I'll Take Pictures; I Promise

So, I should definitely be working on a project that's due tomorrow, but I guess old habits die hard... even if you are in another country. Honestly, people in Spain have this amazing ability to worry about very little if anything at all, and I think it's rubbing off on me a little. For example, I don't care about my grades, and, instead of doing homework, I've been planning my voyages across Europe. Let me share...

February 21: Carnaval in the Coastal town of Cadiz--Spanish style Mardis Gras

March 13-15: Excursion to Lisbon, Portugal

March 19-22: Personal trip to Barcelona with my friends Tori and Abbie

March 27-28: Excursion to Cordoba

April 3-8: Excursion to Morocco

April 9-12: Semana Santa--apparently it's a big deal

April 16-19: Personal trip to Stockholm, Sweden with my friend Abbie (I will also be spending a night in London and a night in Milan, Italy)

April 27-May 3: Feria--this is the biggest fiesta in Andalusia (but I might be off to Bilbao to the see the Guggenheim or to Munich to experience Germany)

May 7-10: Personal trip to Geneva, Switzerland with my friend Tori to visit an old highschool friend studying on the French border

May 23: Flight back to the states

I'm so freaking excited! Anyway, I am fully aware that I'm probably going to just scrape by at school, and I probably won't even be able to speak Spanish that well, and I will certainly come home without a penny to my name, but, hey, you're only 21 in Europe once. And I will finally be able to say, "for the price of pint of milk, I'll tell you all I know about the state of the world today." Thank you Belle and Sebastian.

So, oddly enough, I wanted to write about my recent trips to Rhonda and Gibraltar... I guess I got a little side tracked.

Rhonda is an amazing town enveloped by mountains. It's the most quaint thing I have ever seen...I went to a gypsy district where I bought a hand made change purse for a few dollars--it's that quaint. However, I'm fairly ignorant when it comes to technology, and the SD card I used to store the pictures of Rhonda isn't actually compatible with our laptops. I was fortunate to find this 4GB SDHC card lying on the ground in the gardens of a Moorish palace, and there were no pictures on it; so, I took it for my very own. I expect that my not being able to actually transfer my pictures onto my computer is some form of poetic justice. But, I just won't think about that right now. The town is also the home of the oldest Plaze de Toros and one of the highest/oldest bridges in Spain.

Ernest Hemingway actually visited Rhonda frequently--the way Gertrude Stein felt about Paris was the way Hemingway felt about Rhonda. It's where he fell in love with Bull Fighting, and he drew inspiration to write The Sun Also Rises from this city. That alone made me fall in love with it. After the group visited the Plaza and I inspected the bridge several times for structural support, we wandered around the overlook and ate lunch while soaking in the view of the mountains.

That little gazebo is actually where I ate lunch, and there was a gypsy sitting up there singing "Hotel California" with a lovely spanish accent. It was a nice taste of home. After that, a few of us traipsed around the city looking for an icecream shop, and we happened upon an old man who insisted upon giving us a tour. We politely declined, and annexed ourselved into a geriatrics group. Thankfully, we were able to excuse ourselves and quickly find an heladeria... I'm convinced it saved us from emotional scarring because it's just so damn good! (I think the Spanish have figured out a way to inject it with seratonin).

The following day about five of us boarded a bus for Gibraltar. I'll be writing about that later (there will always be a part of me that succumbs to schoolwork).