Hang On

Well I know its been a while since I've last updated this blog, I'm sure plenty of you have been wondering what has been keeping you guys updated. To be honest, I've been a bit busy with work and traveling, but the biggest thing holding me back was that this update seemed a bit daunting because I knew it was going to be quite large. I wanted to put a lot of time into editing some nice photos and sending some links to facebook so you guys could browse through all my pictures. In addition I wanted to comment on each picture so you knew what was going on. Suffice to say much of that still hasn't been done, but I think an update is still long overdue, so here it is:

On the 24 of June, Jiang and myself set out for an adventure (the A and B on this picture don't really mean anything, but the blue is what we traveled). We booked a couple of tickets on tour to see France. Jiang arranged the whole thing, which meant that it was through a Chinese travel agency and the entire tour was in Chinese with nearly all Chinese people that only spoke Chinese and some German and maybe some English. So for me it indeed an adventure. Jiang translated for me (and did a really good job of it) for all the necessary information I needed to know from our tour guide. The journey was planned to be a four day tour that departed from Magdeburg then traveling to other major cities in Germany to pick up other people for the tour, so it probably took us an extra 5 hours or so to pick up everybody rather than just head straight for France. After we got out of Germany, our first destination was Lyon, France. It is a fairly beautiful city with a beautiful cathedral sitting on a hill overlooking the city.

By the way, I think it is important to note that the entire first day was entirely a traveling day to get to Lyon. We arrived around 10pm and were going to leave the next morning at 8am. We traveled the "Chinese" style, which means we only stop at important locations stopping just long enough to take a couple of pictures and buy a postcard or some souvenir the rest of the time were are traveling so we can hurry up and see some other city. I felt this was rather advantageous for me since it allowed me to see a lot more of Europe, at a relatively inexpensive price, and only miss a two days of work (we left on a Thursday).
Since we wanted to see more of the city, Jiang, myself and a couple of other Chinese girls that sat in front of us woke up early before the bus left. We left around 6:30am and took the subway and explored the city. It was pretty much exactly what I imagined in my head as a typical French city. Everything just seemed narrow. The streets were narrow and the apartments were all built right next to each other.
From Lyon we traveled to Avignon. It was apparently the location where the Pope lived for some period of time back a long time ago (as you can tell I didn't care much for the history that I was looking at but most of this was due to it being translated to me and my translator had a hard time keeping up). Anyways this near-castle-like area was pretty cool. The cathedral inside was extremely ornate, but rather empty (a description that can characterize nearly all of the cathedrals that I visited). Another interesting thing to not was that it has a rather large and detailed stone crucifix that stood alone in the courtyard, yet seated on top of the cathedral overlooking the courtyard (above Jesus on the Cross) was a golden statue of Mary. I just failed to understand.
Our next location was the "stone city," I'm not sure of the actual name of this place but it was a village/city on near mountain that overlooked the French country-side. Every house and building in this village was made out of stone. It really was quite an amazing feat of architecture. The village and surroundings were absolutely beautiful. The best part of this place was that I got to eat an actual eclair from a french bakery. Definitely the best eclair I have ever had. The area around this city is really famous for its lavender. So we visited some lavender fields. Some of the people on our tour came specifically on this tour to see these fields because they love the lavender flower. However, they seemed a bit disappointed when we arrived to the fields.
For almost the entire adventure I never knew our next destination until we arrived at it. I enjoyed this way of travel because I had no expectations of our next destination and was constantly amazed at everything I saw. It was all new to me and always being surprised by what I saw. Unfortunately for my Chinese friends they always felt like our destinations needed to be more grandeur and extravagant than what they saw.
By the evening, we arrived in Marseille, France. Again we arrived late at night and didn't really have time to see the city. All I really remember is enjoying the croissant and latte I had for breakfast the next morning. After Marseille we made our way to Cannes, France, which unbeknown to me is like the Hollywood of Europe. It does have some hand-prints in concrete of celebrities and a red-carpet which I got to see. However, the best part of Cannes was that it sat right on the Mediterranean. Beautiful cruise ships sat on the horizon and as I walked on the beach I stared into the clearest water I have ever seen for a natural body of water.
Soon after my discovery of such crystal clear water, it was already time to leave. In a short hour or so we arrived in Nice, France and yes it is quite nice. Here we stayed a little longer and Jiang and I decided to go for a swim in the Mediterranean. However, the beaches has no sand just smooth rocks! It was crazy. I have never seen so many people just sitting out on rocks for a beach. Despite the rocks, I managed to enjoy my swim in the cool sea and just relax in the gorgeous city.
It seemed like the place we were seeing kept getting more and more beautiful and the next continued the trend. We arrived in Monte-Carlo, Monaco. Some may compare it to the Las Vegas of Europe. In my opinion, Monte-Carlo is exclusively for those who have bottomless pits of cash for pockets in order to gamble while just about anyone can go and gamble in Vegas. The city/country (yes it is its own country) was definitely one of the most beautiful locations I have ever seen in my life. The city sits in a valley surrounded by golden mountains overlooking the blue-green Mediterranean. I saw 3 or 4 Ferrari's cruising around, a lot of Porsche's, a Rolls Royce or two, and two different Lamborghini's among other very expensive cars. It was insane.
From Monaco, we traveled through the beautiful Alps in northern Italy until we arrive in Milan. We once again arrived very late (~11pm) and just spent the night in the city.
The entire next day we spent traveling back to Germany. However, this mean we got to travel through Switzerland. The Swiss have an incredible country. The mountains get large enough to be snow capped. They have many large crystal clear lakes. The rivers and streams we passed were even more clear than the Mediterranean water. Switzerland is just incredible and stunningly beautiful. It just seemed like after we came out of every tunnel we ended up looking at yet another picturesque view of mountains, rivers, lakes and green, green grass. It is definitely a place I would like to visit again.
After Switzerland, we finally arrived back in Magdeburg, Germany at 1am. It was a fast (yet long) adventure and got to see so much. I thought most of you would like to know about that trip I'll be working on getting more photos up on facebook and link you to them in my next update (which I hope will be fairly soon since there is plenty of other things going on that I would like to keep you posted on).

Well thats it for now since it seemed pretty long. It was written pretty quickly so there might be some mistakes and such throughout but I'll try to edit it at some other time.