Spain!!

Wow. I really don´t know what to say. I´m going to be coming back to spain in the fall, sometime in September for another year. I´m soo incredibly excited, I can´t even begin to explain. Its amazing.

On other notes, I´m now going back to the states on the 8th of May, so that I can particpate in the World Tae Kwon Do Championships which are being held in Caceriz, just a couple hours away. I´m not going to be competing though - I´m going to be in an exhibition!!! How cool!! SO yeah, thats pretty amazing. I can´t wait.

Also, FC Barcelona (the soccer team of Barcelona), is in the finals, playing Arsenal in Paris, for the league cup. Which is awesome. Its like the World Series of soccer, more or less. So thats pretty amazing. I totally want to see it, but as they´re playing on the 17th, I don´t know if I´ll get to. But I really hope I get to see it, and that barça wins. It´d be amazing. Absolutely amazing.

Thats about it, really. Lots of crazy cool news. Lots and lots of awesomeness. Totally excited to get home for the summer - but absolutely thrilled that I´ll be coming back. It´ll make the summer just that much better. Now I just have to figure out how Kevin can come here to spain too (or at least, to europe!!)

Two more weeks...

Wow, I can´t believe that I only have two weeks left here in Spain. Spain, Salamanca more specificlly, has become home, something that I really wasn´t sure it would be. But it has... I now feel more at home here, wandering around Salamanca, then I ever did in the 2.5 odd years I lived down in Nelsonville/Athens. I know that I still haven´t fully realized that I´m leaving in two weeks, and not coming back for who knows how long. I´ll come back to Spain, to Salamanca someday I know... I just don´t know when.

There´s also a growing realization that of all the things that I want and do not want to do... I really just don´t want to go back to Ohio, go back to school in Athens... it just doesn´t sound like fun to me anymore, at all. So, I´m looking around at other schools, trying to find something that would/could be interesting, fun even. I still don´t really know what I want to study, though I´m leaning farther and farther away from the whole biolgy/natural resources thing, honestly. Am thinking more and more about International Studies or somesuch. It´d be a good bit more buisnessy (which sounds boring), but at the same time, could lead to a job in which I got to travel more. I don´t really know. I´ll just have to wait and see... see how this summer goes.

Prague

Well, I loved Prague. I absolutely 100% mean that. Prague is awesome. All of the important buildings have steeples of one sort or another, and it truely looks like the "fairytale" city that it claims to be.

The people are overall pretty nice, although I really wish I could have figured out a little bit more of the langauge {more than thanks (deek), thank you (dick-y), beer (pivo), no (neh), bridge (most) and castle (hrod, me thinks)}... Czech is apparently a very hard language to learn, which I can totally see. It took me a couple days to figure out the names of the tram/metro stops that I needed to know to get around correctly... (and even so, I still totally missed tram stop once, late at night...).

In anycase, my favorite building in Prague is definetly the Church of Our Lady of Tyn. Its on the Old Town Square, in the center of the oldist part of town. And the two towers totally, truely look like Gargamels Castle from The Smurfs (a picture of which I can not seem to find online...). But yeah. Anyhow, its very very cool. Well, at least it looks cool... I didn´t actually go inside as its "only open for services" - and I just really didn´t feel like attending my first church service, by choice, ever.

But yeah, the rest of Prague was also very very cool. I really liked Petrin Park/Hill where they have an observatory and a 1/5 scale "model" of the Eifel tower. Which is cool, and from where you can see ALL of prague. There´s also the "Mirror Maze", which isn´t much of a maze, but is still quite a cool place... mostly just a mirrors-only funhouse, but still cool.

Anyhow, I´m going to try and get my pictures up here sometime in the next few days. About half my pictures from Granada are now up... but that still leaves roughly 550 to go...