Italian highlights: Lugano

For the first full day of the tour, we went to Lugano, Switzerland. Yea it was pretty, but I’m still not sure why we went to Switzerland on our tour of Italy. Anyway, we got there and had a few hours to walk around this adorable town right on the banks of Lake Lugano. The streets were narrow and there was a Christmas market going on.



My mom and I shopped around a little bit, browsing at watches (for Joe) and buying soft pretzels, which I’ve been missing. Not that I really eat soft pretzels, but I love pretzels and they’re not that great in Spain (they barely exist).



mmm pretzels!

We tried to buy chocolates, but there was only one place in town and nothing really appealed to us. We walked along by the river for a while and took some pictures. We also stopped into a small church which had little carvings (they were one square foot each) on the wall representing the 14 stations of the cross.

....Internet!

blog hiatus will soon be over because today we got internet installed. we're not entirely sure how/why the guy figured it out today as opposed to before christmas or in november or october....but somehow he figured out a way to connect us to a hook-up box (ours is inside a construction site) and now we have internet.

so, the blog will soon be updated. pictures will soon be available. it's going to take me sometime because i took 2000 photos in italy and 375 in morocco. i'm also currently on internet overload. i have the new york times and bbc whenever i want them!!! i just downloaded bbc podcasts (and the washington post and npr)!! i'm so excited.

ok, back to pictures

What to do at 6am in a Milanese hostel

So, I woke u at 6am, got dressed inside my bed, brushed my teeth and decided to check my email before leaving the hostel. What I found was that my mother's plane was just off the coast of Greenland (or somewhere over there) and wouldn't land until 11am.

Rather than going back to sleep, I thought I would share my journal entry from last night...

After four hours of sleep (I was at a friend's apartment using the internet, then I showered and did laundry), I woke up, cleaned the apartment and walked to the bus station (via the snake path). The ride to Granada was uneventful; thankfully the screaming kid (seated directly behind me, of course) got off in Almedinilla, 10 km from Priego.

Once in Granada, I wandered around the Plaza Nueva area, where my roommates I and I had stayed in October. I wanted tea, but none of the teterias were open yet. While sitting in the sun, a friend called to say that he could have lunch (he was originally going to be home at his parent's house, but he stayed in Granada because he had things to finish up). We met at the Plaza and went for sushi. For lunch we shared spicy tuna rolls, Japanese pumpkin rolls, and a combo roll which contained eel, avocado, cucumber, and another kind of fish. Lunch was good, but I miss really good sushi that I eat at home.

After lunch, we walked around Granada's dead streets. Saturday before Christmas and no one was out. This may be partially because we were walking around during siesta hours. Then we went to his apartment so he could get his car. We drove to a shopping center because he needed a computer cable to hook up wifi at is parent's house. Then he took me to the tiny Granada-Jaen airport.

Luckily my bag only weighed 12.5kg because Ryanair has really strictluggage policies and many people had to open their bags, take stuff out and layer up. I am not joking.

My flight left late, which was unfortunate because that meant I got to the hostel late. Ryanair doesn't assign seats. You get in line inside the terminal, then walk to the plane where it's a free-for-all. Being me, I was first in the line (after the people who pay extra for priority boarding). I took the window seat of an exit row, which was more of a hassle than what it was worth. I was not allowed to have my bag under the seat in front of me, nor was I able to hold my jacket: it had to be on or in the overhead.

When we got to Bergamo (40km from Milan), I went straight to the bathroom in the baggage area. I walked out (2 minutes later) and my bag was already coming around the carousel (EXCITING!). I grabbed it and jumped on a bus headed for the central train station in Milan. I walked to my hostel at 11:30 at night with a pink floral LLBean duffel bag - not the smartest looking travel gear, left over from my late-high school/early-college years.

I had never seen a hostel room like this one. I booked a "four person mixed (gender) dorm." What I found was a room with two twin beds (thankfully one was mine) and a European double bed - two twins under the same big bedspread. It had a TV and private bathroom. I had to share the room with a Russian guy and two Greek guys (they got the cozy bed).

The hostel is also located right next to a sushi restaurant. I haven't seen sushi since I ate it in Sevilla in September. Today I've seen two sushi restaurants....Dorothy is definitely not in Priego (I mean Kansas) anymore.

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Ok, It's now 7:45am, maybe I'll head to the airport. I figure, I'm not going back to sleep, I've read the New York Times, parts of the Economist and BBC. I've typed my journal/blog entry and check both my email and facebook 10 times each.

Sure, my mom won't get in for another 3 hours, but the bus will take at least an hour and if I get tired, I'll just sleep at the airport - not like I haven't done that before....

Christmas Celebrations

Tuesday evening I went with Cecilia and her teachers to their English-teacher dinner. We had tapas at a restaurant in Priego. Her principal came and we ordered fried sardines (which looked like French fries), fried calamari, eggplant (also fried) with a honey sauce, roasted peppers, meat with French fries (I didn’t eat it) and some tiny fried fish. Basically I was sick afterwards from having eaten so much fried food so late at night. It was still a lot of fun to be out to dinner with them and everyone was really nice.

Wednesday afternoon, David called me to tell me that he had received an email saying our identification cards had come in. Thursday morning, Cecilia and I woke up early to walk Erin to the bus station. Then we came home for a little while before returning to the bus station to take a bus to Córdoba. We (finally) got the cards and she took a train to Madrid. I came back to Priego for my school’s faculty party. At 3:15, I put on a dress and went up to the center of town to meet the other teachers. They were standing around the bar having a drink while waiting for everyone to arrive. After a few minutes we went upstairs to the banquet/party room. The following describes yet another marathon lunch.

Our appetizer courses: first we had a paté, which I think was Cornish hen (I know it was a bird like chicken, but smaller). It was pretty good, mostly because there was some roasted pepper on the plate, which I added to my cracker and paté. Next, the servers brought ham and cheese plates around. The other teachers were shocked that I don’t like ham (this was jamón ibérico, the most expensive and “best” ham). Appetizer three was artichokes with garlic sauce and pieces of ham. I ate the artichokes which were delicious. Fourth, we had a mixed fried seafood plate (calamari, shrimp and chunks of a white fish).



After eating all of this food (there was also olives and bread on the table), our lunch was served. I had swordfish with seafood sauce and garlic potatoes. Drinks were included in our price, so everyone drank a lot of wine. That meant I got to taste a few different kinds of wine. I prefer the Rioja to the Rivera. For dessert (which I didn’t eat) there were little portions of things that looked like bread pudding. We also had coffee/tea and rosolí, which is a liquor made of anis and coffee. It’s really good and many people make it at home. It’s light and you can’t taste the alcohol in it.

We toasted several times during the lunch. At one point, José María, deputy principal and husband of the principal, was leading the toast and said we were toasting three things: our families, our friends, and the child growing inside his wife’s body. The entire room stopped. No one (except Lourdes) knew that María José was pregnant. I think she was even a little surprised that he announced the pregnancy like this. Of course, everyone had to have another shot glass of rosoli to celebrate. There was another school at the table next to ours and they had to come over and congratulate her also.

We also had a singing contest with the other school. They started singing Christmas songs in Spanish and our group sung some in response. Then they sung on in English, which we followed by singing much louder in English. This kept going for a while, until they sung Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. I yelled out that it wasn’t really Christmas song and my teachers started by singing more (actual) Christmas songs in English. We clearly won the singing contest.

After lunch (at around 7pm), we went back downstairs to the bar for our “digestive” cocktails. I didn’t drink, but most of the teachers had mixed drinks. We stood around talking and singing until 10 pm, when everyone wanted to go to another bar. At this point I went home because I was tired and my lungs could no longer handle the second-hand smoke.

Friday morning we went to Teatro Victoria for the children’s holiday concert. Getting into the theater was a pain because of all the parents outside. Amazingly, we got all the kids seated and the show started early. First, the sixth-graders “performed” a play about Christmas, which no one could hear because the microphones were too far away from them. Then, each class sung a song in Spanish and another in English including the nursery school kids (the 3, 4, and 5 year olds sung together).


The first grades sung "10 Little Angels."

The concert was great and the children did a really good job. The only problem was the length: it was way too long for the nursery school kids to sit through. They weren’t interested in watching the bigger kids and kept asking to go to the bathroom. They were also too small for the seats. The kids squirmed a lot and when they did, the seats would close with them inside.



Three-year-olds before the concert.

After the concert, we walked up to the school where the kids had a Christmas party for the rest of the day. Some classes played games, while other kids were allowed to play with clay and puzzles. They had tons of food. A group of parents dressed up as the three wise men and came around giving each child a bag of candy.



Here in Spain, most children get presents on January 6th rather than on Christmas. I went around saying goodbye to the students and teachers before taking a photo of the nativity scene the children had made and then leaving school to run my errands.

Last weekend before Christmas

Not too much to report. It was raining and gross all weekend. Friday night, Lourdes came over and we made her “breakfast for dinner:” scrambled eggs, French toast and oven fries (with onions and peppers – kind of like home fries). She really enjoyed it, both the food and the concept.

Saturday morning I walked around Priego and went to two churches that I had not yet been to. One is absolutely never open. I was shocked when I walked by and the door was open. It was really small, but like the other churches in Priego it was lavishly decorated in the baroque style (lots of gold-plated details). I also visited all four of the museums in town. The first was a museum dedicated to the first president of the second republic of Spain. It was in his former house and told the story of his life as well as displayed period furniture and old photos of Priego. The second was about the history of Priego from Paleolithic times to Roman times. Most of its displays were rocks and artifacts found around Priego. The third was a contemporary art “museum” (two rooms), which was interesting even though it had nothing to do with Priego. And finally, museum four was the dedicated to the work and life of a painter who lived in Priego. Museums two through four were housed in the same building (the painter’s former residence). They were all really tiny, but I enjoyed the art work and the old photos of Priego.

At noon we went to an oil mill to see how olive oil is made. There wasn’t much of a tour or anything; the people working there just showed us around and told us how the oil is processed. Priego is smack in the middle of the olive producing region of Spain and they are big on olives and olive oil here.

Saturday afternoon I went for tapas, lunch and coffee with Lourdes, some other people from Virgen de la Cabeza and the person who had my job two years ago. She is now working in another providence, but had come to Priego to visit. In the typical weekend-afternoon-lunch fashion, this was a five-hour event. We went to one place for drinks and tapas, another restaurant for lunch (I had pasta with calamari in squid ink) and yet another place for tea/coffee. I really like the long Spanish lunch because it’s fun and everyone sits around talking and enjoying each other’s company.

Sunday we didn’t really leave the apartment. I read Wicked which is the only book Erin and Cecilia brought that I was interested in reading. It’s also the one book they brought that they don’t want to read. For some reason, we’ve had internet this weekend. We’re stealing it from someone else’s apartment and the signal sucks and it only works on Erin’s computer. We have no idea why it’s working or how much longer it will work.

Red and Green Tapas and White Elephant Party

Wednesday night after our failed trip to Córdoba we threw a party for our teachers at our apartment. The trip was a bust because on November 11, the people at the immigration office told us to come back in a month to get our residency cards and yesterday they told us to come back in seven to ten days because the cards had not arrived from Madrid. The first time we were there, they told us not to call (they actually wouldn't give us a phone number), but this time we have the phone number. So, next week I get to go back to Córdoba....for more paperwork. It's only really frustrating because if I leave the EU (like when I go to Morocco in January), there is a chance I won't be allowed back into Spain without this card.

So, the party.....everyone was told to wear red or green. Some of the guests (mostly other teachers, Spanish, American and Polish) wore Santa hats and we wore reindeer ears.

We had also asked everyone to bring some kind of tapa (appetizer). We wound up with a ton of food. We put out meatballs, a veggie plate, cheese, olives, and patatas bravas (essentially steak fries in a spicy sauce). People brought ham pate, big tuna empanadas, pasta salad, a big round ham and cheese sandwich, more olives, and tortilla (an omelet with potatoes and onions inside). We also had tons of stuff for dessert: chocolate ice cream truffles, cookies, candies and (we made) ice cream sandwiches.


Virgen de la Cabeza teachers singing Christmas songs (in English!)!


Everyone who wore something green...

Everyone ate tons of food, but we were still left with a bunch of stuff. They were also told to bring the worst/silliest gift they could find for a game we were going to play. It was similar to the worst gift game we play at Chaiken's house every New Year's Day. We picked numbers for the order and then choose gifts. The way it works is that person number two can either choose a gift or rob the gift person one had chosen. However, a gift can only be robbed three times.

Some of the gifts included: a toilet seat (actually robbed because some of the guests wanted it), a thong with a stuffed chicken on it, a light up flower vase (what I received), fake hair, a slimming belt, a toilet paper dispenser....Everyone had a great time and laughed a lot.


Fake hair!

Toilet seat!
They also stayed much later than they have stayed for our past parties. Even so, cleaning up was really easy because they had brought most of the stuff and we used plastic cups (we don't actually own enough cups to serve the 13 people we had at the party).

Portugal

Friday after school we went to Portugal! Lourdes, the secretary/music teacher/art teacher drove us to Llerena, Extremadura, Spain where her boyfriend lives (about 2.5-3 hours away). Cecilia and Erin slept most of the way, so Lourdes and I chatted (in English) the entire time. At one point as we approached Llerena, Lourdes said she had never spoken this much English in her life and didn’t even know what she was saying anymore. Her English has improved quite a bit since we arrived two months ago.

Her boyfriend joined us and we drove 3.5 more hours to Lisbon. Once he was in the car, I got demoted to the middle seat in the back (thanks to my small size and complete lack of legs) of Lourdes’s Ford Focus. His arrival also added a (hilarious) GPS unit, and annoying woman’s voice, to our group.

Thanks to the openness of the European Union, there was no border between Spain and Portugal. We could see where the old border posts used to be and all of a sudden the signs switched from Spanish to Portuguese (aka we no longer had any idea what they said).

We arrived in Lisbon and found our hotel, which proved to be really challenging because of all the one-way streets. It took us 20 minutes to get to the other side of the street to find parking.

Friday night we went to the Parque das Nações where the Lisbon World Expo ’98 was held. (Apparently it’s like an international fair where you pay to get in and then can try different foods and see cultural demonstrations from countries around the world.) They had built a mall, event halls and tons of restaurants in preparation for the Expo, so now the area has great nightlife. The longest suspension bridge in Europe (16 km), Ponte de Vasco da Gama, starts there. We ate at an “Argentine” restaurant where I had the most delicious grilled squid (not at all Argentine) ever.

Saturday morning we ate breakfast and went to the Alfama barrio and saw the Castelo de São Jorge which had spectacular views of Lisbon. One thing about Lisbon: it is not a flat city. There are hills everywhere and we were constantly going up and down. After the castle, we walked down the hill and went to the Cathedral, which was less than spectacular as compared to the millions of other churches I’ve been to. We had fun walking alongside the trollycars which speed up the narrow streets.


A trolly passes the Cathedral.

Next we headed to the Praça do Comércio, which used to be the main portal to the city. Now, it’s still an important plaza, located right on the river, with many governmental buildings around it. It’s probable that my great-grandfather walked through it on his way out of Lisbon (before boarding a ship to the US).

From here, we went to a market to check out the produce and building. It was also near the river and housed in what appeared to be an old train station. I also love markets and make a point to go to one in every country I visit.

Next stop was to walk through the Chiado and Baixa, two barrios with lots of trendy shopping. We ate sandwiches for lunch and window shopped a bit before climbing up a hill to the Convento do Carmo, a cathedral/convent built in the 1300s, but partially ruined in a 1755 earthquake that destroyed almost everything else around it. This was one of my favorite places that we visited because it was so surreal. I was inside a church with sculptures and columns and most of the lower structures still in places. Yet, at the same time, I was outside: there was grass and I could see the sky.



Next we went to a viewing tower on top of one of the many elevators around Lisbon. This elevator was 100 years old and most tourists waited to take it to the top, not knowing that you could walk up the hill for free. The views were pretty awesome – it was basically the opposite of the views from the castle.





We spent some more time walking around downtown Lisbon and tried to visit the Panteão Nacional, a huge dome. It took us forever to find because half the roads in the oldest part of the city are no wider than my twin-sized bed and almost nothing on the map was marked because the names are much longer than the space the road takes up. By the time we arrived, the dome was closing and we only got to peak inside.

Exhausted, we walked back to the hotel to rest a bit and get ready to go out to dinner. First we drove across to the other side of the river, crossing a bridge which looks just like the Golden Gate Bridge. We tried to find the huge statue of Jesus, which was really difficult because we put “Lisbon” into the GPS and the statue was in a different town outside Lisbon. Cecilia and Erin wanted to get some pictures of Lisbon from the statue which stands on a hill. However, once we finally arrived, the park had closed for the day. Instead, we drove to Belém, a different suburb of Lisbon and walker around a bit. Next we headed to Barrio Alto, one of the principle nightlife centers in the city, to see a Fado show. Fado is kind of like flamenco except it’s almost always a sad song and there isn’t any dancing. The dinner was decent, but wound up being much more expensive than we thought it would be (we were in the touristy area, after all).

Sunday morning we woke up and went back to Belém where we toured the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, an incredible monastery and church. The ornate carvings and gargoyles were awesome and the entire building was really pretty. Also in Belém, we saw the residence of the president of Portuguese…no secret-service-like security: just an open gate and two guards with serious faces and swords (yes, you read that correctly).


A detail of the St. Jeronimo Monastary in Belem.

We stopped for coffee at a café/factory which opened in 1837 and makes pastéis de Belém, filo dough filled with a custard of milk, cream, and vanilla. Not my thing...but Loudes’s boyfriend, Luis absolutely loved them and ate at least two a day. The factory was really cool because the walls were tiled with Portuguese azulejos and you could see the people at work in the kitchen. Azulejos are tiles and buildings all around Portugal are decorated with different tile motifs. There was even a tile museum, but we didn’t make it there.


Pasteis de Belem.

After Belém, we headed further west to Sintra, a “city” within the Parque Natural Sintra-Cascais. We got some maps and headed for the Cabo de Roca. Even with our maps we got lost on the crazy windy roads and wound up at a beach. After seeing the Atlantic Ocean for the first time in a few months, we got back in the car and finally found the Cabo de Roca, the westernmost point in continental Europe.




The Portuguese coast was amazing!

We took a few photos and headed back to Sintra for lunch and a visit to the Palacio Nacional de Sintra which had some really amazing azulejos: entire rooms were covered in the tiles. Sintra is set on a hill in a park so the views from the palace were amazing. We shopped a little before heading back to Lisbon.


These are some tiles from a room in the National Palace at Sintra, Portugal. Sintra is also a UNESCO city and sits in the hills just west of Lisbon.


A view of Sintra as we approached the town.

Sunday night, the crabby old man at the hostel told us, in Portuguese, to go to Rossio for dinner. It was a short walk from our hostel and we found some pedestrian streets filled with restaurants. For a Sunday night, this part of the city was bustling. We ate Italian food before dragging our tired bodies back to the hostel and sleeping.

Monday morning we woke up really early and drove to Évora (1.5 hours east of Lisbon, on the way to Spain). The fortified city had some Roman ruins and many old buildings. After breakfast we walked around seeing as much as we could in the hour we spent there. Honestly, we could have spent two days visiting museums and churches, but we didn’t have time.


Évora, Portugal is a UNESCO city and deserves to be. There were Roman ruins everywhere and the fortification wall was almost entirely intact.

We drove back to Llerena (Spain) where Luis and Lourdes gave us a driving tour of the city: one of the principle tribunals during the crusades was housed there. We saw it, along with the church, main plaza and parts of the fortification wall that used to contain the city. Then we drove to Luis’s country house a few kilometers outside the city.


Luis's house in the countryside.

His parents, sister, her husband and two kids, other sister, her boyfriend, and some extended family members were there waiting for us with lunch. They had roasted an entire suckling pig, made salad, French fries, and fried eggs. I tasted the pig, which didn’t taste too meat-like because of all the roasting flavors. I didn’t eat more than a bite because I was afraid it would make me sick (I haven’t been eating that much meat lately). After lunch we walked Luis’s property to see the pigs his family is raising for food this year. Three humongous black pigs came running out of their pen to play with the family’s dogs. It was hilarious. After coffee and dessert, we thanked the family and headed back to Priego.



Of course, it was raining and much colder when we got back to Priego. It rained a bit in Lisbon, but it was so much warmer that we didn’t mind. The weekend was really great. Because we went with Lourdes and Luis, we got to see so much stuff. Their car and GPS really helped with getting around and visiting different towns.