Sunshine at Last
Thursday, March 19th, 2009Provence, France.
It has been a long time since I last wrote. We have been both very busy and very lazy the past few weeks. There has been a lot of preparations and planning for coming home, getting married, and moving. Real life stuff has quickly taken over which is nice in its own way. Steve and I are both ready to be home again and then to move and make a new home. I still haven’t heard from Arizona about whether or not I’ve been accepted to their graduate program. Waiting is stressful and a little annoying, but there’s not much I can do about that. We had a nice time in Berlin and Frankfurt visiting our friends Nicole and Jan. It was nice to see Berlin again. It was a completely different experience, though, then when we were there five years ago. It was summertime then and the sun was always shining. In February Berlin was a dreary cold place where even when the sun was out it didn’t seem to fight the dark. We spent a lot of time just relaxing, but we did find the bus stop where we met for the very first time. So that was nice and cheesy. We were only in Frankfurt for a couple of days, but we got a nice tour of the city which is pretty small and nice. We could immediately tell the difference from Berlin–the metro was filled with people in suits and briefcases in Frankfurt where as in Berlin there were more mohawks, piercings, and trenchcoats. I watched my first European football match. It was a little boring. I was surprised by how whiney the players were. There was a lot of fake injuries trying to get penalties called. I guess that’s just how the game is played, but I thought it was pretty silly to see grown men pretending to be hurt.
We have been in France now for a week and it’s nice to visit my family and see the sites. We’ve been tourists again which has been fun. I convinced Steve to go to the Louvre with me, and it was really lovely. We got the audio guides which were well worth the money. I only wish they had information for all of the pieces of art as the placards at the Louvre are only in French and sometimes I’d be interested in something that wasn’t on the guide, but I was out of luck. I was disapointed by both the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo. Neither really captured my attention or my imagination. We’re in Provence now and it’s so beautiful and sunny. It’s wonderful to see the sun again. I’ve really noticed how much dreary, cold weather affects me. Yesterday I felt more awake and happy than I have maybe since coming to Europe and that was with waking up at 5:30 am to get the train to Avignon. TGV train tickets are very expensive, but we got a deal through the website iDTGV. The tickets should have cost us 300 euros for 2 roundtrip tickets from Paris to Avignon. Instead we got them for 150. We could have gotten them cheaper, too I think, if we would have booked them earlier.
So far we’ve had pretty good luck with transportation in Europe. There’s a bus line called Eurolines which has cheap bus tickets around Europe. We took them from Prague to Berlin for 50 euros. And we got a cheap train ticket from Berlin to Frankfurt–only 10 euros each. There is a special weekend ticket in Germany where up to 5 people can ride on one 40 euro ticket. We found a guy online who wanted 10 euros each to ride with him on his ticket. It worked out really well. We had to change trains three times, and it took longer than the more expensive, faster trains (it took us 9 hours) but since it was so cheap it was worth it. It was also nice to be traveling with someone who knew where he was going. We just hung out and he told us when it was our stop next and directed us to the next train. It was one of the least stressful trips we’ve had in a long time.
We fly to the US on the 24th. We got really cheap tickets then, too, through Aer Lingus. Under $1,000 for both of us one way Paris to NYC. So we’ve been having good transporation luck lately. We’re going to spend two days in New York being tourists. Neither of us has been there before and we’re looking forward to seeing the sites and hopefully going to a Broadway show. And then it’s a Greyhound Bus to Pennsylvania and seeing family and friends again. I think being back in the States is going to be a bit of a shock. It’ll be interesting to always understand what people are saying and to be able to ask questions and read menus again. And wedding and party planning is going really well, so that’s exciting too.
So everything’s good with us. We went to an amazing Picasso exhibit at the Cathedral of Images near Les Beaux. It was breathtaking. They took an old quarry and project images of artists on the walls. It’s all set to music, and the whole experience was one of the best we’ve had on the whole trip. Click Here to learn more about it. They feature different artists every ten months. The Website also has beautiful pictures that almost capture how awesome it is. Steve and I both highly recommend it to anyone traveling around Provence.
montarsig