Happy Valentine's Day! With love, from me.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Other Links
Hi there! Above is a photographic check-in. Just to send a smile. :)
And here are links for all the photos, loaded onto my photobucket in case the facebook links don't work for ya:
Mom's Visit and the Foreigners
Paris
Scotland
Dénia
Bye-bye Davey
Panoramas
Sunday, February 6, 2011
What Better Way to End a Vacation than on the Coast?
Note on pictures - I'll upload some to my non-facebook picture storage place and post the link here in a couple of days, for those who are not able to see my facebook albums. And I'll post more recent ones than Dénia this week. Now, pictures from Dénia, Spain and some not-so-great-but-still-fun panoramas from when Mom was here:
Dénia
Panoramas (available only via photobucket; facebook doesn't like the dimensions of panoramas)
So, the final part of the vacation story. We got up early on the morning of the 4th in our little apartment in Edinburgh. But we never wake up early enough. So we rushed to get out of the apartment, but missed the first bus that we had intended to catch to get to the airport. Luckily there was a bus right behind it and we were off to the airport not 15 minutes later.
We met Alasdair at the airport to drop off the keys to the apartment and said goodbye one last time. And one last time I need to say here that the Tollemache family was our life-saver. We would have been over-budget and just worn out by trying to eat and entertain as cheaply as possible. What’s less fun than trying to scrimp when you’re on vacation?
I was personally excited to get our last RyanAir flight out of the way. Not that they were a bad company, it’s just that the experience with them made me realize just how awesome things like assigned seats and orderly boarding really are. So, after more waiting in line and snacking on some fabulous sandwiches that David managed to snag for us before we boarded, we were on our way to Spain again.
This was my part of the trip to take care of because it was my friend that we were going to see in Alicante, so I was supposed to have done my research beforehand. Which meant, of course, that we had no idea what we were doing when we got to Alicante. Hey, that’s my style.
So we found a bus that went to the city center and got on it. After asking around, we found the bus station and asked about tickets. We weren’t sure if we should just go for the bus or try to take the train, but in the end we decided that, since the train was a Cercanías, like a longer subway that made stops at every place, we would just do the bus, which was fairly direct and cheaper. It got us all the way to Dénia, where the condo was where my friend Jes and her friends were staying. Once we got to Dénia, we found a restaurant, parked ourselves and our bags, and had a beer and some “brave potatoes” and waited for Jes to come find us.
We settled into the condo, which was tiny, with six people sharing it. Space was tight, but it was nice to have some new company to mingle with. We played games, watched TV, and had some fun with this terribly potent drink that was mixed in a soup pot and served with a high-class metal ladle. It was great fun.
While the other four went one day to another city, I slept in and then went for walks on the beach. It wasn’t warm, but it was fair weather, so we only needed sweaters and maybe gloves, instead of sweaters, gloves, coats, hats, and long underwear under it all. It was a nice break from the other two frigid countries we had been in.
And the next day when the other four went four-wheeling, we did about the same thing. The views were amazing and with the strong personalities of some of the others in the group, we were glad to have some time away from them, even though it was fun to come back together in the evenings to be with everybody.
There wasn’t much else to Dénia. The other four had to leave early in the morning on Saturday the 8th, so we slept in until about 10 o’clock and then checked out of the room by 12 for them and slouched around Dénia until we could catch a night bus to Madrid.
Aaaaaand that was a long bus. I didn’t sleep at all. It was like 6 o’clock in the morning by the time we got to Madrid, but then we had at least 7 hours to wait until we could catch the train back to Castuera. So we found a semi-warm corner of a café to sit in inside the bus station, and we sat. For 7 hours. It got old.
I didn’t trust our set-up in the café to sleep, so while David took a three-hour nap, I sat up, watching our things. I probably could have trusted our surroundings, but my Ecuador experiences made me gun-shy and I didn’t dare. Okay, broken-bottle-shy.
FINALLY we were allowed to board our train and we went home. I never thought I would call this place home, but compared to traveling for almost 3 weeks, that’s definitely what it is. A place to stop moving, for once.
And over the next couple weeks, we watched a lot of movies, did a lot of great cooking, and lounged around to rest our bones. David found out just what I meant when I said that 10 degrees Celsius is cold, despite that its Farenheit translation would never scare anyone. I realized that its because my entire building is made of nothing but tile, concrete and rebar, with no insulating material whatsoever, so the cold from outside makes the walls and the floors cold, which make the inside of the house cold. And oh man how nice my life would be here if the floors were heated.
On the last weekend that David was in Spain, we got on a bus to go to Madrid where we went to my first ever soccer game! We had fantastic seats, something like four rows back from the field. We got to see the players up close and I was even taught how to eat sunflower seeds for the first time! It was phenomenal!
And of course Real Madrid won. Icing on the cake, for sure. And even though it was an outside field, we even stayed warm!
Two days later I got on a bus to come back to Castuera and David left Madrid the next morning, making it safely back to the States. The past couple weeks for me have been uneventful but enjoyable, as it’s getting a little warmer. Well, the temperature does not seem to be rising, but somehow it is warmer. I think it’s the sunshine that has broken through.
I’m working on two books at once right now, the first of which will not end. I’m loving it and reading it on my Kindle, which gives me the ability to highlight all the amazing quotes about capitalism, free market, sex, and love that are just astounding me. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand was always a book I meant to read and I’m glad that I am, but my goodness! I’ve been working on it for so long and I’m only 42% through with it! It might kill me, but I’m plugging away. One thing that is cool, yet also a bummer about the Kindle is that it tracks my progress exactly, meaning that each electronic page that I flip through goes by and gets tallied for me to see, in much the same way that you watch the seconds hand of a clock tick by in high school algebra class. I always enjoyed physical books because I would get lost in what they were saying and then discover that I was already 150 pages into the thing. Or even if it was a slow reader, I didn’t do the calculations at every flip of the page and say dang, I’m only 13% through this book.
So, it’s nice to watch the progress, but also not so nice, it just depends.
And the other book that I’m reading is Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, in Spanish. I want to read through all of them in Spanish, but I’m a little intimidated. This is the last moderately sized one. After this one, they get to be 600, 700, 800 pages long and that’s just a huge thing to undertake in another language. But I want to be able to read any novel in Spanish and Harry Potter is a great first step because A) they’re translated and so they’re in simpler language than if they were originally written by a Spanish author, B) I love the books and so I know I’m making a good investment of my time and it keeps me interested and finally C) I’ve read the books in English so even if I don’t know all the words, I know the context of what it is saying. It’s a fun achievement and props to my friend Jack who has already read all of them in both languages. Impressive.
That’s about all I have for now. Hopefully it’s been a good vicarious vacation for you. It was a good one for me and it was a wonderful gift to be able to have someone to spend the holidays with. Thanks, David.
Hope all is well back home. Did Phil see his shadow this year? I am excited for winter to be over here. I think spring is coming and for that, I’m glad I’m here and not in Idaho, where I think winter will be dragging out into March and April, like it does most years.
Love to all.
Emily
Dénia
Panoramas (available only via photobucket; facebook doesn't like the dimensions of panoramas)
So, the final part of the vacation story. We got up early on the morning of the 4th in our little apartment in Edinburgh. But we never wake up early enough. So we rushed to get out of the apartment, but missed the first bus that we had intended to catch to get to the airport. Luckily there was a bus right behind it and we were off to the airport not 15 minutes later.
We met Alasdair at the airport to drop off the keys to the apartment and said goodbye one last time. And one last time I need to say here that the Tollemache family was our life-saver. We would have been over-budget and just worn out by trying to eat and entertain as cheaply as possible. What’s less fun than trying to scrimp when you’re on vacation?
I was personally excited to get our last RyanAir flight out of the way. Not that they were a bad company, it’s just that the experience with them made me realize just how awesome things like assigned seats and orderly boarding really are. So, after more waiting in line and snacking on some fabulous sandwiches that David managed to snag for us before we boarded, we were on our way to Spain again.
This was my part of the trip to take care of because it was my friend that we were going to see in Alicante, so I was supposed to have done my research beforehand. Which meant, of course, that we had no idea what we were doing when we got to Alicante. Hey, that’s my style.
So we found a bus that went to the city center and got on it. After asking around, we found the bus station and asked about tickets. We weren’t sure if we should just go for the bus or try to take the train, but in the end we decided that, since the train was a Cercanías, like a longer subway that made stops at every place, we would just do the bus, which was fairly direct and cheaper. It got us all the way to Dénia, where the condo was where my friend Jes and her friends were staying. Once we got to Dénia, we found a restaurant, parked ourselves and our bags, and had a beer and some “brave potatoes” and waited for Jes to come find us.
We settled into the condo, which was tiny, with six people sharing it. Space was tight, but it was nice to have some new company to mingle with. We played games, watched TV, and had some fun with this terribly potent drink that was mixed in a soup pot and served with a high-class metal ladle. It was great fun.
While the other four went one day to another city, I slept in and then went for walks on the beach. It wasn’t warm, but it was fair weather, so we only needed sweaters and maybe gloves, instead of sweaters, gloves, coats, hats, and long underwear under it all. It was a nice break from the other two frigid countries we had been in.
And the next day when the other four went four-wheeling, we did about the same thing. The views were amazing and with the strong personalities of some of the others in the group, we were glad to have some time away from them, even though it was fun to come back together in the evenings to be with everybody.
There wasn’t much else to Dénia. The other four had to leave early in the morning on Saturday the 8th, so we slept in until about 10 o’clock and then checked out of the room by 12 for them and slouched around Dénia until we could catch a night bus to Madrid.
Aaaaaand that was a long bus. I didn’t sleep at all. It was like 6 o’clock in the morning by the time we got to Madrid, but then we had at least 7 hours to wait until we could catch the train back to Castuera. So we found a semi-warm corner of a café to sit in inside the bus station, and we sat. For 7 hours. It got old.
I didn’t trust our set-up in the café to sleep, so while David took a three-hour nap, I sat up, watching our things. I probably could have trusted our surroundings, but my Ecuador experiences made me gun-shy and I didn’t dare. Okay, broken-bottle-shy.
FINALLY we were allowed to board our train and we went home. I never thought I would call this place home, but compared to traveling for almost 3 weeks, that’s definitely what it is. A place to stop moving, for once.
And over the next couple weeks, we watched a lot of movies, did a lot of great cooking, and lounged around to rest our bones. David found out just what I meant when I said that 10 degrees Celsius is cold, despite that its Farenheit translation would never scare anyone. I realized that its because my entire building is made of nothing but tile, concrete and rebar, with no insulating material whatsoever, so the cold from outside makes the walls and the floors cold, which make the inside of the house cold. And oh man how nice my life would be here if the floors were heated.
On the last weekend that David was in Spain, we got on a bus to go to Madrid where we went to my first ever soccer game! We had fantastic seats, something like four rows back from the field. We got to see the players up close and I was even taught how to eat sunflower seeds for the first time! It was phenomenal!
And of course Real Madrid won. Icing on the cake, for sure. And even though it was an outside field, we even stayed warm!
Two days later I got on a bus to come back to Castuera and David left Madrid the next morning, making it safely back to the States. The past couple weeks for me have been uneventful but enjoyable, as it’s getting a little warmer. Well, the temperature does not seem to be rising, but somehow it is warmer. I think it’s the sunshine that has broken through.
I’m working on two books at once right now, the first of which will not end. I’m loving it and reading it on my Kindle, which gives me the ability to highlight all the amazing quotes about capitalism, free market, sex, and love that are just astounding me. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand was always a book I meant to read and I’m glad that I am, but my goodness! I’ve been working on it for so long and I’m only 42% through with it! It might kill me, but I’m plugging away. One thing that is cool, yet also a bummer about the Kindle is that it tracks my progress exactly, meaning that each electronic page that I flip through goes by and gets tallied for me to see, in much the same way that you watch the seconds hand of a clock tick by in high school algebra class. I always enjoyed physical books because I would get lost in what they were saying and then discover that I was already 150 pages into the thing. Or even if it was a slow reader, I didn’t do the calculations at every flip of the page and say dang, I’m only 13% through this book.
So, it’s nice to watch the progress, but also not so nice, it just depends.
And the other book that I’m reading is Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, in Spanish. I want to read through all of them in Spanish, but I’m a little intimidated. This is the last moderately sized one. After this one, they get to be 600, 700, 800 pages long and that’s just a huge thing to undertake in another language. But I want to be able to read any novel in Spanish and Harry Potter is a great first step because A) they’re translated and so they’re in simpler language than if they were originally written by a Spanish author, B) I love the books and so I know I’m making a good investment of my time and it keeps me interested and finally C) I’ve read the books in English so even if I don’t know all the words, I know the context of what it is saying. It’s a fun achievement and props to my friend Jack who has already read all of them in both languages. Impressive.
That’s about all I have for now. Hopefully it’s been a good vicarious vacation for you. It was a good one for me and it was a wonderful gift to be able to have someone to spend the holidays with. Thanks, David.
Hope all is well back home. Did Phil see his shadow this year? I am excited for winter to be over here. I think spring is coming and for that, I’m glad I’m here and not in Idaho, where I think winter will be dragging out into March and April, like it does most years.
Love to all.
Emily
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
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