Paris- the City of Lights and Love

So when I last left off, we were boarding a night train to Paris. The train definitely wasn't the best night's sleep I've gotten... we opted for seats in the normal train car (sitting instead of laying) to save money. As the guy in our compartment pointed out, "cheap tickets mean cheap seats". But we survived and arrived in Paris bright and early at 9:30 the next morning. This was definitely the farthest out of my element I have yet been language wise. I mean, it was a fight just to figure out how to find the English option on the metro ticket machines. Thank goodness Steve still remembers enough French that we were able to get by. Prague had been a completely different language too, but something about throwing the huge bustling city in the mix makes it all the more complicated.
Anyway, we managed to make our way to the hostel and drop our bags off before heading down to the departure point of our free tour. It was leaving at 11 and we managed to get there with plenty of time. Unfortunately the weather wasn't gorgeous... it was warm enough, but very overcast, though luckily it never did rain. The tour started at St. Michel's Fountain right across the river from the Notre Dame and Sainte Chappelle. We then headed across the river, saw the Louvre, the old royal palace, some statues of famous people (kings and Joan of Arc), the French Academy where they make sure the French language stays "pure", the Jardin du Tuileries (gardens), the obelisk that Napoleon decided Egypt wanted to give him, l'Hotel des Invalides, where Napoleon is burried, Arc de Triomphe (from a distance), and, of course, the Eiffel Tower. The tour let out within walking distance of the tower, so we made that our next stop. The line for the elevator stretched from the ticket counter at one of the legs to pretty much the middle of the base. We made it to the front of the line for the stairs in about 10 minutes. And then we climbed. It wasn't really that bad. Mostly becasue you can only walk up to the second level and then you have to take an elevator to the top anyway (but no line for that ticket!). The view from the top was amazing. We got down around 5 and subwayed up to Montmartre where we got to climb stairs again to get to the Basilica of the Sacré Cœur at the top. Another great view, but interestingly enough you can't see the Eiffel Tower from the Basilica. We walked through the church then grabbed our first Paris crepes (yummy!!!) for dinner and wandered through the Montmarte district. Unfortunately we couldn't find Picasso's studio... the street wasn't on our map. We did see the Le Chat Noir cafe and Moulin Rouge, though! We grabbed a meter long Baguette for dessert and since it was 9:00 pm but still quite light outside, took the metro to the Arc de Triomphe. We'd had enough climbing for the day by that point and opted not to go up it. Instead we observed the completely insane roundabout surrounding it ("it would be suicide, not attempted suicide, but suicide, to try to cross that road" our tour guy told us). I'm surprised their aren't accidents every minute. There are no painted lines, no directions, just a really huge circle with 12 streets feeding into it. We were impressed. We opted on the pedestrian tunnel to the monument tried to get the entire arc in the picture from the middle of the roundabout. It didn't get dark till after 10, (Yay for travelling in summer! Your day gets extended by like 5 hours!) There was supposedly a light show at the Eiffel Tower for 5 minutes on the hour after nightfall, so we made our way back and sat down in the grass with a perfect view to wait. Indeed, at 11:00 the lit up tower started sparkling. So cool! Actually, I was hoping for colors, but it was still pretty neat. After the show we went back to the hostel and crashed.
The next morning there was free breakfast at the hostel (croissants!!!) and then we headed straight to the Louvre to get in right when it opened. I had read that there were multiple entrances, such that one didn't have to wait several hours in the famous glass pyramid entrance. Unfortunatley, we had quite the time trying to find these other entrances. One "entrance" we walked into led us to two French security guys who very quickly responded to Steve's "Parlez-vous anglais?" with "Non". So then poor Steve had to try to explain to the guy that I wanted another entrance (he directed us to the pyramid) and wasn't leaving till I found it. Finally we got directions. They took us down to where the pyramid also leads... but without the line! Perfect! And, it turns out, I get into the Louvre for free because I study at an EU University! Also pretty nice! So then we did a lightning tour of the Louvre. First stops were the Nike and Venus statues, and then of course, the Mona Lisa. Turns out it's actually not that crowded right when the museum opens! We waltzed right up to the front as the group in front left. We also checked out the Egypt area and then stopped by Hammurabi's Code. I think Steve and I were both equally impressed by the museum itself as much as the artwork. It used to be a castle and is just gorgeous. The foundations are another "exhibit" in themselves in the basement. Anyway, having seen the Louvre in an hour and a half, we crossed the river to Sainte Chappelle, the famous stained glass church of Paris. That one we had to wait for. It was only a 15 minute wait though, and mostly becasue you have to go through airport security (yup, X-Ray machine, metal dector and guy ready to search you) to get in. Not really sure why... it apparently used to hold "a piece of the cross Jesus was crucified on" and "a thorn from the crown" but when we got inside we found out that those were actually moved... the stained glass is pretty amazing though. It's actually a double church. There's a very impressive chapel on the bottom for the king's servants, etc. And then on top is the famous huge stained glass windows for the king himself. The windows are pretty much the entire walls of the church and tell the story from Genesis to Jesus. Very pretty. We walked straight from that church across the street to Notre Dame. Another very impressive church. Granted, big churches are slowly getting lost on me as I've seen my share, but still quite impressive. Especially the flying buttresses in the back. Those were neat. Following Notre Dame we headed off to Versailles for the afternoon. It's a 40 minute train ride and then a 5 minute walk. The palace is huge. Well, obviously, but still. And very extensively decorated. The funny part was that we had just been to Herrencheimsee a week before, which is the copy of Versailles. So we kept seeing things we recognized (fountains/rooms, etc.). That was cool. After walking through the palace, we explored the gardens for a bit. Unbelievably large. I can't even imagine how much the upkeep takes! Eventually we caught the train back to Paris and made some quick stops to the things we hadn't yet seen. Specifically the Pantheon (which has the bodies of Voltaire, Curie, Braille, Pasteur among others), which had closed minutes before we arrived. Oops. Then we grabbed dinner and I left Steve in the subway while I ran up at the Bastille stop... turns out the Bastille is an opera house now. That's fun, too! From there we stopped by the hostel to grab our bags and headed up to the train station for our 10:00 pm train to Brussels.

And with that, I'll end this post with a few pictures and pick up from Brussels in the next few days.

Pictures:
In front of the Eiffel Tower
The light show at night
Arc de Triomphe
The Louvre (from inside)
the stained glass windows of Sainte Chappelle
Notre Dame
The flying buttresses of Notre Dame
Hanging out in Versailles

In and Around Bavaria

So... sorry for the delay, but the last two weeks have been chock full of excursions and activities! The weekend I left off, I was at least mostly productive in writing that research paper. I did take a break on Sunday to join Hans at the Residenz. This is the original palace of Munich where the Bavarian royal line watched over the city. It's a gorgeous building and has some impressive rooms. It also has one of the apparently more impressive treasury collections in Europe with crowns and jewels from the 1000's up. Monday and Tuesday involved a lot of getting ready and finishing up. Wednesday morning I met Matt at the subway station. His girlfriend was coming in the same day as Steve, so we went together to pick them up from the airport since their flights were only an hour apart. I dropped Steve off in my room and ran to my German Lit class, then picked him up again at 4 for the two hour Munich walking tour that I'm getting so much better at now. :) We ended this with a trip to the English Gardens so he could have his first liter of beer and as-large-as-your-head pretzel. Our weather was happily gorgeous. Thursday, a group of nine of us (Matt, gf, Hans, Kristina, Tim, and two girls from Hungary) took a day trip to Chiemsee. Chiemsee is the largest lake in Bavaria and has two islands on it, Herreninsel and Frauen insel (Men Island and Women Island). They have a monastary and abbey on them respectively. Most notable is one of Ludwig II's three castles that is on Herreninsel, which he named Herrenchiemsee. It was built to be a model of Versailles because apparently Ludwig II was mildly obsessed with the French and specifically Louis XIV. Like Neuschwanstein, the palace was never finished (it was about a third of the way through) and is considerably smaller than Versaillse, but the famous "Hall of Mirrors" was actually more extravagantly completed as its model in Versailles. After touring the palace and the old monastary (which is actually the Old Palace), we took the ship to Fraueninsel and wandered around before taking the train back to Munich. Then Friday, Steve and I hopped on the train to Innsbruck where we were warmly greeted by Andrea, Hannes and Lisa. I "toured" Steve around Innsbruck in the afternoon... touring being the extent to which I remember the city from three years ago. We hit the main sites though. That night we crashed early because he wasn't quite over jet lag yet. Satrday morning we walked around Hall. After lunch, Andrea and Lisa accompianed us to Wolfsklamm. If any of you remember from my Austria blog, I went there once with Lisa and a handful of exchange students. It's this hike up a mountain to a church/monastary on top. The best part, though, is that you're climbing up through waterfalls. It's absolutely gorgeous. Steve managed to set a pace up that had Andrea panting and apparently we made record time... 35 minutes instead of the expected hour. The trip was well worth it. It was as beautiful as I had remembered and I'm pretty sure Steve appreciated the waterfalls. After dinner that evening, we followed Lisa out to Innsbruck. I'd been promising her that I would go out with her in Innsbruck since my first trip in October but for some reason or another (I was tired/she was tired/she was gone) we hadn't yet managed. So we met up with some of her friends (and one of my old classmates!) at an Irish Pub in Innsbruck. Sunday morning, we went with Lisa up the new cable car to the top of Innsbruck's moutain. I say Innsbruck's mountain because it's the closest mountain to the city... in fact you can travel between the city and the top of the mountain in less than a half hour, most of that being the transportation up the mountain. You can't find that just anywhere in the world. It's actually the same mountain I learned to ski and snowboard on... because it's the mountain that the Planks have their cabin on. We saw the cabin on the way up, actually. From where the cable car let us off we hiked the remaining 50 meters of so up to reach the peak, marked with the typical cross and then we pretended we had hiked the entire thing. The view from the top was breathtaking. Afterwards the three of us met the group from last night at a lake about 15 minutes outside of Hall and experienced the "summer day" favorite past time for Austrians. Any day it's above 70 degrees it's warm enough to lay out in the sun, preferably by the lake. More the relaxing side to counter the mountain hiking we'd been doing. That evening we headed back to Munich and the following morning, bright and early, we were on a train to Neuschwanstein. By the time our train reached the desired stop, the remaining 10 people in our car were all eurotripping American college kids. One was from St. Louis and one was from Chicago. We were lucky on weather. Once again it was absolutely gorgeous which was a plus since the last time I'd been it had been quite cloudy. I did realize it had been exactly three years since I went with the Planks though. It was the weekend before Penecost then, too! We decided to see both castles (well, that was actually probably me... I hadn't seen Hohenschwangau yet and wanted to) so we started with a tour of Ludwig II's parents castle and then did Neuschwanstein. The first castle was actually relatively small and not very intricate in terms of gold, but it was gorgeously painted. There were murals along all the ceilings and walls telling the story of the history of the castle. We decided to hike up to Neuschwanstein, and, specifically, to go via way of the Marienbrücke (Mary's bridge), which gives the most famous view of the castle. This required us to hike up a relatively steep grade for about 40 minutes. It was bordering on hot, we were out of water and I was exhausted and then we finally reached the bridge (turns out the castle is downhill from the bridge) and prepared for our amazing view! And guess which side of the castle is completely covered in scaffolding! Yup! The famous one! It was still gorgeous though and we determined (since we had made it) worth the strenuous hike up. It also gave us a view of the waterfall, which was neat. So then we toured Neuschwanstein. Surprisingly I got a lot more out of the tour in English this time than I did in German three years ago... I learned a lot this time! Then we rushed back to our train to Munich and went straight from the station to dinner. Erika had organized an "American" dinner which turned out to be pretty big since everyone had guests in town. It also luckily had German food so Steve got a real German meal. Schweinbraten and Knödel. Tuesday I actually managed to make it to some more of my classes (never fear, there was no class the previous Thursday (Christ's ascension to heaven?), and I have no classes on Friday so I had just missed two on Wednesday (Tim and Kristina took notes) and Stat on Monday). I dropped Steve off in the library and then after Orgo, swiped him in to the cafeteria with Kristina, Matt and I. After a quick tour of my campus in Garching, we took the train out to Erding, a suburb of Munich which happens to have a pretty famous spa. It's called Therma Erding. We went, however, for Galaxy, which is a big indoor water slide park. Exclusively water slides. It's got about 14 of them. Three are rated "extreme" and have a minimum age limit of 14 to ride. One (Steve tried this one) takes you up to 40 miles per hour in an enclosed slide. I finally worked up the guts to try the short red one that spits you out into the air so you go flying before you hit. Ow. That's all I can say. I felt that in my neck for the next two days. We both avoided the one that pretty much takes you almost straight down for the equivalent of two stories. We did appreciate the other ones though. It was pretty cool. You pay by the hour so we put two hours in. By that point it had started to rain and was, in fact, thunderstorming by the time we made it home. This was actually quite possibly on the second thunderstorm I have ever experienced in Munich so that was pretty cool. Wednesday morning I left Steve with my keys and instructions of how to get to BMW world, how to get to Marienplatz to see the Glockenspiel, and how to do laundry. I went to all three of my classes! I met him back at 4 and we both packed our stuff for Paris/Brussels. We managed to pack in my big green travel side pack and one backpack which I thought was pretty good. Then, because he hadn't seen it yet and we had some time to kill still, we circled Olympic Park and climbed "Olympic Mountain". The day was once again gorgeous so we got a very nice view. After a quick stop to grab our stuff from my room, we headed to Marienplatz and went to the famous Hofbrauhaus for dinner. If you aren't familiar with it, it's a world famous beer hall, or, as they translate it "Beer Palace". Steve's mom was very insistant that he have Wiener Schnitzel so we ordered that and Apfel Strudel and of course, beer. (well, I stick with Radler's, but...). We hung out there, surrounded by waitresses in drindls and a Bavarian band in Lederhosen until 10 and then walked to the train station to catch our 10:45 night train go Paris.
And with that I will end this post as it is already pretty long. Paris will be up shortly.

Pictures:
Inside the Residenz- the mirror room
Another picture of the Residenz
Steve and I at the Biergarten
The scaffolding covered Neuschwanstein
Hohenschwangau and the lake
Steve and I on the top of the mountain

Prague!

For the record, this weekend the plan is simply to sleep in for the first time in three weeks and then WORK!!!

Anyway, so the week after London was pretty short... considering we got back Monday and I was out of the country again on Friday. Hans, Matt and I met at 8:00 Friday morning at the train station for our 6 hour train to Prague. It's actually surprisingly cheap to travel to Prague... if you know what you're doing. It was a 33 Euro Bavaria day ticket for three people (11 euro each)to Pilzen (in the Czech Republic). Then we took a 95 Koruna (<4 style="font-style: italic;">that cheap. Food cost between 80 and 120 CZK, and since the exchange rate was 26.5 CZK to the Euro (we rounded down to 25 for simplicity's sake), that's 3-5 Euro.
Anyway, we got to Prague, dropped our stuff at the hostel and headed out to explore. The New Europe (free walking tour that I've been doing in every other city)tour just recently started in Prague... as in 3 weeks ago, so we got really lucky. That was the plan for Saturday morning, so instead of walking around the city we grabbed some food (A Czech Gyro... I gotta say, the German Turks do them so much better. I was not impressed) and headed down to the Vysehrad. This is pretty far south in the otherwise very walkable city. It was the original "city" and is now considered the "ruins". It's basically a walled complex with a cathedral and buildings from the the 10th century. The current city of Prague was built up around the Prague Castle (in the city center), however. Now there's a very big graveyard in the Vysehrad which includes such people as Dvorak. Hans basically came to Prague to see Dvorak's grave and thus was very disappointed when we found out that the graveyard had closed 40 minutes before we arrived. He vowed to go back the next morning. We walked up the coast of the river to the famous Charles' Bridge and then around the city to check out the nightlight. We ended up finding a nice little pub that was playing live music... live Czech music! It was a bass/violin/accordion trio and they kept us very entertained while we sipped our Budweiser (Budvar... originally from the Czech Republic... A&B stole the name) and ate our Czech honey cake. Then we headed off to bed.
Saturday we woke up and headed to our 11 am free walking tour! Like all the others, it was well worth it. Three hours around the city took us from the old square with the famous Church of our lady Tyn and the world renowned Astronomical Clock, to the new town square, to the Jewish quarters with all the Jewish synagogues, to the Powder Tower and Henry Tower from the original city wall. We saw statues concerning Kafka, the "Cubism Building" (an actual example of cubism in architecture), the Lennon Wall (a monument to John Lennon) and the Prague Castle. Prague is actually a beautifully intact city. Turns out the Nazis loved it as much as the Romans had (it was the capital of the Roman Empire for a time), so they spared it almost completely during the war... it only got bombed once a few days before the end of the war when the otherwise low-laying people of Prague decided to rebel a few days before they were liberated by the Russians. And thus their city hall was destroyed. But yeah, unlike Munich, most of the buildings are old and original!
Following the tour we went up to the castle. It's actually the largest medieval castle in the world. And it's really more of a walled city within a city on a hill. It doesn't really look like a castle... it really looks like a wall around a cathedral. Because there is a huge cathedral inside it. Apparently they wanted an archbishop in Prague so they had to build a cathedral worthy of one. Haha. Unfortunately we couldn't go up the towers of the cathedral due to maintenance so we just wondered around inside and around the castle grounds.
Then we stopped back at the hostel, grabbed dinner, and headed to an Opera! Yes, an opera! We got tickets to The Marriage of Figaro for only 10 Euro each! The Marriage of Figaro is a Mozart opera that actually premiered in the Estates Theater in Prague in 1768 (or somewhere around then...). We were seeing it over 200 years later! Actually, the importance of the Estates Theater is that Mozart's first opera, Don Giovanni, premiered there. So that was kinda cool. It was really good... mostly because they had English translations of the songs so we knew what was going on. After the opera we decided to do the one other bit of tourism/nightlight we had to experience in Prague... Absinthe.
As background, Absinthe is illegal in the States. It's a very strong green spirit and "apparently" makes one hallucinate. This has been declared a myth and while a version of Absinthe is available in the US, the original form still isn't. On the other hand, it's everywhere in Prague. I mean, everywhere. All the tourist shops have bottles of overpriced green alcohol next to the shot glasses and magnets and postcards. We found an Irish pub that looked promising (a surprising number of those in Prague...) and ordered a shot each. The other cool thing about Absinthe. They set the shot on fire. Basically, the shot is poured in a whiskey glass. You fill a spoon with sugar, slightly dip it in the alcohol so it's just soaked, set the spoon on fire, and then rapidly stir it into the shot such that the Absinthe is on fire. Then you're supposed to blow it out and take the shot immediately.
Well... all for the experience, right? Wow. It burned. Possibly partly because it had been on fire 30 seconds ago and possibly partly because it was 72% alcohol. The sugar didn't seem to do much for the taste... needless to say, one was more than enough and we determined that we had crossed that off our list and head back to the hostel for the night.
Sunday... we found an all-you-can-eat-buffet for about 5 Euro nearby the hostel. There was fruit and crepes and croissants and eggs and cereal and pretty much everything. Well, worth it. Then we headed over to the "Mini-Eiffel Tower" for a view of Prague. Built 2 years after the original (1891), the Petrin Tower is 1/3 the height of it's big brother. We took a tram to the top of the hill it was perched on and then climbed 299 steps to the top for a great view of the city. From there we headed back to the main city to peak in the churches we had been walking past but not stopping in. We also wandered around trying to get through the city the easiest way possible because there was a marathon going on. Thus it was pretty crowded and a lot of streets were blocked off. We did not take part in the marathon, fyi.
Finally, at 3pm we headed back to the train station and got on our 4 pm train back towards Munich. It was a Czech train. Let's return to my previous statement about Eastern Europe. The train scared me. A lot. I felt like I needed a seat belt. It was without doubt the bumpiest, loudest train ride I have every experienced. The writing on the seat signed August 1988 (before I was born) did not help. The ride back was not as easy. We bought a 3 Euro ticket from Prague back to Pilzen. Then we had to get off the train in Pilzen to buy another ticket to the Czech/Germany border for another 4 Euro. Luckily we were back on a Germany train after that. Then we had to hop off at the border and buy the day pass for Germany and hop back on before the train left (we had 10 minutes. We made it). We finally made it back around midnight. In all though, we calculated that it was around 30 Euro round trip by train to Prague. Considering our hostel was 30 Euro for two nights, that was a very cheap weekend trip!

The other thing we noticed about Prague... a surprising number of people did not speak English. Like didn't speak any English. A surprising number did, however, speak German... was pretty interesting.
On a side note, in London we noticed that German was also extremely common. It was easily the second most often heard language outside of British English... hmm....

Anyway! As I said, this weekend I'm taking it easy. I have a paper for research that I'm hopefully going to successfully manage to write up before next Wednesday (busy weekend, I know...), because next Wednesday (countdown 7 days!) Steve arrives! And after that chances are I'm not getting much done because we have a lot planned for those two weeks. The first weekend we'll be heading down to Hall to visit Austria. The second weekend we'll be heading off to Paris and then Brussels! He flies home on June 2nd (I think?). June 8th (the following Monday), the Americans are cooking (remember Thanksgiving dinner?) again. This time we're going a little easier... the current plan is mac&cheese, grilled cheese sandwiches and apple pie... still need to find an oven for the pie though. And then, today I bought tickets for Barcelona the weekend of June 19th-22nd. So life isn't slowing down anytime soon it seems! Anyway, here are some pictures and look for a post (most likely two...) after Paris/Brussels!

Pictures:
Castle (with Cathedral) at night
Matt and I on the castle wall
View from the Petrin Tower... the city of Prague
The Old Town Square
Church of Our Lady Tyn (picture this at night with fire burning in all the spires... it looks pretty spooky)
The Astronomical Clock
Me with my Czech money

London!

So... Thursday afternoon, Tim, Kristina and I started our adventure in London. We headed to the airport over an hour and a half early even though it was an inter-EU flight... and still got to the gate only 30 minutes before the flight left because apparently the airport is really crowded at 9:30 pm... anyway, the flight was an hour and a half and with the time difference, we landed in London at 10:30. And immediately recognized the things Germany does not have. Like English. And vitamin water. Pretty exciting. Anyway, we caught a 45 minute train to a station in central London and then had to take the night bus to our hostel. It's around 2 pm when we finally get off the bus. The hostel is street number 639. We follow the directions and turn right... and find numbers in the 700's. So we turn around and go left... and find numbers in the 500's... we get really confused. After wandering around for a good twenty minutes in what we're hoping is a safe part of town, a taxi driver finally stops and asks us if we need help, then informs us we need to walk past the 700's and we'll get to 600's again. Of course. How silly of us. So we start walking. It's a good 10 minute walk. Past a graveyard. A graveyard that is falling down. As in, there was a very tall wall around it. The wall has fallen into the graveyard. The gravestones are a mess. At 2:30 in the morning... We finally got to the hostel, checked in, and crashed.

We woke up at 8 the next morning to go on an 11:00 am city tour. First we got to experience the hostel's free breakfast. Which basically was really soggy cereal and white toast. No, sir. We're not in Germany anymore. But we're not sure we're happy about that... Of course we got to the tour an hour early (but we'd had no idea how long it would take to get to the meeting point) so we took a nap by Wellington Arch. The weather loved us. It had just started raining in Munich when we left. London was blue skies and sunny. All three days. We were really lucky. This is London! We started our tour- the same free walking tour I've done in Amsterdam and Berlin. It was the "Royal London tour" so she took us by Buckingham Palace in time for the changing of the guard, then to the Palace Prince Charles and company occupy (he drove in right as we got there!), then past Hyde Park, around to Trafalgar Square, to Churchill's WWII bunker, St. James Park (where the pelicans eat pigeons), past the guards with funny hats, and finally over to and ending at Westminster Abbey, the house of Parliament and, of course, Big Ben. Following the tour, we grabbed lunch and waled back to Trafalgar Square, which has "climbable" sculpted lions that look semi like dogs as the artist modeled them after his cocker spaniel(?). Granted the two times we tried to climb them, we were shooed away. Oh well. We then walked back down to Big Ben after stopping to pose with the guards, and then crossed the Thames and walked over to the London Eye. The Thames is a very brown river, fyi... though apparently that's the water the city drinks. Eek. After a quick dinner we posed in the red telephone booths, and then walked over to where we were meeting the pub crawl. The pub crawl is offered by free tour group (it's not free, but saves you a lot of money on entrance to the bars/clubs). It took us to 5 different bars/clubs in London and showed off the different areas of night life. There is quite a nightlife in London. It was a lot of fun. Specifically because WE SAW A CUBS GAME at the first bar. Could not believe it. Definitely not in Germany anymore. That was pretty cool. After we got to the last club (12:30), we left pretty quickly since we had to get up the next morning. Still took a while to get home with the night bus though. Even on Fri/Sat, the subways stop running at midnight... even Munich is better than that! Seriously!

The next morning, however, we did not end up going on the second tour like we thought. Tim thought he lost his passport and by the time we searched everywhere and finally went down to ask the front desk if he'd left it there (it turns out he had... but our front desk was not the brightest. "Why would you leave your passport here?" she asked, very confused.... well, obviously he didn't leave it on purpose. She then proceeded to tell us that she did not have the passport. Then looked down and asked what country he was from. When he said, "USA", she said, "Timothy?".... "Yes...." Turns out she did have it....) we were too late to make the tour. Instead we loaded up on about 8 pieces of white toast and jam (yummy) and decided to reverse our plans. So we started off in search of Abbey Road. Yes, from the Beatles cover. We found it, and got eyerolls from the residents of the neighborhood as we excitedly snapped pictures of the street sign and walked across the crosswalk. Then we got lost finding our way back to the subway. Eventually we found it again (People in London are very friendly we found out... speaking English probably helps) and then took the subway up to King's Cross and found... yes!... Platform 9 3/4. King's Cross is right by an "alternate" market that had been recommended to us so we walked through it a bit (touristy stuff mostly... but they were also passing out free boxes of a Cinnamon Toast Crunch style cereal.... which we grabbed several of for breakfast since the toast was getting a bit old...) and then decided to try the typical "Fish and Chips" for lunch. Um. Eww. Not for me... though I prefered the chips to the fried fish. We did our tourist shopping after lunch, then headed back to the hostel for a bit to drop stuff off before heading down to Hyde Park. We detoured to see the Kensington Palace (where Diana lived), as well as her memorial fountain. Then we took a nap in the park. Rather than going out, we headed to the supermarket for dinner (the front desk couldn't figure out what a supermarket was initially... and then informed me it would be closed on Saturday. Said supermarket was 3 blocks away. We went at 8:30 pm. It was very much open... so we bought two frozen pizzas and some fruit tarts and heated up dinner in the hostel oven. By that point we were pretty exhausted from walking around the city and opted to stay in for the night.

Sunday morning we woke up late... turns out that happens when you don't set an alarm. Specifically we woke up at 9. The tour started at 10. It was at least a 50 minute subway ride away. So we grabbed our cereal boxes and raced to the subway. We got to the meeting place 13 minutes late to find the Spanish tour still there... and a very angry American college kid arguing with the Spanish tour leader. Turns out he'd bought a ticket for the English tour which had been cancelled for the day because there weren't enough people (they needed 5 to run...). He didn't want a refund, he wanted a tour. After about 30 minutes of arguing with the Spanish tour guide and realizing that three more English speakers had shown up, they finally decided to call the tour guide back to have her run the tour anyway. She was goign to show up at 11. The angry guy went off to get coffee. The tour guide showed up. 11 came and went. We paid for our tour (offered by the same company, but there's only one free tour per city and since London is so big they had to break it up into the "Royal Tour" and the "Old City" tour). We wanted to leave without him (after that big fuss, he was late?) but the guide apparently had strict orders to give him his tour. He showed up at 11:15 and we finally got to start. This tour took us by the Tower Bridge (which is the famous one... often misreferred to as the London Bridge. The actual London Bridge is actually quite disappointing), the Tower of London, Shakespere's Globe theater, the Church of the Knight's Templar (from the DaVinci Code), the courts of law (with the hanging clock featured in all the Harry Potter movies), a bank from which Gringott's (Harry Potter again) was based on, St. Paul's Cathedral, and the Millenium Bridge (wobbly pedestrian bridge across the Thames).

The most exciting tidbit of info was the story of why England drives on the left side of the road. That was actually the norm back then... if you were right-handed (like most people) and you were a knight with a sword and were walking down the street, if you were to meet the enemy, you needed to grab your sword from your left side and spar. Well, if you're walking on the right side of the road, this gets awkward (she acted it out for us). If you're on the left side, it works out quite nicely. You can quickly start sparring. However, Naploeon was left handed. So he insisted everyone walk on the right hand side. Thus the rest of Europe (which he invaded), drives on the right hand side, while England still sticks with the left hand side.

Anyway, our tour ended at 2:30 or so. We crossed the Millenium (wobbly) bridge and walked up the other side of the river, past the Shakespear's Globe Theater and then across the Tower Bridge. Then we caught the subway to the British Museum and wandered around until closing. We really only went to see the Rosetta Stone, which was pretty cool, but the museum in itself had a lot of really awesome stuff. After the museum closed we found "the Ultimate Burger" (definitely not in Germany... HAMBURGERS!) which also sold Budweiser. Not kidding on that one. We wandered around for a bit on our own since it was a new area, and then headed back to the hostel to pack. Our flight was at 6:40 am. So we went to bed around 9:30pm and woke up at 1:30 am. That makes for the start of a wonderful day... see, we didn't know what time the night bus came (Hostel didn't either... after all, why would they? it's only the only way outside of taxi to get to the airport at night... they guessed it came once an hour. I knew it came twice an hour... just not when). Well, we got to the stop at 2:10 and it turns out it came at 2:30 so that wasn't horrible. We got to the train station at 3:10 but the train to the airport comes once an hour on the hour so we caught the 4:00 and got to the airport at 4:50, checked in, bought breakfast, changed our pounds back, boarded the plane, and crashed.

We landed at 9:10 and I went straight from the airport to my 12:15 Stat lecture. Slept very well Monday night... when I finally got to sleep. That's pretty much it for the week. Classes are continuing. Research is dragging out as I expected it to... I went in Monday and Tuesday and am supposed to go in next Tuesday and Thursday... and then supposedly I'll be finished (minus that paper). Still working on credit approval for the new classes I mentioned... the Transportation class and Genocide in Eastern Europe (which Tim and Kristina, who are in the engineering college, got approved for non-western... now it's just up to me to get it approved through the LAS college...). And other then that... I leave for Prague early tomorrow morning. I'm going with Hans, who I went to Cologne with the first time, and Matt, who's the new kid from U of VA. We're taking an 8:30 train Friday morning and will be back late Sunday night.

So for now I'll leave you with some pictures from London and catch up again after Prague.

Pictures:
Big Ben (note the gorgeous sky)
Buckingham Palace
Me at Abbey Road
Big Bend with House of Parliament from across the Thames
Tower of London
Us at Platform 9 3/4
Tower Bridge (not London Bridge)
Us with a posing guard

A bit of Germany

Okay, so to start I had my first week of classes. Here's a brief schedule.

Monday:
Stat discussion 10:15-11:45 (meets every other week) in Garching
Stat lecture 12:15-1:45 in Garching

Tuesday:
Organic Chem Lecture 10:00-12:00 in Garching
Organic Chem Discussion 12:00-1:00 in Garching

Wednesday:
Construction of Traffic Infrastructure 8:30-11:00 (it's an English taught Graduate level class that Kristina and Tim might be taking... and I'm hoping to get 400 level Technical Elective credit for... pending approval) at the Main Campus
Novellas of German Literature 12:00-2:00 at the LMU
Genocide in Eastern Europe 2:00-4:00 at LMU (hoping to get Non-western credit for this but kinda doubtful... Kristina and Tim are taking it too)

Thursday:
Organic Chem Lecture 8:00-9:00 in Garching
Organic Chem Discussion 9:00-10:00 in Garching

and that's it! granted two of those classes are still waiting for approval in the US so I might end up dropping them... so we'll see what happens. But I have Fridays free again! Yay!

Anyway, so that was my school week... then Friday I hopped on a train to Cologne to meet James who I'd never met before. We've got a group of mutual friends and he's in the Netherlands on Spring Break this week with a EuroRail pass. I got in around 8 pm and we introduced ourselves and wandered around looking for dinner and then just around the city. Headed back to get a club recommendation... James was looking for the Industrial German music scene... well, apparently that doesn't exist in Cologne. Just everywhere else in Germany. We took a 20 minute tram to the recommended spot and walked in... it was after midnight on a Friday night. The place was completely empty. The bartender looked surprised to see us. We left.
The next morning we headed over to the Cathedral and wandered around inside. I said it last time I was there and I'll say it again. Massive. We opted to be brave and hike up the 509 steps to the top. We regretted it pretty quickly. You're literally hiking straight up a spiral with no landings. 509 steps. On the way there was a stop off so you could see the bell- this is the largest swinging church bell in the world. Then we went up farther. We thought we were at the top! The spiral ended! We entered a large room! With another staircase! Ah! But we finally made it to the top. Awesome view. The entire thing is caged in on top and all sides though.
After we made it back down we headed over to the chocolate factory. That was pretty cool. There was a bit of background on chocolate as well as a climate-room with cocoa plants, and then there was a working factory where you could taste the end product. They were also making the Lindt truffles that they were selling there too. Then came the awesome gift shop. Chocolate pretty much anything and everything you can imagine. Chocolate Cathedrals, beer bottles, noodles... So then we stopped for some food and to rest our feet for a bit. Afterward I headed over to this old Gestapo prison museum. It's one of the best preserved in Germany. The basement has a bunch of cells. You can see the scratchings in the walls from the prisoners. Upstairs is a war museum. Then I stopped by the Ludwig Museum, which is a later art museum. It's got the second largest (after Paris) Picasso collection (mostly later works), Surrealism, and as part of the more recent collection, Andy Warhol. Following that came dinner and then a walk outside the Roman-German museum... no point in paying 6 Euro since the walls are glass and a good portion of exhibits are outside. Cologne used to be part of the old Roman Empire... from the year 300. There's a lot of stuff from Rome still there and it's all over the city.
Also, as a side note, I found my numbers on the Cologne parade that I was wondering about last time: "more than forty tons of sweets, 100,000 chocolates, 100,000 packets of popcorn, flowers, and cologne are hurled into the crowd!" That's a lot of chocolate/sweets.

Anyway, Sunday morning I took an early train to Heidelberg. James was going to meet me later for the castle tour since he wasn't interested in the Altstadt. I wandered around on my own and found all the churches, the University (the oldest in Germany), The City Hall, and Hotel Ritter, which is apparently the only building from the 17th century still standing due to invasion/war, etc. (now, obviously, a hotel). At 2 I met up with James and we hiked up to the castle. Pretty cool. It's half ruins and half standing and it was pretty awesome on both halves. There was enough to walk around on the outside that we opted against touring inside. We did head to the "grosse Fass" though as I didn't remember exactly what a Fass was... wine barrel. We saw one that was about 12 feet in diameter and started snapping pictures. "Yeah, this is a big barrel..." Then we walked into the next room and found the real one. It's 9 meters in diameter... that's like 30 feet. Wow. Apparently the kings here liked wine... Anyway, we wandered around the castle a bit more and then figured we were castled out. I stopped for crepes at the base for lunch... which proved to be a bad idea as I will shortly explain. Then we crossed the famous "Old Bridge" (not really all that old but looks cool and is pedestrian bridge) and headed to the other side of the river to hike the "Philosopher's Path" which was apparently frequented by philosopher's back in the day. Well... Heidelberg is in the mountains. The path is on the hill... which means we had to get up to the path first. We of course had hiked 509 stairs the day before and had just hiked up the hill on the other side to get to the castle. I think James was regretting letting me plan the day out... needless to say having eaten salty crepes (ham/cheese/tomato) was not helping the lack of water we had... It was quite steep to get up but we finally made it and then had a lovely time hiking along the gardens/vineyards/trees on the hillside. Lots of really good overlooks to the river (Neckar) with the bridge and the castle and the city. We got to the Philosopher's Garden which is where it looked like it branched off on the map and decided to take the downward route. This turned out to not actually be the route which maybe we should have noticed... but we ignored. So we jumped down a 6 foot tall stone wall onto a grassy path, and walked through two wooden gates (in our defense they were unlocked) and jumped down another wall until we realized that we were in a private garden area and could go no farther... Oops... So then we had to turn around and go all the way back up the hill and back up the walls and go the actual marked way down... and then we trekked back across the city to the train station, bought ourselves cold liquid from the supermarket inside and got on the 7:00 direct to Munich.

And that was my weekend. James hung out till this afternoon. Yesterday I had my two Stat classes and then research which went till 6 so he went on a city tour and wandered around the English Garden. Tim and Kristina joined us for dinner. Meanwhile I've got quite the to-do list for this week with homework and research and planning because... Thursday night we fly out to London! Update on that next week...

Pictures:
Heidelberg:
View from the castle across the river
View of bridge and castle from Philosopher's Path
Me on bridge with castle in background
Castle Ruins x2

Cologne:
you've already seen these, so just a picture from the top of the tower

The semester begins again

So classes start tomorrow. Finally. I have my preliminary schedule for the semester worked out and it currently includes the following classes:
Statistics (STAT 400)- I'm gonna see if this is actually going to be doable though, because the UIUC guy who approved it said it looked like there was a prereq I hadn't taken, so we'll see.
Orgo (CHEM 236)- also hoping this one is passable. I do have the benefits of having the script to the lecture because the professor sent it to me so I could get the course approved. Lucky me!
German Lit- for my minor requirement. Not sure which class I'm going to take yet, so I'm going to visit a couple of them first.
Organic Chem Lab- this apparently starts halfway through the semester. Unfortunately it meets Monday 9-5 and Tuesday 1-5 which is a lot of time. It also conflicts with Stat, so I'll have to see if Stat's worth it by that point.
Technical Elective?- Kristina and Tim, the two CivE's here, found a CivE class in English about transportation/traffic. I'm really hoping it will be approved as a 400 level class, in which case I could get 400 level technical elective for it.

Meanwhile, I got my Religion Sociology paper back. I got a 1,3 which is also what my Basic Sociology professor gave me, meaning the combined 4 hour class will transfer back as an A. Unfortunately linear did not go so well... The exam was actually more difficult than the first exam, coupled by the fact that none of the questions on it were even remotely similar to the first exam, and most I had not seen before, homework or otherwise. Anyway, running far away from that class this semester. It conflicts with other classes anyway.

As said, I spent Easter weekend in Austria. I went down Saturday morning and hung out. Sunday we took a day trip down to South Tirol (northern Alps of Italy), which is a really gorgeous location. We specifically went to the Kaltener See (Cold Lake) and spent a couple of hours hiking in the area amid blossoming apple orchards before
settling down for a picnic lunch on the lake. Then Monday we went over to my previous host aunt's house for the yearly Easter brunch.

The rest of the week (following the linear exam) was spent finishing up research. I've started analyzing the data and writing up my report. That will take a while. As classes start, I'll be working in the lab only a couple of days a week, probably for the next three weeks. Then I'll be down with research and just have to finish writing.

This previous Saturday, I did a day trip with the TUMi organization to Augsburg on Saturday. Augsburg is a pretty cool city, it turns out. We went to see the cathedral, which is huge and dates from 900 something. It's got a mix of styles because of this. It looks pretty Gothic on the inside but has a random attached room with a baroque style alter. It also (apparently) has the oldest stain glass windows in the world. Glad I thought to take a picture. The crypt is also pretty neat. Augsburg also has a neat Town Hall with the "golden hall" which is a very gold decorated room. The other big stop was the Fuggerei, which is the oldest social housing project in the world and a "city within a city". A rich trading family opened it up to house the poor. Each family gets a (tiny) 4 room(bath/kitchen/living/bed) 600 sq ft apartment. Rent has remained the same since it opened in the early 1500's- 88 euro cent per year. Yes, year. They do have to pay heating now though. Gates are also locked nightly at 10 pm. It's still managed by the same family and was rebuilt after the war as all but one of the houses were pretty much completely destroyed. It turns out Augsburg was a pretty important city pre-war time, and thus got very heavily bombed. Anyway, the city was cool. I liked it. I didn't like the trip back.

It was supposed to be a 45 minute train ride. We left at 5:06. I got home at 8:50. Why? Something happened on the tracks between Augsburg and Munich. I still do not know what as even though it closed the track down for several hours it didn't make it into the paper. So we had to stop and wait for a bus. Except the bus didn't come for 2 hours. We got off the train at 5:30 and got on the bus at 7:30. We finally got dropped off at the working section of the tracks again after 8, in time to catch the subway and be back home by 8:50. That made for a long day.

But anyway, classes tomorrow. This coming weekend I'm hoping to head out to Cologne and Heidelberg. A friend of a friend back at U of IL is studying in the Netherlands and has Spring Break and a EuroRail pass and wants to see a bit of Germany, so I'm meeting him in Cologne on Friday night and we're heading to Heidelberg on Saturday and then back to Munich. So that'll be the next update!

Here's some pictures of Augsburg!

Pictures: (in reverse order)
St. Maria's Church (the old one)
The Golden Hall
A strip of the Fuggerei
A really pretty residence we passed
A couple of other churches... the one in back (the big one) is the Catholic church and the small one in front is the Protestant one.

SPRING!!!

So… the last two weeks of my life, I guess.
First off, the weather has been GORGEOUS! Munich finally decided to accept SPRING! So we've been having weather in the 60's and 70's with gorgeous sunny blue skies. It's been absolutely perfect since April 1st!
Meanwhile, I’ve been mostly keeping pretty busy with the research. I’m working 9-4 or so daily, with hours varying on the day and the experiment. It’s still pretty interesting stuff but science is starting to kick and not do what it’s supposed to do… the best part of lab work, so the results are taking longer than expected. I’ve now worked 2.5 full weeks. (Good Friday here is a national holiday so On no one worked…). Classes still don’t start for another full week, so I’ll work most of next week too, and then start working part time around classes until I’m done with the research. I’m going to have to write a 15 or so page report of my work. Considering I wrote 15-20 page lab reports weekly freshman year, this doesn’t sound so bad… and hopefully I’ll have these 3 credits under my belt and be completely finished by early-mid May.
In other news, all the new semester students are now here. I met Tim and Kristina, both sophomore civil engineers from U of IL, on the 1st and 3rd of April respectively. They both live in my building (yay!) so my life has been a little more social in terms of grabbing dinner and running errands, etc.
Meanwhile, I’ve been using the leftover free time to study for linear algebra. Exam is Tuesday. Tuesday is also the day I get to go pick up my grade for my Sociology paper. That means that by Thursday (granted the linear exams are graded as quickly as last time), I should have all my first semester grades! As classes for this semester are dependent on my passing of linear, while I’ve got a very good idea what I will be taking, I’m not 100% sure yet.
Friday I decided to take a day trip to Zurich. Zurich is not technically a day trip. It’s a 4.5 hour train ride in each direction. But quite honestly there’s not all that much to do in Zurich and it’s also quite the expensive city to overnight in, so I figured a day was okay. The train left at a very early 7:12 from Munich and got in to Zurich at 11:45. I changed over enough money to last me a day, picked up a map from the tourist info (after I found it… that took about 30 minutes) and headed out for a self-guided walking tour of the city. It’s a very pretty city. Pretty and clean and obviously rich. And the weather was absolutely gorgeous. Blue sky, sunny, and a perfect 70 degrees! Bahnhofstrasse (Train station street) is the main shopping street with expensive stores selling watches and jewelry. This leads into Paradeplatz (which used to be a pig market and is now the financial center of the city) is the square where most of the main banks are situated. This further leads (and then dead ends) into Lake Zurich, which has an Alpine skyline on the opposite horizon. Along the way you pass some of the more famous churches in the city, including Augistanerkirche, Münsterkirche (two twin towers to represent lightning and fire), and St. Peterskirche (which has the largest clock face in mainland Europe). One church was closed till evening because of Good Friday. Those I did get in were setting up for evening concerts/services so no pictures, but they were surprisingly plain on the inside. Liebesfrauenkirche, which I stopped by only at the end because I had a little extra time, was actually the magnificent one and it’s a bit out of the main inner city. Anyway, on the way back up from Lake Zurich, I walked through the Schipfe, which is a very pretty little street on the river that used to be the artist sector of the city. I also walked up to Lindenhof, which is the highest point in the city and has a gorgeous view. I dipped into the Swiss National Museum, which is actually in an old castle. It’s the largest culturally historical collection of Switzerland and was partway under construction… I got to see exhibits starting from way back about things they’ve found in Switzerland… so starting with Ice Age fossils and moving up through old weaponry to Middle Aged coins and jewelry to a section on the stuff that had originally been in the castle. I still had an hour to kill when I finished with the museum, so I crossed over the river again and wandered up to ETH, Zurich’s University. It’s quite a climb to the top but also has a great city view. The train back was 6:16. That was a very long 4.5 hours until 10:45 when we pulled back into Munich. Worse still was the realization that I was going down to Austria the next morning to visit the Planks for Easter… which meant another train ride. Luckily it’s only two hours to Innsbruck.

Anyway, posted are pictures of Zurich. I’ll update sometime midweek about how Easter in Austria was, how linear went, and the results of my sociology paper as well as plans for the next couple of weeks… from the plans already being determined for the next 6 weeks, it looks like this semester is going to move pretty fast!

Pictures:
National Swiss Museum (former castle)
City Peaks with Mountain backdrop
Frauenliebkirche
Münsterkirche
St. Peterskirche and yet another bridge
View of the city from the southern bridge