Ok I promise I haven't forgotten about this blog...

...but I really have had no time! Here are some pictures to make up for it, I'll catch up when I can!

Pompeii

Vatican City's art collection

Raphael's portrait of Michaelangelo in the School of Athens

A famous fountain in Rome...I forget the name (starts with a T)

Florence at night

Famous bridge in Florence, all of the gold and silver shops are still there

A big craze in Italy as well as France. It's supposed to symbolize
your love, like carving your names into a tree

Cinque Terre

Venice

The End (+ Italy)

Well it's over. I'm so sad. If you are thinking about going on a study abroad all I can say is do it!!! It has been one of the best experiences of my life, and I am so glad that I had the chance to go. I made some wonderful friends and saw some pretty spectacular sights (and my french got a lot better). It was amazing! Here's the recap of the last couple days:

At first I thought Geneva was going to be kind of lame. I mean there isn't really that much to see touristy-wise, and while it's really pretty and very very clean (especially compared to Paris) it's so dang expensive!! The first night we got there everything was closed so we ended up grabbing some McDo for  dinner (something I said I'd never do, but when you are starving and there are no other options it's pretty tasty). Well a happy meal + McFlurry = 11,60 swiss francs = a little more than that in dollars. Talk about pricey! We ended up getting pretty creative, most days our meals looked like this:

• delicious paid-for (that's the important part) hotel breakfast of swiss muesli, yogurt, an apple and hot chocolate
• a piece of bread, cheese, nutella and a yogurt taken from breakfast for lunch (sometimes an apple)
• waiting until we absolutely had to buy food for dinner and buying the cheapest thing we could find, which often was McDo. Go figure.

haha the joys of being a student. But really, travelling as a student is the best. You get discounts a lot of places and you can plan your own schedule...take a nap whenever you feel like it. So besides the expensive part, Geneva ended up being really fun. We went around the whole city and saw the few sights like the flower clock, the cathedral, the jet d'eau, and went to a cool Reformation museum. But my favorite part was definitely jumping off platforms into Lake Geneva. It was soooo much fun! And a very nice break from walking and museums. It was really nice to just hang out and spend a little more time with my friends before we all left.

View from the train

An old catholic cathedral taken over by the Protestants during
the Reformation, with a neo-classical facade added

At the top of the cathedral

Group fondue night! It actually kind of made us sick because of all the
cheese, but it was fun to try it 

Swimming!

Well sorry this is short but it's late and I have to get up absurdly early tomorrow to catch a train to Pompeii (I can't believe I just typed that!). Yesterday my family flew into Geneva and I gave them a tour of the city-it was cool to know it well enough in only 3 days to act as a tour guide! Then I said goodbye to everybody and we caught a flight to Rome. Today we visited the Forum, Colosseum and Pantheon--they are pretty amazing. I'll blog more about that later but here's a teaser:

The walls in the center are the underground passages that were under the stage

The outside of the Colosseum

Pantheon! It used to have stairs in front but they are now 25 ft underground
because the city has risen so much over 2000 years. Crazy. 

Well goodnight! I hope Pompeii lives up to its reputation, I've been wanting to see it since I was probably 5. We'll see!

I love trains!

I'm officially in Switzerland! The train ride from Lyon was gorgeous, all sweeping hillsides and so many trees! I've missed trees being in the city so much. I mean they have trees in cities, but not like this:

view from the train

view from our hotel room

Tomorrow we are going to do our walk and explore Geneva! I like it so far, it's just as clean and beautiful as everyone says (except the un-free wi-fi is pretty lame. And food is ridiculously expensive)

So our last day in France was yesterday, it was kind of sad. But it was a really fun day. We had to do our Lyon walk and explore the city so we just made a day of it and stopped whenever. We saw the two rivers, Le Rhone and La Saone, the Hotel de Ville, Opera and a really cool fountain designed by the same guy who did the Statue of Liberty. It has four horses with steam coming out of their noses representing the four rivers of France. 

There was a huge professional petanque game going on

We had sushi for lunch! It was such a nice change from bread and cheese

A statue representing Le Rhone and La Saone as humans-an old man and young woman

Le Rhone

Me and Amy at the fountain with our accidentally-matching shirts

Rachel, me and Tony

We found this empty niche missing its statue and had fun taking pictures

We finished off the day with (can you guess?) bread, cheese and ham for dinner (plus some fruit). It's cheap (an entire baguette is 71 centimes) and filling and on every corner. We added some grape juice as our "wine" and ate down by the river to celebrate our last night in France haha. It ended up being really fun, and was a great goodbye to France. Hopefully Switzerland's outdoor stuff is as good as everyone says.

P.S. I get to see my family in 3 days!

Lyon: best city yet!

I. LOVE. LYON. It's awesome. So quaint and cleaner than Paris (especially the metro) and the people are so much nicer! Some guy just came up to our group in the square yesterday and explained that he works at one of the museums and that students get in for free so he would love to have us. That would NEVER happen in Paris. Even though we did get in for free a lot with our art cards they seemed kind of annoyed that we were cheating the system or something. (Of course there were some really nice people too). But it really does seem like there's a papable difference in the air of Lyon. And the architecture is really different too, it's much more Italianate than in Paris.

A Renaissance courtyard, they are all over Vieux Lyon

La Tour Rose, one of the most famous in Lyon

So Lyon. After saying goodbye to Claude, we headed to Gare de Lyon in Paris and hopped on a 2-and-a-half hour train to Lyon. I love trains, they are soooo much better than airplanes here. Although the whole dragging-the-huge-suitcase-around-the-metro thing wasn't so fun. I'm pretty sure it weighs more than half of me, at one point some old man felt sorry for me and carried it up the rest of the way. My arms and shoulders are totally sore, especially after all the staircases and then the gravel driveway to the hotel. But it was all worth it, cause we had dinner at a traditional Lyonnaise restaurant last night and it was amazing!

It's called Les Ventres Jaunes "The Yellow Bellies"
We sat at those yellow tables

The appetizer: millefeuilles aux legumes

Entree: Saucisson de Lyon

Dessert: Ile Flottante. Sooooo good. It's a meringue drizzled with caramel
on top of crème anglaise. It was the best thing ever.

Today was super cool and also very long. After a breakfast of 3 different kinds of bread, hot chocolate and yogurt (the only things at the hotel breakfast) we headed out to see Vieux Lyon, the old Renaissance quarter of the city, with our professor. Hudson specializes in the Renaissance so he knows Lyon really well, it's his favorite city. So that was awesome, he knew where all of the courtyards and passageways were. Here's some examples:

This is a Renaissance well, the rich families had them
inside their own private courtyards

Le Maison Henri IV

The home of a really famous architect from the Renaissance
he designed it, but his name escapes me

The bright colors are the same as the originals

After our tour of Vieux Lyon, we headed over to 2 museums about the early printing industry-Lyon (along with Geneva) was a major printing city in the 1500s. It was super interesting!!

one of the first printing moulds, before the printing press
It was hand-painted to create playing cards (see below)

The cards! 

our tour guide showing us the trays for printing-he designs fonts for his career

the type

Showing us how it works on an authentic press from the 1500s

Our second tour guide demonstrating on a reproduction-she's
a lithographer and artist

I learned some super interesting facts like:

• The reason we call letters "uppercase" and "lowercase" in English is because the uppercase letters were in the upper case, or top part of the drawer, while little letters were in the lower case. 
• "Mind your p's and q's" comes from the fact that a "p" letter was a p, q, b & d just by switching the direction.
• the typesetters were nicknamed "singes" or monkeys, because they were on the top floor of the house and had to be quick with their hands
• the men who worked the presses were called "ours" or bears because they had to be super strong and were usually bad-tempered
• French printers didn't originally have a spot for the letters w, j or u because in Middle French there's no w, j is an i and u is a v
• the ink ball was called something "du chien" because they had to use dog skin for the leather so that the ink wouldn't soak in (because dogs don't sweat, so there's no pores)
• the expression in French for kids who do the same job as their parents comes from printing and has to do with the ink paddle things (I forget what they are called) because their children would help out
• Gutenberg invented moveable type, not the printing press
• The Chinese did invent printing first, but they used wood and not metal so it wasn't very efficient
• italic font was invented by the same guy who invented the pocket-size book because he needed to fit more letters on a page

We also got to see some pretty cool originals

A page from one of Gutenberg's original bibles from 1450

An original "placard" from the Placards Affair. The protestants posted these all over the city and even one on the king's bedroom protesting Catholicism. It resulted in François Ier cracking down on Protestants and the end of the printing trade in Lyon because they all had to move to Geneva. It's one of only 10 originals in the world and the only one available to the public

That museum was definitely one of my favorites of the whole trip if you can't tell ;)
After the museum we headed back to the hotel and crashed for a 2 hour nap-that was heavenly. Then we grabbed dinner and were going to meet the rest of the group at the bottom of the huge hill to climb up and see the basilica at the top. However, dinner took forever and then we almost got stuck on the metro because a bunch of drunk gypsies were blocking the entrance (they were soooo wasted and had a stroller full of beer).  And then we thought we lost Lacey (but we didn't). Anyways by the time we actually made it to the metro stop we just decided to take the Funicular up in hopes of catching up to everyone else. Luckily we did end up finding them, and took a bunch of fun pictures-the view was beautiful!

the sky turned out really cool

me and Rachel!

the basilica

goofing off

Caleb messing around with my camera

Gustav Eiffel built this tower too, but it's not as famous. The guards saw me taking a picture of it and said "En faite, ce n'est pas la Tour Eiffel..." (Actually that's not the Eiffel Tower...) haha. I laughed and said "je sais" (I know) but I really should have played along and "Non! Vraiment?" haha

The rest of the night only got more hilarious, I haven't laughed so hard in a really long time. Basically it went from:

• learning the Melbourne shuffle outside of the Basilica
• Erin imitating an old lady and E.T.
• the entire group playing the animal game (including Dr Hudson. that was the best part, he's hilarious. That and Caleb forgetting Erin's name...if you want to see a video, Rachel posted at the bottom of her post here)
• people jumping out at each other in the forest on the way down
• us marching in a single file line through the metro following Hudson (it was his idea) and trying not to crack up at people's reactions......

Yeah it pretty much gets more and more ridiculous. It was sooo funny. I don't know what it is about Lyon and nighttime but both nights we've all been super hyper. And this picture basically sums it up:

I love Lyon!