So. Get ready for a long blog post.
thursday 5/21-22 Utrecht>Schipol>Vienna
My plane to vienna left around 8pm. It was an easy 2 hour flight. Got to my hostel around midnight and passed out. I was meeting Steph the next morning. There was some confusion booking our hostels (the company has two hostels in Vienna) but the hostels are right around the corner from eachother. The next morning I met Steph at her hostel at 1030am. We werent really friends in HS. more like friends of friends, but we got a lot closer when we both had internships in DC last summer. So, neither of us really new Vienna so we just started walking towards the center of the City. First we saw Museum Quarter, walked around. Then we just kept walking around the parks in the area. All the buildings were really old and fancy looking. Then we found what i think was the palace for the Hapsburgs, which is now a museum. We didnt go inside because it was expensive, but we just checked out the view. Then we walked around the grounds some more and decided to find somewhere to eat. We picked a restaurant in Museum quarter that was pretty good and not that expensive. Walked around some more, and we noticed a really fancy looking building. I was guessing and said that maybe it looked like it could be the parliament building and she said absolutely not. it was way too decrative with all the gold and statues. Lo and behold two seconds later we saw the sign on the building that said “Parliament”. Woo i am so good! then we planned to walk to the House of Music museum that my guide book said was “mind blowing” but we got distracted along the way. We saw a sign for Beethoven park, so we walked there. Took some pictures with Beethoven and then walked to the bigger park that was near by. I believe its called Stadtpark, but im not sure. We didnt realize how huge it was. But its giant. We walked around, found a statue of Strauss in the park. Had some yummy gelato and just sat in the sun for a while. Then we decided to change our plans because the big fancy Versaille-like palace was going to close soon. So we needed to look for the train to get there. This is where we are stupid. we saw a point on a map that showed what we thought was a tram that left in the park. but that didnt make any sense to us, because we didnt see any tram tracks. So we walk to the edge of the park and are even more confised beause there are no trams to be seen. So we walk pretty much around half the park and ask someone how to get to U …so and so. And he points us in the direction. Turns out that the “U” is an underground metro system. that makes sense.. ha. so we got on the train an headed to the Schloss Schonbrun which is the Hapsburgs summer palace. It was absolutly gorgeous. The outside wasnt as pretty as versaille, but still really nice. We walked around the gardens, found a maze, walked through, and then decided to hike up to the top of the grounds to get a better view. It was a pretty intense hill. Probably Bascom hill times 3 or 4. Once we were at the top it was so beautiful. We had a really nice view of Vienna. After we hung out for a while we decided to walk back to our hostel. We didnt really realize how long our walk was, but it wasnt that bad. We headed back and went to an Asian restaurant recomended by our hostel. It was called Yellow. So delicious. Then we headed to the House of Music museum. It was pretty cool… but not mind blowing. It was interactive, but kinda lame at the same time. We did spend like two hours there tho. So after that we headed back to Steph’s hostel to claim our free drink at the bar and then i headed back to m hostel.. it was like 11 or 12ish im guessing and I passed out right away. We planned to have an early start for our 2nd and last full day in Vienna.
5/23 Vienna
Woke up around 8, met Steph at her hostel around 9am. First on our agenda was to go to the Nasch Market, a huge market in Vienna. It was gigantic. It had pretty much everything. It was a giant flee market along with a food market. Had some okay falafel for breakfast and some cheese samples along the way. After walking around the market for a while we headed towards the main touristy part of town, by STephen’s Cathedral. Really old church, surrounded by tourists. Walked around awhile, checking out all the old buildings. Then we went to get Gelato at supposedly the best gelato place in Vienna. It was really good. I love lemon Gelato fyi. then we found a nice quiet square for us to sit in the sun and eat while we just chilled. Across the square i recognized a name of a restaurant that was really familiar. It was the restaurant that Mor (my roommate reccommended and wrote the name in my guidebook). He said it was really hard to find and that we would need to ask someone to find the street. So we checked it out and planned on coming back for our dinner later. At this point it was pretty early but we had planned so many things to do that day that we decided on a 4pm ish dinner. So then we walked around some more and tried to find the Jewish quarter. It was pretty hard to find but once we saw some black hats we knew we were in the right place. In the center there was a big holocaust memorial which is a hug giant book shelf looking thing with all the books facing outward (the opposite way than a normal bookshelf). Sat around for a while and then headed out. Then we headed for a train to take is the the edge of the city on the Danube river because there was a ferris wheel on our map. Turns out there is a big carnival type amusement park with a giant ferris wheel. the paper we got said it was one of the oldest of its kinds in Europe. So we rode the big ferris wheel which gave us another great view of Vienna. After we hung out at the fair for a while we decided to head out to the Danube river. It was a beautful day and when we got there there were tons of people sun bathing and swimming in the river. The river was really blue and clear and we both wished we had our swim suits on. O well. Layed in the sun some more and then headed back to the city for dinner. So this restaurant must be famous, but it was pretty cheap. I got what Mor suggested which was Weinerschnitzel and potato salad. It was really tastey. After dinner we needed to head to the Opera to get our standing room only tickets. First we noticed that there were tons of people in this one candy store. Does anyone know if wafers started in Vienna? because this was a giant touristy wafer store. Bought some cheap wafers and headed to the opera. Side note: All over the city there were these people dressed in Mozart costumes heckling tourists to buy tickets to some mozart orchestra show.. they were really annoying and all over the place. So when we got to what we thought was where to get standing room tickets, these annoying mozart people were telling us and all of the other tourists looking into the ticket office that it was sold out tonight and that we should buy these mozart things. We knew that it was sold out already, but we didnt want to buy these tickets. super annoying and i feel bad for all the tourists that get trapped by them. So then someone tells us that standing room tickets are on the other side of the Opera building. So we waited in line for a while and got our tickets for 3 euros. Incredible. So we saw Eugen Onegin by Peter Tchaikovsky. It was really really amazing. Super impressive. the hardest part was standing for 3 hours. but whatever. Then we were both pretty tired but we wanted to see the main bar area of Vienna, so thats what we did. It took us a while to find the “Bermuda Triangle” cuz thats what its called. But we did, found a bar our hostel recommeded and had one drink and then headed back to the hostel not that much later. Our bus for prague left pretty early anyway.
5/24 Vienna>Prague
Bus was easy. About 4 hours maybe a little longer. Got there around 12ish. This time we were staying at the same hostel which makes life a lot easier. We didnt really know much about Prague, what else is knew. So we headed out around 1ish i think that her friend recommended. Oh, but first we headed to lunch at a restaurant that was recommeded to us by our hostel. there was a 15% discount for people staying at our hostel. It was a czech restaurant, so obviosuly it was very meat and beer heavy. I got some chicked dish that was topped with ham and a beer. YAY for finally having Bohemian beer that i have been hearing all about. super cheap! Its a park on the outskirts of town that has a cemetery and a church and my guidebook its a place that mosts tourists dont know about. So we walked for a while to find the park. It was quite a hike up to the top. It is pretty annoying that all these maps that i have gotten since ive been traveling dont mention which part is up hill. But anyway, the view of the city was amazing. We could see Prague Castle and the center of town. We walked around the cemetery that was super old and we saw some younger girls doing what looked like a traditional/folk Czech dance, i guess we’ll never know. Hung around the park for a while, laying in the sun. Walked around the higher parts somemore to soak in some of the view and then we headed back down. Since there was no real plan, and our big sight seeing day was going to be tomorrow, we walked around the city to the next big park that has a mini Eifel Tower in it. To get there we walked along the Charles river. REally pretty, with amazing views. We both needed to go to the bathroom by the time we got to the edge of the park and we saw a sign for a subway that said like 700 meters. not bad right? turns out we need to learn the metric system. It isnt that far but i really really needed to pee and it wasnt that close. But YAY for a free bathroom. Ugh i am sick of paying to pee. SO then we decided we were too tired from all the walking to hike up to the eifel tower so we decided to walk through the city some more. Found some cheap place to eat dinner and kept on walking. So basically we walked around the entire city that day. We started all the way west.. walked all the way south…then walked east and then up north through the center and then all the way back west to our hostel. Pretty intense but we say the entire outer part of the city which was nice. We were planning on going on a walking tour the next day which would show us everything important in the center. So we had a full day of walking and then passed out.
5/25 Prague
We went to the main square in Prague for the free walking tour around 10:30am. It was a huge group, but it didnt matter because we had a really amazing tour guide that spoke loudly. The tour was four hours and at the end of it it i tipped 50 crown (i dont know how to spell the currency) …which is like $2.50. kinda sucky..but thats all i had and the tour group was huge so he made bank. Anyway, so on the tour he told us some pretty good stories and he told us a lot of czech and prague history which was really interesting. So some of the sights: Astronomical clock…which gets a HUGE crowd infront of it every hour just to hear it tick for one minute. pretty lame, but it had a cool story behind it, Jewish square.. that was still pretty much intact even through WWII because hitler really liked Prague and wanted to use the Jewish Square as the memorial to the extinct Jewish race. sucks for him. The concert hall where Mozart debuted Don Giovanni (which was the opera we missed by one night in Vienna), stopped at an AMAZING bagel place called Bohemia Bagel, Some Franz Kakfa sites, a cool Jewish clock that ticked counted clockwise, Jan Palack Square. (hey mom, do you remember him? he was a pretty young kid that killed himself in the 60s in protest to the communists taking over Prague. im pretty sure). Got sweet views of the Prague Castle, and Charles Bridge, some controversal DAvid Cerny artwork, The John Lennon wall (for the parents: lennon never came to prague, but after his death people started grafitting a wall with imagine and paintings of him to support peace and such) and its been decorated constantly since 1980 with new stuff. So the tour was over. It was really really good. After, we decided to make the trek up to the Prague Castle. It was really pretty and had, once again, great views of the city. Most of the stuff cost money to get into, so we just walked around the grounds. It was pretty complicated and we never found the gardens, but o well. Sweet views and pretty buildings. then we walked back into the city center via the Charles Bridge which is basically a really really old bridge with tons of sculptures along the side of it. Along the way i bumped into a girl that lives in Parnassos. crazy. well.. and she is really werid. so i just said hey and then just bounced. When we got back to the city we saw a group of younger kids singing…really impressive they mustve been on some school chorus trip. Saw the astronomical clock once again, and actually got a good view of all of it because it was not close to ticking again. Then we headed back to the bagel place for dinner. so good. We were tired and we planned on going on the pub crawl so we headed back to the hostel to relax for a bit. Pub crawl left at like 9ish. It was a huge group, which is good because my friend that did a pub crawl in prague said it was lame because there were hardly any people. Our tour guide was on it along with a bunch of other tour guides. That night me and steph hung out with 2 guys that just graduated from Lehigh, a guy from Atlantic City, and a girl from Dublin. It was really fun. Had a good time. Didnt stay out too late but then headed back to the hostel.
5/26 Prague>Berlin
The next day we took it pretty easy. We went back to the Jewish Quarter to see on of the synogagues that seemed pretty interesting, but found out that you needed to buy entrance to all the sunyagagues and we didnt want to spend that much money. So we just ended up walking around the JEwish quarter for a while. Then we found a park along the river where there was a really cute dog that hung around and played with us. After that we found the Deli that my mom sent me an email the day before about. It was just recommened in the NY times (along with the bohemia bagel place that weve already been too). It was soo good. I forgot what the word is, but my mom told me to order them… basically there were tons of open faced sandwiches and salads. they were super cheap, so i ordered a few. So delicious. Im glad we found the place. thanks NYtimes. My train to Berlin left at 4-5ish i think (steph was taking the bus the next day).. so i headed back to the hostel to gather my things and head to the train station. The train station was super creepy. Right out of a thriller. seriously. I talked to 2 americans while we waited for the train and i met two other american while i was siting on the train. Its was like a 4:30 hour train. not bad. i slept most of the way. Found the Circus hostel pretty easy (also recommended by the NYtimes and 2 of my aussie friends here). the hostel was so nice. It had its own bar/lounge and a restaurant. And the rooms were huge, and the bunks were really nice. AMAZING. best hostel ever. only thing that sucked is that internet was a rip off. 1 euro for 30 mins. whatever. i only spent like 1 hour over the course of 4 days. So it was pretty late when i got back. i just chilled in the lounge with some American girl i met in the elevator and then went to bed. Weird thing i noticed about nicer hostels: old people stay there. Sorry parents. Super weird when there are some old people staying in the same room as you. on to the next day:
5/27 Berlin
I wasnt meeting Steph untill 2pm ish, so i spent the morning walking around Berlin, which isnt so hard, since there was so much to see! First i walked to Alexanderplatz which is a big square that has the TV tower in the center. The TV tower is the tallest thing in BErlin, so i thought about going up it, but it was 10 euros, so i didnt feel like spending that much for nothing. So next the plan was to walk to the next destination and see what I saw on my way. My next stop was Museum Island. On my way I saw the Red town hall (which im not actually sure what it is/was used for), a park with a statue of Marx and Engels (yay econ) in the center of it, a bunch of fancy university buildings that eventually got explained to me on a tour, and some famous museums on Museum island. My next destination was the Bradenburg gate (of course). on my way there i past check point charlie which isnt that important just the 3rd of many checkpoints that were around during the berlin wall era. For some reason its a tourist destination tho. I saw the US embassy woo!, and a museum dedicated to the kennedys. Then i got to the brandenburg gate. REally huge! from there i got a view of the victory column and the tier garten. Then I walked around to the Reichstag and saw a huge line of people outside and i was wondering what was so interesting (more on that later). then i walked along the river spree to see if i could find the starting point of the tour me and steph were going to take. After i found it i found a restaurant right on the corner so i decided to grab a cheap lunch at a pretty fancy looking restaurant. Oh, by the way. The weather was fantastic on the entire trip so far. I forgot to mention. Some days there were no clouds in the sky and i got some real burns some days. It was super hot. maybe around 80 degrees. Berlin was a little colder than prague/vienna but not much. So after lunch i found steph and we went to the tour starting point. So the tour we were taking is with the same company that did the free prague tour. The tour we were doing first was the “Alternative Tour”. Our tour guide took us around east to even more east Berlin to see a bunch of really cool things. First we stopped at an old Jewish Department store turned illegal squat that is now space for artists to work. There is also a club and a bar in it. We went all the way up stairs to see some of the really cool spray paint all over the building and the artwork some of the artists were working while we walked around. super cool. then we hopped on a train to go even more east. we saw some really cool squats that are super illegal and fighting for property rights and some really cool graffiti. Then we went to the East Side Gallery which is the longest stretch of whats left of the Berlin Wall. Basically eahc big square was given to a famous artists to paint. One of them (that i didnt actually get to see) is Keith Haring. Pretty cool. REally cool paintings/spray paint stuff. At the end of the tour the tour guide brought us to some park that had two LIVE brown bears just chilling. it wasnt completely closed. i was so shocked they were just living there. super cool. i guess bears are the symbol of berlin and they just belong to a museum/park in the area. I cant believe that they dont cause problems/drunk people dont get killed by them when they jump in. i guess that only happens in America. After the tour me and Steph headed to a park that was all the way on the bottom right corner of our map. not really a tourist spot, but our tour guide told us there was a really cool soviet memorial there. So we found the park, and it took us a while to find the statue, but woah was it huge. First of all, the section of the park dedicated for this Soviel memorial was huge. Tons of 1945s and hammers and sickels carved everywhere. And at the tip of the area was this GIANT statue. like huge! even from far away was it giant. It was a soviet soldior that was carrying a baby that was stepping on partly crushed swastika. really epic and intense statue. So we walked all the way to it and stood nexxt to it and maybe his feet were my height. maybe bigger. HUGE. after hanging out at that park for a while we hopped on the train and headed to a Bar that our tour guide recommended to us to watch the big Championship league football final game between Barcelona and Manchester United. We found the bar, and even though it was almost an hour early it was packed! we walked around for a while and there were no seats upstairs or downstairs. Sitting wasnt that big of a deal but we were really hungary and wanted to eat. So i noticed these to girls that looked nice in a booth and i mentioned to steph that i should ask them if we could sit with them. she thought it would be awkward to ask. so we walked around once more looking and then as we passed the booth the two girls called out to us and offered to let us share the booth with them. Super nice! they were from Austin, Texas (liberal!). seriosuly the nicest people from texas ive ever met. really liberal and cool. got dinner and “watched” the game. kinda watched. Barcelona won (thats who i was rooting for). after the game i headed back to the hostel and passed out pretty early.i was super exahuasted.
5/28 Berlin Steph’s 21st Bday!
This was Steph’s only full day in Berlin so we packed as much into it as possible. First, early in the morning we went to the Checkpoint Charlie museum. Its a museum dedicated to all the escape attempts from East to West Berlin. Super cool. One family made a makeshift hot air balloon, a bunch of people made tunnels. Awesome. I really liked it. After that we went back up to the Brandenburg gate for the Free walking tour. there were tons of people. they broke us up into a bunch of group and our tour was about 25 people which was is a good amount i think. Our tour and our tour guide were AMAZING. he had me on the edge of my feet the entire time wanting to learn and see more. seriously it was amazing. So what we saw and learned about: Hotel Adlon, the most expensive hotel in Berlin (more on that later) and where Michael Jackson dangled his baby a while ago; the reichstag, but this time with a view of the whole thing not close up so you could see a huge glass dome on top of it (what all the tourists were waiting for); the holocaust memorial or the official name is the memorial to the murdered jews of europe. Its massive and was just made in 2005. Its tons and tons and tons of different size gray blocks made of stones of different heights. As you walk into it you get lower into the ground and cant see over the blocks anymore. Intense. REally cool. Awesome that it is right smack in the center of Berlin. Oh yea, this was the one day with crappy weather. It was kinda rainy kinda sunny during most of our tour. We saw the grounds of Hitler’s bunker. Where he lived his last year, got married the day before he died, and died in. no sort of mention of where it was. right now its just a parking lot. we saw some old nazi bunkers that now serve as apartments (creepy) or a german tax office (ha). Another stretch of the Berlin wall. then we stopped at lunch at a place called Aroma (the Israeli starbucks). cheap sandwiches that were pretty good. Then it started pouring. not as bad as it would get later tho. We stopped at Humboldt University, where i stopped before, and where there was a massive book burning by the nazis where 25000 books were burned. There is a memorial underground. You can see through a window tons of empty book shelves. and you cant even get to the actual room. its locked and sealed. the last stop was Museum island where we saw the tackiest old building ever.. i think it was the berlin cathedral. It kinda stopped raininga t this point, but sensing it was about to rain, our tour guide took us under this big chunck of trees to tell us the last part of the story. The story was really epic about the one word that caused the fall of the berlin wall. he was teasing us with the story the entire 4 hour tour. So as the story was getting more intense it started downpouring like crazy. we werent really getting that wet, but still. some huge chunks of hail were flying everywhere. it just made the whole story that much more epic. And that one word was “immediatly”. he told us this funny story about the GDR press secretary not reading the minute notes and just telling international reporters that the wall was coming down.. haha. really funny and true. So the rain ended after the tour and me and steph headed to the Jewish Museum. It was really good. The building the museum was in was even more impressive. The museum was dedicated to Jewish history in Germany since way back when. Sad ending, obviously. Some really cool exhibits tho. then i headed back to the hostel to grab some quick dinner and to get ready for another pub crawl for Steph’s 21st. It was really fun. the first stop was the bar that was in the old jewish department store. We met some really nice girls from canada. I really wish that i would have gotten there names so i could find them on facebook.. o well. it was really fun, but after 4 bars neither me nor steph were in the mood to go to the club so we said our goodbyes (probably untill xmas break) and we both headed to our hostels. I passed out as soon as i got back to the hostel
5/29 Berlin
So i was on my own from now on.. not a big deal at all really since there was tons of stuff i still wanted to do in Berlin. First i went on another tour with the same tour company to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp about an hour outside of Berlin. Really creepy and sad. It was one of the first of the concentration camps built in the 30s mainly for political enemies and communists at first and then jews. We walked around for about 3 hours. there were some really good exhibits throughout the camp. Turns out the soviets ended up continuring the camp for political prisoners right after they liberated it in 1945. And they didnt even acknowledge any of the other prisoners there other than the communist ones till pretty recently. some of the Jewish Barracks were still intact and you got to see the terrible conditions. there were nice exhibits also on the torture and the work assignments given to the prisoners. really creepy. this wasnt an actual death camp, but alot of the prisoners were sent to auschwitz. we saw the places that firing squads took place and how they disposed of the bodies in the ovens. then we saw the place where prisoners of high importance were kept. in even worse conditions. The guy with that really famous holocaust quote was kept there… i just looked him up and im talking about the guywith the “First they came…” poem. His name was MArtin Niemoller.. and he actually survived this camp and Dachau. Then we saw the place where they did medical experiments. All really creepy and sad. It was an intense day. By the time the tour ended and i got back to my hostel it was 6pm. and i was starving. I heard that Asian food in Berlin was amazing from a few people so i went to a vietnamese place that was close by that was recommended by my guidebook. It was called Monsieur Vuong. I was lucky because i guess its pretty common to go there by yourself becaus there were tons of communal tables. It was so good. Since i was by myself I decided to treat myself and get an appitizer, and a meal, and a really fancy homemade lemonade drink. Everything was so good. The lemonade was seriosuly the best lemonaide ive ever had. soo good. After dinner I decided to take a train back to the brandenburg gate. My plan was to walk to the victory column that didnt look that far away on the map throught the tiergarten. The Tiergarten is the massive park in the center of berlin. Turns out the Gate and the tower are like 1500 meters apart. I didnt realize at the time it was that far, but it was a nice long walk through the park. I saw a bunch of statues and memorials along the way. When i got to the column i took a picture of the brandenburg gate, but it was so small you cant even see it without zooming in. SO crazy. then i walked ALL the way back to the reichstag. I decided to see what the big fuss was and wait on the line to get to the top. It was free anyway. It was around 9 oclockish now..and the sun was about to set when i finally got up there. Some really nice views. I got a free headset and as you walk up the spiral ramp up the dome the headset tells you all about the history of the buildings you could see. Which was pretty much everything in Berlin. It was really interesting. Then on the way down the spiral ramp you learned the history of the Reichstag building, parliament, and all the really cool things about the dome. the dome is really really high tech, like it catches water, and vents air, and gets enough sunlight to heat/ naturally light the chamber. It also has these natural blinds so a huge glare doesnt build up. Oh yea, quick anecdote from the free tour. So the dome on top is glass and see through and from it you can see the debating chamber for the people in parliament and they can see the people in the dome. Our tou guide made a funny joke about it: “So when all the members of parliament are debating aout issues and laws they can just look right up into the dome to see the people that really matter and the people that make the decisions in this democracy……American tourists”. Haha. really funny. Spent a good amount of time in the dome and the roof of the reichstag and then headed back to the hostel. I had another early day planned for my last few hours in Berlin. O yea. Also this day i kinda started getting sick. Like the worst i felt since ive been here. Super bad headache and terrible sore throat.
5/30 Berlin<Duisberg>Utrecht
Woke up pretty early to head to the Berlin Zoo! I was super excited for this. I really wanted to see Knut that famous baby polar bear that was just born a few years ago. the zoo was pretty big. I walked around for a while looking at all the aniimals. you know, a zoo is a zoo. I still had a really good time though. Finlly found Knut. he was actually seperated from the other Polar Bears because he was rejected by his mother right after he was born (i remember that news story from the Colbert Report). Anyway, he wasnt that small anymore. he just turned three. But still you could tell he was a baby they way he was trying to move a log from on part of the water to the next. So cute. I watched him for a quite some time. The zoo has a super impressive amount of monkeys. And next to each window where the monkeys they have all their names and birthdays so you can tell how old they are. Some of them were kids but some were in the 60s. really impressive. Tons of monkeys. I hung out there for a while too. I read somewhere that this zoo has the most speices that any other zoo in the world…or was it Europe. im not sure. but seriously impressive. I spent a few hours there that day. Then i headed back to my hostel and then headed back to the train station. Oh and by the way the Berlin HBF train station is super impressive. obviosuly gigantic, but so pretty and modern looking. I found out from the Reichstag dome tour that it was just built for the 2006 world cup. So the whole train journey home kinda sucked. I had a really bad stuffed nose and i had a one hour stop in Duisberg, Germany. It wasnt terrible. It was only 6:30 hours. And i did have a first class ticket (i waited too long to book it and all the 2nd class tickets were sold already…it was only 20 euros difference i guess.. not that bad). but there is a HUGE difference than 2nd class. tons of lefg room…i thought too much leg room.. like so much it was kinda uncomfortable. and the people who worked on this part of the train were kinda like flight attendents. they served peanuts and if you wanted to pay you could buy food and drinks from them. Got home around 10 last night and here I am.
I still feel kinda sick. but kinda better than yesterday. My apartment is SUPER empty. out of the 12 people that started.. and the 14 total that kinda live here there are 3 here right now. CRAZY. Eric is visiting germany for the extended weekend. gabor and mor left for good 
. turns out lou suddenly had to leave for good because something about her home university and i didnt get to say goodbye AGAIN. lucia and david are in turkey till the 15th, alex is still around, aliisa is in Finland till the 8th, anita has been in hungary for over a week and no one has a clue when she is getting back, karina is around, trent and adele are in Paris, and Ivan moved out a while ago. So right now its just me, and Karina, and Alex. seriously the two people i care about the least. But its not a big deal. today was a lazy day becuause i didnt feel like doing anything. My neighbors are around. And i think im going to the beach with some friends tomorrow.
And then i have class tuesday and wednesday and then i leave for London on Wednesday night! SO EXCITED!
woah. that was intense. 6253 words.
