Cayda y Chuck Norris en Salamanca

This is my summary of the 4 day vacation I spent visiting my friend Sarrah in Salamanca, Spain. Sarrah is my friend from high school who is also studying abroad this year. Benefitting from this rare occasion of knowing someone who lives in Spain, I crashed at her place. 


Saturday January 12th: I took the train to the Lyon airport, which was oddly empty for a Saturday night. It was quite creepy. While running for a shuttle bus, I dropped my apartment keys, student card and Grenoble transit pass. Smart move Cayda! Luckily, the bus driver was super nice and drove me back to Terminal 1 where I found them 30 minutes later. Sigh of relief. Later that night, I watched that show "Once Upon a Time" in french. I also watched this really stupid '90s french show called "Les femmes à côté".

Sunday January 13th: Early morning rising to catch my plane. Surprise surprise, I get patted down at the security check! C'mon security guards, shake it up! The flight was a short one, only about an hour and a half. I arrive in no time to the Madrid Barajas Airport. My bus to Salamanca departs 4 hours, time to play the waiting game. While sitting and reading my book, I kept getting people coming up to me asking me questions in Spanish. One note on the Spain spanish accent: the soft "c" sound is pronounced like a "th" sound. Besides the fact that I do not speak Spanish, it sounded like everyone was lisping! After staring blankly and saying "no habla espanole" (which is incorrect spanish in and of itself), I would be left alone. I finally get on the bus and in 3 hours am seeing Sarrah. The most beloved sight in the world as this point. We go back to her place. Sarrah and her roommate Viola, show me around Salamanca, we have dinner and watch Walker Texas Ranger and Harry Potter in Spanish. Long day.

Monday January 14th: I woke up and decided to go on a little stroll of Salamanca by myself. Being a little town, I saw the majority of it in about an hour or so. Salamanca is a very pretty town. It was honestly what I had envisioned when I think of Spain. Old buildings with red terracotta rooves. I loved the old architecture in contrast to the relatively new infrastructures in Grenoble. I also loved the sun! Oh god, Grenoble is very grey in the winter. Everyday is overcast. How I loved the sun shining in Spain. We then hang out a bit in Sarrah's apartment and go grocery shopping. After a delicious homemade pasta dinner, Viola makes some Aqua de Valencia (a regional drink) and we play King's Cup while watching Troy in Spanish. I think the alcohol greatly influenced the positif view of the movie.

Tuesday January 15th: Sarrah and I walk around Salamanca again, this time taking pictures! I needed proof I went there, you know? Oh and in a very European fashion, there was a strike going on! For lunch, we decide to do some sort of tapas thing.We order 2 types of Tortilla dishes (Spanish Tortilla is a potato and cheese dish, contrary to a flour tortilla), and churros and chocolate (a thicker than hot chocolate drink). Back at Sarrah's we watch A LOT of "Los Simpsons", which wasn't actually that hard to understand. More Walker Texas Ranger! AW YEAH! After making dinner, Viola introduces me to an Irish tv show called "Moone Boy". We take a shot of gin and go out so they can show me some Salamanca night life. We go to a bar called "Chiqueria" (which means shots), then to another called "Pan y Agua" (bread and water). Alcohol, nay, everything in Spain is a lot cheaper than France. I picked the wrong country.

Wednesday January 16th: Sleep in! After I finally get up, I make some scrambled eggs and watch "What not to wear" and "Love it or list it". I am completely baffled by how "Love it or List it" and "Walker Texas Ranger" are so popular in Spain. I say thanks and goodbye to Sarrah and Viola and take the bus back to the Madrid airport.  At the airport hotel later that night, guess what I watched? Walker Texas Ranger IN ENGLISH! His voice in Spanish is much more manly.

Thursday January 17th: Taking a free shuttle bus from my hotel to the airport was never more difficult. Apparently, I wasn't on the list and since I didn't speak Spanish, nor did they speak any English, we had a really hard time communicating. Basically, I ended up sitting in a bus locked from the outside by myself for 30 minutes. It was sketchy and weird. I finally got to the airport! Oddly, my flight was slightly delayed as there was an unidentified backpack on my plane. Great, I think, are we honestly playing with the notion that someone intended ill-actions on the cheapo Easy Jet flight from Spain to Lyon? Good on you! You messed with a plane full with 50 people too cheap to fly through a nicer company! Anyway, eventually they flight attendants figured out who the bag belonged to.

That pretty much sums up my trip. I arrived back in France, to snow! Quelle surprise! Sadly it metled within the week. Not that I'm complaining about the warm weather, but snow is always pretty.

Fun Facts:
-Salamanca's animal is the frog
-Jesus do they like to eat pork in central Spain!
-Salamanca has one of the oldest universities in all of Europe (which Sarrah attends)
-Chuck Norris is a bamf
-Agua de Valencia (cava, gin, vodka and orange juice) is delicious and dangerous

Berlin: Gloomy day, fun night.

Sorry this took so long. I'm sure you've all been waiting with baited breath.

Thursday December 20th: We all woke up and decided that we should buy some snacks before heading off for the day's events. After finding a little grocery store near our hostel, I bought an apple, some trail mix and a doughnut that tasted a lot like those timbits that are kind of raw in the center. Happiness thy name is uncooked dough! We took the subway to Brandenburg Tor again to catch our tour for Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. 

Although none of us had the appropriate train tickets (suck it controllers!) we left with the group. It took about 45 minutes to get out of Berlin and into the small town of Oranienburg. Creepily, we were informed that these are the same routes and train tracks many people would have taken to get to the camp when it was in use.

Work will set you free

Once at the camp, we had about a 3-4 hour tour of its entirety. Upon writing this, I wish I had written this blog a lot earlier as I seem to have forgotten much of the really interesting details. Basically Sachsenhausen was mainly a POW camp and held mostly Soviet soldiers (including Stalin's son!). Although there were also some political prisoners and some Jewish people there too. We toured the Jewish barracks, the grounds, the medical facilities, where the gas chamber once was, 'death trenches', etc... All and all an uplifting experience.

Jewish Barracks

Its odd. Although I really wanted to go, for history's sake, personal family stuff, learning in general, etc...the moment you get there, you really want to leave. I'm not one to be incredibly spiritual about things, ultimately I'm more of a cynic, but there was definitely a "vibe" you get from being there. Maybe it was because it was a colder day, maybe due to it being terribly grey and cloudy, maybe it's all mind over matter, but standing in this huge empty walled in area, you can't help but notice this great feeling of despair. We were right next to a train route, but you couldn't hear the any train. No birds, no cars, no people. Eerily silent.

Remains of the gas chamber

I highly recommend it for anyone who has the chance. I learned a great deal and was shocked by how much I really didn't know. To ease off the tension my friends and I referred to Sachsenhausen as a "baby concentration camp", as in size and importance, Sachsenhausen was quite small. Still, it made all statistics seem ridiculous. If so many atrocities happened in this one little camp, the whole picture becomes unimaginable.

Doom and gloom aside. We took the train back to Berlin and met these two very nice German guys. We talked about "How I met you mother" and " The Big Bang theory" and we all laughed when one of them asked us what "ixnay" meant. He thought it was a real word and tried to look it up in the dictionary. I had a great amount of fun explaining Pig Latin to him.

That night, we decided to go and have dinner at the Alexanderplatz christmas market. I don't really remember what I ate, except that it was delicious. Mushrooms and sausages and gravy....something like that. Listening to the music and drinking our Gluwein (mulled wine), we met a really nice group of people. Two sisters from Germany, a Spanish girl and a man from the Netherlands. We talked and drank for an hour and a bit before heading back to the hostel.

Friday the 21st- Time to leave. I wake up around 4:30, trying to be as quite as possible and not wake up my friends, and I make my way to the airport. Being told there was an express train, I desperately tried to find it. Of course I'd ask the only German person who didn't speak any English is she could help me. Through sign language, we made it work. Two hour wait and one flight later, I'm in Geneva. Woohoo! Just in time for my 3 hour wait until a train going to Grenoble shows up! Boredom, boredom, boredom, reading, reading, reading. AHA! Grenoble. 2 hour wait until my Lyon train. Print off tickets, get on train. LYON!!!! OH GOD FINALLY! I make my way to an airport hotel and go to bed.

Beyond that point is Cayda on transatlantic flight and Cayda in Canada time. So there is the conclusion of my time in Berlin!!

Fun Facts:
-The Nazis tried to ruin the British economy through inflation by printing exact copies of pound notes. (They intended on dropping them in an air raid) They never got around to doing it though.

-Even after WW2 Sachsenhausen remained open and became a Soviet camp for containing their prisoners of war. Do as I say and not as I do, eh?

-Travelling, nay, waiting to travel sucks. I honestly think I've spent at least a full day merely waiting for transportation.

Eins, zwei, drei!!!

Hello! Welcome to my Berlin blog post part eins (1).

Monday December 17th: Krista and I made our way to the Lyon Airport. Regretfully, we took the wrong train, ending up at another station in Lyon. An absurd 14 euro and 20 minute tram ride later we arrive at the airport with several hours to spare. Better safe than sorry. We chill. We hang. We stare at walls. In a couple of hours we are in Berlin! 

Upon arrival we make our way to the nearest S-Bahn we had to buy a ticket. NEWSFLASH: neither Krista nor I can speak/read German. God help us, it may as well have been written in Kanji. We manage to buy an incorrect ticket and get on the train. Starving, we make a detour and have our first German Kebab. Delish. We then make our way to our lovely, awesome, kick ass hostel. 

Fun Fact: While rolling my suitcase through the snow I somehow manage to roll over some dog poo, then proceed to lift my suitcase to carry it (unaware of the poo of course), thus rubbing the bag against my pant leg. You can picture the rest.

Tuesday 18th: Krista and I wake up and decide to start walking toward Brandenburg gate. Hungry, we stop in to a little pastry shop and both order a croissant. Order being the key word as I freaked out realising I don't speak German. I just pointed to the pastry and said "croissant!". Rude and embarassing, score! We walk around, see museum island, Berliner Dom and take loads of pictures. We then make our way to Brandenburg gate to catch up with the 3rd Reich tour. I'm glad in hindsight that we did this tour as we got to see a lot of things I would never have realised were there. Such as: Roma, Homosexual and Jewish memorials, 'Hitler's bunker', Luftwaffe headquarters, Nazi ministry of Propaganda, Berlin Wall, SS and Gestapo ruins, the old Jewish region, cemetary, 'death street', the house of the German 'Schindler'. 4 hours of walking later, we are starving and try to find a famed Mexican restaurant....which was closed. Chinese it is! We go back to the hostel and Cara and Estelle arrive. Much rejoicing.

Fun fact: I ran out of cash the night before, so the entire day Krista was paying for me, as I searched for a bank machine. We finally found one after dinner. After that, they were everywhere! I think they all hid from me.

Wednesday 19th: We all wake up and take the S and or U-bahn to get some food. I have dunkin' doughnuts for the first time! I also have a pastry I could not pronounce. We walk out of the Alexanderplatz station to see...a Christmas market! WOOHOO. We walk around, drink it all in and vow to come back. We then make our way to Brandenburg gate to take the free walking tour of Berlin (as Cara and Estelle had not yet seen anything). We essentially saw all the same things with some more added, such as: Checkpoint Charlie, some pretty churches, the book burning memorial, and the fancy xmas market. We decide to be fancy and go to a prore restaurant for dinner. It was incredibly bizarre as the place was apparently famous, was a huge location but besides 3 other groups, we were the only ones there. I had the famous currywurste (total fusion cuisine) and loved it. We spend a really long time at the restaurant. Atleast 3 hours.

Fun Fact: We hung out at the hostel that night and got in trouble for laughing too loudly. Sorry my joy is harshing your mellow German hostel security guard!

To be continued....