carnaval in Cádiz

After taking a nap on Saturday afternoon, I walked to Sevilla’s train station in the rain. The only people that were out at that time were some tourists who were braving the cold rain. It didn’t look good for carnaval that night. The train station was a festive atmosphere – a lot of young people wearing costumes where hanging out and drinking and there was a big group of Spaniards all dressed as hippies with drums and whistles making music. I met up with two friends and got in a long line of carnaval-goers, went through the loose security and got on a train in time to find a few of the last open seats. A lot of people were standing or sitting on the ground throughout the train ride. Everyone in our car was dressed up; I put my batman costume on in the train because I didn’t want to walk around Sevilla in the rain in my extremely tight superhero costume. There was one old guy on the train and he was the only one not dressed up. I guess he just caught a bad night to go to Cádiz.

Cádiz is one of the oldest settlements in Europe; the Phoenicians established a port there about 3000 years ago. During the Spanish golden age it eclipsed Sevilla as the most important port connecting Spain to the New World and became wealthy from the Spanish-American gold and silver trade. During the 20th century it built a reputation as being the most liberal and progressive city in Spain. Its wild carnaval was a big part of the town’s character and was the only carnaval allowed during Franco’s reign. One of my professor’s explained why the carnaval was never interrupted there by pointing out that “there would have been another civil war if Franco banned carnaval in Cádiz.”

We sat with some Spaniards dressed as vampires who were studying in Italy and came back for the Cádiz carnaval. They told us all about it because we didn’t know what to expect when we got there. They gave us some face paint and got us really psyched. When we arrived everyone spilled out of the train and pushed their way to the exits. We snacked and drank in the train station while waiting for the rain to stop. It was hardly raining but it was windy and pretty cold. We followed the crowd through some packed plazas and got to the big cathedral. The train station was crazy but it didn’t prepare us for the center of the city. It was my first time in Cádiz so I got a unique first impression of the city. One of the first things I saw was a person in a cow costume climbing a palm tree in front of the cathedral as thousands of people cheered the cowperson on. The cathedral was a really cool building and was the perfect backdrop for thousands of people to dress up, sing, dance and drink. Cádiz, a beautiful 3000-year-old port town on a (usually) sun-soaked long and narrow peninsula, was the ideal place for an enormous outdoor party. No one seemed to care that it was raining.

We ran into a lot of Spaniards and Americans that we know from Sevilla and met lots of new people throughout the night. My Spanish brothers were there too, I called Pedro at one point and found out that they were nearby but couldn’t find them in the crowd. I did run into him later in the night as we were heading back to the train station to go home. Just before midnight its started to rain hard and everyone got their umbrellas and ponchos out. It only lasted a few minutes and then everything was back to normal. Later on it started to downpour again and we tried to wait it out but it didn’t stop. We started to look for cover but every single bar, restaurant and covered public space was packed with people so we went to the train station and took a spot on the floor. We regrouped there, dried off our socks and shoes using the hand dryer in the bathroom and got to know some Spaniards and other American students. The train station closed at 2 am so we got kicked out. It had stopped raining by then and we were now dry and warm. A big group of young Spanish guys all dressed as the Cruzcampo beer mascot showed us some other parts of Cádiz. There was plaza after plaza and lots of narrow streets swarming with people. I couldn’t believe how many people where there despite the rain.

By now the streets were trashed with plastic bags, cups, bottles, beer cans, mud, pieces of costumes and passed out revelers. No extra garbage cans had been put out so everything ended up on the ground. And people urinated everywhere. There were hardly any police out there either, something you would expect to see at a big outdoor party in the United States. The atmosphere was different than anything that would ever happen in the US though, everyone was peaceful and staying under control. The Spanish love to sing and make music. People were clapping and singing flamenco on the train ride down to Cádiz and there were people with drums and whistles everywhere. I was surprised at how good the costumes were and that virtually everyone was wearing a full costume and more then just a mask or some face paint. At Halloween in Madison costumes that are offensive, vulgar or slutty costumes are more common but almost everyone in Cádiz had a respectable and well-made costume. The most common costumes were traditional ones, with some Spanish influence of course: matadors, men in flamenco dresses, Cruzcampo guys, Guardia Civil, soccer players, hippies, cows and bulls, police, soldiers, cowboys, superheroes, clowns, and vampires. There were a lot of large groups of friends all dressed in the same costumes and a lot of cross-dressing. There were not a lot of the traditional Carnaval/Mardi Gras feathered masks.

We went back to the train station around 5:30 am. Walking back we trudged through sidewalks and streets covered in a layer of muddy and soggy garbage. Our train was supposed to leave at 5:55 am and everyone hurried to get on before it left. Again we were lucky to get seats. For some reason the train didn’t leave until 7 am, we sat there for a long time but that just meant more time to catch some sleep. We got back at 9 am, I walked home and after a shower and a shave I ate breakfast and started my day. It was a crazy night and it all went by really fast. I’ll have pictures online later.

new pictures from Sevilla

Carnival weekend

So it got cold recently, but it’s still nothing like Madison, which got about a foot of snow last week forcing classes to be cancelled one day. The European Champions league, a big soccer tournament, is reaching the final stages so everyone is watching all the games. The Real Madrid game was on pay-per-view Tuesday night so we went to a bar to watch it. On Wednesday night Barcelona beat Chelsea (a team from London) with two late-game goals in a really exciting game that we were able to watch at home. Real Betis is still playing poorly.

Pretty much everyone in the family was sick this week, including me. Everyone had a bad cold. I wasn’t that sick, but it lasted almost a whole week and other than going to class I just slept. Luckily I am back in full health because it’s a five-day weekend and carnival. One of the biggest carnivals in the world is in Cádiz, which is a little more than an hour south of Sevilla. I’m going because everyone is going to be there. Today I went costume shopping with some friends and bought train tickets. I got a really cheap, made-in-China kid’s sized Batman suit to wear and tickets for an 8 pm train to Cádiz Saturday night and a 6 am train back to Sevilla Sunday morning. It’s supposed to rain though; we’ll see how it goes. Next Tuesday is el Día de Andalucía, so there are no classes that day nor on Monday.

My English class was supposed to start this week on Wednesday but the hotel canceled on me so I start next Wednesday instead. Yesterday my art history class went to see a temporary exhibit of 16th Century art, mostly by Diego Velázquez, José de Ribera and Caravaggio. We will visit a few more museums throughout the semester. I got involved with a communications group in my program and two weeks ago we visited the University of Sevilla’s new campus that houses the Communications school. It had a lot of brand new and high tech TV and radio studios and rooms full of PowerMac G5s for editing. Last Thursday we toured a local TV station and saw a radio news program being broadcast live and then stood in the back of a TV studio while the two anchors read the news. We were right behind the cameras and had to be dead silent as they shot the program live. For the last half of the news show we were in the control room. It was interesting to see how they coordinate and time everything and there was a lot of stress and yelling going on among the producers.

I posted an album with pictures from Alicia’s (the daughter) birthday four weeks ago and Alicia’s (the mom) birthday last week. There are also pictures of the Giralda and Cathedral and the two buildings where I go to class. I climbed up the Giralda tower for the first time last weekend and there is a great view at the top. There’s a good amount of Sevilla in the pictures so Martha and everyone who is visiting in April can see a little preview of what they’ll see when they’re here.

So next week I’ll have two days of class and then I’m going to Salamanca on Friday. My program let the yearlong students plan a weekend trip. My top pick was Salamanca.

back in Sevilla

Life is Sevilla is pretty good. My oldest sister, Alicia turned 27 two weeks ago. The older siblings, her fiancé and a bunch of their friends celebrated at a bar near our house. I met a lot of Spaniards and got free cake and drinks and then we went to a club until 5 am. The following night was the Super Bowl, which I watched (sort of) at bar with dozens of other American students so I was able to meet a lot of the new students. The game was shown live, from 1 - 4:30 AM. The broadcast in Europe had no commercials, during commercial breaks the camera showed bored fans and nothing else. And then the first day of class was the next day. Tuesday was my mom Alicia’s birthday. She got a ton of presents, I gave her a red fleece Wisconsin blanket that I intended to give away for Christmas but it was lost in my room.

So I have had two weeks of spring semester classes so far. After a couple schedule changes, I have my five classes and I really like all of them. I am taking two classes for Spanish culture credit and one Spanish literature class, which leaves me with one last Spanish class to take before earning a bachelor’s in Spanish. The class I’ll take next year in Madison is intro to Spanish literature and is mostly freshman and sophomores. I think it will be really easy. The first of my two culture classes is The Masterpieces of the Great Spanish Painters in which we look at slides of paintings for most of the class period. So far we’ve only gone through the basics of paintings, the Greek and Roman influence on Spanish art, and the earliest art found in Spain - prehistoric cave drawings.

The other culture class is The Social History of Spanish Colonization, which is the only class I have at the University of Sevilla with Spanish students. All of my other classes are through my study abroad program. This class at the University is small, only 20-25 students and about 1/3 of them are American students. The number of Americans was kind of disappointing, but avoiding other Americans is impossible in Sevilla. Some classes at the University of Sevilla are more than half American, I don’t know how, but there actually are several classes where Spanish students are the minority. And the class is very different from the way classes are taught at Wisconsin. The professor sits behind a table and talks for the entire period, no discussions, no visuals aids, no homework, and no feedback. There are some recommended readings and the student’s grade is determined entirely by the final exam. I am glad that I am taking this class for the experience but I am also relieved that I will never have to take a class taught this way ever again.

My literature class is Spanish Literature of the Margins and we read authors like Ruben Darío and Federico García Lorca which I am excited about. The other authors I have never heard of. The class is part sociology (studying why and how certain social groups are marginalized) and we read literature written by people who were marginalized for political or racial reasons. I am taking one class for political science credit, The Political Construction of the European Union. So far we have learned about the geography of Europe, international organizations in general, and the history of the formation of the EU. The professor is a great guy, an international relations professor at the U of Sevilla. So far its been really easy because its basic stuff that I know already but since I know nothing about the European Union itself I know it will be an interesting and informative class.

My last class is Professional Teaching Development, taught by a young and super nice Barbados-born Canadian guy who married a Spaniard and now teaches and lives in Sevilla. The class began with a thorough review of English grammar. Even though we all know English well, we have all forgotten the names of verb tenses and parts of speech and need to learn why English is written the way it is. We also learn teaching methods and how to teach English to non-native speakers using only English in the classroom. To prove us that it is possible to learn a foreign language using only that foreign language in the classroom, on the first day of class the professor brought in a young Chinese guy to teach us Chinese using only Chinese. It took lots of repetition, drawings, body language and patience, but we slowly picked it up and were able to learn how to say simple Chinese phrases. By the end of the class we were able to have simple conversations along the lines of “Hi, how are you? I’m good, thanks. My name is __. What’s your name? Goodbye.” Anyways, next week we will start teaching English to a small group of Spaniards twice a week for the rest of the semester. Local companies who want their employees to learn English arrange the classes. So I’ll find out more about it soon.

reflections on the trip

I can’t believe how much I saw in five weeks. It was the trip of a lifetime. Nine countries: Spain, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Switzerland and Italy. Eight languages: Spanish, German, Czech, Dutch, Flemish, French, Italian and Catalan. Overnight stays in 16 cities: Madrid, Stuttgart, Munich, Vienna, Prague, Dresden, Berlin, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, Lyon, Bern, Venice, Florence, Rome, and Barcelona. Counting day trips and brief stopovers, I visited over 20 cities. I traveled on two planes, a few of Venice’s public boats, one long bus ride, three high-speed trains and countless other trains, streetcars, public buses and subways and walked countless miles. I took almost 1800 pictures, collected 83 postcards and 15 beer coasters, and came home with a few blisters on my feet.

It is hard to take in everything that I did. In one trip I saw some of the world’s greatest works of art: Picasso’s Guernica, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s David; and some of the most iconic buildings and monuments in the world: the Berlin Wall, the Eiffel Tower, the Coliseum, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Notre Dame Cathedral, St. Mark’s Square, the Charles Bridge, and St. Peter’s Basilica. There were countless unique sights and experiences: the beer gardens in Munich, catching up with Pau and his parents, taking in an opera in Vienna, strolling the grand boulevards of Paris, a boat ride down Venice’s Grand Canal, scaling the Eiffel Tower, seeing a symphony in Prague, exploring Roman ruins in Italy, watching the snow-covered Alps go by on a train, joking around and hanging out with Charlie, celebrating New Years with Germans, seeing Amsterdam’s bustling red light district, touring royal palaces in Vienna and Prague, witnessing two bears mate in Switzerland, browsing new cars at an auto show in Brussels, meeting the whole Pavanini family, seeing millions of human bones up close, watching kids sled down hills and a shepherd herding sheep in southern Germany, seeing Barcelona for the fifth time, and sampling the different beers, espressos, waffles, cookies, fruit, pastries, snack foods, cheeses, and cheap meals in every country. I visited museums ranging from a sex museum and a beer museum in Amsterdam to Dalí’s wacked-out museum in Figueres to the Mercedes-Benz museum in Stuttgart and several world-renowned science, history and art museums.

I did it. I saw Europe. I finally satisfied my desire to see almost everything that I had wanted to see in Western Europe. With that out of my system, I feel like I can stay in one place now and just enjoy Sevilla for four more months. It left me with a weird feeling though, Europe no longer seems so foreign and faraway. It was sort of a loss of innocence experience – after seeing it all in person it’s no longer as appealing as it once was. Throughout the trip I kept thinking, “I bet the next time I am back here again, I will be traveling with my wife and kids.” I know I’ll be back sometime but I couldn’t help thinking that next the experience will be very different. It definitely left me wanting to see the rest of the world. And I realized that my trip wasn’t that ambitious or difficult, I never left the western world, I never left the bubble of large, developed cities with extensive English-speaking tourist infrastructures. I was more a tourist than a traveler and I always fit in everywhere I went. So now that I’ve exhausted Europe, I think Latin America is next. Before I go home, there are two places on my list to see this semester that I haven’t been to yet -- the UK and northern Spain.

pictures from Barcelona, San Cugat and Figueres

Barcelona, San Cugat and Figueres

So when I got there on a Friday night it was raining. I flew from Rome on Vueling Airlines, a Spanish budget airlines. I walked around the Ramblas and Plaza Catalunya that night and went to bed early. The next day I was able to see he city better, even though it was still raining. It was weird to be in a place that I knew well. Everything reminded me of past experiences; just hearing the names of metro stops announced on the metro brought back old memories. Other than a few new stores, nothing has changed. At 1 pm I took a train to San Cugat, where Pau picked me up in his new car, a Seat hatchback. It was raining in Barcelona, and in San Cugat, 15 kilometers outside the city, it was snowing. It was the first time I have ever seen snow in Spain. Pau’s twin brother was in Italy on vacation and his sister is working in London so he was the only kid home. He is studying biology at a University in Barcelona and working part time as a waiter. We had lunch with his parents. The food reminded me of the summer I stayed with them, it was some of the same food I ate everyday there. San Cugat has grown and changed a lot in recent years and with all the snow it looked really different.

Pau drove me back to Barcelona and I went to see some of the Gaudi buildings, the Casa Milá and Casa Batlló. I had never really paid attention to them when I was in Barcelona before. I walked around the L’Eixample neighborhood (where I am going to buy an apartment one day), and the old Gothic Quarter. The next day I went to the train station to reserve a bed on an overnight train to Sevilla, using up the last day of my Eurail pass. I took a train to Figueres, a small town in the Pyrenees north of Barcelona. There was some bad flooding in that part of Spain, some of the fields near the train tracks were under several feet of water. Figueres is the birthplace of Salvador Dalí and he designed a museum to be built there to house his art and his body after his death. It is the second most visited museum in Spain, after the Prado in Madrid.

So as you can imagine, the Dalí Museum, designed by Dalí himself, is weird, it’s hard to describe. The first room I went into was dimly lit and displayed some jewelry he designed as well as his tomb. There is a round building with his more normal paintings. And then there is a lot of weird stuff. The courtyard has an old black car with a lifelike mannequin at the wheel and huge a fat lady on the hood. There are lots of 3D displays that he made that are coin operated, for 50 cents you can put the moving parts in motion and make lights flash. A lot of his work was inspired by famous works of art, some of which I had seen earlier in the trip. Dalí made his own surrealist interpretations of Creation, the David statue, the Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa. Dalí was a weird guy and seeing his personal museum was the best way of trying to get inside his head and discover how he perceived the world.

When I left the museum to walk back to the train station I got caught in a downpour so I was soaking wet for the ride back to Barcelona. I had a few hours left in Barcelona so I walked around the University area, the old part of town and the port. There was a great sunset during the few hours when it wasn’t raining. I got to the train station around 9 pm and had to wait for the overnight train to leave at 10:30. I was in a 2nd class four bed sleeper cabin with one other guy for about an hour and then was bumped up to a 1st class two bed sleeper cabin. The bed was the same in both cabins and since I did nothing more than read and sleep the upgrade wasn’t a big deal. I left Sevilla on a bus at midnight on Tuesday, December 27th and returned on a train almost five weeks later, on Monday morning, January 30th.

pictues from the Roman Forum

pictures of the Coliseum and Pantheon

pictures from the Vatican

Rome

On my first full day in Rome I headed out early for the Vatican on a metro that crossed the Tiber on a bridge. The Vatican walls opens up to Rome in a huge circular plaza, the Piazza San Pietro. A big nativity scene and Christmas tree was in the center of the plaza. There were lots of school groups there, and nuns and priests were everywhere too. I first went into the basement that holds the tombs of dozens of Popes. John Paul II’s tomb was very somber. It’s a large plain rectangular slab of marble in the ground, with just his name and the dates of his papacy written in Latin. There was a small crowd of people praying at his tomb.

I then went inside St. Peter’s Basilica. From the outside, it doesn’t look so big because it’s surrounded by other large buildings and stands behind a huge plaza. Once you step inside though, you feel really small. The ceilings are extremely high and everything inside, the windows, statues and frescoes are super-sized. The giant marble statues were one of the coolest things in there. I was excited to see Michelangelo’s Pietá inside. That statue and the Creation fresco in the Sistine Chapel were the two things that I really wanted to see.

After walking around the Basilica I climbed to the top of the dome. You can go around the of the dome on a walkway and look down at everyone on the ground floor. You can also walk around part of the roof, although the view of Rome is partially blocked by the walls and buildings of the Vatican and the hills nearby.

After the dome I went to see the Vatican Museum and Sistine Chapel. You first walk through a lot of long hallways and rooms that are full of art. The two notable hallways are the hall of maps and the hall of tapestries, and then there are the Rafael rooms full of his paintings. There is also a museum of Christian art, from Renaissance to modern. I enjoyed all of that, but was really anxious to see the Sistine Chapel, especially the frescoes done by Michelangelo. I have seen so many pictures of them and I was really excited to finally see Creation in person. You can’t take pictures inside the Chapel; I wish I could have taken some as it was the coolest room I have ever been in. The ceiling and walls are covered with vividly colored Renaissance paintings. The room was packed with people and everyone was staring up at the walls and ceiling in awe. With all the gigantic highly detailed paintings there is a lot to look at. My neck was really sore by the time I left. The Creation painting is relatively small and is just one of six frescoes on the ceiling. After the Sistine Chapel I saw the museum section on early Christian art.

I took the metro back to the center of Rome and walked by the Spanish Steps. They were packed with people this time. I then found the Pantheon, which is the best-preserved Roman building. Parts of the exterior are falling apart but the dome and everything inside is in perfect condition. I saw the Trevi fountain and Piazza di Venezia again. I had seen them the night before but I wanted to see them again during the day. I also saw some of the Roman ruins.

So the first day was devoted to the Vatican, and my second day was voted to seeing ancient Rome. I went first to the Coliseum, which was swarming with souvenir sellers, tour guides and tons of large groups. I just bought a ticket and went inside to explore it solo. There was information posted inside and I overheard lots of the English tours. It was amazing to stand inside the and try to imagine what it would it would be like 1500 years ago, watching wild animals and gladiators battling to the death before a crowd of 60,000 – 70,000 Romans. They brought in wild elephants, lions, jaguars and bears to fight prisoners wielding small weapons. They also would flood the arena and stage naval battles. I learned that the English word arena comes from the Latin word arena, which means sand, as sand was dumped on the floor of the stadium. The words stadium and colossal (the Coliseum got its name because it was so huge) also come from Latin. After the Coliseum I walked around the Roman Forum and Palpatine Hill, which is basically a huge archeological dig. It’s the site of the old Roman city.

Later that day it rained for a bit but I went into some stores and hardly got wet at all. I saw Piazza del Popolo and then back earlier than normal to cook, watch TV and hang out at the hostel. The next day I had all morning to see the last thing that I wanted to see in Rome. Rome has several catacombs, but I had just been to the huge catacombs in Paris. There was one place listed in my guidebook that sounding intriguing… and morbid. The Capuchin church was nearby my hostel so I decided to check out the crypts there that are highly decorate with the bones of monks and poor Romans who couldn’t afford a proper burial. It was incredible – every single type of bone in the human body was used to make all kinds of structures and designs on the walls. The centerpiece in one room was an altar made of skulls; another had an altar made of pelvis bones. Spinal vertebrae, jawbones, ribs and small bones from the hands and feet were glued to the ceiling to make various patterns. There were also whole skeletons wearing the plain brown monks’ robes. The last room had the skeletons of two children; they were about three feet tall. It was interesting to study the anatomy of the bones – the skeletons all seemed to be small in stature, some skulls were more complete and almost mummy like, they had discernable facial expressions. There were wisdom teeth in most of the jaws. When I left there was a monk near the exit, wearing the same brown robe that were on the monk skeletons. I couldn’t help but imagine what he would look like as a skeleton as I walked past him. They didn’t allow any photos, but they did have postcards with pictures of the rooms so I got two of them. It was just like the catacombs, gross but really intriguing, and better than any haunted house could ever be.

I met all kinds of cool people everywhere I went on the trip. There were always a lot of interesting people at each hostel. In Florence on the first night there was a group of four American students who had just arrived and their study abroad program began the following day. There was a college student from Russia traveling over his winter break, a group of French girls, and an Australian who had lived for a few years in the US and then went to a high school in Japan for the last three years. After graduating from his Japanese high school he traveled through China and Eastern Europe for a couple months before reaching to Italy and he was about to go back to Australia to start college. I had met a few Spanish-speaking travelers on the trip, most were from Spain or Mexico. I was able to speak a lot of Spanish in Rome, there were a few Spaniards staying in my hostel there, in addition to a few Portuguese who spoke Spanish, a young couple from Mexico, some Spanish-speaking Italians, and two girls from Argentina who were traveling over their summer break. They were surprised at how well I spoke Spanish and I was surprised that I was able to get back into it so easily. It was nice to use be able to use Spanish again after being stuck in German, French, Italian, Flemish, Czech and Dutch speaking countries for weeks where I understood hardly anything. And then there were a lot of Australians, only two Americans, and the guy I met in Florence who went to high school in Japan ended up at that hostel in Rome too. There was also a young Polish guy who had hitchhiked down to Italy and he spent his days busking on the streets of Rome as a human statue -- dressed as a monk with white face paint. I saw him in costume on the street one day.

I also ran into people I knew a few times throughout Europe. I ran into a guy who lived in my dorm in Madison my freshman year in Munich. He is studying in England and was traveling over his break. I ran into him again a week later in Berlin. Two students from Madison that Charlie and I met in Berlin I saw a week later at the Louvre in Paris. Its weird to run into people you know when you are so far from home. In Florence I met a two guys from Argentina, a dad and his grown son, who were touring Egypt and Italy. They were the only other people outside the Galleria della Accademia early in the morning waiting for it to open. I saw them later that day in Pisa… and then again the next day at the Vatican. I ran into them in three different places in Italy. Countless times I would also run into people I knew from the hostel while walking around during the day. Charlie met someone who knows me at O’Hare – a UW student who is studying for the year in Sevilla and was going home for a couple weeks.

pictures from Pisa

pictures from Florence

Florence & Pisa

I left Venice on Sunday and went to Florence. There were lots of people out for an evening stroll when I first walked around the city and there was lots of stuff for sale on the streets, much more than in any other city. The city had a cool feel, there was live music, tons of people strolling and shopping, the old bridge, lots of statues. I also noticed a large number of American students who all stood out as very American. They were all fresh of the plane and had come to Florence to study for the spring semester. The next day, which was a warm and clear day (finally!), I saw the main plazas, the oldest church in Florence, Mercato Centrale – a big food market, the Chiesa Santa Croce (Holy Cross Church), the burials of Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and Galileo (who died in 1642 but was not buried here until 1737 when the Catholic Church decided to give him a proper burial). I crossed the river on the old bridge, climbed up the hill on the other side of the river, which was a really nice neighborhood with huge houses.

I tried to pack a lot into the next day, so I woke up at 6:30, took my pack to the train station and went to the Galleria della Accademia. I got there before it opened so I walked around the neighborhood for a bit and went back as soon as it opened. A tour group of 30 people came in soon after. So I saw lots of Renaissance art, a room with hundreds of molds of busts and statues, Michelangelo’s Slaves and one of the most famous statues in the world, Michelangelo’s David. It is an impressive, towering statue. The statue seemed to be about 12 feet tall and was standing in the middle of a huge dome. I wish I could have taken a picture of it, but you know what it looks like. There was a computer nearby where you could play around with a digital model of the statue. There was a laptop computer and some instruments next to David’s feet doing an experiment on the air and how it reacts with the statue. I forgot what they were testing exactly, but it is a well-studied statue.

I then took a train to Pisa, which is about an hour from Florence. It was a nice sunny warm day, and the weather got even nicer closer to the coast. I saw the Leaning Tower of Pisa and then walked right back to the train station to catch a train to Rome. The tower started to lean even before it was finished being built. Pisa spent decades bringing in architects to try to fix the tower, but they never could get it straight so they decided to just finish it anyways. In the 1990s it started to lean too much so it was closed and righted somewhat. Today the top hangs 15 feet out over the base and the observation deck on top is open again. It’s a funny looking building and it was surreal to see it up close because I’ve seen so many pictures of it that it was hard to believe that I was actually standing next to it. When I got to Rome I went to my hostel, which was only blocks from the train station, showered and then walked around. I was walking down the street when I noticed a large dimly lit building down a wide cobblestone street. It was the Coliseum, another surreal sight. I also saw the Piazza Venezia, the Spanish Steps, and the Trevi Fountain while walking around. So that day I was in Florence, Pisa and Rome, where I saw the statue of David, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Roman Coliseum, all in a single day. Not bad.

pictures from Venice

Venice

I left Bern and took a train through the snow-covered Alps to Milan. That was probably the best train ride of the whole trip. There were lots of snow-covered mountains and little towns. There were also lots of short tunnels, which made taking pictures of the mountains frustrating at times because as you got higher up and the views got better, you went through tunnels more often and lost sight of the mountains. I was in Milan for 20 minutes, and then took a really crowded train to Venice. As the train approaches Venice, it goes on a long narrow bridge, shared by a highway that connects one of Venice’s islands with the mainland. I expected Venice to be more like Copenhagen or Amsterdam – a coastal town with a few canals. It’s unlike anything I have ever seen before, it’s actually a bunch of islands fairly far out in the Adriatic Sea. It’s a city without cars too. Boats and footbridges are the only way to get from island to island. Lido, Nina’s island, does have cars and fewer canals than the city, and the island that has the train station and the shipping port also has cars. The only way to get to Nina’s island is by boat from downtown Venice, or ferry (which carries cars), or by flying into the little airstrip. I had only decided to go to Italy about a week earlier. I figured that I had time and plenty of days left on my Eurail pass and wasn’t sick of traveling yet, so why not see Italy.

Nina picked me up at the train station and we walked to her dad’s office to say hi and drop off my big pack. She showed me around the city. I tried to pay attention so that I could learn my way around, but it was dark by then and I was so excited to talk with Nina that everything was a blur. She showed me some of the city’s important buildings, the big stores and her school. Luckily I was able to see all of that again the next day and take it all in better.

It was foggy and freezing cold. Nina said it had snowed in Venice the week before. After walking around we got on a boat to Lido. We took one of the public boats that connect the major islands and go down the Grand Canal that cuts through downtown Venice. The boats are pretty big and don’t fit down the many smaller canals. It had to take a different, slower route to Lido because of the fog. I was really tired and cold when I finally got to Nina’s house. A hot shower really helped. I didn’t really fit in the shower (low ceiling), or the bed (a few inches to short) but I slept really well. Mario and Francesca were home – they couldn’t believe that they were meeting another Brummitt. Nina and I both couldn’t believe it either, it was really cool to be there.

When Andrea got home we went to a Pizzeria that was just across the canal outside Nina’s house. The restaurant had salads, lasagna and pasta but everyone there just got their own pizza, and they had a wide variety. I had a pizza with mushrooms, green olives, some green leafy vegetable and salami. Toppings such as tuna, spinach, eggs and anchovies seemed common. And the mozzarella isn’t shredded, instead pizzas are made with big chunks of mozzarella cheese. Fosca had a basketball game on another island. She got back late so she met us at the restaurant later on and scarfed down all of the uneaten pizza. Nina gave me a book about Venice, and I gave her and her family some Swiss chocolate and cookies. At home I had the whole basement to myself – it’s a huge basement with a kitchen and a few bedrooms that they only use in the summer.

The next day Nina left for school before I got up and I left with the parents to take a boat downtown. It was a Saturday so the three kids had a school until 1 pm. The parents left for the mountains for the weekend. I walked around all morning and saw the San Marco Basilica, Piazza di San Marco, the Royal Palace, the fish market, the Rialto Market, got lost, walked into a few dead ends and took lots of pictures.

I picked Nina up when she got out of school and we went to one of her favorite restaurants. We both had pasta with seafood and a coffee. Then we walked around Venice for hours. I saw some things for the third time, but she showed me a little of new places that I never would have seen otherwise. It was great to be led around Venice by a Venetian – I never walked into any dead ends with Nina. We were going to go to the top of the tower in Piazza di San Marco but it was closed for renovation, so she showed me another old tower that was really cool but costs 3 euros and isn’t very tall so we didn’t go up. She also showed me the Jewish quarter (the word “ghetto” originated in Venice from the Italian word “gettati” (dumped) because the Jews were forced to live in the area were scrap metal and cannons were dumped before being smelted – according to Nina’s book about Venice). I also saw the hospital and its fleet of ambulance boats. Nina pointed out the little island that holds the city’s cemetery and the island of Murano, which is well known for its colorful blown glass, the theatre, some churches and the port.

That night the kids ate at home. We watched movies and I showed them a bunch of my pictures. Nina and I walked to a disco nearby for a friend's 18th birthday party so I met a lot of her friends and had mini pizzas, chips, and birthday cake.

updates

Blogs and pictures are now up for Brussels, Paris, Lyon and Bern. I am still going through hundreds of pictures and will have blogs and pictures from Italy and Barcelona up soon.

Its really warm in Sevilla and classes start on Monday. Its nice to be back with the family and have a normal, slower life at home.

pictures of the Alps and bears in Switzerland

pictures from Bern

pictures from Lyon

more pictures from Paris

pictures from Paris

pictures from Brussels

Bern

Around 2 pm I got on the train to Geneva. I was only in Geneva for 15 minutes, which was just enough time to buy a postcard in the train station and catch a commuter train that goes to Zurich and makes a lot of stops on the way. There was never a great view from the train, I could only catch glimpses of Lake Geneva and the mountains through the trees and houses along side the train tracks. By the time we got out of the built up urban areas of Geneva and Lausanne it was too dark to see anything. I got off the train in Bern; it’s the capital of Switzerland and right in the middle of country. I was back in German-speaking Europe and had to find an ATM to get some Swiss francs. The bills are really brightly colored and full of images. They look more like glossy magazine ads than paper money. The coins are all silver and plain looking. Pictures of the bills didn’t turn out well, but they looked weird. The first night in Bern I went to bed early.

The next day was a busy and interesting day. Bern is a small city -- only 180,000 people and the old part of the town is crammed onto a narrow strip of land where the Aare River wraps around a mountain. A lot of the town is expensive shops and cafés, but the buildings are beautiful and old. There are colorful little fountain-statues everywhere and old government buildings. It’s in the middle of the Alps, but it was too foggy to see more than a couple city blocks away so I didn’t really see the mountains. I walked by the University and train station early in the morning. A huge group of little kids were getting on a train with their sleds and there were a number of skiers and snowboarders heading to the mountains. I walked across a really high bridge to the south bank to go to the Historical Museum, but I got there before it opened. So I decided to walk to the Bärengraben (the bear pits). The founder of the town, Berchtold V, named the city Bern in the early sixteenth century because he killed a bear in the area (bern means bear in German). So the symbol of Bern is obviously a bear and they have kept a few bears in the bear pits ever since. The bear pits are just a little zoo with some plaques explaining the history of Bern’s bears.

I expected the bears to be hibernating or just sitting around doing nothing. That was clearly not the case. What I saw there I will never forget… there were two massive brown bears having sex. The male was behind and on top of the female, digging his claws into her shoulders and humping away. It was quite a sight. You can buy bags of fruit to feed the bears, and there was a little girl there with her mom and grandmother. The little girl had a bag of the bear food but she didn’t really know what was going on, she just kept throwing berries at the bears while they were having sex. Meanwhile, I was trying really hard to keep my composure, take a few pictures and not laugh out loud. The bears didn’t seem to care that they had an audience, they just kept going at it. Wow – I had tears in my eyes from laughing so hard. The bears had sex three times in a row, collapsing in a heap in between each session. Nothing will ever top that. Everyone who was there definitely noticed what was going on and just stared at the bears. No one showed any reaction, except for me, I just couldn’t control myself. It was too damn funny. In the other bear pit was a lone male bear that was just batting around a toy ball – not quite as exciting as the bear sex in the other pit.

I went to the post office to mail a postcard to my family in Sevilla, and then went to the house where Albert Einstein lived when he worked at the Swiss patent office around the turn of the century. After graduating from the Polytechnic University in Zurich he moved to Bern and he wrote and published his most important works, including a paper on the Specific Theory of Relativity, which made him famous years later, and a paper on the electromagnetic effect for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. The place was pretty small but it had some of Einstein’s clothing, letters and books on display, along with a lot of information about his personal life and his work in Bern.

There’s a modern art museum in Bern so I went there. It was really cheap and had lots of different stuff, some by Picasso, Mondrian, Matisse, and Braque, a lot of impressionism, and some weird 3D art. After that I bought some milk and cereal, which I never eat in Spain, and took a short break at the hostel. From there I went back to the Historical Museum. It was more expensive, but well worth it – I spent almost four hours there. The museum was really ambitious, it covered everything from the earliest human beings who lived in the Alps, through the Bronze Age and Stone Age and the Roman empire.

The most interesting was an exhibit on Switzerland during the Middle Ages when it was a patchwork of warring city-states. There was a long history of mercenary armies and military empires fighting each other. In the 19th century the city-states formed a confederation and wrote a very progressive constitution and became the neutral nation that they are today.

There was also art and jewelry on display from Europe, ancient Egypt, the Middle East and Asia. The top two floors of the museum had a temporary exhibit on Albert Einstein to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the year (1905) when he published five groundbreaking physics papers in Bern. The Einstein exhibit was really ambitious too, there was a lot of general history of the Jewish people since Einstein was a non-observant Jew who was actively involved in helping Jews get out of Europe before WWII. He also helped to establish the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and supported the creation of the state of Israel. And then there was a whole exhibit on Germany in WWI and WWII and the two decades in between. Einstein lived in Berlin until the early 1930s when he fled for his life and moved to Princeton, New Jersey. There was stuff on Einstein’s personal life (he had an interesting love life), but most of that was a repeat of what was in the Einstein house. There was also a big exhibit on the development and use of the atomic bomb and on Einstein’s legacy after his death.

Finally, the top floor was dedicated to his theories and how they have shaped modern physics. There was a whole exhibit explaining the history of how humans kept time and made calendars because the theory of relativity radically changed our concept of time. There were videos that broke down his theories step-by-step and explained them with simple examples. There were replicas of the experiments that were used to prove his theory on the electromagnetic effect (that light has characteristics of both waves and particles) and the Brownian effect (that the energy of atoms causes molecules to move around in a liquid). One room had a giant screen in front of a stationary bike. You pedal the bike and steer it through the streets of a virtual 3D Bern. It was an ordinary virtual reality simulator with one difference – you could pedal the bike up to the speed of light so that you could see what it is like to travel around Bern at 99% the speed of light. There was also a lot of information on the universe and recent discoveries and theories in physics and astronomy. It was the kind of stuff that blows your mind; one fact I learned is that there are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, and there are 100 billion galaxies like the Milky Way in the universe. That’s a lot of stars. It was physics heaven and a museum that Charlie has to visit. There was an unbelievable amount of information and interactive exhibits, the museum was enormous.

So it was a really good day in Bern. I can say that I learned a lot that day, about history, art, physics, astronomy, and every little detail about Albert Einstein’s life. And on top of all that, I witnessed two bears having sex.

Lyon

I took the metro back to the hostel, picked up some food, got my pack and then walked in the rain to the train station. I went from the Paris-Lyon station to city of Lyon on the high-speed TGV train. It’s a double-decker train and I had a seat on the top level. The train was fairly empty so it was quiet and roomy. Part of the railway went along a highway and it was cool to see how fast the train goes compared to cars traveling in the same direction on the highway. The train blows by all the cars.

When I got to Lyon I took a metro to the west side of town and then took a funicular up the steep hillside. I thought the hostel was up on the hill but it turns out that I didn’t really need to take the funicular. I ended up walking almost the whole way back down the hill to get to the hostel. I walked around that night and saw the St. Jean cathedral and a plaza somewhere where I got a huge plate of rice and beef at a Middle Eastern restaurant. There were a lot of Middle Eastern restaurants, and a lot of the famous bouchon (wine bars) serving renowned Lyonnaise dishes. Lyon rivals Paris in the quality of food and has more restaurants per square kilometer than anywhere else in the world. It was raining lightly all night and I was exhausted so I went to bed early.

The next day I walked to the train station to reserve another TGV train, this one to Geneva, where I would catch another train to Bern. The hostel is at the bottom of a hill on the west bank of the Rhone River, which is the area where the Romans settled. Today, the whole city is a UNESCO world heritage site, mostly because of the Roman ruins. There are two amphitheatres there. I also saw the Bellecour plaza where there is a huge statue of Louis XIV.

Paris

The train to Paris is the Thalys high-speed train. It was a pretty sweet train that went over 150 mph. And I was happy to find that it was sunny and kind of warm in Paris. I had hardly seen the sun during the first couple weeks of the trip. I walked to the Seine River where a lot of people where selling used books. I saw Notre Dame from a far, and then walked to the Lourve. I got there at 3 pm, it closes at 6 on Sundays, so I didn’t have a whole lot of time, but I got to see everything that I wanted to see - Michelangelo’s Slave, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and the Royal Crown jewels. I walked through the sections on Greek and Roman statues, Italian paintings, Egyptian art and Babylonian art.

The next day I tried to see as much of Paris as possible. I walked to the Pompidou Centre – a strange looking new building that houses a modern art museum among other things. Walked through an underground shopping mall and then went to the Notre Dame cathedral. I climbed the tower to see the view of Paris and got up close to the enormous bell. Then I walked the Champs-Elysées up to the Arc de Triumphe, and then walked to the Eiffel Tower and climbed that. There was an ice rink and restaurant at the first observation deck and you can climb up almost 700 steps to get to the second observation deck. It’s really high up and takes a while to get up there. There are no stairs to the very top, only an elevator. It seemed like climbing up took 30 minutes and going down the stairs only 5 minutes.

I gave in and took the metro to the Montmartre neighborhood (otherwise it was an hour long walk) and climbed the hill to the Sacre Ceur church, the art square, Place du Tertre, ate a giant crepe with sugar that was really good, walked to Place de la Republique, picked up some food, ate in the room, went online, and went to bed around 9:30, dead tired and with some blisters and calluses on my feet. It was a lot of fast walking and stair climbing that day, but I saw most of Paris on foot.

It rained all night long and it was still raining the next day. I walked to the Pompidou Centre to go in the modern art museum, but its closed on Tuesdays so I skipped that and instead walked over the bridge, across the Ile de la Cité and found the catacombs. It was kind of hard to find, but worth it because it was scarier than any haunted house I’ve ever been in. You descend a long spiral staircase, and then go through some tunnels with a very low ceiling. There’s boring information on the history of the quarries there. A lot of suspense builds up before you finally see the bones. All the bones are neatly stacked to make walls on both sides of the tunnel and the skulls are placed in the walls of bones in straight lines or in patterns to make arcs and crosses. Most of the tunnels are closed off so that there’s only one path to take and you can’t get lost. But I was a little worried about the lights going out, or getting lost, getting stuck down there would be scary. There were a few other tourists down there. I’ve never seen so many bones, and they are all from humans. It’s creepy. The exit is many blocks away from the entrance, so when I stepped out I was glad to be in above ground and in daylight but I was immediately lost again.