The french school system gives a number of holidays for the kids, so starting this week they have two weeks off which gave us a chance to do a little traveling. We also had another motive. If you are in France or I believe any other EU country for more than 90 days you need to apply for resident permit and pay a large sum of money. When we received our visa via the consulate in San Francisco, the employee there decided to waive the permit for myself and the kids since we were coming about three weeks later than Wes and just gave us long stay visas. Rumor has it if you leave the EU or schengen area (kind an open borders between various countries) and have your passport stamped your count starts over and you avoid having to get the permit. So Wes and I racked our brains where were wanted to go- our first choice was Morocco, but unfortunately the air tickets decided to sky rocket right before as we made our plans. Our alternative was to visit Croatia (I later read that they are joining the EU in July, we were close) via a side trip to Italy.
This is what we have experienced so far:
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The kids were really excited to be riding a bullet train, unfortunately we are second guessing whether it really was. It was pretty fast, but Wes thinks there are special rails and we were not on them.
It was a pretty long day and train ride. The first stop was in Turin (2006 winter olympics were held here).
We had about an hour layover until our next train came so we took a walk and headed to a cafe for drinks.
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After a really.................... long day we ended up in Trieste, Italy. It was a part of Austro-Hungarian empire before WWI and later belonged to Italy the end of the war. It is on the Adriatic Sea and is very beautiful. It was pretty late when we got there, so we went straight to our hotel to check in and hurried out to dinner before bed. Next to the pizza shop was a gelato shop that Wes had read was the most popular shop in the city, It was very good- so much in fact we hit the shop the next day as well. It was also packed both days.
Thursday morning we walked around the city before we caught our bus to Croatia.
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| Train/Bus station |
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Greek orthrodox church
The above is a video of the organ music in the church. There was a large pipe organ and a lady was playing up in the balcony. This was nice, since often when you enter these churches, the taped music is piped in via speakers.
Rumor had it that there was a castle/fort on top of the hill. Knowing our luck with viewing castles, we started walking!
The view from the top of the hill. I was getting nervous- no castle in sight as of yet.
Finally a castle/fort that was open!
Notice that the castle here was a much different style than France
Fresco on the ceiling
Kids thought the knight was pretty cool
View from the window overlooking the sea.
Notice that the table is warped from years of probably washing it with water.
Of course with any of our sight seeing trip the kids must check the local playground and make sure it is up to pare. One things we noticed that there appear to be far less playgrounds compared to France. I am not sure if this is general rule or something we noticed in the specific cities that we were in, but we only found one. Wes and I have realized that a playground really keeps the kids going and is a great break for them and us.
After the castle we needed to catch the bus to Croatia, so we headed back to the city and stopped in a cafe for lunch. As always you NEED to see what we ate.
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