Temperatures are going up, the clocks have gone forward one hour, and it’s damn nice outside. Last weekend, I spent Friday, Saturday and Sunday afternoon at Museumsquartier, reading and enjoying the sun.
Spring has arrived, finally!
The yellow thingy in the middle of the 2nd picture is an “Enzi”. It’s kind of a plastic couch, pretty comfy, and there are a couople dozens of those in the inner court of MQ in Summer. Awesome place to hang out, is MQ!
So after not much more than 36 hours, we sai “Good-Bye to Stefanie and got back on the road. Just before she had helped us to find a couch for Pittsburgh: there is this girl, Laurie, who will be staying with Stefanie in some weeks’ time. She seemed to be a nice girl, so Stefanie asked if she could host us. When she said Yes, Josef sent her a message with our profiles to fix the deal. And it worked out, as you will soon see!
But first things first. As the Niagara Falls are on the way to Pittsburgh, we of course stopped by there. We were being very touristy – walking along the falls, taking dozens of pictures. We even met some people giving Free Hugs, who were pretty surprised by our reaction to them 🙂
As it was Family’s Day in Ontario (a holiday recently invented as there are no other holidays in between Christmas and Easter), and President’s Day in the U.S., there were some hundred people lining the railings along the Falls. After some food and coffee, we got back to our car and crossed the border right at the Falls. The customs guy asked us a lot of questions, but was rather nice (though I don’t understand why it should be a problem of us entering the US at a different location than leaving them).
Several hours and potty breaks later, we arrived in Pittsburgh. We still had to wait about an hour for Laurie, as she had a late class that evening. This hour we spent with walking around the Campus and her neighborhood.
Sightseeing in Pittsburgh was limited to a rather short walk through the inner city and old parts. After more than a week of sightseeing, I was pretty done for already and was looking forward to not having to see anything 😉 Also, we still had a rather long drive to Washington DC before us, and we had received a nice tip from another Couchsurfer who had nearly hosted us instead of Laurie.
I want one like that for my flat door, saying:
“You might enter iff you bring something we will like.”
By the way, since I have started studying IT, I indeed understand more and more of the XCD comics. But also without special knowledge, one can understand. If you don’t, there’s still wikipedia.
After the – kind of obligatory – odyssey through the neighborhoods and motorway exits, we made it to Stefanie and her cats Milow and Misterio. To honor our stay in Toronto, she organized a Pubcrawl through some of the lowest bars of the city – pretty awesome! We met several other Couchsurfers from the area, had a great time and some (too many) drinks, and even witnessed a fistfight, only minutes after entering the first bar.
As bars close at 2 am, and the subway only works until 1.30 am, we were home around 1.50 am after the Subcrawl. In this case, “we” consisted of me, Josef, Stefanie and 2 other Couchsurfers who more or less last-minute asked Stefanie for a place to stay.
The next morning, we waited a bit for Stefanie to get up before leaving the apartment. She had promised to cook some beer battered waffles – and they were great 🙂
Toronto in short: we saw the harbour, some of the old city parts, the CN Tower (whoa, great view!!) and China Town, where we had great lunch.
Of course, also the cats were a sight for themselves and we spent several hours playing and cuddling with them.
As I mentioned in the last sentences of the post about Boston, my phone decided not to guide us to Annick’s doorsteps, and I had to make do with the maps it had saved while creating the route.
When we finally arrived, I was already pretty tired. Annick had prepared some food and great ideas for the days we were going to spend in Montreal. She and Josef were making plans for the next hours while I was slowly drifting way … Shortly after 10 pm I finally made it into my sleeping bag.
The first day, we visited several viewing points. This was not well planned, as the weather was way nicer the next days: over 0°C, sunshine and nearly no wind. The first day: overcast, cold, windy, and even some snow.
Montreal in short: Little Italy, Chinatown, Vieux Montreal, the “underground” Montreal aka “Reso”, a little brewery/restaurant at the Quartier Latin and several beer tastings at Annicks place.
So it’s a sunny though not too warm Sunday morning and we’re having breakfast in Boston, one of the oldest cities in the USA. Its city center is really interesting, as it consists of a lot of rather old buildings, next to modern ones, has a bunch of small parks, and most of the streets are old cow paths – so there aren’t as many right angles as e.g. in New York City.
Finding our way from one historic spot to the next was incredibly easy: The Freedom Trail, directing tourists from sight to sight, is a red line, sometimes made of brick stones, sometimes painted on the sidewalk. So all one has to do is keep their eyes open and follow its lead for about 5 kilometres. In theory, this could be done within 1 hour, but then again we had to stop every once in a while to warm up in souvenir shops and cafes, and of course had to take a ton of pictures.
The end of the trail is on the other side of Charles River, where we visited the Charlestown Navy Yard and of course Bunker Hill. Josef did walk up the 294 steps and had an awesome view of the city. I was too lazy, and also we were already a bit late for meeting my cousin … but YES, I regret not going up those stairs – Josef’s pictures are great 🙁
Both Jason and his room mate had to work late, so we had to kill some time after the late lunch with my cousin. We decided to go see the area around the Aquarium and check if we could still take a ferry towards Jason’s place. The last ferry had already left, so that plan did not work out, but I’m still not sure if it was a good plan at all. The distances on the ferry/bus/subway plan looked a bit strange.
The next day we left with Jason, as Harvard and MIT were on our agenda that day. There are guided tours of the campuses, done by the students. We did not manage to get one at Harvard, but the one at MIT really was nice. They give inside information on dorms, on interesting classes and degrees one can get, and also they have great stories on the pranks (or hacks, as they call it) that are played on the University on a regular basis.
One of the great things about Couchsurfing is that your hosts can tell you where and what to eat – so for lunch, Josef had a lobster roll and tried an oyster. I’m not that into Seafood and I’ve already tried to eat oysters – but they won the staring duel, I had some Clam Chowda (which was really yummy!).
After lunch, we paid a visit to the old parts of the town again, and also to the MAAH. Linking together some important places of Afro-American History, one can follow the Black Heritage trail through the MAAH’s area. In the early evening, we met with Jason to get the keys to the appartment, as the guys again had to work late. Back home, I did some reading and Josef did some sleeping. Then we finally made it to the Pub around the corner, where we also met a cousin of Roger’s, and had a great time.
Going from Boston to Montreal by car takes about 6 hours; after half of the way, we stopped at some random little town to have lunch and get water for the rest of the journey. Just outside Montreal, we stopped again for coffee (in order not to arrive too early) and went into the evening rush hour head over heels.
Funny as it is, my phone thought it would be cool to delete the rest of the directions for Annick’s place in Montreal, so I had to do the navigating with only the map data buffered on the phone.
Austrian motorway junctions are NOTHING compared to those in North America, believe me … o.0
And here are some snapshots from Boston:
So after picking up our car, we had a rendezvous in Providence: Eric, who had surfed my couch in Summer 2012, after hearing that I was coming to Boston, had suggested Pizza and Geocaching. The pizza was really good (awesome decoration, too), the first geocache was discovered quickly, and as a reward we had frozen yogurt afterwards.
Another hour driving (and some more detours after taking a wrong exit in NYC already) took us to Dorchester, Boston. We stayed with Jason, who is 23 and is working on his PhD in Nuclear Sciences at the MIT. We had planned to go to the Pub around the corner, but ended up having drinks at home.
The next day in the morning, our first stop was Boston Common, to find the Visitor Information Center. On the way, we walked by the Soldiers and Sailors Monument – and found an unexpected geocache: Josef saw the hideout, said “I bet there’s a cache!”, reached in, and got it out. Awesome!
The flight was great, getting to Manhattan was also pretty easy. Only my suitcase got into my way more often than not – lesson learned, next time it’s the backpack for sure.
For the first night, there was already a party planned: Couchsurfing New York’s weekly meeting, featuring the birthday party of two members. People were asked to dress up 80ies-themed, and some costumes were really great 🙂
The next day we went to Central Park … Just like that, we walked all the way from 103rd street down to Central Park Zoo. Of course we took a break in between; we had a snack in a Cafe that is located in a church(!). Also, we visited the shop at the Guggenheim Museum (I got a book on graveyards around New York there 🙂 ).
Thanks to some awesome recommendations from Chris, my former work colleague, we had a huge list of food to choose from for lunch. We decided to have the roastbeef sandwich from Little Italy – something we for sure did not regret. The rest of the list is still somewhere around, for my next trip 😉
Later we walked over to Brooklyn (yes, all the way from Little Italy via the Bridge). After that, we went to High Line Park – all in all this were about 12 km that day, so I had good reason to fall asleep on the couch at 9 pm 😉
The next day, we had breakfast at the mexican restaurant downstairs, packed our stuff, said good-bye to Nicky and the other surfers and went to pick up our car at the airport.
The lady at the rental company tried to make us change from a normal car to a SUV, as the weather was “so bad”. In fact, the further north we got, the sunnier it was. True story.
And now for some pictures!
3 cats, about a dozen different types of beer, poutine, chowda, smoked meat, hot dogs, pastrami, tostones, Kaiserschmarrn and of course a red Ford Focus – that’s what came along during my 17 days in North America.
17 days, in which we spent about 1800 miles on the roads of 8 states in the US and Canada (New York, Maine, Massachussetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Quebec, Ontario and also a bit of Virginia, as far as I remember).
17 days, in which I severly annoyed my travel companion with remarks about his accent.
17 days, in which we stayed in 7 households, with 15 different people and all in all 3 cats.
17 days full of great impressions and lots of awesome memories: a pubcrawl, pubfood, great views of great cities, a CD release concert, crossing the US border, the Falls …
Be prepared, it has begun …
All over the Alps, people never were very creative when naming their villages, mountains and meadows. “Au” is one of the most commonly used name for parts of villages near rivers (it means floodplain), for example. Also, “Ried” (meaning marsh or reed) can be found all over Austria, Germany and Switzerland.
And then there is “Hahnenkamm”, which is of course used for mountains that resemble the shape of a cockscomb. The most famous of these is situated in Kitzbühel in Tirol, and another is the local mountain of my hometown. And that’s where I went to go skiing for some hours with my mum. It’s only 5 minutes by car, and after last year’s renovations, the area has been improved big time 🙂
Like the pictures? If you want to see it in real, just come by 🙂