Cuando regresé en casa (When I returned home).

Friday, March 21, 2008

Risky Business

Risky Business does not directly relate (in this blog) to our past actions of sleeping outdoors. The reference is to the beloved movie with Tom Cruise and his escapades while home alone. As of right now, I am home alone. After 9 hours of bus travel, 3 days of not showering, and going on about a day of eating nothing but bread and gummi’s, I was very excited to get home to Doris’ hospitality. “Familia! Estoy en casa! Comame!” Unfortunately, nobody is home. Not a big deal. Actually a great deal, I will go take a nice hot bath, make a bocadillo or maybe even heat up left-overs! I walk in put my bags down, shiver, and wonder why my window is open. All the windows are open. The house is freeeezing. I just got back from sleeping outside in the cold. The piso should be warm. Oh well, nothing a hot bath and blankets can’t fix. In the bathroom, ten minutes later, still no hot water. This is testing my patience. Did I mention there is absolutely nothing in the fridge to eat? I go check my email so at least I can utilize one comfort of home. Great emails. Still hungry tho. Still pretty cold. I decide to go handyman. First, I start my laptop, close off my room, and start making it work hard by playing music, movies, slideshows, you name it. I want that processor buzzing and HOT! That way, it heats my room. Heat – check. Water? Still working on it. Food? Found some spaghetti and tomato sauce in the closet. – check. Water? I guess I could heat it up on the stove. Probably would take too much time. I wonder if that porch-like room as anything useful. It does. The mini-fridge looking thing is actually the heating system. Crank it up. We’ve got water. Anyone impressed? I can rough the indoors. The night turned out well. Warm, fed, and sleepy. I have a bed to sleep in. See you in 13 hours. I’m out.

My travels during Semana Santa

It is official. I am terrible at blogging! I have a heck of a time trying to keep up with this thing, so if anyone is reading this I apologize for the sporadic entries. Sin embargo, here is a recap of my spring break.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Sometimes good ideas only last so long. My traveling buddies and I found that our idea to just “rough it” and sleep outside (due to the lack of hostiles) escalated into a long, cold, frustrating 3 nights. Let’s not jump right into the exciting parts tho. We will start from the beginning. Sunday morning (March 16) we were meeting at the bus station for our trip to Madrid. I was running a bit late so I jogged most of the way, but still made it in plenty of time. I arrived thinking I was the last person. That was not the case. Kevin actually never came. We called him a few times and when he picked we had to inform him that we were on the bus leaving the station. “Kevin, where you at?” “ugh, still in bed” “really? Cause we are leaving on the bus.” whoops. We told him we would just meet up with him when he got to Madrid. After we made our way to our hostel and got settled in Kevin arrived a short bit later and we went to the big park in the middle of town and watched a big drum circle perform. I guess every Sunday night people will gather in this park and just have huge jam sessions with the all of the drums they bring. It was a pretty cool sight. Everyone there seemed to be having fun. After leaving the park we walked around the city for a while but everything was either closed or had no people in them, so we eventually headed back to the hostel to play cards. The next day we woke up, made breakfast, talked with a guy from New York, and then went to Puerta del Sol for a free walking tour. It was a fairly good tour. We went around and saw the Cathedral, the Royal Palace, the oldest restaurant in the world, etc. and eventually made our way to a little café for some tapas. Our tour guide said this place was the best because it was really cheap. Only 4 euros for tapas and a drink, what a deal. . As we sat waiting for our tapas we discussed how this tourguide made money. We figured it was from the tips at the end because the way these tours work is that you are supposed to “donate” what you think the tour should be worth. We knew that we didn’t have much money to donate so it was really confusing to us how he was able to only have this as his job. About at that time Kevin overheard the waitress tell Victor (our tourguide) in Spanish that the price was 2 euros a person. Shortly after that Victor came up to us and said that he had paid for everything, just so it was easier, and that we could pay him the 4 euros when we got outside. I don’t think he knew that we spoke Spanish. That was about the time we learned how he made the rest of his money. There were about 20 people in our group so if you do the math that is 40 euros in his pocket for doing nothing! Not too bad of a deal if you don’t mind cheating people. We decided to pay him the extra two euros and call that his “donation.” We left the tour shortly after that. That night we made spaghetti and it was delicious. I was in charge of the sauce and it was actually quite tasty. So tasty in fact that an Italian guy that was also at the hostel tried it and agreed that the sauce tasted wonderfully. That night we met a bunch of people in our hostile’s kitchen. We met people from Portugal, New York, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Michigan. Quite the group. It was a blast.

Next day, we caught our flight to Valencia and we were exhausted. In Valencia we found the beach and decided to nap for a while. While napping, I caught a bit much sun and turned a nice shade of pink. Whoops. After the nap we walked around saw the huge science museum, The City of the Arts and Sciences, and then made our way to the main plaza that night for the biggest fireworks show I have ever seen. It was a pretty crazy crowd too. People were just throwing fireworks everywhere and explosions were going off all around us. It blew my mind actually when I noticed that a lot of these explosions were coming from the hands of 8 year olds! Parents would just hand there small children firecrackers to throw and would just laugh when it almost blew up their childs feet. Unreal! When the fireworks ended the huge crowd started moving out and it was the biggest crowd I had ever seen. Things started to get a bit crazy though, people started throwing fireworks that would shoot and spin around into crowds of people! One of the fireworks shot and bounced off of a girl a foot in front of Jon and me! It was pretty insane! We got out of there and then went to find a café or somewhere to pass the time since we did not have a hostel. After a while we started getting pretty tired so we headed home (the beach) and tried to get some sleep. Unfortunately, the beach patrol was out and was not letting people sleep there, so we had to be sneaky found a nice hidden shadow to sleep in for the night. That was probably the longest, coldest, most frustrating night I have ever been through! Haha. It actually was a terrible time. We laid out there for 3 or 4 hours until 6am when the metros started running again and slept on it while we tried to get warm for the next 2 hours. When the sun came up we headed back to the beach where it was warm again and then slept a bit then. After we woke up we went to find food and to take part in the Fallas celebration. We stopped at a Burger King for some familiar food and while eating (the most delicious whopper ever) some huge explosions started erupting outside and soon after the entire street outside filled with smoke. It was crazy! The explosions was how they announced they were about to burn down the falla. There was soo much smoke tho. Burger King had automatic doors and people kept standing in front of it and thus allowing billows of smoke to enter the restaurant. I’m sure the workers were happy. After we ate we walked around and some some sites until the huge celebrations took place that night. We found the biggest falla in the middle of the city and ended up watching it burn in a crowd so jam packed that we could barely move! I have never been that squished in my life! It was a blast tho and luckily I had all of my valuables safeguarded so I had nothing to worry about. I still can’t believe the crowd of people. When the burning was over everyone tried to barge out and it was just a mess of humans pushing and shoving and screaming in 3 different languages. It was wild! We eventually made it out and then headed to the bus station to pick up our bags in the lockers so jon and I could head back to the train station to wait/sleep. Once we arrived at the train station we had to wait 5 hours before the train would leave and I had to wait 3 hours before I could buy my ticket. That time was spent trying to sleep, moving around to get warm, watching people vomit, and seeing the guards kick people to inform them to not sleep on the floor. Three hours later I found out that they all the trains were full for that day and there was no way for me to get to Madrid via train for 2 days. I decided to take the bus. I then parted with Jon and found Eric so that we could hopefully get a ride on a bus. Luckily, we did find seats but it was not as direct as we wanted. We had quite a few layovers but we eventually made it home. It was quite the trip!

Backtrack to PARIS

March 4, 2008

Wow. Sorry I have not blogged for some time! Here is a blog from a week or so ago.

Whew. It has been quite an exhausting few weeks or, more or less, last week. Last Tuesday, I began getting sick with a cough and sore throat and immediately started taking the corrective measures to prevent myself from getting sicker. Especially, since I would be going to Paris that coming weekend. I did manage to get rid of one symptom, but I managed to add a runny nose to the mix. Runny nose and cough for Paris. Oh well. The trip to Paris was quite the adventure. I went there with my buddy Jon and met up with another friend, Rémy, who actually lives just outside of Paris. Jon and I’s adventure began Thursday night with a bus ride at 1:00 am. We found it was cheaper to travel that way. We rode that bus for 4 hours to Bilbao where our flight would be leaving at 7. We did not get any sleep that night. I’m not sure if it was because the bus just didn’t ride very well or if the driver was terrible, but needless to say I had a terrible time trying to sleep. We did get there with no problems and made our flight with no hassle. We arrived in Paris at the Charles d’ Gaul Airport around 9 and went searching for tickets to take the train into town. This turned out to be more confusing than we had expected. In our Let’s Go! Travel book we read that the tix should only be like 1.50E or something and the ones we were seeing for sale were much more expensive, like 8E. We searched the kiosk screen and found the cheap ones we thought we needed and headed towards the train. Unfortunately, we did need the 8E ticket because the tickets we bought were for every other type of transportation (metro, bus, etc). So, all we could do was jump train with the old British lady. After trying to small talk with some Americans from Notre Dame, who turned out to have terrible social skills and actually a bit arrogant, I noticed an old English woman part from her group and end up on the other side of gate. Curious, that she was able to do that given the current state of panic and frustration in the increasingly long line. She informed her group that she went thru the open swinging gate and did not use a ticket (all in a killer accent mind you). Haha. It was hilarious. She was so matter of fact, like it was not a big deal, which made it even more comical because people were freaking out about these other gates were getting super upset. Knowing that my ticket was not going to work, I nudged Jon and was the first to go through the open gate. This caused a chain reaction of another 20+ people to follow suit thru the gate and board the train sin billete. Ha. Probably wasn’t the idea the train station had in mind. But jon and I were on our way. We did get slightly nervous when we saw that we needed a ticket to leave the station again. We rode the train for a while. Got off too soon, got back on, and eventually arrived at our hostel in the projects of Paris. Sort of a scary location, but the rooms were clean and the guy at the desk was pretty friendly. After dropping off our stuff, Jon and I spent the rest of the day at the Louvre. Very impressive. We also walked around the park just outside of the Louvre and watched some little kids play with sail boats in the fountain. We retired to our hostel early and didn’t do too much that night. We wanted a goodnight sleep for the next day with our tour guide, Rémy. Rémy is a friend from high school who is from France. We picked him up at the train station at 10:30 and then hit the town. We stopped by his sisters flat, went to the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Sein River, the Basilica, the artists square, a piano bar to eat crepes, and Moulin Rouge. We accomplished a lot in the day! That night we had subway (delicious) , met up with one of his friends, then went back to Eiffel Tower at night (beautiful) and Jon and I went up to the top. It was a pretty impressive view. The next day our flight left fairly early so we had to be up and running at 6am….yuck. we made our flight and everything and got back to Spain around 11. We flew into Bilbao, which is the home of the Guggenheim Museum, and spent the day there. The museum was INCREDIBLE. This was probably my favorite museum out of all. It had a lot of modern art and I especially like the Andy Warhol inspired work. It was just super cool. Around 6 we headed back to the bus station, at 6:30pm we missed our bus due to some incorrect info we received from the Info Desk. We then had to wait until 1:45am for the next bus. Haha that was sooo miserable because we were already exhausted from not really sleeping and it was Sunday and nothing is open in Spain on Sundays. Luckily we found an internet café and we cut some time down there. We ended up making it back and all was well.