Berlin was a city that I hadn’t planned on visiting, but when I saw fliers for a trip to Berlin sponsored by one of the programs through ESC Rouen I decided that I should go. I really wanted to visit Germany, and Berlin is a city with so much history and culture that it would be a shame if I passed up the opportunity. So just three days after I got back from Amsterdam, I boarded another overnight bus to Berlin to set off on a long weekend in Deutschland. The bus ride to Berlin was an adventure in itself. [View Full Entry]

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I have to admit that I was pleasantly surprised by Amsterdam. I had heard stories of it being kind of a seedy place with its infamous red light district and “coffee shops,” however I really enjoyed it. There is a lot to do without having to venture into the less respectful areas. Like Bruges, Amsterdam is a city connected by bridges and canals. There are also thousands of bikers. Almost everyone rode a bike in Amsterdam, and if you got in the way of the bike lane you feared for your life- some of the bikers were pretty intense! The [View Full Entry]

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When trying to find a place to travel to for Easter weekend, my friend Beth found some information about a chocolate festival in Belgium, so we decided it would be the perfect time to travel north and visit Belgium and the Netherlands! The chocolate festival was held in Bruges (also spelled Brugge, and Bruge…I’m not sure which one is the English version!). Bruges is a really cute city, called the “Venice of the North” because of all of its canals that run throughout the city. It is the biggest tourist destination in Belgium, and in fact I have heard that [View Full Entry]

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First of all, I’d like to apologize for not writing for so long…I’m sure you are wondering how the rest of my spring vacation was after the disaster that was Naples! Well, as I said before, once that plane landed in Barcelona I felt a sigh of relief. The weather was perfect, the airport was clean, we flew in right over the ocean…it was getting better already. I would have loved to stay in Barcelona because many people had told me that Barcelona was a great city to visit, but I instead decided to head south to Valencia with some [View Full Entry]

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Napoli. Where do I start? And this time I do not mean that in a good way. Let me preface this by saying that we were not planning on spending much time in Naples when we decided to book our hostel there, but it was convenient to get in and out of, and provided an easy access to a number of different day trips in that area. The main reason both Celeste and I wanted to go to southern Italy was to go to Capri island (the ferry leaves from Naples), so when we arrived in Naples and found it [View Full Entry]

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My second week off happened to be only two weeks after I returned from my first break, but I was eager and excited to get back into travel mode and explore Italy and Spain for the following ten days. The first stop was Florence, Italy where a few of my friends from Fairfield are currently studying, so I was excited to meet up with them. Celeste and I started our trip by taking a night train from Paris to Florence. I didn’t really know what to expect, but since not many airlines fly to the Florence airport, it was the [View Full Entry]

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Our train from Vienna arrived in Budapest around 8PM on Tuesday. We were supposed to arrive earlier but our train was stopped somewhere just over the Hungarian border for over an hour! The conductor made a few announcements in German and then said in English that “the police were coming.” It wasn’t too big of a scene but we were curious as to what was going on. Police came and were looking under the tracks with flashlights. We assumed that it had to do with some kind of vandalism, but we never found out what the deal was. We were [View Full Entry]

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The weekend after Budapest I decided to take it easy and stay around Rouen, however my friend Celeste and I quickly realized that there really isn’t much to do and since we had a four-day weekend (Monday and Tuesday classes were cancelled) we decided we should go somewhere for at least a few days. One of our friends told us that you could get last minute deals to various destinations around France on the SNCF (French railway) website. We researched this a bit and found that one of the featured towns was Tours. Tours is located in the Loire Valley, [View Full Entry]

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Sunday morning we took an 8am train from Prague that got into Vienna around 12:30pm. Our hostel was a short tram ride away from the train station, which was nice because the hostel was in a fairly central area. I was really impressed by the hostel- it only opened last summer so everything was very clean and seemed very secure. They even gave us all maps when we got there that listed important sights to see while we were in Vienna. After we checked in we took the metro to one of the main streets called St. Stephan’s Square. My [View Full Entry]

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Prague. I don’t even know where to start! I spent my Winter Break traveling in Central and Eastern Europe, starting in Prague, then moving on to Vienna and finally Budapest. It was a great trip- I really learned a lot about these places and I had a lot of fun. They weren’t even places I had planned on visiting when I was first making a list of places to visit when I came to Europe but I am so glad I did. We left for Prague Thursday evening. It actually took a while to get to Paris Orly airport because [View Full Entry]

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