David: Spain Trip - Day 5

Manu in his kitchen

I had to wake up at 7 today... but the whole being 18 and it being my birthday made it worth it. I started the day off normally with cereal, toast, and Spanish coffee. Then I went to Manu's school for the first time and struggled listening to what was going on in every class, but I made some new friends and somehow stayed awake the whole time.

Math class

After our classes we were introduced to a small group of teachers and students. Manu said some words about me in Spanish that I hope were good because I couldn't really understand anything he was saying, but oh well haha.

From there we left school and relaxed at Manu's house until we left to go meet up with our friends, Luis, Connor, Austin, and Fermin. We walked around for a bit and we helped get Connor a jacket that he had been wanting the whole trip and then met up with the rest of our friends at a bar downtown to watch the UEFA Champions League match between Real Madrid and Lyon. Manu and his family got me a Real Madrid jersey for my birthday and the game, but unfortunately the game ended up tied 1-1.

My new Real Madrid jersey 

The game on TV

The bar

(From left to right) Amanda, Luis, & Sarah

Luna

(From left to right) Sofia, Lucia, & Rachel 

Rachel & Luna

At the end of the game I was getting a little hungry so Manu, myself, Sarah, and our friends Matt, Jose Juan, and Cristina all went to get pizza at a place around the corner. I learned how to say bacon in spanish... Bacon. And I shared a bacon and pepperoni pizza. It was better than I expected it would be. And after we were done, Manu and myself went home and now I'm about to go to bed to start day 6 tomorrow!

Jose Juan & Matt

Cristina 

Bacon & Pepperoni pizza

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David: China Trip Day 5

Today was a bad day weather wise. It didn't stop raining, and on top of things it was our shopping day which was mostly outdoors lol. We started the day at the Three Gorges Museum, which was cool, but mostly everything was in Chinese so I couldn't read anything. We did get headphones and a little voice thing to listen to someone talking about the exhibits in broken English though. After the museum we headed to Ancient Street, which is pretty much what it sounds like. It's a cobble stone street with hundreds of different stores and restaurants lining the outside. We mostly ended up stopping and getting these fried dough pretzel like pastries, which I guess are really popular because there was a line passing 10 stores down the street (and this was all in the pouring rain). But other than that we stopped shortly at a few stores people pulled us into trying to sell us something, which happens every single time because we're foreigners and they know they can trick us into buying anything. After Ancient Street we went to Industrial Street in the business district of town. This was where all the normal stores you'd see in America were, but mostly high end like Burberry, Dior, etc. Didn't really have enough Yuan for any of those stores either so we moved on to dinner. And dinner was a pretty big cultural experience called the hot pot where you throw food into a boiling pot of hot spiced up water so it cooks fast and also burns your mouth like crazy because it's so spicy lol. But otherwise it was really good and wasn't too bad. When we finished with that we headed to the Yangtze River for a river cruise around the city. It seemed like every building had its own little light show going on with it and the whole city was lit up with different colors. It was cool to see everything from outside the streets though and get a sense of what the whole city looked like. And once we got off we headed back and that ended Day 5.




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