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

Crazy days before school starts!

TRYING TO BOOK TRAVEL PLANS for the semester!!!  Also, spent mulllllltiple hours today trying to figure out my schedule! I think I have it down and it includes...duh duh duhnnn a spanish class haha :)
We'll see if I can keep up!  I am also taking history of the international system between 1917-1947, a class called "literature francaise moderne et contemporaine", a class on the history of FOOD which only meets one hour a week, and two art history courses including the one taught by the Boston College coordinator! phewww hopefully I stick with these and don't need to change because that would not be an easy feat!
A bientot :) (wish me luck!) 
p.s. also met an old friend (kind of ) for the first time (kind of ) haha its a long story!

One down! Weekend in Belgium :)

This past weekend, I made it to the first stop on my list of travels: Belgium! I left Paris early enough on Sunday morning that I saw the Richard Lenoir market outside my front door being set up in the dark-that was cool! I took an eight a.m. Thalys train to Bruxelles, and than a local train out to Mortsel, where old family friends live.  I first went on a short bike ride to the local bakery, which was made slightly longer by the fact that they are all substantially taller than me, so the bike I was riding was a bit tricky to get a handle on!  After much helping and holding and pushing the bike I was on my way (albeit slightly more anxious than usual not to be wearing a helmet!), and each time I had to start up again people helped me, including their good friend that we ran into along the way haha...I was proud that I was able to pull it off, and the last time I started I got going all on my own!  I spent a great day eating and talking with them (the food was delicious!!), and then the mom and daughter took me into Antwerp on the tram, and the last leg consisted of walking through a long tunnel that went under the river to cross into the city!  We saw  some churches, shopping areas, the new Antwerp museum, which was a really interesting style of architecture, and even strolled through the tiny red light district (which they said I had to see since we were there)...it was one of the most bizarre things/concepts I have seen...I was a little weirded out to say the least! I got to watch a weekly television program with them with updates on the Belgian royal family, and then we watched Glee!  Apparently it is the dad's (closet) favorite show :) He didn't want to admit how much he liked it, but he laughed when I told him that in the US there is a word for people obssessed with Glee ("Gleeks").  
I took the train back into Bruxelles Monday morning and met up with three friends from Paris! Although the Bruxelles tram system through us for a loop initally, we were finally able to figure out where we were going, and made it to the 2Go4 Hostel, five minutes walk away from the Grand Place.  After dumping our stuff, we went in search of some lunch and were satisfied with delicious plates of moules-frites!  We walked all around the Grand Place, taking pictures, looking for chocolate (which I of course bought some of!), and using our cool interactive maps that we got at the hostel.  We saw about three churches Monday, as well as some ancient towers that now had modern buildings built right into them.  We got dinner at a great little place, with somewhat of an italian influence, and then went to a bar, Delirium, which one friend had found in her guide book as having the record for most types of beer on tap...not really knowing what any of the options were or tasted like, I ended up getting lucky with a pear beer that was really yummy :)
Tuesday we slept in a bit, left our bags at the hostel, and walked around the city again for almost the full day (two days did seem like enough time to see most of the main sights in the city, and to be able to walk around almost all of the city, although we didn't make it to any museums...) We went into the museum of comic books briefly, the museum of chocolate for a longer time, saw the two biggest cathedrals, went back to the Grand Place for some fries at a "friterie", and waffles, and saw the Royal Palace and adjacent park, as well as Parliament! Whew!! we were so tired out by the time we got to the train station Tuesday evening to come back to Paris.  Luckily I had a great book (The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest) with me, that I couldn't put down, so I was able to read quietly on the way back!
It was a great trip, amidst some pretty chilly and drizzly weather, and I had a great time with new and old friends!  Now on to my Belgian chocolate!!
A bientot xoxo
Gillian