Spain/Italy Trip (Part 6)

This post is dedicated to the time we spent on a ferry from Barcelona to Italy.  We went straight from the beach (still sandy and disgusting) to the ferry, where we waited in line to board.  Clearly, it was a slightly shady ferry because getting on (and off), nobody checked our passports once.  I could have easily gotten from Spain to Italy without any kind of identification as long as I had had a ticket.  That seems like solid security...

We were starving by the time we got on the ferry and immediately went to the cafeteria to eat.  We had the lowest of the low when it came to meal plans, and the people on the ferry were food Nazis.  I took two ketchup packets instead of one, and I had to give it back.  I feel like you're packing too lightly in the kitchen if you're worried about ketchup packets...  We wolfed down squishy lasagna, fries (what a bizarre side dish with lasagna), and diet coke.  It was pretty abysmal food, but you take all you can get when you're that hungry.

After dinner was a lot of showering, unpacking, and waiting around.  The cabins were tiny, but could have been worse.  We messed around on deck for awhile waiting to leave, but we could tell from the massive line of trucks still waiting to get on the ship that we were definitely not leaving on time.  My boyfriend and I wandered around for awhile longer and came back up to the deck (two hours after we were supposed to depart) and watched as we left port.  It's was so strange to watch Barcelona get farther and farther away as we left into darkness.  I thought that it would be pitch black out at sea, but I had forgotten about the moon.  The moon is actually incredibly bright when it's the only thing lighting your way...  Unfortunately, the light from the boat made it hard to see the stars.

Soon after we left, I went to bed and slept remarkably well.  Something about the pitch black rooms and the vibration from the engine was a great combination for sleep.  The following morning we ate a sad breakfast in the dining area and spent the day killing time.  I interviewed a few of the kids for a grad school project and started typing a paper, took a nap, paid to use the workout facility, and kind of wandered otherwise.  We were all so bored and felt claustrophobic on the ship.  It was cool to be out at sea, but a 20-hour trip was too long.  After experiencing the ferry, I'm pretty sure that my personal hell would involve working on a cruise ship or ferry.  I would feel so confined, bored, and sick of the awful ferry food.  The pay would have to be extremely high, that's for sure.

The students had a great time on the ferry, however.  There was a group of Spanish students about the same age on the ship, and the two groups quickly bonded.  It was funny to hear them talk about how they realized how little Spanish they actually knew when they tried to communicate with the Spanish teens.  I don't know how representative that group of kids was, but many of the students in our group said that their English was awful even though they had taken far more years of English than most American kids take of Spanish.  I wonder if this group of kids just has a crappy English education program at their school?

Needless to say, I was thrilled to see Italy.  The ferry was a good life experience, but life on the sea is not for me...

The large lounge in the ferry.

The bar in the lounge.  I can't say I took advantage of it.  That would have been inappropriate on a school trip.

Just one of the hallways.

The top of the ship.  The pool was not in use.  It would have been far too cold.

The dizzingly long and narrow cabin hallways.

The abyss...  I've never seen ocean fog before, but it is thick...

A ship that was following us into port at Italy.  I won't pretend to know how to spell the name of the port.

This guy totally hopped into a tiny door on the side of the ship.  That's unbelievably dangerous and I admire his bravery.

The Italy sunset through the bus window as we drove towards Rome.  This picture doesn't come even close to doing it justice.

Spain/Italy Trip (Part 5)

The second major section of our trip was spent in Barcelona.  I noticed immediately that, despite the old architecture, that Barcelona was a much "younger" city.  It seemed much more relaxed and liberal overall.  Maybe that's because it's a beach town?  I'm not really sure, but the vibe was much different than in Madrid.

We took a tour of the city in a bus that used to be used by FC Barcelona.  I noticed that it was a pretty fancy bus, but I didn't realize it was fancy enough to haul around a famous soccer team.  The city had some very unusual and interesting architecture.  La Sagrada Familia was pretty incredible.  It was bizarre and really beautiful at the same time.  Europe definitely spares no expense when it comes to enormous cathedrals...  We also visited the mini town (the name escapes me at the moment) designed by Antoní Gaudí.  I felt like I had stepped into a Dr. Suess book walking around that place.  Sometimes I feel like the world would be a better place if everyone was able to live in really funky and cool looking houses...

Other than the beach, another area we spent the most time in during our stay was La Rambla.  Somehow we always ended up walking up and down it to get from one place to another.  The one thing that annoyed the hell out of me in both Madrid and Barcelona were the guys selling those bizarre squeaker toys.  They had some unusual plastic film that you can put in your mouth to create a weird helium voice.  I swear to God there was a salesman every five feet in Spain selling those irritating toys. I know the economy is bad in Spain, but of all the things you could choose to sell on the street, why squeak toys?  

Anyway, the last day before we got on the ferry to Italy was a beach day.  I was excited to spend some time near the ocean because, as a Nebraskan, my beach opportunities are rather limited.  It was fun and relaxing, but also not as glamorous as it sounds.  First, I greatly underestimated how irritating all of the sand would be.  It got everywhere and you couldn't get rid of all of it if you tried.  Second, it was not blazing hot in Barcelona like it generally is in home in early June.  It was under 80 and felt rather chilly. Third, it was unbelievably crowded. I've never seen so many people come to one place to just chill.

I basically took a nap in the sun for a short period of time (it's easy to get drowsy in the sun for some reason), and I spent some time walking along the beach.  I'm not an amazing swimmer, and the water intimidated me, so I didn't go in very far.  The waves started getting rather large, and I really didn't want to get knocked over.  All of the women sunbathing topless threw me off just a tad.  It didn't bother me that much, I just can't imagine feeling comfortable enough to have it all hanging out in a public place.  I thought it was somewhat odd that walking around town in shorts is frowned upon (at least from what our tour guide told us), but it's totally cool to take off your shirt at the beach.   I'd love to hear the reasoning behind that because I thought that was quite contradictory.

Anyway, here are a few pics from various places in Barcelona:

A far-away view of Barcelona and La Sagrada Familia.

A closer view

Flowers around the outside

Our tour guide said Star Wars helmets were inspired by La Sagrada Familia.  I'm not even sure what the people in this statue are supposed to be.  

Gaudí and some larger structures in Barcelona

Part of the longest bench in the world

Candy land houses...

They sold tiny and adorable plants along La Rambla

A convincing Johnny Depp lookalike...

Bambi!  Made entirely of chocolate at the chocolate museum.

Crowded beach looking one way

That looks...terrifying...

Some people were getting owned by these waves.

Crowded beach the other way.  I'm not sure what this statue is supposed to be...

Spain/Italy Trip (Part 4)

My internet appears to be working again, so there should be less of a tone of frustration with this blog post.  Today, I'll talk about our last day in Madrid and our first day in Barcelona.

We got up early and spent a couple more hours touring Madrid before we had to catch the AVE (a high speed train).  We went to a modern art museum, which wasn't really anyone's thing except for two of the other adult sponsors.  I did get to see some Salvador Dalí paintings and Picasso paintings, but they weren't the especially famous ones.  I know I'm uncultured, but arts museums just aren't that fascinating to me.  I enjoy history museums far more.  I remember feeling the same way when we went to the Smithsonian museums in the eighth grade.  I loved many of the museums (the Holocaust Museum, the American Indian Museum, the Botanical Museum, etc.), but myself and my classmates got done with the Modern Art museum in about 20 minutes.  It infuriated the art teacher who was one of our adult sponsors...

Getting back on track, the most interesting thing about the modern art museum was what happened immediately before entering.  My boyfriend, his mother (a Spanish teacher), and myself called ourselves "sweeper team" because we would hang out in the very back of the tour group and "sweep" all of the high schoolers back together if there were any stragglers.   This usually worked out well, except this time I was wearing a backpack...  As a general rule, I always used my camera bag as a purse of sorts so I could wear it over one shoulder and guard my bag in front of me.  Unfortunately, we had checked out of our hotel, and our big suitcases were locked in a separate room until we returned to get on a bus to the train station.  I felt nervous about leaving ALL of my stuff in a shared hotel room, so I took my backpack that day.

Obviously, it's hard to keep your eyes on your backpack at all times because it's not in your line of sight.  I learned that it's an easy target for pickpockets when I felt a strange pull on my bag and sensed a presence behind me.  I looked back and a teenage girl (not one of our girls) put her hands down very quickly and tried to look the other way.   I swung my backpack off immediately and saw that she had managed to open the entire tiny back pocket of my backpack.  Nothing was gone because I had caught her mid-unzip, but she could have made off with a couple very inexpensive and boring objects if she had really tried.  I guess that proves that you shouldn't profile.  Before that moment, I was looking for teenage boys or older men as pickpockets, but clearly that was a bad assumption.  I'm just glad that I had consciously put anything I cared about in bigger pockets that would have been too risky to attempt to open.  I'm also glad that my spidey senses started tingling in that moment.  It would have been very disappointing if I hadn't been able to catch her red-handed.

Anyway, after the art museum, packing up our stuff, and getting to the train station, we hopped on a high speed train to Barcelona.  If I'm remembering correctly, it was about 450 miles that we traveled in 2 to 2.5 hours.  Basically, it's like traveling across the entire state of Nebraska (the long way) in just a couple hours.  The train was amazingly smooth, and the ride wasn't too bad at all.

In Barcelona, we checked into our slightly shady hotel and then took a walk to the beach.  I've never seen the ocean (or in this case, the Mediterranean Sea) close up before, so it was a surreal experience for me.  I've been landlocked my whole life, so it was crazy to be able to stand in the ocean and feel how (surprisingly) cold the water was this time of year.  That's another thing that was funny...  The girls on the trip wanted to go to the beach so badly, but it was honestly pretty breezy and cold in Barcelona.  It was far cooler than it had been in Madrid, and Madrid wasn't even terribly hot.

After the beach, we made the trek back to the hotel.  The hotel was in some kind of outlying suburb of Barcelona, so it took us an hour of tram and subway hopping to get all the way back.  We saw a meth addict on our way to the beach who was acting shady, so I wasn't crazy about walking the same neighborhoods with a bunch of kids super late at night.  I was extremely relieved to arrive back to the relative safety of our hotel.

So, that's was our travel/transition day!  Here are a few pictures from the first night in Barcelona.  I have video of the AVE that still needs edited, but no pictures.

Spain/Italy Trip (Part 3)

Well, here goes nothing.  The internet at my apartment absolutely sucks (it's "free" shared wifi), so we'll see how far I really get before something stops loading or I get weird router pages again...  I'll have to go yell at the worthless apartment management again sometime later today.

This post is mainly going to focus on a single day: our morning trip to Toledo.  Since there won't be as much to say about a single morning, I'll throw in a few other observations and stories.

Toledo was one of my favorite places during the entire trip.  It's absolutely beautiful and almost fantasy-like.  I've never seen a place with the classic moat, city walls, a palace, and such old architecture.  It was truly majestic, and it introduced me to the first of many enormous cathedrals/basilicas that I would see throughout the trip.  We did a walking tour, visited the cathedral, and visited a gold-working and metal-working factory.  The outlook point that showed us a view of the entire city and the incredible cathedral were the highlights of the day for me by far.  If I ever become a millionaire (or maybe it would require me to be a billionaire...), I would love to have a small vacation-y type of residence in this area.  It's very calm and beautiful, and I would have enough photograph-worthy material to last me a lifetime...

After Toledo, we returned to Madrid and honestly didn't do much.  It was a "free" afternoon that was followed by tapas that night.  My boyfriend and I chose to forego the tapas because, a) It cost 24 euros, and we thought that the money was better spent elsewhere, and b) We hadn't been impressed with Spanish food thus far.   That leads me to the discussion of the food I experienced in Spain.  The consensus that almost everyone on the trip came to was that Spanish food was "edible, but not enjoyable".  Most of it I could tolerate well enough to somewhat satisfy my hunger, especially since the eating schedule was positively wacky compared to the one I was accustomed to following.  There were always three courses: soup, main dish, and dessert.  I am not a soup person AT ALL, so I could usually tolerate few bites, but almost always left most of it in the bowl.  I'm sure it made me look disrespectful and picky, but I can only force feed myself a homogenous, vegetable-based liquid for so long before I want to hurl.  It always tasted okay...I just didn't want a ton of it.  The meat was a tremendous disappointment at every restaurant.  I'm used to marinated or spiced, tender, nice cuts of meat, and it seemed like the chicken/pork/shrimp/etc. was just thrown in a pan and cooked to extreme chewiness.  I felt like I was eating leather surrounded by tasteless sauce at every restaurant we attended.  The paella I had did not thrill me either.  It was decent, but neon orange rice threw me off just a tad...

Just as a disclaimer, I'm not saying that all Spanish food sucks and that no one should like it.  I'm not that kind of person.  I personally did not care for the food that I had, but it could have been poor choice of restaurants by EF Tours or just my personal taste.  I've known plenty of people who have studied abroad in Spain and LOVED the food.  I'm just not one of those people...  I will say that I did appreciate that there wasn't a ton of salt, cheese, and grease on everything in the restaurants.  In the U.S., I avoid restaurants because I always feel bloated and nasty after eating sodium-filled, greasy, unhealthy foods.  However, I would say that a happy medium between Spain bland and American over-salted would have been my personal preference.

As a side note, to make up some of the calories we were missing due to eight hours of walking per day on half empty stomachs, my boyfriend and I went to a McDonald's across the street (I was shocked to see so many American fast food joints in Spain).  We didn't get a meal, but we did get a McFlurry.  Spain McFlurries, for anyone interested, have only one size: small...very small.  They also put the toppings on top of the ice cream instead of blending it in.  I thought it was very wise to only have small sizes available, and I actually kind of enjoyed mixing the ice cream myself instead of having it chopped up throughout.  It's the small things like the differences in McFlurries that I noticed the most while abroad...

Anyway, I've gone off on enough of a food tangent for today.  Here are a few pics of Toledo and of the Príncipe Pío mall where we got the McFlurries later that night.

Spain/Italy Trip (Part 2)

For Part II, I will discuss the time we spent in Madrid.  I went with a tour group full of teenagers (I was a technically a chaperone) and ensuring that teenagers stick to a European dress code is not always the easiest thing to do.  Students were specifically told not to wear shorts, tank tops, athletic shorts, cutoffs, or anything else that looks extremely touristy and American.  So, what do students wear on Day 1?  Absolutely everything they aren't supposed to wear.  I understand that a large group is never going to look like locals, but some of these girls were pushing it so much with their short shorts and midriff-bearing outfits.  As a future teacher, I should probably get used to teenagers not following instructions, but the blatant disregard for everything they were told to do definitely irritated me.  I know that wardrobe makes a significant difference because I wore flats (not tennis shoes), a shirt with no logos, and jeans almost every day, and many locals came up to me and my boyfriend (when we had diverged from the group slightly) and began speaking in Spanish.  We understand a lot of Spanish, but any accent or unusual response by us gave us away quickly.  Still, that was confirmation to me that you CAN blend in and avoid trouble if you try.

Wardrobe aside, the first couple days in Madrid went well.  The weather is freakishly stable: always about 75-80 degrees and sunny.  We visited the Royal Palace, Plaza Mayor, Retiro Park, Puerta del Sol, the Prado Art Museum, and other random places along the way.  The first day, I was dying a little bit from extreme fatigue.  I'm fairly certain I had two hours of sleep in the first 48 hours of the trip, so I slept like the dead the first night.  The second day, I was approximately 1000% more awake than the previous day, but all of the standing and walking was a brutal way to recover.  I consider myself a walker and in good shape, but for some reason my lower back absolutely killed the entire trip.  I think my Walmart, $9 Toms-ripoff shoes had to be a factor, but even when I switched to tennis shoes, I still had lower back pain.  Everyone in the group had the same problem, which made me feel like less of an old lady.  We looked like zombies rising from the dead the way we would lean over and let our arms hang to stretch our backs....

On a similar topic, I'm not surprised that Europeans weigh less.  The amount of walking they do alone has to control weight well, plus their portion sizes are definitely smaller.  I have a great deal to say about the food, but I'll leave it for a later post since I've already rambled on for two or three paragraphs here. Anyway, not everyone in Spain is supermodel thin--there are overweight people, for sure--but I didn't see the massive obesity that I often see here in the U.S.  "Spain overweight" is someone who is maybe 20 to 30 pounds above ideal, whereas "American overweight" is 50+ pounds above ideal.

Anyway, onward to some actual pictures.  Here are a handful from the day (with labels):

Puerta del Sol: A lot of the students were obsessed with shopping on this trip, so they were fond of this place.  I thought it was okay, but I'm not much of a shopper, so this area wasn't as exciting for me.

This is kind of across from Puerta del Sol.  My boyfriend pointed it out, and I was shocked.  My friend said it's a seafood restaurant (I'll take her word for it), but I still don't know why it's called "Nebraska".  You can find a little Nebraska no matter where you go, apparently.

The entrance to Retiro Park.

Illegal immigrants selling knockoffs in the park.  Our tour guide said that if we bought anything from them, they would keep the money, but the police would confiscate our items.  These guys took off when a police car came rolling through the area.

The pretty streets of Madrid.

A flamenco dancer outside of the Royal Palace. 

A shot of the palace.  I was so disappointed we couldn't take pics inside because this place was incredible.

The Real Madrid soccer stadium.  It holds a number of people comparable to Memorial Stadium here in Lincoln.

The shoes I blame for my back problems...  

More pretty apartments by Plaza Mayor.  The rent on these has to be sky high.

Plaza Mayor

One of the creepiest street performers I have ever seen.  I have no idea what kind of animal this is supposed to be,  but this is the stuff of nightmares, folks.

Spain/Italy Trip (Part 1)

Howdy!

It has been awhile since I initially promised to post cool pictures.  I'll start posting them a little bit at a time along with explanations as to what they are and where I've been.  The trip to Europe was an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I'm so happy that I was able to go.  At the same time, the entire trip made me appreciate certain things about the United States and Nebraska.  Europe is gorgeous, but I was SO ready to return home by the end.  I missed the good ol' USA.

To start, here are a few plane shots.  This trip was the first time since the eighth grade that I had flown anywhere, so initially it was a tad nerve-wracking.  Plane rides across the ocean are especially disturbing when you aren't used to air travel.  I had an overnight from Philadelphia to Spain and I'm positive that that's the worst night of sleep I've ever had in my life.  The seat belt bell kept binging, there was turbulence, the plane seats were unbearably uncomfortable, and I was too excited about landing to get a wink of sleep.  I would estimate a total of an hour of dozing the entire flight.  As a result, I felt like a zombie for the first day of touring in Madrid.  The dark circles under my eyes were so intense that it looked like I had been punched in the face...twice.

All that aside, the clouds and horizon views from the plane were awe-inspiring and beautiful.  I managed to get a few photos, but none of them fully capture what I could see in the moment.  The following photos show views from the plane, including the landing in Madrid.

That's all for tonight!  I'll fill in more about the trip a little later on as I have time.  I've been pretty swamped with graduate school homework, so it has been hard to get around to any posts.