Hey stranger, it’s been a long time since I’ve updated this, partly because I’ve been traveling a lot, partly because I’ve been lazy, and partly because for a long time I refused to come to terms with the fact that this beautiful semester is coming to an end, but seeing as I’m now sitting at the Prague airport and my plane leaves in an hour, I guess now is a good time to face reality.
The past two months have been the busiest as far as traveling goes. I actually spent more time outside of Vienna in June than I spent in it. I traveled though Belgium, Norway, Poland, Italy, Croatia, and Spain and loved (almost) every single second of it.
Jacqueline and I both had 12 days where we didn’t really have too many classes, so we decided to plan a trip to wherever RyanAir would take us. We sat down on Skype one night and started experimenting with different travel plans, picking each city randomly from a drop down menu. It’s almost embarrassing to admit how many cities we had to put into Google because we had no idea what country they were in (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia…) but we ended up with a pretty decent flight plan in the end: Brussels to Oslo to Krakow to Milan and back to Vienna. Oh, and we decided to do the whole trip with only a carry-on. Awesome!
I don’t think I heard anything positive about Brussels from anyone, not even my grandma, but I knew with Belgium waffles and chocolate I wouldn’t be disappointed and I really wasn’t. Actually, I really loved the city. It wasn’t too big and we were able to see pretty much everything in one day, from the churches to the parks to the palace. We even managed to try macroons and waffles and frites and weird street meat. I gave in and tried some different flavoured beers that tasted more like bubbly fruit juice than beer, so I was alright with that…but I’ll take a vodka lemon over a Corona anyday.
On a side note, our hostel in Brussels is also where I picked up the book Scar Tissue, which was one of the best books I’ve read. Anyone that has ever listened to a Red Hot Chili Peppers song needs to read that book, it’s one of the most honest, raw biographies I’ve ever read and I have a lot more respect for the band. Plus it’s massive, so it’s perfect for traveling.
Our next stop was Oslo. I’ve loved every single person I’ve met from Norway, and everyone I know from Oslo is awesome. Really, you guys rock. But I am never, ever, ever going back to Oslo. I don’t know if you could pay me to go back there, but I mean that in the nicest way possible. We ate sandwiches every day for lunch and had pasta with tomato sauce for dinner every night because everything was so expensive.
Yes, I now know that it’s common knowledge that Norway, Sweden, Finland, etc are all incredibly expensive countries. Obviously, Jacqueline and I did not find that out until our tickets were booked. There was a really beautiful park that I would’ve enjoyed so much more if it didn’t start to pour half an hour after we got there, which was the case every single day we were there. We did get lucky and didn’t have to pay for a place to stay because of couchsurfing.org. A couple let us use their apartment while they were on vacation for the weekend (hostels started at $50 a night).
I also learned that Oslo doesn’t really have a lot of nighttime. It got dark around midnight and the sun came up at 4. Because of the ridiculous prices, we only went out one of the nights we were there. Since we did think to buy a bottle of vodka duty free at the airport we didn’t have to pay $10 for a beer at the bars and it was definitely an adventurous night. We met some guys that lived there and they convinced us to go to some club called Blue (pronounced “blauuu”, they said) with them. In turn, Jacqueline and I somehow convinced the bouncer that we didn’t have to pay cover. We stayed there till the sun came up – which isn’t saying much, since the sun rose at 4 – and then went to an after party at someone’s apartment. It was sorta fun, until we realized some guy had a broken ankle. He wasn’t exactly sure what happened. He thinks he fell down the stairs…I think it will forever remain a mystery. It was around then we decided to head back home. Good thing I left my cell phone at the apartment!
We got it back the next day, and that was also when I realized that these guys don’t really speak a lot of English. It was around that same time that Jacqueline and I realized we may or may not have told this guy last night that we wanted a tour guide. Awesome. We managed to part ways after the Opera House, which, Oslo, I’ll give you that. You have an absolutely beautiful Opera house. If I liked Opera, that would be awesome. Oh, and you have a Hard Rock Café, that was cool.
But you know what was not cool? The fact that our plane did not even land in Oslo, we landed outside of it and it was hour long bus ride between Oslo and the airport. But I guess what was kinda cool was that on the way to Oslo, the bus was full so we got to ride for free…if we sat in the aisle. You win some, you lose some.
Needless to say, we were definitely looking forward to Poland, and Krakow did not disappoint us. It was probably my favourite city I visited all semester. I originally didn’t even want to visit Poland but I’m so glad I did. The hostel we stayed at (Tom & Jerry’s) was fabulous – the people were great, the staff was so nice, it was clean and fun and the front desk sold vodka shots. The city itself was beautiful and the food was delicious.
We did a walking tour of the Jewish Ghetto, of the main parts of the city, and went to Auschwitz. We did cut our city tour short due to us wanting ice cream, but I think we saw most of the important things. One of the days we went out to eat at a traditional Polish restaurant in the city center and I think that was the only bad choice we made the entire time we were in Krakow. It was not traditional Polish food, it was just suspicious dry meat. Otherwise, Krakow rocked. The hostel had a vodka tasting one of the nights and again, somehow Jacqueline and I convinced the lady that we should get twice as many shots as everyone else. And then suddenly we decided it was someone’s birthday so that was a good reason to have more hazelnut vodka, which, by the way, is absolutely delicious. The rest of the night was really fun and ended in 5 a.m. kebaps, which is always a good choice.
If it were up to me, I’d never leave Krakow, but we had a flight to Milan to catch. Krakow didn’t want us to leave either because we barely made it to the airport on time. We woke up late and rushed out of the hostel to make the train to the airport, but I have my priorities so I had to grab breakfast first – the hostel had an awesome breakfast buffet, don’t judge. So Jacqueline finished packing up and checked us out while I ran downstairs to get breakfast. Well I started making sandwiches and there were so many combinations of meat and cheese that I couldn’t make just one sandwich. So I made 4. Jacqueline was shouting at me from the top of the stairs but c’mon, then there was this awesome Greek-type salad that I was in love with but I didn’t have anything to put it in...so I may or may not have eaten it straight from the salad bowl. Maybe that’s one of those things I keep to myself? Either way, I grabbed the sandwiches and some yogurts and decided we were good to go.
We sped walked to the train station but got lost along the way and missed the train to the airport. Good thing there’s only one train every half hour. We sat down and hoped we would make our flight, but on the bright side, I figured this was a perfect time to enjoy breakfast. I don’t think Jacqueline felt the same…but I think now we can both look back at the situation and laugh, because we made the next train and then sprinted like gazelles to the airport and made our flight with a few minutes to spare. Although I did have a very close call and almost threw away my passport while I was throwing away 3 empty water bottles (still don’t know why I was carrying them all with me) and the yogurt containers and my sandwich wrappers. Thankfully I caught myself in time and was able to continue sprinting after Jacqueline.
We landed in Milan where we planned to couchsurf for the 4 nights we were there. Our host was very unique and interesting and Italian. We ended up not staying at his place the whole time because we decided it wasn’t exactly what we were looking for, but he did cook us delicious Italian meals, made us coffee in the morning, shared his wine with us, introduced us to the best gelato place in Milan, took us to a great Italian restaurant and let us sleep on his leather couch, which I had to unstick myself from every half hour.
When we arrived he made us pasta and it was a pretty quiet lunch with plenty of awkward silences. I had to pinch myself more than once to keep from laughing out loud at how ridiculous our situation was. He was kind enough to take us around the city afterwards and we saw the Duomo, the shopping streets and city hall (or some important city government building).
We got up early the next morning because our host had to work, but it worked out in our favour because we went to the top of the Duomo before there was a line and hardly anyone was up there. The view of Milan wasn’t beautiful, but the cathedral itself is amazing, inside and out. We spent the rest of the day walking through the city and I have to admit I was pretty disappointed, and by the end of the third or fourth day I was more than ready to leave Milan. There’s not much to see or do and our host wasn’t exactly the funnest guy to hang out with – turns out he spends his Friday and Saturday nights watching television.
We actually ended up doing what we could to avoid going back to his place our and thought of an elaborate story to explain why we had to cut our stay with him short. Our plan worked and we were home free, except now we were homeless in Milan (Yes, I’ve noticed me being homeless is a reoccurring theme this semester). I had to find a hostel to stay at because Jacqueline was staying with her family. After hiking through half of Milan with our giant backpacking backpacks we found a travel agency that was open (it was Saturday…Sunday? so everything was closed) and with broken Italian and a lot of hand gestures we found a hostel for me to check into for the night.
The hostel had the highest reviews but it was still awful. I think that’s why we wanted to couchsurf in the first place – Milan is not hostel friendly. I explored the city by night and got terribly lost going back to the hostel and was informed by a man on the subway that the part of the city I was staying in is full of mafia members, so that was cool. I went to sleep and couldn’t wait to get out of the hostel and back into my own bed, especially when I woke up covered in mosquito bites. Three of them were on my forehead. Also really cool.
The next morning I walked to meet Jacqueline and her family for lunch, and naturally it started pouring the second I walked out of the hostel. Again, I was trekking through Milan with my giant backpack, but this time I was also using a map as an umbrella. If that isn’t an awesome way to end my backpacking trip, I don’t know what is.
Jacqueline and I spent the day with her family, but they don’t speak English so I spent most of the day smiling a lot and eating really great Italian food and not saying much. Our plane left at some ungodly morning hour, so we headed to the airport with one of the last busses and planned to sleep at the airport for a few hours before heading to Bratislava and then back to Vienna.
Luck was not on our side, because this airport was not down with passengers sleeping all over their floors and chairs. They closed off everything overnight except a small section by the entrance, so we set up camp in a corner and nearly froze on the cement floors.
We finally made it back to Vienna and I was so happy to fall asleep in my own bed, although the mosquito bites on my forehead were not getting any better. No but seriously, all joking and creepy men aside, it was an awesome trip and I’m so happy we went and I really wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
“Still, despite all this, traveling is the great true love of my life. I have always felt, ever since I was sixteen years old and first went to Russia with my saved-up babysitting money, that to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice. I am loyal and constant in my love for travel, as I have not always been loyal and constant in my other loves. I feel about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless, newborn baby—I just don’t care what it puts me through. Because I adore it. Because it’s mine. Because it looks exactly like me. It can barf all over me if it wants to—I just don’t care.”
-Eat, Pray, Love
After our backpacking adventure we were in Vienna for a few days – just enough time to unpack, do laundry, buy alcohol, and repack for Croatia for Spring Jam 2011. Hundreds of students piled onto a party train (literally a train – not like a party bus, it was an entire train with compartments and everything) and partied for 12 hours from Vienna to Porec, Croatia. There was a neon party on the way there so I got to wear my neon pink leggings again. That’s twice I wore them out here, which I think is quite impressive. In Porec we got onto busses and were driven about an hour away. I couldn’t tell you exactly where we were. Actually I couldn’t even put Porec on a map (another embarrassing fact I probably shouldn’t admit here) but either way it was one of the best weekends of my life.
Spring Jam is like Spring Break in Mexico but condensed into a weekend and with a lot more Europeans. Whatever you think happened, probably did, maybe it was even worse. Our trip started with vodka shots for breakfast and ended with us hiding sandwiches in our pants on our way out of breakfast. We went on a Bacardi party boat which was better than any booze cruise I’ve ever been on (sorry Hawaii, sorry Mexico…you have a lot to life up to). I shuffled my life away in Croatia and I am quite alright with that.
We came back to Vienna haggard, tired, sorry excuses for human beings. I woke 5 hours later a haggard, tired, sorry excuse for a human being and went to take my Media & Society final. Awesome! Afterwards I had just enough time to unpack and then I had to repack again because I was going to Spain for 10 days to visit Jillian for Hogeras, a popular Spanish fiesta where the city puts up giant (massive) statues made of wood and Styrofoam on almost every street corner, everyone looks at them and drinks in the streets for a few days, then they burn them down and everyone continues partying in the streets and then there’s fireworks for a couple of days after because in Spain the party really doesn’t stop. I’ve learned Spanish people love loud noises and they love fire, so this whole celebration really makes a lot of sense.
Before all the festivities began we went to Benidorm for the weekend. Benidorm is one of those tourist/bachelor/bachelorette party destinations that really just has beaches, bars, and beach bars. Reoccurring theme in our travel destinations? Possibly. We made friends with various bachelor parties, bought wigs and microphones, visited waterfalls and visited the most miserable small Spanish town I’ve ever been to in my life. Oh, and we were there for two nights but to keep things interesting we only booked a hostel for one night. Yes, homeless for a night in Spain. Homelessness: another reoccurring theme in my semester abroad. If nothing else, it always makes for an interesting story.
The hostel we stayed in the first night wasn’t the greatest and it actually wasn’t really a hostel, either. It seemed more like an apartment building and we were the only guests. We stayed the first night, but after walking into the “lobby” to find the son Skyping, and after he added me on Facebook, we decided it was time to check out. So we checked out but left our luggage in the storage downstairs…and then came back a few hours later and got ready in their bathroom. It was a tricky situation but somehow we managed. Our second night we planned just not to sleep and then catch one of the morning busses back to Alicante. Our plan worked until about 6 in the morning, when as we were leaving the club, we decided we should take a little nap on the beach. We used the beach chairs to built a fort to keep the wind out (and by fort I mean circle) and then lay down in the middle to sleep.
Jillian woke up an hour later to find a strange Middle Eastern man sleeping in between our beach chairs and made the executive decision to relocate our napping location farther down the beach. The Middle Eastern man woke up and when we told him he couldn’t come with us he ran away. The beach was still pretty empty, so we walked down the beach closer to the hostel we weren’t staying at anymore, pulled out another two beach chairs, and passed out again. We woke up roughly two hours later to find the beach filled with people in their swim suits. Then there was us. I was wearing a lei, holding a microphone and cuddling with a pink ukulele a nice British man gave me the night before (it was missing a few strings. Okay, it was missing most of the strings). And we had also lost our third party member and both our cell phones had been stolen throughout the night. Another ideal situation we had found ourselves in.
First things first, we gathered our belongings from the hostel and sat down to wait for our third musketeer to come get her suitcase as well so we could leave this town and maybe get some sleep. Due to us sitting somewhere where we couldn’t really the entrance to the hostel, we missed our third soldier by a few minutes and trekked back to the train station on our own, but for once luck was on our side and we all met up in the train.
Benidorm got the best of us but I think we got the best of Alicante. We hiked to the top of the castle one of my first days there. It was still closed so we climbed a fence and spent a solid hour at the top. It wasn’t until we were walking back down that one of the employees started yelling at us that the castle wasn’t open for another two hours. Yeah, I’m still not sure exactly how that happened either.
Rikki met up with Jillian and I for the weekend of Hogeras and it was so much fun! We hadn’t been together in so long but it was as if nothing had changed. We spent the entire weekend laughing and laying on the beach and hanging out with Jillian’s roommates and skinny dipping at 9 in the morning (okay, that was only me and Jillian. Rikki decided to go to sleep at that point). We ate paella, drank sangria, went to a nude beach and swam in seaweed. That was also when I immediately took back any plans I ever had to become a mermaid.
Of course I spent 12 days traveling with RyanAir with a massive backpacking backpack and never had any trouble with the carry-on restrictions, but on my last flight of the semester with RyanAir, from Alicante to Bratislava, I was towards the back of the line and of course they made me try to fit my rolling suitcase into the stupid size checking box. Of course it didn’t fit and of course I did everything I could to shove it in, almost knocking the whole thing over on the stupid RyanAir employee in the process. So I had to check it in and was miserable the whole flight back to Bratislava. But again, it was all so worth it and I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat because those 10 days were absolutely fabulous.
I know this is a disgustingly long entry, but I have to make up for the past two months. Of course every single night in Vienna was amazing and as the semester came to a close I realized just how much I appreciate everyone that I met throughout the last six months. Well not that I didn’t realize it throughout the semester, but you know what I’m saying.
Our last nights were spent in the same way we started: traveling as a giant pack of exchange students. I loved it, actually I loved Vienna so much that I really just couldn’t leave. I was supposed to be out of my dorm (and therefore I guess out of Vienna too) on June 30 at 9 a.m. The night before I still had no idea what I was going to do after I checked out, because I didn’t have a ticket back to Prague and my ticket back to the US wasn’t until July 17. I had three giant suitcases with me and no idea what to do with them, so Jonathan came to the rescue and said I could stay with him until I got my life together and left Vienna (yes, I am aware I was once again homeless).
So we get home around 5 or 6 in the morning and I did my last minute packing, checked out of my room, and we lugged my giant suitcases to Jonathan’s dorm, where he was already storing two other large suitcases. Naturally the elevator at the subway was broken so we had to carry the suitcases up the stairs (thank you, random man who helped us even though you also had to help your wife carry the stroller). I spent the next couple days flopping around Vienna with whoever was left, and then finally let Jonathan have his room back 3 or 4 days later when I booked a bus ticket to Prague. I would like to give Jonathan a giant thank you for all his help…but I don’t know if he reads this, and even if he does, I think this is way too long and he’s maybe skimming it at best. ;]
Arni and Jonathan helped me carry my bags to the bus in the morning and my uncle picked me up in Prague and we transported the suitcases to my grandma’s place, which I’m sure she was thrilled about, because she already had my mom’s suitcases here too.
I was in Prague for all of two (three?) days when everyone decided they were leaving – my mom was going to Switzerland to run a marathon, my grandma was going to her summer cottage, my cousins were in America, and my other grandma already had people over. And quite frankly I just wasn’t ready to say goodbye to Vienna, so it really didn’t take much for me to decide I was going back. Arni was nice enough to let me stay with him (so technically I wasn’t really that homeless this time…) and I went back for four days which were absolutely amazing. I did everything I could to hold onto this past semester, and it worked for a while but at the end of those four days I had to suck it up and say my final goodbye to the city that has been my home for the past six months. And to be honest, it was more of a home to me than Hawaii and I still cannot believe that this beautiful dream has come to an end.
I came back to Prague and went to visit my other grandma in Marienbad for a few nights, and came back to say bye to my cousins before the left for Italy, and now I’m sitting here waiting for it to sink in that this is my last few minutes in Europe. I’m posted up at the airport wishing the wifi was faster so that websites would actually load.
Vienna, it’s been real. I would give anything to be able to do it all over again. Everyone that studies abroad comes back home and says, “oh my gosh it was the most amazing thing ever, I loved every minute of it, I would love to do it again, there’s nothing like it, blah blah blah” and I always sat there and thought “uh-huh, yeah, sure, okay, you’re exaggerating but I’m going to smile and nod anyway”, but now I finally get it, and now I’m going to be the one saying it’s the most amazing thing ever (because it is) and there’s nothing like it (because there isn’t) and that I met some of the most amazing people ever (because I did) and that I am so incredibly thankful we all crossed paths (because I am). And maybe now you’re going to be the one sitting there thinking “uh-huh, yeah, sure okay…” and smiling your head and nodding, but if you ever get the opportunity to study abroad, please take it and you’ll understand what I mean. And if you don’t get the opportunity to study abroad, create the opportunity.
I don’t think I could say this European love affair is over, because it’s not. It’s on hold for a few months because I have to go back to Hawaii and do the whole last year of college thing and then do the whole graduation diploma thing, but then I’m coming back. Unfortunately for my bank account, I’ve fallen in love with this continent. Europe, see you next summer. You have stolen my heart.
“We travel, in essence, to become young fools again – to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.”
–Pico Iyer
