Semana Santa- Grandparents

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

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

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

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

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