Anyways, I never blogged about my trip to Barcelona, so I'll do that first. All in all, it was amazing!! Barcelona was one of the cities that stood out to me when I took that student trip around Europe when I was 14, so I had originally planned on studying abroad there for years. Unfortunately, there was no Wisconsin program there, and I also changed my mind and wanted a smaller city feeling, so I ended up choosing Sevilla which I am very happy about. Madrid and Granada were cool, but not as great as Sevilla. Barcelona was SO cool and so much fun, but it still feels like a very big city compared to Sevilla, not that Sevilla is that small (700,000)!
But moving on...I travelled to Barcelona with my friends Franny, Chrisy, and Jillian. It was our first trip that we had planned ourselves, so it was pretty exciting, and everything ended up working out great! We had a few minor mishaps (almost missing the bus to the airport, for example), but the flights, hostel, transportation, etc all worked out very well. Our hostel was called Gothic Point and was in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona, which turned out to be a pretty good location! We were right next to a Metro station (which we successfully used several times!), right by some good shopping, lots of restaurants, and even a few blocks away from the Picasso Museum (which by the way, was so interesting and fun to see!). As for the hostel itself, it was very nice, however the actual rooms were slightly sketchy. You can even see for yourself:
Yep, down where Franny is standing on the left is where our beds were, thank god on the bottom. Interesting, huh?Anyways, highlights of the trip included seeing La Sagrada Familia, an amazing church designed by the famous architect Antoni Gaudí (yes, I have started putting links in my blog to wikipedia...for those of you who want to actually know more!). Construction of the church began in 1882, and still continues to this day!! Apparently it is supposed to be done in 2010...but they've been pushing the date back for centuries already so...yea right. Gaudí has tons of other structures "sprinkled" around the city as my friend Adam so nicely put it. We went to one of the most famous ones, Park Güell. It was SO cool that we spent a few hours wandering around there. Check out my album to see the pics! Especially cool are the benches:
Me and Franny sitting on the benches. The park is literally surrounded by these benches, all different designs!
And here is a facade of La Sagrada Familia- the older side. The front facade looks a lot newer.Another plus was that my friend Adam is studying in Barcelona, so it was also great to hang out with him once again (he came to Sevilla once too). He did a good job of helping us get around and telling us where to go! My cousin Zach was also in Barcelona at the same time, however he did not have a phone and we never managed to find each other. Major disappointment. The other big bummer of the weekend was that my Blackberry got stolen. Some guy literally took it out of my hand on the street and ran off with it. I am fine, everything is fine, no need to worry- I already have a new phone. But, it was a wakeup call that I do need to be more careful. Sevilla is very safe, and although I am very careful most of the time, I do probably let my guard down at times, and that came back to get me in this case in Barcelona. But I definitely learned my lesson.
We got back from Barcelona midday on Sunday, and I had a pretty good week since then. As I said, the weather was gorgeous, so we spent a lot of time outside. I had a really cool interest group meeting on Tuesday where we listened to a prominent member of the Jewish community here in Sevilla speak. I learned that out of the 700,00 people living in Sevilla, only 100 of them are Jewish. I was in SHOCK. I knew that there weren't that many Jews left here (due to the Spanish Inquisition back at the end of the 15th century), but I thought that meant at the VERY LEAST 5,000. And in Spain as a whole there are over 40 million inhabitants, 30,000 of which are Jewish. Wow. So that was very interesting to learn about.
Another interesting little fact is that I have somehow acquired two Italian 17 year old roommates since I got back from Barcelona! Apparently they are some friends of a friend of my Señora's daughter and are doing a 2 week stay here in Sevilla. So it has been pretty entertaining....their names are Beata and Denise (however Tita Charo can only remember Beata's name). They do speak some Spanish, but it usually just sounds like Italian and therefore is very difficult to understand. The three of us usually eat dinner together and Tita Charo eats after, since there are really only 3 spots at the table. I find it pretty funny trying to converse with them at dinner, and I've enjoyed having some of the attention off myself around the house. And by some, I mean mainly all because there are two of them and they are much less easy to live with than I am haha. The only hard part is that I have to basically compete with them for first shower. It's a fun little game....
Lastly, today I went on a day trip to Aracena. I had already been there to go hiking, but this time we went to see the caves. I haven't uploaded my pictures yet from today, but the caves were SO cool. It was hard to believe that it was real, I felt like I was in a movie! Or possibly Huckleberry Finn. I also was really brave and went without any of my friends- they all couldn't go but I was still signed up so I just decided to go for it. Who am I? I would never do that in real life. But it worked out fine, I did in fact find people to hang out with for the day and was not a sad loner (my roommate from orientation, Emily, and her friends...I liked them all!).
Anyways, definitely bedtime because I have a midterm tomorrow (ah!), but here is the link to my facebook album from Barcelona:
Barcelona!!
Hope everyone's doing well! Love and miss you all, Jess
P.S. AARON COMES ON FRIDAY!!!!!! More on that later!
No comments:
Post a Comment