25 days of christmas

happy december 1st! i had to buy my last monthly pass for the metro today...not gonna lie it was a strange feeling. 25 days of christmas starts now and i'm kicking it off buy hoppin on over to belgium for the weekend. i'm sitting in my school's cafeteria writing this cause i got here aggressively early, and i'm one class away from a winter wonderland. bad news is: it supposed to rain all weekend. OF COURSE. but i'm not gonna let it ruin mah trip. also, i may or may not be staying in a hostel that is a little old man's house complete with a tiny dog. Karel (the belgian man who owns the house/hostel) has already sent me a few emails about my stay and i am very anxious to see what this weekend has in store. i predict eating my body weight in waffles and spending too many euros on mini santas. welp, off to one of my last days of grammar class.

lazy girl problems

i am officially done being ms tour guide for my family and now i think it's socially acceptable to spend all afternoon watching laguna beach online. can't stop, won't stop. this week with the fambam was actually really great. i showed them all the typical madrid touristy things: museums, parques, templo de debod, and a royal palace. i also managed to introduce them to a wide variety of spanish foods. it was so nice to be able to eat out at restaurants cause i'm usually too cheap to buy anything but tapas. i even survived a lunch with marisol and eduardo where me and kim were translators the entire time. it was surprisingly less painful than i had anticipated.

while it was great having my family here, it was still so weird for me to be away from home on thanksgiving! i am so grateful that my immediate family was able to be with me, but i still missed everyone getting together at grandma's house and watching football. and of course all the food. (i'm trying to convince my mother to cook all thanksgiving food for christmas. i'll let you know how it goes.) however, after eating a dinner that did not include potatoes, turkey, or pumpkin pie, my family and i headed to an irish bar in the center of madrid. why? because they were broadcasting american football obvi. this place was packed with american college students and even a few of my friends showed up. it was the perfect taste of america that i needed. even though the niners lost. plus, who doesn't love an opportunity to get shmammered with their parents? it was sad to see them leave yesterday morning, but not really because i'll be on a flight home in just less than 3 weeks.

while i was running all over madrid showing my family around, i got a chance to remind myself why i chose here to study. i got a chance to appreciate things here like i did for my first few weeks. i feel like sometimes madrid feels like such a home base that i forget all the cool stuff it has to offer.  highlight of this week: all the christmas lights are finally up! madrid is even complete with an oversized tree in the middle of sol.

other things:

• i got my nose pierced! sins mom and dad. 
• i got a caricature of myself in plaza mayor and i now have self esteem issues. 
• i kissed a boy wearing a giants hat. can check that off my abroad to-do list. 
• i posed for 395876 christmas card pictures. i hope one turned out okay. 
• t minus four days till i'm off to brussels. 
• i'm terrified of how fast these next few weeks is going to pass. 
• the holiday season has begun and i'm thinking about anthony more than ever. praying to ya every night and missing ya everyday. so extremely thankful to have had you in my life. 

christmas time is here!

happy thanksgiving from dubliners

eduardo's american gift from my family was a snuggie.

lookin good. 

reunited and it feels so good

so i would start off by telling you about my day trip on friday to chinchon, but that would require me to remember anything other than the fact that i woke up an hour late, still drunk, ran to my bus, made a fool of myself to everyone on my program, was hungover all day, and then ate a huge lunch in a cave. cool life? this weekend we balled out because it was our last weekend all together before finals. welp, that's the saddest sentence i've typed all day. i wish i could say i did more than go out all night, sleep in late, watch tv online, rally, and then go out all night again...actually i don't wish i could say that. this weekend was a great time. but the best part of it was surprisingly not my fleeting romance with my dream spanish husband alberto, but last night when my family arrived in madrid! believe it or not, i miss the poop out of my crazy family, especially with thanksgiving coming up. i'd be lying if i said i wasn't jealous of the fact that all my friends are at home, driving down 280, smoking their medicinal marijuana, drinking in garages, making smores, and catching up. but then i remember that that will be me in 26 short days. and then i remember how much i'm gonna miss this semester. and then i cry inside. jk. but seriously.

today i skipped my last class of the day to meet up with the rents and lil broski and we went to the royal palace of madrid. i can't believe it was my first time there all semester! this place was almost as big as the palace of versailles and had a crazy armory room as well. i'm sort of a palace brat at this point so it was refreshing to have my family there, with their jaws dropped, to remind me of how incredible it really was. just because i've seen three enormous palaces in the past 10 days doesn't make them ordinary. after that we went to plaza mayor and ordered some traditional spanish food. and by we ordered i mean i ordered. did i mention none of them can speak spanish? no pressure or anything...

tonight i will attempt to explain the metro system to my mom and we're going out for tapas and sangria with some friends in la latina, the only place we take parents to eat because we don't ever spend that money when it's just us. sins. and tomorrow we take on parque de retiro and the museo del prado. wish me luck!

we'll always have paris

so, starting where i left off. as we were sitting sipping on french onion soup, a group of five pretty darn good looking men were sitting next to us. we were obviously american because we had USA written all over us, and the easy conversation starter was "rough loss huh?" after that, we were talking for the next hour and a half. they learned all of our names and where we were from and we did the same. there was yves, peter, richard, toby, and one more but he had a girlfriend from home so, he doesn't count anyway. they drove from switzerland to paris for the weekend and were the friendliest people i've met in europe thus far.  i honestly wanted to marry each one of them. oh, and they were all fluent in english. and german. and french. and chinese. since being here i have become pissed at america for not making us learn more languages. in some countries in europe, you can't graduate high school unless you're fluent in THREE languages. THREE. i've been working on spanish for six years and i'm still not fluent. talking to people that are from other countries, yet speak your language perfectly, makes me feel so inadequate sometimes. however, long story short we had to catch the metro home at 130 so we couldn't continue our romantic flirtation but it was a great way to end the evening.

saturday morning me and shan got up early and went to find the eiffel tower in the day time (cause we had tickets to go to the top that night.) i will never forget the feeling i got when i turned the corner and saw this enormous monument staring me in the face. i may or may not have almost started crying. i know it sounds dumb, but i really didn't realize how big it was! we got some great photos and stared into the distance for a solid 7 minutes, but then we had to rush to catch a train to versailles for the day. me and kim decided to pay for a tour because i honestly am so much more interested in things when i know the history behind them. #nerdygirlproblems. our tour guide once again was fab. we started outside the incredible palace and spent almost two whole hours in the gardens of versailles, learning everything about louis XIV and XVI. oh, and marie antoinette of course. that part of french of history is officially my favorite. after the tour was over me and kim went inside the palace to see it in all its glory. i have never seen so much marble and so much gold in one place. and the hall of mirrors was by far the coolest part of the palace for me. it was where the treaty of versailles was signed, just casually ending the first world war. ain't no thang.

after our day in versailles was over, we hopped back on the 40 minute train to paris where i met up with molly and the gehls to get an authentic french dinner. it was the best idea we've ever had to get fondue. not only have i never had fondue before, but i have never had wonderful french fondue before either. i had french onion soup round 2 to start and then we got four cheese with bread, potatoes, and steak strips to dip in it. oh, and i had a snail right out of the shell. i can check "eat french escargot in paris" off the bucket list. after dinner we headed over to the eiffel tower to see it all lit up! again, my breath was literally taken away (as nauseatingly cheesy as that sounds) because it was just as amazing as i expected it to be. the view from the top was frightening at first, cause i'm not the biggest fan of heights, but i have never seen the world from that high up before. i didn't even take many pictures because i knew that they wouldn't do the view any justice. believe it or not, we spent almost two hours gawking on top of that tower. but i think it was the only way i would have wanted to spend my last night in paris.

i know that you're wondering how i survived not going out for an entire weekend. my response is that i will make up for it this weekend in madrid, which i have slowly realized has a nightlife unlike the rest of europe.

other exciting news:

• i booked my flights to brussels and amsterdam for my two remaining trips this semester. 
• my mom sent me a package that i finally received today! even though i'll see her on sunday. 
• i got to spend my night last night drinking sangria with michaela instead of doing my homework and i want her to come back to madrid. 
• i finally bought new black tights. 
• its sunny! 

this is my pretty friend shannon 

posing as gargoyles in front of notre dame obvi

hall of mirrors

solo shots.

bonjour, merci, au revoir.

i have 7 goddamn minutes left on these photos i have been trying to upload for an hour and a half. throw me a freakin bone, mark zuckerberg. 

anywho. it's time to talk about my trip to PARIS. paris is a place that people literally dream of going to for their whole entire lives, and i am fortunate enough to have gone at age 20, more or less on my parents dime, with the company of my friends. how did i get so lucky? i began my trek to france in the middle of the night, leaving my apartment at 345am. after bussing it and making it through ryanair's nazi baggage rules, i was taking off at around 7 and landed in france a couple hours later. of course, we flew into the airport that was 2 hours outside of paris, forcing us to pay 15 euro for a bus where i sat next to a man that might as well have been a pack of cigarettes. after a total of seven hours of travel, we had arrived in the city. i am super proud of us for figuring out how to use a metro system in a city where none of us spoke the language. #runninshit. and as soon as we dropped our stuff at the hostel we nommed on some quiche and headed off to the louvre. 

okay so this place was actually unreal. obviously i heard it was big but i wasn't expecting a damn palace! there is no way a human could conquer this place in one day. i was there for almost 4 hours and i was more or less only on one floor. i've learned that i'm a huge nerd when it comes to art. my class in the prado has become one of my favorites because i think it's insane that i get to look at real, original, paintings by such influential artists. annnnd i'm turning into my mother. the louvre is home to so many famous pieces of art, not just the mona lisa. 35,000 pieces of art to be exact. i think it was the perfect place to start our french adventure. molly met us after we were done and walked us down the champs elysees, home to some of france's best shopping  too bad i'm poor  but we didn't have time to stop. at the end of this famous street is the arch de triomphe, where we got to see some kind of special military ceremony, because that weekend was their version of veterans day. *fun fact about the arch de triomphe: the flame that is always burning under it represents an ambiguous "fallen soldier" of various wars and one of the only times it was been put out is when a mexican guy peed on it and got banned from the country of france forever.* thursday night was uneventful and we passed out after drinking wine in our hostel's bar. 

friday morning we woke up ready to take a 3.5 hour walking tour. only in paris would i be excited about this. especially when it was FREEZING. thank god patty agreed to bring my coat to madrid this weekend. lord knows i'll need it in brussels and amsterdam. digressing...our tour guide was phenom and he was actually from amsterdam, making him automatically cooler than everyone ever. we saw the entire city and he had crazy stories about the history of every monument. i honestly learned more on friday than i did in a whole semester of history class. after the tour was over we ate an authentic french meal and then headed to the notre dame. the architecture of this place was even better than in the disney movie. inside was so different than the other cathedrals i've seen thus far simply because it is so old. in 2013 it will be the notre dame's 850th anniversary. that's like, more than twice as long as america has even been a country. friday night we went to the USA vs France soccer game and had legit seats for only 10 euro. i guess no frenchies wanna sit in the american section. even though we almost got lost on the journey there and didn't have any time to pregame, i had a great time. just being in that atmosphere and being able to be patriotic for the first time in a long time cured a little bit of america-sickness. france won though, and we were all sore losers, so we drowned our sorrows in french onion soup after the game. here is where we met our future husbands. BUT that story is gonna have to wait. this post is getting too long and my hot water is gonna get turned off in an hour. for the next two days. wtf. 

more on paris later bye. 

weekend recap

it's finally freezing! leggings and boots and sweaters are in full force thank gosh. side note: i can see the sunset out the window of my apartment right now and it's sick nasty. i digress, my friend alexa's parents are here this week and we're having a lil get together at her apartment tonight to meet them. and they're bringing wine. that costs more that three euro. when other people's parents come it makes me extra anxious for the rod fam to take espana. 13 days!

after miss jade hamilton left madrid to go to russia or something dumb like that, our weekend continued. friday a great discovery was made. mexican food in madrid. the memory of finding it is bringing tears to my eyes. i miss mexican food SO much. just so you know, it's entirely different than spanish food. same language, different cooking habits, who woulda thunk? i was in too much of a food coma after enchiladas that i didn't do much else friday night. but then saturday i had to go to a play for my literature class. not only was it in spanish, duh, but it was in the middle of nowhere. we asked people on the streets and even cab drivers where it was and they had no clue.  hence, why we were forced to wander the in dark for quite some time, look extra american, and arrive 30 mins late. it was a play by lorca and had a ridiculous plot as always. also, in spanish theatre, talking doesn't exist. EVERYTHING IS YELLED. actually though. and this is coming from a girl who could be heard in the quad from my room in sheehan. #truestory. three acts and two and a half hours later, we got out of there to start the main events of the night. we had another friend's guest to show around, so we had to drown our livers in alcohol and stay out until 5am again. clearly. we decided to mix it up and try a more authentic spanish club though. the bouncers at the first one we went to were poop heads. they didn't let us in just because we were americans! or they didn't think we were pretty...but what are the chances of that happening c'mon. it was my first encounter with discrimination. twas scarring. but after being shot down in spanish, we weren't discouraged. we walked to this other club tucked away in a place that i didn't even know existed and after our friend mac was forced to change his shoes (apparently this was a classy institution) we dropped 12 euro and danced the night away.  it was actually really fun being the minority for the night, well, more so than usual.

on sunday kim came back yay! and i went shopping cause i realized i don't own sweaters or clothes i can layer. how have i survived two years at villanova? lord only knows. oh, i also went to mass on sunday. i haven't been since easter but i'm trying this new thing where i look to a higher power to help through shit. i'll let you know how that goes. i do have to say, i'm proud of myself for remembering the our father in spanish. guess my high school education wasn't for nothing.

one more day of school till i can focus on packing for paris. rough life right?

rest of the vacay

on sunday, everyone was back in sevilla and we decided to do more sightseeing. (by the end of this semester i will be proud to say that i can actually read a map and navigate any freaking city to find sights.) we got to this one street where we ate lunch that actually for the first time reminded me of something in california. there wasn't any crazy spanish architecture or fountains. it was a street that looked like a promenade in venice beach with palm trees everywhere and so many people biking and rollerblading. it was actually kind of nice to feel at home for a little bit.  after treating ourselves to steak tartar and sangria, this is diva weekend we're talking about, we headed towards plaze de espana. on the way there though we took a pit stop and had a spontaneous photoshoot in a garden. normal. plaza de espana was UNREAL. honestly, one of my favorite places i've been in europe so far. there was a mini river to row boats and hand-painted mosaic tiles all over the place.  i could have sat there all day probably. oh, and apparently they filmed part of some starwars movie there, which makes it famous. and cool. on the way back to the hostel we made a quick detour to the river and checked out the torre de oro.  seville had so many random sights to see and since it isn't a big city at all, it was possible to do it all in a few days. that night we went to an international festival happening for the weekend.  there was a booth for every country with respective food/drinks. it was fun to bop around and check things out, but i obvi spent the night eating tacos and drinking coronas like a good mexican should.

american lookin street

plaza!

our last day there was halloOoOoween! me and shannon decided we wanted to rest up for the night out so we treated ourselves to some good old fashioned arabic baths. spaaa daaayyy haaayy. it was so nice and much needed. sorry for being a betch, but i get a mani pedi at least a couple times a month but here it's just not a part of the culture. i need some pampering time. and this was perfect. there was hot/cold baths, salt water baths, massage baths, and a sauna. the hour and a half flew by. after being so relaxed, all i could handle was food and a nap. that night, i realized that as much as i loved seville, i'm so glad i chose to study in madrid. we paid 12 euro for an open bar which is a super good deal. there were a ton of nova kids there and we all trecked over together, but we had to be there by midnight. (ugh so used to going out at 2am..) once we were there, i realized that we weren't at a club or discotecca, but in the warehouse district. who knew those even existed in europe? after getting in, i also quickly realized that we were the only americans there, there was no running water in the toilet...sanitary, and that in spain, people dress up fucking scary on halloween. not trying to make out with you, zombie frankenstein. you're gonna haunt my nightmares forever. BUT obvi i danced the night away and took full advantage of the open bar. it was just no comparison to what us madrid brats are used to.  

*camera died before halloween. sins.* 

overall, this past weekend was amazing but i was itching to get back to madrid on the 6 hour bus tuesday afternoon.  i had a whopping three days of school this week and now it's already the weekend. after pulling my hair out and registering for my classes last night, we went to kapital for the first time in a few weeks (google this place so you can be jealous.) of course, we didn't leave the hip hop floor. i will have sean paul and 50 cent stuck in my head for the next 48 hours. 

ttfn ta ta for now. 

home sweet madrid

after a much needed five day weekend i am happy to report that i made it back to madrid in one piece. break felt long but also so short because i was filling each day with a ton of activities. the six hour bus ride to sevilla wasn't terrible (on the way there at least) because it was in the middle of the night. the only terrible part was waiting in the bus station for hours because we couldn't check into our hostel until around 11. which actually ended up being 1. at least i had my gehls by my side.

after wandering the streets for 45 mins, we found our hostel and dropped our diva suitcases there before exploring a little bit. one thing that is so rare compared to madrid is that in seville, you walk everywhere. i thought i walked a lot in madrid but then i remembered i take the metro everywhere before i walk. we wandered for a little but then found the cathedral (standard in every spanish town) and alcazar. i loved alcazar because so much of castle was outside and it was beauutiful weather. just 78 and sunny the entire weekend. on halloween. no big deal. also, alcazar, as well as almost all the things we saw this weekend, have insane detail and the architecture is influenced so much by arabs that it's very different from anything i've ever seen. after chilling in a castle all afternoon, we found the BEST place for lunch. i'm salivating just thinking about all the food we ordered. we always try to ball on a budget in madrid, meaning we eat one euro sandwiches as much as possible for meals outside the homestay, so eating at real restaurants all weekend was a treat. friday night i didn't want to drink myself into a coma because we were leaving for the day to granada at 6am so me, shannon, katherine and alexa went to a super authentic flamenco show! and by authentic i mean we were the only americans there and people thought we were lost. it was amazing. and i'm also a huge nerd when it comes to dancing/musical performances. it was such a different atmosphere then our typical friday night, considering we weren't grinding on a dance floor or chasing shots with yogurt....that was only one time. sevilla is known for their flamenco and i'm so glad i got to experience a little bit of it.

alcazar.

flamenco bartenders.

on saturday, me, shannon, alexa, and katherine, spent the day in granada, only about a 3 and a half hour bus ride from sevilla. everyone on our program had been raving about it so we figured we had to go. the biggest deal in granada is the alhambra and of course, we didn't make a reservation. who knew betches needed reservations? so after somehow finding a cab next to the bus station located in the ghetto and waiting in line for a solid 45 mins to get in, we didn't make the morning cut and were ticketed for 5 oclock. obviously we put our time to good use. by eating a lot and shopping a lot. this weekend i bought gifts for everyone and their mother. sevilla/granada have such a different shopping scene than madrid. much more hole in the wall places and amazing ceramic shops. after being divas and spending too many euros, we finally trecked back to the alhambra, and quickly realized it was worth the wait. this place was 1. enormous and 2. beautiful. like i said, there is a huge arabic influence on all the major sights in the south of spain, and the attention to detail is mind blowing. like it actually blows my mind. we had such a photoshoot and i know i will always remember walking through it with my jaw dropped the entire time. 

so detailed.

shitty weather right?

okay so i realized at this rate, buy the end of this weekend post i will have written a novel. imma break it up into two days for ya. i'm also a grandma and i'm falling asleep at 11pm. 

random thoughts blowing my mind: 

• i have to register for spring semester at nova tomorrow. 
• my parents are coming so soon! 
• i'm gonna be packing for paris this time next week. 
• i got an A on my spanish midterm the semester when my grades don't count. of course.
• i haven't eaten cottage cheese in two months. 
• i only have six more weeks here....