Egypt!!!

The dang Koshary that was oh so good, but oh the consequences!

Alex wasn't too happy to take this picture

Traditional Egyptian meal.

Fresh pita bread from the lady below.

Local Egyptians making pita bread in a brick oven.

It was super windy, so most of my pictures turned out with my hair like this :(

The Sphinx

We climbed all the way up on it!

Sitting on the actual Pyramid

Sun shining on the Pyramids

Where we ate :)

At our picnic.

Leaving on our camel ride!

Perfume Gallery in Egypt

Vatican Museum, Ancient bath tubs

Here is the post most of you have been waiting for. It's gonna be a big one so you might want to grab a chair or just take a peak at the pictures and read it later. Just thought everyone would want some details on this trip. Since it's such a long one I'll break it up by days like I did for Corsica.

So we had fall break last week where we had 5 days off from school and were free to travel wherever we like. Alex and I chose to go to Cairo, Egypt with 2 of our other good friends Michelle and Yvonne.

Wednesday: We left at 10am on a flight out of Geneva and headed for Egypt. We had a 9 hour layover in Rome so instead of staying in the airport for 9 hours we took the metro out to the Vatican. We toured the Vatican Museum and went into the Sistine Chapel. We had about 4 hours at the museum and wasn't enough. The museum was one of the greatest museums I had ever been to. We started at the beginning and took our time strolling through each room and exhibit and we still felt rushed and like we couldn't have walked through one more time. The Sistine Chapel was absolutely breath-taking. There were no cameras allowed in the chapel so I don't have any pictures but they wouldn't have turned out great anyways because of the lighting. The ceiling and walls of the chapel are completely by Michelangelo and are what he is most famous for. Some scenes he painted included God giving life to Adam, Adam and Eve in the Garden and the Great Flood. There are no words to express this work of art. It was the end of our tour so we were ready to sit down for a few minutes once we got to the chapel. A few minutes was an understatement. We sat in silence staring at the ceiling and the walls that are completely covered in paintings and frescoes. After finally leaving, we caught dinner at a pizzeria down the street and hopped back on our metro back to the airport to catch our flight to Egypt.

Thursday: We arrived at the Cairo airport at 2:30am and were dead tired but so excited to be in Egypt we didn't let our exhaustion get to us. By this time we were delirious and finding everything funny. When exiting the airport we went through customs and security check and they were checking Egyptian visas. Our hears all sank because we didn't know that you had to have a visa before coming into the country. The last thing we needed was to be stuck in the airport with no way back because we didn't have a visa. Luckily, that was not the case. If you were only there on vacation you can buy a visa for $15 at the window before the exit gates. I guess this was our first indication that Egypt doesn't really give a crap about anything. So we bought our visa's and got the heck out of there. When we got the bottom of the escalators there were two men waiting for us with our names on a plaque. This was so cool, I had always wanted someone waiting for me at the airport! His name was Muhammed and his partners name was Husein. They were our tour guides that would be in charge of us the entire time we were there. I was so happy to know that we would have a local with us at all times because judging from what I had only seen at the airport so far, I could tell that this wasn't going to be a safe place for four girls on their own. When we arrived at our airport we had a little mishap because our reservation was for Nov. 5, but their days don't start until 6am instead of midnight so we technically didn't have our reservation until 6am. It was 4am and we did not want to pay for a full night to just sleep there for 2 hours. But long story short, we ended up getting suckered into paying just so we could go to bed. Just as we got into bed and started to fall asleep the city had its morning prayer call. The churches have towers called minarets and they are all over the cities and at the same time all of the minarets have people in them that start chanting their prayers and the entire city stops what they are doing to pray. This was the first time we had heard it and got a little freaked out until we realized what it was.

Later on Thursday: We got up at around 11am and ran downstairs for breakfast then got ready for our tour which picked us up at noon. Our tour-guide's name for this day was Rehem, but we called her Rico. She was really nice and cool and had our whole day mapped out for us. We went to the Egyptian Museum which houses all the mummies and the treasures from inside King Tut's tomb. They also have the entire history of Egypt in this museum so we took some time brushing up on our Egyptian history that we had learned about in high school and college. Next we went to a perfume shop where they mix all the oils to make their famous perfumes. Ancient Egyptians were known for their talents of mixing oils to make perfumes and the recipes got passed on over time so they have the exact ingredients of Cleopatras favorite scent and other oil remedies they would use for calming and relaxation. This was the same idea as wine tasting but with perfumes and oils if you can imagine.

Thursday Night: This was the most epic night of our entire trip. We got picked up from our hotel at 8pm and were taken in a van for about an hour out of town until we pulled into this parking lot that had 4 camels waiting for us. There was a camel driver and his son waiting to take us on a camel ride into the night. We hopped out of the car and were all a little hesitant to get on the camels after seeing how huge they are. After a couple deep breaths we got on them and they got up like transformers in a bunch of different movements. Our tour guide got on the camel with Alex and the camel driver got on my camel with me. Michele and Yvonne had their own camels that were tied to ours. We headed out into the desert and after about an hour we were completely in the middle of the Sahara desert. It looked straight out of Aladdin, rolling hills of sand for miles and miles and nothing but darkness, the stars and our camels. After a while of riding we took our camels up to the top of this hill where our tour guide had a surprise waiting for us. They had set up a pic-nic before hand with a blanket and pillows and tea and traditional Egyptian food. So we proceeded to eat our food in the middle of the Sahara with our camels huddled next to us and as we looked around we noticed that the Pyramids were off the distance and they were the only things we could see for miles. It was so surreal, literally something out of a movie. I would have to say this was one of my favorite parts of Egypt.

Friday: Today we had a full day tour. We got picked up by Rico and we headed out for the Pyramids. After a little drive were standing in front of the biggest pieces of man made creations I had ever seen, let alone the oldest. 6,000 years old and still standing strong they looked amazing. They seemed to not be as big as first but as we got close to them we realized how enormous they were. We even crossed the rope and climbed up on them for a little photo session. I can't really do much more explaining without pictures so once you see the pictures you will see how amazing it was being able to see the Pyramids, the Step Pyramid and the Sphinx. Later on Friday night our other tour guide Ahmed asked us if we wanted to hang out with him after hours and he took us to the top of a mountain that overlooked all of Cairo and we had tea and talked for a few hours. It was really nice and he was really cool and nonetheless it was a beautiful view.

Saturday: This was our last day in Egypt and we didn't have anything planned so we of course had to see the biggest mall in Africa so we took a day trip out to the mall that was 7 stories and had a ton of stores. It was really cool being able to see it, even though I didn't buy anything. Not much went on this day, we really just were killing time before our plane left that night. We felt like we had spent the perfect amount of time there and had seen everything we wanted to. At 2am our plane left and we couldn't wait to be back home.

Don't get me wrong, Egypt was the most amazing experience ever and I absolutely loved it but I was so ready to be back home in Switzerland. The city in general was extremely dirty and resembled a third world country. Lots of poverty everywhere we went and was really unsafe, although we were always safe with our tour guides. We also had found a liking for this food called Koshary which ate two times and fell in love with. It's traditional Egyptian food that we drove into the slums to get just because we wanted it that bad. Well after being back for a few days, I am regretting my decision to eat all the Koshary. I'm still feeling the effect a week later, if you know what I mean!

There is so much more to say about Egypt but I feel like I've written so much already that it would be excessively long to write it all out. Also, if I tell it all on here then I won't have anything new and exciting to share when I get home. So that's all for now :) xoxox

Disneyland Paris!

Notre Dame Paris

Disneyland Paris Castle

Since we had the field trip on Friday we couldn't do any big weekend traveling so we decided to take a day trip to Paris and go to Disneyland. Disneyland closes at 10pm and the last train going back to Lausanne left at 5pm. So we spent the night in Paris and planned on catching the 8am train back to Lausanne on Sunday morning. We spent all day Saturday from opening to closing at Disneyland. It was so much fun, and almost exactly like the Disneyland in Anaheim, except for the rides are so much more intense. We rode Space Mountain about 10 times and Thunder Mtn. was just as fun. It was raining all day and I was wearing canvas flats that ended up getting soaked and my jeans were trashed by the end of the day, but it was so worth it. However, on Sunday morning we woke up early to catch the metro to the train station and then the train back to Lausanne. BUT, while on the metro, Alex realized that she left her phone in the hotel room so we had to jump off and catch the metro back to the hotel. I waited in the station until she got back and we caught the next metro to meet our other 2 friends at the train station. Our train left at 7:58 and we were going to have about 2 minutes to spare to run through the station and make it on our train. But with our luck the metro broke down in the middle of a tunnel for about 3 minutes and we missed our train. We ran up to the platform as the train was pulling away. I could have literally reached out and touched it, but we were about 10 seconds too late. To make things worse, that was the only train going back to Lausanne on Sunday. So every way we tried to get back home didn't work out and it looked like we were going to have to spend the night in Paris, with mid-terms the next morning. After 9 hours of trying to get back home we finally found a whack route back to Lausanne on a train where we had to switch 4 times. 18 hours later, we got back to Lausanne at 1am and had to study for our mid-term the next day. Little did we know that going to Disneyland for one day could cause so much drama. But while stuck in Paris we tried to make the best of it and walked down to the Notre Dame and took some pictures before catching our train.

Geneva, Switzerland

It's starting to look like Fall :)

It was freezing so we all got bundled up to walk around Geneva.

UN Conference Room.

UN Political Conference Room

Entrance to the UN....it was nothing special :(

Sorry for the long wait on posts, things have been crazy around here with mid-terms and getting ready for trips and whatnot. But I have some time so I'll try to update the blog as much as I can.

Last weekend we took a field trip as a group to the United Nations headquarters in Geneva. Nothing too much to talk about, so I'll just post some quick pics.

CORSICA!!

All the girls who got their ears pierced.

Getting my ears pierced. Eek!!

Thought I would capture the French flag in there for extra effect :)

Tunnel in the Caverns.

The village from atop the mountain.

Swimming hole where an octopus attached itself to Michelle's leg. Absolutely freaky and disgusting, so glad it wasn't me!

Swimming Hole.

View from where we ate lunch.

The small village we stopped at.

Some of the Rocks and Caverns we pulled into.

Josh Currie.

Off the Back of the Boat on Friday.

The Girls.

Beachside in Corsica.

Napoleon himself.

Napoleon's Mother's Room. Reminded me of my mom's room.

Napoleon Bonaparte's House

Beautiful Sunset from Ship.

Port in Marseilles. View from ship.

Palais des Papes

Palais des Papes

Avignon, France. I was freezing so he lent me his beanie, I'm not sure how well it worked out though, haha!

Sorry for the wait, but here is my latest post from my Corsica trip! Finally! Ok, so if any of you are like me, you probably had never heard of Corsica before, or if you had you didn't know much about it. Well that was the intent of the field trip for us. It is called an Educational Field Trip, so each semester we get to spend a week in a location to solely learn about it. Corsica is a fairly large island in the Mediterranean, south of France and west of Italy. We stayed in the capital of Corsica, Ajaccio. Don't ask me how to pronounce it, I avoided saying it at all costs! Our trip lasted from Tuesday to Saturday. So much happened on each day that it would be one tremendously long paragraph if I wrote it all in one. So I'll break it down by days :)

Tuesday:

We met in the lobby of our building at butt-crack of down (4:30am)!!! Two buses picked up our group and set out on our 7 hour journey to Avignon, France. We arrived in Avignon around 11am to tour the Palais des Papes (Palace of the Popes). During the 1300's the popes relocated to Avignon to escape the violent chaos in Rome. Many Popes lived in the palace up until 1377 when they went back to Rome. We took a walking tour through the palace and a little bit around the town. If the weather had been better it would have been enjoyable, but it was hard to focus on anything when it was about 45 degrees plus heavy winds. I was so glad I had a long sleeve shirt and scarf on. Some girls had expected the weather to be warmer and were in shorts and shirts...I would have died! After touring the palace we went to a group lunch at a nice restaurant in town. They served chicken (just like every other meal here) so of course I had the vegetarian meal. It was so amazing though!! Penne pasta with pesto sauce, sun dried tomatoes, snap peas, green beans and olives all mixed into one! Mmmmm. After lunch we headed back to the buses for another 3 hour drive to Marseilles to catch the ferry to Corsica. We had been told that we were taking an overnight ferry to Corsica, and that we had cabins with beds to sleep in for the night. However, they didn't tell us we would be taking something close to a cruise ship! When we pulled into the port to board the ferry we were staring at what looked like Queen Mary..Ok. Maybe not quite like the Queen Mary, but it was the nicest and biggest ferry I had ever seen. We boarded around 7pm and after getting settled in had dinner on the boat. I took a Dramamine before getting on so that I wouldn't get sea sick and would be able to sleep easier. It definitely did the trick because I was zonked out before we even left port.

Wednesday:

We arrived at 7am on the ferry in Corsica and once again our trusty buses took us to our hotels. The group was so large that we had been split up into 2 different hotels that were about 15 minutes apart. One was right on the water, and the other was directly in the center of town. Although the seaside one would have been nice, I was satisfied with ours being in the middle, it meant that everyone had to walk to us! Our hotels offered buffet breakfasts in the morning which were amazing. I actually ended up taking food from breakfast in my purse to last me until lunch so that I didn't waste money on snacks. In the afternoon, we toured the house of Napolean Bonaparte. He was born in Corsica and lived there unitl he was 9 years old. Nothing too special, but believe or not it was the only claim to fame that Corsica has so of course they took it and ran with it. Everything in town is named after Napolean. Our hotel was Hotel Napolean, the restaurants were Restuarant Napolean, I mean you can see where I'm going with this. It was a little bit ridiculous, but to each their own I guess. Not much to talk about or Wednesday, just went back to the hotel and had some bonding time with other students. Why is it that when you travel with people you always become close with them? Weird concept.

Thursday:

After another amazing breakfast in the hotel we boarded our buses once again for a 3 hour drive into the center of the island to a place called Corte. It is a university town of supposedly one of the most historic universities of the island. Again the weather was not permutable for much enjoyment with low temperatures and wind chill. We spent most of the day in museums and shops except for the trolly/train ride we took around the town. It was buried into the mountains and was actually a very quaint, pretty town. To get to the town we had a 3 hour bus ride up a mountainside. It was just as intense as driving to Big Bear. Now imagine that drive on a huge tour bus, you can only imagine the amount of people who got car sick. We had people laying in the isles and taking sleeping pills to avoid it on the way back. I usually don't get car sick but by the end of it I just wanted to puke. It was pretty bad, but the drive itself was pretty to say the least.

Friday:

This was my favorite day of the trip. We boarded a tour boat at 8:30am and didn't come back to port until 5pm. We spent all day touring the coast of Corsica and splashing through the Mediterranean. It was absolutely gorgeous! I had never seen something like this before! The boat was pulling in between huge caverns and rocks that had never been touched by man. We saw nature at it's peak. The water was so blue you could see for days to the bottom! We stopped at a small village on the way that only had 18 people living there. We had packed sack lunches that morning to take with us and eat when we stopped at the village. A few of us found a small swimming cove that was just a little bit of a hike around the hillside, but it was well worth it. One of the most beautiful views I have ever seen. It was amazing being able to eat our lunch on a rock, cliffside that overlooked miles of clear, blue Mediterranean. After getting back form the boat tour we were on our own for dinner so of course we resorted to a panini stand that we found, always a hit! They were amazing!

Saturday:

This was check-out day. The plan was to check out at 11am and have free time for the rest of the day until we had to be at the airport at 6. So my roommate and I decided to sleep in that morning and go down for breakfast, then pack our bags, checkout and roam the city. A stress free morning right? Wrong. We got a call from our director at 8:50am who was frantically trying to get a hold of all the students to tell them that the hotel had just informed her that our checkout time was 9am and that breakfast was also closing at 9am instead of 10am. Well well well, isn't that lovely. We had no time to shower, no time to get ready. It was basically, jump out of bed, run down to breakfast, run back up throw clothes in the bag without folding, sit on bag to zip it shut, checkout and then try to have a nice day on the town after all the hussle and bussle. Luckily it all worked out and we ended up having a really nice day. I spent more money than I probably should have, but I consider it money well spent. A group of 12 girls, including me, came across a piercing shop and decided they wanted to get their ears pierced. Of course I got suckered into it and got my second hole on my lobes pierced. It was definitely the most impulsive thing I had ever done, and it actually didn't even really hurt, which I was grateful for. At 5pm we loaded the buses and headed for the airport and said goodbye to Corsica. It was definitely a trip to remember that was filled with bonding, laughing, crying, and exquisite memories.

Hope this wasn't too boring for everyone to read! Just so much to tell, and I didn't even cover it all!

xoxo!!

Lazy Weekend in Switzerland

This weekend my roommate and I decided to have a relaxing weekend and instead of traveling stay in Switzerland. Just our luck that the one weekend we stay, the weather is horrible and raining all weekend. That's okay though, all the more reasons to snuggle up with blankets and watch movies all day (which is what we did all day Friday). Saturday we got up early and took a train into Geneva then went out to a town called Broc. There is a chocolate factory here that shows you how the famous Swiss chocolate is made and at the end you get free, unlimited samples. Needless to say, it was amazing!!! I bought chocolates to bring home for family so don't worry :)

Tomorrow will just be another day at the house. We have papers to write and classes to study for, so we thought we would stay in again. 

We leave for Corsica on Tuesday and don't get back until Sunday. So no posts till then, but I'm sure the next one will be good :)

That's all for now. Love you all! and miss you!

Milan, Italy

It goes on like this for 40km!! So Beautiful!

We found a small pathway and thought we would see where it took us. It ended up on a little dock on the lake. 

This is how all the shops are in Bellagio. In between stair walkways and such. Really old and cute.

The White House in the Center is George Clooney's on Lake Como

The Beginning of Lake Como

A Really Old Amphitheater that had Chairs Embedded in the Cement.

The Courtyard of the Castle 

One of the Decorated Coke Bottles. I thought this picture was funny :)

Covered Mall with Prada and Louis Vuitton

Other Friends From the Group

Quite the Picture. It actually stayed on me for a long time. It let me walk with it. I probably have Bird Flu now, but whatever!

Birds Everywhere!!

In Front of the Duomo

So for our 2^nd traveling weekend we decided to go to Milan, Italy. It was basically the same group of people except for 2 people switched out for 2 different ones. 8 of us caught the 7:20am train out of Lausanne and headed straight for Milan. It was nice not having to make any train changes on the way. It was only about a 3.5 hour train ride to Milan from Lausanne, much nicer than the 7.5 hour train ride to Nice the previous weekend. I was not in charge of booking the hostel for this trip, and now I know that I should probably always handle the hostel bookings. We showed up to a hostel that was not near the center of town so it was a pretty far walk from everything we wanted to do, it smelled of bad Asian food, and was really janky. One of our rooms had only a bidet in the room, and it was literally IN the room. The toilet was in the same area as the beds with no door, very awkward. Needless to say, the people in that room used our bathroom.

It was fashion week in Milan the weekend before we went, so the city was still decorated a little bit from fashion week. There were large coke bottles everywhere that were decorated differently as an ode to fashion. We spent Friday at the Duomo (the cathedral) and walking around the shops and trying to find our way around downtown. Milan is known for its designer labels and name brand stores. Needless say, we didn’t do much buying, just window-shopping. The Prada store is based in Milan so we got to visit that which was pretty cool but intimidating. We visited a castle the same day and walked through a really cute park in the middle of town. At the end of the day we found a pizzeria that was really cheap but had the best thin crust pizza ever! We super excited to find it.

On Saturday, Alex and I decided to break off from the group and take our own day trip to Lake Como. We found our way to the train station and bought a ticket on our own (I was very proud of us, this is quite a daunting task when everything is in another language). It was about a 40 minute ride from Milan to Lake Como and well worth it. It was one the prettiest lakes I’ve ever seen. When we got off at the train station we met these 3 older couples traveling together who were form Austrailia. They all had been away from home for close to a month and were starting to miss their kids and grandbabies so they insisted that we tag along with them. They got us on a ferry boat and we rode for two hours around the lake and ended up at a small town called Bellagio. It was absolutely adorable and beautiful at the same time. Bellagio is known for their silk and cashmere so there was plenty of shopping to be done there. Lake Como ended up taking up our whole day and we got back at around 9pm (after ending up at the wrong train station and having to find our way back on the metro).

Sunday morning was basically the same as Friday. We ate breakfast and sipped cappuccino’s on the steps of the Duomo. Quite an experience on a Sunday morning. Not much more form Milan, a weekend was enough time for me, any longer would have been too long.