I didn't see any bull fights...

If I had that many [frequent flyer] miles, I'd just show up at the airport, look up at one of those big destination boards, pick a place and go.

-Up in the Air

On Thursday, it looked like there was a pretty boring weekend ahead. I had no homework to do, and, except for a small cultural festival in my neighborhood, there was nothing to do. By Friday night, I was in Madrid.

Madrid has lots of hills.

Originally, I had not planned on going to Madrid, since everyone goes there and I don't really want to go to a place that "everyone goes" to. But Thursday I rolled out of bed with nothing to do and began poking around the websites of Ryanair and Easyjet, two low-cost airlines that operate out of London, but there were no cheap fares. I wasn't looking for anything in particular, I just wanted to go somewhere, even if I had never heard of it before. And so, I clicked on Ciudad Real. The flight was 58 pounds each way, about $92.

Ciudad Real, as it turns out, is in the middle of nowhere. The ground was completely dark all the way down to the airport, making it hard to tell when we'd land in Spain. It's a tiny city, and the Ryanair flight I booked was the only jet airplane that flew out of the airport, which was just built in 2008. The airport's lone duty free store looks like a scene from some apocalyptic movie since it's completely empty. About 100 people pass through this airport every day, and it felt dead.

No one really flies into Ciudad Real and stays there unless that's where they live. Spain's great high-speed rail service runs the 99 miles between Ciudad Real and central Madrid in under an hour, making the airport a good alternative to Madrid's main airport.

A woman named Leanne sat next to me on the crowded bus from the airport to the train station in Ciudad Real. She was in her thirties and talked with the mouth of a sailor. She was nearing the end of a journey from her home in Wales to Madrid for the weekend with two of her friends. Like the bed and breakfast owners in Blackpool, she had been to the United States once before, but not to see New York or Hollywood or the Grand Canyon, but to go to Disney World and soak up some of America's entertainment. When I asked what I should do while I was in the United Kingdom, she replied, "nothing." I still can't figure out if the British really don't like their country or if it's all just an act, an unspoken British code to pretend to hate the country in order to protect the good parts from foreigners.

Spanish band playing in Plaza del Sol.

Statue of a bear and a tree, the symbol of Madrid.

Madrid itself was beautiful. It was almost midnight when I stepped out of the train station, but Plaza Sol, the square near my 'Hostal' where I stayed, was just beginning to come to life. Plaza Sol and Plaza Mayor are home to the best street performers I've ever seen, including some who looked like they were levitating or falling or headless. (I still can't figure out their secrets.) Sunday morning at the 'Rastro,' Madrid's biggest market, I watched teenagers buying shirts bearing images of American culture, including t-shirts and belt buckles featuring The Nightmare Before Christmas and Green Day and other icons. Madrid's cafeterias are great for solo travelers. In these restaurants, diners order at the counter and sit in a bar-like setting on a stool at a counter until the staff brings out a sandwich on a baguette, still warm from being fresh from the oven.

Metropolis building on Gran Via, Madrid's Broadway.

The museums of Madrid were excellent. The famous Museo del Prado featured countless 500-year-old paintings, but the most interesting exhibits I saw were at the Reina Sofia. This modern art museum had a room full of newspapers from September 12, 2001, all of which had haunting pictures of the burning World Trade Center on the front. The newspapers were from all over the world, published in English, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, and Mandarin. There was also another room, arranged by the same artist (Hans-Peter Feldmann), with 100 photographs. The first picture was of a newborn baby. The last picture had a frowning old lady in it. Each picture in between represented a year in life, from birth to ninety-nine. After I looked at each portrait, I stood in front of the 20-year-old's picture. His was one of the only faces with a smile. I looked to my left and noticed that the pictures only stretched to the corner of the room, from nineteen down to newborn, a distance short enough so I could make out each individual photograph. Then I looked to the right, and saw the long line of photos stretching all the way to 99. I felt young.

I Hate You, Bike Thief

Yesterday I went outside, helmet in hand, hoping to go for a bike ride down Regents Street. When I opened the front door, it was raining, so I went inside. When it stopped raining, I picked up my helmet again to see if the weather would hold out this time. But again, I had to turn around and go inside because my bike wasn't there. Even though it was in much-less-than-perfect condition, some thief had clipped its lock off the post and taken it away. Again, I rode the elevator upstairs and put my helmet down. I went outside to walk to the West End instead. It was slower, but I stopped to look in some stores and even found a book written by the professor who teaches my Monday night class. My walk looked like this. At least I hadn't invested much money in the bike (Or the lock, but I guess that goes without saying) and I got to take it to Manchester and Liverpool and Blackpool and I definitely got my £75 worth.

This is where I used to park my bike. Note the absence of bicycle.

It's been a pretty dull weekend. Today I wrote a long essay about immigrants in Britain over the past 150 years. Friday I went to the Docklands Museum with a class for the third time.

Thursday, however, was a lot of fun. I went to York, a really old English city. Old York is different from New York in every way. It's small and slow-paced and quaint. It's so old that it had an old wall built by the Romans that people can walk on. I felt like I was walking on a mini Great Wall of China. Then there's the castle, built in 1068. The castle just looks like a little round thing on a hill, but it does have little slits for shooting arrows out of like in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and it's incredible that it's survived a thousand years. York's town center is home to the Shambles, a street that used to be filled with butcher shop but now houses gift stores. Shambles looks like something from a movie with its 500 year old storefronts. Google named it the most picturesque street in Britain earlier this year, and it's not hard to see why. The second floor of all the crooked buildings hangs over the street for a really old-time feel. York is also home to a giant cathedral called York Minster. It feels as big as St. Paul's or any major cathedral in Europe. It completely dominates the little Tudor shops below, casting a big shadow on the rest of the city.

Old Roman wall.

Shambles

Now that I know how cool York is, I'm ashamed to admit that I wouldn't have gone there at all if it weren't for the National Rail Museum. For someone who likes trains, this museum is amazing. For those of you who don't like trains, well, I guess it's good you stayed home. This museum was really cool, it had the actual Hogwarts Express used in the movies, a Japanese bullet train, and railcars used to bring royalty around the country. I want my wedding here. Part of the museum was converted from an old cargo dock/shed on the railroad, and it's really pretty. It has the glass ceiling like most British rail stations have. The museum's set up elegant tables underneath, and visitors can eat dinner in an antique railway station. Since renting out Grand Central Terminal isn't really an option, the rail museum is a great place for a wedding.

Really long name of some place in Wales.

This is where I'm getting married!.

My train to York left from Kings Cross Station. It was then that I realized that Platform 9 was barricaded with automatic gates, and only ticketed passengers are allowed in. I guess I'll never find out I'm not a muggle.

My life here is starting to look like Homer's when he was in New York.

The trees turn yellow in the fall here, too.

I've fallen into a sort of routine here in London. Not that I'm bored of it yet, but I've been here long enough so it feels like going to class, getting homework done, volunteering at the SHINE school, biking to a new market for lunch each Sunday afternoon, and walking down to the Thames on a clear night are things I've done for years.

Chapel at King's College in Cambridge

I've been staying around London recently, largely because throughout the first half of October I have class on Fridays. I don't have the luxury of four-day weekends to travel into Europe right now, but I'm taking advantage of this by taking day trips. Saturday was spent on the school-organized Cambridge trip. Cambridge is a college town that feels very small. With one of the world's most famous universities with some of the world's greatest thinkers as alumni, Cambridge would be a fun and beautiful place to go to school. After I finished the guided tour of the town, some friends and I shopped around in the stores that lined the street and got some lunch.

Punting on the river in Cambridge. The boats move by a pole that's pushed off the bottom of the shallow river by the guy standing up, a process called punting.

Cambridge University is famous for, among others, Watson and Crick, Stephen Hawking, Isaac Newton, and Francis Bacon

Street in Cambridge with shops and hardly any cars.

I've still been getting around London, too. We've had great weather so I've been taking walks around the neighborhood, and today for one of my architecture classes I went over to the old docks in East London. The warehouses are not used for industry any more, but they make a unique neighborhood of apartments built on a quiet canal. I also saw the Shard, a giant skyscraper that will be the tallest building in London when it's finished.

London on a clear afternoon

January is still far away, but I'm in the process of picking classes for next semester. Seeing every class I've already taken laid out on the planner made me realize how I'm not that far away from the end of college. I'd probably feel better about all this if I hadn't read this depressing article about unemployment amongst people in their 20s yesterday.

Haven't written one of these about London in a while.

I'm not a big fan of the 'study' in study abroad. This weekend I stayed in London because I knew I wouldn't read 100 pages and write the two essays I had to get done if I went off to explore the European continent. Even with the work, I took time to see more of London. I went to the National Gallery, where there's lots of pictures of people I've never heard of (And a few that I have-Charles Darwin, Paul McCartney, and Winston Churchill among them), as well as some nice Renaissance and Impressionist exhibits. One exhibit was photos taken just this spring of British immigrants to New York City. It was interesting to read about the things they missed about the UK and what brought them to New York. Many were quoted missing British humor but loving the concept of the "American Dream"-the ability to start with nothing but aspirations of fame and fortune and realistically hope to achieve these dreams. Some mentioned that Americans heard their accents and immediately made the British feel welcome. I would like to see an exhibit like this of Hispanic or black immigrants and read about their experiences in New York. I think it would be different.

Sunday morning I went to Spitalfields Market. It is very expensive for a market, but it did have some nice things. Friday I took a 20 mile bike ride out to the Northwest area of London, a place called Edgeware. Located at the end of the Northern Line on the Underground, Edgeware is a middle-class residential area. Think of it as London's equivalent of the outer areas of Queens in New York-a generic neighborhood on the outskirts of the city.

Last Wednesday I started volunteering at an Islington elementary school. I love it! The students are great. While some of the boys in the class are disruptive (The teacher has an aid or two in class at all times helping out), the students I was working with are really sweet, although I had forgotten how hard scissors are for seven-year-olds! They all have wonderful accents, although in their eyes I'm the one with the accent. One boy asked if I was from South Africa. I guess the ties from Britain's empire days still exist, since both the students and my own professors seem to mention the former colonies often and they seem to be the countries the British know most about. Today I went to the school again to volunteer.

Last night I went to see Blood Brothers, a musical running in London's West End, a slightly-less-glitzy version of New York's Broadway. The story of two twins separated at birth was, I thought, quite good with funny dialouge and top-quality singing. Everyone I went to the show with hated it, though. They said the humor was of poor taste and the plot was boring. Maybe I'm the one with weird taste.

It was sunny and warm today. It's been raining in the northeastern United States for days. London gets less than half the annual rainfall of New York. Your mind is blown.

Because going to London and saying you've seen England would be like going to New York and saying you've seen the entire United States

The internet is powerful stuff. This weekend, while I was staying in a bed and breakfast in Blackpool, I was talking to the man who owned the house about a British TV show called Top Gear, which features road tests and crazy stunts done with cars. The show is very popular in the United Kingdom (The security guard in my dorm even watches it through the windows of the TV room) but has not made its way to the United States yet. As we talked, the man mentioned an episode that I had watched on Youtube a while ago, before I even knew I was coming to London. It was great to make that cultural connection with him. Internet piracy is making our world smaller.

Blackpool was beautiful. It used to be the place to go to the beach for the weekend from anywhere in Britain, but in the past few decades it's gotten less attention because Ryanair can fly you to the coast of Spain for so little money. Because of this, it's retained a lot of its old-fashioned charm. In Blackpool, three piers extend over the beach, each with games and small rides and great views. At low tide, you can walk out for about 1,000 feet onto the beach below, which slopes very slowly into the Irish Sea. Blackpool was one of the first towns in the world to be wired up with electricity, and it still shows today. At night, the Illuminations festival, which runs through November, lit up the streets with lights strung across the street and on the sidewalk for miles, as if Christmas were coming early. Old double-deck streetcars ran along the waterfront, Britain's oldest continually-function tramway. Even though the beach is nice, it was cold, getting as low as 40 degrees at night. I'd like 1928 better if it were warmer.

Before Blackpool I had been in Manchester for one night. Famous football team, old industrial revolution history, but nothing to really see. Don't go to Manchester. It's not too exciting. The Museum of Industry was interesting, but that's about it.

Liverpool, on the other hand, was quite nice. Famous for being the birthplace of the Beatles, I biked out of the town center to see Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane beneath the blue suburban sky. Back in the city center, I went to The Cavern, the club that was active in the 1960s where The Beatles were discovered and many other musical group, including The Who and Queen, performed. The entire street The Cavern's on, actually, was dominated by live music on Saturday night, and the sounds of numerous guitars could be heard pouring out of the half a dozen or so venues on the street.

Britain outside of London was, like the United States outside of New York, less exciting and quieter. On the train ride up north, I passed a number of farms with sheep and cows. The center of all three places I went was dominated by an outdoor car-free shopping area. It appeared to be the local hangout for high school kids in each place. Even though these shopping areas featured all chain stores, it seemed to be a nicer solution than sticking Wal-Mart and Costco on the side of a busy road for retail.

This weekend was the Durham Fair. It's the biggest event in town that happens every year, and this is the first time in at least fifteen years I haven't gone. I knew this day would come sometime, when I'd have something bigger and better to do than head home for the weekend and enjoy popcorn, llama shows, and seeing old friends. Traveling around Britain is fun, but I did miss the fair this weekend. I'll go next year.

In Liverpool there was a modern art gallery. On an old wooden table in the museum, surrounded by paintings and sculptures, was a red binder. Inside, people had written all kinds of words of encouragement, drawn smiley faces, and shared funny stories. One man wrote a poem for his wife.

I love you so much

You light up my life

I'm so glad I met you

And made you my wife

And when we're both older

And wrinkly and gray

I'll love you as much

As I love you today

It made me smile.

Little streets made of gray stones

Rome lives on a different schedule than the rest of the world. At midnight, the piazzas are still crowded with people eating dinner in the warm September air at the restaurants. At 6:00 in the morning, no one is around, not even the early commuters on their way to work. So as I made my way to the train station this morning to catch my early flight back to London, I had to hail a taxi from a stand because I could not get a bus. When we arrived two days ago, the driver who took us to the apartment we rented from the train station ended up driving us to an unfamiliar neighborhood. After a frazzled hour of arguing with the poor agent from the apartment agency, we learned that the apartment we had reserved had a plumbing problem and settled in to our new Roman residence, a large place in the Trastevere neighborhood in the center of Rome.

Roman piazza

Rome is arranged around beautiful piazzas, squares with churches. Unlike London's squares, which are quiet, grass-filled places where locals can relax, Rome's piazzas are busy with all sorts of people shopping, eating, or just passing through during the day.
Sunday morning my grandmother and I went to a flea market. It stretched for at least half a mile down the neighborhood. It was very busy and had very cheap prices on electronics, clothes, and souvenirs.

Tiber River at dusk

We went to the Pantheon, but stayed away from the other touristy sights like the Vatican, Spanish Steps, and the Colosseum. I liked walking around and seeing the way real Romans lived, not just the old ruins from 2,000 years ago. Even so, we inevitably stumbled upon the occasional ancient ruins in this 2,000 year old capitol.

There are always archaeologists uncovering more of ancient Rome

On the way into London this morning the plane flew right over the city.

Today I got my placement for the SHINE project, a volunteer opportunity in which I help out in a London elementary school classroom. I will be at St. Andrews Primary School in the London borough of Islington. I am excited to start next week.


This evening I was checking my bank account to see how much money I had spent in my first three weeks here. I spent more than I expected-about $1400 more! Someone had stolen my debit card, somehow, and was withdrawing £200 twice a day all weekend while I was in Italy. I have to live frugally for the next couple of weeks before I get a new debit card in the mail. Hopefully I have enough cash to live off of until then.

Side note: I'm not sure why some of the pictures come out with high-resolution versions when clicked and some don't. I uploaded that last one differently via my Flickr account. I'll do the rest like that.

Rain on the Riviera

Train from the airport to Monterosso

I never got to see the sun turn the pastel colors of the Riviera’s stucco houses to gold. Yesterday, on my day in the small village of Monterosso on Italy’s northwest coast, it rained all morning and afternoon, finally giving way to a humid and cloudy night.

Cliffs dropping into the ocean

Monterosso from way up on the trail

But despite the rain, I had a wonderful time traveling with my grandparents, who are in Europe for the week. Monterosso, the northernmost village in the Cinque Terre national park, is built on the bottom of huge cliffs that drop sharply into the Ligurian Sea. It is connected to the other four villages in the Cinque Terre, all built along the water, by a footpath that scales the cliffs and looks out on the clear sea below. After breakfast in the hotel, which was high above the village and built into the cliff, my grandmother and I set off for Vernazza, a village located on the other end of the longest and most remote stretch of the Cinque Terre paths. Along the way, we wound our way past thousands of terraces filled with grape vines used for making wine.

Train used for collecting grapes that winds around the mountain

Vernazza from the trail

A light rain during the hike kept us cool but not wet, but on arrival to Vernazza it started to downpour. We grabbed some real Italian pizza from a restaurant in the village and sat under my umbrella as tourists and villagers ran for cover from the rain. We then hopped a train to the southernmost village of Riomaggiore and walked along the short and well-paved trail to Manarola, even though it was downpouring. Of course, I enjoyed some gelato during my stay in the Cinque Terre! Ice cream in London is a rare treat, with a pint costing over ₤4 ($6) in every grocery store.
As I write, I am racing toward Rome on a train with compartments like the Hogwarts Express (They even came by with a food cart, but it wasn’t selling any Bertie Botts’ Every Flavor Beans). There, my grandparents and I will meet up with my uncle, who is teaching a study abroad class for the University of Washington. When I came to Italy five years ago on a family vacation one summer, I remember passing fields of sunflowers and seeing rows of vibrant yellow all pointed in the same direction to face the sun. The train just passed a field of dead sunflowers, all brown, all facing in different directions, many fallen over. Maybe Rome will have peanut butter. Grandma is upset because she can’t find any in Italy.