Uploaded images

I finally uploaded the pictures from the trip. Unfortunately for you english-only-speakers, the comments are in swedish. But you can see the pics nevertheless!

Back home

I'm home again. I wish I hade anything summarizing to say about the trip, but I guess I have to let it all sink in first. Thanks everyone for posting comments! I will put up a link here with a bunch of photos when I have sorted out the good ones from all the crap.

Back in Germany

Ok, so I got to Leipzig pretty alright. The train trough Italy was really hot, but at least it took me here in time.

Leipzig has treated me good so far. The weather has been just perfect, the town seems nice and Amelie which I'm staying with is "Great!", as she would have put it. I just came to the conclusion that what I think of a place is probably much more dependent of what the weather and the people I meet is like, than the actual place itself.

But anyway, I will be coming home on Sunday evening, and I'll just try to enjoy the last bit of my trip as good as possible. See you soon!

Not that Nice

So green water and blue skies, that all seems like Nice is a nice place, right? Well, I guess, but to me it's more like unbearable heat and stupid cashiers.

First of all, the train from Toulouse was 3,5 hours late, so we all got to sit in a drafty entrance in the train station in the middle of the night which made me catch a cold. I was able to find a hostel right outside Nice, which was very nice except for the location. Then I went back into town to get a ticket for Leipzig. This is the conversation with the cashier in short:

- I wanna leave here tomorrow and go to Leipzig
- (searches a little)... full
- Are all trains to Leipzig full? Ok, can I get on any train that takes me north?
- You have to tell me a place
- Ok, so... Berlin?
- Full
- Hmm... so Munchen?
- Full

I keep picking some towns like Strasbourg and other places in Germany and get the same answer on everything. So I try Vienna. It turns out I can get a bed on a night train to Vienna for 40 euro. Which is not really what I wanted at all. So I say that I will have to think about it for a while and let those behind me get to do their things in between. So I settle for Vienna, and when it's my turn again they're about to close the desk and are really unpolite. Now Vienna is full too? And then they lose the connection with the international booking server?

-Sorry, I can't help you

WTF! Anyway, I'm going to the regular cashier queue, not the one for just interrailing bookings, and wait for another 15 minutes. Then I ask the cashier there the same question, just to see if she says the same thing. She searches for a long time, and says that the train between Paris and Frankfurt is full, which would be my route to Leipzig. I ask if I can't go over Italy instead, and she checks that for a while. And voila, there is a possibility to go over Milano to Leipzig. So I take it of course, and happily pays the extra 28 euros it costs. That's how well this whole train booking thing works.

So, on Friday I will hopefully be in Leipzig. Which probably will be my last stop. I'm getting tired of this.

Song: Home - Michael Buble

I'm in Toulouse (just like the cat in Aristocats) right now for a couple of hours. I will take another night train from here and wake up in Nice tomorrow. Or wake up a bit earlier probably, but Nice is where I'm going. Speaking of sleeping - I slept for almost 13 hours straight in San Sebastian. Very unlike me, but I needed it I guess. And the town wasn't that bad at all. Quite nice actually, if they only would have had the decency to speak english. Coming back to France feels a little like coming home.

Song: What if I'm right - Sandi Thom (without title meaning this time, it just felt very right when it popped up in the emmpeetrois as they say here)

Rain in Spain

No matter how far south I go, the rain keeps following me. Although it was mostly in the morning, the day has been alright.

I am in San Sebastián, close to the nortern french border of Spain. It´s hopeless. Nobody speaks english. Not a bit. Not a single soul. Nothing! I did manage to get a room by just speaking english to a woman who just spoke spanish and wrote numbers on papers and did gestures. And I did manage to get a pizza. But that´s about it. I have to leave here tomorrow. The guy at the international train booking place actually spoke a few words english, but he had no idea of how the trains went. I´ll have to go over to the french border and take it from there. I will go as far east as I can, away from this madness. I probably will shorten my trip quite a bit, as it is so consuming looking for trains, places to stay and places to eat all the time. And you can´t really plan anything either, because you don´t know how the trains are going and if they´re full or not. Oh well, hopefully I´ll be in France or Italy or Switzerland or anywhere that is not Spain next time I write.

Quick update

It's my third day in Paris, and I've seen a lot so far. The first day I went to the Notre Dame church with my heavy backpack, and then wandered around and turned up outside the Louvre. The entry was luckily free for people under 26 on fridays after 18, just when I happened to get there, so I ran in, took a look at the Mona Lisa for a couple of minutes, and then ran out again. It must have been the quickest visit they recieved ever. Yesterday I went to the Eiffel Tower, Triumph de Arc and the oh so wonderful Montmartre area.

Tonight I'll take a night train to Irun in Spain. They were all full to Barcelona. That's all I have time to tell you right now.

Song: Oh L'amour - Erasure (simply because I can't get it out of my head)

Paris, oh sweet Paris

I made it to Paris! I'm staying with Mathilde somewhere in the south of Paris, I just drank a third bottle of cheap but good french wine and we're going to some friends of her's right now. I'll tell you more later!

Sex, drugs and... more sex and drugs

When I looked at internet, I couldn't find a single free hostel in Brussels. So I'm staying in Amsterdam for tonight, and leaving here early tomorrow for Paris with just a quick change of trains in Brussels.

Amsterdam is crazy. There are sex shops and coffee shops everywhere. I'm about to head out to the red light district soon, to see the really crazy shit. That's all for now!

Off to Amsterdam and Brussels

That's at least where I think I'm going. Just do Amsterdam for a couple of hours today, and then head over to Brussels for a night in a hostel.

Yesterday evening me and Mischa went out with some of the students of scandinavian languages. It's a bit strange that all these people spend years of studying grammatical rules and things that you never heard of, you just get it naturally. It's also a bit strange coming to a foreign country, and still speak the language you use to communicate with better than all the others, even though some of them were pretty good. And that they speak their own language between them and I don't get a thing of course.

A few more pics from Hamburg

My blogging seems very unorganized I guess, because I forget to tell a lot of things and so. And the image uploading function on blogspot is a bit strange. But I'll give it another shot.

Here's a sign. In the beginning of Reeperbahn. That's all you're getting from this street of decadence.












Just right to the Harbour are these cool old storage buildings, which they still are used as.








What I forgot to tell you was that on the tuesday evening Sarah took me to this cool community of shortfilm makers, which had a screening of different flicks from all over. Most of them were made on 48 hours, editing included, and some of them were really cool.

Even though I don't like the song at all, it seems like I have no choice. It rained in Hamburg a little on and off, and it has been raining pretty much every second I've been in Groningen. Which made the city tour very short. So...:

Song: Genom ett regnigt Europa - Tomas Ledin

Here comes a few pictures in no particular order. The harbour in Hamburg is right outside the city, and there are public ferries that let you watch it up close.














Here's Anna, happy because she just got her long awaited cash.



Over: Two happy street performers. Relied more on charm than musical brilliance.

I never even gave it a thought, but the train from Copenhagen went straight into a ferry in Rodby and ended up in Puttgarten.

Deutsch to dutch

So, I did manage to get out of Hamburg. I took some buses to the station, which Sarah was kind enough to clearly explain and write down the numbers and stops for me on a piece of paper. My train was luckily ran by a private company and not affected by the strike. So, now I'm in Groningen, northern Netherlands, home of my sister's friend and the best Vapnet-interpreter of "Blandat 0702" - Mischa. I pretty much just got here, but the first impression is... bikes! Bikes everywhere. They even had an enormous bike garage right next to the station, where bikes where parked in two levels and row after row.

Anyway, I didn't get time to tell you about Hamburg earlier today. As I said, Anna showed me around all day. We went by S-bahn, U-bahn, bus and ferry, but most of all by foot. I did get to see Reeperbahn by day, which was pretty uninteresting compared to the night I guess, and other famous sites.

And oh yeah, just when I was sitting on the train between Hamburg and Bremen thinking that this blog-soundtrack-thing never will work out, two things happened at the exact same time:
1. A whole schoolclass of youngsters (probably around 12 or so) burst in to the train and starting yelling and running around like crazy
2. My mp3-player, which I among my favourite songs also includes a few songs in german, french and spanish, started playing what now is today's feature:

Song: Verruckte jungs - Blumchen

Strikes and things

So, my stay in Hamburg is over. Almost at least. Now is the problem getting out of here. The train is on strike, the S-bahn that is supposed to take me to the station is on strike. Hopefully I will get there by bus, and hopefully my train will leave the station, but nothing is certain for sure.

Anyway, I've had a good stay so far. I arrived alright and was picked up by my host Sarah on the station on Sunday. Then yesterday I met up with Anna who I hosted in a few weeks ago, and she showed me all around town. That's all I got time to tell right now. See ya!