This is a bit long for people with normal hair, but if I had dreads it would be perrrrfect.  Too bad I don’t like dreads.  I’ll probably type up a pattern to put in my Etsy store with this version and a shorter version :]

I just spent an incredible couple of days with my friend Rosangela and her family in Triggiano, Italy.

It was really nice to have a few relaxing days as opposed to the go go go go go craziness I’ve been living in for the last month.  I have never met more hospitable people than Italians.  Rosangela, her family, and her friends welcomed me in and treated me like family despite the fact that no one other than Rosangela really spoke English, and my entire Italian vocabulary consisted of “gratzie” and “ciao.”  It was wonderful.

Rosangela’s mom is an amazing cook.  She made things like parmeseana, rizzoto, focaccia, pasta, and this really good noodle thing with peas.  The family tried to get me to try “trippa.”  Luckily Rosangela talked them out of it because I later found out that trippa means tripe.  AHHH.  I love Italian food, but tripe is not my thing.  Haha

I think my favorite part of the trip was when I went to Rosangela’s grandfather’s house.  I had the great fortune of meeting her entire extended family, only a few of which spoke English, but I LOVED it.  Something about foreign languages and foreign cultures just fascinates me, even when I can’t understand what people are saying.   I loved listening to them talk to each other and trying to figure out what they were saying.

I had so much fun in Triggiano and Bari.  The people I met were so interesting and kind (Rosangela’s mom even made me a bunch of sandwiches for the train ride to Zurich!), and I cannot wait to go back and visit them again.  Hopefully I’ll have a little more Italian so I can converse more :]

The last little chunk of photos from Florence

Here are most of my pictures from Firenze (Florence, Italy).  Enjoy!!

(I just realized I have more which I will post later!)

On my last day in Prague, I decided to go see the Bone Chapel in Kutna Hora.  Since I really only spent like $10 a day here, including beer, I decided to splurge on a tour of the chapel.  We also got to see St. Barbora’s Cathedral, which was unbelievably beautiful.

After the tour, a group of us decided to go out to this beer garden (Letenské sady) overlooking the entire city.  It was so beautiful.  We sat down with two other backpackers and ended up spending the rest of the night with them.  It was awesome!  We talked about absolutely everything:  our travels, our lives, our bread…  It was perfect hahaha

I loved Prague.  Please enjoy my pictures:

On Monday, I rolled into Prague around 1:30pm my time.  I hadn’t anticipated having extra time to do stuff, so I sat around my hostel pretty disappointed that not a lot of people seemed to speak English.  So, I pulled out my little netbook and dinked around because there is no Wifi here.  A really nice guy from California, who DID speak English, asked me about my netbook and we started talking.  I ended up hanging out with him and his friend all day running around kind of the armpit of Prague, but that wasn’t a big deal because they were really interesting.

My friend Stuart whom I met in Berlin was also in Prague on Monday, so after I left my two new friends, I waited around in Old Town Square for Stuart.  While I was waiting for him, I chatted it up with some really funny guys from Mexico and pretended not to understand Spanish so I could eavesdrop when they thought I couldn’t understand them haha.

When Stuart finally showed up, my Mexican friends left me and Stuart and I grabbed some beers and sat down in the middle of Old Town Square to watch the Spain football match.  I love how much Europeans are into football.  Football seems to form really strong community ties within every country other than the United States.

Yesterday I missed the free morning New Europe tour, so I met up with Stuart again and we walked around the Jewish Quarter.  We found a shop that sold authentic handmade Slavic tchotchke (which reminded me a lot of my Grandma’s house), so I went in and bought a hand-carved hair clip and a hand-carved palm mirror.  Then we went on a different tour with Tip Trips up to the Prague Castle.  The tour was all right, but I like the New Europe ones better and plan on going on it today.

Prague is so beautiful.  I love how old everything is.  In old cities, everything has a story.  On the side of the river with Old Town Square, everything seems to be more pragmatic and practical whereas the side with the castle has a history of mysticism and wonderment.  It’s wonderful.

Well, that’s all I have time to write before my tour leaves.  Enjoy 70+ pictures!  (I’ll put captions on them today or tomorrow so you know what you’re looking at)

Today I was on my own for the first time in a long time.  Stuart went to Dresden for the day, but hopefully he and I will meet back up in Prague.  I sat myself down in the hostel’s kitchen for some breakfast and blogging this morning and ended up meeting these really cool guys from Sweden.

Thomas and Mack are travelling the world filming a documentary about street performers and what it’s like being a street performer in different countries.  There’s a good chance they’ll be in St. Paul this Fall, so hopefully I’ll get to see them again.

After breakfast I made my way back to Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis and went inside.  Lame.  The inside isn’t that great, and I kind of felt like it was a waste of time.  The outside is way more impressive.

Then I walked over to the War Memorial.  Why is everything under construction when I want to go see it?!?!  The memorial was boarded up because they’re doing construction on it, so instead of seeing the memorial itself, I got to see a very nice, giant wooden box with a painting of the memorial on the outside.  BUST!

Reichstag was next on my list, so I decided to wander through Tiergarten.  I got a little lost, but that was fine.  The Tiergarten was once a hunting ground, then it was bombed, and then it was heavily deforested during the hard times Germany had following the Second World War.  It has since been reforested and is now as beautiful as ever.  I highly recommend strolling through here if you have the time.

I underestimated how far Reichstag was from the War Memorial, so I ended up walking for a good… hour… but that’s fine.  When I finally made it to Reichstag, I only had to wait in line for forty-five minutes.  That might sound like forever, but it’s a relatively short wait for this particular place, and it’s TOTALLY worth it.

When you get to the dome, you have a bird’s eye view of all of Berlin.  You also get a free audio tour that explains everything you’re looking at as you walk up the dome.  I took a bunch of pictures from//of the dome and the observation deck.

I figured the Holocaust Memorial exhibit would be closed, and I’ve been pretty emotionally drained from all the other Holocaust exhibits I’ve seen, so I decided to save that for another day.  I also meant to go to a concentration camp, but I couldn’t find the time.  I’ll probably go to the one near Munich when I get there.

Falafel for dinner, blogging at the hostel, probably going to grab a beer and pack and go to bed.

Prague tomorrow!!!

I slept in a little bit yesterday which was absolutely woooonderful, and a little difficult since the sun comes up at like 5am here.  I walked around with my friend Stuart from New Zealand all day again, which was nice because he actually knows where he’s going.

We went to quite a few places.  We started back at the Topography of Terror so we could finish looking around and reading everything.  I highly recommend that exhibit to anyone visiting Berlin (and it’s FREE).  Then we made our way over to the Jewish Museum.

The Jewish Museum combines architecture and clever displays to force you to engage yourself.  It’s actually really interesting.  The way the main part of the museum is set up, when you walk in you become very disorientated because the hallways are set up in a zigzag formation and the floors are all slanted.  It’s very symbolic of the Jewish mindset at the beginning of the Second World War.  The displays are all inside the walls, and you have to almost press your face against the glass to be able to see them and read the captions, further engaging you.  Down one of the zigzags, you can enter the “Holocaust Tower.”  You have to open a large, thick metal door, and when it slams behind you, you find yourself along in a triangular, very tall, cement-walled room.  It’s very very dark with only a dim light from outside.  You can faintly hear the goings-on outside, but in the end you know you’re all alone.  It’s bone-chilling.  There’s also the Exile Garden.  Here, you have to walk on hazardous, uneven cobblestone through giant, slanted cement structures topped with willow trees.  It’s beautiful and significant.

After the main part of the museum, there’s a large exhibit on Judaism, which was interesting, but after the emotionally-draining first part of the museum, my attention span was at an all-time-low and I whizzed through the 150+ displays.

The next stop was the East Side Gallery.  Here, artists took over the last remaining strip of the Berlin Wall and reclaimed the space by painting beautiful murals signifying joy, remembrance, confusion, and the willingness to rebuild.  I think it’s amazing that most of the paintings have remained unmarred for so long.  My favorite portion had a caption which read, “Many small people who in many small places do many small things that can alter the face of the world.”  I included a LOT of pictures of the gallery so you can get an idea of what it looks like.

We ran over to Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis, but it was closed.  I think I’m going to try to stop by again today.

The line for the Reichstag was absurdly long, so we skipped that and made our way back to the hostel to find everyone else.  On our way past the Brandenburg Gate, we got stuck in the party end of the giant Gay Pride Parade that had taken place earlier in the day.  It was so fun!  Lots of people were dressed up and dancing and just having a really great time.  Once we got through, we took the U-Bahn back to the hostel, met up with the rest of our group, and walked over to the nearby industrial beer garden.

The beer garden is actually in an old bombed-out train depot in the middle of nowhere near our hostel.  They turned one of the old bomb shelters into a giant rock climbing wall and most of the rest of the area was just full of chairs and tables and big screens playing the World Cup games.

Another great end to another great day :]

Oh, Berlin.

So, yesterday, it took me about ten hours to get here.  When I finally did arrive, I decided to go out for a beer before bed, but, about a third into my liter, I realized I hadn’t eaten all day and nearly fell asleep in my glass at the bar.  Bad decision.  I was a little concerned about the rest of my stay in Berlin.

Luckily!  This morning I talked to a guy from New Zealand who was staying in my hostel room. Coincidentally he was planning on going to the same tour as I was, so I paired up with him all day.  We did the free tour again for a bit, and then met up with his friend from Melbourne to go watch the Germany World Cup game from the top balcony in a packed theatre.  It would have been better had Germany won, but it was still really fun.  We wound up walking through a park and grabbing a beer at a beer garden there before leaving his friend to go to Checkpoint Charlie and Topography of Terror.  The Topography of Terror was one of the most unsettling and life-altering exhibits I’ve ever been to.  It goes through a detailed history of how the Nazis started and progressed and the terror they brought upon unsuspecting Europe.  I highly recommend that exhibit to anyone in the Berlin area.

After the exhibits, he and I took the train back to our hostel because on Friday nights, the U Inn Berlin hostel has a night where you can come and learn to make authentic German food, AND you can eat of for FREE.  Yes!!!  Our chef decided to be a little more international today and make shepherd’s pie instead, but it was great.  Fun fact for everyone who’s been following my blog:  I, by chance, found out he had use some pineapple juice in the meat, so I ended up just eating the mashed potato top with cooked tomatoes and some strange German sauce.

At the dinner, I met a few kids from Georgia and Australia, and we, along with my new friend from New Zealand, bought a few beers and played hackeysack in a park late into the night, retreating to the hostel to check email, add each other on facebook, and watch some strange German television show about hot girls playing pranks on unsuspecting men.  And that is where I will leave you.  Have a wonderful rest of your night :]