Angel and Tiggs

At least once in your life, you’ve probably felt a great excitement to go somewhere new. If you’re a good tourist, it won’t be hard to do some study about the places you’re about to visit. I always research historical places, monuments, landmarks in general so I can go there and take pictures. Well, for a number of reasons you can just skip great places. See some of them below.

Paris, France. Notre Dame, Eiffel Tower, Quai d’Orsay, Hôtel des Invalides, Champs-Élysées, Arc de Triomphe. These are all great French monuments, right? Partly. These are also all the places I couldn’t take pictures from. My digital camera was almost brand new and I forgot to recharge it before travelling. The result was tragic. Just before both monuments I couldn’t take pictures because my battery was dead.

Underneath the tower

This is all I have from the Eiffel Tower

San Francisco, US. A very nice city by the Pacific Ocean. Full of entertainment, attractions, sunshine etc. There’s a very popular and delicious local chocolate called Ghirardelli whose factory is located in a big, super busy fisherman’s wharf by the bay of Alcatraz. They even give you free bars after your visit. I went there one night unaware of the factory. Worse, I decided not to take my camera because I thought there would be nothing interesting to see. Lost a sweet opportunity to visit a nice place. Literally.

The Presidio area, not too far from the Ghirardelli factory

Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Newcastle’s been there for almost 2,000 years. In the outskirts there’s a beautiful Roman construction named after Emperor Hadrian (Hadrian’s Wall), a massive fortification built to contain the “barbaric” Scots. That was the final frontier of the Roman Empire. Living for almost 1 year in Newcastle, I didn’t go there. What a miss!

Haymarket, downtown
Newcastle

Nuremberg, Germany. A medieval city in the centre-north of Bavaria full of restored monuments. Legend says that Allied bombings in WWII destroyed up to 91% of the city’s buildings. Talking about war, one of my itinerary plans was to go to the buildings where the famous Nuremberg trials were held. On the map it looked really far. It happened to be a 20-minute walk from my hostel.

Leaving the Central Station in Nuremberg

Beijing, China. I was there a year before the Olympics. The Bird’s Nest (Olympic Stadium) was on my map and, again, looked far. It was less than 10 minutes on a cab from where I was that would probably cost me 3 dollars. I chose not to go.

Downtown Beijing

Oslo, Norway. Walking downtown Oslo I saw a very simple museum with a bust of Alfred Nobel (yes, that one). Incredibly I thought it was some sort of a bogus place. The Nobel Institute couldn’t be that small. I took picture and left without visiting the building.

The “small” Nobel Institute

New York, US. It was a beautiful spring Sunday in New York. I was hungry, but still enjoying the sunshine and mild temperature downtown Manhattan when I saw a cathedral very similar to La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. It was Saint Patrick. I looked at the towers, a lot of people moving around and decided to eat instead of visiting it. 20 minutes later I had changed a ticket toSaint Patrick for the greasiest pizza of my life at Sbarro’s.

Saint Patrick Cathedral