Paris!

My apologies for taking so long to update this thing! I didn't go anywhere the weekend after Budapest besides Arcen on Sunday afternoon, which is this cute little town about 20 minutes away from here. The other days of that weekend were mostly spent doing homework and catching up on sleep. We've also had midterms this week so I've been INSANELY busy. Every moment spent awake has been devoted to studying. But thankfully I am done now, and it is time to update!

Paris this past weekend was absolutely incredible. We left at about 8am on Friday morning and got to the city around 4pm.



It took us about 5 actual hours on the train to get into the city. We were all going a bit stir-crazy after the day of travel so we spent some time in the hotel (pictured above) hanging around recuperating and getting ready for the night.



We'd heard that the Louvre is free on Friday nights for anyone under the age of 26, so we went, and found out that it's true! We all got in for completely free and spent something between two and three hours wandering around the massive museum (when I say massive I mean MASSIVE, I was NOT expecting it to be that huge). It was surreal seeing a lot of things I've only read about or seen pictures of in textbooks. All of the artwork was incredible. Too many things to name. We even saw Louis the XIV's coronation crown!



I'm on the right!



Seeing Nike was amazing too. I totally wasn't expecting it either, she just sort of...appeared. I knew she was in the museum, but not in the place that we found her.



Mona Lisa was mind-blowing also. She's encased in glass with two guards standing around her at all times. We managed to get near enough to take a picture, thankfully. Nicole and I kept making Da Vinci Code jokes the whole time we were there. When we first walked into the massive Louvre entrance area with all the pyramids we started yelling, "SHE'S BURIED RIGHT HERE!" at each other.



Twins?



After the museum, we wandered down past Le Jardin de la Tuileries, which is the garden somewhat attached to the Louvre, to the Place du Concorde and the Obalisque. In the distance we could see the Arc Du Triomphe illuminated, and to the left of it the top of the Eiffel Tower. Paris is truly gorgeous at night. I liked it so much better then than during the daytime.

Everyone was getting tired and hungry at this point so we hopped on the metro back to the hotel. There were these three guys playing music in one of the cars we were in. They were amazing. I managed to grab a 20-second video in addition to a few pictures. We found a cafe for dinner literally right next to the hotel and decided to call it a night.

The next morning we got up earlyish and headed out to see the city. We stopped at a little patisserie/boulangerie on our way to the metro and grabbed a quick breakfast. All I got was a croissant but it was literally the best croissant I've ever had in my life. The place we went to didn't seem to be all that hole-in-the-wall-ish, but it was pretty small, sort off a cute little shopping street. And it was SO good. We stayed near the Republique area, which is a little square with a bunch of restaurants/bars/cafes, so there was lots near the hotel to do.



We made our way down the Champs-Elysses. It was truly a surreal experience, being able to actually walk down this street I've heard about/craved walking down for so long. Unfortunately it was pretty rainy and gross out so we were all hiding under our coats, but there's still something beautiful about the city when it rains. Everyone's running around with coats and umbrellas and all the tourists who need to see what they've planned to see are still out, so there's this really strange sense of camaraderie among everyone. We all understand how badly we want to enjoy the city and all appreciate how gross our situation is at the same time.



The sign is technically pointing to the underground passageway that'll take you into the center of the roundabout, where the Arc actually is. I just think it's pretty funnily placed.



After that we visited La Tour Eiffel! There were a million people around its base but the lines moved quickly so we decided to head to the top. It was - I know I've said it once, but I've gotta say it again - truly surreal. We just kept looking at each other like "Guys...we're in the FREAKING EIFFEL TOWER RIGHT NOW!"



View from the top! Taylor has a picture of us at the very top I think, but he hasn't uploaded his pictures yet so I don't have it. It was just so insane being able to see the entire city, from all the way to the Arc, where we'd just been, to the Louvre and Place du Concorde to Notre Dame. Paris is so much more massive than I thought.



Every single shop we went into we found berets. We didn't think they'd actually sell them and we were quite surprised. They sell them in every color imaginable.



After grabbing some lunch (at the cafe with the red awning behind the car!) we came across...a car with a New York license plate? Needless to say, we were rather confused.



Next we headed to Notre Dame! Again - surreal. Notre Dame is incredible. It's free to go inside so we all definitely took advantage of that. There was even this creepy blind dude hanging around out front that looked like a hunch back (I know it's sort of mean to say that, but it sort of added to the ambiance...just go with it).



The inside of Notre Dame is magnificent. There are candles and statues everywhere and the most insane stained glass. Everything about the church is amazing. There's even a running confessional that people can go to if they want/need. Notre Dame is one of those places that makes you wish you were religious, just so that you could take part in it. We spent at least an hour in there, just admiring the beauty (also because we were sorta tired and appreciated having somewhere to sit).

After Notre Dame we headed back to the hotel to hang around, freshen up, and do work before the night. We all ended up passing out for two hours instead, but it was much needed, and we all woke up feeling very refreshed.

Afterwards, we headed into the Montmartre district, and...



The Moulin Rouge! It was SO COOL seeing it. We walked out of the metro stop and it was literally RIGHT there, with a million people everywhere and lights flashing in every direction imaginable. We stood outside it for a while just admiring, and then decided to try and find some place to eat.



Literally RIGHT down the street from the Moulin Rouge is Le Cafe des 2 Moulins, which is the cafe at which the movie Amelie was filmed! We hovered around the entrance for a while, debating whether or not we should go in, and decided against it. We did take a bunch of pictures though. Inside on the counter (for anyone who's seen the movie) is a gnome! There are also a few pictures of Amelie inside. It was so cute. I wanted to go in so bad, but we just didn't have time/money. Next time!



We found this incredible little restaurant called Les Dix Vins not too far from the Moulin Rouge. It was tiny and literally had 10 tables and this was the menu. There were only two people working there - one person in front and one person in back. And the food was. Beyond. Incredible. I'm getting hungry just thinking about it. You got a three-course meal for a set price, and since Kendra's birthday was the day after her parents were nice enough to give us 50 euro to spend on dinner one night, to splurge a little (since Paris will undoubtedly have some of the best food we'll have on the whole trip). I had tomato and mozzarella for my appetizer, this duck in honey sauce with incredible vegetables and potatoes as my main course, and a fantastic creme brulee for dessert. The dinner lasted somewhere around two hours, it was about 10 by the time we got out, and we were ready to explore.



We wandered into this bar for a while down the street from the Moulin Rouge. The bouncers like...pulled us in, it was really funny. They called us "Miss Americas" too, which was sort of entertaining. After that we wandered around the area for a while longer, looking for other things to do. It was around 12:30 by now so we were considering heading back to the area around the hotel, since the metro closes in Paris at 2. We got back around 1 and I was getting sort of tired so I headed back to the hotel to do some reading, but Nicole, Kendra, and Taylor ended up finding this cute little karaoke bar not too far from the hotel and spent another hour-or-so there celebrating for Kendra's birthday.



The next day after we checked out of the hotel we went to see the Sacre Coeur, which was one of the most gorgeous things I've ever seen. We wanted to go up to the top, but there were like a million stairs to get there and we were exhausted, so we just hung around its base for the most part, snapping pictures and talking. We were conned into buying these little string bracelets by these guys standing around the base, which is a whole other ranty story that I don't want to get into, but I do sort of like my bracelet now, and there's a story that goes with it if anyone asks where I got it, so I do appreciate it.



After the Sacre Coeur we wandered down some side streets for a bit, found some lunch (Kendra wanted to get escargot at some point before we left the city and she did, so she was happy), and walked back to the train station, which wasn't too far from the area at all. Our train left in the early afternoon and after many delays we finally made it back to the castle at about 10pm.

So, to recap, things I've learned from my weekend in Paris:
- French people are nice. You hear so often from tourists and travelers that the French hate everyone, are mean and judgmental. We did not experience this AT ALL. It probably helped that Kendra speaks a bit of French and I remember a minute amount from taking it in junior high, but I literally don't think we could have met nicer people than we did. Everyone was so welcoming and sweet and I was never afraid of telling people where I'm from.
- Parisian croissants > any other croissant, ever.
- 2.5 days in Paris is not nearly enough. I want to go back for a month and I think that even if I did I wouldn't be able to see everything that there is to see.
- Even in the rain, the city can be beautiful. In the rain, the city shows a different side of its beauty.
- Going to the top of the Eiffel Tower, no matter how packed, is totally worth it.
- Don't settle on the first, or the second, or even the third restaurant you see. Find the one that suits you. Wander. Don't be afraid to walk down streets that look empty. At Les Dix Vins, by the time we left, there were people waiting to be seated at the door, all holding glasses of wine and sipping and chatting with friends. That tiny little 10-tabled restaurant with one menu scribbled on a chalkboard that the single server carried with him from table to table was probably one of the best restaurants we could've found.
- Use the metro and buy a day ticket. So worth it.
- Rest before going to the Louvre and expect to spend half a day there if you truly want to see everything there is to see. Also don't be freaked out if you can't find the exit (because while you're looking for it, I guarantee you won't be able to find it, but any other time you don't need to leave you'll walk past it a million times).
- Walk from the Louvre to the Arc du Triomphe at night. We didn't, because members of our party were complainey and tired, but I wish we had. It would have been incredible.
- Paris at night is more spectacular than you can imagine, I guarantee.
- Prepare to fall in love.

Now I'm off to London this weekend! Another update will soon follow, I promise. :)

Hungry in Hungary

I'm afraid that I'm not going to be able to do Budapest justice by talking about it here. I am going to attempt though.

Basically, this past weekend was incredible. We left for the airport at about 6am on Friday morning and arrived in the city around noon. As we were on the bus getting into the city center, my friend Taylor turned to me and said, "It has such a dilapidated beauty about it." He was completely correct. Budapest is absolutely gorgeous. There's no other way to describe it. But it's old gorgeous. It's not fancy and flowery and insane. It just is. And it's beautiful.

We managed to navigate the metro very well, if I do say so myself. Apparently the Budapest metro system is what the NYC subway system is based off of. It's insanely efficient. There are even little timers at each platform to tell you about when the next train will arrive. We got to our hostel, which was down this side street a few blocks away from the metro.



Our hostel...was amazing. Despite the fact that it was sort of hidden, the way it was set up was that there was a main hallway with a kitchen, bathrooms, and four bedrooms off of it. Each of the bedrooms were themed. We stayed in the 8-person dorm, which was the Africa room (pictured above). It had a loft with 4 beds and a bottom area with 4 and the entire room was decorated like crazy. There was also an India room for 6 people, a space room for 5 people, and a Japan room with a double bed. The best thing about this hostel? It was 13 euro a night. It's probably the cheapest hostel we'll stay at the whole trip. Not to mention the staff was SO nice, the showers were clean, it had breakfast, had free computer access/internet, and they made our beds/cleaned our room each morning.



Here's a blurry group picture taken on the stairs at the hostel. It was pretty much the entire second floor of an apartment building and we didn't have keys or anything, we just had to buzz up when we needed to be let in since there was always someone sitting at the desk to open the door for us. On the top are Andrew and Taylor, and bottom are Kendra and Nicole.



The street our hostel was on! Kendra, Andrew and I went exploring for a bit on Friday night because Taylor and Nicole wanted to do this caving expedition thing that we did not have any interest in. We walked around, found this awesome underground mall, got gelato, and then headed back to the hostel. Then? We got massages. Yup. The hostel has this deal with a masseuse where you can get an hour-long Sweedish massage for about $25. It was SO GOOD and SO RELAXING.

Afterwards, the woman working at the desk (Agnes, who was one of the co-owners) booked us dinner reservations at this crazy Hungarian restaurant a few blocks away. She kept raving about how incredible and cheap it was. It was about $18. For all you can eat. And drink. Needless to say, we took advantage of this.



Yes please.



Saturday morning we wandered into the center of the city to this gorgeous basilica because Taylor and Andrew wanted to try and get tickets for a show since they have to for their History of European Music class. This is the square it was in.

We decided to spend $20 on this bus tour that would take us all around the city. We thought it would be convenient because we could use it for a total of 24 hours and it would take us to a lot of hard-to-get-to places. We also got a coupon book with it, and I haggled the guy selling the ticket down to $20 from like $35, so it was definitely worth it.



Something else to note about Budapest is that they don't use the Euro, they use the Hungarian Forint. This is why most things we spent money on (with the exception of the meal and bus tour) were SUPER cheap. The exchange rate is wonderful. It looks really expensive though, which is sort of funny.





This is Heroes' Square, a stop on our bus tour. Kendra and Andrew took turns climbing on the statues while we all took pictures.





This is the grand synagogue in Budapest. (Photo credit to Nicole) It is apparently the second largest Jewish building in all of Europe (I don't know what the first is though). It was simply incredible. We couldn't go inside though, which was sad.



After seeing the synagogue, we took the bus all the way up to this citadel on literally the tallest cliff in Buda (the city is divided into Buda and Pest), which overlooks the entirety of Pest, and some of Buda. The view was phenomenal, and I'd be lying if I said we all didn't tear up just a little bit seeing it. Of course we had to pose to take many pictures.

Since we hadn't really spent any money on anything but the massages, bus, and hostel (we didn't even get lunch on Saturday), AND since the prices for dinner in the fancy part of town were really reasonable, we decided to treat ourselves to dinner. We went to this AMAZING restaurant called Fresco and sat outside at 9pm laughing and talking. We split two appetizers, and I ordered a drink along with my huge meal, and the total cost was $27. This meal would have cost probably about $40 for each of us if it had been in the states. And it was probably the best meal I'll have all trip.



Sunday morning we went to the House of Terror, which I thought was going to be a haunted house when I first heard its name, but in fact was this awesome museum all about the terror regimes of WWII. They had all these insanely cool Nazi and communist things displayed, and the museum itself was set up in this giant old house and was so modern and cool looking. It was definitely worth it.





After grabbing some lunch we headed towards the Danube to take advantage of a coupon we'd gotten with our tour for a free one-hour riverboat cruise. It was SO worth it. The weather was absolutely gorgeous (which didn't prevent us from freezing our asses off, but it was worth it in the end) and we saw so much of the city. From the river it is even more incredible, which I didn't think was possible. Seriously...these next two pictures don't even look real.





After we were done, we headed back to the hostel and got ready to head back to The Netherlands. We tried to go to bed early (if you consider 11 early), but I didn't end up falling asleep until around 1. We had to be up at 4:30 to catch a cab to take us to the main square to catch our bus to take us to the airport by 5, and we did with no problem. Our flight left just after 7 and we touched down back in Germany (since technically the airport is in Germany...even though it's 20 minutes away) at around 9. We got our (reserved!) cab and made it back to the castle by 9:25, ran to the dining hall to scarf down some breakfast before it closed at 9:30, and by 10am I was in my Art History class giving a presentation on the Pop Art Movement (which I totally aced, by the way).

It was a good weekend.

Brussels - Chocolate, Waffles, and Peeing Statues?

Brussels this weekend was a lot of fun. I went with Nicole, Kendra, Sam, and Paige. We had to wake up at 6am to make it to the bus stop in Well to get to the Venlo train station in time, and everything went off without a hitch until a train accident caused us to miss one of our connecting trains. Kendra luckily had a copy of a few different train schedules, so we managed to figure out what we had to do in order to fix things. We got into the city around 1pm and with only a minor headache, so all was well!

When we got in we decided to head for our hostel, since it was like a 25-ish minute walk from the train station. We got there, checked in, dropped some of our stuff off, and went out to explore a bit and find food. Our hostel ended up actually being right across the street from the Brussels Botanical Gardens, which was pretty cool, so we explored that for a bit.





We were also right down the street from St. Maria's Cathedral, which is this really gorgeous old abandoned parish. We found a tiny patisserie near it, got baguettes for lunch, and some fruit from a stand, and sat around it eating. Afterwards, we went back to the hostel and sat around for a bit doing homework and just relaxing. There was a cool bar there, so we mostly hung out there and planned what we were going to do on Saturday, since we anticipated that would be the day we'd really get to see the city. We got dinner at this tiny little hole-in-the-wall vaguely French/Italian restaurant a few blocks away and turned in sorta early.

The next morning we hit up a Comic Strip Museum, which was super awesome because they were celebrating their 20 year anniversary. They had live music and whatnot while we were there and other things planned for later in the day, but we got there very early so we didn't see a lot. The guy who we bought our tickets from was very curious about where we were from and when we explained where we're studying he attempted to speak Dutch to us, since apparently Dutch and French are the two national languages of Brussels, but we told him we couldn't understand him. It totally baffled me that he's nearly fluent in three (or maybe even more) languages. He was really nice and he even gave us this really nice English-translation booklet for all the exhibits so that we didn't have to decipher the French.



Afterwards, we wandered into the center of the city and to this cute little market. I ended up getting a bag for 15 euro, which was my only real purchase of the weekend beyond food (and a new backpack, that was sort of necessary), because I really needed a good bag with a body strap since I'm really paranoid about pickpocketers and purse-stealers.

What we did not expect about Brussels was that it has a HUGE middle-eastern population. There were brown-skinned women in head-scarves everywhere. And the hostel we stayed in was conveniently in the Turkish neighborhood. Almost everyone you see who's begging for change in the city is a Turkish woman.





We walked to Grand Place, which is like the main square in the city. We were not expecting it to be nearly as gorgeous as it was. We got lunch at this tiny little restaurant off a side street and then wandered back to get some waffles. We also ended up running into some other castle students who were in the city this weekend as well and Sam split off with them to go to a museum or something.



Here's me eating my waffle in Grand Place!



We wandered away from Grand Place because we'd heard of some cool shops nearby. We ended up stopping at this tiny thrift-like shop, as well as two record shops, which were all really cool. All of the store-owners were really nice to us, asking where we're from and what we're doing in Brussels. Nicole, Kendra, and Paige ended up buying a lot, but I didn't really get anything since I was trying to conserve money.



After that we headed in the direction of the Royal Palace, which had some amazing views on the way. Brussels is actually a lot hillier than you'd think. You can pretty much see the whole city from this spot.



It was very windy.



Only in Brussels.





Brussels is also apparently well-known for its peeing statues. The Mannekin Pis is its most famous statue and we were lucky enough to see it. He was dressed up in some sort of uniform, which was really cute. There was a huge crowd around him too so we had to fight to get close.



Afer that we went to the Bellevue Museum, which is a sort of historical museum right next to the Royal Palace (in the Royal Palace square thingy). It was pretty cool. We were really tired by now so we couldn't appreciate a lot of it (especially since most of it was in French too) but some of the exhibits were presented in really neat ways, so it kept us awake. The guy at the ticket counter was especially interested about our school and what we were studying.



This is the Royal Palace, which Nicole was dying to see. The flag was raised, which apparently means that the royal family is home. But we were warned by someone working at the hostel that even if the flag is raised the family is usually at their country home in the Belgian countryside.

We walked back to our hostel after this since it was beginning to rain. We sat around the bar doing work for a bit, and around dinnertime wandered out to find something to eat. We found a tiny middle eastern restaurant and got falafels and gyros. I've literally never had a better falafel in my life. The food was SO good. We also got some frites with our meal. It was only 5 euro and the food was truly incredible.



The next morning after checking out we wandered back into the city center. Here are Kendra, Paige, and Nicole looking very lost.



The Brussels Marathon was also actually going on this weekend, so the whole of Grand Place was fenced off and packed with people. Every time someone would run or bike by everyone would cheer. There was everyone from little kids to old people walking around with numbers pinned to their chests.



We also stopped by a chocolate shop before we headed back to the train station, because who can resist Belgian chocolate?



We finally made it to the train station around 1 and took the 1:11 train back to The Netherlands. It's weird, but when the signs finally turned from French to Dutch we all felt like we were home. It was a really nice weekend.