I'm leaving on a jetplane

Wednesday is here, and the real adventure begins. We spent a good portion of last evening deciding what we wanted/could do in the 13 days between now and our flight back to Atlanta on August 10, and it looks like we're headed to Venice first. So here's the schedule:

7/26 night flight Madrid - Venice
7/27 Venice
7/28 afternoon train Venice - Rome
7/29 Rome
7/30 Rome
7/31 afternoon train Rome - Florence
8/1 Florence
8/2 Hopefully time with my cousin Troy outisde of Florence (he's conducting an opera there)
8/3 Arrive from overnight train Florence - Bern, Switzerland make connecting train to Interlaken
8/4 Interlaken - canyoning, mountain biking
8/5 Floating day(could be spent either in Interlaken or add an extra day to Florence area stay)
8/6 Interlaken - Perpignan french mediterranean beach town, stopping place in middle of 12 hour ride to Barcelona
8/7 morning train Perpignan - Barcelona
8/8 Barcelona
8/9 Barcelona night train to Madrid
8/10 Fly home to Atlanta arriving at 3:30pm

I have no idea how readily I will be available to give updates, but I will try to keep in contact so that everyone knows we're alive. I'm all packed and ready to go, just have one more test and paper to do and I'll be done with my spanish minor! I just commented to my roomates that my pack for the next two weeks is smaller than that I took this past weekend to Tarifa (only because I don't need my beach towels and camping hammocks), so I've obviously tried to be as prepared as possible without any excess.

My mom had her port for chemo installed today, she's feeling pretty sore and unable to lay and sleep confortably because of the soreness. Her voice sounded great though, she sure is a strong woman. Holly just had her one year anniversary with her boyfriend Tim, it was enjoyable to hear about some romance too. I told Dad and Holly that I'm having trouble packing all of my stuff up because I have so many gifts for Mom and Holly; one of the girls on the trip said that she wishes I were her brother because I'm always looking for neat stuff for my sister.

The picture is of me poking my head out of the tent after our night on the beach. We had a guy open up the door of our tent around 5 am asking if we had any hashish...fortunately after we said No he didn't have any further interest.

Tarifa...aka relaxing

All week I had been longing for a few relaxing hours on the beach somewhere. What resulted was more than I could have asked for, with two full days on the southernmost point in Spain in a town called Tarifa. The trip started off a bit hectically; our group of five mistimed our arrival to the bus station because we didn’t realize before we got on the metro that the station we needed to go to was different than the one we had used before. After running for a good 10 minutes to make it to the bus station, Keegan made it onto the bus and the four of us who didn’t have our tickets printed out were left to figure out something else. After everything came to pass, we ended up arriving in Tarifa only 30 euros poorer and an hour and 45 minutes later than we had planned. The beach was very wide, like Hilton Head, with mountains a couple miles behind us and supposedly Morocco 15 kms across the ocean. The city is located at the southernmost tip of Spain, where the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Ocean meet. The water was surprisingly cold; colder than the water in San Sebastian, which is about a 15 hour drive north…interesting…but oh so refreshing. The town is known as the birthplace of the sport of Kite Surfing – a relatively new watersport utilizing a 12 ft. long kite, a waterski-type handle, and a pseudo wakeboard. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see much of the kite surfing because they were doing it about 5 miles down the shore in the mouth of a river near a large sand dune. The first day, it was too hazy to see Morocco and there was an almost painful amount of wind. My intents were not to sunbathe all day in the sand, so I was not affected too much by the torrents of sand near the beach surface. The second day, Saturday, was beautiful with the wind blowing in the opposite direction…weird huh? I suppose this was because we were on a point, and the wind could be blowing inshore on one side and out to sea on the other and vice versa. The haze lifted and it was ridiculously obvious where Morocco was and unbelievable that we couldn’t see the Moroccan mountains the day before. Two of the girls in our group took an afternoon trip there, but were victims of high prices and a very touristy Morocco experience, with no real chance to see anything outside of the planned route. We met two groups of madrileñas, some girls from Madrid. The first group were a bit younger than us and incited my attention by making jokes thinking that we couldn’t understand what they were saying. On that note, Americans are almost unmistakable in most situations, but I can’t figure out why. It’s not really the clothes, the hair, or any one specific thing, but you can pick out the American kids from the others by some aspect…albeit a subtle one. Anyways, I started talking to these girls, two of which were twins, who didn’t really like Americans and weren’t very talkative. They asked us to “hacer botellon” with them later that night (Friday), which I will explain the significance of this phrase in just a moment. The second group we met were a few years older than us, and much more fun to talk to. We also were asked to “hacer botellon” with them (Saturday). Hacer botellon in Spain signifies an event where kids from age 15 to 25 buy their own drinks and go to some area of town to hang out for a couple hours before going to the discoteca (it’s necessary to say discotec here because ‘club’ means that for guys only…) So the first night we went, we went to a castle in the city and there were only 10 people there at 11:55 pm. An hour later, there were hundreds of kids, music, and drinking. The event was quite a sight, I wish we could have something like this in the US to unite the young people. The legal implications of this type of event are close to none in cities outside of Madrid, where it IS illegal to hacer botellon. I think the only real down side to this activity is the mess that’s left behind afterward, but I think the Spaniards have figured out how to take care of that (after seeing the cleanup crew go to work in Pamplona).

We’re planning to meet up with a couple of the girls here in Madrid on Thursday night this week to show us a good time for our last night in Madrid. We haven’t really had the time or the right guides to take us out for the nightlife here in Madrid because we’ve been traveling so much, so I’m looking forward to Thursday.

Today, we visited “el Corte Ingles,” which literally means “the English cut,” which is a monstrous store like Macy’s on crack. We actually got on the metro that was adjacent to one Corte Ingles and got off the metro at another Corte Ingles, they’re everywhere! You can do just about anything you could ever need to at this store: furnish a house, get a loan, plan a vacation, buy clothes, get prescription glasses, take cash out, buy books and CDs, grocery shop, virtually limitless possibilities. It is no Walmart though; this is high quality (and expensive) stuff. The speaker told us that cities take pride in having a Corte Ingles, as this establishes the fact that the city is substantial enough to need such a monster of a store. It was a very informative visit, probably the best of Spain because of the speaker.

Tomorrow, I have to turn in a couple papers and make a presentation, and Wednesday we have our last test. Time is running out in Madrid and I will be taking care of some of the things on my to-do list in the next couple days. I think Friday night or Saturday, we will be leaving for Rome – it will be here soon enough!

Week and a half catchup

It’s been a while since the last update, I apologize for the delay. I may have lost a few readers, and I think it may get a little more difficult as time goes on to be up to date, with my Eurotrip quickly approaching. We started our second course on July 13 with a trip to Andalusia, the southern region of Spain. We were gone Thursday through Sunday with pseudo-class during the visits. We first visited Grenada where we saw a flamenco show and La Alhambra. Unfortunately, we only had one afternoon there, and we were so tired that everyone slept the afternoon away. I was mad at myself because I didn’t get to see much of Grenada; I suppose my body appreciated the rest, though. That evening, we went to a restaurant that was specifically set up for flamenco shows. It was quite a spectacle, it is certainly a must for anyone who comes to Spain. My favorite part of the show was the amazing guitar and singing that set the stage for the interesting form of dance. It appeared to be mostly improve, just the dancer and the guitarist working together to demonstrate a feeling. In Sevilla, we had the first day to ourselves to explore and shop in the narrow streets. Saturday, we explored La Giralda, which is the second largest cathedral in the world, second only to that of St. Peter’s in Rome. It has a huge tower that is 29 stories high that allowed for a wonderful view of the city. The heat here was punishingly hot, called el sol de justicia (the sun of justice). In the evening time, three other friends and I rented bikes and went on a three hour ride around the city. Although the bikes weren’t that great, the tour was amazing. We got to see all of the highlights and more. Margaret felt the consequences of the heat, though, and had some effects of heat exhaustion for the next 24 hours. On Sunday, we visited La Mezquita in Cordoba, a really big palace that had a cathedral incorporated into it, neat building but not my kind of architecture.

Last Monday, I went to the Reigna Sofia where Picasso’s Guernica is on display. I went with a girl that I met here at the residence; she studies in London but is originally from Nairobi where her parents live. I knew nothing of this painting before seeing it, aside from the fact that everyone wanted to see it because it was famous. They have on display there many of his practice drawings of the different sections of the large painting (probably 15 feet high and 30 feet long). This museum reaffirmed my perplexity at who decides what good art is and what’s not. Personally, I enjoyed the paintings in Bellas Artes in Mexico City more so than anything I saw here, but hopefully the Prado can change that thought later this week. I am unhappy to say that I will not get to go to an actual bull fight here in Madrid, due to our absence in all of our weekends in Spain aside from our first. I have heard stories, seen pictures, but will not get to experience it myself. Apparently after the 3^rd or 4^th bull that is killed, the fights get kind of boring but I would still enjoy the experience.

The crazy weekend of no sleep

Ah...after the necessary nap to recoup from the long weekend, I now have the time and energy to attempt to convey to you the once-in-a-lifetime experiences of this weekend passed.

Friday morning, our group of 8 arrived in San Sebastian to a morning drizzle after no sleep for the night. As it was 6:30 am when we arrived, the city was just starting to wake, so four of us decided to explore a bit by foot on the way to the other four’s hotel. The touristy part of the town is set around a crescent shaped beach called “La Concha,” which means shell in Spanish. Keegan, Cameron, and I spent a couple hours in the morning rock crawling along the coast where I thought we might find a neat place to set the hammocks up for the night. Fortunately, we didn’t find a place because on the way back to the regular beach, we spoke with an old man who was collecting snails for his granddaughter and he said that the tide rose like 12 feet in the afternoon which meant we wouldn’t have been able to get back to the regular part of town for quite a while. We then found a tranquil park where we set up the hammocks to take a nap. We hid our packs in the bushes and dozed for an hour. Before we went to sleep, I asked Keegan how long he wanted to sleep, and after no response, I said that we should just wake up when it became beautiful out. An hour later, we awoke to completely different weather - my prediction: no clouds, wind, and an 85 degree perfect-for-sun-bathing air temperature. We made our way down to the beach where we ran into some people from our group and enjoyed the better part of the afternoon. There was a street that bordered the water on the bottom part of the crescent, and after the tide came in, it was deep enough to jump 15 feet from the wall into the ocean. We ran into a girl who was wearing a UCONN sweatshirt and one of the guys from our group said something to them because he hates UCONN for basketball reasons. We ended up in a conversation with them; they turned out to be from Arkansas and knew a couple people that Keegan knew. We ended up meeting up with them later that night to walk around the city together. We set up the hammocks around 8 pm, just in time to watch a beautiful sunset. We met up with the girls, had dinner, and walked around with some of their friends from their five week program in San Sebastian. The streets were filled with Americans, I could not believe the ridiculously large amount of English being spoken. I then realized why Americans have the stereotype that we do, as there were hundreds of loud, drunken American kids running around in the street.

The next day we spent on the beach, and preparing for a night without sleep. The beach on the other side of the river had some nice waves where a bunch of people were surfing and boogie boarding. They had some stands set up on the beach for what would appear to be seating for a surfing competition, but the waves certainly weren’t that nice. One of the guys in our group said that he had seen surf competitions on TV in San Sebastian, but it must have been a different time of year or something. Nevertheless, it was a good chance for me to observe some of the techniques that I will be needing in the coming weeks when I begin to learn out in San Diego. Unfortunately, Keegan must have gotten a bit of food poisoning from his steak the night before because he was sick for a good 24 hours with nausiousness and vomiting. Following a short ride to Pamplona at 9:15 pm, we arrived just in time for the best fireworks show I have ever seen. They have one every night, and I’m sure it is a very expensive show to put on, as the finale lasted a good 3 minutes of pure firepower; my shorts were literally shaking from the waves in the air. I spent my night in Pamplona exploring and taking in the festivities, without a drop of alcohol. They say it rains calimocho (wine and coke mixed) in Pamplona, but somehow I managed to survive the night with not a drop on me. Our professor was a bit off on the numbers in Pamplona, as there were two million people in the city on Saturday night. I expected a little pueblo with dirt streets for the running, but it was much more modern than that. The streets that we ran on were indeed cobblestone, and were quite slippery from all of the drinks spilled on it during the night/week. You could tell the people who had been there the previous nights because of the large purple stains on their white outfits from the calimocho. It was a great feeling to know that we were at a party that people come to from around the world to participate in the festivities. I came up with a drunk-proof solution for keeping our stuff safe – I climbed a tree and Hayley handed up our bags so that I could hang them 25 feet above the ground, high enough to be out of reach of any lazy thieves. It was also neat to see everyone there in white outfits with a red bandana around the neck and a red sash, so that everyone looked nearly the same. As 5:30 am approached, I roused those who were lying down to make sure they could get there in time to see the course and to pick out the spot they wanted to watch from. By this time, I had already walked the course a couple times and had a good idea of what I thought would be the ideal route. Unfortunately for the girls with us, they found a fence to sit on but had to move just before the running. There are two sets of fences surrounding parts of the running, one to hold the crowd back and another to keep the bulls in line (and for the runners to jump over for protection). Keegan and I positioned ourselves at the top of a slight hill where we could see the bulls coming from about 100 yards away, so we’d have some fair warning. We actually met one of the most famous rugby players in the world beforehand when we were talking with some Englishmen, that was pretty neat. When we saw the bulls round the corner, chaos broke loose and it was a mad dash to see how far you could get before the bulls caught up to you. We made it about 80 yards down the course before the bulls caught up to us and we had to bail out on a fence. I could have touched the bulls as they passed, but I was concerned about a horn snagging my leg, so I didn’t push my luck. After the bulls passed, I sprinted to keep up with them until we entered the Plaza de Toros, where all the runners who make it in time gather to have some more fun with the bulls. They let four bulls out of their pens, one by one (only one at a time though), and the bull just runs rampant in the ring where crazy people dodge the bull as he comes charging past. The second bull that they let out was a jumper; he jumped clear over the wall surrounding the plaza only 10 feet away from me into the area between the wall and the stands. He then turned towards us and made his way around the outside of the ring forcing people to jump back into the ring. There were quite a few people who were gored by the bulls, but only resulted in some ripped clothes and I’m sure some pretty nasty bruises. One guy, who looked like a rugby player with soccer shorts and green and black striped soccer socks on, decided to go head to head with the bull when it ran at him. He grabbed the bull by the horns, literally, and tried to take him down. After he got thrown off, about 30 of the guys in the ring started beating the crap out of this guy riot-style. They calmed down after about a minute, but he was rudely informed of the rule that you’re not supposed to touch the bulls. The last bull came over right in front of us and ran his horns across the wall trying to push everyone over the wall. So I was busy catching the people around me who were frantically jumping over the six foot tall wall, it was incredible. I’m really glad that we got to participate in this because the running only lasted about five minutes, but in the ring, we spent 45 minutes. If anyone is to go to the running of the bulls in the future, my advice to you is this: If you just want to watch, that’s fine, but pretend like you are going to run, and right when the first firework goes off signaling that the gates are open, hop over the fence and then you have the best seat in the house, versus trying to see from the crowd. If you want to run, make sure you don’t run too early, because the people in our group who went the night before us made it to the plaza before the bulls got there, so they technically didn’t even get to run with the bulls. All in all, my conclusion is that the running of the bulls is not as dangerous as it is made out to be, but the drunk/stupid people who get hurt every day usually aren’t those who are taking any precaution and who are getting close to the bulls for a rush. This danger is quite manageable in my opinion.

Now that we’re back at the residence, I had a chance to catch up on two of the three nights of sleep that I missed from the weekend. Tonight, we have flamenco lessons from one of our professors at the school, I’m sure it will be interesting. I bought tickets this afternoon for a Bela Fleck and the Flecktones concert for next Wednesday night, I’m pumped about that. Last night, I was searching for the location of the Bela Fleck concert and I discovered that a Pink Floyd cover band was opening for Alan Parsons Project a block away, but it started an hour before I discovered this. I decided to go see if I could hear anything from outside the plaza. We missed the Pink Floyd cover band, and we could hear Alan Parsons Project playing outside the entrance. I wasn’t willing to pay 20 euros, so we stuck around for Psychobabble, then took off.

Thursday morning, we are leaving for a weekend tour of the south province of Spain, called Andalucia, which will include Sevilla, Cordoba, and Grenada. I’m looking forward to getting to see some of the muslim influence in Spain, but not so much about the 110 degree heat that we will be suffering through meanwhile. We have a free weekend next weekend, and I’m trying to decided where we should go, maybe to Valencia, the south coast of Spain like Cadiz or Tarifa, or Portugal. Everyone else is planning to go to Barcelona, but we will be coming back through that city on the last stop of our Eurotrip post-programa. Any suggestions?

San Sebastian

A couple pictures to keep you interested until I finish this next blog that covers probably the most exciting time of my travels yet...it will be up by the end of tomorrow. The first picture is of me in the Plaza de Toros after the running, the second is of one of the beaches in San Sebastian, and the third is of Keegan next to the bull who jumped over the wall right next to us, it was nuts! Hasta manana!

weekend at the beach/bulls

We’ve been meeting more and more people from the school, it is neat to have such a collection of people from all over the world. There is a group of Italian girls here vacationing, two Russian girls, a group from Mexico, a group of Americans from all over the US, some French guys…the list goes on and on. I kind of wish that I had done something like this in high school, but I guess the chances for funding assistance would have been a little more scarce back then.

Yesterday was very entertaining. We didn’t have class because we had two company visits, one with the national institute for foreign promotion and the other was Coca Cola. The first was just a presentation informed us of ICEX’s role as a national institution to aid Spanish companies with foreign advertising and entrance into foreign markets. I thought that it was interesting that the government provides free help to Spanish international companies. I was interested in finding out how certain companies receive this “free help,” because I’m sure that there are some sort of strings attached. Second, we took a bus to the outskirts of the city where we didn’t see a Coca Cola factory, but actually a separate production facility that had contract with Coca Cola to do the bottling for the Madrid and surrounding areas. The most interesting part of this visit was the explanation of how the plastic bottles are formed. They start with a test tube looking plastic piece that has the top of the bottle formed at the head of the tube. They proceed to heat the tube up and inflate it with a certain gas in a mold…very clever. The afternoon consisted of lunch and shoe shopping. Around 11 pm, Keeque y yo went to a park nearby with three people from a Mexican group that is here studying. After being enveloped by English within the group and in many dealings in Madrid, it was great to get some straight Spanish practice, even if we had to revert to the ever-kind Mexicans. We played a bit in one of the playgrounds at the park, then laid under the stars while two guys who were sitting nearby played beautiful flute music. The music was something like I would image a snake charmer would play, amazingly relaxing. It was a great way to spend an evening learning more vocabulary and learning why a Mexican would want to come to Madrid to participate in some mechantronics classes.

Today, we will be leaving for San Sebastian which is on the north coast of Spain. Keegan and I are planning to forego hotel plans since I brought my camping hammocks and there appears to be an ample amount of trees nearby the beach…it will be interesting. Don’t worry -- we have friends who are staying in a hotel, so we’ll have a place to store our things so that nothing will be stolen. The plan for the weekend is this: tonight we will take a bus from 12:30 am to 6:30 am from Madrid to San Sebastian (by the way, you should look it up on google and check out the images J) We’ll stay there all of tomorrow, sleep in the hammocks tomorrow night, stay there for most of Saturday and then take a bus to Pamplona Saturday evening. Whether or not we will sleep at all Saturday night, I do not know, but we’ll have the hammocks in case there’s any question. Apparently, most people just stay up in the streets all night, and then participate in the running at 8 am the following morning. I’ve heard that the city officially only has 10,000 residents, but over the course of the week, there is an average of over 1 million people there for the festivities. We watched a couple videos about the running in class today, I’m really excited. The streets are wider than you would think, so I’m not too worried about the actual danger of it because the people who don’t really want to run can just stand on the side of the street and be in a relatively low level of danger. I will take precaution, though, to make sure that I can safely and painlessly enjoy the rest of my stay in Europe. So we will participate in the running on Sunday morning, then take a bus back to Madrid, hopefully in time to see the World Cup game on the tele.

Update on the news from my mom: She’s doing well, she had her mastectomy yesterday and seemed upbeat afterwards. Unfortunately, they found traces of cancer in one of her lymph nodes, so there is a good possibility of chemotherapy in the future, which I’m not too comfortable with. Everyone has been very supportive from what I hear, which I’m sure is reassuring to her. Love you mom!

First weekend in Madrid

The first four days in Madrid have proven the large difference in the Mexico and Spain parts of the LBAT program. We have had basically four days of free time, with one being a day trip to Toledo. I have been utterly amazed at the amount of English that I have been hearing in the streets here. I am not sure if it is because of the surprisingly large number of tourists or just the invasion of English as an international language, but it seems that I could get by without knowing any Spanish without too much of a problem. The residence that we are staying at is not just for our school, but houses many international student who are hear anywhere from one week to one year, any nationality. We’ve met Mexicans, Romanians, Italians, Frenchmen, and many Americans. We actually ran into some girls last night in the Puerta del Sol who were from Auburn but one lives in Atlanta.

The first two days, our entire group crashed hard to try to sleep off the jet lag. It really took me two six hour naps to get it out of me, but the fact that the good night life doesn’t start until like 3 in the morning didn’t help my body’s clock. Friday night, a small group of us decided to go out with a few Middle Eastern girls from California to this club called Kapital, which had six floors and hundreds of people. If this club could be transported to any large city in the US, there would be no need for any other clubs in that city. The top floor consisted of about 30 couches under an open sky with a blue fountain in the middle, a place for people to cool off and unwind away from the loud music. Unfortunately, the “salsa” floor wasn’t very salsa-ey and so we had to deal with the hip hop floor for most of the night. I thought it was humorous that we got there so late that we would have to stay until 6 in the morning to wait for the metro to open to take us back. I can honestly say this was my first taste of night life where you come home when the sun is coming up. Saturday, we went to Toledo, which is about an hour east of Madrid. This town sprang up in the path that was created when the other Europeans were traveling across Spain to Africa, and turned into a lookout point to be able to see who was coming. In this very hot and aged city, there were many tourists and many streets that were obviously made for no more than a horse and cart to pass through. As we walked with our guide and one of our professors, I learned the necessary Spanish words for sky diving (paracaidismo) and bungee jumping (hacer puenting). The second is funny because it is an English version of a Spanish word – the base of the phrase comes from the word ‘puente’ which means bridge, thus the phrase literally means ‘to go bridge jumping.’ Saturday night was quite interesting, as it was the end of a festival of gay pride in a section of town near by called Chueca. The group wanted to go check it out, so I had no option but to follow along. The first streets we went down were so packed that everyone was shoulder to shoulder, but not with an excessive amount of gays – it appeared that straight people had just come for the festivities. Then we proceeded to head into the heart of things where we passed a stage that men dressed as women were dancing for the crowd, something I was definitely not interested in seeing. After having a dude feel my chest as I shuffled by, Keegan and I decided to leave everyone else because we were ready to get away from this ungodliness. Little did we know that the side street we took away from the concert was leading us to an even larger place with even more gay people. After being on a street with Bon Jovi blearing and lots of rainbow fags, I mean flags, we made it back to the main strip called Gran Via. We later met some girls from Ohio University but nothing else too crazy happened. The down side of such late nights means that waking up at 2:45 pm shouldn’t be that surprising, but it seemed like it should be. I spent a couple hours in the afternoon getting some sun in one of the nearby parks with another girl from the group.

I was telling someone today that all of this free time in Madrid is a bit of a double-edged sword for some people. Those who don’t have the initiative or desire to find things to do on their own will find these four weeks boring, others will have plenty of time to accomplish their goals, whatever they may be. As for me, I want to get some shopping in, see the Prado, visit some bike shops, attend a few concerts (by the way, I realized when I got here that I missed Xavier Rudd by one night, and Bela Fleck is playing here on July 19…woohoo!), get some running in, and plan the rest of my Eurotrip. If there is anything else that you think is a must for some free time in Madrid, please leave a comment!

A glorious week at home

Ok, so let’s recap the eight great days at home. Tuesday was my dad’s 48^th birthday, which I think I enjoyed more thoroughly than he. I started the day off with some mountain biking with Pete, one of my best friends/neighbors, followed the ride up with a short lunch then Disc Golf with Stephen Goldman, aka Slam (my former two year long roommate). I then attended one of my sister’s church softball games, and went out to eat to none other but a Mexican restaurant for my dad’s birthday. Wednesday, I went to the lake with the fam and enjoyed some quality wakeboarding and sunbathing time. I was surprised at how much hotter it was in Augusta compared to Mexico City, I guess I took the altitude in Mexico City for granted. Wednesday night, I convened with some friends for a quality game of Cranium – very mentally stimulating. Thursday, I participated in a game of softball that appeared to result from my original attempts to get a softball game up before I left for Mexico, but with a much better turnout. Unfortunately there wasn’t much wind during the time I was home, so I didn’t get to spend any quality Hobie-time with the padre, but I’m hoping the four days that I’m home in August will bring some breeze. I did enjoy my two days on the lake though - quite relaxing. Not too much else exciting happened, I spent quite a bit of time taking care of things on the To-do list that couldn’t be done from outside the country. Also, trying to plan a 13-day trip for Italy, Switzerland, France and Spain has proven to be a bit challenging, but I’m looking forward to the spontaneity of the trip. Unfortunately, none of my friends where reliable enough to go with me on a backpacking trip for the weekend, so I’m hoping to get some hiking/camping in the schedule for the Swiss Alps (I brought the camping hammocks!) On Monday afternoon, I went to take my last mountain bike ride for the next six weeks, only to bend my front forks straight outward during the first five minutes of the ride. This marks the end of three pairs of front forks on my dad’s old mountain bike, I guess it’s karma. I went to the bike shop that I’m probably going to buy my new bike from in Atlanta today, and I really enjoyed my time in the saddle of a future ride. I just hope that either I can learn to be smoother on the trail, or the engineers making the bikes can make them stronger because I really don’t want to have to fix a new $1000 mountain bike. I also bought my Eurail pass at the student center before leaving, which made the start of my expenses in Europe already more than I spent in four weeks in Mexico. I’ve been saving for this occasion for quite a while, and with some help from the grandparents, I think I’ll be fine. Off to Spain I go, I am really excited about my first Eurotrip (hopefully of many).

One serious note: while I was home, my parents informed me of some recent test results from my mom’s doctors. She found a small lump in her breast and discovered she has early stages of breast cancer. Fortunately, she found it early enough that it doesn’t appear that it will be too difficult to combat. She is having selected lymph nodes taken out this Thursday for further testing, then a mastectomy on July 5. Please pray for her health and quick recovery, as I expect such an otherwise extremely healthy woman should have. Drop her a note if you would, to let her know how much we all care about her! (Chris at cehess1@comcast.net) Love you mom!