the trip. Maybe it has something to do with obsessing over small amounts of money, which my dad keeps accusing me of.
Our tour guide was . . . interesting. When my sister and I were able to check his facts, it seemed to us that he made up blatant lies about history. Like how da Gama sailed around the horn of Africa and then went to China. Sadly, I can't remember more examples, but I promise you they existed. He also tended to overestimate the amount of time we were being given to visit something and underestimated the amount of time spent traveling, which I never got to complain about, which still kind of bothers me. This was exacerbated by the fact that my brother turned the trip into a bathroom tour -- maybe that's why I had so many thoughts on the subject -- so any drive that was longer than announced tended to turn ugly. Since it was a Chinese tour, the guide spoke in Cantonese and English, but in spite of being from Hong Kong, his English was less than impressive. For me, the most memorable line was about how people in the Netherlands speak "Hollish". So yeah, that was our tour guide.
I think that was most of the thoughts I really wanted to get down -- I have a warped sense of what's worth remembering, yes, I know.
Anyway, on to pictures! I keep promising to install Gallery and upload pictures "later", but I think I've finally recognized the reality that it'll be a long time before that happens, so at least here's some evidence that I was actually in Europe. Scenery will have to wait, since I figure you can find those elsewhere anyhow.
With my sister in front of St. Paul's Cathedral, where Diana and Charles were married. There's this statue of lovers, and you're supposed to kiss in front of it to make your love eternal or something, except they didn't, or so the story goes.
In front of Tower Bridge. I include this mainly because Tower Bridge is gorgeous. The tour guide had this story about how Americans came and looked at it and assumed that it had to be London Bridge because it was so grand, and so they bought London Bridge, which turned out to be much more boring. And so the London Bridge there now is actually a new one put there after the first one was shipped in pieces to the US.
At the top of Mt. Titlis, the highest peak in Switzerland (?) or something. [No glasses because they were fogging.] I blame all my troubles on this day. Immediately upon reaching the summit, we had to climb 5 flights of stairs, which did not suit my lungs very well. Then there was the cold, of course. When we came back down, I had a sip of limoncello, this 80 proof drink that the tour guide had mentioned that my aunt had bought to try. I had a headache the rest of the day, and that night was pretty miserable. I didn't help that the hotel kept the heater extremely high, and so we slept with the window open (while it was snowing) and traffic sounds all night. For the rest of the trip, I was congested and had a cough, and that lasted until I got back to Tech, upon which I promptly caught the much nastier sick that downed me the first week of term. So I blame the mountain for making me sick initially, which made me more susceptible to the flu thing.
Plus, while I'm sure the sights from the cable cars are quite stunning in the summer, pure white just isn't that interesting. Titlis has bragging rights on this rotating cable car thing that I think is the stupidest idea ever. If you cram 100 people into a round thing, not very many of them are going to appreciate the fact that they are in fact turning around slowly. My sister and I did manage to stand near the window on the way down, though, but, like I said, there wasn't anything to see. We did amuse ourselves, though, by writing things like "Frodo lives" and "ZOMG" in the frost. XD
Night on the Champs-Elysees in front of the Arc de Triomphe. The rest of the tour group went to see a show at Moulin Rouge, but my sister and I had no interest, and the tour guide suggested that my brother not go, they dropped my dad and us off at the Champs-Elysees for 3 hours. I'm impressed that my dad and my brother actually survived, even considering that my sister and I aren't that obsessed with shopping. I think we only visited the Swatch store and Sephora. We came back to see the Arc the next morning with the entire group, but I like this picture better. It feels more alive and real. Only with crappier lighting.
You can't visit the Netherlands without seeing windmills.
Oh yeah, two more things I wanted to say.
My dad was talking to a young couple, who was considering visiting Japan. At first he suggested that I tell them about it, but before I had a chance, he launched into the story of how my grandparents went and thought it was boring because they just saw temple after temple after temple. [And yes, Kyoto can be really boring like that.] But the husband countered that visiting Europe was just church after church after church. [Or cathedral, or basilica, or whatever the differences are.] And it's really true. There's the Duomo, and there's St. Peter's, and there's Notre Dame, and they all look the same to me, too. At least the temples are all incredibly different in character.
Speaking of churches, though, it was interesting and weird to visit St. Peter's Basilica because I had finally got back to finishing the Hyperion Cantos, and they talk about it a lot. Even to the point of traveling through the catacombs underneath and coming across the supposed remains of St. Peter. Of course, this is after they had transported a big chunk of the Vatican to the planet Pacem before the Earth got swallowed up by a black hole.
Europeanized Asian Food
Date: 2006-01-24 03:38 am (UTC)lol, I'm continually amused by international McDonald's. That thing we ate at the Hong Kong one was cool too. Spicy burger thingy.
Re: Europeanized Asian Food
Date: 2006-01-24 06:04 am (UTC)That spicy thing was scary. Didn't it make us drink, like, tons of water? o.O
no subject
Date: 2006-01-25 07:10 pm (UTC)when i was in europe [15 years ago, kind of scary to think about], the group i was with liked to go to mcdonalds and what not to look at the differences in how western culture was perceived [and to get the cheapest meal available at the time]; it also prevented a sense of homesickness by presenting the familiar. i can understand why folks would fly halfway around the world to see a pale-imitation of what they experience at home - to see how foreigners depict it, and gain a sense of comfort with what they are accustomed to. although it also provides a rather large source of mocking bemusement as well when they get it wrong... [i was very tempted to eat at the 'california-style cuisine' restaurant we encountered in paris back in the day. it probably would have been everything you get at other restaurants smothered in avocado slices or some such.]
i would be curious to know more about the origins of the red tape seen in the background of your champs elysees picture that says 'booba'. ^_^
no subject
Date: 2006-01-26 03:05 am (UTC)