Switzerland

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! They dont have Thanksgiving here in Italia, but dont you worry - we are cooking ourselves a fantastic Thanksgiving feast (but not until tomorrow night...). I hope everyone has a blessed day and remembers everything they are thankful for.

Right now, Im thankful for free internet so I can tell you about my favorite location of the semester - Switzerland!

We had our "four day break" in Switzerland, which really meant two travel days and then two days of no class or museums. It was such a wonderful break, in one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. We stayed in a town called Interlaken, which means between the lakes, and it literally is in between two huge, blue, mountain lakes. The Swiss Alps surround the whole city, and we got snow one day we were there!! The Alps themselves are not all that different from the Rockies (at least in the spot we were) except for the fact that they dont seem to have any foothills. Our hotel was on completely flat ground and less than a half mile away was a huge snow-capped peak. I dont think my words could ever do justice to the incredible beauty of that place, so Im going to stop trying, but I can tell you about all the fun stuff we did there :)

Our first night we came in in the dark and rain, and so we had no idea what to expect for the rest of the weekend. The next morning, however, a few other girls and I and one girls (Vanassas) parents, who were visiting, got up really early and took the train to "the top of Europe". Its the highest train station in all of Europe, and it takes a couple of hours to get up there. The views on the way up were incredible, though, because we were going right through the middle of the Alps. You have to change trains a couple of times, and at the first town we got out, it started snowing and I was SO excited to be seeing snow! One girl with us had never been in snow before, so she was running around playing with it like an excited little kid (or like my dog last Christmas break...) When we got to the top we went out onto the highest point in a full on blizzard - snow blowing EVERYWHERE! It was so fun :). Inside the train station they have this thing called an ice palace - its a part of the mountain carved out so everything is ice - walls, floor, ceiling, furniture, and they have a bunch of ice sculptures. We played in there for a while and then eventually rode the train back down through more incredible scenery and then had famous Swiss fondue for lunch. Probably one of my favorite days of the trip.

The next day, my friend Morgan and I hiked over to one of the lakes and then just wandered around the town enjoying the beauty of the place. Morgan is orginally from Bozeman, Montana and now lives in New Zealand, so she is all about mountains and snow and she loves them as much as I do, so it was fun to share that with her.

Overall, probably my favorite location of the whole semester, and somewhere I can not wait to go back to!

Free internet is about to run out, so I must be off, but happy Thanksgiving and all my love to all of you :)

I AM still alive :)

Hi...I promise I am alive! Once again, difficult internet and lack of time means not many updates. It is currently 6:30 am and I am about to leave for the day, but I wanted to at least let everyone know I am alive!

Readers Digest version of the last 2 weeks:
-Paris was great - going up to the top of the Eiffel Tower for sunset was definitely a highlight :)
- Switzerland was, by far, my favorite place of the whole trip. Snow, mountains, cold, no class - it was wonderful! More details on that soon.
- Venice was wonderful (even though it smelled a little bit) and I really enjoyed getting completely lost in the middle of the city multiple times :): The highlight of that was proabably going to see a performance of La Boheme (the opera) that was SO bad it was good!
- Now I am in Florence in a crazy little hotel in the very middle of the city, literally right next door to the Duomo (FLorences famous cathedral. I cant wait for the next week!

More to come soon (I hope!)

All my love...

its been a while...

I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry. Its amazing how difficult it has been to find internet lately, and the few occasions I have found it, the keyboard was so difficult to decipher that it just wasn' worth it. SO I apologize for my lack of updating.

No, I have not actually been in Berlin since October 14 :). I have actually been to Leiden, The Netherlands, Bruges, Belgium, Bayeux, France and Paris since then. I'm in Paris right now in a ridiculously expensive internet cafe, but I can't really complain since I saw the Eiffel Tower last night and am going to the Louvre tomorrow!

The rest of my time in Berlin was wonderful. We spent our last day there (a free day) going to the zoo (yes - the zoo!) and the Reichstag, which is the German government building. There is so much interesting history in Berlin, and it is really beautiful, which I didnt expect. The day before we left Germany we drove out to a town called Potsdam to see a famous castle out there, and it was unbelievable. There were huge trees everywhere and all of the leaves were changing - I was pretty much in heaven.

The time between Germany and Paris was a little bit of a break time for us before the craziness of the last month. We stayed in smaller towns and nicer hotels and didnt have quite as much scheduled as usual. Leiden is a university tozn about 20 minutes outside of Amsterdam. Windmills everyzhere and cold enough to snow (but it didnt...) - it was a beautiful place. We spent most of our time there studying for midterms, but we did get to go to the Anne Frank House (which has Disneyland status lines) and the Van Gogh museum, which was incredible. This museum has about 70 of Van Gogh's works, and it is so interesting to be able to see how much his style changed throughout his life. Also, he was a wierd dude, so that museum was full of all sorts of crazy stories.

After Leiden we went to Bruges, Belgium, which may be my favorite town so far. It was just ridiculously cute! Bridges and alleys and leaves and horses and chocolate everywhere - what could be better?! One of my best friends from school, Juliann, is studying in the south of France this semester and she was on break this week, so she came up to Bruges to play with us, which was so fun. We also got to spend a day in Brussels visiting the European Union sights and generally becoming more educated, worldly human beings.

After Bruges we traveled to Bayeux which is a town along the beaches in Normandy. We spent Halloween there - we had a party and then a group of us hiked up a bluff to an old Nazi bunker in the dark - how creepy is that?!?! We stayed in a pretty nice hotel outside of the city on a golf course, and it was just beautiful. Our first morning there I woke up early and went for a walk during the sunrise...it was probably one of my favorite memories of the trip. The best day of that city, (and the reason we went there) was the day we went to all of the D-Day museums and actually walked around on Omaha Beach, the main beach where the Americans invaded. It was surreal to stand in such a peaceful, beautiful place and imagine it as the chaos of battle. We also went to the American Cemetary (which is owned by America, so I got to stand on American soil for the first time in 2 months!!) and spent a lot of time talking about the envents of D-Day.

Now we are in Paris enjoying this crazy huge city.

32 days left - I promise to update my blog at least once in that time ;)

all my love...