Central College Abroad

Luckily for me, the program in Leiden offers its students a fall break. The break lasted 10 days so my friends and I got loads of traveling in. My fall break plans got off to a bad start because I originally wanted to fly to St. Petersburg, then take a train to Moscow, and then another to Berlin. So two friends and I booked a flight to St. Petersburg, thinking that getting a Russian Visa wouldn’t be too much trouble. Well we were wrong. Thankfully our flight had a stopover in Stockholm, so we could just get out in Sweden, instead of flying on to Russia. 

So our journey started in Stockholm, where we stayed for a long weekend. In short, Stockholm kicked a lot of ass. There are large canals running through the city, creating many small islands within the city. We stayed at a hostel on one of these islands, which was directly looking out at the Old Town. We didn’t do anything particularly specific. More or less, we just wandered around Old Stockholm for the weekend, going to various bars, shops, and talking to locals. I found Stockholm to be vary beautiful, and despite it not having an Eiffel Tower or Berlin Wall, I would still highly recommend it (even over Paris). 

We left Stockholm late Sunday on a  cruise to Tallinn, Estonia. After an interesting night encountering many merry Estonians and Swedes, we made it to Estonia early Monday morning. For my two companions, Tallinn was the highlight of all fall break, and for good reason. Tallinn’s Old Town was fantastic and well restored for Medieval times. We kept up our wandering in Tallinn, spending most of our time strolling through Old Town taking pictures and admiring the sites. One of the coolest parts of Tallinn was that one night we ate an Medieval restaurant that had real wenches and old medieval recipes (including bear, wild boar, and other awesome wild game). 

We left Tallinn Tuesday night by bus to Riga, Latvia. Unfortunately, I don’t have to much to say about Riga. The weather kind of sucked and we slept in way too late on Wednesday morning. But we did do some walking through Old Town and ate some good Latvian food. 

We then left Riga Wednesday night by bus to Vilnius, Lithuania. Vilnius was pretty cool, with again a awesome Old Town. Again we wandered through old churches and Soviet markets through cobblestone streets. On Thursday morning, we took a nice 3-hour free tour through Vilnius. Which was great because we saw some really interesting sights that we wouldn’t have normally seen.

Leaving Vilnius was a bit tricky, but eventually we found a pretty cheap over-night bus to Warsaw on Thursday night. When we got into Warsaw at 5 a.m. we quickly found a cheap train to Berlin at 7 a.m. We weren’t interested in Warsaw because the city had pretty much been bombed to pieces in WWII, making it just a typical modern city. Plus our original goal was to be in Berlin on Friday afternoon.

We got into Berlin around lunchtime on Friday. Berlin was fantastic, my personal highlight of the trip. As a history enthusiast, I found it fascinating to be in the city that was the most affected by the 20th century. I’m sure you know the story of WWI, WWII, and the Cold War. We visited all the monuments, the Wall, the Brandenburg Gate, etc. I was terribly interested to be in the square in which Napoleon marched through or see the university library were communism was born (where Marx, Engles, and Lenin studied). On Saturday, we took another great free tour around Berlin. And on Sunday morning we headed back to Leiden by train.