quatre dias

Today is the last Monday I'll ever spend in Barcelona (on this trip, anyway. I'm going to say that because I would like to come back to Europe someday, and visit Barcelona to see how it's changed). And it went pretty well, I'd say.

We went up to Tibidabo, this mountain that overlooks the city and which has an amusement park on top. We took a train, walked a fair ways, and then took a funicular (I guess we'd call it a cable car) to get all the way up. It was worth it--we had some fantastic views of the city. There were these middle-aged British women trying to find La Sagrada Família down below, and I spotted it and took a picture. Then I tried to show them where it was--I even got out my camera and showed them the picture--but they refused to believe me. They thought it was the Barcelona Catedral, which it definitely was not. Silly ladies.

This weekend was also a good way to wrap up the semester. Saturday during the day I took a short trip out to Sitges with a friend from my research class. Sitges is a beautiful beach town less than an hour from Barcelona, to which I wouldn't mind retiring someday (but on a teacher's salary, that's probably too much to wish for). It has nine beaches, and some of the finest, cleanest sand I've ever seen at a beach. We wandered around the city and just had a nice, relaxing time looking at the shops and eating gelato.

Saturday night I went with some people to see the fountain at Montjuïc, ate some freshly baked pizza for dinner, and then saw La Bella y la Bestia--the musical, live, in Spanish. The show was pretty fantastic--the costumes and set blew me away, and it was really interesting to hear Beauty and the Beast in Spanish and see where the translation differed from the original English. The guy who played Lumiere was really great, and "Be Our Guest" was pretty much exactly what it should be on stage.

Tomorrow I'm just going to hang out in the city center, get lunch, and give my final research presentation. My professor read over my draft of the complete paper and said it didn't need anything more, given the time constraints. That was pretty nice to hear. Check the research paper off the to-do list!

I still have two exams ahead of me, but I'm sort of kind of done caring. I'm having a good last week in Barcelona, and soon I'm going to England (where I'll meet up with my mom!) and Scotland. After that, it's HOME!

travel marathon!

This past weekend was the start of a four-weekend-long "travel marathon" for me--first stop, Vienna! (Next is Granada, and after that it's two weekends in Italy for spring break.) There I met up with John, and was blown away by all the musical history in the city as well as all the wonderful sights and food.

I spent the night (Thursday the 19th) in the BCN airport because my flight to Vienna was at 6:30 on Friday morning. Needless to say, I didn't get enough sleep and ended up passing out on the plane from Barcelona to Vienna. Friday I spent the day by myself, walking around Vienna and visiting some music-related things--such as Mozart's house! (One of the many he lived in, anyway, which is now a museum.)

Saturday was a long day of sightseeing and at night we almost saw Joshua Bell live. But tickets were completely sold out--even standing room! Before that, we ate lunch at this great little place that served finger sandwiches for €1 each. They were pretty tasty, and there were some great vegetarian options.

Sunday we got up realllllly early to go see the Vienna Boys' Choir perform at mass in the Hofburg chapel. The singing was wonderful and had a very other-worldly sound to it. I would have liked to see some of the mass, too, but we were stuck in a very crowded standing-room part of the chapel and I was behind some very tall people. So that was sad. But it was nice, nonetheless.

We also saw the National Library (or part of it, anyway) on Sunday. That was a really wonderful, overwhelmingly ornate place--it was built for one of the emperors of the Austro-Hungarian empire (can't remember which at the moment, though). Compared to the Long Room at Trinity College in Dublin, it was huge and . . . well, like I said, a little bit overwhelming. The whole ceiling is covered with elaborate paintings, and the place itself just sort of oozed decadence and royalty. Not that that's totally a bad thing. But I preferred the Long Room to this, by far.


The National Library

Another thing we did on Sunday was tour the State Opera house. It was beautiful, huge, and the tour guide was really interesting and I learned a lot. Most of the building was destroyed in WWII, but has since been reconstructed mostly according to the original plans. Here are some pictures:


Inside the main hall thing, looking up at the seats directly facing the stage and the huge, awesome light fixture.


Going up the main staircase.

I came back on Sunday night, spent this week going to classes and trying desperately to set up interviews for my research project (and failing!), and getting ready for Granada. Oh, and coming down with a cold. Yessss.

So tonight I head off to Granada by train. I have a ticket to see the Alhambra, but nothing else concretely planned for the weekend. I'll be there until Sunday evening, when I take another night train back to Barcelona. Hopefully going to Granada makes me feel less sick, because this cold thing is really kind of irritating.

Anyway, there are pictures from Vienna here! And now I should go finish packing my stuff for tonight!

update!

Wow, it's been a while. Things have been weird--I got really sick the weekend of February 20th, spent the next week recovering, went to Ireland for 4.5ish days, came back to Barcelona for two days, went to Navarre for three days, came back to face the harsh reality of midsems, spent this past weekend in Barcelona, and here I am.

I have a TON of pictures from my trips to Ireland and Navarre. I took . . . over 200 pictures in each place? Woops.

To sum it up: Ireland was absolutely amazing. It's green and beautiful right now, so I can only imagine what it's like during the summer months. We saw the Cliffs of Moher and spent time in both Galway and Dublin. We also spent a couple nights in Lisdoonvarna, a small town near the cliffs. We walked from Lisdoonvarna to Doolin, a coastal town near the cliffs, one day and then rented bikes to get to the cliffs. That failed because it was rainy and cold, so we retreated back to Lisdoonvarna and went to the cliffs the next day--and it was sunny and beautiful! So that was really nice. Here is a picture of the cliffs (one of many dozens that I took throughout the visit):



Galway was a really nice, pretty little city. Dublin was really cool, too. We saw ancient books at Trinity College, which was kind of one of the highlights of the trip for me. What can I say, I'm a sucker for old illuminated manuscripts.

All the rest of my Ireland pictures are here.

The next weekend I went with IES to Navarre, which was kind of an organizational disaster but still a good time. We saw a couple old castles, lots of beautiful mountains, snow(!), and more wind turbines than I've ever seen in my entire life (the record prior to that trip was one, so it may not seem that impressive . . . but it was). We also visited a vineyard and some stops along the road to Santiago de Compostela, which was a huge route for pilgrimages a la The Canterbury Tales, except on the continent. We stayed in Pamplona, where Hemingway stayed and fell in love with the Fiesta de San Fermin, which includes the running of the bulls. There are lots of pictures
here.

In that album there are also some pictures from my weekend here--I spent a lot of time outside near the sea. It was warm and beautiful out, so I did a lot of walking and even spent some time at the beach! So there are some pictures of that in there too.

Here is a picture of the Castle of Javier in Navarre:

Madrid

This past weekend, I went to Madrid with three girls from my program. Despite the cold and occasional rain, it was a good time and we saw pretty much everything we had planned to visit.

We took a bus from Barcelona at midnight on Friday and got to Madrid around 7:30am on Saturday. We went straight to our hostel, checked in, and then went out to do some sightseeing. Here are some pictures from Saturday, when we went to the Museo del Prado, el Parque del Retiro, and Plaza Mayor (among other things).


In front of El Prado. We weren't technically supposed to take pictures inside the museum, but I snuck a few . . .


. . . this one included. It's Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Sons." I was particularly interested in seeing this one because a friend from school (hi, Mer!) has a print of the picture and we learned about Goya in Spanish 4 in high school. It was smaller than I expected, but still really cool.


After El Prado, we went to El Parque del Buen Retiro. It was really, really beautiful, complete with a large pond and a "Palacio de Cristal" (a glass palace).


Palacio de Cristal

Later we went to Plaza Mayor. It was quieter than I expected it to be, but that's probably because we went in the afternoon on a chilly Saturday. I think it's supposed to come to life at night. It's pretty touristy, though, so there wasn't too much to see except souvenir shops and some restaurants.


Plaza Mayor


Plaza Mayor

It was kind of gross out on Sunday (rainy and too cold to walk very far without losing all sensation in my feet). The tour of Palacio Real, the main thing we did that day, was mercifully indoors. It's an enormous, old, decadent palace that housed several generations of Spanish kings. Like at El Prado, we were forbidden from taking pictures inside the building, but I snuck a few anyway.


In this huge courtyard thing.


Beautiful ceiling (almost all the rooms had painted ceilings).


The throne room. The image quality is kind of crappy, but whatever. It's the THRONE ROOM.


There is a room called the Stradivarius Room. I didn't realize it would be full of actual Stradivari until we got inside and I saw glass cases with beautiful violins and cellos inside.

(Like always, there are more pictures here.)

All in all, the trip to Madrid was a good one. The experience of eating in Madrid, however, emphasized just how hard it is to be a vegetarian in Spain. In 2 days, I ate 3 tortilla española (basically, an omelette with potatoes and onions inside) sandwiches as main meals. I'm really glad I decided to live in an apartment in Barcelona.

This weekend I'll be in Barcelona, probably going back to Parc Güell and walking around the city some more. There's still a lot I haven't explored, but which I really want to see.

Besalú and Vic

On Saturday, 450-some IES students went to Besalù and Vic, two medieval towns near Barcelona in Catalonia. It was pretty much the most yuppie-touristy thing I've ever done. Here you can see the crowd from just two of 9 or 10 busloads of people that traipsed through the cities:



Besalú is an important historical site because of its Jewish quarter and how well the buildings have been preserved. The river that runs near the town is water that comes from the Pyrenees, and apparently over time it filled up some of the buildings and preserved them. One of those buildings contained a water purification bath. Here's a kind of crappy picture of it:



Apparently men and women had different schedules for purification; that is, women had to enter the bath more frequently than men to rid themselves of sin. There was some interesting numerology behind the number of steps, but I forget the details.

Later in Besalú we saw a church that survived not only time but also fire during the Spanish Civil War. It was pretty impressive inside. There were some restored pillars near the alter, and you could tell which ones were restored and which were original: the originals were scorched black by fires and chipped by gunfire during the Guerra Civil. Unfortunately, none of my pictures from inside the church turned out too well.

We got some free time to go walk around Besalú after the tour, and there were a lot of really pretty, old buildings. Outside of a shop on our way out of the city, a man was offering samples of cookies sold there. I asked him what they were like, and after he described them to me he asked where I was from. When I told him "los Estados Unidos," he immediately lit up and said, "Ah! Do you prefer Bush or Obama?" I told him Obama, and he seemed pretty pleased.

Vic wasn't quite as pleasant an experience as Besalú. While it was pretty chilly in Besalú, it was even worse in Vic because it rained pretty much the whole time we were there. The tour was fairly interesting, in spite of the cold. Here are some pictures from Vic:


Main plaza in Vic. The arches on the buildings date back to medieval times when they were constructed for the markets that were held in the plaza.


Roman temple, or the reconstruction of a Roman temple that used to be on this site.


Inside of a beautiful church.

The trip was interesting overall, but the weather was pretty much the worst weather ever for tourism in Spain. On the way home, we had to be let off the bus away from our point of origin because there was a huge protest against the Israeli strikes in Gaza. Streets were blocked off, police were everywhere, and there was a helicopter circling the plaza where the protest was held. Powerful stuff.