This is Camp Nou, home field of FC Barcelona. This game was the main reason we came to Barcelona in the first place, and it was quite an experience. We got the cheap seats (30 euros) and were on the very top row of the entire stadium.
There were a lot of these trees at Parque Guell that had parrots (i think) flying around and making a lot of noise.
This is me doing an amatuer-class trick at one of the many world-class skate spots in Barcelona
This is a giant sculpture of a spider, located right outside of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, pretty creepy looking thing.
This is just one example of the cool modern architecture around Bilbao.
This is my friend Seth striking an epic pose in Playa de Somo (near Santander).
This is my board! Full and Cas (Spanish brand) 6'3''. It got a little crack in it the second day i took it out, which bummed me out, but I'm going to get it fixed soon enough.
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So I’ve started getting kind of slow with the updates. I’ve done a good amount of traveling over the past two weeks with trips to Bilbao and Barcelona. I went to Bilbao 2 weeks ago on a group excursion (one of the trips planned out for us ahead of time). Bilbao is the major city of the Basque region, which boarders France in the Northeastern corner of Spain. The Basque people speak Euskara, which is an incredibly unique language that cannot be traced back to any other language (like Latin, for instance). The Basque culture is very rich and deeply rooted, which is one of the reasons why the Basque separatists want to be independent from Spain. The Euskara language is filled with lots of ‘k’s and ‘x’s, and is not really that close to Castillan Spanish, which we are learning. Luckily for us, pretty much every person in Bilbao speaks Castillan Spanish, as well as more than a little English.
We were given a brief history of Bilbao along with our tour. Apparently, not too long ago, Bilbao was very dirty. The river that runs through the city was incredibly polluted with sewage waste. Bilbao had a bad reputation of being a grimy port city. So, the city officials decided the completely revamp their image, cleaning the river and the city as well. They also won the bid for the construction of the Guggenheim Museum, an incredible work of architecture which is now the main tourist attraction in the city (with good reason). Since this city-wide revamp, Bilbao is now filled with modern art sculptures, statues, and modern architecture. Bilbao still has an older part of town, with narrow alleyways speckled with small shops and 5 or 6 story apartment buildings, which seems to be common of many European cities.
The Guggenheim was definitely an interesting experience. The artwork inside was a mix of giant geometric obstacles to walk through on the first floor and some really crazy sculptures and artwork by the Japanese artist Muruagi on the 3rd floor. Muruagi’s work was a mix of pop Japanese culture, anime, and graffiti. In one room we watched the video Muruagi made for Kanye West’s song Good Morning. In another room a full size naked anime girl transformed into a fighter jet plane and some sort of robot. Crazy.
The week following Bilbao not too much happened. One of my friends on the trip had a birthday and we celebrated that night on the beach, which was fun. My computer also broke that week (the monitor went black) and took me a week to fix it (it works now). Other than that, pretty uneventful week.
This past weekend (March 5-8), I went to Barcelona with about half of my group. Barcelona was AMAZING. The city is huge but still holds an irresistible charm to it. This was my first time flying with RyanAir, and I’ve got a couple things to say about them first of all. We flew out of Santander Thursday night around 10:30 PM, in one of the windiest days that we have had here so far. I think every other airline would have delayed our flight or cancelled it altogether, but not RyanAir. We took off 5 minutes early, and after 30 minutes of smooth flying, we began our descent back to the ground, only to be bombarded with turbulence. Sitting in the plane felt like being on a dizzying roller coaster. It was really rough, but we landed safely and gave the pilot a round of applause. I don’t know if it was the wind or not, but we got to Barcelona 30 min ahead of schedule.
I'll update more later.
Plaza Mayor in Salamanca. This plaza is from the 18th century and is one of the main attractions for both tourists and Spaniards. It's basically just a big flat plaza enclosed by this 4 story building/wall with lots of shops and restaurants along the bottom. It was constantly filled with people while we were there, during the day and most of the night. by the way, we had some of the best kebab wraps of our entire lives in salamanca at these restaurants called doner kebab, so delicious. 
This is the view from our room on the 7th floor in a really nice hotel in Leon. 
This is part of our group at the top of a mountain trail in Covadonga. Covadonga is an area in Picos de Europa with some really big lakes surrounded by huge mountains. It was pretty warm that day ( i was wearing a t-shirt and pants) but there was still snow on parts of the trail we walked on. In this picture (from left to right): Gonzalo and Greta (our teachers/group coordinators), Emma (Greta's daughter), Lauren, a professional photographer from Asheville (Greta's friend), somebody being blocked by a bookbag, and Nadia.
One of the Covadonga lakes.
A great view from the trail in Covadonga.
