Slainte!

My weekend in Dublin ended this morning VERY early, as myself and my two friends had to be at the airport before 5:30 am! I had an incredible weekend in Ireland, and didn't want to leave; this was surprising as Ireland really wasn't very high on my list of to-visit places until my friend invited me to take the trip with them.  Nothing personal, I had just already been there a long time ago and remembered it as being really pretty, but really slow-paced, and not much to do.  There did really end up being a lot of things to do and see, but the pace was slightly slower than the previous few trips I had taken.  This turned out to be EXACTLY WHAT I NEEDED!  I really enjoyed spending time in Dublin, and interacting with the locals, who were really nice, and helpful! We had random strangers asking us if we needed directions, suggestions for dinner, etc... Although we decided that as a whole, the men were much nicer than the women...that could have had something to do with the fact that we were a group of four girls...two redheads :) The guys we met were certainly interesting let me say!
The day-long bus trip that we took on Sunday was definitely the highlight of the trip! Although it also left outrageously early in the morning (we really didn't have any sleeping in days), it was a relaxing day filled with beautiful sights of the countryside, small towns, sheep, the gorgeous Cliffs of Moher, where we had a stroke of luck and the wind blew all of the thick fog away for us! Our tour guide was really nice, funny, and had a great accent; he even sang for us along the way!
I ate some delicious food, first of all including "flapjacks" sort of a granola bar but chewier, with chocolate, and nuts and toffee etc on top of it! Other than that, the stews, sheperd's pies, Guinness (must admit had to choke that one down on the Guinness factory tour!), and irish breakfast were the icing on the cake of a wonderful weekend! 
The last day, my friend and I went to the famous Kilmainham Gaol (jail) outside of Dublin, and although we were too late for a tour of the actual jail, we were given free tickets to the museum of the history of the jail, which was really interesting for my friend and I after taking a course last semester at BC that included discussions about prisoner justice.
We also stopped by The Church, and beautiful old church that was converted into a bar; the melding of the two is really interesting and pretty! Pretty much every restaurant that we were in there was some type of live music going on, and it was really cool to hear a mix of contemporary and very traditional songs played, and to see that the locals knew all the songs and sang (and danced) along!
The final biggest surprise was that we stumbled upon Boston College's office in Dublin! We were strolling around the Saint Stephen's Green area, taking pictures of one particularly pretty rowhouse with relaly cool ivy/roots (?) growing along its walls, when I noticed that the window shades said Boston College! We rang the bell, and went in where we met a really welcoming women who works as the BC Ireland liason, who gave us a tour of the beautiful old historic house, told us about BC's Ireland program, and then gave us suggestions of places to eat, and visit, and shop!  It was such an unexpected treat, and made us feel really at home in Dublin!
All in all it was an incredible weekend and I now feel like I have quite a different image of Ireland in my head! I hope to go back again, and hop from inn to inn, and have more time to wander around the countryside!
Back in Paris/land of french :) couldn't be happier...
A bientot!
xoxo Gillian

Off to Ireland :)

This Saturday morning I am leaving for a weekend in Dublin with BC peeps :)! I can't wait for the city, which I have only been to briefly before, the beautiful countryside, which we will see on a day-long bus tour to the cliffs of Moher on Suday, and THE FOOD (aka irish breakfast, shepherds pie, etc...you get the picture!)
I'll post again once I get back from the "Emerald Isle"!
A bientot,
xoxo Gillian

What a beautiful Paris afternoon

Today was one of the warmest days we have had so far in Paris! After my morning class, and a leaisurely lunch with two friends, we wandered over to the Jardin de Luxembourg where we took some sunny day pics and then lounged and chatted on a bench for a couple of hours, watching kids run and play on the playground, and couples sit and read in green chairs by the huge fountain...what a great Tuesday! It got all of us reallllly excited for the warmer weather to come; springtime in Paris :)
A bientot,
Gillian xoxo

KerfurstenstraBe-Berlin long version!

Snuggled in bed this morning...stomach isn't feeling really great so I decided not to go to my morning class today...might have been all the different (kind of rich) food in Berlin and tiredness getting to me :(


Berlin was a really great city though! Our Hostel (Amstel House) in west Berlin worked out really well, I would recommend it to fellow travelers for sure.  The sightseeing was also a lot of fun, and really interesting, and we were lucky that the weather was pretty nice and not too cold, although a little overcast all three days, because we did a ton of walking each day, especially Saturday when all the "trams" and buses were striking for most of the day! 


My favorite things that we visited were the Holocaust Memorial (Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe), which had a museum under the memorial with very personal stories of jewish families throughout Europe and what their experiences were in the Holocaust, and even a room with enlarged postcards sent during that period, some tossed out of train windows, some sent to children, parents, family abroad.  That room made me the most emotional.  I also really enjoyed the East Side Gallery, where a mile of the Berlin wall has been turned into an art gallery, painted with murals by artists from all over the world.  It was really interesting to see firsthand the city of Berlin, and start to understand and feel for the first time what a bizarre and complicated last hundred years of history it has experienced.  It made me rethink a lot about how people move on after tragedy, and betrayal, and how people build communities and trust back up again, and remember not to forget who they are and what they think is right and wrong. 


We ate a lot of good food, and especially for breakfast all three days had some yummy sort of fruit buckle/cake, some with rhubbard, some with plums, and milkcaffe (like a cafe au lait).  Soft pretzels were also delicious, as were wiener schnitzel, sauerkraut, lots of potatoes, and apple strudel!  We also enjoyed the markedly cheaper cost of food/drinks in Berlin compared to London and Paris, and it will certainly be harder to consider paying four to five euros for a coffee from now on!


All in all, I was pleased with the city of Berlin, and glad we decided to go there on such a whim! Next weekend I have Dublin to look forward to with some other good friends (and more delicious food of course!) and then two weeks of no classes :) yippee ....
A bientot!
 xoxo Gillian

Berlin! (short version!)

I promise more is coming on my trip to Berlin this past weekend, but here is at least a list of the places I visited while in Berlin, so minimum I don't forget what I saw! It was suuuuch a blast :)
Day 1: Friday
Berlin House
East Side Gallery-art gallery using a mile long stretch of the Berlin Wall
Topography of Terrors-museum looking at the Nazi Party's rise to power in Germany
Checkpoint Brick Bridge


Day 2: Saturday
Holocaust memorial/museum
Brandenburg Gate
Reichstag
Pergamon Museum/fleamarket
Berliner Dom
Victory Gate
Tiergarten
Soviet War Memorial


Day 3: Sunday
TV Tower
World Clock
Berliner Dom (went inside this time)
Checkpoint Charlie (ehh kind of a let down, as I was promised it would be!)


All in all, Berlin was great, we ate great food, walked a tonnnn, and I hope to be able to write a longer post about the weekend tomorrow!
Until then, a bientot :)
xoxo Gillian

Berlin demain matin :)

Tomorrow morning I am off to Berlin! My flight ended up being kind of early for my liking, especially since I am off right now for a bateau mouche nightime trip...but at least I will have the full day tomorrow in Berlin with my two friends.  Last weekend a good friend from Boston College came and visited me for the weekend with two other friends, which was a really good time! We hit up all the touristy spots, and probably walked five to ten miles Friday-Sunday, albeit in the verrrrry cold weather! I'm glad it warmed up this week, although Berlin may very well plunge me back into freezing temperatures haha we shall see!  Another good week of classes, applied to an internship in the US for after I get back this summer, made plans to get together with some friends next week, and spent a wonderful evening with friends last night celebrating an old friends 21st birthday! I had so much fun :) and found a great wine bar to go back to in the future!
Heading out now, will post when I get back from Berlin! gutentag :) (wish I could say "bye for now" or "a bientot" in german, but lets face it, I have about three words in my german vocabulary, and that is optimistic at best! Thank goodness it sounds like everyone in Berlin speaks english!) I am excited because this is the first time I will have traveled to a place I haven't been before "on my own"! 
xoxo A bientotschleinauss (my made up german word for talk to you again soon :)
Gillian

Friday full of friends :)

Last friday was such a fun day :) While it was one of the coldest days I have ever spent in Paris, I spent a lot of the day walking around the city!  I met a friend at our moms' old cafe haunt in the 17th, Cafe Vigny, right by EAB Monceau, and got a hot chocolate and pain au chocolat :).  We actually saw british and american mom's of kids at the school, so we had a little nostalgic chat about the old days in Paris, and how bizarre it is that so many of us seem drawn back to the city all at the same time.  I just finished the book The Paris Wife, about Hemingway and his wife, and the time they spent in Paris.  I love imagining what happened in authors real lives, that you only see hints of in their writing.  It was really interesting because I love Hemingway's quotation about Paris being a moveable feast, that once you live there, you carry the city with you forever.  I identify so much with that sentiment.  My friend and I were having moment after moment of feeling simultaneously like an eternity had passed since we left Paris, and also like it was just the other day that we we trooping into Parc Monceau in our blue and grey and white.  We compared 9/11 stories, mine being spent in Paris right at the very start of my time there.  We felt old and young at the same time. 
I got lunch in the 1st arrondissement with a BC friend, and then headed back to the 17th for an "English Tea" with a really old Paris friend (and her pug!).  I love friends who you can not see for days, months, years, and find you can fall into the same friendship each time you see each other again.  
Later in the weekend I headed to the Musée D'Orsay to escape the cold, and what a beautiful building it is!  I took in some Degas(my favorite), Seurat, Monet, etc...and then had a leisurely chevre chaud salad and frites in a nearby cafe, while I read Camus' La Peste for my french literature class (how and when the rest of the class has already read it I'll never know!)
With the cousins, I got down to some planning for our end of the semester traveling/backpacking/eurorailing/hostel-hopping, you get the picture!  We booked our initial flight from Paris to Bilbao at the end of May! It is really happening-and I can't wait!
Upcoming trips: In two weeks, I am off to Berlin for the weekend, and then the following weekend to Dublin, AND the following weekend (the first in March) to Lyon to see extended family! I can't wait! Hopefully the weather will have gotten at LEAST a few degrees warmer by then, but I'm not keeping my hopes too high for that!
A bientot :) bisous
xoxo Gi

"Les trains sont perturbés"

Sorry for the delay; what with classes starting this week I have been all over the place!  I started classes on Monday, and I am glad to say that I am finished for the week! (aka no classes on Fridays!)  Classes so far seem interesting and within my abilities, if challenging, although it is tricky to navigate a system where most classes are carrying over from first semester, so everyone has already read the book, or the syllabus was handed out in september and hasn't been heard of since.  I haven't yet been to my spanish class (because of a slight mix up in which my brain changed 15h-17h to 5-7 pm...I knew that would happen to me at some point)...Luckily, I was able to meet the teacher and talk to her to make sure that class wouldn't be too hard for me.  Switching that quickly directly from french to spanish with no english in between was a little jarring, and I had to literally bite me tongue to keep from dropping certain french words in with the spanish! Class should be interesting, needless to say, but I feel like switching back and forth will keep me on my toes :) 
Today after caving and picking out a longchamps bag (simply the best bag to fit my laptop, notebooks, etc that doesn't look totally crappy-I should have done as the french students in all of my classes and gotten a little notebook, instead of having my macbook...oh well...), I went to the Louvre with a few friends, where we were pleasantly surprised to find that university students (at least "french" universtiy students" haha) get in for free! We hope this carries over to many of the other major museums too :) We picked one wing (French/Italian Renaissance wing), based on what we talked about in our first Modern Art History "TD", and were able to recognize a lot of the paintings and artists that we had talked about in class this morning (and when I say talked about, I mean the teacher played a slideshow and quizzed the students at random on artist, title, location, dates, etc. of paintings they had studied in the fall..unfortunately we hadn't introduced ourselves as study abroad students before the class, so when he called on any of us, it was kind of awkward/we mostly failed to correctly i.d. haha) Luckily he was nicely quizzing everyone, not meanly quizzing everyone!
After the Louvre, I stopped off at the Gare de Lyon to try to get a 12-25 pass, which discounts all train tickets in France.  After stopping to ask where I could buy one at approximately five different "guichets",  I arrived at a huge line of about 200 people waiting to buy tickets...it would appear that they don't have a separate location to just buy this discount pass, so I decided I will try to buy it online again before waiting in a horrendous line!
Can't wait to be taken to an "american cake shop", as my british friend calls it, tomorrow afternoon :) (did I mention I don't have class on Fridays?)
A bientot! I promise to try to post more frequently in the future!!
Gillian