A photo journal from Paris To Pisa

Wow, it's been an adventure since the last post. Not including how difficult it's been to find an internet point that let's us upload photos, we've also managed to rail/fly/hostel our way through a french transportation strike, through the canals of Venice, through the tourist trap of the tower of Pisa, and all the way to Rome!

We didn't quite finish with describing our amazing experience in Paris last time, so we wanted to start this post with it as well. The French love to strike! We'd like to announce, that Tyrn and Kelsey have officially had the true French pleasure of navigating through Paris on "strike day". Not only did we make our way across the city for free, but we also managed to do a full guided tour of the Louvre Museum. You can go ahead and tell your friends that you know the pros, when it comes to smart eurotravel.

The above photo is of the famous Venus de Milo, which is an ancient Greek statue. It was found by a farmer in his field in Greece, and was bought by a French General and brought back to France as a gift to the King. One of the big mysteries about her is that we don't know who she is (much like the Mona Lisa). We learned that Greek statues were often identifiable by the arms and what they're holding. Since her arms were never found, experts guess that the statue is of Venus.

The painting below is a section of a famous painting of the crowning of Napoleon. The guide explained a lot of the details of the painting, including how it was made as propaganda for Napoleon. Notice that it looks like he's crowning Josephine, but he actually crowned himself as well. Not a very suave gesture. There were really a million amazing things to see in the Louvre, not to mention the Louvre itself. Ty was not prepared for the magnitude of the whole thing and had his jaw on the ground for most of our time in Paris.
Now, onward to Venice! Sparing you the long story of how we made our way to the Beauvais airport outside of Paris, there is a silver lining to the grey cloud of the strike. Because of the strike, two friendly neighbourhood Canadians from Halifax had to book emergency flights to Venice since there train was cancelled. SO, on our way through the skies, we met Mike and Anita.
We ended up staying at the same hostel for a night and going out for supper in Venice with them. It was so nice to hang out with those cool cats.

Venice is truly more picturesque than our amateur photo skills can convey. We payed a heap of money for our transit passes, so we spent a lot of time riding the canals on the water "buses". It was such a surreal experience to wait on a bobbing platform for your boat/bus and then touring past the gondoliers and the waterside cafes. Ty was keeping an eye out for celebrities the whole time but unfortunately struck out. Here is a small sample of the photos we took.






Piazza San Marco (St. Mark's Square)
Travelling in Europe in November does have it's drawbacks. Although the crowds are fairly minimal, the construction is everywhere. In the off season they give all the iconic landmarks a face lift, hence the scaffolding. St. Mark's Square is also very famous for the pigeons. People can pay 1€ for a bag of pigeon food, which they then pour all over themselves so that they are swarmed by the little pooping birds in hopes of a smart photo. BUT, after the picture has been taken, people often have trouble shaking the pigeons loose. We could have taken a whole photo montage of people's reactions to the persistent pecking machines. These are a couple of our favourites:
Click on this one to see the expression up close!
One of our least favourite things about Europe is that you have to pay for everything. That includes using the washroom. In this one, Kelsey is not impressed to have to pay a whole Euro to use a seatless toilet with cold water taps in Venice. Venice is the most expensive place we've peed in.
It finally happened. We are chronically having to run to catch our trains and barely making them. This time it bit us in the butt. The water buses were much slower today than we remembered them being, and we ended up at our platform 5 minutes late. After paying the difference for the fancy train leaving an hour later, we learned our lesson. We'll tell you the story in person sometime of how Tyrn "helped" Kelsey with her bag on the run to the station.

A Piece of Pisa

We ended up arriving in Pisa late, and wandered around nervous about finding a place to stay for the night. Of course, our prayers were answered yet again and we found a great hotel close to the tower for an affordable price. When we woke up and went for a walk, we found this around the corner:

The tower is the major source of industry for this town. Even in low season, there are throngs of people gazing up and taking funny posed photos amongst the souvenir vendors. Having said that, we did enjoy it and did end up taking some funny posed photos ourselves. Unfortunately, the 15€ admisson fee kept us from going inside the tower.

Sorry, we can't rotate our photos, but we wanted to show one of the classic Leaning Tower poses.

Sometimes it seems like the tower is peaking out at you. It reminds us of Kelsey's Mom, who's always popping into rooms wondering what's going on. We call this one the Louising Tower of Pisa.
Yesterday we took a day trip from Pisa to a small town named Lucca. Lucca is walled, but not menacing. It has a gorgeous walkway around the old town and a circular "square" in the middle. It was our first time eating gelato in Italy. Mmmmm.
We are now in Rome. We have 4 days of touring here before we fly to Cairo.

K & T