I never posted about Prague. It was mostly time spent with friends so I can summarize pretty quickly. Ate some goulash. Spent some cash. Went to some underground bars that would essentially become inescapable furnaces of death in the event of a fire. Most buildings in the city that I saw were of some sort of distinct "style" be it Neo-Renaissance or ultra-modern Gehry or Victorian and everything in between. Ate a lot of cereal and read Seven Types of Ambiguity.

The main museum there is really boring. I am a museum guy. It was put together poorly, without any sort of chronological or thematic ordering. Except for the rock section, which was an entire section of rocks. Well done!

These people were in our short-term apartment: Brycen and Ben his brother, Drew, Whitney, Alison, and Cara. Miro appeared out of no where and slept on the wooden floor.

The tram system was wild and difficult, with extreme fines if you didn't do it right. People don't much like tourists. After the going to the Communist museum (which was good, and was worth the money), I can see why. Fight for decades to get an oppressor out of your country, no one around will help. Immediately after you are liberated, people flock to your country. You barely have any time to use your own language in the streets before it's filled with tourists who have no interest in your alien language. That's the breaks, I guess. They are getting plenty of tourism money though.

And then to home, by way of two planes and a long bus ride full of friends.

I have posted a whole load of pictures on my Flickr account and mostly the same ones on Facebook. Check 'em out!

http://flickr.com/photos/brainus/ for my photo stream (just view them all in reverse order, I recommend this)

http://flickr.com/photos/brainus/sets/ a bit organized

The best part about England was being with mom and dad and going places with them. The second best part was that there were like infinite pretty and exotic looking girls. The third best part was eating a whole lot, which is closely linked to best part 1.

We ate a bunch of shawarma, which is pita filled with a mixture of lamb, chicken, fat, salad, garlic sauce, and spicy sauce. It is even better than it sounds. And it sounds really good. We also went to a couple "noodle" shops, which were delicious and I had my first duck and curry outside of evil Communist China there. Additionally, I and my parents made frequent use of a lounge that provided free horsdoerves (SPELLIN'!) and Pepsi and cereal etc. It was a nice change from the meals in Spain that are not always filling (partly because of my own dislike of what I think is liver, if anyone reads this who knows what liver feels like on the teeth please describe it in the comments so that I can know?)

Places we hit: Stonehenge, Westminster Abbey and a couple more churches, and a couple museums which included my favorite museum so far in my admittedly limited career: the good ol' Winston Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms. My European history teacher recommended it to the class as the museum to see in London other than the super big one that I didn't see, when it was just the Cabinet War Rooms, and it's even better now. We went to King's Cross because of a silly Harry Potter fan desire to know what it looked like after that strange, strange scene with old Al.

Mom and I read Pastwatch: the Redemption of Christopher Columbus to my dad, who doesn't like to read fiction all by his lonesome, and it really grew on us right quickly. We were very close to finishing it when I left to head to ye olde Praha. I highly recommend that book to anyone who fulfills any of the following requirements:

• Likes fun
• Likes books
• Likes Spain
• Likes Latin America
• Likes history
• Is alive

We spent a couple minutes before I left in a bookstore we had visited the night before (when I couldn't pick out a book, because it is extremely difficult and I wasn't ready for Tolstoy or Nietzche on this trip yet), and I picked out a book mostly at random called Seven Types of Ambiguity, by Elliot Perlman. It is one of my favorites, ever. Ever. It was lengthy, dense, and pretty heavy, but I finished it in a few days given how much traveling I did and how little I slept when I got home because I was so intrigued by the book.

But that comes later. Mom and Dad brought me to Liverpool St Station and saw me off, and it was emotional. It was really nice to reunite for a while, and mom bought me and dad candy at the station to assuage our pain. It certainly helped. I finished La Sombra de Ender on the train and then fatefully opened 7ToA as we rattled through the countryside.

Accidentally waking up early made it possible for me to experience a week full of old and new Europe. I had a plane from Sevilla to the outskirts of London that was supposed to take off at eleven. The window from my room to the enclosed patio (which is open to the sky but otherwise only to my window and the living room) was open with the metal blinds rolled up, so I guess the weather got through and woke me. I was going to try to go back to sleep, but decided to take it leisurely that morning instead and stroll to the bus stop over by the university, which is about 20-30 minute walk away.

So I showered, zipped up my bag without putting my mouthguard in it, and left. I needed to drop by my study abroad office to print out my documents so I could get on the plane. It's a detour, but not too bad. It only adds about 10 minutes to the total journey to get there. It turned out to be closed, so I had to find an internet cafe that was open that early, and did my business there. It took a bit of extra time, but not so bad. I was already glad I had gotten up early even though I hadn't saved all that much time yet.

Finding the bus stop for the airport was what took enough time that by the time I got to the line to get my boarding pass, after a meandering, not very express, route to the Sevilla airport, I got to the gate as they were boarding.

I got the whole row to myself and spent the time reading La Sombra de Ender, which is the translation of Ender's Shadow into Castellano. I enjoyed that book. It has an unreliable third person narrator who tells you the thoughts of the main character, Bean, exactly as he has them. It goes from simple and ruthless (but really clever) to arrogant, supposedly emotionless and cocky, etc. through all the stages to an actually self-aware and emotionally "mature" brilliant 7 year old military and political strategist. It's a very plausible story, especially in Spanish.

I decided after sitting for so long that I would walk instead of taking the underground to the hotel. I knew it was a good idea to use a not-to-scale map of the underground to make the trip.

The way it turned out, it would be better to describe it as a walking tour. I saw a lot of sights and accidentally took the historical Jubilee Trail. They use the word "jubilee" a lot. In any case, I got to see a lot of fancy buildings, historical ones, and some interesting markets and I got to listen in on conversations in the street that were predominantly in English, which is a sensation I didn't expect to find gratifying but did.

I eventually ended up at the hotel as it was getting dark. It took me a while to find it because I didn't know where it was and it wasn't very clearly marked. I knew it was near the London Eye. It turns out you can actually jump onto the London Eye from the hotel. It is literally right next to the London Eye. I would have been able to walk straight there if I had known that. You can see the eye from a good bit, and I kept it in the middle distance to make sure I wasn't getting too far off the mark.

The hotel was pretty out there. I still wonder what the bloke at reception felt as he checked this mildly sweaty, long haired and mountain bearded teen into an upgraded suite, and informed me of our access to the executive lounge. Because I felt awkward. It would be fair if he got a little bit of jollys out of it, you know?

There were marble columns all over the place. It was the county hall for a while, and it was pretty well furnished when they made part of it the hotel. There was a Dali exhibit below it.

I explored a bit. Having already seen a lot of shops and a few street markets, mostly I wanted to sit down. I had walked for around three or four hours I think. But I passed the time in and out of shops and the hotel and the street, and eventually mom and dad showed up and it turned into a family vacation.

Walking through the streets of London was surreal. I hadn't been to any cities that I had seen and read about extensively, and knew so much of the history before I went there. England, I've been exposed to my entire life. From Thomas the Tank Engine to Mary Poppins down to Children of Men and V for Vendetta. Sweeney Todd. Not to mention history classes and the fact that the language I speak came from this place, et cetera ad infinitum and more Latin phrases. It felt strangely comfortable being there, like it was "proper." I could spend lots of time there if I could afford it.

To be continued.

I haven't posted in a while before that little story below so I figured I would make a few short notes.

I went to Morocco and it was eye opening and really enjoyable. A lot of people got sick, but I was okay most of the time. The place is famous for green mint tea as I may have mentioned, it's delicious stuff and it's probably one of my favorite things about the place. I enjoyed the closeness of the "open air" market (Medina) in Fes but I am pretty certain it would tire quickly, especially with the amount of donkeys and their feces around. I ate a lot of bread there, because it's something I trust a lot to not get me sick, and because the bread there, which comes in flat loaves that are delicious, is very cheap at about 15 euro cents a loaf. 1 dirham.

Everyone was trying to sell something. Every place we went sold clothing or food or large fountains as well as some other stuff. The places we went where there was the most selling didn't have so much infrastructure so I guess there isn't much else to do if you want to eat.

We drank a lot of Coca Cola too, because we liked the bottles and it was something we could trust as well. We ate the food they gave us, but Coke is a nice reliable enjoyable drink if you don't want to accidentally drink camel juice or whatever that you buy at the supermarket. Everything is written in Arabic or French, but most people speak Berber. It's a pretty multilingual place.

Me and my friends read Catch-22 out loud to each other to pass some of the quieter times, like the nearly 24 hours we spent in wheeled travel, and the night in Fes which is not such an exciting city in the late hours as we found out. Catch-22 is a good book to read out loud, and in quiet. It's funny and gives you little bits and pieces of insight by surprise while you're laughing.

When we weren't reading or sleeping, we could watch the Moroccan landscape pass us by. It's hard to generalize the Moroccan landscape, except by saying something like: it has a bit of everything. On the way back, after driving down a cold grassed mountain from the Sahara desert, we encountered a cedar forest bathed in fog. As we got out of the bus monkeys approached us through the newly falling snow.

That's Morocco for you.

There were canyons of great depth and breadth, like, quite grand canyons I would say. We took 4x4s, me in a Land Rover, both ways to and from the camp at the edge of the dunes. The one we came in on had something like 450,000 kilometers on it. It's more than my car has on it by about 60,000 miles, but this is on harsh, volcanic rock terrain marked by sedan killing ditches.

Once we were at the camp Brycen and I spent most of our time in the dunes or hanging out with Morroqui kids. We played a lot of frisbee, talked a lot of trash, and slept a couple nights out on those dunes. A 15 year old kid named Mohammed who looked like he was 10 was probably the most intriguing kid I knew there. He knew 4 languages and how to throw the frisbee. What else do you need?

Everyone at that camp likes to play djembe and other tribal instruments, and I wish I could comprehend how their mind works and play with them. I tried but mostly ended up being exactly what I am: white and American. So it goes.

I rode a camel, but it hurt my crotch and smelled like unwashed camel. They also sound like Tusken Raiders. But you should try it, don't take my word for it!

One night heading out to the dunes I dropped my water bottle, and my blankets were so cumbersome I didn't manage to pick it up. The next morning, even though dozens of people had to have walked past to see the sunrise, I found it on the way back to camp and picked it up, clean as a whistle except for the desert sand all over it and full of refreshing agua.

I managed to sleep on the 4x4 trip back, because I guess I was tired. I have been tired since then, so maybe it's a bug or something. Once in a while I woke up with my head bleeding from hitting the window. Just kidding. But I did get tossed around, there weren't any seatbelts and those ditches and rivers we had to cross were risky.

We ate sandwiches in the cold mountains, and were attacked with begging by African nomads. We gave them food and money and bananas but it will never be enough, so I just got on the bus, padded my knees with my sweatshirt, and relaxed for the long ride back home to Spain.

Past the train tracks, where his older brother had made him a neckless from a flat penny but two days later was found dead with yellow paint around his nostrils like crusted sunshine, a ragged kid in dirty beige shorts and a buttoned up fleece jacket worked alone. He moved like a squirrel in slow motion, frantic and almost aimless. Shavings of wood spat to the ground, but some lighter ones got caught by the breeze and floated gracefully a distance away.

He sat in a log. When he first got down to begin his work the rotted log had collapsed into a contoured seat of dry, caked wood that also covered his hands. His face was streaked with rivulets of water from his eyes that sometimes dripped from his chin, past the coin that hung on its beaded chain, to land on the leafy ground or get caught on its way down on his roughly formed carving.

The sky had cleared of clouds early in the afternoon, but dusk approached and the light on the trees began to redden and fade. The boy could hardly see when he finally held up his oak crucifix to the west, the last vestiges of sunset shining past the emblem a cruel death unwarranted. He pulled a weak smile and pushed on his frozen knees to stand. He walked east toward home with dim twilight to guide him through the brush. The coin and the crucifix were buried in the log under dirt and wood fragments.

This past weekend I heard some of my friends talking about going to Morocco and decided to join them. I had been talking with another one of my friends about going to the beach for the four day weekend but me and beaches have a couple issues with each other. I didn't think I would have enough time to buy sun screen to protect my pale self if it was swimming weather so I decided for North Africa. We went to a travel agency and got it worked out pretty easily.

It was pretty cheap, considering how the whole thing went. 65 euros got us a ferry ride, two hotel nights, and a ferry ride home. That's a pretty outstanding deal if you take into account the price of a pair of shoes here -- usually it runs more than 65 euros. We tried to figure out why it would be that inexpensive, and I have concluded that the hotel probably owns a good stake in the ferry, and the amount of people they put through this travel agency makes it possible to lower the prices a whole lot.

The hotel was pretty nice. It was 3 stars, I guess, the major difference between it and the four stars we usually stay at with ISA (my study abroad group) was the quality of the bathroom. The floor of the shower wasn't perfect ceramic white or anything. We didn't drink any of the water, of course -- we tried very hard to avoid any sort of water-borne illness. So far it seems like we avoided it.

After we went to the hotel, we pretty much just walked around. We found the medina and kasbah, two of the major parts of any Arabic city (from what I understand). It was pretty cool, lots of really cheap stuff and haggling is the norm. Everywhere you go the proportion of men to women is enormous, probably at least 6 to every 1. And all of these men just hang around looking at people pretty much. I'd say there are about an equivalent number of drug dealers and women in the streets. I guess I look like a drug user because I was offered hash and heroin more times than I can count. But it was at least 25 the first day.

That night I bought a blanket. It's a pretty nice blanket that I got for the equivalent of around 12 euros. I brought the price down from about 40 euros, and I am sure I could have gone lower but I was willing to pay 12 euros for it.

The next day we went to a Portuguese fortress town. It was a lot of the same vibe as Tangier, but all the houses were white and we had a tour guide. Street peddlers mildly hassled us the whole way, but it wasn't too bothersome. Tons of counterfeit clothing and shoes, as well as a lot of authentic looking Africa-wear.

We had an incredible meal, probably one of the best I've ever had, for only 12 euros each. From what we had been paying at other places in Tangier this was astoundingly expensive, but it was about 4 courses of delicious sea food etc. Unstoppable.

The ocean was beautiful against the rocks outside the fortress town, it was full of small cliffs and large brown stone in the water. The ambience was very nice.

When we got back me and my friends just hung out and talked for a while, then went out to play frisbee in the wind on the sand by the ocean in Morocco. It was "genial."

And then we went home by ferry and bus, and it was lovely.

This past weekend I went to Lisboa or Lisbon in Portugal. It was a good trip. I slept pretty much the entire way there, waking up when my cell phone told me I was roaming. I pulled out the battery from fear of extreme roaming charges. We arrived in Lisbon and soon after ended up at an ancient castle. It was pretty cool, and old. We stood upon the parapets etc. There will be a couple of pictures of that. I went to sleep early that night after a delicious fish dinner -- I have been feeling ill lately so I wanted to recover with some intense sleep. I have pinkeye too I think -- I woke up with some wonderfully glued shut eyes. I got some antibiotic drops from a new friend named Theresa and it is healing quickly. I woke up with clear eyes, but I am still doing the drops every six hours.

The day after we had a tour of Lisbon, including a cathedral/monastary (of course) and a seaside fortress that was also used to house political prisoners. All very cool. The monastary has the tomb of Vasco de Gama, which is pretty neat. One of the dudes. The Cathedral of Sevilla has a tomb which is apparently Cristoforo Colombo's, but there's a little bit of history (read: controversy) about whether it's in Sevilla or some other city. There is another tomb that has his son's in it, pretty much for sure. Additionally there is a building across the river where there used to be a monastary, where apparently Colombo asked the monks specifically to pray for him on the first journey to the "Indies." A tree there that's gigantic and beautiful is said to have been planted either by his son or by his brother. Either way, that's a long time to be growing. The building went from being a monastary to a ceramic factory to being a building for the government of Andalucia, the autonomous region in which we live. This was a major exploration port so it's got a lot of history like that.

Back to Portugal. After we were released from the arranged tour I stayed with Whitney and Allison and a bunch of other females joined us (again the crazy ratio coming into play, there were 7 of them and one of me -- remind anyone of anything?).

Hotel -> metro -> train -> Cintra -> Capo de Roca.
and reversed

Cintra is a charming town, extremely hilly and mountainous. It is home to a Unesco heritage site that I didn't know about, otherwise I would have made more effort to see it and check it out. But really Cintra was a stopping point on our way to the farthest western point of contintental Europe, the Capo de Roca. It may be Copa or Capa or something, it's like The Rock Cape in English.

Side note: Portuguese, if you just try to recognize what the accents mean and then pronounce the words as if they were Spanish, is pretty easy to function with in terms of reading. A lot of the words are exactly the same as Spanish but to spell them so they are pronounced the same requires different letters to read.

Continuing. Inside Cintra, we took a crazy, crazy bus ride. We got the ticket assuming it would be a scenic, meandering tour of the town so we could see it and take pictures. Instead, it was the most rip-roaring (sigh) ride of probably my entire life, including the taxi in China, which is an entirely separate and exciting story. This bus would rip around corners on the top of ridges that would have left us plummeting for as many as 2 seconds before splitting us on a tree. Etc. But it was worth it because we did get to see an ancient Moorish castle and another castle (they were on two separate hilltops) for approximately 1.5 seconds combined. Once the ride was over and we attempted to process what happened, we went and explored the town for a little while before the bus that would take us to Capo de Roca appeared. It was a pretty place, very foggy and ancient looking on the hiltop, newish and charming down in the town.

The bus ride, once it finally happened, was pretty extensive. I think it was about half an hour or 45 minutes, and it cost about three times as much for the round trip bus ride as it did for the round trip train ride (oh well). We kind of got to see the country side, but it started raining sheets, and it got very foggy inside the bus so eventually we couldn't see out the window. Once we arrived at the site, we could forsee that we would be coming home wet. To use a common phrase, the rain was plummeting rapidly and at about 67 degrees from the horizontal in such a manner as to prevent the effectiveness of any wetness prevention device other than a poncho/rain slicker. The wind also made the umbrellas reverse. I will post a couple pictures of that too for your enjoyment. But we got there just in time for sunset. It was beautiful. After we got all tohse pictures me and Whitney tried to get down to the beach. Instead we got to the top of this intense ridge that would have been impossible to get back up the way things were turning out. I was worried about my camera too, so we headed back to the shelter of the bathroom building/cafe. It was a really cool experience -- probably one of the best I've had. If I hadn't had my camera (or if my camera bag had some sort of wetness protection factor) I would have had an even better time, but it evens out because I got a couple of cool pictures.

We rode home completely drenched. We ate Pizza Hut in Cinta, my first American restaurant experiment, 2 days before the 1 month mark of me being away from America. Not bad, I think. We just needed a lot of warm, immediately. It was delicious. I got a soup that turned out to be corn soup. How very American.

On the train ride home there was a creepy man who spoke random
words of English and held his thumb up all the time. I put this
here so I remember him always. Fish!

That evening we went dancing and because my pants were completely drenched I borrowed a pair of pants from Whitney. They turned out to be rather ridiculous. Ideally none of you will ever see pictures of it, but it's possible you will. I warn you: they are red. They are small. I felt more gangly than I have ever felt in my life -- it turns out tight pants make me look rather twig like, except for my calves, which will always and forever appear to be the size of several homes.

The next day we went home, basically. I hung out with my American friends and had a lovely time listening to American music, to celebrate going home from Portugal, which felt like a very foreign country to me, to Sevilla, where I honestly felt joy at coming home. Sevilla is my favorite place. It has not yet done me wrong.

I do miss certain things about the U.S., other than people. I miss playing Frisbee all the time, and people giving away stuff for free (this happens a lot more in the US than you realize, and not at all in Spain), being able to drive. The ability to pick up and leave to do anything any time, to see someone or just go somewhere. I guess now I understand people who haven't been able to have cars at school. I have been getting a bit more in touch with the bus system here though, and maybe I will be able to get out in to the country a bit more and it will be almost as if I can drive there.

If anyone reading this plans at all on coming to Spain to be near me, please let me know so that I am around when you want to come. I am starting to plan the voyages near the end of the semester and need to take people into account.