Sun 12 Jun 2011 at 1:22 am ♥ Filed under food, Spain 2011, Travel
I feel like it’s almost necessary to preface this post by telling you about food. Out of all the three cities, Barcelona had the best food options, hands down. I mean, sure, we marvelled at the splendor that is Antoni Gaudi and we probably had our most relaxing time just lazing about on the beaches of Barceloneta, but YOU GUYS. THE FOOD. If anything, you simply must get Iberian ham in Spain. I don’t even like ham back in the States, and I was already missing jamón ibérico by the time I packed up my bags. And patatas bravas. More on that later in this post.
DAY 7 (03/17):
Anyway. Barcelona. By the time our plane landed, we were already craving dinner. Lugging our suitcases across town from the airport didn’t exactly put us in the highest of spirits, and by the time we finally finished unloading our suitcases at the hostel, I just wanted a bloody sandwich. Or something to make my stomach shut up. This is the part where a cute little vegan restaurant named Juicy Jones enters the picture.
Sat 04 Jun 2011 at 12:41 am ♥ Filed under Portugal 2011, Travel
Out of the three cities we visited, I’m quite certain that Lisbon was the prettiest of the bunch. I might even go so far as to wager that Lisbon’s the prettiest city I have ever visited in Europe.1 Sorry, Barcelona, but as much as I nerd out over amazing architecture, Gaudi doesn’t really compare to the easy-breezy charm that is Lisbon. “Strolling” around the city is akin to navigating a labyrinth. Screw grid streets; Lisbon is all organically sloped hills, limestone buildings that layer on top of one another, and stone staircases that meld nicely with the narrow, cobbled alleyways. Not to mention, there’s antique trams, the castles, the oceanside views, and the egg tarts. Not once did we take the subway. After all, it would have been almost insulting to experience the city underground when all of your outside surroundings are like a photographer’s treat.
This? This was the window view from our hostel.
Wed 01 Jun 2011 at 5:26 pm ♥ Filed under Attn, Life
So. It’s been roughly two weeks after the fact, but I’m officially a Columbia alumna, and I have the diploma to prove it. It’s odd to imagine that I’m indefinitely done with school, but I’ll take whatever freedom I can eke for now. In the past two weeks, I’ve bought my new digs in Austin, visited the relatives in San Diego, and settled down for a month back home in Shanghai.
As much I love Shanghai, I’m also majorly jetlagged1 and deprived of most of my Internet mainstays2. No Facebook? Well, shucks. No LiveJournal? Yikes. No Twitter? Cruel. No GMail for an hour? Okay, now you’re just screwing with me. On the upside, Tumblr isn’t banned anymore, so now I get accosted with graphics that like to constipate my Internet connection. Welcome to my life.
So what does this mean? I’ll probably have more free time to blog and post photos that I should have posted yonks ago. I’ll probably use this chunk of time to go on short excursions within China (hi, I just got back from Hangzhou yesterday!). I’ll probably tell you more about my trip to Spain/Portugal that I took almost three months ago. And if I have time, I might even throw in a redesign. Oh yeah, and I’ll be trolling the Internet at weird hours and complaining that every social networking site worth updating is now banned. Yup.
footnotes:
1: If you see me online at the odd witching hour or complaining about lightheadedness at 5PM, don’t worry. That’s just typical me being typical. And you know what else? I hate timezones. Timezones are responsible for things like jetlag, clock adjustment, TV spoilers and people flooding up my Tumblr dashboard bitching about said spoilers.
2: Actually, if there’s a bigger life-ruiner than a time zone difference, it’s the Great Firewall of China. No trip back home is ever complete until I start scowling at the fact that China likes to ban every site I frequent.
