The Woodmere Gang Takes Europe

Photos!

2010-04-26T16:09:00.003-04:00

All-righty y'all, as promised we have uploaded all of our photos and videos to an external website. It's called Snapfish, and to view them you have to create an account (don't worry - it's free!). ALL of our photos and videos are up there. They are organized and divided up by cities we visited. Rachael spent her entire first weekend home loadin' em all up for your viewing pleasure so enjoy! You can view them all HERE.

We also added photos to all of the posts here on the blog that haven't had photos (so that's basically everything since Venice). So scroll on down and enjoy those as well.

Thanks again for following!

What we done did!

2010-04-24T12:33:00.006-04:00

Below is our final map as well as an accurate itinerary of what we did when:

Also, we want to give Nikki Blue a special shout out for being our 5,000th visitor! Woo hoo!

But wait! There's more!

2010-04-21T19:15:00.004-04:00

Although we've just posted our last blog while traveling, there's still more for us to add! Once back home and in the land of consistent Wi-fi, we promise that we really will add more pictures to the posts already within this blog, add all of our pictures to an online account and will share the link with you all on here. We also plan on writing up reviews of the different hostels we have stayed in, reviews of the tours we have taken while on our adventures, packings tips, traveling tips and more so that if you yourself ever want to embark on an awesome adventure like ours, we hope our experiences can help you prepare.

So keep checkin' back!

Peace ninjas!

XOXO K&R

Leaving on a jet plane

2010-04-21T19:13:00.004-04:00

We slept in this morning until about 11am / when the cleaning lady came in yelling at some roommates, so we took that as a cue to get out and get going. We left our hostel and went in search of some lunch and sat down at a cool little restaurant up the street called Cervecería 100 Montaditos. It was kind of a tapas restaurant but not really. We ordered four little sandwiches, a Cesar salad and a plate of fries that was served on a plate similar to a painter’s palette that had 4 different sauces in little divots around the edge. While we were eating lunch, we got a text from Natalie and Blair, our Aussie buddies, that they were heading toward town and wanted to meet up to do some sightseeing.

We finished our lunch then checked on the prices for a hop on/hop off bus tour and saw that it was pretty reasonable. We shot them a quick text and did some window shopping around Puerta del Sol when we got a text from them that they were across the street from us. We headed over and did Rachael’s signature “tap on the opposite shoulder” move to surprise them but since they’re awesome Aussies they already knew this trick and caught us. Curses!

We headed off together to window shop and find some iced coffee for Blair. We ended up stumbling into this really cool shop that had lots of fun and eccentric decorative tchotchkies. After some shoppin’ there we headed to a Starbucks near our hostel for some iced coffee and frappucinos. Yum! While there, Natalie got a call from their other Aussie friends, Ramon and Katherine who had slept in (they had traveled all the way from Australia the day before - 20 hours traveling!). We wanted to wait for them to get in town before we all got the hop on/hop off bus tickets together, so we went to kill some time at El Corte Inglés (an amazing department store in Spain) to check out some shoes that Natalie had been eyeing the day before. We talked her into getting them. We’re good at helping others spend their money. We all eventually split up for a bit to do some of our own shopping. Rachael got lost and was about to start playing an epic game of Marco Polo in the store when she got a text saying that the whole Aussie gang (and wannabe Aussie, Katie) were outside. That would’ve been a long and embarrassing game of Marco Polo for Rachael! We all finally got together and headed off to buy our tickets for the hop on/hop off bus.

We hopped aboard, like you do on buses, and went to sit in the back on the top, because we’re cool like that. We popped in our headphones and jammed to the history of Madrid, with the occasional Spanish opera. It was awesome. We wanted to be sure that we got to hear everything and still get to the Reina Sofia Museum around 6pm because we had heard that it’s free to get in on Wednesdays. We were ridin’ and jammin’ and got to the Palacio Real when our bus broke down! Wah-wah. We decided this was a good opportunity to go check out the Palace. We hopped off, like you do off of buses, and headed toward the Palace to find that it was closed.

At least it looked pretty through the gate, so we took some pics anyway. We then headed back toward our un-Tigger bus (no hopping, get it?) and waited for another bus to come along. One came by so we hopped on, grabbed some seats and got back to rockin’ out to the history of Madrid.

We stayed on until we got to the Prado Museum and hopped off and began to make our way to the Reina Sofia Museum. We also wanted to check out the botanical gardens near by, but we decided to head to the museum first and take advantage of their “free admission” deal, hang there for a bit then go to the botanical gardens. We got to Reina Sofia and discovered that the free admission deal didn’t begin until 7pm - it was 6:15pm. Well shoot! We were already there so Rachael and the Aussie Gang shelled out the 6 Euros to head inside while Katie, who visited the museum when she studied abroad 4 years ago, opted to go visit the botanical gardens that she hadn’t seen before. We made plans to meet back up after about 1 ½ hours and meet Katie at the botanical gardens, so we split off and went off to see some art!

The Reina Sofia houses a ton of modern art all from the 20th century such as Salvador Dali, Joan Miro and Pablo Picasso. One of the more famous paintings in the museum is Picasso’s Guernica which depicts some events from the Spanish Civil War. We had all seen pictures of it in the past but never realized how huge the painting was! Near it are also some sketches and process photos of Picasso creating the work. It’s was really cool to look at how Picasso’s process began and to see the final product. It’s a really cool museum, full of all sorts of fun, abstract and modern art work. It soon became time to meet back up with the Aussie gang. Blair and Natalie wanted to stick around and see if they could find Dali’s painting “The Persistence of Memory” while Rachael, Katherine and Ramon headed off to find Katie at the botanical gardens. We got there to find Katie sitting outside. It was closed! We decided to head off and find a cool road with poetry inlaid in the pavement that Katie remembered was near by. We started to make our way there when it started to drizzle. Rachael, not having an umbrella, decided to head back to the Reina Sofia up the street to stay dry and see some more stuff while Katie, Ramon and Katherine kept going. As both parties went their separate way, the rain started to pick back up. Rachael ducked into a Starbucks near the Reina Sofia while Katie, Ramon and Katherine ducked into Pinocchio’s, the restaurant where Rachael and the Aussies had had dinner the night before.

Once the rain let up, Rachael headed back toward the Reina Sofia to find that they too were closing and that she couldn’t go inside. So she went and looked around their gift shop while she waited for Natalie and Blair. The three of them met up and went in search of the other half of their gang. We found each other and decided it was time for some dinner! We looked up the tapas restaurant that we had tried to find the night before in their Lonely Planet book and realized that it was quite a trek away. We knew that we wanted to get into bed fairly early and that they had to catch a train back to their hotel around 11pm so to play it safe, we decided to go to a tapas restaurant up the street from our hostel which is fairly close to the train station they need to get back to their hotel later. We ordered a couple of different tapas and shared some sangria. It was delish! It soon got to be pretty late so we asked for our check, paid, and began to make our way back to our hostel. We bid a tearful farewell to our Aussie buddies (we’ll miss you guys!) and headed back up to our hostel to pack up and get ready to head to the airport early in the morning.

It’s been a bittersweet last day. We’re sad to be leaving but excited to go home and sleep in one bed for more than 2 nights in a row. We have had the trip of a lifetime and have had a blast traveling together, seeing all the sights, trying all the food and meeting all sorts of amazing people. We will miss everyone that we’ve met and hope our paths will cross again some day and are excited to see all of our peeps back home. Thanks again to everyone that’s been following our blog! We hope that you’ve been having just as much fun reading and following along with our adventures as we have.

See you at home!

XOXO K&R

Well, trains, you’ve been fun. We’ll miss you.

2010-04-20T17:55:00.008-04:00

We decided to take full advantage of our hostel’s noon checkout time and slept in this morning. There is a speed train between Sevilla and Madrid that leaves every hour or so, so we didn’t have to be in a rush to get to the train station. We got our things together and started to walk toward the train station when a cab stopped right in front of us to let a lady out. We decided that it was fate that we take a cab to the train station so we loaded up our backpacks and had a nice ride instead of walking the half hour to the train station. Because we took the taxi, we got there about 25 minutes before one of our trains left so we reserved our seats and hopped on the train. The ride was about two and a half hours. It was cool! This train line has all speed trains and they play movies each time like on the airplane. Neither of us took advantage of being able to watch the movie, but we thought it was cool that we could nonetheless. We finally got caught up on our blogging! We were sad to think that this was our last train ride. We love and will miss those awesome trains!

When we got to Madrid and found that the train station is connected to the metro system so we hopped on the metro and made our way to our hostel. We started walking toward our hostel and ended up taking a wrong turn somewhere and ran into Blaire and Natalie! In case y’all didn’t know, Madrid is a pretty big place. We were really surprised to bump into them. They have a couple of friends that came to hang out for a week before starting a 4-week European tour next week. The four of them were about to grab a bite to eat so we ran to the hostel and checked in and threw our things down and met back up with them.

We had heard through the grapevine that the Prado Museum is free on Tuesday nights from 6 - 8pm so we all headed off in that direction to check out the museum. We did some photo shoots and exploring along the way and made our way to the Prado. They only let in so many people every 15 minutes so we stood in line for a bit and waited our turn. We got inside and decided to all meet up at the Goya statue out front at 8pm so we split up and went on our own art exploration adventures.

The Prado Museum in Madrid houses a ton of European art from the 12th - 19th centuries. Lots of Byzantine, Romanesque, Romantic, Gothic, religious and realistic paintings and sculptures. One of the more famous paintings here is Hieronymus Bosch’s painting of “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” We had recently heard comedian Stephen Colbert compare the new KFC Double Down sandwich to this painting. We actually ran into a KFC about 15 minutes before going into the Prado to grab one just to test his theory but the “deep fried madness and breaded insanity” has sadly not made its way across the Atlantic. Oh darn.

We met back up outside afterward and talked with our new Aussie friends about the awesomeness known as Australia. We talked about everything from kangaroos, to politics, the Aborigines, the epic blue ring octopus, and even learned some new Australian phrases. For example, when Katie tried out her new Aussie accent, one of the guys responded, "You've got Buckley's doing it right." Apparently that means that she had no chance of speaking with a believable Aussie twang. Also, we taught them how to say “y’all.” It was a very productive evening.

After a while, our stomachs started to get a bit grumbly so we started to make our way to a tapas restaurant that Blair had found in their Lonely Planet book. Katie wasn’t feeling too well so she left and headed back to the hostel to rest while Rachael went to go eat dinner with the Aussies. We ended up going to a small Italian restaurant called “Pinocchio” that served great pasta and sangria. After dinner, we made plans to meet up at some point tomorrow to see the Royal Palace of Spain and possibly do a hop on/hop off bus tour together. We bid adieu for the evening then headed back to our respective hostels. The Woodmere Gang is now at the hostel and chillin' for the rest of the night. We want to make sure we get enough sleep so that we can take full advantage of our last day of our epic European adventure tomorrow! How did it get to be so late so soon?!

Peace ninjas!

XOXO K&R

The Barber of Seville

2010-04-20T15:49:00.004-04:00

Monday, April 19

We woke up a little late on Monday morning and had to get moving so that we could meet Nat and Blaire. We ended up being a little late and they had already gone in without us. We found them a few minutes after we got there. The Royal Alcazar is a palace/fortress that many different kings have inhabited over the centuries. The palace part was a lot like the Alhambra in Granada but smaller. It has a lot of the same influences with the Alcazar had a lot of hidden courtyards and extensive gardens.

Folks, we’ve visited lots of castles with gardens on this trip but these gardens beat them all, at least in Katie’s opinion. There were three different sections. One had walls that created different room-like areas with fountains and pools and such. Another section had brick paths going all around with benches and fountains and flowers and trees. There were also English gardens that were more open with dirt paths and a few trees and a couple of fountains but it was mostly open.

The coolest part of the English gardens was that it had peacocks! They were so beautiful! Katie had the brilliant idea to see if they liked crackers. Well, they did! They pecked the crackers right out of her hands, but they didn’t stop there! When the crackers were gone, they continued to follow us around the gardens wanting more!

We've made a little video to document the experience. We call it the "Peacock Witch Project."

**Disclaimer - please excuse Rachael being a real whuss and thus her profanity...

After that fun experience, we decided we might need to move on so that they peacocks would leave us alone so we made our way to the exit to meet Natalie and Blair for lunch. We found a tapas restaurant with good prices so we dined on sandwiches, a dish of garlic mayonnaise mashed potatoes and another dish with tomatoes and onions with salt and some other oily-vinegary deliciousness.

After lunch, Blair and Natalie had to go back to the hostel and get their things together so they could catch their afternoon train to Madrid. We followed them back to the hostel because we wanted to nap so that we wouldn’t be too tired by midnight for the Alumbrao, which is the kickoff for the Feria de Abril. Well, when folks nap, Katie has a habit of sneaking off and doing her own thing. An hour or so later, Katie came back to the hostel with a whole new ‘do! Apparently, getting her hair cut in Paris wasn’t crazy enough so she got it whacked off in Spain too! It’s the shortest she’s ever had her hair, so she’s not quite sure how she feels about it yet, but you can all see for yourselves when she gets home in two days! After napping, we took the time to try and get caught up on all the blogging we’ve been slacking on. We’ve finally gotten you guys pretty much up to speed!

At 11pm, we started making our way to the place where the Alumbrao was taking place. It was about a half hour walk that turned into almost an hour walk because of all of the people! The Alumbrao is the kickoff of the Feria de Abril where they light up this huge gate thing that they construct just for the feria every year. There were so many people and so much hype that the Alumbrao seemed a little anticlimactic but it was still pretty cool. According to one thing that we read about the Feria de Abril, this festival is the second biggest celebration of the year, only being beaten by the Oktoberfest in Germany. We believe it! There were people everywhere!

We learned that the feria is actually pretty exclusive. Different families and organizations rent out casetas which are like personal party huts. They’re decorated with chandeliers and paintings on the walls and they have personal wait staff and entertainment in each little caseta. You can only get into the caseta if you’re invited.

There is also an area with rides, fair food, and games to play. It’s such a fun atmostphere! We walked all around the feria, had some churros and chocolate and then decided to make the trek back to the hostel so we could rest up for our journey to Madrid the next day!

XOXO K&R

Toro! Toro!

2010-04-20T15:25:00.003-04:00

Sunday, April 18

The plan was for the Woodmere Gang and the Aussies to have breakfast together before going on the free walking tour at 10:45 on Sunday morning. Well, half of the Woodmere Gang made it to breakfast. Katie decided to skip out on her Spanish breakfast in favor of another hour of sleep. By the time the tour rolled around, Katie was up and showered and ready to go but the Aussies couldn’t get excited about walking around for two hours so they went back to sleep while the Woodmere Gang braved the rain clouds and set out on the tour. Our tour guide’s name was Ronnie. She is from Tel Aviv and she was really cute and fun. Our group consisted of the Woodmere Gang, two other people about our age, and a married couple with their two year old son. It was a nice intimate group, which always makes things more fun. We got to see the cathedral of Sevilla which is the world’s largest Gothic cathedral and the people of Sevilla are very proud of that fact.

We also got to tour the old neighborhood of Barrio Santa Cruz, Plaza de España, the Murillo Gardens and lots of other fun things. About halfway through our tour, it started sprinkling a little bit. No problem! We’ll just throw our hoods on and we’re set. Well, that worked fine until a little later when the deluge of biblical proportions that threatened to wash us all away! This ended the tour a little early, as it was raining so hard that we couldn’t even hear what Ronnie was saying. That’s okay with us! We know just what to do on a rainy day! We made our way back to the hostel and decided to nap the rain away. It didn’t exactly work, but we did get nice and rested up for the next phase of our Sunday in Seville - the bullfight!

It wasn’t raining near our hostel when we left for the bullfight, but we were prepared just in case. We walked to the bull ring and got our tickets. We had fun people-watching. Bullfights are like football games in the South. Everyone comes dressed to the nines! There are lots of women in towering high heels and men with coats and ties and cigars. Lots of them came with little red and gold striped cushions to sit on. Well, we couldn’t miss out on something as cute and red and gold striped cushions! We saw a guy selling some and they even had cute little holdy-handles on the side for easier carrying. OMG, precious! We each bought a cushion so we could try and fit in a little with the people all around us in their Sunday best. We were a little late purchasing our tickets online and weren’t able to sit together so we each made our way to our seats and got comfy on our cute cushions. We were pretty early, but that turned out to be a good thing because the stands ended up being PACKED!

There was barely room to breathe or move, but that just made it even more fun. Rachael got to sit next to a really nice older Spanish couple. The wife barely spoke any English but the husband spoke a little, so they enjoyed trying to communicate and explain to Rachael what was going on. On Katie’s right were a couple of young Spanish guys who basically ignored her but on her left were a couple of older Spanish men who were really nice.

Bullfights are really interesting because while the action is going on, the whole crowd is completely silent. If anyone makes a noise, they get shushed. If the bullfighter is doing really well, the band starts to play music and it looks more like a dance than a fight. If the bullfighter does really well, he gets awarded an ear of the bull and then he walks around the ring while people throw their hats to him. If the bullfighter does poorly, the crowd begins cheering for the bull. It’s so funny that’s it pretty much exactly like you imagine a bullfight to be. We both made friends and enjoyed the whole experience. Anyone who knows Terrell Stanley knows that he’s a big hunter and has instilled the same bloodthirstiness into his children. So, it probably comes as no surprise that Katie thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing (it was her second bullfight) and can’t wait to go again. Rachael, on the other hand, isn’t a big fan of animals being killed but she stayed through the whole thing, thought it was interesting, but will probably never go again. Overall, though, it was a good cultural experience and we gained a lot of respect for both the torero (bullfighter) and the toro (bull). Below are some pictures.

***Please be warned that there are some that are kind of bloody.

After the bullfight, Katie and Rachael reconnected and started to make their way back to the hostel. Apparently we chose the right direction to go, because we ended up walking right past the exit where the bullfighters were being escorted to their getaway vehicles. It was a mob scene! One of the bullfighters ducked into the van waiting for him and the guy in the front seat started passing out sweet 8x10 glossies of the studly torero. Well, we couldn’t let an opportunity like that pass without getting a glossy! Katie jumped right in the thick of things, reached over all the people, and grabbed on of the photos and then was able to escape all in one piece.

We got back to the hostel and dropped our things off and then headed back out because we were both starving. We ended up at this teeny restaurant right by our hostel where we had some tapas and the most amazing sangria we’d ever had. Take note, y’all: the guy put sugar in the bottom of the glass, poured the sangria in (to which he told us he’d added rum and something else we didn’t understand) and then sprinkled cinnamon on top. It was amazing! When we got back to the hostel, Natalie and Blaire had just returned from a flamenco show, so we made plans to go to the Royal Alcazar with them the next morning and headed off to bed.

XOXO K&R

Kansas City? But we’re not in Kansas anymore!

2010-04-19T16:48:00.004-04:00

Saturday, April 17

After being rejuvenated in Nerja, our next stop was Sevilla. We had booked this hostel way back in March because it’s right at the beginning of their big festival called Feria de Abril (Festival of April). Since Nerja is teeny tiny, there wasn’t a train station so we had to take a bus to Malaga and then take a train from there to Seville. We woke up to rain, rain, rain. We packed up our things and then trudged through the rain to the bus station (aka, a stop on the street with a kiosk selling tickets) and waited for our bus. We were about half and hour early so we sought shelter under one of the covered benches to wait on our bus. It finally came and we threw our backpacks under and then hopped aboard. We guess Malaga is a pretty popular place because our bus was packed full. At one stop, there was apparently a disagreement between one of the riders and the bus driver about this older lady that tried to get on. They were speaking way to fast for Katie to get what was going on, but from what she could understand, she was guessing that the bus driver wouldn’t let the lady on because she didn’t pay or something but the man on the bus was telling him he should let her on. Or maybe she’d missed the bus she was supposed to be on and was trying to get on this one or something like that. Basically, it was two men yelling at each other and the lady was crying and it was a big ol’ mess. Finally, we got to Malaga and were lucky to find that the bus station was right next to the train station so we didn’t have to go too far in the rain.

We made it to the train station to find that the place was amazing! It was like a mall, train station, movie theater and bowling alley all rolled into one! We were sort of sad that we only had about half an hour after making our reservation to spend in the train station. Well, since we have priorities, we decided that we would spend our half hour in line for Burger King. We didn’t expect for it to take that long but we should have learned by now that fast food places are only fast in the States and Paris. Since we were running short on time, yet again, Katie went ahead to hold up the train if need be while Rachael waited for the food. Rachael made it to the train just in time, but not before hurting her already bothered shoulder. She popped a few ibuprofen with lunch and hopped right back on that travelin’ horse. When we got to Sevilla, we collected our things and hopped off the train. We saw signs for Kansas City Avenue and Katie was very confused until brilliant Rachael remembered that Sevilla and Kansas City are sister cities. Now you know everything!

We made our way out of the train station and used the amazing iPhone to find our way to the hostel. It was a nice hike, but we finally made it. We plan on taking a cab back to the train station! We learned that the hostel has a neat tapas tour that they do where they take you to three different restaurants where you try different tapas and drinks. Sounds like our kind of tour! After we put our things in our room, Rachael grabbed a quick nap before the tour while Katie decided to go exploring. We met back up and freshened up before our tour. We met some new friends on the tour, most notably Natalie and Blaire, a young Australian married couple who are currently living and working in England. We ended up being good buddies with them by the end of the night.

At the first tapas restaurant, we had sangria and lots of unidentifiable but delicious tapas. Our favorite dish was potato slices cooked and slathered with amazing garlic mayonnaise. Talk about yum! The second place we went had two different kinds of sherry, which is a specialty of this region. Our favorite dish at that place was a toss-up between this interesting cheesecake kind of stuff and a really delish tender beef dish. At the third place, we had sangria again and several different seafood dishes. They also served interesting sandwiches with chorizo and cream cheese. At this point, the tapas tour ended but it was also the beginning of the pub crawl. Well, they talked us into it! Blaire and Natalie said they’d at least go to the beginning of the pub crawl so we decided to do the same. It got off to a slow start, but we ended up spending about an hour at 3 different bars before ending up at a discotheque for some crazy Spanish dancing.

We only spent a few minutes at the last place before the four of us split a cab back to the hostel. We made plans to have breakfast together the next morning and then we all went to bed.

XOXO K&R

Nerja? Snoozeha!

2010-04-19T16:25:00.003-04:00

Friday, April 16

We woke up Friday around (drum roll please) 3:30pm. Yeah, that’s right we slept about 15 hours. We’re awesome like that. Guess all that partying with our moms wore us out! We got moving and went to find some lunch and ate at a great little restaurant with a really nice man to serve us. After lunch, we decided we needed to veg some more. We went to the super market near our hostel, invested in some Kinder Buenos, Nutella and crackers then headed back to the hostel to catch up on blogging, eat nutella, nap and veg. It was awesome. There are some really cool caves in Nerja, like the ones with all of those cavemen drawings, but veggin’ just sounded way cooler that day than checking out the cave men art. At about 8pm, we decided that we should do something productive so we made it our mission to find the latest episode of one of our favorite shows online: GLEE. We found it. We watched it. And it was awesome. After that, we blogged a bit more then went to sleep. Good times.

Memories of La Alhambra

2010-04-19T16:18:00.004-04:00

Thursday, April 15

In case you didn’t already know this, our moms are awesome. It’s true! They woke up super early Thursday morning to go and get tickets to La Alhambra for us. Turns out they only sell so many tickets every day and if you aren’t there in the first hour that the palace is open to get tickets, you don’t get tickets. They came back around 9am and woke us up. We had tickets to walk around the Palace of the Nazarene at 10:30 am. We had been told that if you don’t make it to the palace by the time specified on your ticket, you don’t get in. So we left our hotel at about 10:15. AHH.

We got to the main entrance and started running! We ran and ran. In case you don’t know this, La Alhambra IS HUGE. From the main entrance to the area, all of the signs say that it would take 20 minutes to walk to the palace. Well we ran it in 10, y’all. We got there, out of breath at 10:35 only to find that you could check in anytime up until 11am. HA. Well, at least we got our work out for the day! We stood in line and waited to get in while JL went to purchase an audio guide for herself and Marty. We made it inside and started walking around.

It’s so interesting to see all of the different religious influences within this palace. This is where Sultans, Muslim, and Christian leaders ruled from for centuries. It really is an amazing palace, full of amazing architecture, color and gorgeous gardens. We can definitely see why it was fought over and sought after for so many years. Once we made it out of the main palace, we continued exploring and checking out all of the awesome gardens.

After seeing all of the pretty flowers, it was time to head back towards town. We went and found some lunch at a great little Moroccan/Spanish restaurant up the street from the main square and had some awesome sangria. After lunch, we did some window shopping and walked around all of the cool shops in the area - it looked like the Arab shuk in the Old City of Jerusalem! We then slowly made our way back to the hotel. Where we hung out with our moms a bit longer. It was now time to part ways. We headed out to catch a bus to the bus station as our moms headed out to catch a shuttle to the Granada airport.

We are so glad and thankful that our moms got to party with us for a week and experience all of the fun and craziness that we have been having together. Thanks again to everyone that helped to make it happen - it was totally worth it! We gave them info on how to find us in case they got stranded due to Iceland’s volcanic ash cloud. You never know!

We made it to the bus station and bought our tickets for the next bus to Nerja (there is no direct train to Nerja, you have to go by bus). We tossed our stuff underneath, hopped aboard and went to sleep. After about an hour, we woke up with our necks bouncing all over the place and looked up to see that we were going through a crazy stretch within the Sierra Nevada mountains, full of hair pin turns, perilous drops, and amazing views. At several points we were above or in the clouds. It was really cool.

We eventually arrived in Nerja and found our hostel. We called the number posted on the door and a woman came to let us in. While checking in, we observed a Hamsa and a menorah in the hostel’s main office. We asked if she was Jewish. She explained that her family had only recently found out that their family was Jewish way back in the day. Her family was Jewish and once the Spanish Inquisition was kicking into high gear they went into hiding. We like fellow Jew crew members with cool stories! We went upstairs and dropped our stuff off in our room. Then went out to find the beach. We found it but by the time we got there it was dark (aka 9:45 pm - the sun sets pretty late here) so we made our way back up toward the main drag of Nerja and had some dinner then went back to the hostel then went to sleep.

Pomegranates/ Granada, To-may-to/To-mah-to

2010-04-19T16:15:00.003-04:00

Wednesday, April 14

Making it to a city early in the morning by train has its perks and its drawbacks. On the one hand, you’re up and ready to go, on the other hand, you’re exhausted because it’s very difficult to have a full night’s rest on a night train. We stumbled onto the train platform with our bags pretty groggy eyed and made our way to a café for breakfast and COFFEE. After breakfast, we hung out at the train station, researching how to get to Gibraltar and Morocco. We saw that trains were leaving from Granada and figured we could go down to Gibraltar for the day, hop a boat to Morocco (since it’s practically across the street) then come back to Gibraltar and spend the night, then come back up to Granada the next day. Turns out Gibraltar is pretty far from Granada, about a 5 hour journey by bus AND train. There is no direct train line to Gibraltar, you have to take a train to a station within Spain then take a bus the rest of the way to Gibraltar. Looks like that dream won’t be happenin’ folks! We then made it our mission to find a place to stay for the night in Granada. We found some places but were not able to book them, but we did have addresses, so we hopped in a taxi from the train station and went to the first hostel on our list. We got there and the hostel was a hostel no longer. Turns out the hostel had moved. Awesome. We then hiked down to a little park we had passed in our taxi. We left our moms and our bags at a little café and went in search of the Granada Tourism office.

Turns out the tourism office knows a lot! They handed us maps, info sheets with names, prices, locations and ratings for all of the hotels and hostels in the area. We hiked back up to our moms to discuss and research. (THIS IS WHY iPHONES ARE AWESOME). We checked a couple on Trip Advisor and eventually found Hotel Anacapri. We read in one of the reviews that if you say the magic words “We found you in our Rick Steves book” they’ll give you a great discount. It worked! We had some pages from one of Rick Steves’ books left with us. We had sent the bulk of his giant “bible” home and ripped out the pages we needed for our trip back in February. We called up the hotel, said the magic words, and they said to come on down. We walked there from the park, made a reservation then went up to our room for four. We joked that we were getting the penthouse as we were riding up in the elevator. Turns out, it was true! Once we got to the last floor in the elevator, we had to take some stairs up to the very top floor - our room. It was a great little 4 bed room with a sitting area and everything. After dropping our things off, it was time for a nap! So we napped for about an hour then went out to get some lunch and meet Granada. Why, hello, Granada. We’re the Woodmere Gang. Pleasure to meetcha.

After eating, we walked around and eventually made our way to the Cathedral where there was a hop on point for the City Sightseeing Bus Tours. These buses are in every city everywhere and really convenient. You hop on, plug some headphones into your seat and listen to the history of the town and can hop off at any of its stops (always in important, touristy, “you gotta see this” areas). We opted to stay on the whole ride and hop off after hearing all of the history and info about Granada (about 1 ½ hours).

After the bus ride, we hopped off where we started at the Cathedral and did some shoppin’ (always fun with the mommies!) After our shoppin’ we decided to do like the Spanish do and take a siesta! We headed back to the hostel, made a reservation for a Flamenco show, then took a nap. We woke up, showered, got dressed then headed downstairs to meet the person picking us up. Turns out it was also a walking tour! We hopped on our bus and were dropped off in what was formerly the Muslim area of Granada. What makes Granada so interesting is that it went back and forth between the Moors and the Christians for hundreds of years so you have a ton of Muslim, Gypsy, and Christian influences all around the city. We eventually made it to a great lookout point where we could see La Ahambra lit up in the distance. It was pretty cool.

We then went up to the restaurant where the Flamenco dance party was held. It’s located in what was formerly a cave inhabited by Gypsies. We ordered our dinner and sangria and watched in awe as these 4 dancers and 3 musicians took the stage. Although the main volume for the music was up probably a little too high, it was spectacular to hear and watch. The musicians and dancers are constantly moving. If they aren’t clapping, they’re tapping with their feet. It’s elegant and powerful all at the same time and quite a workout! We’ll try to upload a video soon.

After the Flamenco dance party, it was about 12:30am so we headed back to our hotel. We tried researching hostels in Gibralatr again and just couldn’t find anything so then we started to look up places on the coast of Spain like Malaga. We asked the woman at reception if she liked Malaga. She said it was cool, but that Nerja was cooler and had lots of cool caves to check out. Sounds cool! We looked up hostels in Nerja (pronounced “Ner-ha“), found one 3 blocks from the beach, booked it then went to sleep.

XOXO J&K&M&R

What a Gaudieous Day!

2010-04-19T16:09:00.005-04:00

Tuesday, April 13

We woke up fairly early Tuesday morning. Our moms grabbed some breakfast and croissants for us from the hostel’s breakfast room and we packed up our bags. We got all of our things together and left them all in the hostel’s luggage area and went out to explore some more of Barcelona. First stop - a Gaudi house!

Gaudi was a BA architect back in his day. He started the Neo-Gothic movement in the early 1900s and his work has inspired several modern artists, most notably Picasso. He was commissioned to design the Sagrada Familia cathedral that we saw the day before (which is still under construction btw) and several parks and buildings around Barcelona. He’s kind of a big deal. At one point, he was asked to design an apartment building. It has now been converted into a museum to showcase all of Gaudi’s work and inspiration. The attic of the building is where there are several displays, models of buildings and cathedrals he designed as well as a collection of inspirational items he used to help define his work. There is also a terrace, full of winding stairs, tunnels and funky chimneys. The scenery looks like it was taken out of a Dr. Seuss book! A couple floors down from there is an apartment that is furnished as it was back in 1912 when the apartment first opened, full of art nouveau furniture and period décor.

The rest of the building is all offices now. After playing a fun game of hide and seek around the museum, we eventually all found each other then headed out to find some lunch. By the time we finished lunch, it was decision time: go see the other Gaudi house-museum and Parc Güell (pronounced: “park way,” a park he designed that is now open to the public) or just the park. We voted to go and see the park because that was our priority in case we didn’t get to anything else. We went to the metro via a little shopping stop and made our way to Parc Güell. When we got off of the metro, we checked our email real quick and received some very sad news: Katie’s dog Nicky had passed away. He was already declining in health but we had hoped that he would be able to stick around in time for Katie to get back. We was a precious and sweet ol’ pup and we will miss him dearly. In the words of Katie’s dad, Terrell, “NickNick was dreaming about chasing bad guys and biting them real hard when his courageous little heart gave out. He was a fearless defender and devoted friend.” We took some time to mourn our loss before slowly making our way up to the park. It’s on a steep hill and is a great lookout point to see all of Barcelona. There were several escalators outdoors next to the sidewalk to make the schlep up to the top easier.

Once at the top, we explored the park and took some great pictures from the different lookout points. If you don’t know anything about Gaudi, you should Google him real quick because he’s designed some pretty crazy (aka awesome) buildings and Parc Güell is another example of his interesting style.

Our train for Granada left at 9:30 in the evening, but we wanted to be back at our hostel around 7pm so that we could get our stuff together and get to the train station in plenty of time to hopefully sweet talk somebody into letting us swap beds with them so that we could all get into at least the same car of the train, if not the same room. We ended up being there way too early and we couldn’t even go through the gate that we needed to pass to get to our platform. Eventually, we talked the guard into letting us pass through but sit in the chairs just on the other side and wait out the remaining 45 minutes or so. We finally got down to the train platform and boarded the train and made our way to our compartments. We were able to swap with one girl so that Marty and Rachael were in the same room but Katie and JL were in separate ones. We were all in the same train car together, though, so all we had to do was open the door to the compartment and go out into the hall to see each other. We weren’t quite ready to crash yet so we decided to rendezvous in the restaurant car to hang out and have dinner before going to bed. The meal there was expensive and sub-par, but we ate it and washed it down with a great red wine called “Sangre de Toro”. That means “blood of the bull” for those non-Spanish speakers out there.

After dinner, we hung out for a little while longer and then headed to our respective sleeping compartments. None of us got much sleep but we did get to Granada at 8:30ish the next morning, so that was cool.

XOXO J&K&M&R

Barthelona

2010-04-18T10:05:00.004-04:00

Monday, April 12

We woke up Monday morning to the sounds of dishes clanging - turns out our room is right next to the hostel’s kitchen and breakfast was wrapping up. Time to wake up and get some food! Our moms were quick on their feet to grab croissants and coffee while Katie and Rachael, who move a bit slower, started to get ready. Rachael had heard about the **Fat Tire Bike Tour in Barcelona and had researched it the night before. Turns out they have a tour that started at 11am. It was already 10, so it was time to get moving! We were out the door by 10:30 and started to make our way to the tour’s meeting point. We got there around 11:15, just in time to find some members of the tour testing their bikes before the tour started. They were able to point us in the right direction so we ran and got some bikes then began the tour.

Our guide’s name was Buddha and he was great. The first stop on our tour was Placa St. Jaume which has two important Spanish government buildings. We hit lots of important spots in Barcelona including Sagrada Familia, el Parc de la Ciutadella, the cathedral, the historical museum of Barcelona and much more! The tour also included a lunch stop at a neat restaurant on the beach that served some delish sangria. Good times!

What was great about the bike tour was that there weren’t too many hills and the stretches between each stop were spaced out just enough so that you never felt like you were working too hard. Our tour started to wrap up just as we started to feel a couple of rain drops. Our timing was perfect!

After the tour, Buddha (who is trained to be a chef, not a bike tour guide) pointed us toward a great produce market a few blocks from the Fat Tire shop. When we got there, we went a little nuts snapping photos, but everything was so beautiful! There were all sorts of fruits, vegetables, breads, meats, cheeses, and much, much more!

We browsed for awhile but then found a booth selling all sorts of chocolates that became our downfall. Katie and Joy filled a plastic bag with their chocolate selection and Rachael and Marty soon followed suit. Not long later, one of us (not quite sure which) had the brilliant idea to buy some things to go with wine that could be our dinner that night. We ended up with quite a spread, including bread, two types of cheese, pineapple, strawberries, garlic and some wine we’d picked up during our travels. Another popular thing at the food market were the fruit vendors selling all sorts of wonderful fresh juice smoothie thingies. We all had to try one so we went on our way, browsing stalls and vendors, smoothies in hand. It was a blast! After our bike tour and shopping escapades, we were a little tired, so we headed back to the hostel to drop off our things and rest a bit.

At this point, we still didn’t know exactly how we would be traveling to Granada the following day so we decided it might be a good idea to run to the train station and figure out what our options were. Turns out, Spain’s big! We thought it might be a 6 or 7 hour train ride, but it was 11! Basically, our only option was to take a night train from Barcelona to Granada the following evening. It wasn’t very expensive and we’d sleep on the train so that saved us the money we would have spent on a hostel so we booked it right then. There were only 4 beds left on the whole train so we were just in time! We weren’t able to all be in the same room because, well, beggars can’t be choosers, so we figured we’d just try and sweet-talk whoever was in our rooms so that we could be closer together. We weren’t sure about making it to Gibraltar or Morocco the following day but decided we’d ask when we got to Granada and if we could, we’d go but if not, there’s plenty to do and see in Granada!

After getting our transportation smoothed out, we were excited to basically have a whole other full day in Barcelona. There were still a few things on our list to see! So, we headed back to the hostel, ate our delicious fresh meal from the produce market and went to bed shortly thereafter.

XOXO J&K&M&R

**For those curious, yes, the Fat Tire Bike Tour and the amazing Fort Collins brewed beer are related - the bike tour came first. The guy who started the beer in Colorado did one of their bike tours in Europe and named the beer after the tour company. We are sad to report that there was no Fat Tire beer waiting for us in Barcelona’s fridge, or at any of the Fat Tire tour locations and that there are no Fat Tire Bike Tours in the States because of an agreement between the two organizations. Don’t worry - we plan on writing a letter to complain, because if there is anything that this world needs more of, it’s Fat Tire Ale and bikes.

A Happy Birthday Shout Out!

2010-04-16T19:44:00.001-04:00

We just wanted to wish a very Happy Birthday to our friends Tyler Waters and Nirali Kapadia. Hope you two have a fantabulous birthday! We miss you guys!

The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.

2010-04-16T19:40:00.004-04:00

(Sunday, April 11)

We woke up Sunday morning, ate some breakfast, packed up all of our belongings and headed to the train station. Once at the train station, we asked if they had a better idea on how to get to Barcelona from Rome. They said that Milan had a night train every other day of the week to Barcelona and the next one would be leaving on Monday. Well it’s Sunday and we wanna be in Spain already! We booked the next train to Milan and planned on either booking a flight at a reasonable price or taking a train.

We arrived at the Milan train station and went in search of some Wifi. We left some of our bags at a luggage locker and went outside the train station to find a McDonald’s that we were told had free internet. Why do those golden arches keep haunting us!?! We searched and searched and realized that there was no Mickey Dee’s in sight. We walked back to the train station and found a travel agency. Maybe they could point us in the right direction! We told them that we were trying to get to Barcelona today and they found us a flight with really reasonable price. We had learned in the past 48 hours that if you see a good price, you book it without thinking twice because in 5 minutes it could triple in price. So we booked ourselves a 5:30 flight to Barcelona! We bought our tickets and hopped on the next bus from the train station to the airport and got there around 3pm. As soon as we got inside the airport, we repacked some of our luggage so that we would only have to check one bag each (we had bought a suitcase in Florence for some souvenirs and wine).

We got to the check in counter, started to check in only to find that we had never purchased tickets for this flight. WHAAAAT?! We explained to the guy that we had bought our tickets at the train station and he recommended that we go buy more tickets for the flight at a location within the airport because it was possible that we got scammed. After some more phone calls and craziness, we learned that the travel agency where we bought our tickets was legit and their digital booking stuff was on a different system thus causing a delay in the relay of information among computer servers. Confused? So were we! Our buddy at the desk said to wait a bit and the info would eventually come through. So we waited and waited and the info did finally come through. Success! At this point, we only had about 10 minutes before our flight began boarding. We tossed our bags on the conveyor belts, got our boarding passes, and headed to the security check point - that was a mile long. We got in line and waited. We’ve learned that Marty and JL can make quite a ruckus when others cut in line. It made for quite an adventure. When we finally made it through security, our plane was already boarding so Katie ran ahead to make sure that they waited for us. Once the whole Woodmere Gang caught up, out of breath, we boarded the plane, sat down in our seats and took a breather. Once the plane took off, we all took a lil’ nap on the flight.

About an hour later, we landed in Barcelona. We grabbed all of our bags then found a little restaurant in the airport’s waiting area where we sat down and had a very late lunch/early dinner and researched hostels in Barcelona, Granada, Gibraltar and a possible excursion to Morocco. After spending about two hours researching and booking it was about 10pm. We got our belongings together and headed outside to catch a bus to a metro stop near our hostel. The junior Woodmere Gang members, after traveling these past 6 weeks, have developed a habit of following the directions emailed to us from Hostel World, get off at metro stop “blah” and walk around in circles for a bit until we reach street “blah blah” until we reach the hostel. Our mothers, the more refined travelers, insisted upon calling the hostel to ask them where they are and how to find them. But who needs phone calls when you have iPhone GPS?! So we ignored our mothers requests and eventually found the hostel via iPhone, checked into the hostel and researched tours in Barcelona and potential Granada/Gibraltar/Morocco plans. After all of the travel research and craziness we all finally went to sleep.

XOXO J&K&M&R

Roma?!

2010-04-16T16:44:00.004-04:00

(Saturday, April 10)

We woke up fairly early Saturday so that we could take full advantage of the breakfast offered at our hostel - toast and coffee. But this wasn’t just any ol’ coffee - this stuff so strong it needed about 5 packets of sugar to kill that coffee taste. Yum. We headed out to find the meeting point for our tour and found that it met at a fountain in Piazza Repubblica. It’s just up the street from the train station, Roma Termini and we had passed it the previous day while searching for our hostel. Go figure! We sat by the fountain and waited and realized that we would probably need some more food to hold us over if we didn’t stop for lunch while on the tour so Katie and Rachael made a food run and headed off to some golden arches across the street. We returned with food in time to find our tour ready to go and learned that they would break for lunch once we got to Vatican City. Well, shoot! We would still enjoy our awesome Mickey D’s. We went and bought bus tickets and with our tour group hopped on a bus toward St. Pete’s. We got off at a point outside of Vatican city and walked toward the river.

From here we could see St. Peter’s Basilica, the bridge of Angels and Castel Sant’Angleo (where Tom Hanks beats up that other guy in Angels and Demons). We learned all about the history of Rome, how the Christians moved into this area and how Vatican City came to be. It was a real history lesson for the Woodmere Gang! From there we walked across the Bridge of Angles which is lined with 10 angels depicting the passion of the Christ and made our way toward Vatican City.

Once at the main square we refilled our water bottles (Rome is famous for it’s awesome and plentiful water fountains) then went to a panini place for lunch. Having already been fed, the Woodmere Gang went in search of some gelato to hold us over. After everyone finished dining, we left to go inside the Vatican, bought our tickets and began our tour.

We learned about how and why the Cathedral was built where it is, different "gifts" (aka artifacts plundered from past civilizations such as the Egyptian pine cone in the picture above) how the Cathedral has changed over the years depending on who is holding the big seat, and how the Catholic church chased Michelangelo down a couple of times to put him to work. We then went inside and saw parts of the Vatican museum, the hall of maps and eventually the mother lode - Saint Peter’s Basilica. While learning about the Vatican earlier, our tour guide Justin pointed out that since Michelangelo spent so much of his life painting the famous Sistine Chapel ceiling, once he was commissioned to paint the Last Judgement on the altar wall, he painted himself as St. Bartholomew holding his skin, so as to say that the Catholic church had skinned him dry after making him spend the better part of his life under their ceiling. We feel a little sorry for ‘ol Mikey but are sure glad he took the time to create this fantastic work of art. It is absolutely beautiful. Once inside the Sistine Chapel, you are not allowed to talk or take pictures… but what the Pope don’t know won’t hurt him!

Check out a full 360 panoramic experience of the Sistine Chapel here

After checking out the Sistine Chapel, we headed outside where our tour wrapped up. We bid adieu to our tour guide, Justin, who we would see later on for our evening tour. We walked around a bit more then went inside the Basilica to look around.

After having our fill of Vatican City we left and headed back to our hostel to take a quick nap. We woke up about an hour later then headed back out to Piazza Repubblica to meet up with Justin again for our evening tour. Our tour started at Piazza Repubblica. In that area, there are several big important things to Rome’s history, one being an old brick building that formerly held Roman baths. There are also some fancy hotels in the piazza as well as Rome’s most important movie theater, which is where Italy premiers all of its big movies. The fountain in the middle is also pretty cool.

From there we headed to another area and saw the Church of the Immaculate Conception which is designed and filled with bones of past monks. Mmm… juicy. From there we headed to the Spanish Steps and learned about its history. On the top side of the hill was the French Embassy. On the bottom side of the hill, the Spanish Embassy. The Spanish were getting’ real tired of hiking up the hill and things were starting to get a lil’ tense so the Italians one day said “hey fuggedahbout it and cut it out already!” so the French, being French, said “sorry ‘bout cha hill, Spain” and they built them a nice set of marble stairs. So they are now called, the Spanish Steps.

We walked down the steps, snapped some cool pics then made our way to the Trevi Fountain. We learned about how it was designed (and it’s haunted!) and built and threw in our obligatory coins (1 coin = You’ll come back to Rome, 2 coins = You’ll come back to Rome and fall in love, 3 coins = You’ll come back to Rome, fall in love and get hitched).

We then made our way to Piazza Navona and learned about the Four Rivers Fountain. It’s being refurbished at the moment so we saw a lot of construction materials as opposed to the fountain. This is why Al Gore invented the internet and by default, Google. Our tour ended there, so we bid adieu to our buddy Justin but not before snapping a few pictures of him and his dazzling magical beard.

We decided to grab a quick slice of pizza then head back toward our hostel to go to a little internet café and research transportation to Barcelona. The Rail Europe website that we have been using to determine transportation our whole trip told us to hop a train to Rome, then to Milan, then to Nice, then to Paris, and from there, take an over night train to Barcelona. I don’t know if y’all know this but Paris is a bit out of the way. That’s like saying to get to New Orleans from Miami, you should drive to St. Louis then drive back down along the Mississippi to New Orleans. Trains were looking, for the first time on our trip, the least efficient mode of transportation! We looked at flights and luckily found a Ryanair flight from Rome to Barcelona for an amazing price of $50 per person. We had typed in all of our information and were about to book it when the price jumped up to $300 per person - YIKES! We decided that the Roman Gods were obviously against us (or that midnight was a bad time to be booking a flight for the day of departure) and decided to try again and sort it all out in the morning. We went back to our hostel and went to sleep.

XOXO J&K&M&R

From Naples to Rome

2010-04-16T16:12:00.003-04:00

Friday, April 9

We woke up Friday morning and got a slow start. We went and had breakfast upstairs at our hotel, showered and began packing up all of our bags and goodies. After getting all of our stuff together, we hopped on a bus to take us back down to Sorrento and from there we took the Circumvesuviana train (a metro line between Naples and Sorrento) back to the Naples train station. Once we got there, we got our tickets for the train to Rome and were forced to sit in first class because there were no more regular seats (sweet!). We had about 30 minutes to kill so we went to grab some pizza from a place in the train station that Marty knew of then headed off to our train to grab our seats.

It was about a 3 hour train ride to Rome so we napped, caught up on our bloggin’, showed our moms some pictures, and discussed Spain. We knew that from Rome we needed to be in Barcelona but didn’t know how to get there cheaply and efficiently but knew that we would get there one way or another. Once in Rome, we left the train station and went in search of our hostel. We arrived and found that the owner did not speak a lick of English so Katie got to use her mad Italian skillz. We got to our room and began researching tours in Rome. Katie and Rachael had found some Segway tours that were offered in some cities so we began to look those up only to find that they were not offered in Rome. We did, however, find another tour group called “Rome(ing) Tours” that offered several tours of Rome and Vatican City. Knowing that we only had 2 days in this town, we decided to contact these guys to see what tours we could do with the time we had available. We shot them a quick email then headed out to find the Colosseum.

The Colosseum was within walking distance of our hostel. We took some cute pics and checked to see if it was open for tours - it had just closed 30 minutes before we got there. Nerds! We left there then went off to find the Pantheon and Piazza Navona for dinner. We hopped in a cab and were on our way. Once at the piazza, we walked to the Pantheon (they’re about 3 blocks away from each other). We got there in time to find that it was closed and under construction. Wah-wah. Maybe next time! Our stomachs were starting to get a bit grumbly after this so we headed back up to the Piazza Navona for some grub.

It was packed with artists and tourists and lined with dozens of restaurants. Everywhere you turned were dozens of paintings, sketches, caricatures, and portrait artists. What we’ve noticed about Europe is that when it’s time for dinner, each restaurant has hired a “seller” to stand outside the entrance of each restaurant to entice you to come eat at their place. As you look at the menu and prices, they have about 10 seconds to tell you why their restaurant is better than all of the others. In places like Piazza Navona they all have about the same kind of food for the same price so we went with a guy that could really sell it! After checking out our third or fourth restaurant, the “seller” at Ristorante Navona pulled us aside and gave us his whole presentation and four reasons why his restaurant had the best deal and he promised us prosecco to drink while we thought it over and if we stayed, free limoncello after dinner - free liquor? SOLD! We ended up eating there and it was delicious. While at dinner, Rachael got a call from the “Rome(ing) Tours” company about seeing Rome the next day. We reserved spots for the Vatican Tour that left around 11am and the evening tour of Rome that left around 8pm. This way we could see all of the big things in Rome in one day!

After dinner, Katie spied an artist in the distance doing some fantastic portraits so she headed over there to check on prices and see about getting her own portrait done. After paying for dinner and sipping on our limoncello, Rachael, Marty and JL left to go and find Katie. We found her! She had found the perfect lady to do her portrait and was being drawn as we arrived. JL stayed and waited with Katie while Rachael and Marty headed off to look at some cool Italian art work. They wandered around for a bit then made their way back over to Katie just as the artist was finishing Katie’s portrait. It was beautiful! The four of us then looked around at the different paintings and art work, had some gelato, then eventually made our way to a taxi stand and took a taxi back to our hostel and went to sleep. We were going to see all of Rome in a day and needed our beauty sleep!

XOXO J&K&M&R

Sorrento: The Sequel

2010-04-16T12:00:00.004-04:00

Wednesday, April 7th and Thursday, April 8th

We woke up, packed up and started to make our way to the train/bus station so that we could hop a bus to the area near our bed and breakfast. We picked up some pastries (aka breakfast) to take with us to munch on while there. We ate a little then hopped on a bus to Santa Agata, the village that the B&B is in. We hopped off at one place in Santa Agata and realized we were not close at all to our B&B. We found a taxi and he drove us a whole 5 minutes to the B&B where he charged us 12 Euros (not a 12 Euro drive, Ladies and Gents). We didn’t have much of a choice, so we paid the man and checked into the B&B and into our sweet room. It was huge!

Katie took the laptop upstairs to do some Facebook business while Rachael took a nap. Turns out the springs on that bed were worn out on the side that Rachael was napping upon because she rolled over at one point and fell of the bed. Good times. She went back up stairs to tell Katie about it and we decided it was a good time to eat those pastries we brought with us. We went to our room and devoured them then went back upstairs together to write up some blog posts and upload some pictures online. We got upstairs and saw that the owner of the B&B was sitting on the couch where we were before, talking on the phone so we sat together on the other couch that faced the beautiful view of Sorrento and had our backs to the front door of the B&B. We had been sitting there for about 15 minutes when the owner ran outside to go and check on something.

We kept blogging when all of a sudden, we heard a very familiar voice say “Damn, I like that hair cut” We turn around to see Marty and Joy! We were so surprised (as you all have probably seen in the video below. If not, scroll down and watch it). We honestly had no idea they were coming. They got us good! We laughed, we cried, we took pictures. A good time was had by all.

Turns out they had been planning to surprise us since we started planning our trip. Originally, we had planned to be in Spain by now so they had each booked plane tickets to Barcelona. Upon finding out that we were still going to be in Italy, they booked the B&B in Sorrento to anchor us for a couple of days so that they could catch up and not be chasing us all across Europe. Thank you to anyone and everyone who helped arrange it and keep it all a secret. It totally worked out! The owner (who was totally in on it and ran to grab their camera when he saw them drive up) helped us move our stuff around and get a 4-bed room with a fantastic view.

We dropped our stuff off and caught up on everything! Their crazy plan and adventure to find us, the naysayers (toldja so!), and how everything just fell together perfectly. They couldn’t have done it without the help of Cathy, the Delta agent who helped them figure out how to track us down. Thanks from the whole Woodmere Gang, Cathy! Turns out, Joy was pretty quick on her feet because the aforementioned “Starbucks” where she and Marty were meeting was actually the Atlanta airport. They fed us that line to cover for all the airport noises and we somehow didn’t hear any of the announcements in the background. After chillaxin’ for a bit and letting the moms shower (they had been traveling for two days straight) we headed out to downtown Sorrento to grab some dinner. We found a cute little restaurant where we shared some prosecco and vino and ate a fantastic Italian meal. After dinner we walked around for a bit and had some gelato then hopped on the bus back up to our hotel and went to sleep.

We woke up Thursday morning and had a delicious breakfast upstairs. We then hopped on a bus to Positano (which according to some information we read is synonymous with “Summer fashion”). Those bus drivers are so talented! The road first goes up some winding roads high up onto a hill where you can see the Mediterranean on both sides of the land. From there it weaved back down toward the ocean to smaller roads and tighter turns. We gained a lot of respect for bus drivers that day. Once in Positano, we walked around and window shopped. Marty got her self a fabulous new Italian hat and jacket, Katie and Joy got some fabulous beaded tunics and Rachael got herself a nifty linen shirt. Now, the Woodmere Gang is synonymous with “Summer Fashion!” We walked around and made our way to the beach. We noticed that the prices went up the closer you got to the shore - good thing we did most of our shopping away from the sand!

It was around 5pm when we made our way to the water and we felt like we’d hit Positano pretty hard so we decided to check out Amalfi. We weren’t thrilled with the idea of walking back up the hill to where the bus had dropped us off so Joy (who we lovingly refer to as JL) had the brilliant idea to check on a water taxi. Win! It was only 6 Euros apiece for us to take the 20-30 minute cruise from Positano to Amalfi and the boat was leaving in 20 minutes. We timed it perfectly! We, not at all faint-hearted, decided to grab the very front seats of the boat even though it was a little chilly and overcast. We discussed the fact that the men working the boat were probably placing bets on how long we’d last out front so we showed them what Georgia peaches are made of! We basically had a 30-minute dance party all the way from Positano to Amalfi. When she gets home, you all should ask JL to do her patent-pending Toaster Dance for you. We also made some new friends on the boat.

Once we got to Amalfi, we could see a really neat-looking church so we made our way toward it. We were all fading fast after our epic dance party so we decided to park ourselves at a café right in front of the pretty church and enjoy the scenery. There was an interesting fountain there, too, that people kept leaning over to drink out of, so apparently the water is okay to drink out of fountains. Glad we got that cleared up. We took some neat pictures during our time out.

We didn’t know much about Amalfi, so we just shopped our way up the street and had a great time looking at all the beautiful ceramics and fun souvenirs. Before long, our tummies decided to tell us it was time for dinner. We found a neat little restaurant where we had a great meal and a fun waiter. We shared a bottle of wine and relaxed after our serious shopping day. The junior Woodmere Gang-ers were thrilled to have our mommies with us because we finally got to souvenir shop like pros!

After our delish dinner, we figured it would probably be a good idea to check on bus times to get back to Sorrento. We made our way back down to the bus station (but not without making friends with a lady at a neat ceramic shop) and found out that the next bus was also the last bus of the night to Sorrento and we had 45 minutes before it left. Oh, darn! That means it’s gelato time (our favorite time)! We found a teeny gelato shop that was having its grand opening that week. The girls didn’t speak English, but they had some amazing gelato! We unanimously agreed that these girls were destined to be millionaires because it was the best gelato any of us had ever tasted.

Our bus pulled up to the station as we made our way toward it so we boarded and waited the 20 minutes or so that we still had left before it was supposed to leave. JL wrote in her travel journal, Katie took a nap and Marty and Rachael talked and laughed and sang and danced the 20 minutes away. Once we got moving, we weren’t able to do any of those things anymore because we were all trying to keep from getting sick on the windy mountain roads. After an hour or so, we finally made it back to our wonderful hotel and not a moment too soon.. Our unsettled stomachs were very thankful. We caught up on emails and such and headed to bed to rest up for our Roman adventure the next day.

XOXO J&K&M&R

Another apology

2010-04-11T15:23:00.003-04:00

So, folks, we know you've been wondering where we've been and if we're still alive. Don't worry, we are. Unfortunately, the internet in Italy is not so alive. Believe it when we say we've suffered blog withdrawal right along with you folks back home. We're in Spain now, so things are lookin' up! We are working on catching up as well as getting pictures uploaded to a website where you can look at them all. We'll be working on that and we'll get back to you with a link when it's done. For now, enjoy our trip through Cinque Terre and the first part of our stay Sorrento. We're also working on a couple of fun posts about the hostels we've stayed in and what we think of them as well as the different tours we've taken. We're going to go travel now, buh-bye.

XOXO K&R

Sorrento, Part One

2010-04-11T15:21:00.005-04:00

(Sunday, April 4 - Tuesday, April 6)

Happy Easter! We woke up on Easter Sunday and started to make our way toward Sorrento. We hopped on a train to La Spezia then on a train to Rome and from there we took a train to Naples (so technically we were in Rome for Easter). While traveling, we mapped out the rest of our trip. We decided we would look into cancelling our last night in Sorrento so that we could make it to Rome by Wednesday, spend two days there then start making our way to Spain. Woo hoo!

On the train to Naples we met a couple from Utah who were traveling around Italy. They were also bound for Sorrento so once we got to Naples we stayed with them to try to figure out how to get to Sorrento. We had been told Easter Sunday was a good day to travel because there would be less traffic (like Christmas is for Jews and Asians). Well, that proved to be true until we hit Naples. There is a metro line that connects the Naples train station to Sorrento that runs hourly every day - except Easter. So we journeyed outside to find the bus to Sorrento. While searching, Rachael got yelled at by an angry Italian man and our Utah mom had a kid wipe something on her face. We had heard Naples was sketch but didn’t believe it until now! We searched and searched for the bus only to find that it also does not run to Sorrento on Easter and that the next best option would be to catch a bus to the Naples International Airport and catch a bus that leaves for Sorrento at 7:30 pm from there. By this point it was about 3pm so we hopped on a bus and made our way to the airport where we waited. And waited and waited. The bus finally arrived so we hopped aboard and rode to Sorrento. It’s usually an hour bus ride but the traffic was so backed up because of Easter it took about 2 and a half hours!

Katie was a real home sick that day and had been really hoping to find internet all day. This was the first time she was not with her family for Easter so she really wanted to find some internet so that she could Skype with her family and find out what the Easter Bunny brought her. We finally made it to Sorrento and found our hostel. They wouldn’t let us cancel our last night, they had no wifi, but one computer with Skype and a video camera that had been broken earlier that day. We got up to our room and it was tiny. With 2 sets of bunk beds and 2 singles. Katie took the laptop and went in search of some internet so she could Skype her fam while Rachael went to get some dinner. Katie was finally successful. Turns out, the Easter Bunny got us a night at a bed and breakfast in Sorrento for Wednesday night! We were super excited but a little stressed since we had already tried to cancel Wednesday night at our hostel and had made plans to go to Rome that day, but no worries! We would make it work. We were so exhausted after our 12 hour travel day that we went upstairs and went to sleep.

When we woke up Monday morning, we found that our bathroom had no toilet paper and the door to the shower was no longer attached. After traveling for 6 weeks in staying nothing but hostels, this was by far the worse and least accommodating that we had visited yet. That bed and breakfast for Wednesday was starting to sound like heaven! After speaking to the management, we left and went to go and see Pompeii. Monday is also a holiday for all of Italy so the metro to Pompeii was packed! Once we got there, we walked around and explored the ruins for a couple of hours.

We then went to grab some lunch then made our way back to our hostel. We then went to walk around downtown Sorrento, did some window shopping then ate some dinner. We headed back to the hostel and went to sleep. We woke up Tuesday morning and headed to the Isle of Capri. Capri is an island off the coast of Sorrento with some fabulous views of the Mediterranean. We had just missed a boat there so we bought tickets for the next one and went to grab some lunch. It was delish!

We finished lunch just in time to hop on the boat to Capri. In retrospect, that probably was not a good idea to do on a full stomach but we made it there just fine. Once on Capri we walked around for a bit and decided to do a boat tour of the island after our food and our stomachs settled so we hopped on the tram to go up to check out the rest of the island.

We walked around and window shopped up there. Katie found a cool little icing gizmo to help her decorate petits fours. We walked some more then decided it was time for an afternoon cocktail. Katie got herself a margarita and Rachael got herself a strawberry something. It was just what we needed. After our drinkaydrinks we walked around a bit more then headed back down to do a boat tour. We got there just in time to find the last tour returning. Turns out we missed it by about an hour. Oh well. We then decided this would be a good time to check out the beaches on Capri. We walked around and found that there was no sand, just rocks that had been weathered and were so soft from the ocean. It was really cool to listen to the sound of the waves rolling in and out as it moved the rocks - it sounded like a rain stick. Katie then began to find really cool pieces of glass that had been weathered down by the ocean so we made it our mission to find as many as we could! After doing that for awhile, we realized that the second to last boat was leaving soon and that we should try to be on it so we made our way to the pier and hopped aboard. Once back to Sorrento, we hiked back up to the downtown area and had dinner at a great little restaurant. We each ordered iced cappuccinos and enjoyed them so much we decided to eat dinner there too. It was delish! We did some more window shopping and saw tons of art with inlayed wood - apparently it’s kinda big here in Sorrento.

After walking around we headed back to the hostel to do some last minute things on the internet before heading to the bed and breakfast the next day. We found some free internet and Katie skyped her mom, Joy real quick. Turns out JL and Rachael’s mom, Marty, were at Starbucks together getting some coffee. They all chatted for a bit, catching up on the events from the past couple of days and we told them how excited we were about the B&B the next day. After hanging up with them, we continued to check email and stuff. Just before we went to bed, Rachael got a text from her dad saying that Marty's cell phone was not working and that if we needed anything to text him. No problem! We went to sleep and woke up the next day then headed to the bed and breakfast!

XOXO K&R

The Cinque Trail

2010-04-11T15:18:00.007-04:00

(Thursday, April 1 - Saturday, April 3)

We checked out of our hostel Thursday morning and headed to Mario and Jessica’s hotel. We dropped our bags off and made our way past the Duomo and to the Uffizi Gallery. There was a really long line since the doors had not even opened yet so we decided to let line dwindle down a bit and check out the Ponte Vecchio bridge and the Pitti Palace (it looks like a big fort). Once we found the Palace, we saw on a map that some cool gardens were nearby so we decided to go and check those out too. We made it to the Boboli Gardens to find that there was a 10 Euro entry fee. For a bunch of plants? No thanks, we‘ve got kudzu! We turned around then headed back toward the Uffizi Gallery to check and see how the line was looking now that it was open. We got there only to find that there was now a 2 hour wait time to get inside. Pssh, we got a train to catch to Cinque Terre, yo! Sorry ‘bout ya, Uffizi.

We made our way back to Mario and Jessica’s hotel and Mario ran over to the train station to check on train times while the rest of us went to email our new pal, Pall, our Cinque Terre expert and also use the time to research hostels. In our email to Pall, we said that we were planning to spend the next 2 nights in Cinque Terre and would book a hostel before we left. We sent the email and got to talking with Jessica and totally forgot to look up hostels! By the time Mario got back, it was getting close to go-time so we packed up our things and planned on finding a hostel via internet or via Pall once we arrived. We got to the train station and bought our tickets and had about 25 minutes to kill so we each split up to get some lunch to take on the train. Mario and Jessica went to a sandwich shop in the station while the Woodmere Gang headed to those loyal golden arches yet again. Bah dah bah bah bah - we’re lovin’ it! Rachael’s line seemed to be going faster so Katie went ahead to grab seats on the train with Mario and Jessica while Rachael was left on food transport duty. The line took for-ever and by the time she ordered and got their food, she only had 5 minutes left! Fortunately, Mickey D’s has had the foresight to create big bags to hold the food and drinks, making it easier to run through train stations…which is exactly what Rachael did. So, imagine if you will, Rachael, with her big ‘ol backpack, running through the Florence train station, ticket in one hand, a bag fulla sunshine in the other, sprinting and dodging fellow travelers, leaping over baby strollers and midgets and just when she stops to catch her breath, she feels someone taking her food - it’s Mario! It’s become a relay race of Olympic torch proportions! We ran and ran and made it to the train just in the nick of time. We ate our lunch on the train, napped a bit, and checked our email on Rachael’s phone real quick to see that Pall had emailed us back. He said that he lived in Riomaggiore and to give him a holler once we got in.

We changed trains in Sarzana to head to Cinque Terre. We saw that our stop in Riomaggiore was only one stop away so we stood up and collected our things and stood in the exit pod to wait when all of a sudden, there was a break in the tunnel and on the left we caught the most beautiful view of the ocean! You could hear everyone in the train car gasp in awe. We stood with cameras ready, hoping to get another glimpse of that brilliant blue but our train went back into another a tunnel, so we only got little flashes. Our train finally stopped in Riomaggiore and as soon as we got off the train, we had another stunning view of the Mediterranean.

After snapping a couple of photos, we called up Pall to let him know we were at the train station and to see if he could meet up with us to discuss what we could do while here. Turns out he lives pretty much across the street from the train station and could see the ocean too. We met up and told him that we didn’t get a chance to book a place to stay yet and asked if he could help us. He called up some friends of his and couldn’t seem to get in contact with anyone, so we sent Mario and Katie to the Internet café at the train station to research hotels and hostels while Rachael and Jessica stayed to chat with Pall. Turns out, Pall lived in Sarasota too so he and Jessica had lots to talk about. Katie and Mario returned about 30 minutes later with defeated faces. Turns out, it’s hard to book a place in Cinque Terre the Thursday before Easter! All of Italy actually has a four day weekend during Easter - they get that Friday and Monday off. It’s big vacation time for them and we’re in a big vacation area. Things were not looking up for our gang. Pall made one last phone call to a friend who finally did pick up. Turns out he had 8 beds available and would let us stay (hurray!) We hiked and hiked up all 50 steps to Antony’s apartment. He lives on the top floor of a building in Riomaggiore and has converted the two rooms below his into a dorm. We dropped our stuff off, freshened up a bit, and met Pall downstairs to start touring around his hometown. He took us down to the Riomaggiore marina which had tons of little boats and a fantastic view of the ocean.

We then went to grab a little bite to eat where Pall told us about the different trails we could hike with or without him. He said that the lower trail is easier but is packed with tourists. He prefers the more difficult trail that is much higher up where you usually don’t see another soul for miles. After eating, Pall showed us around some more. We went to some great lookout points around the village and took lots of pics.

We ended up back near our “hostel” and decided to meet back up with Pall for dinner in Manarola at a restaurant he kept raving about. We had about 2 hours to kill and we were all exhausted after running around Florence that morning so we decided it would be a great time to nap. So we did. And it was awesome. We got going and met Pall over by the Riomaggiore train station and we all walked to Manarola. That part of the trail is all paved and wide enough for baby strollers and runners and is part of the Cinque Trail (as we have named it). It was an easy 20-25 minute walk.

We eventually made our way to Il Porticciolo, a restaurant near the bay of Manarola. Pall kept saying that we have to try the seafood here because it’s the best. We ordered an appetizer sampler plate full of swordfish, mussels, octopus, cuttlefish, anchovies (one in lemon and the other super salty) and garlic cloves that were mild enough to be eaten whole. We loved it! After enjoying our delicious appetizers, and finishing our first bottle of wine, we ordered another bottle of vino and some delicious spaghetti pesto. Pesto actually comes from the Cinque Terre region, so if there is any place to get you some good pesto, it’s Cinque Terre. While dining, Katie noticed that at the table behind us, there was an American family. One of their kids, about 10 years old, was dressed head to toe in green. Green scarf, green hat, green shirt, green pants, green sunglasses. We named her Kermit.

However, we began to love Kermit even more when she opened her mouth and with an awesome lisp said “Mom, I think I’m gonna have the thpagetthi with peth-to.” WIN. The best was probably once she got her food, saw the amazingly green pesto spaghetti on her plate and said (read it with a lisp y’all - it‘s the quote of the day)

“Mom, this peth-to has pine nut-th in it. It-th not edible”

We just about died trying to contain our laughter. After enjoying our pesto spaghetti AND pine nuts, which were quite edible, we ordered dessert. Boy are we glad we did. Mario and Jess ordered the tiramisu while we ordered some delicious thing with Nutella. However, Mario and Jessica’s tiramisu was the best. Not just any good tiramisu - this was the best tiramisu any of us had ever tasted. We had found THE PERFECT tiramisu - who knew it was hiding in Manarola? Everyone had to order another round. Overall, it was probably the best dinner we have had yet on our trip, if not our lives. Everything was delicious! We went to pay and bought Pall his dinner as a thank you for showing us around town and finding us a place to lay our heads. We made our way back to Riomaggiore and bid adieu to Pall then went to sleep. We woke up early and decided to take Pall’s advice to do the lower trails through Cinque Terre. We got moving, each packed some water, Gatorade and a bottle of wine to share (just in case), and were out the door by 9am. We grabbed some croissants to go and started walking. We made it to Manarola in no time at all, it was a really easy walk and all paved.

We walked around to some other parts of Manarola so that we could see it in the daytime, then started to make our way to the next town of Corniglia. We learned real quick that the path between Riomaggiore and Manarola is the only paved portion of the Cinque Trail. The path to Corniglia was all dirt and a lot of uphill with a beautiful view of the Mediterranean! Once we got closer to the town, there was a point where you could either take a bus up to the town or hike up 365 stairs.

Mario and Rachael were feeling energetic and did the stair master together while Jessica and Katie took the bus. Once we all met back up, we took a gelato break together then began to make our way to Vernazza for lunch. We walked pass vineyards and olive tree groves and made our way to the top of a lookout point and found an amazing view of Corniglia behind us.

We kept hiking, and hiking and hiking and finally made it to the down hill portion toward Vernazza. To celebrate, and because we were in desperate need of some magical juice, we sat down and cracked open the bottle of wine we had brought with us. It was exactly what we needed to make it down through the last half hour of our hike into Vernazza.

We made it down into Vernazza and had only one thing on our mind: FOOD. We picked up some foccacia bread with tomatoes and pesto and munched on that while trying to track down a restaurant. We eventually made our way to the Vernazza marina and found a restaurant where we could eat outside. We dined on bruschetta, pesto and pasta. It was delicious! After the successful tiramisu we had the previous night, we just had to try this restaurant’s version. It was a huge disappointment. Right then and there we decided we had to go back to Il Porticciolo in Manarola for dinner and eat their tiramisu again. After lunch, we decided we needed to let our food digest and take a quick power nap in the sun at the marina Vernazza.

While napping, Mario and Rachael got to talking and realized that we were losing Katie and Jessica quick and we had to get them to hike to the last village no matter what! After about 15 minutes, we woke up Katie and Jessica to get moving again. We took some quick pictures around the village then started making our way up one mo’ time.

We made our way past the vineyards and olive trees, past the cliffs and valleys, past the magnificent ocean views, over the hills and through the woods. Rachael was trailing in the back taking pictures and in the distance, with a huge valley in between them, she spotted Katie! Rachael did her best hybrid crow-rooster impersonation and “kaw-kawed” at Katie from across the valley. Katie heard and “kaw-kawed” back at Rachael. It was a beautiful thing.

We continued hiking and got to some portions of the trail that were just wide enough for one foot, giant boulders that rolled after us if we touched golden monkeys, pits of snakes and perilous cliffs until finally, we could see in the distance the beaches of Monterosso. Ok, that’s a bit exaggerated, but there were definitely some portions of the trail that tested our Indiana Jones capabilities, but don’t worry - no snakes or monkeys.

We got to the end of the trail and Rachael was the last one out. Jessica and Katie were there, singing the Rocky theme for all that were exiting the trail. The three of us headed toward the train station to find Mario who had left earlier to purchase his and Jessica’s train tickets to Milan for the next day. While sitting and waiting, we examined Katie’s awesome Merrel knock-off shoes that she purchased at Bass Pro for $25. They were broken. The Cinque Trail devoured Katie’s shoes!

We met up with Mario and went on to explore Monterosso and had some smoothies and piña coladas from a guy that looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger and was a huge country music fan. He was rocking out to Alan Jackson when we came in and he and Katie immediately bonded. After the bonding, we walked around and found a neighborhood with some sweet houses and even better views of Cinque Terre and the Mediterranean. We found a good spot and took a group pic of the 4 of us.

We then made our way back to the town and decided to go and eat dinner again at Il Porticciolo in Manarola. We saw that the train to Manarola would not be leaving for another hour so we went back to see Arnold and split some beers.

We hopped on the train to Manarola and were talking about what an amazing day we had. The weather was perfect! Blue skies all day, not too hot with just the right breeze to cool you off when you needed it. What is amazing about the Cinque Terre hike is that each view you see is more beautiful than the one you saw 5 minutes before. Every turn in the trail, every single view and the sound of the ocean crashing on the rocks below was just absolutely breathtaking. Everyone that we ran into on the trail was in the best mood - and how could you not be? We were looking at the most beautiful and amazing views that we had ever seen! If people were singing a song, we’d sing along with them as we crossed paths. Needless to say, the Rocky theme was the most popular by the day’s end. If someone needed a hand climbing down some stairs, you helped. If anyone had a camera out you offered to take pictures. It was the most perfect, beautiful, blue sky, no clouds in sight, kind of day and we loved it. We made it to Manarola and grabbed a seat at Il Porticciolo. The owner even recognized us from the night before! We ordered our food (which was delish) but we were all really holding out for that fabulous tiramisu.

We each ordered our own and were in heaven. We even ordered a fifth for us to share- it was that good. After eating, we walked back to Riomaggiore and hiked up to our “hostel” and passed out. It was a perfect day.

We woke up Saturday morning and bid farewell to Mario and Jessica (we miss you guys!), packed up our things and then headed off to the train station to research hostels in Sorrento. We could not find a single place available for Saturday night anywhere in all of Italy. Who knew the day before Easter everything would be sold out in Italy? By this point it was about 10:30 am. We went back to our “hostel” and asked the owner if we could stay for one more night. He said of course, so we went back into our room and went back to sleep…until 3pm! I guess we needed it! We then woke up and hopped on a train to Vernazza to go eat at the restaurant where we had had lunch the day before. We each ordered bruschetta and the pesto lasagna. We went to explore Vernazza a bit more then headed up to the train platform to hop on the next train to Monterosso so we could go see Arnold and his smoothies again. The trains do not stop here as often. While we were waiting in the platform, we were both hit with a big ‘ol wave of exhaustion and decided to head back to Riomaggiore and just veg for the rest of the day. Apparently our bodies were mad at us for the beatings we gave them while on the Cinque Trail! We went back and stayed in for the rest of the night then went to sleep.

The Woodmere Gang grows!

2010-04-07T16:44:00.004-04:00

Just a quick update:

So we were writing you guys an update about Cinque Terre and Sorrento when some of our favorite people walked in - our mommies! They totally surprised us! We're super excited that they are here and will be joining us on our adventure for the next 10 days. Enjoy the video below!

Our moms made us promise that we will update the last couple of days so that you guys can catch up with our adventures. Don't worry - we will!

We're gonna go party with our moms now. See y'all later!

XOXO J&K&M&R

We (kinda) apologize

2010-04-04T17:29:00.000-04:00

Dear Woodmere Gang fans,

Sorry to leave you hangin’, but we’re really not so sorry that we haven’t updated in a whole week. We had so much fun in Florence, did a tour around Tuscany where we made lots of new friends and made it to Cinque Terre where internet doesn’t exist. We hiked through all 5 villages of Cinque Terre on Friday and chilled Saturday, letting our bodies recoup after the beating we gave them. While chillin’, we typed up two whole new posts for you to read. So read on and enjoy! We’ll begin where we left off back before we left Venice for Florence. This will make things a little out of order, so we'll dumb it down for you: Read "Florence" followed by "A Special Day in Tuscany". Then check back some other time for pictures because once again, we didn't add any. Also, we'll try and catch up in the next few days, but we make no promises. Sorrento calls!

A Special Day in Tuscany

2010-04-04T17:20:00.005-04:00

We got picked up at 7:30am from our hostel to begin our “Special Day in Tuscany.” We keep putting that in quotes because, A) it’s funny, and B) that was the name of the tour. We made it very clear when we booked it that if it wasn’t special, we didn’t want to do it. The van that picked us up took us to the meeting point for all of the other folks on the tour. It took everyone a little while to get there but we finally grew to a sizeable group of 18. We made friends with the couple behind us and found out that they were both in the Navy and that Matt was stationed in Sicily (tough life) while Amy was stationed back in the States. They both had leave so they decided to take a romantic trip around Italy. When we finally got going, we learned that the tour was going to be conducted in both English and Spanish, which proved to be very interesting. The tour guide was Italian, but she would say everything in English first, followed by Spanish. According to Katie, her Spanish was way better than her English so Katie got to do a teeny bit of translating for Rachael. We were on the bus for about an hour or so before we reached the town of Pisa, as in Leaning Tower of. You might have heard of it. We had an hour to check it out and take all the funny/obligatory photos.

Silly Rachael, that ain't what we're looking for!

This is!

There were lots of booths set up selling all sorts of fun Leaning Tower souvenirs. Katie’s personal favorite was the Leaning Tower mug that was, in fact, leaning. While taking photos, we ran into a couple that we recognized from our bus and swapped cameras so we could photograph each other. We’d heard the girl call her boyfriend Mario, but we didn’t know her name so we began referring to her as Luigi. We chatted a lot on our way back to the bus and learned that they are engaged and Mario lives in Sarasota and Luigi (aka, Jessica) is studying in Bristol, England right now. She was on spring break so Mario came over to visit for a couple weeks. We used our entire hour to take pictures and ended up with quite a few winners. Let us know what you think:

After Pisa, we drove for a little over an hour to the town of San Gimignano where we had a small Tuscan lunch and wine tasting. We were seated at the end of a long table with Mario and Luigi and another couple who we found out were married and live outside of Washington DC. We each got to taste four different wines and we had a light lunch that was basically a sampler of bruschetta, salami, prosciutto, a couple of cheeses, some sort of liver paté and a pretty good bean porridge thingy.

However, there was a little lost in translation. Prior to our meal, our tour guide had been explaining all of these delicious Tuscan specialties before we arrived for our lunch in San Gimignano. One of the items she described in mouth-watering detail was a grilled steak that Katie thought we were supposed to be served. Turns out she was wrong, that little paper thin sliver of salami was our steak. A light lunch it was for Katie who decided she’d better save room for the steak! Oops. After lunch, we set out with our newfound friends to check out the town of San Gimignano, also called the Town of a Thousand Towers. There used to be a lot more towers, but there were only 14 remaining. We learned that each family would build a tower and the taller the tower was, the richer the family was. It turned into a big competition to see who could build the biggest and best tower so they were pretty spectacular. We also found a neat lookout point where we were able to take some great photos of the Tuscan countryside.

After our photo op, Rachael, realizing we were in the Chianti region, went in search of wine to purchase while Katie went on a hunt for gelato in the few minutes we had before meeting back up with our group. Both missions were accomplished and everyone was happy!

When we boarded the bus, we had about an hour drive to the town of Siena. Most of us took this opportunity to snooze. When we arrived in Siena, we met up with a tour guide who showed us around her town. We went to the Torre del Mangia in the Piazza del Campo where they hold the Palio horse race every year. She told us the story of the horse race and then we booked it to the cathedral because it was almost closing time. We got there just in time for the cathedral’s bouncers to tell us it was a no-go. Things closed early this week because of Holy Week. So much for that tour!

We still had about an hour before we had to meet up with our group so what were we supposed to do? Shop and eat gelato, of course! We worked our way back to the “square” (it’s actually in the shape of a seashell) where we were supposed to meet up later and found Mario and Luigi sitting in the warm sunshine so we decided to join them. While chatting and waiting for our meeting time, we learned that Mario and Luigi had planned to go to Venice the next day but heard how expensive it was and were considering a change of plans. They’d heard how wonderful Cinque Terre was (so had we) and were toying with the idea of going there instead. Well, we knew we wanted to do Cinque Terre, but we were going to wait and do it while making our way from Italy to Spain. We told them we’d go with them to Cinque Terre if they decided to do that instead of Venice. After chatting for a bit, it was time to meet our group again so they told us they’d get back to us on that plan.

While walking back to the bus, we chatted with our DC buddies, Maria and her husband. Before boarding the bus and heading back to Florence, someone had the brilliant idea for all six of us (DC couple, Sarasota couple and Woodmere Gang) to go get dinner together. We had about a two-hour drive back to Florence during which we mostly snoozed . When we got back to Florence, it was getting dark and brrr-cold, so we all decided to run to our hotels/hostels and layer up before dinner. We all met at Mario and Luigi’s hotel and headed out to dinner. We found a neat (and CHEAP) restaurant that Mario had found the day before so we ate there and all shared a bottle of wine. We had such a good time together that we didn’t want the night to end so we all got gelato together and went back to Mario and Luigi’s hotel to hang out for a bit and Facebook each other. Now our friendships are official! Maria and her husband were heading to Venice fairly early the next morning, so they decided to call it a night. We all hugged and promised to call if we were ever in the DC area and said our goodbyes. (We miss you already, guys!) At this point, Mario and Jessica (we knew her well enough to call her by her name now) finally made the decision to go to Cinque Terre instead of Venice, so it was time to plan! Our planning consisted of almost emailing Pall (the tour “guyd” we met in Florence Sunday night), checking train times and thinking about finding a place to stay once we got there. There were still a couple of things we all wanted to see in Florence before heading out the next day, such as the Ponte Vecchio bridge (by day) and the Uffizzi Gallery so we decided to meet at Mario and Jessica’s hotel with all of our luggage around 8:15 the next morning, leave our bags in their room while we all did some last minute sightseeing together and then grab our bags before heading to the train station. We bid them adieu for the evening, went back to our hostel and packed up our backpacks and a new suitcase full of wine and goodies so that we could have an easy start early in the morning.

Florence!

2010-04-04T17:16:00.004-04:00

We woke up in Venice on Sunday and packed up our things in time to check out of our hotel. We ate breakfast there, a tasty mix of toast and cereal (nothing fancy). Katie also took the opportunity to re-stock her snack supply with a delicious snack-cake thing that was basically like a Swiss Cake Roll without the chocolate peely stuff on the outside or the cream on the inside. Whatever it was, it was good. While we were eating, we started to hear singing in the distance. What could it be? All of a sudden a parade comes right by the hotel window where we are eating! People playing guitars, lots of singing, and the carrying of palm branches. We had completely forgotten that it was Palm Sunday! We’re pretty bad about keeping up with what day it is at all. As this parade made its way by our hotel, there was a police escort for someone dressed up in a lot of red whom we could only assume to be a cardinal or somebody that was kind of a big deal.

After the parade made its way by, we had finished our breakfast and it was time to hit the road one mo’ time. We took a water taxi back to the train station where we activated our Italy/Spain rail passes and reserved seats for our train to Florence. After taking care of that business, we had about 45 minutes to kill before our train left, so we decided this would be a great time for some gelato! We each got a cone and sat down on the front steps of the Venice train station, soaking up that good ol’ Italian sunshine and watched the boats and gondolas pass by. Once it got closer to go-time, we hopped aboard the train and into our cabin, tossed our junk on the floor and passed out. Our train got going and eventually stopped in Bolgna for a long time where it picked up a ton of people. Katie was still snoozing but Rachael sat up unable to sleep, just in time to watch a family pass by our car. A little kid, no more than 6 years old, passed by and saw Katie snoozing and smacked on the window right where Katie’s head was resting, thus waking Katie up. Rachael found this hilarious. Katie… did not. Soon after, we had to readjust and clean up our cabin for our 5 other travel mates that also had seats in our cabin. One of the couples in the cabin with us had a little kid about 4 years old. Not knowing if he was going to be a crier or not, and already aware of Katie’s half-awake unhappy mood, Rachael offered Katie whatever food she had left in her bag to prevent the Katie monster from coming out to play, aka, using the 4 year old’s head as a soccer ball. Thankfully, the train ride with our new cabin mates proved to be uneventful and eventually made its way to our stop in Florence. Once there, we realized that we were actually at the wrong station and were one stop away from the train station we needed in Florence. We hopped on the next train and made our way to the correct station, Florence Santa Maria Novella. From there we walked to our hostel. Our hostel was sweet! It had its own restaurant, bar, and pool! You could even sign up for spa services! We dropped our stuff off in our room, unpacked a bit, met some of our roomies then went downstairs to grab some dinner. After dinner, we left to check out Florence. We walked around for a bit then found a gelato place. We can never turn down gelato! While ordering, we bumped into some of our roomies who were ordering some gelato too. After paying (way too much, might we add) we all headed out together to go and explore the town.

After checking out the Duomo, and the Ponte Vecchio bridge, we attempted to go and find the Synagogue Rachael had visited in high school. We got a little lost so we decided to head back to the Duomo. Once there, we found a cute little restaurant and the four of us sat down and split a bottle of wine. We were all feeling pretty sleepy after the vino so we decided to head back to the hostel. While walking, and feeling a lil’ tipsy, Katie was sharing with our hostel roomies our new philosophy on hygiene. We don’t shower or change our clothes everyday, but we make sure to at least change our underwear. We looked around and realized that we were being quite loud and that some people behind us must have heard our whole conversation. Katie said, “I hope nobody heard us or that they at least don’t speak English.” As she looked to the older gentleman behind us, he began speaking in Italian. Katie says “Ok good” (thinking we’re in the clear, that he did not understand our conversation) until of course, the man continues the conversation in perfect English. We’ve been caught! We got to talking and turns out that our Italian impersonator, Pall, is from Rhode Island and now resides in Riomaggiore and does tours around Cinque Terre. He gave us his website info (www.trekguyd.com) and told us to give him a holler if we make our way there. He says he usually meets up with people at the train station and over a cup of coffee talks about their budget, what they would like to see and experience and makes it happen. He can also help them find a place to stay. We definitely wrote down his info and bid adieu for the evening. We made our way back to our hostel and went to sleep.

We slept in until about 10:30am on Monday then went downstairs to grab some breakfast (which is served until noon - real good sign of an awesome hostel. They really know their clientele!). After breakfast we decided to check out where we needed to be that night for our Seder. We wandered through a market, checking out all of the touristy trinkets and eventually found the Chabad House in Florence and the Synagogue.

The Chabad House is just up the street from the Synagogue and Ruth’s, a restaurant where Rachael had some awesome hummus and falafel when she visited Florence in high school. However, we were too full from our late breakfast to check out Ruth’s and the Synagogue was closed on Monday and Tuesday because of Passover so we decided to start making our way back to the Duomo. While en route, we passed by a leather store. Katie was wanting to purchase herself a sweet leather jacket while in Florence so we went inside to check it out.

There we met Adam, who was delighted to meet us and help Katie spend her money. He says that his favorite part of his job is to help the women zip up their jackets (aye-oooohh!). Katie found the perfect jacket and wanted to check out some other leather goods to bring home as gifts (get excited, boys!). Adam obliged and cut her a really sweet deal on her jacket and the other items she got. He was totally hamming up his Italian accent the whole time (which we loved), crying “Mamma mia!” every so often. He told us that the first sell of the day brings him good luck and would not let us leave the store until we both gave his a kiss on the cheek. We loved hanging out with Adam and Katie loves her new jacket! If you’re ever in Florence, definitely go visit Adam and he’ll hook ya up!

We then decided it would be a good time to head back to the hostel, drop off our new goodies and to start getting ready for Seder. We finally had a chance to whip out the dresses we had brought with us!

We made it to the Seder and were the first ones there. We grabbed a seat but later moved to go sit with some other fellow Americans. There, we met Liz, who is also backpacking around Europe. Turns out Liz was staying at the same hostel as us and her travel buddy, Christine had stayed in for the evening. The service began and the leader of the Seder, a guy who could not have been older than 20, conducted the Seder in English and Hebrew. A Seder is a service and dinner conducted on the first and second nights of Passover where we tell the story of Moses and the Jewish people leaving Egypt. In Hebrew, Seder means “Order.” There are several parts of the Seder that contain different songs and traditions to commemorate Moses and the Jewish people leaving Egypt. There are basically two types of Jewish holidays: if the event was a tragedy and several people died, Jews fast, but if the event was successful and everyone lived happily ever after, Jews mark the occasion by eating and drinking - a lot. Rachael likes to think of Passover as a little bit of both, because once the Seder begins, you have to wait for what seems like an eternity before you can eat! It was an interesting experience and very different compared to the Seder Rachael’s family hosts every year (they start it off with a shot of Kosher for Passover tequila!). The songs and prayers were the same. It was pretty cool to sing “The 4 Questions” and “Dayenu” with so many different people from all over the world in Florence! Katie was very upset at this part, though. She wanted to know who that poor Enu was and why he had to die! She was kidding. “Dayenu” in Hebrew means "it would have been enough for us." They served some Passover classics such as gefilta fish and matzah ball soup (don’t worry Marty - yours is waaay better). Katie ate all of her gefilta fish but out of pure tradition, both Rachael and Liz refused to even look at it! Katie was severely disappointed in her Jewish buddies’ lack of adventure and didn‘t shut up about it for the rest of the night. Once the dinner portion concluded and the “After meal” prayers began, and we saw a guy stuff an egg and matza down his pants, we decided it was time for the 3 of us to head out. We headed back to the hostel and tried to Skype Rachael’s family before their own Seder began but gave up because the internet connection was pretty crappy. We went to bed and slept in again (why? Because we’re free!) on Tuesday. Rachael woke up in time to grab some breakfast from downstairs but Katie slept in until noon (Win!). We eventually got going and headed outside to see Florence when we both got hit with a big dose of exhaustion about 5 blocks from our hostel. So we went and had a quick but super-delish lunch at Antico Mercato (it’s on Via Nazionale near Santa Maria Novella - really good!) then came back to the hostel to do some laundry and nap. Definitely a good start to Passover! After napping we booked an excursion to tour Tuscany on Wednesday. We had only booked our hostel through Tuesday night so we had to go online and book one more night at our sweet hostel since the tour would not get back into Florence until late. We went and had dinner at the hostel then came up stairs and went to sleep to get ready for our “Special day in Tuscany!”

XOXO K&R

Gnocchi? Okie Dokie!

2010-03-31T18:51:00.004-04:00

Hey friends!

Don't worry, we're alive! We've had a fun past couple of days, went to a Seder here in Florence, did laundry, and went on an excursion today to Pisa, San Gimignani and Siena.

But Woodmere Gang (you ask) where are you going next?! How is Italian matzah? Is gnocchi kosher for Passover? Are you soaking up that Tuscan sun? Did you drink Chianti? Why is that tower in Pisa so special? Does the Easter bunny exist in Italy? What are you even doing for Easter?

Well, we will answer all of those questions and more in our next post! We have an early day tomorrow. We are waking up super early and meeting our new friends Mario and Jessica (aka Luigi) and going with them to the Ufizzi Gallery then heading with them to Cinque Terre. We're super excited!

So we will blog on the train and catch you up on all of our fabulous adventures.... in our next post.

Peace ninjas!

XOXO K&R

That's amore!

2010-03-27T17:15:00.005-04:00

Well, folks, not much to say about today. We woke up this morning and grabbed a breakfast of croissants (Katie's with chocolate inside and Rachael's with vanilla creamy deliciousness) and each had a cafe latte. It took us awhile but we've learned that you have to ask for a cafe latte because if you just say "cafe" they bring you a teeny weeny cup of espresso. Same amount of caffeine, but doesn't taste good at all! Apparently normal drip coffee doesn't exist in Europe.

After our nutritious breakfast, we went to check out the Rialto Bridge by day. It's really cool! It is lined with neat shops and there are different vendors and customers all over the place. It's a really fun atmosphere. We basically walked around and window shopped all day. We had lunch around 1:30 and then went back to the store where we bought the wine stoppers yesterday and took advantage of the amazing sale they were having. We bought some more souvenirs and gifts for family and then headed back to the hotel to drop off our goodies.

When we set back out, we walked around for awhile and bumped into a group of three women that we'd spoken to on the train in yesterday. We chatted for a little while about where they were staying and what they've been up to. We learned that they were from Alaska and have basically been traveling all over Italy for a month. The Woodmere Gang was on a mission to find out about going on a gondola ride so we parted ways with our new friends. Turns out, gondola rides are stinkin' expensive!

We guess they charge it because they can, but they were asking for 80 Euro. A. RIDE. There was no way we were going to pay 40 Euro apiece so we started to walk away when the gondolier told us he'd give us a special price of 70 Euro. Ummm, NOT a deal, dude. We both decided we'd be okay with ditching our dream of going on a gondola ride. We walked off and then passed back by that bridge a little while later when the gondolier chased us down and told us he had talked to his boss and that his last offer was 60 Euro. That's 80 American dollars, folks, and equal four nights in a hostel. No way.

But then, Katie had a brilliant idea! Alaska could make our dreams come true! We knew which direction our three new Alaksan friends were heading and we thought that maybe, just maybe, we'd be able to find them again and talk them into splitting the gondola with us. We searched every corner of St. Mark's Square (joker's big, btw) and up and down the maze of streets and canals, high and low. We were both on the verge of giving up, when lo and behold, in the distance, at an ATM, shining like the Holy Grail, we spot them! "ALASKA!" we yell, over and over! "ALASKA!" And we run to them in slow mo, epic movie-style. Okay, a lot of that sounds like an exaggeration but we did yell "ALASKA!" a few times upon spotting them and it was basically a miracle that we found them at all. We presented them with our idea and it turns out they'd been wanting to do a gondola ride, too. It was perfect! So they followed us back to the bridge where we'd first talked to the gondolier and he wasn't there. But another gondolier was. And he was cute.

We were only able to talk this guy down to 75 Euro but we liked the idea of splitting that five ways a lot better than splitting it two ways! So we all piled in. The Alaska trio was sweet enough to yield the romantic seat for two to the Woodmere Gang, so the two of us cuddled up real sweet. We went through some of the small canals and then entered the Grand Canal and passed under the Rialto Bridge. We got to see Marco Polo's house and also where Giacomo Casanova used to live.

We were sad when our gondola ride ended, but felt it was definitely worth the 15 Euro we each paid. We probably wouldn't pay much more than that, though. We chatted with the Alaska trio a little more before going our separate ways. We headed back to the hotel to drop some more things off and then set out in search of postcards and dinner.

We ended up going on a walkabout of epic proportions. We basically walked without stopping for nearly three and a half hours. It started off slow. We were just trying to find somewhere to eat that didn't cost an arm and a leg. Venice is expensive, by the way. Then, we somehow found the residential section of Venice. We didn't know it existed, but basically there was nothing. For a long time, we only saw houses and not a single souvenir shop or overpriced restaurant. Finally, when Katie could go no longer without food (she gets mean when she ain't fed, btw) we found a place that sold kebabs and pizza. Those are two offerings that are guaranteed to be cheap. So, we perched on stools for about 10 minutes to scarf down some food and then set out again. We were still pretty far from anything touristy or recognizable so we kept on walking. Finally, we found some kiosks selling junk so we figured we were headed the right direction. When we still didn't recognize anything, Rachael finally pulled out her iPhone and figured out that St. Mark's Square was a nice stretch back in the direction we'd just come. Brilliant. So, we did an about-face and finally made our way back to St. Mark's Square. At this point, we were both in dire need of wine, so we shelled out the eight and half Euro they were charging and enjoyed resting our feet after our ridiculous walkabout. One cool thing we noticed was that there were a couple of small puddles in the square that kept growing!

When we inspected them, we saw that there were holes between the cobblestones so that water can come through when the tide comes in. There are postcards that show gondolas on the square when the water gets really high! After enjoying our wine, we came back to the hotel and uploaded our photos and then hit the hay. Our plan for tomorrow: go to Florence! See ya there!

XOXO K&R

Ahhh, Venice...

2010-03-26T17:33:00.007-04:00

We had to wake up at the crack of 8:30 this morning to get all of our things together in time to check out of our hostel at 10am. It was rough after sleeping in the previous morning, but we made it. We didn’t have to return our rental car until noon, so we drove down to the touristy area of Lugano for breakfast. We headed to Hertz to return the car around 11:30 and remembered that the train we wanted to take to Milan left at 11:48, so we hightailed it up the hill to the train station and made it just in time! We didn’t realize, however, that we should have had a reservation for this train. Luckily, it only cost 8 Euro apiece on board so we paid the ticket guy and settled in. The ride to Milan was only a little over an hour so we’d barely gotten comfortable when they announced that we were arriving. We were both really tired and wishing we’d taken advantage of that train ride and napped. It was raining in Milan and neither of us could really get excited about walking around the city for awhile before grabbing our next train so we walked around the block and then hopped on a train to Venice. Turns out we also needed a reservation for that train and it ended up costing us 18 Euro apiece. That train ride was about three hours but it was packed so neither of us could really sleep on that one either. When we finally got to Venice, we had no clue how to get to our hotel but we knew it was near St. Mark’s Square. So, we hopped on a water taxi that took us to a stop right outside the square.

We kinda turned the wrong way and took the scenic route, but we eventually found the square and realized what a sweet location out hotel is in. It’s only 2 blocks from St. Mark’s Square! We got really lucky with this place!

We have a “dorm” room with one other roommate (Hey, Nina!) who is only here for one night. After we dropped our bags off in our room, we went out to find some food. We wandered around a bit and found several little restaurants with similar kinds of pasta and pizza dishes. They were each a little too pricey for what we were willing to pay for a little dinner when off in the distance, shining like a beacon - the BK Lounge. We both looked at each other and decided that Whoppers were exactly what we needed. It’s funny, neither of us really eat McDonald’s or Burger King while back home but it seems to be our comfort food of choice while abroad. After dining on our delicious Whoppers, we headed off to the ATMs to get some more Euros (all we had left on us at this point were Czech Krowns and Swiss Francs). While there, Katie spotted a cool store in the little square that was having a sweet sale. We headed over there and each got some cool Venetian glass wine stoppers. We then went window shopping for a bit around all the cute little shops lining the streets. Rachael was excited to see commedia masks lining the walls of every store! We then continued to walk around some more and made our way to the Rialto Bridge.

Katie said that the real one looked cooler than the one in Vegas. We then made our way back through Saint Mark’s Square. It was super foggy and misty. The way the light was bouncing off everything made it look so mystical.

What’s so cool about Venice is that it’s like a maze! You can wind all around these little alleyways and streets and then all of a sudden you come to a bridge and there’s water and a little gondola sailing by. It’s really cool. We’re excited to see it all tomorrow in the daylight.

XOXO K&R

Our travel map

2010-03-25T19:24:00.009-04:00

For some reason, you can't click on this to make it larger. If you save the image to your computer, you should be able to zoom in on it once it's saved and you view it from there.

Here's a map of where we've been and where we're going and how little sense it makes. Even Indiana Jones would have a headache!

The red and blue lines are where we've been. Red is our main travel and blue marks the day trips that we've taken from where we were staying. The green lines are where we plan to head next. Changes are always a possibility, so we'll try and keep this updated.

Locar-no you didn't!

2010-03-25T17:14:00.006-04:00

This morning, we took full advantage of not having to share our room with anyone and slept until about 11:oo. We both showered (in the morning!) and decided to take advantage of our rental car and drive to Locarno on Lake Maggiore here in Switzerland. It was about a 45 minute drive. We got there and parked our car next to the train station. It was so rainy out! Our first order of business was to find some food. We found a buffet restaurant across the street from the train station. It was one of those where you grab a plate and heap however much you want to eat all on one plate. However, we had a hard time deciphering how much each thing cost, so once we got to the check out we were a little upset to find out how pricey our lunch was. We ate anyway then began wandering around the town. We found lots of little cute shops and did some window shopping. We stopped by one watch store and were able to get a new battery for Rachael's watch. It's been dying and then resurrecting itself on us for the past week or so but finally kicked the bucket earlier this week. Our mission today was to find some Swiss Army knives so we headed out to find those next. Sure enough, we found a nice little knife shop that even had free engraving. They had knives in every color and style you could imagine! Rachael got herself a Leatherman Squirt (it's a cute little multi-tool that fits on your keychain!) and Katie got herself a Swiss Army Knife, the Silver Tech Lite (it has a little LED light in it). After shopping for ourselves, we also got a couple of cool ones for our loved ones at home. We hope that they'll like them! We then did some more window shopping, bought a bottle of wine to bring home (that is, of course, if it doesn't weigh us down too much, otherwise it won't make it) then went to go walk around the lake. Once it started to rain again, we decided it was about time to head back to Lugano. We got back to Lugano and took care of some hosteling business, booked our hostels for the next week, checked train times then headed out to grab some dinner. We ended up back at the restaurant we had gone to last night. The owner recognized us and asked if we wanted the same thing but we decided to try his pasta instead. It hit the spot, it was exactly what we needed. Rachael got a spaghetti with meat sauce and Katie got a spaghetti with carbonara sauce and bacon. After dinner, we headed back to the hostel to blog and upload some pics. Our plan is to have all of the pictures we've taken uploaded to Snapfish in the next few days so that all you readers can check them out. Unfortunately, it takes about three forevers to upload photos 'round these parts, so we're doing the best we can. We check out of the hostel at 10am tomorrow, return our rental car, and then hightail it to Venice!

Ciao! XOXO K&R

Some pretty pictures we took today:

Stop looking at me, Swan!

Train rides from hell. Good thing we can laugh!

2010-03-24T17:04:00.005-04:00

Pics have been added! Enjoy

We woke up yesterday morning around 8:30 so we could pack up all of our belongings and get ready to hit the road one mo’ time. We locked up our bags in the hostel lobby and set off to find the cheapest place to send one last box of goodies home. We were told that the post office around the corner had the best deal. However, when we got there, not one of the people working there spoke English. We couldn’t figure out how to communicate “we need to send a big ‘ol box to the USA” so we left and went in search of a DHL that Katie had seen the other day. We look and see on our map that we will end up passing our Bohemian Bagel. Ohhh darn. We just had to run back in and get some more delicious bagel, blueberry pancake and hash brown goodness. Did we mention that they also have free refills on fountain drinks? We will truly miss Bo-Bagel.

After eating, we headed to find the DHL and shipped our box home full of our wintry clothes and some of Katie’s new Bohemian crystal dishes. The box should get there tomorrow. We didn’t need it shipped that fast but hey no biggie. We did some more wandering around Prague.

The memorial to Jan Palach

The Astronomical Clock, one last time!

A cool looking Art Nouveau Hotel

We later made our way to our hostel where we booked our next hostel in Lugano and confirmed our reservations for the Seder in Florence. We then headed for the train station around 4:30 and made it there just in time to grab our stuff from the lockers, where we had stashed some of our belongings earlier. We hurriedly ordered some Burger King to go (yum!) and made it to our train just in the nick of time, BK in hand (that’s our way!). We found our car and saw that our two other roommates had already situated themselves for the evening. On one of the bottom bunks, an older Czech woman and on one of the top bunks (that we had reserved) was a fellow American from New York who is studying in Prague. We learned fairly quickly that she was pretty chatty. She is on her way to Switzerland to meet up with her boyfriend who has been studying abroad in Australia. While we downed our Whoppers, she told us about herself and her boyfriend, what she’s studying, and how she loves musicals (she and Rachael even sang a little duet from Les Miserables together. The Woodmere Gang loves to breakout into song and dance). She also prided herself on being the little Jewish mom at her school and likes to cook for her friends for all of the major holidays. Rachael was really impressed by this since she can’t cook. Although Rachael tried throwing her own Seder last year, it would not have been successful without some fellow Jew power and the goodness of Toojays, a Jewish deli restaurant in Orlando that specializes in matzah ball soup. We hopped up onto the top bunk opposite our fellow American so we could all chat together. We began to blog when our fellow American started to eat…and drink. A whole bottle of wine. In less than an hour. By herself. We didn’t mind as our conversation grew louder and louder (though our Czech roomie probably did). We especially didn’t mind when she invited us to watch “V for Vendetta” on her laptop. It’s been awhile since we’ve watched a movie. We tried hooking up some ear buds to her computer but we couldn’t get it to work, so we just listened to it through the speakers. Although she had said that it was one of her favorite movies, our fellow American didn’t last too long. She passed out into a wine-induced stupor about 5 minutes into the movie. Despite the comatose kid next to the laptop, we continued watching the movie. Rachael had seen the movie once, but not in a very long time and Katie had never seen it so we were really getting into it. About half way through, during a really big plot turn, our roomie (still on the top bunk) begins to roll over in her wine-induced coma. Off. The. Bed. Fortunately, Katie and Rachael, in sober states, were quick on their feet - literally. All we could do to prevent her from plummeting to the floor Mufasa-style was to put our feet up against her. We were holding her up with our feet for quite some time. We also attempted to wake her up for quite some time. We finally nudged her awake and she readjusted herself to a less hazardous position. Katie and Rachael then moved her laptop to our bed so we could continue watching the movie. We got to the point where Natalie Portman’s character returns to V’s home on the 4th of November when our fellow American rolled over yet again. This time Katie and Rachael were not quick enough, and our buddy very nearly plummeted to her death (not really, but she would have gotten some bruises). Luckily, we were able to catch her well enough with our feet that she didn’t hit her head or anything. That finally woke ol’ girl up! We forgot to mention that it was so hot in our compartment on the train that she had already stripped off her shirt and was just in her bra and blue jeans. So, imagine if you will, drunk, scantily-clad American girl very nearly plummeting to her death (okay, we exaggerate) from the top bunk of a moving train while the two of us attempt to catch her with our feet without subjecting her laptop to the same fate. What a sight! This was definitely a blog-worthy moment. But just wait - it gets better, folks! When our new friend regained her balance, she found her shirt and decided to go use the bathroom. The whole time she was gone, we were laughing like crazy at what had just transpired. We had a little time to compose ourselves because it took Drunksy (we don’t actually know her name, but think it might be Jenna) a few passes by the compartment to finally find us again. We successfully talked her into spending the rest of the night on the less perilous bottom bunk (which was really supposed to be hers anyway) so that we wouldn’t have to spend the rest of our night saving her life. Well, she didn’t want to go back to sleep until her things were put away, so she took her laptop from us (we don’t think she knew we weren’t done with the movie yet) and moved her things to the bottom bunk. Since we no longer had our movie, we began our blogging again. A few minutes later, Drunksy starts making noises in her sleep. She wasn’t just making noises or talking, though. She was singing! In her sleep! This girl has talent, ladies and gents! We couldn’t really tell what she was singing. Perhaps something from “Spring Awakening” because she was professing her love for the musical earlier in the evening. Katie thought this would be a good time to offer some earplugs to our poor Czech roomie. She confessed that she actually enjoyed it and that she herself is a professional singer. Well of course she was. We all couldn’t help but laugh at the irony of the situation. Or at our fellow American. Now we’ll never know what happens to V - does he get his Vendetta? Will Natalie Portman grow her hair back? Do they all die in the end like in Titanic and The Perfect Storm? We’ll never know. V and his Vendetta will forever be a mystery, but this epic (sleepless) train ride will live on in infamy. We all had a really hard time sleeping because our compartment was so hot. We got to talking with our Czech roomie and learned that she is THE singer for the Czech Philharmonic. She even has her own CD! It’s called Bohuslav Martinu: The Peach Blossom, The Orphan and Other Songs featuring Olga Cerna. Go look for it on Amazon and help make our new friend famous. Katie and Rachael decided it was time for their own bottle of wine (to share over a longer period than an hour because we’re smart like that). We were really classy and poured the wine into our left over Burger King cups:

Olga was saddened to not hear us sing in our sleep so she hummed a little lullaby to us before she went to sleep. Not long after, Katie and Rachael tried to fall asleep. And tried. And tried. And it just didn’t happen. We both kept waking up. After witnessing our fellow American’s near death experience we both kept waking ourselves up in fear that we might fall off our top bunks. We both had to catch ourselves a couple of times. Needless to say neither of us got much sleep and were pretty tired when we got going this morning. We got into Zurich and had planned to leave our bags in lockers at the train station and go see the city, then come back later and catch a train to Lugano. However, after seeing the size of the lockers and taking note of our current zombie state, we decided it would be best to head straight to Lugano and skip the sightseeing in Zurich. We saw the train station - that counts, right? We both passed out on the train for a bit until a 4 year old girl and her caretaker came into the car. This wasn’t just any 4 year old girl. This was the Bride of Chuckie 4 year old and was so obnoxious it made us each question the need to procreate. After putting up with her for about an hour, we decided to move into another, quieter car (as had several other passengers). We kept checking the door because we had a feeling she’d follow us, but luckily we got a little peace for the remainder of our ride.

We got into Lugano and Katie had the brilliant idea of looking into renting a car. The things that we want to see in this area is all really spread out. Soooo we rented a car!

We drove around for a bit and once we got the hang of the GPS, we headed to Lake Como, Italy. We were both baffled and tickled by how relaxed the border patrol was while crossing into the Italian border from Switzerland. We literally drove by two guys chatting, rolled down the window and flashed one passport, and were waved on. We made it to Lake Como, parked the car and had some lunch at a cute outdoor restaurant overlooking the lake. After eating, we went and did a tour of the lake (fo’ free!). Although it was a really cloudy day and nothing is really in bloom yet, it was a beautiful little tour of the lake and all of the cool houses and towns that lie around it.

We got back to Como then decided it was definitely time for some gelato. It’s Italy. It’s always time for gelato! We walked around for a bit with our gelato and decided it was time to head back to Lugano and find our hostel so we could pass out. We made it back and again, were baffled with how relaxed the border control was. We made it to our hostel and checked in. Our hostel is really cute and has a great view of the city and has several little gardens which satisfied our thirst for springtime (which is exactly what we needed!). We have a 8 bedroom room all to ourselves! We did some laundry real quick then went across the street to grab some dinner. After dinner, we headed back to the hostel, picked up our clothes and laid them out in our room to dry. We then grabbed the laptop and here we are! We're pretty tired, so we're gonna go hit the hay.

Peace ninjas!

XOXO K&R

Prague Spring (2010)

2010-03-22T16:50:00.006-04:00

We finally posted pictures!

We woke up this morning completely amazed and happy to find blues skies and sunshine as far as the eye could see. We got a little bit of a late start because we opted to sleep in, but luckily Bo-Bagel serves breakfast all day! After consuming some more hash browns and some amazing blueberry pancakes, we went to the Spanish Synagogue in the Jewish Quarter. Rach got there just in time yesterday for them to shut the doors in her face so we went back together. It was amazing! The architecture is Moorish in design and the inside is pretty indescribable. Check out the photos and enjoy. It's advertised as the most beautiful synagogue in Europe. We beg to differ. It's the most beautiful synagogue in the world! As we exited the Spanish Synagogue, we were checking out some posters for a concert series they hold there a couple of times a week. It was 'The Best of World Musicals and Famous Jewish Songs." How could we resist?! We bought tickets and we'll describe it more in depth a little later in this post.

After checking out the Spanish Synagogue, we'd missed the guided castle tour for the day, so we decided to have our own tour of Prague Castle. It's pretty amazing. We walked there across the Charles Bridge, which is a famous bridge here in Prague. It was built during the rein of King Charles IV. The bridge is lined with statues on either side of different saints.

The statue of John of Nepomuk is particularly popular for tourists. There are two plaques on either side. One you rub for good luck in life, the other you rub for good luck in the fertility department or death, according to some stories. Funny, the folks who didn't know this kept rubbing the wrong side! We were watching for spontaneous baby bumps or heart attacks. No dice.

In addition to the statues, the bridge is lined with street vendors selling art, jewelry and other touristy things. Once on the other side of the bridge, we started to make the great big trek up the hill toward the Prague Castle. About halfway through, we decided it was time for a break and popped into a little pastry shop where we re-hydrated and shared a slice of cheesecake. We then continued the trek up the hill and found ourselves looking at the most incredible view of the Prague skyline.

We made our way into the castle grounds and made it into Saint Vitus Cathedral just before they closed the doors. Boy, are we glad we made it inside! The sun was hitting its main rose window just right so that the floor and walls were painted with the most brilliant shades of purple, pink and yellow. We had learned on our tour yesterday that Saint Vitus isn't just any ol' saint - he protects against lighting strikes and animal attacks and is the patron saint of epileptics. We like him! The cathedral, like the synagogue we had visited earlier, is just indescribable at how beautiful it is. We now understand why Prague is called "The Golden City" - because every building, interior and exterior, is absolutely exquisite!

After checking out the cathedral, we walked around outside, checking out different shops and views. We then found another amazing view of Prague and took some more pictures. We then remembered that Rachael's friends, Meredith and Phil, will be visiting Prague in August. Rachael had joked about leaving them a little treasure hunt for their visit. Rachael decided that it was no longer a laughing matter, and that we really should make a little treasure hunt for them! So off we went to find a cool and safe place to leave a treasure for Mer and Phil. We found the perfect spot, a sitting area in the vineyard that over looks the entire city. It's a pretty sweet view and hopefully, a safe place to leave a lil' treasure for the next 5 months. We'll be emailing them some more specific directions on how to find it but here are some pics of us hiding it and the fantastic view you have from up there:

We then headed back down the hill and back towards the Jewish Quarter to go see the concert in the Spanish Synagogue. The seating that had been roped off earlier was now open and you could hear the sounds of a small orchestra tuning up. The orchestra then made their way to the bimah (the platform or "stage" where the Jewish services are conducted from). It was an hour long concert that consisted mostly of show tunes written by Jewish composers. We love us some show tunes! The 6-piece orchestra played tunes from West Side Story, My Fair Lady, Evita, Cats, Phantom of the Opera, and Porgy and Bess as well as the songs Mack the Knife, Rhapsody in Blue, and Cheek to Cheek. They also played some traditional Jewish tunes such as Hevenu Shalom Alechem, Lach Jerusalem, and Hava nagila. It was so cool to be in what has got to be the most beautiful Synagogue in the world and listen to some of our favorite songs. The experience definitely made it's way into the top 10 best things we've done on this trip. After the concert, we decided it was time to grab some grub so we made our way to the Old Town Square where the Easter festival was going on and we each got ourselves a hot dog. We walked around some more and all of those shiny things in the shop windows finally hypnotized Rachael. We made our way into the crystal shop that Katie had been in the previous day. Rachael got her self a shnazzy new necklace and Katie got herself a cool plate. Not gonna lie - we're lovin' the exchange rate here!

After shopping, we decided to check out the Choco Cafe, a restaurant the owner of our hostel had told us about. He said they have the best hot chocolate ever and we gotta check it out. So we headed over there to find that it had closed only 15 minutes ago. Waaah waaah. Maybe we'll make it back over there tomorrow. We then started to make our way back to the Old Town Square when we found an ice cream shop. We already had our sweet tooths itching for that hot chocolate, it just had to be satisfied somehow! We got us some ice cream and started heading back toward the hostel. We have a long day tomorrow. We have to check out of our hostel by 10am, check and see how much it will cost to send a box back home to mail some of our presents and warmer clothes, perhaps do some more shopping and then book a night train to Switzerland! If we can grab a seat, we hope to grab a night train from Prague to Zurich, Switzerland for tomorrow. We will get into Zurich on Wednesday morning and tour around for the day then that night head to Lugano to check out Lake Como. Katie's dream honeymoon destination is Lake Como, so we have to go check out the sites and make sure it's okay. Later this week we'll head to Milan, Venice and then we'll be in Florence in time to eat some matzah ball soup at a Passover Seder.

So that means a whole lotta train rides over the next couple of days (woo hoo!). That also means you get a whole lotta silly blog posts the next time we get internet so keep checkin!

Peace ninjas!

XOXO K&R

Czech me out!

2010-03-21T16:54:00.014-04:00

Don't get too excited! About 18 Czech Krowns = $1 US Dollar

We were surprised and happy when we got to Prague and the weather wasn't too cold. This is probably the last "cold" place we're going to visit and we're beyond happy that we finally get to have Spring! Moms and Dads, you may have another box coming soon. The only thing that kinda stinks about Prague is that the weather is basically always rainy. We're completely okay with it, though, because it's way better than the weather being rainy AND cold, like some of the other places we've visited!

We went on the free walking tour this morning so that we could get a good feel of the city. Our guide wasn't as entertaining as the other ones we've had, but he was informative. The tour started in the Old Town Square so we got up in time to have a nice American Starbucks breakfast before meeting up with our group. The first stop was the Astronomical Clock, which is on a big tower in the square. It is sort of hard to describe, but basically it counts regular time, Hebrew calendar, Zodiac, Czech calendar and so on and so forth. Every hour from 9am to 9pm, the clock comes alive and chimes and has these 4 little guys that shake their heads and has some saints that poke their heads out of these little windows. Also, there's a guy at the top of the tower that plays a few notes on his trumpet and then waves at everyone. It sounds cool, but it really isn't that big a deal. If you go to Prague, don't go too far out of your way to be there on the hour. It's cool enough just checking it out anytime you're going through the square.

On another note, apparently Spring is springing here in Prague because they had a neat festival taking place in the square. There were all sorts of different vendors selling their wares and even a big stage where they have live entertainment every night. It's a really fun and festive atmosphere and only about a 5 minute walk from our hostel! (Katie took this picture, by the way, and is very proud of it!)

After learning all about the different buildings in the square, we went to Wenceslas Square, which is actually a rectangle. Go figure. It is really long and at the top of it is the Prague National Museum. There are lots of shops and restaurants lining both sides of the square. In front of the museum, there is a plaque marking the place where a young man named Jan Palach committed suicide by setting himself on fire protesting the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring on January 16, 1969. What a way to go!

Most of the rest of the tour was looking at some cool buildings that all mean different things in the history of Prague. This tour was a lot different from the other ones we've been on because it seems like most of the information we got was from post-WWII because that's when Czechoslovakia came into existence and then they didn't separate into the Czech Republic and Slovakia until January 1, 1993. Many of the buildings were really, really old, but most of the information seemed quite new. We didn't walk past one single building that could be described as boring. Every single one is beautiful and as different as it could be from the ones preceding it. Here are some lovely photos taken by your talented photographer of the day, Rachael Koplin!

An example of Cubist Architecture

In the middle of our tour, we had a lunch break at a restaurant that we'd already heard about called Bohemia Bagel. (Thanks to Jennifer for the tips on our hostel and Bo-Bagel!) This place was just the thing we needed! Bohemia Bagel serves American-style breakfast all day long as well as an extensive menu of other delicious offerings. As we were both in dire need of hash browns (or ketchup with a side of hash browns, as Rach prefers), this place was like an oasis in the desert! We have now been back there four times in a day and a half. When the tour ended, we considered immediately beginning another tour of the Prague Castle, but at that point it had started raining again so we decided against joining another 3 hour tour. We went back to one of the places we visited on the tour, the Pinkas Synagogue. It is no longer used as a synagogue but as a museum to commemorate all of the Czech Jews who died during the Holocaust. There is a ticket you can buy called the Jewish Museum Pass that gets you into all of the synagogues and memorials in the Jewish Quarter. For the first time ever, Katie and Rachael split up! GASP! The shop displays of shelf after shelf of beautiful gleaming bohemian crystal had gotten way too much for Katie to bear, so she decided she had to do some shopping while Rachael got back to her roots. A couple of hours later, Rachael bumped into Katie as she was paying for some amazing purchases and we had dinner together on the patio of a restaurant right in front of the Astronomical Clock. We enjoyed our meal, but couldn't push the thoughts of some amazing ice cream sundaes we had seen earlier from our minds so we figured we probably needed to indulge. Yum!

After our delish dessert, we did a little window shopping before heading back to the hostel. Rachael decided to go on a pub crawl with some new hostel buddies while Katie opted to catch up on skyping her peeps and hit the sack early. Don't worry, Moms and Dads, Katie wouldn't have let Rachael go out unless she was sure she'd be okay. And she was!

XOXO K&R

It's okay - we're Americans!

2010-03-20T19:46:00.006-04:00

Pictures have been added. Enjoy!

We left Vienna on Thursday around 11:00 am. We ended up purchasing our tickets to Salzburg so we could save a day on our rail passes. It was a 3 hour train ride and we basically passed out. We called this our "Harry Potter train" because we it had compartments rather than rows of seats. We grabbed one to ourselves and took off our shoes so that no one would want to be in there with our stanky feet (which, incidentally, we composed a song about shortly thereafter).

We got into Salzburg and checked into our hostel around 2:00 pm. We were all bundled and layered up from being in Vienna and once we got off the train in Salzburg, we were delighted to be greeted with some lovely Springy 60-degree weather. We were definitely sweating by the time we reached our hostel because of all of our layers. We unloaded all of our stuff and Rachael went to go take a shower so she could feel so fresh and so clean, clean. We were about to leave

the room for lunch when Rachael dropped her watch behind our bunk beds. The furniture in this hostel is pretty solid, we soon learned. That stuff is really hard to move! Luckily, after some major grunting and groaning, we got her watch back and all is well. We then headed out to find some grub. We found a cute shopping

area with tons of food and shops. We stumbled upon this great little restaurant with outdoor seating, which we just had to take advantage of. On the menu, we were both drawn to the same dishes so we ordered the same thing. The first was a creamy garlic soup. Yeah, that’s right, garlic soup. It was basically the best thing ever. We both wiped our bowls clean and then we moved on to the gnocchi with gorgonzola cream sauce dish that we shared. Our breath was awesome by the end of the meal. Afterwards, we decided to do some exploring and made our way to the Old Town. There were tons of cute shops, restaurants, and historical venues to check out. Salzburg is in a valley surrounded by mountains on either side and has a river that runs through it. You’ve probably seen this river and these mountains before. In fact, these aren’t just any mountains - these hills are alive! This is the city where “The Sound of Music” was filmed. So knowing that, we just had to do a tour! (Thanks Amanda!) We headed back to the hostel and booked our tour for the next morning (Friday). Our hostel is all decked out in “The Sound of Music.” There are pictures of the movie, the stage production, filming locations, or the actual Von Trapps themselves lining every wall of the hostel AND every day at 10:30am they show the movie.

Our hostel roomies were doing the same tour so we all woke up and had breakfast together. The tour bus picked us up right at our hostel (score!). It also picked up Jonathan and the Shorter College gang at their hotel so we were all on the same tour together. We were a little disappointed to not see Jonathan sporting his Maria dress as he had promised. The tour got going and we had a vary flamboyant tour guide who sang and yodeled for us the whole way. We learned that Hollywood took a lot of liberties when they made their movie version of the story. This did not exactly fly well with the real Maria Von Trapp, but she got quiet real fast when they wrote her a $900,000 check. The first stop on our tour was the lake where Maria and the gang flip over in their boat as well as the house they used as the back exterior of the Von Trapp house. The gazebo used in the movie lived here for some time after the film came out but was later moved to another location because the occupants of this house got tired of people hopping the fence day and night to snap pictures of their gazebo.

The next stop on our tour was the gazebo itself! It’s locked up now because an 80 going on 90 year old lady broke her hip trying to hop around on the benches a couple of years ago. We also passed the street where Maria sang her confidence song (which is now a pedestrian road, so our bus couldn’t go over there). This road runs in front of the house they filmed for the front of the Von Trapp house. After that, we left the city limits of Salzburg and headed up into the mountains to see some more lakes, mountains, and other scenery used in the film. As we left the city, our guide began playing the movie soundtrack so that we could all sing along. And we did. And it was great.

We visited the church where the wedding scene was filmed and had lunch in the town there, called Mondsee. Apple strudel is a very popular Austrian dish, so we just had to have some for dessert (oohh darn).

After lunch, we got back on the bus and headed back to Salzburg. The tour ended in front of the Mirabell Palace which you can’t visit because they actually do stuff there, but behind it are the Mirabell gardens, which you can visit (for free!). This is where they filmed several different scenes, most notably, the “Do-Re-Mi” song.

While on the tour, we met our new friend, Matt. He’s from Seattle, so we call him “Matt from Seattle.” Creative? We think so. We exchanged numbers so that we could all meet up for dinner later. After touring the gardens, we headed back to Jonathan’s hotel (which we later learned is only 2 blocks away from our hostel). After hanging there for a bit, we headed off to find the Mozart house. We walked around and toured where Mozart was born and raised. You can see some of the instruments he played, music and letters he wrote, as well as other personal belongings. At the end of the tour, you can see sketches and models from some of the first productions of his operas. There were original costume sketches from the first production of “Le Nozze de Figaro” and models from several notable productions of “The Magic Flute.” It was pretty spectacular.

After touring there, we headed up to the Hohensalzburg Fortress. It was built in 1077 and is one of the best preserved fortresses in Europe. A tram took us up the very steep hill. At the top, there is a fantastic view of the entire city.

We were exploring when we ran back into our hostel roomies, Jennifer and Rodrigo. They told us that everything was closing, and that we should probably head back down. We found a path, and walked back down to the town. Once we reached the bottom, we found a cool looking cemetery and started walking around. The caged in graves looked a bit familiar. We looked in our “Sound of Music” map and found that this cemetery was the one used at the end of the movie when the Von Trapps are hiding and trying to get away from the Nazis.

We left there and began making our way to a church for dinner. However, this isn’t just any church we were headed to, it was the Augustine Beer-hall at the Mülln monastery. Yup, they brew their very own beer here and there are monks pouring pitchers. Needless to say we had a deliciously fun time:

After dinner, we decided we had to check out the roof top bar at the Hotel Stein that our guide told us about. Although it was fairly warm during the day, it was definitely getting chilly by nightfall. As we were walking toward the hotel with the roof top bar, we could see the outdoor heaters poking up, so we figured we would be okay to sit outside. We headed into the hotel and made our way to the top. We got outside, sat down, and started shivering! The heaters weren’t even on - what a tease! Luckily, they did have blankets which helped some but it was still pretty chilly. After we ordered some drinks, our new friend Matt from Seattle came to join us. We also saw the group of ladies who sat next to us on our tour (Hey Edelweiss buddies!). We decided we couldn’t take the cold any longer and headed inside, but didn’t stick around for too much longer. The drinks were 9 Euros each (that’s $12 folks). So after thawing out, we left and started to make our way back toward the hostel to take advantage of the bar there. On our way there, we found a different bar. We were debating on whether or not to go inside, when a Dustin Hoffman look-alike turned around and beckoned us to come inside. We obliged. Who can say no to Dustin Hoffman!? We made friends with “Dustin” who is actually French and owns the bar. Now a sizeable group of 7, we got pretty rowdy, but for some reason, they loved us. At one point, they turned the music down so “Dustin” and Trey, an opera singer in training at Shorter, could sing “O Sole Mio” together. A good time was had by all. The bar seemed to start closing as “Dustin” was leaving, so we left too. We headed to the hostel to hang out some more. Not long after, our group dispersed and we hit the hay.

We woke up around 9:00 this morning so we could get packed up and checked out by 10:00 am. We looked up rail times for Prague and saw that we had to go back to Vienna to catch a train to Prague. Trains for Vienna leave about every ½ hour so we were good to go. We went to get breakfast and found an outdoor market where we ate some delicious pastries. After leaving there, we realized we were right next to the Shorter College gang’s hotel and Jonathan’s window was open. So we just had to be “those Americans” and started yelling his name. Five seconds later, he walked out of the lobby where he had been talking to one of his chaperones. He told us after he heard his name being called from outside, his chaperone had said “I think your friends are outside.” We got to say our farewells again and left the Shorter gang for good (tear). We headed back to the hostel and collected our belongings before making our way to the train station.

Not too much to report after that. We got to our train and slept all the way to Vienna and are now in Prague! We’ll be here for the next 4 days and are super excited to see what everyone’s been talking about. We plan on doing the free walking tour tomorrow morning and then a castle tour on Monday.

Peace ninjas!

XOX K&R

Bratislover

2010-03-17T16:47:00.009-04:00

We'd seen pretty much all we wanted to see in Vienna so we took a day trip to Slovakia today. Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, is only a little over an hour train ride from Vienna. The round trip ticket only cost 14 Euros, so we didn't even have to use up a travel day on our rail passes. We both had pleasant naps on the train and woke up in a completely different country. It never gets old, how great it is to just hop from country to country! One of the cool things about Bratislava is that it's basically a walking city. We got to the train station and had no problem finding our way on the 20-minute walk to the city center.

The first cool thing we saw was the changing of the guard at a palace (one of the like, 5, that Bratislava has). Even though there were only 5 soldiers, it was still really neat.

We kept walking and made our way to the main square. We went into a couple of neat shops and then met a new friend:

We really didn't do anything specific in Bratislava. We just really enjoyed exploring and looking at all the neat Baroque architecture.

We had a delish dinner at a place called Jazz Cafe and then made our way back to the train station and Vienna.

Also, our friends in Orlando, Kate Zaloumes and Candace Neal, are in a video contest for Ingrid Michaelson's "Everybody" music video contest. You should go watch it. We LOVE them and everybody in it!

XOXO K&R

A night at the opera

2010-03-16T21:01:00.007-04:00

We had another chill day today. We woke up around 11:00 and went out to the Museum Quartier again to get some food and shop around. After eating some delicious pizza, we began walking around again outside and it started to sleet, so we made our way into what seemed to be a department store but turned out to be a home decor place full of all sorts of, as Katie puts it, "wonderful shiny things." It was overall very similar to Ikea. After walking around in there for awhile, we made our way back to the opera house to do a backstage tour. We learned that the Vienna State Opera House (or Wiener Staatoper) was originally built in the 1870s. When it was finished, the Viennese weren't too fond of it's appearance and said that it looked too much like a train station. That proved to be true in WWII, when it was bombed because it was believed to be just that - a train station. Just about the entire building was destroyed at that time and it was rebuilt to match the original drawings in the 1950s. The opera is open from September to June and has a performance every day. The same show never takes place two days in a row. After each performance, the set is struck and a completely new and different set is there for the next performance. Overall there are about 50 shows that they perform in rep throughout the year. They have storage facilities off site where they keep all of the different sets, props and costume pieces. However, they do keep the set and costumes for 'Tosca' on site as a backup show should something go wrong with whatever show is scheduled to perform that night because it only takes 90 minutes to set up. We didn't really get to see backstage at all though, because the changeover crew was striking the rehearsal floor for the ballet that was rehearsing on stage just before our tour began. We did see several of the intermission halls which were pretty cool.

After the tour, we headed back toward the hostel to grab some gelato from the Zanoni & Zanoni that is across the street from our hostel. After dining on our delicious gelato we decided it was time for a nap. So we napped. And it was good.

We woke up and headed back to the opera to stand in the student ticket line for tonight's performance of 'Moses und Aron.' We got some sweet seats that would have cost about 150 Euros for only 12 Euros (woo hoo!). That was probably the smartest thing we brought on our trip - our student IDs - because there are pretty much always student discounts available.

'Moses und Aron' is an opera by Arnold Schoenberg and premiered in 1954. The production we saw was pretty avant garde. I mean, if you think of any pictures or movies you would associate with German and/or Austrian avant garde, that's just a taste of how... unique this production was. The first image we saw was the whole chorus in black trench coats with suitcases at center, facing upstage, lit in silhouette with Moses at center facing the audience. The stage was caged in by these black flats and the chorus slowly began to move toward them and began writing on them "Ich" (which means I or myself in German) in white chalk. Moses started having his 'lil chat with G-d about saving the chosen people and the voice of G-d was provided by the chorus, which sounded mystical and eerie all at the same time. It was pretty cool. Moses then met up with Aron, and things got moving. To prove his power, Moses' infamous staff becomes a snake. This was done through a tower of televisions that came out of the stage floor. Aron, with the staff in his hand, put that arm behind the TV tower and an image of the staff morphing into a snake played. The first act ended with an abstract image of Moses splitting the sea and the chorus following him upstage into the light as they became silhouettes together again. The first act was really spectacular to look at, but the second act is where it got interesting. It opens with Aron and the chorus waiting for Moses to come back down the mountain with the 10 commandments and no one has heard from or seen him in 40 days. The stage is caged in now with hundreds of yellow squares, each with faces printed on each of them. After a lot of singing about "where is Moses??" Aron, pulls a gold scarf out of his jacket and basically says that they can build their own thing to worship in the meantime. The chorus begins dancing with these gold scarves and before you know it, giant golden letters spelling "Ich" comes out of the stage floor. Some of the chorus members change into gold suits and evening gowns and begin to dance around large, golden words that Katie translated to mean "I am G-d." The giant golden "Ich" went back into the stage floor and a giant television took it's place. As the chorus began dancing with the "I am G-d" letters (pretty suggestively), images of plastic surgery and killing cattle were played on the giant TV. This was the part of the performance that made our stomachs turn a bit. Some of the chorus killed off other chorus members, so lots of images of blood made it's way to the TV screen as well. Moses eventually made his way back with the 10 commandments and he was pretty upset that everyone took to worshiping themselves in his absence. The yellow squares then each flipped to white, leaving the stage now caged in with these white squares. The chorus and Aron exited through a giant door at upstage as Moses was left by himself as the stage faded to black. After the curtain call, there was a presentation honoring the actor that played Moses. We found out later that this actor was being honored for becoming an official member of the Vienna State Opera. It's kind of a big deal.

Overall, it was a fun and... different night at the theatre. We're both glad that we had the experience of seeing a true avant-garde piece, but it's definitely not our cup of tea.

After the performance, we left with Johnathan and his friend to go and get some dinner. We went to an Australian pub where Katie got a kangaroo burger! She said it was interesting, but not something she plans on dining upon again any time soon. They also served fried grasshoppers there, but we decided that between the kangaroo and the avant-garde theatre experience, we had expanded our tastes enough for one night.

While making our way back through the train station next to the opera, there were some questionable characters making cat calls at us. Katie got worried that they were following us and asked a complete stranger if he spoke English and if she could hold his hand. He said of course with what we detected to be a little bit of a Southern drawl. We later learned that our knight in shining armor's name is Eddie and he is from Colorado. He's here in Vienna working with the UN and did a backpacking trip like this himself when he finished undergrad. We made it back to our hostel safe and sound and all is well. (Thanks again Eddie!)

We learned through some posters in our hostel that Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia is about 90 minutes away. Soooo we're probably gonna go to Bratislava tomorrow. What's one more country checked off our list? Until next time....

Peace ninjas!

XOXO K&R

A sad day

2010-03-15T18:57:00.005-04:00

We must embrace pain and loss and burn it as fuel for our journey. ~Kenji Miyazawa

We got word today that Rachael's great aunt Mimi passed away.

We're lucky to be sharing this adventure and certainly aren't taking it for granted. But we are reminded every day that we are far from home, far from our comfort zones and far from the people we love. Today was particularly difficult. The passing of a loved one often brings families and communities together and the awareness of being so far away from it all makes it difficult to cope with loss. When you leave all you know behind, you leave with it your support network and familiar comforts. This void can often be filled with McDonald's French fries. Believe us, we tried, but to no avail. Regrets are as plentiful as the good memories in which we take solace. Her presence was uplifting. She was wonderful, fun, and a bubbly spirit and will be missed dearly.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

2010-03-14T19:54:00.004-04:00

Aight y'all, as a Sunday night treat, you get 3 new posts tonight! Read on and enjoy!

In this post, we will talk about each of our modes of transportation and what we love and hate about them, but we will open with a late-night conversation between Sara and Katie that could have only been brought on by exhaustion. Well, maybe also illegal drugs, but that wasn’t it. (I promise, Mom!)

Katie: So, if planes, trains, and automobiles were lions, tigers and bears, which would be which?

Sara: (Instead of saying “Katie, what the heck are you talking about??”) Well, I would say that a tiger should be the train. Not necessarily because it’s fast, but that it just has the idea of speed, you know? And I guess the lion would be the airplane because he’s just really strong. So that leaves the bear to be the car and that sorta makes sense.

Katie: So, plane equals lion, train equals tiger and automobile equals bear?

Sara: Yeah.

Katie: Well, you just put them both in order together. Cheater!

Sara: No, I had reasoning! It wasn’t all willy-nilly like you said!

So here goes our scientific analysis of transportation.

Planes

Planes get you there fast, but you have to deal with all the checking and claiming of bags and rules and all that. We definitely vote for planes on the way from the States to Europe, because a boat would suck. Unless it were summer and it was a cruise. But even then, that’s pushing it a little. The nine-hour flight from Atlanta to London wasn’t bad because it was direct and it was a red eye so we left at night and got there in the morning and didn’t really lose any time other than sleeping time. However, planes aren’t very easy to sleep on. So, unless you have a very good sleeping pill and a neck pillow or you‘re over 5 feet tall, you’re not going to do very well. Katie had these things (except for being under five feet tall), Rachael did not. For some reason, though, the sleeping pill didn’t work as well as she’d hoped and Katie only got about 5 interrupted hours of sleep versus all 9 hours uninterrupted. I guess you can’t have it all. Rachael’s chosen method to induce sleep was to drink some wine. That didn’t work too hot either, but it did work a little which is better than not at all. As far as RyanAir flights within Europe, we’re not big fans but it is super-cheap. They have weird rules and they’re really small planes and they take you to airports that are way out of the way. But they’re cheap. And if that’s your priority, then that’s how you should go. It sort of is our priority, so we took a few RyanAir flights within the UK since our rail passes couldn’t be used there. That takes us to our next method of transportation.

Trains

We’re big, big fans. Trains aren’t quite as fast as planes, but you do get to see stuff. And they’re pretty fast if you get a speed-train. Using our rail passes is basically like flying standby. If there’s a seat on the train, you get on. They check your ticket later. The pass is the ticket, so we don’t really have to book anything in advance unless it’s a night train or some other special train. We love that we have our bags with us so we don’t have to worry about careless plane dudes hurting them or losing them or whatever. We have lots more legroom and, if you’re lucky (which we have been all but once so far) you can get the set of four seats with a table. Then you have lots of space and can even prop your feet up on the seat opposite you! We use the table for typing up blogs while we have time, taste-testing gummy bears, taking naps and playing Uno.

The night train was really cool because we didn’t have to pay for a hostel and we got to sleep the whole way. It was an 11-hour ride, which was spent either sleeping or being almost asleep. It didn’t feel like 11 hours at all. It was great! Not the most sound sleep either of us has ever had, but definitely worth it and earplugs helped a ton!

Train subcategory: Metros!

We love when the cities we’re in have a metro system. It makes everything seem so much closer! It’s [nearly] idiot-proof and it is cheap and quick and we just love it! When there isn’t a metro system, we often throw in the towel and take cabs or walk way farther than any human should. This brings us to our next category.

Automobiles

Of course, we wouldn’t want to take this trip by car because then it would take a million years, but we’re car fans in everyday life. Our mommies took us to the airport in a car and bought us a delish dinner and that was wonderful. The only other cars we’ve taken are when we punked out and caught cabs. If we were richer, we’d take lots more cabs, but we’re not. Cabs are wonderful because they pick you up from wherever you are and take you right to where you’re going. You don’t have to walk a block or six to get to the stop and then another three blocks from the stop to your door. We like cabs but we can’t afford them. Darn.

Summary

Trains are definitely our hands-down favorite. They’re comfortable, scenic, cheap and fast. You can’t beat that!

XOXO K&R

This is what we do on trains...

2010-03-14T19:38:00.005-04:00

So, the wonderful Sidonie Smith had the cutest welcome package waiting for us when we arrived at her apartment in Essen. Included in that package was a bag of Haribo gummy bears:

Since we already “slept” all night on the night train, we can’t sleep so we finally decided to have a taste test and figure out which colors are our faves.

Reddish-orange- a real disappointment. Not a lot of taste and we’re still not sure what flavor it’s supposed to be.

Regular orange- very orangey, kinda has a little bit of orange rind bitterness taste in it

Invisi-bears- the invisibears are pina colada flavored, they got an “I like it!” from Rach.

Yellow- lemon flavored and refreshingly delish. Not a too-tangy lemon, which is often the case but kinda has a urine aftertaste, or what we think urine would taste like

Green- green apple flavored, a solid flavor. Not bad.

Red- raspberry flavored. They really dropped the ball on this one, it could have been way better.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The winner: it’s a toss up between green apple (Katie’s fave) and the orange (Rachael’s fave). Good times!

XOXO K&R

Au Revoir Paris! Guten Morgen Vienna!

2010-03-14T19:26:00.013-04:00

We’re typing this blog while on a night train leaving Paris en route to Vienna. But Woodmere Gang, (you ask) your schedule from way back when said you would be going to Berlin after Paris, why are you going to Vienna now? Well, read on, folks and find out!

Friday morning we woke up and had to find another place for the night. We had originally planned to stay in Paris through Thursday night and leave Friday, but we have just had the best time with Dan and Sara that we decided to stay through Saturday. Our hostel was already booked up for Friday night so we had to find somewhere else to stay. Dan booked us a room at the Hotel Belfort (sounds swanky, we know, but…. not so much). We checked out of our hostel, and set off to find a UPS where we could mail some Belgian chocolate gifts and vino home. We were able to fit it all in one very small box but it would have cost 99.00 Euros (about $135.00) to mail them. Soooo to all of our loved ones to whom we had promised to bring some delicious gifts? Sorry bout cha chocolate - it ain’t gonna make it. If it makes y’all feel better, though, it was delish.

However, not to worry casa de Koplin! Dan has the kosher for Passover vino and it is heading home to Orlando with him and will be to you guys in time for Seder.

We headed back to the hostel to drop off our would-be shipped items, started muchin’ on some delicious Belgian chocolate (I guess we just have to rub it in now. The first apology goes out to Jeremy! Your chocolate went first and man, was it good).

We then headed off to Versailles. The palace at Versailles was first built by King Louis XIV aka the Sun King. He thought the Parisians didn’t really like him so he went ahead and got out of town and built his own palace thus the Palace at Versailles.

It’s pretty Roccoco-ed out: lavish rooms with fabric covered walls, gold trim, heavy furniture and frescos on the ceilings (aka, bliggity bling). We went and toured the inside and saw the Hall of Mirrors as well as the King’s sleeping quarters, Marie Antoinette’s sleeping quarters (mmm.. cake!), as well as Dauphine’s sleeping quarters.

The interior of the palace was interesting but the best part of Versailles is the gardens.

We walked around for a bit and saw some lakes and smaller gardens then found the mothership of the gardens, a long lake, lined with trees and gardens on either side. It was pretty spectacular.

We walked around one area for a bit and saw a couple of different fountains. Since it’s still winter, everything is really dry and the statues are covered up (some even look like they’re wearing mittens) to protect them from the adverse weather. We then passed several people on golf carts. Turns out, you can rent a golf cart for 30 Euros and see the gardens on wheels! We think this is aimed toward American tourists. We decided that was a bit out of our price range, but then we stumbled upon bicycles! What better way to see Versailles then by bike? (Maybe golf cart, whatev) So we rented some bikes and got pedaling.

There is no possible way that we could have seen all of the gardens in the short amount of time that we had. To anyone out there planning to visit Versailles someday, skip the palace and just check out the gardens.

They’re free, way cooler and much more fun! It’s not like you can touch anything inside. Look in a book!

After our biking adventure, we headed back to Paris. Dan and Katie were pretty tuckered out:

We met back up with Sara and had some dinner then went to the Louvre. On Friday nights, the Louvre is free for anyone under 26 so we definitely had to hit that up. Free is our favorite price! We split up so everyone could see whatever they wanted. These are some of the pics Rachael took:

After the Louvre, we all headed back to the hostel where we all first met to dine on the rest of the Belgian gift chocolates. However, we didn’t get too far. We were all pretty exhausted and the daunting realization that we still had to tote all of our stuff to another hotel before going to sleep (it was already 10 pm) hit us pretty quick once we got back to the hostel. So we didn’t dine on the chocolates just yet. We picked up our backpacks that we had left in the luggage room that morning, and headed off to Hotel Belfort. We got to the hotel and played on the interwebs for a bit before hittin’ the hay.

Katie and Rachael still weren’t really sure where they were going next after Paris. As of 48 hours ago, the plan was to go to Berlin, maybe see a big wall and eat some more schnitzel, but thanks to the glorious Facebook, we learned on Rachael’s newsfeed that Jonathan Parks, will be in Vienna. Why have two awesome reunions in Europe, when you can have three?! (Dan and Sidonie were the first two, for those of you not keeping track.) So the Woodmere Gang is now en route to Vienna to see Jonathan Parks! Thanks, theatre, for making the world a smaller place!

We had planned to wake up Saturday morning around 9:00 but we really didn’t start moving until 10 am. We headed off to Gare de L’Est and bought tickets for a night train to Vienna. The coolest part? It’s only 20 Euros for a bed! Yeah that’s right, we have a bed and transportation for the next 11 hours and don‘t have to pay for a hostel. Score! Also, since it departs after 7:00 pm and arrives the next day, the two travel days count as one on our EuroRail pass. Cool, huh?

After getting our tickets, we met up with Sara in the Latin Quarter and ventured off in search of crepes. We ate at a restaurant named Creperie Saint-Germain and it was delicious!

We then headed off to the Eiffel Tower to get some daytime pics.

Then we decided that we’d seen everything Paris had to offer so we walked around for awhile. We stumbled upon a patisserie that had a very inviting window display, so we spent some money in there before continuing our walk. Sara had the brilliant idea to pull out her handy dandy map and find us a park to eat our sweets in, but when she did, we realized that the Rodin Museum was only a couple of blocks from where we were. Idea! Let’s go look at some sweet sculptures to kill time! The ticket price for the museum was 5 Euros, but it was only 1 Euro to see the gardens so we paid that and went out to the gardens.

There wasn’t really a whole lot to see so after about five minutes, the four of us posted up on a bench by a little pond with a statue in the middle and three peculiar ducks. We ended up sitting there long enough to get to know the ducks’ personalities really well. We noticed that one kept getting out of the water. Did he not like the water? Maybe he’s a shy duck or maybe they were playing a rousing game of Marco Polo. We think this was the smart duck since that water did look pretty darn cold. We then realized that the other two ducks weren’t letting the other one into the water. When someone came to feed the ducks some bread crumbs, the two ducks in the water would chase off the loner duck. When the loner duck tried to get into the water, the other two chased him away. We began cheering for the loner duck and decided that if we could, we would definitely punch the mean ducks in their duck faces. Unless the loner duck had done something wrong, like murdered one of their duck friends, which maybe why the other two ducks were not playing nice with him, which if this were the case, he deserved to be chased off.

Yeah, that’s right, a good long paragraph was just dedicated to three ducks. Hope y’all are enjoying this blog as much as we are.

Well, after all that duck business, we figured we should probably get moving and make our way to our respective train stations via the hotel to get our bags. We got our bags from the hotel and learned that most restaurants weren’t open yet because the French like to eat late. We knew there would be food at the train stations so we went to Katie and Rachael’s first, where they put their bags in lockers, and then to Dan’s so that we could get food since he had to be there a little earlier than we did. We dined on salad and French fries (Katie) and spaghetti with meat sauce (Rachael and Sara) and beef stew business (Dan). It was pretty good. We headed back to the train station and said our goodbyes to the magnificent Dan Dansby and then Katie, Rachael and Sara went back to the other train station. We got our bags and then found our platform and bid adieu to the lovely Sara Siegel. (We’ll see you in Cinque Terre, Sara!)

When we boarded the night train, we met our roomies, a cute German couple about our age and some German dude a bit older than all of us. We found it a little difficult to sleep on the train, but mostly because we were worried someone would try and steal our junk while we were asleep. We were surprised, though, when we got the 20-minute warning of our arrival in Munich, so we must’ve slept okay. All in all, the night train was a neat experience, which we’ll be glad to repeat, we just need to not worry about our stuff. The best part was traveling and sleeping at the same time and not having to pay for a hostel.

When we got to Munich, we realized that we had arrived an hour later than we thought we were going to so we had to wait an hour before another train could take us to Vienna. Katie vaguely remembers being stopped at one station during the night for what felt like a long time and hearing frequent announcements before getting moving again. They were all in German, so we had no idea what was going on, but no biggie. We took the extra time to have breakfast and write some postcards before hopping our next train to Vienna!

We’re seeing a whole lotta snow on the ground outside the train, so we’re a little concerned about the temperature, but we’ve survived so far so we’re sure we’ll be okay.

We checked into our hostel in Vienna and had some lunch at a restaurant next door. We started to head toward the museum district when we got a call from Jonathan! We decided to meet at a popular gelato place called Zanoni & Zanoni near the Vienna Opera House. We got lost for a little bit there, but finally found him! We each had some delicious gelato then followed Jonathan and his Shorter gang to the Vienna Opera House. When in Vienna, do as the Viennians do and go see some opera!

Tonight they were performing 'The Flying Dutchman' by Wagner. We stood in line for the student tickets for awhile only to find that they only had two seats left and the rest were standing tickets. That means, you guessed it, we stood up the whole time. Fortunately, this is one of the shorter operas out there so it wasn't too bad. From what we could see, it looked and sounded really good.

After the show we went out to celebrate one of the Shorter gang's birthday. We made plans to meet up with them again tomorrow and pretty much piggy back onto their Vienna adventures.

After hanging out with the Shorter gang, we headed back to the hostel and here we are updating the blog. Good times. Hope yall enjoyed all the pics in this one! We'll eventually get all of the pics loaded up to another site so you can see them all.

Peace ninjas!

XOXO K&R

Gay Par-ee!

2010-03-10T12:12:00.027-05:00

We apologize for slacking on our blogging (Mary Alston). More people equals more fun! On our first day here, we woke up early and went on a free walking tour from 11am to 2:30ish. There's this company called NewEurope that provides free walking tours in lots of touristy cities because they feel that everyone should have the ability to really get to know a place regardless of your budget. The guides all work for tips, which makes the tours really fun and entertaining as well as informative. This is the same company that did our tour in Edinburgh, for those of you that can remember back that far. We barely can!

The tour was really great. Our tour guide's name was Colin and he was from England. He has lived in Paris for about a year and is leaving tomorrow to bike to Barcelona and live

there. He says he'll look for a job in about a month when he gets there. He was a really neat guy. The tour began at Place St. Michel, which is a little plaza with a statue of St. Michel killing the devil. Sweet. We walked from there to Notre Dame and then all the way down the Seine to the Louvre and then down the Champs-Elysees. In the middle of the tour, we had a short lunch break where we decided to eat something super-French. Or not. Man, McDonald's in this country knows what they're doing! MMMMmmm! After the tour was over, we then met up with Sara at L'Arc du Triomphe and took some perty pictures.

After that, we decided to head to Montmartre because it's a really neat area of town. We were so enamored with Colin, that we decided to go on his Montmartre tour at 6pm.We were pretty

frozen after our first tour, so we basically sat in a cafe for about an hour and a half and thawed out until it was time to get frozen again. The Montmartre tour was really neat because we got to see some really cool things while meandering our way through steep cobblestone streets to Sacre Coeur at the very top of Montmartre. Some of the highlights from the tour include: the Moulin Rouge, the cafe from Amelie as well as the place she did her grocery shopping in the movie, an apartment shared by Vincent Van Gogh and his brother, Theo, Picasso's studio and the Lapin Agile, where Picasso first

began to sell paintings. It was mostly dark by the time we got to the top, but the sky was still a brilliant shade of blue which contrasted brilliantly with the color of the Sacre Coeur. It is one of the highest spots in Paris, so we got an amazing view of the skyline. One thing that was conspicuously missing was the Eiffel Tower! That crazy tower was hiding behind a tree! Silly tower.

There were only 10 or so of us on the tour, so we got to know each other pretty well. We met a young couple from Portugal who told us to let them know if we make it to their neck of the woods, so we may just have to do that! We also met a beautiful British girl named Mel who had the best story of how she got to Paris that we've ever heard! She goes to "uni" in Bristol (south of London) and skipped class to compete in a charity competition where they see who can get the farthest from Bristol without spending any money. She dressed up as a gorilla

and her friend dressed up as a banana and they made it all the way to Lille (a little north of Paris) for absolutely nothing! What can we say, Rachael and Katie are trying to pick up some tips! She told us how she took a train, hitchhiked and took a ferry. Turns out, she and her friend won the competition and had a really great story to tell. She said that one year someone made it all the way to Warsaw! She had to go back to uni the next day, but made the most of her short time in Paris.

After the tour, we were all pretty exhausted so we went back to the hostel and crashed. We woke up around 8:30 yesterday morning and Katie, Rachael and Dan went to Musee D'Orsay, where Sara met back up with us after her French class. We spent most of the day browsing greatness in the museum and left there around 3pm. We walked from there to Notre Dame, where we took lots of pictures and went inside to look around. At this point, we were all pretty exhausted (our weaker companions still battling jet lag) so we decided to head back to the hostel for a little nap. Well, most of us. Katie said she'd come up to the room in a minute but she wanted to check on something. Durned if she didn't come back with a brand new 'do! In the interest of challenging ourselves and trying new things, we've decided to take the ultimate challenge and get our hair cut in a foreign country where we don't speak the language. Armand (who speaks zero English, btw) worked his French magic and this is how it turned out:

When her surprised hostel-mates recovered from their shock (or being awaken from their slumber..) we all got moving and decided to grab some grub. Sara had heard about a neat fondue restaurant in Montmartre where they serve wine in baby bottles. We love a good gimmick, so we were all over that! When we got there, it was a teeny weeny restaurant with two long tables that everyone shares. It was completely full and there was barely room to move so the guy asked us to wait "two minutes!" outside and he would seat us soon. So, we waited. And waited. And then three more people went inside and were seated... hmm. We got mad so we decided to go across the street to a different fondue restaurant. This place didn't serve us our wine in baby bottles, but it was delish so we were cool with it. So much for touristy gimmicks.

We headed back to the hostel after dinner and crashed pretty hard. When the alarm went off at 9am, we decided to ignore it and proceeded to sleep for another 2 hours (Sara had to go to class though, ha!). Mmmmm. Sometimes you just gotta sleep in! When we finally got going, we were in dire need of some crepes so we decided to remedy that situation. Rachael had a crepe with vanilla ice cream, bananas, whipped cream and chocolate sauce. Katie's had pineapple, vanilla ice cream, whipped cream and chocolate sauce and Dan's had compote des pommes which was basically applesauce.

After our nutritious breakfast, we went to meet Sara at the Pantheon. We hung around there and took some more pictures before walking to the Ile St. Louis to get... ice cream! Sara has a book and a friend who both recommended this place so we figured we probably needed to check it out. Definitely worth it! At this point, Katie and Rachael parted with Dan and Sara because Rachael had an appointment for her very own hair cut adventure. Voila! Btw, see how Armand's hand is blurry? That's because he was like Edward Scissorhands he was so fast!

By the time the four of us hooked back up, it was way dinner time. We decided to all go to the Jewish quarter for dinner. We ended up eating falafel and schwarma and it was delish. After dinner, it was only 9pm or so and we didn't want to go back to the hostel quite yet so we walked around and just enjoyed being in Paris. We found a funny photo op. It was really cold, so we ducked into a cafe for some hot chocolate before making our way back to the hostel. We're very sad because Sara had only booked the hostel through last night and they were full tonight so she's staying in a different hostel tonight. We miss you already, Sara!

XOXO K&R

Amsterdam to Paris

2010-03-08T17:51:00.006-05:00

Our train for Paris didn’t leave today until 3:15pm, so we had lots of time to do some more sightseeing before hightailing it to the train station. We woke up around 8am to make sure that we actually got going in time to see some stuff. We had breakfast in the hostel cafeteria which was actually pretty good. They had a Nutella knock-off that definitely would do the trick in a pinch. Checkout was at 10:30am, so after breakfast, we got our packs and had an interesting time fitting them into the lockers provided by the hostel. It took some work, but we got them in there!

We set out to do a little shopping at the cute stores we saw last night but found that the whole town was pretty much dead until 1:00. If we weren’t on a schedule, we’d sure like that a lot! Since we couldn’t get into any of the shops, we made our way to the Anne Frank House. It has been refurnished and designed to be more like a museum. On the walls are quotes from her diary that describe their living situation and how she longed for fresh air. The building was her father’s office. There are several videos that talk about the growth of Nazism and how Anne and her family decided to go into hiding. There is a scale model of their small apartment, complete with furniture and furnishings. Anne’s father, Otto, who survived the concentration camps, asked that the hidden apartment’s rooms and walls be left empty once the building became a museum. There are only small cases throughout the rooms with items from the apartment such as magazines, diary clippings, homework, a siddur and some posters on some of the walls. While walking past their attic near the living room, we could hear the church bells from the adjacent church ringing outside. An exhibit at the end showed where everyone involved with Anne and her story ended up including the others that lived in the attic with the Franks as well as the helpers. The last of the helpers, Miep Giess, recently passed away this past January at age 100. At the very end, there was an interview with Otto Frank where he stated that he knew about Anne’s diary. She would sometimes give it to him to protect at night had said that she wished to have it published some day after the war. After Otto returned from the camps and learned about his family’s fate, he took it upon himself to finally fulfill Anne’s wish to be published. As you exit the museum, you can see the dozens of different languages her diary has been published in. It was a really interesting experience. It’s cool to be going on this amazing trip but this was a sad reminder to be conscious of the dark histories several of the places we are visiting have. It's weird to think that all of that happened only a few decades ago.

We then headed back to the hostel to pick up our bags and hit the road one mo' time. We hailed a cab about 2 blocks away from our hostel and upon arrival to the train station, learned that it was half the price of our cab ride to the hostel the previous day. Hmmm, live and learn folks. We boarded our train, which was a high speed Thalys, put our bags on the luggage racks and passed out. We now both fully understand everyone's fascination with Thomas the train...or any kind of train because trains... ARE AWESOME. One hour you're in Amsterdam, and in 4 you're in Paris. (In our next post, we'll have another story about why trains are awesome. It may or may not involve a gorilla and a banana. Stay tuned!). Our train however, had a slight malfunction while stopping in Brussels. It was supposed to connect up with another train on the front end, but that train broke down so our train had to re-maneuver and go down another track. It ended up causing us to be an hour late to Paris. Once we got to Paris, we were greeted by the fresh air and Monsieur Dansby! We then headed off together to find our hostel.

We got to our hostel and saw that one of the four beds was already occupied. Shortly after unloading our packs and deciding where to go get dinner we met our roomie, Sara! She had just arrived in Paris from New York and will be studying French here in Paris for the next 2 weeks before heading off to work on a farm in Provence. We invited her to tag along with us to dinner and we all became fast friends! Since we're in Paris, we just had to go eat dinner near the Eiffel Tower, so we did! We even got to see it sparkle! The Eiffel Tower has a light show every hour on the hour that makes it look like it's sparkling! After dinner, we headed back to the hostel and crashed.

We woke up today and did a free tour of Paris... but we'll have more about that as well as gorillas, trains, starving artists and much more all in the next post!

Peace ninjas!

XOXO K&R

Aufwiedersehen, Essen! Hallo, Amsterdam!

2010-03-07T17:12:00.003-05:00

After her show last night, Sidonie brought us a wonderful dinner of three different delish kinds of pizza. We also were finally able to have our long-awaited beer tasting of the four beers we bought in Brussels. The chocolate beer was the winner by far. We joked about our boy’s night with the pizza and beer, but we did actually put the pizza on plates (real ones, not paper ones!) and the beer in glasses. That’s the difference between men and women, we guess. We enjoyed our last evening together and went to bed late. We had to catch the train to Amsterdam this morning at 10ish so we woke up sort of early so that we could get all of our things packed and straighten up a little bit.

We hopped on the train and it was packed! We ended up sharing a little double-seat like on a bus… with each other and our backpacks. It wasn’t too bad because we just propped our feet on our bags but it was a little tight. After about an hour or so, a man vacated the four seats he was occupying by himself and so we scooted over and spread out. When we got to Amsterdam, we decided to go ahead and book our train to Paris tomorrow so that we could take the train that gets us there at the same time as Dan. That’s right, Mr. Daniel Dansby is FINALLY getting his tush over the pond and joining our adventure! We couldn’t be more excited!

Well, getting the train booked was a little fiasco. They had this system where you are assigned a number and they call you like at the DMV. Only, apparently there was a little lapse in communication because we were assigned the number B725 and they hadn’t called a single B-number. The only ones they were calling begin with C. We finally realized this after waiting for about an hour and a half. We were told originally that the C numbers were priority and that’s why they were called first. Guess that’s true, because they didn’t call a single B number all day! Once we got all that straightened out, we got our train booked and took a cab to the hostel. This place is huge! It’s like a really big hotel except for there are 3 sets of bunk beds in each room instead of a king-size or two double beds.

After dropping our packs off at the hostel (which, by the way, aren’t as heavy as they used to be!) we walked to the Van Gogh Museum. Rachael said the experience there upped this day to the top 5 best days of her life. We got to see a lot of paintings we’ve always talked about in school and it was really neat to be that close to Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Irises and multiple self-portraits. We got to the museum around 4:30pm and were all but kicked out when it closed at 6pm.

At this point, we had only had breakfast and that was long gone, so we went in search of food. We heard from the lovely JL and Tee-Rell that we just HAD to try an Indonesian rice table, so we did! It was really neat. We actually shared a single dinner order because we had a feeling it would be more than either of us could eat by ourselves. Turns out, we were right! We were served small portions of about 15 different dishes that were laid out on these little candle heater thingies on our table. It was a really neat experience and it was all really good! Maybe because we had no idea what we were eating…

After dinner, we wanted to see more of the city, so we went a-walkin’. We found a neat city square kind of area with lots of different shops, including several selling all of the things that Amsterdam is often associated with. We now understand why folks say Amsterdam is neat but sketchy. We were both pretty glad to only be staying one night. It seems that the hostel we’re staying in is the cleanest place in the whole city (thank goodness!).

Amsterdam is a very bike friendly town. There are two parts of the sidewalk, one half meant for pedestrians, the other half meant for bikes. They’re everywhere! Where you would see parking lots or garages, there is an ocean of bikes. There is even a traffic signal at each intersection just for bikes. The majority of them are road bikes, but every once in a while, you’ll see an interesting design. Some with what seem to be like wheel barrows on their front ends meant for toting goods or children, some bikes you can pedal by hand… you could basically write a Dr. Seuss book about all of the different bikes you can see around here.

After walking around we decided we needed an Amsterdam dessert. We found a small restaurant in that shopping area and ordered a traditional Dutch dessert called poffertjes. We were served ice cream, dough balls covered in powdered sugar, and topped off with what seemed to be a whole tub of butter. Delicious and nutritious? You bet! It came with some little orange slices so at least we got our fruit for the day.

We plan on heading back to that shopping area tomorrow because we saw lots of cute stores that had already closed for the evening. Tomorrow we rest our heads in PARIS!

XOXO K&R

Essen, teil zwei. (Part two, that is.)

2010-03-06T14:06:00.007-05:00

First of all let's tell you which German words and phrases we actually know. We apologize in advance for our spelling.

1) Scheizze - Shoot! (or the other word...)

2)Bier - Beer

3) Guten morgen/tag - Good Morning / day

4) Danke - Thanks

5)Weiner schnitzel - A type of food

6) Volkswagen - Punch Buggy!

7) Meine Damen und Herren - Ladies and Gentlemen

8) Willkommen - Welcome

9) Fremde - Stranger

10) Gluklich zu sehen - Happy to see you

11) Bliebe reste stay

12) Herr - Mr.

13) Frauline - Ms.

14) Aufwidersehen - buh bye

15) Herr passport bitte - Your passport please

16) Haben sie gehort das Deutsche Band

17) wundebar! - Wonderful!

18) Guten Tag hop hop

19) Ach du lieber

20) Eins, zwei, drei, Cool Runnings!

So the extent of our German vocabulary comes from movies or musicals by Mel Brooks and Kander & Ebb. Good stuff to know, but not so much when trying to communicate with actual Germans. Fortunately, we have learned that lots of Germans speak English. So when ordering food or purchasing flowers, just a simple "Do you speak English?" gets you a whole lot further than our obviously limited vocabulary would.

After arriving in Essen, Sidonie took us to go grab some lunch. After lunch, we walked around the shopping area where we ate while Sidonie had a very successful talk with her new agent (yaay!) We then headed back to her apartment and began laundry. We now feel clean and don't smell anywhere near as offensive as we did before. We then met Sidonie at her theatre at about 5:45 and she gave us a tour of the backstage. We learned that Stage Left and Stage Right are actually flipped here in Germany, the perspective is actually from that of the director, not the actors on stage. We also found it interesting that the Stage Manager gives the standby's and go's in English and is also called "Stage Manager" - no German translation. Cool huh?

Foreshadowing? Maybe so...

Backstage, there were a few different dressing areas. Each actor has their own section and the renderings of their costumes are hung next to it. The set was also really cool! It's designed to look like a giant jukebox. At the foot of the stage are giant letters and numbers that lit up during the pre-show when different songs came on. The stage itself is a giant record player. The record is a revolve where the drum kit was set up. To stage left (or here in Germany, stage right) was a needle for the record player with an arm large enough for people to stand on. One of the more impressive parts about the show is that all of the actors supplied the music. There was no orchestra pit, it was all supplied by the actors on stage. One of our favorite scenes was Buddy Holly at the Apollo. It opened with a fantastic rendition of Big Momma Thorton's "Hound Dog." When Sidonie made her entrance for this scene, she looked like Beyonce in Dreamgirls! Just sayin - über fierce.

At intermission, two giant screens came from both sides of the stage to act as the curtain. The screens were jukebox playlists. Sidonie told us that all of the songs listed were either by Buddy Holly or songs inspired by him. Our personal favorite was Weezer's "Buddy Holly." There was a lot of Elvis and interestingly, a couple Beyonce songs. The majority of the second act was a big ol' rock concert with Buddy Holly, Big Bopper ("Chantilly Lace") and Ritchie Valens ("La Bamba"). If you aren't familiar with the story, they all die in the end. In Don McLean's song "American Pie" when they say "the day the music died" it is referring to the day that Buddy Holly, Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens all died in the same plane crash after this last concert they performed together. The last number in the show was HUGE. It had the whole house up and dancing. The guys hit their last notes, the lights popped and they were gone, just like it was all those years ago "the day the music died." The ensemble, still on stage, began to sing a slow downed, almost gospel-like version of "Johnny B. Goode" (which was awesome, btw). The guys slowly came back on stage and began to sing it in the Michael J. Fox "Back to the Future" style we all know and love. At the curtain call, the lead explained that the Colosseum Theatre is sadly closing in August with the show. Like many theatres right now, it is having a tough time keeping it's head above water during these rocky economic times. It's so sad to see yet another beautiful theatre close its doors, especially one as unique as this one. The building looks as though it was an old factory warehouse, so the interior has lots of open beams and sky lights. It's really quite beautiful.

The show itself was really cool. It's so interesting to see a show in another language. Sidonie was kind enough to give us a little plot breakdown before we saw the show so we had an idea of what was going on. It was still difficult to follow at times, but that just added to the adventure of seeing a show in a foreign language. Fortunately, all of the songs were in English, so we could follow those for sure! During several numbers, the cast tried to get the audience to clap along to the music. We noticed that everyone in the audience was clapping to their own beat, not to the one provided on stage, which we found to be pretty amusing.

After the show, we grabbed some dinner, then came back to Sidonie's and passed out (as evidenced by our short post from last night). Sidonie got going early this morning to perform in a promotion for her show while the Woodmere gang slept in until noon (awesome). We finally got going, did a little shopping and ate some lunch at Vapiano's, a Subway-style Italian restaurant. We dined on pasta and Arizona peach tea (a sweet reminder of home!). We then picked up some dinner for Sidonie then took it to her at the theatre. We got to hang out and meet some of her friends for a little bit before the theatre kicked guests out before the show. As a thank-you for doing her promotional gig today, she got a huge bouquet of flowers (we've learned that they do flower bouquets really well here in Germany). We took those home for her but ran into an Ikea across the street to get her a big vase. Now that she has an agent, she'll need bigger flower vases for her soon-to-come bigger flowers!

So now we're chillin' at casa de Sidonie and waiting for her to come home! We still haven't sampled our beer that we bought in Brussels, so we're planning to have a chocolate and beer-tasting party when she gets here. We leave tomorrow for Amsterdam and hope to get there in time to check out the Van Gogh Museum.

We also really like reading the ads around here because, well, they're funny. Here are two winners from Germany: