My Life in a Nutshell

(due to technical difficulties, this blog was delayed in being posted. It is therefore already a week out of date. Story of my life.)

A few moments ago I briefly closed my eyes. When I opened them just now, I found that somehow a month had passed. The past weeks have been packed, with traveling, with family, and even with a little bit of class thrown it to fill up the free time. I have crossed the length of Spain from Granada in the south to San Sebastian in the north, toured the small towns, back roads and ruined castles of Portugal, and briefly popped over to Africa for a weekend in Morocco. I am currently coming back from a trip to the Scottish Highlands to take my finals over the next few days and then return to the U.S. in exactly a week. Time flies when…well, when doesn’t time fly?
For a brief recap:
One month ago, I went with my program to Granada, mixing place of many cultures, vestige of the last Moorish kingdom to fall to the Spanish Reconquista, and home of the incredible Alhambra fortress/palace. The trip was, of course, too short. But the winding streets steeped in centuries of history and conflicting cultures were nothing short of magical. At the end of my trip, I returned to Salamanca to find that my parents had not actually made it across the Atlantic yet (though there was a Magda Love staying at the same hotel at the time who kept this from being a straight forward discovery).
Luckily, two days later my wayward parents arrived safely after a pitstop in Dallas to renew a passport. The next weekend, the three of us hopped in a rental car and drove up to San Sebastian in the northern Pais Vasco (Basque country). People say that “Spain is different,” which the more I travel the more I realize is very true for a number of not easily pinpointable reasons. But in Spain people say that “Pais Vasco es diferente,” which is also true. Somehow San Sebastian manages to mix the architecture and feeling of a Mediterranean resort town with that of a village from the Alps. After enjoying some great seafood, and even a night of tapas (small snacks that you acquire while drifting from bar to bar) we returned to Salamanca, at which point Mom and Dad embarqued on a tour of central Spain and I went to class.
The next weekend, Bill joined us for a tour of the less seen sights of Portugal. Aside from being a wonderful family trip accomplished in true Love-Anderegg family style (i.e. lots of good food, good company and going to bed early) this was also a nice break from the crowded bustle of my previous travels that had necessarily been restricted to those highly populated areas accessible by public transport. We visited something on the order of 5 castles (in various states of disrepair), gave our respects to the Atlantic Ocean, and as an early Christmas present stayed in an incredible palace in the middle of a national forest.
Upon returning to Salamanca, Mom, Dad and Bill undertook another small excursions, and I went to class. Me going to class may appear to be somewhat of a theme, but a assure you it is not. Aided by a few Spanish holidays, I have completed all of one full five day week in Spain. It is, I believe, a lifestyle I could get used to.

Once my family returned from their outing, we celebrated a very Spanish Thanksgiving (i.e. eaten at 2:30 p.m. and consisting of a variety of meats, with some meat on the side and some fried potatoes to top things off), before heading our separate ways, my parents and Bill back to the U.S. and me to Morocco. At this point, I realized that I was going to miss approximately half the classes that remained before finals. Accompanied once again my trusty travel companion Rosalie, I ventured into the exotic, labyrinthine, and generally overwhelming streets of Marrakech, Morocco. Unfortunately, the one full day that we were in the city, it happened to be an Islamic sheep sacrificing holiday. This meant that everything, absolutely ev erything was closed and the streets were deserted. We perhaps should have suspected something when we encountered numerous sheep the evening before, tied on top of cars, trussed up on the sidewalk, on the back of motorcycles. But we were caught quite by surprise the next morning when the only people to be seen where the kids burning sheep heads over fires in the streets. Despite this minor setback, we greatly enjoyed checking Africa off our list of continents visited, and returned to Spain content.
After another brief interim of going to class (made more brief when I caught some nasty stomach bug and was out of commission for a day), I headed off for my final trip. My housemate Chris and I did what any sane person would do on a holiday in December, and headed to northern Scotland. As one might expect, Scotland was fairly cold, very wet, and very dark. However, the weather, infrequent off season busses, and six hours of daylight were more than compensated for by the highland scenery and the Scottish natives. Traipsing our way from small town to small town, Chris and I had the entire highlands to ourselves. At every turn we found mystical glens, windswept mountains, and ridiculously nice Scottish people. From the couple we met on the plane ride over who drew us a detailed map of how to get from the Glasgow train station to the bus station and gave us their phone number in case we should run into any trouble on the trip, to the man we met on a ferry who told us all about diving on ship wrecks in the area, the Scottish people were welcoming almost to a fault. Our final night in Inverness, we found ourselves in a pub talking to two toothless old men (or trying to talk, impeded as we were by their thick accent and lack of teeth) who proceeded to buy us pints of beer. When another man who we could actually understand joined the conversation, it turned out he was of the same Scottish clan as Chris (who is ¼ Urquehart). We did not find the Loch Ness Monster, nor see very many kilt wearing bagpipe players, but after a few hours of talking to Chris’ distant relative, we returned to our hostel feeling like we had gotten the real Scottish experience.