Okay, so I realize

that anyone who relies on this blog for updates of my life currently things I’ve been stranded or left for dead in Eastern Europe for the past three months.  That is simply not the case.  However, things got so ridiculously busy for the last month there that I simply didn’t have time to blog.  Next week, I don’t work, and I don’t leave for Boston until Sunday, January 20th, so I’ll try my darndest to get blogs up for Prague, Budapest, Zagreb and Samobor Croatia, Slovenia, Switzerland, London again, German Christmas market, and a few last fun things that took place at the castle.

 Though to tell you the truth, part of the reason I’ve put it off is because even just thinking about the castle that I’ll never see again, and the castle kids, the majority of whom I won’t be seeing anymore — it makes my stomach knot up.  This past semester was phenomal.

 However, Boston this spring should be great!  I’ll be working a lot more to try and raise money for lots of travel this summer (a week in Rockport, my two week trip — probably either Ireland or Australia, possibly a road trip with Bridget, possibly a small trip with Amberlee) and my apartment in the fall.  I’ll be having fun with all my new friends, probably salsa dancing almost every Friday night.  There will be classes, and also forensics, which I need to get working on SOON!  Plus several of my New England friends want to take me home to visit their families, which I would love.

 OH! And I have a single!  A room all to myself at Emerson.  I’m so excited about that, even if it cost me $250 out of pocket.  Uh well; totally worth it!

 That said, though, I’ve got things to do.  Already I’m having to do things to get ready for heading back up there.  Dad and Thomas are probably flying up with me to get my stuff there; it’s going to be a stressful two days moving in for sure.

Merry Christmas Season

My friends and I have started a tradition here.  See, Christmas in the Netherlands and Germany is two-fold, and the beginning/first part of Christmas is on December 5th.  Which would mean the month of Christmas starts much earlier.  Tempting as it has been for us to just start listening to Christmas music nonstop since the beginning of November, we realized that this would be pure madness.  Two months of Christmas is over-kill.  So to combat this, we created our own little tradition.

Every night at 8:50pm, I go sprinting across the castle, up the narrow stairs, and burst through the door into Amanda, Jessye, and Stef’s room, yelling, “Christmas carol time!”  Though 8:50 is the planned time, it usually takes fifteen minutes or so for everyone to show up.   Bridget comes shuffling in from her room next store.  Eric will forget to Bridget ims him and we all watch him sprint across the courtyard.  David comes ambling in.  Joel came once.

The carol selection is handed to one individual every night, who can select any song they want, to be found in either our vast iTunes collections or online (youtube!).  By this point, I’m usually already dancing around the room, leaping, twirling, singing my own songs.  Amanda is trying to show people videos on youtube; Jessye is yelling at me to listen to her cool recording.  Frequently everyone will make a dash to cram onto Amanda’s bed because we know she hates it.

Then, finally when the song is chosen, the dancing begins.  All of us leap and writhe and twist around the room, belting out as many of the words as we know (I’ve been teased for knowing all the words to all the songs thus far). 

Once the song has finished, we write it on the paper posted on the wall, in order that no song shall be repeated throughout the season.  If someone has been absent (for instance, when I was in Italy over the weekend) but there are enough people left for the song to continue, someone will send an e-mail to the absentees so that they can listen to the song on their own and maintain the tradition.  Originally, this was only to get us through the pre-Thanksgiving, Christmas-is-unacceptable season, but we’ve decided to continue it for the rest of the semester. 

I’m sure we all look like nuts.  The windows of their room look out over the courtyard and multiple times we’ve had people wander up to see what the heck we’re doing.  But for those five minutes, we can’t explain ourselves to anyone.  It’s complete Christmas release, chaos, no worries about school or travel.  Just good ol’ fashioned Christmas cheer.

Italy rocked my face off!

Dear Venice and Rome,

Thank you for a WONDERFUL trip.  Even if you did strike.

Sincerely, Me

I’m back in the Netherlands.  257 pictures have been put up on webshots, more than I’ve taken any other weekend that I’ve been here, haha.  Venice was just insanely photogenic, and in Rome there’s so much to SEE.

So photos are up.  Check those out.  I’ll get blogs for Venice and Rome (and Vienna!) up hopefully within the next couple days since we leave for Prague Thursday 5:30am, and then is our travel break.  However, I have TONS of papers due this week.  Now begins the final surge before home, so I’m going to be busier than I’ve been all semester for sure.

Now off to write papers!

Leaving toniiiiiight

Well, I would have liked to say farewell for the weekend a little later than this, but I’ve got SO much to do before my classes 2:30-8:45, and then I literally will run from class to the busstop to make the 9:03pm bus.  So instead I’ll say it now.  Ta everyone, have a wonderful rest of your week and weekend.  Maybe say a prayer for me that all my rerouting due to the strike works out okay and that I have a great time in Venice and Rome.

Italy was already on my bad side because of Milan

Okay, so first the almost-bad news.  Fidan messaged me about thirty minutes ago, frantic because Italy trains and busses are (probably) going on strike  Friday.  Of course, I was supposed to take a train from Venice to Rome on Friday.  And to even get to the train station, I’d have to take a bus.

Fortunately, this time I got one up on International Travel.  I immediately e-mailed both my Venice and Rome hostels, asking if they’d heard anything about this.  I told my Venice hostel that if so, I’d need to cancel Thursday night, and my Rome hostel that, if so, I’d need to book another night, Thursday night.  I found a train that goes directly from Venice to Rome at 6:38pm Thursday night, arriving at 11:03pm.  I have wifi in my hostel in Rome, so as soon as I get there, I’ll e-mail Fidan.  By then, her school will have told her what times the strike is.  If it’s going to prevent us from meeting up Friday then we’ll just have to make due with only seeing each other Saturday, by which time the strikes SHOULD be over.

 Don’t get me wrong, I’m FURIOUS about this.  Let’s recall my history with strikes, shall we?

1. I get stranded in Achen, Germany due to the trains all being screwy as an after-effect of German train strikes two days before.  I spend the night in a stranger’s aparment.
2. I get stranded in Paris, France on my way to Nice due to French National Railway strike.  I spend the night in a hostel but lose a day in Nice.
3. I . . . okay, I actually didn’t see it at all, but Germany went on strike again and I only narrowly avoided it on my way to Vienna.  I literally left the country of Germany like an hour before teh strike began.  My friends all missed a day in Berlin because of it, though.
4. Italian air traffic controllers went on strike, so my friend Emily got stranded in Italy for three days during midterms.

And now I am PUMPED full of adrenaline.  I’m so relieved I knew about this ahead of time.  I’m upset that I’m missing an evening in Venice, and it means I’m going to have to deal with an evening train and getting into Rome really really late instead of having a nice quiet evening at the hostel.   But it could –and has been before– so much worse.  I’d rather lose an evening in Venice than only have half a day to see Rome.  This would have been such an infuriating surprise in Italy.  Hopefully both my hostels will be very understanding and helpful and e-mail me back SOON so I can feel absolutely sure it’s all sorted out before I leave tomorrow night.

And now I’m excited about Italy.  Maybe my anxiety about this trip was a gut feeling that something was going to go wrong.  I just wasn’t feeling RIGHT about it.  I actually had been considering cancelling it the past two days.  Now I feel like this was God’s way of saying, “No, look, you’re going to be fine.  I’ll even let you know ahead of time what’s going to go wrong so that you can be ready for it.”  Thanks you, God!

In light of my adrenaline rush from defeating International Travel (sometime I’ll explain that castle-wide joke), here’s a game for you to play.  It’s called “Find Jessa”.  I guarantee I’m in every single one of the following pictures (taken by a professional photographer at the banquet we had for Jackie Liebergott back in September).  Some are harder to find me in than others.  Have fun!

A couple home movies . . .

Here are two videos, both made in Amsterdam.  One is the video e-mail I was making for my mom at the Anne Frank House.  The other is a silly video of Bridget and me this past Friday at teh Museum of Bols in Amsterdam, trying to show off our mad flare skills.  Both videos are silly.

FLAIR

Annoying Kids Are Universal

To finish up the weekend

Saturday Bridget, Joel, Eric, Nick, and myself went into Koeln for the day (it’s Cologne, but I’ve read it on German maps and schedules so often now that I automatically call it Koeln.)  There’s nothing much there except a BEAUTIFUL big church and, in December, one of Germany’s better Christmas markets.  Saturday there was also a demonstration, one of the chain taking place all across Europe, calling for the release of the Kurdish rebel leader Omar something-or-other.  We stood around just long enough to take some pictures and try to decide what language the speakers were yelling in.  Women speakers need to realize that they need to pitch their voices down when making speeches through a PA system.  Otherwise their voices just come out shrill and obnoxious.

The church was interesting for several reasons.  First of all, it’s the first church I’ve been cold in. Usually, no matter the weather outside, the inside is fairly warm.  Second of all, the church was mostly destroyed during WWII so it’s been heavily rebuilt.  All the stained-glass has been replaced, but most of the replaced glass isn’t even an attempt at being historic; usually stained glass in churches are either ornate rose windows or tall, bright religious scenes.  There were a few of both, but a majority of the windows were interesting, sort of modern artsy patterns.  By the prayer candles, there was this little nook that was all colored over with what looked like crayons and sketch drawings.  That was pretty cool.  Also, some famous guy a long time ago took a trip to Jerusalem during the crusades and came back with what he claimed were the gifts of the Magi.  You can’t actually see them, but supposedly they’re in this oppulent gold box thing shaped like a big church near the altar of the church.  I’m not buying it, really, but if he really DID then hey, I stood five feet away from the gifts of the magi to Baby Jesus!

Ate lunch at a rather pricy Mexican restaurant.  And it didn’t taste like Tex-Mex OR Mexican.  But it was still lovely to eat enchiladas for the first time in several months.  I hope that when I get home, someone will take me out for a HUGE Mexican feast.  That would be lovely.

Afterwards, Bridget and I had planned to shop.  The boys managed two stores with us before fleeing for their lives to the Modern Art Museum.  Bridget and I scoured FOUR H&Ms and no less than six boot stores.  I bought two cute tunics and a pair of leggings; she bought two shirts.  We caught a 5:30 train back to Venlo where we purchased some milkshakes, then took our time getting a bus back to Well.

Sunday, Mission Purple Shirt and Mission Boots continued.  After doing laundry and brunch, Bridget, Amanda, and I caught the bus into Venlo for a couple hours.  We searched H&M.  No purple shirt.  However, they did get their boots.  I got some new sneaker flats for ONE EURO!!  They’re uber cute.  I’ll be going back to that shoe store for SURE within the next couple weeks; cute sneaker flats range from 1-5euro.  There are also some boots I like, but I want them in black.  I’ve also discovered they don’t actually have my shoe size, haha, but I can handle one size bigger, which is the size they carry.  AND I got a bag that I can use for traveling alongside my backpack; it’s tough for me to cram all my schoolwork, laptop, camera stuff, and clothes into my backpack, but I don’t want to lug a big rolling bag around.  So now I have a truly atrocious yet somehow cool turqoise bag that cost 10euro.  Not bad.  With yet another stop for milkshakes, this time from Mickey D’s, we concluded our shopping trip and returned to the castle, presumably to do homework.

I didn’t do homework, however, as I had said I would this weekend.  Nor did I clean my room.  I did, however, do laundry.  I’ve got my schedule figured out and ready to register for next semester.  I planned a bit more for my Italy trip, which I leave for Tuesday night.  I don’t have as much homework as I had feared, though I do have an essay I should be writing about right now.  I hadn’t realized it was due today.

And the good news is, my funk is over.  I’m in a good mood.  I’m actually excited about Italy now and I’m not feeling so overwhelmed with schoolwork. 

I just put some pictures up in a new webshots album called “Odds n Sods”.  It’s got some Amsterdam, some Cologne, some Halloween, some pumpkin carving.  Just odds and ends, you know.  Here are a couple old pictures that friends took, though, from Halloween and pumpkin carving.

Oh, and I also just edited the Amsterdam entry before this, so if you’ve already read it, maybe rereared after it says EDIT.

(I am)sterdam

Sort of.

 I, along with seemingly 1/3 the students of the castle, decided to stay here this weekend and just do daytrips.  Today Bridget and I went into Amsterdam for the day, intending on doing the Andy Warhol Museum.  Instead, we wound up doing the Rijksmuseum (which cost 10euro and is mostly shut down because of construction; we did get to see a lot of Rembrandts, though, including “The Night Watch”; should that be italicized?) and the Bols Museum, which despite being the museum for Bols genever, was really more like a science museum.  There was one part where they had you do different tests with your taste buds.  Another where you walked along a wall smelling from spray bottles and guessing what it was.  There were things to run your hands through and a room to dance in.  Great fun.

Other than that, lots of walking ensued.  It was grey and misting all day, but not too unpleasant to walk in until the evening.  We ate falafel for dinner in a nice, funny man’s tiny hole-in-the-wall Middle Eastern food restaurant.  He was so happy because business was doing so well.  We did a little bit of shopping, not much, and then caught the 7:07pm train back to Well. 

Well itself is rather creepy tonight.  A thick fog has rolled in so that you can’t see very far in front of you except for the dim glow of street lamps.  We were walking from the bus stop back to the castle and this group of little boys with an adult woman carrying a lantern were in front of us.  They must not have noticed us until we were right upon them, because they spun and gave us BIG terrified eyes.  Then this other man came creeping out of the dark woods behind the castle.  They must be boyscouts or something going on a late-night haunted house or camping or something.  But they certainly looked creepy and I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes.  The castle is creepy enough with the lack of voices and footsteps, with the creaking walls and windows, the distant chime of the church bell.  Halloween was two days ago, but the castle seems to be getting creepier by the day.

Photobucket isn’t cooperating.  I’ll put a couple pictures up here tomorrow.

EDIT::

I forgot two funny stories from Amsterdam.  First of all, Bridget and I were walking along, discussing the bike epidemic in Amsterdam that has been written about since the 1930s at least (I just read a book I LOVED, written in 1931, and the author discussed it).  We were trying to decide what would happen if suddenly we just KICKED a bike.  Would it fall?  How would the biker react?  Would he chase us down?  Would pedestrians cheer for us and help us escape?  I noticed this guy, probably mid-20s and with a long blond ponytail and a huge backpack, was laughing at us, walking beside us.  So I asked him what he thought, and he assured us that if we kicked in just the right spot they’d go over.  Then he explained, “But you’d really do better just to push them, like this.”  And then he bodily shoved Bridget so hard that she crashed into me and we both nearly toppled down.  He continued his speed-walking away.  Bridget and I were so shocked that this stranger had just pushed her that we didn’t know how to react.  Which is probably actually just how the bikers would react.

Not five minutes later, as we walked along, this guy walking towards us leaned in right into my ear and said, “wwwOOOOwww,” with just that pitch and rhythm.    I’m assuming he thought we were some hot babes.  Even if we looked like drowned rats in the rain.

The trees were either bright yellow or completely naked. Personally, I think this season suits Amsterdam the best.  It really highlights the buildings and canals.

Were we deserving of a “wwwOOOOOwww”?  I think si.

Christmas lights!!  Christmas is December 5th in Germany and the Netherlands.

Halloween in a haunted castle

I realize I’ve been terrible with blogging lately.  If you’ve talked to me much at all, you know by now that I’ve been quite sick, beginning in Vienna with Fidan and only now finally disappearing into simple common cold symptoms.  There was talk of hospitals and menengitis and pneumonia testing, but the running guess is that it was the flu.  Some extremely rare, exciting, will-make-a-great-story flu.  But the truth of the matter is just that I’ve been miserable for a week.

That’s not to say I haven’t enjoyed Halloween, however.  Monday night SGA had pumpkin carving for us.  Though I was still feeling horrendously sick, I decided to go, and the excitement at least lifted my spirits for the evening.  Stef took my camera and wandered around, so if I ever get around to putting the pictures up on webshots, I can only take credit for maybe five of them.  It was held outside, too, under the carport, and since the night was rainy and cold, I didn’t stay but for about an hour.  Despite my lack of true pumpkin-carving experience, though, I was extremely proud with how mine turned out.  The eyes were even almost the same size.

I got teased quite a bit for my deftness with a knife.

Me with my finished creation.  I think he’s rather cute.  And without make up, I think I’m far scarier, haha.

Then last night the staff threw a party for us in the barn (which, unfortunately, due to mass consumption of alcohol but all but a couple of us was NOT much fun; drunk kids dancing and yelling is just kind of annoying when you’re sick).  They also turned the castle and grounds into a giant haunted house, though, and had us wander through in groups of six.  I was beyond amazed; they really pulled out all the stops.  There were chain saws, ghosts telling stories, fog horns, a mechanical dog that tried to attack us, things zipping all the path; truly incredible.

So really, between the haunted castle, the pumpkin carving, and simply the fact that I was IN a castle on Halloween made it not too bad –even if I do miss the parties and trick-or-treating at home. 

Now healthwise, I’m almost all better and ready for a fun weekend HERE in the Netherlands.  It seems half the castle is staying here this weekend; all this traveling PLUS classes is really wearing on everyone.  So I’ll be here, get some homework done in the evenings, and do day trips.  Tomorrow Bridget and I are headed up to Amsterdam, then Saturday over to Cologne.  I don’t know about Sunday yet.  But I’m actually relieved to have a low-key weekend, since next week, when I leave for Italy, then begins the final push until we go home –which feels to be rapidly approaching.

 So I hope everyone had a Happy Halloween.  And now, onto November! 

Hanging out at the party.  I didn’t dress up because I just didn’t feel like it. Megan is Whitney Houston.  Samantha is Amy Winehouse.  Rachel is a Mormon evangelist.

Kate snapped this lovely one of us trying to get past the fierce dog, haha.

Austricht!

Does that mean “Austria”?  I feel like it does, but my brain is also DEAD right now, so maybe it doesn’t.  I dont’ feel like googling it.  I’ve already googled “elaphantitis,” “Evan Rachel Wood,” “Things to do in Vienna,” “canonization,” “gene for race,” AND “homemade remedy for stomach ache,” today.  And it’s only just barely 1pm.

I leave tonight for Vienna.  Hopefully everything will go well.  Nothing with trains could really go worse than what we went through for Nice, so I’m not too worried.  Fidan and I are hopefully to meet up at the train station since we both SHOULD arrive about the same time.  I can’t wait to see her!  The hostel supposedly has internet access, but not wifi, which means I probably won’t be using it.  Plan is I’ll get home around 9:30pm Sunday night, give or take a bit.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!