I’m sorry that my blogs are so infrequent. It is very hard to find time to actually sit down and write what is happening in my life. Last week, well for 10 days, my friend Christine Wahlskog and I were on a backpacking trip around Europe. It was an incredible trip that took an enormous amount of planning to find hostels and trains to everywhere we wanted to go. It was definitely a great experience to be living in a backpack (well, for 10 days) and sleeping on trains and hostels and running to catch trains. It’s crazy to look back and think that we actually did it. We had a lot of semi crisis that could have turned out to be major problems but we had really great luck and everything always turned out fine.
On October 26, we left Jönköping at 9:30 after waking up super early to try and register for our classes for spring semester back at North Park. Our plan was to take a bus to Malmö, which is in southern Sweden, and take a train to Copenhagen, Denmark and then another train overnight to Paris. On the bus Christine and I were feeling nauseous and nervous about the whole week. I just really wanted to get on that train to Paris because as long as we got there then it would be a little bit of relief that our trip would go according to plan. When we got to Copenhagen however we learned that the trains directly to Paris were only seasonal and had stopped running a few days earlier. We were panicked and thought we might have to sleep in the train station or even that our trip would turn into a complete bust. We learned from the ticket guy that we could catch a train to Hamburg, Germany and then to Paris but it was leaving in 2 minutes! We ran as fast as we could and just made it on the train before it left. On the way to Hamburg the train drove right onto a ferry and went across the Baltic Sea and into Germany. We could get out of our trains and into the ferry where they served meals and had stores. It was a crazy concept! We arrived in Hamburg and we went a ticket counter to verify that the rest of our trains that we would be taking the rest of the week were correct. They found some mistakes so we are glad we had it checked! We had a whole compartment on the train for ourselves so we were able to sprawl out and lie down and actually get some decent sleep and finally woke up in Paris.
Once we got to Paris we walked to our hostel from the train station. It took about 20 minutes but it was so great to know that we could find out way around Paris pretty easy with just a simple map. We stayed at Village Hostel, which turned out to be really nice. We stayed in a room with four other girls. We couldn’t check in until four in the afternoon so we just left our bags in a storage room and went into the city! We found the train station and it turned out to be really easy to get around on. Everything was extremely well marked and I was able to remember some key phrases from high school French classes that were of help. We went to the Louvre, Notre Dam Cathedral and the Eiffel Tower on the first night in Paris. Christine and I climbed up over 600 stairs to the second level of the Eiffel tower and then took an elevator to the top. It was really cool to see the city from so high up. On the second day in Paris we went a church, Sacré Couer that was right behind our hostel. We saw part of a Catholic mass in French, which was interesting. We saw the Arc De Triomphe, Panthéon, the Cemetere du Pere Lachaise where famous people like Chopin, Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde and others are buried. The cemetery was so beautiful and interesting to see graves from the 1600s next to graves from 1900s and more recent. A lot of the graves had huge gravestones and statues. We bought a baguette and Nutella and had a French snack. We went back to the Eiffel Tower that night and met up with two other girls, Hilary and Vicky, from our group because it was Vicky’s birthday.
In the morning it was raining and we were so glad that we were missing it. We headed off the Bern, Switzerland. The ride there was really beautiful with the hilly countryside and the snow capped Alps in the distance. We were expecting Bern to be at least an interesting city but I guess we didn’t do enough research. We had 10 hours to wait in Bern until our train to Rome and we had little to nothing to do there. It was very cold and all there was to do in the Capital of Switzerland was to walk around. We did that for a while and then got extremely cold and so we just hopped around from McDonalds to Burger King to keep warm. We didn’t want to spend any money there either because they are on a Swiss currency. If I have any advice to give from this week it is to not go to Bern, Switzerland. If you do, plan to be bored out of your mind.
That night we got on a night train. We slept in a sleeping car and let me tell you, that’s an interesting experience. Christine and I were on the 3rd highest bunk in the train car. The highest bunk didn’t have enough room to even sit on the bed and so it was almost impossible to get situated. Thank goodness for the railing on the bed or else I think I would have definitely fell off. Christine captured that moment on camera and the Ethiopian man slept in the bunk below me. I got an OK night sleep and we were glad to never have a sleeping car for the rest of the trip.
We arrived in Rome in the morning and went to our hostel to find out that they had overbooked and were sending us to another hostel “close by”. It definitely wasn’t close by but it turned out all right. It was called “Ciao Bella”. We had to leave our bags again and check in later. We saw the Spanish Steps, Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon, Piazza Navono, Area Sacra, the Coliseum, and Palatine. We got tours at the Coliseum and at the Palatine and it was really worth it. We learned a lot from the tour and it was a lot better than us just walking around for 10 minutes to see the place and then leave. It started to rain though towards the end of our tour so we left and went out for pizza. The pizza had really thin crust and was delicious. The second day in Rome was Halloween. We went to the Vatican, St. Peters Cathedral, and the Sistine Chapel. It was also a Wednesday so we saw the Pope speak in the square. It was cool to see even though I’m not Catholic. We had an early day and just hung out in our hostel the rest of the night.
The next morning we left Rome and spent a few hours in Venice wandering around and exploring the city with no roads. It was beautiful and the sky was blue with little clouds. Venice was everything like it seemed in the movies. We got back on a train to Salzburg, Austria. Our hostel was the nicest hostel of all the ones we stayed in all week. The next day we went on a Sound of Music tour. It was awesome to say the least! The tour took us all over to the places where it was filmed and drove into the Alps and stopped in little villages along the way. It was the most perfect day and it was so cool to be almost every place where the movie had been filmed. After the tour we spent the rest of the day wandering around Salzburg and seeing the shops. We met some really cool people in Salzburg from Washington State.
Our last stop was Prague. We were kind of tired of seeing another old city by that point so we just decided to skip museums and stuff and just walk around. We ended up seeing the big Castle there and the Charles Bridge. We also saw the new and old town and stumbled upon the American Embassy. We were so excited to be so close to American soil and we hugged the building. We also found a TGI Fridays and ate an American dinner. It was so good to have a little taste of America again.
The last day of our trip was a full day of traveling. We took 4 trains, a ferry, a bus and a car to get home. We were ready to get back to Sweden by this point in our trip. We wanted to have real food and to sleep in our own beds again. All week we ate bread with peanut butter or Nutella with the occasional meat from fast food restaurants so when Monday morning breakfast came along we were extremely excited.
The trip was an awesome experience and I am so glad I did it!
Yesterday it snowed for the first time and it was so beautiful! A couple of us went out and played in the snow. On Monday we start Santa Lucia practice and it’s almost Thanksgiving. Time is flying by so fast and it’s already been a week since I went to Greece. I want this time to last but it’s definitely going to be so nice to be home. It is definitely a relief that the Swedes will be at North Park when we return Spring Semester. It will make leaving a lot easier.
Make sure to check out my pictures!
love
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