Blogs from Europe - page 11910

After a short flight from Barcelona, I arrived in Granada in southern Spain. Granada is beautiful and much more laid back from Barcelona. It is a large city, but the main attractions are in the city center and within walking distance (all uphill, of course :)). My hotel is in a pedestrian plaza, with tons of restaurants and gelato stands and a big fountain in the middle, a really great location (and at 50Euro, pretty cheap). A couple of hours after I checked in I had tickets for the Alhambra palace, which is amazing! Granada is lobbying to have it included in the new modern wonders of the world, and I can see why. I took tons of pictures, and will try to upload them before I leave. The city itself is very quaint and laid ... read more

LisbonJulie J Vanover I arrived in Lisbon early in the morning fresh from a nights sleep on the train. I arrived at my hostel and had breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast!!! Oh it was so good, by far the best breakfast that I have had. I was preparing to leave for the days adventours when Daniel arrived in the bed next to me. He had just landed from Brazil so we headed off together to explore Lisbon. He's from Brazil, so he speaks Portuguese, super bonus! We first went to Saint Jorge's Castle, which is an old castle on the hill. The castle was cool, but inside there were these ugly white tents with vendors everywhere. We both agreed that this distracted from the coolness of the castle. The had a mirror projection system that ... read more

When you're backpacking, the people you meet quickly become close friends. This is the way it was with the Canadians we met in Sarajevo - we just couldn't get enough of each other! From Mostar, we took a bus to Dubrovnik, a seaside town on the Dalmatian Coast of the Adriatic Sea. We were immediately greeted by a swarm of women with pictures of their homes, wanting us to stay with them! Fortunately we made Brandon our haggling "captain" and he found us a nice place to stay for our three nights in Dubrovnik. Croatia is more expensive than what we were used to, but the time we spent there was well worth the money! Dubrovnik is a lively beach town, and did we ever take advantage of the beaches! After spending a couple of weeks ... read more

Saturday was an open day for our local wine region, which incidentally produces very drinkable, very reasonably priced wine that the Swiss seem to snub. To get there we took a bus, changed to an extremely crowded train, got out a stop early, and then walked up a hill to discover we could see our apartment from the vineyards. We spent the morning wandering through a few cellars, and then walked home. That evening we took a local white and a heap of strawberries and cheese to a Eurovision house party. We watched beautiful people from miscellaneous European countries try to sing and dance, and then we watched people from Ukraine dressed in silver space outfits jump around like aluminium Wiggles. For me there was no question. The Ukranians were a standout. They were better ... read more

Church in Warwick was another great experience for me—I really enjoyed the way the branch seems to just get straight down to business instead of asking surface level questions like some wards back in Utah. The talks in sacrament meeting sparked some really good ideas for one of my essays. I love it when things work like that! Again, our group doubled the size of Relief Society, though it was nice to see more young people in the branch due to the presence of a university. Since we’d already moved out of our hotel rooms, we spent the day in the church, preparing lunch and practicing for our fireside. We’d been informed that morning that the mayor of Warwick along with some of the city council members would be attending, so we were anxious to get ... read more