My house in Spain

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Hello from across the pond (as Jeffrey would say)! Nothing super exciting has been happening in the past few days, just class and hanging around town.

For those of you who don't have facebook (aunts and uncles), I just realized you guys haven't seen pictures of my house. I have a very large house. You walk in through the basement. Up one flight of stairs is the main floor with the kitchen and bedrooms, and up one more floor is my mom's floor with her study and bedroom. I'm so lucky that I have such a beautiful house! I have no pictures of my family yet. I'll post that when I can.

As for this weekend, tonight at 11, 7 of the girls from my program and I are leaving on an 8 hour bus ride to Barcelona! Eight hours is an awfully long time, but round trip to Barcelona and back cost only 50 Euros compared to a train which costs around 200 Euros round trip. Hopefully since we're traveling at night, we'll all fall asleep. We arrive in Barcelona around 7am. We plan to drop our bags off at our hotel and then see some sights. Out hotel is a Best Western, so I hope it's good. To confirm our room, I had to send my credit card number via email. Does that seem weird to anyone else? We're assuming they had a hard time understanding us on the phone, but who really knows. I hope it all goes well. Our hotel is quite pricey, about 150 Euros a night split between 3 girls a room. We're staying for 2 nights. We want this trip to Barcelona to be a vacation, not a sight seeing extravaganza. We plan on sight seeing and going to museums in the mornings then going to the hotel for a break. After that, we plan on baking at the back in the evenings. I can't wait! All we've heard about Barcelona is "Watch your stuff!" so we're trying to really minimize our time spent shopping and stuff. We all have money belts and will only be carrying our cameras with us in the mornings. Hopefully this is a good enough plan and nothing gets stolen! I would be a very unhappy Sara is something bad happened.

Well I hope Barcelona is all the good I've heard about, and none of the bad. I'll let you guys know Monday or Tuesday how it went!

Happy 4th of July!!!!!!

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Photos

Family Room
This is my family room in the main floor. The upper part is my mom's floor with her study.

Stairs to Mom's floor
The other side of the family room. The stairs lead to my mom's floor.

Study
My mom's study on her floor.

Kitchen
Kitchen. Door leads to the backyard.

Backyard
My backyard. This view is from the kitchen. There's french doors that open up to the backyard. They keep all the doors open to let air through.

Backyard Patio
Still part of the backyard, the stairs that go down to the walkout basement.

View of back
View from the backyard to my house. My bedroom window is the middle window.

Basement
This is the floor you walk in on from the street. Through the right door is the living area with another bedroom, bathroom,family room and kitchen. The basement living area can be rented out as another apartment but they just use it as their own. Through the door straight ahead is the walkout basement door.

Downstairs
Part of the downstairs family room.

Bathroom
This is my shower. It's a hand-held shower head, so say goodbye to taking a relaxing shower. Also, there is no shower curtain, and there's a large mirror directly in front of the tub, so not only do you bath in the nude in a huge bathroom with no cover, but you have to stare at yourself in 3 mirrors.

Bathroom View
This is the view from the bathroom: the aquaduct! There are a lot of cranes around it because they are doing construction on a street nearby.

My bedroom.
Finally, my bedroom. It's small, but how much space do I need? It has a beautiful view of the backyard.