Burgers and Baby Bears

Friday came.  I was determined to do the last of my homework during the day so I could just have fun the rest of the weekend, but did that happen? No. I slept until 1 pm, sat at my computer blankly, barely convinced myself to get out of my pajamas and into real people clothes, and then went back to blankly stare at my computer some more.  Epic fail.  So, tomorrow will be my official homework day.

Last night, we went to Ring Burger Bar and Cafe.  I was really excited because it was really good the first time and I was basically out of groceries so I'd barely eaten all day.  But then I got my Cheddar Burger and cut it open to find that the meat was basically still alive, despite my request for well done-ness, and I lost my appetite.  That sucked but it did inspire some hilarity, I suppose, because I said I was glad I looked at it before eating it so I didn't get "Baby Bear disease" (a disease that turns you into a baby bear, I guess).  Don't ask me why that came out of my mouth, but it did, and it resulted in plans to film a B-movie in Budapest with that plot line.  Once we get enough teddy bears, maybe it'll happen.  We have about 3 so far.

After that, we went to West End Mall for gelato before going to see Red Riding Hood, which was really bad but I loved it anyways.  Once again, going into a movie with no knowledge other than the title and the cast proved wise, because I think I would've hated the movie if I'd known anything about it at all.

Dani and I watched Cry Baby when we got home after stopping at the non-stop ABC for food, since I was really hungry from not eating my bloody burger, and it was a lot of fun.

Today, we were supposed to go to Memento Park.  It ended up being only me and Julie, and we got on the metro, and then a tram, and then arrived at the bus station to find that we would have to wait an hour for the bus to take us there.  We backtracked and went to Arena Plaza instead to go to Tesco, since I desperately needed groceries, and ended up doing some shopping, which was a lot of fun.  AND WE WENT TO PIZZA HUT!!!! It was awesome.

And tonight, we're gonna see Scream 4, and I'm so excited!!!

And tomorrow...maybe I'll actually get my homework done.

Vienna: A Whirlwind of Freud, Mozart, and the Habsburgs

Vienna was initially underwhelming.  We used Gus as our measurement, which carried over from Venice, when he periodically updated us on his level of "whelm."  We arrived there at like 3 AM, but I don't even remember for sure, because the last week was really a blur of travel by bus.  The hotel was less confusing than the Venice one, and as Dani put it, she felt like she was staying in someone's house, which I guess is valid if you're only considering the actual room, which was full of wooden furniture and coziness.  The hotel breakfast was less impressive here, in my opinion, but most everyone else thought it was better.  I'm not the best judge since I'm such a picky eater, but Venice had better bread.

Anyways, our first morning was spent orienting ourselves within Vienna by visiting some famous churches.  One of them was really cool, because we could take an elevator up to the dome to see the paintings up close, and the braves ones in our group took the stairs from there to go even higher to the top of the dome, but I was not one of them.  That scaffolding was rickety.  The second church was a gothic cathedal, which I always think are beautiful.  The final one was really strange.  It had some modern art exhibition in it that was of some gold table settings underwater, which allegedly had a lot of religious symbolism involved, but what I found more impressive was that this church had a fake dome that looked real if you stood in a particular spot on the floor and looked up.

We had free time next, so a group of us when to the Freud museum, which was underwhelming.  I don't really know what I was expecting, but it sure wasn't the rooms of his books and notes and other things like that, mostly written in German.   The next thing we did, though, made Vienna suddenly four times more awesome, and that was seek out Prater Amusement Park to ride its famous Ferris wheel.  However, we got there and were distracted by this thing that was like a significantly elevated chair swing, and rode that instead.  The park was different from American in two main ways- 1) You paid per ride and 2) They had so many kinds of rides I've never even seen before in American parks.  It was awesome, and we wanted to go back later that night but it didn't end up happening.

Everyone gathered at our meeting place at 3 to head over to the Habsburg's summer palace together.  Schloss Schoenbrunn was completely awesome, and I learned the value of an audioguide.  I think I would've enjoyed Versailles a lot more if I'd had an audioguide, actually.  The best part of Schoenbrunn, though, were the grounds, which were vast and green.  We spent a lot of time exploring them and climbed a massive hill to get a great view of Vienna.

When it came time to leave, though, we thought incorrectly that we knew how to get back to the hotel.  We either followed incorrect directions or incorrectly followed directions, which resulted in us getting off two metro stops before the one we should have gotten of at, which resulted in about 35 minutes of walking rather than 5, which disoriented us and ultimately made us really late for dinner.  It was really stressful, actually, because while most everyone else had also been late, nobody had been as late as us.  It was silly, really, because we'd left with 40 minutes to get back and we should have been early, if it weren't for that metro mistake.  Plus, I was developing some more blisters, which seems to be a recurring problem in my travels.

Anyways, then it was dinnertime, and we all went to a restaurant and it was awful, in my opinion, but nearly everyone else liked it.  I don't like crepes much in general, but I especially don't like dinner crepes.  Crepes are more dessert or breakfast.  You can't eat dessert or breakfast for dinner when you're super hungry after a really long day.  I can't even eat breakfast for dinner under normal circumstances, actually.

After dinner, a group of us went to go see Mozart's house, which would of course be closed since it was nighttime, but we still thought it'd be cool to see it.  After following the strangest directions on a sign I've ever seen, we found it, gazed upon it, witnessed a nearby dogfight, and left in search of something to do.  Attempts were made at souvenir shopping, but Viennese souvenirs were more expensive than Venetian ones! I couldn't really buy anything except an overpriced keychain.  We all hung out at an Australian pub until some of us got tired and others wanted to go find a club, and we went our separate ways and I went to bed.

The next morning, after packing up our stuff, loading it onto the bus, and eating breakfast, we all went to the Kunsthistoriches Museum, which was overwhelmingly full of art, and we had a packet to do that went with it.  I really hate those packets.  They take away from the experience of enjoying an art museum.  I was kind of miserable, actually, because I was so focused on answering the questions and not running out of time (we only had a few hours before the bus left, you see, and we still had to eat lunch, too).  Anyways, we got it done, and Laura and I went off in search of food and bus snacks.  We got some really good pizza and gelato before entering a grocery store to get water, because we knew at this point that a bus ride without water is the worst experience ever.  I also bought carrots, which I forgot to eat and later got all slimy in my backpack when I found them in Berlin, which was gross.



The bus ride home wasn't too long, luckily, and we got back early, which was awesome because we had to leave that night for Berlin and therefore had more time to get ready.

I think I would like Vienna if I had more time there to experience it, and I would love to go back there one day with my sister.

Gondolas, cobblestone streets, and excessive amounts of gelato

Venice is a place I've always wanted to go but never thought I'd actually get to.  Even as we were on the bus on the way to Italy, I was in disbelief, because it just felt impossible.

The morning before we left, I'd discovered free Kindle books and had a downloading frenzy, so I was ready for the long journey.  I decided to read my the one I paid for, though, which was Stephen King's Under the Dome, for which I'd seen posters in Paris.  I couldn't stop.  I read that 1000-page novel in about 5 days, which is impressive considering that I was also traveling Europe at the time.  It was amazing.  I recommend it.  We drove through Slovenia, which was absolutely beautiful.  If I had the time, I'd go there just to spend a day or two in one of the small towns nestled in the mountains.

We arrived in Maestre at 2 AM and immediately collapsed into our beds.  The hotel rooms were really nice, but the hotel layout was really confusing, and different elevators/stairwells took you different places. but it was nice nonetheless.  The breakfast was good, too, and I had the most delicious lemon tea.

We left for Venice by public bus, which was about a 20 minute ride, if I remember correctly, which I probably don't.  We crossed a really long bridge to get there, and the lagoon it spanned was absolutely beautiful.  I've never seen water that color in real life before, even when I lived in Hawaii.  We arrived at the bus station that was located at one of Venice's larger bridges.  Only 3 or 4 bridges actually cross the Grand Canal, we learned.  This one we called the "slippery bridge," because that was how our art professor guide described it to us in a warning of how it could get when it rained.  The first part of the trip was a journey across the city to San Marco, which would be our meeting spot for later in the day.

Dani, Laura, Julie, and I went off with Gus, Kasey, Matt, Z, and Casey to go get lunch.  I was so excited for real Italian food, but the places we were passing were expensive.  Venice is one of the most expensive cities in Europe, but we are college students, so we finally stopped somewhere that looked like a cheap American Chinese restaurant but with Italian food.  The photos on the menu were like that of turn of the century digital cameras, with distorted colors and grainy quality, but hey, it was affordable.  I rather enjoyed my margherita pizza, but Julie wasn't so lucky with her Spaghetti aglio olio e peperocino.  The peppers were so hot that Casey teared up when he ate more than three slices of pepper at once.  We spent our free time just exploring without any real agenda, stopping for gelato when the mood struck, because there were gelato stands everywhere!!! We got kind of lost and reached some outer edge of Venice just as Julie's gelato started melting all over her, and in her frenzied hopping around to get it off, I feared she'd fall in the water, which luckily, she did not.  She did wash her feet in it, though, which was hilarious and led to a brief photo shoot session.








We met up with everyone back at San Marco in order to walk over to a gorgeous church, after which everyone who was interested went questing for a gondola ride.  I was so excited, because I've always wanted to ride a gondola.  We finally found a place and divided into three groups.  I was afraid it wouldn't happen because it cost 80 euro per gondola, but since up to 6 people could fit into one gondola, it became more affordable once we split the cost.  Our gondolier gave us a bit of a tour while on the ride, and we learned a lot about Venice that we otherwise wouldn't have, so it was nice.  Afterwards, we took a vaporetto (water bus) to a more central/familiar location so we could find a place to eat dinner, and that was nice.  We ate outside, and the waitress kind of hit on Nick, but we were not sure.  After the lovely Italian food, we kind of explored for a while at night, which was a lot of fun until we lost Kasey and had to go find him.   The group split up around that point, because people were getting tired.  We waited for a while at a vaporetto stop before we found that night vaporettos didn't service that one, so we walked down to a different one and eventually made our way back the the hotel.


The next day, our first destination was the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, which was really interesting, but also weird, because it was modern art.  A lot of the stuff looked like a whole lot of nothing to me, but then I'd read the description and it would say stuff like, The three floating bells are a representation of lost childhood... I don't even know.  There was a nice garden, though, and it has a wish tree established by Yoko Ono on which one person had asked for a French sugar daddy, which made me think of Rhaelynn and her Parisians.  After this, we were free again, but Laura, Julie, Dani, and I got hopelessly lost and it was Palm Sunday so we kept running into parades of people with palm fronds, and I felt guilty that our touristy-ness was kind of interrupting that.  Anyways, we ended up taking a vaporetto COMPLETELY around Venice to get somewhere familiar, when we later found out that we could have walked about 10 minutes and done the same thing.  Maps are so much harder to read when you're lost.  Anyways, we made it to our meeting point on time, and from there, went to a palace that was rather awesome, even though we weren't allowed to take photos.  It had a lot of really creepy religious art, though.





In our final span of free time, I ventured alone into a Da Vinci exhibit because the others weren't so interested, but they should have gone with me because it was so cool! I got to play with replications of his inventions.  Totally worth it.  We also ate our last gelato and last Italian pizza.  Our last moments in Venice was spent under the slippery bridge, waiting for everyone to show up so we could go back to the hotel and get on the bus.  I'm really glad I got to go to Venice, especially as part of a group trip because I would've been so lost otherwise.

Next stop, Vienna!

Spring Break: The Aftermath

I fell asleep as soon as I got home yesterday, and slept through both my alarm going off and Dani knocking on the door to tell me that it was going off.  When I woke up, I felt really sick from not eating in over 12 hours, and managed to pull together a pasta dinner with the limited food supplies I had.  I did not accomplish much at all, unfortunately.

Today, though, I made up for it.  I still felt sick so I slept through my Lit class and then got up and started tackling my to do list.  The heating guy came to fix our water heater as I was mid-newspaper article, in my pajamas at the table, surrounded by papers and gummy bears, and it was awfully embarrassing how messy the apartment was in the aftermath of our return from Spring Break.

I made a schedule for myself that will help me get my work done these next two days so I can have fun this weekend, which is possibly the last one before finals but I'm not sure at this moment.

Last hour in Berlin...

I'm in the hostel lobby, killing time until we head for the bus station for a 14 hour ride back to Budapest.  I can tell you right now that I'm gonna be miserable, just because I can't sleep on buses.  Meh.

Laura has been reenacting movies super fast and we've been recording her with the remaining space on our collective memory cards, and it's so funny.  My laptop started dying, though, so I relocated to a table near an outlet and am therefore away from them, but it's fine because I'm skyping my boyfriend and attempting to get some work done.

Speaking of work, I have so much to do tomorrow, which is unfortunate because I know I'm gonna wanna just sleep when I get back tomorrow.  I don't understand why teachers decide Spring Break is an excuse to give out more work.  It's not like I have extra time, especially considering that I'm studying abroad and this is the best opportunity for travel.

After dinner at an Italian restaurant tonight (it'd been 5 days since I had pasta and needed it),  we went on a Spezi quest, but since it's Easter, most places were closed and the best I could do was a liter of Mezzo Mix from a shop in the train station, which isn't as good but it's similar.  I'm gonna miss Spezi.

I'm also gonna miss all the sausage stands.  In Budapest, 80% of convenient food is Turkish.  They have that here in Berlin, but it's not so disproportionate.  I'm probably never gonna be able to eat a bratwurst again without comparing it to the ones here, and it's possible I won't even eat one again unless I come across a sausage stand someday because I'm incapable of cooking meat.

There are only about 3 weeks left abroad, which is awful, because there's so much I have left to do!!!  Ugh.    I'm gonna leave it at that for now and try to upload some photos to older posts while I have a decent internet connection, starting with Prague, so check it out!! Also, some of the Venice pics are on my photobucket now, but more will be up tomorrow.

Ich liebe Deutschland

I'd hoped to get some work done while here in Berlin, since the hostel has wifi, but I can't focus at all.  There's some awfully loud and piercing swing music playing in the loud lobby, which is the only place that has wifi, so...no work for me, which means no Venice and Vienna blog post for you, for now.

I love Berlin so far, though.  The sausage stands are awesome!  We're going to Sachsenhausen Concentration camp tomorrow, which will be emotionally intense, undoubtedly, but a girl we met at the hostel said it was an eye opening experience, which I'm sure it will be.

I can't handle much more of this music down here, so I will have to leave you only with that.

More later!