Matvrakhelg!! og Eurotour!!

Here is just a little taste (hahaha pun!!) of the matvrak (crazy food people?) weekend I had with Tale--we made AMAZING food and taught her little brother to ride a bike :) This is curry chicken salad with homemade buns and a smoothie--YUM!!!

 Euro tour 2012
Okay so I just returned from what I would easily call two of the best weeks of my life—a trip around Europe with all other exchange students with Rotary from Norway and Iceland. I wish that I could go into a detailed description of all my experiences, but that would literally take days!! Instead, I decided to include photos and a bulleted list of things we did, experienced, and saw in each country. I should also probably stay that me and a few friends decided to run in every country at least once, so we’ve got photos of us running all over Europe!

The order here is a little off, the actual order we travelled was Germany, Czech Republic, Austria, Italy, France, and then England.

 Germany
Berlin:
• Running at six thirty in the morning with Imogene (California) and Angela (Taiwan)
• Fantastic tour guide from the US who had lived in Germany for a number of years and could speak German
• Three hour tour of the city with this guide with books, walking, and intense history lessons
• The Jewish Holocaust Memorial/Museum
• The Berlin Wall
• Hitler’s dying place
• Tons of famous buildings from World War II
Dresden:
• Difficult to hear the guide
• Beautiful buildings and statues
• Only had about an hour in the city before lunch

 Austria
Vienna:
• Evening run with “the letter game” with Imogene, Josh, and Jonathon
• Tour with a guide of some fantastic cathedrals and other areas
• Sitting at a café with a bunch of other exchange students, eating chicken and salad as usual
• Getting our extremely tiny coffees
• Seeing the house Mozart lived in when he died
• Dancing in the street with Duncan (Australia) along with another random dancing couple for fun
• Singing and dancing in the streets with the other exchange students
Salzburg:
• One of my favorite places
• Home of the Vann Trapp family
• Driving over the Alps and then singing “The Hills Are Alive” in the actual hills of Austria
• Discovering cool places at the old castles
• Drinking coffee at a café by the house where Mozart’s wife (or something, we don’t speak German) lived
• Discovering different trails in the area
• Everyone getting dressed up to go to “The Sounds of Salzburg” and taking photos
• “The Sounds of Salzburg” performance with Austrian folk songs and songs from The Sound of Music
• Running through gardens in the morning with lots of other exchange students, led by Morten from Tromsø

 The Czech Republic
Prague:
• Afternoon run around the city with Imogene and Josh (Australia)
• Evening in the outskirts, discovering the nearby ruins up on a hill overlooking the city
• Whole day in Prague with a guide with the green umbrella!!
• So many people in Prague
• Sexual Artifacts Museum with many friends—we were mature about it, don’t worry!!
• Seeing an Jewish Synagogue
• Taking a horse and carriage ride with Jonathon (Pennsylvania) and Calvin (Canada)
• Clock Tower views, seeing the clock tower go off
• Spending the evening on the outskirts of town while it rained

 Italy
• Swimming in the Mediterranean Sea!
• Wandering around the various Indian shops on the island? Why? I don’t know why there were so many Indian places
• Italian pizza!!
• The beach at night
• Running on the beach in the morning with Imogene and Josh and then swimming (skinny dipping) afterwards—not everyone can say they’ve done that!!)
Venice:
• Taking a boat ride across some of the “islands”
• Wandering our way back to lunch and discovering all the shops and gelato along the way
• Eating a “real Italian lunch” (they begin with pasta and THEN have the main meal)
• Going into mask shops
• Gondola ride along the river with a real Italian man standing and rowing the boat for us!
• Many restaurant musicians—listening to them with Ben (Argentina)

 France
Lyon:
• Just slept one night in Lyon
• Wandered around in the evening
• Ran up to a church in the morning and passed by some ruins they were fixing up with Imogene, Josh, and Morten
• Ate breakfast at a real French café—chocolate croissants! I ordered all in French AND the man who sold them to me was also lactose intolerant so he knew exactly what I could and couldn’t eat
Versailles:
• We were just here for a few hours, but we were at the Palace!
• I wandered around with Luiza (Brazil) and Jonathon inside the Palace, translated a few things for them
• We took pictures in the beautiful gardens
Paris:
• We wandered around that night trying to find L’Arc de Triumph and accidentally found the Louvre museum!!
• In the morning Josh, Kyle (Australia), Morten, and I took a run up to the central church in Paris—fantastic view of the city
• We walked up two levels of the Eiffel Tower and then took the elevator the rest of the way up—fantastic view
• We took a boat ride around to see all the different sites in Paris
• We split up and went to Les Champs Elyseés
• Went to the Louvre and saw the Mona Lisa
• We went out to a restaurant to eat, and then headed back to the Eiffel Tower to see it at night
• We sat under the Eiffel Tower and had baguettes

 THAT'S THE MONA LISA!!!!

 England
London:
• We took the ferry over from France to England and saw the white cliffs along the shore!
• Everyone ate fish and chips (except me—I got chicken and salad!)
• We got a little time to shop and ate an awesome dinner
• We wandered around and discovered a park that we ran at the next morning (Imogene, Angela, and I)
• We got a guided tour of the city
• We found Big Ben and the London Eye to take photos
• Went to King’s Cross to take photos at platform 9 and 3/4
• Went to a London “haunted house” and got some crazy pictures of us in the “London Dungeons”
• Went to a billion tourist shops finding lots of things with British flags on them
• Found some very cool statues

 before changing of the guards in London at Buckingham Palace:

 Typical American photo with Imogene (my twin) holding the Norwegian flag.

 "Anne and my bitches" crew in Berlin near the wall:

 Before "Sounds of Salzburg" the amazing musical dinner theater!! I love you, Marina!:

 Then we had to, unfortunately, say goodbye the next day. It is pretty incredible that we packed so much into just 13 days—I’m impressed, at least! I wish I could include ALL details from the trip but that would be so impossible, so these are the highlights of the highlights!!

Dresden, Germany--the loves of my life!!

Coming soon...we ran in every country, so of course we have running photos in every country!!!