Eurotour Part One

The Eurotour started with a night over in the ferry to Stockholm. This was a late night and early morning, mostly because all the exchange students wanted to spend time together. Fortunately I had been on the ferry once before back in November so it wasn't a new experience for me, so I didn't need to explore the entire ship. Getting up at five in the morning the next day wasn't a great experience but we managed to get up and get to breakfast and enjoy the beautiful view of the fjord into Stockholm in the morning.

I had been to stockholm in November, but it was very dark, so it was my first time seeing the city from a distance in the light, and it was beautiful! Unfortunately our tour didn't include much of Sweden so as soon as we got off the ferry our bus drove us south and we were at the southern most point by Dinnertime.

Sweden from the Road 

After Dinner we took another ferry to Denmark, which was only about an hour, and enjoyable until the end of the ride when Monica and I got lost and well....I don't like to think about that...

We took the bus to Copenhagen where we found our hotel, then in the evening we went to Tivoli, the world famous amusement park. Our entrance to the park was paid for, but the rides were expensive, and I was a cheapskate. So I didn't go on any of the rides, but I had fun exploring the park and taking pictures with a fellow cheapskate. The park became absolutely gorgeous after the sun started going down (the sun going down actually shocked us because we were so used to the finnish sun setting very late, and we weren't even that farther south, but it sure seemed like it). We spoke a lot of finnish when we were going through the different shops, which was a lot of fun, because we knew nobody would understand us, except maybe the other exchange students in the park. 

The next day we got a guided tour of the city in our buses. This was a great way to see the city, stopping and getting out at the famous places, and we got to see a lot. I finally saw the little mermaid statue, whose fake statue I have seen in the Copenhagen Airport every time I have had a layover there during summers I went to Norway. I was really happy to see the real one finally! 

For some reason we decided to make a pyramid....

We found the statue that was a part of the latest season of the amazing race and we had a lot of fun posing next to it and realizing that the amazing race was here! We actually found a lot of places the amazing race was during our whole tour, and since we are travelers ourselves, everyone's a big fan of the amazing race.

We were in Copenhagen on June fifth, which happens to be their constitution day (kinda like our July 4) so all the danish flags were flying and everyone was inside at home enjoying their day off, so the city wasn't as crowded as normal. 

Later we had some free time in Copenhagen before we drove in the bus some more and got on another short ferry ride headed for Germany!

Top Ten Moments of Eurotour

Eurotour is a trip that Rotary Youth Exchange Finland offers to all the inbound exchange students, and there are about 90 spots open for first come first serve. But it is an optional trip and costs an arm and a leg. I of course could never pass up such an opportunity so I paid and signed up as soon as I could. So at the start of June I set off with 87 other exchange students, two buses (with two bus drivers), two chaperones and four rotex (former exchange students from finland that actually did the chaperones' jobs), I think the chaperones just went along because some people might frown upon sending 87 exchange students across Europe with hardly any adults, so Rotary provided the bare minimum, two adults that didn't really do anything.

I was lucky because the actual tour started in my city of Turku. Other exchange students who lived on the other side of finland had to take ten hour trains before the tour even started, whereas I had to take a ten minute drive from my host parents. The tour started in the evening, so I invited some of the arriving exchange students to my house for the day, since the needed a place to hang out for several hours before the tour started.

The beginning of the tour was actually the overnight cruise to stockholm (which resulted in very little sleep for me that night), so the meeting place for the tour was in the ferry terminal, and it was such a great moment seeing all the exchange students that I hadn't seen since the Lapland tour in December. We had such a great time even in the first few minutes of fooling around in the ferry terminal waiting for the start of the tour.

The next two and a half weeks spent on a bus cruising around the continent was probably the best two and half weeks of my life. Before I get into great details about the whole trip I have created a countdown of the best and worst moments of Eurotour.



10 The complete lack of sleep we got on Eurotour (worst)

Every morning we got up mad early, which was absolutely awful. It wasn't that we always got into the hotel late either, because we always had plenty of opportunity to sleep in the evenings, but of course we stayed up late nearly every evening. Both my roommate and I (she was Monica Weller, whom I have mentioned before, and I have a link to her blog on the side) had a lot of trouble getting up in the mornings and sometimes we would try and go back to sleep even after our wake up call. Once we did that and then I woke up in what seemed like a minute but I looked at the clock and shot up, saying "Monica, the bus leaves in ten minutes!" We didn't get much breakfast that morning... Fortunately, the bus rides were long and we had plenty of time to catch up on our sleep then.

Trying to catch up on sleep

9 Spending time in Hotel Rooms (Best) 

Every Night Monica and I would spend a lot of time our Hotel room fooling around, a common guest in our room was our friend from Mexico, Sebastian, who you see in the above picture. Monica and Sebastian were probably the people I spent the most time with on the tour and we had such a great time every night.

Our Hotel Room in Paris, Sebastian, Me and Raphael, and Monica is taking the picture

8 Getting Lost in Copenhagen (worst)

This is definitely a moment I would like to forget....While getting off the ferry in Copenhagen, Monica and I took a wrong turn and got lost, with nothing but a camera, no phone or numbers or anything. This was definitely one of the worst ten minutes of my life. We got yelled at when we finally found the bus, but I was more relived than anything, and when we finally got on the bus, everyone cheered and clapped for us, because we'd gotten lost (and been the first ones to do so, since this was the second day of the tour).

7 Things we do in Austria (best)

My three hours in Austria makes this list because it was one of the first times during the tour which I spent with Sam, the other exchange student from my school and we had become such good friends over the year, and throughout the tour we hadn't spent much time together, so we got separated from some others in Austria, and went off to have lunch, and we found such a good deal on lunch too! Three Euros for a gigantic Schnizel Burger, which was awesome!

The burger was seriously the size of my head!

6 Getting Sunburned in Monaco (worst)

I hate sunburn...and since I have such pale skin, I always need to have sunscreen on if I am in the sun for even a few minutes. The day we went to Monaco, I didn't really think that we were going to be in the sun for all that long, and boy was I wrong...Advice for everyone..if you have pale skin and planning a trip to the french riviera, pack sunscreen, and never forget to apply! All of my shoulders were sunburn, except for the strap marks from my shirt, which were very clear...

It was horrible...

5 Speaking Finnish and Confusing Everyone (best)

Because Americans have somewhat of a reputation abroad, some of the other americans on the trip decided that we would try to speak finnish to each other sometimes, and it was a lot of fun, because it was basically a guarantee that nobody would understand us. Later on we actually used it for safety because in the big city of Paris, we didn't want people to understand us when we were talking about where we were going and what we were doing. 

4 The Paris Subway (worst)

Since Paris is such an expensive city, our hotel was somewhat cheap and not in a very good neighborhood of the city. The first night we were in Paris, it was our job to get back to the hotel on our own, using the subway. Since we went to the top of the Eiffel tower in the evening, it took us several hours, and we weren't on the subway back to the hotel until one in the morning, and this was before we had realized that we shouldn't shout to each other what stop we are getting off at in english, so there were some very suspicious people on the subway that caused us to start speaking in finnish, and eventually we had to get off at a different stop then we had originally planned because we were so paranoid that some of the people on the subway were going to follow us. This was moment was tied for worst moment of the trip with getting lost.

3 The Bus Rides (Best)

Some of my favorite memories from the trip are actually from the bus rides, which were spend talking, sleeping, laughing and every other great thing you can do with some of the coolest people in the world. The two buses on the trip had a great rivalry, which was so much fun, and in the end some of my best friends are those that I spent time with on that bus. The bus became our home and our fellow eurotourers became our family.

1 and 2 Saying Goodbye (Best and Worst)

The last night everyone on the tour got together to say goodbye. It is a custom for the exchange students that are soon leaving (such as me) to give gifts to the australians that came in January and are only had-way through their exchange. Usually these are goodbye gifts and come with lots of hugs and tears. This time wasn't any different. In the end when we all sang a song to the Australians, I seriously burst out crying in the first line of the song and couldn't stop. This was followed by many more tears and hugs with my fellow exchangers. I knew that I wouldn't be seeing a lot of them for a very long time, if ever. Saying goodbye to these people is probably the hardest thing I have ever had to do in my life. All these exchangers will always be my family. 

I look back at Eurotour with so much fondness. Every now and then when I accidentally open my pictures from Eurotour, I get sucked into all the memories until I have looked over every picture twice. I love talking to all my friends from the trip because we could gab and gab about the trip forever and never run out of things to talk about, or even if we did run out of things to talk about, we would never get bored talking about it. I think that Eurotour has been the best part of my life and always will be. 

Sweden!!!!!

Hello again. It has been a while but blogging is more difficult than you think, because it involves sitting down and typing a ton! And with the existence of Facebook....it is harder to blog than you may think. A friend of mine here in Finland labeled her last blog post Ugh which I think is an appropriate blog post for this one as well, but then I have a specific thing that I am talking about in this post so I will not label it Ugh, but instead Sweden.

This last weekend my host family and I went to Sweden! It was a weird feeling, to just visit another country for the weekend, but then we are in Europe. We left Friday night on the ferry to Sweden. The ferry left at 8:00 at night from Turku Harbor. And since Turku harbor is only a 15 minute drive from my house, we left at like 7:30, so that was quite a strange feeling, to leave for another country only a half hour before the boat left. The boat terminal had a feeling a lot like an airport. There was passenger check in and then many people standing around waiting for the boat to leave with their suitcases.

The boat was packed on Friday night. Many finns go on the ferry to sweden on friday night and then party the entire night on the ferry and then don't get off in Sweden and take the boat back to Finland right away and sleep the entire way back. I have talked to many people in school, who have taken the ferry to sweden many times, but in fact have never stepped foot in Sweden. There were 2700 people on board that night, so it was almost full.

On board, right after we left 

Turku Harbor in the background 

So we went on and then we did some shopping and looked around. We ate dinner in one of the restaurants on the boat and then we slept most of the way there. Because it is international waters, there are no taxing, nor laws for gambling, so on the ferry there are plenty of opportunities for shopping (lots of alcohol and chocolate) and plenty opportunities to gamble, even I could gamble (with adult supervision of course). With 25% sales tax, it is nice to get a relief and buy things for cheap on the boat. Of course I did get the feeling that it was quite similar to titanic, but I really wasn't worried at all. Overall, the ferry had such a nice atmosphere to it, it was very nice. 

Tax free shopping! 

Tax free Beer! Don't worry I didn't buy any 

There is a time difference between Sweden and Finland of one hour, and the clocks had both times with the finnish flag pointing at the finnish time and the Swedish, at the Swedish time, I thought that this was so cool! 

This was our room, the beds were a lot more comfortable than you thought. 

Unfortunately, the ferries often leave from Turku early enough in the evening so that people are hungry and go and eat dinner in the onboard restaurants, this would seem fine, but that means you get to your destination earlier. Meaning that we get to Stockholm at six in the morning. Yeah, I know, it sucks. So we had to get all our stuff together and walk off the boat into darkness. So we found the subway and it took us to the city center. We dropped our luggage off and went to find breakfast. After breakfast, it was still very very early, but at least the sun had risen so it wasn't still dark. Looking back on it, if I weren't so tired, it was very nice to get into Stockholm and see it in the early morning, because it was well before anyone in the right mind would get up so there was no one out, and cities, especially big cities like stockholm are very different in early morning, and it was interesting to see. We went along the area by the old town and there were many fisherman fishing on the sidewalk, there wasn't the noise of lots of traffic and the sun was just coming up so I got to see the sunrise on the hundreds of years old buildings. It was really nice, if I wasn't so tired! 

Something that I really liked about Stockholm was the way that the city was on several different islands. The main, oldest part of the city was at it's center and on it's very own island. It was nice because there were many bridges and there was a lot of water. There were also a lot of very old buildings there. There has never really been a lot of war in Stockholm, so many buildings have been able to stay intact. And the people of Sweden take very good care of their old buildings, especially in the oldest part of town. They were actually quite intimidating. But very pretty. 

Swedish Parliament 

Nobel Prize museum

So we walked around a lot in the old town. We saw a lot of the old buildings, many of the tourist attractions were closed because we got there so early. But it was very nice. It is a really nice city. So then in the afternoon we saw a bit of the newer part of the city, where the big expensive department stores were. We went and had lunch with my oldest host brother who lives in Espoo, Finland but was also in Stockholm that day. We ate in the Market Hall of Stockholm, which is where you can buy tons of fresh meat and fish and bread, and all sorts of things. We have one in Turku, but the Stockholm one was much bigger. 

At Lunch 

The Market Hall

We also went to a church in town, which I am guessing is the official church of Sweden, since it was the one that Princess Victoria and Daniel got married in a few years ago. It was really nice. It was one of the most impressive churches I have been to. It had so much detail, that it was just incredible. I was totally blown away by it. 

So then we went to the Swedish royal palace, which many people have said that it is the ugliest building in Sweden, but I think that it wasn't ugly, I thought that the architecture really was strong and powerful, like it said "I'm better than you" Which is exactly what you want the home of a king to say. But I may be the only one with that opinion. What I liked most about this palace is that it is like a copy of Versailles. It isn't as huge and extravagant as Versailles, but when they designed it, they wanted to have everything, especially everything that Versailles had. And one thing that I am especially looking forward to seeing on my eurotour next summer is Versailles. Unfortunately, when we toured, we were not allowed to take pictures, so I don't have any pictures, but I can assure you that it looked very nice. There were lots of rooms that were very royal. 

So then later we got on a train and went a little bit into the country side and stayed the night at my host uncle's house. It was nice because it was way out in the countryside, but still very close to the city. The next day we didn't do much, we went to a shopping outlet and everyone except me bought something. On Sunday night we drove to the ferry terminal and boarded the boat back to Finland, this time I had seen a lot of the ferry before and we had already eaten dinner, so after a little bit in the tax free store, I went to bed. And we got into Turku early morning, but I was feeling sick so I didn't go to my first classes. Overall it was a really great trip to Sweden. 

Leaving Stockholm 

Vad jag varit gjöde

I think that title may be correct swedish....but I have no idea.....For all those who don't speak broken up swedish, it means "What I have been doing"


So when did I last write? A while ago...it is so hard to keep up because everything goes by so fast and so much happens! And I could be a professional free time waster.

Let's start where I left off.....

This time of the year appears to be the sales season...because every store and mall appears to have their own big sale, I mean these sales are nothing compared to sales in the US, but they are a big deal here, apparently the prices are supposed to be a lot better, but they really aren't. But it was fun because it was test week and all the other exchange students and I had free time so we spent it shopping and hanging out. It was quite fun! The biggest sale was the department store, Stockman's Hullut Päivät, which means crazy days. It lasted almost a week and it was nice. But what wasn't nice was there was so much candy on sale so I wasted a ton of money on chocolate and now I can't sit in the same room with it without getting fat.

Can you see why I am getting fat?

And just to comment on the whole getting fat situation....I don't like it. I know it is no big deal when you are on exchange to gain a couple pounds and that you will lose it all when you go back, but I don't like to be fat! It is annoying!

And while I had some time off I spent it with the other exchange students a ton. One day, which I think was one of the most fun days, we went to the cathedral and there we ran into one of the other exchange student's host dad, who is the organist for the cathedral, and he gave us a private show of the organs, so we got to go up to the top where the organist sits, which has a great view of the whole cathedral, and I do have to say that seeing an organist play is quite cool. I could never play one, it is way to complicated looking, I mean I can't even play the piano. We also went to the Turku Castle, but we didn't go inside or anything, and we went to the terminal where the boats from Sweden come, and it was pretty fun.

Me with my "crazy days" bag 

Inside the Cathedral

The organs 

The organist 

Turku Castle 

The ferry terminal 

But anyways. Something cool that happened also was that there was this showing in a theater of Star Wars: Uncut! Which was a version of Star Wars Episode 4 that was made up of 15 second fan made clips. It was AWESOME! A bit hard to follow at times...but it was really cool! I loved it! They also showed a movie about copyright infringement and how it is suppressing new types of art that focus on a lot of remixing. I thought it brought up a very valid point, and it was a very good movie. Overall the day was very good. I went with a couple other exchange students and on the website it said "We are only letting the first 1000 people in" and of course being from the US, we assumed that it meant that there were going to be well over 1000 people there, unfortunately we were wrong and got two hours early. But it was fine, we hung out in the free exhibition that they had in the same building that was focused on soccer and it was quite fun.

The Place where The Star Wars was shown 

For the european culture of capital 

Inside the soccer exhibition 

Hanging out because we were the stupid americans and got there 2 hours before it started 

I have had all new classes in the past week. It is nice. I can get used to them quickly. The thing that is most different about this new period is that I am starting to actually try harder. I mean in some of my classes, I plan on getting grades, taking tests and getting credit for three of my classes this period. Geography, Art and Spanish. So I am focusing a lot more in my classes and trying harder. I actually did my swedish homework the other day! Which is more than I ever did in the states.....sadly...But I think that it kinda fun to try and pay attention, probably because I enjoy the classes that I have a lot. But I think that the hardest part of this is the fact that it is so incredibly easy to just let go of my mind and let it wander in class. Because I don't understand anything that the teacher is saying, I have to really try to catch words and guess what she is saying, So that means paying utmost attention...not the easiest. But I am trying!

So another thing that has happened it that today I went to Turku Art Museum. It is a quite small museum, especially compared to Denver Art museum which takes a week to really see everything...and that is not just an exaggeration...it was literally designed so that it would take 5 days to see the entire permanent collection. But the Turku museum is my favorite art museum that I have been to. For one thing, it is an incredibly beautiful building that looks like a castle. The city square, along with the river, is in between two big hills, that the road of Aurakatu goes up and down. One hill is called Luostarimäki and the other is called Puolalamäki. My school is at the top of Luostarimäki and the art museum is on top of Puolalamäki. So it is on top of the hill, and you can see it from all of Aurakatu until you reach the top of Luostarimäki. <-----this may have been an irrelevant fact about the art museum, but I felt like I needed to tell you that. So I have been wanting to go to the art museum because I have been seeing advertisements for the Carl Larsson collection that they have there now and he is a Swedish artist so I have been wanting to see the art. And I was not dissapointed. I went with my art class so the teacher talked about much of the art in finnish, and I didn't understand a lot of what she was saying but I still appreciated the art. Plus there were signs with text in english, so I could read those. I really liked Carl Larsson. A lot of him art depicted Scandinavia, and they reminded me so much of Norway and a lot of my childhood, and it was very nice. It was just sooo scandinavian, and there is nothing that I love more than Scandinavia! And also the other art that was in the permeant section of the museum was also very scandinavian and I absolutely loved all of it. So that is why Turku Art museum is my favorite art museum that I have ever been to, because it is the only one that I have seen that had scandinavian art, which I adore!


I wish I had pictures of this but I will probably have in the future

This is by my school. As you can see, fall is definatly here, which is a nice change, because it summit county, there is no fall, just summer and winter

I should probably go to bed seeing as it is 12:36 am and I doubt that tomorrow I will be going to bed very early...as I am going to see Britney Spears in Helsinki! Ahhh! I am excited! Seriously excited!


So...stay tuned because this staurday I plan on posting about Les Miserables in Swedish, Helsinki and Britney Spears!


And I apologize for any typos that you may see, it is very late!