beginning of ISP period...freedom

so finally ISP period has begun. which means that we have no obligations or commitments for a month and the whole time free to research.

of course monday though (26 October) we had a take home test due in the afternoon that I had not completed. So Marisssa, Megs, Ace, and I went went to this great cafe in Geneva in the morning. That night was really fun, we had a big bon fire to celebrate the official end of classes.

Tuesday was a pretty average day. Megs, Annie, and I got lunch at this great cafe in Nyon. I got a vegetable panini which was totally out of this world. Then I hung out there in the afternoon to get some work done. I tried to start doing some reading which didn't go to well...but I did read the newspaper which was good. And I am still completely obsessed with my podcasts.

Yesterday (Wednesday 28 October) was great. In the morning, Annie, Jess, and I had French class. We decided to keep taking small group lessons with our teacher once a week. Then in the afternoon, a bunch of us went on a hike. The weather has been soo weird here. In the beginning of October it was absolutely freezing, like total winter weather. Then for some reason this past week has been super warm and sunny. So our group of 9 took the little train up the mountain (the same one I take every day except all the way up the mountain) and got off in St-Cergue. We hiked for a total or 3 hours maybe and had lunch on the top of this great glassy plateau field area with an unreal view of France and the alps.

first try at a group pic

It was so beautiful, I'll post pics of our group there soon. It was so funny, we had 2 cameras on timers and it reminded me of all our crazy family get togethers trying to get a good group pic. And of course the first time, you underestimate how long the timer is, so as soon as someone goes to check if its working, the camera flashes (that one was Chels, ha). But it was worth it, we got some great pics.

yayy, a good one. we were all kneeling to try and get the mountains in

jess steve and i with mountains!

Today: In the morning I hung out with Megs and Annie at the cafe we like then went to the grocery store and bookstore. Then we got roasted chestnuts (marrons in french) which are so good. I love getting food from street vendors especially when they remind me of christmas ("chestnuts roasting on an open fire..."). I have spent most of this afternoon trying to get all my ISP stuff organized. We only have a little over 3 weeks left in Switzerland to do our ISP before we go to Croatia which is so out of control.

I honestly can not believe that I am leaving so soon. Everyone says abroad goes by fast, but seriously. This is crazy. I'm going to have to crack down and start getting research done.

Tonight should be fun. Some of us are going to see Taking Woodstock in Geneva, I can't wait. Then hopefully we are going to Interlaken this weekend, yay!

I'll post pics soon. Hugs and love.

Paris/Brussels pics...finally!

Ok, so to make up for the fact that I didnt update my blog for 2 weeks..I'm putting up a bunch of pics from Paris/Brussels. enjoy!

me walking by the seine

the "hostel group"-annie, ace, me, megan and chels, dancing on l'arc de triomphe
basically the best pic ever...me, ace, and annie. if you cant tell, our group absolutely loves holding hands and hugs (aka, hug it out). and i can say honestly that this picture was not planned, megan yelled, "look both ways" and snapped the pic without us knowing

hand holding...again :) ace me and steve on our way out to delirium, a bar in brussels with 2005 types of beer..the most of any bar in the world

pic outside the place ace and i spontaneously cut our bangs in paris

ace and i in front of le sacre-coeur

ace, meg, megan, laurel and annie at le louvre

last night in paris...me, ace, chels, and tucker (not pictured) got together a picnic of bread, cheese, fruit, chocolate and wine, and ate on the grass in front of la tour eiffel...it was a great night

i hope you enjoyed the pics! im definitely back in the blogging routine, so be prepared for frequent updates :) hugs and love.

11 days later...lugano, montreux, and a marathon

yes, i know. i am the worst blogger ever. the problem is that blogging is like exercising, in the beginning your really motivated and you do it everyday, then you start to get busy and its hard to find the time and then one missed day turns into two and suddenly you havent exercised (or blogged) in over a week. so i apologize. but i have made the decision to spend the next 30 to 45 minutes giving you updates and loading some pics.

so. not too much has happened in the past few weeks. but i guess ill start off with some lugano stuff which seems sooo long ago, it was the weekend of Friday October 9-Sunday October 11.

LUGANO!
my friends and i left after group presentations on friday. we stopped by migros (which is like walmart in the US kind of, it literally somehow owns everything and despite how we talk about how annoying that is, its cheap so we still shop there) to get some food for the weekend then took the train from geneva. Lugano is in the italian speaking part of switzerland, and i mean legit, it should be part of italy. this part of switzerland juts into italy and so lugano is probably 20 minutes or so from the italian border. pretty much no one really spoke english, so that was a challenge as i pretty much speak zero italian.

the train ride was 5 hours total, we had to switch trains in luzern. it was a fun train ride though on account of my new obsession with podcasts. and i literally mean obsession, my friends make fun of me all the time. we got there around 7pm and it was raining which was a downer. the hostel wasnt too far though from the train station. it was a really nice hostel/hotel and our room was awesome. we were a group of 7, but the room was for 9 which meant that there were 3 sets of bunk beds (if you cant do the math, that means the bunkbeds were 3 beds high) which were awesome!

the next day, annie, steve, seth and i went to hike. we took the funiculaire (this little tram thing that goes up hills) into the center of town and then took a bus to the hike. we had to wait a little while for the bus though so we explored this cute little market that was just opening. annie and i got these cute old-fashioned rings, my first souvenir of the whole semester, yay! the bus ride to the hike was crazy. we went up the mountain which mean winding our way up a too narrow road for 25 minutes.

but the hike was amazing. the day kept getting nicer and nicer the more we climbed. it was kind of like narnia on the hike (lion the witch and the wardrobe reference, duh).

narnia!

it was just so magical through the trees. once we started to get up towards the top though, there were some great look outs. lugano is absolutely beautiful. its right on the lake with mountains coming up on all sides, it was like a mesh of italy, figi, and new zealand.

me, annie, and seth
the hike all around was about 4 hours maybe. that night we went to an awesome italian place for dinner that seth found in his guidebook. it was totally authentic and off in an alley. you even drank wine out of little ceramic bowls. we got back to the hostel at 10 and planned to go to a club or something later since nothing opens till midnight. of course though, everyone is getting kind of tired, so ryan says im just going to take a 20 minute power nap. that all sounded like a good idea, so we all climb into our beds to rest for a bit. i knew it was over then when the lights went out...despite seth having set his alarm, we all ended up waking up not 20 minutes later, but 9 hours later at 8am the next morning. we all got a good laugh though.

sunday was the most beautiful day ever! it was perfect. warm, sunny, blue sky, beautiful blue lake. we walked around this park down by the lake for awhile and just chilled out.

look at the lake! so blue!

annie seth steve and i took an earlier train home at 1:15. it was another fun train ride, we spent a few hours making up would you rather questions, some of my favorites were: would you rather be the tinman and continuallly be out of oil, or would you rather be the scarecrow working in a brickoven pizzeria? and another that i came up with, although i dont know how as my creative side of the brain never seems to work. but nonetheless..would you rather always feel like you have to go to the bathroom or would you rather every time you brushed past something as you walked you got stuck to it for 10 minutes? it was a good laugh.

WEEK STUFF: October 12-16
nothing really exciting this week at all. we went to the UN a few times and the UNEP (united nations environment program) and the ILO (International Labor Organization) but thats about it.

WEEKEND: OCTOBER 17-18
it was a really fun weekend. saturday, the girls (me, megan, annie, ace, marissa, and molly) went to montreux for the day. its on the opposite side of the lake. we had lunch and then spent the afternoon at the castle chillon (which is super famous because of lord byron's poem called the prisoner of chillon). it was a huge and cool medieval castle.


this is the castle..so cool right??

me, chels, molly, marissa, and megan...
pretending to be constipated sitting in the "bathroom"...which was a box with 2 holes in it that just went down...


that night, some of us went to a concert at a venue in nyon. it turned out to be a heavy metal music festival. it was like a time warp back to the mid '90s. aka, yelling music, long hair, head pounding, the works.

WEEK: OCTOBER 19-23
again, another non eventful week. it was the last week of class though which was great. we start ISP (independent study project) period tomorrow so i have a whole month to research and chill and write my paper.

WEEKEND: OCTOBER 23-25
so finally, I am at the past day. Friday night was great, I went to a jazz concert at the same venue, but it was much more chill. lots of people, good music. saturday, us girls went into geneva to go to the market, its a huge flea market with tons of stalls all around this one square in old city. it was so fun and i got a really cool sweater/crocheted dress type thing.

Today was so amazing also. Ace, Annie, and I ran in a 1/4 marathon in lausanne. you could sign up to run a 1/4, a 1/2, or a full one. it was such a great experience. the start was by a huge park, so the whole area was filled with runners and people warming up. there was also a stage with 5 people running this aerobics/dancing warm up with tons of music. it was great.

pic pre-race...we got nametags and everything!

the running was fun, ace went ahead a bit, but annie and i ran together and finished in 55 minutes, which wasnt too bad. then afterwards, we got waffles and pizza from the stands by the finish. it was great.

post race-wearing our shirts and medals!

so now its 5:50, i took a break in writing this to skype with chris for over an hour which was great. ill edit the post tomorrow or something and put pictures up. but i hope this update is good for now. i have to do a take home test tomorrow and then i will officially be finished with class. i miss you all boatloads and hope your having great falls. Hugs and love.

sorry for the lateness! lots of updates

To start off, I apologize to all of my dedicated followers to the delay in updates on my life. I have been so busy and things have been crazy that I just have not had the time and patience to sit down and update. But here it goes.

Paris/Brussels
I won't go into that much detail as I think I gave a pretty good update in my video, but it was an amazing trip. Brussels and Paris both were such cool cities and I am proud to say that I got lots of opportunities to use my French. Paris especially was unreal. Just so beautiful and magical. I absolutely want to go back and stay for longer since there are so many places to explore.

So I got back from Paris 2 sundays ago, October 4, and was just so exhausted. We had monday off of classes, thank gosh, but in the afternoon a bunch of us went to see Mihkail Gorbachev (ex-Pres of Russia) speak at the United Nations in an event open to the public. It was so amazing and cool. Ban Ki-Moon (the secretary-general of the UN) introduced him and then Gorbachev spoke about nuclear disarmament and then there was a Q and A at the end. So that was a great day.

The rest of the week was fairly standard. Then this past weekend, some friends and I went to Lugano. Its a town in the Italian part of Switzerland which literally juts into Italy, so while its Switzerland it feels completely like Italy. Ok sorry to cut this off short...but I am so exhausted and have to prepare for an interview tomorrow. But I will finish this post tomorrow and put up pics and stuff. Hugs and love.

You know you have it good when...your bummed about going back to Switzerland (Paris/Brussels Trip)

hi all! i will update with stories and pics soon, but here is a video to tide you over since i know you are all going crazy with anticipation to hear about my latest escapades and probably haven't been able to sleep at night...