August 23, 2010
London, England
Arrived at about 8am after a layover gone wrong in Dallas, walked around and explored the city, saw pretty much everything except for Buckingham Palace and Hyde Park, woke up the next day at 4am to fly to Bordeaux. I was obviously very tired when I arrived, but managed to take the tram to the city with a group of students before I conked out at about 5pm. I woke up in the middle of the night, suffering from serious jet lag. This was after my computer had crashed in Gatwick Airport so I didn't really know what time it was, plus last minute I had unpacked all my books to make my suitcase lighter. Don't really remember what I did but I managed to get back to sleep within a couple hours and wake up the next day for our noon orientation.
Late August/Early Sept
Don't remember the exact dates but the Centre de Californie took us on two excursions during our first couple trips. I'll add more later.
September 17-19, 2010
My first trip outside Bordeaux, three weeks into the year. Paris with the Octopus!!! (That would be the eight of us that really got along and hung out a lot, later made into OctoClaire when Claire started hanging out with us more. We're not clique-y at all....)
September 25, 2010
The next weekend I did a day trip with Kim, Claire, Nix, Kathy, and Tristan to St. Emilion, a small medieval town now famous for its wine. We went on a tour of the monolithic church, did a degustation at a cave where the owner was very excited to have Californians! We tried eight different wines and ended up taking a picture with him. Hung around and explored a little before taking the train back.
October 1-2, 2010
Trip to the coastal town of Biarritz, two hours from Bdx and half an hour from Spain. Such a beautiful place; I hope I will be back someday. We spent one day there, and the next in St Jean de Luz, another coastal town ten minutes away. Definitely could see the Spanish influence there. We (being my roommates Joanne and Kayla, along with Kim) spent the weekend basking in the sun and picnic-ing on the beach. Just in time for the end of the warm weather.
October 29-November 7, 2010
My first big one. We had a week off of school so everyone planned out trips all over Europe. I started out in Paris with two high school friends, Ali and Ainsley. Ali had won (on the Ellen Degeneres show) a super fancy hotel room at the Westin Paris, with a beautiful view overlooking the Jardin des Tuileries with Eiffel Tower to the right and the Louvre to the left. Still can't believe how lucky we were! I played tour guide and we went all over Paris, ate some good food, and really enjoyed ourselves.
From Paris I headed to Dublin, Ireland to spend a week on the green isle. Monday morning I flew and met up with Claire in the airport, since our flights arrived fairly close to one another. We checked into our hostel and found a pub, where I ate some soup (pretty much what I survived on that week). After, Claire went back to take a shower and I met up with Kim and Kayla, who were in Dublin at the same time. They went to eat before Claire met up with us again and we walked around the city, took a tour at Dublin Castle (which I had definitely already done before with the choir; it was like déjà vu!), and for dinner we went to a pub where we were supposed to meet for a literary pub crawl, but it turns out that it was off season so it wasn't happening. All the pub had was sandwiches, I guess because it was before dinner and they were a little fancier than a normal pub. That didn't fill us up so later we went to another pub, which had some really incredible mixed drinks. Kim and I shared a sampler plate. Getting hungry thinking about it! The next day, Tuesday/ my birthday, Claire and I went to the Guinness factory where I had my first pint (I think it was...hard to remember). We took a train after that to Killarney, but arrived a little too late for this small town and ended up eating Indian food for dinner, pretty good! The next day we walked around Killarney National Park, played with some dogs, and saw some incredible views. (like this)
From Killarney we took a bus to Galway. We arrived pretty late and we were tired so we skipped dinner in favor of sleep and got up the next morning for an Irish breakfast. That day (Thursday) we took a tour to the Cliffs of Moher and the surrounding area that was arranged through our hostel (which we paid a euro for!) with a friend from work who is studying in Galway this year, Shea.
