Saturday, my dad, my sister and I caught an early morning flight to Boston as part of a Thanksgiving break Boston and New York City sightseeing and college visiting trip. We landed, dropped our bags off at the hotel, and took a cab straight to Boston University. After that, we had the rest of the day and the next morning to explore Boston before heading to New York. Continue reading
Friday afternoon, I was sitting around with my friend and her sister. “Do you know what happened in Paris?” her sister said, “there’s a lot of stuff on Twitter with the hashtag #PrayForParis”. Naturally, my first instinct was to check the Twitter hashtag. The top tweet was from a news source saying there had been a terrorist attack on Paris. A few minutes later, my mom, an avid Francophile, sent me a text asking if I had “heard about Paris”. Soon we had the news turned on, our faces glued to the TV in horror as we found out that the attack had been by ISIS and that many were dead and more were being held Continue reading
Last weekend, my mom and my grandma and I drove down to Grinnell, Iowa to visit Grinnell college. Grinnell is a small town of around 9,000 people. I hoped it would be a little Gilmore Girls-esque, but I wasn’t expecting much more than that. It was a quaint little town with beautiful old houses and a “downtown” area that stretched for 3 or so blocks. For dinner, we ate at the Prairie Canary; someone had described it as the most “hip” restaurant in town, the type of restaurant you might find in the city. Compared to the rest of the town, it was pretty “hip”. The town was very quiet, very calm; not many people out and about. Sometimes it felt like we were in a weird time-warped bubble: victorian houses on paved streets and sidewalks, an old-fashioned movie theatre with Continue reading
Road trips can bring hours of boredom speckled with the occasional pretty view. The views on a road trip from Minneapolis to middle of nowhere Iowa consist of, you guessed it, farmland. Miles and miles of farmland and nothing but farmland.
This afternoon, my mom, my grandma and I drove a few hours down to Grinnell, Iowa, a small town just east of Des Moines, to visit Grinnell College. On the way, we stopped at an apple oarchard just outside of Northfeild to pick up some hot apple cider and deliciously fresh apple doughnuts. It was the perfect way to stock up for the trip.
Last weekend, Minnesota students were once again rewarded with MEA break. MEA is a long weekend given to Minnesota K-12 students every year while a state-wide teachers’ conference is being held. Each year, our church youth group spends MEA up at camp Castaway. We eat good food, stay up too late, sing and worship together, play silly games and laugh a lot. The camp is in up-north Minnesota, near Detroit Lakes, right in the middle of Minnesota lake country. It’s surrounded by three lakes that are lined with houses and summer cabins and thick forests, and this rural location left me in awe. Every time you stepped outside, you’d breathe in crisp, fresh air, and know that you were somewhere special. You’d see the trees beautifully flaunting reds, oranges and yellows around the camp. And at night, the sunset would cast stunning colors over the lakes, and Continue reading
Who says you need to travel far to be a tourist? I live just outside of Minneapolis (yes, in the suburbs, I know, how boring…), but we don’t make it deep into the city very often unless we’re catching a concert or going to an event. Yesterday, we decided to spend the day touring Minneapolis like we had never before set foot inside the city limits. So my mom, my younger sister and her friend and I headed out into the city to be tourists for the day. Of course, you can’t cover all of Minneapolis in one day, but we did as much as we could fit into one afternoon and night. Continue reading
For Minnesotans, like me, the North Shore refers to the stretch of land bordering Lake Superior in northern Minnesota. It’s one of my favorite areas in all of Minnesota. Lots of nature, but also home to Duluth, a beautiful city right on Lake Superior’s coast. For those who don’t know, Lake Superior is one of the Great Lakes. It’s so vast that it seems like an ocean sometimes; you can’t see straight across it, and instead the water reaches to the horizon. My family loves to travel up here to visit Duluth, or go skiing or camping.
Duluth is so perfect because it combines metropolitan life with nature and beautiful scenery of Lake Superior’s shore. Duluth is also major port city, so it has picturesque Continue reading
For the past few weeks, I’ve been writing about the time I spent in Spain over the summer of 2014. You may be bored of it by now, but Spain has been on my mind as I’ve been writing these post, and I have just a few more words to get out.
I had this preconceived idea that Spain was all fiestas and siestas, bull fights and flamenco dancing. But when I actually got there, it blew my mind. Although I did go to a fiesta or two, and I did take a few siestas, I found out that Spain is more than what I thought. It is a place of rich history and vibrant culture. Its architecture is old-Europe reminiscent; it flaunts remains of the Roman Empire and of medieval times. Its capital is home to world- Continue reading
I loved Madrid. Even though Natalia’s family lived in the suburbs, Madrid was only a bus ride away. We would take the bus in to go shopping, to visit museums, to visit Natalia’s mom at work, or just to explore the city. Madrid has this unique, buzzing energy. You see it in the architecture, in the way people fill the streets, and it fills you with the energy that the city emulates.
One day we took a gondola ride over the outskirts of Madrid. We had terrific views of the city, and even of the mountains in the background. For part of the ride, we passed over trees growing in desert-like land. I found it strange; any trace of nature in big cities always Continue reading
I spent a total of three weekends in Spain, and they were mostly spent going on outings outside of Madrid with Natalia and her family to discover other parts of Spain.
My first weekend there, we spent a day in Segovia, a historic town just north of Madrid. As it had once been part of the Roman empire, the city was filled with remains of the ancient empire. At the center of the city was an iconic Roman Aqueduct, complete with it’s own visitor’s center and gift shop that detailed Segovia’s Roman history. To add to it’s historical repertoire, Segovia is famous for the Alcázar de Segovia, as a stunning medieval Continue reading
Roaming Elsewhere 