Last little trip to Germany

As my time here is slowly coming to an end, I decided one place that I needed to spend some more time is Germany. I have a German friend who was an assistant in Reims who lives in Würzburg, a student town near Frankfurt, and she invited me to come visit her there.  My friend Devin wanted to visit Germany before leaving Europe too, so he found himself a plane ticket to fly back home to the States out of Frankfurt, and everything fell into place for us to visit her. 

We were once again really lucky with the weather, it was warm and sunny our whole time there.  We enjoyed the food, lots of beer, and met lots of nice Germans.  I was stunned by how great everyone speaks English there as usual! 

One little day trip we took from Würzburg was to a town called Bamberg, where I've wanted to go for a while.  It was just like all the towns that I love, the cute little picturesque places, and of course with the buildings that resemble the Alsacien architecture I was sold.  We had a great day, walked around town, enjoyed the beautiful sights, and ended our day in a brauhaus, where Devin got his first taste of some delicious traditional German food. 

I knew that after Würzburg I wanted to go back to Alsace to see Thibaut's parents, but I had a few days to kill before the weekend came.  I decided to make a little stop in a town called Bacharach. My family has been going to Bacharach for over 30 years, originally my Grandma's brother went there when he was over here in the military, and eventually my grandma, grandpa, and uncle fell in love with the town too.  It's a cute little village in the middle of the vineyards with delicious wine from the Rhine Valley. Luckily, there is an amazing couple that my family used to hang out with that is still living in Bacharach, and I was able to get a hold of them before my arrival.  When I got there I went straight to their tourist shop to say hello, and I was greeted with the most amazing hospitality!  They were the nicest people, they took me to dinner, showed me around, drove me to my hostel (which was wayyyyy up on the hill) and insisted on taking care of me the whole time I was there.  It was so great to hear old stories about my family, all the good times they had there, and to get to know their friends.

The one thing that I had time to do there was to take a boat cruise along the Rhine. There were so many beautiful old castles that were from the year 1000 (!) and even before. I visited the little town of Rudesheim for about an hour, hopped on the boat back to Bacharach and headed directly for the pool at my hotel, because it was over 90 degrees. 

And also apparently my family wasn't alone in their love for Bacharach, because Rick Steves loves it too. I saw over a dozen Americans wandering around with their noses in their Rick Steves guide books.  Makes it a little bit less authentic, but since I love Rick so much I just couldn't be mad about it.

Bamberg

my amazing hostess in Bacharach! 

after dinner drinks

view from the hostel 

the Alte Haus

that's my hostel, wayyy up there

Rudesheim

Drosselgasse in Rudesheim

view of Bacharach and the Rhine

Arcachon/ Saint-Emilion/ Bordeaux

Before we went to Barcelona, we were invited by Thibaut's parents to spend time in the Bassin d'Arcachon, which is an area on the ocean not too far from Bordeaux.  We spent five days there with his parents, sister and his brother-in-law.  Everyday we had a different activity:

The first day we hiked the Dune du Pyla, which is the tallest sand dune in Europe.  Walking uphill is hard. Walking uphill on sand is even harder. It was a beautiful view from the top, and we had a nice walk on the beach too. 

Day two we took a boat across the Bassin d'Arcachon, and spent the day hiking around, a little over ten kilometers! Thankfully it was all flatland. 

Day three was our lazy beach day, and I loved every minute of it. 

Day four we spent the entire day in Saint-Emilion, which is a really cute little wine village about an hour away from Arcachon.  Thib's parents have friends that live nearby and we all decided to meet for lunch and some sightseeing, and even some wine tasting for the day.  On the way back we visited the Chateau Michel de Montaigne, which is a famous chateau where the author Michel de Montaigne lived in the 1500's.  

Finally, we visited the Oyster shacks, and learned all about how oysters are made.  You might think it's easy, but there's a whole method behind it.  Who knew?  Unfortunately for the others, NOT for me because I hate oysters, there was some kind of oyster plague happening and no one was allowed to eat Arcachon oysters during the time we were there. 

On the last night we decided to stay in Bordeaux since our flight was on Sunday afternoon.  We kind of just wandered around, had dinner and drinks, and most importantly, finally found Thibaut some oysters!

thibs and his dad at dune du pyla

view from the top

walking on the beach

and back up the dune...

Arcachon

our hotel

Saint-Emilion

the wine purchases! 

Bordeaux

finally got them.

Barcelona

Well it's been a very busy couple of weeks for me!  I had three weeks off of school (spring break combined with a reading week to prepare for exams) and I decided that I needed to take advantage of visiting more of Europe while everything is still easily accessible.  I'm going to start at the end because I remember it the most...

Thibaut and I booked a last minute trip to Barcelona. I had been there before in 2006, and he was there when he was little, but neither of us seemed to remember it very well.  We found a really cheap flight from Bordeaux, and booked a room through his hotel company and were on our way.

Our trip was amazing, we had such beautiful weather, saw so many things, ate great food and were just so happy with every place we visited.  Our favorite things were everything that is Gaudi, the famous architect of Barcelona.  It's a great change from all the typical museums, roman ruins etc that most European cities have to offer, Barcelona is much more modern.  Some days we would leave the hotel at 10am and not get back until 1am, there was just too much to do. Our favorite Gaudi things that we visited were :
Casa Battló
Park Guëll
Sagrada Familia cathedral
Casa Mila
Casa Vincens

The two that were well worth the money to go inside were the Casa Battló, and Sagrada Familia.  I stole the first picture below from Wikipedia to give you a better idea of how Sagrada Familia looks inside, it's amazing. We spent at least two hours in each place and listened to every word of the audio guide, it made us notice so many more things that we never would have noticed otherwise.

Otherwise we visited Poble Espanyol, which is an outdoor museum, the BEACH, which was barely relaxing because there were people trying to sell us stuff the entire time (I gave into this cute little asian woman giving 5 euro back massages), and the Barcelona soccer stadium, which is one of the biggest in the world.  Obviously the last one was not for me, but it made Thibaut's year. It was definitely hard to leave this city after only 5 days, we could have stayed another week and never run out of things to do!

Click on the pictures to see the full image:

inside the Sagrada Familia

Sagrada Familia

Casa Battló

inside Casa Battló

roof of casa battló

mosaics in Park Guëll

view from the park 

Casa Vincens 

Poble Espanyol 

Stockholm

I'm a little behind here as usual, but in March my friend Devin and I went to Stockholm for a weekend.  I was getting antsy since it had been a full 3 weeks without traveling, so we found a cheap flight and went to check out some more of Scandinavia. I visited Norway last year and pretty much loved it so I was excited to check out another place. 

We were so lucky to have such amazing weather, it was a little bit chilly but we had blue skies the whole time!  This seems to be my luck with vacations, and I'm not mad about it.

The first day we arrived we just checked into our hostel, which was so nice, clean and welcoming, and then walked around the city.  We thought we'd have a casual beer, but when we saw the prices, we went to the 7/11 and decided to just drink in the streets, as you do.  I was shocked at how expensive beer was!  It was like ten dollars for a pint of beer.  I am not paying that. 

The next day we walked around the city, explored a local zoo/outdoor museum called Skansen which was awesome, checked out the Vasamuseet and enjoyed the sunshine. The Vasamuseet is a museum where they restored and entirely put back together a ship that sunk right outside of Stockholm in the 17th century.  They somehow salvaged it over a hundred years later, got it up from the bottom of the ocean and brought it back to life.  I fell asleep during the video so that's all I can really say about that, but the ship was cool to look at!

Our favorite part of the trip was the concert and bar that we went to that night, where they had FREE live music playing and lots of cool-looking hipster kids.  Those Swedes really know how to dress, and I have never felt so midwestern and uncool in my life.  Both of the bands that played were great, we met a few really nice Swedes, and this time we learned to BYOB so we didn't have to worry about the absurd drink prices! 

The next day we didn't have much on our schedule, we just wandered around the old town, did some shopping, and visited the Grand Hotel, where my Grandpa and uncle Charlie went to years and years ago.  We just sat in the lobby and people watched pretty much, but it was funny being somewhere where I knew that they were so many years ago. 

Overall my favorite Swedish custom that we picked up on (thanks to Rick Steves I have to say) is fika.  Fika is the Swedes ritual coffee break.  They have a big coffee, american style, and some sort of pastry (my fave was the cinnamon buns. so good.), sit outside, and enjoy their coffee break with friends.  Since it's just a few dollars, this is a custom we really got into.  Our favorite part of the day was enjoying our fika break and taking in as much people watching as possible.  One thing that we really noticed is that pretty much every young couple is pushing around a stroller, and usually has another baby on the way.  It's a major baby boom in Stockholm!  Something else that caught our attention is that Sweden is way more progressive than France.  France does everything to keep their culture, old buildings and customs, and in turn always seems just a few steps behind the rest of the world. Sweden is the complete opposite, and almost seems a little bit too far ahead. If you've ever stepped foot in an IKEA, you know what I mean.  Anyway we loved Stockholm: fika, hipsters and all. Great weekend getaway! 

Skansen

Devo with the swedish mascot, the Dalahäst

reindeer!

What they used to use for scuba diving, called a diving bell.  It pretty much just gave you a tiny air pocket to breathe in, it must have been terrifying 

The Vasa

extremely lifelike and creepy replica of a man's skeleton that they found in the Vasa