i wake up in the most stifling room ever even after sleeping with both of my windows wide open. i go and check the thermometer and outside it is freaking 90 DEGREES FARHENHEIT. 90 DEGREES. i realize a lot of you are only used to Celsius but i mean, American buddies, would you EVER think of Sweden as reaching that temperature in the summer? that’s like, as hot as it got in Spain like the entire time we were there, or at least it didn’t go much above that the whole time.
it is HOT.
i’m bad at actually blogging daily. it is currently around 1 am and i’m just now blogging. it’s really hard because there’s not a lot to say. it was hot out, again. very very hot. i didn’t know what to do with myself. it was hot outside and hot inside and i was constantly sort of sweaty. the heat is nice in theory but it gets to be too much.
we’ve been looking into which IB school in Colorado i’ll go to when we move back. it’s just one year, but of course we want it to be a good school, and we’re looking so we know what places to look for a house or apartment or whatever we decide to live in. our top 2 are Niwot High School, in Niwot obviously, which would be good because i’ve been there once before and i know some people there, or Fairview High School in Boulder, which would be good because it’s in Boulder which i like and it’s apparently really liberal (of course it is, it’s Boulder afterall) and it has a medieval theme apparently XD so yeah. those are the final options. they both have really similar test scores… really good ones… and stuff like that, so i’m really not sure which one we’ll pick.
i don’t have much else to say. i’m listening to ambient music whilst writing in my journal, sprawled out on my bed, and it’s very therapeutic. i’ll get back to that now. bai bai. <3
this post hardly counts as the post for the day since it’s technically the next day, but whatever, i’m not skipping a day unnecessarily.
today the weather was really, really good. it was actually a little too good. painfully hot out. i strongly prefer painfully hot weather to snowing, though. i hung out with Richard in town, and went to shops and got ice cream from this very happy man in Gallerian who my family and i have been getting ice cream from for about as long as we’ve been living here. i don’t really think he’s knows who we are but we really like to get ice cream from him, he’s always the same person working there and he seems to enjoy his job quite a lot. that stand has really, really good lemoncurd ice cream and really, really good mango ice cream. anyway, after that he came to my house and we watched Friends on old ripped dvds from China.
yeah. good day.
that sounded sarcastic XD it wasn’t. today WAS a good day.
today will be a short post day. i’ll blog again tomorrow <3 bye bye!
1. Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain (The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain)
2. Little Miss Sunshine
3. Across The Universe
4. MirrorMask
5. The Breakfast Club
and i don’t have much else to say besides that. it’s really, really nice outside so i should probably go get ready and go out for a while before i have to babysit. i don’t have any other plans for today though.
five favourite songs right now:
x Strange & Beautiful - Aqualung
x Stellar – Incubus (i realize it’s old, i’ve re-fallen in love with it)
x It’s Not The End Of The World But I Can See It From Here - Lostprophets
x If It Kills Me – Jason Mraz
x and this is just embarrassing, but Can’t Be Tamed – Miley Cyrus. this is the third song of hers i have enjoyed. it’s a GOOD SONG. TT.TT
yeah.
epic graffiti in Spain in case you are wondering.
sorry that i didn’t blog yesterday or the day before ): i was kind of busy and i just completely forgot about it somehow. anyways, the second aspect of the trip to Spain that i’d like to cover is the Midsummer-ish festival that is unique to the city of Alicante. the festival itself wasn’t at all like Sweden’s traditional Midsummer celebrations, i’m just comparing it to that because the purpose is pretty much the same. it takes place over a few days in June, with fireworks and parades and outdoor eating and things like that, but the main night is on the 24th.
the most outstanding thing about the festivals is the bonfires. these, ladies and gentlemen, are not any regular bonfires. for a week or so before this holiday, there are large sculptures made of paper-mâché in different parts of the city, around 40 total. they are painted as well, and very big, and are ridiculously intricate and detailed for the purpose that they serve.
these are some of the sculptures before they met their fate:
the interesting thing about all of these artworks is that the entire purpose of their creation is to be burned down. at midnight there is a single firework, which signals the beginning of the festival, and from that point on sculptures are set aflame all over the city. fireworks shoot from them at the same time as they start burning, and it’s absolutely crazy.
the first one we watched was really big and had an absolutely giant crowd of tourists watching it. it was in the water and was absolutely giant.
before burning:
everyone was starting to get impatient waiting until it finally started burning down…
as you can see, it’s kind of terrifying. the fact that the sculpture featured a freaking clown and some masks did not help at ALL. it was really apocalyptic, my mom and i thought, because as this was not the first one to go off there were giant billows of smoke coming from several different places and completely smoking up the sky, and there were giant fires in different places, and people all over the place. it was surreal and freaky and really, really cool.
i might mention that before it burned fireworks shot from it into the air, and there were little firefighting boats spraying it to make sure it didn’t burn down some boats or something.
the next one we watched was actually cooler. it was more true to the culture and real, instead of being photographed by swarms of tourists.
before burning:
i didn’t get any pictures of this one burning, only a video.
this one was extremely freaky. and also very awesome. it was like the other one except instead of all the tourists there was a group of screaming Spanish people getting sprayed by a firefighter with a hose, the guys waving their t-shirts above their heads. also, as well as a giant billow of smoke pouring into the sky there were craploads of embers and pieces of burning cardboard pouring down from the sky. we all got little spots of ashes on us, my mom actually got burnt… we had all like run back to avoid being hit by the embers but i mean you couldn’t avoid it.
it was also funny to put into perspective how completely not allowed that would have been in the us. this giant fire was located DIRECTLY by a tree, and between buildings just in the middle of a regular city block. the massive amounts of safety hazards would have already completely made it not even something to be considered. my mom and i think that also there would be the issue of sensitive parents being offended by burning sculptures replicating human figures, and bringing in issues like 9/11. just because they do things like that. it would just not happen there. for many different reasons. cultural differences ftw.
it was a really cool thing to get to see, though. the dates for the trip just happened to fall perfectly upon the time of this holiday. we tend to have luck with that sort of thing.
in other news, today i went on a massively long walk all the way from my apartment to my old school and then past there to Haga and around it, and then back to Odenplan and then i took the train home. all of this in very hot, sunny weather. it was really fun. i love going on long walks.
my summer is going swell :D swell-ly? i don’t think swell is an adverb.
oki doki byebye <33
so my trip to Spain was two weeks long, which is a long time, and i don’t really feel like going into extreme detail about it cause i mean that’s over 14 days to write about. i’ll give an overview of the trip and then focus on two of the more important aspects of it.
before going to Spain we had an overnight layover in England, which was fun. we drove to London and went to the Madame Tussaud’s wax museum and drove around. in Spain, we stayed at a couple’s apartment in El Campello… it was actually more of their vacation home or something, their primary apartment is in Valencia which is nearby. the apartment was quite nice, and there was a really pretty pool downstairs that we were in quite a lot.
the trip was really good and really nice overall because it was really chill; we weren’t running around doing tourist-y things, mostly just hanging out on the beach or at the apartment or shopping or whatever.
so the first important aspect of the trip was the beaches. we spent many an hour lying on the beach, tanning, sleeping, reading, and/or listening to our iPods, or going on walks, or looking for seashells, or going in the water. the beaches there were unbelievably pretty, some of the most amazing beaches i have ever been to. the sand was perfectly clear and soft and white, and the water was really blue and see-through and warm.. and it was always very warm and sunny, which was of course nice.
we went to very many different beaches. there was a really pretty one right down the street from where we were staying, but we only ended up at that one a couple times because we tried out a lot of difference ones. we ended up having many picnics on the beach, too, which was really fun. the striped blue pad thing you see under my family in one of the pictures below was used very frequently. we still managed to get sand all over our clothes and the apartment, though. we were always getting sandy, salty, and sticky from sunscreen.
but there’s much less to say about it than there is to show, now <3
i also might just mention that i got a darker tan than i’ve ever had before.
