Fall Break '10: Brussels

The Brussels trip was a short one. We were only there for a day. I wish we were there for longer though, there was still so much we haven't seen! I was glad to be back in a French speaking country. Brussels would be the result of Paris and Luxembourg City having a baby.

The first thing we did was check into our hotel before going sight seeing. We found the Grand Palace, which was surrounded by souvenir, chocolate, and waffle shops. Belgium waffles are so yummy!

Chocolates galore!

The Grand Palace Square was beautiful

 We did lots of walking, checking out a since street fair. We were trying to find the Royal Palace because it was free to get in, but when we got there it was closed. Stephanie went to go to an art museum, and I wanted to find a bookstore to buy more Tin Tin books. We found a very busy bookstore with just what I wanted. I bought three more Tin Tin books in French.

Royal Palace gates

When all three of us met up again, we did more walking/sight seeing, then off the to city centre for dinner. We ate at a nice restaurant. Stephanie and I split one Belgium waffle and it was delicious. That was our last day of October break. We were exhausted from the traveling, so we went back to hotel. We were leaving at 3:30 AM to take the plane back to Dublin. To be honest, by the time we reached Brussels I was sick of traveling and wanted to be back in my room. But, I have a great 9 days. I was surprised that I was able to afford such a trip!

Anyway, I've been back for at least a week. Now that it's November, it's time to get treatments and scripts done! Only 48 days left, and they're gonna go by fast. 

Tomorrow I'll update about my Halloween weekend, even though it wasn't that exciting.

Fall Break '10: Amsterdam

Hello everyone! Happy November! Sorry it takes me so long to get these entries done, they should have been finished last week! Anyway...

For the third city on our eurotrip, we took a train from Luxembourg to Amsterdam. We had to transfer in Brussels, which is funny cause we're were there 3 days later. Anyway, once we got to Amsterdam we took a cab to our hotel. I immediately loved Amsterdam. It felt like an artsy/bohemian city to me. Plus, the Dutch are extremely open, especially with sex and marijuana. The souvenir shops had some very sexual souvenirs, like penis-shaped salt & pepper shakers, as well as pot leaf souvenirs.

Our hotel was named Hans Brinker, a "budget hotel." It was more like a hostel than a hotel. We did get our own room and bathroom, as well as lockers. But there was a sign that said not to leave valuables in the rooms. The lockers are very easy to break open. There were a lot of young people staying in the hotel, including Americans. One amusing things about the hotel is that they advertise how bad they are.

The hotel street

Amsterdam had some good street art

The first thing we did was visit a coffee shop. All coffee shops sell weed in Amsterdam. You have to be at least 18 to enter them. You can buy the weed itself, pre-rolled joints, or brownies. It was culture shock to see a menu just for weed. I'm not much of a pot smoker, so the fact that weed was so accessible wasn't a big deal to me. However, it was relieving that you didn't have go through shady means to buy and smoke weed.

We went to a sports bar to eat lunch because we hadn't ate much during our journey. I got myself a hefty English Breakfast with eggs, bacon, sausage, and toast. I love breakfast meals! It was so yummy. Although, one thing about the city is that the restaurants don't give free tap water, so we had to spend 6 euro on a bottle of water.

Our hotel was right in city centre, a great location for shopping.

After lunch, we went out to explore the city. I went straight into a gift and bought myself an Amsterdam messenger bag, a t-shirt, postcards, and lighters for my friends back home. There were so many awesome stores. I wish I could have gone shopping, but I didn't want to go overboard. We went deeper into the city centre. That weekend there was a fair going on with rides and games. We just checked out all the souvenir shops, which had some interesting things in them. One common Dutch souvenir is the wooden clogs. I bought mini ones to put on my desk.

Ferris wheel at the fair

There's a shopping mall inside!

The one thing that began to unsettle me about Amsterdam was that walking around at night made me very nervous. Beneath all the great sights and whatnot, the city is pretty sketchy, especially at night. I liked it better during the day.

The next day we set out to do some museum visits. There's lots of great (but pricey) museums to visit. We took a walk in a very nice inside Vondel Park first before going to the Van Gogh Museum, which was outside city centre.

Check meeee out.

The Van Gogh Museum was beautiful. The paintings were arranged chronologically. They had some other artists as well, like Claude Monet. Unfortunately Starry Night isn't there because it's in the MoMA in New York. I saw it the first time I went there.

In the museum shop I picked up postcards of the paintings I liked, and I bought my sister a mug. I spend a long time debating whether or not I should get my mom a gift in the museum too, but I decided not to, based on her tastes. After we had gotten lunch Stephanie and I went to a different museum while Anna went to the Heineken brewery. I forgot how to spell the name of the museum we went to, but there were lots of Dutch paintings (some by Vermeer and Rembrandt) and artifacts. I found the museum to be pretty boring, so I just glanced at the paintings. There were large tour groups crowding the paintings, so I didn't even get to look at the more interesting paintings.

Stephanie wasn't feeling so well so when Anna met up with us we went back to the hotel. Stephanie stayed in while Anna and I went out to meet our roommate Hannah. She came with us to dinner and then had to leave to meet her friend. Anna and I decided to find the Red Light District. It was so crowded with tourists (mostly male). The prostitutes just stand in the windows waiting to be bought. There are red lights above their windows (hence the name "Red Light" District). Including prostitutes, there sex shops and theaters with live sex shows. A very shady area indeed.

The Red Light District before it opens

On our way home Anna and I were heckled by two guys who wanted us to party with them. Anna said it was just a way to pickpocket us, further confirming my belief about how sketchy Amsterdam can really be. I feel safer walking the streets of Manhattan at 3 AM.

The next day we went to the Anne Frank House. It's not her actual house because she grew up in Germany. This was the house she hid in before the Nazis took her. It's a really popular museum, with tickets selling out for the next couple of days. We had bought a card that got us into any museum, so all we did was wait on a long line in cold, rainy, weather.

The museum was probably the most depressing place I've been to. You climb the stars to the secret annex where Anne and her family hid. Most of the furniture was gone, but some belongings were kept. They even had her original diaries as well as photographs. The saddest room showed the concentration camps where everyone was deserted. What was really sad was that only Anne's father survived. Anne had giving up on life after her sister died, believing everyone in her family was dead.

The museum had a bookstore with copies of The Diary of Anne Frank in different languages, as well as other books about the Holocaust. After the museum we got lunch, and then tried to find another museum to visit. We couldn't find the one we were looking for, so we went back to city centre.

We spent the rest of the night checking out bookshops, souvenirs stores, and the Red Light District (so Stephanie could see it). We had another early day, catching the train to the last city, Brussels.

Last photo in Amsterdam

More photos on Facebook!

 

Fall Break '10: Luxembourg

Hello everyone! I should be better at updating, but alas, I'm lazy. I also just came back from Belfast, which was a very boring trip. But more on that later.

So, anyway, on the 19th Anna, Stephanie, and I took a train to Luxembourg City. It was cold and rainy there, but luckily the hotel was right across the street from the station. Also, French and German are spoken in Luxembourg, so once again I could get by very easily. We checked into our hotel, which was the nicest we've been in so far, and set out sight seeing.

First picture in Luxembourg!

We walked around for a bit, and decided to go into a museum because it had started raining hard. It was a museum on the history of Luxembourg, which wasn't that interesting. The most interesting exhibit was about teenagers and their culture. They focused on the music, clothing, sex, personal identity, language, etc. of adolescents.

Afterwards we set out again to explore the outside. There's a very scenic area with castle ruins and cliff over looking parts of the city. The buildings were so classical European, yet in the background you could see modern skyscrapers.

Luckily it got sunny out, but not for long. We had a map that had all the places we could visit. What we really wanted to find was The Three Towers, which at the time I had no idea what they were, I just followed Stephanie and Anna. There were some places we didn't know how to get to and when we tried to find a path it would just lead us into private property. Then it started hailing, then raining. I pointed out a random path and we just took it to see where it lead us.

=)

Consulting a map

Hail!

Eventually we walked into a forest, which lead us to a museum of modern art, which lead us to what we assumed were the three towers. It looked like it was part of castle, but they had built classrooms or something on the inside. Really, all we did was walk around, but there was so much to see as well.

Three Towers?

We started heading back to our hotel because it was getting dark. For dinner we stopped at Quick Burger, which is a European fast food chain, and went back to our hotel. Watching TV was amusing. Only CNN was in English, but everything else was in German and French.

The next day we were woken up to sounds of construction. It wasn't that bad because we were waking up early anyway, but the hotel manager apologized and said he'd leave us something. We walked around in the city centre looking for souvenirs. We went into a bookstore and I bought the first book in the Tin Tin series. Tin Tin is a  comic book series from Belgium about a reporter named Tin Tin and his dog snowy who go all over the world. It's in French, but I found it in the young adult section so I should be able to handle the reading level. Before we left France a I bought a volume of Dragon Ball Z in French :)

I also bought a pretty glass necklace in a German store. While we were walking we saw the Royal Family in their car pass by. The palace is right in the city centre. There were a bunch of tourists outside the palace, waiting to get a picture of the prince or king. Stephanie bought a postcard of his face because they had postcards of the royal family.

The Royal Palace

We stopped for hot chocolate and cake in a little cafe. You choose the type of chocolate you want; it's attached to a wooden spoon, and they give you hot milk. All you do it put the chocolate in the milk and it melts, giving you extremely delicious hot chocolate. The servings of cake were huge, so we were all sugared out. Once it stopped raining we went exploring in the areas we haven't been to. There wasn't much left to see. We did found the Three Towers, because what we saw the day before wasn't. The real ones...not as great.

Apparently these were the Three Towers...

By 4 or 5 pm we had seen everything there was to see. So we went back to city centre. All the shops close pretty early, like 5 or 6 PM. Anna and Stephanie wanted to try the local beer, so we went to a pub. It was 2 euro a pint, which is waaaaaay cheaper than any pint you can buy in Dublin. For dinner we ate at Pizza Hut, which was more like an Italian restaurant than the normal take-out place in the States. We all went to bed because we were catching a train to Amsterdam the next day!

Remember, check out the full album on Facebook to see all the pictures!

Fall Break '10: Paris: Effiel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, Pére Lachaise Cemetery

Hello everyone. So continuing my post from before: after leaving the Louvre we walked around the area, getting lunch and exploring the Louvre gardens. The Obelisk and Arc de Triomphe was a good distance away, but we actually walked towards the Effiel Tower instead.

The Obelisk

Kasey took this. The Effiel Tower is in the background!

This was built as a hospital for wounded soldiers during the reign of King Louis

The Effiel Tower is so beautiful, yet seeing it was so surreal. It's such an Paris icon, and there I was right in front of it. When we got close by it was just starting to light up. And every hour, it sparkles! It was so amazing.

Sparkle!

Before going to the Effiel Tower we went for dinner at a pretty pricey restaurant. I tried steak tartare for the first time. It's literally raw meat stuffed with all sorts of onions and seasonings. It kind of freaked me out eating raw meat, but apparently only the outside of meat is unhealthy to eat. It ever occured to me, because you could totally eat a hamburger that's bloody on the insides. Also, I wanted to try something new. After dinner we walked back to the Effiel Tower. You can pay to go up to the top and see all of Paris at night. It was amazing.

On the elevator to the top

After the Effiel Tower we called it a day. The next day, Monday, was our last full day in Paris. I spent the day with my friends Anthony and Paulo. That morning Paulo and Anthony needed to buy train tickets to Amsterdam, and I also needed to find where the train station was, so we asked for directions and walked to one of the stations. There were two: Gare du Nord and Gare du l'Est.

By the way, did I mention Paris has awesome graffiti?

Space Invader! This should look familiar if you've seen the documentary Exit Through The Gift Shop

After discovering train tickets to Amsterdam would be twice as much the next day because the Monday trains were canceled, Paulo and Anthony had to resort to taking the bus. So they bought their bus tickets, and we took the metro to the Arc de Triomphe! The arch is huge. Think of the Washington Square Arch, but bigger. Actually, the Washington Square Arch is based on the Arc de Triomphe. The resemblance is obvious.

Anthony, Me, and Paulo

We didn't stay there long. I would've loved to walk down the avenue Champ-Élsyéés, but the three of us really wanted to visit the cemetery Pére Lachaise, which was going to close at 5 pm. So we took the metro there. Pére Lachaise is a famous cemetery because there lots of famous people buried there, notably Oscar Wilde, the painter Eugene Delacroix, the composer Chopin, singer Edith Piaf, and Jim Morrison. The cemetery is huge and probably one of the most beautiful cemeteries I've been to, as morbid as that sounds. We visited Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf, and Jim Morrison

Oscar Wilde's tomb, covered in messages and quotes by fans.

It's traditional for girls to kiss his grave with lipstick on.

Edith Piaf's grave

The last grave we visited was Jim Morrison's grave. I'm a little of a Doors fan, and so this was the highlight of my day. His grave is barricaded off because so many people have defaced is and stolen headstones.

This nearby tree was covered in quotes and lyrics

Morrison's grave

Me, Anthony, and Paulo

Those were the last of the pictures I took. That night Paulo and I went back to Notre Dame so Paulo could see it. We had dinner with Anthony and Paulo's friend Jill at a restaurant. I splurged on a 16 euro three course meal and tried duck in orange sauce for the first time. So yummy! I also had crême brulé for dessert and it was yummy. The last highlight of the night was meeting with my French friend Francine. We went to an Irish pub (still very French though haha) and got drinks with her.

I was very sad to leave Paris. On the morning of the 19th Stephanie, Anna, and I took a train to Luxembourg. But if I ever were to become an ex-patriot, I'd totally move to Paris.

To see all my photos from Paris check out my Facebook =)