





When I got off the train in Marseille it was freezing! I’ve officially been through a complete year in a week a far as weather goes! On my way to my host I got a bit lost and some very kind old man helped me back on my way.
After a somewhat problematic train ride we arrived in Zürich and were faced with problematic tram rides. With some help from our host we managed to make our way to their place.
We got to Milan in the afternoon and took the rest of the day off. We chatted with our hosts, 3 of which were on couchsurfing, uploaded the Rome Blogue et did some couch requests and went to sleep very early. We wanted to recuperate from our stay in Rome which had involved very little sleep and a lot of walking. The next day, after 12 and 15 hours of sleep we woke up to a snowy day!
We left Rome with some sadness at leaving some good friends but with the feeling that we’d been in Rome for a month. When you change cities every 3 days, spending 6 nights in one is very disorienting. We wish we’d have had less rain but in all we had a great time. Let’s just hope we can rest now and take it slower!
Tuesday night we arrived in Florence and on our way to our hosts it felt rather surreal. Statues a every corner, squares, old buildings, churches everywhere.
Did you know Venice is the doom of tourists? Maps are useless and you just have to go with the flow. The city is really beautiful though, with all its small alleys, bridges, canals, and no car/bikes anywhere.
Did you know no one in Austria knows about the Sound of Music? Or almost no one. They have tourist stuff for foreigners but the normal people have no idea what that is. And normal european neither. I was pretty disappointed! The hostel I’m staying at though has a daily showing of the Sound of Music and although I didn’t want to waste half my day watching it, I borrowed it and watched it at night! This movie makes me so happy!! And I recognized a bunch of places I’ve seen.
On Sunday morning we managed to get up early and were at the train station in time, but with the help of strangers we figured out there was a special training for bad winter weather going on. So we had to take two trains instead of our usual one to get to Amsterdam and then another two trains to get to Breda.
After our escape from Bruges, we arrived in Amsterdam and wanted only one thing: shower. We figured a bit late that the map in our guide was wrong or out of date because the hostel we booked was way further than we initially thought. So, after half an hour walk with our backpacks and almost getting run over by bikes we made it to the Jordan Shelter.
On Tuesday morning, we left our host’s place in Brussels to catch a train that would take us to Bruges in a little less than an hour. While it wasn’t far away, we quickly noticed that this was a very different place. Bruges is a part of Flanders, the netherlandish-speaking part of Belgium. However, we are now used to be faced with signage in a language we don’t understand, so it wasn’t that much of a shock for us anymore.