somebody pinch me

a very wise friend asked me how I thought I would deal with life on the road. you know, without all the "creature comforts" to which I've grown accustom.

at the time I kind of just brushed off the question. how hard could it be, I thought to myself. i'll be seeing the world! if I can't live with wavy, kinky, frizzy hair for a year then I have alot of growing to do!

well... I've gotten over the curly hair thing...it's really only annoying on super hot days when my fresh from the shower hair takes 4 hours to dry and it remains sticky and damp, clinging to the back of my neck. nope...the hair is not the problem. a ponytail fixes all...

Jason is not the problem either. we've worked out a pretty good system for staying off each others nerves (except today which I'll blame on the hot & tireds). if anything he is too patient and too understanding and gives into my pleas for a foot massage more than anyone in their right mind should!

none of the blogs I read while dreaming of this trip mentioned a word about how hard it is to travel longterm. or maybe some did but I just dismissed them as being wimps. but I suspect that the people like me, that find life on the road a bit overwelming, are afraid to talk about it.

like...how lame is that to complain about traveling around the world for a year. boohoo. pity party for Corina...

well, for those of you with a sympathetic ear for a homesick girl...sometimes traveling sucks. it sucks when it's a travel day AGAIN and you have to pack up the meager belongings you carry around with you from place to place and it's 28 degrees and you get lost on the way to the hostel and you haven't eaten in 6 hours. it sucks when you get a sore throat that never goes away no matter how much 'downtime' you had in San Sebastian. it sucks when you really want to spend every day exploring Barcelona and your body says 'holy crap, you are almost 40! did you really think you could do ALL that in one day?'

so how am I adjusting to life on the road?not as well as I'd hoped but probably as well as my wise friend would have predicted. if I'm completely honest with you...the phrase "what the 'h, e, double hockey sticks' was I thinking" has run through my head on more than one occasion.

but then I'll spend the afternoon in Barcelona, hanging out with Jay and our Bordeaux host, Berenise, at Gaudi's absolutely, awe-inspiring Sagrada Familia and all the pain is forgotten. if only for a moment...

adios,
corina

turns out we're not telepathic

we've gotten to know a bit about how we travel and potential problems that may arise from our oddities and quirks. usually with enough planning and forethought we can avoid these problems. this was not the case as we left to catch our train to bordeaux...

usually we try to have our bags packed the evening before our travel day so that the morning can be dedicated to showering and eating a good breakfast. this time however we were out late trying to find a way home from our date with ron and al after the metro closed...without a map, of course. so this meant an early morning and a scramble to get packed. to add to the scramble the plumber guys, that were working on demolishing our host's bathroom, showed up an hour earlier than usual.

we left the apartment with 50 minutes to catch our train. according to anyone else you would ask...plenty of time. we'd booked our tickets online so all we had to do was show up, print our tickets, and find the correct platform.

when we arrived at the train station panic started to churn in my stomach...the station was massive! and confusing! and all in french! we stood in line at the yellow ticket machine for a few minutes but when that was taking too long we looked for alternatives. i mean, who knows if we were even standing at the right machine! an official looking train guy walked by so we asked where to get our tickets. he pointed to an elevator and told us to go to the second floor and we would see the ticket office to the left.

at this point we had about 20 minutes to catch our train...

there were 2 couples with strollers waiting to catch the elevator up. we tried to cram in with the second couple but we didn't all fit.

corina in a fog obviously not thinking clearly when she says:

"jay catch the elevator after me and meet me at the ticket office. i'll run ahead and get in line."

so i hit the second floor running...couldn't see the office right away so i asked for help (which by the way is weird for me). finally in line i started to think that maybe jay wouldn't be able to find the office. merde! it was my turn to the ticket window and the agent was ready to print our tickets when she asked to see the credit card that was used to reserve online. merde! jason used his card! i couldn't get the tickets without the number...a security measure she said. i started sending urgent telepathic messages to jay to stay at the elevator. i ran back and jay was no where to be found. circling the area around the elevator, escalators and the train schedule tv's i had the sinking feeling that we wouldn't find each other in time.

as i rounded the escalators for the 3rd time i saw jay down on the main floor pacing in front of the elevator, grocery bag thrashing around and feet stomping. i yelled out to him and jerked my thumb up indicating he should get his butt upstairs asap! we found a machine that was free and printed off our tickets but it was all in vain...we missed our train.

jason's rebuttal:
Now, according to the rules: when person A, is seperated from person B the person who is left behind ALWAYS stays put no matter how many telepathic messages they receive telling person B to move there but! If you don't believe me it is in the "How to travel together safely" manual under the rules: section 5 paragraph 13.

For a change, I was not the one running around. For some reason I was calm...well, calmer than Corina. I only started to panic when Corina was not coming back for me. I will admit though, I overtook her on the panic scale. as I paced and swung my shopping bag I kept thinking "I'm doing something wrong" even though I was following the rules...sigh.

jason doomed to wander in the fog forever

In case you are wondering, we did make it to Bordeaux.

miroir d'eau in bordeaux

we drank wine, ate cheese and had 3 wonderful dinners with our cs hosts berenise, ben & their fluffy cat, sardine. they suggested we go to saint-èmilion for a wine tour so we did :)

saint-émilion cobbled streets

bordeaux wine country (view from saint-émilion)

santè,
corina & jason

btw, there was no meltdown resulting from this episode and we are already laughing about it. wonder what that means...

pain au chocolat and other reasons i liked paris

we arrived in paris via a night bus from utrecht, netherlands. the savings of taking a bus vs. a train plus the advantage of not paying for accommodations seemed too great to pass up. i have to wonder if monetary savings ever actually benefit travelers' sanity, comfort or general well-being. six hours on a bus, in the middle of the night may have been the cheapest option but it cost me 3 days of a cold & flu, a day of sightseeing spent exhausted & catching up on sleep and the pain & suffering we had to endure while other sleeping passengers let 'er rip.

onto the good stuff...

we met some really fantastic people while we were in paris. most of them were spanish friends of our couchsurfing host veronica but that doesn't mean there aren't friendly parisians, we just didn't meet many. our first night veronica took us to a party at jose's flat. on the weekend we went to fontainebleau with some of the same people...sonja, teresa, andrew (he's a cdn from toronto not spanish), jose, and miguel.

a quick lesson in boating with our new friend jose acting as translator.

the highlight of our trip to fontainebleau was the opportunity to try boating on the canal. some of us were more eager to try than others but we all took our turn eventually. jay and i were in the last group to go. jay kept saying, "i'm gonna fall in" and we all assured him that he wouldn't. well, you can guess what happened. shirt, pants, hat and wallet...ass over tea kettle...

after the fall

on our last night in town we got to meet our san francisco blog buddies, alison & ron of 'leap...and the net' fame. we met on couchsurfing and had hoped to meet in san fran when we were there in march for evan & mary's wedding and never did. so it'd been a long courtship of reading each others blog posts and exchanging emails before the inevitable first date. we over paid for our french onion soup and got dirty looks in the bar-where-you-must-wear-black but i feel confident that we'll get a second date...

alison & ron from san francisco

of course we did some obligatory touristy things like visit the eiffel tower, arc de triomphe, and the louvre. but we also did some bonified parisian things like carry a baguette home from the bakery, avoid dog poo on the sidewalk and sat in the park on sunday afternoon eating the aforementioned baguette.

arc de triomphe

eiffel tower right up the guts

notre dame front facade

notre dame gargoyles

the famous louvre pyramid

jason trying to get kicked out of the louvre but they make it pretty hard to do...flash photos, people hugging statues and lax ticket checking. how very french.

next post: how we missed our train to bordeaux and other french delights ;p

salut,
corina

we´ve added pictures

we´ve added an amsterdam picture album to our picasaweb account. if you click on the thumbnail photo at the bottom of this blog under photos from the road you should be taken to our web albums. for some reason we cannot load to this blog from the internet cafe we are at. there may be a good reason but its in spanish so we're not sure what it is.

it's costing us jay's beer money to hang out in this unairconditioned hole in the wall and post pictures so we'll stop for now and maybe write an update without pictures from our free wifi apartment later today.

adios,
corina

rewind to berlin

as we flew over germany and specifically the area surrounding berlin, both jason and i felt a familiarity with the landscape. square plots of farmland, trees skirting the dividing lines...a patchwork of fields and colours. i became oddly homesick while in berlin. i'm not sure if it was this familiarity, the time frame that we had been away...i was starting to miss people from home and the comfort of my own space/bed...or if it was that berlin was the first city we'd been to where english wasn't spoken everywhere. all of the above i suppose. it was an overwhelming time for me. looking back at how much we'd already seen and looking ahead to the remaining unknown.

we were fortunate to find couchsurfing hosts again in berlin. we were first hosted by florian and rhea in their gorgeous apartment in a neighbourhood that reminded me of osborne village only older buildings with bigger floor boards, bigger windows and higher ceilings. i just wanted to stay in the apartment all day because the space was so soothing. flo and rhea were amazingly warm and generous people and it would have been nice to hang out with them more than we did.

our living space for 3 days in berlin with flo and rhea - "i could live here" said corina to jay

our second hosts were mark and andrea. mark actually contacted a radio station from winnipeg to request a song for our arrival. the dj´s talked about the email they received, jay and corina from manitoba, and couchsurfing. it was definitely a unique way to be welcomed to berlin :D

on our last night in berlin we tried to get into a club with mark and andrea...why not...we hadn´t really experienced any real night life on our trip yet so here was our chance. we waited in line for about 20 minutes, were let through by the first bouncer and waited in the 'you are almost in...wait patiently' line. when we reached the front of the line the second bouncer told us we were too dressed up and could not enter as it was casual tshirt and jeans night. 2 of us were wearing jeans, i was wearing a tank top under a cardigan, the boys were wearing button down tops (not high fashion by any means!). we had seen girls entering wearing skirts and teeny tiny tops before us. andrea tried to call his bluff but he held firm. i still shake my head in bewilderment whenever i think of this evening. i'm pretty sure it had nothing to do with what we were wearing and everything to do with our age. sigh. my first experience with ageism...

reichstag dome redone in the 1990s - cool views of berlin from here for free!

we saw some cool stuff while in berlin. it wasn't my favourite place so far but we probably missed quite a bit in our rush to get to amsterdam. we saw bits and pieces of the berlin wall, checkpoint charlie, brandenburger tor (which was completely surrounded by a construction fence as they were preparing for the 12th IAAF world championships in athletics), and the reichstag dome at night.

flat penners hanging onto the berlin wall...they just want peace, man!

flat petroffs join flat penners in the 'hang in' for peace

corina's feet crossing the berlin wall marker, 20 years ago she would have been shot

flat petroffs hanging out with the irish bear (of buddy bear fame) in berlin

flat penners in potsdam, germany...oh no is flat ellie going to be squashed even more while flat hannah and flat sasha just smile for the camera?

we are definitely finding that in larger cities 5 days is not enough to see and do everything. one day is spent traveling to get there or catching up on sleep from traveling all night, and at least one day is spent planning the next phase of the trip and doing laundry, etc. we've been in paris for the last 5 days and tomorrow we move on to bordeaux. we could definitely spend at least another week in paris alone but we booked our train tickets to bordeaux before getting to paris and now have to stick to the plan...lessons learned...we hope to slow it down in spain and i am insisting on 10 days in barcelona :D

guten tag,
corina

p.s. if you are a penner like i am you may find this a bit funny...

when our host andrea found out my last name was penner she kind of giggled. apparently penner means begger in german. when we went out to dinner with them jason gave my last name to the server so that he could call us when the food was ready. needless to say he called out 'PENNER' with extra enthusiasm. snickers could be heard throughout the restaurant and patio.