Thursday 20th January 2011

Lake Geneva, Switzerland

I always feel that flying from a city without visiting it is a missed oppurtunity.  It also leads to problems when it comes to classifying whether or not I have visited a place - I have, for example, caught a plane from Warsaw, but I didn`t actually go to the centre.  To save this administrative error, I decided to curtail the end of my skiing trip and spend a day in Geneva - a city that has always interested me as the home of many many international organizations, as well as being a place of legendary beauty.

CERN, Geneva

I arrived at about 11.00am, having caught the train from Sion, and after dumping my bags at my hostel, set out on the legendary Swiss public transport system (which was free thanks to a travel card that the hostel gave me).  My first destination was CERN - le Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or as it tends to be known in the British media, the Hadron Collider.  With the one mark dropped on my Physics exam being the catalyst for my gap year, it seemed like not only a fascinating, but also an appropriate place to visit.  Unfortunately a guided tour of the actual laboratory needs to be booked a month in advance (which I found out a week ago), so I went to see the two major exhibits that were on display -  Microcosm (a history of post war European science) and Universe of Particles.  Both were very interesting and were pitched at a level that was accessable to somebody who had done an A level into it - it wasn’t as hard as it could have been.  It was a place that I could have spent days in, but there were other places I wanted to visit in my afternoon in Geneva, so I was only there for a few hours.

Palais de Nations, Geneva

My next stop was the Palais de Nations - one of the European headquarters of the United Nations, and the birthplace of the League of Nations.  It is in many ways the centre of 20th century European history and is all the more worth going to for still being in use to this day for international diplomacy.  In order to get access to the site there is a fairly rigorous security check, which involves a passport check and being given an identity badge.  This wasn’t an inconvenience though, because being given an identity badge made the visit even more exciting.  It goes without saying that members of the public aren’t allowed to just randomly walk around the site so I was obliged to take an English tour with a German tour guide.  This was fairly interesting, but she tended to ramble on about pointless stuff, like how nice the view is from the windows, rather than exploring the various intricacies of international relations.

Original League of Nations conference hall

The palace had been built after the end of World War One as the home of the League of Nations, an international organization that hoped to avoid there being any more bloodshed on a major scale.  Anybody who knows their history will know that the League of Nations was a bit of a flop and after failing to prevent World War Two, was disbanded and replaced with the United Nations, who moved their headquarters to New York.  However, such a large organization requires more than one ‘branch’ and Geneva, along with Vienna, was chosen as the European branch of the United Nations.  On top of that, the Hague in Holland was chosen as the site of the International Criminal Courts.  I hadn’t realised it, but there is also a United Nations headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya.  But that is beside the point.  The Palais de Nations was the obvious place for the United Nations to be housed in Geneva, but it was deemed too small and several new wings have been attached.  The original core of the building is retained however and there are still remnants of the League of Nations - the letters LN on the door handles for example, or the fact that the grand hall is made of materials from each of the founding League of Nation members (granite from Norway, marble from Italy etc).  In my head I imagined there being one large auditorium - the famous one with all the national name plaques, but there are in fact over twenty of such rooms.  The original League of Nations auditorium is the most intricately decorated of these, and is now home to the International Disarmament Committee.  Members of the public are free to sit in on certain meetings and there are a wealth of topics that are discussed - from the state of natural gas reserves to the growing problem of back pain in adults.  While most decisions are made in New York, there are some occasions - such as the war in South Ossetia, where Geneva is preferred for peace talks.  The tour cost 10CHF (about £6.00) and was well worth going on.

Main auditorium, UN

I had spent most of the day at the two sites, so didn’t have any time to go in anywhere else - there is a whole lot more I could have done in the city.  I therefore decided to go for a stroll into town from the UN building, along the lake front.  It was very windy and this unfortunately seemed to mean that the famous Jet d'Eau had been turned off - the lake itself was very choppy, so it wasn’t much of a surprise.  I wandered around the Jardin d'Anglais, where there is a flower clock with the longest second hand in the world.  At this stage it seemed that I was scraping the bottom of the site barrel so I headed to a traditional local coffee house (Star..somethings) and then on for a curry.  Which of course the Swiss are famous for.  Once back at the hostel (the City Hostel - £20 a night for a four bed dorm), I proceeded to give myself a heart attack.  Opening up the locker that I had left my luggage in earlier, I found that it was completely empty - all of the things I had brought with me - the ski equipment, camera etc etc was gone.  I rushed up to reception to report that it had been stolen and the receptionists came down and asked if I had checked the other lockers.  I saw no reason why my stuff would be moved, but followed their advice and lo and behold I found it.  Having placed all of my gear in locker 13 and having shut the door, I had proceeded to put the padlock on locker 12.  Possibly the most stupid traveler mistake of all time.  I left my hostel, disgraced, the next morning and got the early flight back to London Luton.  All in all, Geneva was a very worthwhile city to see, and is a I would love to go back to in the near future.

Windy Lake Geneva

Sunday 16th January - Thursday 20th January

Tracouet

Not long after coming back from Prague, I headed off on my next adventure, this time to Switzerland to go skiing.  I had never been particularly interested in skiing, but when a friend invited me out to stay in his family chalet, I figured it was a case of trying everything once.  As somebody who tends to get frustrated at being bad at things (think back to how little time I was willing to spend learning to ride a motorbike in Egypt), I decided to go on a “learn to ski in a day” course in Milton Keynes. This proved to be a worthwhile investment as it meant that by the time I got to the Swiss Alps, I had got the basics.  Under the expert tuition of Tom, I was soon able to go from the “snow plough” - a posture that immediately signals you out to everyone else on the slope as a beginner, to parallel skiing.  From there, I was able to enjoy blue and red runs at will.  For non skiers out there, the grades of difficulty that are given to ski runs are categorised as green, blue, red and black, going from easiest to hardest.

A view over Sion from Tracouet

Getting to Nendaz, where I was staying, was very straightforward.  Flights for Geneva left Luton every hour so after finishing work at 3, I got the 6.00pm flight and arrived at about 9 (with a delay and time difference added).  The Easyjet flight was very bizarre - there were only 23 passengers taking up the 120 odd seats, so everyone had two aisles each.  There were so few passengers that I was asked to sit in the seats on the wing for take off as this is where the emergency exits are located and apparently it is law that they have to be manned take off and landing.  I stayed in Geneva for Saturday night, though I didn`t see any of the town as I went straight back to my hostel - I aimed to come back on Thursday to look around a bit.  On Sunday morning I got a direct train to Sion, which is the town in the valley below the Nendaz ski resort.  The journey was fantastic - possibly the best I have ever been on, as it skirted Lake Geneva through the towns of Lausanne and Montreaux, and I was early enough to see the sun rise over the lake.  The sun slowly burnt the mist off, but for the majority of the journey the far bank wasn`t visible - Smoke on the Water.

Verbier

It is difficult to know how to write a blog for something like a ski holiday as every day involved the same activity, just in different places.  But here goes.  Having arrived on Sunday at midday, Tom and I headed for Traquoet, the nearest cablecar station to the chalet.  A free bus service runs between the ski resorts.  I spent the rest of the day consolidating what I had learnt at Milton Keynes by going down blue runs, but I was yet to leave the reassuringly slow snow plow.  My first time on the slopes was remarkably free from falls however - in fact the only time I fell was in an embarassing tangle with Tom when I was putting my skis on, which involved me essentially wearing his skis as well as my own and causing the two of us to go bundling down the nursery slope as a single entity.  I guess it was the worst possible start, but things got better from there.  That evening I was introduced to the other people who were benefiting from Tom and his dad`s generosity and were staying in the chalet with us.  The group was an incredibly eclectic mix - with the financial, aviation, music, furniture and car businesses represented.  Needless to say, the evening was mainly spent listening to the stories that these people had to share.  As well as spending two hours in the jacuzzi.

The ski team

On Monday we headed over to Thyon.  It was here that I actually got the hang of skiing properly and it was strange how it suddenly just clicked - one moment I was slowly wobbling down the slopes and all of a suddent I was flying down and cornering with parallel skis. From there it was a lot of fun.  The days followed a wonderful routine - breakfast, skiing, lunch, skiing, jacuzzi, dinner and this was how I spent my time until Wednesday.  After my first few sessions of being by myself, I joined the others and we skiied as a group.  Our only time when we weren`t as a group was when Tom and his dad went off piste with a guide for a day that was so intense that it resulted in a broken ski for Tom`s dad - a situation that would have caused most people to roll up in a ball and cry, but only resulted in him skiing down an unmarked run on one leg.  Amazing stuff.  We changed where we skiied each day - going to Verbier on Wednesday for my last run and it was here that the weather became overcast and misty, without yielding the snowfall that we had been hoping for.  This was good though, as it meant that my last day of skiing was in harder conditions.  Lunchtime on Wednesday was very impressive - we went to a restaurant called Chez Dany which includes Prince William as its past guests.  As with most good restaurants in the alps, the only way to get to it was to ski down a tough slope to get there, but we all made it and ate in real style.

I appreciate that this probably isn`t the most informative of my blogs and is really the story of how I learned to ski, but I thought I would include it for completeness.  It was a fantastic oppurtunity that came from sheer generosity, which I would have been foolish to refuse.  A thorougly enjoyable week.

Thursday 6th January 2011

Plzen town centre - with half a man who ruined my panorama

Train journey to Plzen

On our last full day we decided to venture out of Prague again.  This involved me looking at a lot of rail timetables and finding where we could travel to and from in a day.  We eventually settled on the town of Plzen, about 2 hours south west of Prague by train.  It is the fourth biggest city in the Czech Republic and is most famous for being the town that Pilsener, the world’s first lager.  This started with a wonderful train journey, where the line snaked through a canyon beside a river.  Unfortunately, as seems to be the case with most trains in Central Europe, the windows were dirty and it was difficult to get any good photos.  I guess this is the best of the bunch.

Lunch in Plzen with a Pilsener

We didn't really know what to expect in Plzen - lonely planet didn’t really elaborate much on the sites.  Upon arrival it turned out that the city was trying to be European Capital of Culture for 2015, so we expected there to be a lot to see.  Our first stop after a long journey was the local beer hall, where we had the compulsory Pilsener Urquell beer.  The food was traditional and served on a wooden board which had been crafted to include the beer mat - a typical thing to do for such a beer based town.  I was able to look at the map of the town I had picked up and found out that it isn’t only the brewery that it’s famous for.  It also contains the third largest synagogue in the entire world - behind only Jerusalem and Budapest.  However, beyond that, it didn’t seem like we would be able to spend much time there.

Plzen Synagogue

Willing to give the town a chance though, we headed from the beer hall towards the town centre.  This was tough in itself though because, just like Kutna Hora, the roads were really icy.  From the beer hall we headed to the synagogue, via the town square.  Despite being the third largest in the world, the synagogue was closed - so with no other major sites we headed back for the station.  There was nothing particularly impressive or bloggable about the town - I am struggling to find stuff to write about.  On the way back to the station we saw the old Brewery Gate where the horse and carts used to enter the city with kegs of beer.  There was a Pilsen museum, but we didn’t really have time for it, without missing the only train to Prague with a reasonable time.  It was worth going to Plzen - to say that we have been there, but it felt a bit like we had spent 4 hours on a train for the sake of a beer.  It is definitely somewhere to go to on your way through the Czech Republic, but possibly not somewhere to base a trip around.  Unless you are a real beer fan.

Brewery Gate, Plzen

Tuesday 4th January 2011

Kutna Hora panorama On our third day in Prague, we decided to go and explore the rest of the country a bit. Having both interrailed in the summer, we decided the best way to get out of the city would be by train. Our chosen destination for this journey was the town of Kutna Hora, about 60 miles south of Prague.  The town had once been the country’s second city having felt a boom when silver was discovered in the hills there.  as a result, it is renowned for its elegant buildings, palaces and cathedrals and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  However, it was not these sites that drew us to the town, as we had heard about a place called the Sedlec Ossuary.  After arriving at a small and relatively deserted station with no idea which direction to go, we followed the first rule of travelling in a tourist destination and followed the Japanese people with the big cameras.  Sure enough, they led us right up to the entrance.

Sedlec Ossuary, Kutna Hora

Bone Chandelier

City Coat of Arms. Literally.

See, it’s a church too

The Ossuary is a small monastery in a graveyard on the edge of town.  From the outside it appears to be fairly insignificant, but inside are the remains of 40,000 human bodies.  The skeletons of these bodies, which were either victims of the Hussite Wars or of the Black Death, had centuries ago been meticulously arranged by a half blind monk into a variety of objects, such as a chandelier and a coat of arms, as well as being attached to most of the free wall and ceiling space and piled into four large mounds of skulls and bones.  It ought to have been a sombre place - it contained over a hundred times as many bodies as the amount of British soldiers that have died in Iraq and Afghanistan to date - packed into a small church, but strangely the overwhelming feelings in the building were curiosity and awe.  It was as though nobody was quite willing to acknowledge that every skull represented a human being.  The strangest thing of all was that, despite appearing to be what I imagined hell to look like, it was a place of worship and amongst the skulls and bones were crucifixes.  It is a fascinating place and one ot the most unique I have ever been to.  It’s also very accessible from Prague - a £4 return tourney lasting just under an hour.

Saint Barbara Cathedral, Kutna Hora

With the logic that, interesting as it was, the Ossuary alone couldn’t have warranted the town’s UNESCO status, we thought that there had to be a few more places to see and headed towards the town centre.  This meant a half hour walk through the town’s suburbs on which we saw pretty much no locals.  It was like a ghost town.  This theme continued in the town centre - while there were a few people going about their daily business, the seemingly sparse population was totally out of character with the grand buildings.  The centre of the town had been built by King Wenceslas amongst others and featured two cathedrals and several palaces. Our plan was to only spend about 2 hours in the town, but after looking around the Saint Barbara church and a few squares it became apparent that the transport system in the town was very confusing.  Our train tickets from Prague allowed us to travel from the Kutna Hora Mesto station, but it wasn’t marked anywhere on the maps we had.  To get around this, we decided to follow the train line until we met the station.  To add to this confusion, the icy paths and roads made it impossible to move with any pace and the fact that the town was built on a hill only worsened the problem.  To cut a long story short, we found the station 10 minutes after the train back to Prague had left, with the next one departing two hours later.

Inside the Cathedral

Having done pretty much everything of interest in the town, and with two hours to spare, we headed for a restaurant to warm up a bit.  The food was good and wasn’t too expensive.  I picked up a map from a tourist office and found a few other little sites to look at.  With plenty of time to spare, we ambled back towards the Mesto station, from which there was a train to the station on the outskirts (where we had arrive), where we would change for one back to Prague.  It wasn’t quite that simple however as, despite the journey only being six minutes long, there was another station between the town centre and the outskirts.  It hadn't occurred to me that a town of 20,000 people would need three train stations, so we got off the train, only to find ourselves at the wrong station and lost.  What ensued was a mad dash from this middle station to the outskirts, along icy streets.  In said mad dash I slipped over and Ellie nearly got hit by a car (the fact that I pulled her back from it is her present for it being our six month anniversary), but we got there.  Just. This was a massive relief as the idea of spending two hours in a tiny Czech railway station, the only entertainment in which was a coffee machine, was massively depressing.

Italian Court, Kutna Hora

I write this from the train, where apart from the conductor telling us we had the wrong tickets and charging us fro new ones, things have gone smoothly.  Having had a chance to see the map of Kutna Hora, it is clear just how strange it is.  The town has 20,000 people, but has double that number of human skeletons hanging up in a church in its suburbs.  It has two massive cathedrals, three train stations and a palace built by the Czech national hero, King Wenceslas.  If that wasn’t enough, having looked at the map I have found it has loads of museums, including a silver museum, a cigarette museum and a “baby prams from 1860-1960” museum.  All this and the streets are basically deserted.  If in Prague, this curiosity of a town is well worth a visit.

Sunday 2nd January 2011

Old Town Square, Prague

I am now 3 months into my impromptu gap year.  Seeing as I ended my European travels with next to no money, I have spent most of this time building up my bank balance (apart from my two week excursion to Egypt).  It turns out that when you aren’t earning money or travelling, gap years give you a lot of time to yourself which, in my case, is spent planning where to travel to.  This desire to plan everything, combined with the amount of free time I now seem to have has led me to pin up on my wall the many National Geographic maps that I have gathered, before acupuncturing them in the places where I have been.  Thus far in my life, the European map is by far the most impressive, but there is one gaping hole in my travelling repertoire - Prague, and the Czech Republic in general.  Those of you who read the Overlord blog, which documented my last trip to the continent, will know that after a frantic sprint around the Viennese metro, I was two minutes away from visiting Brno in the south of the country - missing the train.  After such a disappointment it was only a matter of time before I planned a visit to the city of a thousand spires.  Just because its a romantic trip with my girlfriend doesn’t mean I can’t right a blog, right?

Astronomical Clock, Prague

This trip is a little different to my last travels, in that I have booked 5 days in an apartment in the centre of Prague and aim to use this as a base to visit other cities in the Czech Republic, Poland or Eastern Germany.  I have yet to decide where we will go.  However the key destination is Prague itself and after arriving in the city at 11 this morning, we have started to explore a bit.  Our apartment is located right next to the National Theatre (the statue on the roof is the main sight from our terrace), so we have a nice central location on the east bank of the Vltava, to the south of the Charles Bridge.  We started with a random meander around the city, which started with coming across the infamous Astronomical Clock in the Old Town Square.  The clock is very impressive, but is known for being very unimpressive and it didn’t disappoint - it is amusing just how insignificant the actual chime was when it struck 11.  The Old Town Square itself was pleasant however as the Christmas Market hadn’t left yet and there was a big Christmas Tree in the centre.  The Christmas theme continued as we walked from the square to the Charles Bridge as not only were decorations still up, but there was a fair bit of snow still around.  The paths were cleared, but the roofs of buildings were white and big snow piles had been made my the sides of the road.  The Charles Bridge is the most famous crossing of the Vltava and is one of the most well known bridges in the world, due to its being adorned with over a dozen statues of saints.  It is also the bridge from the first Mission Impossible film.

Charles Bridge, Prague

I know that there isn’t much historical context (or architectural/artistic knowledge), but that is because I don’t know much yet (the overly American based content of my school history course has left me fairly clueless about European history).  However we hope to amend this at some stage by going on a walking tour.  For the time being this means I will just say where things are and what I thought of them.  After a spot of lunch near the Charles Bridge at a local cultural restaurant that most definitely wasn’t McDonalds, we headed towards the Petřín Hill.  The hill is quite bizarre as it dominates the skyline of the west bank of the Vltava, but is actually pretty empty - imagine if you were walking down Oxford Street and somebody had turned Hyde Park into a big hill and you get a rough impression.  Looking down at the city from the top of the hill we were surprised to see just how small it seems.  Having seen Slovakia’s Bratislava and Slovenia’s Ljubljana, I have seen how newly emerged countries can end up with small cities as their capitals which had been bit parts of the Austro Hungarian Empire.  Somehow I expected Prague to be different - I would rank it up with the most famous cities in the world. Yes, it is still considerable bigger than the aforementioned examples, but there is no sign of it just being one large urban sprawl.  While there are a few sporadic concrete monstrosities on the skyline, the city centre and surrounding area seems to have retained much of its character.  At least from what I could see from the Petřín Hill.  Our plan was to go up the “Belvedere” - a small imitation of the Eiffel Tower, but frustratingly we couldn’t find our way to it.  Despite it being an obvious landmark on the skyline.


The vague sightseeing of the early afternoon had only really happened because we hadn’t been able to go to the apartment, so after coming down the hill we headed back across the Vltava to pick up the keys and have now basically crashed in the apartment, due to our 3.30am start this morning.  We want to be up bright and early for tomorrow’s excitement.  The content of which we have yet to decide.
Oh, and Ellie is awesome. 

Prague Skyline from Petrin Hill

National Museum, Wenceslas Square, Prague