Massive Update!

So this is officially the longest I've gone between posts. Ooops! Let me try and play catch up for a bit...Where did I leave off?

Things have been great. Incredibly busy, as the semester is starting to wind down which is nuts. Two weekends ago I went to Barcelona again with a few girls from the program and to see Jessica. I love that city (it actually reminds me a lot of San Francisco) so that was a lot of fun! We ventured by train to Figueres which is where the Dali Museum is and that was fantastic. We spent most of the day there just wandering around the exhibits and slightly exploring the tiny but charming town. The weather is Barcelona was wonderful, heaven compared to freezing Madrid. We also celebrated St. Patty's day there which was really fun (I got an awesome green guinness top hat from one of the bars)!

Once back, we had a quick half week of classes because early Thursday morning we left for our group trip to the north of Spain! It was a fantastic trip! We went by bus and our first stop was Bilbao to see the Guggenheim museum. Sadly, we had a bad guided tour which kind of ruined the museum for me, but it was still a very cool building. Then we continued on to San Sebastian which was by far my favorite stop on the trip. It was absolutely beautiful! And it was really rainy and gross out so I can't imagine how amazing it would be in the sunny, warm weather. Ha! We had the afternoon/night there so we explored the city and its nightlife and then the next day had a guided walking tour all around the city, from one end of the beach to the other and into the center, etc. It was a lot of walking but such a pretty city! We had lunch at a great restaurant at the top of a hill overlooking San Sebastian's bay. Amazing view!

From San Sebastian we took our bus to a tiny little town in the La Rioja region of Spain. The town was called Haro and was really small and quaint, with not a lot going on but it was a cute place. We stayed there overnight because it was close to the winery/wine museum we were visiting the next day. We went to a wine museum which was cool, but kind of a tease because I think most of us wanted to see the vineyards, wine cellars and taste the wine. Apparently we were supposed to have a wine tasting at the same place but something got messed up and we didn't end up getting to do that (which was VERY disappointing). So from there we drove to another small town for lunch at supposedly one of the best restaurants in Spain. It was in a really cool building, like someone's old house and the food was good and we more than made up for the lack of wine tasting because they just kept bringing us jugs and jugs of wine at the table. :-)

From there we went to our last overnight stop on the trip, Burgos. We stayed in a really nice hotel (as SC always puts us up in reallly nice hotels) and just relaxed there for a bit before venturing out into the cold (and snow!) at night. The town is really pretty, right on the river and really beautiful. But I think we were all ready to head back to Madrid after our whirlwind tour of the North!

The next day we stopped in Laguardia for lunch in a palace, which was really good and a nice ending to the trip and then we headed back to Madrid. It's still cold here and poured this morning but hopefully it will start to clear up and warm up because I'm MORE than ready for some sun! Tomorrow night my family comes!! I'm really excited for them to come and be able to show them the city and then Sunday morning we go to Portugal for a few days which I'm really excited about. Hopefully it will be warm/sunny there!!

Ok I think that's a lot of catch up for now...Hopefully I'll remember/have the time to write again soon!