Gary Halliday posted on July 22, 2010 07:52
So now school is over and all the exchange students from Finland gathered together to go on Eurotour!
Our Eurotour consisted of all of us students on buses (and occasionally boats) driving around Europe for 18 days. We went from Finland to Sweden by boat. This was one of the big cruise ships like nothing I'd experienced before and they had lots of fun things to do while we were floating over to Sweden. After we got off we then drove through Sweden to get to another boat that would take us to Denmark.
In Denmark we went to the Tivoli amusement park and also took a tour around Copenhagen. Unfortunately the statue of the Little Mermaid was on show at Shanghai so we got to see the rocks where she had been. From Denmark we drove and took another boat to Germany. We drove through Germany on the way in because we would be stopping on the way back. We went straight to the Netherlands where we visited a cheese and clogs factory. The cheese was quite good. From there we went to Amsterdam and visited the Anne Frank museum and took a cruise of the canals. The next day we moved on to Belgium where we stopped in Brussels and had some free time to visit the chocolate shops as well as admire some of the incredible architecture. Then we moved on to Paris where we would stay for 3 nights. The first day we got there and slept. The second day we had a guided tour through Paris on the buses. We looked at many buildings and heard a little bit of history. We also visited the palace at Versailles which had incredible artwork and some of the nicest gardens I have ever seen. It was a great place to look at.
Our tour ended at the Eiffel tower which we then went to the top of, even those who were afraid of heights, good on them. The view was incredible and we could stay as long as we wanted. We had the rest of the afternoon to ourselves, and we spent it planning the next day, our free day.
On the free day I managed to walk down the Champs Elysees, visit the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre, Sacre Coeur church, Notre Dame Cathedral, the Galleries Lafayette, Moulin Rouge and make it back to the Eiffel Tower in time for the light show. It was quite a busy day with lots of things to see on the way and extensive use of the metro system thanks to the French exchange students who were with us.
The next day we were back on the busses and headed to the south of France. We stopped by a liquor factory on the way to Cannes. We went to the beach that night which was, by comparison to Australian beaches, terrible. The next day we went to Monaco and Nice which were both nice places. The next day we went to Italy to a seemingly quiet resort town called Lido de Jesolo. The beach there was so much better than France. We took a boat to Venice and back. Venice was very nice although really crowded. We got a gondola ride which was also really good. Our gondolier man looked like The Rock (Dwayne Johnson) and he even sang to us in between talking to the other gondolier men. The next day we had another free day. This one was spent getting the laundry done and swimming at the beach. It was most enjoyable.
The next day we headed into the Alps. They did look stunning from a distance but up close they didn't look so impressive. We had a “hike” into them which was more like a walk but it was very pleasant and the woods were a nice change of scenery. We stayed overnight at a nice hotel before heading off the next day.
We went through the Alps and into Austria for a short stay in Innsbruck then straight on to Germany. At dinner we were treated to a Bavarian song and dance show which everybody got into. We stopped for the night at Nuremberg. The next day we visited the war museum there which was impressive and emotional and we got a sense of how the Germans were motivated for WWII.
Afterwards we headed for Berlin and made it there by nightfall. The next day we saw the Berlin wall, the Holocaust memorial and the Brandenberg Gate. Then we had a little bit of free time to look around and do some shopping. Then we boarded our busses once more and headed for the port that would take us back to Finland. This boat was not as large as our first one but since there were almost no other passengers it was a lot more fun and we barely slept the two nights it took us to get back to Finland. Saying the goodbyes were hard is an understatement, I had met and bonded with some amazing new people that I may never see again especially as now for many of them their year is over (just about everyone except the Australians has the start of their exchange year to coincide with Summer where they're from – Northern Hemisphere so now they are heading home). Hopefully I will meet some of these great people again.
When I got back to my host family it was back on the road because we were going to our summer cottage for mid-summers. We had a big bonfire on an island and it never got dark. That was strange all over again because it got dark in the rest of Europe we had been visiting.
So now half of my holidays are over and there is still half left before its back to school. I hope you have as much fun reading this as I have had doing all the things I write about. Thanks again for giving me this incredible opportunity it has already been enjoyable beyond expression.