We'll Always Have Paris

Today is the first of multiple Travel Tuesday posts from the fabled Eurotrip 2012, and it only seemed fitting to kick this off in the city that kicked off our trip: Paris!

For those of you that are new around these parts, when I studied abroad in London I went to a real British school (not a British campus of an American school), and the way they do things over there is that they give you the entire month of April off. To "study for exams." So, obviously, a couple of friends and I spent three weeks of that month backpacking through Europe. Obviously.

Paris was our first stop. We were overflowing with excitement. We were happy, naive and uninjured, with a fair amount of money still in our pockets, clean clothes neatly folded in our backpacks, and ready to eat ALL the cheese and ALL the bread!

But that ended pretty quick. Our plans to take the train to our next stop were ruined by Easter weekend, and we were then royally scammed by a budget airline that was suddenly not so budget. Couple that awfulness with the fact that I was smacked in the face by a metro turnstile door on our last night, and you get an enraged, bitter girl with a giant bruise on her forehead who is chomping at the bit to get the holy hell out of Paris.

So, while my lasting impression of Paris is tainted by a whole lot of suck, it was a very enjoyable stop on our trip, though not my favorite. The city, to me, felt kind of aloof and unwelcoming and pretentious. However, nothing quite prepares you for that view of the Eiffel Tower. It's majestic, I swear. And we climbed every stair up that sucker! Did YOU know it glitters at night?! And Versailles was pretty insane, and walking through the Louvre was something special. And, of course, Notre Dame, and the Arc de Triomphe, and the Moulin Rouge, and the Sacre Coeur, and Napoleon's tomb... And the crepes. And the bread. And the cheese. Wow.

Paris also gave me one of my favorite travel memories ever. We were walking by the shops near the Louvre, and we passed a street artist with amazing sketches of various objects and animals morphing into the Eiffel Tower, like this:

I was instantly obsessed, but for some reason I decided not to buy one. I regretted it instantly and spent the entire next day kicking myself... until we happened past the same spot the next night, and found the same artist. He didn't have any sketches like that left, though, and I told him how sad I was and how much I adored them. His response? In lots of miming and broken English...

"Come back in an hour."

So we spent some time in the Louvre, and when we returned, he had four sketches waiting for me. Between Amanda and myself, we bought three of them. I honestly treasure that sketch and this memory, and I hope I adequately expressed my gratitude to that man!

And, last but not least, there were several photos taken in Paris that became a must-do in every other city on the trip: 1) throwing up the U (duh), 2) Amanda picking me up, and 3) jumping pictures. So here's the first installment of what became our obligatory trip photos!

(Not our best jumping picture. But it was only our first city. You'll get to watch us progressively improve as the trip continues!)

For my original post on this stop on our trip, click here!

Miracle Monday: Steve Janaszak

GUYS, I'm excited.

In my Liebster award post, I mentioned a super awesome blogger Caity, who nominated me. I was initially hooked because of our mutual obsession with love of London, but another awesome thing about Caity's blog is Fab Four Friday. See, Caity is a huge Beatles fan. So every Friday, she blogs about the Beatles. Now, I wouldn't call myself a huge Beatles fan. I mean, I love them as much as any other self respecting human being does, but they're not something I'm diehard about. But I love Caity's posts about them because you can tell how passionate she is about them. She's full of fun factoids and YouTube videos, and I just really love when people get excited about things! And she's just trying to spread some Beatle love!

So this all got me thinking... I love this concept. I think everyone should blog about things that get them excited, that they could yammer on about for days. And I'm all about spreading the love! So I'm stealing her idea. Thanks, Caity! ;)

I, however, will be writing weekly posts about a different group of boys, and on a different alliterative day.

(Raise your hand if you're surprised! I'm actually surprised it took me this long to do something like this.)

I didn't truly get all gung-ho about this team until I learned more about the players as people. When they went from being nameless and faceless to having personalities, quirks, hardships, best friends and interests outside of hockey, suddenly it all felt more accessible to me. Heck, most of them were in younger in Lake Placid than I am right now! These are real, regular human beings who just so happened to do something pretty damn extraordinary.

So, to spread the love, I'll be highlighting one member of the team each week! Because all of them are epic, even the one that never saw any ice time. Which brings me to our first spotlight...

FUN FACTS:

+ Janny (because on this here blog, we refer to guys by their nicknames as if we know them personally)  was quite the epic athlete, earning 10 letters in high school for hockey, football, golf and soccer. He was the backbone of the hockey team, and he'd been nicknamed "The Man." The dude was legit. He played for Herb Brooks at the University of Minnesota, and the Gophers won the NCAA championship in both 1976 and 1979. Janny was named tournament MVP in 1979, but just months later, Herb selected him for the Olympic team... as Jim Craig's backup.

+ Janny was the only player in the entire Lake Placid 1980 hockey tournament to not play a single minute. But he remained positive and supportive, and even helped sharpen his teammates' skates. Other guys on the team have said that now, looking back on the Olympics, they don't remember him as not playing. They still felt he was as much a part of the team as anybody else. And one of the first things Jim Craig did in the post-gold medal press conference was publicly thank Janny for his contributions to the team. (I love me some goalie love!) But Janny's Olympics wasn't a total personal bust for him. That's where he met his future wife, who was working as a translator in the Olympic village. :) (I'm sorry, but is that not the cutest story you've ever heard?)

+ While he's mostly known for being the ultimate team player, I feel the need to stress that Janny was far from just some passive presence on the bench. He constantly worked his butt off and came up big in important situations, and wasn't afraid to stand up to Herb when he felt he was being treated unfairly. He also happened to be a chemical engineering major in college (in other words, he was brilliant). Janny was absolutely not a doormat -- he had his role on the team, and Herb valued him for his ability to fill that role flawlessly. 

+ Undrafted by the NHL, after the Olympics Janny signed with the Minnesota North Stars. He played for several franchises over the next few years, mostly in their minor league systems, before retiring in 1983.

+ Sorry to end on kind of a scary note, but... Janny worked as a bond salesman for an investment banking firm on the 89th floor of the South Tower in the World Trade Center until March of 2001. So, like, six months before 9/11. He says the company lost 67 people when the towers collapsed, including most of the people on the trading desk where he had worked. (Probably a good thing that he took that other job, huh? Sheesh.)

And now, watch this video and appreciate. (Also, this reporter is my spirit animal. "I've been wanting and waiting to interview you for 34 years!" That dude gets it.)

Closing Ceremony

I feel like a total sap writing posts about things in my life ending, but I do it fairly frequently. (Hi, study abroad. And college. And my USA Volleyball internship.) And here I am, doing it again. It just feels wrong to close a chapter in my life without reflecting on it a little bit. And maybe putting it down in words helps with the closure aspect of things.

I'm not even totally sure what to say this time. I mean, all of my past endings were very definitive endings. Study abroad? Leaving my school and the country. College? Leaving my school and the city (and the state). USA Volleyball? Leaving my internship and the city (and the state. And the time zone). Each time, an ending meant packing up my life and moving over a thousand miles away. But this time, my job is over, but I'm not going anywhere. At least not yet. So it's this weird sort of gray area holding pattern. I'm still going to be in Colorado Springs, with all the same places and the same people, but on Monday morning, I won't be getting up and going to work. And it's going to be bizarre.

I'm going to miss my sweet red accent wall.

My job at the United States Olympic Committee has finally fulfilled the "temporary" part of its title and come to an end. Doomsday has arrived. It's kind of interesting; I've dreamed of working for the USOC for basically my entire life, but in none of those imaginary scenarios was my job temporary. So now I'm in entirely new territory, having achieved this huge goal of mine yet not being done working to get there. It's REALLY WEIRD and I'm not entirely sure what to do with it.

But again, I can't help but feel really lucky to have had an experience so great that I'm so sad to see it end. It has been the realest five months, from the first minute of my first day (that started at 7 a.m.), when I was creating athlete bios for the Sochi Olympic team before I even had a computer at my desk. It's been lots of learning, lots of fun, and lots of awesome people. And lots of days that started hours before the sun came up. (If I can wake up at 2:50 in the morning on a regular basis, I can do anything!) I worked with such a great team, including the other temps and interns that cycled through while I was there, and going to work was always so enjoyable because of the folks I was surrounded by.

And I really want a job now just so I can have a cubicle to display my going away gift in!

Is that not epic? I'm obsessed with it. Between this and the gold volleyball I was given when I left USAV, my future cube decorations are going to be the snazziest! :)

But for the time being, I'm jobless. Again. The other day I was having a pretty intense quarter-life crisis, but right now I'm feeling pretty good and optimistic. (It's a rough cycle, guys.) I feel like good things are brewing, and it's only a matter of time until I'm embarking on the next great adventure. (And I feel the need to document this optimistic moment because it probably won't be more than a day until I'm eating my feelings and wondering what the point of my life is. I'm not kidding about it being a rough cycle.)

Right now, though, there are jobs to apply for, it's the Fourth of July and I have a whole lot of Team USA gear to rock. :)

Happy Fourth, friends!

Shabbat, Shekels and Sherutim

I have some exciting news, guys! Well, maybe it's just exciting to me. I'm fairly well-traveled (though seeing some of the travel bloggers out there makes me embarrassed to even think that thought, but whatever), but most of my travel posts were more of a play-by-play diary than anything. Seriously, why did I not include more pictures? I have thousands of photos, and they're all collecting dust on my hard drive.

So I've decided that I'll be joining the Travel Tuesday link-up every week! Each Tuesday will be a different destination I've been to, and will essentially be a giant photo dump (see also: this one). Basically, this is an excuse for me to go through all my photos and relive some truly amazing memories. I'm pretty pumped. :)

For my first installment, I'm going back to a trip that kicked off the most epic year of travel in my life (so far?): Israel!

I went to Israel in May of 2011 with a birthright group from University of Miami Hillel. If you're unfamiliar with birthright, it essentially means that all Jewish people have a (duh) birthright to visit Israel, so there's a group that funds these trips for young Jewish adults. I'm probably not explaining this well at all. Basically, it means a free trip to Israel. Yes please!

Everyone I knew that had already been on birthright gushed and raved about how that trip changed their life. I was kind of skeptical, as I'm not a particularly spiritual or religious person. But more than three years later, I can honestly say that that trip did change my life.

I actually do feel much more connected to Judaism. Do I believe in god? I still don't think so, but that didn't stop me from being totally overwhelmed and crying when we visited the Western Wall on Shabbat. We spent most of the 10 days traveling with a group of Israeli soldiers who were our age, who wanted nothing more than to be in our shoes and go to school, who had ridden camels but never ridden horses, who love watching Friends and That '70s Show, and that alone was astronomical in changing my perspective on the world. As a Jew in America, I've never been a part of the majority... but in Israel, on Fridays, everyone greets absolutely everybody else with "shabbat shalom." We visited the Old City of Jerusalem and the new city in Tel Aviv, hiked valleys and deserts (where I broke my toe, oops) and Masada, swam in the Dead Sea and kayaked on the Jordan River, stayed at a kibbutz and in a Bedouin tent, rode camels, visited David Ben Gurion's grave and a military cemetery and Yad Vashem, ate shawarma and hummus (all. of. the. hummus)... and everything was amazing. Except, of course, the broken toe. And the ear infection. And the fact that the mere sight of hummus made me nauseous for several months afterwards.

I highly recommend traveling there if you ever get the opportunity to, even if you're not Jewish. It's an absolutely beautiful place, and so unbelievably full of history. And, for the record, not once did I ever feel like I was in danger.

(Also, if you're wondering about the title... the shekel is Israel's currency, and "sherutim" means "bathroom." It's just one of the few Hebrew words I learned and still remember, and I liked the alliteration. Hah.)

For my original posts on this trip, see here and here!