Getting to Germany was kind of a relief. Not because Portugal was bad or anything, but the ease of communication with people who can readily speak English is something I will not take for granted anymore. Of course, Marissa and I didn’t know how much of a relief it would be until we got there. It turns out Germany feels and looks quite a bit like Wisconsin, where we both

The river in Tubingen

grew up. We kept having strange deja-vu moments where we’d forget we weren’t actually in Wisconsin, actually. But, I digress. Hannah Heagy, a friend of ours who is another year-long person, met us at the airport and brought us back to Tubingen with her. Walking into her room made both of us a little jealous, because it’s much bigger than the rooms Marissa and I have in our respective cities. Much more conducive to hosting large sleepovers, which is basically what we did for a week. That night we pretty much crashed, because flying and making connecting flights and such is kind of exhausting.

The first day in Germany, Hannah showed us around Tubingen a bit. We walked down to the river and through the park on the island in the middle of it. We got doner kebabs from the corner shop, which were surprisingly good, and walked through the charming, winding streets of the German town. Hannah showed us all around the older part of the town, including a gorgeous church. Outside the church, there was a plaque to commemorate the discovery of DNA. I thought this was hilarious, because they tell us in Cambridge that DNA was discovered here. Turns out the molecule was discovered in Tubingen, but the double-helix structure was discovered in Cambridge. So, technically, it was both. There’s a fun fact for ya.

We also walked up the hill to the castle. (My time in Germany and Portugal reminded me that not everywhere in the world is as blessedly flat as Cambridge is. My legs protested. Loudly.) I probably will never get over being able to just like, walk up to these amazing structures that were built centuries ago. It was just up the hill. And apparently the University of Tubingen uses the rooms for classes and dorm space, so people even get to LIVE in the castle, which, not fair. Basically, seeing Tubingen was lovely and it felt a bit like coming home, because the atmosphere was just so homey. That night, Hannah’s mom and brothers (who had visited her for Christmas, lucky girl) took us out to dinner at a nice restaurant where I had extremely satisfactory soup and chips.

The University Library

The next day, we decided to be productive little college students. Hannah and I both had papers to work on, so we headed over to the library of the university. Along the way, Hannah pointed out a bunch of the university buildings, which were surprisingly modern. I guess at this point I expect everything in Europe to be old, but that’s not always the case. So, we were somewhat responsible on that particular day, and after the library we went to the grocery store to stock up on food for the week. We ended up having a fabulous dinner and wine while watching Frozen together. We didn’t know it at the time, but movie nights turned out to be a thing we did almost every night.

The day after that was Sunday, but Marissa and I slept through church… we slept pretty solidly until about 10:30, which had become pretty weird to me since being over here. But we grabbed the free day to take a hike up in the hills. The forests around Tubingen are lovely, and it was just cold enough to give the air a little bit of bite, and there was even frost on the grass where the sun was blocked by the hills (keep in mind that I’m a Wisconsin girl who hasn’t seen snow yet this winter… I’m going through withdrawal). We hiked through the woods to an old monastery in the hills, which was surprisingly large and surrounded by a cute little village. You’d think I’d get desensitized to gorgeous old buildings and massive stone churches with intricate stained glass windows, but it hasn’t happened yet. Walking those halls, and around those walls, is just an amazing experience every time. Being able to walk up the stairs and duck through tiny stone doorways, being able to look off of rough balconies and step over uneven cobblestone–it just doesn’t get old.

New Year’s Eve was a pretty fabulous day. We got a bunch of food and dressed up and had a fancy-ish dinner with a bunch of Hannah’s friends from the University. After dinner, we walked up to a meadow on the side of a hill where we’d been told a lot of the kids from the city gathered. We got up there, and the view was instantly amazing. We could see at least half of Tubingen laid out before us, all lit up with New Year’s revelry. It took us a little bit to find a spot that our big group could fit, and get settled in, but by the time we did there were already a few fireworks going off. Apparently, fireworks are only allowed in Germany for the four days around New Year’s, so people kind of go all out. I could barely see because of all the sulfur, or hear due to fireworks exploding all around me, by the time we got to the actual countdown part. But we did count down from sixty together, as a group of crazy Americans, and screamed ‘HAPPY NEW YEAR’ and shot off champagne as the clock struck twelve. Of course, that was also the moment where the entire city, our hillside included, basically exploded with the amount of fireworks that went off. It was nuts; it was amazing; it was one of the most incredible nights of my life. We lit sparklers and sang Auld Lang Syne and screamed when wayward fireworks exploded too close to our feet. You could say we started off the New Year with a bang.

On New Year’s Day, Hannah, Marissa, and I took the train into

The castle in the plaza

Stuttgart to visit the Art Gallery, because it was free for people 20 and under on New Year’s. This was pretty cool, even though I think we might have gone through it backwards. We started with the modern stuff, and ended up with Renaissance art. It turns out that we got there too late to get through everything though, because there was still a whole section of the museum we had to leave unexplored by closing time. Fortunately, Stuttgart was still lively and bright, despite the darkness that had already fallen. There was even a skating rink in the town square, along with the gorgeous fountains and castle. So we wandered through the people, and the big shopping district street, and eventually ended up back at the train station, and headed back to Tubingen.

My final full day in Germany consisted of a trip to the second most visited castle in Germany–Hohenzollern Castle on the edge of the Black Forest (The first most visited is, of course, Neuschwanstein). This trip involved train, then bus, than a nice steep hike up to the castle itself. Unfortunately, it was ridiculously windy at the top of this mountain, so we didn’t get to eat our well-planned lunch of nutella and croissants outside like we wanted to. But the beauty of the castle made up for it. Walking up the winding ‘driveway’ was an experience in itself. To get inside the rooms, you had to have a tour, so we ended up slipping and sliding on the polished floors with the ridiculously large slipper things they gave us to cover our shoes as we walked through. The coolest part of the tour was definitely the treasury, where we got to see the crown of the Prussian royal family, original scores by Mozart, and an amazingly embroidered dress that once belonged to Queen Louise.

The next day, Hannah and Marissa put me on a bus, and I headed to the airport to fly back to England. My holiday adventure was interesting and incredibly fun, but I won’t deny that I breathed a sigh of relief upon arrival in Cambridge. As much as I love seeing the rest of Europe, Cambridge is the place I clicked with the fastest, and it’s become my home over here. It was a massive relief to be back in this familiar space.

With a bit of tiredness, nostalgia, and love,

Bryn

Okay, so I’m having a hard time starting this one. I spent a week in Portugal, so summing my experience up in one blog post is gonna be a little difficult without giving you guys more of a novel than I usually do. Okay, so first things first–background on why I went to Portugal in the first place. When my mom was in college, her family hosted an AFS student from Portugal named Adriano. Our family has kept in touch with him since then, and he’s been to the States quite a few times. I was thrilled to be coming to Europe for the year, because I thought it would be a chance to finally visit him for a change. However, he and his family moved out to California last August. He still wanted me to be able to see Portugal, though, so he set up a week with a family friend and his mother showing me around Lisbon and Cascais. My friend Marissa, also studying for a year over here (in Spain though, not England), decided to join us because we wanted to have friendly faces around us for the holiday season, since we couldn’t afford to go home. So, on December 19th, I flew to Portugal. This was a bit nerve wracking, because I didn’t know who was picking me up at the airport. Once I got there, however, I met Luis, a friend of Adriano’s. He drove me back to his place in Cascais, where I met his wife Helena and their two daughters, Rita and Teresa. These guys would become our very good friends over the course of the week. The next morning, we drove to the bus station to pick up Marissa, and our adventure was fully underway.

That first day, we did a lot of exploring the Expo area of Lisbon, where Adriano’s mother owns a restaurant. There are a bunch of pathways, gardens, museums, and even an aquarium in this area of town. So Marissa and I walked around for a bit, ate at the restaurant, and finally met Celeste, Adriano’s mother. She was a truly incredible woman, if a bit intimidating at first. We were lucky Marissa speaks Spanish, because Celeste didn’t speak English at all and we communicated in a hodge-podge of Spanish, Portuguese, and hand gestures. We slept at Celeste’s apartment that night and had the next day to ourselves in Lisbon.

We didn’t do too much exploring that day, because we were both pretty tired still from travelling and exploring the day before. We did, however, go to see the Castelo de Sao Jorge, which was absolutely gorgeous. We like to think that our laziness contributed to the awesomeness of our experience, because seeing the castle at sunset was absolutely gorgeous. The bridge at the mouth of the river looks kinda like the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and there is a giant Jesus statue on the other side of the river like the one in Brazil. All of this we could see clearly from the old parapets, made of rough, cream-colored stone and glowing in the orange of the sunset.  Marissa and I had a blast running around the castle until it closed and we had to make our way to the subway to get over to Expo.

We had to go back to Expo because we had been invited to a Christmas dinner with Celeste’s family. This was a pretty amazing experience, not the least because I forced myself to try and finish almost all the food I was given (those of you who know me well know how amazing that feat was, and imagine I’m taking a bow). Luckily, we were seated among some of the young adults, most of whom spoke English. That being said, many speeches were made in Portuguese that we didn’t understand, and gifts were given out to everyone, including us! We were definitely not expecting that, and tried to thank everyone the best we could (‘Thank you’ was a phrase we learned in Portuguese pretty early).  Despite everything, dinner was still a little awkward until one of the kids brought over his iPad and we played a game involving matching logos to their brand names. Everyone got in on this game, and there was so much hilarity and fun that we didn’t even notice when Helena and Luis showed up to take us back to Cascais.

The next day, Luis, Helena, and Teresa took us to Sintra.

Cabo de Roca

Along the gorgeous coastal drive, we stopped at Cabo de Roca, the westernmost point of continental Europe. This was pretty cool, because it’s the closest I’ve been to America since I left in August. Not very close at all, really, but knowing that home was just across the waters I was staring at was kind of amazing. There was a kind of park area around it too, lots of grass and hills and paths along the coast. Of course, it was very high up as well, and the cliffs were incredible to see. We wandered up and down the coast for a bit, just to see as much of the shoreline as we could. Helena was snapping pictures like crazy the whole time, of the landscape and Teresa and Luis and Marissa and I. We kept telling her that our parents would be so happy because we keep taking pictures of what we see instead of us. Now we have plenty of pictures of us doing all these things, parents, so don’t worry! After walking around the point for a bit, and airing ourselves out (it was very windy), we got back into the car and drove the rest of the way to Sintra. Sintra was really interesting to see, especially with Luis as our guide. He grew up there, and so he knew the paths to the castles like the back of his hand. There are six castles in Sintra, by the way, but we only got to see three.

The first castle.

The first was in the center of Sintra, and involved some of the most beautiful tile work I’ve ever seen. I kept having strange flashbacks, because I’m nearly 100% positive that my grandmother has replicas of some of that tile work in  her house. The first palace also had these incredibly tall chimneys, stark white and enormous, that erupted from the kitchen. We could see them driving in to Sintra, and we saw them later from the Moorish castle.  After a tour of the palace, we got roasted chestnuts from a street vendor. And let me tell you, those chestnuts are one of my new favorite things, which is actually really bad because I haven’t seen them anywhere since Portugal. These roasted chestnuts were actually amazing, especially with the kosher salt that was put on top and the warmth and… basically it was delicious. We also went to have coffee in a famous shop called La Piriquita. The coffee was wonderful, and we ate some traditional Portuguese pastries (we ate a lot of Portuguese pastries on this trip).

Then we climbed the hill to the Moorish castle. The hike up from the parking lot was lovely, and the castle was even better. It was very old, dating back to when the Moors conquered Portugal, and the sturdy stone walls and tall parapets illustrated the warlike nature of that period very well. climbing up the parapets and walking the defensive walls was incredible, and we got amazing views of Sintra below us and the ocean just beyond. Plus, clambering around old castles, rocks mossy with age and walls haphazardly tumbling down, is just plain fun. I’m pretty sure I had a permanent smile on my face the entire day.

The last palace we visited was called the Palaisa de Pena, which was ironic because Luis’s last name is also Pena. Much of our visit to this colorful palace involved us cracking jokes about how Luis was finally coming home, and how everyone here knew him, and that was his bedroom and this was his personal balcony. The palace was incredible though, all jokes aside. Inside they had the first telephone in Portugal, as well as an early shower-like contraption. Walking around these castles was one of the most surreal experiences I’ve had thus far in Europe, and it was truly amazing to have people like Luis, Helena, and Teresa showing us around. After the palace, Luis and Helena took us out to eat at one of their favorite seafood places. I, being me, was rather nervous for this because I am a notoriously picky eater, and I didn’t want to offend anyone. But to everyone’s surprise, the clams, crab, and fish we shared was really fantastic. I ate my fair share of everything (I’m not lying, Mom, people took pictures to prove it!). It’s safe to say I was pretty proud of myself after that.

The next day, Helena, Rita, and Teresa showed Marissa and I around Cascais and Lisbon. We strolled through Cascais at a leisurely pace, taking in the beaches and the houses and the tiled paths and streets. Helena was fabulous about giving us maps of every place we went so that I could tape them into my journal when I got home. We also got to eat ice cream at Santini’s, a famous ice cream parlor in Cascais. We stopped for more roasted chestnuts too, because by this time everyone knew I loved them. Then, Helena drove us into Lisbon. We were going to visit the monastery where Vasco de Gama is buried, but unfortunately it’s closed on Mondays. So instead we walked around a bit, saw the Monument to Discovery along the shore of the river and had coffee and some more pastries at a well-known cafe near the monastery. After that, Helena showed us around a twisty, cozy area of Lisbon called Alfama, and we had lunch at a cute restaurant deep in Alfama. It was, unfortunately again, raining for most of this, but we drove down to the main plaza and got a few pictures in anyway. After that, we went back to Cascais and had dinner, which was delicious, and spent our last night at the Pena’s. Marissa and I really didn’t want to say goodbye to them, because they really were a great family to stay with.

The next day was Christmas Eve, and we headed back to Celeste’s for the last three days of our stay in Portugal. We were shocked by the generous amount of food that greeted us when we walked into Celeste’s dining room that night. It was a full-on Christmas feast, and there were only three of us to eat it. Each and every thing we tried was delicious, but I’m a pretty light eater. Marissa managed to make a pretty good dent though. We just hope we didn’t offend Celeste by eating modest portions of everything. On the bright side, we managed to finish most of the food over the two days of our stay at Celeste’s. Christmas Eve was strange for the two of us, being away from our families. We both stated, multiple times, that it definitely didn’t feel like Christmas. The next day, we skyped with our families as much as we could, and Celeste took us out for Mexican food at lunch and fabulous Chinese food for dinner. It was a quiet Christmas day, but for my first away from my family, I think it was a good one. The day before we left was bittersweet, because we were really excited to go to Germany next, but Portugal had been amazing. We took a last walk around Alfama, and Expo, and packed our things. We had Celeste drive us to the airport around midnight, because our flight was really early the next morning and we didn’t want to wake her up early.

Portugal was amazing. It was not at all like I expected, but it was incredible for that. I’m so happy I got to go, and that I got to go with a great friend like Marissa.

With gratefulness, a smile, and much love,

Bryn