I’m waiting to catch a night train to Barcelona so in the meantime I thought I’d whip off a quick blog about the mini Taricaya reunion in Southern Germany this past weekend. For those of you who don’t know, Taricaya is the ecological reserve in the Peruvian Amazon where I volunteered at the end of last year. Most of the other volunteers were European, including many from Germany. Since right now we are unusually close geographically, we decided to get together. I took the train from Paris to Pfaffenhofen (right outside Munich), my friend Marlene’s hometown. There [View Full Entry]

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As much as I want to share my experiences in Ghana with my friends and family, I’m not sure how to do it. The experiences were many and unique and they had an impact on me I don’t think I can describe in words. I don’t think I even truly understand the extent of that impact yet. Even my photos will not help as much as they usually do. All I know is that a part of me was extremely sad to leave Ghana and that I returned to Paris feeling exhausted, like I had been bombarded with too many things [View Full Entry]

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At the request of my dear father, I am going to take you on a short tour of my day-to-day here in Paris. P.S. The Travel Blog uploader is working again so I've added photos from Bruges and my visit with Fre. Enjoy! [View Full Entry]

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I arrived in the Netherlands on Queen’s Day which, like the name suggests, celebrates the Queen of Holland. Young Dutch people use the day as an excuse to party like there is no tomorrow! I felt both disappointed and relieved that the real partying goes on the day and night before Queen’s Day. I saw a lot of “crazy Dutch people dressed in orange” (as Fre put it) although most of them seemed pretty tame and worn out. By the looks of it plenty of partying went on in the trains themselves, which were littered with confetti and deflated orange balloons. [View Full Entry]

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…but personally I thought the movie was pretty horrible. The film actually did a decent job of portraying the city in all its beauty, but I was thankful I didn’t run across any gun-wielding maniacs while I was there. I wouldn’t have minded bumping into a Colin Farrell look-alike though. I only returned from Salzburg to Paris for one night before hitting the road (or the tracks rather) again. Like Salzburg, I had wanted to visit Bruges since I read about it in my guide book. Belgium is an appealing country (the chocolate being only one of the reasons why) and [View Full Entry]

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At first it was hard to be on my own again after spending time with Dad. If there is one thing that I’ve discovered this year, it’s that traveling is much more enjoyable if I have someone to share it with. Before setting out for Peru this summer, a part of me was really looking forward to traveling by myself. In part I took this gap year to learn more about myself. I was eager to do some soul searching and there were a couple of particular kinks in my life that I needed to untangle in my brain. The time [View Full Entry]

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I arrived in Prague midmorning on Saturday. I slept quite well in my reclining seat and had a nice conversation with the three American girls next to me, who are studying abroad in Ireland and were visiting Prague for Spring Break. I spent about 3 hours trying to find the hotel to check-in and dump my luggage. Yuck. The Prague public transportation system is not as straightforward as Paris, at least not to me. It didn’t help that the locals I was pleading help from kept giving me mixed directions. But ninguna problema in the end, I found the hotel and [View Full Entry]

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My journey to reach Prague and meet up with Dad was a lot longer than I originally wanted. I took an early morning train from Paris to Mannheim, Germany and then had to wait in Mannheim from 10:00 in the morning until MIDNIGHT to take a night train to Prague. It was either that or get to Prague a day later, but which point I would only have a few hours to explore the city before Dad and I needed to travel to Vienna. I had no idea what to do in Mannheim and didn’t especially want to spend 12 hours [View Full Entry]

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My second week of French lessons have come to a close a day earlier than I had anticipated. My dad conveniently has some presentations to give in Europe over the next week so we are going to meet in Prague and then travel to Vienna and Budapest together. Unfortunately in order to meet him on time I have to take a train out of Paris tomorrow morning, which means I miss French class. I think it’s worth though it to spend the extra time with Dad. I’m super excited about our trip! I am happy to say that I’m enjoying my [View Full Entry]

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Earlier this week I had planned on going to Bruge, Belgium for the weekend. I could have started using my Eurail Pass this at that time, which I am eager to start doing, and I have heard really good things about Bruges. Unfortunately, when I went to buy my ticket on Friday afternoon the woman at the ticket counter told me that ALL Eurail Pass user seats on ALL trains headed to Bruges on Saturday were taken. In fact pretty much ALL seats on ALL trains going ANYWHERE this weekend were taken. The reason for the unusually full trains was Easter, [View Full Entry]

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