europe archive 4/30/07: bonsoir!

Hey everyone!!!

We are in France and it is amazing. I am trying to adapt to the keyboard but it is even crazier than the German ones- a's instead of q's, m's next to the l's and the comma/question mark where the m's should be, w's and z's switched, and not one punctuation mark where it belongs. I'm pretty impressed with how well I'm doing so far :-)

Anyway, we basically had one full day in Paris (arrived late Friday, left midday Sunday) and our one day back in Paris was just long enough to remind me of how very much I love Croque Monsieur (the french version of grilled cheese, basically) because it is ridiculously fantastic, and we got to go in the Opera house (it was closed last time we were there) and see an extra cathedral we hadn't seen before (the one King Louis IX built to hold the crown of thorns; it's about 80 percent stained glass windows) and we spent some time at Notre Dame and the Latin Quarter which were just as lovely as we'd left them. It really only takes one bite of the food in Paris to make the entire city seem like a paradise.

Sunday we took a train to Nice in the south of France and it was the most beautiful train ride I've taken in my entire life. Cannes was especially gorgeous to go through; it looked very much like Greece actually, except more colorful. Nice turned out to be kind of the French version of Venice beach, which was a bit funny. The food is super yummy even if
I can't find Croque Monsieur or Madame anywhere. *tear*

We've been spending our time in France as leisurely as possible because this past week and a half has been incredibly whirlwind and busy- four countries in I think a total of eight days! So today was spent at the beach instead of at museums and it was just delightful....and it was so fun; afterwards we climbed tons of steps up a hill (Castle Hill?) and it started to drizzle and by the top it was POURING, except it was a wonderful warm Mediterranean rain and we were all laughing and soaking wet as we slipped and slided in flip flops all the way back to the hostel.

Anyone following along with the itinerary might notice it's changed a bit- things were getting very rushed so we've been taking our time getting from Paris to Vienna and are landing there May 2nd, then doing Salzburg and landing in Florence on the 7th, then doing Rome, Venice, and Milan in that order.

I've really been enjoying the variety of walk/don't walk lights in all these countries, by the way; perhaps because in the US you never see a red standing man representing "don't walk!" In Paris the figures were tall and lanky but here they look more like the little yellow AOL dudes, except in red and green. My favorites were in Berlin because they wore hats. They kind of looked like they were smoking pipes as well but maybe I just associate that sort of hat with smoking a pipe.

Love you all bunches and bunches,
Sara

europe archive 4/26/07: "and real Dutch people, they come from somewhere near the Netherlands, right?"

("Don't be silly. The Netherlands are like this imaginary place where Peter Pan and Tinkerbell come from.")

Hello everyone!!!

Amsterdam has been pretty whirlwind, as we really only got a day and a half here. Though that's pretty much enough to see what it's all about, I think. It has the look of a European town, with old buildings and cobblestones, the relaxed feel of Hawaii or Jamaica, with the activity of the Moulin Rouge by night. The food and weather are great and we've been able to fit in most of our "must see" things- a couple parks and museums and Anne Frank and Rembrandt's houses- and we just have the Van Gogh museum left for this morning before catching a train to Paris for the weekend. Oh, Paris. It'll be nice to be somewhere familiar. Although it's been pretty useful how everyone in Amsterdam speaks English.

Off for another busy day. Hope everyone is doing well!

Love,
Sara

europe archive 4/23/07: Praha!

is so, so pretty.

It's kind of like what Disneyland tries to be, or straight out of Ever After, or any other sort of fairy tale. Mel and Mo keep talking about architecture things that I'm not terribly familiar with since I haven't taken Art History yet (...music majors have a hard time fitting such things in their schedules?) but basically there's a bunch bunch bunch of architecture styles and around every corner is something totally different. The astronomical clock thing in Old Town Square is gorgeous, and also kind of the apostles version of the clock outside "It's a Small World," fitting with the whole Disneyland thing. It's very fun to watch it strike at the hour (in addition to the apostles going in a circle, Death turns the hour glass and pulls a string, then the apostles come out one by one and a rooster crows), and also fun to just watch the huge crowd that gathers when it strikes the hour. The giant metronome is not terribly exciting comparatively for being another city landmark; it ticks once a half hour I think and it kinda just looks like a crane. Oh well. The city as a whole is still made of fantastic-ness.

Today we went and saw the castle and the little street that Franz Kafka used to live on. The four of us have a mutual distaste for Kafka, so we mostly just perused gift stores for a little bug type souveneir, which would have amused us greatly. We didn't find one, though. Sigh. We also went on the paddle boats in the river under
St. Charles' bridge. Mo and Jill paddled, and Mel and I were lazy. Groovy times.

We also saw a play last night, Pygmalion (by George Bernard Shaw, the play that My Fair Lady was based on). It was especially interesting because it was in Czech, and also because I have never actually seen My Fair Lady so I was pretty lost until Jill filled me in at intermission. It was very funny, though. The scenes with pronounciation were hysterical, possibly moreso because of the language thing, actually;-)

Not surprisingly, the four of us sound very silly attempting the Czech language, though our attempts amuse us greatly. Today on the paddle boats we had several forceful conversations consisting of the only words we knew: "hello," "yes" "no" and "thank you" Czech as well as Polish. Although, I'm still mixing up "thank you" in both of these languages (they are pretty similar) so there was some gibberish mixed in as well.

Aside from the architecture, the greatest thing in Prague is probably the food. The Czech put cheese on pretty much everything. There's this thing called Fried Cheese- it's something else in Czech, of course, but I can't remember the words for anything in this language, much less spell them- and you can buy it on all the street vendors for about a dollar. Win. It's basically a mozzerella cheese stick, but shaped like a hamburger patty, on a hamburger bun with mayonaise and ketchup. It's one of the most amazing things I've ever eaten in my entire life and I'm completely baffled by the lack of it in the US. If I had any interest in business I would go straight home and open up a fast food chain exclusively devoted to this thing. Seriously.
We've had two each so far and if weren't for the total lack of nutritional value I would probably eat them every meal until our train tomorrow night.

Guess that's it for now- we're heading to dinner, so I probably won't get to write personal emails for a day or two depending, but the next hostel has free internet as well, so, hooray! I'm loving it. Tomorrow we are catching an evening train to Amsterdam for Jill's birthday on Wednesday:-D I am wary of the train after the fiasco that was our last one, but as all the other train rides have been lovely
and everyone seems to be in good health now and we're definitely shelling out the money for beds, it *should* be okay. I hope.

Love you all bunches and bunches,
Sara

europe archive 4/20/07: krakow!

I would begin by saying hello in Polish, but I really can't begin to spell any of the words here. So, hallo again!

We are on our third day in Krakow and I absolutely adore it. ('Three days,' you say? 'I thought you were only going to be there for two.' Yeah, yeah, we missed our morning train to Prague by about a minute and a half. Bye bye train. But it's okay because by taking a night train tonight we'll save money on a hostel anyway. Plus, Krakow turned out to be awesome. So we can pretend like it was all intentional.)

We arrived on Wednesday morning after taking a night train from Berlin. Night trains are totally rad. It's funny though, the people who come through the trains to check tickets and passports nearly give us heart attacks. On the train from Hamburg to Berlin we had a burly German woman barge in, and on the last train we had some train-men-dudes burst through the door around midnight when we went over the border. haha. Nothing like a good start to get the adrenaline going. (As a side note, every time we get on a train we talk about how we feel like we are in Harry Potter. The day trains feel like the Hogwarts Express because of the compartments, and the night trains feel like the Knight Bus because of the beds. So fun. Yeah, we're nerds.)

Anyway, Krakow turned out to be very pretty. We spent the first day exploring the castle and the church around the corner from the hostel. According to legend, a dragon ate a goat at the castle's dungeon and then drank itself to death, or something similarly exciting, so we took touristy pictures with the dragon statue. I had a kind of neat moment walking around the crypt of the church. There was this tiny stained window at the top corner of this one room, so that a bit of light came in, and I was like, "Wow, back in California, I had no idea that there was a little tiny stained glass window in the basement of a pretty church in Krakow. And now I do know." And...you all do too, now. I'm not sure why that struck me so but I thought I'd share.

Our second day here, yesterday, was a big day. We visited the Auschwitz concentration camp. I'm not sure I really want to go into detail on what it was like- you all can certainly read about it yourself but I'm not sure if anything will quite explain it. I had read about it myself and been to the Museum of Tolerance and read Elie Weisel's memoir Night and it still caught me off guard. Honestly, it was just very intense.

It makes you wonder, really, how something like that could happen. There are a thousand explanations, of course- ignorance, hate, apathy, doing horrible things because you somehow feel you're doing something right- but it's just so hard to grasp.

Well, I gotta go...the hostel has communist internet, by which I mean we all get a half hour free and but can't buy extra time, so now I've got this big lineup behind me for their half hour of free Internet time. Talk to you all soon!

Love,
Sara

P.S. Someone please forward this to Jimmy and Nancy Follmer, since I haven't had a chance to fix their email address in my mailing list yet. Thank you!

europe archive 4/16/07: streets of berlin, I must leave you soon...

(oh, will you forget me? Was I ever really here?)

Hey everyone!

Berlin is shaping up- we've had two really incredible days here since I last wrote. Yesterdaz we saw the Berlin Philharmonic!!!!!!!!!!!!! (Please multiply number of exclamation points by a much larger number.) They were PHENOMENAL. We went to see if we could get rush tickets, and they were sold out so we waited around for cancellations and got incredibly lucky with tickets for only 20 euros each. Plus, I ended up in the front row of the lowest tier of side balconies, in the seat closest to the orchestra, meaning I could literally (and did, a bit) read the music Brahm's 1st Symphony over the shoulders of the 2nd violins- I was about five feet from them. I think the only seat in the entire house that might have been better than mine was the one exactly on the opposite side of the room where the guy sitting there could read over the shoulders of the 1st violins. But then, I think the bases may have given him a less clear view of the oboists. Soo...yeah. Wow. There aren't really any words, but watching them is like this amazing sea of motion; even the wind players are incredibly physically expressive with their instruments. The string players breathed as if they were wind players themselves and at the end of really intense phrases I could hear them all breathe in at the same time. So. Crazy.

Otherwise...today we went to the Bahnhof Zoo. They have a baby polar bear there, Knut, who's literally a celebrity here in Berlin and he's in all the newspapers and people line up to have pictures taken with him, so we went to see him and he wasn't there today! It was very sad. But we saw lots of monkeys and penguins.

We also went to a church called Kaiser-Wilhein-Gedächtniskirche (nope, no clue how to pronounce it) which was bombed during World War II and left that way to show the effects of bombing. I had a hard time wrapping my mind around it, I think partially because we hadn't planned on going, we just ended up finding it and having lunch on the steps.

This evening we went to the East Side Gallery, which is basically the longest still-standing section of the Berlin Wall, covered in murals which are now becoming covered by grafitti. We walked along the entire thing ( 1.3 km) at sunset. The artwork was so moving and had all sorts of things about peace and freedom. One of my favorites was a black and white painting with two hands pushing up a foot, lifting someone else over the wall.

Tomorrow is our last day here, and then we catch a night train to Krakow, Poland, where I hear the hostel has free internet! Hooray!

Until next time,
Sara

europe archive 4/14/07: Berlin, babz

Guten tag!

The kezboards are still switching zs and ys, so bear with me.

We are now in Berlin, and all is groovz. Berlin is a weird citz. I'm not sure if I like it much but it is cool to be here nonetheless. Jill summed it up nicelz: "I feel like I'm in 1984." Me: "The book or the year?" Jill: "Yes." We are stazing in East Berlin, verz near the border, and it does feel like a time warp. Cool, though, I suppose.

Todaz has been prettz light so far. We mainlz just explored a bit and saw the museum about the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie (which was REALLZ cool.) We're stazing with some friends, Daniel and Julien, who we met through a project called Couch Surfing ( couchsurfing.com) and they are fantastic hosts. Julien is French and made us a fantastic dinner when we arrived last night. It's quite amusing all the French and Italian food we've had already on this trip, since we haven't even been to either place zet.

Internet time is still limited since the computer apartment is on the fritz, so, until next time--

much love,
Sara

europe archive 4/12/07: safely in Hamburg

Just wanted to let you all know:-)

Not much new to report at this point...tonight will be a quieter night in at the hostel (which has very nice, sunny dorms, though no private bathrooms in this one.) Hamburg is sunny and fairly warm during the day, though quite cold at night and in general filled with strange smells. I'm honestly not sure how trusting I am of German food at this point- we were warned by a few people before we came not to eat any meat if we didn't know exactly what it was!

Germany is also funny because Germans in general seem to wish to console us about being silly Americans by giving us odd candies. In the few hours we've been here so far I've received a weird flavored jolly rancher sort of treat from the airport bus driver and also a sort of cherry flavored hard candy melted into a sea shell by the restaurant owner where we ate dinner.

We did have a bit of adventure when we arrived. Jill (who has taken three years of high school in German so can at least ask people, in German, if they speak English) asked the airport dude how we should get to Hamburg, and it was like a frenzy! "Come, come, you must catch this bus or you will have to stay the night here! We must make the bus turn around and come back to get you!" It was craziness. And THEN we didn't even catch that bus, since we hadn't had a chance to go to an ATM so we didn't have enough for all four fares. Weirdly though, there was another bus leaving in a half hour. So I'm still a bit lost as to what the whole fuss was about. It's quite funny being somewhere where you don't speak the language.

Speaking of which, starting now with the language change random letters and symbols on the keyboard are switched (y's and z's, for instance, and a "#" where the " ' " should be, and no "at" szmbol at all... and thez#re quite a nuisance to change because the backspace is shifted as well, so I think on such kezboards I will saz that all z#s are y#s and vice versa. Unless that is far too confusing to read, but reallz I think it could add comedic flair, right?

Anzwaz, tomorrow will be our first daz using a Eurail pass, and we're off to Berlin! Woot!

Until then, love and hugs,
Sara

europe archive 4/11/07: dublin dublin

Hey everyone!

Dublin is so beautiful, and after that first freezing morning when we arrived it actually warmed up quite a bit. Yaaay! ("Yaaay!" is a quote from some Avenue Q characters, the Bad Idea Bears, that they say following all their cheerful suggestions. It's become a running joke here since we saw it.)

The trip has been feeling more whirlwind, since we basically have had three very busy days here and are off to Hamburg, Germany tomorrow morning. We've seen Trinity College and the library there (so. awesome.) and the National Gallery and the National History Museum (bog men!) We also went yesterday to see the Christ Church Cathedral, which was built in 1030ish and has really cool stuff like the embalmed heart of an archbishop from about 1200 years ago (it is believed that you can pray to it and it will cause miracles- one woman told Mel it had saved her mother's life) and a cat and rat from the 1800s which became mummified when one chased the other into the pipes of the organ. Crazy! We also went today to St. Patrick's Cathedral, which was beautiful and there was a choir singing there. Everyone here is so friendly, and the accents are loads of fun.

Guess that's it for now, as I don't have much time. Until next time, take care!

Love,
Sara

europe archive 4/9/07: dublin!

G'day all:-)

Dublin...is cold. And rainy. But beautiful! We arrived this morning at about 7, and buses were running slow because of the holiday so we didn't even get into the city until nearly 10, buuuut we are here now. We spent the day wandering about Dublin- we mainly saw Trinity College and found a couple nice cafes and planned our itinerary for the next few days (yay, castles and old churches and art museums.)

Easter in London was lovely, by the way- we spent the morning going on slides at the Tate Modern, which were SO FUN. The artist's explanation of them was really cool too- the idea is that you see the work from the inside and out, and it creates this feeling of excitement, and he liked to think of what the world would be like if we all went down a slide every day. (It'd be pretty groovy. Especially these slides. They were huge.) Later in the day we found Platform 9 and 3/4 (for all you Harry Potter geeks) and went to music services at Westminster Abbey. Those were lovely! There was such a pretty organ piece (Fantasie Aria by Philip Moore) and the soprano was fantastic. And, for anyone else going to Europe on a budget, going to church services is an excellent way to see the inside of these great churches for free;-)

Hope everyone had a magnificent holiday!

Love,
Sara

europe archive 4/7/07: last update from England

hellooooooo!

Not much new except for England's freakishly lovely weather for this time of year. We spent yesterday in London- visiting the Globe theatre in the morning and the Museum of Natural History in the afternoon. I'd been to the Globe before but it was so nice to visit it again; it really makes you feel like you've gone back in time...I'll send some pictures when I get a chance, but there are wood pillars painted to look like marble and thatched roofs and beautiful paintings on the ceilings, and when you're standing in the groundling section you can put your elbows right on the stage. I hope someday I get to go when it's actually in season:-p (it only runs from May to September since it's an outdoor theatre.)

The Museum of Natural History turned out to be pretty fun (there are loads of stuffed animals on display, and when you walk in there's this big dinosaur skeleton in this church-like room). We were very entertained by all the different displays with buttons to push and things.

For dinner it was a trip down memory lane and we found the Mediterranean restaurant we'd eaten at on Bayswater the last time we were in London. Tres exciting! We had fish and chips- yum:-) Then we headed across town to a theatre that was showing a dark comedy that sounded interesting, but it turned out to be closed for Good Friday. Whoops! So, we went to Covent Garden to hang out; which is just this street area with a carousel and street musicians and shopping. But totally by chance, we stumbled upon the theatre Avenue Q was playing at, and on an whim went inside to check prices. It turned out that since we were students, we could get half off tickets for best seats, which translated to 25 pounds (about 45 dollars) for the third row. OMG. It was completely fantastic and worth every penny.

Today was a quiet day in Sutton- we did laundry and went with Tilly to the park and rolled down the hill and went on the swings. We took the Huttons out for dinner as a thank you for letting us stay with them, and the whole evening was so much fun. They've been just wonderful to stay with so it was great to have a last night out with them.

So tonight we are packing, and tomorrow (Easter Sunday) will be our last day in London- we're catching the last train around 11:00 p.m. to the Luton airport, and spending the night there for our VERY early flight on Monday to Ireland. Woohoo! And fortunately, March has just passed, so it's not peak season there anymore. But the hostel we're staying at won't have free Internet access, so I expect my email checking/sending will be patchier at least until we arrive in Berlin around the 14th (we have something like four days in Ireland and a day in Hamburg in between).

I hope you all have a FANTASTIC Easter- have fun, find eggs, hang out with family, and eat GOOD food. Mmm, honey baked ham. hehe.

Loads of love to all,
Sara

europe archive 4/5/07: hello again

Hey everyone!

Just a quick update, but with pictures! [blog edit: some pictures now interspersed with other entries.] Hopefully they aren't too bad to download; I'm not sure how to downsize them on this computer.


In the past few days we've been to Stonehenge (I'm in front of the rocks in one picture), Bath (to see the Ancient Roman baths- such a pretty city), spent a day in London at the Tate Modern, Harrod's (an expensive department store), and Abbey Road (there's a picture of us crossing it!), and today we spent the day out in Guildford where Mel and Mo had college interviews and we all hung out with Seong (who some of you know as Tevye from CV's production of Fiddler on the Roof.) We had lunch at a pretty park in town and hung out at the neighborhood castle, which was small but right out of a fairy tale.










Hope everyone is doing well! Sorry for any delay in writing back to personal emails, but it's wonderful hearing from you all so please keep me posted on how you're doing!

loads of love,
Sara

europe archive 4/2/07: castles, abbeys, and carbohydrates

Hello all!

I think when I last wrote I said we were choosing between day trips to Windsor Castle and London. It has been two days and we've done both! We went to Windsor Castle first, on Sunday. It was so fun and pretty! It was a bit silly getting there- we first got on the correct line going the wrong direction (whoops!) But we arrived successfully, and had potatoes (each of us got a different topping- mine was tuna) before heading over to the castle. It was an exciting time to be there because the Queen considers it her home, so she was spending four weeks there for Easter. That meant that her flag, the Queen Standard, was flying- when she leaves, Tony the Flagman will change it to the Union Jack.

In the castle, the best things were definitely Queen Mary's Dollhouse (which has real paintings by famous artists and a working piano) and the seals and swords and armour of the Knights of the Garter. It's also always neat seeing 17th century graffiti;-)

Today we went to London and saw Westminster Abbey and had lunch in Trafalgar Square before heading over to the National Gallery. We'd intended to visit both that museum and the Tate Britain, but being the art geeks we are we ended up spending nearly five full hours wandering just the National Gallery. I'm so glad we did because really it's a toss up between that and the Louvre for my favorite museums in the world (so far!). My absolute favorite things I saw on this trip were:

Leonardo da Vinci- The Virgin of the Rocks
Peter Paul Rubens- Samson and Delilah
Delaroche- The Execution of Lady Grey
Claude Lorrain- Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba
Renoir- The Umbrellas

We have also been making audio tours of places we can't take photos in using Jill's recorder. These tours provide commentary from the Quad on very important features such as a sword with a disco ball attached to the end in Windsor Castle and the painting titled "A Very Grotesque Old Woman" in the National Gallery (which is really exactly what it sounds like.) On a similarly entertaining note, we have been very amused by the train and tube stops here. Some favorites so far have been Twickenham Station and Tooting Broadway. Yup, we are mature grown-ups.

Must be off to bed- big day tomorrow visiting Bath and Stonehenge! Hope everyone is well.

Love to all,
Sara