Sunday, November 30, 2008

Espana!

I know it's been a while since I have updated you all on my European status...but here I am, just back from Spain, with more great stories of course! But first I will start out with my Florence adventures before heading off to Barcelona for the holiday.

After a horrible weekend last week, I finally turned in two papers totaling an astonishing THIRTY FOUR pages. I spent the better part of my week at the library, but I finally finished two research papers: one on the Mafia (which was super interesting), and one on Bernini's sculpture of Apollo and Daphne. I could not be happier to get those out of my hands. So, after quite a stressful weekend, Tuesday night became my official Thanksgiving. A bunch of us decided it would be fun to have Thanksgiving together before we all headed our separate ways for the long weekend, so we rented out a giant room in a restaurant close to our school. The chef there offered to make us an American Thanksgiving feast, with turkey and everything! He had to get a lot of the food imported from other places, and he even had one of his American friends teach him how to cook a turkey Thanksgiving style. The food turned out surprisingly delicious. There was turkey, obviously, but we also had real bread, with
butter, mashed potatoes with gravy, sweet potatoes, salad, green beans, stuffing, and of course, pumpkin pie. mm mm gooood. The dinner was great, but even more entertaining were all the confused Italians in the rest of the restaurant wondering what the hell was happening. Random people kept peeking in...probably thinking "what are those Americans doing, why is there so much food, and how are they really eating all of that in one sitting?!" Quite amusing...

So after a delicous Thanksgiving, Barcelona was only a train, bus, and plane ride away. Who knew that we would need to leave 8 hours before our scheduled flight to get there on time?! Seems a bit rediculous to me, but hey, whatever saves money! So...we got into Barcelona at last, checked into our hostel, and wandered around the neighborhood at 11pm, starving and searching for anything edible. The first place looked a little sketch...it was called "Bar Granja," Spanish for "Farm Bar." Now, I don't know about you, but any place with the name farm in it doesn't exactly sound appetizing. So we moved on. The next place we found was definitely right up our American alley...HotDoks. Yes, we found a hot dog place. And they had fries. With salt. At last...a country that uses salt in their food...Halleluia! So after a wonderfully American meal, we headed off to bed, ready to explore Barcelona. The next day we took the metro downtown. It was so easy to get around in that city. I love that the metro is actually on time and takes you everywhere. It was so easy! I felt like by the end of the weekend I knew Barcelona better than Florence! So after learning the ins and outs of Spanish public transportation, we ventured around the water and walked up and down La Rambla, the famous main shopping street in Barcelona. We found an incredible market. (I have decided that markets are just fabulous, and every time I see a market now I go crazy). But this market, La Boqueria, was phenomenal. Huge. Massive. Blocks long. I have never seen so much fruit piled into one location. Or meat for that matter. But not in the same place...that would be gross. There were some interesting selections to say the least. My favorite was probably the random pig heads. One of them was even decked out in some sweet sunglasses. We saw full chickens, with the feathers still attached, needing to be plucked out, and pig brains, intestines, hooves, all sorts of fish, octupus, shark. You name it. I was very amused at all this, but I don't think Lauren was feelin' it (she's a vegetarian)...so, unfortunately, we didn't last too long in there.

Then we wandered around the waterfront. It reminded me a lot of California...Shoreline Village. The harbor was full of giant sail boats everywhere, and we walked over to the aquarium. Then we had lunch at a Spanish/Mexican restaurant. And then the trip took a turn for the worse. At the time, the chicken and cheese enchiladas smothered in green chile sounded like a grrrreat idea. I will come back to this... So after a tasty lunch, we wandered back to the area around our hostel. It started raining so we went to watch a movie for a bit, and then that night we headed to Hard Rock Cafe for a good ole American Thanksgiving treat. Sounds like we ate a lot of American food...it just so happens that Hard Rock cafe was the place to be for Thanksgiving, and it was really fun sitting around, meeting a bunch of random Americans from all over the place. The best part was when some guy accidentally elbowed me in the back. I turned around, he apologized, then we were about to go our separtate ways when he said hi. He looked vaguely familiar, so I asked him where he went to school...He said he had already graduated and was just visiting Barcelona for the week, but he went to...Vanderbilt. Of course. So then we had that moment where I was like "Oh my gosh,
I go to Vanderbilt!" We got to talking about that, and I asked him what his major was. Commnications and Spanish. Of course. So I run into some random person in Barcelona from Vanderbilt who studied the same thing that I am now. What a small world. Turns out he looked familiar because we had class together last semester. Weird.

So that was Thanksgiving. But then three o clock in the morning rolled around...and that "tasty" lunch from earlier that day seemed to be making a comeback. Lauren and I were up all night, sick to our stomachs. Food poisoning is horrible! So all night and the next day were not so fun. We went to see La Sagrada Familia, Gaudi's famous unfinished cathedral, but both of us were hunched over in pain the whole time that we went back to the hostel for the rest of the day. Bummer. It's a good thing we had quite a bit of time...we still ended up doing most of the stuff we wanted to on Saturday. Saturday was a much, much better day. We got up early, it was pouring, and seemed like a great day for museums. We went to the Picasso museum first. WOW. He had so many different styles...I had no idea that his early works were so realistic. It was definitely the coolest art gallery I have ever been to. To think that every single thing in that museum was done by Picasso is just unbelievable, and that is supposedly a small collection! It was also a relief to look at something that wasn't painted between 1430 and 1680. Renaissance art is so engrained in my head that looking at all Picasso's abstract works made the whole thing even more enjoyable. I could have spent hours in there. But remember...I was traveling with two girls who hate looking at art for more than 20 minutes. So I was kinda bummed, but I did make sure to see everything quickly. Then we went to the Chocolate museum. SO MUCH FUN! It was pretty small, but so cool!!! There were sculptures of horses and people and animals...pretty much anything...but sculpted in chocolate. And there was a bunch of stuff about the history of chocolate. Apparently Americans, on average, eat about 11 pounds of chocolate per year (that's an individual person!), and the Swiss eat about TWENTY THREE POUNDS! Woah. That is a ton of chocolate. That's
billions of pounds of chocolate consumed in just one year! I was baffled at that thought. And maybe a little disguted. But of course, I ended up eating a ton of chocolate later that day, after visiting the gift shop. Haha.

Saturday night we went on a tour that I found on a brochure in our hostel. It included a Spanish dinner of tapas and sangria, and a flamenco show. The tapas were good...just pieces of bread with different toppings, like the Spanish version of a sandwhich, but with only one piece of bread. The flamenco show was one hundred percent my favorite part of the trip. The dancing was incredible, and the music even better. I have never seen anyone move their feet so quickly, and the expression and emotion in the dancing was so intense. And the Spanish guitar was beautiful. The show didn't last very long, but it was definitely worth it. And so, that was the end of our Barcelona adventure. I loved Spain...and it was so fun being in a country where I actually know the language. I mean, I know enough Italian by now to get around and ask questions, but knowing Spanish was great! I got directions, talked to people in stores, ordered stuff at restaurants, and just had random conversations all in Spanish. I didn't realize how well I knew the language until I was actually there using it. The words just came out, second nature, I didn't even have to think about it. It almost makes me regret not studying in Spain. Almost. So now I am just more determined to speak in Italian everywhere I go. Surprisingly, I found myself thinking a lot in Italian while I was in Spain. So that must mean I am retaining something! The two languages are so similar that at first it's really hard to tell them apart, especially from a distance. But when I got back to Florence today and heard people speaking Italian, it sounded so different for the first time. Cool.

So now, once again, I am back to my little bedroom in Florence, waiting for something new and exciting to tell you. It's currently thunderstorming outside, and I am a little nervous that the power could go out. In which case, I would have no idea what to do. We don't have candles or flashlights. And it's night. I can just imagine that happening, and the power not coming back on for a week or so. That would be typical Italy...especially considering last week we had no hot water or heat in our apartment for three days. That was miserable. It was colder inside the apartment than outside...and it was about 50 degrees outside. I had to wear everything I owned to keep from shivering in the middle of the night. And I showered by using a ladle to pour hot water on my hair, which I got by boiling water on the stove. It was quite a sight...and quite a disaster. So yes, I am back in Florence, with power and heat and hot water. For now.

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