Reims!

Bonjour! This weekend I travelled to Reims, France, among other places. Well, actually I travelled to Verdun, France first to see the fort and battlefield from World War I. This site, I can honestly say, was the first time that I really felt the impact of studying AND travelling abroad. The first few two weekends I saw some incredible sites and had truly unique/unusual experiences, but didn’t really feel like I had learned a lot from the actual location. I certainly learned a lot about being in a foreign country and all that goes along with that, but didn’t really feel too impacted from where I was. At Verdun, however, I felt I had a better understanding of what WWI really was, especially for those living in France. For instance, the landscape of the battlefield is completely different from that of the city because of all the shelling. I learned a good deal about living conditions of the Verdun fort as well, and that completely changed any romanticized feelings I had about living a fort. I always pictured the fort as being the safe haven for war-ridden soldiers, but our tour guide informed us otherwise. She told us that some soldiers actually left the fort and entered the battlefield, because the conditions (constant noise, little food/water, extremely low hygiene and disease) were so bad. We also learned that there were about 9 villages in the battlefield areas of Verdun, but those areas haven’t been inhabited since the battle in WWI. This really made me understand the impact of having a war in your home country. I suppose I never really realized that the war impacts the soldiers, the soldiers’ families, and those living in the country of the battle. Quite obviously, this was a big learning experience for me, particularly since it was all in the span of 3 hours.
After Verdun, we travelled to Reims in the Champagne region of France. I learned that you actually cannot call sparkling wine champagne unless it’s from the Champagne region of France. I believe that it is actually illegal. Before getting to our hotel, we went to the Pommery champagne cellar. To get to the cellar, we had to go down 136 stairs. Our guide told us that, at that level, the temperature is always 55 degrees and the champagne needs to have a constant cool temperature. The tour was really interesting, particularly as the cellar is divided into areas named for cities in Belgium, Luxembourg, France and other areas of Western Europe. A lot of the rooms also had pieces of modern art in them. One room, for example, had a palette full of Nutella just sitting there and our guide told us it was modern art. Many in our group, myself included, considered taking a piece of that modern art for ourselves. At the end of the tour, a friend of ours got to open a Champagne bottle with a sword (so cool!) and we all got a flute of Pommery champagne (with three different kinds of grapes) for ourselves.
Following the tour, we checked into our hotel and had some authentic Mexican cuisine at Le Latina! I know it sounds awful having Mexican food in France, but French food is pretty expensive here and it had been a long time since I had guacamole, yum! The next morning we visited the Reims cathedral. I found it to be an absolutely breathtaking place. The outside is huge, and is almost difficult to fit into one picture. I had never seen so many statues on one building before! The inside is also gorgeous, with lots of intricate stained glass everywhere. I’ve found that the advice of my Grandmother and Grandad has been incredibly useful in cathedrals, among other places of course! They told me to always consider the actual work that went into making it, which I took to heart when I saw the very top of the massive church and realized that someone must have had to go up there to work on it (I’m guessing cherry pickers were a lot harder to come by back then). Their second piece of advice was to “look up” which caused me to see some amazing statues that I never would have seen had I not remembered to look up! All in all, I was incredibly impressed by the cathedral and am very excited to see more like it in Florence next week!
We left the cathedral around noon and headed to a monastery in Belgium where they brew their own beer and make their own cheese. The monastery was, in accordance with the rest of the sites of the trip, beautiful. We got to taste the beer and cheese and I discovered a love for celery salt! Now, I know you’re thinking “Lisa, isn’t the cheese/beer a little more important than celery salt?” I answer this, no. Beer seems to be everywhere in Europe and, although the cheese was delicious, cheese is also everywhere. Celery salt is not! It was amazing, it really tasted like celery but in salt form! And put together with the cheese, it was so good! I need to know if they have celery salt in the States, because if not, I am going to bring some home! Thus, I had a very good time at the monastery.
After the monastery, we traveled to a citadel in France. The citadel was cool because it reminded me of my days in history class learning about city-states. I always wondered what one would be like and if it would really make me feel safe, as some of the wars back then did not seem like experiences I wanted to have. The fortress was really interesting and I definitely felt safe, however, the town with the citadel is so obscure now that I never really felt unsafe. Maybe put it in some inner city area of Atlanta or something and then I could really put that safeness thing to the test! We then travelled from the citadel back to Luxembourg, making my Saturday a tri-country day!

Oktoberfest and Salzburg!

Whew! This past week/weekend has seriously flown by! Classes have been going very well at the Chateau, and my professors are all extremely interesting. More than once, my professors have stopped the class to discuss Luxembourg culture or answer a question about European customs. I must admit that I find those times a little more interesting than learning about pronouns in my French class, though the lessons I have learned in French have come in handy more than once here. While at a supermarket the other day, I actually used a new French phrase to explain that I speak Spanish! My classmates and I have noticed that one of the biggest differences between Americans and Europeans is the degree of modesty with languages. For instance, my host mom says that she only speaks a little English while she is largely fluent and has been learning it since primary school! I have learned that I should say “Je parle un peu espanol” as I really only speak a little Spanish compared to most people here.
Anyways, I traveled to Munich and Salzburg, Austria this weekend and it truly was an adventure! A friend of mine, Ben, my boyfriend Dan and I took an overnight train to Munich from Luxembourg in which I slept in my first couchette, or sleeper car. Though those things might look super glamorous in the movies (I kept imagining that scene from White Christmas), they are cramped and slightly awkward as you’re basically sharing a closet with 5 strangers. Despite that, it was still one of the coolest parts of the trip! We got to Munich around 7 and headed straight to Oktoberfest after meeting up with some other Miami kids.
Oktoberfest was an extremely cool but almost surreal experience. The festival reminded me a bit of a Cedar Point-type place except with much more Bavarian food and, obviously, lots more beer. Since we got there on opening day, the festivities were quite intense. Here’s an Oktoberfest fun fact: no one is allowed to drink until the mayor ceremoniously opens the keg at noon, certainly a cultural difference from the States! Although, the thought of Mr. Finkbeiner doing that does bring a smile to my face. All of the beer halls were described to me as tents but they certainly didn’t look like tents! The halls are huge and look like any other building, except with a ton of traditional Bavarian decoration. One of the ones that we explored was the Spaten tent and it had an entire ox roasting on a stick. Needless to say, I did not partake. I am, however, proud to say that I had my first Bavarian pretzel which was about twice the size of the biggest ones in the States! There were some chocolate covered ones too, but I resisted those! We left the festivities around 3 as many in our group wanted to see the rest of Munich. We explored the huge city, going into various churches and exploring some really cool shops. After our Bavarian cuisine for lunch, we decided on a very non-traditional restaurant for dinner: McDonalds! It was there I discovered that European McDonalds has something that American McDonalds do not, and that is SOUR CREAM! I have searched every grocery store in Luxembourg for sour cream and have not found any but McDonalds has it! That was quite a high point for me.





After a little more exploring, Dan, Ben and I traveled to Salzburg around 9 that night. We got into our hostel, the Yoho International Youth Hostel, and fell right asleep. We woke up around 7 and spent the morning exploring the city. Most of our time was spent in the old part of the city, where most the churches and beautiful buildings are. I found the cathedral to be absolutely breathtaking, with one of the most beautiful domes I’ve ever seen. My favorite part, however, was the garden. It was just so well maintained with so many different flowers and statues, I didn’t want to leave! Sadly, however, we had a 9 hour train to catch and left the city around 1.

Bruges!

These past (almost) two weeks seem to have flown by! The days following our arrival to MUDEC, the group of 130 some Miamians and I took part in a few days of orientation sessions. The sessions were long but very informative about living in Europe, traveling and living with host families. The school also took us on some field trips to military cemetaries (Luxembourgish and American), a WWII museum, a beautiful castle, a winery and Luxembourg’s famous fair: Shebefuer (spelling??). The fair was one of the coolest things. It was just like a carnival except bigger and more intense with rides resembling the Power Tower at Cedar Point and with an entire street of cool Lux merchant stuff. The fair is also over 660 years old! We then had a week of classes. Classes are going well and most of my professors are from Luxembourg so that’s a major plus! I’m pretty excited about my poly sci class right now as my professor used to be an ambassador to Russia for a long time and has some awesome stories. French is also going well, although my pronunciation is a little off. My professor told me I need to ignore what I learned in Spanish as the pronunciation could not be more different between the two languages…still working on that one!

Well, after an orientation weekend and a week of classes at the Chateau, a group of friends and I went to Bruges this weekend! Bruges was about 4 hours away by train and we got a pretty good price for the ticket/hostels there so I felt we were off to a good start. We left Friday pretty much right after our classes ended at noon. We got to Bruges right around dinner time, but had to check into our hostel before dinner (our backpacks were heavy!). This being my first hostel experience, I would say it was a pretty good one. Our rooms were huge, with about 8 people to a room, but very clean. We met several Australians in the hostel on Friday night and that was definitely a cool multicultural experience. That night we really experienced the whole European dining scene as our Irish dinner took about an hour and a half to come out after we ordered it! Other than that, it was a fun night just getting to know the city!

Saturday we got up pretty early and headed to the town’s square. The square was absolutely beautiful, with a church stretching across one side and buildings/shops on the others. We started with a canal ride that lasted about a half hour with a guide who told me he has a chocolate lab like Coco!! The canal ride was a really cool way to see the city from a different point of view. We then went to Church of our Lady to see Michelangelo’s Madonna & Child, which is one of the only Michelangelo’s works to be outside of Italy. The entire church was beautiful, but the Madonna & Child was really amazing. After a quick lunch of one Belgian waffle with chocolate sauce and whipped cream from a street vendor (don’t worry Mom, I did eat a pretty healthy breakfast earlier!), we went to this massive church in the square to climb to the Belfort. To get to the top of the church’s belltower, we had to climb about 360 steps! I definitely felt a little better about eating that waffle after climbing all those steps! The view from the top was seriously breathtaking and definitely worth climbing up to. We then had a day of shopping around the square, pretty much scoping out the best chocolate stands. Although we probably went in like 10-15 shops, each one was different from the other but all smelled delicious! I tried to resist buying some chocolate, but eventually gave in after sighting some amazing looking truffles. Yum! After shopping, we went to our second hostel which had smaller rooms and a very American-y restaurant attached. The restaurant had all kinds of posters from some U.S. cities and I was happy to see some signs from Chicago and Ohio! We ate a quick dinner in the square and spent the rest of the night wandering around the small city. Although we did reference our map several times, we discovered that Bruges is very small and pretty much all streets lead to the town’s square.

Sunday morning we had a breakfast of Belgian waffles (delicious again!) and left for the train station. I was pretty excited to get back to my comfort zone of Luxembourg, but was really sad to leave the city. Bruges was definitely an amazing and beautiful city and if you’re ever in Belgium, I highly recommend visiting! We got home around 7:30 (or 19:30 here), very tired and very eager for any food that wasn’t covered in chocolate!