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Published: April 16th 2008
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Egyptian Spice Market
Tons of smells everywhere! Kaixo all!
I´m sorry for the late update. I´ve had bad luck with internet.. and technology but we finally have decent internet in our apartment 😊 My Spring break was nuts! An intense 2 and half week travel spree and am very tired but I enjoyed every minute of it. Not a boring moment and finally got to see my family after 2 months of being so far away😊
Started off the crazy trek with London which was soo hip. We stayed with a friend of a friend who showed us around.We took a look at the London Eye and Big Ben and walked along the river. The pound really deprived us of doing too much.. so we found an organic food market where we had amazing samples 😊 and saw the punk rock district of Camden which reminded me alot of Haight St. It was the first time I had been in an English speaking country in a while.. and it was funny hearing the accent. Orange juice with pulp is called juice "with bits." which made me giggle. And every time i heard "bloody" i had to smile. Small things you cherish in such an expensive country.
After
Inside the Blue Mosque
We had to wear a head scarf and take off our shoes in order to enter. It was huge inside and hard to photograph.. sorry couldnt share how the rest looked that short stay me and my friend Maya were off to Istanbul where we experienced some of the biggest culture shock. It's a beautiful, huge city and soo old! We visited the Hagia Sofia which was built emperor Justinian under the Byzantine empire. That alone was nuts to comprehend. There are also many mosques in the city, most with domes and with tall towers around them. This makes for an amazing skyline. At prayer time, the hymns are projected from speakers around the different mosques and they sort of sing to eachother. Someone told me it was the mosques calling everyone to prayer. It's pretty amazing and almost surreal and again emphasizes the history of the city. The people were also very nice and were anxious to speak to foreigners. We got invited for tea (which is big there) countless times and asked where were from almost everywhere we went. People would point at us and guess like making a game out of tourism. We made a couple Turkish friends which were able to answer a few questions. One interesting part of the conversation was how defensive they were about being Muslim. They seemed to think we thought they were
Inside the Hagia Sofia
Inside another huge temple. It was built as a Christian temple, but then was converted to a Mosque.. hence the arabic. Another place that was too huge to photograph well :/ fundamentalist terrorists. It was strange having to assure them that we didn't think that at all. But it was nice meeting english speakers in a country we were having trouble understanding. I left Turkey back to mainland Europe with a feeling that I had visited some strange mythical place
From Istanbul I flew into Madrid where I met my family which was great! And our hotel in Madrid was in a hip little district. We spent the evening walking around Madrid and I think they were mostly surprised at how social everyone is. And that old people are everywhere out and about and chatting it up. We had churros and cafe con leche which made for a nice intro to Spain. We made several day trips to Toledo and Segovia, two medeival towns. Toledo was all about swords, El Greco and Don Quixote. It was also Good Friday so many of the churches were preparing these sort of altars to carry in the street in the evening. Unfortunately we missed out on the processions because we had to catch a bus back to Madrid, but we enjoyed Toledo alot. It was the kind of Spain you imagine when you think
Mosaics
The famous mosaics of the sacred family. of Don Quixote. Segovia had a different feel. We caught alot of rain there, and a bit of snow which set the mood for visiting a castle. I took my parents up the 150+ stairs to the top of a tower. We also went inside the cathedral which had many different altars all along the different sides. Afterward we made our way towards the outside of the city where the Roman aquaducts are located. This seemed to really impress my family. My dad commented that it´s was something he had only seen on tv and never thought he´d see in real life. It was nice to know in some way I´ve finally brought them to all these things that seem so far away. The following day we went to the Parque del Retiro, the Prado, and Le Reina Sofia. It was a day stuffed with art art and more art which was a nice way to end our Stay in Madrid.
Our next stop was Bilbao where my family met my room mate, and got to see some of the areas I spend alot of time in. We also went to the Guggenheim Museum where they had an amazing Surrealism
Sunken Palace
This was built underground in the 500s to store water. They call it the Sunken Palace because of it's appearance exhibit going on. I think this may have been a bit on the wierd side for my parents, but I enjoyed it alot and got to see a ton of Salvador Dali´s projects including a phone shaped like a lobster. We were off the next day to San Sebastian where we encountered nearly non stop rain. The main thing to do in S. Sebastian is walk along the beach and do a bit of hiking, so unfortunatly we coultn´t take advantage of that. We spent most of the day lounging around from cafe to cafe which gave us a good amount of rest from our otherwise busy schedule. This was also good because we soon had to take a 10 hour bus ride to Paris.
Paris was our last stop, and I think my mother enjoyed this city the most. We stayed in a great little hotel in the artsy district of the city, and very close to Notre Dame and the Latin Quarters. We visited most of the main attractions like Notre Dame Cathedral, Eiffel Tower, Latin Quarters, the Museum D´Orsay, the Louvre, Arc de Triomphe and Luxembourg park where we had an amazing picnic. My dad and brother
Medusa
In the back of the Sunken Palace are two Medusa heads. also discovered Gyros, which is the closest thing to fast food in Paris. I also dragged my mom along to visit Jim Morrison´s grave which was actually pretty neat considering I thought it´d be closed off to the public. We all really enjoyed Parised and ended our trip museumed out! From here I parted ways from my parent´s and headed back to Bilbao.
It was amazing seeing my family and I sent tons of love with them to bring back to you all. It was a crazy 2 weeks that felt like a month because of all the things we saw and the non stop walking but it was great to have finally inspired my parents to leave the bay area ! and I hope I inspired some more traveling in them.
I´ve seen a few new sites since then but I´ll save it for the next entry because this one was rather long... :/
But I have a little over a month left before I head back! I send all my love and warm thoughts to all of you!
Un monton de amor !
-Angelica
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