Find new apartment, check.

It's official!  I found a nice place to live in Lisbon.

I'll be moving in on Saturday, so I finally have justified the fact that I never really unpacked into my room here by the University.  Haha, that's right, I've still got most of my stuff in my luggage.  But now, I'm glad I do!

So, it all kinda fell into place on Wednesday, I had been looking online and at a bunch of listings for rooms and apartments and houses, and I got in touch with 3 people and made arrangements to view the places during the day on Wed.  That way I would only have to go into Lisbon once (it's about a 45-60 min of transport to get there).  The first address I went to was this super sketchy door leading to a dark and sketchy stairwell, with 2 guys in an "office" at the top floor.  And by office, I really mean a room with a round card table and a pile of papers and a laptop on it.... Oh, and the stairwell smelled like death.  So, no the best first impression.  At all.  However, I soon realized that one of the guys, a really short but super friendly Portuguese man, was going to lead me to the building where the room was actually located.  It wasn't in the scary stairwell, yay!  We walked about 15 min and rang the bell at this tiny door in a little alley, really cute place, looked completely "local" with laundry hanging between the buildings above us and everything.  A cute girl comes to the door and introduces herself (I have since then forgot her name) and says that she will show me the room.  At this point the guy departs and the girl takes me to yet another building!  By now I've gone through "oh god, this building is terrible, let's get this over with" to "this place is really cute, I wonder what the interior looks like" and still haven't actually seen the place that they are offering.  We round the corner of the alley and she pulls out a key to open another door, this time glass.  We hop into an old elevator with the iron gates for doors and head up to the 5th floor where I finally get to see the room!  The guy who lived there was just starting to pack, so the room was mostly still lived in (which was actually kinda nice to see it that way), but it was a nice looking room.  It's maybe 10'x8' or so, with what looks like a full bed (a nice little improvement over my single in my current room) and a desk, full closet with drawers at the bottom and a cork-board on one of the walls.  As I walk in, I immediately head for the most tantalizing feature: the glass door leading to the balcony!  Being on the 5th floor I can barely see over the rooftops around and it's a pretty awesome view of the city and the bay.  Plus there is a grill out there (and I am already imagining a hookah as well), so not too shabby.

Inside I see the kitchen and meet the 2 residents who will continue living there, a girl from Germany and another from . . . . well, I don't remember.  I want to say Czeck Republic, but I think I'm mixing that up with another apartment I visited.  Anywho, they were having lunch in the kitchen, which is a bit small and has some paint peeling on cabinets, but is fully equipped.  Fridge, freezer, microwave, stove, oven, all the basics.  There is even a little "greenhouse"-esque balcony on the other side of the apartment with a washing machine and racks for drying clothes!  I chatted with the girls for a bit, (they seemed really nice and have English as their common language, so I will have an easy time with that.  Not sure if that is a pro or con though...) and then told the girl showing me the place that I liked it a lot, but had a few more to look at today and would email them that night with an answer.

By now it's about 1pm, so I grab some lunch at this little cafe with some tables in the back.  The food is cafeteria style, but it's quite yummy and cheap, so I'm happy.  It consisted of french fries, pork, rice and some red sauce with lots of cabbage, and was ready and on a plate in front of me in about 30 seconds.


My next apartment appointment was to call after 4pm and arrange a time which meant I still had a few hours to kill, so I wandered off towards the main square to explore.  I'd been there before, so once I reached it I immediately decided to aim towards the castle to the east and see if I could navigate the winding labyrinth of streets that surrounds it.  As it turns out, the neighborhood in that area is beautiful!  Lots of little cute things, hard to sum it up without pictures though.  The highlights included a building in a row, where they usually share walls, but one was missing and had been recently, within the last few weeks, been filled in by this really cute garden!  Another was the answer to the age-old question "what do you do when you convert a building into apartments..." a doorbell for everyone!

Another highlight was the view of the city I got from the top of a hill, with this cute little cafe/restaurant and a nice garden with benches.  My phone wasn't quite up to the task of capturing this view, so I'll have to return and bring my camera next time.  I never actually made it to the castle, so that will have to be another adventure sometime.

By this time I had to head to see the next apartment.  I called at 4, but no answer, so after calling again at 4:30 and still not getting through, I had to go meet my 5pm viewing.  This time I got SUPER lost.  It turns out that Lisbon has 2 mechanisms for screwing up my map-reading abilities (which I usually take a lot of pride in): first, the map I had is full of lies.  There was definitely a street about 50 meters before where it was drawn on the map and after missing that, I had to walk around a hill and a train station.  The hills themselves are the second confusing factor.  Roads that look like they intersect or are parallel on the map are actually 30 feet different in elevation, so many of my simple "first left, 2nd right, on the corner" type mantras actually led me quite astray.

I finally made it to the next place, and called the number they gave me.  I won't go into as much detail about this one, as I crossed it off pretty much immediately.  My phone call was answered by a woman while I was expecting a guy named Antonio.  I said as much to her, and eventually realized that he was not around, and she did not speak English.  As our conversation grew more difficult, she said in a very un-hopeful tone "espanol?"  Ahha!  I can do that one!  I'm a little rusty, but it's better than my Portuguese.  So, they showed me around a cramped apartment with a nice little interior patio and a 4-bed bedroom.... yes, 4 beds, shoved into one long room.  It looked like a nightmarish cross between a hostel and a hotel.  I'm all for meeting people, but that's ridiculous.  I said my goodbyes (still in Spanish) and told them I would send an email later that night, and responded to the text from the girl I was supposed to contact after 4pm.  She wasn't at the apt, but her friend was, so off I went for my last viewing. 

It was a super nice new place, but the room they had available had no windows... and what looked like a giant filing cabinet for a wardrobe and no desk.  It did have a double bed though, which was appealing, but not worth living in a cave for.  So, as you surely can guess, I decided to accept the first place I saw! 

In an interesting twist of fate though, the first and last apartments are really near to each other, so when I told the girl from the last place that I found something else, I also asked if she had any recommendations on where to go and what to see, and she responded that she has some friends from London in town this weekend and will be showing them around, and I should join them!  So, I'm not even living there yet, and already am on the inside track.  I've got a great feeling about this year, this is just what I was hoping for.

On Saturday I will move into my new place, and I will post pictures as soon as I can.

There is always more to tell, but this post has gotten long enough!  Short summary of everything else on my mind: 

• My first/trail language class is tomorrow.  
• I gotta figure out how to get public transport to IKEA and what is the largest object I can realistically carry home.
• I hope I can get all my stuff (including all purchases since landing like kitchenware, food, and towel) to the new apartment in one trip.
• The other 2 people in my program, Tatiana and Tewodros, just found an apartment in the beach town near the university, so I'll have a great place to visit when I want to be by the beach, and they will have a place to visit in the city.  A nice compromise I think!
• I love and miss you all, and finally have a floor to offer if you wanna come visit!  It's not super big or comfortable, but it's free and in the heart of Lisbon and has an awesome host.

Day 10 in Bolzano

This is how I spent my first weekend in the lovely city of Bolzano! Well, I'm not actually in the city as you can see, I'm about a 1.5 hour drive to the east into the heart of the Dolomites. On Friday we had an orientation and I started asking people about hiking in the area and started talking with a 3rd year student who loves to hike and she invited a few of us to join her and her friend on a hike that Sunday! It was totally worth getting up at 7am, I cannot believe the views we got during the drive and during the hike itself.

Other than enjoying the scenery, I've been busy meeting people on my floor, dealing with paper work for about a bajillion things, and catching up on my lack of internet over the last 5 weeks. The paperwork part of the last week has sucked, but it's almost all over now so that's makes me happy. I've got a tax code, a bank account (which should start getting scholarship money in 3 weeks), a student number, and an Italian cell phone (which has some issues with the data connection (read: keeps stealing my money for no good reason)). The only thing left to do is find a bike so I can explore a little further in this pretty city!

My living situation is a combination of awesome and very odd. I'm on the second floor of the building with a lot of other Erasmus Mundus students, but across the courtyard from our half of the building is an elementary school! In the same building! It's a bit confusing. The accommodation is run by a religious group, so they are pretty strict about some kind of unusual things. For example, you can't move any of the furniture in your room and my friend Ondra can't hang his laundry outside his window because "it's awkward for the kids to see it while they have recess in the courtyard." Um, really? But, the rooms are super clean and big, and we get a mini fridge between me and my flatmate, Lamar, so I can't complain.

On that note, I've met so many great people already! It's fantastic. On our floor we have 2 guys from the Czech republic: Ondra and Yhan. 2 girls and a guy from Russia: Tatania, Angelina, and Yuvgeni. My flatmate from Texas, Lamar. An Italian guy named Marco. A guy from Brazil named Diego. I've met many more people around the building as well as other students in different housing, but there are way too many to name here or even to remember all their names! But the group that I mention above have all hung out a fair amount in the last week, so that's really nice to have some consistency after traveling for so long.

I think that I've finally figured out my class schedule too, so next week my freedom will all end and I'll have to get used to having responsibilities again. It looks like I'm taking about 4 required courses and get to choose maybe 1-2 that I want to take in addition to a language course in Italian. Right now my optional courses are a toss up between some paired courses. Either Semantic Web Technologies paired with Machine Learning: Algorithms and Applications, or a course called Digital Libraries paired with Knowledge Representation and Ontologies, which is supposed to be a really strong subject with some of the professors here. The other option is to pick some courses from the Language and Communication Technologies modules. They seem really interesting, but less related to the fields that I saw myself pursuing.... If anyone (*cough* NateFreddieDon *cough*) has any thoughts on these courses, I'd be quite interested to hear them.

After all this text, I leave you with a link to my new Picasa photos! Some pictures from Berlin, Prague, Amsterdam, Brussles, and my first week in Bolzano, plus some hiking. Please take a look at them and feel free to comment on the photos, that way I'll know exactly how jealous you are. ;)

Also, my mailing address, in case you want to send me anything. I like food, money, letters, and surprises! If you give me your address, I promise I'll send something back too!

Quentin Schroeder, Room 216B
Istituto Rainerum
Via Carducci, 7
39100 Bolzano, Italy


Love you all!

Itinerary Update!

Hello faithful readers! I've got a few spare seconds before I'm heading out for the evening so I thought I would post something with a little more content then "OMG, good beers!" So, here it is!

First, I thought you might all like to have a quick recap of where I've been (and by "like to" I mean that I just want to gloat some more). So far I've been to London, Edinburgh, Isle of Skye, Copenhagen, Berlin, Prague, and am currently in Amsterdam. I think I've pretty much doubled the number of countries I've been to since I started this trip... Next up, on Sunday I will be taking a train over to Brussels where I hope to spend 3 nights relaxing and finding as many different beers as possible to enjoy. I don't want to be as touristy while I'm there, I'm getting a bit tired of that. So my plan is to sleep in a bit, wander aimlessly during the day looking out for good beers and then meet some like-minded people at my hostel and spend the evening sampling some of Belgium's finest. Not a bad way to end my time traveling, if I do say so myself.

Finally, on Wednesday, I'll fly to Milan and grab a 3 hour train up to Bolzano where I will see my new home for the first time! I'm pretty damn excited to stop living out of a bag and have a place to actually call my own. There's definitely something exciting about always being in new places and meeting new people, but after 5 weeks of that I'll be greatful to slow down a bit. Plus my bank account will appreciate it. Haha!

So that's it. That's the first part of this big adventure almost done. I've definitely had some ups and downs along the way, missing friends and family and familiar comforts like my apartment and job, but after the first 2 weeks or so I've gotten used to traveling again and used to being solo and I've really enjoyed myself! I've meet more awesome people than I can possibly keep in touch with, but with facebook I'm going to try really hard. I've seen some amazing cities, architecture, art, culture, everything! Highlights of the trip so far (subject to later editing due to retrospect) include the gothic cathedrals in Prague, the feeling of the physical presence of history in Berlin, Isle of Skye (will always be a favorite), the canals of Amsterdam (MUCH prettier than Venice!) and bikes everywhere in Copenhagen!

I'm sorry there haven't been more pictures yet, but as soon as I get to Bolzano I'll be able to get everything off of my camera and get the good ones online. Also, I'm happy to report that after a brief hiccup in customs my box with the rest of my belongings has arrived happily in Bolzano and is being held at my residence house. Potential pain in the ass: avoided!

Now I'm off to grab some food with some of my fellow hostelers and enjoy the nice weather this evening. Hope everyone back home is doing well!

I love you all!

Real Travel Photos!

Hey everyone! I've finally managed to get the computers here to work with my camera and have posted some fun photos of my travels on picasa. You can find them here, and they've all got comments about where they were taken.

Love you all!

Italy, winding down, and cookies!

I am extremely happy to report that as I am writing this blog I am also running frantically back and forth from the kitchen (runs to kitchen) to swap cookies in the oven and to take batches out and put new ones in. I went on my last shopping trip this afternoon and decided to go crazy and buy stuff to make chocolate chip cookies. My excuse is that I needed to use up the rest of my flour, but really I just wanted cookies. I think I'm going to be having a lot of lasts in these next couple days, it's going to be interesting. Unfortunately for me, my kitchen is not quite "fully equipped" so I'm kind of improvising. I've got a small oven and small trays, so I can only make 9 at a time, and they take about 9 minutes to cook, so I'm basically getting up every 4.5 minutes. It's great! Well worth it though. Here you can see my first 2 batches. I ingeniously rigged up a cooling rack out of wooden skewers and tape, which is working quite nicely.


On the note of the cookies taking about an hour to finish, I think during my time over here I've managed to appreciate slowing down a bit. It takes longer to get places, I walk a lot more, I think I just have a more relaxed life in general. I like it. Of course, that's in a very stark contrast with the times when I'm traveling! On those days, things seem to go in huge blurs sprinkled with the occasional interminably long wait at a (runs to the kitchen) bus stop or airport.

And speaking of travel, Italy was amazing!!! (Sorts through some pictures, runs to the kitchen to get the last batch of cookies.)

To save myself a bit of hassle with formatting, I'm going to provide links to most of the pictures and only embed the most impressive pictures and ones of the things I liked best. As I previously mentioned, my favorite things in Rome were the Colosseum, the Pantheon (which I mistakenly referred to as the Parthenon in my last post, whoops!) and the keyhole, which I hadn't even heard of until very recently.

I saw tons of other stuff while I was there though. On the first day, I met some people during breakfast (Canadian and English) who were making some joke about Americans, so I was forced to chime in and correct them. After schooling them in the ways of the American people, we discovered that we were all heading towards the Vatican and decided to go together. So the gang and I hopped the metro for my one and only sub-Rome journey and went to see the Vatican museum, complete with famous and not-so-famous sculptures and the Sistine Chapel (pictures weren't allowed, so that was the best I could get while being subtle). I lost the gang after a few rooms because we were all walking at different paces and I think at some point we took different turns as well. There was tons more to see in the museum and I spent maybe 2-3 hours there. It was kinda exhausting, and I felt bad for a lot of the art because when you're surrounded by things like that, you kinda start to neglect it or take it for granted. Yeah, sure, here's an amazing ancient roman statue, but there are 5o more in the next room! Kinda makes it hard to fully appreciate each piece. Oh well, at least they have these amazing collections for people to see at all.

After that, I went to see St. Peters Basilica, including the Pieta and a climb up the dome for some awesome views. From here, I just kinda wandered. I had a vague idea of what I wanted to see, but I was also just going off of my tourist map and heading from one landmark to the next. Some of the more important/recognizable things I saw: The Castel Sant' Angelo, which is an old fort converted into a museum-y thing (a little pricey, but pretty cool). The Piazza Navona with its three fountains. TONS of basilicas, some famous, and some just random, but all very impressive. The Trevi Fountain. The Spanish Steps where there are lots of Italian men who try to give you flowers and take your money. Constantine's Arch. The Palatine Hill and the Circus Maximus. Santa Maria in Cosmedin, which is on of the oldest churches in Rome and has the skull of Saint Valentine. The Monumento a Vittorio Emanuele II, which was one of the most impressive buildings I've ever seen. And Trajan's Column.

Phew, I think that's all the major stuff. The city is absolutely stuffed with piazzas and basilicas though, so I was pretty much seeing amazing stuff where ever I was. But enough lists, on to some pictures and details!

First, the Colosseum is absolutely massive. I spent about 2 hours the second morning just wandering around in it. I got some really good pictures of it too, and a couple videos to try to show the scale.


This is what I saw as I came over a hill and got my first view of it. There's a metro stop right next to it, but I decided after my one trip on the metro that I would rather walk everywhere. The city center really is not that big and I figured I would get a better feeling for the city that way.




The inside of the Colosseum is much less intact, but since the floor is missing you can see right into all the corridors and rooms that they used to hold animals and gladiator and such. Nathan told me that I needed to take a video of myself shouting "are you not entertained!" but I didn't want to get thrown out . . .

Oddly enough, after spending the morning in the Colosseum and heading over to the palatine hill, I heard some one call my name! That was pretty unexpected in Rome, so I turned and was shocked to see the two guys (James and Richard) from the day before! They were just on there way to see the Colosseum themselves and were going to meet up with the girls (Lindzi and Courtney) there. They had also met up with James' friend Gulia (pronounced like Julia) who was a real live native Roman and was going to show them around a bit. We swapped phone numbers so we could do dinner that night, I asked Gulia about any hidden secrets of Rome, and then we split off again to do our own thing.

Later that afternoon after spending about 2 more hours on the palatine hill I went exploring to find the keyhole. Now, this is a lesser known sight in Rome (at least, less known to me), but it's a door with a keyhole that looks directly out onto the dome of St Peter's. Sounded pretty cool and Katie had said it was her favorite thing in Rome, so I figured I had to do it. When I got there, it was surrounded by tourists, but I just waited a bit and it cleared out so I could get some good pictures. It was pretty non-descript from the outside, just this wall with a big wooden door in the middle, but as you get closer, and closer, and closer, and closer, you can finally see through the keyhole an amazing view of Saint Peter's Basilica! (I admit, I had to edit the image a bit with Photoshop to get it to work. The garden was too dark, and the dome was way too bright, so I had to take a bunch of photos at different settings and then merge them together. I think the result looks pretty awesome though.) While this may not have been my absolute favorite thing, Katie was right, it's pretty impressive.

Sadly I didn't get as impressive of photos of the Pantheon. It's too big a space inside to get it to all fit into one picture. I got this nice one of the outside and a few good ones inside, but they just can't begin to convey the power of this place.

And here I am being in awe of the
geometric perfection in this building.

I really liked this picture of the oculus and the circle of light coming through it being distorted on the wall of the dome.











I heard some people reading a guide book and it said that it was an amazing experience to be in the building when it rained since the top was completely open. I really wished it would have rained, but I at least found the original drains in the marble floor so I could imagine what it would have been like.


So that's pretty much it for Rome. On Friday morning I hopped on a train and went to Florence. and at the same time, Katie was flying out of Robin Hood Airport just outside of York where she was visiting a friend of her mom's. She landed in Pisa a took a train to Florence to arrive just an hour after me. I got in at 1:00pm and went to get the keys to the apartment we were staying in, and then went back to meet her at the train station. It's always a little tricky booking places online, but the apartment was amazing! It was really big and right next to the Doumo. Since there wasn't quite as much stuff to see as there was in Rome, we decided to just take it easy and stroll around fairly randomly. There were tons of tourists in the main areas, which served to reinforce my preference for traveling in the off season. I'm really glad that I've done a lot of that so far. Since I was being less touristy now, I also ended up taking a lot fewer pictures. I did get some really nice ones over the city at sunset though.



That big dome is the Duomo, which actually comes from the word for "house," meaning that as a welcoming building of God, everyone can consider it their home.

This is the Ponte Vechio (old bridge) at sunset. It is the only bridge to survive bombing in WWII and is now famous for it's gold shops. I saw some of the gaudiest stuff I've ever seen on this bridge. It's a shame I'm not rich or I would have brought some home.

We also went to the science museum which was really really awesome, especially considering that the entire renaissance pretty much happened in Florence. So many amazing things to see. There were different measuring devices, lots of astrology stuff, a room full of telescopes including Galileo's original two, and then some static electricity machines and a bunch of didactic things to show properties of motion. Another room was full of globes of the earth and the stars, and then there was stuff on medical discoveries and tools. Pretty astounding how people from 300 years ago can make me feel so stupid.

I wasn't supposed to take pictures in the museum, but this thing was way too impressive for me to not to capture it. I'll let you puzzle out what's going on. It's hard to tell in the picture, but I trust in your abilities.

I've also just realized that you haven't seen a picture of Katie yet, so here's my classic self-taken "aw, aren't we cute" photo.

After 2 days in Florence (and 4 servings of Gelati later) we grabbed an early train up to Venice. I sadly am running out of time to finish this post, so I think I'm going to have to leave Venice and general end-of-year thoughts till next time. The reason I'm running out of time is because tomorrow morning at 5:30am Katie and I are grabbing a taxi-train-bus-train-ferry to Belfast for the weekend! It should be fun, but I've still got to get ready and do some study prep. I'm glad I'll manage to get to Ireland before leaving. It would be a shame not too since it's so close.

That's it for now! I've got 3 exams next Wednesday and Thursday, so I probably won't get to blog again till after that, but you can count on another one then.

I love you all and can't wait to see you!

Rome - check

Well, I think I've seen it all. I got here less than 48 hours ago, and I think I have a pretty good grasp of Rome. And I've got the sunburn and sore feet/legs to prove it. I'll have to take some pictures of the burn later, it's pretty impressive, but hopefully not too painful. Sleep will be the test.

Speaking of pictures, I'm sad to say that I can't get any online from here, so that'll just have to wait till I get home. And also speaking of pictures, I've got about 450 already!!!! Holy moly! I may have to go through them and purge some, and I'm actually getting worried about running out of space on my 1Gb card! I never thought that would happen.

Without being able to post pictures, I don't think I'll tell you too much about what I saw/did in the last couple days, otherwise I'll just be repeating myself when I post with pics. Let me just say that I think the Parthenon, the Colosseum, and the Keyhole were my highlights so far. We'll see what Florence or Venice have in the way of competition.

As my time in Rome comes to a close, I'm happy to say that I've got a relaxed evening planned. I'm going to dinner with some people I met at the hostel and their Italian friend, and then probably come back and read and listen to music and get bed early so that I can get up early to get my train to Florence! I'll get there around 1pm, and Katie should arrive at 2pm, which will be awesome! It's been fun here on my own, but I'll be glad to have some company.

This is probably the last time I'll be able to post before getting back to Stirling on Tuesday, so I'll just end with a big "I love you all."

Northern Italy, here I come!

Blogspot knows I'm in Italy

Which is why this page looks all funny with a different language and everything!

I just arrived here in Rome about an hour ago, and wandered my way over to my hostel (which is surprisingly nice!). Unfortunately, my arriving around 8:30pm meant that everything was closing and it was just getting dark, so I haven't had anything to eat besides a bag of crisps. I mean, chips. (Britain is confusing with those words.) Luckily I have 3 cliff bars left from what mom gave me for my flight over here and what they left me after their visit in Jan. I try to save them for traveling days and I haven't done much in a while.

So, for tonight I'm just going to go take a shower and look through all of my guides and information that I printed off and make a plan for tomorrow. I think I'll get up early, have some free breakfast, and head over to the Vatican and try to beat the crowds!

I don't know if the computers here will let me handle pictures from my camera, but if so I'll try to get some up tomorrow and make you all super jealous!

I love you all, and am excited to see you soon!