Back to the USA!

Well, after 8 months in France and other European countries, I'm back in the United States! It was, of course, a little sad to leave...I'll miss speaking French, taking the train, eating smelly cheese, and spending time with some of the wonderful people I met, among a number of other things.  But, I must say, I'm pretty excited to be back.  I can't wait to see my family, my friends, and my dog!  And I'm having a wonderful time people-watching in the Philadelphia airport, where I have a layover.  I haven't seen so many tshirt-wearing, Big Gulp cup-toting people in months!  I'm ridiculously amused.

On a more serious note, underscoring all of this is the fact that today is such an important one for the United States, with the death of Osama bin Laden taking place this morning.  While I don't exactly find myself rejoicing over the death of another human being, no matter how much of an enemy he may have been, it is impressive to be returning on a day marked by such patriotism.  Certainly, the United States has its faults, but I sure do love it. There really is no place like home...It's good to be back!

Belgium yum yum

I spent last weekend enjoying a completely decadent 48 hours in Belgium.  While the weekend flew by much too quickly, I don’t know if I could have withstood much more…by the end of it, I felt a little bit like how I remember feeling as a kid on the day after Halloween—so completely full of sugar that temporarily going into a diabetic coma was not out of the realm of possibility.  Belgium is a dangerous place for a chocolate-lover like me…there seemed to be a chocolate shop on every corner, each one unique and just begging to be entered.  Some shops were old-fashioned, selling traditional ganache-filled pralines.  Others looked like zenned-out yoga studies and took care to differentiate between chocolate with 43% cocoa from Venezuela and chocolate with 70% cocoa from Tanzania.  As if the chocolate shops didn’t offer enough temptation, there was also the mouth-watering smell of cooking gauffres wafting through the streets.  Needless to say, I indulged in a sweet treat or two.  Still, despite being in a two-day-long sugar-induced haze, I managed to actually get a feel for the places I visited in Belgium.  And I liked what I saw!

My first stop was Bruges, where I spent all day Saturday and Saturday night.  I had heard tell of the town being really popular with tourists, so I was sort of expecting to find Bruges a bit cheesy and uninteresting.  But instead, I fell in love with the place within the first five minutes of being there.  The town looked like pages of a storybook brought to life—think cobblestone streets, whimsical architecture, and cute elderly women riding bikes with baskets full of market produce nestled between the handlebars.  To top it off, it seemed as if Bruges was holding a conference for the most beautiful & well-dressed people of the world.  They were everywhere--strolling down the streets with their perfectly-groomed purebreds, soaking up the sun on the city’s numerous café terraces, and constantly appearing to have just stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine.  Maybe one could see it all as a bit superficial, but I have to admit that I totally reveled in all the aesthetic perfection.

The next stop was Brussels, capital of Belgium and of the European Union.  Brussels is not quite as utopic as Bruges, but it’s just a really cool place.  It had a bit of a Parisian feel with a funky, playful twist.  I think it speaks volumes that the city’s most famous landmark is the Manneken-Pis statue.  Brussels was great because although it is bigger than Bruges, it was still a very walkable city…which I guess is how all the residents avoid becoming morbidly obese despite all the Belgian beer, chocolate, and gauffres surrounding them.

Of course no Belgium blog post would be complete without mention of the beer.  I’m definitely more of a wine kind of girl, but some of those Belgian beers gave my typical Bordeaux a run for its money.  At the top of the list? Hoegaarden’s Rosée.  Regular Hoegaarden is already amazing, but when you add an ever-so-slight raspberry flavor and then complement it with perfect springtime weather, it becomes perfection in a glass.  Sadly, it’s only distributed in Benelux.  But that won’t stop me from having the beer I love…I’m already looking into importing it in mass quantities.  

Happy Poisson d'avril!

On a recent day trip to Belgium, I noticed something strange.  In the windows of the all the chocolate shops (yes, there is one on practically every corner in the magical chocolate-filled land of Belgium), alongside the candies made to look like eggs and Easter bunnies, there were fish-shaped chocolates.

My curiosity sparked, I did some research to figure out what was behind the strangely-formed treats.  As it turns out, the chocolates marked the approach of “Poisson d’avril” (April fish), which is basically the French equivalent to April Fools’ Day.

The story behind the day begins waaaay back in 1564, when the French king decided to change the calendar for the year, moving the first day of the year from March 31^st to January 1^st.  Apparently some people were slow to embrace the change…no big surprise there, seeing as how I still struggle to remember to change my clock for Daylight Savings Time, despite half of my appliances syncing up automatically.  Anyway, those who continued to celebrate New Years’ Day on April 1^st were mocked and made to look even sillier for their inability to keep up with the times by having a fish stuck to their back.  Some sources say that these “April fools” were stuck with only a paper fish, which I suppose is the 16^th century equivalent to sticking a “kick me” sign on someone’s back.  Other sources, however, say that real fish were used.  Of course the latter makes for a much better story, and it’s what I prefer to believe actually went down.

I guess the French have decided to celebrate Poisson d’Avril in a bit more sophisticated way these days.  Children still might mischievously tape a paper fish to their friends’ backs, but the occasion seems to now be marked more by perfectly-molded chocolates than the threat of having a reeking dead fish strapped to your back.  And that provides yet another reason that I’m glad to live in 2011 instead of 1564…

Visit to Auschwitz

For quite a while now, I have been oddly intrigued by the Holocaust.  I can’t really explain why.  It probably all began when I read The Diary of Anne Frank during a vacation and spent an hour crying on the balcony of my hotel when I got to the end.  Since then, I’ve studied that period of history quite a bit during my time as a student of International Relations & European Studies at college, and I’ve read lots more on the subject, but I still just can’t wrap my brain around how something so terrible could have been allowed to happen.  Anyway, after studying the subject so much, I felt that it would be important to see the place that is attached to this tragic period of history.

So, despite the fact that it is something I’ve wanted to do for a while, I was really nervous about going to Auschwitz during my time in Krakow.  Like butterflies-in-my-stomach, slightly nauseous nervous.  Fortunately, I ended up having some moral support, as a couple of guys from my hostel decided they wanted to catch the same bus as me.  Conversation with them offered a nice distraction during the hour-long journey to Oswiecim, the town where Auschwitz is located.  I was on my own for the tour, though, since they went with a Spanish guide.  But maybe this was for the best, as it made the tour a more personal and reflective experience.  

Walking through Auschwitz, I think my brain wanted to avoid fully processing what had happened there.  It was just too terrible to comprehend.  There were moments, however, when I was overcome by the reality of the atrocities that occurred.  One thing that really got to me was a display case of clothing of children who had been at the camp.  It was heartbreaking to see those tiny hand-knit sweaters, probably made by some loving mother or grandmother, as a representation of a child that was torn away from his family, never to have a chance at a full, happy life.  I was also disturbed by a gigantic pile of shoes, each pair having once belonged to a person taken to the camp.  Strangely, it wasn’t the magnitude of the pile that got to me as much as the individual pairs of shoes and the personalities they represented.  A pair of colorful espadrille sandals that poked out of the heap, for example, brought to mind a lively young woman with a love for summertime and vacations.  A pair of well-worn oxfords conjured up the image of an ambitious, hard-working man doing his best to support his family in difficult times.  Still, one of the most difficult parts of being at Auschwitz was walking through a former barrack lined with hundreds of photos of the camp’s prisoners.  As I studied these haunting pictures, I was struck with the fleeting image of the faces of my own loved ones as the faces in the photos.  This thought forced a direct and profound connection between the people who are so dear to me, so real and important in my life, and those who were imprisoned at Auschwitz. 

I think it can be fairly easy to not fully grasp the realness of something so terrible as the Holocaust because the people involved don’t seem fully real.  We are separated from them by time, geographical distance, and perhaps religious beliefs.  But seeing a child’s lovingly-made sweater, seeing a pair of sandals that could easily belong to your sister or your best friend, seeing sorrowful eyes stare back at you from a photo …these are the things that make these people real.  You are forced to recognize that these people had once been living and breathing, laughing and worrying, celebrating and working, loving and dreaming, just like us.

So that brings me to the lesson that I took away from the difficult visit to Auschwitz—that we must not forget our fundamental connection to every other human being in this world.  This can be difficult…we live in our own little bubbles, passing each day consumed by our own troubles & triumphs.  We often forget to be mindful of what is happening to the people we have never met in a country we have never been to.  But after visiting Auschwitz, I’m reminded of how important it is to avoid this lack of consciousness.  We live in a time in which, sadly, genocides still occur, and people are still persecuted for simply being who they are.  I have hope that this won’t always be a reality.  But if that is to be the case, it is vital for us to remember that the person we’ve never met, in the country we’ve never been to, is just as human as our mother, father, sibling, or best friend.  He may be different in terms of nationality, language, or religion.  He may be unknown to us, but what is important is that he feels and thinks things are known to this, and for this reason, we should care.

Krakow

When I arrived in Krakow after a somewhat complicated bus ride, I was dead-set on having a quiet night of reading at the hostel.  Leave it to a bit of Krakow spirit and a lively group of Australians, one of whom was celebrating a birthday, to change those kinds of plans.  I had only been in Krakow a few hours when I found myself in the midst of a circle of my fellow hostellers, with the girl who had checked me in bringing everyone a round of drinks.  A couple of hours later, I was in a Krakow nightclub called Prozac (not even kidding), being instructed on how to salsa dance by an Argentinian.

Needless to say, it was a late night, and I must admit that I struggled to wake up for my eleven o’clock tour of the city.  But I soldiered on and spent the day visiting the Town Square, the Wawel Royal Castle, & the Jewish Quarter.  I also managed to squeeze in a lunch of pierogi, or Polish dumplings, which are ridiculously delicious and became the only thing I wanted to eat for the rest of my stay in Poland.  After such a full day, I stuck to my guns and stayed in that night, trying to prepare myself for the next day’s visit to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The visit was a really difficult experience, but a really valuable one (more about that to come later…an experience like that definitely deserves an entire post).  It was a very strange, even guilt-inducing experience to spend a part of my time in Krakow at a bar, dancing with my fellow hostellers, and another part of my time making that haunting visit to Auschwitz.  But after thinking about it for a while, I decided that one of the many things we can learn from such a visit is that we would be insane to not appreciate and really live each day of freedom that we have.  If that involves having a good time with a group of people who come from all over the world, peacefully enjoying their company despite differences in nationality, age, and culture, then that’s all the better.

So, on that note, I spent my last night in Krakow dining and dancing with my hostel friends.  I was sad to leave the next day, not only ending my wonderful experiences in Krakow, but also my trip as a whole.  Fortunately, I was able to return to France with the happy knowledge that it had been a completely incredible trip.  On one hand, my thirteen days of travel flew by quickly.  On the other hand, I felt like I had been gone for weeks, judging by the amount of places I saw, the number of amazing people I got to know, and the bit of wisdom I think I gained.  If that doesn’t make for a perfect trip, I don’t know what does.

Prague

I had heard a lot about Prague before going there, so I had pretty high expectations of the place.  Fortunately, I wasn’t disappointed.   I don’t know if it’s because of the warm colors and beautiful architecture of the buildings, the lively crowds of people from all over the world that roam the streets, or maybe just all the cheap beer that is constantly flowing, but the city has a great energy about it.

I could hardly have asked for a better stay…the weather was chilly, but the sun was shining for the entirety of my four days in Prague.  My hostel was perfectly homey, I met some great people, and I managed to check everything off of my Prague sightseeing list while still enjoying Prague’s nightlife.

I accomplished all the “must-sees,” like the famous astronomical clock in Old Town Square, the Charles Bridge with its rows of Baroque statues, and of course the massive Prague Castle that perches on a hill overlooking the city.  I also visited the busy, boulevard-like Wencesclas square in New Town, the tower on Petřín Hill (which looks like a smaller version of the Eiffel Tower), the old Jewish Quarter, and the Lennon Wall.  And in between all the sightseeing, I was busy sampling the ridiculously unhealthy Czech specialty of fried cheese, drinking Czech beer, and dancing until the wee hours in one of Prague’s many night clubs.

After such a great stay, Prague is definitely going on my list of favorite places.  It felt very safe, and it is extremely tourist-friendly (many restaurants had menus in at least four languages, for example).  It is inexpensive yet elegant, historic but progressive, and small enough to be walkable while still big enough to keep visitors well-entertained.   So, if you have the chance to visit Prague, take it.  You won’t be disappointed!

Bussing it through Poland

Just when I was beginning to think that I was getting pretty good at the whole travel-through-Europe thing, the Polish bus system brought me back down to size.  In a perfect world, I would have boarded a bus in Prague this morning and then would have arrived in Krakow, Poland, 9 hours later, well-rested and with luggage in hand.

Alas, that’s not exactly how things went down.  The journey started out well…I woke up on time, I had my passport in hand (after a brief and frantic search at 4:45 in the morning), and I didn’t get lost on the way to the bus station.  I boarded the bus, which was only a harmless 15 minutes late, and settled into a seat in the back between two plump women in big puffy coats.  It was like being wrapped up in a big, cozy quilt, so with the comforting sound of the wheels rolling below me, I fell asleep (it was 5:30 in the morning, after all).

Fast forward 3 hours, and I’m being tapped awake by the ticket-checker.  The conversation that followed went something like this:

Ticket-checker asks me something in Polish, none of which I understand.

Woman on my right says something that I heard as, “Werasdnnfe aosdoiwer Eeen-glaaay-zeee,” which I assume was her telling Ticket-checker that I speak English, not Polish.

Ticket-checker pulls out the ticket I had given him upon boarding, pointing at my name with a questioning look on his face.

I nod, say yes, and repeat my name…just to be sure he knows that yes, that is indeed my ticket.

Ticket-checker shakes his head with a slight air of pity, says another incomprehensible phrase in Polish, and walks back to the front of the bus.

So at this point I was quite confused, especially because I had just woken up from a very deep sleep.  Why had I been singled out in this bus of 30+ people? Had we passed Krakow? Did he want to see my passport?  I would have asked for some more details on what the encounter was all about, but the woman on my right couldn’t offer much assistance, as she didn’t speak any English.  The woman on my left did speak some English, but was sleeping so hard she was beginning to snore, so I didn’t want to disturb her.  In any case, the bus was rolling on, so I figured I would reassess the situation at the next stop.

The next stop turned out to be Wroclaw.  As the bus pulled into the station, the driver said a few things over the loudspeaker, but the words were once again incomprehensible to my ears.  But then, in the mix of unfamiliar phrases, I thought I heard my name.  “That’s me!” I said, as if I had won a prize.  Fortunately, the English-speaking woman to my left had woken up to disembark, so she explained that I needed to change buses here.  Okay…that wasn’t listed on my ticket anywhere, but I could go with it.  I disembarked and went to fetch my luggage from the lower compartment, only to be greeted with another pitying shake of the head and the somewhat horrifying words, “No bag.”  Ummm...what? Fortunately, yet another English-speaking woman was around to clarify things, and she explained that I was apparently supposed to switch buses a while back (guess I slept through that…).  While I hadn’t successfully made the transfer, my luggage had, so it was somewhere en route to Krakow, leaving me in the dust.  At this point I could have chosen to panic a little bit, but I stopped myself.  I reminded myself that it was only a bag full of clothes.  I had the things that really matter…passport, money, and camera.  And who has time to panic when the bus driver is shoving you onto the next bus, comforting you with a big smile and the words, “No worry! Krakow!”

A few hours later, we rolled into some unknown town to pick up a few more passengers.  I jumped off the bus for a bathroom break, and by the time I had returned from the restroom, the bus driver was saying “Madame, bag! Bag!” He pointed into the compartment of a nearby bus, and lo and behold, there was my suitcase!  Somehow we had caught up with the bus I was supposed to have been on all along.  So I hopped on, feeling peaceful in the knowledge that I had all my possessions with me, and I was on my way to Krakow.  I just had to marvel at how the world can throw some kinks in your plans, but if you take it all in stride, you will probably still get you to your destination.