An recent IM conversation between me and Gene:

urbanfoxx 1: i'm gonna get in trouble with my program for misuse of school computers
urbanfoxx 1: i'm writing a paper on Dali for my art class
timesbgd: why would you get in trouble?
urbanfoxx 1: i had to look up the words in spanish today, on freetranslation.com in the computer lab, for sodomy, prostitute, mastubartory, feces and syphillis.
urbanfoxx 1: and i'm only half done.

So, that's what I'm up to.

Next post: brag-fest about how I pulled off Thanksgiving in a country that doesn't sell cranberries. Also, a healthy dose of self-deprecation about how, in all of the many pictures people took, I look like someone who just spent 10 hours in the kitchen.

It would have killed me to run a brush through my hair?!

I have a lot to write about, and I'm not going to write about it now. Granada, Paris, and the hellacious week of coursework that came in between deserve a little more brainpower than I'm able to give right now.

But my roommate Anne and I were just up on the roof of our building, eating some cheese we found at a market in the city center with some fresh bread and a bottle of sparkling rioja, looking out at Placa Espanya, the lights coming off the Palau Nacional on Montjuic, and the Olympic monument right behind it.

Have to make sure I make this clear - that I at least put down in writing for posterity, for my parents who have made this possible and for myself - that rare is the moment that I'm not entirely aware of how lucky I am to be here. This is likely to be the time I look back on as the best of my life, young and without any real responsibility, living in Europe, experiencing a world that has something new and gorgeous to offer every time I turn a (literal street) corner.

There's something about the roof that makes me want to talk about it. All of the things that living in Europe has offered me become incredibly clear when I'm standing on the top of our building, seeing what I've got around me.

Anne and I were talking about it, while we were up on the roof having our wine, cheese and bread meal that would have set us back thirty dollars in the States that cost us, all told, about twelve euros here. Even though we've both been keenly aware of it the whole time we've been here, we've never talked about it before - we're both in a class of people who go to four-year universities that encourage spending a semester abroad, families who give us the means to actually go and do it, and have a sensibility that allows us to look around and absorb as much of it as we can.

How lucky can you get? What on earth have I done to deserve a life like the one I'm living here?

At the very least, my own children will be lucky. Mom's gonna run her mouth about "when I was in college and spent a semester in Europe" so much there's no way I'm gonna be able to dodge making it possible for them to have semesters abroad themselves.

Meh. Spoiled, already.

Fireworks display at Placa Espanya.

Exams, Granada, presentation, exam, exam, exam, Paris.

...return from Paris, blog entry.

Okay?

Okay.

This metric system is killing me. It really is.

My bottle of shampoo is 300 g. The piece of frozen lasagna I ate for dinner tonight is 300 g. I had as much lasagna for dinner as I have...shampoo. What?!

...or maybe one was 300 ml. But still. It boggles the mind.

---

In other news, I made a new friend today. He's about seven, and I'm pretty sure he's retarded. I met him at Ciutadella when I was sitting near a veranda where he and his friends were playing. I was eating a container of tomatoes and green beans. He came up to me and asked me if I liked tomatoes. I said I did. He laughed, and then told me I was his friend. I said, claro que si.

It was the most fluid Spanish conversation I've had yet.

Thinking about writing this entry makes me tired. There's something about the thought of Morocco that makes my stomach flip over, even two days after my return to the first world. It was probably the fourteen meals of couscous, or an accidental sip of tap water, or the nauseous ten hour bus rides through the country. Or it was that afternoon in the Fes marketplace on the last day, with the rancid smell from the tannery and the crush of people and donkeys trying to go both ways through five-foot-wide alleys and the peddlers constantly following you down the street shoving fistfuls of beaded necklaces in your face that were only twenty dirham, no problem, very good price for you.

I don't miss Morocco. But it was just the experience I hoped it would be. I came back Friday with sand in my ears, exhausted, just barely able to walk from the pain in my camel muscles, craving pizza and lugging a bag of souveniers of questionable quality.

What I didn't come back with was a life-altering new perspective of the world - and I'll be honest, I was wondering if I would. Anyone traveling to the third world would have to wonder.

Victor, one of the IES advisors who came on the trip, put it perfectly: a week isn't long enough to understand Morocco. There's no way, as a American with no background on the area, that you can truly grasp a Muslim, Arabic-speaking, third world country, where entire families live in tents and drink water with caterpillars wriggling around in it and where stealing isn't a crime against society, it's a crime against Allah.

You can't understand all that in seven days. All you can do is look. You can observe, and alter your preconceptions accordingly. You can see that a little nomad boy who lives in a tent in the middle of the Sahara with nothing in it but a few rugs, some stools and a loom can still giggle and play peek-a-boo like any little boy you know from home with a nanny and a shelf full of Baby Mozart tapes.

You can see that hospitality doesn't require money, or even furniture. Even if the only furnishing you have in your house is a TV on a wooden stand, you can still offer twenty American students your husband just brought around a seat on the floor, and refill their tea the second it starts running low.

That all sounds a little precious. And there's a good chance the woman who served us the tea and invited us into her home was looking for a few dirhams in return, and that the little boy was turning on the charm so we might buy a few of the handmade knicknacks his siblings had on hand. I don't know how I feel, whether that's manipulative or completely understandable. Both, probably. I don't understand the culture, whether it really is that accomodating or whether you just have to pull whatever trick you can to bring in a few dirham, when getting money out of tourists is the only way you have to feed your family.

So forgive me if this is an entry of run-on sentences. It was a run-on sentences kind of trip.

---

Marrakech

We arrived at the Casablanca airport in the early afternoon, then piled into two cramped little vans we'd get to know all too well for the four-hour drive to Marrakech. After a few failed attempts to find a restaurant that was open for lunch during Ramadan, we finally found a little tourist trap off the main road that served us tajine, chicken broiled in a clay pot until it's about to fall off the bone...and french fries. There were stray kittens everywhere. I was feeding them table scraps until one clawed me for taking too long. I decided the cats in Morocco were jerks and I wasn't gonna feed them anymore.

A few more hours on the bus and we were at the Ibis Moussafir Hotel in Marrakech. We dropped off our luggage and grabbed cabs toward the city center for a few hours of shopping before dinner. The marketplace was straight out of Aladdin: snake charmers, dagger vendors, men walking monkeys around on leashes, stand after stand selling heaping piles of spices and dried fruits. We got to the market just as the sun was setting and people were getting ready to break the Ramadan fast. We heard the early evening call to prayer, and suddenly people were everywhere, sitting down on the street, breaking apart loaves of bread and drinking bowls of soup.

The vendors were relentless. They spoke English, Japanese to a Japanese girl we were with, and apparently, some of them even broke out their Catalan for one of our IES advisors. Haggling is so standard that things don't even have price tags: the vendor gives you a price, you give them another price even your mother wouldn't sell it to you for, and you work it out from there. I managed to get a Christmas present for Gene that's so cool I might just keep it for myself (...um...hi, Gene...) for 400 dirham less than the asking price. I bought my parents this gorgeous blue tajine with silver palm trees on it for the china cabinet, a Moroccan tea set I fell in love with as a housewarming gift for Gene's parents, and a necklace for me. I discovered that a great way to get vendors to stop following you around is to make a show of hefting up your shopping bags and telling them you're out of money.

The bags really were starting to get heavy, and I overheard one vendor telling someone he'd sell them a straw satchel for 50 dirham. That's about 5 Euros, and I was willing to spend 5 Euros to consolidate all my stuff. So I take one of the bigger bags in the pile and tell the vendor I'll give him 50 dirham for it. He says no, that was the price for the smaller bag. Okay, forget it, then. I walk down the stairs away from the vendor, not even trying to haggle but not interested enough in the bag to get into all that again. Suddenly, behind me: "Fine! Take it!" I turn around, and the vendor throws the bag down the stairs at me.

Some vendors are more gracious than others.

I put all my stuff in the bag. I was going around with some girls from my group, but after a while my arms started getting tired from carrying the bag around. I told them I was going to sit down at a bench for a few minutes, and I went over, put my bag down and sat at a picnic table. No sooner did I separate from the group that a some men came up to me. "Hello, swittie. Hello, swittie. Hello, swittie. Bloody good? Bloody good, yes?" I was more tired of carrying that bag than I was annoyed, though, so I ignored them. They hung around for a minute, then one of them started gesturing toward me at the people who were walking by, like he was trying to show me to them. My friends started walking over to me, and the man stopped them and asked them something. They looked confused, then horrified, then ran over to me. My friend Amy took me by the arm and said, "They just asked me how much you cost."

I thought that was the are-you-kidding-me story of the trip until I heard that another blonde had been offered seven camels for her hand in marriage. I told Amy that if she'd been offered seven camels for me, I would have totally understood if she'd accepted.

We spent the next morning on a walking tour of the city, with two Moroccan guides. The architecture and design of the Prime Minister's palace and the catacombs and the old theological school were all beautiful, but it took about 20 minutes to get supremely tired of being shown every engraving there was to see, and the tour lasted about four hours. We were told so many times to "look at the beautiful ceiling" that it became a group joke. At the end of the tour, the guides suddenly got very intent on us going with them to some Berber rug stores. Sure, we could go somewhere else to shop, but other stores wouldn't be authentic and we'd get overcharged and we'd get our wallets stolen and wouldn't remember where to look for them. It turns out that these guides get commissions for any people they bring in from their tours who buy rugs - and with older groups that would work, but what are the odds of college students dropping several hundred dollars on a Berber rug? Manel, our IES advisor, told them we weren't interested - it was lunchtime, anyway, and the last thing we wanted to do after looking at all the beautiful ceilings was go check out some rugs. I wasn't there, but I heard that the guides got all scary and angry when Manel finally made it clear we weren't going to the shops with them. They told him he was in breach of their contract and he was unprofessional and so on. Manel studied in Morocco for a year and is adept at handling situations like that. But they were both twice his size and cranky from fasting and not being able to smoke...I did not envy Manel the task of telling them where to go.

The Atlas Mountains and Ouarzazate

Not much to report on the Atlas Mountains and Ouarzazate except that I saw them briefly and they are breathtaking. We left Marrakech in the early afternoon and drove six hours through the mountains. One of the things that amazed me about Morocco is the diversity of its landscape: you can be driving across the country, and for half an hour its nothing but desert with no end in sight, and suddenly there's a palm grove, and there's another one, and here's a small city and some more desert and some more desert and somehow you're in the mountains and everything is green for hours. We drove until it was dark, and then we drove some more. Even being as carsick as I could possibly be without vomiting out the window, I was enamored with the scenery and all the stars that lit up when it got dark.

I don't feel I'm exaggerating much when I say our hotel in Ouarzazate was an Arabian palace. Gigantic four-poster beds with red velvet sheets and beaded curtains, royal palms everywhere, tents set up in the back with lanterns and rugs for I don't know what...lounging? A royal feast? I couldn't believe IES got it together enough to put us up somewhere like that. They can't even figure out how to tell us where to buy textbooks. I decided when I saw that hotel that I'm officially done bitching about IES.

The 5 a.m. call to prayer woke me up in the morning. The sound of a rooster crowing at daybreak woke me again.

Merzouga

Also known as...the middle of the freakin' Sahara!

We drove nine hours from Ouarzazate to Merzouga, where we stayed in another Arabian palace in the desert. We got to the hotel just before sunset, grabbed some lunch and headed out to the dunes to roll around in the sand and watch the stars. For the next three days, every time I closed my teeth, I heard sand crunching; every time I rubbed my eyes, sand came out; I was actually coughing up sand, if you really want to know how sexy I am.

This might have been where I developed my aversion to Moroccan food. Since we were quite seriously in the middle of nowhere, we relied on the hotel for three meals a day for three days. God bless them, they tried to mix it up, but the result was different versions of the same courses, or the same courses served in a different order as the meal before. Breakfast every morning was mandarin juice (okay, that was actually delicious), some cheese and pancake-shaped slabs of fried dough you were meant to spread jelly, honey or nutella on. Lunch and dinner were various versions of either lentil soup or a vegetable and rice salad as the first course, lamb, beef and couscous for the second course, and fruit as the third course. A typically Moroccan type of white bread was served with every meal.

These were all foods I found delicious before I had to eat them every day. Any of those things in moderation would have been fine - it's just that everything was so heavy, I could still feel it sitting in my stomach like sludge by the time the next meal came around. I ate less and less of the meals until by the last night I was just taking the bread, dipping it in the soup, and calling it a day.

The morning after we got to Merzouga, we went on a walking tour of the village. We walked through some crop fields (how they grew in the desert that way, I still don't know) to a rug shop, where one of the vendors explained how they were made and what the patterns meant. The rugs are made as a dowry, and the wife-to-be presents it to her suitor as an indication of what a good wife she'll be. The craftsmanship speaks for itself, and there's one pattern that indicates that she knows how to travel through the desert, one that shows her lineage, etc. A lot of people got hooked after that explanation and ended up buying rugs. I bought a purple scarf to protect my face from the sun, and a vial I could put some Sahara sand in as a souvenier.

Then we went to the very spartan home of one of the hotel guides, the one with no furniture but a TV stand I'd mentioned earlier, whose wife made us tea and for a few dirham would paint henna on your hands. We sat in the shade for a while, playing with their kids and half-watching the Berber cooking show that was blaring in the background.

I hadn't realized we were going to go dune climbing after that, so I was dressed entirely inappropriately - flip-flops, a tank top with no sunscreen, nothing but a denim jacket to keep me from burning to a crisp. I am also unreasonably irritated by walking through sand. It's something about falling back every time you try to go forward, sinking when you're trying to advance - it just makes me angry. So I went angrily trudging up the dunes in my flip-flops and my denim jacket, sweltering and cursing and being a general bad sport. Finally, I just turned around, went back and sat by the bus until everyone else got back.

I also didn't want to bust my hump being angry on the dunes because I had to save energy for what we did next. After the dunes, we went back to the hotel, got our backpacks, and left for our two-hour camel excursion into the desert to camp in the Sahara.

I was absolutely convinced my camel wouldn't be able to support my weight with those spindly legs, but one by one all 21 camels lifted us up - some with more grunting and snorting than others. I was lucky enough to get a nice, well-behaved camel I named Spot. His one downfall was his appetite - whenever he came across a patch of brush, he would bow his head down to eat it. Snack time for Spot meant lurching me forward from what already felt like my extremely precarious position on his back. It also meant a delay. Camel riding is by no means a comfortable way to travel. My inner thighs didn't take long to start feeling a funny combination of numb and searing with pain from clutching Spot between my legs - you don't want your camel to stop for a quick bite, you want it to get to point B before your legs fall off. I was sure I was going to fall off Spot at some point, especially going up and down steep dunes. I maintain that you haven't felt fear until it's dark out and you're going downhill on a camel.

It got darker as we were riding, from what I think was 4:30 until about 7. At sundown, the men who were guiding the camels stopped for a few minutes to break the fast. I couldn't tell a lot of the time whether it was actually getting darker or if the clouds of sand the wind was blowing up were blocking the sun. It got pretty intense at one point - bucking back and forth on the camel, wind whipping sand in my face, my head wrap coming undone and blowing in my eyes, the sky getting darker and darker. We went down the steepest valley of all to get to the camp site. Two large tents were set up for sleeping, and one for cooking. We dropped our bags next to the tents, and laid in the sand and shot the bull until it was time for dinner. The excursion was organized by our desert hotel, so we got the same calibur food we would have gotten there, which of course means we weren't exactly roughing it - a three-course meal served on ceramic dishes in a tent lined with wool blankets. Still, it seemed relatively authentic, to my untrained eye: the food was Moroccan, the blankets were Moroccan, and the camels and the desert were certainly Moroccan. Take away the group of nineteen Americans and two Spaniards, and the experience was pretty genuine. After dinner, there wasn't much to do except go to sleep. A few of the guys climbed up the highest dune they could find, but we've discussed my feeling about walking through sand. We had our mats and blankets set up outside in the sand so we could sleep under the stars and wake up with the sunrise. Except for a few times I had to adjust my blanket because it had gotten colder, I slept soundly through the night.

I woke up with the sun to the sound of camels snorting. Everyone had been making a big fuss about watching the sun rise in the Sahara, but I couldn't get worked up about it. I opened my eyes and looked around, and it was just like any other sunrise, so I went back to sleep. (I've been thorougly spoiled with my beach sunrises, what can I say? I'd prefer one of those any day of the week.) I really woke up a few minutes later. It took me a second to figure out why I was covered in sand.

We rode the camels back to the hotel. It wasn't nearly as scary in the morning as it was painful to use those muscles again. Spot took care of his taste for brush several times along the way.

Back at the hotel, we bid farewell to our camels, showered off the desert, had some breakfast and headed off to an afternoon of off-roading into the desert on jeeps. They let us sit on the roof of the jeeps, which had low railings that you could hold on to. From the front of the roof, you could plant your feet on the roof of the front end of the car and feel pretty secure. I spent the first leg of the ride there, and it was a blast, screaming and feeling like I was flying through the desert. But I wasn't quick enough to get my choice seat when we got back from one of our sightseeing stops, and I ended up in the middle, legs crossed Indian-style with just my hands to keep me on the roof. I spent fifteen minutes feeling like I was about to fall off the car. Every time we hit a rock, every time we went in a little ditch, I squeezed my hands around that guardrail so hard I got blisters. Once the car stopped, I jumped off and got inside. I had had about enough of feeling like I was going to fall off of things in the desert for one day.

That night, the hotel hosted a Moroccan music party, where a few Berber bands played some ethnic music and danced in circles with us.

Fes

The next day, we drove twelve hours from our hotel in Merzouga to Fes, a medieval city near the Mediterranean coast. We ended up getting there early enough that some of us wanted to go out and look around the city, so we headed out with a good enough mix of girls and guys that we felt safe. It was bizarre - there were no women on the streets at night. The cafes are filled with men. The stores are filled with men. The market, nothing but men. What few women there were were with a man and, more times than not, a baby or two. There was the occasional single woman walking down the street, but she had her head down, and she was trying to get where she was going as quickly as she could. The city was pretty dead, but we did get to see people (all men) outside a mosque, praying during the call to prayer. I wish we could have gone inside one, but it's forbidden if you're not Muslim. We peeked in the open doors as we walked by, and it looked beautiful.

We spent the next day on a walking tour of Fes. That was the point I realized I'd had enough of Morocco. We went to the medina, a medieval city with streets so narrow and complex it's only accessible by donkey. It was crowded and rank and everything the vendors were selling looked dirty and cheap. The vendors themselves looked dirty and cheap, the more they followed us, the more they insisted. I had spent the evening before sick to my stomach, shaking and sweating and pretty sure I was going to die. The next morning I felt much better, but every time I almost walked into someone carrying a slaughtered chicken by the feet, or we walked by a butcher with slabs of meat hanging from the roof of his stall, I wanted to go back to the bus and curl up into a fetal position.

The places we went that didn't involve meat or smells were pretty cool, though. We went to a ceramics factory and saw things being made, painted and packed up. We saw a Jewish cemetery and got a view of the city from the top of a mountain. We left in the early afternoon and took a bus to Casablanca, where, wonderful, glorious people that they are, they served us fish sticks and fries for dinner.

Left from Casablanca the next morning. Barcelona has never been so beautiful to me.

this is wierd. i'm writing a paper for my economics class, and i don't know if my professor's english is strong enough to read it.

i'm tempted to write gibberish.

can i go on vacation yet?

I've been a bad blogger lately, I know. But I have an excuse! My classes at the Spanish university started, I've been getting home late, getting up early, and traveling every weekend.

So, a summary.

Two weekends ago: La Merce, a weekend-long festival for the patron saint of Barcelona, and my new favorite holiday. The only possible way it could be better is if you got presents.

We rode carnival rides, danced with drum circles on the street, saw a spectacular fireworks show over Montjuic in Placa Espanya cued up to jazz music, ran from fire-breathing dragons, and made a Catalan dinner in the apartment.

Seriously, this is a holiday that would never fly in the states. One burned cornea, one traumatic head injury and these events would shut down so fast you wouldn't know what hit you. Spain, not so much. One staple of the La Merce festivities is the correfoc, where huge dragon and devil floats go down the street spitting fire into the crowds. Everyone wears long sleeves, bandanas over their heads, sunglasses and whatever you need to protect yourself from catching on fire. The little children had bandanas tied over their noses and mouths, and it looked like the streets were filled with adorable little bank robbers. The other staple is Castellers, the human castles people make by standing on eachothers shoulders, where the team with the highest tower wins. Little children are usually the ones at the top, and little children are usually the ones who go tumbling a hundred feet to the ground. (They wear helmets, after a little girl got killed a few years back.)

I didn't make Castellers - I slept in, thinking they were going to happen later in the day - but the correfoc was such a rush. Running and screaming and trying not to catch on fire was probably the highlight of Barcelona so far.

I started my classes at Universitat Pompeu Fabra the next week. I'm taking Arte y Artistas, a class about avant-garde Spanish art, with a concentration on the work of Picasso, Dali, Tapies and Miro. We've got the prototypical art history professor: a wiry, overly emphatic man prone to oversized coats that make him look a lot younger than he probably is, who talks with his eyes closed and hands clenched in front of him and keeps switching into English just to make absolutely sure that we understand what he is trying to say. If I loved him any more, I would cry.

The other class is about cinema in post-Franco Spain, with a teacher who fires off Spanish like a machine gun. If I can leave a class understanding one out of every ten words she says, I'll consider myself fluent and just go home.

The walk from my morning classes to my Pompeu Fabra classes is spectuacular. Walk through Placa Catalunya to La Rambla, hang a right into the Gothic Quarter, walk past the cathedral and the galleries and the halal markets until you get to the Arc de Triomf (...the Catalan response to the one in Paris?), then hang a left until you get to Ciutadella, Barcelona's Central Park. Cut through the park toward Barceloneta beach until you get to campus. It may be the nicest walk in the world. I feel awful for the people who take the train to class.

Last weekend, I went to Madrid by myself for a couple days. There were times I was glad to be traveling alone, but at the end of the day, I think I have a better time traveling with people. Before sundown, I could do all the touristy things my little American heart desired. I spent an hour sitting on a bench in the park in front of the Prado Museum, listening to a guitarist playing the Pachebel Canon and Ave Maria and people-watching, blissfully digesting my chocolate y churros. I went looking for a better location for people-watching after I had to hurry away from my table at the cafe because a homeless man had decided to park himself on the other side of the sidewalk cafe where I was eating, perch his head on his fists and stare at me while I ate. He had this sinister little half-smile that made me feel more by the minute that he wanted to enjoy me with fava beans and a nice chianti, so after lunch felt like the right time to head toward the museum.

At night, it was a little wierd. There's not much Madrid nightlife can offer the solo traveler, except for street musicians in Plaza Mayor and some tourist-geared flamenco shows that I looked for and never found. That was when I wished I had someone along. Oh well - now I know how I feel about traveling alone. Great before the sun goes down, a little depressing after that.

I saw a bullfight! ...and if I never see another bullfight again it will be too soon! It was an apprentice show, so the tickets were half-priced and they went through several short rounds of what would usually be one long fight. Four times, I saw about six guys trying their best to anger one bull, tagging it with pins and stabbing it in the sides. The bull would eventually be stabbed in the skull until it stopped moving, get a hook buried in its back, and be dragged out of the ring by a team of horses.

I almost threw up the first time. The second time was pretty bad, too. The third and fourth time, I started to root for the bull killing the matador. Then I realized I was looking forward to people getting gored in front of me, so I left.

A few friends and I went to Geneva this weekend, and it was significantly less gruesome than that.

My friend Kim found plane tickets to Geneva for 38 Euro on clickair a couple months ago and asked if I'd be down for a trip to Switzerland. How do you say no to 38 Euro tickets? So we bought them, along with two of my roommates, and planned a trip to Switzerland for no more reason than it was cheap. It was the best hastily-made travel decision we could have made - the city is gorgeous. Geneva is clean, uptight, chilly and just the polar opposite of Barcelona. We could see the Alps from our hotel room, which was a huge rush since none of us really though through that we'd be in Switzerland until we actually got there.

I booked our hotel room with the intention of the four of us sharing a double room, two to one bed, just to keep costs down since the only hostel in Geneva was full. We got to the hotel, and the woman was appalled that we had come up with such a scandalous notion.

"It is just not allowed," she said. "It is not just a matter of cost, it is a matter of safety."

Now, I'd considered that before, so I scoured their website looking for anything that implied that there could only be one person per bed. There was a long list of rules and regulations regarding the rooms, but one person per bed wasn't one of them. Besides, don't couples share double beds on a regular basis? Why should broke collegiate travelers make conditions any more dangerous?

"It's just not done," she said. "Everyone knows that. It's like when you have four children. Each girl should have their own room, and each boy should have their room."

Cost, I understand. Safety, I understand. Please don't start with the logistics of rooming siblings.

After a little more arguing, we paid a little extra for a triple room with a cot. We were all on one hour of sleep since our plane took off at six in the morning (you make sacrifices for 38 Euro tickets) so we just dealt with it.

We went out in search of lunch. Geneva speaks French; we didn't. After much head-scratching and gesturing to the waitress, we realized the restaurant we'd sat down and ordered drinks at wasn't serving food until later in the day. We also realized that Geneva is an extremely expensive place to buy water, with four individual bottles setting us back 16 Swiss Francs. We were starving, so we paid for the water, picked up our bottles and got up to leave. A waiter leapt up off his barstool and said, "Non non non non non!" and gestured toward our bottles. Apparently, it is not acceptable in Geneva to carry out the bottles of water for which you have just paid 4 Swiss Francs.

At that point, hungry and tired, freezing because weather.com overestimated the weather in Geneva by fifteen degrees, out 16 Swiss Francs for bottles of water we couldn't take with us and 30 Swiss Francs apiece for the cost of the larger room, we were ready to go back to Barcelona. The four of us ate at McDonalds: it was open, it was cheap, and we were pretty sure we knew what was and wasn't allowed. Then we went to a bookstore and read cookbooks until we could finally go back to our hotel, check in, and take a nap. We checked in at noon; we didn't emerge again until 8.

From then on, Geneva was a gorgeous glimpse of nature and all that is pristine and European. We wandered around Lake Geneva, taking pictures and playing with swans and eating overpriced French food. I bought a cheap little Swiss army knife and a keychain with a stuffed hamster holding an accordion that yodels when you squeeze its belly.

We took a boat tour of the famous chateaus along Lake Geneva, but other than that didn't hit the touristy sights too hard. The Red Cross Museum, the League of Nations building and the old UN headquarters are all in the old part of the city. We sort of headed in that direction, but at that point in the late afternoon everyone had started to lose steam. So we snuck onto the back of this tour trolley, hoping the conductor wouldn't catch us and we could get a ride back to the city center. After a few minutes we thought we'd been spotted, so as soon as the trolley stopped Kim, who was sitting at the end, hopped off. Before the rest of us had scooted over to get off, too, the train started moving again. Everyone in our car turned around and watched Kim disappear into the distance, too shocked to know what to do.

It was the funniest thing that's ever happened. We ended up finding her shortly after, but still, that's what we get for stealing rides.

Next week is Fall Break, and a week-long study trip to Morocco. I'm ready for something mindblowing. And I really want to ride a camel.