The end.

the Paris Project

Each color photo is my copy, my remake. The black and white being an original postcard from Paris. I want to thank (in order of each photo left to right) Megan Tye, Charlotte Powley, Amber Lily Whiteread, Oscar Dublin, Megan Tye again, Julie Linzmeier, Malia Moss, Spannerann, Megan Tye again, Roman Korver, and Anatole Dublin! They were so patient with these photos and they also made my year!


Two months after I returned from Europe leaves me in a place that I had been running away from: College. I am here now, trying to make it work, but I know now that I am going to keep exploring. It has been hard coming back to reality, and leaving this blog open and available was keeping me from settling into San Diego, while this blog continues, so does my want to go back home to Paris. So this is the last post on this blog. That doesn't mean it's over though. I will be keeping a real life blog about University which you can check out here if your desperate for some distractions.

I was thinking about trying to sum up my past year in this blog post, but can I really do that? Just like when people ask "How was France?" I have nothing to say. Last year meant so much more to me than living in Paris. Last year was about exploring and experiencing new places, meeting such amazing people, and working for and loving my three boys, V,O and A. I have experienced so much, and I know that it is only the beginning. If in one year I can become a regular at a cafe on Rue Cler, get three new brothers, travel to eight countries, learn a new language, make lasting friendships and live off of cheese and wine, I can't wait for the next four years. I still don't know what I want to do with my life, but I guess that's ok with me.

Thanks for being there all.

Bisous

Mo

London. Again.

London in 36 hours. Whoah.

Julie and I had both been to London on seperate occasions, I went back in October and Julie had started the month earlier with five days on her own, so it was not essential that we had to see all of the tourist sites but tone thing was essential. We had to see David Tennant and Catherine Tate in Much Ado About Nothing.  Most of you know my unhealthy obsession with Doctor Who and the chance of seeing my two favorite actors from Doctor Who playing my two favorite characters in my favorite Shakespeare play, was not something I was going to miss. To get lottery tickets you normally wait outside of the theater about two hours before the play, but instead this theater had tickets out on lottery at 10:00am. Julie and I had to get  from my friend Amber's house in North London down to central London so we left at 9:00, our host too drugged up from her recent surgery to come with us. (I promise I will come back Amber and we can have a great time!) After waiting in the lottery we got one ticket and one standing room ticket and I will say it was the most fun I have ever had watching a play in my life. They placed the play in the eighties, but kept the traditional dialouge. It was brilliant. Catherine Tate and David Tennant did such a good job and they have such over the top acting styles that it was very appropriate for a Shakespeare play.

 Now comes the complicated stressed running around part. After we got the tickets at 10:30 Julie insisted that we go get pictures in front of Big Ben because she didn't have a camera before.

Voila. 

After we ran around getting these pictures with a disposable camera because we forgot to charge the camera, we of course had to go Hogwarts briefly.

 After we got back from Hogwarts it was getting late and we had to head back to Amber's house to pick up our luggage. Here was the stressful, costly, part of the whole day: We had to check my luggage at the train station while we were at the show because the show wouldn't get out until 10:30pm and we had to get Julie on a train by 11:00pm to get her to the Birmingham Airport before the last train left, even though her flight didn't leave until 8am the next morning. She spent the night in the airport.

After making sure my sister was on her way, I took my bags (no wheelies, just fifty pounds of dufflebag) on the tube to get to a shuttle stop and I arrived at my airport at 2:00am for my 9:00am flight. I spent the night in the airport.

Our day in London was hectic and stressful but amazing all the same, a pretty good example of London itself.

She was making a David Tennant Face. FYI.

Bruxelles.

I have been putting off my last couple of stops and while I attribute that to being extraordinarily busy , I suppose you could blame me for just not wanting to wrap up this blog. However we are close to the end and  I promised to write about the places I've been... so here we go.

Trekking in the rain.

Brussels (Bruxelles), Belgium: A stressful, fun and exciting 36 hours. The last stop Gaby, Julie and I made before returning to Paris for a "layover." When we arrived after an enjoyable two part train ride, we had a mini panic attack. In comparison to the other capitol cities we had visited, it was small. (Like everything else in the country). It was the most modern looking city as far as architecture and the wettest and coldest weather we had seen since our first stop in Munich. Our panic attack was caused by the crappy planning and inability to book a hostel and the tourist office being closed when we arrived at 6:00pm. Long story short, we walked around Brussels for a few hours in the rain looking for a broom closet to sleep in. We finally found a nice hostel/hotel that put us up last minute for a decent price. We showered off and headed out to the famous Brussels Red Bar where they had over 2,000 types of beer. I got an 11% beer that tasted no stronger than an Amstel Light and was the same color. After drunk arm wrestling (Julie and I got caught in a tie) we wandered home for the night and got ready for our long day.

Burger Vending Machine

The next day we saw all of Brussels' tourist attractions which consisted of  a little statue and a courtyard. We also got two waffles each throughout the day and had traditional hot chocolate and french fries (which originated in Belgium... go figure) Wahoo!

Then for something else to do we went to a flea market where we snagged awesome traditional beer mugs from the places we had been and Julie found a pretty silver cup. After this fun detour we went back to the hostel to gather our things and headed back to Paris on a train that gave us one hour to explore Lille which is a beautiful little city in the North of France and we were able to watch the reflection in the glass windows of a church in the main town square.
After a nap on the train, a trek back through the Parisien subway and a quick walk back to Corinnes, I took twenty four hours to say goodbye to Paris.

Brussels is a major tourist town for rich old ladies.

Hot Chocolate

11% Love.

You did this to yourself.

We got waffle #4 with powdered sugar and I blew on it and the sugar proceeded to fly up into Gaby's face and make her choke on her waffle. Cute Story.

Next Post: London in twenty three hours. 

The project.

As some of you may know, I have been working on a project from my last few months in Paris. I am going to display all of the photos as my final post, but I thought I would post one part as a taste of what I have been working on. I hope you like it! A lot of effort went into this! The top is an original postcard without any editing. The bottom is a recreation.

Please comment on it if you like it!

The evacuation.

A brief interruption to the travel blog for an update on school life:

I drove down to State and met up with my cousin's girlfriend Lindsay, after unpacking one of my two bags we took off to go explore San Diego and get tacos. I finally got excited to be living down here, the area is so cool and I feel like I could happily work anywhere from the French restaurants downtown to ticket sales at SeaWorld. Lindsay dropped me off just in time to witness my building being evacuated for unknown reasons. After meeting some cool Freshmen we took off to explore campus while waiting for the dorm to open back up.

It didn't.

Turns out there was a flood that flooded into the basement where the electricity box is kept. (I know thats not a real thing but I don't know what it's called). No electricity. No water. No dorm.

After a silly yet fun mixer we were told that the Red Cross was setting up in the gym for all of us who didn't have a place to go. I know I could have stayed with Lindsay or some of my other friends who offered, but I opted to stay in the gym to get to know the people in my dorm. It is a really cool building with transfers, freshmen and foreign exchange students. Not to mention the baseball team (which unfortunately did not stay in the gym). This morning I was able to go to my car and get my computer, choose not to go to the commencement ceremoney and now I wait in a Starbucks trying to kill time before our meeting at 1:30. It is now 10am. Le sigh.

Some Videos.

I don't feel like posting a whole post today so here are some videos I forgot to upload earlier. This one is of one of the performers at the traveling show in Dresden.

Prague. (Praha)

So take a step or two back to Prague, capitol of the Czech Republic. We stopped in Prague right before Dresden and on a night train from Vienna. On said night train we lost a camera with the photos from earlier in the trip so we bought a disposable camera, the film of which we just had developed. So the photos aren't great, but you can still see what is going on in them. To the left is the sister dearest standing next to the astronomical clock, voted Europe's number one most pointless tourist attraction. It may not have done anything cool, but it is still pretty 'cool that such an old clock still works with all of its original functions. It also had a cool 600th anniversary event. The video of it was something I saw years ago before I even knew where Prague was. The video is pretty long and starts off really boring but gets very cool and it goes through a lot of Prague's history, which is a real achievement seeing as they have been through so much. You can watch that here.

We did another walking tour in Prague 

On the tour of the old city Prague we saw and learned so much that I don't remember most of it. There have been so many battles and revolutions that it was just impossible to keep track. For example this lovely glass roof was over a courtyard where someone died? Or maybe there was a protest? I can't remember but I remember taking this photo for more than "Oh, that's pretty."

We also saw a lot of things dedicated to Franz Kafka and I took more than one photo of these statues for a Mrs. Coghill. (Shout out!) As we were walking around I just kept thinking about all of the people moving around like bugs. Kafka, a weird man. After our tour wrapped up we explored on our own over the famous tourist bridge (Charles, I think it was called) and over to the old town area where I felt like I was stepping into the grounds of Hogwarts. (How many nerd references can I throw into one post?) Check out the photos below:

Right?

After that long day of walking around we went back to our hostel and hung out, showered, napped and went to the grocery store. Beer was cheaper than water. Literally, cheaper than water. We met two Swedish guys who were on break from teaching and we taught each other drinking games. We taught them Kings Cup and by the end of the game our "Rule Makers" had us high-fiving, over the table, with our tongues out, yelling with our eyes closed, EVERYtime ANYone drank.  

The next day we went with the guys to Kutna Hora outside of Prague where we went to the Sedlec Ossuary. Which is monastery filled with the old monks bones. I didn't get any good photos but it is definitely worth looking up better photos. Here I did it for you: Photos

We also walked up to the old (est?) cathedral in Prague and possibly Europe. The rest of the photos are just us goofing around on a playground and exploring the town. I will try to get photos from our Swedish friend and put them up, but for now these will have to do. 

Na zdraví!

Sorry Starbucks.

Amsterdam.

After we took the disorienting night train to Amsterdam and wandered around for several hours looking for our couchsurfing host, we gave it up for good and tried to find a hotel online at an internet cafe.  This is what it felt like:

The internet was slower than when my grandpa had AOL Dial Up internet and we had just spent ten euros getting us all to the outskirts to see her house and then we spent another ten to get back into town to find the hotel. Once we had settled in though we started enjoying Amsterdam. Oh did I mention it started raining as we lugged our luggage to the hotel? No? Well it did.

After we settled in it occurred to us that we hadn't eaten anything for the past 18 hours. We went here:

Yummy.

By this time it was already pretty late but we explored Amsterdam a little and quite enjoyed it. I assumed it would be this small little town that is only famous for it's lax laws and cool policemen, but it was really quite beautiful. All of the old town homes were leaning because, as we learned later from our tourguide, that it was built on a swamp and that the ground kept sinking. The houses were also built to lean a little forward so that when the people wanted to store something in the attic they would just attach the cargo to a hook from the top of the house and haul it up, and because of the lean of the house, the heavy cargo would not slam into the building front. For example:

The pictures in Amsterdam didn't turn out great but we had a really great time and took some on a disposable as well, which we are waiting to be developed. But it was a lot of fun goofing around coming up with stupid things like the traveler walk:

We also abused Amsterdam's cheese shops which were giving out free cheese samples. I think we could've gotten by on those free cheese samples. And if anyone ever wants to give me a gift of cheese, know that I really like two year old goat cheese. ;)

We went on a tour which went through the red light district, the old town district and ended near the Anne Frank house which we went through as well. Amsterdam was fun.

Our tour guide warned us that if we took pictures of the prostitutes they would throw stuff at us  so I took this one from a safe distance.

Lucky Boob.

On to Brussels.