Ok, I guess keeping my weblog updated is not really my forte :-|. I’ve been extremely busy with work and uni since my last post. Especially my last quarter had an insane workload (think 50+ hours a week, seriously). I’m just really glad my courses are so incredibly interesting and my progress is going well, otherwise i’d never be able to keep this up :-S.
In the meantime I’ve been traveling in Scandinavia and had my 3rd visit to my lovely Italy! But first things first: the backpack trip to Spain in june last year! The fun thing about backpacking is that you meet a lot of people who are really passionate about traveling, so you can end up traveling around with people whom you might’ve met on totally different backpack trips. As was the case with this trip. Huiping and Yushan, two sisters from Singapore whom me and my friend met on my first Italy trip, happened to be backpacking through Europe at the time. Since I wanted to meet up with them again and I really needed a little break to the mediteranean climates, I played hooky for a little week (actually the professors were okay with it :p) and went to join their Spain leg of the trip.
The first part was four days of Barcelona. Although I had a lot of bad luck this time around (see last blog entry), Barcelona was still a really beautiful city to travel in. Although traveling with a party of three is not the ideal number, on the last day in Barcelona I met Ayako, A Japanese girl who was studying architecture in Berkeley, California, and we just had the most wonderful day traveling together (I will *never* forget the beauty of Parc Guell!), seeing loads of interesting buildings (private tourguide to Sagradia Familia = awesome!), talking a lot about cultural differences and travel experiences and…well…you’ll read more about it in the travel blog of my third Italy trip later :-). In the evening of that day when the four of us wanted to get something to eat, we even got invited to dine/drink with a group of local Spanjards! Naturally, in the beginning we were a bit shy and unsure as to whether to join them or not, but we just went along with it. The result was just a marvelous evening with good food, good drinks (gotta love sangria!) and wonderfull company (wow, these people were even warmer than most Italians!). Sadly at midnight we had to say goodbye to them and Ayako, since we needed to catch our flight to Sevilla.
The next three days in Sevilla were all about relaxing! Sunbathing on the terrace of our youthhostel was just *so* nice. And Sevilla is just a really nice city to walk around in; it’s small enough to basically see everything in two days and there’s loads of lovely parcs and quaint districts! The youth hostel we were in also organized a visit to a pub where they performing the flamenco dance, which was well impressive, since the pacing was really fast and the gestures and dance moves were really intricate. I ended up that night exploring the somewhat limited but still lovely pubbing scene with a guy from New Zealand (New Zealanders are apparently called Kiwi’s 🙂 ), a Kiwi/scottish couple (they were traveling the world together for a year, respect!) and two girls from merry ol’ England, which was loads of fun (although it made me realise I’m just not the drinking type of student anymore ;-).
Well, that was basically my Spain trip in a nutshell. Although quite a bit of things went wrong, I ended up having a lot of fun and relaxment any way and it really made me love Spain (although not as much as Italy :p). I uploaded the pictures as well, so you can check them out if you want to.
Next up: my summer trip from last August to Denmark & Sweden!
Italia è meraviglioso 