Spring Break!

February 27-March 8, 2009

When asked what I did over spring break, the first things that come to mind are climbing trees, playing on playgrounds, and picking citrus fruits. Then of course we did other less important things like visit architecturally important buildings, go on tours, become experienced users of the mass transit systems, pick up a little Catalan and German, and try to recall all the Spanish we ever learned.


February 27, 2009

I went on Spring Break with Nikul, Ash, and Kelly. We started with Barcelona. We had to wake up WICKED early on Friday to walk over half an hour to catch our train at the station just outside of Florence. Of course, we had all stayed up late the night before to have one last family dinner to celebrate midterms being over, so that walk was a little rough. Luckily our train had little compartments with seats that can all slide out to form one giant bed so we napped the whole way to Milan, where we had to catch a bus to the airport, where we finally got our plane. While we were waiting at the airport, a man accidentally set off the alarm, but NO ONE came. The alarm went off forever until someone leaned on the other emergency door. When it was finally time to board our plane, we were all herded onto a shuttle bus that took us about 20 feet to the plane and everyone who didn't fit on the bus just walked over to the plane. It was super weird. The plane was cool, though, cuz we got to climb up a flight of stairs like in the movies.

Once we landed in Barcelona, we had to take another bus into the center of the city and then find our way to our hostel, Hostal Maritima. Along the way we discovered a cool park with a giant tile sculpture and some neat buildings and piazzas. Our hostel was located right on La Rambla (the main drag leading right down to the water), so we got to see all the street performers, statue people, and street vendors along there as well. Once we checked into the hostel, we went back out wandering the city again. Barcelona is such a gorgeous city. Everything is so designed, and people actually populate all the public spaces. Even the random little piazzas that seem out of the way are full of people.


February 28, 2009

Saturday morning, we got up bright and early to go explore Montjuic, the mountain just on the edge of the city. On the way to the mountain, we found these funny trees with spikey branches and strange fruits. We really wanted to get one down, so I tried jumping for one and failed miserably. A runner was jogging by and laughed at me and said, "Almost!" We also tried throwing Nikul's shoe (despite his protestations that it would get stuck), but didn't manage to knock anything down. We decided to move on and soon came to another clump of the funny trees. Since Nikul's shoe hadn't gotten stuck before, we figured it was safe to try throwing it again. We weren't so lucky this time, and his shoelaces got tangled around the branch. I tried to get it down with a stick, but that didn't work. Just when we decided that I would need to climb on Nikul's shoulders, a group of runners came over and I swear you could hear the music playing, "Dun da da dunnnnn!" They quickly formed a three-man pyramid, tossed Nikul's shoe down and ran back in the direction they had come from. We were cracking up over the fact that they clearly ran out of their way to help us, saved the day (and were very proud of it), and continued on their run.

We had originally planned to spend the morning on Montjuic, but we quickly realized we would need the entire day to fully enjoy this mountain. There were parks and playgrounds and all sorts of fun things to do all the way up the mountain. We climbed a trillion trees before we even reached the parks. All the trees in Barcelona are amazing for climbing. We were even climbing from tree to tree. While up in the trees we picked oranges to eat.

One of the first fun things we came to was a ropes course. The sign said it was for 12 and under but we stayed out of the way of the little kids and joined in the fun. Before long one of the moms had joined us. We also found a musical park. At the first part, there were these wooden planks to jump on that played different notes and these wooden pumps that also played notes. Then we came to a series of squashy stepping stones. When you jump on them, they play notes, so we spent a while figuring out how to play "Mary Had a Little Lamb." The Spanish family walking by was quite amused. Continuing up the mountain, we saw more awesome playgrounds and these two GIANT slides that of course we just had to go down (still for 12 and under).

When we finally reached the top of the mountain, we found ourselves at the castle (which was originally our destination). We spent some time exploring the castle and eating our stolen oranges. Then we took a sky car to a spot about halfway down the mountain so we could go find the Olympic Stadium. The sky car was cool cuz we had a great view of the city. The Olympic Stadium wasn't that impressive but we got to see the Walk of Fame, with different athletes' footprints, the track stadium, the pool buildings, and Calatrava's famous communications tower.

On our way back down to the main city, we saw this really cool building that's part of an art school or art museum or something. It's weird, but there are escalators that run up this part of the mountain. We eventually came out to some important plaza; I think it might have been Placa Espana or something like that. It has a huge fountain, but it wasn't on. After stopping back at the hostel briefly, we found our way to the Gothic Quarter to see the cathedral by Gaudi. Unfortunately much of the exterior of the cathedral was covered by scaffolding but it was still really cool to see. We listened to a bunch of the musicians playing in the piazzas around the cathedral, grabbed some dinner, and went back to the hostel to relax.

Back at the hostel, we sat out in the common room playing card games with a deck of cards borrowed from a French girl in another room. A girl named Ana from Croatia soon joined us. She spoke English amazingly well, and she said she learned it all from watching "TV and Cartoon Network." Soon the group of British kids and the group of French kids were all out in the common room, too. Two of the French kids, Pierre and Lou, joined our group playing cards. Even the man who ran the hostel joined in. After many rounds of cards, we moved into the French kids' room to hang out for awhile. Our Italian roommate Matteo also joined us. It was kind of crazy how all these different people from England, America, Italy, Spain, France, and Croatia could all hang out together and have so much in common. Other than the man who ran the hostel, we were all foreign students, so it was cool. Luckily, everyone spoke English, although some of the conversations were in Spanish or French or Italian, too. When it was late enough to go out, we all traipsed out to the club. The French and British kids went one direction, but Nikul knew of a club on top of the mall down by the water, so we headed down there with Pierre in tow (I guess he preferred coming with us than going with his group). We spent awhile at the club, but Pierre and I got separated from Kelly, Ash, and Nikul, so we wandered around Barcelona for awhile looking at all the cool things down by the water. It's hard to describe, but seriously EVERYTHING in Barcelona is designed, from the pedestrian bridges over the highways to the coverings over the benches. It's really neat to see.


March 1, 2009

Sunday morning, I got up early to go to mass at the Gaudi cathedral. All the streets were blocked off, and on my way back, I found out why. I saw a wheelchair race go by, which was so cool. Back at the hostel, we all packed up our stuff, left our bags at the hostel, and went out to see all the other Gaudi buildings. The wheelchair race wasn't going on anymore, but this time we saw a regular road race going by. As we headed up Les Ramblas, we saw these awesome drummers. I could have stood there and listened to them all day.

The first Gaudi building we saw was Casa Batllo. Casa Batllo is an apartment building whose shape is inspired by a dragon. It's such an awesome building. Gaudi's style is absolutely crazy, with colored tiles everywhere, and no straight lines, other than the flat floor. We paid a lot of money to go in and see the interior of the building, but it was worth it, since Casa Batllo is my favorite of Gaudi's buildings. I was really glad we got to go on the roof where the main part of the dragon is. My pictures probably don't do it justice, because it is such an awesome building.

After Casa Batllo, we went to see Casa Mila. We didn't spend as much time there, because we didn't go in. Casa Mila is very Art Nouveau and wavy, too, but it doesn't have the colored tile. Supposedly it has a really cool roof, but we couldn't see that from the street. Next we went to La Sagrada Familia, also designed by Gaudi. La Sagrada Familia has been under construction for over a hundred years. The cranes scattered among the towers are as much a part of the building as anything else.

After La Sagrada Familia, we headed across the city to Park Guell. I don't think I can even begin to describe Park Guell. You'll just have to look at my pictures when they go up. A huge portion of the park was closed for maintenance (there were like 3 tree branches on the path.... hardly reason to close half a park), which we were extremely disappointed about, so we snuck into the other part of the park.

We eventually headed back towards our part of the city to have a real sit-down dinner before leaving Barcelona. On our way back to the hostel after dinner, we stopped to listen to a man who was playing the guitar and singing English songs. He had a HUGE gathering watching him, and they all knew these English songs better than I did. It's no wonder everyone in Europe seems to know English with so much English television and music around. We listened for several songs before heading into the hostel to grab our bags. While we were in there, we said good-bye to the French kids, who didn't want us to leave. It was funny how sad they were to see us go. They tried to convince us to stay another night, but we had a ferry booked, so we headed down to the harbor.

We took a ferry all night to Palma de Mallorca. We bought the cheaper tickets, which didn't actually include seats, so instead we got to sleep on the benches in the cafeteria. The cafeteria closes at midnight, and the benches are pretty comfortable, so it actually wasn't bad at all. It might have because of how all the activities we crammed into the past couple of days, but I slept great.


March 2, 2009

We arrived in Palma at around 7:00 in the morning. Even the reception at our hostel, Hostal Terramar, wasn't open that early, so we found the hostel and then sat on a ledge, eating oranges and watching the sunrise. When the hostel opened, we relaxed for a little while before heading out in search of a bike rental. We rented bikes and biked around the island for a couple of hours. Kelly's not much of a biker so she explored the historic district while we biked. Then Nikul and I joined her and she showed us around. We saw the cathedral and some piazza type areas. When Ash met back up with us, we headed back to the hostel for a little more relaxing before dinner at a little sandwich place. After dinner, we stayed in the hostel playing Outburst with our British roommate Fiona.



March 3, 2009

Tuesday morning, Nikul and I tried to get one last bike ride in before we had to return our bikes. We decided to head down the coast in the opposite direction we had gone the day before. We quickly came to the end of the bike path and came to the highway. It was starting to rain at this point as well, so rather than trying to bike on the highway in the rain (and soak the few clothes we had brought with us), we headed back to the hostel. We still biked for almost an hour, so it was all good. After we had returned all the bikes, we reconvened at the hostel to figure out our game plan for the day. Originally, we had hoped to take a ferry to another island that only houses a national park. No one seemed to know anything about this ferry, which might not even have been open since it's not tourist season yet, and it was really starting to rain, so we decided to scrap the national park idea. Instead, we decided to head into the historic part of Palma to see the Arab baths.

Once in Palma, we followed the signs for the baths around in circles until we finally found it. The Arab baths were a HUGE disappointment. There was a scraggly garden and one room and that's all there was to see. We had only paid 2 euro to get in, but we wanted to get our money's worth, so when we found a lemon tree, we figured we might as well pick some of the lemons. None of the lemons could be reached from the ground, so Ash climbed up into the branches. Unfortunately she still couldn't reach, but when she jumped down from the tree, a giant moldy lemon got shaken free and fell just a few inches from her head and splatted on the ground. It was really funny, but the smell made us want lemons even more. Nikul climbed up into the tree and with his long gangly arms managed to pick some lemons. There was a German family who were also visiting the baths and thought this was all very funny and took pictures of Nikul.

After the Arab baths, we wandered around the city for awhile until we found the tourist information center. Here we got information about hiking and buses and decided to take a bus to the other side of the island to see some of the scenery. On the way to the bus, we found an awesome playground, but it was fenced off and we were severely disappointed.

We were originally going to take a direct bus to Soller (the town on the other side of the island), but we figured out that a different one would be more scenic, so we took the other bus to enjoy the scenery. In Soller we walked around, took pictures, and then had dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Eventually, we took the bus back to Palma to enjoy our last night drinking a beer and taking in the view up on the roof terrace.


March 4, 2009

We got up bright and early to watch the sunrise from the roof, but it was so cloudy that we couldn't see anything. Then we gathered all our things and caught a bus to the airport to head to Berlin. Once in Berlin, we had to catch a train and then take the metro out to the Schonhauser Allee stop (we had a lot of fun with that name). Then it was just a short walk to our hostel, The Corner Hostel. It was pretty late in the day when we got there and we were all pretty pooped, so we spent the afternoon planning our time in Berlin. We made dinner in the hostel and met two groups of Italian kids who were also staying at the hostel. The one group of girls didn't really speak English and were younger than us, but the other group was our age and spoke English fairly well, so we hung out with them after dinner. After playing cards for awhile in the hostel, we went to the pool lounge that was literally across the street.


March 5, 2009

Thursday morning, we took the metro into the heart of Berlin for a free walking tour. The tour was really awesome. Our tour guide was a girl from Australia named Lucy and she did a really good job. She was really funny and the tour gave us a good overview of the city so we could decide what to go back and see in more detail later. We learned so much history about Berlin, too. Some of the things we saw were the Brandenburg Gate, the American and French embassies around the gate, the famous hotel where Michael Jackson dangled his baby out the window, a Gehry building, the Reichstag, one of the many Holocaust Memorials, the former site of Hitler's bunker (now just a parking lot so that he's not glorified in any way), Checkpoint Charlie, the Berlin Wall, the Nazi Air Force Building which is now something else, some famous chocolate store, Gendarmenmarkt with the Konzerthaus and the French and German churches on either side, and a bunch of other stuff. The Gehry building is totally unlike the stuff he normally does. Usually he creates these crazy buildings with fairly normal interiors, but there's a law that no building in the piazza with the Brandenburg Gate can outshine the gate, so Gehry had to internalize his craziness. The outside is very normal looking, but the inside looks like the belly of a whale. It was pretty cool.

After the tour, we went back and went into a bunch of the buildings that we had only seen from the outside. Of course we went back to the chocolate store to buy some chocolate. We explored a little of West Berlin as well since we had only seen East Berlin on the tour. While we were trying to figure out what one building was, we ran into Emily, Hardy, Phil, Jarrod, Katie, and Liz who had all been traveling together for spring break. We all made plans to meet back up later that night, and then we went to climb the dome of the Reichstag. The Reichstag is a pretty neat building, because the main building was built towards the end of the 19th century, so it looks fairly traditional. The dome on top, however, wasn't added until the end of the 20th century, so it's much more modern looking. The dome is completely glass and offers a 360 degree view of Berlin. In the middle of the dome is this huge mirrored pointed thing that's kind of hard to describe. It points to a window through which you can see the German parliament meeting.

After the Reichstag, we rushed back to the hostel, grabbing dinner on the way, so we could go on the pub crawl hosted by the same group that had led our tour. We quickly gobbled our sandwiches, dropped off our bags, and headed to another part of Berlin for the pub crawl. The pub crawl was supposed to go to 4 bars and end at a club, but by the third bar Kelly wasn't feeling well, so I went back to the hostel with her.

Finding our way back was extremely difficult. We didn't have a metro map and the closest stops didn't have the train that went to our hostel, so we had to figure out where to switch, but the trains stop running at a certain part of the night, so we actually had to take a tram. It was all very confusing. There were two German boys who spoke English who tried to give us directions but we quickly realized they were telling us to get off at the wrong stop so that we would get off with them, so we rode the tram a little longer to put some distance between us. By the time we got off the tram, we had no idea where we were, but I used the miniscule amount of German I know to go into a cafe and find someone who spoke English. I asked the man behind the counter if he spoke English, and when he said he only spoke German, we started to leave, but he grabbed my arm and indicated that he would find someone at the bar who spoke English. I thought it was really nice of him to find someone who could help us, because he was obviously busy. Luckily the man who spoke English was able to direct us to the Schonhauser Allee stop so we could find our way back to the hostel with no further difficulties.


March 6, 2009

Friday morning, we headed back to the same place as on Thursday for another tour with that group. We gave that tour group plenty of business. This time we went on the concentration camp tour (unfortunately not free like the other one). The concentration camp is a little ways outside of the city, so we had to take two trains to Oranienburg, where we walked the same path the Holocaust victims took to get to Sachsenhausen (the concentration camp). The tour was really interesting, but it was FREEZING cold, which wasn't pleasant. I can't imagine how any of the victims survived the cold in their thin little uniforms. I was super bundled up and I felt like I was getting hypothermia, so it's no surprise that so many died. A lot of the camp is no longer standing because of how expensive it is for the upkeep of so many buildings, but our tour guide Lucy (the same girl we had for the free tour) knew a lot of really interesting information and was able to give us a good idea of what the camp had been like. I really liked how she didn't focus on any one group that was targeted during the Holocaust but talked about all the groups that were brought into the camp. She listed 5 or 6 different categories of prisoners; I don't remember all of their correct names, but the largest group to be targeted besides Jews were the Romana City (at least that's what it sounded like she said, but basically it's the Gypsies). Jews and Gypsies were the lowest rung of the social hierarchy in concentration camps. Other groups higher up the ladder were social somethings (I can't remember the name), which included alcoholics, criminals, and the unemployed, Communists, and some others that I can't remember. The Communists were the top of the hierarchy because they weren't inferior people; they simply had the wrong political views.

When we got back from Sachsenhausen, we went to see the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche or the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. This was a church that was bombed during World War II (most of the interesting facts we learned in Berlin had something to do with WWII). It wasn't restored in order to commemorate the bombings, so there are holes in the church where you can see all the way through, or see out to the sky. It was closed when we went, so we couldn't go inside, but it was still really neat to see. During the mid-1900s a new church complex was built on the same site. The new complex has several buildings that sort of surround the old church. All the new buildings are very modern looking, made of glass blocks. It's a strange juxtaposition.

When we got back to the hostel, we made a big spaghetti dinner and then hung out with the Italian kids again. Liz and Katie came over, and we went over to the pool hall again. This time some of the Germans challenged the Italians to a game. All the German locals were clearly very good pool players. We watched a couple games after the Italians lost. After a while we decided to go find another bar. Since we were in more of the suburban part of Berlin and since Germans go to bed really early, not many places were open. One place we came upon was very clearly a gay bar with blacked out windows. Some of the others and I tried to point this out and that it might not be the best place to go, but Katie and two of the Italians decided to check it out anyway. They weren't even allowed through the door. One of the guys inside shut the door in their faces. It was amusing.

We eventually found some other little bar. We stayed there for a little while until a really sketchy German boy tried to pick a fight with us over a missing box of cigarettes. Between his drunkeness, some misinterpreted jokes, and much confusion because of the language barrier, things started looking bad, so we beat it and went back to our respective hostels.


March 7, 2009

Saturday we had a big day planned. We wanted to go find the Hindu temple (second largest in Europe supposedly) since Nikul is Hindu, go through the Jewish Museum, and visit a bunch of the architecturally important buildings we had learned about in different classes.

We had an address for the temple and directions via the metro, so we took the metro to the street it was supposed to be on and started walking. I forget the name of the road, but it was a very long road, so we walked all the way down one side to the next metro stop, and then turned around and walked all the way back up the other side. Nowhere along the way did we see a Hindu temple or even anything remotely resembling a temple. We weren't sure if construction was completed, but we saw pictures of the ground breaking two years ago on their website, and they had information about services for different holidays, so we figured the temple had to be around somewhere. We eventually found where it should have been based on the number address, but it was just a strip mall and a Home Depot type store. We asked in the Home Depot store where the temple is and no one had heard of it, so we went back out and continued looking. There's a big park next to the strip mall and the pictures on the website had shown greenery so we trekked all through the park in search of the temple. Still no luck (although we did find a really cool playground). We started discussing the possibility of the whole thing being a huge hoax to raise money (the website asked for donations for the construction process), and just when we were convinced that no Hindu temple exists in Berlin, Nikul spotted this little white board that said "Sri Ganesha Hindu Temple." It was sitting on a little plot of land that looked fairly abandoned. There were some trees cut down, a random park bench, and a teeny construction trailer, but no sign of construction. We're still baffled by it, since we had seen the pictures of the ground breaking but no ground was broken. If that was the second largest Hindu temple in Europe, I'd really like to see the largest...... maybe two construction trailers and a chalkboard?

After visiting the "temple," we headed uptown to visit the Jewish Museum whose building was designed by Daniel Libeskind and was a topic in several of our architectural history-type classes. We weren't impressed with the museum, but experiencing the architecture made it worthwhile. The building is super crazy with all these sharp angular forms and window cut-outs, I think to symbolize the pain and suffering Hitler caused. The building includes the Holocaust Tower (a big dark, cold tower with no exhibits) and the Garden of Exile (this weird slopey outdoor space with all these tall square pillars). The museum was a lot of reading mini biographies of random Jewish people involved in the Holocaust plus some other random information that had very little connection to Judaism. The building would have done much better as a memorial and place for reflection than as a museum. There was one exhibit that I really liked, though. It was called Fallen Leaves and was a whole bunch of faces cut out of metal with different expressions covering the floor of one of the "voids" of the museum. I didn't realize when I was there that you are allowed to actually walk on the faces and touch them, but it was still interesting to see and think about.

Next we started our whirlwind tour of as many architecturally important buildings as possible. We started with the GSW building and then tried to see the Page Memorial (I'd never heard of it but one of our teachers here recommended it as something we should definitely see), but unfortunately couldn't find it. Berlin seems to have a unique way of swallowing up buildings so unsuspecting tourists can't find them. Just like with the temple, we went to the street address and searched all around and couldn't find more than empty lots. So we scratched the Page Memorial off our list and continued on our way to see the Netherlands Embassy (where we were scolded for walking on the grass after we were clearly off the grass and leaving the building), the Sony Building, the Potsdamer Platz Building, the Kammersmusiksaal, and the New National Gallery. Everything we saw was really cool except for the New National Gallery. The Gallery is empty right now, with no exhibit, but it has those screens that have words running across them (I can't think of the name). There were a zillion of these screen strips running across the ceiling of the building but they all had really creepy, violent, gruesome poems or stories or something scrolling across. And it was all in English which was weird. After reading about someone's murderous ambitions and the satisfaction of killing, we got creeped out and headed to our last stop which was a Police and Fire Station with a really cool facade.

At this point it was dark out and we were all frozen and exhausted so we headed back to our hostel for dinner and some much needed relaxation. When we got off at our stop, I went to one of the churches the lady at our hostel had found for me. Since we would be traveling all day on Sunday, I knew I wouldn't make it to mass, so I figured I'd go in and say a prayer or something. When I got there, though, there were two men in the lobby hanging up flyers and the church was locked up. I tried to ask them about it, but they didn't speak English, so they went and got someone who did, who explained to me that no one can go in the church except during mass. I thought it was really weird, but I guess in cities, that's not uncommon.

When I met back up with the group, we decided to go out for dinner to celebrate our last night of Spring Break. As luck would have it, the first affordable place we found was an Italian restaurant. The waiter didn't speak English but he did speak Italian so we were able to communicate. Who would have thought that we'd be speaking Italian in Germany?

In the midst of our packing slash napping after dinner, Nikul, Ash, and I made lemonade with the lemons we still had from Palma de Mallorca and the last of our oranges.


March 8, 2009

All day Sunday was spent traveling back to Florence. From our hostel we had to walk to the metro, take two different trains to the airport, fly to Milan, take an hour-long bus from the Milano airport to the Milano train station (I spent this hour sitting on the floor, since they let too many people on the bus, and I gave up my seat to a little old lady), take a 3 hour train to the outskirts of Florence, take another super short train to the center of Florence, and then walk home. All this time I had a raging fever (which I later found out was the onset of pneumonia) and was utterly miserable. Despite my unhappiness during all this traveling, I was really glad that I didn't get sick until the very end of Spring Break. I was able to have a blast, climbing trees, scampering up mountains, and trekking all over the place.