itinerary for next three weeks

may 27-30:belgium [bruiges, antwerp, brussels]

may 31-june 2: berlin [hectically trying to finish an essay and gather reading material for the essays i will have to complete upon my return FROM::]

june 3-june 13: GREECE. more specifically, flying in and out of thessaloniki. more specifically, we will be going to many beaches.

oh, the anticipation

last week, isabella and her roommate from paris visited me for a few days. we had great times, including a really fun dancing friday night out at rosi's, a very berlin, diy, grunge-esque friedrichshain club/bar. but the highlight was definitely our saturday visit to the tierpark, i.e. the former eastern-berlin zoo. we walked all over the gigantic park and visited with our favorite mammals and avian-variety creatures. definite favorite was the baby elephant, born only 2 months ago.

it was a bad romance

don't call me on my t-t-t-t-t-telephone
let's hug it out, blue eye shadow girls
kleine monsters

maybe four posts about one place is too much?

juices at la boqueria
palm trees!!
paellaaaaa
ice creams plus [already ripped] polka tights
la sagrada familia
la sagrada familia
aww
it's like 'where's waldo?', only this time it's 'where's hannah?' i am sooo original.
blurry hannah
yayyy, futbol

blogging craze

i forgot to mention that one of the most important things ever in my life happened last week.
ready for it??

I SAW LADY GAGA IN CONCERT OMG OMG.

i know that some of you will not approve of this but i.do.not.care. Lady Gaga is an amazing performer. Yes, she is kind of weird and crazy. But she is actually incredibly talented and has an amazing voice. She even learned some German for the concert, and I'm pretty sure she learns a bit of the language of each country she visits, just to personalize each performance a bit. the sets were out of this world, her costumes were incredible. She played the piano in 6 inch stilettos, she is definitely biologically a woman (if you have seen the telephone video, you may have noticed that people are unsure), and I seriously and weirdly respect her. Wow, this is more serious than I meant it to be, but you get the picture.
The best part is when she said the following:
'no one ever believed in me, everyone thought i would fail. no one thought i was pretty, everyone said i was fat, that my voice wasn't good enough. no one thought i was pretty.' it was hilarious at the time but, wow, poor gaga: no one ever thought she was pretty!
haha, ok, anyways, i have lots of videos that i will eventually upload.

goodbye for now, kleine monsters.
rawrr

barthelonaaaa numero three

sunday, we packed up and then metroed/climbed our way up a mountain to go to parc guell, or the gaudi park. gorgeous. words are not enough so just wait for pictures. we ate fruit and sat on the grass and got slightly sunburnt and it was good. this whole trip has made me realize how much i deeply miss sun. it's been the coldest may in 100 years in berlin, so you can imagine i'm not really pleased with that. i miss having vitamin D influences in my life. the ocean is something that i've also been missing quite a bit, too. i cant believe i hadnt seen an ocean since january!
after picking up our stuff, we headed to girona where we were spending the night (the ryan air airport is 90 km away from barcelona, much like frankfurt-hahn is not part of civilization nor normalcy). we ended up getting the wrong train (woops) but it worked out because our train traveled along the coast, which meant we were tantalized by the beauty of many beaches and many tanned people. spain is a gorgeous country, and i really cant wait to go back someday and spend more time there. in fact, it is my most fervent desire to go on a longer trip to spain sometime in the next ish-years. where are you, spontaneous, wealthy benefactor?

in girona, we witnessed the joy of the winning of the game between barcelona (who won) and some poor, sad loser. when i say 'witnessed', i mean we took a few pictures of the drunken revelers and then retreated to our hostel to hear the boom of fireworks for the entire night. girona really isn't anything special except that it has a white tower-thingy; we may or may not have taken some self-timer shots which invoked the gandalf/sauron story. whoah, probs shouldnt admit this on the internet. but what the hell? I LIKE LOTR, OK?

all in all, i was incredibly impressed by this trip and i cant wait to do more traveling. which is good, because a week from thursday, i'm headed to belgium and then three days after returning, i'm flying to thessaloniki, greece (with hannah), which will hopefully involve me becoming tan.

also, i'm impressed by any of you who read all of this. i know i can be kind of long-winded but it was amazing. go to barcelona. you will not regret it. peace out.

barcelona numero dos (ok i lied, i cant really speak spanish)

yeah, my spanish vocabulary is limited but my pronunciation is amazing (NOT).

day two aka saturday hannah and i visited the picasso museum which was pretty cool because it followed his development chronologically. the museum started off with a showcase of sketches from his youth and then mapped his development through his time in paris, the blue period, and then finally to cubism and some random pottery pieces he did. wow, cubism. here's the thing about modern art that i find so conceptually difficult: uh, it is conceptually difficult. i can always sort of pick out bits and pieces of what picasso is trying to say but unless it's something like guernica, picasso is hard for me to 'get'. i also feel like i need the prints to be in front of me in a book or something because i was overwhelmed by the largeness and colorfulness of the paintings, as well as confronted by a dearth of time to really examine each one. my one super brilliant observation was this: in a lot of his cubist paintings, picasso paints in a small cat or dog, often including genitalia to distinguish biology, at the bottom of the painting. yup that's it.

moving on from my obvious insufficient art analyses...

hannah and i then embarked on another exceptionally long walk in search of the sagrada familia. the best part of this weekend was the fact that i was in charge of navigation and didnt realize that the hostel map i had actually did have all the street names on it until more than halfway through the trip. yeah, how did i get into berkeley? anyway, we did a lot of intuitive wandering but it turned out to be really nice because we walked and saw more of the city than we would have done had we taken the metro everywhere. the sagrada familia was fantastic. it is incredible mostly because it is so exceptionally large. it also sort of messes with your mind because it is under construction and the projected year of completion is 2080! that's something that will make you feel mortal...

hannah and i then walked some more (duh) and then we went to top shop with which i am now completely obsessed. ok, realize this is really materialistic. i'll stop now.

after returning to the hostel (which was called 'alternative creative youth hostel'...uh, ok) we ended up going to eat tapas with two random brits who were staying at the same hostel. they were in town for the big soccer (aka football) game of sunday, which barcelona won (but i'll get to that). they were hilarious and BRITISH and i would like to point out that even if british people have the personality of a stone, they are still hilarious because of their accent. oh man, so good. we also went to a bar which was definitely populated by spanish people which was so exciting because i hate being among only other tourists.

i'll leave you with this quote from british man #1, which is nothing without the accent but whatever:

'i went into an antique shop on my lunch break the other day and listened to these two biddies natterin' away. one of 'em says to t' other one; 'there's a lotta old tings in here, ain't there?' '
hahaha, whaat??

oh, also, we met an austrian man named christophhh who sounded like old arnie schwarzenegger when he spoke english, and whose dialect i could not understand when he spoke german. awkwardddd.

post number three it is

barcelona, part numero uno (wow, i speak spanish)

there are no words. i thought i had spent all my love on berlin, but it seems that i can also love another city. and that city, my friends, is barcelona.
let me start by saying that i am currently in the school library so on top of my already lazy capitalization problem, i'm probably going to have some punctuation FAILS in this post. please forgive me.
also, i am extremely busy AGAIN but i am writing this now because if i dont, it will probably never get written and then i will forget everything and then i will CRY. at least i found the caps lock key or whatever.
anyways, i traveled to barcelona with my friend hannah who is from australia and is on exchange at the fu (freie universitaet) this semester as well. we got to barcelona via an incredibly circuitous route aka the frankfurt-hahn airport. the f-h airport claims to be in frankfurt, germany, but actually it is 200 km away and is there only for the purpose of forcing people to suffer. we were there for 10 hours the first way through and it was not pretty. my advice to you is this: avoid frankfurt hahn at all costs. also, ryan air is really hilarious and scary and the pilots are shitty, but i am a student and cheap so that is how it goes. 'nough said.

on friday, we awoke in our barcelona hostel and immediately set forth to explore the city. per taylor's suggestion (sadly, she is already back in the states and could not give us a tour first hand) we walked through las ramblas and headed to the boqueria which is an amazing covered market. wow guys. i'll post pictures later, but the fruit juices we bought were mind blowing. we spent a lot of time photographing the seafood which, in some cases, WAS STILL ALIVE AND WIGGLING. ewwww, but also hilarious. there were also dead, baby pigs we nicknamed (crassly) babe and wilbur and the picture of which will probably not make it onto the blog because it's pretty gross and disturbing.

we then walked to the harbor and really all around these little streets, ate tapas, SHOPPED (ack, wow, the shopping in barcelona is amazing and super dangerous), and then ate amazing paella and drank a bottle of wine. i'm proud to say that we didnt eat dinner until around 11 pm which is almost late for a spaniard and also that we closed the restaurant down.

my only complaint for this weekend was that i had a cold and so i couldnt completely taste everything i ate. i could taste enough, however; barcelona is a food paradise for sure.

ok, i'm going to separate these posts because otherwise you might die of boredom (if i haven't lulled you to sleep already). also pictures will have to wait til i'm back at my home computer.

and, update again

i am terrible at this 'consistent blogging thing'. it's kind of like when i try to keep a diary: aka always a major fail. (i'll write a long, ten-page entry when i have a terrible day or something, vowing to write again 'tomorrow'-- and then nothing for two months until something else stupid happens.) i'm not sure why i thought blogging would be different? i actually kind of think i'm hesitant to write on this thing simply because i don't know exactly who is reading it. that's it: i'm writing on a blog instead of in it. obviously, i know that a blog is public, but it's hard to censor myself sometimes. i am not always very careful with my words--i write hurriedly, not carefully--i'm even too lazy to capitalize here which definitely says something about my time priorities. let's just say that there are a lot of things happening in my life that i could just never write about in a public setting like this.

i do sometimes self-centeredly wonder how many lurkers i have out there though. i guess i'll never know...

back to may 1:

the first of may is the worker's holiday. in berlin there are always a tonnn of protests on may 1. there's a traditional neo-nazi protest and then there's 'worker' protests in other areas of berlin. fun fact about germany: all protests must be registered with the police before they take place. yeah, you actually have to ask permission to protest. weird, right? the protests are pretty much always allowed, but the police can decide where and when you can protest. obviously, this has to do with the history of the country etc.

anyway, the protests in berlin on may first are pretty notorious for being violent. there are often riots and last year, about 300 policemen were injured (!). i went to an area of kreuzberg where the streets had been closed and where musical venues and food stands were set up. it had more of an open air festival feeling than of a protest, but there was definitely an undertone-feeling of violence--there were huge masses of people and a lot were drinking heavily. honestly, i kind of realized today that i'm kind of over the huge-mass-of-people outdoor festival thing. maybe 'over it' is not completely accurate, but at least, i feel like i've experienced enough of them to not feel this one to be particularly special or unique. i also wasn't super stoked on the fact that there was a definite undertone of anger, and i booked it out of there pretty quickly. i guess heavy drinking + angry men is not really my thing? i dunno...

tani and another friend from gv visited this week! we had a really nice time and it was so fun to have a little slice of home in berlin. hope this post was totally boring/weird. i'm in a rambling mood today i guess.

happy may first!