Twas the night before orientation...

After running out of things to do to entertain myself (i.e. finished the Hunger Games series and want to procrastinate packing for yet another trip for as long as possible), I took some time to look back at the past 10 days when I embarked on my Spanish tour. Each city was beautiful and captivating in its own way and I continue to appreciate the rich diversity of the Iberian peninsula. Here are some things I noted:

• The food was best in San Sebastian, closely followed by Valencia. The north also had the best wine, hands down.
• The people in Valencia were the nicest. They seemed to be the least annoyed at my requests for clarifications and offered extra help whenever they could.
• The linguistic diversity in Spain is no joke! In the north, most things were posted primarily in Euskera and then Castellano (Spanish) underneath. The same is true for Valencia, where there is widespread use of Valenciano (the name for Catalan in the Valencian province) as the primary language and then Castellano as the second language. Valencian has a bit of a French twang to it, so between that and all of the Italian and German tourists, it was actually a bit strange sometimes to hear standard Spanish out in public. 

Lastly, I was sure to walk as much as possible and minimize my use of public transportation in order to get the true feel of each place I visited. The first few days, I made hour long treks in shoes that, though somewhat stylish, did not treat my feet kindly. By the fourth day, I gave up entirely on the whole dress-like-a-Spaniard thing and busted out my comfy, touristy, running shoes. My feet were still pretty blistered and achy throughout the entire trip because I never truly rested enough to recover, but even so I continued on foot through each city. 

After coming across a blog post about celebrating the end of a social experiment called The Naked Face Project and reflecting a little bit about how much I walked throughout the week, I realized what it actually means to have these uncomfortable aches as a souvenir of my trip - it means that my body is healthy enough to carry me through trips like that. That I am blessed to have the use of my legs to help me explore new things. This detail of my trip is just another example of the abundance of blessings I have been given. - I'll have to remind myself of this once we start orientation, because if it is anything like winter quarter's orientation, we may be walking (or should I say climbing) up several steep hills. 

With that said, tomorrow I get to meet 30 new classmates and begin the second half of my Spanish adventure. Let the games begin! (--> couldn't resist a reference to the Hunger Games, though it's probably not the most appropriate comment in this sense)