Chi town

Hey y'all,

On Friday, I accepted an offer to attend the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy. I'm super excited to pursue my master's there for the next two years. I was deciding between an MA in Public Policy from Chicago and an MA in International Affairs from George Washington, but I finally made a decision and went with Chicago.

I'm TERRIFIED about freezing to death, but oh well. I have loved living in big cities and am very excited for this big move.


On a possibly even more exciting note, I just signed up to run the Bank of America Chicago Marathon with the American Cancer Society on October 13, 2013. I'm running in memory of my cousin Ann Mewborn and my grandmother Edna Black. This is the first race I've ever run with a charity, and I'm really excited to be running for someone other than myself. I set my fundraising goal at $1200 and I would love to even surpass that goal.

Here's the link to my fundraising page.

$1200 is an awfully lofty goal, but I have over 6 months and I really think I can do it. I hope you'll help me!

Luv,
Sarah

Honfleur and Etretat

Hey y'all,

So Sunday morning we woke up and met up with the tour group at 8:30, which actually felt like 7:30 for us, because France JUST NOW had daylight savings time. Too wild. Way too tardy for the party. Poor Stephen and Boots - they had to go through spring daylight savings time twice. What a nightmare.

Anyways, we met the group and headed towards Honfleur. 

I adored Honfleur. It was a cute little port town. We got there about 9:30 am and our first priority was to find something to eat, seeing as we hadn't eaten breakfast. 

This was my view from breakfast. The ambiance was incroyable. Loved my croissant and petit café crème. I think I've asked this before - Do I have to leave? 

The old port at Honfleur was so so pretty. There were tons of sailboats and it's just a gorgeous area. 

One really cool thing about Honfleur is that it has a church that is made completely from wood. We stopped in for a quick peek and they were having an Easter service. The place was PACKED. 

Fun fact. Samuel de Champlain, the explorer who discovered Acadia and Canada for France, left from Honfleur. So wild. 

Our next stop was about an hour away and it was a little town called Etretat. Etretat is known for its cliffs, which just so happened to be painted by Monet. 

Here are a couple of Monet's paintings on the falaises (cliffs) of Etretat. There's about a million, so you can google it if you so please. 

There were cliffs on each side of the beach and you could hike up to the top of both, which was really fun. At the top of the cliff on the right, there was a small little chapel, which made for a pretty picture. You can see the other cliff off in the distance. 

Stephen and I both said that this reminded us of the cliffs in Dover, England that we visited with our family about 6-7 years ago.

It was VERY windy. 

We left Etretat and made it back to Lille about 8:45pm. Pretty painless.

It's been a lot of fun hanging with these two jokers. They're heading to London tomorrow and I wish I could go with them, but I've got to work. Womp womp womp.

The double Ds arrive in 2 days. Holla.

Luv,

Sarah 

Mont Saint Michel

hey y'all,

So Saturday morning, we took a bus trip to Mont Saint Michel. It's in Normandy, and the bus ride was gorgeous. We've been so lucky that we've had awesome weather for the last week. It's been cold, but absolutely no rain. Here's where Mont Saint Michel is on a map. It's really far from Lille, so it took us about 6 hours on a bus. OOF.

The ride was well worth it though. Mont Saint Michel is pretty incredible. It's a really old abbey that was commissioned in the 8th or 9th century. It's an incredible labyrinth of a building, but what is really cool about it is how it's on an island and just sort of sticks out in the middle of Normandy. The picture explains it a little better. This is the view from the parking lot.

Next to the Eiffel Tower, this is one of the most widely recognized French landmarks/monuments. You can find a picture of it in approximately every single French textbook out there. 

We had a great time on our visit. At the bottom of the picture above, you can see some buildings that are separate from the abbey. In order to get up to the abbey, you spiral up the streets of this town with tourists shops and restaurants on every side. It's a really neat sight. We obvi stopped in for a petit café. 

The inside of the abbey is pretty vast and it was freezing cold, I assume from the tall ceilings and stone walls. There's a lot of places with construction going on, which makes sense seeing as it's over 1000 years old...

Here's a view of the top of the abbey.

Here's a view of the channel from the top of the abbey. 

Here's the cloister of the abbey.

After Mont Saint Michel, we started making our way back to Lille (Saturday night). We stayed in a hotel in Caen, and then stopped at two more seaside towns in Normandy, which I'll save for the next post.

Luv,

Sarah 

Happy Easter!

Hey y'all,

Yesterday we took a bus trip from Lille to almost as far west france as you can go and went to Mont Saint Michel. Today we're going back to Lille by way of Honfleur and Etretat. Here's a picture of our breakfast this morning at the Honfleur Port. Incredible ambiance.

I'm updating from my phone so I can't write tons and tons. Will post more pictures soon!

Luv,
Sarah

Stephen and Boots

Hey y'all,

Stephen and Boots arrived yesterday and Emily and I have been showing them around. Last night we took them to our Thursday night dive. Stephen is acclimating well.

Luv,
Sarah

"Arbeit Macht Frei"

Hey y'all,

So last Thursday we took a day trip from Krakow to Auschwitz. The bus ride took about an hour and 15 minutes, so it wasn't bad at all. In my typical nature...I slept 95% of the way. Fun fact, Auschwitz is actually the German name for the Polish town Oświęcim.

Anyways, Auschwitz is made of up three camps. Auschwitz 1, 2 (Birkenau), and 3. Most visits only go to 1 and 2. Auschwitz 1 is home to this infamous sign.

Arbeit Macht Frei - Work will set you free

-Constructed by people in the labor camp

It's hard to describe the feeling I had when walking through Auschwitz. I've always enjoyed history - especially 20th century history - and so it was really neat to see this in person. It's one thing to read about it in history books, watch Schindler's list, read Elie Wiesel's Night, etc - but it's a completely different experience to actually be there, see where these people lived (and died) and walk where these people walked. Insane. 

It was tough to walk around and hear the stories and the statistics and all of that - it was one bad thing after another. It was really tough/heavy stuff to sit and listen to. To top it off, it was rainy and about 30 degrees the whole time. 

Here are a few shots from Auschwitz 1. Auschwitz 1 mainly consisted of the barracks where the prisoners lived. Each separate building had an exhibit on various aspects of the camps. 

These are cans of nitrous acid (I believe, although don't hold me to it) - that were used in the gas chambers. 

Auschwitz 1 had a gas chamber that you could walk into, which was interesting, although it was filled with the overwhelming feeling of death. 

We then took a quick 5 minute shuttle ride over to Auschwitz 2- normally referred to as Birkenau. Birkenau actually used to be a town, but was completely destroyed so the Nazis could use this as a concentration/extermination camp. Wild. 

Birkenau was convenient (for the Nazis) because the train tracks went straight through the gate and into the camp - aka it made transportation of the Jews that much easier. 

The building in the middle is the main entrance. 

There were three gas chambers at Birkenau - 2 were destroyed by the Nazis after the victory of the Allied Forces in 1944. The other gas chamber was destroyed by Jews who were living in the camp, which I found pretty interesting. This happened a few months before the Allied forces won, as the Jews were able to sneak the things they needed to make explosives into the camp (whatever that might be, I'm not a scientist...), seeing as most of them worked outside of the actual camp. In response to this rebellion, the next day, the Nazis executed over 200 Jews. 

Here's one of the typical train cars that would carry hundreds of Jews.

View of part of the camp

Watch tower

Barbed wire fences

Here's a picture of one of the gas chambers that was blown up by the Nazis. Really wild. 

Here's the wild thing about the gas chambers. The Nazis had no issues gassing the people, as in, they did their research and they knew how to do it quickly, efficiently, and very inexpensively. Apparently, there problem was with figuring out how to dispose of all of the bodies. It was either mass graves or cremation. There are still places in the camp where you can see ashes from the bodies. Out of control. 

Here's a picture of where people would sleep.

I can't even imagine.

Needless to say, it was an extremely exhausting day to see all of that and to just take everything in, but it's a place that I've wanted to visit for a very long time, so I was glad to be able to go. I had just visited the Anne Frank House with my parents, so it was interesting to see this as well. 

Luv,

Sarah 

Kraków

Hey y'all,

One of my friends here had some time off and we decided to take a random trip. Destination: Krakow, Poland. Why? It seemed like a cool city. Plus, it's super super cheap. From Tuesday to Sunday (lodging included), our trip cost 150 euro each. Yeah. That's cheap. And, it's actually a place I've always wanted to go. Y'all know that I've got a gypsy soul to blame and I was born for leaving, so I was obviously down for this adventure.

I'm going to preface this by a joke that my big bro Stephen sent me before I went to Poland.

A Polack goes to get his eyes tested. The bottom line of the eye-test chart read C Z Y N A S Q H T M. The optometrist asked, "Can you read the bottom line?" The Polack replied, "Read it? I know the guy!"

I die. I die.

We arrived in Poland and were a big scared...we caught a bus from the airport to the train station in the "center of the city". However, when we arrived, no one really spoke English and thus no one could tell us where we were. It was about 9pm and completely dark and it was just rough! It was actually very frightening. We thought about just walking and trying to somehow find a road that was on our map in our guidebook but then we were like, mmmm betta not. We bit the bullet and caught a taxi - only cost us about 4 euros. Loved Poland already.

The next day with toured around the city. It's a neat town with a really pretty 'old  city', so that was cool. Here's the main square:

That's the church of Saint Mary, I believe. 

The interior of the church was GORGEOUS. It was so bright and colorful. I loved it. It was a refreshing change from the French gothic cathedrals that lack color. 

Wednesday was a beautiful day, but it was coooooold. Also, the Poles are super accommodating for vegetarians. Wasn't expecting that. 

We spent most of the day walking around in the cold, but I enjoyed it. 

The old part of the city is neat because there's a wall that goes all the way around it and there's a big gate into the city.

The city actually reminded me a lot of Prague (they even had someone play a trumpet from the top of the church every hour on the hour. loved it). Those Eastern European countries.

One time we ate this whole pizza. No shame, y'all. No shame.

Oh slurp.

The beautiful thing about Poland is that everything is so so cheap. Our most expensive meal which was a really nice traditional Polish meal was about 16 euros total. 4PLN = 1 euro. Now that's an exchange rate I could get used to. 

On Thursday, we went on a tour to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. I'll write a whole post on that later. I will say though that it was incredible. 

Friday we walked around some more and toured the Jewish quarter. Oh by the way, it snowed about 6 inches on Friday. Woof. It was very pretty, but so so cold. The snow soaked through the one pair of boots that I took with me, and I'm not going to lie - I'm not quite sure how I still have toes. No joke. The Jewish Quarter was alright, I suppose. We were going to go into some of the synagogues...but you had to pay...to enter a Jewish place of worship. Insert joke here. 

Here are a few shots of Krakow in the snow. 

This is the church of Saints Peter and Paul. There are statues of each of the 12 disciples, but I couldn't fit them all in there. Sorry about that, Bartholomew. 

Similar to Prague, there's a castle in Krakow. It wasn't as big and as pretty as Prague's, but it was neat, nonetheless. It's called Wawel Castle. 

Anyways, that's all about Poland for now. My next post will be about Auschwitz! 

Also, fyi, Stephen and Boots have arrived in Europe. And the double Ds arrive in 8 days. Get hype, folks.

Last thing: a 4 year old told me I was belle et charmante today. Can I stay here forever?

Luv,

Sarah 

3/26/13

#unitedformarriage