The Last Month: Spring Break Part 2, and Much More...

Hello everyone! If you've followed me this far, thank you! I hope you've enjoyed reading about my adventures, both in Denmark and across Europe. I'm leaving Denmark on the 19th, which is fast approaching, and between now and then I have a million and a half things to get done, including going to see my visiting family later today, somehow writing two papers before Tuesday, attempting to visit Germany and Sweden, as well as places within Denmark that I haven't been to yet, like Tivoli - a massive amusement park in the heart of Copenhagen - and the Louisiana - a famous modern art museum, as well as taking two finals and packing up my life here to go HOME! Somehow it'll all get done, and I'm looking forward to spending these last few weeks in Denmark with my friends who I am going to miss like crazy; now that classes are done and the weather is beautiful, there's so much to do and so little time! Because of that, I won't be posting in great detail about all of the the back-logged stuff I haven't gotten to yet (like going to England and my friend Claire coming to visit) but instead I'll just post lots of pictures and tell you all about my adventures in detail when I get home.

So things have gotten a bit out of sequence, but before my travel break, my friend Claire came to visit me in Copenhagen for a week! It was great to see her and show her around the city that I've gotten to know over the past few months. It was a pretty crazy week for me academically, but we still managed to do a lot and I had a ton of fun.

Claire and I in Nyhavn 

Since Claire here for a week, she got to come with me to my practicum site. This is the view from the roof of the school - one of the best views in Copenhagen, or so I'm told. 

Rosenborg in Spring 

We also went to Christiania, a "free town" in Copenhagen that governs itself by it's own laws, which include the legalization of marijuana and the absence of cars

I had a day back in Copenhagen between Moscow and London, and I was able to meet up with my friend Dana who had been in Denmark for the week visiting a family friend. It was amazing that the timing worked out as well as it did, and we were able to spend an afternoon together, picnicking in the park and exploring the Botanical garden. 

Inside the Palm House at the Botanical Garden. You can climb up the stairs to a walkway that goes around the top of the greenhouse. I wish the Smith greenhouse had one!

Dana!  

Botanical Garden  

Botanical Garden, which reminded me a lot of Smith, actually 

The second week of my travel break, I went to England to visit my friend Monica who is studying in London. We did a ton of really fun stuff, including seeing Westminster, Big Ben, Parliament, the London Eye, St. Paul's Cathedral, Buckingham Palace, and a lot more. We even got to see Billy Elliot on the West End, and we took a day trip to the adorable town of Bath. It was my first time in England, and I had a whole week, which is definitely what you need to see London because it's huge! The weather was fantastic the entire time, which I was not expecting from England. Yes, I am wearing t-shirts in some of these pictures!

The London Eye, which was really close to Monica's flat 

Parliament and Big Ben across the Thames 

In St. James's Park, with Buckingham Palace in the background

London from the top of St. Paul's Cathedral - 530 steps to the top! 

St. Paul's 

Billy Elliot! I've been wanting to see this show forever,
and it was just as fantastic as I hoped it would be! 

The Roman Baths in Bath, England 

Roman Baths

High tea in Bath!  

Beautiful garden on the edge of the Avon River 

Pretty English garden 

The Tower of London 

Tower Bridge 

St. Paul's, this time from the ground

The Millennium Bridge, or as I liked to call it, the Harry Potter bridge 

I'll hopefully get to posting a few more shots from my adventures around Denmark and the surrounding countries before I fly home, but if not, let me just say tak for reading, and vi ses (see you later, or as the case may be, see you soon!)

A Week in Russia Part 2: Novgorod and Moscow

On Tuesday afternoon we all piled on to the bus and drove to Novgorod, a medieval town between St. Petersburg and Moscow. It was colder there than anywhere else in Russia, and there wasn't all that much to see, so it was definitely one of the low points in the trip. We saw the Novgorod Kremlin (kremlin basically just means a fortress wall), St. Sophia's Cathedral (the oldest in Russia), and met with a monk who lives in a monastery near by. 

St. Sophia's in Novgorod

From Novgorod, we took an overnight train to Moscow, arriving at 5:30 a.m. the next morning. I'd never been on an overnight train before, so I suppose the experience was good just because it was something new, but it's really not very glamorous. Our sleeping cabins were tiny, cramped, and hot, and you could  We were able to stop by our hotel (a huge 30 story building, which we soon learned is not so unusual because Moscow is ENORMOUS) before heading out for a full day of site seeing. We took a bus tour of Moscow and saw some of the most famous sights, including the Kremlin and the Red Square. 

St. Basil's Cathedral 

The Red Square, which isn't red at all, but the buildings around it are 

Moscow's Kremlin 

On Thursday night, we met up with our "forced friends," students and 20somethings from Moscow with whom we were to buy groceries and make dinner at their apartment. Two of my friends and I met up with two recent college graduates, Alexi and Svetya, who showed us around Moscow before meeting up with two other acquaintances of theirs, Sousha and her brother Vladimir, whom Alexi worked with. Together we took the train to a bus stop and took the bus another 30 minutes or so out into the high-rise suburbs of Moscow to Sousha and Vladimir's home. We bought groceries and made dinner and they were all confused as to what exactly I was supposed to eat if I didn't eat meat. There were definitely lots of awkward pauses, especially because not all of the Russians knew each other, and because my American friends and I had only really known each other for a few days. Despite that, it was a really cool experience and definitely something that made the trip unique and unlike any kind of experience you could get traveling on your own. 

Multiple churches inside the Kremlin 

On Friday we went inside the Kremlin and to another famous church. I'm not sure what I was expecting to see inside the Kremlin walls, but definitely not what we did see, which was just a lot of churches. You see, it's not enough to have one multi-purpose church, not when you can have one for your baptisms, one for your coronations, one for your weddings, and so on and so forth. And so that's what they (the czars back in the day) did. 

Cathedral of Christ the Savior 

The last important cultural place we went was the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the tallest orthodox church in the world. In 1931, the entire church was demolished on the orders of the Stalin administration.  For a while, the site was slated to house a monument to socialism, but due to lack of funding it was never built. Then it became the site for the largest open-air swimming pool in the world, until finally the cathedral was reconstructed in the 1990s, once again rising up to become the tallest orthodox church on the planet. 

Matryoshkas in the market 

On Saturday, we had the option of going to largest market in Moscow, conveniently located within walking distance from our hotel. Due to the exchange rate, stuff is relatively cheap in Russia (and much cheaper than in most other cities I've visited), so I was able to pick up lots of great presents for family and friends back home. 

I had a great time in Russia, and sometimes I still have a hard time believing I was actually there because it all seems so foreign. It's definitely not a place I can ever see myself going back to (although I guess you should never say never) and I feel really grateful that I was able to go at all. Next time, I'll tell you all about my trip to London and the lovely visits I had from my friends Claire and Dana! 

A Week in Russia Part 1: St. Petersburg

As most of you probably know, I spent the first week of my spring break in St. Petersburg, Novgorod, and Moscow, Russia! It was an incredible, almost inexplicable trip - definitely not like anything I've ever done before, or will probably ever do again. Every time somebody asks me how Russia was, I find that I have a really hard time adequately explaining it. For starters, I went as part of a class, so there was much more of an academic focus than any of my other travels have had. It wasn't really a relaxing, vacation-y sort of place either, but that part didn't really bother me so much. I'm so incredibly glad I went with this group,  because Russia is definitely not a place I would wish to travel to on my own. Hardly anybody speaks English,  getting around can be difficult because the cities are huge and not all that friendly, and getting there in the first place is not the easiest or most pleasant experience. Our professor Jon acted as a great (albeit overly enthusiastic at times) tour guide, and I definitely got so much more out of my trip than I would have had I gone on my own. 

Anywho, preamble aside, let me begin because our days were packed and I have lots of pictures to share. The post will cover St. Petersburg (definitely my favorite of the places we visited) and the next will cover Novgorod and Moscow. We left Copenhagen early on the morning of Saturday the 10th of April, and arrived in St. Petersburg around noon Russia time (2 hours ahead of Copenhagen). The first day was spent walking around St. Petersburg and getting a feel of the city, which is beautiful and much more westernized than the rest of Russia. 

One of our first views of St. Petersburg,
with the Church of Our Savior on Spilled Blood in the background 

The next morning we took a bus tour around St. Petersburg and saw many important sights, including the Winter Palace from across the Neva River, a famous statue of Peter the Great, the Peter and Paul cathedral, in which many famous Russian czars, including Peter the Great and Catherine the Great are buried, and a famous statue of Lenin standing on pieces of an armored car (a huge statement since most famous statues are of men on horseback). 

Peter the Great 

Inside the Peter and Paul Cathedral 

Lenin on the armored car 

In the afternoon we took a walking tour of "Dostoyevsky's St. Petersburg" in which we saw the famous author's house as well as the house where the fictional Raskolnikov of Crime and Punishment infamy lived. We also walked the path he supposedly took on his way to murder the pawnbroker. I was lucky enough not to have read Crime and Punishment in it's entirety at any point in my life, but even reading the approximately 20 pages that I did for this class was really painful. As I'm not a huge fan of the book, I found this tour pretty boring. That evening, we went to the Russian ballet. This trip was optional, and I had originally decided not to go but was given a chance to at the last minute and decided, "when in Russia...why not?" I probably could have done without it, though, for multiple reasons. Instead of being one story it was lots of smaller segments from various famous Russian ballets, and the dancing was definitely not as good as I had expected it to be. Also - huge culture shock - people were dressed really informally, and the group of middle-aged adults sitting behind us talked and took flash photos throughout the entire performance, and they weren't the only ones. Needless to say, I was kind of horrified. 

Canal on the Dostoyevsky walk 

On Thursday morning we got a "behind the facade" tour of St. Petersburg, which was a fascinating look at places that tourists definitely aren't supposed to go. We began at a kommunalka, or a shared apartment.  Kommunalkas were big during the USSR years, and some still exist today. They are basically huge apartments that used to be owned by one aristocratic family but were split up into individual rooms in the early years of the Soviet Union, with each single room being occupied by a different family. Everyone in the building shares communal bathrooms and kitchens, and the building we saw (that is still in use today) was incredibly run down and kind of sketch. We had a key to get in, but our guide told us not to talk but just pretend we belonged there and get in and out as quickly as possible. Our next stop was at a huge market where they sold everything from fruit and vegetables to meats and cheeses. I got some delicious dried apricots for a steal! Our final two stops were to an antique store that had lots of old Soviet propaganda related things and to a vodka bar, which is exactly what it sounds like. The Russians love their vodka - so much that they refuse to drink it mixed with anything else! This place was literally a hole in the wall, with no bar stools or tables or anything, just a bar and huge shot glasses. There's nothing quite like watching a group of American college students take vodka shots in a hole-in-the-wall at 11:00 am in the morning in Russia. 

In the afternoon, we visited the Winter Palace, home of the czars during the years of the Russian Empire. The palace is huge and beautiful and ostentatious and is home to the Hermitage Museum, one of the oldest and largest in the world. Most of all it was a huge contrast to see right after all of the stops on our "behind the facade" walk. The inside looked like it had been dipped in gold, and the museum held many important (but non-Russian) works of art. Although it was beautiful and definitely one of the highlights of St. Petersburg for me, it was easy to see why people revolted against the czar because one family had so much and so many else had so very little. 

Winter Palace. The building is so huge that it was hard to get a picture that
accurately captured it's size 

Inside the Winter Palace. Why, yes, those are columns made out of gold.
Don't you have those in your home?

Dance (II) by Matisse. Just one of the many famous paintings at the Hermitage.

After our trip to the Winter Palace and the Hermitage, we had some time on our own, so I went with some friends to see the Church of Our Savior on Spilled Blood up close. The church is one of those quintessentially Russian looking churches which Jon, our professor, told us is actually an inaccurate description. Apparently churches like these, and like St. Basil's in Moscow (which Church of Our Savior is modeled after), are created to look fantastical and over-the-top, representing romantic nationalism and the ideals of Russia. Still - totally gorgeous and mind-blowing!

Church of Our Savior on Spilled Blood, so named because it was built on the exact spot where
Czar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881