Return

We got into London yesterday and had a lovely welcome-back family dinner last night. Molly’s travels continue (prepare yourself, Scotland!) for another two weeks, but Tara is packing up things here and returns to the States next week.

We have now ridden in what feels like every possible type of train: on the Eurostar, on many varieties of regular trains, in a sleeping-car, on high-speed trains, on little tiny local trains, on a double-decker train… through fields, mountains, cities, and towns, by rivers and through tunnels.

It’s been an exciting, roving, fun, and thought-provoking adventure: traveling through foreign countries, staying with strangers, making friends, taking care of ourselves, observing and exploring and experiencing. This blog has been a rather anemic representation of what we’ve done, but as we return to a more normal pattern the next few weeks, we’ll do our best to flesh things out with all the stories, details, and photos!

For our route, check out our updated Googlemap (link in the upper right-hand corner of the blog).

 

why is europe obsessed with nutella?

Current location: Berlin
Current weather: Snowing
Current mood: nutella and peanut butter muesli for breakfast

after a straight-shot 9-hour train ride yesterday (our longest without changes so far!), we arrived in Berlin last night. We decided that rather than take the overnight train we’d find a nice place with a cheap hostel to spend Sunday and the Interwebz found us Interlaken, Switzerland. It was perfect – we went for a long walk by a river, with Molly murmuring compliments to the mountains (yeah. YEAH. go mountains! switzerland for the win!) and taught our roomates how to juggle a bit. the weather was gorgeous, too, which is odd as it SNOWED our last two days in Italy after being warm and sunny the previous week. go figure. we also bought Swiss Army knives in Switzerland, which we’re more that a little obsessed with (hey, can I open that envelope for you? what about that plastic bag? wanna haircut?)

we’re staying with Lindsay and Athena, friends from school who are studying abroad here. this afternoon Lindsay is taking us to an open juggling/circus gathering where we will be communicating with new friends via our happy common language of circus and mime, since they speak no english and we speak no german.

we also plan to hunker down in internet cafes for a substantial amount of time, so we will post pictures. really! we did try in Italy, but the site refused to upload them because we were using internet explorer on an old PC. excuses, excuses.

and really, nutella has been in EVERY grocery store, supermarket, and corner store we’ve been in in Europe. not that we’re complaining.

thank you for your comments! much love to all!

 

Buongiorno from Torricella

We’re in Italy! We travelled by train from dawn to dusk, leaving Courtelary in the misty pre-dawn and arriving at Lake Trasmino just as the sun had set. Today we got to tag along on a boat ride to an island in the middle of the lake, picking flowers and wandering amongst the olive trees by an old castle. We’re earning our keep by making beds, and we both learnt a lot about wrinkle-free sheets this morning.

The internet here is fast and available – so look forward to pictures soon. For realz this time.

 

Tschüss, Helvetica!

It’s been a great visit: going for snowy walks, visiting the local chocolate factory, exchanging juggling tricks and eating family meals. We’ve made new friends we’re sad to be leaving, but Italy awaits…

 

bitte, danke, nein (bringing our german vocabulary count to three words total)

we’ve arrived in switzerland… it was snowing when we got off the train! we are staying in a co-op type shared house with kids and animals and, would you believe, circus! our hosts here have made us feel very welcome. though they mostly speak swiss-german, we’re getting by on our little french and their more than little english. we made dinner tonight and swapped juggling tricks with some of the kids. we’re really excited to be here and help them out the next few days!

 

avignon

we are in avignon! that is about all we have time to type, more soon!

love
t + m

 

preuves photographiques de la france

soon we will put up a joint flickr account, but for now you’ll just have to do with this little selection:

juggling in front of the eiffel tower

you know I couldn’t have photoshopped this because we’re probably 1,000 miles away from any computer with photoshop. I took it with my little tripod.

the view out our shutters when we wake up in the morning

molly mulching in the late afternoon

 

azerty keyboqrds qre a fun chqllenge

we’ve been settling down in Peyrenegre after arriving here wednesday evening…

tara’s favorite moment of the trip so far was opening the shutters (yes, real shutters, wood slats and metal catch and all) our first morning; having arrived at night, stumbling awake and leaning out the window into the bright dawn to be greeted with rolling french countryside was rather overwhelming (and gorgeous) for 8am.

we are staying in a gite, a little cottage/apartment attached to the main house through a large ex-barn. enid and kevin, our hosts, are a charming and straightforward brit ex-pat couple. half the day we help them out with whatever’s needed – painting, gardening, making mulch, cleaning, and the rest off the time is ours to explore and relax. this morning we checked out the nearby town of marmande (which took all of an hour, barely). yesterday we went for a walk around the nearby farms, accompanied by their two little dogs, sam and sally. it’s wonderfully quiet here – except for the hens – and a world away from our normal lives!

 

travel poem #2: paris limerick

How Tara and Molly spent the day:
They decided to derivé
From the Sacré -Coeur
To Montmartre and more
And then they went to the Museé d’Orsay

 

travel poem #1: paris haiku

journey has begun
baguette and cheese for dinner
happy in hostel