Five on Friday: Summer Travels!

It's that time again...and now I'm back in Blacksburg for the final semester of my college career. Insert "I can't believe it, I swear just yesterday I was a freshman" comments here.

Today's Five on Friday is a special edition, in which I talk about my plans for this summer. I am so excited to travel to Eastern Europe with my best friend Jordan! We're doing a two-week trip in which we'll hit six cities in five countries.

So yeah, I'm pumped.

Berlin - Jordan and I will fly into Berlin (by way of Copenhagen), and will spend the first couple of days of our trip exploring the largest city in Germany. I'm so excited to see all the historic sites, especially the Brandenburg Gate and the Berlin Wall, and experience one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. I'll need to learn a few key German phrases first, though, so I don't get lost between the airport and the hostel.

Vienna - Jordan and I are both music nerds, so I am super pumped to visit the home of my two favorite composers, Mozart & Beethoven. Well, not home per se, but a place where they spent lots of time and wrote their best works. Can I see places where their best works were performed?!

Prague - Another river city! Prague sits on the Vltava River, and the pictures I've looked at online are just stunning. There's a ton of 20th-century history in Prague, but it's also blessed with history dating back to the Holy Roman Empire.  One such piece is Charles University, founded in 1348. It was Central Europe's first university.

Budapest - This is a city I never thought I'd be so excited to see. My friend went to Budapest last summer, and after seeing her pictures, I wanted to experience it for myself. Yet another river city... I'll be humming Strauss while waltzing along the banks of the beautiful Danube.

Krakow/Warsaw - I grouped the two Polish stops in one here. We'll see some real World War II history in these cities, especially in Krakow. Despite being darker than other places we'll visit, it doesn't curb my excitement. I hear the architecture in Warsaw is something else.

One day soon, I'm going to start some kind of "Travel" tab on here so I can organize all my travel posts in one place. I guess wanderlust has hit me. But I will never complain. I'll be writing more on each city and all aspects of the trip between now and departure.

Europe, here we come (in May)!!! Hope it'll be warmer then than it was in this picture!