G4S

Part of my job in Edmonton is dealing with G4S, which is a money handling company similar to Brinks. A large armoured van shows up a few times a week to drop off money and take away deposits. The G4S employees are usually alone, but they have their vans as well as various threatening weapons attached to their hips.

I was sitting in a square in Luxembourg and I watched a man in a G4S uniform begin to walk across to a Tabac on the other side of the square with a bag in one hand. I am quite sure it was a coin order. At first I was excited as I thought about how little pieces of home always seem to sneak into life no matter where you are.

Then I noticed the oversized guard dog (I'm guessing it was a rottweiler) trotting along beside the G4S guy with it's mouth in a muzzle... but you know that if you take so much as one step too close to this guy, his aptly named guard dog would first rip off his muzzle and then rip off your face.

I guess walking around Edmonton with the protection of a dog isn't that feasible, but if I were working for G4S, I'd take the dog any day.

Rain? What is Rain?

I woke up this morning to overcast skies and rain. After I finished breakfast, the rain had turned into a full on downpour. This is the first rain I've seen the entire trip. I don't even think it's been overcast. I've seen blue skies everyday.

I utilized the free wifi to stream the last few episodes of Parks and Recreation I missed after I left Canada, laughed my ass off for an hour, and when I finished the rain had petered out and headed into town. Thanks weather gods, you've been great.

Why yes, I have been to Luxembourg

Luxembourg! The trilingual country which is a mix of French, German, and Luxembourgish. Naturally, nearly all of these gifted people that I met seem to also speak English. I feel so useless. Still, my evening walk here has quickly made me head over heels for this place. It has all the elements of a city, but it's quiet and intimate like a town. I never seemed to be more than 5 minutes from a large, green park and I have felt the safest on my own here more than anywhere else I've been (not that anywhere else had been dangerous).

Changing Languages; Missing Friends

I only spent one night in Paris since I've spent time in the city before and will be returning for a weekend with my classmates from Lille. I decided to utilize the “Benelux” portion of my rail pass and hopped on a train to Luxembourg. When I arrived, I was met with German signs for the first time in a year with a few recognizable signs around me reading Abfahrt! (departure) Verspatet! (late). I was immediately reminded of my last Europe trip, when we arrived in Vienna and I couldn't get over the German words and kept repeating them robotically to the amusement of my travel buddies.

All through the trip I've been missing these girls. Emily would always ensure everyone ate before we were starving, and often before we even realized we were hungry. Her plan-oriented mind left little room for forgetting to do something like find out where the hostel was located (oops, forgot to do that once) and ensuring we had proper seat reservations on the trains (that screwed me over more than once). Chloe would kick my butt into gear if I was being lazy, and also justified downtime when we both just wanted to spend an hour napping or going on our computers in the hostel.

I travelled with Sarah and Stephanie less often, but I still have times when I think about how they'd help me. Sarah was always up for anything, and I could shop vicariously through Stephanie without actually having to load my backpack up with any more weight. Both knew about really cool places to see, whether they be art galleries or monuments or just cool areas of town.

Travelling alone has its perks, but it's always nice to have a friend, especially to have someone to share a meal with at the end of the day. I really don't like eating alone at restaurants, and have generally avoided it for the most part by making my own food at the hostel or getting something to go. I'm quite excited to make new friends when school starts in a few days in Lille. In the meantime, I'm going to channel the energies of my absent travel buddies.

Not so Disappointed

Before I left Canada, I planned out where I would be going and booked hostels up until Carcassonne. That left 5 days of 'freedom' to go wherever I wanted. Really, I just couldn't decide where to go. I still couldn't make up my mind until Carcassonne, where I finally decided to go on to Toulouse, a town about an hour away from Carcassonne. I neglected to book a bed in the only hostel in town since there were 12 beds available and I didn't think it was necessary. That ended up screwing me over, and the night before I left Carcassonne I found out that every last bed had been booked. There was no room available in Toulouse. Frustrating. I ended up just going to Paris for convenience. Trains take a long time to get around the country, but once you're connecting in Paris, everything is close (Thanks 300km/h TGV trains).

This pretty much sums up my trip: disappointment means going to Paris. Life is good.

Castle!

In Nice, everything is translated from French into English and Italian for the convenience of the foreign tourists everywhere. It makes sense to have things in Italian considering how close Nice is to the Italian border, but I still thought that it was cool that in Carcassonne, which is in Southwest France, everything is translated from French into English and Spanish.

Anyways, I spent the day exploring the town. The ramparts are accessible in a lot of areas, and large areas of the castle are open complete with audio guide which was really nice. Carcassonne has a long and complicated history of occupation that I only followed for as long as the audio guide was speaking into my ear. I do remember that at one time, Carcassonne was a border town between France and Spain, and therefore was incredibly important for front line defense. When some treaty or other was signed, the border moved further south and Carcassonne became relatively unimportant. The castle was restored in the 19th century by a famous architect named Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. He made all these extrapolations and hypotheses about what the castle would have looked like during it's various occupations over the centuries. A reddish line in the wall here represents the time when the Romans inhabited the area and levelled the wall, a line of holes along the stone there were the place for the beams to be inserted as support for the wooden room to be constructed on the second floor. Nowadays, computer programs can create 3D models of the town by electronically scanning the area. This allows archeologists to create more solid hypotheses about what the town used to be like. Even against this technology, the work of the architect 200 years ago that he did all by himself without fancy technology is, for the most part, just as accurate. Bad Ass

Carcassonne

From the train station, Carcassonne seems to be just another European town. All the euro style buildings, narrow streets, and cafes lining the sidewalks are great, but for a tourist hungry for the spectacular, this town does not look promising.

Carcassonne was recommended to me by my friend Kate, so I added it to my itinerary and booked a hostel. I'm very glad I did. A short ten minute walk from the centre of town brings you to the amazing Old Town, which is a small, well fortified fortress complete with a castle that has been built and remodelled again and again throughout the past thousand years or so although the area has been occupied for a lot longer than that.

My first few minutes in the town were great and my eyes just feasted on the medieval wonders around me, but all I was really thinking about was the sweet relief of the cool wind against my skin that meant finally, finally for the first time in two weeks, I was not sweating. There is too much Canadian in me to fully enjoy the endless sun and warmth of the Mediterranean. Bring it on, wind! I'd love to finally use my sweater.