Well my bags are packed, I'm ready to go...

I leave Santander tonight, heading on the night train to Madrid to catch my flight to Athens tomorrow. It's hard to believe. Jackie, the first in the group to be taking off, is leaving on the 7pm train (her flight leaves for the US at 6am tomorrow). I am going to help her take her suitcases down to the taxi stop in about ten minutes, and it is pretty bizarre.

It's going to be weird to leave here. I've been here two and a half months, and I am really used to it. A guy asked me for directions yesterday, and I knew where he was going and could give them to him. (Although it ended up being in English. I started in Spanish but was trying to explain a turn-around, since I don't know the word for it, and he said I could speak to him in English. At least he didn't ask me in English to begin with, so maybe my neon "American" sign is dimmer now after all.)

I miss home. I miss the US, I miss English, and I really miss the food. But a lot of things about here have become normal now, like eating lunch (disgusting as it may be) at 2:30pm, or walking everywhere.

I don't know, but I'm still really excited to be leaving, and going to Greece. I am going to walk on the island that is the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis. And I lived in a foreign country with a foreign language for almost three months. It's pretty crazy.

Signing off for the last time in Europe (this time around at least),
Anica

Picos de Europa

We went on our last excursion this past Friday. We went to Santo Toribio de Liébana, Picos de Europa, and Santa María de Lebeña.

Santo Toribio de Liébana is a church that has the biggest remnant of what is supposed to be Jesus' cross. The church was in it's holy year, which is when their saint's day falls on a Sunday. We walked through a door that is supposed to give us time off in purgatory, due to it being a holy year and all. Then we got to touch a little piece that is open for people to touch, and it was really smooth. Then we left.

Then we went to the Picos de Europa, of the Peaks of Europe. We rode a cable car up to the top and got to wonder and eat our sack lunches. It was pretty nice, a good view, and pretty spiffy. I'm glad we waited for the trip, since originally it was a few weekends earlier but the cable car was going to be shut down.

Then we headed back down the mountain and to Santa María de Lebeña, which is a tiny little church. It is an example of mozárabe, or Christians living in a Muslim area, which is rare for this far north. Muslims generally had good hold over the south and the Christians had good hold over the north, although they kept going back and forth over who's area was who's.

So that's pretty much it. Not a lot of learning or sightseeing on this trip, but pretty nice just the same.

Anica

Well the time has passed so quickly...

I have less than a week left in Spain, and it is hard to believe that this is my last weekend here. It all went by pretty fast.

I still have a hard time understanding when people talk to me, more so than I think anyone else in my group. Part of the problem is with my host mom - I see her, at most, a half hour a day, which really doesn't make me as submersed in the language as I was expecting. I'm a little nervous about Puerto Rico, but hopefully it will all click early on. I have found out that I am a whiz at grammar though, making only two mistakes total on my last grammar test (and one wasn't grammar related, but vocab. I used the wrong verb in a sentence - to die instead of to kill. Oops.) I can tell when my friends are talking and they use the wrong grammar, and I think I talk fairly well...I just can't understand people half the time. Oh well. :)

I have had a change in plans that I keep forgetting to tell you guys about. (Although, that's assuming anyone actually reads this...) ;) So first, the good news: my mom is getting better! There is a really good chance that this round of chemo is the last round and she will be in remission in July! The doctors, of course, of dumbfounded, but we seem to like doing that as a family. :)

In other things, I discovered two things from my trip to London: 1) I don't like traveling as much as I thought I did (at least not running from one place to another really fast to see as much as you can in a limited amount of time) and 2) It's a lot more expensive than I thought. So, after my London trip, and with my mom getting better, I thought about it and decided to change my plans for Europe. Rather than run around for 25 days, not getting to see everything I want because of time and money constraints (I swear everything has an entrance fee), plus then arriving back in the US without a dime to my name (which would be a problem with Puerto Rico), and possibly not even enjoying it that much, I am coming home sooner.

I leave Santander on Thursday night on the midnight train to Madrid, and then fly from Madrid to Greece. Then I'm hopping on a ferry and going to Mykonos, one of the islands, where I will be for a couple of days in my own little beach cabin (surprisingly the cheapest accommodations). I'll get to see Delos, a nearby island which is the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, and just relax and enjoy. Then I return to Athens by ferry, spend a few days there seeing those sights. (I'm staying at Hostel Zeus...hee hee...) Then I will be returning to Las Vegas on June 15th.

I'm happy - I was able to buy some souvenirs for others (and myself) today that I wouldn't have been able to buy otherwise, and now I can choose to maybe do something I wouldn't have before because of worrying about being able to afford sleeping and eating. I also get to spend six weeks with my mom instead of three, which right now is more important to me than seeing Europe anyway. I figure I can always come back later in life with more money, and even if I don't, I wanted to see Greece more than anything else anyway, and if that's all I ever get to see, I'm fine with that too.

:)

Anica

Long Weekend

Whew. So we had a long weekend trip to Segovia, Toledo, and Burgos, and it is kind of funny how sitting on your butt on a bus for a lot of hours really wears you out.

We started off leaving at 8:30 Friday morning from Santander, heading down to Segovia, which is about 4-5 hours away. We dropped our stuff off at the hotel, ate lunch, and then went on our guided tour of Segovia. They have Roman aqueducts, which are pretty amazing. Not only did the Romans think of a way to move the water uphill to where it was needed, but the entire thing was built back in the first century AD without any cement or anything. Then we went and saw a variety of things in the city, ending with the castle. It had a dried up moat, and what can I say...I'm a sucker for castles. Anyway, after that we had some free time to look around before dinner, and then that was the end of the day.

The next day we had breakfast at 8 and left the hotel at 8:45 on our way to Toledo, which is about 2 hours from Segovia. We had a tour guide this time (the other times it was our art/culture teacher), named Carrrrrlos. (Which is how he said it when he talked to us.) He was pretty funny, although the group asked him to talk to us in Spanish but he talked like we were 8 year olds and kept going back to English for most of it anyway. It was kind of nice because he was talking his Spanish so slow and Spanglishing it so much that I think I actually understood everything he said. We saw a lovely panoramic view, one of the churches, the cathedral, and El Entierro del Señor de Orgaz by Greco, which is a really famous painting from the Spanish Renaissance. The Cathedral is the tenth largest in the world and the second largest in Spain, so that was spiffy as well. Then we had lunch and free time, and then it was back to Segovia and the hotel.

Sunday, we again left at 8:45 to head home and go to Burgos. The weather, which was warm (really hot by Oregon definitions - wimps can't take 85 degrees!) :) and sunny for Friday and Saturday, decided to drop to the 60s (freezing by my little Vegas standards) and rain Sunday. We got to wake up to a nice thunder storm though, which I've missed while living in Oregon. We did a big tour of the Cathedral in Burgos, which started off really cool and impressive...but was really big and I've noticed the spiffy architecture stops being spiffy after you've been looking at it for two hours. Then we had lunch and took off for home, getting home at about 5:30. Originally I think we were supposed to spend more time in Burgos and see something else, since we were supposed to get back at 9, but with the weather I think they decided against it, which by that point I was happy with.

So that was it. Lots of cool stuff, lots of time on a bus, lots of not wanting to go to school today...I just need a day off. :) But it was fun to see the stuff.

:)

Anica

The people are crazy, crazy, crazy!

And no, I don't mean the Spaniards, although I'm starting to think that the food could have been used for medieval torture, but that seems to just be my host mom's lack of ability to cook. All my other friends are complaining about how good the food is and how they are getting fat...I swear, I might hurt someone if I hear another tiny girl complain about being fat again. I actually heard the sentence "But I'm up to 127 pounds!" -Gasp!- :)

So I have figured out the reason that people hate Americans, and why there are riots in France over the new president saying that he wants to have a good relationship with the US. There is a valid reason why most of the world hates us and thinks so poorly of us - because of the people who study abroad.

Now, in my group there are about 28 people or so. Of these, I am the poor cousin in the family, and quite a bit. My friend was talking to her parent's about how she didn't quite have enough money for London, and they deposited $1,000 in her bank account the next day. Almost everyone is rolling in it, which would make sense since this is pretty expensive (thanks to good 'ol Uncle Sam for giving me loans that I will be paying off until I am 85). In that alone they are leading a great example, telling the one guy from China in our classes that families have a car for every person in their family in the US, which is true...in their economic circles.

At least half of the people here are in a frat or sorority, and are acting in the stereotypical way that makes me crack jokes about frat and sorority people. There are these two 18 year old freshman girls that are loving the fact they can get drunk every night...and think their story about going swimming at midnight, in the ocean, naked, alone, and drunk, on a school night no less, is hilarious. Almost everyone in my group is a walking American stereotype that makes me hate us too.

Do you know how bad it is? My closest friend here, who I spend time with everyday, is a reformed christian republican who actually likes Bush. And I like her better than anyone here! (And that may sound mean, but she thought it was hilarious and finds it just as funny that she is spending all this time with a tree-hugging liberal lesbian, so we're even).

Aggghhh. I may lose it in the next month, I really may.

Anica