Walking Tours

I'm now in the fourth city of this little six-city journey, Paris, and in three of the four cities I've been on free walking tours. I love them! In Prague, Amsterdam and Paris now I've been on one walking tour apiece.

The way they usually work if you don't know or haven't figured it out by the obvious title is this: a person from a small, loose organization of usually young, often recent or current students living in that particular city who has become knowledgeable about the area's history gives you a tour, for free. Simple enough. So they work for tips in other words. They meet in a central, touristy public place and charge no up-front fee, walking you around to the major sites and giving you a brief narrated overview of the history and various entertaining anecdotes about what may or may not have happened there, or other myths or legends surrounding the sites.

They're usually pretty historically informative, but I've been taking some of the stories with a grain of salt. Especially here in Paris, the tour guide did know his history relatively well, but he spent so much time entertaining us that a little bit of the memorability of the locations and buildings was replaced with his constant jokes and style of conveying information. Nevertheless, especially in Prague, the focus was on information and pointing out what we all wanted to see and know about the location that you would never know as you wandered the streets alone or with your fellow travelers. With the thousands of years of history in some of these places, there's just too much that has happened everywhere and no way to find out what happened and where without at least a little help (unless you're the researching type and that's what you're looking to do on your travels). I use a mix of both reading and listening, trying to get a feel for these awesome places.

Anyway that's just a little tidbit of an observation I have made as I travel from place to place, trying to take in as much as possible. Between the inundation of information, the walking with a bit of a knee problem, the constant travel between cities and the food and beer consumption, these travels have been taking a lot out of me. But I'm absolutely loving it!!

I now have just 6 more days, on which I will try and post everyday to catch up a bit on what's been going on. And I'll get a few pictures uploaded too, but it'll be difficult (at this Internet cafe and others they have the USB ports and the operating system pretty locked down). I'll get there though. Cheers!