Europe tour Interail 2006 : Venezia, the water city

En français
The first thing that stroked me when we arrived in Venezia was the water. Of course everybody knows that the city is kind of floated and that they have basically water everywhere and you have seen pictures just like I did. But I wouldn't have imagined that going out of the train station the first thing I was going to see was water. That is one of the images that will stay engraved in my memory.
We walked around visiting the city, they don't have cars, they have boats. That's probably a reason why Venezia is famous for it's gondolas otherwise you take bridges to cross the streets. I think Venezia is a pretty unique city and I can understand now why there are so many tourist visiting it.
Venezia is also famous for the carnival in February or March and even though it wasn't the season for it we could still see a lot of shops selling masks and costumes, making me want to visit the city again during the carnival period.
We walk to Piazza San Marco from where we could see the San Giorgio Maggiore island.Walking in the city we could appreciate the diversity of the Venetian architecture, especially of Gothic style. The Venetian Gothic style has the particularity of using of the Gothic lancet arch with Byzantine and Arab influences which comes from the crossing of culture from Est and West in the 14th century. The city also have buildings of Renaissance and Baroque styles.

Of course we took pictures from Ponte di Rialto like every tourist, even though I like to see what the local people do, I also like to go into the tourist cliché as well.
Europe tour Interail 2006 : Introduction 
Travel table of content

ゲゲゲの鬼太郎 千年呪い歌(Kitaro and the millenium curse)

En français

ゲゲゲの鬼太郎 千年呪い歌 (Kitaro and the millenium curse) is a Japanese movie from 2008 following a live-action relieved in 2007 (I hope to see that one soon). The story put in action the main characters of the manga series ゲゲゲの鬼太郎 by 水木 しげる (Mizuki Shigeru) created in 1959.








The main characters are 妖怪 (yokai) or demon spirits. The Yokai and humans have been at war for a long time and Kitaro and his tribe and friends are fighting for the peace. His group is composed of his father, 目玉のおやじ who looks like a walking eye, 猫娘 the cat girl, ねずみ男 the rat man, 砂かけ婆 the sand throwing hag, 子泣き爺, 一反木綿 the roll of cotton who flies the others every where they like, ぬりかべ plaster wall nice to hide behind in case of danger.
In the movie, they are trying to save a human girl from having her soul taken by a evil spirit called nure-onna. They will find out that the curse has to do with the love between a human and the yokai 1000 years ago.

When I started to watch this movie I didn't know what it was about and the first bit was a bit scary but after Kitaro and ねずみ男 appear it becomes a lot of fun. I like the yokai they are funny and ugly.

Voir aussi Japan : 調布市、ゲゲゲの鬼太郎

Casting :

ウエンツ瑛士 as Kitaro
北乃　きい as Kaede
大泉 洋 as Nezumi-otoko
田中麗奈 as Neko Musume
室井滋 as Sunakake babaa
田の中 勇 as the voice of Medama oyaji

Watch it here.

Cinema, Manga, Animation Content

Europe tour Interail 2006 : Pécs, back to Hungary

En français
We then took the train back to Hungary to visit a city called Pécs. This city is the 5th largest city in Hungrary even though the city center is quite small. It is surrounded by fortification. The main square is called Széchenyi Square in the historical center, there we can see the Mosque and the statue of Hunyadi János on horse back. Hunyadi János was the governor of the kingdom of Hungary in the 15th century and voivode of Transylvania. Twelve streets leads to this square. We also walked around the fortification on a pedestrian road.  This city is interesting because you can see the vestige of some medieval constructions.
To get to our next destination we need to first take a train to Gyékényes, at the border with Croatia where the controller decide to make us pay for a reservation or want to have us leave the train at the next stop as we don't have Euros. Hopefully we will find someone to lend us the money.

Europe tour Interail 2006 : Introduction 
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Europe tour Interail 2006 : Bosnia and Herzegovina, amazing hospitality

En français
We left Hungary direction Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The train was pretty scary and noisy and we were asking ourself if it was not going to fall apart but we still arrived safe and sound in Sarajevo.
The city was amazing. It contains Synagogue, Church and Mosque in the same area, some people should really take a chance to learn about diversity taking this country as an example of what can be achieved. There are still traces of the war as they are part of history but that is not the most important.
We stayed there a while, walking around and also watching a match of giant chess.
The only think that annoyed me was to be attacked by flying ants in the main place but I think that's part of the fun. I had never seen that many of them and I'm not a big fan of insects especially when they fly.
We then took the train again to go to Visoko. Visoko is a small village between Sarajevo and Zenica, we wanted to go there to see the pyramids. The fact that they are pyramids is a bit controversial, you can discover more about them here.  In the train people were indicating us where we should go and we met someone from the place who proposed to actually show us a bit around. We ended up spending the evening with him and his family. Bosnia offered us one of the best greeting we had so far during our travel.
Europe tour Interail 2006 : Introduction 
Travel table of content 

Europe tour Interail 2006 : Budapest

En français
We arrived in Budapest (Hungary) at 8am, we started with taking a shower and breakfast before noticing that the next train to leave to our next destination was from the other train station. We crossed the city with our bags, I mean the big big ones, I was really dying, so heavy. But we finally made it to the train station where we left our bags for the rest of the day before going to visit the city.

Budapest  is divided in two parts, Buda and Pest. We start to go to the Buda Castle (Budai Vár in Hungarian) then we went down to visit the Pest part of the city with Heroes' square (Hősök tere) taking the Széchenyi Chain Bridge (Széchenyi-Lánchíd).
Europe tour Interail 2006 : Introduction
Travel table of content  

Europe tour Interail 2006 : Romania or train, train, train

En français
After our visit of Košice, we took our next train to Bucharest in Romania. Due to lack of planning, not noticing the jet lag and not really planning our visit of the city we arrived in Bucharest's train station a bit lost. We walked around a bit but the only thing that we ended up being told (my Romanian is really poor) is that we should walk to Constanta which is another city really far away. So we decided to eat a pizza in the train station and to take the next train to Sighişoara. Sighişoara is the city of Dracula. We walked there at night seeing the places where he was bitting his victims. You all know how I like vampires' stories, I was really happy to be there. We then waited for the train that was supposed to get us more west.
I really hope to be able to go back to Romania some days to see the country more in details.
Europe tour Interail 2006 : Introduction
Travel table of content 

Europe tour Interail 2006 : Košice

En français
We spend another night in the train, during this travel this is going to become an habit. We went through Eastern Slovakia to reach our new destination of the second day, Košice. Our little routine started : find how to go to our next destination, get a shower, some breakfast, a map of the city, a place to leave our bags (well not this time) and go to walk around for our visit.
Košice is the 2^nd largest city of Slovakia after Bratislava the main city, even though it didn't look that big. It was a Sunday so the city was really calm, a lot of people were at the church. One interesting thing in this city was the fountain that follow the music.
Europe tour Interail 2006 : Introduction
Travel table of content