I'm home (at least in the States)!!!

So much to tell!!

I guess we left off in Vienna. A lot has happened since then! We stayed in Vienna one night and then our first day in Prague we took it easy. It was rainy and ugly and we took a glorious nap :D. After that we went and had an amazing dinner at a typical Czech restaurant. It was so nice to have a whole meal (meat, potatoes, vegetables, a Coke and a beer) all for under 10 dollars!!! I love the Czech Republic and it's exchange rate!

The next day we actually got up and got out of the hostel. We went on a free walking tour of the city that took us all over. We went all around the city and saw castles, gardens, the famous Charles Bridge, the Jewish ghetto, and lots more. Prague is one of the only European cities that was untouched by WWII, so the architecture was phenomenal and everything was so original and old!

After our walking tour we had a great lunch with people from the tour group. We all had goulash and big dumplings and beer and just too much food in general...it was a cool place with a bunch of locals, and even some ancient old man playing the accordion.

When we went to pay the bill we were trying in vain to decipher the check and had to call the waiter over. They had actually charged us a cover charge (to sit and eat) a service charge, AND they charged us about $1.50 (35 crowns) for the music!!! They actually CHARGED us to be in the same room with the accordion! Ridiculous, but pretty funny. Way to go Czech-ies, they are making up for lost time and taking advantage of us capitalists :D.

That night Alison and I had to go to this club we had heard about. It was 5 levels all together. The bottom level was like a tacky American club, with a dance floor and a stage to dance on, and then a balcony all around it to look down upon all the dancing fools. The next level was a "techno" theme, with lots of flashing lights, fog, awful electronic music and a huge female robot hung on the wall with lasers that came from her eyes that looked around the crowd.

The third floor was an oldies level, with hilarious 80's music mixed with other songs like "Twist and Shout" and plenty of other funny music. And each of these levels had its own bar (but the 80;s floor had 2!!).

On the 4th floor was the hip-hop level, with every 13 year old Czech thug dancing in their baggy pants being tough. It was just too funny. The last level was a lounge type of bar, with big overstuffed black leather couches, bean bag chairs, and lots of candles on the low coffee tables. It was a nice place to chill out between dances, so we went up there a few times.

The rest of the night we spent running from floor to floor avoiding bad songs and making complete fools of ourselves. We got there around 10pm, and were definitely the oldest people until about 1am. I think the drinking age there must be 13, because there were middle school age kids dancing with us most of the time.

This club was the best people watching opportunity ever. We had dragged an Australian guy from the walking tour with us to the club, and he and I never stopped laughing at the kids around us. It was a very interesting mix of people, to say the very least.


After that we went back to the hostel, got a few hours of sleep and got on our train to Berlin....my last stop :'(

We got there and Carrie (Alison's fiance's sister) met us at the train. She was there studying abroad, which is why we were going to Berlin. We found a hostel and then grabbed lunch!! Brats and sauerkraut and beer!! It was a great German cure for the night before! After that we climbed to the top of the Reichstag (the Parliament building). It was an awesome view from the top of the dome on top, and we could see all of Berlin.

We then decided to try to find a beach bar. These are apparently all the rage in Berlin right now, and are supposed to be fun. Most of them are just a regular bar with sand trucked in and dumped on the floor and lounge chairs instead of tables...and it sounded pretty good to me! WE never found the one we were looking for, and we walked waaaaay to long trying to find one, so I ended up parting from the girls and going home to bed.

The next morning the girls wanted to go to a museum, and I wasn't in the mood that early, so I stayed in bed. When I woke up and started chatting with the people in our room. They were 3 Norwegian kids, and they were absolutely hilarious. It was 2 guys and a girl, and I think they are some of my favorite people I have met on the trip. We wandered around the city for a while trying to find a Subway (because apparently Subway sandwiches are very expensive in Norway, and cheaper in the lower European Union). We never found that either, and ended up going to Dunkin Donuts instead, which are all over Berlin. After a good hearty breakfast of mysterious German cream cheese and bagels they decided they had to go to the museum I had tried to avoid earlier in the morning.

I reluctantly agreed, and we took a long leisurely walk toward the Pergamon Museum. This museum has the gates of Babylon INSIDE of it (they are huge!!!) and the Pergamon altar. They are huge ancient building/gates that were stolen from their original locations and pieced together inside this ginormous museum. It was pretty cool.

I had to leave the awesome Norwegians and meet up with Carrie and Alison, and we did the free walking tour of Berlin. We had a very excited British girl as our tour guide, and learned a lot about the history of Berlin through WWII and the Cold War, and all the way through the fall of the Wall. It was actually fascinating, and I don't usually care too much about history. But everything in the city had been blown up, flattened, and rebuilt (some buildings 3 or 4 times) and so many significant events happened there.

After our walking tour, Brett (Alison's fiance) and his parents arrived from the US and we met them at the hotel we were all staying at together. The whole family was going to go have dinner together, but I really wanted to do a Pub Crawl I had been told about by everyone who visited Berlin. I left the group and bravely went to the pub crawl alone :D.

It was a really great group of people, and we hopped from bar to bar all night, and ended up at a whacky German dance club. I had a blast and was really glad I decided to do it, even if I did have to start it off by myself. By the end we were all very friendly, and I crashed in a hostel near the last bar with a group of Australian girls (since the metro wasn't running back to the hotel by the time we ended the night!!)

In the morning I met back up with the family and went on a bike tour of Berlin with the whole gang. It was the same tour company that ran the tour we did in Paris, and we rode around everywhere! We had lunch at a cute German biergarden and then saw even more places.

In the two days of tours we saw the site of Hitler's bunker, Checkpoint Charlie where you could cross from East to West Berlin (and into American territory), the Brandenburg gate, and my favorite Holocaust monument. It is this maze of 2711 giant concrete blocks. They are arranged in straight lines, but they are all different heights and widths, and they are on different gradients....so when you walk through even though they are in straight lines sometimes you feel really lost. I'll have to put up pictures for you to get a real idea, but it was really moving for me.

Anyway, after the bike tour we had dinner with Carrie's German teacher (who had been teaching her the language for the last 6 weeks during her study abroad). This woman had lived through the entire drama of the Berlin Wall and had a lot of interesting things to tell us. She was like living history!! She was so patient with all of our questions and took the time to explain everything we asked. She was a really nice old lady, and told me to come back and live with her in Berlin and study at Humboldt University (where Einstein and Karl Marx studied!!). I considered it....

It was my last night in Europe :'( I packed up everything after dinner and made arrangements to get to the airport. I was flying out of Tempelhof, a tiny little airport in the heart of Berlin that is being closed down next year. It is the world's oldest commercial airports. In my infinite wisdom I left for the airport at 4am for my 6:55 am flight. I arrived there at about 4:40am...and the airport was definitely closed. I had to go all the way back to the hotel, went back to sleep for an hour and then tried again.

I was successful on my second try (and got rid of ALL my "extra" Euros on the way to and from the hotel). I hopped onto the plane to Brussels. I got to Brussels, went back through security, and got on the transatlantic leg of the flight (delayed by 2 hours of course).

I got to NY NY, and my aunts and uncles were nice enough to hire me a car from JFK into Jersey so I didn't have to deal with the buses after 14 hours of being in a plane.

And here I am, back in the US. It is pretty surreal, and it hasn't set in that I was gone for over 5 weeks. It went in the blink of an eye....


I will be uploading pictures as soon as I can, so keep checking back!! Tell me what you guys thought of the blog as a whole! I hope you liked it, because we probably spent a ton of US dollars trying to find the internet to keep you guys updated ;)

I wish it wasn't over, but there are a lot of other adventures ahead, and maybe we'll fire this back up one day for Europe round 2!

Be back to FL on July 7th!!

Cheers, Auf Weidersehen, Aur revior, Ciao, and Zbohem....
Kristyn

Vienna!

Well, we survived our first (and only) overnight train, and it actually wasn't bad at all...the trip would have been incomplete without at least one overnight ride. We were in a little couchette with four bunks, but they were pretty spacious and comfortable. It was definitely an easy way to take a 12-hour train ride!

We got to Vienna bright and early, and began by exploring the city. There is a main road on which most of the sightseeing lies, so we did the loop via a combination of walking and tram-riding. All the buildings are absolutely beautiful, and things like Parliment, City Hall, the Hofsburg Palace (which houses a ton of stuff, including the Vienna Boys Choir and the Lipizzaner Stallion training grounds) and the Museum Square were really impressive. Everything here is so big and grand, it makes our cities look so lame!

We took the metro out to the northern corner of the city to go see Vienna's famous ferris wheel, which is over 100 years old and still running. It now sits in the middle of probably the strangest amusement park we've ever seen; with all the bizarre rides and decorations, walking through the park was a sight in and of itself.

After finishing the loop, we cleaned up and headed off to the Vienna Opera! The opera in Vienna distributes tickets for the evening performance an hour before the show. They are standing-room seats, but actually a really good location in the theater, and for about $4, we couldn't pass up the opportunity! The show was a Wagner opera, and was really good except that the set and costumes were done in a really avant garde style (read: bizarre and distracting). However, the performance was very enjoyable, so we were glad to partake! We ended our Vienna evening with a traditional Viennese dinner at a popular local restaurant, complete with goulash and potato dumplings...all in all a great stop!

We just arrived in Prague, which so far has been very easy to get around and find sites (despite a language we can't understand with letters from an alphabet we don't know!) It just finished raining, so we're off to explore the sites!

See everyone soon!
Alison

Venica...and Vienna

After a very grueling train ride here (a 10 hour ride that was only supposed to take 4.5 hours) we finally made it to Venice last nite!! We dumped all of our stuff and ran to the city. We carefully explored the canals (it is SOOOOO easy to get lost here) and got our mandatory gelatto. We were only staying here for one nite, so today we went back into the city, and then to the island of Murano to look for their famous glass. I'm pretty glad we aren't staying here longer. Its a pretty city, but it is SO overrun with tourists, its driving me nuts.

Tonite we are for some reason voluntarily getting back onto a 12 hours train ride (our first, last and only overnight train!). We are going from Venice to Vienna and are staying there for one night before we go to Prague for 2 nites.

Hopefully all is well back in the states, all we hear about are floods and fires here, so stay high (and not too dry) over there!!

Only one week of travel left :'(
Love you guys!!!
Kristyn

When in Rome..

Hello from Roma!!

We have had a couple more awesome days in Florence! Yesterday we did a 23 kilometer bike tour of a vineyard, and we got to do wine tastings and olive oil tasting right where they bottle their products. The whole operation was run out of a castle built in 1199, and after a few grueling hours of biking we got a nice big lunch with wine, pasta, dessert, coffee, and more wine.....Then we had to get back on our bikes and try to get up a 900 meter hill. It is needless to say that not only did we not make it up the hill on our bikes, but that nobody in the tour group made it up. We all ended up walking the bikes (after about 50 meters, haha) and huffing and puffing up the giant hill. I guess we have been eating too much pizza (and pasta and gelatto, and foccaccia, and olives...). We didn't do a whole heck of a lot after that, and we spent a relaxing nite back out our "hostel."

We spent our last 2 nites in Florence camping in an olive grove near the Piazza Michelangelo, which is on a big hill that overlooks the whole city. We got to watch some amazing sunsets from up there, and camping wasn't even that bad!! We were in an aluminum frame tent (like a little hut) and it had a locking door and everything. It even had adorable little bunk beds inside, so it was barely even real camping. It was almost nicer than our last hostel, because as soon as the sun went down the tent was a lot cooler than a builing with no AC.

Today we tried to make it to Rome starting pretty early. We had heard there was going to be an Italian train strike, which apparently they do about once a month, leaving all the major intercity transportation in shambles for a while. We had the joy of trying to figure out how to get here with no regional trains running and no reservations for the EuroStar trains (the nice trains with big cushy seats and AC). We teamed up with about 6 other people from our campground that were also trying to get to Roma, and finally found a train that was actually leaving and going to Naples...We hopped on right as the doors closed and had to stand by the bathrooms on the train for the 2 hour ride!!

Oh well! It wasn't that bad considering it was one of the nicer trains (and it was airconditioned). And I don't know if you are sensing the common theme here, but I think I'm a pretty sad Floridian....Its so hot here!! We are taking about 3 cold showers a day. I don't even miss the AC that much, but I really, really, really, miss ice cubes. Why don't they drink cold beverages here?!?!? Its insane!!

Either way, we made it to Rome without too much trouble, and our hostel (although its a little scary here this time) is really close to the Colosseum. We went all through that today, and of course re-enacted several scenes from Gladiator (just for you Brittany!!). Tomorrow we have plans to wait in line for the Vatican, probably forever. We want to make sure to see everything here, but there is just so much to do! Tomorrow night we are also doing a pub crawl, so we may sleep in on Sunday instead of dealing with Rome on a Sunday :)

I can't believe I only have a little more than 2 weeks of all this left! I'm a serious travel addict now guys, and I think I'm going to be nomadic as much as possible after this. Seeing this many places is just so amazing.

Anyway, we still have a lot more gelatto to go find, so I must go explore more of Rome! Hope everyone is doing great - keep up the comments!

XOXO (on both cheeks),
Kristyn

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” -Jack Kerouac

Firenze!

So, after leaving Cinque Terre, we began our journey south further into Italy. We stopped off at Pisa and took the requisite tourist pictures, then continued into Florence. Everyone has spoken very highly of Florence, so we were pretty excited to get here.

Our first day here was pretty slow, just exploring the city and getting a feel for our area. Yesterday, we climbed to the top of the Duomo, which gave us a great view of the city. We also explored Florence's open-air market, grabbed some lunch, and cooled off with gelato in the city that made it famous. At the end of the day, we went up to the Piazza Michaelangelo to watch the sunset over the city. Today, we are getting ready to hit up the Galleria Accademia to see the world-famous David sculpture and explore that side of the city.

We have been hanging out with a group of kids from Colorado we met in Cinque Terre who are actually staying in our hostel here too. It's been fun to see the sites and hang out with a group for a change, and it allows everyone the flexibility to do what they want a little more.

The only downside about Florence so far is the unbearable heat and humidity. It's really draining to walk around in the heat, and almost nothing here is air-conditioned (ah, spoiled Floridians!) Needless to say, we've been consuming disturbing amounts of water and taking lots of cold showers. Rome is going to be just as bad.

Oh well, such is summer!
Alison

From the mountains to the sea...

Well, after four amazing days in Switzerland, including two very long hikes (yes, I said hikes) we pried ourselves off our alp, caught our cable car (and bus, and five trains) and headed to the Italian Rivera to arrive by sunset at Cinque Terre. We are staying at Riomaggore, the southernmost of the five villages, and one of the cutest of the five.

Today we walked the trail that goes between all five villages, (well, we made it to the fourth before we needed foccacia and a nap on a sunny rock) each of which are nestled in the cliffs overlooking a turquoise Mediterranean. The towns are comprised of a rainbow of stucco and flowers, and look so cute with their laundry lines and boat-filled harbors. Surrounding them are mountains filled with grapevines, lemons and olive trees, all of which overhang onto the rocky cliffs below.

Switzerland was amazing, but this area is absolutely beautiful in its own right (plus it was reassurring to see the ocean again!). This one will be even harder to leave behind!

Oh, how we love us some Italy!
Alison