¡españa!

so far my big trip to spain has not been very exciting. i’m not one of those people who needs a lot of alone time, so being by myself has been weird. it’s not scary or anything, i feel totally safe, but it’s just strange because I am used to traveling with friends. i haven't felt like seeing anything really cool, because i would rather wait til i can come back with someone else to share the experience with. yesterday I was walking down the sidewalk and saw one of these guys walk by me,


and it was one of those moments where i really wished someone else had been there to laugh about it with me. he seriously looked like he stepped off the movie set.

i spent a little over 24 hours in airplanes/airports without any major problems. i do wish i had packed a little less in my carry on bag because it was really heavy and I had to lug it all over the airport in houston, trying to figure out where to get my boarding pass for my flight to london. my shoulder is actually bruised from the strap. a lot of times i would just drag it behind me and i felt kinda tacky when people would walk by with their little wheeled suitcases, but it was seriously hurting so I didn’t care that much.

i don’t want to give a play by play of what i’ve been doing bc it would be really boring. i went to bed at nine last night, and then woke up at 4:45 today and could NOT go back to sleep. it was pretty frustrating, because i had set my alarm for ten o’clock. i was waaay off. i spent the day walking around the Gran Via, which is a major street in madrid and where my hotel is located. all the buildings are really pretty and old looking, but then they have stuff like McDonalds and Burger King in them.

Gran Via


the building in the middle is where my hotel is, and i think it has the stiffest, scratchiest towels i have ever felt. the little old man who runs it is really nice, but he talks really fast and i think he might have a speech imped.



after i ate lunch (at starbucks... i'm still too chicken to go in and try and order real spanish food) i used the metro to go find the hotel i will be staying at for the next two nights during orientation. i was pretty proud of myself because i’m not the best with maps, and i had to figure out which lines to take and i even had to change lines twice and i got there without getting lost. i found the hotel without too much trouble, but when i tried to go in, the doors were locked. that made me a little nervous, bc there hasn’t been too much communication between me and whoever is running this program, and i could definitely see them changing the location and me never hearing about it. So i just decided to sit on a bench in front of the doors to see if anyone else would try to come and get it. i probably sat there for twenty minutes before a couple came along. when they couldn’t get in, the man pointed down the sidewalk to the left and they started walking that way. once they passed me and got a few yards away, i got up to follow them. then they turned around, and started walking back in the opposite direction, straight towards me. i didn't want it to be too obvious that i was following them, so I had to keep walking a few steps, then turn around and follow them again. there were some other people sitting on the bench with me and they probably thought i was nuts. i followed the couple around the corner to another entrance i had completely missed, and found out what i needed to know about orientation tomorrow. so i feel pretty good about that and now i think i’m going to bed.
hasta pronto.

switzerland

these are some pictures from switzerland that i never posted. i'm testing some other ways to post photos for my next adventure in spain.

well, i am sitting in the dfw airport and ill be here for approximately another three hours. i got to come home to be in my cousins wedding and im so glad i was able to bc i would have been really sad to miss it. it was good to see my family and everything, and now im heading back to san jose for two and a half more weeks.

i just wanted to post this link to more picture for yall to look at. its a lot easier to put them on this site than on the blog, so hopefully yall will be able to get to it pretty easily.

http://acu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2039406&l=35791&id=54600828

this is a picture of me and adrienne and two precious little girls from the church. we met them during a food break during an all night prayer meeting at the churhc. it was from 7 at night to 5 the next morning, and of course it was all in spanish. that was pretty much our first exposure to the church, and it was a really good thing, but it was really hard to sit there and not understand much of what was being said, and stay awake. but it was good.



this is a picture of the avocados at la ferria, the outdoor market, that we went to on the first weekend we were here. the avocados are huge and really really delicious



this is called pipa, and its a coconut before it turns brown, they cut the top off and theres water inside and you drink wiht a straw. its pretty good, but really strange. we saw sooo many different kinds of fruits and vegetables, more than i even knew existed.



this is our whole group, jen, marisa, me and adrienne, from left to right. marisa and i live together wiht the preachers family and they are great. the other two girls live together with another family from the church. this picture was taken after we went to the funeral of the dad's mom from the other family. she passed away on wed, and the funeral was on thursday. it was really weird to go to the funeral of a person i had never met, and it was only two weeks after my grandpa's funeral, so it was pretty tough not to think about him and everything we were doing right before i left.



ok this is the volcano that we went to last weekend. its called arenal and i think it is the most active in costa rica, and maybe one of the most active in central america. anyways, if you didnt know it was a volcano, there would really be know way of telling that it wasnt just a big mountain. but knowing that it is a volcano makes it cool. and you can see the cooled lava on one side of it, but not in that picture.
we spent the day there with some other people from the institute and it was a lot of fun and good to get away for a day.

ok so thats all the pictures i have for now. i know its not many, but my internet connection isnt very trusty, so i didnt want to try to do more.

we go to spanish class from 12:30 to 3:15 everyday, and i really enjoy it. i realized that if i really want to be fluent in spanish, it is probably going to take longer than two months to get there. im still trying to figure it all out though. we go to church with our family on sundays, and then they have church on tues. night and thurs. night instead of wed. we were supposed to have a youth activity this past sunday, but it got moved to this coming sunday, i think bc of fathers day. i am looking forward to getting to spend time with all of the youth bc we havent really had a chance to be with all of them together yet.
ok well i need to go to bed. love you all. thanks for reading, and leave me a message!!

http://acu.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=31056053&id=54601459

this is a test to see if i can put pictures up more easily than i did when i was in oxford.

so scotland was great. we took an overnight bus from oxford to edinburgh which took about 9 hours. i got carsick on the bus- not a fun experience. we got to edinburgh at about 730 in the morning and got all bundled up to walk out of the bus station and it was pouring and really really windy. so we ended up sitting in burger king for a long time before we caught the shuttle to our hostel. then we watched braveheart, bc we had to wait a few hours before we could check in. then we took a nap. haha it sounds like we werent really taking full advantage of where we were, but we were just tired. that night we went out to eat with some americans we met at the hostel, and one of the girl's parents,grandparents and great grandparents had all gone to acu, but she ended up at belmont in nashville. that was kinda crazy. the next day we went on a twelve hour bus tour that took us into the highlands and loch ness! it was amazing, and made me really love scotland. the trees were all changing colors and it was just beautiful. our guides name was garry, and he had this speech problem and he would always say things like loch nessssss, riversssssss, mountainssssss, streamsssssss. he even did it on some th sounds and f sounds sometimes.

these are all pictures of the highlands. it was really foggy and cloudy, and some of them were taken through the window of the bus, so they arent all that great.

















this is a highland cow named hamish.

these are all from loch ness. garry told us some crazy facts about, which i feel compelled to share bc really they are sorta unbelievable. scotland has over 30,000 lakes, loch ness is 23 miles long, and in some places 900 feet deep! the eiffel tower would fit in the lake and not stick out. and this is the craziest one- you could double the worlds population and everyone would fit in the lake and there would still be room. we were in shock when garry laid that one on us, i dont know how you could really even figure something like that out.






this is urqhart castle, with loch ness in the background.



we took a boat out on to loch ness and it was COLD and windy.





thats when i saw nessie.



we ate lunch at the cafe where jk rowling wrote a lot of the first hary potter book.



we went to the national museum of scotland, and this is a mask that a guy would wear so that no one know who he was when he was preaching against the catholic church.



"do you know how to spell guillotine?"-me
"g-i-o-t-i-n-e"-bryan



edinburgh castle.



the royal mile.

ok sorry it took me forever to put up these pictures, i had a lot of stuff due right when we got back, and then i went to switzerland, where i just got back from a few hours ago. ill put up some of those pictures in the next few days.

i just got back from a week traveling around italy, and it is now my new favorite place in the world.
we started out in rome and saw all the typical tourist sights, but we spent the first day at the beach, which was so great. we rented chairs and just laid out there for about three hours, and i got one of my books for class finished.



we couldn never really decide the name of this beach, but it was pretty, and there were quite a few topless people. i dont think i could ever get used to that.

we found this one gelato place that was amazing, and we went there every night. we also had the BEST tiramisu in the world at this one little place. italian food is one of my faves and rome did not disappoint.



the colosseum at night.



more colosseum.



our first dining experience in rome. we were sort of lost, and walked by this place and it looked good so we went in and it was.



me and g inside the colosseum. the maze like thing behind us is where the people and animals were kept before they were brought out to fight. there was a wooden flooring over it, but it was burned up or collapsed or something along time ago.



a better view of the inside. you can see where they built part of the flooring so you could see what it used to be like. it could hold 50,000 people and within the first 100 days of it's opening, 5000 wild animals were killed



these guys dressed up like gladiators, or maybe centurions, were walking around all over the place, trying to get people to pay to take pictures with them, but i was sneaky and got one from above. ha.



looks like sing song is a much older tradition than we thought, even the ancient romans had a sing song stage.



im pretty sure there was a lion in here at some point.



some ruins of the ancient city.



katie, me and kristin with the city behind us. the big white building with the statues on top is HUGE and was built for one of those world exhibitions. too bad the leveled parts of the ancient city to build it.



the pantheon. it was first used as a temple to seven different gods, but since the 7th century its been used as a basilica for the catholic church. the roof was the coolest part because it is this huge dome, but its not supported by arches, vaulting or ribs. i couldnt get a very good picture of it, because it was so big. the artist rafael is buried there.



a not very good picture of the trevi fountain. there were people everywhere, so we just sat for a while and people watched. we saw a lady with some sort of stick contraption getting money out of the fountain,and then a police woman came and followed her around. it was pretty funny.



the spanish steps, also covered with tons of people. we sat there for a while, but didnt climb them.

on friday, we went to the vatican and waited in this huge long line to get into the vatican museum. it took about an hour, and when we got in, we looked around for a while,saw a mummy, which was sick. then we set off to find the sistine chapel, and it felt like we were going through a maze. when we finally got there, it was super crowded and of course most of what you're supposed to look at is on the ceiling, so my neck started to hurt after a while. it was very beautiful though, but i wish i could just go in there and lay on the floor and see it. when we got out of the chapel, we were sick of looking at art so we left to go find a place to eat. then we went to st peter's basilica, which is where peter is supposed to be buried. we waited in line for a long time, then realized that it was for something that we didnt want to do so we got out and walked around in the tombs of the popes. then we went into the basilica and that was crazy. ive never seen something so grandly decorated in my whole life. there were paintings and statues everywhere, and it was HUGE! we kept trying to follow tour guides that spoke english, and one fact i picked up was that the building is absolutely the biggest it could possibly be, otherwise it wouldnt be able to stand. also there are dead popes in glass cases in different places throughout the basilica. they sorta look like statues laying down, but they really are the remains of the popes, it was a little weird to me.

the next day we caught a train to cinque terre, which are five little towns on these hills next to the mediterranean sea. it was gorgeous, and we stayed in this amazingly clean and nice hostel. it was in this tiny little town, that only had one restaurant and one little grocery store in it. the restaurant turned out to be really good and we had dinner both nights with some australians and new zealanders from our hostel.



this is the view out of our window. i decided that this is my new vacation spot- who needs ruidoso?

the next day we took a bus to the first of the five towns- riomaggiore. we did a little shopping and then walked to the next town. between the first two, there is a paved walkway and its real easy. the next one was a little more difficult and from then on we just took the train. the towns were all so cute,and i went a little crazy on the shopping. i had the best,or maybe second best pizza of my life- cheese pizza with pesto. so good. at the last town we sat on the beach for a little while.



the jetty in riomaggiore.







you can see the trail we walked on in this one, and the water was soo blue!



someone caught a shark in the second town, manarola



this is one of the towns, i think riomaggiore.



i just like this one.



we climbed down these stairs to get to this big rock that we sat on for a while.



me on the big rock.



the beach in monterosso.



the sunset we saw on our train ride back to the hostel. we were all scrambling to get good pictures of it everytime the train stopped. once we got to train station, we discovered that we had missed the last bus to the hostel, so we had to wait about an hour for taxis to come get us. it was quite an experience, but we got to hang out with the aussies and new zealanders, so it was fun.

i took a ton more pictures, but most of them look a lot alike. it was soo beautiful though and if any of you ever go to italy, i definitely recommend going to cinque terre. i wish we could've spent a few more days there.

next on our trip was venice, and it was amazing too. i cant really pick between cinque terre and venice as to which was my favorite bc cinque terre was soo beautiful, but venice is just a cool place. we actually got to stay in a hotel there and that was soo nice. we had a lot of great food and found a lot of cute stores, and i went a bit crazy with the shopping there too. we didnt really do too much except walk around, shop, eat and ride on the boats. gondolas are like 90 bucks so we opted to use the public transportaion boats.



the grand canal. you can see one of the boats like what we road around on. they even have little boat taxis.



gondolas.



one of the canals.



more gondolas.



me and dre on the ponte rialto, one of three bridges that goes over the grand canal.



turns out freckles made his way to Venice. lucky.



more gondolas. I love black and white pictures.



I also love sepia.



we love trying to take pictures of all four of us, this was on our last boat ride.

we are back in school for about a week before our next break-im going to scotland! we also found out that we have another break between now and thanksgiving, so im going to try and make it to ireland. my family is coming over thanksgiving and we're going to florence for a few days and im pretty pumped about that. it's pretty hard to do school when the real reason i came here was to travel, but its not too bad. hope all is well with all of you! much love!