Oh my GAAAAAAAAAWD

Holy shit, how the time does fly.

It seems like only yesterday it was early January and I was traveling around London with the parents and girlfriend, not updating my blog. Then all of a sudden it's early April and I'm in Barcelona, not updating my blog. Where do the months go?

Well here I am, in the Barcelona bus station, waiting to catch my ride to Valencia, which kicks off the real travel-y part of my post-Oxford...travels. Let me get you up to speed on what's happened and where I've been:

After Oxford, I went to Dublin for a few days around St. Patrick's Day with some American friends. Dublin is an incredibly expensive place. We figured there would be a bit of a markup, but goodness. A pint of beer at virtually any pub in Dublin was at least five euros, often more. That's pretty ridiculous. Other than that, Dublin's pretty alright: we got to see the Book of Kells, which as a history nerd made me giddy. We also got to tour the Guinness storehouse and see how they make the stuff. The tour came with a free pint at the end, as well as all the handfuls of barley you can eat (it's actually pretty alright!). The last real highlight from the trip was Christ Church Cathedral, which is basically the official church of the city, even though it's Anglican. Go figure.

After Dublin, I came back to Oxford and had a few days left to prepare for traveling to Spain. That meant either throwing away a lot of the stuff I had in my room or sending it back home in boxes, since the bag I bought to travel around Europe was much, much smaller than the bags I had brought stuff over in from Minnesota. I sent a lot of stuff home, and it wasn't cheap: it probably cost me about the same as an extra flight from London to Minneapolis. That said, there was a lot of stuff that was pretty irreplaceable, and a lot which would have cost more to re-buy when I got home, had I destroyed them. So I spent a lot of money on that. Then it was off to Spain!

I woke up at 9:00, thinking I had plenty of time to catch a bus to Gatwick from Oxford, for my 12:40 flight to Lisbon, where I would transfer to Barcelona.

Then I found out the flight was at 12:10.

Then I went to the bus station and saw that the bus to Gatwick had just left five minutes early. The next bus wouldn't come for an hour. Crap.

I ended up getting to Gatwick at 12:05, ahead of schedule according to the bus driver. I checked in quickly, as there was no line for TAP (Portuguese airline), where I was told they would try to hold the flight for me, but if I didn't make it in time it would be my own fault. Cue me sprinting to the security check, only to be told I had a corkscrew in my backpack (I had packed miscellaneous stuff like that in a hurry, dammit) and that the entire bag needed to be searched. So that took about five minutes. Cue me sprinting through the rest of Gatwick with my negligibly-lighter backpack and a plastic bag full of dirty clothes, realizing with each step that gate 43 is, in fact, on the complete goddamn opposite side of the airport from where I checked in. Bear in mind all the Regent's Park soccer games I was going to play in this term were either canceled due to weather or scheduled to be on the same day as one of my tutorials. Also, I had a cold from lugging box after box of stuff from my house to the post office. Also, I hadn't had any breakfast. Needless to say, running was not a pleasant experience.

I rounded the corner, where I saw gate 43 glowing in front of me, and despite all the televisions on my approach telling me my flight was "Doors Closing", the official-looking woman standing at the end of the moving walkway asked if I was going to Lisbon. A glimmer of hope! Yes, I'm going to Lisbon. "He's here!" she says to the lady behind the desk. "You made it, good!" the other one says. By the time I got there, they had held the plane for me for a good 10 minutes. Whatever people's bad experiences with some airlines may be, I could not have been more impressed by how awesome those ladies were to me. The moral of the story is this: make sure you know when your flight is, play it safe when you live 2 hours from the airport, and fly TAP. TAP is good people.

My flight from Lisbon to Barcelona, by contrast, was incredibly easy. I had a five hour layover and a nice, air-conditioned airport to relax in. Trying to maintain my vegetarianism, I had to resort to eating Pizza Hut Express. (That's a difficult task for me, since I used to work in one of them at Target, and I know how those pizzas are made. Hint: it's not exactly a hand-crafted artisan pizza.)

I got into Barcelona the night of the 24th and met up with my friend Eli, who's studying at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, the city's premier university. His brother Luke came in to visit a couple days later, and our friend Justin, who is studying this term in Belfast, came in for his Spring break the next week.

It's hard to believe it's really been so much time, but I've spent three whole weeks in Barcelona, mostly unwinding. The weather is amazing compared to England, with the exception of a few chilly or rainy days, and there's this thing called the Mediterranean Sea. I can find a wall by the beach, dangle my bare feet over the water, and read my book. It's incredible. There are also parks to see, particularly Parc Güell, designed by Barcelona architect Antoni Gaudi, which has some great views of the city.

Living in Barcelona is pretty cheap, especially compared to England. They have 40oz bottles of beer for 73 cents at the supermarket. That's a pretty low-cost investment which can last most of the night on its own. That said, Spanish beer isn't great. It tastes like Mexican beer, but less cheap and watery. It really made me miss The Cricketer's Arms, my neighborhood pub of choice in Oxford, where my friends and I would go a few times a week and get a pint or two of St. Edmund's ale. Delicious, wheaty, real English beer.

I was incredibly shocked by the lifestyle of the Spanish, or at least of most Spanish students. Eli and his housemates typically have no class on Fridays, and boy do they take advantage of it. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, they'll typically stay out until at least four or five in the morning. The good weather certainly makes this easier, but it's still mind-blowingly late compared to what I'm used to from England. There, my friends and I would pretty regularly stop by the pub on our way back from dinner. We'd get a few pints, agree we were all tired, and walk a few blocks back home and fall asleep or get back to work. Not so in Spain, where any drinking before 10:00 p.m. is considered stupid, since it will make you too tired to go out late, and ending the night before 2:00 a.m. makes you a weirdo. Frankly, I prefer England's pub culture, since it's much more relaxed and quiet, and more conducive to conversation between friends. When Justin was visiting from Belfast, he expressed a similar feeling. The main thing I can't comprehend is how people can do the bar scene here more than one night in a row. I can do it maybe once a week if I want to, but afterward I need at least two or three days to recover. Maybe I'm getting old.

I didn't take too many photos while in Barcelona, since I was here for Semana Santa (Holy Week), which is the busiest tourist week of the year, and I didn't want to make myself look too touristy by having a camera everywhere I went. There are a lot of pickpockets in Barcelona, see. My stay in Barcelona was mostly supposed to be fore relaxation, anyway. And I certainly did get to do a lot of that. The three weeks flew by really quickly, and now I'm off to Valencia, city of El Cid, Rodrigo Diaz. There will be a lot more historical sightseeing there than there was in Barcelona, I'm sure, and I'm only there for two nights so I'll have little choice but to hurry to get it all in.

After Valencia, I'm flying to Sevilla, the major hub and effective-capital of the Spanish empire. I'll be spending almost a week there, hopefully visiting essentially every museum, library, and monument they have to offer, and with any luck I'll be able to get some research done for my senior thesis next year, which will be on the Spanish Empire.

I'll take lots of photos from here on out and post them to share as soon as I can. I'll also be sure to upload the photos I've yet to put up from Bath, London, and Dublin. Stay posted!

Oh hey, I'm not dead

Hi everybody. On the off chance you're still reading this, rest assured I am alive and have not been murdered in an attempt to find the thieving crackhead who stole my laptop and iPod. In fact I have a shiny new laptop and will hopefully be getting a fancy new iPod Touch when I get back, all for free! (Actually I profited from the thing, since the insurance company sent us more for my new toys than we paid, even though we told them exactly how much replacements would cost. Very curious.)

I don't have time to upload pictures of the last, oh, month and a half of my life just now, but rest assured I will get around to it someday. I still have trips to Stirling and Edinburgh to relate, as well as my awesome fun visiting Bath and London with the girlfriend and parents.

This term I'm taking a tutorial on Early Modern Spain and Latin America, which is awesome and extremely fascinating. It's going very well and I'm always fascinated by the new topics. Unless something goes horribly wrong in the last four weeks, the course has reinforced my desire to study colonial Latin America in graduate school and pursue a doctorate in it.

My other tutorial is on Republican-era Rome, starting with the Second Punic War and ending about a hundred years before the establishment of the Empire in 27 BC. It's very different from what I've studied in the past, since I've never done ancient history before, but my tutor is very helpful (and patient!) with my silly elementary questions and it's quite a bit of fun.

Check back soon (okay, who am I kidding) for more updates: they WILL come!