Eurotrip

I mean, where do I even start here? Roughly 500 photos, the mother of all blisters on my foot, several swanky new passport stamps, and ten pounds worth of pastries later, spring break 2012 was quite the success. If tiring. I've been putting off writing this because it's practically overwhelming to think of how much I have to talk about. Which I suppose means I'm going to go in the opposite direction, not attempt to overload y'all with a kabillion photos (technical term, this) and overwhelming details but everything I did. We're picking and choosing here. First up, my momma was here. Fact. We hung out in Paris like chic Parisian ladies and ate delicious foods and got cultured in various museums and walked everywhere. (This can actually be applied to every place we have visited). Also, before I start showing photos, sadly we had torrential rains basically every day of break, dotted with rare fifteen minute periods of sunshine. European springtime, kiddos. ALso also, momma won't be showing up in these photos because I'm pretty sure if I put her picture on the internetz she'd probably fly back just to beat me up. So this is solely featuring awkward photos of me standing next to things. Anyhoo, various Parisian activities shall now present themselves:

So, uh, the elevator was....tiny

Only sunshine on the trip occurs whilst inside the Louvre

Galerie Vivienne

Doesn't everyone pose next to the métro?

Please note the tornado-skies...

Taking shelter from a downpour inside Église de la Madeleine (this becomes a current trip theme)

Once more with feeling

So then we spent the weekend doing outside-of-Paris day trips to Vesailles and Monet's house in Giverny. Don't worry it rained both days. (But not the whole time! Somehow we had this weird luck where we always managed to be inside a museum or a restaurant or a church when it started to rain. Sixth sense?) At Versailles they were feeling especially classy, and depending on where you went in the garden, you could hear opera and classical music excerpts. Just like old times. We also trekked all the way out (well, would've been more like fifteen minutes if I had correctly navigated the gardens) to Marie Antoinette's "little country house" and the royal family's "little vacation home" at the other end of the grounds. It's like the Château, but 80% less tourists!

Accidentally discovered this random angsty statue while attempting to find Marie's digs.

Country Livin'

Home sweet home!

In the Château, things started getting out of hand....

Stop.

So basically, Versailles is ridiculous. Every surface is so covered in extravagant displays of wealth that you don't even know where to look. I recommend doing the grounds and Marie Antoinette's house first (and do her house and vacation home because most people forget about it since they think it's too far away - it's really not...just don't, uh, get lost like me) and then going to the Château after 3pm at the very earliest to avoid being trampled to death by the crowds. Tourist tip of the day.

We also went to Giverny. So pretty!!! Even though it was only April, most of the flowers were already in bloom.

Pouring rain as usual....

Japanese bridge in the water lily garden

Pretty in pink

The "town" (basically one street)

Big old church, little young Rachel

 Okay enough of this France nonsense! Commence petit Eurotrip!! We started with a 5am wake up to get to the train station in time to catch the first train out to Londontown. Note to train users: do not assume that ten minutes until the train leaves means you will have enough time to hop off and buy the newspaper. Also do not assume that any of the people guarding the train will tell you this, only look at you knowingly as they blow the whistles and laugh as you now awkwardly have to turn around and run back to your car before the doors close (sorry for the heart attack momma). So what did we do with six hours in London? The Tower of London, the British Museum, and a quick stop over to Big Ben/Parliament/Westminster for a photo op. We did lunch in the British Museum's café and this was how I became certain that we were, indeed, not in Kansas Paris anymore: there were five vegetarian options.

Oh sorry, I had to stop writing this entry because I was too busy celebrating the extremely French holiday known as cinco de mayo. Holla at me decent Mexican food in Paris. I also just explained to my host mom what a burrito was. Anyway. London. For some reason these pictures will only upload in reverse order, so think backwards. And yup, that's a backpack I'm wearing, 100% tourist-style (gotta bring clothes for Copenhagen somehow).

British Museum

It's a clock! It fires cannons when the hour changes and the little people move! I want!

The Lewis chessmen

Hi

Being culturally insensitive

Rosetta Stone

Struggles in the Tower of London slash have you ever tried climbing the teeniest staircases ever with a giant backpack on your back making you liable to get a wee bit too top heavy and almost fall back down? Oh. Because I have.

Just plain rude

 And then it was off to Copenhagen/Copenhague/København! That flight was probably the longest I spent sitting down the entire break. WORTH IT. So we landed in Denmark around 7pm and successfully navigated the S-train (Copenhagen's RER) to get into the main city. Oh, and it was pouring again, and would pour for the next two days (surprised?). What was weird was that we were clearly marked as tourists...because we used umbrellas. I guess it rains so much there that the Copenhagians (.....shh) don't care anymore and walk around as if, if they pretend it is not raining, it will stop raining. This seems like a logical plan. I'm just going to go ahead here and share with y'all pictures of things I ate since obviously this is the most important part (it is... ohmygodthefood).

BRUNCH AT PALUDAN FOOD COMA 4EVA UGHHHH

"This picture is a lot uglier than those delicious salads we ate" - my mother

Smørrebrød on dark rye bread (bien sûr!) with blue cheese and praline

Don't worry I also partook in the Danish pastry scene, notably a Sarah Bernhardt cake (a type of meringue chocolate cake with coconut and other delicious things) at one of the Lagkagehuset (literally: layer cake house) bakeries, and a snegl (pronounced, naturally, like the English word snail, except with all sorts of weird lilts and strange vowel sounds at the end that are typical of basically every Danish word. However the pronunciation here actually makes sense, since snegl=snail in Danish. How bout that), which is kind of like a mix between a pain aux raisins and a cinnamon roll, only with icing on top. Snegl is typically eaten for breakfast so of course I felt obligated to do the same. Oh, but the point of this convoluted paragraph was that I was too busy going to my happy pastry heaven to remember to take photos. Other food observations: that dark rye bread is basically Denmark's baguette. It was very dense and almost bitter, but not in a bad way, oh that doesn't make sense does it. I don't normally eat rye bread so maybe that's what I was tasting. The butter they give you with the bread is very good as well. Also, the yogurt in Denmark was much thicker than I was expecting, and it was also much more intensely flavored. It almost tasted like a fromage blanc or a petite suisse from France but with a different flavor... the only thing I can think of is maybe the milk wasn't from a cow. We went to Madklubben for dinner the second night and tried to be daring and eat authentic Danish (minus all that fish and pork). Beetroot salad, potatoes in a cream with tarragon, and these really interesting deconstructed desserts with gooseberries, another type of thicker yogurt/cream, praline, meringue and chocolate. Ughhh food. The Copenhagen food scene is really interesting because it's now becoming very influential globally (the world's #1 restaurant is located here, and they have an unbelievable number of Michelin starred restaurants. None of this means anything to me because I probably couldn't eat anything but the desserts on any of their menus. Not that that would be a problem, per se); the "New Danish" trend has led to all sorts of creative pairings where they take traditional ingredients and mix them together in new ways, and so I had lots of dishes where I would have never have thought to mix certain foods together. General trends seem to be that cream-yogurt, gooseberries, rhubarb, dark rye bread, remoulade, and of course any fish that is smoked. Okay this is a huge paragraph about Danish food. Sorry, I'll reign it in.

I am very impressed/shocked at how much we were able to see in Copenhagen in only two days, without taking the subway once, and with time to visit three museums. Basically we made the impossible possible. I was snapping pictures the whole time, but it was difficult to hold my umbrella, watch where I was walking, not get hit by yet another bicyclist, hold open my map and try to figure out what the heck the street we were on was called (the names changed basically every three blocks, only the map we had only marked one name per street), and take photos, so sorry if most of them seem strangely crooked and rushed. Because they were. Also, again, the pictures ended up being out of order. I tried to rearrange them but sometimes it didn't work (you're killing me, Blogspot) so apologies all around.

At the entrance to Christiansborg Slot

Nyhavn (pronounced sorta kinda like new-haun)

Strøget (Europe's longest pedestrian shopping street)

WHOA BABY BLUE SKY

Bikes on bikes on bikes (almost all unlocked, too)

Back of Nyhavn

Rachel and a windmill

At Rosenborg Slot

 No pictures inside the Castle (slot = castle y'all) but we did see the royal jewels! It was a lot different from the French over the top, let's-put-as-much-gold-on-this-as-possible method of displaying wealth. The things in the Danish castle were what the French might find to be very simple, but were far more detailed and intricate, I suppose, than anything I saw at Versailles. Here's the link to Christian IV's crown, you'll see what I mean (click the photo of the crown to enlarge it).

Exhibit on the current royal family's wardrobe

All the Queen's dresses

Changing of the guard at Amalienborg Slot (royal family's palace)

People of Denmark exhibit at the National Museum

Yep

Dollhouses!

Traditional Northern Danish fashion

Obviously these are examples of THE HORN OF GONDOR

Okay this post is ridiculously long. I promise I'm basically done now. Only two other things to say about Copenhagen: 1. Everyone speaks English fluently, with essentially no accent, and whenever I timidly asked "I'm sorry but do you speak English?" (over-reacting in my head each time that I was basically becoming That American who assumes foreigners in their own countries must of course speak my language) every person responded with this almost-offended "Uh yes of course" (read: "Duh"). and 2. Our hotel was the weirdest. Basically we ended up in this very modern hotel that even had its own ice bar (don't worry, this kid decided that entering a room made entirely of cold, cold ice probably wasn't the best idea) that is apparently also known for its "molecular cocktails" (I have no idea what that means). To give you an idea of what I mean by 'weird', here's an example... this is the lobby bathroom (yeah I took a photo):

Fête?

Anyway I feel like I've been writing this post for days so I think I'll finish here. If you made it this far, I congratulate you. Special thanks to Nicole, Other Rachel and Ksenia, who gave me wonderful tips on how best to spend (and what to eat during) my time in Copenhagen. And a quick shout-out to my girl Grace again for showing me London back in March so that I could successfully navigate the London tube this time around. Merci!

I'll leave you with the pictures of Momma's last day in Paris, when we went to the Montmartre area, I finally saw Sacre Cœur, and we did a quick evening trip to the Eiffel Tower.

Musée de la vie romantique

Sacre Cœur basilica

In other news, Paris continues to be amazing.
x R.