Travels

I'm so shocked that it's the end of October already. This month has flown by. Two weekends ago I went to Mallorca, and this weekend I got to go to Valencia. Both places where tons of fun and really interesting. Mallorca is the biggest island in Spain. It's right in the Mediterranean, so I got to lay on a beach in 70 degree weather in the middle of October. It was awesome. Here's some pictures from the trip.
There's a huge basilica in Mallorca. It was really cool because Mallorca is this little island and yet the basilica was one you would expect to see in a huge city. Valencia was a very cool city as well. I'm now planning on going back for the festival de las fallas. Each year in March all the neighborhoods in the city commissions a giant float. All the floats have a theme. Some are political, some historical, others are based on famous art/ novels/ movies/ people. A lot of them are supposed to be satirical.
We went to the Museo de las Fallas. Every year one of the smaller "muñecas" or dolls from the floats is "pardoned". The muñeca is put on display in the museo. There are also pictures of some of the best Fallas from over the years. The center piece of one of the most memorable fallas was a giant (20 foot) version of Michelangelo's David.

When we first arrived in Valencia, we had a few minutes to look around in the Mercado Central. It's huge and has something like 1,000 stalls. The fruit and cheese looked amazing and there was all kinds of interesting fish and meat for sale. I particularly liked this fish.
Another highlight of the trip was the visit to Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias. This is the part of the city that houses Valencia's arts and sciences community. There's a science museum, an Aquarium and a theatre. The whole thing was designed by a famous Valencian architect. All the buildings are done in a super modern style, which usually I'm not a big fan of. But the scale of these buildings was just amazing (think along the lines of the Sydney Opera House).This picture doesn't actually capture it too well. The sun was so bright that day that I couldn't get a decent picture, but you get the general point.

Me encanta los miércoles

I've decided I LOVE WEDNESDAYS. During orientation, we were told that we would have Wednesdays off, but would have to go to school Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. At first I had mixed feelings about the idea. The biggest downside to this is that everyone in the group was under the impression that Fridays would be our days off and thus we'd have 3 day weekend for travel purposes. Considering that there are about a million places I want to visit in the general Europe area, I was disappointed not to be able to take long trips all the time.

However, I have quickly grown to love the free Wednesdays. Last Wednesday I traveled to El Escorial with some friends. El Escorial is a monastery/royal palace/ school about 45 minutes outside of Madrid. It was build by Filipe II.

After beating the French in some battle or other in 1557, good old Filipe decided he should build a monastery so he could live the life of a monk. And when you've just beat the French and have tons of money rolling in from a continent you've recently conquered, you don't just build any old place/ monastery. You build one with over 1,200 doors, 2,600 windows and 16 courtyards. Because really, why not? It's most definitely the biggest building I've ever been in. My favorite part of the building is Filipe II's bedroom. He had it built right off the main alter of the church so he could watch mass from his bed when he was too sick to go.
After touring the palace, we found a Super Sol (the Spanish version of Kroger’s or Dominick’s) and bought baguettes, chorizo, and fruit and had one of the best lunches I've had so far for 3 euro each.

Today, another fabulous Wednesday, a bunch of friends and I went to Madrid's Palacio Real. It's really quite amazing and it blows my mind that people actually used to live there. All the rooms are incredible overdone. There's silk, gold, porcelain, crystal and velvet everywhere. They still use it for official state business, although the king and queen now reside elsewhere.

The throne room is one of my favorite rooms. I've been trying to find a way to marry into the royal family so that I can get access to the parts of the palace that normal people can't see. Unfortunately, all the royal family members are either way too old and married or they're way too young (the king's oldest grandson is 10). Looks as if I'm going to have to go with plan B: date a security guard who works at the Palacio. I'll let you know how that turns out.