London Adventures – April 10

Happy Monday, friends and family! It’s a beautiful day here in London today, and yet again I’m stuck in class for 7 hours. As difficult as that may be, I’m trying to make the most of it seeing as though I only have 12 more days here in this lovely city. How crazy is that? I feel like time has flown by so fast. I feel like it was just yesterday that I was standing on the deck in my backyard calling my dad to tell him that I got […]

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Holidays

Norway is weird about Holidays. After having everything closed during a four day stretch around Easter, again on May 1st everything is closed again. I can’t remember the last time I went to the grocery store. In my fridge right now I have an expired half gallon of milk and in my cupboard I have some knock-off Coco Puffs in the shape of Star Wars characters. I’m trying to get back into a normal workout and dietary schedule, and it’s just not happening. I came back from a trip to […]

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Dunkelheit

Alright, it’s been a while. At first there wasn’t much going on to write about, but then entirely too many things happened in rapid succession and I didn’t have time or energy to write. I still don’t, really, but I feel like I’ll go nuts if I don’t say something about all of this. Classes began a week ago (last Monday) at the university. The whole system is very loosey-goosey, chaotic, disorganized, and overall is the complete opposite of what I would expect a German university system to be like. […]

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The Real Beauty and the Beast

I’m pretty sure I visited the set, or at least the inspiration behind the Beauty and the Beast film(s)! With my program, we took a trip to the Alsace region of France, as well as some of Western Germany. We visited Strasbourg, Riquewhir, Trier, and Freiberg. All so gorgeous! Each town was so quaint and lovely and covered with flowers (Wysteria is in bloom right now everywhere in Europe it seems…it’s so lovely). In Strasbourg, we took a tour and saw “Little France,” where quarantined patients once stayed during times […]

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PATAGONIA VIDEO

The long-awaited Patagonia video is now up and running! This trip was one of my favorite places I have ever experienced and the video and pictures only capture parts of its beauty. It’s truly something you have to experience in person to fully understand how incredible Torres del Paine actually is. But, I hope you can start to understand how this place captured a piece of my soul.  

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Reflexión: me he enriquecido como persona

Reflection: I have been enriched as a person through studying abroad.  My view of cultural emmersion coming to Toledo was that I would be able to experience the traditions that I learned about in Spanish class, the Paella, the Flamenco dancing, the siestas etc. The real emmerison happened when I realized that the Paella is well known in La Comunidad de Valenciana (I am not studying in the Conunidad de Valenciana, I am in Castilla-La Mancha), Flamenco dancing is most traditionally from southern Spain and not everyone has time to […]

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LONG OVERDUE UPDATE

Hi everyone! Sorry for my lack of posts in the past few weeks. I have been really busy with school, being sick, and travelling, so I haven’t been as diligent with keeping my blog updated. So here are a few updates on life in Valpo and sneak peaks at my next few posts. TERREMOTO: I experienced my first earthquake in Chile today and it was terrifying for me, but everything ended fine. I was just mentally freaked out by it. At its origin the earthquake was a 7.1 and where […]

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Sunday, 9 April: Eternity in Two Days

Ciao, tutti! (Hello, everyone!) Yep, I’m using Italian again, because I visited Rome ethe weekend of Palm Sunday to start of my spring break from the Fundación Ortega-Marañon y Gasset, the school through which I am studying here in Toledo, Spain for the spring semester. I could also say “Hola a tothom!” which means the same thing in Catalan; I visited the capital of the Autonomous Community of Catalonia, Barcelona, on Friday before going to Rome. The week before my travels commenced was the last week of regular classes at the […]

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London Adventures – April 21

In 12 hours from now I will be on my flight home from London.  Minnesota, I hope you’re ready for me.  Until next time, London,  Cheers, ya’ll. #jengland2017

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When a (wo)man is tired of London…

I am not tired of life. And I’ll never be tired of London 😉 London is probably my favorite city in the world (or at least of the cities that I’ve been to). I think a lot of us get a feeling in certain places, a feeling that we really belong there. That’s how I feel whenever I am in London. There’s something about its energy that’s just exactly what I want to be a part of. Anyone who knows me knows I’m a complete Anglophile, and that I’m determined […]

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London Adventures – April 17

Happy Monday, everyone! I’m currently sitting in class watching the film, “American Honey”, and ironically enough I can’t get over the fact that at the end of this week I will be back in the States and back with all my friends and family from back home. Don’t ask me how the time went so fast, because honestly I have no idea either, but if you figure it out, let me know… I have 5 more days left of my adventure and I have so many things that I’m going […]

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Österreich: Der Salzkammergut

The second part of my trip was a 3-day visit to the Salzkammergut region of Austria. It’s basically a chain of mountains and valleys dotted with lakes and forests and such. I had never heard of it before I planned this trip, but after googling pictures of it I decided I had to see it. I thought I would be burned out of museums and big-city life after Salzburg, so a quiet retreat to a small mountain town for some hiking would be appreciated.   That turned out to be […]

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Österreich: Salzburg

Writer Hermann Bahr once described the city of Salzburg as “Music transformed into stone.” As the birthplace of Mozart and the setting of the film The Sound of Music, it is a saying thrown around there a fair bit. I’m not sure I would have said it myself, but after exploring the city for 6 days I can see why others would. I went into this trip not knowing terribly much about Salzburg, not caring about Mozart at all, and having never seen the Sound of Music, and I still […]

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