Oxford!

Remember to go ahead and read my post before this one first, as it sums up the travel portion, and this one just introduces the Oxford half of things.

So here we are. Oxford. This is the Oxford Study Program, after all, and we've finally made it to the place. I've only been here for 16 hours or so, so I can't really tell you much, so I'm just going to go ahead and give you the basic rundown.

First of all, we're staying and studying at Worchester College, just a tiny campus in the grand Oxford University scheme of things. Most of my travel group mates are staying in the Canal Building Dormitory with me, and let me tell you, we're getting spoiled in here. I was all excited for North Ave. next year, and it's probably going to suck in comparison to this. Well, all the video games will probably even things out. haha.

To give you a taste of where I'm staying, I filmed a quick tour of my room. Keep in mind that I have this room to myself. I have no roommate. At all. Zero.



Yeah, it's pretty awesome.

I don't have class until 13:15 (another win), but I got up early today to get some groceries, since we don't get served lunch here. We do get breakfast and dinner though, and while I haven't been to breakfast yet, dinner is pretty much a three course meal which gets served to us. Unfortunately, we don't really have any control over what we get served, so last night's dinner wasn't too great, considering it was Salmon. I tried to eat it, I really did, but I got sick to my stomach after 2 bites, so I stopped. haha. I was a bit hungry going to be last night.

I suppose that's where the groceries come in though. I got a whole bunch of stuff (bread, lunch meat, detergent, snacks, apples, drinks, etc...) for only 15 pounds, which I feel is pretty cheap. Also makes me glad that we have our own fridge. Certainly comes in handy.

I think that's a pretty decent overview of things. I have class from 13:15 to 16:25 every Monday-Thursday. The campus here is beautiful, and we see a lot of it because the Canal building is literally on the opposite side of the campus from just about everything. Even though I don't have class 'till the afternoon, I still think I'm going to try and get up early, so I can get breakfast and then get into the routine of writing for an hour or so every morning.

Also, keep in mind now that since our routine has stabilized itself considerably, I probably won't have as much to tell you guys. I'll definitely keep you all up to date with stuff, but just don't expect an update every day, cause that would be just as boring for you as for me.

Hope everything is going well.

The End....or is it Not?

Hey everybody, sorry it's been a few days. I'm going to go ahead and write two posts now, the first one wrapping up the travel portion of the trip, and the second one introducing the Oxford portion, which starts today. But, per usual, lets go back first.

Our last two days in Paris were a museum day and a free day. On the former, we went to the d'Orsay and Rodin museums, and my opinions of each could not be further apart. On one hand, the d'Orsay was pretty awesome, and I'd venture far enough to say that it was my favorite museum from the entire trip. The setup of the place was fantastic, and the art was pretty cool as well. Our next stop, the Rodin, wasn't as impressive though. In fact I might say it was one of my least favorite museums from the whole trip. It was just a collection of mini-statues, none of which really interested me, and so once I had my drawings a bunch of us just hopped on the Metro and went back to the Hotel.

I spent my free day trying to get work done. I finished my paper, although it didn't even get to 3,000 words (2,950), but it seemed like Lewcock wasn't too concerned with length in comparison to content, so I think I'll be okay, especially since i got an A on the first paper. The girls all went out to shop, which, of course, I wanted nothing to do with, so I just finished my Art paper and then spent some time chilling in the room. It was a relaxing day; I finished it off by making a kebab run around 21:00. It was my third time going to the place, and the guy recognized me this time around. He was a nice dude.

And then the next day we loaded up the bus and set out for Oxford. A pair of funny things happened on the bus though. First of all, we had to leave somebody behind in Paris. Apparently Chuck ended up going back to another hotel with a girl the night before, and he wasn't there at 8:30 when we were ready to leave, so we left him behind. He actually got to Oxford an hour before us, although it cost him 400 Euros to do it. Ouch.
The second funny thing involved an injury. James (not my roommate James, a different James) was sleeping in the aisle on the bus. He was on his back (this is important). Well, as he's passed out on the floor, the bus hits a little bump, and his rather big laptop, a good 6 or 7 feet above in the luggage rack, bounces out and falls, corner-first, right onto his balls. Funniest. Thing. Ever. What a suckish way to wake up though, tell you what.

Alright, so now that you know exactly how I got to Oxford, I think I'll go ahead and sum up my impressions of the past month.
I suppose the best way to generalize things is to say that I don't think there's another program that I've heard of that gives you such a broad, yet somehow detailed, view of so many different European cultures. We've been to Italy, Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, France and now the UK. And while we only spent 4-5 days in each country (on average), the program did a fairly decent job of showing us a lot of different parts of each country.

Dr. Ulrich said something to us at the start of classes. "He who visits a place for 2 weeks writes a book, he who visits that place for 2 months writes and article. He who stays for 2 years writes nothing."

In other words, I am aware of the fact that my experience with these countries is minimal. I've spent just enough time in each place to see all the ways that we are different, but not enough to begin to understand all the ways that we are the same. I could tell you about all the differences I've experienced (different electrical outlets, no air conditioning, NO FREE WATER [seriously, I'm abusing free refills when I get home]), but that's not really the important part of the trip, I think. I feel like I've seen so much, and I feel like it's made me much more aware. But that's all. I'm aware of these other places, but I haven't learned about them, because we never really had time to sit down with somebody and ask them all about their life.

It's hard to explain, so I'm sure what I'm writing isn't making much sense. I suppose the easiest thing to say is that I'm grateful for this experience, and I feel I will be able to see the world a little bit more clearly now.

Where People and Pigeons Sit Down Together

Today was our first day in Paris. And it was a busy one and I do have a couple stories to share. Hopefully I can remember them all.

As I said last night, we got to sleep in this morning because classes ran late, but a brave handful of people in our group got up at 04:00 to go photograph the Eiffel Tower at sunrise. Apparently they had an unfortunate run in with their taxi driver, who started their meter when she was called to pick them up, and not when she picked them up. Her dog was also apparently in the front seat of the car, and she refused to allow anybody to sit up front, and then when the total of the ride came to 15 Euros and they gave her a 20, she only gave them 2 Euros back and refused to return the rest of the change.

It seems like people are, in general, kind of rude here in this city. It hasn’t been everyone, and it hasn’t been non-stop, but I’ve definitely gotten the sense that ‘manners’ are just kind of out the window.

Regardless, though, I didn’t wake up until 09:00, at which point I got breakfast and then slept a bit more. At 11:00 we met down in the lobby and got our train tickets, and we arrived at the Louvre at around 12:00. A small group of us (not the usual suspects) went and got lunch at a small crepe (german pancakes, for my family) restaurant. I got one with Nutella (it’s like chocolate peanut butter), and it was delicious. This restaurant is where today’s title comes from, though. There were a few pigeons wandering around inside the restaurant, just checking things out, hoping for scraps, totally unafraid of people. It was funny and maybe even a tad bit cute.

We met at 12:30 for our appointment at the Louvre, and by 13:00 we were in the museum with plans to meet at 16:00 outside to walk to the next one. I don’t know if any of you have ever been to the Louvre before, but here are my impressions.
To be honest, I didn’t think too highly of it. It definitely had a very extensive collection, and there were some respectable pieces of art in there, but it felt very much to me like it was starting to become a tourist trap. If I can remember correctly, this is only the second museum on this entire trip that has allowed us to take our bags in and take pictures with flash. It almost seemed like the museum was resigned to the fact that it was just an attraction, which I felt was somewhat disappointing. Oh, and the Mona Lisa is really tiny, and I didn’t even bother getting too close to it, since about 200 people were crammed right up against it taking pictures. Somebody even said they doubted it was the real one, and I’d totally believe that they would put a replica on display. Nobody’s the wiser, right?
But hey, Barry Bonds was there today. Literally. People got pictures with him. He was just there walking around with his family. It was the high point of about a dozen people’s lives, I think. Haha

After the Louvre we walked across town to the Pompidou museum, which has modern art in it. Our appointment wasn’t until 18:30, so a few of us went to a Pizza Hut for some good old American style pizza and paid 25 dollars for a pizza that would have cost 8 back home.

The Pompidou was a much better museum, in my opinion. I’m not the biggest fan of modern art, I feel like a lot of it is baloney, but there were a few pieces I liked. One was The Deep by a guy named Pollock. See if you can google image it. It just looks like a white piece of canvas with some black splotches down the middle, but I kinda got the sensation that I was drowning when I looked at it. Weird.

The Pompidou was our last stop for the day, so I went with Kate and Jenny back to the hotel. We had to come up with our own route, since we were at a different stop to begin with. We had to make two connections, but during the first one we ran into another ticket checking machine. So Kate just put her old one through and when it didn’t seem to open right away she literally drop kicked her way through. It was pretty hilarious.

I went and got a sandwich from a nearby shop after we got back since the Pizza didn’t quite fill me up, and at the shop I met a guy who lives here in Paris, but spent some time in Texas. He talked about how great a country America was and how nice the people were there. I didn’t want to be rude, so I didn’t outright agree with him when he said America was nicer than Paris, but secretly, I agreed. Haha. He was a really nice guy though. So I still can’t decide if the people here are generally mean, or if we just had bad luck earlier in the day.

Maybe tomorrow will tell. Tomorrow is an early day, so I’m going to call it quits for now. Hope everything is going well. I'm actually going to go write a short story. A happy one.

Tata.

The Last Stop on a Long Journey

Hey everybody, sorry it's been a day or two since my last legitimate post.
We're in Paris right now, the last city on our trek across Europe, and we'll be here until Sunday the 28th, which is when we'll leave for Oxford. I suppose I'll go ahead and get you up to speed with what's been going on the past few days.

I'll start with two days ago, which I think is when I put up my last post. We had the day off in Brussels, and I accomplished a fair amount of work, not enough, though. At the end of the night a whole bunch of us went out to celebrate Lindsay's Birthday. We took the tram/subway into the city and found a little seafood place to get dinner at (bleh), and the food was good. I got a steak though. No seafood. Haha. From there we wandered to a bar and spent some time there socializing before a few of us went back to the hotel for the night in a cab.

The next day was our trip from Brussels to Paris, which went really well, although nothing too exciting happened. I just listened to music the entire time. We arrived in Paris around mid-afternoon, to find that the hotel was not too happy about our arrival. As it turns out, the group that was here before us almost got themselves kicked out of the hotel because a half-dozen kids were wandering the hallways half-naked in the middle of the night, knocking on all the doors and causing a general ruckus. So we're on thin ice, here, to say the least. That being said, everybody still seems pretty nice, which is far from what I was expecting. We had class until 23:00, though, which sucked, especially since Ulrich loaded us up with five more mini-essays to write in the next week.

Today we got to sleep in since we had class yesterday, which was fantastic, and so in about a half hour we're going to head for the metro to get to the Louvre. We'll be in there for about 3.5 hours, and then we head to the Pompidou museum after that, and we're in there until 8 or so, if I remember correctly. It's going to be a busy day. Same with tomorrow.

I know this post sucks...haha. Sorry. The last few days have been somewhat bland, and I'm a bit tired right now. Hopefully I can write one a little bit more exciting when I get back tonight. Assuming something exciting happens today.

Well I hope everything is going well back home. I miss you guys.

When bad planning almost gets you arrested

Today we drove to Ghent (another city here in Belgium) and had about 90 minutes to check things out. Then we drove to Brugge, and had about 8 hours to check things out. Keep in mind, these 8 hours weren't organized and filled with things we had to see. About one hour was for that. The other seven were for us to waste time with. So guess what a lot of our group did to pass the time?

Yay Alcohol!

A group of people almost got into a fight with the locals because they were noticeably drunk in the streets near a church, and then later on in the day the group caused a bit of a scene in the town square while we were waiting on the bus to leave.

Normally I would just blame it on us for being dumb college kids (note when I say us I don't mean to imply that I was part of the group), and while some of the blame obviously belongs to them, I definitely feel the bad planning that has plagued this city in particular had something to do with it. I mean, why on earth give us 6-7 hours of free time in a city where there is nothing to do? Of course the kids are going to drink.
The travel portion of this trip needs to be flexible, sure, I understand that, but there's a difference between flexible planning and straight up bad planning.

One cool thing came out of the city though. While the majority of our group was making a ruckus in the town square at the end of the day, about a dozen of us were chilling out on the other side of the place. Well, Imran told us how he told his friend Dede (his relationship with her is similar to mine with Sydney, so we could relate on how insane they drive us) that he would take a bullet in the left arm for her, and that she responded she would take a bullet in the left pinky toe for him. Then Sydney jumped in and tried to SOMEHOW explain that Dede was actually making a bigger sacrifice, and I told her that was obviously retarded.

Then Imran and Dede were arguing and Sydney and I were arguing and eventually things turned to blows (these are, you know, love taps and not actual punches, but we were whacking each other on the arms and whatnot). Well Lindsay was nearby and she didn't like the fact that I was picking on her little (Sydney), so she started to attack me, and...well, you can see what happened below.



Tomorrow we have a free day, so I'm going to sleep in and get some work done, per usual.

All you have to do is take the 92...

So we had a concert tonight. It started at 20:00, so we had to be there by 19:45.

We had the afternoon off, and the rest of my group of 5 went out into the city while I stayed behind to try and do some work. Come 19:00, I'm dressed and leaving the Hotel, confident I can get to the concert on time given that I had 45 minutes and all we had to do was "take the 92 bus to the Royale stop."

False.

19:00- I leave the Hotel
19:02- I arrive at the bus stop and attempt to purchase my ticket via the automated machine there (there are no people). The machine only gives me directions in French (a language I have NO knowledge of), and so it takes me about ten minutes to realize its broken.
19:11- I have decided time is slipping away, slowly but surely, and that it is time to just risk getting on the bus without a ticket.
19:25- Bus 92 finally arrives. I board it near the back.
19:30- Everyone suddenly gets off the bus, and I am told to do so as well, even though this is not my stop. Another kid my age, who looked like and seemed to speak German, was just as confused as I was, so the two of us just stood around together for 15 minutes at the bus stop labeled for bus 92.
19:45- I am officially late for the meeting time, and another bus on route 92 has not shown up. I cross the street and begin walking back the way I came, and stop at the next 92 stop to examine the map. I eventually locate where I think I am and realize that route 92 is not a loop, but a line, and that I have reached the end of it, going in the wrong direction. I also manage to decipher another sign and learn that the next bus on 92 is due at 19:50. I decide to wait. I feel like a hitman, wearing black pants, black dress shirt, black tie (with silver and red touches), and black shoes.
19:52- Bus 92 appears over the hill, and once again I board in a way to try and avoid detection by the "You-have-no-bus-ticket" detection squad, or whatever they are called. I am successful, and settle in for the ride.
20:07- Bus 92 finally reaches my stop, I jump off and begin my trek on foot to the concert hall. The concert has been ongoing for 7 minutes.
20:12- I reach the concert hall, walk in, and am subsequently directed to another set of people, who direct me through a set of doors, which leads me to a man who leads me to my seat in a balcony box with other people on my trip, mumbling to himself the entire time in French, probably about how obnoxiously late I am.
20:16- I am sitting in the box and people chuckle at why I was so late. Miraculously, the concert is only just starting.

And that was my exciting story for the evening!

Our Beer Garden Commercial

As mentioned in the Munich Superpost. Embeded from Youtube.

You're worse than Ryan Adams.....

First of all, let me assure all of you that the title bears no disrespect to my friend and future roommate, but is, as you know if you read my Munich Superpost, a quote from Sydney. However, as I'm sure you've become accustomed to by now, I'm not going to get to the titular story until the end of the post. See, its a good strategy, because now I have you hooked and you're going to read all the in between stuff because you don't want to miss the story about Sydney at the end.

We left Munich yesterday bright and early, and set out on the 700+ km journey to Brussels, Belgium. You may be saying 700 km isn't too far at all, and it really isn't, but keep in mind we're in a Coach Bus going half the speed limit and stopping every two hours. So the trip took 12 hours, and we got to the hotel here in Brussels around 20:00. I found ways to pass the trip, though. I slept for the first few hours before I gave the window seat to Sydney, and then I spent a few hours reading The Giver. All of you who read this blog and have not read that book, go read it NOW. I've read it a dozen times and each time I do my respect for it only grows. I'm almost certain I'm going to do my senior thesis on that book, even now. I got half my group interested in the book too; Imran has it now and there's a line five people deep waiting to read it after him.

But once we got to Brussels we went out and got some dinner, then pretty much went back to the Hotel and called it a (late) night. Clearly, we have internet here, and it's even in our rooms, for the first time since Padua, and the first time it's been good since Florence.

The scheduling for this city is a mess, though. Today we were supposed to do a half dozen different things and we only ended up going to a museum. We've got the entire afternoon off until after dinner this evening, when we have a concert. So I'm going to spend my time writing a concert paper, my final paper for art, and my book.

And this brings me to my Sydney stories. I want you all to be aware of the fact that as soon as she becomes privy to the fact that these are on my blog, she's going to pitch a fit at me. Still, since I told you the first half of the whole "You're worse than Ryan Adams" tale, I have to tell you the second half (real quick: The first half was the story of how I took an extra 5 minutes to gather all my laundry in Munich and Sydney spent all five of them shouting at me from the hallway, telling me I was "worse than Ryan Adams"). Don't worry, I will endure Sydney's rage, as I have for some time now, and the story shall remain.

Here we go.

The story begins yesterday morning, before leaving Munich. We were all sitting in the lobby, waiting to board the bus. Something had happened the night before and I was a bit bothered by it, and Sydney came in and started asking me what was bothering me. I told her not to worry about it because it was nothing she was concerned with, and I didn't feel like explaining it to her. But she gets upset with me and insists that I'm being unfair because I'm not telling her everything. I eventually told her later in the day.

Fast forward to last night, in Brussels. Before departing to each of our individual rooms, the five of us agree to meet at 20:40 in the Hotel lobby to leave for dinner. Carol, Kate and I are there on time. Sydney arrives at 20:49. I tell her she's "worse than Ryan Adams" because I love throwing people's quotes back at them (as you all know).

Fast forward to this morning, when we're suppose to be on the bus at 09:45 to leave for a tour. Sydney is literally the last person out of the Hotel, a solid 5-10 minutes later than everybody else. When she gets on the bus I tell her she's "worse than Ryan Adams" and that's twice in the last 12 hours. She shrugs, then scrunches up her face and asks when the first time was. Here's the conversation:
Peter: "Last night, before dinner. That was the first time."
Sydney: "How was I worse than Ryan Adams with that?"
P: "...we said we were meeting at eight. You were ten minutes late."
S: "No I wasn't."
P: "Okay, sorry, nine minutes late. And yes, you were, I checked my watch as soon as you finally showed up and it was 20:49."
S: "We weren't tell minutes late, Peter. We weren't meeting until 20:45."
I blink a few times and then turn back to Carol and ask her when we were supposed to meet for dinner. She says 20:40. Sydney says nothing.

We had a class at 14:00 today. Sydney showed up at 14:07.

And then, in a separate vein, going back to her getting mad at me for not explaining everything to her, we got our Art papers back today. When I asked Sydney how she did, she refused to tell me.

North Ave. South 508 CANNOT COME SOON ENOUGH. lol

But that's pretty much all the stories I have for now. I'm going to do some various assignments before the concert tonight...hope everything is going well.

Pope Lewcock the First

I've decided Professor Lewcock is an exceedingly awesome dude.

Lewcock is our art professor, and up until this point I haven't really found him as awesome as everyone was saying I would. He obviously, as Ulrich puts it, "has forgotten more than I've ever learned," and he's extremely knowledgeable about a dozen different topics, not just his field of study. The problem I've always had with him is that he's pretty much a walking encyclopedia, and when he teaches he's telling us so bloody much that it just gets overwhelming. So that's why I've just been so-so on him thus far.

I had breakfast with him today though, just by coincidence. Most of our group is in Salzburg right now, and so when I went down to get breakfast I was the only one from our group there. Well Lewcock came by after a few minutes and asked if he could eat with me, and of course I said yes. First, let me just give you some background on the man. He was born in Australia, is a fellow at Cambridge, has had multiple articles published, owns homes in three different countries, has visited over 100 different countries, and is over 80 years old and still going strong. So, clearly, he is very decorated. But we sat and chatted over breakfast for a while, during which it came to light that I'm a Liberal Arts major and that I've written a few books. We discussed literature for a while and then discussed his teaching style and he asked me what I thought of the material. I might have embellished a teeny bit how much I enjoy art, haha. But I told him my plan was to do some work and walk around the city a bit, and he told me his plan was to grade our papers all day (ouch).

All in all it was a great conversation. He's a really awesome guy. In fact, he reminds me of my own grandparents a bit.

I spent the day doing various things. I did a concert report which is due tomorrow, which, naturally Sydney hasn't started yet and won't be able to until close to 22:00. I also made a trailer for the next Pennsylvania Trip movie I make, and it came out pretty awesome. Insanely awesome, actually. Then I did some Bible reading and then some writing. I'm hoping to go up and finish the chapter after writing this.

Oh, and its raining here, so I didn't go to the beer garden (its outdoors), and so I made it through the day spending only 3,58 Euros. I'm just gonna finish up the groceries I bought on Wednesday for food. The 50 cents came from a phone call I made to my Grandfather at a pay phone, and the rest of it came from snacks I bought for the bus ride tomorrow.

I actually bumped into Lewcock again out on the street going to the grocery store, haha.

And that's it for now. This will probably be my last post from Germany, so I'll write to you all again from Brussels.

A Map for You All

I took some time on Google Maps and plotted out our entire trip today. Check it out!


View Larger Map

The Munich Superpost

Day One: Tuesday, June 16, 2009

So I’m here in Munich now, and unfortunately for all of you, my dear readers, the hotel we’re staying in now is a bit….lackluster. Let me put it this way: I feel that, as a human being and a Georgia Tech student, I only need two commodities (note: I count a Bed and Shower as the reason for a Hotel room existing, and therefore do not count them as commodities) from a Hotel to be satisfied. Air Conditioning and Internet Access. Unfortunately, the Hotel Europa here has neither of those. Well, let me be more precise. It has absolutely no air conditioning whatsoever, and has internet access at the price of 17 Euros per day. ….think I’ll pass on that one.

But let me rewind a bit and see if I can come up with any stories on the way. We got up nice and early to load the bus once again today, and by 09:30 we were rolling away from the Hotel Duo in Prague and on our way to Deutschland. Per usual, Sydney slept the whole way. The whole way. I passed the time by listening to music, reading the Bible some, and polishing off my Zelda notes (example: I’ll need to shave 10 minutes off my Water Temple time of 27 minutes in order to be on par with the world record). We also learned that our next drive, from Munich to Brussels, is going to take upwards of ten hours in driving time, which likely means it’ll take us fifteen hours to get from point A to point B. I’m not really looking forward to that…I might just finish a book or something, since my laptop battery will only last for 2 or 3 hours these days.

Oh, and come to think about it, there was one interesting story from the bus ride. When we pulled out of our Hotel in Prague, Sally (group leader) got on the bus microphone and asked everybody why James (not my roommate James, a different James) got left all by himself at a club the night before. Everyone chuckled for a moment, and when it became obvious that Sally was waiting for an answer, someone finally shouted “Because he couldn’t lock it in!” Everyone got a good laugh out of that, although apparently what happened was that James ended up going home with some random European girl he met at the club and took a bus back to the hotel at 6 AM. The college lifestyle in Europe?

Upon arriving in Munich, though, and unpacking my various items in my room (i.e. hanging up my suit), the five of us (Carol, Kate, Sydney, Lindsay and I, and if you don’t know who ‘the five of us’ refers to by now I must be awful at making those names memorable) went out to do laundry. Actually, the whole ordeal started off with Sydney in the hallway telling me to “hurry up” because I was “worse than Ryan Adams” and “making everybody late.” Well we weren’t in any rush, because we got lost, and stayed lost for about an hour before we eventually found a Laundromat. So we all did laundry, and thankfully I’m pretty sure it’ll last us the remainder of the travel portion of the program! (This is Sydney typing) We wouldn’t have gotten lost, if Peter had come out on time, because we could have followed the people who actually knew how to get to the laundry place. (This is Peter) I probably would have been able to get ready faster if Sydney wasn’t screaming in my ear the whole time like a freaking banshee. I practically went deaf listening to “PETER! *man voice* PETAH!!!! YOU’RE WORSE THAN RYAN ADAMS! WE’RE LEAVING WITHOUT YOU! Etc….etc….”

We also hit up a grocery store for dinner products. I just got break and some Salami, and a single beer to drink (Beer is literally the cheapest liquid you can purchase here in Germany) and Twix for desert. The whole thing came to less than 4 Euros, so the grocery store is definitely the best deal in town. Note to all of you though, American candies taste funny in Europe. Just an FYI.

So we made our way back to the Hotel and ate our food, and afterwards one of the guys in our group came by and told us they had found a Bowling Alley. So we went Bowling! I jumped over things on the way there and Sydney told me I was dumb, per usual. Bowling was kind of expensive, I think I paid almost 15 Euros for 2 games of Bowling and one more beer. Now I also know that two beers is more than enough for me to drink it a short span of time.

The first game of bowling was fantastic. I started off awful, and I’ll blame the alcohol and slippery floors for that, so my score was only 38 after 6 frames, and I was in last place. Over the next 4 frames, though, I got two strikes and a spare, and ended up tying for first place with 112 points. Awesome! The second game was just bad though. I didn’t really have my head in the game and so I think I bowled a 75 and came in second-to-last. Haha. Oh, and for the record, Sydney finally got herself a White Russian at the Bowling place’s bar. It cost her almost 7 Euros, but she drank it all, the alcoholic. The bartender seemed pretty new, she said, and gave her a lot of Vodka and Kailua, so you know it was strong stuff... Sydney seems to have a higher tolerance for liquor than I do, though, and she likes to remind me of that all the time. It’s annoying.

Okay, and I’m going to let Sydney herself type a story for you all now. Apparently, I was pretty funny on the way back to the Hotel from the Bowling Alley tonight and I figure its best for her to share the story so that you can get the funniest possible perspective. So here’s Sydney:

(Sydney) Hello everyone.. this is Sydney now. The best writer ever. And boy, do I have a story for you. Our dear friend Peter, sometimes known as PPOP decided that even though he seems to have a very low tolerance for alcohol, that he would drink two beers. TWO WHOLE BEERS. Shocking, right? So Peter’s quite tipsy. And we’re walking back to the hotel from this bowling alley, through Munich, and Peter’s running and jumping all over the place. Like a crazy person. He’s trying to clear these EXTREME fire hydrants and practically killing himself in the process. So Lindsay makes the mistake of telling him that he reminds her of a video game character, and boy, does this make the situation even more incredible. Peter gets even more riled up, swerving through the streets, jumping, flipping, and trying to clear any tall object he can find. Well I’m just standing there hoping I’m not gonna end up spending my time in Munich in an emergency room explaining how and why my friend managed to break every bone in his body jumping over a bush or something. So yeah… it was pretty hilarious.

(This is Peter again) Okay, so obviously Sydney was pretty excited about all that. Glad she could impart her excitement upon you. I personally don't see what's so exciting about it....I mean, I do it all the time anyway.

And I think that sums up today. Oh, I think James (roommate) has a girlfriend now…..so……crap.

I’m going to go to bed for the night, and hopefully find a way to keep my window open so we don’t fry, but also keep all the bugs from coming in (because the windows don’t have screens!). I hope everything is going well back at home.

12 days until Oxford!


Day Two: Wednesday, June 17, 2009

First of all, even though I said this in my miniature update on Wednesday, I want to extend another (this time belated) Happy Birthday to my little sister. Happy Birthday Jen! Hope your 16th was a good one.

So on to my day, I suppose. Well, per usual, it was an early morning. Breakfast was from 07:00 and 08:00, and then class ran from 08:00 to 11:15. Good stuff! As usual, Music lecture was interesting and I….oh wait, I got my laptop from my room and therefore did NOT fall asleep in Art.

Sydney and I had another argument during lecture (what else do we ever do?), and I want to share this one with you, because it baffled me. It was during the fifteen minute break between Music and Art lectures, and I was wasting the time by (and I know this is very lame, so you don’t need to remind me) writing the Zelda ocarina songs on a piece of note paper I had. Lindsay was sitting on one side of me, and she leaned over and asked what I was doing, and since it was such a lame thing to be doing, I told her I preferred not to tell. Sydney was on my other side, and she knew what I was doing, and she told me not to be so hissy pissy or whatever and to share what I was doing. So I told her to stop being so nosey. So here’s where the argument began. I tell her not to be nosey and she tells me that she isn’t. But then she goes on to say that if I read something she was typing on her laptop right next to me and asked her what it was, that would be nosey. Double standard?

After class we left the hotel to walk to our museum visit for the day, and for the life of me I can’t remember how to spell its name. Oh wait….here it is, the Alte Pinakothek. The long and short of the inside of the museum is that I didn’t like it much. The art inside just wasn’t very interesting, and none of it really struck a chord with me. However, the outside of the museum was beautiful. It was surrounded on all sides by a big grassy field with trees on all sides, so when we had an hour to eat lunch and none of us were hungry, the five of us plopped down on the grass and basked in the sun a bit. It was nice.

Oh, and I should mention that we ran into a student protest on the way to the museum. Not a little one, a legitimate protest. There were police and everything. But apparently the kids were mad about having to pay for college. Go figure. We all stood on the grass and watched them (probably over a thousand) march past.

After the museum we walked back to the hotel, I made myself a sandwich, and then we got on the bus for an optional day trip. Normally I don’t go on these optional day trips, but this one really sounded like it was worth it. We went to Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp responsible for upwards of 30,000 deaths. There was something very oppressing about the place. Well, that gives it a negative connotation, so how about I say it was definitely an eye opening experience. It was eerie, too, standing in the rooms where you know people were exterminated. You could almost feel the essence of those rooms, standing there in them. It was overwhelming, and very solemn. It’s probably one of the things I’ll remember most about this trip.

But that was the end of organized activities for the day. So once we got back to the Hotel a few of us (and by few I mean the usual group of 5 plus Ben, another guy in our group) decided to go to what everyone said was an especially good Beer Garden in the city. And we were not disappointed. The place looked like something out of….the Renaissance Festival or something, I don’t know. There were easily close to a thousand people there, just chilling out and talking. So we went and got some food (I got a Curry Bratwurst, a Beer Pretzel, and a liter of light beer. It all came to 18 Euros, which, sadly, is very expensive) and then picked a bench and took a seat. The food was great, as was the beer, and it was a great time.

I have a terribly low tolerance for alcohol. Terribly. I mean, I was perfectly capable of moving and all that, I even preformed a few field sobriety tests on myself just to make sure, but after drinking a bit I just get so talkative. Not in an obnoxious way…it’s more I just say whatever comes to mind. Also, my eyes get really heavy. I was going to put my head down on the table to rest for a second, and the surface definitely got to me much faster than I was expecting, haha. Pretty much smashed my forehead on the table, which everybody laughed at. It was all good though.

And here’s a nice little snippet of our time at dinner. You know those new Twix commercials? The ones with the motto “Need a moment? Chew it over with Twix.” Well, if you don’t, they basically go like this. Character A is put in a potentially dangerous situation (socially) by Character B, and so Character A quickly stuffs a whole Twix into their mouth in order to gain a “moment” to come up with a suitable answer. So we decided to recreate one of those commercials. I play Character A, and Carol plays Character B, She puts me in a precarious position by asking if her shirt makes her look fat. In this video a Beer Pretzel plays the part of the Twix. Keep in mind these are BIG pretzels.

NOTE: Lindsay hasn't given me the video yet, I hope to upload it into this post tomorrow.

Sydney and I and a few other people hit up an internet café after getting back to the Hotel, where we all caught up with our individual internet needs. I updated you guys with that mini blog post and called my house to wish Jen happy birthday, did a few emails and then finished up within an hour, all for the low, low price of one Euro. Much cheaper than our ripoff hotel rates.

Okay, and I believe that pretty much brings today to an end. I am going to bed and am pretty confident I will sleep long and hard, thanks to my new friend the Beer Garden.


Day 3: Thursday, June 18, 2009

I need to start off by sharing something will all of you. Carol wrote me an ode in class today, and it’s pretty freaking awesome. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

An ode to Peter, my “hot German friend.”
I’m glad you love traveling and the places we’ve been
You have quite a following of college-aged girls
As we gallivant around the European world
Leaping over ledges, cars, and more
You’re so above pillows, they’re such a bore!
…just kidding, good sir, but yes! Have a beer!
And then show off your dimples as you are of good cheer.
Please promise us all you won’t drink again
Good job not arguing with Sydney, though I don’t know when
You’ll stop making snide comments- my guess would be never
But no worries, Pipiopi, Sydney won’t talk to you---ever!
I’m glad you’re excited for Oxford very soon
So you can have your own single-sex room.
Here’s to you Peter, the anti-travel one
Despite emo moments we’re all think you’re fun!

First of all, hats off to Carol. That ode is just plain fantastic. Secondly, I suppose I’ll explain a few of the jokes in there, since you may not understand a lot of what’s going on.
In line 1, “hot German friend” refers to a comment Carol made yesterday about how all German men were attractive. I thanked her, seeing that I am German.
Lines 4 and 5 refer to Sydney’s story about jumping all over the place on my way home from the bowling alley on Tuesday. Pillows refers to the hurdles we make whenever I go to Pennsylvania.
Line 6 probably refers to the night when Lindsay ordered a beer for me in Vienna, because she decided I wanted one. She’s a force feeder/drinker.
Line 7: Apparently I have dimples when I smile real big, and apparently I smile real big after I drink.
Line 8: In Italy I made what everyone calls a faux-promise to Sydney that I wouldn’t drink on a particular night. Basically, Sydney never asked me not to drink, I just told her I wouldn’t, and when Lindsay started pushing wine on me that day I told her I couldn’t because I promised Sydney and everybody just thought that was hilarious.
Line 9: Refers to the bet I had going with everyone that Sydney and I could go two hours without arguing.
Line 11: Pipiopi (pronounced P-P-O-P) is a nickname everyone has given me. It comes from Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

So yeah, that should cover most of the inside jokes in the Ode. I hope you all find it as incredible as I did.

But beside that, I learned something about myself today. I learned that I would rather starve than follow Sydney around a city for an extra two hours. But, per usual, I’m going to leave you all in suspense and go back a bit.

After classes in the morning, which is when Carol gave me that glorious Ode, we got our books together and headed over to the Neue Pinakothek, a museum. I figured out what yesterday’s museum’s name meant, I think. I think it refers to the fact that the art in it was older, and therefore today’s first museum, the Neue Pinakothek, is the ‘new’ art museum, for more recent art. We walked through, and for the first time I actually took more time in a museum than Sydney, and afterwards we had an hour to burn for lunch from 13:00 to 14:00. Nobody really wanted to eat, and I didn’t want to spend more money, so we just laid out on the grass again. Then at 14:00 we set out for the next stop, the Pinakothek der Moderne (‘Museum of Modern Art’, I assume), and spent some time there. I don’t really get modern art….it’s all so abstract, almost pointless.

And now we get to the starvation story. After leaving the Modern Art Museum, my assumption was that we were heading back to the hotel for a little bit to get some r and r, then out for dinner. But the girls have all decided, unbeknownst to me, that they want to head into the middle of the city. I’m disappointed by this, but when they reveal that they plan on eating dinner in the city, I feel like I have no choice but to go along with them, since I don’t really want to eat alone or starve. So we start walking towards…wherever, and after about 100 yards Sydney has already spoken enough nonsense to get me to the point where I told them to have fun and I just walked back towards the Hotel.

Well on the way back I ran into a girl who was on our trip, and we both wanted to make stops at a grocery store, so we walked together. We got some supplies at the store (Bread, Yogurt, Sprite, Beer, and Cookies for me, and it only cost me 5 Euros!) and then started walking towards what we thought was the hotel. Well, apparently we thought wrong, because we got pretty lost. We wandered around for about 10-15 minutes when my walking buddy remembered she had a map on her, and thankfully we navigated our way back to the hotel, which is where I am now, just chilling out, doing some work, and writing to you, all my dear readers.

Sydney and the girls are somewhere out in the city right now. I’d be a little worried about them but 1) the break from Sydney is wonderful and 2) they have a guy from our group named Josh with them. I’m sure they’ll be okay.

And with that, I’ll leave you with this wall of text to filter through. Sorry about that. Tomorrow is our free day, and if I’m really productive I’ll get some work on my art paper done, but if not I’ll just work on my book. Haha. I think I might go back to that Beer Garden for dinner too, even if I go alone. It was really cool, and I liked it a lot. Plus I saved a good bit of money eating cheap today, so it evens out a bit.

Well I hope everything is going well. Wish me a speedy 15 hour trip to Brussels and that we’ll have internet in our hotel!

So you guys all know whats going on....

Okay, our luck finally ran out. We dont have internet in Munich, so Im down the street at an internet cafe trying to crank out as much stuff as possible.
This is just a quick update, Im not going to tell you guys much, because right now Im prepping what Im callin THE MUNICH SUPERPOST, which, as you can probably guess, is going to be a wall of text telling you all about the city and our time here. My plan is to try and get it uploaded on Friday, our last day in the city, and then hopefully well have internet in Brussels and all will be right in the world.

So, thats just about it. Were in Munich, were gonna be here until we drive to Brussels on Saturday.

Last but CERTAINLY not least, I want to wish my little sister Jennifer a Happy 16th Birthday! I hope youre having a great day Jen, sorry I never got in touch with you on the phone.
All of you that read this, wish Jen a happy birthday too. Cost of reading my updates.

Talk to you all on Friday!

Pictures Thus Far

Don't forget to look below and read my post on Prague!


Me and Lindsay on the Bus in Rome after the "Lewcock Pub Crawl"




The timing on this one is perfect. I'm giving Sydney a wet willy.



Me, Sydney, and our friend Imran on the hill overlooking Florence. You can see the Cathedral Dome in the background.




Sydney, Lindsay and Carol. Oh, and me. Creeping over the shoulder.




The Trevi Fountain in Rome




Another bus picture.




And last but certainly not least...this is the cat we found in the Colosseum!

Prague: A Summary of Sorts

Art papers are no fun, let me tell you that much. Our final one will be due when we get to Oxford, I assume, and that one has a max word count of 5,000. =( Makes me a sad panda. And apparently the average grade for our art class is a B, which is far from what my original understanding was, so I might actually end up hurting my GPA on this summer program. Go figure. Oh well, it's helping my resume right? haha.

Before I go on to tell you all about Prague, I figure I'll share another picture, now that they're all starting to hit facebook. This one was taken on our last night in Florence, and in it you can see (from left to right) Sydney, Me, Carol, and Lindsay.



Cool stuff, right?


Okay, so, Prague. I'll start with yesterday, the 14th of June.
We started the morning off with classes. Music was interesting, as usual. I slept through art, as usual. (I understand now why the average for the class is a B.)

We met down in the lobby immediately afterwards, where Sally and Cristy (our group leaders, in case you don't recognize the names) gave us our Subway tickets. The subway here in Prague is much better than the one in Rome, it can't be more than a few years old. But once we were in the center of town we split up for lunch with the promise of meeting back at 14:00 to walk to the Modern Art Museum. Well for lunch the usual 5 of us wandered into a nearby mall, and sat down at a restaurant named L.A. Finger food. Note to self....Czech American food is....not so good. haha.

But we caught up with Lewcock at 14:00 and started walking to the museum, which was a good ways away from where we started. The walk wasn't bad though, we crossed over the river in the city and got a really good view of things.

The museum was...interesting. Modern art is cool, I think, but only for the first hour or so. After walking around the museum for 90 minutes, I was ready to leave. We were given 2 and a half hours to walk around the exhibit, and I can understand why, given its size, but as I've experienced with art, after about an hour I just can't focus on anything anymore. It's like studying: it's good, but if you do it for too long you stop learning. At least that's how I feel about it.

We came back to the Hotel for dinner, and we ate in one of the restaurants on the ground floor. During the meal, Kate, Carol and Lindsay bet Sydney and I that we couldn't go 2 hours without arguing, and so, stubborn as we both are, we took up the bet.

It went down today, during our walking tour of the city, and naturally Sydney and I won. It wasn't even that hard. haha. But at the end of the walking tour, the usual group of us followed Lewcock and Ulrich to the Hotel Europa, which Lewcock claimed had Europe's best cup of hot chocolate. After trying it, I would probably agree. It was delicious. After that, I followed Ulrich to a nearby cigar shop, just to check things out.

And from there we got back on the subway and came back to the Hotel, which is where I am now. It's downpouring right now, so I think our original plan of grocery shopping has gone out the window. Instead we'll probably end up eating in that same restaurant as last night, or maybe just get some food from the hotel bar. Who knows?

Tomorrow we head to Munich, which, needless to say, I am very excited about.
I don't have much text to update you guys with, but I've been told that a bunch of pictures of me just hit facebook, so I'll post a handful of them here for you guys to enjoy.

Hope everything is going well.

A Picture for you guys

I'm really tired, so I don't have the energy to tell you about all of today's events, but here, I thought you would enjoy this picture. It's the first one of me on the trip to hit facebook, taken by a girl on the trip with us.

This was in Venice, on one of the water taxis. You can see how crowded it was, and my offense at it. Also note Sydney's eyes at the bottom of the pic.

The Biggest Czech I've Ever Seen

I'm sure you're just dying with laughter over that awesome pun in the title. It's okay, I'll let you get your giggles out.

Done? Okay, so now I can go ahead and tell you all about just what exactly that means.

Today was another travel day for us, and so we left Austria behind and set out for the Czech Republic. As I'm sure you can guess, I am still very sad about this move. Vienna was awesome, better than our three stops in Italy put together, and I shall miss it. But alas, we had no choice in the matter, and at 10:00 (yes, this is two hours later than usual, and we were all very grateful for it) we were packing up the bus and eventually pulling away from the hotel.

Apparently Prague and Vienna aren't that far apart. I google map'd the trip and it told us the drive was only 3 and a half hours long. How it managed to take six hours for us to get there is beyond me, but I suppose it's okay. I need to say, the countryside of Austria and the Czech Republic have been incredible. Austria had these great wide rolling grassy hills, and Czech (I'm just going to call it Czech from now on because I really don't want to have to type Republic every time I say the country) has these endless fields of tall grass that roll in the wind. It's like an ocean, except with grass. It was awesome.

As for Prague itself though....I'm not as happy with it as I was with Vienna. That's probably because Prague feels a lot more like it belongs in Italy than in between the Germanic countries. It's also not a member of the European Union, so it's even more separated from what we've become accustomed to. Very few people speak English, and their language is almost impossible to decipher on the go. Plus, they don't use the Euro as currency here, they use the Koruna. And this is the source of my pun in the title.

We went out to dinner in Prague tonight before our concert, and there were 8 of us who sat down to eat together. I got a plain pizza and a Pilsner Beer, which was a total of 260 or so Korunas, which translates to maybe 10-12 Euros. So the Czeck (hehe) came and our total was about 2,200 Korunas. So yeah, it's the biggest total I've ever seen on a check. Past that, though, the whole situation was kind of unfortunate. The restaurant took Euros as well, and since we didn't have Korunas at the time, we all had to pay with Euros and the guy at the restaurant gave us an absymal exchange rate. Needless to say, I stopped at an ATM ASAP and pulled out 1,500 Karunos; hopefully that'll last me until the end of the stay here, and if I've got anything left over I'll just exchange it for Euros.

But that pretty much catches you up to the present, at least in terms of general details. Before I go, though, I'll share a story.

It's from last night, the last night in Vienna. Sydney, Lindsay, Carol, Kate and I all went out to dinner, and on the way back to the hotel everybody was apparently pretty cheery because Lindsay, Carol and Kate started skipping, all arm in arm. Well Sydney decided she wanted to get in on the action, and so she came up behind me and tried to link arms with me so we could join the line. Here's where she went wrong. First of all, her aim was terrible...either that, or she mistook my left kidney for the space between my arm and torso. Second of all, she tried to link arms with me at speeds at or around Mach 5 (if I were to guesstimate). So when you put those two together, you can understand that my side felt some mild discomfort for a few minutes.

Alright, and that's it for now, I'll be going to bed soon. I know I've been saying good night in whatever language of the country I'm in....but I have no idea how they do it here and I'm not going to google it right now. haha. Maybe tomorrow.

No! Bueno!

Now, normally you don't see 'Bueno' after 'No!' without some sort of explanation, so I'll go ahead and tell you the story of Bueno, a friend that Sydney and I made here in Europe, and how they died today. Yes.....died.

First of all, it's important to know that Bueno is the name of a very tasty candy bar over here that Sydney and I have indulged with many times. Today, Sydney decided to purchase one after lunch (which, in case you care, was a Durum today, which is sort of Austrian Burrito with meat, lettuce, tomatoes, sauce [of some kind] and hot pepper). So we walk out of the station where we got lunch and walk across the street to continue on our way to our next stop for the day. Upon reaching the other side, Sydney freezes and shouts, "Oh no! I dropped Bueno!"

I spin, and sure enough, Bueno is lying in the middle of a three lane street, and cars are roaring towards it. Now, Bueno was positioned right smack in the middle of the lanes, so when I told Sydney there was no way he would make it, she told me he would.

So we watched. About 8 cars sped by without incident, and for a second it looked like Bueno would be okay.

And then, it happened.

Now you have to understand, I was laughing this whole time. The fact that Sydney was talking about this candy bar like it was a person and was watching its fight for survival with such rapture was pretty hilarious. So you have to understand, when a car finally flattened it, it was pretty funny. Even more so because it made a startlingly loud POP when it got hit. I honestly thought for a second that a car's tire had exploded, or something. So I was laughing pretty hard by the time the traffic stopped and I waltzed into the street to grab the pancaked remains of Sydney's candy bar.

Needless to say, she didn't eat it.

Beyond that though, things are going pretty well. I was up late last night talking to Rebecca on Skype, and so getting up this morning kind of sucked. But breakfast was good, as it has been most days, and class was pretty short. Today was the first time I managed to stay awake through an entire Art Lecture! (There are two reasons why I always fall asleep. 1) I find the material kind of dry. 2) Lewcock turns the lights off so we can see his slides (literally slides) and so the room is just begging me to fall asleep.) Today we went to the Belvedere Museum, which had some really impressive landscape paintings, and then we went to Lunch and had the whole Bueno fiasco, and then walked around Vienna a bit. It wasnt a bad day, although it started to rain at the end.

Sydney and I also had two big debates today. The first was over the validity of cutting off a foot for something you really wanted. You see, Zach once told Sydney that he would cut off a foot for World Cup tickets, but she doesn't actually believe he would, whereas I told her that, yes, if there's something a guy really wants, a foot could be viewed as expendable, at least in the heat of the moment. There was another argument, but right now Sydney is too enthralled by her conversation with Zach to tell me what it was about. You don't really need to know what it was about though, because I won, of course.

Tonight we're going to see 'Owen Wingrave,' an Opera by Benjamin Britten about pacifism. We're leaving at 19:00 to head for the theater. Hopefully the rain will stop by then. Tomorrow is going to be a work day though. It's actually a free day, but after I sleep until noon or so, I have to write a concert report about Owen Wingrave and a 3,000 (!) word paper on the differences between the painters Caravaggio and Raphael. Bleh. And that's just the midterm.

I'll end with an inside joke for my college friends. On occasion, Sydney and I will find a pidgeon that has sort of inflated himself to make him look really big and intimidating, and will chase other pidgeons around to try and scare them off. Everytime we see one of them, we call it Joe. JOE.

lol, Tschus.

Quick Update before Bed

THE MATTRESSES HERE ARE SO COMFY

That is all

Four hours in Austria....

…is already better than the two weeks we spent in Italy.
Hang on, let me go back.
We got on the bus bright and early today, as has become the custom, and by 09:00 we were rolling out of Padua for Vienna. It was a long drive too; we probably spent about an hour and a half stopped, but it still took until about 19:00 to get here. A couple of exciting things happened on the way here. First of all, the mountains on the border between Austria and Italy are incredible. It’s probably one of the best natural scenes I’ve ever encountered. And, honestly, that was just the start of it. I’ve already decided that Austria is the most beautiful country I can remember seeing. The countryside just looks perfect. It’s hard to explain, which is why I took pictures, but unfortunately it looks like we’ve taken another step backwards in terms of internet, so I can’t upload them as of yet. So, to sum it up, the scenery on the drive was impeccable.
Oh, and I also found a bag of Crispy M&M’s at a rest station we stopped at. Yes. You heard me. Crispy. The best M&M’s ever that they stopped making in the States for whatever reason? Yeah. Those. It was wonderful.
But we’re in Austria and we arrive in Wein (Vienna) at around 19:00, and of course our first course of action was to drop our luggage off in our room. Sadly, our room isn’t that big this time around, and we still have a “Glass case of emotion” shower (and, actually, the walls are actually glass this time around), but there is one ray of light. One of the beds is in this little nook that flush…ly (?) fits the bed, and then there’s a curtain you can pull to hide the entire nook. Obviously, I shotgunned it straight away. Anybody that knows me from my childhood knows that I’ve always loved making little curtains and what not to surround my bed and hide me. For example, with my old bunk bed, for the longest time, I had a sheet-thing hanging from the top bunk that could be pulled all the way around to cover the space between the bunks. This is like that, except in Austria. And I’m 18 instead of 8, so it’s even cooler.
And then there’s a food. Oh my goodness the food. Maybe it’s just because Italian food was less than stellar, but I got Bratwurst with boiled potatoes and sauerkraut (which I did eat some of) for 8,80 Euros tonight and it was hands down the best meal I’ve had since I left. It was fantastic. We’re probably going to go back there again, because the food was great and the owner was really nice.
That’s something that seems true; everyone seems a bit more willing to embrace Americans here than they were in Italy. But then again, it could just be my bias. I’ll have to wait and see for sure.
In summary, I’m looking forward to our time in the Germanic countries, which is pretty much the rest of the trip (Vienna, Prague, Munich, Brussels). Although, haha, I don’t know if I’ll like the museums any better. Just a fair warning. =)

Tschus

"There's Beauty in the Breakdown"

The title has nothing to do with this post; it's just a line from a song called "Let Go" that James introduced me to. It's pretty cool, in a haunting sort of way. Right up my alley. haha

Anyway, we leave early tomorrow for Vienna, which is apparently a long drive away. It's all good though, the bus days aren't too bad. It's a nice break to just sit back and watch the scenery go by. But we get to Vienna tomorrow, spend two days museum hopping, the third day is a free day (during which I will be writing our 3,000 word (!) midterm paper) and then we leave for Prague on Saturday the 13th. The rest of our cities are like that, which leads me to believe our time before arriving at Oxford is gonna go pretty fast. Who knows though?

Assuming we have internet in Vienna (and I pray it's better than what we got in Rome and here), I will be updating regularly, as I have been. Hope everything is going well with all of you.

Mindset Disclaimer

So before we go on any further, I just want to introduce myself and the way I'm viewing this trip.

Apparently my distaste for these museums comes across as whining, and for that I am sorry. That is not the impression I meant to convey, even though I do understand why some of you may have reached that conclusion. I'm not whining about the trip or anything of the sort; I had no disillusions going into the trip, I knew I would not be too fond of the first half of things (traveling around Europe). I've never been a travel sort of guy, I've always enjoyed spending my days relaxing at home, wherever that 'home' may be. For example, my family went on a cruise a couple years ago, and I thoroughly enjoyed it because the ship was home and I was free to just relax or go and do things when I wanted to.
That is not the case with the travel portion of this trip. We have virtually every hour of every day planned out for us in advance, which strikes me as rather stressful and really seems to take a lot of the fun out of it. Furthermore, we don't really have a 'home' or days where I can relax, and so it all feels rather tiring after a while. On top of that, I have never been a big fan of art or architecture, and so while I do understand why so many people enjoy it, I do not, and I was aware of that distaste at the onset of this trip.

I am grateful that my parents have given me the opportunity to take this trip though. It has been a wonderful learning experience, even if I have not enjoyed everything I am learning about, and I am confident that it will continue to teach me many new things. I am grateful for the world experience this trip will give me and the credit I will earn towards my degree(s) because of it. So no, I am not miserable, and to those of you that worried as much I would like to apologize and tell you otherwise. This part of the program is just very...uncomfortable for me. That's not the right word, but I think you may understand.

These places are places that I should see, but I am looking forward to being able to see home again. So, once again, I am sorry if my dissatisfaction with our museum visits has come across to all of you as whining and ungratefulness. I am very grateful for this trip and I hope my parents know this. I also hope they (and all my friends) know I miss them very much.

So, to my parents and everyone else who made this trip possible for me, thank you very much.

Ah....Venice.

First of all, let me apologize to everybody who is aggravated/disappointed with me for what I am writing, because apparently there are a few people. I will try and remember to talk less and be less personal.

Shall I pick up where I left off then? The concert last night was a mixed bag. It was fun, I enjoyed the idea of going to see it and that was pretty cool, but the music was honestly pretty mediocre. The players all knew how to play their respective instruments, but their interpretation of the music just seemed...off. Our professor agreed. But it was fun. Afterwards wasn't though.

I've decided I don't really like Venice. At all. It's a nice city and all, so I understand why so many people want to see it, but therein lies the problem. There are no roads, and there's no easy way to walk around the city without taking the Water Buses, which, as you can probably guess, are way overcrowded. You're standing cheek-to-cheek the whole way, and a lot of people aren't happy about it and they tell you so.
So after the concert (it's getting close to 23:00) we all have to crowd into the little water bus, which, because of all the people on it and the stops on the way back to the bus station, took us about an hour. So it wasn't until 00:00 that we got on the bus. This in itself would not have been so bad, because we're college kids and that's normal.
The reason it was annoying was as follows. Because we ran light getting back to the bus (which was technically the fault of the people in charge, who didn't know which water bus to put us on), we couldn't get a ride on the bus to Venice the next day, so we had to get up even earlier than our typical 8 AM to get to the train station on foot (over a mile away) to ride the train into Venice to ride the water bus to the Accademia Museum.
Fun.

But from there we saw the Accademia Museum, the Maria Gloriosa del Frari Church and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. The last of them was my favorite, and it actually had a piece or two I found interesting. Once piece, called Developable Surface was a collection of 8 or so curved planes. They were all melded together to make one shape, but it was very confusing from a mathematical standpoint. It's hard to explain, so I wish they would have let us take pictures. It's a modern art collection, by the way.

But that's about it. We came back to the Hotel and Sydney, Lindsay and I went down the road for some Italian McDonalds (not worth the 8,20 Euros we payed for it at all), and then we came back to the Hotel again. Right now Carol and I have our clothes in the Laundry, it's the first time I'm doing it since we left and I really needed to. We'll have to go fetch it out at around Midnight, and then once I'm done sorting that I am going to bed and sleeping until I can't sleep any longer. Hallelujah.

I'll likely spend tomorrow writing Book 3 and (yes) preparing for my upcoming Zelda battle in the Fall. But I'll tell you all about tomorrow...tomorrow.

"I'm in a glass case of emotion!"

Why the anchorman quote? Well, it came to me while I was showering last night, which, as you've probably guessed, is about the size of a phone booth and has semi transparent walls.

Anyway, we're in Padua now, which is an hour out of Venice, and we're here to stay until Tuesday, when we'll be heading to Vienna. The bus ride here was long, I think about ten hours passed in between getting on and arriving in Padua. Some funny things happened on the way.

I was sitting next to Sydney, of course, and she would always start dozing off. Well she does that thing where your head starts to droop and you're still semi-conscious so you rip your head back up and you're awake for half a second before you do it again. It makes her look like a bobble head. Besides that, though, at one point her head started leaning in my direction. It was gradual, but eventually her bobbling brought her pretty close to my shoulder. She pulls her head back up, and I figure she'll just start leaning over again.
Nope.
The next time she literally smacks her head down onto my shoulder, fully waking herself up and sending me into laughter. She did this three times on the trip. Headbutted me.

The other bus story also has to do with Sydney sleeping. At one point when she was out, she all of a sudden slapped me on the leg, pretty hard too. So I looked at her, thinking she was mad about something, and when I do she rolls her eyes at me and turns away and goes to sleep. And hour later when I asked her about it, she didn't remember a thing.
Dangerous stuff.

Anyway, we spent the day in Padua, saw a few museums (bleh) and whatnot. We're going to a concert in Venice in about 30 minutes, so I'm going to go and get dressed soon. We'll be seeing the Four Seasons by Vivaldi, which I think are pretty nice pieces of music.
Tomorrow we're going to be seeing some more museums but Monday is a free day! Win! So I'll most likely spend the day writing my book. But that's still a ways off.

I'm gonna go get changed, talk to you all later.

Off to Venice

Alright, we're off to Venice tomorrow so, again, we might not have internet there, but I think we'll be okay. Just a warning.

I spent the day at the hotel today, which was great in a really lame way. I stayed in bed until noon and didn't get dressed until I had to go get lunch down the road at 13:00. Then I just spent the whole day in my room/2x2 patio thing. I wrote the better part of two more chapters for book 3, which totals about 3 or 4,000 words, and puts me at about 1/10th of the way through the book. I know you guys are excited.

Anyways, that's it for me today. As long as we have internet in Venice, I'll try and be more consistent about posting so you won't all have to read a wall 0' text again.

Rome III: Best Night Thus Far. Easy. Hands Down.

But the day sucked.

Going back a bit, we had class at 8:00, and thankfully the classes were only an hour each today (usually they're 90 minutes), even still, I managed to fall asleep for about ten minutes during art class. Sydney woke me up by poking my leg. It's okay though, I got her back when she was in the process of dozing off in Music. I poked her in the ear and she absolutely flipped out. It was funny.

Class was over by 10:15 and we were in the hotel lobby at 10:30 for the daily walking tours. Okay, so as I mentioned before, today sucked. The day part. We left the hotel, like I said, at 10:30, and headed for the Metro (subway), which took us into the older parts of the city. So, say, we actually started touring at 11:00. We well walked around Rome from 11:00 to 13:00, and you guys all know how much I hate walking and sightseeing. We saw the Trevi (sp?) Fountain, which was actually pretty cool, thankfully, since Sydney and I burned two hours there in between
14:00 to 16:00, just sitting on the steps and chatting. Good stuff, I know.

We went to the Borghese musuem at 17:00 and stayed until 18:00, and then from there we actually followed Professors Lewcock and Ulrich into the city where we sat down at two different restaurants and got drinks and chatted. Okay, I will admit, I apparently had more to drink than I should have. I wasn't drunk, but I was definitely....cheery, and lightheaded. Which everybody was excited about, since I think I smiled more during this point than during the rest of the trip put together. It got out of my system fast enough, since I didn't really have much to drink anyway, so by the time we sat down for dinner everything was back to normal, but I was still cheery. We ate at a pretty fancy restaurant, at least compared to where we've been going, and were there until past 23:00. Since the Metro stops running at 23:00, we had to catch a bus across town and connect towards the hotel. Thankfully we all made it back alive.
Great night.

But most everybody is going to either Naples or Pompeii (Sydney, WIN) tomorrow, and I'm just going to take the day to relax, so I'll be around. Happy to do so, as well.

And unless anything exciting happens, that's pretty much Rome. We're heading to Padua/Venice next, which I think I'll like more, to be sure. I'll likely put up one more post before I head out though.

Ciao.

Rome Part II: Yesterday. Boring.

Read Part One if you haven't! GO! Oh, and remember: I wrote this last night, so in the first sentence its 21:45 yesterday, the 2nd.
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Alright, it’s about 12 hours later now (21:45) and I’m (again) chilling in my room, writing to you guys. We toured the Vatican today, which I actually found to be kind of disappointing. We saw the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican Museum, as well as St. Peter’s Cathedral (we actually attended a mass in there, and of course I had no idea what was going on since the whole thing was in Italian), and sadly I wasn’t really ‘wowed’ by anything. St. Peter’s Square was actually pretty cool, it was very open and it just felt kind of empty, even though it was packed. The contrast was very interesting.
As you may have figured out, by the time we got back from the Vatican, Sydney and I just ate dinner down in the hotel lobby (groceries we picked up from Termini) and then I went upstairs to my room for the internet and computer so I could write to all of you. I was just finishing the paragraph you read right before this one when Sydney knocked on my door and asked if I could do her a favor, which ended up me being going up to her room and staying there. Okay, explanation.
If I haven’t said this already, we only get one key per room (unless you con the front desk, like James and I did….twice). Last night, Lindsay was out with most everybody (in fact I bet Sydney and I were, like, the only ones to stay at the hotel) and so Sydney had to take the key down to the front desk so Lindsay could get into the room upon her arrival, since Sydney was planning on going to go to bed. Keep in mind this was around 22:00. Anyway, I went up to Sydney’s room, she took the key back, and then Sydney came back and we had this conversation about why I have all these terrible, sad, melodramatic philosophies about everything (note that because of the content of the conversation, I’m not going to talk about it…..you can all thank me when I get back), and I didn’t get back until after midnight and so I was tired and we had class at 8:00 and I wasn’t about to wrestle with this place’s god-awful internet to get a blog post online. So, hence, you get three posts today. And that was the end of last night, really, it was a pretty boring day I think. Today was more exciting, which I will write about in the next post.

Rome Part I: Unfortunate Arrival

Alright everybody, here's part one of our stay in Rome. I wrote this yesterday with the intention of putting them up then, sorry....again.
Part Two and if necessary Three will be up soon.
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Alright everybody, as I said last night, sorry it’s been so long. I guess I’ll just get right down to it.
So on Sunday we all hopped on our groups big travel bus and set off for Rome from Florence. From what everybody said, it’s about a three hour drive. Well, we were driving out of Florence by 09:00, but we didn’t get to Rome until close to 17:00. There are a couple reasons for this. First of all, it’s because we had to take 2 or 3 rest stop breaks along the way (including one where Sydney literally followed me into the men’s bathroom, which was pretty hilarious because most everyone in there saw her and started laughing) and we also took a 3 hour stop in a town called Seina.
Seina felt and looked a lot like Florence. It was much more hilly, though. Apparently the city was built upon a valley/mountain combination, and so there were all kinds of steep streets going down into the square and things like that. It was a nice city, just like Florence was, but I’d had my fill after about 30 minutes of the allotted 3 hours. I’m sure part of that is the fact that we have to walk everywhere. I think the only days I got to bed without my feet hurting are the days we spend on the bus traveling, and then my legs hurt from being cramped up for so long. Haha. Oh, one thing over here that I don’t understand the concept of is paying to use a public restroom. All the bathrooms in Seina had a 0.50 cent entrance fee, and since I didn’t have a 0.50 cent piece, I ended up having to pay a Euro to take a piss. I know you’re wondering why I didn’t ask for change, and there’s a reason for it, but it’s long and probably wouldn’t make a lot of sense if I were to write it, so take my word for it, there was nothing I could have done.
Anyway, we’re back on the bus and we finally start getting closer to Rome. You can tell because of all the graffiti. Rome is a lot more modern than Florence, and it looks a lot more run-down (no offense to any of you who like Rome, just sharing my opinion). I’ve yet to see a segment of wall (or similar structure) 100-meters long without any signs of graffiti. The stuff is just everywhere. It just feels a lot more like a city, in the sense that we know of, like New York. Florence felt very separated from the city-feeling, whereas Rome exudes it. If that makes sense…I’m writing at 8:22 and I’m still a little sleepy.
At first I was pretty worried about our hotel. I mean, literally the entire ground floor of the outside is covered with hundreds of little paper-sized posters, which makes it look kind of dumpish, so I was surprised when we walked into the lobby and found polished tile floors and hanging chandeliers and just overall a very nice looking place. Don’t judge a book by its cover, I suppose. The lobby is easily nicer than the one of the hotel in Florence, so I was kinda excited about seeing our room and things. Unfortunately, we got a little bit shafted with our room. Never before have I seen a hotel with so many different room designs. There are at least 6 or 7, in a pretty small little five story place. Naturally, we ended up with the smallest of the room designs. The elevator is literally less than two feet away from our door, and I think it’s safe to say the size of our room is about half that of what Sydney and Lindsay are enjoying while we’re here. To give you an idea, we have a little 12-inch tv sitting in our room which is likely no less than a decade old, while Sydney and Lindsay have got a 26-inch LG Plasma up in there’s. Talk about luck of the draw.
We didn’t do much of anything on our first night here. A bunch of us went and bought some giant pizzas and brought them back to the hotel to each. It was okay, but not fantastic. I think a bunch of us have decided to go somewhere actually nice one night while we’re still in Italy. We’ve been trying to save money more than anything, and so we’ve yet to find any legitimately great food, which sucks because we’re in Italy which is supposed (I think) to have great food.
Yesterday, though, we went to check out a large chunk of ancient Rome. We took the subway (also graffiti’d!) to the Colosseum, and walked around for 3 hours behind Professor Lewcock as he told us about the Roman Forum and all that jazz. Again, most of this stuff doesn’t really matter to me. I don’t really know why, but old buildings and sightseeing and all of that just gets old really, really fast for me. After touring the forum we headed towards the Colosseum and spent an hour or so in there. Again, not very interesting for me. But I did see something exciting though! There was a kitty in the Colosseum, and I was going to pet it but Sydney made me leave because the rest of the group was already gone. It was funny though, as we left she commented on how when I saw the cat is was the first time I looked excited all day. A man’s got to have his priorities.
On the way back from Rome we stopped in a place called Termini (a station whose name I remember thanks to Zelda: Majora’s Mask, whose setting is called Termina) to grab some groceries and whatnot. Sydney and I also spent an hour or so scavenger hunting for an Ethernet cable, since the wireless connection in the hotel is awful.
When we got back we all went up to Sydney/Lindsay’s room to eat our groceries, and Sydney made some more of her accidental sexual innuendos by commenting on how she was going to stretch out her lower jaw because her sandwich was too “big” and “hard” to fit into her mouth properly. I was the only guy in the room, but I wasn’t the only one laughing so I didn’t feel bad about thinking it was funny. The girls also started planning a day trip on Thursday (our free day) to Pompeii. I don’t know if I’m going to go; I might just stay at the hotel and catch up on sleep before doing some work on Book 3, since I haven’t had much time to do that yet. Who knows.

Explanation...again

Sorry I didn't post anything last night as promised. Long story, which I will explain in the posts I'll start putting up now. I'll just write about our stay in Rome thus far, and I'll probably put them up in three parts or something like that.

Explanation

Hi everybody. We do have (suckish) internet here in Rome, and I just wanted to let everyone know that my plan is to update you all on what's gone on since we left Florence tomorrow afternoon/evening when we get back from the Vatican, which will probably be interesting.
Talk to you all then.