The city of lovers is glowing tonight...Paris!

Hey everyone!
Yes, the title of this post quotes a song from Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame. So I just kicked off my month and a half of straight travel (with some school and some Sevillian festivals in there) and I am really pumped. I really can't even think about how quickly my time here will go. This last weekend, I went to PARIS. I should let you know, going to Paris has been a dream of mine for a very long time. I've been to France twice before, but the other two times, I went to the Southern coast. When Kels, Steph and I got together at the beginning of the semester and we were talking about where we wanted to travel to, I said "We can go wherever you want, but if I leave Europe without seeing the Eiffel Tower, I'm going to jump off a cliff." So as you can imagine, we planned a trip. We knew it would be really hard to see all of the city in one day because there are SO many things to do, but at the same time, we feel like veteran travelers by now and we know how to do even a huge city in a few days.

So we left Seville right after school on Thursday and took a non stop flight to Paris. When we got off the plane, we took the metro to our hotel and checked in. Our hotel was located on Grand Boulevard and had a balcony with an amazing view of the busy street below. Because we knew that we had a PACKED day the next day, we went to dinner when we got there, planned out the next day and went to bed. We woke up bright and early and left the hotel with our map, cameras and jackets and set out for our day. By that point, we had made an itinerary for the day according to where it was on the Paris map. One really awesome thing about Paris (among many) is the fact that their Metro system is amazing. It really can take you absolutely everywhere. Also, there was a metro stop literally outside of our hotel. Our first stop was the Sacre Couer. This was the only place that we visited this weekend that I had never heard of and I have no idea how I hadn't. It's a giant white basilica built high up on a hill that overlooks the entire city. You had to walk up about 6 STEEP flights of concrete steps to get up to it, but once you did, you realized it was completely worth it. You could see all of the city from the front steps. The inside was even more breathtaking. Being in Europe, I have seen many MANY churches but this was by far the most beautiful church I've ever seen in my whole life. Whereas many other cathedrals in Europe are very dark on the inside, the Sacre Couer was built with white stone and was full of light. It was so warm, inviting and marvelous. At the front of the altar, this is a GIGANTIC moral of Jesus and other important people from the gospels painted on the domed ceiling. Also, there was a sign at the entrance that said "This is a house of continuous prayer, please don't talk", so it was completely silent as well. The environment inside this church was unexplainable. After we had walked around the whole thing and took a few moments of silence, we left the Basilica and got some nutella and banana crepes before setting off for the next place.

Our next stop was the Lourve Art Museum. As you've probably heard, it is the biggest art museum in the world and it is completely useless to try to see it all in one week, let alone a couple hours. While we knew it would be daunting, we decided to go anyway and see the two most famous pieces: the Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa. Thankfully, in this HUGE building, those two works were relatively easy to find. I had heard this before I saw it, but the Mona Lisa is one of the biggest overstatements in history to the untrained mind/eye (aka me). It's smaller than you think it is and they put it on this MASSIVE wall. Yeah, I looked at it, but I was more interested in the GIGANTIC painting of the last supper on the opposite wall (not the one you've heard of, but a similar painting). I really do want to find out what makes this small portrait of a woman so darn important and famous, so I'll have to wikipedia it or something. After the Lourve, we took the Metro to the Notre Dame, which was another sight that was a little different from what I expected. This is a little embarrassing to admit, but the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the disney movie, is one of my favorite movies. In the movie, they make the Notre Dame look like it is 50 stories tall. This is not true in life. It was beautiful, but it was again smaller than I thought. The inside was very dark but it made the stained glass windows looks even more spectacular. Unlike the Sacre Coeur, there was no policy against talking, so it was a little harder to realize the holiness of the building, but it was still really nice to visit. The part that I enjoyed the most about the Notre Dame wasn't even inside the building, it was the beautiful statues and sculptures on the outside. I especially loved the sculpture of the 28 kings of Judah and Israel that were above the 3 huge entrances on the front.

The next thing that we did was by far my favorite part of the day. After the Notre Dame, we found a grocery store where we bought ourselves the perfect French picnic: 2 French baguettes, two wedges of brie, a bag of grapes, a bottle of wine, olives and 3 toblerone bars. With grocery bags in hand, we hopped on the Metro to the Eiffel Tower. When we got there, we found a tree in the park in front of the Eiffel Tower, ate our picnic and took in the beautiful sight. I honestly cannot explain how happy Kels, Steph and I were. We were all smiles for the entire hour and a half we were sitting. After our picnic, we walked over to a plaza where it's really easy to take pictures with the tower in the back ground. It was a little scary because you have to take a couple flights of stairs to get to the platform where you can take the best pictures. When you get up on the ledge, it's literally a two story drop straight down to concrete. I tried not to think about it when I was taking pictures, but I'm really thankful none of us fell. After taking pictures, we walked to the Eiffel Tower so we could actually go up it. Sadly, the very top of the Eiffel Tower was closed. It was about 4:30pm, the elevators stopped at 6:30pm and I cannot even explain to you how long it was to get on the elevator. We probably would have been waiting at LEAST 3 hours. So we decided that it was cheaper and easier to take the stairs. It's hard to say how many flights it is to get to the first and second levels because it's so curvy, but we definitely walked the whole way. But in the end, it was worth it, because I was on the second level right as the sun was setting. We finished off our day with a walk down the Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe.

So if Friday was our French, brie-eating, Eiffel Tower visiting day, Saturday was definitely our corporate, "I'm an American tourist" day. We had been in Europe for so long that we had no shame in doing all American-things that day. We woke up, got our starbucks and hopped on the Metro to Eurodisney. Many people asked us why Kels, Steph and I would think about going when we have the same park at home, but they have no idea how obsessed with Disney the 3 of us are. As I could have guessed, Eurodisney is almost exactly the same as Magic Kingdom in DisneyWorld Orlando, with a few differences. First of all, the characters on all the rides speak French, which made our "Star Tours" (the star wars ride) pretty interesting. Also, the Space Mountain goes upside down and is A LOT more extreme than the one at home. We went on all the important rides: Space Mountain, Haunted Mansion, Pirates of the Caribbean and Indiana Jones. It was also really nice because we had a good friend from England, Jack, meet us. We met him in Lagos on my birthday and he decided to meet us in Paris. He worked on Friday, so he met us at Disney on Saturday. That night, the four of us continued our American journey (along with our British friend?) and ate dinner at Hard Rock Café Paris. It was really awesome to sit with Jack and compare common sayings from our countries. I called Jack an alien because he kept saying such weird things. He responded by calling me a cow, which I thought was hilarious. While in America "cow" usually means you're fat, "cow" in England means "catty". I told him that he should be careful to never call a bigger girl a "cow" because she won't take it as easily as I did. After Hard Rock Café, we ended our night and our trip with a return to the Eiffel Tower. At night, the Eiffel Tower sparkles every hour on the hour. Please forgive me, but for lack of a better word, it was absolutely magical. I was in Paris watching the Eiffel Tower sparkle with my two best friends and an awesome British guy; I couldn't have been happier.

Please forgive me if I haven't said this enough in my other blogs because it's always on my mind, but I cannot even explain how blessed I feel to be able to do all the amazing things that I've been doing. I didn't think that feeling could be made stronger until I saw the Eiffel Tower. In my prayers, I am constantly thanking God for these amazing experiences and this amazing opportunity to do these things. Not only has God blessed me with these sights, but he blessed me a long time ago when he gave me 2 parents who would support me in all my dreams, including this one.

Anyway, that's my update of my Paris weekend. I am back in Seville going to school this week until I leave for Barcelona on Thursday. I'm trying so hard to soak up Spanish culture on the weekdays now that I'm leaving every weekend. Yesterday, in between classes, I sat in the Jardines de Murillo, which are the gardens outside the Alcazar, (the old king's palace) to read. The weather has been flawless every single day for the last 2 or 3 weeks. It’s been about 70 degrees without a cloud in the sky. Once again, I truly am blessed. Thanks for reading, you guys! I know that these blogs are long but I keep telling myself that people who really care (like my parents) will read the whole thing so congrats on making it this far, cause I don't know if would read someone else's blog if it were this long! Love you all!

Here's a link to more pictures:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2375057&id=10235591&l=855d8cdb2a

It's the half way point!

Hey guys!

So tomorrow, I will have officially been in Seville for 8 weeks out of my 16 week semester. I don't really have a lot of write about in this post the time since I wrote last has been pretty uneventful. We didn't travel anywhere this weekend and we didn't even really go out to bars or clubs either because we were still recuperating from our sleepless, crazy Lagos weekend. When we got off the bus from Lagos last Monday, I went directly to class so I never really had a day to get back on track. So as you can see after Lagos, a weekend of sleep and sightseeing sounded amazing to me. On Friday, I woke up and met Kelsey to do our weekly bible study. After the bible study, Kelsey took me for a walk around Triana, her "barrio". Seville is broken up much like New York City is broken up into boroughs. Triana is the "Brooklyn" of Seville. It's on the opposite side of the river from downtown and it really is charming. We walked down all the small, old streets. We walked by cathedrals, took pictures on the bridge and even went to a market which was really similar to farmers' markets in the states. Also, that day (along with almost every single day for the last week) was about 75 degrees and sunny. That afternoon, I spent a lot of time in my bedroom and around town just relaxing. I just started "Twilight" (yes, I gave into the fad), took a nap and worked out, 3 things I never get to do in the States. That night, Steph, Kels and I met up to go to a bar that has a terrace that overlooks the river and the city. We had a drink, talked and walked back home to our host families. Even though the 3 of us just went to sit and have a drink, because it's Sevilla and it's not normal to go to a bar before 11am, I still wasn't in bed until 2am. 2am is an "early night" here; isn't that crazy?

The next day (Saturday) we decide to go to the beach. The nearest beach from Seville is about an hour away by bus. The only departing times for the bus were 8am or 11am. Because we wanted to get the most out of the day, we took the 8am bus, meaning we had to be at the bus station at 7:30am. The bus was absolutely packed with people wanting to get to the beach and the drive through Spain's Southern countryside was beautiful. We got to the beach, which was named Matalascañas, went to a café for some breakfast and headed to the beach. This beach was the biggest beach I had ever been to. Every single beach I've been to in my whole life has had some sort of curved land or marina that cut off some of view of the ocean, but this beach was like a straight line and there were no marinas in sight so when you stood at the shore line, the ONLY thing you could see was blue water. Obviously, we did all the cliche beach things; we played in the waves, took in the sun, etc. We also had a really nice lunch at a restaurant on the beach. We took the bus home at about 6 pm and got back to Sevilla with enough time to catch a movie. We saw Gran Torino with Spanish subtitles (good flick, love the symbolism). We were all exhausted from the sun and the night before, so we all went home around 10pm. I got to bed and slept for 13 hours. Finally, today is the first day I've felt well rested since Lagos.

This week, I have midterms so if you send me emails, please forgive me if I don't return any of them this week, because I will be studying. I know this post was pretty uneventful, but get ready for some big news and stories coming up in the next ones. Here's my schedule for the rest of my semester here:

March 19th-22nd (Next Weekend): PARIS!

March 26th-29th: Barcelona

April 1st-9th: Italy (Rome, Florence, Venice)

April 9th-12th: Semana Santa Events in Sevilla (these are a HUGE deal here)

April 17th-19th: Madrid

April 23rd-28th: Palma de Mallorca

April 29th-May 3rd: Sevilla's "Feria" (This is Sevilla's annual fair, people flock from all over the world to visit)

As you can see, I am incredibly blessed/spoiled and I will have a LOT to write about over the next month and a half. This also means that I will be busy busy busy, so again, please forgive me if I don't respond to emails as quickly or as frequently as I have been. Next weekend, I am going to see the Eiffel Tower, which is one of my life goals (1. Be happy, 2. Have kids. 3. See the Eiffel Tower...). I can't wait to tell you all about it!

more photos: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2372487&id=10235591&l=14f87d3022

How do you say "It's my birthday" in Portuguese

Olá! Bom dia! Fala inglês?
That means "Hello! Good day! Do you speak English?" in Portuguese, a language that I don't speak a word. I had to look up what I wrote in my Let's Go: Spain and Portugal guidebook. This weekend (the 6th, to be exact) I turned 21 years old. I don't usually make a big deal out of my birthday. I like to spend it with people I love, but I usually don't need a lot of things to make me happy. Even though I am so blessed to be in Europe, I was a little down because I knew that I wasn't going to see many of my BEST friends on my birthday. I also knew that I will never have the cliché Boulder birthday where you go to Pearl Street with all of your friends, you don't pay for a single drink and you kiss the buffalo (it's a Boulder thing). Obviously, if I had to pick between spending my 21st birthday in SPAIN vs. Boulder, I would pick Spain. Before I left for Spain, the study abroad office taught us something called the "Cultural Awareness Curve". It basically showed us that it is normal to have highs and lows while you are abroad. I am rounding the half way point and I think that I was in one of the lows last week. I was walking around the city and I just didn't appreciate it in the same way that I did the few couple weeks I was here. I'm getting to the part where I miss certain things about home more than I used to and find certain things that annoy me about Spanish culture that didn't bother me before, even though Seville is still breathtaking. For all of these reasons, I wanted to have a good birthday. I decided that it would be nice to take a bus down to the beaches of Southern Portugal and spend my birthday on the beach.

That's right, Steph, Kels and I went to a beach town called Lagos, Portugal, which is located on the Southwest corner of the Iberian Peninsula. It's known for its beautiful beaches, breathtaking cliffs and lively nightlife. It's about a 4 hour bus ride from Seville so on Friday morning, we woke up and caught the 7:30 bus to Lagos. Most of the bus ride was along the coast so it was so beautiful to see the ocean. When we arrived, we took a taxi to the hostel I found online. We stayed at the International Youth Hostel and it was amazing. It was 12 EUROS a night including breakfast. It was really close to the center of town and only a short walk to the beach. The people that ran it spoke English and it was clean and neat. Also, because it was the off season for the town, the 3 of us got a 4 person dorm all to ourselves. Overall, it was an awesome pick. Unfortunately, the weather on Friday was not that good and too cold to really go to the beach. We were going in a weird time of year, so it was a toss up of whether the weather would be nice or not. Just because it's on the beach, doesn't mean that it's warm and sunny all year.

We got there, settled into our hostel. I went to go check the internet and I came back and Steph and Kels had set up a little surprise birthday for me, complete with a cake and a birthday card (somehow they snuck a cake onto the bus without me noticing). After singing and eating a little bit of cake, we went to the center of town where we had a drink and a snack. It was here that Steph and Kels bought me my first beer as a 21 year old. After that, we walked around town a little bit and walked down to the beach, just to see it. That night, we got all dressed up and went to dinner. We went to a place that the guy at the hostel recommended and it was amazing. We got 3 HUGE plates of food for cheap cheap food and a cheap cheap bottle of wine. We had pasta, prawns and filet mignon and potatoes (it was unbelievable). After that we went to the bars. A few funny things about that night: First of all, we didn't know that there was a time change between Spain and Portugal, for the first 30 hours or so of our trip, we thought it was an hour later than it really was. Second of all, Lagos was in its off season. So we out that night and not that many people were out. We also knew that all the bars closed at 2. So we left at "2" to go back to our hostel (it was really just 1pm). Plus we didn't find out until the next day that the bar were at closed at 4, not 2, so the bartender must have thought we were crazy when we said we were leaving cause it was too late. We went to a few bars and had a few drinks that night, which was nice but we definitely could have stayed out a lot longer.

The next day I consider my real birthday because it was absolutely perfect. We woke up to an impeccable blue sky and 72 degree weather. We ate a quick breakfast and headed down to the beach. We got there and there was the cutest little bar/restaurant on the beach. Before actually going down to the beach, we stopped and had a margarita (my first). Then we stayed on the beach for the rest of the day, listening to music, reading, sunbathing, relaxing and talking. At about 3 o clock we had an AMAZING meal at that same restaurant. We still the whole sha-bang: appretizer, meal, desert and coffee; All of it with an amazing view of the Atlantic ocean. That night, we went out for real (we had changed our clocks and everything). We got dressed up and went to the bars. This night was a lot more lively than the first. The first bar we went to, we met some Americans and a British guy who we spent the rest of the night hanging out with. We went to probably 4 bars that night all around the center of town. We also did everything you would do on your cliché 21st birthday. We sang, danced, drank, played pool, laughed, etc. I also had my first Long Island Iced Tea. After this night, I felt like I really had celebrated my 21st right.

We had planned to leave the next day but realized that we just couldn't. The only bus we could take would be in the middle of the day on Sunday. We didn't have class until later on Monday and the hostel was only 12 euros, so we decided to stay and take the bus home early on Monday. Sunday's weather was even better than Saturday and we decided to go to a different beach this time. The walk to our beach was amazing. We had to hike upward and as we did, we could see the whole ocean sprawled out before us. They call the town "Lagos" which means "Lakes" in Portuguese because there are almost no waves. It isn't even located in a gulf or a cove; It's situated on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean and the water is as calm as a lake. The beach that we went to on Saturday was Meia Praia, which was big and flat. On Sunday, we headed to the beaches that were west of town. These beaches were divided by large cliffs and huge grottoes. We went to Praia de Pinhâo, a beach that we had to take a huge stone staircase built into the cliff in order to get to. The beach on Meia Praia was beautiful but this beach was BREATHTAKING. Because it was situated between cliffs, the wind couldn't get to us so it was nice and warm. We stayed there for the day just relaxing. We finished the day with another meal on the beach, but this time, the restaurant was on a cliff, not just on the sand of a flat beach. That night, we went out again to many of the same places with the same guys that we met the night before. We stayed out until 3 o clock in the morning and got back to the hostel with just enough time to sleep for about 2 and a half hours, pack, clean up our room and head to the bus station for our 6:30am bus ride home. Needless to say, when we got back to Seville and I had to go to class, I was DYING, but I think that's expected after the weekend of your 21st birthday.

By the time this semester ends, we will have traveled many places in Europe. Some trips will be more culturally based where we see how many museums and landmarks we can fit in one day. This weekend was not like that at all. My wish was to have a RELAXING beach weekend with no rushing or worries. That is exactly what we did. We ate, drank and completely relaxed. Not a single museum or landmark was seen. We just took in the breathtaking atmosphere that Lagos has to offer and I cannot think of a better way to spend your birthday. Hopefully for my 22nd birthday I can take a plane back with all my friends from the states. That won't too expensive, right ;)? This upcoming weekend, I am staying in Seville which is good because I have midterms next week and I will be studying. Also, I just checked the weather in Seville for the next 10 days and, no joke, it is supposed to be between 70-75 degrees and sunny EVERYDAY. I am so thankful that spring has finally come to Seville, because the rain and the clouds were really beginning to bother me. Thank you so much for all the birthday wishes I received! Thanks for reading and I'll see you guys next week!

Here are links to better pictures:

http://i579.photobucket.com/albums/ss239/kelseymcwhirter/DSCF3581.jpg

http://i579.photobucket.com/albums/ss239/kelseymcwhirter/DSCF3554.jpg

http://i579.photobucket.com/albums/ss239/kelseymcwhirter/DSCF3592.jpg

40 días y 40 noches

Well, not exactly. So Lent just started and Steph, Kels and I made a decision to give up English. Steph, Kels and I spend a LOT of time together. We are always on the phone, doing cultural things about the city, sitting at a café or going out for the night together. We all spend time with Spaniards too, but for the majority of the time, it's only us. You can imagine how much English we are each speaking when we hang out so much. Plus, our program made it sound like you couldn't even speak English in school, so I assumed that when you weren't in class but you were still in the building everyone would be speaking Spanish. Unfortunately, no one enforces this rule and most of students don't care, so they all speak English anyway. Even though we are in Spain, it's really easy to completely avoid the language if you want to. You can hang out with your American friends, never meet Spaniards, speak English all the time and only hear Spanish when you go to your classes (all the classes are in Spanish). The program makes it sounds like you will be completely immersed in the language, but you really do have to work at it and put yourself out there. Kels and I are both Spanish majors and Steph might as well be because she has taken all of the same classes. We all came here with the goal to perfect our Spanish, so we all started feeling a bit anxious when we noticed that we were spending a lot of time together and we were only speaking English. So a few days ago, everyone in our program got an email from one of the heads our of program telling us that many people who are studying abroad give up English for Lent. This was just the kick we needed to take our begin taking our Spanish more seriously.

Obviously, I am writing in English right now so you can see that we have a few regulations about this time. First of all, when we are communicating with people at home, we can use English. Obviously, my dad doesn't speak Spanish and I can't assume that everyone that reads this blog speaks Spanish, so my blog is in English. Also, if we leave the country to travel, we can speak English. Obviously there is no point of 3 American girls going to Paris and speaking Spanish; that's just confusing. But other than that, every time we hang out, every time we text each other or talk on the phone and every time we talk to another Americans in our program, we're only going to be speaking Spanish. We have been doing it for 3 days now. The first day was very very frustrating, but it has gotten easier and easier. It's to the point where I don't even notice it anymore. Yesterday, I didn't speak a word of English because I didn't go online to email or call anyone. It's also helping us to learn even more vocabulary. Each of us have our Spanish/English dictionaries on us at all times so that we can explain things better. For example, in the last 3 days I learned "anxious", "annoying", "to be in a bad mood", "sketchy", "awkward turtle" and other very common words. I cannot even explain how happy I am about using my Spanish. I have absolutely no anxiety when I talk to a stranger in Spanish. It's also amazing to know that I can say basically everything I want to say. I want to say that I'm fluent, but it's hard to say because there are still times when I meet someone with a thick accent or someone who talks very fast and I can't understand a word they're saying. My señora for example, is really hard for me to understand.

Sense my last blog, things have been pretty uneventful. We stayed in Seville last weekend and we stayed in Seville this weekend. I did win that free day trip to the beach, but I didn't end up going cause the weather was bad. On Friday night, I met a Spanish guy who knew the CU fight song. It was the most random thing. He said that he had friends in Boulder. I took a video of them on my camera singing it. Kels, Steph and I went to the Parque Maria Luisa yesterday. This place is a lot like Central Park but not AS big, but still pretty big. It's probably about a half mile by quarter mile in area. It has two museums, a HUGE plaza, trees, fountains and beautiful ceramics. I took pictures, but I'm going to come back and take more soon because it was pretty cloudy and I can tell that the park will be STUNNING when the weather gets better. My classes are still going very well. I really like the way my school is run. Because they know that we all want to travel and get to know the city, we spend more in the in the class room and less time doing homework and assignments outside the class room. I go to school for about 4 hours a day and the rest of the time, I have no worries! We also don't have school on Fridays. It really is a dream for me, especially after a busy, busy semester with all my activities at CU. It is such a relief to have time to sleep, read, work out and RELAX. I know that I'll come back so refreshed and ready to take on school in the states when I come back. I'm still spending time with both Daniel and Alejandro. I also spend a lot of time with the girl that Steph lives with, Maria Angeles, who is 19. Daniel and Maria both have been taking us out with their friends, which is a lot of fun.

Also, one more thing I wanted to tell you guys. The schedule here is unbelievable. They wake up at 10, eat lunch at 2 or 3, and eat dinner around 9-11. It is not unusual at all to see an elderly woman or a mother with her 3 year old out at 10 or 11pm. Also, they really do have a siesta. I had heard about this before I came here, but I thought it was just something that they did 100 years ago. Every single store and business closes from 2-5pm so that people can go home and eat lunch or take a nap. Thank God I have school during this time or it would be pretty difficult to run errands. It's the same with the night life. People don't even go to bars until 12, bars don't get busy until around 2 and people don't go home until 6 AM. Kels, Steph and I went to a dance club last night at 1 in the morning and NO ONE was there. We left at around 4 and it was packed. As we were leaving, some Spanish guys that we had met there were asking us why we were going home so early. A couple nights ago, Kels, Steph and I were out and decided we wanted it to be an early night so we were going to go home. We looked at our clocks, it was 2 AM. In Spain, all the stores and businesses are closed on Sundays, so many of the young people (and some of the old people) stay out until 6 am on Saturday nights (or is it Sunday mornings?) and then sleep all day Sunday. Surprisingly, this is getting more and more normal to me every single day.

Well that's all I have for now. My birthday is on Friday so we're taking a bus to Lagos, a beach town in southern Portugal. I'm praying that the weather will be nice because I've heard that it's beautiful.

¡Hasta Luego!