and are you getting somewhere? [entries|friends|calendar]   (or did you get lost in amsterdam) userinfo ] emerson's castle well ]

they're singing deck the halls, but it's not like christmas at all. [fri 12 dec 03|04:00pm] i have two finals tomorrow and finished a kind of shitty final paper today, and i'm developing a cold, hence i'm in a kind of shitty mood, but italy certainly isn't shitty so maybe writing about it will help me feel better. florence was that third and last of our group excursions. and florence is far away. now, i love all eighty of these other people i've been living in a confined space with for the last three months - wait, no i don't. and i thought traveling overnight in a couchette with all of them would be a pain in the ass, but it ended up going alright. we took the couchette from dusseldorf to milan, and in the early morning train from milan to florence we got our first views of beautiful italian and tuscan scenery, although our heads get nodding towards our chests in sleepiness, preventing us from fully appreciating it. after we checked into our hotel - no wait, let me focus on the hotel for a second, because it kicked ass. kerri, sam, erin and i roomed together, and being as it was a hotel, we had separate beds (no bunks!) that were made for us, our own shower, and a TERRACE connected to the few rooms next to us. a TERRACE. let me repeat this. i could step outside our room and look down to the courtyard below and over lovely red shingled roofs that i grew to love. it was all horribly romantic and i was in love with italy already. so, kerri, sam, pam and i got lunch at a lovely restaurant down the street that we ended up eating at twice, marking my first pasta of italy. which i continued to eat almost every meal for the rest of the 9 days.. so to interrupt this, i'm listening to hanson's christmas album at the moment, and everyone who owns this album (which everyone obviously does) is already aware of this, but a few of the tracks they wrote themselves, and most of them are really lovely and sentimental christmasy like. but the track that just came on is called "everybody knows the claus," at least so i believe. and the music, the melody, everything, is honestly one of the catchiest, wonderful christmasy pop-y songs i've ever heard. but the lyrics are just absolutely ridiculous. (maybe you can catch this from the title.) it's basically about how santa claus likes to eat a lot of junk food - there's actually a line that goes "don't forget the donuts" that they kinda yell - and it's really hard to not laugh out loud, or at least smirk to yourself, while listening to it, but it's so damn catchy and fun sounding that you really want to. but the lyrics really make it hard for me to defend them, which i always do.. i really don't know what they were thinking. another favorite line of mine goes, "now don't get me wrong, he's a nice guy, but you don't want to get on his bad side." i mean. my. so yes, firenze! we wandered around the city for a little while before we met up with everyone again and split into groups, where we got the super-fast-history-of-florence lecture from a hot teacher. he eventually led us down to the duomo, which is one of the most impressive cathedrals i've seen, mostly because the facade is so different from most cathedrals. it's all white and pastel designs and statues. yeah. i obviously can't describe it so anyway. later that night, we all went as a group to a paid-by-dulcia meal at another awesome restaurant, made especially excellent by the fact that each table got their own bigass bottle of red wine. we sat with allie, ben, and carey p., and considering all of us except for my weird roomates are big fans of the red wine, once we drained ours we passed our glasses over to the next table to get refills from theirs. hah. it was an especially good time because some of the people that don't normally get drunk - including teachers - indeed did get drunk, and we heard that a bunch of the drunk teachers took a bunch of the drunk students to a discoteque where they spent a good portion of the night. ah, emerson college, best educational institute ever. a lot of craziness went on in florence, actually, at least that i heard about, none of which i actually partook in because i am, uh, boring. the next day we spent at two museums, san marco and the uffizi. i'm sure we saw a lot of fascinating art but i can't remember any of it so there you go. oh, wait, i'm sorry. we saw "the birth of venus" by botticeli, which was cool, even though i know i totally just botched his name. i actually can't remember much about this day, other than i was moody and stayed at the hotel that night writing and reading instead of going to the club with everyone else. a+ for me again. the last full day in florence sticks out the most in my mind, because a group of us went to the palazzi piti in the morning, where we roamed around the boboli gardens. which are, quite simply, the most beautiful gardens i've ever been to in my life. and considering it was november, it's not even that there were lots of flowers out, just the whole landscape.. it's enormous, first of all, the higher you walk on the paths, the better view you have of this wonderful tuscan landscape, all these misty mountains, and that's what i think of when i think of florence. people scattered to different directions that night, and carey p. and i stayed behind an extra night. we went to the museum accademia where michelangelo's david is, and then found our hotel. due to the lack of hostel availability, we had booked a budget hotel, which ended up being wonderful. i don't feel like describing it right now, but it was wonderful, so full of charm. had another lovely italian dinner and a good night of sleep. the next morning while carey waited in a cafe for me i climbed to the top of the duomo, which had 500 something steps, inbetween the dom and the belltower in brugge. maybe it was because i had just woken up, but it was pretty rough. i was sweating like a pig, in fact. but it's alright, when i go back home i'll have thighs of steel from climbing all these stairs and all the pretty girls will be jealous. or uh. maybe. then we hopped on a train to roma. which, when i write about it, will hopefully be more amusing than this was. 4 love letters|comment

it's become so obvious. you are so oblivious to yourself. [wed 10 dec 03|12:01am] so, after a few days of rest sam and i headed back to central europe, this time headed for the czech republic, with kerri, pam and sam m. we left on another night train, but all the couchettes were booked so we had to sit in a regular compartment. all night. with one another dude. who kinda smelled. the sams even nicknamed him "smellie" although i refuse to stoop to this level of immaturity. or uh, something. but he eventually got off at some stop in the middle of the night in germany, so we could spend the rest of our uncomfortable night by ourselves. we arrived in prague in the morning and found our hostel, then went to b;[p.l <-- IMMATURITY BY MY ROOMATES WHO ARE TRYING TO TYPE ON MY KEYBOARD AND DISTRACT ME FROM DOCUMENTING OUR WONDERFUL TIMES TOGETHER. ahem. SO WE WENT TO BRUNCH where i ordered hot chocolate, which was more like melted chocolate than you know, swiss miss. i ate it with a spoon, which i thought was wonderful. and i had some food too but i can't remember what. chocolate = the most important thing in life. after that we walked around the city, eventually finding our way to the old jewish quarter, which is set up as a series of museums. it made me realize how little i know about judaism; how little i know about religions other than christianity. one of my favorite little european tid bits i've learned since i've been here is that in sweden, all children are required to take a religions class in elementary school that explained each of the major world religions. kerri tells me that she had this in elementary school in new york too, so maybe it happens in some of the larger more liberal cities. but considering the elementary school i went had maybe like three jews and two blacks, venturing outside of the anglo protestant/roman catholic way wasn't happening there. but anyway, after that we found our way to the charles bridge, one of the biggest tourist attractions of the city. the pedestrian-only bridge is filled with statues on each side, and covered with vendors selling jewelry, photographs, paintings, etc. even if it is crowded (the next day we were there, you could hardly move, i can't imagine what it's like during the summer) it's an amazingly lovely place. the czech republic, along with poland, is attractive to a lot of tourists because it's beautifulhistoricalblahblahand CHEAP. so we had a really kickass dinner at a kickass italian place. sam says that we eat at too many italian restaurants instead of tasting the local cuisine, but you know what, you can never go wrong with gnocchi and wine. it's just a fact of life, the end. (although i forgot to note in my last entry that poland was the first weekend where we didn't eat fast food or pizza once.) since we were pretty tired, we just went to the movies that night. sam m. and pam went to see that philosophical-keanu-reeves-whatever movie while sam b. and i saw kill bill. which was pretty violent and bloody. and, for those who haven't seen it and aren't aware, roughly half of the movie is in japanese. and the subtitles were in czech. (which we obviously don't speak, because why would we learn another language while studying abroad? i mean, silly idea) but even with not understanding half of it it was alright. if you know. you like the violence and blood. but the experience was wonderful in any case because we got a FREE KINDER BUENO (candy bar) on the way into the theater. (chocolate = the most important thing in life.) the next day we did some shopping and took a walking tour of the city, which took us to.. a lot of places. interesting, right? it's late, i'm tired. it was interesting though, then we went to another good restaurant for dinner where we got in a fight with each other over the bill which is always a fun fun time, then went to a concert in the church of st. nicholas. it featured pieces by mozart, vivaldi and bach, but obviously not full pieces--it was only an hour long. which was kind of disappointing, to me, but it was still well done. there are people everywhere in streets handing out flyers for such tourist-catering concerts around the city, but as i wrote in the piece i wrote for my travel writing class, there are much worse tourist attractions. i can't remember if there was much else we did in prague before heading back the next morning, and this entry's been pretty crappy, but really, prague is one of my favorite places i've been. it's entirely tourist driven, but it's so amazingly beautiful and charming anyway that you don't even care. i took a roll of black and white film on the charles bridge that may be the best black and white roll i've ever taken, and even if when i develop them it turns out they're not, it felt like they were while i was there, and it made me feel good. not that i regret any trips i've taken, but after visiting krakow and prague, i wish i would have taken more time to explore central/eastern europe. i'd like to see hungary and slovenia and so many other places. there's this whole group of countries that are rising out of the ashes of communism joyfully and it's just fascinating. eleven countries i believe (including the czech republic and poland) are joining the EU next year (which not everyone in these countries supports) so it'll be interesting to see how that pans out. anyway, we rested for a few days again before our next overnight train. to an equally wonderful city this time: florence. which i'll tell my five loyal readers about in the next episode, until then i'm sleeping. (sleeping = the next important thing in life besides chocolate.) 4 love letters|comment

i am on your side (it's taken me a long time) [sat 06 dec 03|04:52pm] so i realize that pete yorn is overproduced and, to most people, mediocre if that, but i don't care, he's still one of my favorites. i've been listening to old mix cds all weekend, and found "undercover" which i had completely forgotten existed, and what a great song. i wonder why it didn't make it onto his latest cd. now that i think about it, maybe it was on a soundtrack or something. anyway! so yeah, the next weekend we went to poland. and yes, pete yorn is an obvious segueway into poland. duh. man, is that how you spell segueway? what a weird word. looks really weird. but anyway, the travellers included sam, pam, (who rhyme), emma and myself (who don't), and it was our first really-far-away adventure. now that i think about it, it might be the furthest away place i've been.. well, rome might be farther. but i still have prague and florence to talk about before rome. and yes, i do like dropping all these fancy names, you would too. it was, hence, also our first experience with night trains, which we were a little apprehensive about, but didn't have any real set plans/reservations about. it seemed to go well for the first leg of the trip. and let me tell you. there are some strange, amusing characters on german trains late at night. on the first train, two teenagers sat across from us, clad in black leather and white face makeup, and sang some german pop/rock/goth/whatever song. like, really loudly. like, the whole time they were on the train. i was trying really hard to restrain myself from laughter, cause i didn't want to make it look like i was laughing at them, because i am really a fan of strange people and they were making me pretty happy. but their strangeness was far superceded by the passengers across from us on the next train. this guy with a rainbow colored mohawk had a backpack full of beer bottles, and after finishing one and attempting to stuff it into the little-tiny-metal-garbage-box (which it obviously did not fit in) he gets another one out of his bag and proceeds to OPEN IT WITH HIS TEETH. i can't remember if he spit out the cap or not, that would have really been perfect, but man, he was a classy character. if i recall, i think he was wearing spandex. at one point his girlfriend was coming down the aisle and he put out his arm to trip her, and in doing so almost punched sam, and she visibly jumped and looked frightened. sam and i were discussing our favorite train characters from the last three months the other day actually, and we're still partial to the chain-smoking-and-sleeping-man on the german train our very first trip, but he might be tied with this dude. but continuing with the story, we got as far as dortmund, germany, where we were supposed to catch the long overnight train to berlin. and obviously one of our previous trains was delayed which messed our whole schedule up so we obviously missed the train to berlin and trains to berlin obviously only leave once per night so we were obviously stuck in the dortmund train station for the next six hours. however, we didn't fret at first, for there was a bar still open in the train station, where we sat and played cards and ate the food emma had packed and brought with her for a good two or three hours, buying a beer and joking about our situation and partaking in some good conversation. eventually though, these delusional good moods wore off around three or four in the morning and we left the bar and sulked in a corner of the dirty freezing train station not talking to each other. emma, who brings a sleeping bag with her everywhere she travels, got that out and curled up in it, helping us look like we were homeless and prompting countless random german men to come talk to us/ask us if we had a light for their cigarettes/etc. it was a jolly good time. anyway, eventually we got on a train to berlin, and then achieving that got on another train to krakow. all said and done, we left venlo in the netherlands at around nine or ten pm and got to krakow late the next evening, around eight or so maybe. we found our way to our hostel, which we were much excited about, for it was called - drumroll please - ahem - blingbling. if you're in denial of the bling bling, you can check out their website. it was different from any hostel we'd been in thus far, mainly in the fact that it was tiny. we were disappointed at first, but by the end of the trip, it ended up being one of the best hostels we'd stayed in. because it was so small, it was a really comfortable atmosphere, and a lot easier to socialize with everyone else there (which i didn't particularly do because i'm bad at 'socializing with everyone else' still, but sam and pam did). it basically felt like you were sleeping over at someone's really nice apartment, which is a good thing. so a+ for the bling bling hostel. after dropping off our bags, we headed out to find pierogies. or any kind of food really, for after almost 24 hours on trains i might have killed someone soon if this didn't happen, but pierogies were my first choice and we were lucky enough to find a really kickass cheap (what am i talking about, everything in poland is cheap) little pierogie place not far away. in meeting people in the last few years that haven't grown up in the northeast of the US, it's been my horror to find out that there are a shocking amount of people who haven't the foggiest clue what a pierogie is, sam being one of them. if you haven't experienced one of these potato-cheese-however-you-fancy-preparing-them delicacies, you really should. they were pure goodness and i was a happy girl. ahh. i'm getting hungry just thinking about it. then we went back to the bling bling and i passed out. the next day we traveled to auschwitz. since i already have some of what i wrote while i was there typed up, i copied and pasted it in another post below. now that i read it over again, it's really not that well written, and it has no real conclusion, which i don't really like, and it doesn't fit in with the tone of this journal in general.. oh well. guess i'll leave it be anyway. but i won't dwell on it long here, everyone knows about it; basically the camp was a complex of three different camps - auschwitz I, birchenau and auschwitz III, the first beginning as a labor camp and the latter two added on as pure death camps. it's recommended that you get a tour guide so we did that and she took us through auschwitz I, then a few of us took a taxi to birchenau. the buildings of auschwitz I are still mostly in tact. they're brick and two stories and the paths are lined with flowering trees. the physical setting doesn't match your emotions, or at least what you expect to feel. birchenau on the other hand, is mostly destroyed. once the guards realized the allies were coming and there was no escape, they tried to destroy most of the gas chambers. it's barren and open and there's a large memorial set up at the end of the train tracks where the victims were brought in, and we were there at sunset and it's devastating. on a somewhat brighter note, the four of us met a lovely young woman from new jersey who took the train back to krakow with us. we invited her to dinner with us, and we walked to a great restaurant on the edge of the main square. the restaurant and the meal were good, and the square was beautiful. it's decorated with somewhat strange, modern metal sculptures that i cannot really accurately describe, with a beautiful building that houses a large outdoor market in the middle of it, and lit up at night it was one of the coolest thing i'd ever seen. and oh, yeah. on the way there we saw a guy get hit by a car. after dinner i honestly can't remember what we did, i think we just parted from the nice women we had met whose name i can't remember either, and went back to the hostel. the next day we headed back to that market in the square, which was wonderful and cheap and prompted me to do the first real shopping i've done in europe/buy some christmas presents, which left me feeling really good. sam and i were skipping our monday classes but pam and emma weren't unfortunately, so they had to leave later that morning. sam and i continued wandering the city of krakow which we were increasingly liking, even though it started to rain. the wawel castle in the city is more a complex of huge buildings than one single castle, and the outside was beautiful even though the inside was closed by the time we got there. we also found an exhibition of outdoor photographs (as in, large reproductions of photographs, outside), that we had also seen in amsterdam, but didn't have time to actually look at. if i recall, we were getting lost trying to find the red light district when we passed them, i was all "guys! this is cool! guys! these are so cool!" but everyone was busy getting mad at each other and basically ignored me. so here at krakow we took a good hour probably walking down the line and looking at them all (in the rain), which was really quite interesting and made me happy. i even remembered to write down the address of the website, so if you're feeling particularly bored you can go there to check out what the hell i'm talking about, since i'm obviously not explaining it well at all. we spent most of the day after that just wandering around the city, and by the early evening we found ourself back at the main square, drenched and tired and cold, and so the obvious option was to go into a fancy ice cream parlor and order ice cream concoctions from the children's menu. (my ice cream plate was called robinson crusoe, sam's was pinnochio.) it was actually a really neat place. even though we had a good few hours until our train left, being that we were wet and we'd been walking all day and it was dark, we decided to gather our stuff from the bling bling and head to the train station anyway. a fan of sitting in train stations for hours, apparently, we passed the time by shaking our heads to the same old polish man who asked us for money twenty times, and i read an old mother jones magazine that had been in my backpack forever. it was some special issue about the environment, and i was in a particularly sharing-kind-of-mood, so i kept saying things like "can you believe that george bush has not added one species onto the endangered species list?" and "can you believe what george bush has done to superfund?" while sam vaguely nodded her head and pretended to listen to me. the train was our first experience with a couchette (trains that contain compartments with six beds so you can sleep) which albeit somewhat uncomfortable, went alright, and in any case we returned back to the castle the next night in time for dinner. a tiring, but very worthwhile trip. and it gave us experience for our future long distance travels: to prague, italy, and switzerland. all of which i will get to, soon, before we leave this continent in two weeks. but now it's time to wait for my margherita pizza to arrive and maybe start work on a paper. (or, you know, watch a movie, or something.) peace. 3 love letters|comment

written notes jotted in the travel journal at auschwitz. [sat 06 dec 03|04:44pm] I don’t know if there are any adequate words for sorrow, just as there aren’t any for extreme happiness. Maybe words can only justify the mediocre, the in between. The Polish scenery so far is dense. Sometimes there are patches of scrubby flatland, of somewhat dull shades and tints-—it is almost November, after all, soon winter will be settling in; even without snow, winter sets that faded frozen chill over everything-—but most often it’s an impenetrable stand of trees. None of them are too tall, or fat, but all are perfectly aimed to the sky, someplace I can’t see from the train window. Sometimes the undergrowth is thick, sometimes it’s bare, with the black tree trunks almost symmetrically aligned on a floor of copper. I pay the most attention to the birch trees flying past the window, the spots of white thin bark that stand out against the background, thinking only at first of how they remind me of home, for I have always paid the most attention to birch trees. After awhile though, I remember some facts I learned in high school biology class, and then pause for a moment on the recollection that birch trees thrive in soil that has been ravaged by fire. Death camps don’t exist on some other planet, some other world, like we expect them to. They have to be placed somewhere real. The closest well known city to Auschwitz is Krakow, but the camp itself is in the town of Oswiecim. It’s small, but a place nevertheless where people live—-graffitied apartment buildings, a brown tennis court, small but maintained parks, a train station, pretty birch trees and willows whose dead leaves fall and kiss the ground, whose still-alive branches catch the sunlight. The economy of Oswiecim, of Krakow, has to benefit from the tourism of Auschwitz. What a horribly, terribly depressing thought. I originally brought a hat and gloves, it was so intensely cold last weekend. But it’s surprisingly beautiful today. The sun is shining and there’s a slight breeze but it’s not freezing, it’s perfectly pleasant. I almost wish it wasn’t. Waiting for the beginning documentary to start, I put on my glasses. Maybe for the reason that I don’t wear them enough and see better. Maybe for the reason that I feel slightly shielded with my glasses on. Similar to how I used to feel shielded with my long hair. There’s a surprising amount of ways to hide yourself slightly from the world, even with your face, even with what you think you can’t hide. Emma, sitting next to me, has fine vision and shaved her head last week. I don’t know her well enough, but I think Emma’s been through a lot. Maybe she’s brave. Our tour had to stop once to wait for four men who were taking pictures by a fence of barbed wire. One man took hold of it, shaking for a second, pretending to be electrocuted. I looked away and pretended I didn’t see it. I have a nice coat. It’s beige and corduroy, and the hood and some of the lining is a wild kind of imitation fur, so that when I put my backpack and scarf and everything else on when we’re about to travel somewhere, Kerri and Sam always joke that I look ready for a hike through the arctic. My mom bought it for me before I left. It was $50, which by Emerson student standards isn’t a lot of money for a coat, but for me, it is. But she bought it anyway, because I loved it, and she loves me. Sam and Pamela made friends with other people staying in our hostel last night while I went to sleep instead. We talked briefly with them this morning and they saw us off. “Have fun,” one of them said, followed by, “Well, that’s not a good phrase, but, you know-“ “Appreciate it,” her friend finished for her. I think what she meant was, “Appreciate your life.” There’s a man who has been videotaping the entire tour. There’s always such a need to capture everything everywhere. Instead of watching what’s in front of your eyes. I can’t imagine sitting at home showing videos of your tour of the largest concentration camp of the Holocaust. I don’t want to say that I hate him, since hate is how this place got here in the first place, but by the middle of the tour I want to throw down his tiny expensive many-pixeled camera and scream incomprehensibly, loudly, for a long time. Auschwitz-I is somewhat small-—if you can say that, since one pebble of Auschwitz is too large. The buildings are two storied, brick, compact, the streets now lined with strong blooming trees and green grass, almost pretty. Three kilometers away but part of the same machine, Birchenau is immensely wide, flat, open. Aside from its larger size, it’s this way because most of it has been destroyed. Hundreds of chimneys are all that’s left of the bunkers, brown-red in the sunset, symmetric—-lone, involuntary monuments. The only color in the entire place are the flowers, the candles left at systematic points of mourning, memorial. The candles are all placed in various brightly colored glass jars; I don’t mind people taking pictures of those. They are beautiful. In one of the rooms full of shoes in the museum, piles of the hundreds of shoes stolen and left behind, some of the color has been preserved in just a few. A red high heel, and you wonder what the color must have been like in these people’s lives, before it faded, drained, was forced to bleed over history. comment

lift up your head, focus on every detail. [thu 13 nov 03|12:16am] i'm gonna attempt to summarize strasbourg and luxembourg, where we went three weeks ago, which should be somewhat amusing (or boring) considering i can hardly remember any of it. the travellers included sam and crystal (aka slip). kerri unfortunately woke up friday morning and laid back down five minutes later, unable to come with because she was way ill. this was pretty sad, since we love kerri. warm fuzzy moment for kerri. so the three of us headed to strasbourg, a town in eastern france right near the german border. we arrived in early afternoon and found our hostel, which turned out to be quite aways away from.. anything, but it's alright, cause it was a fun walk. kinda. we spent most of the day just walking around the city, which was really quite pleasant, an interesting blend of french and german influence. we visited a cute little area called le petit france, and the notre dame cathedral which was pretty impressive. and that means a lot, since i've seen quite a few cathedrals by now. (i've seen three notre dames, i think.) strasbourg is in the alsace region of france, which if you recall, was invaded a few odd times during the world wars, so it was kind of crazy to think about that while i was there, wondering what this place, on the borderline of france and germany, had seen in the last hundred years. strasbourg and brussels are also important seats of the european union. i don't know why you'd want to know this particularly, but i remember we were in a square next to a big EU flag when i witnessed a jumping fountain for the first time. there are these blocks of concrete, sitting unassuming, and then out of nowhere water shoots from one black to land on the next, and then water shoots from that one to the next, and so on. i was the only one of our trio who hadn't seen this before, but it provided for a solid five minutes of entertainment. then we uh, probably ate dinner somewhere, and probably just went back to the hostel cause we were tired. (things like where we ate or what we did at night apparently escapes my mind, but the jumping fountain! important details!) we woke up early the next morning to take a train/bus to luxembourg, stopping on the way to the train station for the second time at a wonderful little bakery near our hostel. now, people may have issues with the french for whatever reasons, but they can't deny that when it comes to pastries, these people know what the hell they're doing. note to boys who may want to marry me in the future: if you can produce some yummy food, you have a soft spot in my heart already. one of the slightly disappointing things about europe is that you pass from one country to another without a clue. i would kind of like some big tacky signs with logos declaring borders, like between states in the US, like "Y'ALL COME BACK NOW, YA HEAR!" (sam tells me kentucky has something similar to this). like, when you pass the border into france, it'd be kind of refreshing to see a sign saying "BONJOUR, DUMB TOURISTS! WE DON'T LIKE YOU!" or, when you come to the netherlands, "WELCOME ALL HOMOSEXUALS, ENVIRONMENTALISTS, OTHER FORMS OF LIBERALS, AND POTHEADS." it would be much more exciting. in any case, on the bus we passed a little tiny sign announcing the border of luxembourg, the first such border sign i've seen anywhere - it was pretty boring, just said LUXEMBOURG inside the ring of gold stars standing for the EU. it still excited me, though, cause i hit sam on the arm while pointing out the window as it flashed by, and sam, who had just settled into a pleasant nap, looked around for confused for a minute before shrugging at me and going back to sleep. my friends love me. anyway, strasbourg was more of an afterthought for the trip, our main purpose was to visit luxembourg just so we could say we've been to luxembourg. (how many people do you know that have been to luxembourg? this is what we're saying.) we really didn't know anything about it other than it's small and rich people live there. so imagine our surprise when it turned out to be beautiful. luxembourg began as a military fortress, built on a plateau and reinforced on three sides by massive stone walls, which still stand (and are a UNESCO world heritage site. i'd like to count how many world heritage sites i've visited by the end of this trip. that was just a note to self, sorry.) at certain sections of the wall are "casemates," underground tunnels where people could hide during wars, but also apparently where people - royal families, i think - used to live. i'm not sure why exactly, cause it was really pretty darn creepy. it was distinctly different from the caves i visited in maastricht - lower ceilings, different stone, this one lighted and marked off for self guided tours. in maastricht, if you didn't have a flashlight and a guide who knew what the hell he was doing, well. you were just crazy. but yeah, both were creepy. outside, though, luxembourg was decidedly not creepy, but pretty. you could look over the stone walls onto hills blooming red and gold in the fall, and then walk down to the other side of the stone walls, where a wonderful park wraps around the whole thing. the internet shuts off here in the computer lab in about three minutes, so i'm going to wrap this up quickly by saying that, speaking of parks, sam got on videotape me playing on playgrounds in various parks about five times this particular weekend. not exactly sure why we felt a need to search out and then play on playgrounds, but i'm sure it will be amusing to me later, or, confusing to sam's parents when she shows it to them. i still have poland and prague to talk about, but tomorrow i'm leaving for italy, where i will be for ten days on our second travel break. i will eat pasta and drink wine for all of you. big hugs. 9 love letters|comment

if it isn't warm where you're sitting, then kitten, get yourself out of the cold. [thu 06 nov 03|01:18pm] after a ten day trip together, my roomates and i wisely decided that the next weekend we should perhaps spend on our own. it had also been advised to us before we left boston to travel alone at least once, because it will be a great learning experience and blah blah, etc etc. i was up for this anyway, considering i've always been somewhat reclusive and am pretty happy alone with a journal and a camera. i decided to head to brugge, a city north of brussels in belgium, because i'd heard nothing but wonderful things about it (which all proved to be true). sam was headed to brussels, so we traveled together that far on friday morning. i might have overestimated my traveling-alone-competence, however, considering as soon as we departed in the brussels train station, it somehow took me two hours to get to brugge, normally a half hour train ride. twice during the weekend, in fact, i sat at the last stop of a train, not realizing it was the last stop, until a conductor, checking to see if there were any dumb americans still around, came and kicked me off. pure genius, my teachers always said. anyway, i eventually arrived in brugge and after buying a mars bar in the train station, i felt much refreshed and optimistic, and set out in a beautiful day to wander aimlessly around brugge for awhile. bill bryson describes belgium well in neither here nor there so i'll just quote him: As countries go, Belgium is a curiosity. It's not one nation at all, but two, northern Dutch-speaking Flanders and southern French-speaking Wallonia...The Flemings can't sand the Walloons and the Walloons can't stand the Flemings, but when you talk to them a little you realize that what holds them together is an even deeper disdain for the French and the Dutch. (this journal, by the way, is obviously a lame attempt to live my dream of being bill bryson, and if you've never read anything by him, then gosh, you must.) brugge is simply one of the most beautiful cities i've seen in europe. it's clean, uncrowded, not too commercialized, and full of canals and beautiful streets and buildings. i simply wandered around pleasantly for awhile until i realized that i should probably find my hostel. i actually had two hostels booked for the weekend, because the hostel i wanted to stay in only had availability for saturday night, so i found another hostel that i'd heard not-very-good-things-about for friday as a kind of last resort. which was clearly not destined to turn out well. i was a little sketched out when the check in was at a bar. a lot of hostels have bars, but this hostel actually was a bar, so while the bartender was taking my information and my money she was simultaneously refilling beers. it was kind of strange. i was directed to a little gray door in the back, which led to some sketchy stairs to an even sketchier, dark, hallway. my room was of course at the end of the hallway, and the room itself was alright except for the fact that there were six beds and not another living soul in the place. when i opened the door back to the hallway, apparently the lights are timed to go off or something, but it was pitch black. couldn't see a thing and had to search for a light switch, convinced that something was going to jump out and eat me at any second. all the place really needed to invest in was a few more light bulbs and it would help it immensely. or at least a little. anyway, it was creepy. really. i went to find myself some dinner, and found a lovely little place where i got soup, lasagne, ice cream, and a glass of beer all for 11 euros. other than debating with myself for a half hour whether i should leave a tip or not, it was awesome. this is always a debate when you're in a new country. i was shocked when i came to the netherlands that you don't tip at restaurants, but then we were in paris and all of a sudden you were supposed to again. the thing is that at countries where you're not supposed to leave tips, supposedly they get offended when you do. i don't really understand how, but, really. they should just have a big sign on the wall in the room in the castle where they have travel guides: "COUNTRIES THAT WANT YOUR MONEY, COUNTRIES THAT DON'T." actually, it seems that anywhere you go in europe, none of them do, because if you don't physically ask for your check, you can wait until eternity to get it. i really didn't do anything exciting that night because i'm lame. so, moving on to the next day. the first thing i did was leave the sketchy hostel and find the other one. it was too early to check in, so i asked the receptionist if i could just store my bags there, which most hostels will do for you. there was loud reggae music playing, and the guy didn't even say anything, just took my hands and danced me to the storage room. now that's the kind of hostel i like. i mean, i didn't really dance as well as him, considering i was half asleep and with my coat and scarf and backpack on i somewhat resemble the michelin man and hence don't have a great amount of agility, but, it still made me happy. and, i ended up rooming with two guys, one of which was One of the Most Beautiful Boys Jill Has Ever Seen, so, yay for hostel number two. i headed to the belfry in the main square, and paid some money to climb the stairs to the top. there were only 200 or 300 some steps, can't remember, but whatever it was it was still wimpy compared to the dom in cologne. but anything is wimpy compared to the dom in cologne. i always think climbing up these things are a wonderful idea, until i have to walk down again. the stairs are always small, spiralled, uneven, and crowded with entirely too many people that it was made for, and i get some kind of vertigo and always feel like i want to die after the 100th step down. the views are still probably worth it, i suppose. after the belfry i went to the groenings museum, an art museum covering flemish art from the 12th century to today, approximately. it was really a lovely museum i thought, and you get a free audio guide, so i actually understood a few of the paintings - or well, understood some of the history, any guide or analysis can't make you understand a painting - which is always a plus. i lamely went to a quick (fast food chain) for lunch, where strangely enough i ran into john, another kid from the castle who was traveling by himself for the weekend, so we had our crappy european fast food together and reminisced about the crappy magazine writing class we had together last semester and it was good times. afterwards, i headed back to the train station with a mission to get to oostende. when i saw on the map that brugge was so close to the north sea, i was determined to go for the pretty simple reason of seeing a beach and the sea because, i have this philosophy that everyone likes a good beach. it's a deep philosophy. i didn't know anything about oostende other than it would serve this purpose, and actually didn't explore the town itself since the train station drops you off right at the beach. i did see a pretty nice looking gothic cathedral, right in front of which a carnival type thing was going on, which was kinda funny. cause it was like hey, gothic cathedral, hey, neon salt and pepper shaker. i mean, it wasn't that funny, i suppose, but i thought it was, cause i think just about anything's funny, and, yeah. what a horrible entry this is. hah. i went into a tourist shop to buy some postcards, and they also sold salt water taffy. for a minute, it was almost like i was at the jersey shore. other than the fact that you know, it wasn't as dirty as jersey, and everyone was speaking dutch, and all. the beach was surprisingly pretty and long - i walked for a long time and it just kept going, so i eventually stopped and headed back. it was chilly, but there were a lot of people flying kites, walking dogs, playing soccer in the sand. i stopped to buy a waffle off a vendor, and sat for a little while to watch the sunset. then i walked as quickly as possible back to the train station because it was freaking cold. i eat completely horribly here, and have on average one candy bar a day, justifying that this is okay because "it's fun european candy!" i examined my mars bar on the train back to brugge though, and the ingredients were listed in six different languages. interesting, eh? and before i left oostende, i stopped at aforementioned carnival to buy some french fries because french fries are considered a full meal here. no, really, they are. and everyone eats them with a huge glob of mayonnaise. if you ask for that crazy ketchup stuff, everyone automatically knows you're a foreigner. but while i was waiting at the french fry stand, i watched the lady speak to one man in dutch, the next lady in french, and to me in english, flawlessly one after another. language. crazy. back in brugge, the only thing i did that night was see a movie (whale rider, subtitles in both dutch and french) because there was a cool independent theater by my hostel and i've made a new goal since ireland of watching cool independent movies while i'm here in my cultural heyday. i'd also like to see goodbye lenin and elephant before i left but we'll see what happens. it somehow took me six trains to get back home to the castle the next day, but it was a good trip nevertheless. and i don't have time to say anything else because i have to check my laundry then run to class and then shower and pack before we leave tonight for prague. i miss all of you beautiful people, hope you're taking care of yourselves. comment

if you want to make sense, what are you looking at me for, i'm no good at math. [wed 29 oct 03|11:28pm] we left london on a virgin train (as in virgin megastores, virgin airlines - the day they merge with clear channel and take over the world is inevitable) to cross the english countryside (pretty nice really, lots of rolling hills and such) for a brief stint in liverpool. the stint was mainly for sam, who's a big fan of that little band that's from there. had some hits in the sixties, or something. unfortunately, we got there a little late in the afternoon so that by the time we found a hostel and got ourselves oriented, there wasn't as much time to see everything she wanted to see - strawberry fields, penny lane - and we hadn't even had time to see abbey road in london, either. it's alright though, because i trust that when sam marries a fine rich gentleman he'll take her back to britain and she'll die a happy woman. we did check out the "beatles story" museum by albert dock though, which was pretty decently done. there probably could have been a few additions to it at the end - linda's death and paul's remarriage, more importantly, a proper tribute to george harrison - but i'm assuming it doesn't get a lot of funding. liverpool as a city was alright - some of the streets we were wandering when trying to find our hostel (which turned out to be the best hostel we've stayed in) were a little sketch, but it seemed like a lot of the other areas by the water and downtown were pretty nice. but it was interesting, after coming out of the museum, to imagine what it must have been like in those early days of the 60s, before they became so big that it engulfed them. to be a teenager and go see this band play in this tiny, tiny club where you could touch the drumkit and reek of sweat, and just be part of this really great, electric... thing. like what rock and roll is really supposed to be like, before it turns stupid. anyhoo, we wandered to some other attractions like a statue of eleanor rigby and a gigantic ugly piece of bright metal that was supposed to resemble a yellow submarine, and the place where john lennon bought his first guitar or something, which is now of course a big ugly shoe store or something similar. sam and i headed to matthew street at night to the cavern club (that little club where they got their start that i was just mentioning), or rather, the cavern 'pub' that was across the street from what used to actually be the cavern club. and by 'at night' i mean at like 8pm, because bars in the UK and in most of europe for that matter, close at 11, and we had nothing better to do anyway. and so when we walked in, there was a whole bunch of loud girls who were completely trashed at 8pm. it was bizarre. the pub itself was kind of lame, but then again, if you start having some alcohol you stop really caring. actually, some guys showed up with guitars and started playing a bunch of fun covers that i (obviously) sang along with, which was kinda cool, so i take it back. i had a guiness, since it's so famous in that area of the world, but it really didn't do anything for me. the only beer i've had that i've really enjoyed has been the local beer here at the castle, brand beer. now that's some good stuff. actually, i had some beer with my dinner at brugge in belgium, jupiler i think it was called, and that was pretty good too. but i haven't even gotten to discussing belgium yet. and hey, let's talk about alcohol some more in a public journal that your parents read, jill. good idea. anyway. the rest of the night only really involved us obnoxiously waking up kerri back at the hostel, who had been peacefully sleeping and somehow deals with us. the next morning we woke up and walked to the docks where our ferry was leaving for dublin, while the sky was still dark. having to wake up and stuff your life into a backpack once again, while the sky's still dark, isn't always fun. but it's alright, because once we saw that our ferry was called "the super sea cat two!" and had a big painting of a somewhat frightening cat on the side of it, we had to break out of our sleepy stupor to laugh at it. we eventually arrived on the shores of ireland, and took a bus from the docks to the center of dublin. or at least, sam translated for me that we had to take a bus, because i could not understand a word that the nice man said to me. apparently, so i learned, british accents and irish accents are a world apart. and the latter befuddles me greatly. anyway, dublin didn't prove to get less confusing, because they apparently have a thing against street maps. no little pink signs, no little "you are here" stickers anywhere in the city. so it took us a good while to find our hostel, and after this fun experience and some lunch we decided to take a little time to ourselves to wander around the big dirty city. so i wasn't a big fan of dublin. maybe it's just that our hostel wasn't in the greatest location, and i was only there for a few days so i can't pass judgement. i had also been traveling for a week at this point, so maybe i was just a little tired and cranky. but any crankiness i felt towards the city was made up ten thousand times once we actually left its limits. the next day we took an all day bus tour into the wicklow mountains. a lot of movies were filmed in the area; braveheart and uh.. a bunch of other movies our tour guide mentioned that i can't remember. the tour was definitely one of the most worthwhile tours i've taken since i've been here - our tour guide was cool, first of all - he discussed a lot of social/political issues that are going on in dublin and ireland right now, which was interesting just because it was interesting, and a lot of tours are all yay happy shiny gloss. and the scenery was just outstanding. lakes, hills, sheep, greeness, all the stuff you expect ireland to be. we'd ride for awhile, then stop somewhere and walk around for an hour or so, and so on, so it was overall a satisfying day. and then the next day we took a commuter rail with two other emerson kids we'd met up with, john and enrico, to howth, a peninsula right outside the city. there's a cliff trail you can hike that goes almost entirely around the peninsula, and it was amazing. it's so hard to describe these things, the really beautiful things, especially when i've already been typing this thing for an hour. but it was awesome, that is, until sam and i got lost. yeah. that kinda sucked. kerri and john and enrico though, who we were supposed to meet, waited for over an hour for us, which was really nice of them, although we were too tired and annoyed to probably really appear appreciative. yay for nice people. also, one of the nights we were in dublin, we went to see a movie because well, we haven't seen a movie in a long time. and there are simple things like that that you miss. we randomly chose a movie called intermission cause we recognized colin farrell's name on the advertisement, completely thinking it was an american film. turned out to be some really weird, independent irish film. totally weird. it kicked ass. and oh, i also went to the dublin writers museum cause a hella lot of famous writers have their origins there, which was almost overwhelmingly informative. and some protestors insisted that sam and i join the socialist party. i keep remembering these fun tidbits. so sunday morning we woke up at 5am (hauling our way-too-heavy-at-this-point backpacks while it's still dark out thing again) to take a taxi to the airport, where a plane took us to brussels, and an hour long bus took us from the brussels aiport to the train station, where we eventually took four trains home. we met up with two other emerson girls who were on their way back from dublin, and when we reached the maastricht train station and had a few minutes to grab something to eat, we walked into the mini grocery store in the station and collectively let out a cry of excitement at seeing dutch junk food again, a sure sign that we were almost home. i got a cassis and some stroopwaffels, and i was a happy gal. since then i've gone to brugge (belgium), luxembourg, and strasbourg (france) and tomorrow i'm departing on a long train to krakow (poland). i'll get caught up on this journal eventually. but if you've actually read this far, wow. thanks. maybe you should go do something productive now or something. big hugs. comment

tell me you hate those bright street lights, sometimes the shadows give you the creeps. [mon 27 oct 03|07:23pm] aside from the trouble of actually acquiring eurostar tickets (which we did the second morning we were in paris by going back to the train station at 8am, thankyouverymuch), once we arrived at waterloo station, london was cake. this is due to the factors of a) the blessed english language and b) the bleesed friendly english people. while standing in the subway station after getting off the train, some tube-worker-woman came out of nowhere and asked us if we needed help (do we really stick out that badly?) and directed us how to buy a daypass ticket and which lines/stations we needed to take to get to our hostel. we blindly nodded while she helped us, since there was no way we would have figured all this out by ourselves, even if the daypass did cost an arm and a leg. because oh, that's right, EVERYTHING in london costs an arm and a leg. the tube did end up being very efficient and easy to understand, though, and we didn't have trouble finding our hostel because once we got out of the subway station, there was a pink sign saying "WHERE DO YOU WANT TO GO?" with directions pointing out how many blocks, right turns, etc., and our hostel was on it. (really, that little pink sign, a piece of genius.) and then we went to a deli on the corner that was decently priced and had really good sandwiches and orangina. i loved the british already. our hostel was relatively close to the british museum so we headed there first, where we saw the rosetta stone and a hundred and one other things that are Exciting For Geeks, Especially If You Liked History Class. and i just stopped and stared at the screen for a few minutes before turning to sam and asking her what else we did in london because i blanked out and couldn't remember, and said "ohhh, right!" and nodded a lot when she reinformed me of my memories. so, after that we went to hyde park and kensington gardens. we were entertained by a bunch of weird ducks and pigeons and geese and whatnot for a surprising amount of time, considering that we see them everywhere we go (hell, they all live in our moat). it was a pretty big park, and our main purpose in going was seeing the peter pan statue, which was hidden by one of the ponds. london's a pretty big city, obviously, but didn't seem as overwhelming as paris. this could have been just because i wasn't stressed out by everyone speaking french, but i also loved how many parks there are. it's amazing how much just a little open space and some trees can do for a city. kerri stopped in one of those famous red telephone booths to call her friend that was supposed to meet us, who unfortunately couldn't make it but did give up a head's up on trying to buy theater tickets. so we followed her advice and headed to piccadilly circus and got tickets for noises off that night. they were pretty cheap for theater tickets (although they would have been much cheaper if the little pound symbol next to them was changed to an american dollar. grumblegrumble) and it was a really funny show. our seats were good (and comfy and plush and red) and they sold ice cream, inside the theater, at intermission, which i thought was somewhat strange but pretty nifty. sam also had a conversation with the nice man next to us that, when he asked where we were from, went something like: "i'm from kentucky, and she's from new york, and she's from pennsylvania, and we go to school in boston, but we're studying in the netherlands right now, and we just came here from paris for a few days" and it sounded so ridiculous (because it is) that it was pretty amusing to me at the time. the next day, we bought tickets for one of those red double decker hop-on-hop-off tours that are as prevalent as the red telephone booths. we spent the most time at the tower of london, which also cost an arm and a leg to go in. (i should mention, however, that most of london's museums are free which is pretty admirable in my opinion.) the tower of london is pretty much a little complex of old historic buildings/castles/churches, and i thought it was alright. it reminded me a lot of colonial williamsburg, in that it was halfly interesting and halfly cheesytouristy... except.. you know, not about colonial america. yeah. after that, we went to basically all the major attractions of london: buckingham palace, st. james palace, westminster abby and big ben, the globe theater (although we didn't actually go in because this also cost an arm and a leg). even though it was pretty chilly out, we thought it'd be fun to ride on top of the double decker bus once or twice and let the wind blow our hair, which was pretty invigorating. well, kerri didn't think it was that invigorating, so she didn't join us on the "twice" part, but that's alright. kerri also headed back to the hostel a little earlier while sam and i went to king's cross station because you'd see, we'd heard that they have a sign there that says platform 9 and 3/4 and so this was obviously a very important mission because harry potter is God. (not really, but wouldn't that be crazy?) so we found it and took our pictures by it, obviously, because we're nerds, and laughed at ourselves a lot, and as we were walking back we hear an announcement: "this is a safety annoucement to remind all passengers that flash photography is prohibited on all platforms for this may cause accidents." and we bowed our heads and walked swiftly back to the subway. that night we went to the original hard rock cafe, which cost an arm and a leg (just seeing how often i can use this phrase), but it's alright because the meal was awesome and so was our waiter. his nickname was fish man, and he totally made my night. thanks fish man, wherever you are. we were boring and didn't do much of note that night (at least i didn't), which was alright because we were catching a train the next morning for liverpool. which i'll write about tomorrow, because i'm being called out of the computer lab at the moment to go carve a pumpkin. which is totally rad. maybe i'll even do some homework after that, but i love pumpkins. yay for autumn at the castle. good times. comment

give a little bit. give a little bit of your love to me. [wed 22 oct 03|11:01pm] i'm gonna attempt to condense the rest of the travel break, considering i've already gone on another trip since then, and in a day am leaving for another country yet again. not that any of you really care to know the details of any of this, but i feel some need to write it down because i know i'll forget everything and want to remember it someday. i mean, i'm forgetting things and cities are blurring together already. time's seriously doing some weird things lately. as in, going really fast and being confusing and my head spins, sometimes. so right, the other stuff we saw in paris included: the place de la concorde, part of the inside of the louvre, notre dame, saint-chapelle, the top of the eiffel tower at night, and another random hostel room. we also ate some fondu (cheese and beer, mm) in the latin quarter and some street vendor chocolate crepes while walking down the champs elysses.. and i just turned to ask sam how to spell that since she's the knowledgable-french one but she's not here. she's probably doing something silly like studying for our history midterm tomorrow. psh. studying. i'll mention saint-chapelle briefly because it was the one stop i wasn't familiar with beforehand (considering i'm not that familiar with paris or france at all this may or may not be alarming). there's more historical stuff relating to it that they told us about that i can't remember now, but it's an old church that is essentially one narrow room with a lot of stained glass windows. we had to wait an hour to see this room, but it was worth it. because these stained glass windows are the most amazing stained glass windows i've ever seen. and considering i've been traveling around europe i've seen quite a few Big Old Important Cathedrals and a lot of stained glass windows. the colors and the scenes and the height of these in saint-chapelle was overwhelming. it was beautiful. the eiffel tower was also quite an experience. it's obviously the most touristy thing in town, and it's also quite a shady area at night. as soon as you even have it in sight, men start running up to you and shoving glow in the dark plastic eiffel towers in your face while talking in rapid french. it doesn't sound that disturbing, but it really kind of is. and once we actually got there, the whole crazy-pushing-people thing occurred again, but i think it was even more intense than in the subway. there are big lifts (no one calls them elevators here) that take you to a first, then a second level, then all the way to the top. squeezing your way into these lifts was apparently a life-or-death matter for a lot of people. one little girl started crying/yelling/something high pitched on the way up being as all of her fellow tourists were probably crushing her to death and not caring much. on the way down though, while we were just waiting for the lift to come, this little old woman started pushing on my back. she must have been eighty something and she was pushing me. and we were just standing doing nothing. a woman in front us was holding a place for her husband, and when he came to cut back in line, the old lady behind me smacked him on the arm and said something angrily in french. as if all of us horrible people were distracting her from getting back to the ground you know, thirty seconds faster. i was kinda frightened. and it was october. it was cold. i can't imagine what it's like in mid-july. there are must be injuries daily. and then once we were down, we were almost immediately barraged again by street vendors whose sole purpose is to scare the hell out of you, even if you did want a tacky souvenir for prosperity. (prosperity = to collect dust in a random closet or drawer for twenty years.) "grab your shit and run!" kerri instructed us, and once we reached the subway station again we breathed a sigh of wimpy tourist relief. but oh wait, i forgot the whole being at the top of the eiffel tower thing. (although, just to let you know, i just typed 'at the top of the empire state building' and then was like waaiit. hah. wow, do i suck. i should never drink alcohol, just a bit of fatigue apparently does it for me.) paris, apparently, is the city of lights. you don't really comprehend this until you're at the very top of the eiffel tower. when you're up there, the city of lights doesn't seem to justify it, it's more than a city cause you can't see the end of it, you think that it must never end, this big sprawling sea of neon and streets and buildings and life. you have to wonder if george bush, or that dumbass who thought of 'freedom fries,' has ever been to the top of the eiffel tower. cause when you're there, you understand why the french are just as proud of themselves as americans are. [ although, to kind of detract from this big respectful statement, when you stop and think about the eiffel tower you have to kind of wonder. like, the guy who thought it up must have been like "hey. i'm rich. let's just build a big freaking tower for the hell of it. it won't serve any real purpose, but lots of tourists will pay lots of money to see it for eternity. genius!" and all the poor men that had to build it, they were probably like "hey, jacque. so why the hell are we building this big freaking tower?" "eh, some rich guy thought it'd be a good idea." "weird." "yeah." ] and then we left one morning on a high speed train to britain. dun dun dun. (audience pauses in suspense) 7 love letters|comment

everybody tells you you pay for what you get. [wed 15 oct 03|07:39pm] our first official travel break, all ten days of it, was probably the most overwhelming trip of my life. i've been procrastinating writing about it, actually, just because it was so overwhelming. but if i don't, i know i'll soon forget it entirely and pictures don't always do life justice. so, anyway, we started in paris, which i'll probably describe the poorest since it happened the longest ago. we left on october 3rd, an important date as i've previously mentioned being it was my twentieth birthday, on an approximately six hour bus ride from well to paris, stopping in belgium inbetween for lunch. once we were all situated in our hotel (which was AWESOME by the way - your own shower and little soaps and complimentary cookies and not having to put your own sheets on the bed are luxuries well appreciated after some hostelling experience), we had about an hour and a half/two hours to go get dinner. so, basically, our directors told 80some bus-weary students to go wander around paris for awhile and somehow find your way back to the hotel later. here are two quick lessons about paris: it is very, very, very, very big. and although most people speak english, the majority of them do not want to. this scheme was obviously not destined to go well. my roomates and i decided to go to the train station before finding dinner, because we needed to a) validate our eurail passes and b) buy eurostar train tickets so we could get to london in two days, because at this point we had our hostel in london booked already but no apparent way to get there, and this was disturbing to us a little. so we get on the subway, go to this freaking big train station. stepping off the subway was our first real taste of the french, because the moment our sneakers hit the platform we were almost trampled by a massive crowd of people who were apparently determined to get to the escalators faster than the person next to them, not caring what bewildered american students they happened to knock over in the process. anyway, we wandered around the train station trying to find the ticket booth we needed for a long time. when we eventually did, the lines were 184891247 miles long, and if i didn't eat something soon i would have turned into one of the crazy angry Pushers on the Subway People, so defeated we ran to a mcdonalds (lame again) and in approximately seven minutes crammed the greasy fast food goodness into our systems before running back to the subway hoping we could find our hotel again. later, we learned that some of the other people who had tried to purchase eurostar tickets for london couldn't get the discount we were supposed to get, and were going to pay 120 euro and upwards for them. which freaked us out even more. it was a great start in the city of lights. back at the hotel with the rest of the emerson kids, we were split into groups to walk to the louvre. my group leader was pretty hot, so things were already starting to look up. we stopped on a bridge over the seine where he gave us a ten minute history of paris - obviously the super super super abridged one - before heading on to the louvre. you reach the outside of the back of the louvre, and it's pretty much just a big square building. then you walk around a pillar and enter the courtyard, and you almost fall over. we went there the next day too, but it's not as powerful as at night. at night, they have it specially lit up in a way i obviously can't describe, but it becomes the immense, magical almost surreal palace that it is, and i have to say it's one of the most beautiful things i've ever seen in my life. we had a lecture in the courtyard for awhile about the various pyschotic kings who created the louvre (who kept saying "you know, this isn't ridiculous enough. let's make it bigger!" and then there was louie the 14th, who was all "this definitely isn't ridiculous enough. i need a completely separate lavish, immense palace in the countryside. let's put lots of gaudy expensive stuff in it and call it versailles"). when we were done, kerri, sam b. and sam m. and i went out to celebrate my birthday. i had two simple desires: wine and dessert. after being my regular indecisive self for awhile, i chose a place called hippopotomus because, well. it was called hippopotomus. even with its cool name though, it ended up being a little disappointed because of a) language barriers b) plain crappy service and c) we were all so tired and zoned out that we kind of just stared at our placemats attempting not to pass out. i had a creme brulee, which was pretty yummy, but the only thing i had really wanted was the wine, which never came. once we finally got our waiters attention again an hour later, he brought out a different wine than i'd ordered, but i drank it anyway. it was a small little bottle, and sam had one glass while i had the rest. ("because it was icky," sam, who is sitting next to me and obviously reading my screen, just said.) so basically, i just drank a lot of wine by myself while they all watched me. but they all paid for me, which was really extaordinarily nice of them. thanks, dudes. and now i'm tired and want to leave the computer lab. after talking about just one day. maybe if i keep going like this, i'll finish my description of this trip by 2004. 2004... maybe america will even have a new president by then! now there's a happy thought to keep with you. 1 love letter|comment

shake, shake, shake senora. [thu 02 oct 03|01:25pm] i'm getting less and less timely with writing, replying to emails, etc.. my apologies. time here goes fast and slow all at once. it's crazy-like. last weekend was a bit different from other weekends, because i spent it in maastricht with my friend pascalle, her husband francois and their wonderful family. it was much different spending time with a dutch family who has lived in the netherlands their whole life, than living in a little bubble of a castle with a bunch of other american students, or traveling in big cities with other american tourists. they educated me a lot about dutch politics, food, culture. it was really a learning experience in many ways, and pascalle and her whole family were so accomodating and nice and wonderful. so if by any chance pascalle's reading this, thank you so much for everything. maastricht is the oldest town in the netherlands, although you don't hear many people in the north mention it much because it is so far south; it's tucked right between belgium and germany. they speak a different dutch dialect than in the north (which they would speak to each other, although they spoke perfect english to me, and even their daughter spoke great english. she's thirteen, and takes french, german, and english in school). francois explained that there are regional differences between the north and south just like there are regional differences in the states: "we're a much smaller country, but have had a much longer time for them to develop." i suppose regional differences exist for any country. the city is named after the maas river which runs through it (and which also passes by well). we started saturday with a tour that began by boat on the maas, which we got off of after awhile to take a tour of these caves. they're technically not caves, but mines, because they're completely man made - they began to be dug by the romans, i believe. so, really really old. and massive. they are big enough that you could easily wander in and never again find your way out (kinda creepy, really). they could be used as bomb shelters during world war two, and there were actually plans to evacuate the entire city into them if needed. it wouldn't have worked because there wouldn't have been proper ventilation, but it gives you an idea of the size of these mines. the kind of strange thing is that every once and awhile, you'd come upon some beautiful piece of art - charcoal paintings on the wall from a hundred years ago, that haven't deteriorated because of the lack of sunlight and constant temperatures, or sculptures. there are even two chapels down in these things, i believe. it was full of history of all kinds - historical, even geological - most of the caves were built from the top down, and you can see there's a layer lining most of the walls near the bottom that's different from all the rest of the stone. they've deducted this must have been from an age of drastic climate change. for some reason it's kind of hard to describe the place, but, it was neato. the next day pascalle showed me around some more of maastricht. some of the old stone walls that used to protect the city in midieval times are still in tact and you can walk along the tops of them. we also visited two really, really old churches - one of which had a separate museum type thing attached to it, containing a lot of really, really old artifacts. like, we're talking old roman ruins and the tomb of a priest who died in 259, or something like that, can't remember the exact year. and all these fancy boxes completely made out of gold and horns and jewelry made from ivory that used to be used in services hundreds upon hundreds of years ago. it almost felt kinda strange. francois and pascalle gave me a ride back to well late sunday afternoon, which ended up being even more of a pain in the ass for them due to rain and traffic. so my gratitude for them again. i feel like i wasn't very descriptive with any of this, sorry, i'm a little distracted at the moment. i'm trying to find a map of liverpool, and trying to figure out this freaking eurostar high speed train from paris to london, and i have to check my laundry and go to class in a half an hour and then i have to go to the store and pack and @*%&@*&. that's right, our first big travel break starts tomorrow. we'll be leaving altogether tomorrow for a fun bus ride to paris, where we'll be staying as a group friday and saturday nights (sunday night my roomates and i will still be there, but in a different hostel). monday we leave for london (hopefully, if we can figure out this friggin expensive train), where we will be monday and tuesday nights. wednesday we leave for liverpool, where we will be staying that night. thursday we leave for dublin, where we will be thursday, friday and saturday nights, although we probably won't sleep saturday night since we'll have to leave at the crack of dawn for our flight back to brussels, and hopefully sometime after that we'll end up back here in one piece and not wanting to kill each other. confusing, right? overall, it's a 10 day vacation including three countries, four cities, five different ho(s)tels, one flight, one ferry, and numerous busses and trains. it's going to be Crazy And Insane. everyone seems a little stressed at the moment, trying to get all of our reservations and maps and etc etc together, and trying to ignore the fact that it's supposed to rain the entire time and we are all getting sick on top of PMS. it's going to be awesome! hah. no, seriously, i'm pysched, and am listening to my maroon five cd right now to get myself pumped. because i just remembered what a damn catchy album it is. word up to confident pop music. i am all wrapped up in the romanticism of this continent. tomorrow's my birthday! and i'm gonna be in paris! send donations for wine! *(@%&*(@%*(!@%^ 6 love letters|comment

you better put some beauty back while you've got the energy. [wed 24 sep 03|05:05pm] so the guy next to me in the computer lab just turned and said, "when i get bored online, i go to ebay and search for belt buckles." oh, emerson college, how i heart thee. anyway. amsterdam. what an incredible city. and in my opinion, incredibly misconstrued. a nineteen year old coming from america, you think the only thing you're going to see is sex and drugs. yet once you're there, the first things that are presented to you are art and history, and beautiful architecture and canals. the whole city is built around canals. it's called the venice of the north a lot, although as was explained to us, the cities are really very different because venice is built on natural islands while the canals that circle around amsterdam were purposely constructed as a means of protection. amsterdam started as a fishing village built on two sides of the amstel river, until they built a dam to connect the two sides of the town. hence amsteldam, which for the dutch was difficult to pronounce, so it became amsterdam. there's your history lesson for you. this was our first trip altogether as a group, all eighty two of us. (the other ones will be paris and florence.) the first thing we did on friday, after finding our hostel and some other boring stuff, was head for the rijksmuseum, the largest museum in the netherlands. we looked around for awhile, and then dulcia (the director of the program, who has degrees in art history) took groups to two or three different paintings and explained them in depth. i'm not usually all about analysis of art of any kind - you can dissect a poem or a piece of art to death until its emotion and meaning is completely dead to you. but seriously. she talked about one painting for thirty minutes and it was completely interesting. dulcia could talk about a fleck of dirt for thirty minutes and you would be completely enthralled. i haven't met anyone here who doesn't think she's completely amazing. she's the ultimate rock star. after that we all went to an indonesian restaurant for, check it out, a free dinner. let me reiterate to you that a) dutch food sucks and b) i am poor. and that a) indonesian food is awesome and full of random spicy stuff and b) again, it was paid for. i was all about it. that night, the history of music students were going to see the symphony orchestra, and dulcia had a few extra tickets that you could buy for $20. considering they were originally almost $50, i couldn't really pass it up. our seats were scattered all around the symphony hall, and i ended up being in the first row of a section of seats behind the orchestra. it was a pretty primo seat, except i felt kind of odd because, considering i had just decided to do this on the spot, i was wearing some ratty field hockey tshirt and jeans. dulcia had insisted that in amsterdam no one really cared what you wore to these things, but i still felt weird. but they played beethoven's fourth, and tchaikovsky's fourth. from the very little symphony experience i have, i've decided that tchaikovsky is the man, even if i have no clue how to spell his name. he's so violent, and passionate, and.. yeah. i think by the finale of it my mouth was actually slightly agape. i think i used that same phrase in my last entry. guess there's lots of awe inspiring things in this continent. beethoven's a little repetitive, but tchaikovsky, word. look at me, talking about art and symphonies. am i cultural, or what. what what. i don't think there was much of note after that. i had a heineken, cause you know, it's from there so it was the thing to do, but i didn't really like it. so there you go. we started the next day at the van gogh museum, which was also pretty wonderful. this is what i'm talking about with the art - van gogh (which is properly pronounced by the dutch as von hoch, like you're coughing up some phlegm or something) and rembrandt are from holland. aftr lunch, we got split up for awhile and sam b., zoe and i went to the anne frank house, where she and another family hid for twenty five months, which was thankfully, very well done. a self guided tour took you through the house, then you enter a room where her actual diary is on display, along with this massive tome full of names of people from the netherlands that were sent to concentration camps. the last room had copies of all the editions of anne frank that have been published in countless languages on one wall, and on the other were original letters that her father, otto, the only one to survive the war, had written. one was written soon after the war, when he was still convinced anne and margot were still alive, and the other written after he had received confirmation that they weren't. i've never actually been able to get through the entire diary of anne frank, and i remember when i started to read it once, wondered what the huge deal was. but at the point of the letters, i was really trying my hardest not to bawl because i hate crying in public places or crying in general. but it's strange how you can read figures of the unbearable amount of people that died during the holocaust, and it can all kind of pass over your head without effect. but then you think about the life of this one single girl, and see her picture and all of a sudden it's the saddest thing you've ever seen. after that sobering moment we relaxed for awhile by one of the canals. there was some music festival going on in the square behind us. there's so much life in amsterdam. so much music, sound, light, people. actually, too many people was the only gripe i had about the place. it's one of the most crowded places i've ever been and it's also the city of bicycles. everyone in holland bicycles. they walk their dogs while biking, they throw their infants on the front handlebars. really, it's crazy. they have their own separate lanes everywhere, and god forbid you get in their way, they'll just run into you and yell something angrily in dutch before cycling away. i watched numerous dumb american members of our group be a part of this phenomenon. it's pretty amusing, overall. (update from the guy next to me: "can we all turn our attention to this elvis presley belt buckle? because, i mean, that, really, is a gem.") we ate at a very satisfying italian place for dinner, and eventually wandered back to our hostel. where sam and i played some foosball, which was kind of randomly situated outside our hostel, where i totally kicked ass. okay, well, so, i lost, but i still played foosball, outside, in amsterdam, which i think is pretty cool. we eventually met up with kerri and some other people again, so we headed out to find the red light district. you'd think this would be an easy thing to do. it's a famous thing. but apparently not. we walked for a long time without finding this elusive street of sex, checking maps several times and getting angry with each other. we eventually did find it. it was kind of depressing. like i thought it would be. don't really have much more to say about it. just depressing. after that we tried to find a bar to have some good final times in amsterdam. but like i was mentioning before, we were kinda frustrated with each other, and had been walking for a long time, and were tired, and so forth. and i had passed an ice cream stand that looked really good. so i thought out loud, "man, know what would be awesome right now? a mcflurry. do we have to get beer?" so we split up, and my roomates and i for the second weekend in a row succumbed to mcdonalds and got a mcflurry, chicken nuggets, and fanta, respectively, and were back at the hostel and ready to sleep by 12:30. in amsterdam. we are so amazingly lame, it's almost funny. the next morning kerri and sam m. headed back earlier, while sam b. and i walked around a little more and most importantly, took our picture sitting in a big wooden shoe. ah, holland. the trip back went relatively smoothly, other than me accidentaly kicking the man across from me on the train to nijmegen in the shin rather hard, and the bus from nijmegen back to well being sweltering hot and, considering i was tired and hadn't showered in three days, making me want to shoot something. oh, and we also passed a men's field hockey game on the bus, which was pretty exciting, at least to me. alright, i've been in the computer lab for entirely too long. i'm out. see you soon. like the coldplay song. (which is good.) 4 love letters|comment

hey little girl, see them all run around. hey little girl, seem them all tumble down. [sun 14 sep 03|03:22pm] cologne provided so many good times and stories, and it was only two and a half days. blows my mind to consider i have three more months of this craziness. our weekend in germany could also be titled: a beginner's lesson in being dumb americans in a foreign country, starring jill, kerri, sam b. and sam m. although mostly jill, as we all should have known when not five minutes out the door on friday i realized i had forgotten my bus ticket - and my room keys - inside our room. aforesaid bus ticket was to venlo, since well is too small to have a train station. the bus ride went pretty smoothly, but once we got to the international train counter at venlo the confusion started. since there were four of us, there's a group pass you can buy for germany which is much cheaper. or at least, this is what the man tried to tell me when i told him i wanted to go to cologne, but i of course wasn't exactly following. but another woman led us to a ticket machine where she ordered for us a ticket to the border, and then another ticket from there to cologne. the border town was called something like manchausheuyauidf. she told us this, but we of course all just kind of blankly stared at her and nodded and walked away. nice people though, really, it did end up being much cheaper. in the train station i also paid a euro to get something hot and fried out of a vending machine type thing. it was salty and made of some unknown meat product, but i was pretty hungry so it actually tasted alright. "hey, i'm here to experience culture," i said, as the others drank their sprite and i wolfed down my fried gray meat.. stick.. log.. thing. so, we get on the train and of course have no bloody clue what stop we're supposed to transfer at, but by flags in front lawns of houses we were passing, we could tell that we were already in germany. anyway, long story short, we did eventually end up in cologne, albeit attempts to get off at the wrong stop (twice) and a german conductor who was very clearly laughing at us. [ this makes me think of a side story, that's not related to germany but i'm of course going to tell it anyway: a few days earlier, my roomates and i went to the bank in town to try to get some cash out of the atm, which is inside a little glass entrancewaything. so kerri swipes her card at the thing by the door and tries to open it, but to no avail. some other emerson kids from the castle come by and they each try to pull and tug at the door with no success. so there's about six of us just sitting around the bank door, defeated, when a local dutch man walks through us and very smoothly, pushes the door open. none of us had thought of the brilliant idea of pushing the door open, instead of pulling. it was really a classic and hilarious two minutes of my life, if you could have seen it. this local dutch man was also very clearly laughing at us, although he was trying to look like he wasn't. ] once we find our way out of the cologne train station, we are immediately greeted with this looming, overwhelmingly massive cathedral. it's called the dom, and took around six hundred years to build, and is honestly breathtaking. so we all stood silently with our mouths slightly agape for a minute or two, and then realize that our backpacks are pretty heavy, and that we'd like to put them down before we can truly admire this enormous gothic place of worship. so the search for the hostel begins. we find the bridge across the reine we have to cross, we even find the right street it's supposed to be on, and walk up and down and around it for awhile but are still clueless. i eventually ask someone at another fancy hotel on the street (which was clearly not ours) and she points me to a building that we had of course already passed. so, we check into the hostel, and trudge up to the second floor and try for a good ten minutes to open our door. seriously. our keys were not working. the door would not budge. kerri and i went down to the main desk twice, and finally a teenaged german boy comes up with us, takes one of our keys and very smoothly and quickly opens the door. we look at him in awe for a second, and he says in his german accent, "so, what is the problem?" with "you stupid american girls" silently following this statement in the imaginary bubble above his head. it was awesome. (yes, this is going to be a long story. and yes, it was all probably more interesting/amusing/exciting at the time.) the hostel is actually very nice and clean. impressively nice and clean, even. the best hostel we're going to stay at, probably. so we put our stuff down and head out to the city and the massive cathedral. we walk around outside and inside, and it's beautiful. we also decided to walk up to the belfry. 509 steps. up a windy spiraling staircase. after not having eaten or drank anything for a good five hours. prooobably not a bright idea. in fact, i'm really amazed that i didn't fall on my face and kill myself on one of the 509 steps down. but the view probaly was worth it. beautiful. i have a hard time thinking of adjectives other than 'beautiful' when i'm tired. once we all regroup, we decide that we definitely have to get food, so we walk around and find a restaurant that looks suitable, so we're standing outside looking at the menu and a waiter comes out and asks us something. probably "can i help you" but honestly. i can't even understand this much in german. the others aren't saying anything, so i say, with some meaningless hand motions, "can we uhh, um, eat, here?" it was smooth, let me tell you. i didn't sound dumb at all. and then, even better, he says no. "the kitchen does not open until five." apparently in europe they're all cultural and don't eat until late, or whatever. at this point, we are all tired and hungry and want to kill each other, so we give up and go to mcdonalds. which i realize is pretty lame, and eric schlosser would be disappointed in me, but, we had just walked over a thousand steps. i ate every last greasy corporate french fry. word. i think we just walked around for awhile after that. this was two days ago, and my memory's gone. man. i need a nap. but later that night, we drank some beer by the reine river and talked to some german boys. which was mostly initiated by sam b., who had mentioned several times that day that it was her mission to drink some beer and talk to some german boys, so a+ for sam for following her dreams. the first thing we did on day #2 was hit up the chocolate museum. that's right, a whole museum dedicated to chocolate. what gets better than that, you may ask. not much, i would say. it was pretty big, too. there's a surprising amount of history behind chocolate. we went to lunch after that, at a sucky restaurant where i had a tiny sandwich with fatty ham, and where we waited an hour to get our check. the two tables around us got there after us and had left by the time we got it. it sucked. although, something i never knew before: you don't leave tips. i don't know if this is just in germany or everywhere in europe, but, no tips, ever. this is perhaps why you wait an hour to get your check. we went to the ludwig art museum after that, and when we had left there, had reached another point where, for some reason, we wanted to kill each other. traveling in foreign countries apparently puts a strain on relationships. but so we split up for awhile and sam b. and i walked quite a ways up the reine where according to our map there was a sculpture garden and more importantly, a zoo. so, going to a zoo seems like a kind of random thing to do in a big european city where there are probably things of much greater cultural importance, but, it somehow seemed like a good idea to us at the time. the sculpture garden was full of random things that didn't make any sense, which of course describes any sculpture garden in the world. there was a guard at the beginning of it, and i asked him if it was free, but he didn't speak any english, so after he made some gestures which i eventually gathered to mean "yes" i said thank you in german. dankeshurn? i can't even spell it. but, it was the first move i had made all day in not being an ignorant ass, and man, i was pretty proud of myself. ("hey sam, remember when i said dankeshurn to that guy? yeah, that rocked.") the zoo was actually a pretty good time, and pretty impressive. i was completely expecting it to suck, and consist of like, deer and pigeons or something. but think of an animal, any animal, and i probably saw it. and how many people can say they've been to a zoo in germany? (the amount of people who would want to go to a zoo in germany is not important at this time.) after walking the 124897 miles back to our hostel, we all went out to a mexican restaurant on the corner. yes, i know that going to a mcdonalds, and then a mexican restaurant, is not really embracing german culture. but, well. german food sucks. sorry. and mexican food is good. mmm mexican food. we didn't do much this morning and took an early train/bus back home to the netherlands, which amazingly, went off pretty well. the only slightly interesting tidbit was that on the first train we accidently sat in the smoking car, which sucks because i hate smoke cigarettes are evil boo, but i stared for awhile at a guy across from me who appeared to be sleeping and chain smoking simultaneously who kindasorta looked like art garfunkel in a kindasorta way. he eventually dropped one of his cigarettes and jumped in reaction, although since i was listening to my discman i was only alerted of this by sam, who was trying to be discreet in laughing at him and not being very successful, but i think he was already asleep again, while on his fifth cigarette, so it's alright. man. i really need a shower and a nap. if you're reading this, i probably miss you, and hope you're well. stay tuned for tales from amsterdam, which is next weekend. it actually feels pretty good to be back in the netherlands. 'tis truly a pleasant country. 4 love letters|comment

lift up your head; focus on every detail. [mon 08 sep 03|04:52pm] some more fun tidbits about the castle and the netherlands before i forget them. the castle was built sometime in the 1300s as a military base, or at least the groundwork was laid then. more of the higher floors weren't built until later (you know, in the 1600s or so). louis napoleon stayed here once, while his brother bonaparte was off slaying millions of europeans and taking over stuff. the castle and another university outside of amsterdam are the only two american institutes of higher learning in the netherlands, or in most of northern europe, for that matter. most american universities are based in the south - florence has the most, i'm pretty sure. the castle is classified as a national monument, meaning that around 70% of the cost for the upkeep of it is funded by the government. meaning, the taxpayers of holland are basically paying for us to stay here. and the taxpayers pay a lot. in the netherlands, only 40% of your paycheck goes towards your net income, the other 60% is taxes. but. they have universal health care. both full time and part time workers receive benefits. not having to worry about getting surgery or care you need even if you're poor sounds like a good plan to me. it's often called a socialist country, but as dulcia says, "we are definitely not socialist, but we are highly socialized." most of this information is coming from dulcia, and by the way, you should be prepared for some more praise and adoration for the woman from me. she's the most amazing public speaker i've ever seen. my roomates and i are planning to take a trip to cologne, germany this weekend. i stayed for two days in boston before i left at aaron, dean, tony, chris and keith's suite, and kerri had bought them a big wall map of europe to keep track of our excursions. so buy some tacks and start marking this down, boys. we are much more important than your scantily-clad-females collage. really. but i'm finding out that going to all these places i want to go is a little more difficult than i thought, and actually involves like, planning. i have startling epiphanies everyday, i tell ya. the town of well, although still small and almost impossible to find on a map, is larger than i thought at first and is going to provide many hours of exploring i think, which makes jill happy. the flowers here are astounding, just around town and in people's lawns. no tulips - i'm pretty sure they're not in season until the spring - but still, it's all impressive and beautiful. and the landscaping and the brickwork. it's all fabulous. i could take rolls and rolls of pictures just in this tiny town alone. the other night at the bar i had one big glass of beer and it made me tipsy. this shows you have naive and lame i am with alcohol. yesterday we were supposed to have tea and coffee at one point during the afternoon, but the tea and coffee never showed up. so at a later meeting, the assistant director chester lee (who is also amazing) apologized, saying, "to make up for it, at the barbecue tonight there's gonna be free beer!" and everyone cheered. welcome, my friends, to emerson college. i'm honestly not going to spend my entries discussing alcohol though, because it seems that's all a lot of the people here do, all the time. and personally, i think that's kinda lame after awhile. 1 love letter|comment

are you such a dreamer to put the world to rights. [sat 06 sep 03|07:56am] traveling = fun times. our flight to amsterdam was delayed three hours - after we had already gotten on the plane. aforesaid three hours was spent in the logan airport spending our $10 voucher on mcdonalds and making origami. the plane was the biggest i've ever been on, with nine seats in each row - and lucky me was smack dab in the middle for seven hours. i wouldn't mind long rides if i was able to sleep on planes, and not just attempt to shift around uncomfortably while my back screams at me. for seven hours. also, a piece of advice: if you know that you're not going to be able to sleep for 48 hours, get more than 4 hours of sleep the night before. although i kept nodding off on the bus ride down to well (after we had actually arrived in amsterdam), i was glad i forced myself awake. the netherlands is a flat but supremely green and beautiful country, and it also seems to be the cleanest i've ever seen. the highway system is smooth and organized, there is no litter, and almost everyone bicycles. recycling is required by law, and you have to bring your own bags to grocery stores. the village of well is about the cutest thing i've ever seen, except in a good way, and not a yuppie new england way. it's extremely close to germany - as in, we could bicycle there. it also contains one bank, one grocery store, and three sex shops. and a big freaking castle, where we're currently eating sleeping and starting monday, going to class. it's pretty sweet living in a history castle. one of my roomates sam has already started pointing out the similarities to harry potter. such as, a) there's a groundkeeper (whose name is hubert - pronounced oo-bare), b) the director, dulcia, is pretty dumbledore-ish. she's fifty and looks about twenty five, and speaks seven languages. seven. i can hardly comprehend that. there are a hundred and one ways to feel incompetent once you get out in the world. c) emerson college's mascot is a lion. what was gryffinor's mascot? this is what i'm saying, people. d) christ, it's a castle. in europe. the castle is a big tourist attraction in town, so tourists stop a lot to take pictures. when we walked out today to go into town, there was a whole group of people on bikes that smiled at us and said lots of stuff in dutch that we didn't understand. twice now, once at the airport to the main who stamped my passport and today to the woman at the grocery store, i said "hi, how are ya!" since i'm so used to having that as my greeting, and then feeling slightly stupid for being one of those assuming-everyone-speaks-my-language people. (even though everyone does). i'm still new at this being-in-another-continent thing, but i'm pretty psyched about learning about it. we have a big pretty window in our room that looks out onto the moat and a footbridge. one of the moats, that is - there are two. my bed is lofted up high, with my desk and closet underneath. it's a fine setup, except i am positive i'm going to kill myself one morning/evening while attempting to climb up. that'll be a fun entry. "hey guys, i died today while getting out of bed. it kinda sucks, but holland is still pretty cool." we're probably going to head out to check out the bar in town tonight. most people did so last night, but i was a little preoccupied with my screaming back and need for sleep. when i would tell people i was studying abroad, they probably thought i was doing something really important and cultural. take my cousin greg, who studied abroad in russia last semester. now that is something impressive that i admire. but apparently studying abroad emerson college style is just one big party. 3 love letters|comment

gonna burn to shine. [mon 25 aug 03|07:50am] testing one two one two. this is going to document some of my observations/reflections on my ramblings through europe, living in this castle. bookmark it, tell your friends, cause it's gonna be cool, y'all. 1 love letter|comment

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