The Rain in Spain Stays Mainly in the Plain

Vienna, Munich, Innsbruck, Prague, Ulm., Strasboug, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, London, Barcelona, Madrid.......4 months abroad and 8 countries visited and now my time here in Salzburg is halfway over. NOOOOOO....... how could this be?  But wait, I still have 4 months left here.  Just enought time to still visit Berlin, Zurich, Coppenhagen, Budapest, and Dublin, as well as Rome and Athens, but luckily those two cities are included in our three-week tour of Greece and Italy in the spring.  Well, these are all of the places I hope to visit at some point next semester (the next 4 months of my year abroad).  Aside from classses, I really want to get the best out of my time here abroad and travel to all of these places before I come home in May.  I have absolutely no idea when or if I will ever get to go back  to Europe someday so my advice is to just "take advantage and go out and explore, dream, and discover!" like Mark Twain expresses in the quote of his I have posted here on my blog.  Our spring semester begins this coming Monday, January 10th.  This semester, I'm taking German, Fine Arts, Music, Philosophy, and Theology- again, all core requirement classes, but this time harder.  Now that I have an idea on how the classes are here, I'm being very optimistic about next semester as I try to balance out 13 credits and travel to the rest of the European cities/countries on my travel list.  I think I can manage.      

I began my new year in Spain.  My friend and I left Salzburg on the morning of the 1st via train to Munich and flew from there to Barcelona.  We spent the first two days in Barcelona, which I've got to say is pretty much all of the cities of California smashed into one big city (i.e. San Francisco, Santa Cruz, San Diego, Santa Monica, Los Angeles, etc).  But it was absolutely beautiful.  The weather was just perfect and it was nice to get out of the freezing cold snow.  Barcelona has a big pier with a mall witha huge marina and beautiful beach with lots and lots of palm trees.  I swear that I took at least 20 different pictures of just palm trees.  The main steet of Barcelona is calles Las Ramblas, which is basically a market where craftmakers sell their work and where you can buy souvenirs, have dinner, and such.  It was really neat, but crowded. Our second day there we just visited museums and saw all the sites that one of out Lonely Planet travel books told us to do.  We first walked to the Gothic section of town where we saw some beautiful churches and cathedrals and visited a couple of interesting museums that we free.  It was Sunday so I got a chance to see a part of a service (Catholic service of course).  We just so happened to enter the Cathedral when the priest was giving his sermon, which sadly, I could not understand at all since I don't speak Spanish.  But still, it was a cool experience.  So far I have see a service in German, French, and now Spanish- pretty good for my label as "Daughter of the Deacon."  My mother, an Episcopal Deacon, would be proud!   That afternoon, we went to the Guell Park, which is a park up on the hill that looks over the cirty.  It was established by Eusebi Güell who wanted to create a stylish park for Barcelona aristocracy.  It's basically the Santa Cruz-like area of Barcelona that totally reminded me of PT due to its unique beauty and mass load of tourists.  The park had some amazing views of the city and really cool stone structures and statues, including a lizard that's mostly made up of colorful stone tile. Otherwise, this park was well worth the visit and the endless hills we had to climb.
Out of all the three places we visited in Spain, I think Barcelona was my favorite because it was the warmest and had the beach and palm trees.  And I've got to say I was really excited to see a real body of water and port, which reminded me more of home and what I grew up around. And I also had the best Paella ever.  If you don't know what Paella is, it is a popular Spanish dish with rice and vegetables and is usually served with seafood or chicken.  I learned about several other varieties of Paella on this trip, such as Paellas with noodles or black beans and even beef.  The kind I had was a seafood Paella with shirmp, mussels, and calamari.  The funny thing was that the shrimp still had eyes.  If you are friends with me on Facebook, look for it in my pictures.  But still, it was all great.

In between our visit to Barcelona and Madrid, we wanted to take the train up to San Sebastian for a few hours, which we had heard is a popular and touristy becach town in northern Spain.  Unfortunately the train only went to a town called Bilboa, about an hour outside of San Sebastian.  We figured that if we tried to take a bus from Bilboa to San Sebastian that we wouldn't have enough time to look around there so we just decided to stay put in Bilboa and have lunch and walk around for a couple of hours before I train to Madrid.  It was a nice little town, similar to Salzburg with a new part and an old part separated by a river.  After walking around and looking for about two hours, we hoped back on the train to Madrid.  Our train left pretty late in the afternoon and we didn't arrive Madrid until 10:30pm.  Since none of us had never been to Madrid before, we kind of got lost trying to look for our hostel, but luckily we found it.  The next day we walked around a lot seeing all the popular and famoud landmarks of Madrid.  We stopped at this market place thing that sold a bunch of beauiful jewelry, scarves, hats, etc.  I bought a bracelet with pearl beads and a scarf.  I was happy looking at all the jewelry and everything until I walke under a tree and felt something splatter on my favorite red coat from S. Oliver.  Yep, you can probably guess.....bird crap!  After growing up in Port Townsend with lots of seagulls, crows, pigeons, and other birds, I had to be splattered on in Madrid wearing my favorite coat!!!!  Well, luckily there was a McDonald's across the street so I was able to wash it all off in the restroom sink.  So we continued on and there was no permanent damages to my coat after all, but still.....GROOOOSSSSSSS!!!  After that little incdient we walked around the Botanical Gardens, which were really cool, even at the beginning of January.  It was like being in a jungle and best of all there were cats there and one looked like a (much) smaller version of my cat Rio.  Madrid was where I got to experience most of the wonderful food, such as a (real) Spanish tortilla, which is really thick and contains less cheese and Churros dipped in hot chocolate, mmmmm.  The next day in Spain, we went to the Museo del Prado, which is like a smaller version of the Louvre.  They just so happened to be having a temporary Renior exhibition which we got to see while we were there.  After taking a semester of art history here in Salzburg from an amazing woman, Frau Dr. Loos, who is a retired art museum curator,  I'm able to apply and recognice the things I have learned  from that class and continue to appreciate art as well.  Then we went to the Reina Sofia, the Museum of Modern Art in Madrid, which had some very interesting displays and was, again, very Port Townsend-esque, obviously.

Spain was a lovely place to conclude my Christmas break and it was good to get away from the freezing cold and snowy climate of Salzburg.  Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love Salzburg, but it does get pretty cold here.  As a matter of fact, I think that Salzburg is the most perfect town for me.  I don't feel isolated at all like I do in PT.  I can walk a few blocks to the grocery store, train station, and it takes about ten minutes for me to walk from the Center to Alstadt where all the great shopping is.  Plus, I can also hop on a bus at the train station that can take me directly to the airport, Ikea, or Europark (a humungous mall on the outskirt of Salzburg).  I just feel like I have access to EVERYTHING here, except sailing.  I really really really like it here, but I will have to come home in May as will need to get a job in order to earn all the money back I spent to have all of these advenures until I go back to Portland in the middle of August.  Oh well, it will be nice to have four months to relax and recuperate after spending eight months abroad in a foreign country and see all my peeps back in PT.

So here's to a new semester with even better and more exciting adventures.  I hope to savour every moment from here on out as I continue to explore, dream, and discover.