Nica's European Expedition

Hello once more.

This will be a short entry. I arrived home safe and sound on Friday night and have had a good few days to get rested, reflect on my travels, and get settled back in to my life at home.

I just want to say thank you to all who followed my blog. I sincerely hope you enjoyed it; I know I loved being able to keep everyone updated on my travels. Hopefully this will not be the one and only blog I ever get to write about far away places and adventures.

Until next time. Thanks again.

Nica

Hello again!

Thank goodness I've been able to make frequent updates for the last few days of my trip. I was looking at my past posts and the Czech Republic was woefully underrepresented, so I vowed to blog up a storm during my time in Belgium.

Yesterday Charlène and I went to Bruges. We had a very lucky morning, having gotten a rather lazy (i.e. late) start, when we got to the train station in the nick of time to run to the train and hop on as the doors closed. We would have had to wait another hour for the next one, so it was some good karma that got us on the first train and on our way to Bruges.

It is one of the prettiest cities I've ever seen. It's called "Little Venice" because it is built around an intersection of several waterways, and it definitely lives up to the name. The whole place was absolutely charming, and Charlène and I decided it was a very happy city. It was also nice because even though there were tourists there, they weren't overwhelming the city like a plague.

The whole main city was accessible by foot and much smaller than we had originally thought, so we ended covering most of the main city in only a few hours. We arrived in the town square and decided to climb the Belfry that overlooks the city. A seemingly unending spiral staircase led to the very top, where we were blown about by strong winds as we looked out over the red roofs of the city. All in all it was a very successful climb, and our appetites were properly stoked afterwards, so we ate lunch in the town square.

We then walked around the many shops in the city, and I ended up buying an embarrassing amount of Belgian chocolate and assorted other sweets. There were an appalling amount of lace shops everywhere, as there were in Brussels (apparently Belgian lace is a big thing, which I didn't know), so after a while I began to feel a strong aversion to any sort of needlework, but hopefully that's just temporary.

Our next stop was one of the old churches, which was larger on the inside than it looked, and had beautiful, intricate tapestries and stained glass windows. There was also a giant organ that took up the whole back wall that was being played while we were there.

On the train on the way back I thought to myself that Bruges is a place I would very much like to see again. It had a very unique and friendly atmosphere and it was just so pretty.

At night we went to a movie (The Expendables- why, Sylvester Stallone, why?) in the main room of a big movie theater in Brussels that's decorated with all sorts of gold and fancy seats. It felt very important, and even though I was quite sleepy I forced myself to stay awake through the movie, not wanting to insult the grandeur of the room.

What a day it was! Bruges in the morning and a movie at night-- it doesn't get much better than that.

I'll write again soon!

Bonjour!

Well, here I find myself in Brussels, Belgium, waking up to the sounds of city life after having enjoyed a good night's sleep.

I arrived in Brussels on Sunday morning by train. Taking the train was quite the experience; in truth the in-between times of being in the station or waiting for the stops was quite stressful. However, riding on the train and watching the countryside, as well as meeting a colorful cast of characters on the night train more than made up for the moments of discomfort and worry.

Once in Brussels, I met up with my friend Charlène, who I have not seen since I graduated high school. It's a strange experience seeing someone for the first time after so long. It's almost as if the person becomes real again. It was an excellent reunion, and as soon as we had found each other in the train station, she whisked me away to Paris for the day!

I now understand the reputation that has been built around Paris. It's a truly beautiful city. It's also very touristy, but in an ever-so-hip sort of way, so it's almost forgivable. The one thing I noticed that was a little too cliché for me was that on several bridges over the Seine, people had put padlocks on the bars. At first we were puzzled by this, assuming it was some sort of tourist tradition we didn't understand. Upon closer inspection, however, the padlocks all had "K + F," or some such initials, scrawled on them. As in, "Paris holds the key to my heart." I'm sure people thought they were being very creative and romantic, but for me the sentiment just ended up being very cheesy.

We saw Montmarte, the Eiffel Tower, The Arc of Triumph (which connects up to the Champs Elysées), and Notre Dame, as well as various other sites that were seen in passing. The Effiel Tower was well worth the crowds and slight wait to get to the top. It was breathtaking. Paris spread out for miles in all directions, and we even spotted the pyramid at the Louvre! Notre Dame was spectuacular, and we saw it at night. The interior was mostly dark, and therefore a bit eerie, and outside the famous gargoyles were much more striking than they would have been in the light. As we left the city we drove past the Eiffel Tower again, now lighted, and as we got even further the lights began to have a sparkle effect. It was a fitting end to our day in Paris, and I came away hoping that I can have an even longer visit in the future.

Yesterday Charlène took me around Brussels. I discovered several things. Firstly, the main square is perhaps the prettiest I've seen yet, out of London, Prague, and Brno. Secondly, the Belgian waffle I ate yesterday (plain, out of a bag like a pretzel) was absolutely nothing like the fluffy and unsubstantial waffles one can order in any American restaurant. Oh no, it was like a mini-meal: filling and completely delicious in and of itself. I'll never be able to go back. Thirdly, Charlène tells me that French fries are actually Belgian fries, and that they were invented in Belgium. Alas, history cheated Belgium out of its fry fame. I've yet to try them here, but I'm told that the French fries in France are not any good compared to here.

Today we are taking another day trip to Bruges, a city in the Dutch north of Belgium. I'm quite excited.

The only thing that could make the trip better so far is if I could speak French. I feel utterly useless when it comes to that language. But thank heavens I have someone nearby that can translate for me, otherwise I probably would've gotten lost the second I arrived in Brussels and would have wandered all the way to Denmark by now.

The journey is coming to a close but I feel like it's just beginning. I will report to the trip to Bruges as soon as possible!

Well, well.

I have realized that I don't like packing. It's exciting when you're about to go to a place; you get to choose what to bring and daydream about what the trip will be like. But it's quite awful when it's time to pack up and leave. That's what I really do not like about packing. It's just no fun on the way out.

Tomorrow I will board a train and go to Brussels to visit a friend I haven't seen in over 2 years. I can't even describe how excited I am, but leaving the Czech Republic is more bitter right now than sweet. When a person is entrenched in a certain lifestyle for 24 hours a day for three weeks, it's jarring to awaken to the reality of that lifestyle being over. However, I'm a bit uplifted by knowing that this is not the last time I will ever be on an archaeological dig. The other silver lining is that I also will see the people I've met here many times in the future-- I even have classes with some of them. I think the strangest thing for me to wrap my head around right now is the fact that I will be travelling alone again tomorrow. I haven't been alone at all these past three weeks, and I'm afraid I might have to get a bit reacquainted with silence during the next day or so of travelling.

Today we backfilled the second site we had been excavating this past week. Backfilling is just what it sounds like: we took all the dirt that we dug out of the pit and put it back in, in order to protect the site during the coming year and also to not leave a gaping hole in the middle of a field. It was rather disheartening seeing how quickly all the dirt went back in the pit as we packed the equipment away. All our beautifully cut walls and carefully excavated squares were buried within minutes. However, it was a definitive end to a beautiful three weeks in the Czech Republic.

I feel like I should be coming home afterwards, but I know tomorrow I will wake up and be ready for more travelling. I am quite excited to be travelling by train. It's such an old-fashioned and romantic way to travel (even though the trains aren't old-fashioned, but that's okay). Luckily, I get a window seat for two legs of my journey, so I will bask in the countryside of the Czech Republic, Germany, and Belgium and it will be a lovely time. Let's hope I don't have any more travel scares of being late for connections, etc! I think that would just be too much.

I'll write again soon!

Hey everyone!

Sorry for not updating more often. We only have one internet connection available in the hostel and it's hard to sneak in a few minutes here and there during the day even to check email, what with others needing to use the computer and the long days we work. But here I am, sitting in front of the computer and wondering how I will be able to describe the past week in the right words to convey how amazing it's been. I also am really tired from staring at rocks all day, and I keep mistyping words and pausing to remember what I was saying, so it may very well be a sorry little post today. My brain is kind of fried.

Archaeology, for those of you who think "Indiana Jones" when you hear the word, is not glamorous, but it is full of adventure and fun and a lot of hard work. There is, obviously, a lot of dirt involved, and I feel so lucky to be like a kid again-- playing in the mud and being outdoors all day, and even packing a little bag of lunch every day, too.

There have actually only been a few days we've gotten to dig since I've been here. The weather has been rather uncooperative, so the past few days we've been inconvenienced by rain and more rain. So as not to go stir-crazy sitting in the hostel all day, we've been on a couple of excursions into Brno, where there are some very cool sight-seeing attractions. We got to go the Gregor Mendel museum (you know, the man who figured out genetics by crossing peas), and everyone in our group geeked out to the point where we all bought souvenirs; some of us (including myself) even got t-shirts.

We've also been doing a lot of lab work to make up time not digging. This involves, in essence, sorting through a lot of rocks and trying to decide which ones are important enough to keep and which ones aren't. This sounds a lot easier than it is, but wouldn't you know, rocks can be tricky little buggers! It's a funny experience, spending hours in a room picking through rocks... you definitely start to go a little crazy after a while. Thankfully, everyone else that's been doing lab work is equally crazy by the end, so we just end up all being insane together and it works out fine.

Being on site and excavating, though, is where the real charm of archaeology occurs, for me at least, and it's the part that is my favorite. This sounds like I don't like the rest of the process, but I do. I've rarely done anything in my life where I enjoy an activity wholeheartedly, but archaeology is one of those things that I love all-around. Even parts that are inconvenient or disappointing or difficult are still fun for some reason, or if not fun, they're interesting and challenging. It's a sort of complex thing that I can't exactly describe in so many words, or even in print, but I really feel so entrenched in this lifestyle already. I could get used to this. Not to get overly sentimental, but I imagine that this feeling of contentedness is something akin to destiny (for those of you who believe in that sort of thing), or the happy coincidence of finding just the right niche (for those of you who don't). Either way I'm lucky.

I've got to be going now to try and fit in a little bit of laundry. Literally every piece of clothing I brought has some type of dirt on it and even the things I've tried to keep lean are coated in a sort of rock-dust. But what do you do?

Hopefully tomorrow I will get to go and dig some more, so let's all hope for some good weather to come my way! Bye for now!