Berlin

After our fun adventures at the airport, I headed to Berlin with my friend who is studying there. She was going back to more school (haha), but I was there for vacation. I ended up spending 7 days in total in Berlin, and I stayed with my friend in her host family's apartment. One of her hosts speaks English, but the other doesn't, although he did speak a little Russian. This lead to a lot of fun conversations in a strange mix of English, German, and Russian, but, in the end, it was all ok. It was also really cold and snowy while I was in Berlin. It had snowed the day before we arrived, and I don't think that it got above freezing the entire time I was there.
My first day in Berlin (Jan 5) I didn't do much. We got in around lunch time, and my friend's host made us lunch. After that, we went grocery shopping, and we went to my friend's orchestra rehearsal. On Tuesday, I wandered around West Berlin, which is where my friend is staying, for a bit and I spent a couple hours in an amazing bookstore on Friedrichstraβe, Dussmann, which had an impressive foreign language section. I ended up buying Harry Potter 5 (OotP for people who speak Harry Potter) in Spanish, since it was much cheaper in Berlin than anywhere I've seen in in Spain, and I read Candide and a little bit of Terry Pratchett's "Small Gods". On Wednesday, my fried took me around the city to see where all of the touristy stuff was.
Like I said, it was cold and snowy, and these poor, cold ducks are sitting on the ice in the Spree. You really can't help but feel sorry for them.

Brandenburger Tor. It is the old city gate in Berlin and miraculously survived WWII and was a gate between East and West Berlin before the wall fell. The American Embassy is immediately to the left of Brandenburger Tor.
And here is the scary American Embassy in Berlin with armed guards outside all of the doors and around the perimeter. Apparently, there were plans to build the embassy in this location before the Americans realized that they needed a secure zone around the embassy, so they asked the city of Berlin to first move the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which hadn't been built yet, and then when Berlin said that they couldn't, they asked them to move Brandenburger Tor, which is one of the iconic buildings of Berlin. Of course, Berlin didn't move Brandenburger Tor, so the Americans redesigned the embassy to have the building be part of the buffer zone, which was the obvious answer that was probably easier and cheeper than anything else. No wonder Europeans think the Americans are arrogant!
The Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe. There is also a really good museum underneath of the monument.

The Reichstag, which has a really neat dome. Its a government building of some sort.

Thursday, we took a day trip to Potsdam, which is a suburb of Berlin and the place where all of the royalty of Germany lived for a long time.

We took the S-bahn, which is the inner-city train from the Hauptbahnhoff (Main train station). It was really pretty, and the sunrise was really pretty too.
Giant ice crystals on the snow (probably frost). They are just really pretty.

Potsdam is really, really picturesque.
We saw one of Mozart's houses. Apparently he had a whole bunch of houses scattered all over Europe.

A pretty church.

Inside the church.

Christmas tree in the church in Potsdam. The Germans like to use these spindly stars as Christmas decorations all over the place.
This picture is for one of my friends.

Potsdam also has a Brandenburger Tor. It seems like the cool thing to have.

The main attraction of Potsdam is the park that used to be where all of the royal people lived, and there are lots of pretty buildings and sculptures and such there.



Pretty pictures of the snow and some more cold ducks.
And ski tracks. There were lots of people skiing in Potsdam and Dresden (more about that later), and it made me really miss my snowy Wisconsin winters.


Theses are all pictures of the summer palace. We were thinking about going to visit the other palace, but we would have had to take a tour, and we just wanted to see one room that was full of pretty rocks that came from the rock collections of various monarchs. We also wanted to get back to try to get student rush tickets to the Nutcracker, which didn't work out, but we did go to some museums for free museum night and we saw lots of cool old stuff, including a very nice display of the common marbles used in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome and their origins (there were a lot from Spain). On Friday, my friend had class all day, so I wandered about Berlin, and I went to the museum that is a part of the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe, where I spent nearly 4 hours.
On Saturday, we went to Dresden, which is a city southeast of Berlin that was nearly completely destroyed by the allies in WWII. Most of it has been re-built and it is a very pretty city full of stone buildings and narrow streets. We spent the whole time we were there just walking around, and it was really, really cold.
I actually don't know what any of these buildings are, although I think the one with the clock on it has a geology museum in it. The most striking thing about all of the buildings in Dresden is how obvious the damage from the bombing is. Most of the buildings are a mix of old and new stone, and there are still several ruins in downtown Dresden.


Dresden is trying to be a green city and they have tons of bike paths around the city and the river. There were also a lot of people skiing and pulling their kids on sleds down by the Elbe, the river. I'm always impressed that European cities don't have much development on the flood plains of their rivers, which makes so much practical sense.

The Japanese Palace, which is now an art museum. It was in the Neustadt, and we crossed the river to see it, which was very cold, but gave us an excellent excused to have a snow fight, which will likely be the only snow I get to play in this year.

On Sunday, we just hung out in my friend's apartment and we made her hosts muffins, and then Monday, early in the morning, I left to return to Spain for a few days of studying and my mineralogy final before heading to London. Germany was amazing, and, if I spoke German, I would go back to spend more time there. The people were really nice, the public transportation was always on time, and it was really clean. Plus they had snow...

Italia- Rome, Città Vaticano, Firenze

I feel like I have a lot of pictures from Italy, although that's due to my friend who took over 1000 pictures during her winter break, and most of my Italy pictures are actually hers.
After dropping my parents off at the airport, I got on a bus to Bilbao. After realizing that my pesión wasn't within walking distance of anything worth walking to, I decided to stay at my pensión, read my guidebooks, and get plenty of sleep. I was probably in Bilbao for 12 hours, so I don't have any pictures. The following day, I met a friend who's studying in Germany this year at the bus station, and we caught a bus to the Santander airport, and flew to Rome.
This is San Sebastian, which is a really big resort town in the Basque Country of Spain. It is on the Cantabrian Sea and has a really famous beach.

As soon as we got to Rome, we went and found our hostel, which was only a 5-minute walk from the Colosseum, so that evening, we walked to the Colosseum and took some pictures (ok, my friend took pictures, and I watched, but I did make her take some pictures of rocks, although they didn't turn out well because rocks don't photograph well with low light or flash).
A pretty Roman arch that is between the Colosseum and Palatine Hill. After we saw this arch, we walked down some of the Via Sacra, which I recognized from my brief Latin studies.

The following day, we took a tour of the Colosseum and the Roman Forum, which was fascinating, although it did make humans look foolish, since they managed to engineer the Roman Empire and then spent a few centuries forgetting everything.


Lots of Colosseum. In the last picture, you can see where they reconstructed some of the floor.
Also, it didn't take me long to figure out that most of Rome was made out of travertine, since, on first arriving in Rome, we passes a metro stop called Travertine Arch. I let my friend model with this travertine in the Colosseum.

Via Sacra from the Colosseum.

The Roman Forum from near where Cesare was cremated.

Ruins of the Temple of Saturn

The other side of the Forum. The brick ruins in the middle are from one of the many palaces on Palatine Hill.

The Golden Mile, from which all of the distances in the Roman Empire were measured. It stood outside the Temple of Jupiter and used to have a column on top of it that told the distances to the major cities in the Empire.

The leaning tower of Rome. Thank an earthquake.

The Forum from Palatine Hill

Colosseum from Palatine Hill, which was where all of the Roman emperors (except Nero, sort-of) had their palaces. Mussolini built himself a house there too.

On New Year's Eve, after visiting the Colosseum and Forum, etc., we met a friend of mine who'd been studying with me in Salamanca during the fall and was in Rome with her family. We met at the Colosseum and went out to eat, and when we were trying to get back to our hostel on the other side of the Colosseum, we couldn't get through because the road was blocked off for New Year's. We ended up walking all of the way around Palatine Hill to get back, and the whole journey, which should have taken us 10 minutes, ended up taking an hour, becuase Palatine Hill is huge. We did, however, get to see the Circu Maximus, which is also huge, and it smells like a swamp.

Our research about New Year's Eve in Rome told us to go to the Piazza del Popolo, which in the the northern part of the city.

There was a big obelisk in the middle of the piazza. Actually there are obelisks all over Rome.

It turns out that New Year's in Rome is crazy. Everyone was setting off their own fireworks (it turns out that Roman candles are appropriately named). It was a bit dangerous, and, although my friend and I stayed away from the middle of the Piazza, people were throwing fireworks over our heads. I felt like this picture was a pretty accurate depiction of the proximity of people to fireworks.

There wasn't a clock in the Piazza, so we really didn't know when it was New Year's exactly, but at some undetermined point, everyone started yelling and spraying champagne all over. Rome also had their own fireworks show.

So I know that this photo is very poor quality, but it shows all of the broken glass (after people finished their champagne, they smashed the bottles) and firework debris.

The following day, since it was New Year's Day and nothing was open, we walked around the city and looked at the things that don't have to be open.
This fountain in from the Piazza Navona. It plays an important role in Dan Brown's "Angles and Demons". I also bought a candied apple in the Piazza Navona, becuase I'd always read about them, but never seen them for real. It tasted like an apple covered in cotton candy, which wasn't bad, although I thought it would taste cinnamonny.

We also threw coins in the Trevi Fountain, which guarantees that we will return to Rome some day.

After the Trevi, it started raining, so we went to lunch. When we left, it had stopped raining, but as soon as we got to the Spanish Steps, it started raining again, although it did make some good pictures.

This picture is from the top of the Spanish Steps looking down one of the main shopping streets (Both Prada (not Prado, which is a museum in Madrid) and Gucci have stores on this street).

This is at the bottom of the Spanish steps and gave me an unusual opportunity to be a little library-geeky. It's the Keats museum, and there's a store next to it called Byron. It reminded me of Dr. Jekyll's next to Hyde music on College Avenue (that's one of the only things I remember from move-in day at LU).

We wanted to get out of the rain, so we decided to go get gelato. We made the mistake of buying it only 2 blocks away from Gucci, so it was like 10€, which is really expensive. It did look pretty and it tasted pretty good, and it was a pretty good first encounter with gelato for me.

I saw this while eating my gelato. It's a Lodi Bank, which was pretty exciting to see, although it's probably named after Lodi, Italy rather than Lodi, WI.

The next day, we decided to go to the Vatican, and we planned on getting there early. We ended up getting there 1/2 hour later than we'd wanted to, but it proably wouldn't have made much of a difference, because we waited in line for more than 2-hours to get in. I'm assuming this was because of all of the Catholic pilgrims who came to Rome for the Pope's New Year's blessing. We decided to not go the St. Peter's to see the Pope to get blessed because it was really early in morning, it was really crowded, and neither of us in Catholic. The Vatican Museums were really crowded too, although that was an advantage in the Sistine Chaple because they really couldn't enforce the "no pictures" rule.

This is in the Vatican somewhere.

The Pope has a lot of amazing rocks in his country, although none of them are native. I think that the Vatican probably has the highest percentage of area covered by non-native rocks of any country in the world.

Yes, this is a Star of David made out of pretty rocks on the floor of the Vatican

Not only did the Vatican have amazing real rocks, it also had some great representations of rocks in paintings and tapestry.
The focus of this picture is not Jesus' feet, but rather the fairly realistic marble depicted in this tapestry.

Also the art in the Vatican was ok, by which I mean pretty amazing.
This is the "School of Athens" by Raphael. You can see Euclid (bottom right bent over and writing), Plato (standing, center in pink), Aristotle (standing on Plato's left in blue and green), and Socrates (the old guy in green in the upper left of the painting who's arguing with everyone). Pythagoras is in the bottom left, but he's blocked my someone's head, and Hypatia is barely visible in white at the left of the painting. There is an excellent Wikipedia page about this painting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_School_of_Athens

Here's my illegal picture of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. You can see Adam and Eve and God creating Adam.

And this is a pretty model of St. Peter's Basilica, which was in the museums, but makes an excellent segue into our visit to St. Peter's.

We left the museums after a few hours and a grumpy pizza lady and went over the St. Peter's. It was raining again, and we got to stand in another line there. At least this time we got to appreciate the beautiful architecture in St. Peter's square, and there was a really nice Italian lady who shared her umbrela with us.

Singing in the rain in St. Peter's square.

St. Peter's was huge. It's hard to appreciate how huge it is without seeing some pictures of people for scale. If you look at the Pope and other priests up at the high alter during Christmas Eve Mass and other important things, they look tiny, and they're standing under the high alter, which looks tiny from the back of the basilica.
Here's St. Peter's tomb. We did go down in the crypt and saw all of the Popes that are buried under St. Peter's (apparently a whole bunch more are buried in some catacombs elsewhere in Rome), and we saw St. Peter's tomb up close.

St. Peter also has some pretty rocks in his final resting place. This one has some pretty strain patterns.

The following day, we looked at some more of Rome, and we spent most of the day walking around, and we did some book shopping (my friend studies Italian and most of the book stores had a nice selection of Spanish books, although I did spend a lot of time "reading" the pop-up books, and I "read" every "Little Polar Bear" book that they print in Italy. Most of my reading involved looking at the pictures and making up stories to go with them that fit the words that I recognized. I think that the large number of children's books that I've read makes it easier to make up the stories than when I was little).

We first visited the Pantheon, which has the largest free-standing concrete dome in the world, and it's original from the time of the Ancient Romans. The engineering that went into making the dome is pretty nifty too. The Pantheon is also the best-preserved Ancient Roman structure, thanks to the Catholic church converting it into a church shortly after the decline of Rome.

The Pantheon is especially famous for the oculus, which is the hole in the center of the dome.

Also the Pantheon has a complex drainage system under the oculus to remove water that gets in through the roof. It was raining when we were in the Pantheon, and I have to admit that I think that the Ancient Roman drainage system works better than the Modern Roman drainage system outside of the Pantheon.

After going to the Pantheon, we headed to Castel San Agelo, which is the Pope's fortress in Rome. We were planning on going in, but it was more expensive than the Vatican Museums and we didn't really feel like looking at a display of Renaissance weapons.
The Tiber and the bridge of Angles going to the Castle of Angles.
The Tiber was really muddy and had a lot of interesting woody debris in it. Castel San Angelo really does look like a fortress.

On our last day in Italy, we went to Florence, which is the capital of Tuscany and famous for its Renaissance art.

A pretty bridge and a narrow street that are really not significant, but have the feeling of Florence as a place just full of little pretty, European-feeling things.

We were in Florence on a Sunday, so nothing was open until the afternoon, so we spent the morning walking around, which was perfect, since Florence really isn't very big.
A lot of the menus in touristy places have a lot of English errors on them, but this one was especially priceless.

Florence has two really impressive churches: Santa Croce and Santa Maria de Fiore (also called the Duomo because of its dome). Santa Croce openned first, so we went there first.
Both of the churches look really similar on the outside with the white marble bordered in green. Santa Croce has a lot of famous people buried in it, like:

Galileo

Michelangelo

and a memorial to Dante. Machiavelli and Rossini are also buried there.

This statue is believed to have inspired the Statue of Liberty. It's called "The Liberty of Poetry"

Santa Croce was also a monastery, so there were a lot of other rooms and courtyards.
I posing here for an artsy, melancholy photo, but I mostly wanted to stand in the sun. It was rainy most of the time we were in Rome, and we actually decided to go to Florence rather than Pompeii because it was supposed to be sunny in Florence and rainy in Naples.

After going to the Santa Croce, we went to the Ponte Veccio (old bridge) on the way to the Duomo. The Ponte Vecchio was the only bridge in Florence to survive WWII.


Since the time of the Medici, the patrons of Florence during the Renaissance, the Ponte Vecchio has been lined with jewelry shops.

Finally we went to the Duomo.

The Duomo is most famous for its dome, which was designed by Brunelleschi and is one of the symbols of Florence and the Italian Renaissance, along with David (who is huge and also in Florence).

The stone-work on the outside of the Duomo was intricate, but very beautiful.

The inside was also very simple compared to most of the big churches that I've seen in Europe. Most of it was plain white, although the floors were really interesting. They were designed as optical illusions. When you stand in the middle of the first one, you feel like you are at the bottom of a really deep pit, and in the second one, you feel like you're in a Chinese finger-trap that's squeezing you. It was really, really cool.



We still had some time to kill after visiting the Duomo, so we decided to go try a gelato place that was recommended by and MTV guidebook that we read. We were pretty skeptical because the authors of this book tended to spend a lot of time focussing on rather suspicious aspects of visiting Europe (like what would happen to you in specific countries if you were caught with marijuana), but this place had amazing gelato. It was definitely the best gelato I've had in my life (although I've only had it 3 times).

So if you ever find yourself in Florence, you should look up this place.

On the way back to the train station, we found this amazing tactile map of Florence, that even had the street names written on it in Braille. I was very impressed.

On our way back to Rome, we got the experience the pleausres of the infamous Italian train-punctuality. The train that was supposed to leave an hour after our train, actually left before ours. It made me feel like I was back in Spain...
The tran ride home. I'm reading a Spanish book I just bought in Rome and holding my Fanta that I bought to buy us a place to sit in the train station.

The next day, we left for Berlin, after a really scarey moment at the airport where we were afraid that we were going to miss our flight. At the airport in Rome, they only had one security station open, and the line to go through security was a 3-hour long line. Since no one in Europe gets to the airport 3-hours before their flight, they had a seperate line for people whose planes were taking off in 15 minutes, which made all of flights leave late because no one got to their gates on time to board. It was a fun time, but we did get on the plane, and we did get to Berlin safetly.

And we flew over the Alps, which are amazing, pretty, snowy mountains.
So that's a record blog post as far as length, but now you can look forward to Berlin and London coming soon.