so it's been a while

sorry about that. it's amazing how busy life can get just with traveling and keeping up with school. apparently in spain they're huge fans of not doing anything for months, then heaping it all on for a few weeks, so i'm getting to the tail end of that (finally...)

let's see, what all have i missed? mom's visit (vienna, madrid, paris), san sebastian, and semana santa in italy. dang.

well, mom's visit was great. so so so good to see someone from home again, particularly my mommy. vienna the first weekend was great - enough to do in a day, no problem. we had great austrian food (remember that sweet cheese and vanilla thing, mom? incredible.), climbed to the top of st. stephen's and burned off the same amount of calories as are in a sacher torte, ate our sacher torte, got standing room seats at the opera from a couple that was leaving... very fun. AND that saturday when we were out on the town was the only day for the last month that it hadn't rained, including the days we arrived and left. perfect!

madrid during the week was less fun, as i was in class and mommy was on her own for the first half of each day. the first day, that resulted in a fun little (not little) walking adventure for her, from - for those of you in madrid - the reina sofia, up to plaza mayor, and back down to the general atocha area. poor mommy. i did my best to show her around the city in the afternoons, though, and on our last day ana (the woman i rent my room from) cooked a huge paella lunch for us and my other roommates. it was great - paella, sangria, and a brazo de trufa from la mallorquina. i love la mallorquina.

then thursday evening, we headed off to paris! which was pretty much a fiasco from the beginning. my mom's bag was 'delayed' when we arrived there at orly airport in paris, and wasn't delivered to the hotel until a day later. at which point, it had been robbed. a large sum of euros were gone, as well as her cell phone. police were useless, the airport was useless, both airlines were useless, and all of the above have continued to be useless for the last month.

paris taught me 2 things about why the US is the big world power:
1. when someone steals from you/legitimately wrongs you, there is something that can be done about it. here, there is not. they treat you like an idiot and send you on your way.
2. we know how to run an airport. bag checks, security (in vienna, it was downright scary how lax they were about suspicious items...), posting gates and boarding times... gracious. in orly on the morning we were leaving, they didn't post what gate the plane was at until a good 10 minutes after our boarding time. after. and it was a 7am flight, the plane had been there all night! and if you can believe it, they lost my mom's bag on the way back, too. gracious.

anyway, back to paris. our time there was a bit marred by me being super intent on seeing everything. which led me to stress out about being late and get mad when stupid parisians sucked and messed things up. seriously, they are probably the least helpful and most rude about it people i've encountered. there were, of course, exceptions to that, but i definitely would not return to paris for the people. the further i've gotten from that trip and the more i've talked to people about it, though, the less i hate paris. i still think it's pretty dang overrated and only cool because "oh my gosh, it's paris!", but i no longer hate it as much as i did when we left.

if you ever go to paris, take a fat tire bike tour. it was fantastic, i plan on doing one in barcelona in a week and a half. oh, and don't bother going to the top of the eiffel tower - the line is way too long for such a hazy view... the montparnasse tower is way better. and really, what's the paris skyline worth without the eiffel tower? i ended up taking about 1000 pictures in paris and kept almost 300, so despite my dislike, i apparently found it rather photogenic.

nothing really ever happens during the weeks here... i go to school, run errands, come home, do schoolwork, skype, waste time on surfthechannel... and go to bed. mix bible study in there on wednesday nights, and there you have it. i like it that way, i have to catch up and relax after my weekends away sometime, right?

by the time i was done traveling with my mom, i was very glad to settle back into speaking spanish and not flying for a while. i realized a week or two ago that in these 4 months, i'm doing the amount of travel a normal person would do in several years. and crap, it gets really tiring. particularly the flying part, airports suck.

so after paris was an ESN (foreign kid) trip to san sebastian. it. was. amazing. after so long of being in city after city after city, it was great to be on the coast, climbing a 'mountain' (large hill, let's face it), with trees and beach and... nature. made me realize how much i love the water, a fact later reinforced when alex and i arrived in venice. but that's another paragraph. anyway. there wasn't much structure to the trip because, apparently, the main point of the trip was to drink. which, whatever, just meant we got to do our own thing during the day and ignore the drunkies at night :) i went home early both nights, but 'early' meant 3am and 4am, respectively. (insane, i know. welcome to spain.) walked around a lot, ate pinxtos (tapas, basically), played on the beach and only very narrowly saved my purse (and all its contents including my little camera), umbrella, and coat from a rogue wave that decided to make it's way quite a bit further onto shore than we anticipated. mostly it was just a fun trip to enjoy the beauty of the place and be away from madrid without having a million things to see and do. we stopped by burgos for like 2 hours on the way up there and spent the afternoon in bilbao on the way back, which meant getting to see the guggenheim.

which further reinforced that i am not an art person. granted, there were some very cool things in there. but for the most part, it was lame junk that i either found to be incredibly distasteful or just not requiring that much skill to create. really, that's been the story of me and art museums on the whole... it's either distasteful, amateurish and something a kindergardener could do, or just rather boring. i find architecture and photography to be SO much more interesting, which i think is why i loved italy so much...

ah, italy. so many adventures over semana santa...

we made a blanket fort because our first hostel in rome had mosquito issues... did a lot of wandering, actually, especially in verona and venice. but that's more because our verona map was useless and venice is too complicated to bother with a map... ate gelato 2-3 times a day... hung out in a thrift store in rome after close, drinking wine and talking to the old guy and 2 young guys that worked there because the old guy LOVES texas and found out i'm from there... we hopped buses for free in rome :)... ran into renee mcvay at the vatican... cut the line at st. peter's, went to the vatican at 2 pm so we only had to wait 15 minutes to get in, got a free ticket (with reservation) at the uffizzi, so we bought another ticket for the same reservation time and got to walk right in, and we went to the david late so we only waited like 10 minutes (in general had incredible luck and hardly ever had to wait in lines)... marveled at the ridiculousness of rome only having 2 metro lines... made sure to visit the bocca dei verita, like in roman holiday... alex got pickpocketed in the rome train station, so i played sugar daddy and paid for everything for the rest of the trip... ate an incredible ricotta cheese and nutella calzone from this impossible to find place in trastevere in rome... had some great conversations... rode bikes in the tuscan countryside. which, honestly, was freaking hard. those hills are unbelievably killer... hunted for a new hostel in florence at 930 pm because our original one ignored our reservation and didn't have room... ended up in a WAY better hostel... met creepy creepy italians. geez, those guys are so creepy... figured out trains like pros... ate lots of pastries... took pictures with the pigeons in st. mark's... bought murano glass and journals on ponte rialto... put a lock on ponte dell' accademia with 'jake & kristina' on it... fell in love with the adorable italian children... accosted a woman in siena because i thought she was eating samples of bread with pesto and cheese, and i wanted some. turns out, it was definitely something she had bought and i made a total idiot out of myself. it was great... had this funny fat pasta in siena that was handmade in the restaurant... got directions from a security guy in venice who then turned creepy and asked us to hang out the next day. we didn't, don't worry...

it was just... it was amazing. we saw rome, seina, florence, verona, and venice.
i love italy, rome and venice in particular. i love how in rome, you can just wander around and stumble upon ancient ruins all over the place. there's such an energy there, too... one of my favorite things was crossing the street, because you just... crossed. i mean, obviously i never walked out when there were cars coming (at least not too quickly...), but the streets were just in such constant chaos that the only way to get across was to just assert yourself and go. i loved it. the last thing we did sightseeing-wise in rome was to walk down to a neighborhood called trastevere, which is pretty much as far from our hostel as you can get. there we finally found a restaurant called dar poeta, which had been recommended to us by (funny story) a girl we met on our flight from madrid to rome, who is studying in rome but had spent a few days in madrid visiting a friend. who goes to UC3 (my university here). who alex and i met for the first time the weekend before in san sebastian. it is a crazy crazy small world. anyway, dar poeta has ricotta cheese and nutella calzones that are absolutely incredible. we ended up hauling butt back to the hostel from dar poeta in hopes of still making it to the free pasta they were serving... it was a grueling (for me, anyway, my feet were dang tired) 40 minute powerwalk, and it was totally worth it for that calzone. yeah, that good.

siena was a cute little town, and biking was a lot lot lot harder than we (at least i, anyway) thought that it would be. florence was nice and i think i would have loved it more if i hadn't already been to rome. it just wasn't as entertaining, didn't have the energy and personality of rome, but it was cool. we went and saw the david, which is where we ended up running into a friend of alex's from whitman (her college in washington) and another girl. we ended up spending that night hanging out with them and another guy from their school, it was crazy. but back to the david, it was amazing. so much more than just a 'big naked guy', as jake put it. the skill that goes into creating a sculpture like that... impressed even an art cynic like me. i mean, you can see veins in his hand. crazy!
went to a bar that night with those kids and hung out for a while, then alex went to dance off her dragoon beer... and ran into creepers. persistent creepers, one of which i ended up having to physically shove away from us. geez. the next day we met up with the guy (matt) and one of the girls (laura) from the night before, and spent our time just wandering. ended up at a great restaurant for dinner that night, then hanging out on ponte vecchio listening to a street musician. he did this great song where he just kind of melodically talked to and about the people who were passing by... the general tune and 'buonna serra' were stuck in my head the whole next day, and i didn't hate it

verona was another nice little town, though a bit more gimmick-y i think because of the whole romeo and juliet connection. it was fun for a day trip, though... we had good pastries and we got out of a big city for a day.

venice was... probably my favorite. i mean, a city on water with a mix of adorable and impressive buildings, how can you not love it? of course, i could see where, in the summer when it's hot and the water smells and there are 5 million idiot tourists everywhere, it would be absolutely heinous. which reminds me, i now officially hate tourists. and i know that's a little bit hypocritical, as i technically am one, but it's like saying i can't stand the college students in college station... i've been here longer and i'm not stupid like the majority of them. yep :)
but yeah, venice. ah-mazing. the water was a lot cleaner looking than i expected, too... the buildings were adorable, you could walk everywhere and be completely lost and it wouldn't matter... seriously, using a map would've been a waste of time, the streets were crazy and usually unmarked, so we had fun just seeing what we saw and stumbling upon things.

by the time it was all said and done, though, we were ready to be done. alex was a fanastic travel buddy and we got along great, but i'm pretty sure a few more days of only having each other to talk to would've had us at each others' throats from sheer travel exhaustion. we walked so dang much that i'm surprised my feet don't still hurt a few days later. it was worth it, without a doubt, particularly because it meant we never had to think twice about our multiple daily gelatos and the various pastries we had here and there too :) seriously, how could we go to italy and not eat?


this trip left me with an even greater desire to come back someday, hopefully in a couple of years, but it also left me with a new theory about europe:

europe is like the first week of college. i'm not sure how it is at other universities, but at texas a&m, freshman move into the dorms a week before school starts. and for that whole first week, thousands of kids who are just barely out of high school are on their own, in a new place, and surrounded by more new people than they've probably ever seen. during that time, it becomes completely acceptable to talk to anyone. no one looks at you weird to introducing yourself to a stranger, joining a card game or conversation in comm lob with people you've never met is fine... i can remember a few nights when toni (my freshman year roommate) and i either left our door open to see who wandered by to talk (and people did) or headed over to comm lob and talked to whoever looked most interesting.

here, it's a lot of the same thing. that first night in florence, when alex and i were frantically searching the city for a hostel with space, anytime we heard americans on the street, we asked them where they were staying. most people were pretty helpful, one group even walked us down to their hostel so we could make sure and find it to see if they had space. and no one (well, with a few rare exceptions) thought we were that weird for it. alex made friends in our hostels left and right, particularly in our second rome hostel. and heck, in a week and a half i'm going to spend the weekend in barcelona with a guy and a girl from alex's university that i met in florence, people i hardly know at all. granted, i have spent the semester with people who were complete strangers before, but for barcelona... i've spent like 4 hours with the girl, and like a day with the guy, so they're much more 'complete strangers' than anyone else.

but i'm not that worried about it, and it's not that weird, it's just the way it is here. certainly not the way i'd want to live all the time, but it's fun. like that first week of college... you meet a ton of people, have some good stories and some good fun, stay in touch with the ones that really mattered, and move on to some other new and exciting stage of life.