beep beep beep

Hi Friends,

Two exams and two papers down, two exams and one paper to go.

Until I complete those things, I've filled my current life with lots of activity. I'm headed to Fes, Morocco this Saturday for four days, after which I will immediately (almost) take a train down to Lisbon, Portugal. I'll try to fit the studying and paper-writing into there somehow.

Just a quick update for those who are interested... Alberto from CIEE, are you reading this? How did you find out I have a blog?

over&out
LAURA

Computing...

I think I'm going to need a new computer soon. I had two presentations this past week and it took me probably three times the amount of time to finish each powerpoint due to my computer's speed. It's doing fine right now, but once I have more than... two or three programs open at the same time, it goes a bit (or a lot) sluggish.

It's crazy to think that the semester is almost over. Many of my classes end on Tuesday, three days from now. I think this is my last weekend in Barcelona. I might go to Marseille next weekend (if Jade ever gets back to me... Jade, I hope you're reading this although you probably aren't), then to Morocco the next weekend... and then to Portugal directly post that. After that, I'll be back in Barcelona for three-ish days to take my last exams and to go to the Daydream Festival (Radiohead!). And then... I start my train-taking around this continent. News: Jamie is coming to Europe for a month and will be joining me for part of the journey (Pamplona, southern France, Italy, and maybe Hungary or Croatia). Excitinggggggg!

So here are my temporary travel plans:

May 23-26: Marseille
May 27-30: Barcelona
May 31-June 3: Fes, Morocco
June 4-9: Portugal
June 10-13: Barcelona
June 14-July 5: France, Switzerland, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France
July 5-8: Pamplona, Spain
July 9-24: Southern France, Italy, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece
July 25-August 2: Mediterannean Cruise
August 3-5: Venice

So, to my lovely European friends who live in those countries... will you be around for me to visit you? I don't know who reads this, so I'll send you individual messages too. But do let me know! And of course, if anyone wants to/is available for traveling, I would love for you to join me!

over&out
LAURA

May is here.

Alright, so once again, it's been awhile. I don't know how many people actually read this, but here's a little update of my life.

Since going to Madrid, a lot of things/not really anything has happened. I had a good amount of visitors, who kept me fairly busy. The first was Peter, who was here for a few days from London. We saw the sights, went to the beach, had gelato... you know, the usual. He got a crazy sunburn on his hands from reading outside or something equally silly. Next came Rachel and her friends from Brookline. Our big plan was to see Peaches perform at Razzmatazz, a huge club in Barcelona. So after some bevs at the Ovella Negra, we headed to Razz. But what?! She never came on. Yeah. Lame. Total disappointment, but luckily Razzmatazz is always fun, or at least it has been so far. Katherine was here the same weekend as Rachel, but unfortunately I didn't get to see her for more than a day. She and some friends from UNH were here so I let them do their touristy things, although we did meet for a yummy dinner in El Born. Jessie came to visit this past weekend. Maoz, Unicornius, Park Guell, Bar Marsella... and the beginnings of making the M.O.M. Want to know more? Ask away! Soooo, it was really nice to see everyone, especially since I won't see them again until August, at the earliest.

I also had some more CouchSurfing thingies. I met a guy named Massimiliano (Massi for short) from Italy. He was traveling in Barcelona for a few days and sent me a CS message to meet. He, being the master juggler he is, inspired me to buy my own juggling balls. I'm currently in the process of learning. I've always had juggling balls in the US and had tried learning when I was younger, but didn't put that much effort into it. Hopefully I'll finally get it this time.

Last Thursday I went to a CS meeting and met a ton of CouchSurfers from all over the world. I must say... I do love it. If you haven't heard of it, check it out at www.couchsurfing.org and let me know what you think. I'll be doing it pretty much all summer while I'm not staying with my UVM International friends. So anyway, after the meeting, I went to Feria d'Abril with some of them. It's a carnival or something with rides, food, and dance tents. I only took advantage of the latter since I literally only had one Euro on my person, but it was all in good fun and we went to Club Fellini afterwards. The meeting was an intercambio/language exchange that happens every Thursday. I'm looking forward to going tomorrow.

Summer is coming up soon... most of my friends at UVM are done with finals. My dad's doing his last week of classes and finals start on Saturday. I still have a few more weeks, but my last final is on June 11th and then... well, we'll see what happens. I haven't done any real planning yet, but I hope to visit people (you know who you are)!

I've gone swimming three times now.

I'm Alive!

Um, so I may have disappeared for the month of March, but here I am again.

I've been traveling quite a bit recently... in fact, I realized that I had been on six airplanes in the past three weeks. I just returned to Barcelona a few hours ago from visiting Eva and Katherine in Madrid. Eva let me stay in her family's beauuutiful home and showed me around the city... quite nice. Katherine and I ran through the Prado during its free entrance hours, but I missed out on the Reina Sofia because it was closed. I guess I'll have to try again some other time. Madrid is polleny.

Last weekend, I went to Paris and had my first CouchSurfing experience. Xavier, a famous CSer, hosted me in his new apartment. He was super nice and I'm definitely looking forward to more (for some reason I just typed "mour") CouchSurfing this summer. In fact, I'm hoping to CouchSurf the whole two months I'll be hopping around Europe. If you didn't know, I plan on purchasing the 2 month unlimited Eurail Global Pass. It goes to 20 different countries... so I'll be able to visit a bunch of the UVM 2006 International Students... yay! Especially exciting because I had to miss the Reunion last month due to classes....

I spent seven hours in the Louvre. SO exhausting, but definitely worth it. I also visited the Musee d'Orsay and had supposedly "the best falafel in Paris". I'll admit it was quite good, as was the double chocolate eclair that followed it. Hung out with Rachel a bit too, which was fun.

Andddd, let's see. The week before that was Semana Santa (spring break). I went to Italy with Katherine and Kerry... we definitely had some adventures. We stated in Sicily (2 nights in Trapani and one in Taormina), then moved on to Naples and then Rome. We met friendly Sicilians in Trapani about our age who showed us around and taught us Italian, and new friends in Taormina (also travelers... same hostel): Fernanada from Mexico, Bruce from Ottawa, and Martin from Switzerland. Our Taormina hostel was a little crazy since it was the downstairs of a woman's house and she had a loud two year old boy, but it was fun anyway. I ate two oranges in Sicily, the first of which was the first whole orange I've ever eaten in my life, and the second of which was the second whole orange I've ever eaten in my life. Believe that? It's true.

The hostel in Naples (Hostel of the Sun) was fannnntastic. More new friends from all over (Romania, Austria, Portugal, and the US, including four guys from Brown University who know of Sylvanus)... I saw two of the guys from Brown in Paris last weekend... which was totally crazy and coincidental. While staying in Naples, we took day trips to Amalfi, Positano, Sorrento, and Pompeii. Really pretty coastal towns and some super-intact ruins (impressive) inhabited by stray dogs (kind of depressing). A great time had by all, despite Kerry's lost digital camera. She made due with disposables until we got back to Barcelona though.

Rome was a little less exciting. I was only there for a day and a half and it was totally rainy and cold. I'll go back in the summer to see things though (Vatican, here I come!). On my way back to Barcelona, I spent about five hours in a freezing room waiting for the Departures Zone to reopen at 4:30am. Not so fun.

Hmm, what else has happened? I'm taking a break from big trips until May 31st when I head off to Fez, Morocco. Until then, I'll be super-occupied with visitors from the US who are also studying in Europe.

I don't know what to say since I haven't updated in so long. Random things? Sure:

I met an English boy named Dean and we have plans to travel Latin America for a year after graduation (a completely unlikely plan, but it's nice to pretend). I made friends with four people from Switzerland last week (two of which I will maybe visit this summer... hooray!). Oh, here's something! I swam in the Mediterranean last week at the beach... at like 6:30pm = cold. It was only for a few minutes, but I'm definitely glad I did it. Peaches is coming to Barcelona at the end of the month and is playing at Razzmatazz. I want to run a marathon at some point in my life (ha). I really like learning languages. I think I learned a good amount of Italian while in Sicily and I want to keep it up. The Catalan class is moving slowly, which is lame, so maybe I'll do some self-teaching. I still am totally in love with the Art History class, which we have an exam in this Friday. I'll have to do a bunch of studying, but I'm actually kind of excited to take it which sounds totally absurd. I didn't think I'd ever want to take an art history class again, but now I know I'll be checking them out for Spring 09. Speaking of UVM, registration is this week and I don't know what to register for because I don't know how my classes will transfer. Also, I can't take Frank's painting class because it overlaps with an anthro class that I want. Kerry and I met some "Funky Cyclists" near the beach. They're those guys who ride the bikes with the little chariots or whatever on the fronts. The company is called Funky Cycle and its employees are from all over... we met people from Germany, France, Italy, Russia, Brazil, and Argentina. They're all (I think) in their 20s. Umm, that was a long and disorganized paragraph, so I'm going to stop here.

over&out
LAURA

So it's been awhile, eh?

I guess a bunch of things have happened since my last post... most notably, another sighting of that thing. After class one day, I decided to walk back to la residencia to see how long it'd take (if you're curious, it was about 50 minutes). I was on one of the main streets in the city when I spotted him. That's right. This fella.



YEAH. I tried to follow it, but it was walking really slowly, so I snapped some photos and made my way home. The next day, Kerry and I were wandering around Plaza Catalunya between classes. She mentioned something about Juanes (the singer) and then suddenly screamed "There he is!" and took off running. Slightly confused as to why Juanes was still in Barcelona (he played a concert here a few weeks ago), I followed... only to find the one and only.


This time, he was pretty speedy, walking with a clear destination. We picked up the pace as he rounded a corner and entered a shopping mall. What the hey? Oh no! He see us on his trail! How embarrassing. What's this? A head removal? It's a boy, about our age. I asked him what he was doing and he explained that it was for some Canadian language school. The mascot or character or whatever was "lost" in Barcelona and there was some kind of scholarship for 8000 euros. Hot dang. Unfortunately, he was speaking in Spanish and I didn't catch everything he told us.

Alright, what else is new? Jade came to visit. For those who don't know who Jade is, she's pretty much the longest-time friend I had. We met on the first day of kindergarten. She's studying in Marseille this semester, so I'll definitely be visiting her at some point too. I took her to Maoz for some delicious falafel and then we had gelato.


Last Thursday was Carnaval for the residencia. In other words, another excuse for everyone to dress up in costumes and party. Just about everyone from my dorm went. In Spain, when you dress up for things, you dress up in groups, all in the same or matching costumes (see Alberto's blog for an entry when he and his friends were human mops). All of the girls in my program in the dorm were dressing up as fairies. Obvi, I did not want to be a fairy. Finally, after much debating about what to do regarding not being a fairy, I decided to dress up with two other friends from the program who live in homestays. We were Charlie's Angels (guess which one I was... ha ha), also not my first choice, but at least I got to kick some ass instead of prance around in purple tights and rainbow wings.

I didn't make it to class that Friday, which is too bad. It was Catalonian Art History which is my favorite class here by far. Like I said in the last post, it's definitely more interesting than ARTH 5 and 6 at UVM. Speaking of classes, the Catalan class has begun to lose its charm. Laia is awesome, as usual, but the class itself is really boring. Since it's half culture, half language, the learning of the language is moving really slowly. I feel like I barely know any Catalan at all, but whatevz.

I've gotten to know some of the kids from IES (a different study abroad program that has American students the residencia). On Friday, a few of us went to Tibidabo, but the funicular (tram that takes you up the mountain) was closed. We thought it was probably really far to walk, so we decided to go to see the fountain show at Plaza Espanya instead. Umm, unlucky day or what? The show was scheduled to start at 7:30PM. At 7:35 some dude announced technical difficulties and a 20 minute wait. We stayed to see it since we were already there, but it never came on! We returned to the resi... hungry, cold, and without a sweet fountain experience. Oh, one thing though. They were playing music and we heard lots of Disney songs in Spanish.

On Saturday, I took a train to Montserrat with Kerry, Allie, and Charlie. It was really awesome, especially because I've been in cities since I left Maine. We walked around on trails on the mountain, had our lunch, befriended and fed a stray cat, and took fun photos.


That night, everyone went to Mirabe, a club on to of Tibidabo. Apparently the walk up the mountain wasn't that bad afterall because we walked down it when we were going home. I met some Dutch guys who taught me things to say to Putri when I visit her.

This week went by pretty quickly. Yesterday, Kerry and I explored Poblenou and had a photo shoot in a playground. I don't have much else to say, but I guess I've said a lot already. Umm... I played soccer last week and actually enjoyed it for the first time in my life. I bought plane tickets to Madrid (first weekend in April) and Paris (last weekend in March). Most of our hostels for spring break are booked (Trapani, Taormina, Naples). I learned some breakdance moves from Thomas. I have a sore throat. I've been introduced to and have become addicted to The L Word. I put up two photo albums on facebook... check them out if you're bored. I suppose that's all. muchlove.

Figueres, Classes, Barceloneta, Strange Things

My apologies for not having written in awhile. Please note that I've changed the link of my blog to laura-cui.blogspot.com.

Last Sunday, I got on a Renfe train with Shaelyn, Melissa, Kerry, and Nora to go to Figueres, Dali's town. It was a pretty comfortable ride and we got there in about an hour and a half. Figueres was quiet that day; most stores and restaurants were closed because it was Sunday. We went to the Dali Musem, which was really cool. I even got to see the famous room with the furniture that makes up a face. If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's a photo:

After the musuem, we walked around a bit and ate at a restaurant. The food was delicious although the service was a bit strange.

The rest of my classes started this week. I am taking two CIEE classes with people in my program and two classes at the Universitat de Barcelona with other Spanish students. I had to change my UB classes because I couldn't understand either of the professors. Not to mention that the Anthropology professor seemed totally insane to all of us. Anyway, the courses I am taking this semester are: Masterworks of Catalonian Art, Introduction to Catalan and Its Social Context, Geography of Catalan, and Spanish in the United States. Very Catalana, it seems. I really like the art history class, even though most of my classmates have expressed that they think it's boring. It's the best art history class I've taken (although I suppose I've only taken two before - Ancient to Medieval with Mierse and Renaissance to Modern with Thompson). My professor for Intro to Catalan is really awesome. She's totally cute and I'm pretty much crushin'.

When I first arrived in Barcelona, I thought it was a huge city. The Metro system is misleading in that way... it makes the city seem a lot larger. In reality, each Metro stop is only a short distance from the next one. It's completely possible to walk all of Barcelona in a day. I've yet to do this, but I plan on it. I don't have any classes on Wednesdays so I plan on using this day to explore this walkable city by foot. I discovered how easy it was to get around when I walked to Barceloneta (Barcelona's beach) from Plaza Catalunya (downtown Barcelona). It's a nice beach, but it seems like it will become very crowded as it gets warmer. There was a good amount of people while I was there last week and it's only February! I mean, it's by no means cold here (at least not to me, an almost life-long New Englander), but it's quite breezy by the ocean and definitely not warm enough to swim and sunbathe. Everyone at the beach was wearing pants and jackets. Barcelona is also really touristy, so the beach will probably be swarming in a month or two.
Barceloneta
So... I've encountered a few strange things since arriving. The two most recent ones were pretty excellent, although my roommate has informed me that I'm a bad storyteller. I was on the Ferrocarril (like the Metro, but not the same thing) earlier this week and I saw a person. Great story so far, I know. But she was wearing a costume! She had a huge "mask" on her head of some kind of brown animal with big eyes and little ears. It reminded me of Totoro. She was just sitting in one of the seats minding her own business... it was pretty hilarious. The strangest part of it was that no one else in the car seemed to find it strange. I tried to get a picture, but couldn't get a full-frontal shot. Here's the best I could do.

Oh! Also, I finally met up with Elizabeth, a good friend of Jessie's who is studying abroad here this semester too, but at the UPF (Pompeu Fabra). We got yummy juice from La Boqueria. She was present when this other weird thing happened to me. We were just walking and an old woman stuck out her arm and like... smacked/pushed me in the shoulder. I looked at her like "what?" but she wasn't even looking at me. It was like she was a football player running towards the end zone or something. So odd.

La Boqueria, Friends, Sitges, and Plane Tickets

Alright. Hola everyone, here's a better blog update, meaning not just boring things about going out at night.

So, let's do this in order of the heading. La Boqueria is this really awesome market off of Las Ramblas. I haven't really bought much there because I don't have a refrigerator, but I love going there to look at the people and colorful food.

Fruits and Veggies! Strawberries! Peppers! Wall of Candy!

Friends, eh? Well, Sylvanus and Ben visited me with another Bologna studier named Mike. What a story this will be. We're not allowed to have people stay with us overnight in the residencia. Well, duh, how will they know? Right? Wrong. 24-hour surveillance plus 24-hour door people = bad for me. They got in successfully the first night and things were swell, but the next day, they came in in the morning and gosh darn, Ramon (Mr. Residencia) came to my door and told me they had to leave. I later explained to him that they didn't spend the night and had just come in (which was true! At least for that day...). Ramon seemed alright with it after my explanation and I gave CIEE a few days to contact me, but after they didn't, I felt pretty relieved, especially because their threat for rule-breaking was getting kicked out of the program. YESTERDAY, over a week later, I receive an email from who but Nicola, the CIEE staffperson who's in charge of housing. She wanted to "talk". It was scary, but I didn't get kicked out (obvi). There's odd tension between CIEE and me now though, at least for me, so I'm probably going to stay away from their offices now. However, Ramon and I are totally cool.

The weather here has been amazing. High 50s-mid 60s and sunny everyday, until last weekend when Taylor visited. It rained pretty much the entire time he was here. It was nice to see him though and I'll definitely be visiting him in Vigo later in the semester.

Last night, I went to Sitges with a few friends from the program. Sitges is a town about half an hour from Barcelona where an annual thing happens called Carnaval. It's basically a huge party that lasts for a week, similar to Mardi Gras. It was really insane... tons of people all over the place. In fact, I got separated from the group within five minutes of arriving, which kind of sucked. Luckily, I was able to find some other people I knew. There were a few people/groups that I saw periodically throughout the night, but strangely enough, I never ran into the people I went with during the five hours of wandering through the crowds. When I returned home in the morning, I found my shoes very dirtied, as well as lots of confetti on my person.

I bought my plane tickets for spring break today. I'll be going to Sicily, hooray! I don't have my return ticket yet though, yipes! Also, the cheapest ticket I could find was for the Thursday morning before break starts, which means I'll be missing some classes. I thought it'd be fine, but it turns out I have exams in two classes those days. Oops, what a mistake that was. I don't know why I didn't think about that... too bad the tickets are non-refundable. I'll try to get the exams moved, but if I can't, whatevz. Almost none of my classes will transfer to UVM to be worth anything anyway.

I suppose that's all, except that I finally bought a mic for my computer today so I can use Skype. If you think I'm cool, find me, add me, and we'll have a little chat!

over&out

LAURA