Slovakia!!!

Slovakia was filled with warm hostpitality, castles, and some of the most beautiful views I have ever seen! Dasa showed me places that I never would have figured out how to get to on my own. She shared her family with me and even took me to the castle where she worked at as a tour guide during highschool... while translating all the while. I found myself laughing a whole lot even though I spoke very very little Slovak. It is an amazing place! Dasa and her mom showed me around Nitra.
Dasa's mom cooked us a tasty dinner and then took us out for some warm spiced wine to keep us from getting too cold!
The view from Dasa's window in Nitra! Can you believe it? Amazing!
Zvolen's Castle:
Dasa's mom packed us a huge lunch for the road (with Zvolen's castle in the background)!

Dasa's father and brother, Miro, greeted us in Nitra. They treated me like a princess! Dasa's father said that he wanted to treat me well because I was the first American ever in their flat, and he wanted to make a good impression. He joked that I might have been the first American in their whole eight story building!
Looking over Bratislava:

Dasa's University in Bratislava:
The Slovak National Palace and some goofballs taking action shots in front of it:
As an environmental engineer, I appreciated the sewer man statue in Bratislava.
Bratislava's castle:

We met up with Martin and another friend in Bratislava. It was great to see Martin again. It felt like old times in Tampere.

Thanks for a fun and memorable trip Dasa and family!!!

Switzerland

Geneva was beautiful during my short short stay:
United Nations Plaza:
The International Red Cross was founded in Geneva (the similarities between the Red Cross flag and Switzerland's flag are not a coincidence). It started in response to war casualties. Red Cross volunteers would help injured soldiers regardless of which side they were on. The museum had some information on the Geneva Convention, which allowed them to work on the battlefield as a nuetral organization.

This was in Zurich where I spent six hours watching the beautiful river, writing in my journal and reading my book before heading on to Bratislava.

Portugal: Get a Date

Get a Date: a Play by Play of Getting Kicked OFF the Bus!

It was a pretty easy trip by bus from Santiago de Compostela, Spain, down to Porto, Portugal. Leasa, my travel buddy, and I thought the bus was rather hot on the way there, but it was a nice bus with padded seats and movies playing. Let’s be honest, it was only three and a half hours between these two delightful cities. We could put up with anything for that long. Plus we had guaranteed comfort and good food on each end of the trip.

On our journey to Santiago, we had advanced purchased round trip bus tickets to avoid any future complications on the way back. Very forward thinking… we thought. So it was Saturday morning and we were ready to leave Santiago. We had just spent two marvelous days eating Spanish tortilla and paella, and wandering the beautifully crafted streets. The way back was going to be easy: fool-proof. When we got to the bus stop, Leasa even recommended a strategy to avoid the ventilation problems that we had experienced on the way there. Good idea. She took the bags to the back while I pushed and shoved my way to some good seats near the air conditioner. We sat down, the bus started up and we were off. Piece of cake.

What a beautiful route it was: lakes and wide open spaces, balanced by quaint little cities with red roofed houses… and countless satellite dishes to remind us that we were in the 21^st century. The bus was full. When we arrived at our first of three or four planned stops, there was a crowd waiting to get on. I was curious: how were these people going to fit? There were zero seats left. So I was thinking about this while I was flipping through my tour book in the forefront of my mind. I was glad we purchased our tickets ahead of time and already had our sea…

“Laura, Senorita Laura, shdondesh eshta shda shda shda?” gurgled in from the loud speaker to the back of my not-really-Portuguese-speaking mind. Long pause. “SENORITA LAURA!!!...SHDONDESH ESHTAS?”

What? I think they’re saying my name over the loud speaker, I thought. My mind shifted from planning our leisurely day in Porto back to the bus on which I was riding. Oh shoot! There was a really long awkward silence and it was ME they were searching for. Why? How did they even know my name? …and that I was a senorita? OK, I told myself, start thinking in Spanish and come up with some quick reasons why your seat shouldn’t be the one that’s given up to the seat-hungry crowd.

I spent a few minutes begging and pleading with the driver not to drop Leasa and me off in this random town. “What if we sit on the floor?” I asked. “How about the co-pilot seat up front?” Just don’t leave I told myself. If I leave, I’m no longer a problem (except to myself!). But if I stay, I’m everyone on the bus’s problem… sort of a tough place! The driver permitted Leasa and me to stay until Vigo, close to the border of Portugal and Spain. Then we were shown the door. The person who won our seats smiled sheepishly and wished us luck.

Apparently we were supposed to get our pre-purchased tickets validated before we hopped on the bus. Our tickets didn’t have the date. “You need a date! You don’t have a date!” the bus driver kept telling me.

So there we were… in Vigo. First we were told that we needed to hang out in Vigo for nine hours at which point the next bus would come. While we did enjoy our brief stay in Vigo, nine hours would have been overkill for the little town. We found a local bus (with a much happier driver) that took us to Tui where we could walk across the border. We picked up a new Polish friend who was also accidentally dumped in Vigo and a Spanish guy who had a similar problem (and he was even Spanish!). We felt like pilgrims as we boldly marched across the bridge that links Tui to Valenca (Spain to Portugal). With the Schengen Agreement, no one actually ever walks across the border anymore. It was a special moment.

After a marvelous lunch followed by some much needed ice cream, we hopped on the train, the Valenca-Porto train, that is. We enjoyed a mix of English, Spanish, and attempted Portuguese on the train ride, which brought us all safely to Porto by 5pm, just in time to grab a glass of sweet port wine and watch the sun set in Portugal!

Either the plan was not fool-proof or we were the fools! Anyway, Portugal (and Spain) was filled with adventures and good times!

Portugal: Aveiro and Porto

Ali and Leasa are good friends from Tampere. They're in an Erasmus Mundis program that moved to Portugal for Fall semester. I took advantage of their nomadic lifestyle and visited them in Aveiro. We had fun fun fun! The food was good and the wine was cheap. After living in Finland, I was continually surprised at how cheap everything was. One morning I went out to buy bread for breakfast. My Portuguese is pretty... negligible so I kind ended up buying a whole lot of types of bread. I had two grocery bags full. How much did it cost? Three euros! It didn't even matter that I don't speak Portuguese. I got to try a bunch of breads!Lots of buildings have very colorful painted tile patterns like this:
These are some shots around Aveiro:
This is Porto. I loved it there!

Spain: Flamenco and more!

Pilar is a friend from my Berkeley days. She and her husband moved their whole family from Colmenar Viejo (just outside of Madrid) to Berkeley for a year. They took language and business courses and enrolled their kids in the local schools. They are true entrepreneurs and continue their adventures with their new business that they have started up in Spain.

Pilar and I went to a traditional flamenco show one night.
Apparently flamenco is most famous in southern Spain and typically performed by the Spanish Roma Tribe people who are forever capturing my cross continental European attention. Each muscle, eye, and smile or grimace were all part of the dance. Clap clap-clap-clap SMACK SMACK! It was all planned.The volume, the sound, and the tone take turns climbing and falling. The musical feet click-click-click Stamp-stomp stamp-stomp faster than my eyes could manage, forcing me to depend on sound, which was still grounded by reality. Ale! Toma! The crowd yells. "Ale Miguel!" one of the dancers agrees. "Escucha" someone else yells who prefers everyone listen quietly. But the crowd continues on. The dancers and musicians feed each other through their struggles, sadness, anger, and occasional smiles that allow us to applaud.

The music ends suddenly and quickly continues again, against our expectations. The dancers move faster than I thought possible. Each knuckle, finger and eye placement are perfectly placed and ask the musician to play louder, softer, or longer. The dancer continues past what is humanly possible while sweat drips down their faces and saturates their clothing.

It was amazing!



This is the train station in Madrid:
I took over at the place that Pilar took me to eat traditional Spanish tortilla. Scoot over master chef...
Barcelona!

Paris Waste Water Treatment

In fact, it was quite beautiful. Imagine yourself in Paris, watching the sun set... with the conical water tower in the background, and a very faint smell. The Paris wastewater treatment plant hosted a group of us from the UNESCO New Directions conference on a tour of their facility. It's privately operated so they have fancy advertising. They wined and dined us. It took a brief adjustment period for me to embrace the idea of eating delicate little Parisian chocolates just after walking through all of that microbial action. But it was alright. I was most interested to learn that Paris did not have its own treatment plant until the early 1980s, before which time, some of the city's waste (that wasn't sent away) found it's way directly into the river. That was not very long ago. Now, however, they have a fancy wastewater treatment facility with activated sludge and hopes of marketing their biosolids as fertilizer. I think the translater was a little bit surprized to find himself saying that the solid waste is treated and they hope to sell to people one day for their own use.

We dressed up in these fantastic outfits with baseball-shaped hard hats, very fashionable safety vests and headphones for our translation. I really wanted to wear my outfit around Paris, but I had to leave it at the treatment plant for the next group.

Paris

I'm in Paris getting ready for my final presentation at the UNESCO headquarters and doing some sight seeing here and there.

These are all of the tiny people looking down from the Eifel Tower.The perfectly manacured gardens sit beside the Concord Metro stop. They're very beautiful, but DON'T step on the grass. Grass is to be looked at in Paris, not touched! In addition to the tiny fence that keeps honest people honest, there are threatening signs keeping passerbys from stepping on the grass.
Notre Dame is remarkably bright for having so few windows.
I watched some kids play soccer for hours outside of the Patheon. That's a high quality of life: soccer outside of the Patheon!