England, the Abridged Version

I've finally got internet in my room, which is a vast improvement on me running to the library at random times to check my e-mail. That also means I can start blogging as regularly as my schedule allows. Which is, I think, going to be not very much! For instance, I haven't stopped DOING stuff since I woke up at 8 AM this morning. When I wasn't in class, I was reading Titus Andronicus to prepare for class, and in 20 minutes I have to leave for an information session about my Scotland trip this weekend, and then after that, we're having a "restaurant night"--I chose to go to an Indian restaurant--and then after THAT, I have to come back and read A Midsummer Night's Dream for my Shakespeare lecture tomorrow as well as interview my character (...more on this in a second) for my Short Story Writing class. Short Story is SO much fun. For example, yesterday, our professor told us to write for 10 minutes when we woke up this morning. Then today, in seminar, we were to go through and pick out 7 words from what we wrote and write them all spread out on a separate page. Then our task was to link the words together in story (mine's about an old man dying with some sort of lung disease that makes it hard for him to breathe). Then, she sent us out into the town to follow the first person we saw, taking notes on his movements, speech, where they were headed, what we though they were thinking, etc. When we returned, she had us add this character into our story in some way. It's a lot of fun, forcing yourself to be creative and seeing what comes of it. Which is why tonight, I have to interview my character without planning the questions beforehand, the idea being that each answer will prompt the next question. This sounds weird, because, well, I'll be supplying both the question and the answer, but the point is to become the character, to really get inside his head. Should be fun.
So my classes are good. The social scene is fun too. Last night was our first "formal hall" which is essentially everyone sitting down together in a giant hall (which looks a lot like the Great Hall--there were even four tables) and being served a three course meal. Much fun! We even got to walk on the lawn (this is a subject for its own blog post. I wish to do the inanities of this university's traditions justice.)
There are about a gazillion more things I want to say--so I'll note them here for now and return to them later. They include: vocabulary differences, new friends, my first pub experience, the power of the British accent, the dining hall and food system (esp. in comparison to Yale's), and my room.
Unfortunately, I won't be posting any of my own pictures today as I literally haven't taken any since I got here. However, I will treat you to one of my favorite views so far:

I haven't been inside the chapel yet, but hopefully soon I'll step inside the *wondrous* King's Chapel. 

One final note before I head off. I was reading Richard II the other day for my Shakespeare class, and funnily enough ran across the lines that I quoted in my first blog post. I suppose it was only a matter of time, but still, reading those lines after having actually seen England made them infinitely more powerful: you cannot imagine the beauty of the English countryside or the quaintness of the Cambridge streets until you have seen them for yourself. So the thing I am actually looking forward to next is the bus drive to Scotland and the hike in the Trossachs, where I will really get to see this blessed realm.

Cheerio? 

Erica

Addendum: I can't be positive, as I'm no expert on bird-calls or whatever, but I'm pretty sure I hear owls outside my window all the time. This, of course, leads me to hoping that one of them will swoop into my window holding a letter only about 10 years late. 

Hiking up Mountains, or, How I Saw All of Barcelona in Two Days

My feet hurt, my shoulder hurts, my legs hurt; my stomach is sated and so are my eyes. In the past two days, in a whirlwind of walking, Melissa and I took in much of what the city of Barcelona has to offer. We went to La Sagrada Familia, Gaudi's brilliant church, and took the elevator up to the top of the tower, where we could see the whole city, and then we went to Park Guell, his park. After hiking all the way to the top of Guell, we had an amazing view of the city laid out below us that was well worth the trek (today, my feet disagree).

Here's a view from inside the church. The columns are supposed to look like tree trunks.

After Guell we headed over to Barceloneta, the port and beach area of Barcelona that has the feel of a fishing town. We walked by the beach and observed some toplessness, although not nearly as much as what we encountered in Ibiza. Next was Las Ramblas, the city's most tourist-y destination, complete with shop stalls and street performers. It was kind of a spectacle, but one worth seeing. After stopping at Cafe Viena (for the world's best ham sandwich according to some guidebooks and pretty highly praised by this guy) and at La Boqueria, which is a big covered market, with lots of meat and lots of fruits and vegetables, we ventured into the Gothic Quarter, where the streets are twisty and turny and tiny and filled with little boutiques and restaurants. After heading back up Las Ramblas, we wandered toward the restaurant we had chosen for the evening's dinner, a pretty big tapas place that was recommended to Melissa by a real Barcelonian. The food was pretty good and relatively inexpensive. We headed over to a bar to watch the Spain v. Chile game, but we were both too tired to care by that point.
This morning, we hit the Picasso Museum just a few minutes after it opened, and there were already a decent number of tourists there. We spent a while in the museum--first at the permanent collection, most of which Picasso donated himself, a lot of which from his earlier years, and then into the temporary exhibit, which wasn't very good. After the museum, I wanted to go to the chocolate museum, but Melissa wasn't interested :( so we headed back to Las Ramblas, planning to go into the Catedral on the way. Unfortunately, we got turned away because we were wearing shorts, which I guess is reasonable, but it's also really hot here. Ah well, a church is a church is a church, right? Outside, there was a group dancing the sardana.

We stopped at the market and I got some fruit to eat and then we wandered into El Raval (one of the neighborhoods) on our way over to Parc Montjuic. Here was where the most amazing thing happened. One second we're walking down the street, and the next, we hear someone call out "Melissa!" so we turn around, and sure enough, there are our friends from the winery, who are meandering over to the same park!!! What are the odds? Barcelona's not a huge city, but still, this was a little weird. We seem fated to be friends. We walked for a while with them, catching up on the past two days' adventures, and then parted ways, Melissa and I heading for the south side of the park, they for the north.
We hiked up the park (much to my chagrin) and had our gazillionth breathtaking view. This time, I'll actually let you see for yourself!

This is only really a small portion of the city, but that's La Sagrada Familia to the right (heavily under construction, since Gaudi died before completion. I think it's due to be finished in 2025...)

We stopped at the botanical gardens, where we saw cacti, my favorites. I chilled with this guy for a bit:

This is basically the end of our trip to Barcelona. We have one last thing for the night, and that's dinner reservations at Tapioles, 53 (incidentally, that's the address of the restaurant) where there's no consistent menu and all the ingredients are collected by the chef that day from local markets. 

I'm somewhat sad to be leaving Barcelona--it's a pretty cool city and we just scratched the surface--but I'm glad to be moving onto my next adventure: Cambridge!

Espana!

WOW. This has been a whirlwind few days of travel for me, much of it spent literally traveling, but I've had some time to see some cool things, starting with the Barcelona airport--where I spent about 12 hours on Monday. The airport is beautiful; the glass is all tinted sea foam green and it really affects the quality of the light and the atmosphere in general. The building is spotless and the bathroom are some of the nicest public ones I've ever seen. I spent a couple hours in the morning repacking my luggage to store some of it in the airport while I headed off to Ibiza for two nights with just my backpack and my camera.
By the time I finally got to sleep in Ibiza, I hadn't slept in about 38 hours. But staying awake was worth it for Ibiza. The water was the prettiest I've ever seen and the temperature was perfect (although I imagine being there in July and August would be *too* hot). It looked like this:

We spent our time in Ibiza at the beach and at a few clubs and then on our last day there we went to the "Hippymarket" which was fully of pretty shiny things:

and I bought myself a necklace. 

I do have one beef with Ibiza, and that's its transportation system. The public transport was so bad it was absurd. We took a bus to a town, then had to get off the bus to take it to a town that was only another 15 minutes away. This whole trip, which was about 30 minutes of actual travel time, took us about 2 hours. On our way back, there was no ticket station at the stop, so we had to buy the tickets on the bus, which meant everyone had to stand in line to get on the bus while tickets were purchased. But when we got back to the first stop, we had to get off the bus and the next bus was waiting. We thought oh we'll just buy our tickets on the bus again, but no, this time, you have to wait in line at the ticket station to get a ticket, while the driver sits there waiting for people to get on, when it could move twice as fast if he also sold tickets. Silly! The other annoying thing about transportation in Ibiza is the crazy cab drivers and the prominence of the "roundabout," which is possibly the most dangerous type of road since the one-lane bridge. When you combine the fast drivers with the roundabouts, disaster seems imminent. We made it out alive, if not a little poorer. 

Our trip back to Barcelona was flawless and we woke up early this morning for what I think was our best day yet. We decided to go cava tasting in the cava winemaking regions about an hour outside of Barcelona. If you don't know what cava is, it's basically the Spanish version of Champagne. It's made in exactly the same way, but they couldn't use the name, so they chose a different name (cava is the underground cellar where the wine undergoes the fermentation process). The train system in Barcelona was pretty easy to navigate, with the help of my high school Spanish (dos billetes, ida y regreso, a Sant Sadurni d'Anoia) and we arrived a bit early in the village. When we got to the train station, we saw that a winery different from the one we originally had reservations for was right across from the train station, we decided to go in there for a tour as well. It turns out that the two tours were pretty similar, but still interesting, and now I feel super informed about the cava making process. 

That's our tour guide at Freixenet (fresh-uh-net) holding up a bottle of cava that's almost done with its second fermentation. The stuff near the neck is basically leftover yeast that they need to get out (which they do by freezing it into an ice cube, taking off the cap, letting the ice cube pop out from pressure, and then recorking it quickly.
We tasted three cavas between our two tours, and I really liked them, although one was a bit dry (a brut natural) for my taste.
We ran into two Canadians on our second tour and got a recommendation for a restaurant from the woman who poured the cava for the tasting. As we were all walking away to go to the restaurant, the woman pulled up and told us it was closed (it's a holiday here!) and then she drove us around to a few different restaurants until she found an open one (that may have been her son's...although her English was a bit spotty). The four of us ate together and tried a cava sangria, which was actually delicious, and then headed back into Barcelona on the train together. The couple we ran into was engaged and really cute and it was the kind of thing that might be awkward but was just really nice. We all had a good time together and I'm really happy for the experience.
It's about time for me to take a nap and then tonight Melissa and I are heading into the center of Barcelona for the first time, finally, and tomorrow we'll head back into the city center for some real touristy-type sight-seeing. I'm glad that we didn't spend our whole trip doing that though, because going to do the wine tasting and running into a bunch of cool people was better than seeing the tourist attractions (not that I'm not super excited for Gaudi's La Sagrada Familia, among other things).

Well, as they say in Spain, adios!