liverpool and dublin

for the majority of my spring break, i went up to the channel islands to visit my friend heather, a lovely girl i know from school back in seattle. so, on friday march 14th (pi day!) i flew up to liverpool, england. we had one of those fun airport reunions and then mostly just got settled, did a little shopping (my new favourite store is primark, oh my gosh..) and had some dinner. we did a short walking tour of liverpool and saw the university, the anglican cathedral from the outside, and the catholic cathedral from the inside. it's very modern and absolutely BEAUTIFUL! i'm glad we decided to go in.

the next day we popped down to the warf to go to the beatle's museum. just as we arrived and i was about to open the door to the museum, the fire alarm went off and they evacuated the whole building. everyone received free reentry passes, and when one woman asked us if we had received any yet, isemi-truthfully replied no, we had not - we hadn't, but we also hadn't paid to go in yet... but, she gave us passes and we waited while the firemen did their work and then we entered and got those little audio things you get at monuments and thereby saved at least ten pounds - which right now is twenty bucks. it was a neat little museum, and we made sure to buy some souveniers to give them SOME business. at any rate, the real highlight of this day was going to the liverpool-reading game. heather is a crazy big liverpool futbol fan, and i've found that i actually enjoy watching soccer. oh yeah, and liverpool won 2-1, and i already have a favourite player: 12, favio aurelio. it was a super fun afternoon, and we had a very nice dinner of indian food before we caught a bus to wales. from there we took the plushest ferry i've ever been on to dublin. it was too bad we were so exhausted, travelling through the night and all, because it was like a hotel on a boat - shopping, restaurants, rooms even. very cool.

anyhow, upon arrival in dublin (march 16 now), we SLEPT. we woke up and went to a little scone shop/cafe before continuing on to the guinness factory. on the way, heather gave me a ton of history and we stopped at trinity college, dublin castle, and cristchurch cathedral. i wish i could go back and see more... anyhow, once at the factory, we ended up waiting in line next to 4 other americans who were studying in england. one of them goes to georgetown u and has a cousin who lives in a small city near granada and does the voice over acting for the harry potter movies when they're dubbed into spanish. crazy... anyway, the factory was crazy because there were tons of bands and mimes and free food and other entertainment as preparation for paddy's day. it was lots of fun, and i learned to pull my own pint! we accidentally met up with one of heather's roommates and her friends who were visiting and we all went on a literary pub crawl. that mean that we visited 4 of the older and more historical pubs of the city which had been important to irish authors in their days, guided by two actors who told us about irish literature and who sometimes performed scenes for us. it was actually really neat! i was glad we decided to do that.

and of course, monday was st. patrick's day, regardless of the fact that the pope moved it so it wouldn't conflict with holy week. we started the day at the parade, and then grabbed some lunch before we began our tour of the bars, somewhere around 1pm. i met tons of heather's friends, and their friends, and just all kinds of people and it was so much fun! i will tell you this, dublin is extremely expensive. part of it is the exchange rate, but part of it is just dublin. yikes. good thing i was only up there for a couple days... anyhow, we ended the night with some delicious garlic cheese fries from some fast food restaurant - not healthy, probably not especially amazing, but it was just fun to get fast food again - and then took a taxi home. our driver was very nice, as per usual with cabbies from the channel islands. a fun guy.

the next day, heather and i went to kilmainham gaol (gaelic for jail) and took the tour. i got a bunch more history because that jail has held a lot of political prisoners over the years of the irish's fight for independence. we took it easy that night and made some jumbalaiah rice, watched an obama speech on race, and kicked back with some sex in the city, just like old times! it was such a great extended weekend with my girl and i was really sorry to go, but i wanted to get back to see some of spain during holy week.

as it turns out, i didn't really like spain during holy week. there are processions all day and all night throughout the whole city, but i didn't really understand them. i know they are very moving to the catholics here, and they're all about penitence, but i just found them annoying because it was hard to get anywhere. they have a lot of people wearing outfits that in the states are ONLY worn by the KKK, so i have yet to figure out what they mean exactly here. i tried to go to the beach with nora and her sister and her sister's friend who were visiting, but when we got there it started to storm and we were in beach clothes, so it was not very happy. oh well. the rest of the weekend has been rather quiet. i watched hairspray and now i want to do musicals again - surprise, surprise. my parents come to visit on thursday which will be neat. i hope i can find enough interesting things for them to do... i also hope i can find their hotel. on the map, it's somewhere amidst the tangle of streets in the albayzin, which i am constantly getting lost in.

anyhow, as per usual, tons of good times in europe. after visiting ireland, which is a lot more like american culture than mainland european culture, i really miss home and i'm looking forward to going back. but, when i was there, i really missed speaking spanish and found that my automatic responses came in spanish before english, so that made me really glad because it means i'm making progress here. oh well! i guess there's no making me happy! or everything makes me happy. maybe that's it. let's hope!

nerja for the day

today, rebecca and i went to nerja for the day and it was BEAUTIFUL! it's a little coastal town, along the costa del sol. we arrived at 11ish, bought some groceries, wandered down to the beach, swam in the medditeranean sea and then fell asleep in the sun for like 4 hours. it was aboslutely glorious, and i would love to return for a whole weekend. what a fantastic day!

unfortunately, i awoke this morning with a cold, so i'm scraping my other evening plans in lieu of going home to shower the sand and salt off my body, hop into bed, watch stardust, and sleep. mmm, a good ending to a great day!

Madrid, Segovia, Toledo

I have just returned from a 5 day trip to Madrid, Segovia, and Toledo with my program, and I loved it! We saw a ton of art in Madrid, and the other two cities were absolutely precioso, which in Spanish means beautiful in a cute way and usually refers to places that you like a lot.

On Wednesday we went to the Prado, which has a ton of famous works of art, including some Rafael and Velázquez and Goya. To be honest, it was mostly boring, but there were some art students painting copies of Velázquez works, which was really fun to watch because they were great.

Thursday took us to the Reina Sofia museum, which has mostly modern stuff that I don’t like, such as Picasso (tons of him on loan currently – unfortunate since I already went to the Picasso museum in Barcelona) and Miró and Dali, which I did actually enjoy. In the afternoon we took a historic walk with a very funny and easy to understand tour guide, Edu. Did you know that Madrid has an ancient Egyptian temple a few blocks away from the Plaza de España? Yeah, the sister to it is in New York City, and was given to Spain and the States as a thank you for helping to move another larger temple to prevent it from getting washed away by water which was being diverted by a hydro electric dam, if I understood Edu right. Anyhow, it was a great walk with lots of history, and that evening I walked to el Parque del Buen Retiro with a few girls and we took silly photos.

We headed out of Madrid on Friday to see El Escorial, a monastery an hour out of the city that houses a huge library full of books which were banned during the Inquisition, including books in Arabic and Hebrew, and some covering topics of astrology and palm reading. After that we went to El Valle de los Caídos, which is a memorial for the Spanish Civil War built by the dictator Francisco Franco, who is buried there. It was a totally strange place, because it’s a huge church built into the side of a mountain, so it’s long and dark and you can see some of the mountain rock in some areas, and as one guy in my program noted, you can totally see Harry Potter fighting the Basalisk in there. There’s a huge cross built on the top of this mountain which you can see for miles. One of the oddest parts of El Valle is that the only people buried there, and thus the only ones memorialized, are those who fought and died on Franco’s side, and there are a lot of symbols inside to remind people of the power Franco had. Very creepy, odd, and interesting location. On a happier note, we returned that night to Madrid and a few of us went searching for somewhere to eat dinner and stumbled upon a little Indian restaurant. It was a little nicer than we’d meant to eat, but we got food money from the program and we’d been having kebap for a couple days and had some extra money leftover, so it was alright. The food was delicious, and at the end of the meal, we were given free champagne for who knows what reason. It was yummy too – I don’t know what good champagne is, but this was definitely not Cook’s. Also, our waiter put on a fake mustache and asked us how the meal had been while we were drinking our champagne and we laughed with him and when we finally left, he held the door for us and shook our hands and wished us a good night. A very fun experience!

We were in Segovia for Saturday, which is architecturally a feminine city, according to Edu, who once again took us on a walking tour. I had a picnic lunch with some folks and we saw the oldest preserved aqueduct in the world, which was so totally cool – the stones are held in place by gravity, with only sand between them, no cement. We also saw a castle there which Walt Disney visited and used as the basis for the design of the castle in Snow White. Pretty neat, and very pretty! That night we watched “Jamón, Jamón” at the hotel, which stars Javier Bardem and Penelepe Cruz, and is totally weird because of the extensive and graphic love triangles, and the fact that at the end, Javier’s character kills another man with a leg of ham. We laughed a lot.

Finally, Sunday, today, we went to Toledo, which I think I liked the best of all the places we went. We focused our attention on the Jewish quarter, because Toledo seems to have one of the best preserved examples of Spanish Jewish history. Edu told us a story about the Jewish Expulsion from Spain in 1492. Apparently, some families were under the impression that the Expulsion was just temporary and that they would be invited back to Spain when it was more politically feasible. As such, they brought their house keys with them, and some families passed these keys down through the generations as they preserved the hope that they could one day return to their homes. 1992 marked the 500 year anniversary of the Jewish Expulsion, and as part of the observation of this, the Spanish government invited the decedents of the Spanish Jews to come to Spain as a symbolic returning, and one family came back to Toledo with the keys that had been passed through their family for 500 years, went to their house, unlocked the same door that had been on the house since the 15^th century and entered their house – they actually came home. It’s amazing that the keys stayed in the family, and the door of the house was never changed. No one knew where the house was, but I really wanted to visit it to see. Anyway, because of this history, a lot of the tiendas that sell souvenirs include rings of old looking keys, which I think is neat. So, we visited two synagogues, one of which included a really interesting Semetic Jew museum. We also went to a mosque which was turned into a Christian worship space, and is now kind of an active archeological dig. We walked through and we met a really nice cat in the gardens. It was lunch time, so we found a very traditional Spanish restaurant and I tried melón y jamón for the first time, which is exactly what it sounds like – melon and ham, together. Mmmm, sweet and salty! After lunch we headed home, and now I’m here, really excited to get some clean clothes!

Only two more weeks until my trip to Liverpool and Dublin to visit my friend Heather! I can’t wait!!!