Owen's European Adventures

  After a month, we left Florence on Monday. We were back to traveling like the first 2 weeks of our trip. Those weeks were tiring, but fun because of how much we were able to see. This time we only have 1 week of travel before we get to Valencia where we will stay for a month. We went to Turin (Italy), Lyon (France), Montpellier (France), and Barcelona (Spain). We got to Turin around 3 on Monday. We were meeting my dad’s cousin at the train station. He picked us up and took us to our B&B. We didn’t do much on the first day, but we did get to meet his family. We got takeout from a local pizza place and ate it at their house. The next day we actually went into the center of Turin.  It turns out that they were having a chocolate festival in the main piazza. There were so many different tents that had all different kinds of chocolate. My sister and I got cioccolatte calda, which is a better version of hot chocolate. It’s pretty much drinking straight melted chocolate. We ...

This week we went to Siena on Wednesday. Siena is a small city south of Florence. We were supposed to go there in 2018, but we never made it there. We decided that we could take a day trip to make up for that.  The train ride from Florence to Siena was a little more than an hour and a half. We got to Siena around 10:30am. Siena is on the side of a mountain, and the train station is only about halfway up. Because of that, we had to take 11 escalators to get out of the station. When we got to the top, my parents got coffees and my sister and I got pastries. We walked to Piazza del Campo, which is the main Piazza in Siena. The piazza is a semi circle surrounded by restaurants and souvenir stores. When we walked by the souvenir stores I noticed a bunch of flags I’d never seen before. I asked my dad about it and he said that they were for all the neighborhoods in Siena. I decided that I was going to have to get one of the flags before we left. There are 17 different neighborhoods and ...

  One thing I’ve wanted to do since we got to Florence is climb the Duomo. The Duomo is the big church in the middle of downtown Florence. It towers over the rest of the city. My dad and I got tickets to go Monday morning at 8:15. The tickets we got let us climb up the Duomo and the bell tower. My dad and I were on the tram by 7:30 on Monday morning. When we got to the center of Florence, we stopped to get some drinks and a croissant before we started our climb. The piazza that the Duomo is in was pretty empty early in the morning. The only other people there were the other people who were going to climb, and shop owners setting up for the day. We waited in line for about 15 minutes, and then they opened up the doors. My dad and I were 8th and 9th in line so we got in pretty fast. We had to go through security, but no one was actually checking anything so we just walked through. As soon as we scanned our tickets to go in, there were stairs. We went really slowly on the first set ...

  After about a week in Florence, we went on our first day trip to Lucca. Lucca is a smaller town than Florence, but it’s still a decent size. It’s a popular place to visit because of the old walls that surround the center of the town. I had never heard of Lucca before we decided to go. We decided that Wednesday the 12th would be a good day to go because we would still be able to do lots of schoolwork during the week, but it also shouldn’t be full of weekend tourists. We had to be at the train station by 9:00 because our train was at 9:09. We took the tram from our house to the train station, and we got there with plenty of time to spare. Our train took about an hour and 20 minutes, so we got to Lucca around 10:30. The train station in Lucca is outside of the walls, so we had to find a way to get in. Luckily there were a lot of other people going in too, so we just followed them through a passageway in the wall. On the inside Luca looks like a normal Italian town. You can tell ...

This week we finally settled down in Florence. We’re going to be here for the rest of October, so we don’t have to rush to do everything in 2 days. This week we did lots of exploring the center, and saw a bunch of interesting things. I also saw lots of activities that I want to do in the upcoming weeks.  Even though it’s only been a week, there have been so many things we’ve seen in Florence. The main thing we’ve seen is churches. There’s a church about every 3 blocks here. We only went inside of 1 so far, Basilica di Santa Croce di Firenze, but I’m sure we’ll go in many more over the next month. Basilica di Santa Croce di Firenze felt more like a graveyard than a church. There were tombs all over the walls and floors, and Galileo is even buried there. The Duomo is my favorite church we’ve seen from the outside though. I like it because of how big it is, and how big the dome is. Another thing we’ve seen a lot of is statues. If you go to Piazza della Signoria you can easily see mo...

We’ve already been in Europe for more than 2 weeks! We’ve been to 7 countries, and we still have more to go. The 7 countries we’ve been to are England, Belgium, Netherlands, France, Germany, Austria, and Italy. They’ve all been very different in positive ways, and I’ve enjoyed our time in all of them. The main way they were different was the food. My favorite meals came in Germany, Austria, and Italy.  Besides England, which we’re going back to, Germany is the country we spent the least amount of time in. Even though we only ate a few meals there, we found some really good food. The best meal was in Munich. We were only in Munich for less than 6 hours because it’s Oktoberfest. Oktoberfest is a huge festival in Munich that takes place from the middle of September to the end of October. More than 6 million people go to Munich for Oktoberfest, so we decided we wouldn’t stay there because of how crowded it would be. Instead we stopped there to visit my dad’s cousin and her husband wh...

We spent our first full day in Europe riding the train from London to Brussels. Brussels is the capital of Belgium. We were staying 2 nights in Belgium, so that meant we would have a full day there. My mom had seen an article called “What to do with 1 day in Brussels” so we used it to help us find out what to do. We decided to pick a few things from the list. There were 2 things in the article that stood out. One was Mini Europe and the other was the Atomium. The next day we took the subway to Mini Europe. Mini Europe is a park where there are little models of most of Europe’s famous landmarks. When we walked in we took a picture with the mascot. The mascot was a turtle, but he had orange skin and a blue shell. The weather was not very pleasant, so we all put on our raincoats. There were on and off showers the entire time we were there, but it was still lots of fun. We followed the path to the first models, which were of viking settlements. There were so many models and they were all r...