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!

Cordoba y Sevilla

Okay so i'm trying to catch up! So a couple weeks ago, specifically March 27th to the 29th, we had our first CIEE program trip down to Andalucia to the cities of Cordoba and Sevilla. We left friday morning early early early and started on the 6 hour bus ride down there. We stopped in this tiny little town thats know as part of the route of Don Quijote where we got to see the molinas or windmills that he "attacked" as he thought they were giants. if you dont know the story of Quijote 1.shame on you because its famous and good and 2. that last bit won't make any sense but anyways. We finally arrive in Cordoba which is much smaller than I had imagined, but very beautiful nonetheless. We begin with a walking tour led by Fausto, our director's husband and an all around black hole of knowledge about anything and everything Espana. We then went into the Mezquita, the main attraction in Cordoba. [the pictures of the tall red and cream arched building is the MezzyQ] Mezquita is the spanish word for mosque but the unique thing about the one in Cordoba es que it incorporates all three of the major religions that clashed there throughout Cordoba's past. The main foundation of the building is Moorish because the south of spain was the last to fall from the Moors, and that part is all the red striped arches. In the middle of the building the Catholics came in a built a huge Catholic open cathedral altar type thing and then i can't remember the third religion to influence it...
anyway later that evening we headed over to Sevilla [about an hour away] where we ate and went to our hotel just to start over early the next morning. We began saturday with the gardens of Sevilla, starting off the day right with a statue honoring Christopher Columbus, and then Fausto led us on another walking tour, this time of Sevilla. We went to the Mezquita there which was completely different, it looked a lot like the Alhambra, the major palace in Granada, with a lot of moorish influence. We then had lunch and returned for a visit into the huge, amazing cathedral there. [the pic is of it at night] The picture of the statue of four kings carrying a coffin is inside this cathedral and just happens to be Christopher Columbus' tomb. awesome. The rest of our day was free and as always we ended up wandering and getting to know Sevilla better. Sunday morning we went to the main gardens and another big building thing that was really pretty but quite obviously at this time my attention span was dwindling AND i was getting sick [not a good combo for me] Sevilla was def up there with Granada as one of my favorite places i've seen so far.
<---oh and ps mom that is def a picture of a fairy house. the spanish faries from sevilla live there. i saw them.

Valencia - LAS FALLAS

Hola todos,
sorry its been so long since i've written, i've had a lot going on in my classes and have done a lot of traveling these past couple of weekends. first off: Valencia. its a city on the eastern coast of spain and we went for a puente which is what they call four day weekends here. We took a bus there and arrived late wednesday night and got up on thursday, the main day of the fallas and fathers day (dia de san jose, the father of christ, aka carptenter, hence why they have big fires) and we wandered around valencia seeing all the fallas we could fit into the day. fallas are huge, three story high wooden statues that are super ornate and at the end of thursday they burn them. we staked out our spot and on thursday night watched the burning of the main falla in the city center with a huge fireworks show following the burning. Friday we slept in a little bit and then got up and went to the beach all day. It was maybe 70 or 75 degrees and beautiful, the water was a bit cold but we weren't about to pass up a chance to swim in the mediterranean! we went home and made a wonderful spaghetti dinner that night. Saturday we decided to hit up the museum of arts and sciences and the aquarium which all were really cool. The aquarium had this underground tunnel thing where you were surrounded by sharks and tropical fish and whatnot, plus we got to see a dolphin show! After a day full of tourism we decided to do a flamenco dinner and show. We got an amazing three course dinner of Paella followed by an awesome show of flamenco dancing! Sunday we got up and went to the falla museum which houses parts of fallas dating back to like 1930 or something like that and after that we headed home after an amazing weekend!

Este fin de semana

hola todos! We have what they call a"puente" here, which is one day longer than a long weekend, aka i dont have school on thursday, so tomorrow i'm leaving for Valencia to see the Fallas [google it, its cool] and i won't be back until Sunday night, in which i have a lot to get done homework-wise, but i'll get pics and stories up here for all of you to see very soon after! besos!

Hangin with Franco

So last friday we had an excursion with one of my classes to go to el Pardo (Francisco Franco's palace) and el Valle de los Caidos (Valley of the Fallen) which are both very close to Madrid. It was pretty sweet hangin at Franco's pad, but kinda weird too as he was such a powerful dictator and the civil war and Franquismo and everything happenned so recently. The place itself was very pretty with a lot of beautiful artwork and it was furnished very lavishly. from there we had some free time where we bought big loaves of homemade bread and ate them in the sunshine of Franco's garden. We then headed over to the valley of the fallen, which was amazing. It was on top of this mountain, so high up that it was snowing and raining and the wind was blowing at about 800 mph, but it was so cool. Franco built this place 1. as a burial site for himself and his cousin and 2. as a memorial for all of the people who died in the name of spain during the civil war. It was enormous and somewhat tunnel like with a pulpit type church part at the other end. The picture with teh cross is the outside of it - lots of arches and a huge cross up on the hill. Because of the snow/rain up there there was also an absolutely ammaaaaazing double rainbow up there. the rest of the weekend was good, we just hung out Alcala style, oh and on sunday we ventured into madrid to go to the rostro, a huuuge street market which was really cool but also very overwhelming. the weather is getting beautiful! its about 65 degrees every day and i love it!! besos, Nat

cuenca + last week

so last friday we went on another free trip to Cuenca, a small city about 2 hours away from us. Cuenca is gorgeous, and also famous for its casas colgadas, which are houses built out off of a cliff, quite crazy actually. We went to a modern art museum which was interesting but the tour was very long (and we all know i'm not a huge fan of guided tours) and then we went through the cathedral and had the rest of the day free. I wasn't feeling well but i sucked it up because i'm in spain for crying out loud! we ended up walking around the cute little streets and finally out onto this cliff - believe it or not i ventured out kind of to the edge, you'd all be proud - and had an amazing view of the ravine with all the casas colgadas and could see all the city. overall it was really fun. i stayed in most of last weekend other than that to study and recoup a bit from being sick, which i still am a bit, but my host mom gave me these amazing pills that work like magic and i feel great now. tomorrow we have a field trip to the valley of the fallen and Franco's palace so that should be really interesting, i'll post pictures and everything right away!! Mommo i hope you're feeling better!! Love you all, un besito!

GRANADA

so two weekends ago (Feb 12-15) we went to Granada for the weekend. we left after class on thursday and caught a bus from madrid down to granads, which was about a 5 hour trip. the ride down there was absolutely gorgeous as we went through mountains and the countryside of spain. we got to our hostel which was literally right across the street from the Alhambra and the next morning we went to the Alhambra at about 9. The alhambra used to be the palace for the arabic kings, as granada was the last city in spain to fall to christian rule it has a lot of arabic influence. we spent probably 4 or 5 hours there and it was worth every second. for starters this place is huge, and it was also up to be one of the new seven wonders of the world, i dont actually know if it is or not but it should be. all the walls and ceilings and floors were tiled or carved super intricately and everything was so elaborate. there were tons of mirrored pools that were amazing, plus we had a great weekend weather-wise. after teh alhambra we went back to the hostel and ate and then took our siesta on the roof of our hostel's terrace. day 2 we slept in a little bit and then ventured down to explore the town which is super pretty. the sierra nevadas are off in the distance and the alhambra as well you can see from almost any point in granada. we stumbled upon this little park behind our hostel that opened up to this huge green hillside with the sierra nevadas in the background and people sitting playing the guitar and little yellow flowers everywhere - it was very picturesque von trap family style. it was a very chill weekend all in all which is one of the things i loved about it.

bueno, i'm sorry i haven't gotten around to posting anything about granada so far, this week has been a little busy for me so far but its slowing down. time just goes by so fast here i dont know what to do about it, its already the end of february pretty much and it feels like i just arrived. for some reason today was difficult for me, speaking-wise i'm doing great but i just feel a little overwhelmed, but the thing is i have nothing to be overwhelmed with. maybe its that i miss my family and all my friends at MN or maybe its because i realize now that things will be different when i come home, and its not them who are changing, its me. this trip is an amazing life experience for me and for that its shaping me as a person. well obviously i had a lot of free thinking time to myself today but it could be a good thing. don't worry mom i'm still extremely happy here, i dont know how i could not be. every day i notice or learn something new and every weekend i travel to these places and literally around every corner i see something new and more amazing that god created and it blows my mind. this really is the opportunity of a lifetime :) well tomorrow i will work on getting pictures and stories from granada up here for you guys! besos

so the last two weeks have been a little crazy for me. This week was the first week of regular university classes, so i added three more hours of class on to my week which wouldn't be bad if it wasn't in very rapid sometimes incomprehensible spanish! i feel like i'll be learning a lot more in that class because i'll be pushed a lot harder, but my profesora is really nice and helpful so thats a plus. last Friday we had a day trip to Toledo, but instantly upon arriving in Toledo it started snowing very hard. One of the pictures is of us trying to catch snowflakes in our mouths - the flakes were so big that we had it down to an art! We did get to see the monestary but then our leader person said we would have to go home after because he didn't know what the roads were going to be like. As we were walking back to the bus it suddenly got beautifully sunny, and as we were leaving Toledo it started to snow again, so atleast we got a little window of sun! The snow seems to be following me though! I brought it over from wisconsin, and then it snowed in paris, and then it snowed again here, and then it snowed in Toledo! but so far it hasn't come back to Alcala! Tomorrow I leave to go to Granada for the weekend, which i'm super excited about! Granada, being in the south of spain, should be decently warmer than here, 60's or so.

Paris Day 2

Hola todos! bueno now on to day two of paris (saturday) and our departure on sunday. we got up early again on saturday to begin our adventure. We started off going to the catacombs which were absolutly amazing! i dont have many pictures from these days because my camera died and i have yet to get them back from my friends. the catacombs were formed because a major plague/disease swept through paris and so they buried people in mass graves because they couldn't bury them as fast as they were dying, and as they were decomposing they stunk and so they dug them up and put all of the bones in a 2 km long underground tunnel under the city of paris. it sounds kind of gross i know but it was so cool! the walls were lined with femers and skulls and the bones went way back. i guess there were the bones of six million skeletons down there!! at the end there was a man checking our bags for stolen bones before we could leave and he had a small pile of them next to him so people must take them often! we went to this amazing bakery to get sandwiches for lunch and from there we walked to the eiffel tower again to picnic and see it during hte day and go up in it. this was very cold but worth it. we took the elevator up and the top was so windy i thought i was going to freeze, but you could see everything from there!! we then walked to the arc de triomphe and walked down what is probably the most expensive street in all the world! louis vuitton and cartier to name a few! we were confused as to how to get to the arc as tehre is a massive traffic circle around it that assured certain death if we tried to dart, but then realized there was a tunnel leading over to it. the arc was the last on our list for the day so we got out the map at a little cafe and randomly chose more things to do. we went over to see the moulin rouge which wasn't that cool, just another building, but from there we walked to the Sacre Coeur which is the picture of the beautiful cathedral. millions of stairs later we were up there and could see all of paris - absolutely beautiful! we then randomly decided to walk down some street and found the most picturesque little french neighborhood ever with crepe shops everywhere and people painting on the street and lights everywhere and it was so cute! from there we went home to get up early the next morning and come home to a light covering of snow here, and we just missed the major snowfall in paris. overall a wonderful trip!

so i went to paris last weekend and it was absolutely amazing! there was a transportation strike in paris on thursday and we were convinced that our flight was going to get canceled as many that day were, but ours was only delayed a couple of hours. we got to paris and there were french soldiers with guns directing people around which was a bit intimidating. we got royally ripped off by our taxi driver but finally arrived at our hotel which was worth the 7 dollars we paid a night for it - our bathroom was basically non existant it was so small and all around it was just a bit sketchy. the first pic is of me cowering in the corner :) we got up bright and early to venture into paris (our hotel was in a town called Chelle which was not 15 km out of paris as the website told us...) we hopped on a bus and then a train toward paris and met a very nice and extremely helpful english speaking man that told us how to get to where we wanted to go. from that train we took the metro and emerged about a block away from the louvre!! we ate at a cute cafe on the river seine and then headed to the louvre. the building of the louvre is art in itself its so beautiful! and its much much larger than i thought, we could have spent the whole weekend just there! it was amazing getting to see such historic stuff that we've heard so much about! the second picture is of the outside of the louvre. from there we walked to the bastille, which i was SO excited to see, but apparently i didn't pay enough attention in Ms. Zimmerman's lit class because i found out that the bastille came down two days after it was stormed, but i did get to see the monument. The sad picture of me in front of a statue depicts this part of the trip. we then walked from the bastille to Notre Dame, and from there started our quest for the eiffel tower. Understand that this walk from the dame to teh tower is very, very long but our map was not exactly proportionate. we walked through the park of invalides without even knowing it and passed some awesome architecture. we finally reached the tower at about 9:15 and stayed till 10 to see it sparkle and it was soooo worth it! from there we made our way home just to start again on saturday.

here are a couple more pictures from our crazy hiking adventure. the one is of a couple friends and me looking out over Alcala, and the other is of one of Lauren walking through one of the worst muddy patches of the whole hike!

so yesterday we took another adventure into Madrid by ourselves to go to some of the museums because sundays are always free. We hit up el Reina Sofia, one of the most famous art museums in Madrid and I got to see la Guernica, one of Picasso's most famous paintings, and I saw some pretty cool Salvador Dali paintings. There was a lot of modern art and just weird art. the museum is four floors and each floor is huge, so by the end of it we were so worn out! we didn't make it to the rastro (the outdoor market that i was so excited for) and the prado was only free from 5 to 8 at night, so we decided to save that for a different day. We hopped on a train to come back to Alcala and ended up taking an hour and a half train ride to who knows where! we ended up going in a huge loop around madrid and then ended up back at the station Atocha where we started. we then had to take a different train back to Alcala and this time it worked. dad you'll be happy, it turns out i kind of have a job here as well! i replied to a posting on the school's website to help a nine year old boy with his english homework twice a week thinking that someone else had already gotten it, but she emailed me right back! Its 10 euros an hour which is only 20 a week, but thats about $30 more every week to put in my travel fund! three days until Paris!

so i'm very frustrated that my skype won't work correctly so i'm sorry for the lack of contact. Mom and Bug i tried calling you on each of your birthdays but didn't get a hold of you, i hope you got my messages and both had great days! i'll get something up and running soon so we can talk!