It's the most wonderful time of the year!

I am feeling incredibly giddy about the fact that springtime is here and that life, in general, is just plain fantastic.

I happily spent my Sunday lounging around with friends in the sun at parque El Retiro, along with hundreds and hundreds of other Spaniards who are equally as happy to enjoy the sunshine. 

Think of a cat on catnip -

Sooooo good

and that's pretty much what I look like in the sun. Even though I was raised in a desert city with incessant sun (El Paso is the Sun City), Cristina in the spring & summer time is a much nicer and happier version of Cristina in the winter. I can't wait to see what the next few months have in store for me knowing that next quarter will be full of nice weather (and hopefully an equally relaxing course load). 

I am really sad though that the end of a quarter abroad also means that the people I have gotten to know & love over the past 10 weeks will be shipping back to the states. I hardly knew anyone at the start of the program, but it wasn't long at all before I realized these were truly some great people that I have been blessed to get to know. I guess now I can just be that much more excited to get back to Stanford in the fall!

As much as I miss my friends and family from home (spending more and more time with my host mother and really feeling cared for makes me miss my own mother so much!), I have been filled with this incredible sense of happiness. I visited two monuments in the outskirts of the city last week that really made me appreciate life, in a slightly creepy, but overall really fulfilling way. 

This is El Escorial, a monastery designed by King Phillip II which then became the final resting place for all the  Spanish kings and queens in history. You get to tour the different parts of the monastery and see the actual tombs of all the royal families in the crypt! 

This is El valle de los caidos, the valley of the fallen, which is a huge monument erected by Franco to commemorate all the people who died during the Spanish civil war. The sight is captivating and it quite literally takes your breath away to see a monument like this (visible from miles away on the mountainside) and to understand what it stands for. There is alot to be said about the fact that Franco himself is buried here, as well as the sentiment it holds for the Spanish people today. 

These visits sparked all sorts of philosophical and historical questions for me, but I won't bore you with those thoughts here. I will, however, encourage you to watch the video about Your Brain On Love on this site. It's seriously cool.