Learnin' English!

Thursday was my last day of tutoring.  I loved this family so much and tutoring was one of my favorite parts of this semester.  On our last day I went over to their house early to eat lunch with Maria.  Then we walked to their school to pick them up.  It was about a 20 minute walk.  Maria walks to pick them up every day and she says it is the best part of her day.  We brought them fruit and little sandwiches to snack on.  Their school days last from 9:00 to 5:30!  Even for Anna, and she is five.  Anna's school was so cool.  Part of it was all outdoors and they have a class pig named Lucy.  Anna brought me around to introduce me to all of her friends.  She was sure to tell them that she was practicing her English with me and then would demonstrate proudly to her friends what she knew.  I think she has improved so much over the past few months!  Next we walked to Luis and Juan's school, which was completely chaotic.  Maria was trying to introduce me to the teachers, but Anna would get upset every time I had to stop talking with her.  We sang our ABC's all the way home.  

Anna with her favorite book, "The Very Hungry Caterpillar"

Juan is the silliest.  His favorite part of the class was always playing Simon Says!

 I am so proud of all of them!  Juan earned an A on his last English test, and Luis has been studying very hard for his English exam at the end of May.  If he passes it, then he can say that he is proficient in English.  I think they will all have a great summer in Maryland and I have already promised to Skype them this summer to hear about their adventures in the US!

Sweet, Sweet Summer

Today marks my first day of summer!  Not only that, but I get to spend the first week of my summer in Spain.  It also hit me that today marks the halfway point of my college career.  I really can't believe it.

I am so blessed to have had the chance to see so many places in such a short amount of time.  And I still have one trip left!

Here's what I've been up to this week:

We had to say good-bye to Marlene!  She left on Friday to stay with her mom in Galicia and we were going to be gone before she came back.  I already miss her so much.  We had a great time with her out in Madrid!

On Saturday I had lunch with Juan, Anna, Luis, and their parents.  I feel so welcome in their home.  They are so excited to be living in Maryland this summer and I hope that they enjoy their time in the US just as much as I have enjoyed my time in Spain!  I sadly only have two more classes left with them.

After lunch with the family, Luis took me for a tour around Madrid!  (Juan and Anna weren't old enough to come with.)  He was a great tour guide and such a fun friend (He turns 11 tomorrow!)  He even took me to Starbuck's and got me a special coffee because "All Americans like iced coffee."  Very true, Luis.

On Saturday night Liz, Marvin, and I went to a famous sangria bar called Sesamo's, supposedly the very best in Madrid, and reminisced about all the fun that we have had this semester.

On Monday after my Linguistics final, Liz and I met up with Kenzie, Anna, and Liz W and went to get tapas in Plaza Santa Ana.  After tapas, Liz and I stopped at San Gines to split some churros.  I am so sad that I won't be able to be with all of these wonderful people in just one week!

Many people will be leaving for the US tomorrow, but I will be roaming around Madrid for the next four days before I head to the Canary Islands!  If you want something from Madrid, now is the time to let me know people.

End of the semester: Birthday celebrations, Tapas, Grandma and Ralph come to town!

Last week was filled with a lot of fun!  First, on Tuesday I went to the Prado with my Art History professor and then she took us out for tapas to celebrate the end of the year.  She is by far one of my favorite professors and I will try to keep in contact with her after this semester.  Wednesday was Anna's birthday, so we celebrated accordingly!  First, we had donuts for breakfast.  Such a nice break from toast and...well, toast.  Then for lunch, we went to McDonald's and joyously ate our Big Macs at Retiro Park!  That night we met up with a lot of our friends to celebrate.  It was so much fun!

With the birthday girl at the park!

Thursday night we continued the celebration with more friends.  Friday I watched the Royal Wedding (loved the dress), then on Friday night Alejandra and Marlene decided to continue the birthday celebration with us!

All of Gabby and Ro's girls!

Grandma and Ralph arrived in Madrid on Friday night, and I met up with them in Sol at 12 on Saturday.  They had a little trouble finding our meeting spot, but I had a lot of fun showing them around Madrid and hearing about their adventures.  We went to the Royal Palace and took a tour.  On Sunday I met up with them again at 3:00.  Unfortunately, the bus tour that they were on had a little accident.  So they weren't able to see a lot before I met up with them!  But we had a great afternoon and found a couple different tapas bars that were really delicious.  I hope they had a fun time in Madrid.  It was great for me to have more family visit.

Grandma and Ralph in front of the Royal Palace!

With Grandma in Plaza de Oriente.

Today I woke up to the news that Osama bin Laden has been killed.  I am so thankful to our troops!  Then I finally finished my Later Shakespeare research paper...it is worth 40% of my grade so please wish me luck.  I will have lots of studying to do this week for finals, but I have lots of time to do it.  Tomorrow is my very last day of classes before finals.  It is amazing to me how quickly time is flying by.

To honor the dead and warn the living.

"Dachau - the significance of this name will never be erased from German history. It stands for all concentration camps which the Nazis established in their territory."  -Eugen Kogon

Friday, our last day of Semana Santa, was spent at the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial.  I will never forget my visit and am so glad that I was able to see this memorial. 

To honor the dead and warn the living.

Dachau was open from 1933-1945 (12 years) making it the longest functioning concentration camp.  It was the first major concentration camp and also a model for all of the rest.  This sight was chosen because it was close to Munich, the birthplace of the Nazi party, in a city that was very badly effected by the post-war economy in Germany.  Most residents of the city of Dachau were employed at a large ammunition factory, and when the Treaty of Versailles was signed, many citizens lost their jobs and the ammunition factory was no longer making ammunition.  This old ammunition factory was then chosen as the sight for the concentration camp.  This was also the sight of the SS training camp.  Because the SS training camp was located right next to the concentration camp, Dachau was especially awful because new SS Guards would be extremely violent towards prisoners in order to assert themselves as "capable" officers.  Every officer of the SS started their training at Dachau.

Starting in the 1960's, the old concentration camp turned into a memorial.  The SS training buildings are now used by Bavarian police in order to prevent neo-nazis from turning this space into a place of worship.  Though there were many chilling and disgusting aspects of this camp, the most memorable for me was the building that the SS used for torture.  The building was freezing cold and completely dismal.  It was really hard to imagine the horrible acts that had taken place there.  (I am going to spare you the details, even though our tour guide was very specific in describing the disgusting and inhumane acts that took place at this site.)  Dachau also has the last original gas chamber in Germany which I walked through very quickly because it was one of the most eerie places that I have ever stood.  We also walked through a recreation of the barracks.  The original had to be torn down because after their twelve years of use they were in terrible shape.  The recreation showed the changes that took place in the living arrangements as time progressed.  At first, each man had his own bed and about 50 men slept in one room.  Towards the end of the war, up to 500 men were sleeping in one room.  That's 2,000 men living in one building.

Today there are many memorials that honor the 200,000 people that were imprisoned there and 41,500 that were murdered.  The original gate remains, which is always open in order to demonstrate that this is no longer a prison.  

"Work will set you free."

After our day at Dachau we got some gelato to cheer ourselves up and headed to the airport to return home to Madrid.  Our flight was early the next morning, so we had a sleepover at McDonald's before we "slept" on some lovely benches.  

On Easter I had a great afternoon because I was able to Skype with my family while they conducted the Easter egg hunt.  Per usual, Carolyn found the most eggs.  Even though I was feeling a little homesick on Easter, I am really excited to spend my last couple weeks in Madrid!  There is still so much fun to be had.  Tomorrow I have a trip with my Art History professor to the Prado and we are going to her favorite spot for tapas and pinchos after our visit to the museum.  Wednesday is Anna's birthday, Thursday is Liz's flamenco performance, and Friday is Anna's birthday dinner with Gabby and Ro.  Not to mention that Grandma and Ralph will be here this weekend too!  It feels great to be home with Gabby and Ro and this is my last week of classes!  I can't believe how quickly this semester has passed.

That time we followed a handball team to Munich...

Finally our train ride went smoothly!  (Thanks to Max and the crew).

After our exhausting journey to Munich with the twelve year olds in tow, we took a little time to nap and read in the hostel and get our bearings in Munich.  We watched the Madrid-Barcelona game that night and, what do you know, Madrid won!

On Thursday we went on a walking tour through Munich and we bumped into Stephanie along the way.  Our tour guide was a very chatty guy and gave us a good refresher on a lot of WWI and WWII history that I have forgotten since high school.  We started out at the New City Hall, where the Glockenspiel is, and after watching that (rated the second most overrated sight in Europe), we walked through the city and saw lots of WWII memorials, the Hofbrauhaus, the royal residency, a huge market with a beer garden, and a memorial to the German resistance.  Munich is the birthplace of the Nazi party.  The Nazi party held many meetings in the festival hall of the Hofbrauhaus and that is where the swastika was revealed.  Munich has a lot of history with the Nazis because that is where it all started, but our tour guide really stressed that there is so much more to Munich than that, and there was!

Lucky lions.  Lions are the symbol of Munich.  There are four lions outside of the royal residence, but you can only touch 3 for good luck.

The festival hall in the Hofbrauhaus.

After our tour we had lunch at the market (I had a brat because there were no kasekrainers) and beers in the beer garden.  The beer garden is owned by the city, so everyone can bring their own food and picnic.  We sat next to some really friendly elderly Germans.  Pretty much everyone there was a really friendly elderly German.  After lunch, we wandered Munich for a while.  For dinner we went to a really yummy Italian restaurant and ate some gigantic pizzas to celebrate our last night out on spring break and we made it back to the beer garden to finish off the night.

Finished our liter beers!  A job well done.

Edelweiss

Our first day in Salzburg was so relaxing and beautiful.  We stayed in a hostel that was more like a family budget hotel with a hostel in the basement.  It was definitely one of the nicer hostels that we have been in and one of my favorites because there were so many cute little kids running around.  Right up the road from our hostel was the Abbey from The Sound of Music and The Fortress of Salzburg.  We wandered the old neighborhood which is really charming, had some pretzels, and ate dinner outside.  But my favorite part of the day happened when we got back to our hostel.  We watched The Sound of Music in our hostel in preparation for our tour the next day!

Tuesday morning we woke up and went back to the old town and ate Kasekrainers for lunch and sacher for dessert.  Sacher is chocolate cake that is really popular in Austria.  Then we went on the tour!  We saw many sites from the Von Trapp's true history and filming sites of the movie.  The Von Trapp's true history is very different from the movie story.  Maria was hired by Captain Von Trapp as a tutor to one of his sick children.  In reality, they were married for 11 years before they escaped from the Nazis.  And they didn't escape by climbing the mountains to Switzerland.  They took a train to Italy and immigrated to the United States.  At this point many of their children were adults.  They also had two children together in Austria, and one more in the United States.  The age difference between Maria and the captain's oldest child was only five years and the captain's oldest son was a boy.  So after we got the real background of the Von Trapp Family Singers, we saw some of the sights that were featured in the movie.  We stopped at the path where Maria skips on her way to the family house for the first time, the gazebo where Liesl and Rolph sing 16 going on 17, the Nonnberg Abbey, the palace that is used as the back of their house, the palace that is used for the front of their house (the house was really a mixture of two places that were nowhere near one another), and the church where Maria and the captain are married (The Church of Mondsee)!  All the while, we were singing along to the soundtrack.  I couldn't ask for a more perfect day.

Just like Maria!

The palace that was used as the back of their house and the lake where they fell in!

Eating apple strudel.  It took me a total of 60 seconds to clean my plate.

The gazebo from "16 going on 17"

Again--just like Maria!

For dinner I had a Kasekrainer (shocking, I know), and we relaxed in the hotel again with The Sound of Music and snacks.  We also met an interesting crew of characters--Maximillian and his 12 year old all girls' handball team!  They were in Salzburg for a weekend of training and were traveling back to Munich the next day on the train that we needed to take!  We decided, due to our horrible history of failure with the trains so far, that it might be smart to follow them on our journey.  Sure enough, Max and his team were more than happy to have us tag along the next day.

Wednesday we woke up super early to fit in the rest of our sightseeing.  Everything in Salzburg seemed to be untouched by modernization.  It reminded me somewhat of Switzerland because it was such a peaceful town, surrounded by mountains, and very green.  After one more Kasekrainer (sorry), we were on our way (trailing behind Max and the twelve year old handball team).  I'm definitely coming back some day!  (Get ready Rita.)

Some snapshots from our day:

Fun in Mirabell Gardens--just like Maria and the gang.

This is the St. Peter's Cemetery and the information for the scene of The Sound of Music when the family is hiding from the Nazis.  It was actually filmed in Hollywood.  Everyone who is buried here actually rents their grave sites.  Every ten years, the family of the deceased has to pay a tax, and the families are also responsible for taking care of the graves.

Vienna waits for you

Happy Easter!  I am home safe and sound after my most exciting spring break ever.

We started out in Munich, but had to find our way to Vienna right away from the airport.  Unfortunately, the train we needed wasn't running that day because of a train crash (whoops!), so we had to take the much more expensive but much more comfortable high speed train to our first destination.  Once in Vienna, we quickly found our way to our hostel which was a 20 bedroom dorm!  Actually, there were many more people staying there because there were other bedrooms that branched off from our room.

On Saturday, we woke up and explored the city with Anna's brother who met us there that morning.  We saw the Imperial Palace--where the Habsburg dynasty lived for centuries, Mozart's house, St. Stephen's Cathedral, and many huge parks and museums.  For lunch I ate a Kasekrainer, which is like a hot dog with cheese, but so much better than that.  That turned out to be my first of many during my stay in Austria.  We decided to go into the Albertina museum, which is one of my favorites that I have visited.  We saw works by Picasso, Monet, Mel Ramos, and the state rooms of Sisi.  For dinner, we went to a restaurant called WienerWald (translation: sausage forest).

The Plague Monument--1/3 of the Viennese population died during the plague of 1679.

Statue of Mozart (he lived in Vienna for only a short time) in front of the Habsburg's Imperial Palace.

St. Stephen's Cathedral--completed in 1433 and the symbol of Vienna.  The tiled roof was donated by the citizens of Vienna to repair damage from WWII.

On Sunday we went to the Schonbrunn Palace which was another palace that the Habsburgs lived in.  Now it is just a huge tourist destination, and it is easy to see why because it was one of the most beautiful gardens that I have seen.  We wandered through the gardens, played in the giant maze and labyrinth, and had a delicious sort of dinner at the Easter market in the front courtyard where we laid around for hours.  It was a perfect day!  We were so lucky that every day of spring break was sunny and pleasant.

Playing in the maze triwizard tournament style.

The next morning we made our way to Salzburg.  This time we were sure that we could figure out the trains and we purchased the group ticket and hopped on--no problems!  Except we got on the wrong train.  The group ticket only works on local trains, and we got on the fast train.  Oops!  We paid the conductor the difference, and took note of what we needed to do to get it right for our last journey.  Then we arrived in beautiful Salzburg!