out of order

brussels (day 3)
bruges (day 2)
bruges (day 2)
bruges (day 2)
antwerp (day 1)

a poem about a poem about you

• if you like beer, you will like belgium.
• if you like shopping, you will like antwerp.
• if you like venice but wish it were colder and that the official language spoken was flemish rather than italian, you will like bruges.
• if you want to visit a city that represents the european union but which is itself the capital of a country that is considering disbanding, you will like brussels.
• if you like traveling through countries in the span of three days while still managing to see three famous cities within it, you will like the belgian train system.
• if you have strong thighs and a desire to burn calories, the medieval tower in bruges' central square was made for you [366 narrow narrow tall tall steps to get to the top. and then all the way down as others try to get up the same tiny little staircase].
• if you have been in europe for five months and miss urban outfitters and your first name is jennifer, you will go to the three story urban in antwerp and purchase a heart necklace with a j on it [oh god, but i havent taken it off since]
• if you like watching fit and not fit people [30,000 of them] run 20 km through a city, you will like brussels on a certain sunday in may.
• if you like cobblestone streets and chocolate and thinking and hostels that are attached to bars [actually the only thing i didn't like about belgium was this hostel/bar. it was lamelamelame], go to bruges.
• if you like waffles with toppings [many different ones, your choice] or street waffles with sugar in them, belgium will make you drool on yourself.
• if you like buying espadrilles for 3.50 [and even though you will ruin them a week later in greece during a freakish rain storm], bruges will make you sing.
• if you like light, sweet, delicious beer that gets you quickly tipsy [heyy, 9% alcohol], try a belgian beer on a terrace in antwerp with a friend.
• if you like thinking about the dynamics of nationalism, the reasons for statehood--like, how can this state that has two national languages even consider surviving its inability to keep a stable government in check? and if it can't do that, how does the european union even think it stands a chance??--definitely talk to me because i am obviously interested. but talk to me about it when we're in belgium together, duh.
• if you have two friends in belgium, you should visit them there. if you don't have friends in belgium, you should go anyways.

i bet you'll like it.

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

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

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.

ash clouds and socialism

the ash cloud may actually concretely affect my life. it's so weird to read the news about crazy things happening in far away lands, only to realize that you are in fact in that far away land and, unfortunately, the eruption of a volcano in iceland may prevent you from flying to the french riviera on thursday. not that i have much of a right to complain because it could be much, much worse, but still. sucky sucky.

anyways, life has been busy like whoah. on saturday night, a group of us went to the berliner ensemble, a theater in berlin that always plays bertold brecht. we saw the play 'mutter courage und ihre kinder'--aka 'mother courage and her children'. i kind of wish i'd read the description of the play before i saw it, because a bit was certainly lost in translation. but i was proud that i did get the jist of the story as it went along.

to be perfectly honest, though, i didn't really love the play. it's quite strange to go to a play in a foreign language. i wonder if it's even possible to like a play if you constantly feel that you're missing out on little nuances? though i suppose, shakespeare plays are really difficult to follow sometimes, and i still like them (except for the history plays, sorry dad, but they are really boring). so maybe i'm just not a bertold brecht kind of girl? i'm taking a language class that is 'theater' themed, which is great because it will definitely get me to the theater more often.

and get ready for the best factoid about germany-the-socialist-nation: berlin theater is subsidized by the government. yep, that's right. student tickets to a world-class theater cost only 5 to 10 euro. i am officially in love with socialism even more than i already was. sigh...

i spent all day yesterday eating brunch with friends and sitting in the park. i mean, literally all day. we arrived at brunch at 12 and sat on the terrace for three hours. yeah, and ate a lot, of course. it was truly very lovely. pictures to come later.

if i was in berkeley, i'd be dancing in the streets

Let's celebrate Mr. Obama tonight; he made something happen that I didn't think was possible and I am, for the second shocking moment in the last 1.5 years, so very proud of my country.

Read about it here

“Tonight, we answered the call of history as so many generations of Americans have before us. When faced with crisis, we did not shrink from our challenges. We overcame them. We did not avoid our responsibilities, we embraced it. We did not fear our future, we shaped it.”

--President Barack Obama

dresden

neustadt; hi white russians.
kulturhof; neustadt

altstadt schloss; the loveliest sunniest day in germany so far.
dresden's altstadt was bombed flat by the allies on valentines day of 1945. the picture you see above these words is one of an old baroque city, but actually, these buildings were erected within the last 60 years. the altstadt (old city) is still under construction even to this day, since the ddr didn't really have enough money to rebuild the whole altstadt; in fact, most of the neustadt (new city) is physically older than the alstadt. in dresden, i stayed in a hostel by myself and actually really enjoyed the space to just wander around and think. i didn't know anyone in the city and for those two days, that suited me just fine. i read two books (including mario puzo's the godfather-- which was royally entertaining though of no real intrinsic value past simple enjoyment. i need to see the movies now); i found a tiny little tea place on thursday night and read about 200 pages of the godfather while drinking the most delicious tea of my life. i wandered the altstadt and thought a lot about whether i liked that it had been rebuilt. berlin, for example, is kind of a blunt city architecturally--i mean, it doesn't really strive to recapture the look or feel of prewar times. as a bit of a history fiend, i completely understand the motivation to preserve old structures that mean something as a physical document, but on the other hand, it felt sort of wrong to see buildings trying to look so old. like a facade or weak kind of replica. when i really think about it, i realize that i live in a place--the former east--where boundaries are new, fresh, and seemingly still in the process of being drawn. it's hard to know whether it's right to try to fix something that's gone, or just embrace an unknown (but hopefully brighter) future. does not rebuilding something mean you've forgotten it? i guess i'm not sure yet. what do you think?

leipzig

if you want a crash course in the history of the ddr (gdr to you american readers), leipzig is really the place to go. the runde ecke, a simple exhibit in the former stasi headquarters in leipzig, gives thorough descriptions of east german life in the ddr. leipzig is the place where a lot of the demonstrations that culminated in the fall of the wall in 1989 began (though, friedrich informed me, professor connolly of our history department at berkeley would disagree about the location of the first protests).

the völkerschlacht denkmal (battle of nations monument) is another example of strange historical leftovers. finished in 1913 by the last german emperor, the memorial celebrates the defeat of napoleon some 100 years before. it's a massive building--much taller than the eiffel tower, for example. it was used by hitler, by stalin, by the ddr to proclaim the primacy of the german nation (whichever form it happened to take at the time). nationalism reformed, reworded. tough stuff.

on a lighter note: i had a great time hanging out with friedrich in the old city of leipzig--home of bach and wagner, and the place where goethe was apparently inspired to write faust (i touched faust's toe which will hopefully give me luck or something nice like that).

addendum:

check out emily's post it project. contribute! (it's fun, i promise)

if you go, you can see what what i added for the day.

now, to bed!

good night moon

where to go?

i'm having trouble with narrowing. my paper theses aren't narrow, my thoughts aren't either. this is troubling when confronted with the task of choosing. where should i go when i'm in europe? should i spend more time in berlin or concentrate on traveling?

in no particular order, (but in some particular order) here is where i'd like to go next semester:

istanbul, paris, rome, barcelona, prague, athens (plus every island in greece), st. petersburg and moscow, london (and to visit alex and laurence in their home towns, too), edinburgh, dublin, florence, venice, madrid, budapest, amsterdam, sarajevo, vienna.

there's more, but i already know the above is too much.

where do you go, when you want to go everywhere?