Partie du Champagne.,.+*

So I'm temporarily skipping Hamburg, Luebeck, Frankfurt and London and jumping straight to Oxford. Will fill the gaps later on 'cause my big travel photo book thng is taking a bit of time to edit & I've got lots to catch up! Our last stop of the EU tour of July 2008 was to drop my sister off at Oxford and my parents & I will fly back to TPE. Oxford in summer was definitely more crowded than other times. We stayed at a old town house right behind my sister's college. It was definitely SMALL and the floor and bed creak. But it's an interesting experience staying at one of those old and tiny town houses that you often see at touristy places like this. The place in the photo is...

Checkpoint Charlie was a sort of a "immigration" point on the edge of the Berlin wall which separated Berlin into the Allies' West Germany and the Soviet's East Germany. Many from the Eastern part attemped to escape via various means to get to the other side of the wall and many tragic stories of how many were tortured and killed as a result of attempting to run away from the eastern part. The landmark in the photo is near the Charlie Check Point but I'd say it doesn't have much to do with the tragic stories of the 2 halves of Berlin. But you can see more photos of what remains of the area near Check Point Charlie in the Chinese-word link below.

If you have not gone into the underground world when you've visited Berlin, I think you have missed a large portion of what Berlin was about. Unlike the glamourous shopping places built underground in a lot of cities (eg. Montreal, Tokyo, etc.), this is very extensve, dark, gloomy and clausterphobic undergound network of bunkers built to shelter the cilivilians during air raids. We started out with finding the bunker where Hitler committed suicide but then we came across this tour to the underground world of Berlin (you're not allowed to go to the bunkers on your own). It's one of the few bunkers that were not destroyed during the de-militarizing activity after WW II largely due to the fact that...

[ Figaro House, Vienna]
By the time we got to Mozart's former residence (the apartment where he lived when he was at the height of his career as a sort of "free-lance" musician in Vienna in the 1700s. There's ittle left of Mozart in the house since many centuries have past and people moved in and out and did modifiations to the building and the interior. But the museum (of the many "Mozart" museums in Austria) attempts to reconstruct what th place was like when Mozart stayed there and to recapture a sense of...

Imagine a more like Home Depot or IKEA kind of warehouse for the furnitures that were once used in the palaces and imperial functions. I think it's a pretty neat idea.Hapsburg Empress Maria Theresa founded this "lumber room of the monarchy" where furniture and other household items not need at the court will be deposited here. If it were not included in the Sisi Ticket, I guess it's one of those places that people would just...

This is no fancy lounge or restaurant. In Zieglergasse, Vienna, here you find a very different kind of MacDonald / MacCafe. Definitely beyond your imagination! Apparently it has...

The Philosophy Hall - One of the two beautifully done library in the Strahov Monastery in Prague. It's truely impresive in the sense that the exterior and the rest of the monastery might not look anything like what's in the library, which makes the two elegantly-decorated libraries in a monastery founded in 1140 stand out. It is normally not...

Nerudova in Prague is one of the most colorful and well-preserved streets in Prague. & It has been said that it has changed little since Mozart walked them during his visits between 1787-1791. What makes this street so fascinating is that each house has its unique + fancy characteristic and pictorial house signs. Some has a large lobster above the door. Other signs include: a key, a red lion, 3 violins, etc. Nowadays, many of the larger + fancier buildings are home to the various countries' embassy in Czech Republic. Other ones become...