Around The World in Eight(y) Days

Around The World in Eight(y) Days

As I hopped from plane to train to bus to taxi to tram to metro to rickshaw this past week, one thing that kept coming to my mind was an epic novel of my childhood by Jules Verne. Although I lacked the hot air balloon, I don’t think I’ve ever flown higher in my life..

It was a surprise to me that this week of adventure was planned literally the night before (from my end at least). I’ve come to accept and even enjoy my last minute behaviour and so continue to live the unnecessarily suspenseful comic book life. My character has always come through just like any protagonist does and so I’ve come to like the CRASH! POW! WHAM!s that lead to the sunset on the last page.

The beginning of my adventures were not so sunny. I woke up at 5 am Friday morning after a 1 hour sleep to start the long drive to Poznan, Poland with the men of the family, Bolo, Andzrej and Tony. They were quite surprised that I expressed interest in coming with, but really excited to flaunt their hometown as I would later find! But first, an executive summary of the crashpowwhams of the road up..
1) Striking in Paris.. ‘PAS DE GAZOLE!’ (seriously, what civilized city runs out of gas ?)
2) Fuel mission complete, we hit a bunch of traffic in Paris, again in Belgium, again in Poland..
3) Germany was left out of that list, bless their efficient hearts. I had my first autobahn experience, Bolo went 200km/hour! Although I was impressed by the speedometer it felt so smooth and safe that I’m seriously considering petitioning for some higher speed limits in Canada…
4) When we hit the Polish border B pulls out a walky talky to eavesdrop on trucker chat.. the guys offer to sell me off to the trucker crowd via a pimp/mobster named Sasha that apparently has a temper. Little did I know that this joke would follow me for the next 4 hours of car ride and through the weekend (and if I’m not careful the rest of my life, I reckon)
5) Anyway, I didn’t mind that what was supposed to be a 12-14 hour road trip was 19 hours.. it was perfect fun. Classic oldies jam sessions, polish lessons and wiener schnitzel..what more could a girl want!

My impressions of Poznan were really good. I think the guys heavily downplayed the city and Poland in general so I was truly shocked! On Saturday I went out for a beautiful brunch at this really artistic café called Veranda, which was owned by the family of one of the friends I met. Afterwards we explored the market square, saw the famous clock goats battle at noon, saw Chopin’s piano at the museum of musical instruments, enjoyed the golden leaves at a huge park and even cheered on some racing rowers before heading home for a much needed preparty nap!

That evening Andzrej hosted a crew of posh Poles at his apartment for a predrink and then we headed to the mall (weird, I know!) to hit the clubs on our list for the evening. The first was having an opening party/magazine unveiling. quite glam! I was lucky to meet a lot of accomplished and trendy folks, all friends and even family of the guys.
Apres le apperatif, we hopped across the isle for our plat principale- Barbara Tucker, the legendary house diva, at a club called SQ. I really enjoyed this place- it was so well balanced – cool crowd, nice layout and décor, a really sweet ‘ chillout room’ which actually got quite rowdy later, and of course awesome music and company!

After a big night, Sunday was quite slow. Tony and another friend of Andzrej’s slept over and we shared some morning drunk LOLs, just like at home! After doing some solo exploring of the city centre, the guys scooped me up for a traditional polish dinner.. half a duck!! The waiter was so pumped that I ordered it (and just pumped in general actually..he reminded me of the ‘why heellloooo, yes? Nooo, I’m had a stroooooke’ waiter from the Simpsons. Anyone?) The next part is funny… we went back to this super mall and went bowling! A couple of times I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself when I realized how random it was “Bowling in Poland”.. probably up there on the list of things I wouldn’t expect to have done in my lifetime. We went back to home base and chilled for a while before saying goodnight. Andzrej and I somehow ended up handling nearly a whole 26 of JD while watching kitesurfing vids (so cool, I really want to learn!) and looking at awk ward teen pics..

Monday morning I was passed off to Tony, and so begins the next comic book-esque escapade..Berlin in ein tag! To keep things quite short, the city was all one would expect from the German Capital – order, sleek design and optimal nature to urban ratio. Following the usual model, the outset of the trip was a little rocky, but totally negligible compared to what we’d been through in the first leg of the race.
We only had about 6 hours but it was a perfect sunny day and we had our explorer hats on… I got a good feel for the city. We walked through the city centre, saw some pieces of the Berlin wall, the Reichstag, (where we saw a moderately rowdy demonstration about atomic waste or something..), a plaque stating that the polish helped take down communism located ‘around zee corner, zen around zee corner’ of the Reischtag, a collection of huge rocks from around the world, the shooting of a movie scene, some beautiful parkground in which Grillen was Verboten..(surely a note to any polainskis in town) et plus..
Monday night was Amsterdam.. I had a really smooth flight over, which was a nice surprise given my history, so I was feeling ready to take on the world when I got into the city at nearly midnight! I was lucky to catch a few glimpses of the city sights in the evening lighting on my tram ride from central station to our hotel. Seduced and sedated by these beauties, I was “bouleversee” (seriously couldn’t think of the English word there..) by little Elaine running in zigzag to greet me. Her and a few Americans we were traveling with had already been there for 2 nights, and she has something to show for it… A tattoo! Such a wild one she is…
Anyway, it was one of the guys’ birthdays so we went out for a proper night on the town. The group before I arrived had already done some of the wilder activities the city had to offer, but I’ll spare you the details.
The next morning we went for ‘coffee’ and a canal cruise! I couldn’t help but nap on the boat given the circumstances, plus the bouncy dutch voice of the boat guide was so lulling. Not much more to say about Amsterdam, seeing as I was only there for 18hours! Next stop, Italia!!


I bet you can guess how I’ll introduce this one, so I’ll spare you the word bouquet and tell it straight: full sprint to the plane and pretty much had to knock on the plane door for them to let us in…

Anyhow, I started writing this entry a month ago so my tribute to Italy will be disproportionately short! Our first city was Milan. We had an authentic dinner at a cute place just around the corner from our hotel. Here is where we first learned of the mysterious ‘boss tax’ that would become a mission for us throughout the rest of the trip. Despite the boss tax which we were intrigued but not too happy about, we scored a free pizza for home and some good advice for some evening entertainment…
“You Club” definitely left and impression on me. We got bottle service and our table was right behind what we found out was a little stage… there was a gladiator dance show going on all night long right in front of us! The swords even had some sort of sparking technology…the Italians don’t play! Actually I guess they do play, and quite hard..as this night was one for the books! Elaine and I decided we would lead the fun as the rest of the group was feeling under the weather so we pulled our usual moves and strutted into the VIP section like we owned it.. we ended up doing a little table hopping (maybe even table dancing?) and befriending some gladiators.
The next day we slept in unintentionally but managed to get in all the necessary tourist items. There’s really not all that much to see in Milan, it’s quite commercial. We did go to a medieval castle a really stunning church, Duomo.. We climbed up to the top and caught the sunset..contemplating life and love of course. Next we hit a few shops and while in a random glove shop (I bought two pairs but have since lost 3/4 gloves..merde!!) I get a tap on the shoulder…turn around, and it’s one of my friends from ESCP! Such a small world, goodness me.

Juan linked up with us as he was travelling alone and we went for another great meal at a famous pizza/pasta place in town. After a failed attempt to snag some last minute opera tickets we decided to catnap and gear up for round two on the town. The gang was too exhausted to go out but Elaine and I decided to be warriors (must have been inspired by the previous nights’ company, haha). We went for a warm up drink at a cute little cocktail bar where we used gestures and made up Italian words to squeeze out some recommendations for our night out. After confirming with a gelato vendor (our next warm up stop) we landed on “Just Cavalli.”
This place is single-handedly the most glamorous club I’ve been to in Europe. Designed by Roberto Cavalli, it was beautiful inside and out, and full of models and mobsters. Despite the haute-gamme venue, the VIP section welcomed us but may have been a little too hospitable… the next part of the evening was quite hazy and involves a trip to another club, some wandering and poisonous garlic bread…

The next day I managed to drag my corpse around for a little more sightseeing and shopping before catching (aka almost not catching) our plane to my last stop… Roma!

Day seven, we are tired and still very much feeling Roberto Cavalli’s treats. But Rome was just too beautiful to give a shit. I’ll interrupt here with a short anecdote about a time in Paris a couple of months ago…I had a weird eye infection going on for about a week at one point and then one day I went to the Dali museum and loved it so much that when I came out my eyes were totally healed! Pure magic. In any case, Rome worked a little magic as well and totally juiced us up. First, a local friend of one of our travel companions took us for the best pizza in town. (such a lil greasy hole in the wall with so many characters working..but wow were these pizzas delicious!!) Then, when the rest of the crew headed to some bar, Elaine and I decided we would explore the city by night! We walked for about 4 hours, totally starry-eyed. It was just amazing. My favourite part was Fontana Trevi which was all lit up and had tons of couples and crews hanging out. There was also a movie scene being filmed there, look for me on the big screen!

Rome wasn’t built in a day but unfortunately in our case it had to be visited in one. Although we had avoided bus touring throughout the trip we decided that this was the only way… A classic hop-on-hop off gave us a few short and sweet rendez-vous with some of the city’s most loved sites. Colliseum, Vatican, Pantheon and lots more… All in all the city has a really strong impression on me. Somehow these amazing ruins and buildings felt right at home in the centre of modern life. It was so warm in every way and there was something special in the air. I’ve already decided that I have to go back there, its definitely made the list of places I’d like to live in at some point in my life!

Its only appropriate that I missed the bus I was supposed to take back to the airport…luckily I made it in time with the next one and got to enjoy the city for another precious hour! I ended up flying back by myself (the rest of the crew was going to Venice but I had to head back early for a proj..) so I had some time to digest the week’s adventures. Expecting an epic slideshow of ‘best ofs’ to play in my head I was surprised to find an involuntary change in the in-flight programming...all I could think about was Paris and how excited I was to be almost home.

And so on day eight as I crawled into my little Vivaldi bed, in my ‘packing-in-panic’-ravaged room, I felt version 2.0 of a feeling that I was starting to know quite well…comic-book sunset hot-air balloon adventuring bliss.

A la prochaine…