Easter Break 09: Spain, Morocco, GIbraltar, and Portugal!

I realize I am embarrassingly late in updating this blog but I'm going to try to accomplish a massive blogging update for Easter Break and hopefully get one up about my English class trip to Berlin.

Mama and I flew out of Frankfurt-Hahn on Friday morning and arrived at our apartment in Torremolinos (in the Costa Del Sol) a little bit before noon. After going to the grocery store for some lunch food about everything you would expect to go wrong with the apartment did, the laundry machine locked with our clothes inside then proceeded to flood, the shower wouldn't turn on, the power went out, etc, etc...We did manage to get down to the beach for an hour and sit in some sun, for me for the first time in what felt like 1,000 years. We got dinner at an Indian restaurant that night and watched some classy MTV programing on tv. The next day we both managed to sleep past noon and then went shopping along the water before the boys arrived from Madrid.
We departed Torremolinos the following day and drove to Tarifa. On the way we stopped at the rock of GIbraltar. It wasn't like anything I had been expecting, people actually live out there on that rock which stunned me. It was also amusing seeing all the British signs and paying in sterling for the day. We hiked around in the hills and saw the ony wild primates in Europe. I swear we were surrounded by 20 monkeys, one of them really enjoyed climbing around on Dad's back. After sitting at a cafe in the town square we drove on to Tarifa where we would stay in order to go on our day trip to Morocco.
The next morning we took the boat over to Morocco. We spent the day with a tour group and had a bus take us up to ride on some camels (scarier than you would expect when they stand up), see a snake charmer, wander the streets of the medina, and learn about rugs and traditional medicines, and eat a traditional meal. The meal was so good, they gave us chicken with couscous, dessert, sweet tea, and kebabs. It wasn't a very large amount of time spent there but it was still worthwhile and enjoyable. I wish I could write more on this trip but I think you had to be there to understand just how cool walking around the Medina and Kasbah was. Six continents down, one to go!
Once we got back to Spain we travelled on to Sevilla. The Easter festivities that were occurring were crazy! I swear we nearly got trampled by the Easter processions. These people were borderline terrifying, they marched silently through the streets in hooded and masked cloaks that looked like the outfits the KKK wore. We climbed to the top of the Cathedral on our second day and on our fourth explored some alleyways trying to locate where the flamenco dance performance was. We also saw the most magnificent Spanish architecture. On our third day in Sevilla, we actually did another day trip, this time to Portugal. We saw a plethora of boats and Griffin ordered himself a Smirnoff Ice, because it was legal and because he's a wimp. We took a ferry out to a secluded beach and I lay in the sand for as long as my parents would let me. It was I think the nicest and cleanest beach I have ever been to, the sand squeaked when you walked on it! We had dinner at a restaurant along the water and ordered a pitcher of sangria, Mama almost fell asleep while sitting at the table.
After Sevilla we went to Cordoba for a pit stop on the way to Granada. We saw the Mesquita in Cordoba that was awesome, the striped bricks were really cool and it's a building my friends in architecture studied which made the trip feel more legit, even if it was pretty enough on its own. We saw a synagogue in Cordoba too and ate lunch at an interesting restaurant. We got to Granada around dinnertime and Griff, Dad and I headed out to find food, we ended up eating at the ex-pat bar and went back for every meal in Granada after that. For the day in Granada we went to Alhambra which was a palace designed with Moorish architectural style. It was really cool and overlooked a hill. There were also a lot of pretty flowers, which I am a little too fond of. We had an apartment in Granada and the only reason that I mention our housing accommodations is because Griffin and I had to sleep upstairs and to get there you had to climb a spindly spiral staircase which I fell down on the last day giving myself some of the nastiest bruises I have ever seen. We split off from the boys because they had a flight home to the states and Mama and I took the train to Madrid where we spent the day walking the streets and looking in the botanical gardens next to the Prado, we tried to go but it was closed on Mondays. On Tuesday I flew off to Berlin for my English class field trip and Mama was able to see the Prado and then jetted off to Stockholm to see Robin.

Morocco Pictures, Costa Del Sol and Sevilla Photos, Portugal and Gibraltar Pics, and Cordoba and Granada

Oily Balls Coated in Cocaine in Maastricht

I took a 14 euro and 3:30 hour train up to Maastricht on Thursday and got to spend the weekend with Phil and Uncle Bruce. It was a gloriously relaxing weekend and I was even mildly productive on my English paper that's due on Wednesday.
I got into Maastricht around 5 o'clock on Thursday and was met outside of a Chinese restuarant, Wen Chow, by Phil. A little sketched out to be approached by a tall man smiling at me, I quickly realized it was Philip and he drove me back to the house in Oost-Maarland. I chillaxed for a couple minutes before helping Phil make dinner. Not to boost his overly inflated ego (kidding!), but the risotto and salmon was fantastic. It was awesome to be able to cook and eat homemade food all weekend long. After dinner Phil and I made what we deemed the world's greatest chocolate chip cookies, seriously, no competition. I went to bed feeling stuffed, fat, and exhausted.
We had been planning on going to the Friday market bright and early but Phil didn't wake up until late so we missed it. I got a plot summary nearly done for my English paper, the piano got delivered, went on a walk to a castle down the road and wasted a lot of time on the internet. For dinner on Friday night we went to a Spanish restaurant and shared the best paella that I have ever had. After dinner we came home and made ice cream cookie sandwiches with the leftover cookies, delicious.
On Saturday we went into town and walked around for a while running errands. I think we bought 12 oranges, protein powder, a dutch dessert for Uncle Bruce, and 10 oily balls. Phil danced like a crazy person by the car while we downed oily balls covered in powdered sugar that looked vaguely like cocaine for a late lunch. We stayed in for dinner again and made pasta and chicken, another fantastic meal. We also managed to make another batch of cookies and I fell asleep on the couch in a food coma.
I left around four on Sunday but in the morning, Uncle Bruce made me breakfast and we chatted about his MBA students. I tooled around on the computer some more until Phil drove me to the train station to come home to Lux. It was a very quiet and relaxing weekend and it was very nice to be able to see family while abroad. I didn't get to take that many pictures this weekend, but the ones I have are linked here!

When Will You Realize, Vienna Waits for You

I know I'm pretty late in updating the blog about last weekend, but this past week has been pretty crazy and I have a feeling next week will be worse, what with 5 projects/papers due on Wednesday, Mama coming in on Tuesday, and leaving for Easter Break on Thursday...
Regardless, I took the overnight train to Vienna last Thursday night which was brutal. I decided not to get a couchette because the last time I had one I didn't sleep at all. This time I was in a compartment with the sleeping man who had been on the train since Amsterdam and then the giant Swiss man wearing leggings. It was a little cramped until Amsterdam man exited the train around 5 in the morning and then I had a few more seats to spread out and get a little bit of sleep.
Daniela picked me up at the subway stop near her family's compound, it's an interesting setup where her husband's brothers all live in houses conjoined to theirs. Daniela explained that it makes it easier for the children to play with kids their own ages, I can only imagine how much I would have been picked on had my childhood been like that! I took a shower and ate breakfast with Daniela before took me around the Ringestrasse on her way to work. I spent the day walking around the Inner City half awake but taking it all it nonetheless. I saw St. Stephen's, the Rathaus, Judenplatz and the Holocaust Memorial, a few houses related to Mozart and Beethoven and the Opera House. It was pretty chilly and colder than anticipated so I bought a light jacket to wear on top of my North Face. After roaming for a while I stopped in a restaurant and ordered a sacher torte and cappucino. Sacher torte is a famous Viennese dessert that's made up of chocolate cake with a light frosting and a raspberry jam on the inside. It was pretty good and I felt incredibly chic chillin in the Viennese restaurant cafe. That night Daniela and I had dinner at her friend's house for a typical Shabbat meal. It was absolutely delicious and I had to stop myself from eating more and more so that I didn't look like a pig. I discovered that Jews are Jews the world over, where they were brought up makes no difference. I don't know if I can verbalize exactly how it felt but it was definitely refreshing to be around a group whose culture I understood yet didn't fully grasp all aspects at the same time. Conversation at dinner was half German and half English and I suspect that the three year old little girl understood more of the conversation that I did but it was still a great experience. When we got back to the house I met Emily and Friedi and I sat talking to Friedi for a while before going to bed. Funny side note, when I sat on the bed to take off my shoes, I fell backwards onto a half filled water bed!
On Saturday morning after breakfast, Daniela's brother-in-law showed me around the compound and we hung out with some chickens before Daniela, Emily, and I drove into the city to go to synagogue. This was definitely a cool experience because it is the only synagogue in Vienna, thus it would have been the one that Grandma Esther and the rest of the family attended. It was rather full on Saturday because there was a Bar Mitzvah, which we stayed for, and because it was an orthodox temple, the women were on a higher level than the men watching the service from above. We went to the food market after services and it was the coolest food market ever, there were loads of different countries represented and Emily and I bother got some free falafel with hummos from the Greek stall. It was without a doubt the best hummos I have ever had, and that's saying a lot because I am a huge fan of hummos. We had gelato and Japanese food afterwards and watched this old clock strike at noon before driving up into the Vienna Hills to get a view of the city from above. Afterwards Daniela took me to the Schonbrunn which is the Austrian version of Versailles. It was gorgeous and we hiked up the hill to get the full view of the palace and the city that served as a glorious backdrop. Once at the top we stopped in the cafe and had a drink before climbing down and heading home. We relaxed at home for about an hour before Daniela, Friedi, his girlfriend, and I went back into the city to see Slumdog Millionaire. On the way though, Daniela showed me Grandma Esther's high school and Friedi, his gf, and I went into a restaurant where we got some salads before the movie, which I hadn't seen yet and was amazing!
On Sunday I had to catch an early train out of the city but on the way to the train station Daniela dropped me at the Belvedere for a few minutes. The train ride home took thirteen hours and was a little brutal but I did homework for a few classes, studied for a midterm, and watched the Dark Knight.
The pictures from the most Jewish weekend I have had in a long time are viewable here!

The Spiral of Nearly Stinky Panties

Oh my g-d. Interlaken, Switzerland has got to be one of my favorite places of all time. We were warned before our trip that it is a backpacker's hell but we found it to be anything just, that could be because we prepared ourselves for hefty bills at the outright or that it felt like a little bit of Australia in Switzerland (seriously, everyone who lives there is either Australian or Indian). After the six hour train ride from Luxembourg, we found our hostel to be cozy with its red and white checkered sheets and our room was conveniently located by the sinks.
After our free breakfast (something that Sally requires of a hostel) we were picked up by Bernie, an Aussie for our hang-gliding adventure. We met Bernie's wife Minda and our other hang-gliding pro at the landing site. This place was breath-takingly beautiful. The snow capped mountains and peaks surround you and off to the left, down a path that smells suspiciously like the county fair due to horse poop, is an incredibly blue lake that you just want to take 1,000 pictures of. We lucked out with weather too, it was sunny and clear and a jacket was barely necessary. Bernie split the group into three so we each had a partner and then took us up the mountain in rounds for our hang-gliding experiences.
I got to go with Dedu, Bernie's partner, who was also supposedly Evil Knivel's nephew. At the top of the mountain, Minda hooked us up into our harnesses and we were ready for flight. The take-off was spectacular, you ran off the side of a mountain until the wind picked you up. Dedu reminded me to not stop running though so for the first few moments of flight I felt like Wile E. Coyote after he ran off a cliff but his legs kept propelling him over empty air. The views we had of the lake and the Swiss Alps from the air were so awesome that I can't come up with a better vocabulary word for it. After cruising through the empty air over the lake and mountain we headed towards the landing field where Dedu decided I was gutsy enough to do the tricks like the one mentioned in my posting title. It was awesome, there was no point when I didn't feel completely safe in the air and the adrenaline rush was spectacular, it felt like a roller coaster and then you realize you're in the empty air not attached to tracks and it feels so much cooler! After landing I played around by the lake while I waited for the rst of the group to go. We all survived! Afterwards we got a late lunch at a pizza parlor where we ordered the hang-glider's pizza. We explored Interlaken following lunch and sat in the town square watching para-gliders land while simultaneously thinking how pathetic they looked in comparison to us... ;) We went out to a Mexican-Indian restaurant for drinks that night with some fellow MUDECers and took the early train home yesterday.
The pictures from my weekend can be viewed here!

Walks Along the Seine, Laughing in the Rain

Since Carnival was just last week and that had wiped me out physically and economically I decided to forgo a long weekend trip and paying for a hostel along with many meals eaten out for a day trip to Paris on Saturday. Once I worked out the logistics of getting to Paris sans TGV in the morning and then getting back at a reasonable hour on Saturday night all things were a go. The train travel went off without a hitch, when I easily could have missed my connecting train in Metz.
I arrived in Paris around noon and metroed over to the Eiffel Tower since it was the furthest destination I wanted to hit from Gare de l'Est where I needed to be at 7:05 that evening. It started out as a gloriously clear and sunny day. I walked around the Eiffel Tower for a while and then trekked up to the Champs Elysees and L'Arc du Triumphe. I sat on a bench along the Champs Elysees eating a chocolate crepe before meandering down to the Luxembourg Gardens. From there I entered the Louvre and checked out the pyramids (and according to Dan Brown, the location of the holy grail aka Mary Magdalene's last resting place). I have a newfound interest in the pyramids since we studied the Davinci Code in my English class last week. After the pyramids at the Louvre I crossed the Seine and looked at the stalls that lined the river for a while before descending the stairs to actually walk along the Seine. I walked until I hit the Notre Dame. I had been planning on climbing it to get the views and relive Quasimodo's life a little bit but the line was pretty long and I was nervous that I might not have enough time to make it back to my train station by walking. Instead of the climb I souvenir shopped, donned a cheesy red beret, and purchased my second crepe of the evening. I strolled along side streets until I accidentally found Uncle Juli's old neighborhood and almost purchased some hammer pants that were on sale nearby. I watched a street performer outside the Pompidou Center before grabbing dinner at a grocery store and heading back to the train station. Along the way, I randomly found the St Sulpice church and went in, of all the Catholic churches, nunneries, and monasteries I have been to thus far on my European travels, it was the first one where I actually saw a nun. Fitting I suppose since it is the place the nun gets murdered by Silas in the Davinci Code... I told you, new obsession. I made it back to Gare de l'Est with a half hour to spare and travel home after that went off seamlessly.
It was a really pleasant day in Paris even though the weather started to go sour after the Eiffel Tower and my feet are still a little sore from walking for seven hours straight. Here are some of the pictures from the day.

Hey Prague! Czech Me Out...

We arrived in Prague on Wednesday evening but decided to just go to bed when we got in that night. On Thursday morning we walked across the Charles Bridge to Prague Castle. I think we spent a little too much time there and were ripped off by the man at the ticket counter and it was a little cold but it was neat to see the changing of the guard at noon. We got to see Good King Wenseslas' tomb and learned more than you would expect while tooling around the Cathedral with our audio guides. All that we seemed to retain, however, was something about cooking babies on skewers, how a king's brain had been preserved in this tomb, that Wenseslas was murdered by his brother (he is so beloved that every Czech King since him has merely borrowed the crown from him), and that his grandmother had been choked to death by her own scarf. We lurked around the castle grounds for a little longer before grabbing lunch in a cafe near the castle. It is hard to find something to eat in Prague that doesn't have beef or lamb or pork in it, so I ordered a pizza. After crossing the Charles Bridge back to Old Town Prague, we did a bit of souvenir shopping, which included the purchase of a hat on my part since my ears had turned scarlet due to the cold. Leave it to my luck, however, that it warmed up the next day and I haven't needed the hat since then. On Thursday night we went to one of Prague's famous night clubs where Erin and Lee proceeded to humiliate themselves by dancing to techno music with intoxicated Europeans.
Friday morning I split off from the group and explored the Jewish quarter, which includes four synagogues, a holocaust memorial, and the old Jewish cemetery. The graveyard was amazing, now I'm no fan of graveyards, but this one was full of the oldest headstones you can imagine that were practically piled on top of each other. The spacing was interesting to examine and the number of graves and I started to wonder how far down all the bodies actually were considering the number of tombstones. Anyways, after the Jewish quarter I sat in the Old Town Square for probably two hours just people watching which was fantastic. I swear Old Town was exactly like the Renaissance Festival, except real life. I still cannot get past the fact that people were actually sitting around eating sausages and dancing to Czech music in public like that. It was great.
On Saturday I got to see Will and we just walked around the river all afternoon and it was a pretty nice day so it was enjoyable. We ate dinner at a medieval restaurant and then the group did a ghost tour of the city and I was planning on meeting up with Will again but I fell asleep. We spent 13 hours on the train yesterday which was intense and I met someone from Silver Spring at my bus stop once we were back in Luxembourg. All in all it was a generally positive trip. Two albums of photos can be found here and here!

Budapest: When in Doubt, Guess the Danube

We arrived in Budapest late at night on Sunday and crashed at our hostel. We awoke the next morning for breakfast and talked to Gabe, the man who ran our hostel, about what there was to do in Budapest. We had arrived not knowing anything about the city except that it used to be two cities, Buda and Pest, separated by the Danube River. Gabe informed us that we were on the Pest side of the city and proceeded to plan out the next two days for us.
Monday morning we walked to the synagogue, which proudly declared that it is one of the largest in Eastern Europe. Believable. This thing was enormous and had a museum and graveyard attached. We spent a fair portion of the morning there before moving on to the Basilica that took about 300 years to finish building. Inside we had a special treat of viewing the 1000 year old hand of a Saint. Glorious! That hand was one of the most disgusting things I think I have ever seen. We ate lunch in a cafe near the Opera for pretty cheap and I got some pasta and the best brownie cake dessert thing afterwards, it was warm, soft, and delicious. We headed up towards Heroes Square next and took a look around before heading to the Hungarian Bath House. As none of us brought our bathing suits with us on our trip through Eastern Europe in February (how foolish of us) we opted to forgo the experience of bathing naked with middle aged Hungarian men, surely a treat. I am actually a little disappointed that we didn't go in but we took a look around and it sure did seem amazing. We checked out a castle before walking back to the hostel before dinner. We ate dinner at a famous restaurant. I think I ordered the wrong dish though because I didn't find this restaurant all that fantastic considering the price and comparing the meal to others I ate in Hungary. I got what was essentially a jelly donut with chicken inside it. Not very filling, or tasty. I hit the hay at the hostel after dinner and the rest of the crew went out drinking.
Tuesday morning we walked as close as they would let us up to Parliament and then crossed the Danube to explore the Buda side of the city. We climbed up a mountain and got some amazing views before checking out the fisherman's bastion and a church. I walked home to take a much needed nap in the afternoon and met up with other MUDECers for dinner at a traditional Hungarian restaurant. My chicken and potatoes were fabulous, it was probably the best meal I've had all semester and to top it all off I enjoyed the most fantastic strawberry juice with dinner. We left in the afternoon on Wednesday for Prague and managed to avoid using our Eurail train passes and only had to pay 19 euro for the trip.
Overall, Budapest was a fun city, a very interesting combination of cultures was easily distinguishable the only real negatives were the terrible weather we faced and continuing to travel with the same group for an extended break can get exhausting. Pictures can be found here! Next up, Praha!