Molly's European Travels

She is the blondie back there     While I was in Sweden I was able to go to the ABBA museum! I absolutely love ABBA so this was such a fun experience! I was first introduced to a lot of their songs through the Mama Mia movies, which are some of my favorite movies. I literally want to be Donna. Anyways, the museum was so fun and I was able to learn a lot about the individual singers so I am choosing to write this blog on one of them! Agnetha fältskog was one of the singers of ABBA. She was born in Sweden and totally has the classic Blonde hair, blue eye look. Something that I didn’t know was that she had a solo career both before and after the band was formed. In my opinion I think they should have stayed together longer because I had never heard of her solo career before this day, but obviously I had heard of ABBA. Another thing I was able to learn about her was that she dated and even ended up marrying one of the members of ABBA. Actually, she was with him before they f...

     Great isn’t like any other woman we have learned about, in the fact that she is still alive. I am sure some people expected me to say it's because she is young but we learned about some other young girls that made a difference. We learned that Greta started her journey by protesting outside the parliament every Friday. She is very passionate about the environment and stepped up because she felt like no one was speaking up. Something I learned about her that makes me feel a little off about her is that she uses selective mutism. She only speaks when she thinks it’s important. When I think about that it makes me wonder if I were to try to start a conversation with her, would she just not respond because she doesn’t think it’s important enough? I think it’s the things like these that turn people away from liking Greta and not respecting her.       To be honest… I am not totally sure if she actually has affected the climate in any way. But I think sh...

     While in Sweden we went to their modern art museum. It was in this museum that I found a piece to do my art of choice blog on. The piece is titled “To my sister” and it was done by Asher Jorn. I am not the biggest fan of modern art but I kinda liked this piece. Modern art is complex because a lot of the time it is up to the viewer's interpretation of what the painting is and what story it is telling. When I first looked at this painting I saw a big quill, which after finding out what the name of the piece was I knew I was correct. The painting is full of colorful swoops and shapes with some black spaces in the background. My eyes were drawn to the colorful parts of the painting, but it is hard not to notice the dark parts. A story I came up with while looking at this painting is that someone is writing amazing life stories out to their sister that lives far away from them. On paper this person's life seems perfect, but in reality all of the stories they have written ...

*This picture was taken of the buildings right across from the Opera house and where we talked about her.      For this final Vienna blog post I am choosing to write about Alma Mahler. She has a complicated history. She has been known to be slut shamed throughout history. She was a fabulous lady who liked to have relations with men. If a man had done that, and they do, then they would be praised for their “game”. She is proof of the double standard that was present back then and even today. She is so much more than this label. She was a gifted composer and when Professor R. McFarland showed us some of her work, I totally thought she deserved the gifted part of that title. I may not totally agree with the choices she made in her personal life, I think she is a very skilled composer and deserves to be remembered as such.       I think her biggest contribution is how her story can serve as an inspiration and comfort for other women. In today's world, as a...

     While in Vienna we got to go to their imperial treasury. I thought this exhibit was so cool because there was so much history in such a small space. I am a sucker for jewels and gold and so I was loving seeing all the fancy artifacts. There were a few jewelry pieces that I was dying to try on, one in particular was a set that seemed to have my birth stone as the main jewels. Another thing I loved getting to see were the giant cloak/outfits they would wear. They looked like they weighed a ton!! They were rich shades of red and blue with very intricate designs sewn into them. Some of them even had matching shoes and hats! It was so cool to be able to look at the little description by all the displays to be able to see where these artifacts originally came from.       The national treasury contains so much history and cultural importance. Like I said above, the amount of rich history the artifacts contain is unreal. Everything in there holds a unique...

     On our first day in Vienna Professor M. McFarland told us about Empress Elisabeth (Sisi). She sounds like a very glamorous lady. She was known as the most beautiful woman of her time with hair down to her ankles and an 18 inch waist! From what we learned though I think she was quite vain. She didn’t let people take her photo after she turned 30 even though I’m sure she still looked amazing. She was married at age 16 to her first cousin. I can not believe that people used to be married that young, I can barely even imagine being married now at the age of 21. Something I thought was sad was that her mother in law would take her children away from her and raise them how she wanted. I can not wait to be a mom so if my mother in law did that to me I would be very mad. It also is sad how tragic her death was, being stabbed to death is not how I want to go. She was a very interesting woman to learn about.       One important thing I was able to learn abo...

     This blog post is about Maria Theresia, the “Empress” of Austria. I put that in quotations because apparently she never actually received that title even though it’s what she was. I have learned a lot about her this past week in Vienna and been reminded of other facts I learned back in the prep class. Here are some of the things my professors taught me: She became queen at the age of 25 and things were not looking too good. Everyone thought she was going to be a weak queen so she had to fight many wars in her first years to defend herself and her country. She was able to recreate the Austrian Hungarian empire from her victories. During the years of these wars she was also having many babies. When her kids grew up she ended up getting the name “The mother in law of Europe '' because she married them off. Apparently she only let one child marry for love. That was very smart of her when it comes to a political standpoint but not so great from a mother standpoint. She so...