Pics of Muros and Galicia

Our apartment.

The walk from our apartment up the hill to he house where everyone else was staying. It was a lot harder to navigate than it looked from this map.

Looking down at the sea from the hill on Muros.

Seafood!!! 

And outside Muros...

Driving a Mercedes rental!

Countryside.

We couldn't believe how beautiful this place was! We proceeded to cross the bridge on foot, explore the old mill buildings, take pics of the castle and part of the Camino de St James, and cool off in the river. Then we had beer and ice cream at the cafe overlooking it.

Exploring a 15th century castle ruin. I peed here.

 

Santiago de Compostela and Muros (Galicia)

We made it to Santiago!!!! Thank god. We had had enough of Barcelona - the heat, smell, bustle, cheap stuff that didn't work, the heat, the expensive food, the heat, and mostly the heat.Matt thinks Santiago is beautiful!

The big cathedral where pilgrims on the Way of St James end their trek. We saw lots of them pour in and cathartically fall down and roll around in the square. The ground next to the entrance to the cathedral has many flowers and candles and notes to the victims of the terrible train accident that happened last week. The flags across the plaza were at half mast also. 

The first thing we did was get some breakfast since we got up so early. We got some pastries and coffee, and drinking chocolate and churros. 

We didn't have lunch here but there were so many good looking restaurants there!

Local liquors that I want to try at a bar before I buy. Side note, we didn't drink any of the tiny liquor bottles I bought for our flight because Lufthansa has free unlimited beer and wine!

We rented a car, which turned out to be a Mercedes hybrid. Lolz.

The drive to Muros was about an hour.

Here we are! The weather is so mild and breezy and the air is so clear and fresh.

We got to our apartment in late afternoon and did laundry, and took showers and naps, since we had been up since 4 am and had a huge seafood lunch with beer.

Now we're in a cafe near our apartment trying to contact the rest of the family, who should have arrived at their rental house by now. Unfortunately we don't have wifi at our apartment so our communication is limited. We tried to get to their house since we can see it on the hill but we couldn't get to it. 

The version of sangria here is Rioja wine (red) mixed with lemonade, and it's delicious. It's like a radler but with cheaper wine.

Matt has a bit of a cold, since our last night in Krakow, so he's finally getting to relax in breathable air and a nicer bed. However, our courtyard is very popular with little kids as a playground, and there is some sort of construction going on all day, and also copious seagulls screaming constantly. Hopefully those will abate by the time it gets dark - it's 9:30 pm and still light.

Ok that's all for now! More later...

Barcelona

My memories of Barcelona:Matt loves meats!

Janky fan, the only thing keeping us alive. 

Showers plus naps = embarrassing hair

On our last night in Barca, we went out to dinner in the Gothic Quarter with Rachel and Gabe. Randomly we chose This nice place, where the guy outside offered us all free sangrias if we ate there.  Matt and I had paella and patatas bravas. Coincidentally this is the restaurant used in Vicky Cristina Barcelona - we sat next to pictures of Woody Allen and Scarlett Johansen on the wall.

Recycling

Poland had no recycling anywhere, though one of our hostel hosts said that as of July 1, some law was passed about it, yet it had not yet become practice.

The Berlin airport had glass and paper recycling only. No aluminum or plastic.

Barcelona has giant recycling and compost bins in some street corners. Yet our apartment is so small and cramped, I question whether people have room for sorting bins in their kitchens. Our apt has just one small trash can in the kitchen, total. We are gathering recycling in a reusable bag I brought, so we can empty it at the street corner the next day.

I wasn't homesick so much in krakow but I am here. The Barcelona apartment is much less cool than the pictures led us to believe, plus they don't have or use the AC they advertised. I hope we can summon the power to get out to check out some cool stuff before we leave for Galicia in three days, and don't regret our stopover here.

Barcelona Day 1

We flew to Barcelona today, remorsefully leaving behind delicious pierogies, cold beer, mild weather, and quaint old European buildings. In exchange we get the hot, humid, sprawling metropolis of Barcelona. Even the airport was humid, like an indoor swimming pool. Taking good advice to not drink the tap water here because of high saline content, we immediately got bottled water. We got picked up by our AirbNb host's transportation gal, Lucia. She drives to our shared apartment in downtown Barcelona. She spoke Spanish to us on the way and we tried vainly to keep up. We reached the building - a cramped 50s apartment squeezed among many others like it. The apartment is shared with several other people and it has tons of quirks and janky shit. We're on the sixth floor, which is actually the seventh because here they don't start counting til the floor above the "lobby" level. Out the back patio we are in a huge courtyard where it can see and hear everything. The standard of living is lower here, maybe this is what "second world" means.  We went to a corner grocery store and stocked up on wine, salamis and smoked meats including the famed jamoni iberco, fruits and other stuff. Matt is totally bushed from yesterday's two walking tours of Krakow, plus not sleeping enough, so he is trying not to get horribly sick. So our first night in Barcelona will be very chill, and I will most likely wander around once it gets much much much cooler. Until then I will drink wine and maybe nap, and spy on all the courtyard neighbors' goings on. Oh and practice my Spanish with my translate app!

Krakow Day 3

We kept seeing girls wearing "crazy pants", so I had to get some. We tried the giant mall for one and a half hours with no luck then we stumbled upon a street market and found these for about US$10. They're super comfortable and breezy.

 :D

 

We tasted a bunch of different liquors here and ended up buying a ginger vodka. Mmm.

Today we went to the salt mine which was amazing and all the pictures are on Matt's camera so we will post them later.

Wawel Castle and lunch

Here we are at Wawel Castle

Lunch

It only cost about $22 usd!!

Arrived in Krakow!

Matt and I have arrived in Cracow safely and so has one of our luggage - his. Hopefully mine will be delivered to our hostel tomorrow.  

The biggest mall I've ever seen The biggest full moon I have ever seen

 An ice cream sundae with wine and cherries, and a polish beer.

 Old town Cracow

 Market Square

 St. Mary's Church

 So romantical. There's lots of horse drawn carriages and flower stands.

Countdown to EUROTRIP 2013!!!!!!!!!!!

Here's the Browns and crew at Ed (Matt's dad's) birthday party two weeks ago.  (left to right) Dominic and Susie, Rachel and Gabe, Matt and me, Ed and Alice with grandson Liam, Chris and Christina with their baby Edie (not pictured, Lucia), and Dan and Stephanie with Ezra.

Everyone here is going to meet up in Muros, Spain (minus Dominic and Susie, who are going to NC, and Ed and Alice). 

Matt and I leave for Krakow in just three days - July 20.  We've been looking forward to this vacation for SO LONG!

I am bringing my iPhone, which has the Blogger app, so I will probably be posting pictures and maybe some text here.  Then I'll probably clean it up and add more when we get back.  So check back for more next week!

Polish calendars from my landlords

These 22 calendars belong to my landlord, whose sister passed them along for me to look at. I looked at all of them. They are Polish, both their parents came from different parts of Poland. I live in a house their parents built, directly across the freeway from the Polish Hall. We still need to go to the Hall and check out the private restaurant in the basement. Dropping the family name will get us in. They have imported Polish beer and snacks for sale, and homemade Polish food.

A couple months ago, my mom, Matt and I went to a new Polish restaurant in SE called Bar Dobre. It was super tasty. So was the food at the summertime Polish Festival last year. I can't wait to eat in Poland!

We are now done with booking all our accommodations. We're staying in a nice, non-partying hostel in Krakow, a cool apartment in Barcelona, and sharing an apartment with Matt's sister and bro on law, Rachel and Gabe. They're all super nice and not too expensive. I think we got good deals!

Saturday we're celebrating our one year anniversary!! :D

The flight is booked!

Booking our roundtrip tickets to Europe was a lot more complicated than I thought it would be.  After months of procrastinating, eventually we just had to go into work on a Sunday, put our laptops side by side in the largest conference room, use a whiteboard to figure out time zones and flight length, both looking at the same shared Google doc, and spend a couple hours running different flight options til we were satisfied.  Only, when I tried to actually buy the tickets, both my cards were declined. The frustration took over, we gave up for the night and went to Breakside Brewery for sustenance.  Amazingly when I called my bank to get help, they called me later that night, and explained the cost of the tickets were slightly above my daily limit.  Also a couple days later my credit card company decided on their own to raise my monthly limit.  Score.  So thanks Umpqua and Discover for increasing my buying power.  Anyways the next day I finally did buy the tickets.

We are leaving mid-afternoon Saturday July 20 to fly to Krakow with a stopover in Frankfurt, which I read is Germany's business and transportation capital city.  It didn't seem like a city I'd want to visit, so I guess we'll just have a bier in one of their fine airport bars.  We will stay at some youth hostel in the heart of Krakow, and check out the whole chunk, including the Kazimierz old Jewish quarter, which is rich in history and is now more bohemian and artsy.  The have a big market there that I want to check out.  I'm hoping it's the opposite of a Generica strip mall, and I'll want to buy everything instead of being disgusted at everything.  I'm just excited to be going to a really old city where there's very few new buildings, and still feels authentic and cultural. After four days there and thereabouts we're taking off for Spain.  We thought it would be good to hang out in a Spanish city on our way to Muros.  We chose Barcelona over Madrid, lots of our friends and family said it's better.  I haven't done any research on Barcelona yet.  I do know that there's huge unemployment especially in younger people.  It will be very interesting to go from a large chaotic city where they speak Spanish and Catalan, on the Mediterranean Sea, to the tiny town of Muros, in a bay of the Atlantic, where they speak Galician (and hopefully English).

In this satellite image of the town of Muros, you can see there's only a few noteworthy places.. One of them is the vacation house the Browns and kin will be staying in, and one of them is a hotel on the waterfront that I want to book for Matt and me, and Rachel and Gabe.  (Rachel is Matt's big sister, she's a lot of fun.)  We are going to have such a great view!