Amanda's Adventures Abroad Part 3

And I'm back!  Though not as soon as last time, sorry about that.

On to Copenhagen!

Copenhagen

From Berlin we took a plane to Denmark, which was probably one of the best airplane experiences I've had.  On this flight, since it was a small plane, we actually got to walk out onto the tarmac and climb these stairs that were pushed up next to the plane.  Like they do in old movies.  I thought it was pretty cool.  We also got some delicious pretzel bread during the flight and chocolate afterwards.  The flight itself was only about a half-hour, though.

From the airport we took a train to our hotel.  It certainly wasn't the fanciest hotel we stayed at, but I was actually pretty excited about that.  I'm the kind of person who thinks it would be fun to stay in crowded hostels . . . or in the back of a car.  We had four people to each room with two bunkbeds that were set into the wall kind of like you expect to see in a boat.  It was awesome and crowded, but it was an adventure.

Our first day there we went to the National Museet.  Best.  Museum.  Ever.  Not only was the subject matter fantastic (Vikings, one of my favorite groups of people from history) but the museum itself was done very well.  It didn't take itself too seriously.  The little information cards they have next to artefacts actually gave you fascinating information and were incredibly well-written.  I could've spent days in there.  It kindled my imagination, which I think is why any kid falls in love with history in the first place (or art for that matter).  It's fascinating to think about how people lived and what they did every day and whether you might've been friends with them had you lived back then.  That's why I'm getting my minor in Anthropology/Archaeology instead of History.  History focuses on those giant, world-changing events while archaeology focuses on individuals.  And not just important figures, but every individual they can dig up.  There's still a degree of impersonal-ness in the field, but that's why I'm minoring in it and majoring in art.  I want to fuse the two somehow, but I haven't figured that out yet.

Any way, if you ever get the chance to be in Copenhagen, you really ought to go to the National Museet.

Their gift store was also pretty amazing.  I bought a book on reading runes.  It's so cool!

Later that evening we attempted to find that famous Danish landmark, The Little Mermaid Statue.  We walked for a really long time and were very close to giving up when finally, finally we spotted it from atop a hill in a little park by the coast.  It was somewhat anti-climatic, but I have no regrets.
We got to see a lot of the city that way.  Copenhagen is one of the most beautiful cities I've seen.  My mom described it very accurately when she told me she remembered it being "quaint".  It's like this perfect little European town forgotten by time.  Unfortunately that probably somewhat accounts for the steep prices of everything.  I would've run out of money much more quickly if we'd spent the majority of our time there instead of Berlin.

The next day we went to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. My phone died that day so I didn't get to take any pictures, but I did get to see some great art.  Namely, I got to see some Giacometti sculptures!  Yay!  I like those guys.

I don't remember much else from that day, except that we went to the most fairy-tale-esque chapel for church.  (Gosh I love Danish architecture).  Oh and we did go see the original Christus statue.  It seems like almost everything in that city is difficult to find, though.  We again walked for much longer than we would've liked trying to find that church.

We started our last day in Copenhagen (and our last day of the program) by going to Den Bla Planet, an aquarium.  It was pretty great.  They had sharks and schmetterlings (butterflies) and puffins.  Before we left I decided to buy a loaf of bread (because they apparently sell bread in their aquariums in Denmark).  In other countries I think I had gotten fairly good at figuring out what different foods were based on their labels, but Danish was new to me, so I had absolutely no idea what I was ordering except that it looked like bread with possibly slices of apple in it.  Turns out they weren't apples, they were potatoes.  It was delicious, though!  I've been wanting to make some ever since I got home.

Anyways, we went back to the hotel after that and lounged around and started packing up before heading back out for our last night together.  And what a night it was.  Included in our 72-hour Copenhagen cards was admittance to Tivoli Gardens.  Essentially, it's Denmark's version of Disneyland.  It's much smaller, of course, but still pretty awesome.  I got to ride my first Ferris Wheel and we went on some awesome rollercoasters.  Fun fact about me: I love rollercoasters!  I used to be terrified of them for the longest time, but then my friends dragged me on to Wicked at Lagoon my senior year of high school and I've been hooked ever since.

The end of the night was bittersweet.  It was sad knowing our program was over and that I wouldn't get to hang out with all these awesome people all the time anymore, but it also was nice to be going home . . .

Well, not just yet.

The program may have ended that night, but my travels weren't finished just yet.

Back to Brussels!


Awesomely enough, my brother and his family had just moved to Brussels a few weeks before the end of my trip and they let me come stay with them before I finally headed home.

Unfortunately my brother was back in the states for the first part of my visit, but I had loads of fun with my nieces and nephew and sister-in-law anyways.  We went to castles and French lessons and comic museums.  It was so great to change pace and be able to travel around without the constraints of being a student, anymore.  I absolutely loved hanging out with my niblings - the collective term for nieces and nephews.

I loved talking to them about how I was going to school to be an artist.  Every day it seemed they would beg me to do some sort of art project with them.  They really rekindled my desire to perhaps one day teach art.

My nephew made this collage comic!

"Do you like my hat?  Do you like my party hat?"

My brother finally got back at the end of the week and the next day we decided to go out to the Medieval Fishing Village of Walraversijde.

It was another fantastic museum.  If there's one thing I developed during my travels abroad, it was a strong opinion of how I think museums ought to be run.

Walraversijde is a medieval fishing village out in West Flanders that also has some cool World War II history around it and something to do with King Frederich or someone like that.  There's like three museums all in one there.

Anyways, with the fishing village they start by showing you a short introduction video that just had some CG scenes of the village at different years (it got destroyed a lot).  Then you took your audio-guide outside on this path down to three reconstructed houses.  I was actually impressed with the audio-guides.  I normally skipped things like that, but I was glad I didn't on this one.  Each house belonged to a different class of person and the audio-guides were from the perspectives of the kind of people who would've lived in each house.

However, the best part of it all was the lack of the typical kind of security you usually find at places like this.  A few props were nailed or screwed to the table to keep you from stealing them, but there was absolutely no guardrails or security guards to keep you from touching whatever you wanted.  We sat in the beds, we opened the windows, we climbed all the ladders.  It was awesome.  I think allowing someone to touch a piece of history, physically touch it, is one of the best ways to get them excited about it.  Most of the bricks used in the three buildings were actual bricks they had excavated from the site.  How cool is that?!

The three houses

Archaeologist's Building

For the next week we mainly just hung around my brother's apartment - going to parks, Carrefour, bookstores.  Since it was also my nephews birthday that week, though, we made plans to take a road trip to Paris that weekend.  (I still have a hard time believing I took a road trip to Paris).  Before leaving Friday morning, however, there was one last thing to do in Brussels - The Flower Carpet.  Every two years the city fills the Grand Place with cut flowers arranged into a carpet pattern for a weekend.  It's also the only weekend that tourists are allowed in the giant palace-looking building that's there.  

It was pretty awesome and I'm so glad we had time to go see it.

But then we had to be off, Paris was waiting.

Originally our plan was to stop at this castle on our way to Paris, but unfortunately the GPS had a rather difficult time of finding it and we ended up at some sort of fort thing with no clue as to where this castle was and no internet to look it up.  So instead we soldiered on to Paris and got there earlier than we would've, having enough time to venture out into the city and find some delicious dinner.  

I will admit, Paris has some spectacular food.  Restaurants are a little confusing in Europe at first, but boy is the food almost always guaranteed to be delicious.  And once you get used to how things are done, it's kind of nice not to have waiters constantly disturbing your meal to see how your food tastes or if you're ready for the check.  After dinner I think we walked past Notre Dame, but it was getting late by this point so we headed back to the hotel.  

The next day the real adventures began.  Our first stop was the Eiffel Tower as requested by the birthday boy.  I was really glad seeing as I didn't have time (much to the astoundment of my family) to go see it the first time I was there.  (How can you go to Paris and not see the Eiffel Tower?!)  

Well, now I've seen it.  Although we didn't get to go up because the line was longer than that of Space Mountain's during Spring Break when the fast passes aren't working.

Later that day we returned to the Louvre, which I was most excited about.  It was a little difficult getting there because a lot of the Subway lines were down so much walking was involved.  The major attractions of Paris aren't really too far apart from each other, but when you're traveling with three children anything can seem forever away.

But we made it and I was free to wander the art-saturated halls.  Since we only had a few hours I probably should've explored a part of the museum I hadn't been in before, but I was on a quest.  I had to know if the restorations on the Winged Victory had been completed.  And it took me a little longer to find it than it had before.  But, lo and behold, there she was!  In all her headless, armless beauty.

 I spent most of my time just sitting in front of it making drawings and sketching.  But I did get to other parts of the museum before my time was up.  For example I got to see these Archimboldo paintings.  I didn't even know they were in the Louvre.  And the Venus de Milo (again, didn't even know it was there, I just kind of turned a corner and was like "hey, I know that statue").  And yes, I did see the Mona Lisa this time.  I was resistant, but decided I should see what the fuss was about it, and to be honest, I think it's absolutely ridiculous.  I see no special qualities to the Mona Lisa.  There were far better Da Vinci just outside in the hall and no one was even paying attention to them.  It kind of made me mad, but I'll spare you all the rant.

By the end of our Louvre trip, we had three exhausted children and most likely three exhausted adults, so that marked the end of that day.  We spent the rest of the evening in our hotel rooms.  My brother, sister-in-law, and youngest niece in their room and me, my nephew, and other niece, in the other room.  Boy are those children crazy.  We were up well-past midnight that night watching strange French operas and jumping on beds.

On Sunday it was time to leave, but we decided to venture out into the city one more time to get some breakfast and see Notre Dame.  We ate at a little cafe just on the other side of the Seine from Notre Dame.  It seemed almost surreal being there.

Now I won't bore you with how magnificent and breathtaking Notre Dame is because I believe I already talked about it in my first edition of adventures, so I'll just continue on with the rest of our day.

Originally our plan was to head straight home, but we decided to give finding that castle one more shot while we still had some access to internet.  At first, it seemed like the GPS was taking us to the exact same empty fort-place we had ended up at before, but right before getting to it, we turned a different way (mind you, there are trees and hills all over that would keep something even like a castle fairly well-hidden from sight).  After driving through gorgeous country roads, the trees finally gave way to the most adorable little European village I've ever seen.  My experience in Europe up to that point had been limited to big cities and drives along the major freeways.  But this was how I'd imagined Europe.  It was like a tiny valley lost in time.  Narrow cobble-stone streets ran higgledy-piggledy around the shops and houses all smooshed together.  The Pierrefonds Castle stood above everything on a hill in the center of this remarkable place.

View behind the castle - everything is so green!

Some sweet-looking ruins

 Something I forgot to mention is that the reason we wanted to go to the Pierrefonds castle (other than the simple fact that it was a castle that conveniently lay between Brussels and Paris) was that it was the castle used in the BBC show Merlin.  Augh!  It was so cool!

 It was probably one of the best highlights of my trip.  My inner child was over the moon and I couldn't get enough.  Unfortunately the castle itself had closed just as we got there so all we could do was walk around the grounds, but it wasn't too bad, because in the town of Pierrefonds itself a medieval fair was being held . . .

 This is my absolutely adorable niece doing some dressing up.  Personally I would've gone with the cape, but the flower crown really suits her.

What a way to end my European adventures.  It was so cool to be in that place at a medieval fair, participating in activities and buying goods that perhaps weren't so far off from the types of things people did and bought when this place was first built.  I'm a sucker for anything medieval, so going to a fair in a real medieval town outside of a real medieval castle was mind-blowingly crazy.  And the best part was that I got to be there with these awesome kids.  My time in Europe was quickly coming to a close and I probably didn't quite realize yet just how much I was going to miss these guys.  With my classes having ended and my life not quite back to normal, these kids had become my only family, my best friends, and the world to me for two weeks.

Needless to say, I wasn't really prepared to come home just yet.

But whether I was prepared or not, that next Tuesday morning I had a plane to catch at the Brussels airport.  My two months of travel were finally starting to wear on me and I looked forward to my series of flights home with exhaustion, excitement, and a little apprehension.  For the first time in my two months of being abroad I was going to be traveling entirely alone (not counting that one time I got lost in Berlin).  It wouldn't have been nearly as frightening if I were just flying straight to the States, but I'm not nearly that wealthy.  No, my return flight plan was very similar to my outbound one.  First I was flying from Brussels to Iceland, then from there to New York, and then finally home.  And, like my original flight plan, I had some rather long layovers.  

Iceland

While nervous about the next two-three days of flying on my own, I was also a very different person than the one who'd been dropped off by her family at the SLC airport just a few months prior.  I was ready to figure things out and start seeing the world for myself.  My layover in Iceland was again going to be very lengthy and overnight.  I was determined not to sleep in that airport one more time and booked myself a hostel a few days before leaving.

Despite my determination to be a brave world traveler, I arrived in Keflavik a little fidgety with a slip of paper with the adress of my hostel written on it crumpled in my sweaty hands.  I'd never ridden in a taxi by myself before and I was afraid the driver might look like a serial killer and not be able to speak English.  However, my paranoia was unfounded and my taxi driver, a nice old lady who spoke very good English, cheerily drove me to my lodgings.  I was also relieved, by the end of the drive to know that I had indeed pulled enough krone out of the ATM to pay for the ride and would undoubtedly have enough to get back the next morning.  I felt very accomplished after this and excitedly checked in to my hostel.  The receptionist was extremely friendly and, after hearing I was only spending one night in town, quickly informed me of the public bus system (absolutely free of charge) and how to get into town and back.  

I was more than excited by this time - I love public transit, especially when it's free - and I wanted more than anything to go exploring.  I surveyed my accommodations first, but was out the door again very quickly.

It was early afternoon and, as expected, Iceland is pretty cold.  It never really rained while I was out and about, but Keflavik is right next to the ocean and I think the air is probably constantly filled with mist.  My first goal once I got to town was to find something to keep me a little warmer.   

I bought this hat from a little grocery store at the end of the bus line.  Then I wandered for a while, trying to find this Viking museum I'd read about.  Unfortunately it was pretty late in the afternoon and I soon realized that the museum would be closed by the time I finally found it.  I didn't mind that much though.  I was walking around Iceland, for heaven's sake!  For the first time in two months I was completely by myself and on my own.  I had the ocean on one side of me and adorable Icelandic children playing in their driveways on the other.  I was pretty content with the world.  

After walking back to the grocery store I got KFC for dinner (I know, very exotic) and waited at the bus stop for quite about an hour to get back to the hostel.  

Side note about the hostel I stayed at.  It's called Start Hostel and while it's not directly inside Keflavik itself, I would highly recommend it to anyone traveling to Iceland.  It was clean and the beds were incredibly comfy.  They also divide the rooms into boys dorms and girls dorms, so that made me a little less terrified of staying in a hostel for the first time.  I also had very nice roommates from Germany.  And it was cheap.  Probably the best first hostel experience I could've asked for.

Anyway, I didn't sleep a whole lot that night, partially because I was worried I wouldn't wake up in the morning to catch my taxi back to the airport, partially because the sun doesn't go down until after midnight, and partially because I was more happy and excited about life than I had been in a very long while.  

The morning did come and I woke up well-before my alarm.  I tried to pack as quietly as possible without waking my roommates and went to wait in the lobby, where I proceeded to collect as many travel pamphlets as possible.  The taxi soon showed up and I was to begin the final stretch of my travels home.  When I got to the airport there was literally no one line and so had a fairly lax and calm security experience (always the worst part of traveling).  I then had a few hours to wander around and spend my last few hundred krona.  I bought a pin, some chocolate, a Tintin book, a wool tie for my brother and some lunch.  

While the rest of my day was (literally) the longest day of my life, it wasn't all that interesting, so I'll be brief.  My flight to JFK was long and a little painful.  Mostly because my backpack didn't fit under my seat, so I had to put it in the overhead bins where I couldn't get to it as easily and so didn't have anything to do and also because I had some very interesting neighbors.  One of which periodically doused himself in the foulest-smelling lotion I've ever had the misfortune to smell and the the other would sporadically go into a panic-attack where I was convinced he was either going to accidentally punch me in the face or have a heart attack and die.  Needless to say, that was not one of the better flying experiences I've had.  Oh, and I also had to fill out a customs form for the first time and I was mildly terrified that I might've brought back something illegal and would have all my belongings confiscated and arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist.  (I sometimes worry a little too much).  But, no questions were asked, I was not put in airport prison, and I finally found myself back on American soil.  I arrived to JFK airport early Wednesday morning and could finally call my parents without having to be connected to the internet.  And then I waited.  My layover in New York was about 14 hours, I believe and I didn't have a whole lot to do.  I knew JFK was a much busier airport than KEF, so I didn't dare go outside into the city and then try to come back in time later, so I just got myself some food, found my gate and sat on the floor.  It was excruciating and I was exhausted, but eventually evening came and I found myself on my last flight to Salt Lake City on an airplane with slightly larger storage capabilities and some very agreeable neighbors.

And then, I was home.  Just like that.  It was weird, being in such a familiar place knowing I had been in Europe and Iceland and New York just in the past few days.  It took some adjusting and to be honest, I think, even now, I'm still trying to adjust, but life soon returned to normal . . . ish.  Except I now find myself with cravings for waffles and German pizzas and an almost unbearable wanderlust.  I got a taste of the world and I discovered that it was beyond delicious.  I can't wait to see what my future has in store.

Thus concludes Amanda's Adventures Abroad.  Sorry that took forever and this is probably way longer than anyone would like to read, but I feel rather accomplished finally getting this down in words.  I couldn't tell all of my experiences of course, but most of you are probably glad for that.

It really was, though, one of the best experiences of my life.  Travel does amazing things to your perspective and soul.  I highly, highly, highly recommend trying it out sometime.  (And take me with you, if you do!)