barcelona

So, here's the thing about Barcelona. I didn't do much. There's not a lot to report.

Oh, sure, the city was beautiful. It was all sun and sand and orange bicycles, and long winding streets and palm trees that sprouted with leaves like pineapples, rough and splintery brown trunks. It was basking on a beach with warmed between my toes and the icy crashing of the Mediterranean sea, cool and blue and opaque. It was icy Malibu and tanned faces and sunburn and a heavy sense of relaxation and laziness settling in our chests. A fuzzy, out of control feeling of delight and no obligations and lying with the sound of waves in your ears and your friends around you and your face on a warm red towel.

Barcelona was a vacation, plain and simple. I coasted by some of The Sights on a bright rented bike, wind whipping against me; a tall, red arc of brick and a church with the ugliest, most square and unpleasant architecture that I've ever seen. Buildings warble and wave, walls smoothed round and circular, giving off the appearance of melting concrete.

Our hostel, Kabul, was bedecked with rainbow lights and red-faced people toting plastic liter cups of beer that foamed and frothed. Wooden tables with chess pieces scattered about and black and white pictures on the wall and laughter and noise. Warm breezes even at night and discussions of politics conducted over shared balconies that look over a plaza populated by waving palm trees and a bubbling fountain. 

Vacation, all I ever wanted.

One last trip to Italy - coming soon to an internet near you.

Starting to think about leaving this place is driving me mad but that's a whole other story, too.

croatia

WELL.

We are BACK from travel break number two, and was it ever a doozy. Before I get to that, though, I think you need to know where we were.

We flew into Split, Croatia, and then took a bus along a sprawling seaside road, where gray cliffs jutted out into the sea which sparkled with sunlight, then effervesced in a luminescent yellow as the sun dipped down behind the horizon, a glowing peach against the cream colored sky. Most Emerson students slipped into a doze, but some stayed awake the whole time, noses pressed against the cool glass windows of the buses, breath fogging as we longed for more of the view before the sun dipped away entirely.

We pulled into Dubrovnik at night, and we were prevented from really seeing what it looked like. We awoke to the Adriatic Sea, wide and blue, directly across the street from our hotel, flanked by palm trees, tall and green. Moreover, there was sun, sun, sun, glorious and warm, and we turned to face it like turtles, eyes closing and faces pasty white shining in the glow. Our hotel was only a twenty minute walk from the walled old city of Dubrovnik, a fortress city where we spent most of our time. 

Let me get this straight for you: the old city of Dubrovnik is absolute magic, a city forgotten by modernization and left back in the times of Narnia and fantasy. It is all smooth white stone, pale orange roof tiles, and sun that gleams and glints over everything. It is worshipped at its feet by the Adriatic sea, hugging up against the city walls in all its cerulean blue glory. The sea is covered with twinkling stars of reflected sunlight. 

We found ourselves, when not carted around for academia, licking at gelato in a rainbow of flavors and collapsing onto a pebbled beach. The ocean thuds against the shore and when the waves slide out, a rain of pebbles cascades back down, making a sound identical to that of a rainstick. We spent days positively basking in the sun, soaking up the rays usually hidden behind a curtain of grey Dutch clouds. We wandered the streets of the old city, sipping on brightly colored drinks; everyone sported red faces and huge smiles. It was magic, magic, magic and no words can truly convey the pinpricks in our chests at such a wonderful place.

That said, this trip was packed to the brim, positively overflowing with unfortunate events; each one was a blow to our stomachs, and it just wouldn't stop.

One. Thirteen Emerson students, walking home from the old city, were jumped by a crew of unruly and angry Croatian teens; everyone turned out just fine, for those of you who will worry, and we rallied together as a group to prevent this from ruining the magic of the city around us. Total number of hospital visits: four.

Two. One student became violently ill; "I've never seen someone throw up so painfully before," one friend professed. She was carted off to the hospital (five), and on a bus ride to Bosnia the next day, three more people had to stop to throw up.

Three. Well - we were supposed to see Bosnia, and drove for two and a half hours to reach the concrete-and-iron gate that is the Bosnian border - only to find that four students had not brought their passports. Because, you know, I rarely bring my passport with me to BOSNIA. If i were going anywhere but BOSNIA I would have brought my passport, but it's only BOSNIA so no worries. We turned around with four "rejected from Bosnia" slips to sunbathe in a random Croatian town by a murky brown river before boarding the bus back to Dubrovnik.

Four. One girl fell over. Got a concussion. Spent two days (?) in the hospital. That's six.

Five. There was a small earthquake in the middle of the night. Scary for those who did not sleep through it like yours truly, but overall harmless.

Six. Several students rented scooters to zoom all around Dubrovnik; they had a very delightful day, or so I hear - until one scooter attempted to turn and instead crashed in a shower of plastic against the side of the road. Minor injuries, but a not-so-minor bill from the scooter place. No hospital visits, though.

Seven. We went to an arboretum, which was a positive labyrinth of green and yellow and purple, flowers and trees blooming and reaching petals and leaves up to the sky, soaking in the sun as much as we were. We decided it would be a good idea to swim in the Adriatic, which looked so disarmingly inviting that we all stripped to our skivvies (yeah, I said skivvies - deal with it) and leapt into the cool embrace of the water. Problem? Well, this grotto we were swimming in was flanked by stone walls we could climb out on - resulting in several students being attacked in the feet by prickly sea urchins that were clinging to the walls. Most of the spines were removed excruciatingly by a pair of tweezers and a sewing kit, but one person's foot was punctures so badly that he was carted off to the hospital to get them removed, bringing our total up to seven.

Eight. Meanwhile, during the sea urchin attacks, a few people decided they wanted to see what was on the other side of a wall - and as such, grabbed hold of a rusty old white ladder to vault themselves over the wall. The problem there? The ladder was electrified. No further explanation needed, I think.

And nine, most academic pretenses had to be abandoned in the face of Dubrovnik's ever-closing museums; we would approach a museum or an exhibit only to find ourselves facing a closed sign. In the middle of the day. This happened about six times, and by the end of the trip, Rob Duckers and Dulcia were practically pulling their hair out, puzzled and frustrated by the lack of quality art combined with the lack of open museums -and the Duke needs all the hair he can hold onto! (love ya, Rob!)

It was the most ridiculous, painful, frightening, unifying and positively unreal trip I have ever taken.

After which time, we got to go to Barcelona.

But that's a story in and of itself.

paris

Ah, Paris. City of love.

Is it the city of love? I don't actually know. I may have made that up.

Either way - after Dublin, we cruised our way into Paris, and oh, was it wonderful. The city is huge, sprawling, like a picnic blanket draped over a rocky terrain; viewed from above, it is a checkerboard of black and grey. Our first night there, the city is hugged by a tight gray mist, cramping but cool. Our hotel (not a hostel this trip - we went up one step to a one star hotel. very classy.) clings to the base of Montmartre, a huge hill that rises up out of the flat buildings and winding streets. Endless stone steps clamber up; we climb like mountaineers. I huff and puff by the end, hunched over and clinging to my knees. It is at this point that I realize I should work out more.

A towering white basilica by the name of Sacre Couer tops the hill, guarded by two green statues of horsemen. Three enormous domes protrude from the ceiling, tiled in the same white stone that the rest of the basilica is construced from. At night, tourists and locals alike blend on the steps, sipping wine and eating bread; two children fight with wooden swords, jumping and swinging, an adventure of imagination set against the Parisian skyline. Paris lays down in front of us, wide open and lit up. The Eiffel Tower shines like a beacon in the distance, blue light knifing its way through the mist from the very top.

We retire to our hotel with its fading pink and yellow wallpaper and crumbly brown carpet. The windows peer down upon a busy street, cars zipping by. Buildings light up with neon, and we clutch glasses of cheap, delicious wine and lean over the railing, breathing in cool air and exhaling our breath into spirals.

Our first real day in Paris is a whirlwind of The Sights, capital T, capital S. We begin the day on the Paris Metro, loud and rumbly. We embark on a walking tour of Paris beginning at the Bastille Monument, a tall phallic stone tower that gleams with a golden statue on top; we realize that nothing of the Bastille itself remains on this spot, the only record being this towering thin pole.

"Sorry guys," Katherine says, "Guess it's not here anymore."

We wind through Paris, two baguettes sticking out of Greg's black backpack providing sustinence throughout the day. We keep a bottle green canal to our right most of the time, its sparkling water glistening in the early morning sun.

Destination One: Notre Dame. As in, Hunchback of. I was getting Disney flashbacks the entire time, picturing emerald-clad deformed gentlemen swinging from bell ropes and singing "I Want" ballads.

The ceilings of Notre Dame, inside and out, are positively gravity defying. Stone vaults so impossibly high, and I try to picture people in the Middle Ages carving and creating, and I can't do it. Everything is so perfectly supported, and it is all smooth like glass, even though it's hard and heavy stone. Windows that evoke rainbows and flowers are everywhere; I count fifty before I stop, realizing how futile that effort is.

People, tourists, whatever they are, mill around us. Nine out of ten hold cameras up to the ceiling, despite numerous NO PHOTOGRAPHY signs. Flashes keep going off, illuminating dark corners and making it all look so fake. I don't understand this. A picture cannot capture the immense glory of this place. Notre Dame catches your breah, takes hold of it, and twists it right around. The atmosphere should be serene, but buzzing cameras bring it down. They can try to capture the preciseness of it all, the exactitude of placement. I fixate on the windows with petals of every color, blinking wide and facing the sun. It is stunning.

We move outside and begin our trek across the city. Next stop - the one and only.

That's right, boys and girls. The Eiffel Tower.

Mind you, to get there, we have to pretty much walk across the entire city. That tower is such a tease, because it's so enormous that you can see it from so far away - I'm almost there, you think, when you see it prodding up over the horizon.

No. You're not. It's just really big.

We wander and wind, our feet aching the whole time, but then there it is, a monumental digit scraping away clouds from the blue skies above. It is better in person than in any picture I've ever seen; more solid and real. It has a lace-like quality to it, crossing iron beams forming an intricate pattern of x's and spirals and arches that the eye can't quite fully grasp. Four solid pillars slam into the ground, supporting the obelisk that is the central tower. It is all the same color - they paint it every ten years, someone tells me - a mustardy sort of brown that is most clear when the sun hits the tower in just the right way. It is a soothing, calm and pleasant color.

We climb the stairs halfway up. There are informative placards every few hundred stairs, but we plow on by. I wonder if anyone really stops to read those things. The journey up is almost as harrowing as the journey accross the city to get here, but finally we reach the midway point, where a steadfast elevator pulls us the rest of the way up.

I have realized, being here, that I really like views from high places. Standing on top of the tower, I feel effortless, wind whipping around my head. The view is magnificent, of course, but there's something more than that that keeps me up here. Being so high up on such a creation feels powerful somehow,

French people aren't as bad as pop culture portrays them, at least at first - we run across a language barrier or five, but beyond that, people tend to be rather genial and helpful. But then, I suppose there are stereotypes for a reason, I note, as a family jostles by us, not even looking where they're going. The road around the Arc De Triomphe seems to personify the French - it is a circle of death, with an absurd seventeen roads converging into one roundabout (or so I hear). Pedestrians like us are resigned to crossing through a dank gray underground tunnel, which seems unfair for some reason.

The Arc itself is - well, an Arc. At this point in the day, we are all tired and want to retire for dinner and some more wine. But Napoleon's monument is certainly impressive, adorned with sculpture and inscriptions of France's great victories, now buried in the past behind stereotypes of those damn defeatable French. It figures.

The next day is dominated by the Louvre, which I find myself without words to adequately describe. It is a labyrinth - I half expect a minotaur to plow by. It is a child's maze, each hallway leading into four more hallways, half of which have stairs attached. Every room is ornate - gold doorframes and sculpted wood carvings in every wall and paintings on the ceiling of angels with speckled wings and massive yellow halos.

(The Mona Lisa is quite a letdown, by and by - the crowd around it is so massive that it is about the size of a postage stamp from where we stand, and honestly - I don't get the big fascination with that painting. Thanks a lot, Dan Brown.)

We pass by the inverted glass pyramid - I know people objected to the modern architecture smack dab in the middle of the courtyard of this ancient palace, but I like it. It glows with the sunlight and has a sort of quiet majesty to it. A little boy walks by, pauses. He can't be more than three. He reaches up, straining his arms to reach the point, but it evades him. He lets his arm fall and stares up at it, eyes sparkling and curious.

"Whoa," I hear him mutter.

That pretty much sums up the entire experience.

Paris draws to a close as we board a high speed train, green and brown whistling by the windows. It is a long way home; my eyes waver and shut. I doze for a lot of the trip.

In retrospect, I've realized that I wrote this one in present tense for some reason. I don't know, mixing things up a little bit, I guess.

Next blog: Berlin. This weekend: Back to Ireland.

Luck of the Irish. Allll right.

london & dublin

HELLO. IS ANYONE STILL OUT THERE READING MY BLOG?

I hope so. 

Let's talk about London. My biggest exposure to London prior to this mainly involved the Friends season 4 finale, The One With Ross's Wedding, as well as reading Harry Potter. (And let's face it, the odds of me finding The Leaky Cauldron were slim to none. London's a big city and I don't have a wand. SO ANYWAY.) Beyond that, I didn't know what to expect.

We flew in on the bumpiest Ryanair flight I've taken yet - and that's saying something. It felt like were were flying in the rattle of a very energetic and colossal baby. But we made it, and coasted through back streets past billboards and storefronts until we pulled up in front of the County Hotel. If you've been to the castle before, you know the deal with this hotel. The lobby is sparsely furnished, with crumbly wooden tables and padded chairs; the concierge desk is large, wide and unfriendly - which nine times out of ten could also go for the concierge sitting behind the desk. The rooms, for their part, are tiny and cramped like shoeboxes, brown bunk beds that are about as tall as I am. There's no bathroom attached to your room, just a sink that sticks haphazardly out of the wall; you have to turn the handle four, five times before a feeble stream of water will trickle out. One late night, a fire alarm rang through the halls at four AM - eighty bleary-eyed, VERY unhappy Emerson students crowded together on the sidewalk outside the hotel, puffing anger in our breaths.

The streets of London are both familiar - bright lights, loud noise and brick sidewalks - and unfamiliar - bright red double-decker buses teeter along on their four wheels, and they look do delicately balanced on the road that half the time, I expect them to tip and tumble like toddlers taking their first steps. People kept comparing London to New York or Boston, and I disagree. It's certainly not New York - the buildings are too small, the lights aren't as glaring, and the streets wind and coil. It has Bostonlike qualities, to be sure, but there are too many people, too much happening, and it is just so uniquely London - so old and new at the same time, a city of white stone, so much brighter than Boston, the buildings firm and strong.

We were led on tour after tour after tour in London. Big Ben clambers into the sky and glimmers like gold during the day, bathed in the sun. Trafalgar Square, made of endless white stone, features fountains with statues of stone and bronze that spew water like geysers. The fountains sparkle, the water a crisp and serene blue; white patches glow on the top of the water as evidence of the sun that glows overhead. The entire square seems to glow with an ethereal light, the stones themselves shining bright. Westminster Abbey - sprawling stone floors and soaring vaulted ceilings, with windows that stretch from floor to ceiling, shards of rainbow glass fitted together to create a dazzling display illuminated from the outside in. It was loud in there, surprisingly loud; everyone talks at full volume, and their voices clamber and bounce like restless children through the halls and paths of the Abbey. Tower of London - stone towers connected with winding white paths, the crown jewels sparkling behind thick glass, a field populated by cackling ravens with clipped wings and bills like knives.

I spent time in more museums than I can count over this break; British Museum, National Gallery, Victoria & Albert Museum - all in London.  One thing I notice - they all smell the same: old and musty, like a book with yellowing pages. I think my favorite museum was the British Museum: cascading tile floors, with an ocean of a ceiling made up of interlocking white triangles. The artifacts found in these museums are insane - ancient jewels and jars, statues older than the city they live in. I feel like it's redundant to say everything, but the sheer amount of beauty sculpted in white marble still blows me away.

Katherine and I went to see Billy Elliot the Musical one night in London; it was hands down the most wonderful show I have seen in a very long time. I'm by no means a good theater critic, but god, almost everything about Billy Elliot was absolutely astounding - the music, the dancing - I was left with chills and a permanent slackjaw. So beautiful. Wow.

We went to Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford upon Avon, and it was a refreshingly quaint little town, bathed by the sun with buildings of white and brown wood. Shakespeare's garden was very nice, with a gnarled and knotted tree at the center, grown from a cutting of Shakespeare's tree. A calm brown canal slithered around the town, with boats floating on the surface that functioned as ice cream stands and restaurants.

The next stop after Emerson released us was Dublin - it was unimpressively dank, to be honest. Very urban, very modern, very dirty. Trash was scattered on the sidewalks, and the entire city smelled of car exhaust and bacon. One long canal filled with brown water that sluggishly lurked through the city - a chair and an old shopping cart stuck sorely out of the water like miniature Titanics sinking into the murk. Gray clouds smeared themselves across the sky almost the entire time we were there, allowing almost no light to shine through except at the horizon, where a few strings occasionally peered through, feeble and small.

In Dublin, we met up with a girl from Chicago named Brittany who was bright and cheery to match her bright complexion and shiny blonde hair, with a twang to her speech. She was traveling on her own, and joined our group for the two nights we spent in Dublin. We went to the Jameson Distillery and sampled whiskey at eleven in the morning; we stopped by the Guinness Storehouse - the rest of our time was spent wandering through Dublin's winding streets and hopping from pub to pub. The pubs were wonderful, even if the city itself was dank -

stretching wooden floors and walls and ceilings, all of it illuminated by bright lights. There was music in every pub, high-pitched and cheerful, infectious; it put us all in good moods.

The thing about both England and Ireland is this - they speak English. I should have no problem understanding them when they speak.

Yeah. Right.

A combination of different inflection, different accents, and different speeds makes the language I allegedly am fluent in sound like a foreign tongue. It is only when someone articulates that I can understand them if they're simply in passing. If they talk directly to me, so long as they don't speak at the speed of light, I understand them.

We thankfully didn't spend a long time in Dublin - we flew out after two nights. We'd barely gotten into the air, when an announcement crackled into our ears:

"We apologize for any inconvenience, but we've got a warning light on in here, so we've been asked to return to Dublin so we can check this out - we'll alert you when we're about to land."

PERFECT. About five minutes later...

"Folks, the warning light has gone off, but we're still going to 

We rolled to a stop back in the Dublin airport, and had to switch airplanes after about ten minutes on the ground - we trudged from one blue tube to another, the Ryanair airplanes crunched, looking like midget planes in comparison to full-sized airplanes that land and launch around them.

I love flying - especially the first few minutes, right after you've launched into the air. The ground lies down beneath, green and patchy; you can gape at the view for just a moment, before it's gone, washed away by a white blanket that obscures the windows entirely, and you feel yourself moving up, up, up, and the plane bursts like a volcano out of the clouds and you find yourself above them. They spread out in all directions, father than the eye can see - like any classic depiction of heaven. The only things missing are winged babies and gold halos. The sky is blue again, and more clouds hover far from you, just out of reach. Peer down through a break in the clouds, and the ground is so far away - a deep ocean of white, not blue, and it's a long way down. The sun is nothing but a hazy yellow blur, and you feel like Icarus - don't want to get too close. 

We rolled to a smooth stop in Paris - but that's a blog for a little bit later.

I don't know if it's at all interesting, but my first assignment for my ridiculous Travel Writing class was to combine word and image in some way, so I went and made a website from which a lot of this blog was ripped directly. You can see it here if you're at all interested, but the words might be similar to you, and if you've seen my facebook, so are the pictures. But consider it a preview for the Paris blog, if anything. Yeah. ANYWAY.

We're swathed in midterms here at the castle, and next weekend I'm off to Germany to meet up with the one and only Bonnie - should be interesting.

For the record - unlike Mallory, I did not discover famous ancestry in London - but the trip is young.

:)

travel break

I'm back from ten days pillaging across Western Europe. In those days, we hit up London, Dublin and Paris, and it was an insane whirlwind of laughing, walking, and some of the most incredible things I've ever seen. Expect a blog or two in the coming days - I need to prepare to write what I expect to be behemoths of blog posts.