Las Fallas en Valencia!

So this past weekend we took a trip to Valencia, Spain to see the festival of Las Fallas. For those that do not know what it is here is a Wikipedia deffinition. But I basically felt like I was in a war zone with the amount of fireworks going off literally constantly!

The Falles (in valencian) or Fallas (in Spanish) are a Valencian traditional celebration in praise of Saint Joseph in Valencia, Spain. The term Falles refers to both the celebration and the monuments created during the celebration. A number of towns in the Valencian Community have similar celebrations inspired in the original one from the city of Valencia.
Each neighbourhood of the city has an organized group of people, the Casal faller, that works all year long holding fundraising parties and dinners, usually featuring the famous speciality paella. Each casal faller produces a construction known as a falla which is eventually burnt. A casal faller is also known as a comissió fallera.

Basically everybody comes to Valencia to see these massive floats, shoot off fireworks, and get drunk. This festival is like nothing I have ever seen before! It puts 4th of July to shame with the amount of fireworks and crazyness going on in the city. I had to wake up at 7am in order to get to the bus station at 9am for the 3 hour bus ride to Valencia. We got there about 2pm and pretty much did whatever we wanted to for the rest of the day and just had to be back on the bus by 3am to go back home.

I spent my day with 5 other girls walking around the city and trying to figure out what all was going on and what happened exactly with the floats. We ended up just walking aimlessly around the city looking at all the different floats and drinking Agua de Valencia which is absolutely delicious!! It's this drink made up of gin, vodka, champagne, OJ and sugar. It is so fruity but one glass gets you really drunk!

When it started getting dark out they started to burn the smaller floats which was extremely loud because they started the fire with fireworks. Sidenote: People were throwing fireworks in the middle of crowds around people. It was extremely dangorous and stuff like this would never happen in the U.S.

This festival was complete chaos and I have never been to anything like it in my entire life. Around 1am we headed over to this famous club SuperClub 95 which was so awesome! Hands down coolest club i've ever been to! It had two levels and I felt like I was on like Jersey Shore haha

Needless to say by 3am I was more than ready to go home!

smoke from the fireworks

there were SOOO many fireworks and it sounded like explosions

One of the floats

Me with Agua de Valencia

Burning of a small float

Paris 2011

So these past 2 weeks I have done quite a bit of traveling! I went to Paris, France to see all of those sights and then I also went to Valencia, Spain to see the Las Fallas festival. Both trips were interesting and a lot of fun/stressful.

First Paris.

I absolutely loved Paris! The food, the sights, the people, the boys. Everything was absolutely wonderful and breath taking. I went with 3 other girls and we stayed 6 days in Paris. It was about a half a day too much because by the 5th day I was ready to go home and go back to a regular schedule and sleep in my own bed again. Our first night there we just walked around the city saw the Eiffel Tower at night and of course ate a crépe, which are absolutely delicious btw.

Eiffel Tower at Night 

Our second day we actually climbed all 668 steps of the Eiffel Tower which actually wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. The view from the tower was awesome! You got to see the whole city and all of the other famous monuments. After the Eiffel Tower we made our way over to the Louvre to see all the famous artworks including the Mona Lisa and Venus. It was cool to see it but after about an hour I was arted out and tired of looking at it. We then walked around the city for a little bit more but by 6pm we had been going since 10am and were ready to be done for the day. (Paris is a HUGE city and it was a ton of walking)

The 3rd day we went to see a famous basilica called the Sacre Coeur. This church was massive and absolutely beautiful! There were actually lots of locals outside of the church asking to draw your picture for cash which was interesting. After touring this church we stopped at a park for lunch. Food in Paris was very pricey! For a sandwhich and drink you would be paying around 12-14 euro!! So we just stopped at the supermarket everyday before leaving and got sandwhiches. Probably saved ourselves a good €100. After this church we headed over to the Notre Dame. We actually got there just in time because mass was just starting and I got to see the prosession of all the priests and boys studying to become priests. There were also confession booths all along the side of the church with signs that said they spoke like 5 different languages which was really cool. Two of the girls that were with us climbed to the top of the church but my legs could not handle anymore climbing that day haha

Sacre Coeur

Sacre Coeur

Our 4th day was spent traveling to the Red Light District to see the famous Moulin Rouge theater. This part of town was really interesting to see and the theater was really nicely put together. Too bad tickets were like €100 :( We then went to get lunch and went home for nap time because we were all exhausted ha and wanted to go back to the Moulin Rouge at night because its even prettier then! We also went to see the Arc de Triomphe which was really pretty and had a "Lost Soldier Tomb" which was really neat.

Moulin Rouge

Arc de Triomphe

Our 5th day in Paris we went had planned to take the free tour that was available but could not find the meeting point so we ended up just going for a walk and found the famous Love Padlock bridge that I had been searching for the whole time. The thing about the bridge is that a couple gets a lock writes their name on it and then locks it to the fence and throws away the key. Well seeing as I am single I put an H with a heart on it because this past year I have been working on myself and loving myself: =) We then moved on to find the Opera which was HUGE and really pretty! We couldn't go inside though which was kind of a bummer! We still had some time to kill so we of course do what girls do best, shopped! We found this awesome perfume store that is only France called Fragonard. They had some of the best selling perfumes i've ever smelt! Then we hit up the H&M and went home for nap time ha. Later that night we met up with a friend that lives in Paris and got drinks with him which was really nice. We got to ask him all about Paris and get a native's perspective.

My Love Padlock :)

The Love Padlock Fence

Opera

All in all, I really enjoyed Paris and I am very excited to start learning French when I go back for my last year at NWU. Speaking of last year, time sure has been flying by! I cannot believe that my 10 months here are almost over and I will be going back home in 3 months. It makes me sad and happy at the same time. I am really excited to be back home and see all my family and friends but at the same time I have fallen madly in love with Europe! There is so much culture and history, a day doesn't go by that I don't find out something new about this continent. I am excited to start planning my next trip here, hopefully soon after I graduate =)

March Madness!

I have officially registered for my classes for this semester. My schedule is completely different and I am not taking and political science classes mainly because I took 4 last semester and a break from that department was  greatly needed!! I ended up taking a phraseology class, translations, language of music, and a business class. Completely random I know but the phraseology and translation class help a ton with being able to communicate and it is really helping my vocabulary as well. When you translate from one language to another you cannot translate word for word or literally because other languages don't express things the same way as your native language. For example, the English idiom "The early bird gets the worm" is not the same in Spanish, it is said "A quien madruga, Dios le ayuda" which translates to "whoever gets up early God helps".This class is really going to help me be able to write and of course translate more effectively.

Other than school I have not really done much of anything else because I have been adjusting to my new schedule and there have been a TON of "Despedidas" aka going away parties. So I have been saying goodbye to a lot of my friend that only stayed the first semester. It is really sad and got me thinking how thankful I am that I get to stay here for a whole year! It is amazing how much my attitude has changed since the first month that I arrived. In the beginning I was really unsure of being here for that long and I was tempted to change my stay to only a semester, but then I soon began to have a ton of fun and am so glad that I sticked it out  =D

Well I was supposed to go to India with my mom and a friend of mine here the first week of March but apparently you have to have a visa just to enter the country for any amount of days. I was extremely bummed not to be able to go because I really wanted to see my mom and India would have been amazingly beautiful!! Plus staying in 5 star resorts right on the beach would have been heavenly!! Oh well, this just means that I will have to come back to this side of the world and continue my travel adventures:)

As for my upcoming trips, I will be in Paris, France March 10th-15th. I am so excited for that trip! I cannot wait to see the Eiffel Tower and all of the other museums, and because i'm a student I get free access to most of the museums with my student ID which is pretty sweet.

Other trips in March are going to include "Fallas de Valencia" which is a trip organized by my school to Valencia for only €19 which is extremely cheap considering a trip to Valencia by bus is €30! Oh and Valencia is in Spain just north of Murcia, my city. I will also be going to visit my friend Maggie in Latvia the last week in March and into the first couple days in April! It's her 21st birthday and I cannot wait to celebrate that with her American style in Latvia!!!

I am so excited for all my upcoming trips:) Oh another thing that is going on in Spain right now is there are a ton of carnivals. Now, these carnivals are not like back home where there are portable rides, funnel cakes, and beer gardens. These carnivals are huge parades and groups of people in costumes, almost like Halloween, and everybody is suuuuuuuper drunk. This past weekend was the start of all these carnivals and it was really interesting to see these different groups of people dressed in different costumes. I saw a group of SIMS, babies, pirates, zombies, and hippies.

Next post will be much more exciting and will include pictures of Paris =D

Besos!!