Adventures in Pastry

I know I haven't written in awhile. It's not that I haven't been up to anything. It's not even that I haven't had time, I've just been spending it thinking about coming home. That is going to happen in ten days.

I've been reading all of the "re-entry" literature that's being disseminated by Pitt and by DIS and by all of my friends here and by all of my friends back in the States who have done it. And I'm beginning to get a little scared to come home.
Right now I just want to record what I'm thinking as I'm surrounded by my jumbled, half-full suitcase and Molly's full, neatly-organized one. Will I remember today when I look back on this semester? Probably not, because today was just like any other day + four slices of free pizza for filling out a survey.

I am told that I will be bored, misunderstood, Denmark-sick, alienated and frustrated. Who would go for that? Especially when I'm anticipating a beach bonfire on Friday where I will be, hopefully, burning the teal jacket you've seen in half of my pictures and which I wore every wintry day here. Now THAT is something to look forward to, especially if you're like me and your 8-year-old's fascination with fire never passed.

I'm especially worried because Denmark is not the kind of place that lends itself to exciting stories. It is comfortable, familiar, and my study abroad experience has felt like one giant inside joke, as much as I try to describe it to people on the outside. How will I fit a semester of a fairytale-bike-flower-land into a 30 second anecdote as an answer to the inevitable "How was your semester?" question?

I welcome any advice/commentary/criticism/ideas of exciting stories, preferably involving an alligator, that I can bring back with me/invitations to eat Danishes with me when I'm home/etc.

In closing, I want to temper this with the assurance that I am ecstatic beyond description to see all of the people that have been living their happy and exciting American lives while I've been here. I can't wait to hear how YOUR semester has gone! You are all very special to me and be expecting a call around May  18th when I have hopefully gotten over my jet lag.

In final closing, a couple of pictures from the Danish tall ship I was sailing on this weekend.




   

We went to the Queen's birthday celebration at Amielienborg (the royal family's current residence) on the 16th.
Festivities, which included the Queen waving and her family waving and the Danes waving, were to begin at noon. We decided to get to the palace around quarter-til 11... And we were the oldest, if not some of the only people, wanting to get a good spot in the square.

At precisely twelve o'clock noon (The Danes are a punctual folk.), the birthday girl made her appearance.

The day can be summarized like this:

    



    



Check out the little girl in the bottom left corner of the second to last picture... Most adorable royal baby in a very attractive family.

Going to Prague on the 6th of April, the only thing I could think about was that part of the first Mission Impossible where the agents all go to that party to catch the guy with the disk and Jon Voigt gets shot in and falls in the river and the car explodes and Tom Cruise uses his detonating gum to destroy the aquarium restaurant.

It wasn't really like that.

I met my friend Kimi at the airport and decided to try to take public transportation to the place where we'd be staying. We bought our tickets (for just over a dollar!), got our map, and hopped on the 179 bus to Vypich. Surprisingly, about 45 minutes  and a ride on the 22 tram later, we arrived at the building where Kimi's friend Kate lived and where I'd be renting a room for three nights. We met Kate and she took us to a trendy Thai restaurant called noi. Kimi and I were thrilled at how cheap everything was. (There are about 20 Czech crowns to a dollar and a pretty nice meal averaged around 100 to 150 crowns...) Kate walked us around the Old Town area, across Charles Bridge.

The next day we woke up and were planning on spending more time in the city, seeing Prague Castle, and going to the Prague Easter Festival.



The Easter Festival is a month-long celebration of SPRING in Prague, where they have traditional performances and food, including this sausage that is like a foot long and very difficult to eat. Apparently a must-do in Prague, we ate them in the Old Town Square. The older buildings in Prague were a lot like the ones above: light-yellow-tan buildings with red tile roofs and the occasional copper ornamentation. Beautiful.

The Communist-era buildings, on the other hand....



Ugh... Though the store inside of this monstrosity, Tesco, was a good friend to Kimi and me, providing us with things like granola bars and balsamic vinaigrette, the likes of which we cannot get in Copenhagen.

One of my favorite things about Prague was its eclectic collection of public art. Included in this is the John Lennon wall, a public wall in the touristy area of Prague which people have been tagging since the time of Lennon's death. Most of the messages are Beatles lyrics and peace signs--a really neat display.

   


Kate told us about a place called Bukowski's that served free sangria on Tuesday nights from 7 to 10, no strings attached. It was much fruitier than the Parisian sangria I'd had the previous week and was well worth the fifty Czech crowns we ended up paying for a basket of chips. Later that evening, Kimi and I tried what the Czech deem "the best beer in the world". Since pilsner was developed first by the Czech, I figured it had to be good. However, Pilsner Urquell was no Carlsberg! Score for the Danes!

The next day Kate had to be in class, so Kimi and I were on our own to explore the city. We went paddleboating in the Vltava river, which runs through the center of Prague, under the Charles Bridge, and is presumably the one that Jon Voigt fake-bled into. Eew. We did NOT swim. We spent the day wandering, reading (We had each bought a new book at an English bookstore we'd heard about), and meeting up with my friend Chris from high school. It was neat to see him, since he studies in Prague and we were hoping to arrange something. It was also very dream-like, hanging out with Chris and Kimi together. One of those situations where you know people from two COMPLETELY separate circles, but they somehow find themselves in the same scene in your head. Or in Prague.

We stopped by Starbucks (Kimi is a Seattle native so she sees it as supporting a local business) during a freak and short-lived downpour and met Kate to eat at a popular Mexican restaurant. I hadn't eaten  all day in preparation and managed to down an entire skillet of chicken fajitas. Thumbs up for Czech Mexican! Bueno!

I can definitely see myself returning to Prague. It is a beautiful city to visit with a lot of things to see and a really walkable lay-out, except for the giant hill leading to the castle. Even the hill has its upside: one face of it is a giant park of green grass and cherry blossoms. I'm glad I visited it last. It was the perfect send-off to my week of whirlwind exploration.

...tourist city. And it made us feel quite unaccomplished as we were taking pictures in front of the Eiffel Tower not decked out in work-out gear or donning a shiny medal.

I flew out of Athens on Friday the 3rd of April after a stressful time of leaving my hostel, taking the metro to a station where I was supposed to pick up a bus to the airport, which I had an almost-lethal time locating and which was supposed to take a half-hour to an hour (depending on traffic), but turned out to take an hour and a half. Whew.

But I caught my flight, nursing my still pink skin which was irritated from the dragging of luggage. Shoulder straps on bags seem much less convenient with a sunburn.
I arrived in Paris, and by some miracle got a ticket from the Orly airport to the station where I was to get off for our hostel using an automated ticket dispenser. By another stroke of luck, I wandered down the correct streets and found the Aloha Hostel where, shortly after Becca, my good friend from Pitt, met me.

We set out to the Champs-Elysees to meet Becca's friends that she met while studying in London this semester. A big group, there were six of them from her program, they were all really nice and we became friends right off the bat. We wandered around looking for affordable food and ended up each getting a croque monsieur (grilled cheese with ham!) at a cafe near the Louvre.

Since the Louvre is free for people under 26 (Europeans really want you to hold on to your youth... They offer discounts to people who are almost-thirty for being young.) on Fridays, we decided to trek over and check out some art. We only had a couple of hours at the museum before it closed. There are people who say it would take almost a year of art-looking, without any breaks, to see the entire museum. Needless to say, we saw everything you're supposed to see at the Louvre: the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, Winged Victory, an elephant pendant from the Royal Danish collection, etc.

We also took some pictures reminiscent of The Da Vinci Code


The next day we decided to head out to Versailles to see the palace. I had been there previously with my family a couple of years ago, but I'd really forgotten how HUGE this place was. The garden especially, stretches out for at least a kilometer behind the palace. We wandered about for a couple of hours, looking tourist-a-licious with our Engilsh audiotour headsets. Mid-afternoon we decided that it was lunchtime and decided to meet the guys in our group at a place we had passed on our way from the train station: Buffalo Grill.

Mock us not: this place was a very interesting study in the French take on all that is Texan. The waitresses wore cowgirl outfits and handed out headdresses to all of the "Little Indians" ordering from the kid's menu. Not the most P.C. place, but they had pretty good barbecue wings and we got a lot of food (including a little creme brule!) for few Euro.

We made our way out of little Versailles-ville and to the Notre Dame cathedral, one of my favorite churches in a continent awash with visitable churches.



After some souvenir shopping, a pledge to get crepes the next day, and bidding adieu to the boys, who decided they wanted to climb the tower of Notre Dame, we headed off to the Eiffle Tower. The line for the elevators were astronomical, as is to be expected on a spring-has-sprung Parisian evening, so we decided to stare down the task of climbing 700+ stairs to the second level of the tower.

700+ stairs later, we were at the landing. And it wasn't even that hard! We took some pictures there and hung out until it started to get dark enough to grab an elevator to the very top. (We wanted pictures at night...)


We got home and decided we wanted to see a little more of Paris at night. The man at the front desk of our hostel was very helpful in directing us to a bar serving sangria that was "very French". We chose not to comment on the ability to exist as both a sangria-serving and very-French place. We found Le 10 and descended the narrow creaky stairs to the basement. Packed in like sardines, we sat between a group of French guys and a group Italian guys, who were quite...talkative--open to political discussion and the usual. Anyone who knows about World Cup soccer will have an idea of what the conversation devolved into between the two groups, so we took it as our cue to leave and headed back to the hostel.

The next, and our last, day we decided to see the Catacombs of Paris. For anyone unfamiliar with catacombs, they are piles of bones. Underground. These particular catacombs have been around since the late 1700s and are said to contain the bones of hundreds of thousands of people. The tunnels snake around a good portion of the city and are referenced in a lot of French literature, including Les Miserables. They were scary.



After seeing a lot of dead people, we were hungry for some crepes. All six of us (Becca's friend Erin had left earlier that day) got Nutella with banana, a gastronomical delight I would probably commit at least a misdemeanor for.

Later that day, we saw the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur, another one of my favorite churches. It is set upon a hill that looks over the city, and is consequently a hang out for a good amount of street performers. One guy tried to get everyone to sing a long with some U2 and John Lennon songs, but since the majority of the audience was Danish, interestingly and coincidentally, he got very little response.



The rest of the day was fairly uneventful, save for a delicious dinner, it's consequential stomachache, and saying goodbye to Becca and all of my new friends, one of whom knows a good friend I've made in Denmark!

I went to bed early, since I would have to catch the very first Metro of the day to make my flight to Prague.

Just another romantic weekend in Paris, a city I would definitely recommend to anyone who is prepared to try to speak French, or at least ready to be exceedingly polite in English.

When we got back from our study tour, we had two extra weeks of spring break to spend as we wished. As much as I was tempted to spend my vacation sleeping after my sleep-less study tour, I instead spent a week in Greece, a weekend in Paris, and a few days in Prague in the Czech Republic.

I flew to Athens with my roommate Molly and our friend Sam, a girl who lives down the hall from us, on Sunday, March 29th.  After a mildly stressful trip into town from the airport (the Athens metro, in all its glory, was undergoing construction on the line going to the airport), we made it to our hostel. After settling into our room, we went down to the front desk to ask about finding food in the area. The woman at the desk pretty much told us we didn't want to spend any time near our hostel, and instead directed us to the Plaka, a touristy area below the Acropolis.

It turned out to be a very fruitful idea: we ate a delicious and relatively cheap Greek meal at a taverna with outside seating, went souvenir shopping (I bought sandals!), and explored the area. We tried to get close to the Acropolis to take pictures of it illuminated at night, but we ended up on a wild goose chase through a random Athenian neighborhood.

The next morning we ferried to Mykonos, which took about five hours. Since the weather was nice, we spent a lot of time on the ferry's deck, looking at the little islands we passed with villages straight out of Mamma Mia. I even caught a couple of old Greek guys on film, which was one of my goals in visiting Greece.





We arrived in Mykonos and were picked up at the port by Christina, the woman who ran our hostel in Mykonos, Mama's Pension. (As much as we referred to Christina as "Mama", the REAL Mama was actually her mother in law. How Greek!) She told us all about the island, how it would be fairly deserted since it was before tourist season really began. She also put the idea in our heads to rent mopeds or ATVs to ride around the island for one of the two days we'd be in Mykonos.



Our hostel overlooked a beach, so we decided to venture down some treacherous steps to a cute little sand beach. After awhile we got hungry and decided to seek out a place for dinner. Many restaurants in Mykonos are closed on Mondays, apparently, so it took us awhile and a kilometer or so of walking to find a place to eat. El Greco was completely empty except for the three of us. We decided to order a Greek salad. Little did we know, we'd all become addicted. Greek salads in Greece are lettuce-less, except maybe as a garnish. They contain (delicious) tomatoes, cucumbers, Kalamata olives, capers, and green peppers. Oh, and about a kilo of feta on top. We ate ours with olive oil and vinegar while we waited for the rooster we ordered to come out. Anyone who knows: why would this place specify that they were serving rooster? How is it different than chicken served everywhere else? It came with noodles and none of us could finish, so we saved it for breakfast the next morning.

Feeling slightly guilty about eating the little guy as we heard his cousin crowing in the background, we ate our left-overs the next morning before heading into town (about a mile's walk) to pick up the mopeds we planned on renting. The man at Hercules Bike and Car rental refused to rent us mopeds without a motorcycle license (understandable...), so we rented two ATVs instead. Sam rode hers alone and I chauffeured Molly around for the day.



A few hours of ATVing around the hilly island and a developing sunburn later, we stopped to eat a picnic at a beach called Super Paradise. The beach, as we noticed with most beaches on the island, was deserted. We ate our picnic and splashed a little in the water, though it was still much to cold to go swimming.



Since we were no longer walking, we could get everywhere so much more quickly. I think we saw the majority of the 7 by 10 kilometer island that day. It was the most fun I've had this semester and am thrilled we made the decision to ferry to Mykonos. That night, we ate dinner (my birthday dinner, since it was March 31st and we were going to spend the next day on a ferry back to Athens) on the water. We split baklava AND a brownie, since it was my birthday and we were on vacation, after all, and ATVed back up to our hostel. At this point I was pretty sunburned on my arms a shoulders, an affliction that would inconvenience me for the next week. POOR ME, right? ;)

The next morning, we strapped all of our luggage to the ATVs and slowly ventured back to Hercules to return our vehicles and catch our ferry. We had breakfast on the water, got some tea, and boarded the ship back to Athens. Our hostel that night was a walking distance from the Plaka, so it was much more convenient to track down some gelato for dessert.

We woke up early the next morning to see the main archaeological sights before Sam had to catch a flight back to Copenhagen. We saw the Parthenon, the Ancient Agora, the Temple of Dionysis, etc. It was a hot, sunny day and it definitely wore us out.





That afternoon Molly and I metro-ed to the Olympic complex area. Since the 2000 Olympics, the place had become pretty deserted, though some of the outdoor pools still had water in them. We had dinner and called it an early night, since I would be leaving for Paris the next morning and we were pretty worn out from the heat.

If you are on facebook, you can see two WHOLE ALBUMS worth of pictures from Greece. If you aren't, I'd be happy to email you some of the more eventful ones. Just let me know!
More to come about Paris and Prague. The two P's await!

I'm missing everyone and getting REALLY ready to be back in the States. Love from across the ocean!

I have officially returned to Copenhagen after a ~three week break. I traveled a bunch and am going to try my darndest to tell you all about what I've been up to.

I'll start with my week-long study tour to Stockholm, Sweden and Tallinn, Estonia with the other people in my Human Health and Disease class. These were the same kids I traveled with to western Denmark and again, we had a blast.
We arrived in Stockholm on the 22nd of March and reported directly to our hotel's sauna. (Apparently Sweden, and other parts of Northern Europe, really likes its saunas.) Later we went to a French restaurant for dinner. Sadly, we had to rush through our meal to get to a performance of Swan Lake we were seeing at the Stockholm Konserthus (a theater in downtown Stockholm). The ballet was beautiful--the girl who played the Swan princess was a fabulous dancer. Afterward, a group of us sought out a T.G.I. Fridays (the only place open on a Sunday night) to hang out. I tried a Pripps, a Swedish beer that tastes a little like honey.

The next morning, half of our group went to a local children's hospital, Karolinska hospital, while the rest of us had the morning on our own to wander around Stockholm. We found a Swedish market and a few neat stores downtown before heading to the hospital ourselves for a lecture on burn treatment. As a dermatologically squeamish person, a few of the pictures were hard for me to take, but we learned some neat things. For example, if you put a film of silver on a burned area, it works as both an antibacterial and an antiviral so the area does not get infected. Later we took a walking tour of Stockholm's old town area, Gamla Stan. It was fairly cold, but we got a good overview of the nicest part of Stockholm.



The next day it was our turn to go to Karolinska. I ended up shaddowing a radiologist for the morning and got to sit in on an MRI of a baby, a fluoroscopy (when they make you drink Barium contrast and take a series of x-rays to examine your upper digestive system) of another baby, and a couple of ultrasounds of more small kids. We left that afternoon on a boat tour of Stockholm, since it has a lot of islands and quays that you can travel by boat. We saw some parts of town that our walking tour couldn't quite reach. It was a nice sunny day and the boat provided blankets for people, like us, who decided to sit on the deck.



The next day we visited a couple of museums in Stockholm, the Vasa Museum, dedicated to a Swedish shop built in 1682 that sank on its maiden voyage, and the Nordiska Museum of Swedish history.
The Vasa was impressive in its hugeness. It was rumored to have sank because it was too top heavy. That was pretty evident by looking at it. This thing had an enormous and intricately-carved deck area. It looked like a pirate ship!



Later that day, after a lecture about the Swedish healthcare system, we boarded an overnight ferry for Tallinn. This "ferry" was more like a cruise ship with a couple of restaurants, a club called Club Aluminum (Aluminum? Was that the classiest metal they could come up with?), a Duty Free shop, and a live show hosted by a guy named Pedro Santana. It was a fun, though sleep-deprived night, since there were three of us sleeping in a cabin the size of a large walk-in closet..



Sadly, my camera died on the ferry and I had used all of my batteries, so I was unable to take any pictures when we arrived in Estonia. It's a real shame because Tallinn turned out to be an adorable medieval city.

In Tallinn, we visited the Kumu Art Museum, where we saw an art rock show. Estonian art rock, apparently, involves a jazz jam band playing soothing music to a slideshow of pictures of nature. It was a neat show, but maybe not the best idea for a bunch of drowsy college kids. The next day, we visited a local organization created to educate Estonians about HIV, since they have the second highest HIV prevalence in all of Europe. The lady who spoke to us was very engaging and willing to answer all of our questions. Later we ate lunch at a medieval-style restaurant called Olde Hansa in Old Town Tallinn. This was followed by a walking tour of the city and a flight back to Copenhagen.

The trip was only five days long, but felt like a month since we were kept so busy and came to a group consensus not to sleep. It was one of the best experiences I've had here and I learned a lot.

More on the other two weeks of spring break later. My little typers hurt!

These guys were speaking a Danish/English hybrid on the bus today that I completely understood. Now I just need to drop the -glish part and I'll be set.

Since returning home from Dublin last weekend, I've mostly been preparing for my three week Spring Break, which starts this Saturday!
I learned a couple of Danish games from some friends who live in a kollegium, which is sort of like an dorm for Danish university students. The only difference is that it's separate from the university system, so you can go to any college and live there. As a result, you often have to commute to school, which is the situation with my friends. Anyway, the games: They are played with dice and are very popular. You'll find dice and dice cups in any bar in town. I learned a game called "Cheat" and another called "Meier". To avoid getting into details, just know that the games require convincing other people that you know more than you really do. In other words, they are lying games. And consequently, I am awful at them. I really do like them, however, and will be happy to play with anyone when back in the States.
On Thursday I went to a concert at a new concert hall in Copenhagen called the Koncerthuset ("Concert House"). It is a really neat building that is constructed out of any building material imaginable: glass, cement, wood, metal, etc. They also use projection to show "murals" on the interior and exterior walls.



The show I went to featured two Danish groups: Spleen United and The William Blakes. Their music can be described as a sort of indie/rock/electronica mix. Difficult to explain, but really great to see in person. The William Blakes probably had 8 or 9 band members, including two drummers who played simultaneously. At the same time. Sweet.
The bands alternated songs, so there were two stages set up in a room about as big as a typical high school gym. The walls had paintings of famous Danish musicians and composers, including Carl Nielsen and apparently, Ben Webster and Van Morrison...!?!



It was being filmed for broadcast on Saturday the 21st on a show called "Backstage". I'm going to be on Danish TV! I think that my friends and I were the only Americans at the show, so I hope we were good representatives of our country. We were definitely the most enthusiastic audience members, since Danes on the whole tend to be very unresponsive at live shows. They mostly just bobbed their heads and maybe tapped their feet.... While wearing earplugs.

In preparation for my travels, I want to warn everyone that I'll probably be fairly out of contact starting Saturday. For your reference, however, here is a list of the places I'll be and when I'll be there:
Stockholm, Sweden and Tallinn, Estonia: March 22nd-March 27th on my class trip.
Athens and Mykonos, Greece: March 29th-April 3rd
Paris: April 3rd-6th
Prague: April 6th-9th

Then back to Copenhagen to complete about 57 hours of postponed school work!

I hope everyone has/will have/wishes they could have a wonderful spring break! Keep in touch!

Much love and Happy St. Patrick's Day!

...but the ear canal of a homebody. One of my ears is still pressurized from my flight home from Dublin yesterday!
Other than my cochlear issues, I had a wonderful weekend trip to the Emerald Isle.
For those of you who are really only about the visuals, here are some links to the facebook albums I've posted:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2275496&id=14228627&l=a2969
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2275534&id=14228627&l=35d00

Everyone else, READ ON!
My friends Molly and Kimi and I stayed at a little hostel with a really friendly staff in an area about ten minutes from the center of Dublin.
We arrived Friday night around 1 AM, got a map from the front desk for our adventures the next day and passed out at the hostel until morning.
The next day proved to be bright, sunny, and warm, a far cry from the weather.com predictions (forecasts are completely useless, I've decided). We trekked about 25 minutes from our hostel to the Guinness Storehouse, a facility that produces millions of pints of the "black stuff" everyday! It was one of the nicer breweries I've been to, not only because I'm a Guinness fan, but also because everything was really nicely organized and the building was very modernly industrial. They have a bar on the top floor that is round and entirely made of windows so you can drink your free pint and look out over Dublin.
After Guinness, we walked around the rest of the city, seeing all of the sights including St. Patrick's cathedral, Christ Church cathedral, Dublin castle, St. Stephen's Green, Trinity College, the Temple Bar district, and so on. We probably walked 10 miles and my feet were killing me, but the city was very navigable and really beautiful. All of the Irish people we met were overly friendly and polite--a far cry from the slightly distant and reserved Danes we're used to being around.
That night we met our DIS friends Sam and Carrie at their hostel near the Temple bar district. We hurried through a small downpour (with no umbrella, since I'd left mine on the train in Copenhagen earlier that week... Poor forgetful me...) to a traditional Irish place with some top notch fish and chips. We made our way, this time without the showers, to a couple of other places in the area. One of them had a live duo singing some popular songs as well as some traditional Irish ones. Though I left the place without the Irish coffee I'd planned on ordering, I felt like I'd had the Irish pub experience I was expecting to have.

The next day we shopped a little. I bought some super-cheap sunglasses, as I was unprepared for all of the vitamin D we were absorbing. We bought some picnic food at a grocery store and made our way to the train station, where we departed for Bray, a little town on the Irish Sea. We got off the train after 45 minutes, got some tea and hot chocolate at a small cafe near the station and got directions to the beach. The pictures show it better than I can describe it, but it was exactly what I wanted from an Irish seaside town. There were guitar players on the sidewalks, a slight breeze as we climbed some piles of rocks that dotted the shore, and a good stretch of sand leading to open water. At one end of the beach was Bray head, a hill/cliff with a cross at the top that was supposed to be "easily accessible". We tried to easily access it and were promptly turned around by the conditions of our trail. It was basically a river of mud and none of us were dressed to ascend something like that. So we took some pictures and headed back to the beach to eat our picnic. Along the way we saw some clover and a rainbow. Check and check.
It got pretty windy and wet while we were eating, so we scarfed down our sandwiches and decided to eat the grapes and Pringles-knock-offs we had purchased on the train back to the city. Again, we were caught in a downpour (still umbrella-less) as we navigated ourselves home.
The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful, but enjoyable. Now I'm back in Copenhagen with less than two weeks until my huge spring break and about a week away from my friend Karen's visit! The semester is flying... I hope to hear from everyone/anyone soon!

Anyone interested in seeing pictures from the past couple of weeks who doesn't have facebook, here's the link for you (Mom....)!

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2272714&id=14228627&l=e401c

Much love and HAPPY MARCH!