Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

For the most part, Americans tend to take what seem like peculiar holidays when they come to Europe.

Americans usually have the limitation that they only get two weeks vacation time per year which is something of a downer compared to the five or six week norm throughout Europe. However, in a two week holiday, Europeans almost always stay in a single resort be that in a European country or even in America and they don’t travel terribly far from that base during their vacation time.

Americans on the other hand come to Europe for two weeks and try to take in several different countries in that time. Typically they will spend a few days in London to “do” England, head over to France to spend a few days “doing” Paris before moving on perhaps to see the Normandy beaches before heading off for Rome or where-ever.

OK, to be fair the Europeans may well take several two week holidays per year and thereby they can get to see quite a bit of the world in the course of a year if they choose to do that (although many head to the same resort every year).

Americans tend to lose out a lot with their style of holiday-making in that they get a very cursory view of everywhere that they go and this is accentuated even more when they go on packaged holidays: the tour bus only stops for the minimum amount of time to see the highlights in each place so that, for example, in Versailles they’ll see the exquisite apartments but usually won’t see much of the magnificent gardens.

It would be much better if they tried a middle ground and concentrated on one country or even one area of one country. For example, Paris and Britanny/Normandy make a nice two week trip with a varied mix of city and scenic periods.

We didn’t make it to Geneva this weekend for all sorts of reasons so we’re aiming for next week now.

That means that we’ll have a whole lot more time to play with as the kids are on holiday so we’re thinking of something like a five or six day trip. Same starting point, so all being well we’ll be in Geneva next Friday evening and that’ll be our starting point for the tour.

As for this weekend, the plan is to see Geneva on Saturday and probably end up in Lausanne that evening. Then it changes as we could head on up to Bern, possibly on up to Zurich (haven’t looked at the guidebooks so I don’t know if that’s worth the trip) or possibly in the other direction towards Zermatt and perhaps swinging down via Austria to Venice before heading for home.

The distances above are reasonable but I will have to have a good look at the guidebook to see what’s worth seeing along the way.

We’re hoping to keep our programme of mini-holidays running well into the Winter though obviously we’ll need to be more selective about destinations as the Winter kicks in.

At the moment, we still have Albi and Valencia on our short-list. They’re both within a about three hours drive of here which is a perfect daytrip distance. Uzes also looks interesting and there’s still quite a lot in the Nimes/Avignon/Arles area to be seen including the Camarge, Aigues Mortes (“Dead Eagle” but still a lovely place).

Marseilles isn’t much beyond Arles and indeed we managed to get ourselves onto the road to Marseilles last night by mistake. Is it worth going to though? For one thing, I just can’t understand a Marseilles accent but then we don’t talk to many people whilst we’re on our daytrips so that’s no great problem. It’s also got something of a reputation of being a bad area (yes, the whole city!) which puts me off it somewhat but against that I’ve also heard good things about it too.

Monaco at around five hours is a possibility for a weekend type daytrip though it’ll be a couple of weeks before we get a slot for that. In practice though, there isn’t a whole lot in Monaco.

Also sitting at the five hour mark are the likes of Cannes and St Tropez which would be interesting though I’ve not looked into them much as yet. It was quite interesting for me to be in Cannes a few years ago as apparently I’m the image of Jean Marc, one of the French film stars who had been there for the awards a few weeks earlier. I hadn’t realised that at the time so it was pretty confusing for me when a series of girls tried to pick me up in the street though things went downhill somewhat when an old guy tried to do the same thing!

To be honest, with all the security things on these days, I figured that visits to CERN would have been cancelled but apparently not.

In fact, they seem pretty keen on getting people to go. Well, one aspect of that is that CERN costs a whole heap of public money and as with the likes of NASA they’re very keen to show that the money is being well spent.

That would ordinarily be particularly difficult for CERN in that the stuff that they do is very much into seriously technical high energy physics which, let’s face it, is far removed from most peoples’ lives. On the other hand, how could you put a value on the invention of the World Wide Web? The money that’s been generated by that single invention would more than likely repay all the money that’s been invested in CERN from the day it opened.

They go a little overboard on the visits in that they take a half day vs the cursory hour or so in normal places. That in turn means that they can’t have people just dropping in for a visit so if you book one, expect a wait of anything up to six months between your application and when they can show you around.

Oh, and they do show you around too. You get to see at least one of the experimental areas during your visit.

Aside from anything else, one thing that surprises me about this photo is that although I scanned it with a reasonably good scanner for its day, the resolution is much lower than even that of a cheap digital camera these days.

That aside, we’re planning on a trip to Geneva this Friday. As usual, it’ll be “weather permitting” though at the moment the prospects are looking quite good.

You might think that there would be loads to see in Geneva but in reality there isn’t a whole lot. Having said that, what there is, is pretty good in that you get the Red Cross museum, the Olympic museum, etc. courtesy of all the international organisations based there and, of course, there’s the scenery. Oh, and not to forget CERN where Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1990 (that link is to the first ever website). Yes, it’s that recent!

Also potentially on the cards is Lausanne which is about 40 mins up the road from Geneva.