Hamilton College Admission Journals: Maeve Gately

At Last...

Fri, 27 May 2011 19:25:56 GMT

One could say I spent the majority of this past semester sitting on trains. There was the forty-minute commute to Reid Hall from my Parisian apartment every day, not to mention the countless back-and-forth trips I made to classes, museums, babysitting, and lunchtime rendez-vous with friends. I took a TGV (the high-speed trains that run across the entirety of France) with Kylie down to the Alps, took an German Bahn train from Berlin to Prague, boarded trams, the RER, a téléférique up a mountain and a funicular down Sacre Coeur. I became an expert in train travel, made special playlists on my iPod and learned to calculate exactly where to board at a specific station and where to sit for the best window-views.

On Saturday afternoon, I boarded one last train, one for which I had bought a ticket in October and for which I had planned ever since: the Amtrak Lake Shore limited from New York Penn Station to Utica. And then, after months of anticipation, I was home. I had known from the very beginning that I was coming back for Hamilton graduation no matter what. Even if it meant missing my last week in Paris, taking exams early, and saying goodbyes, I would be on a plane on May 21st, and sitting in the field house the morning of the 22nd. Some of my best friends were graduating, and I would not miss it for the world. As I wrote Nick in an email in February, “I will be there if I have to swim.”

And so, on Friday morning, I packed up my chambre Parisienne, took all of my postcards and calendar off of the walls, ate a final lunch with Marielle, hoisted my three suitcases, donned my Royal Wedding hat, and walked down Ménilmontant for the last time. The last week had been absolutely wonderful: the weather was perfect, my French finally stumble-free. I ate lunch with Lucia and cooked dinner with Anna, sat in front of the Eiffel tower at midnight with Kylie and Emilia, and ate sole meunière. Leaving Paris was bittersweet, as expected, but I knew it was not a final farewell, by any means. Marielle drove me to the airport, and we hugged in front of security, waving until I was past the checkpoint.

As my plane took off from CDG, I closed my eyes, sighed for one last time, and then smiled, like a giddy child. The next 25 hours were some of the longest, and most wonderful, of my entire life. I stayed overnight in a hostel in Heathrow in order to catch my 8 am flight, boarded the plane (from the sleek and futuristic terminal 5!), and, after 7 hours, touched down in JFK. I went through passport control and baggage claim, looking like a jetlagged fool as the American accents and humidity washed over me. I took the Airtrain to Jamaica in Queens, then the Long Island Railroad in to Manhattan, where I sat for 3 hours in a Starbucks, looking up at the skyscrapers, before my train left from Penn Station. A redhead with a multi-patterned dress, one hundred pounds of luggage, and a black-and-white bonnet, I have no doubt I looked utterly ridiculous. But, as usual, I hardly cared.

After a five hour train ride up the Hudson River Valley (which was sun-washed and breathtaking), I got into Utica at around 9, where Sharon picked me up from the train station, and drove me to campus. I got to Babbit, where I called Olivia, who ran downstairs to let me in, and hugged me so hard I nearly could not breathe. I went up to her room, where I met Catie, then Nick, Amanda, Michael, Ilse, Allison, Preetha and Mikayla. The next few hours were spent hugging, giving out presents, talking, laughing, being sassed and tickled, and generally in a state of blissful reunion. I had anticipated that night pretty much since the moment I left Hamilton, and had worried that, in the intervening time, my friends would have moved on, or been too busy the night before their own college graduations to deal with my return, and all of the energy it would entail. I tried to prepare myself for a group of preoccupied friends, for a campus that was different from the one I had left, for even the slightest of disappointments.

As always, I feared my expectations were too high. Keats said that the moment before an event, filled with anticipation and longing, is far better than the thing itself, that we anticipate far more than can ever be expected and, inevitably end up disappointed. Remarkably, for someone who has more excitement than most classes of first-graders on a sugar-high, I have never found this to be true. And on Saturday night, Sunday morning, and all through graduation until the moment I left campus, I could not have possibly wanted anything more than what I found. I laughed, I cried, I sat back on Olivia’s bed, prosecco in one hand and a box of macarons in another, and knew there was nowhere else in the world I would rather be. By eight pm on Sunday, I was physically and emotionally spent. I went back with my mother (who had come all the way up from Baltimore to pick me up!) to her hotel in Utica, intending to come back to campus to socialize for a few more hours, but fell instantly asleep until eight the next morning! I helped Michael pack up the Babbit kitchen, said a few tearful goodbyes, and got in my blue station wagon and drove back to Baltimore.

I am currently sitting in my kitchen, baking a batch of gluten-free fudge brownies, and basking in this feeling of home. Yes, I will miss France. Yes, there is a lot ahead of me to figure out. This summer, I will be in New York, working for a historical magazine, and living a block away from Nick and Emily, two of my best friends in the entire world. Life, at this moment, is nothing short of gleeful. So congratulations, class of 2011. I will miss you terribly, but have not a single doubt we will keep in touch. Au revoir, La Belle France. Thank you for a semester of food and laughter. Hello summer, Manhattan in the blistering heat; filled with expectation and (hopefully) discovery. And thank you to my wonderful, amazing friends, for looking out for me, putting up with my excessive energy, making me feel loved. Without you, I would be lost. Here’s to the future. To wild and ridiculous anticipation. May it always be unmeetable. And always, impossibly, surpassed.

To Food. To Friendship. And to France.

Tue, 17 May 2011 21:51:54 GMT

I should start out by saying that I am not Julie Powell. Despite my rather quirky and wonderfully food-filled semester in Paris, love of writing, and possible resemblance to Amy Adams, I do not fancy myself the protagonist of “Julie and Julia,” nor have I spent the last five months of my life in a mad attempt to recreate everything from the pages of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” That said, however, I must admit that Julia and I have been together for this entire adventure, pretty much from the very beginning.

My friend Lindsey lent me a copy of the legendary cook’s autobiography, “My Life in France,” right before I left, and I added it to the stack of French-themed books over my bed in my Parisian apartment (there were eight or nine, ranging from maps of Paris to from the Michelin guide to France to “A Woman’s Guide to Finding her Inner French Girl”). I began to read it by lantern after I had turned off my lights and climbed under my burgundy covers, and in those early, cold weeks, her glowing descriptions of sunny boulevards, smoky cafés, and that perfect, magical first Sole Meunière, made me smile, and push harder to make Paris feel like home.

As days wore into weeks, I began to find my stride, stopped falling off of trains, learned how to say “that works!” (ça marche!) and “but of course!” (mais bien sur!) in French, which remain to this day my most-used phrases. I learned which metro lines to take for classes, exactly which spots to stand on the platforms for the best transfers. I traded my purple wool sneakers for simple, black flats (though was still judged the other day by uniformed soldiers with machine guns, who smirked at my tevas on the metro), and stopped worrying about how I tended to mouth the words to songs on my iPod. I took notes in my previously-incomprehensible Sorbonne classes, made friends, started laughing again. And of course, I fell deeply and irretrievably in love with French food.

I have always been a “foodie” (even the word makes me smile), and spend far more money and time on what I eat than any normal person. When I first came to France, I feared gluten-free French eating would be tragically limited, but should not have been surprised to learn that, while the French do not really understand life without wheat, the gluten-free food they do produce is a hundred times better than what we have back home. I dove into the world of macarons with a fiendish intensity, began sampling every one I could find and comparing flavors and brands (contrary to popular belief, the best do not come from Ladurée or Pierre Hermé, but from Gerard Moulot on rue de la Seine, which makes a salted caramel flavor that will make you want to die on the spot). Kylie and I found a gluten-free crêperie in the Marais and made it our Sunday night destination (the waitstaff all know us by now as the two girls who need buckwheat dessert galettes!). Lucia, my food soulmate from Brown whom I met through my Medieval lit class, and I began meeting in between our two classes on Tuesdays to seek out the very best lunch spots in the 5th, and on other nights wandering from the 2nd to the 19th, sampling mojitos and cream of artichoke, laughing and stuffing ourselves as the sun set behind the boulevards.

I bought my very own copy of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” brought home artichokes, meat, raw stalks of rhubarb, and white asparagus, not having any idea what to do with them, and read Julia’s careful, occasionally sassy instructions as I tried to mimic the glories I had sampled in restaurants. Anna and I went to La Defense to get ingredients for chicken dishes with olives, onions, and wine. My kitchen filled with smoke and laughter. And all the while, golden beet season turned into that of white asparagus, and finally perfect, soft red strawberries, and somehow I began to grow up. It happened little by little, imperceptibly at first, and not without pain or embarrassment.

Last Sunday, I woke up at 9, put on my Royal-Wedding white-and-black dress and donned Marielle’s “le specialiste du tofu” canvas bag, and boarded the metro for the organic market in Raspail. This had been on my bucket list since the very beginning, and it was entirely worth the wait. I wandered down the long, colorful corridor over and over, picking up cups of thick melted chocolate and fresh fried potato cakes with fromage. I came home with a heavy bag and a rueful grin. I did not even question my decision to dress up for what was essentially a grocery run. It was quite simply French, and I loved that it felt right.

My mother, Rosemary, one of the most wonderful people on Earth and a fellow foodie, came last Tuesday to visit me, and we spent the most marvelous week together eating, laughing, and being crazy. She, Lucia, and I took a cooking class at Le Cordon Bleu, the French school Julia Child made famous, and as I bit into my perfectly roasted cod with tiny, minced ratatouille and grinned like a five-year-old, I could not help but feel it was the perfect ending to my food adventures in France. I am almost done now, have two exams, three classes, four days, and way too many sights to see left.

For my last dinner with Marielle on Thursday, she is making us Sole Meunière, as I have been obsessing over it since January, and the normal version has flour in it. This is so very wonderful, as I know she is not a huge cook, it is therefore a gesture of affection. I tried to cook her an authentic American meal earlier this semester. But I chose chicken fricassee, which was one of my mother’s specialties, and is, of course, French. I took this as a sign, and conceded her food culture would always be better than mine!

You will hear from me again before I go back; this is not quite goodbye yet. I still have to climb the Eiffel Tower at night, eat that last crème brulée à la pistache, take everything off of my walls, pack my life into suitcases, and say goodbyes. This feeling of finality is oddly familiar, but somehow this time it is not quite as sad. Some of that may have to do with the fact that I am going directly from France back to Hamilton for graduation, will be in on a 9 pm train Saturday night, and utterly overjoyed to see everyone again. But I think the fact that there is more sweet than bitter in this last week has more to do with me, with the fact I have learned goodbyes are not final, how to meld memories with hopes, how to find that perfect, soft macaron in heaps of croissants. Somehow, this time, I am ready.

This afternoon, over our last, fabulous Tuesday Lunch, Lucia looked up from her nougat crème brulée, raised her glass, smiled, and in two lines perfectly summed up the past five months of my life, and what I will take away once all of this is over. “Here’s to the three great F’s.” She declared, looking me straight in the eye like the French do when toasting. “To food. To friendship. And to France.”

Where there’s a Will…

Fri, 06 May 2011 08:17:51 GMT

In order to go to a Royal Wedding, one must have several crucial things. An invitation is not necessarily at the top of this list, but a willingness to get up at 5 am and stand outside of a church for six hours certainly is. You must also have some sort of tacky wedding memorabilia (preferably a plastic flag with a picture of the bride and groom), a paper periscope for peering over crowd heads, and something resembling champagne (even if it’s just sparkling apple juice for the kids watching).

But first and foremost, (and, in my humble opinion, of the utmost importance), you must wear a hat. And it must be fabulous. Such was my past weekend, which was spent in sunny and ecstatic London with five other friends from Hamilton. Crazy ideas are something with which I am a bit of an expert, but I never imagined this one would turn out as well as we had planned. In December, I was at a holiday party thrown by some friends on campus. We all discussed our going-abroad plans, and how we should try to meet up at some point in the semester, since a good portion of us would be in Europe. The wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton had just been announced, and I suggested we all go in April, to be there for it! Shockingly, everyone seemed willing, and Kelsey sent us an email in January confirming our hostel room and plane tickets. We were going to the Royal Wedding!!

Months went by and this spring date hung hazily in the near distance, close enough to be exciting, but not quite a reality. I went on my whirlwind spring break, found a hat in Prague, and came back to my life in Paris, which was delightfully warm, and just as I had left it. And so it was that on Thursday morning, I donned my hat, packed a bag full of gluten-free snacks and dresses, met Kylie at Gare du Nord to board the Eurostar (which goes under the English Channel to London and is pretty much the coolest train on the planet), and began our weekend of adventure. Even though our journey involved crossing borders and passport control, everyone else had a bit further to go. We met Caitlin, who has spent the past year in Dublin, Kelsey, who was in Italy for this semester, Lauren, from Scotland, and Rachel, from Spain. Everyone had flown or taken trains to meet up in our little, six-bunk hostel room on Cromwell road, and when we went to bed that night, the atmosphere was feverish.

The alarm went off the next morning at 5:30. We had decided that, if we were coming all the way to London for this crazy wedding idea, we might as well go all out. So we got dressed up (Lauren also wore a hat, though hers was a blue “fascinator”, which is like a chic, half-hat with netting that Kate Middleton loves to wear), boarded the Tube, and walked along crowded streets lined with Union Jacks to stand in front of Westminster Abbey. The next six hours were wonderful, chaotic, and incredibly surreal. We procured a “Blighty” periscope (in retrospect, Blighty was probably the name of the company that produced these, but from then on we continued to ask each other to “pass the Blighty” so we could see over the heads of those in front of us), and took turns ogling at the guests as they began to trickle in. We saw Elton John, Victoria and David Beckham (or at least, so did everyone but Kylie and I, who went exploring at the very moment the last two arrived and missed them!), and a whole slew of wonderfully dressed British socialites we did not know, but ooohed and ahhed at nonetheless.

Before I go any farther, I must pause for a moment, and dedicate a few gushing lines to my hat; it is simply too great not to recognize. I found it with the help of my friend Lucie, in a tiny, handmade hat shop in Prague, and instantly knew I had to have it. It is a black-and-white, wide brimmed bonnet with a jauntily-perched bow, and went perfectly with the black-and-white and dress I found in a French thrift store and wore along with it. It earned me several interviews, one in botched French with a local television station as I boarded the train, one with Yahoo news, and a third with Lauren for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in which we ended up featured! The women at immigration in Paris yelled at Kylie for not knowing where our hostel was, but applauded me with rueful grins and comments about how crazy I was to dress up. Hats, suffice it to say, are nothing short of magic.

A series of cars went by with tinted windows, but we knew from the applause and time schedule (which we had memorized by now) , that these must contain the royals. When the wedding itself started, we settled down on the cobblestones, legs tired, and ate lunch as we listened to the ceremony, which was broadcasted over loudspeakers along the entire parade route. We were amused at the thought that everyone else in the world (including our Hamilton friends back home, who got up at 5 to watch the ceremony on TV), could see the wedding, but we, almost 30 feet away, could not see a thing. Hearing it, however, turned out to be even more wonderful than being able to see it.

The couple exchanged their vows, and a deafening roar went up from the crowd. As the church bells began to ring, the wonderfully British commentator announced “we could hear that cheer from inside the church,” and we all cheered again. And as the lines of soldiers on horses processed by, followed by the royal carriages, filled with the newly-wedded William and Kate (whose dress was nothing short of magnificent), Prince Harry, looking ruddy and pleased, big-eared Charles and the despised Camilla, and finally the Queen, looking resplendent in yellow, I smiled, and stood on my toes, crushing the geranium bed beneath my feet to see the royals go by.

Out of everything that day: getting up at 5 am, drinking mimosas in front of Big Ben, making friends with wedding-crazed Brits, and seeing the Prince and Princess themselves, my favorite moment was something I could never have expected. I heard the words of that commentator and could not help but feel a part of the ceremony itself, as ridiculous as it may seem, and suddenly all of our crazy planning seemed not only sensible, but perfect. William and Kate had heard me, I realized, sitting on the cold cobblestones, eating cheddar and rice cakes in my ridiculous, wonderful hat. We would be a part of their wedding memory, just as they were a part of ours. And for a moment, I, too, felt royal.

Bring out the Lamb

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 13:56:46 GMT

It seems only fitting that my European spring break begun in quiet beautiful Paris, boated through bizarre and wonderful Berlin, stopped for a brief pause in golden Prague, and finished with a midnight walk through loud, gritty, spectacular Athens. I disembarked the plane from Prague on Tuesday morning, walked through baggage claim and airport security, ordered a frappé (the iconic Greek iced coffee that accounts for the first phrase I learned in Greek), and sat waiting for Emilia with an enormous grin on my face.

In a strange and wonderful way, I was home again. For those of you who have not read my very first journal entries way back in September, you may not know how very obsessed I am with this meditaranian country. I spent most of last summer on an archaeological dig in eastern Crete with John McEnroe, my Hamilton Art History professor, and Kiernan Acquisto, another student in the year below me. We worked on Gournia, at first digging in dusty trenches, and later drawing the architecture of the Minoan site. I woke up every day with the sunrise, and ate Greek Yogurt by the Aegean, and lay up on the rooftop of the taverna from whom I rented my room, talking to friends as the sun set and the millions of stars came out. Needless to say, it was the best summer of my life, and I left Athens last August with a suitcase full of olive oil and a lump in my throat, not knowing when I would return.

Now, only eight months later, I was on my way back to celebrate Easter, Greek-style, with Professor McEnroe (who is currently spending his semester sabbatical in the city) and Han, an Art History friend from Hamilton who joined me at the end of her own grand tour. I spent the first few days island-hopping with Emilia, boarding ferries, walking along donky-filled, cobblestoned streets that seemed suspiciously picturesque, and having multiple bizarre encounters with ferel cats. We came back Friday night, and met Han in Plaka, the touristy part of the city directly below the Acropolis, just in time to buy candles from a street vender, and hurry down to the Mitropolis, the city’s main Cathedral, for the start of our Easter weekend.

Greek Easter, an orthodox holiday that often falls on a different day from that of its Roman counterpart (this year the two happened to coincide) is a phenomenon I had heard a lot about, but never witnessed. Athens, a usually packed city that houses a third of the country’s residents, empties out for the holiday, and the streets are refreshingly easy to navigate. The groups of Greeks who do stay, however, celebrate in style. Good Friday mass consisted of the Epitaphios, a sort of mock-funeral in which robed priests carry around a casket representing the crucified Christ, and are followed by a candlelit procession. We followed the crowds of chanting Greeks to Syntagma square, the political center of town and the site of many protests and demonstrations. There the priests joined other, smaller processions from churches around the city, and were met by a military guard who marched solemnly before the parliament building.

We came back at around eleven, the ideal dining hour for Greeks in the summer time, and ate at a tiny, crowded taverna in the basement of an ouzo bar, where we were served plates of grilled fish and dolmades and glasses of watery white table wine. I ate with gusto, laughed with Han and Emilia, and, exhausted climbed into bed. The next morning, we said goodbye to Emilia, who was on her way to celebrate Catholic Easter in Naples with an Italian family friend, and begun the mandatory (but still spectacular) climb up the Acropolis. Han and I had taken Classical Art together back at Hamilton, and, though it was now my third time on the famous hill, found ourselves in the same state of educated wonder.

We wound our way down, past the Ancient Agora (Greek marketplace), and got juicy, spiced kebabs from a famous souvlaki stand in Monastiraki. Unsatisfied by the single climb, we wandered through the Agora, and then went up another, nearby hilltop, to gaze down at the sea. We later took a tram down to the shore itself, dipped our feet in the still chill water, and watched the sparkeling water for some time before heading back. We ate an early dinner and tried to take what my friend Olivia calls a “disco nap” (in preperation for a long night), but found ourselves too excited to sleep. At eleven, we got up, bundled into our warmest clothes (I had, as usual, improperly, and so had to borrow Han’s fleece), and went back to the Mitropolis, where crowds gathered outside the nearby byzantine chapel, tiny and filled with chanting priests. Sometime around half past, the lights in the church were extinguished, and candles lit, as the crowd slowely drifted out towards the church square, following the priests who held a wooden icon with the resurrected Christ. Anticipation was thick in the air, and I looked from one well-dressed Athenian to another in wonder.

At midnight, the church bells began to toll in a joyful cacophony, and all of the Greeks around us lifted their candles, shouting “Christ is Risen” in Greek, and kissing each other with the words “Kaló Pásha” (Happy Easter)! We climbed to a hotel rooftop in Syntagma Square, and watched the forays of fireworks go off around the city, the yellow-lit-Acropolis shining under the April moon. It was nothing short of magical. We walked back through Plaka, through now-empty streets, and found the crowds of Greek mass-goers now huddled around bowls of traditional tripe soup, cracking red-painted eggs and laughing, their still-lit candles set in vases in the center of their tables.

The next day, we got up, bought Greek yogurt from one of the two shops open in Plaka, and ate it with ice cream spoons on the way to the metro. I had donned my Royal-wedding-hat-cum-Easter-Bonnet, and when we met Professor McEnroe at his apartment (the latest in a series of unlucky events this semester resulted in him breaking his hip and having to be in crutches for the past month!), it was the first thing he noticed after opening the door. We drove up to the American School for Classical Studies, whose library Professor McEnroe has been using for his research, and whose gardens extend in beautifully tiered expanse behind the neoclassical building. The school roasts lamb in the traditional Greek style (a rather gruesome, spit-turning process that takes hours and ends in the lamb’s head being cut off and placed on a spike!), and we sat in the lawn as archaeologists and classicists slowly trickled in, bearing salads and dessert. Despite its appearance, the lamb itself was delicious and we ate, talked, and laughed for hours under the olive trees. By the evening, when we said goodbye and walked up one final hill to see the sun set over the city, I was well-fed, sunburned despite my hat and layers of sunscreen, and blissfully happy.

I am right now on a plane back to La Belle France, where I will begin a month of paper-writing and exam-cramming, and have visits from both of my parents. Although I am bound to be overwhelmed and stressed quite soon, at this very moment I cannot help but smile. As we lifted into the air and cruised away from Athens (I watched the Acropolis until it was obscured by the plane wing), over the Aegean, Croatia, and the Italian Alps, I leaned against the window, fabulous hat on my head and suitcase once again filled with olive oil, and closed my eyes. Greece was still there, still wild and wonderful, still my favorite place on Earth. But I had missed Paris, and, as finding multiple homes has been part of my college experience, so I felt the call of the pristine, respectful French, boursin on toast, and my lit Parisienne. And this, I suppose, is how it should be.

Czech Me Out!

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 09:24:09 GMT

It has been nearly two weeks since I have updated my journal entries, a fact for which there should be no excuse. But, considering these two weeks have been filled with everything from international train rides to staying in hostels on boats, witnessing a saxophonist have a heart attack while serenading us, and meeting members of the Czech royal family, I will first assure you that I have been sufficiently occupied, and then promise that the resulting stories will make up for the wait!

Let me go back a few steps to clarify. I am halfway through our spring break, which began last weekend and lasts until Easter Monday. As I write, I am sitting on an orange couch in my friend Lucie’s apartment in Prague, with a view out of her balcony, across a splendidly bright sky, to the spires of Prague Castle. I began this adventure with a 6 am bus ride to Orly airport, where I bought coffee (now a vacation luxury for me, as I am trying to minimize the number of caffeine-insanity days spent in my host mom’s tiny apartment!) and sunglasses, and then boarded a plane for Berlin. After some brief but panicked hostel confusion, I met up with Kylie and Emilia at City Hostel in central Berlin, where we stayed for the next two nights and toured the main sights of the city.

As is the case with at least half of the things I do in Paris, I had chosen to visit Berlin because Michael had recommended it, having visited last winter during his own time abroad, and gushing about it ever since we met. Now, having been there myself, I understand the source of his enthusiasm. Berlin is unlike any city I have ever visited—funky and hip in a way homogenous Paris could never attempt, modern, but completely in touch with its history, young and very much alive. We climbed to the top of the Berliner Dome (the big cathedral on Museum Island), explored different neighborhoods (the city is much more neighborhood-based than centralized), and went to the East-Side Gallery (the ratified version of what is left of the Wall). It was all incredible. Then, on Sunday afternoon, we boarded the U-Bahn (the Berlin metro) for the southeast part of the city, where Kylie had found a hostel on a boat, and (in a moment of blind impulse we were sure we would not regret!), booked us there for two nights. We arrived to meet the rather bleary-eyed cook, who was Turkish and in his mid fifties. He showed us around the boat, with its adorable kitchen, bunk-bedded rooms, and four dogs, told us we would all be cooking dinner together that night, and then regaled us with stories of his youth, spent going up and down the river, playing music at different bars and restaurants with the ship’s captain. Bemused but excited by this rather alternative hostel, we took the tram back into the city to sightsee until that evening.

When we returned that afternoon, I went down to our room to drop off my things while Kylie and Emilia stayed up on deck with the cook. From a window down below, I heard a saxophone blast out the first few chords of “Summertime” and rolled my eyes skyward at how very wonderfully bizarre my life is. After a few minutes, however, the music stopped, and I came up on deck to find everyone in a state of panic, the cook bent over on a stool, head in his hands. The captain’s girlfriend, a woman who also worked on the boat, ran up to the deck, phone in hand, while Kylie tried to tell her we needed to call the paramedics. After a few tense minutes (where we were put in charge of keeping the cook awake, and asked him random questions about the lineage of the boat’s many, related dogs!), an ambulance arrived, and he was taken to the hospital. We later learned that he has a pacemaker, or something similar, that shocked his heart back into its proper rhythm, as he was playing the saxaphone. But to Emilia and Kylie, who had seen him jump up in surprise, declare something was wrong, and then shout in German, it had been a completely baffling experience. He did not return until the day after we left, but is apparently doing fine now. We never had those communal dinners, however, and the rest of our stay was pretty much music-free!

Despite this rather harrowing first day, we absolutely adored staying on the boat hostel. The captain took us across the river in his dinghy, we met an absolutely adorable French family, with whose children I practiced my best French small talk, and we all celebrated the captain’s birthday, on our last day there. Tuesday, we left Berlin on a Prague-bound train with heavy eyelids, suitcases crammed full of German chocolate (at least in my case!), and stories we were sure no one would believe when we returned home! The train ride across Germany and into the Czech republic was utterly breathtaking, and the five hours passed in what seemed like moments of contented repose. We met Lucie (a Czech friend who was Emily’s exchange student in high school, and with whom I have remained good friends for the past few years) at the train station, got to her wonderful and spacious apartment, and, after a traditional Czech meal and a starlit walk across the Charles Bridge, fell fast asleep.

We spent the next few days touring Prague, despite the freezing, wet weather, met up with Han and Ding, friends from my program one afternoon, and spent another with Emilia’s cousin, who is working at the Lobkowicz museum, a renovated palace which was only recently returned to former members of the Czech nobility! We had coffee on a terrace overlooking the city, and met two of the Lobkowicz grandchildren, who are currently interning at the museum. On Friday morning, Emilia and Kylie got on a train for Vienna, and I stayed in Prague with Lucie. I was originally supposed to go with them, but really needed to catch up on work and life in general. I am always running around in a state of excited, have-to-do-everything mania in Paris, and needed to slow down for a bit, before going back to the rest of my trip. I also learned this week that I got a job as a part time freelance journalist for a site that previews arts events in New York! This, along with another internship at a historical review, means that I will be spending next summer in the city, two hours away from my family and only blocks away from some of my best friends. As much as I am loving my time here, I could not be more delighted at this prospect.

So what next? I am going to a walk against anti-semitism in the Jewish Quarter of Prague with Lucie this afternoon, enjoying now sunny and perfect Prague for two more days, and then getting on a flight to Athens on Tuesday, where I will meet Emilia and Han for the end of our adventure. The weekend after next, Kylie and I are meeting Hamilton friends in London for the Royal Wedding (an event for which I bought the most fabulous hat the world has ever seen, in Prague this week), so I promise I will have many more adventures to share. Until then, as the Czechs say, Ahoj!