Spring Break: Berlin

Berlin

Of all the cities that I visited over spring break, Berlin is the one I had the least amount of time in. Everything was scheduled so that we'd each have two full days, but in most locations we had a good chunk of a third. This wasn't the case in Berlin, where we got in late and left early, so we only had the two full days.

There's a tremendous amount to do in Berlin, so unfortunately we didn't really get to do everything we would've liked. So the night we got there, we saw a sign in our hostel for a free 3 1/2 hour walking tour. We decided that might be a good way to get acquainted with the city.

The walking tour took us all over the city, beginning at the Brandenburg Gate and then going to the Memorial to the Murdered Jew of Europe, the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, where Hitler killed himself, and around to see various other less important buildings. Our tour guide was British, but had been in Berlin for a while and gave us a tremendous amount of history while we walked around, which was nice.

The Brandenburg Gate.

This isn't actually important, but you know when Michael Jackson dangled his baby out the window of a hotel? Yeah, that's this hotel. Like I said, not important, but kinda a fun trivial factoid.

Do you see the line of bricks in the road? That shows where the Berlin Wall stood.

Speaking of the Berlin Wall, here it is! It's not actually all that visually interesting.

That's the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. There are 2,711 stones, made of concrete, in the memorial.

Checkpoint Charlie!

So the weather during the tour was bright and sunny. It was a little too hot, however. After the tour we walked around Tiergarten, the big park, for a little bit before deciding we needed to go inside for a while. We decided to go into the museum that was under the holocaust memorial. It was sad, as is typical of holocaust museums.

Afterwards, we decided to go to the Reichstag Building where you can see a whole panoramic view of the city.
This is the dome on top of the Reichstag Building.

After that we decided to get some dinner in which we got to try Berliner Weisse. It comes in two kinds, rot and grun (red and green). Basically, when a bunch of French were staying in Berlin, they tried the beer, didn't like it, and decided to dump a bunch of fruity syrup into it. It's absoltuely delicious. :)

The next day we got up and went to the German History Museum which was absolutely gigantic. Too big really. The amount of material was overwhelming. We spend 5 1/2 hours there and that's still with considerable skimming of material. After that we just walked around, did some souvenir shopping, went to an internet cafe and had some dinner.

There's one more aspect of Berlin and that's the Ampelmann!
That's the ampelmann. So, on crosswalks, there is typically a green walking man and a red man to tell you when you can cross the street. In order to teach this concept to the children, Berlin created the Ampelmann, a cartoonish adorable man in a hat, to make it easier and more appealing for the children to understand when to cross the street. When it's okay to walk, he looks like the man above. When it's not, he's red and standing with his arms out. It gave the city a little more character which was very nice. :)

That's mostly it for Berlin. It was fun, but there's definitely a lot more I would've liked to have seen that I didn't get a chance to. Oh well. :)

Stockholm!

So, Spring Break is officially over. I have traveled all around, took plenty of pictures, and have done a tremendous amount of walking. Now I get the task of reporting all about my delightful trips. I may be a little slow about telling it all, but there's a lot to tell!

I'm going to try and not completely bombard you with pictures on this, but there will likely still be quite a few. More complete albums of pictures are being uploaded to facebook and of course, Mom and Dad, you can see the complete albums of pictures when I get home, but I'll put some of the best up on here to help illustrate my stories. :)

So to begin, I'm going to talk about Stockholm, Sweden!

We arrived at the Skavsta airport around 8 or so PM on the 30th of March. The Skavsta airport (which flies budget airlines and mostly just ryanair) we learned was about 1 and 1/2 hours away from the city center, which was a little less than ideal, but there was a bus, so it was alright. We got to our hostel, which was on a boat! The boat hostel was pretty nice. There were two boats that were part of the hostel. We stayed in the one called Ran. We were in a room of 10, but there there never more than 5 (including us) staying there, so it was pretty delightful. :)

That's the boat we lived on. It was pretty nifty.

This was the inner decor. It was quite delightful. :)

So on the 31st, we got up and decided to go to the Royal Palace. The Royal Palace is composed of three parts that are open to the public: the royal apartments, the treasury, and Gustav III's Museum of Antiquities. We just decided to go and get tickets to the royal apartments because each had to be separately paid for. We did snag a nice 50% student discount though, which was pretty awesome.

The rooms in the royal apartments were pretty ridiculously ornate. To the point of being gaudy at times, but in general they weren't too bad. Interesting to see them. :)

That's a picture of the outside of the palace. :)

After the palace, we walked around Gamla Stan, which is the old town.

Gamla Stan was full of cute little quaint streets and lots of little touristy shops. It was really enjoyable just to walk around and look at everything. It was a very nice area to walk around in.

We later learned how well people know English when we went to a grocery store to pick up some dinner. The cashier said something to me in Swedish and I must have looked confused because he then said "Oh, I'm sorry. You must not speak any Swedish. It's very hard to tell sometimes who can speak it and who can't."

We chilled the rest of the evening in the lobby of the hostel, trying to decipher the available Swedish and German magazines. There was one in English and it was the strangest magazine I've seen, with articles about breast milk cupcakes, penis mushrooms, and body farms. Very strange.

The next day, on April 1st, we headed out to see the Vasa Museum, which houses a 17th c. Swedish warship that sank after a grand 20 minutes of sailing. It was top heavy, two narrow, and had ineffective round ballast stones in the bottom.

That's the Vasa. It was incredibly well preserved because the salt worms, that would ordinarily eat wood of other sunken ships, don't live in the Baltic Sea due to a low salt content. The Vasa is absolutely gigantic and the museum had a lot of exhibits and information that related to it as well as the ship in the middle. I really enjoyed the exhibit that analyzed the skeletal remains of some of the people who died on board, which then constructed wax figures based on how they thought they'd look. It was really neat.
This is the diving bell which they had in the museum. You would stand on it and enough air would stay inside the top of it after being submerged that you could stay underwater for about 15 to 30 minutes (depending on time of year and water temperature since you had no protection) to investigate the ocean depths.

We spent the rest of the afternoon just walking around Stockholm.

We spent a few hours the next day (the second) walking around Gamla Stan again, getting souvenirs, before flying off to Berlin that night.

We went into one shop only to learn from the shop keeper that Bill Clinton had been there the day before. Darn!

Here are a couple pretty pictures of Stockholm.

We thought their phone booths were really neat looking. :)

That's about it for Stockholm. I will write about Berlin next time. :)

Spring Break!

So classes have ended and I now have a three week vacation. :)

Today I am heading out to Stockholm, Sweden, then going to Berlin, Germany, then to Prague, Czech Republic, and then to Amsterdam, Netherlands. I then travel back to the UK to visit Sara at the University of Sussex before coming back to Edinburgh in time to do some laundry. I then head to the Isle of Skye for my last weekend before the exam period.

It's going to be a pretty exhausting three weeks, but also hopefully fantastic.

:)

So the first trip that Butler (my program) organised was a trip to Loch Lomond back a couple of weekends ago. We took a bus to the hostel, which was a renovated castle and absolutely beautiful. They treated us to a nice dinner and then showed Braveheart. During the course of the evening, we also signed up for activities for the next day.

I ended up signing up to do Gorge Walking in the morning, with a High Ropes Course in the afternoon.

Nobody explained what Gorge Walking was before we got there. Once we met with our instructor, he handed us full waterproof suits and helmets.
To show you our super sexy waterproof gear. We quickly learned that Gorge Walking did not actually involve walking. At all. In fact, gorge walking was entirely climbing and scaling walls.

It was a much more hardcore experience than anyone anticipated, but it was a tremendous amount of fun.
You see where that waterfull goes through the rocks? That's called the Key Hole. Instead of climbing up the log, like one might assume, we each had to go under the rock and climb through the small hole instead.
Our instructor convinced us to slide down the rocks -- kinda like a slide. Seems kinda stupid in retrospect. We fully understand why they made us sign the wavers at the start of the trip after this activity, but it was a tremendously good time.
This is a picture of the whole group after our gorge walk, feeling highly accomplished.

The afternoon involved a high ropes course.

It was a tremendous amount of fun. Of course, I've been wanting to do a high ropes course for pretty much my entire life and I missed my one previous opportunity due to a sprained ankle, so I had a really enjoyable time.

After our enjoyable day, we had a nice dinner.

On Sunday, they took us to a wool center so that we could buy souvenirs and see a sheep dog display. After treating us to lunch, they took us home.

Overall it was a pretty enjoyable weekend. :)

Grr...

There are a set of construction workers outside my window listening to really poppy awful music.

Grr.

Very soon I will post about my weekend at Loch Lomond and the gorge walking that did not, in fact, involve walking.

Madrid!!

So this past thursday, I skipped a couple of classes and headed off to Madrid instead! I flew out on a 9:45am flight, getting into Madrid by around 3. After checking into my hostel, I headed off to the Prado while Fiona finished off an essay she had to write.
That's the Prado. It was pretty exciting. I got to see a lot of really awesome famous art, including all sorts of pieces that I'd been studying in past classes, so it was really good.
After the Prado we mostly just walked around. Fiona took me to where they do the bull fights, so I could see the outside of the building. It was pretty impressive, although I apologize for the dark picture. It was after dark.
So, like a lot of cities around the world, Madrid was doing that whole 'let local artists decorate the themed object' thing. (Places have had cows, guitars, globes, etc etc.) Madrid was doing cows, so I took a picture next to the lego cow! It was good that I did this because when I walked past the next day, the cow was knocked over and broken. :( Anyway, I then headed off to the hostel to get some sleep because I was pretty tired.
So Friday was a beautiful day. Bright, sunny, and probably around 70 degrees. Absolutely wonderful. We decided to spend a lot of the day going to various parks because they were pretty and the weather was so nice. There were even some flowers!!

We even headed out to see the Palace in Madrid. We didn't go in because there was a line and I was more in the mood to go see more parks, but we got to see the outside of the Palace.
This is a park. That's the palace in the background. This is the park that doesn't allow you to walk on the grass and has all sorts of birds walking around including copious numbers of peacocks!!

Yes, that's a peacock in a tree. We got to see lots of peacocks which was just very very exciting. :)
We then walked up to see the Egyptian temple that was given to Madrid. I don't really remember why though. :(

There were some nice views from the Temple though because we were way up on a hill. It was nice to get a bigger view of the city. That night we met up with a couple other people and did some drinking outside with every intention of hitting up a discotecca. We never got to the discotecca sadly, but it was fun anyway.
On Saturday, we went out and I finally got a picture of the bear eating the strawberry tree, which is the symbol of Madrid. It was right near my hostel. :) We then headed out to the Thyssen-Bornemisza to see more exciting art and then to the Reina Sofia to see Guernica. (Picasso) After that, Fiona and I had a cup of coffee.
We then went to look inside the train station. It practically has a jungle in the middle of it. It's really pretty. We then walked around some more, sat around talking for a while, had a couple of guys ask us where to buy marijuana (why he decided to ask the two very not spanish american girls speaking english pretty loudly instead of any of the other groups of slightly sketchy looking men smoking their cigarettes is beyond me), and then got churros with chocolate. Then I headed to sleep for a few hours before heading back to Edinburgh on my 7:30 am flight.

Overall it was a really nice time and I'm glad I went.

Stirling and Ghost Tour!

I know I said I'd write about this ages ago. Now I'm getting around to it. I'll try to be better about posting exciting things, because it makes me sad that I don't have daily updates from all the people whose blogs I'm following.

So, Stirling! I hopped on a train on a Saturday morning, for a grand total of 7.80 pounds and about an hour of travel to arrive in Sterling. We walked around a little, heading continually up a hill on our way to the castle.

On the way, we passed super exciting things like the following:
The entrance to the Old Town Jail! A grand tourist attraction that was closed and will continue to be closed for quite some time, apparently. :(
A Church with cannons!
And this delightful sign that tells us that we're approaching a 'Heavy Plant Crossing'. :)
Then we finally got to the castle!
Unfortunately, we picked potentially the worst day to go. It was very very foggy. In theory, Stirling's got some really pretty views. It was hard to tell however. That is, in fact, a picture of the castle, by the way.

Those are some pictures of the castle and an almost not super foggy picture of one of the views.

I would say that Stirling Castle is kinda like Edinburgh Castle but even more hokey. For example, I will show you a splendid picture from the great kitchen exhibition.
Yes indeed. It was a room full of fake men and fake food in theory to tell us how the food was done in the great kitchens. It was mostly just pretty ridiculous.
That's the surgical kit in the military museum that I probably wasn't allowed to take pictures of. For whatever reason, I couldn't get it to turn on this, but oh well.

Overall it was a fun day.

The following Tuesday, I went on a ghost tour! They took us around the city a little, told us some stories, and then took us down into the Edinburgh Underground Vaults. The vaults were originally used as storage for alot of business, but given their lack of waterproofing they weren't very good for it. It ended up often being housing for the city's poor. They told us all sorts of creepy stories and then took us for a free drink afterward. It was fun.

:)