Three weeks from today I'll be on a plane home to the US :-( Although I miss home, thinking about leaving Spain makes me incredibly sad. I wish I had at least another two months! I feel like I am really just getting the hang of things, really getting comfortable here and now I have to leave. One of the main reasons I would love to stay longer is to practice my Español más. It certainly has gotten better but there is still a lot of room for improvement. More than anything, I would love to just live here (or anywhere [View Full Entry]

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Ok, so I know that I've been really bad about updating... part of it is that the last city we visited kind of got ripped off. Hopefully this will be rectified, but until then... here's what I can say. The drive up to Granada was incredible. I'm really glad that we decided to drive because it really allowed us to see a completely different side of Spain. On the flip side, we also got to experience the real traffic side of Spain. And unfortunately, that meant that we arrived at the Alcazar later than our reservation... by about 30 minutes. While [View Full Entry]

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Olé, So much for Granada being cooler than Seville; The heat caused the first upset of the trip! After spending the day milling about Granada, we arrived back late at the campsite ready for a good nights sleep. Well, as we settled down on our expensive self-inflating mats, we discovered they were now more like self-inflating beach balls! The temperature in the tent during the heat of the day was so hot it caused the mats to blister. For those of you thinking of purchasing mats read the instructions first. The campsite was clean, had a large pool and an Italian [View Full Entry]

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I didn't get to rest much before it was time to go to the last country on my trip which was Spain. We got the train to Stansted Airport which is outside London and when we got there I had spaghetti bolognaise which was not very nice and then we got on the plane to Granada, which is in the south of Spain and it took about two and a half hours to get there. It was a hot evening when we got there and my Dad picked up the hire car and we drove into the city to our hotel [View Full Entry]

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nothing too out of the ordinary happened this weekened: we went out friday night with some friends from France and Spain. Our rational was celebrating the 4th of July. The two high school boys that are living with me planned this huge dinner with typical Independence Day food, to try and share the culture with our family. We made potatoe salad, ribs (that was interesting), corn on the cob, had water melon and one of them made brownies. They planned it all, and I only helped a little. It was pretty impressive how well they pulled it off. Sadly, they are [View Full Entry]

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'Very enjoyable' was Kev's take on our night of Flamenco and I'll second that! Such proud, sensual dancing and the way both the men and women move their bodies is a joy to watch. The following day we left Seville and were driven the 250 kms to Granada for yet another Spanish adventure. No sooner were we settled into the Hotel Carmen (which is not only a girl's name and an opera but it's also a Spanish word for house) than we went off to see some of the sights. Walked up to the area around the cathedral - outisde of [View Full Entry]

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si, es la verdad. last night we went out after dinner to have a few drinks and meet up with some friends. My roommate Sarah is gone now but another girl from our program (her compañera also went home) lives across the street, so we walked around together. Anyway...we hung out at a Café with a fairly large group of people from WSU and also from our school here, including a group from France, here studying Spanish, and a group of Spaniards studying english at our school. Our waiter was this funny old man who reminded me of Elvis and who [View Full Entry]

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we are currently enjoying the beautiful and laid back city of granada. [View Full Entry]

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After Morocco I thought it would be best to start off my travels in Europe with the last stronghold of the Muslims in Spain. I took a boat from Tangier in the evening and took a night bus from Algaciras to Granada. The boat was interesting and I chatted with some Moroccan women on the way over. I saw a couple other foreigners, but practically everybody on the boat was Moroccan. After customs I found the bus for Granada, which was also completely full of Morccans. The bus got to Granada a bit earlier than I had expected - it was [View Full Entry]

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Spain is the champion of EUROPE!! YEAH! Last night, Spain beat Germany 1-0 in the finals! This is the first time in 44 years and only the second time ever! I have never seen anything like what I saw last night...it was just LOCURA!!! (madness) anyway, we had lots of fun celebrating...the game itself was actually not terribly exciting. Torres, #9, scored in the 30th minute and that was the only goal of the game. He is a very young player and they are calling him " El nino de oro" or boy of gold. Its rather fitting since he scored [View Full Entry]

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