An incredible discovery.

One thing I love about Spain (well, Europe in general) is the crazy variety of food they have here.  Moroccan food, Turkish food, Spanish food (duh), Australian food, Lebanese food, Greek food, and so on...  Not to mention the pastries and gelato on every corner.  Yummm.

So now to my discovery.  Normally for lunch I grab a bocadillo, which includes the top and bottom slices of bread, meat, and some cheese (if you pay extra).  That's it.  Granted, the bread is the long thick fancy kind instead of the square sliced bread we use, and the meat is thicker than US sandwhich meat (usually chicken or little sausages or something), but still.  I do like bocadillos because the meat is really good, but they're still not super filling.  The other day, however, I was walking back home from the metro and noticed TWO Turkish doner kebap places!  Why haven't I gone to either of them yet?!  Needless to say, today I will be feasting on a fabulous doner for lunch instead of a little bocadillo.  Which I am off to go get now.  Score!


....


Tah-dah!  Here it is!  And for the same price as a bocadillo.  Couldn't resist posting a picture... 

So little time left!

I can't believe how fast this semester has gone by!  I have my final for my regular-enrollment art history class on Monday and the rest of my classes for foreigners end in about three weeks (they started later than art did).  Spain is on the trimester system so the semester ends a lot faster for me.  From there I'm taking a trip with my wonderful friends to Mallorca to hang out on the beach for the weekend!  Then I'll come back and stay in Barcelona for a few days before going out to London to meet up with a friend from my art class who lives there.  Gawdon Bennett!!  Then I return to Barcelona and recover for a day or two before my parents come.  I'll show them around the city before the three of us visit Paris and southern France.  Then I come home!  I'm really excited about all the trips I'm taking after school ends, and I can't wait to see everyone back home again, but I don't ever want to leave!  It's so sad :(

Today has so far been a pretty chill day.  I woke up around 10:30 to meet three friends to work on a homework assignment for spanish.  Luckily, this homework assignment is pretty easy.  It involves taking an hour-long walk and writing up a description of where we went.  On Friday we're exchanging our work with the other group (there are only 8 people in our class) and spending the rest of the class time taking a stroll outside.  Yessssss I like assignments like this.  So our group went to the nearby mountain/big hill called Montjuïc, and walked past the art gallery, Olympic Stadium, through some gardens, and down into a nearby neighborhood.  And the nice weather pretty much topped it all off  :)

After we finished that around 12:30, I came home and changed to go on a run.  I've been really wanting to run to the Sagrada Familia (incredible Modernist church designed by Antoni Gaudí; it´s easily the most famous "attraction" in Barcelona) but it's a bit far from my house so I hadn't gone before.  But today I finally went!  I'm completely exhausted because I hadn't run in a week, but it was the perfect weather for running and I got to see the Sagrada Familia again!  Here's a few pictures of it that I took in January:

I wanted to stop running and just sit and stare for 20 minutes, but sadly I continued on my run.  I need to take a walk over there sometime to take more time to revel in it's amazing glory.  That's going on my list of things to do.  Mom and Dad: I'm taking you here, you have no choice!

Mmk well that's all for now.  Hasta pronto!

trip to Berlin

Hello all!

This post shall be dedicated to summarizing everything I did this past weekend in Berlin!  This trip was the biggest test of independence I've had yet, as I travelled to Germany on my own.  My friends and I were initally planning on going together, but things changed when we had to choose between Istanbul and Berlin.  They really wanted to go to Turkey but I still really wanted to see Berlin, so after some thought I decided I would just go see the city on my own and let them be free to do what they wanted to do most.  Though it's always more "fun" to go with other people, I thought that going by myself I would be a good experience because I would be able to see what I wanted to, go at my own pace, appreciate the history more, and have some good alone time.  Much longer than four days I thought I would get lonely, but just for an extended weekend I figured it'd be fine.  Plus, I found the idea of travelling to a foreign country on my own incredibly exciting :D

And guess what?  IT WAS AMAZING.  Everything went perfectly smoothly.  I got to the Barcelona airport okay, then figured out how to go from the Berlin airport to my hotel (by train, then metro, then on foot for a block or two).  I spent the rest of the afternoon (Thursday) walking around the old part of town (Mitte) for 2 or 3 hours to establish a sense of direction.  Honestly that's one of my favorite things to do.  I headed out in search of the philarmonic concert hall, where I knew I'd be going the next day (yay!), then just sort of wandered around aimlessly (okay not totally aimlessly. I knew where I was and headed in the general direction of where I wanted to go)  And I ended up running across several of the places I had already been planning on visiting though I hadn't looked for on the map yet!  So first the concert hall...

The building is kinda unusual-looking from the outside, but it's even more incredibly on the inside.  The auditorium isn't the typical set-up with ground floor and a layer or two of balconies.  It has that general idea, obviously, but the sections are divided up more, and stand individually.  As a result, it's kind of tricky finding your seat because you have to go up a couple sets of stairs (if you're near the top like I was haha), stopping to read the signs at every level just to find your section.  Idk if I explained that very well, but it was the coolest and most complex concert hall I've ever been in.  In fact, outside the actual hall and in the maze of a reception area was even cooler. Oh and I almost forgot... THE BERLIN PHILHARMONIC.  One of the most (if not the most) famous symphonic orchestras in the world.  Just the sound quality of the instruments was like nothing I've ever heard.  Everything was so crisp and clean and perfect.  Ahh I have to go back again.

So continuing with my Thursday afternoon stroll, I headed up north in the direction of the Tiergarten, which is the "Central Park" of Berlin.  But sadly, I found that pretty much everything was still in winter mode.  Another reason for me to have to go back: so I can see the Tiergarten in the spring or summer. 

From there I crossed the street over to the Holocaust Memorial for Jewish victims.

Exactly 2,711 concrete slabs of varying sizes (some a few inches tall, some a few meters,) are organized in straight files over a large slanting plane.  It was practically a laberinth.  You start out walking between the short slabs on the outskirts, but the deeper you go the taller they get, and the more the ground fluctuates.  Once you get deep inside you feel quite alone wandering aimlessly between the blocks, which was the intent of the architect.  It felt very eerie in there, and gives you a chance to just be alone, think, and reflect.

After leaving the memorial, I saw something big and cool-looking in the distance, so I went to go check it out... And what did I find?  BAM.  The Brandenburg Gate!

I don't really have any significant commentary on this one, other than it was pretty cool and is famous.  Oh I could mention though that it, and pretty much everything else in Berlin had to be reconstructed after Berlin got bombed really badly at the end of WWII in 1945.  It was sad exploring the city and learning that everything I was seeing was a reconstruction after all the damage from that year.  And as a result, the current Berlin is a new city with a very modern vibe that's easy to notice while walking down the streets.

I did a bit more exploring before finally heading back to my hotel, which was located about 2 minutes away from Checkpoint Charlie, the famous Soviet/American crossing point between East and West Berlin. 

If I had to pick one thing I got the most out of from my trip, it would have to be Checkpoint Charlie.  Obviously I knew that the Berlin Wall didn't come down until the 80's, but for some reason I never realized just how recent that was.  West Berlin was a little pocket of democracy surrounded by communism until 1989, which was only a year before I was born.  It feels so much more real when you're there, when you can see the line drawn into the pavement, walk along the reconstructed sections of the wall.  I was able to casually cross right over the former border between East and West Berlin, when just over 20 years ago I would have been shot on the spot.  I usually passed by there once or twice a day because it was so close to my hotel, and I tried to make an effort to really think about it, and how to appreciate the way things are today.  That was definitely the most eye-opening thing for me.

After my walk I went back to the hotel to relax before going to bed.  The next day I woke up and did an awesome 6 hour walking tour for just 10 euros (woo!), but I'll talk about that later.  Looks like this is going to be a long re-telling of my trip, so I'll stop this post here as installment one!  Hopefully I write the other ones...  Take care everybody!

Hello!

Wow it's so hard to keep up writing on this thing.  There's so much I have to talk about!  Well for starters I just got back from a trip to Sevilla this weekend, which was the first independent overnight trip I've taken with friends!  We stayed in a hostel that was within walking distance of the Real Alcazar (where the spanish kings and queens use to live, though very much not like a normal palace because everything was in the mudejar--the mudejars were moors permitted to live in Spain after the Reconquista by the Catholics-- style), and la Catedral, which was really fun and brought back memories of summer camp (all six of us in one room with three bunk beds).  We took a day trip out to Cordoba on Saturday pretty much just to see La Mezquita.  That place was incredible.  Its construction began in the 8th century while the Moors dominated Spain and underwent 4 or 5 expansions over the course of the next several 100 years.  But after the Catholics gained control of Spain they converted the Muslim ezquita into a Catholic cathedral.  So you enter and are surrounded by moorish architecture and hundreds of their iconic arcs, but while walking around you come across chapels and Chrisitan paintings.  It's the most unusal thing ever.  Luckily my camera is ancient and didn't buy a new one before going on the trip, so I only took about 5 really crappy pictures inside la mezquita...  I'm definitely planning on stealing photos from my friends.  I should load the ones I did take on here but my camera is way across the other side of the room and I'm nice and cozy snuggled up on my bed right now...

As for this weekend I'm planning on staying in Barcelona to do whatever sight-seeing I haven't done here.  I still haven't seen the inside of the Sagrada Familia yet, and I really want to go to the old little theme park called Tibidabo up on the top of the mountains overlooking Barcelona, so maybe I'll get to do one of those.  If not, I've got a list of places to explore that my host, Esther, mentioned to me.  The weekend before last I walked for over 3 hours listening to my ipod and enjoying the city.  I love long walks :)

Take care, everyone!

Wine and Onion Roots, a classic Catalonian meal

This past weekend we had a CIEE excursion entitled “Caminata and Calçotada.”  Seeing as how I didn’t know what either of these words meant, I initially had no idea what this trip was going to be.  Luckily I did find out before that Saturday that we were going on a hike and would be eating Calçotadas, a very traditional Catalonian food.  They´re basically a type of onion root that you dip in salsa and eat.  But before I get more into that I’m going to give a basic overview of stuff I’ve seen in Barcelona, which I haven’t really done yet.

I inserted a map (I love maps, they’re so much fun) and added pin points for a key places.  Click on the link and you should be able to see all my labels as well as zoom in and out (there’s one pin kinda far away).  Let me know if it doesn't work right.
http://www.bing.com/maps/default.aspx?v=2&cp=41.393228778640406~2.175807597902173&lvl=13&dir=0&sty=r&cid=D3735F57650C2205!125

 

As for some of the things on my map, I have a marker for my house which is on Rocafort; another is the CIEE building that they call “La Casa,” which is where all the staff have their offices and where we take our Spanish classes.  I also marked some of the places we visited two weekends ago on Montjuïc, and the trip we took this past weekend to hike and eat Calçotadas. 

Also, you should check out Plaça de Catalunya and Passeig de Gracia on googlemaps (http://maps.google.com/). Do the street view for the Plaza and walk around there, then go to Passeig de Gracia, (which branches off from the Plaza) and walk along the road looking at all the buildings.  Make sure you see Casa Batlló, and La Pedrera, which you can search in the tool bar if you want to jump straight there. (In case you didn´t already know, you can click and drag the little man on top of the zoom bar and situate him wherever you want to “stand” on the street. It makes life easier)

Here are some of my own photos of Plaça Catalunya:

Esta es la entrada al metro, y el edificio “El Corte Ingles” en el fondo es como un “mall” de Los Estados Unidos aunque El Corte Ingles es toda la misma tienda.---This is the entrance to the metro, and the building “El Corte Ingles” in the background is like a mall from the US although El Corte Ingles is all the same store.

Another really cool plaza that’s a 10 or 15 minute walk from house is Plaça d’Espanya (Yes, I know that´s not how you write it in Spanish; any names that I write which don´t look Spanish are probably in Catalan, which is spoken in Barcelona and the rest of Catalonia).  There’s a really beautiful monument in the middle of the plaza, and in another direction off in the distance you can see the Museu Nacional d’Arte de Catalunya, which we walked in front of two weekends ago when exploring Montjuïc (there are more pictures of the front of it in my last post).

En el centro de la Plaça d’Espanya

El museo en la distancia.

And now for last weekend.  We took a short train ride (it was underground along with the metro, nothing exciting) up to the stop “Tibidabo,” which is a really cool, old theme park that’s on top of the mountains overlooking the city.  I haven’t been there yet but I really want to.  After meeting with the rest of the CIEE group, we started our little hike up the mountain.  It wasn’t terribly rigorous, but it was incredibly scenic.

La vista desde la montaña durante nuestra caminata.

When we got to the top we stopped to enjoy an enormous meal, complete with calçotadas and salsa (definitely not Mexican salsa; it’s a special Catalonian salsa that you dip the calçotadas in), wine, salad, bread with cooked eggplant and peppers, beans, meat, dessert, and coffee/tea afterwards.  Let’s just say that we were there for a while.  By the way, every course we had was brought out on a big plate and shared between four people.  So that was different, and pretty cool.
Now begins the narrative of this amazing meal.  To eat the calçotadas we had to peel off the outer layers of it that were burnt (they cook it first), then dip the bottom into the salsa and eat!  However, because they´re really long roots you have dangle them from above in order to eat them.  They´re really really messy, which is why the waiters pass out bibs beforehand.  I don´t know why, but I didn´t take pictures. Sorry… Oh and the wine! Hahahaha that part was really fun.  They put it in a special vase, I forget what it´s called, and you literally have to pour the wine out of a spout and aim it into your mouth.  (Didn’t get a picture of that either…) Now that was when the bibs really came in handy.  Here´s a picture of the wine:

Luckily it wasn’t regular wine because they mix it with carbonation, so that made drinking it in huge gulps a lot easier.

Then they brought us salad and bread with the eggplant and pepper, which was pretty good.  But next was the meat.  And I mean it was literally a plate stacked with sausages and ribs and chicken legs and anything else you can think of.  Wow.  After that they brought out the dessert, which was a chunk of ice cream (or something cold and creamy) surrounded by baked bread and drizzled with chocolate.  As you can see here…

Yummmmm…

And after we finished that lovely meal we made our way back down to the city.  I quickly went home to shower and grab my backpack before heading out to catch a train to the mountains.  My host mother, Esther, had gone to spend a weekend with two of her sisters (she has a lot; they were a family of 12 kids) in a house that one of them owns, but I had signed up for that CIEE day trip so I had to take a train out there after my excursion ended.  When she told me the house was “in the mountains” I thought she meant the mountains around Barcelona.  But no, I rode for two hours out to the Pyrénées'-Orientales…

Which I shall talk about next time.

Hasta entonces!

Thought of the day, 27/1/11

I’ve decided that since I’m often busy or lazy and don’t sit down to write blog posts very often, I’m going to start making little short ones in between the others.  So here’s one for today:


I went to the market yesterday and bought some yummy chocolates.  There’s a rose, a mushroom (the spotted one) a cup of coffee (the one that looks like an eye), a chocolate covered cherry, and more!  I was super excited but they ended up costing me 11 euros (about $15)!! Oops…

Though sometimes Spain is expensive, it can also be wonderously cheap.  The croissant and café con leche (half milk, half coffee, and smaller than a cup of coffee that they normally sell in the US) cost 1.20 euros together (less than $1.60-ish).  And the enormously monstrous bottle of water, three times as big as a regular bottle of water, cost .90 euros! Crazy!  But on the other hand, you get charged more than that in restaurants for a mini bottle of water, so I guess it balances out…

THE END


Second thought of the day:

Whoever thought of pancake stands was genious!  You can just walk up and buy a warm pancake filled with hidden chunks of suger, doused in chocolate and sprinkled with bananas or nuts... mmmmm

Thank you, Spain.

Begin Week Three

Good morning all!  (Side note: I started this almost 12 hours ago and am finishing it now, which is why the hours don't match with it being morning) I just finished my delicious breakfast of coffee and toast with ham (which here is more like wide slices of thin, flat, non-crunchy bacon; sooo good), and am now hanging out in the living room/kitchen while my host mother is getting ready for work.  I don't have class until pretty late (noon on Mondays and Wednesdays, and 3pm on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays), so last week I ended up sleeping in until 10 or 11 every day, which is too late!  I'm going to try to get up earlier and go do stuff this week, even if just walk around the city, because sleeping 10 hours a day is such a waste of time.

So this past weekend.  Friday I didn't do anything before 3 (oops), then had class 3-6, then went home and sat on facebook until 9:30 (another oops) when I went out to meet my GA group and Lluís for the most enormous meal of my life.  We were going out to get tapas (I don´t remember if I´ve explained tapas yet; put simply they're special spanish snacks similar to appetizers except that usually people order them individually; you can get patatas bravas (potatoes), or salchichas (sausages), or other stuff) so I assumed it was a small meal.  But this was a very fancy tapas place.  We had wine, four rounds of tapas, AND a main dish.  I wasn't feeling incredibly well so by the time we got to the main course I couldn't eat any more.  And by the way, this whole eating huge meals isn't very normal.  Well, I guess sometimes Spaniards will eat a huge meal once a day, but I've gotten the impression that they like to eat a bunch of small meals throughout the day.  Which personally I like better than the American method of stuffing your face 2 or 3 times a day.  By doing it the Spanish way you can constantly be eating without feeling like too much of a fatty.

Wow I'm still on Friday night.  So afterwards our group split: all the Americans went off to some American bar called Dow Jones (oh so clever) while Lluís went out with his friends who had just showed up at the restaurant.  He invited all of us to go with them, but everyone wanted to go out with the CIEE people.  I was the only person who took him up on the offer.  Luckily it wasn´t too awkward since they were all really friendly and Lluís talked to me a lot.  But I will admit that when they were having a group conversation I had no idea what they were saying about 95% of the time.  They speak so fast!  Anyway, we went to a nice bar where one of their friends was having a birthday party, and I hung out there with them until we left around 2 (which is very early for Spaniards, might I add).

The next day, Saturday, I spent the majority of my day at el Parque Montjüic, which is on top a small nearby mountain.  It was beautiful weather to be outside too!  I´d say it was in the low 70´s, upper 60´s perhaps?  Up there we...

...explored a castle...

 ...walked around in the park...

...saw the ´92 Olympic Stadium...

 ...and walked past El Museu Nacional d'Arte de Catalunya (this is the view from the front facing away).

 We also found the most amazing pair of slides in the world.

We would have spent the entire day there but a father with his two girls showed up so we felt awkward and left.  All in all, Saturday was a great day.

Now for Sunday.  First half of the day I didn´t do much (again, the whole sleeping late thing...), although I did meet up with some friends to plan the weekend trips we want to take this semester (it's tricky figuring it out because we have class on Friday, so our weekends are short).  Short summary: Berlin and Prague on our 4-day weekend (I'm going to see the Berlin Philharmonic!!!) and Amsterdam and Brussels on a 3-day weekend.  The other weekends not reserved for studying we hope to go to Granada, Sevilla, Mallorca, maybe Salamanca, maybe somewhere in northern Spain.  We'll be somewhere in Spain the week before Easter for Semana Santa (Holy Week), and back in Barcelona for the Catalonian holiday, El Día de San Jorge.  Hopefully after the program ends I´ll find some time to go to France or visit my friends in Italy (one´s going to see family there, and another will be travelling around with her boyfriend).  My host señora also invited me to go up in the mountains behind Barcelona one weekend with her and Julia (her 4-year old daughter) to visit one of her sisters (my señora is one of twelve siblings!).

The big part of Sunday was the FC Barcelona game!!  Oh my gosh it was amazing.  The stadium was absolutely enormous, it was so cool!  European football is so much better than American football.  I'm adding this to my list of reasons why I'm never coming back home.  And of course Barça smashed Málaga 4-1.  Haha we also happened to sit in front of this huge group of guys who kept randomly yelling cheers, or continuing stadium-wide cheers after everyone else had stopped.  It was really funny.  At one point they started one cheer that went to the tune of the Yellow Submarine and my friend next to me started humming along.  Yet again, it was all in all a very good day.

I promised myself I wouldn't write enormously long posts, but I think that's going to be impossible for me.  Either you get all the details or none of them.  I'm gonna go with all of them because otherwise each post would be about five sentences long, which is boring. So anyway, I hope you all have an awesome day!  Adios!