Hjemme i U.S.A.!

Fourteen countries*, eleven official languages**, and eight currencies*** later, I'm home again.  I had to remind myself the first time or two I went to Starbucks not to start with jeg vil gerne have, and I still do a mental double-take when I need to excuse myself to a stranger.  And it's actually legitimately strange to see only green money (no joke!) and even more bizarre to think that I can't walk outside and get Israel-quality hummus at Hey Bagel!  I miss Thai Bo classes and my incredible roommates and my dried fruit stand on the Strøget.  On the upside, I have a lot of conversation fodder, a couple passport decorations (not so many thanks to the Schengen Agreement, but a Liechtenstein stamp and Danish and Russian visas aren't too shabby), and enough understanding of the European Union to process news about internal borders and Javier Solana and the Lisbon Treaty and Turkish accession and changing European identities.  (I'm still waiting for my transcript, but no matter.)  It was truly an incredible semester, from start to finish, with great people along the way.  And who knew I'd eat so well (except in Madrid)?  I think no matter where I could have been this semester, I would have had a wonderful time--be it back at Brown, or in Brussels like I'd originally considered, or taking the semester off as I'd also considered.  It's very good to be home, of course; I'm psyched to return to Brown in the fall (and not just because Dara and I will have hygge dinners and yak in our limited dansk) and I have a great summer ahead of me.  But I am so, so glad that this was my spring.

To everyone still reading at this point, tunsind tak for sticking with me this long!  I'll be back with pictures once those from Spain reach my computer.  In the meantime...vi ses til alle!

For anyone keeping score...

*Denmark, Sweden, Germany, England, the Netherlands, Belgium, Czech Republic, Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Russia, Norway, France, Spain

**Danish, Swedish, German, English, Dutch, French, Flemish, Czech, Russian, Norwegian, Spanish

***Danish kroner, Swedish kroner, Euros, pounds, Czech koruna, Swiss francs, roubles, Norwegian kroner

Pictures now, proper posts later.

Behold the complete photographic coverage of my semester abroad, minus the last six days!

København and beyond: En     To     Tre     Fire     Fem     Seks

Long Study Tour: Amsterdam and Brussels 

Spring Break: Prague     Prague & Vienna     Austria, Liechtenstein, Luzern     Grindelwald & Geneva

Russia: First     Second     Third

Scandinavia: Stockholm     Oslo

Paris: Un     Deux     Trois

Spain: Madrid     Barcelona

Special thanks to Nadine and Shaina for the Barcelona pictures!

Jeg skal hjem...

I'm so glad I flew home from Copenhagen, even if it was a bit counter-productive to do it this way.  Touching down on Tuesday night, I saw the windmills near the beach at Amager Strand, ordered yogurt at the train station på dansk, and (despite what I'd thought on my last night in the city) enjoyed my last Danish nightfall.  I found the Danhostel no problem and had a lovely conversation with a young Norwegian filmmaker who had one of the other beds in my room.

On Wednesday, my flight wasn't until 12:20, but I roused myself at seven that morning for a last goodbye to my city.  The hostel was basically in the same neighborhood as my apartment and DIS were, so I crossed Rådhusplasen and smiled bittersweetly along Vestergade and Studiostræde and the rest of the streets.  At one point, a woman asked me for directions--to Skindergade, no less!--and while my Danish isn't anywhere near good enough to provide directions, she spoke enough English for me to tell her just where to go!  I had a chocolate wienerbrød (Danish) from Skt. Peder's Bageri, picked up my favorite tomato bagel with pesto cream cheese from Bagels & Dreams for the plane (which turned out to be a good idea, as I'd forgotten to switch my in-flight meals to vegetarian), and, of course, one very last lille chai-cino from the Baresso near my apartment.  And with that, I caught my last S-Tog and jumped off when they announced, "Næste station, Kastrup Lufthavn."  I traded in a couple hundred kroner, several euro notes, and an unexpected 50 Czech crown note in for U.S. dollars, and smiled sadly at the Øresund windmills as Sjælland fell away for the last time...for a while, anyway.

España, numero cinqo!

After breakfast Tuesday morning, we were walking to a convent when we passed the Palau Guëll and decided to see the inside, particularly because it was free.  Not worth it!  The line moved fast enough, but they limit how many people can be inside.  And most of the inside is under heavy restoration, so all you can see at the moment is the cellar, which doesn't really have anything to see.  The place was designed by Gaudí, too, so that was a shame.  If you squint, you can see the funky, decorative chimneys on the roof, though.

We next headed to the Picasso Museum, where a protest by hotel workers on the way was temporarily distracting.  We also stopped in more souvenir shops--Jen wanted something for her stepdad, who is of partial Spanish/Basque descent; Nadine wanted a Spanish-language Wizard of Oz; and I was hoping for a Gaudí-style goblet that my family could use as a Kiddush cup.  We all met with success so quickly it was almost shocking!  Luckily, the shop that sold both me and Nadine Kiddish cups bubble-wrapped them well, and the package fit neatly into my purse.

The line at the Picasso Museum was a bit daunting, but it ended up not proving too terrible.  I think most of his really famous stuff is scattered--most of his stuff that I'd heard of, at least, I saw at MoMA in New York City and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and elsewhere.  The museum was neat, though, because it has a lot of his older work, most notably before the cubist style set in.  There was also a whole room of studies for his eventual reinterpretation of the Meninas, which, having seen the original just days before, was damn cool for me.  

We found more pintxos for a late lunch and high-tailed to another Gaudí building that a friend from home had recommended I see.  We got a bit turned around walking there from the Metro stop, unfortunately, but because of those of us with planes to catch, we wouldn't have had time to wait to go inside anyway.  The outside was gorgeous, though, and a quick swing through the gift shop gave us a sense of what we'd missed.  Thank goodness for postcards!  Back at the hostel, I grabbed my backpack, rearranged a few things, and hugged everyone goodbye.  I made my plane from Barcelona to Copenhagen without incident, fortunately, although I finished my last book along the way, leaving me with nothing to read on the overseas flight the next day.

España, numero quatro!

Monday dawned sunny and warm enough to have the pants-or-shorts and sandals-or-sneakers debates while getting ready; sneakers turned out to be a good idea, jeans less so, but no matter.  The hostel had a small breakfast consisting mostly of bread with jam and Nutella (fine by me!), after which we set out for Parc Guëll, a winding expanse of greenery accented with Gaudí statues, buildings, and balconies.  It's a bit outside of town (and the Hello BCN Hostel is pretty central) and requires a significant uphill walk, though this was made easier by a couple of escalators.  Although these escalators were set up in a neighborhood--kind of strange.

In any case, the park was incredible!  Gaudí is all over Barcelona, of course, but this was really our first look at him.  His style involves a lot of mosaics and tiles, accented in fabulous color, done on shapes that seem to take a traditional structure--a house, a column, a fountain--and reconfigure it just enough.  Curse my broken camera!  The others were awesome about letting me take extra pictures with their cameras, happily, so once they all get stateside again I shouldn't be too wanting for pictures.

We somehow ended up walking to a different Metro stop than the one we'd started at, and the walk took a while.  But everyone was getting along and we got a good look at a different part of town, complete with plenty of stops in gift shops.  We took the subway a ways back into town and found lunch--falafel for the two vegetarians, Spanish meaty things for the Simmons girls.  The next stop, just across a park, was a spectacular cathedral, also designed by Gaudí.  It's been under construction for over a century!  The outside seems mostly finished, and it's really fabulous, with soaring towers, sharp-featured statues, and colors like I've never seen on a cathedral, anywhere.  The fact that the construction was still ongoing was enlightening-- every cathedral in Europe that I've seen featured a story of long construction, but with this one, you realize that something so massive simply takes forever to build, regardless of the technology available, apparently.

Against the recommendations of the Canadian girls from the hostel, who'd been less than enthralled, we paid to see the inside and the lower-level museum.  The interior is much further from completion than the outside--but completely, totally, 100% worth seeing.  It was designed to be almost forest-like inside, with the columns acting as trees and the stained glass windows (some of which were completed, while others were simply clear windows at this point) shining with solid blocks of colors.  It seemed like the finished interior would be a rainbow of color and light--not enough to make me Catholic, but certainly enough to merit a return trip if they finish it in my lifetime.  It was really stunning.  The museum downstairs was cool, too-- besides a surprising number of models, maquettes, and casts of all different aspects of the building, there were tons of pictures of the construction (with English explanations!), descriptions of many of the Biblical references in the architecture, and an overall good sense of how all of this would end.

We took the Metro back to the central area, to the foot of Las Ramblas where the waterfront is.  By the large Mroador de Colón, we found a British tourist who, with some trouble on his part, got a picture of the four of us riding a giant lion statue, and then took a long loop around the harbor, with a coffee/ice cream stop, of course.  We eventually found a cable car to ride to the Montjuïc area across the water, which brought more spectacular views and gorgeous parks.  Reformation artwork I might be sick of, but the vistas and the gardens were hard not to love, particularly when enjoyed with an in-depth discussion of children's television and old-school Nickelodeon.  At one point we even found a path covered by an arched trellis which I felt the need to skip up, Sound of Music-style!

We eventually ended up back near Las Ramblas, where the guidebook sent us in search of Basque tapas.  We found the recommended place with little trouble and discovered the wonders of pintxos, which are basically small Spanish-style smørrebrød.  We ended up having a solid appetizer course there--the cheese combinations were too much to resist--and found another place for dinner where Nadine and I split vegetable paella and Spanish-style gnocchi.  In case it's not obvious, vegetarian eating is a lot easier in that part of the world.  By the time we'd walked back to the hostel, it was nearly 11, and we were all more exhausted than expected, so we waited our turns to check email and such and called it an early night.  This was just as well--Nadine and I both had early evening flights out the next day, so we wanted to get as much in beforehand as possible.  

España, numero tres!

I was up and out the door early on Sunday morning to make what was supposed to be a 9:15am flight to Barcelona, only to discover (after first going to the wrong terminal and having to spend four euroes just to get to the right one in the same airport) that my flight had been canceled.  An hour-plus line wait later (during which Andy came and went and departed), I'd been moved to the next available flight...at 6:30 that night.  This was probably the lowest moment of the semester, in retrospect--I was tired and alone and stranded (however temporarily) in a place where I didn't speak the language.  I missed my family and all the traveling really wears on you and it was just time to stop, it felt like.

On the upside, I had plenty to read in the meantime, and the airline gave me vouchers for two meals.  I had a leisurely breakfast and then decided that rather than spending all day sitting in the airport (I didn't have that much to read!), I'd go back into town.  The cathedral and the monastery would be closed on Sunday, but I remembered a popular Sunday flea market that my reliable guidebook had recommended.  Unfortunately, my guidebook was in my already-checked backpack, so I hopped on the Metro and got off near Placa Mayor, hoping for the best.  Things worked out, happily-- I encountered a group of Northeastern students heading to the same place.  A couple of them had maps and they all spoke Spanish (studying in Toledo, as it were), so I eventually got where I wanted to go.  The occupied a solid two hours as I looked around at everything from hardware to antiques to jewelry, artisan works, and clothing.  I ended up with a few sister gifts and a thick wooden bangle for myself, the price of which I successfully bargained down by two euros.

In a much better mood (bully for retail therapy!), I returned to the airport, enjoyed my free lunch, and polished off the rest of The World Without Us, my remaining New Yorkers, and a decent chunk of The Memory Keeper's Daughter before I finally landed in Barcelona.  By the time I reached the hostel, checked in, and found my friends, it was 9pm--fortunately, they'd waited for me to eat.  We went around the corner to a Spanish place for omelettes, bocadillos, and self-serve tap beer measured by table on a big screen while getting better acquainted, as no one really knew everyone.  We had me, Jen (whom I've known for five years), Nadine (from my Russia trip, who'd only met Jen once or twice), and Jen's friend Shaina (they both go to Simmons College).  

Back at the hostel, we settled in for the night.  Everyone had had an early morning--the two Simmons girls had been up at, like, four to get to Barcelona from Bergen, Norway.  The hostel itself, though, was fairly cool.  Unlike other stops I'd made, this was an actual youth hostel--you had to be no older than 24 to stay--and being on the ground floor was almost like a freshman dorm: a bar, computers for public use, couches and tables, and a ton of signs and photographs advertising the various activities the place offered, from cooking classes to bike tours to pub crawls.  The four of us shared a room of bunk beds with two girls from Canada that had great bathroom proximity and a decent view of the neighborhood to boot.

España, numero dos!

On Saturday, the goal to go to Toledo for most of the day--it's less than an hour away, and a part of the Madrid visit, apparently--was ruined in part by the busy and kind of confusing Spanish train system, not to mention the poor English of most of the people behind the counters.  We finally got tickets for a 1:15pm train, and set out to see a monastery (only open to Spanish-language tours, which were filled up anyway), an Egyptian temple (given to Spain by Egypt, very cool if random!), and the palace cathedral in the meantime.  It was when we arrived near the cathedral that we realized we really didn't have time to get back but made the mad attempt anyway.  The scramble was almost as ridiculous as the one leaving Vienna (minus baggage, fortunately) but less successful-- we watched our train pull away as we argued with the gate agents about the uncoolness of their closing the platform prior to the train's departure.

We ended up getting a spot of food and bus tickets--longer ride but half the price and an earlier departure--as they wouldn't refund the missed tickets.  I napped most of the way to Toledo, although not long enough to miss that the Spanish women sitting near me was only playing popular American music over her cell phone.  The bus turned out to be a better way into town, as the bus station eliminated the need for a twenty-minute uphill walk that arriving at the train station would've meant.  We spent several hours just walking the streets.  They were almost all narrow and a bit winding, many with religious and cultural hangings and tarps to protect pedestrians from the weather, all of which lent an air of authenticity and antiquity to the whole place, which we rather liked.  There were a couple of churches and two synagogues to wander into--the latter stops were particularly worth it to me, as one had been oddly converted into a chapel and the other had wooden-beam ceilings and Moorish designs.  Not as fabulous as the Spanish Synagogue in Prague, but as this one was, you know, actually Spanish, I didn't mind much.  Unfortunately, Andy's camera had a broken screen, so apparently most of the pictures of both temples didn't come out too well.

Toledo's palace had been converted into a museum, so we perused the old swords and things on display there and then spent a while admiring the ridiculous views at hand.  The old part of the town is atop a hill, so we had a look down at the rest as well as the surrounding countryside.  Like Madrid as seen from the palace, the buildings and streets appear to just stop and give way to extensive forests and farms.  At another overlook, we saw a river with an ancient, half-disintegrated bridge with a lower cliff to which Andy insisted on descending to.  Despite the random tourist ladies nearby screaming that he was being unsafe and asking me if the guy was nuts, he made it back safely and positively delighted.

We found food in a big square packed with people and banners and flowers and took a long and winding downhill walk to the train station.  I'm really glad we took the train back-- it was way faster than the bus, of course, and the train station itself was gorgeous--a small but open, airy space with stained glass and just the right amount of woodwork ornamentation.  We did a tapas dinner at Placa Santa Ana where I had more Manchego cheese and Andy tried about four different variations on Spanish meat followed by microbrewed beer at the bar next door, which came with a dish of nuts (which I like now, apparently).

España, numero uno!

Thursday morning began waaaay early: Emily's flight left Charles de Gaulle at eight-something, and our parents had insisted we be there three hours early, in case of multiple long security lines or baggage-checking issues, as they had encountered in the much less busy Copenhagen airport when visiting me.  This plan meant a 4:45am shuttle from the hotel--we were up earlier than the Paris Metro, and the transit workers were about to be striking anyway--and we ultimately beat most of the airport employees to the airport.  Turns out that they don't keep those maze-lines set up overnight.

We were parted by six, so I checked my bag and settled at my gate with coffee, a croissant, several New Yorkers, and The World Without Us.  After several naps, an article on Michelle Obama, and the discovery that microscopic bits of plastic are literally everywhere, I finally hopped on a plane (it wasn't until 11) and arrived in Madrid!

Andy wasn't set to arrive until after dinner that night, and Carlon, a friend from home studying there, was still in class, so I checked into the hostel and took myself to the Thyssen-SE:Fesf? Museum, which had a great ground-floor collection of modern art, particularly Picasso and O'Keefe.  The rest went by a bit faster--I was a little spent on nineteenth-century Dutch art by this point in my travels--and ended up sitting in the sun on the grass by the Prado Museum while waiting for Carlon for a bit.  She took me to the Placa Mayor for dinner, where I had both my first taste of authentic tapas and the discovery that eating vegetarian in this city was going to be a bit harder than it had been elsewhere.  We had a good session of catch-up and I got a few recommendations of what to do in the city over Manchego cheese and a Spanish omelette (which had ham in it the first time around) before she had to meet up with some friends and I headed back to the hostel before it got too dark.  Andy arrived within the hour, happily, and was thrilled to go to a bar next door and end up with a free tapas by buying beer (it's a thing in Spain).  I crashed pretty quickly afterwards--no more early wake-up calls for at least another couple days!

Friday found us croissants, churros and café con leche for breakfast on the way to the Metro, followed by the Reina Sofia, which is home to Picasso's Guernica and a lot of interesting contemporary art.  I think we were in the room with Guernica for a good ten minutes: it's gigantic, and the colors (black, white, and gray) were stark and vivd.  There was an adjacent exhibit of sketches and studies for the work, too.  The rest of the works were largely by Spanish artists, and their descriptions were in Spanish, which lessened the helpfulness of my Modern Art History class from sophomore year, but Yves Klein popped up again, as did several other familiar names.

We had lunch at a busy sandwich place, where Andy continued his love affair with new and foreign foods while I thanked the tourist industry gods that someone had stuck a veggie sandwich on the menu.  (And yet I could get lox and grilled vegetables all over Russia?  Go figure.)  After lunch we went walking around the central area of town, checking out famous buildings and parks, like Retiro.  We eventually ended up at the Palac Real, Madrid's answer to Versailles and Schönbrunn and the rest.  While I rented an audio tour guide, Andy ran into a quintet of high school friends, whom we saw again the next day at the subway stop by our hostel, randomly enough.  The palace was predictably ornate and lovely; the Spanish look differentiated a bit from elsewhere in central and western Europe, which was interesting.  Some of the smaller rooms also had specific themes that tended away from the  requisite Asian/Chinese look that at least one room in every European palace seems to need, and the classical portraiture was comparatively more original.

It was raining a bit at this point, so we stopped for chocolate con churros on the way back to the Metro.  The treat is churros dipped in the thickest hot chocolate you can imagine; of course, with just three churros for one cup of chocolate, we had plenty left over for straight drinking.  We headed back to the center of town and met Carlon at the Prado-- it has free entrance after 6pm most days!--and lazily perused Goyas and Velasquezes for a couple of hours, including the Meninas and more Dutch works (for a small country, they had a lot of output) while wishing we'd kept up better with our European history teacher (me and Carlon) and snickering at my hiccups, which were particularly loud and echo-y that evening (Andy and Carlon).  Andy and I went to Placa Mayor for dinner--he dug into chicken paella and shared his gazepacho while I had pizza--and explored the pedestrian streets before crashing for the night.

Cinq jours Parisienne (cinqiéme)

For our last day in Paris, we started back on the Ile de la Cité for Notre Dame.  The interior was lovely but, I admit, not terribly distinguishable from the interior of, say, St. Vitus in Prague or Stephensdom in Vienna or several others.  But the outside!  We waited in line for a while with a friendly Jewish girl from Toronto and ascended.  I have a major problem with little closed-in stone spiral stairwells, but once we made it up I was a much happier camper.  The views were incredible, and the close-up look at the stone work was great.  There was one view where you could see the bridge connecting the two islands and those connecting each island to the rest of the city.  Just stunning.  They also had Victor Hugo quotes, both related to the famed hunchback and otherwise, posted everywhere, and we got a couple of really cute shots in the belltower itself.

We had a leisurely lunch over Moroccan-style crêpes (picture a dark, almost whole-wheat kind pancake) and went on a small but furious and ultimately successful hunt for the perfect chocolate pastry for Emily.  We did some good wandering-shopping along the Seine on the way back to Ile de la Cité while waiting for Saint-Chapelle to open; I found an antique map of Nice for Andy and Emily bought an Asterix book for her French teacher.

Back on the Ile, we went to Saint-Chapelle.  I'd had a friend in ninth grade who had raved about this particular church a couple of times, and for some reason his enthusiasm about the stained glass had stuck with me.  So we went, and I would just like to take this moment to say thank you to Jake Chang.  Europe has a hell of a lot of churches, and the inside of this one is far and away the most incredible, even having seen St. Petersburg's Church of the Savior-on-Spilled-Blood and even having seen the Roskilde Cathedral on Sjælland.  The first floor has the vaulted Gothic arches as you'd expect, but they're all painted in bright primary colors with little detailed patterns.  Upstairs, the stained glass just takes your breath away.  The 13 windows are nearly floor-to-ceiling, and each depicts a different book of the Bible in great detail.  The surrounding walls, ceiling, pulpit, and reliquary are all equally fantastic in decoration.  I couldn't stop taking pictures, and when I finally did, we just sat and stared for a while.

Our last stop was the Luxembourg Gardens, and we decided to walk there.  On the way, we both finally had fantastic purse-shopping success, so now I have a beautiful and mature bag from fashionable Paris!  The Gardens were a perfect last tourist stop afterwards; big and beautiful, and manicured enough to be lovely without being overdone.  (There was also a gigantic golden sculpture of a bald head that required a bit of attention.)  We sat for a while and took in the gardens, and the fabulous time in the city, and everything in between.

And it wasn't over yet!  Andrew met us not too far away for dinner, where Emily finally got to try rosé and Andrew sent us on a quest for what he'd deemed the best crêpes in the city (they may well have been).  We walked so much...for five days, we got to see a ton of the city!  And the company could hardly have been better (unless, of course, our sister Jill could've come as well).  All in all, a fabulous time.  We turned in early (wakeup Thursday was at 4am so Em could catch her plane), but it was almost hard to be pumped about Spain after such a great, great trip to France.  Almost.

Cinq jours Parisienne (quatriéme)

Tuesday, like Monday, started a bit later than we'd intended, but I honestly don't think an earlier arrival at Versailles would've made the line too much shorter.  It wasn't a painful wait, really, just long-- fortunately, we'd stocked up on a baguette plus cheese and fruit in our hotel's neighborhood (goat cheese with craisins? Wondrous).  We finally got in and did the tour, and wow.  Just, wow.  My bleeding-heart liberal self isn't sure how anyone could justify building something like Versailles with peasants starving in the streets of Paris, but at least they did it in style.  Lots of style.  Solid audio tour, too-- not too much information, but enough.

The gardens were, for me, the really worthwhile part.  In every direction we wandered, from finding a lunch spot to a bathroom, to Marie Antoinette's mini-palace and -village areas, it seemed like the land just kept going, with manicured lawns and topiary and lakes and more wow factor.  We got a few great sister-pictures from miscellaneous English-speaking tourists, although it's very much worth noting that Emily's French was good enough to carry on whole conversations that I could understand most of but definitely not participate in.  Bully for M. Warsaw back in Norfolk!

After we saw Marie Antoinette's area and discovered we had two broken cameras on our hands, we started heading back, and the fact that her mini-peasant village was closed for restoration speeded that up a bit.  After a good nap on the ride home, we had a bit of downtime at the hotel before we met up with Andrew and his friend Becca near the Ecole Militaire, where we met up with Andrew's other grandparents, who kindly took us all out for a wonderful dinner.   Afterwards, Andrew and Becca showed us to a very cool café-bar with old foosball tables tacked to the wall, a live baby chilling at the bar with its patron-mother, and a very hygge atmosphere (particularly considering we weren't in Denmark!), down to the candles.  The conversation continued for several hours until they realized they had classes the next day and we called it a night.

Cinq jours Parisienne (troisiéme)

Monday morning we booked it to the Louvre, though things like sleeping delayed that a bit.  We had croissants and coffee on line, and proceeded to spend the next 4 1/2 hours getting a bit lost throughout the museum.  We did the Mona Lisa, of course, but it was so crowded in that room that "Liberty Leading the People" evinced much more of a reaction from us both.  We also loved Renoir's "La Lecture," which is of two young girls reading to each other.  It was a great visit, though there were points where we had to collapse on an open stairwell to rest our very weary legs.  Very, very big museum.  I think we managed to see the whole thing, minus maybe a room or two of Russian paintings.  

We met up with Andrew for lunch following a quick exploration of Ile St. Louis.  He wove us through enough neighborhoods to end up near the Sorbonne, which is where we found a small park and quickly demolished (collectively) two baguettes and plenty of cheese and fruit.  

As if we hadn't had enough art earlier in the day, the three of us wandered over to the Pompidou, where the modern art museum proved as awesome as any other I've been to (and there have been lots)-- more Serra, a room made of felt, a section on design (how Scandinavian!), and some Yves Klein made me a happy girl.  Emily and I spent about an hour over coffee in the café afterwards, mostly unable to walk.  We did end up walking, though, in the surrounding neighborhood.  We weren't really hungry for dinner, so we had crêpes again and searched for a black purse for Em.

The night ended with a screening of "Casanova" in the hotel-- I highly recommend the new iTunes rental service and the very kind (if not English-proficient) staff of the hotel, who kept an eye on the computer in mid-download while we looped around the block and had apples as the rest of our dinner.

Cinq jours Parisienne (deuxiéme)

Day 2 in Paris began quite peacefully, with coffee (apparently I like coffee now?), fresh raspberries, and croissants in the Marais district.  We were a bit determined to work in some French fashion, so we wandered in and out of several boutiques (including one called Allison)-- Emily found a few blouses--and then through an extensive outdoor market that included any kind of food you can think of, Tupperware, and artisan work.  The skies opened and closed in turns, but Em had a beret going, so things worked out.  We did lunch in the Jewish area--falafel!--and found the first of many gifts for Jill at a jewelry shop.  

In the afternoon, our first stop was the Museé d'Orsay, where I managed to avoid hiccuping in the atrium (it's a converted train station), and our series of pictures of Emily posing like various statues began.  I think my favorite part was an exhibition downstairs that had scale models of the Paris opera house and its sets, along with a nineteenth-century model of the city, located under a floor area of Lucite.

We went to Montmatre for the evening: Baz Luhrman's Moulin Rouge is one of my favorite movies, so I had to go, and Emily was plenty game--a pivotal scene in Amelie unfolds in front of Sacre Coeur!  We discovered what a "charlotte of tuna" is over dinner, saw the Moulin de la Galette (closed) and the Moulin Rouge (bit of a letdown, but no matter), and made it to Sacre Coeur well before the sunset we intended to see from its steps.  We used our time wisely, taking a loop through the church, down the hill and back up, stopping for pictures of things like Emily in midair or me barrel-rolling down the grass.  We sat on the steps for a while, but the sketchy beggars were starting to get a bit sketchier as it got later-- I got rid of one by speaking Danish--and so returned to the hotel, with plenty of Art Nouveau posters in tow for friends and Jill.

Cinq jours Parisienne (premiére)

On a bright and early Saturday morning, two sisters rendezvoused at Charles De Gaulle Airport after four long months apart.  There was some confusion regarding the appointed meeting place, as one sister both lacked a cell phone and, having arrived in a different terminal, was unable to meet the other sister at baggage claim, as agreed upon previously, and unable to tell her as much.  Fortunately, this didn't hinder things too much.

After additional confusion regarding just where to go and some teamwork with a friendly fellow DIS student named Donovan who was on my flight, we managed to catch the appropriate train into the city and checked into our grandly titled budget stay, the Hotel de Paris.  The next priority was lunch, wherein Emily enjoyed eggplant manicottis filled with brie (despite not liking either component beforehand) and kindly listened to my exuding about all things awesomely Danish.  From lunch, we pretty much just walked for a while, until our cousin Andrew, who's currently studying in Paris with Stanford, called us with a meeting place-- Ile de la Cité!

After the initial excitement of simply being in Paris--in front of Notre Dame, no less--with siblings and cousins and so forth, Andrew walked us to Bethailles, apparently a famous ice cream café, then through the Louvre's courtyard, around the Tullierie Gardens, and to L'Orangerie, which is a small museum home to a dozen or so Monet murals.  We're talking gasp-worthy, stare-inducing, very large if slightly blurry water lilies of all sorts, plus a weeping willow or two.

Andrew left to meet with some visiting friends (he has us, said friends, and his maternal grandparents in at that point!), so we walked the length of the Champs-Elyseés, stopping at the Grand Palais for Richard Serra's Monumenta exhibition (very interesting) and at l'Arc de Triomphe.

We re-met with Andrew, now with his Stanford friends in tow, for dinner, after which we took the Metro to Trocadero, where Andrew said we'd get the best view of the Eiffel Tower.  We so did, starting on the balcony overlooking it atop a hill.  We watched the sunset from there in between lots of pictures and oohs and aahs when we discovered the lights sparkle for a few minutes every hour after dark.  I've discovered that certain major sites, when see for real, are a bit of a letdown--you've seen the pictures, etc., so that's sort of that.  The Eiffel Tower, let it be said, was not one of those.

We walked around the park leading down to the tower itself but got slightly lost trying to find the closest Metro station, so we hauled back up and were waylaid when a bathroom stop turned into a free visit to an architecture museum.  We finished off the experience with Nutella crêpes on the subway home and called it an early night-- I'd been up since five at that point, and Emily was working off of 3 hours of sleep over two days.

Vi ses i morgen, København!

And thus ends my semester in Copenhagen.

Classes wrapped up, exams occupied most of the last week (minus a trip to the Botanical Gardens in perfect weather again), and now I'm all packed to meet Emily in Paris in about 11 hours!  To recap the recap-worthy parts of my last days in the city...

Friday afternoon brought, along with the end of classes, a roommate trip to La Glace for our last pastries-- very worthwhile, of course, and the company was hard to beat.  That night found Dara and I too restless to do the work we should've, so we took a rather long walk, all the way to the Little Mermaid statue.  This resulted in barefoot climbing on the rocks around her and a photo session with her and a Brown t-shirt...the Campaign for Academic Enrichment likes that kind of thing, apparently.  Pictures to follow, possibly from multiple sources.

We took a short bus ride to Fælledparken, where there was some sort of Carnivale celebration going on.  It turned out to be pretty basic-- a few rides, mostly a lot of food and merchant booths, with some DJed music and various Brazilian flags.  We looped about and, as it was early yet, walked home, totaling about 4.5 miles for the night.  (Go us.)

The weekend was otherwise all work-filled, mostly because the final for my Human Rights in Africa class (which was through Københavns Universitet) was an oral final with a synopsis and 1,000-pages-of-reading bibliography, and I didn't have a great idea of how to approach it.  This worrying fortunately paid off, though, as I can now dazzle you all with my scholarly-literature-based arguments for genocide intervention.  I also wrapped up a Danish oral exam, an essay exam for Migrants, Minorities, and Multiculturalism, and a 10-pager on EU language policy for European Politics (thank you, Professor Stultz from Brown, without whom I'd've had to write about Turkey like everyone else).

Tuesday night, in the midst of learning about English dominance as a working language and the failures of the statist system, the four of us roommates put together a little dinner with our remaining food.  It was Jackie's last night (she starts her internship on Monday in New York, so she had to get back), so we had pasta with vegetables and pancakes with blueberries and marveled over how ridiculously lucky we've been to have landed in the group we did.  I'm the next one to go-- Yuri and Dara are around until Sunday.

On Thursday, I went straight from handing in my EU paper to Høje Taastrup, where I'd volunteered to go speak to an English class at a Danish højskole.  This ended up being nearly two hours (with a break) that flew by as eighteen-year-olds peppered me with questions ranging from "Have you ever been to spring break?" (as in Florida) to "Have you been to see the Little Mermaid?" (yes, see above) to "What do you think of carbon emissions?" and everything in between.  I did my best to answer honestly and thoroughly, pulled out a few good stories, and, in retrospect, probably used some big words.  To be fair, some of those kids have really good English, which I guess is what you get when you've been learning it intensely since the fourth grade.  I asked them a few questions about what they thought of Americans-- nothing surprising there, though I liked how enthusiastic they were about southern California.  Danes do love their warm weather--my Danish teacher Nina claims this wouldn't be the case without the never-ending winters, of course.  Go figure!

It's so interesting to me how much the rest of the world can be focused on the U.S.  I mean, I'm used to the American outlook, being American, but you'd think someone from, say, Denmark would be more interested in Denmark and not in a place 6 or 8 time zones out.  But they watch Cartoon Network and complain that they didn't touch war for 450 years until Iraq came along and have not only McDonald's but also Burget King and KFC (all on the same Strøget block, no less).  Not so different, are we?

After that experience, I met Dara at the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Ishøj.  It's not a huge museum, but the collection was great, as were the café muffins, particularly the free chocolate one the guy gave us just in case we didn't like the rhubarb-that-we-thought-was-cranberry version.  We then decided to be a bit spontaneous and, after a good walk back to the train station, ended up in Køge, a little town at the end of the purple S-Tog line pronounced "coo," which a friend of mine from my EU class had recommended for wanderings.  We discovered that there really isn't much there (aside from some Danish children playing in -- no joke -- a sand-filled dumpster on the street), so we made it back to the train and home just in time for the time on our original stamped tickets to expire.

Next came a quick turnaround for dinner at Café Retro, where my last chai there came with a cinnamon star atop the foam, and I showed Jen a few more wondrous things her PowerBook can do.  The three of us, plus two other friends of Jen's, took the Metro to the beach at Amager Strand, where we toasted champagne to the sunset and the end of a fabulous semester (Jen's brilliant plan).  This was followed by a trip to Heidi's, a pub down the street, and the stor Hoegaarden I'd meant to try for a while.  Ridiculously sized glass, that.

Today started bright and early, as Dara and I had a whole day planned for ourselves.  Thai Bo filled our last trip to the gym, and then the Statens Museum for Kunst followed a mid-morning Baresso run.  The museum had a great modern art collection-- you've got to love a city that has three of those within the public transit system.  We tried to do smørrebrød for lunch, but the takeout place that I'd been trying to find for a second time all semester didn't have any veggie options, so we ended up enjoying the fine products of Bagels & Dreams around the corner.  (Tomato bagel with pesto cream cheese--perfect!)

The afternoon brought the DIS closing ceremonies, which were surprisingly sweet, and a candid of me on the short study tour in Lubeck showed up in the slide show.  Yuri also nabbed a couple of awards, which is doubly impressive given that they only doled out about six!  The rest of the afternoon was packing and organizing travel stuff, plus dinner at Café Katz and a stop at the DIS-sponsored party at Celsius Club at Rådhusplasen.  I ducked out early to finish packing (which I have) and take a stab at an almost-decent night's sleep.  My plane leaves quite early tomorrow morning, but there's Paris and a sister and my cousin Andrew on the other end!

I promise to reflect more on all these experiences in good time.  I also promise to post photos of everything I've blogged about since my birthday or so.  Both of these things, however, will likely have to wait until I'm back Stateside.  In the meantime, vi ses til alle, og jeg elsker Danmark!

Eksamen.

It's been a very low-key week since last I updated, more or less unfortunately.  Exams and the like will do that to you.  On the other hand, I'm done this time next week, so...

I did manage to spend several hours studying at the absolutely gorgeous Botanical Gardens on Saturday.  The weather has been practically perfect for the last week or two--60s, sunny, no humidity--so it was a rather delightful experience, minus, you know, reading about rampant corruption in African society.  When that closed (who closes a garden at 6pm when the sun doesn't set until nearly 9?), I got a muffin and continued the al fresco gig at Nazaza Coffee on the Strøget.  And I still didn't quite get all my reading done.

Sunday brought a more-intense-than-usual Thai Bo class and much research for my Environmental History paper.  I'm not a fan of the class (history, I mean, not Thai Bo), but we did get to pick our own topics, and I like mine--the impact (or lack thereof) of radical environmentalists in Europe.  Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Earth First!, the Animal and Earth Liberation Fronts, you name it, it's probably in there succeeding only marginally.  So that's been interesting, in a I'd-rather-be-outside way.  It (as well as the last few class meetings) dominated most of this week, though.

The exception was yesterday, when my EU politics class had our wrap-up event: the fabled Simulation Game.  It wasn't as Model UN-esque as I'd hoped, but my group (as the Czech Republic) made a very respectable showing, and we even managed to swing some decent funding for rural development.  The Sim Game was generally fun, I guess, but the whole thing might've had fewer dull undertones had they picked a more stimulating topic than the Common Agricultural Policy.  Other semester, they've debated environmental policy or Turkish accession.  We got dairy quotas and landholding thresholds.  But we also got wine and very, very good mini-sandwiches at the reception afterwards, so I daresay I'll live.  (For some reason, I only seem to like Danish lox.  Never liked it at home, didn't enjoy the Norwegian variety, but the Danes do smoked salmon really, really well, apparently.)

Wednesday also brought my roommate and fellow Brown student Dara's birthday, which the four of us celebrated by taking her to the Post Office Café, which is a lovely eatery literally atop the Post Office Museum.  You take the elevator all the way up, and it's like you're in the Great Glass Elevator above the city!  The day was gorgeous, so we ate outside on the roof; we caught the changing guards marching down the street from above and shared a very rich chocolate cake accompanied by a very small Danish flag.  Birthdays are fun.

Now, of course, it's back to work.  My Greenpeace et al paper is due in about 23 hours, and it needs to be 10 pages long.  Oy.  Time to move into Baresso or Café Retro or something.  Wish me luck!

Blomster og Maj Dag i København

'Tis spring at last!  Granted, it's still kind of rainy and cool, but it's that much less so than it was in the winter, so it's hard to complain.

I got to keep the parents for Monday, Tuesday, and part of Wednesday after our trip to Oslo.  In between classes, we wandered up to the Little Mermaid and the nearby park, strolled on the Strøget, and chilled with Niels Bohr (or his bust, anyway) at Frue Plads.  We also went to the ballet to see the lovely but tragic Onegin, which featured some impressive pointe stamina and gorgeous sets with oversized lace and a magic mirror.  Tuesday night, we did dinner with the roommates plus Jen (the virtual fifth roommate) at the Atlas Bar, and ended up staying there talking for so long that they all but kicked us out.  

Wednesday morning brought a trip to Rosenborg, the royal summer palace within walking distance from home (as so many things are).  We wandered the gardens (which featured the usual lovely rows of trees and flowers, plus an odd art piece with a tree growing out of a block of concrete on wheels) and popped into the castle when it opened at 11.  The rooms were ornate and contained some nutty artifacts, but I again discovered just how lower-key Danes are compared to much of the rest of Europe.  Also, the displays didn't feature anything to read aside from a map with a line about each room; this nicely removed the pressure of reading a bunch of things you won't remember anyway.  In the cellars, we admired the Crown Jewels, which, though perhaps fewer in number than, say, the House of Windsor, I found no less spectacular.  Also, I do love that every Christian monarchy gets its own Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.

After splitting a Wednesday snail from Skt. Peder's Bageri (a giant pastry that can only be had there once a week), I bid farewell to the parents (and a good amount of my stuff), and headed with Jackie to the Copenhagen police station for a presentation and some demonstrations.  I overestimated the amount of sleep in my system and missed a decent chunk of the presentation on protest procedures (although I did note that beating rioters was legal until 1993), but the demonstrations were fun, if short!  We observed a guy donning full body armor--he looked like a cross between a baseball catcher and a Transformer before the outer shell went on--and a group showing how to restrain someone with (apparently) fire extinguisher foam.  Nice.

Thursday was May Day, which Denmark observes with an all-inclusive day off (even the gym was closed!) and a carnival of sorts at Fælledparken in Østerbro near the soccer stadium.  A number of workers are currently on strike over a wage dispute, so there were a fair number of Communist Party types out, too.  I bussed over with the roommates, but the rain was bad enough that we walked through for about half an hour before catching the bus back.  Definitely glad we went, though, particularly when I found I could understand a lot of the signs about workers' rights and "Rød 1 Maj."

Next week is the last week of classes here, which for me includes the all-important EU Simulation Game for my European Politics class, followed by a week of finals and term papers and Danish oral exams.  It should be busy, though I plan to get to a couple more museums in that time as well.  Closing ceremonies and one more party on DIS come Friday the 16th, and I ship out to Paris to meet Emily the next morning!  This semester has gone by awfully fast...

Norge og forældre!

My parents are the best, really.  No sooner did Andy return to Cambridge than Mum and Dad appeared on our doorstep, bearing Luna Bars and some abnormally large birthday cards from the sisters!  I had class for much of Friday, when they got in, but we spent the afternoon catching up over salads (no croutons, please) before catching an evening flight to Oslo.

Norway, or at least its capital, is pretty awesome.  I don't think it's quite as low-key as Copenhagen-- it reminded me of a scaled-down Brussels, for some reason--but we were definitely in Scandinavia and thus it was definitely beautiful.  Saturday began with a walk through the Vigelund Sculpture Garden, which provoked important questions like, "How did one man make so many incredible statues?"  "Do babies really grow on trees?"  and "Why aren't my sisters here to pose in front of the gate with three female silhouettes?"  (Dad has pictures of my attempt to do this solo; tell him to email them to me so I can post them!)

After the sculptures, we attended the Norwegian Changing of the Guard.  The palace, like Amelianborg here, has no fences, just a few guards in slightly ridiculous period costumes.  I never quite figured out which guards were switch with which, but it didn't really matter-- we were treated to a show of very straight marching and standing (and the guards' penguin waddle to maintain their lines) by guys with oversized green epaulets and major hat-feather action going on.

After lunch, we made our way to the Münch Museum.  For the record, it does not house a copy of The Scream, which was a bit disappointing, but it does have numerous other lovely works and a real lithograph machine.  It also has a great little café with tables perfect for a very tired and vaguely sick dad and daughter to nap for a solid hour.  Good times.  We did dinner at a funky place with excellent salads and less excellent chai near the university and were planning to call it an early night until we turned on the TV.  Bored of an endless BBC segment on the horrors of bottled water, we stumbled onto a mostly-English documentary on Chernobyl (Saturday was the 22nd anniversary of the disaster), followed by the movie The Mexican, which among other things answers the question of what happens when you put Julia Roberts, James Gandolfini, and Michael Cerveris in the same car.

Sunday morning, we wandered to the waterfront and caught a ferry across a very foggy fjord to the Kon-Tiki Museum, which celebrates the achievements of Thor Heyerdahl, a Norwegian best known for sailing papyrus and reed boats very long distances to prove that early people could have done it, too.  It was a fun museum, with a couple of the original boats, lots of memorable information, a walk-through cave, and a very friendly land-shark wandering about.  We followed this with a visit to Oslo's Viking ship museum, which, unlike Roskilde's, did some reconstruction work (and also has much more complete findings).  So two of the three ships had sides and decorations and curlicued hulls, and the back section had a ton of artifacts, including three gorgeously intricate sleds and some thousand-year-old textiles.  Apparently Vikings, like Egyptians, believed that after death you could, in fact, take it with you.

We enjoyed a delicious Passover-breaking lunch at the Nobel Peace Prize Museum's café.  (The goat cheese-on-French-bread salad was too good to resist.)  The museum itself was kind of amazing, too.  A little unnecessarily high-tech, but fun to be sure.  How can a museum be unnecessarily high-tech, you ask?  Try a fiber-optic garden with motion-sensitive displays on all the prize-winners (including Al Gore and the IPCC), followed by a projected, touch-operated 'storybook' on Alfred Nobel, followed by digital wallpaper that sorts and details all the prize-winners' work and the Nobel Committee and awards process.  Nifty gift shop, too!

We headed back to the airport after the Nobel museum, lingered over more chai and Taunte Bev's Passover granola (which is amazing even when it's not Passover), and stopped to demonstrate proper downhill luggage trolley riding technique to an amused Dad and a slightly skeptical Mum.  Then it was back to Copenhagen, which Mum, who studied on DIS in the spring of 1978, now refers to as "our city."