unas fotos de mis niños

i finally remembered to take some photos in class today. this is one of my 6th grade classes, and they were working on posters about the USA. in all the rest of my classes we talked about Halloween and did different art projects about that. i'll take some pictures next week. i am in love with some of these kids, and i already know i will want to bring them back with me in may. sidenote- i took more pictures, but blogger is being really slow right now, so im only putting these two. ill add more next week.

vamos a coger setas.

i've officially been in spain a month today!! it's absolutely crazy how time flies.

today i went on a little excursion that made me feel like a hobbit. i went with three other girls, all spanish, to pick mushrooms! usually people go early in the morning, but we left barbastro at 11:30, so that put us at our destination around 12:30. there were pretty much no mushrooms. actually we found three. haha. i didn't really mind though bc i'm not a huge mushroom eater, and i just enjoyed walking around and pretending like i knew what i was looking for. then we drove a little further on to this little pueblo that is a world famous site for mountain climbing. we walked around the town for a while and saw the places where people climb the cliffs. then we went and ate at a restaurant of a friend of one of the girls. we had some "typical spanish food" and it was all really good. then we spent a few hours lying on the ground in the sun in the middle of this little pueblo. it was a great day. tomorrow i have my first private english lesson! so prayers for some confidence would be greatly appreciated around 8:00 my time tomorrow.

mis clases

The whole reason that I even came to Spain was to teach, and I haven’t written anything about that so far. So, that is the subject of today’s post.
I’m working at two different schools and at each school there are two English teachers. One school is Pedro Primero (Pedro 1), with Luis and Isabel, and the other is Alto Aragón, with Inma and Lorenzo. I have two classes of 4th, 5th and 6th grade at each school, so all in all I have 12 classes.
Here’s my schedule, so you can know what I am doing while you are still sleeping/starting your day. Monday I have class from 10:00 to 1:00, then from 3:00 to 4:00. Tuesday I go from 11:00 to 1:00 then 3:00 to 5:00. Wednesday is 12:00 to 1:00 then 3:00 to 4:00 and Thursday is 10:00-12:00. So it’s a pretty sweet schedule and I didn’t even ask for it, that’s just what they gave me. There is a two hour break for lunch everyday. A lot of kids go home to eat, but some of them stay in the cafeteria. Their cafeteria food is SOOO much better than ours back home. It’s actually real food that is cooked right before it’s served. Teachers eat at 2:15 in the cafeteria and they eat the same food as the kids. Most days there’s bread and salad, and then a first course, which so far has been pasta, mashed potatoes or soup, and then there is the second course, which is some kind of meat. Then they have fruit and yogurt. Also, for the teachers they serve wine! That was kind of a shock seeing wine on the table at school, but here it’s completely normal. So far, all the food I’ve eaten at the school has been really good, but some of the times I haven’t been too sure of what I was eating.
OK, enough about cafeteria food. I really, really like being in the classroom. Most of the kids are really cute and for the most part well behaved. In most of the classes they talk a lot, but I think that’s normal in any country. A few of them are little punks, though and I find myself really wanting to chew them out in English but of course they won’t understand me and that’s not really my job. The 5th graders are definitely the worst behaved at both schools, so I don’t enjoy those classes as much as the 4th and 6th. Funny stuff happens on a daily basis. There is one boy who wears glasses but I don’t think they are strong enough so every time I look at him he is squinting, like he can barely seen anything, and it makes me laugh every time, especially when I am up at the front talking, and he is just squinting at me. One kid told me he likes to break dance and so he showed me a few of his moves after class, and another girl in the same class asked me for my autograph. I don’t know all their names yet, and it kills me because I really want to, but I only see them for one hour a week so it’s kinda hard. When I was in school, I always thought that was a weak excuse for teachers not knowing kid’s names, but now I can understand.
Even though I am having a lot of fun in the classroom, I am SO glad I chose speech pathology as my major and not education. I would much rather be working with all these kids in a one-on-one setting and I still don’t really like talking in front of the whole class, even though these kids are ten years younger than me. At this point I can’t really tell if they are going to improve their English with me here, because we have mostly just been doing introductory kind of stuff. The curriculum they use here is a lot different than what I expected. I was thinking it would be like our Spanish 1 classes in the states where you start learning basic vocabulary first, then start with present tense verbs. Here they have this crazy book that I can’t even explain to you. I don’t feel like it really helps them learn English and they definitely don’t know basic vocabulary, like parts of the body, seasons, weather, family or the months of the year. I tried to play a game during the second week where they had to draw a word and describe it in English to their team without saying the word, like catchphrase. It didn’t really work out so well because a lot of times they didn’t know the word that they drew. Then when I or the other teacher would tell them the word in Spanish, they didn’t know enough other words to be able to describe it. Some of the classes were way worse than others, and it was almost painful for me to sit there while they were trying to describe the word tree or winter. Especially because I love catchphrase and I was thinking of a million different ways to tell them how to describe it, but they just didn’t understand. So I think we will not be playing that game again for a long time. Ok this is getting to be too long and no one is going to want to read it. I am going to try to post every week from now on what we are doing in class, and then post pictures if I have any at the end of the week. Thanks for reading!
Mucho amor y hasta pronto!

por favor, no hueles mi ropa.

I had a really weird experience yesterday, and it might be one of those “you had to be there” moments, but I’m going to write about it anyways.

I came home for lunch and when I walked in the gate, I saw that my windows were open, and I knew immediately that meant the cleaning lady had come. I think I mentioned in the post about my house that there is a cleaning lady who comes once a week. Last week, Mary Carmen (the owner of the house) told me she was coming so I was prepared, and I cleaned my room before she came. Well this time I didn’t know she was coming, so my room was not so clean. Those of you who have lived with me before know that I am not the most organized and neat person. Even if you haven’t lived with me you probably know that. Here in Spain, I don’t have that many clothes so it’s not too hard for me to hang them back up, or put them in my laundry hamper. And I don’t have any of my craft supplies so I can’t start a project and then leave it in the middle of the floor for weeks. So compared to my normal standards of messiness, my room has actually been pretty neat. Yesterday though, I had stuff on my bed and several pairs of shoes on the floor and who knows what else was lying around. But when I came in my room, I found that Mary Carmen had put it all away for me. She also gave me some containers for pens and stuff on my desk, and a few little baskets and a tray to put my jewelry and other stuff that I had out on top of my shoe closet. So that was all great and of course I appreciated that. Then she started telling me that I needed to wash my sheets and pillowcases, which was probably true, but seriously, I don’t need her to tell me when to do that kind of stuff. Then she saw that I had thrown my north face jacket up on one of the shelves, and she was like, oh no that doesn’t fit there. So she pulled it down, and this is the weirdest part, she SMELLED MY JACKET! She smelled it and told me that I needed to wash it! I promise you that jacket does not smell bad! I have worn it one time since I have been here and in no way does it smell bad. I didn’t really know what to do with myself, and then she started rattling off in Spanish about zipping all the zippers on all my clothes before I wash them (while she is doing this to all the zippers on the jacket) and who knows what else, because I was still thinking about how she smelled my jacket. After she left my room, I smelled it myself, then threw it back up on the shelf where it was. Take that Mary Carmen. Just kidding, she is really nice and I think it’s just one of those cultural things that I am going to have to get used to. At the very least, from now on I will make sure my room is clean on Wednesdays.

here is my the offending jacket in its place in the closet.




and here is my reenactment of mary carmen smelling it. but she didn't really make a face like that.

sardinas

in one of my other posts i said that i was attempting to eat like the spanish do, at the same weird times and all the same strange foods. today my goal was put to the test. one of my housemates told me that he was going to make a paella and asked if i would like to learn how and then eat with him and the other housemate. so of course i said yes, bc i want to learn how to cook spanish food, and especially paella bc i've had it before and i really liked it. just in case you dont know, paella is a rice dish that originated in valencia, and its pronounced like pie-ay-uh. so he asks me, "do you like fish?" and i say yes, though in reality there are only certain kinds of fish that i like, and they usually aren't too fishy. but then he said "and sardines?" and then i got nervous. sardines. they just sound gross. so i said, "well i've never had them, but i'll try them". so at two thirty today, he started cooking. lunch. at two thirty. he pulls the sardines out and thank goodness, they had already been beheaded and deboned and did not look like what i was imagining.



after another hour of cooking the paella was finally done. it was really good, sardines and all. i think i would rather make it with chicken, but at least now i know i can eat sardines if i have to.

mi casa!

i finally found a place to live!! i had been staying with my friend sarmite in her apartment, and i was super ready to get my own place. it was really annoying having to live out of my suitcases. on wednesday, one of the teachers i work with helped me make a ton of phone calls, which really means that he just called while i sat there, because talking on the phone in spanish is a very difficult task. one of the numbers we called was this lady who rents out rooms in her house. so i went to look at it and it was soo nice and it was the cheapest thing we had found, so i moved in! so far it has been great and i am so glad that i have that taken care of because it makes me feel more settled here. i made a little video so that you can see where i live. hope you enjoy!

pilar!

I can't believe i have already been here for two weeks. My first week here in barbastro was really great.. i love being in the classroom, the kids are so cute and funny, and i found a great place to live (more on that in another post) It has been way way better than i expected at the beginning.

Barbastro is in the region of Aragon, and the capital of the region is Zaragoza. For the past week and half the whole city/region has been celebrating the Festival of Pilar. I'm not really sure what exactly they are celebrating, but i know it has something to do with catholicism and an appearance of the Virgin Mary. on second thought, here is the excerpt from wikipedia about it-
" According to legend, the Virgin Mary appeared miraculously to Saint James the Great in the 1st century, standing on a pillar. This legend is commemorated by a famous Catholic basilica called Nuestra Señora del Pilar ("Our Lady of the Pillar").

The event, called "Las Fiestas del Pilar", is celebrated on October 12, which is a major festival day in Zaragoza. Since it coincided in 1492 with the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus, that day is also celebrated as El Día de la Hispanidad (Columbus Day, literally Hispanic Day) by Spanish-speaking people worldwide.

"El Pilar" lasts for nine days, with all kinds of acts: from the massively attended Pregon (opening speech) to the final fireworks display over the Ebro, there are bands, dances, procession of gigantes y cabezudos (carnival figures made of papier mache), concerts, exhibitions, the famous "vaquillas" bulls and the bull festival. Some of the most important features are the Ofrenda de Flores (Flower offering) to the virgin on the 12th, when an enormous cloak is made of the flowers"

So Sarmite and I, along with another girl, Amanda, who lives about an hour away in Huesca, decided to go check it out. We got there and had no idea where we were going, but this nice spanish lady helped us find the Basilica, which we figured was the center of all the activity. We looked around the Basilica and then met up with another girl i met at orientation, Anne Marie, who lives in Zaragoza. She showed us around a little bit, but mostly everything was closed, bc of the siesta. They take that very seriously here and its nice to have break during the day, but its also kinda annoying when you need to get something done, like say buy a cell phone, and all the stores are closed for three hours. We ended up going to this store called El Corte Ingles, which is like nothing we have at home. It's like Dillards, Target, Borders and HEB all in one giant store. We only went so Sarmite could put more money on her phone, but when Anne Marie found out there was a grocery store downstairs, she decided to take advantage of the fact that she had three friends who could help her carry her groceries back to her apt . I think this might be kind of strange but i really love going to grocery stores in other countries. I like to see what is the same and what is different and its one of the first things i did when i got to barbastro. So, i was perfectly happy to be in this huge grocery store, and i found a couple of things i really wanted to get. For example, they had taco seasoning, tortillas, and peanut butter, all of which i have not seen in barbastro. i decided to hold off on buying them bc i've only been here two weeks and i think i should wait until i am more homesick or desperate for something familiar. in two months, im sure i will be soo happy to eat some tacos, but for now im still enjoying trying all the new stuff. after the grocery store, we went back to anne marie's apt to wait for stuff to start happening. in spain, people dont eat until nine or later so we went about eight just to walk around some more and see if anything was happening. the streets were completely full of people and it was really fun just to see all the different people who were there. we saw two different groups of drummers performing in the streets, and also this group of breakdancers and i swear one of them was this guy i saw breakdancing in barcelona two years ago. at nine there was a fireworks show, and i LOVE fireworks, so that was really exciting for me. finally around ten we decided to go eat at this italian place and it was really good. i've been attempting to try any food that is offered to me and not ask questions, bc normally i am pretty picky and im trying to get over that. also i want to fully experience the spanish culture, and of course the food is a huge part of that. at this restaurant they put out a bowl of green olives, which i have never tried before because i always thought they smelled bad. but, i tried them and discovered that i really like them! so far my adventures in trying new foods have all worked out pretty well for me. by the time we finished dinner it was almost 12:00, and we were all super tired and our legs hurt, so we went back to the apt. and crashed. most of the people in the city were probably out until atleast 3 or 4, and i know that some people probably didnt sleep at all. we wanted to see the offering of flowers to the Virging Mary before we left, so we headed out this morning and it was insane!! there were sooo many people, all dressed in the traditional dress of Zaragoza carrying bouquets of flowers to put on the altar. I don't really know if they call it an altar, but thats what im calling it. there were so many precious, precious little kids and i kept trying to take pictures of all of them, and i probably looked like such a creeper. but little kids in costumes are just so cute. we got to the basilica and there were already a ton of flowers on the altar, but by the end of the day there would be soo many more.
Now i'm on my way back to barbastro (i'm writing this on my ipod, and i'll email it to myself, then post it. Thanks Dad!) I have the day off tomorrow for some national holiday but i can't really figure out what its for. Thanks for reading this long post, and i promise there are more on the way.
mucho amor y hasta pronto.

¡barbastro!

i've only been here for four days, but it already feels like a lot longer. i arrived on thursday night, spent friday meeting my teachers and trying to get some things taken care of. those first two days were not so great. meeting the teachers was great. i got to sit in on one class and everyone i met was so nice, but like i said in my last post i'm not the kind of person who needs a lot of alone time, and in reality i tend to avoid it. so spending most of the day walking around these narrow windy streets... alone... then thinking about the prospect of having to eat dinner... alone... and then thinking about what i would do for the rest of the weekend...alone... was a little too much for me to handle on friday night. i had a little bit of a breakdown when i talked to my dad for the first time, and he later told me that he was fighting the urge to jump on a plane and come over here to help. haha. anyways, i tell you all that to say that things are much, much better now. everyone that i talked to on friday said they were praying for me, and God definitely answered their prayers. saturday morning i met up with a girl named Sarmite ( sar-mee- tay). she is from latvia, and she's teaching english in a catholic school here in barbastro. we spent about five hours walking around town and talking about life in latvia and the states, and the weird things here in spain. we met up with a teacher from her school for coffee, and then got an invite to go out with them later that night.we spent the whole day together, and i can´t even describe how thankful i was to have a friend that day. she even offered to let me stay in her apartment until i find one so that i dont have to keep paying for the hotel. and then she came and helped me move all my stuff over to her place. i am very blessed to have met her and have her for a friend for this next year. i'm still looking for a place and i have a few leads, so hopefully something will work out very soon. im grateful to be staying with sarmite, but i would much rather have my own place.
on a different note, i had my first classes today! i already know i am going to love it. the kids and their accents are so cute. for my first day, i told them about myself, and showed them the USA, Texas and Boerne on different maps, and then passed around a few pictures of friends and family. then they each had to stand up and introduce themselves and say how old they are and how many brothers and sisters they have. some of them had no idea what the were saying, they would just repeat what the person before them had said. i loved it. the teacher, Isabel, had them draw a picture of me and copy down a sentence about me. some of the pictures were pretty funny, but some of them were actually pretty good. i still have one more class today, but right now i'm about to go eat lunch with some of the teachers in the cafeteria.
¡hasta luego y mucho amor!

¡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!