For the last time this year, here’s a quick round-up of this month’s goings on:
Spontaneous trip to a little city called Tarazona one Saturday. Great way to spend a day crossing the border into Aragon and seeing all the sights, like the Cathedral and the Old Bull Ring as seen in this picture. Something to whet the appetite before the inevitable trip to Zaragoza!
Pretty exhausted after the trip to Tarazona, the next day I accepted the invitation to go on a walking excursion to Valonsadero, a nearby park (I say ‘nearby’ but it took almost 2 hours to walk there). After a much needed coffee break when we arrived, we set off to explore the cave paintings and admired the beautiful natural landscapes before the long trek back home. What a weekend!
So on my wanderings in Murcia, we came across this pretty Government building with an old sign saying ‘Agua Para Todos’ (Water for everyone). Outside the building are several needless, functioning water fountains. This amused me greatly.
Saw some sand by the sea in Alicante when we popped over for a visit. It was wonderful. Family members have since noticed a slightly darkened skin-tone i.e. a tan. YAAY!
Last blog-post of 2012 so to finish off, here’s an appropriate song for the festive season which accurately reflects the linguistic fusion that is my life at the moment.
I don’t even watch Made in Chelsea but it seemed like the perfect opportunity to use a play-on-words to document my trip to Murcia. (Also, because I can’t think of any other suitably alliterative city – besides Madrid – that I am likely to visit during my Year Abroad to justify using the Made in… title).
Anyway, we had, what I like to call, an ‘unofficial puente’ (slowly turning into Miranda‘s mum with all my special names for things), which is where we had Día de la Constitución Española, a national holiday on the Thursday but unusually were required to work on Friday. This was especially weird because this was followed 2 days later by Día de Inmaculada Concepción, also a national holiday yet the CYL Government was apparently one of the few Spanish regions that refused to ‘bridge the gap’ and make it a long weekend.
Not one to let an unofficial puente go to waste, I quickly rescheduled my classes on Friday so that I could ‘viajar un poco’ (travel a bit) as I’d had a few too many weekends in Soria (which, by the way, turns into an ICY HELL over the winter. Note for future Year Abroad students: check the year-round weather forecasts of your province!).
Long story short, I decided I’d go and visit an amiga Scousa in Murcia and make a long weekend out of it since it would take a while to get there. Doing the 2 bus, 10-hour journey by myself was a lot less stressful than I had originally thought, though I think I did lose blood circulation in my culo at one point.
By the time I arrived it was too late to actually do anything but we had a lovely dinner in a restaurant in the Plaza in front of the Cathedral. The next day, we did some proper sight-seeing and only then did I realise how grand and ornate the Cathedral I had overlooked actually was. I’ve seen a lot of pretty cathedrals during my time here, but this one had one of the most ornate exteriors I have ever seen. (Top 10 Spanish Cathedrals – future blog-post? You betcha!)
Iglesia Catedral de Santa María in all its majesty
The entire city was, in fact, cluttered with really beautiful churches so it’ll be impossible, not to mention boring, to document them all here! Other interesting things we did was see the famous Río Segura, the botantical gardens and take a trip via tram to Nueva Condominas, a super-giant shopping centre where I generously did my bit to help Spain’s economy.
The next day we went to Alicante which was a one hour bus ride away. Alicante, which features heavily in holiday brochures, has a beach you know. This made me very excited. We first went and wandered around the Santa Barbara Castle which was enormous and surprisingly intact – one of the few castles I’d been to that wasn’t totally ‘ruin’-ed.
One of the many views from the Castle. Blue skies, blue sea, Sun shining, beach and Benidorm in the background…and it was December!
The port was pretty, the seagulls were terrifying, the markets were funky and the bars were classy (one of them even jutted out over the sea with no barrier so you could literally walk of the edge!). But before we could even think about dipping our toes into the Mediterranean, it was time to get the bus back and spend a final night in Murcia.
Also, the weather for the entire weekend was FRIGGIN’ FANTASTIC. Got a bit of a tan too, I think.
To finish off, here’s a funny video showing what people are like in Murcia. A lot of the lyrics address how different the Southern accent is. One real-life example (I think) I heard when I was there was ‘Gra-sta luego’ – seemingly a merge of ‘gracias’ and ‘hasta luego’. Ugh.
ESPANA IN THE WORKS 