Sierra Nevada's

January 31, 2009
Sierra Nevada’s!

IF YOU CLICK PICTURES THEY GET BIGGER! picture in bar is Christina, Me, Grayson, and my roommate Leah. Picture on Mountain is Me, Grayson, and Christina.

Since we don’t have Friday classes (ever!) my friends and I decided to plan a ski/snowboard trip to the mountains. The Sierra Nevada’s are only about a 30 minute bus ride away from where we live, so it’s super easy. We had to get up at 6:15 in the morning to be able to catch the first bus at 7 am that would take us to the big charter bus station where the first bus of the day left at 8 am. Since I didn’t go to bed until about 2:30, this was a pretty obscene time to have to get up and get ready. I chose to wear 3 pairs of leggings, a pair of sweat pants, and then rent ski bibs at the ski rental place. My leg’s looked REAL huge, Grayson described them as “sausages” (at least she is honest). We all chose to rent our ski’s at the station because we were told they were cheaper than renting at the mountain (which Molly found out the hard way was true, her story will come later.) For skis, boots, poles, and pants, it was only 15 euro- BOMB price. Grayson and Christina snowboarded; Molly, Leah, and I skiied. I really wanted to snowboard, but we unanimously decided that this was neither the time nor the place to try to learn.

We arrived around 8:45 and bought our lift tickets. Thank god we took the first bus because around 9;30 the lines for the lift tickets were so long and probably about a 45 minute wait. As my dad always says, 1 minute will cost you 10. This is probably the first time I have been happy to have known that saying of his. After getting all of our stuff together and some of us buying hats/gloves/etc we were ready to hit the slopes, until we realized we needed lockers. The search for these was unreal. Probably 30 to 45 minutes later we had found them, and then realized Leah and Molly were nowhere in sight.


Now for Molly’s story.

Molly had rented skis with the rest of us, and put her ski’s with the rest of ours when we had gone on a hunt for lockers. When she had gone to pick hers up, they were missing. She went on a search and realized they had either been lost or stolen. Molly comes to ask us if we have them, but as she is walking she trips and wipes out on ice. As she would explain later, she told Leah that if she said anything about this she was “just going to freak out”, I can only imagine. She then went and asked the police and she had to file a POLICE REPORT at 10 am after some jackass stole her skis (but very nicely, left her poles). So she is alone, in a foreign police station, trying to use her Spanish to communicate what has happened. Keep in mind, she RENTED these ski’s and now has to worry about paying for them once we get back to the bus station. She gets the report finished and goes into a ski shop on the mountain to rent a second pair of skis. She rents them and later finds out, when she returns them, that they were 15 euro JUST for the ski’s (we got allll of our stuff for that price, sucks). So around 12 she is ready to hit the mountain, oh but of course more bad things happen.

First, her ski pants that she rented are about 3 sizes too small. I tell her she looks like John Travolta because they are literally spandex on her legs. They are also far too short, she looks hilarious. So her outfit becomes too tight blue plants, a brown Columbia zip up with a kstate gray sweatshirt over it, a red, orange, and black scarf, no hat, no sunglasses, and ONE GLOVE. She lost her other glove during her morning police adventures. Molly and I bought 2 Euro gloves the day before at a cheap Asians shop by our classroom, we should have known better. Everytime we fell snow would FILL the gloves, pretty awesome. So Molly’s first few passes down the mountain, she had to try super hard to not fall, and she couldn’t fall on one side since she didn’t have a glove on that hand. Later in the day I gave her an extra pair of sunglasses I found, and my friend Christina gave her an extra glove, so she was wearing mismatched gloves as well. I am telling you I have never laughed harder than when seeing Molly on the mountain. On a 3 person lift up, where about 200 people were waiting, no one would even sit with her. So after riding up in full lifts, we see Molly coming up all alone, in her ridiculous outfit, and SO COLD (it was the single most miserable experience of my life, the wind was blowing SO HARD, it was probably negative 20, and the lift was moving at a snail’s pace. I’m guessing it was a ten or 15 minute ride, and Molly had to suffer alone, in her horrible get-up, and with no body heat of others. Her day ROCKED).

At lunch Molly realized she had lost her Driver’s Liscence, but luckily when she returned her second pair of rented ski’s, they had found it. When we got back to the ski rental place she had to pay 50 Euro to replace the ski’s she had lost, which sucked, but could have been about 200 or 300 Euro if the guy was a jerk. So all in all, Molly’s day was pretty awful, but it gave us a really good laugh at times. WE LOVE YOU MOLLY!

Okay, so back to the rest of our day. Leah got up the Mountain with Christina, Grayson, and I and realized one of her boot/ski pairs wasn’t fitted, so she had to go figure that out, but Grayson, Christina, and I hit the slopes. We started with a green and I think I may have fallen once. Snowboarders fall a lot more than skiers, and it is expected, but there was really no reason for me to be falling, at all. I then realized that I hadn’t skied since I was 10, in 6th grade, in Breckenridge. So now being almost double my age, probably double my weight, my lack of experience was truly showcased.

Us three then went down a blue and all hell broke loose for me. It became apparent, very quickly, that I had absolutely no speed control. I was seriously FLYING down the mountain, and couldn’t slow myself down AT ALL. When I got going too fast I would usually hit a huge patch of ice and just wipe out like crazy. Usually my ski’s fell off, and usually my calves/feet/toes/thighs would cramp up, it was awesome. Throughout the day I got better, and even didn’t fall at ALL on one pass (about 20-25 minutes of skiing after taking a gondola and a long lift up after that), I was pretty proud of myself.

I face-planted probably 4 or 5 times throughout the day and fell close to 20 times. Grayson was usually near me and said she would laugh so hard that sometimes she couldn’t even get up (if she had fallen) or continue on after seeing me. She said I wouldn’t even try to stop myself, and I would just tumble down the mountain.. Many times I lost my ski’s and she would have to sled them down the mountain to me, since I usually sledded down about 20 feet on my butt/back after I fell. One time in particular, that we both still laugh so hard we can’t tell the story, is when I lost one of my ski’s in the middle of a pretty narrow and steep part of the pass. So I was basically screwed. She sledded my ski to me and after multiple failed attempts to put on a ski on a steep hill, I decided I had to just go down on my butt and my one ski until I could reach flatter ground. At the flatter grounds there are big red signs that have about 6 inches of room underneath them that say “DESPACIO”, which means “SLOW”. So as I am went down the hill on my one ski and sitting, I was doing circles, getting TONS of snow in my face, and just being a complete mess. As if this isn’t bad/funny enough for Grayson to watch, a man above us then loses a ski and it is going TOP SPEED past us. He decides to abandon his other ski and slides so fast on his back down the hill past me and UNDERNEATH the DESPACIO sign. I was in tears I was laughing so hard; Grayson was in hysterics after having just seen me do something almost equally ridiculous. The man’s ski had hopped the side of the mountain as he was limbo-ing on his back underneath a big red sign, poor guy.

Eventually all 5 of us girls got our lives out of shambles and went down all together and it was really fun. Our bus home left at 6:30 and the last lift went up at 4:30, so we had a lot of time to relax and hang out before our bus came. We were all really tired, but since it was really nice and sunny at the bottom of the mountain we decided to buy a beer and enjoy the rest of our day there. After Molly had to pay her 50 Euro for the lost skis, we rode the bus home (most of us passed out) and then took naps at our own homes. We were supposed to meet at 11 to go to a Tapas Bar (a place where if you buy a beer/wine/any drink you could a free small appetizer with it) but I was too tired and decided to just sleep the rest of the night until this morning.
As I write this, I am SO SORE, but so happy I went skiing, it was such a blast. Today I don’t know what I will do, but tonight we are going to a big discotecha called MaeWest. I guess it is sort of like the HAWK, but on a bigger scale. About 10 rooms of all different kinds of music and the girls in my dorm want to take us there because they love it. I can’t wait!

I haven’t written in a long time, I will try to stay more up to date. My refresher classes are going well, but between 4-7 I want to be napping, so sometimes it is hard to stay awake. We have homework due Monday, but it shouldn’t be too bad.
Sorry this was SO long. I love and miss everyone, SKYPE ME!

me gusta festejar, todos los noches

January 27, 2009
I love my dorm. I walk in and am always greeted with big smiles and kind “holas” or “que tal” (how are you) or anything else that is friendly and genuinely nice. They are just as excited about Americans as we are about being here. A few of the girls I have gotten to know better in the dorm (during meals mostly, right now they are all studying because this week and next week are finals weeks for them) are Pilar, Lorrena, Annabelle, y Susanna. There are only four boys, but I know Ahmed and Antonio. I think Antonio is sort of like the “playboy” of the dorm. He is very attractive and dresses sort of like your typical American prep/frat boy. Ahmed is cute, but in a different way. The girls tease him and whenever he talks and I don’t understand (most of the time), they will look at me, out of his site, and do the motion for “he is crazy” (finger circling by their head). I think he is what would be considered a “nerd” in America because he is super smart and I think he is usually talking about his studies and smart people things and that is why the girls tease him and basically tell me to just ignore him (sad!). He really likes us American girls and was the first to greet us, and of course kiss us (both cheeks, surprisingly pretty easy to get use to. Shaking hands is basically non-existent) when we arrived the first night.
They are all so nice. Many have offered to do things with us . Lorrena wants to take us somewhere in the morning where you sit and here live music and apparently it has a really nice view. Pilar wants to take us out to party this Friday, I can’t wait!
Last night my friends and I went out. We drank some wine in our room first (3 bottles, 12 euro total, pretty great and actually sort of expensive. We are in search of the 1 euro wine; we pray that that day will come sooner rather than later!) and then went in search of a bar. Sadly, with everyone studying for finals, and half the population of Granada being students, not many people were out. We got recruited to come into a bar (this is apparently very typical/common because everywhere this has happened) and were given free shots, per usual (TERRY, that was for you). We then had some sangria and beer for 1 euro a piece and met some creepy-ish Spanish men ranging in age from about 30 to 40. They followed us to the next place we went, without being asked or told; if that helps you define creepy. The place we went was a HUGE and very nice discotecha (club). It had couches and tables and booth areas and a huge dance floor and dj. There were only about 20 people there, maybe less, but on a Friday or Saturday night it will be so much fun to go to, especially with our new Spanish friends. We danced and partied there until about 4:30 A.M. Grayson, Christina and I spent a lot of time dancing on raised platforms, and the creepy men spent a lot of time trying to get up on them with us (we would get off every time they got on, so this proved to be very hard for them).
On our walk home we found a kebob place that was open all night (this will definitely become my new 5 am hangout). Kebobs look like a Pita Pit to me. I haven’t tried one yet, but they look good. Christina and I ordered hamburgers and they were INCREDIBLE, no regrets. Grayson, who is a vegetarian, ordered falafel which I have never heard of, but she liked hers as well. We walked home from there and finally got to sleep around 5 or 5:30 I think. We had to meet with API this morning at 11 (Molly didn’t quite make it) so right now I am exhausted and running on no sleep (I just ate lunch, it’s almost 3:30 here, my roomie is napping and we have to go to our language refresher class for 3 hour starting at 4. KILL ME.) I will definitely not be partying tonight, so hopefully I will get some shopping done tomorrow.
Picture are really flaky to load on here, and my Facebook is still rejecting my albums, but I will keep trying!

P.S. How is Lost? How is The Office? Desperates? These are so hard to live without.

Granada!

I’m finally in Granada! We woke up early and bussed to Toledo, which was about an hour away. The city is encompassed by walls and inside the city walls there are 80 churches. It was freezing cold and rainy and no one dressed/prepared for the weather, so the 3 hour outside tour was close to unbearable. Had it been warm, I would have loved it I think. We left around 3 and bussed the 4 hours to Granada, and got here when it was dark.

Four girls from my program are living in a dorm right in the center of Granada, awesome location. When we arrived, the 50 or so Spaniards who live here (only four boys!) were SO EXCITED. They were as nervous as we were, and they sort of just stared at us at first, taking us in. We got a quick tour and then ate dinner with about 20 of them. They were all super nice and more than willing to get to know us better. I spoke with a girl for most of dinner and she tried to use her English at times and I tried to use my Spanish. They understood most of what we said, and at one point I was struggling a LOT with a sentence, so about four of them asked me to say it in English, and after about ten words they all were like “whoa whoa whoa, ”. I now understand that it’s not just the Spanish who speak to fast for me to understand, but everyone has to talk slower when speaking to someone whose second language is your own. They were all very interested in learning and practicing English and getting better with us, so we will all be helping and learning from each other, pretty exciting.

Tomorrow we start refresher courses that last for a week and a half or so, for 3 hours a day. I have to go shopping and get adapter outlets, boots (everyone is SO incredibly stylish here), a straightener, and tons of other stuff that I just couldn’t fit in my two huge suitcases. My roommate Leah and I got the biggest room in the place! (one per floor, 7 floors, VERY lucky). It is about the size of 3 dorm rooms and we have our own bathroom and 2 closets, it’s great. Everyone smokes in the dorm. They can smoke basically anywhere in it I think. As we were sitting in the tv lounge, everyone on their laptops, all the Spanish people were smoking and studying for their finals which are for the rest of the week.

That’s all for now, I keep trying to put pictures on Facebook, but they fail EVERY TIME, super annoying. I will keep trying. I love it here, I miss American Television, but we get more than our fair share of American Music. In the restaurant last night, a nice restaurant that was sort of dark and had nice tablecloths and nicely dressed waiters, Smack that by Akon came on along with some old school 50 cent, pretty strange.

el final dia en madrid

Our last day in Spain we went on a group API (my program) trip to Real Monesterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial. It was about an hour bus ride away and in the Mountains. This was my favorite thing that we have done so far. I was put in a group with a guide who did the entire tour in Spanish and I think I understood almost everything. He was a hilarious older man and my friend Molly and I followed him around and asked him a lot of questions (in Spanish!). We learned that it was built in the 1500’s after San Lorenzo was literally grilled alive on top of a parilla, grill in Spanish. It took 21 years to build and is MASSIVE and the most beautiful place I have ever been. Unfortunately we couldn’t take pictures, but it was incredible. It houses the second greatest library in the world, second to the Vatican.
Monks still live and pray and do their thing in the monastery so we could only see about 1/50th of the whole thing, but it still was about an hour or two hour tour. Our guide told us if you were to walk all the corridors it would be about 10 miles of walking, yikes! We saw the tomb room where the last 5 centuries of Spanish kings and queens were put, it was pretty creepy, especially since we walked past the door where the bodies are sent to rot for 25 years before they’re bones are placed in the tombs. We also saw all the tombs for the royal families of these kings and queens and there was room after room of these.
There were paintings EVERYWHERE in the main rooms we got to see. Some were by El Greco and some other famous guy, tiatian, titian, something like that. There were paintings on almost all of the ceilings and they were all sorts of styles of art since they were painted throughout the last 4 to 5 centuries. The architecture was incredible and I cannot get over how these things were built without the technology that we now have today.
We went to a Sangria Bar last night that was like a cave and it was a lot of fun. Yesterday for lunch we saw 4 men at a table around 3 pm (middle of the workday) that were probably between the ages of 40 and 55. They were drinking tons of brandy, wine, and shots and were playing cards. They live America’s nightlife during the WORK DAY, it is amazing. Everything is much more relaxed here and I think American workers would be a lot happier if this is how they could spend their afternoons as well.
We leave for Toledo and then onto where we we will be living for the next four months, GRANADA! I cannot wait to get there. It is a college town with about 200,000 people and 80,000 plus are students. Classes don’t start until February 11, but starting the 4th we begin language refresher courses for about 2 or 3 hours a day. So we have tons of free time and hopefully I can get some traveling in before school starts.
I miss everyone, and I wish everyone could just come move to Spain with me, it would be impossible to dislike, I promise. I will try to write again soon!

Estoy aqui!

SPAIN-MADRID-January 25

So I arrived yesterday after about 20 hours of travel. All my flights were on time, and we even arrived early to Madrid, only a 5 hour and 55 minute flight, still way too long. I watched Baby Mama, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and some Dark Night so it made the flight go by way faster. I also sat next to a girl in my program, Christina, who is one of my good friends here now. We got into Madrid right before 10 am, so 3 am Kansas time, I was exhausted. I have 4 friends so far that I spend most of my time with (yeah I’m pretty popular with four friends, I know, but it’s hard to learn so many names and all that…). They are Leah, my roommate, who is a senior at K-State; Molly, a junior at K-State (real weird that one person is from K-State, let alone two, but despite being wildcats, they don’t suck!); Christina, a junior from UMass; and Grayson, a junior at UGA and from North Carolina. They’ll be in tons of my partypics and the things I post on here, soooo yeah.

Once we got sort of settled in the hotel (really nice, surprisingly), we decided to go out to lunch for our first Spanish meal. IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE. We went to a random tapas bar, which is just small portions of random food, and the menu was entirely in Spanish (duh, I guess), and it was definitely not the same words for food I had learned in Spanish throughout high school. I ended up ordering Papas Bravas which is just like hashbrownish french-fry things covered in a red sauce kind of like pasta sauce and salsa combined, pretty awesome. I also got some bread with blue cheese on it and some olives. My friends ordered some food on accident that was covered in squid looking stuff, yikes. We went back to the hotel to nap since we were so tired and then got dinner with the whole API group at a really good restaurant. They brought out 10-12 different dishes for us to try, and it was WAY too much. We thought we would only get about 4 or 5 plates, so after gorging myself with those, I of course continued to stuff my face with the second half of even more friend and battered food (I have NO idea how the Spanish stay skinny, bread is served with every meal and lots of things are fried). Ham is very common and so is cheese. One of the dishes was squid that was battered, but not like the calamari rings they have in the US. It looked like a piglet fetus and it looked bloody as well, it is safe to say that I refused to eat this and made pretty inappropriate comments to my friends.

After dinner we got ready to go out for the night. Since API provided us with a map, we tried to find an Irish Pub called O’Neils that was on the map. My friends and I are all apparently directionally challenged and got lost…but right as we were about to go find a different bar, a man came up to us and told us to follow him to a different Irish Pub (weird that there would be 2 of these within about 2 or 3 blocks since it was IRISH, but whatev), so we did! O’Reilly’s was the name of the bar and we ordered a bucket of Corona for the 5 of us, since it had six bottles, we passed the last around (I’m sure this looked REALLY cool). This bar played LOTS of Eminem and other good music, we were loving it. We left this bar and were headed to find O’Neils when we got intercepted by a pair of men. We walked with them for a while since they said they were headed to a bar, but then decided that it was a bad idea and said ADIOSSSS ! While walking we were approached by another man asking us to come into his bar, they offered my friend Molly free shots for all of us, so our hands were tied, we had to go in. They gave us tequila and it wasn’t SO bad. We ordered another bucket, and passed the 6^th around, pretty awesome. OH, also, this pub was also an irish pub (so not only 2 irish pubs within 3 blocks, but 3 irish pubs, even weirder), it was called Dubliners. We met a lot of Spanish men at this bar, and they were so much fun. Some bought us shots, but we mostly stuck to our beer buckets. Also around 12 at night they brought out papas bravas and CHICKEN WINGS to all the tables at the bar, it was probably my own personal highlight for the night. They played 100% American music in the bar, it was awesome. Spanish men LOVE it! One of them, who I promise was straight, loved Beyonce and had tickets to her concert in May, awesome. They played rap as well, and after I saw one guy dancing to “Bird Walk” (Lauren Kimball, you will appreciate this most, probably), I of course approached him and Grayson and I birdwalked with him. I decided to ask him about my main man Lil Wayne, and he LOVED him. We talked about The Carter I and our mutual adoration for him. I can’t remember this guys name, because I couldn’t understand him when he said it, but after accidently calling him today (my phone is in Spanish, I have no saved numbers…) he texted me and he and his friends want to hang out with me and my friends tonight again, so we’ll see!

We left the bar around 2 or 2:30 since it was our first day and we had to get up the next morning for some tours. We went to the Prado Museum and saw awesome Goya’s and painting by El Greco. Afterwards we got lunch and then went to the Royal Palace, which has over 2,000 rooms and was the home of a bunch of Spanish royalty. It was incredible. I think that’s about all for now. I will try and figure out pictures and stuff soon! Adios!