Heya!
First of, sorry for the tardiness of this post. As I left family and friends and started staying with couchsurfers and hostels, internet became a valuable commodity.
So my route over the last month has been Paris-Annecy-Geneva-Lauterbrunnen-Interlaken-Lucerne-Bellinzona-Lugano-Locarno-Liechtenstein-Appenzel-Cortona(Italy)-Zurich.
Paris is a really amazing city (I know I'm not the first to say it). There is so much history concentrated in this city in all the monuments, parks, and museums. I climbed to the second level of the Eiffel Tower, visited the Pantheon, toured around the Louvre for 3 hours, walked around Notre-Dame and generally soaked up the city. Though there is amazing art and architecture all around, there is also a sense of uneasiness when it comes to poverty and immigration. But the most important of all was that I had a Moosehead beer in the Great Canadian Pub on La Seine!
Annecy is absolutely gorgeous! A big enough city to have everything you want and right next to a beautiful (and not too cold to swim in) lake and the Alps. I did quite a bit of hiking, some hitch-hiking to get around, some sailing on the lake (the lack of wind left me a little wanting though) and some relaxing in the parks. This was also my first experience couchsurfing and it was really great.
Geneva is pretty neat. As an international hub, I heard a lot of different languages when I was walking around. I checked ou the "Jet d'eau" (a 50-metre jet of water in the middle of the lake that seems to only serve one purpose : make Geneva a little more touristy), the Red Cross Museum (excellent and very moving), and the Palais des Nations, the European UN HQ (also, the old headquarters for the League of Nations, but curiously the most interesting thing for me was bookshop - books and reports on any social issue yo could want to learn about). This was also my first experience with hostels in Europe and I wasn't that impressed. My hostel was so huge and there wasn't any effort made to create situations where backpackers will meet each other.
I then went way up into the mountains at Lauterbrunen. A really nice little ski-town, it made a good base for a little hiking. The only problem was that it was raining adn cloudy when I was there so I didn't see too much of the Eiger, Monsch and Jungfrau mountains. My hostel was really nice, but it was a little overrun with South Korean tourists who aren't very interested in meeting other travellers.
Interlaken is just a little below Lauterbrunen. It's renown for its extreme sports, but I stuck to hiking. The weather cleared up a bit and I got some really nice views. I also met three Czech guys in my hostel (much better than in Geneva) who insisted I taste every kind of Czech alcohol they had with them - it was a fun night. Na zdravi!
I then chilled out in Lucerne while waiting to meet up with my friends. We were there for August 1st, the Swiss National Holiday, but there wasn't too much going on except a celebratory cannon salute to the Swiss Cantons.
We spent a couple nights in the Italian part of Switzerland in an old house on a hill with a vineyard. The food and the wine were both excellent and began noticing my lack of german and italian skills... We also went to a chocolate factory near Lugano (where I did not see any Oompa Loompas :( ).
We then left for Liechtenstein - a small country, which was really great. We went swimming, hiking, wine-tasting, museum touring and generally had good time. Our hike was a little more than we had expected (it was very steep with a lot of loose rock) and we didn't even make it to the top.
We then went to Appenzel for a couple hours to see "a typical Swiss town", but we left soon after and stayed with some family friends in the north of Switzerland.
I left for Cortona, Italy on August 5th. Cortona is one of the Tuscan hill-towns (literally built on a hill). It's really nice and though it is a bit touristy, it has done very well at maintaining its small-italian-town culture (for example, almost all the shops are closed from 1 to 3 for siesta). Walking around in Cortona is quite a work out since, mystifyingly, everything seems to be "up the hill". I joined my friend Olivia who had studied in Cortona with a special program of the UofA. It was great to learn about the Etruscans and the Romans for whom Cortona had been very important. We went to a villa her parents had rented for a week - a villa with olive groves, fresh vegetables and fruit from the garden, a swimming pool and lovely Tuscan sun. We also went for a little hike out to a very old (12th century) Franciscan monastery.
I've come back to Zurich now to visit some friends I met in Ecuador. It's been really great. We went to the zoo yesterday (ironically, I saw some spectacled bears, which are endemic to Ecuador) and last night I joined a big group of their friends for cheese fondue in a park!
To come: a side-trip to Innsbruck for some hiking, visiting some friends in east Germany and then hanging out with some other friends in Copenhagen/Lund. In September, I'm planning on returning to Holland and concentrating on my Dutch while doing some Woofing (volunteer organic farming) and some housesitting. My last month in Europe (november/december) I think I'll head south to somewhere a little warmer before coming back to Canada in the middle of winter (apparently I like shocking myself with extreme temperature differences). If anyone reading this woul like to join me for a little tour of Spain, the French riviera and a little bit of Italy, let me know!
More to come in the next couple weeks.
Cheers,
Chad
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