I made it to Sydney!! After having a really great time eating my heart out in LA with Katie (yes Dad I had In-and-Out in your honor), I boarded my flight to Sydney at 11:00PM. It was almost 15 hours, but surprisingly it went faster than I’d expected. I immediately fell asleep when we got in the air thanks to my handy Dramamine and slept for 6 straight hours (totally skipping dinner and out snack). After a walking break (at the request of Pat so I wouldn’t get one of those embolisms from sitting too long), I went back to sleep [View Full Entry]

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Well we took a bus last night from Barcelona to Madrid, and it was pretty much the worst thing we´ve ever done on the trip! The seats were terrible, and we didn´t sleep at all. So today we were so out of it that we were both basically sick feeling. We took the bus just so we could get here in time to see the Prado, and well...once we got here we figured out that it was closed today! (we normally check, but this we our only day we could get here so I guess we didn´t even think about it) [View Full Entry]

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Today was beach day!! It was so beautiful!! Not exactly warm enough to get in and swim, but great for dipping our feet in. We also went to the Gaudi park, which was really nice to see. There was just enough breeze that the sun felt nice to walk around in. The park had some great views of the city, and it had some really cool plants and flowers also. [View Full Entry]

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Today was a chill day. We walked around for most of the afternoon taking advantage of all the shopping in Barcelona. We did a bunch of looking in windows and wishing we had room in our backpacks to put more stuff in. There's tons of stuff here that the locals make and sell on La Ramblas. It's such a cool environment, and we managed to do it without getting anything stolen. This evening we went to a flamenco show downtown. The dancers were amazing! Their tapping was in perfect sync! We had fun putting on dresses and looking nice for a [View Full Entry]

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Barcelona is wonderful! It's so much fun here!! Today we saw Gaudi's Casa Batllo. It is the coolest house ever. There are no straight lines in the entire house, only curves. In the center there is a huge courtyard of completely blue tile, which was my favorite view. We went next to his La Pedrera, which gave some history of his life and his methods of design. He used to use hanging models to learn about where beam loads would be so he wouldn't have to use complicated math calculations. I thought it had some pretty cool information in the tour. [View Full Entry]

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Well today was interesting to say the least…We woke up at 3AM after realizing our flight to Barcelona left at 6AM not PM!! WOW are we glad we realized that! Anyway we did make it okay, just exhausted! So we spent a leisurely day at the aquarium in the bay. They had some really great exhibits, although it was a lot smaller than our aquarium at home. Then we spent the afternoon shopping at the mall, until we got so tired that we had to take a nap until dinner. Dinner, let me just say, was an shock of culture. We [View Full Entry]

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We woke up super early to beat the long lines at the Vatican. Once we were in we spent the morning walking through all the chapels, and last but not least the Sistine Chapel. It was definitely beautiful! However, the famous Michelangelo hands were a lot smaller than I had thought. They blended in with the entire ceiling, but they were directly center. We walked through a few of the other museums inside the Vatican, and then went on to St. Peter’s Square. We waited in line to go inside because it turned out the Pope was speaking while we were [View Full Entry]

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We started off taking the high speed Eurostar train into Rome. Our hostel wasn’t far from the station, so we were able to drop our bags off and then we headed to the Colosseum. It was such a cool thing to see, and a nice change from the many churches and museums we’ve been used to. It was really cool seeing down inside the floor where they used to keep all the animals before the fights. After we walked around the entire thing, we walked through the Roman Forum. It was amazingly old, but you could still tell where many of [View Full Entry]

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Well Florence has been consumed with rain and really cold temperatures. The good part is that we are staying in an amazing hostel! The lady that owns it is the nicest lady in the world. She cooked homemade breakfast for everyone this morning-delivered to the room. Today she even did our laundry and brought it back to our beds! She is so cool, like a mom to all of us away from home. We did some shopping this afternoon when the rain died down a bit. Then tonight we had the most amazing dinner yet in Italy! It was recommended by [View Full Entry]

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Today was let me just say...interesting to say the least. We decided to tackle the museums today since they'd be closed tomorrow, starting with the Academic Gallery- where Michelangelo's David is located. We got there and there was what looked like a small line just down a small street, we were thinking maybe at most 30min-1 hour. Well...we were sooooo wrong. Three hours, a thunder and lightning storm, and hail later we saw David!!! You have no idea how miserable we were! By the time we had gotten half way through when the rain started, we thought it'd only be a [View Full Entry]

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