i went on a trip!

itinerary:
Madrid, Spain: 3 nights
Barcelona, Spain (Catalonia): 2 nights
Montpellier, France: 5 nights

 It was a grand trip. Full of a some beautiful things in museums and a lot of beautiful things in plain air. Sometimes, I like to bring a really random book with me on trips (I brought For Whom The Bell Tolls with me to Cairo a few summers ago) just to kind of keep things real. You know, remind me of the vastness of history and the world so I don't get swept away by my surroundings. So I brought Maya Angelou's autobiographical novel, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings with me to Iberia. I had a lot of great moments with Maya: crying in the Madrid airport, contemplating American racism from Antoni Gaudí's Parc Güell overlooking Barcelona and picnicking under a windmill in Collioure (small Mediterranean town in France). Certainly the type of book that hurts when it's over because you have to realize that you don't actually know the characters. Anyway, visions of Stamps, Arkansas are forever entangled in my memories from last week's voyage.  Here are some pictures to narrate what I actually saw and did.

I went to Madrid with two friends from my program, Emily (left) and Emma (not pictured). This is a photo in La Parc de Retiro in Madrid of Emily and Arnaud, a friend we met at the hostel in Madrid. Turns out that Arnaud, who's from Paris, lives around the corner from my host apartment so we can be friends in France, as well:)

El Tigre, a tapas bar in Madrid (recommendation from Lizzyfizz). At this restaurant, all you have to do is buy a beverage and they bring out plates and plates of tapas for free!  Most of the tapas varieties feature some form of sausage, which is plentiful in Madrid as you can see in the background of this photo. 

La Sagrada Familia, Antoni Gaudí's unfinished cathedral in Barcelona. The most awe-inspiring cathedral I've seen yet. It doesn't really translate in this photo, but Gaudí architecture is porbably the basis of the CANDYLAND board game. 

Fruit stand in the Boqueria market in Barcelona. So fresh! So cheap! 

The above photo is of Manue et Manu (short for Emmanuelle). Manu (right) hosted me in Montpellier, France, for five nights and did an outstanding job showing me around the region. I met her while working at Cedar Campus on crew the summer after my freshman year of college.  Her friend Manue, who stayed with us for three of the nights, was in the south to visit different GBU (French Intervarsity) chapters because she's going on staff in the fall. It was fun, although exhausting, to speak with them in french, especially about our 'sister' campus ministries. Another highlight was eating lunch at her parents house in nearby Béziers, where we drank aperitifs from their vineyard, watched her foster sister's hip-hop infused ballet routine to a Justin Beiber song and I answered questions about what the Tea Party really is.

An old Roman arène (arena) in Nîmes, a city in the south of France established by them (the Romans).

Parc de la Fountaine in the same town, Nîmes, which has plenty of beautiful old Roman things.

Courtyard of an old church in Bézier, France. 

A late winter landscape. 

The medieval city, Carcassonne. Yes, like the board game. There's a moat and everything! And people still live in there. 

Gargoyle. In Carcassonne. 

Collioure, France. A hop, skip and a jump away from Spain.  Part of Catalonia, actually. 

The sea in Collioure. It was an incredibly picturesque town and incredibly windy along the water. 

The Collioure gare.

An exhibit on Polonia and immigration to France at the National Museum of Immigration (back in Paris). The second painting from the right is one of my host mom's father's, himself a Polish immigrant. My mom invited me to the tour for people involved in the exhibit.

Sneak attack photo by Aldona. 

It was a great ten days. The following week I ran in the Paris semi-marathon (last Sunday). Quite memorable and fun, but at the time pretty difficult. We ran in the Bois de Vincennes on the east of Paris, left toward Place Daumensil, Place de la Bastille, along the Seine and around Hôtel de Ville and back the the bois (it was a race du bois, if you will **Kayla Dubois**). A few interesting differences between this race and the one's I've seen in the US stood out to me. Like the fact that only less than one quarter of the runners were female, whereas usually it's fifty/fifty in the States. Also, there were little hired orchestras and bands of many sorts lining the course to encourage the runners. And is was quite encouraging. As a runner, it was standard to applaud the bands if they finished a piece as you were running past. My friend, Maggie, has a post-race picture I'll post soon. In the meantime, here's a mini course map:

Is there a picture-to-word ratio limit for blog's? If so, this entry probably exceeds it. My apologies. But photos are more interesting.