this is Spain :)

i wanted to make a list of everything that makes me think of spain/salamanca this semester :)

plaza mayor
skinny streets
free shots
meeting people from all over the world
chatting with random people at 3am
paella
sangria and red wine
spanish people and loud spanish girls
window shopping
olive trees and orange trees
mountains
sitting in the same classroom with the same people for 5 hours straight
tortilla espanola
cathedrals
Rocio and Anna Lilia
pints of beer
toros
las ferias
La Alhambra and the mosque of Cordoba
walking down the same street cars are using (no sidewalk)
the amazingly gorgeous buildings of Salamanca
roundabouts
super fucking guay / super fucking ego waffle
carmen
efectivamente and mmm?
pepe
jamon...so much jamon
Santiohgodno
la rana
las casetas
tapas
sitting in Plaza Mayor having drinks with friends
coca light
intercambios
Erasmus, Rock Roice, Cubic, and at the beginning, Irish Rover
Real Madrid and Barca
crazy madres
pan
excursions
our bus, the tequila sunrise as ann calls it
chorizo
rojas
miguel
bocadillos
washing the streets
"patatas fritas y una hamburguesa con queso"
Leonardo's
Alfredo, my padre :)

ok there's DEF more..but its a great start :)

my madre is a crazy bitch

there have been a few nasty bugs in my room the last couple days, one of which crawled out from under my sheets, so i've been trying to keep my window closed. but my madre opens it every day when i'm gone. so last night i left a note ON THE WINDOW that basically said please don't open my window because there are bugs in my room and i don't want any more / i don't want to get bed bugs like a few people here already have. so i came back from class a little bit ago and my window was open! with the note on it! such a crazy and confusing madre. also, there was a bug in my soup for lunch. maybe she likes bugs. i dunno.

in other news, ireland tomorrow! yayyyy. so excited, it's gonna be beautiful :)

haley

awesome halloween weekend :)

omggggggggggg i had SUCH an excellent weekend.
ahhhhh.
so many great things happened.
so everyone went to Barcelona this weekend, and Lauren ended up getting stuck here because apparently you need a passport to travel to Barcelona even though it's in the same freaking country....but even so i'm so glad she was here because she helped make this weekend excellent.

it started Saturday night when Rachel's roommate Katherine asked me if i wanted to eat dinner at her friend's house, that he was cooking. i thought it'd be a good chance to meet some more new people, so i went. it ended up being so much fun! there were 5 other people there, 2 of them lived there. a guy and 2 girls from germany, a guy from brazil, and a girl from connecticut. and katherine is from hong kong lol. but they made pasta with this really good mix of veggies and nuts and cream to put over the pasta...it was delicious. then the guy katherine is friends with gave us some super good chocolate for dessert. oh and they had wine! it was so nice. they just invited whoever over to their house and just cooked for them. it was awesome, and everyone there was awesome. so after that i left to meet Lauren at Erasmus. she got one of the cocktails, and i was just gonna get a beer because the cocktails are 7 euro....so she ordered a gin fizz and another bartender brought it to her, and then right after that the bartender she told that she wanted a gin fizz to brought a blue lagoon and was confused for some reason..so he just said to take it, that it's free! so i took it...haha. and that was just the beginning of the free drinks i got this weekend holy crap. ok so after that we went to la chupiteria and got some chupitos, then to cubic where we danced for soooooooo long! and omg was it fun. cubic is always fun, but not very just because the crowd is usually like 16 year old guys, but Saturday night it was packed! and there were actually people our age! yay! so we danced for forever and then Lauren was tired so she left, but i stayed for a while after and danced some more. i met a few guys and danced with them and it was way fun. i was walking around and saw this guy dancing with really cool black and white pants and a mask on, so i started dancing next to him. we danced for a while and asked the general questions like "where are you from?" blah blah blah and then danced some more. and then he asked me if he could kiss me! like it was so cute..usually guys here start dancing with you and 2 seconds later try to stick their tongues down your throat, but it was so nice that he actually asked lol. so i was uh yeah! so it was way fun. we danced and such for at least half an hour, then his stupid friends kept telling him they were leaving and pulled him away and they all left. lame. but then i walked around some more and met 2 other guys who i chatted and danced with for a while and they were really funny. they were obsessed with america and thought it was so cool that i was from there. by that time it was about 330 and i was super tired so i went home. but pretty successful night i would say!

then last night we went out again because it was actually halloween! i am so surprised at how popular halloween is here. its not anywhere near what it is in the US, like no one really decorates very much or anything, but so many people dressed up every night this weekend! it was great. i tried to get a costume way too late..yesterday lol..but of course nothing is open here on sundays. so anyway...we went to erasmus again because it was buy one get one free cocktails for halloween, and i was definitely willing to pay 7 euro for 2 cocktails. so we went up to the bar and i ordered a long island and was about to pay when the bartender was like "gratis para chicas guapas!" which means its free for pretty girls haha. sooooooo i was like alright i'll take another free 7 euro cocktail, yes please. then i went to get my second one and he still didn't charge me haha. so that's 21 euro, which is almost 30 dollars, worth of cocktails at erasmus this weekend fo FREE. glorious. then we went to chupiteria and got a few chupitos and actually danced there for a while. there were some great costumes! one guy was freddy krueger and his costume was legit. he looked awesome. then there was a gangsta from california..lol and we all just danced for a while. then after that we went to cubic again and saw some of the people from owu there. they had some friends with them from australia and we all danced for a long time there. i danced with one of them for probably like an hour..it was so much fun. he was also dressed as a pirate and i kept telling him i wanted his sword and when we left he actually gave it to me haha. and that's basically it..definitely a super fun super successful halloween weekend!!

and even though i'm sad for lauren that she didn't get to go to barcelona i'm really glad she was here because i had so much fun with her!

on another note...a bug just crawled out from my sheets....so scared there are bugs in my bed....ugh. seriously hope not..i could not deal with that! 

LOVE haley

dying..

..slowly....

in history class.......................................

papa americanooooo

it's been way too long since i've regularly updated this!! ugh

but really not much has happened lately....i've been sick since the first week we were here...so it's been almost 7 weeks now...i got a little better for maybe 2 weeks and now my cough is back, especially at night. i've been waking up every night this past week coughing a bunch. annnnnd my right side like where my ribs are hurts in one place..i don't know what i did to it! i'm seriously thinking it may be because of all of the coughing lol. i'll be sick the whole time im here...perfectly fine.

i'm going to ireland next weekend!! leaving the 4th. sooooooo very excited. i've heard it's absolutely gorgeous. and i also found out that the blarney stone is like a 10 minutes bus ride from cork, so i'm super pumped for that!!

also, i can't believe how fast this is going. we have this week, then 3 weeks of november, then excursion to the south, the boom! finals and we leave. so so so crazy. but i'm also pretty excited to go home :)

we met some spanish girls the other night who i'm fb friends with now. they were really cool and we're hoping to actually hang out with them again. it's so frustrating that we keep meeting people one night and then never see them again.

ok so my madre's cooking. i know i complained alot about it at the beginning saying how much she stuffed me and everything..but now it's the opposite! she isn't feeding me nearly as much now. i think i'd rather have it the other way around! even so, i'm still getting awesome food. i feel really lucky to have such a great cook for my madre. she makes tortilla espanola, paella that is way more excellent than any other paella i've had here, french fries!!, little hamburgers (without the buns) but they're seasoned so well!, lomo which is a part of a pig or cow i forget which one but its awesome, salad with oil big chunks of tomato and pomegranate seeds, this pasta dish with all kinds of seafood in it that is excellent!....ahhh as much as i miss american food, i'm gonna miss her cooking so much when i leave!!

one more thing in this mezcla of a blog....we have membership to the gym here, and they have classes there, so on friday i went with a few of the girls to a class called body combat. omgggggg it was insanely cool! it was hardcore nonstop punching and kicking and running and jumping for an hour. it was so hardcore and i was sooooooo sore all weekend, but it was awesome and i felt so good! and the music was sick too. definitely going to be doing that class a couple times a week now :)

haley

Madrid, La Granja and Segovia

im sad im writing this now because its been several days since this weekend's excursion and ive definitely forgotten alot of the details, but to sum it up:

we left at 7am on Saturday, so we had to get up at about 6 blah. and they ran us the entire day, with a 3ish hour tour of Palacio Real, and a shorter, but not by much, tour of the Prado museum. they were super cool! it was just super boring being on a super long tour with a lady speaking spanish at you. Palacio Real was gorgeous, im sad we couldn't take pictures inside. but those 2 things took up basically the entire day, with a great lunch in between! and by great i mean it was one of the worst experiences of our lives. for the first course i got paella, which is always good, except the meat, which was questionable, that was in it had little bones and i kept taking bites and getting a mouth full of little bones. then! a bunch of us ordered calamari for our second dish. and when i think of calamari here in spain i think of the fried rings of deliciousness, so i was pretty excited after my bone paella. omg it was the opposite of what i was hoping for. we got squid, which is ridiculous because since being here i've ordered squid/calamari 3 times in restaurants thinking it was going to be fried and awesome and all 3 times i've gotten cooked squid that was super chewy and flavorless. that's exactly what this was, except it was also stuffed with it's own intestines AND covered in INK. yes, its own ink. holy shit it was nasty. it didn't exactly taste disgusting, because it didn't have much of a taste, but just the fact that the squid was swimming in its own black ink was horrible enough. omgggggggggg i can't believe that's what we had for lunch. but we were laughing our heads off the whole lunch, it was hilarious and we were in disbelief.

then we went to the palace then got to our hotel and went to dinner. it was one of the funnest dinners of my life. omg we were laughing like crazy. first of all they gave us wine, and after our day of extreme exhaustion and no lunch we were so ready for some wine. needless to say our whole table, which consisted of just the 7 of us girls, was drunk, or at least feeling the wine. and everything we did seemed hilarious. the waiters were also opera singers! haha so they kept singing opera and having us sing along. and after dinner which lasted over 3 hours, we had champagne and then a double shot of this stuff that was red but tasted like jager. by this time it had been 4 hours of sitting in the restaurant, and we were soooooooooooooooooooo exhausted. but 4 of us decided to go out anyway! because we were in Madrid for only one night so.....duh!

so we went to this club and danced for probably 2 hours. just danced. it was glorious. oh but before this...we took a taxi to their plaza mayor and right when we got out christina lost her shoe in the road and was like "oh my shoe" then right after she said that we saw her shoe get run over by the taxi that we just took. probably my favorite part of the night. it was so good.

the next day, Sunday, we got up at the ass crack of dawn yet again and left Madrid for La Granja and Segovia. they were both GORGEOUS. and! it was FALL there. im having a real problem with there being very little trees in Salamanca and the trees that are here aren't changing pretty colors like they should be. but in Segovia and at La Granja it was falllllllllllllllll. i literally cried a little because i was so happy to see fall leaves, smell fall, and walk through crunchy leaves on the ground. omg. so La Granja is a palace that of course we took a year long tour through, but afterward we walked through the gardens behind it which were huge and absoulutely gorgeous. it was SO PRETTY. this is when i cried lol. and after that we took a 5 minutes bus ride to the city of Segovia, which was gorgeous as well, and had an awesome aqueduct. it was so super cool to see. it also has the castle that was the inspiration for the Disney castle, which was also super cool! i also bought a pretty scarf and ann and i bought keys there :)

so although we were dying the entire trip, i had a wonderful time because of the beautiful things we saw!
also, my pics on fb explain more, so if you're reading this you should check them out :)

haley

we're fucked

and by that i mean we're not getting fucked.