THE SUN DOES SHINE IN NORWAY

For my last travel weekend Vanessa and I went to Norway. We had some flight drama getting there. Ryanair was supposed to fly us into an airport about two hours outside of Norway but, because of snow and ice on the runway, they dropped us off at the actual Oslo airport. We had a much easier time getting to our hostel.

When we arrived there was this beautiful soft snow falling lightly on our heads and on the ground. We spent maybe a half an hour walking around in the dark just watching the snow fall.

Oslo isn't the most tourist friendly city, especially in the winter. The Cathedral was under renovation and completely covered in scaffolding and tarps. The Parliament building is closed to tourists and the National Theatre shoos you out if you try to explore. We did go to the Munch Museum, but were rather disappointed because they only had a small exhibition and weren't displaying any of his most famous works.

We did get to see the Viking Ship Museum! That was really cool. I just wanted to climb in the boats and pretend to pillage and plunder. We we awoke on Sunday we were surprised to find that the sun was actually shining! As you might know, in the winter Norway has very little sunlight (the opposite is true in the summertime). At this time of year in Oslo, the sun rises around 9am and sets by 3pm. Usually, because of overcast, the sun isn't visible at any point throughout the day. We got lucky, however, and were kissed by the sun on Sunday.

The real drama happened on the way home, though. We made our 3:30pm bus to the airport, arriving around 5 o'clock to make our 7 o'clock flight. It was at this point, after the hour forty-five bus ride from Oslo, that Vanessa realized she'd forgotten her passport at the Hostel. Long story short, she went back and got the earliest flight to Amsterdam out of Oslo on Monday morning. She said she'd be fine and convinced me it wouldn't be worth the extra hundreds of Euros for me to not take the flight that night. But, all turned out well and she made it back in time to do her scene in acting.

Here are some pictures from Oslo.

Well, that's it. I'm sitting here in a packed room. We leave for London tomorrow afternoon and then it's back to Arizona on Friday. It's been an amazing semester. Really, this experience has affected my life in ways that just going to college wouldn't have. If you have kept up with my irregular posting habits throughout, I thank you. I know some of them were too long and some were too short, but in the end I hope you are okay with it.

And while it's been a magical experience, I cannot wait to be home.

ITALIA

After London, Noel, Zach, Ben and I had made plans to go to Italy. When we first booked the trip we merely booked flights from London into Venice and back to the Castle from Milan. This was early on in the semester and we decided to decide later exactly how we'd spend our time in Italy. Well, many weekends of travel passed, and when it came down to actually booking our Hostels (and trains because my Eurail had expired), we decided ease of travel was the best choice. So we booked two nights in Venice, two nights in Florence and a night in Bergamo (close to the airport) so it wouldn't be stressful catching our flight home.

Venice is really magical. In the same way as Trogir, I could literally point my camera anywhere and get a good picture. We spent all day Wednesday just walking around the city. We went inside the San Marco Basilica, which was one of my favorite churches so far. It was dark and had less ornamentation on the walls and ceilings. It was a neat difference from a lot of the other churches I've seen this trip. Venice is wonderfully small and there's plenty to eat. In the afternoon we found a little shop that sold wine for two Euros per liter so each of us got one. That was a fun night.

On Thursday we did more walking around, saw a monastery and a few more churches and then had to make our train. Because we were travelling during dinner time, we decided to postpone our Thanksgiving celbration until Friday.

We arrived in Florence relatively late and went straight to our hostel. We discovered that our hostel was, in our case, an apartment. That, in and of itself, made Florence. It rained all day Friday ,but since we had our apartment, it was wonderful to just stay in and read. It's amazing what a difference a table can make to a city's experience. That night, as planned, we made a Thanksgiving feast. We bought handmade pasta , homemade sauce and two liters of wine from a little shop near our apartment. We bought bread from the baker and sausage from the butcher. We added some wonderful cheese, an onion, a tomato, some garlic and a little salad and got five hours worth of cooking, eating and drinking. For not being home, I'd say it was a rather successful Thanksgiving.

On Saturday we visited the Duomo, saw Michaelangelo's David and explored the city's original walled fortress (which, upon exiting, we saw was labeled "No Tourists"). With a train to Bergamo and a flight to Weeze, we found ourselves home in time for dinner on Sunday. Cheers to a successful travel break.

LONDON AND STRATFORD

This was my second trip to London and it was even better this time. I went the first time with the parents and the sister (and don't worry, that's not the reason why it was so much better this time round). When I went with my family we had such a limited amount of time that we didn't really get the chance to see London.

With the school I was required to take some walking and museum tours. I got to see the British Museum, the National Gallery, the Tate Modern, Westminster Abbey, the Joan Soane house, and visit Shakespeare's birthplace Stratford upon Avon.

London is AMAZING about museums and I got to see some really wonderful things. I won't go into detail about each one, but if you have any questions about what I saw in any of them I'd be glad you let you know.

The most exciting part of our stay in London was the County Hotel. It just had this wonderful ambiance and the most friendly staff and the walls were peeling and the carpet smelled like dog food and the porter (to whom we had to give our keys before leaving the hotel) was kind of a monster who sometimes wouldn't give you your key back. I highly recommend it.

But, yeah. London wasn't too rainy and wasn't too cold and I really really enjoyed my second stay there. Now I'm off to dinner.

ALMOST DONE (PRAGUE)

So, these past few weeks have really flown by. I just looked back on the blog and realized how many weeks it's really been. We've got: Prague, London and Stratford, Venice and Florence, and (most recently) Oslo.

Prague was an amazing city. Before this trip I hadn't thought of going there but, once I'd heard people talking about it, I had to go. We went on a tour of the city (it was a little rainy, but that made it more Prague-y) and our guide was just jolly. He told us that Prague is so interesting architecturally because it has historically been much poorer that many other European cities. This forced architects, in redesigning or updating a building, to make small cheap changes, usually to the facade of buildings. That would explain a medieval building with Renaissance stylings. Later on we went on the most amazing "Haunted Prague" tour. It was free because we had gone on the other tour so we decided why not. Our tour guide was so wonderfully unenthusiastic and was so blatant about her lack of desire to be there. We had trouble keeping ourselves together.

On night two we tried to see an opera or a dance, but nothing was playing so we went to the biggest club in Europe. That's right, five stories of skeezy dancing. It was fun, but it was loud and didn't live up to our Haunted tour. No exciting train stories on this trip, just a long long day on a train.

AS PROMISED

Venice and Florence.

More text to come later.

PHOTOS FROM LONDON

Our second travel break was one to London (I also took a day trip to Stratford Upon Avon, where Shakespeare grew up).  I'm sorry, again, that I'm not posting, but they say a picture is worth a thousand words!

Here are 44,000 words worth of pictures.

APOLOGY

I'm sorry I'm doing such a bad job keeping things updated.  Things got pretty crazy right before we left on our last travel break so I didn't have time post about Prague.  Then we went on our travel break and we went to England and then I continued on to Venice and Florence.  Then, I got back and now finals are upon me and papers and research are keeping my time filled up!

I finally put some laundry in (ten days of travel really puts a damper on your underwear supply) and uploaded my Prague pictures.

There will be more later, I promise.  But for now, here are the Prague pictures.

Don't hate.