Gaming World Forums
General Category => General Talk => Topic started by: datamanc3r on November 15, 2008, 07:20:35 pm
-
Okay, classic end-of-high-school thing to do. Europe trip.
My girlfriend and I are saving money to go to Europe next summer (june-ish), and being the dumbass, uncultured Americans we are, we need some ideas. Where should we go? What should we do? That sort of thing.
I kind of hate going around and sight-seeing because those trips are expensive and pretty boring. Yeah, I'm sure the Eiffel tower is great, but I don't want to go "OH YEAH, JUST SAW EIFFEL TOWER, CROSS FRANCE OFF THE LIST." Focusing on shit like that really takes away from the overall experience. So we're really just looking to travel around and see what's life like on the other side of that great Atlantic puddle. Seeing as how traveling around is pretty much a regular thing to do for you WEIRD FOREIGN PEOPLE, keep in mind that this is pretty new to us. I've NEVER been outside of my country. So general basics would be awesome.
For now, how did your trips go? What do you recommend bringing? Have any cool stories to tell?
-
We went to Cancun for our class's senior trip.
Maybe you should try backpacking across Eastern Europe (any pussy liberal arts major can backpack across Western Europe, it takes a real man to go through the East). Or, you could make a cross continent trip visiting all of our European gaming worlders (You can invite yourself to sleep on their couches).
-
the coolest kids have been to prague
-
if you have money and is interested in culture:
go to Rome and do fucking everything you can that is culture related. go visit ruins and cathedrals during the day and go to operas and old restaurants at night. get your ass into the vatican state and check out that shit. visit the spanish steps and the pantheon.
seriously, if you do this, get up every day at like 7 AM and go strong all day trying to get a sense of everything you can. it's a great experience and I recommend it.
the same thing can also be done in Paris but imo Rome is better though they're both perfect culture cities.
-
Go to ukraine, you can pay roughly $100-$200 for a day trip to see pripyat, the abandoned radiated town next to chernobyl pp
-
I was planning on doing something similar next year but to New York, just spend a week up there and soak shit up rather than sightseeing (that stuff is boring as)
(but It turns out that the study trip may be to New York and I can't afford going there twice!)
-
I want to do something like that next summer too, for two or three weeks. I was thinking I'd go to Italy, France, Netherlands, and maybe Germany. I still haven't thought much about it however, so yeah.. this thread would be pretty useful.
-
I agree, sightseeing isn't very fun, because everything just seems planned and mundane.
Europe is a great place to go, though - I've been there twice - just allow everything to be spontaneous.
-
My eurotrip last summer was done by rail. Interrail and Eurail passes are incredibly good value. My Interrail pass cost me £295, which got me unlimited rail travel within all European countries for a month. You often have to book a seat on the train in advance (ie. the night before or that morning) and occasionally there are surcharges of about 2 euros for this, but all in all, it's amazing. We kind of did what you're looking to do. Sure, we did end up seeing some sights, but we also just wandered around each city, had some good food, met some good people, had some crazy experiences, taking it all in. When you're far away from home in a foreign country, even shit as mundane as catching a train can be somewhat exciting. A splendid time is guaranteed for all.
My 5 week travel itinerary:
Bergen
Oslo
Stockholm
Malmo
Copenhagen
Berlin
Prague
Krakow (with trip to Oswiecim)
Vienna
Bratislava
Budapest
Ljubljana (with trip to Lake Bled)
Venice
Munich
Basel (with trip to Zurich)
Geneve
Lyon
Paris
It was quite a hectic 5 weeks.
ps. go to traditional Budapest swimming baths for maximum octaganarian nudity.
-
go everywhere, see everything. eat the food!! make sure you try lots of different kinds of pastries and foods
btw the people in prague were pretty terrible in my experience. also if you go to the tourist section everyone will try to rip you off
-
gazz what did you do in oslo?
-
gazz what did you do in oslo?
I was offered drugs and attacked by Nigerian prostitutes.
-
we're on the Rhyne on the Rhyne you have to rhyme
-
go with just a backpack and only stay in hostels, otherwise you're an awful tourist
-
I think you should just WANDER THE TOWNS, that's awesome to do. Wandering around Reykjavik not knowing what there was to see and not having a plan meant that I got to see a lot of things I otherwise wouldn't (and I ate some awesome food). Just do shit like that. Go somewhere and look around, don't spend all your time wandering a town trying to find some tourist spot you heard of, just wander for the sake of seeing the city.
-
I was offered drugs and attacked by Nigerian prostitutes.
and people say oslo isnt an international metropolis huh!
-
I went round Europe this year and would say that you definitely need to stay in hostels if you want to meet people. We stayed in a few awfully cheap hotels and they were rubbish because there was no common room etc. I'm gonna do a plan like Gazzwa did. Like him, we used to the interrail pass (which I recommend). We only went for 3 weeks though
Marsielle (expensive, probably not worth going to)
Rome (a lot of impressive history to see. go to a bar called Scholars)
Vienna (Go to a hostel called Wombats)
Budapest (really cheap. Make sure you go to baths and the island is a cool place for night life)
Prague (You'll find a lot of guys on a stag do unless you go to the right places. Make sure you go to the club that has 7 floors. Don't use the taxis, they are run by the mafia)
Krakow (Night life is pretty dead other than a friday and saturday where its mental. Go see Auschwitz, its close)
Warsaw (Don't be surprised if you see a dismembered corpse on the train line.)
Berlin (Stay in a Wombats hostel again if you can. Matrix night club is awesome. Go to a few cocktail bars too)
Amsterdam (note: if you have smoked weed before, expect the weed to be 10 times stronger than what you are used to.)
These are the only places I got to go to and we had an excellent time in all of the places except maybe a few nights in Poland where we got into some trouble.
I recommend traveling with a group of people because you get that school trip vibe. I went with 7 other guys and to be honest, other than seeing the sights in Rome and Auschwitz, we pretty much got drunk and met the locals and that was our agenda. This a good way of getting to know the culture imo
-
This'll be pretty awesome.
Yeah, we're pretty much thinking the same thing. We're travelling light, and definitely by rail. I'll probably just bring my clothes, sketch pad, and a camera if I can keep it from being swiped. What else would I need to bring besides the necessary papers? Also, would it be feasible to *find* a good hostel just by walking around -- so that I don't have to spend the nights figuring out where to stay next? (Alternatively, I could mooch offa you GWers).
Hm. As for where to go, I'm thinking Italy definitely. I'm not really acquainted with Eastern Europe, but I'd be willing to check it out. I wanna go to Spain to test out my Spanish skills (all those wasted years taking Spanish have got to pay off) and she wants to go to France. Other than that, we should have some time to just travel around without too much planning.
By the way, what's the best period of time to stay in any one area?
EDIT:
We're thinking 3 weeks, too -- but it seems like a pretty skimpy amount of time.
Also, just to make sure, what's the general drinking age? :D
-
www.339eurotrip.blogspot.com is the uh, travel blog that my friend kept when he had a chance to hop on a computer.
-
go with just a backpack and only stay in hostels, otherwise you're an awful tourist
As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it's only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let's-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way--hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation trave To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.
-
that is true. but at the same time I think it's possible to participate in tourism and not be an awful ignorant and rude american. or maybe I'm not actually talking about dumb tourism, just some middleground between being a stinky backpacker and a fat slob who packs the hotel breakfast bar in her purse and shouts "the hoff-house is this way girls"
-
don't come to sweden
its boring
-
that is true. but at the same time I think it's possible to participate in tourism and not be an awful ignorant and rude american. or maybe I'm not actually talking about dumb tourism, just some middleground between being a stinky backpacker and a fat slob who packs the hotel breakfast bar in her purse and shouts "the hoff-house is this way girls"
wat, why does the backpacker have to be stinky. also that middleground is probably RICH GUY in which case you aren't so much of a tourist as someone who takes multiple trips to europe and probably has some stupid ancestry there.
BOOOOOO FUCK WHITEY.
-
How much time are you planning on spending? Because, you know, take any of the big cities—Rome, Paris, London, Madrid, Berlin—all of them can keep you busy for weeks. Just the Musée du Louvre in Paris (I'm assuming you were able to tell that musée means museum) has over 60,000 square metres worth seeing. If you're going to go, make sure you ask yourself what type of thing you really want to see and then make a list of things.
I don't even know very much about Europe (just Western Europe, really) but I think you should have a look at the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_Heritage_Sites_in_Europe). All of the things on this list are amazing and historically significant in some way, yet not all of them are gigantic tourist traps. You need to see the Eiffel Tower and the Guernica, but you don't need to hop only to and from places that you've seen on TV. Go to Kinderdijk (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinderdijk), Cáceres (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A1ceres,_Spain), Mérida (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9rida,_Spain), Abbaye de Sénanque (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9nanque_Abbey). Go to the Tom Simpson memorial on the Mont Ventoux (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Ventoux) and watch as the runners of the Tour de France (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tour_de_France) crawl by. Go to Ravenna (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravenna) and walk on actual mosaics.
To feel a little closer to the people who inhabit the countries you're visiting, you don't need to just visit things that people at home will recognize when you tell them how your vacation was. And it'll be a lot more serene that way, too.
One tip, though. If you're going anywhere near the southern part of Western Europe (Spain, France, Italy), don't be afraid of churches. Even the local churches in the tiniest villages are amazing. This is the center of catholicism, funded by and made out of gold stolen from Latin America (sorry, guys) and the denarii of the poor. I say you should have at least a peek in every church you find. They almost always have free admission, too.
-
As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it's only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let's-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way--hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation trave To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.
well hello mr. fucking cynic
i disagree with this! i think it's possible to not look like a fucking INSECT ON A DEAD THING. use it as a chance to become more intune with like the WORLD IN WHICH WE LIVE. it's a really refreshing experience that i think is pretty good for the mind! ever since the prospect of my italy trip has come up i have gotten waaayyy more into understanding the world and looking into what makes us different and shit
idk lol ramblind
anyway tell me some serious specifics about Rome! My family is going to italy for like 14 days and were spending like 4-5 of those in a flat like literally a 30 second walk away from Pantheon or the Colliseum (weve not picked yet!) well be spending a loooong day in the vatican as well. catacombs too i hope. the spanish steps... yadyadayada. then moving down the coast a couple hundred miles to check out salerno and naples and then a lot of time on the amalfi coast. oh and maybe sicily too haha
i have never been so excited for a trip in my entire life. please tell me anything and everything you recommend doing! (p.s. were going in april/march which apparently is like a month before the tourist season really picks up!)
-
Oh yeah, one last thing. You don't need to spend long days walking around trying to squeeze in as much time and muscle strength to view as many cultural landmarks as you can. Don't forget that you're on vacation. If you take a little time to really appreciate things, not just through your camera or because of what the guide is telling you, but by looking at them and feeling them and taking into perspective the circumstances under which they were made. I think this is important because otherwise you'll be that annoying American tourist you want to prevent being.
-
I live in Budapest and I really don't recommend to visit this place. It's filthy and shit, and lot of the waiters in restaurants try to squeeze money out of you just because you are a foreigner.
-
well hello mr. fucking cynic
i disagree with this! i think it's possible to not look like a fucking INSECT ON A DEAD THING. use it as a chance to become more intune with like the WORLD IN WHICH WE LIVE. it's a really refreshing experience that i think is pretty good for the mind! ever since the prospect of my italy trip has come up i have gotten waaayyy more into understanding the world and looking into what makes us different and shit
idk lol ramblind
to be fair to the late mr. wallace he was referring to intranational travel (and I deliberately left that part of the quote in), although I will defend my posting of said comment as an intranational truth and an international potentiality.
if you'd care to defend intranational travel though I'll take his side since I agree with it entirely.
-
wat, why does the backpacker have to be stinky. also that middleground is probably RICH GUY in which case you aren't so much of a tourist as someone who takes multiple trips to europe and probably has some stupid ancestry there.
BOOOOOO FUCK WHITEY.
backpackers are always stinky because they don't bathe, read a history book.
-only going to a specific group of countries, studying the culture and languages beforehand, not acting like an oaf. anybody can do that!! and why is it that people need to GO TO EUROPE and try to see it all, it doesn't work
-
I will defend my posting of said comment as an intranational truth and an international potentiality.
Hmm. This is anecdotal evidence, so ignore it entirely, but I wonder why every American I've met and talked with in Europe said he hates Bush and voted for Kerry or Gore?
I'm not looking for a fight or an argument, I'm looking for an answer.
-
Hmm. This is anecdotal evidence, so ignore it entirely, but I wonder why every American I've met and talked with in Europe said he hates Bush and voted for Kerry or Gore?
Because most of the people who at this point still don't hate Bush think that Europe is nothing but terrorists/foreigners/satan. FACT.
-
Because most of the people who at this point still don't hate Bush think that Europe is nothing but terrorists/foreigners/satan. FACT.
By the way, I'm not talking about right now. I'm talking about the past 6 or so years.
-
I was actually considering this as a topic yesterday, but decided not to because I didn't feel it had enough room. many europeans are pretty astonished to learn most americans do not have passports; a lot of them tend to just file this under DUMP AMERIKKAN. I've always thought that while that has a bit to do with it, the majority of the reason is distance. in europe, you can travel through several different countries, each with its own language and culture, within a day. in the US you have to go quite a bit of distance in most cases to cross a border, and it is a conglomeration of states instead of countries. where a passport is a necessity in europe, it's a luxury item here.
that being said, aside from a lack of passports, international travel is doubly frowned upon by what can best be described as a pathetic nationalism. many americans, some rightly, believe they lead a good life in the US. thus, with no curiousity forced upon them by circumstance (unlike in europe, where I suppose its possible for someone in norway or whatever to have no interest in their much closer neighbors but this is improbable), they see no need to have a costly venture out to another nation and leave the comforts of home. the fact that such an experience might have cultural or existential benefits does not occur to these people.
these change from people to people, but I've found xenophobia and nationalism do tend to vary on circumstance; Texas, one of the most rightwing states, hasn't cared about the immigration issue for years. rather, it is non border states who are finally getting a glimpse of illegal immigration who complain about pressing 1 for English. but with the aftereffects (or hell, current effects) of manifest destiny still in play, most Americans have dug themselves into what I think was best described by quintessential American Marge Simpson as a happy little rut. but a combination of international travel being a luxury instead of a pastime and some idiot nationalism lead to only your wealthier more liberal Americans traveling abroad.
-
to be fair to the late mr. wallace he was referring to intranational travel (and I deliberately left that part of the quote in), although I will defend my posting of said comment as an intranational truth and an international potentiality.
if you'd care to defend intranational travel though I'll take his side since I agree with it entirely.
ok well first of all this guys entire thought process relies upon this really negative take on human curiosity. second of all, i hope you understand that i see what he's saying and i give him some credit for his ideas but i think he's taking a pretty one-dimensional approach to 'tourism' and the experiences it brings. the fundamental piece of his argument basically requires this zealout-esque appreciation for aesthetics and time/place. AN INSECT ON A DEAD THING. really? i think that experiencing these relics is an important part of understanding where we are today and what we've evolved from- it's this sort of time lock/past meets the present thing that breeds curiosity and (yes i for sure agree with him on this) it is just good for the soul. Why? I think seeing what man has done and can do is an inspirational experience in itself, and furthermore, by merely seeing and experiencing the world outside of our 6 by 6 cubical that is america it breeds appreciation for international perspective and understanding of various cultures. i totally agree that this kind of thing is totally humbling! but i think that humbling is born more of respect and inspiration then despair.
but my ideas are probably a little unfounded and i am kind of just spitting all this off of the top of my head so feel free to refute me! ill think about it a bit more and get back later
-
hello dude INTRANATIONAL.
ffff I even explained this, he's talking about travel within america, you're still talking about WORLD OUTSIDE.
-
Visit Iceland and make me jealous.
Spain and Italy for sure. Paris, Berlin, and London are all also awesome.