Highlights

The first thing most people have asked us since we got back is some variation of, “What was your favorite place?” Of course, this is a difficult question to answer, given the variety of places we went.

When my wife answers this question, she is pretty quick to say Salzburg was her favorite place. She wishes we had scheduled more time, there. I am less sure (though I would have loved to spend more time in Salzburg). I really enjoyed Brussels for certain reasons, but also really liked Strasbourg and Normandy for entirely different reasons.

All things considered, I think Belgium was my favorite country. This kind of surprised me as I had never really considered Belgium as a “must-see” part of Europe.

Strasbourg (France) is pretty magical. I was surprised at how cool it was, given that I didn’t know very much about it before we got therre. Much of the time we were there I had to remind myself that this was an actual place, not a fake “neighborhood” at Disneyland; it really does feel like one of those manufactured experiences at a theme park … but it’s real, of course.

We didn’t get to spend enough time in France and we didn’t get to visit as many places as I would have liked. Immediately after riding the EuroStar across the channel, we rented a car and drove to first to Juno Beach and then to the village of Beauvoir (near the Mont-Saint-Michel abbey). This area was beautiful. It was quiet and quaint. I would love to find a way to spend a month just kind of drifting in and out of the “bustle” of the touristy stuff like le mont and the (seemingly) laidback lifestyle of the typical Norman fisherman.

Lowlights

People don’t ask this question as often, but if someone were to ask me about the place I liked the least, I would be able to answer a lot more quickly. Amsterdam. I know a lot of people love Amsterdam, but it was just too much for me. It was chaotic and overwhelming. The actual Netherlanders themselves seemed like perfectly wonderful people, but the touristy-ness of Amsterdam really dissuaded me from loving it. That’s not totally Amsterdam’s fault, I suppose.

I was also less-than wowed by Munich. We didn’t venture very far outside the city—just a bus ride to Dachau—so we may have missed what makes Munich great. We were in Strasbourg just before Munich, so that city’s charm might have set Munich up to fail in my eyes.

The thing that disappointed me most was Paris, I think. A big part of my disappointment was simply Paris’s reputation; I have dreamed of visiting Paris since I was a young teen, and I had bought into all of the romantic notions we are all told about the “City of Love.” In a nutshell, Paris was dingier and more rundown than I had imagined. The metro trains are kind of rickety, the metro stations are dirty and smelly, there is graffiti in prominent places … in short, Paris is a a big, bustling, modern city struggling with all of the pains places like Los Angeles and New York have to battle everyday. I didn’t notice as many of these “problems” (features?) in some of the other cities, but I may have just been primed to notice them in Paris simply because I had built the city up to be paradise in my head. Some people hate it, but I really like L.A. But, I know the places to avoid and go in knowing there will be annoying “actors” trying to con you into taking a picture with them on the Walk of Fame; I expect there to be grimey alleyways all throughout Silverlake and Echo Park. Paris was dealing with these exact situations … I just didn’t expect it for some reason.

I have more to say about all of this, some of which I want to visit in a future post(s).

on My Trip to Europe, part 2

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