photo update
i FINALLY uploaded my argentina album and have also added photos to my germany and bolivia albums! check them out!
SPAIN valencia (las fallas)
to valencia for ‘las fallas!’ every year, valencia celebrates st. joseph’s day (march 19) with a TWO WEEK festival! basically, neighborhoods spend all year fundraising so they can erect sculptures with paper -mache to display around the city. the theme is “anything that can be parodied,” so the creations can be anything from spanish politicians to celebrities. the size of these things are incredible;they range in size from about 5 feet to over 30 feet tall! some are erected in intersections of the respective neighborhoods, while others take over plazas with their presence(check out my photos!). how do they cap off the festivities and get rid of the sculptures? by burning them ofcourse! after all this work, they go out in style by being burnt to the ground.
another feature of the fallas is fireworks. oh my god. not only are there firework displays during the day and night, a lot of people have them and set them off all day. you can’t walk down a street without hearing loud bangs as even little kids set light them and throw them onto the street. the worst is at night. i don’t think anyone sleeps during fallas because the streets were still packed at 5am! this means that drunk people throw them at crowds so you have be ready to run. i think i had about twenty heart attacks that night. ay dios mio.
SPAIN ibiza
lesson learned from our trip to ibiza: check the weather and events for your next destination BEFORE buying your ticket. kelsey and i bought our tickets in january figuring it would probably be warm in march. man, were we wrong. it was warm enough during the day, but definitely cold at night. there was also a taxi strike, which meant we had to walk everywhere since the buses were infrequent during the day and stopped running after midnight. blue and pacha were the only clubs open. and did i mention 90 % of the town was closed??? wow we suck. haha.
a plus was that we managed to really walk around town. when we do go back (now we absolutely need to go at the height of the season) i won’t need a map and we’ll know where the good spots are for food and drinks. ooh and if we can’t catch a cab home one night? i’ll have no problems walking the 2 km distance from pacha!
PORTUGAL lisboa (come back to me, ipod!)
i have absolutely no luck when it comes to holding onto ipods. there goes another one. the pensions are pretty cheap so we got our own room, thinking it would be great to not have to worry about personal belongings. well, we came home the last night and was gonna put on some music and enjoy some porto (portuguese wine-like drink) on the balcony when i reached into my backpack and could not locate my ipod. i realized they were stolen when i couldn’t find paul’s either.
all i could do was to find the pension owner who claimed to have seen nothing. he also insisted the box where we had to leave our keys before leaving was safe. well apparently not. either he was involved, or another person staying there got a hold of the keys because he was not keeping a close eye on the box. either way, we had to blame someone. 
the argument was going no where and i think he was going to have a heart attack, so all we could make was a police report. aaargh.