Portugal

Mmmkay. So first off, I’m behind again in my blogging – I was planning on catching up last weekend but then I got real sick… I got some weird stomach bug thing that gave me stomach problems from like Wednesday till the following Thursday or so… Saturday and Sunday my tummy was cramping so bad that it felt like I was going into labor or something and I couldn’t get out of bed on Sunday morning.  My madre here took me to the hospital and I ended up having a fever and all that.. she did some feeling around and took xrays (not quite sure why they needed xrays…?) but pretty much it ended up that I had something weird going on (they always call things infections here, so I had a stomach ‘infection’ and had to not eat anything for 24 hours, which ended up being 36 hours.. and then I was on some strict diet of like rice and bananas and carrots for a few days.  Real exciting stuff.  I’m feeling a hundred percent now, but I definitely felt like crap for about a week.  I do have some experience now with socialized health care… and I must say, going to the doctor in the US is much more pleasant.  Just throwing that out there...

So. Portugal.  Or shall I say Cancun?  That place was wildddd!  We (a group of 35 of us) went to a town called Lagos, right on the Atlantic coast.  It’s an absolutely adorable little place with hilly streets and lots of restaurants and cute plazas.  Pretty much everyone there spoke English, which was kind of odd for us since we’ve all been used to Spaniards surrounding us everywhere.  Obviously… since we are in Spain… so we got there Friday night after a long bus ride and got led to our hostel – named the Rising Cock- by some drunk British guy promoting a bar.  I’m pretty sure that was the moment we all realized we had just entered a serious party town.  It took awhile for everybody to get assigned their rooms and stuff-  our 12 person room was called the Princess Room and was decorated all in Disney Princess stuff- there even was a nice painting of Cinderella holding a beer bong and a fifth on the wall. Gotta love it.  By that time everyone was all sorts of ready to go out and party… so party we did.  We made our rounds and hit up a couple of little bars, where Kelsey and I made friends with this great group of British guys—they were amazing.  There were 4 of them, and they kept us entertained all night… like until 5 or 6 in the morning.  That was pretty rough, since we had an organized booze cruise to go on the next day…  After getting a good 3 or 4 hours of sleep, we ate crepes made by the mom of the hostel and then went and explored the town and took pictures of things.  The booze cruise started at 1ish and went until 5:30 or so… and yeah. Booze cruise-y things went down.  However, in the middle of the booze cruise we all got to go on these grotto tours, where they took us into these amazing rock formation things in the water.  Hands down the prettiest beach scenery I’ve ever seen. 

After the booze cruise, my friend Kelly and I decided we wanted Thai food, so we ran around town looking for this Thai restaurant.  We found the place and literally sat there for an hour until the place opened, then we ate A LOT of Thai food. It wasn’t near as good as at home, but it was satisfying.  Then, after a brief nap we went back out onto the town and met up with our British friends.  We ended up at some weird mansion/bar/party thing, and were entertained by some nasty Brazilian or Portuguese man wearing leather pants and gloves and his skeezy woman wearing the shortest dress ever doing their own version of Dancing With the Stars, porn style.  People in Lagos are odd.

Basically, my experience in Portugal involved a full 6 or so hours of sleep, a booze cruise, Thai food, British boys, and a lot of amazing scenery.

Pirate Ship Parties and a U.S. Airshow

The main events from last week:

Last Sunday, my familia invited me to go to an air show with them on the beach here.  My madre packed a little picnic of tortilla Espanola- which is like my most favorite thing here (egg and potatoes fried together- it’s hard to explain)—and some ham flavored potato chips (since that’s what they eat here) and we went off to the beach.  The air show was actually pretty cool, but I thought it was freakin hilarious because the airplanes in the airshow were American military planes!  The military base at Rota is super, super close, so the planes in the show were basically from home!   I thought it was pretty funny.  But yeah, we sat and watched this cool airshow and ate Spanish food in front of a castle on the beach in the sun all day- not too shabby of a way to spend my Sunday. 

Where we set up our picnic to watch the airshow...

Last Wednesday, we received an invite (like a real paper invite) to a cocktail party with the Italian navy officers-in-training, who had been in town for a couple of days.

Cocktail party invite

Basically, they have this pirate ship that they take around for 3 months every summer and do training stuff on it and go from port to port, and then they have a cocktail party to celebrate the end of their tour in Cadiz.  Since it sounded like a legit adventure, we decided to go but planned on jumping off if the boat started to leave port and head for Morocco or somewhere to sell us for slaves… So yeah, we got all dressed up and went out to Mexican for a friend’s birthday, where we had sangria Mexicana-- slightly frozen sangria blended up with tequila… yeah.  The makings of a good night right there.  We left there definitely ready to party on a pirate ship. 

I am in no way kidding when I say this is the boat we partied on.

We got escorted up the plank of the pirate ship by some nice Italian navy boy and walked into a crowd full of Italian navy officer guys.  If you know me at all, you’d know that I was a happy camper at that moment in time.  On the ship there were two dance floors complete with djs, a few open bars, a buffet full of crab and cheese classy treats, a real, gourmet cake, some champagne toasts and many, many foreign men in uniform.   Needless to say, it was a nice time.  Me and my girlfriends taught some of them how we dance in America, which was hilarious- apparently we were the first Americans some of them had ever met. 

Us with some of our Italian friends

I’m pretty sure the US and Italy are going to have a better relationship now, thanks to us.  They were all just really sweet boys who danced with us all night and gave us some tours of the ship, which was really cool.  At like 3 or so a few of them decided to be gentlemen and walk us home, something completely unnecessary in Cadiz but still a very nice gesture.  My night ended with an invite to Mallorca this weekend to visit them and hangout on the boat some more, but I think that I’m gonna have to decline this time haha

My next post will be about Portugal, and then I’ll be caught up!

Ronda

The bridge in Ronda

On our first group excursion, we went to a town called Ronda in Spain, which was a two hour bus-ride from Cadiz.  Our madres packed us little picnic lunches—mine consisted of 2 bocadillos, which are huge baguette sandwiches, 2 apples, 2 bananas and a huge bottle of water.  It’s pretty funny comparing our lunches here to those at home. Lunch here is the biggest meal of the day, so they don’t mess around with sack lunches.  One guy’s madre always packs him like an entire package of jam, a loaf of bread, a package of cheese, and ridiculous amounts of fruit to “make the other kids jealous.”  But anyways, Ronda just so happened to be having a bull fight the day we went, so there was a huge festival going on with drinking and eating going on everywhere in the streets. 

Decorations for the street fiesta

A little group of us went to a museum where they had stuff from the Spanish Inquisition and other times where they used torture as a means of punishment.  They had all sorts of sick stuff, like a machine that kills you by stretching your body out as far as it’ll go, and a guillotine and all that.  It was actually pretty interesting- sick, but interesting.  After we did some walking around and taking pictures and stuff, we went and ate our sack lunches in a cool park right by the bull ring and watched all of the ladies walking around in their traditional Spanish dresses and the men in their Spanish suits. 

We wanted to go to the bull fight, but each ticket was almost $200.00, so we decided not to… obviously.  They are starting to make bull-fighting illegal here, so it might have been my only opportunity to ever see it, but oh well.  That’s a lot of money to a college kid!  So, we ended up walking around and drinking tinto de verano, which is tinto (wine) and juice or pop—absolutely delicious—and just enjoyed the fiesta that was going on.  It definitely was a great experience in a beautiful little town, and I’m very happy we happened to be there on that day. 

Ronda!

Some little details of life in Cadiz...

So, after leaving Germany and paying almost $200.00 to get my bags on the plane, I ended up here, in Cadiz.   This place is amazing.  Not like I-want-to-live-here-forever kind of amazing, but it’s a pretty sweet place. 

This is my town...

La Caleta- a small beach here with lots of cute little boats

Some facts as to why it’s so sweet:  It’s right on the water, so we go to the beach almost every day… wine is cheaper than water.  Fo real…. They have chocolate sandwiches (chocolate bar on French bread)… they have tapas… shopping here is amazing… everything is within walking distance… yeah.  I’m a big fan of the food here- so far my madre has made amazing, amazing things (Other than the fried cow-brain chicken nugget things- I didn’t like those so much.)  I'm gonna learn to cook some dishes before I come home, so everyone be prepared! Every Sunday my padre brings home churros with this thick fondue-like hot chocolate for breakfast… yum.  So, so good.  I've been running every other day though, because I'm not trying to come home 100 pounds bigger- which is totally possible what with all the frided food they eat here.  My madre even went out and bought a frier my first day here so she could fry more stuff haha

The days here go something like this:  wake up around 9, eat, go to class, have a snack around noon, eat lunch at 3:30, nap till 5, go to the beach or shopping, eat a snack, have dinner at 10 ish, go out at 11, come home around 3, repeat.  It’s a pretty relaxed life around here, which is nice.  It’s just sooo different from home, where everything is go go go.  It’s kinda hard realizing that I don’t actually have to be anywhere other than class for like an hour or two every day.     

Some negatives about Cadiz- it’s not normal for women to smile here.  If you smile, that means you are a slut.  No joke.  Like, if you walk past someone and smile at them and they happen to be male, you may as well be inviting them in your pants.  This is a little rough for those of us who smile a lot… It’s kind of funny though- at bars, people will say that they can tell we are American before we even talk, just because we are smiling and like to have fun.  I thought everyone liked to have fun…?  We’ll walk into a bar and be the only ones dancing at first because we are having a good time… thus, it’s obvious that we are American.  Oh, side note- if you like your personal space… Don’t come here.  There is no concept of personal space.  You’ll be standing in line and the person behind you will either decide that they no longer want to be behind you, they’d rather be in front of you and then push forward, or they will just linger awkwardly on your back.  It’s great… not.  Also, they walk sooooo slowwwww but drive soooo fast.  I don’t get it. 

My family here is so cute!  My madre and padre are so sweet, and then I have three host sisters.  Two I see every day, but only one lives here.  The one that lives here happens to be named Laura and is Lauren’s age. It’s pretty funny because they act the same too, but one speaks Spanish… There’s a dog too, named Kiko.  He’s a yorkie and is yippy as all hell.  So yeah… that’s my life here in a nutshell.  I’ll post more later about some cool things that have happened, but now I’m heading off to Portugal for the weekend J

Germany!

I started off my European adventures in Frankfurt, Germany with my lovely friend Christina.  She’s a really good friend from high school who just so happens to be German and live outside of Frankfurt… I stayed with her and her family, which was really cool. I absolutely love her mom and sister- just such good people!  I got to experience real life Germany- I pretty much had no idea what was going on for the majority of the time, but started to catch on a little to some things. For instance, I can say important things like kitchen and cheese and beer… Which, speaking of- they mix hefeweizen with banana juice there, or hef with grapefruit juice... umm, delightful.  Highly recommended.  But yeah, so… we went to Heidelberg one day, which was so cool.  It’s a very, very cute town with a castle that’s pretty tight… And they happen to have a US military base there- I was happy to see some of our guys on the street because it made me feel safe haha  

Me at the castle in Heidelberg

 Let’s see… I met some of Christina’s friends, which was cool because I had only heard of them and never actually had met them.  One, Franzi, is totally awesome- she studied in the US at the same time that Christina did, so she’s super fluent in English and helped keep me company when everyone was speaking German.  One thing we did that was pretty cool that you wouldn't ever see in the U.S.-- we went to this like Wagner symphony performance that lasted an hour, but was followed by Wagner-inspired electro-club music at a man-made beach in the middle of the city, complete with sand and a beer garden.  Probably the strangest thing I have ever seen, but so cool too haha



These are beach chairs at the Wagner-techno beach party... haha



Basically, I got to spend a lot of time with Christina in Germany, which was awesome- I love that girl.  I’m going to try and go visit her in Berlin soon too, which should be fun!

Pre Europe...

Okay, so, I had a bunch of people suggest blogging about my time here, so… here it is.  I figure that my life isn’t very exciting at home, so I might as well share the details while it actually is kind of exciting…

So, to begin with-- I left home on August 10^th.  My mom, Wyatt, Lauren, Rachel and I flew into Wilmington, North Carolina, then drove down to Charleston for a few days… We stayed in this amazing little bed and breakfast right on the harbor.  The house was pink and had 3 pink Pomeranians running around, no joke. 

Our bed and breakfast... The Palmer House

Charleston is such a cool city! Super hot and humid in the middle of August, with jellyfish galore (I got stung on my ass by one- he got the whole length of it too, which is an impressive feat, not gonna lie) but there was a lot of cool things to see and do.  We went on a ghost hunt in the middle of a thunderstorm late at night on Friday the 13^th- talk about spooky!  Graveyards from the 1700s are scary enough by themselves, let alone in the middle of an intense storm on Friday the 13th.  But yeah... We only spent like 3 or 4 days in Charleston, but I’ll most def be going back there.   From Charleston we went to Myrtle Beach, which was a freakin blast.  Not much to say about it other than laying by the beach, enjoying beer and eating southern food is not too shabby of a lifestyle.  David came down and hungout with us for a weekend, which was nice since the trip was mostly planned to go see him haha But that was a good time- we always have fun when he’s around, even if some things have been a little… messy in the past.  But yeah, saying bye to my family was sad, and when David dropped me off at the airport and I was all alone it hit me that I was leaving everyone behind for awhile… so I spent a good few hours fighting off tears and trying to figure out ways to get David to come pick me up till I was able to get a flight home to Seattle haha—I’m such a baby.  Thank God I didn’t go through with that, since it’s amazing here!