First trip to Europe

[Amentep]

I thought about riding a train in the US once, then figured out I had to travel a day north-east by train to travel a day south-east by train to get where I wanted to go...as opposed to driving 5 hours north-east to the actual destination. 

 

Also all the cool trains like the 20th Century Limited ended their runs in the 60s.  Maybe someday I'll tackle The Venice-Simplon Orient Express run from Paris to Istanbul since that's about as close as I'm going to get to the classic days of rail travel anymore...

[Hurlshort]

Only good way to travel the US is in an RV.  

[ShadySands]

I heard most of the same things about France when I was in Italy. We were warned against going if we didn't speak French and then again against going to Paris if we didn't speak it perfectly. Though almost all the Italians we meet had mostly bad things to say about the French in general, also some loathing of French tourists that beat any obnoxious American stereotypes that I didn't really hear much of when I was there either. A lot of bashing of UK tourists too for whatever reason. Germans too.

I guess we need to step up our game

 

PS the trains were interesting

Edited January 13, 2017 by ShadySands

[melkathi]

That's something you will find quite great as opposed to US I suppose, public traffic in EU is quite outstanding (excluding south states )

Oi! The Athens Metro is pretty much the one thing working in Greece. That and the intercity coach service. Sometimes the Metro is on strike, but I have an app on my phone for that

[melkathi]

I heard most of the same things about France when I was in Italy. We were warned against going if we didn't speak French and then again against going to Paris if we didn't speak it perfectly. Though almost all the Italians we meet had mostly bad things to say about the French in general, also some loathing of French tourists that beat any obnoxious American stereotypes that I didn't really hear much of when I was there either. A lot of bashing of UK tourists too for whatever reason. Germans too.

 

I guess we need to step up our game

 

PS the trains were interesting

Everybody loves to hate on the French

 

And nobody has anything nice to say about UK tourists. That is the large groups traveling with Thomas Cook to the south to get drunk by noon, hit on or insult (or both) anything that moves, urinate on the sidewalk etc etc. Though to be fair, any UK tourist who doesn't fall into that category won't have anything nice to say about them lot either.

[Azdeus]

Oh cmon, you have tons of great stuff in Sweden, but you are expensive as hell

 

yeah and that problem with alcohol - not for use east Europeans

Well, true, you can only buy extremely expensive alcohol from select stores between 10-18(10-15) ;p

 

The only thing that I can think of that is really worth seeing here, except Lappland(The northern part of Sweden) is the warship Vasa. And supposedly the pretty girls, but I doubt I can recommend that to him when his wife is coming along

We do have an awful lot of runestones and burial mounds, but since I've got two mounds(One next to the school I went to and one about 200 meters away in the middle of a field) only a stonesthrow away I don't get as impressed with them as I ought to.

 

Edit; Then again, Birka!

 

I'm not too bothered that 70cl of Absolut Vodka costs 30$ to be honest, what really, really, really annoys me is that they've gone from 75 to 70 cl. I'm not even joking, that has me fuming when I think about it. Trying to sneak in a priceraise like that.

Edited January 14, 2017 by Azdeus