This Is A Lake - A travel blog

Our third day in New Orleans and we're still the Only Europeans Left Alive in the whole state of Louisiana, or so we thought until we crossed some Italian guys today. Other than that, almost all tourists here are American, with a few Asian and Latin American representatives. It's an odd feeling when all the streets here have the Spanish coat of arms on the walls with their former Spanish names. Today was all about the culture, now that the museums are open again. We began with the Historic New Orleans Collection, a two-floor museum about the history of the city. The ground floor is dedicated to US president Andrew Jackson, who gained fame as a general by winning the Battle of New Orleans against the British. The top floor has a room for each phase of Louisiana's history, starting with the French and Spanish colonial eras (turns out Louisiana was given by the French to the Spanish, then the Spanish gave it back after a few years, and then the French sold it to the ...

Today I woke up half an hour later than yesterday! I'm gonna get over this jetlag just in time to get jetlag when I come back! While doing research for the day's itinerary in the morning, I found out that ALL the museums in the French Quarter are closed on Mondays: the New Orleans Historic Collection, the Old US Mint, the 1850 House... So I had to shift the day's focus out of the old town and into the Western side of town. Our first goal was to get to Lee Circle, a roundabout that has three museums right next to it: the Contemporary Arts Centre, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the WWII Museum. To get there from Treme we had to take a bus at Northern Rampart, so our day began by waiting at a bus stop on a crossroads while construction work was being done on the road, with forklifts and tractors and trash trucks drove left and right in front of us. The roads here are in a dreadful state, and that's true for the most central and touristy areas of the French Qu...

The wonders of jetlag: After having travelled for 22 hours yesterday, today I woke up at six in the morning lucid enough to perform surgery. It didn't help, of course, that right outside our house was a talented songbird that could effortlessly switch between the tunes of "backing forklift", "pedestrian crossing streetlight signal" and "burglar alarm". At least I slept like a rock; after failing to switch off the air conditioning last night I thought I may freeze to death while it was 20 degrees Celsius outside (why is there no degree symbol on the iOS keyboard? OMG found it it's on the zero) 20°C outside! But it wasn't that bad in the end.  By the time we left the house, at 11h, I was bouncing off the walls, so I was super excited to start sightseeing! For our very first day in New Orleans, we decided to just walk around the French Quarter a bit. We just have to go down Ursulines St and in about a quarter of an hour we run in...

It's the start of a new adventure! For this new edition of This Is A Lake, we're going on our very own tour of the South of the United States, and the first port of call is New Orleans! The trip began, as all trips out of Paris must, with train troubles, when the RER B left me stranded in the middle of Southern Paris with no service until past Les Halles -I had to dash out into the street and find a metro station to take me to Gare du Nord... After that, thankfully, things went smoothly and I could meet up with Mom at the airport. We embarked on a 9h flight to Atlanta, Georgia, which honestly didn't feel that long. Harstfield-Jackson airport seemed huge; just our Terminal B alone could give Orly Ouest a run for its money, and there are 5 more terminals in ATL! I was kind of amazed by all the fast-food chains that I've never seen anywhere else in the US. I thought all American airports carried the same multinationals, but I guess things are different in the South! The ne...

Our last day in Vienna! Today we began by taking a quick peek at Naschmarket, a pleasant food market that happens to be just two blocks from our hotel. It's located in one long strip of pavement between rows of houses, so you can enter from one end of the street and just make your way to the other end. It looks small on first impression, because it's so narrow, but in fact there are a lot of stalls selling spices of all kinds, olives, cheese, meat, Greek and Turkish products, fruits and vegetables... It was packed with people, including lots of locals hanging out in the pub terraces merrily enjoying their half-litre jugs of beer at 10:30 in the morning. Was that breakfast or the apéro? I dread to think what they drink at 9PM if that's how they start their day... Food markets are nice to look at, but there's not a lot there for the passing traveller, so we left when we got to the next tube station and went to Schönbrunn, the Habsburgs' summer palace. Wh...

The culture is coming out of my ears! Today, for the very first time these holidays, the weather was cold and rainy, so we took refuge in the History Museum, which is located in the same building as the Nationalbibliothek and the Ethnographic Museum (now called the Weld Museum). The building itself is grandiose and imposing, all shiny white marble, staircases, columns and vaulted ceilings. The History Museum is a bit of an odd space with three wings: one is the Ephesos wing, with a few fragments of ancient Greek ruins (I'm sure they're archaeologically invaluable, but they aren't much to look at, especially if you've been to the Louvre and the British Museum), and then the two big wings: historical instruments, and arms and armour. The arms and armour exhibition boasts mostly ancient suits of armour, literally dozens, chiefly from Austria or the Austro-Hungarian Empire but also from the rest of Europe and even Turkey. They have 16th and 17th century armour...

I'm exhausted! This was just our first full day in Vienna and it already feels like we've done three tours of the city. After so many days of walking, I get tired sooner every day... For our first visit today we went to the Museumsquartier, a complex off Heldenplatz that houses several museums and galleries. We bought the 72h Vienna Card, which gives you unlimited access to all public transport, so we took the U-bahn there in order to leave as much walking as possible for the museum. From the different museums there, we chose The Leopold Museum, a huge building spanning 6 floors of exhibitions by Austrian painters. They have a really astounding collection of paintings by Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, among others. They were impressive, but I especially loved a small photographic gallery of portraits of Viennese stage actors and opera singers from the 1920s. Most of them were tiny photographs of the actors in costume or in character as Macbeth, Othello, Cleopatra, Cio-C...