Easter Break 2010- Geneva

Geneva was one of my favorite places. The lake was gorgeous, the view of the Alps was breathtaking, and the UN tour was amazing!

To get from Nice to Geneva, we had to make a side trip to Milan. We only thought we were done with Italy. We didn’t see anything in Milan though, we just made it there in time to get to a creepy hostel to sleep, and then woke up to go back to the train station. We made it to Geneva in the afternoon just in time to miss the tour of CERN. Chloe is an engineering major, and really wanted to see CERN, a big scientific study location of anti-matter or something like that in Geneva. (I apologize to anyone who actually knows what CERN is; science is not my favorite subject). So we found our hostel and a grocery store and then passed out for the day.

While in Geneva we went to the UN and took a tour of the building. We had the best tour guide EVER. We took a picture with him in the end and we were supposed to find him on Facebook, but I think we lost his e-mail. He liked to make fun of our Texas accents; he said “ya’ll” a lot. Obviously being a tour guide there was just his side job, normally he worked in some legal department at the UN. Fun fact, his roommate works at CERN, we had a good laugh at how smart their apartment must feel. Here are some cool facts I learned on the tour of the UN:

1. There are 192 member states and 2 honorary members, the Vadican- because it chooses not to be an active member, and Palestine, because it doesn’t have set borders.
2. The 6 official languages of the UN are English, Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and French.
3. There are about 10 peacocks that live on the grounds. Meetings have had to been stopped because of the loud obnoxious mating calls.
4. The UN headquarters in NY are the official political headquarters while the Geneva headquarters mainly focuses on human rights.
5. All other branches of the UN (other than NY and Geneva) are just operational branches, including one in Vienna.
6. A bunch of other historical facts that I won’t bore you with, or out myself for not already knowing them.

Like I said before, Lake Geneva is beautiful. A couple of different times, we just ate our lunch while sitting on a bench by the lake. One evening we walked around it and went out to a lighthouse. There are swans nesting on the side of it. I don’t know that I have ever seen a swan this close before, they are rumored to get violent if you annoy them.

We met a girl named Natalia in our hostel who was there for 2 weeks interning at the UN. She is a translator, she spoke English, Russina, French, and Spanish I think. She was officially translating English to Russian. She was super sweet and smart, and I decided that she should marry my friend Justin Bauman (who is studying in Russia right now), but I didn’t get her full name or anything, so… sorry Justin.

I LOVED Geneva. I would really like to go back there in the summer time. Our tour guide said it was amazing then. Visiting made me really excited to go back to Switzerland with my family in July.

Easter Break 2010- Florence

The trip from Rome to Florence was eventful. We got to the train station with 3 minutes to spare before our train left, the only problem was that we couldn’t find it, so we ran… and running with a 65L backpack is not fun. Not fun at all. We missed our train and got on another one that left 30 minutes later, so it really wasn’t that big of a deal. Oh yes, let me tell you why we missed the train. There was free breakfast at our hostel, and in an effort to save money on food the rest of the day, we stuffed our faces and threw food into bags to take with us. Hoarding free breakfast was a skill that we perfected by the end of the trip, but that is another story. Anyway, back to the traveling. We went from Rome to Pisa to see the Leaning Tower, which I thought was a little disappointing. It was exactly like the pictures look. The weather was rainy and cold on the day we went, and so all we did was walk to the tower and then turn around and walk back to the train station. The pictures we took were very unimpressive too; sorry Mom, I didn’t take any pushing it over pictures. Then we got on another train to Florence and were there by dinnertime. But we didn’t have to buy dinner because we still had free breakfast food left over, yum.

Checking into our hotel was a little scary because somehow our reservation was lost, and there weren’t any 3-person rooms anywhere because it was Easter Sunday. Did I mention the hotel clerk didn’t speak English? Well she didn’t, but she was so sweet, and eventually put us in a 2-person room for a discounted price (we just squeezed on the bed).

My favorite thing that we saw in Florence was the Dome of the Florence Cathedral. It is a double dome, and it was a 1 hour wait in line and over 500 stairs to the top. The view was gorgeous, you could see for miles and miles (or kilometers and kilometers). I also saw The David while in Florence. It was surprisingly larger than I thought it was. It was absolutely amazing; you could see the veins in his arms! I got yelled at for taking a picture of him so you better appreciate it!

It is hard to say what was my favorite place in Italy, because they were all so different. I got to see so much in Rome, but I loved the laid-back schedule and atmosphere in Florence. Florence was our last Italian city, or so we thought, so we got our fill of Pasta and gelato, and headed to Nice!

Easter Break 2010- Rome

The first night we got to Rome we didn’t have much time to see a lot, but we did have time for Charlotte to get a fine on public transportation. They take validating tickets seriously. Here is what happened: we had to take the underground and a bus to get to our hostel, and we bought 1 hour tickets and validated them before getting on the underground. When we were headed to the bus, Charlotte realized that she had dropped her ticket and bought a new one. When we got on the bus she didn’t know that she had to validate it, and we were on the only bus with people checking for tickets. The guy was a complete jerk, took her passport, and made us get off the bus. We tried really hard to talk our way out of it, (there might have been a few tears threatening to come out) but in the end Charlotte paid 50 Euros, and we all learned a lesson… transportation guys are jerks. We did walk to the Vatican that night. It was Easter weekend, so they were setting up for a big service. This is kind of sad, but one of the fist things that came to mind was Angels and Demons.

The next morning we went really early to get in line for the Vatican Museum and Sistine Chapel. The line was an hour and a half long, but totally worth it. We met a pair of girls later on the trip that said the next day the wait was 5 hours! The inside of the museum was very interesting; the Catholic Church collects A LOT of things. A LOT. There were tons of statues and paintings. The Sistine Chapel shocked me; it was smaller than I imagined it, but the artwork was amazing. I can’t believe one man did that.

After the Vatican we started walking towards the Coliseum; which left me speechless. I don’t know that my mind has comprehended yet; that has been there for thousands of years, and I saw it. We didn’t get there in time to go in that day, they were closing early for some reason, and so we walked to the Trevie Fountain. It was one of my favorite sites in Rome, well that is hard to say because everything was amazing. Tradition has it that you are supposed to throw two coins into the fountain: the first to ensure your return to Rome and the second to grant a wish. And no I won’t tell you what I wished for, but I think it’s pretty much a sure thing that at some point in my life I will return to Rome.

That night was our last night to eat at a sit down restaurant in Italy (my budget wouldn’t have made it eating out every day). We had pasta, and I couldn’t decide if I wanted cream sauce or meat sauce on my tortellini, so I asked the waiter If I could have a mix, and he said no. Then when he brought our plates he had split my order in two, so I could have both sauces. It was the sweetest thing ever. Oh and of course we got gelato again that night. I decided the walking cancelled out all the extra calories, and WHO CARES about calories… IT’S REAL GELATO!!!

The next day was full as well. We went to the Roman ruins, the Coliseum, and the Pantheon. The Roman ruins were beautiful. And we decided that we traveled during the perfect season, because the weather was gorgeous, it wasn’t too warm, it was perfect! The inside of the Coliseum was almost eerie. I had a hard time dealing with the thought that thousands of people were okay with people fighting animals or even other people to the death. By the time we got to the Pantheon I was exhausted, but I’m glad I saw it. Oh, I forgot to mention that our hostel in Rome was on the beach, that morning we went down to the beach took pictures; it was so fun, if it wasn’t Rome and we didn’t have so much to see, a day at the beach would have been wonderful.

That was it for Rome. It is one of the places that I really can’t believe I got to see, and I’m so thankful for the opportunity to do so. The history behind it, the atmosphere, it was all very incredible.

Easter Break 2010- Venice

Day 1 was the first and only problem-free travel day. Our train left at 8:30 from the stop right across from my housing, convenient I know. I didn’t sleep much (at all) the night before. I was too excited, and I had to do laundry, and I kept repacking my backpack. It turned out I packed very efficiently; the only thing I didn’t wear was my bathing suit. My housing has free breakfast, so I grabbed a sandwich and ran to meet Chloe and Charlotte at the train station.

Background information/introductions- Charlotte is my friend from A&M who is also studying in Vienna. Chloe and Charlotte went to high school together, and she is studying in Wales this semester and also got a 3 week Easter Break. Chloe and Charlotte were the navigators of the trip; I am slightly directionally challenged. But I had a watch! So I kept us on time, that’s an important job right?

The train ride was around 5 hours; thank goodness I needed time to nap. When I wasn’t sleeping the scenery was gorgeous. The mountains and countryside here are breathtaking. We had to switch to a bus at some small town in Italy, and we thought we were going to miss it, but we didn’t (looking back now, we were way too worried about that), and were dropped off in Venice. We were only a short 10-minute train ride away from our final destination. When we got into Venice we bought a map and headed to our hotel… or so we thought. Venice was a little bit hard to navigate in because there weren’t street signs on every street, and when there were there was no guarantee that it would be on the map. But one nice thing about Italy, was that if we looked the slightest bit lost someone would offer to help us; even this one old man who didn’t let the fact that he didn’t speak English and we didn’t speak Italian stop him from trying to point us in the right direction. We found our hotel; we had a 3 person private room that night, and it was so nice! We went to find food. Italian pizza and wine, nothing is better. Then we went to bed, it was an exhaustingly wonderful first day.

The next day we saw St. Mark’s Basilica; it was beautiful. Then we just walked around the city; the canals really make it gorgeous. We stared longingly wishing someone would pay 80 Euro for us to go on a gondola ride; I thought about trying to flirt my way on to one, but chickened out. That afternoon we had our first real gelato experience, and I think we had gelato everyday in Italy after that. That night we bought a deck of cards (best purchase of the trip… they were a little steep at 6 Euro), and just hung out and played cards in Venice. It felt absolutely surreal that I was actually there. Hearing all of the Italian made me wish I were learning it instead of German (that’s not going well, by the way).

The next morning we went to the train station with hopes of getting on a 10 o’clock train to Rome. We waited in line to get reservations and were informed that there were no open spots until the 2 o’clock train. Awesome. It turned out well though, we sat outside in the beautiful weather playing cards, and then in a few short hours we were on our way to Rome.

Easter Break 2010 in a Paragraph

The WU knows how to do Easter Break; students got 3 weeks off from school. I think I might e-mail Dr. Loftin (the Texas A&M president) and suggest it. Anywho, during the 3 weeks I traveled with my friends Charlotte and Chloe. I would like to point out that I lived out of a 65L traveler's backpack for those 3 weeks, and learned I can pack light and wear the same 2 pairs of shoes for 20 days after all. We started out in Italy, going to Venice, Rome, and Florence. Then we went to Nice in southern France, next was Geneva, Switzerland. Then we went back to France to Paris, and we finished in Bern, Switzerland. Our trip was plagued with travel delays because of a train strike in France, but honestly the “bumps in the road” made for the best memories. I’m planning on blogging by city about my trip, so stay tuned! Oh yes, I put up all my pictures on Facebook, so go look at them!

Best Morning Ever

I'm writing to you from the halls at the WU. I have a class that starts in 10 minutes; it's my last class for the week. That's right, I'm done on Tuesday, be jealous.

Anyway, this morning was just wonderful. I woke up before my alarm went off, which is really weird for me. It was 7 am here so it was midnight on Texas time. I thought that Mark was probably still awake, so I talked to him for a little while. Then I got ready for school and went down early for breakfast. Background: at my housing there is free breakfast; most mornings I just run in grab a role and run to the subway. This morning I had time to sit and enjoy breakfast and I realized that I could totally pack a sandwich for lunch and no one would notice. In-fact, I watched a guy pack his bag with 3 sandwiches and no one said anything. So I had toast with jelly and butter, some cheese and bread, yogurt and granola, and then packed a sandwich for lunch. So I've eaten like a fatty and haven't spent a cent. It's so exciting! Then, I was walking to the subway and someone was handing out free chocolate (with a promo postcard), FREE CHOCOLATE!!! And to top it off it is a beautiful day outside! Oh, and the class I just finished doesn't meet again until May 18th.

I just reread all of this and none of it sounds amazing, so I guess I just woke up on the right side of the bed.

Around the world in 80 days… or 3 weeks, it’s whatev

European schools know how to do Spring Break, or Easter Break, as they refer to it here. My last day of class before the break is Tuesday, March 23rd, and my first class after the break is Monday, April 19th. That is a 3 week break! And we’ve just been in class 2 weeks! When I’m still going to class in June and everyone back home is done, I might complain, but I’m in Austria!!! SO WHO CARES!!!

During my break I will be backpacking with Charlotte (a friend from A&M who is also in Wien) and Chloe (Charlotte’s friend who is studying in Wales this semester). We leave in the morning, Tuesday March 30th, for Italy, Swizterland, and finish in Paris. I’ll be home at the latest on Sunday, April 18th. Expect a blog update about it.