The Hills Are Alive...

Helllllo! Since this is my first time actually blogging from the road the entry will be more brief than usual. Thís Hungarian keyboard is also more confusing so please excuse any typos...
We started off Carnival Break in Salzburg, Austria. We took the overnight train from Luxembourg to Munich and slept in the couchette. That was probably the smallest space I have ever slept in. We arrived in Munich around 8:30 in the morning and transferred trains to Salzburg. Erin and I managed to grab a cup of Starbucks in the Munich train station though before catching the next train. The only reason I found this notable is because it was the first Starbucks I have seen since leaving the United States.
We finally made it to Salzburg around 11 and took the metro to our bed and breakfast. Our B&B was on the side of a freakin mountain in the Austrian Alps and had amazing views. We had two rooms for the five of us and both were enormous. We managed to time our arrival into Salzburg with the arrival of over two feet of snow. After settling in and napping for a few hours we decided there was nothing else to do but have a snowball fight in the nearby expanse of snow. Cold and wet, we returned to the B&B when our faces could no longer feel the stinging. After warming up and changing clothes we settled in for a cozy movie session. Take a guess as to what movie we watched...After the movie we took the tram back into the main part of town and ate dinner at an authentic Austrian restuarant. We hung out at the restaurant for a while before calling it a night and heading home.
The next morning we were picked up at our B&B and transferred to the starting point for the Sound of Music tour. It was awesome. We saw a lot of the sights from the movie and our tour guide was a lot of fun and sang along with us throughout the bus ride. (Mom, unfortunately, we did not get to go in that house and we were pretty far away from the lion gates because the lake behind the house was entirely frozen over). After our four hour tour of Sound of Music film locations we grabbed lunch by the train station and off we went to Budapest.
More on Budapest later, we got in last night and today was action packed but we are about to eat dinner so stay tuned! Love you all lots! Pictures can be found here!
xoxoxface

Geo Class Field Trip

Here are the pictures from my Geography class field trip to France, Switzerland, and Germany. Just your average class field trip to a few foreign countries, no big deal... ;)

Playin' the Boot on the Emerald Isle

Dublin was awesome. I've been before the summer after freshman year of high school but because it was our first day of vacation, all I can remember is sleeping through the bus tour of the city. Needless to say, it was great to be able to go back.

We flew RyanAir for 5 euro each way and stayed in the most amazing bed and breakfast imaginable in a few towns out from the city. Sandy Hills B&B is run by Mary Buckley, the most adorable, generous, and caring woman I have ever met. When we arrived Friday night she had baked us fresh scones and served them with her homemade jam. Afterwards, she invited us to join her in the television room where we watched the Irish version of the Late Show where Enya was the guest for the evening.

We woke in the morning and ate a delicious and full Irish breakfast while Mary graciously planned out our day in Dublin and secretly made phone calls to the train station manager asking him to give us a deal on our train tickets into the city. Once we arrived in the city we headed to Trinity College where we went off trying to find the Book of Kells. Sadly, it isn't on display in the winter but we got to see a museum all about the book and we decided the money on entrance was well spent when we turned the corner on the staircase leading to the library. I have a bizarre adoration of libraries to begin with but when I came around the corner I gasped and even lost my footing on the staircase I was in such awe. This was without a doubt the most beautiful room I have ever been in. There are over 200,000 books held in this room and it's dark wood bookshelves are two stories high. Busts of literary heroes in Europe line the columns. It was heaven. We grabbed some lunch after Trinity College and meandered down Grafton Street and its neighbors. In the late afternoon we walked over to the Jameson Distillery and looked around there for a little while. We ate dinner in a pub that had the Ireland vs. France rugby match on (thankfully, Ireland won, 30-21). We sang our hearts out at a karaoke bar off of Grafton Street for an hour before taking a musical pub crawl in the Temple Bar region of the city. We played the boot (tapping your foot in 6/8 time) with our Irish musicians and learned some Irish folk songs.

On Sunday we woke up and had another delicious breakfast. At breakfast, Mary offered to drive us around the countryside in her car if we helped her out with the dishes. We gladly accepted her offer and she took us to a museum about old Celtic mounds, the ruins of an old Abbey, and she drove us to Northern Ireland! We ate dinner in a pub playing traditional Irish music with Mary in a town called Collingsford, Ireland. Mary drove us back to her B&B where we bought some jam from her and caught two cabs to the airport. The flight back was a little delayed leaving, which was fine by us because all five of us managed to secure exit row seats, so we had to run through German customs in order to catch our bus back into Luxembourg City. I had a great chat with Taylor on the two hour ride back and immediately fell asleep once I got back to my host parent's house.

Such a fabulous weekend! I leave for my Geography class field trip on Wednesday so I'll be out of contact from then until next Monday.

xoxo, face

Oh, pictures from this weekend can be found here!

J'ai un crise avec les Americains

This past weekend we traveled to Reims, France. Reims is the capital of the Champagne region, which is the reason we chose the random destination. The weekend started out with an epic fail travel wise. First, we read the military time wrong and stood on the wrong platform while our train pulled out of the station, then the power on the new train went out for about ten minutes, which was terrifying. After the power came back on we were still sitting there for about 15 minutes. When we finally arrived in Reims, a full two hours after our original arrival time, the buses in the city had stopped running. But honestly, in what kind of city do the buses stop running at 8:45pm? We decided to walk the 20 minutes to the hostel from the train station, which wouldn’t have created problems if the directions the hostel had sent us weren’t horrifically wrong. Without a map we headed off towards a town called Betheny and the bus stop Comete on the K route. The problems was that our stop was called Comedie and since that name didn’t exist on the route we were told to follow, we decided that it must have been a typo and we walked, what turned out to be about 6 km to the bus route Comete to realize it wasn’t accurate.

Frustrated, tired, afraid, and with sore feet we turned around and walked back in the direction we came. A little after midnight a young French man stopped and asked us if we were okay, Erin took the reigns and asked him if he know where our hostel was. I’ll never forget the look on his face we he realized how lost and far we still were. He called someone on the phone and in a panic said in his rushed French, “I have a crisis with the Americans.”

About twenty minutes later our French friend, Benoit had convinced us to let him drive us to our hostel. He drove half of us to the hostel and then picked up the remaining two at the alleyway we met him by. We went to bed after freaking out about how we let the previous four hours occur. Honestly, we got in a freaking car with a random French man. How stupid. But we were so grateful and relieved to have made it safely that all we could do was laugh uncontrollably in our hostel room.

Saturday we headed to the Notre-Dame Cathedral, which used to be the location of the coronation for French Kings. The cathedral was gorgeous. It was full of enormous, colorful, and beautiful stained glass. We headed to a tour of a champagne cellar, which came with three free glasses as a tasting. We found a park where we goofed off for three-quarters of an hour before grabbing dinner and riding on a two-story carousel! We hung out in the hostel, playing pool for a while before meeting up with some other MUDECers and going out to a bar.

Sunday, we checked out the basilique, went to a couple of museums, and had lunch at a delicious Indian restaurant in the town center. I headed to the train station and sat with some of the other MUDECers while my friends checked out a final museum. Our train ride and transportation in general, were in comparison seamless and we arrived safely at home around 10pm.
Pictures will be up sometime on Tuesday and I’m headed to Dublin for the weekend, so make sure to come back! xoxo