Swiss

I can officially say I have been hiking in the alps! The only down side is that I had to take a bad grade for my missed history test. I guess..... you can't win them all. We reached the small city of Lucern on thurday and spent one day taking a ferry to the mountains and hiking and resting on them. We found ourselves straying off the path regularly and finding some pretty cool hiddin things, like an amazing area behind a waterfall. It was also pretty tight to see the familiar face of Jon Mouw on this trip as he began his continental European travel after already having been in London for a week. sorry I have to end here... I would write more, but I am leaving to italy for ten days in a half hour.

Bar-Cel-Ona

A real, real tight place to be - Barcelona. "slip off the shoes, tip my toes in the jacuzzi baby". I love Spain! First of all, I am fluent in spanish thanks to my two years of studying it at Unity. So, I was able to easily communicate with all of the people there. Second, the coastal city is Beautiful. The mark of the famous architect Gaudi gets my stamp of approval as well. The Sagrada Familia is one of his masterpieces. This "melted candle" (in the words of Aaron Faber) is like no other cathedral I have ever seen. We also walked through the park he designed: Parc Guell. The park has the longest park bench in the world. We also went to the the Beach where we played hacky sack. It was fun. Later in the weekend we walked to the palace of Barcelona and chilled at the park. North of the palace is the Olympic park where we saw the place where the olympic ceremonies were held, as well as the Olympic stadium. On saturday Aaron, John, and I went on the tour of Camp Nou, FC Barcelonas stadium. (one of the best teams in the world) This stadium was five star rated! The players seats were leather car seats with the FC Barcelona sign embroidered on them.
One of the highlights of my weekend was eating at a Mediterranean resteraunt by the beach! The Shrimp, crab, and other sea fish we ate were sick, but I just ate it and tried not tlook at it. I just want to say that I Love lawren sinnema....when the waiter asked what he wanted to drink Lawren said "water". The waiter responded by saying "auga"? Then Lawren responded by hastily saying "NO, WATER!" It was great. I love barcelona!

City of love

Paris, France. An amazing city with some amazingly open people.
First of all, as always, we saw all the famous sites in Paris such as: Notre Dame, The Pantheon, Luxemburg park, The Eiffel tower, Arc de Triomphe, and Sacre Couer. If this was not enough we took a day and went to Versaille to see the amazing Palace of Louis IX and former residence of Napoleon. Its breathtaking gardens keep us occupied for most of the afternoon and the inner decor including the hall of mirrors keep us very interested.
The people of Paris are more open than in any other city I have ever seen. Im pretty sure I saw at least 35 couples making out everywhere like the middle of the street, the subway, in the bakery, and anywhere in which a large number of people would see them. Needless to say I was rather disgusted with the whole situation. Other than those 70 people most of the other French people were very friendly and hospitible.
On Saturday night we dicided to splurge and go out for a nice (expensive) meal in the latin quarter. We ended up at a pretty upscale resturaunt for about 3 1/2 hours chatting and eating and drinking.
Amongst many random things on this trip we had an incident where we had wine but no cork screw and Aaron being the smart guy he is decided to push the cork through with a pen. This is the result. It still tasted good though.