So right now I’m hanging out with Colleen before going to Easter Vigil mass at Sacre Coeur trying to catch up on emails and such. As for the past couple of weeks, I’ve just been working on my projects and relaxing during the weekends with friends. This past week was really different though – an intensive design week where the American’s were divided and paired up with three other French 2nd year architecture students to create a 24 square meter green box house that left no carbon footprint. It was to be designed with a client in mind and made to run completely by its own energy. My group members, Maxine (m), Marie (f), and Antoine (m). Designed and finished it in two days (even though we had four, our design had to be restarted several times), the project made me learn a lot more french and I made some new friends. After going to lectures and guest speakers on Monday and Tuesday, we had all day (and night) Wednesday and worked Thursday morning before presenting at around 3pm. The entire thing was meant to be in English, but more of a mixture of a language was achieved than anything. I had dinner with Jeremy, Jon, Vince, and Antoine, all french on Thursday night and just talked shop, language differences, work, family, and drinking games over homemade crepes. It was a great time. I’ll be relaxing and catching up most of the weekend, hoping to get a call from my family because my phone ran out of minutes. hint hint. Monday (Easter Monday) will be a work day.
and to all, HAPPY EASTER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Spain Travels and Catching Up
March 22, 2008
Well I truly apologize for being so bad at keeping this updated… it looks like that’s a current theme. So be prepared. It’s been more than a month and I have a lot to write.
So I traveled to Spain at the end of February with none other than my best friends here, Max and Charlie. However before that I was able to meet my Mom in Cologne, well Bonn (birthplace of Beethoven) actually. I met her in front of the Dom cathedral and it was like I hadn’t left her and just saw her yesterday. At the same time I nearly cried because it was so nice to just see someone that knows you better than you know yourself after being around “strangers” most of the time (Although all us American students have become a family pretty much – albeit dysfunctional). That first night together we walked around Bonn and then got dinner and just joked around. I can’t describe how happy I was… man even typing this up makes me kind of emotional, phew! Haha. So the next day we went to see the Krivokutya side of the family in Gelsenkirchen and Herten. It was really cool seeing my mother’s father’s side, and to see the resemblance. We just talked and had coffee at my great aunt’s house while my Mom met her first cousins for the first time. It was strange because I saw pictures of me when I was little and pictures of my family from years ago, and I didn’t even know these people. I felt a little weirded out while feeling really loved at the same time. We then went to the hospital to visit my great uncle Max, my grandpa’s cousin. He was sleeping. It was sad. I didn’t know how to react so one of my second cousins (? My mom’s first cousin is my….??) walked around with me to a castle on the grounds of the hospital. We talked about what it meant to get a tattoo and how you change as you grow up. And that crows were her favorite animal because they were so smart. We walked back to the hospital and stayed a bit more. I prayed for him as I watched my mom try to talk to him in Croatian. That was the first time we saw a reaction, he tried to say something but just went back to sleep. We ended the day at my great aunt’s house and met some more family members before taking a 45 minute train back to the hotel that night. It was so great to talk to my Mom, I can’t describe it better than that!! I definitely cried as I got on the bus to the airport the next morning.
Okay, so now I will talk briefly about my Spain travels, because they mostly consisted of traveling by plane and train to different cities, staying in hostels, and sketching the modern architecture (well, mostly. We went to a few historical sites). I’ll share a story from each city.
I met up with Max and Charlie in Barcelona, where they had been for the two days I was with my mom. I enjoyed looking at the various Gaudi architecture, and highly recommend going and touring the Sagrada Familia. I can’t wait until that thing is finished. Mmmm nerdy architecture dreams. I met up with a friend studying there for a year and ate lunch bought at the fresh food market on Las Ramblas. Sitting and just talking was really beautiful. She made sure she spoke Spanish all the time so speaking in English was a little harder for her. A lot of other architecture students from the program were also in Barcelona so later that night (after walking around the city all day, from Park Guelle, to the Harbor and the Gothic quarter, and no I don’t mean the angsty anti-social metal heads, I mean the old part of Barcelona with the cathedral etc) we all met and went to an Aussie bar. And stayed anti-social by just talking amongst ourselves about all the neat-o architecture, like the beautiful simplicity of the German Pavilion and why Gaudi totally dominates Barcelona and how Enric Miralles loves the curved form. I’ll press on with the other cities…
Bilbao! We arrived by plane into an airport designed by Santiago Calatrava. I felt like I was on the inside of a wave. We checked into our shady Hotel Bilbi and slept. The next morning we walked down the river to the Guggenheim Museum designed by Frank Gehry to sketch in the sun and then had the most amazing breakfast inside. You would think that because you’re eating in a world-class museum that you would pretty much have to sell your soul to pay for the meal. But nay, friends, it was super cheap for the most amazing café con leche and Spanish omelet I’ve ever had. To talk about the museum though, heh…. We were completely blown away. It lives up to all the hype. The atrium is cloud-like and soaring. The exhibit paled in comparison to the building… haha we got there just in time to see “American Art”. Oh irony.
The highlight of Bilbao however was seeing one of my best friends Anne Marie. We walked around the old part of Bilbao with her and eventually got dinner before I had to leave. It was very refreshing to see her too.
From Bilboa we flew to Seville. It was a city that we didn’t really research a lot of before going to, but we had a great time just walking around in the glorious warm sunshine and see a lot of old architecture. It is one of favorite cities because I had just a great relaxing time there. I got to go into a perpetual adoration chapel for a little while in the morning of the day we were there and it was just amazing. The architecture was our first example the mixture of western and Islamic architecture. And it had great graffiti.
We trained it to Cordoba where we stayed in a sweet hostel with some other friends and the following day we spent inside the Mosque-turned-Catholic-Church-turned-Museum sketching in the cold interior perspectives of the hypostyle columns before walking around the city and realizing that nothing was open because of an Andalusian national holiday. We ate a sweet Chinese buffet before catching a train to Granada.
Granada was a sad story that I won’t tell. It was still beautiful and the Alhambra was interesting. But that’s all I will say.
We concluded our Spain travels in Calatrava-town, commonly known as Valencia… another favorite city. We actually got into Valencia at 5am and watched the sun rise over the museum section of Valencia on the coast, mostly designed by the architect Santiago Calatrava, thus the permutation of any time of town or village named after him. Yes, another nerdy architecture joke. Later that day we went down to the coast and walked around in the Mediterranean before watching the sun set over Valencia and eating Paella in the Plaza de la Virgin. It was a great break. I got a lot of sketching done, but school started too quickly after the break and at all at once I was pulling all nighters again.
I’ll leave you with this post and will write about the past two weeks shortly.
