Hola, Asturias

So, classes are well under way, I've started at San Ignacio, and I have only gotten lost in Oviedo once so far! I’ve had a cold for the past couple of days, which is lame, but I’ve noticed that that’s pretty much how I start off every new semester anyway, so no big deal (Sorry, is this boring? When I told one of my friends that I would be doing this blog, he made me promise that I wouldn’t write about boring nonsense, only interesting stories and pictures :-p).

We’ve been exploring Asturias with ESN (exchange student network…the group that organizes all kinds of events and trips). At the end of last week we went to Gijón, a city not too far from Oviedo that’s right on the coast. We took the train from Oviedo, which only cost about 5 Euros round trip (I dream of a day when I can take the train from Buffalo to Rochester for $7…). While we were in Gijón we wandered around and enjoyed the views. In one of the pictures below, there’s a famous sculpture that, if you stand in the middle of, you can hear the echoes of the waves down below.

On Sudnay, we went to Covadonga, a little village up in the mountains where someone decided that it would be a good idea to put a church in a cave (leave it to Spain!). After exploring Covadonga for a while in the morning, we were supposed to go to los Lagos de Covadonga (a scenic area with some lakes even higher up in the mountains) for lunch, but the road was icy and, as our tour guide José said, “if we go up there in the bus, we die”. So, we went shopping for a while instead!

We spent the afternoon in Ribadesella, which is a gorgeous town that’s both on the coast and in the mountains. Since it was a Sunday in the middle of winter, the place was pretty quiet and not a lot was going on, but we climbed up to the scenic viewpoint and took all kinds of pictures.