MichaelOrr.net

Of course Vimeo uploaded the two crummy videos with no problem earlier but took 6 hours to upload the better videos. Ugh, oh well. Here they are:

So yesterday was a very good day for 4 reasons.

1) I went to an English speaking Protestant church yesterday with Joyce and Sarah. Yay! It was actually a lot of fun. They were very friendly and I am looking forward to going back. It was a really small church, not many people but everyone was very warm and inviting and everyone spoke English! It was called International Church of Barcelona and it truly lived up to its name. There were plenty of Americans but there were also Brits, Canadians, Pakistanis, Persians, people from Africa, Latin America… all over the world! It was a very cool experience to see all the different cultures worship together.

2) I went to the Barcelona Cathedral after church to try to watch the traditional Catalan dances but I guess we were too late because there wasn’t much going on. There was a trio of people playing classical music on violins and a standup bass though, so we chilled for a little while and watched them before deciding to walk to Las Ramblas then back to Onix through the Eixample. As we were walking back, we stumbled across a small farmer’s market and I started poking around. I found a small section that had some fresh cheeses. For those of you who don’t know, I am crazy about good cheese. It could be anything from Gouda to fresh Mozzarella, Blue Cheese, Brie, or even just Colbie Jack. Today though, I hit the jackpot. I found some fresh goat cheese. The package I bought has 4 pieces, one with oregano and some other herbs, one covered in black pepper, one with a sort of pesto sauce, and another with a spicy red pepper sauce. I wish computers had smell-o-vision so that y’all could experience this with me!

3) Jennifer and I were almost back to Onix as we were passing the Arc de Triomphe and we heard music and chanting so we decided to go check it out. We found a huge group of people practicing Capoeira. It looked like it was a summer program to train these kids. The kids ranged from 5 or 6 all the way up to mid-twenties. I’ll let the videos do the talking……

I have two more videos that are SIGNIFICANTLY BETTER but they are being slow on the upload so check back in a few hours and hopefully I will have those up for you.

4) As I was walking in the door from all this, I ran into a group of people walking out to play soccer under the bridge. The sun was shining and you couldn’t ask for a prettier day so we went and played soccer for several hours until we were all ready to drop.

5) (Bonus random cool thing) There has been crazy music going on constantly since Thursday. On Friday night, we heard a drumline walk down the street through the courtyard behind Onix. Everyone had some kind of cymbal, bongo, whistle, or chime. There was more than 60 people just walking down the street and they had a following of about another hundred people. Everyone was chanting something and most people had some kind of drink in their hand. A group of us were tempted to follow them but we had just started cooking dinner. All day Saturday was a live music festival in the park just down the road. They had live music of almost every genre including jazz and country! I can hear some crazy loud music from the plaza below my window right now so I think I am going to make a sandwich, grab a beer from the fridge, and go check it out. (Turns out it was a huge celebration that we think was for a wedding. Streamers and confetti everywhere, lots of people cheering, lots of music. But they were wrapping up when I went down there)

I can hear the guy in the room next to mine singing in the shower…. in Spanish. I’m not sure why, but that amuses me.

If you google search for European Fohawk (no quotes), I am the 4th hit on the front page.

That is all.

EDIT: And no, that is not my hair in the picture above.

Phew, I’m back in Barcelona. Poor from Italy and trying to get things organized here at Onix. Today was spent going to an all-you-can-eat sushi place for 8.50 and updating this non-blog. We definitely got our money’s worth at the sushi place. Oh, and I’ve been uploading pictures to flickr like you wouldn’t believe. That pro-membership was well worth the $25/year. I started uploading at 1, it is now 8 PM and I the transfer is still not done. I think I am going to make either fajitas or rosemary chicken for dinner. Hrmmm, choices choices. Gaby won’t be back to Barca till Sunday night but there are about 10 people who either never left Barca or got back early like me. We all went out to a club last night, I’m sure something is going on tonight, who knows what.

Venice looks and feels like you are walking around in a GIANT movie set. The entire thing hardly looks real. It was so much fun just watching all the boats go up and down the grand canal. The gondoliers are incredibly talented. The come within inches of each other and the walls, but hardly ever touch. We spent our first day in Venice at the museum of art, St. Mark’s square, and the Rialto bridge… all the touristy stuff. And there were definitely a lot of tourists there. I’m not sure if I could live in Venice just because of the massive amount of tourists. It’s funny how when you stay in Europe for long enough, you start to resent the ignorant tourists who don’t have a clue what’s going on, just walking around snapping pictures every few feet.

After lunch, we went for a gondola ride (mandatory) then we went back to the hotel for showers, to take a nap, and get ready for dinner. We went to a cafe in Campo Margherita which had a 3 course meal for 14 euro. You got one of several choices for each dish. It ended up being delicious. Only one problem: the wine. It was 16 euros per bottle of the house wine. Dinner ended up being a little pricey but worth it. 

The girls left for Florence early Tuesday morning but my flight wasn’t until that night so I headed back into Venice and wandered. I ended up wandering through the Jewish ghetto of Venice. Which neither like a Jewish community, nor like a ghetto. In fact, the only thing I could tell different was the fact that the streets were wider and there were hardly any tourists. I wandered through here for some time and grabbed a snack of fresh strawberries from a local produce market and continued to wander back towards the grand canal. I made it to St. Mark’s square and went into the basilica (which was impressive but not overly so). Then I went back to the Rialto bridge and watched the water traffic while I walked up and down the Grand Canal for a few hours. It amazed me to just watch the city busily going up and down the canal. 

I was wearing a soccer jersey from Milan and had my fo-hawk action going pretty strong so I was being mistaken for a European more often than not. I was walking around with my bags and my camera so I was obviously a tourist but I was mistaken for being French pretty much all day. French, I can see. Italian, not so much. To close out the day, I had a late lunch of gnocchi along the Grand Canal and stopped for gelato one last time on my way to the bus station.

Standing outside the bus company’s office, I ran in to two guys from Tech who were killing time in Venice. They had been there for 3 days after coming from Prague and I just ran in to them as we were all leaving town. I walked over to where I needed to catch the bus. The bus pulled up, and off walk two more guys from Tech, just arriving to Venice. What are the odds. Running in to 4 people from your same trip randomly in Venice. Anyways, I am currently uploading a LOT of pictures to flickr. And soon I will be picking out the better ones and adding them to facebook.

So, I apologize in advance for the length of this post and the one for Venice. I didn’t have internet in either city so I haven’t been able to update in several days.

I forgot how much I really love Italian people, architecture, food, everything. 

Alright, I’ll start at the beginning… I was planning on catching a bus at 3:45 am to Girona (a smaller airport on the outskirts of Barcelona) for my flight to Milan. Only problem was that I fell asleep and the alarm on my phone didn’t wake me up until 4:20. I frantically ran down to the bus station around the corner and caught the next bus at 4:45 which got me to Girona at 6 for my 6:45 flight. I made it but with no time to spare. Phew. Our flight to Milan was uneventful and after a short bus ride, got into Milan around 10 on Saturday morning. We dropped our bags off at the hotel and went back out in search of food. Our first meal in Italy? A huge piece of focaccia bread with cheese melted on top, MMMM! 

We caught the metro to the duomo plaza. We took one step out of the metro and the first thing we see in front of us are all the white spires of the cathedral stretching up in front of us. We stopped in awe. Take a look at my pictures and you will see why. There are over 2,000 statues on the outside of the church and over 130 spires on the roof. The church is Italy’s oldest gothic building and very ornate. We walked around for a while, did some window shopping and then walked over to the ruins of the medieval Milan castle which was surprisingly intact. Because of our long night of traveling, we decided to take a nap in a big park behind the castle.

Lunch was at a small pizzeria. Authentic Italian pizza and gelato, you just can’t get much better than that. We went back to the hotel to shower and rest up before dinner. We went out for pasta and found a small restaurant close to our hotel and we had a huge meal of wine, mussels, fried calamari, lasagna, risotto, tortellini, desserts, we got the works. They even brought out shots of lemoncello for everyone after dinner. 

The next morning I woke up early to go see Da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper.’ Incredible. At 15′ x 30′ the painting is so much bigger than I ever thought. The amount of detail, the expressiveness of the apostles’ faces, the the level of intricacy in the painting just blew me away. No picture could ever do it justice, you really must see that painting in real life. I could’ve sat and stared at it for hours soaking in the scene but we were kicked out after 20 minutes because they brought in groups at intervals through a series of airlocks and one group had to leave before the other could be let in.

I went back to the hotel, picked up the girls, and we headed out in search of breakfast. Croissants and cappuccinos, delicious. Then we went to the church again and climbed to the rooftop terrace and took pictures. Typically from the rooftops of these amazing churches, the city is the coolest thing to look at. In Milan, the church itself is waaay cooler. Just check out my pictures on flickr. 

The girls did some shopping, I did some people watching then we headed to the train station en route to Venice. Oh, and I was so so close to buying an Italian suit at one point. I had to leave or I probably would’ve plunked down the 200 euro for it. Luckily, reason told me that eating was more important than Italian pinstripes.

Yesterday I went to Sagrada Familia with some friends and we spent several hours wandering the inside and the outside before taking the elevator to the top of one of the bell towers. The views from the top were incredible. Mountains on one side, sea on the other with a beautiful city sprawling in between. Words still cannot express the magnitude of detail on this structure. Luckily my new camera can withstand taking more than a few pictures so I was happily snapping away and came away with a LOT of pictures. There are currently 4 towers completed and they are working on the foundations for four more. In all, there will be 18 towers. One for each of the apostles, one for each of the gospels, one for Mary and one for Jesus. The existing towers dwarf the city and stand staggeringly tall over Barcelona but the tallest two towers (dedicated to Mary and Jesus) will ultimately make the existing towers miniscule. The goal is to be completed by 2026, in time for the centennial of Gaudi’s death. They have a long long way to go in order to make that deadline. I took pictures of some of the architectural plans and scale models and you can see from the other pictures that there is a lot left to be done. 

Today marks the beginning of my first vacation. Today is being spent in Barcelona getting ready but tonight at 3 AM (yeah, you read that right), 5 of us are hopping a flight to Milan. We are staying in Milan until Sunday night and then we are off to Venice. The rest of the group is heading to Florence on Wednesday and then to Rome but I am coming back to Barcelona to hit some museums and hopefully the beach! I’m going to take my laptop with my through Italy but I’m not sure about internet availability so you might not get any updates until Wednesday. Expect some awesome pictures and some good stories from Italy when I get back.

A big group of us at Onix got together to cook on Wednesday night. Everyone brought a different random ingredient and a bottle of wine and we got creative. It was incredibly delicious. A very successful dinner that will have to be repeated.

My professor moved the bucket out from under a drip in the ceiling because he didn’t like the drip drip drip noise that it was causing. Now it is going drip drip drip on the floor. So much better.