The Long and Short of It

Ok, so as predicted, I have fallen horribly behind in keeping this thing up to date. I think part of the reason is that I have been without a camera for the past two months. The good news is that I am getting a new camera today, and I am resolving to keep this thing up to date for the last two months I am here ( actually I only have 7 weeks left which is crazy!). But to bring everyone up to speed, I am going to give a brief list of all of my trips thus far, if for no other reason than my own personal records. There are no pictures of these trips from my end, but I am going to try to get pictures from all on my friends before I leave and will put them up if I do. Ok, so, here it goes:

• Thursday March 6-Saturday March 8: Munich-I went to Munich with my friend Jamie who I met here. She is from Montana and wanted to go to meet up with some of her friends on spring break (their spring break, not ours). Munich was a really cool city and my first big city that I had seen since I got here. Highlights we saw: Olympic Park with swim meet going on in the pool ( made me miss pilot), Hofbrauhaus the famous beer garden, the glockenspiel. On Friday, we took a train with her friends outside of the city to see the Neuschwanstein Castle. It was amazingly beautiful which is why Disney used it as its inspiration for the castle in Sleeping Beauty.
  
• Saturday March 15-Sunday March 30 was my TWO WEEK LONG SPRING BREAK! Needless to say, I was more than a little excited to get 2 weeks off even if classes had just started 2 weeks prior. I spent all of it with Nathan Silver this is what we did:
• 15-17: In Stockholm-I get to see what studying abroad in Stockholm is like, meet some of Nathan's friends there, see the city which was beautiful, watch Nathan play guitar in a blues club in the city!
• 18-20: Berlin- Berlin was an amazing city! We took a tour which took to some places we definitely would not have seen otherwise, touched the wall, enjoyed food from most of the street vendors in the city center and found a socialist wine bar one night where you payed 1 Euro for the glass, drank as much wine as you wanted and paid what you felt it was worth at the end. We spent almost an entire day in the German History Museum which was fascinating. Berlin might have been my favorite city of our entire spring break trip. On the night of the 20th we took a night train on to our next destination...
  
• 21-Brussels: by some miracle we were able to find our hostile after arriving very early in the morning from the night train. Brussels was very nice. We ate lots of waffles and chocolate, walked around and saw all the pretty buildings, ate some more food, saw the Pissing Boy (he wasn't dressed up but we did see some of his costumes in the Belgium History Museum), and ate some more. It was a very good city for food.
• 22-Bruges: The next day we went to another nearby city in Belgium. Bruges is an old Medieval city which still had alot of its old architecture. We tried to follow the map on a walking tour all over the entire city, but the bad weather and our lack of sense of direction hindered us at times. Despite the wind and rain and snow, we had a nice time, fed some ducks and swans (swans can be mean!), Oh, and it was here that we saw a Salvador Dali exhibit which was absolutely amazing. That evening, we figured out that the hotel we had booked was not actually in Bruges but in the neighboring town a short train ride away. We also figured out that you have to be very careful at paying attention to which train stop you get off at or else you will have to walk for several hours in the dark to finally get to your hotel.
  
• 23-25 Amsterdam: Also, a great city, we took a canal tour which was a little boring, went to the Van Gogh Museum, saw the house where Anne Frank and her family were in hiding which is now a museum, walked around the city quite alot, and slept in a boat on the canal. My only complaint was that we didn't have enough time to see the flower gardens and it was too cold for the regular flowers to be in bloom yet.
• 25-26 Hamburg: Hamburg was a nice city, although after so much traveling I think we were a little tired. We were really only there for one evening and morning before we had to catch our flight out. That night we took it easy and decided to go to get some German candy and go to a movie which was a nice way to finish out our trip.
• 26-29 Stockholm again: More time to see the city, hang out with Nathan and his friends, and see the Nobel Prize Museum which was pretty cool. And finally my 20 hour journey to return to Linz- something like 2 buses, 2 trams, 2 trains and a plane ride all in all.
• Friday April 4-Sunday April 6: It is a good thing that I don't really have many classes in the week because I was off again the next weekend. This time with 50 of the international students on a school organized trip to Budapest. We took a coach bus from Linz and stopped along the way to briefly see Vienna. The next day, we took a bus tour of Budapest and furthered our sightseeing on our own for the rest of the day. Before we left on Sunday, we got to spend the morning in one of the famous natural spas in Budapest where we lounged in the warm pools, sweated in the saunas, and tortured ourselves in the cold baths that you are supposed to get in when you leave the sauna.
• Friday April 18-Sunday April 20: Stuttgart- I accompanied 8 of my friends here to Stuttgart where the were having a Fruhlingfest or spring festival. Due to some traffic problems(we traveled by car), we didn't get there till late Friday night. Saturday we spent the morning walking around the city and afternoon and evening in the beer tent where they not only had beer but also concerts. The next morning, we woke and started our journey back stopping along the way in a nice little town (although I am not sure of the name of it) for lunch.
• Thursday April 24: Each week there is a party on campus and a different student group gets to host the party and collect the revenues from the cover cost and drinks sold-Hows that for a fundraiser? The 24th was the international students organization's turn to host the party, so we were all up until the wee hours of the morning serving drinks and having fun.
• Friday April 25: The school took us on a tour of VOEST which is a steel company with its headquarters in Linz. We got to see how steel is made. There were robots, it was pretty cool.
• Saturday April 26: Inspired from our brief visit on the way to Budapest, four of my girlfriends here and I took a day trip to Vienna to go shopping. The trip was a success, I get a nice new spring skirt.
• Thursday May1-Sunday May 4: School trip to Karakow: we left on Thursday night and rode a bus through the night to get to Krakow 12 hours later. There is no other way to describe this mode of travel other than miserable. Despite the long sleepless night, we set out the next morning on a walking tour of the city. Our guide was really good and knew alot about the history of the city. Krakow was one of the few big cities in Poland not to be destroyed by the Nazis and is full of amazing history. That night, we went to a traditional restaurant where we learned what it meant to be a highlander as many of my friends were embarrassed by Polish actors in traditional clothing. The next day, we went to Auschwitz, the largest death camp in WWII. While I can't really say it was enjoyable, I was deeply moved by what we saw and am so grateful that I got to go there. Saturday, we spent 12 more hours in the bus. At least on the ride back everyone was so tired that no one made much noise. Did I mention that the bus driver got lost like 5 times and that he had to stop every 2 hours as part of his contract? Yeah, the bus ride sucked.

Ok, that about brings us up to date. I am sure I forgot lost of details and as they come back to me I will try to fill them in. I have lots more exciting things planned for my last 7 weeks here and will try my best to do a better job of writing about them right when they happen. I am starting to miss everyone back home and hope everyone is doing well!