Hey everyone!

Hey blog,

It’s been a while. We’re officially past the week 5 marker... I still can’t quite believe it. Today I’m going to touch on something that I initially believed would be a lot more central to my experience here in Amsterdam, but surprisingly hasn’t been: school.

No.  Scottish accents are impossibly challenging to understand.  Unless you’re quite acquired to hearing Scottish english, it essentially sounds like “arghhh larhghg grealallhhhh loch ness.”  But this is not to say it isn’t entertaining to hang out with the Scots, who were friendly and welcoming during my weekend trip to Edinburgh and the highlands!  

Dear Internet,

Though this is usually the point in my posts where I attempt to introduce some vague lesson/insight from my most recent travels, my time in the European Parliament in  Strasbourg, France, and my personal adventure to Munich, Germany (see pictures below), have left me with more political revelations than I'm comfortable with divulging. Instead of jumping into that lava pit, I've opted instead to focus on the days when we're not trekking across Europe and taking selfies at every available national landmark.

Monday, February 29^th, 2016 23:32

Alhamar, Granada

A few weeks ago, I took the bus to meet a friend of mine at Dublin Airport. I’d avoided learning the bus routes for as long as possible up until this point, intimidated by the lines and the Leap Cards, but I finally made it a mission to figure public transport out. One LeapCard and a downloaded Moovit App later, I was venturing on my first solo bus mission, complete with a bus transfer.

January and February are the hardest months of the year. It is cold and wet and we are weary, the dip of the holiday season leaving us in a bit of a haze, and then things are busy, busy, busy.

After hearing about the 'Northern Irish Troubles' for weeks, I finally got to see the place for myself. To be honest, I imagined deserted streets and I thought I would feel completely unsafe the whole weekend. The history of that place is so dark and violent that I was prepared for the worst. Well I ended up feeling pretty dumb when we pulled up to a beautiful part of the city of Belfast, with tons of great nightlife and shopping. If I hadn't known about the troubles previously, I would never have guessed all that had happened there.