new classes, new problems

we have been told from the start to leave california behind. don't try to compare the university systems, they are very different and it really won't do you any good. and i must admit, that has been kind of tough. usually ending in me preferring my university system back home and wishing the one here made more sense to me. but i've taken it in stride and understood that that is what study abroad is about. i chose this, and it is possible to get used to it. and so i managed to make it through last semester. the first week was crazy as i went to an excess of classes trying to figure out which ones i would actually take. but eventually, i figured it out, and i should even be getting credit for three of the classes i took! assuming i passed that is.

i was looking forward to second semester being easier. i understand the language much better than when i first arrived, and i understand what is involved in picking classes. plus, i may not have to go to a ton extra the first week either.
things started going downhill for me though. it was fairly easy for me to find psychology classes i could get credit for last semester because, well, they are all listed under psychology. plus, when i tried to get a hold of my psych department at home, they were actually responsive to me.
finding education classes hasn't been quite as simple, and i knew it wouldn't be. i knew it would involve picking classes that i would have to get cleared by my department at home, because there aren't any obvious education classes offered here. what i didn't realize is that they would be nearly impossible to get in contact with. and when i did get in contact, they would keep telling me i need to walk into the office. anybody else see a problem with me walking into the office? and no, it's not because i'm too lazy to walk allll the way up to science hill. i'm thinking the whole me being on a different continent has something to do with it.
not knowing what else to do, i called my dad hoping he could help me figure out how to get around this unfortunate situation. i figure him working in education could maybe help get me somewhere. and amazingly enough, it did. soon enough he had gotten me in contact with someone in the education department. no, this person couldn't guarantee one hundred percent that i would get credit for the courses i found, but at least he gave me some idea of what might work and what might not. and honestly, i knew that is as much as i could ask for. sure i could still be taking a class that won't count when i get back to santa cruz, but i'm glad that at the moment there is at least a possibility.

so now it is the weekend before i finally start classes again, and it looks like i actually have my schedule figured out:
psychologie cognitive: education
psychologie: education-formation
psycholinguistiques
version (translation english-> french)
i only have classes tuesday-thursday which keeps my weekends open for traveling if i want, and my afternoons are open as well. which means that hopefully i will get a call back saying a tutoring position has actually opened up. not only would a little extra travel money be nice, but to be honest i probably have to much free time on my hands at the moment, so it'd be nice to have something to keep me a little busier.

5 months. where has the time gone?!

i have now been in france/ europe for 5 months. where has the time gone? how is it possible that i have already been here longer than the amount of time i have left?! time seriously needs to slow down a little bit. my french has improved a lot, but i am so glad i am staying for the next semester because i still don't feel it is good enough to go home. plus, although i have managed to see 14 cities in 5 countries already, there is still so much more i want to see!
my trip up to this point has been nothing short of incredible. i have made so many new friends and seen so many new things, sometimes i can't believe this is really my life.
and sometimes i still can't believe that i am actually here. i mean i have always known i was going to study abroad. hell, i showed up in the eap office during spring quarter of freshman year to check if there was anything i needed to start doing to apply then. they sent me away telling me to come back in the fall. so i came back in the fall (the first week of the quarter i believe, maybe the second), and started the process of applying. there was a full month during which it was actually possible to turn in the application. i was there the first day, at 7:30 in the morning. the office didn't even open until 9. i was second in line, first for my program. i probably would have been the first one there except i lived downtown while my friend lived on campus.
in case you are wondering why i was there so ridiculously early, it is because applicants would be accepted on a first come first serve basis, so long as their application was acceptable. i wasn't going to risk losing my dream simply because i procrastinated.
then i spent the next weeks just waiting to here for a response. when my friend found out she got into her program, i started checking my email every 10 seconds. literally. (you can ask my mom, she got to watch me freaking out wondering when my email was finally going to arrive). it took 2  more hours before i finally got the response i had been waiting for for weeks (well years really, i guess). one that i was sure i already knew, but i needed in written form before it would seem real.
it's strange to realize now that that was over a year ago that i actually applied.

i have heard second semester goes by even faster than first semester, and i really don't want to believe that is true. first semester passed in the blink of an eye, and i am nowhere near ready to say bye to france yet. so do me a favor, time, and slow down a bit this semester would ya? it really would mean a lot. thanks. ariane.

Madrid

from barcelona we hopped on a plane to madrid arriving to what appeared to be another beautiful day outside. problem was, it was actually really cold. too bad.
we made it to downtown without a problem, found what i believe is an old post office, as well as a large arch.

old post office?

arch

we were kind of hungry and couldn't find a supermarket as planned, but we did run into a haagen-daaz so we decided to get the ice cream that we truly deserved.

it took us a little bit to get ahold of our host because he was in class, but his metro stop was easy to find and even more amazing was how close he actually lived to it! we also had been still looking for a supermarket and eventually gave up hoping there would be one near his apartment. low and behold there was! right next door! seriously these erasmus kids lived so conveniently close to everything.
our main host was actually from belgium, but his english was amazing. and apparently he speaks about 7 languages. makes me feel realllll good inside about my french skills haha. anyways. he was actually only there our first two nights since he would be heading home for a week, so we also got to know one of his italien flatmates. his english wasn't amazing, but communicating wasn't really a problem.
that first night samina and i passed out "early" because we were so tired from not getting a ton of sleep the night before as well as from traveling.

the next morning we started our madrid adventures. to save money we had purchased sandwich fixings and decided we would eat in retiro park. this park is beautiful, and felt very naturey which i haven't seen a lot of since being in europe.

my favorite part though? we found a swing! the child inside of me was so happy. i even made us stop for a few minutes.

there is also a "lake" at retiro park. it doesn't smell very good, and we found two dead fish, but at least we got to rent a paddle boat!

dead fish floating

working hard, obviously

next we head to the el prado museum and saw the renoir portion. unfortunately, as is the case with many museums, we were not allowed to take pictures. there was, however, a beautiful display and luckily a lot of stuff (though not all) was explained in english as well as in spanish. it was definitely more than worth the 4 euros we paid to get in.

we also saw plaza del sol, which is the center of spain. to be honest, i wasn't all that impressed. i thought it would be slightly more exciting because it is the center, but hey, i guess not.

i liked plaza mayor much more. it was a cute little courtyard, and not surprisingly, had a statue of a man on a horse. oh by the way, we found a lot of those in madrid. more interestingly though, there was also a human statue, a fat spiderman, and a matador! not really sure what all that was about.

fat spiderman?

matador?

next up we saw the royal palace and the cathedrale de almudena, though we didn't go into either. it was really convenient that everything was so close together, and that earlier we had found a map and had an information person circle the spots we wanted to go, so there was no need to spend all our time lost the way we had in barcelona.

cathedral de almudena

royal palace

though after awhile, we decided to get on a random bus to either see something new or head back, but really we were just cold. conveniently enough, we happened to hop on a bus that took us back to places we knew! since at that point we had wandered off a bit.

we made ourselves dinner that night, to save money instead of eating out, and because we didn't want to wait till spain's normal hour of 10pm. but we also made some guacamole! samina had been wanting it really bad, and we found out our hosts had never tried it, so why not! it was delicious.

that night we went out to a club with our two hosts. it was different than samina and i had anticipated, and we learned the spanish have a very different style of dancing than we are accustomed to. but it looked like they were having fun! i enjoyed afterwards even more though. it was late by the time we got back, but our belgian host convinced our italian host to make us some pasta! it was like 4 i think. but it was delicious. i'm thinking i should live with an italian in the future so they can make me pasta after we go out at night.

for our last full day, samina and i headed back to park retiro to find the crystal palace. its pretty cool actually. an entire building made practically out of nothing but glass. check it out:

afterwards we ended up at a restaurant for samina to eat lunch since she had eaten her sandwich the previous night. i just got a dessert, but it was delicious.

the waiter was also very friendly, trying to explain the menu to samina, considering that since it was in spanish, we were at a bit of a loss. my amazing spanish skills did come through though when we were asking where the bathrooms were. samina said bathroom. i said el banos? waiter said ohhh toilets. win!

during this lunch, samina and i got to thinking about the differences between europeans and americans, seeing as we have been around so many europeans. i remembered back to when i was in germany and watched german students attempt to name all 27 countries that are part of the european union. there were about 20 of them and they had some trouble with a few. we decided to see if the two of us could come up with all 50 states. we were doing pretty well, getting most of them very quickly. when naming them randomly stopped working quite as well, we tried alphabetically and had some success. all in all we managed to come up with 49/50. not bad right? i mean there were only two of us. well, this last state was killing us, and we spent the next hour or two while we were still wandering around town trying to come up with what it was. state number 50 was completely lost on us. which one was it? wyoming. thats right. wyoming. we now strongly dislike wyoming. who ever talks about that state anyways. have you met any one from there? exactly. anyways. it drove us nuts, but eventually we looked it up and were able to stop thinking about it.

so we didn't do much else that day due to the cold weather and the fact that we were exhausted from 6 days straight of walking allllll over the place. so we went back and took a nap before whatever would happen that evening.
well that evening samina and i got it into our heads that we really wanted to play pool like we had in milan. she looked up a place, problem was when we got there, we found it was closed. same problem with whatever place our host came up with. so we started wandering around asking people where it might be possible to find a pool table. eventually, however, we found one! problem was, it was occupied, and managed to stay that way until we decided to give up and go home. but while we waited, still with the hope we might get to play, we talked to the two people we were with who spoke a bit of english. we learned a couple things. there had already been some discussion before about the differences between certain languages. spain spanish and mexican spanish for example. or brazilian portuguese and portugal portuguese. well then of course came up the discussion of british english and american english. they didn't seem to think we spoke english, but rather american. we told them a number of times that american is not a language. both are english, the differences are the accent and a tiny bit of vocabulary. but they are the same language. they tried to compare it to different italian dialects, we had to point out its not the same thing. it was surprisingly frustrating. later though, on the bus back to the apartment, i also got to learn something else about english. did you know that if a word has 5+ letters you say more, and if it has less than that you add -er? interesting the things native speakers are never taught. i also loved that i was taught this by a guy who's english isn't the greatest :) learn something new every day!
and once again, we got pasta when we got back! love this whole late night pasta thing. seriously.

i have to say, overall i really enjoyed spain and would love to go back some day. i was even inspired to try to take spanish this semester since i have space in my schedule. i won't be able to since a beginning spanish class isn't offered/ my directors don't recommend learning another language while i am still perfecting my french, but i am sure i will in the future :)

i was of course, still super excited to return back to lyon and france. i had missed being able to understand what people were saying.

oh, and once again i forgot to buy postcards. sorryyy about that. so if you think you are owed a postcard, hopefully i'll remember to buy them from whatever city i go to next!

Barcelona and the directionally challenged

After spending enough time traveling in countries where i don't speak a word of the language, i decided to prepare a little better for my trip to spain. for once, i was going to be "ready" for new cities, barcelona and madrid. so i came up with a list of vocab to help us out along the way.. which to be honest didn't get us very far, but hey, at least i tried! although in barcelona they also speak catalon, so we were still a bit lost.
Samina and i arrived in barcelona to find sunny (and more importantly, not freezing) weather. since we arrived in the afternoon, our couchsurfing host wasn't quite ready for us to show up, so we headed to the pier and sat and enjoyed a bit of downtown.

after wandering around a bit, it was nice to be able to set our heavy backpacks down. when we realized we were a little bit hungry, we found a random bar to get a snack. there were so many people with dreads i thought i may have accidentally teleported back to santa cruz for a second.
eventually we wandered to our hosts house and actually got there with perfect timing because we hadn't even gotten a chance to text him or buzz his apartment when he walked up to us. he and his flatmates were very nice, but didn't speak much english, which made for an interesting couple of nights of communication.

the next morning samina and i headed straight for the beach. and by straight i really mean we attempted to go straight to the beach, but didn't quite succeed in getting there directly. we weren't really sure which metro stop to get off at, so we randomly picked one. well we found the water, but it turns out it was kind of an industrial area and there was a whole bunch of construction (this would only be the beginning of our directional failings). it took a little while, but as we walked along the road, we finally found a way to get to the water. i hadn't really realized how much i missed the beach and was so excited to be able to put my feet in the sand.

i was also so happy it was warm enough to be able to take my coat off for a little bit!

by the way, the Mediterranean is kind of cold in january, but it was fun to touch the water anyways :)
for lunch we decided to try some tapas and sangria.

after lunch, we wandered a bit figuring we would go see the famous cathedral de sagrada familia, or find guell park. plans changed quickly when we saw a gocar parked on the side of the road. immediately we both decided that we wanted one of these too. we found a phone number in the car and called to see where we needed to go so we could rent one! soon we were at the rental place and giving the necessary information.. sort of. in order to rent one we needed to give a passport number, a driver's license, and of course some money. well. i provided the passport just fine. i provided my expired driver's license. and we paid. then after being instructed how the car works, samina got in the drivers seat. clearly, this was a very strict process. now this car was cool. it had a gps and gave us our own personal tour including which ways to turn and describing what we were seeing. it could even get us back on track if we missed a turn. or scold us if we didn't follow directions too well. whoops. we just wanted to feel the wind in our hair! well sort of, we were wearing helmets of course.

our awesome gocar: the talking tour car

a few things we saw on our tour:

this represents david and goliath

seriously though, such a great spur of the moment decision.

next up was dessert time. i got some delicious chocolate thing. and we sat down at tables we found outside.

a wierd lookin guy came up to us with a ketchup bottle. i swear he almost squirted us with it. "i don't know what he wanted, but i felt threatened." when we weren't giving him whatever he wanted from us though, he left us alone. a waitress from a cafe came out to take our orders since we had sat down there. she was perfectly friendly and told us to just ignore the random guy. when she returned with our drinks, she asked, "can you please pay now? i'm cold and don't want to come back out here. and those bastards won't let me wear long sleeves." we thought it was hilarious but obliged. and soon moved inside as well since we were also cold. she found this slightly amusing.

finally we made our way to check out the famous cathedral de sagrada familia by gaudi, though we only went into one small room. you can still see lots of construction, since it isn't supposed to be completed until 2026.

i really liked these windows

though as we wandered around the side, we did find this:

better picture than i took, courtesy of samina

after checking out the cathedral, we decided to decide to try to find guell park. this proved to be much more difficult than we anticipated. we got off at three different metro stations and still couldn't figure out how to get there. even had someone give us some directions. after it was obvious this plan was going to fail that night, and realizing we wanted to see it during daylight anyways, we gave up and headed back to our host's house and decided to try again in the morning.
we decided to text our host to see what he was doing for dinner and decided to eat with him. we asked him if we needed us to bring anything and he said no, so we returned empty handed. when dinner time finally came around at about 10 pm (which is normal in spain), there was no food. obviously something had been lost in translation. samina and i decided to treat everyone to kebabs to thank them for their hospitality and afterward they played music for us, asking us to correct them/ sing along.

day 3 (well full day number 2): the most ridiculous day of the entire trip.
goal for the day: eat breakfast, find an internet cafe to print our tickets to madrid, maybe find the bubble thing, find guell park, maybe find the cable car?
what actually happened:
short version: we spent most of the day lost and somehow i learn to understand spanish.
long version: we ate breakfast at a cafe but couldn't find an internet cafe near the apartment. we hopped on the metro and headed downtown in hopes of finding internet (i might add this was in the opposite direction of guell park, our most important destination of the day). we walked into a random shop and got directions to internet and this time managed to find it and print our tickets, check email, look up which stop exactly for guell park, etc. we took the metro to guell park and got off at the nearest stop (which happens to be not at all near the park..) we found a large escalator, and ended up taking a detour where we found a nice view at jardin de turo. we saw a mysterious castle on a hill (really far away), and decided to add that to our itinerary.

mysterious castle on one side

cathedral de sagrada familia on opposite side

at this point we turned around and headed back down the escalator (always downward in defeat luckily. we both decided it's so much nicer to be walking up hills when we still have our hopes high, and walking downhill when we realized that once again our directions had failed us), and back across the bridge to the metro stop (a bridge that we had now crossed probably 3 times between the two days in search of the park). we stopped at a market for some food for lunch and continued on our way. after a while of walking up and down the same streets, we realized we should probably stop for lunch because we were both getting a bit grumpy. we then asked a few people if they spoke any english so they could help us out. a few just said no, but finally found someone who could at least tell us which bus to take. man, if we had just had this info 2 hours earlier, we both would have been much happier (and probably seen more that day). getting lost still wasn't funny this early in the day. so the bus arrived and we paid for tickets (something we later realized we didn't need to do because our metro ticket worked for the bus as well) and got to the park just fine (well only relatively considering the rest of the morning). upon entering we found gaudi's house and decided to pay the 4.50 euros to get in.

turns out, his place is pretty small, but there were still 10 guards making sure people didn't touch anything or sit on anything. one even got mad at me because my coat accidentally lightly brushed a table.  also, because i was holding a water bottle (mind you, it was closed), but i still had to put it in samina's bag. here is about half of the house:

finally we found the famous view with the bench.

and we found the lizard. my new best bud.

i've decided i really like gaudi's artistic style. and i also liked how even some of the more naturey parts of the park were also sort of mosaic-like, though evidently i forgot to take a picture of it. too bad.
we got a little more sangria and then went to see some more of the park. we found a cross thing with a cool view and a ridiculous/terrible singer.

the view 

really no words to describe this guy. notice the leopard print onesy.  he was an awful singer.  

where the previous photo of a view was taken from

soon we were on our way again. but as we left the park, a japanese woman came up to us. she wanted us to be models for 5 minutes. something about some magazine. i'm not really sure. but we played along through our confusion. i mean, if this day hadn't been odd enough already, why not let someone random take our picture? it was quite a bizarre experience. apparently we are fashionable people.

to get back into town, we got on a bus, this time realizing we could use tickets we had already purchased. when we saw an escalator, we hopped off. we exited through the wrong door (you are supposed to exit from the back because people enter from the front, whoops). suddenly we realized it wasn't the same escalator and we needed to get back on the bus. we tried to get on in the back door. wrong again. the bus driver was nice enough to let us get back on through the front door though, and off we went again. when we got off at the stop we meant to get off at originally, once again we almost exited through the wrong door, until i realized and we turned around. when we got off correctly, the bus driver applauded us. pretty sure we had just made his day with our ridiculousness. but we were amazed that i had suddenly learned to understand spanish when we had gotten back on the bus and he explained the whole which door to use situation. now we were back at the bridge. though i was turned around enough that i didn't realize this until we were half way across. give me a break, it wasn't a bridge crossing water! but then 2 seconds later i also saw out of the corner of my eye that we could have gotten off one stop further and been closer to the metro. my perception is evidently a little off sometimes.
anyways, we found the metro and decided it was castle time. we had asked at the gift shop at the park where it was located/ called and been told it was only from the 20th century and therefore not interesting, but we decided to go anyways. we realized we needed to take the brown line to get there. we then spent a rather large amount of time in the metro station trying to figure out how to find the brown line. we saw signs, but they didn't really make sense and so we went back and forth multiple times. up and down multiple times. we were really confused why this wasn't working for us. we finally took a break for dunken donuts since we had passed it enough times. we used to be so good at the metro, i'm not really sure what happened! though by this late in the day, after all of our screw ups, we were starting to think they were all just funny. i mean of course we would screw up the metro, it's not like we had really done anything correctly that day! it was also a little ironic because samina had said this town was easier to get around than previous cities. but it's just so big!
eventually we found the brown line and made it to the correct stop, but decided to eat before heading to the castle. while we were eating, we decided not to go to the castle, we figured it might be expensive to take the funiculaire, we had already seen a couple views, and it was dark anyways. plus, that guy had said it wasn't interesting. change of plans again. anyone surprised?
instead we decided to look for conditioner in small bottles. this didn't happen, because it is an impossible task in europe, but we did find small plastic bottles which we could then fill with conditioner in a china store! here we got yelled at for making a mess (we were going to clean it up!) because as we were searching through the bin some other bottles were falling on the floor. then we went back to a grocery store and bought a regular sized bottle of conditioner. we felt pretty successful.

we got back to the normal metro (the brown line was a little different) and promptly got on the closest line we saw. i should probably mention this is not the line that went to our host's apartment. fail again. so we got off and tried again. when we got off, we somehow got off at a different exit than before, and then walked the wrong direction on top of that, all the way to the previous stop just to be sure we were walking in the wrong direction. when we finally got ourselves going in the correct direction, we found an internet cafe a block from the apartment. really now?!

by the time we made it back we couldn't stop laughing. our day had been so ridiculous, and we hadn't even made it to many places because of our directionally challenged ways. and of course what was our host's flatmate's first question? "what did you do today?" we couldn't help but bursting into a fit of laughter, and i'm pretty sure they thought we were crazy. but due to the language barrier, it's not like we could explain ourselves all that well. soon he gave up on us. we decided we DEFINITELY had to get ice cream the following today (following sackheim family tradition of course).
eventually we got ourselves together enough to hang out with our hosts. and later we went out with our main host, and his friend (who thankfully spoke more english), and spent most of the night out. remember how i said people in spain don't eat till 10pm? well because of this they don't go out till midnight. which means staying out till 5am is normal. i love barcelona, but i don't think i could ever live there for long. my schedule is just too backwards!
i would love to go back someday, especially if i learn to speak spanish. though maybe when it's even a littleee bit warmer.
also, i found it interesting that there was cellphone service in the metro! and that we never had to wait more than a minute for a metro. loooove this fact.
oh, and i totally meant to send a few people postcards, buttttt i forgot to buy any. sorry guys. maybe next time!

a little bit of freedom and too much cotton candy

between finals and spain, i had a good five days to do whatever the heck i pleased. what did this mean? skyping with friends i haven't talked to in too long, shopping because the sales conveniently started this week, trying to plan my life for the next year but failing miserably, going to parc de la tete d'or, and simply relaxing because hey, i have the time :)

i really was super excited to get to skype with people, between my busy schedule, other people's busy schedules, and the time difference, skyping with some people had previously been impossible. but when i am able to wake up a little early, or stay up a little late, and plan a little in advance, sometimes it just works out!

as far as shopping goes, i finally bought a p-coat! something i have been looking for the entire time i have been in france. i still spent a little more than i wanted, but hey, at least it was on sale! now if only i could find some boots that are higher quality i would have everything i need. and apparently sales get even more amazing the last week in january, so maybe i'll even be able to get something i just want.

planning my life for the next year has proved pretty difficult because it is way to early to actually be able to do something. simply because i have free time to be able to think about it, doesn't mean those in charge are actually able to help me out at the moment. too bad. and i've already changed my potential/very vague schedule five times. and of course it is going to change again when i find out i can't get into the classes i want. yayyyy but not really.

today patrick and i went to parc de la tete d'or. yknow the park i always talk about? yea, that one. loooove it. it was gorgeous out today and patrick even showed up in shorts in a tshirt.. though he regretted that a bit later when it cooled off a bit. we were just so excited it was sunny out! we played some set (so glad i found someone who knows this game!).

each got a chocolate waffle.

enjoyed the beauty of the park.

and decided that some cotton candy was necessary. and not just any cotton candy, cotton candy of epic proportions.

 this is after we had eaten a some of it, notice it is still bigger than our heads:

this is the "super" size. for reasons unknown at this point, we decided it was important we get the biggest (the choices being mini, medium, and super). we probably should have had about 8 more friends helping us to finish it, because mannnn was it a lot. we made a lot of progress with it, but eventually we were defeated and forced to throw the last bit away (an amount that would probably still have been a normal "small"). i may never eat cotton candy again. but at least we got our carnival food fix :) ... not sure why we wanted it so bad though haha.

after a great afternoon in the park i returned home knowing i still needed to pack for spain. it's now 9pm and i still haven't started (i leave the house tomorrow probably by 10:30..) maybe i should get on that now... so, until after spain!