La granadina It's the spring semester of my junior year, so I am celebrating with un gran viaje filled with classes (unfortunately) and crazy foreign fun.

Segovia was a sweet little city, where we spent the morning/afternoon of the fourth and final day of our Spain adventures. First we went the El Alcázar, the castle where the Catholic queen Isabel grew up, back when Spain was just a bunch of regions, before she married Ferdinand, drove the non-Catholics from the peninsula, and unified Spain into one country. It was an interesting place, because having been much destroyed by fire some years ago, many of the walls and windows are now filled with contemporary works illustrating different parts of Isabel’s life, the Inquistion, and the Reconquista that she and her lovely husband directed. We went up the tower (because at this point we obviously have no concern for our legs) and the view was very nice. City, cathedral, mountains… The cathedral was next, it was a cathedral, I don’t really know what else to say, and then we finished at the Roman aqueduct running through part of the city. Seriously, those Romans had the construction business pretty under control. The, the little group of us quested for meat and baguettes and picnic lunched it right there in the middle of the plaza. €7 for six people. My kind of meal! It was delicious too. Yum, yum. Then it was back to Madrid fro the next leg of our travels: Paris! As our last meal in Spain, we got Italian (hey though, Madrid is the international city, after all, and I had some mad cravings for pasta). It was definitely the best restaurant experience we’ve had so far. Then we went back to the hostel, which was high-class at a whopping 18€ per person. Anna and my room didn’t have a lock, which is creepy, so the guys took this prime opportunity to be guys. Of course. First it was basic stuff, comments about the creepy-girl pictures on the wall, pointing out the old-building sounds, noting the mysterious door across our hall. Then when they “left,” they hid out in the hall bathroom clanging things against the tile walls until we found and beat them goodnight. So then, they actually tied their sheets together (being one floor up) with a bar of soap at the end and swung it against our window for an hour. Seriously. It took forever to figure out how exactly they were doing this, but when we did, we had some words. Needless to say, the 3:30 alarm came way too soon…