Maybe I should tag this post as almost-travel-blog, or maybe as a marvel-universe-travel blog or a travel-blog-to-one-movie-location. Or, maybe I should just tell you the story and let you tag it. Let's try.
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One evening, my kids and I decided to try to catch with Marvel story of 'Avengers and Others'. We could not figure out what the heck is happening in new Thor movie, and how he got there and who is he fighting, and why is he doing that... In short, we were seeking to find out what in the name of Zarkon is happening with that movie series. After careful thinking (3.5 seconds to be honest), we decided to try with Age of Ultron.
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A movie was a nice waste of time, up to the point when the fight was starting to taking place in the fictional country - Sokovia. Scene after scene, I had strangest Deja Vu - I've been there. After saying that out loud, I had to endure endless comments from my kids about 'Their Father - The world traveller, the man who visited Marvel Universe, and survived to tell the story to his kids'. I almost regretted saying anything. Having two teenagers with your sense of humour is sometimes very interesting and fulfilling experience. This was not one of those moments.
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Just a few seconds later, I had my 'A-ha time' when the scenes were filled with signs written in pure Serbian Cyrillic. With 'I told you' smile, I had a bit of 'know your country' monologue closely continued with 'you do not travel enough', cleverly combined with 'you didn't see a single shit from our travels' ending with famous 'when I was 15, I travelled across Europe' speeches... But something was wrong... that wasn't Serbian town. I could not connect those streets with Serbia at all.
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As I was not able to remember which town it is, I reached deep into my mind and with my knowledge of meditation and mind self-control, I reached the moment in time when I saw the town with my own eyes. As my meditation abilities are so well polished and controlled, 3.5 seconds later I decided to stop goofing around and asked Google. He knew it - the town was Aosta.
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A few years ago, I was one of those crazy enough to be part of Tour de Mont Blanc, legendary 170 km long trail through Italy, Switzerland and France, around Mont Blanc. This trail, with more than 10.000 meters of the vertical climb is one of the hardest in Europe. Especially if you try to conquer this hiking trail on a bicycle.
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Logistics part of this adventure was a complete nightmare. Each day one of us was in charge to transport supplies, tents, food and spare parts to the next location. After roughly half of the stages, I found out that my knee injury is getting back, and having in mind words of my doctor about wheelchairs if I continue to disobey his advice, I chose to volunteer logistic for the rest of the tour. So sadly, I finished the second half of Tour de Mont Blanc as a car driver.
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The first morning after my decision, I woke up, crawled out of the tent and decided that I really need an Italian coffee. I could mix something from my supplies, vaguely resembling a coffee, but I needed a real thing. So, after saying 'good luck' to my friends on bikes, I packed our tents and supplies in the van and went into near town for a dose of Italian poison they call coffee.
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If you never had Italian espresso, you missed a lot. Or maybe not, if you are not fun of sudden increase of heartbeat and hyperactive feeling in the morning. I worship Italian coffee and I really needed it. Aosta was the largest town on my path to next location in Swiss mountains, so I decided that I should finally see it. I was passing by that town for years and never had enough time to actually pay it a visit.
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While searching for perfect bar, I enjoyed beautiful Aosta and its monuments. At this point, I must describe what I found so adorable about some Italian towns. They are a combination of amazing Roman architecture, modern attempts to copycat those incredible Romans, modern attempts to not copycat those pesky Romans and Italian 'I do not really care' attitude.
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So, I found myself in the town, initially built by Romans in 30 BC, with some amazing ruins, leaning to a modern building in (almost) the same style, while across the street is a modern Anglo-Saxonian structure. In the end, everything is connected with hanging cables no one cared enough to hide, ending with crooked signs of local shops. I think I know where 'zero fuck given' expression came from.
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And Aosta is exactly that - charming Italian town with a lot of ancient ruins, modern (but old-looking) buildings and some strange ones, with a lot of flowers, cables and signs with the same message - we do not really care, but we have bad-ass coffee.
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While enjoying the second espresso, I finally stopped to think about the big mystery of Universe called 'Italian girls' and started a casual conversation with the bartender about his town. It turned out that he was well informed, so he pointed me to couple locations which I found and a couple more which I didn't.
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Actually, I started to worry that my four hours coffee break is a little bit too much for a guy who carries supplies and tents for wet and tired riders in the mountains. So I decided that Aosta deserve another visit one day when there are no worries that four angry bikers will yell at me and my thirst for knowledge.
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A mystery why someone in Hollywood thought that Aosta is a typical Eastern European town, just perfect for Avengers movie - remains unsolved. Those guys are anyway beyond the understanding of anyone who is not experimenting with new designer drugs.
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There are couple theories about Sokovia being actually Serbia or at least one part of Serbia, and couple more about that producers wanted signs on Russian but all they had was some Serbian guys fooling around with them. Whatever, as a result - we have movie recorded in Italy, happening in Eastern Europe with all signs written on Serbian Cyrillic. Priceless.
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So we didn't really watch the end of that movie carefully. Someone was determined to talk about his adventures in the Alps, which resulted with his kids fall asleep in a desperate move to finally make him shut up. So, guys, if anyone can explain to us - why Thor is such pain in the last part, we would appreciate an explanation.
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I hope you will enjoy in these photos as much as I enjoyed taking them.
This blog entry is part of My Travel Blog series.
All my posts are !originalworks and all my photos are @originalworks
I have many more travel stories in my bag, so stay tuned.
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