Lived there for several years, albeit as a transplant. It’s got a great music scene if you like classical or jazz or blues. The cost of living is incredibly reasonable. Yes, the winters suck, but the city does a pretty decent job of taking advantage of the good weather months with its various festivals. Granted, most of my enjoyment there was a combination of finding great friends and being able to live reasonably despite a $25k annual income, but I have zero ragerts about my time there. I will certainly grant that, unless you’re there for a particular event, it’s a better place to live than visit. Most tourists would prefer Niagara or the Finger Lakes.
lilac festival. plus you could easily spend a day at house of guitars if that’s your thing.
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I’ve heard Montreal, but Tampa for the US.
You in the Finger Lakes?
Summers here are A+ for outdoor lake stuff, hiking, breweries and wineries and food and biking and so on and so on. But it’s also still basically winter.
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I think I stayed out there once or twice but never dipped my toes in. I think they’re not remarkable. Certainly the urban form of the place isn’t noteworthy.
Getting ready to head to Europe for 20 days or so later this afternoon. Itenerary is as follows:
Bruges
Paris
Mont Sant Michel/Rennes/Saint Malo
Bordeaux
Amsterdam
The trip is roughly split with 3-4 days in each place. We will have a car for the MSM portion but the rest of the time it will be trains/public transit. Open to any suggestions of good places to eat/drink/things to do in those areas.
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Day 3 update: man I get you have to check the box for the Vatican but that place is an absolute circus. 25,000 people per day through that place and you definitely feel it. For me, impossible to appreciate the beauty and separate the profoundly evil nature of the institution. Three mandatory gift shops. Guess those settlements for running a global child sex abuse factory aren’t going to pay themselves.
City remains awesome. Found a hole in the wall trattoria for lunch that was us and locals - super fun. Shocked at how affordable Rome is relative to other major cities I’ve visited.
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These kinds of things are always what my wife and I end up talking about later rather than the box checking exercises. Our last trip in March we went to Ireland for a couple weeks and we spent 3 days doing the ring of kerry before some of our friends got to Galway where we were meeting them. My wife and I were talking about how glad we were to have a quiet few nights before the impending bender once our friends met up. We stayed in Cahersiveen which has about 1000 people who live there. By the end of the first night we were closing the bars down with locals and I woke up to a text from one of the guys asking what time we were getting out for round 2(it was Sunday). Needless to say that was not a very relaxing stretch of the trip but it was amazing and a couple of them are coming over to the states to see us later this year and go on a US road trip.
The more I travel the more I end up spending all my time seeking that out in some local dive over seeing the shiny things or the old buildings.
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Mom lives in Fairport. I visit for a week about once a month right now. I lived here from 12-18 yo
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Going to Eastern Slovakia tomorrow (based in Kosice). Anybody been there?
gotcha, I’m down between Seneca and Cayuga, outside of Trumansburg. … we’re about to get to the good part
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Oh yeah - Canada is special. At least Vancouver anyway. Again, so I hear.
But in the US when we say best in the world we really just mean best in USA #1 suck it haterz
The whole reason to go to the Vatican is to realize they could cure world hunger tomorrow by selling off like 1/10th of their collection. So if you came away with that message it was worth the trip.
Rochester has the House of Guitars, a wonderfully chaotic music and record store that can best be summed up by showing its collection of memorabilia worth at least several hundred thousand dollars that is haphazardly screwed to the walls.
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Have you done the Normandy beaches before? If you haven’t but are planning to go so close to them while having a car, I can’t imagine missing them. The beach at Arromanches still has some remnants of the artificial harbor that got built in the wake of D-Day to give you an appreciation of the scope of the thing and an appreciation for the logistical planning that went into the operation. The Omaha beach cemetery is deeply moving. There are some gun batteries in the area you can walk around in, too, to get a feel for what the Allies were up against. And the museum at Utah Beach is fantastic.
We liked the Bayeux tapestry, too. Pretty funny for being irreverent at times, e.g.
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I’m not a big traveller at all but on my very short list of places I’ve been to was Normandy 20-ish years ago. The remains of the Mulberry Harbours at the beaches is indeed something to see.
I remember going up this well kept path from the road to a little copse in the middle of a random field - it turned out to be a memorial to 5 french resistance fighters whe were murdered by the Gestapo at that very spot - probably the most poignant moment in the trip for me.
Bayeux tapestry was great - really well presented - still got my copy from the shop :)
(Harold getting it in the eye in the last postcard)
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I’m more of a budget restaurant kinda guy. I usually try to find the hidden gems that are only 10-25 euros a plate. So keep that in mind. If you’re in Paris and want a couple cheap, but delicious meals, then check out Canal Poké in the 10th near Canal Saint Martin. Their salmon bowl is probably the best bowl I’ve had, and it’s like 13 euros (or cheaper with discount). Les Bariolés de Maud in the 11th has a plate of these little pizza roll things that are awesome.
Probably the best tip I can give is to sign up at TheFork.com. I used it all the time in my 3 months in Spain/France and it saved me hundreds of Euros and I tried some great restaurants I wouldn’t have otherwise. I was spending about 10-18 Euros in Madrid, Paris, and Barcelona and had some dang good meals. So you don’t necessarily have to break the bank to eat well.
In big cities, you’ll usually be able to find a lot of restaurants with 20-50% discounts on plates/dessert (but not drinks), and it’s not just crappy restaurants, there are some great, very highly reviewed restaurants. Canal Poké, for example, was offering 50% off their already low prices. I kinda felt bad paying the bill.
I found that if a restaurant had a 4.7 or better on Google Maps as well as a 9.5/10 or better on TheFork, that it was a lock it’d be a great meal. Or at least I went about 7/7 in a limited sample.
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i love that stretch. visit Dr Konstantin Frank, buy some riesling.
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I’ve had more of their dries than any other wine in my life. Doesn’t hurt that they get distributed by Wegmans in both Boston (where I am most of the time) and Rochester. They had some Ukrainian fundraising/donations recently too given the founders and family background
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Paris - L’Avant Comptoir - it is a wine bar in the 6th arrondissement just west of the Notre Dame Cathedral.
I want to say the food is tapas/Spanish, but I think it’s mostly French w some Spanish inspiration.
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