NYU's dime--which is to say my parents dime, translated through innumerable internal NYU accounts--took a bunch of us to one of Spain's least famed autonomías: Extremadura. Though its marginal status and name are somewhat justified (the land to interesting stuff ratio does not favor interesting stuff), the wilderness held certain treasures. Notable features included, Mérida, a fairly well preserved Roman city, and Cáceres, a well preserved contemporary city. Further, there were a range of reconquista era castles and lush, agricultural vallies to be seen. Most interesting among the sites was a museum holding a collection of artist Wolf Vostell, a German who lived in Spain and made gooey mashups of televisions, cars, and assorted machine parts. He depicts these technologies grappling with nature, and the setting itself extends this theme, placing them in a converted outpost ... read more

Last Thursday my comrades and I took the train to Lisbon, Portugal’s premiere city by the sea, capital, and San Francisco knock off—in the non-chronological sense, that is. We arrived early on Friday, and wandered groggily, taking stock of the immediate neighborhood surrounding or Residéncia. From our admittedly superficial investigations, it seems that that the city offers, in no particular order: 1) Public spaces wavering between extreme friendliness and unfriendliness to pedestrians—on one hand there are ample and monumental plazas and parks scattered about, as well as an almost pathological, though aesthetic, ordinance about paving sidewalks with white and black cobblestone. Moreover, the citizen public art (read vandalism) is highly evolved and often lovely. On the other hand, sidewalks are often non-existent or laughably narrow owing to massive and poorly managed public ... read more

Tricked out with a regimen of malaria medication, I arrived in the Andean country with a small contingent NYUers to gawk at ruins and butcher the Spanish language.... read more