Lots of travels

I've been really busy the last few weeks. It seems like I have hardly spent any time at home. In the past month I've been to Salamanca, Lisbon and Sevilla. When I am home, the internet in the dorm shuts off a lot, so it takes forever to write a blog and upload pictures. That is one of the complaints I have about the dorm on a list of many. I will leave my issues with the dorm for another post, though.

So, my first trip after rreturning to Spain was to Salamanca. My friend Morgan studied abroad in there, so she was our tour guide that weekend. I was there once before with my study abroad program, but we didn't spend enough time there to explore. This time we went to all of the historical sites: the cathedral, la Casa de las Conchas (The entire outside of the building is covered in shells or 'conchas'), the university, and of course Plaza Mayor. We stayed in a great hostal that had a balcony overlooking the plaza.

Two weeks later we took a trip to Lisbon. The only time I had been there before is when I was flying from Porto to Philadelphia, with a stop over in Lisbon. Our suitcases made the plane, but we didn't. We had to stay the night in Lisbon without clothes, toothbrush or anything. We managed to get by, and actually had a great time eating American food at Hard Rock Cafe and going to a Sporting Club soccer match.

This time the trip was very different. We rode an old trolly up to Saint George's Castle where we had a beautiful view of the city and the river. We ate and went out in Barrio Alto, the old part of the city, and ventured to some small towns on the coast. We tried to have a picnic on the beach in Cascais, but as soon as we got off the train it started to pour. We ended up having our picnic under an awning of a building across from the trainstation. Later, it stopped raining and we were able to walk to the beach, where we all took our shoes off and played in the sand and water for a few minutes. It was still too cold to stay out long, so we headed back shortly after to Lisbon.

The next day we went to a beautiful town in the mountians, called Sintra. High up on the summit of one mountain there is a castle called the Palace of Pena. It is a castle that seems like it is out of a fairytale. The ouside is blue, pink, yellow and purple, and resembles a dollhouse. There was a beautful view of the valley and the Atlantic Ocean in the distance. Overall I really enjoyed Lisbon and would love to go back again to see all of the things I still haven't seen.

Unfortunately, I'm still not able to upload pictures, but you can search for any of the places I talked about to see them online!