Bruges/Brussels

For our last weekend of travel, we took a daytrip to Bruges and Brussels. Bruges is famous for its chocolate shops and they were delicious. It’s a very cute European town with a lot of shopping and is slightly touristy. We ate a legitimate Belgian waffle…mmm, good. We ran into some friends (Dustin and Sara) who also went to Bruges for the day. After walking around for a few hours, we trained to Brussels. There is started to rain, but we braved it to walk about 3 square blocks, haha. We found a really cute cookie/candy shop with all sorts of tins to fill up. After the shops and a market we trained back to Maastricht for the night and to catch up on sleep and studying!

Yay! Finals are almost over! Only one left tomorrow, the sendoff party and then 3 weeks of traveling!! I can hardly wait. Our plans are Barcelona, Carcassonne, Avignon, Nice, Strasbourg, back to Maastricht, London, Dublin, Edinburgh, Maastricht and HOME for Thanksgiving!

Luxembourg

The next adventure was a day trip to the enormous country of Luxembourg. It took about 3 hours to train through Liege and into Luxembourg City. Luxembourg has three official languages: French, German and Luxembourgish (no joke). The city looks like a fairytale land. The city is on a plateau, so forested ravines and streams surround it as well as old buildings emerging in different spots. The park was the perfect fall scene with a light breeze causing leaves to fall ever so slowly. The Grand Duke’s palace was complete with a guard out front, but is a bit hidden and unassuming. We climbed down into some caverns used as fortresses in previous wars. They were slightly creepy and we lost Annabelle for a few minutes-eek! I did find a French bookstore and bought a few books for fun. Overall Luxembourg is a really cool, relaxed, and inviting place. The people were very friendly and seemed to just enjoy the day.

Germany and Italy!!

Hello everyone! The semester’s more than halfway over…whoa. I just got back from a week and a half semester break. Believe it or not, with only twelve days of class I was more than ready for a break! We started the trip as a full group of 57 people including our professors. The first stop was Berlin. We went there to see the Charité Hospital and the Plastinarium in Guben, Germany. Baylor set up the accommodations for everyone and they did a very good job. The Maritim Hotel is 4-star. It is across the street from the German Department of Defense. Interesting historical tidbit, the courtyard where the Valkyrie conspirators were killed is there. Moving to the WWII part of the story, Berlin is noticeably different from other major European cities. Because the city was bombed in the war, nearly everything has been built since then. We went to Checkpoint Charlie and heard a brief history review from our tour guide near the Berlin Wall. I could go on, but this is just the beginning of the week! We bussed to Guben and saw the Body Works-like exhibit there. This site is the original and it was incredible to see the human bodies posed and preserved. The quantity of history at Charité was also stunning. Virchow’s desk is still on display among many things.

Next, we flew into Venice, Italy and bussed to Padua. There we enjoyed touring the University with the first anatomical theater. Galileo and Vesalius both taught there among others. Padua was a nice, small city with great shopping and gelato J

After Padua, we were ‘released’ from the big group and dispersed in our smaller travel groups. We went back to Venice for a night and enjoyed the city a bit. It hasn’t sunk yet! I found a true Venetian mask shop where the lady was making the paper maché masks. Now I’m ready for a Masquerade!

The next stop was Florence…aka Firenze. There we climbed all 46o+ steps to the top of Il Duomo. It was gorgeous to see the entire city. Every night we went to the Piazza Michelangelo, which is on a hill in Florence and brought dinner to the steps. The sunsets were beautiful and we had a view of the Ponte Vecchio. We took a day trip out of Florence and into Siena. The smaller town was nice and the surrounding area was pretty, but I’m still not sure how the town has become so touristy. Back in Florence we shopped the leather markets extensively and saw the David—perfection!

After Florence was the amazing Cinque Terre or Five Lands. The little towns are on the Italy’s northwest coast. We stayed in the first town of Riomaggiore and trained/hiked to the other towns. The beaches were beautiful and the mountains gave us great views over the water. Our first night there we hiked up to see the sunset. Then, an offshore storm started during the sunset…we took sooo many pictures of the sky. One of our group was actually in tears our last night there because it was so amazing.

We trained bright and early at 5:40 to Milan and met our whole group at the airport to fly back into Brussels and get back for class. We would have rather stayed in Cinque Terre!