Liz’s Blog

Our trip to Istanbul began at 3:00 in the morning when the alarm at Jenna’s house went off to alert us of the fact that we needed to get our butts out of bed and get a move on so we could catch our taxi at 3:30. Being the typical college students that we are, we hit the snooze button and waited until 3:15. At 3:27 am we were out the door headed across an empty park towards the street so we could hail down the taxi we attempted to call the night before. We weren’t sure if they had understood that it was THAT morning at 3:30 that we wanted a pick up, nor did we know if they had understood our directions to the nearest bus stop. We did know though, that if our taxi for some reason did not show up…we were in big trouble. 3:30 comes and goes. 3:31. 3:32. Jenna: “Guys…there’s no one out here. What are we going to do?!” Me: “Ok well it’s only 3:32, there’s hope yet…” 3:33. 3:34. Nectarie: “Ok if it’s not here at 3:35 we are calling the company!” 3:35. Me: “ARE THOSE HEADLIGHTS!!?” Crisis averted. We made it to the train station by 3:50 am which gave us a wonderful 25 minute wait outside in the cold until our Lufthansa bus got there. We waited alone for 10 and by around 4:00 am everyone else started to trickle in. at 4:10 we had everyone…except Nate. Nate was no where to be found. Jolyn called him and discovered that he was apparently lost. He had been walking to the train station but was unable to tell us precisely where he was located other than, “I’m near the river.” Well great, it’s a good thing the river isn’t too long so we can pinpoint his exact location! Not! So we started with our next idea. “Are there any bus stops near you?” He found one and Jolyn says, “I KNOW WHERE YOU ARE! Keep the river on your left and start running.” Silence…silence… “No Nate, I said on your LEFT not RIGHT! What the hell are you doing?! Don’t go that way.” She hangs up the phone. “He thinks he knows where he’s going but I think it is in the opposite direction.” We all roll our eyes and our teacher says we should start getting on the bus and hope that he gets there in the next 4 minutes. Since Nate is my friend, I feel that I should wait outside the bus just in case I see someone running then I can flag them down. 4:12 and no sign of Nate. 4:13, no Nate. 4:14, “Is that someone running?!” Yes it was. There was Nate, sprinting towards us from across the train station. 4:15 we were on the bus and we were on our way to Frankfurt Airport.

If you have been following my blog, you would know that my last experience at the Frankfurt airport was rather…unconventional. To say the least. This time, I think Karma was coming back with a vengeance on us. We get to the stands where we check in at about 6:30 am. They were impossible to figure out, yelling at us that we were a part of a group and wanting to know if we wanted to sit with someone but then you couldn’t actually do it. It was impossible. Then Kayla managed to freeze the screen on her computer and couldn’t print her boarding pass. Then she switched machines and could only print a receipt of her check-in, not the actual pass. Not wanting to hassle with the line for the desks, we just hoped for the best. Then we see Jolyn getting pulled aside by a Lufthansa worker. Now to make a long story short, Jolyn tried to go to Sweden over spring break and failed miserably. There is something about the French Visa for American students that the Germans do not like. It says the visa is valid for France and “+1 Schengan Transit.” The Schengan is a new thing that Europe has come up with. Those countries that are members of the Schengan Group, you have an ability to travel between them without like major boarder or passport controls. This is like in the states; you can travel from Ohio to Michigan without having to check identity but not from the US to Canada. The same is now true for many European countries. Now back to the visa problem. The German government translates this “+1 Schengan Transit” as “if you’ve already been out of France once, then you’re done.” Most countries turn a blind eye to this confusing visa and just let us students travel as we please. When Jolyn tried to go to Sweden from the Baden-Baden airport, not only did she get denied from going but she was essentially deported back to France. They escorted her onto the first train back to France. But since she knew she was going on this trip she was able to strike a deal with the Luxembourg government to get a visa that would allow her more “Schengan transits.” But the German police wanted to question her anyway. We all had to get to our gate so we had to leave her, but we were all hoping for the best.

After we went through security we had to go through our first passport control. Being at the head of the pack I got in line first. I stepped up to the man on the left while my peers for some reason chose the man on the right. How I wish I had gone to the right! The man takes my passport and flips through it. Silence.

Controller: “Um…What is this?”

Me: “What is what?”

He holds up the page with my visa. My brain says, “SHIT SHIT SHIT!”

Me: “That is my French visa.”
Controller: “You’re a student in France?”
Me: “Yes.”

Silence. The controller turns to his colleague and says something in German. I hear the word Schengan. Shit. He turns back to me and I flash him my best please-let-me-through smile. He looks at my passport. I’m starting to get frustrated because at this point the other man has now stamped through five of my friends. He looks at me again. Now six.

Me: “Excuse me sir…but all of those students that he stamped through have the SAME visa as me…” Smile. Smile. Smile. Silence.

Controller: “Mmm….ok.” Then I heard the glorious thud of a stamp being stamped on my passport. I’m through!

With that ordeal over, we realize we don’t have much time until our flight. Kayla still doesn’t have a boarding pass so we head off to find a Lufthansa desk. There are several but they don’t have anyone working at the moment. Now what? We decide to just head to our gate because that will probably be the easiest solution. Wrong again. We get to our gate and there is another security area complete with x-ray machines and passport controllers. I know you are all thinking I’ve got to be kidding. I wish I was. This is our third security check since we got into the airport! The line is huge because the security point as three gates behind it so there are three flights trying to get in. We get in line with only a ½ hour before we’re supposed to board our flight and a huge line ahead of us. After about a 20 minute wait we were finally through, no hassles by the passport people and we found our group. By the time we made it through, with 10 minutes to spare before boarding, we were sincerely hoping that everyone else was through as well. I was mostly worried about Jolyn so it was to my relief that I saw her sitting with the rest of our group. We had all made it. Thanks Frankfurt…remind me never to come back. I’m telling you, it was the karma from our first trip coming back to haunt us.

The flight was not as eventful as our adventure in the airport and we arrived in Istanbul right on time around 1:00 in the afternoon. We were greeted at the airport by some guy from the travel agency our teacher used who would take us to our hotel. Once we got out of the airport we finally noticed it was sunny and warm and crowded. Not to worry, we had our own party bus of sorts to pick us up. The ride to the hotel was about 45 minutes and gave us a great view of the expansive stretch of the city. You could only see buildings as far as you could see. Buildings and minarets as far as you could see. It was incredible to see. We got to our hotel, the Green Anka, unloaded our belongings, and headed back out the door 20 minutes later for a walking tour or part of the city. We started by getting on the metro line which was fun. We all had to buy tokens to the metro from a man who spoke no English so our teacher told us to hold up our fingers with the amount that we wanted. Then we got onto the most crowded metro I have ever been on. It was the same way almost every time we got on the metro but it took a little bit to get used to. Since I’m not the tallest person in the world, it hurt my arm a lot to keep it up holding onto the bar above my head to steady myself. However, if I let go, I would go flying into some Turkish man which I figured was probably very inappropriate. So I settled on standing in the middle of a group of friends, trying to keep my arm us whenever possible. We were kind of like dominos the whole ride, if one fell, we all fell. We tried not to though…to avoid looking too much like tourists. (Not that a group of 16 Americans could ever stand out of course)

We arrived at our final destination after being squished like sardines for about 20 minutes. We came out of the metro at the “bridge stop” (the only names I can give you are the tourist names because I can tell you, I have no idea how to say or spell the real ones) The bridge is obviously a big bridge that has cars on top, accompanied by hundreds of fishermen and a boardwalk and restaurants below. It’s really beautiful. You can see for yourself:

We walked across the bridge and then hopped on a trolley up the hill to Taksim Square where there are a lot of restaurants and touristy things to do. We just followed our teacher through the streets checking everything out as we went. Then we hopped on a bus down the hill to the water where we saw our first mosque up close. We of course wanted to go in after we were told that we could if we wanted. All the shoes had to come off and the girls had to take the scarves provided and cover their heads. We did this MANY more times on the trip but our first time with the head scarves was an experience. Some people didn’t know which way to rap it, how much it should cover, etc. It was really funny to watch us all. Eventually we completed the task and went in. Being the American tourists that we are, we started taking tons of pictures of the walls, the decorations, and of course of us. We stayed for about 10 minutes and then headed out to get some dinner on the pier.

Since we’d been up forever, we were exhausted and hungry. As we were deciding where to get food we kept seeing people walk by with these giant bowl-like things that appeared to be a giant potato stuffed with everything under the sun. After seeing about 10 go by I said, “I need to have whatever that is.” A few of us set off to find a potato stand and we found about 20. Let me tell you, it was so incredibly delicious. And I don’t think it’s just because we were starving. It had butter, cheese, two types of olives, carrots, corn, salad, a spicy paste, EVERYTHING. Since only five of us were together, and me being the vegetarian, I got my own while the other split between two each. I do not regret having my own that is for sure!

After eating we wandered around the area, got some pictures, and when the group met up we hopped on the longest bus ride ever to get back to the metro and finally made it home where I passed out the moment my head hit the pillow.

The next day we started going to the old horse track area which is right next to the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia. The Blue Mosque is a huge mosque that is a famous symbol for Muslims world wide. It is a really beautiful mosque.

The Hagia Sophia has a long history of going back and forth between a mosque and a church throughout its existence. It’s under some construction so you can’t really see some of the inside very well but it’s of course beautiful. In the mosque itself there are old Christian mosaics in tiles that were covered up when it was converted to a mosque but because of the plaster, have been really well preserved. I believe its one of the biggest mosques in the world? I don’t know. Anyway it’s pretty amazing to see.

After the Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque we headed to the Sultan’s Palace. I cannot even begin to think about how much work went into building this place. Apparently there was a perfectly nice Byzantine Palace that existed before the current palace but since we can’t have any competition over palaces, it was torn down and the current one was built! Every building that was within the palace compound was decorated in every corner. I tried taking pictures and videos but I don’t know if it could actually capture how incredible it was. There were a couple of buildings that were dedicated to the Sultan’s treasury. I have no idea how authentic everything was, or if they are just objects that have just become real because of their stories but according to the labels I saw Moses’ walking cane, and the footprint and some personal belongings of Muhammad. The view was great of course, because you can’t have a palace without a view. There were fountains and grassy knolls and just beautiful things everywhere. Eventually after taking in as many tiled buildings as we could handle, we ended up lying out in the grass in the sun. It was great!

After the palace we were free for the rest of the day. So some friends and I went to a delicious lunch at a little café. We sat outside which was so great to be able to do because we’ve been living in some pretty cold weather for a while. However I got a little bit of a sun burn on the left side of my body. Anyway I had some delicious tzatziki that made me reminisce about Greece. Then we headed to the Grand Bazaar for some shopping.

The next day we headed to Sultanhamet where we saw another mosque there, a sultan’s tomb, and had a long lecture from our professor about how any moment in life can change the course of your life. It was a pretty motivational speech from our super cool professor – Raczka. Raczka is from Poland originally, live there through the 80s and a large part of its communist history. He is married to an Italian woman who is equally as interesting and cool. (She came into my European Politics class to give us a lecture about Italy and the mafia. Pretty interesting family for sure. Raczka actually taught two of my classes this semester. The “Arc of Crisis” which is the class that brought us to Turkey. It’s on the history and politics of the Middle East. He also taught my class on Central and Eastern European history. Anyway so back to the story! After we hung out at this other site, we went back to “the Bridge” where we had coffee/tea/beer at a restaurant and just hung out and talked looking at the view.

After our drink break we went to the Spice Bazaar. You can buy all sorts of good things there and it smells incredible! Here are some pictures from the insanity that is the Spice Bazaar.

For the afternoon, 4 adventurous friends and I went to our first Turkish bath. For those of you that don’t know quite what that all entails I can give you a few details…first of all it took me about 24 hours to build up to this experience. This is due to the fact that a Turkish bath is basically a big spa experience that is completely naked. We had heard about it, looked some places up online before we chose one, and got a complete description of what we should expect just so we knew exactly what we were getting into. It was definitely a once in a lifetime experience. When we got there, we paid for the bath, we were given our tokens and sent behind some doors to the spa. That was the last time we saw any men so don’t worry. It was completely women only. So you go in and you’re given a little towel thing and you change clothes in one of several dressing rooms. Everyone gets lockers with keys that you can wear on your wrist. Once everyone was stripped down and in our towels we are taken into the spa. When you walk in it’s just a giant marble circle that is heated so when you lay on it you’re nice and warm and it helps you perspire so you can get your toxins out. You lay there and get nice and warm. There is the option of getting washed but you don’t have to do it. Then there are individual rooms where there are fountains with bowls and you can cool yourself off by pouring cool water over yourself. Then there’s a hot tub and a “cooling tub.” I say “cooling” because I think it was only really a few degrees cooler than the hot one. We just hung out and talked and perspired and cooled off and hot tubbed for two hours. It was such a great experience. It was so relaxing. The girls that I went with, with the exception of Kayla, weren’t really good friends of mine but we had this really interesting and new experience together and hung out all day. It was a really great chance to get to know them. We obviously couldn’t take pictures but they had free post cards of the place so you can show other so if anyone is really curious, I’d be happy to show them to you and tell you more about it.

After our bath we were contemplating a place for dinner and saw a beacon from the heavens. El Torito. If you can’t guess by the name, let me give you a hint: MEXICAN FOOD. Surprisingly at the end of our stay here in Europe, as we have been discussing the foods we’ve been missing and craving from the US, the most popular is Mexican food. One girl said, “I don’t care how far I have to drive or what I have to do but as soon as I get to the US, the first thing I’m doing is going to Chipotle!” You know we are desperate when we are craving Chipotle. So when we saw El Torito across the street from us, we didn’t even have to have a discussion. We were practically running. It was one of the most delicious meals I’ve had in Europe. I’m not even joking. I got a big cheese quesadilla. YUM! There was a big soccer match on and it was just a great time. After that we walked home and went to bed. Great day!

The next day was the coldest one we had during our time in Istanbul but it was still a really fun one. We went to a different part of town that’s less touristy and saw a big Greek Orthodox Church that has also been converted and reconverted from church to mosque. There were more of the covered up mosaics that were just as incredible as the Hagia Sophia, some were even more in tact. After that we walked to the big wall that used to protect Istanbul from invaders. It’s not really useful anymore but it gave us a great view of the city.

After that we walked around the “non-touristy” part of town for a while, making our way down to the water. Here are some pictures of it. It definitely wasn’t the most glamorous part of town that is for sure.

From there we got on the water taxi and headed to an area that had a huge graveyard on the hill. We walked all the way up the hill which was a hike, but I am proud to say that I was the first one to the top. From there we had another amazing view and ate lunch. They didn’t have any English menus and so we had to go off of some bad food descriptions and hope that we got something edible. After lunch we headed back down the hill. We saw a couple that was about to get married. Then we got back on the ferry and headed to Asia. I say Asia because it’s the Asian side of Turkey. This is why Turkey is said to be half in and half out of Europe because one part of it is on the European continent, situated next to Greece while the other side is across the water and is technically Middle East or Asia. We went to the other side and sat on a wall next to the water and had delicious apple tea. Again we just hung out, got to know each other, drank tea, and tried not to get frozen.

After the tea we were on our own for dinner. Guess where we went? Yes, you guessed it, we went back to El Torito. It was just as good the second time. This time I had a giant salad in a taco shell.

We found ourselves Monday morning on our own for the morning. A few of us headed out to the spice bazaar again to spend our last bit of Turkish Lyra. It was just as crowded but I managed to spend a good amount of the cash I had left so I didn’t have to exchange it back to Euro. But before we went back to the hotel to catch the bus to the airport we saw a Starbucks and we felt compelled to wander in. GREAT idea! I got a gigantic iced Chai Latte for the equivalent of about $2.50. That made my day! I tried to savor every sip because I can’t help but miss Starbucks. From there we went back to the hotel, got on the bus, and went to the airport.

Istanbul was such a great trip. I don’t know that I would have gone without have our fearless Raczka to lead us around. It was so cool being in a country like Turkey. It’s truly unique. I have learned a lot about the Middle East and being there was a great way for me to see it all for myself. I would recommend that anyone who gets the chance to go to Turkey and is interested, they should. I have some videos of the call to prayer that comes from the mosques. That was probably the best part. I’m not even joking. It was the coolest thing. You’re just walking along and suddenly loudspeakered voices are coming from everywhere singing something you can’t understand and it’s just amazing. You have to hear it. I’ll show you the videos!

GREAT TRIP! I loved it! I was with great people in a great place!

Paris is incredibly more beautiful in the springtime than it was in the winter. Don’t get me wrong though, the snow that we got to experience all those months ago when we jetlaggedly stumbled around Paris in the cold, but honestly it is simply magical in the spring time. This trip to Paris was with my Art History class at school. I mentioned in the last blog entry that this was the trip I was supposed to go on in the middle of the NATO summit during the chaos so it started out very oddly. Luckily my host mom drove me to the train station and I made it past all the policemen without a problem. However our first problem came when we realized we were missing one girl. Gloria. Gloria will come up a couple times in this blog because she is a very interesting girl and none of us are really sure she’s on the same planet. She’s extremely nice and smart but she’s definitely missing a few crayons in her box. Our train was supposed to leave at 9:15 am an by 9:00 there was no sign of Gloria. Our teacher finally said, “Can someone PLEASE call Gloria!” and after a few minutes of everyone fiddling with their phone we finally were calling her. Emily had a couple minute conversation with Gloria then hung up the phone and said, “Well…she’s right outside but she forgot her glasses.” We weren’t sure just how horrible a statement that would be at the time but we would find out soon enough. We all waited for her because she didn’t have glasses so she wouldn’t be able to read the signs to our train and we finally boarded with only a few minutes to spare. With that we were on our way to Paris on the TGV. The TGV is the fast train so it only took us an hour and 20 minutes to make it to the Gare de l’Est. From there we hopped on the metro and headed to the FIAP. The FIAP is where we stayed so long ago in January. The name FIAP stands for something international something or other and is basically a glorified hostel. It was weird being back so many months later because it was lots of memories flooding back. That was the first place we went once we got off the plane in Paris in January and no one knew anyone and we were thrown in rooms together. Needless to say it was strange. But we settled in and headed off to the Musee D’Orsay.

Without a doubt, this is my favorite museum in Paris. It’s beautiful because it used to be a train station and it has lots of windows and the giant clocks etc…if you haven’t been, I would highly recommend it. Just around the corner from the entrance to the museum is a line carved into the side of a building. This is where we first stopped and our teacher asked us what that was for. After a couple moments of silence she explained to us that this line signified where the water line was in 1910. Apparently the Seine River has risen approximately every 100 years for the last 700 or 800 year or so to about this level. Well let me tell you, this level was almost over my head. I have no idea how the Seine rises that high or why but I can tell you that when it does again it’s going to be biiiig trouble. Now if you were all doing your math, you should notice that that water line is from 1910 and it floods every 100 years….what year is it? Yeah, I’m scared too. Our teacher told us that all the museums have evacuation plans for artworks and stuff when it comes and like special lock-down rooms that are water tight around the city. I don’t know what will happen. I can’t even imagine this but I’m pretty sure it can’t be good.

Anyway, so on to the museum. After some discussions with the guards, our teacher led us down into the bottom part where we were identified as a guided tour group and shuffled on our way to the museum. All semester in art history we have been studying various impressionists painter and a few others in the relatively same time period. (This would be the late 1800s) Before we got to see the impressionists we were taken through the more classical paintings that we should know. While I understand their importance, they’re really not that exciting most of the time. But in the Musee d’Orsay there are a LOT of impressionist paintings. I absolutely love impressionist painting so it’s always exciting to get to see it in person, especially after we’ve talked about it so much. In fact, as we were walking around the museum we were debating the question, “if you could be painted by any impressionist artist, who would you be painted by?” I chose Renoir because I think the women he paints are beautiful, everyone is always happy and dancing and talking and having fun and are beautiful colors. I just love it.

Here are two Renoirs that I think are beautiful:

The other famous impressionists that we saw were of course some paintings by Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, Pissaro, Degas, and more. Here are some of their paintings…

Here are some pictures of the museum itself.

After an exhausting three hours at the museum we were free to go out on our own. Fortunately for me the wonderful Stoddard family was in Paris in the last few hours of their spring break so I got to hang out with them for the evening. It was great getting to see an American family that I knew. It’s been soooo long! Also the Stoddard’s have two boys that are about the same age as William and Jonathan who are friends with them and act a lot like them so by the end of the evening I was happy but also extremely homesick. It made me miss my brothers!! But we had some delicious crepes, good conversation, and a mini freakout at the idea of me having to travel by myself back to my hotel. Fear not, I made it home just fine. We all were in bed by about 10:30 pm because we were exhausted from being at a museum allll day and at the thought of doing it again TWICE the next day was a little intimidating.

The next morning we were up early and on our way to the Louvre. Again, for anyone visiting Paris, if you do not have a lot of time, I would highly recommend you skip the Louvre. I know it’s a classic Paris spot to go but it’s gigantic. Bigger than you could ever imagine, and you need days and weeks to go through it all. The Musee d’Orsay is like ½ a wing of the Louvre and we couldn’t do it all in 3 hours. So that is my recommendation. But we were going with a trained professional who could take us to the highlights and send us on our way. (In about another 3 hours) We started with the infamous Mona Lisa. I think she knew that for those who had never been to the Louvre, if we skipped that famous painting, there would be a mutiny. So we just started with it to get it out of the way. Also in that room is the biggest painting in the Louvre. You would never know because everyone is so focused on the Mona Lisa that they don’t turn around and see the giant painting behind them. I had a picture of it but it turned out horrible because you can’t use flash (for good reason) in museums so you can’t see it but it is called Wedding of Cana painted by Veronese. It is HUGE.

After the Mona Lisa we wandered through that wing looking at other Da Vinci paintings and talking about them. We saw a couple women making copies of various paintings which was kind of cool to watch. One had a very interesting technique that maybe I need to learn to paint better…

As promised, I will tell you a little more about Gloria’s ordeal in the museums. Since she forgot her glasses, she couldn’t see anything very well. When we approached a painting, our teacher would get in front of it and start talking. We 11 girls would huddle around her so she could talk about the painting and then suddenly Gloria would break off. She would sneak behind the teacher, nearly inches from the painting, lean in very close, and just stare at it. The first time she did this we all thought she was crazy. Clearly the teacher was trying to talk to us and she was ignoring her and sticking her face in the paintings. Each time I swear she was getting closer and closer to the painting. We kept telling her to back up a little because she was going to trigger some alarms or just knock the painting down. After she was done staring at the painting the teacher was talking about, she would continue to wander around the room sticking her face in every other painting. Meanwhile we’re all watching her, including the teacher, thinking that this girl has some issues. But she was completely oblivious to our stares. As we were leaving a room in the Musee d’Orsay I leaned over to someone and said, “What the hell is she doing?! Is she trying to get in trouble?” and someone else said, “Well she forgot her glasses right? Maybe she’s blind and needs to get that close to see anything…” After that it started to make more sense but the wandering around the room was still a little unnecessary but so very Gloria. Another problem with Gloria getting in front of all the paintings is that when we would try to take a picture, we would have it all lined up and suddenly the back of Gloria’s head would sneak out of no where and block the view. It’s clear that we were not the only ones that found this frustrating because everyone else in the museum was annoyed too.

Continuing in the Louvre, we saw several other classic painters and paintings like Delacroix and his famous Liberté.

One of my favorite paintings was by David named “Sacre Napoleon.” David tried to make the biggest painting in the Louvre. He looked at the other painting that I mentioned, measured it, and thought he had gotten a canvas like one inch bigger than the other but it turns out he measured wrong as was about one inch too short. So he definitely failed in that respect but the painting is still gigantic and beautiful. It’s a depiction of Napoleon crowning himself which is funny but the details that he put into the painting were absolutely incredible. Josephine is the woman kneeling in front of Napoleon and I think David made her look so beautiful. The lace on her dress, her face, the details. AH! I loved it! I wish I could do that. You can take a look at it for yourself. These aren’t high quality images (again thanks to the no flash rule) but just look at the outfits people are wearing and the details that went into them. Everything has decoration on it.

Every part of the Louvre is decorated. It’s kind of amazing to think about when you see it all. Kings have added wing after wing to the Louvre during their reign and it just got bigger and bigger and everything has painted ceilings or decorative borders etc. Then of course there’s the big pyramids that are a huge controversy in France, some love them some hate them but whatever your opinion, they’re still there. Here are some general pictures of the Louvre and then I’ll stop talking about it!

After the Louvre and a lunch break we headed to the Museum of Gustave Moreau. He lived around the same time as the impressionists but he was by no means an impressionist. I am not really a fan of most of his work, after studying him I think his stuff is kind of creepy but nonetheless he is an incredible artist. Going back to the details, he put details in EVERTYHING. He died really young of cancer so many of the works that we saw in his museum were unfinished. I think that if he had let off on some of the details he could have finished them but that’s his prerogative. His museum is actually his house and studio where he worked in Montmatre in Paris. It was a quaint little house on the first two floors, nothing special, then you get to the top two floors where he worked and there were two huge studios with lots of light and paintings everywhere. The studio is as he left it when he died. I think they have of course taken paintings down for restoration and whatnot but essentially everything is as it was. Gustave Moreau is our art teacher’s favorite artist so she had a lot to say on the subject but it was really cool just wandering around. He had hundreds of unfinished paintings but had made hundreds in his short painting career. His big thing was that he loved androgyny. I found it a bit much in some of his paintings because you can’t tell if you’re looking at a woman or man but it makes for an interesting painting. He also was a huge fan of mythology and a vast majority of his paintings were depicting mythological stories. You can just look at some of his works…

After this museum we were free for the rest of the afternoon. Since we were already in Montmatre we decided we wanted to go and find the Sacre Coeur. Armed with only a small guide book to Paris, I was put in charge of leading the way up the hill. A hill it was. Let me tell you, it is a pain in the butt to get to the Sacre Coeur. Even if you wanted to take the metro, it still only drops you at the edge of the big part of the hill and you still have to walk. This is not for the faint-hearted. Do no attempt unless you are in some kind of shape because you will not succeed! During the walk though we saw the infamous Moulin Rouge and Moulin de la Galette. The second Moulin (Moulin means windmill by the way) is very famous because it was the subject of many impressionist paintings by Renoir, Van Gogh, Monet, etc. You can’t really see the windmill anymore because it is surrounded by things but back in the day it stood on the hill alone.

After winding down little streets here and there (We never got lost once, go me!) we finally found the Sacre Coeur. It is really an incredible church with an incredible view. Had it been a little nicer of a day it would have been better but you can get the idea of what it would look like from the pictures. The inside was beautiful. We weren’t allowed to take pictures but I’m sure you could find some online but it was immense and again decorated everywhere.

Outside there was a little impromptu concert going on and everyone was gathered around. We sat and listened to several Beatles songs before we left. We made a friend with a little kid who was watching, I’m pretty sure I found a mini Harry Potter who unfortunately found himself in the arms of a crazy drunk man (I have videos if you’re interested, they’re hilarious) and we had a great view of the city. After our adventure in Montmatre we headed back to the FIAP to get dinner and get to bead early because we had another long day ahead of us.

Sunday we went to the Picasso Museum. We hadn’t studied Picasso yet really so we didn’t know any of his paintings and we were all exhausted and sick of being talked to in French about every painting in the museum so unfortunately we weren’t very into it. The building itself was pretty cool with colored windows and a giant mirror outside but I didn’t even take pictures inside the museum. I’ve determined that Picasso had some interesting ideas about art, some good some bad, but that’s about all I took out of the trip there. We played with the mirror and headed on our way into Paris because we had the rest of the day free.

Our teacher unleashed us on Paris for 9 hours…we weren’t really sure what to do so we did lots of touristy things. I headed off with Courtney and Nectarie and we saw the Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, the Champs Elysees and Arc de Triumphe, etc. We also did a lot of sitting. We were exhausted so we would make it to one of the land marks and sit. We had lunch around the corner from Notre Dame, we sat in the grass along side the Eiffel Tower and watched the people go by, and we sat in a park next to the Champs Elysees, ate Nutella crepes, and watched waaaaaaaay to many couples making out on the benches.

Finally we made our way back to the FIAP so we could gather our bags and go back to the train station to go home. Our train was to leave at 9:24 pm and our teacher wanted us to be on it by at least 9:15. We were worried about everyone even getting to the train station on time but by 9:00 we were all there. However at 9:10 when we got up to go to our train we realized that someone was missing. Gloria. “Where is Gloria?” Our teacher asked. Silence…silence… Emily: “Well that’s her bag right there…so she’s here somewhere.” Silence…silence… “Can someone please call her?” Silence…silence… “Hi Gloria? It’s Emily…Where are you?…Ok, bye. She says she’s 15 seconds away.” Eye rolling and laughing all around. 30 seconds go by. “Do we know exactly what direction this supposed 15 seconds was?” “No.” waiting…waiting…waiting. “Ok, we need to get on that train. Someone grab her bag, Emily call her and tell her to meet us at the train. We need to leave.” As we grabbed her things someone yelled, “I SEE GLORIA!” We all turn and sure enough, there’s Gloria, sauntering her way over from the food stand. “GLORIA!” I yelled and gestured for her to hurry up. She puts her hand up, waves, and nods. “NO! GLORIA HURRY UP! WE HAVE TO GO!” I yell. She nods again. Nectarie: “GLORIA! MOVE!” Finally she gets it and picks up the pace. We all start walking away from her, hoping she got the message. We made it on the train with only a few minutes to spare AGAIN. We were still putting our bags in the overheads when it started moving. Oh well, we were all on the same train headed towards Strasbourg so we weren’t complaining. We pulled in around 11:30, my host mom picked me up and took me around to show me the NATO damage (described in last blog entry), and I went home and passed out.

This was probably the most exhausting weekend I’ve had in Europe. I think it was all the standing around in museums and constantly being talked to in French. It’s physically and mentally exhausting doing all of that. It was really fun though and like I said, Paris is beautiful in the spring!

France has a history of having “grèves.” For us American students, we have turned it into the English verb “grèving” (Used in a sentence such as, “Oh, the French are “grèving” again”) because it has happened so often here. As I have learned in my French history class, the French as a whole LOVE their right to go on strike. A grève is basically a strike. Throughout history, this has been their way of keeping the government in check, just to make sure they know that it’s the people that rule, the government is just there for show. As our teacher explained, in 1936, after a series of angry strikes for more social rights, the people of France finally elected a socialist government. Now the values of socialism, workers rights and the like, is exactly what they wanted but within a week of electing their president (Leon Blume) they had a massive strike just to let the government know that even though they had been elected, they were not in the clear yet. Talk about pressure! So when we got to school way back in January we were told that probably throughout the course of the semester, there would be a strike that would affect the transportation system. All I could think was, “Great! I’ve just arrived in a foreign country, I’m living with a foreign family far away from school, and now I’m learning that there could be days when I physically can’t make it to school because the French will just shut down the transportation system.” Well with my luck, it happened about the third week of school on the day that I was going to have my first day of work at my internship. So not only was I worried about starting work all in French, but then I had to worry about the fact that I might not even be able to MAKE it there. Well after a long discussion with my advisor at school, it turned out I could easily walk to my internship but there was no way I was getting home by walking. The only thing that saved me was Nicolas Sarkozy. Since becoming the president, Sarkozy has changed a few laws about striking. (Yet another reason why the French seem to hate him – his current approval rating is at 36% according to The Economist.) Striking can no longer just happen. The government must be informed of the strike, why it is occurring, and whoever is striking must provide a minimal amount of service. Therefore if the transportation system is going to go on strike, not ALL of the trams and busses have to be running and they don’t have to come as frequently but nevertheless there are some basic services provided. After consulting with the CTS website, I found that the bus I needed was supposed to run every 30 minutes that day. Well that is great, but that doesn’t really tell you when the bus is going to come and if you just miss the bus you would be stuck waiting for a half hour. So to get to school in the morning by 9:00 I had to figure out when I thought the bus was going to come. I figured if it went every half hour then at the end of my line a bus would be leaving at 8:30. Since I am about three or four stops from the end of the line, I figured it would take at least 5 minutes if not more to get to my stop and with the trip taking 20-25 minutes, if I was at the bus stop by just after 8:30 I could make it to school on time. Then to get home from work, if the bus came every 30 minutes and that stop is about seven or eight stops from the end of the line on the other end, if I got out of my internship at 6:00 on the dot, I could make it to my bus stop by 6:10 to hopefully catch the bus to go home. This is the kind of planning that has to go into strikes for us commoners who just want to get to school on time. Fortunately for me my math skills served me well and I made it to school and home from my internship in a wonderfully timely fashion. I was quite proud.

Aside from strikes on the public transportation systems, everyone else kind of gets “grève fever” and hops on grève bandwagon. Before you know it the students are on strike, the teachers are on strike, workers are on strike….it’s absolute insanity! My host mom told me the two times it has happened that she would not be striking but most of her colleagues would be. It’s all very confusing to us Americans.

Another big issue is the educational system itself. Sarkozy has been making significant reforms to the system especially for the universities. In January of 2009, all the universities in Strasbourg became in a way combined into one “University of Strasbourg.” They were originally different schools like for technology and so on but now they are one. The students are extremely perturbed by this and all over France they have striked multiple times which angers the administrations and it’s just a vicious cycle. The university has tried to make it all better by launching giant campaigns of advertising saying “La Université de Strasbourg. Elle est unique.” (The University of Strasbourg. She is unique.) All semester, the branch of the university that is near the Syracuse center has had a big sign on it that says, “Elle est unique….elle est EN GRÈVE.” (She is unique…she is ON STRIKE) This is yet another demonstration of the student’s anger at Sarkozy’s policies. However just before the NATO summit when President Obama came, they took down the sign so as to make it look prettier for all the politicians coming to town but it was up the Monday after.

Speaking of the NATO summit, I’m sure some of you have seen the fiasco that occurred when this event took place. The week leading up to the summit was pure madness in Strasbourg. We all had to carry our passports around because if you were stopped by the police and were unable to produce proper identification then you risked getting arrested. There were police everywhere. They patrolled the streets all over town just staring everyone down as you walked by. I felt like a criminal just trying to walk to school. The Thursday before the summit (it was to begin on Friday) there were supposedly bomb threats made for the train station and the riots/protesting began already. Friday morning I was supposed to go to go to the train station to go to Paris with my art history class. This was probably the scariest prospect ever because even though the threats on the station were proved to be false, I knew there would tons of police and I was scared of getting stopped or not being allowed to get on my train. Fortunately I didn’t get stopped but there were four police at every door to the station. Once I got on the train I was off for the weekend and heard nothing of the events in Strasbourg until I returned on Sunday. This is all going to relate back to striking don’t worry…

When I got back to the train station on Sunday night, I of course inquired as to how the weekend turned out in Strasbourg. My host mom was very surprised that I hadn’t heard but proceeded to tell me about all the mayhem that had ensued. It was projected that there were to be anywhere between 30,000-50,000 NATO protestors in Strasbourg for the weekend. This was an accurate estimate. They were also all supposed to be contained within one area of the city, just outside where they couldn’t get into the center of town where all the famous people would be. That part of town happened to be right around the corner from my house. My host mom said that among the peaceful protestors that were just there for peace, there was the “Black Block” which she described as a group of anti-capitalists from Germany that tend to stir up a lot of trouble wherever they go. They just like to go to protests where there’s supposed to be peace and just try and shake things up a little. Well that is certainly what they did in Strasbourg. They decided they were really angry about the capitalist leaders in Strasbourg and essentially threw what I can only call a hissy fit in my part of town. My host mom drove me around after she picked me up from the train station to show me the damage. At the tram stop right by my house, these angry protestors had dug up bricks out of the sidewalk and used them as projectiles at both police and advertisements. There is a sort of island between Strasbourg and Kehl (Germany) which is where most of this damage occurred. Between my house and Kehl, they had basically destroyed every advertisement in sight on both the bus stops and billboards. However this was nothing compared to what they did to building structures. On this little island area there was a Hotel Ibis, a large building with a post office, pharmacy, and bank, as well as the old passport control building. These three buildings were burnt down by the Black Block. There were pictures of this in newspapers all over the world. I have a few pictures of the aftermath. Fortunately no one died in these attacks but it’s sad that they had to happen in the first place. I asked my host mom why they had been burned and she said that the police and in essence left this area as a sacrifice for the rest of Strasbourg. They figured they would let the Black Block and other violent protestors do their damage in one part of town, away from the politicians, and it would keep them happy so they wouldn’t try to breach the police line to go into town. She also said there were protestors wandering the streets all over the area near our house.

I’m so glad I wasn’t home for all of this and that I was safely tucked away in Paris where all was calm. But it all goes back to my original discussion about strikes. I know that protesting NATO is not quite striking a University but the point is that there is just something very different about the European culture regarding these kinds of subjects. I know that there are violent riots in the United States, case and point Toledo when the neo-Nazis where invited, but not like in Europe. London saw much worse things than Strasbourg. It’s just insane to me and the rest of us students here. Anyway, this is all just a part of European life that you have to get used to when you live here. There is a history of revolutions and overthrowing governments and powers that we have never seen in the United States which I believe accounts for these feelings of protests and strikes. It’s confusing but c’est la vie!

I hope this has given you a little insight into the world of Europe! Gotta love it!!

Our trip to Nancy, Verdun, and Reims was another all group trip. Transporting approximately 40 some college students around France for three days. We started off at a surprisingly reasonable hour from the SU center to head first to the city of Nancy. We again had our wonderful purple bus with our favorite Pierre as a chauffeur. After we arrived in Nancy around 3:00 pm we headed straight to city center to have a 2 hour walking tour around the area. We learned that the city had recently redone the square in the center to get rid of the roads that went through it so people could enjoy the square without getting hit by cars. The gates surrounding the square were covered in gold details which I have decided will be very appropriate for my palace some day. I may have to come and steal them from Nancy in fact, they’re that pretty.  Nancy has a long history and is a pretty city but I have to admit there was nothing standoutish about it aside from the gold gates. We had a lot of fun in Nancy but I cannot say that I was totally in love with it. Some friends and I wandered around the city at night and met some nice French boys (don’t worry, they didn’t stay with us long) and enjoyed seeing the city at night but that’s about it for Nancy. Oh the dinner was delicious. I had some vegetarian meal that I can’t say I actually know what it was started by a salad with chevre chaud (melted chevre cheese on pieces of toast–delicious!!) and it was followed up by chocolate mousse. It was incredible! So despite a not so fascinating city, the Hotel Ibis in Nancy can COOK!

Even though the city might not be that fascinating, I did see a few things that seemed out of place….

As well as the cutest little kid who tried to fly/jump/skate/dance/run in his roller blades!

The next morning we headed out early towards Verdun. For those of you who do not know anything about Verdun, bear with me and I’ll try to give you a bit of history. Verdun was one of the giant battle grounds of WWI. It was seen as a territory that both sides (Germany and France) wanted to have.  The French were unwilling to give it up and the Germans were unwilling to let the French win. So in the end, thousands and thousands of men and women died in this area all to gain a couple meters here and there to just lose them again another day. Most of the area was a forest which proved to be a problem for those that wanted to see their enemy so eventually it was just destroyed and all the villages in and around it. We saw the signs for several “Village Detruit” (Destroyed Village) where people used to live before it was decimated. During WWI, during a period of 9 months, 23 million shells were dropped on Verdun. This has left a permanent mark on the entire area. You can see from some of the pictures that there are craters everywhere in the ground. It looks like they flattened some of it out to have areas for farming but for the most part as you’re driving through Verdun, you are surrounded by craters. It is the most incredible thing to think about. The whole area is changed and all of the trees in the forest are relatively new because they were completely destroyed. There was no more forest!

We also visited the Ossuaire in Verdun. This is a monument built to all the people that died in Verdun during the war. In the basement of the Ossuaire are the bones of 130,000 unidentified soldiers from the war. They dug them up from their graves and transported their bones which are now piled under the building. You can see the bones through little windows on the side of the building which is extremely eery. Also at the Ossuaire are the graves of thousands and thousands of soldiers. It was an incredible site to see and so sad to think about the families who never knew what happened to their sons. It is great that the French have made such a beautiful area for their final resting place.

After we were done at the Ossuaire we piled back onto the bus and headed to Reims. Once in Reims we took a guided audio tour of the cathedral. While the cathedral was beautiful, I would not recommend the audio guide. We got a detailed description of every windowpane ever installed in this giant church. This was all accompanied by beautiful classical music and provided us with one of the most boring 45 minutes of our lives. We also had to do it in partners which meant that to each audio guide there were two headsets so everyone had to walk around in 2 by 2s throughout the cathedral which got us some very strange looks. And of course, like every other thing in Europe, it was under construction…gotta love scaffolding!

After the tour of the cathedral we drove to our hostel where we had to back up down a one way street in a giant purple bus. Pierre, being the expert driver that he is, made it look easy but I was worried the whole time. That night we were on our own for dinner so me and some friends decided we wanted to go on an adventure to the Latin place we had seen earlier to have some delicious food to get rid of our craving. When we got there we ordered the nachos to start. This was a grave mistake. We thought we were getting the American version of nachos with food piled on top of food. But no, we got the French version which consisted of some chips thrown on a plate, a dab of salsa, a dab of guacamole, a dab of sour cream, and we believe there was a small layer of cheese in there somewhere. Pathetic. Severely disappointed we paid our bill (way to expensive for what we got) and headed down the street for something else. What we found was waaaay better than we could have imagined. We all got these extremely thin pizzas that were incredible.  Mine of course had more chevre on it and I savored every last bite of it! I wish I could bring it home with me.

The next day we got up early (again) and headed to a champagne cellar where we would get a tour of the facilities and a champagne tasting. This was all at about 10:00 am by the way…I’m not quite sure who planned that one but way to go?! The cellars we got to see were extremely old. Some of the caverns had been dug out by the Romans way back in the day. They were digging for chalk and left the remains for cellars in the future. There were champagne bottles EVERYWHERE. We couldn’t tell if they all had liquids in them but we were told that a good percentage did. There were stacks of over 100,000 bottles in some parts of it. It’s insane to think about how much champagne they made there. The whole process is very complicated to make the champagne and I couldn’t hear it all because there were 45 of us down in a cave where everything echoes so I can’t tell you exactly how it’s all done but there were many many steps involved. After the tour we got to taste the champagne and I can tell you it was delicious. I don’t really ever have champagne but I could get used to it!

After champagne tasting, we drove around the vineyards (which are not as impressive in the winter) and then headed home. It was a really fun trip and it was great to have a relaxing weekend where I didn’t have to plan anything, I just had to show up for the bus! Verdun was definitely my favorite part of the trip and I’m glad I got to see it. Unfortunately it was cold but I would have loved to explore it more.  Another great adventure for me!

As a disclaimer to start, being the intelligent girl that I am, I forgot to bring my camera charger to Greece with me so I had to drastically cut back on the amount of pictures I took to avoid it totally dying. I will be eventually getting more pictures from the other girls on the trip so don’t worry, I’ll have lots more!

Tuesday morning our ferry was to leave at 7:25 am and we were told to get there at least a 1/2 hour early. Then from our hotel we figured it would be about a 25 minute metro ride, however since we didn’t have a schedule of times of when it would come, we had to factor in the fact that we could be waiting up to 10 minutes for each metro and we had to change lines once. We also wanted to pick up breakfast/snack for the trip so we decided we needed to be walking out the door of our hotel at 6:15 am. Miraculously that’s exactly what we managed to do. I don’t think we were fully awake but we were at least moving! We only had to wait 3 minutes for our first tram which was a wonderful surprise. Then we had to switch metros at Omonia. We had passed through the Omonia stop several times throughout our visit in Athens and every time we did there was a nasty horrible smell that smelled like some animal was maybe hit by a one of the trains and has been left there to rot. I don’t know. We speculated on the source but everyone in the metro would be covering their faces until we pulled out of the station and of course the smell would linger in the car until the next one…horrible! So anyway we get to Omonia, cover our mouths and noses, and started walking to the green line. We were trying not to breath and walk as fast as we could. As we rounded the corner to the escalator up to our next train we heard one pulling in. Worried that we would have to wait forever for the next one I took off running up the escalator hoping Jenna and Kayla would follow. At the top I saw our train waiting there for us. The doors on the Greek metros kind of slam shut and if you’re in the way you could lose a body part so I had to wait until the last possible second until I knew we would all get on the train without risking death. But we made it!

Once we got to the pier we were worried about finding the boats but when we came out of the metro area, we realized how stupid we would have had to be to not find it. There were about 20 ferries in the water across the street so we got that taken care of. We grabbed some bread from a street vendor and some interesting chips as a snack for the ride.

I have no idea who decided this would be a good idea but we bought them. I can’t even begin to describe the taste other than to say they were interesting. So anyway we got on the boat and headed off into the ocean down to Santorini. The boat ride was a total of 8 hours with several stops along the way at various islands. I got some pretty pictures from the boat deck of the other islands.

We pulled into Santorini a little after 3 pm and were met by the husband of the couple that owned our hotel on the island. He was the epitome of how I have perceived Greek men. The whole family was actually. They were so cute! Poppy, the wife and our main contact when we were booking our hotel, was the nicest woman! She greeted us all with a hug when we got to the hotel and sent her husband to the kitchen to get us all glasses of wine while we checked in. Then she pulled out a map to show us where to go on the island that was filled with lines and circles that made absolutely no sense. I have the map with me so don’t worry, I would be happy to show it to you all later. It was incredibly incoherent. But she was nice enough and we stopped into the main office at least 3 times a day to ask questions and Poppy or her husband were always there to help us out. We never learned the name of her husband but he was super laid back, clearly loving the island life, ridiculously tan from being outside all the time on an island, and had no problem taking orders from Poppy. They had two kids that occasionally were behind the desk. I never talked to them but Jenna tried to ask the son some questions and said he spoke basically minimal English and couldn’t communicate at all with him. Our hotel room was amazing! We had a little mini-fridge which came in handy later when we had a picnic in our room, and an amazing view of the ocean, and of course we had Poppy! The day that we left, Poppy made us these incredible donut things as a thank you for staying with her! She’s great, I’m telling you. Find Poppy at the Manos Villa !

View from our room!

That night we went out for a delicious dinner and made it an early night so we could rest up for our adventures the next day. The next morning we got up and headed back into the city of Fira, the capital of the island, to a travel agency we had seen the night before advertising a volcano island cruise. We bought our tickets, grabbed some breakfast at the grocery store, I bought some sunglasses (that’s something else I forgot at home) and headed to the cliff we had to climb down to get to the port where our boat left from. The woman at the travel agency had told us it would take 20 minutes to walk down which we thought was insane until we saw our path. There was a cable car the went down the side of the cliff as well as donkey rides. We decided to walk down. WOW what a walk…it took forever, our legs were rubber by the time we got to the bottom, and we were exhausted. Please look at our hike!

After we made it down the cliff we stuffed down our breakfast and hopped on our awesome pirateship boat to take our cruise. It was the first time we had been around sooo many Americans. There were a ton of kids studying abroad who were on their spring break on the boat with us. They were from all over and all different schools and it was really bizarre hearing so many American english accents again. We cruised our way over to the newest island near Santorini. Let me interrupt with a little bit of the history of Santorini. Santorini used to be a big whole island with a big volcano on it. Now everyone knows the story of  the lost city of Atlantis…the big, advanced city that disappeared into the ocean…well as the legend goes, that city was on Santorini. Long long ago when Santorini was the big island, it had this huge city that was very advanced and was this amazing place. Then there was a huge volcanic eruption that destroyed the city and the island. Most of the island was covered in water and disappeared for ever into the sea. Now all that’s left is the main island that’s really skinny and long and some little minis off the coast. There is an ancient site on the island called Akrotiri that is known as the Pompeii of Greece because of this eruption so long ago. It was closed so we couldn’t make it there but we did see parts of the place and artifacts from it in a museum on the island and they had these incredibly painted walls that were apparently characteristic of that time. So to come back full circle to my original story…the area around Santorini still has an active volcano and according to what Jenna read, it’s due for another major eruption any time now. (Any by any time I mean in the next couple hundred years) Our cruise was to go to the little island off the main island of Santorini that is still active. When we were on it we could see some gaseous sulfur-smelling stuff coming out of it. Once we got there we got to climb around it for an hour and 1/2. It was very strange because it’s mostly volcanic rock which I’ve  never seen before of course and beautiful views of the ocean and Santorini.

After hiking around the volcano (I’ll have lots more pictures later don’t worry) we got back on the boat to go to another little island where there are apparently hot springs. We hadn’t prepared for hot springs but it worked out in our favor because the water was FREEZING and you had to jump off the boat into the freezing water, swim 100 yards to the “hot springs” to find out that it was only luke warm. Everyone who did it came back on the boat and spent the rest of the ride shaking in their cold, soaking, wet suits. We weren’t too upset about missing out on that part. We watched it all from the boat with about half the other people on the excursion. Something else that was hilarious about our trip was that there was a huge group of high school age kids from Quebec on the boat with us. Jenna had told me that she heard that the Quebecois accent was crazy but we didn’t know for sure until we heard these kids. We heard this group yelling at each other lauging talking etc and I assumed they were from some European country. Suddenly Jenna said, “GUYS! I think they’re Quebecois!” I started trying to listen to what the kids were saying and I said, “Jenna…there’s no way. They aren’t even speaking French.” and Jenna said, “No no listen…you can pick out a few words. They are speaking French.” So I listened carefully trying to pick out words I knew and suddenly I heard a girl yell, “QUI A VOLE MA SERVIETTE?!” and I realized I understood that! She had yelled, WHO STOLE MY TOWEL?! and I understood but damn it was a weird accent. Unless you spoke French I don’t know if you could understand how bizarre it sounds but it was so different from what I’ve become used to that I literally did not think they were even speaking a language I understood. Sorry Quebec!

Once we got off the boat and looked at our hike back up the cliff and decided it would be best to take the donkeys up. It was incredibly scary because the men threw us up on our donkeys and sent us on our way up the hill on our own. They donkeys all knew where to go but they had a mind of their own. They didn’t have to listen to anyone and they decided who would go first. Mine liked being up front and would occasionally run to get up there despite the fact that he didn’t have much competition for the spot. One of the guys on the way up had a donkey that liked pretending to bite the other ones which would make them freak out and run away from him. As a former horseback rider I wasn’t too scared on the trip but once I helped Jenna and Kayla get off their donkeys I realized just how scared they had been. They vowed never to ride a donkey again.

That afternoon we headed to the end of the island where we were promised over and over again a spectacular sunset that would take our breath away. We got there around 4:30, preparing to see the sunset around 6:00 and be on our way back to the city right after. Well we didn’t quite get the sunset we were hoping for. We had some pretty pictures leading up to the sunset but to kill time we wandered around the eerily empy streets and when we were done there were clouds covering the sun and we saw zero sunset. It’s ok because we got to see some postcard views of the island and took some pictures while we wandered.

The next day we spent some time wandering around the island. We tried to go to those ancient archaelogical sites I told you about but couldn’t because they were closed. We also had impossibly high winds. We went to a wine museum and saw some pretty sweet dislpays that had moving mannekins that taught us about the history of wine making on Santorini. Fun fact, there was no electricity on Santorini until 1967. Imagine that people…kind of scary huh? The museum was pretty informative and we got to taste 3 types of wine with it. I had the BEST white wine I have ever had and I would have loved to buy a bottle but knew I couldn’t take it home with me Anyway I didn’t get any pictures of the high wind, the other girls did so I’ll have to show you the evidence later, but we managed to round up a gang of stray dogs to follow us around the city for a while. So I just have a few more pictures of the island…

Friday we got on the ferry to go back to Athens. We had a pretty uneventful ride except for the ridiculous rocking. I was ok but Jenna is known for motion sickness so we were a little worried about her but it turned out alright. We got into the port city around 11:30, found our hotel and passed out in our beds. The next morning we headed back to the port to take a small ferry to Aegina, a small island about 40 min away by boat. The boat ride was traumatic both there and back. It was rocking back and forth and we thought we were going to die the entire way there. However we made it and got off at a beautifully sunny port town. From there we got a quick breakfast snack at a delicious bakery and got on a bus to the temple on the island. It was a beautiful temple, pretty well in tact and wasn’t being supported by scaffolding! We got some amazing pictures and went back down to wander the city, get lunch, and head back home. It was just a nice relaxing day on a sunny island, a perfect way to end our trip. After we got home, we took a nap until dinner, found a cute little place near by and went to bed early.

Sunday morning we headed to the airport to fly home. We were sad to leave but it was time. We were actually starting to crave French food despite eating delicious food all over Greece. It took a while to get to the airport but once we were there we found some delicious coffee in a cafe. However as I learned throughout the trip, you can smoke ANYWHERE in Greece. It’s kind of ridiculous. I would love to know their statistics on lung cancer there. A girl was smoking in the cafe. I watched he finish a cigarette, stamp it out in the ash tray as she pulled out another one from her pack. So if that wasn’t enough smoke, a man sat down right next to me and lit up another one. I’m pretty sure I was breathing straight cancer. I made us all get up and leave right after he started smoking because it’s really not fun breathing in and feeling your lungs on fire.

When we went through security Jenna got her stuff searched and had her contact solution, lotion, and a tub of peanut butter thrown away. She put up a fight about the contact solution, arguing that it’s a medical supply but they didn’t seem to understand. The peanut butter was what really made her upset because she had been craving it since she left the states and finally found some Skippy in a grocery store on Santorini. I thought she was going to cry. Once through security we realized there was no food on the other side so we had to sit there for an hour and 1/2, starving until we got on our flight. We were served food which was unfortunately not vegetarian this time but I did a pretty good job of picking through it. We got home safe and sound, took the legal way out of the Frankfurt airport on a bus and got back to Strasbourg around 11:00 pm.

Once again, an amazing vacation! I had a great time with Jenna and Kayla on the second part of the trip. I can’t wait to go back to Greece, there’s so much more to do and see. It’s such an interesting place and we saw remains of buildings and civilizations older than I can even imagine. It was incredible! I recommend anyone that can to go there! Best spring break ever!!

After the most hectic week of midterms I have ever had I found myself on a bus Friday morning en route to Frankfurt, Germany where I would hop a plane to Greece. Even though we had an extremely easy path between us and our plane, we of course managed to make it difficult for ourselves. Once we were dropped off outside the airport by the Lufthansa bus we had to figure out where to check in in one of the largest airports I’ve ever been in. So we hopped on the SkyTram to get to the different terminal we THOUGHT we needed to go to but once we were there we realized that it was wrong so we went back one terminal to our original spot to discover that was also wrong then finally made it to the last terminal. However once we stepped off the tram we noticed that the the people in the other tram car had gotten off on the other side, a side that didn’t open up to us…we thought this was odd but we figured, how can you go wrong? Well it was wrong…very strangely, oddly wrong…there was no one on our side of the tram stop except one woman standing in front of one security x-ray with 2 guards. I cautiously walked up to the woman and said, “Hi…we’re lost.” She asked for our itineraries, saw that they had flight numbers on it and ushered us through. So the four of us went through to the security barrier and the 2 guards who took our bags through the x-ray, we went through the metal detectors and on the other side saw signs for “gates.” I said to the others, “guys…please tell me that wasn’t security. Why do the signs say gates? We don’t want gates, we want check-in tables…” We all looked at each other, shrugged and figured it would all work out. We found a door that lead to these mysterious gates, walked down 2 flights of steps where we saw no one, and opened up a door into the middle of the Lufthansa terminal. I have no idea how we did it but we did not have any airplane tickets, we were armed with our carry-on bags and nothing else. How was it possible that we entered the Frankfurt terminal with no tickets and through a security with 2 guards? No idea.  However, I think only me and my traveling crew could do that.

After the security “incident” we had a boring hour or so in the airport and a relatively uneventful flight. However, I have to give some credit to Lufthansa, they served us VEGETARIAN food on our flight, they don’t charge for carrying bags on a plane, and they apparently speak many many languages on the airplane just in case we don’t speak German. What an airline!

When we got to the airport in Athens we found the bus to the the city center and had to stand the whole hour and 1/2  it took to get there because it was so crowded. We were dropped off at the city center to discover that it was not the train station as we had thought so we had to get on the metro to find our hostel. The Hotel Neo Olympos was located just a few blocks from the train station right where it said it would be on their website. Since I was the one put in charge of picking out the hostel for Athens, I was a little nervous about what the hotel would be like. As we checked in, I got a little nervous when the man said, “Oh I’m sorry but we don’t have a four-person room available right now,” But I was happy to hear when he followed it up with, “So I’m going to put you in two double rooms instead.” Already we were getting a sweeter deal, the same price for 2 doubles instead of a quad! When we got up into our rooms we found extremely comfy beds, extra blankets (my favorite) and a little walk out balcony. It was perfect! I got nothing but compliments on my find for only $12 a night a person. Yes, I know that sounds cheap but I promise there were working toilets, showers, and free internet (a rare find in Europe, let me tell you…) We settled in, unpacked a little, had a delicious and inexpensive dinner and went to bed.

The next morning we got up bright and early to set out to find the bus to Sounion so we could see the Temple of Poseidon. After many awkward question asking to various travel agencies we found in town, we had several different opinions on where to go to catch the bus. So we stood at where we thought the bus was going to come for about 15 minutes and miraculously it did! We then embarked on the most beautiful drive down the country side to the temple. On the bus we met a couple from Egypt that were traveling with their two children, a girl about 6 or 7 years old and a son that was about 2. The drive down was one beautiful scene after another of the ocean. Once we got there we got out to take pictures that were incredible but extremely fake looking. I swear we were actually there but the pictures are so amazing that it seems fake.

Below is the little Egyptian boy we met on the bus…just before this picture, his father took a family portrait of his wife, daughter, and son in my arms with the rest of us girls. We don’t really know why they wanted a picture with us but the wife turned to me and held out her son and said, “Would you like to hold him?” and without me really saying yes or no, I found myself holding him. On the ride home the little boy decided he wanted me to be his new mommy. He would try to walk down the aisle of the bus so he could get to me and then I’d pick him up and make faces at him which made his day. His dad made sure to capture that on video camera…so we are permanently in their lives now!

After the trip we wandered around the city to see the sites and found that that was much easier to find ruins than we thought! There are actually ruins all over the place in Athens…go figure. We’d turn a corner and BAM ran into ruins. They were in the sidewalk, in the metro, in parks, everywhere! It’s incredible.

After wandering and lunch we headed to the 2004 Olympic Stadium which was absolutely incredible to look at! It had some pretty insane architecture (in a good way, not the Gaudi way) and we had a fun time wandering around trying to see what we could see. I even got to see the pool were Michael Phelps once swam! That was a highlight for me…I took a couple pictures of it. It was pretty cool being in my second Olympic Park. It made for an interesting comparison to Barcelona. The two parks definitely have very different feels.

The next day we headed to the Acropolis for a day of sightseeing within the city. To our wonderful discovery, apparently museums and and archaeological sites are free on Sundays! How exciting is that?! We didn’t even plan it! So we headed off to a FREE day at the Acropolis where we would normally have had to pay 12 Euros or so. It was another spectacular day with only a few clouds in the sky. We took lots of pictures but also spent a fair amount of time just basking in the sunlight. (This caused me to have a burn later on that day, but who really cares…) Kayla, one of the girls on my trip, has had a life-long dream of going to Greece since 6th grade so for her to see the Acropolis in person was an incredible moment for her. I’m so happy that I got to be there with her when she saw it. She was spitting out facts left and right about Greece and the Acropolis as we walked through. She was so funny to be with. She loved it. We all did for that matter. It was a beautiful day!

Lots of free ruins around the city to see…

Monday morning we headed to Delphi to see the ruins there. It was kind of a hectic drive along the mountainside but we got to see a small ski town in Greece (I know, strange) and see more of the terrain and countryside. When we got to the site, we were worried it was going to close so we had to basically run through the town to get to the site so we could try to power walk through as much of it as we could. All of the brochures and pictures we looked at showed Delphi as this beautiful flat place where we could see ruins and have a wonderful day. Well do not be deceived by the pictures. Delphi is on the side of a mountain. Sacred Way, the path you follow up to the stadium is like a 45 degree angle. When you get to the stadium where people supposedly held some Olympic games, all you can think to yourself is, they must have been carried up by slaves because if you walked all the way up there, you’re not running any races anytime soon. It was insane….then when you’re all done at that site and you walk back down the hill and you think you’re done, NO! There’s about 4 more sites to see. We only saw 3/4 but it was pretty intense. You had to walk another half mile down the road to see the other places. Our walk down the road involved us encountering a giant pig that looked like it could probably sit on us, squash us, and eat us and no one would ever know. It was HUGE and we were very worried about angering it and making it come chase us. Delphi was very beautiful, also miraculously free apparently that Monday, and it was nice break from the Athens city life.

So this was my first few days of the trip in Athens. We saw a ton of ruins, which is what you’re supposed to do in Athens, right? As a city, it didn’t do much for any of us. I had been forewarned by William that he didn’t like the city while he was there so I knew going into it that I might not like it. It’s kind of a dirty place and it’s really unlike most of the other cities in Europe. I guess I have become accustomed to most European cities where there are all these old historic buildings with lots of charm and beautifulness. It Athens…I mean you have ruins, which you can’t really get much older than that, but that’s about it for old stuff. All the buildings look like they were built in the last 50 years, at least after WWII, probably later. They are all kind of ugly. However, after becoming a member of a sorority, I have learned the Greek alphabet. So I had a fun time going around trying to read the signs with the Greek letters. Kayla had about 5 pages of printed Greek words so we would try and figure out what the signs said. At night we also made an interesting discovery. While we would walk around to find places to eat for dinner, we started noticing that there were never any women in the streets. There were hardly any women at restaurants except for tourists. It is probably different during the summer months when there are more people in the city, but again they would be tourists. It was strange that there was never really any women walking around. We were never in danger, don’t worry, but we didn’t spend much time outside at night in Athens. It was always dinner then bed!

So there you have Athens! It was an interesting experience, that is for sure. The Acropolis and and all the ruins in the city were incredible to finally see. It’s insane to think about how old they are…it makes you feel kind of insignificant in terms of your place in history. But don’t worry, there’s lots more Greece to come!

My trip to Luxembourg and Brussels was completely boring in terms of travel compared to my other trips. This trip was for my class called “Policy Seminar” which is basically a broad coverage of European politics. We were going to visit the Court of Justice in Luxembourg and the European Economic and Social Committee and the US Mission to the EU. I will explain this all don’t worry…We got on our bus with our scatterbrained Swedish teacher to head to Luxembourg. It was an extremely uneventful ride except for our rest stop for a quick bathroom break…one of the girls had to go to the bathroom so bad that we had to make a special stop for her. Most of us decided that if we were going to stop, we might as well all go to the bathroom. So we all jump off the bus and head into the rest stop. It was a little dark…and by a little I mean we couldn’t really see the stalls and so I, fearless Liz, took the plunge and opened the bathroom door. I took one look at it and laughed. Anna (the girl that really had to go to the bathroom), not that she isn’t a really nice girl, but I can tell you that never in a million years would she voluntarily pee into a hole in the ground which is what I found myself staring at. I heard her say, “What’s wrong Liz?” So I yelled out to her, “You’re really gonna like this one Anna! You better really have to go!”  I turned around and walked back out, I didn’t have to go that bad. She looked at me with eyes filled with terror and said, “Liz…what’s wrong with it?” I just smiled and said, “You’ll have to see for yourself!” Needless to say she was not impressed by the facilities. She was going to refuse to go but Jenna took one for the team and went first. Anna was still not going to go but after I said to her, “Anna, think of how bad you had to go before we stopped…you are not going to make it another hour.” After several more skeptical looks at the bathroom she went in, came out a few minutes later, running, saying, “Ew ew ew I can’t believe I just did that. Oh my god, get me back on that damn bus!” I laughed and followed her back to our big purple bus (yes again, a big purple bus) and we finished our journey.

Our hostel in Luxembourg was very fancy compared to some other places I have stayed. We got to our rooms and went down for dinner. I was awkwardly served a big plate of meat which I had to take back to the woman who served it to me and explain in French/English that I couldn’t eat it. So she got out the menu and said, “Lasagna?” I looked at her and said, “Yes, if there is no meat in it…” She gave me a completely blank look and so I looked back down at the menu and so did she. Then she said, “Pizza?” I smiled and said, “Yes, just with cheese…” Again a blank stare….I sighed and looked back at the menu and she said, “Omelet?!” I said, “Yes…” and then she interrupted me with, “Omelet Fromage?” Those were the golden words, cheese omelet, I think she got it! So I nodded and said, “Yes!” and finally 10 minutes later I had a big cheese omelet and fries in front of me. Not bad for no real communication.

That night we decided to explore the town. Unfortunately we found ourselves in a ravine so getting to town was almost virtually impossible. We asked the people at the front desk where a cool place to go was and they circled a few places on the map and we were off. The night started out fine, we found a cool bar, watched some rugby on TV, and then looked outside and realized it was pouring snow. Me, Kristen and Courtney decided to head out before we couldn’t make it home anymore. I’m glad we left when we did because those that came later than us had even more trouble . We knew we were in for a long walk home when we took our first steps onto the snowy cobblestone outside. My boots and Courtney’s boots were apparently not made for the snow. We were forced to do a sort of shuffle down the street to keep from falling. When we hit the edge of the path down the ravine we started getting worried. The snowflakes were gigantic, it was kind of sticking, kind of melting on the ground and we had no hope. Courtney and I resorted to using walls and railings to support us. Don’t ask how the wall worked, it was just something solid to hold on to. We essentially slid down the entire way. Kristen’s boots were fine, she was practically jogging circles around us as we yelped and screamed down the ravine road. We eventually made it to the bottom which basically opened right up into our hotel and we were happy to be back in the warm comfort of our beds only a few minutes later. It was certainly an adventure and I definitely feared for my life.

The next morning we had an unnecessarily early start to go to the Court of Justice. Going back to our teacher being scatterbrained, he failed to mention to us that it might be a good idea to dress nicely for the court. We show up to the room where we were getting a joint lecture about the inner workings of the court with some students from American University and some other American group in jeans, t-shirts, etc. I have never felt so judged in my life. Not only were the last group to get there, we were about 10 minutes late and extremely under-dressed compared to the other students in their suits and ties. We snuck into the back of the room and tried to melt into the chairs. This kid in front of us said, “Excuse me, where are you from?” We said, “Syracuse University, what about you?” “From America.” “Yeah? Where in America?” “America!” “No I mean what SCHOOL are you from?” “Oh we’re all from American University.” “Oh cool, we’re just visiting, we go to school in Strasbourg, just checking out the court etc… What are you guys doing here? Where are you studying?” “In Brussels, we ALL have jobs interning for the European Parliament. We’re here for work.” And with that he turned around. Not that all American students are stuck up (no pun intended) but he definitely made it clear that we were the odd ones out on this one.

After the boring lecture that we couldn’t see through the sea of black suits, we headed to the court to actually hear a case. Our teacher had warned us about the bailiff waking up judges who fell asleep but we didn’t believe him. We couldn’t see how someone would fall asleep in court, especially the judge. Oh how wrong we were! I could not keep my eyes open if my life depended on it. It was beyond boring. It was to a point where I had to try to listen to the other languages it was being translated into and draw pictures in my book to try and keep my eyes open. I felt like every time I looked up, the bailiffs eyes were looking at me…knowing that I was about to fall asleep. But we made it through to live another day. We had lunch, some free time in Luxembourg and left for Brussels.

Proof of our ravine hike:

We were starving and exhausted by the time we made it to Brussels and had walked to our restaurant where we were having our big group dinner. Unfortunately there had been some confusion about our reservation which pushed back dinner even further but it ended up working out because the restaurant gave us free appetizers and a round of drinks. The appetizers, bread, and passion fruit ice cream for dessert were incredibly delicious. I kind of disliked the entree because whatever was in my tart thing (I believe it was a cheesy cream sauce thing) smelled really bizarre and I couldn’t get over it. The dinner took in total almost 3 hours so by the time we got out of there at 10:30 we were dead tired so we all went home and went to bed.

Sitting at our table for our ridiculously long dinner…

The next morning we headed to the European Economic and Social Committee. This is an organization that has no actual power within the European Union, but when legislation is coming up for a vote, the EESC produces opinions on what they think should be done. So we went and talked to the man in charge there. It was kind of interesting, the man was very knowledgeable about his job but I can’t say that I remember everything that he said, I was too busy watching the girl across the table from me struggle to stay awake. I had to control myself to keep from laughing because she would try and try and try to keep her eyes open but failed every time. Apparently I wasn’t the only one watching her. As soon as our talk was over, a kid named Tom walked over to her and said, “GENEVIEVE! I lost count of how many times you fell asleep but the last number I remember is 57!”

After the EESC we had lunch and ran around Brussels for a while then went to the US Mission to the EU. Basically their function is to act as a voice from the the US to the European Union when we want to tell them something and on the flip side, they can go through the Mission to talk to the US. I had to stop dead in my tracts when I walked into the building because on the wall is saw three big pictures that took me by surprise. I saw Obama, Biden, and Hilary all smiling down at me. This was the first US government building I’ve been into since Obama became president and I was sincerely taken aback to see those pictures up on the wall. But I had to just smile back and then hand over all my possessions  including purse, notebook, pen, passport, and coat. All I could keep was my scarf but I’m pretty sure they were eying that too. Then we were escorted up to the room for our lecture 3 at a time because we might wander off and hide ourselves in the building somewhere and steal all their secrets…The two interns that work there were very nice, the escorted us up the stairs, down the stairs, and to the bathroom which was approximately 10 steps away.

Our talk was probably the most interesting thing we’ve done so far. First we got a talk from a woman who has been in the foreign service for over 20 years and she told us a little about the process to get in and what you do once you’re in. Apparently you change jobs about every 2-3 years and you pretty much switch countries every time. It sounds like a crazy job…Next was a man who is kind of an international trade lawyer. He handles various trade problems between the US and the EU. He told us about the conflicts between us over the poultry and beef that the EU (especially France) don’t want to import from us as well as the the French Roquefort cheese that the US in turn has increased tariffs on so people won’t buy it anymore. I loved the conversation, it was all about economics and I personally found it pretty interesting. The final person to come in a talk to us was a woman who looked really young but apparently wasn’t. She told us that she had been in the foreign service for 9 years and she’d been stationed all over the world. She worked in Hong Kong, Cyprus, for the operations board and before coming to Europe she was a special assistant to Condoleezza Rice. Her job at the operations board was pretty crazy sounding. The people that work there are basically working 24 hours a day between them. They take all the calls from embassies around the world if something happens. They will call in and say, “Oh, hey there was a bombing in Madagascar, do you think we should call the general?” And then the operators would say either yes or no depending on the situation and keep track of it. It seemed like a pretty intense job to have. I can’t imagine being on the receiving end of that. She did this in 2003 so I can only imagine the kinds of calls she got considering the year.

The most incredible part of it all was when she worked for Condoleezza Rice. She was essentially an assistant to her assistant. Her and the other special assistant would trade on and off every day. If they were the late shift, they would get into the office around 3-4 and stay there until around 10-11 getting things ready for the morning. Then she would go home and was on call throughout the night. That meant that if a call came in from the operations board, they would say, “Oh hi, there was a bombing in Madagascar, do you think we should wake up Ms. Rice?” And it would be her job to say, “Oh no, I think it’s ok but call me back if something changes.” Or whatever her response would be depending on the situation. Once again, it was her job to literally decide whether or not to wake up Condoleeza in the event of an emergency. I can’t even imagine. Then after being on call all night, she had to be into work at 5:30 am to look through newspapers and online articles to decide which ones would be important for Rice to read before she began her day. I can’t imagine the pressure! Then her day would be over around the time the other intern came in to do his late shift and then she got to go home early. She did that every week for a year! (Well except when Rice left the country, then it was a vacation according to her) It was fascinating hearing her talk because I can’t even imagine what her life was like doing those things!!

After the talk we were escorted 3 at a time back down stairs, given our possessions back and then had the rest of the day free. We ate some incredibly delicious waffles, saw some sites in Brussels and headed back to the hotel.

A famous statue in Belgium…??

That night it was Anna’s birthday that night and we were going to take her out when suddenly I received word that Jenna was throwing up in her room. Having the mothering personality that I do, I sat by her side as she got sick. The poor girl had the 24 hour flu. I took a break from feeding her water and pretzels to go out for a birthday dinner. We had some incredible pizza, surprisingly, and then Kristen and I walked home to get back to Jenna. She was still pretty ill but Kristen and I took good care of her and the next morning she was as good as new!

So I must tell you the story of my teacher’s reaction to Jenna’s sickness. We had all originally thought she was dehydrated so he disappeared and came back with a big glass of beer. We all looked at him with utter dismay and he said, “It will help her hydrate!” Now I’m not sure how they do it in Sweden, but I’m pretty sure beer does not help hydrate someone who is very sick. He made her drink some before I finally had to say, “I’m sorry professor, I don’t mean to be rude but I think it would probably just be best if Jenna is just alone with us right now. I’ll call you if we need anything.” And I kicked him out. Oh swedes…

So anyway the next day we went to the art museum in Brussels, had more waffles and fries, and headed home.

All in all a very interesting trip. I really enjoyed our lectures and talks and I don’t know if I did a very good job about relaying them to you but it was pretty fascinating!

Once again me and my friends managed to find an extremely difficult way to get to another country. You thought Zurich was complicated? oh no no no, try flying on Ryan Air. They pride themselves on cheap flights, which is true…you can get a flight for 3 cents! But then once they tack on the fees associated with it and traveling, it starts adding up. If you are a non-EU citizen there are various fees for checking your passport, checking in at the airport, all sorts of things. We had to pay a 10 Euro check-in fee for each flight, there and back. Not to mention the fact that if you took a bag bigger than a carry-on you had to pay another 30 Euro to put it on the plane…but the big kicker is the airports location! SO here’s how our day started. We met at 8:30 am at the bus stop by my house so we could take a bus over into Germany to the Kehl train station. We hopped on the bus and went over the bridge. We got off at the train station and went in to buy a ticket to Baden-Baden. At 9:34 on the dot we got on the train and were on our way. However after the first stop we knew that we had to switch trains, but there was no indication of where we were. After many confused looks, some guy sitting across from us said, “can I help you?” We gratefully accepted his help and followed him off the train at the next stop. Then went through a series of paths to get to our “connecting” platform that was actually a 5 minute walk away. Then we had a 20 minute wait for our next train. That train finally showed up and we found ourselves in the Baden-Baden train station about 20 minutes later.

From there we knew that there was a bus that would take us to the airport (which is apparently another 20 minutes away) and found that it ran every 45 minutes. Well that was all fine and dandy but if we waited the 1/2 hour until it came back for us, it would put us a little too close to our departure time for our liking. After consulting with the people in the train station we decided to take a taxi. So we found a taxi, hopped in, and went to the airport. It was relatively uneventful once we got to the airport. We just checked in like any normal flight, got to our gate, hopped on a plane, and flew to Spain. Once in Spain we had to take another bus into Barcelona. This one was an hour long! Finally after several hours of traveling we got to Barcelona.

Let’s recap our modes of transportation: bus to train, to next train, to taxi, to airplane, to bus. Hola Barcelona!

Once in Barcelona, we decided to walk our way to the center of town. We passed by the Arc of Triumph, went through a park and saw all of the beautiful palm trees which reminded me of school and then went to the chocolate museum. It was only 3 Euro and we got a chocolate bar with it so we went for it. There were lots of statues made of chocolate and some informative films…it was fun and yummy!

We wandered around the city, saw a church, saw a pet store on the street, and then noticed that the sky was turning a nasty shade of black. So we decided we had 2 choices, we could either wait out the rain we knew was coming, or try and make it to our hostel before it hit. We decided to wait it out in a bar which was the best idea we could have had because 5 minutes later it was pouring outside. So we just had a beer until the rain stopped and then went to our hostel to clean up before dinner.

Dinner was INCREDIBLE! We all fell in love with the Spanish food. We ate outside because it was nice and warm compared to the weather we have been having in Strasbourg. We each had the special menu which included a glass of Sangria, 2 tapas each, and a big plate of paella. Being a vegetarian and all, my tapas were pretty mild compared to what Kristen and Jenna had. They had some sausages and meatballs made of some unknown meat and something that looked like a tiny fried squid. (Kristen was the only brave one to try it)

After a delicious dinner we headed back to our noisy noisy hostel for bed. Our wonderful roomates that were sharing our hostel with us came in a approximately 4:00 in the morning and woke us all up but we got to return the favor when we got up to have breakfast, shower, and get on our way for an early start. We set out to find the infamous Gaudi Cathedral and found an interesting Gaudi apartment building on the way…

The Cathedral was by far the weirdest thing I have ever seen! I can’t even describe it to you so I will show you and you can draw your own conclusions….

Please note that those are FRUIT on the CATHEDRAL!

Then we move along the side of the church to find…iridescent windows! I guess that’s nice…

Then we move to the back of the Cathedral where we apparently find a completely different everything and a built in Christmas tree!

On a side note about the church: apparently it was started by a completely different architect which I think explains the entirely different architecture in the back of the cathedral. When he died, Gaudi took over the construction of the cathedral and began turning it into (in my opinion) the most cracked-out thing I have ever seen. Gaudi however never got to see his completed cathedral because he died in it before it was finished. Since his death there has been continuous construction on the cathedral and according to our guidebook it probably will be perpetually under construction for the next 30-40 years. We did not go inside because of the long lines but I’m quite curious as to what is in there. We don’t know why it is still under construction, it looked pretty complete to us but perhaps there is more fruit that needs to be added to its towers…I don’t know. I thought it was more a mock of the church instead of someplace for people to worship but again, that’s my opinion. As we stood and looked at the cathedral before we left I said, “Who in the WORLD decided that would be a good addition to Barcelona?  Who looked at those plans and said, ‘yes, I like it’ ?? I don’t understand.” and Kristen said, “I think the better question is, who the hell actually PAID for that?” We just shook our heads and walked away…

After we got over the shock of this church we decided to go to the 1992 Olympic site. We hopped on a subway and headed down.  After some confusion on the bus ride into the park, we found ourselves overlooking the entire city from up by the Olympic museum. We had such a beautiful day and were so luck to get to see it all. It was definitely a better view than in Zurich…

We wandered around the area looking at all the buildings for the Olympics. There was this huge statue/monument thing that I’m not really sure what the purpose is but it was cool looking and I got a great picture of it with the beautiful blue sky in the back!

We also saw the grand Olympic Stadium that we proceeded to walk around for about a 1/2 hour trying to see if we could get into it. There were some mysterious poles everywhere that we eventually determined lit up at night. We also thought we were never going to see the inside of the stadium but we rounded the final corner (almost to where we started from) and saw the torch and entrance. The stadium was gigantic! I read that it was actually built for the 1936 Olympics that were granted to Spain but when the civil war broke out, they were taken away and so for 1992 they just refurbished the stadium.

After the Stadium we decided we really wanted to see the FC Barcelona soccer stadium. (I think we were inspired by all the athleticness of the Olympics) so we got back on the subway and headed up towards the stadium. We got lost a little trying to find the stadium but when we finally saw it, it was giiiiigantic. However we couldn’t find a way in so once again we wandered around to see what we could see. It turns out the stadium is even more gigantic than we thought it was. Total, we ended up walking around it for about 45 minutes…but we finally found the entrance but you had to pay 17 Euro to see the field so we just saw the outside, some statues, the gift store and headed out.

After the soccer stadium we headed to the ocean to enjoy the sunset and Medeterranian. It was a beautiful day and we did a lot of walking which killed my feet by the end of it.

We had another dinner just like the one from the night before but at a different restaurant. It was equally delicious, if not better. Then we headed to a Flamenco concert which was pretty amazing. (I have some videos of it if anyone wants to see it in action…)

We went to bed straight after Flamenco because we had to get up at 6:25 am so we could leave the hostel at 6:45 so we could walk 25 minutes to the bus station where we could get at 7:30 bus back to the airport for our flight at 10:35 then to the bus back to the train station to get on a train back to Kehl to get on a bus back to Strasbourg. We were home by 3:00 pm. It was by far the most intense traveling I think I’ve ever done but it was SO much fun and I can’t emphasize how good it was to see the sun! The food was delicious, we packed in an insane amount of things in the 48 hours we were there, and had a really fun time!!

I LOVE EUROPE!

So now I can tell you all about our journey throughout the city of Zurich. In general it was a very pleasant city full of extremely nice people willing to answer all of our questions but like the rest of Europe it was freezing.  The first day we did a tremendous amount of walking which seems the be the theme of most of our trips in the freezing weather but it was definitely worth it. We started at the Landes Museum which is supposedly the cultural museum to beat all cultural museums in Europe. Their special exhibition currently is about Roman gold which was not only beautiful to look at all the pieces but very informative as well. I learned a lot about Romans and Roman history. Apparently as the fall of the Roman empire was in sight, its citizens all over would hide their gold, jewelry, and anything remotely expensive either underground or in the walls of their homes as raiders would come through their cities.  Then unfortunately some would be killed, move away, or just forget where they hid there things which was extremely fortunate for us because we have found them hundreds of years later! So in general the exhibition was really fun and interesting. The rest of the museum had a large collection of things from all over time and history of the general area. They had a journalist photo exhibition in one of the rooms which had some very cool photos including one from the Beijing Junior Olympics where a gymnast is flipping around on the parallel bars so he’s a big blur but his teammates are standing next to him looking very nervous for him. It was a really amazing picture and it won second prize. They also had an ancient civilization exhibit that had lots of ancient things like ancient bones. (I know, very descriptive) But it did have a giant woolly mammoth which was exciting!

From the museum we went walking around the city, seeing the sites, and finding a place to eat lunch.

Proof of the cold:

Also on a side note about the fountain, apparently there are some 1300 fountains in Zurich….

Lake Zurich:

We walked all around as you can see then headed to our hostel to clean up and figure out a place for dinner. We were told to go to some place by a guy on the bus, but after wandering around for a 1/2 hour we didn’t see anything that resembled the restaurant he told us to go to so we settled on an Italian place near our hostel. We enjoyed some wine with dinner and headed back to the hostel for an early bedtime so we could get an early start in the morning.

The next day we did even MORE walking around, seeing many parts of the city. It was actually snowing by the time we left the hostel in the morning so it was even colder than the day before if that’s even possible. The best part of the day was taking a train up into the mountains to a little place called Uleitberg where we could get a beautiful view of the lake and the city. Since it was snowing it was not as spectacular as it could have been but we did pretty well. We even climbed a tower to get an even higher, less obscured view.

On the way back down the mountain we stopped at one of the stops on the train because there were some horses sitting there. We soon found out the horses belonged to some drunk Swiss men who were drinking beer outside in the snow with their horses that they apparently rode from somewhere…we asked to pet them and ended up getting a lot more out of the deal. Before we knew it, one of the men had thrown Kristen up onto the horse to ride around if she wanted. Kristen, being a horse owner and rider, decided it would not be a very smart idea but I guess that’s what you get when you run into drunken Swiss on the mountains!

After our adventure with the horses we headed back down the mountain and took a tour around the city for a while via tram to warm up our bodies and to eat the sandwiches we had packed for lunch. We wanted to try and go to the famous art museum there because we had heard it might be free on Sundays but once we got there we found it was definitely NOT free so we gave up on that and settled to wandering the streets of Zurich once again. However, Rodin’s Gates of Hell were outside so we did get to see that!

We walked down the Bahnhofstrasse which is apparently one of the richest streets in Europe. Not only is it lined with stores like Louis Vuitton, Chanel, and Cartier, but apparently under the street the banks have conveniently stored all of their gold. So that was pretty exciting. We also bought some delicious chocolates that were called Luxembourglis from some store and they were heavenly! At the end of the day, because everything was closed in the city we wandered through the train station for our last few hours to eat, shop, and hang out before our bus ride back home. In a cafe in the train station we found the Nadal/Federer match on a TV which of course I was excited about. I watched the last few sets to see my man, Nadal, win the Australian Open. I’m glad I didn’t celebrate too much because it did not occur to me until after I returned home that Federer is FROM Switzerland and I was sitting IN Switzerland when I was watching it. Way to go me…

All in all the trip was, as  I said, an adventure but it was such a fun time with the 5 girls I went with. Our ride home on the bus was incredibly uneventful, we weren’t stopped at the French border and we made it home in record time I’m sure. Everyone talks about how wonderful the Swiss are, and they certainly were, however I would like to end this with a few pictures to show that maybe the Swiss don’t quite have it all together upstairs….. (and I apologize for the bad word!!)

This picture was on the side of a church that was being renovated:

This man was enjoying the nice warm snow…rocking out to his ipod down the streets of Zurich

Some interesting lamp posts on the mountain–we couldn’t decide if they were reindeer, giraffes, or their love child with lights…

The Pharmacy Rat?? Well that makes me want to go buy medicine!

Finally, What Not to do on a Swiss Tram: please do not smoke in someones face, do not either have horns on your pants or watch out for pick-pockets, do not sing or play the guitar, do not saw the seats, and please do not put your spiky shoes on the seats.

If this is not enough proof, on our tram ride we also witnessed a crazy crazy man yell at his computer, “dance” all over the tram, and by dance I mean he humped the door and seats occasionally, gyrated his hips a little, threw his arms up in the air, and yelled as he did it, then spill an entire bag of chips on the floor of the tram, and when he realized the mess he had made, he proceeded to literally hop off the tram like he was about to do a long jump. Gotta love the Swiss!

The trip itself to Zurich was a once in a lifetime experience. It started with me and my friend Jenna planning out a tentative schedule the night before we left for the weekend using online tips and the Frommer’s guide. This was pretty much all the preparation we had done besides buying a bus ticket and booking a hostel. It was our first solo trip in Europe and we didn’t really know what to expect but but we found a cheap bus ticket to some where other than Strasbourg and we decided to go for it. The night before the trip Jenna came over to sleep because the walk from her house at night would have taken over an hour. Because our bus left so early in the morning, the public transportation no long ran at the time we needed to be at the bus stop so we were in bed by 10:30 preparing for the journey. My alarm went off at 3:10 and we were up and out of the house by 3:35. Fortunately my host mom and sister were gone for the weekend visiting family so we didn’t have to worry about being loud as we stumbled around trying to wake ourselves up and leave. From there we walked 20 minutes to the Landesberg tram stop where we met up with our friend Kristen and hopped in the cab we had called the night before. (Calling the cab was in itself an adventure. We had to give them an address because they didn’t understand why we wanted to get picked up at the tram stop at 4:00 so we gave the address to the grocery store right next to it.) He took us to our bus stop that we had mistakenly thought would be a bus station and found ourselves sitting outside on a bench at 4:15 am hoping that our 3 other travel companions would be able to find it. Jolyn had told us the night before that she had planned on riding her bike there so we hoped that she wouldn’t die of the cold and be able to find her way to this middle of no where bus stop. Megan, who had told us her mother recommended we tie a rope around her to keep her from getting lost, had spent the night with Lindsey, who had bought her bus ticket only 48 hours before as kind of a last minute afterthought. We were hoping that between the two of them they could find their way. By 4:30 the troop was assembled and we were ready for our bus to show up as indicated on the ticket. That is not quite what happened. There were several buses that came and went but none of them had Zurich written on them. We mistakenly tried to get on a bus to Amsterdam that hadn’t been labeled at all but we were corrected and rejected. However, the bus driver thought that the 6 of us girls were such a sight that he decided to take a picture of us…

5:00 am roles around and there is still no sign of the bus which was supposed to be there and gone by that time. We started getting worried but we figured that since there were other people there waiting and not looking worried that we would be fine. Again, not the case. At 5:30 when we finally got the guts to go over and ask the other group where they were headed, we found out that they were headed in another direction on a bus that wasn’t supposed to come until 6:00 and that usually these buses were on time and that we should probably be worried. Well shit, was what we were thinking. Here we are in the freezing cold weather at 5:30 in the morning with no bus prospects in sight. Even the Strasbourg public transportation was back up and running at this time. Then Lindsey realizes she forgot her passport at home. So now there’s no bus and there’s a high probability that even if it does show up, we might get rejected at the border because one of us doesn’t have a passport. After discussing the options, we decided that since the bus was late, there was no way that she could run home and get it because as soon as she did it would probably show up. 5:45 roles around and we see a bus on the corner of the street turning our way…we don’t hold our breath too long because every other time this has happened we were severely disappointed. We couldn’t feel our hands and feet, I had Jolyn sitting on my lap to keep my legs from going numb and the bus pulls up. We designated Kristen this time to go check out the sign and we hear a scream, “IT’S GOING TO ZURICH!!!!” I have never seen anyone move faster. Despite our numb bodies, we RAN to that bus. The grumpy driver who had clearly been driving all night, let us onto the bus, we find seats and expect to be on our way finally to Zurich. Well….not the case. Since our driver had been driving so long, due to the EU mandate, he gets a 20 minute break after driving for 2-3 hours. So after all that waiting and freezing we wait some more.

6:00 roles around and finally the bus pulls away from Strasbourg. We could care less about anything other than the fact that the bus actually came, we were actually on it, and we were going somewhere. Personally, I dozed on and off throughout the ride. It was too dark to see anything so I didn’t really care what was outside. At 7:45 we found ourselves at the Swiss border. A mean looking border control agent gets on the bus and tells everyone to get their passports. We start to get worried for Lindsey…all she had was her international student ID and a French student ID she had gotten to go to the Conservatoire to play music. We held our breath as the agent took our passports and got to Lindsey’s seat. She explained in wide-eyed panic that she had forgotten her passport, that she was a student studying in France, that these other 5 girls were on the trip with her, and that she was very very very sorry. The man scolds her and takes her ID and leaves. We waited for about 20 minutes before he came back. There were two of them now, one carrying all the passports and one carrying Lindsey’s IDs. Once again we didn’t breathe while he went to her seat and gently explained that you couldn’t travel to Schengen states without a passport, that it was irresponsible that she had forgotten it, but since she was a student studying in France and she had all of us with her to make sure she did not stay in Switzerland, that he would let it slide this time. We about all died. We couldn’t believe he was going to let her go! So the rest of the passports get handed out and we were on our way.

An hour or so later as we started seeing the signs for Zurich I made the comment that all I wanted right now was a gigantic cup of Starbucks anything. I was exhausted, my body hadn’t yet thawed (I was still wearing my scarf, coat, and gloves in the bus) and I just wanted some familiar and delicious coffee to wake me up. Well we pull into the bus stop in Zurich, get off the bus, and like a heaven-sent sign from God that he really exists, across the street we see a Starbucks. Tripping over ourselves we run across the street and within 15 minutes we were sitting in Starbucks, drinking our warm lattes, and talking about how happy we were to finally be in Switzerland. It was probably the most expensive cup of Starbucks I have ever had (which set the tone for the entire trip in Zurich) but I don’t think it has ever tasted better. The man working at the counter was excited to hear that we were from America and upon discovering that Jenna was from Wisconsin said, “OH! I have a friend that lives there now…is it true that everyone in Wisconsin really wants to get out of there as fast as they can?!” To which we all laughed, especially Jenna who has essentially moved her life to New York and never wants to go back, and were delighted to have just find someone who spoke English and was happy to help. He gave us all the directions we asked for, finished our cups of coffee, and were on our way for the day.

Here is where I have to stop for now. The journey we had to Zurich is worth a blog entry in itself…I will continue about our trip with pictures later!