I'm sorry I took so long to make a new entry, this past week since getting back has been the busiest of my life probably. But I will quickly summarize my trip. First we went to Madrid. Madrid is an amazing city. We enjoyed picking out all of the little differences from Barcelona. In short, Madrid is a lot more like New York City. The buildings are bigger in scale, there are more cars, and it is much bigger. Barcelona is smaller but more dense, and the roads are more narrow.
Madrid is a little bit cleaner. The main places we went included the Museo Nacional del Prado, the Botanical Garden, outside the Royal Palace, and the Reina Sofia, where Picasso's Guernica resides, except I didn't see it. We are thinking about maybe returning to Madrid to see Guernica and maybe also take a day trip to Toledo. The best part about Madrid was walking with the rest of the class all over the city and seeing the many modern skyscrapers there. They are so much more beautiful than the ones in New York City, which are quite plain compared to these. They are also smaller than NYC's which I like because they don't overpower you.
We also took two day trips while we were in Castile. One was to El Escorial, north of Madrid, where the Monestary of San Lorenzo resides. It was most likely the largest building I have ever been in. There are so many things to see inside, including religious art and a royal palace. What I liked best was walking down a staircase cladded in green marble to see the coffins of about ten kings/queens and ten princes/princesses along the walls. We went to the city of Segovia the next day which was my favorite day in Spain so far. This medieval city is so old and compact and has so much character. There is a cathedral, a fort, a city wall, and most famously a roman aqueduct, which is the only remaining roman aqueduct in the world (i believe). Any attempt to explain the amazingness of this city would do no justice to the experience I had in this great place.
Then afterwards we flew to Bilbao, Spain. This is the largest city in Spain's Basque region which is famous for its separatism and claim that it is a country of its own. We also visited a beach resort town called San Sebastian. The weather for the most part did not cooperate with us in the Basque region but it was a great experience nonetheless. It was so much quieter that both Barcelona and Madrid, which was an interesting change. By far the most amazing part of the trip was experiencing Frank Gehry's amazing Guggenheim Bilbao museum. We didn't get to see all the art but we spent a full day sketching the dynamic building that put Bilbao on the map. I used to think the building was more of an object than a building but after being there in person I know now that I was wrong. It was amazing to walk around the building and experience it from every angle, and then walk inside and see its beautiful space. Frank Gehry is brilliant.
The trip overall was a lot of fun. It was tiring having 21 of us run around to catch trains and such but it was something that I hadn't experienced before in my life. I can't wait for the next trip in two weeks to the southern region of spain.
Also from November 9 through 20 all of us are supposed to come up with our own travel trip, which can be basically anywhere in the world (although most of us are just going elsewhere in Europe). My friend Joe and I are going to Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, for the first 5 days, and then we are going to Italy for the second 5 days. We agreed to each pick a place, I picked Italy and he picked Prague. But that's not to say that we're not both excited about both. We will be in Prague, a city my teacher likes a lot, visiting all the modern architecture and also some small towns. Then we will fly into Rome and spend one night there. Afterwards we will take a train to Florence where we will spend the next four nights. We'll only spend maybe a day or two experiencing Florence and will take day trips to other smaller tuscan towns, including siena, pisa and one or two others that I haven't decided on. Finally we will fly from Pisa back to Barcelona.
