utadæsjælåpplevelse: kelsey i norge 09-10: Much Like Napoleon...

...we recently conquered Europe, before the volcano conquered us.

It was an adventure, to say the least...we (Anjuli, Warren, myself) were all on Easter break before we left for the trip, so planning=very little. We basically just put on our backpacks and headed out. But...that's the best way to do it, right?.....

First stop: Bologna, Italy. This trip was planned around Ryanair's cheap tickets, so our destinations were perhaps a bit random, but we got each ticket for around 8 Euros, so it was totally worth it! There was actually some method to this madness as well. Anjuli's friend Julia is studying in Bologna this year, so we had a contact there. Her friend Alexandra even came to get us at the train station when we arrived late that night! Very nice :)

While we were in Italy we took an overnight trip to Venice. AWESOME. We stayed in a hostel, made a super cool Australian friend, and wandered around the canals. Fantastic. We were in Bologna for the rest of the time, which is a beautiful city, so I was perfectly content with that.

Next: flight to Bratislava, Slovakia, followed by an hour bus ride to Vienna, Austria. Warren and Anjuli have a mutual friend who is studying there this semester, Sylvia. She met us at the bus station and we stayed in her dorm for a couple nights. It was really fun to stay there! We met some other cool students and were able to cook all of our own meals. There was even a bar, right in the dorms...! Haha. Crazy. Vienna itself was a really, really cool city. Unfortunately it rained practically the whole time we were there...I would love to go back someday when the weather is better!

Stop number three: Dusseldorf, Germany. Sylvia studied in that area for a year when she was in high school, so she tagged along with us. Nice to have a German speaker with us, not to mention someone who was familiar with the area. While we were waiting for our flight, however, we noticed a lot of people standing around, and saw that all the London flights were cancelled. This seemed strange, but we didn't think too much about it.

That night, checked into our hostel in Cologne, we saw the volcano on the news. Uh oh, we thought. But we had three days before we were going home...that was enough for things to get under control, right?

We had a really nice time in Cologne...met some awesome German students and made some friends. That was definitely the highlight...a BBQ outside of some student housing in Cologne, hanging out and talking to the students. Very cool. The nice time ended, however, the next morning, when we got the news that our flight was cancelled. Very bummed out, we took a train to Bonn, where Sylvia had also studied before, and chilled out on a big lawn in front of the University there. Highlight. The sun was shining and it was a beautiful day (no sign of ash...bitter).

We decided to make a snap decision and try to get home as quickly as possible. At this point, the situation only seemed to be worsening and the trains and bus systems, we heard, were getting overwhelmed. It was a gamble, but it seemed to us that we better get ourselves out of there before the situation got any worse.

Ride to Hamburg from Cologne (four hours), bus from Hamburg to Copenhagen (five hours). Arrived in Copenhagen at 2:30 AM, where luckily I had managed to get ahold of my excellent friend Emma. She had beds all prepared for us in her apartment when we got there! SUCH A GOOD FRIEND. I woke up early that morning and was luckily able to chat with her before she went off to work. Being able to see Emma actually partly made all the chaos worth it for me! Imagine that.

We found a bus that left that morning for Oslo. It was something like 9 hours, with an hour stop sometime in there. We arrived in Oslo that evening around 7 pm. I have NEVER been so happy to be in Oslo...everything seemed so gloriously familiar. The train station! The opera house! YAY! We sat outside at the opera house and caught the sunset while we ate a subway sandwich dinner. Perfect.

Took the late train back to Bø and finally made it home at 1:10 AM. Sooooo nice to finally be home. Amazing how it took us about 20 hours of total traveling to get home, while a plane only would have taken 45 minutes. It is definitely a different feeling to travel on the ground...taking the ferry from Germany to Denmark, seeing the entire Swedish countryside...it puts the size of things into perspective :)

All in all, it was an awesome trip, and we saw and experienced a lot...but there were definitely things we wished we had done better...like, planning...oh well. It was an adventure. And character-building, as I kept reminding myself. Haha.