Paris!

I don’t think I have blogged since the middle of October because things have been getting pretty busy in Spain!  Also, this week marks the midway point for my semester abroad!  I feel like I have already been here for a long time, but I also feel like the next half of the semester will fly by because I am so busy!  

The traveling started this past weekend, which I spent in Paris with my API group.  We left on Thursday in the middle of the day and after many bus rides and a plane ride we arrived in Paris on Thursday night.  Friday morning we were up bright and early for a three hour long bus tour of the city.  After making a couple stops for photos in front of the Eiffel tower the bus dropped us off in the middle of the city and we explored from there.  Our first stop was the Notre Dame Cathedral, and although we didn’t go up to the bell tower, it was beautiful on the inside.  After we left Notre Dame we made a stop for lunch at a little stand and I experienced my first crepe which was filled with egg and cheese and tasted so good!  We walked to the Louvre, a famous (and huge) museum in Paris which is mostly known for housing the Mona Lisa.  It is impossible to see the entire museum because it is so huge, we spent probably three hours just in one wing.  We managed to lose our friend Anna, which gets tricky when no one uses their cell phones here ( including myself) but we miraculously found her in the end.  From the Louvre we walked to the Eiffel Tower and waited in line to go up to the top.  This is right about when Paris started to become very, very cold.  I’ve been so lucky that Salamanca has been incredibly warm and I was definitely not ready for cold weather yet.  Naturally as we got further and further up the tower ( we had to change elevators a couple times) it got colder and colder and by the time we reached the top I was shivering.  The view from the top was amazing, I don’t think I realized how huge and how densely packed Paris was until then.  After walking a couple laps around the top and taking tons of pictures for random strangers we were able to watch the sun set from the top!  We took the elevator half way down and then walked (mostly ran) down the remaining stairs and reached the bottom just in time to see the hourly light show!  We probably could not have had better timing with our Eiffel Tower trip.  We spent the next day exploring the catacombs, the Musée de l’Orangerie (to see Monet’s paintings) and wandering around some of the old neighborhoods in Paris.  We even went back to the Eiffel tower that night and sat in front of it for long enough to watch three light shows.  This is when I had the best desert I have ever experienced: a chocolate and banana crepe, making the hour long walk to the Eiffel tower well worth it.  Sunday we walked (we walked SO much in Paris) to the Luxembourg gardens and stayed there until it was time to get on the bus and head to the airport.  Paris was an amazing trip and made me so excited for the rest of my traveling this semester!

Some pictures of Paris:

The Eiffel Tower:

Inside Notre Dame:

In front of the Louvre

The Mona Lisa

The Eiffel Tower

 Views from the top:

 Locks of love on the bridge:

The catacombs:

 Monet exhibit:

 The Basilica:

The tower at night:

The gardens:

Salamanca is just as great as it was when I left it, just much colder now.  I feel like my weeks are getting busier as I split my time between meeting with my intercambio, volunteering in an English class for Spaniards, and trying to get through the book I have to read for my literature class.  I am trying to finish all my work and studying ahead of time since everything seems to be due when my parents are coming and I want to be able to spend all of my time with them instead of studying and reading.  So far it has been going pretty well and I am halfway through my book, which I ended up enjoying more than I thought I would!  

Valladolid

This past week was the start of my new classes and the good news is I like all of them.  My favorite class is my conversation class, my teacher is really enthusiastic and I get the chance to practice my Spanish speaking skills.  I also had an intercambio this past week which is when I meet with a native Spanish speaker who is in the process of learning English to practice speaking and listening and help them with their English skills.  It is such a good idea and a great way to practice Spanish! Each time at the beginning I am constantly thinking about what I have to say but by the end of the meeting I am speaking without thinking.  My intercambio from last week introduced me to his group of friends here, who all live in different parts of Spain but are all studying at the University of Salamanca.  I hung out with them one night and I was loving listening to all of the Spanish and by the end of the night I was thinking completely in Spanish.  Whenever I have experiences like this or come back from four hours of Spanish class I always have trouble switching back to English quickly and often times my English sentences come out structured incorrectly if I don’t think about what I say first.

This weekend our API group went and toured a vineyard in Valladolid, a city two hours north of here.  Saturday also happened to be the first day that the weather dropped below and eighty degrees and it actually felt like fall.  We spent the beginning of the day walking around the outside of the vineyard which was also home to wild pigs (which look nothing like regular pigs) and many deer.  The tour guide said that the family who owns this vineyard and all the land is one of the richest families in all of Spain!  After our outside tour we went into the cellar where they make the wine and were walked through the process of crushing all the grapes, making the wine, bottling the wine and letting it sit in the cellar for years.  The cellar was filled with bottles of wine piled from the floor to the ceiling, filling every shelf, I couldn’t even capture it in one picture.  After that we came back up to the big fancy dining room for a wine tasting and got to try some of the soup that is known in this region which I loved.  After this, we got back on our bus and left the Vineyard and headed to a medieval market in the city where we got dessert and walked around for a while.

I had a really relaxing weekend and got the chance to skype my family and friends which is good because from now on our weekends start to get really busy considering how many different places we are going!  Every time I look at my calendar I’m amazed at how much I’m doing over the next two months and am reminded of how two months isn’t really as long as it seems.  It’s just a constant reminder to keep doing as much as I can while I’m here and to take in all of Spain while I have this great opportunity!

One Month!

Today is October 1st which means I’ve now been here for a month.  I really can’t believe this. That may have been the fastest month of my life.  I can’t believe that within the same month I have already travelled to so many places within ( and out of) Spain and done so many new things.  Yesterday was the last day of the early start program and on Monday we will be retested for our regular semester classes.  This also means that the rest of our program has arrived in Spain and new people are moving into the residencia.  Some are Spaniard students which is good because now we are forced to speak in Spanish all the time, even though I imagine my Spanish probably drives them crazy.

I feel like it has been a long time since I last blogged so I have many updates for everyone.  Last weekend we went to Bejar, a different city and hiked for about seven hours of the day.  It was beautiful there and we had an amazing view from the points we hiked to.  We were hiking off the trail at one point and realized that the sign we walked by translated to something like “Private hunting ground, keep off” which when we read we immediately ran off back to the main trail.  We also encountered a donkey some cows and even two bulls (which i thought should have been contained better than they were) and a woman who lived on the mountain who joined us for a little because she wanted us to get to a certain point on the mountain to see the view from there.  After an entire day of hiking we wandered our way back to the bus station and returned to Salamanca.

On Sunday we went down to the Tormes River, the big river that runs through Salamanca and rented the paddle boats and took them out on the river for about an hour.  The river was beautiful, the weather is still so nice here, it’s hot enough to wear shorts still even though it’s October now. At the end it was so hot and we had been paddling for so far that we all jumped into the river, in our sundresses, and then had to walk all the back home across the city back to the residencia.  

This past week was filled with studying and once finals were over we spent our free time figuring out more of our travel plans for the rest of the semester.  We also spend most of our afternoons wandering around Salamanca and exploring still.  This week we went to two different museums and to a movie.  On Tuesday we went to the Domus Atrium which was a museum that used to be a prison and most of the art and photography in the museum were very modern, and more than I expected were representations of things in the United States.  On Wednesday we went to the movies and I saw “Silencio de Amor” which was a French film about an Italian family but dubbed over into Spanish. Woah.  I was pretty impressed that I could follow what was happening in the movie and the movie itself was pretty good too!  On Thursday we went to a strange museum that I would not even know how to explain but apparently it’s a big deal here, it was called the “Museo Art Nouveau y Art Deco.”  Fun fact: they have the biggest collection of dolls in the world.  And I thought Stonehill’s shovels were cool. 

Today we went to Segovia for the day and saw the aqueduct which was very impressive!  We also saw the castle and cathedral in Segovia which were beautiful too. The cathedral there was designed by the same person who designed the New Cathedral here in Salamanca so the cathedral in Segovia looked very familiar.

This week marks the beginning of the regular school year here in Salamanca and the beginning of all my traveling.  Let’s hope that the next months don’t fly by as fast as that first one just did!