Genova, Italy! Flags with mysterious origins!

Friday, June 3

Once arriving in Genova, I set out for my hostel via a bus. Although I bought a couple bus tickets for my time there, I was soon reminded that almost no one pays for the bus in Italy.  I think the bus drivers can pretty clearly notice that no one pays, but just don't care.

The view from my hostel.

The hostel was located amongst the hills surrounding the city, about a 30 minute bus ride away from the center of town (the trip was a bit longer when I rode it to the wrong end of the line first.)  It is a member of Hostelling International - I've stayed at these several times, and they always prove to be basic and rather uninteresting, but clean and inexpensive.  I dropped off my bags, picked up a map, and returned to the city to investigate the historical district.  While looking around, I met an Italian from Genova, an architect who had been planning on meeting up with friends who were visiting the area to check out the downtown area.  His friends never showed up and so he had the afternoon free, so he offered to show me around. It was an odd surprise, but turned out to be a huge blessing - he had a huge store of insight into the history of the town and what parts were best to see.  I learned that Genova's symbol of St. George and the dragon, and the red and white cross come from England - the country offered the prestige of its symbol/crest after Genova supported them in a war.  Permission to change what your city's flag looks like seems less than equal to military support, but HEY, I'm not Italian.  [EDITORS NOTE: I was researching this and found the wikipedia page about the origin of the cross.  According to wikipedia, its actually the other way around - the cross was used in several regions around spain, and the english payed the genoans for protection in the shipping channels in that area. Hmmmm.]

We parted ways for dinner, then met back up a couple hours later.  He showed me more of downtown, including two really cool bars - one with live Jazz music, and the other had once been an old prison dungeon.  It had stone walls and was lit primarily by candles.  The day was full of interestingness that I would have known nothing about had I just been by myself.

Super cool jazz bar.

Moral of the story: if you want to visit cool medieval bars, meet architects in Genova by staring at old buildings.

An old building you can practice staring at.

Other random note: Not only was Geneva itself expensive, its after-effects imputed my wallet greatly as well- when I stayed the 4 days in Switzerland, I spent a lot of money, so when I arrived in Genova, I was so relieved at the cheaper prices, and spent a lot more than I normally would. This is not recommended as a strategy for financial success.

More Geneva! Hiking! Poorly executed metaphors!

Thursday

Lake Geneva (Leman), like much of Switzerland, is surrounded by mountains, and during my second day I climbed one of the trails that was accessible via a short bus ride out of town.  The trail started out steep but well-groomed and stable (with steps at some points!).  Several trails traverse the ridge, so I transferred to another one of these trails, and this one was decidedly trickier - there were many points where rope was strung along the trail because the bath was too slanted and slippery otherwise.  

As I walked along the trail, I noticed a long quarry being mined right next to the mountain.  When making sand castles as I was younger, I didn't put the hole where the sand was dug from right next to the castle.  Apparently, the miners never made sand castles as a child.  

Although I had successfully navigated for a while, I am a creature of habit, and so got lost roughly 3/5s of the way up the mountain.  The face at this point was steep and slippery - a definite transition from hiking as difficult as the stuff depicted in the Fellowship of the Ring to the hiking in the Return of the King.  And just like in the Return of the King, (spoiler alert!) I finally found my way, (spoiler alert!) made it to the top of the mountain, and (spoiler alert!) had my finger bitten off by a deformed halfling, sealing its fate and the fate of the powerful magic ring they both plummeted into the fiery depths within the mountains below.  I then rode down the mountain on a giant eagle.  

My trek down the mountain ended at a point significantly different from where I started, so I walked through Swiss towns for several hours until I found my way back to the city.  Along the way, I almost accidentally walked into France.  I was originally planning on spending another day in Geneva, but felt at this point that I had seen the majority of what the city had to offer, so I pushed forward my schedule to  leave early the next morning for Italy.  The train was going to depart at 5:30 in the morning.  I didn't feel like paying for another night in the hostel when I would be there for only a short amount of time, and, lacking a phone or alarm clock, I was afraid I would miss my ride, so I grabbed my bag and headed outside the station.  There were several other standing around outside: a cadre of taxi drivers, several clearly drunk people wandering aimlessly about, and a group of locals who had missed the last train from the city center out to their town.  I conversed for a while with a man who spoke only French, which, because my polyglotism extends to a pretty good knowledge of English and a high-school language program's worth of Spanish, meant that communication was rather difficult.  Aside from the French guy trying to fleece me out of cash several times ("No, good sir, I will not give you 100 euros (~145USD) for 100 francs (~120USD)"), the conversation was entertaining.  Eventually, the station opened and I boarded the train.

Geneva! McDonalds = Hella Expensive!

Wednesday

Although Interlaken is pretty small, I still managed to get turned around several times spend some time exploring the city as I made my way to the train station. I take the attitude that no area is too small, well organized, or well-signed to get lost in. Eventually, I stumbled upon the station and rode over to Geneva, only a couple of hours east. Lake Geneva (Lake Leman) is half in Switzerland, half in France and one of the largest lakes in the world. The city of Geneva itself is famous not just for being the signing place of the Geneva convention, but also for being really Protestant: John Calvin spent roughly 3 decades in the city, and several places throughout the city mention that when being developed, it was envisioned as a "Protestant Rome". At the Parc de Bastions in Geneva there are statues of several of the main reformers.

I dropped my bag at the hostel and navigated over to the tourist station for a map and info about the city's sights. Geneva is a nice city, but more oriented towards the successful (very rich) businessman type, rather than the average (not very rich) college student - a #1 at McDonalds was over 11 francs! 11 Francs is about 13 dollars, and the prices there were indicative of prices throughout the city, so I stuck to the grocery stores for food.

The park with the famous reformer people

Interlaken, Switzerland! The death of a shoe!

Utrecht, the Netherlands

Monday

The first city I planned on visiting was Interlaken, a small swiss town nestled amongst the middle of the Alps right in the center of Switzerland, with a lot of easy access to hiking. My initial route there was pretty direct, but just as I had all of my things packed and was about to depart on my trip, I realized that I didn't have my passport. After tearing my room apart for a few minutes, I finally found it, and was able to head out, but this little delay was enough for me to miss my first train in my itinerary. As a result, I had to take a different, slightly longer route, with transfers in Utrecht (a dutch city south of Amsterdam) and Frankfurt.

Another transfer was Frankfurt, but I was only there long enough to walk around the main street for a couple of blocks and buy a frankfurter (get it? because thats where I was!). The train ride down into Switzerland was beautiful, but sadly, as I showed up to the hostel, the skies opened and water poured out, so I was stuck in the hostel for the night. I cooked pasta from ingredients left there by previous travelers and met some of the hostels tenants. The majority of people in the hostel were American, and a large number of them were also using the Eurail pass to travel around for the summer. Since I had never heard of the Eurail pass before this trip, I was surprised that it was so widely used.

The hostel in Interlaken.

In Lauterbrunnen

Tuesday

Following a recommendation from another hostel-goer, I decided to visit Lauterbrunnen, an area about 10 minutes away from Interlaken. Three other people from the hostel and I decided to walked through a valley and then up one of the mountains. The hiking was great, although a bit cloudy near the top. Since this trip was at the beginning of June, I managed to avoid many of the crowds that would be traveling Europe later in the summer, and so saw next to no one else for much of the hike.










Once we reached a village near the top, a couple of Swiss guys gave us a ride in the back of their maintenance truck for 20 minutes or so. We hiked on for a little while longer and then split up, the three others hiking back to the hostel, and me continuing onwards for a few more hours.

I should mention that when I was initially leaving for Amsterdam back in the middle of January, I hadn't considered the possibility that I would be doing a lot of hiking, and as a result, instead of having boots for all of this hiking, all I had were some old tennis shoes that were falling apart. "Falling apart" isn't an exaggeration - halfway through my hike, the sole entirely separated from the shoe, and as I walked on by myself, half of the stitching on what was left of the bottom of the shoe broke.
I spent most of the afternoon/evening hiking, and then spent another night in the hostel.

Entirely unrelated song post:

There are two main reasons why you should listen to this song without knowing anything about it:

1. Its a remix of a song originally by Hans Zimmer, and therefore is inherently good.
2. It is by a band called We Plants are Happy Plants. How could a band with a name like that not make good music?

Hans Zimmer - Time (We Plants Are Happy Plants Remix) by WPAHP

Sunday, May 29

The semester is finally over! I'm excited to finally get back to the states and eat chipotle, use public restrooms, drive a car, and not pay exorbitant prices for food.  Although I'm ready to go back, our plane trip back is 2 weeks after the end of exams, leaving time for travel.  Since this is probably going to be the last time for a while that I'm going to get to visit Europe, I wanted to go to a few different places.  I didn't have a specific idea of where I wanted to go other than that I wanted to visit areas with a lot of great scenery.  

I had heard other friends who were planning on traveling mention that they were using the Eurail pass, a travel ticket sold to people from outside the European Union, specially geared to people doing a lot of traveling in a short amount of time. Options for the pass range from travel within one country for only 3 days to unlimited transportation in the EU for 3 months.

After looking through the options for a while, I settled on the 5 day, 4 country pass.  The days did not have to be consecutive, and on those days I was allowed to travel as much as I wanted within Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and Benelux (since the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg are pretty small, they are treated as one country). Having decided upon which countries I would visit, I then had to decide which cities I visited in those countries, and for the sake of consistency with my other trips,t waited too long to start planning. I would be leaving Monday morning, and so throughout Sunday night grappled with figuring out a good route and deciding which cities would be good.  The decision process primarily consisted of perusing wikitravel(which, by the way, is an awesome sight if you are trying to learn about a city or region), searching on google for "hiking near _____", checking to see if the hostels in the areas weren't exorbitantly expensive, and then searching national railway sites for route times.  I reordered my route several times (finding the most efficient route is an NP-complete problem, after all), and, as the sun rose Monday morning finally figured everything out.  

The route I would be taking. Google maps pegs this route at over 3,000 kilometers.