Barcelona!

Barcelona is one of my favorite cities in Spain, perhaps the favorite. Well, I take that back. I think at the very least it’s tied with San Sebastian, which I’m sure you’re all sick of me raving about. Well, just wait until it actually gets nice outside and I visit more often! Haha.

But I digress.

This weekend was a long weekend in my comunidad autonoma of Castilla y Leon because this weekend was the celebration of Carnaval, the Latin version of Mardi Gras and basically the celebration of gluttony and sinfulness before Lent begins. So for whatever reason Castilla y Leon decided that we needed a few days off to celebrate this, so I had a good long weekend – five days! – and I took advantage of it to head to Barcelona. My friend Jennis’s father owns an apartment in Barca (imagine that with the little curly-cue thing below the “c”, like you might see in some French word), which she graciously let us stay in, and I got really cheap train tickets bought in advance.

We all arrived in our various ways on Friday – me by overnight train, Jennis in an airplane from the States, and Lucy on an early train from Logrono – and just spent the weekend wandering around the city and exploring its many neighborhoods. We never got far enough away from Jennis’s place to need to use the Metro, but we walked around her neighborhood (Born), as well as the Raval, along the Barceloneta beach and up and down the Passeig de Gracia and las Ramblas, two major streets in the city. And I have to say, the weather cooperated beautifully, allowing for us to spend a few meals and some coffee-time on sidewalk patios, SUCH a lovely luxury and hopefully a sign that spring is coming soon!

I’d like to say that I can remember exactly what we did or that it was overwhelmingly interesting, but there’s something about just leisurely spending your time exploring a city without any real plans that is really pleasant. I’d already seen a lot of really touristy, museum-y things in Barcelona, so this weekend plan was perfect. And to that point, I’ll share with you some of my favorite pictures of the weekend. I don’t have many, but I hope you enjoy them! Oh, and actually if you want to see more, go visit Lucy’s blog, as she is always way better at taking photos than I am!

Barcelona streetlight

Me and Jennis in front of Barcelona's Arc du Triomphe

Lucy and Me preparing to go out

Catedral de Santa Maria del Mar

Narrow street in El Raval

And the next time that I write, it will probably be to tell you about my mom and aunts’ visit here and all the exciting and crazy things that we did – I AM SO EXCITED!! I hope you all have a wonderful last week of February.

 

The Vagaries of the Weather

I imagine that many of you are ridiculously tired of hearing me talk about how cold I am all the time and how snowy it is all the time here, but I feel like now I have new insight having been back in the last week and seeing just how quickly these things can change.

So, let’s just sum up the last week of my existence in Spain:

I arrived last Thursday and luckily made it back to Burgos before the middle of the country was blanketed with a snow storm that effectively shut down Barajas Airport for a day or two, cancelling hundreds of flights and basically causing tons of people to live in the airport all weekend. Meanwhile, I happened to be in the north of the country where the weather hovered around 10C all weekend and was generally glorious – I could even go out on Sunday afternoon without a jacket on, that’s how nice it was.

I got home on Sunday night, and then woke up Monday morning to -9C weather – that’s a difference of about 35F degrees in a 24 hour period. It literally did not make it out of negative degrees all day on Monday, which was rather swell.

Then, Tuesday it snows. And it was actually pretty nice – by pretty nice, I mean 0-2C during the day. See how this becomes relative all of a sudden? The temperature slowly warmed throughout the week, but never getting out of the double digits. And then WHAM – the most glorious weekend, with temperatures in the low 50s and sunshine and just a generally pleasant atmosphere to be outside in. I remember thinking, “Gosh, isn’t it a luxury to actually enjoy walking outside and window shopping as opposed to speed-walking as fast as possible so you don’t freeze in transit from your house to the bus to the school?”

Oh, and here’s the best part: tomorrow it’s supposed to be relatively nice again, and then another snow storm and highs of 2C throughout the middle of the week.  WHAT?!

I suppose here’s what I have concluded: A) winter weather outside of California rather sucks. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that icing on the cake: while I was literally freezing my rear end off, it was 70F in Palo Alto all week. Talk about totally unfair. B) I thought I was okay with the the winter weather, not dying so much, and then it was -9C for a day and I realized that winter weather is miserable. Why do people subject themselves to it? C) Why is it allowed to be in the 50s all weekend and get my hopes up only to plunge me back into freezing misery this week? This seems totally and cosmically cruel.

I have another conclusion, actually, and it’s this: the snow isn’t really so much the problem – in fact, I think walking through gently falling snow to catch the bus is rather romantic and beautiful – but it’s the ice that inevitably sticks around afterwards that’s the killer. I can guarantee a serious wipe out due to some combination of me walking too fast-me wearing shoes without appropriate grip-sneaky hiding patches of ice sometime in the near future. It’s a serious mine-field out there. And the worst is that you know it’s coming and can’t do anything about it! As in, “Oh, how lovely, it’s snowing, but it’s probably going to dip below freezing tonight and turn all the nice snow and melted snow into hidden ice rinks all over the sidewalk so that I fall and bruise my hip on my way to rushing to the bus.” Dangerous, I tell you.

So, there you go. Again, I’m sure everyone who actually has winters colder than 45F already knows this and is rolling their eyes at my silliness, but I was just so surprised by the sudden weather changes and how completely different each day can be from the next. Let’s hope I can learn to appreciate the beautiful weather for when it comes instead of dwelling on the below zero days, right?

 

Santiago de Compostela

Alright. It’s legitimately been a long time since we went to Santiago and I am lame for not having written about it sooner, so I think I might just write a few quick comments and then just post you some fun pictures to show you how adorable the city is, especially all dressed up for Christmas! The old part of the city has a pretty medieval feel to it, with lots of cobbled streets to get lost in, but the obvious draw is the cathedral, the ending point for all the pilgrims doing the Camino de Santiago.

Okay, so apparently the history of St James that I wrote about here before was a little misinformed, so the nice person who commented on this post very generously corrected it for me: “Your photos are great! Your history… well .. not so great! James (Iago) was Yaakov ben Zebedee, brother of John Zebedee, apostles of Christ. After the crucifixion he evangelized in Spain. In 44AD he returned to Jerusalem where he was beheaded by Herod Agrippa. His disciples took his body back to Spain where they buried him on a hillside in Libredon (now Galicia). The necropolis was forgotten for 800 years. It was rediscovered in 813 and pilgrims have been walking to the tomb of Sant Iago in Compostela ever since. (Compostela – compos = burial place stella – stars).”  Thanks for the correction! I could have sworn there was something about a mysterious boat in it, but my memory’s notoriously lame, soo…who knows? Anyway, people walk, bike, ride horses, or somehow travel from the camino’s accepted beginning in France to Santiago to Compostela, hundreds of miles away. And the cathedral and the massive plaza that fronts it is pretty darn impressive to the unenlightened eye, so you can only imagine how it must feel to arrive there after weeks or months of strenous travel.

Okay, so back to Santiago. Galicia is also one of the rainiest communities in Spain, but we lucked out and had one really spectacular day to take pictures and explore the city. Plus, Galicia is well-known for its seafood, having a very long coast line and access to a lot of fruits of the sea on a daily basis. Unfortunately that is not my thing, but we certainly made friends with the large and very disgusting looking fish proudly displayed in every bar’s window, “enticing” us to come in and try the fare. Needless to say, the weekend was an adventure and worth the 8-hour-each-way bus rides! Enjoy the photos!

City Hall at Night

St James

The Cathedral

Cloisters in the Cathedral

Towards the University

Cathedral from the Distance

 

Snow Pictures!

Since I subjected y’all to two whole posts about snow and how insanely cold I am, I would like to post some pictures now that show you just how snowy the weather got today. Before, it had kind of snowed for an hour or so with nothing really sticking, but today it snowed for a good portion of the afternoon, and it definitely left its mark!

Pedestrian Bridge across the River Arlanzon

River Arlanzon

The Espolon

La Castanera

Plaza de la Catedral

Snowy Cathedral

Enjoy the photos, and send me warm thoughts!

 

Snow

So, last night I feel marked the official beginning of what everyone calls “el tiempo fresco” in Burgos. El tiempo fresco can literally be translated to “cool weather” in English, and that is how burgaleses describe the weather here. In fact, I went to give a private class today around 7pm, after a day in which the temperature hovered around 32 degrees Fahrenheit ALL DAY, and the first thing the father said to me when he opened the door was, “Hace fresco, no?” (It’s cool outside, isn’t it?) This is just how these people think. It is not cold here, it is merely chilly. Oh okay, no worries.

For all of you people who like cold weather and are enamored by the snow, I’ll give you this: it’s pretty. I recognize that. And when my roommate ran into my room last night to tell me to look out the window and see how it was snowing, the gently falling snowflakes and the way it slowly covered the tops of the cars below was enchanting. However, this morning at 9am when I got to leave my house to walk to school made the whole thing seem just a bit less fairy tale-like. There’s nothing like a bit of sleet to wake you up in the morning, right?

So basically all of today was spent wandering around town in the SNOW, wishing that I was at home. For the record, I looked up the temperature in Palo Alto today – a full 30 degrees warmer (in Fahrenheit) and raining. Why do people live in places like Burgos? Why do they so willingly subject themselves to this cold?? Okay, so that’s a bit overdramatic and I know I’m a huge Californian pansy, but still. This is going to take some getting used to.

I learned a really great joke the other day about Burgos and how people view the cold here. Let’s see if it’s at all funny when I translate it all into English:

People from Burgos say: Hace fresco hoy. (=It’s cool today.)
People in Spain say: Hace un frio que te jodas. (=It’s f*ing cold.)
People say in English: It’s freezing.

People from Burgos say: Hoy hace menos frio que ayer. (=Today is not as cold as yesterday.)
People in Spain say: Hace un frio que te jodas.
People say in English: It’s freezing.

And so on. I think the nuances might be a bit lost in translation, but you get the idea. No one ever really admits to how cold it is here, while everyone else recognizes that people in Burgos are just fooling themselves. Perhaps to try to forget the fact that THEY’RE FREEZING. Just a thought.

Anyway. It’s been snowing all day today, and I can only imagine that it will continue. The weather forecast just shows more and more cold days ahead, so if I wasn’t counting down the days until I go home before, I certainly am now.

Keep warm.