Vienna, Austria Part 4: Going Home

This was our last math class at the Connection. These students are from Syria and Afghanistan are good kids and have bright futures ahead of them. They are refugees from injustice and terror and the fact that they come to the Connection to learn and develop skills necessary to succeed in their new lives in Vienna!

Hashem was my best student. He did every single homework assignment and always wanted to go above and beyond. He made incredible progress!

Our last Christmas market was the one on Stephansplatz next to St. Stephen's Cathedral. It is just a short walk from the Austro-American institute and we had a soup bread bowl for lunch.

I never included this in any blog posts, but this is the morning metro paper distributed the morning of the United States election results. Since the paper needed to be printed and distributed before the results were in, the center fold had one half written as though Hillary Clinton had won and the other half written as though Donald Trump had won with a note saying "If Trump won, read here, If Clinton won, read here."

Just out for Sushi with the Healeys and Hendersons. Carli had to work with Cindy's girls.

One of our final meals in Vienna.

Carli's Last Goodbye

No more Croissants...

Went to de-register ourselves with the City...

Good old Handelskai Metro stop meant home for the semester.

Last dinner with the incredible Stiles. They were a great host family who were so patient with all of our comings and goings! And they have a super cute daughter!

Traveling home in our matching University of Vienna sweatshirts. 

I actually really love long inter-continental flights.

CANADA! We flew through Toronto on our way to Minneapolis and it was awesome. We even got some Maple syrup in the airport.

We made it to Chicago! Then we were supposed to catch a flight to Minneapolis and our flight got canceled because of a snowstorm. Thankfully, Dad had been keeping an eye on our flight status and booked us a hotel for the night and a flight out the next morning.

We finally made it and were met by these cuties at the airport. They were just excited to see Carli again. 

4 months. 65 inter-city train rides. 21 countries and 14 flights for Carli. 19 countries and 11 flights for Benjamin. This semester was definitely a success.

Zermatt, Switzerland

Zermatt, Rottenschwil & Zürich, Switzerland: 6-8 December 2016

I had my final exams on Tuesday the 6th, and we didn't fly back to the states until Saturday the 10th, so we had just enough time to fit in one more train trip before heading home. Destination: The Matterhorn!

Carli's face after waking up in Zürich as our last night train ride came to an end!

From Zürich we continued onto Bern, then Interlaken, and then boarded the Matterhorn Express to bring us to Zermatt.

We could not have asked for better weather! The sky was clear and blue. 

The best hot chocolate in the world.

And a best friend to drink it with!

If we weren't already married, I would have proposed to Carli in this spot!

We made our way back to Zürich in the evening and hit up two of the Christmas markets there. This one is right inside of the main train station.

We spent the night in Rottenschwil with Ralph, Antonia and Guapa. Guapa is my favorite dog in the world!

Our arrival back to Vienna was bittersweet as we knew it was our last inter-city train ride together. At least we finished on a high note by riding this Austrian Railjet! We arrived back in Vienna with just over 24 hours left to pack our bags and catch our flight home.

Paris, France

Paris & The Palace of Versailles, France: 1-4 December 2016

Yes, I took this picture

Paris was our final weekend in Europe before coming back home to America! As you can see, we weren't really excited about the night trains any more. Ever since our trip to Berlin when our compartment was broken into and we were robbed, we haven't enjoyed them quite as much. 

Our trains on the way to Paris went like this. Night train from Vienna to Frankfurt and an ICE train from Frankfurt to Paris. This picture is in the German ICE train, Germany's fastest train.

Made it!

DAY 1: Paris

The first place we went was the Notre-Dame Cathedral.

The cathedral is beautiful, and it wasn't busy at all. One of the benefits of traveling in December I guess. 

The amount of detail in every aspect of the cathedral's structure is amazing.

We would have eaten at Cafe Benjamin if we could have afforded it. 

After breakfast, we were walking along the river near the Notre-Dame and we bought this painting from one of the green stands on the south side of the river where they sell art student's work. This painting is about 20" across and wasn't that expensive because they were just students!

We walked through the courtyard of the Louvre museum on our way to the hotel which was near the Arc de Triomphe. 

This is where we met our new Russian friend, Anzhelika. She saw me taking the next picture of Carli holding the pyramid and wanted us to take one of her doing the same as she was alone. I heard her accent and asked where she was from, and she is from St. Petersburg. She joined us in exploring the city until the evening when we went back to the Louvre. It was fun to speak Russian again and I was surprised how quickly it came back. It was perfect, because we could take pictures for her and she could take pictures for us!

Also on our way to the hotel was the Paris Christmas market. It was ginormous! At least a mile long on both sides of the street. It took us a while to make it past the market.

The Champs-Élysées was also on the way. I guess it's a famous street.

I feel like explaining how we got to the hotel is a lot like Dora the Explorer explains directions... This is the Arc de Triomphe. Our hotel was just a few hundred feet off to the right of this picture.

We dropped off our stuff at the hotel and caught a metro to the Eiffel Tower. It was the perfect time of day. We got there when the sun was still up and stayed until dark when the tower's lights came on. Here are a lot of Eiffel Tower pictures.

We decided not to go to the top of the tower. It was expensive and we still wanted to get to the Louvre. Friday nights are free entry for students and they stay open pretty late! 

The Louvre was pretty cool! We saw a lot of famous paintings, and art. Museums aren't really my favorite, but it was neat to be there. Some people say they could spend weeks on end in the Louvre, but my feet and I were pretty content with the few hours we had.

There wasn't even a line to see the Mona Lisa which was surprising! We could just walk right up to it!

Is this famous?

Carli had learned about a lot of the paintings in one of her classes and was excited to see them!

DAY 2: The Palace of Versailles 

There it is! We rode a train out to the palace and walked through a little city to get to it. 

Going inside the palace on a tour was pretty expensive and they only had a student discount for Europeans so we decided not to go in. We had already been inside of a few palaces in Vienna including the Schönbrunn. What we really wanted to see were the gardens which were free entry.

On our walk back through the little city of Versailles we stopped in a little shop and bought a baguette and some cheese. It was delicious! 

When we got back into Paris, we went right to the train station to reserve tickets for our train back to Frankfurt for later in the evening. We already had our night train reservations for Frankfurt to Vienna, but needed to get to Frankfurt. We had the rout all planned out and when we went to the ticket office, they told us that the train was sold out! What?! We had never had a train sell out! So we needed to figure out another way to get to Frankfurt. We ended up having to go north through Belgium and then over to Frankfurt, but we would have to leave Paris three hours earlier than we had anticipated in order to make it to Frankfurt on time. This was sad because instead of having a few more hours to enjoy in the city, we had to rush back to the hotel and get our bags and make way to the train station again to catch our train. Well, we made it. There was more security in the Paris train station than any other station we visited. Understandable, with all of the attacks that have been happening in Europe, and France especially. Paris was supposedly on high alert all weekend.

Our new rout took us through the Liège train station which is brand new. It is beautiful, and architectural, but it was so freezing cold! There was no protection from the wind at all. Even the lower level was cold. So, yes Liège has a cool looking train station, but I was not a fan.

This was probably the best thing that could have happened to us though. As soon as we pulled into the station we searched all around for a french fry place and we found one! As we were eating the fries with the andalouse sauce I wasn't sorry at all that we had to leave Paris early.

This is the couch in a little cafe in the Frankfurt train station that we have frequented a few times over the semester. Ever time we have gone through Frankfurt we've had a bit of a wait and ended up waiting here! We would buy some tea and croissants and sit here and watch movies while we waited.

Escalator etiquette that everyone in the world should be taught. Germany knows what's up.

We weren't about to let someone break into our compartment again! This pen probably saved our lives.

Thanks to the pen giving us a little peace of mind, even Carli was able to get some sleep! She slept right through breakfast.