Skydiving in Switzerland!

3 of us decided to take a day trip to go Skydiving in Interlaken, Switzerland. Basically this was the most exciting/scary/intense thing I have ever done. I wasn't nervous about it... until I saw the first group of people falling down out of the sky. As we got into the airplane, and the guy I was jumping with kept letting me know how high up in the air we were, which pretty much just made me even more nervous. Then, when we were about to fall out of the airplane, I decided that there was really nothing I could do at this point, and accepted what I was about to do. It was amazing! I loved every second of it. We jumped in the Swiss Alps, and just seeing those as we went down made it worth it. We were in free-fall for about 45 seconds before the parachute opened, but it felt like 10 seconds. Yea. It was amazing. On a side note, whenever I jumped, this camera/video guy jumped out with me. He just so happens to be the silver surfer from the Fantastic 4 movie, as in the guy who actually did the surfing in the sky... pretty cool!
Anyway, that night my friend from Lausanne took me to her relatives house in Engleberg, Switzerland. We stayed there that night, then went skiing all day on Saturday. It was fun, but I discovered that skiing in the Alps is a lot tougher than skiing in Colorado or New Mexico. On another side note, my camera screen cracked because all of how cold it was... so I might not have as many pictures for awhile.

practicing....

Just in case...

EFT to Madrid!

Our Educational Field Trip this semester was to Madrid. We left on a Tuesday and returned on Saturday, so it was considerably longer than most of the other trips I’ve gone on. Again, my favorite part was walking around looking at the city (/shopping).
On Tuesday, we checked into our hotel and went to this cute little Spanish restaurant for dinner.
Wednesday, we visited the town of Toledo. This was a medieval town, and it has a moat encircling most of it. Toledo is also known for their steel-making factories. We also saw some cathedrals, temples, and mosques. That night we went to a Flamenco show! It wasn’t really how I expected it to be. The show is supposed to be telling a story, which I guess is normally about anger or frustration, because both of the dancers looked either mad or like they were about to cry the entire time they were dancing. I’m not sure if I liked it that much, I think I prefer more musical/happy style of entertainment.
Thursday we visited the Prado museum in the morning. Here is the Garden of Earthly Delights, which is one of the most famous pieces in the museum. We had the rest of the day free after that. Some people decided to take trips to some neighboring cities, but a few of us just stayed in Madrid. We went shopping a little, and then went to this huge park for a few hours. I’ve decided that Europeans don’t care as much about being sued as Americans do. There was a playground, so of course, we wanted to go play on it. It was fun, but I couldn’t imagine anything like this being in America. They had this one thing that you stood on, with a bar you had to hold onto, then you swung yourself around really fast. I’ll just say there were definitely a few times when I was scared I was about to fall off. We found a lake with some row boats, so we took an hour to go row ourselves across the lake. Eventually, we made our way to the other side of the park, and returned back to the hotel to rest for a couple hours. That night, a large group of us went out to dinner at… Hard Rock Café. Authentic, I know.
Friday we took another trip to a monastery/ home of Phillip II. That night we went to a Symphony. Then, on Saturday, went to the Reina Sophia museum, before heading back for Heidelberg.

The Park:

Toledo:

The Prado:

the playground

My Roommates! We got matching shirts:

Berlin

Sorry it’s taken me like a year to update this! I’ll start with a day trip to Berlin I took a couple weeks ago:

My friend and I decided that we should probably visit Berlin, seeing as how we are living in Germany… It was a pretty laid-back trip. Since I am a political science major, I am pretty interested in how Germany has developed, so Berlin was a great place to go to learn about the country’s history.
We arrived around 11AM, and saw the Reichstag, which is basically their Parliament. It was built during Hitler’s time, which is ironic because an engraved banner on the top of it says something like, “For the people”. We then went to the Brandenburg Gate, about 5 minutes away from the Reichstag. We also visited the Berliner Dom- one of my favorite cathedrals I have been to here in Europe. The Pergamon Museum was our next stop. Here they have essentially re-erected an ancient Greek Temple inside this museum. Looking at all of the statues/learning about how they were able to figure out where all of the broken pieces fit into the murals was pretty interesting, even though it had absolutely nothing to do with Germany.
After stopping to have an amazing crepe at this little stand, we walked to Checkpoint Charlie- the only way to get from East to West Berlin before the wall came down. This soldier there gave us stamps on our passport from the different countries (Russia, England, U.S…) during the war/occupation. Afterwards, we walked to the part of the wall that still remains. They are planning on having a museum one day telling about the history of WWII/memorial to the victims. Until then, they just have a display going along the wall, kind of like a timeline. It was intense, and very strange to think that I was actually standing at the place where such a huge part of history happened.
That was pretty much our last destination, but by this point we were getting a little hungry for dinner. We decided to go to the Hard Rock Café, and what we assumed would be about a 20 minute walk turned into about 60 minutes. Apparently we sort of underestimated how long it would take to walk from the far east side to the far west side… however, it was well worth it!
Before I came to Berlin, when I thought of the city I assumed it would be old and dirty, with obvious signs that there had been a war throughout. I was completely shocked to find that Berlin is actually a thriving, industrial city. The streets are very clean, and everything looks new. My favorite part of the whole trip was just walking around looking at different parts of the city.


Part of the Pergamonm Museum.





Reichstag

Brandenburg Gate Berliner Dom

Florence

Our trip to Florence last weekend was hectic, to say the least. Our plans changed like 20 times, all due to the determination of the Italian train system to be completely unpredictable. It's a little confusing to explain, but I'll try my best!
On most trains, you don't need a reservation unless you are travelling on an overnight train and want to reserve a bed. Except on Italian trains, where you need to make a reservation no matter what. Seeing as how they are hardly ever full, this makes no sense. But whatever. We wanted to go to Florence on Thursday, then come back Saturday night. But in the process of booking the trains for us to come back to Heidelberg on Saturday, we found out that the Italian trains decided this would be a good weekend for them to go on strike. For us, this meant that we either needed to leave Italy by midnight on Friday night or cancel our trip all together.
We decided to go ahead with the plan, then leave Friday night for France. It was a stressful hour of planning for us. That night, when we got to the train station, we learned that the strike didn't actually start until 9PM on Saturday, meaning we could leave late late on Friday night and be fine. So we changed our plans again, and booked a sleeping car for Avignon, France on Friday night.
Then, we took our overnight train to Florence on Thursday. When we got there Friday morning, we found our way to the Pepperdine Florence house (where we were staying). After eating breakfast an amazing, free, all-you-can-eat Italian cafe, we headed out to hurry up and see as much of Florence as we could in one day. We saw Michelangelo's David, which was so cool- I had no idea how tall it was! We also saw the Duemo, this elaborate cathedral, and of course, went shopping.
That night we came back to the house, and we discovered that the train strike had been called off, so we could stay in Florence! hmmm... this meant that we basically lost the money we had spent in reserving the train to Avignon, but we did get to sleep in comfortable, stationary beds for another night AND stay in Florence! yay.
Saturday morning, we stopped at the cafe for another round of deliciousness, then went to a couple of museums, including the Uficci (i don't know how you spell that), where Botecelli's Birth of Venus and Spring are. That was pretty cool, and there were a lot more medieval/renaissance art pieces inside. We walked around some more, discovered a chocolate festival (!), and found a market. Then, we went to the train station to reserve a spot for a train leaving Saturday night that would get us back to Germany on Sunday morning. After walking down a pretty sketchy street for what felt like 3 hours (but was probably more like 30 minutes), we got to what looked like an abandoned prison. It wasn't however, and despite our fears, we got the courage to walk inside to book our train. As we began to talk to one of the ticket people, we found out that an overnight trip was going to cost about 50 euros, way more than what we were willing to pay. But if we waited and left Sunday morning, it would only cost us 10 (plus, that train left from a much less creepy station).
So once again, our plans changed as we decided to spend yet another night in the Florence house before leaving. Sunday morning went pretty smoothly, we found our trains fine. The ride home was nice (homework filled, but nice), minus an incident with a very confused Italian man who thought we were his lost friends...
Despite the situation with the trains, I had a really fun and relaxing weekend! However, while Florence is a nice place to visit, I'm so glad I live in Germany.

Chocolate festival!

Spring

Vespas- the only way to travel in Italy!

our sleeping car!

The cathedral

The fake David... the one they let you take pictures by.

Heidelberg pictures

Here are a few pictures of things in Heidelberg- it's actually a pretty big city, but it's divided into the "Old" and "New" parts by a river. So we really only stay in the old part, where our house and classes are. Heidelberg is also the 2nd biggest tourist city in Germany, the 3rd richest city, AND has the longest shopping street in all of Europe (so we've been told...)

The backyard to our classrooms

Bismarckplatz- where the bus station is

Moore Haus!

Heidelberg view from our house

The Heidelberg Castle