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Azure's Europe Log (Not some stupid blog or xanga)
Welcome to this page full of text that describes my adventures in Europe. This summer, 2008, I will be traveling to Metz, France and studying at the Georgia Tech Lorraine campus. The GTL program is an amazing opportunity to study at an offical Georgia Tech campus where you can take normal engineering classes in English during the week and travel anywhere in Europe over the weekends. It will be an exciting time! This log will be similar to when I traveled to Japan.
View my pictures!
| Screw the french - June 09 2008, 06:13 pm Pacific Daylight Time |
wtf... mass transit strikes? seriously? striking so that people get stuck in train stations all night and can't get anwhere, or have to book more expensive trains after having to pay for reservations on another and no refunds?
seriously? you suck. i just want a bed. and a shower. stop being lazy strikers.
at least good old fashioned american mcdonalds knows how it's done... free wifi.
also, spain is awesome. we were going to overnight train it and go right to class at 8am... but no, now we have to find a way to paris. then find a train to metz. sigh...3 comments | Write Comment |
| Munich - Part 1 - May 30 2008, 08:55 am Pacific Daylight Time |
Wow, keeping up with this is hard. I am going to skip some time and jump to last weekend, so that I don’t fall too far behind. Hopefully I will get around to filling in the blanks.
On Friday, 5/23, our first 3 day weekend began. We decided on Munich, Germany a few days earlier. Jenn, Katie and I got out of class at 11:15, hurried back to our rooms to pack and ran out to catch a bus into Metz. We got the train station, found our first train and got on. It’s so easy to get on the trains here when you have a Eurail pass. We just looked up which trains we needed online, picked the ones that don’t require reservations, and got on. You need reservations for the TGV high-speed trains, but you usually need to book those a few weeks in advance. We didn’t do that, so we had to take a bit of a round-about way to get to Munich, riding a total of 5 trains. The first train was to Strasbourg, a place we have been before (I’ll hopefully fill that in). We had a 20 minute layover and already knew the station a bit, so we found a café and had some coffee (them) and Pepsi (me). It was soon time to get on the next train, and our train happened to be a quite small German train out on the edge of the platform. This was the first time we had been on non-French train, and it was just a tiny local train that took us over the border. We were only on it for 20 minutes, but it was right on time. In fact, all of the German trains we road were accurate by the minute, and it was a good thing too because we only had 6 minute layovers and some stations. The other trains were much nicer inter-city trains. On one of them we just sat on the floor because we had nowhere to sit.
We knew we were in Germany when were at a train station and saw a group of guys drinking out of a small Heineken keg and smoking. Heh.
On our last train, we ended up talking to two German women. One of them was going on a blind date for the weekend in Munich, and the other was born in Munich, raised in Maryland, and was now traveling and climbing mountains. She had all sorts of climbing gear. But, they were both very nice, spoke English, and helped examine our maps to figure out where we needed to go. Munich has a lot of trains, subways, trams, and buses to get around the city, so they pointed out we only needed to get on the subway for one stop, then we could walk to our hostel. The lady from Maryland also helped us buy our ticket. (Sadly, it was nothing advanced – no rfid, no barcode, no magnetic stripe.  ) They have a big honor system with the trains there – nothing is stopping you from just getting on a train. However, some very scary looking German police people DID ask for our tickets once on the subway. We only saw them once out of dozens of times, but I wouldn’t want to be caught without one.
We got on the subway at Munich for about 30 seconds, got off and realized we could have easily walked to where we were now. Oh well. Our map to the hostel was worthless. We went left and tried to find some streets that matched our map, but had no luck. So we went right and tried again. We didn’t see any this time, but I saw some other English-speaking non-Germans and asked them if they had heard of the A&O hostel. They said it was just down the street, so we walked another few blocks and found it. We went to check in and… sorry, you’re at the wrong house! There are TWO A&O’s in Munich. We had to walk all the way back where we started, then walk about the same distance in the OTHER direction. We finally found it, but this was after over an hour of wandering around, including after a 7 hour train ride.
The hostel was pretty nice, it had a nice common area with a small bar and some computers. Everyone there spoke English. Actually, pretty much everyone in Germany spoke English. Germany is awesome. Anyways, we were in a 6 person dorm. We arrived and found one other man in the room. He was a Canadian named James, and was traveling Europe for a month. He was very nice and had a lot of stories and pictures to tell. We talked for a while, and eventually got hungry. It was about 9pm, so we decided to wander down the street to find a restaurant or something to eat. We walked about 15 minutes towards the train station (noting which tram would take us directly to our hostel), and ran into a small park like place where there were lots of people eating and drinking. It turns out we found our first beer garden! Hooray!
If you’ve never been to Germany, a beer garden is place where you drink beer. As I understand it, back in the day they had special licenses to sell beer on the spot, because they kept the beer in large barrels in a basement underground. On top of the basement were trees to keep the basement cool, and so people could come and drink cold beer under the shade. Traditionally beer gardens don’t serve food, you bring your own. But this one had food, and we were starving. We each got a half a chicken. I got a beer for myself, and the girls split a Radler, which is a mix of lemonade and beer. Oh, did I mention that you buy beer in liters here? It was 1 liter of beer. Awesome. The chicken was the best food we have had on this trip, it was amazing to have really good meat. We had a fun time, took some pictures, and eventually decided to go home and sleep. It was a long day.
So I actually have to go catch a bus now to head to Belgium. Mmm, waffles... I promise to update next week. Er, maybe late next week, I have two tests. However, go check out my pictures! I have uploaded about 50.
http://www.pagemac.com/azure/europe/
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| To France - May 18 2008, 04:40 pm Pacific Daylight Time |
Hello, and welcome to the log of my adventure to Europe.
I'll start with a bit more detail of the program I'm in. In the late 1980's, the governor of Lorraine (a region on the eastern border of France) got together with the governor of Georgia, and they decided they wanted to have an American technical presence in Lorraine. You see, the governor was building a new area in Metz (a city in Lorraine) called the Technopole, which would house all sorts of technical and engineering schools, businesses, and related buildings. They decided Georgia Tech looked the best, and finished a building in the Technopole in 1990. It started with only an ECE (electrical and computer engineering) graduate program, and eventually expanded to an ME graduate program. In 2005, they started the summer undergraduate program. There is a full time staff at the GT building here in Metz, and during the summer about 150 Tech students travel over here and take regular engineering classes in English. There are also some graduate programs and research that happens in our building.
On May 11th, my girlfriend Katie and I (she is also in the program – actually it was her idea to come) left the airport in Atlanta on a transatlantic flight. It was an 8 hour flight that left at 6pm local time and arrive in London Gatwick at 7am. Not the best flight – we each only slept about 30-45 minutes, and watched the in flight movies or read the rest of the time. At the Gatwick airport, we had a 7 hour layover. That is not fun. We were pretty tired and the sun was just rising – our flight didn’t leave until 2:45pm local time. It was about 1am in Atlanta. Fortunately, we met up with a lot of other GTL students at the airport. The Gatwick airport has a very central waiting area with plenty of duty free shops. It was more like a mall, actually. They don’t even post what gate you are departing from until about 20 minutes before the flight. Anyways, we all stood out pretty well, so we found each other and sat together, and it was nice getting to know other people we would be spending the summer with.
At one point there was a fire alarm. Katie and I were in a bookstore and there was the sound of an old school bell ringing over the speakers, and the lady said “attention! The fire alarm has been activated in this area! Please evacuate immediately!” It was interesting to see, because it’s very different from our fire alarms in large public areas. I just had one a few weeks ago in a convention center, where you have the typical siren that blares, then a voice that says the fire alarm went off, and you should walk to the nearest exit (stay calm!!!!!). And lots of blinking lights. Anyways, we just got moved to a terminal, waited, and eventually went back to wait some more for our flight. No big deal.
Eventually, we got on our flight to Luxembourg. Do you know where Luxembourg is? Have you heard of it? I hadn’t. For my fellow ignorant Americans, it’s between France, Germany and Belgium. It’s a tiny little country, only 99 square miles, and an hour plane ride from London. We arrived at like 5pm local time (after time changes). It had a tiny airport where we unloaded on the tarmac and took a bus to the terminal. We showed our passports (most of the people on the plane and around us were GTL students, it was fun), and they stamped them all with no problems. We got our luggage and were ready for customs, and then we walked out the door. Ok, so they didn’t really care about customs. There were two agents standing there talking, but they didn’t mind us walking out. That’s cool. But I doubt it will be like that going back into Atlanta. They will surely check our bags then.
GTL arranged for a bus to pick us up (we paid $40 for It, but it was a bit more convenient than catching a city bus, catching a train, then catching a cab to get to our dorms). We had a nice coach bus and took the hour trip from Luxembourg to Metz. The countryside was very pretty and had lots of flowers, but I was pretty tired by this point.
There are two dorms for GTL students. One is ALOES, which is the dorm for SUPELEC, a very good French electrical engineering university. The other is RESAM, the dorm for ENSAM, which I think is a mechanical engineering school. Katie and I were in ALOES, and Katie’s friend Jenn was her roommate (they requested it). When we got to check-in, I didn’t have a room. Nice. They looked at the list, saw I was on it; they just didn’t have a room for me. I had switched from RESAM previously to be with Katie (they are about 20 minutes walking distance from each other), so that was probably the issue. They gave me a temp room for the night. It was nice, but it sucked because I couldn’t really unpack and get settled. My room was a single room. It had its own bathroom with shower, sink, and toilet. It had a normal twin XL bed, a desk, two chairs, a mini fridge, a hotplate, a sink, and a closet. Pretty sweet. Katie and Jenn’s room was the same, except they had two sinks in the bathroom and their own individual rooms with a small, pointless common room that had no furniture.
We were all pretty exhausted at this point, where it was about 7:30pm. We had traveled for about 22 hours, and had very little sleep during that time. But we were hungry, and they had food at the GTL building. So we made our first walk to the building. ALOES is basically on the other side of a lake from GTL; we just walked around the lake to get to it. It’s about a 15 minute walk, not too bad, and there are usually plenty of French people out running, walking their dogs, or just enjoying the outdoors. This is the walk we would be making twice every day. We got there and they had some bread, cheese and meat to eat. It wasn’t too filling, but it was something. I kind of met some other people, but I was tired. We went back to the dorms and went to sleep.
Next up: The first week at GTL and Metz
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| Test - May 18 2008, 03:48 pm Pacific Daylight Time |
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