Spring Break!  Well, not yet.  Before our official travel break started we had to go to our final required excursion with the Castle staff to Madrid, Spain.  Besides the fact that the temperature would be about triple the temperature at the Castle, I had no idea what to expect from our trip to Madrid.  I was excited to see how much Spanish I remembered from my classes now that it has been about 5 years since I stopped studying the language.  The results were rather disappointing.  I remembered bits and pieces, I’d remember some words but wouldn’t be able to come up with the rest of the words to complete a sentence.  But, if we needed to find the library, I had us covered.  ¿Dónde está la biblioteca?

I came to Europe with only 1 trip in mind: I wanted to go dogsledding under the Northern Lights in Norway.  Once I had come up with the trip, I wasn’t going to let anything stop me from making this happen.  This would be the trip of a lifetime and even if I had to go by myself, I was prepared for it, but somehow I found two castle-dwellers crazy enough to enter the Arctic Circle with me.  Planning the trip became a challenge to complete our mission for the least amount of money possible because Norway was very expensive, but we managed to finalize our plans within a price range that we deemed reasonable.  Fly from Amsterdam to
Tromsø with a quick layover in Oslo, spend a few days in Tromsø, catch an extremely early flight to Oslo and spend the day there, followed by another obnoxiously early flight home to Amsterdam.  Let’s go!

I am going to do my very best to describe the indescribable.  I had decided with a few friends to visit Oświęcim, Poland to see the remnants of the Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau Concentration Camps where over 1.1 million people were murdered during the Nazi Holocaust.  We knew going into the trip that this […]

As we started planning for this weekend, we didn’t have much in mind.  Our main goal was to visit the Auschwitz & Birkenau Concentration Camps as we felt it was something that we should all take the time to experience.  Besides that, we had no plans and had no expectations.  In our planning stages, we found that we could fly straight into Poland on Friday afternoon OR we could fly to Stockholm on Thursday night and make it to Poland at the same time for the same price.  Stockholm?  Why not?

This past weekend was a very strange occurrence at the castle – nearly every student here stayed back.  Why did we all stay at the castle?  We were planning to celebrate Carnaval!  Carnaval is only celebrated in the primarily Catholic province of Limburg in the Netherlands where we live.  Carnaval is celebrated the week before Lent when the mayor hands over the keys of the city to the town fool.  The jester then becomes the Carnaval Prince and leads the community in a weeklong celebration before Lent begins.  Everyone dresses up to the point where you can’t recognize each other and the crazier your costume is, the better.  The Dutch love to drink and this is a big excuse for them to party and drink all week.  The whole town of Well was essentially shut down for Carnaval – all the shops were closed so everyone could be out partying.

Our 2nd weekend here marked we’d officially been in the Netherlands for 2 weeks and it also marked our first free travel weekend.  We started off on an optional excursion to Maastricht led by 2 of our professors, which gave us the opportunity to see a city that we had never even heard of.  Despite only seeing […]

Part of our program here at Kasteel Well requires us to go on 2 mandatory excursions with the faculty and staff.  Our first excursion was to Amsterdam – the largest city in the Netherlands.  Although we flew into Amsterdam from the United States, this was our first real experience in a European city for many of us.