The original post: /r/travel by /u/Rasbobbo on 2024-05-28 04:57:40.
This is in no particular order. It’s interesting to me that the things I remember most are not the Colosseum in Rome, or the Louvre, or Westminster Abbey or the Sydney Opera House — it was the experiences and people that were unique to where I was visiting.
In 1991 (oh to be 25 again), on my second ever overseas trip, I traveled around France on the cheap, going to Normandy, the chateaus of the Loire valley, Brittany and Provence. In St. Malo, near Normandy, I stayed at a hostel. I’d go see sights in the daytime — like the abbey at Le Mont St. Michel and D-Day beaches — and then come back to the hostel to cook dinner in the kitchen with other shoestring travelers. Right next to the kitchen was a volleyball court. Every night we played volleyball until 10 p.m., pounding $2 bottles of wine the whole time. Met some amazing people and had a blast.
The late-night place to be in Paris
Around about 2000, I did a combo Spain/Paris trip. In Paris I was joined by a co-worker. We’d go our separate ways during the day, then meet back for dinner and going out. The problem, though, was that bars seemed to close shockingly early. We got to one at 11:00, and the barkeep was locking the door. But he was American, and he said: “Follow me.” He took us to a place near the Sorbonne that looked like a closed restaurant, but that had stairs to the basement. It was a bar with a bustling, young, international crowd. We ended up staying there until 4:30 a.m. It’s called the Violon Dingue — Crazy Violin, and as far as I know is still there. My friend drew portraits of girls at the bar to give to them.
In 2019 I went to London for the first time. On one of my days there, a longtime friend who lives in Dublin flew over just to spend the day with me. It was insane, and a blast. We saw art exhibits of 1,000-year-old British archaeological finds, and some of the earliest books in existence, took pictures of Big Ben and Parliament, took an organized walking/drinking tour of pubs, and otherwise just explored back streets and alleyways near Westminster Abby. Then he caught a train back to the airport to fly home.
On that same trip in London, I happened upon a pub in the neighborhood I was staying in out in the city’s west side, near Hammersmith. What I expected to be a pint and some food and then maybe a walk back to kill time in my room, turned into food, multiple pints and a whole evening’s worth of entertainment as, one by one, the pub’s regulars came in for their pints. By 7:30 p.m. people were packed in. And I had been introduced to half of them. This is where I discovered my favorite beer of all time, Timothy Taylor’s Landlord pale. I bought rounds. And rounds were purchased in my honor. They were fascinated that I worked on politics news. They didn’t hate Trump, really, but kept asking me: How the fuck did such an idiot get elected? (It’s called the Colton Arms. Highly recommended.)
In 2013 I visited several cities in Brazil, and when I was in Rio de Janeiro, they were having a heat wave. Thank goodness the city has world famous beaches! I went to a very crowded Ipanema Beach and I think half the city was there. And a ton of people, including me, were out in the water jumping waves and cooling off. They were the kind of waves that surprise you with how much power they have. And every once in a while you’d see a bigger one coming and say “Oh shit!” You’d see the look of excited panic on everybody’s faces. Then the wave would pass, everybody would survive, and they’d have the biggest smiles on their faces. Rio was a scary city at times — the poverty there creates some desperate people. But in the water, everybody was smiling after the big waves — white, Black, mixed, old, young, rich, poor. The waves became the leveler. figuratively and literally.
This was good rum, but I liked Santiago de Cuba rums even more.
In early 2017, a friend and I visited Cuba during a very brief window when the U.S. allowed independent travelers to go there. While we were in Havana, some massive tides were flooding streets close to the seawall. I can’t remember whose idea it was, but a bottle of fantastic — and cheap — Cuban rum was purchased and a couple of glasses stolen from the AirBnB so that we could join the locals out on one of the main avenues to watch the encroaching flood. I think I would remember more from that night if not for the rum.
Bamberg was a beer lover’s dream.
In the fall of 2015 I visited Eastern Europe from Germany and Poland down to Croatia. I stayed a couple of days in a town called Bamberg in Bavaria. Monks have been making beer in that town for centuries. The proprietor of my AirBnB said: “Hey, if you want to join us tonight, a couple of the other guests and I will be sampling some beers and snacks of the region. Just pitch in a few Euros at the end of the night if you want.” I learned so much that night about German food and beer. It was a blast.
After surviving the ferry from Italy, and a train ride to Athens, the Acropolis shined.
My very first trip overseas was a three-week trip in January/February of 1990 that started in Amsterdam and ended in Athens, Greece. In addition to those cities, I went to Paris, Venice, Florence, Rome and the Greek island of Santorini. To get from Rome to Greece, I took an overnight ferry out of the Italian port city of Brindisi. I was in deck class, lol, on the ground. But so were a bunch of other travelers my age, also experiencing Europe for the first time. I ended up hanging with a few who just so happened to be sharing a bottle of the Greek liquor called Ouzo. Let’s just say that I had enough that I hope I never drink Ouzo again in my life. The deck might have been hard to sleep on, but, I was in no condition to notice.
Our outback tour guide gets the fire going.
In early 2015 I went to Australia for my one and only visit. Besides visiting the big cities of Melbourne and Sydney, I flew to the “Red Center” town of Alice Springs, where I took a three-day long van tour of the outback, including visiting Uluru (previously known as Ayers Rock). On the first night, we camped outdoors, sleeping in what the Aussies called “swags,” basically insulated sleeping bags made for sleeping right on the ground. The trick though, was preparing the area around where you would be sleeping. You see (and this just might be something they use to scare the tourists), if you dig a little trench around your bag, it will keep spiders and snakes from crawling in with you because they won’t go up and down trenches. Well, true or not, I wasn’t gonna NOT do it and just give them a paved highway to my nose! So I dug my trench. I didn’t get bit. But a German girl was the hero of our group because she woke up and saw a dingo in our camp and proceeded to throw a rock at it, and hit it, to scare it aware. Huzzah!
Happy scooter riders in Ho Chi Minh City.
In early 2017 I went to Vietnam for the first time, visiting Hanoi first and then Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). I took one of the most highly regarded tours in all of Southeast Asia, a Back of the Bike scooter street food tour, in Saigon. It was a fun crowd on the tour, and the college-age Vietnamese girls driving the scooters were a hoot. But the thing that really made this night memorable was sports related. In the middle of our tour, as we going from one stop to the next, the streets filled with people celebrating something, yelling, singing and waving the Vietnamese flag. It turns out the national soccer team had just had one of its first wins in international competition. They had been waiting to celebrate for a long time. The honking was constant. And there was a sea of waving red flags.