Tag: food

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Everglades National Park

We started with a 30 minute airboat tour at Gator Park, with several gators swimming up close. At the park, there were small gators fenced in, as well as some large ones that had just wandered onto the property and were laying about, and we watched a little Wildlife Show about them. We then drove to the Shark Valley Visitor Center for a tram tour – about 2 hours driving around with a guide talking the whole time with info about the everglades and wildlife. We stopped by Robert is Here on the way back to the campground to pick up some weird fruits (one’s supposed to taste like chocolate pudding and another like egg custard).

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St. Andrews

Day trip to St. Andrews; luckily we missed the chaos of the big open last week, but there were still some tents set up in a field and you could see the patches of grass where the other hundred tents were. I had an amazing strawberry tart (and hot chocolate) for breakfast; we mostly just walked around shopping and wandering on the beach since none of us could really care less about golf (though literally every other store was a golf store). I did almost have to throw hands with a seagull as it swooped down to get my crumbs as I went to the trash can – I literally almost punched it in the beak before it would leave me alone.

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Stirling Castle

Today I just took a casual stroll through Stirling Castle after class, as you do. For dinner we went into town to try some Scotland favorites: pizza crunch (deep fried pizza), fried haggis, and a fried Mars bar; pizza could have been really good if it had come with more dipping sauce on the side, but the others were really good.

Stirling Castle Video

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Dundalk > Galway

Now the real fun can begin with seeing all the pretty places. We took the train back to Dublin to rent a car and drove to Galway, stopping in Trim and County Offaly to see the Trim Castle and Clonmacnoise Monastery (which we may or may not have snuck into after hours through an open gate).

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Arriving in Dublin

Landed at 1am – I mean 7am – so the perfect time to get started with our day! Got some breakfast, saw the Book of Kells, toured the Guinness factory, then grabbed dinner at the oldest pub and are taking an early night.

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Train to Munich

Spent most of the day on the 7 hour train ride which was a new experience for me and everything went very smoothly so it was very good. When we got to Munich we went to the Hofbräuhaus beer hall where we had some very good wiener schnitzel and strudel. It began raining while we were there so we went back to the hotel and called it an early night.

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Last Day in Budapest

We visited the Shoes on the Danube, a memorial there to honor those lost in WWII. We also went through the Labyrinth, naturally made, but now used in connection to Dracula; they were quite creepy with very few lights, fog, and opera music echoing throughout accompanied by wax figures as a masquerade ball. We took the funicular down Buda Hill, rode the Budapest Eye, and as we were sitting having a milkshake to cool down, a random parade came by as there are multiple festivals happening around here, but what mostly caught my attention was the guy having to wear a fur coat in 90 degrees. We had a great dinner where we cooked our own meat on a lava rock (I had some Mangalica Pork, mostly because I was really intrigued by the concept of eating a fuzzy pig). And then we were supposed to take an overnight train tonight to Munich, but we ended up missing that one, but we were able to get another train to Munich tomorrow morning and a hotel room in the same hotel we stayed in last night so it all worked out. Plus we were glad to be able to take a shower after sweating all day.

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Vienna

We spent all day in Vienna today. Walked around and took a Hop-On-Hop-Off bus tour to be able to see more of the city, had lunch in one of the many cafes, stopped by St. Stephen’s Cathedral and saw the floating rocks, and then visited Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, and Strauss (they have a special section in the cemetery for the composers so they can all hang out together). We also got to take a tour of Schönbrunn Palace after hours; you can see the extravagant palace with beautiful (and huge maze-like) garden, but some of the extravagance is not what it appears (most of the gold inside is only a gold leaf coating so it is cheaper than it appears, and there is a whole porcelain room except that only 2 things are actually made of porcelain while the rest is just wood painted to look similar). Even though they didn’t have a lot extra money, they took a lot of pains to make it look like they did so visitors would be discouraged from attacking this “rich” army. There are also paintings from Empress Maria Theresa’s wedding, and every person has a small number beside them and are labelled as to who they are; Mozart is in one of the paintings, but he was actually never there and was added in later (bit of old school Photoshop) once he got famous because Maria Theresa wanted people to think he was there.

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Melk & Dürnstein

We made a quick stop in Melk and walked through the abbey, then cruised through the Wachau Valley (a UNESCO world heritage site) to get to Dürnstein where we went to a wine tasting. My young tastebuds do not really enjoy the taste of alcohol so I didn’t really like any of the wines, but it was a fun experience. I do quite enjoy that we are able to make stops in these little towns instead of just being in the big cities with tons of tourists, they are quite quaint and beautiful. Also, apricots are really big around here, so I got an Austrian cake sort of thing filled with an apricot spread and at the wine tasting they had an apricot dessert paired with an apricot rum.

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Sailing to Linz

Most of the day was sailing, and we learned about what a lock was and got to experience what it was like to go through one. Since we were onboard for a while, they had a foosball tournament and I competed with newfound friend and fellow youngster (most of the people on the cruise were couples ranging from honeymooners to 60s) Alexis from Montreal, and we made it to the semi-finals but lost by one point after making an amazing comeback. When we stopped in Linz we took a tour around the city – inside the town hall the floor is covered with a map of Linz as seen from above in a helicopter –  and we went into some air raid shelters built during WWII. Apparently even most of the locals don’t know they are there, and a woman on one of the previous tours told the tour guide that she was actually born in there. We went in the “luxurious” part of the tunnels layered with bricks because that was where the officers went during the air raids, but most of them are just the plain sand carved out of the hill. They have some original stuff in there still too, like old tracks for the wagons, the original electricity lines, and original pipes they used to bring fresh air in.