Germany

After another layoff of a couple weeks, I'm ready for the final push on this blog about my summer and then my semester abroad!

For our last big trip, we got to take a very long weekend (there was a holiday on Tuesday, so naturally, Spanish citizens take Monday off as well...so we went from Thursday night to Wednesday morning before class) to central Germany. Elise spent a summer in Germany after graduating high school and I loved it so much when our group went for Oktoberfest, so while other friends trekked to Morrocco, Prague, and Rome, we decided to get back to Germany! My uncle Raleigh and his wife Pam live not far from Nuremberg, so this provided us with an opportunity to have tour guides and hosts for a few days. Hard to beat!

After some drama with our first flight (I was put on the standby list and had to sweet talk my way onto the plane with the last seat on board), we landed late Thursday night in Frankfurt. We took the train into the main train station (Hauptbahnhof), got some questionable yet very tasty Chinese food from a stand in the station, then walked literally across the street to our hostel. The next morning, we caught a train to Bacharach. Don't worry, I had never heard of it either. It was a very small town right on the Rhine river. Our train ride went right along the Rhine and gave us gorgeous views of the valley created as the river dug through the surrounding hills. Elise arranged our hostel in Bacharach--and what a youth hostel it was! We stayed in a castle atop a hill that overlooked the town. After checking in and resting for a bit, we strolled around the quiet yet picturesque Christmas town. It was very German (half-timber houses and buildings) and very Christmas (lots of decorations and setting up for their Christmas market). We walked in shops, got a couple of pastries, and really just enjoyed the wintry cold before heading back up the hill at sunset to relax and read before dinner in the hostel.

On Saturday, we hiked down the hill to the train station, catching a beautiful sunrise over the Rhine, and took a great train (ICE, it is the German express, semi-high-speed train and it was very comfortable, smooth, and fast) to Nuremberg. After a few hours on the train, we got to Nuremberg and met up with Uncle Raleigh and Pam! They drove us to the hotel, then we got a good, German (warm and hearty) lunch right up the street and at the foot of the castle. Potato soup, Nurnberger sausages and Hells beer. Mmmm. From there, we toured the famous Christmas Market with thousands of other people, wonderful smells (candied nuts, sausages, gluhwein--a hot red wine cider-ish drink, and more). We walked around the city and rode in an old carriage for a tour of Nuremberg. The next morning, after breakfast in the hotel, we walked around, checked out some art and armor (German combination) at the German National Museum, then drove to Colmberg.

Uncle Raleigh and Pam visit Colmberg a lot and treated us to join them in a stunning hotel/castle for the night. It is one of the nicest/coziest places I've ever been and after an early dinner in the dining room, we drove to Rothenberg, one of the oldest surviving walled cities in Germany. Rothenberg had another fun Christmas market (picture rows of vendor stalls, Christmas lights, hundreds of people, and sausages, gluhwein mugs, and Christmas music). We even went on a tour with the Night Watchman where we learned a great deal about the city's history and traditions. A beer in the bar with my uncle later, it was time to get to bed.

One more morning in Rothenberg and a fantastic lunch at Raleigh and Pam's favorite restaurant (Elise, Uncle Raleigh, and I all ordered a pork with a mushroom sauce and a German-style macaroni and cheese, with goose ravioli soup), then it was time to tour the town's Torture Museum. The best exhibit was a device used that linked two fighting women so they had to go everywhere together until their issue was resolved! Uncle Raleigh and Pam dropped us off about an hour away in Wurzberg. We said goodbye and thanked them for their generosity in showing us a great time all weekend, then walked around, saw one more Christmas market, dinner, and had fun talking about Christmas traditions in the Sharpe and Cargill households. Obviously, these markets had really gotten us in the Christmas spirit!

On our last full day, we hiked up to the Marienberg fortress on a hill in Wurzberg, got bratwurst at the market for lunch, then saw Germany's answer to Versailles--the Residenz palace. After seeing several palaces this semester, this may have been my favorite. We had a very good tour guide (which, I've learned, always helps to enjoy a place), but this place was great. Probably the most memorable was the Imperial Banquet Room, where the ceiling was painting in a 3-D sort of way, with some of it being a normal painting and other parts (a foot, a corner of a robe) being little sculptures hanging from the ceiling. Very cool place. That afternoon, we caught a train back to Frankfurt, had one more doner kebab for dinner, then walked back to the hostel to get to sleep before a 4:30 am wake-up call for our flight back to Madrid.

What a great final trip in such a memorable semester. I'll try to post one or two more times on wrapping up Madrid and getting back home.

Venice and Milan

Well I'm officially back home and lying on the couch, but my work on this blog is not finished! I have a real difficulty with keeping a legitimate journal, so other than my little list of things I've seen, this blog has officially taken the place of the way I will remember the fall semester of 2009.

In the middle of November, Elise and I embarked on a weekend trip to Italy. Both of us have been fortunate to have taken recent trips with our families to Rome, Florence, and a couple of other major Italian cities, so we decided that Venice deserved our full attention. To make things even better, our good friend, Miss Meghan Tilley, was studying in Venice and offered to host us in the spare beds in her dorm. Very generous and very very appreciated! We flew from Madrid to Milan late on Thursday night after class. After a bus to our hostel near the main train station, we grabbed a snack and then headed to bed. On Friday, we woke up early to have one of the best European breakfasts I've ever had. The best part may have been the cost (free aka included in the hostel price), but it was full of pastries, meats, breads, juices, hot drinks...quite a treat compared to the usual clementine and toast that I have been eating in Spain. From there, we took a train to Venice. I have really fallen in love with train travel--I guess it never hurts to ride through Romeo and Juliet's Verona, with the Italian Alps in the distance for the entire 2.5 hour train ride.

We met up with Meghan at the Venice train station. What a city that is! I had my own mental pictures of what it would look like, but it truly is a collection of islands way out in the middle of a big lagoon. We took a vaporetto (water bus/metro) to Meghan's dorm at the Venice International University on San Servolo island, put our stuff down then headed back to walk around St. Mark's Square and get a brief tour of Venice before the sun set. From there, we walked around a less-touristy area (very difficult to find on one of the main islands) and ate dinner. We got some great gelato at Grom's and then ate it in a piazza called Santa Margarita (where we even encountered some other Dukies!). Saturday, we went to San Marco (St. Mark's) to tour St. Mark's Basilica. It's amazing to see the water/flood damage that has occurred over the years, but it's fascinating to learn about the history that Venice has with the Middle East and Asia (much like how learned about Spain's history with Muslims from North Africa). The Basilica was gorgeous inside with a lesson in art history on the ceilings and a magnificent altar of gold and hundreds of precious jewels. Next, we went into the Doge's Palace (the Doge was a regional ruler, but lived and ruled like a king). The palace is right next to St. Marks...we saw some beautiful, giant rooms full of classic art by masters like Titian. We went downstairs into the prison/dungeon, crossing the Bridge of Sighs (a prisoner's last look at Venice) along the way. A trip up the famous tower (Camponile), a walk, a quick lunch, and more walking and shopping later (Murano glass, silk, Venetian leather and stationery), it was time for one of the highlights of my time in Venice. We went to the Accademia to see da Vinci's drawing of the Vitruvian Man (couldn't take pictures, but it's the drawing of a nude man inside of a square and a circle). It's smaller than a sheet of notebook paper, but it's one of the most famous drawings in history, so I loved seeing it.

Meghan had a few other friends coming in that evening, so we took a boat ride around the Grand Canal and under the Rialto bridge before a good Italian pasta dinner. Meghan, to our surprise, had bought chocolate, marshmallows, and some sort of cookie, so we took a candle outside and we had a little smore party to remind us all of home. It was tame, but a really fun night and I had to keep reminding myself that I was actually in Venice, Italy! The next morning, we took a train back to Milan where we saw the gargantuan Duomo, tried to see da Vinci's The Last Supper (but it was sold out until December!), and finally got to our hostel, found a good pizza place (as is tradition on my trips with Elise on the last night), then flew on back to Madrid the next morning!

Very very fun trip. Meghan was so kind to host us and show us around. It wasn't quite as exciting as Paris, but Venice was a city that I definitely wanted to see and it was a fun and memorable trip!

More Paris Pictures (post is below this one)

Paris

After another few days of class, our small group of Duke friends studying in Madrid (me, Elise, Kesh, Robert, and Liz) left on Thursday night for our flight to Paris! I have been fortunate enough to have visited Paris in 2000 with my family. For whatever reason, I had already gained an obsession with the city even at age 11 and had been hyping it up to my friends for the last several months. A few days before departure, I had gotten a bit nervous that as I had seen more European cities since my initial trip, Paris may not live up to my lofty expectations. Whew buddy, was I wrong!

I love Paris. I used to. I thought I would. And I still do.

Arriving at Charles de Gaulle late Thursday night, we found some other NYU students and even some Dukies and we all took the train together to the city. We got off at St. Michel - St. Germain (really close to Notre Dame) and walked to our hostel. The reception was closed, but our key was supposed to be at a nearby hotel, so we walked there (got my first of 7 crepes on the way), only to find that our key did not let us into our room. We tried all sorts of ways of inserting it, but we realized (at about 1:30 am) that we would not be able to get in. The owner did not answer the "emergency phone", so we started hiking around, eventually using a bartender's reference for a nearby cheap hostel for the night. Thank goodness it let us in, but the next morning we returned to the original hostel to find that that door had a problem, but we negotiated a much-discounted price for our stay. It was inconvenient, but worked out very well.

After a nice breakfast (hot chocolate, bread, nutella, cheese) at the hostel, we went to explore. We saw Notre Dame cathedral (started over 900 years ago!), the Georges Pompidou Centre (crazy, but a must see), and Shakespeare and Company (I fell in love with this English bookstore...comfy chairs, cozy store, lots of books). It was overcast, windy, and very cold, so we were glad to also find a great place for lunch. We ate at Le Rollin and I had roasted duck breast and wine. We got back to the fountain at St Michel just in time for our latest free tour (from Sandeman's...like in Munich). It was a very awkward group (some weird questions and just strange group dynamics), but we walked along the Seine River, saw Pont Neuf, the outside of the Louvre, and ended at Place de la Concorde (at the end of the Champs-Elysses). From there, we lucked out on finding that the Louvre was free for the last few hours of the day, so we hustled in, scrounged up a game plan and saw all the famous ones with time to wander a bit. We learned that if you took 30 seconds to look at each work in the Louvre (giant!), you would be there for 64 (or so) days straight! I wish I could be in Paris for that long. After that, we walked to the Eiffel Tower (very cold night), got a crepe there, hung out for a bit, then headed back for bedtime.

Saturday started with another quality breakfast in the hotel (the owner started spreading some rumors about us apparently!...that we were difficult on him...ha!). We took the train to Versailles where we lucked into another free admission (as students). We had a quality Versailles experience, walking through the vast gardens and seeing the entire palace. It is a phenomenal place. There is so much gold that it almost numbs you to the sight of it after a little while! Back in Paris, I finally had one of my life dreams come true (this one since we only got halfway up the Eiffel Tower with my family in 2000)...I got to the top of the Eiffel Tower! My feet and hands were numb up there, but the view at at Paris sunset was well worth it. From there, we headed to dinner (Elise found restaurants on a website I discovered called spottedbylocals.com...magical site), walking through the Trocadero, past the Arc de Triomphe, and down the Champs-Elysses, then through the Place Vendome (full of the Ritz Carlton, Cartier, and several designer shops and 5-star hotels). We ate at Le Tambour, a lively, cozy, warm (in temperature and in charm) restaurant right in the heart of the city. The waiting staff was a cheery group of large, older men and they helped me decide on ordering a fantastic steak covered in a cheese sauce, served with veggies and potatoes and the onion soup that I split with Elise. That with endless bread, water, and a bottle of wine for the table...in all honesty, one of the best meals I have ever had! Still, it must not have been quite enough because right before we got back to the hostel, I got another nutella crepe before bed! When in Paris...

Sunday had a tour of the inside of Notre Dame and St. Chappelle (some of the largest, most remarkable stained glass windows in the world). Then, we made it up to Montmartre (northern Paris, yes, where the Moulin Rouge is) and met up with a Dukie (who was also in New Orleans with me), Andrew Walker. He showed us around his district, including a wall that says "I love you" in every language I've ever/never heard of, Sacre-Coeur (where we also saw a guy doing soccer tricks while CLIMBING UP A LIGHTPOLE!). We saw one of Picasso's studios, places where Renoir sat or lived...very fun and Andrew was a great tour guide. We made it just in time to have a couple of hours at the Musee d'Orsay to walk around and see works by van Gogh and several other famous Impressionist painters. We had a fun dinner at a Japanese restaurant that night and a lively walk back to the hostel, passing through the Bastille area and Place des Vosges. One more crepe and it was time for bed again!

Monday, we saw Napoleon's tomb at Hotel des Invalides, another trip to Shakespeare, an attempt to register for spring classes at an internet cafe, then a fun lunch. Elise and I met up with one of her sister's good friends (Abby) who is studying law in Paris for the semester. We had a fun lunch (got another steak and some good wine!) at Le Vin qui Dances (The Wine that Dances) as the other guys had to begin their trip to the airport. Elise and I had a great opportunity to walk around the Latin Quarter of Paris (called that because of the universities that taught Latin back in the day), sit by the Seine, and yes, eat another nutella crepe (this was the best one). A couple of hours fighting through traffic in our airport shuttle (there was a train strike that day) and we made it to Charles de Gaulle. An hour flight delay, a flight, and a few metro rides later, I was back in my apartment in Madrid.

What a weekend. I absolutely love Paris and can't wait to get back someday (hopefully soon).

Thanks so much for reading this whole thing! Please leave me a comment to let me know what you think about this post or the blog in general!

Santiago de Compostela

I'll finish up some Madrid stuff later...probably closer to the end of the semester or when I get home (in just over two weeks!). I still need to catch up about a couple of the trips I still haven't talked about...the first was on Halloween weekend to Santiago de Compostela!

Santiago de Compostela is in the Galicia region of Spain. It is near the northwest coast...I was really surprised, after seeing the dry, brown land that surrounds Madrid and extends into southern Spain, to see such green and densely forested land that was still in the same country! It is supposed to look like Ireland and I guess that's appropriate because Galicia is one of the places where the Gaelic (Galician=Gaelic) people came from. I know that my grandmother's maiden name is Spain and I believe that we've figured out that that is Irish and used to be Spanish (de Spain...from Spain). So Elise and I took a weekend trip to the land of our ancient ancient ancestors!

Santiago is also famous because it is the end of the Camino de Santiago (journey/walk of St. James). He walked from somewhere in France all the way to the northwest coast of Spain. Today, hundreds of pilgrims do the Camino every year...we saw several throughout town with their giant backpacks, thick beards, walking sticks, and shells on their backpacks to signify the number of times they've finished the Camino. We took the hour flight from Madrid on a Friday morning and got to our hostel early that afternoon. I had been feeling pretty sick and weak for a couple of days, so we both napped and then started to walk around the city (not a big one!) to find the old town and a place to eat. I didn't have much of an appetite (so if you know me, you know that I was feeling VERY sick), but we stopped at a place where I got tea and a little pastry to get some energy. There was a beautiful garden in the old town, as well as winding streets and great little shops. We even got to listen to two great tenors singing in the street...they were fantastic! The Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela is the main reason people go...it is giant! Gorgeous cathedral and one of the most interesting bits of info is that they have a giant, ancient air freshener (incense, I'm sure) that hangs over the pews because of the stench that the pilgrims gave off after their trek. That night, Elise and I went to dinner and got the local specialties -- pulpo de gallega (octopus tentacles!), shrimp, and pimientos de padron (fried little green peppers), and some great Galician wine. It was a great dinner (I wish I could have eaten more, but my stomach was still struggling) and we were certainly entertained by the lobster tank that we sat next to!

The next morning, we headed to the bus station to catch a bus for a few hours to Fisterre or Finisterre. It was known by the Romans as the end of the world (Fini=end, terra=earth) because it's about as far West in Europe as you can go (I think one city in Portugal may actually be a bit further, but you get the picture). We were on the bus with a bunch of stinky pilgrims (never thought I'd say that), but they were entertaining and we ended up finding one of the cloudiest, foggiest days...but it made the coastline look all the more like it truly was the end of the world. It was a pretty lousy day (rainy and chilly), but we had a good time walking around the town, getting a bite to eat (some of the biggest and best shrimp I've ever had) and enjoying the scenery and the fishing village together. That night (Halloween), we forgot our costumes (unless we were trying to look like American students studying abroad and taking a weekend trip, in that case, we nailed it) and were exhausted from the week, so we called it an early night, found a Domino's pizza for a taste of home and awaited our early morning flight the next day.

Flew back to Madrid to great weather, but it was really fantastic to get to Santiago, see some very interesting sights and enjoy the green landscape that reminded us both a lot of North Carolina!

More Madrid

I also finally got to go to El Escorial. Though Madrid has a royal palace, El Escorial is better known as the grand home of Spanish royals during the Renaissance period. It is about an hour's train/bus ride from Madrid and is a great day trip. I tried to go very early in the semester, but it was closed (I found that out at the front door) and the second time it was closed again (I found that out before I left Madrid that morning).

Robert, Kesh, and I went with a group of students from Vanderbilt to El Escorial while Elise was traveling with her sister. It's always fun to see a palace or castle (this place is a combination of the two...old Spanish architecture but gorgeous gardens and grand rooms), but the best part was that El Escorial is like an art museum, displaying just a fraction of the giant collection of the Spanish royals...complete with works by Titian, El Greco, Velazquez, and other immortals. Really cool to see.

After lunch, we took another bus to El Valle de los Caidos (the valley of the fallen). This place was important and interesting for two reasons -- it is a giant memorial/monument to the soldiers who died in the Spanish Civil War (early 20th century) and it is also the tomb of Francisco Franco. Franco was a fascist dictator who took power of Spain in the 1930s and held it until the 1970s. Though he kept Spain technically out of World War II, Franco also was a buddy of Hitler and let Germany bomb Spanish towns here and there. Though his policies were responsible for boosting the Spanish economy in the 1950s, he also really set Spain back technologically and socially...some of those affects are still seen today...it is only in the last 20 years that Spain is really catching up with the rest of the world. El Valle was really cool...great views in the hills of Spain...a giant cross on top of one hill with a tunnel-like church built into the hill. It is a very creepy church...it is very long and cold and looks like a missile silo. Still, it was interesting with its tapestries of the Apocalypse and the tomb of Franco. Very interesting and worthwhile day.

A bit more to come on Madrid in the next post...

MADRID

Well. Almost a month with no posts. Great job, Graham.

In that month (the month of no posts), I have gotten to travel to plenty of places like Santiago de Compostela, Paris, Venice and Milan, and Toledo, so that should keep me busy on this blog through the rest of the semester. First though, I'm going to catch you (that's a presumptuous 'you'...leave a comment to let me know you're still reading!) up on life here in Madrid.

I must begin by talking about the weather. It is absolutely phenomenal. It has gotten to the point where I rarely need to check online to see if it will be sunny. Every two weeks, we have one or two cloudy days and the rare rainy day. Though it has cooled off since early September, it is still in the 60s, sunny and clear just about every day. This past week (November, mind you), I wore shorts and sandals and walked to school all week. It is a magical, magical place.

In late October, I got the opportunity to go with Elise and Robert to see a Real Madrid futbol (soccer) game. Real means royal, so the team has some history with the Spanish royal family honoring the soccer club as the "royal" team of Madrid. Real Madrid is a team comparable to the New York Yankees -- huge global fanbase, the most championships in history, purchases the best and most famous players (Cristiano Ronaldo), and usually wins. We got to see Real play against AC Milan, one of its rivals. The stadium, Estadio Santiago Bernabeu, is about a 2 minute walk from our NYU campus, so we are very familiar with it. We paid some high prices for nosebleed seats (the stadium holds about 80,000, I believe), but it was one of our best experiences in Madrid. We arrived to the stadium about 45 minutes before the game started, ran across the street with hundreds of other people to a grocery store so we could make sandwiches (bocadillos) to bring in. Finding our seats at the 2nd row from the top of the stadium, we had a great view of the field (maybe not the players' jerseys) and the crowd...the home crowd looked a great deal like the Cameron Crazies if the Crazies were all 45 year-old Spanish men. The AC Milan fans were shoved in a corner at the top of the stadium surrounded by netting to keep them from throwing things onto the field! It was a very tense match from the beginning, with plenty of scoring, drama, faking injuries (come on, soccer), singing and shouting, but Real Madrid was upset by a score of 3-2. What a great time!

I'll continue this Madrid update in my next post...