My Good-bye Blog

This will be my last blog post, I think.

Since I last wrote, I’ve finished up my internship. It was sort of bittersweet: I was sad to leave my friends and colleagues behind, but I then started traveling around Europe for a month, so I was excited for that.

A friend from home flew over to meet me in Leipzig, and then the two of us started to see Europe.  We saw a lot from July 23rd, the day we left Leipzig, til August 18th, the day we flew home.

In between those dates we visited Berlin, Krakow (with the purpose of visiting Auschwitz), Prague, Vienna, Venice, Rome, Barcelona, Nice and Paris, with day trips to the city states of the Vatican and Monaco.

Visiting everywhere was amazing. Each culture was distinct, and each country was rich with history. The ancient treasures of the Vatican Museums and the Louvre to the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin and its inspiration, the Jewish cemetery in Prague, to the excess in Monaco, there was never a dull moment.

We traveled by train for the most part, using a Eurail pass. It is a civilized way to travel, I have to say, though hugely impractical for Canada, except for short distances, such as between Ottawa and Montreal. We got to learn which countries’ trains ran on time (none of them) and which didn’t (all of them), which had the nicest bathrooms (Deutschebahn’s ICE trains), and in which countries one can reserve international trains (you can’t in Spain).

We did travel by sea for one leg of the journey, traveling from Rome to Barcelona by ferry. The ferry was very nice on the inside, compared to the more serviceable ferries one normally finds traversing Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence to Newfoundland, the island on which I live. However, nice as the ferry was, it would never be placed on the Gulf run, because it was very tippy, even in the small four-foot swell on the Mediterranean.

I have a general comment on palaces in continental Europe (both myself and Elyse, my traveling friend, have been to the UK multiple times, so didn’t place the British Isles on our itinerary). If in Paris, visit Versailles. It is just as cool as it’s hyped up to be. There are truckloads of people there. If you get the chance to see it, the Schonnbrun in Vienna (the Summer palace of the Habsburgs) is just as nice inside, and has beautiful gardens. It just happens to be the childhood rather than the adult residence of Marie Antoinette, too.

As I said before,  we flew home from Paris. We checked in online the night before, and at that point, Air Canada was already saying that the flight was 40 minutes late. This was particularly not good for me, as my connecting flight was scheduled to leave an1hr25 minutes after the scheduled arrival of my trans-Atlantic flight, and I had to claim my luggage and clear customs in Toronto. However, with a little luck (the 8 hour flight from Paris got in on time) and a little running (I literally sprinted the length of Pearson airport), I made my flight to St. John’s, and arrived home three hours later.

It was a lovely summer, but it’s good to be home. And Mom had my favourite food (homemade bread) at home when I got there, too

Auf Wiedersehen, au revoir, good bye from Canada