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By Connor Price
Over this past summer, I was fortunate enough to travel to several parts of Europe with my family. This was a trip that my parents had been planning for several years as a sort of going-away vacation before I was to head off to college in the Fall. We were gone for about three weeks and traveled to six different countries, taking all sorts of mediums of transportation to get from place to place. In this blog, I will go through each country I visited, and discuss my impressions and experiences, which could be helpful for potential travelers in the future.
Denmark
The first country my family and I stopped through on our journey was Denmark. We had a day long layover there, and we spent that time exploring the city, trying some Danish cuisine, and drinking in as much of the place as we could before we would have to leave in the evening. We actually got to see my cousin, Jacob, in the major train station in Copenhagen on our way from the airport! He had been studying abroad in Europe for a semester and was about to be on his way home when we happened to run into him. We had a great conversation with him about the incredible cleanliness of the city as well as its fantastic transportation infrastructure, like its abundant railways and bike paths. After parting ways, we walked around downtown and visited some historical sites like a large fort and some of the royal palaces. The nice thing we learned in Copenhagen was that, because it was a member of the European Union, everyone we met also most likely spoke English. Before we knew it, our day in Copenhagen came to an end and we had to fly out to our next location: Oslo, Norway.
Norway
Norway was surprisingly different than I expected it to be after seeing some of Denmark. The airport was a long way away from our hotel, so we took a train through the Norwegian countryside, and I found that it reminded me a lot of Alaska. It wasn’t nearly as mountainous, but the climate and biome were very similar to Denali National Park. After staying in the hotel for the night, we spent the day exploring Oslo. We walked around the marina, visited the opera house, and, oddly enough, found a statue of Franklin Dealano Roosevelt overlooking the sea. The city was colder than Copenhagen had been, but it was just as clean, and it had very modern architecture. We did less sightseeing in Oslo because we had less time, and later that day we boarded another plane to Athens, Greece.
Greece
Athens, to say the least, was a significant change from Oslo. The climate and landscape reminded me a lot of Los Angeles, California, and the city was massive and sprawling. There were cars parked anywhere a car could almost fit along the sides of the alleyways, and nobody really paid any attention to traffic laws. If something was technically possible to pull off while driving in Greece, it was done regardless of traffic rules or laws. Aside from driving, the city was grimy, and the air was filled with smog, but the ancient history there made up for that tenfold. The Airbnb we stayed at was very close to the Acropolis, and we had a fantastic view of it from the balcony. It is lit up at night, which I didn’t realize previously, and its central, elevated location made it easy for me to orient my location in the city. I am an avid Google Maps hater, so being able to find my way around in a foreign place without the use of technology made me feel very confident. When we actually had the chance to go and tour the Acropolis, getting to see the detail of the stonework up close was stupefying, and learning about the Parthenon’s many uses—from temple to fort—was fascinating. Later in the day, we visited the ancient Agora, Aristotle’s Lyceum, and several other historical sites. There was breathtaking ancient statue work and ruins every place we went, and getting to see so much history with my own eyes was electrifying. The food was fantastic as well, but some of the food service workers were very pushy when trying to get us to eat at their restaurants. That was something we quickly learned to watch out for, as if an employee tried that hard to bring us in off the street, the food invariably was not good enough to draw in customers itself. On our last day in Greece, we drove down the Mediterranean coast to see the Temple of Poseidon, located on a rocky cliff high above the water, and its surrounding ruins, which proved to be gorgeous against the deep blue backdrop of the sea. With that last view of Greece in mind, it was time to leave, and we boarded another plane to go off to Italy.
Italy
We began our Italian portion of the trip in Naples. Naples felt very mazelike in comparison to Athens, as it was made up of few main roads and many, many alleys which were confusing to navigate and impossible to map in my head. That made getting around on foot a little bit more difficult, but that was preferable to taking a taxi because the drivers were so aggressive that taxiing anywhere was intensely stressful. Taxi drivers seemed to only be concerned with the speed with which they could deliver you to your destination, so traffic laws were routinely broken and there was little regard for safety. Aside from that, the city itself was old and beautiful, and the food was incredible. Neapolitan pizza is thin-crusted with lots of cheese and little sauce, and Neapolitan pasta is cooked in the sauce to give it more flavor. On one of the days we were in Naples, we took a train over to Pompeii and toured the ruins there. I learned so much about the area, like that Heracles founded the city according to legend and that there was a cult around the Egyptian goddess Isis there. The museum was powerful, and there were a few casts of people that had perished in the Vesuvius eruption that made me a little emotional. Something about seeing the cast of the two people who embraced as the world around them collapsed really got to me. After we left Naples behind, we took a train to Rome which would soon become my favorite city I have ever visited. The intersection of history and politics there is astounding, and getting to see the ancient architecture that is still intact and even in use today truly proved it to be the Eternal City. We toured most of the historical sites there, including the Colosseum, which was absolutely massive. On one of the days we spent there, we visited the Vatican City and its many museums to see the ancient art and statues that have been collected there over the years. The ceiling of St. Peter’s Basilica is one of the greatest pieces of artwork I have been fortunate enough to see with my own eyes, as the amount of detail that was poured into each snapshot made it look windowlike in appearance. After leaving Rome and the Vatican, we were on to Florence. We spent a day touring the city and some of its ancient Christian catacombs, and then biked forty kilometers around the Florentine countryside on the second day. We also saw the David, which was magnificently detailed and so much larger than I realized, as well as some of Michelangelo’s other works while we were there. Upon parting from Florence, we went to Venice for a day, which I honestly didn’t really care for despite its beauty. The city struck me as being very poorly planned and claustrophobic, as the canals spill into the city walkways at high tide and the tiny alleys and lack of central planning made it feel like a labyrinth of high walls and tight rooms. We unfortunately didn’t take a gondola while we were there, but the water wasn’t the cleanest so that decision may have been for the best. After we left Venice, we drove up north into the Dolomite mountains, where we experienced a mixture of Italian, German, and Swiss culture and cuisine. The mountains in this southern branch of the Alps were some of the most extreme and spectacular I have ever seen, and they honestly made that stop one of my favorites on the trip at large. We spent a good day hiking through the mountains, which was much tougher than we expected because the trails were incredibly steep themselves and we were high enough in altitude that breathing was noticeably more difficult, albeit not by much. After spending a few days in the Dolomites, we drove back to Venice and took a plane to our final stop: Paris, France.
France
To put it simply, I did not really enjoy Paris. The city was fun to walk around in, and I loved the abundance of Gothic architecture. Additionally, the magnificent art and history we got to see at the Louvre was fascinating to me, and the food scene was great, but nobody we met while in Paris was nice. Our Uber driver from the airport was upset at us for the whole forty-minute drive to our Airbnb because there were four of us and I guess he didn’t want to drive four people, French café baristas weren’t kind or welcoming as the baristas had been in Greece and Italy, and even some of the everyday Parisians we stood in line with at the Louvre were acting very mean and entitled, cutting the line however they saw fit. I know that the stereotypical American is unkind, oblivious, and impatient, but our family was not exhibiting any of those behaviors and we were still treated very poorly. It would have been different if it was just one or two bad interactions we had there, but everyone we spoke to in Paris acted that way. The city was also kind of dirty and really crowded, much like New York City, and it was preparing for the Olympics so it was under quite a bit of construction and many of its parks were closed. After just a couple of days there, we boarded a plane and returned to the United States.
If I am fortunate enough to return to France, I would love to visit some of the French countryside instead of Paris next time. I would love to revisit the Dolomites and spend more time there in the future, as well as seeing some of the Swiss regions of the Alps. I also felt like there was so much of Greece I didn’t get to see, which I would love to learn about and come back to visit someday. Overall, I am very thankful for the time I got to spend abroad, as I feel like the experiences I had traveling have made me a more educated, well-rounded individual than I was beforehand.
Connor Price is a McConnell Scholar in the class of 2028. He is studying political science and history.