Versailles Architecture 2010-11: Our Travels

During our sketching trips, over winter break, and even on random weekends, all of us have been traveling a lot to discover the many cultures of Europe. To get a few glimpses into our European adventures, here are some stories from your Versailles students abroad. (More coming soon!)

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Winter in Scandinavia

Brittany Hopper

For our winter break, we decided to take a trip to Scandinavia. There's nothing like 10 degree weather and 10 inches of snow to put you in the holiday mood. Our first stop was Stockholm, Sweden. With snow on the ground, English speaking natives, Christmas Markets, and holiday decorations on every building, the atmosphere was simply fantastic. Nevertheless, the frigid weather made us happy to see most of the sites from inside of the heated bus. Then we saw that the Vasa Museum was the next stop and decided to get off. The Vasa Museum is the home of the only preserved 17th century ship in the world. It was easily one of the most interesting museums I have ever been to. The gigantic ship takes up the majority of the building, while the circulation allows you to move around it and see it from all angles. Although the people, the buildings, and the food in Sweden were great, it was time for us to move on to our next city, Bergen, Norway.

Bergen is not a city that most tourists would pick to visit in Norway, but we had read some good reviews and decided to give it a shot. I'm glad we did because it ended up being one of my favorite cities. We had a blast visiting the partially outdoor aquarium, and spending hours at the science center, but the adventure we were most excited about was our day trip into the Fjords to go skiing. Having never skied before, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. Having our minds set on going skiing in real mountains, the Fjords seemed to be a perfect choice. We caught the train early in the morning, and noticed that everyone else on the train had their own personal skis/snowboards. We started to get a little nervous. We then had to transfer to a bus to further climb the mountain. After arriving at our destination, we cautiously approached the rental store to get fitted for some skis. The workers did not seem at all alarmed that it was our first time skiing and had absolutely no idea how to put the skis on, let alone how to ski. They assured us that after a few practice runs on the baby slope we would be just fine. After a few hours on the baby slope we decided to give the easiest trail a try. We should have known after crashing at the bottom of the lift that this was a terrible idea, but I was determined to ski down a mountain. So we took our 10 minute ride up the lift and got off on the "easy" slope. Our hearts stopped when we saw the first drop. Still determined, we gave it a shot. After crashing numerous times and accidentally going off a ramp, we decided we were going to physically hurt ourselves if we tried to finish. Now we were stuck somewhere in the middle of a mountain, too afraid to finish skiing down. We weren't sure what to do from there so we just stood around hoping someone would help us. A friendly man told us that if we walked back to the top of the mountain we would be able to ride the lift back down, so that's what we did. As it turns out, by the time we had hiked all the way back up the mountain and gotten on the lift to go back down, we saw the same man riding the lift back to the top! He had skied all the way down and was ready to do it again. So our ski trip turned out to be quite a disaster, but we had a lot of fun, and got some great pictures.

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Sketch Trip to Vienna, Austria

Kim Daul

The final part of our sketch trip was by far the most relaxing and the most enjoyable for me. But when we first arrived in Vienna at 5:00 am on Saturday, we ran into a small problem: we had nowhere to stay. It turned out that my friend Andrea had accidentally booked a hostel for Weimar, Germany, instead of Wien, Austria, so we were temporarily stranded in the middle of Vienna on a dark, cold morning without even a café to sit it. Fortunately, everyone decided that it would make more sense to pay for a hotel room than to wait for the hostels to open. After a 4 or 5 hour nap, we got up and headed to a nearby market for breakfast. We walked north along the Mariahilfer Straße (pronounced strass, as in "street"), which had lots of cute shopping and restaurants. After passing what seemed like 20 important, stately-looking buildings, we approached the gardens behind the Hofburg Palace. Here we found a statue of Vienna's most beloved former resident, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose name we would soon be seeing literally everywhere in town. We played around and climbed some trees in the garden for a few minutes before walking eastward towards the Staatsoper, the famous Vienna State Opera, where we found lots of people dressed in 18th-century attire. It turned out they were selling tickets, so we talked to one of them and got some cheap tickets for a show later that evening. Then we walked north to the Stephansplatz, the central area of town, where the Stephansdom church towered over everything else. I grabbed some currywurst and a Zipfer for lunch, after which Hyein and I visited Mozart's old house. It was a simple museum, but it was cool to imagine the prodigious Mozart inviting over the young Ludwig van Beethoven and telling him, right in that very sitting room, "Everyone better watch out, because you're going to make a name for yourself."

After dinner we rushed over to the Musikverein, another one of Vienna's many beautiful concert halls, and found our seats in the beautifully decorated hall. The concert was a good one, with the orchestra performing Mozart and Strauss in traditional attire, and there were even some funny moments of audience participation. Afterwards, we walked north to the "Bermuda Triangle," a lively area with tons of bars lining 3 main streets. The next day, I got up early to go see the Hofburg Palace after a really good breakfast at the hotel. I absolutely loved the decorations at the enormous palace complex: everything from the furniture and tableware to the candelabras and royal outfits were all originals. It felt like the closest thing to a "Beauty and the Beast" castle that I've seen so far, and it was interesting to learn about the Hapsburg dynasty. After that, I went across town to the Haus der Musik, a really cool modern museum that dealt with both the scientific and the historical aspects of music.

In the afternoon, I ran into my friend Kara and we walked to see the Rathaus (city council) and some other landmarks on the western side of town. All of us met up again an hour later for our last meal/snack in Vienna. Having heard that Vienna is actually the "coffee capital of the world" we went into the fancy Café Mozart to look at its coffee and dessert menu. It was absolutely unreal how many different types of coffee and cakes they offered... Something about Vienna made it my favorite part of the entire sketch trip. I would go back there in a heartbeat... Hopefully, by the next time I travel there, I'll be able to speak better German and will have more money to see even better concerts.