One of the best things about the program I have chosen (besides the fact that all of my scholarships transferred!) is that we only have class Mondays through Thursdays, which means that I will be able to travel from noon on Thursday until Sunday evening.
We left from Alcala Friday morning at 5:00am to catch the first train to Madrid, and then another one to a town in central Spain called Segovia. We made it just fine to Segovia, but realized we had missed the last bus that went from the train station in Segovia into town. The next one was in 2 hours. Being college students, we decided we were too cheap to pay for a taxi and opted for walking the 7k (which I believe is about 4 miles) into town. So here are 12 American college students walking down the road at 9am in the morning, literally in the middle of nowhere. There was a train station behind us, a black top in front of us, and cows and horses in brown dusty fields everywhere else. At one point one girl thought she saw a tumble weed. It turned out to be a plastic bag, but it would have been so perfect if it was acutally one. After about an hour and 15 minutes of speedwalking down the road to nowhere, we finally made it to town.
The main attraction in Segovia are the aqueducts. They were built in the first century without any mortar or machines and still stand perfectly. It was incredible how well constructed and big they were--the arches run for 9 miles and are about 100 feet tall. I took some pictures, but of course it won't do them justice.
We also saw the Alcazar castle (where Queen Isabella was proclaimed Queen), La Cathedral de Nuestra Senora, and various other buildings that had incrediblely beautiful architecture. I'll attempt to put some pictures up here, but as you can tell I'm not great at keeping up with this blog.
On the bus ride home, we all fell asleep. When the bus stopped the first time in Madrid, 4 of us suddenly woke up and confusedly thought we were supposed to get off then. As we were standing outside, one of the other students woke up inside the bus and realized this was not our stop. We had to bang on the bus doors and ask the driver to let us back in. We truly are the ackward foreigners here.
Friday night was Alcala's Oktober fest, which really just amounted to people drinking huge beers in the town bull ring. Not exactly the cultural experience of Germany's Oktoberfest, but still entertaining.
Sunday morning was spent in Madrid at El Rastro, Europe's largest open air flea market with over 3500 shops. It's sectioned off into different types of things, from electronics to antiques (my favorite!) to clothing to artwork. I definitely recommend going there if you are ever in Madrid on a Sunday, though not if you don't like crowds. And you have to be very careful of pickpocketing.
Nothing too exciting this week, mostly just catching up on school work after a long weekend. Tomorrow after class we're heading to Northern Spain to do some hiking. One of my friends and I bought a bottle of wine for our group to share on the trip. I got carded. The drinking age here is 18. I'm 21. Welcome to my life. ;)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment