Halloween in Lagos!

I decided to take a short vacation before my flight home by stopping in Portugal paradise, Lagos. Its basically everything you could hope for, a small beautiful city, lots of different bars and good restaurants, and an absolutely beautiful beach coast full of little caves and great cliff walks. Plus its halloween weekend so what better way to celebrate than by sitting on the beach all day in 90 degree heat. Certainly beats the weather in Chicago! Heres a few photos!










Can you guess what I dressed up as for Halloween?

Seville

I went to Seville because it is reknowned for its Flamenco music. Unfortunately, no one told me that it was mostly a touristy high cost event these days, especially in the winter when the tourists are fewer and far between. So for the majority of my time in Seville, I tried to find the real Flamenco, and I didnt succeed until essentially my last night there. I kept adding days at my hostel so I could find the music, and finally I did. And boy was it worth it! The city itself, is incredibly beautiful, but after the smallness of Granada and Malaga, it was a bit hard to find my way. It took me about 4 days to sorta figure the city out, and by the fifth, I was in love with it.


Going down a tight kissing lane

Friends from South Africa


The Cathedral at night (3rd biggest in the world)


The Barrio at night (old Jewish quarter)


Main plaza


Flamenco at the free touristy spot


View from above


Christopher Columbus resting place inside the cathedral


A giant carved golden alterpiece in the cathedral


Plaza de Espana (they filmed Star Wars here!!)

Malaga

I spent a couple of night in Malaga, although not much compared to Granada, its got a nice beach scene about 30 minutes walk from the main town. The city is actually much bigger than I expected, and its the main tourist destination these days for the Brits. Its also where Pablo Picasso grew up so there is a great Picasso museum that I got to go to for free, since I was there on the weekend of his birthday. Yay!


Me at the beach


The Beach


Castle on a hill


Pretty!


The cathedral

Granada is Gorgeous

Granada is easily my favorite Spanish city. It´s full of Morroccan beauty, chill people, and delicious tapas. Plus the hostel I stayed in was off the hook and I met a ton of cool people. Here are a few photos!


At a cool lookout to the Al Ahambra (a giant Moorish palace)


An awesome garden (every house has one of these!!)


Old Muslim bath house


The street by my hostel


The Al Ahambra from afar


Being photogenic at the Al Ahambra gardens


Gorgeous Al Ahambra gardens


Churros! Nothing like Mexican Churros, giant fried dough sticks that you dip in thick thick chocolate. They eat this for breakfast!


Travel buddies, L to R: Kieran (Canada), Areio (US), Jack (Germany)


Squatter shacks up in the caves of the albeisin

A taste of the Al Ahambra:













Views from above:

Pictures from Madrid

Madrid, now a good week ago, was a fairly normal big city. I stayed in a pretty crappy hostel, no locks on the doors, no key to get in, but luckily I made it out of there without any problems. I was able to meet up with my Knockanstockan friends from Madrid for one night, and met up with a couple of people I met in Barcelona. Overall, there wasn´t all that much to see there, but the nightlife was pretty awesome. Here are some pics!


A cool square that reminded me a lot of Venice


La Guernica (a giant Piccasso)


My friends from Barcelona in front of El Prado art museum


A cool statue in the Plaza Sol


Tapas bar El Tigre, packed to the brim

Granada

I took a 5 hour bus from Madrid this morning, and have made it to Granada, my first stop on my southern Spain tour. Granada has a ton of history, especially from around the 16th or 17th century from when it was the last stronghold against King Fernando and Queen Isabella (the one's responsible for the inquisition). I believe that is all correct, but because the city was able to hold out so long, it still has a ton of it's original north african influence. The streets by my hostel are all filled with morrocan merchants and the al ahambra (a beautiful morrocan palace) is here. I'm visiting that tomorrow, and tonight is tapas time!

I'm staying here for 3 nights, and even though it's a small city, there still seems to be a lot of fun places to check out. At the very least, the hostel is frickin awesome. It's a hippie heaven, so at least I'll have a couple of days of chill out time to recover from Madrid and Barcelona.

Madrid

I made it to Madrid! After an incredibly lame night of going to bed at midnight in Barcelona (I finally gave in and couldn´t stay out til 4am anymore), I still managed to sleep an hour past my alarm and barely make it to the bus station on time. Luckily, the cab drivers in Barcelona do good work, so I made it just in time and caught my 8 hour bus to Madrid. It was pretty rough, but now I´m here and I already met a few interesting people from my hostel, so we went out for some real tapas and sangria! Then I learned that apparently they are all from seriously Christian schools around the US and one of the boys has never even kissed a girl before and he is 23 years old. At one point I was telling a story about this drunk Aussie that came back to the hostel in Barcelona swearing his head off last night at 4am, and since I was just restating his words I didn´t think about what I was saying, and I managed to quiet the entire table in a milisecond. It was pretty awesome.

Tomorrow, I´m planning on hitting up the big art museum on free day and checking out the weekly flea market, before meeting up with some friends from my Knockanstockan days! Can´t wait!

Sleepless in Barcelona

Since arriving in Barcelona, I think I´ve averaged 4 hours of sleep a night. These people seriously never sleep. My day has consisted of walking around the city during the day, in between a constant stream of naps, definitively waking up for good around 8pm, going downstairs to the hostel for their free dinner, drinking with friends at the hostel until around 1:45am, and then going out in an arranged outing to whatever club is hosting the hostel for free for the evening. Staying out til anywhere between 4 and 7am, and finally getting back to sleep and starting it all over again the next morning.

From what I´ve actually seen of the city it´s pretty awesome, other than the ridiculous amount of pickpockets. It reminds me a lot more of France than Spain though, and I´ve read it´s not really considered all that Spanish a city. The food sold in the grocery stores is very similar to the food in France, and I totally had more reasons why it was like France, but I´ve lost it now, clearly from lack of sleep. I walked around today to all the Gaudi buildings (an absolutely crazy Dr. Suess like architect from the late 19th -early 20th century). His masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia was pretty gorgeous, although almost 100 years from it´s start of construction, it´s still being built. I think it´s still go another 10 years to go. Unfortunately all his sites were way too expensive to go in, so I just spent the day walking and eating delicious food.

I´ve had enough of clubbing from the past two nights, so tonight I think I´m going to check out a film festival going on in the city, and hit up a jazz bar I read about it my trusty guide book. Gotta call it an early evening (meaning before 2am) cause I have a bus to catch tomorrow at 10:30am! How that´s ever gonna happen is a mystery to me right now, but we´ll see if I make it tomorrow! I should be getting into Madrid by 6pm, and I´ll be going to a birthday party for one of the people I worked with at the Irish music fest! Should be another couple of crazy nights!

Aix and Arles

For the past 5 days, I´ve spend my time lazily hanging out in the south of France, in Provence. Now, nothing beats Nice and chlling out on the beach, but I think Arles and Aix are definitely so far my favorite parts of France. Arles actually beats Aix out in my book because of it has a frickin awesome Roman colleseum in the middle of town, which they still use for bullfights to this day, 2000 years after it was built.

I ended up in Aix because of all the people I contacted on Couchsurfing in the south of France, I only got one response from a very nice marketing student named Emilie, who could host me for one night there. I had also heard that Aix (pronounced like the letter X) is a very chic Parisien like provential town. So I figured, why not! Once I got there, Emilie showed me to her gorgeous apartment that she had all to herself, and then promptly took me to a swanky sidewalk cafe where she spent 6 euro each on ice teas for us, as we chatted about her recent trip to Santa Monica and all the crazy things that Americans put French in front of for no apparent reason, at least no apparent reason to her (ie french maid, french kissing, french toast, french fries etc).

It was a lovely evening to say the least, and then she left me to go to a dinner party, and I got a much needed chance to just chill in an apartment, cook some DELICIOUS tomato soup and watch french television for a few hours. The next day I randomly ran into a very nice Argentinian girl, Marilena, who I had hung out with in Nice, and we spent the day running around Aix being tourists. The highlight of the day was us sitting on a stoop in the street, attempting to eat our supermarket bought lunch, when she spilled her cous cous all over the place, and everyone stared and laughed at us as they passed. To make it even better she then took a picture with a tripod of us eating over the mess, and I think the French finally got the change to prove their long held fear that foreigners really are nuts.

For the weekend, I made my way over to Arles, a tiny little provencial town, with as I mentioned before, a ton of Roman history, and which also happens to be the home of Van Gogh when he went nutso. My sister managed to hook me up with a place to stay, since a friend of hers from school just started a teaching job in the city. From the moment I got off the bus, Sarah-Anne grabbed my hand and took care of me for the entire weekend. It was like we´d known each other for years instantly. We went back to her awesomely spacious apartment, and I got to meet her neighbor, Susanna, who is also American and working as a teacher. Both of them had just recently moved to the area and were beginning to get bored with the limited social life afforded to foreigners in France, so it was perfect timing for my arrival. We spent most of the four days I was there walking around, shopping at markets, siting in parks, and cooking elaborate dinners for each other. It was the most relaxing and wonderful 4 days of my stay in France, although I did devlop a bit of an obsession with visiting French supermarches and boulangeries and pastiseries and anywhere else that had delicious French food to buy. Even though I stayed for free, I still managed to drop at least 50 euro on food while I was there, but being in France, it was DEFINITELY worth it.

On my last day in France, I went with Sarah-Anne back to Aix and spent the day chatting with another American friend of hers who lived in town. I tried my first real crepe, which is essentially a giant French burrito. It was the most indulgent thing I´ve ever eaten. I think the lady put at least half a bag of shredded cheese in there, and it was absolutely delicious. I am gonna miss French food so much!

And now, I´ve just made it to Barcelona, on an overnight bus, where I did not sleep one wink. The bus arrived early even, at 530 am, leaving me with no choice but to take a taxi to my hostel, where I had been told there was free internet to occupy my time until noon when I could check in, and couches to lay down on, but once again I´d been douped. Internet costs money and there are no couches. So no sleep for me until noon today! Luckily I´m in a city that really never sleeps, so I should have no problem finding something to do, once the pesky sun rises already.

Hopefully by tomorrow, I´ll have some gorgeous pictures of Spain to share!

Schedule Update pt 2

I've now been staying in hostels for almost 3 weeks, and have had absolutely no luck finding another farm to host me. Staying in hostels is 1) way too expensive, and 2) very tiring as nobody ever sleeps. Therefore thanks to the help of my parents, I've decided to change my ticket and come back to the states a bit earlier than originally planned. So now, I'll be arriving in Chicago on Thursday, November 5th! Just in time to celebrate my birthday at home! Woo!

That also means that the rest of my trip is just gonna be pure sight-seeing, so when I get back I'm gonna be a giant wrecked heap of a mess with absolutely no money. But ce la vie! So the rest of the trip will probably look like this:

Today: Couchsurf in Aix-en-Provence
Friday-Monday: Stay in Arles, France with a friend of my sister's from college
Tuesday 13th-17th: Barcelona
18-22: Madrid
23-31: Granada, Sevilla, Malaga
Nov 1-4: Lisbon

Hopefully I'll be able to couchsurf and stay with a few friends here and there so I won't be spending too much on housing. So if anyone has any friends in any of those areas that wouldn't mind hosting me for a night or two, let me know!

Photos from Nice/Monaco/Cannes

So the great part about staying in Nice is that not only that it's the coolest place on earth, but you can also travel to other coolest places on earth for only 1 euro on the bus! My second day in Nice I went to Monaco for the day, and today I went to Cannes! Both places were pretty cool, although Monaco just felt like a more french version of LA. But Cannes was utterly beautiful, just like Nice.

Here's a few photos!


At the beach in Nice


Monaco Casino - The Monte Carlo


Casino action!


Harbor in Monaco with some of the biggest Yachts in the world!


View from the top of a cliff in Eze (on the way to Monaco)


My travel buddies for the day, Brad and Brandon, having fun at a cactus garden in Eze


Beach in Cannes


Mipcom was happening in Cannes when I was there (the tv equivalent to the film fest)


Cannes!


Little Street in Cannes


At the top of the hill in Cannes


What a view!