some random end-of-semester travel thoughts

In the past 4 years, I’ve been in a lot of airports and on a lot of planes, and in more of those than ever in the past 4 months.  I have recently flown in and out of:

…England, 

…Ireland,

…and Spain (of course).

I am currently in the Barcelona airport, and pretty soon I’ll add Turkey to that list, where I plan to gobble upon arrival.  I’m waiting for my flight to Istanbul in a few hours for what I am anticipating will be the best trip of my life, with fellow mawrtyr (as in Bryn Mawr) Sarah Theobald who just finished studying in Cairo this semester, to and through Turkey, Jordan and Israel.  This is Sarah, for those of you who do not know her – and, no, she does not always make faces imitating sushi patterns:

She’s a lovely lady and I’m excited to see her again and catch up on things.  Needless to say, Christmas will be spent in Istanbul, where as far as I know Christmas is not a big deal, seeing as the majority of Turks are Muslims and Christmas is really about Jesus even if we estadounidenses pretend it’s not or try to disguise it with capitalist marketing (everyone knows that Jesus + capitalist marketing = “the most wonderful time of the year”).

My friend Jess, also fellow mawrtyr and IES student, bussed with me yesterday from Granada to Madrid, where we spent a grand total of 5 hours sleeping in a hostel bunk bed and got up at “ass-o’clock” (I can’t remember who I picked that phrase up from, but whoever it was I blame them for my language) to catch an incredibly expensive taxi with an incredibly cheerful driver to the airport.  Jess is off to Poland for three days before heading home for Christmas, so we split up, she went to catch an earlier flight, and I was left all alone in the airport for four hours, having just realized that I left my Spanish cell phone in my hostel bed in the rush to get out the door in time for her flight…  My flight from Madrid to Barcelona was easy and I slept part of the way which was a pleasant surprise; the Barcelona airport is shiny, and warm, and with a pleasant acoustic system that makes everything seem quieter than it really is.  Too bad my lunch was the most expensive airport food I’ve ever had – 8 euro for a chicken sandwich, though delicious because I was starving.  Also too bad is the fact that I haven’t actually been to Barcelona yet; this semester, I was set on going to Barcelona and to Santiago de Compostela, but never got around to either.

Our semester in Granada officially ended on Friday, after a frantic two weeks of exams, projects, presentations and paper-writing that was super-intense despite the deceiving start to a semester that originally seemed would be the easiest I had had since high school – strangely enough, the work load started exponentially increasing right around the time I stopped writing in this blog.  Technically University of Granada courses are still in session, and I still have a paper left to write that was due *last week*, not to mention the 2 papers more that I’ll have to write in January and February as classes in Spain are finally ending and I’m already starting spring semester at Bryn Mawr… but the bulk of work is over, and it feels good to be on an almost-vacation.  To celebrate, on Friday afternoon I got my hair cut again – I now no longer look like a shaggy cocker-spaniel.  I’m also glad that I’ll be returning to Granada before going home indefinitely – studying and paper-writing is not my idea of a proper good-bye to any place.  I’ll be spending the Three Kings holiday (January 5^th) with my host family and then staying a week, wrapping things up, saying goodbyes, and going home to cooooooooooooold Vermont on the 11^th:

That extra time will hopefully give me the mental and emotional space I need to deal with leaving.  The majority of IES students are leaving today, however – probably frantically dealing with packing and travelling, and will be home for the Jesus + capitalist marketing holiday.  We had a fancy farewell cocktail party on Friday evening with IES, complete with crying professors, delicious fried shrimp on sticks, a slideshow of photos that no one could really see because the lighting wasn’t great, and a bit too much wine.  I had every intention of staying up all night dancing with friends afterwards but I was too tired to hold my eyes open, bummed that my new barista-friend from the café I get coffee at every morning couldn’t come out with us because she had to work early in the morning, and generally sad that pretty soon I’d have to say goodbye to this place for who-knows-how-long… so I went home to my bed at around 4 in the morning and slept like a rock.  I woke up in the late morning to a gross rainy day, went to the pharmacy to buy some Dramamine (my new favorite drug, because it makes me not restless and not pukish on buses – I discovered it while desperate in Morocco at the beginning of this month), packed my bags, and had one last mini dance party to “Dynamite” with Emily, the best roommate on the planet, and Campanilla, one of the best dogs on the planet.  

Then Hortensia and Emily drove me to the bus station in the car that Hortensia had finally gotten back from the mechanic’s that morning, having dropped it off before we even arrived in September.  (I had been starting to doubt of the car’s existence.)  Jess was a pleasant bus companion, and is pretty much a pleasant person in general – this is her, getting over her fear of monkeys in Gibraltar a few weeks ago:

I wish her a happy time in Poland, and wholeheartedly advocate for her buying a pair of boots while there… flats ain’t gonna do it in below-freezing Eastern Europe.

This is a rather random post, following my thoughts a bit.  I’ve mentioned a whole bunch of recent travels that I have not yet written details about, so I hope (I shall make no more promises – we all know where that got me this semester as far as blogging) to write some more soon and tell more about said trips, as well as some things about Granada and the adventures of Sarah and Meegan in the Middle East.

I’m going to go get on my Turkish Airlines flight now!