19 4 / 2012
Post scriptum 3: Top 10
It’s pretty much impossible to select and rank best experiences from a month long trip in varied locations - but I did it anyway. ;) In order to try to sum things up and create some sort of a closure for the blog too. So, here’s a list of top 10 experiences from a month in the European spring:
- Kleine Scheidegg - Truly epic landscape at the height of 2km was one of the strongest experiences I’ve ever encountered traveling
- Rome - On previous trip 10 or so years ago I hadn’t realized how wonderful city this really is. Not just the amazing amount of history, but the even fellinesquely lively nightlife, great food & wine and contemporary culture make Rome one of the greatest cities in the whole world.
- Montreux - Absolutely clear blue sceneries of Lake Geneva & the Alps
- Andermatt - St. Moritz - Bernina Diavolezza train ride - Hard to choose from all the gorgeous train rides in Switzerland, but this one had probably the most varied sceneries among some of the most stunning ones
- Bologna - Surprisingly urban, modern & artistic vibes in gorgeous red-brick old town setting. One of the places from this trip I definitely want to return to!
- Lyon - Large city with the heart of a little town, France at it’s best!
- Siena - Still one of the most beautiful Italian cities
- Perugia - Eccentric mixture of medieval castles, renaissance palaces and early 1900s buildings on a hilltop setting with a lively university scene
- Avignon - Fascinating mediaval buildings with zig-zagging narrow streets filled with inviting restaurants and cafes
- Nice - A city that seems to really love food. Throw in world-famous sea views and some great art collections and you’ve got a perfect destination for a long weekend.
This compilation is very probably the final post to this blog, so to keep up to date on my photos in the future you should look me up on Flickr and follow me on Twitter for generic ramblings and occasional insights.
Permalink 3 notes
18 4 / 2012
Post scriptum 2: InterRail pass
There’s plenty of options in InterRail passes with validity ranging from just 10 days to a full month, some with fewer travel days than the actual validity period on calendar - and all can be purchased for either 1st or 2nd class. (And all are offered with different prices for young people, adults and seniors.)
I knew I was going to be on the road for almost exactly a month, but getting the full month InterRail pass would have been overkill as I wasn’t going to travel even nearly every day, and some of the shorter trips especially in Italy were going to be very cheap to purchase as regular tickets. So I opted for a pass that is valid for 22 consecutive days and allows traveling on 10 days from those 22. It gave the opportunity to travel on every other day on average, which seemed like a nice pace.
Based on couple of blog posts and articles I had read, I ended up choosing the 1st class version of the pass. It cost 200€ more than the 2nd class version (580€ vs 380€), but it was supposed to offer much more relaxed way of traveling.
Well, in my particular trip I probably would have been better of saving that 200€ difference and spending it on something else. I did quite many train rides on local/regional trains where there either aren’t 1st class cars in trains at all or the difference between the classes is very minimal. The longer distance trains like TGVs in France or Frecciarossas/-biancas in Italy then again are very comfortable already in 2nd class, so unless you are really traveling through the whole country on one ride (which I didn’t do) the additional comfort on 1st class might not be worth the price. And besides, you can always upgrade your individual trips on 2nd class InterRail pass to 1st class by paying the difference in price between the classes for that particular trip - handy way of paying for the extra comfort only when you really need it.
There’s one additional benefit for the 1st class ticket that can be really worth the money in busy travel months during summertime: there’s only a limited amount of seats reserved for travelers with InterRail pass on the long-distance trains, so if you’re not making the seat reservations well in advance you might not be able to get on the train you want. But as the 1st class IR passes are not as popular (and 1st class in general), you will have a much better chance of finding a seat on 1st class during those high-season months. But again, this was clearly not an issue during the spring months.
So even though I did enjoy some of the 1st class rides very much with complimentary proseccos, good air-conditioning, wide seats and good views I probably would have enjoyed the trip as a whole equally with the 2nd class InterRail pass too. But that’s just for this particular journey on low-season, where the distances traveled were quite short (max ca. 400km for one ride, max 6-7h on trains in total per day).
17 4 / 2012
Post scriptum 1: Gear
Here are some highlights of the gear I used on the trip. The trip would not have been possible, or at least not as enjoyable, without any of these.
Macbook Air 11”
It’s safe to say that this blog would not have happened without this tiny powerhouse of a laptop. I used it in train rides, hotels, cafes and park benches to edit the photos with Lightroom 4 and to type the blog posts. Nor would the actual journey have been possible without the laptop: it was an indispensable tool in planning the next steps of the journey throughout the trip and booking the accommodations, connected to the Internet via hotel WIFIs. And it brightened up a dull hotel room with my favorite music and provided much needed entertainment in the form of the episodes of The New Girl and Game of Thrones when I was down with flu. All this in tiny package that’s light enough to carry around the whole day in a backpack.
I bought the laptop just before the trip with a plan to sell it right after with a small loss (in essence leasing it for a month), but it proved to be so damn nice piece of computing equipment and definitely fast enough for my photo editing needs that it will actually replace my old Macbook Pro as my primary machine at home.
iPhone4 & Navigon app
No app replaces a good, real map for getting an oversight of the city and the neighborhood you’re in. But when you arrive at a train station late at night in a completely unfamiliar enviroment and need to get to the hotel you booked on the previous night, iPhone with a decent navigator app like Navigon comes really, really handy. I bought the Navigon app a year ago primarily for holiday use car navigator in foreign countries, but the app functions well enough as a pedestrian navigator as well. I was able to get myself a walking route from train stations to hotels without much of a hassle (I had booked 90% hotels in 10-20min walking distance from train stations).
And best of all, as the map data is pre-downloaded in the app, there’s no need for expensive data roaming when using the app (getting the location via GPS-signal can take a while though without the assistance from data network).
Olympus EP-1
On way too many previous trips I lugged around heavy & big Canon 5D setup, that could easily weigh nearly 2kg - and that’s even with a limited travel setup. Carrying something like that on top of everything else with you on a holiday started to take the fun out of vacationing. So when Olympus EP-1 came out late 2009, I was eager to jump on board the micro4/3-train: finally a camera that didn’t compromise the image quality too much on the expense of small size, but still offering clearly lighter & smaller package (clearly less than 1kg even with multiple optics). The perfect travel setup.
And indeed it proved to be, I’ve rarely touched the 5D ever since Sept 2009 I got the EP-1. So that’s the body I used in all the photos on this blog too, using various optics from standard zoom to tiny primes and old manual focus lenses with tilt-adapters. It’s not without faults (what camera is?), e.g. the really slow autofocus can sometimes make you miss a shot, the screen is really hard to see in bright sunlight, the dynamic range could be better just as the high-ISO noise. All those aspects have improved greatly on the new Olympus OM-D I’ve preordered but that didn’t yet make it to the trip. Somehow knowing that I’d soon be using something much better made the limitations of E-P1 seem much more annoying this time around than on previous trips. ;)
Swiss army pocket knife
Peeling a juicy orange, slicing some delicious country cheese, cutting a piece from a fresh baquette, opening a local wine bottle, clipping a split finger nail, opening an iPhone cable package. None of those things would have been possible without this stainless steel multi-tool.
Rimowa Salsa 4-wheel luggage
No, you don’t have to do the Interrail backpacking your way through hostels! You can also choose to travel like an adult, with some style & dignity. ;) But as there was going to be more time spent on city streets with the luggage than on a normal air-travel oriented trip, I wanted something light and easily movable. So I got myself a polycarbonote 4-wheel luggage from Rimowa. It’s waaaay lighter than my old luggage of similar size made of standard, heavy-duty plastic. And the 4 wheels actually make a surprisingly big difference compared to the more usual 2-wheel trolley: on a good surface (think smoother type of pavement, larger stone slabs, metal) you can tug the luggage almost effortlessly by your side, instead of dragging it behind you like you would with a 2-wheeler. And if the surface is rougher, like cobblestone or uneven pavement, you can always tilt it to trolley-position to get it moving.
I was slightly worried about the durability of the zippers and the bendiness of the casing, but everything proved out to be made to match the price & image of German engineering.
This one is for sale now that the trip is over, since I have no continuous use for this kind of special luggage. So if you’re in Helsinki area and want a light, high-quality luggage that’s already been tested on the road for you, get in touch.
Permalink 3 notes
16 4 / 2012
That could have easily been the slogan for this trip.
(This is not my photo, but a reblog of something I stumbled upon here on Tumblr.)
(Source: uglys0ul, via generalfiasc0-deactivated201302)
Permalink 5,446 notes
16 4 / 2012
Especially the emphasized part of the Holstee Manifesto seems to match the journey perfectly…
Go read the whole manifesto if you don’t know it already by heart! There’s also a great video made of it.
15 4 / 2012
32 days, 28 cities (with couple of villages thrown in too), 4 countries, 20 hotels, 1 hostel, 50 train rides (at least, lost the exact count long time ago), 1 lost favorite pen, 1 lost hat, 1 lost iPhone cable, 1 flu, 1 visit to dentist, 3458 photos, 63 blog posts, 407 published photos in the blog, 2 flights, 8 bus rides, 3 tram rides, 2 taxi rides, 2 cable car rides, 4500 km in train (very rough estimate).
Europa – merci beaucoup, danke schön, hvala lijepa, grazie mille!!
(The blog will continue to live for a while, I will be doing couple of post scriptums still…)
Permalink 1 note
12 4 / 2012
Grande finale @ Roma
A month long trip is coming to an end. And no better place to celebrate the finale of the journey than Rome, where great food and wine are plentiful. I had a healthy overdose of truly excellent red wine, cheeses, pasta, meatballs, grappa and ice-cream on the last two days here. The photos here are a more or less random sampling of the snaps taken during those days, wasn’t anymore focusing effort or energy into photography at this point…
11 4 / 2012
Modern art at Rome: MAXXI & MACRO
It’s nice to have stayed long enough in Rome altogether to be able to take some time off from checking out the most important historical landmarks, and focusing for more contemporary offerings of the city for a while. It’s crazy how many big & important exhibitions there are in Rome at the same time, rivaling the cultural metropoles like Paris and New York easily. Helsinki would be considered lucky to be able to host just one of those exhibitions per year. Right now there would have been displays of American modernism from Guggenheim collections, Miro, Dali, Russian avant-garde, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Steve McCurry - just to mention the biggest names.
We checked the two new museums for modern & contemporary art in Rome: MAXXI and MACRO. Both are interesting not only for the exhibitions but also for their architecture. MAXXI is at least architecturally better known of the two, being designed by the superstar Zaha Hadid. On the outside it doesn’t look too special, but the insides are very interesting and also highly functional - there’s a good flow inside the building leading from one exhibition hall to another. Content-wise there’s an interesting mixture of architecture, installations, paintings, video works and photos in display at MAXXI. Also there are preparations on the way for the setting up the installation from recycled clothes by the Finnish artist Kaarina Kaikkonen, whose exhibition we miss by just two days.
MACRO is quite a bit more confusing as an exhibition space than Zaha Hadid’s building, but at least as interesting visually with bold shapes and colors. We actually came here for Steve McCurry’s photo exhibition, only to learn that it was at the other MARCO location (yes, apparently there are two…). But the works in display were worth the walk anyway: interesting samplings from the permanent collection and massive video/installation works in one of the largest exhibition halls I’ve ever seen.
All and all glad to see that the contemporary culture in Rome is alive and well to say the least, on top of the couple of millennia of history….
