England, Ireland, Scotland...

Alright, here we go with the long awaited blog post on my trip to London/Dublin/St. Andrews. I went with my friend from JBU Micah Williams. First stop: London.
We went to a lot of free museums, the first of which was the British museum. We got a real kick out of this museum. Basically it's stuff that Britain has jacked from other countries over the past couple thousand years. They have different rooms full of stuff from each country. It's like, 'hey look what we stole from Egypt, now look what we stole from Greece, now look what we stol from Italy...'
Ya, I digressed to third grade...
Micah, the next great philosopher, with a book in his hand as always...it just happens to be that the book he's holding is our tourists guidebook to western europe. Not quite philosophy but close for Micah.
Me and Alexander the Great, just chillin. I think when he was my age he owned like half the known world, and I...well I don't even own a car anymore, or an ipod anymore, or a phone anymore since I lost my second phone in Cambridge...
I have a picture just like this from about 7 years ago, and yes I even took a picture with me leaning over as if I was gonna dunk my head in the fountain again:) But Micah has that picture and I haven't gotten it from him yet.
Micah and I outside Buckingham palace.
Highlight number 1 of the trip: WICKED! We saw Wicked that Saturday night, and it was incredible, absolutely incredible.
Micah and I in our seats, and yes that is the back wall of the whole theater. For the second act we moved down about 15 rows, thanks to a gay friend I met the night before who worked as an usher in the theater.
Westminster abbey at night. Pretty darn beautiful. We went to an evensong and heard the London chamber singers sing. They were great and it was so cool to be listening to great music in Westminster.
Micah, in sepia, staring up at Big Ben=hot pic
Micah in the attic of the guys' house we stayed at. micah and I both slept in this tiny attic. The 3 London guys we stayed with were hilariously awesome. They were some friends of friends of Micah's sister. So it worked out well. They were great though. They made us a typical English roast that was absolutely delicious and huge.
These two things were the key to my surviving London. Micah and I kept a pretty crazy pace to be able to make it around the city. So my coke and my map basically saved me.
Micah and I on Tower Bridge. By the way, I ran frantically underneat London Bridge only to realize I had been lied to all my life...
So, since they are silly English pig dogs and drive on the left side of the road, they have to tell you on the street which way to look so you don't get creamed by a car. The best part of this picture is just to the right of the picture is an old guy on a moto stopped at the light. So Micah was staring right at him, and he was laughing as we walked by him after taking the picture.
Highlight #2 Les Miserables. We sat in the 10th row, the 10th freaking row. It was beautiful. The show was incredible. Jean Valjean and Javert were absolutely amazing. Sadly we got an understudy Marius who was pretty clearly an understudy, but the show was still awesome.
Me inside the theater. Just kickin it.


Now onto DUBLIN IRELAND!
Ireland was the place I wanted to go to the most in the world that I still hadn't visited.
Micah, Tyler (another guy from our program who we met in Dublin) and Stephen, a random dude we met on the airplane who was cool.
Christ Church
A picture of myself in Christ church. We went in and heard an evensong performed by a small group of 8. It was pretty sweet.
Dublin on a drizzly, dreary day.
Ahhh, a beautiful day to take a beautiful hike, and see a beautiful castle!
Me holding up the castle gate...
Micah and I enjoying some Magnum bars at 4am after dancing in some Dublin clubs for a couple hours. Note to all: Irish people suck at dancing. No honestly, they're awful. If you go to Dublin go to a nightclub and get a good laugh. They play top 40 songs, everything from Nelly Furtado to YMCA to the Killers. And the drunk Dubliners just jumped around.
So we took a day and went to Wicklow outside of Dublin on the coast. It was beautiful. This sign is just silly, it might as well say, "hey come check this out," so we did
We hiked up to a lighthouse
Me in a field on the coast. And that's it for Ireland. Micah and I at this point were running out of room on our cameras and we still had 3 days left, so we stopped taking so many pics.

And now to St. ANDREWS SCOTLAND.
Naturally we stayed with my sister and her husband, which was an absolute blast. They showed us the town, took us on a hike in a nearby town, and introduced us to some really cool friends who gave me the Office season 3! Woohoo! I watched 13 episodes the day I got back:)

So we went to a beautiful castle and hiked around. It was so gorgeous and green it was great! (I'm going for as much alliteration as possible in this post by the way).
Craig, castle, Scottish countryside, cool.

DnA hiking the trail ahead of us.
Well we were in Scotland, almost in the highlands...so why not?
And that's the end of Scotland.
Worst part of the trip: losing my phone in Cambridge
best part of the trip: 2 broadway musicals
Biggest surprise...hahaha this is a good story. After travelling for 10 days, we got back into the Madrid airport, and finally made our way to the bus station. When we got there we were gonna buy our overnight bus tickets to get back to Sevilla. But upon asking for our tickets we found out that both the midnight and 1am buses were full and we couldn't get tickets. So it was either sleep on the street, or pay a little more to travel all night on a bus to some town an hour away from Sevilla, and then take another bus to get to Sevilla when we got there. So that was our solution. We slept horribly on the bus, but made it back safe and sound.

And there ends our trip. Incredibly beautiful, incredibly fun. Micah and I had a great time and had some good bonding. I saw some incredible places. Life is good. Now just 11 days til I'm home!!
oh and to top it off, this past weekend I went to Portugal again just for the weekend to sit on the beach:)

Lagos and Granada

Alrighty, so 7 of us rented a car and headed to Lagos for the weekend. I hadn't had enough of Portugal's beaches so I went back for more. This is us crammed in our little car. There really was no space for luggage, but we made due. And just to say it now before I get the comments, no I didn't wear a shirt on this trip...ever.
Best story of the trip: On our way to Portugal we needed to get gas. This is what our car said when we finally found a gas station, that's right, 2 km until we run out of gas. At this point in time we were way hidden back in the countryside, cause we got so lost trying to find a gas station. We were almost in deep, deep trouble. We rolled up to the gas station in this tiny town shouting in triumph that we hadn't run out of gas, which honestly was a miracle. Then when we got out, the cap had been screwed on wrong and wouldn't come off! We basically tried for 10 minutes to get it off with no success. Then while we were deciding whether or not to just break it off, one of our guys tried again and just pushed and pulled superhard, and pulled it off. So we finally got some gas and made it out of there.
This is the beach in Lagos. It was incredibly beautiful
The group of the 7 of us. We had a great little appartment with 3 rooms, 2 bathrooms, and a nice kitchen. So we made our own meals and just had a great time. Good work Blake on centering your beer in the middle of the picture...
Blake and I doing dishes after the meal. Pretty standard.
This is one of the huge rocks that jutted out into the ocean. Tyler and I climbed it, and it really hurt the feet.
Closeup of us on top of the beast.
We had to swim out into the ocean and climb up part of the back side of this rock, then try to edge our way around the outside of the rock, which was basically razor sharp, just so we could jump from this high and not land on huge rocks.
This is our little beach, and us playing volleyball, we did a lot of that.
Coolest part of the trip: In that big rock on the right there is a little cave. We swam to it and walked through it and it led us to another beach. Then we swam out and through another cave, and another and it led us right out into the ocean amidst these huge rocks and arches and stuff. It was incredible! And of course to end the trip we had a bonfire on the beach. I had even found and bought some marshmallows in Sevilla and took them with me so we could have smores. Good times. Beautiful beaches. Fun people.

GRANADA
So Carine, Hayley, Micah and myself (yes that's an all JBU trip) decided Monday morning that we should skip a day of school this week and go to Granada to see the Al Hambra cause we didn't want to have to spend one of our last two weekends after we get back from our Feria break travelling to Granada. So we planned on skipping Wednesday. Then during our 1st break in classes we found out that our school was taking a daytrip to the ruins of Italica on Wednesday. Well we weren't gonna miss a daytrip, so we decided, hey let's just leave today. So we booked a hostal for Monday night, hopped a train at 4 that afternoon, and went to Granada. We just chilled that night and saw a few sights, even enjoyed some pizza hut pizza. Then the next morning we woke up and went to the Al Hambra. We had heard that you had to wait awhile, so as we approached we saw this...
I started to think to myself, "Aw that's not that...
..aww dang." and the line wrapped around that back wall too... But after an hour and a half we got in.
Micah showing his excitement for his coffee and my pepsi while we were waiting in line. We played presidents while standing and moving in line to pass the time:)
The gardens in the Al Hambra are incredible. So we took a bunch of pictures of flowers:)
Well here we are. This is the ole, set the camera on a ledge with the timer and hope it gets us all in the picture. Worked pretty well.
Someone didn't know how to use the flash on my camera...anyway, me in one of the courtyards.
micah and I being studs
The four happy JBUers just chilling on a bench. Really we're just happy to not be in school.
Most annoying thing: The famous Patio de los leones (patio of the lions) didn't have any leones...Yay they took them out to restore them. That was sad. Overall it was awesome though. It was good to see stuff that we had studied for weeks in our Spanish art class.
This is the Al Hambra from a lookout point accross the city. Those are the Sierra Nevada mountains in the background.

Well those were my two trips this past week. Tomorrow I leave for London/Dublin/St. Andrews! I'm super excited. I'll be in London 4-5 days, possibly hit up Cambridge for a day, definitely planning on seeing Les Mis and maybe another show. Dublin should be awesome. And it'll be a blast to stay with DnA and see their place in Scotland and finally get to see their world. Well that's it. Time to go deal with a bunch of screaming children in a convent:)