March 8, 2010

Hey!

I will do my best to update you again on what's been happening over here. Also, I have now added to my photo album on Picasa (a web-based photo storage made by Google), so here is a link to it so that you can see what all I've been up to. I am not finished with the London album, so please be patient with that one. I should have done that while in China also, but didn't, so perhaps if I'm bored one day I'll try to upload some China pictures to it as well.

http://picasaweb.google.com/SarahMelecki

I think I sent the last update just before we went to Granada. I really enjoyed Granada! It's a little bit smaller than Seville, but still large enough to have plenty to do. We left for Granada on Friday morning and it only took about 2-4 hours by bus to get there. We stayed at a nice hotel very close to the Alhambra (the palace used by the late Muslim rulers). On Friday, we did a little looking around our hotel and then went on a guided tour of the Cathedral there, which is smaller than the Cathedrals in Toledo and Seville. It is where Isabela and Ferdinand are buried, and we were able to see inside of their tomb. My roommate, Anjali, and I went looking around the various shops and things Friday afternoon and found that most of the shops have quite a bit of Moorish influence, probably because the Arab Muslims were able to maintain their presence in Granada much longer than they were the rest of Spain. They weren't kicked out by the Romans quite as quickly as people in other parts of Spain were.

Friday evening, we got to see a Flamenco show at a little place where we were all packed in very tightly. It was great, though, because it meant that we were all able to see the Flamenco very close up. I loved seeing the dancing and hearing the music! I think that everyone in our group was very impressed by the Flamenco show. We explored a few of Granada's bars but didn't stay out very late on Friday, because we had to be up early Saturday to go tour the Alhambra, which was amazing! It was added onto a little bit by the Romans, so there were a couple of parts with Roman influence, but mostly it was Moorish architecture and it was beautiful! I doubt we were even able to see half of it because it is such a large palace. Apparently it used to be painted with very bright colors, but most of the paint has come off over the years. The walls and ceilings are still carved very intricately, though, because (I learned this in my History of Spanish Art class!) the materials used in its making weren't considered very strong, so in order to take away from that aspect they were decorated as much as possible. This is true of all Moorish architecture from that time period. We saw many of the rooms inside of the Alhambra as well as the gardens next to it and the outside of the Summer Palace (which is located in the gardens). We then went to eat lunch before we had to go back to Seville. The following Monday was the birthday of one of my roommates (Megan), so she chose where we ate out on Sunday night and chose a sushi restaurant not far from us. I don't really like sushi, but I do like other Japanese foods and got some really great chicken at the restaurant, as well as very good egg roll type things. Our host mom cooks every meal for us except for Sunday night dinners (because she takes Sundays off) so I feel pretty lucky about that! Also, on Sunday nights its nice to be able to eat out so that we are able to explore some of Seville's restaurants.

Monday, we ate a dish of Megan's choosing that Mama Rosa made for dinner, and got to have birthday cake afterwards for desert. It was wonderful! I went out with the group Monday night to help celebrate Megan's birthday for a little bit, but I have a 9 am class every Monday-Thursday so I came back before everyone else to get some sleep. I spent Tuesday and Wednesday preparing for my trip to London! Wednesday evening, I met my friend Tracy about 8:15 pm at the bus stop to go to the Seville airport. We got to London about midnight their time (only 6 hours ahead of central time zone in the U.S.) and took a taxi from the airport to our hotel because the buses and trains had stopped for the night (we didn't fly into Heathrowe, we flew into Stansted which is about an hour outside of the city center). Our hotel was very nice, and only about a two minute walk from Paddington Station. We got it pretty inexpensively because it is not peak tourist season. It was by no means a 5 star hotel, but we weren't looking for that!

Thursday morning we ate breakfast at the hotel's complimentary breakfast (mostly bread, croissants, fruit, yogurt, and cereal) before venturing out. We walked first through Kensington Gardens, which was beautiful, and saw Kensington Palace there (most famously the home of Queen Victoria, and I think where Princess Diana moved after she and Charles got divorced). It was beautiful, but we didn't go inside. I'm not really sure how you get inside, actually. We wandered around London a little bit after that, getting lost (I think everyone should get lost in foreign countries, because you see more interesting stuff that way!), before finding a bus to take us towards the British Museum. We ate at a cute little pub that had quotes written all over the ceiling and then went to the museum, which was free by the way! I loved the British Museum - we could have spent days in there. We mostly went to see the Egyptian sections because that's what I've always heard of when I hear about the British Museum, and they were really great. Most notably, we got to see a large bust of Ramses II and the Rosetta Stone!

We went to Chinatown after the British Museum, which was very cool. It is about 4-6 blocks big and has a lot of vendors with traditional Chinese things as well as Chinese restaurants. There were a lot of Chinese medicine stores with things like acupuncture offered, as well. One of the best Chinatowns I've ever seen! We ate dinner at a restaurant there, which was good but not the best either of us had had. Tracy's family is from China and her parents always always cook Chinese food, so she knows good Chinese food when she has it, and she said this restaurant was alright, but not like her mom's cooking. We also wandered around some of the shops. At 7:30 pm, we had tickets to a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Twelfth Night at the Duke of York's theatre in the West End. The show was absolutely amazing! I also love Shakespeare, so I was just really excited to see anything by the Royal Shakespeare Company (supposedly the best Shakesperian actors in the world). It was tied for the best Shakespeare performance I've ever seen with a production of Hamlet my dad and I saw in Minneapolis a few years ago, that was done excellently. I can't wait to go back and see more by the RSC!

Friday morning we ate breakfast at the hotel and then caught the Number 15 bus from Marble Arch to the Tower of London. Meredith sent me a guidebook to use that was really good, and one of the things it recommended was to take the Number 15 bus because you can see so many sites on it and it is much cheaper than going on a bus tour around the city. It is one of the big red double decker busses, and we were able to sit in the very front of the 2nd floor, so we could see really well. I also really liked the Tower of London! I wasn't expecting it to be laid out the way it is - I was actually expecting one large tower. Instead, it is basically a fortress that was used at the king's palace as well as a defensive fort way back in the 1200's. It is like a large square with a big courtyard. They had some actors showing what used to be the king's living quarters, and also showed where the soldiers used to "man their battlestations" if under attack. We saw the crown jewels there, as well, because they have been stored there for hundreds of years. They were insane! The largest piece of the largest diamond ever found is in the royal scepter, and I bet it's as big as my hand.

We went from there to St. Paul's Cathedral, but it was just closing, so instead of going there for the afternoon we decided to go over to Convent Garden, which used to be a fruit and vegetable market and has since been converted into shops of all kinds. I really liked Convent Garden! It was just a nice little area in general. We found a good pub to eat dinner at and shopped a little bit, including going to a really great tea shop called the Tea House where I picked up some freshly made Apple Cinnamon tea for my residencia and some tea for my mom. On the way home, we went to King's Cross Station and found Platform nine and three quarters (from the Harry Potter books!) That was pretty fun!

Saturday morning we ate breakfast at the hotel and then went to check out St. Paul's Cathedral. It's only about 300 years old, which isn't nearly as old as the other Cathedrals I've been able to see in Europe, but the tour information said that there were three previous Cathedrals built on that site that had been destroyed. It was beautiful! I got to climb to both an indoor and outdoor observation deck, where I could see a top view of the Cathedral and a nice view of all of London. We took a ride on the London Eye next, which was just across the river and sort of resembles a very large ferris wheel. The compartments you go in are like glass rooms that slowly spin on the Eye and they put in 25-30 people in each compartment. It takes about half an hour to go all the way around. We were able to see a lot of the city that way. It is right on the River Thames.

We walked over to look at Big Ben and Parliament House after the London Eye, which is beautiful. The entire Parliament House is not only massive, but also all done in a gothic style of architecture. Westminster Abbey is right next to Parliament House, so we looked at that next. We weren't able to go inside of any of these places because they were already closed, but the outsides were amazing. After eating a very late lunch, we decided to go back to the hotel and nap a little bit because we were both so tired. We ended up taking pretty long naps and then going to dinner in Paddington, just a place near our hotel.

Sunday morning after breakfast, we checked out of our room and left our luggage with the front desk staff to go see Shakespeare's Globe theater. It is not the original Globe, because that burnt down quite some time ago, but it is an historically accurate model that was completed in 1997 and has an adjacent museum. They only do shows beginning in April because of the weather, so we didn't see a show, but we did go through the museum and take a tour of the actual Globe, which was very cool! Our tour guide was also really funny (I think he might actually be an actor, based on his performance). I spent just a little too much money at the shop there, but I was so excited that I just had to buy a lot of different (and cool) things!

We walked on the outside of Buckingham Palace before we had to go back to our hotel, but didn't go in. It was beautiful. Our taxi driver the first night told us that when the flag is up it means the Queen is home, and the flag was up so the Queen must have been there. I wasn't able to get close enough to any guards to try and make them smile, which was a little disappointing to me, but I will have to try next time I get to London. After Buckingham Palace, we began our adventure home.

Going home turned out to be the absolute worst travel experience I have ever had. Because we were flying a budget airline (RyanAir) we had to fly out of London Stansted, which you either have to take a bus or taxi to. We elected to take the bus because it was about 30 Pounds cheaper per person than a taxi would have been. Unfortunately, the bus was almost an hour late. We were planning on being at the airport between 2 hours and 1 hour 45 minutes before our flight, but with the bus being late, and after having to find our luggage on the bottom of the bus, etc., we only got there just under 40 minutes before our flight was supposed to leave. RyanAir has a strict policy that you cannot check bags onto a flight any less than 40 minutes before the flight leaves, and also that each passenger is limited to one carry-on only (I even had to put my purse into my backpack). Tracy had two bags, and my bag was too heavy on the way home to count as a carry-on, so they wouldn't let us board our plane. They told us our only option was to book a later flight, but they had no more flights that evening going to Seville, and they had one the next day but there was only one ticket left. So, we elected to fly to Madrid where we could try to catch the train or bus home. We got to Madrid and found that there were no more trains to Seville that night, and that the only bus left to Seville was full. By this point, I was very frustrated! We ended up having to take a bus from Madrid to Cordoba (about a 5 hour ride) and then a train from Cordoba to Seville (about a 45 minute ride, with a 2 hour layover beforehand). We finally got home at 8:30 am. It's a very good thing we didn't have classes that Monday!

Last Monday, I stayed home and slept most of the day, as well as doing homework. I had a mid-term on Wednesday and a mid-term on Thursday that I needed to study for. I haven't gotten the results back from either yet. I felt that my Spanish mid-term went alright, and that my politics mid-term went really well, so I suppose I'll find out this week. I have one mid-term left, in History of Spanish Art, and it is this Thursday. This past weekend a lot of my roommates went to Barcelona. I stayed home because I was scheduled to go on a hiking trip to Mulva, Spain for Saturday with our program, but it was cancelled due to rain. It has rained quite a bit here this spring, though I'm told that is quite odd. Usually it only rains a couple of days out of every year, apparently. It was nice to relax all weekend, even if I didn't do a whole lot. I did go to some free salsa lessons on Thursday night, which was fun, and to a tea house/hookah bar on Friday night. I really liked the tea house/hookah bar, and will probably go back.

I think I'm updated now on everything I've done the past couple of weeks. This coming week, I'm going to go to Extremadura, Spain with my program Friday-Sunday. I'm not really sure what is there, so I will let you know after I've been! Then the following weekend I'm going to Berlin, Germany, to visit my friend Nathalie - she was a foreign exchange student I got close to during high school (not the one who lived with us, but a different one). I'm excited for both of those trips, as well as exploring more of Seville during the week!

Love you!

Sarah