Yeesh, June was a busy month! I’m just now finally catching up with what we all did. Hopefully I can get through the several trips we went on before the next batch! My folks had arrived in Europe late in May and had spent some time with our Austrian relatives. Our plan was to meet them in Prague for a week and then head back to Dublin. So on our 2nd anniversary, Diane and I flew to Prague.

We arrived in the afternoon and made the trip from the airport into town pretty easily. There’s a convenient bus from the airport into a metro stop, which we hopped on and found our hotel. Upon walking in we were greeted by my parents and my cousin and her husband who were sorting out our rooms. Apparently the hotel had some water problems, and we were moved to another hotel in the same chain but right in the old town. This turned out to be pretty handy, as we didn’t even have to make use of the transit services at all that whole week. We just walked everywhere.

Having found our new hotel, we checked in and then headed out to wander the streets a bit. The streets of Prague are quite pretty. The streets and sidewalks are all cobblestone, and the sidewalks in particular are all arranged in nice patterns of black and white stones. After wandering a ways, we found a place to eat called the two hedgehogs (after translation, of course). Dinner was simple, and tasty.

The next morning we got up early (well, for us) and after a quick breakfast at the hotel, headed out towards the Jewish district of the city. This is apparently quite a draw for tourists, so we figured getting there earlier would be best. The tourist areas for this were several buildings spread throughout the Jewish district. So we dutifully took each building in order. The most impressive one of the bunch was the Spanish Synagogue — in which every inch was beautifully decorated. I wish pictures had been allowed inside …

After exploring these buildings we went in pursuit of lunch, and after getting out of the heat for a bit, hit the streets again. My mom was looking for some bead shops, and one in particular was near by so we went in search of it. After finding it, our group split up for a bit of exploring and shopping on our own. So Diane and I split off — I had seen a Crumpler store (a company that makes nice bags and backpacks) which we went off to and I bought a new camera bag. Sweet! After that, we found a lovely little park with an incredible rose garden, and a little farther along a mall that sold some cheap and delicious ice cream. We met back up with the rest of our group in front of the National musuem which overlooks Wenceslas square.

From there we headed back towards our hotel to drop off our purchases and get out of the heat for a bit more — it was 30 degrees almost every day there! We then went for dinner at a pub around the corner from our hotel. Not the best choice for food, but it wasn’t too bad either.

The next day, the plan was to hit up Prague castle. This wasn’t something my dad was interested in doing again, so he took my cousin and her husband off shopping and we walked our way up to the castle to explore the many exhibits open there. It was a blisteringly hot day, but we got going and there sure was a lot to see at the castle. Probably the highlight of it was St Vitus’ cathedral, which sits in the middle of a large courtyard in Prague Castle. The cathedral itself is impressive enough from the outside, but inside it was quite amazing. It sported several large stained glass windows with incredible detail, and every nook and cranny of the church seemed to be filled with yet another thing to look at. It was a good spot for pictures…

We took our time looking through all the exhibitions and then headed back down towards Charles’ Bridge: a long pedestrian bridge over the Vltava river. This was our meeting spot with the rest of our crew. On the way, we walked through quite a large group of people surrounding a bike race that had been setup in the area. So in +30 degree heat, these people were pedalling their bikes up and down hills for what is almost certainly a grueling amount of time. Ugh. The rest of our party were waiting for us at the bridge and we walked around the area for a bit doing some recon for a place to eat a little later. Diane had done a bit of research on wikitravel and we settled in a place called Malostranska Pivnice which turned out to be a great choice. The food was delish!

The next day, our destination was Petřínská rozhledna (Petřín Lookout Tower). The tower sits on top of a large hill overlooking prague, so the top of the tower offered a really nice view of Prague. To get there, we took a funicular that serviced that area. On their previous trip to Prague, my parents had climbed the hill and had ruled that out as a possibility for this trip. So after taking the funicular we wandered some of the gardens at the top of the hill and eventually found our way to the tower. Since the rest of the party had already done the tower on their previous visit, just Diane and I climbed the many stairs to the top and enjoyed the view from the top.

The heat had started to get to us there, so we decided it was time to head back down the hill and find a place in the shade to have some lunch. We found a place on the main road not far from where the funicular stop was. After a much needed break we wandered around a bit more before going back to our hotel to rest some more (we really weren’t used to the heat, and the whole week of heat was enough to make us slow right down). On the way though, we grabbed some ice cream from the same place a few days earlier. Mmm.

This being the last day in Prague, I wanted to try and find a particularly good restaurant to eat at. After doing some looking on wikitravel I found one, but when we got there it was all booked up. Oops. So we returned back to the hotel and asked them for a recommendation. They kindly made a reservation at a place really close by for a late dinner — which was fine given our late lunch. So we wandered over there and enjoyed a wonderful meal.

Our final day in Prague was a travel day, so we didn’t do much other than wander a little bit before taking transit to the airport and heading back to Dublin with my mom. It was a pretty fun week, and I think since we didn’t see much more than the old town in Prague that we’ll have to return!

On our May long weekend (May 8-10th), Diane and I decided that it had been too long since our last trip, and since it was a long weekend it was an opportune moment to hop in the car and check out an area of the Irish countryside we hadn’t yet gotten to. One of the main touristy areas we hadn’t gotten to yet was the Ring of Kerry, in South-West Ireland.

So on Saturday morning, we hopped in our car and started down in the direction of Killarney. It’s a pretty long drive! It probably took us well in excess of 4 hours to get there, and since we slept in and packed that morning we didn’t actually get on the road until almost noon. The roads in Ireland are pretty high variance: there are now quite a few fancy new motorways available, but once you get off of those the road quality can quickly degrade into roads that you really can’t drive very fast on. Most of the way out though, the roads were pretty good, so that was good.

We stopped to check in at our B&B – a little house a few minutes drive outside of Killarney. Our host kindly informed us that Killarney was particularly busy that weekend due to a motor rally happening nearby. Forewarned, we headed into town and took a quick pre-dinner walk into Killarney National park before heading off to find some food. Not sure where to eat, we consulted our handy Ireland lonely planet guide and it recommended a restaurant called Bricín which we were fortunate to get a table at since it was booked up later that evening. The food was absolutely delicious! A great way to start off our trip.

We returned to our B&B early since we wanted to get an early start on the next day. The day was a bit rainy and windy at the start, but after being on the road for a little bit the sun came out and the day was absolutely gorgeous. We started the day by stopping off at Muckross house which is part of Killarney national park. The house has some really nice gardens including an extensive arboretum which was quite pretty. Lots of mossy trees and flowering trees!

Our next stop along the ring of Kerry was the Torc waterfall, which conveniently enough is just a few minutes walk from the road. The waterfall is just part of a larger hike which we might need to go back and do at a later time. But we had a lot to see that day, so we didn’t really have time to spend a couple hours hiking. So on we went, next taking a quick stop at “the ladies view” which is a nice viewpoint from the road over the hills and lakes. The place gets its name because of the “pleasure expressed by Queen Victoria’s ladies in waiting on their visit in 1861 in that spot”. It is indeed a very pretty view.

Not too far from there, we stopped at Molls’ gap and the Avoca cafe stationed there for a small lunch. From there, it was a fairly short drive to Kenmare which the guidebook said had a stone circle to see, so we did! We also made stops at the Staigue Stone fort (an old ring fort overlooking some stunning scenery) and at the viewpoint at Coomakeesta pass which offers an absolutely incredible view from the road. The road is up high with green rolling hills dropping below us and spreading out dramatically right out to eh rugged coastline. For us, this was probably the highlight of the very scenic ring of kerry drive.

Our stop for the night was a town called Cahersiveen, which is a lovely little town. We got there pretty early so instead of going to dinner right away we wandered around the town a bit, finding not only the giant Daniel O’ Connell memorial church but also an old abbey that had long since fallen into disrepair. So much so that there was a whole bunch of vines growing in and through the bricks. Pretty neat … Dinner that night was at the seafood restaurant QC’s. Another really good meal!

On the Sunday we decided to call and see if there was any space left on a boat headed to the Skelligs: two craggy rocky islands shooting out from the ocean off the coast of Ireland. Apparently, getting on one of the boats in the summer is pretty tough, but they were just getting going for the season so we got a spot. Nice! So on Monday morning we found ourselves on a boat at 10am heading on a 50 minute boat ride to Skellig Michael. The water was calm and lovely, and we were soon climbing the hundreds of steps up to the top.

The skellig’s stairs were numerous and it took quite awhile to climb them. The view from the top was sure worth it though! Near the top there is some beehive style huts set up  – apparently there was a small group of people who used to live there a long time ago. I can’t imagine it though.

After a couple of hours climbing around, we got back on the boat. The boat operator took us by the other skellig which no one is allowed to land on — it is reserved as a bird sanctuary … and my oh my there were a lot of birds!!! We didn’t just see the birds though – there were also some spotted seals sunning themselves on the rocks! The waves were pretty choppy on the way back, so we were given yellow raincoats to prevent us from getting soaked.

Having made it back to port safely, we were now facing a multi-hour drive back to Dublin, so we started high tailing it back. We stopped in Limerick on the way for dinner at a pub recommended from our handy tour guide… and the food was pretty awesome for pub food.

Not much else to say about our trip. We got back to Dublin pretty late and basically fell into bed after a good long weekend trip! We’re going to have to do another one of these trips in the near future — there’s so much to see down there.

Morgan

A couple weeks ago, we joined a group of friends heading to Mayrhofen, Austria to go on a weeklong ski trip. The week was incredibly fun. We benefited from some awesome weather which certainly helped make our trip a success.

Our flight left Dublin on Saturday afternoon. The group of us included Diane and I, Aaron and Christine, Diarmuid and Bea, Jeremy, and Bryce. Half the group had the earlier flight, with Aaron and Christine being on the later flight with us. Our first surprise on the trip: our 2.5 hour flight to Innsbruck with Austrian Airlines included a meal! I don’t think I had ever had a free meal on a sub 5 hour flight before. So it was a pretty pleasant flight over (although Aaron had an incident with a glass of red wine during the meal).

We arrived at Innsbruck airport, and met our tour operators who directed us to some buses taking us the hour or so drive to Mayrhofen. The procedure was swift and well organized which meant that we were soon at our hotel all settled in and being served our first multi-course meal of the week. Having purchased the package that we did, the flights, accommodation, breakfast, and dinner were all included leaving just lift tickets, rentals, and lunches as the necessary costs of the trip. So despite arriving at the hotel relatively late for dinner, we were promptly served a two-course “snack”.

The next morning, we got up relatively early to get in the queue for ski rentals for the week. Our hotel had a ski rental shop next door so that was nice and convenient. Having got our gear, we joined the giant queue for the main gondola up to the Penken mountain. The queue formed a multi-level spiral which you had to shuffle along slowly. Not a very comfortable way to start the day, particularly in a pair of ski boots, but hey … we’re here to ski right? The Penkenbahn gondola is ridiculous. Between the start and end points, you gain 1200 meters of elevation, and between those two points, there are just two structural towers supporting the cables that carry the gondola cars up that far. The amazement didn’t really leave me throughout, despite several rides in that gondola on the way up and down over the week. It was … well … ridiculous.

The sky was cloud-free and the sun shone down on us all day. It was a gorgeous first day for skiing. Apart from an hour or so stopping for lunch, we hit the slopes pretty hard – exploring various parts of the mountain. The area is pretty vast, but there were also a lot of people in the common areas, causing there to be some pretty massive queues at the numerous chairs around the hill. So in the afternoon, we ventured a little farther away which helped with the queues.

One thing that was pretty amazing about this hill. In Canada, the best chair lifts I’ve been on were the high speed quad chairs. For me, high speed quad was what they were — but at this hill, there was a couple of quad chairs, but they mostly had 6 or 8-man high speed chairs. Woah! Not only that, a lot of the chairs had conveyer belts which helped get everyone to the line where the chair would pick people up. At first I thought it was weird, but the conveyer belts really helped ease the process of getting on the chair which meant less stoppages for people who failed to get on the chair properly. So all in all a pretty solid improvement.

One of the downsides to skiing on Penken is there isn’t a skiout from the mountain to the Mayrhofen townsite. There are two skiouts to neighbouring towns, but this didn’t seem like a palatable choice so at the end of the day we shuffled back into a giant queue for the gondola on the way back down. Of the things that went on that week, the lineup for the gondola on the way down was the most miserable. You don’t really have much to do except deal with a bazillion other people in the line all shuffling along. At the end of a lengthy day of skiing, this wasn’t all that fun. But if that’s the worst part of the trip, that’s a pretty good trip, I think!

Having made it back to our hotel, we returned back to the gondola area where we entered the “Ice Bar”. The bar didn’t really have anything to do with ice besides being next to the gondola, but it was a pretty hopping place. We tried our first mulled wine (or Glüwein) on the trip there while listening to catchy german songs — many of which we had heard at Oktoberfest, and other singable well known songs. Partway through our visit, a guy dressed in a polar bear costume jumped up on one of the stands and started dancing. A few minutes later a girl jumped up on another one and started dancing as well. This was apparently one of the features of this particular establishment since on ensuing nights we would see various people dancing above the crowd of people in the bar.

Having polished off our Glüwein, we returned back to our hotel where we enjoyed its rooftop pool (an event that would be a nightly occurrence all week). The hot tub there would’ve been awesome if it was actually hot … but the pool was pretty nice and warm, and having a rooftop pool with the mountains all around was a pretty awesome experience!

A fairly late dinner followed the pool. The food at our hotel was pretty good in general. There was a few misses, but there was some pretty darn good food — and the soup every night was fantastic.

The next day we got started a little later without the need to beat the lineup at the rental store. The queue at the Penken gondola was still ridiculous, but after making it up that, we got started skiing. I’ve always found that the second day skiing was really rough. My knees take a beating when skiing, and after one full day of skiing my muscles really have a hard time getting going. But we were there to ski, so I pushed pretty hard to keep going. It wasn’t easy though!

That night, the Crystal Ski tour operator put on a pub crawl touring some of the bars in Mayrhofen. So we started at the “Movie Bar” and proceeded to visit half a dozen or so bars. Each was a bit more hopping than the last, and after a shot of (terrible) Schnaps at the first 3 bars and a few rounds of beer … well lets just say we were pretty buzzed. Before leaving from the airport in Dublin, a set of funny Irish hats were purchased, and they made their appearance on the pub crawl. They were pretty popular, and got a fair amount of attention! Some of our party even went so far as to start doing the leprechaun heel click. At one of the bars, we even got the security guard to do a heel click!

The next morning we were in no great shape to get up early. Diane and I were the only ones to make it to breakfast, and it wasn’t until after noon before we made it to the gondola. On this particular day, we decided to go check out a neighbouring mountain called Ahorn accessible by another ridiculous gondola. This particular one was much newer and only had two cars: each holding between 120 and 160 people! Ahorn is a pretty friendly mountain for beginner skiers with a beautiful long-ish gradual slope heading down to an octachair. There’s a bit more advanced skiing from there, but not a huge amount of it and its basically all serviced by a single double chair.

It’s a good mountain though. One of the cool features of it is the White Lounge at the top which is a big igloo with a bar inside. On that particular day, it was absolutely gorgeous out and we spend a fair amount of time at the top lounging on beach chairs/bean bags enjoying the sunshine with a beer. We did a little bit of skiing, but there was a lot of time spent relaxing in the sunshine too. The other cool feature of Ahorn is that there is a ski run right back into town. It was a bit icy in spots, but it made for an excellent way to get back to the town without waiting in a lineup for the gondola.

That was our first three full days in Mayrhofen, Austria. Hopefully I’ll get around to posting about our last three days soon.

Morgan

For the past couple years, we’ve made a bit of a habit of summarizing the year’s events — in a lot of ways just to remind ourselves how much we’d been up to in the previous year. Diane’s already got her ’09 post up. For reference, here’s mine from 2007 and 2008, and Diane’s from 2007 and 2008.

2009 wasn’t set up to be quite as crazy a year as 2008 was — after all, we had set up shop in Ireland already and didn’t have a life-changing schedule involving getting married and moving to another country! It wasn’t without its share of adventures, however. We had visits from several people in 2009, including both my family and Diane’s family, as well as several friends. These visits necessitated trips to various corners of Ireland, and served as good excuses to explore the island we’re living on.

January was a pretty slow month as we went through a fairly lengthy post-holiday case of procrastination. One of the only noteworthy events was we got our Irish learner’s licenses, which was one part of a saga which we needed to go through in order to legally drive our car. The other major part of that saga was a trip home to renew our Canadian driver’s licenses in February. Unluckily for us, delays caused by a week of snow in Dublin made us take 3 days and unplanned sleeps in Dublin and London before finally getting home.. That meant that we unfortunately missed the ski trip out with our friends that we had planned. Doh!

March and April flew by. The company was ramping up for one of the biggest releases we’ve ever made, and tensions were high for what turned out to be an amazingly smooth transition. So I guess I was pretty preoccupied with work. The big event of March though was St Patrick’s day — which is a national holiday here. We headed into town to watch the parade and joined several people after that for pints which lasted well into the evening. In April we made one foray to the Dublin Zoo, and that’s all I can remember!

In May, we finally got out and headed to Budapest to visit my friend Mike. He was planning on applying to work at the company later that year so getting there before he left was high on our list of things to do. Budapest was an excellent time, and we were quite happy to enjoy the time with friends and the wonderful food (I think I really want some goulash now …).

My parents arrived for a long visit in June, so that was a crazy busy month. We took them out on weekend trips out West to see the Cliffs of Moher, and up North to see the Giant’s Causeway, and Diane took them all around the various day trips outside of Dublin that we had seen while I worked during the weekdays. My dad headed home earlier than my mom who stayed on for a couple more weeks — allowing for a short trip out to see the Hill of Tara and Trim Castle as well as a weekend trip to Brighton to visit some friends of my Mom’s there. It was a pretty packed month and a half, and by the end of it we needed a vacation from all the tourism!

In the latter half of July, my friend Mike was in town for his interview, we had an epic company summer party, and we caught one of three Irish tour dates for U2′s U2360 tour.

At the start of August, our friend Bryce came for a visit of about two weeks. That caused us to organize another couple road trips on the weekends – the first out to Galway and the Aran islands, and the second a trip that Christine organized up to Bundoran to go … surfing! I had never been surfing before, and I never expected that Ireland was the place I’d get my first try. But hey, you never know what life’s gonna throw at you!

In September, we headed back to Canada for our JR and Shelly’s wedding. It was held in Jasper, which to us Edmontonians is a pretty special place to us. The weekend went beautifully, and we were very glad to have made it home for that trip. Apart from that, we used the trip home to catch up with as many family and friends that we could conceivably squeeze into a week and a half.

Just a week after Diane and I returned back to Dublin, Diane’s mom and sister arrived in Europe. Diane went over to meet them and they saw some of Britain before coming over to Dublin. The first weekend they were here, we grabbed Carolyn and headed off to Munich with Mike for a whirlwind trip to Oktoberfest. We were there for all of 12 hours, and returned to Dublin just 24 hours after we had left. It was a blast! I’m not too sure that I’m doing that again though. The second weekend of the visit, we took the car back up north again and saw the Giant’s Causeway and the Glens of Antrim.

In November, we went to Oslo, Norway for a weekend which was a pretty fun trip. We followed that trip up with a busy December in which we went to the company Christmas party and then followed it up with a week-long trip to Barcelona! We rang in the new year at a small party with a couple of friends which was a lot of fun — and the big feature of the evening was the inch or so of snow that proceed to fall over the course of the evening.

It was a pretty packed year, full of more traveling than I think I realized. We spent several weekends driving around Ireland, and made trips to Brighton, Budapest, Munich, Oslo, and Barcelona. Oh yeah, two trips home to Canada as well! We sure flew a lot!

To sum up this post, here are some of my favourite photos from this year:

Our 5th day in Barcelona was Christmas day, and since not a lot was going to be open, we decided to sleep in a bit. After a bit of breakfast at the hotel, we wandered out in to the … sunshine! Yup, the clouds finally broke for us and we had a chance to wander around in the sunshine for once. Our plan for the day was to head over to Montjüic, which is a large hill overlooking the city and is the site of several of the venues from the 1992 summer olympics.

The first part of that plan was trying to find the funicular station to take us up, but we missed that which ended up being a good thing since the walk up wasn’t really that taxing, and if we had taken the funicular up we probably would’ve missed some of the views we did get. So as we climbed up, the city fell below us and we got a pretty good look at the city itself — primarily white and beige coloured buildings stretching out before us. Our wandering took us to one end of the closed-for-the-holidays cable car that takes people across the harbour for what I’m sure would be very nice views.

After wandering around a bit more, we took a gondola up to the very top of the mountain where there is a fortress called “Castell de Montjuïc”. This fortress offered some great views of the surrounding countryside, and conveniently for us had a restaurant in the fortress courtyard that was actually open for Christmas day. So we stopped for some food before continuing our exploration and picture taking from the top of the fortress.

Instead of taking the gondola back down, we decided to walk down through some of the olympic venues. This turned out to get us a little lost since there wasn’t a simple route back to the main road so we wandered in between the Stadi Olímpic and the Palau Sant Jordi before finally finding our way out to in front of the Palau Nacional which overlooks a large stairway heading back down into the city. There was quite a few people out on that beautiful day to enjoy the weather.

We headed back to our hotel via metro to have a nap and figure out where a good place to go for dinner was. Once again consulting wikitravel, we eventually ended up at Los Caracoles, which translates to “The Snails” — which also happens to be the restaurant’s signature dish. The restaurant’s exterior features a window where chickens are being roasted on spits, and when you walk into the restaurant, you first walk through the bar to the front desk where you ask for your table. From there you walk through the kitchen to the dining area. Our table was right next to the kitchen so we could see the cooks working away and the delicious dishes being whisked into the extensive dining area behind us. The inside of the restaurant was extensively decorated and felt quite comfortable. To add to the snail theme, not only were there some decorative snails everywhere, but the bread that came with our dinner was curled up to look like a snail! The food was excellent, and it turned out to be a great place to have our Christmas day dinner.

Our last day in Barcelona is up next …

Morgan

The forecast for our 4th day didn’t look any better with respect to the ever falling precipitation. So we decided to head out of town for the second friend recommendation: The Salvador Dali museum in a small town called Figueres. The train ride is about two hours out of Barcelona, but we got on a nice comfy train so it was actually a nice relaxing trip.

It was cloudy, but not raining when we arrived in Figueres. Our first order of business upon arriving was to find something to eat, and we found that in the form of a Kebab from a nearby stand. One of the travel materials I read somewhere said that the donair meat found in Barcelona is quite a bit different from what we’d be used to from North America, and we found that that was indeed the case. It was definitely tasty.

While we enjoyed our kebabs, we walked towards the Dali museum through the streets of Figueres. On the way, we found ourselves walking through their version of an open air market — not nearly as large as the one in Barcelona of course, but still bustling with activity.

The Dali museum is … interesting. Before we went, I wasn’t all that familiar with his work, aside from the odd warped clock image. After going through the museum, my main impression was that the artwork in his collection was incredibly varied. Dali has quite a few more normal sorts of artwork: portraits and scenery and that sort of thing, but then there’s also a lot of pieces where the only way to describe them is: WTF?

The museum itself used to be a theatre that Dali himself converted into a gallery for his work, so you get a pretty consistent experience throughout the thing. One of the coolest moments is early on in the museum — in a large hall where the big globe of the museum is attached, on one end there is a painting called “Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea”. The painting up close is a nude woman looking out a window onto the sea. But if you make the picture smaller (or in the museum pay 20 cents to use a device to make the picture smaller) the picture becomes a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. That was a pretty cool little trick.

Its a little hard to describe the sights in that museum, but I would suggest that if you have a chance you go see it. It was definitely an interesting experience.

With our admission, we also got admission to the Dali Jewel collection, which is co-located in the same building. The items on display in this collection are … odd. Dali wasn’t shy about his use of valuable raw materials, and some of the items on display are neat: like the jeweled eye shape where the center is a clock, some of the items are punny: like the pearls making pearly white teeth in ruby lips, and some are down right disturbing: like the gold heart with a cut away showing red jewels and a motor to make the red part “beat”.

After our tour of the Dali museum, we wandered around the town a little bit since it was still early on and we thought we might as well explore a bit. On our walk, we found an awesome playground that had a lot of really fun playground equipment. So we played on some of the equipment, including a zipline!

On our way back to the train station, we got a little bit lost, but that wasn’t really a problem: there was plenty of trains heading back to Barcelona. Eventually we found ourselves back at the market we had walked through earlier — now vacant. The next train back was right away, so we scurried back to the train station and arrived just in time for the train back.

When we got back to our hotel, we were too tired to go far looking for food so we ended up across the street from our hotel at a restaurant called Organic. This vegetarian restaurant had a pretty extensive menu and actually was pretty good!

Next up: Christmas day – the one day of nice weather on our trip!

Our third day in Barcelona started out with cloudy skies, but it wasn’t raining. Given that the weather was the best we’d seen so far, we decided to head out of town on one of two day trips that our friends had recommended. Earlier in the week at a visit to the tourism information center, the lady told us that one of the trips, Montserrat, had been closed due to snow. So we decided to check and see if would be open on this particular day and it was. Montserrat is a monastery built on the top of a mountain, offering very nice views of the surrounding country side as well as an impressive church.

So we bought tickets for the train out there and the cable car to take us to the mountain, and headed right down to the train station to catch our train. The trip is about an hour and a half or so out of Barcelona, and the cable car was right by the train station when you get there. On our way, we met a newly married couple from the states who sat across from us on the train who were quite nice. They were honeymooning in Spain over Christmas. We chatted with them most of the way there.

The weather didn’t hold out for us, unfortunately. When we got off the train, the drizzly rain had already started up, and mist was starting to rise up around the mountain. Oops. Oh well, too late to turn back! So we boarded the cable car and were quickly whisked up to the top of the mountain. By the time we made it to the top, it had started to seriously rain, and the growing mist was making it hard to see anything from the top of the mountain. Doh!

We walked around a bit in the rain, before deciding to stop at the cafeteria there for a quick bite to eat hoping that the rain might stop. That was a bit optimistic, and it didn’t work, but it was good to get a bit to eat anyways. So from there we headed over to check out the church itself. While the mist was unfortunate for the views, the positive benefit was the area was extremely peaceful. It made experiencing the church and its surrounding area that much more special. Its kind of hard to describe, but because there weren’t that many people around, and the mist reduced the visual distractions, it made the experience more intimate (if that’s the right word).

So we wandered around the church and the surrounding area and took in the peace and quiet. Some of the pictures turned out great as well, so I’m pretty excited about sharing those when I finally get around to it.

We headed back to the cable car and took that back to the train station and headed back to Barcelona. We might’ve not gotten the weather we wanted, but we thought we had a good day regardless!

For dinner, we decided to consult wikitravel again, and ended up at an Indonesian restaurant called Betawi. Our waiter was almost overly helpful in helping us get our meal, but it didn’t take long before we were enjoying satay chicken skewers and spicy prawns.

Up next, another day trip to Figueres to see the Dali museum.

Morgan

Our second day was drizzly again, but we weren’t going to let that stop us. After having our hotel breakfast, we headed out and caught the metro in the general direction of Park Güell. Remember that Gaudí guy I mentioned in the last post? Yeah, he was at work again, this time on a giant public park with large gingerbread-looking houses at the main gates, big staircases with mosaic tiled sides, a large mosaic lizard, a large terrace with mosaic tile seating, and underneath a large shelter with columns and mosaic tiled ceilings. Seriously, this place was full of wonders. Outside of this specific area, there was several sheltered walkways with built with arched supports that, well, I find really hard to describe. They’re just cool!

So Diane and I spent a few hours walking around in the rain, discovering many of the little details of this amazing art and architectural installation. The park is quite extensive, and we wandered a lot taking pictures. Despite the weather, tourists were out in droves, but everyone waited their turn for a picture with the lizard, and it was a pretty nice atmosphere. I wonder what the park was like in good weather! On our way back out, we climbed to the top of a 3-cross monument, which also offered a nice view of the surrounding cityscape.

The next destination we had was back to La Sagrada Família, which we got to by the metro. This time we were going to take the tour, so we got ourselves the audio guide and headed inside. I was very glad we did get the audio guide, because it spent a bunch of time walking us through the various features of the church and some of the symbolism that Gaudí was going for in the incredibly ornate artwork. The church has been under construction for over a hundred years, and the audio guide claimed that they projected it to be done in another two decades. I don’t know about that … despite its already impressive appearance and structure, the final plans still call for something like 7 additional towers to be built. Maybe they know how long it’ll take, but I suspect they’ve got a long ways to go.

Still, it is a fascinating place. Inside the church, giant columns push vaulted ceilings extremely high, and then branch out resembling trees. The ceiling itself looks like large leaves to these trees, which gives you the unsettling feeling of being in some sort of stone forest. The columns themselves start as 8 pointed stars at the bottom and gradually double the number of points until they become almost circles at the top. It is going to be one crazy awesome place to go see when it is all done. I think we’ll have to make a point of going back when it is all done just to see it all. Hopefully it doesn’t take another hundred years!

After finishing the tour, the cold damp was starting to get to us, so we headed back to our hotel where we warmed up and washed up and once again took up the hunt for a place for dinner. We ended up choosing a place called Carmelitas, which we found on wikitravel. For anyone interested in checking out a city and who need some advice, wikitravel is a really good default place to look. It really hasn’t let us down so far, and we used it a lot on this trip.

At any rate, we waited around until 8:00 which was when the restaurant opened (the restaurants open late in Barcelona, and the clubs stay open real late, from what I understand). The restaurant was quiet, but the waiters were friendly so we sat down and enjoyed quite an enjoyable meal. At this dinner, I learned that Entrecôte is a particular cut of beef … which in this case was quite delicious. Diane’s duck confit was also entirely too delicious. As was our wine, and dessert! Let’s just say we ate well.

Up next, our first day trip out of Barcelona … which was perhaps not the greatest idea, but cool nonetheless.

Morgan

As some of you may already know, Diane and I were headed to Barcelona over Christmas this year. Why Barcelona? Well, we’re trying to get a little more Europe traveling in – something that has been a bit tough this year with a bunch of the time off I took for two trips home. We’ve certainly done a lot of sightseeing, but a lot of that has been in Ireland. So we basically want to see a lot of Europe over the next year, and didn’t really care where we started. Our hunt for a place to go over Christmas, then, was basically looking at Aer Lingus’ site to see what was cheap. Barcelona was on that list.

We headed out on the 20th of December, with our flight leaving in the early evening. The trip started out a bit slowly, as we arrived at the airport on time only to find our flight had been delayed an hour. Oh well.

The Barcelona airport is located conveniently pretty close to the city, and its well connected to city center by train. So we hopped on the train and soon found ourselves on La Rambla (a large pedestrian walkway in the heart of the city) by Liceu metro station looking for our hotel. But like I often do, I probably looked confused as I got out of the metro station trying to get my bearings. A random passerby saw my confusion and asked if I needed help … in Chinese?! Umm, were we really in Spain?

My Mandarin is awfully rusty, despite several years in grade school. Nevertheless, I was able to stumble through a response, and the lady helped point out our way. So, there ya go – my little bit of Mandarin was useful in a place I did not expect. Crazy!

Unfortunately for our plan to go to a warmer destination, Barcelona was on the tail-end of a cold snap, so it was pretty cold the night we arrived. Not only that, the forecast for the week was rain, rain and more rain. Ewww! Oh well, we’re hardy Canadians – we can handle it!

Our first day plan was to wander a little bit to get our bearings in Barcelona. It was a bit cold and rainy, but we hiked out on to La Rambla and took in the scene. The area is quite wide, with several retail stands and newstands along it. As we wandered along, we saw a bunch of stands that were selling … pets! That’s right, rabbits, hamsters, birds, fish, turtles … there was an amazing selection of pets for sale! I dunno why, but even in the rain, they were out there selling pets!

Along the way we found our way to La Bocqueria market. What a place! The area is crowded with stalls selling anything from fresh fruits and vegetables to candy to fresh meat and fish. What’s particularly amazing about the market though is the display of the various items for purchase! Fruits were neatly stacked in piles a couple feet high, candy and nuts were displayed in boxes stretching vertically deep into the stall. Nearly every stall had an artful and space conscious way of displaying whatever goods it was that they were selling. It was a wonderful place … and it was open basically every day (well, it was closed Christmas day and the day after). Simply awesome.

We wandered up and down La Rambla getting an idea what was in the area. One of our friends who has hung out in Barcelona a few times suggested a few places for us to go relax and find some food. So we found a little square that he suggested and decided to get out of the rain for a little while to have a bit of lunch, tapas style.

After lunch, we wandered down the harbour, but the rain started to come harder and that dissuaded us from that plan, so we wandered back up to the other end of La Rambla and found the tourist information center looking for some advice on what we should try to see — preferably something inside.

The first thing they suggested was to check out Casa Batlló just a little ways north from where we were. So we took that suggestion and headed in that direction. The house there was designed by Antoni Gaudí – a man whose work we were going to become quite familiar with over the next couple days.

Anyways, this particular house was quite striking from the front. Its facade curves in interesting ways, and colourful tiles give it a look I’ve never seen in a house before. So we decided to take the tour inside, and were well rewarded with some awfully hard to describe scenes. The house had several wonderful rooms that meshed form and function in a very pleasing manner. Quite an enjoyable time — and I’ll really have to get to those photos so I can share what we saw.

Upon exiting that tour, we wandered over to La Sagrada Família – a church that is still under construction over a hundred years since they started. Gaudí was brought on to the project, and it became a massive and incredible piece of architecture and art. We were pretty tired though, so we decided to pass on the tour until later on in the week. So instead we headed back to our hotel room to dry off and look for a place to eat.

Another friend who had recently been in Barcelona had recommended a couple of restaurants to eat at. One of them was highly regarded on the internet as well, so we tried to go for that. Well, when we showed up there it was closed and from what we saw on the door, it opened at 9:00, but it was only 7:30! Eeep! Well it wasn’t raining so hard, so we walked down to the harbour and walked around that area for awhile. It was quite a nice evening, but we were hungry so we returned to the restaurant and it was still closed. But on closer inspection, a sign higher up said they were actually closed for the whole holidays. Oops!

So instead we walked back up the street and went to a tapas restaurant that looked pretty busy. Turns out it was a pretty good choice! We got ourselves a lovely bottle of wine, and had several nice dishes, including a very nice roasted lamb dish that Diane picked out. Mmmm.

We wandered back to our hotel by way of the metro — which, by the way, is awesome in Barcelona. I am entirely jealous of cities with awesome metro systems. It was pretty cheap (with a T-10 pass, it was €0.77 a trip anywhere in the city), and the trains ran so frequently that there was rarely more than a couple minute wait for a train. I think the longest we ever waited for a train was 5 minutes, and that was ten o’clock in the evening on boxing day.

So that was our first day in Barcelona. Hopefully I’ll get through the other days in the next few days here!

Morgan

A couple months ago, Diane and I had started planning our trip to Barcelona, and I had a bunch of travel sites open. While I was doing that, I re-discovered http://www.skyscanner.net/, which has improved a great deal since I last used it. One cool thing it can do is you don’t have to search for the from or to dates — you can ask it to look for cheap flights departing from city X over the next month, or in March or whatever. So when I found this feature, I tried it out, and promptly found a €16 deal for two seats to Oslo and back with Ryanair. Wow! Of course, after all the booking fees, that ballooned up to … €36 for the two round trip tickets. Oh well, I’ll take that!

So I took the day off work on Friday and Diane and I wandered over to the airport for our Friday afternoon flight. The flight, in Ryanair style, landed in an out-of-the-way airport called Torp about an hour and a half or so from Oslo. From there, we caught a bus to Oslo.

When we were looking for accommodation, we quickly found out that Oslo is one of the world’s most expensive cities in the world. Hotels were easily running into the €175-€200/night range, and we weren’t exactly thrilled at the idea of spending that much. Eventually, we found a listing for the MS Innvik, which is a ship that’s been converted to a theater and bed and breakfast. The boat is moored right in the city center across from the Oslo Opera House, which turned out to be a great location. So we spent the weekend in Norway on a boat!

Saturday was bright and beautiful weather-wise. We took a bit of a walk around the harbour and eventually made our way to the tourist information center. The lady there informed us that we should take advantage of the good weather since it had been cloudy and raining for the last 3 weeks! Guess we lucked out on the weather thing! We picked up Oslo passes at the tourist center which turned out to be a pretty good deal. The pass got us free use of the city’s trams, subways, and buses as well as free entry into a couple dozen museums/other attractions.

It being beautiful out though, we decided to not activate our passes (which were good for 24 hours) until later on and instead walked over to the Vigeland Scuplture park. The park is filled with 212 statues originally carved by Gustav Vigeland (although the statues were made by other people based on the sculptures that Vigeland had made). It’s a pretty impressive area. Some of the sculpture were pretty amazing, although I do totally remember being impressed by the brick mosaic patio around this fountain (which actually wasn’t turned on for the winter).

Next up, we wandered around the Vigeland museum which had a lot of the original sculptures that the statues in the park were made from. Following that, we headed to what is essentially museum central in Oslo. There we first went into the Oslo Folk Museum at the recommendation of the tourist information lady. The museum was a huge area and kind of resembled a Norwegian version of fort edmonton park. They had a bunch of old buildings from various eras, and it was pretty cool wandering around looking at all the buildings on stilts.

It was starting to get a little late so we wandered on to the Viking museum without completely exploring the folk museum. The Viking museum is pretty small, so it was pretty quick to walk through and admire the three big viking boats they had on display.

Next up, we walked over to a small area where there are three separate museums. It was after 3:00 when we got over there and we discovered that the Kon-Tiki museum had already closed, and both the Fram museum and the Norwegian Maritime museum closed at 4:00. So we had some work to do!

The Fram museum was pretty cool — the museum itself was a giant A-frame building which houses the entire ship that made several polar expeditions — to both poles. Not only that, you can go up and actually walk through the boat’s interior, much of which is still intact. A pretty nice experience!

The Norwegian Maritime museum didn’t have a huge amount of interesting things for me, but it was good to walk around it. Definitely good to leave to the end of the day where we could hurry through and then leave. The sun was setting as we left the museum so we stayed by the coast there to take some photos — some of which I think turned out pretty well. Not too sure when I’ll get those photos up, but hopefully not too long.

Having done a lot of walking and a lot of museuming, we returned to the city center to find something to eat. One thing we didn’t really find on the trip was any sort of traditional Norwegian food. The places we were at seemed to be populated with Italian and Indian and other food, but we didn’t really see anything traditional :/ Oh wells. So we stopped in at an Italian place which wasn’t too bad. After having a nice dinner we headed back to our boat to enjoy the evening atmosphere therein.

The boat’s common room was the only place where we could get internet, which was a good thing since there was lots of activity in the common room. There was a bar (although the beer they were serving wasn’t amazing), and music and just some general fun times. Some dancing even broke out later on in the evening. But we had had a long day so we turned in early.

The next day we were determined to use the remaining time on our Oslo passes, so we first went to visit Akershush fortress, which we didn’t realize didn’t open until the afternoon on Sundays. Whoops. The day was cloudy and rainy, but we weren’t gonna let that stop us. We walked around the outside of the fortress a bit before heading off to the Nobel Institute, which is based in Oslo. They had some exhibits there, but it actually wasn’t all that interesting, and was pretty pricey at that! Good thing it was free with our Oslo pass!

From there we caught the underground to the Eastern part of town to check out the natural history museum. That museum is actually several buildings spread across a pretty wide area, and there was a lot to see. So we wandered through the rained on plants for awhile before finding the geological building and then the zoological building. They sure had a lot of stuff to look at! Partway through my feet were sure tired of all the walking!!!

We had a couple hours to spare before our bus back to Torp airport, so we stopped in at another Italian place … and this turned out to be a really good choice. I had a dish called “Turkish Risotto” which was absolutely delicious. Mmmm.

We picked up our luggage and spent a rather uneventful trip back to Dublin via bus and plane. So it was a pretty good trip! Next up, we’re headed to Barcelona over Christmas, which is pretty exciting!

Morgan