Una vida en España: February 2011

Back in Toledo, I am in an Art Class that studies the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian architecture around Toledo. The class is one day a week with a morning session where we walk around the city to the various monuments and an afternoon lecture. A lot of the churches are really cool like the one below named San Juan de los Reyes.

This last weekend (Feb 24-26) a group of about 30 booked it out of school after a week of midterms and traveled south to Valencia on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. We flew Ryan Air, the most uncomfortable annoying airline of all time, luckily is was only a 45min flight. We arrived in Valencia at 8:45 PM and began the search for our hostel. That thing about men never wanting to stop and ask for directions is 100% true every time.

This hostel is part of a chain called The Purple Nest

Since we arrived too late to site see, we all went out for Tapas at various places and then out for a friend's 21st.

Palm Trees and hot sunny weather :)

I can't figure out how to rotate pictures, sorry!

Every city I travel to is better than the last one. Valencia is definitely my favorite so far!

It has an area of 4 or five giant buildings with crazy futuristic architecture. They are art centers, museums, and the aquarium.

The aquarium here is the largest aquarium in all of europe being indoor and outdoor. I have a picture of an eel and a seahorse and then my camera died.

THE BEACH :D Words cannot describe how much I love the beach.

Our group isn't in this picture, but they weren't hard to find. The Americans were the only one wearing swim suits or even considering getting in the water. Apparently it's still "winter" there... I think that they should google "Minnesota winter". When it's 70 degrees and sunny us Minnesotans wear shorts and dresses, but here the locals were still wearing parkas.

One of the plates we ordered before we left.

We were all getting sick of seeing churches so we skipped out on the cathedral of Valencia, but here it is from the outside..

Valencia made their metro station pretty with sparkles! We took a 9pm flight home on Saturday. Metro, Plane, Metro, Metro, Bus Station, Cab--everytime...that part gets annoying.

Next up: Ibiza Island, Rome (with mom and aunt Tracy!!), Amsterdam, and Lisbon!

It's already been a month since Madrid (and my last blog entry... I guess that "once a week" thing just is not going to happen, sorry!). And it's already half way through the program :( The whole time that I've been here whenever my host dad would talk I just thought I was really bad at understanding Spanish, but I recently figured out that my he stutters.. not ideal for learning a foreign language.

My new camera was waiting for me when I returned from Madrid and I have tons of pictures to show you all! The next two weekends after Madrid we stayed in Toledo. I went on a day trip to Escorial with the program two Fridays ago on Feb 11th to see one of the biggest palaces in Spain. Our bus left at 8am and it was about a 3 hour bus ride. Myself and everyone else on the bus except for the Puerto Ricans wanted to sleep. However, Puerto Ricans are maybe the loudest people in the world, louder than Indians. There's a group of maybe 15 of them in the program and they're so much fun, just unbelievably loud. Anyways, Escorial is a quaint little town north of Madrid surrounded by mountains with snow on their peeks. The palace was giant and the grounds around it were beautiful. The palace staff would not let me take pictures inside, but I tried anyways. I turned my flash off, but they still caught me. I didn't realize there is still a tiny lazer that shoots off when I take pictures without the flash.

El Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial

The only picture I got of inside the palace before they caught me was of the ceiling of one of the tomb rooms. This was actually my favorite room and the first of the tomb rooms we toured. An entire floor of the palace is dedicated to the tombs of the royal families of Spain from hundreds of years ago up until now. We were basically walking around a very fancy and expensive above ground cemetery so it was a little weird at times. All of the tombs are customized with intricate designs (similar to the ceiling of this room) and usually a detailed statue of the actual person laying down on top of the tomb. They all look like they might cost a few hundred thousand dollars.

The grounds behind the palace

Before I figured out how to use the panoramic setting

Swans!

Maia and I

The next weekend a group of 12 of us traveled to Sevilla in the southern part of Spain. Sevilla is beautiful with palm trees and orange trees everywhere. It gave us our first taste of 70 degree weather since being here. We took a bus leaving from Madrid on Thursday at midnight and arriving in Seville at 6am. I tried to sleep, but the cement filled bus cushion would not let that happen. We couldn't check into our hostel until 2pm so we dropped off our stuff and tried to find anything that was open and would feed us. We spent Friday walking around, shopping, and napping in the sun on our hostel's rooftop patio. At night we went out to see the traditional Flamenco show and then found a strip of bars with streets packed with locals that do not want to be our friends. Fortunately, Seville has the most Americans I've seen since coming to Spain and a lot of people who speak English that wanted to be our friends. The next day we went out exploring the important historical places.

Before Flamenco

At Flamenco with agua de Sevilla

Plaza de España

For 1 euro each we took a boat around the moat

I don't know what this building is yet, but I know it was important.. Why aren't there pretty buildings in America?? Literally every building here looks like this!

We played in this park for a while

The cathedral is amazing and the 3rd largest cathedral in the world. We did not realize that it closed at 4:30 and we did not get there until 3:45. We wanted to make sure that we made it to the top for the view before it closed so I wasn't able to spend a lot of time exploring the inside.