studentsineurope

Inna Shevchenko is a 19-year-old student and activist with FEMEN, a women’s rights group in Ukraine that has drawn significant attention from within the country and beyond.  This is the second part of a two-part interview; see Part 1 here.
Have you run up against any opposition?
We have, not often, but a few times, we’ve had [...]

FEMEN, a women’s rights movement, exploded onto the Ukrainian political scene two years ago with provocative, erotically charged, eye-grabbing protests against sex tourism.  Made up mostly of young female students, the group has drawn coverage in the international press, is routinely featured on the national news, and has become a virtual household name in Ukraine [...]

“It was like the city had become a painting, and I was lost inside it,” my friend told me.  “Everything glowed.  The colors were on fire.  The canal was breathing.”  That, for him, was Wednesday in Amsterdam.  That was when magic mushrooms were legal.
The city most famous for its permissiveness of vice was once also [...]

A lot of more devout Europeans try to out-Catholic each other (I think Poland takes the prize in that category), but no one beats Spain when it comes to ostentatious Easter festivities.  During the Holy Week (referred to as Semana Santa) leading up to Easter Sunday, cities and towns both large and small are overwhelmed [...]

Charles Stevenson is a 26-year-old Washington state native and Managing Director of Snow or Sand, a student-oriented travel company founded in 2009.  From the West Coast, Charles leaped across the country to study at Boston’s Northeastern University and took another great leap to do a semester abroad in Perugia, Italy.  After graduation and two years [...]

Everyone knows about the liberal drug laws in The Netherlands, where marijuana is decriminalized and hallucinogenic mushrooms, while illegal as of late 2008, are tolerated.  However, few people are aware that Portugual has an even more progressive drug policy.  There, not only is marijuana decriminalized, but also cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, LSD, and virtually every other [...]

A camera is a good thing to bring to Carnaval.  Besides the obvious benefit of visually documenting the twisting, turning kaleidoscope of people, colors, costumes, and oddities, it will help you reconstruct a night whose chronology is probably indistinct and whose details get fuzzy at the margins.
Safely back at home after 16 hours in Cadiz, [...]

I hate airports.  They’re big, boring, and inconveniently located.  Checking into any one of them involves the same mind-numbing process of micro-steps that makes me want to die a little.  They make you pour out all your unchecked booze and water and put all your million little metal things in a tray only to put [...]

Since the founding of the University of Bologna nearly one thousand (!) years ago, European students (and those studying abroad) unalterably shaped the character of the places their universities call home.  A number of cities on the continent have been colonized as eternally youthful student meccas, brimming with a massive student population and bolstered by [...]

Improbably high on Amazon.com’s bestseller list is an anarchist tract written anonymously by a group of radicals living in a rural commune in France.  Glenn Beck helped push their dangerous little book (titled “The Coming Insurrection”) to the top by declaring it “possibly the most evil thing I’ve ever read,” but he wasn’t the first [...]