European Vacation

So we finally made it out of India and are now traveling all over Europe. So far we have had a great time and it is such a change from India! We flew into Paris and started out by staying with a girl named Sixteen who lived about 20 minutes outside of Paris. Cami met Sixteen in Guwhatti while volunteering there and they were really close friends while they were there so it was really nice for them to be reunited! Sixteen had a perfect family that was soo nice to us and cooked for us and were so great to hang out with! She had a younger sister who was 19, a younger brother who was 15 and another brother who was 9. Her younger brother Albo who was 9 was really cute and funny. He was taking English at school and spoke nearly none at all, but he really liked English and wanted to learn it. Before we got to Sixteens house she said that Albo was practicing all the phrases that he knew in English so he could say them to us, of course once we got there he was too embarrased to. There were only 2 phrases he really knew and they were "Do you like chocolate brownies, and "Come on boy, lets go to the Eiffel Tower." It was really funny to see Sixteen tease Albo about these 2 phrases he knew and made me miss my family back home a lot, but it was good to be a part of a family again for a little while. I played soccer a lot with Albo and played chess with him and his older brother Pierre as well. We stayed with them for around 4 days and then said good-bye and left to Aix en Provence.

While staying in Aix we had our first couch surfing experience, which was amazing! If you don´t know what couch surfing is it´s an online program where you can join and then find people living in different areas all over the world and stay with them for free! We stayed with a man in his late 30s who was a bit nerdy, as in he played an online game where he had to hide his villagers every night so they wouldn´t be attacked by other players. We stayed with him for one night and took him out for some sushi which is kind of customary when you stay with someone. He really did know a lot about his city though and told us a lot about Aix that we would have never known. I also really enjoyed Aix a lot because there were a lot of study abroad kids there, and A LOT of cute french girls. We saw a couple of Cathedrals while we were there, but it was hard to see much else because it was raining almost the entire time we were there. I got really addicted to sandwiches also because the bread in France is delicious! After staying there for around 3 days, only one with our couch surfing host Christophe, we took off and headed for Madrid, Spain. Madrid was not as great as I thought it would be and there wasn´t much to do at all. The first night we were there we stayed in a hostal and some spanish guys came back around 4 in the morning drunk and woke our entire dorm up. It was really funny though because in the middle of them talking, a guy who they had woken up decided to ask them a question while we were all laying there pissed off at these guys. He started it off by saying, "Hey, where are you guys from." One of the guys answered that they were from Argentina thinking that this guy was trying to make conversation with them. But the guy immediately responded with, "Cool, go to bed!" Cami and I thought that was pretty funny and gave the guy props for standing up to them. After that first night we went and stayed with a girl we met through couch surfing, and although she had to work a lot and we didn´t get to see her much, the times she was actually home we had a great time talking with her about our travels and her own. One day Cami and I split up and I went to the Star Wars exibition which was in Madrid and Cami went to a modern art museum, and the exibition was really great. After staying in Madrid for 3 days we decided to go to a town called Sevilla which had a very unexpected suprise waiting for us.

We arrived in Sevilla and checked into our hostel and began to wander through the streets to explore, and we most definitely found something. In front of a giant Irish pub we found around 300 drunk Englishman who were there to see the England-Spain soccer game and they were out of control! They were all waisted by noon and the game didn´t start until 10 that night. We asked some of them if it would be possible to get tickets and they said there were scalpers all around selling tickets. So we did a little searching and were able to find a guy to sell us tickets for 85 Euros, which wasn´t half bad considering how late we got them. We got to the game a bit early and somehow managed to get in on the England side although our tickets were for Spain´s side. There chants were hilarious, including some such as all yelling "Who the fucking hell are you, who the fucking hell are you, who the fucking, who the fucking, who the fucking hell are you!!" Even the kids screamed this and everyone was waisted as well. When the stadium of Spanish people would start a wave, it would go all around the stadium perfectly, and when it got to the English they would ALL flip off where the wave ended. The Spanish would basically just skip over them and start the wave on the other side, but it was still really funny to see! Spain ended up winning the game and that put quite the dampener on Englands spirits so there was no partying that night, but the game was good enough for me.

After Sevilla we went to Portugal and stayed there for around 3 days. We spent 2 in a hostal and then went and stayed with a guy named Hugo from couch surfing for the last day which was really fun. He was a really outgoing guy and reminded both me and Cami of Ferris Buller. He had dinner ready and made for us once we got there and had our bed all set up as well. He also invited me to go and play some soccer with him and some of his friends, and I agreed. Cami stayed behind as she doesn´t like sports much so me and Hugo set out to play some indoor soccer. I borrowed some of his socks and a pair of his friends soccer shoes and it was a great time, although I did manage to take a soccer ball to the face right in my left eye, and had a little scare that I may have detatched my retina. Luckily I found out today that my eye is ok and will just take a little bit of time, and a little bit of drugs, to set straight. We are now in Madrid because we missed our train to Paris because of my little eye problem and are heading to Paris tonight at 7 and then to Venice afterwards for Carnvial which I can´t wait for and I´m really happy I get to go to instead of get laser surgery on my eye! I´ll try and right a bit more in depth next time, but I only paid for an hour and I dont have much facebook time left, and each hour is 3 euros!

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