Lisbon, Madrid, Segovia

Apologies again for the delay since my last post, but I've been without an internet connection for the better part of the last week and a half. But now I have lots of cool things to share with you all!

Last Thursday after classes ended, I flew out to Lisbon, Portugal to spend the weekend there with one of my best friends from Vassar, Rachel Fink. While I had a cold for the entire time, we still had a blast, and Lisbon is so pretty (as, I'm realizing, most of the Iberian peninsula seems to be). I'm still working on uploading all my pictures from spring break forward, but hopefully they'll be up by the end of the weekend. The weather was beautiful and in the low 70s most of the time. We also made friends with these 4 random guys who had studied abroad together and, fortunately for us, all spoke English. So Archie the Scot, Luca the Italian, Artur the Pole, Olaf the German, Fink, and myself hung out a few times and were generally ridiculous human beings. The really cool thing about these guys was they didn't try and pull any inappropriate crap. I love Spain, but sometimes the things that Spanish men will say or do are pretty shocking, and not in a good way.

But I digress. We saw the sights in Lisbon and then on Sunday Fink & I both headed back to Madrid, where we shared a hotel room until Wednesday night. It was so great getting to show her some of Madrid and a little of my cultural experience. We had dinner with my host family one night, which was hilarious. Luis was in rare form, and Pepita kept telling him things like "Living with you is like living with a child." It made me feel right at home.

So Wednesday night after saying goodbye to Fink I got to come back to Pepita & Luis's house. I love traveling, but sometimes it's nice to just home come to your own bed and your own room. Since wednesday we've been in the middle of a mini heat wave, and the temperatures have been in the mid to high 70s. Wednesday afternoon with Fink and then Friday afternoon with Annie and Rachel, my friends from the VWM program (I seem to know a lot of Rachels) we took advantage of the beautiful weather and went to Retiro, one of Madrid's parks, where we rode the paddle boats on the pond. I even have a little color in my face now and have lost some of my usual Eastern-European winter death glow. It's pretty great. It's supposed to drop down to the 50s or low 60s and rain tomorrow though, so I may have to go out for a run today and enjoy the sunshine while it lasts.

Oh, and yesterday there was a program day trip to Segovia, a town about an hour and a half outside of Madrid. It's small and pretty, and has the castle that inspired the Disney logo you see before every disney movie, so that was pretty cool. Unfortunately, I was so exhausted the night before from traveling & waking up early for classes & catching up with friends that I forgot to charge my camera. So I managed to get all of 1 picture (fortunately, it was of the disney castle) before my camera died.

I think that's most of the good stuff. I did end up booking a four-day vacation with some of my friends to Sevilla and Tarifa (read: the BEACH!) for the first weekend in May, and we have a 3 day program excursion in another 2 weeks to La Rioja and País Vasco. other than that, life here continues as usual with classes, very little homework, and exploring Madrid as much as possible.