Romania

I'm in Romania right now with my aunt, not much time to write but for the past two days her friend drove us through the mountains near Ukraine in northern Romania and we looked at old wooden churches with no nails and beautiful cemeteries and went to this tiny little village where this woman invited us in and gave us some fruit liquor and fresh bread and pork and pickles and she showed us her cows and pigs and gave us fresh warm milk. Then we stayed at a wonderful little house for the night and they cooked us this giant dinner of Romanian food and we watched them feed goats. The next day we looked at some more churches and did a little picnicking next to a river.

Anyways, I'm flying back to Barcelona tomorrow and then on to the United States on Sunday!

Turco

I dont remember the spanısh word for Turkey but I thınk ıts Turco´maybe thats turkısh though. Anyways Im ın Istanbul and I cant really fıgure out the punctuatıon on the keyboard. Also notıce how ı ıs not i because ıts ın a dıfferent place on the keyboard. Anyways julıa and ı arrıved yesterday and met up wıth our frıend andrew from barcelona and we had dınner on the bospherous rıver lookıng over to ASIA! and there ıs cool turkısh musıc and sıngıng all over the place. Our hostel ıs really fun and they have a rooftop lounge wıth lots of turkıshy decoratıons etc.

Our flıght here was really funny because of our flıght attendant that made jokes over the ıntercom. As we were landıng she was goıng ıts been a pleasure to have served you all etc etc yada yada and then she goes - you were so much better than the last flıght . . . honestly -

Thats all for now I need to go I thınk were goıng to have a turkısh bath today - both scary and excıtıng!

Londres

Hey everybody, sorry for the lack of posts. I've been really busy moving out of my homestay and packing up. Right now I am in Brighton visiting fellow MCAD student Jenny Tondera, with my friend Julia that I met in Barcelona. Here we are!



Last weekend we visited London and saw big ben, the tate modern, westminster for an organ recital and many many other places. Today, Julia and I visited stonehenge, it was about two and a half hours away by train and a little bus. It was really cool and eerie only a little bit.
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Todavia en Berlin

Here is one more thing I did while in Berlin. After my friends left I still had two more days in Berlin. I had read about a cool Vietnamese restaurant on the internet and since you can't get any Vietnamese food in Barcelona I decided to go even though it was like a half hour tram ride. After waiting two hours to climb up inside the glass dome of the Reichstag I hopped onto the tram and started my journey. I was getting nervous because it seemed like i was venturing into the suburbs of Berlin but as I got closer to my stop I noticed a lot of asian people getting on the tram, VIETNAMESE people, I was like okay awesome this is good. At my stop everyone on the tram practically got off and I was getting so excited....then I was like but where are they going because they were all kind of just wandering through this gate into what looked like a giant parking lot. It actually was a giant parking lot but just beyond it were three giant warehouses!!

Here is a photo of warehouse 1, or Hall 1, to the left there were two more


So inside of each there is a small hallway and you will find Vietnamese everything, clothing stories, hair salons, nail salons, restaurants, groceries and even many fake flower shops.

Here is the inside


I picked a restaurant and asked what the lady would recommend to me but she spoke no english and i don't speak german so it was kind of pointless and then she just pointed to something and I said I'll have that, it was like a chicken and pepper dish it was so delicious in like a light sauce and then you can add this sauce that is slivered garlic and hot peppers, not sure if that is true but I thought it was garlic....

Then I went to another place where i saw them grilling meat and decided to go there too, they didn't speak any english either so asking for the meat that is grilling outside was kind of hard but somehow we managed, it was pretty good and came with some vermicelli noodles, lettuce and basil assortment and i think fish sauce.

After traveling a lot I have learned to kind of just watch what the other people do and then do the same, so i saw everyone eating this jelly, coconut milky, tapioca like thing with a spoon and decided to try it. There was like a 12 year old girl who helped me and after trying some terrible german with her she revealed her perfect english to me. It was incredible! She said something like, its jelly fruits with coconut milk would you like ice with it. crazy! and then she asked if i wanted to try it but i said no and just paid her and started eating. It was just kind of like jelly candies stuff with coconut milk but it was good, there were also kidney and lima beans in the bottom which kind of freaked me out.



If you're counting i ate two giant meals and that thing right in a row and then bought a steamed bun full of meat, hard boiled egg and cabbage for the road, it was actually my favorite thing. I never found the actual restaurant I was looking for though.

Tchuess!

Tchuess is kind of like cheers in German I guess, not for making toasts kind of cheers but like a "see ya" cheers. My trip to Germany was a great success, I was in Berlin for 7 days and Weimar for about 4 days.

This is currywurst, its a sausage, supposedly with curry in it? and then it has some ketchup curry sauce and then curry powder on top. It's very typical street food in Germany, it's so delicious. I think when I get back home I will probably make it.


This is inside the Treptower park flea market in Berlin. I'm not sure how we actually managed to find this place because it's really tucked away behind some fencing inside a bunch of warehouses, but we did! and it was really incredible as you can see. This is a fairly tame photo of some of the things we found.


Some booths were a little more extreme


Here is Kate, my friend I stayed with in Weimar. She is studying there at the Bauhaus University. Together we ate tons of ice cream and sausages and this photo was taken in the entrance to her friends apartment where they made us some curried vegetables.

Weimar is also home to Goethe and Schiller and some other writers, it has lots of libraries.

While in Berlin, Kate surprised me and was also there! We met up at this scavenger hunt. This is a photo of probably just half of our team, if that. Each team had a color, ours pink, and also a large speaker blasting electro music. Our team won! I think we may have only completed two tasks but we won anyways and I got a certificate.


Berlin was my first city outside of Spain to visit. It is incredibly different than Barcelona, the climate, the people, the food, the way the city is set up and there is so much street food whereas in Barcelona there is pretty much none. Berlin is a very interesting city because it has so much incredibly recent history. Walking around you can see buildings with bullet holes. It's also a very young city, I didn't see that many old people just lots of 20-30 year olds. I also found Vietnamese food, but that is for another post.

Butifarras

Butifarras are a kind of catalan sausage. Sunday for dinner, amongst a platter of butifarras and meat was a piece of blood sausage. Romi had gone to the mountains earlier in the day and purchased some different meats. She decided I needed to try the blood sausage too, it has blood of a pig, go figure. When I put my knife into it, it just kind smooshed all over the place. The consistency was like wet and soft. Then I tasted it and I really liked it, it's kind of sweet and savory but I couldn't handle the texture, it felt so mushy. It was literally like you are eating coagulated blood, wet though. I ate half of it and then just gave up and finished watching Pasapalabra. Oh well, off to Germany I go this week to experience more sausage and also eat sauerkraut! I love sauerkraut I'm very excited, I want to try and bring some home because this german I met told me you have to put in the fridge for a couple of days to let it sit and develop flavor. Auf Wiedersehen!

Pais Vasco

I took a trip with my program to Pais Vasco, or the Basque Country. We visited Bilbao and also San Sebastian. San Sebastian was probably the most beautiful place I've ever been. Its right on the coast with tons of beaches and mountains and there are really old buildings and tons of seafood. Tapas in Pais Vasco are different because they are served on little slices of bread, they are called pintxos. It is gastronomically speaking probably the best place in spain according to all of our guides. They have many 5 star restaurants and some of the worlds best chefs. The are incredibly expensive but I managed to have some mind blowing food, like a fried ball of brie! It was melting all over my hand, but it was so good. The bars just have tons of pintxos lined up and you just start eating and then you pay for what you've eaten after. There is also a greenish wine that they serve poured from really high into a glass, it spills a lot but apparently that's just how they do it. Many things are different including the language. They speak euskara, or basque, which has no roots in any other language in the world. It has many many x's, t's, k's and seriously no us of the letter m.


Here is a photo from inside the Santiago Calatrava, from valencia, walking bridge in Bilbao, He also designed the airport. Both the bridge and airport have this incredibly light feeling. The walkway of the bridge is actually made of clear glass blocks.


Here is the Guggenheim! in Bilbao, the museum was really fun, seriously just like all fun. I saw tons of Richard serra pieces, the best piece i've ever seen by Jenny Holzer, the gigantic Takashi Murakami exhibit and they were screening a Ryan Trechartin video <--that's for you zach nash! It was really amazing, and in front is the gigantic Jeff Koons dog covered in growing flowers. The staff wear really cool dress uniforms designed for the Guggenheim, at least i'm guessing that because it had Guggenheim embroidered on them.


Here are some sculptures from Eduardo Chillida that we saw in San Sebastian, Chillida is also from San Sebastian and his scluptures are everywhere. There are some tubes as well on this stone structure against the cliff that make sounds when the wind is strong enough.