Catching Up

3/14/08

I’ve finally got a bit of break from working - 3 tests and a project this week so it was a little rough. But I should start from where I left off because I’ve gotten behind on things.

London was a blast. I went with 9 of my friends and we got there pretty late on a Thursday night so we went right to the hostel where we filled up our 5 bunk room. On Friday we did the typical sightseeing, Parliament, Big Ben, the Tower Bridge, the Palace (Of course always exciting to be in the land of Princess Diana), had some delicious fish and chips, the real London thing. We went to Westminster Abbey later that night to see the choral evensong, which was really pretty. Unfortunately my phone wasn’t working so I couldn’t get a hold of Sara or Katie right away, but eventually we  got in touch so I met up with Sara that night. Sara, Mateo and I went to dinner while the rest of the group went to go see Wicked (I had already seen it and Mateo says ‘musical theatre isn’t exactly his thing’). It was great being able to catch up with her.

On Friday night I took the train out to East Croydon which is bout a half hour outside London, so that I could stay with Katie fo free at her 4 star hotel that her work put her up in. It was good to get away from the big group for a little which and pretty nice being able to be in a real hotel and a big bed. We had a free breakfast buffet in the morning too which was swizeet to finally have real breakfast. On Saturday Katie and I took the train in and met up with some of the group for lunch and then headed to the British museum where we got to see the Rosetta Stone and Katie and I highly enjoyed some African Dancing demonstrations. After that I broke off with Katie and we decided to head to Covent Garden, which is a cool area with lots of shops, performers and the like, I remembered it from my last time in London and wanted to see it again. We did some more wandering on foot before it was time to meet up with the every body at Big Ben. It was really beautiful to see everything lit up at night, Parliament, Big Ben and the London eye on the river. Since our flight was leaving so early on Sunday, we decided not to book the hostel for Saturday night and live the hobo life instead. Unfortunately everything in our area seemed to close down by midnight so we ended up riding the double deckers for a few hours before making it to the airport around 5am. All in all, London trip: success.

The week after that was our “study week” which is an absurd name to call it because you actually don’t have any time to study for your 3 midterms that will be happening in one day when you get back! It was basically 3 days of conferences in Barcelona and then we went to Navarre, Spain (stayed in Pamplona) from Thursday till Saturday. All in all Pamplona trip: FAIL. The biggest question on everyone’s mind was WHY they would take us NORTH in the winter. It was cold. There was snow. There was rain. There was sleet. There were walking tours. We did go to a vineyard, which was pretty cool, but we had a horrible tour guide for the rest of the sites who claimed English was his native language (as he was from England). But I would beg to differ. He seemed to know little to nothing about the sites we visited and when he DID talk it was long and drawn out and random and weird. I wasn’t havin it.

The good part of the trip was that we got to spend a lot of time with our friends and new friends from the program. We stayed at a nice hotel and hanging out there was a lot of fun. We also spent about 7-9 hours on the bus trips there and back and god knows how long in between our “interesting” site visits. We had to fill out an eval. At the end because this is the first time they have tried to do this. We are like the experimental group for IES. I assume they will not be going north next year. (And I hear the kids will also get a computer lab where the computers actually WORK.)  How lucky.

This week, like I said, has been busy. Katie was here from Saturday to Tuesday and my friend Fer has been here since Saturday and leaves on Monday. I felt bad I wasn’t able to tour them around as much as I would have liked, but I was glad that they had each other for the times I had to leave them to study or work. We did manage to get some fun stuff in, they went on the bus touristic and  we went on a boat tour on the Mediterranean which was gorgeous. We have been having some really nice weather lately. Fer, Chessie, Mateo and I had a long walk on the beach yesterday, which was beautiful. And now I’m writing this outside on my balcony. The sun is really bright and the sky is cloudless, the temperature is perfect, I’m sitting in the shade in a T-shirt, I think it will be beach time very soon.

In other news, my mom is coming to visit next week so I am very excited for that! I’m off now to go meet Fer, we’re going to see Parc Guell.