Trains, Plains and Spain...

To continue with our adventures in Spain...

While still in Santiago, Emily and I went to Viejo Ciudad (the old city) to celebrate the Solstice. The tradition is to jump over a fire three times to keep the witches at bay. Emily did. I didn´t. Eh, I kinda like the witches. Anyway, it was interesting. There was a really cool band with bag pipes and drums, plenty of beer and chorizo (spicy sausage). Oddly enough, the best meat I´ve had so far was the chorizo. And, you all know how I feel about meat. We only stayed until 3am since we both had to give our talks the next day. Ugh. It was really hard giving my talk. I´ve done better, but overall it wasn´t bad. My audience was totally out of place though. I think they just stayed to be nice, since mine was the last talk of the session and totally unrelated to any of the other talks.

On to A Coruña... after Santiago, we headed north up the coast for a brief stint in A Coruña. It was a lovely city and we saw a lighthouse supposedly built by Hercules. We just stayed the one night though and then caught a train to Bilbao (north east). The train ride was 12 hours, so we slept and read a lot. We ran into a few friends from the conference on the same train. They were heading to San Sebastian (east of Bilbao, near the border of France). We met our friends in the food coche for coffee and a snack. Bad idea. You see, in Spain, the trains separate. No one told us the train was going to separate at some random, obscure station. So, while we were having coffee, we went to San Sebastian while our luggage went to Bilbao. It was horrible. We didn´t get to San Sebastian until 9pm and then had to rush to catch a bus back to Bilbao. (An 1.5 hour trip). We had somehow managed, in our broken Spanish, to get the conductor to call the train station in Bilbao to hold our luggage so it wouldn´t go to France. But, by the time we arrived in Bilbao the office holding our luggage was closed. We made it back to our hostel without luggage, and we hadn´t eaten since ¨lunch¨ (3 pm). There were no vending machines in the hostel and the attendant was unsympathetic. We had nothing to do put go to bed. In the morning we woke up and retrieved our luggage, showered, changed clothes and brushed out teeth! We were new women. So we decided to tackle Bilbao and do some sightseeing. We went to the Guggenheim museum... it was closed. Damn it. So took a 20 minute subway ride to Gaxtcho, a little town on the coast. We thought, "oh well, we´ll just take a walk on the beach and see a cute little town". Once we arrived and stepped out of the subway station, it poured. It was like the perfect storm the entire time we were there. We were trapped under the awning of a little store (closed, of course) for 30 minutes. Wet, tired and hungry we made it back to the subway and headed to Bilbao. Once we got off the subway in Bilbao, it started pouring again. We were hopping from awning to awning trying to stay as dry as possible. We had gone roughly a half a mile down the main road before we realized we were going in the wrong direction. We had seen a statue (huge landmark!) at the end of the street which was close to our hostel. Hmmm... it turned out that the same statue was at the OPPOSITE end of the street too. Damn it. I dídn´t like Bilbao. We headed for San Sebastian, leaving Bilbao and it´s bad voodoo behind.

San Sebastian was absolutely beautiful. It was much smaller than Bilbao and more "quaint". There was a lovely beach just next to the heart of the city and the "old city". A cute park and "boardwalk" (but marble) overlooked the beach and the sunsets were amazing. We partied it up the night we got there to relieve the stresses of Bilbao. The next morning we got up early and slept off our hangovers on the beach. It was hard to sleep though since the people watching was ultimately entertaining. Topless women, anywhere from 20 to 80 years old, naked kids running all over the beach and hairy, speedo wearing men. It was very interesting. We tried to hike up the mountain to see a huge statue of Jesus that overlooks the town, but it rained. C'est la vie.

Today we had an 8 hour train ride to Barcelona. We didn´t leave out seats. I´m exhausted and hungry. We tried to go out to dinner, but ordering food is like playing the lottery... sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. I lost tonight. I´m too tired to try again. Maybe I´ll get a hamburger out of the vending machine over there... or just crash in my flimsy bunk bed and pass out. (Side note: I´m definately the oldest person at this hostel. I think the average age might be 20!).

Anyway, I have to finish up. It's about 900 degrees celcius in this computer room and I'm becoming delerious.

Hasta la vista, baby!
Sara

Viva Espania!

Whew! So much has happened since I´ve been here. I have more to say than I have money for the internet... so I´ll do my best to get it all in. I´ll start with my travels. My flight to Philli wasn´t bad, except for my raging hangover and less than a few hours of sleep. The 6 hours layover in Philli was spent reading and wandering. The Philli airport is nice for that since there´s a Gap Outlet and many other fun stores. Anyway, we boarded the smallest international airplane that I´ve ever been on in my life for our flight to Madrid, and of course a 300 lb man sat next to me. The seats were small for ME and I´m not a very big person, so he spilled over onto me and his sweaty arm kept rubbing against mine. Yuck. Although that´s better than what Emily experienced. She had some guy rub his nasty, stinky sock foot on her! Ewwwwwww. (Michele´s nightmare). Anyway, other than the entertainment system not working, and a stupid kid kicking my seat the whole flight, it wasn´t bad. Once we got to Madrid, we had to figure out how to find and use the subway so we could get to the train station. Not an easy task with our limited Spanish. But, we managed. Buying our train tickets wasn´t bad either, but finding where to board the stupid train was ¨muy dificile¨. One thing I´ve learned about asking questions here is that it takes me quite a while to formulate the proper phrase in Spanish. Once I have it down, I´m very proud of myself. I went to the information counter and said ¨¿Donde es el trene?¨. Unfortunately, I´m never prepared for the flood of inchoherent Spanish that follows as an answer. It usually degrades into a lot of miming and hand motions. The guy at information performed an interpretive dance and wrote some cryptic words down on a piece of paper trying to respond to my simple question. After 2 hours of a Nancy Drew-esque adventure, we finally found where to board the train. It was lovely. The seats were huge and the movement of the train was conducive to peaceful sleep. We slept most of the 8 hour trip, but what I saw of the scenery was beautiful. The countryside near Madrid is desert-like and as you move northeast across Spain it turns into lush green mountains. The architecture of every town we passed was beautiful. Santiago de Compostello is hands down the most beautiful city I´ve ever seen. It´s clean and the buildings are white with red brick Spanish tile roofs. There are also amazing Cathedrals and other gothic style architectural delights.

Speaking of Cathedrals, we went to mass with the pilgrims on Monday evening. If you didn´t know this already, thousands of people make a pilgrimage to Santiago to worship in the Cathedral. (Go here for a full history: http://www.gosantiago2004.com/santiago-pilgrimage-history.html). The coolest this was the insence. The priests (6 of them) hoist a giant golden urn full of burning insence up with a rope and dramatically swing it over the congregation. It was really amazing.

Our hotel in Santiago is really nice. Dark hardwood floors and very European style. It is the 4th and 5th floors of a residential building in the middle of the city. Our room looks out the back (opossite the street side) into a huge courtyard. You can see into everyone´s apartments and voyeristically look in on their daily lives. There are clothes hanging out to dry from 10th story rooms, flowers decorate black iron balconies, and gatos prance around the city walls. Yesterday, I was getting ready in my room and I heard a loud laughter coming from the courtyard. I went to see what all the ruckus was about. What I thought was a man laughing was a giant seagull. It was swooping down on a black cat on the roof below and laughing hysterically the entire time. Just as it was about to assault the cat, it would gracefully arch back up, soaring into the sky only to descend again in maniacal laughter. I wish I had a video recorder. (No worries. The cat wasn´t even phased).

Here´s something interesting... it´s still light here at 10:30 pm. In fact, we don´t usually eat dinner until 10 pm at the earliest. Of course, things start a bit later in the am too. I love it, since that´s my schedule back in ATL anyway. I have NEVER seen (or had) so much cafe con leche in my life! You can´t get away from it. Of course the cups are very small so people tend to have 5-6 a day. Also, everyone smokes like crazy. They even smoke in the conference building. It´s very strange to have someone light up right next to you as you´re waiting to go hear a scientific talk.

I´ve also given up on being a vegetarian while I´m here. I believe it to be impossible. For instance, I ordered a vegetable sandwhich (bocodillo de vegetal) for dinner tonight and was served a ham sandwhich with lettuce and tomato. If you order a bocodillo de jamon, you don´t get anything but bread and ham. The lettuce and tomato that were on my sandwhich tonight were the first vegetables I´ve had since being in this country. I´m going on an all vegetable-fruit diet when I get back to the states. I can´t eat anymore bread. (Our breakfasts consist of a giant croissant and a french role - with cafe con leche of course).

Last night, Emily and I decided to go out with a group of people from Switzerland and Romania. We went from bar to bar until 4 am at which point we decided we should head back to the hotel and go to bed. We had to walk back since it was so late (early?) and the buses weren´t running (you can´t catch a cab here unless you get one at a taxi stand, which are few and far between). Anyway, we were hard pressed since we forgot our map. So, one of our Romanian friends let us borrow his map. His map sucked. We couldn´t figure out how to tell what was on the map let alone how to get anywhere using it. So he pointed us in the right direction and said ¨head for the cathedral¨. We did. We got lost. We wandered around Santiago for over an hour at 4:00 in the morning. It wasn´t fun, but we were cracking up anyway because we were drunk and nervous. We ended up at the Universidad and got stuck on the campus. I have no idea how we managed to wander onto the campus and not be able to find our way off. Eventually we cut through a dorm-quad or something and ended up in a neighborhood. Not where we wanted to be. We started to become a little desperate since we couldn´t see any city lights or city streets. I spotted a garbage truck and decided to ask the guy for directions. ¨¿Donde esta un taxi?¨ He started to give me directions (again a lot of hand waving and pantomiming), but we both became frustrated. So, he pointed to his truck (which was very nice for a garbage truck - or most trucks for that matter). Emily and I climbed in and he gave us a ride to the taxi stand. You have to understand one thing, the garbage men in Santiago aren´t like any garbage men I´ve ever seen. They are very clean cut... kind of like white collar in the US. Does that make sense? Anyway... the best part of the whole story ----- he had to keep making his pick-ups. Yep, Emily and I helped make garbage pick-ups at 4:30 in the morning in Spain. It was hilarious beyond the point of reality. We made it back to our room at about 5:30 am and passed out. I am, however, very proud to say that we still managed to get up in time for the first talk of the morning! (Of course, that was at noon).
Tonight, we´re exhausted. I´m heading to bed early (for here - midnight). Tomorrow is a big night. The whole city will be a buzz. There is a party celebrating the solstice in ¨old town¨ (the historic part of the city where the cathedral is located). I cannot, however, get drunk and get lost seeing as I have to give my talk on Friday. No more garbage taxis for me!

¡Buenos noches mi amigos!

Don´t worry Dad, it´s not as bad as it sounds. I promise.