Paris

So, I haven't posted for a while, but now it's time again!

Last Sunday Philip and I went to Paris for a couple of days, just until our classmates from our music class arrived too. We thought, if we go to Paris, we won't only go for four days, but stay two days longer!

In those two days, we did a lot of cool things! Next to visiting some touristic attractions like "La Tour Eiffel" or "L'Arc de Triomphe", but we also went to the "Jardin de Plantes", a huge park with lots of interesting museum-like "La Grande Gallerie d'évolution" and a huge dinosaur museum!

Besides that we also spent half a day in the "Centre Georges Pompidou", one of the coolest modern-art museums I know. After waiting in line for quite some time, we finally got to look at the great exhibitions and drink a hot chocolate at the top of the place!

By the time the others arrived, we've already checked in to the second Airbnb; a lovely place which was totally made for a big group! After jamming a little bit with the others, we went to see a concert called "Swing Lenny" in the "Philharmonie de Paris". I enjoyed it a lot because it had a lot of nice harmonies and the funky polyrhythms.

We also went to a museum which had a chronological exhibition with instruments from historical times to modern synthesizers and other electronic instruments.

We also visited the opera and saw two other concerts in the theatre of Paris. "Dialogues des Carmelites" and a Beethoven Concerto.

The last thing Philip and I did, while the others went onto the "Arc de Triomphe" was to go to the "Galerie de Paléntologie". There they had enormous skeletons of whales and dinosaurs which was quite impressing!

Altogether the trip was really nice, the concerts were amazing and we had a lot of fun together!

Tønsberg

First day in Norway. Everyone slept until 10 but I woke up one and a half hours earlier to study for Biology.. nice...
After a nice breakfast Signes parents drove us to the city to go explore it a little bit. It's a very pretty little town next by the sea and we took some nice pictures of the sea, went to drink coffee and chai tea and went to the mall which was nice too :)
Tomorrow we plan to go to Oslo but the weather seems not that nice so we might go on New Years day.

Visiting Lausanne!

Since my dad went on a very hard mountain bike trip in the Alps with some of his friends me and my mum decided that we'll go somewhere and visit a place too (we're not that much into cycling..)

One thing that came into our minds was that we haven't been in the Swiss French part for quite a while, so we booked a youth hostel and took the train to Lausanne straight on the next day.

We did a lot of things in Lausanne and I need to say that it is a very pretty city and we saw a lot of cool things there! On the first day we just went around the city to discover by our own. We dropped the luggage in the hostel and took the metro (only one in Switzerland!) up the hillside. By just wandering around we found a quartier called Flon. There are a lot of cool shops there and nice cafés.

After that we continued going upwards until we reached the cathedral from which we had a lovely view on the city and the lake "lac léman". It was already quite late so we ate dinner and went back to the hostel to play a round of pool :)

The next day we went to the lake that was just a couple minutes from where we slept. In the restaurant we "stole" some bread that was left over to feed the ducks. And there were so many of them! After a while the seagulls took over though because they are so much faster than the ducks and swans. After a walk along the lake we saw a very nice park by an enormous hotel. Apparently this was the hotel in which Coco Chanel used to stay in a lot. Suddenly we spotted an orange squirrel in the park with a handful of grass and moss in the mouth. And I actually got some really cool pictures of it (see them below ;) After that we went up to the Olympic museum but actually only to eat lunch.. We wanted to go into the photography museum that was just next to it but unfortunately it was closed.

Besides the city there is also a huge park in the city called Hermitage and that's where we went on Tuesday. Next to lovely houses on the hillside there was also a pond with loads of ducks and swans. And of course we were prepared with bread again to feed them :) Also there were a lot of very pretty dragonflies but it was so hard to capture them on camera so I only got one...

On Wednesday an old friend of my mum came to visit us. She once studied in Lausanne for a year but the funny thing was that we kind of showed her around and not the other way around. But I think that is acceptable after twenty years not visiting a city. With her we went into the photography museum. Some of the art in there was just brilliant but a lot of it was simply confusing and did not make that much sense and was weird.. We also had really lovely crêpes later on in the day.

And that was nearly it with our trip to Lausanne.. Nearly because on Thursday morning we walked along the lake in the other direction towards the EPFL, the école polytéchnique fédérale de lausanne where they built a very cool learning complex a couple years ago that me and my mum wanted to visit because we both like pretty buildings :))

Yesterday was the first of August. I went with some friends and my parents to a show performed by some poets of our region and a friend of mine Simon Libsig who is a brilliant poet too. After that the city made a brillant firework like every year and I took the opportunity to take some pictures of it since we only have fireworks here once a year... Take a look ;)