Mil grullas

There are people from all over the world in my classes here, including a small handful from Japan. I can only imagine how difficult it must be to be thousands of miles away from family and friends, watching a disaster unfold in your own country on the news (as far as I know, everyone's families and friends are fine!).

This week, one of my classmates (who is from Japan) found this blog, which is written by a Japanese girl who lives in Madrid. Since making a thousand paper cranes is said to bring good luck, she is asking collecting all the cranes that people make and posting their photos on her blog. We made several to contribute in class yesterday (we’re learning animal vocab this week…it totally counts). On the board behind us are our well-wishes to the people of Japan, written in all the languages that are represented in our class (Spanish, English, Chinese, Japanese, Polish, and German).

Santander en bicicleta

Last weekend I visited Santander with a friend from the Universidad. Santander is fairly close to Oviedo, so we didn’t have to go far to enjoy all the beaches, nice weather, and various tourist attractions.

The city is right on the coast, and everywhere you look there’s another beach. There is also a bike path along all of these beaches/ the boardwalk area…we decided to make the most of this by renting bikes and spending the day riding around and stopping at all the places we wanted to visit (such as the cathedral, a restaurant on the beach, a palace, etc).

We also went to Comillas (a beautiful town on the coast just outside of Santander) to see a building there that was designed by Gaudi.

And just for fun, here are some more pictures of Oviedo!

Galicia (in half sun half shade)

A couple weekends ago, a bunch of us from the university went to Galicia (the region in Spain just north of Portugal), where the weather is weird and the seafood is fabulous.

We visited Santiago de Compostela (the end of the Camino de Santiago) and La Coruña (a beautiful port city with a Roman lighthouse). Both cities were very photogenic (good thing, too, or this would be a pretty lame blog entry).