The last of my 1 year adventure

Alight, so I'm still very behind with the blogging, but I'm going to finish off my year adventure in this one post! And by popular request, I've decided to keep the blog going about my Canadian adventures (though, I'll guarantee they won't be nearly as cool or fun because I'll be in school).

Now, to pick up where I left off.  Sander and I had the chance to experience Egypt luxury style-- on a 10 day cruise on the Nile River.  It was simply amazing.  We met some awesome people, did some really super cool things, saw many many many ancient ruins, and overall just had the experience of a lifetime.  I have around 200 pictures from the trip, but I'll just post a few here. =)

It was HOT.  I never thought heat like that was possible.  We're talking high 40s low 50s for the whole week we were there.  Needless to say, we were in the pool every chance we had! 

Quading in the desert (and no, Sander and I did not plan our color coordination) with two couples from our ship.  They were super cool, and the 6 of us had a lot of fun.  

Karnack Temple in Luxor.

Me goofing off.  Sander's glasses were just too reflective! 

Kom Ombo Temple (I'm actually impressed I remember all the names!) 

On our way to Philae Island.

As an extra excursion, we went sailing. =)

We went to a little island via motorboat and this little kid swam up to our boat, held on and begged the entire way there.  Egypt is like Mexico x 100000 when it comes to begging.  The markets were pure torture because people would not take no for an answer.  Sander and I got tricked and ripped off so many times.  By the end of the week, it was getting really frustrating and we were very happy to be back.

This was a house on the island we visited.  It is one that a very wealthy family would live in.  Most of the houses on the island were built from mud and straw-- a way people built houses in the 20s in Canada.  

We had the chance to visit a school on the island as well.  These were the stairs leading up to the classrooms.  It was clearly a school that was struggling to stay running, and amazingly enough it was built entirely on donations.  I felt so selfish waltzing around on the island poking through people's lives and being surprised by their everyday lives that we would consider poverty in a Western culture.  I wanted to give them everything I had and help them create a better life. 

Abu Simbel Temples.  Fun fact: this is not the original location of these temples (also a bit of a disappointing fact).  The creation of a dam flooded the temples, so they blocked it off, shaved off the front of a mountain, and moved it to higher land, and glued it all back together.  That in itself was quite impressive, but it definitely took away from the awe factor I was expecting. 

This was our ship! 

A typical street in Luxor.  Talk about culture shock.  In all my travels, I have never experienced anything like it before.  I was speechless.

Chickens at the market in Luxor.

And that's where the fun part of my year ended.  Like the saying goes, all good things come to an end, and the fact was that I had some really hard goodbyes to say.  Over the year, I got to know, and fell in love with an amazing Dutch family.  The kids taught me a way to love that I never knew before, and I will always have a special place for them in my heart.  I just have to keep in mind that it's goodbye for now, not forever, and I hope to visit them every time I find myself in the beautiful little country of The Netherlands.

Me and my girlies! Pilou had just clued in that day that I was actually leaving and she would not let go of me! 

Me and Cleo

Pilou, who looks like she's about to cry. =(

Pippa!! 

My little family for the year.   We had so much fun.  I'm already missing them!!

It was a wonderful end to a wonderful year.  I am so lucky to have met such an amazing family.  I will never forget the experience I had, and will treasure it for the rest of my life.  

A One Man Trip to Paris

As promised, here is part two of Kaylee's Last Month in Europe.

Cassie flew out of Holland on a Saturday, and due to the terrifying trains in the teeny country of The Netherlands, I decided to take Cassie to the airport and bid her farewell...and catch a train for an adventure in Paris! One of my favorite musicians, Yann Tiersen, was playing a show Saturday night, and I decided it was the perfect time to go.  It was a fantastic one man adventure.  Saturday was the concert (which was great, by the way) and Sunday I wandered the city enjoying the beautiful sunshine and shying away from the angry French people who like to glare at tourists.  After joining and ditching a free walking tour, and roaming for about three and a half hours on my own, I settled in front of the Eiffel Tower and enjoyed an amazing chocolate banana crepe and read my book for the remainder of the afternoon.  Check out the awesome view I had:

I also did a little bit of people watching.  I once had a Lonely Planet book that was composed of top 10 lists.  One of the lists was "the top 10 places to people watch" and Champ de Mars in front of the Eiffel Tower was number one.  Obviously I had to check it out, and it was adorable seeing all the cute couples lounging in the grass and walking hand in hand. 

After a short and relaxing trip, I caught my train back to Holland and was greeted on the platform by Sander as he was finally back from his month of field work in Spain! 

That Wednesday we caught a flight to Luxor for our wonderful holiday to Egypt, which will be the topic of my next post! Until next time, my friends! 

Rewind and Remember

So, it's been awhile, eh? For starters, I'm back in Canada now (hence the use of eh with rather little mocking).  I could write a whole post about it, but I have a lot of filling in to do before I get to life in Canada, and to keep it easy for the both of us, I'll break it into parts.

First up: Cassie and Poland!

My dear friend Cassie arrived in Holland the weekend after I was in London.  I picked her up from the airport and we hit the ground running.  In a nutshell, this is what we did: Anne Frank house, red light district, hardcore Sunday night partying with fellow Canadian travelers, broken bikes, high tea, pedicures, biking around Maarssen area, kayaking in Utrecht, and a night of great Belgian beer at my favorite restaurant Olivier, Apeldoorn free-range monkey zoo, and a trip to Poland (which will have it's very own section in this lovely blogpost).  All in all it was a whirlwind of an adventure complete with broken cellphones and few blank memories.  Here's a photo summary. =)

High Tea at the coolest little place in Utrecht called De Bakkerswinkel.

Kayaking in Utrecht with Laura.  This is where the first cellphone fatality happened.  Laura was leaning over to help me pull my kayak in and that's when her cellphone found it's new home at the bottom of the canal. 

The adorable little monkey's at the monkey zoo...

And the two little monkey's that joined us for the adventure.

Biking in the Maarssen area.  I was so darned excited to share what my life was about for the last year.  It was so nice to finally be able to share it with someone! 

And now for Poland.  

While Cassie was here (haha, I say here as if I am still in Holland!), we made an adventure to Karakow...well, we didn't make the adventure. The worst airline in the entire world, Wizzair, made it an adventure for us.  After arriving at the airport, we were told that our flight was 6 hours delayed! What fun! Not.  After awhile, we gave into the overpriced beer and drowned our sorrows.  We eventually arrived in Poland at 11:30pm and still had an hour drive into Krakow ahead of us.  Would have been a fantastic drive if all public transport and shuttle buses hadn't been closed down for the night. Thankfully we met a really awesome Polish lady who was on the last shuttle bus from the airport to Krakow, and she negotiated (which is a polite way of simply saying she begged) with the driver to let us on.  Eventually he agreed, but only if the people who had reserved the seats didn't show up.  Thankfully they didn't and the looming thought of having to sleep in the airport vanished. =) 

While in Poland, we visited Auschwitz and Birkenau.  It was a very sobering experience, but I'm glad we went.  The material was presented in a very respectful way, and to maintain that respect, I have restrained myself from posting pictures of the actual camps.  I don't think I need to go into any detail as we all know the horrendous story.  

The rest of our time in Krakow was spent seeing absolutely everything we possibly could, and I think it's safe to say, we covered all of it! We saw the Jewish Ghetto (which has had no restoration work done on it.  All the buildings are as they were during the war), Schindler's Factory, we ate a traditional Polish meal of sauerkraut, pickles, perogies, schnitzel, and beer, we saw the castle, and I'm sure I'm forgetting things, but you just have to trust me when I say we saw it all.  

The original gate of Schindler's factory.

This was a train platform where Jewish people of Krakow were collected to be taken to concentration camps.  People were told to pack all their belongings as if they were moving away, so many people brought chairs with them.  However, the Germans had a different plan, and in order to maximize the number of people that could fit into the train car, they were to leave their large items behind.  Now, on this spot, lies a monument of chairs dedicated to the Jewish people who were forced from their homes and sentenced to death.

This is the main square of Krakow.  So gorgeous, even by night. 

Apparently, they did a contest and 16 adults can fit in this car.

I'm a creep, what can I say? I thought they were so cute, kissing and enjoying the sunset together.  Apparently, I'm hopelessly romantic.  

And that concludes this evenings edition of Kaylee's Last Month in Europe.  Stay tuned for part 2: A One Man Trip to Paris. 

London's Calling

This past weekend, I ventured to The Island and spent the weekend with Vince and Joanne in London.  It was an interesting journey there, to say the least.  This side of the world was battered with hurricane like winds on Friday morning, making flying...uhhh fun if you like a little thrill.  Taking off from Amsterdam was a bit rough, but once we were above the clouds it was fine.  It was landing in London that was the issue.  We nearly landed twice, but at the last moment the pilot abandoned the idea and took off again.  The first time it happened I was a bit confused, but not all that worried.  The lady in front of me though, my gosh, it was like the world was going to end.  The way she was bawling you would have thought we were plummeting to our death.  Then, shortly after that, the little boy behind me started throwing up.  That was when I hit my limit and just wanted to get off the plane.  Luckily, third time's the charm and we landed safe and sound with no harm done. I've never been so happy to get off a plane.

Friday evening, I met up with Laura and a few of her friends and we had dinner at a really awesome burger place called Byron, and you wouldn't believe what they had...

Yup, that's exactly what it looks like.  A rootbeer float! With A&W Rootbeer! In London!! Crazy or what?

After dinner, I met up with Vince and Joanne at the theater and we enjoyed some Minchiney goodness in the form of the musical Matilda based off of Roald Dahl's book.  It was absolutely fantastic, and Tim Minchin wrote the music so it was bound to be great.  The talent those children have is absolutely mind blowing though.  Man o' man they can sing.  Unfortunately I cannot find any songs that are directly from the musical, but here's a sample of Tim Minchin singing the song "When I Grow Up" which is the main song from the show.

The rest of the weekend was spent mainly visiting and hanging out with Vince and Joanne.  Saturday, Joanne and I did a bit of shopping.  In the evening we had a fantastic BBQ and Vince consumed enough beef to last him a month. 

Unfortunately there's no scale to show how much larger his steak was compared to the rest, but you need to just take my word for it.  We're all Albertan's and even Joanne and I thought it was ginormous.
Case in Point: he cooked his for about 15 minutes before our steaks went on the grill.

Sunday morning before my flight, Joanne and I ventured out to the auction house near their place to check out a few items.  I think we spent a good hour in there browsing through all the neat antique items.  Some were in excellent shape, some not so much.  Some were super cool, some were just plain weird.  We didn't bid on anything, but it was still really fun to look!

I thought this old leather trunk was really cool.  I figured it would be really fun to shove a small child in there and have a fun photo session.  Aside from the fact that I would never manage to get it home, it smelled like something had died inside of it, and was slightly moldy on the edges.  Forcing a child in there for photos would probably violate some health code.  Too bad though.  Other than that, it would have been a diamond mine of photos!

And that's my weekend in a fairly large nutshell.  I had another adventure with flights getting home.  I got stuck on the Tube in Central London and ended up being really really really late for my flight.  It left at 4:20 and I arrived at the airport at 3:55.  By some stroke of luck though, I managed to catch the flight and was let through even though the gate had closed already.  Thank you EasyJet!

Pinkpop!

And now it is time for me to fulfill my promise: a blog post worth reading!

Last Wednesday, I met up with my friend Courtney in Amsterdam.  We met in first year at university and suffered through many classes together.  She ended up moving back to Calgary after that and finished her degree there.  We've been trying to get together ever since, but it has never ever worked out.  Well, more than 3 years later, we finally were able to meet up in the most random place, and we had a lovely time walking around Amsterdam (finding the most amazing ice cream shop), and catching up on life.

This past weekend, Sander and I went to a music festival called Pinkpop (named after Pentecost which is Pinksteren in Dutch and a holiday here in Holland).  To put it simply, it was three days of musical genius' showing off their talent to 61000 people under clear blue summer skies.  If you ask me, that pretty much spells out perfection.

Sander and I at our campsite.  We were extremely happy and relaxed at this point because a) we were finally at pinkpop and b) we had just found our tickets that were lost but found thanks to the good soul who turned them in to security! 

Over the three days we saw around 18 bands perform.  I won't bore you with the details of every concert (because I do remember all of them except for a bit of one where Sander had to pick me up off the ground because I fainted.  Apparently Pinkpop is just too much for me to handle!), but I will go into details of one particular concert: Bruce Springsteen.  

Never ever did I think I would see that man perform live, and he truly blew my mind.  He played an hour over the scheduled time because the audience just kept singing lyrics from his songs.  He went crowd surfing, got a little kid up on stage singing with him, came out into the audience for us people who couldn't squish to the front, two stepped with someone, and was all in all the artist I thought he was...plus a bit extra!

I'll stop ranting about my crush and let you attempt to see the awesomeness of his performance through pictures (though I'm absolutely positive it won't even come close to what we experienced). 

Sander and I waited allllllllllll day saving our spots.  Mumford and Sons and Bruce played on the same stage with an hour between the two.  We got our spots at 1:00 in the afternoon and didn't leave until after Bruce was done at around 11:30pm.  It was totally worth it...even with the sunburns!

Brucey, Bruce!!!  

At one point, he came out into the audience and we were SO close! 

Mumford and Sons came out and sang along for one song!  One of the best moments of the concert!

And now for a video!  The sax solo in Born To Run:

Fun fact: Bruce Springsteen's original saxophone player passed away a few years back.  Last night they did a tribute to him in which I found out that his current sax player is actually Clarence's son! Cool or what? 

And one more.  There's nothin like hearing 61000 people sing along with Bruce Springsteen:

So, moral of the story: Bruce Springsteen absolutely rocks. 

I make it sound like Bruce was the main event.  It's true that he was, but I also saw so many other bands that I wanted to see live (Mumford and Sons, Ben Howard, Keane) and expanded my musical love category to many others (Seasick Steve, Babylon Circus, Major Tom, Raccoon). 

 All in all it was a fantastic weekend of dirty feet,

thousands of people, 

and it finished with  Bruce *ahem* I mean a bang!