Author: Mark Young

Location: Reutlingen, Germany

Pronouns: He/Him/His

Midway through October, I went to Paris for the weekend. I saw all the major sights and had a good time. This was a street performer who was singing and dancing on a slackline.

Of course, I saw the Eiffel Tower. I took the tram to the to the top and had a really good time. It was very hazy when I went up but still had a good view. I wasn’t too excited about the Eiffel Tower going to Paris. I thought it was going to be uninteresting; however, as soon as I saw it, and walked under it, I knew exactly what the appeal is about. It’s one of those things that, when it’s in your view, you almost can’t stop looking at it.

The Louvre was very pretty. However, I’m not much for looking at copious amounts of art so I got tired of it rather quickly. The main attraction at the Louvre, is, of course, the Mona Lisa. I took Word and Image with Professor Chelsea Wagenaar last semester, which is all about replications and images(take it if you can, it’s a great class!) and thought I’d try to capture the scene in a slightly more inspired way than just taking a snapshot of the painting. I also wanted to rebel against the hundreds of people shooting tons of photos of it…so instead I did a short photo series of all the people taking photos of the Mona Lisa. It was rather fun to shoot and makes me think about why people take photos of what they do. Here are a couple more from the series…



For Fall Break I went to a few different places. My first stop was Lugano with my roommate. It was a gorgeous city, even though the weather was slightly less than gorgeous…

But with beautiful pathways along the lake, and being able to see across said lake into Italy…who can complain about some rain?

We ended up backtracking a few hours by train because we found a free place to stay in Luzern. I’ve been using Couchsurfing (a free app where strangers let other strangers sleep on their couch) for years now and this was the first time I actually got someone to accept a request to stay at their home. So we got to Luzern and met a very nice guy named Sergio. He was fantastically nice and helped us with planning on next exploring the city. He even was okay with us staying with him a second night. I’d highly recommend trying Couchsurfing! This is the view from the 16th-century wall that guarded the city. If it wasn’t overcast, you’d see beautiful snowcapped mountains surrounding the city.

From Luzern, we headed down to Milan for one purpose: to see Damien Jurado, a favorite singer of mine perform. It was a fantastic performance and he played one of my favorite songs, ‘Working Titles’. Travelers tip: If you’re ever in Italy and want to see a concert or performance or whatnot you may see the price and think “what a steal” and you’ll get there and they’ll say “you have to buy a 15-30 euro membership to get in”. In Italy, they have these “clubs” where you have to be a member and it gets you into a lot of different stuff for relatively cheap…so if you’re planning to see a concert in Italy, expect to drop some more money for the membership fee even if you’re only seeing the one concert.

Italy was being barraged by vicious storms during our break, so we had to quickly change plans. We were intending to go to Cinque Terre, a beautiful town on the western coast of Italy. However, it was completely flooded and most of the town was shut down, so I texted another group that I knew was headed to Rome and we were headed to Rome two hours later. I hurt my ankle rather badly on the first night there and ended up having to use a cane the entire trip. So, as I hobbled around Vatican City, I saw the Pope.

The Colosseum was pretty neat. Like 60,000 birds flew out of it as the sun set.

We had planned on going to Venice for two nights and then directly to Amsterdam; however, every news source ever said Venice was two feet deep in water. So naturally, we wanted to check it out. So we get to Venice and turns out it was all fake news. There were maybe 2 days with flooding and then it all cleared up. Unfortunately, we had already canceled our AirBnB and booked reservations on a night train back to Reutlingen. So we hung around Reutlingen for a couple nights and then ventured up to Amsterdam, pictured above. Amsterdam was a very interesting city with nearly every single building looking like it was going to fall over into the nearest canal. Also, the Dutch language sounds and looks hilarious to Americans and Germans. It’s like if you took German and added a whole bunch of double vowels in random places.
Ants. This was taken at a museum called Micropia, in Amsterdam, that was all about microbes. Micropia was one of the coolest museums I’ve ever been to and my going to it was due to a set of crazy coincidences. I worked at Shedd Aquarium this summer, I made friends with one of the head doctors and a few days before the end of my internship, he gave me a book called “I Contain Multitudes,” which is all about microbes. I had a few other books on my to-read list so I finally got to reading it on the train ride to Rome. And in the first few chapters, the author writes about a Dutchman, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the father of microbiology and then how because of his discoveries, how a museum, Micropia, was opened in Amsterdam(where I’d be in 6 days) to celebrate and allow people to discover and explore microbes! It sounds super nerdy but it turned out to be a super interactive and extremely fun and interesting museum. These ants were open air, no glass or covering at all, and we watched as they harvested the leaves from a plant.

If you study abroad, make sure you make new friends! I purposefully try to sit by someone new every class period and sat by Julius, pictured, my second week of classes. We became good friends almost instantly, bonding over photography and a love of traveling. So, he invited me to his house near Lake Konstanz and I got to experience small village Germany. It was about as authentic as it gets. His grandmother, who only spoke German, made wonderful kaese spaetzle, potato salad, and apple cake. It was amazing. I like to do astrophotography so that night we shot some astro-portraits.

His brother, Janis, was very proud of his Simpson motorcycle — which he was too young to legally drive…so the next day I took some photos of him with his prized possession as well.

The night sky was beautiful in their village, Guggenhausen. You can’t see him, but their cat Charlie is in this tree.