Travel Week 1

Things have been crazy here so I’ve just gotten the chance to write about my first travel week now! Sorry about the lateness. So I left for the first travel week at about 2:00 am on Saturday morning. Almost the entire school decided to go to Oktoberfest in Munich for the first part of the week and many got reservations on an overnight train. For everyone else who didn’t get their tickets in time, my roommate organized an overnight bus to pick us up from campus and drop us off at the train station around 7:00 am where nearly everyone else who took the overnight train would be arriving around the same time. We watched Beerfest (how appropriate, right?) on the way there and continued on for a very uncomfortable 5 hour bus ride to Munich where sleeping proved impossible. We arrived at the train station and met up with the students who took the overnight train. We all went and found the Wombats hostel which was conveniently near the train station. After checking into our rooms everyone spit off into two groups, some went to a concentration camp called Dachau and the others went to find a tent at the Oktoberfest festival. I decided to go to Dachau which was the first concentration camp to open as well as the last to close. It was meant to be a model camp in which every other concentration camp was to be modeled after. It was really interesting to hear the history about how everything started and how they were able to keep anyone from rebelling, but also extremely sad, obviously. After getting back around 3:00 a small group of friends and I went to walk around Munich which was very pretty and then ended our night at a sit down German restaurant. Honestly, the food wasn’t too great, the Germans aren’t really known for their cuisine but the beer was excellent.

My parents and grandparents were in Munich at this time, as I was planning on traveling with them after Oktoberfest. It was pretty stressful trying to get a hold of them because my phone ran out of minutes, but in the end we were able to meet up at the Hofbrau tent for our reservations the next day. It was crazy because I was walking into the tent with the rest of the students trying to figure out where our tables were and all the sudden I see my grandpa standing up and shouting at me. I was SO excited to see my family I ended up spending a good part of the afternoon with them in the tent until they wanted to leave. Oktoberfest was pretty crazy, there was a great band in lederhosen and they played lots of American songs. The following day I took a cab to my parent’s hotel and we left in a rented car to drive to Florence. This was a very long car ride but after arriving it seemed pretty worth it. The next day we toured around Florence, saw the Duomo and the Holy Cross church. Our hotel looked out over a good part of the city so we were very lucky with our view. From Florence we took a train to Rome. I felt very spoiled in traveling because my grandparents had someone waiting to pick us up and drop us off at every train station through some travel agency.

Rome was amazing and we stayed in this really nice hotel that many celebrities have stayed at while in Rome. Every night we had amazing 5 course Italian meals and every day we would tour around the city. We did everything from the Spanish steps to the Coliseum to the Vatican. We got a private tour guide for the Vatican which was really nice because I felt like I learned a lot more than if we would have just wondered around ourselves. I studied Art History last semester so it was really cool to be able to go to the art museums and finally get to see the paintings in person after studying them for a semester through books. Seeing the Sistine Chapel ceiling and The Last Judgment was incredible and definitely one of my favorite parts of Rome. From Rome we ended our travels in Venice. We got there late Saturday night, had a quick dinner and walked around a bit before going to bed. Venice is one of the most beautiful places I’ve been. I still can’t get over how the city has absolutely no roads or cars on the island, everything is done by boat. It was much more of an island than I had expected, I hadn’t realized how far out it is from the mainland of Venice. The next morning my parents and grandparents left which was really sad to see them go but I was so happy I got the chance to travel around with them for a week. After a sad goodbye I made my way back to Paderno. It was funny how everyone gets so easily sick of Paderno and the food and pasta and yet after coming back, everyone said how they were so glad to be back and how they actually missed the pasta from the cafeteria. I’ve got a busy next couple weeks with school but then we get our first travel weekend and I am really looking forward to that.