Slowly but surely

Slowly but surely, I am captioning all of my winter break photos. Now up: Croatia, Switzerland, Strasbourg, and Luxembourg and Trier. Coming (relatively) soon: France (Paris, Rouen, Avignon, Nimes, Nice, Monaco, Marseilles, Chartres) and Spain. That'll catch you up on all of my Christmas break travels, but Christmas break ended a month ago, so what have I been up to since then you may well be wondering?

Here's an overview:

-I've hosted a lot of visitors in February: 5 kids from the Dublin program [my friend Kaitlyn and some new friends :) ], another friend Annapatrice (Dublin) and her friend Emily (Athens), and two friends from the Innsbruck program, Maria and Kate. Having all of them here has been awesome, but it's definitely made me feel like I'm still on vacation and not actually starting a new academic semester, which is a bit of a problem.

-Also contributing to the feeling that I'm still on vacation would be the fact that I've already taken another trip this semester. At the end of last week I went to Brussels with a few other students from my European Energy Policy course to attend the annual Energy Conference put on by a prominent French think tank, IFRI. The conference was awesome - they really pulled in a wide range of speakers: an economist from BP, a statistician from the IEA, a former Secretary General of OPEC, a representative of Deutsche Bank, and the chief US and Indian negotiators from the Copenhagen summit, to name a few. So I learned a lot, but also had a lot of fun with kids from my class. Here's a picture of all of us at the conference - we even got to sit at official tables with microphones and water glasses and translation headphones!

-I'm going to church regularly now at the American Church in Paris. I went one Sunday on a whim to check it out on my own. To my utter amazement, just after I sat down on a side pew because I was late (shocker), my phone started vibrating in my pocket. Now, I don't get very many Sunday morning text messages, so I was slightly perplexed to begin with, but was fairly dumbfounded when I actually opened the message and saw that it said "hey come sit in the back row". I scrolled down and saw that the message was from my friend from SciencesPo (originally UChicago). Weird study abroad coincidence #27 (approximately). Anyway, the rest is history - it's a pretty cool interdenominational protestant church and it's great to sing some hymns and hear a sermon in English. They also have free coffee after the service and that basically sealed the deal for me ;)

-DANI CASTELLI IS IN PARIS FOR THE SEMESTER! This merits all caps and an exclamation point because I really am that excited about it. Dani is one of my best friends from high school and it's amazing to get to spend a semester of college with her, and even more amazing that we're doing it in Paris. It's great to have a really close and old friend here to share Paris with me. We're also going to be doing some travelling together, which I'm sure will be nothing short of epic.

-I got a summer internship! I'll be interning with Notre Dame's Office of Sustainability and I couldn't be more excited. I'll be working in an area I'm interested in, getting paid (!), and living on campus. I've missed Notre Dame so much this year and I'm glad I get to "make up" a few of the months that I've been away by being there this summer.

-I'm running for Walsh Hall president. I'm equally excited about this - I definitely want to be involved in Student Government when I get back to campus and I LOVE WALSH, so what better combination? Campaigning from abroad is proving to be a little tricky, but I'm fairly confident that I'll be well represented by my VP candidates Antoinette Day and Heather Markel and my campaign manager Alexa Doyle :)

Well, I'm meeting Dani in the morning to go see Valentine's Day (in English - I really don't see the point of seeing American movies in French - more on movies in a later post), so I'm going to wrap this up here, but hopefully I'll be getting back into a groove of blogging as well as getting into a groove of academics.

España!

This is another solo journey for me, but not for long! I left Paris this morning at 9:45AM on a TGV that took me all the way to Irun, a Spanish town just past the French border. So I’m now on a Spanish train from Irun to Madrid, where I will spend the night in a hostel by myself because I won’t arrive until around 10:30pm. But tomorrow morning I’m headed to Toledo, where I will be greeted with open arms by two of my friends from Walsh: Stephanie Makar and Sarah Skillen!

As usual, I’m fairly nervous about the 24 hours or so that I’ll be spending alone in Spain. But of that time, like 80% of it should be spent either on a train or sleeping in my hostel so there aren’t too many opportunities for disaster. Really all I need to do is navigate Madrid’s metro to get to my hostel tonight and again to get to the bus station tomorrow morning and figure out how to buy the correct bus ticket to get me to Toledo and then I will have Spanish-speaking friends to guide me.

Notes on today’s travels: I understand why Spanish trains have what I thought were unreasonably high reservation fees even with the rail pass (ok, so 6E50 isn’t that unreasonable, but when compared to the free trains in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and the 3E TGV reservation fees in France, I think it’s reasonable that I was put off by the Spanish fees). But anyway, the long and the short of it is: this is a nice train. There’s at least 50% more legroom than on the TGV I was just on, it’s impeccably clean, there’s plenty of luggage space (the overhead racks are actually wide enough to fit a normal piece of luggage), I just received a free set of earphones so I can listen to the radio or hear the audio of a movie that I presume will soon start playing on the TVs in the middle of the car. Once they add electrical outlets, this train will be perfect.

My only other complaints with the Spanish train system so far are: 1. The station in Irun had absolutely no food whatsoever 2. The woman across from me keeps talking to her dog in Spanish and the dog is now looking at me somewhat askance (if a dog’s look can be interpreted as askance). To solve issue number 1, I think I will soon go in search of a food car and hope it’s not too expensive. Unfortunately I got off to kind of a late start this morning, mostly because I was familiar with the Paris train station I was leaving out of, which meant I didn’t have anywhere near my normal dose of pre-travel anxiety. Anyhow, this meant that I was not able to stop at a grocery store/bakery for a baguette and cheese, so I was relatively unprepared food-wise with only a half-full jar of peanut butter and nothing to spread it on. Not that that last part stopped me from eating my peanut butter – I enjoyed several spoonfuls on my TGV ride, which served as my lunch until we made a 10 minute stop in Bordeaux, so I was able to hop off and grab some food from a vending machine. Needless to say, this still did not make for a very filling or nutritious lunch. So I was really looking forward to grabbing a sandwich during my 20 minute layover in Irun, but no such luck.

Well I have a window seat, so I’m going to take advantage of the last half hour or so of daylight to try to soak in as much of the Spanish countryside as I can!

Hasta luego!

Update: the woman with the dog is not the strangest of my fellow passengers. Her seatmate, another middle-aged Spanish woman clearly takes the cake in the “weird but awesome” category. Weird: she’s been singing along with the train radio station. Well, singing might be a bit too generous of a term actually. I mean she hasn’t been belting out Spanish lyrics or anything – she’s mostly been halfway between humming and singing and it hasn’t been too loud – except for one song which I guess she knew particularly was just really feeling, and that was fairly loud and distracting. Also in the category of slightly weird, but not socially unacceptable, she came and sat next to me and tried to have me help her with her computer, even after I think I had fairly clearly conveyed that I do not speak Spanish. So I really had no idea what she wanted me to do with her laptop, which she had clearly just bought – it still had all the protective stickers and advertising stickers on it. Anyway, I think she was trying to connect to a wireless network, but it was impossible for me to explain anything useful to her, so she just got frustrated and gave up while it was trying to connect. So then she was trying to shut the computer down and couldn’t figure that out, so I was at least semi-helpful on that score, though I still wasn’t sure if she really wanted to turn it off or just hibernate it or what. And then like an hour later, she gave me grapes, thus officially making her awesome as well as weird. Fun times with cultural exchanges.

Also, they did in fact show a movie on the train “Mi Vida en Ruinas,” which I’m fairly confident I translated correctly as “My Life in Ruins” – it’s an American movie (with the actress from My Big Fat Greek Wedding) but of course they were showing it dubbed in Spanish, with Catalan subtitles. Even so, I’m pretty sure I only missed minor plot points by watching without audio while piecing together some English and French cognates in the subtitles.

Oh and I did find the food car and got a tortilla bocadilla – a fantastic kind of sandwich that I was exposed to when I went to Barcelona during first semester. Basically a bocadilla is just a grilled sandwich (apparently distinct from a Panini, at least according to this train menu) and when the Spanish talk about “tortilla” it is not the same as a “tortilla” in Mexican or “Tex-Mex” cuisine – here tortilla is sort of an omelet with potatoes as far as I can tell. At any rate, they’re delicious - especially when all one has eaten all day is straight peanut butter and some oreos….

Final update: I made it to my hostel, which is… lively. I think most of my roommates are out on a pub crawl right now, so we’ll see how much sleep I get…

Catching My Breath

I got back home* from Scandinavia a little after noon on Sunday and I was pretty exhausted after travelling by myself, so I was really excited to take a nap in my own bed. On my way back I finally managed to figure out how I was going to get myself to Spain before my flight out of Madrid that I had already booked for Saturday. My rail pass ends on Wednesday, so I just needed to get to Madrid/Toledo by then at the latest, which is exactly when I'll get there. I have two trains all day Wednesday to get into Madrid, but for awhile it looked like I wouldn't make it at all, so I'm quite happy with those. However, that meant that I had Monday and Tuesday free to either relax and get myself organized for second semester or find a new, quick travel destination.

I couldn’t bear the thought of completely wasting those two days of my rail pass, so I took a day trip to Chartres. Since it’s only an hour from Paris and tickets were only 13E full price (free for me), Meghan came with me, so it was nice to have someone else with me. Why Chartres? Why for the world-renowned cathedral of course. The cathedral of Chartres is, I believe, the largest and second oldest Gothic cathedral in France (behind Notre Dame de Paris J) and has one of the most impressive collections of stained glass in the world. Four of the windows in the church survived a fire in 1164, so they are particularly impressive for their age. Another unique/famous aspect of the stained glass there is the quality/clarity/intensity of blue in the stained glass – at it was pretty impressive in person, I’d say. Oh, and the cathedral was one of the very first UNESCO World Heritage Sites – also where King Henry IV was crowned king of France.

On the whole, I’m glad we went, because it’s one of those places one ought to make sure to go if one spends a significant amount of time in Paris, but we picked kind of a miserable day to do it. It was a shaping up to be a gorgeous day in Paris as we were leaving (around 45 degrees, which feels like 60 when you have that kind of weather randomly in January), but when we got off the train in Chartres only an hour away, it was frigid. Taking a lengthy tour of the cathedral didn’t help warm us up either – I’m pretty sure it was colder in the damp, shaded cathedral than it was outside – you could definitely still see your breath inside. We also didn’t realize that because it was a) winter and b) a Tuesday that would mean that nearly everything else of interest in the town would be closed. So we spent about an hour in the cathedral, then at least an hour getting a hot lunch (soup and coffee) before heading pretty much straight back to the train station to catch a train back to Paris two hours earlier than we had originally planned.

*Paris really does feel like home at this point – especially when coming back from traveling in countries where I don’t speak the language even to the still somewhat limited extent that I speak French. Fun fact: based on days lived in the city, I’m pretty sure I’m officially more Parisian than Phoenician.

Flying Solo

Well, I guess “Training Solo” would be a more accurate title, but that just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. Either way you look at it, I’m traveling alone through Europe, and I’m more than a little apprehensive about it. As I write, I’m on a train between Saarbrücken and Mannheim, Germany. I just had a rather confusing switch from a French TGV to a German IC train that no one knew we were going to have to make…

… and that’s where I stopped writing for awhile on train 1.5 of my solo travel adventure and started freaking out because I simultaneously realized two things:
1. My train was 16 minutes late because of the strange switch we’d had to make.
2. I only had a 19-minute layover at my next station.
Needless to say, this caused some mild consternation on my part. For the next 40 minutes or so I was frantically flipping through my rail timetable seeing if there was any possible way that I could make it to Cologne in time for my night train if I missed my connection in Mannheim. (There wasn’t). So my game plan was basically just pray that I made it in time, which fortunately ended up working out – ah, the power of prayer. Anyone remember the “ah, the power of cheese” commercials? Because that’s definitely what I was channeling right there… At any rate, I made it, but only barely. I, along with nearly all of the other passengers on my delayed train sprinted off the train as soon as the doors would open at Mannheim, which incidentally, is before the train actually comes to a complete stop. My cell phone said it was 20:35, which was when my train was supposed to leave, but, encouraged by the fact that they had still announced my train as one of the connections, I decided to sprint for platform 8 and see if I could make it. Turns out this train was also slightly delayed, but only by about 5 minutes, so it was basically getting ready to leave by the time I got there. I frantically tried to figure out which car I was in because for one of the first times in my train travels, the cars did not all connect and I needed to make sure I at least got on the correct half of the train. So after frantically gesturing between my ticket with the car number and the train to several train attendants on the platform, one of the pointed me all the way down to the far end of the train. Of course. After some more sprinting, I finally arrived in my car. I was surrounded by a rather loud group of Australian schoolchildren, but really didn’t mind because I made it!

(On a side note, if I didn’t make it, I was looking at other night train options from Frankfurt, so I almost ended up in Milan, from where I probably would have gone to see my friend Maria in Bologna, so I was momentarily ok with missing my train… and then I realized that that night train was probably already fully booked, at which point my panic recommenced.)

My switch at Köln went smoothly, but that was my first experience with a couchette car on a night train, so let me describe it for you. Each couchette compartment is about 6 feet long, 4.5 feet wide, and 9 feet high. There’s a middle pathway about 1.5 feet wide and two sets of three beds stacked on top of each other on either side. So for those of you keeping track at home, that’s a total of 243 cubic feet in the compartment, which once you subtract the middle pathway space, comes out to about 27 cubic feet per person. Each person gets about 18 cubic feet to sleep in – good luck if you’re over 6 feet tall. According to my calculations, hat leaves 9 cubic feet per person for luggage. On my first night train, this last part caused some struggles. By the time I got on the train at Köln, there were already 3 people in my car, and all of the beds were pulled out. (Before people start sleeping, the second bed is folded down to be a seat back so that everyone can sit on the bottom bed). My bed was the bottom one on the left side. Directly above me was an older woman who was already in bed/ready to sleep. Above her was another twenty-something girl who also got on at Köln. The bed across from me was still empty, the middle bed was occupied by another girl my age (Swedish, but spoke very good English), and the top bed belonged to a man that I literally think I saw twice during the 12 hours I was on the train.

Unfortunately the bed across from me did not stay unoccupied for too long. Shortly, we were joined by another middle-aged woman. This woman was, well, interesting. For one thing, she was the one who probably struggled the most with the approximately 9 cubic feet of luggage space we each had. To be fair, she got on last, so most of the easily accessible luggage space had already been claimed, but she came in with one very large suitcase and then at least four plastic bags full of who knows what. Not finding anywhere to put her suitcase, she put it in the hallway of the train, which she was told she could not do. This upset her. Then she realized she didn’t have a pillow. This also upset her. The door to our compartment was difficult to close. This upset her as well. This woman was just generally upset for the entire journey, constantly huffing and sighing about something or jabbering angrily in what I am now guessing was probably Serbian, but I actually have no idea. My guess of Serbian is based on the fact that when we had our passports checked in the middle of the night at the Danish border, she identified herself as from “Yugoslavia”. I’m still fairly baffled by that one, because I’m pretty sure she couldn’t still have a Yugoslavian passport… seeing as it hasn’t been a country for at least 18 years or so….

Other than that, the ride was pretty uneventful. I got a decent amount of sleep – definitely more than I got on the night trains I took where I just had a seat. So I arrived in København around 10:30 AM, fairly well rested. Oh wait, there was another “event” on my night train journey – in the morning, I’m pretty sure a girl set off the train’s fire alarm by straightening her hair in one of the washrooms. We never discovered for sure the source or reason of the piercing siren that starting screeching through our train car, but we decided not to be too concerned by it, because, you know, alarms rarely signal catastrophe or anything actually serious.

Where was I? Right, København! Well, right before heading to the train station in Paris, I printed out a google map with directions to my hostel from the train station. The hostel itself gave directions on its website, but those involved taking a bus which I would 1. Have to find and 2. Have to pay for. Therefore, I went with the walking option, which google informed me would only take 26 minutes – not too bad. (Granted, google also informed me that those directions might direct me to streets that didn’t have pedestrian walkways…). But it worked out just fine. I kind of dawdled on my way because I wasn’t sure what time I would be allowed to check into the hostel and definitely didn’t want to get all the way out there and then not be able to actually check in. So I poked around a little park and hung out on one of the canals for a bit. Yes, I literally hung out on the canal because it was frozen solid and there were other people walking and skating on it, so I figured it was pretty safe for me to do the same.

I got to my hostel, had no problem checking in, then spent some time to organize my stuff in a locker, eat some lunch, and use the wifi to let people know that I made it safely and with all of my valuables, despite not being able to lock my bag to a luggage rack, which, as my mother has recently advised me, is what The Esteemed Rick Steves does when he travels by rail. (Please don’t think I’m making light of securing your valuables on trains – this is indeed very important and requires due vigilance, I’m merely poking a little fun at 1. My family’s mildly absurd faith in anything said by Rick Steves and 2. The fact that my mother decided to give me this advice on train safety after I had already taken approximately 25 trains over the course of three weeks.)

My hostel was called “Sleep in Heaven” and was a pretty good hostel all things considered. It was kind of far away from the historic area/city center and they charge you extra for sheets and breakfast, but I have no problem navigating my way into town and I planned ahead and brought my own sheets (a sleeping bag liner actually – a last-minute purchase in the States that turned out to be worth the investment) and food for breakfast. They also had free internet – two computers and wifi. The room I was in had three-tiered bunk beds, which one online review had said were confusing, but after the three-tiered beds in the cramped sleeping car, this was no problem at all for me.

So in the early afternoon I set out to do at least part of one of the walking tours plotted out on the map of Copenhagen I had gotten from the hostel. Highlights (see pictures for details): the grave of Hans Christian Andersen, the Round Tower (oldest still functioning observatory in Europe), the first of three royal residences, a national museum, another park, the Kastellet (fort), the Little Mermaid statue, the Marble Church, and the second of three royal residences. I got to this last one around 4:00pm and it was already almost completely dark, so I wandered around some of the main shopping streets, bought a loaf of bread and then got back to the hostel to figure out some of my plans for Spain next week.

Saturday morning I took an early(ish) train across the Oresund Bridge from Kobenhavn to Malmö, Sweden. Definitely worth it to be able to say I’ve been to Sweden. There was a decent amount of stuff to see in Malmö, but it was freezing and my camera battery died halfway through, so I ended up spending a grand total of about 2 hours in Sweden. But it still counts – especially since I saw an IKEA from the train, which really just encapsulates the essence of Sweden. Again, see photo captions for more details on Malmö.

So I got back to Kobenhavn around 12:30, went directly back to my hostel to charge my camera battery and charge my own “battery” with a cup (ok, two cups) of coffee. So by the time I was headed out again I knew I only had about 2 ½ more hours of daylight to take advantage of, so to be able to walk as quickly as possible and not have to back track to the hostel, I ditched my pack in a locker at the train station.

Highlight of the afternoon: the Danish Museum, not the one I had passed before, but a different one, which was free! It had some great exhibits on Danish history and a special exhibit on climate (surprise, surprise), was really cool because they had things like ice core samples seeing as most of those are from the Greenland ice shelf and Denmark owns Greenland. See photos for fun historical facts.

Lowlight of the afternoon: all of the churches I tried to go to were closed by 3pm. What kinds of churches close at 3 pm?

However, with the last of my Danish kroner and my final hours in Copenhagen, I fulfilled two life goals: 1. Owning a hat with ear flaps and 2. Eating a Danish danish in Denmark. Life is good.

[In case the link snuck past you earlier, click here for the rest of my Denmark and Sweden photo album]

Slovenia

So AJ and I finally sat down around 9:30pm Christmas night to figure out where we were going the next day – we figured it was about time. Semi-jokingly I had suggested earlier that we deviate from our original (but vague) plan of Switzerland and France to add a side trip to Croatia, since with all of my new-found cartographic knowledge I realized that we were in fact quite close to the Balkans… So we looked up the train times and figure out that it was actually fairly feasible to get to Slovenia and Croatia and that it was definitely the most reasonable time for both of us to get to that part of Europe.

We quickly read through AJ’s guidebook’s sections on Slovenia and Croatia to learn the essentials (currency, language…) and figure out where we wanted to visit. Our first stop was just a little ways inside the Slovenian border in a town called Bled (Side note: the train ride to Bled was GORGEOUS. There had just been a snow and they had gotten just that perfect amount to coat all of the tree branches and we went through a couple adorable little towns nestled in Alpine valleys – a few dozen houses grouped around a single church spire. Incredible.) Anyway Bled, which we eventually figured out was pronounced more like “blade” than “bled”, was a fantastic little town on a lake. It had three major sights: an island with church, a castle on a cliff overlooking the lake, and another church along the lakeshore. An exhibit in the castle referred to these three as “the three buildings of Bled”, however, there were in fact more than those three buildings… notably there was a casino on the lakeshore that we kept getting as a point of reference any time we asked for directions.

To get to Bled, we actually had to get off at a train station in Lesce and then take a bus, which wasn’t too complicated, though it might have been nice if the train station had been open. The information center and ticket office and all of that was completely closed up – I think the 26^th of December is still an official holiday in a lot of European countries. Thankfully the bus was still running and other things were open. By the time we got to the lake, it was already starting to get a little dark outside – it was probably only 3 or 4 in the afternoon, but since it’s the dead of winter and we were in a valley, sunset was pretty early. So we got there a little too late to make it out to the island (bummer), but we walked around the lake to the church and then up to the castle.

Getting up to the castle was kind of an adventure. We had to wind our way up some forest trails (with our full packs), but it was more than worth it. The view from the top was awesome – here’s a view of the lake and island from the castle:

We went through the castle museum which gave us a bunch of information on the area around Bled from glacial valley to Roman settlement to Napoleon’s influence to Slovenian independence. By the time we left the castle it was already pretty dark (because we are nothing if not thorough in museum exhibits – if you’ll allow me a Zorb family reference, AJ approaches nearly all museums the way Brian approached the Ripley’s Believe it or Not museum – EVERY informational sign must be read). Anyway, we climbed back down the wooded trails in the dark. Fun times – this would not be our last late-night walking in the dark adventure (see Switzerland…).

We grabbed dinner at a kebab joint. I have no doubt that kebab stands will be coming soon to an American town near you because they are absolutely everywhere in Europe, it’s only a matter of time before the market here is fully saturated and they reach out across the pond. Instead of a Wendy’s or Arby’s or McDonald’s on each corner, there’s an independently run kebab stand where you can get a sandwich (and if you’re lucky fries and a drink) for right around 5 euro. This kind of street food is ideal for students and travelers, and above all, traveling students, so this also would not be our last kebab.

We caught a bus back to the train station and then a train to Ljubljana, where we were going to spend the night. So we arrived in Ljubljana after dark and without a hostel reservation, which was basically our SOP for the entire trip. But thanks to AJ’s guidebook and an ad in the train station, we found a hostel that had been converted from a former Soviet prison and we decided we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to say we spent the night in an Eastern European jail cell, so we decided to spring for that slightly more expensive hostel. It was definitely worth it. It was a really nice hostel (they served a great breakfast – unlimited coffee and a fantastic cheese – and yes, that is a major factor in my evaluation of a hostel’s quality) and didn’t actually end up being that expensive. Fortunately and unfortunately, it didn’t really resemble a prison very much anymore, though we managed to lock ourselves into our room for a little bit because the room had a fairly sophisticated double locking door system that baffled me at least for awhile. There were at least bars over the window, though:

The next morning (Sunday the 27^th for those of you keeping track), we walked around the city of Ljublana, which was very walkable. We had time to walk into about 5 different masses in Slovene, climb up to another castle, and wander through the town’s Christmas market, before catching an afternoon train to Zagreb, Croatia.

Highlights of Ljubljana:

- Founding legend: Legend has it that the first settlement at Ljubljana was created by none other than Jason, of Jason and the Argonauts (I don’t think he arrive on the Argo, so his companions probably couldn’t be called Argonauts in this case…)

- Dragons: the city’s symbol is the dragon, so there was a bridge with really cool dragons on it, but even more fantastic was the dragon exhibit in the castle. We when down some stairs into one of the rooms of the castle that was open, only to be greeted by a soundtrack of strange creaking and growling noises and the sight of about fifty neon-colored, 2-feet tall paper maché dragons. The exhibit wasn’t clearly labeled, but I sincerely hope they were created by a local art class of Slovenian school children.

- The river: Apparently this region of Slovenia is fairly marshy/swampy because the river that winds through the city actually goes underground and re-emerges different places 7 times along its length.

- The view from the castle: The day had been overcast and rainy, so initially I was pretty disappointed with the view/the area surrounding the city. But then, as we were walking down the hillside from the castle, we suddenly realized that we could actually see the alps reemerging ABOVE a line of clouds hanging low over the city. My pictures didn’t turn out that great, but it was really breathtaking at the time: