I hope as you're reading this all is well, I'm doing great here, a little stressed out because I seem to have misplaced my camera, but I'm in the process of getting that worked out and otherwise I am happy and healthy. We're heading into the home stretch to I've been pretty busy with homework (hence the 3 week gap in posting) and various other excursions. I have so much I want to tell you about!! But I made myself an outline so that I can keep this post as short, sweet, and attention grabbing as possible.
The weekend after my last post was the weekend of November 1, Dia de Todos los Santos or All Souls Day and once again I had to go to el cementerio to check out the scene for homework in my religion class. Nov. 1st is a national holiday in Spain so every year on that day everybody and their brother heads to the cemetery to spruce up the tombs of their loved ones and chat with the other people in the cemetery. It is as much a day for remembering and honoring the dead as it is a fiesta, so outside of the cemetery of course there were casetas (food vendors) and I even saw that someone ordered pizza delivered to the cemetery. It was fascinating to see the cemetery transformed from a forest of stone to an especie of garden with all kinds of flowers imaginable.
One of the casetas outside of the cemetery.
The following Saturday, Nov. 5th, all of us IES kids went on a day trip to Toledo, Spain. Toledo is the famous "city of three cultures" because for many years Muslims, Christians, and Jews all lived in Toledo together in peace and tolerance. For this reason there is a lot of cool blended architecture in the city. Toledo is also famous for it's swords. There is something special about the water that runs in the river Tagus that makes the steel produced in Toledo especially good for sword-making, who knew? In fact, the swords used in the Lord of the Rings movies were all made in Toledo. We took a tour through the city with a cantankerous old man who received about 20 cell phone calls during the course of the tour and also walked in a strange manner. In any case, it was fun and I got to see swords and eat marzipan for the first time!
View of Toledo from the opposite side of the river.
girls :)
Toledo's sister city is Toledo, OH.
This is our goofy tour guide, whenever we passed these guard rail things he would walk over top of them instead of around. Also one of the few phrases in English he knew was "Let's rock and roll!" so we heard that a lot haha.
I thought this little corner was cute.
View of the river Tagus and the city.
The bridge and the city.
Swords!
Sword made of mazapan.
Incredible sunset on the way back to Salamanca.
So, the week that followed our trip to Toledo was kind of intense, I had two large papers due and various other trabajos so I didn't do much else than chill in my room and do work. However, this weekend I traveled to Oporto, Portugal with two other girls from the IES program, one girl from Mexico and another from Colombia! The trip was wet (it rained about 75% of the time we were there) and exhausting (in the best way!) but wonderful! It was the closest thing to a real life adventure that I have probably ever had haha. We arrived in Oporto at 6:45ish in the AM, in the dark and rain and with almost zero idea of where to go to find our hostel. Thankfully one of the girls I was with is a whiz with directions and after about half an hour of trudging through the cold and rain we made it to our hostel, Eden House. We spent the weekend walking around and exploring the city (but mostly walking). We saw various museums, churches, cool buildings, and even the beach! Allison and I got caught in a serious storm while we were visiting the beach but despite the crazy wind and rain we managed to enjoy ourselves quite thoroughly (and of course when we went back to the hostel looking like drowned rats there were a slew of bombónes -cute guys- there haha). Unfortunately I only have the pictures from our first day because I've lost my camera, so none of the ocean unfortunately, but enjoy what few I do have:
Cool church, there were a lot of buildings with this type of white and blue painted tile.
On Friday we went to the market, it was really cool!
Another church w/ the tiling.
Hanging out in a cute park we found :)
We went to this military museum that had miniatures of soldiers from every major civilization and war since the prehistoric age. Seeing as it was just Veteran's day a few days ago, I thought this was appropriate.
And yet another church. I think this one was my favorite, too bad we couldn't go inside though.
The Lion Fountain.
Our hostel!
Not sure what this building is, but it is pretty and the picture turned out kind of cool.
La torre of a church in the city center.
Sunset.
Another church.
La torre at night.
Well, I think that's it! I hope the pictures were enough to keep your attention, there will (hopefully) be more as soon as I find my camera! In other news, I'm going to Madrid this weekend! Also I will post all of my pictures from the last few weeks on facebook and get public links up on here as soon as that's done.
So how's home everybody? Leave me some news in the comments!
Until next time, love you all and God bless :)
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