Ostern an der Ostsee!

This Easter Weekend, we made an impromptu trip to the Baltic Sea, since our planned trip to Basel, Switzerland got a little too expensive. Like last time we traveled inside Germany, we used the Schones-Wochenende ticket, which is nice and cheap and lets five people travel together.

In the fabulous German travel guide that I have (Eyewitness Travel: Germany), there was a two-page spread on the island of Rugen that lies on the Baltic Sea. Being and old East German vacation spot and having spectacular nature, I thought it would be a good place for a short visit.

We left early on Saturday morning and when we arrived in Rugen, the weather was not exactly a beach vacation. Some of our teachers asked us why we would go to Rugen in the winter, and I can understand what they meant...


[on the pier in the wind and cold...]

When we arrived in Binz, we first checked into our hostel, which was a real Jugendeherberge, run by the German Youth Hostel Association. The price of 25 euros/night included breakfast and dinner. It was definitely for youth, and their were families and kids running around all over the place.

After we got properly dressed for the weather (with lots of layers and hats and scarves), we went to find the Easter-fire that was supposed to be happening. Whether it was because of the weather or because we had misinterpreted it, I'm not sure, but we couldn't find the fire. There were, however, volunteer fireman trying to raise money.


[Firetruck in Binz]

We decided to walk out onto the long pier. If the high waves weren't enough of a warning, the people coming back from the end of the pier very wet should have been. We walked out to the end of the pier, against the wind, anyway. At the end of the pier, we watched the stormy sea and took pictures. Just as we were about to turn around, a huge wave came, struck the pier, splashed up, and got us soaking wet.


[Sean and I on the pier]


[Watching the big wave come in]


[The after-shock of being completely soaked by the Baltic]

After the shock wore off, we walked down the main street of Binz, which was about three blocks long. Binz reminded me a lot of Pucon in Chile. It is a small town whose main (perhaps only) purpose is for tourism. And like Pucon, Binz's tourism is a little higher class. Having formerly been in East Germany, Binz is now flooded with hotels, bed and breakfast inns, restaurants and stores like "Lacoste." But, this is pretty common, since Germans are the most traveling people in Europe and travel the most within their own country. Binz is just trying to capitalize on an economic opportunity. It is a cute town, but might be better enjoyed with more money.


[Binz from the Pier]


[Main Street in Binz]

The next day, the stormy weather had magically cleared and we were left with a (still cold) blue-skied day.


[Nicer weather...]

We walked around Binz some more before we took the bus to Sassnitz to see the chalk cliffs.


[On the beach in Binz]


[Binz is so small the little train is a form of public transportation...]

We walked from Sassnitz to one end of the Nationalpark Jasmund, which is world-famous for the chalk cliffs there. After a walk in the snow-covered woods, we finally got to the cliffs.


[The crew walking in the woods]


[Annie in the woods... pondering about having a white Easter instead of a white Christmas... isn't it supposed to be spring?]


[Finally at the cliffs! The water was a milky color from all the chalk]

From our walk in the woods, we took stairs down to the beach. The beach was made of rocks, most of which were flint (flint comes from veins in chalk...). The flint was mostly covered in chalk, but could easily be broken to show the black rock inside. From the rocks, high white cliffs rose above us, strangely white and strangely soft to the touch.


[Happy to be on the beach! In a National Park!]


[Looking down the beach]


[Chalk cliff]


[Veins of flint]

Walking along the beach, we magically ended up back in Sassnitz, and had an ice cream along the port, where there were lots of cafes and restaurants.


[David, Annie, John, and Sean eating ice cream]


[Very cool footbridge in Sassnitz, to get from where the main street is to where the port is]

From there, it was time to head back to the train station and go back to the city.

Berlin by Bike

The strike took an interesting turn today, with the public transportation running on a holiday schedule for the week, in order to take advantage of all the tourists coming to town before Easter. However, other methods of transportation have become absolutely necessary, since the strike is likely to resume after Easter again. Luckily for me, Marlies is letting me use Paula's old bike. Even though I say 'old,' it is still in really good condition and serves me just fine.

Berlin is also a very bike-friendly city. Not only is the city really, really flat (making changing gears or gears at all almost unnecessary] there is an infrastructure of bike paths, bike lanes and bike lights on almost every street in the city. The drivers are also really conscious of the bikers, which definitely makes me feel better about biking on the street, and the pedestrians have a lot of respect for the bikers, almost always getting out of the way on sidewalks. If you want to read more about it, I found an article about Berlin's bike infrastructure.

Since the nearest S-bahn station is about a 15-20 minute walk from my house, the best option that I have is to ride my bike. Sometimes it means I ride my bike to the station and lock it up there or sometimes I even bring it on the train if I think its not going to be too crowded. When I am feeling really ambitious, I just bike all the way to where I am going.

With the help of our student Assistant Luis, who basically bikes everywhere in the city, I found a good way to bike to classes. It takes me about 45 minutes to bike to school, which is the same that it takes with public transportation, but I am obviously getting more of a workout. (After the first day biking I realized I had to bring a shirt to change into once I got to school).

In addition to biking to school, I have biked to the Tiergarten to have a picnic with Annie, the Opera, the Consulate to apply for my new Swedish passport, the Turkish Market, and many other places.

Not only is biking a good form of exercise, it is a great way to see the city. There are so many new places, neighborhoods, stores, etc that I have discovered biking around the city that there is probably no other way that I would have learned about them. On a sunny day biking in Berlin makes me appreciate the city a lot more.

Portugal - Porto

We got into Porto late, which in a way was good since Pete could come and meet us at the bus station. We walked around a little bit to see some of the bigger sites and then headed back to his house. He lives in an Erasmus House, which is where students studying abroad within Europe (usually) live together. Kind of like a dorm, each student in Pete's house has their own room, but most have to share bathrooms on the hall. There is also a large kitchen and laundry room, which everyone has access to. Amazingly, Pete lives with 22 other students.

The night we came, they were actually having a dinner for some students that we leaving the house. We got to chat with them a little, but since they mostly spoke Portuguese with each other, it made it harder. After that, we ended up going to a popular student bar/cafe. It was crazy how many people were there, not only in the locale, but also all over the street around it. Porto definitely seems to be a much more student/university based city than Lisbon. From there, we ended up at another bar, where there some interesting folk dancing going on. Still a hip place, we ended up folk dancing for a little while, even though we had no idea what we were doing.

The next day, we got up early to see Porto. Since Pete had to work, he just gave us some tips about what we needed to do in city. We started at the 'Cristal Palace,' which was an interesting dome with gardens around it and nice views of the river. We even caught sight of some chickens and peacocks roaming the park.


[the park]


[peacock!]


[view of porto and the river, with a plaque showing it in earlier years]


[delicious pastry! "pastel de nata" an egg-custard cup of deliciousness]

From there, we walked through town down to the river. Porto definitely has a very 'old-Europe' feel, very different from Lisbon. The houses we old, fit together very interestingly and colorful.


[houses in Porto]


[big bridge in Porto]


[by the river]


[Annie and me... we don't just look tired, we were tired]

On the other side of the river, there are lots of Port (the sweet wine that comes from Portugal) distilleries. Since they need to do some sort of advertising, they almost all offer free wine-testing, and others have tours. We ended up going into one and getting an explanation of the different kinds of Port and then tasting a little. It was really interesting to get to learn about the wine rather than just drink it.


[One distillery, not the one we went to]

After walking around Porto and seeing the sites, we jumped on a bus to Lisbon with Pete in the afternoon; a bus ride that included some delicious sandwiches that we made. Pete was on his way down to southern Portugal to spend the weekend with some French students on the beach.

Annie and I spent our last night in Portugal reflecting on how much fun we had in such a short amount of time and enjoying the last moments of our vacation.

Portugal - Peniche

On our next day in Portugal, we decided it would be worth it to head up to Porto to visit my friend Pete, which was kind of one of the original reasons we were going to Portugal anyway.

But, since we were on our spring break, we really wanted to stop at a beach along the way. We ended up finding a town called Peniche to stop at. We could take a bus from Lisbon to Peniche, spend a couple of hours there, and then take a bus up to Porto.

Our journey started in the morning, where the girl working at the hostel informed us it would be better to go to the Oriente Station, quite a ways away from where our hostel was. Since there were two stations in Lisbon, I wanted to make sure we were going to the right one. She assured us we were.

Annie and I got to the bus station with plenty of time to spare, but looking around, we couldn't find the bus line we needed to take. Asking where those buses went (in my Spanish with what I think is a Portuguese accent), we found out that we actually had to be at the other bus stationon the other side of town. Clearly we weren't gonna make it.

We ended up slowly making are way over to the other bus station to catch the next bus. We stopped on our way to buy some awesome sunglasses and snacks for the day.


[Awesome new sunglasses. Very cheap too]

When we finally got to Peniche, we ended up at a very strange bus station in the middle of an industrial section of town. But the beach was only a five minute walk, and that's all we wanted. We made it there and it was gorgeous!


[beach in Peniche]


[Annie, unlike me, was very brave and actually went into the water. If we squinted we could see the US on the other side of the Atlantic]


[Nothing like that Portuguese sunshine to make our problems go away...]


[Town of Peniche jutting out into the ocean]


[Annie and I enjoying sunshine and clemetines on the beach]


[Jumping for joy on the BEACH in FEBRUARY!]

Although we were only in Peniche for a couple of hours, it was definitely relaxing and worth a little stop over. Absolutely fabulous to be at the beach again!

Portugal! (Lisbon)

After a weekend stuck in Berlin, lamenting over our lost things and what we don't like about Germans and Germany, Annie and I knew that we had to get out. Since we still had our return flights from Lisbon to Berlin, we decided that we might as well buy new flights to Lisbon for the sake of our sanity. The U.S. Consulate was also super helpful in this situation, being able to give us emergency passports within a day.

On Tuesday morning, we arrived to a sunny, blue-skied Lisbon, so happy to finally be on our vacation.


[On the streets of Lisbon in short sleeves!]

We made reservations at a pretty cheap hostel near Marques de Pombal (not pronounced at all like it is written), that included a nice breakfast and internet. Since our room wasn't ready when we got there, we dropped off our stuff and decided to look around town. We started by walking to the Placa de Comercio, where the old palace is. The streets and houses were extremely pretty, but relatively modern.


[at the Placa de Comercio]

From there we headed up into the old Islamic neighborhood, where the facades of the buildings were all covered in tiles. Annie had heard about a bi-weekly flea market in the area, so we set out to find it. Right by the old Pantheon, we found tons of street vendors (from hobos probably selling stolen stuff they found in bars to legitimate businessmen) selling their items. We only ended up buying some buttons and a couple of souvenirs, since not speaking the language barred the whole understanding how much things cost process.


[tile-facade buildings]


[a little part of the flea market]


[by the Pantheon]

We then kept walking up a hill and got a beautiful view of the city. Like Valparaiso, Lisbon is built on hills, right by the water (a river, not quite the ocean), and the whole town made me miss my old home a lot. The buildings were worn down and homey, just like the old English architecture in Valparaiso, there were palm trees, friendly people with dark complexions, sunshine, the ocean... All of Portugal seemed to have an interesting mix of European and Latin cultures. If only I could have understood Portuguese with all the Spanish I know...


[looking over Lisbon]


[view of Lisbon... with the Mediterranean look]

Having seen a castle up on a hill all day, Annie and I walked until we found it. It ended up being a castle built in the 11th century by Moors when they ruled Portugal. the old castle was very pretty itself, but the views of Lisbon were much more interesting.


[at the top]

After that, we attempted to find a late lunch/dinner. But, our vegetarianism got in the way - all the restaurants we found only had meat or fish on the menu. Since we hadn't eaten all day, we definitely weren't planning on settling for sides of bread and salad. We decided it might be better to check the touristy stuff in the center of town. We ended up having luck finding an Italian restaurant run by South-East Asians that had vegetarian options. It was great to sit down, have a nice meal, and drink so Portuguese wine after a long day of walking.


We woke around 8 or 8:30 on Wednesday, got ready, had a big breakfast, and headed out to check out the rest of Lisbon and surrounding area. We started by going uphill towards the Parque Eduard VII, where we came across Lisboners walking their dogs and some interesting statues.


[at Parque Eduard VII right by Marques de Pombal]

We had a plan to take the 28 bus from there, since apparently it is good for sightseeing, and would take us to the Torre de Belem and the Belem Neighborhood, downstream from Lisbon's center. After wandering around, taking numerous buses., magically showing up at the transportation headquarters, finally buying a 24 hour transit pass, and finding the 28 bus, we finally made it to Belem.

Located west of Lisbon's city center, Belem has the Monastery dos Jeronimos, the museums of art, archeology, and maritime museum, as well as the "Cultural Center of Belem." If we had had more money, I'm sure we would have been able to explore these better.


[Annie and I in front of Monastery dos Jeronimos]


[enjoying the sunshine]


[Annie and I at the Torre de Belem]

The symbol of Belem, the Torre de Belem, is an old watchtower that used to sit in the middle of the Tujo River until an earthquake changed the course of the river. It reminded me of some prison that would be romanticized in a Pirates of the Caribbean film.


[The Monument of Discoveries... looking to conquer!]

We then walked, in the sunshine and along the water, to the Monument of Discoveries, commemorating the role Portugal played in the Age of Discovery. They also had a huge map on the ground of the world, showing where Portugal established colonies. Of course Annie and I couldn't resist having some fun with it!


[Longing for Valparaiso!]


[That's Maryland!!]

Across the river from Lisbon, a huge Jesus statue overlooks the city. It is based on the very famous one that looks over Rio de Janiero in Brazil. We took a ferry across to a very different place from the Lisbon we had seen. In an old, dirty outdoor bus station, we found to bus that would take us to Cristo Rei. We bought very cheap round-trip tickets and drove uphill through a much poorer, run-down city.

We finally made it to Cristo Rei (being only two of four tourists on the bus), a 100m tall statue. It cost 4 euro to get to the top (via elevator and some stairs), and was worth the views of Lisbon. It was clearly not a touristy place, I guess since it was so far from the center of Lisbon, but was still pretty cool.


[Annie and I at Jesus' feet]


[Lisbon!]

When we got back to Lisbon, we took the metro home, and had officially used all four types of transit methods that Lisbon had to offer. Obviously less developed than the system in Berlin, but still very good for getting around.


[Annie and I getting ready to go out!]

For dinner, Annie and I decided not to take any chances and found a vegetarian restaurant online that was pretty close to our hostel. (The internet is your friend while travelling!) It ended up being a buffet, with lots of different salads, hot and cold dishes, and even some typical Portuguese dishes cooked with veggie substitutes.

After eating so much great food, we headed to the Bairro Alto (High-up Neighborhood), where there are supposed to be a lot of bars and clubs to check out the scene. Although there was a lot to be offered on a Wednesday night, it was bizarre how many people were just hanging out outside different locales and not really going in anywhere. We headed home pretty early in order to be able to head up to the beaches and Porto the next day.