5 months have turned into 1 day.

Well, here we are, friends and family.

May 19th. 

Somehow, 5 months has turned itself into 1 day.  It's so hard to see this semester come to a close.  It came and went so fast, and now it's time to repack my life for the past 5 months into a suitcase, and a backpack, and board the plane headed back to the states.     

We have finished our exams for the University of Valladolid, we have celebrated our graduation, and I have started packing up to leave tomorrow morning for Madrid's airport.  It seems like just last week we arrived in the airport, sheepishly standing at the luggage claim, helping to make sure everybody got their own luggage.  At that point, we all barely knew each other, but throughout the course of the semester, we've all grown separately while at the same time, growing together.  I've learned that when you study abroad, and are thrown into such a unique situation, you make friends REALLY fast.  We all have to learn to open up and become good friends in a short time, because we all at some point need someone to lean on, someone to help us when we miss home, and someone to share in all of our wonderful memories together.  I've made some wonderful friends being here in Spain, both Spaniards and Americans.  It's going to be hard leaving.

Stepping on the plane tomorrow, I'm going to be experiencing by far the most bittersweet moment of my life.  I've never felt such tumultuous feelings within me before.  I'm so thrilled to go home, to see my family, to hug my parents, and to see all those wonderful people I love and hold so close to my heart.  But at the same time, being here has forced me to grow, it has changed my outlook on life, it has instilled within me a passion for traveling, and it's taught me to be grateful for every experience I have in life.  In 138 days, I've been able to see 2 continents, 3 countries, 30 cities, and I've traveled 21,068 miles.  This has been an experience I will never forget.  I have been so fortunate to study abroad to open my mind to foreign cultures and customs.  While I've been here, I have learned so much here that I will carry with me towards my future, and I won't be leaving without leaving a part of my heart here.

One famous guy once said, "To travel is better than to arrive"...I used to think there was just one path to take to get where you want to be in life.  But if you choose that path, it doesn't mean you have to bail on all the other ones.  I realized that it is actually what happens along the way that counts: the triumphs, the falls, and the friendships.  You just have to trust the people and the future that it will work itself out like it's supposed to.  From here on out, where ever life takes me, I vow to go with all my heart, soul and being.  Because it's the journey, not the destination.

Not only is the fact that the semester is ending hard to grasp, but for me, the fact that tomorrow, I will be closing a 5 year long chapter of my life is even more difficult to understand.  Tomorrow, I will officially finish my 5 years of my undergraduate studies.  And to be honest, I have no other feelings right now, other than it feels done.  It feels closed.  And darn, does it feel good.  I have to say, looking back on the past 5 years, I'm extremely proud of what I've done, and who I have become.  College has shaped me into who I am, the people I have met will be lifelong friends, and they've definitely helped me find "me" along the way.  Even though this chapter of my life is closing, I know I will carry the past 5 years with me where ever I go in life.  There are so many more blank pages in my book, I can't wait to see where they take me.  I've found a family during my time at Stevens Point, and when I officially leave, you can be sure I will leave a piece of my heart there, as well.  

And now, with this final entry, I finish my semester abroad in Spain.  It has truly been a breathtaking experience.  The whole 5 months of it.  And it's opened my eyes to the world in a way they've never been opened before, and for that, I will be eternally grateful.

Spain, you hold a piece of my heart.  I will be back someday to visit.

For the last time:

besos y abrazos, 
Erin 

"You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place...like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again."

   

Casi se me olvide Santander! [I almost forgot Santander!]

Shoot! Hey guys, I almost forgot to write about our last excursion! 

Well, we went to Santander, which is north on the Cantabrian Sea, in Cantabria.  (Huh, never would have guessed that, eh?) 

Santillana del Mar - pueblo house

On Saturday, May 5th, our group left Valladolid bright and early at 8am to drive north to Santander.  We drove through our fair share of rain, and we were afraid our excursion would be ruined by rain, but alas, it held off all day! 

First we stopped in a small town called Santillana del Mar (literally a small town, with a population of about 1,000) which is commonly known as the town of three lies.  First, there is no saint (sant), and second, it isn't flat (llana), but rather full of hills.  And finally, thirdly, there is no sea (mar).  Anyway, while there, I tasted some of the local treats, called quesera, y sobaos.  The quesera was similar to flan consistency, but it was made out of cheese, so similar to a cheesecake, but with less form...uff, I can't explain it properly.  Anyway, the sobaos was a sweet bread.  They were both extremely rich, but yummy!

We also saw the Roman Colegiata, which used to be the site of a Benedictine monastery. In this town, I also found my first white and black Holstein cows!  :)  

This is a photo of the Colegiata.  You can see how old it is...it was super eerie to be in, because they had tombs of people all over, and it just had this really strange feeling to it.

I couldn't leave out the cows!!

This is also a photo from the Colegiata, you can see the influence of the Roman arcs and columns in the architecture.  We were able to enjoy the blue sky for a little bit here!















After a brief stop in this city, we headed north to Santander.  This city is known for it's beaches...but since it was cloudy, a group of us went with the professors to walk to the peninsula and see the Royal Palace that was built for the nobles to summer home and vacation in.  After that we had some free time and just bummed around the city.  It wasn't a very busy excursion, but it was really nice to relax.  We also enjoyed some delicious ice cream (ok, what ice cream isn't delicious?) and boarded the bus around 6pm to head back home.

Here is the beach, it was a really nice sand beach, but you can see how great the weather was!  :)

And this is the palace build for the kings and queens' summer homes.  It's called Real Palacio de la Magdalena (which translates as Royal Palace of the Muffin...) 

Anyway, I know it's a quick recap of what we did, but it was such a relaxed, laid back excursion, it felt really good!  So there's not too many things we did/saw.  But I thoroughly enjoyed it anyway! 

I hope you've enjoyed reading my blog, as we're nearing the end of our semester!  :) 

besos y abrazos,
Erin 

Hemos graduado! [We've graduated!]

Hello blog readers!

Today we had our graduation from the University of Valladolid.  It was a very bittersweet time for all of us students, because I know I won't see many of them for a long time (if again).

I met some great students from Pennsylvania, Brazil, and Japan, and it was sure hard to see us all part ways.  "We all take different paths in life, but no matter where we go, we take a little of each other everywhere".   I'll never forget the people I've met this semester.  :)

 

Anyway, we had our reception in the Palacio de Santa Cruz, in Valladolid, in a room called the aula triste.  Room of sorrows.  I guess it was appropriately named!

We had the ceremony at 12:30, where we were given our diplomas from the course one by one, and afterwards we had a reception in the gardens with our professors and our fellow students.  It was a really nice end to our time here in Valladolid, but it wasn't complete without a few tears shed!

 This is the reception - complete with some Spanish wine, and of course, some Spanish cuisine.  We've all had a wonderful semester, and it was a great time celebrating our graduation with all of our friends and professors. 

 Speaking of professors, this is Agustín (the man in the suit, the other guy is Jacob, a friend of mine).  He was my professor for my Culture class as well as my speaking emphasis class.  The first day I walked into that class, I literally thought I would hate it.  I was shy and afraid to make mistakes speaking in Spanish, but Agustín successfully broke me of my fear, and it soon became my favorite class of the semester. 

 Oh Nathalie - she's from Indiana University of Pennsylvania - and she was in my classes this semester with me.  I wouldn't have made it through the semester without making funny faces at her across the room!

Upon leaving today, she told me that she will miss me, and that we HAVE to stay in touch (which we will) and then she told me that she can tell I will do great things in life. that's when the tears came!

Leaving is hard - we've built such a great network of friends here, but we all know we're going back home to our lives, but now we've been changed, even if just slightly, into a different version of ourselves.  We've all had an affect on each other, and I for one am going to bring that into whatever I do in my future.

   

This is the room that our graduation was held in - our professors are sitting on the top row on the left, and the rest of the room was filled with the students.  I don't know how many there were, but it had to be over 100! 

 Here's a photo of the gardens where our reception was held!  It was a beautiful day, and a beautiful area! 

And finally, a photo of the students from UW-Stevens Point who successfully made it this semester abroad!  We did it!  We cannot believe how fast the time went, but we've made some great friendships, and even better memories!  :)  Love you guys!  

And with that, we ended our day with some frozen yogurt from the newly opened Smooy store, and we all went home to pack our suitcases.  

And my suitcase is calling my name..."Erin, come pack me!!" so I'm off to finish working on that for the night. 

besos y abrazos,

Erin

Pizza, pasta, y gelato...no estoy en España ya! [pizza, pasta, and gelato...I'm not in Spain anymore!]

Hello once again, friends and family! 

What's a trip to Europe if it doesn't include at least a brief stop in the beautiful country of Italy?

The weekend of April 27-May 1st, we also had a long weekend from school, so my friends and I found a cheap flight out of Madrid via RyanAir to Sardinia (Cerdeña, or Sardegna - I'm still not sure which spelling is English, Spanish, or Italian).  It's the second largest island in the Mediterranean sea behind Sicily, and it belongs to Italy.  It's situated north of Sicily and south of Corsica, a French island in the Mediterranean.

After getting up insanely early Friday morning, April 27th, we caught a bus to Madrid's airport, and caught our flight to Italy.  We arrived Friday afternoon into the city of Cagliari, and took a taxi to our hostel, which, ended up being in a small neighborhood outside of Cagliari called Quartu Sant Elena.  Meaning, we were basically staying in the middle of nowhere, Italy.  (Oh just wait, it gets better!)  We got to our hostel, and it was inside of an apartment building.  Well, there was no one there to let us in, so we buzzed and buzzed, and finally a random stranger let us into the apartment building.  We went up to the hostel door, and rand several times, getting no answer.

The view from our first hostel's window!

After sitting for about 30 minutes, we found a nice older man in the hallway, and in broken Spanish/what we knew of Italian (which consisted of "scuzzi", "pizza", "pasta", "gelato", and "prego") he called the hostel owner.  We soon discovered, everybody knew everybody else in the town.  But we couldn't have asked for a better Italian experience!  Margherita, the owner's sister, came over from the grocery store with her friend, Patricia to check us in.  Needless to say, they didn't have us down as having a reservation, so Sarah and I went to her friend's apartment across the way and printed out our reservation using her computer, internet, and printer.  This starts our weekend of running into some of the nicest people on the earth.  Sardinians are so wonderful!  Anyway, after running around and finally getting the hostel stuff situated, we ended up with two rooms with balconies facing the Mediterranean sea!  (Though we were pretty far away!).  That evening, after heading to the store to get some food for Saturday and Sunday, we stayed in our hostel and enjoyed some wine on the balcony, while making pesto and mozzarella cheese sandwiches!  :)  

Poetto Beach - 8km of wonderful sand!

Saturday, we had nice weather, and we literally spent all day on the beach.  We didn't have too many exciting stories from that day, other than finding wild flamingos, swimming in the Mediterranean, and indulging in Italian pizza that night for supper.   

Italian Pizza! (Margherita style)

Sunday is where the fun really starts!  Since we had a long weekend, and could only find flights into Cagliari and out of Alghero (both on the same island), we planned on staying 2 nights in Cagliari and 2 nights in Alghero.  We had looked up ways to get to Alghero from Cagliari and decided trains would probably be our best bet.  The schedule said a train would leave Cagliari at noon, and get to our transfer city of Sassari at 4pm, and from there, we had another hour ride into Alghero.   It sounded pretty easy, right?

Well, we got to the train station in Cagliari at 11:30am, only to find out that our train was leaving at 11:40am.  (Mind you, this is all in broken Spanish/English - I learned it was very hard to communicate without knowing the language!)  After figuring out we had to get on the train we bought our tickets quickly, and got on the train.  Sarah, Will, and I sat near this really nice older man.  He, along with one of the train attendants helped us figure out where to go to get off to switch trains.  We had to get off at Chilivari, and then take a train to Sassari, and then take a different train to Alghero.  Ufff.

The view from the train window

During the train ride to Chilivari, we talked with this older man, and he taught us some Italian words.  We found out later, after some observations, that the whole car was laughing at us, from our poor pronunciation, to our sandwiches we made and packed to eat on the journey!  They were all really nice, wonderful people, and were super helpful, but they thought we were hilarious!  I can remember sitting on the train, eating my tuna and tomato sandwich, and making eye contact with an Italian woman.  She just laughed, and I laughed, all while the older gentleman was teaching us Italian words for cow, sheep, and pig.

Another view from the train

We got off at Chilivari, made our train switch, and headed to Sassari.  We got off at Sassari, and looked to get our last ticket to Alghero, but the office was closed.  They office opened about 10 minutes before the train got in, we all got our tickets and boarded the smallest train I have ever been on.  It was comprised of three cars.  Three.  That's it!  It was the smallest, most interesting train ride of my life.  But at least we had the beautiful scenery to keep us distracted - Italy was a ocean of rolling green hills, with rock walls, with sheep running freely throughout the fields.  I thought I had somehow I had gotten transported to the middle of Ireland.

The hostel above the pizza place.

We got off at Alghero, and after waiting, and waiting, and walking, and waiting some more (we were getting skeptical that the bus was even coming) we got on a bus that would take us to the even smaller town our hostel was in.  (Apparently we really wanted to stay in the middle of nowhere!!!)  We traveled to Fertilia by bus and asked some locals where we could find our hostel.  There was literally one hostel in the whole town, and it was made up of 3 different roads.  Our hostel was the upstairs apartment of a family owned pizza restaurant, so by the time we got there, the pizza place was closing, but they stayed open long enough to make us some pizza!  So, yet again, we all indulged in more Italian pizza!  Trust me when I say you can't get enough!

Look at this wonderful kitchen!

The bikes we rode along the coast.

The Italian Coast

The following Monday, we went grocery shopping, got food to cook in our lovely hostel (with a beautiful kitchen).  It rained/stormed all day - we were planning on going to Neptune's Grotto, which is a series of sea caves, but they don't do tours when it's storming out, so we couldn't do that.  Instead, we discovered that the family that owned our hostel had bikes we could use for free!

Me and my basket bike

So, we biked around the area, explored the coast, and even biked through a pretty decent rainstorm!  Oops! I can't forget the gelato we got that afternoon!  Even though we didn't go to Neptune's Grotto, It was a ton of fun, and one of my favorite days.  It's definitely something I will never forget having experienced! 



That day for lunch and for dinner we cooked a 3 course meal for all 5 of us, which included salad, pasta with sauteed vegetables, and strawberries for dessert.  We were stuffed to the brim full of wonderful food.  Somehow, the five of us made a great travel family.  Even when cooking together.  :)  

Working hard? or Hardly working? "Who wants mushrooms?"

Tuesday, we got up, gave our keys back to our friends in the pizza place below our apartment/hostel and headed to the airport in Alghero via bus.  We left the island of Sardinia having eating Italian pizza, pasta, and gelato; having biked along the Italian coastline; and having swam in the Mediterranean.

For me, this was one of my favorite trips I had this semester.  The five of us who went (Will, Joe, Sarah, Katie, and I) made such a wonderful travel group, and we all had a really wonderful weekend.  I absolutely fell in love with the Italian countryside, and I wasn't even on mainland Italy!  The people I traveled with I would travel with again in a heartbeat, we all balanced each other out, and we had such a wonderful time together! Italy, I will be back some day!  :)

As always, besos y abrazos, 
Erin 

La Gastronomia de España: parte 2 [the gastronomy of Spain, part 2]!

Hello family and friends!

It's been a while since I've updated you on the crazy foods I have tried while I've been here, and sitting here, staring at the cookbook I purchased for myself of Spanish foods is reminding me about the culinary roller coaster I've been on this semester.

I know I've written another entry for you all to see some of the food I've eaten, but it's been a long time..and I've surely eaten some STRANGE food since then!  So this entry is going to be a lot of pictures with descriptions!

(I'll warn you now...some of them are REALLY crazy...those with weak stomachs should probably stop reading now..)

 Let's start off with some more tortilla española, this time filled with red peppers!

Eggs, potatoes, onions, red peppers, all tossed together on a toasted bocadillo bun (sub sandwich bun).

You absolutely cannot go wrong with this!  Throw a little mayonnaise on it for some extra flavor, and down the hatch it goes! 

 In Sevilla, we went to an Italian restaurant and ate some delicious pasta, and what you see here is a cheesy pasta with salchicha (sausage), mushrooms, and garlic.

Delicious!!

And fair warning...here is where things start to get a little off kilter...

We were in Salamanca, and we wanted to try some good looking tapas, so we went to a cafe, and we all ordered, and we shared food between the group...

 This is what one girl got.  It's called  callos, here in Spain, and we had no idea what that meant.  None of us had a dictionary on us, so she got it, and ate it.  I tried several pieces of it, and to our surprise, it tasted delicious.  It had the texture of what I would imagine a starfish would feel like on your tongue...bumpy, but it was cooked, so it was tender. 

 Here's another photo of the callos.  It was in a red juice with peppers, onions, and lots of spices.

Drum roll, please! 

We asked the waiter what it was after we had eaten it...and he explained to us that it was the cooked stomach of a cow.

Oh..I'm REALLY glad I didn't know that before I ate it.

 Also in Salamanca, another girl ordered chipirones en su tinto, not exactly knowing what it was.

But when it came out, it was much more obvious than the previous dish...

Baby squids, cooked in their own ink!  I actually thought this was delicious!  The ink sauce was flavored with a lot of garlic, and other spices, and it gave the squids a nice flavor.   

 Here's a photo of the underside of the squids - the tentacles!  You just pop the little guy in your mouth and eat him whole!

In fact, Maria (my host mom) made us chipirones en su tinto for my birthday about a week after this experience! 

 So that's all the really weird stuff...from here on out it's relatively normal food.

Here's a giant pan of paella from Valencia - the origin of paella.  We couldn't make it a trip without eating some of the delicious saffron, vegetable, chicken casserole that has made the city famous! 

 And this...well, it's food I got in Spain..Barcelona to be exact...but it's not really Spanish food...

I ate NACHOS!  It was the biggest plate of cheesy chips I have had in such a long time, but it tasted wonderful!  I had to include it in this entry, because, well...it was so delicious.  And every time I look at this picture, I can just taste the nachos.  mmmm.  I can't wait for some good tex-mex food when I get home!

  These last five photos are all from my trip to San Sebastian.  It's know to be the culinary capital of Spain...so I wanted to put them last.  They're all tapas.  My friend Sarah and I went to a few different locales to try some tapas, and this is what I ended up with! 

 The one above is bread, layered with green peppers, mushrooms, garlic, and onions, all covered with a garlic spiced olive oil sauce.  It was served hot, and delicious.

 This is a hot dish as well, and it's a piece of white meat (some sort of poultry).  It tasted very similar to chicken, but when we asked the waiter what was inside of it, he said it was poulty, like chicken.  So we don't think it was actually chicken.  But it had this sesame cream sauce over the top of it with fried strips of potatoes.  Mmmm.  Delicious! 

 I think I can say for SURE that this was my favorite dish I tried all night.  It's eggplant, layered with cheese, layered with more zucchini, and another piece of eggplant, served hot.  The cheese had melted between the layers of vegetables, and it tasted absolutely amazing.  I would pay to go there and eat it again in a heartbeat, it was that incredible. 

 For those of you who know me, this one may seem like a strange choice, but I assure you, it took second place only behind the cheesy eggplant.  It's a piece of french bread.  And on one half of it, is a few chunks of bleu cheese with a walnut on top.  On the other side of the bread (facing the camera) is cream cheese with a half of a cherry tomato on top.  The whole piece was then drizzled with balsamic vinegar, which I have discovered to be a very powerful tool in the kitchen.  It was so delicious, and so easy to make!  

 And last but not least, the bacon wrapped salchicha.  It's very similar to bacon wrapped bbq weiners, sans the bbq sauce.  It's a mini sausage (with spices already in it) cooked, and wrapped in bacon.  You literally can't go wrong with it! 

 The last five photos you see here are some of my favorite foods I've had while I have been in Spain.  They were absolutely delicious.  I guess there's a reason why San Sebastian has it's claim to fame as the culinary capital of the country...and there's no way after my experiences I could dispute it.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this brief update on the crazy Spanish food I've been eating!  Oh, and I've also been enjoying my fair share of churros con chocolate, too!  (And don't worry, my cookbook has a recipe for them!)

 Well, that's all for now!  I hope I didn't make you too hungry!  (or disgusted...)

Something I've learned here:  When you get the chance to try something you haven't before, you should take it.  You never know how it's going to end.

besos y abrazos,

Erin  

Mis aventuras Portugueses! [My Portuguese Adventures!]

Welcome again, to my wonderful Spanish semester.  As you read this blog entry, you'll notice I wrote it actually about a week and a half ago, but I'm just getting around to publishing it now...so please, disfruta! (enjoy!)

 Oh the end of the semester is bringing about quite the travel plans!  I’m currently sitting on a bus from the Madrid airport to Valladolid.  It’s Monday, April 23^rd, and it seems like I was just traveling, and here I am, going at it again!  Truth of the matter is, we have a lot of long weekends at the end of April, so I’m taking full advantage of them and getting a few more travel plans in before I come home on May 20^th.

Boats that used to be used to transport wine to Porto

So, to jump start my last month or so of the semester, this past weekend (April 20^th-23^rd) my friend Katie and I headed to Porto, Portugal.  Our flights left from Madrid on Friday and we came back on Monday (today!).  Once again, the country of Portugal has me smitten.  We left Madrid's airport around 3:30pm and after a very short flight, we arrived Friday around 4:30pm and checked into the Garden House Hostel (which, on the contrary from my last experience) was the most wonderful hostel I have ever been in.  We were greeted by a Portuguese man named Rui, who showed us to our room, gave us a tour of the hostel, maps, and any more information we needed.  We headed to the supermarket to get food for the next three days and then bummed around town for a bit.  It was supposed to rain all weekend while we were there, but we got lucky.  When it did rain, it was mainly a drizzle here and there.  Friday night we made ourselves some dinner, along with a group of 25 architecture students from Vienna, Austria, and planned out our weekend.   The group of students was quite intimidating to be around, and only a few of them spoke English, but they were all really, really nice and offered us their leftover food (too bad we had already cooked dinner!)

First you pick your chicken...

Then she butchers it for you!

Anyway, Saturday we got up, enjoyed breakfast (included in our hostel) and ventured around the city.  We went to a market and got the sweetest smelling and tasting strawberries I’ve ever encountered, some zucchini, green pepper, and dried red kidney beans.  The market was incredible...on one end, there was a bread shop, and on the other, you could pick out your chicken and have it butchered right in front of your eyes!!  


This is the market - it was raining, but we made the best of it!  We walked in on street level, which was actually the second level, and we wandered around looking at all the delicious vegetable and fruit stands for a long time before deciding what to get!  There was everything you could imagine, from flowers, to chickens, to parrots, to wooden toys for children...seriously, it was a phenomenal market!  We got some great tasting food for cheap!
 
Anyway, we headed back out to the city after the market and made our way across the Douro River to where the famous wine cellars are located.  Portugal is known for their production of Port Wine.  Well, I guess I should rephrase that.  Porto has the wine cellars in which the Port wine is stored...but the grapes are picked and the wine is produced along the Douro River in the northern provinces of Portugal and shipped to Porto for storage.  We enjoyed a free tour and tasting at Taylor’s Wine Cellars which included samples of both their white Chip Dry Port Wine, and their red Select Reserve Port Wine.  We learned that port wine is sweeter and a much stronger wine because the fermentation process is stopped after about 4 days, and then a grape spritzer is added.  By stopping the fermentation, you preserve more of the natural sugars of the fruit, so it’s a naturally sweet wine.  We also learned about several different types of Port wine, one called a Vintage.  The Vintage wine keeps aging once it’s bottled, and the longer it’s aged, the better wine it will be.  Because of that, on their menu, they had a bottle of their Vintage wine that dated back to the 1800s (it was bottled before the American Civil War) and it cost 2500 euros per bottle, or 100 euros per glass.  Needless to say, we didn’t try it, but it sure sounds interesting!

Wine cellars at Taylor's

After the tours, we bummed our way around the city.  We saw the picturesque Riviera village near the river, and the beautiful train station.  The city also has a ton of churches.  After wandering around all day, we came back to the hostel to make ourselves some rice and beans for dinner.  We had meant to cook the red beans for lunch…but we discovered you have to let dried beans soak for a long period of time before you cook them, so we made them for dinner.  That night, Katie and I worked on our final papers for the semester - we had both brought our laptops along with us to Portugal because we knew we had this daunting paper looming ahead of us, and due to our travel plans, we really had to finish it soon! (See?  We study too...)  

This is the old Riviera town along the river front.

But, the next day, we took a free walking tour organized by our hostel, which was really interesting even though we saw a lot of the same things we saw the previous day.  We were able to learn more  about the buildings as well as the history behind a lot of the places in the city.  We learned about a church that was built a very long time ago - circa the 1000AD, and our tour guide informed us that the first mas was given in 1120AD.  Quite old if you ask me!  The church itself was quite impressive, and ahead of it's time.  Some decorations on it appeared to be very similar to Gothic cathedrals, but my art class has taught me they came much later in time. 

Very old church in Porto, Portugal

This is the cafe where JK Rowling wrote parts of the Harry Potter series

 On the tour we got to see some really interesting things - including an old book store that was JK Rowling's inspiration for Harry Potter's staircases, as well as the cafe she used to sit in and write the Harry Potter series.  We also saw the train station, which had a ton of beautiful tile work inside.  Everywhere you look in Porto there are buildings with blue tiles on them.  In fact, just down the street from our hostel was a church completely covered with beautiful blue tiles.  The buildings here are beautiful, the scenery is beautiful, and the people here are so wonderful!

The inside of the train station!

 After the tour ended, we went back to Taylor’s Wine Cellar to purchase some souvenirs (after a long discussion on how we could fit them in our carry-on backpacks).  Porto is an extremely hilly city (something I didn’t know until we got there!) so we were walking up and down and over, and down and back up and every which way to find these wine cellars.

The church with the incredible blue tiles

After visiting Taylor’s one more time, we walked past another wine cellar that had free tours, named Croft.  We actually took a Spanish tour there, and we understood almost 100% of the tour!  We even explained it to an Indian man who was on the tour and only spoke broken Spanish.  It felt pretty dang good to be able to explain it to him!  After that, we came back to the hostel, cooked lunch at about 5pm, and watched a movie.  We made dinner at 9pm, and sat in the kitchen drinking wine and tea with a few people we met in our hostel until 1am talking about literally everything.  We were hanging out with Todd from Perth, Australia, Julia from St. Louis, Missouri, and Rainer from Dusseldorf, Germany.  It was a very fun night to get to know everybody’s story.  That’s what the hostel experience is really about.

The streets of Porto, Portugal - they have a unique type of beauty.

Houses built on the green slopes of the river

Well, Monday morning (today) we got up, checked out of our hostel, and caught our flight from Porto back to Madrid…and that brings me full circle to where I am now…still sitting on the bus from Madrid’s airport to Valladolid.  I’ll go back to classes tomorrow, but next weekend I’m off to Sardinia, Italy.  It’s an island north of Sicily, and south of Corsica in the Mediterranean Sea.  I’m really excited!  But for now, I’m going to revel in my fantastic weekend travels to Portugal.  Once again, this country has won my heart over!  The people were so genuine, and kind.  It was truly a wonderful, wonderful weekend.

And that concludes my blog updates!  It’s been a whirlwind of a month so far, and I know it won’t end until May 20^th.  The date is looming in the future…last weekend after my bad experience in San Sebastian, I would have told you I was more than ready to be home.  But after traveling this weekend, I’m not sure I want this ever to end.  It’s been a dream come true, and I couldn’t have asked for anything better.

With much love from Spain and Portugal,

besos y abrazos,

Erin