For most of my friends, Christmas break ends today (and for most Americans, it ended last week!). But, as always, I've got the extended weekend, meaning that I am still de vacaciones until Wednesday. The break has been good though -- maybe even great. I've had about 3 weeks to just hang out, relax, travel around, and engage in some tomfoolery. And who doesn't love some tomfoolery every now and again?
During this break, I've made new friends, traveled (finally) outside of Spain, took day trips to Madrid, gotten better acquainted with Toledo, and I think... at some point... we became "regulars" at a few locales. I finished a good book, I baked, I did a lot of laundry, I became accustomed to living alone... (and now I must quickly become unaccustomed to living alone).
My trip to Lisbon was fantastic. The weather, though rainy, was much more pleasant than it has been in Toledo (it was a bit more bipolar, as well). It was mostly gray, sprinkled occasionally, and the sun even decided to show its face every now and then. My friend was sick with what we self-diagnosed as Strep, and I can't believe she managed to actually still go out and see things. If it were me in that situation, I'm sure I would have been a much bigger baby. I feel like we got to see and do a lot of things, but we were never rushed. And that's the way, (uh huh, uh huh) I like it.
This New Year's Eve has to have been the best one of my mere 23 years of living. When we got to Lisbon, we had no plans for how we would spend the night. We were still not sure what we were going to do at 7:00pm on New Year's Eve. We asked the receptionist at the hostel if he knew of any place to go for dinner, and he invited us to have dinner at the hostel, with his friends. We ended up making some new Spanish friends (irony) who were also staying at the hostel. They shared their dinners with us, and we all went together to the main plaza before midnight. It was so great. We brought cans of grapes from Spain, and tried to do the traditional eat-all-12-grapes-before-the-clock-strikes-12 business, which was fun, though didn't work out so well. It's hard to eat a grape every second. Try it (when nobody is watching). But I think we deserve some slack since it was our first attempt! The atmosphere was so great. They had music playing in the plaza, (some live, and then some recorded) and fireworks going off from all 4 sides. It was incredible. It was definitely a great way to spend the first night of the New Year.
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| Fireworks in the Plaza |
I'll post some more pictures of Lisbon in the near future. If you haven't seen, I've added a Flickr box to my blog, and I've been putting some pictures there. I feel like the world of picture uploading can be somewhat of a pain in the rear. But you know...
Just wanted to make a quick post to let you know that everything is going well.
2011 is off to a pretty good start.
1 comment:
You know, I've found that it's easier to meet people in a hostel than when you are even just having real life with them in Spain. Not sure why that is, but maybe it's the shared experience. Also, it's way hard to eat a grape every second. I tried it this year with real grapes and it was tough.
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