Pictures from Chefchaouen, Morocco, Africa

Valladolid

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So valladolid huh? we were there for two days in total and loved every minute of it. i totally understand why emma fell so in love with that city. Its so picturesque and beautiful and antique yet still holds on to the modern aspects as well. We got there on Wednesday and had a bit of trouble finding a hostel but eventually found it after lots of flights of stairs and sore shoulders. We wandered a bit around the beautiful Plaza Mayor, I got led to Emma's old school and got a glimpse of her old everyday life. We went back and in all spanish style took a siesta and then headed out to the Dulce Burbuja, emma's favorite sweet shop in Valladolid and let me tell you, it was very sweet! we then found dinner and stumbled upon the Euro Cup, the European soccer version of the super bowl, and we found it actually very interesting! Barcelona won! anyways, we then headed over to Cine Roxy to see Night at the Museum 2 and left a little disappointed. Thursday we got up and switched hostels before walking over to the beautiful medieval cathedral, the law school which is somewhat beauty and the beastish and then headed over to the Colegio de San Gregorio, according to Emma is a beautifully ornate building, but was covered in scaffolding for renovations. We then got some bread meat and cheese and splurged on some watermelon and headed over to campo grande, the beautiful park to feed the peacocks and picnick for lunch. We headed back for another siesta before heading back to wander the Plaza Mayor with ice cream in hand enjoying our last hours before leaving for Amsterdam.

a weekend in africa...

so Emma and I went to the airport to pick up my friend Rachel and then we all met at the bus station to grab a bus to Tarifa, the southernmost point in spain. Well turns out that there are only two busses a day that come close to going there, and then next one was at 9 at night. we then decided to take the train down, which took us to San Fernando, still a two hour taxi ride to Tarifa, and we had five people, an illegal number to fit in one taxi. We luckily got a taxi van to take us and spent the next day lounging on the beautiful beaches of Tarifa. On Friday morning we got up with all of our stuff and hopped on the ferry over to Tangier, Morrocco. We forgot to get our passports stamped on the voyage and then had to get back on the boat, wait for half an hour before finally leaving and getting heckled by a hoard of taxi drivers all wanting to take us to our mountain city of Chefchaouen. we finally arrived in chefchaouen which is a beautiful city in the moroccan mountains, found a hostel for suuuper cheap, and spent the day walking around looking at artisania. we met two moroccan boys who showed us around, and then we realized that we would have to pay them for it, but we got henna tattoos and saw a waterfall and then that night we went to this rug shop where we got the most amazing moroccan mint tea and learned a little arabic while drinking it!! the next day we swore off all 'guides' and spent the day wandering the beautiful blue streets and buying gifts. we went to a little castle there and fought off the rain and oddly cold weather. sunday morning we had the whole trip home planned out, we got up and ate a cheap breakfast, grabbed at taxi to Ceuta, the spanish owned port, and then took the ferry from there back to Algeciras where we would catch a night bus arriving in Madrid at 7 am. the problem arose when we got to the Algeciras bus station and caitlin got a call saying that her friend's flight wasn't on tuesday but was on monday, at 8 am, and the bus we were planning on taking was full. we then took a bus to sevilla where we had a bit of an adventure and took the next bus home. the transportation wasn't the best but the places we saw were amazing! i'll add pictures as soon as i can!

EMMA'S HERE!!

so emma got here safe!! i got up early early early to go to the airport and i was still late, but it all turned out fine as we found eachother really quickly. I made emma stay up all day which we're getting pretty tired right now but Emma's doing a wonderful job powering through on about 2 hours of sleep. We had a little breakfast and Em got to meet my host mom and sister and then we walked into town. I showed her the Plaza de Cervantes, the Catedral de Santos Ninos, the calle mayor (the picture is of us on the calle mayor) and then we came back to the house and ate lunch with my family which went really well, Emma got along with them really well. We then laid down for a little siesta as is the spanish way and now we're just planning for the rest of our time together!! Just wanted to let you all know we're having an amazing time! even if it did mess up my rome posts, i'll live :)

ROMA Day 1

So as many of you heard i went to rome last weekend! Our flight left Wednesday morning at 7, so in order to get there in time taking the train and metro, it was necessary to sleep in the airport. For future reference, this is NO fun at all! We have a friend who lives in Madrid and happened to be in Alcala Tuesday night and offered to drive us to the metro station which was very helpful but that meant that we got to the airport by about 12:30 with five whole hours to wait before check in. The floor of the airport is very hard and seems to get colder as the night goes on, but we made it through and by 9 that morning were in rome! we headed to our hostel which was kind of sketchfest USA but we're tough girls and didn't mind it too much. The rooms were closed every day from 11-3 so instead of taking a nap as we very well needed and wanted, we decided to grab some food and start exploring the city. We started wandering as we have seemed to become pros at and found ourselves in a plaza outside the palace and then wandered to teh Trevi Fountain which ended up probably tying for my favorite thing seen in Rome. We threw euro pennies in por su puesto so that means we're coming back! watch out rome! We then bought supplies for guacamole [watch for it, it becomes a mitema as my mitologia profesora would say or a recurring theme of this trip] and went back to the hostel and ate guac for dinz. We then went back out to peruze rome some more. our goal was to save the colosseum until thursday when we'd make a day of it, but we ended up stumbling upon some ruins which we later found out was the roman forum which leads to the colosseum. When we first saw it we jumped up and down like little girls on their birthdays. It was almost more impressive to see at night all lit up than it was during hte day. We then went back to the hostel early, watched a movie on Kelly's laptop and went to bed to start again on thursday.

Leon

Two weekends ago we had our second CIEE trip up to Leon in the region of Castilla y Leon. On our way there we stopped at the Bodegas Yllevra, a vineyard and well bodegas. We got to do a wine tasting and get a tour of the whole underground celler bodega stuff. We then got to Leon and got a tour Fausto-style of the city stopping in the Barrio Humedo, the most popular neighborhood in the city, the plaza mayor, the cathedral with some of the most amazing stained glass windows i've ever seen, and an old monestary. Saturday we got up and went spulunking... wellnot really, but we did go to some amazing caves up in the mountains. We walked about 2 kilometers of beautiful caveage. we then had the rest of the day for free time. Sunday we went to the museum of modern art (i seem to be going to quite of few of those here in spain) and it was actually pretty cool. we then spent the morning at the rostro and headed back home.

Las Islas Canarias - Lanzarote

So last week was Semana Santa also known as Holy Week or the equivalent to spring break in the states, so we had off for a week and a half. We decided to take it easy and head to the Canary Islands for 8 days. We stayed in Lanzarote, said to be one of the most beautiful of the Canaries. The whole chain of islands is more or less off the coast of Africa, is a territory owned by Spain, yet the vast majority of the people there are from England or Ireland. So we had an apartment right on the beach to the Playa del Carmen. The picture of the gate that opens to the ocean, yah thats where we stayed. The beaches were beautiful, but it was impressivly windy almost every day so it made beach-going less fun. The islands are all volcanic as they sit on a fault line, so every hill/mountain you see was at one point a volcano. The pic of me and kelly on the rocks in front of the ocean is what a lot of the shoreline looks like over there. One day we took a guided tour [yes i broke down and took one] to Timanfaya National Park which is this huuuge space lined with volcanoes and covered in volcanic rock. The pic of the red rock cliffs with teh black sand beaches were taken in part of Timanfaya. There was a restaurant at the top of the main volcano that cooked its food with the heat from the earth. We saw some demonstrations of the heat, for example a man took a shovel and dug down about 3 inches into the gravely rock and gave us each a small helping and the rocks were so hot you couldn't even hold them! Then a guy poured water into this pipe that went down into the earth and in about 4 seconds the lava got mad and shot the water back up into the air all geyser style. it was really cool seeing how powerful the earth is! we then rode camels around the volcanoes also very cool. The tour then took us on a wine tasting because Lanzarote's wine was rated the second best in the world. Apparently the island has good soil but its covered in about 4 inches of volcanic rock/ash to protect it from the wind. Each grape plant is planted in its own little hole and then each hole is protected by a 1/2 foot semicircular wall. This as you can imagine makes it very hard to harvest them by machine, so all the grapes are still harvested by hand! After eight days of hanging out at the beach and the pool spiced up with a little volcano climbing and camel riding, i still wasn't ready to come back last thursday but i still had four days of break/semana santa celebrations to see!