Hello hello! As many of you know, the Eggum's visited us for a week and a half in March and we are finally ready to write that longer blog! We do apologize for the length of this blog, we just had so much fun! They spent 3 nights in Reading before we traveled and spent 1 night in London, 2 nights in Brussels, 2 nights in Amsterdam, and 3 nights in Montreux.

London:

We had a very full and busy day in London, not one of the most relaxing visits to London, but it was fun to say the least. We started our day by going to Abbey Road and the Beatle's Abbey Road Recording Studio. We signed their wall and snapped the infamous picture crossing in the crosswalk. We then took the tube to Buckingham Palace and were hoping that the guards would be changing, but of course, they were not. Nonetheless, the palace was beautiful and we were able to walk through some of the gardens surrounding the palace. We walked through several large building and Trafalger square to arrive at Covent Garden Market. There is always a paella stand open in the middle of the market, so we sat down for some delicious paella for lunch. We continued on to Westminster Abbey, Houses of Parliament, and Big Ben. My parents requested to do the London Eye and it was definitely worth it! We saw beautiful views of the city, especially Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. After the Eye, we went to Tower Bridge, which is still one of our favorite parts of London. We could not miss out on taking a picture with a red telephone booth before heading back to our flat. We have a good family friend studying in London, so she met up with us at an Italian restaurant for a much needed pizza dinner. We were all exhausted so the night did not go much farther than that!

Brussels:

We took the EuroStar, aka the "chunnel", from London to Brussels. This high speed train actually goes under the English Channel for about 20 minutes. We were able to play cards and enjoy the train the whole time, much different than most flights from country to country. Brussels felt much larger than we expected and we felt like we were constantly getting lost. There are several squares that have multiple streets going off of them in every single direction, which got a bit confusing. Grand Place was beautiful, as we expected, and the buildings were massive and very detailed. The weather was nice when we arrived, so everybody seemed to be enjoying a drink at the patios in Grand Place. We continued our touring and saw Manneken Pis, the peeing boy statue from our photos that is worshiped by many. They actually have over 900 outfits that they dress Manneken Pis up in. Manneken Pis is located by many of the Belgian waffle shops, so we stopped to enjoy a fresh baked waffle with whipped cream, chocolate syrup, strawberries, and bananas. I don't think that I have had a better waffle in my life. After wandering around a bit more through markets and side streets, we ended up at Janneken Pis. Janneken Pis is a statue of a little girl peeing into a fountain. Janneken Pis is not in the open like Manneken Pis is, but fortunately she was located at the end of an alley filled with Dilirium Cafés - a very popular beer café with over 2000 brews. Of course we stopped to try and quickly learned that Belgium has some of the best beer we have ever tried. We continued on to Brueghel to have another beer tasting. We had a great system where John, my dad, and I would all buy a different kind of beer so that we could maximize our Belgian beer experience. We enjoyed a nice dinner and went home to play cards and relax. Day 2 was St. Patrick's day, so we ate lunch at an Irish pub and my dad tried his first Guiness! No green beer over here. We toured Cantillion Brewery. The tour was very interesting and we were able to see the staff actually bottling and labeling the bottles. They don't joke around over here, all of the beers are bottled in what we would assume are wine bottles. We were each allowed two samples after our tour, which was very exciting until we all almost had to spit up our first sampling. The first was a cereal wine. To be nice about it, it was awful. We tried the second samples, which were different flavors, but these were equally as bad. The tour was still really fun though! We ended our stay in Brussels with a bang at Fin de Siecle, a traditional Belgian cooking restaurant. We added pictures of our meals to the blog, just to show how incredibly awesome the meals were, but also to show how HUGE they were!!! We were all very impressed - and full!

Amsterdam:

Similar to Brussels, Amsterdam was very tricky when we first arrived with all of the canals and small streets! Luckily, we got used to Amsterdam much quicker and felt more comfortable with our directions there! It took us twenty minutes to find the office where we could pick up our keys, but by the end of our trip we learned that the office is truly only a five minute walk from the train station. Oops! We checked into our flat and found a beautiful restaurant for lunch. The waitress was very helpful and gave us tons of suggestions and recommendations for the city. As we were wandering, we found a place for a canal tour that we were going to book for later in the evening, but it was leaving when we got there so we decided to hop on! The tour was an hour ride through the canals around the city. It was fun to be on the water, pretty seeing the old buildings, and interesting learning about the city! When we got off of the boat, we took a tour of Anne Frank Huis. The tour was certainly moving and set up in a manner that made us feel like we were there in the moment. I would recommend this tour to anyone who gets the chance to go to Amsterdam someday. When we left the Anne Frank Huis, it was raining, so we went into a pub to play cards. We found it very disappointing that most beers served in Amsterdam were actually Belgian beers and the local beers were limited, but we still enjoyed them. We tried "bitterballen" which are fried dough balls filled with steaming gravy and meat in the middle, served with mustard. This is an Amsterdam special and we loved them so much that we ordered them again in our three day trip! On day two we rented bikes. Amsterdam is crazy for their biking - you can see some of the pictures of bike parking ramps. They have a great bike system, besides the fact that you do not know when another biker or motorized scooter is passing you on the bike path. The scooters got a bit scary. We attempted to bike out into the country to a castle and windmill, but after about an hour of biking and getting lost, we figured we should turn around and stick to everything else that we had on our list within Amsterdam. In our defense, even the locals told us it would be difficult to get out to the castle by bike. The path we took was still very beautiful and we found a restaurant outside of Amsterdam that has minimal tourism. The waiter enjoyed talking to us about our trip and learning about our lives; it was a very nice time. We biked back into Amsterdam to a brewery that is located next to a huge, old windmill. We had a tasting of five beers and each picked our favorite to enjoy in the sunshine. We next biked through a market where my mom was able to buy Birks for cheap! We made our way over to Vondelpark. The park was huge and busy with bikers, walkers, and runners. I am glad that we had bikes to get around the whole park and see everything that it had to offer! After dropping off our bikes, we walked over to the Red Light District. It was interesting to see this part of Amsterdam's culture. There were many crazy shops and clubs, but we never saw the intensity of this craziness after dark. We went home to clean up before a nice dinner out. We were all exhausted from the long day, but we forced ourselves to go out to eat. We ate at a small restaurant that was part of the "nine bridges". The ribs, vegetable curry, and steak were perfect meals to end a good day! Our last day in Amsterdam was a bit weird because we had to be out of our flat at 11, but we did not have to catch the train until 3:30. We had all of our luggage, so we found the best option to be to relax in the sun on a variety of café and bar patios. We ate lunch at a delicious tapas bar and then took the train to catch our flight to Geneva, Switzerland!

Montreux:

We arrived in Geneva after dark and took the hour train to Montreux. After having some difficulties finding our flat in the dark, we called it a night. We stayed in a beautiful home that had a patio overlooking the lake as well as the Alps. You could actually see France across the lake. In the morning, we took a cogwheel train up into the Alps. Our destination was Rochers de Naye. The train tracks literally looked like a rollercoaster, it was so steep in some places and the snow was just packed up next to the train! There were several tunnels and we went through and the higher that we went, the more beautiful that the ride was! On the way up, we went past the location where many Peace Conferences are held. We took several pictures on top of the mountain, and enjoyed the views for a long time. You will see in some of the pictures there are pictures of yurts (white domes). There was a really expensive option to stay at the top of the Alps in a yurt, obviously we did not do that, but it seemed like a kind of cool "camping" trip. We met some locals who were taking their friends up the mountain. They gave us a bunch of really cool recommendations and actually told us to get off of the train a stop early to take the cable car back into the city. We have some pictures of the cable car (fit about 15 people) and the very steep track that it took to get to the bottom. When we got to the bottom we took the bus to another part of town with intentions of taking the "vineyard train", as the locals put it, to some local wineries. We were faced with a bit of a language barrier at the train station and they did not understand what the vineyard train was, and we had not done any other research on it besides what the locals told us. We still enjoyed a sandwich in the sun and figured we would try again for the wineries the next day. We went back to Montreux and walked a couple of miles along the lake promenade to Chateau de Chillon, a castle on the side of the lake. We never had intentions of actually going in the castle, but wanted to see the area and see the castle close up. It was actually really impressive and we were able to take some great pictures with the sun setting behind the castle. When we got home, we were ready just to stay in and relax for the rest of the night. John and I ran out to the store to buy a couple of frozen pizzas - but we learned quickly that NOTHING (besides some restaurants) is open past 5 o'clock, not even on the weekend! We found a tiny store with overpriced frozen pizzas, but we went for it anyways. That's another thing, if you are ever going to Switzerland it is a VERY expensive country. Beautiful and definitely worth the visit, but expensive. On day three, we were anticipating rain and we were not wrong. We still wanted to see wine country, so after doing more research, we figured out the correct train to take and headed towards Rivaz. Our plan was to go to a few wineries, but as soon as we stepped off of the train it started pouring and we were soaked! We went to Lavaux Vinorama. My parents each had a flight of wine tasting and John and I both sampled some of the sweeter wines. The winery old sold wines with grapes from the area (chasselas grapes) and these wines are not exported out of Switzerland. It was great to taste all of the wines and we even got to watch a video of how the wine is produced here! Very interesting. Most of the afternoon was over when we headed out into the rain again and decided to catch the train back to Montreux. We went to a restaurant in Vieille-Ville de Montreux (Old Town Montreux) called Gloria's where we tried two different kinds of fondue. We quickly learned that swiss cheese is fantastic and that fondue is a must if you visit! Later for dinner we planned on just getting something at the store because none of us were very hungry, but it ended up being too late. The bar next to our flat served pizza, so that was good enough for us again. We played cards and enjoyed our last night together before leaving this beautiful place! Sunday was a tough day when we headed back to London, but my parents got to move on to Florence, Italy, which also sounded like a fantastic trip! The sad thing is that we are exactly half way done with our trip here in Europe, but the good thing is that John's parents get here soon so we will have some more fun posts and pictures soon!

If you made it this far, CHEERS!