Saturday, December 31, 2011

El Fin del Año

2011 brought a lot of new experiences. I could not have known last January 90% of the things that were going to happen in my life in the coming months. I have learned so much, and still need time to process. I wouldn't trade these experiences for anything.

To those of you reading this who still have the chance: STUDY ABROAD. DO IT. There is no reasonable reason not to. GO.

To move to breathe to fly to float
To gain all while you give
To roam the roads of lands remote
To travel is to live.
-Hans Christian Andersen

Full disclosure: I got that quote from an Amazing Race challenge.

Happy 2012. Feliz año nuevo.

That Time I Technically Went to Africa

So after eating Thanksgiving leftovers for breakfast around noon, Nidhi and I quickly packed up and headed to the airport to meet up with Leigha, Johnny, Jeho, and Neil for a quick weekend trip to Africa. Tanger, Morocco is technically Africa, although we could see Spain from the terrace of our hotel, and it felt far more Middle Eastern than African. The official languages of the country are French and Arabic, but almost everyone there also speaks Spanish because they get so many Spanish tourists (since southern Spain is so close) and some spoke English as well. We mostly communicated in Spanish, which was cool.

The six of us took this trip with a tour company called European Vibe, and there were 15 of us all together. We all changed a little money (which turned out to be unnecessary, as everywhere we went seemed willing to accept euros) and were met at the airport by our local Moroccan tour guide and immediately set off for Hercules Cave, which is a real cave that looks out on the water.

The quick stop at the cave was followed by a short drive toward Tanger and then a stop off to ride camels. Yes, within two hours of being in Africa, we got to ride camels! When we got there the bus pulled over and our guide said, "We go to the camels now, please. The camels. Yes," which became a joke among our group for the rest of the weekend. It was a little terrifying at first because the camels are very jerky getting up and sitting down, but the ride was fine, and the guys who took care of the camels were funny. Lots of great pictures coming from that adventure.

After the camels we went to the Hotel Continental, which is where Casablanca was filmed. It's not a particularly fancy hotel now, but it has a lot of character. Nidhi, Leigha, and I shared a room and the boys had the room directly above us. We all settled in, regrouped, and then the six of us decided to go out exploring a little bit before we were picked up by another tour guide later for dinner.

It was already dark and a little hard to navigate the tiny twisting streets of the city, but we worked our way down towards the water and found some small restaurants where we decided to have a little something to eat, as we were all quite hungry. (This turned into a tradition we now call pregaming dinner with dinner.) The place we went to was extremely cheap. I had a bowl of soup and a soda and the whole thing was 12 dirham, equivalent to 1.2 euros, which is still less than two US dollars. If only the rest of our meals could have been that cheap. Our waiter didn't speak English, though we did have menus in English and Spanish, and the food wasn't too bad, considering we didn't really know what anything was.

Then we went back to the hotel and met up with the rest of the group to go to the tour dinner, where we got a three-course meal and baklava for dessert for ten euros. There was also live Moroccan music played, and at the end we all danced. It was a little strange, like everything about the trip, but it was fun. When we left the restaurant, our night tour guide (who liked flamboyant shirts) made sure we all spoke Spanish and then told us (in Spanish) that people don't normally go out on Friday nights in Morocco but that if anyone wanted to go out, they wouldn't have to go alone. I don't know what anybody else did but my group decided to hang out in our room, watch TV and relax, as we were all still a little tired from Thanksgiving the night before.

Saturday morning we had breakfast in the hotel (several kinds of bread, cheese, juice, coffee, and cereal) and then met our tour guide from the day before to go on a walking tour of Tanger. I finally learned that the Kasbah (as in "Rock the") is the old part of town in Arabic countries. We walked through impossibly tiny streets and saw miniscule shops, taking in daily life in Tanger. We stopped at a store where they made Moroccan carpets and were given a show of all the different types, and then some people bought some. Nidhi and I worked hard to refuse, but managed to get out of the store without buying anything. We also stopped at a place with lots of typical Moroccan goods, jewelry, mirrors, glass and metal objects, etc. 

But the real selling happened in the streets, where we were actually chased by people trying to sell us stuff. I put on my "don't talk to me" sunglasses and a stony New Yorker face and didn't pay any attention to them and they mostly left me alone. Others of my group made the mistake of showing them the least bit of attention, which meant they then usually couldn't get away until they had bought something.

Also on our tour we stopped at a Moroccan pharmacy, where we were shown all the different herbs and things they had for various ailments. I bought some Moroccan tea to take home to share with my family, because we had had it the night before at the restaurant and it was quite delicious.

After the tour finished, we got on the bus and headed for a side trip to Asilah, a beautiful coastal town. Our first stop was lunch at what seemed to be a nice restaurant, but none of us were big fans of Moroccan food, as it turned out, so it was a little disappointing. After lunch we took a walking tour of Asilah, which was much cleaner than Tanger, and saw all the white washed buildings and some amazing graffiti. Then we had a little free time to shop and explore, and Nidhi and Leigha got henna.

We took the bus back to Tanger and had some free time before we went out for the night with the group. It was unclear if the place we were going had dinner, so we pregamed dinner with dinner again, this time at the hotel restaurant. Then we ended up going to a bar which also served food, and we ate with the group and watched a soccer game - Barça against a minor Madrid team, which happened to beat FCB, a big coup.

After the game was over our tour guide took us to his friend's bar, a place that would stay open past midnight. Everywhere else was closing at midnight because of some big holiday; I'm not really sure about all that. The bar was pretty empty when we got there but got crowded quickly (we ourselves were 15 people) and was extremely smoky. I tried to enjoy myself but it was hot and hard to breathe.

I don't remember what time it was when we left, but after a slightly scary ride through the streets of Tanger we made it back to our hotel. I wanted to shower because everything was so smoky, but there was no hot water so I fell into bed instead.

We had breakfast the next morning in the hotel again and then went out for more exploring and shopping. Originally a shuttle was supposed to take us all to the airport at 9:30 in the morning, but no one had a flight before 2:30 so we arranged to be picked up at 1 instead. My friends and I went in search of a few more souvenirs. I found a necklace at a small shop where I talked with the owner in Spanish and he complimented my language skills. Probably to get me to buy things, but it was nice to hear anyway. I also picked up some pretty little glasses painted with moroccan looking designs on them as gifts.

I wasn't hungry but my friends were so we grabbed some food to go as we headed back to the hotel to pack up before the shuttle. We met up with the rest of the group and watched from the terrace for a van that looked like ours to arrive in the parking lot. One finally showed up at around 1:30, and we went down to it. It wasn't our van. Fortunately there was a French girl with us who could talk to the driver and figure out what was going on. He made a call and we eventually got taken to the airport. It was admittedly a little weird, like everything else on the trip.

At security in the airport we were separated by gender into lines because after you went through security they did a pat-down of everyone, period. Interesting. The Tanger airport is kind of funny because it only has 3 gates, and they're so close together that the planes don't actually pull up to them. You walk out to the plane on the tarmac. When you walk into the airport you can see the other side of the building. It's probably the size of about 3 high school gyms put together.

We all slept on the way back to Madrid (an hour long flight) and then went our separate ways. Nidhi and I took the subway home together, and then I headed off to get some schoolwork done with friends.

And that leaves only one trip... London! Coming soon.

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Thanksgiving in Spain


So I may be back in America, but I haven't given up on finishing my chronicle of my time in Spain, or my time based in Spain when I did a lot of traveling elsewhere. After Rome and before my next trip (Tanger, Morocco) we had four days of classes, including the day before and the day of Thanksgiving. (Thanks to all the Spanish holidays we got off, we couldn't take more time off for American holidays.)

El Día de la acción de gracia turned out to be a huge affair. My roommate and I had decided to have some friends over, since we had a nice-sized apartment and a good kitchen for cooking. I invited a few people, my roommate invited a few people.

And soon half of NYU in Madrid was coming to my apartment for Thanksgiving dinner.

As the days passed by I watched the "attending" count on the facebook event continue to rise. In the end somewhere between 35 and 40 people came over on that Thursday night. Everyone brought food and drink, though, and we ended up having enough of everything for everybody.

Thursday came, with a full day of classes. My roommate and I returned home with a couple of friends in tow who were planning to cook in our kitchen since they lived in homestays and couldn't cook at home. I embarked on  making mashed potatoes without an electric mixer, which I had never done before. But with some help from a friend, I got four kilos of potatoes chopped up nice and small, which meant once I cooked them well, they were easy to mash with a fork. Sour cream was impossible to find, but I added lots of butter, cream cheese, garlic, and salt, and can happily report that the potatoes were a huge hit with no leftovers.

While in the midst of my cooking frenzy, combined with that of Nidhi's guacamole-making and Gus's chickpea salad invention (it was a very diverse Thanksgiving dinner) the turkey crew arrived. No seriously. Our friend Johnny ordered a ten-kilo (about 22 pound) turkey, but didn't have an oven to cook it in. So during the day he and our friend Jeho marinated it in spices and juices and then Johnny and his roommate Neil brought it over to our house around 6:30.

The turkey was almost as big as our oven, but it fit. And then we cooked it for the next 4 1/2 hours. A team of Gus, Patrick, and myself continued to watch over the turkey, turning it and adding more marinade every hour. Somehow, even in Spain, with an oven in celsius, and none of us having cooked a turkey before, we managed to make a delicious turkey that Patrick and Isa carved and everyone enjoyed. We had some random appetizers in the living room which I barely saw as I was so busy in the kitchen, welcoming people, managing coats and whatever food/drinks our guests brought, and making sure we weren't being too loud for our neighbors. It turned out if we could just keep people in the living room with the door shut, it was actually pretty quiet in the hallway outside our door. That was a bit of a struggle in itself, but we didn't get in trouble, so I'd call it a success.

The turkey crew plus Yasmin: Yasmin, Patrick, me, Gus, and Johnny
We managed to have enough food for everyone with plenty of turkey, potatoes, various salads, mac and cheese, stuffing, and dessert - pumpkin pie and apple cobbler with ice cream - for everyone. There was even enough wine and Emily made some rum-spiked hot apple cider that was a big delicious hit.

A good food table, partway through dinner.

Remember Matt from Rome? He came, too, even though the only people he knew were me and Emily. From what I can tell he had a good time and chatted with lots of the NYU crowd, and even stayed until the bitter end helping me and Emily clean up.

Look at how cute we are!

At some point Nidhi and Grace returned from an expedition with a few Spanish friends, so we even had some Spaniards at our dinner.

Heroes of the evening:
Gus for helping with the turkey and being amusing.
Isa for being my sanity and carving the turkey with Patrick and yelling at people when I got frustrated yelling at people.
Emily for doing dishes and helping clean up.
Matt just because it was super cool that he came.
Patrick because he took command of the turkey and answered the door phone when I couldn't and yelled at people to go in the other room when they got tired of listening to me.

All in all, despite my apprehensions at hosting a dinner for an undetermined but certainly large number of people, we had an amazing night. I hardly sat down, but the food was good and it was nice that it was an event that everybody pitched in to create. Nidhi and I may have been left with a lot of dishes and a bit of cleaning up to do, but people actually did a pretty good job not leaving cups or plates around, and we were paid in a week's worth of leftovers. (Emily spent the night and the three of us had Thanksgiving dinner for breakfast around noon.)

 Here we are:


And that's actually not quite everybody. But a successful bunch! So many reasons to be thankful.

Friday, December 16, 2011

A Punto de Salir

So it's about 3 am, and my flight from Madrid leaves in about 5 hours. I'm leaving my apartment in a couple hours. It's that weird period of time where you sit in a place knowing you're about to leave it, trying to drink in everything with your senses to paint a full memory.

Tonight I just hung out with Isa and Yasmín, later also with Nidhi and Leigha, and briefly several other NYU-ers came over before they headed out to party up their last night in Madrid. I was happy to chill out here with my friends, watching youtube videos, reading stupid tweets, and just passing the time together, laughing, taking funny pictures, and so on. Madrid is a beautiful city and I will miss it, but more important to me than the place is the people I've gotten to know here. I can't think about it too much right now because every time I think about leaving my Spanish family indefinitely I want to cry. (I cried far more than I'd like to admit throughout Wednesday, both in anticipation of and after leaving their house.)

Most likely I will need a little time at home before I can fully appreciate all that I have learned here, putting it in perspective with my return to America. Still I am so grateful for every experience I have had here, good, bad, frustrating, painful, incredible... I think it still hasn't fully hit me that I just lived in Europe for almost four months and have started to create bonds around the world. I have seen ancient artifacts, not just behind glass but in the streets where they first existed. I have become nearly-fluent in a second language, an invaluable skill. I have made some incredible friends and together we have done some amazing things.

Yeah it's definitely too soon to try to analyze all this. I feel the experiences of the whole semester still simmering in my blood, just barely starting to settle. Really, school just ended yesterday. I had two exams and a final presentation just yesterday. The end of the semester here is so compressed because of the Spanish holiday schedule.

I am unspeakably thankful for so many things, experiences, people, perspective. The reminder that the whole world is a place in which to learn. Classrooms are so often confining, but the world has everything, in a much more hands-on manner. I have been so, so, so lucky. I can't wait to get home and see my family and my dog and sleep in my bed and speak English and use American money. At the same time particularly over the last few days the thought of leaving has gotten harder. I was way more ready to go home in October than I am now. I wish Chicago and New York and Europe were not so far apart. Seriously, who is getting started on making apparition happen? Because I know for sure now that if I could have one special superpower, that would be it - the ability to instantly transport myself between places, like my home that is New York (hogar), my home that is my family (tierra), and my new home in España (casa).

To those of you reading this that I have met on these travels, thank you so much for the fun times we have shared, whether at NYU, in Madrid, or elsewhere in Europe. I cannot yet know exactly all that I have learned from all these experiences, but I know that you were a part of it.

The world is a remarkable place if we open our eyes. I know this part, the leaving part, would be hard if I stayed a month or a year, and I know I'm ready to go home. And I know I will come back. There's not much else I can say right now, as I'm feeling pretty emotional and simultaneously exhausted but attempting to not fall asleep before going to the airport. This is not the end of this blog at all, but quite likely the last post from Spain. So I leave you with this:

"Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes."
Henry David Thoreau

Madrid, te echaré de menos. Besos y abrazos.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Mira a Barcelona

Okay so I went to Barça a month ago. Here's pictures!

A view from my hostel in the mountains. How scenic, right?

Palm trees and sunshine!

Palau Güell (Gaudí)

Palau Güell

Casa Batlló (Gaudí)

Covered in mosaics.

La Pedrera/Casa Mila. He asked Gaudí for something better than Casa Batlló and got this. (It's not better.)

SAGRADA FAMILA - Nativity Façade

Hello! (It's really tall.)

Sagrada Familia - Passion Façade

What you see when you go in the current entrance (on the Passion façade side)

Main altar.

Pretty.

Not even half of the stained glass is in yet and it's still amazing.

Nativity facade.

More stained glass.

So many colors.

Look at what the sun does look at what the sun does look at what the sun does!

Sunlight through the windows... (Are you kidding me?)

Sagrada Familia in the late afternoon sun.

Another side.

Barcelona from Parc Güell

My map was sponsored by a shopping center so it had all the shopping information. And then on the back it said, "You should also visit La Sagrada Familia." Well, I did.

Yes, I went to this.

Colón monument

Port de Barcelona. Reminds me of St. Augustine, because St. Augustine is Spanish.

Boat and palm trees.

Rose window in one of the oldest Gothic churches in Spain.

Santa Maria del Pi - pi is Catalán for pine (like the tree).

The Venetian style - layered and scraped away.

Narrow streets in the Gothic quarter.

Where the senate has resided since Roman times.

The 13 geese. Long story involving a 13-year-old girl who wouldn't renounce her Christian faith and therefore got rolled down a hill in a barrel full of broken glass 13 times. She became a saint and these are her geese.

My favorite goose, the rebel with the mohawk.

Why I ate lunch where I did on Sunday.

Picasso's Las Meninas. I was not supposed to take this photo.

Cop de Rock! (Time of Rock)

Arc de Triomf - Catalans can't spell.

Mi Pelo Tan Largo

Other thing I miss about America: short edgy hair. Look at how long it is now!


One week to haircut. One week.

(Combined with a pink shirt, this is about as girly as I'm gonna get...)

Monday, December 12, 2011

Things I Miss About America

Just had my penultimate English lesson with my Spanish family and need to remind myself why I want to go home, because I'm really going to miss them. Thus I give you:

THINGS I MISS ABOUT AMERICA (Besides, obviously, my family)
Dryers
Dishwashers
English
A cellphone with a qwerty keyboard
Cuddling with my dog
Bagels. With cream cheese, egg and cheese, whatever.
David's breakfast cart on the corner where I buy said bagels.
Mom's pancakes and french toast
Mom's chili
Watching Modern Family with my dad
Playing video games with my brother
My big, comfy bed
Communicating with my best friend in sounds rather than words
Ridiculous late night antics with Joe/Harrison/Vince/Amy/Hollis/Grace in Laf
Bizarre existential/artistic/theological/philosophical (that was hard to spell) discussions with theatre kids
Everything about Playwrights Horizons Theatre School
The Brooklyn Bridge
The Fire Cat Gang etc.
American Christmas music
NoHo at Chrismas
My books
$1 slice pizza from 2 Bros/any pizza in New York
Falafel
The Art Institute of Chicago
Theatre in English, especially downtown NYC theatre and Playwrights shows
MAKING THEATRE MAKING THEATRE MAKING THEATRE (acting, lighting, and maybe even directing a little bit)
The Chicago skyline
UU churches, especially First UU Brooklyn and my kids that I teach
Fuerza Bruta!!!
Coffee dates with Bob
Navigating without thinking about it
Stores like Target (who would have guessed?)
Prices being in dollars

Okay so I can't wait to get home and see my family and my dog and sleep in my bed and eat food and have real breakfast and understand all the words people say and not have to convert prices in my head. And I can't wait to finally get back to New York and Playwrights and see my friends and make theatre and never sleep and sometimes cry and sometimes be really happy and in any case know I'm doing what I love.

5 days, America. 5 days.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

Roma

So a mere three weeks after the adventure, here I am to write about Roma, a trip I actually didn't take by myself! My friend Emily and I flew out early Friday morning to Rome Ciampino, the smallest airport I had ever seen (until I went to Morocco). Emily is a big foodie so she had big plans for us in Rome.

We first took an airport shuttle to Termini, the big transit station in Rome, which was less than 10 minutes from our hostel. We got to the hostel and found out we had been upgraded to a 6-bed ensuite room (instead of a 12-bed with a bathroom across the hall) and couldn't have been happier, considering we only paid 10 euros a night, the cheapest (and it turns out best) hostel either of us had found in our travels. After settling our stuff in our room, we headed out to explore Rome, heading in the general direction of one of the best coffee places in Rome on Emily's list of places we had to eat.

First stop: gelato across the street from our hostel to enjoy on the walk. I had straitacella and coffee, both incredibly delicious. The weather could not have been better, cloudless and in the 60s, perfect for enjoying a walk with ice cream. I think we got a little lost as the map the hostel gave us wasn't great, but we enjoyed wandering around and seeing old things. We ran into the Trevi Fountain at one point.

Eventually we made it to San Eustacio, and it is indeed an amazing coffee place, and pretty cheap too. I had a really good cappuccino, to be Italian. We decided we would come back again another day and headed out to walk more. Now we were in search of real food, and as we wandered around looking at shops and wanting to buy all the clothes we saw in every window we headed towards a pizza place on Emily's list in Trastavere across the river. We got there and it was closed, not opening until later, so we backtracked and went to a place we had passed along the way that seemed cheap and looked delicious.

Pizza in Rome isn't like pizza in America - it's made with an impossibly thin crust that gets very crispy at the edges and I think they're always baked in a brick oven over a wood fire. I don't remember exactly what we had, but it had mushrooms and it was really delicious. By the time we finished eating around 5:30 (I don't know what meal that is) it was pretty much dark out. We went to one of the best gelato places in Rome (on Emily's list), San Crispino, where I got chocolate rum and caramel. It was massive and really creamy. Better than the place across the street from us but as it turns out we would still find better.  With our gelato we wandered back past the Trevi fountain at night, and then to the Pantheon. (I still get the Pantheon and the Parthenon mixed up, sorry.)

The Pantheon is kind of strange to me because it was Roman but then became Christian, so the mix of architecture and art doesn't really make sense. It was fascinating though, and actually pretty quiet despite all the people. I was grateful to get to be in yet another holy place, especially one so old.

Now tired from all our walking, Emily and I headed back to the hostel and caught the end of "happy day" at the hostel bar, which is from noon to nine. We had a drink, did a little research on the hostel computer and our rented iPads (which you get for 30 minutes free each day, and very cheaply after that). After figuring out a plan for Saturday, we got dinner at a restaurant near the hostel that was on Emily's list. Finally I got to have pasta with cream sauce! So happy. We got back to the hostel and decided to go to bed early, around 11 or something, since we had had an early morning and wanted to be ready for a full day the next day.

In our room we met Matt, who it turned out was our age and also living in Madrid doing an internship as part of his international relations major. He lived only about 10 minutes from my apartment in Madrid, and after we chatted for a while I invited him to our Thanksgiving dinner extravaganza (and he came! But we'll get to Thanksgiving later). He was also on the same flight back to Madrid as us and, like us, hadn't reserved the hostel for the night since the flight was so early, so he joined our party of staying up Sunday night.

Saturday morning we got up and had breakfast in the hostel - french toast with honey and bananas! And orange juice! And espresso! I was so happy for french toast... I had been thinking about it since September when all the NYU kids were posting about the new IHOP in the East Village, and hadn't had any in Paris since I ate in the hostel every morning. It was so delicious. Happily fed, we headed off to the Vatican.

Getting to the Vatican required navigating Rome's pitiful metro system. By system I mean two lines that form sort of an X over the city. They're working on building a third line, but it's going very slowly because it's Rome so every time they dig anywhere they find more ruins. None of the stops really get you directly to anywhere, they just get you sort of in the vicinity. It's also pretty dark, dirty, and crowded and makes the NYC subway look like the greatest public transit there is. In any case we got to  Vatican City and got in line to enter St. Peter's Basilica, which is free and therefore has a long (though fast-moving) line.

The Basilica was amazing. It's humongous and so ornate everywhere, including the floor. I am constantly awed by the scale of these buildings. I don't really know how to put it into words but I will get pictures up eventually. After the Basilica we went to the Vatican museums and saw tons of art. The museums are massive and a little overwhelming. We bought an audioguide to help us focus a bit as we looked at everything, and after a very long time finally made it to the centerpiece: the Sistine Chapel.

Actually the Sistine Chapel was one of the most anticlimactic experiences of my life. It was dark, people were talking, it was crowded, guards were yelling at people to stop talking, so it was hard to see, hard to hear, and hard to just enjoy the space. We listened to a few of the audio guide explanations, stared at the ceiling a bit, and then left.

By the time we finished at the Vatican it was time find lunch before our 5:30 walking tour that was starting from the Spanish steps. We got pizza at a place near Plaza Spagna and then wandered around a bit in search of gelato but instead only found all the most expensive stores in Rome - Gucci and Prada, Armani, etc. Slightly disappointed, we caught our tour which seemed to have started a little early, and walked around old Rome. Our tour took us to the Pantheon, where we were given some time to look around, and since Emily and I had already been there, we ducked out to grab gelato at a place on her list that was just around the corner. Tiramisu and hazlenut... A wonderful treat to enjoy during the rest of our walking tour.

After the tour we were pretty cold and headed back to San Eustacio for more coffee to warm up. We did a little exploring of sights at night, including a couple pretty fountains, checked on opera tickets for Sunday night, and then headed back to the hostel. We had missed happy day, but used our free welcome drink tokens to get a drink and sat and chatted with Matt for a while before going back to the pizza place that had been closed for a late night dinner. We got seats right by the oven and got to watch the pizzas cook. We also accidentally ordered a litre of wine though we thought we asked for a half. So dinner became a matter of will. After that though we successfully caught a bus back to the hostel and went to sleep.

We had to get up relatively early on Sunday to check out and then we left our stuff in their luggage area for the day. We had breakfast with Matt and then made plans to meet up later since we wanted to visit the Coliseum and he had already been.

The Coliseum is really big. And it's across the street from some apartment buildings and things, so you could essentially have a view of the Coliseum from your bedroom window, if you were rich, I'm guessing. The line to get in was ridiculously long and we didn't think we really had time to wait in it but found out if you got a tour or an audioguide you could skip the line. So we paid a little extra for a tour and went right in. It was pretty impressive to see how much of such an old structure is left. Our guided tour was okay, but a little hard to hear even though we had a walkie talkie system thing.

Once we finished the tour we left the Coliseum and headed to the Roman Forum, which turned out to be just a giant park of more ruins. For some reason I had thought it was a building of some kind. I blame the set of ITC's production of A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Forum. It was kind of interesting, but after a while old ruins start to all look alike: old and ruined.

Ruins were followed by more gelato, though I don't remember where... Then we walked to the Jewish quarter to get lunch but the restaurant we were trying to go to was closed. Everywhere looked good though so we sat down outside and a different place. The area was really cool because we got there around late lunch time, and everyone seemed to be out in the street eating and talking. Plus Italians are really smiley so it just seemed like a happy place to be. And then our food came. The best creamy pesto pasta ever. (This was following little fried mozzarella balls that were also really good.) Emily and I were both quite happy as we sat and ate and watched everyone in the street.

We walked around some more and finally found the other gelato place we were looking for - Gelateria del Teatro, which of course turned out to be the best place. I had mint straitacella, their flavor of the month, with really fresh mint, and sage raspberry. Together they were even better, and all so fresh. We definitely wished we had found that one earlier, but we barely found it at all! It's so small and tucked away. Worth the search though.

After gelato we went back to the hostel to relax for a short bit. We had a drink and met up with Matt, who then headed off to a fútbol (soccer) game. Emily and I went off to the opera. I really wanted to see opera in Italy, and Emily was down since she'd never been. We saw The Magic Flute by Mozart. I was excited because it was directed by Peter Brook, a very famous British director who wrote a very important very dull book called The Empty Space that I had to read before I started studio. I think Brook used to be avant garde but now he's just boring. There was nothing in the production (that was only an hour and a half long) to keep me interested. Plus they spoke in French, sang in German, and the subtitles were in Italian, so I was super lost. But I've now seen opera in Italy and I've seen a Peter Brook production, so I don't need to do that again.

And then commenced the waiting part of the evening. We returned to the hostel, picking up pizza to go along the way, and hung out in the bar area, where Matt eventually rejoined us. After a while we made friends with some other Americans, Kirk, his brother Joel, and their new friend Christian. I had been sort of spying on Kirk for a while because he had been talking about dialects and accents and nerdy IPA/voice and speech stuff. And he looked like a young Bon Jovi. Then I found out he's really into Jesus and since then Emily and I have been lovingly referring to him as Bon Jesus.

We passed the evening with the boys and finally around 4 am the three of us (Emily, Matt, and I) walked to the bus station to get the shuttle back to the airport. The system from the airport had been great but was a mess at the bus station, and instead of getting on the first bus at 4:30 we ended up on the second one at 5. By the time we got to the airport we were pretty tight on time for our 6:15 flight and of course encountered the only security lines I've experienced ever on any flight to anywhere in Europe. We figured out we could skip the line since it our flight was soon though, and Emily and I did. I tapped Matt to come with us, but he waited in line a little longer and ended up a little further behind. We got through security and tried to wait for Matt, but one of the men at the gate practically pushed us out the door to the bus that would take us to the plane. Matt didn't get on our bus and we watched the aisle for him to board the plane, but never saw him. Yep. Matt missed the plane. We were very sad and checked in with him as soon as we could back in Madrid. Stupid RyanAir.

From the airport we both went home to sleep a few hours before class. And that is the end of the Roma saga. Viva Italia! (Pictures coming soon.)

Saturday, December 10, 2011

On the Streets of War

Much-delayed but worth waiting for photos from Berlin, October 28 - November 2, 2011.
Yet another famous arch-like structure. (Brandenburgur Tor)

In the Holocaust Memorial (Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe)

Nazi architecture is scary and depressing like everything else Nazi.

First view of the wall.

This cobblestone path runs throughout Berlin to mark where the wall once stood.

Church.

Memorial to all the books that the Nazis burned - the empty library. Enough empty bookshelves to hold approximately 10,000 books.

Autumn in Berlin.

Seriously.

Cities with rivers are better than cities without rivers.

Brecht's theatre!

Holocaust memorial at sunset-ish.

Berliner bier at Currywurst 36.

Street art.

The infamous balcony out of which Michael Jackson dangled the baby - Hotel Adlon's cheapest room is something like 5000 euros a night. Michael Jackson stayed in the most expensive one.

Eating a pretzel!

One of those green men is real.

This weirds me out - the tourism created by replicas of wartime.

All he needs is a monocle.

Berliner Ensemble!

Avant-garde! (Don't miss the frankensteins in the front... I kept changing my mind about whether they were part of the show or not until they stood up and started yelling.)

All the stamps you need to go from East to West Berlin!

Memorial to the murdered Jews of Germany.

Jud.

Replica of Mendelssohn's gravestone.

The only remaining real gravestones.

Autumn in the graveyard.

Art.

Graffiti.

I found it hard to smile in Berlin.

Being artsy?

Windows.

Checkpoint Charlie.

Stabbing at my soul.

Topographie des Terrors.

Topographie des Terors.

Berlinermauer.

Yeah couldn't smile in front of the wall.

Ghost of the Berliner Maur.

Jews? (Outside the Jewish museum)

About the only funny thing in the Jewish museum. (On the other side it says "My bubby is voting Obama")

Best part of Berlin. (All following photos are part of the gallery - painted on the longest remaining stretch of the Wall. You can click them to see bigger. I recommend reading the ones with text.)

























Right at the river.

Contemporary art museum.

In the art!