I’m going to miss… juice bars. Seriously. There’s nothing like Boost there. Indeed, the places to eat for lunch all suck over there. Australia is surprisingly awesome about those things. I’d say I’m going to miss y’all too but that would just be weak. So. I’m not. We’ll keep in touch.
I have teh visa. So I am officially going next week. Yikes!
Most Expensive City: London, hands down. Accommodation in Venice? 55 Euros. Almost equivalent accommodation in London? 55 Pounds. Most Overrated City: Milan. It’s not that bloody special, and the shopping district is pretty average actually. City felt dirty, unsafe and just out-and-out sucky. Most Overrated Museum/Monument/Art Gallery: The Louvre. The Mona Lisa specifically. Honourable Mention: Buckingham Palace. Most Overrated Attraction: The Changing of the Guards. So very pointless. Worst Restaurant Service: Paris. Rude French waiters are not a rule - some of the best service I had was in Nice - but Paris seems to have a very distinct style. ...
The suitcase was put away today, the contents having found their way to the spin cycle. I’m still not out of the traveller mindset completely, with many things scattered across my bedroom awaiting proper organisation of some sort. Jet lag appears to have waited for a day, finally catching up yesterday and delivering a right thumping to my ability to stay awake at work. So much has happened over the last 10 weeks at work; while it’s not totally unfamiliar, it’s certainly something of a reset from the comfortable groove I had found myself in before I left for London. I’m re-learning all those little shortcuts that you invariably pick up over time. A couple of faces have gone in the (relatively) short time I was away, which is a little sad. The sun is still up when I leave work, which is awesome, but feels somehow wrong. ...
Perhaps it was the cold, or my friends having left, or maybe it was just one of those days, but it seems like the previous post was an age ago, none of its words entirely relevant anymore… As my train came down on Saturday night from the heights of Milan, I made my first attempt at broken Italian small-talk with the lady in the same cabin as me. She’d talked for most of the journey to another passenger in the cabin, but now that it was just us, for the next hour, I couldn’t well bury my head in my book and ignore everything else. She spoke not a word of English, and I only spoke some phrasebook sentences, concoctions of words that work on paper but never quite roll off your tongue the same way when speaking. Still, I managed to extract that she was from Milan, on vacation and heading to Cannes for a week, explaining that I myself was from Australia, had seen much of Italy over the previous week and from Nice I would be heading to Barcelona. And then the train turned, and the sea appeared out the window. ...