Where the accents sound fake...

ENGLAND.

A couple of weeks ago I headed to England to visit my cousin Bill for the weekend. We ate a couple of deliciously filling, hearty meat pies and fish and chips, and I thoroughly enjoyed locally brewed ales in a number of pubs. These are the non-food and drink related things we saw in England....

So, obviously, this is Stonehenge. It was a little disappointing on the "WOW" factor you would think it might have, considering it's a "World Wonder," but it was still cool to see nonetheless. There was a free audio guide provided with the entrance ticket which pretty much summed up to "We have no idea why Stonehenge is here.... We don't know... We're not sure... We don't know..."


Bath is a city that could never be described in photos or words. It is just as beautiful as everyone describes it as, and I absolutely loved these chimney tops. It reminded me of Mary Poppins. We took the cheesy, bright red, double floored tourist bus for the day, and it was actually quite informational and entertaining. I do recommend them if you've got one day to spend in a city with lots to see. The most interesting piece of information learned?: the dresses women wore back in the day (17th century, I believe) could be up to three meters (9 feet) wide. The tour guide claims this is where the tradition of men holding open the door for women came from-- because no matter how far the woman reached, she couldn't reach the door handle!

On my last day in England we headed to Oxford. It is in this city where I found my favorite local beer. After six months of drinking what I think may be the worst beer on the planet, Cruz Campo, I was thrilled to enjoy a number of real tasty beers. Nummmmm.


Ta ta for now

To Portugal and back

This spring break my mom came to Spain and we took a little road trip to Portugal and back. It started off a bit rough in Madrid... My mom´s flight arrived to Madrid three hours before my train arrived from Jaén. We had decided to meet up at the metro stop closest to Tomas´ house (where we were going to stay for a night before starting our drive). Of course, when I arrived to the metro stop she wasn´t there. We apparently had a little miss-communication about how long she should wait for me there... I said wait til 11am, she thought til 10:30am, I arrived at 11am. Well, by 10:45am she had assumed I had missed the train and wasn´t coming... so she left the metro stop and wandered to Tomas´apartment (Tomas was out of town) where no one spoke enough English to know to give her the keys to his place... so, she wandered the English-less streets of Madrid, bouncing between bars and shops trying to ask for an internet cafe in an attempt to call me. I waited for her at the metro stop until 11:30am, then headed to the apartment, then to the cafes near his place, then back to the metro stop, where an hour later, I found her standing in front of the metro stop on the verge of tears! For those of you who read my blog from last time I was living in Spain, something very similar happened to me when I went to Paris. (I was supposed to meet my friend at the Paris airport but we landed at two different airports... I couldn´t find the hotel... I found him on a random street corner a couple hours later...) After this little hiccup, the trip was flawless... well... besides the fact that we spent half the trip sick with head colds.

On a happier and more successful note, our first night in Madrid was spent going to a drag show, a professional drag show. I'm not talking "Gay 90's" style where the girls get up on stage and lip sync to tacky songs... I'm talking about a drag show in a real theater on the main strip of the city doing a hilarious comedy act (accompanied by song and dance of course) type of show. It was hilarious! "Dolly" is one of Tomas' friends and proved to be very talented and extremely entertaining. I have a totally new view on drag shows and hope to attend another one in this style another day. For those of you who speak Spanish, you should check out Dolly on YouTube.

The following afternoon we headed out for our six hour road trip to Lisbon. We made one pit stop on the way to a town called Talavera de la Reina- a Spanish city known for it's ceramics. For those of you who know my mother, she makes amazing ceramics which adorn our entire house. We stopped in a few shops to "ooooo" and "ahhhh" at the beautiful pieces and continued on our way. This shop owner told us he sells ceramics to New York City and to "the place with all the Cubans..." I'm assuming he meant Miami.


To drive into Lisbon you have to cross a beautiful, San Francisco Golden Gate looking bridge which spits you into the center of the city. We arrived after dark and drove in agonizingly frustrating circles around Lisbon until we finally found a hotel to stay at. We spent a couple of days wandering the streets of this truly charming city. It is the simple things that makes this such a great place to visit... The main pedestrian walkways are decorated with colored cobblestone arranged in cute designs. The narrow and steep streets still sport old, yellow trolleys that climb through ancient looking neighborhoods. (A couple of lines are always jammed with tourists but they are otherwise still used by local people as a legit form of transportation.) And the people were kind, so kind. Waiters and bus drivers, shop owners and plagued by non-Portuguese speaking tourists every day, were smiley and friendly... and the majority of them put up with my pathetic stuttering of the little Portuguese I do know. My favorite part about Lisbon was spending time admiring the tiled houses houses. I've never seen houses and buildings look like they do in Portugal.

The following two nights were spent in a small town a couple of hours north of Lisbon, called Aveiro. This tranquil town has a lot of quirky things to it that make it a neat place to visit. First off, it's nicknamed "The Venice of Portugal" for it's cute canals and colorful boats. Second, the beach front part of town is decorated by striped houses that make it look like Candy Land!! Mom commented, "It's silly that something as small as striped houses make you want to visit a place..."


On the way back to Madrid we stopped for one night Salamanca, Spain. The University of Salamanca is the oldest university in Spain, founded in 1218. During my middle school trip to Spain, we visited this university, and it was the place that made me want to go to college in Spain. It has a beautiful old library that I was mesmerized by when I was only 12 and am still enchanted by today. This time around I visited the library alone, by chance there were no other tourists visiting the university at the same time as me. I spent a good half an hour staring into the library, wondering who studied there, what kind of books were in there, and what it must smell like to be around all those old things (you "enter" the library by walking into a glass box, the library is air tight to protect all the old books).

Semana Santa (Holy Week) in Spain is a pretty big deal. Every day of the week there are a number of religious processions that run through each city. Every church usually has their own procession with it's own theme, it's own colors, and it's own statues and thrones. In Salamanca we happened to be situated perfectly in the window of a cafe as a procession passed by. It was quite the spooky site, as the people's costumes resemble those of the KKK (according to wikipedia they are not found to be related in any way). This procession started in a chilling silence, with rows of people walking slowly in front of a statue of Jesus. Later on came a full band with intense percussion, followed by a statue of the virgin Mary. These processions can last anywhere from two to eight hours and people of all ages participate.

I saw another procession in Jaén on Easter Day. In this procession I was surprised to see that there were people underneath the thrones walking barefoot. When I asked a teacher about this, she explained that people do it to show their Catholic dedication, and that when she was a kid, there were people who walked on their knees through the whole parade. The whole walking on the knees thing has since been outlawed because it was too gruesome for such a popular family and community event.

Stay tuned... Next up is... ENGLAND