Sep 26

Written by: Maribel Lopez
9/26/2008 9:52 AM

I’m so glad that test is over…I feel it went well…better in some parts than others…but it’s over now so no reason to dwell. After the test, Ashley and I walked around on some of the main streets checking out the shops. We didn’t buy much but it was fun to look around and not have much too worry about as far as class goes. It’s Friday!

We headed home for lunch and then met up again to go to the school and look up tickets for our long weekends/breaks. We shopped around on ryanair.com and vueling.com and a bunch of other sites to find some deals for the long weekend we have in a couple weeks as well as for our fall break which is at the end of October. After about 4 hours, we booked flights from Seville to Milan and Rome back to Seville for our long weekend. We are going to miss a couple classes, but it’ll totally be worth it. We are going to fly into Milan and then head south over a course of five days, stopping in Florence along the way and ending in Rome. We still need to look for hostels but there a ton so it shouldn’t be a problem. We also found a pretty good deal for our fall break to Greece. The options for direct flights from Seville to Athens were ridiculous, actually almost all the flight to anywhere in Greece were outrageous but we ended up booking from Madrid to Athens and then Athens back to Madrid for a slightly reasonable price. In the end, I feel like we got a lot planned and with our trip to Barcelona, Italy and Greece, we haven’t even spent 600 dollars, so…when in Rome, right?

We really only have one other place to book a flight to, Berlin, so I can visit my friend from high school and then we may plan a day trip to Morocco, we’ll see.

At about 8pm we headed home for dinner and then met up again close to midnight for a night out on the town.

We met up with Rachel and Erica downtown and went to the Torre de Oro, which is right by the river and always has a bunch of people with their botellones of booze, pregaming prior to hitting up the discotecas. So naturally Ashley and I had a couple bottles of champagne to celebrate the end of the final and the beginning of the weekend. We were going to take a cab out to Antique but when we found out some of our friends didn’t get in for one reason or another, we changed our minds, especially considering the cab ride is over 10 Euros. So we ended up on Calle Betis at our favorite place, Rio Grande. It felt like we hadn’t been there in a while so it was nice to be somewhere familiar and relaxing. After a while, Jose called and we met up with him. I strolled in at 8 this morning…and slept until 2. Ate lunch and then slept again. Gotta get ready to do it all over again tonight. What a life. I think I’m becoming Sevillana rather easily.

Advice to future study abroaders:

If you plan on doing some traveling on your own, shop around! There a lot of websites, like ryanair.com for instance, that have some really great flight deals. Granted, it takes some time and patience, but totally worth it. Also, hostelworld.com is great for searching for hostels and I recommend buying a couple travel books. I love Let’s Go (Europe, they have it for all destinations) On A Budget. It’s a great book with great tips on how to save money and be a smart traveler.

Paz y amor,

Maribel

Tags: