Well, I sucessfully made it around the Iberian penninsula with only minimal problems. Really, considering the number of connections and types of transportation I was relying on, it is a miracle.
I headed into Paris a few days before leaving for Spain to meet up with Brad, our family friend who works for American Airlines. We had a great time, just exploring the city and we found a couple really cool places with live music that I want to go back to. It's amazing how quickly Paris became familiar. I just wandered Paris for nearly 2 days by myself, without a map, and loved it. However, you have to appreciate the organization of Paris- you can never really be lost because every street is labeled with it's name and arrondissement, so you even know which area of the city you are in. I went to Montmartre for the first time, and climbed the steps up to the Sacre Coeur. It is very impressive but I always laugh when I realize that some of Europe's classic monuments are not older than anything in the U.S. I have this idea that everything here is old, and I forget that Europe has changed too. I also walked around the Pere Lachaise cemetary where so many famous people are buried, but it was raining and there were no maps that I could find. So I stumbled upon Balzac's tomb, and Eugene Delacroix's too, but I did not find Jim Morrison's.
I made it to Barcelona without any problems, except for realizing that I could no longer speak Spanish once I got there. The trains to the center of the city weren't running, but I was able to tell the woman where I needed to go in Spanish, but it was all downhill from there. Ordering food, asking for directions,...I felt like I was translating from English to French to Spanish. And even then, my vocab felt so limited. That was one of the most frustrating things about the trip. I can handle being in countries where I don't speak the language at all, but I when I feel like I should be able to...I just keep thinking about how my Spanish was so much better than my French in June. I did love being around the Catalan though, and I could start to read it reasonably well but I can't pronounce a lanuage that I've really never heard. And Catalan people don't speak Catalan to non-Catalans. Although I think one guy in a coffee shop might have, either that or I just couldn't understand the Castillian spanish.
My first day in Barcelona I just wandered around the city. I didn't want to go to any of the main sights because I knew Caroline was coming later and had never seen the city, so I just walked along Las Ramblas and then through all the neighborhoods where Gaudi and the other Modernists designed apartments. It was a very nice re-introduction to the city. Caroline got in pretty late, so I went to the train station to get her. It's funny because once again on this trip, I was definitely the tour guide. I don't mind at all, especially in Barcelona, but I really had only been there for 2 days four years ago. We hung out with a bunch of the kids in our room at the hostel that night, and then did the big Gaudi stuff the next day. We went to La Sagrada Familia and Parc Guell- two of my favorite places in Barcelona. We were at Parc Guell just as the sun was setting and it was beautiful, although the pictures couldn't really capture it. The next day we just walked along Las Ramblas, went to the Picasso museum and went out for tapas. We didn't realize we were going to be in Barcelona for Halloween, and we ended up going out with a group from our hostel to a flamenco show and then a salsa club. It was funny because clearly the only people dressed up were Americans.
It was actually a very social trip for us, in Barcelona we met a couple people that we went sightseeing with and Caroline looked up a breakfast one morning and saw a girl from her high school! We met people studying in Madrid, Florence, Barcelona, Paris...someone who's interning for Adidas in Germany, and then a few people who were just traveling for a few months, or even a year.
We flew from Barcelona to Lisbon on Friday morning. Lisbon has a very unique feeling to it...it's hard to describe, and I loved it, but it's very different than anywhere I had been. We kept using the phrase "old world." You could tell that it had been a powerful, important country, but the last 500 years had also started to wear away some of the glamour of the city. It almost felt like a colony of itself rather than the colonizer, as if someone had poured all this money in and then left. Regardless, it is beautiful, so picturesque and our hostel was amazing. We were right in the middle of the downtown pedestrian area, in the center of the city, with great common spaces to hang out in when we got back and the people working at the hostel could give us recommendations about everything. The first day there we just wandered in two different neighborhoods- one was the Alfama, the oldest neighboorhood because it survived an earthquake in the 1700s. Along our way up the hills, we also were looking for the famous cathedral, the Se. We found three churches that I thought were the big one before I realized it was actually the giant one up ahead with all the signs. They were all nice though...We also wandered in the Bairro Alto, which is where nearly all the restaurants, stores, bars, everything is. It also has a great view of the city though, and we walked to the same point that an Elevador would have taken us. Lisbon has these elevators throughout the city that just take you straight up to a platform so you don't have to climb all the hills, but we somehow ended up on the platform just walking. The second day we went specifically to a area called Belem, which is known for its tower, the Monastario dos Jeronimos, and, honestly, its pastry. The pastries were delicious and the monastary was beautiful too, with a very elaborate courtyard that I wouldn't mind having in the middle of my house. We also climbed up a different hill to reach el Castelo do San Jorge. There's remnants of the Moorish castle underneath the Medieval one, and it has an amazing view of Lisbon itself, as well as the coast. The last day we went to a town named Sintra, just 45 minutes outside of Lisbon and a UNESCO world heritage site. The town itself is lovely, but it's known for its castles. We first went to a palace that our hostel recommended, where the palace is only a small part of the attraction. It's surrounded by incredibly elaborate gardens, with stone towers, grottos, fountains. You feel like a character from a fairy tale walking around and it's even more unbelievable because it was all created in the 1800s. But it seems as if you're walking around on these ancient grounds and climbing ruins. It was like an amusement park. You have to see the pictures, although they don't really do it justice. Afterwards, we went to Pena Palace, which is painted about 10 different colors and is overlooking the whole coast of Portugal it feels like. Inside was frustrating because we had to just file through to look at each room for 5 seconds, but the views on the outside more than made up for it. And they also have really good pastry there.
Coming home was another ridiculous day of traveling. We left our hostel at around 8 in the morning and I was back in my room in Bordeaux at 11:30 that night. I flew from Lisbon to Madrid on the same flight as Caroline, but I had a much shorter connection to head back to Paris. So I had to fight everyone to get off the airplane, run through the airport following signs to the shuttle between terminals. I had a little less than an hour originally, to change from Terminal 4, which is not connected to the rest of the airport, to Terminal 1, make it through security and sprint to the gate. But then the flight from Lisbon was late. So I was panicking, sitting on the bus checking my watch obsessively. And then we come to a stop. But the driver isn't letting anyone out so I can't figure out why we are stopping. I look in front of us and I see a big group getting off a tour bus. Now I'm just angry, and don't understand why we're stopping for them. Then I glance at the tour bus sitting next to us and realize who this is. Real Madrid. The soccer team. The whole team, the manager, everyone walked right front of my bus with camera crews running around them. So I almost missed my flight because of Real Madrid. And it would have been worth it. But I made it, because there was no one in the security line and easyJet did not close the gate half an hour before the flight like they said they were going to. Luckily I also made it to Paris in time to pick up my suitcase with all my belongings that I expected to have back in September and then to make my train in plenty of time. It was a very long trip. But it was a very nice break from everything, and made me happier to be back here.
Now I have to start planning things for the rest of this semester, and it's terrifying that I can plan all the way til the end...it's not that far away. However, I wanted to go back to Paris next weekend and I think that there's going to be another strike. Of course there is...
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