Malaga y Cadiz

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Friday our program took us all to Malaga for the day. I've uploaded pictures on facebook that you can check out. It's a beautiful city and the beach was amazing! Much cleaner than Sevilla right now, which was a nice break. We started with a walking tour of the city and checked out the cathedral there. It's beautiful inside, I can't believe how they built places like these. Eventually I'll start to get sick of looking at cathedrals, and remembering the specifics and differences between them, but they're always going to be beautiful to look at. Then we went to the Picasso Museum. Picasso was born in Malaga and then traveled to Madrid and Paris and a few other places throughout Europe. This museum has 250 pieces of his work, all the originals. I'm not an artsy person so it didn't hold my attention but I enjoy the history aspect of it and it was cool to see the museum.

Then we went to the beach! It ended up being a beautiful day for it. We took our shoes off and ran around in the sand and put our toes in the water. It was awesome, none of us wanted to leave and we're excited to go back! A few of us were feeling adventurous and were sick of eating cheap food from little cafes so we had lunch at a nice restaurant on the beach. It was pricey, but it was worth it. We shared 2 bottles of red wine and a few of us shared calamari and aioli, grilled clams, and paella with seafood and chicken in it. It was all really good! The seafood in Malaga is amazing since it's on the coast.

On Saturday, almost our entire group went to Carnaval en Cadiz. It's their version of Mardi Gras. It was actually a huge disappointment. We had fun drinking and dressing up in costumes, but we all expected it to be more of a street party with music and dancing, but it was just a bunch of people drinking and standing around in a plaza. We went with an organized group that gave us bocadillos for the ride and took us there and back. We left Sevilla around 8:00pm and the pick up time wasn't until 5:00am the next morning. We were all ready to leave by like 2 since it was pretty lame and it was really cold. My roommate and I lost our spanish cell phones and she lost her camera, and we both lost a few other things. We're hoping we left them on the bus and we can get them back tomorrow, we'll see. Overall, not so great of a night. I'm ready to travel to Italy, Paris, and Germany and see more of Europe.

These first two weeks have been a rollercoaster of excitement and scariness. I'm hoping it gets easier this week and from there on out. It's starting to hit me that I'm still here for 3 more months, the honeymoon period is ending and it's becoming real life, with school starting and everything. Crazzzy!

Miss everyone, hope all is well in the states.

Love,

Haley

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