Me Encanta España

So, three things of note have happened in Spain this week. 

1)    I realized how long it's been since I've posted a blog.  I'm sorry, I'm not very good at this whole dedication thing.  BUT today I posted several things and tried to catch up a little on what I've forgotten to tell you.  Please don't hate me. 

2)       I had to give an oral presentation in my Spanish Conversation class.  I wasn’t sure what to present on, until someone suggested I talk about TIP.  I was immediately sold on the idea.  I gave a 40 minute talk all about camp, and Texas, plus I showed a termbook video with Spanish subtitles.  Win.

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     3) The radiator in one of the classrooms decided being a water fountain was cooler than being a radiator.  The people in charge of the school disagreed. The heater sprung an ENORMOUS leak in its imitation of a fountain, and made HUGE mess.   It was pretty funny, but only because it wasn’t my classroom :)

Hakuna Matata

There’s this really cool thing in Spain.  It’s called the Gibraltar Straight, and it’s the reason why people here can say things like “oh you know, just went to Africa for the weekend, no big”  and mean it.

So, since I’m basically Spanish now, I’m going to tell you that I went to Africa, and it was no big. 

Except it was SO AMAZING I CAN’T EVEN HANDLE IT!

Seriously, I LOVE Morocco.  I’m in love with it.  Everything was so awesome, and our hostel was ridiculously adorable.  I definitely want to go back.

We took a ferry from Algeciras to Tangier that was supposed to take 30 minutes.  It didn’t.  It was closer to 3 hours, we found out later that it’s normal, and people just assume that you have to double triple, or quadruple the suggested boat times to Morocco. 

When we got there, the 6 of us piled in for a two hour taxi ride, 2 in the front seat and 4 in the back. We are all very good friends now.

While we were in Asilah we got mobbed by like 23984532 kids who wanted their pictures with us.   I’m still not sure if they were making fun of us, or if they really wanted the pictures, but either way it was very, very strange.

Anyway, the moral of this story is that I LOVE Asilah, and Morocco, and my life right now is pretty darn awesome.  

On An Evening In Roma

I love Rome, I’m officially obsessed. 

We got the tour the Vatican, which was super cool for anybody, but especially interesting since I went with a group of Catholics.  The art was ridiculous.  Seriously, you could spend days in there just looking at sculptures and paintings and tapestries. 

We, however, were on a pretty tight schedule because we had a date with the Pope. 

Oh Yeah, you heard me right:  we got blessed by the Pope.  Along with 324532223 other people, but whatever.

We also did the Coliseum and the Forum, the Spanish Steps, the Pantheon, the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, wandered Rome, found an amazing lookout, chilled on the Spanish Steps, ate the BEST paninis, pizzas, pastas, salads, bruschetta, etc and then went and hung out some more on the Spanish Steps. 

It was a beautiful adventure. 

Hey Now, Hey Now, This Is What Dreams Are Made Of...

That’s right folks, I’m talking about Italia. It was absolutely amazing.

We breezed through Venice, spending just enough time there to fall in love with it.

Next on the list was Verona, because we wanted to visit La Casa de Giulietta.   What we did NOT want to do in Verona was get in trouble with the Italian Police…

Our first ever bus in Italy was our downfall.  We tried to buy tickets on the bus, but the machine was broken.  We kept trying to pay, but it kept shooting our money back at us.  We alerted the bus driver to the problem, and tried to pay him, but he waved it away and motioned for us to just go sit down.  

Minutes later, who boards the bus with us?  Yes. That’s correct:  An Italian police officer checking for tickets. 

And we didn’t have any, because the stinking machine was broken. 

The officer was questioning us about it (in Italian/Spanish)  and we were trying to explain (in Spanish/English) but the conversation was not going in our favor.  He was just about to write us tickets when Dana managed to convince him to ask the driver.  After a conversation (in Italian) with the driver the officer helped us work the machine, found out it wasn’t working properly and let us off the hook.  Thank goodness. 

At this point, we had apparently missed our stop, and the driver pulled over and kicked us out because we were at the end of the loop.  We were on a sidewalk, with no idea where we were…in a city where we didn’t speak the language.  Perfect. 

We managed to come across a couple of Italian girls, who we showed the address to our hotel.  They only spoke Italian, but they were angels.  Complete angels.  They walked us all the way to our hotel just so we wouldn’t get lost again.  If I had an award to give to the nicest person on the planet, it would probably definitely go to them. 

The next day, we decided we weren’t going to chance our luck with the bus machine again, and prebought the tickets.  When the bus pulled up, who was driving?  That’s right.  Same guy.   He opened the door, saw us, we showed him our tickets, then he promptly smiled shut the door and drove away. 

I can’t particularly say that I blame him.

BUT we found another bus driver and made it successfully through the rest of Italy without any further run-ins with the law.  Thank goodness.