06/01/2012

So I have been busy! Bristol and Bath in 2 and a half days and now on a train back to London to get ready for my tour starting tomorrow!

Bristol: My impression of Bristol is that it is normally a crazy place, mainly due to a big number of uni students running riot. There is also apparently lots of street art through out. When I was there, neither of these 2 things were true, but I still made my own fun J I arrived at my hostel to find out that I was the only person staying there other than some staff, people say hostels are great places to meet people.. Not when you are the only person there! I decided to get out and see Bristol, I spent a couple of hours walking around town, the main tourist attraction I saw was the chapel, an impressive building sitting half way up the hill on one side of Bristol. Other than that I walked along the water and through the centre of town which was filled with water features and a huge open space. I ended up getting a pub dinner and trying out a few different pubs, chatting to locals where I got the chance but all in all there was almost no one else around so I sent myself home at around 9pm.

The following day things picked up a lot more, I managed to walk around town, catch a ferry taxi across the river and have a look at 2 tourist attractions, the old boat “Mathew Bristol” and the first Iron boat ever built, a hugely important ship, the “SS Great Britain”. Mathew Bristol was a replica of a small boat used 500 years ago to sail from Bristol over to South Africa, a huge feet in the tiny thing, that’s about all there was to it though. The SS Great Britain was far more interesting, not only was it the first ever Iron ship but it was also one of the first ships ever with a propeller and the engineer also designed the first ever balanced rudder, which basically meant the steering wheel sat directly over the middle of the rudder so that it was much easier to turn. The boat was hugely important in terms of the progression to the boats we used today; it was first used in 1843. It was actually abandoned of the coast of South Africa years ago where it finally sunk and stayed there for 30 years, finally the money was raised to rescue it and bring it back to Bristol to be stored in the dry dock where it was originally built. I was able to walk around the underside of the ship to see how it was preserved, basically they had to keep the humidity of the air around it at 20% because apparently it will almost completely stop the rotting process of the Iron hull. I also walked through the insides of the ship that were very recreated to show you exactly how the ship looked. The boat was used for a lot of different purposes over its 100 years on the ocean, one of which was to carry people from Liverpool to Australia. The impression I got was that in those days, either all people were midgets, or they would have had a pretty uncomfortable night sleep in their tiny beds.

The one thing I missed was the suspension bridge in Bristol because it was too far to get too in one morning but apparently the same designer of the Iron ship also made the first ever suspension bridge in Bristol.

Bath: I moved on to bath yesterday, when I got there I checked into a hostel named “St Christopher’s Inn” which was attached to “Belushi’s” pub, it was a hostel I would definitely revisit if I am ever back. It was right in the centre of town, a close walk from the station, nice staff and even more importantly, other customers! I had 3 room mates, two Aussies from Sydney and a 29yr old from Montana that was studying in Spain named Bryson Stoner.

I left the hotel to be a tourist while I could, I visited the chapel the “Bath Abbey” and also the Roman Baths. This was definitely a highlight for me. I took my time, got heaps of photos and read up about the Romans that built the bath house around the hot spring many years ago. It had a lot more to it other than just the bath house specifically which I didn’t expect, a lot of other remaining pieces of buildings and sculptures, each of which had its own story.

That night my 3 room mates and I hit the pubs to have a look at the night life, all in all it was a lot busier than Bristol and a good fun night out looking around town and meeting the locals.                

Today Bryson and myself decided to rent a car to go see the Stone Henge an hour drive out of town. It was a lot cheaper for Bryson to drive since he was over 25 so I got to sit back and enjoy the ride, as much as I could.... It really was a ride, before we started he told me he’d driven once in the last 4 months and never with a manual car on the left side of the road in the right hand seat of the car... after a few dodgy, curby mounting moments we eventually got to the Stone Henge. All in all there wasn’t a lot to it other than the sheer achievement of building the thing, which for me was enough to keep me interested. I found it hilarious that the audio guide tried to speak so much about it. It would go on and on speculating about everything it possibly could, but of course almost nothing was actual fact! Sentence upon sentence of “this may have been used for this or this...” very funny. The ride back was generally pretty could, up to the last 10minutes... Bryson saved the best for last and got within centre mitres of crashing into a little pole on the curb going around a corner, but other than having a shot of adrenalin pushed threw me we emerged unscathed. The last few minutes were pretty tense as he just tried to get us home in one piece, which he did do, and yes mum he was a very sensible driver, he just battled big time with been on the other side of the car. Also I may have almost sent us the wrong way around a round about... almost.

That’s about it! Now I am on a train on my way back to London, I am staying in a hostel called “The Clink 78” and leave for my Topdeck tour early tomorrow morning!

Speak soon,

“Dale Winton” (apparently)(....not a compliment, stupid English tv presenters).

07/01/2012- 08/01/2012

So I met a French guy with a medium amount of English in the hostel , I joined him and his French friend to have a look around town and find out some info about Paris. It was a good time but a bit frustrating after a while with the language barrier. On the bright side he did give me heaps of info about Paris which was where we headed on the 7^th.

First thing in the morning I met the group and took 2 buses and a ferry, totalling about 8 hours travel to get to Paris. That night we got given a bus tour of Paris, seeing all the main sites and getting info about each from our tour guide. The most interesting fact been that the runner up contender to the Eiffel tower was actually a giant guillotine in memory of all the people beheaded in their history. For a good few years it seems that the French people lost and decided to kill all their own people..

 The next day we had a full day to look around, we started with a bike tour around town with about 30 of us from Topdeck, again it was really good to see a lot in a short space of time, the bikes were good fun and the tour guide new so much. After that myself and 6 others went out on our own to see Paris! We started with a trip to the top of the Eiffel tower, the view was awesome and I took a lot of photos J From there we made our way to the Leuve, which is basically the best museum/ art going around, it was amazing. The building was a monument in itself, the most luxurious looking building, so open, big and expensive it was crazy. Inside was filled with statues, sculptures, paintings and ancient building remains. Apparently if you looked through the entire Leuve it takes about 5 hours and you would cover 14km of walking. We chose to see two main attractions, Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa. Both were awesome to see in person but it is hard to top the hype of the Mona Lisa, there would have been 200 people standing in front of it at any one time. We then moved on from there to go see the Chaunta Lessay And the Arc de Triumph, they were very cool, way too much money went into so many places in Paris. During the night we headed into a suburb named Odeon which was recommended by my French friends as the place to be. Generally it was pretty quiet but we mananged to find a really good bar at the end of the night that had live music playing all the classic hits you would get in Australia.