Girls Trip 2011!

First, I apologize for the hiatus from the blog. Life got crazy, I couldn't upload pictures, and time got away from me. But one of my New Year's resolutions is to keep up better with the blog! So some of these posts are going to be about things that have already happened but I'd like to share them nonetheless.


As the title of my post suggests, I had two friends come over in late September to visit. First time to Europe and it was soooo good to see familiar faces in my new territory. We spent the first few days getting them adjusted to the time change,which meant marching them around Leiden, showing them all the cool history that I'm sure they have no recollection of! The following day we went to Amsterdam and did a boat tour, toured the Anne Frank house, and fed the pigeons in Dam Square.  We ended up our day eating Dutch pancakes and packing for the start of our Tour De Europa.

We left early the next morning for the airport, to make our flight to our first destination...Rome! Rome was a whirlwind, at least for me. There is soo much to see and do there and we were just in awe of all the history. We went to the Colosseum, the Roman forum, the Pantheon, the Spanish Steps, Trevi Fountain,and a ton of other small gems we found. We ate at the world famous "Alfredo's" home of the "original fettuccine alfredo" . Not what we think of as fettuccine alfredo but delicious anyways! We toured the National Museum of Rome, which basically was a lot of carved heads. The real reason we wanted to go there was because of the famous Discus thrower statue. Turns out it was a fake. That was disappointing.  We spent our last day in Rome at the Vatican City. We toured the Vatican museum, at which point we entered a time warp and seemingly lost half our day. We sat in awe in the Sistine Chapel and thanks to Rick Steve's travel book, found our way through a secret backdoor out of the sistine chapel, into St. Peter's Basilica. Did you know that the Sistine Chapel is the pope's personal chapel? and that is also where all the bishops and cardinals lock themselves away to choose the next pope? That is where the white smoke comes from. Pretty exciting to think about. So we did a quick tour thru the Basilica, which was incredibly ornate and beautifully done. We saw where the pope gives mass and where Peter's bones are buried. Definitely, maybe. We had to hurry  though because we wanted to climb the stairs to the top of the dome and we were running out of time before we had to catch our plane. We climbed some 600 stairs, through a narrow, cramped, slanted, curvy passageway, all the way to the top of the Vatican. It was the highest point in Rome and the view was well worth the climb to the top. But we had to quickly make our way down so we could catch our flight to our next destination.

VENICE!!!
Venice was every bit as amazing as it appears in the movies. We only spent one day there but we got to see most everything. The best advice we were given was to get lost in the back streets of Venice. The island itself is so small that you eventually wind your way back to the main parts. True to form, there were gondolas, street artists, and delicious gelato! It really is a picturesque place with beautifully colored buildings that are directly on the water. We actually stayed a little outside of Venice, which made for cheaper accommodations and I would recommend that to anyone on a budget. It was a short 15 minute bus ride into the city.

Finally we headed to our last stop, Barcelona!

Barcelona
We had no idea about Barcelona and had forgotten the travel book at home so we were really on our own. It was the most relaxed part of the trip because we didn't have an agenda. We stayed in a hostel, which was interesting in and of itself. We spent a day at the beach, splashing in the Mediterranean and feeling slightly overdressed as we were surrounded by a lot of topless women. I tried to convince Meg to "do as the locals do" but she just couldn't get behind that. :) We also celebrated Meg's 31st birthday with a traditional Spanish dinner and sangria! We followed that up with going to a flamenco dancer show. It was absolutely amazing. It was a more intimate setting, above a bar with just about 50 people crowded around a small stage, with one flamenco dancer, a singer, and a classical guitarist. That was my favorite thing in Barcelona! We also visited a lot of the artist Gaudi's works, including the Sagrada Famillia, which is a crazy church that has been in construction for some 120 years and is still not finished!

and then we capped off our Tour de Europa with some relaxing time back in Leiden, where the girls got their first experience at riding bikes as their main mode of transportation! It was a fabulous trip and I am so thankful that I have good friends willing to make the journey to come visit!