Holy Toledo!

We took the train to Toledo, which is a typical small Spanish town with windy roads and really great green views. It was rainy, so I can only imagine how beautiful it is in nice weather. The cool part about Toledo is that at one time Muslims, Christians, and Jews all lived here together peacefully. You can see all three influences in the architecture and things like that.

la familia en madrid

The whole fam came to Madrid! This is Christmas dinner at La Favorita Restaurante where one minute the waitors are pouring your water and the next they are belting out amazing opera right next to you :-)

Valencia

spanish christmas lottery

The Christmas lottery is a huge deal in Europe and in Spain. All day today they were drawing numbers because there are lots of small winners and also lots of big winners. Here's a youtube video of the televised event-and yes it kinda is the most boring television ever.
They're singing the number, and then usually mil euros-which is like $1,500

Free Sahara

These signs are all over Spain. In Barcelona I saw a protest in front of the city hall and in Seville a girl was on hunger strike also in front of city hall to support Aminetu Haidar. This is what I gather of the situation:

-The girl's name is not Sahara like I thought at first, it's Aminetu Haidar.
-She is not a girl, like the poster seems, she's in her forties and a mother of 2.
-She is a western sahara separtist activist-so she wants western sahara to be independent of Morocco because of human rights and displacement concerns.
-She flew to the US to recieve a human rights award, and was denied re-entry into her hometown by Morocco because on her passport she wrote “Sahrawi” as her nationality and “Western Sahara” as her country of origin.
-However, Spain would not receive her either, and she spent over a month in the airport of Lanzarote in the Canry Islands (this is Spain) staging a hunger strike, wanting to re-enter her hometown.
-A few days ago she had to go to the hospital, clearly after not eating for more than a month.
-Now Morocco allowed her to re-enter, and no one has apologized or admitted wrong doing.

She definately drew a lot of attention to her cause, at least in Spain, I'm not sure internationally. Is this news in the US and the rest of Europe?

   

cumpleanos en madrid :-)

25th brithday in Madrid with Maria and Angela.

My backpack

I have a love/hate relationship with my backpack right now. I look at it with loathing at 5 am when I know I have to carry it to the metro stop, change metros, take the shuttle to the airport, find the easy jet terminal, pray they don't give me the sticker "odd shaped baggage" because then I have to lug it somewhere else. However, we watched Into the Wild the other night at the hostel in Barcelona, and this image is my inspiration to keep on trucking: