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