Home JNow I'm back home, adjusting to life in English with no siesta.I have the greatest parents possible; they never discouraged me from doing anything (except for hitchhiking…) and I thank them for that. I had an amazing semester - I visited 10 countries and their capitols, learned to be a traveler and not a tourist, biked over 250 miles through a foreign country, hiked, surfed and hang-glided spontaneously, became an international swimmer, visited more mu...

Dublin was just as rainy as the coast, so we did some shopping for souvenirs (the one flight where we didn't have to worry about how much luggage we had was in just a couple days!) and then went to the Temple Bar area for dinner in a pub. The next day we took a city tour, through the Trinity College campus where the Book of Kells (the New Testament in Latin) is kept.We didn't get to see it, but we were very close.That afternoon we decided we were done being to...

We got into Cork in the late afternoon, and hopped on the bus into the city.Our bus driver even arranged a hostel for us, and dropped us off at the door after his other stops.That night we wandered around Cork, and in and out of a couple pubs with live music. It was pretty rainy, but the weather cleared up over night and we had a beautiful morning at Blarney Castle.We both kissed the Blarney Stone, not that either of really need extra aptitude with flattery or...

London!After an hr long train ride into the city from the airport we found our hostel went out on the town.We did a little of our own sightseeing, found out that the famed "London Bridge" is actually called the "Tower Bridge" but from the London Bridge we got some good pictures of the Tower Bridge.We spent most of the afternoon hopping from one double-decker bus to another, being our own tour guides around the city. We ended up going on a J...

We got to the train station no problem and were in Amsterdam by noon. The first thing I noticed, besides the smell of marijuana, was that they had more bikes than people! There were bikes everywhere—chained to bridges, trees, other bikes—it was awesome. We wandered through the streets that morning, found our hostel and then went back to wandering. We didn't go to the red light district real late, but it was late enough. Everything you hear about the Re...