Spain

June 27th 2009-Im in my room with Grace and Kyla watching Wall-E! This is the best movie ever fyi…anyway lets talk about ESPANA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
AMAZING…BEAUTIFUL…CULTURAL…NOT SO GREAT FOOD…HOT AS HECK…AMAZING! I have only been in Europe for about 4 days and I am in love with it. I can now completely understand why some people come over here and never come back. America seriously has it all wrong. We actually suck in a lot of ways. Don’t get me wrong, I love my country, but we have almost everything backwards. All the buses here run on natural gas, the trash cans are all equipped with recycling bins and glass bins all in one, so there is no excuse to litter. The streets are so clean, people leave work in the middle of the day to actually spend time with their families and pick their children up from school. Imagine that. From 2-6 pm its siesta time and everything shuts down and people go home to nap or just sit and relax and have tapas which are little tiny food platters that are extremely cheap. It’s a beautiful thing. Also these people party so hard. NYC sit down. The clubs DO NOT OPEN UNTIL 3 IN THE MORNING! At midnight everyone is just sitting and relaxing and talking in the plazas with their little half naked children and dogs without leashes running around. Its beautiful. I love it. Spain is absolutely gorgeous. I had the most amazing time here. I can barely find words to tell you about it. So it all started like this….a whole group of us…about 10 or 11 stayed up alllllllllllllllll night and when I say all night I mean all night. We were awake for the ship pulling into the port of Cadiz….pronounced CadiTH…..it was beautiful. We literally watched the sunrise over the city and even in the port where all the ships and tugs boats go, the water was clear blue. The air here is so different and all the colors on all the buildings are so vibrant despite them being hundreds of years old. The first day here me, Grace and this other girl hopped on the bus to head towards our first destination: Cordoba…pronounced Coor-Dough-Ba…say coor really fast then doughba together…does this make any sense? Anyway, this city was amazing. It is a small town about 3 hours away from Cadiz. I have never seen so much remnants of Islamic, Jewish and Catholic art and influence as intermixed as this city had. There were so many monuments and statues and buildings and Mosques, or Mezquitas en espanol, and they all had different styles of art mixed into the same structure. I don’t really know how to describe it but it was amazing. It was beyond amazing. Grace and I wandered around this Alcatrez/castle thingy where there were about a million rooms and all these orange trees and flowers and old paintings. It was craaazy. We have 100090989798797986 pictures…people will see them eventually. We stayed in this gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous hostel….please throw out the whole stereotypes about hostels because they are not true. This place had tiled floors and a private enclosed courtyard with those little booty cleaners in the bathroom. It was just amazing. After we saw all there was to see in Cordoba we headed to Seville which aside from New Orleans is my favorite place I have ever been to in my 22 years of life. Ew that sounds so old. Buuuuuut speaking of OLD!!!.....

After Cordoba we went to Seville ON MY BIRTHDAY!!!!! This place is breathtaking. It has so much culture and art work and sites to see and I think I went everywhere!!!!!!!!!! My favorite place was the THIRD largest cathedral in the whole entire world, the Cathedral of Christendom , which had so much Islamic design to it which I thought was funny. Europe is so interconnected and I find it amazing. Anyway. This was the MOST BEAUTIFUL PLACE I think I have ever seen. Please google this place and look at the pictures. I don’t know when ill have time to upload the pictures on the internet so please just go look them up now. Every single inch of this place was detailed in different scenes of the Bible, different Saints, and one part was, from ceiling to floor, dipped in GOLD! Well I think it was gold, the people who worked there didn’t understand my broken Spanish and I couldn’t remember how to say gold, soooooo I don’t really know what it was covered in but I swear it was gold. Anyway, this place was unreal. It was built in 1400 something and guess who’s tomb is in there, being held by these 9 foot tall men on all four corners, CHRISTOPHER FREAKIN COLOMBUS! I don’t really know if I believe he is really in there but it was amazing to see. We stayed in another cool hostel that night and the people there were soooooooooooooooooooooooooo nice. I met people from Ireland, south Africa, germany, Italy and France. We ended up all traveling together to the sites in Seville and I learned so much from these people. Its awesome to hear the perspectives of people from completely different cultures than me. Anyway, I partied my heart out in Spain. I don’t think they will forget me and the people I was with. I promise you all I wasn’t crazy and dumb but I don’t think I have danced so hard ever. We got made fun of by some of the Spaniards because we left the club at 530 and they were just beginning to party. I’m sorry but I could not hang with them. I need to sleep sometime before the sun rises.

Um, side bar, I can not believe Michael Jackson died. So, im not even going to speak on it too much. Its just crazy that he died on my birthday and its even crazier how I found out from two girls from Sweden who spoke NO ENGLISH while standing in line for the bathroom. I guess that just shows how much he impacted the world. RIP Mike.

Ok, back to Spain, there is just so much to tell, but I think ill wrap it up. I was thoroughly disappointed with the food here. Im going to give the country the benefit of the doubt and blame it on the fact that Im on a budget and couldn’t buy a really nice meal, but I really don’t think that was it. Everyone said the food was no bueno. And also, these people are not the friendliest in the world, I guess it’s because they knew we were Americans. But despite that I LOVED SPAIN! ILL BE BACK! Next stop: Italy.