Prague, Czech Republic...

My Oh My, I'm sorry for neglecting!

I've been back from Prague for a week! And I can tell you it was one of my favorite cities I've been to, probably second or third, London of course being number one, and will probably always be number one in my book, but I still love Prague.

The journey to Prague started way too early in the morning on Sunday. I got up at about 3:30am to meet everyone at the bus stop at 4:20. Stefan was running late, so he ended up riding his bike to the train station. We couldn't take the bus because on Sundays the bus doesn't start running until 6am. So we walked the 45 minutes to the train station, to supposedly get on a 5:15 train to Stockholm, but that was bad information, so we ended up waiting for a 5:45 train to Upplands Vasby then take another train to Stockholm, and then we took the hour and fifteen minute bus ride to Skavsta airport, not my favorite place. Everything was fine until we were on the plane and they told us something was wrong, so we stayed on the plane for another hour, until we were ready to go.

We FINALLY made it to Prague in the afternoon. I had 30 Euros left over from Italy, so I exchanged it for Czech Kroner, which has an amazing exchange rate at 18 Czech kroner to the dollar. Anyway, we hopped on the bus to the metro station, and of course, it was pouring out, but by the time we got off the metro, at Wenseslas Square, it was perfectly sunny. We made the mistake of going to a McDonald's for lunch which is very pricey in Europe because it's a luxury item. After we ate, we found our hostel, which was really close to the square so it was great. The Rosemary Hostel in Prague is awesome! Our room was 3 bunk beds and 2 beds up in a loft. We had a shower room and bath room, and our own kitchen. Thankfully, there was a computer with a printer, so I could print off my boarding pass to get back to Sweden. Nicki, Stefan, and Jackie took a nap since they'd been up for a long time, while I read on the couch, yes we had a leather couch.

When they decided to wake up, we found a Czech Restaurant, where I had goulash! It was very good. It was still early when we finished eating, so they tried to find a barish place, and we stumbled upon the Zombie bar, it was quite strange, and we were the only ones in there. We then retired to our room once again.

On Monday we wanted to take the free tour, but we ended up going in the exact opposite direction we needed to go to meet up with the tour guide, but thankfully there was a tour later on in the day, so we walked around and ended up finding a trolly to the top of a hill to climb an observation tower. Somehow I always end up paying money to climb stairs, and I don't really like that fact. I hated climbing, but the view was fantastic. It was almost time for the next tour to start, so we made our way to the Old Town Square where the meeting point was.

The tour guide, Ruth, was great, she was very energetic, and informative. The tour took 3 hours and I was happy to actually know things about the buildings I was taking pictures of.

Monday night the others wanted to do a Pub Crawl, and it was my job to make sure they got back in one piece. Well, I ended up getting everyone home at about 2:30, and I was exhausted and quickly fell asleep. And I surprised myself with knowing my way around this city already.

On Tuesday we all woke up late. Then we went back to the places we wanted to go, like the Jewish District and the Charles Bridge. We also made it up another big hill to the Castle and main Cathedral. This was filled with other amazing views. We pretty much just walked around all day and ended in another bar at night, where I had some awesome hot chocolate, mind you.

That's pretty much the whole trip in a nutshell. I'm sorry that it took me forever to write about it. It is an amazing city and I suggest it to everyone!

Other information: I'm done traveling until my parents get here. I am very okay with this because I feel as though I'm a little traveled out, and I would also like to spend some quality time here in Uppsala.

I think the volcano messed with our weather a little bit, seeing as though it snowed the past two days, I was not very thrilled at this, but it's supposed to get better now.

Next week is one of Sweden's holidays, I it's called Valborg ( go here for more information http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walpurgis_Night), and my friend Lili and I are going to see what it's all about. Lili is in my Swedish class and she's from China, in case you were wondering. She's been giving me Chinese lessons during our 15 minute breaks in Swedish class.

I also have my last dino class tomorrow! I'm very excited to be done with the ever so boring weekends that consist of dino class.

Hope all is well..... 43 days until my family comes!

Hej då!

Lindsay

Milan and Genoa, Italy...

Hej Hej!

So all in all the Italy trip was good although our accommodation were less than stellar and it rained most of the time.

Our flight left on Wednesday afternoon from Arlanda Airport, and we flew right over the Alps! We arrived in Milan at about 6:30ish and was welcomed by nice warm weather. We then took the shuttle bus to Milano Centrale Station, which took about an hour. Upon arrival at the train staion, we had to find the Metro and figure out how to get to our hostel. We got there pretty quickly but when we got out of the metro, it took us a while to find it. Once we found it, however, we had to figure out how to get inside because it was a call thing on the sidewalk, but we eventually found out which number to call and we made it in. The hostel was horrid, at least for the first night. We got there at about 9:30pm, and we were starving! So we asked the guy where we could find some food at this time of night and he directed us towards a market where all we found was a bag of chocolate chip cookies and juice, to which I acquired an affinity towards Grape-Fruit juice. Anyway, the mattresses were abysmal, they sank into the floor, and they only gave us one thin blanket which made me extremely cold during the night. And the bathroom....it didn't have toilet paper the first night, so that was fantastic...

On Thursday we bought a 2 day metro pass and bought a map, one with all the tourist destinations. Our first stop was the Duomo, the Gothic Cathedral. Upon arrival, there was a tourist trap...although they were everywhere, this one was a guy who would put bird feed in your hands and have the pigeons ascend upon you, I was NOT happy about this, but I still have a few pictures from this incident. We went inside to find that they were having a service inside, given that it was Holy Week, and it was a surreal experience, being in an old Gothic Cathedral watching a Cardinal do his thing in Italian. Anyway, we found out that we could walk up to the roof, but Jackie failed to inform me that there was en elevator, so I walked up 240 steps to the top, and it was worth it, it was a beautiful sight, and thankfully it wasn't raining yet.

There is a shopping place, that's also on the map for tourist destinations, right next to the Duomo. We walked through it, it was filled with Designer stores and loads of people. There was ballet troupe that was out dancing promoting something, but I can't recall what exactly. After a gourmet meal at Burger King, we were going to go to where "The Last Supper" painting is. We got a little side tracked when we got out of the Metro, we meandered to an old looking building, which coincidentally was on the destination list. And after walking through the building we walked through a park that was next to it, and found another Arch, but unfortunately it was being repaired or something so it was covered in scaffolding.

We eventually made it to the place with "The Last Supper", sorry I don't know any names of things other than the Duomo, only to find out that you had to make a reservation to see it 2 weeks in advance, and they only allow 24 people to go in at a time. Even though we didn't get to see it, on the other side of the building there was an exhibit of other original Leo De Vinci works, so we saw that, and was pretty awesome. By this time, we were going way too fast through our tourist destinations, so Jackie said she wanted to take a nap. I, however, didn't want to take a nap, but I had nothing else to do in our room, so I asked if we could go to a bookstore that we found back by the Duomo, before we went back. As soon as we got to the book store, it looked like it was about to rain, so we quickly went inside and found the English books, thank the lord, and I ended up buying Harry Potter: And the Deathly Hallows. I figured it was a long book so I wouldn't finish it any time soon, plus it's the British version, which makes it even better! By the time I picked out my book and went back outside, it was pouring, so we quickly took our exit and made our way back to our hostel via the Milano metro system.

After Jackie's nap and my reading, we decided to find some grub. There was this section of the city that was suggested for good food, so we took the metro for about 30 minutes to get some authentic Italian Pizza. Again, I apologize about not remembering ANY names, as I forget the name of the Restaurant. The service was great, and we were seated, ordered, and done eating within a half an hour! Unfortunately, we were hoping it would take us longer than that, you know, to kill some time, but we went back to our room and I continued reading, and went to sleep early.

Friday was a lovely day, it didn't rain! Since we didn't want to exhaust our tourism, we let ourselves sleep in, and I fully appreciated this. Our first stop was to find some food, and guess what, we went back to the Duomo! That seemed to have become our main area. On the metro, I saw a sign that advertised an exhibit of Goya paintings and drawings, an artist I learned about in my art class last semester and really liked, his most well known painting is Saturn eating his children. So we tried to find that, it was supposed to be around the Duomo, but we passed it so we just decided to walk around Milan, and we did so for about 2 hours. I actually forget the exact details from this day, but we did end up finding the museum with Goya, and it was very good.

Saturday we left for Genoa. It wasn't a long train ride, only about an hour and a half, however, it was raining this day. It was pouring when we arrived in Genoa and we then spent the next 2 hours trying to find our B&B, and I suggest to everyone that you shouldn't stay in a B&B that you find alongside hostels. We eventually found it, it was the smallest sign I've ever seen for a place, and to make it even better, it was facing in the opposite direction form us. The problem after we found it is that you're supposed to call the person when you get there, however our phones don't work there, so we tried the pay phones, and guess what, those didn't work either! Suddenly, when I was about to just go find a nice hotel by the train station and I would pay for it, I was NOT going to spend the night homeless, the guy whose wife owns the place found us. Apparently he had been getting my calls, they just dropped after the initial ring. I was so relieved when he showed up! The place was right on the port, so the view was nice, but there was scaffolding blocking our window. So we dropped off our bags and we set off on our adventures in Genoa. We went to the center which isn't very big, but it's a port city so there were tents and touristy things. we walked all along the port and kept getting bombarded with people asking us if we wanted to buy an umbrella.

After loosing ourselves around the awesome old streets, we didn't know what else to do, so when I saw a tourism van, we jumped on. Thankfully we did this because we wouldn't have known what to do on Sunday. After the tour we went and got a great meal, and I actually had a glass of wine! Go me :)

Sunday, Easter, we woke up and began getting ready because we didn't know when we were supposed to be leaving, but when we were finishing our two rolls and orange juice breakfast, Maura, the owner, came scrambling in and told us we had to leave, basically ordering us out, thankfully we were ready. It wasn't a very fabulous place to be, but whatever, it was an experience. We took our cue from the previous day's tour and we went towards the mighty fountain in the center of town. We made our way to the shopping street, which unfortunately was mostly closed since it was not only a Sunday, but Easter no less.

We saw Christopher Columbus' house! That was really cool, since I pretty much owe him my whole life as I know it. We found some stairs that led up to a great view of the city, and we followed it to see if we could find the Mediterranean Sea, which we found after about an hour of walking, we found a beach, however it wasn't the cleanest beach, but a beach none the less. We sat there for about half an hour until we got too chilly and started to head back to the center of town. That took us a while, and when we made it back to the center, we thought we'd try and get to the Medieval Lighthouse that looked awesome, so we tried to take the bus. We ended up in a different town because the bus didn't actually pass it even romotley. So we were on the bus for about 2 hours and when we got off, it was time to go to the train station back to Milan.

That was pretty much it. I wish I had better weather and better accommodations, but what are you going to do?

I'm sorry this was a little overdue, I'm just a huge procrastinator!

I leave for Prague in about 7 hours or so, so I will let you know how it goes, hopefully sooner than this time.

Hope everyone had a lovely Easter :)

Lindsay