Luke In Spain

Rome, I will return!

…but Florence, get ready because I’m on my way!

Ciao Roma!

I’ve been loving Italy.  I will write the details in the posts to come, but I leave for Florence tomorrow morning.  Hopefully I’ll do some writing on the train!

The battle with Latex

has been won!  And not the material, the programming language!  Today Darren and I put down a solid 3 hours of hard labor “professionally formatting” our document using a programming language called LATEX.  It basically makes everything look awesome, after you jump through a thousand hoops to get it all programmed and in order.  We get extra credit in our Robotics class for doing this, so I’m stoked for that.  Spent about 9 hours at school today studying with Darren and friends.  One more day of studying tomorrow (now today I guess) and I should be ready!  Exam is on Thursday, and promises to be one of my most difficult, wish me luck! 

I realized…

…how much I need the internet now that I don’t have it.

Earlier this week we called Jazztel (our ISP), to tell them that we didn’t want them to renew our service for January and we wanted to end our subscription at the end of December.  Our landlady was talking on the phone to the company as the bill is in her name.  She was saying that the guy was a trainee and didn’t know how to really help us.  Bjorn, Darren, and I were sitting on the couch watching her get progressively more and more frustrated with the man on the phone.  Eventually she hangs up and says that he told her everything would be taken care of.  She left our apartment and we went to our rooms to get some homework done before dinner.  ohhhh CRAP! were the words echoed around the apartment.  Anyway long story short.  This idiot on the phone had terminated our account NOW instead of at the end of December.  We called our landlady, and she called the company back, and they argued some more.  Anyway, she jumped through a ton of hoops for us to no avail.  Jazztel admitted that the problem was their trainee’s fault and that they were sorry, but they couldn’t just “turn the service back on”.  We would have to open a new account with them and a service representative would have to come out in 5-10 business days to activate it.  Seriously?!? Assholes.  Anyway, Jazztel is a piece of $h!t company and I highly recommend against doing business with them EVER.  We are currently using borrowed wifi from our very generous neighbors.  We all crowd around the one corner of the apartment where we can get 1 or 2 bars of internet signal to send off an email (or post a blog).  I have to go to school now to download powerpoints and things for work.  I can’t get anything done hunched in the corner or spinning around with my laptop around looking for signal.  So I’m sorry for the lack of blog posts, I’ll definitely write some during/after Italy as well as in the airports.  I have lots to say, just not a lot of time to say it.  Between work, and finals, and commuting back and forth from school to use the internet, this is going to be a lonnngggg week.  But hey, FIVE MORE DAYS!  I CAN DO THIS!  

Writing an epic for my epic adventure

Note: This post is long enough to span multiple postal codes.  I apologize profusely in advance.  I did my best to accommodate the light reader in the lines before the narrative. 

I’m currently writing this entry on the train back from Paris.  The countryside is beautiful here, it’s very inspiring.  If I was a writer I could see myself wandering through the forests and fields looking for inspiration.  But anyway…it’s always a bad sign when I’m about to write in my blog and I get distracted before I even get to the story. 

So for those of you hadn’t heard, I spent the past 3 nights in Paris.  I’m pretty sure we did EVERY touristy thing you can think of in just 2 days. 

In order to organize my thoughts and give a people who don’t want to sift through all the details a chance to cut out early, I’m going to summarize my trip with a FAQ/Cliff’s Notes version.

Was Paris your favorite city so far?

Definitely

Would you study there if you could?

If I was an art/history major, I couldn’t think of a better place.  But as a person who spends most of his time drooling over technology…I’d be happier elsewhere.  Also, as a somewhat frugal person, I was appalled by the prices in Paris…and I’m living in San Sebastian right now haha. 

Best experience in Paris?

The museums, hands down.  I got to the see the EPIC and I mean that as in Homer’s Odyssey epic, Louvre as well as the very impressive D’Orsay.  (bad pun, sorry). 

Worst experience in Paris?

The way down from the Eiffel Tower.  (I’m going to make you read that part :P).

Did you try any French food?

We had some amazing crepes!  I got one with strawberry compote and another with sugar.  I also had a cup of coffee (café au lait) in a French café near the Centre Pompidou museum.  It cost 5 Euros and I almost got up to tell the waiter there was a mistake with our bill before Emily (currently a student in Paris) told me that’s what to expect here. 

Did you run into any funny stereotypes?

Definitely, a French guy on the metro laughed the most stereotypical French laugh I could think of and I started laughing and almost cried.

Did you get your ass kicked?

Not then, but almost at the Flogging Molly concert lol

You saw Flogging Molly?

Yes, and I have never danced or sweat so much during a concert in my life. 

OK, I might be convinced to read your entry now, will it be a brief factual recount, or will there be odd sidebars throughout? 

I am incapable of a linear storyline.  No seriously, have you been reading how I write?

Abstract aside, let’s get down to business.

Day 1 (Thursday):

Woke up, packed up, headed to the supermarket and packed myself a fresh baguette, sandwich fixings, and some snacks.  Walked to the Eusko Tren station (basically a long distance metro for the Basque Country) and took the line from Centro all the way to the end over the French Border.  No passport control, just a train.  Crazy!  Funny thing:  First thing I saw in France was “Casa Jose: Bar and Mexican Food” hahaha.  Also Jose, you are welcome for the publicity.  My blog reaches at least 10 people almost 1 of which could end up in Hendaye to visit your fine dining establishment.  Walked less than a block down the street to find the train station.  There I noticed that the trains weren’t moving in and out.  They were parked end to end on one rail for some reason.  After asking which of the 3 trains spread out on the track was mine (in Spanish thankfully) I hopped on and took my seat.  I chose the “social” car for my ride up and they placed me at a table.  I talked to an elderly Spanish couple across from me.  I assume they found my American/Latin-American/Spanish brand of Castilian charming.  After watching the countryside for a while, I watched some TV on my laptop and tried to type some stuff out in Matlab.  **SEVEN HOURS LATER** I arrive in the Montparnasse station in France.  It was quite a sizeable train station.  It felt like an airport without all of the pointless security lines and checkpoints. 

Again, using my Spanish (English was almost useless until I got into Paris) I bought a set of Metro tickets and made my way to my hostel.  Bjorn and Darren were flying in, and my train got in an hour ahead of them, so I went up to the room and chilled.  The bunk scenario was pretty comical.  The person on the bottom bunk had to LITERALLY “crawl into bed” at night.  And the person on the top bunk got to smack their head on the ceiling if they sat up in bed.  There was one outlet in the room, and it was above the sink.  And France had some odd adaptor system with an extra prong, so I borrowed an adaptor from the emergency light (shhhh) and strung that with my American power converter the ran the cord across the dorm to my bed. 

We had a tiny balcony that I used to take what would end up being my favorite picture of Paris.  My camera does NOT perform well in low light so I used bulb exposure whenever I could this trip.  I’d just prop it up on a railing or a flat wall and do bulb exposures to take pictures at night.   Some of them turned out really well. 

Bjorn showed up after I set up camp and we ventured out into the streets.  We headed to find food first.  We ended up wandering the streets for a while to find most things were closed.  We stumbled on a kebap place that we settled for.  Turned out to be VERY tasty.  My kebap was grilled fresh and they put CHILI sauce on it.  It was HOT.  I haven’t had anything that spicy since I got to Spain.  I was sweating with happiness.  And even though it was a kebap place, the French still made us feel classy by pouring our canned beverages into fancy stemware.  Haha.  Our stomachs full, Bjorn and I decided to take a walk down the edge of the river that ran past the front of our hostel.  We walked around for a good while.   We saw signs for the Bastille and planned to storm it, but then we never found it, soooo oops?  Turns out the Bastille doesn’t exist anymore, just a statue commemorating it.   We also ran into a lot of bike sharing stations.  I mean A LOT.  You put in a credit card and get a bike for free for 30 minutes or for 1 euro an hour after that.  We NEED this system in San Luis Obispo.  It’s amazingly efficient and convenient.  You can buy a ticket for a day or have a long term plastic card that you just wave over the locked bike and it comes off.  The bikes all have self-generated power for head/tail lights and all the metal pieces are shielded from the elements by plastic.  I’m quite jealous.  Speaking of which, the metro system in Paris is SPECTACULAR.  They have mass transit down to a science.  It has to be one of the most efficient systems in the world.  You can use each metro ticket for 90 minutes to travel on any form of transport.  So you can buy a metro ticket, take the underground, then get off at your stop and catch a bus if you need to…all for the price of one ticket.  The metros cover the entire city (they say you’re never more than 400 meters from a station and that seems to be true) and we only had to take a bus one time.  Anyway, day 1 was over and Bjorn and I were back.  We met a guy named Pablo from Guinea.  He was an interesting guy.  He smelled terrible though.  I mean, I was on the second bunk and he was below me, and I could smell him through the mattress (he hadn’t showered in a few days).  So after tossing and turning for a bit I fell asleep, ready to hit the ground running the next morning. 

Day 2 (Friday)

Today was a massive day.  Absolutely jam-packed.  So fasten your seatbelts, there’s a lot of reading ahead.  Bjorn and I woke up and headed out for breakfast.  We walked to a few of the cafes that were open and were sad to find they only sold over-priced croissants and coffee.  We ended up finding a small bakery and grabbing some pastries and juice for breakfast and then we caught the metro **sidebar**haha reminded me:  in Spain we use the verb “cojer” to say “to get/pick-up/catch/grab/etc” whereas in Latin America cojer signifies “to [have sexual relations]”.  Anyway, we met up with Darren and Emily at the Notre Dame. 

It was really cool to see it in person.  As with a lot of the Parisian monuments, you see them in movies all the time and you somehow expect them to be props or something.  But no, they are there, and quite a bit larger than you’d expect.  We walked around inside the cathedral (which was really dark and sadly no flash was allowed) and I took some pictures of the windows and monuments.  I was really disappointed to see how commercialized the church was.  There were 2 euro “holy token” vending machines every 20 yards around the walkways in the church.  In addition you could purchase prayer candles, religious memorabilia, etc.  All this was INSIDE the church.  But besides the blatant commercialization of the church, the inside was still quite spectacular.  Emily told us that the reason it was so dark inside the cathedral was because the original designers didn’t realize how heavy the structure would be and they had to add more supports outside that covered all the stained glass windows haha. 

After exploring the inside, we went around the outside to go wait in line to view the top (for a fee of 5 Euros of course).  The line was too long, so Bjorn went around the back to take some pictures in the gardens.  We went back to the line, met some cool people from San Diego, and then climbed the hundreds of spiral stairs to the top.  You climb to a mid level first and then walk around to see the gargoyles, then you get to climb to the very top.  I took plenty of pictures of the city from both heights so you can check them out. 

And we got to see one of the original bells.  It was HUGE.  I also made sure to tell my friends one of my father’s terribly lame jokes found here.  

After the Notre Dame we headed across the city to explore some of the sights.  Emily gave us a pretty great guided tour and showed us some of the important buildings.  I didn’t write anything down, so there are going to be some unlabeled monuments in my pictures…sorry haha.  Our first stop was the Jardin du Luxembourg.  Here we played with some leaves and found one of the three “little sisters” of our Statue of Liberty. 

We also got some crepes from a street vendor that Emily recommended and they were very tasty.  I got strawberry compote.  Mmmm.  It started raining so we continued onto the next adventure…the catacombs!  Oh boy those were cool.  We headed down a bunch of spiral stairs (I seriously climbed THOUSANDS of stairs in Paris.  It’s quite a recurring theme haha) into the dark depths.  We walked down the dark narrow corridors to the tombs. 

Once we got there we were extremely surprised.  There were bones EVERYWHERE.  They were stacked and arranged all around us for hundreds and hundreds of yards of pathway.  It is literally mind-boggling how many bones are down there.  A lot of them are arranged artistically but most of them are stacked very straight and efficiently in huge groups.  

After the catacombs we headed over to Emily’s neighborhood to gather some groceries and make lunch.  Bjorn and I whipped up a lemon, grilled onion, and honey mustard salmon on sheermal bread.  I also drank about a liter of Coke to undo any of the healthy benefits I got from my otherwise excellent lunch.  Stuffed and ready for the next challenge, Emily headed off to class, and Bjorn, Darren, and I headed off to see the Louvre!  The metro dropped us off at the mall underneath the Louvre.  It was all decked out for Christmas.

We walked through and surfaced and saw the sight we all recognized: the giant glass pyramid. 

That was impressive, but what was more impressive was the size of the building.  There must have been miles of floor space in the Louvre.   It dumb-founded me from the outside and was even more spectacular from the inside.  We got in for free (as we had waited till the free student hours (6-9 on Friday)) and headed straight for the Mona Lisa.  I figured that was something we had to get done ASAP.  When I got into the room with the Mona Lisa, I didn’t see it at first, because I was looking at the MASSIVE mural on the wall opposite the Mona Lisa that no one was looking at.  Literally a hundred people in the room all staring at the tiny Mona Lisa when there was a massive work of art behind them! 

But after viewing the other work, I got in line and took my picture with the Mona. 

After, we viewed hundreds of works from different time periods, nationalities, and artists.  I was most excited when we got to see the original Hammurabi’s Code stone.  I remembered seeing it in an elementary school text book and had been fascinated by it ever since.  It’s the first recorded set of laws EVER (1780 BC) and is quite a work of craftsmanship.  Not only is the idea of the law interesting, the fact that someone so skillfully crafted all of the text into the stone fascinated me. 

Along with Hammurabi’s Code I saw many of the other famous Louvre pieces such as Venus de Milo, King Ramses II, and Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss.  The only piece I didn’t see that I wanted to was Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix.  We took a wrong turn and ended up on the opposite end of the museum and nobody wanted to walk across the museum just to see one piece.  We thought we were going to head home until we headed outside and saw the Eiffel Tower glimmering in the distance.  We all thought: “Damn, we HAVE to see that now.”  We took bus 69 from the Louvre straight to the Eiffel Tower.  This might sound weird, but this was when I had my first, “wow, I’m ACTUALLY in Paris moment.”  As I stood at the base of the Eiffel Tower and we took pictures I was dumbfounded that I was seeing it in person. I had always seen it in movies and general pop culture but I never really thought that I would be standing directly in front of it one day.  It was a great feeling. 

We waited in line for the lift to the top of the tower and finally got up and bought our tickets.  We got in the first elevator and went up pretty high.  Then we stopped, checked out the middle deck, and then got on another elevator to go to the TIP top.  It was amazingly high up.  If you’re afraid of heights I strongly recommend against the Eiffel Tower haha.  From the top there were flags positioned above the windows in the sitting area where you could see the direction and distance of major world cities.  I found the one for LA and saw that it was a good 9.1 thousand kilometers away.  When I got to the top I took a bunch of bulb exposure pictures.  None of them could capture the view I saw.  It’s truly an experience you need to enjoy for yourself.  I’m really glad we went at night though, I don’t think it would have been as awesome during the day. 

So my time on top of the tower was great, but the way down, was awful.  Everyone was waiting in line for the elevator and they pack you in one at a time until the elevator is full and then send it down. Bjorn got in on the elevator before us.  He was lucky enough to miss what happened to us next.

We got stuck.  Yah, trapped in an elevator, how cliché.  I’m not claustrophobic, it wasn’t the fact that we were stuck there even.  I wasn’t worried until the elevator started dropping suddenly.  BOOM!!!…screeeeeech! The elevator would slip a few inches down the cable and then stop again and then oscillate up and down on the tensioned cable.  Everyone held their breath.  A couple minutes later BOOM!!!…screeeeeech! It happened again.  And again.  4 times.  Each time a slip and then a scary wobble up and down.  Then the 5^th time.  BOOM!!!…………AHHHHHH.  We slipped a lot, a lot more than before, and we thought we were done for.  Luckily the brakes caught us a couple of feet later.  Darren and I joked sarcastically that we could both use a new pair of pants.  We then slid, very slowly, all the way down the tower.  A couple of small slips and drops later (and some salty profanity) we made it safely to the ground.  Everyone sprinted from the unlucky elevator as soon as the doors opened.  I am officially taking the stairs whenever I can now. 

After the tower we were all tired and upset (except Bjorn, he had gotten French Fries from a street vendor to pass the time during our 45 minute descent down the tower).  But hey, at least we had a good story to tell right?  Positive outlook right?  Anyway, Bjorn and I headed back to our hostel and hit they hay.  We got back to our room at around 11:30 to find that Pablo had left and there was an Australian girl in our room.  She had decided to take my bed for some reason, so I moved to the bottom bunk.  She complained about us being loud coming in.  Which is funny because it was 11:30 in a youth hostel without a curfew.  She’s going to HATE the rest of her experience in Europe when she realizes everyone but us stays out till well after 4am.  Her passive aggression lost her any points that her accent had gained for her haha. 

Day 3 (Saturday)

The next morning at 9am, to the complaints of our stupid new bunkmate, Bjorn and I got up, showered (oddly located right next to the bunks in the room), and headed out to meet Darren and Emily at the famous Sacré Cœur in the northern part of Paris.  Once again, the incredibly efficient Metro system delivered us there in record time and we had time to grab some breakfast.  We steered past a bunch of the local tourist traps and found a small market.  We bought some sweet egg bread, yogurt and orange juice and headed off to the iconic church on the hill.  We passed some incredibly aggressive street vendors who actually grabbed Bjorn and me and we were forced to smack them away.  We took up a post higher up the hill away from the vendors to eat our breakfast.  I realized at this point that I had left my camera at home and forced Bjorn to take all of the stupid pictures that I would have taken.  I need to get those from him. Anyway, we headed up the massive amount of stairs (Paris = stairs) to the top.  The view was great!  We then headed inside the church where, to my wry amusement, photography wasn’t allowed.  Darren and Emily never showed up, so we texted them and told them to just meet us at the next destination after I had gone back and grabbed my camera from the hostel.  We met up at the unmistakable Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile. 

I took some pictures, and was going to go to the top, until they said that I had to pay 7 Euros.  I laughed in the man’s face.  The Notre Dame had only cost 5 and it was 3 times taller and more impressive.  So we walked around the base and I got to see the ever burning flame for the lost French soldiers.  After the Arc we headed out to walk the streets again.  We saw (the outside) of the Centre Pompidou museum which has its inner structure exposed.  It’s like the architecture building on Poly’s campus only much more spectacular. 

I also got a cup of coffee here with everyone.  I couldn’t believe that my coffee was FIVE freaking Euros.  Really, really!?!? 

Anyway, after my coffee we were ready to walk some more.  I saw the Bastille monument Bjorn and I had been looking for before.  We walked along the Seine river and saw all of the street vendors and their carts.  We eventually made it to the Musee D’Orsay.  It used to be a train station in early 1900’s but was converted to an impressionist museum in 1986.  I personally think it’s more interesting than the Louvre because it feels more accessible and unified.  I personally like impressionism so I might be biased, but outside of the works featured there (Monet, Van Gough, Cezanne, Courbet, Delacroix, etc) the building’s architecture was amazing.  The old “hard iron work” feel of the early 1900s was preserved along with the railway’s massive clock.

This classic industrial feel is juxtaposed with a very modern interior design that is truly impressive. Cameras were not allowed in the exhibits but I snapped a picture of the main room inside to show you what I’m talking about. 

After we left the museum it was late and we needed to run off to grab dinner and get ready for the Flogging Molly concert.  We had some Asian food from a restaurant near the museum and then took the metro back to the hostel.  I caught a great sunset over the bridge on the walk from the metro to the hostel, and luckily I snapped a picture. 

Later we met up at the Le Bataclan for the concert.  The first band was already on when we got there.  They were pretty energetic but I never caught their name.  The next band that came on was a punk/classic rock band (called The Minutes) and the lead singer had a Hitler moustache. 

They were extremely energetic and we had a good time listening.  Sentences are getting shorter as my fingers get tired from typing, sorry.  Flogging Molly came on and the place erupted.  As soon as the guitar and drums came on the dancing started, and once the tempo broke from ballad to rock, it became a seething mass of bodies bouncing off one another.  It was just one large mosh pit in GA.  I was right up in the front row and was loving it. 

By the end of the show I was literally saturated with sweat.  My shirt was so full of sweat and water (poured on us by the bouncers because we were on the verge of passing out in the middle of the concert **seriously, I started getting really dizzy**)  that it was almost at my knees. I had never danced/moshed/raged or sweat so much in my life.  A-m-a-z-i-n-g show.  So that concludes that day pretty much.  Bjorn and I headed home after the show, choked down some McDonald’s (out of desperation from not finding anywhere else open at 1am), and went back to the hostel.  Interrupted our stupid roommate who was asleep and rolled over theatrically to say, “oh don’t worry, it’s not like I was trying to sleep or anything” to which I responded to with a poorly concealed chuckle at her ignorance.

Day 4 (Sunday)

Woke up to piss off that Australian Girl again.  Seriously, she doesn’t understand what the rest of her trip is going to be like.  I showered, packed up (by stumbling around in the dark for a while until I could shovel my stuff into the lit hallway), then headed down to the bar.  Oh yah, our hostel had a bar for a front office. Europe.  Haha.  I talked to the barkeeper and he gave me a metro map and one of the cleaning guys pointed me to a local supermarket where I could get supplies for my trip.  (I had asked the barkeep about breakfast and snacks and he didn’t know any places open Sundays and told me to just get it at one of the Metro station markets because “it’s all about the same.”  Ha! I wasn’t about to see what “airport prices” looked like in Paris.  I got supplies from the grocer, hopped on the metro, and headed out to the train station.  I got some chances to take pictures this time because I wasn’t scrambling to make my check-in time like when I arrived.  They have a weird, (well to me at least, I had never been to a large train station before) policy of putting up the train’s platform only 20 minutes before it leaves.  AKA: don’t choose the wrong ¼ mile platform or you’ll definitely miss your train.  Luckily (I mean skillfully) I ended up in the right seat on the right train [MASSIVE by the way, 30 cars, not counting the 6 engine-cars, first class, or dining cars]. 

It was quite the machine.  In a weird piece of, I’ll call it meta-writing, I’m about to catch up to myself in time.  I started this entry writing about day 1 while on the train, and then my battery died.  I’m now on the Eusko Tren home and will recap my time on train haha. 

 As I said before, the French countryside is beautiful.  There were massive forests (sadly, most doomed for commercial logging) and wide open fields.  I had the funny experience of seeing hunters walking through the fields in search of deer or quail.  They were out of luck it seemed, but as I passed them on the tracks, I could see them searching the field on one side of a stand of trees and a huge group of quail/turkeys or deer on the other side of the trees.  It happened a few times and took my mind off the chaos in the train car.  The rows in front of me were PACKED with ridiculously noisy kids.  Two sets of parents had 9 kids between them and the one dad loved to hear himself talk and repeating what seemed to be the one phrase he knew in French OVER and OVER to his kids in different voices.  People were moving to other cars to avoid this group.  I was lucky enough to have my noise-cancelling headphones and my laptop…but once that died I was back in the fray.  I was tempted to move, but I saw the people who had left returning once people boarded the train and needed their seats.  The Dominican lady to my left was threatening to strangle the parents and kids under her breath.   It was clear that she had a massive headache and her previous polite requests for the parents to calm themselves and their kids had fallen on deaf ears.  At this point I’m nursing a headache as well.  The train was annoying, and when I went to use my Eusko Tren ticket I had bought for the return trip, it didn’t work.  Apparently when you pay for a “both-way” ticket, that means both ways in the same day.   Didn’t say that anywhere on the booth or ticket.  Oh well, euro lost, experience gained (I obviously should have procrastinated :P).  Can’t wait to be home!  Paris was fantastic and I would love to return at some point (Christmas or New Years especially).  I hope that I captured at least some of the amazing feelings that I had about Paris and this trip.  I know I griped about travel and annoying people, but hey, who loves those things anyway?  Speaking of travel, I am finalizing my plans for Italy this week, I’ll be going right after my last final.  I’m so excited.  But I’ll leave that story for a later date, you’ve suffered enough. 

Au revoir!

Never thought I’d say this…

…but I actually ran out of energy to finish writing my post.  I’ll try and get it done tomorrow.  When you see it you’ll understand haha.