swift travels

yeah!

2010-11-21T01:48:00.000-08:00

Drew (who has now joined me in the UK) has told me to write in my blog: "I'm in London! Tea! Bye now!"

A substantial update will follow at a later date, I promise! So much to do in the next few days: Buckingham Palace, the Tate Modern, the Tower of London, the London Eye, Indian food!!!, Harrod's (which we went into around 5 pm on yesterday, a Saturday, and quickly exited because of the crowds), Camden Town, Notting Hill, pubs!, and lots of (sigh, window) shopping.

Love and London, Eliza

PS: I finally updated new photos, which include Vienna, Salzburg, the fairytale castles in Bavaria, Dachau, Nancy (France), and (more!) Paris: http://www.flickr.com/photos/elizaswift/sets/72157625429460504/

barcelona, paris, luxembourg, nuremberg, prague, budapest, vienna

2010-11-09T07:05:00.000-08:00

It's getting to the point where going home is no longer a distant fantasy, but a reality looming on my horizon. If I'd been asked three weeks ago, I would have said I was excited to leave Europe and ready to be home. But, of course, my feelings have changed and the thought of returning to the States terrifies me. Traveling has just started to become comfortable! (Although, perhaps, some of that is subconsciously due to my knowledge that I won't be doing it for much longer.) Earlier I wrote on here (or perhaps I didn't write it down, but thought it) that I was perplexed by the people who travel for a year at a time—how taxing that must be!—and now I find myself envying them. I've started to really enjoy the ability to go wherever on a whim. The portion of my trip with Alex was lovely and so much fun, but it was pretty well planned out. Being on my own gives me the ability to find out what spontaneity really means. I can decide on a moment's notice where I want to go. Right now, I'm trying to decide if I want to stay in Vienna tonight or push on to Salzburg. I've booked an extra night at my hostel here, but I want to get to eastern France by the weekend and I still have some castles to go visit in Germany. I intended on staying in Vienna an extra night so I could go visit Bratislava today, but I unfortunately find myself very sick again and I decided not to go with my friends. So I'm sitting in my hostel wondering—what now? It's a very liberating question.

I'm trying to figure out what exactly I can and should do in the week and a half I have before I meet Drew in London. It's frustrating, because there is SO MUCH to see and I've really just started to get tired of the big cities and ready to explore the small towns. I had so many thoughts before I came on this trip: Scandinavia, southern France, Portugal, etc. I've realized that I am not going to accomplish seeing every nook and cranny of Europe, and nor should I; if I leave no stone unturned, what will there be to come back to? (No, the travel bug is not out of my system, even yet...although I expect to be sated by this trip for quite a while.) So this is where I am: alone in my hostel dorm room, coughing up half a lung, trying to decide what happens after the fairytale castles and before I get to see my darling boyfriend in the UK. It's really not a bad place to be. (On the Vienna versus Salzburg question, I've just made a decision, which is to stay here for the night because I've paid for it anyway. I'll take an early train tomorrow. Budget travelers must stay budget conscious!)

Anyway, you're probably on here because you want to find out what exactly I've been doing and not because you want to read the pseudo-philosophical haggard-backpacker ramblings. (Did I mention that I'm sick? Again? As in, I was sick for almost a full month, recovered for about a week, and am now back on medication? My body will definitely be happy to be at home and recuperating.) So let me try now to reach back into what feels like a distant memory, over four weeks ago (oh my god has it been that long I am so sorry for being such a bad blogger aghhhh) to when my Mom and Ian joined me in Europe.

I had an early flight from Rome to Barcelona, which coincided with their arrival time in to Spain, so I had to leave the apartment in Ciampino around 6:30 am. It was really great to see the two of them, although they were looking very "fresh" from their long overnight plane flight. We got into a cab and headed to our hotel, conveniently located on the popular Las Ramblas. We checked in and they cleaned themselves up a bit and then we searched for food. I introduced the two of them to falafel—a middle-eastern dish that is a cheap diet staple for me in Europe—and we wandered up and down Las Ramblas for a while. I knew it was time to take them back to the hotel and let them lay down for a while when my mom started freaking out over these little mouth squeakers that the street vendors were selling; I dragged her back to the hotel before she could buy every single one of them. We had some amazing massages, ordered in dinner at the hotel, and called it an early night.

The next day, we slept in late and then went to see some Gaudi architecture. I think the two reasons anyone goes to Barcelona are to see the Gaudi buildings and to party on the beaches. Unfortunately, the latter was not an option for us because it was too late in the year. We headed first to Park Guell, the beautiful Gaudi-designed park that overlooks the city. From there we went to Sagrada Familla, the famous unfinished church that will someday be the world's largest cathedral (someday being when it's finally finished, which is projected around 2040-something). After that, Mom and I had a drink on the rooftop terrace. Ian wasn't feeling well, so we left him at the hotel and went out for dinner on our own, to a famous seafood restaurant named Botofumiero. It was good—although the waiter misunderstood Mom's order and brought her the wrong paella. After Botofumiero, Mom and I went to go see some flamenco dancing, which was really the highlight of the night. It was so passionate!

The next day, we went exploring the area around our hotel. After lunch at a cafe, Ian was still having trouble adjusting to jet lag, so he went back to the hotel. Mom and I walked around the whole afternoon. In the evening, she and I wanted to go to a hip restaurant called Moo, but it was booked...so we went anyway. They were still booked, but we were able to eat at the bar and it was really unbelievable food.

We thought we were leaving the next day, Sunday, for Paris, but we were actually heading out on Monday, so we didn't have anything planned for Sunday. Mom decided to hire a car to take us on a personal three-hour tour of Barcelona. We were able to get out to see Gaudi's famous Casa Batillo, a dazzling house and well worth the visit. The whole tour was great and we saw so much of Barcelona, including many places that we would have missed out on otherwise. For dinner, we had more falafel...I'm sure Mom is cursing that word, because that greasy food really did not sit well with her.

On Monday (the 18th of October), we left for Paris. Being in France during this October was an interesting experience, to say the least. All over the country, riots and strikes were taking place because of a pension reform plan that was passing through to law. Many oil refineries were shut down and a lot of trains were canceled. So we entered Paris feeling a bit nervous about the situation, all of us worried about our ability to leave. We checked into our hotel and grabbed lunch at a nearby cafe. Afterwards, we walked around Rue de Saint-Helené, a famous shopping street right near our hotel. It was mostly uneventful, although we did spot Mila Kunis, which was kind of funny.

The next day, Ian had a massage while Mom and I walked around and did some more shopping. Mom had a very long manicure at the Anne Fontaine salon and then we went to dinner at a chic little restaurant in the Marais quarter.
On Wednesday, Ian stayed back at the hotel while Mom and I went exploring. We had a grand lunch at a beautiful hotel whose name is slipping my mind—Mom will have to fill in that hole. Afterwards, we walked over the the Musée d'Orsay to see some impressionist painting. There was a great exhibit on the painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, whose work I had never really seen before. When we left the museum, we headed over to Marais to do a little shopping. That night, Mom and I went to a restaurant recommended by our concierge. Unfortunately, she slipped on a stair in the bathroom and hurt her back, so we left dinner early.

Thursday, Mom and Ian left Paris, and they thankfully did not have too many problems getting to the airport. I had one night left at the hotel, so I had a lazy day. I walked around our neighborhood, bought myself a rolling bag (tired of carrying that heavy backpack!), went back to Marais again to return some clothes that Ian didn't like, and had a light dinner. I wasn't sure where I would be going for the weekend, but I knew I needed to get to Prague by Tuesday, so I had to start working my way eastward. However, as I mentioned before, many of the trains weren't running, so my options on places to go were slim. At the last moment, I chose Luxembourg—it wasn't too far from Paris but it successfully got me out of France and, miraculously, trains were still running there.

Friday morning, I headed to Luxembourg. My train was quite early in the morning, around 7:10 am, so I had a taxi take me to the train station—I didn't want to deal with the Metro in case there were problems with it. The train ride was relatively uneventful and I arrived at my hostel in Luxembourg around 10 am. Luxembourg was freezing! There was frost on the ground and the sky continually threatened snow. But my goodness, it's a pretty place. After I checked into my hostel, I walked around the city for a few hours and had lunch. I went back to my hostel around 1 pm to start the laborious process of doing laundry, something I hadn't done in far too long. Around 6 pm, I went back down to change out my laundry and was having trouble making the dryer work. Luckily there was someone else in the laundry room—a 19-year-old Canadian girl named Kathryn, and she helped me out. We started talking and kept talking, eventually getting dinner together. Her French roommate, Marie-Fleur, joined us. The three of us spent all night comparing our different countries, bemoaning the French strikes, and planning out our next day in the city together. At one point, we met Allan, a nice guy from Texas, who decided to join us on our walk the next day.

So on Saturday, armed with new friends and my very warm new winter coat, I headed into the city to do some sightseeing. Our degree of success is debatable. We weren't really sure what many things were, but we walked for hours. Luxembourg is very hilly, and the city appears to exist on several layers. One of the downhill portions of the city is called "Grund," and you're able to get down to Grund by taking an elevator. Once down there, we walked to an old church and what I believe was once a 19th-century military hospital. From there, we headed back up into the main old town area of Luxembourg. There was a big markets going on in the center square and we perused that for a while. I bought some magnificent cheese from Trier, some really tasty sun-dried fruits, and a bar of lavender-flavored chocolate.

All day and all previous night, I'd been whining to my new friends about how much I missed Mexican food—something that Allan and I saw eye-to-eye on—and he mentioned that there was a Mexican restaurant in the center of the city. Kathryn and Marie-Fleur were kind enough to agree to go there for lunch. It was a chain place called Chi-Chi's Tex Mex, and while it was far from the best Mexican food I've ever had, it tasted like a revelation. It was so wonderful to have guacamole, margaritas, Spanish rice, black beans, and all the other flavors I'd been missing so much.

After we finished eating lunch, Allan needed to head back to the hostel and grab his bag so he could leave. Marie-Fleur needed to go shopping for some work clothes, so Kathryn and I went back with Allan and then went to the train station with him so we could book our own train tickets for the next day. By that point, I'd chosen Nuremberg, Germany as my next destination; Nuremberg was two easy train rides away, was a city full of fascinating (if macabre) history, and was a short trip away from Prague—it seemed like a good decision. We said our goodbyes to Allan and met back up with Marie-Fleur. The three of us went shopping and I was able to get a nice warm hat, something that I desperately needed in the Luxembourg cold. (I'm not exaggerating, folks, it was around 30 degrees Fahrenheit! In October!) We visited the main cathedral in town and then headed back down to Grund to go grab a drink at Marie-Fleur's favorite pub. After our beers, we went back to the hostel for dinner. All in all, it was a wonderful day in a very beautiful city.

On Sunday morning, I left for Nuremberg. I arrived in the early afternoon and checked into my hostel before going to walk around by myself for a bit. After about an hour and a half of walking around Nuremberg, I decided to head back to the hostel—cold rain was starting and I realized that I'd seen most of the old town already. What would there be left for me to do on Monday? So I had some falafel for dinner and watched a movie before calling it an early night.

Monday was kind of boring. Nuremberg is sort of a picturesque Bavarian town, but there isn't too much to do. I followed my path from the day before, and this time went all the way up to the Kaiserburg, a castle that's situated on the old city walls. It was really pretty and had great views of the city. From there, I went and grabbed some soup for lunch. After that, there wasn't much to do. I'd seen all the old churches already, and the infamous old Nazi rally grounds were situated outside of the city, so that wasn't an option. I ended up back in the hostel early again, cursing my decision to go to Nuremberg. I shouldn't have spent two nights there—there was just enough to see for one day of exploration. But all was well, as I had Prague to look forward to the next day.

The big perk of going to Prague, other than getting to see a wonderful city, was meeting up with my friend Chris from Semester at Sea. He'd been living in South Korea for the past year, teaching English, and he and some friends set off on a journey when their contracts ended in late August. They went up through China and Mongolia before hopping on a train through Russia and ending up in Eastern Europe. Chris is the same guy that I traveled with in Japan and in Thailand, and I knew that I would have a great time with him and his friend Chase.

I arrived in Prague and went to my hostel, the Czech Inn. Prague was much cheaper than the rest of Western Europe, all things considered. My hostel was running a special on the large female-only dorm and I was able to stay there for around 5 euros a night—an obscene amount cheaper than any other hostel I'd stayed in. The hostel was situated outside of the city center, but it was an easy tram ride in to the main attractions. Chris had left a note for me with the front desk, saying that he and Chase would meet me in the hostel's bar for happy hour around between 6 and 7 pm. With my belongings secured in my room (so clean! and large! and lovely!), I decided to go out for a walk and see how far I got. I ended up walking quite some distance: past the National Museum, all the way down Wenceslas Square (named after the same Good King in the famous Christmas song), into the heart of the old town where the famous astronomical clock tower is located. It was here that I found a holiday market going on, called "Holidays of Spices and Cheese." Amazing! I bought this type of street pizza thing called langose, which consisted of a piece of fried dough covered in garlic sauce, ketchup, and cheese. It was quite yummy. Just as I finished eating it, I saw a bunch of people gathering around the astronomical clock and arrived just in time to see it go off. It's a moving clock and it's actually kind of anticlimactic, but it's been around since the 1400s, so I guess that's cool.

After that, I went back to the hostel and met up with Chris and Chase in the bar. It was so good to see a familiar face! We met two other guys in the bar and the five of us headed out for the night, back toward the old town. We couldn't find any good bars so we mostly just walked around the area. We did manage to make it over to Charles' Bridge, which was very beautiful at night.

The next morning, we got up early to go on a free walking tour of the city. The tour started at the clock tower, where we found out some interesting history about the clock. It was the first mechanical animated clock in Europe, and the citizens of Prague were very proud of it. When they found out that the guy who designed it was planning on building an even better and bigger mechanical clock in a different city, they knew they had to find some way to stop him...so they poked his eyes out and blinded him. He was understandably pretty pissed about that, so he went up into the clock tower and smashed all the mechanisms into bits. Unfortunately, he was the only person who knew how it worked, and he had been blinded, so there was nobody available to fix the clock and it sat around unmoving for something like 150 years. Crazy! We also learned all about the Hussites, a religious minority in Prague that had been subjugated by the Catholic Church. In the 15th century, the Hussites were quite mad about their position in society and started defenestrating city officials. In case you don't know what "defenestration" means, it's a word that I learned on the walking tour: tossing people out of windows. What a method of revenge!

Although our guide was not the most enthusiastic, the walking tour was all-in-all very informative and I think we all enjoyed it. We also met a girl on the walking tour named Ashley, who was staying at a different hostel. After the tour, Ashley walked across Charles' Bridge with us and over to the castle. For some reason, the castle was closed, so we were only able to see the cathedral. There were really great views from the top of the hill, though. Ashley was headed to Budapest after Prague, the same as me, so we exchanged contact info. That night, we had dinner in the bar and met a British guy named Sam who was on holiday from his job as an officer in the Queen's Royal Navy. Sam, Chris, and Chase all went out for a pub crawl, but I was tired from the day's activities and opted to stay in for the night.

Thursday, the 28th of October, was a national holiday in Prague. I think it's technically celebrated as the independence day of the Czech Republic, because it signifies the day that they separated from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Some Czech people told us that it wasn't really celebrated. However, it did mess up the transit system quite nicely, as a lot of trains and trams weren't running at their normal capacity. Chris, Chase, and I had decided to go Plzn that day to go on a tour of the Pilsner brewery. We got all the way to the bus terminal necessary to go to Plzn (which took us something like an hour and a half), only to find out that there were only two tickets left on the 3 pm bus to the city—and three of us people. The brewery closed at 5 pm so our only chance would have been to make the 3 pm bus. It was really disappointing. But we tried to make the best of our day and headed back into the heart of Prague to do some sightseeing. We walked up a huge hilly area called Petrin hill to what is called the "Eiffel tower of Prague," Petrin tower. There were great views of the city from up there. We took the funicular back down the hill, took a tram over the river to our side of the city, and walked back to our hostel. That night, we made a lot of friends at happy hour, including a Canadian girl named Jacqui who was in the same dorm room as me. We all went to a bar called B-52, suggested by a girl from New York named Jarra, who had studied abroad in Prague a few years prior.

The next day, Chris, Chase, Sam (the British guy), Jacqui and I got on a train to Kutna Hora, a town about an hour outside of Prague that houses the famous "bone chapel." The inside of the chapel is decorated in thousands of human bones, mostly victims of the bubonic plague. It was quite a sight to see, similar to what many catacombs look like but more ornate. After checking out the bone chapel, the five of us headed back to Prague. By this point, it had been decided that we were all going to do the pub crawl that night, the same one the guys had been on a few nights before. So we got back to our hostel, all got ready, rallied the troops, and headed out with a big group of people. The pub crawl starts at a pub that has open bar from 9 pm to 11 pm, and lots of drinking games to play, including beer pong and flip cup (two very popular drinking games with the university set). After that, you head to three other bars and clubs, and there's a free "welcome shot" at each other place. By the time we reached the fourth bar, we'd lost Chris and Sam, Jacqui and I were ready to go home. The three of us ate some street food and took a long walk back to the hostel. All three of us were going to be heading to Budapest, so we planned a few things out. Jacqui was due to take the night train on Saturday night and arrive Sunday morning, and Sam would do the same thing on Sunday night, arriving Monday morning.

On Saturday, I got on the train to Budapest. Chris and Chase were still sleeping when I left, so I managed to avoid doing a sad goodbye. Ashley, the girl we'd met on the walking tour, was booked on the same train as me, so we met up in the train station. We were miraculously booked into the same compartment! The train ride to Budapest was about 6 and a half hours long, and both of us thought we'd spend most of it napping, but we ended up talking for a majority of the time. When we got into Slovakia (the train passed through it), we received a nasty shock: our Eurail passes weren't valid in Slovakia, a fact neither of us was aware of, and the ticket collector demanded that we pay him. We'd both spent as much of our Czech crowns as possible and had not yet pulled out more money, since we were changing currency to Hungarian Forints...so neither of us had any money on us. Thankfully, a Hungarian girl around our age was in our compartment and spoke English, and she offered to lend us 7,000 Forints (close to 30 U.S. dollars) so we could pay. Crisis averted, we spent the rest of the trip talking to the Hungarian girl about her country, which was very illuminating.

When we got into Budapest, Ashley and I parted ways: she was staying at the Grandio Party Hostel (yes, "party" is part of the name), which I couldn't get a reservation for, so I opted to stay at the much more tame Suite Hostel. It was a little unsettling arriving in a new city after dark, but I managed to find my way to my hostel. I cannot express enough how much I enjoyed the Suite Hostel. It was set up in a bunch of converted apartments. The apartment I was staying in was the main hang out area, and it had a full kitchen for guest use and giant living room complete with an expansive DVD library. The dorm rooms were situated on the second floor: two rooms with eight beds each and en suite bathrooms. I had an experience that I like to call "winning the hostel lottery," which consists of booking the largest, cheapest room available and ending up in a smaller room. This has happened several times on my trip. I booked a 16-bed room at the Suite Hostel and ended up in an 8-bed. Not so bad! After I checked in and put my stuff away, I went into the living room and asked if anyone knew where the closest grocery store was. A guy named Chris, funnily enough, said that he knew and was about to head there himself, so we went together to buy groceries. Back at the hostel, he offered to share his salad with me and I made enough pasta for the both of us, so we cooked dinner together and hung out with everyone that was coming and going in the kitchen. After dinner, we put on the Ricky Gervais show "Extras" and watched a few episodes before bedtime.

On Sunday (Halloween!), I left a note for Jacqui with reception and went out on a free walking tour. The walking tour I had in Budapest was nowhere near as informative or as good as the walking tour in Prague or the one I'd done before that in Paris. I think part of the reason is because there was a very nice family with three very young girls—ages 4, 6, and 9—who needed attention. The guide seemed to take the tour at a slower pace to accommodate the family, which is understandable, but did not make for the most interesting tour. However, the little girls adopted me as their best friend and I spent the entire time entertaining children, which was actually quite fun. Budapest is really constructed of two different cities that combined in the 19th century, Buda and Pest, and the tour went from Pest over to Buda and around the castle. After the tour ended, three and a half hours later (ugh!), I went back to Pest to my hostel and finally met up with Jacqui. The two of us cooked dinner and then started getting ready for the main event of the evening: Halloween.

Halloween in Europe is mostly nonexistent. However, when you're staying at hostels, you're surrounded by mostly non-Europeans, and we knew that there would be a party happening somewhere. That somewhere, it turned out, was at Ashley's hostel, the Grandio Party Hostel. Jacqui had another friend that was staying there, so we went about the business of figuring out makeshift costumes. Jacqui decided to go as a hippie. I had no idea what to be, but I had a yellow dress with me, so I decided to revive my makeshift Semester at Sea Halloween costume: mustard! I drew a French's mustard sign and pinned it onto myself and I was good to go. A guy from our hostel, Stephen, decided to join us at the party, so he taped a bunch of maps around himself and went as a map. The party was crazy! We arrived just after pretty much everyone there had done 10 (yes, TEN!) Jagerbombs each. Ashley had taken a picture of the Jagerbombs being lined up, and it was insane, something like 500 drinks in a row. I have to admit that I am very glad we came just a little bit too late, because that sounds like my idea of a nightmare. A few minutes after we arrived, the hostel shut down the main upstairs bar and sent us all to the basement bar. The basement looked like a cave, and it was very creepy to have a Halloween party there. The best part of the evening was, by far, all of the makeshift Halloween costumes.

On Monday, Sam arrived at our hostel, and so the dream team was reunited! We decided to go to the House of Terror, a museum based in a building that had been used by both the Nazi forces and the Communists as a building to torture detainees. We got all the way over to the museum before realizing that it was closed for All Saint's Day, which is a national holiday in Hungary. We kept walking, and went on to the Hero's Monument, which according to my guidebook was "built to mark the 1000th anniversary of the Magyar conquest." After that, we decided to head to the huge mall nearby the train station, because we knew there was a giant Tesco's (super market) inside and we wanted to get food to make. Unfortunately, the Tesco's was also closed, but the movie theater was open, so we opted to go see a movie. We all received student prices (the benefit of having my old student card on me), so the tickets only cost around 900 forints, or close to five dollars. Five dollars for a movie! Not to mention that the movie theater was one of the nicest, cleanest, newest theaters I've ever been in and we had assigned seats in the middle of the theater. Jacqui and I managed to convince Sam to see "Easy A," the comedy starring Emma Stone that came out just before I left for Europe. I think she and I both really enjoyed it, although Sam thought it was kind of a chick flick. For dinner, we just made some more pasta because all the grocery stores were closed.

Tuesday was like a weird repeat of Monday. We walked down to the river front so Sam could see Buda, and then we had lunch at a delicious Indian restaurant. From there, we walked back down Andrassy, a boulevard known as the Champs d'Elysee of Budapest, where the House of Terror was located. It was thankfully open, and we were able to go inside and see the exhibit. I learned a lot about the history of Budapest and of Hungary, and it was a very interesting museum. The most chilling part of the museum was undoubtedly the recreated dungeons in the basement.

After the House of Terror, we went back toward the Hero's Monument, into the Varosliget, or city park. Here is where the Szechenyi Spa Baths are located. Budapest is well-known for its thermal bath houses, and we'd be poor tourists if we didn't experience them. We entered the spa and separated into the male and female dressing rooms. I rented a bathing suit, which sounds kind of gross but it was very clean, although it was a bit too small on me. From the dressing rooms, you enter the outdoor pool area. There are three huge pools outside, including two large heated pools and one lap pool. We spent a few minutes in the heated pool before going inside to the sauna. The sauna was wonderful, and when you left, there was a 60 degree chill pool to jump into. From there, we went up into the thermal baths. There seemed to be unending rooms filled with the thermal baths. Of course, they smelled a little weird because they had sulfur and all other sorts of minerals in them. Each bath had a varying temperature, up to as hot as around 120 degrees. There was one of the baths was a whirlpool that whisked you around the tub as you sat inside it. We also went into a steam room where the steam had a medicated smell, almost like Vick's. We ended the day back in the heated pools outside. All and all, it was an incredible experience. The thermal baths were so relaxing and made us all feel wonderful. It was especially great for me, as I was starting to get sick again (after having just gotten better!)

From the baths, we walked back to the mall we'd been at the day before so we could go to Tesco's. We had decided on making Mexican food, and Tesco's had everything we needed. They even had peanut butter, which I'd been looking for since Prague but hadn't been able to find anywhere! (Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are a great cheap food option for me.) Back at the hostel, the three of us cooked up our giant Mexican feast and spent the night watching The Office.

Budapest was so comfortable, in large part because we were staying in a hostel that felt like an apartment, and we weren't in any rush to do more sightseeing. So on Wednesday, we decided to try out one of the other bath houses, the Gellért baths, which was situated on Buda. This bath house had two common pools but separate thermal baths for men and women, so Jacqui and I had to separate from Sam for part of the day. There weren't as many thermal baths as Szechenyi, so we weren't as impressed. We all agreed that we wish we'd gone to the Gellért baths first, so we would have appreciated it more—compared to Szechenyi, it just wasn't that great. It looked like there was a bunch of baths outdoors, but the outdoor area had been shut down for the season, so we didn't get to experience those.

That night, we cooked a huge stir-fry dinner. It was really wonderful having a kitchen and having people to cook with! That night, we decided to go out to a popular bar called Szimpla Kert. "Kerts" are, according to my guidebook, "fun, makeshift bars set up for short periods of time in buildings awaiting demolition." Szimpla, which was the first kert, has become a permanent bar. It was a really cool, eclectic space.

The next morning, we all slept late. Jacqui and I were heading to Vienna that day, but the trains to Vienna from Budapest are very frequent, so we took our sweet time getting ready. The three of us watched some more episodes of The Office while having a long lunch. Sam was heading to Krakow the next day, so he left for a while to go book his bus ticket. Meanwhile, Jacqui and I went out for a bit. I needed to mail some postcards, but I also had to get to a pharmacy—my impending cold had at this point become the inevitable and I was desperately in need of a decongestant. We stocked up and went back to the hostel to say our goodbyes to Sam, a sad parting since the three of us had been together since Prague. Then we went to Vienna.

The train ride to Vienna was short, comparatively—only about 2 and a half hours—and we arrived in Vienna somewhere near 8 pm. Our hostel, Wombat's, was easy to find from the train station. At this hostel, too, we "won the hostel lottery," as I like to say. We'd booked an 8-bed female dorm and we were placed in a 4-bed for the same price. Traveling during the off-season can be so beneficial. We had dinner at the hostel bar and called it an early night.

On Friday, I woke up feeling really awful. My cold was officially back in full force. We decided to make it an easy day, and after a long lunch at a Turkish restaurant near our hostel, went into the center of Vienna. There we took the trams around "Ring Road," a circle of roads created in 1857 to replace the town's fortifications. The tram ride took maybe half an hour in all, but by the end of it, I was exhausted, so Jacqui and I parted ways. She went to go walk around some more, and I went back to the hostel to nap. Being sick while traveling is the worst because it's the total antithesis of sightseeing. That night, Jacqui suggested we go see another movie, which was one thing that I felt capable of doing, so we went and saw The Social Network. Not bad!

We needed to actually go do some stuff on Saturday, and our hostel was located in walking distance of the Schönbrunn Palace, the summer palace of the Hapsburgs. Schönbrunn looks a lot like Versailles, but I actually enjoyed visiting it a lot more; there were nowhere near as many tourists, which made it easy to sit and enjoy every room, and the history of the Hapsburgs was fascinating. It was a really remarkable sight and I'm so glad we did the full tour of it. After we finished the interior of the palace, we walked around the gardens for a while, but opted not to go to the ground's zoo (the oldest in the world). After the palace, we went back to the hostel, so I could lay down again, and Jacqui went out in search of a new purse. That evening, we headed to the Vienna State Opera House to see Mozart's The Magic Flute. We were able to buy standing room tickets for only 3 euros a piece. The opera was magnificent, but we couldn't see very well (only about a quarter of the stage from our perspective) so we ended up leaving at intermission. I'm so glad we did it, though, because it was a really worthwhile cultural experience. When we got back to the hostel, we ate some food, played cards, and watched some TV before going to bed.

On Sunday, we met up with my friend Kathryn from Luxembourg, who was also in Vienna, although staying at a different hostel. We met at the Albertina museum and walked over to the Sacher hotel, home of the original famous Sacher torte. Obviously, we had to try the torte, so we all ended up eating cake for breakfast. From there, we just walked around for a few hours. We saw the Stephensdom cathedral, but the catacombs weren't open yet so we decided to go back later. From there, we walked by the Spanish Riding School (whose famous show we had just missed), down past the museum quarter, and over to Naschtmarkt, a famous food market that was unfortunately closed for the day. Then we walked back toward the Stephensdom and had lunch. After lunch, I was feeling really ill again, so I left Kathryn and Jacqui and went back to the hostel to have yet another nap. I met the two of them in the bar around 5:30. Jacqui loaded her iPod up on my computer and then had to say goodbye—she was taking the overnight train to Rome. It was hard saying goodbye to Jacqui as we'd been traveling together for over a week and a half by that point. But I feel confident I will see her again someday—maybe in Vancouver!

On Monday (yesterday!), I was supposed to take a day trip to Bratislava with Kathryn and her fellow Canadian friend, Jeff, as I said at the very beginning of this post. But I was feeling really crappy and I opted to stay back. I got pretty much nothing accomplished yesterday, but when you're traveling, you sometimes have to have your down days. I was fine staying back—I feel like I saw everything I had wanted to see in Vienna.

And now I'm done with this post! Whew! I'm actually on the train to Salzburg, and I've been writing this post since I got on the train. Three hours later, I'm about ten minutes from arriving there, so this worked out really well. It's grey and cold-looking outside, and I'm really hoping that tomorrow will be clear because I'm planning on going on the Sound of Music tour. (I downloaded and watched The Sound of Music yesterday while I was sick in bed and am now very excited to visit Salzburg).

I cannot believe that I'll be home so soon! I will hopefully have a few more posts for you before then, and I hope to upload some more photos tonight, assuming that my hostel's internet connection is halfway decent.

Love and (just went through) Linz, Eliza

photos!

2010-11-05T11:20:00.001-07:00

So I may not have a new blog for you (sorry sorry sorry!!) but I've finally posted some photos. These are from Barcelona, Luxembourg, Nuremberg, Prague, and Budapest. Here you go: http://www.flickr.com/photos/elizaswift/sets/72157625185511101/

Just a quick update: I've left Budapest and I arrived in Vienna last night. I'm traveling with my friend Jacqui, who I met in Prague. I'll be here until Monday at least and then I'm heading to Salzburg after that. Miss the cheap prices of Eastern Europe already!

Love and Euros (finally back to Euros!), Eliza

sort of a post!

2010-10-30T01:04:00.001-07:00

Hi everyone,

Sorry things have been so slow on my blog! I have not been setting aside the time for it, which is very bad of me. I'm in Prague right now and heading to Budapest this afternoon, which is a six hour train ride and hopefully I will get some time to catch up then. However, I did get some time to write a few pages the other night and was able to finish writing about the rest of my time in Italy. I thought I would've been able to completely catch up by now but Prague has been a gigantic party so that hasn't happened! But I figured I might as well post those pages I'd written already so this blog isn't sitting completely unused. Here they are!

Man, I am not a very consistent blogger. Apologies for that. It's a lot harder to make myself write these now that Alex is gone and isn't pestering me to do it every day. I have so much to write about, just like last time, and so I had to finally make myself sit down and do it...otherwise, I know I'd find myself in London a month from now, wondering where the time went and cursing myself for not blogging. I can't believe it's still October; it's hard to imagine that this is the same month that I went to Switzerland. Right now, I'm sitting in my hostel dorm room in Prague. I love this city so far. My friends think it's kind of over-hyped, but I didn't really hear much about it (as I wasn't even 100% sure I'd be coming here), so I think it's just great. It's actually a revelation after the snoozefest that was Nuremberg...but more on that later.

Ok, so, starting off from my last post would bring us up to Rome. I only left Rome two weeks ago but it feels like forever! So after our harrowing almost-forgetting-our-passports experience, Alex and I had a smooth train ride to Rome, where we proceeded to get extremely confused by the Roma train station. As I said in the last post, Alex and I stayed in the second apartment of her former au pair, Paola. Paola lives in a suburban area of Rome called Ciampino, which was about 15 minutes by train from the city center, and we were due to meet her at the Ciampino train station at 7 pm. It should have been an easy ride for us but we got very turned around in the train station and boarded a train that had just recently arrived. As soon as we got onto it, the train powered down and we got stuck inside the car for about 10 minutes. After that, we were worried that the train would leave if we got off, and so we decided just to stay on it—but the train didn't leave until 7:30 pm. Thankfully, we had Paola's phone number and Alex was able to call her and tell her we wouldn't be there until 8 pm. We figured out the train system pretty quickly after that and didn't have any more problems.

Paola picked us up and took us to her apartment, where we had dinner with her and her husband, Fedrigo (I think I'm spelling that right but I'm not sure, so Alex can correct me if I'm wrong.) They made us a huge Italian meal, which was our introduction to how the Romans really eat. Apparently, Italians eat pasta first and then a salad or main course. Crazy! It was really great food and they were very accommodating about my whole vegetarian situation. After dinner, Paola took us to a pharmacy so I could get some cough syrup—I was at the height of my illness (which started in Switzerland) at this point and kept having coughing fits. Then she took us to her second apartment. The place was really nice, with a TV (and cable! such a joy for people on the road!), it was an easy 5 minute walk from the train station. Alex and I went to sleep very happy to be in Rome.

The next day, we got up and ready and realized the weather might be rainy...thank goodness we took our umbrellas into Rome with us. We had planned on doing a large walking tour from the Spanish Steps to the Coliseum, but after a few minutes at the Spanish Steps we realized that it was going to be too rainy to do much of anything, least of all walking. So we scratched that plan for the day and decided to head to the Vatican museum. Unfortunately, when we got to the Vatican, we realized that every other tourist in Rome seemed to have the same idea—the line was never-ending! So we sat down at a restaurant nearby and got some pizza and a bottle of wine and waited for the line to die down. By the time we got into line, at 3 pm, it was significantly shorter. We didn't realize it, but the Vatican stops letting people in at 4 pm and we were worried that we weren't going to make it, but we just barely got in. Alex and I kind of breezed through the museum; you reach a point when you're traveling that, unless you're a student of art or particularly interested in one thing, all the museums start to feel the same...kind of boring. But we had to make it to the Sistine Chapel, which is at the very end of the Vatican museum, so we had to go through everything to get to it. I've been to the Sistine Chapel before, when I went to Italy with my choir tour in high school, so I wasn't overwhelmed or anything, but it was cool to see again.

By the time we got out of the Vatican museum, it was getting kind of late, so we decided to head back to Ciampino. Both of us were looking forward to spending a night inside maybe watching a movie, and we found all three Jason Bourne movies for sale as a package for something like 20 euro, so we splurged and got them. Back in Ciampino, we bought some wine and some (more) pizza and settled in for the night in our apartment. It was perfect.

The next day was the day that Alex made me finish writing the last blog (I so miss her encouraging me to do this!), so we had a late start, but we got into Rome in the early afternoon. We went straight for the Coliseum area and headed to Palatine Hill first. That was one site that I didn't visit my first time in Rome and I really enjoyed it; the view from the hill is incredible. Afterwards, we went to the Coliseum and decided to get a guided tour. Unfortunately, our guide's Italian accent was so thick that her English was barely intelligible. Also unfortunate: I was seized by a major coughing fit and had to excuse myself from most of the tour. Oh well...I don't think the Coliseum is going anywhere, so maybe I'll have another tour of it someday. From the Coliseum, we walked over to the Roman Forum and saw that for a bit, before continuing on to the Trevi fountain. Oh yes, we did the entire tourist circut. We stopped and had a glass of wine after the fountain before heading to another area of the city to meet up with Paola and Fedrigo for dinner.

The dinner they took us to was incredible! The name of the restaurant was "Acchiappafantasmi," which means, "ghost busters" in Italian. We had the fixed menu, which was a menu of mushroom dishes...good luck for me, since it was mostly vegetarian and they were able to alter the dishes that weren't. Bad luck, as well, since I loathe mushrooms. But it was actually really delicious. The antipasto was a mushroom salad with parmesan (good) and these big cooked mushrooms with gorgonzola (which I thought was gross). After that came the "primo," which is the pasta course. This included two types of pasta: a dish with truffle oil (so delicious) and a fettuccine with mushroom sauce. Next came the "secondi," or the main course, which were more mushroom things. By this point, I was both so stuffed and so sick of mushrooms that I barely ate any of it. And then after that came the dessert, which was three types of gelatos. And after that came espresso, limoncello, and shots of two other after-dinner liqueurs. I have no idea how the Italians eat like this, it honestly boggles my mind. Of course, dinner took a really long time; they don't try to eat all that food in thirty minutes like Americans do. After dinner, Paola and Fedrigo drove us back to Ciampino and we said goodbye to them—Alex was leaving the next morning.

Having to say goodbye to Alex the next morning was only easy because I was half-asleep when she left around 9 am...I had spent most of the night awake coughing. It was extremely sad to lose my traveling companion though, especially one that was so much fun to travel with. I was a little nervous going on the trip with her, because it's been many years since we've spent so much time together (maybe since summer camp), but I really don't think either of us got sick of each other and we actually traveled really well together.

After she left for the airport, I got back in bed and slept until almost 1 pm. Yikes! It had been quite some time since I'd done that. But my body needed to heal. Once I woke, I got ready for the day and headed into Rome. I went to see the Mouth of Truth, the statue made famous by the movie "Roman Holiday," and walked up to the Pantheon and the Piazza Navona before heading back down toward the Coliseum. On my way, I stopped at a bookstore and bought both "Roman Holiday" and "Charade" on DVD...there was some special going on for Audrey Hepburn movies so they were discounted. After stopping in a grocery store at the train station for some food, I went back to Ciampino for the night and watched both movies. It had to be an early night for me because I had to leave Ciampino by 6:30 am the next day to catch my flight to Barcelona!

*****

Alright, so I will work hard to write some more today and get further caught up. I have done so much in the past few weeks and can't wait to tell you about it!

Love and lots of coffee, Eliza

on the move again!

2010-10-22T01:15:00.000-07:00

Hi all,
My brief blog hiatus (unintentional, I swear!) is sort of over. Okay, I don't have a big blog for you (and I know it's going to be a huge one, have to report on my few days in Rome, and then Barcelona and Paris with Mom and Ian), but I did want to tell you where I am and where I'm going. So I've managed to make it out of Paris---not an easy task considering the union strikes currently happening---and I'm currently sitting on the internet at my hostel in Luxembourg City! Yes, I am in Luxembourg! Why, you may ask? Who the hell knows. I picked a place that the trains were running to and went there...just needed to get out of Paris. So I'm looking forward to exploring this small city over the next two days, and then I'm off to another yet-to-be-decided location. Currently on the list of possibilities include Cologne, Frankfurt and Munich (again)...I'm trying to work my way eastward so I can meet up with some friends in Prague. I actually don't have a HUGE desire to go to Germany again just yet, but it may be unavoidable given my current location. Anyway, I'm gonna go explore the city now. It's very cold and gray here and I'm extremely glad that I bought a new, warm, winter coat. As I was taking the train here, I could see frost on the ground. The colors of the scenery looked completely muted! So not the best walking weather, but I'm eager to stretch my legs either way. Look later today or tomorrow for photos, I'm going to try to get those uploaded at some point.
Love and Luxe, Eliza

that time alex and i almost left our passports in florence

2010-10-12T02:35:00.000-07:00

Alright, I've been a horrible blogger. Each night, Alex pokes me and says, "Dude! Are you going to write your blog post?!" I meekly reply, "Well, maybe," but then I become too involved with cheap Italian wines to get anything done. But finally, finally something really worth telling has happened (not that everything else hasn't been worth telling!) and I've been inspired. So here we go. Alex and I are on the train from Florence to Rome, where Alex will be departing from in three days. At the beginning of this trip, I said that I would either be very sad or very happy to see her go, and thankfully, it's the former. I can't believe her portion of this trip has come to an end so quickly, especially since September felt like it dragged on forever.

Ok time to put sentimentality aside for the time being and get to the travels. I started a blog post in Paris which I never finished, so I'll start the post off with that portion:

Alex is yelling at me right now because I'm not paying attention to the task at hand—writing this blog post. I'm too busy being distracted by a million little things: the food being cooked in this kitchen in front of me, our Brazilian roommate playing the guitar, the half-empty bottle of Chardonnay on our table that begs to be finished, the British news channel discussing public funding of British universities (yaaawwwnnn), and the two delicious tarts we bought earlier (one is chocolate and one is strawberries and both are amazing!) that keep daring me to eat them. So, from that description, I imagine that Paris sounds really lovely, and at the moment it is exactly that. I'll talk about Paris earlier, but all you need to know is that we're enjoying it despite our hostel being the worst place ever (yes: Alex and I have agreed that we'd take another night in the Tent over this.)

So, first and most importantly, Switzerland!! The last (substantial) post I wrote, Alex and I were spending a rainy day inside in Zurich, patiently awaiting our travels to Lucerne. We got to Lucerne around 5:30 and waited in the tourist office for my friend Julian to pick us up. (Yes, it's funny, his first name is Alex's last name.) For those who don't know the story of my Swiss friends Julian and Pascal: I met them in Barcelona in 2007, when I was on Semester at Sea. They were staying in the same hostel as my friends and I, and we only met for one night, but it was enough to exchange email addresses (this was before either of the guys had Facebook, and they wanted to send us pictures of our night out together). Needless to say, we stayed in contact over the years; Julian and Pascal visited me in Chicago for 4 days in 2008 during their large trip to the United States, and they were kind enough to return the favor when we came through Switzerland.

After Julian came and got us, we walked over to a Swiss grocery store (called CoOp, huge chain) to get some food to prepare for dinner. For legal reasons or something (Julian explained this to me at some point, but of course I've totally forgotten), Swiss grocery stores close very early, so we had to go before we went back to his apartment.

Ok that's where the post from Paris ends. Picking that back up, we decided to make pasta and salad for dinner. From the grocery store we headed to his apartment, a really nice place that seems close to everything (although Lucerne is so small that it's hard not to be close to everything.) Pascal came over and the four of us cooked...or, rather, Julian, Pascal, and I cooked while Alex drank some wine and talked about how she was useless in the kitchen. It was great to have our first home-cooked meal of the trip! After dinner, we decided to go out to a bar called the Black Sheep, because they had great drink specials: 2-for-1 champagne and beer. We called it an early night because Pascal lives a short while out of town and the buses were going to stop running.

The next day, we were ecstatic to see some sunshine, although disheartened by the amount of accompanying clouds. We ate a delicious breakfast of chocolate croissants and strong Swiss coffee, and Alex and I put a few loads of laundry in. If you've ever been on the road for more than a week at a time, you know how precious doing laundry becomes. There are few things more exciting to me now than clean clothes! (Ah, simple things.) After breakfast, we went to the train station to book tickets to Paris. Unfortunately, even though it was only Friday, all the high-speed trains to Paris from Bern were already booked. (There is only a certain amount of Eurail passholders allowed on each train.) This meant we had to book a slow train, guaranteeing us another very long day of travel on that Sunday. But we felt fortunate to have booked anything!

After our tickets were booked, Julian and Pascal took us on a tour of Lucerne. We crossed the famous old wood bridge (which, at several hundred years old, burned down in the 90s and was rebuilt) and went to a Lucerne brewery for lunch. I had a traditional Swiss dish called Auplermacaroni, which is basically macaroni, potatoes, and grilled onions smothered in raclette cheese and served with a side dish of applesauce. It was incredible, although I was so fatted afterwards that I felt like I could barely walk.

We had waited until the afternoon to do the main event for the day: take the cogwheel tram (the steepest in the world!) to the top of Mount Pilatus, the highest mountain around Lake Lucerne. We'd all hoped that by the afternoon, the clouds would have disappeared and were disappointed to find that they did not. However, Alex and I decided that we were willing to fork up the 40-odd Swiss francs each to go to the top anyway, and we're so glad we did. The entire top of the mountain was snowy and cloudy, but the clouds would part occasionally and let us see through them. The way down from the mountain was the most spectacular part, because the clouds started to disperse and we had an incredible view of Lake Lucerne.

After we descended the mountain, Pascal drove us to the other side of the lake to the top of another mountain, where we were afforded another incredible view of the lake, as well as the surrounding areas. Rolling green pastures with the Swiss alps in the background...it all really looked like a painting. Here's something that is not a stereotype about Switzerland: there are cows *everywhere* and they're all wearing bells! When we got up close to the cows, Julian and Pascal had a good laugh at my childlike delight.

From there, we headed to a fondue dinner. Julian and Pascal both maintained that we needed to have fondue, even though they admit they only eat it a few times a year. So we went to a restaurant directly on the lake, where we got the full ordeal. The fondue cheese pot was served with potatoes, bread, and an assortment of fruits and vegetables. Also accompanying it was a HORRIBLE thing that the Swiss call "schnapps" but which bears no resemblance to the kind of schnapps that American teenagers get drunk off of. We were each given a shot glass of the schnapps, which bore a taste similar to nail polish remover. Alex and I were told that we needed to dip the bread into the shot glass before putting it in the cheese and both of us were disgusted and horrified by the following taste. I don't think I've ever had such strong-tasting liquor in my life. However, the boys maintained that it helps one's stomach digest the incredible amount of cheese, and by the end of dinner, I was sipping it. Each sip was more bearable than the last, although I wouldn't say I'm eager to drink it ever again. I managed to finish my shot, something that Alex refused to attempt. Pascal and Julian were true gentleman and, knowing that the dinner would be stretching for both of our budgets, bought us dinner. Have I mentioned yet that they were pretty much the best hosts someone could hope for?

That night, we geared up to go to a Swiss nightclub. I was very surprised the night before when The Boyfriend emailed me telling me that one of his close friends from high school, Jeff Dwyer, was also in Switzerland at that exact moment. Jeff lives in Chicago and I've known him for a quite a few years, so I emailed him to see where he was. Blessedly, Switzerland is a tiny country (fact: 4 hours to drive from one end to the other), and he was coming to Lucerne that Friday! So we all met up with Jeff and his brother at their hotel and had a beer on the hotel's rooftop before heading to the club.

The nightclub that we went to, Opera, was set in an old cinema and it was gigantic. I can't even begin to describe what a mess this place was, but I will try. First of all, there were flashing lights everywhere. It looked like laser beams! In the main dance hall, there was a shower on the second floor that people who were inebriated enough could get into for a shower and a dance. (No, we did not even attempt that disaster.) Because the drinking age in Switzerland, like every else in Europe, is much lower than the U.S., we were surrounded by teenagers. Alex and I, on our cheap backpacker budget, ordered Sex on the Beaches all night because that was the drink special. I don't really like fruity drinks, so it wasn't fun to chug down, and I didn't feel great the next day. Anyway, we had a really fun time just watching the crowd and dancing, so much so that Alex and I needed to get some pizza afterwards. I don't know if it was just the alcohol, but it was some of the best pizza ever.

On Saturday, we had plans to head to Bern. Julian's parents and girlfriend all live there and he and Pascal went to school right outside the city. Pascal also had a concert with his carnival band (more on this later) that night, which we were going to attend. Since Pascal had to drive out to his parent's house (in a village about 45 minutes outside of Bern), he offered to take our bags with him, which was so great. Being able to take a train without lugging our bags around was amazing. Julian was going to take the fast train to Bern so he could get in early and do some errands, and Alex and I had intended on taking a slightly slower and more scenic train. However, since we were not a little tired from the night before and we wanted to give him some extra time, we decided to take the extra-long train which went through Interlaken. We are both SO glad that we decided to do this. Saturday was incredibly clear and the views from the train were unbelievable. There are pictures, which I've already posted, but they barely do justice to the beauty.

When we got to Bern, Julian and his girlfriend Miriam met us at the train station. They proceeded to take us on a long and wonderful walking tour of the city, where we saw the parliament building, the many fountains in the streets (which are for drinking water!), the old famous clock face, the captive bear family that is the mascot of the city, and some incredible views from a park at a slightly higher elevation than the main area. After our walking tour, we went to Miriam's apartment and made dinner. By this point, I was starting to feel really sick. My nose was stuffed and my brain felt fuzzy, so Miriam let me lay down in her bed for a while after dinner and gave me some saline flushes to use in my nose. Laying down made me feel a bit better, and around 9:30 pm we headed out for Pascal's concert.

Carnival, which is similar to but also quite a bit different than the Brazilian carnivale, is a big holiday in Switzerland, particularly in Lucerne. Pascal is in a band that performs carnival music, and the best way to describe it is to say that it's essentially a marching band without the marching (they perform on risers.) Pascal happened to have a concert while we were in town, so we drove out into the country to see his band perform. It was a fun evening, where several different carnival bands did their thing, but I grew more ill feeling as the night went on. After Pascal's performance, Alex and I said a bittersweet goodbye to Julian and Miriam. I feel confident that I'll see them again at some point, somewhere else in the world! We've agreed that we have to conquer a new continent.

Pascal packed his car up and then drove Alex and I back to his parent's house in a village near the French area of Switzerland. I've also posted a picture of this so I hope everyone looks at it; Pascal's village is so beautiful and picturesque and I can't believe anyone lives there! I'm still halfway convinced that Switzerland is not a real country and that they're using backdrops to convince tourists otherwise. Pascal's wonderful mother made up the guest bedroom for Alex and I, and we were so beyond excited to be sleeping in a big, comfortable bed...our first *real* bed of the trip. I can safely say that neither of us had slept so well until that point.

The next morning, we showered (yes, even Alex!) and got ready for our train ride to France. Pascal made us some delicious cheese sandwiches for the road with a type of Swiss bread his mother had made that he said was called "weekend bread" (which looks like challah and is completely yummy). He drove us to a train station about 15 minutes away in the French part of Switzerland and there we had to say another sad goodbye. I can't say enough how wonderful both Pascal and Julian were throughout our entire time in Switzerland; amazing, gracious hosts, excellent tour guides, and wonderful friends. I'm so appreciative that we were able to have the "100% Swiss Experience" (as we kept calling it) with my 100% Swiss friends.

Then we left Switzerland. I think we were both very sad to be leaving it. It's such a small country but it's a really remarkable one, with incomparable beauty. If only Switzerland was a little less expensive! So then, France. We had to change trains in Basel and we arrived in Paris at the East train station around 7 pm. Alex and I made the horrible mistake of not writing down any information about our hostel before we got to Paris; we've been overly reliant on tourist information offices during our travels, which can be found in every train station. The train station in Paris had a tourist information office too. Unfortunately, we both had lost track of the days and failed to realize it was a Sunday. The tourist information office was closed. No problem, we thought, the train station is sure to have wi-fi. It did, but we couldn't figure out how to get on it. "Ok," I rationalized, "I'll just call my parents and have them look up the information on the hostel for us." (My phone has been fixed!) Unfortunately, my phone was completely out of batteries. After about twenty minutes of sitting around feeling defeated, we decided just to walk in what we thought was the right direction. I knew that our hostel was in Montmartre, so I figured out where the Sacre-Coeur church was and lead us toward it. Eventually, we found a McDonalds that had free wifi, and Alex was able to look up the reservation on my computer. Miraculously, I had been leading us in the absolute right direction and we were only about a 5-10 minute walk from our hostel, Le Montclair.

So, as we are budget travelers, we booked the cheapest hostel we could find that didn't seem like a total dump. Boy, were we wrong. Le Montclair is a very gross, dirty place filled with exceptionally weird travelers. Neither of us have loathed a place as much as this, ever. The girl working reception barely spoke English and was frankly utterly useless. (Our nickname for her, Fuzzy Head, stuck throughout the rest of the trip—named so because she oddly brushed out her dishwater blonde curls in a way that made her look electrocuted.) Ole Fuzzy Head gave us our room number and told us we were on the second floor, but failed to tell us that we were on the second floor of the other building, so we spent an incredibly frustrated 15 minutes trying to jam out keys into other room's locks before we figured it out. The room, as a 6 person dorm, had blissfully few people and an en suite bathroom, but the bathroom looked like it hadn't been cleaned in years. I took a shower on Tuesday morning and the only word I can use to describe the experience is "violated." It was a matchbox of a shower that alternated between boiling hot and ice-water cold, and the water had to be pushed back on every 15 or so seconds. Yes, the showering experience was so bad that I felt violated by it. The beds were horrible too. The first night, I was on a top bunk of a bed that was so wobbly that every time I slightly moved a leg, the whole bunk would rock and slam into the wall, loudly, undoubtedly waking up the person under me. Anyway, the place was horrible and to spare your delicate sensibilities, dear reader, I will describe it no further.

After we finally got a room and our things sorted out, we went to pretty much the first restaurant we could find, where (in our incredible frustration with the universe), we proceeded to spend too much money on pizza, lasagna, and wine. Ohhh, the wine. Alex is a beer drinker, so the first half of the trip was heaven for her, but there are few things I like more than a good glass of wine, and the past week has been perfect for me. The wines in France and Italy are not only great, they're so cheap! We're able to buy totally palatable bottles for only four euro (and sometimes just two). It's just wonderful. We went to sleep feeling much better about everything, even though I was still very sick.

On our first day in Paris, we had our free hostel breakfast and set out for the Sacre-Coeur. The view from the Sacre-Coeur is probably the best in Paris, because it's unobstructed and lovely. From there, we took the Metro (are there better public transit systems existing on the planet? I think not! What a useful and wonderful system!) to the St. Michel station. Here we met up with a free walking tour of Paris, which lasted about three and a half hours. The tour took us through Ile de la Cite, over a few famous bridges, through the Louvre grounds and through the Tullerie gardens, and down Champs-Elysee. It was a really nice tour and we learned a lot about the history of Paris...not to mention that we walked right through Fashion Week and we were able to stare at that for a while. By the end of the tour, I was feeling really beat (the cold was catching up to me), so we went back to the hostel and Alex let me nap for a few hours. That night, we had Indian food for dinner, again...which brings us to how many times? Too many, probably, but we sure do love our curry.

On Tuesday, we walked through Montmartre during the morning. We were able to see the Moulin Rouge, and we accidentally ate lunch at the cafe that Amelie was filmed at (I say accidentally because we chose it for its food selection, not realizing that it had been the filming location until we sat down and looked around). In the afternoon, we headed to the main event for the day: Versailles! We only had a few hours, so we just did the palace and a part of the gardens. Versailles was, of course, beautiful, and it was incredible to see the Hall of Mirrors. The pop artist Takashi Murakami has put up a temporary installation of his sculpture work throughout the palace and grounds, and I almost enjoyed seeing the Murakami work more than Versailles. Don't get me wrong, it was beautiful, but it felt really sparse (pretty much none of the original furniture remains, so there has been a little bit of period furniture thrown in) and the tourist crowds were the worst. Alex and I were shoved around quite a lot by gigantic Asian tour groups eager to get their photos with every piece of artwork. It really ruined the atmosphere of Versailles. I think I may be going back to see Petite Trianons sometime next week with my mom and brother, so I hope to have a better experience at that point.

After Versailles, we bought a bottle of wine and a baguette and went back to the hostel for dinner (where we ate our Indian food leftovers). Fact: the stereotype of French people carrying around baguettes is well deserved. We were amazed to see how many people actually stop by their neighborhood boulangerie in the afternoon/evening and walk around with baguette in hand.

Wednesday was our Louvre day. The Louvre is so big and so overwhelming, so we only saw a few things. We needed to see Mona Lisa, of course, which had a similar tour-group-shoving vibe as Versailles, and we also saw Venus de Milo. We weren't sure what we should go see after that (and we kept getting lost) so we thought it would be interesting to see Napoleon III's apartments in the Louvre. It was incredible! I actually have to say that I enjoyed the apartments more than Versailles, because the apartments were created in Louis XIV's style (which means that they actually look quite like the style of Versailles) and all the original furnishing is in place, but there were very few people milling about, so we were able to spend time appreciating everything. After the Louvre, we walked over to see the Notre-Dame Cathedral, which was lovely. From there, we took a train back to our hostel (which we'd already checked out of) so we could cook some dinner for ourselves and pick up our bags. And then it was off to the overnight train to Venice.

Ah, the overnight train. I actually didn't really mind our experience with the overnight train. When you've booked a couchette, the cheapest option (it cost us both around 28 euro with our passes), you get a fold-down bed in a six-person compartment. So there are three people sleeping on each side of the compartment. Alex and I were both stuck with middle berths, which we were upset about (we assumed that the middle would be the worst). The compartment next door was filled with a big group of Chinese friends, a few of whom were in our compartment, and they wanted to make a switch with us so more of their friends were in their compartment. They offered us bottom berth tickets, so we of course agreed, assuming that the bottom would be much better. We were so wrong! The bottom berth stays at a weird sort of angle and the headrests fold down so they're hanging in your face all night. It was incredibly uncomfortable, but it was also a learning lesson—now if I have to take a night train again, I know to keep a middle bunk or try for a top. The train took around 13 hours, but Alex and I watched TV on my computer for the first hour and a half, and drank enough wine that when we had lights out around 10 pm, we were both ready to go to sleep. We woke up around 8 pm, ready to arrive in Venice.

We booked a hostel in Venice that my friend Jackie had stayed at and recommended, called L'Imbarcadero and located about 10 minutes (walking) from the train station. We got into Venice, went to the hostel, put our bags down and cleaned up in the bathroom, and headed out for the day. The guy who ran the hostel, Alex, highlighted a walking tour for us on a map that he said would take about 4 hours (and it did!). We spent all day hoofing around the island and we were able to see quite a lot...although we didn't go into St. Mark's cathedral because there was a gigantic line and far too many people. We were able to take a (very short) gondola ride that only cost us a euro each, which was great! We also went back to the train station and booked a ticket to leave for Florence the next day. We had intended to leave in the morning, but all the trains were booked until 2:40, so we had to book that. By four p.m., we were exhausted and I was still feeling sick, so we went back to the hostel and napped for a few hours. Our beds were so comfortable (they weren't bunks! just individual beds!) and we both ended up napping for something like three hours. Whoops! But I really needed it, this cold has not been very much fun for me. After we woke up, we opted to go out for dinner (versus eating in the hostel) because we both wanted to go stretch our legs. Then we came back to the hostel and went back to bed.

At some point in the night, I was scratching my arms and hands and face so hard that I woke myself up. Freaked out, I went into the bathroom and saw that I had bug bites all over my arms, hands, and face. My first assumption was, of course, that I had bed bugs. I went and shook Alex awake, and we turned on the light and stripped my sheets. No bed bugs! Alex convinced me that I had given myself some sort of nervous hive reaction and prompted me to go back to bed and stop scratching. I heard some buzzing around my head, so I slept with the covers pulled over me. In the morning, I woke up with swollen face (my chin looked like Jay Leno!) and a right hand so swollen that I couldn't use it. We've deduced that I was probably bit by some sort of mosquito, because of the buzzing noise and since I was only bit on areas that were exposed. Plus, I always have very adverse reactions to mosquito bites. The guy who ran the hostel, Alex, took me to a pharmacy and translated for me, and I was able to get a cortisone cream and an oral antihistamine. Slightly fixed, Alex and I went to a park in Venice and just sat and read our books until we had to get on the train.

We arrived in Florence around 5 pm and walked to our hostel, Ostello Santa Monaca, a really clean and nice place. We were in a 6-person female-only dorm room with a huge bathroom en suite. There wasn't a big party atmosphere or anything, but the hostel was probably the nicest we've stayed in, which was funny because it was also the cheapest. The first thing we did in Florence was walk to Vivoli, an old and famous gelateria, where Alex made the mistake of trying new flavors and ended up with what tasted like a ginger flavor and a pear flavor, neither of which were particularly good. After a big pasta dinner, we headed to bed, ready to take on Florence!

On Saturday, our main day in Florence, we grabbed a quick breakfast at a close-by pastry shop and went to the train station to book our train to Rome the next day. Once that business was taken care of, we headed into the heart of Florence to take a look at the Duomo, the huge and famous church in the city center. At that point, the line was obscene, so we just took a gander at the outside and walked over to the Accademia to see the David. The line at the Accademia was also outrageous, but tickets were sold at a nearby museum, so we were able to purchase some and by-pass the line with a reservation. David's very impressive, even at my second time seeing him, and it was well worth the entrance price.

After viewing David, we went back toward the Duomo, where the line had completely died down and we were able to get inside. Both of us found the outside to be more impressive than the inside, and frankly, at this point, all churches are starting to blend together. Following the Duomo, we did the necessary walk across Ponte Vecchio, the bridge that's covered in jewelry shops, and did some great window-shopping. After a quick stop at another gelato shop, we went back to the hostel, where I did some much-needed laundry. For dinner, we went to an organic wine bar across the street from our hostel. Have I mentioned that I love Italian wines?

The next day, Alex and I had another breakfast at our favorite pastry shop, and then we headed out for a long walk. We found a nice park to sit in and we read our books for a while, until Alex finished hers. She's gone through a lot of books in the past three weeks, because she keeps trading in her finished books at book exchanges in hostels and taking whatever's in English; the books she ends up with rarely end up to be very good. Then we went back to the hostel, made ourselves some lunch, and went to the train station for our train for Rome.

We got our bags out of the luggage room at our hostel and headed on the 10-minute walk to the train station. We arrived at the station with about 20 minutes until our train departure. Alex suddenly gasped and shouted, "Oh...my...god." She looked over at me and said, "We left our passports at the hostel." Oh yes, with 20 minutes until our train, our passports were still securely locked up at the reception desk at the hostel, where we usually leave them. Without much hope, Alex handed me her bags and sprinted off in the direction of our hostel. I can imagine she was probably an obscene sight, wearing a bright red dress and boots and running down the street haphazardly. As the minutes passed by, I started chewing on my nails harder and harder. Missing the train wouldn't have been a *huge* deal, except that we were supposed to meet Alex's former au pair, Paola, at a train station in her Roman suburb, and we wouldn't be able to make that appointment. With two minutes to departure, Alex appeared back in the doorway to the train station. We grabbed our bags and hauled ass onto the train, Alex dripping in sweat and both of us amazed that we almost left our passports in Florence. We're both very thankful that we managed to remember before we boarded the train! From now on, I'm going to be obsessed about where my passport is at all times.

Ok, so, I'm now 9 pages into this blog post and I was not able to finish all of this on the train from Florence to Rome—I've been finishing it up over the past few days in Rome, and it's now Tuesday, our second full day. Rome has been great so far, mostly because we're staying in the second apartment of Alex's former au pair. Paola and her husband were nice enough to offer us this apartment, and we're thrilled to have a television, a kitchen, a clean bathroom and a big bed. However, it's getting later and later into the morning and we have a ton of stuff to do today, so I'm going to have to update on Rome later. We're hoping that today is sunny, since it was pouring rain yesterday and it ruined our plans to go do a walking tour. Instead, we went to see the Vatican and we'll be doing our walking tour today.

Whew! Huge post! Thanks for reading it all. I'm really bummed out that Alex is leaving tomorrow but looking forward to seeing my mom and brother on Thursday in Barcelona. I can't believe that this has gone by so quickly. During September, both of us felt like the time was dragging on, but then we got to October and suddenly Alex is leaving! Anyway, I'll try to get up another post before Barcelona describing our few days in Rome. Meanwhile, I'm still pretty sick (can you believe it?!) and I've got a totally offensive cough that has been repulsing Romans all over their public transit system. So think sunny thoughts and well wishes in my direction, please!

Love and lots of pizza, Eliza

ugh

2010-10-05T15:23:00.000-07:00

Ok, I'm awful, I haven't had a chance to update the blog yet. I've written like 1/4 of my new blog post. But to tide everyone over, I've posted some photos to Flickr. Unfortunately, the internet at this hostel (like everything else at this hostel) is incredibly slow and horrible, so I don't have the patience any more to title them. But here's the album of Switzerland and Paris (so far): http://www.flickr.com/photos/elizaswift/sets/72157624978299687/

I'll put some titles and descriptions on the photos in the next day or two and will hopefully get a blog posted in the next 24 hours!

Love and sleeps, Eliza

overdue!!

2010-10-05T02:46:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone,
I know that I am incredibly overdue for a post! I've got a whole boatload of excuses for you, some of which are: a) we've been having toooooo much fun!, b) Alex and I are both sick and sleeping a lot, c) we were in Switzerland (Alex maintains this is a legitimate excuse.) We're about to head out and explore our neighborhood (Montmarte) for a bit before going to Versailles to see some decadence and indulgence (our favorite things). But I promise I will try my very hardest to get a real, lengthy post written tonight...so much to tell! Mostly, I'm moving to Switzerland! (Ok, not really, but I wish.) Just an FYI: everyone seems to be freaking out about this security alert thing, but no one over here is even talking about it, so please stop being worried. We're fine. We love you and miss you all!!
Love and Louvre, Eliza

so far...

2010-10-01T01:50:00.000-07:00

So far, Switzerland is: hanging out with my favorite foreign friends, delicious homecooked meals, laundry!!!, hot showers with great water pressure, comfy blow-up bed, good 2-for-1 drink specials at luzern bars, going to the Alps today! You win, Switzerland!

Today is going to be the most expensive day of our trip, because of the trams we're taking to the mountains, and because we're going to fondue for dinner tonight. But Alex and I have agreed that it's 100% worth the true Swiss experience. More later, and photos, but probably not until Sunday.

Happy love!, Eliza

PS: THERE IS SUNSHINE!!!!

all about germany!

2010-09-30T04:54:00.000-07:00

Ok, blog time, finally. I've been meaning to do this for days but there was always some reason that I didn't; mostly, I've just been too tired to devote the time to it. But I really am going to try to be more consistent about posting, I promise. On that note, I've posted some new photos, which you can see here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/elizaswift/sets/72157624936887689/

It's been a crazy five days and there's so much to tell! But, of course, I'll start from where I last posted, which was Berlin. So after our long, crazy day of train rides, we arrived in rainy and cold Berlin around 7:10 pm. We stayed at the BaxPax Downtown hostel, which was probably the cleanest and nicest hostel we've stayed in so far (although the one in Amsterdam was still the most fun.) We went out for a birthday dinner at a cheap Indian restaurant around the corner. Back at the hostel, we made friends with a group of Swedish guys, who invited us out with them for the night. We met them at an oddly tropical-themed bar and the restaurant gave me a free birthday drink. It had sparklers in it! Terrified me quite a bit, and tasted like it didn't have any alcohol in it. We went to another bar after that restaurant closed and we were out until quite late in the night (like...4 am? yikes.) I had a couple cool conversations about our respective countries with the Swedes. For instance, they told us that smoking marijuana is considered so bad in Sweden that their families would disown them, and they would stop talking to friends that did it. (This conversation came up because they were on their way to Amsterdam.) One guy told me that he was appalled by America's arrogance, but admitted that he thinks the U.S. is the best country in the world—"I just don't want you *knowing* that you're the best, that is horrible!" Another couple interesting things I learned about Sweden: they do not eat the Swedish fish candy and they have never seen the Swedish Chef. They were very offended by our "borgity borg" impressions.

The next day, we were very surprised when we slept until almost 12 pm; we've been getting up at 8:30 almost the entire trip. We groggily cleaned ourselves up and headed toward Unter den Linden, a large boulevard in Berlin that a lot of tourist stops are near. Imagine our surprise as we get closer and closer to the boulevard and it gets louder and louder—the Berlin Marathon was going straight down the middle of it! We'd been seeing people in these green Adidas rain ponchos for the past two days and wondering why...if only we'd looked closer and seen "Berlin Marathon" printed all over them! So the big thing for us to see at Unter der Linden was the Brandenburg gate, which was very pretty. It was the first time in the trip that I've really felt the weight of the history around me, especially when I saw some old photos of the boulevard that were taken at the Nazi rallies that had been held there. From the gate, we headed to the Holocaust Memorial, or as the official name goes: "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe." Pretty blunt, eh? At the outside, the memorial didn't look like very much, but as you walk further into it, the ground goes down until you're walking underneath these huge pillars of stone. It was very moving. We then walked over to a large preserved portion of the Berlin Wall, which was also incredible to see. It started raining really hard so by 5 pm, we were ready to get back to our hostel and have some showers. We had Indian food for dinner AGAIN, which, if you're counting, brought us to 3 times in 5 days. Obsessed much? We felt a little guilty for not eating traditional foods, but only a little, since we both love curry so much.

So we got back to the hostel that night and I had a horrible realization: I was sleeping next to The Snorer. Every room in every hostel, no matter how big or small, appears to have a Snorer. I'm not talking about someone that lightly, inoffensively snores. The Snorer is in a league of his/her own (although, it is more often men than women). The bunk next to The Snorer is the worst property in the room and pretty much guarantees that you will not sleep in what is already likely an uncomfortable bed. I slept next to The Snorer in Munich, too, but the guy in Berlin was by far the worst I've heard. It was like trying to fall asleep to the sound of geese aggressively mating. It overpowered the (admittedly minimal) strength of my earplugs. Somehow, I managed a few hours of sleep, but it wasn't easy. We had a very early train ride to Munich, at 6:50 am, so we had to leave our hostel around 6. It was gross out and raining again, so we didn't feel guilty sleeping on the train. We arrived in Munich around 12:50 pm.

Ok, so our hostel in Munich was kind of a disaster. The hostels get really expensive during Oktoberfest, so we booked the cheapest one we could find, which is called The Tent. The Tent is literally a large circus tent that people sleep in and a campground. We were thankfully placed in the smaller tent, but there were still at least 50 people inside. Unfortunately, there wasn't any heat, and it was pretty cold (high 40s to low 50s) the whole time we were in Munich. By the end of our time at The Tent, we were cold, bitter, crabby, dirty, and ready to get away from it. But we didn't go to Munich to stay in a nice place, we went for Oktoberfest, and we really had an incredible time.

The first day we got into Munich, we were going to walk around a bit and see the city, but we decided to stop by the Oktoberfest grounds for a minute first and see what it was like. Neither of us thought we'd be able to get into any beer tents, since we didn't have reservations and it was later in the day. We were wrong! The Oktoberfest grounds are enormous, and it feels like a gigantic county fair. I thought there would only be 3 or 4 beer halls, but there was something like 10. We sat down outside at Hofbrau, one of the more popular tents, and quickly were chatted up by obscenely drunk Italians. One of them wanted to "have a dialogue" with me, away from Alex, so we got him to go back to his friends and then bolted from the tent as soon as we finished our beers. I wanted to go on some of the rides, and I managed to talk Alex into going on the high swings with me. They look like the regular swing rides that we have in the U.S., but they go up maybe 75-100 feet in the air. I thought it was going to be really fun, but Alex was terrified, squeezing my arm the entire time and screaming, "We're going to die! This is going to snap!" Needless to say, I didn't really enjoy myself, and both of us were very happy when the ride ended.

After the ride, we were walking around and I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around and there were our Australian friends from Amsterdam!! We were so happy to see them, we had a great couple of days with them and we really never thought we'd see them again (especially not at Oktoberfest, which was so packed full of people.) We all went back to Hofbrau and Alex and I had another beer. She and I left Oktoberfest around 8 pm, back to the wretched Tent. There was a campfire going on, though, and we sat around that and chatted with fellow travelers for a while before going to bed around 10:30.

Our second day at Oktoberfest was the real mess. We met the Australians outside Hofbrau at 11 am and walked around the rides for a while. At some point, we went into one of the tents, where Alex and I had our first beer. The guys left us for about an hour to walk around while we drank. A huge group of Italian guys sat down with us, and didn't talk much to us, although they showed us a love letter that one of them had received and translated it for us. It was very dirty! At one point, a television crew came around and one of the Italians offered to have his chest waxed for TV. The Australians came back and we left to go to Hofbrau again. We found seats inside with a big group of Brits and had another drink. One Australian, who was not really with our group, puked all over the table and into his drink...really disgusting. I feel like 18-year-olds should not be allowed at Oktoberfest! We were kicked off of the table eventually, because the people who reserved it showed up. At this point, we went and got some food, even though we were all filled with beer—I knew that I had to eat something, though!

Sometime after our second beer, I got into a snitty mood and Alex and I started to fight. The Australians decided to head back to their hostel and let us work our shit out alone. Alex wanted us to head back to our hostel but I convinced her to stay (can you imagine? ME convincing ALEX to stay at a party?! major, major role reversal). Then she got into a snitty mood and we fought even more. Neither of us knows why we were fighting or what about, but we apologized to each other and got another beer. During our third beer, we sat down outside with some Germans. One of the guys didn't speak any English and was apparently saying very rude things to us in German, which another German was translating. So we taught him how to toast in English. We got him to toast to diarrhea, dingleberries, and saggy tits. By the time we were toasting to saggy tits, he was catching on that we were screwing with him and was very resistant, but we got him to shout it out anyway. I really wish I had captured a video of the whole thing.

Then we went inside that tent for our fourth beer. We found some (other) Germans who had a friend working at the hall and helped us get some beers. They asked us if we were Australian, so we naturally agreed and went along pretending we were Australian for the rest of the night. We're lucky that there were no Australians with us, because our accents were probably really horrible, but we managed to convince this group of friends. Somewhere after the fourth beer, the night gets a little blurry, but we know the beer tents closed at 10:30 so we must have left around there. Alex and I tried to piece a few things together the next day, but there are a few things we still have questions about. For instance: Alex has a huge bruise on her butt, so she must have fallen at some point, but neither of us remembers it. Alex's coat looks sort of like she slept in a gutter, which would support the falling-in-the-muddy-rain theory. Also: both of our jackets are covered in stains that look suspiciously like mustard. Once we thought about it hard, Alex claimed, "I have a vague feeling of mustard," so we've deduced that we ate something mustardy at some point.

You may guess that we were feeling pretty awful yesterday, and you would be correct. We didn't have the foresight to plan out yesterday ahead of time, so we knew that we needed to leave Munich and go somewhere but we weren't sure where. (We had an extra day in between when we left Munich and when we'll meet my friends in Lucerne tonight.) So we stared at my guidebook all blurry-eyed for a while before deciding just to go to Zurich. Yesterday was definitely the day for us to be taking a 4-hour train ride. We thought we'd sleep on the train, but of course it was the first really sunny and lovely day we've had since Amsterdam, so we stared out the window the entire way. Switzerland is lovely! The hostel we're staying in here in Zurich is nice and quiet, which was perfect for us last night. We were able to take showers (Alex even washed her hair!), which was a very welcome feeling after The Tent. So we didn't do much last night, just cleaned up and ate dinner at the Italian restaurant below our hostel.

We had to check out of our hostel at 10:00 am, so we were able to go do some sightseeing in Zurich this morning. However, it is of course grey and rainy out again, so we're back in the lounge at our hostel. Alex is reading the new book she picked up from the book exchange (a crime thriller called "A Faint Cold Fear"), I'm downloading some television for us to watch in transit (I've been able to do a surprising amount of that! HOW CRAZY WAS MAD MEN?!), and obviously I'm writing this blog. We're gonna take a train to Lucerne around 4:30, and we're meeting my friend Julian at the station at 5:30. Alex and I are both very excited to sleep in someone's apartment and not a hostel. We're also looking forward to doing some laundry...our clothes (many of which have been slept in) smell quite fragrant. It will also be nice not to pay for a hostel; Switzerland is incredibly expensive (which I had heard but somehow not totally comprehended.)

Alright, off to eat some falafel. We really are having an incredible time, although we do miss everyone at home. I'm trying my best not to think about how long my trip is going to be, because it makes me really homesick when I do. But, at the same time, I can't believe we're in Switzerland already! Hopefully I'll be able to get another blog and some more pictures up by Sunday.

Think sunny warm thoughts for us, lots of love, Eliza

still alive, apparently

2010-09-29T00:56:00.001-07:00

Hey all,

Even with all the crazy rides that aren't allowed in America and all the litres of beer (MANY), we are still alive!! Oktoberfest did not vanquish us! Both of our jackets are incredibly dirty and covered in weird stains (mustard, I'm thinking, which means we ate food at some point...hooray). Today is an awful feeling of a day. But we are going to drag our hungover selves to the train station and get on a long ride to Zurich. We wanted to go visit some castles but it's going to take to long to get there and back, so we sort of randomly picked Zurich. (We have a day until we meet my friends in Lucerne...should have figured out our plans before we drank so much at Oktoberfest.) Anyway, I'm hoping to do a long blog post later, but I just wanted to let all the loved ones know that we do not have alcohol poisoning (probably) and that we're on the move.

Love and hangovers, Eliza

oktobermessed 2010

2010-09-27T12:45:00.000-07:00

I just want to let everyone know, from both Alex and I...we are alive! I meant to write a huge blog post about Berlin this morning on the train to Munich, but we slept for most of it and caught up on Modern Family and Glee for the rest, so who can really fault us? When we got to Munich, we checked into our hostel/tent and went to Oktoberfest. We just wanted to see what it looked liked but we ended up spending all afternoon there (and, surprisingly, getting into a few beer tents, as well as riding the scariest amusement park rides EVER) and now we're back at the hostel. We're about to go to sleep. "Santeria" by Sublime is playing for its 6th time in the internet room, which means it is definitely time to go to bed...no on else seems to be weirded out by this. But, yes, we are fine and dandy in here in Munich. More posted when we get a chance!

Love and lager, Eliza

the time we went to belgium to sleep

2010-09-25T13:44:00.000-07:00

I'm writing this from the train (our fourth today), presumably to Berlin. I say "presumably" because Alex and I have had a very, very confusing day of train travel from Bruges, where we spent last night. We had to take the train from Bruges to Brussels. At Brussels, we had to board our second train, to Cologne. However, that second train was running slowly (high speed my foot!) and we ended up getting into Cologne about four minutes after our train to Berlin had departed. Thankfully, there was another train headed to Berlin (we thought) about 15 minutes later. We got on that train, sat in a compartment with a German guy around our age and set off. When he got off the train in Hamm, we were thrilled—the compartment to ourselves! But, thankfully, he quickly returned and told us that if we were trying to get to Berlin, we would have to transfer trains because Hamm was the end of the line for this one. So now we're on our fourth train, which is very full...we've been kicked out of several seats already by people who have reservations for them. Drama! We should finally get to Berlin in about an hour, 7 pm, after traveling since 9:30 am. It will be welcome for many reasons, particularly because it is my birthday and I would really like to not spend the whole day on the train.

By the way, I know that Alex has decided she's too lazy to write out blogs or emails or anything and that she's sending all of her loved ones to read my blogs, so to Alex's loved ones: hello! She is alive and well, I promise; we haven't killed each other just yet.

Okay, so let me start back in Amsterdam, because we have had a busy few days. After I woke up Alex after my last blog post, we went downstairs and had our free hostel breakfast. I must say that I'm enjoying these breakfasts: toast with butter, jam, or nutella, hardboiled eggs, a myriad of fruits, and at least one option of cereals. (Alex, for instance, filled up on Cocoa Krispies.) From breakfast, we went to the H&M down the street because Alex wanted a more fashionable traveling bag, and then on to a bike rental store. Amsterdam is a perfect city to explore by bike—gratuitous bike lanes, traffic that yields politely to bikers, and beautiful scenery. For our first activity of the day, we rode over to the Van Gogh museum. We were pleasantly surprised when we discovered that the "I Amsterdam" sign was on the same grounds as the museum; we'd been wondering where that was! After we had our obligatory pictures with the sign, we headed into the museum, which was pretty cool. Learned a lot about Van Gogh.

After the museum, we biked over to a nearby outdoor market. We bought the most amazing cheese there from a cheese stand. It tasted like a sort of soft parmesan. No idea what it was called, but I do know that we bought a brick of it about the size of our heads for only 6 Euros. If all cheese is this cheap in Europe, I am in big trouble. This purchase got us started on what I'm calling "Operation Bread and Cheese," whereby Alex and I survive on bread and cheese for the rest of our time in Europe. We also bought a few varieties of plums and a nice baguette. With our food in hand, we biked to Vondelpark, a huge outdoor space in Amsterdam that's considered their sort of Central Park. Our lunch was great but it started to rain and we were both exhausted, so we returned our bikes, went back to our hostel and took a nice long nap.

Once we awoke from our nap, we decided to head to the central train station to get our Eurail passes validated. We wanted to take the 6:50 am train to Bruges the next morning, and the reservations office didn't open until 6:30, so we thought it safer to get it done that night. At the reservations office, we were hit on by some very creepy middle-eastern men who told us that we were "such nice American girls" and told us that they "have everything we need for a stay in Amsterdam, you can come stay with us." Ew, no thank you, creepy stranger. Our parents have taught us better than that.

We dodged the creepsters and were craving Indian food so we wandered around our neighborhood until we could find an Indian restaurant. We gorged ourselves on curry and headed back to our hostel, which had the best drink prices we'd seen. The hostel bar scene was a complete mess, and we drank plenty. In fact, we broke our very first rule of the trip, which is: "When the shots start coming out, it's time to go home for the night." We downed a few repulsive Jagerbombs with a group of Aussies we'd befriended (Australians are EVERYWHERE!) and at some point decided it was time to wander around the red light district. I stick to my earlier conclusion: the red light district is an utter trainwreck. At some point we returned back to the hostel, where the bar was still open, although we intelligently switched to water. However, neither of us got to bed for very long at all, and when we woke up at 6 am to get ready for our train to Bruges, we were running on about two hours of sleep.

I think Alex was sorrier to say goodbye to Amsterdam than I was. I probably could have spent another night there, because I think there were still plenty of tourist things for us to do, but I'm equally happy moving on. I don't really like being in the main tourist areas and I like to see cities from the insider's perspective, and Amsterdam struck me as a city that is extremely touristy all around. But maybe if we'd spent more time there, we'd have gotten to know it better. Biking through Amsterdam was a real treat, though, and it made the city really grow on me.

I almost forgot! I have to eulogize my iPhone. I have really shit luck with iPhones in Europe. When I was in Spain on Semester at Sea, I busted my first iPhone, which was almost brand new. I pulled it out of my bag after a long night at a discotheque and discovered that the screen was shattered. To this day, I have no idea how that happened (although I choose to "blame it on the a-a-a-a-a-alcohol"). So once I got back to the States, I had to buy a whole new phone, which has been fine over the past three years. Narry a problem with it. Until I return to Europe, of course. On my second night of my two-month trip, my phone fell out of my back pocket in the hostel bar and landed on the floor. I thought it was fine at first—I've dropped my phone many times with no recourse. But as soon as I gave it a hard look, I found a big problem: the power button is jammed down. I've tried and tried to pull it out but I don't think it's going to happen. The phone proceeded to turn itself on and off until the power ran out. I was bummed out about losing a mode of communication, of course, and it's a pain in the ass not to have an alarm anymore, but I wasn't truly devastated until I realized this afternoon that I don't have any music. It makes these long train rides that much longer. So, dear iPhone: you were with me through the good times and the bad, and stuck with me through the years even though I beat you constantly. I'm sorry that our relationship reached its tipping point. You were a delightful companion and will be sorely missed.

Which brings us to Bruges! The train ride to Bruges was quite pastoral, and I had really wanted to sleep but couldn't help but stare out the windows instead. We had to transfer trains in Antwerp, so the journey all around took about three hours. Alex and I arrived in Bruges exhausted, stinky (especially Alex, who still had not showered since Chicago) and frazzled. There was some confusion on which hostel we were actually staying at, but we managed to get on a bus that took us to it. We stayed at St. Christopher's Inn at Bauhaus, which some fellow travelers in Amsterdam had recommended. The prospect of showering and laying down for a few hours sounded so attractive and we were very disappointed when the girl at reception told us the rooms wouldn't be ready until 3 pm. Furthermore, there weren't lockers in the room and we'd have to pay 5 euros for 24 hours of locker rental in the locker room! We cleaned up in the tiny bathroom in the common area, washing our faces and brushing our teeth, and once we'd both applied some new makeup we felt almost refreshed. It was time to go see Bruges.

Bruges is a very small city so it was easy for us to walk around and see all of the necessary tourist sights. Based on a helpful guide map we'd been given, we decided to walk to a part of the city that was notable for its spectacular bakery and butcher shop. We purchased some rolls and some truffles at the bakery, some mozzarella salad at the butchers, and some strawberries from a fruit store, and headed to the lovely park next door for our second picnic in two days. (Operation Bread and Cheese is my favorite. Ever.) I was so tired and hungry that everything tasted spectacular to me, although Alex was not as overwhelmed as I was.

From our picnic, we headed to the main market area of Bruges, which is the tourist area. I know I complained about tourist areas just a few sentences ago, but Bruges is an entirely different story. It's an incredibly beautiful, picturesque, well-preserved city and the tourism it attracts is very well deserved. Alex and I felt as if we were in a fairy tale the whole time. I think I can speak for us both when I say we're disappointed we couldn't spend another night exploring the city and seeing the sights. We both managed to mail out some postcards in Bruges, so some of you should look forward to those. We decided we were exhausted (okay, I was exhausted and starting to annoy Alex with my whining) so we headed back in the direction of the hostel, but made a pitstop at the windmills in Bruges. It was all very Flemish! I want to say "picturesque" over and over again, but we literally took pictures so please see for yourselves.

We returned to our hostel shortly after three to take what we thought would be a short nap. When we woke up around quarter to 8 pm, we were both a tad embarrassed; the truth of the matter is we ended up going to Belgium to sleep. It's unfortunate that we didn't do more, but I think we're both very glad that we were able to see the city at all—it was such a treat. After we woke from our nap, we had dinner, both showered (Alex finally showered!!!) and went back to bed. The one really great thing about the hostel in Bruges was that we were staying in a room with only 6 other people, and everyone turned in by 11 pm, so we had an early lights out.

Which takes us back to our multiple and confusing train rides, so essentially back to the beginning. A pleasant surprise about the train: even though we missed our original train in Cologne, we will be arriving at approximately the same time. So all's well that ends well. Tonight we'll go celebrate my 23rd birthday. As far as numbers go, I don't think 23 is a very spectacular birthday (in fact, I've been forgetting about it all day), but it will be notable because we'll be in Berlin. After we check into our hostel, we'll go out for a hopefully nice dinner (although I'm not sure what I can eat of German food with my vegetarian diet) and then get ready to head to the clubs. The night clubs in Berlin don't get started until around 1 am, so it's going to be a very late night for us. I expect we'll be exhausted tomorrow since we need to get up early enough to go sightseeing, but I'm adjusting to this on-the-road lifestyle. I also have a feeling that I'm not going to be able to update again until we're done with Oktoberfest; we head to Munich for that on Monday and leave on Wednesday. However, I will try!

Love and long train rides, Eliza

PS: We just saw some lesbians kissing on our train that reminded us both of a game we've been playing and wanted to tell you about. In shorthand, we're calling it "E or G"—we're trying not to be too offensive to the people around us. E stands for "European" and G stands for "Gay." The purpose of the game is to guess if a person is gay or just really European. There's an extremely fine line. We've just had a long discussion about whether or not this game is too politically incorrect to share with my blog, but we don't mean it in a hateful way, so whatever.

PPS: Another thing we wanted to share, that I forgot about. The street names! Alex and I have had to create our own street names in place of the street names in both Amsterdam and in Bruges. The Dutch street names have been utterly unpronounceable for us, so we come up with words that sound sort of like how they appear on paper and use those instead. Some notables have been: "Koopatrooper Street," "Ho Street," "Bangalang Street," etc. Wish we could think up a few more that we had come up with, because they certainly amused us to no end.

photos!

2010-09-24T23:15:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone,

We're in Bruges right now, and it's 8 am. Guess early rising is going to be my "thing" on this trip. But it gives me time to get things updated on the internet, which is nice. Speaking of which, I have now updated my flickr account with a photo album of Amsterdam and Bruges. You can see that here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/elizaswift/sets/72157624903936535/

I will hopefully be posting another blog some point tonight. Alex and I are heading to Berlin in a few hours, but our train ride will be quite a few hours long, so I should have plenty of time to write a new post. Right now, I'm downloading some of my favorite comedy tv shows that premiered Thursday night. Excited to be able to watch some of those on our way! Alsooooo, it's my birthday. It feels weird, I've been so disoriented the past few days that it's hard to comprehend it being my birthday. We finally got a full night of sleep last night though, so I'm starting to feel a bit excited about it.

Lots of love from the cold floor of our Bruges hostel, Eliza

amsterdarn (get it? god i love puns)

2010-09-22T23:41:00.001-07:00

Well, it's 7 am in Amsterdam and I am awake, showered, dressed, and sitting in the lobby on my computer, sipping some water and waiting for the rest of the hostel to rise. You may be concerned about me reading this. You may think: "Eliza, has Europe changed you this much in 24 hours? Are you not the girl who boasts about waking up at 11 am every day? Are you not the person who has been a lifelong and diehard advocate of napping at least once daily?" Do not fret, reader. Unfortunately, I think my daily naps have been my undoing. The night before last, Alex and I had our eight and a half hour flight from Chicago to Amsterdam, and I slept maybe 30 minutes. My conscientious travel partner encouraged me to stay awake all day yesterday so we could adjust to the jet lag---she force-fed me espresso when my eyes started to droop, kept me on my feet wandering around the city all day, and even relented when at 10 pm, I started to whine about being tired. Yes, everyone, Alex Julian agreed to go to bed at 10 pm in Amsterdam. (Shocked? She was too.) So by 11, we were snuggled into our top-bunk queen bed, eyemasks on, praying that the loud, drunk 18-year-old Australians would leave the room and head to the bar. (They eventually did, but not after a lot of eye-rolling and heavy sighs on our part.) I fell asleep quickly, so happy to be in a bed, asleep in the dark. I woke feeling perky and refreshed...at 1:30 am. "This is not right!" I thought. I managed to trick my body into falling back to sleep, only to jolt awake again at 3 am. By this point, I figured out what was going on: my body, my poor confused, jet lagged body, was convinced I was taking a nap. (FALSE IDEA, BODY.) After I woke at 3, I tossed and turned for a long while, but I think I got about another 45 minutes of sleep. By 5:30, I accepted the fact that I would not be falling back to sleep. Also, by this point, my large hostel dorm room filled with sleeping people and the temperature in the (non-air-conditioned) room was a bit unbearable. Sweaty, uncomfortable, and crabby about my sleep situation, I decided to get up and shower at 6, which brings me here, writing this blog in the empty lobby/bar.

I've just asked the guy manning reception what the weather was going to be like today. "A bit rainy, for a change," he said not a tad sarcastically. (Does it rain a lot in Amsterdam? This is not something of which I was aware.) That's too bad to hear, because yesterday was beautiful...sunny and in the mid/high-60s. We did quite a lot of walking yesterday and had a great plan for today: rent bikes, go to a few museums, eat a picnic in the big park. Sounds like we may have to adjust our plans.

Alright so I will get to Amsterdam in a minute, but first I want to discuss a few things I have learned in the past 24ish hours.

1) Vegetarian food on United. So, if you know me (and I am assuming you do, if you have any interest in reading this rambling blog), you probably know I've been a vegetarian since I was 16. But since I've been a vegetarian, I've never taken a flight with an American airline that was long enough to warrant a meal. Now, we all know that airline food is nothing to write home about and is usually edible at its best. But I've spent the past couple weeks getting myself really overly excited about the FREE MEAL! that I would receive on my flight to Amsterdam. (Unfortunately, I think I've thought more about that meal than I did about some of the logistics of traveling, which I will get to in my next point.) United offers three meal choices for vegetarians that you can call in a special request for: lacto-ovo vegetarian, Asian vegetarian, and vegan. I called and ordered the lacto-ovo vegetarian, and spent the past few days gloating to Alex about how my meal would be tasty and hers would be mystery meat. So we get on the plane, take off, and mealtime arrives. Mine comes first, because I am *special*. (This makes me feel even better about my choice.) The steward places my meal down in front of me like I am the royal princess of airlines. I look down. I squint. What the hell is this?! My meal, my precious, over-hyped meal, appears to be some sort of mashy baby-food-like rice concoction, with some sad and withered vegetables thrown in. The bread is a cardboard-substance "wheat" bread and my salad is, I shit you not, just a head of iceberg lettuce. I wasn't expecting much, but I wasn't expecting this. The only potentially edible part of the meal, a couple pathetic pieces of canned fruit, have been heated up along with the rice and are at a scalding and un-fruity temperature. After poking at my meal morosely, I come to the conclusion that United has combined the lacto-ovo, vegan, and Asian vegetarian meals into one in an upsetting cost saving measure. Even more upsetting to me is what Alex is given to eat: a meat-free pasta dish with a green (GREEN!!) salad and yummy cookies. WHAT?! Why wasn't THAT my vegetarian meal?! Anyway, I'm soooooo over it, but I will not be ordering the vegetarian meal on my eventual flight home, that is for sure.

2) When we got to our hostel and I used the (dirty, stinky, small) lady's room, I had the horrifying realization that I would not get to use a nice toilet (with soft toilet paper) or shower (with strong water pressure) for the next two months. aside from the week I will be with my mother in real hotels. This should have been something I realized long ago, like say...when I first decided to backpack through Europe for two months, but no. I knew I would be uncomfortable often and unshowered most of the time, but I didn't really *think* about what not having a nice place to rest my bum would be like. It made me feel very weary and ready to return home, but that was mostly because I had not been fed yet and I was running on the aforementioned 30 minutes of sleep. Anyway, now that I've actually had a shower today and I'm not wearing the same leggings that I've been wearing for an international plane flight, I'm feeling much more confident about everything. I just may have to go buy a roll of halfway decent toilet paper, though.

Okay, so, Amsterdam. My immediate impression was that I hated it and wanted to get out as soon as I could. We're staying a few blocks from the central train station, in the heart of the backpacking district, and the overwhelming tourism vibe really did not make me feel great. But that was Before Food (B.F., in shorthand), when my blood sugar was low and I was already feeling a little sobby. It certainly didn't hurt that the weather was lovely yesterday, but this city has really grown on me. It's quite unlike any place I've ever seen. It feels a little like Disneyworld for adults. So we had a very productive day yesterday, overall. We went to the Sex Museum, mostly because it only cost 4 euro and it's just over a block from our hostel. It was an interesting place, worth the 4 euro, but not worth going into detail here. Pretty much what you would expect from a Sex Museum...lots of dirty pictures from throughout the ages. After that, we walked across the street to a canal boat tour place, where a tour was just about to leave, and we got on board (a reasonable 13 euro). It was a slow paced, hour-long tour, and it was very beautiful. Unfortunately, by the end, I was about ready to fall asleep, but I did enjoy it. We saw a lot of lovely bridges and so many interesting houseboats! (Not to mention all the incredible architecture in Amsterdam). Afterwards, we returned to our hostel, drank some coffee, and played a round of pool with a few other travelers. In the later afternoon, Alex and I went on a long walk just to wander. We went all over the districts around our neighborhood and stopped into two bars for a beer. I'll post some pictures within the next day or so, but the architecture here is astounding pretty. Lots of old churches and open plazas, not to mention the canals. After another stop off at our hostel, we went on a walk through the Red Light District to see what that mess was all about. I think it's kind of a bummer that such beautiful old buildings (the main drag is really pretty) are being used for such sleaze, but hey. It works for Amsterdam, so whatever. Not my city, so I'm not going to criticize it. A man outside one of the porno theaters tried to coerce us to come in by telling us that it was "the most quality filth you'll ever see." Um, no thanks.

As I said, we ended up going to bed shockingly early. We didn't even eat dinner last night because we were so exhausted, so the free breakfast at the hostel is sounding pretty good right about now. I think I'm going to go wake up Alex and drag her down there with me. Cross your fingers that today's weather will be manageable!

Love and (overpacked) luggage, Eliza

onward, again

2010-09-21T10:20:00.000-07:00

Well, I am heading off again. Last time I made use of this blog, it was 2007 and I was still on Semester at Sea. Three years later and my lust for travel has not died down at all. I've just finished my degree and it seemed like the appropriate time to take another long trip---this time, I am going to Europe for two months to backpack. It will be an entirely different journey than Semester at Sea (not at least because I have nowhere to go "home" to like I did with the ship, and because I will be traveling sort of alone). My flight for Amsterdam leaves at 6 pm this evening and I still have quite a lot of packing to do...but of course, I am online. :D

So for those who are unaware, here is my rough itinerary. I'm flying to Amsterdam with my best friend, Alex Julian, who has been my lifelong partner in crime (though there won't be any actual crime on this trip, I promise! unless we decide to turn into expat outlaws! [hey, that doesn't sound half bad...]). She and I are spending two nights in Amsterdam before moving on to a night in Brussels. Then we head to Berlin for two nights to disco it up for my 23rd birthday, and Munich for two nights to enjoy the 200th year of Oktoberfest. From Germany, we meander over to Switzerland for four nights, where we'll be visiting some Swiss friends of mine in Lucerne and Bern. After we've had our fill of fondue, we'll go to Paris for four nights to fake French accents and take obnoxious pictures in front of the Eiffel Tower. Then we head to Italy: a day in Venice, maybe two nights in Florence, and probably three (or is it four?) nights in Rome, where we'll be staying in the guest apartment of Alex's former au pair. On October 13th, Alex leaves me to head back to the States (and I undoubtedly will be very sad to see her go, unless we've gotten totally sick of each other by that point, in which case I will see her off with glee).

After Alex leaves, my mom may (or may not) be coming to Europe. The plan is to go to Barcelona and Paris together. More on this later, once it is booked. When Mom leaves (approximately Oct. 22nd), I will scoot my boot up to Scandinavia. Here I'll be meeting up with my dear friend from Semester at Sea, Bree, who is one of my absolute favorite travel companions. Bree hasn't finished booking her trip yet, but she and I will spend between 10-12 days seeing the best that Scandinavia has to offer us...Copenhagen, Stockholm, perhaps Oslo, and as many fjords as we can find.

My travel details get sketchy in November. I frankly am not sure what I'll be doing, but I'm not too concerned about it right now. I know that it will be great, whatever it will be. One thing I do know is that I'll be ending my trip in London. Drew (the boyfriend) is going to fly out to London from Los Angeles to meet me, so we can have a few fun days of European travel before we head back Stateside for Thanksgiving.

I leave Europe on November 24th. With any luck, there will be many more blog posts in between now and then. So cross your fingers, folks, and perhaps I will be a more devoted blogger during this journey than I was during my last...you know, now that I am an older, more mature college grad. Oh yes, I am wise now, and I have a very expensive piece of paper to prove it.

Sayonara...email me your addresses if you don't think I have it and you'd like a postcard: eliza.swift@gmail.com. Love and (disorganized) luggage, Eliza

my days in 'nam (and cambodia. and thailand.)

2007-11-09T00:36:00.000-08:00

Hi all! We're out of India and well on our way to Egypt at this point...we get there in four days. We've been on the ship for about a week now and I'm starting to get cabin fever again, so I'm so excited to finally get to Alexandria. In other news, we entered the Red Sea early this morning and just a few minutes ago we passed by a recently-erupted volcano, which was amazing. (Not sure about the specifics of the volcano; I heard that it's currently erupting, but my friend's teacher told her that it erupted a couple years ago and the stuff that was coming out was volcanic ash from back then.) Either way, we could see something coming out of the volcano and how many people can say that?

Alright so there's a lot to tell and I know I haven't been the most devoted blogger, so I'll start way back with Vietnam and Cambodia. I can't believe it's been almost a month since I've been there!

We docked in Vietnam on September 27th, which was a Thursday. The clearing process went unbelievably quickly (to this date, the easiest country we've cleared) and we were able to get off the ship around 9 am. Rachel and I took our time getting showered and ready and we left the ship around 10:30 with our friends Erica and Bri. The port in Saigon wasn't super close to the downtown area, so SAS provided a 15-minute shuttle for us from the port to the city. We took the shuttle into the city center and immediately went in search for food. We weren't feeling too picky so we walked around for about 3 minutes, found a place that said "pizza" and headed on into it.

After our early lunch, we set out on our first order of business for Vietnam: having dresses made. Tons of students have dresses and suits made in Vietnam because the turn-around is so quick and the cost is so cheap. My friend Morgan had given me the name of a tailor that her sister had gone to and recommended, but we decided to look around for a bit and see if we could find a good place on our own. We couldn't find anything that looked promising, so we hailed and cab and headed to the recommend tailor's. The ladies who worked at the store were really nice, and we decided to have our dresses made there, even though there wasn't much of a selection on fabrics. (Silk only, and limited colors.) A lot of people went to the markets to pick out fabrics before they went to a tailors, but we didn't really care that much. I went with two designs in mind, and was measured, picked out the colors of silk, and sketched out the designs for them. We told them we wouldn't need our dresses until Monday and left hoping for the best.

When we walked outside of the tailor's, cyclo drivers immediately surrounded us. Cyclos are a form of transportation in Saigon that are basically bicycles with a seat/cart in front of them. We weren't quite sure what we wanted to do, so we looked at a list of places that the cyclo drivers could take us, and we decided to head to the War Remnants Museum. We settled on a price of $2 a person and each got into our own cyclo.

Traffic in Vietnam is something else. There are a fair amount of cars, but far outnumbering them are scooters and motorcycles. Also, there aren't really traffic lights and traffic is navigated by honking. The city is so loud with honking. It's so dangerous looking, but it somehow works. In addition to this, because there aren't traffic lights, there aren't really lights to help navigate pedestrian traffic. In Vietnam, if you want to walk across a street, you have to just walk. Everyone navigates around you. It's so frightening the first couple times you do this, but it's just how their traffic system works, and it actually, surprisingly, works.

We arrived at the War Remnants Museum around 1 pm. There are two areas to it: one building full of photos taken during the Vietnam war and blurbs about the war, and one building full of information on Agent Orange and the American war crimes. The photo building was interesting but it was really the latter building that got to me. Inside, there were tons of photos of people who had been affected by Agent Orange, pictures of dead bodies piled up, stories of people whose lives had been affected by Agent Orange, statistics about the way it affected following generations, even preserved bodies of infants dead because of Agent Orange. Plus, there was a wall of drawings by orphaned children in Vietnam, almost all of them having to do with peace. It was so hard to look at. Some people didn't like the museum because they thought it had a very strong anti-American bias, which it did in some respects, but it really made me think about everything our country had done to theirs. And despite everything, the Vietnamese people were so kind and so welcoming to us while we were there!

After the museum, our cyclo drivers offered to take us to some Chinese pagodas, which were pretty but not that interesting. Then we had a quick snack in the restaurant and, after a struggle with our drivers about how much we owed them, got in a taxi back to the ship. It had been raining almost all afternoon and we were ready to go back to the ship to clean up and get dinner. After dinner, I went with my friends Kate, Chris, and Stasi to a bar called Apocalypse Now (yep, themed after the movie) where we saw our Captain.

On the 28th, I went to Cambodia. You can only go to Cambodia if you're on a Semester at Sea trip, and it's a country I've always had a lot of interest in, so I was very excited for the trip. Our trip was supposed to have about 60 people on it, but it was split into two groups for some reason, a group of around 40 and a group of about 20, and I was in the bigger group. There was a parent trip organized by SAS that met up with the ship in Vietnam, and the Cambodia trip I went on was the one Cambodia trip that had parents on it. (Lucky me...no offense Mom and Dad, you guys are great, but my idea of a good time is not having other peoples' parents being bossy and parent-y when I'm trying to travel the world.) We left the ship around 12:30 pm and caught a mid-afternoon flight from Saigon to Phnom Penh, our first stop in Cambodia. It was a short flight, less than an hour long, and we got into Cambodia around 4:30. From the airport, we went to our hotel, which was sooooo nice. The total and complete opposite of my hotel in China! My roommate was a girl on the group that had been split from us, so she hadn't checked in yet. After putting our things in our room, we left the hotel for a sunset cruise on the Mekong Delta.

The sunset cruise might have been cool if it hadn't been raining, but there was no sunset so it was pretty anti-climactic. The Mekong Delta is really brown (I think from the silt, but definitely also because of pollution) and one of the grossest looking rivers I've ever seen, yet it's considered the "life-force" of Southeast Asia. What was interesting, however, was the riverboat village built over part of it. All these houses are built on platforms and are all tied together, and it was very interesting to see. They even had electricity in the houses, which I couldn't quite figure out.

From the "sunset" cruise, we went to dinner at a restaurant that was essentially a high-end buffet. I've never seen so much food in my life! Cambodian food is so delicious—lots of coconut, bananas, and soupy things. Then we went back to the hotel. A couple other girls and I decided to go get massages because there were a few massage parlors just down the street from where we were staying--$6/hour for a Khmer massage! After our relaxing massages, we had a glass of wine in the hotel bar and gossiped about shipboard life until the restaurant closed down.

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Ok, so I wrote all the above one day during class and didn't get another chance to write until just now—the day after Egypt! So here's the rest of the blog, written over a week later. The following parts talk about my visit to the Genocide Museum and the Killing Fields and if you don't feel comfortable reading it, please feel free to skim to the part where I travel to Angkor Wat.
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We had to be in the lobby by 8 am the next morning for our first stop of the day—the Genocide Museum. It was really hard to see the Genocide Museum at such an early hour because I felt like I was almost half asleep and my emotions weren't ready for it. The museum is housed in what was a prison during the days of the Khmer Rouge; before the Khmer Rouge turned it into a prison, it had been a high school. We saw the cells of the "important" prisoners first. These were small rooms with a bed that the prisoner was chained to. Next, we saw the regular cells. Brick cells were built in former classrooms and each cell was so small that a person could barely sit in them. There were several rooms filled with the photographs of the people kept in the prison, as well as photos of dead bodies and people post-torture. The Cambodian Genocide was so awful because the Khmer Rouge kept documentation of absolutely everything. It was so strategic and well-planned, and a lot of the people committing the crimes were just little boys that had been turned into soldiers. People were typically only held in the prison for a few weeks before being taken to the Killing Fields, but some stayed for up to four months.

We spent about an hour and a half at the Genocide Museum and then we went to the Killing Fields. The closest killing field to Phnom Penh was about 10-15 kilometers outside the city, and it was the area that all the people from the prison we had visited were taken. At the Field, there's a monument that's been erected which holds all of the skulls that had been dug up there. It's actually a very pretty piece of land, lush and green, and it was really hard to picture all the gruesome things that had happened there. The Field had 8 specific gravesites of excavation, and more people were presumed to have been buried there than they dug up; there was a swamp formed behind the main areas of excavation that couldn't be opened up. Basically, what we saw were relatively small holes in the ground, most of which had grass grown over them. The smaller holes had had between 20-40 bodies buried in them, but the two largest ones each had between 100-300 people buried in them; one of the larger holes was for children. Walking in between the grave sites, you could see pieces of clothing sticking up from under the ground, and I even saw a few teeth by the side of the path. The children's grave had a large tree next to it that our guide told us the soldiers beat the children to death on in front of their parents.

All in all, my visits to the Genocide Museum and the Killing Fields were frightening. It's hard to believe that humankind can possess the kind of evil in it that can justify the mass murder of people just for killing's sake. Previous genocides, like the Holocaust, make more sense (if that's possible) because they were based on hatred of classes of people. Cambodians were killed for almost no reason by their own peoples...their family members, their former friends, one-time colleagues. Generations and whole lines of families disappeared in several years of bloodshed. Seeing the places where this happened was the most sobering experience of my life. There are no Cambodians who didn't know someone who died. Our tour guide's mother and entire extended family had been killed.

Yet Cambodia was one of the friendliest countries I've visited. The people in Cambodia have had it so rough, with the genocide and then with years and years of political unrest. Somehow, they've managed to maintain a kindness as a population that I witnessed almost nowhere else; they seem so down on their luck and so eager to improve their country that I think it's impossible to visit Cambodia and not want to help them.

After all that was done, we went to the Russian Market, which was really just your average bazaar/market. It's called the Russian Market because in the eighties, Russians were the only tourists to Cambodia and the market became the hotspot for tourist shopping. Once the Soviet Union fell and the Russian economy collapsed, there were no more Russian tourists, but the name stuck. When we'd finished with our light shopping (I got more pirated DVDs, yippee), we went to lunch.

From lunch we visited the Royal Palace and the Silver Pagoda. I can't wait to post pictures of the Royal Palace because it was SO BEAUTIFUL. It's all made out of gold and looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss book. I believe they said that the king doesn't live there anymore, but he still holds diplomatic things there. The Silver Pagoda is on the property of the Royal Palace, and is also made of gold, so "Silver Pagoda" seems to be a bit of a misnomer at first. However, the floor of the Silver Pagoda is made out of sheets of silver. There's a gigantic emerald Buddha inside that is beautiful.

When we left the Palace, we went to the National Museum, which was in a similarly designed but red building. The museum holds pretty much only sculptures, and we breezed through it relatively quickly, but it was cool to see. From the museum we went to the airport for our flight to Siem Reap.

In Siem Reap, we went straight to our restaurant for dinner because we were running late. It was another buffet-style ordeal, but it was cool because we got to see a traditional Cambodian dance show with the meal. The Cambodian dancer women, who famously can stretch their fingers back really far, train their hands from the age of five. They were all so beautiful! We went to the hotel after dinner, which was another absolutely gorgeous place, and I went with some friends to the tourist bar area, where we frequented a bar called "Angkor What?".

The next morning, my roommate and I overslept through the optional sunrise tour of Angkor Wat, which I would've been disappointed about, but the people who went said it was really overcast and you couldn't actually see the sunrise. So I got up for a quick breakfast before we left at 8:15 for Ta Prohm. Ta Prohm is an ancient temple in the middle of the forest that is falling apart and one of the most stunning places I've ever been. Part of "Tomb Raider" was shot there. What makes it so cool is that the forest has grown around it and through it. Gigantic trees are growing on top of fallen stone walls. It's seriously so frigging cool. I wish we could've stayed there longer than the hour we were there.

After Ta Prohm came the big attraction in Siem Reap—Angkor Wat. Angkor Wat is the largest religious structure in the world (or at least that's what our guide told us) and was originally created as a Hindu temple, although it was changed to a Buddhist one later on. The main section of the temple is a huge building with very steep stairs that you can go up. The stairs were created so steeply so that people had to back down them and never turn their backs on the images of the Gods inside the temple. A lot of people went up into it, but one look at the stairs (seriously the steepest stairs I've ever seen in my life) had my stomach whirling and death fantasies spinning, so I opted to stay on the safer-looking ground. There were really complex symbols and stories carved in the stone all throughout the Angkor Wat, so I looked at those instead. In all, it was really cool and very beautiful but I honestly thought Ta Prohm was more interesting.

We had lunch at the hotel, and then went to Angkor Thom, which was the site of the ancient city that had been in the area. There was a large gate leading into the Angkor Thom, and when the city existed, people were searched before entering. If they were missing any fingers, ears, or toes, they weren't allowed into the city, because those were the signs of criminals; people had appendages cut off when they committed a crime. The gate was really cool and looked like something out of a Hayao Miyazaki movie; I feel positive that he must have visited Cambodia before animating "Spirited Away." Inside we visited several more temples, the coolest of which I believe was called Bayon—it was a large, winding temple that went up quite high and was ordained with somewhere over 200 faces of Buddha. So cool!

Then, to the airport once again for our flight back to Saigon. We were back to the ship a little before 8 pm, and I cleaned up quickly before leaving with some friends to go bowling. The bowling alley we went to was really neat—it was a combination bowling alley, Pizza Hut, arcade, sweet shop, bar...plus it was really clean and very new. Apparently bowling is cool in Vietnam.

On the last day, October 1st, I slept in until about 9 am and went out with my friend Kate. She and I hired a cyclo driver for the day and went to get our dresses, which were at different shops. We went to my shop first, where only one of the dresses was ready. It turned out really beautiful; it's a cap-sleeve v-neck dress in cream-colored silk with black silk around my waist and comes to a little above my knee. It fits like a glove. The other dress is a tacky purple color with thin straps and a drop-back, and it has a layered skirt that looks nothing like I wanted it to; the dress looks like a cheap high school dance dress and I think I'm going to wear it to a club in Croatia and never look at it again. We had to go back to my shop several times throughout the day to check on the production of the dress, which was irritating because I told them to have it ready by Monday. But that's Asia for you.

Then we went to Kate's dress shop, where they had neither of her dresses ready; they were apparently somewhere else and would be at the shop later in the day. So we went and had lunch, and then went to the Ban Pho market. Again, it was just another market. I've been to so many markets in the past two months that they have blurred together in my mind. They're all crammed full of stalls of people who shout at you in the language they think you might speak and hassle you to look at whatever shlock they're selling. We checked back at Kate's dress shop and they still weren't ready so we went and had massages; they were a bit pricier in Vietnam, a whole $12.

Finally, both of our dresses were ready and we met up with our friends Chris and Morgan for dinner. And then we said goodbye to Vietnam.

I wish that I had more time to spend in Vietnam, but I'm really glad that I was able to go to Cambodia because it's a country I've been interested in for a long time. Either way, they were both absolutely beautiful countries with so much to offer and I really hope that I get to go back to them someday.

Next...Thailand!

We arrived into Thailand on October 4th. I had plans to travel with Rachael (my roommate), Kate, Chris (from Japan, I'll call him Chris S), and yet another Chris (I'll call him Chris M to make things less confusing). We all had plane tickets to the island of Ko Samui for 2:30 in the afternoon. Well, Thailand ended up being the longest country to clear, and we didn't get off the ship until about 1:30 pm. On top of that, our ship was docked near Pattaya, not Bangkok, and the bus ride to Bangkok was about 2 and a half hours long. Needless to say, in the hours we spent on the ship freaking out about our flight situation, we ended up switching our flights to 7:30 pm.

Once our bus got into Bangkok, we took a cab to the new international airport. The new Bangkok airport is probably the nicest and biggest airport I've ever been in; it's absolutely gigantic. There were a ton of other SAS students heading to the same place as us, and we had 2 planes (the 7 pm and the 7:30 pm) almost completely booked with students. The 7 pm flight ended up being delayed and not leaving until almost 8, so they arrived at Ko Samui a few minutes after us. From the airport, we all were heading to the smaller island of Ko Phangan, which was a ferry ride away. However, the last ferry was at 6 pm, so we had to hire big speedboats to take us.

From the airport, we took vans to the dock and then got on the two speedboats. The ride to Ko Phangan was quick, less than half an hour. We got close to the island but the boats didn't have anywhere to dock so...they dropped us in the water, close to the shore, and we had to walk into the beach. It was absolutely hilarious and one of my flip-flops came off in the process, although I found it a few moments later.

Once we got to shore, we had to pile into taxis to our "resort," which was on the other side of the island. I use the term taxi loosely; taxis on Ko Phangan were basically pick-up trucks with benches in the bed. Finally, after a bus, a taxi, a plane, a van, a speedboat, and a taxi, we arrived at our "resort"—I'm putting "resort" in quotes because even though it was a really nice place, it wasn't a resort like the kind of places you would go to in the Carribean. It was called Milky Bay Resort, and we stayed in bungalows in the forest and around the beach. Beautiful! The bungalows were pretty nice, especially for the cheap $15/night we each spent to be there.

We put our bags down in our bungalow and cleaned up after our long day of traveling (it was close to 10 pm at this point), and then headed to the night's main attraction—a gigantic party in the forest. It was at this area that was cleared and used specifically for parties, and was equipped with crazy lights and DJ booths. Basically, it was a crazy European dance club, relocated to a forest. We danced the night away until about 5 am. There were Thai people there, plus all the SAS students, but tons and tons of foreigners—Australians, Europeans of all nationalities, and so many Israelis. In fact, we met a ton of Israelis all over Thailand. Almost all of them had just been discharged from the Israeli army, where enlistment is compulsory for people ages 18-20 and 2 years of service are required. However, after they've done their service, the state of Israeli sends the soldiers on a 6 month vacation to wherever they feel like.

The next day, we slept until about 10 am, got up and had lunch at Milky Bay, and then the 5 of us took a taxi back to the other side of the island, where the better beaches and the main restaurant/bar drag were. We spent the day laying on the beach, renting jet skis, and just enjoying the lovely weather. Ko Phangan was the best beach area I've ever been; mountains turned into beaches and then weather was fantastic. We went back to our hotel to shower and clean up, and talked for a while to one of the security men who worked there, an Australian who recommended a restaurant back on the main drag called Outback (not the steakhouse!). We had a fantastic dinner and then went back to the beach, which had turned into basically one big bar. There were fire dancers and dance contests and all sorts of wild things up and down the beach so we spent a couple hours walking and people watching, before going back to our hotel.

Kate and Chris S had an earlier flight from Ko Samui to Bangkok than Chris M, Rachael, and I, so they were up and out of the hotel by 6 am the next morning. We, however, stayed until about 10, and then took a taxi with a bunch of other SAS students to the ferry to Samui. From where the ferry docked, we took another short cab to the airport. The airport at Ko Samui was the coolest place—it was an outdoor airport with thatch-roofed open-air buildings, a testament to the perpetually nice weather on the islands. Our flight was at 1:30 pm but we were there so earlier that they bumped the three of us to the 12:15 flight.

We got to Bangkok around 1:45 and took a cab (real ones, this time) to the Davis Hotel. Chris M had several friends that were supposed to be staying there, and we figured we could either stay with them for a night or get our own room. After a lot of debate with the hotel staff about whether or not they had space for us, the three of us booked a room with a king bed. The Davis was a gorgeous boutique hotel, definitely too nice for us to be staying in, but I hadn't stayed in a nice hotel independently yet and the room was the equivalent, per person, to the guesthouse I stayed at in Japan. So we stayed there for two nights. The bed was so gigantic and comfortable, and the bathroom was all marble with both a large bathtub and a large shower and the whole experience was marvelous. I wish I had the kind of spare cash that I could travel like that in every country, but really all I ever need is a place to rest my head and hopefully shower. It was nice to feel pampered, though.

That night, we made friends with a waitress in hotel bar named Dao, and she decided to take us all out to a bar. She took us to the backpacking district in Bangkok, so we ran into a couple of other SASers. Here seems as good of a place as any to talk about Thailand's king. Thai people are OBSESSED with their king. He's on every bill, pictures of him are all over the place, there are huge signs at the airport that declare, "long live the King." It's the 60th year of his reign, and so Bangkok has billboard after billboard of pictures and sayings about the king. Anyway, on the cab ride to the bar, I asked Dao about it, and she rambled on and on for 5 minutes about how much she adored her king, what a great person he is, what a humanitarian he is, how he's done all these amazing things for Thai people. It was interesting to see because I've never seen a group of people that revered their ruler so thoroughly.

The next morning, October 7th, Kate and Chris S met up with us at our hotel at 9 am and we went to the Chao Phraya River for a boat ride. The river runs through Bangkok and is where the nicest hotels and apartment buildings are located. The boat ride was about 2 hours long and pretty uneventful, although we could see several monuments from the river, and we passed through residential areas, which were cool to see. When we got off the boat, we decided to head to the Grand Palace. However, when we got there, Rachael and I were the only people properly dressed (your knees had to be covered), so we broke off from the group and visited it by ourselves.

The Grand Palace is so beautiful! It's weird, though, it looks very similar in the architecture to the Royal Palace in Cambodia. Lots of gold, pointy buildings and fantastical creatures made of stone and precious metals. The main attraction in the Grand Palace is the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, which is the holiest place in Thailand. Buddhism is the Thai religion, and I couldn't tell you what makes the Emerald Buddha so holy, but there you have it. Once again, I felt like I was back in Cambodia, with the whole Emerald Buddha thing. In Thailand, when you're sitting in front of an image of Buddha, you have to have your feet crossed or tucked behind you, because the Thais consider feet to be the dirtiest part of the body and it's really really rude to point your feet at something holy. (On that note, YouTube was banned in Thailand for a while because there was a video of someone pointing their feet at an image of the king.)

Rachael and I felt good having gotten something cultural out of the way, so we rewarded ourselves by going shopping! We went to this store called Playground! which was considered a concept store. The first floor had a Starbucks, a restaurant, and a music and magazine area. I've seriously never seen so many magazines in my life, and I bought a few because it was the first time in over a month that I'd had access to American mags. The CD selection was also pretty fantastic.

The second floor of Playground! had a bookstore area (mostly of the coffee-table variety), a stationary area, all sorts of weird toys and knick-knacks, and clothes. It was all so cool and hip, but a lot of it was really expensive. The clothes were interesting but more like art than clothing I would want to wear on a daily basis. The top floor had two more restaurants and a home design center. All in all, it was a really interesting and enjoyable store; I wish we had something like it in Chicago, I know it'd do really well. Even without buying much, Rachael and I spent well over 2 hours there.

When we got back to the hotel, everyone had left to go to see Muy Thai fighting, which neither of us had any interest in. The plan had been to meet up after they all saw Muy Thai for dinner. The two of us decided to take a nap and ended up sleeping almost 4 hours (I'm telling you, it was a really comfortable bed...plus we're both fantastic at napping.) We woke up at about 9:45 and decided to go out on our own. We had intended to go to this bar called Vertigo, which was a rooftop bar/restaurant at a really nice hotel and apparently had the best views of Bangkok. We got sort of dressed up and went but we couldn't get in because we didn't have closed-toe shoes on. C'est la vie. So we went to a different bar, called Syn, at a different hotel. There weren't many people inside, and the lighting was low and colorful. There were lots of little lights in the carpeted floor that lit up and faded and looked like glittering stars, and the chairs we sat in were plastic half-globes that hung from the ceiling.

The next morning, our last day in Thailand, the Chrises decided to go try and see the Grand Palace, and Kate came with Rachael and I to go to a crocodile farm. We went because we heard there were elephants there and we really wanted to ride one before we left Thailand. It's supposedly the largest crocodile farm, but it really was just depressing. The animals looked mistreated and miserable, and the lone elephant was so sad. We just fed him bananas and moved on. The crocodiles were laying in these rivers of what looked like weirdly dyed water, and we found out later it was to dye their skins and make them into handbags. It was a depressing last thing to do in Thailand.

From there, we went back to the mall we had to meet the bus at and then got on the bus back to the ship. Thailand was a lot of fun, but I really felt like it was the most vacation-y country we went to. I probably could've done more interesting cultural stuff if I had wanted to, but after being thrown into 4 countries into the 3 weeks leading up to Thailand, all I really wanted was some relaxing time to clear my mind. And I did, and it was great. I don't regret the way I spent my time there at all, and I hope I'm fortunate enough to vacation there again some day, because it was a blast.

Alright, so now I've gone through India and Egypt and tomorrow I'm going to be in Turkey. I'd like to try to get the India blog done tonight and posted before I have yet another country to write about, but once again, I can't make any promises. India and Egypt were AMAZING, though, and I can't wait to write about them. I'm going to be staying in Istanbul, I think, and I'm staying on the ship to save money, so maybe I'll have a little extra time to write.

I love you all and miss you lots! I'll be home in a little over a month...yikes!

china!

2007-10-10T21:45:00.000-07:00

Sorry folks, I know it's been a while since I've written last. I promise I've been thinking about writing a lot! But life here aboard the MV Explorer has been hectic at best. I didn't really realize exactly how little time we had between each country...two days looks a lot different on paper. So I've now officially gone to China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand, and I have so much to share. This is probably going to take two or three posts, so I'm going to get China done in this first blog and try my hardest to have the rest done before we get to India.

Right now, I'm sitting in my cabin and the boat seems to be stationary, which means we're now docked in Singapore! That would be a lot more exciting if we actually visited Singapore, but we're just here to fill up on gas and stock up on water before we finish the voyage to India. I've just finished taking a midterm for my linguistics class, which was such a breeze and I feel silly for even stressing out about it. Meanwhile, I've acquired a terrible cough which has me running to Kleenex or a sink every five minutes, hacking up half my lung, and that's no fun at all. My body feels pretty out of whack, and I'm pretty sure I'm just not getting all the nutrients that I need thanks to all this ship food. I never thought I'd say this but I would probably fight a bull for some fresh romaine lettuce right now, or maybe some spinach...I miss my leafy greens! (We have salad on the ship, and I eat it at every meal, but it's a kind of iceberg lettuce that is literally crunchy water.)

Fresh, uncooked vegetables and fruits in the countries we've been visiting recently are a big no-no if you don't want to spend a couple hours praying to the porcelain god. (Traveler's diarrhea, folks.) It's soooooo tempting too, especially the fruit. On the upside, we now have a regular stock of Japanese pears on the ship, which are officially my favorite fruit ever. They're crunchy like apples but taste kind of like pears...delicious.

On the subject of traveler's diarrhea (how appetizing), we had an outbreak of infectious diarrhea on the ship that was so bad that we had debriefings telling us that we might not be let into Thailand! Apparently, only 2% of the ship can have diarrhea in order to dock in a country, and we were at a whopping 5%. Yours truly was not affected, thankfully. I guess people were eating some things they weren't supposed to in Vietnam. Anyway, after they let us know that we might not get to go to Thailand, a bunch of people who had reported themselves sick earlier went back to the nurse and let her know that they were better and the crisis was averted.

What else can be said about ship life? Well, as I'll tell you more when I get into the subject of China, I got really sick on our last day in Beijing and subsequently missed Hong Kong. I mean, I could see it out of my bedroom and it looked like a really killer city (seriously, it was the best looking city we've been to), but I was too sick to venture off the ship. So we got back to the ship on the 23 of September, I slept all day on the 24th (the last day in Hong Kong), slept through my classes and a lot of the day on the 25th (my birthday!), was feeling mostly better on the 26th but still slept through all of my classes. And then we were in Vietnam on the 27th. Starting to see why I haven't blogged in a while?

I love the routine of Semester at Sea and how we see these countries, pause to catch our breath and repack our bags, and dive back into it, but at the same time, it feels so great to have a break right now. We haven't spent more than two days at a time on the ship since we got to Japan on September 12th! I'm finally getting caught up and back on track with all my classes, as is everyone...there's really been zero time to do homework (which, let's be honest, I can't complain about.) We got back on the ship on Monday night, had Tuesday off from classes, and we dock in India on the 15th. I have to say, I think the best part about this short reprieve from traveling is that my hall finally had laundry day on Tuesday. However, I still haven't gotten my laundry back, so my outfits are getting really creative.

So I started a blog entry about China in between China and Vietnam, but like I said, I was pretty sick, so I got maybe a quarter of the way done with it and didn't really feel like continuing...I didn't feel particularly articulate, needless to say. Anyway, here's what I had, and I'll continue from there (bear in mind that this first part was written two weeks ago):
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I've finally recovered from China (and I mean that in a very literal way) and already I'm going to be in Vietnam tomorrow. If I felt like I didn't have enough time between Japan and China, I've had less than enough time between China and Vietnam. But that's half the fun, right? After spending tomorrow in Ho Chi Mihn City, I fly to Cambodia on Thursday, which I think is going to be life-changing. Either way, I'm excited to move on.

So we docked in Qingdao on last Wednesday. Because of the typhoon offshore, Qingdao was pouring rain and really nasty out. I headed with three of my girlfriends (Kate, Stasi, and Morgan) to the Tsing Tao brewery around 11 am. We went on a tour, which was relatively unenlightening (it was self guided, so we sped through it pretty quickly) and then ended our time at Tsing Tao in the bar. (Beer was included with the price of our tour...have you had Tsing Tao beer before? I think it's my favorite now!)

Here comes the good part of the story. There were two professional photographers near where we sat down, apparently with a wedding party or something. Anyway, the four of us young ladies got situated and they immediately started taking pictures of us. And not just a few. Easily hundreds. Two of the guys with the wedding party had their pictures taken with us. One of the professional photographers had a video camera with him and he interviewed Stasi for a news segment in Giulin. And the head photographer just kept taking pictures of me. He was being kind of sly about it, popping up from behind poles to catch me when I wasn't looking, but he eventually stopped trying to be coy. He knew that I knew. So he took picture after picture after picture of me. Only me. Before they left, the photographer ducked into the gift shop and bought me a pair of ceramic pigs that can hold a bottle of beer between them; a gift, the lesser photographer translated for me, because he thought I was so beautiful. Pigs! (They are REALLY ugly, by the way, but I'm pretty sure I'll have them forever because honestly, how often will I be given pigs in China?)

After the hilarity of the brewery, we got lunch and then walked around a market area of Qingdao. There really wasn't much to do, it was pouring rain, and we couldn't find an ATM that took American debit cards, so around 4 pm we decided to head back to the ship for the night.

The next morning, I was up and in the Union at 6 am for my trip to Beijing. The first couple hours were pretty uneventful (ah, the act of traveling itself) as we took a plane to Beijing and then got on our tour bus. I chose to do a university-hosted trip to Beijing, which means that our guides were university students instead of real guides and that we had a chance to interact with Chinese people our age. Our guides for our stay were named Kate and James (not their real names, the names the chose to be called because their Chinese names were too unpronounceable for us), and the university my group was paired with was Renmin University. My group was the smallest university-hosted trip, with only about 30 of us, and my trip leaders were my extended family parents, Jim (the assistant dean) and Nancy (his wife). (Following still?)

Anyway, we got into Beijing around 1 pm, had lunch, and went to our first attraction—the Temple of Heaven. Basically, the Temple of Heaven is where the Chinese emperor used to receive sacrifices. I made some jokes about human sacrifices, but it seems that there were only animal sacrifices (although, if there were human sacrifices, do you think the Chinese government would ever admit to it?). The Temple of Heaven was pretty but not worth describing in detail here...I suggest Googling some pictures of it, though. The most notable thing that happened at the Temple of Heaven was that I met and walked around with Stevie, Jenna, Danny, and Chris (different Chris than from Japan!), or, as we came to call ourselves for the duration of our trip, "Team Dragon."

After the Temple of Heaven, we went to our hotel (absolutely nasty grungehole called "Long Du Hotel"...also not worth describing, because I think it would gross my Mom out.) Our hotel was bad, but there are worse things in the world. Stevie was assigned as my roommate, which was awesome because she and I get along exceedingly well. We threw our stuff down in our rooms and then it was back to the bus. Dinner was at Renmin University! We had a banquet of sorts with the Chinese students, and we all sat at tables with them. The girl I sat next to called herself Nancy and she was so nice. I feel like I learned a lot about the way Chinese life works thanks to her. (For instance, the Renmin students all live in the dorms because they can't afford apartments in Beijing, and they only pay 100 USD a year to live there!! On the other hand, the living situation in the dorms sounds pretty grim and really minimal...ahh, the Chinese.) Once dinner ended, everyone at my table wanted to go out with the Chinese students, and we agreed on karaoke (or, as the Chinese call it, KTV). KTV was a blast and I have many invitations from Chinese students to come back and visit them (although I'm not really sure if I want to go to China again!).

This seems as good of a time as any to go on a rant about Beijing. It is SO dirty. Not just dirty like garbage in the street. That actually wasn't so bad. But it is straight up the most polluted place I've ever been in my life. You could hardly see a hundred yards in front of your face because it was so smoggy, constantly. I felt like every time I took a deep breath, I was losing a day of my life. I'm really confused as to how it was chosen as an Olympic city because I don't know how Olympic athletes will be able to compete in air like that.

Ok, this is where the original part of the post ends. Picking up from that...

The next morning (bright and early at 7 am!; Friday, Sept. 21) we left our hotel to go see the Ming tombs. On the way to the Ming tombs, we stopped at a jade factory, which was really just a lame tourist trap. Apparently, bus drivers take tour groups to places like this because they get a cut of the profit from it. Our bus driver made up an excuse about how traffic was really bad and we might as well stop and wait for it to get better...except that there was no traffic. Anyway, we eventually got to the Ming tombs, which was pretty anticlimactic. Thirteen out of the sixteen emperors from the Ming dynasty are buried there, and it's a gigantic area and maybe if we had a whole day to explore it, I would've enjoyed it more. We only went to one tomb, the Ding Ling tomb (yeah, it's really called that), which is the only tomb that has been opened and excavated. It wasn't very cool because it had been looted or something and there really wasn't anything to see, except a gigantic cement hole that you walked into. (This part of the trip, seeing useless touristy stuff that's really only interesting if you know a lot about the history, made me wish I had done an independent trip!)

After the Ming tombs, we went to lunch, but first we had to tour a cloisonné factory (gotta love that bus driver.) Then, after lunch, we headed to the exciting part of the day...the Great Wall!!

There are several parts of the Great Wall that are close to Beijing and open to tourists, and we just went to the section that was closest to the city. The sections that are open have obviously been rebuilt over the years, and aren't really the original Great Wall, but it was still probably one of my favorite parts of Semester at Sea to date. Of course, I'd heard all about the Great Wall since I first started taking history classes (so, what, first grade?), but I'd always pictured it as just a long stretch that you walk along. (Apparently, some of the sections are like that...the most touristy section, which some of the other Semester at Sea groups went to, features a cable car to the top and a slide to the bottom.) Anyway, the section we went to was not like that. At all.

Basically, the section of the Great Wall that we climbed (yes, climbed) was a never-ending, extremely steep staircase. You'd take the winding, swerving stairs up for a while, and then there'd be a stop at a tower, and then you'd start again. I think there were eight or nine towers, but I honestly stopped counting. Team Dragon started climbing the stairs all together, but then Jenna and Stevie were exhausted by the first tower and decided to go at a much slower pace, so I continued up to the top with the boys. It took about 45 minutes to get to the top and wow! The view was so spectacular. I kept stopping along the way and taking pictures, much to the chagrin of the two jumpy young men I was climbing with. It was a really difficult climb (probably because it was so frigging humid out) but it felt so great to get done. It's too bad, once again, that Beijing is such a polluted city, because the mountains were polluted too and the view would've been so much better if it had been in clean air. Regardless of the pollution, it was an awesome experience; I'll try to get some pictures up soon (I know, I know, I keep saying that, but the ship internet is really too slow!) because they're pretty cool.

We went to a Peking duck restaurant for dinner, which I obviously did not partake in, and then we went back to the hotel. Team Dragon (yep, it's really easier than naming everyone) went out to this nightlife area that's built around a small lake, called Houhai, which was pretty much full of tourists but pretty nonetheless. Not feeling up to spending too much yuan in a flashy club full of Americans, we bought some Tsing Tao beers from a stand for the equivalent of 30 cents US each and spent the night walking around the lake and people-watching.

The next morning (Saturday, Sept. 22), we were up again at 7 am and we started our day off at Tiananmen Square. It was interesting to see almost solely because of the historical value, but it really is just a big open public area. Here's something creepy, though: Mao's tomb is built on the square and there are viewings twice daily. I really wanted to go inside and check him out (I think he's mummified or plasticized or something), but there was an insanely huge line of Chinese people waiting to get inside and we just didn't have the time.

Here's an appropriate time to go on another rant about China: I HATE LATRINES. I've heard that squat toilets are supposed to be more sanitary or something but honestly. It's really hard to use a squat toilet unless you've been doing it all your life and have the appropriate muscles needed for it. With that preamble, now let me say: Chinese babies and young children don't wear diapers. They wear pants with slits in them and when they need to go to the bathroom, their parents help them squat whenever and wherever they happen to be. For instance, I saw two adorable Chinese toddlers squat with the help of their mothers in front of the Chinese flag and the gigantic picture of Mao that lords over Tiananmen Square and urinate in public. Right there. On cement. Not so adorable. Let me once again emphasize how dirty China is.

Anyway, after all that, we walked across the street and visited the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City seemed like it could've been pretty awesome. Seriously. But, along with everything else in Beijing, it's under renovation for the 2008 Olympics. So the main building was closed, along with a couple of the more important looking buildings. I don't really know what I saw there but it was all really beautiful and I left feeling disappointed because I think I'll have to go back and visit the Forbidden City again someday when it's not mostly closed. The disappointment is for having to go back to Beijing someday. I feel like this is all complaining and I really don't mean it to be; I'm really glad I got to see China and I got to see all these fantastic things that I've always dreamed about, but I think it just wasn't what I was expecting it to be. And I have to be honest, (once again, I'm so glad I got to see these things and feel so fortunate, but...) I really don't like what I saw of China and never plan on going there again. I guess I've made it pretty apparent that it's not my cup of tea, huh?

Well after the disappointing hour and a half we spent in the Forbidden City, we were scheduled for lunch and to go on tours of the hutong. Hutong are these communities built within little roads all throughout Beijing. They're kind of hard to describe, so once again, I'm gonna suggest you Google "hutong". They're important right now because the city of Beijing has been tearing down a lot of hutong in order to build new things for the Olympics and it's a really big controversy in China since they're a longstanding part of the city culture. I'd heard from some of the Chinese students that the hutong are really good to see by bike and I was getting pretty tired of scheduled group tours and itching to do something on my own. So Chris and I said farewell to the group and he and I left the Forbidden City in search of bikes to rent.

After about ten minutes of walking with no real direction, he and I decided to walk into a hotel and see if they knew anywhere to rent bikes. And, coincidentally, the hotel rented them out. So we found our bikes for the day! Now I actually have something positive to say about Beijing: it is an AMAZING bike city. There are huge bike lanes built next to car lanes and usually separated by a median, and the bike lanes even get a traffic light. It's such an easy city to bike in and the afternoon that we spent biking was, the Great Wall aside, the highlight of my trip to China.

So we rented our bikes and we decided to head to the Silk Market. The Silk Market area was, at one point, notorious for cheap fake goods. However, because of the Olympics, the city was trying to "clean up" the area, so it isn't the knock-off mecca that it once was. We parked our bikes in a bike lot and walked around the area for a few minutes before we were enticed by a man selling pirated DVDs. (Sorry, Dad.) It was actually a pretty sketchy transaction; we followed him to a restaurant, and sat down at a table at the restaurant. Then they brought out the DVDs and we looked through them and picked out ones we were interested in. We probably went through a few hundred DVDs and ended up getting around 30 between the two of us. After we left, another DVD hawker hooked me when he promised he had Sex and the City, so I bought the entire Sex and the City series, too. And you know what, it's really awesome having some TV shows to watch on this dang ship.

After our movie-buying marathon, we went into the actual Silk Market, which is a big building (4 stories with two basement floors?) filled with stalls of people selling knock-offs. Shirts, shoes, purses, even socks. Anything that you might want a knock-off of, they had it. But neither of us really wanted anything, so we just went to the mail room and I finally sent out all the mail I'd been meaning to for two ports (has anyone received anything yet? I feel like it will probably never get to you.) Then we got back on our bikes and continued with our adventure.

We biked through hutong, which was really cool and a very interesting perspective of Chinese life, and somehow at the end of all our biking we ended up back near the Houhai area we had been at the night before, so we found a restaurant around the lake that looked good and had dinner there. After dinner, we had to meet our group back up at the Beijing opera, so we had to book it to the hotel we'd rented the bikes from and drop those off. Then we grabbed a taxi and went to the opera!
Chinese opera is actually really fun to watch. It's kind of a spectacle; there's singing, there's acrobatics, there's really crazy costumes! I was really tired though and kept almost dozing off...oops. After the opera, we just went back to the hotel for the night and we all hung out in Stevie and my room for our last night in Beijing. I was really tired and started falling asleep but I was feeling kind of nauseous, and even told Stevie and Chris that I wasn't feeling very well. Well, that was the beginning of the end for me.

I woke up in the middle of the night and had to race to the bathroom to vomit. That happened four times throughout the night, and needless to say, I was having some trouble getting my stuff together and getting ready the next morning. For some reason, my legs were so sore and painful that I couldn't really walk; even when I was sitting completely still, my legs hurt. We went to the Summer Palace, which I really had wanted to see, but I wasn't feeling well enough to get off the bus and spent the entire three hours in the back of the bus sleeping. From the Summer Palace we thankfully started heading to the airport, but I got sick again as we arrived at the airport, and then one last time when we were in the airport. It was maybe one of the most miserable days of my life. Then we took our plane to Hong Kong. We got on a bus in Hong Kong, were shuttled back to the ship, and by that point I hadn't eaten all day and hadn't been able to keep almost any liquids down. We got to the line to get back on the ship and I almost started crying because I was having trouble holding myself up. Stevie and Chris took my bags from me and made sure everyone in the line knew that it was urgent that I got back on the ship first, so I thankfully cut the line and got my stuff from them later. The first thing I did was take a hot shower to try and make my muscles feel better. Then Jim, the assistant dean/my extended family father, came by my room and took me to the clinic.

Well, surprise. I had a 102-degree fever and was severely dehydrated. The nurse gave me anti-nausea pills and ibuprofen and then I went straight to bed for my Long Sleep. I can't say enough how nice everyone on my trip was that entire last day. Nancy kept coming with me to sit down at the airport because I couldn't stand for more than 5 minutes at a time, and people switched off who carried my bags. The nurse has no idea if I got food poisoning or if I just picked up something viral, but either way, I feel eons better now.

So basically, I didn't have the best time of my life in China but it was definitely an experience. I think I should probably end this blog here, because I've been writing this for about an hour and a half now and it's seven pages long and I need do some homework! But I really am going to try to post at least about Vietnam/Cambodia before we get to India. Just to let you know what you have to look forward to in that post: I am completely and totally in love with Southeast Asia and have been floored by every other country I've been too. The people in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand are all so nice and so kind (in comparison to the Chinese, who I found to be loud, rude, and not so kind) and the countries have all been so beyond beautiful. (Although I think I might have allergies in Southeast Asia, which is weird because I've never had allergies in my life and I'm just kind of confused about what I'm feeling...I keep thinking I'm getting sick but maybe not?) I miss you all and love you so much. Thank you for sending me emails, they make my day, even though I haven't really been able to respond to them individually...just so you know, I am reading them, and I really hope you all keep writing because I love knowing what's going on with all of you in the States. It's hard to not feel pretty disconnected from home on this ship somewhere on the other side of the world.

Until later then, xoxoxo,
Eliza

nihon

2007-09-18T04:59:00.000-07:00

Hi all! I'm back from my wonderful 5 days in Japan and we're already going to be in China tomorrow! I wish I had another day or two to recuperate from Japan before getting thrown into another foreign culture, but I've been having an amazing time. To update you on my life aboard the MV Explorer: I'm the executive producer of the student-run TV channel ("SeaTV") which is a lot of fun and keeps me blissfully busy, and I recently sang with my friend Jason in the talent show...it was nerve-racking but felt great. As far as Japan...well, it's probably best to start from the beginning here...

We docked into Japan around 8 am on Wednesday the 12th, but because Japan had such hard port regulations, I didn't get off the ship and into Yokohama until about 2:30. I traveled with a girl named Hannah from Hawaii, and a guy named Chris from Seattle. As soon as we were off the boat, we walked to the train station to exchange our Japan rail passes. Unfortunately, we went to the wrong train station and had to take a cab to the one that would exchange our passes. Yokohama looked like a really interesting city but we didn't get to see much of it.

The line in the Japan Rail office was really long with all the Semester at Sea students in there exchanging their tickets for passes, so we put in our information and went down to the basement of the train station to find some food. Japanese train stations are so gigantic, clean, and confusing. There's an American mentality that Japanese people all speak English; this is definitely false. However, there was a tourist information office that DID speak English, and they directed us to food. We walked into a Japanese restaurant and pointed at things on the menu, telling the waitress that Hannah and I were vegetarian with the help of Chris' Japanese phrasebook.

Once we finished eating, we went and got our rail passes and attempted to find a train that would take us to Tokyo. By this point, it was around 5 pm. Seems I have to pause for backstory now: I have a really good friend from Tokyo named Yumi Kawai, who I met at Woodlands. Yumi was in France while we were in Japan, but she hooked me up with her parents and two of her friends. We planned on being shown around by her friends all day Wednesday and Thursday and staying at her parent's house Thursday night. Her two friends names are Yukako and Tomoko, and I had originally told them that we would be in to Tokyo by noon. When I realized I wouldn't be getting off the boat in time, I called Yukako on a Japanese student's phone and told her I wouldn't be into Shibuya (the neighborhood we were supposed to meet her at) until 2:30. Once I got off the ship, I tried to call her several different times from different locations, but wasn't able to get ahold of her!

Anyway, we tried to find a train to Shibuya, which was difficult because we couldn't really read the train maps and we were having trouble finding an English speaker. We even boarded the wrong train at one point, realizing a moment before the doors closed that we needed to get off of it. Ultimately, we found the train we needed to be on with the help of a person who worked at the train station and we headed to Shibuya.

The train station at Shibuya is of note because there is a gigantic statue of a dog outside of it. The story of the statue is that there was a dog that used to follow his owner to work every day and wait for him until he came back. One day, the owner died, but the dog kept coming to the train every day to wait for him. The Japanese found the dog's loyalty so admirable that they erected a statue for him near the station. The Shibuya district is of note now because it's a really hot shopping district for young people.

It was pretty daunting getting off the train because there were people EVERYWHERE. We tried to find someone to direct us toward the public phones but, again, we couldn't find anyone who spoke English. We finally located the phones and I called Yukako, who sounded relieved to hear from me; it was 6 pm at that point and about 4 hours later than I told her we'd be meeting her. Yukako and Tomoko met us at the statue of the dog and showed us around Shibuya a bit. It was very colorful, very loud, and very full of people.

After about half an hour, Yumi's parents, Megumi and Takeshi, showed up, and the seven of us went out to dinner at a Japanese restaurant. The Kawais are so nice and so kind; there wasn't an awkward moment the entire time we were with them and we had a great time together. The restaurant was the type where you take your shoes off and sit on the floor. Takeshi ordered us all a round of beers and sake and Megumi ordered all the food. Instead of an appetizer like bread, they served fried spaghetti, which was so good; I'd prefer it to popcorn in a movie theater if I had the choice. We had sushi, fried tofu, shrimp, tomato salad, and so much more for dinner. Then they ordered us some traditional Japanese desserts, which were yogurts and ice creams with fruit; delicious! All in all, it was such a fun and satisfying dinner.

We had plans to stay in a capsule hotel that night, and the Kawais were insistent that we give them our backpacks and anything we didn't need so we wouldn't have to carry them around the whole next day. We ended up giving them two of our backpacks, which was so nice of them. Then they hailed a cab for us and directed us toward the Roppongi district, which is one of the nightlife areas, and we parted ways for the night.

When we got to Roppongi, Chris, Hannah, and I went to a "manga cafe" (a super nice internet cafe that has isolated rooms you go into for privacy) to check our emails. Then we went down a floor to a capsule hotel that we had decided to stay at. Capsule hotels consist of little pods that you sleep in; it was way more comfortable than it sounds! Chris went across the street to a club called Gas Panic, where a bunch of Semester at Sea students were meeting. Hannah and I didn't really feel like going out to clubs, so we wandered around Roppongi just taking everything in. We went back to the capsule hotel around 1 am and enjoyed the public bath/spa in the women's area...it really helped my sore legs feel better. Thus ended our first night in Japan.

The next morning, I got up around 9 and showered and started getting ready. Then I woke Hannah up, and we packed up our stuff and met Chris out in the lobby of the capsule hotel. We grabbed a small breakfast from a coffee shop and navigated the frightening trains again to meet Megumi, Yukako, and Tomoko in front of the sumo-wrestling stadium. After getting lost around the station, we finally found Megumi, and we all decided that the sumo tournament was too expensive for something we didn't really care about seeing. Takeshi's office was across the street from where we were, so he met up with us and we all went to lunch at a soba noodle restaurant. Soba noodles are SO GOOD and really healthy! You dip them in soy sauce, and you have to slurp them in order to be like a Japanese person. We saw them making the noodles and it was really interesting.

After lunch, Takeshi took our one last big backpack to his office with him so we could walk around without it, and we parted ways with him for the afternoon. We all headed to the Edo Museum, which is a big museum dedicated to the history of Japan's Edo period. It was cool to see because we don't get much Japanese history in American museums! When we finished with that, we got into two cabs and went over to the Asukasa neighborhood to have tea and see a temple.

We had Japanese desserts/snacks in the tea restaurant and I honestly can't explain them. They were all dumpling things and beans and weird tasting...but good. The menu had a lot of English misspelling on it, which made Chris, Hannah, and I almost cry from laughing. (Such as: "Sweet syrup is sprinkled on the one that the block ice was plane" and "We will not eat two or more people in one dish. Hoochs such as beer and wine are not served.") When we finished tea, we went to a Buddhist temple, which was beautiful. I'll try and post pictures of it later, when I'm on a faster internet connection.

After the temple, the six of us took the train to Shinjuku to meet Takeshi for dinner. The Shinjuku station was connected to a department store and we went inside it to see what it was like. We entered the basement floor, which is apparently the food level of any Japanese department store. I have never in my life seen anything like that food level. Chris, Hannah, and I started calling it "Prada food" because the food (mostly delicacies and sweets) were laid out in glass display cases and sold in the same way that American department stores sell fine jewelry and expensive sunglasses. It was beyond cool and extremely mouth-watering. I ended up buying these cookies that Yumi always brings to me and sends me, which are a butter cookie shaped like a cigar. (They're absolutely delicious and I'm already almost through my box...although I have been sharing quite a bit.)

When we left the "Prada food", went outside and met Takeshi at a tempura restaurant, that the Kawais told us was very famous ("because it's so good!"). Yukako left us here because she had to go meet her boyfriend, which was a sad goodbye; she had been so helpful and kind the past two days! We exchanged emails, addresses, and phone numbers, and I encouraged her to come visit Chicago someday; we'll see if she takes me up on the offer. Tomoko was still with us, which was good because we needed people to do karaoke with!

The tempura restaurant was really amazing; we sat on the floor again with our shoes off, and they showed us the eel, squid, and fish we were going to eat before they cooked it. Hannah and I didn't really eat any of the fish, although I had some sushi and some shrimp. The Japanese seem to eat for hours, it's a miracle that they're all so thin. When we finally finished dinner, we did something that Chris, Hannah, and I had been craving...KARAOKE!

Tomoko was an amazing singer and it was such a treat to hear her sing. She's studying voice at a university in Japan, and her mother is an opera singer (her father is the head of a record label). She has such a clear and lovely voice; the Kawais pressured her into singing Amazing Grace at karaoke and it was beautiful. She and I sang the Whitney Houston/Mariah Carey duet "There Can Be Miracles" (from "The Prince of Egypt") and it made Takeshi tear up! The Kawais sang some Japanese songs for us, which was so cool to hear. It was so much fun.

When our hour+ of karaoke was finished, we said our goodbyes to Tomoko and got on the train with the Kawais. We only traveled about one stop on the train because their home is also in the Shinjuku district. They have a lovely apartment, and we stayed in an external room that I think people from the apartment building can rent when they have guests. They showed us pictures of Kyoto and told us good places to see, and then we exchanged gifts. We went to bed thoroughly satisfied with the time we had spent in Tokyo.

On Friday, we woke up early and went upstairs to have breakfast at 9. Megumi had prepared a gigantic traditional Japanese breakfast for us, complete with miso soup, vegetable rolls, salad, Japanese grapes and pears, and soymilk. It was probably the best breakfast I've ever had. (No offense Dad—your pancakes still own my heart!) After breakfast, Megumi drove us to the Shinjuku train station, parked her car, and got on a train with us to take us to Tokyo station. (She said we wouldn't have been able to navigate it by ourselves, and she was definitely right; it was the largest station I've ever been in and everything was in Japanese.) She helped us find a train to Kyoto and took us to the platform, waiting until our train pulled away. The Kawais were so great and beyond hospitable our entire stay and I feel so blessed that we were able to experience Tokyo with such great guides.

We got into Kyoto around 1 pm and spent about an hour and a half in the tourism office booking a hotel for the night. We had planned on renting bikes and seeing some temples that day, but it started raining, so we walked around the mall in the train station for a while and grabbed some lunch. Then we took a cab to our hotel, which was a traditional Japanese-style ryokan. It wasn't a very nice one, though, because we didn't want to spend much on a hotel we weren't going to be in for very long. However, it was good enough for us.

We started wandering around Kyoto, and it was around 6 pm by that point, so there wasn't too much to do. We popped into some vintage stores and did a little shopping, and I bought a crazy hat at a hat shop. Then we spent a really long time trying to find an international ATM. American ATM cards don't work in Japanese ATMs, and international ATMs are pretty much only in post offices and in Citibank. We couldn't find a Citibank and we couldn't find the international ATM that my Japan guidebook told us about, so we eventually gave up and decided we could only go to places that took credit cards.

Wandering around the neighborhood we were staying in, we found a hidden little bar that Hannah was dead-set on going into. The decor was really interesting and the halls were lit with neon lights, and we had to walk down a set of stairs to get to the bar. It was a really small bar with just a single bar and barstools, and it looked really nice, so we decided to have a drink there. We were the only people in there at first. The bartender had been bartending for 18 years and he was very proud of his profession, and spoke pretty decent English. There were a few drinks on the menu that he had created, and I tried one that was made with machi, the Japanese ceremonial green tea, which he said tasted like Kyoto to him. It was very delicious. After having a drink, we left the nice bar and kept looking for food.

We found a restaurant that looked good enough, so we went in and sat down. There were two other tables of people in there; a large table filled with about 20 Japanese businessmen and a table with about 10 friends who appeared to be in their early 30s. We ordered some food and some drinks and sat around having good political conversation for an hour or so. The businessmen cleared out and I'm not sure if it was because they finally were drunk enough or they had built up enough courage, but the table of friends next to us came over and started talking. They didn't really speak any English, but we were able to make conversation with my point-and-speak Japanese book and Chris' Japan phrasebook. They started buying us drinks; apparently the Japanese love treating foreigners. We had a really fun time with them and made some great new friends.

Saturday morning, we had to be out of our hotel by 10 am, and we had decided by that point that we were going to spend a second night in Kyoto. Chris and I went to ask if we could stay another night at the ryokan, but they were all booked up for the night, so they helped us get a room at a guesthouse near by. We all walked over to the guesthouse; it was owned by a woman and her husband and had several rooms that they rented out. It was a beautiful home, which she told us was around 130 years old. We had two large rooms (a bedroom and a living room area) and slept on the futon mats again. We put our bags down and cleaned up a bit and then rented bikes from the guesthouse. Then we began our adventure in Kyoto.

Hannah was feeling pretty under-the-weather, so we only got to one temple, but it was gorgeous. The gate in front of the temple is one of the three biggest in Japan and the view from the top of it was outstanding. It also had lovely gardens. After walking around the temple grounds for a couple of hours, we went in search of a bike/walking path called the "Philosopher's Path". It took us a while to find it, but it was one of the loveliest bike rides of my life. The path only took about 15 minutes on bike, and it wound near a little river and next to the mountains. We passed young couples on dates, happy families, senior citizens out for a walk—it was so nice. We stopped at a little shrine and lit some incense for the Buddha, and at the end of the path, we got tea flavored soft-serve ice cream that was a million times better than any American soft-serve.

We found a little Italian restaurant and had dinner there, all of us thoroughly sick of Japanese food. (It's so good and healthy but you can only eat noodles, rice, and seaweed a certain amount of times a day!) Then we biked back to our guesthouse because it was getting dark out, and turned our bikes in. After that, we hailed a cab and went to the Gion district (a great nighlife area and the home of geishas!) in search of geishas. Unfortunately, we didn't see any.

Our guesthouse had a curfew of 11, so we got a cab back to the neighborhood it was in and stocked up on Japanese snacks before we got back to our room. The three of us sat around on our futon mats and I fell asleep a bit after midnight...I was so wiped out from such a tiring day! I fell in love with Kyoto, though. At first I wasn't so impressed with it, but once we started biking around and we got near the mountains, it was the most lovely city I've ever seen. I'd adore living there someday.

The next morning, we had planned on getting up at 6 am and taking a train out to Hiroshima for a couple of hours. Hiroshima was 2 hours away from Kyoto by train so we had to be up and on a train by 8 am or 9 am. Unfortunately, Chris either turned his alarm off in his sleep or didn't set it right, but we didn't wake up until 8:30. So we had to cancel our plans to go to Hiroshima and left for Kobe to meet up with the ship.

Maybe it's because it was pretty grey out or we just weren't in the right areas of Kobe, but I didn't like it very much. We wandered around a bit and found a mall that we walked through, and then we decided to go ride the big ferris wheel in Kobe. There was a great view from it, which made me like Kobe a bit more. There was some sort of festival going on in the area around the ferris wheel, and we were able to see various troupes performing traditional Japanese dances. It was pretty cool but it started to rain.

We got back on the ship around 5 pm, exhausted and ready to be back to something familiar. I thought Japan was so cool—very colorful, technology-minded, loud, but strangely traditional and historical at the same time. It was much more foreign than I had expected it to be; I somehow always pictured Japan to be like America but just a little different. That's not the case at all. I'd like to live there sometime, but I don't think I could do it for more than a year. It's just a bit too much.

Tomorrow we get to China! We dock in Qingdao, and I'm there for a day before I go on my university-hosted trip to Beijing. I think my friend Kate and I are going to rent bikes and see some of the German architecture, and maybe go on a tour of the Tsing Tao brewery. I'm really excited for Beijing and seeing the Great Wall, as well as getting to meet some Chinese students. (Also, I'm going to rent a bike in Beijing as well...I can't wait!) After 3 days in Beijing, we take a plane to Hong Kong where I'll be for two days; some friends and I already have plans to celebrate my birthday (early) in Hong Kong, although we're not sure where exactly. It should be a really interesting trip and I can't wait to share my adventures with all of you. :D

Much love from the Sea of Japan,
Eliza

one week down...

2007-09-04T02:19:00.000-07:00

Well, it's officially been a week since I've been aboard the MV Explorer. And what a week it's been! I feel like there's so much to say and share with all of you and it's really hard for me to know where to go begin. So I guess I'll start with ship life.

I have a cabin on the third floor (3105), on the starboard side, that I share with a girl named Rachael. I honestly couldn't have asked for a better roommate. Rachael's from Wyoming originally but she goes to the University of San Diego, where she studies International Relations. She's so sweet and so funny and we get along smashingly. The cabin is small, but it's pretty much what I expected. We have two single beds with a cabinet in between them. Over our beds is a window through which we have a fantastic view of...(you guessed it!) water. Across from our beds we have a small desk and mirror, as well as a little table/sitting area. Against one wall is a set of cabinets; the top two are false cabinets and are actually a tiny refrigerator. Above the refrigerator is a small TV where we get all our boat updates (where on the map we are, our latitude and longitude, the temperature outside, and the current time). The TV also has a couple stations, which usually have movies looping on them. Our bathroom is pretty small but not so bad.

There are two dining rooms on the ship, one of which has a patio connected to it so you can eat outside. There's also a grill/bar on the seventh deck, where the pool is. We have a fully functioning spa, which is attached to the fitness center; I'm tempted to try it out (they have massages and facials!) but fear for my wallet.

My classes are going pretty well so far. The one class I have every day is called Global Studies, which is a lecture class that everyone on the ship takes at 9 am. The lectures revolve around the ports we're going to, for the most part. Every day that we're at sea, we have class, and we run on a schedule that has "A" day and "B" day. On A day, I have Global Studies from 9:20 – 10:35 and then I get a break until my Genders and Sexualities in Cinema class, which is from 2:55 – 4:10. I usually spend the break up on the pool deck, laying out and doing my reading. On B day, I have Languages of the World: The Global Impact of English from 8:00 – 9:15, then Global Studies, then break again until my Hollywood and the World class at 2:55. All in all, I really have zero complaints about my schedule.

I'm sleeping so well on the ship! I think it has something to do with the fact that the ship pretty much rocks me to sleep every night. Because I've been getting up at 6:30 or 7 almost every day, I'm usually sleepy and ready for bed around midnight, which is a completely new thing for me (before, I couldn't fall asleep before 2 am most nights!) Also, I'm eating more healthily then usual, because there's salad at lunch and dinner every day and I always eat it. The ship water isn't amazing—it's purified from salt water—so it tastes better some days than others. However, they sell bottled water at the pool deck and also in the piano bar.

One thing that really amuses me about ship life is the drinking situation. On "pub nights" (every night we're at sea, aside from the day before we get into port), people are allowed to have 2 drinks with dinner and 4 drinks at the pool bar from the hours of 9 pm – 11 pm. The choice of drinks consists of American beers with low alcohol by volume percentages or 4 oz glasses of wine, and they cost $3.50/drink. We have drinking cards that they stamp when we purchase a beverage—it feels like rationing during wartime. Every night, when the pool bar starts serving, there's a line that looks something akin to the lines in front of liquor stores when the prohibition was lifted. It's actually pretty depressing to see how desperate the majority of my fellow students are for our allowance of bad and overpriced alcohol.

That seems to be all there really is to say about ship life—I'm really enjoying it and I'm meeting some nice people from all over the place (such as countries like Mauritius and Peru!) It took me a couple days to get used to the rocking of the ship, but I haven't been seasick yet. However, we'll see how I fare in the next couple of days...apparently, on this trip from Hawaii to Japan, the waves are going to be 10 times more violent than they were on the trip to Hawaii.

Which leads me to the next subject...Hawaii!! Ok, so as many of you maybe have heard me say, I'd been planning for a long time to go skydiving in Hawaii. I signed up to go (a girl on the ship organized a huge trip for us, and about 100 Semester at Sea students went) and have spent the past couple of months in unrelenting terror. I convinced Rachael to do it with in the morning group, and our friends Erica and Annie signed up to come too. As Hawaii got closer, Rachael and I got more and more frightened; she even tried to talk me into backing out of it and going snorkeling instead on the morning of. I, however, was adamant about going—I figured that Semester at Sea is all about confronting my fears and doing things that I have never done and would never do. So around 10 am yesterday morning, we boarded a van and headed to the north shore of Hawaii to skydive.

Reading the contract that Skydive Hawaii made me sign had me thinking that perhaps I shouldn't go. It said over and over again that skydiving is dangerous and that you can die or be seriously injured skydiving. Of course, they have to say that in order not to be held liable for anything that could happen. So I signed my contract and tried to push all thoughts of falling to my death out of my head. When we arrived at Skydive Hawaii, we were able to see people landing from jumping, and it helped alleviate some of my fears; it actually looked quite fun.

Rachael, Erica, Annie, and I made sure we were all in the same plane and then we waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, around 1 pm, it was our turn. I met my instructor, whose name was Ed, and who had been a skydiving instructor for 17 years. He was very amusing and nice and teased me a bit about my fears. He showed me what positions I would need to know and then helped me into my harness. We all headed to the plane, which was a tiny little nothing of a plane (Mom, you would've hated it.) There was a large plastic door that opened and closed and we were to jump out of. The flight up was horrifying and beautiful; we could see all of Hawaii, all the mountains, the entire stunning blue ocean, but there was the looming knowledge that we were about to jump into the open air. Annie went first and watching her fall out of the plane with her instructor made my heart come up to my throat. However, I didn't get much time to be scared because Ed and I were next. And then we weren't in the plane anymore.

Skydiving was genuinely the coolest thing I've ever felt. I imagined I would've had a stomach drop, but I didn't. The first second is really jolting because you're freefalling and it's a completely new feeling, but after that it's really not a big deal. They dropped us over the ocean and the first 60 seconds is just a freefall. It was the windiest feeling I've ever had. Then, Ed pulled the parachute and we spent the next 6 minutes or so gliding, which feels like nothing. We spun around a lot, so my view went from the ocean to the mountains to the ocean to the mountains. Hawaii is so unbelievably gorgeous. Then, we navigated toward a field, where we came to our landing. I wanted to go back up again immediately! Well, I suppose there will always be next time. Jumping made me feel so at peace with the earth and the world, plus it was a major adrenaline rush. After jumping out of a plane, I don't think I will ever be scared to do anything ever again.

Once skydiving was done, they shuttled us back to the port our ship was in. We were all starving, so we found the first place we could to eat, which was a relatively sketchy Chinese food restaurant. When we finished lunch, the four of us got in a cab and headed to Waikiki beach, where we spent the rest of the afternoon enjoying the hot Hawaiian weather and the (perfectly warm!) Pacific. I have to apologize because I wrote a bunch of letters and postcards but didn't have any time to go get stamps before we had to get back on the ship, so they're all going to be sent out from Japan. My bad!

The line to get on the ship last night was absolutely ridiculous. We were told we had to be back on the ship before 9 pm or we'd get dock time in Yokohama. In order to avoid that, the four of us got back to the port around 7:30. It took until after 9 to get back in the boat. I accidentally split up from my friends when I stepped out of line to go to the bathroom and got back in line with a different friend, so I thankfully got on a few minutes before 9. However, all my friends were "late" and now may face dock time, which really stinks because we were there so early! Anyway, we'll see what happens.

We don't dock in Yokohama until September 12th, so it's going to be a long week and and a half on the ship. I'm getting more accustomed to being away from land all the time, though, so hopefully it won't be too tedious. And we lose a day when we cross the international date line!

Well, I should get back to all the reading I have to do for tomorrow, but I'll try and post another blog before we dock in Japan. I'm not making any promises, though, because I don't think anything really interesting will have happened before then. I tried to upload some pictures but the server on the ship is too slow, so hopefully I'll get some sent out soon to you all!

Lots of love!

Port Addresses

2007-08-23T22:51:00.001-07:00

Well, so far there isn't much to say, seeing as how I haven't left Chicago yet. In due time, I imagine I will have LOTS to share with everyone as I journey around the world--so please be my penpal! Below is the link to the various port addresses I'll be arriving at. Semester at Sea recommends sending letters from the U.S. two weeks in advance of our arrival date in any port. And if you write me, I promise I'll return the favor.

Port addresses here!

-Eliza