France is more than just fries and toast...

Since my last update, we finished up our time in Switzerland with a trip up Rigi mountain to see the Swiss Alps from the top of one, to Luzern to see the Old Town, a gorgeous church, and the William Tell bridge and then a day spent in Zurich seeing the churches and people watching. The weather was beautiful and sunny and we spent quite a bit of time basking in the sunshine! Then we got on a train to Paris on Monday.

So we made it to Paris… and we are leaving again tomorrow! A few days was enough for me, though. It is a nice city, but I really don’t think it is all that it is hyped up to be. This might, however, be because it has been raining for the past three days straight… the whole time we have been in this city. We spent the first evening walking to the Eiffel Tower (6 miles!!) and then we climbed up it, which is definitely something that has to be done here! We were there for the sunset so we saw the city lights come on and were actually in the tower when they turned those lights on! It was pretty spectacular. The downside of this was that there were so many people there, it was ridiculous. We were pushing our way through crowds the entire time… there were a lot of people in super small areas and it took us over an hour to stand in the two lines to get down from the top in the elevators. But it had to be done, so we faced the crowds.

The next day we saw Notre Dame, La Chapelle Church, and the Musee d’Orsay. Funny story about the Orsay Museum… we saw an advertisement banner hanging off of it the day before that was talking about a Corinth exhibit within the museum. We were pretty excited because we went to Corinth in Greece and thought it would be fun to see an exhibit on it. Well we got to the museum and stood in the ridiculously long line that took us nearly two hours to get through because it kept winding like a snake throughout the whole courtyard, and about halfway through, we realized that the Corinth exhibit wasn’t about the city in Greece, but it was a collection of paintings by a man named Lovis Corinth. Slightly disappointing, but we figured since we had already been standing in the rain for an hour, we might as well stay for the rest of it. It was a pretty good museum and worth our time, I guess. We saw a number of Van Gogh paintings so that was pretty cool.

We took a walking tour of the Montmatre district that included seeing the Moulin Rouge, a few of the cafés featured in the movie Amelie, and the Sacre-Coure church. That was cool.

Today we went to the Louvre. Everybody has been right… the Mona Lisa isn’t nearly all it is hyped up to be… it is like 11x17 so it’s not very big and I don’t really understand why it is so good, but whatever. I braved the crowds and took pictures of it anyways. I also saw the Winged Victory statue and Venus de Milo. They were all pretty cool. We spent like two hours wandering around after that. There is so much to see in the museum, it is incredible!

Then we went to see the Opera Grandeur… the Paris Opera House that was rumored to have a phantom living underneath it—subject to Gaston d’Lerox’s novel and Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musical. It was beautiful. Then we faced public transportation again (and were let down yet again) to get out to Napoleon’s Palace in Versailles. We didn’t go in the palace because it closed an hour after we (finally) got there and it cost 10 Euros to enter so we didn’t think it was worth it, but we wandered around the gardens for a while. We saw the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul and saw Napoleon’s Apartments in the Louvre that morning so didn’t feel like we were missing too much inside, and the gardens were beautiful.

So that’s my story. I don’t particularly like Paris. This might be because of how much I really liked Switzerland, but I am ready to leave tomorrow. I feel like I have seen all that I wanted to. Today, Lissie and I were actually trying to think of things to do with our time. I hope the weather is better elsewhere.

I am also very excited for these last two parts of the trip. Tomorrow we go to Utrecht, Netherlands, where we are staying with a family that I met a few months ago through a long line of friends’ relatives’ friends…. Ask me sometime if you want the whole relation story. It’s quite complicated. Anyways, they are great people and I am excited to see them again. Then on Sunday we are going to London to meet with my nephew Chris! By the way, in case you were wondering and haven’t been reading all of my posts, the whole luggage thing has worked out perfectly and all of the plans have been settled for the rest of the trip and I am quite excited for them! And then next Friday, after nearly five days, we are flying home!! I will hopefully try to update at least once more before I get home.

Also, Lissie and I have walked 84 miles since we left the group 10 days ago. This brings our grand total of miles walked up to 442 for the semester.... can we hit 500 in the next 9 days? I think so... we've been averaging just under 10 per day so far. Hooray!!

I also have some more pictures!! They only go through Rome though... I'm working on the ones since then. Enjoy!!

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2000696&l=54b57&id=1273320032

Italian Escapades

Wow, so this is Italy! It’s truly a shame that I couldn’t spend more time here because it is truly a beautiful country. Lissie and I have been taking trains everywhere and have had a great chance to see the countryside. To be quite honest, however, most of it looks exactly like Greece. But it is still beautiful!

Our first day of travel was long… 3-hour train, 16-hour ferry, 5-hour train again. But we finally got there and were able to meet the other six from Concordia who flew directly to Rome the day before. We all went out to dinner at a restaurant called “Concordia” that we figured was pretty appropriate.

If you can believe it, Lissie and I saw the majority of the large sites in Rome within the only full day we were there. We saw the Spanish Steps the first night so were able to cross them off our list. We got up at 5:30 AM to get to the Vatican by 7:00 when it opened. We saw St. Peter’s Basilica when there were maybe 20 others there (first picture) and it was still quiet inside (absolutely gorgeous!!) and then took the Cupola tour and climbed up into the top of the basilica and then up into the cupola and saw the Roman skyline. It was gorgeous. Then we went to the Vatican museum which was filled with so many things that I don’t even know what to say. We were told that if you spent one minute in front of every piece in the museum, you would be there for over 14 years! Needless to say, we had to pick-and-choose what we saw. The second picture shows a painting on the ceiling... a PAINTING. Not a sculpture. It was amazing. We ended up going to the rooms of paintings, Egyptian stuff, map room, modern art, and of course the Sistine Chapel (third picture). Everybody says it is beautiful, but you have no idea until you can see it for yourself. It was crowded with tourists, so that wasn’t very pleasant, but the frescos were gorgeous!!

This is where my blog pictures end... I haven't taken the rest off of my camera yet. They will come in the next one hopefully!!

Then Lissie and I went to the Coliseum and took a tour of the inside. It is colossal… just like its name. It was originally used as an arena for gladiator fights and other types of violent entertainment involving people and/or animals.

Then we walked to the Pantheon which is a domed church that defies the laws of physics because of how it was built. The dome doesn’t have many supports on it and it is miraculous that it is still standing. It was very pretty inside.

Then we went to the Trevi Fountain which is just as spectacular as pictures show. We both, of course, threw money in backwards to ensure good luck, a good life, and a return to Rome.

Then we walked to the Church of Santa Maria di Maggiato (or something like that) which was one of the only other churches in Rome to rival St. Peter’s in size, although it was obviously significantly smaller. It was also very pretty inside.

We met our group for supper at the Arch of Constantine which was near the Coliseum. The 8 of us walked to the Piazza Navona for dinner. Three of them have birthdays coming up soon, so we celebrated that tonight by dressing up and eating nicely. It was delicious! Then we split up and went back to our respective hostels to sleep.

Lissie and I walked 14 miles on that day….. needless to say, our feet hurt by bed time! It was also kind of funny because the first night we were there, it stormed incredibly hard and we got caught in the rain and were soaked from head to toe. Our shoes were soppy and we weren’t looking forward to having to put them on again for our long day of walking. That obviously didn’t help our sore feet by the end of the day, but it wasn’t as bad as either of us anticipated, so we were grateful for that.

The following day, we went to the Roman Forum, the Palantino, the Circus Maximus, and the Mouth of Truth in the morning before 12:00 when we had to get back to the train station. We got on a train around 1:10 and came to Siena, which is about 3 hours away. We had a huge bus fiasco because the public transportation here isn’t clear to non-Italian speakers, and since it is a small town, not many people spoke English. We finally found a hostel to stay in… it is a bit out of town but is quite nice. We met a woman from Australia who helped us get to the hostel and then joined us for dinner at a local pizzeria that was delicious!! We had an early night because we wanted to have an early morning!

The first bus that drove by our hostel left at 7:20 AM, so we decided to catch it and see the city all morning. We got to the first church, called the Duomo, before 8:00 AM. The church is covered in black and white marble so it resembles zebra stripes. It looks really gorgeous. We found a pamphlet that had a walking tour of Siena, so we followed that around the older parts of the city. We saw a few other churches, a few gorgeous views of the surrounding areas, and we ended in the Piazza del Campo which is a large square outside of a governmental building and is used for horse races twice a year. Unfortunately it happens in like March and September, so we weren’t anywhere near seeing them. By this time we had walked over 4 miles and it wasn’t even 10:30 AM, so we caught a bus back to our hostel and decided to try and get on an earlier train to Pisa.

We got into Pisa early, easily found a cheap hotel and then we wandered aimlessly around Pisa for the night. We had pizza at a restaurant that looked at the tower, had gelato on the lawn in front of the tower, and had a relaxing night without anything pressing on our minds.

We left Pisa this morning and got on a train at 11:45 that eventually landed in Zurich. We spent over 9 hours on the train today, but Switzerland is gorgeous!! We are here for the next three days (which should all be nice weather) and I am so excited to see the mountains!

Speaking of nice weather, I hear the weather back home is going to suck these next few days. That's too bad.... you should probably order sunshine and warm weather for when I get home, though. Thanks, that'd be great!

More pictures!

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2000694&l=dd2fd&id=1273320032

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2000696&l=54b57&id=1273320032

Coming to a close....

Wow, my last blog entry for the official semester. For some reason, I thought I would have more than 21 blog entries… oh well! School officially ends tomorrow, although I finished all my homework and projects three or four days ago (which felt really good!). But don’t worry, faithful followers—I will try to write periodically while I am traveling around Europe for the next three weeks, as well.

Before I get too far into this, I want to say that I officially lived up to the name of my blog… I had an olives and cheese sandwich! I was pretty excited.

But anyhow, we had a wonderful last few days in Turkey. We saw a lot of really great sites like the ancient city of Ephesus, the wonderfully preserved churches in Cappidocia that are built into the sides of funny looking rock structures (that's what the picture is of), and a final two days in Istanbul exploring the Grand Bazaar, Suleyman the Magnificant’s mosque, a cruise down the Bosporus. We had a ridiculously long bus ride one day—14 hours with only one stop besides bathroom breaks—but even that was OK because the dynamics of our group are so great. I am really going to miss the other 22 people on this trip when it is over.

We got to Athens yesterday and had a free day today. I had a terrible morning trying to sort out things with the Greek post office to ship a large box to London so we don’t have to lug it around Europe but also don’t have to pay three times the amount to ship it to the United States. Today is Saturday, and apparently every Hellenic Post branch doesn’t ever ship packages weighing more than 2 kilo, and the only one that does is closed on Saturdays. (Fun fact… 2 kilo is 4.4 pounds, and our suitcase was roughly 30 kilo-- ~66 lbs. Somehow we got a price quote for that weight from the post offices that we went to… go figure. Ugh!!)

Anyways, after taking the metro three times carrying a 66 lb suitcase and three large cardboard boxes, visiting two different post offices, crying in front of one postal worker who had no idea how to handle a 20-year-old crying in public, and traveling for two hours, we finally made it back to the hotel and were EXTREMELY frustrated. The post office suggested splitting it into 15 2-kilo boxes at 21 Euro per box… we said no. The front desk called UPS and they said they could ship it for nearly 500 euro—that’s about $800. We said no. But We have two lifesavers in the group and they offered to take our bags on the plane under their name (since you’re allowed to check 2 bags when you fly) and then it will be waiting in Fargo for us whenever we come pick it up. Hooray! This means that nobody reading this will get souvenirs those first few days I am home, but you’ll have to deal with it. :-) Plus, these two people are saving Lissie and I almost 60 euros a piece. Thank goodness!

Other than that, I am really excited and sad. We are having a going away party tonight with our language lesson teacher from the beginning of the trip and also a viewing of our acting workshop that I wrote about in February (if you didn’t read that entry, you should. It was the strangest thing we did all trip and you will understand why I am excited to see the video that they made!). Lissie and I are going back up the Acropolis tomorrow morning as a last hurrah and we are going to leave on a train at 11:38 in the afternoon (although we’re leaving our hotel at like 10:30 to allow for ample time since neither of us really know what we are doing!).
I will update this when I get the chance… my guess is that I will have lots and lots of time on trains and ferries to write, the only problem is sketchy internet in the hostels. We’ll see, and I plan on keeping up-to-date as well as I can.

One final note… please pray for Lissie and me. We don’t know what we are doing and are kind of winging it and we both confessed to each other last night that we are scared out of our minds. It is going to be such a good adventure that we are sure we won’t ever regret doing it, and I will be sure to keep track of all the stupid things we do because we don’t know better. But if you could keep us in your prayers, I would be very grateful.

Take care, everyone!

I also have more pictures from Turkey!! Enjoy!

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2000688&l=250f0&id=1273320032

Mmmm... Turkey!

Sometimes I feel like my sister.

If you know my sister, you might know that this is a good thing. But you might also know that she has a tendency to be starstruck whenever she has the chance to meet somebody famous. Well last Monday, I had the opportunity to have a private audience and meet the Patriarch of Constantinople, His All Holiness Bartholomew, and I’m still nearly giddy about it.

At this point, we were still in Istanbul. We went to the building called the Patriarchate, the place that the Patriarch lives and works, and got a tour of the church that was on site. Then we were ushered into a beautifully decorated room that the Patriarch has meetings in and stuff. Dr. Roy Hammerling brought students here to meet him two years ago and he warned us that His All Holiness is a very busy man and might not have much time to talk to us and that we should be prepared to be ushered in, take a picture, and then him having to leave. Well we sat there for about 5 minutes until His All Holiness came in. He walked up to the front of the room and sat in a chair and started speaking to us. He started out by saying how he was pleased to meet us and then continued talking for 20 minutes! He talked about the efforts of the Orthodox Church to partner with the Islamic faith in Istanbul to create a more peaceful atmosphere for everyone. He talked about the Interfaith Dialogs that they have been setting up, one of which was in Athens in early February and our group actually went to listen to it.

This whole time, I was in awe of how professional and soothing this man was. His All Holiness Bartholomew is 68 years old and the 270^th patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church and he is fluent in five languages. His voice was soothing and very easy to understand. It felt like he was talking to us for a lot longer than 20 minutes just because of his elegance. He is a world leader, having worked closely with people like Pope Benedict and met important international leaders. When he was done, he gave us all cross pendants. The back of the pendant says “Patriarch Bartholomew” in Greek. We then gave him a few gifts as well. We gave him two CDs with music written and/or performed by Concordia professors and ensembles. We gave him a book on the history of our college and also a book on the college with an article written in it about the last time a Concordia group met him. He saw that and joked saying, “Who will be the one to write a story about this meeting?” and Roy Hammerling said, “Where’s Emily? There she is; she is our resident journalist. She’ll write about it.” He looked at me and smiled.

One of my favorite parts was when he was giving us these pendants, we walked by and shook his hand. Even though we are in Turkey, he is patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church so they all spoke Greek within the walls of the Patriarchate. We took Greek language lessons when we were in Greece, so although I don’t consider myself anywhere near fluent, we all know simple phrases like yes, no, please, thank you, etc. When I shook his hand, I said “Hiero Poli” which means “Nice to meet you” and he looked at me and smiled and said “Hiero Poli” back to me. That made my day!

After we all got our necklaces and a piece of chocolate, he ended his speech by talking directly about our college. He said, “Concordia. What a beautiful name. It means One in Mind, One in Heart.” This was a beautiful way to end his speech because he had been talking about the unity of the Greek Orthodox Church and the Islamic faith.

So that was my exciting news of that day. We ended up forgetting to take a group picture with him (dumb!) but I got a few as he was speaking so that will have to be good enough. I feel very honored and excited about it.

One little bit of fun news after that. We spent the last three nights in Ephesus. I was excited to see Ephesus because of the history with St. Paul and other Christian things, but I had no idea how many things there were to see here and how big the site is! It was really cool to see these sites and learn how much history is in this place besides the short period of time written about in the Bible. But the fun news doesn’t come from an ancient site.

After seeing ruinous ancient cities, we were told we were going to a leather shop. We were told that we shouldn’t feel obligated to buy anything but that they would give us really good prices on leather jackets. I was expecting a factory or something, but we got there and they brought us into a room with a runway in the middle! We’re all shifting our eyes at each other, telepathically sending the message of “what’s going on??” Pretty soon, the heavy bass music starts and we’re all wondering what is going to happen next. Almost immediately, five models come out and begin modeling the leather jackets. Now this wouldn’t be a big deal except it was so different from what any of us were expecting. Then about halfway through, there was one guy who winked at Ingrid and I an we both began laughing, and then the next time he came out he came over, grabbed my hand, and pulled me up on the runway! Another model pulled Brock out of our group and we both went into the back and put on a leather jacket and sunglasses and strutted our stuff down the runway! I couldn’t stop laughing the entire time because of the overall ridiculousness of the situation, but I had so much fun!

Then we went into their shop and tried on some jackets. A few people bought one, but the cheapest ones were marked at Î595 which is like $800+. Nobody paid full price because they did give us good deals, but they were still not any cheaper than $200. I tried on a chinchilla jacket that cost Î20,000… approximately $35,000 or so. Ridiculous. Needless to say, I didn’t buy anything.

So there are two fun stories from my last week in Turkey.

Plus, I have more pictures! There are 60 in each album so there are quite a few to look at (I’m sorry!!) but the first one is of the last part of Santorini and the first part Istanbul, the second is the last half of Istanbul, Troy, Pergamon, and the first day in Ephesus (including the Temple of Artemis… one of the seven wonders of the ancient world!), and the third is Ephesus, Priene, Didyma, and Miletus (they are all ancient cities that are ruins now, so don’t feel bad if you don’t recognize any of the names except Ephesus J)

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2000662&l=acfc0&id=1273320032

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2000674&l=5c489&id=1273320032

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2000675&l=40d24&id=1273320032

Enjoy!

Island Hopping

Greetings!! I know it has been way too long since my last entry and I apologize for that. This one will recap our last week, March 27-April 5, in the islands!

First of all, I want to say that the Greek islands are just as beautiful as they are in any picture that you see of them. None of that is fake... it is beautiful there!! It was kind of sad to leave Crete after the month that we spent there, but we were all pretty excited to go to the islands.

Our first stop was Tinos. We got there and it was rainy and windy… not exactly conducive to beach time. Tinos is a really interesting island. There is a large monastery dedicated to the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary (when Gabriel told her she was going to be the mother of Jesus) and it is a popular pilgrim destination. It is located at the top of the hill, and people visiting will often start at the bottom of the hill and crawl on their hands and knees to the top of the hill as an act of humbleness. There is also an icon in the church that was found buried in the ground. A vision came to a woman named Pelagia in a dream and told her where the icon was buried. She eventually became a saint and there is a nunnery on the island dedicated to her. Anyways, Tinos is an incredibly religious island and there wasn’t much to do there because all of the tourist shops were either closed or sold icons only. The weather was also consistently cloudy, rainy, and windy, so it wasn’t exactly a welcome beginning to our island adventures.

The second stop was Mykonos. We were here for three nights. This is probably the most picturesque island that we were on. All of the buildings are whitewashed with blue or green trim. I asked someone why houses in Greece look like this and they told me that it was because of all of the patriotism that the nation holds. Their flag is blue and white, so the houses are a representation of their patriotism. Very interesting! There is also a line of windmills on the coast that are very conducive for gorgeous pictures.

Weather when we were traveling wasn’t very nice still… extremely windy and cold. But the second day we were in Mykonos was a free day for our group and the sun came out and the wind stopped and it was beautiful! This island is very developed and touristy so there were a lot of shops open in the shopping district. Many were getting ready for tourist season coming up soon and were repainting their trim and stuff, but there were still plenty of places to buy jewelry.

Mykonos was also the moment I realized how much I dislike tourism. I work as a tour guide on the William A. Irvin in the summer, so I already knew a little bit about how annoying obnoxious tourists can be, but I’ve gotten to the point on this trip that I no longer consider myself a tourist in Greece. During one of our days here, a cruise ship pulled into port and all of the inhabitants got off for the day to go shopping. It was ridiculous how obnoxious they were with their disrespect for the local people and disregard for the local culture. It was clear that they were on vacation and felt like the world revolved around them and that all of the people in Mykonos were there to serve them. The worst part was that all of the shop owners would group us in with the cruise ship people and automatically treat us significantly different than they did before. Even if we walk into the shop and offer a greeting in Greek (Kalimera—good morning or Ya sas—hello) they would scoff a little. It made us all not want to shop in their stores just because of the rude vibes they were giving off because of their disdain of tourism.

Anyways, we also went to the ancient site of Delos. This is really close to Mykonos but uninhabited and preserved as an ancient city. Myth says that this is where the god and goddess Apollo and Artemis were born. Myth also says that the island was barren until they were born and then flowers bloomed all over… and there were definitely a lot of flowers there when we visited!

We all know that the world is small, but I have a real-life example of how small it is. There was a group of older adults touring the island at the same time as us, and at one point we had stopped to talk in the middle of a path and they walked through us. There were two people with Minnesota Gophers hats on and we got really excited and were like, “Yay Minnesota!!” It turns out that the entire group was from Minnesota. If that wasn’t cool enough, Dr. Roy Hammerling told someone the two in the hats we were from Concordia College in Moorhead, MN, and some others in the group overheard… Apparently they are both Cobber alumni! And not only that, their son is also Cobber alumni and went on a May-seminar here with Dr. Schmoll and Emeritus Olin Storvick!! How crazy and small of a world is that??!?

The next island was Santorini, which is most likely the island that you will see in pictures or movies about Greece. Santorini is an active volcano. It used to be round but about 1500 BC the volcano erupted and sunk most of the island so now it is a crescent shape like a backwards ‘C’. It is beautiful. We stayed in a town north of Fira which is in the middle of the crescent. It was about 15 minutes to walk into town and shop, which was done quite often. We also took a boat tour of the islands of Santorini which included stopping and swimming in hot springs and climbing the island with the volcano. It was gorgeous and a lot of fun.

We watched the sunset in a town called Oia—pronounced ‘ee-ah’. We sat on a rooftop that said “No Entry—Keep Out” but we climbed on it anyways. In our defense, we are almost positive that nobody was home, and we needed a place to eat our picnic dinner and sit comfortably for the sunset. It was beautiful!! I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to take a bad picture of that sunset.

We also visited a black sand beach in Santorini. That was really cool. Since the weather actually cleared up for us in the islands, it was nice to sit outside and enjoy it. We spent a few hours on the beach in the late afternoon until the sun went down and it got too chilly to be comfortable, but it was fun to sit with a small group of people and just hang out.

So that was the short version of our island adventures. If you want the long version, come talk to me when I get home and I would be more than happy to show you all of the pictures and tell you more stories than I feel like most people want to read on a blog. We are now in Istanbul and have been here for three days but are leaving early tomorrow morning. I have an amazing story about what we did today concerning His All Holiness the Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew, but that’ll have to wait because I am all blogged out.

More pictures, though!

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2000658&l=b1486&id=1273320032

Take care and keep reading!