travel
Here’s a little quiz for those who have been following my blog. If I were going to visit a monastery high up on a cliffside in the mountains outside Barcelona, which of the following modes of transportation would I choose: 1. A comfortable luxury tour bus driving on a
travel
I’m behind on my blogging due to an Influx of Fun™, so here’s a quick catch-up on what’s been happening in Barcelona since we spoke last: Saturday During my pre-travel research period (otherwise known as “Incessant Googling”) I ran across the Barcelona Improv Group, an English-language improv
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Spain is good at basketball. Really, really good. Arguably, other than the United States, they’ve been the best national team in the world over the past few years. Of course that’s like saying “Other than Facebook, MySpace has been the most popular social network over the past few
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So funny thing — after spending the better part of the last month brushing up my Spanish I managed to come to the one part of Spain where Spanish isn’t the first language. Not everyone knows this (I sound like I’m playing Wikipedia) but this region of Spain is
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By totally random coincidence, my brother and sister-in-law are in Barcelona at the same time as me. Well, maybe not that random, considering that I’ve been systematically stalking them since my company moved its headquarters to their hometown (Boulder), allowing me to randomly show up on their doorstep 4-6
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In the lead-up to my trip, I approached the impending 10-hour Portland to Amsterdam flight with the same sense of doom that one might have when assigned to life imprisonment. It would be — by several hours — the longest flight I’d ever taken, and growing up the joke in Alaska
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I was worried that I wouldn’t have anything to blog about on my last night here. The last two days have passed uneventfully, with me mostly working during the day and walking around at night in the lovely evening air. And then at 9:45 tonight, the landlord showed
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You know how you sometimes do something where you know it’s a bad idea but you do it anyway because you’re too lazy to do the right thing? No? Perhaps you don’t live in my head. I had my latest willfully stupid moment yesterday when I did
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I’ve been packing in the sightseeing over the last few days, since I’m leaving Nicaragua on Wednesday. Life is good. The power has stayed on. The internet has stayed up. The landlord has gone out of town. Even the mosquitos have done their part to make sure that
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I’ve managed to go my entire adult life without ever having the power company knock on my door, demand payment and then abruptly shut off electricity to the house. It took seven days for this to happen in Granada. Some backstory: Two days after I arrived here, a note
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It’s been an interesting 24 hours in Granada. Right now it’s 5:30 a.m. and I’m writing this in the darkness of the living room in my casa. I was awoken about 15 minutes ago by a giant storm — wind rattling the windows and rain pelting
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Yesterday I took a tour to Volcán Mombacho, the allegedly-dormant volcano that towers over Granada. The tour brochure suggested bringing walkable shoes, a jacket, mosquito repellent and water, advice that was soundly rejected by most of the rest of the tour group, to their later chagrin. But not by me.