WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS!!

That was the most awesome football game I have ever seen. I watched my hometown team win. By four points. In the middle of the Strait of Gibraltar. At 3 o’clock in the morning. Yeah, it was amazing!

At first, we were watching some online feed from NBC, but the picture was really bad, so they switched to some German broadcast with video from NFL Network. It really didn’t matter that there wasn’t any commentary because the picture was way better.

The Union was packed with people – including the executive dean, who told us on the first day that he was a Steelers fan – when the game started, then the crowd fizzled out after halftime. There were about, say, 50 people left in the Union and about a dozen diehard Steelers fans (including me!) sitting in the front up to the very end. It was awesome. We even got a picture together! I think all of us almost had a collective heart attack in those last 35 seconds of the game. And, even though we moved our clocks forward for Morocco, it's 3:30 a.m. But it was totally worth it.

It's actually OK that I'm going to bed so late because we had trouble fueling today. I guess the conditions were too windy, so we have to refuel in the morning, which means one less day in Morocco. :o( But, it also means no class and sleeping in, so as to enjoy the sweet victory of the Super Bowl. GO STEELERS!!!!! :oD

SPAIN (parte dos)

After the Mezquita, we walked around Cordoba and looked in some of the shops and stores. I wanted to find a music store, so, naturally, I stopped a woman carrying a guitar and she said there was one down the street that she would walk me to. And, to make it even better, she spoke a little bit of English. She said she learned English in Germany, which was interesting. The store, however, was closed, but the woman ran into her husband pushing her daughter in a stroller. So, that was a pretty cool experience and I walked back up the street. As I was walking, I noticed a hippie-type store that was open and went in. There were a lot of posters, incense, scarves, jewelry and other music-oriented stuff. I started asking the store owner about the music shop, and realized that he spoke English, too! He looked to be in his 20’s or 30’s, as was the woman I talked to. As Cristina had said on the train, more young people know English and this proved it, so I asked the guy why that was. He said it was because people of the older generation were young while Francisco Franco was still the dictator in charge of the strict government. The guy in the store said that he learned English in school, but it always seemed like the same thing over and over (which is the same experience I’ve had with Spanish!). Because the things from India in the store, the guy said he has actually been there a few times and that is why his English improved. That was awesome. I enjoyed that more than any frustration I had had with my other experiences with the language.

We got back to the hotel and knew that there were some futbol, or soccer, games on TV, so we tried to find a place to go for dinner that would be kind of into the game, but I think we were directly wrong, but the little bar we went to had good food, so it worked out fine.

The next day, Friday, we decided to travel back to Cadiz. Everything was going fine until we made it to the train station. We weren’t exactly sure if it would be more advantageous to take the train or the bus, and we knew we might miss it because there were only two to three trains that leave directly for Cordoba. There was a train about to leave that was actually delayed for about 10 minutes and we had just enough time to get on it. But, as the man behind the ticket counter was printing the tickets and he told us how much the tickets cost, Jordan and Shannon decided that 20 euro was too much and everyone started disagreeing. I didn’t make the situation any better by trying to yell over everyone that we had the tickets and we should just take the train. But, Jordan and Shannon said that we could split up and walked away from the three of us. So, we made the decision to stay together as a group and decline the train tickets. Instead, we were going to take the bus. There is no direct bus from Cordoba to Cadiz. We had to take one from Cordoba to Seville and then from Seville to Cadiz and the price ended up being the same. Jordan and Shannon later said in hindsight that they didn’t realize that the distance was what made the ticket more expensive than the train from Cadiz to Seville. Oh well. We got back to the ship at about 5 p.m. then I unpacked and went to get dinner with Sara and Jane and another girl, Rachel. We enjoyed our meal and I came back to the ship. I was trying to meet some other friends to go out for the night and ended up running into my roommate and her boyfriend (while it was pouring down rain) so I hung with them late into the night and had a lot of fun.

On Saturday, I got showered and ready and just as I was about to go out the door, Jane called and said they were leaving for breakfast. So, we went out with Rachel, Sara, Jane and another girl, nicknamed G (because of her Korean name).

The coffee in Spain is really, really good. Café con leche is served in smaller cups because it’s basically espresso and milk. I really, really liked it. They also drink chocolaté, which is more like thick, liquid chocolate than what we think of as hot chocolate. It was great! For lunch in Spain, you can get tapas, which are like little portions of appetizers. Some of the good ones we had were chequetos, which were like little fried dough balls with bits of ham inside them; aceitunas (olives); tortilla Espanola, which is like an egg-potato omlet; calamari; paella, which is like a rice dish with veggies and seafood mixed in; they also like to throw either French fries or fried potatoes with a lot of things – like meatballs with French fries, or pollo y patatas con queso. You can also get bocadillos, which are sandwiches on rolls with just meat and cheese. We also ate a lot of queso manchego, which I mentioned in my last post, and it was really good too.

After breakfast, we walked around and saw the Cathedral, which was amazing. I was the only one that paid to get in, but I think it was worth it. You can even walk down into the crypt below the cathedral where many of the bishops and priests are buried, along with a famous Spanish poet and writer who were from Cadiz. Then we walked to the ruins of a Roman theater that was discovered in Cadiz. The stairs of the theater were easy to recognize and you can also walk underneath of the seating in the gallery, which was really cool, especially if you consider that those stones have been there for ages. Only part of the circular theater has been excavated because otherwise, many of the buildings surrounding it would have to be demolished. After that we walked to the Paza de Flores, a small triangular plaza where there are four or five flower stalls and cafes all around. Near there is covered market with stalls selling fish, fruit and other produce. Shortly after that I broke away from the group to do a little wandering by myself.

All of the streets in Spain would be considered alleys in America. They’re narrow, turn abruptly, have little or no sidewalk and are mostly all paved by stone or tile. The streets are really cool, but hard on your feet after walking for days on end! In Seville, many of the streets were lined with orange trees! I had never known that Spain could even grow oranges, but they were everywhere. I was imagining that maybe when the oranges are too ripe they fall and hit people on the head, but who knows? Maybe the Spanish have learned to dodge them when they fall. I also wouldn’t want to be driving on the Spanish streets because some of them aren’t marked with many signs or markings. In Seville and Cordoba, they also have extra lanes next to the sidewalks for bicycles, but the motorcycles seem to weave in and out of traffic as they please. That would be pretty scary.

On ship time was 6 p.m., so I wanted to make sure I was back on the ship by 5. So, I walked to the store and bought a few snacks for on the ship. We’re allowed to bring things back, as long as they’re in sealed packages. I finally made it onto the ship safely and ate some dinner. The ship didn’t actually leave until everyone turns their passport back in, so we left at about 8 p.m.

I woke up to go to Global Studies this morning and then came back and went back to sleep to try and catch up from Spain. I woke up for lunch and sat with two guys who were trying to figure out if we were going to get to watch the Super Bowl or not. He had his Steelers jersey on, so I remembered that I should wear my Steelers shirt and cross my fingers that we’d get to see them play. We’re refueling now near the rock of Gibraltar. It’s awesome how it just juts out of the curving, hilly coast line, partly covered with vegetation. I went up and took some pictures of it – I wish I could post some of them.

I was working on this post when the 5 o’clock announcements came on and broadcast that we WILL, in fact, be able to either see or at least hear on the radio the Super Bowl! How awesome is that?! It will be about 11 o’clock here when it starts, but we’re gaining an hour tonight, so it won’t be so bad. I’m excited! Here we go Steelers!!!

SPAIN! (part one)

Spain. Was. Awesome. I can’t believe that four days can go by so fast. I am a journalist, so I will try and tell you as many details as I can and, keep in mind that that means this post (or possibly the next few posts, if I decide to break it in parts). I am also safely back on the ship and we’re headed to Gibraltar to refuel – I hope we get to see it from the deck.

We pulled into port Wednesday around 7 a.m. and I woke up early enough to get breakfast and watch the ship pull into the dock in Cadiz. I was so grateful to see something other than ocean, then, to actually to be able to get off the ship – that was even better! If you’re planning on traveling overnight off the ship, they recommend that you take your passport, so they call people by “seas,” which are like floors – I’m in the Mediterranean Sea – and after that you are allowed to disembark the ship. As soon as we were called I was packed and ready to go. I met Jordan and Shannon, who I was traveling with, in line to get off the ship and shortly after found Sara and Jane, who we had also planned to travel with. Sara and Jane are roommates on the ship and Jordan and Shannon are boyfriend/girlfriend from Connecticut. We walked through Cadiz and stopped to get some coffee, or café con leche, before heading to the train station. Then we got the train from Cadiz to Seville. On the train, a girl sat down near us while we were practicing our Spanish with a Spanish/English dictionary. Then she joined in on our conversation, which was a lot of fun! Her name was Cristina and she is a student in Seville, but is from Cadiz. She was helping us with our Spanish and we helped her with her English. She told us that she learned English after taking 9 years of English and French in grade school. So we talked then, when it was time to get off the train she even was nice enough to direct us to a taxi. That left all of us feeling good about our next few days in Spain.

We then settled into the hostel, which was actually really awesome. It was pretty modern with white marble-like floors and glass and steel stair railings as well as three computers with free internet, a nice lobby with lots of travel information, and a kitchen and rooftop terrace. We stayed in a room with three sets of bunk beds, so it was just the five of us until we came back from dinner and another girl traveling from South Korea took the sixth bed. Each bed also had a small safe in a bank of them outside each room that you could set a code to open and close. I really enjoyed our night there and was only disappointed that we couldn’t stay longer. We ventured out to see some sights in Seville, but ended up just wandering for most of the afternoon. We did see the Plaza de Espana, a huge building in a semi-circle shape that opens into a tiled plaza with a fountain, man-made waterway and bridges crossing them. Then we walked through one of the gardens of Seville to the cathedral there, except that we didn’t make it there before it closed at 5 p.m. But the outside was impressive by itself. We got some dinner and came back to the hostel after walking for a long time through the streets of Seville. We visited a department store, called El Corte Ingles (literally “The English Cut,” as in the English cut suit) that has a supermarket in the basement with housewares on the two upper floors. We bought some bread, queso manchego (“cheese of La Mancha”) and drinks and went back to the hostel. We enjoyed chatting and eating for a while, before deciding to go out again for some more tapas and retiring to the hostel once more.

On Thursday, we decided to go to Cordoba. We took the train from Seville to Cordoba shortly after getting some breakfast. After that we found the hotel, which was only a few more euro than the hostel. There we had two separate rooms, one that was a double and the other was a triple – and the bathrooms had bidets in them! (I meant to take a picture, but forgot). We wandered through Cordoba for a while, until finding the Mezquita (the “mosque”), which is actually now a cathedral. It was mind-boggling. The mosque was originally built in something like 732 and taken over as a cathedral in the 1200s. Really? I can’t even wrap my mind around something like that. They were doing some sort of work on one section of the building, so it seems like they’re continuously working on it. The sheer age of everything just is incomphrensible. The building is also enormous and is about 10 degrees colder than the outside. The huge arches throughout the entire inside are really cool looking because they’re striated in two different types of stone. If there’s anywhere Uncle Al is looking to vacation I would definitely recommend Spain, just for the religious relics and buildings. The entire building is also bordered on the inside by altars or shrines to matyrs and saints. Most of them were amazing portraits or statues in these sort of alcoves blocked off with wrought iron gates. The Mezquita also had a beautiful court yard with orange trees and this patterned stone pavement. It was probably the best thing I saw in the last four days.

There’s a bit of an update, although that’s not the whole trip. I will continue in the morning because I need some rest.

Photos!

Hey all - We're in Espana and the hostel we're at has FREE INTERNET! It's like nursing an old addiction, so I set up a photobucket account and hopefully this works, but you should be able to see some of my photos from Spain and the ship here:

http://s673.photobucket.com/albums/vv92/staceyfederoff/

It should work - sorry that the captions are sparse, I was trying to be quick. Hope you enjoy!

We had fun - walked all day after meeting a girl from Cadiz on the train and speaking to her back and forth in broken English and broken Spanish. We are going out in a bit to get dinner, which is actually really late in Spain because they take time for tapas and then lunch and THEN dinner.

Perhaps in Morocco I'll post pictures from Spain? haha.

Land ho!!!

We stopped!! I got up early enough to see the ship pull into the dock and watch the sun rise over Cadiz. I'm soooo excited to get off the ship! Hooray Cadiz! It was so awesome to finally see the city lights and skyline this morning. They're starting to call people to get their passports, so I'm gonna get ready to go! Yay!

ESPANA manana!

So, I’m all packed and ready for our first port – ESPANA! Or, Spain, for those of you still in the Eastern Standard time zone. We should be arriving at the port at around 8 a.m., receiving our passports at 8:30 a.m., then we have to wait for the ship to be “clear” after everyone has them. So, I should be in ESPANA around 9 a.m. tomorrow and all of you guys – except for maybe Katie – will still be asleep. My group’s plan is to meet outside the ship off the gangway and walk to the train or bus station (which, we were told only takes a couple minutes) in Cadiz. There will be five of us, four girls and one guy – two girls who are roommates, a couple and me. From there we will hop on some sort of transportation to Seville. We plan to stay there for one or two days, depending on if we feel we’ve seen enough things there, if not we were thinking of going to Cordoba. Then, the last two days, we were going to save some money and just come back to Cadiz so we can sleep on the ship Friday night, go back out to Cadiz on Saturday and be prepared for the ship to leave Saturday evening. I’m so excited! I don’t know if I’m as excited as first getting on the ship, but I can’t wait to finally see land again! I packed tonight so I could get up in the morning and go get breakfast in order to hopefully catch sight of the sunrise or land when it comes in to view. We’ll see if that works.

In the last few days, I’ve just had some normal (if you can call it that – we’re on a ship! How’s that for normal!) happenings. Going to class, eating with friends, studying and continuously still meeting new people. There was a meeting last night about starting an a capella group. I went and really enjoyed it. We set up two groups, one that is all women (since there were more women interested) and one that is co-ed, which has three men and about eight women. I decided to go with the co-ed group, which christened itself the “Sound Waves.” Clever, eh? We just introduced ourselves and sang the Star Spangled Banner together, but the ship has some sheet music in the library and one girl is a music major, so she might arrange some songs for us to sing. It should be fun!

We also had mandatory meetings, which are pre-port cultural and logistical meetings about Spain, tonight and last night. The speaker talked a lot about food, some of the festivals (but we won’t be there for any of them) and the night life. On the logistical end, the water and food are safe to eat and drink, because we’re in Western Europe. We were told that there are some pickpockets and petty thieves that target tourists, especially around ATMs, so we have to watch out for that. Otherwise, Spain should be lots of fun. I have to remember to work on some of my projects for class – all three of my classes want us to observe and find out about certain things in each port to apply to papers and such in the subject matter. For example, in English as a Global Language, we’re supposed to take notes and talk to someone about the use of English in Spain (granted that they speak English at all, I guess! Haha). I also need to remember to pick up a few things – maybe some free maps, postcards, menus, etc. – for the Vicarious Voyage program.

Visitamos Espana manana! Hooray! Buenos noches!

I'm All Thumbs

Today was another day at sea – got up on time, hooray! I went to breakfast and then to both of my morning classes. I came back to the room and set my stuff down and went into the bathroom. In a moment of absent-mindedness I grabbed the door jamb to keep my balance and…the door swung back and jammed my thumb. Oh, man…what an idiot – they warned us the first day about this. The doors are heavy so that they do swing shut, for safety and all that. The captain actually told us that people lose fingers that way. That was my first thought as I was trying to run cold water over my throbbing thumb but, thankfully, it was moving OK. My next reaction was to run down stairs to the second deck where the medical clinic is. But, of course, they were closed, so I ran up to the fifth deck at the Purser’s Deck, where we’re supposed to go in case of an emergency. They paged the physician who came and looked at it and said, “Yeah, you can move it so it’s not broken. Take some Advil.” So, that was reassuring. I kept ice on it for the next couple hours and it didn’t seem to swell too much and it’s actually not extremely black and blue, even though it still hurts a little bit. The funniest part about the whole thing is that the next time I checked my e-mail, Mom had sent me a message asking about a cough I had last week when I left: “How is your cough? You know how I worry.” Haha. So, no worries, right, Ma?

This evening there was a meeting about the “Vicarious Voyage” program that the SAS program runs. They have K through 12 classrooms that we correspond with over the course of the semester and send fun things from the ports so the kids can learn a little more about each of them. You were given the opportunity to be matched with a classroom near you before the trip began, but I just signed up the other night at the activity fair they had on the ship. Here, it turns out, one of the guys I know who is also from Penn State, Colin, was signed up with a group from Pittsburgh. He saw me without a group and suggested I join his. I looked at the address of the school – it’s a Pittsburgh address, but the teacher’s email address is “phsd,” so I think it’s in Penn Hills. How cool is that? So, we’re required to send them three “cultural packets” in 11”x14” envelopes and they’ll also send us some mail. It should be fun.

I also made some plans with some of the people I met the first night in the Bahamas – I didn’t really make too many plans for Spain, because there wasn’t anything in particular I wanted to see. There are four girls, including me, and one dude, who will be in our group. We plan to go to Seville for one or two days, maybe make it to Cordoba, then spend our last two days in Cadiz, the port city where the ship will be. There was also a presentation tonight by one of the professors about dining in Spain, so he gave us some good tips and Spanish vocabulary words that we can use when we get there. I think they should be pretty helpful!

I saw another ship today on the horizon, which was odd, because there hasn't been the sight of one the entire trip. Someone else mentioned another ship today too. I need to remember to take some sunrise/sunset at sea pictures for Dad. We’re moving the clock forward again tonight, so I will now be four hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time.