June 2

We just got back from a BIG dinner at trinity college. Wow these brits like their booze! We started with sherry before dinner, white wine during dinner and port after dinner. Luckily almost everybody walks in cambridge.

Afterwards we were stuffed so we took a walk around and saw jesus college and some of
'downtown' cambridge. the streets are VERY narrow with bikes and cars and pedestrians criss-crossing everywhere so you really have to watch where you step. plus there's cobblestones and grates and lots of boobytraps all over the sidewalk =)

June 3

Today trudy took us on a grand tour of the major colleges at Cambridge and they are
GORGEOUS! Then we had lunch and took a 45 min. walk to Granchester which is a little place just outside of Cambridge where we had tea and I discovered this wonderful thing known as 'clotted cream'. It's yellow on the surface but when you dig underneath, it sort of looks like margarine and you GLOB it onto your scone and it's delicious. Then you read the nutritional information and you discover that per 3 tbsp, there's 560 calories and 60 grams of fat. Interestingly, it's recommended that your total daily intake of fat should be about 60 g so you can have 3 tbsp of clotted cream and not eat for the rest of the day. We asked some native British people about it and they said that it's pretty much one step away from solid butter. Then we lounged for an hour then walked back to Cambridge, saw some more colleges and had indian curry for dinner and coffee with some of her friends.

Allergies are going crazy!!!!! It was that walk to Granchester, just way too much
nature. So all three of us are sniffling and sneezing and have bright RED eyes =)

June 6

So yes, we're in London now and staying at a fairly decent hostel. All those fears of pubic lice have so far proven to be unfounded.

Yesterday we had about a half day so we saw parts of the V&A (that place is huge, there's no way you could see the whole thing even if you had the entire day. so we hit the highlights. photography and glass for me and architecture for kevin. if we have more time we'll go back and look at their renaissance stuff. that evening we got half-price tickets for the Producers, which btw, is fantastic! and you should all check it out if you get a chance. we might try and see another show while we're here.

Today we spent the morning at the Tower of London (BIG diamonds!!!! and rubies!!! and emeralds!!! and a solid gold punch bowl) and the afternoon walking around downtown London (Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, Parliament, Trafalger etc.), hung out at St. James' Park and watched little kids tease the birds and then run away when they got mad, went to Sir John Sloane's Museum (a private museum. He was a collector and the highlights of his collection include an authentic sarcophagus and an Egyptian mummy as well as lots and LOTS of marble busts)

So far we've managed to get some pretty cheap eats =) Yesterday we dropped into Harrods just to check it out and their food market (which sells Canadian lobster for $80/kg) was having a 2-for-1 on baguettes so that worked out pretty nicely. We've also discovered that all of their grocery stores have really good deli sections so today we dropped into a store, and picked up 2 kinds of pasta, fruit salad and a lime drink for about 5 pounds and ate it by the river in front of London Tower and Tower Bridge. GORGEOUS view, but I think I might have burned a bit =) So seeing as we're doing pretty well on the budget front, we might splurge a bit on an extra show or a nice dinner or just save it up for something nice later on in the trip.

June 8

So we're currently staying at this really nice hostel in West London with lovely clean sheets and have decent breakfast every morning. Plus it's decently close to 2 different tube stations so it's quite convenient. Only problem is that we're sharing a room with these 2 Italian guys. And it wouldn't be THAT bad (a little weird sharing a room with strangers but you get used to it after a bit) except that they have almost completely opposite sleeping patterns to us.
So yesterday we were running around the British Museum which is an amazing place. Since the Brits conquered everybody, they would plunder all of the countries they invaded and bring the spoils back to Britain. So we saw the Rosetta stone and the Elysian Marbles (plundered from the Parthenon), Egyptian sarcophaguses and monuments etc. etc. It was great! Then we saw Chicago! Which I also really liked also the Producers was probably a bit better. We got home probably around 10 and we noticed our roommates were leaving as we were coming back. That was fine with
us cuz we could wash up and go to bed in peace. Then they came home...


AT 6 AM IN THE MORNING!!!!!! AND TALKED AND TALKED AND BRUSHED THEIR TEETH AND STARTED
UNZIPPING THEIR SUITCASES AND LAUGHING AND JOKING AND I WANTED TO TAKE THEIR LONG,
BEAUTIFUL ITALIAN LOCKS AND STUFF THEM DOWN THEIR THROATS!!!!!

But I didn't. And I was a good girl. And I made myself read my bible instead (it sounds like I'm being sarcastic, but no I did actually make myself read the bible and I calmed down considerably). So instead I woke up early and took a nice, long shower and shaved my legs and started off the day 2 hours earlier but much smoother than I normally am =)

Haha, then today we went to the British Gallery and then to watch this thing called
Beating Retreat. It's leftover from the old days when the trumpets would announce the end of fighting for the day and everyone would go back to camp for the night. Now they've turned it into this amazing ceremony with horses and different bands and marching etc. etc. If we had gone yesterday the Queen would have been there! But we weren't quite on the ball, so we went today instead. Now I'm off to pack my bags and to bed because we need to get up at 5:30 tomorrow so we can catch the tube, so we can catch a bus, so we can catch our plane which leaves from some obscure airport outside of London, hence all the connections.

June 11

Now we're in Paris using a very strange non-qwerty
keyboard so this email will be shorter than usual because it's taking me twice as long to type! So the last 2 days have been very nice. After arriving in Paris, we had to learn to navigate the métro, but once that was taken care of, things were pretty easy! We saw the Eiffel tower at twilight (beautiful!) and in the evenings, all the Parisiennes bring their picnic baskets and eat underneath the tower. It's very cool. Wine here is cheaper than both water and pop. We bought a bottle thinking it would cost us 6 Euro (about 8 dollars), instead it was 1.5 Euro (2 dollars), but crappy wine so i don't think we'll repeat that again!

Then yesterday, we went to see Versailles! Which is immense! And incredibly grand. All gilt and tapestries and marble! Then after lunch we took a walk in the gardens which are also immense so needless to say after a full day of walking we were exhausted. Reward time! There are incredible restaurants on every corner so last night we tried Italian food (in France, and in a few days we're going to Italy but uh... whatever =) Then tonight we had escargots, coquilles st. jaques and steak. Soooooooooooooo good! Oh yes, and today we went to see the Louvre but the place is a veritable tourist mecca. So we skipped quickly through the famous pieces ( the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo) and spent our time looking at some of the more obscure (but still beautiful) pieces.

June 15

so we're in venice now! city of more than 150 islands all connected with teeny tiny
little bridges and tiny little side streets. most of which are beautiful, some of which are just a little bit sketchy. keeping an eye out for gypsies and other unsavory characters (we've been warned by the owner of this hostel) but doing just fine all the same. so today we went on a little walking tour through venice. visited their main museum, saw st. mark's basilica and waded our way through hordes of tourists to look at the little shops. didn't buy anything though =( dad, kevin can ruin just about any shopping spree. if you're ever worried about sending mom to singapore alone with the credit card, just send him along with her. he takes all the fun out of splurging =(

before this, we were in a little town called st. malo which is to the west of paris. we were there to see the mont st. michel which is a medieval abbey that was built on a sand bar. when the tide is high, the ocean surrounds the abbey completely so it looks like it was built in the middle of the sea. and, like my sister likes to remind me, it was the buildling upon which minis tirith (from the lord of the rings) was based. so you can imagine that it's quite impressive. the abbey sits at the very top of the mont, and the entire town is built around it's base so that all of the streets spiral upwards towards the abbey. very, very pretty. as usual, swarming with tourists. why can't we seem to get away from them?

we were staying at a tiny little B&B in the french countryside where we were the only guests and the owner spoke nothing but french, so it's a good thing we both did immersion as kids. now that we're in italy, it's a little harder to make ourselves understood but no disasters yet! hm...best things about venice would have to be the bridges. hundreds of tiny little ones mixed in with the few, larger, famous ones. also, the gelato which is dirt cheap =) and lastly, our hostel has free internet!!!

June 18

WE'RE DISGUSTING!!!! Because Florence is playing havoc with our allergies and we've been double dosing on our once-a-day Claritin and it's still doing absolutely nothing. So we've gone through an awful lot of kleenex\paper towel\toilet paper\napkins and one of my eyes is bright red and makes me look like the devil! awesome. and kev can only breathe out of his mouth =) tubular.

alright, other than that, we're staying at a not-so-nice hostel at the moment. to start with the description on hostelworld said that it had been decorated with "the ultimate in florentine taste" what that ACTUALLY means is that we have a double bed with a king-size headboard. this very dirty and dusty maroon-colored shag rug (which is in no way helping the allergies), a horribly old armoir and best of all, these 2 red "mood-lighting" lamps which when turned on, make the entire room look like a red-light district. last night for kicks, we turned them both on and laughed ourselves silly. that is, until the dust from the shag rug made us sneeze uncontrollably. then we opened the windows to vent the place, but the noise from the cars\motorcycles outside was just to much to bear. fun, fun, fun!

haha but today we're going to try to get to the boboli gardens. and we'll try getting into the uffizi later. the lines here are immense. florence gets 14x more tourists than it's actual population and it shows. yesterday we went to the duomo (a beautiful basilica in white, green and pink marble) and the basilica where the entire room has been covered in a gold mosaic depicting different events in the bible. Gold plus Jesus -> The maternal side of my family salivating voraciously.

June 20

We're in Sorrento right now and much happier (well, at least I am). The town is
much quieter and sits right on the edge of the sea. Our hotel is much nicer, the decor is better (goodbye red-light district) and there's a kitchen so we're not spending fortunes every single day keeping ourselves fed. Best of all, there's air conditioning! Woohoo

Getting here was a bit of an ordeal though. Our original train this morning was delayed by more than an hour. Once we arrived to Rome, they announced that everybody had to get off the train as it would NOT be continuing onto Naples (we were originally on a non-stop train). Only they only made the announcement in Italian. So we sat there, blissfully unaware, until some nice girl told us what they'd just said. So we make our way to an information booth to try and figure out what we're supposed to do next (just jump on the next train? make a new reservation?) and the man is completely USELESS!!!!! Not only does he not even listen to a single word we're saying, the stuff coming out of his mouth is either in Italian or English so badly accented it might as well be Italian.

Whatever, we found a much nicer lady who helped us out. And now we're here and fed and content. So tomorrow we're planning to visit Capri. The day after we may go to Pompeii or just lounge around on the beach. Depends how lazy we feel.

Here's Kevin's two cents:
- 60 cent beers =)
- black sand beaches (only seen at golf courses until today)

OK, that was useless. Kevin was supposed to summarize the remainder of Florence for you guys but clearly, I'll have to do it instead.

Kevin interrupting...
- Florence: not as much to see as we thought there'd be. the duomo (whose name supercedes the name of the church which houses it) was amazing. i'd learned about it in my first year architecture course but never fully appreciated the grandeur of the roof. apparently it was such a huge project that Brunelleschi had to devise his own construction techniques and eventually resorted to buidling a double dome just to maintain the integrity of the roof while spanning the enormous altar area (50m?). Uffizi was great too but we only spent half a day there (the line-up was huge) and and we couldn't buy tickets for the next day (in advance) because it just so happened the next day was monday (and apparently they're closed on mondays...) They had a really neat leonardo da vinci exhibit which we kind of had to rush through because they were closing, but it was really interesting nonetheless. We spent all of monday (when a lot of the other exhibits are closed) at the Pitti Palace lying on huge red-blood cell shaped pieces of marble and staring at the sky (i know what you're thinking, what a waste of time....) but it was REALLY nice and REALLY relaxing (the rocks stayed really cool during the day and it was a REALLY hot day). We have pictures of the rocks if you want to see them =). Didn't do much
else in Florence. Looking forward to Amalfi tho =). Back to Dez...

OK, we didn't spend ALL of Monday lying on a RBC-shaped rock. At the most it was an
hour. And he neglects to mention that the rock was in the middle of the Boboli Gardens, which no one ever tells you, you have to climb over a really BIG hill to get to. So we were tired. Anyways, but yes, maximum of an hour. After which we went to see the Medici palace (half of it is provincial offices and you can't go in, but they have this amazingly cool interactive thing where you can point at certain sections of a fresco and it tells you more about it. And then we went to see another da Vinci exhibit. by which point we were exhausted, and proceeded to nap for the next 2 hours. Before making our way to a neighborhood restaurant where the girl spoke no English and we spoke no Italian. So we spoke semi-French and gestured a lot and I worried a lot until the food finally arrived and it turned out to be pretty good. Ok, now Kevin says this email is too long and it's time to stop.

June 24

We're now in rome. sorrento was beautiful and wonderful and we were very sorry to leave. We spent a day in capri where we took a boat tour around the island and visited the blue, green and white grottos. we spent the rest of the afternoon sitting on the beach, walking around the island and the pier and looking for shady spots to sit and have a quick drink of water cuz it was HOT! but being by the ocean made it bearable.

the next day we spent in pompeii and we were blessed with a day of bad weather! for once it was cloudy so it was much cooler than it would-ve been otherwise. which is great because pompeii is hot and dusty and there-s very little shade and next to no water. it was quite fascinating though and while there were other tourists there, it was nowhere near as bad as we thought it would be. our last day in sorrento we tried to catch a bus to positano. but by noon time, no bus had shown up and we weren-t totally sure if we were even in the right place. so we ended up going to the beach at sorrento and it was lovely all the same.

today we-re in rome. and while it's fascinating and the ruins are fantastic, it's also noisy and loud and very, very hot!!! today was officially the hottest, stickiest, sweatiest day of our entire trip and it put us in a fairly crabby mood. we still managed to see the colosseum and the palatine hill though. those two areas contain pretty much all of the ancient roman ruins, so we saw what-s left of the palace of the caesars. we've checked into a hostel in which we're sharing a 6-person room. plus there's a bar downstairs which is currently filled with rowdy world-cup watchers so we'll see how it goes! i'm quite ready to come home now. a month is a long time to be living out of a suitcase.

June 26

last email update for this trip seeing as we leave tomorrow. well, after our rather hot and sticky start to rome, the rest of our days here actually went quite well. our second day we walked and walked and walked. and we saw the spanish steps, the trevi fountain, the pantheon and the the piazza navona. the first two were alright. but the pantheon was just fantastic! absolutely huge! perfectly round and more than 40m in diameter and just covered, floor-to-ceiling in marble. really, really beautiful. we thought this would take us the whole day but we were done all of this by about lunch time. so we spent the rest of the afternoon walking around rome and doing a little bit of shopping. most of the shops were closed though =( a sunday afternoon and it was siesta time -> rome was pretty much a ghost town.

today we dragged ourselves out of bed at 7AM so we could line up for the vatican museum and the sistine chapel. but the line was already HUGE!!!! we got into the first line we saw and after about 15 minutes realized we were in the wrong one! there's one for tour groups and one for individual visitors and we were in the tour group line! so we had to change lines and this one was just as long. we ended up waiting for about 2 hours before we finally got inside. luckily we met this lovely couple from new zealand who we talked to the whole time until we got inside and it made everything move much, much faster. when we got inside the highlight was definitely the tapestries. 10 tapestries, all designed by raphael and created in some of the best workshops in europe. just really, really beautiful and woven with gold and silver thread. i really loved the sistine chapel too except that it was packed with people and the BO was getting a bit overwhelming =) then after lunch we went to st. peter's basilica. BIG. everything is just colossal in there.

I'm back! And obviously I was less than diligent about blogging from Europe. What I'll probably do is cut-and-paste the emails that I sent close friends/family so everyone can read about our trip. It's a long read but totally up to all of you whether or not you want to slog through =)

I'm FREE!!!!!!!!!!!!! Actully, I've been free for about a week now but life has become a little nuts as we're preparing to leave for Europe!! I finished exams (they've sent out a class email telling us that we all passed!), then Kev came up to Edmonton, then my mom came up, then it was mad packing and cleaning, then I was home and then it was mad shopping and then s'more packing! And repacking and repacking =) I used to think I was a pretty neat packer and then my mother came through my suitcase and thoroughly zip-locked everything =) But finally everything is done and organized, so now we're all neat and sterile and ready to go =)

Will try and update from Europe but no promises. In the mean time, hope you're all having a WONDERFUL summer ( for those of you who get a summer =) Sorry to those of you who don't but hey! You've got cash coming in! Which is more than I say =)