AndorrAllie

Two posts in one week means I just had a wonderful experience and I've got a big week of Spain and Portugal with Grace Modisett in T-2 days so blogging won't happen for a while.

I spent all of Monday night furiously hunting for ways that I could make it to the Pyrenees for some R&R and mountain time to almost no avail. Spain makes it crazy fast, cheap, and easy to go literally everywhere else in the country, but the Pyrenees, while they're 2.5-3 hours away can't be accessed without a car or a multi-day dedication to seventy buses. But then the excerpt on Andorra from my touristy book fell into my lap and so did divine providence. Andorra is the baby country squished in the Pyrenees in between France and Spain. Apparently it's been around for over 600 years and up until recently was a co-princedom.

There's a great direct bus (called Direct Bus) from Barcelona to Andorra La Vella (the capital of Andorra) that takes 3 hours and has wifi. I kind of jokingly thought I would try to go to Andorra sometime during this sabbatical, mostly to add another country to the count, but HAD NO IDEA. So

The beginning of my trip began at 5 am with two cockroaches. One was the fluttery brown kind that flies directly into your nostril when you're trying to get on the metro. The other was the tall human kind that told me he'd quit his job to come with me and his wife would never have to know. Really flattered that I could still be hit on with one of my eyes still half shut and no toothpaste in sight.Slept the entire way there until suddenly I woke up and we were buried between two glorious mountains and speeding past a shining lake. We didn't even stop at Customs. Pretty much from that moment until my return my mouth was wide open and my brain was just a constant stream of "panic" "I'm moving here" and "Andorra, Adore-A." For anyone and everyone who has Spain or France or anywhere in the world on their travel list, immediately add Andorra.

They have a free pamphlet to welcome you to their country with all the information you would ever need. At least twenty pages are dedicated to telling you what Andorra is the capital of. The capital of the Pyrenees. The capital of culture. The capital of gastronomy. The capital of skiing. The capital of [insert really any random word here and they'll claim it]. The people there just love. They speak Catalan, French, Spanish, and some English so I basically used the extent of my knowledge of each and they all thought I was French at first guess. Je m'appelle Allie. Everyone I met was so dear and friendly, probably because they moved there to live in the mountains and not deal with politics and just enjoy God's beauty forever. And make free pastries for tourists.

So the first day I was there I hiked to the oldest Romanesque church in the mountains, which was built in 1200 something and gave me great views of the whole little inhabited valley. The entire way there was wild food. Apples, pears, blackberries, raspberries. Tried them all and survived them all. Thought that was beautiful. Thought the trip had peaked. Then I hiked the "Sola" path, which runs along the mountainside about 50 m above the valley and follows the path of an irrigation canal. There's the shade version on the other side. Pretty much you emerge from the old quarter with stone cottages into this madness of precarious hill gardens growing only things with lots of bright colors or curly vines. And I stayed there in awe until sunset and that was amazing.

But the next day was even better. I found out how to take the bus to the next village up. There are like seventeen buses that run between these four villages, and I have no idea why they have that many because only like fifteen people live in Andorra. Plus some are only "local" which I think means they circle one square block or something. So I went to La Massana and Arinsal. At Arinsal I started on a hike to a Refugi (basically a small stone hut where you can sleep for free in the mountains). I don't have much to say that does better than the pictures, but I learned that the national bug is the grasshopper because those are more prevalent than air. Butterflies and violets in mountain meadows happen outside of Pollyanna. And when I thought it couldn't get better, real cows with real literal cow bells and wild horse friends were frolicking everywhere. I sang "The Hills Are Alive With The Sound Of Music" at least eleven times and never wanted to leave. But I hiked way more than planned and was getting scared I hadn't left enough time to come back for my bus. I came upon a sign though that was either encouraging or devastating as it said "Arinsal, 2.1 km, 2 hours 55 min." I'm not really sure what person (who could have physically made it to read that sign) would have taken 3 hours to hike 2.1 km, so I chose to ignore that snippet and unfortunately made it back in plenty of time to force myself to go home to Barcelona.

Seriously Andorra is perfection. The weather. The people. The mountains. Probably going to go back a few times.

Got real good at the self-timed photo. If you lose me, I'll be in Andorra.

HikinGallies

So my dad and his assistant were here for the past week to present an exchange program for Catalan students at CU. This meant they were mostly busy with meetings during the day, and I saw one or both of them for dinner each night. Sharon was a little bit appalled that our idea of a great dinner was a five euro kebab from a couple of Cuban men on the street so sometimes she didn't join us. But one night she got a bit of a reprieve from engineering men, and Sharon and I went to a concert at Palau de la Musica Catalana en Barri Gotic. We went to dinner beforehand and had cava (basically famous Spanish champagne) and glass-filled empanadas. I think they were supposed to be chicken, but mine actually had glass in it, so that was a fun experience that ended in a free dinner. The Palau de la Musica is immensely beautiful. We watched a man play Spanish guitar which really meant he played a lot of Bach and Vivaldi who I'm sure are both not Spanish. The ceilings and walls are covered in beautiful, geometric mosaics, and the area behind the stage is home to the muses. These are sculpted busts of women playing instruments, with their lower bodies as mosaics. I probably stared at them more than the musician.

One of the evenings, we went to dinner with a couple of the professors they're in contact with here at this exorbitantly nice restaurant on the harbor.  Basically that meant my meal cost more than I spend in one week and although we were paying our "hosts" kept ordering more and more food even when I was sure it was obvious that my stomach was becoming one giant stretch mark. But we overcame the odds and enjoyed the great meal, and my dad stayed up past midnight for the first time in his life. Our best meal though was probably the Japanese buffet we found one block from me. It's this great invention where you get to look at endless seafood on ice and then ask them to grill any and all of it for you, and then you eat sushi and dumplings while you wait. Going back there every day.

Friday was one of their only full days off so Pa and I spent the morning roaming around Barceloneta (the harbor/beach area) and Barri Gotic. Then, we grabbed Shar and went to Sitges, a notoriously gay beach town. Found a beach with fully nude old men. And another with just the usual topless old women. Still unsure whether we enjoyed that or the water more. 

 

Mariko and I adventured to Montserrat, a monastery/national park an hour via train outside of Barcelona. Twelve hours of conversation that physically cannot get much deeper than "Are the sidewalks in Japan like here or no?" is quite a patience building experience. I think we went on Montserrat Cheese and Fig Cake Festival Day. The one street outside the monastery was lined with people giving out free samples of cheese and these strange fig cakes that basically tasted like large amounts of fruit leather. But the cheese part was wonderful and Mariko learned of my deep reverence for that food group. The monastery itself was beautiful and pretty incredible, seeing that it's perched in the middle of these rock columns that jut out of the ground like God's fingers. I keep having this tendency of going places and forgetting to read about them and then suddenly realizing why people go there. The most famous thing is a statue of the virgin Mary and Jesus that are carved out of black wood. Apparently, the monks couldn't move this statue (which is like maybe three feet tall) so they built the monastery around it and the Black Mary is one of the patron saints of Catalunya. We ended up waiting an hour in line to see this statue. By the time I realized how long we would have to wait, we were huddled in this teeny corridor with no way out except forward, so us and all the devout Catholics got to thoroughly enjoy one stained glass window every ten feet and some pretty mosaics. The better part of the park is the hiking above the monastery. I initiated Mariko on what I think was her first hike/extended period of movement. We climbed a couple hundred disintegrating stairs up to a path in the mountains that wound past little hermitages, climbing areas, and gorgeous views. The day was perfectly clear and we could see both the Pyrenees and the islands off the coast. We stopped every twenty steps to take a break, and Mariko would panic every time we approached a place with a slope of greater that 0.0001 degrees. I feel a teeny bit bad because every day since she's dissolved into laughter about her "dolor de mis musculos" (muscle pain) and shock over me adamantly still taking the stairs. On the way back, we sat amongst a group of little old ladies who fed us Montserrat caramels and cackled hysterically every time I tried to say something to them. 

 

When we got back to Barcelona we happened upon the Medieval Festival, which pretty much had nothing to do with Medieval  times except for a few of the vendors were wearing assorted cloth that I assume were their costumes. This again was a plethora of free aged cheese samples and pastries of every color and size and my heart's song of street food. So that was wonderful, and I legitimately planned my Sunday around going back to eat the food again after church.

Sunday I went to church after having to explain to Mariko that she was welcome to come but it wasn't an "iglesia" that you go visit to take pictures. I didn't want her to get the wrong impression, because spending two hours in a basement singing with strangers probably isn't a tourist attraction. But we met up later with our roommates to spend the afternoon going to free museums around the city including the Palau Guell (one of Gaudi's famous constructions) and the Museo Picasso.

I have my first test Thursday and received my second every homework assignment that is "optional." I completely do not understand how school functions here. And, this week I learned that the engineering program used to be NINE YEARS because they had a course pass rate of like negative six percent. I can't imagine how long the PhD program must have taken.

Next post may be full of international adventures. Got one planned for tomorrow and another next week.

Love,

Allie

PS. In other news. Received my first letter from my dearest friend Michallynn today. So she'll be receiving a Spain Souv. Anyone else?

Visitallie

This week has been a wee bit rainy, but it's a welcome respite from four months of excessive heat and humidity. My dad and his assistant, Sharon are here this week for business--they're doing a bunch of presentations at universities in Catalunya for CU's exchange program. Sharon and I have a date to go to the Palau de Musica de Catalunya for a concert on Wednesday and my father refuses to come...so that'll be fun. We spent their first day here laying on the beach. Sharon was forbidden to take her top off. My dad and I spent a day/night in Tarragona, a beautiful formerly Roman city just south of Barcelona. I'd been there before, but had completely erased it from my memory until we walked up to the giant cathedral and everything flooded back. It rained pretty much the whole time, but that didn't stop us from swimming in the ocean. Also the sight of a dead rat (DEAD RAT) on the shore was similarly not enough to stop us from swimming in the ocean. I'm starting to think maybe I need to reevaluate my desperate need and goal for going in the water every time I go to the beach. Our friends Carme and Danny took us to dinner, and it was really interesting to learn how regulated education is at the university level by the government. Chemical engineers here for example have more than 60 percent of their curriculum specified by the government, rather unrelated to their field. Students learn to not only design a treatment process (chemical eng), but how to build an entire plant from electrical to structural. Super engineers. It made me feel both totally lazy and undereducated, and really blessed to live in a place where I elect what I want to study and am essentially guaranteed a focused and unhindered quality education. And to top it off the Spanish government keeps saying the upcoming November vote is illegal and they won't hear of it. SO THAT WILL BE FUN. I also brought Pa to church, which must have been a hilarious experience for him since it was entirely in Spanish, but he sang the songs anyways and managed to mostly stay awake. They're here until Friday.

Another highlight of the week included taking a page out of a chimpanzee's book and grooming my roommate. I'm not kidding. My Japanese roommate approaches near hysterics when she finds a stray white hair on her head. This week, she had the lovely opportunity of finding one at the nape of her neck, out of reach for self-plucking. So I was employed to tear the small white hair from her head and then ensure no other stragglers remained. I thought she was kidding for probably ten minutes. But then she wasn't, so that happened. Another great thing was upon meeting my dad, she got extremely flustered and told me she has so many things she wants to talk to him about but doesn't know English and is distraught.

I've also signed my self up for the Bicing program. Which is Barcelona's bike share program and one of the most wonderful things in the entire world. It's so convenient, and available only to people who are residents in Barcelona, so it's the latest part of my scheme to assimilate here. Speaking of which, both my local favorite bakery and corner cafe have finally recognized me as more than just a blond American, resulting in free gifts and great non-tourist conversation.

I spent my Friday night with eight of the most outrageous human beings I've ever met. For those of you who don't know what YoungLife is, it's a Christian ministry that befriends weird kids who don't normally get excited or even know what church is. I've sort of done it in the states, but historically my family has been all about supporting international YoungLife so that's kind of our thing instead. Anyways, Luis (the area director) called me to say they were having their leader meeting Friday night and wanted me to come to share all my experience (what experience? who knows). So I hopped on the metro and rode it farther than I thought possible to a random barrio that certainly was no longer real Barcelona. And then it was dark and kind of sketchy so I ran all the way to the church and arrived kind of hot and bothered for this meeting. It was exactly like walking into YoungLife in America, except they all spoke Spanish/Catalan. Got my first taste of singing in Catalan, which pretty much only convinced me that I need to take an intro to Catalan class since the pronunciations are
nothing like Spanish.

Anyways, it was really cool to get to go and share a teeny piece of life with some of the few Christians in Barcelona. Their desire to love on the jovenes (young people) here is just like some of the YLers I know back home, and their authentic sense of community is infectious. That was clearly conveyed by the fact that I was suddenly roped into attending a 2 am McDonald's run because what else would you do with eight of your new best friends? We planned the next club (youth meeting), and they kept asking for ideas for games. I real fast learned that America's version of ridiculous and hilarious doesn't really translate well. Apparently not everyone thinks swallowing live goldfish or blending up and chugging an entire happy meal is fun. But in all seriousness, it was really refreshing to spend some time in Christian community and learn about the manifestation of their faith in Barcelona. Churches are really small here, one of 250 people is considered a mega church, but 30-40 is much more common. And the interesting thing is none of the leaders is just bumming around with ample free time. One woman is a scientist in a laboratory that does something with something that eats oxygen, another is an engineer, a couple are in school...But these people volunteer their time to live out their faith and do it for free because no one else is and showing kids a piece of God is more important than anything else.

At one point Luis was talking about plans for the next week, and I asked a clarifying question and then accidentally heard myself volunteer to teach on 1 Thessalonians (a book of the bible). UM WHAT. No idea how that happened or even what 1 Thessalonians is about or how to even say anything about that in Spanish, so We've got a lot to do. Probably also committed myself to going to the YL Europe conference in Madrid in Novemb.

I have some homework to do from my roommates. They had a dinner party here last week, and one of the guys swears by the success of his system of annually answering 20 life questions. Basically they're all goal-oriented and involve things you want in your future like, where do I want to live or how much money do I want to make, etc, etc. We all made an agreement to answer the questions in secret notebooks and not tell anyone, and then we'll have a dinner party in a month where we can revel in the shock that all of these things are coming to fruition. He swears by it.

Lastly, I took three pictures this week. So thought I'd share all of them with you. Oops. 

La Sagrada Familia, right by my apartment.

Roman amphitheater in Tarragona

Cathedral in Tarragona

Lots of love.

xoxo.

Castellallie

This week has been wonderful. I've been here long enough that I'm starting to have favorite cafes and places to go, and I'm hoping if I return enough these people will realize I'm not just a dumb tourist passing through. I've put a lot of effort into blending in, and I thought it was going well. But then this week I realized that while I'm trying to employ the Spanish accent of lithping all "c" and "z" sounds, I accidentally am alwayth lithping all "s" thoundth too. Way to go Alan. Real thmart. Might just have to dye my hair black and surgically remove my freckles and four inches of height. 

Another great Catalan adventure involved setting up my online login. You're all probably sick of hearing about admin, but I think the fact I've done 86% of this in Catalan is hilarious. I had to pick a security question, which although I can usually guess what Catalan means, these questions might as well have been in Chinese. So I chose one at random and gave a random answer. Now to remember which one I chose...

We had a small break from sweltering humidity this week in Barcelona. My beach day was replaced with reading children's books in Spanish with my 36 year old Japanese roommate. Blessings come in all forms. We also witnessed a real life police crime scene investigation across the plaza from our apartment. Either that or the filming of the next Law and Order. Policemen with gloves and cameras. The real deal. But we'll never know why because the windows are now completely boarded up.

This week was another major Catalunyan festival. Or maybe just Barcelonian. La Merce. I think it's for the patron saint of Barcelona. Which is odd because only 1% of the festivities (a closing mass) had anything to do with her, and the other 99% were just giant moments of celebration.The Barcelona/Catalunya orchestra gave a free concert in the park in the middle of a giant downpour. Really cool to listen to a symphony and stare at four hundred umbrellas. Probably my favorite part of the festival was Wednesday. We went to Plaza Sant Jaume and watched a bunch of people in giant costumes bob up and down together. Each barrio got a pair of giants. This was followed by las castells. Think human pyramid except not on your hands and knees and not something any American can do. They started with just stacking four people standing on each other's shoulders. And I thought that was crazy. Until the towers started running across the square. And then started growing until at least seventy people were involved in each one, and each layer had multiple people. It's really something else to see tiny baby five year old girls climb up the human towers and then slide back down the humans. I don't think I would have been able to take it seriously if eighteen hands were grabbing my butt all at the same time. But maybe that's part of the thrill.

 La Merce also meant several of the sights around the city had free admission. I accidentally walked 22 kilometers one day to go visit castle Montjuic. I planned to eventually get on the metro but that obvi never happened. The castle wasn't the most spectacular of castles I've been to, but it had a glorious view of Barcelona and a rather twisted history of fighting for ownership with the Spanish government. Barcelona didn't actually get to keep the castle until 2007, and as late as the 60s people were still being tortured and executed inside. I didn't know these things existed outside of the Medieval era. Shows what I know about the world.

The whole festival finished Wednesday night with the most spectacular fireworks show and largest crowd of my entire life. A giant screen was set up in Plaza de Espana and they broadcasted a 45 minute documentary detailing the history in Barcelona (I only understood like 36% since it was in Catalan) and exposing the region's cultural identity, all the while having fireworks exploding in theme. In theme. Like soundtracks do for movies. It was amazing, but also meant I got four hours of sleep for class today and really struggled.

My Japanese roommate discovered the month of November this week. She was more excited than children waiting for Santa. She still struggles to understand full conversations, but her sudden exclamation of the one word she gets always kills me. I also discovered a market right by my house that was created for me. It's perfection in every way in that it sells everything I adore and is a haven for treasure hunting and everything costs less than 3 euros. Probably haggling for my paella pan and my 2015 wardrobe here.

Maybe it's because I haven't met many English speakers so the only English I hear is in my head or maybe it's because I'm fast approaching graduation and being thrown out into unwanted responsibility or maybe it's because I'm in Europe and writing a blog, but I spend a lot of time reflecting on everything here, something I haven't done in years. At home my life feels far too fast paced to waste any time just sitting and thinking, but here I'm loving being able to take a moment to freeze a memory in my brain or to smile at why something is so different or to appreciate the beauty of humans. Just being thankful for the many many ways the Lord has blessed me and kept his hand in every part of this sabbatical. 

One final thought to leave you with.

The metro is home to endless photo booths. This is apparently the method of choice for passport photos. I'm sorely tempted to climb into one of these and create an updated version of my 2012 Glam Shot from China. That might be my next post.

xoxo.