Europe Trip - Part 1

i will recount my trip in a couple installments.

Day 1.

The people involved: my parents, my aunt, my grandparents, and myself. No etong. she, unfortunately, did not come. =(

We boarded our plane to Chicago then to Zurich then to our final destination of Copenhagen, where we took a cab from the airport to the seaport. All I saw of Copenhagen was out the window of the cab. Looked alright. Nice buildings and water ways.



we embarked on our boat, MS Amsterdam. once we got on, we had safety training and met the lifeboat, Lifeboat #6, that would carry us to safety should anything terrible happen. i had these images of the titanic cracking in half in the scary ocean.



from our first dinner, it was apparent that we would be fed well. there was always food around in buffet form including ice cream and midnight snacks. ice cream wasn't that great, but other things were pretty tasty. my first meal:


crab salad.


Pork chop.


Mango Sundae.

Don't remember much of after dinner. i think i read a bunch instead of sleeping and ended up waking up early enough to see the sunrise.



then off to the relatively huge gym. they even had spinning bikes. but you had to pay money to use them =( poopers

Day 2.

was spent on the ship loafing around. well, i spent the entire day sleeping, while everyone else loafed. and dinner was 'formal dress', so everyone put on suits (some even tuxes) and dresses. below are my parents and me. hooray.



Day 3. Rakvere and Tallinn, Estonia

on day 3, i saw a very pokable man. so round... he didn't seem so jolly. a bit intimidating in fact. anyway, here are two views of him. i especially like his donning of suspenders without a shirt. his tan made him look more appealing.




the day was spent visiting a vodka museum, another small museum, a ruined castle all in Rakvere, and then eventually Tallinn. vodka museum was fun. we were welcomed with a shot of vodka and some pickles. passed on the shots but the pickles were tasty. they had some old instruments used back in the day to make vodka. apparently, the grain harvest was low for sometime and potatoes were brought in to eat, but peasants didn't care for them until they realized they could make vodka from them :P at the end of the museum tour, there was a vodka taste test! i was curious and found that different vodkas taste differently! imagine that. some are so much worse than others. anyway, i share the same taste as the estonians. they prefer the Saaremaa vodka. it actually went down smoothly.



then we were off to the small museum. i'm not quite sure what to call it? a house that was decorated with antiques to look like it did in the 1920s. however, i think the whole thing was a bit sketchy. it seemed like they just took old looking things and threw them in a room together. i guess anyone can fool american tourists. next stop was the old ruined medieval castle. at first i was excited to see a castle, but they dressed the whole thing up to be like a big play ground, so who knew what was real or not. they had an amusing sword 'collection' where they let you take pictures with swords and armour. my dad and i had some fun there.



we had lunch at the castle. i think it was supposed to be medieval food. they fed us mashed peas cause there was no potato back then. interesting meal...



then off to Tallinn. the city seemed like it was still struggling to climb out of the communist era with austere looking apartment buildings. the view over the older part of the city was not bad. i liked looking over the rooftops.