it's been nearly a month since I posted ANYTHING in here - I definitely need to dust cobwebs of sorts. A lot has happened in the last 3 weeks since I posted my first blog (?) - thank goodness I do update my true journal more often than this site!

I came back last week from Europe, and I still need to pinch myself from time to time (well, maybe that's exaggerating) to make sure that everything I saw wasn't just conjured up by my wild imagination further aggravated by the heat! Or closer to reality, I look at the pictures, especially the ones I shot at random. (Well, at least those shots make sure I just didn't cut my picture and posted it on a believable background or something.)

Anyway, I think I saw a lot in the two weeks that I've stayed there. I saw some of the places I previously just learned from Sir Ozaeta's class, like the Louvre, Gustav Eiffel's tower, St. Peter's Basilica (with Bernini's colonnade and baldachino), the Cologne Cathedral, the Colosseum. My visit gave me a glimpse of Parisian boulevards and the way previous Parisian architects designed their cities. I saw how they veered away from the grid pattern and employed a web-like maze of streets and alleys to highlight symbols of power and prestige in the city - for example, one can see the Arc de Triomphe clearly from several streets, including the famous Champs-Elysees. The landmark is a diverging point for these streets, and this pattern occurs with other Parisian monuments. And I guess you can't walk a couple of blocks without seeing yet one of those monuments in site.

Another city famed for its monuments (or rubble, depending on one point's of view) was Rome. I was able to visit the famed church, St. Peter's Basilica, the Trevi fountain and also some of the ruins of Roman baths, aqueducts, temples, forums, and of course, the Colosseum. But my stay there wasn't really that long enough for me to experience the place. Sayang, as our visit there was the last in our itinerary and supposedly the crowning glory of the 16 days we were on tour. There were other places I also wanted to see like the Sistine Chapel and those flights of steps I saw in Audrey Hepburn's 'Roman Holiday'.

Seeing those buildings I just saw in books thrilled me to the core, but the really, really fun part of the whole trip was those things I really didn't expect to experience on our stay. In Amsterdam, I saw lots of trees with brown leaves (I can see you rolling eyes over something un-poetic as brown leaves) dotting the landscape, and a creek with tumbleweeds growing at its banks, and mallards racing to the edge. It was something out of a Rembrandt painting. They also had quaint apartments there, narrow buildings in shades of brown and red, with white trimmings, and at the top were hooks to hoist furniture that can't fit through the narrow entrances. They had canals everywhere, and boathouses too. Tulips just seem to thrive anywhere. And of course, I also saw what Netherlands is known for - windmills.

In contrast to the marshy plots of the Netherlands were the hilly and mountainous terrain of Germany, Switzerland and Austria. We never stayed too long in the cities of those countries we visited, just a day and a night's rest each. As soon as we ate our meal, spent the night there, or saw the city's attraction, we were usually on our way to the next city. I guess it was okay, because most of the places we visited in those cities were rather provincial and so there's nothing much to gawk at, except maybe, those houses in Heidelburg, Germany that reminded me of those villages in the Lord of the Rings. Anyway, the long trips afforded me glimpses of the countryside, of forests, valleys, ranges, snow-capped peaks, lakes, hills, fog and plains that almost seemed like a striped carpet covered them, as strips of fields in various shades of green and brown could be seen as far as the eye could see.

I mentioned Rome earlier, but before we got there we were in Venice and Florence first. We got to see this square, Piazza San Marco, which had pigeons nearly equaling the tourists in number and some parts of Venice while we were on a gondola. I liked the place, though I acknowledge that fact that it's expensive to do anything there, even go to the WC or simply seating down! One of the guys on our trip ordered a coke and sat on one of the chairs that were put outside by a restaurant, near the stage where the musicians played, and his 4-euro coke quickly became 11, as he was actually charged for the ambiance of seating there!

I guess there are a lot of other things that I need to include in this journal, including Fabio's (our Italian coachdriver) way of greeting the people upon entering the toll gate. (We call it "the kiss-kiss system" as Fabio made kissing sounds. He jokingly remarked that no one could resist his kiss!) But I need to stop this and get back to reality!