No Rock Unturned

All that glitters...

2011-07-03T19:34:00.003-04:00

Some of you may know that my master's research is sponsored by a gold mine. I was up there ~1 month ago doing field work, and I got a photo taken with a gold bar and an award the mine won for safety. They are very safe up there.
Here's me holding $1.5 million in gold!

Christmas and back to Ottawa!

2011-01-09T17:13:00.003-05:00

First of all...

Happy MMXI!

(I'm really looking forward to some more interesting years, like MMLXXXVIII, but I'll never get to see anything in my lifetime cooler than MCMLXXXVIII, and I completely missed out on the priceless MDCCCLXXXVIII, because everyone knows that 8's are by far the best numbers to write as Roman numerals, although MDCLXVI does have its merits)

My winter break was pretty enjoyable, but far too short. My only real complaint is that it got too warm, and all of the snow melted before I got a chance to go skiing, and I even brought my ski boots home. It was nice to be home with everyone, despite having a cold (grr...airplanes) the entire time. On the upside, because I was sick, I got to drink the leftover communion grape juice at church on Christmas Eve.

I was worried that the warm weather would delay the opening of the canal, but one section (only ~2 km) opened yesterday! The Rideau Canal is the world's longest ice-skating rink, and I can't wait for the section that goes past my office (Rideau St. to Pretoria Bridge) to open. I'm thinking about using my lunch to skate. My original plan was to do a lap, but the canal is 7.8 km long, which is 15.6 km or 9.7 miles if I do a lap, so I might have to work up to that. For more on the Rideau Canal, check out: http://www.canadascapital.gc.ca/bins/ncc_web_content_page.asp?cid=16297-16299-10080&lang=1

Things at school are going well too. This week, I'm going to make a heavy mineral concentrate out of my buckets of rock sand, and then I can start picking out the zircons, which I'll use to date my rocks. I can also use them to figure out the temperature the rock crystallized at, and how the magma evolved over time. Once I have my zircons, I'll make an appointment to go to UCLA to analyze them, and that should happen in February. I'm also working on grinding my rocks into a very fine powder so I can figure out what elements are in them. I don't think I'll be taking any classes this semester, but I'll be busy with research and TA-ing, and skating on the canal, of course.

I hope you all enjoyed your holidays too.

Pictures

2010-11-17T10:56:00.005-05:00

Gatineau Park

'Canada' geese (aka ducks if you're Cori)

D. C. Look at the fantastic ductile structures in the fountain!

My room and the view from my room. These are about a month old, so the trees are much barer now.

Catching up!

2010-11-16T11:02:00.002-05:00

I might be the world's worst blogger, since I haven't posted anything for 2 months, so here's a quick summary of the past 2 months:
The first weekend in October, I went to Appleton for my grandparent's 50th anniversary, and I visited LU. My flight out of Appleton was over-booked, so I got to spend an extra day there (fun stuff) and missed class, learning how to crush rock, and the due date for a scholarship application. Luckily, my advisor submitted most of my application, so I was still eligible to apply.
The next weekend was a metamorphic petrology field trip. I'm not taking or TA-ing the class, but my advisor teaches it, and he needed people to drive. It was a lot of fun, and it made me realize that driving in Ottawa is really not as scary as it looks. Plus, there are some really fantastically deformed Grenville rocks basically in my backyard, and I saw some crazy high-grade mineral assemblages (olivine spinel marble, silliminite amphibolite, amphibolites with garnets as big as your head, and a skarn with megacrysts of calcite, hornblende and cpx. There may have also been a charnokite (opx-bearing granite)).
That weekend was also Canadian Thanksgiving. One of my roommates loves to cook, so she prepared an elaborated feast with ~10 dishes. It was extravagant, but delicious, and the turkey turned out beautifully. She also had a bunch of friends over, and we watched American football, so it was much like Thanksgiving back home.
The following weekend, I wrote a paper and made a presentation for class and went on a hike in Gatineau Park with the international student office. I fooled everyone into thinking I was Canadian with my superior mastery of Canadian English. Gantineau Park is a national park just across the Ottawa River from Ottawa. It's technically in Quebec, but it is only a few miles outside of Ottawa.
That week, I went to see the National Ballet of Canada performing a collection of short, modern ballets, and it was very good. I got an incredible seat (10 rows from the orchestra and dead centre) through the student rush program, which was very good.
The following week (Oct. 25-29) was reading week, essentially a bigger, beefier version of reading period. It was really nice to have the week off, and I got a lot of research-related work done since I didn't have class or TA duties.
On Friday of reading week, I left for Washington, D.C., because I decided to go the the Daily Show/ Colbert Report's Rally to Restore Fear and/ or Sanity. I was planning on meeting up with some people from LU, but my Canadian cell phone had horrible reception, and it didn't work out. It was also really difficult to see or hear the speakers because there were so many people there. The rally was still fun though, mostly because of the signs that people made, but I also met some people who had connections to LU and WI, so I talked to them for a bit. Going to D.C. made me a bit homesick, because things were similar (US money and speed limit signs), but still not quite the same. It was beautiful, though. I went to all of the important monuments on and around the mall, and I spent several hours in the Natural History Museum. They had some very impressive rocks, including some huge slices of Jasper Knob, Ediacarin fossils and fist-sized zircons (I have zircons on the brain). I was disappointed in their eclogites, though. Maybe I've just been spoiled by the fantastic Holsnøy eclogites at LU, but I have to believe the the Smithsonian has some prettier eclogites. I was quite impressed that there were a lot of rocks that visitors were encouraged to touch, since I firmly believe that you can't really appreciate rocks behind glass.
Since the D.C. trip, things have been quieter. I've been doing a lot of school work (mostly research-related, since I only have one class), and soon I'll have some more substantial quantitative data. I've crushed 8 samples, run them though the disk mill, and sieved them to find zircons, and all I have to do with them yet is sink them in heavy liquids (the dense minerals will fall to the bottom, and zircons are dense, so they should fall out) and then pick out good zircons, plus pray that I get 20 good zircons from each sample, or I will have wasted ~8 hours per sample. I'm starting to get samples prepped for doing XRF (this is less time-consuming, because I just need to cut off the weathered bits of the rock, crush it, and grind some pieces into powder, but it is more sensitive to contamination). This Friday, I'm going to Carleton to use their microprobe to measure the Al in hornblende, which will tell me the depths that my magmas were intruded at, which will help constrain their interaction with the rest of the greenstone belt. It's very busy, but it's exciting that all of my work is finally about to get me some data.
The last bit of news is that I love TA-ing. We are done with field trips now, so the students are doing indoor labs, like reading maps and learning rocks and minerals. The indoor exercises are ok, but they're a lot more tiring and a lot less fun than field trips. TA's in Canada do a lot less than those in the US. We are only allowed to work 10 hours a week, maximum 130 hours a semester, and we're not allowed to teach, only assist (after all, that's what the A stands for...). On field trips, for example, I might work with a small group of students doing something like learning to use a compass or explaining some features in the field, but the lab instructor is always there, even though he might be some place else explaining something else. When we come back as a group, he usually goes over what we saw, but in a very cursory way. I did some grading (actually, the Canadians call it marking, and I only had to mark 2 labs (150 reports per lab), and now I'm done), but I am not doing much more than I did lab assisting at LU, and I make nearly 5x's as much per hour. There are some TA's who just mark and some who basically have a ton of office hours (like my office mate). At first, I felt like I didn't have anything to do, because I was only taking one class and working only 10 hours a week, but now that I have more research-related things to do, I've been a bit busier, but it's nothing like last year at LU.
Ok. That's it for text, the next post (tomorrow, since I have to get my pictures off my camera yet) will be pictures.

First week

2010-09-13T21:16:00.003-04:00

So far, things have not been too terribly exciting. Classes started last week, but I didn't have any responsibilities until yesterday, so I've been spending a lot of time reading. Mostly about migmatites and granites. As it turns out, granites are way more controversial than I'd ever expected, which I guess is good since that's what I'm studying for the next 2 years, but it's also bothersome, because it's hard to apply uniformitarianism if we don't understand modern processes.

Even though I haven't been especially busy, there's been a lot going on in Ottawa. Last weekend, there was a hot air balloon festival in Gatineau, which is on the other side (Québec) of the Ottawa river, and we could see lots of cool balloons from our apartment.

There was also some organizational stuff, and I now have a desk in an office I share with one other person. It's a pretty nice space--we have a lot of room and a sink-- but it's in the sub-basement, so there's no sun. The room is actually called "The Lair".

I will be putting up some picts of my apartment when I get around to taking them.

O Canada!

2010-09-01T21:45:00.001-04:00

Greetings from the north, sort-of. Ottawa is actually almost the same latitude as LU, so I didn't really move north, just east.
So far, everything is going fine. I've moved into my apartment, and I'm getting the know the city and the university.
This year could be fun, eh?
Cheers!

Trip Home

2009-12-02T15:31:00.003-05:00

My trip home was quite exciting. I left my apartment at 6am, and even though I was only a few blocks from the bus station, I called a taxi (my first time calling a taxi in Salamanca) to take me there because I had 2 suitcases, a carry-on bag, and my backpack. One of my suitcases was full of rocks and books, and although it was very small, it weighed over 100lbs. A few weeks before I left, I found out that there was a new bus service to the Madrid that went directly from Salamanca to the airport, which was excellent, because I had way too many bags to worry about. When I got to the airport, I found out that my small bag was too heavy to legally fly, so I switched a chunk of eclogite with a pair a sneakers, and that did the trick. The person who ended up checking my bags was in a hurry, and didn't charge me any over-weight luggage fees, even though both of my bags were over-weight. It was really annoying when I was at the counter getting ready to leave, and the people started speaking English to me as soon as they saw my passport, because their English was hard to understand, but I wouldn't have had any trouble understanding their Spanish.
The flight to the states was pretty uneventful. The person I was sitting next to was really friendly, and it was a pretty pleasant trip for 9 hours in an airplane. We left an hour late, which is perfectly normal when you're flying out of Spain, and had to change our flight path to avoid a big storm, so we ended up getting to Dallas 2 hours late. It took forever to go through customs, and by time I was ready, my flight had left. I was really tired from my trip, and I didn't know what to do, so I ended up at the information desk looking lost a bewildered. Fortunately, there was the really nice woman named Dianne who helped me figure out what to do. I ended-up flying flying to Minneapolis, but there was a mechanical problem with the plane, so that flight was delayed an hour. When I finally got to Minneapolis, the airport was nearly empty, and my flight to Madison was going to leave in 20 min. I ran through the airport, and got there just as they were boarding the final passengers. I got to Madison after midnight, and got home at 1am, after more than 24 hours of traveling. My bags didn't make it with me, but they got home the next day. So it was a successful trip. 8 months and 30 days, and it was quite a challenge, but exceptionally rewarding.

Adios España

Madrid (ballet and geology)

2009-12-02T15:02:00.006-05:00

The weekend before I went to Costa del Sol, I took a short trip to Madrid to help my flatmate move home. She wasn't taking any classes at the university, so she was done, and I wanted to go to the ballet and the geology museums in Madrid, so we decided to go the night before she left, go the the ballet, and then after she left, I would spend the day in Madrid and go home for dinner. When we got to Madrid, we decided to take a taxi to our hostel, because my flatmate had all of her earthly belongings with her, and we didn't want to risk her bags to the Madrid metro. There was a big outdoor concert on the street that our hostel was on, so we had to walk a bit, but we figured it out without too much trouble. Our hostel was really close to the Teatro Real (royal theater), so walking was easy. We saw Romeo and Juliet by Ballet Stuttgart (they are from Germany). The dancing was good, but I didn't really like the color scheme. I was also really surprised by how small the theater was. The floor area was quite small, and the balconies were really steep, but it was lavishly decorated, and there was royal box for the King and family (they weren't there). After the ballet, we got Turkish fast food, since the tapas in Madrid were horrendously expensive.
The next day, I went to the airport with my flatmate, and then went to visit the geology museums in Madrid. There are two: The Royal Geologic Museum, which is housed in the same complex as a whole slew of other natural science museums, and the Geologic and Mine Institute of Spain's museum, which is smaller, so I went there first. Since the museum is in the same building as the offices for the Geologic and Mine Institute of Spain, I needed to show ID to get into the museum, but that was fine. The museum was a little old, but really well-organized, and it showed how Spain changed over geologic time and highlighted the mineral wealth of the different provinces in Spain. I spent more than 2 hours there, and it definitely exceeded my expectations. The Royal Geologic museum was a little more of a disappointment. The geology museum was closed because they were renovating the biology museum that was in the same building, and the main exhibit was about Darwin's time in Spain, but they were dismantling it when I was there. They did however have a really cool exhibit on the Mediterranean, and a really good outdoor geology museum, plus they didn't charge admission because so much was closed, but it was still disappointing that the main geology museum was closed. Those silly biologists.
The trip back to Salamanca was uneventful, and, because I didn't spend much time at the geology museum, I got home with plenty of time to study for my exams the following week.

The ceiling at the Geologic and Mine Institute of Spain.

Costa del Sol

2009-11-27T19:28:00.006-05:00

My last weekend in Spain, I took a trip to southern Spain, to the popular tourist location known as the Costa del Sol (the coast of the sun). It is on the Mediterranean Sea, and the area I visited has the largest ultra-mafic body (the Ronda peridotites) in the world.
I stayed in a very touritsty town on the coast, but the first place I visited was a small town in the mountains where I had good access to the lherzolites and dunites. This town, Istán, is one of the white hill towns of Andalucia, and it was very quaint.
The town is well-known for its artisian wells that are all over the town, and you can hear the water running under the streets from all of the fountains.

This sign says "Don't forget, behind a ball there is always a child."

Despite its closeness to the Mediterranean, this part of Spain is really dry, and the landscape looked very dessert-like.

This was a cave that was below the town. There were some of these caves that looked like tree houses.

I also say a pair of doves just outside of the town.

Marbella, the town I was staying in was full of resorts, and there were beautiful beaches. It was also perfect beach weather while I was there, so it was pleasant for studying.

The weather was wonderful, and it was surprisingly clear, and, I could actually see Africa.

They also had a bonsai museum in Marbella, and some of the trees were more than 500 years old. Marbella was interesting culturally, because it was so touristy. There was actually a really large Russian population there while I was, and I heard nearly as much Russian that weekend as I did Spanish.

Santiago and Galicia

2009-09-12T14:02:00.009-04:00

The weekend of May 1-3, I took a trip to Galicia. I'd wanted to go to Santiago, because it was one of the culturally important cities that I hadn't been to yet in Spain, and the I found out that there was a suite of ultrahigh-pressure rocks on the very northern edge of Galicia, so I decided that it was worth one of my last weekends in Europe.

Galicia is the northwest-most autonomía in Spain, and it has the Atlantic Ocean to the west and the Cantabrian Sea to the north. Santiago de Compostela is the capital and alleged burial place of St. James (his tomb was discovered in Santiago in 814--St. James died in 44ad--during the Christian reconquest of Spain) . It's a very popular spot for pilgrims, and it's the final destination of the Camino de Santiago (the Way of St. James), which is the pilgrimage route that goes across Northern Spain.
There is a very ornate cathedral that was built in 1122, but was re-clad in it's current façade in 1750, because the old one was starting to dissolve because of the rain, since Galicia is one of the wettest places in Europe.
This is the high alter, which has St. James' tomb under it.
Some pilgrims outside of the church. I was only in Santiago for a couple of hours really early in the morning because I was waiting for a bus to the coast. The trip was quite exciting (11 buses in one weekend), because it was Spanish Labor Day, so it was a bit more difficult to get transportation. I had to take a bus to Madrid to catch the bus to Santiago, but after getting to Santiago, I took regional buses to Cariño, so it was much less busy.
Cariño is a popular vacation town, and near the northern-most point in Spain. I was there in the off-season, so it was pretty empty, but it was breath-takingly beautiful. The coast was really rugged and rocky, and I found some amazing eclogites, which were what I went to Cariño to see.

A street in Cariño.
Mountains of eclogite
The weather was beautiful when I was in Galicia, but the lush forests (it looked like rainforest) made it pretty clear that it is extremely wet in Galicia.
The northern-most point in Span
Cariño from the mountains
A 1 Euro-cent coin modeling with some eclogites

updates

2009-08-09T20:40:00.003-04:00

Just so you all know, I made it back from Spain safely the 30st of May after some exciting travel (I missed one flight and almost missed another). I stopped updating my blog in April because I got really busy with school, and I was planning on not finishing it, but some people said that they would like to read about the rest of my adventures, so I'm going to right one more post for each of my trips from April 17 until May 30th.
Since I started my post about Portugal in May, that one will actually appear before this one.
Enjoy.

Portugal (or Paradise)

2009-05-04T12:16:00.012-04:00

If you remember last semester, IES took us on a weekend-long trip to Granada and Sevilla, and this semester, they took us to Portugal the weekend after Easter. We left on Friday, and the first place we stopped was Coimbra, which is the Salamanca of Portugal: it's a relatively small city, whose history is dominated by a historical university.
We took a tour of the university and the old town. The picture above is from the oldest part of the university (the patio de escuelas-where the frog is- would be the Salamantino equivalent). There we saw the old library (below) and a richly-decorated chaple, both of which were remnants of Portugal's gold age of exploration.
The University of Coimbra also has many student customs, including their typical dress, which they wear from sophomore year on, and reminded me of Harry Potter robes (they even had black capes).
Coimbra is also home to the oldest living thing in Portugal, which is a 1,000-year-old olive tree that was a gift from the Holy Land. It doesn't look very impressive, but it's really neat to think about all of the change that has happened while this tree has been alive.
Since Portugal is much closer to the ocean, it was warmer and more humid than in Spain, and there were a lot of fun, nearly tropical plants, like the bird of paradise here.
On the way to Lisbon, we stopped for lunch in Batalha, Portugal, which is the place where the Portuguese finally beat the Spanish to secure independence. They built an amazing monastery and church with great stained glass.

That evening, when we got to Lisbon, we checked into our hotel and then went to a Brazilian restaurant, where they had amazing black beans and rice and 10 different kinds of meat that the cut from giant skewers onto individual's plates, which was pretty neat.
The next day, it was beautiful in the morning. We drove to Sintra, which is a suburb of Lisbon, to see the royal palace. The palace was ok, but the city itself was a tropical paradise. Everything was lush and green, and just breath-takingly beautiful.

We had some free time after we visited the palace, so we picked a road to walk down, and we came across this waterfall, but then, we turned a corner and found a spectacular garden/ villa that fit my idea of paradise perfectly. It was 9 euros a person to enter, but it was probably the best 9 euros I spent on that trip.
The gardens were actually designed to represent Eden, and they had stone structures hidden in plants and windy paths and nooks and crannies and caves and a secret tunnel. The first floor of the mansion was modeled after Roman villas, but the other floors were just really strange. There was one room with bookshelves along all of the walls a mirrors underneath of them all around the perimeter of the room, so it felt like the room was floating in a never-ending tunnel of books. It was very, very creepy. The towers offered nice views of all of the surrounding area though, but they were really narrow, and not easy to climb up.
After Sintra, we headed to Boca do Inferno, which is the furthest west point of mainland Europe. There were some pretty rocks, and the ocean was really big and enticing.

As soon as we left Boca do Inferno (which means mouth of hell in Portuguese), it started to rain, so the rest of the day was much less enjoyable. We rounded out the day with a trip to a monastery in Lisbon, where I got to see some gargoyles spitting water, and a visit to the mariners museum, where I found some nice fossil ammonites.

On our way back to the hotel, we saw a bridge that is nearly the same as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Fransisco. Lisbon also has their very own Christ the Redeemer statute that is the same as the one in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
On our way home from Portugal, we stopped in Fatima, which is a holy city in Portugal where the Virgin Mary appeared to some shepherd children and told them three secrets, which the Vatican has decided were authentic. There were a lot of pilgrims there, and it was really interesting to see all of the intensely faithful people thanking or praying to the Virgin of Fatima.

The bus ride home was really long, and when we got back, my housemate and I realized that we had a stomach bug that kept us pretty miserable for a couple weeks. We were sick the Monday we got back, and missed the important Salamantino holiday of Lunes de las Aguas, Monday of the waters, which celebrates bringing the prostitutes back from the other side of the river, where they had to stay during lent so they couldn't distract people from being good, faithful Catholics.

Semana Santa- Grandparents

2009-04-29T13:26:00.004-04:00

For the second half of my break, I stayed in Salamanca with my grandparents. We met in the Madrid airport, and I took them back to Salamanca, where we checked-in to the hotel, and they got some sleep. The next day, I gave them the grand tour of Salamanca, and we had a coffee date with my señora where I got to play translator. Spain goes a bit crazy for Holy Week (Semana Santa), and there were processions all hours of the day and night, and more people than I've ever seen in the streets of Salamanca. On Thursday, we went to Zamora (I was there before in September), which is well-known for its processions. The processions are sponsored by certain "brotherhoods" who are in charge of carrying certain special statues through the streets. The uniforms they wear are slightly scary looking, and for that reason, the KKK took the inspiration for their robes and masks from the Spanish Catholics (there's a little bit of irony here). Some processions, like the one that ended just before we got to Zamora have women wearing the traditional Spanish headscarf (women during Franco times were required to wear them whenever they left the house), and all of them are accompanied by one or more bands. They also walk really slowly. For the first procession we went to see, we went to the Plaza Mayor, which was listed in the paper as being on the route. We waited for 45 minutes after the time it was supposed to start, and then we started back toward the hotel. We didn't get too far, though, before we ran into the procession, which was blocking our way. When we found it, it was only 5 blocks from where it was supposed to start, and it was an hour after it was supposed to start.
On Friday, we spent the day in Salamanca shopping, which was lucky, because it snowed! It wasn't too bad in Salamanca, except for being crazy cold, but when we went to Madrid the next day, there was a lot of snow along the highway. Our hotel in Madrid was near the airport, so it would have been difficult to get to downtown, and all of the touristy places were closed on Saturday afternoon and Sunday. Fortunately, the mall near our hotel was open, so we had Easter dinner at a buffet with pretty good Spanish food. Monday I went to the airport the Grandma and Grandpa and then came back to Salamanca after a very nice, and (mostly) relaxing break.
The garden near the Facultad de Ciencias with the wisteria arbors. It is a very lovely place to read when it's warm enough.

Coffee Date

A procession

This is the only picture we have from Zamora because we spent most of the time walking around. The flowers were really pretty though.
Snow! In Spain! On the 10th of April (Good Friday)!

Semana Santa- París

2009-04-29T06:11:00.007-04:00

Holy week holidays started on the Thursday before Palm Sunday, and we didn't have housing in Salamanca until the Monday after Easter, so everyone traveled. My grandparents came to Spain for Easter, but they didn't get here until the Tuesday before Easter, so I had a long weekend to travel by myself. I decided to use this time to go to Paris, since I felt like it was one of those places that you have to see in Europe, and I didn't know when else I was going to have time to go there. I went by train, which was the cheapest, quickest way, and I also wanted to see the countryside. I left on Friday morning from Salamanca and spent the entire day on Friday getting to the border with France. It wouldn't have taken so long, except that the train broke down in Burgos (the capital of the most eastern province of Castilla-León), so we had to wait for buses to come and take us to our destinations. The bus ride was fine, and there were some really spectacular road cuts of folded rocks when we got near the border. Since there were some people who had a train to catch (I was taking a train the next day) they took us to France to drop those people off before bringing the rest of us back to Spain. I spent the night in a pensión in the town Irún, which is on the ocean and the French border.
The next morning, I followed the Camino de Santiago (the route the pilgrams from France take to Santiago de Compostela, which is where St. John is allegedly burried) backwards and walked to France to Hendaye to catch my train. This part of Spain was breathe-takingly beautiful with beautiful, green, steep hills, and when I was there it was warm and humid and foggy. Hendaye was a pituresque little town and I spent the morning exploring the town while I waited for my train. The train ride to Paris was also beautiful, and I think that that day was the most quaint, pretty day I've had in Europe. When I got to Paris, I checked-in to my hotel and met-up with a friend from high school who is studyin in Paris this semester, and we walked around a little in the area near my hotel.
Sunday I got up and started exploring Paris. I decided to not use the metro so I could see more of the city, so I started my day by walking to Notre Dame via Batille. There were a whole lot of people there, which wasn't too surprising, since it was Palm Sunday. There were also a lot of gypsy's heckling tourists, and whenever I took out my camera, or took off y coat, I looked like a tourist, so I didn't take my camera out too much. I was a little disappointed by Notre Dame, since it's not very big, or old, or especially interestingly decorated. I also didn't go inside because there was a really long line, and it feels wrong to go in a church for touristy reasons when there are people there for religious reasons.
The Seine River was pretty too, but it seemed really trapped, because the Parisians didn't give it a flood plain. After visiting Notre Dame, I went to the Latin Quarter, which was my favorite part of Paris because it seems the least pretentious, and there were a lot of students and a few less tourists. I went through the Latin Quarter and found the Senate building and a park and the Pantheon. I went in search of the geology museum, which was by the zoo and the institute for the Arab world. The geology museum is in a complex with a mineralogy museum, a paleontology museum, and the zoo. It turned out that the geology museum was closed for renovations, and the mineralogy museum was closed because they were installing a special exhibit, so I went to the paleontology museum. They had a special Darwin exhibit (for the 200th anniversary of his birth) and they show fossils relevant to The Origin of Species, which was interesting because I was reading it in Spanish at the time. I spent nearly 2 hours there, and most of the time I was in the invertebrates (it's a bit geeky). They had some really cool fossils though, like Burgess Shale and Ediacaran fossils. They also had several trilobites from Wisconsin, including one that was from Eau Claire! They had an outdoor geology exhibit too, but they had all of the rocks in cages, which made me sad. I think it would be a great idea to have outdoor geology museums with rocks that people can touch. I went back to my hotel via a tower that had a statue of Pascal in it, because he did experiments on air pressure there.

Pascal

I bought my dinner at a grocery store and had juice, Camembert cheese, and a baguette, and then I went to bed.
The next day I explored the west side of the city. I started at the Louvre (I didn't go inside again because there was a lot I wanted to see, and to be perfectly honest, I'm not a huge fan of art).

I instead walked toward the shopping district, which sort-of disgusted me because of all of the excessive wealth. After that unpleasant wake-up call, I went to the last really famous Paris site on my list. The Eiffel Tower was actually very pretty, and I liked it much more than I'd expected. There are really pretty gardens around the tower itself, and that's where I ate my picnic lunch, and before leaving, I took the obligatory Eiffel Tower picture.
I also realized that the Eiffel Tower looks a bit like an exponential curve, which made me like it even more.
After visiting the Eiffel Tower, I wandered back along the Left Bank back to the Latin Quarter, where I ate dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant before heading back to my hotel to get some sleep before catching my flight the next morning.
Tuesday morning was nearly disastrous. I left the hotel in time to get to the train station to get my ticket to the airport, and I got to the train station with plenty of time to spare. I was planning to buy my ticket from a person, but it was just after 5:00am, and there weren't any people, but I figured out the machines without any trouble. I'd been carrying around a lot of Euro in change for when I met my grandparents to take them to Salamanca, which was a very good thing, because the machines only took exact change, and the train ticket was more than 8€. After getting my ticket, I started following the signs to the platform for the train I needed, but after going through an electronic barrier (where I had to put my ticket in), I found out that the platform that I was on was under construction. I went back out and found the correct platform, but since I'd already scanned my ticket, I couldn't get through. I started to get concerned (as well as angry), and I went to find a person to help me, but there wasn't anybody. Frustrated, I went back to the ticket machines, which also had a credit card option, and tried to pay with all of my credit cards, but it wouldn't accept any of them. By now, it was nearly 6, and I needed to catch the 6:15 train to make it to the airport on time, so I tried to find some sort of store that was open so I could get some change, but there wasn't anything in the train station. I was really nervous, and I just went walking all over the station trying to find something, and I miraculously found myself on the platform for the train I needed, but the 6:15 train had already left, so I had to wait until 6:45. Luckily, the 6:45 train was express, so I got to the airport 5 minutes before check-in was supposed to close, and I was one of those annoying people who runs through the airport. I found my check-in counter, just in time, and was waiting in line, when a couple of old French ladies budged me. They took a really long time to check-in, since they had a lot of questions and complaints, and I didn't check-in until after I was supposed to be boarding, but the gate and security were immediately behind the counter, so I made it. I was especially worried because I was supposed to be meeting my grandparents at the Madrid airport, and I had no way to contact them. The Paris airport fiasco was definitely one of the most stressful experiences that I've had ever. Luckily, it turned out fine, and I found my grandparents and got ready to start the second half of my Semana Santa.

Bordeaux and vistor

2009-04-29T05:49:00.005-04:00

After Dublin, I took a couple weeks off of traveling to write my papers, and the next trip I took was to Bordeaux, France with a friend from school who was visiting from the US. We started in Madrid, where I picked her up at the airport, and we spent a few hours in Madrid's central park before catching our bus to Bordeaux. We were taking an over-night bus, and we went to Bordeaux because there was a bus (maybe not the best reason to go visit a city). The bus ride was ok, but we didn't get much sleep, and we got to Bordeaux before dawn. We ended up going to the train station and waiting there until it got light, and then we took a taxi to our hotel, which wouldn't let us check-in until 3pm. We spent the rest of our first day there in the mall that was next to our hotel and in a park that was between the two. Once we checked-in, we both slept until the next morning. The next day we spent exploring the city, which is really industrial, although the old part of the city was pretty. Our train left the next morning, so we didn't spend too much time in the city. The train ride back to Spain was very pretty, especially when it followed the coast, and when it was in the Pyrenees foothills. We had to switch trains at the border (Spain and France don't use the same gauge train tracks), and we had a tense moment, when we were afraid that we were going to miss our train, but we made it home without too many problems.
My friend stayed with me that week and we did all of the Salamanca things and went back to Madrid the next weekend, where we saw a clothing museum and an Ancient Egyptian temple (it is the only complete, authentic temple outside Egypt and was a gift from Egypt to Spain after Spain helped them save some monuments from flooding). The clothing museum was probably the best museum I've seen in Spain, and it was really well-designed and interesting. The next day, I bid my friend farewell at the airport and headed to the Reina Sofía art museum in Madrid for the Dalí and Guernica, a famous painting by Picasso about the Spanish Civil War. After that, I went home to finish my essays before Semana Santa.
These are pictures from the cathedral in Bordeaux.

Dublín

2009-04-15T12:50:00.012-04:00

The last weekend in February, I met a friend in Dublin, and we had a great time.
We met in the airport on Friday evening and set out to find our hostel, which was downtown. We checked in and went to bed, since neither of us is the going out type and we had a long day planned.
This is the hostel. The green blur is me not realizing that there was a picture being taken.
We got up bright and early the next morning, enjoyed the complimentary breakfast (milk for drinking!), and headed to St. Patrick's. The cathedral was very different from most of the cathedrals I've seen, partly because it's really young and it also has a lot of Irish architecture (of course). Also, I was a bit disappointed that they still call St. Patrick's a cathedral, because it is non-denominational now, and it's not the bishop's church. In Spain, especially in the middle ages and golden age, having a cathedral was very important, and the distinction between a cathedral and a normal church is still very clear here. St. Patrick's did a very good job though of being a big, beautiful church.
Floor tiles, which were very decorative and very non-Spanish
The organ where Handle played (they also had a really old (possibly original) copy of the Messiah)
This is a monument/ tomb for the Boyle family. The little Boyle in red in the middle is the famous chemist, Robert Boyle.
Apparently, John Wesley also preached here and served communion in a silver service that he later donated to the church. Someone stole it, but the Methodists donated a replica, but it was behind glass and didn't photograph well.
Upon leaving the church, we stumbled across the oldest public library in Dublin, and we contemplated going in, but it wasn't open yet and we had other things to go see, but we still took a picture.
Also, the guy who founded it has the same last name as my favorite Lawrence president.
The garden where St. Patrick allegedly baptized converts wasn't open either, but we took some pictures of that too.
Our next stop was Trinity College to see the book of Kells, which ended up being a bit of an adventure. My friend left me in charge of directions, and when I do directions I just walk in the general direction of where I'm headed, so that's what we did. Except we went the wrong way. Luckily, we figured it out without too much daño and found Trinity College, etc.
The Book of Kells is a really old illustrated New Testament, and it was really cool, especially with the display, but it really couldn't hold a candle to the Trinity college library, which was an amazing long room filled floor to ceiling with really old books. They didn't allow pictures, but there are some on-line on the library's web-page: http://www.tcd.ie/Library/heritage/longroom.php
After visiting Trinity College and seeing the Book of Kells, we started looking for a bench on which to eat our picnic lunch on our way to Guinness. I didn't anticipate any problems with finding a place to eat, but there aren't very many benches in Dublin, and we spent a long time looking for one, but we did eventually find a place to eat. We had quite an impressive picnic, mostly because my señora packed me my weight in food, and it was really a beautiful day for a picnic.
After lunch, we went to Guinness. The journey to the museum was a little like my walk around Palatine Hill. Guinness is actually huge, and we didn't really know where the museum was, so we just walked around it, assuming that we would eventually get there, which was accurate, even if we did end up walking much further than necessary. Walking around the entire Guinness plant also gave us an opportunity to take lots of pictures of signs that said "Guinness", and we talked about how jealous my dad would be.
I didn't take this picture, since my self-portrait skills are not that good and my friend always has her eyes closed when I take a picture of both of us.
The Guinness museum was fairly interesting, and most of it was about the process of making beer, which I was already familiar with. It was still really interesting because it was very interactive and the even had places where you could taste the beer and its components at different stages. They also had a huge sandbox of barley, which reminded me of the corn table in preschool...
At the end of the museum tour, you can get a pint of Guinness or a soda, and since my friend and I were convinced that we wouldn't both be able to drink a pint, we got one of each and shared. Surprisingly, I thought Guinness tasted much better than the clear beers I've had (I'm going to blame my dad for the dark-beer genes).

Here's our pint.

The bar is on the top of the museum in a glass room that had some really excellent views, so I took some pictures of the Guinness plant for my dad and some of the mountains for me.

After several hours at Guinness, we decided to try to walk to the ocean before finding dinner, and the walk was very beautiful, but the sun set before we could actually get to the ocean (later, we looked at a map and it's actually kind-of tricky to get to the ocean, since they have the harbor and all).
We have no idea what this old boat is, but I thought my sister would like it.
When we finally started looking for a place to have dinner, we were looking for a pub, but there was England v Ireland in the rugby play-off's so all of the pubs were full, and we went to a Chinese restaurant instead. The food was really good, and the vegetarian entrees were really cheap, which made up for not being able to get a Strongbow with dinner. Since we were exhausted from our day, we picked up some snack food (Strongbow, chocolate, chocolate-chunk cookies dipped in chocolate, and Mars bars) and spent the rest of the evening in the hostel.I had to catch my flight early the next afternoon (thanks to the 4-hour travel adventure between the Madrid airport and Salamanca), so we spent the morning in the botanical garden.

It was wonderful, because it was warm and green and there were spring flowers blooming, and I really didn't want to go back to brow, rainy Spain.
Good thing that I couldn't see how difficult the trip back woul be, or I might have decided just to stay. I got to the airport pretty early, since I get too nervous if I'm not there at least an hour before my flight, which was very good because I got randomly selected for additional screening. The people at security took everything out of my backpack, and even took some of the things I'd bought out of their box. Good thing I never travel with anything illegal. Then, once I got to Madrid, I had to wait more than 2 hours because all of the buses were full, and during that time, someone stole my bus ticket, and I got to go get another one. The most annoying thing about the stolen bus ticket was that it was a non-refundable, open return ticket, that was assigned to the seat that was immediately in front of where I was sitting, and the seat was empty, which means that no one got anything out of it, except the bus company. I did make it back to Salamanca though, even if it was at 11pm.

Catch up

2009-04-15T12:46:00.003-04:00

So now that I have finished all of my papers and now that Holy Week is over, I should have time to catch up.
Just a quick note-
It snowed today in Salamanca, and it's the 15th of April. I think that someone needs to tell the weather that it's spring

Geology week

2009-03-16T14:59:00.004-04:00

The week after Carnaval, it was geology week in the Facultad de Ciencias. They had posters about why people should study geology and what geologists do (it's a good question) in the atrium and it was very impressive. Then, I climbed the stairs, and they had a display of common builind rocks in Salamanca with their trade names and the location where they were quarried. I was very impressed, and I took a few pictures:
This is the rock that is on the walls of the language building.
This is a slate that is all over the city. The quarry is actually right outside the city.
This marble is on the walls in the science building.

The trade name of the Salamanca sandstone that all of the buildings are built out of.

The next week was geologic engineering week, which was much less impressive. They only had one little poster in the foyer.

Carnaval

2009-03-13T13:52:00.010-04:00

Spain, being a good Catholic country, has wild drunken parties the days leading up to Lent, and one of the cities known for its Carnaval celebrations conveniently happens to be only an hour away from Salamanca by bus. So, my roommate and some other friends from our program decided to take a day trip there to see the city and see some Carnaval activities.
We left Salamanca at 9 in the morning, and there were 5 buses completely full of people that left then, so it was crazy. Since the city is tiny, and we weren't planning on going to any bars (which were completely full), we had very limited access to free bathrooms, so we decided to use the facilities in the bus station. My experience with bus station bathrooms is that they tend to be lacking, and this one was no exception; it even had sawdust floors.
The first thing we did was orient ourselves, which was very easy, since Ciudad Rodrigo has 6 streets and is a walled city with impressive Renascence defense structures. There is a cathedral that still has battle scars from when Napoleon attacked and the Plaza Mayor, which was converted into a bull ring, but little else. It was a beautiful day, so we spent a lot of time enjoying the sun.
Ciudad Rodrigo is famous for Carnaval because it falls near its saint's day, which means that there are bull fights. Ciudad Rodrigo is also small enough that they still do a lot of the traditional bull fighting "games" like having the bulls run through the streets and having a "capella" which is where all of the brave, macho men in the town can fight the bull. We saw one encierro, where the bull runs though the street chasing all of the stupid people who decide to run in front of it, and part of a capella, but we left before they did anything except taunt the bull.
After our exceptionally cultural morning, we had a nice lunch up on the city walls and spent the afternoon in a market and relaxing in a small, grassy plaza outside the city walls. The bus ride home was interesting, because several of the people on the bus were drunk, noisy Americans, and all of the people I was with and I pretended we weren't American (we didn't speak English) because we were so ashamed of them.
Here are some exciting Ciudad Rodrigo pictures:

The cathedral from near the bus station

Fortified ramparts

The river

There were a lot a bands in the city just walking around playing Spanish music.
In the Plaza Mayor, all of the bands met and had a show down, which ended in them all getting together and taking a picture, and then all of the older people passed the instrument off to some kids, who kept playing while the adults went and got drinks. It's Battle of the Bands Spain style.

They also had a bunch of 20-somethings and teens dressed in bull costumes that chased the kids through the street.

In the Plaza Mayor/ bullring

Silly, macho men taunting the bull. Most of the time, the poor bull could care less what was going on and ignored all of the people.

They also frequently herded cows into the bull ring to get the bulls attention. Like I said, he really wasn't interested in any of the proceedings.

Cannon wounds on the cathedral.

Here are some videos. The first one is one of the bands, the second is little kids getting chased by the fake bulls, and the third is of the bull running into the plaza. While I was making the third video, I forgot that I was taking a video, so there is some nice footage of the back of the person in front of me.

The past month

2009-03-13T13:49:00.002-04:00

Yes, I'm still here, and yes, I have been doing things the past 4 weeks, although you probably can't tell from what I've published on my blog. I will work on correcting this imbalance.

Visitor

2009-02-23T14:02:00.006-05:00

One of the great things about having visitors is that you not only have some one to make you leave your apartment, but you also have an excuse to go see all of the touristy things in the city and take pictures.
We didn't really do much during the 3 days that she was here, but we spent a lot of time in the sun and took a lot of pictures.

More storks

The tower by the Cueva de Salamanca

Storks in the courtyard of one of the academic buildings
El Palacio de Anaya, which is the language building

A monument to the growth of Castillian (the Spanish that they speak in Spain)
It says: The most beautiful city is watching, like the dashing painter of the gorgeous sky polishing all of the illuminated sky. Already with his light the brimming Tormes (the river in Salamanca) the flowers that garnish it banks attentively watch its white path and crystal waves. This is from Salamanca, the solid seat, the well of science, the source of miracles...
Lope de Vega (a Spanish poet and playwright from the 16th century)

The Roman bridge across the Río Tormes
A Celtic boar that guards the city. It lost its head when some naughty (likely intoxicated) college students pushed it into the river in the 1700's. They found the boar's body, but the head was never recovered.
A statue of Lazarillo de Tormes, who is the protagonist in the first real Spanish novel. According to the story, he was born in Salamanca.
Cathedral at sunset

More storks

My señora invited my friend over for comida, and we took some pictures from the balcony of my apartment.

The last picture is of the mountains. I don't really know for sure, but I think that they're in the Sistema Central

Stork Stalking

2009-02-23T13:52:00.003-05:00

The storks are back!
In the spring, the storks come through Spain from Africa and leave huge nests all over the buildings and trees. They are giant white and black birds with bright orange legs and beaks and make this great clacking sound, and I love watching them and looking for their nests. A friend of mine warned me that they might take out a restraining order against me...
These are some stork pictures from Salamanca:

Hooray cigueñas! My señora also told us that storks are a sure sign that spring is here. It's just too bad that my camera doesn't have a stork setting, but I guess I'm lucky that it has a rock and mountain setting...

More Siccar Point

2009-02-20T14:24:00.005-05:00

These are some pictures that I took from my friend...
There really was a rutabaga plant, at least we found some pretty convincing evidence.

Informational sign posts that are surprisingly helpful.

Rocks!

Rugged, Scottish coastline

My descent to the unconformity.

Unconformity!

A fun sign on the secret path from Cockburnspath to Siccar Point

Dunbar.

Valladolid

2009-02-11T13:04:00.005-05:00

Last Saturday, we took a day-trip to Valladolid, which is the capital of the Autonomía Castilla y León, which Salamanca is is (an autonomía is like a state, and Salamanca is a province as well as a city).

Valladolid is very different than Salamanca. Its architecture is not as Spanish and it looks a lot more like other, typical European cities. Most Salamantinos think that Valladolid is ugly, but they're a little biased.
Also, Valladolid is in the dead center of a sedimentary valley, which means that there is a lot less variety in building stones, and a whole lot of brick.

Because it was a Saturday, and we are in Spain, there wasn't really anything open in the morning, so the first place we visited was the cathedral. It is not a pretty as the one in Salamanca (they only ever built half of it).
But it is made out of travertine, which is kind-of exciting.

Then we went to visit the Cervantes house museum. Cervantes is probably the most famous author from Spain's Golden Age (1500's), and he wrote Don Quijote. Incidentally, although Cervantes only lived in Valladolid for a couple years, and he lived in Salamanca for a much longer time, Valladolid still has the house where he lived, so they get to have a museum. I think the Cervantes house in Salamanca was destroyed by Napolean...

"Here lived Cervantes"

We got a little lost on our way to Cervantes house, and when we asked for directions, we got a taste of the legendary Mediterranean hospitality, since the couple we asked took us right to the house.
After the Cervantes house, we had almuerzo in the Plaza Mayor (almuerzo is the meal between breakfast and the gigantic comida, which is between 2 and 3).
There was a carousel in the Plaza, but the sign specified that it was only for children.
After almuerzo, we went to the Museum of Valladolid, which was mostly about archeology. They had a lot of really interesting artifacts from when the Romans were in Spain, including some reconstructed villas from the province of Valladolid. Valladolid does not have Celtic artifacts like Salamanca.
We ate comida in a chocolatería (hot chocolate store), where we could buy drinks and have a place to eat the sandwiches that our señoras packed us. We had to kill a couple hours during comida, because everything was closed, but it turned out to be a nice, sunny day, even though it was a little cold (the weatherman had predicted that it would be cold and rainy). Our last stop of the day was the National Sculpture Museum, which was good, but did not have any modern sculpture and far too many Piedads (Mary holding the body of Jesus), Ecce Homos (Jesus' face while he's being crucified), and saints being martyred for my tastes. The most impressive thing in the sculpture museum was how much more realistic the sculpture during the middle ages was compared to the painting.
After our quick tour of the city, we got back on the bus, and made it home for cena (dinner seerved between 8 and 9).
Here are just some assorted pictures of Valladolid:

Cultural Experiences

2009-02-10T10:39:00.003-05:00

Some interesting cultural experiences from the past two weeks:
1. The Spanish version of Saturday Night Live. It's on Thursday after dinner (between 10 and 11pm), and it's not censored, so there was nudity, on public television.
2. My geo. prof. canceled class for the first 4 days because he had another class at the same time.
3. I found out that the queen of Spain is vegetarian.
4. The US needs to import Pasapalabras from Spain. It's a game show that is mostly vocabulary based. It's amazing.
5. People eat cuddlefish...

My apartment

2009-02-09T13:24:00.008-05:00

I moved, and I'm now living in an apartment with a señora who cooks me 3 meals a day and cleans my room, which is extremely convenient, although there are a lot of interesting moments when we don't really know what's going on. I also don't have internet at home, which means that I carry my computer with me every where during the week, so I can check e-mail and do homework when I have a free moment. My señora is very nice, and makes us talk to her and corrects our grammar, which are all good things. She also has 10 children, at least 4 of which live in Salamanca, and one comes over for lunch nearly every day, and 15 grandchildren. One of her grandkids lives in the same apartment building as us, and is over every weekday from sometime in the afternoon until 8. The food has also been excellent. Every dinner, we have a plate of soup and a plate of either fish, eggs, or vegetables for me. Lunch is a little more varied, with 2 plates and fruit every day. Our apartment is huge, and it's actually 2 apartments converted into 1. My housemate (who is really nice) and I have our own half of the apartment with our own door and bathroom, which is highly convenient.
Here are some pictures:

This is our door. We live on the 9th floor of the apartment (in American floor numbers)

The hallway if you come in the door and turn left. The dinning room is to the right.

The kitchen with...

larvikite counter tops :)

If you go to the end of the hall and turn left, here's my room.

And my housemate's room

and to the left of my housemate's room is our bathroom

When you enter my room the first this you see is the desk.

Then there's a storage closet that's full of kid's toys, and the balcony.

The balcony looks over a really narrow courtyard.

My bed is next to the heater (which is only on from 12pm to 12am). There is also a secret room between my housemate's room and mine. There's a window we can see from the balcony and we hear people in this room, but we can't get to it, and there's a wall on the other side. Very mysterious.

and the closet

and the shelves with my birthday cards

and my birthday cards.

my plant

and my books. I felt like it would be interesting to compare them to my books from the beginning of last semester.

That's the grand tour.

Birthday

2009-02-05T13:36:00.002-05:00

Thanks for all of the birthday cards. They make a nice addition to my room. I'll put up pictures next week when I have a faster internet connection.
My señora is making arroz con leche for comida today, and I'm pretty excited about that, and tomorrow my housemate, and IES friend and I are going to Valladolid for the day. Exciting stuff.

London

2009-02-01T12:01:00.006-05:00

I'm finally catching up on my travels. I don't have internet in my house, and the internet in my study aboard center has been alternating between immensely slow and not functioning, and, until yesterday, I couldn't use the wireless at USal. Fortunately, I got the USal problem fixed (it turns out that all of my student Id cards have a different number on them and, my actual user Id was a different number yet.
So London. I went to London immediately after finishing my USal finals, and I stayed with a friend who is studying at the Lawrence London Centre, which was pretty convenient because I didn't have to find my own housing, and I had a kitchen and a travel guide. I flew out of Valladolid airport, which is only an hour from Salamanca by bus, is much smaller than Madrid, and has a bus that goes directly between it and Salamanca. Additionally, flights to London from Valladolid are only 15€ each way, which is a great deal, and the bus tickets are only 20€ round trip. Altogether, Valladolid is better than Madrid, although they only have one flight every other day. My flight left late, remeber I'm leaving from Spain..., so I got into the airport late. When I got into Stansted airport, I found out that the train wasn't running, so I'd have to take a bus, which took another hour. Luckily, I have nice friends who waited for me at the train station and found me when I got there, and I repayed their kindness by making dinner.
Actually, the friend I was staying with can't cook, so I also made dinner because the other option was pasta with salt...

The next day, we took out our A to Z (pronounced "zed") and visited all of the really touristy places in downtown London.

Like Big Ben

and Parliment
and Westminster Abbey

and Trafalgar Square (which is not actually square)

and Piccadilly Circus

and Buckingham Palace
and some pretty gardens

That afternoon, my friend had an art class, so I wandered about for a bit. I ended up going back to Paccadilly Circus, because I knew for some strange reason that the Geologic Society of London's address had some-sort of Piccadilly in it, and I wanted to see if I could find it. I had some trouble with that at first, but I eventually realized that I was having trouble finding it because it was in a huge building. I didn't go inside, but I took some pictures from of the outside.

My friend and I then went out for dinner (we got Indian, since they don't do foreign food in Spain), and returned to her place to rest for the next day, which was...more touristy stuff!

We went to the Tower of London, and the Tower Bridge (it turns out that London Bridge is a little underwhelming, and the Tower Bridge is much prettier).

Tower of London pictures. The Tower of London is actually a collection of small towers and an old wall

and bridge pictures

After visiting the Tower and Bridge, we went to the Natural History museum because my friend wanted to see me "geek out" (her words). It was pretty amazing.
I thought that this phrase would make a nice, simple life philosophy...

More inspirational words

After spending some time in the museum and some store related to some geologic society (they had geologic maps of Siccar Point, but no topo map) we hurried home to watch the inauguration on-line, and then we went out to a pub to celebrate.
They actually had very tasty falafel burgers at the pub, and it wasn't smokey, which makes me like London a whole lot.
We also got a 1 GBpound pound cake from Sainsbury's (aren't they clever). Actually, this picture shows some of the best food in the world: Sainsbury's custard creams, a Milka Cookies bar, rellena de chocolate cookies, Nairns, a chocolate cake and a Strongbow...
Just to avoid confusion, we the only place that we actually went inside was the Natural History Museum, everything else we enjoyed from the outside.

The next day, I left really early, and after some tube issues (a lot of routes were closed) I made it to the airport and back to Spain. I had a fairly enjoyable flight back and the person sitting next to me talked to me the whole time in Spanish, which was good practice. I made it back to Salamanca fine, and I started to pack to get ready to move to my new house, a Spanish apartment where I live with my house mate, my Señora, and her various family members (she has 10 kids and 15 grandkids, most of which live in Salamanca), who are always stopping by for lunch.
Look for my new home and school stuff soon.

Berlin

2009-01-29T10:44:00.009-05:00

After our fun adventures at the airport, I headed to Berlin with my friend who is studying there. She was going back to more school (haha), but I was there for vacation. I ended up spending 7 days in total in Berlin, and I stayed with my friend in her host family's apartment. One of her hosts speaks English, but the other doesn't, although he did speak a little Russian. This lead to a lot of fun conversations in a strange mix of English, German, and Russian, but, in the end, it was all ok. It was also really cold and snowy while I was in Berlin. It had snowed the day before we arrived, and I don't think that it got above freezing the entire time I was there.
My first day in Berlin (Jan 5) I didn't do much. We got in around lunch time, and my friend's host made us lunch. After that, we went grocery shopping, and we went to my friend's orchestra rehearsal. On Tuesday, I wandered around West Berlin, which is where my friend is staying, for a bit and I spent a couple hours in an amazing bookstore on Friedrichstraβe, Dussmann, which had an impressive foreign language section. I ended up buying Harry Potter 5 (OotP for people who speak Harry Potter) in Spanish, since it was much cheaper in Berlin than anywhere I've seen in in Spain, and I read Candide and a little bit of Terry Pratchett's "Small Gods". On Wednesday, my fried took me around the city to see where all of the touristy stuff was.
Like I said, it was cold and snowy, and these poor, cold ducks are sitting on the ice in the Spree. You really can't help but feel sorry for them.

Brandenburger Tor. It is the old city gate in Berlin and miraculously survived WWII and was a gate between East and West Berlin before the wall fell. The American Embassy is immediately to the left of Brandenburger Tor.
And here is the scary American Embassy in Berlin with armed guards outside all of the doors and around the perimeter. Apparently, there were plans to build the embassy in this location before the Americans realized that they needed a secure zone around the embassy, so they asked the city of Berlin to first move the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which hadn't been built yet, and then when Berlin said that they couldn't, they asked them to move Brandenburger Tor, which is one of the iconic buildings of Berlin. Of course, Berlin didn't move Brandenburger Tor, so the Americans redesigned the embassy to have the building be part of the buffer zone, which was the obvious answer that was probably easier and cheeper than anything else. No wonder Europeans think the Americans are arrogant!
The Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe. There is also a really good museum underneath of the monument.

The Reichstag, which has a really neat dome. Its a government building of some sort.

Thursday, we took a day trip to Potsdam, which is a suburb of Berlin and the place where all of the royalty of Germany lived for a long time.

We took the S-bahn, which is the inner-city train from the Hauptbahnhoff (Main train station). It was really pretty, and the sunrise was really pretty too.
Giant ice crystals on the snow (probably frost). They are just really pretty.

Potsdam is really, really picturesque.
We saw one of Mozart's houses. Apparently he had a whole bunch of houses scattered all over Europe.

A pretty church.

Inside the church.

Christmas tree in the church in Potsdam. The Germans like to use these spindly stars as Christmas decorations all over the place.
This picture is for one of my friends.

Potsdam also has a Brandenburger Tor. It seems like the cool thing to have.

The main attraction of Potsdam is the park that used to be where all of the royal people lived, and there are lots of pretty buildings and sculptures and such there.

Pretty pictures of the snow and some more cold ducks.
And ski tracks. There were lots of people skiing in Potsdam and Dresden (more about that later), and it made me really miss my snowy Wisconsin winters.

Theses are all pictures of the summer palace. We were thinking about going to visit the other palace, but we would have had to take a tour, and we just wanted to see one room that was full of pretty rocks that came from the rock collections of various monarchs. We also wanted to get back to try to get student rush tickets to the Nutcracker, which didn't work out, but we did go to some museums for free museum night and we saw lots of cool old stuff, including a very nice display of the common marbles used in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome and their origins (there were a lot from Spain). On Friday, my friend had class all day, so I wandered about Berlin, and I went to the museum that is a part of the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe, where I spent nearly 4 hours.
On Saturday, we went to Dresden, which is a city southeast of Berlin that was nearly completely destroyed by the allies in WWII. Most of it has been re-built and it is a very pretty city full of stone buildings and narrow streets. We spent the whole time we were there just walking around, and it was really, really cold.
I actually don't know what any of these buildings are, although I think the one with the clock on it has a geology museum in it. The most striking thing about all of the buildings in Dresden is how obvious the damage from the bombing is. Most of the buildings are a mix of old and new stone, and there are still several ruins in downtown Dresden.

Dresden is trying to be a green city and they have tons of bike paths around the city and the river. There were also a lot of people skiing and pulling their kids on sleds down by the Elbe, the river. I'm always impressed that European cities don't have much development on the flood plains of their rivers, which makes so much practical sense.

The Japanese Palace, which is now an art museum. It was in the Neustadt, and we crossed the river to see it, which was very cold, but gave us an excellent excused to have a snow fight, which will likely be the only snow I get to play in this year.

On Sunday, we just hung out in my friend's apartment and we made her hosts muffins, and then Monday, early in the morning, I left to return to Spain for a few days of studying and my mineralogy final before heading to London. Germany was amazing, and, if I spoke German, I would go back to spend more time there. The people were really nice, the public transportation was always on time, and it was really clean. Plus they had snow...

Italia- Rome, Città Vaticano, Firenze

2009-01-22T14:17:00.022-05:00

I feel like I have a lot of pictures from Italy, although that's due to my friend who took over 1000 pictures during her winter break, and most of my Italy pictures are actually hers.
After dropping my parents off at the airport, I got on a bus to Bilbao. After realizing that my pesión wasn't within walking distance of anything worth walking to, I decided to stay at my pensión, read my guidebooks, and get plenty of sleep. I was probably in Bilbao for 12 hours, so I don't have any pictures. The following day, I met a friend who's studying in Germany this year at the bus station, and we caught a bus to the Santander airport, and flew to Rome.
This is San Sebastian, which is a really big resort town in the Basque Country of Spain. It is on the Cantabrian Sea and has a really famous beach.

As soon as we got to Rome, we went and found our hostel, which was only a 5-minute walk from the Colosseum, so that evening, we walked to the Colosseum and took some pictures (ok, my friend took pictures, and I watched, but I did make her take some pictures of rocks, although they didn't turn out well because rocks don't photograph well with low light or flash).
A pretty Roman arch that is between the Colosseum and Palatine Hill. After we saw this arch, we walked down some of the Via Sacra, which I recognized from my brief Latin studies.

The following day, we took a tour of the Colosseum and the Roman Forum, which was fascinating, although it did make humans look foolish, since they managed to engineer the Roman Empire and then spent a few centuries forgetting everything.

Lots of Colosseum. In the last picture, you can see where they reconstructed some of the floor.
Also, it didn't take me long to figure out that most of Rome was made out of travertine, since, on first arriving in Rome, we passes a metro stop called Travertine Arch. I let my friend model with this travertine in the Colosseum.

Via Sacra from the Colosseum.

The Roman Forum from near where Cesare was cremated.

Ruins of the Temple of Saturn

The other side of the Forum. The brick ruins in the middle are from one of the many palaces on Palatine Hill.

The Golden Mile, from which all of the distances in the Roman Empire were measured. It stood outside the Temple of Jupiter and used to have a column on top of it that told the distances to the major cities in the Empire.

The leaning tower of Rome. Thank an earthquake.

The Forum from Palatine Hill

Colosseum from Palatine Hill, which was where all of the Roman emperors (except Nero, sort-of) had their palaces. Mussolini built himself a house there too.

On New Year's Eve, after visiting the Colosseum and Forum, etc., we met a friend of mine who'd been studying with me in Salamanca during the fall and was in Rome with her family. We met at the Colosseum and went out to eat, and when we were trying to get back to our hostel on the other side of the Colosseum, we couldn't get through because the road was blocked off for New Year's. We ended up walking all of the way around Palatine Hill to get back, and the whole journey, which should have taken us 10 minutes, ended up taking an hour, becuase Palatine Hill is huge. We did, however, get to see the Circu Maximus, which is also huge, and it smells like a swamp.

Our research about New Year's Eve in Rome told us to go to the Piazza del Popolo, which in the the northern part of the city.

There was a big obelisk in the middle of the piazza. Actually there are obelisks all over Rome.

It turns out that New Year's in Rome is crazy. Everyone was setting off their own fireworks (it turns out that Roman candles are appropriately named). It was a bit dangerous, and, although my friend and I stayed away from the middle of the Piazza, people were throwing fireworks over our heads. I felt like this picture was a pretty accurate depiction of the proximity of people to fireworks.

There wasn't a clock in the Piazza, so we really didn't know when it was New Year's exactly, but at some undetermined point, everyone started yelling and spraying champagne all over. Rome also had their own fireworks show.

So I know that this photo is very poor quality, but it shows all of the broken glass (after people finished their champagne, they smashed the bottles) and firework debris.

The following day, since it was New Year's Day and nothing was open, we walked around the city and looked at the things that don't have to be open.
This fountain in from the Piazza Navona. It plays an important role in Dan Brown's "Angles and Demons". I also bought a candied apple in the Piazza Navona, becuase I'd always read about them, but never seen them for real. It tasted like an apple covered in cotton candy, which wasn't bad, although I thought it would taste cinnamonny.

We also threw coins in the Trevi Fountain, which guarantees that we will return to Rome some day.

After the Trevi, it started raining, so we went to lunch. When we left, it had stopped raining, but as soon as we got to the Spanish Steps, it started raining again, although it did make some good pictures.

This picture is from the top of the Spanish Steps looking down one of the main shopping streets (Both Prada (not Prado, which is a museum in Madrid) and Gucci have stores on this street).

This is at the bottom of the Spanish steps and gave me an unusual opportunity to be a little library-geeky. It's the Keats museum, and there's a store next to it called Byron. It reminded me of Dr. Jekyll's next to Hyde music on College Avenue (that's one of the only things I remember from move-in day at LU).

We wanted to get out of the rain, so we decided to go get gelato. We made the mistake of buying it only 2 blocks away from Gucci, so it was like 10€, which is really expensive. It did look pretty and it tasted pretty good, and it was a pretty good first encounter with gelato for me.

I saw this while eating my gelato. It's a Lodi Bank, which was pretty exciting to see, although it's probably named after Lodi, Italy rather than Lodi, WI.

The next day, we decided to go to the Vatican, and we planned on getting there early. We ended up getting there 1/2 hour later than we'd wanted to, but it proably wouldn't have made much of a difference, because we waited in line for more than 2-hours to get in. I'm assuming this was because of all of the Catholic pilgrims who came to Rome for the Pope's New Year's blessing. We decided to not go the St. Peter's to see the Pope to get blessed because it was really early in morning, it was really crowded, and neither of us in Catholic. The Vatican Museums were really crowded too, although that was an advantage in the Sistine Chaple because they really couldn't enforce the "no pictures" rule.

This is in the Vatican somewhere.

The Pope has a lot of amazing rocks in his country, although none of them are native. I think that the Vatican probably has the highest percentage of area covered by non-native rocks of any country in the world.

Yes, this is a Star of David made out of pretty rocks on the floor of the Vatican

Not only did the Vatican have amazing real rocks, it also had some great representations of rocks in paintings and tapestry.
The focus of this picture is not Jesus' feet, but rather the fairly realistic marble depicted in this tapestry.

Also the art in the Vatican was ok, by which I mean pretty amazing.
This is the "School of Athens" by Raphael. You can see Euclid (bottom right bent over and writing), Plato (standing, center in pink), Aristotle (standing on Plato's left in blue and green), and Socrates (the old guy in green in the upper left of the painting who's arguing with everyone). Pythagoras is in the bottom left, but he's blocked my someone's head, and Hypatia is barely visible in white at the left of the painting. There is an excellent Wikipedia page about this painting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_School_of_Athens

Here's my illegal picture of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. You can see Adam and Eve and God creating Adam.

And this is a pretty model of St. Peter's Basilica, which was in the museums, but makes an excellent segue into our visit to St. Peter's.

We left the museums after a few hours and a grumpy pizza lady and went over the St. Peter's. It was raining again, and we got to stand in another line there. At least this time we got to appreciate the beautiful architecture in St. Peter's square, and there was a really nice Italian lady who shared her umbrela with us.

Singing in the rain in St. Peter's square.

St. Peter's was huge. It's hard to appreciate how huge it is without seeing some pictures of people for scale. If you look at the Pope and other priests up at the high alter during Christmas Eve Mass and other important things, they look tiny, and they're standing under the high alter, which looks tiny from the back of the basilica.
Here's St. Peter's tomb. We did go down in the crypt and saw all of the Popes that are buried under St. Peter's (apparently a whole bunch more are buried in some catacombs elsewhere in Rome), and we saw St. Peter's tomb up close.

St. Peter also has some pretty rocks in his final resting place. This one has some pretty strain patterns.

The following day, we looked at some more of Rome, and we spent most of the day walking around, and we did some book shopping (my friend studies Italian and most of the book stores had a nice selection of Spanish books, although I did spend a lot of time "reading" the pop-up books, and I "read" every "Little Polar Bear" book that they print in Italy. Most of my reading involved looking at the pictures and making up stories to go with them that fit the words that I recognized. I think that the large number of children's books that I've read makes it easier to make up the stories than when I was little).

We first visited the Pantheon, which has the largest free-standing concrete dome in the world, and it's original from the time of the Ancient Romans. The engineering that went into making the dome is pretty nifty too. The Pantheon is also the best-preserved Ancient Roman structure, thanks to the Catholic church converting it into a church shortly after the decline of Rome.

The Pantheon is especially famous for the oculus, which is the hole in the center of the dome.

Also the Pantheon has a complex drainage system under the oculus to remove water that gets in through the roof. It was raining when we were in the Pantheon, and I have to admit that I think that the Ancient Roman drainage system works better than the Modern Roman drainage system outside of the Pantheon.

After going to the Pantheon, we headed to Castel San Agelo, which is the Pope's fortress in Rome. We were planning on going in, but it was more expensive than the Vatican Museums and we didn't really feel like looking at a display of Renaissance weapons.
The Tiber and the bridge of Angles going to the Castle of Angles.
The Tiber was really muddy and had a lot of interesting woody debris in it. Castel San Angelo really does look like a fortress.

On our last day in Italy, we went to Florence, which is the capital of Tuscany and famous for its Renaissance art.

A pretty bridge and a narrow street that are really not significant, but have the feeling of Florence as a place just full of little pretty, European-feeling things.

We were in Florence on a Sunday, so nothing was open until the afternoon, so we spent the morning walking around, which was perfect, since Florence really isn't very big.
A lot of the menus in touristy places have a lot of English errors on them, but this one was especially priceless.

Florence has two really impressive churches: Santa Croce and Santa Maria de Fiore (also called the Duomo because of its dome). Santa Croce openned first, so we went there first.
Both of the churches look really similar on the outside with the white marble bordered in green. Santa Croce has a lot of famous people buried in it, like:

Galileo

Michelangelo

and a memorial to Dante. Machiavelli and Rossini are also buried there.

This statue is believed to have inspired the Statue of Liberty. It's called "The Liberty of Poetry"

Santa Croce was also a monastery, so there were a lot of other rooms and courtyards.
I posing here for an artsy, melancholy photo, but I mostly wanted to stand in the sun. It was rainy most of the time we were in Rome, and we actually decided to go to Florence rather than Pompeii because it was supposed to be sunny in Florence and rainy in Naples.

After going to the Santa Croce, we went to the Ponte Veccio (old bridge) on the way to the Duomo. The Ponte Vecchio was the only bridge in Florence to survive WWII.

Since the time of the Medici, the patrons of Florence during the Renaissance, the Ponte Vecchio has been lined with jewelry shops.

Finally we went to the Duomo.

The Duomo is most famous for its dome, which was designed by Brunelleschi and is one of the symbols of Florence and the Italian Renaissance, along with David (who is huge and also in Florence).

The stone-work on the outside of the Duomo was intricate, but very beautiful.

The inside was also very simple compared to most of the big churches that I've seen in Europe. Most of it was plain white, although the floors were really interesting. They were designed as optical illusions. When you stand in the middle of the first one, you feel like you are at the bottom of a really deep pit, and in the second one, you feel like you're in a Chinese finger-trap that's squeezing you. It was really, really cool.

We still had some time to kill after visiting the Duomo, so we decided to go try a gelato place that was recommended by and MTV guidebook that we read. We were pretty skeptical because the authors of this book tended to spend a lot of time focussing on rather suspicious aspects of visiting Europe (like what would happen to you in specific countries if you were caught with marijuana), but this place had amazing gelato. It was definitely the best gelato I've had in my life (although I've only had it 3 times).

So if you ever find yourself in Florence, you should look up this place.

On the way back to the train station, we found this amazing tactile map of Florence, that even had the street names written on it in Braille. I was very impressed.

On our way back to Rome, we got the experience the pleausres of the infamous Italian train-punctuality. The train that was supposed to leave an hour after our train, actually left before ours. It made me feel like I was back in Spain...
The tran ride home. I'm reading a Spanish book I just bought in Rome and holding my Fanta that I bought to buy us a place to sit in the train station.

The next day, we left for Berlin, after a really scarey moment at the airport where we were afraid that we were going to miss our flight. At the airport in Rome, they only had one security station open, and the line to go through security was a 3-hour long line. Since no one in Europe gets to the airport 3-hours before their flight, they had a seperate line for people whose planes were taking off in 15 minutes, which made all of flights leave late because no one got to their gates on time to board. It was a fun time, but we did get on the plane, and we did get to Berlin safetly.

And we flew over the Alps, which are amazing, pretty, snowy mountains.
So that's a record blog post as far as length, but now you can look forward to Berlin and London coming soon.

Christmas in Spain

2009-01-16T18:13:00.011-05:00

After my second whirl-wind tour of Edinburgh and the surrounding countryside, I had 4 days to myself, and then my parents and sister came to celebrate Christmas in Spain. We took a 10-day tour of the country, starting in Salamanca for a few days, then going to Granada, Barcelona, and, finally Madrid.
If you got our Christmas letter (or New Year's letter) this year, then most of this information will just be repeated.
I went and picked my parents up at the airport at any ungodly hour (I had to take the 6am bus...)and brought them back to my room for comida and packing, since they were bringing the suitcase that I was going to use for the next 3 weeks of traveling. I made them a proper Spanish comida with 2 courses and dessert, mostly because I had to use up a whole bunch of perishable food that other people had left me when they moved out. We couldn't eat all of it, so I ended up freezing some rice pudding, which was nice to have when I got back and didn't have any groceries. Then we went to our hotel, which was literally on the Plaza Mayor and went to bed early since we all were pretty tired. The next day, I took everyone around Salamanca and showed them all of the important sights, including churros and chocolate. We also did the cathedral and the Museum of Salamanca History.
The next day we took the train to Madrid and ended up catching a bus to Granada after finding out that there were no more trains to Granada that day. It was ok, though, because the bus ride was very pretty, and we made it to Granada earlier than the train would have. The next morning, we went and took a tour of the Alhambra, which was less exciting than it was last time I was there. We also explored Granada on foot for a little bit. After a good night's sleep, we did some more hard-core exploring and visited the cathedral, which was very white, and the Capilla Real (we got to see where Isabel, Fernando, Juana la Loca, and some other people were buried) with Isabel's painting collection, which was really nice (she was particularily fond of small paintings). That afternoon we went to the Garcia Lorca gardens. Federico Garcia Lorca was a controversial poet and playwright, who was a Franco victim. Granada turned his house and estate into some pretty amazing gardens, although they were under construction when we visited.
Early on Christmas Eve, we flew from Granada to Barcelona. The Federico Garcia Lorca airport is tiny, much smaller than Madison. Our flight left late (we were in Spain...), so we got to Madrid late, and almost missed our connecting flight after an incredibly slow border patrol (they're Spaniards, they have much more important things to do than pay attention to the people in line...). But after that, we made it to Barci, which, even without Gaudí, was an incredible city. Barcelona is in the autonomía of Cataloña, and they speak Catalan there, and I was a little concerned that I wouldn't be able to understand anyone, but Catalan looks like a mix between French and very phonetic Spanish, and it sounds a whole lot like the Castellano they speak in Salamanca, although the numbers are different. They sounded to me like the French numbers. We explored for a bit that night before going out to dinner at Els Quatre Gats, The Four Cats por inglés, which was a restaurant where Piccasso hung out in his youth. I like to think that it was the Brewed of the turn of the 20th century. The food was amazing, and it was a very fun way to spend Christmas Eve, although it is the first time I can remember not spending Christmas Eve at LUMC. Since everything was closed on Christmas, we spent the day walking around the city. Our hotel was just off of the Rambala, which is the main pedestrian street in Barci, so we started our day with a walk down the Rambala to the Mediterranean. There was a swim meet going on that day, which was a strange concept for Wisconsinites. We eventually wandered into a park that contained the zoo and a geology museum, which was, sadly, also closed. We were very fortunate that it was nice on Christmas, because the next day, it rained the entire day, so we took a tour bus around Barci and visited the Sagrada Familia, which is the famous Gaudí church. We ended the day getting soaked by a rain storm and getting some chocolate.
The next morning we left by high-speed train for Madrid. We visited the Royal Palace, which was amazing. Those royals really have lavish taste. We also saw the Royal String Quartet instruments, which are all Stradivarius and very impressive. Too bad, we couldn't hear them played. The next day, we went to the Prado, which had some amazing art, although there was too much to take in with just one visit. On the way back to our hotel, we went by the Plaza Mayor, where Santos Inocentes celebrations were well underway. Santos Inocentes is the saints day for the babies killed by Herod in the Massacre of the Innocents. In Spain, it is celebrated as a mix between Children's Day and April Fool's Day. All of the newspapers print practical jokes, and there are children's markets with street performers and funny hats and hair (the Spanish really have a thing with wigs) and balloons.
The next day, my parents left for the US, and I left for Bilbao and New Year's in Italy.

Plaza Mayor in Salamanca with Christmas tree.

Windmills in Castilla- La Mancha on the way to Granada

In the Alhambra

More Alhambra

Granada
In the Palace of Carlos V. They have concerts with the Royal String Quartet in the center of this palace.

Cathedral in Granada

In Spain, they have a lot of these figures who are breaking into the house. Here they are the 3 wise men, but sometimes it's Santa climbing up the balcony.

García Lorca gardens

Christmas Eve in Barcelona. Corte Inglés is wishing us Happy Holidays

Dinner at the 4 Gats

Christmas Day. This is a statue of Columbus pointing out to the sea, but he's not pointing to the New World, but rather Africa.

Pretty statue from when the Olympics were in Barci.

People dressed in costumes at the swim meet
People swimming. Outside. On Christmas Day...

A parrot in the gardens in Barci

Pretty fountain

Rocks outside the geology museum. All of the info about them was written in Catalan

Some one I'm assuming is a famous geologist, since his statue is outside the geo museum.

From the Nativity side of the Sagrada Familia

From the Crucifixion side of the Sagrada Familia. Yes, there is a secret code on the wall.

Inside the Sagrada Familia. I decided that Gaudí must have been very fond of calculus becuase of the shapes he used to design his buildings.

A turtle outside the Sagrada Familia. It's holding up a column. Apparently, Gaudí liked to use reptiles and gastropods from the Mediterranean in his architecture.

I don't have any pictures of Madrid or the rest of the trip, since I didn't take any. All of these pictures are from my dad, who's the family photographer.

Siccar Point (Again)!

2009-01-16T15:48:00.007-05:00

As you may remember, I mentioned in October that I took a trip to Scotland to look for some rocks, that I failed to find. Well, my friend and I decided that since we didn't know when we were going to get back to Europe, much less Scotland, we were going to try to get back and try again. We ended up meeting in Dunbar, a really nice town on the seashore, on the 14th of December for our second assault on Siccar Point. This time we were prepared with our memories about what not to do and lodging closer to Siccar Point. It was also convenient that there was neither a train strike nor construction on the railway. It seems like the stars had aligned to help us get to the unconformity this time.
This time, though I left for Scotland on Saturday morning (my flight left at 7am, which is a disgusting time to fly, but EasyJet only offered 7am flights between Madrid and Edinburgh in December. This also meant that I had to spend the night in Madrid at a hotel with transfers to the airport because Madrid public transportation doesn't start running until 6am). As soon as I got to Edinburgh, I got on the train to Dunbar, and made it in time to catch the 12pm bus to Cocksburnspath. Since the sun sets so early in Scotland in the winter, we had to be back in Cockburnspath before the last bus to Dunbar, so we couldn't get stuck in Cochbrnspath again (I really have nothing against Cockburnspath, but the only thing that they really have is a phone booth, which they are going to remove at the end of this year). So, armed with our previous knowledge of the greater Siccar Point area and some Nairns, we set off to find the unconformity.
Being slightly wiser than last time, we did not take the first path marked "Siccar Point Footpath" but instead followed the directions in the guidebooks we'd borrowed and continued toward the rutabaga plant (we could, conveniently, follow the trail of rutabagas). We eventually encountered sign posts with maps of the unconformity and pictures of our favorite geologist and his verbose friend, and we took that to be a sign from God, or at least Hutton, that we were on the right track. After seeing the map, we decided not to continue all of the way to the rutabaga plant (we would not want to be tempted like Rapunzel's mother), but followed a new footpath that was actually the same path we follwed last time, but this time we stayed on it until we got to the unconformity.
To make a long story short (too late), we found the unconformity and enjoyed the amazingly beautiful Scottish countryside, despite the incessant, cold rain, and on Sunday night I went back to the Methodist church I found the first time I was in Edinburgh over a Sunday. Some of the people remembered me, which was strange, but nice, and we sang some quasi-Christmas songs (apparently this church follows the liturgical calendar much better than good old LUMC ;). I was a little disappointed that there wasn't any snow where I was inScotland, but then I came back to a winter wonderland in Spain, which was the perfect end to my adventure, despite missing class the day I got back.

Sunrise over Madrid

Secret footpath to Siccar Point

Sheep! Good thing my friend wasn't worrying the livestock...

Map and James Hutton

Steep slope and pretty, slippery rocks

Unconformity!

The path down to the unconformity.

Sitting on about 80 million years. Also, I'm reading the free Salamanca newspaper, and I intend to send them this picture to see if I get my picture published in the travel section. Also, you can tell from the lovely red patch on my jeans that I had a little mishap with the path...

It deserved lots of pictures.

I love how this seashore looks like it's the end of the earth.

Ruins of St. Helen's parish, now in a sheep paddock.

My tiny, little hotel room in Edinburgh.

Sunrise behind North Bridge in Edinburgh. I feel like I need to put in lots of sunrise pictures because my family doesn't believe that I can wake up early enough to see the sunrise ;)

Nochevieja Universitaria

2009-01-16T15:27:00.005-05:00

Well, I'm finally back in Salamanca after a 3-week hiatus around Europe. I promise that there will be pictures and information soon, but I'm trying to keep everything in order.
Nochevieja means New Year's Eve in Spanish, and it's a pretty big deal, with lots of parties and every one staying out until 2 the next afternoon. Unfortunately for USal students, most of them are home, or at least not in Salamanca, for New Year's Eve, so the students organized their own New Year's Eve party, on the 12th of January, which conveniently happens to be the day before they put up the giant Christmas tree in the Plaza Mayor. Mostly, Nochevieja is a huge party, about 50,000 people big, but it has all of the trappings of traditional Spanish New Year's, including the twelve grapes (which are replaced by gummies) that you are supposed to eat at every chime of the cathedral bell at midnight. Other slight modifications in the university version of New Year's Eve, included a live band and the president of the university counting down to midnight and lots of advertising, including the orange wigs that are in all of the pictures.
The people that I celebrated Nochevieja with before the Plaza Mayor was completely overflowing with people.

More advertising, plus a nice "Happy Holidays" message.

The Plaza Mayor filled past capacity. Plus the really horrible Christmas lights that they hung all around the Plaza Mayor, and, since we're in Spain, of course they flashed.

Midnight!

Happy New Year's (2 weeks early)!

We did not stay out all night (we didn't even make it to 1) because we all had finals the next day for our IES classes, but it was still really fun, despite the noise and crowd.

Concert

2008-12-17T11:26:00.002-05:00

Apparently, my religion prof. is a big wig in Salamanca, and he got invitation only tickets to the Castilla y León orchestra concert celebrating Salamanca's 20th anniversary as a patron city of humanity. Any way he gave us tickets to the concert, which was incredible. The theme was the extremes of Europe, and the concert was songs by Spanish and Russian composers.
The concert was:
Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain"
which was connected to Spain because of the witchcraft traditions in Spain that inspired the piece
Pablo Sarasate's (a Spanish composer for the violin) "Nouvelle fantasie sur Faust de Gound" and "Russian Songs"
which was played by an amazing young violinist
and, finally Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony, which is not at all related to Spain.
Anyway the concert was amazing, especially the Sarasate. The soloist even played an encore. It was definitely a great way to end the semester.

Thanksgiving

2008-12-17T11:11:00.005-05:00

IES had a really nice Thanksgiving (in Spanish: Día de Acción de Gracias) dinner for us and our IES professors at a restaurant in Salamanca. The food was an interesting mix of Spanish cooking and American traditional food. My friends and I ended up sitting at the table with all of the professors, but we got to speak a lot of Spanish and learned about holidays in Spain and were the only table that didn't run out of wine...
Professors and crema. Crema is a Spanish style soup that's vegetables put through the blender and heated. The first course was three cremas: pumpkin, chestnut, and potato.

More profs. This was when we realized that our religion prof. didn't only speak incredibly slowly and clearly because we were Americans; that was his normal speaking voice.

Friends and a sneaky plot to steal our vino. People from another table sent someone to our table because their table had run out of wine, but they had to be sneaky about it because they didn't want to look bad in front of the profs, but we still have photographic evidence of their deviousness.

oops...

2008-12-17T11:05:00.002-05:00

So I haven't actually published a blog post since November, and I have a whole bunch, including, one about my geo field trip, Thanksgiving, an incredible concert, Nochevieja Universitaria, and finally finding Hutton's Unconformity. So they all will be coming soon.

¡¡Feild Trip!!

2008-12-06T07:27:00.006-05:00

Last Tuesday, the 25th of November, we had a field trip for my mineralogy class and we went to a pegmatite mine and a greisen. It was amazing, mostly because it was a field trip, but we did get to see some fun rocks.

The first mine that we went to was nearly in Portugal. We could see Portugal from the mine, and I could have jumped over the river that separates Spain and Portugal. I had brought my passport because the field guide said in bold letters that the mine was not in Salamanca (meaning the province), and since I'm not an EU citizen, I could have problems getting into different countries. As it turned out the mine was not officially in Salamanca because it was in an international park on the boarder, but I guess it's better safe than sorry. Also, the mine was not really a pegmatite mine, because they hadn't actually gotten to the pegmatite yet, and they were just mining the aplite in veins above the pegmatite. The mine was started as a cassiterite mine, since the cassiterite formed at the margins of the intrusion, but now they also mine REE's and uranium. According to my professor, this area of Spain has some of the richest uranium deposits in Europe.

A typical zoning pattern in this mine. The top of the rock is slate, followed by a area that contains cassiterite and muscovite, which is followed by a quartz and spudomene zone, and then there's the aplite, which is rich in quartz, lepidolite, and alcali-feldspars.

Andalucite and cordierite porphyroblasts

The mine wall with lots of interesting veins.

Portugal!!!

The second mine that we went to had some historical significance. It was a scheelite, arsenic, and kaolinite mine, and during WWII, the Spanish (who were officially neutral) mined scheelite and sold it to the Germans. However, since Portugal was an ally-leaning neutral country and this mine is visible from Portugal, the Spanish mined the scheelite by night and carried it across the country by donkey. Luckily for the Spanish, scheelite has interesting fluorescent properties, which made it easier to mine by night. Right now, there's also a British company looking into re-opennign the mine, but they have to figure out what to do with all of the aresenic-rich water that's in it right now.

Slickenfibers! on faults associated with the formation of the greisen. I think that they were indicating movement of the footwall in the direction of the pencil.

Arsenic-rich pond and more Portugal, although Portugal is a little further away in this picture. It's just visible as hills in the distance.

A'dam

2008-11-21T16:17:00.002-05:00

Last weekend, I went a visited a friend who is studying in Amsterdam. Amsterdam was a really neat city. Every one bikes every where and there are canals and house boats and a whole host of exciting, interesting things. My first day in Amsterdam, my friend and her roommate took us on a tour of the city. We went to the main square and the red light district, and ate lunch in a really cool public library. On Saturday, we went to the market and had Turkish pizza, which was very good. We also went to the Nemo, which was a really great interactive science museum, which you definitely need a whole day to appreciate, and we went to see the Anne Frank House.

This picture is from the top of a secret tree-house-like reading cubby in the children's section. Also, they use the Dewey Decimal system at the public library in Amsterdam.

The Bronze Bust statue in the Red Light District.

Boats and a canal.

Windmill! This windmill is actually used as a brewery now.

Ducks... with Susie!

This picture is of the paving tiles outside of my friend's apartment complex, and shapes of the paving tiles reminded me a bit of some of the fracture and stability textures. My friend was right when she said that there weren't really any rocks in Amsterdam. There were some paving stones that looked like they were made out of the really well-known black marble from Austurias, which makes sense since the Netherlands used to be a part of the Spanish Empire. There were also some interesting paving stones in the red light distict that were a pink granite, although some had ductile shear zones in them.

.I had to take a picture of the Pyrenees, since I crossed them more successfully than Hannibal, and he's well-known in Salamanca, since he said that the women of Salamanca were the fiercest in the world after they attacked his army and held them at bay for a couple days.

Student strike and San Alberto

2008-11-21T15:13:00.002-05:00

So last week, there was a massive student strike planned, and the students were going to blockade the buildings and everything, but it ended up not being a big deal. Most of the students didn't go to class, but the University hired security to prevent them from blockading buildings. There was a pretty big protest in the Plaza Mayor (a couple thousand students were there), but the protests during classes were much more disruptive. Apparently, things were a bit more interesting the Facultad de Historia y Geografía, because there were some students trying to convince other students not to go to class, but most of the foreign students went anyway, because the Bologna Treaty benefits them.

I went to my geo lab, and the prof blamed the low attendance (I was the only student) on the fiesta for San Alberto, who is the patron saint of the Facultad de Ciencias. For the fiesta, there were a lot of good costumes. There was the lab coat (a very useful accessory, because it can be worn for the fiestas for science, medicine, biology and chemistry (chemistry and biology have their own facultads, so they have their own patron saints)), cowboys (the geo department dressed like cowboys), and a very impressive group of people dressed like planets and moons (they even orbited each other).

Halloween

2008-11-19T06:14:00.007-05:00

I know this is a little late, but I was waiting for pictures from some friends (I didn't bring my camera out into the rain), and I was otherwise occupied with writing papers and reading Terry Pratchett (I don't mean to say that reading for pleasure is more important than keeping people informed about what I've been up to, although, if you haven't read any Terry Pratchett, I highly recommend him).
So Halloween...
The day before Halloween, IES organized a spooky tour of Salamanca for us, and we learned a lot of obscure, interesting facts about the city. We went to the Cueva de Salamanca, which is associated with a legend where the devil taught classes in witch-craft to 7 university students in exchange for the soul of one of them, but he was eventually tricked by a clever student. We also visited the cathedral and learned more about the "victor" which is the symbol that PhD recipients get to paint on the walls in their facultades. In the good old days, when the university was housed in the cathedral because there wasn't any university building yet, students who passed their exams and got their degrees were expected to throw a huge party afterwards, complete with bull fights (they used the blood of the bulls to paint the victor). However, this was fairly expensive, so poor students would say that a family member had died to avoid all of the hubbub and cost. This eventually lead to a rumor that getting your PhD at USal would lead to the death of your family members. We also visited the Casa de los Muertos (House of the Dead), which was the house of an old Salamantino family that had on-going feuds with another local family in a manner that strongly reminded me of Romeo and Juliet.
On Halloween, there is a tradition where a man climbs outside the Cathedral to the highest bell tower and plays a flute and drum and sings and releases a dove. This tradition started in 1757 after the earthquake in Lisbon, Portugal, during which the tower of the cathedral cracked, but the family that lived there to ring the bells always rang the highest bell in the tower for All Saints Day, but they couldn't get up there because the crack in the tower broke the staircase. To fulfill their obligation, one member of the family climbed the outside of the tower to ring the bell. Later, the tradition moved to October 31, so it wouldn't conflict with All Saints Day celebrations.
Here are some pics (that I mostly got from other people), and a video of the guy on top of the cathedral.
Our pumpkin, which won the pumpkin carving contest is the rana.

I dressed up like a mouse, with a tail and whiskers.

The cathedral climber on a balcony.

On top of the cathedral, sitting on the weather vane.

Here's the link to the Mariquelo playing and singing from the top of the cathedral:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOIZF1oHa_A

Toledo

2008-11-08T14:17:00.008-05:00

A few weekends ago, IES took us to Toledo, which is a city just South of Madrid which is famous for its cultural history (it is known as the 'city of 3 cultures'), its swords and its marzipan.
Toledo used to be the capital of Spain, and, because of that, it is both a surrounded by walls, both natural and man-made and the River Tajo.

Walls and bridges

City of 3 cultures:
Like every Spanish city, Toledo has a cathedral, but unlike many other Spanish cities, the cathedral in Toledo is actually an important part of people's every-day lives. Toledo is considered the most religious city in Spain, and daily mass at the cathedral is usually well-attended.
In the past, though, think pre-1500, Toledo was known for having the largest Jewish population in Spain, and one of the largest in Europe. Toledo was also ruled by the Moors for 500 years, and during this time, about the last century or so of Moorish rule, Toledo managed to support a population of Christians, Muslims, and Jews, although they all lived in separate parts of the city, which were walled and isolated from each other at night.
A great example of the mix of 3 cultures in Toledo is in the synagogue of Santa María la Blanca, which was designed by Muslim architects, used as a synagogue, and then converted into a church/ convent.
This façade is from another synagogue in Toledo, and will show up in a slightly different form later.
Since Toledo was the biggest city in Spain during the late 1400's, it was also an important place for the Reyes Catolicos (Fernando and Isabel). They had actually planned on being buried in Toledo, but changed their minds after conquering Granada. They constructed Monasterio de San Juan de los Reyes for their tombs, but ended up donating it to an order on monks.
Tanto monta, monta tanto, is an idiomatic expression that roughly translates into 'one is equal to the other', and it was used during the reign of Isabel and Fernando to signify that they were equals. It can be found in a lot of the buildings that they built (like the Alczár place in Segovia).

Swords:
While we were in Toledo we went to the factory that made the swords that were used in the Lord of the Rings movies, and we got to see swords being made and iron being deorated with gold.
Forge that is dormant, but you can see a pile of swords to be finished in the lower left-hand corner, and some iron to be turned into swords on the right-hand side of the picture.

Here a metal-worker is decorating iron pendants with gold wire. The pendants are made in molds and have little grooves in the top. He puts the gold wire (which he draws himself) into the grooves, and then the whole thing gets re-heated, and the iron turns black and the gold stays nice and shiny.

Marzipan:
Toledo had very tasty (although very expensive) marzipan.
Here is a model of nuns making marzipan that was in a window of one of the marzipan stores in Toledo.
Here is the façade of the Synagogue del Tránsito, but this time it's made of marzipan.

Toledo is also famous for being the home of el Greco, the famous painter. While in Toledo, we went to see the 'Entierro de Conde Orgaz', which is one of his most famous paintings.
Toledo also had really great rocks. The city is located on a reverse fault from the Hercynian Orogen and is built on a migmatite complex (if you click on the picture, you can see better detail of some migmatite structures).
My 900-page long 'Geología de España' textbook definitely comes in useful at times like this (I actually consider it one of my best purchases so far. My only complaint is that it doesn't have a very good index).

Besides having amazing outcrops of really interesting rocks around the city, there are also some great building stones in Toledo (like there are in all proper Spanish cities...).

Also, a picture of some ducks for my friend Cori...
and windmills in the sunset.

US Elections

2008-11-04T22:19:00.002-05:00

I watched the US elections tonight from the BBC coverage, and found it very amusing. British journalists are a lot more confrontational than US journalists, and they argue with the experts on the news station, which is very amusing. Also, they used a lot of geology terms, notably: seismic, tectonic plates, and mountain building were mentioned.

Oh, plus, a republican ambassador to the UN told the BBC that they should fire one of their reporters...

Bombing in Spain

2008-10-30T10:43:00.004-04:00

Today, there was a car bombing in Pamplona at the University of Navarra, which is in the north of Spain, in the province of Navarra. 17 people were injured. ETA, the Basque separatist terrorist group is believed to be behind it. I'm ok, and everyone I know is ok. The official people who have contacted me, like the Embassy in Madrid, are not too concerned about any other ETA attacks outside of the northeastern corner of Spain in the near future, and ETA has historically not targeted tourists or foreigners, and they tend to attack government or official targets. Even so, terrorist attacks are never a good thing, especially at a university.
Happy Halloween.

More protests and snow!

2008-10-22T09:23:00.002-04:00

My grammar class today was, once again, interrupted by protests, with protesters entering our building and setting off the fire alarm and throwing open classroom doors (which is completely normal. It really isn't a big deal here to set off a fire alarm just to create a disturbance; it actually happens about once every two weeks in the residence hall, and every one just ignores it. If there were a real fire, we could all just crawl out our windows, and, since the buildings are made of brick or stone, it's much less dangerous). My grammar teacher told us that the students were protesting the implementation of a standardized EU education system because they think they will have to work harder. It turns out, also, that the new system will apply to every one graduating next year and in the future, so students who are juniors now will have to scramble to meet all of the requirements in time to graduate, and some will have to stay an unanticipated extra year.
There are rumors that there is going to be a student strike starting November 3.
Grammar class was also eventful, because it started snowing after the protesters left. I don't think we really learned much about grammar in class today.

Cold, Blustery Day

2008-10-22T05:59:00.003-04:00

Today, when I left for mineralogy, it was:
a. Still dark (the sun doesn't rise until 8:30)
b. 36 degrees (F)
c. rainy
d. really windy (gusts up to 40mph)
I'd check the weather, so I knew about a-c, but I hadn't been expecting the wind. Altogether, it made for an unpleasant 1.5km walk to class. Apparently, I wasn't the only one who found the weather conditions unpleasant, because I was the only student who came to class for the first 30 minutes. The professor commented to me that Spanish students are afraid of the rain, but she then proceeded to lecture like normal (usually, there are 4-5 students who come to the lecture portion of class). It was a little strange to be on the receiving end of a private lecture, and I was very relieved when another student showed-up. In class, however, our professor told us about how she found scheelite in Salamanca by walking around at night with a UV light and looking for the phosphorescence, and she then told us that she came back the next day and "sampled" it. I'm pretty sure that's about as legal in Spain as it is in the US, but it sounds like something a geologist would do...
Now, though, I have an hour before class, and I am nice and cozy in my room drinking cola-cao, the Spanish version of instant hot chocolate, which is made with milk (which makes it clearly superior to instant hot chocolate made with water).

Awesome Weekends (Scotland)

2008-10-19T13:45:00.012-04:00

Last weekend, I met-up with a geology friend, who's also in Europe this year, in Edinburgh to take a pilgrimage to Siccar Point, which is the location where Scottish geologist James Hutton discovered the concept of deep time in 1787.
Here's a brief summary of our Scottish adventures:
We started out in Edinburgh, which was a pretty amazing city, although it was a little disorienting that people drove on the other side of the street.

We stayed in a really nice bed and breakfast, and we planned to head to Siccar Point early Saturday morning.

Here's the b&b.

We planned on taking a bus to Cockburnspath, which is a small town near Siccar Point. On Saturday morning, though, we ended up taking a city bus to the opposite side of town than the bus station, and decided to walk and enjoy downtown Edinburgh.

However, downtown Edinburgh is a very distracting place for a geologist, since there are a lot of interesting rocks, like this deformed basalt that the Edinburgh castle is built on.
We also found this really fascinating rock that is basalt clasts in an organic limestone.
This is a picture of some snails crawling on the fossilized remain of their ancestors.
Anyway, we decided to look for more of the really cool conglomerate-limestone, so we went up the hill by the castle.

We didn't find any more of that really fascinating rock, but there was a great view of the city.
Our little side trip made us miss the early buses to Cockburnspath, though, so we ended up leaving Edinburgh at 3 and getting to Cockburnspath at 4.
When we got to Cockburnspath, we oriented ourselves, and set out to find Siccar Point and Hutton's Unconformity.

Scottish countryside:

We can tell we're getting close because there's gently-dipping Old Red Sandstone:
And... Siccar Point!
Siccar Point is the second piece of land jutting out into the North Sea.

Yep, we made it to Siccar Point.

More Siccar Point.

However, it was a little more challenging to get to Hutton's Unconformity.

We went down a hill-side covered with ferns. Walking through ferns was a very strange sensation and felt a little surreal.

Then we walked around the beach on the Old Red Sandstone and the conglomerate layer, which directly overlays the Silurian greywacke at the unconformity.
However, it eventually became clear that we were on the wrong side of the point to see Hutton's Unconformity, and the sun was setting and the tide was coming in.
So we decided to climb back up to the top of the point. Unfortunately, when we got there, it was dark, and we couldn't go looking for Hutton's Unconformity any more that day. We walked back to Cockburnspath and took a taxi to Dunbar, with plans to return to Siccar Point the next day.
After a night in a very expensive b&b in Dunbar, we tried to call a taxi to get back to Siccar Point with no luck: taxis don't run on Sunday morning. So we spent the morning in Dunbar and took a bus back to Edinburgh so my friend could catch her flight.

Trying to call the taxi.

The oldest Methodist church in Scotland.

The birthplace of John Muir.

Cool braided stream patterns on the beach.

After my friend left, I had some time to kill in Edinburgh, and I went to a really cool museum (the Dynamic Earth Museum). I found it really well put together, and they had really good exhibits, including real glacial ice and the rocks of Scotland. In the whole museum, which took a good hour and a half to walk through, there was only 1 thing I disagreed with (they said that the subducting slab melts, which causes arc volcanism).
They also had the most original geologic cross-section I've ever seen. It's called "A Slice through Scotland" and shows the major faults as different sections of rock and has real rock for the different Scottish rocks.

I also found this on my way to the museum:
On Sunday night, I found a small Methodist church, and the people were really friendly and had coffee fellowship, so it felt a lot like home.

I left Monday morning (Monday was a national holiday in Spain, so I had the day off), and took some nice pictures of the Salisbury Craigs in the sunrise.
So, even though we failed to find Hutton's Unconformity, we still found some great rocks and had a wonderful time in Scotland, and the trip was definitely worthwhile. There may be plans for a return trip sometime this winter too.

Awesome Weekends (Oviedo)

2008-10-16T19:49:00.005-04:00

On Sunday, when we got back from Picos, we took a bus (yes, with civilized people who had probably not been anticipating sharing a confined space with dirty, muddy, smelly Americans) to Oviedo, which is the capital of Asturias, so we could take a bus to Salamanca.
We only spent 4 hours there, but Oviedo definitely has some of the most interesting rocks I've ever seen in a city, so I decided to share them.
Oviedo in the far north and is marked by a red star.

Pretty, Mediterranean architecture and nice shade trees.

Marble breccia

Black marble with shell fossils.

More fossils, but in red marble.

And our very good friends: ammonites!

Coming soon...Scotland and Siccar Point!

Awesome Weekends (Picos de Europa)

2008-10-16T17:10:00.009-04:00

This is kind-of a continuation of my last post, but I decided that the weekend really needed to be broken up into smaller pieces.
So, Picos de Europa is a national park in Spain on the boarder between Asturias and Cantabria in the Cantabrian Mountains. It is the oldest and largest national park in Spain and one of the oldest and largest "wild places" in Europa (according to the Picos website).
It was amazing.
We basically took a 1-day backpacking trip. We left from Covadonga by bus to the Lagos of Covadonga.
It's 20 km from Covadonga to the Lagos, so here we are securing a ride back on Sunday morning.
There were a lot of these taxis, and we had to bargain a bit to not pay ridiculous prices.

The Lagos were amazingly beautiful.

When we got up to the Lagos, we discovered that it had snowed in the mountains that night, and it was pretty chilly.

We left the Lagos and headed up into the mountains.
All of the yellow-green bushes are very prickly, and we broke the law by taking plant matter out of the park with us, although it was in the form of thorns in our hands! For the first part of the path, we followed a stream up into the mountains and it was very muddy and a little treacherous, but very pretty.

After we got out of the mud, the path mostly went through pasture land.

Some of these pictures are from the way back, which is why the lighting is so different, but we did literally walk through herds of goats and cows. It felt like we were in the "Sound of Music".

We ate lunch at a cirque.

Peanut butter and cheese sandwich with a carrot knife.

After the cirque, the trail rose very steeply and got rockier.
And we ran into this horse that we couldn't really walk around, so we followed it until we could pass it.
Right after we met this horse, we found...

Snow! It was actually really snowy for a while on the trail, but it was still really warm, because we were walking at a fairly brisk pace.
We spent the night in a refuge in the mountains with a whole bunch of really friendly Spanish people. It was a great experience because we got to both be in these beautiful mountains and practice our Spanish. It was 7.6km from the lakes and 600m higher than the lakes. There's more information (in Spanish) at: http://reddeparquesnacionales.mma.es/parques/picos/recomen/recomendaciones128.htm

Here's the refuge.

And we had a really excellent dinner, and since we were in Spain, there was wine, although it was served in paper cups.

The fire was the only heat source, and the only place to dry our damp shoes, but it was a bit smokey.

Our refuge was near a very famous gorge in the Picos, so we took a short trip to go check it out.
We found this scary cave, as well as a lovely hanging valley, accompanied by a mysterious cave in addition to the gorge.

There was a really prominent snow-line on the mountains on the other side of the gorge.
We also found coral in the limestone that we were sitting on when we went to visit the gorge. I love the juxtaposition of the coral and the snow.

We had to leave the refuge really early in the morning so we could make it back to Covadonga to catch our bus. Notice that it's still dark outside while we're preparing to leave.

It actually turned out to be really good that we left early because the sunrise in the mountains was beautiful.

The mountains were really incredible, and Picos is definitely one of the most amazing beautiful places I've ever been. Climbing through the mountains made me want to be a structural geologist when I grow up.

This video is of the wonderful music of the animals in Picos (I didn't take this video, so the credit should go to my traveling companion.

Awesome Weekends (Covadonga)

2008-10-16T13:16:00.005-04:00

A couple weekends ago, I took a trip with some friends to Asturias, which is in northern Spain, and blue in this picture (sh... don't tell Mr. Hiliker).
We traveled by bus to the far eastern part of Asturias, almost to Cantabria, where there is an incredible national park (Picos de Europa) and we spent a day and a night in the tiny town of Covadonga.
Covadonga is famous in Spain for being the site of the first successful battle of the Reconquista, in 722 AD. The legend behind the battle is that the Christians were hugely outnumbered and were retreating from the Moorish advance. They were hiding in Asturias and took shelter in a cave to regroup and reorganize their forces. Here, the image of the Virgin of Covadonga came to the soldiers and inspired them in battle.
Today, the cave is a pilgramage site (Pope John Paul II took a pilgramage to Covadonga, and the current pope made it an official holy place, so that pilgrams who go to Covadonga receive a papal blessing). The town is mostly the sacred cave, the basilica, a museum and the tombs of some 11th century abbots.

Sacred grotto

A pool with really blue water (I think there's probably a lot of stuff dissolved in it since it comes from an underground stream). According to the stories, if you drink from this spring, you will be married within a year.

Here are several pictures of the basilica:

A statue of Pelayo, the general who defeated the Moors and became king of Asturias.

We spent 1 night in Covadonga and tried the local food. Asturias is famous for its cheese, cider, fish soup, and fabada, which is a really thick bean soup. We also had "tarts" for dessert, which were sort-of like cheese cake on a crust that was soaked in brandy. Our meal was very good and very filling.

The fish soup really should have been called sea-food soup.

The cider tasted like bad white wine, unless you drank it aerated.

Asturias is really rainy, so we spent a lot of time in this tiny little bar while we were in Covadonga. They had very cheap and tasty sandwiches and, most importantly, Cola Cacao, which is hot chocolate in instant powder form. Anyway, the bar at this bar (hmm... there probably is some sort of word-choice issue here), was made out of all of the different rocks that I'd seen in the area.
The bottom and the top is a read marble (the basilic is made out of this marble), the black stone is black marble (most of the rock that I saw in Picos was black marble or limestone), and the cream-colored rock in the middle is travertine (one very smart person guessed that there was likely some travertine in Picos).

There were also some fun rural things in Covadonga, like a house with farm animals in the front yard.
Covadonga is techincally in the National Park, Picos de Europa, so there's a lot of really cool things, like waterfalls and giant slugs and strange tress. Mostly, though, Covadonga was really, really peaceful and beautiful. It was a really nice break from the city.

Protests and Parties

2008-10-16T05:48:00.002-04:00

This week has been very interesting at USal. Since Tuesday, there have been on-going student protests over something that no one I've talked to really understands. It has something to do with credits, but even my professors don't really know what the students are protesting. However, like all good protesters, they have successfully been interrupting the normal lives of everyone around them, including classes. One of my professors got very angry when they were in our building and left the classroom and went and told them off. It wasn't very effective in convincing them to leave, and I'm pretty sure that he just egged them on (he commented to our class that this sort of political activism came to Spain from France). As the week has continued, though, we've adjusted to a quasi-equilibrium with the protesters.
Today, marks the beginning of a new distraction, the first of the festivals for the patron saints of the facultades. The first festival is in the Facultad of Medicine, and it is well-known for its extravagance and drunkenness, but they're going to try to crack down on the excessive revelry this year. Since they don't have classes for the rest of the week, there are gangs of noisy, costumed medical students roaming around the city with the protesters, which makes for a lot of chaos and distraction.

Awesome Weekends (Granada)

2008-10-09T06:16:00.008-04:00

We went to Granada the same weekend we went to Sevilla, and we visited the Alhambra and a flamenco show.

The Alhambra was very beautiful. There are 3 main parts: the gardens, the village, and the palace.
Here are some pics from the gardens:

This is the palaca from the gardens. The name for the Alhambra is derived from the Arabic word meaning "red", referring to the color of the walls.

This is the city from the Alhambra. It really felt like a Mediterranean city because of all of the vegetation.

The palace:

All of the ceilings and walls are covered with elaborate plaster designs, and the ceilings are designed to look like caves.

The Alhambra at night.

Flamenco:
We saw a flamenco show in a gypsy cave in an older part of the city.
To get to the caves, we walked through a famous, white-washed neighborhood in Granada that was constructed outside the city walls and was inhabited by minority cultures (Jews and Christians when Granada was ruled by the Moors and Arabs after the Reconquista)
Flamenco:

Also, while we were in Granada, the city was celebrating the fall with the "fruits of autumn" festival, and there were people selling fresh fruit and bread on the streets. Granada is Spanish for pomegranate, and fall is pomegranate season, so I bought and enjoyed a granada from Granada.
On the 8-hour bus ride back to Salamanca, we stopped at the place that inspired Cervantes to write about Don Quijote's fight with the windmills. It was very windy, rainy and cold, but there were some interesting deformed rocks from the Central Iberian mountain chain (not to be confused with the Central System in North of Madrid).
You should try to picture Don Quijote attacking these fearsome windmills.

Awesome Weekends (Sevilla)

2008-10-08T13:20:00.006-04:00

So I've been pretty traveling the past couple weekends, so I've been spending my weeks doing homework instead of updating my blog, but now I have a whole bunch of pictures and stuff to write about.

The 26-28 of September, I went to Sevilla and Granada. This was a trip organized through IES, so I didn't have to do any planning, which was very nice.

Sevilla and Granada are marked with red stars; they're both in the extreme southwest of Spain.

Sevilla:
Sevilla was the virtual capital of Spain during the golden age, and it was the biggest, richest city in Europe at one time. It was also a Moorish city at one time, so there are elements of Moorish architecture throughout most of the city.

We visited the cathedral while we were in Sevilla, which is the biggest in Spain and the biggest by volume in the world.

This is the outside of the cathedral. The tall tower is left-over from the mosque that used to stand were the cathedral is today. There is an excellent view of the city from the tower.

The royal chapel. There are only 3 families in Spain that can marry in this chapel, one of which is the royal family. The entire alter is covered in gold-leaf.

Looking down the length of the cathedral. The gold on the ceiling is reflected from the royal chapel.

Christopher Columbus' tomb. He actually has 4 tombs, but his body is here. Originally, he was buried in Granada, but he didn't want to be buried in Spain (he was not a fan of how the Spanish treated him after he stole a whole bunch of money from them), so his body was moved to the Dominican Republic, but after Spain lost the Domincan Republic, he was moved to Cuba, and then to Sevilla after the Spanish-American War. His casket is raised so that he is not, technically, buried in Spain.

The Patio of Oranges in the cathedral. This was another relic from the mosque that was replaced by the cathedral.

Bells is the mosque tower. They still ring every hour, and it's a bit scary when they ring while you're in the tower.

A pretty view out one of the windows of the tower.

All of these pictures were from the cathedral, and that's about all we saw in Sevilla, although we did have real Andalucian paella while we were there.

Cultural Experience

2008-09-24T04:18:00.003-04:00

Today I had mineralogy, which was my first university class with students who weren't freshmen (Cursos Internacionales suggests that we take freshmen or sophomore level classes because the majors are much more specialized than in the US). I got to class on time, and like a typical Spanish class, class started 10 minutes late (most classes start between 10 and 20 minutes late). However, when the professor got there and started class, I was the only student there, and by the end of class, there were only 3 of us. Also, my professor wasn't really prepared for class, so class was done at 9:30 (It was scheduled to last from 9-11). Since class started 10 minutes late, we only had a 20-minute-long class!

During the 20 minutes that we had class, the professor talked about the textbook, which is the same as the green one that was always in the mineralogy lab, except translated into Spanish, and the structure of the class. This class has 2 finals, a theory one and a practical one. For the practical final, we have to identify a bunch of minerals in hand-samples and in thin section, but we get to use our notes and any pictures we draw (good thing I've had lots of practice drawing minerals under the microscope). The mineralogy department also got new microscopes this summer, and I'm very excited to get to use them.

If the first class is any sort of indication as to what it will be like in the future, I am going to have a very small class, but it will be very different from anything that I will have at LU.

¡Geología!

2008-09-23T15:49:00.002-04:00

I had my first geology class today, which made me very, very happy. It was Intro. Geo. for students in the geologic engineering department, and there were only 8 people in the class. I got a bit lost looking for the classroom because the geology department is huge: 4 floors in two separate wings in the science building, but I did successfully find it. We were waiting outside for the professor, but he snuck into the classroom through the secret professor entrance, and he was waiting in the classroom for us. The professor looked like the stereotypical mad-scientist, with frizzy white hair and lab coat, and there were rocks on a table in the room (hooray rocks!).

Despite being in a different language, the class felt very much like being at home. The topic the first day was the history of geology, so there was talk about Usher and Hutton and Lylle. Additionally, the explanation the professor gave for uniformitarianism was, word-for-word, the exact definition that I have in my notes from intro geo (the present is the key to the past, or, in Spanish, el presente es la clave del pasado), which also made me very happy.

And the professor complained a little bit about have geology divided-up into sub-disciplines, which he called boxes. He also talked about how rocks should be understood in context, not in boxes, which made me feel like I could have been sitting on the 2nd floor of the YC.

Hooray for uniformity within geology!

University of Salamanca

2008-09-21T16:20:00.004-04:00

In honor of classes starting tomorrow, I decided to write a little something about the University of Salamanca (USal).

USal was founded in 1218 by Alfonso IX, the king of León. It is the oldest Spanish university still in existence, and one of the oldest universities in the world. Back in the day, like the 1500´s, it was considered the best university in the world. That was when people like Cervantes were studying there. USal is still referred to as the Oxford of the Spanish world.

Currently, the university has some 40,000 students (both graduate and undergraduate) in 16 facultades. Each facultad is like its own autonomous college with departments within it, and students apply to and enroll in an individual facultad. Additionally, each facultad has its own buildings, library and holidays. This system is partially why students are so specialized as soon as they enter the university, although high schools are also specialized (there are high schools with a humanities or science emphasis, etc.). Very few students change majors, because they have to start back at the beginning with their classes because there aren´t really any shared gen. eds, and fewer change facultades, because they have to re-apply to a different facultad.

I´m in Cursos Internacionales, which is a quasi facultad. Cursos Internacionales doesn´t offer many classes and doesn´t have their own faculty, but they are in charge of making sure that all of us non-native speakers of Spanish know what we´re doing (they also make sure all non-EU citizens get all of the proper permission to be here). One of the main benefits of being in Cursos Internacionales is that I can take classes at any facultad, as long as I can find their course catalog, which is not as easy as it sounds (the facultad of medicine is really good at hiding their course catalog), and I get library privileges at all of the facultad libraries (the amount of access that I have to the library is up to each individual facultad, though. In some, I can´t check out books, and in others I can´t use library materials in the library).

That´s my current university home. I´m sure I´ll have more to add about USal as I get to know it better.

Ferias y Fiestas

2008-09-18T15:34:00.005-04:00

The past week (officially, September 7-15, although it doesn't really end until this weekend) has been the biggest celebration in Salamanca: Las fiestas y ferias. The fiestas y ferias are in honor of Salamanca's patrona (female patron saint) La Virgen de Vega (her saint's day was the 8th). The city kind-of goes crazy for the fiestas, with people (even little kids and old people) out until past midnight nearly every day, the streets are full of casetas, which are little shops that sell food (and alcohol) on the street, and there are all sorts of strange and interesting performers in the streets.

They put lights all over this city, like this sign that was hung over the main road into the city.

The sign says: Felices Fiestas, and I took the picture from the back because the road was closed for the fireworks.

They had fireworks at the very beginning of the fiestas and on the last night.

Here are some casetas near the Plaza Mayor.

There were also a bunch of street performers on stilts dressed-up like butterflies and other giant insects. I think this one was an ant.

The Plaza Mayor absolutely full of people. There were probably more people in the Plaza Mayor that night than there are in the entire city of Lodi (the Plaza has a capacity of 20,000 people, and it was so full that one could barely turn around)!

On the first day of the Fiestas, we were walking down the street, and were taken by surprise by a torrent of pre-teen boys running down the street. It turns out that there are these characters in masks, and the boys tease them and provoke them, and the masked-people chase the boys away with sticks. The second time we were inundated by pre-teen boys, I commented that I finally understood how the west coast felt after the ice-dam broke at Glacial Lake Missoula.

Now that the Fiestas are over (well, sort-of over. They still have bull-fights until sometime next week), the city is going to feel very different. I would say that there's going to be a lot less people in the streets at night, but the University students are starting to move back, so I don't really think that will be the case. I don't really think that the city is going to get much quieter, but it will probably be less exotic.

Accommodations

2008-09-16T14:42:00.006-04:00

While is Spain, I am living in a single in a residence hall. Each room has its own bathroom and a shared kitchen. I must admit, it is much nicer than anywhere I've lived at Larry U. Although the view isn't quite as inspiring.

Here are some pictures:

This is what you see from the door.

To the immediate left of my door is my closet, followed by the folding chair (left of photo) and my bed. The attractive brown blanket is courtesy of the Universidad de Salamanca.

The foot of my bed is in the left side of this pict. Here, my single shelving unit topped by my collection of Spanish-language newspaper and my newly acquired rocks is visible.

My very empty bookshelf and LU banner from Kelly. All of my books are actually from home (I put them all in my carry-on because they were too heavy for my checked bag. They were very heavy in my carry-on also). Also there's a prize for anyone who knows exactly what every book is (I think there is only 1 person in the world, other than me, who could know that).

My desk and window. The shelves are in the left corner of the photo.

The view. None of the windows have screens, so people can hang their laundry out to dry, but I'm on the first floor, so that doesn't really work for me.

The empty wall. My desk is to the left. The door on the left leads to my kitchen, and the door on the right is the bathroom door.

Bathroom with drying rack on the door and a ridiculous water heater that's set at 75 degrees C (and I can't change it).

Shower with drying laundry on it.

The only hooks in my room.

The door. Bathroom on the left and closet and bed on the right.

Kitchen. The door leads to my kitchen-mate's room.

Kitchen table, window and cleaning supplies (supplied by USal).

Stove, sink, cupboards, refrigerates and scary microwave oven (it's an oven and a microwave (hence the name), and the first time I tried to use it to heat up water, it made burning smells, and I burned my finger on the heating coil on the top. I have since figured out how to use the microwave setting, but I haven't really experimented much with the oven setting).

My room feels really bare, because everything in it (minus sheets) fit in one suitcase (I still managed to have a surprising amount of stuff), but it is starting to feel more homey.
Fortunately, it is really easy to keep clean.