From Paris we took the train to Liege, for a few days with my great aunt and uncle on the other side of the family. Again a bit of a repeat of the trip from a couple of years ago: arriving in the fantastic Guillemins station designed by Calatrava and then travelling to the Liege suburbs on the edge of the forest where they live. Continue reading
Category: travel
Paris
A return to Paris for me, where we stayed in my great aunt’s (slightly small) apartment in the 5th Arrondisment. It’s in a great location with 3x weekly markets in the square around the corner, a boulangerie and boucherie on the next street and a metro station nearby, and let us live lice locals again.
Barcelona
A return to Barcelona for me, which is where I first set foot on foreign soil as a solo traveler 13 years ago. Since then, Barcelona seems more crowded and busy, but still as fantastic as I remember it.
We’re using AirBNB for some of our accommodation on this trip, where people with spare places rent them out. We were living just out of the centre of town in an area called ‘Hostafrancs’. It’s outside the main tourist area so we felt like we were living like locals. At least until we tried to start talking. My Spanish wasn’t as good as I thought it was, obviously.
Switzerland
Lausanne and surrounds to be more accurate. Lausanne is where my second cousin and her partner live and our base for a couple of days before we headed to their chalet in the nearby mountains.
Talk about being diametrically opposed to Cambodia! The temperature and humidity; neatness and tidiness opposed to chaos; european aesthetics; you get the picture.
Cambodia II
Wow. Even having been to the Killing Fields of Choung Ek and Tuol Sleng Prison before, they are just as haunting a second time around. They are mostly for the tourists, however, as we were told on more than one occassion that a lot of Cambodians want to put the whole experience of the Khmer Rouge era behind them. Continue reading
Cambodia
So in the last few days it’s cooled down, making us a bit more able to get out and about and still feel human at the end of it. I’m writing this from Phnom Penh towards the end of our time in Cambodia, where it’s been a chilly 32 degrees.