Wednesday, June 18, 2014

World Tour 2K14 and also The End and maybe Better Late Than Never


I realize that it’s been over a month since we left Europe and now it just looks like I’m milking this study abroad business for every last drop (…this metaphor is getting weird), but you should know that we were all too heartbroken upon leaving Europe and then caught up in the whirlwind of understanding everybody and seeing sweatpants out in public that we could not even touch the blog, let alone write a whole post.
But alas, Mal and I happened to be casually sitting in my dear, sweet sister’s living room (missing our third amiga all the while, of course) and holding her teeny tiny new son (hi Carsten!) when she threatened mentioned that she had some serious cash riding on whether or not we would write a final blog post about our “epic backpack adventure” (unnecessary quotes because that’s a phrase I just made up) and because I’m a good sister about four times a year and know how seriously she takes her ice cream allowance, here I am.
WHERE TO BEGIN?
The beginning, probably.

No idea what we're getting ourselves into here.
Barcelona: (Did I mention that Mal’s older sister Caitlin joined us for this world tour? No longer appropriate to mention the three musketeers and will now refer to the group with stupid monikers like “the fab four”, and you’ll enjoy every second.) After stuffing all of our backpacks with clothes and protein bars and a diary (JK that was only Laura) so that they looked like perfectly round bowling balls resting on our backs and then kissing Mari goodbye (NOT on the lips you weirdo!), the fearsome four trekked to the train station, destination Barcelona, via our newly-purchased Eurail Global Passes (second class, because we are poor). I’m not going to wax poetic about the high-speed AVE train we took, which made the three hours to Barcelona feel like we were floating on a cloud at the speed of 300 km/hour, but let me tell you, it made our spring break overnight train ride to Lisbon look like absolute hell… which it was. Anyway, we arrived in Barcelona at midnight and had six hours to kill until our train would leave for some small town that I probably don’t even remember which country it was in, let alone the name. Probably normal travelers would try to get a little shut-eye in the train station during this layover, but we are young, fearless, and can’t sleep unless we’re lying down in a bed, holding a stuffed animal up to our chest (just me?), so we naturally chose to explore Barcelona in the dark. Basically, we found an open bar with a ping pong table, played some intense games of Round Robin because we felt like breaking a sweat, drank mojitos, and then wandered down La Rambla and complained about our backpacks. (I believe a direct quote from Mal was, “It’s only been like, five hours and I already want to burn this backpack.” Same.) It should be noted that sometimes the backpacks became frontpacks because those things were freaking heavy and because sometimes looking like hobo tourists simply isn’t enough. Ultimately, the takeaway from Barcelona was that it is still beautiful (albeit cold) at night and that “all we need is each other to have fun” (guess which amiga said this! hint: Laura).
Maybe we should just leave our backpacks here?
Paris: After the dream that was the high-speed train to Barcelona, it is only natural that we would have Train from Hell Experience 2.0 on the way to Paris. Apparently, it is not very easy to get directly from Barcelona to Paris, cuz we went to some small town to some other small town and then on to Paris. If that weren’t enough, our first train was kept at a balmy temperature of around 0 degrees Celsius (that’s, I don’t know, 32 degrees Fahrenheit or something for all you Americans out there), the seats were literally made of rusty nails, and the loudspeaker announced each stop (every five minutes) at a tone so loud that I officially went deaf in one ear. (Not a single exaggeration to see here, folks.) Also, we were sleep-deprived and thus each sprawled out on our own bed of nails, hoods up, scarves over our heads, which made all the Frenchies (Spaniards?) gawk at us, undoubtedly wondering about the new homeless-ride-free program. At least the ride from the next small town to Paris was slightly warmer and Cait got a chocolate croissant for consolation that she hadn’t just made the biggest mistake of her life in agreeing to adventure with us. (Did any of that make sense? It didn’t at the time, either.) Whatever, you guys, we made it to Paris. Our hostel (Cait’s first!) seemed suitable enough (though later I would discover some dried puke on my blanket and Laura would call our roommate cute while he was still in the room) and we quickly set out to explore with what little time we had. Somehow while wandering we got lucky enough to find a crepe stand, which was the main reason we returned to Paris in the first place. While devouring our crepes (our first real food in what felt like seven months), we meandered to the Moulin Rouge, which I had been dying to see due to my unrequited love for the movie (I know all the songs by heart and cry every time and get nothing in return, ever) and also through Montmarte, which was icky. Next we parked ourselves in front of the Eiffel Tower, because that thing doesn’t ever stop being beautiful. In addition to staring at the Tower and taking at least four hundred pictures, we watched some fellow tourists do some stupid poses and unathletic jumps, ogled some French hotties, ignored the guys selling keychains and champagne, and witnessed a pseudo-photo shoot of some probably famous Frenchies that we didn’t recognize. Oh, and the Eiffel Tower sparkled! And the sun set. But not in that order. Our takeaway from Paris was that crepes are amazing and that if you huddle really close together, you can feed off of one another’s body warmth enough to make it until the tower sparkles.
Sorry about your face there, Laur, but here's a good example of snuggles for warmth. Not sure who that hoodlum in the middle is.

Munich: After saying “Au revoir” to Paris (haha, puke cute), we trained away to Stuttgart (where we would switch to Munchen, which is a funny way to say Munich) and it was there in Stuttgart that we discovered Germany’s gift to America: no, not the Price sisters… croissant-wursts. If your life is miserable and pathetic and you have no idea what a croissant-wurst is (much like us, at one dark period of our lives), it’s a hot dog wrapped in a warm croissant and it’s THE bomb.com. Even without ketchup (though I would recommend the ketchup). Obviously Germany was off to a good start. Once in Munchen, we checked into our hostel where we would sleep with 36 other strangers in one room (NO idea whose crazy idea it was to book that…….) and then, typically, went wandering. We discovered the city center and that German people are like, the nicest (and everybody speaks English! we were spoiled) and that the Glockenspiel was very, very monstrous and cool but that it does not do a song and dance every hour on the hour like some of us may have believed. We also ran into some Canadian guys who happened to be staying at our hostel (though, strangely enough, not in our 40-person dorm) who lived up to every Canadian stereotype out there (eh?). Also I saw some Pippi Longstocking graffiti and didn’t stop talking about her until I landed in Chicago eight days later. We dined at the famous Hofbrauhaus where we drank beer out of massive mugs (admittedly it was Radler’s, so we actually drank beer-flavored lemonade out of massive mugs) and split a ginormous pretzel and Cait ate a pig’s knuckle and we listened to some beer house music. The whole experience was very German. Also, we met some German guy staying at the hostel who told us what town he was from but we all actually just thought he was spitting up a hairball. He was super nice, though. That night’s sleep, however, was not super nice and for some reason we kept getting shushed? I can’t imagine why. The following morning after a glorious (free!) hostel breakfast, we Eurailed our way to Dachau concentration camp. No jokes here, for the trip was emotionally charged and moving; it’s one thing to read about the Holocaust in history books and it’s quite another to see where it happened. Dachau is actually the first of all concentration camps built by Hitler and first held political prisoners (read: opponents of Hitler), but it eventually and unfortunately imprisoned a wide variety of people. To lighten the mood, though, on the busy bus ride to the camp, Mal sat with her face in some man’s armpit and swore off doner kebaps for the rest of her life (which is fortunate, considering they hardly exist in Troy, Missouri). Back in Munich for a few hours, we walked around the outdoor market looking for another croissant-wurst, took some more pictures, and soaked in the beauty of the relatively small city. Our takeaway from Munich was that you should try the 40-person hostel room at least once but be aware that at 3 AM a girl will decide to shout about her ab routine and that pretzels don’t taste very good if you dip them in beer and that German cops are hot.
Never leave me, croissant-wurst.

Prague: I couldn’t begin to talk about Prahahaha (what the locals call Prague… and by locals I mean four noob backpackers) unless I mentioned the most memorable train ride there. After getting ourselves some croissant-wursts to go, we fought our way onto the train and into a private Harry Potter compartment, surrounded on either side by some ROWDY boys. We were amused from afar as we watched the boys play soccer in the narrow hallway from the safety of our compartment and run around like children (no judgment, though). Inevitably, the boys let themselves into our little room, though I attribute this less to our winning good looks and pleasant scent (wearing the same pair of socks three days in a row in absolutely acceptable on world tours) and more to the fact that we were blasting “She Looks So Perfect” by 5 Seconds of Summer on repeat. It turns out that our rowdy friends were an Irish soccer team (Irish soccer is a sport, but they were also literally from Ireland) from Munich, traveling to Prahaha for a tournament. During the rest of the ride, various players were popping in and out and it was all fun and games until their Irish pub songs turned into one dude singing “Wagon Wheel” BY HIMSELF which was charming for the first 20 seconds and then painfully awkward for the last five minutes of the song. Also, there was a really old guy named Pete who was labeled the team’s resident pervert. (Their words, not mine.) It was quite the welcome to Prague, except that they happened to be staying at the same hostel as we were and honestly the fab four was a little wary of being bombarded with another solo. After helping the guys find the hostel in the rain, we retired to our private (!!!) room and threw our stinky backpacks all over the room, simply because we could. Also, at midnight that night Mal turned 20 and it was absolutely earth-shattering and monumental. (Her words, not mine.) Then we went to bed because defending American culture to Irish guys is exhausting. After another amazing free breakfast (yogurt! cheese! coffee!), I used my brand new map (like, a real paper one… those still exist) to navigate us throughout the city. Because maps are hard, I led us on the very, very long way to the city center and for a while we were just walking down some deserted (but charming!) streets while all secretly worrying that literally nobody lived in Prague and maybe not even the Czech Republic. But, I rationalized to myself, who were those Irish guys gonna play soccer against? Plus we found the market and all was well. The rest of the day, we managed the rain (even if it sucked and poor Mal’s Toms were absolutely soaked which wasn’t very fair considering it was her birthday and all) and saw the Charles Bridge, the Old City, the Powder Bridge, and some gorgeous old opera house. My knowledge of the significance of all these neat architectural things is limited, considering I was merely using the beloved map and doing my best to eavesdrop on as many tour guides as I could, but no matter. We also saw the Lennon Wall and even signed our names, lest anyone forget that at one time we were brave enough to ride in dirty trains around Europe. After devouring a delicious birthday lunch, we toured the castle (mostly because it was raining but also because it was cool and historical) and I dropped my camera down some concrete steps and a woman told Laura I was lucky. As if she didn't know! Later on, once we had blow-dried everyone’s shoes for an hour or seven, we laud Mal some more at an authentic local pub, in which some patrons literally congratulated us on eating there. Thanks, guys. Dinner was phenomenal, even though a stray dog was like running around at one point and the waiter’s English wasn’t the greatest and so he was for some reason not pleased that it was Mal’s birthday? Who knows.  We were excited, so that night we celebrated in style (literally… just wait) at the most famous nightclub in Prague, which had five floors AND an ice bar that for some reason people (read: we) pay extra money to be really, really cold in for fifteen minutes. (Plus Cait lost her complimentary gloves on the three-step walk to the door, so she was extra cold.) Once our frostbite was sufficiently contracted, and because no world tour is complete without dancing, we showed those Czech-ians how fashionable Americans are and tied our scarves and heavy coats to our day purses and quite literally danced the night away on the Oldies floor, where they played strictly American classics. Seriously, the Oldies floor was awesome and you probably had to be there to understand how it was the cultural highlight of the tour. On our last day in Prague, we visited the astronomical clock, which took us an embarrassingly long amount of time to find considering it's literally in the middle of the city center. We were somehow led to believe that the clock puts on some crazy kind of show every hour on the hour (and you’d think we would have learned our lesson at the Glock), so we actually ran to the clock to make it on time, coats flapping, umbrellas threatening to take flight, only to discover that the show is a little skeleton guy waving his arm up and down for an entire minute. Blown. Away. So that thing sucked. I also led us on a tour of the Jewish Quarter via my special map and it probably would have been awesome had I known what I was talking about, other than saying, “So… this is a synagogue.” Our takeaway from Prahaha was that the Oldies floor is hands down the place to be and that Prague is beautiful even in the rain and that Mal is no longer a teenager. (Sucker.)
Forgot our spray paint, had to sign the wall with a Sharpie.

Normal club attire. 
Berlin: Due to the unceasing rain, we made the fortunate decision to take an earlier train than planned out of Prague. Luckily, this particular train happened to be standing room only (if you are not vicious enough to elbow everybody’s foreheads in the mad rush for seats), which was doubly pleasant because at this point our backpacks smelled like they contained only rotting garbage in them and also weighed as much as we did (empty beer calories included). About two and a half hours into the trip, enough people had left the Harry Potter compartments, which we knew because they had to step over our exhausted bodies that were strewn all over the hallways, and we got to sit with a German military guy and a stereotypical (read: perfect) German woman (who later knit socks). Everybody took cat naps (even me, but my head was lolling and as soon as I happened to open my eyes I made eye contact with bro next to me and it was more than a little weird) and then Laura chose to jinx us by preemptively filling out her Eurail travel log (still tracking with me? no? oh well). Because I guess she doesn’t have a heart or something, she sabotaged our trip and while she had the great fortune of sleeping (girl sleeps everywhere… love you, LC), our train literally broke down in the middle of the woods. Nice German woman joked that we should just get a taxi from there except that it wasn’t a joke. Also they kept announcing things over the speakers and despite our attempted German lessons with our fellow passengers, we didn’t have a clue if they were talking about the faulty train or just spitting into the microphone. Anyway, Laura got lucky because we started moving after some thirty minutes so we didn’t have to beat her up or anything and there we were in Berlin. The next day, instead of relying on a real-live map for navigation, we did our first organized tour with Fat Tire Bike Tours. It turned out that Berlin was the perfect place to do so, considering the city’s rich history, since what the place lacks in aesthetic beauty, it makes up for in stories on stories on stories. Our tour guide was Australian and great at delivering history lessons. Other Cait forgot how to ride a bike and despite the forecast for rain, we took one for the team and wore our plastic bag ponchos literally all day, even after the sun came out. Not letting Laura jinx us on that one. The day was definitely an informational one, but in a good way, and not without a stop at a beer garden so we could drink some more lemonade and make friends with our other tour takers (Australians! Canadians! a guy named Ralph!). Post-real tour, our subsequent self-guided tour ended in us trying to get a tan on the lawn in front of the Reichstag and then a frustrating attempt to find dinner. We ultimately ended up at a little restaurant that didn’t have an English menu (gasp! the horror!) but our adorable waiter (Jan, pronounced Yahn) translated literally the whole menu for us in his adorable little accent and then made us order our food in German just so that he could laugh at us. The food was insanely good and wow, I really miss Jan. The next day was for once not cloudy so we didn’t have to layer on layer and Mal didn’t have to wear socks with her Toms again, so we went to Mauher Park which was very hipster-y and has a huge, long wall of graffiti. It was readily apparent that we were nowhere near cool enough to be in the presence of these groovy locals (obviously… I just said the word groovy), but they graciously let us ogle without cursing us out for being American, so that was a plus. Also we ate hot dogs and drank Coke. Our takeaway from Berlin is that a city doesn’t have to be beautiful to be worth visiting and that German sounds like you have a bunch of rocks in your mouth.
Better believe those ponchos didn't leave our body, rain or shine. (Mostly shine.)

Amsterdam: Alas, the last leg of the world tour. The ride to Amsterdam (our last Eurail ride! sob) was probably pretty eventful but I can’t honestly remember, except that an old man walked in on me in the train bathroom and I apologized to him. I definitely remember our adorable hostel which looked like an Anthropologie but also inexplicably had a teepee in the middle of the common area and our room’s windows were literally right next a canal. So Amsterdam-y! Our first and last full day in the city, we rose early to go to the Anne Frank House, which is truly one of the most well-done museums I’ve ever gone to. Anne, quite frankly, was a badass chick and I could quote something cliché about how she gives a face to the millions of Jews murdered during World War II except that it’s totally true. Plus, you think the Secret Annex was small but then you see it and you can’t believe two families lived there, in silence and in the dark, for two years. All of that learning and reflecting naturally made us hungry (also the fact that we skipped breakfast) so we took a Rick Steves suggestion (thanks, bro) and had massive, famous pancakes at Sara’s Pancake House. Mine had peanut butter on them and that’s probably all I need to say about them for you to understand. With full bellies, we decided we were ready to brave the Red Light District. I won’t go into any description, but it’s worth seeing just once if you happen to be stopping by Amsterdam within the next few days or something. Anyway, the city of Amsterdam is incredible. I believe it’s called the “Venice of the North”, though I have no idea if that’s true or if that’s just what some Spanish guy told me once. Plus all those little houses? Adorable. I’m pretty sure we could have just wandered and wandered all day, which we more or less did and only partly because we were a little lost (no thanks to yet another real map). Naturally the frolicsome four stopped at the I Amsterdam sign where we sat for like two hours because we love to make fun of fellow tourists and because a Mexican family was monopolizing the entire sign and it was too intimidating to try to take our own cutesy pictures there. Which letter should you pose with? Should you try to mimic the letter with your body? Should you try to spell something? So daunting. As if that people-watching weren’t enough, we were fortunate enough to witness a middle school dance at a bar that night. At least that’s what I think it was... lots of bopping, lots of ill-fitting dresses, and I think one girl had braces. On our last day in Amsterdam (meaning the last day of our epic backpacking adventure) we did some canal wandering and ate at one of those frozen yogurt places where you get to put on your own toppings and I’m not lying, I think I spent 13 euros. Worth it. Our takeaway from Amsterdam was that when Rick Steves recommends a pancake restaurant you need to go and oh my gosh, those canals.
....show-offs.

The End: A huge takeaway from the whole trip is that trains are the way to go because from Amsterdam we flew into Sevilla, where we loitered for a few hours until our 12 AM bus back home to Madrid, on which some guy smelled like he had bathed in our backpacks and the bus driver insisted on playing dance tunez for the entire six hours. From Madrid we flew into Philadelphia where Laura and I said goodbye to the Price sisters and then tried to fly into Chicago except literally nothing on the plane was working or something and I cried a lot and then we got into Chicago but couldn’t get off the plane and I had a flight to Minneapolis to catch at 11:30 PM and my body was so confused and also I was crying a lot. Did I mention I cried? Anyway, not the point. The point is that despite the too-heavy backpacks, the weariness of train rides (which were actually so fun), the tying of our coats to our purses in a night club, the walking in unsuitable walking shoes, the rain, and the sleeping in rooms with strangers who snore, I think (I hope) I speak for all of us when I say that our mini tour of Europe was undeniably the best experience of our little lives. I could write a twelve page essay on each of the places we visited and on the food we ate and on the people we met and on the lame jokes I told, but no one wants to read that (and if you’ve made it this far, hey thanks!) and also then I would start missing it all again too much. Thanks are owed, of course, to helpful train conductors, hostel workers, waiters, fellow tourists and all those people who took pity on four American girls who looked like a disaster waiting to happen. Of course, thanks are owed to maps. Those things are the greatest. And thanks to the three best travel companions (and friends!) I could literally ever ask for, for putting up with my need for an itinerary, my uncanny ability to get lost, my crabbiness when hungry, the smell of my sweaty running clothes in that tiny backpack… you get the idea. Even though seeing so many different cultures in such a short amount of time was absolutely incredible (to say the very least), it’s quite possible that the best part was just hanging out with these goons. Or the Oldie’s Floor.
Because I’m an English major I can take the liberty of quoting Ernest Hemingway here, I’ll tell you he once said, “Never travel with anyone you do not love,” and I wish I could say I took his advice.
Jokes, jokes, jokes. I love the (un)forgettable four like, too much. (And I miss you guys too!) Let’s do this again next year?




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