Sunrise in Alicante

In 24 days I will be home. Not Hogarth home, but real life home…not this strange and once in a lifetime reality I’ve been living. I don’t know how that happened. I do know that 24 days ago was June 27th. I was in Spain having an absolutely wonderful time after a tough but also wonderful 5 days in Missouri. Saturday marked one month since my grandpa’s death and I have felt him with me every day since then. Sitting on the train after a night and morning on the Southern coast of Wales, I thought of him and smiled, knowing for sure that I was exactly where he would want me to be.

But before I get to the incredible Wales weekend, I want to attempt to recap these last 24 days. First is my trip back from US to London for a few hours, then on to Spain. I’m stealing a timeline a made for a class reflection. Looking at it now, I’m not sure how I survived this… FYI it’s all in London time, for consistency.

----Wednesday June 24th
•    2 p.m. {8 a.m. CST}: wakeup in Missouri to finish packing, say good bye and leave for STL airport for 1 p.m. flight to Boston.
•    8 p.m. {2 p.m. CST}: Still in STL because of flight delays. Getting nervous about missing my international connection in Boston. Airline representatives recommend looking for another flight to London.
•    10 p.m. {4 p.m. CST}: Land in Boston and sprint to the gate, which they are holding for about 5 of us from STL.
-----Thursday June 25th
•    6:30 a.m. (12:30 a.m. CST}: Land in London. Not much sleep on the plane. Lots of turbulence and old people to remind me of my Grandpa and babies to remind me never to fly without earplugs.
•    8: 30 a.m. {2:30 a.m. CST}: Arrive back at Flat 3. Finally. The customs line took an hour and the tube about the same. Time to begin my packing and re-packing process along with a game of email catch-up.
•    3:30 p.m. {9:30 a.m. CST}: Leave for Victoria station to catch bus to the airport, but not the same one I was at a few hours before.
•    8 p.m. {2 p.m. CST}: It’s been a full 24 hours since I’ve been in St. Louis. Now at my fourth airport of the day. We board the RyanAir flight for Alicante, Spain. The comfort factor=not quite as nice as the American Airlines flight earlier in the day.
•    11 p.m. {5 p.m. CST, Midnight Spain}: Land in Alicante. Find a cab to our Mizzou friend Xenia’s apartment. The driver tells us about Michael Jackson
-----Friday June 26th
•    1 a.m. {7 p.m. CST, 2 a.m. Spain}: We leave the apartment for our first night out in Spain. I have never been so tired in my life, but it was a blast.
•    5 a.m. {11 p.m. CST, 6 a.m. Spain}: Back to the apartment after 4 hours of dancing the night/morning away. Why can’t this happen in Missouri?! I fall asleep on the couch and wake up in the morning—more like afternoon—with my shoes on and purse still around my shoulders.

Recap: In some of the busiest 39 hours of my life that happened to follow one another, I covered 5 airports and 3 countries with zero sleep.

As for the actual happenings in Spain…well we had an incredible time. We were in a different world for those few days in Alicante and Rachel, Adrienne and I loved every minute of it. I can’t even begin to explain it so I’m cheating and sending you to Rachel’s blog for all the juicy details. I still smile every time I read about our Alicante adventures and the story she tells about the one-armed hero in Barcelona is so true and so hilarious…enjoy.

rachelmetzler.wordpress.com

Some of my other favorite memories from the Spanish holiday…

.“It was a really nice baby.”
We laughed about this for hours. Our Spanish friend Daniel used this line to describe his friend’s 6 month old baby. To be fair, we were pretty delirious after climbing a mountain and being seriously dehydrated, but really...are most babies not nice?

.Dinner for 5 Euro. Wine? Included.
After a wonderful first night out and afternoon on the beach the 3 London girls decided we really needed to do something to show our gratefulness to our incredible host, Xenia. We thought, great idea, we’ll make dinner for her and buy wine for the night. I hope it’s the thought that counts because we loaded our basket with fresh bread, noodles, fruit, pasta sauce, meat, and 2 bottles of wine. The grand total was 5 Euro, or about 8 bucks. After living in London for 2 months I think we all had culture shock with those kinds of prices.

.“We should leave the bar and go watch the sun come up…oh, it’s already light outside? Oh it’s 5 a.m.? Cool!”
I love this and I’m not even sure who said it. It perfectly captures the carefree spirit of Alicante and our time there. Staying out until 6 is totally normal there, but for us it was an exhilarating deviation from our London routine.

.Leaving copies of my passport and credit card in Alicante train station.
Sorry, Mom. I still don’t know what happened but somehow when I grabbed some paper from my bag to fan myself I managed to leave it who knows where. I owe big thanks to my mom who had to cancel the entire family’s credit cards so A. no stolen identities, and B. my sister, who was leaving later that week, wouldn’t be in London then Africa with no money. Oops. :)

.“That guy must have been the one who tried to take your wallet because he only has one arm. They cut off your arm for stealing!”
This cracks me up every time, not because whoever said it actually believed it, but because it perfectly reflects the absolute frenzy we were in after the almost-theft, almost-fight between the one-armed man/hero and the balding woman/former Diet Coke hero/thief. Whew. Have you read Rachel’s blog yet?

.Mizzou and homemade mojitos on the beach.
No, not Panama City Beach, Barcelona beach. Adrienne saw someone from Mizzou that she had a class with a few years ago. Also there were about a million sales people boasting their supplies of “heavy, sexy, cold beer” and “doo da doo da doo da” which is apparently code for coconut? Weird. We passed on that, but did get some homemade mojitos that were delicious.  

.MU-kU clash in Kebab House
After a failed attempt at a big night out in Barcelona, we stopped at a Kebob place for some dinner before bed. The kebobs were great, but more exciting was our run in with some kids from kU that Rachel first met (completely randomly) on her flight from KC to Chicago. She ended up having dinner with them and I met up with her and met them too. They spent a month in Italy and then were going through Barcelona on the way home. The farther away I get from home the more I realize how close it is. Even aside from that, it has been so strange to see the way people cross paths all over the world…whether it’s the kU in the Kebob hut or the stranger on the tube that appeared 6 hours later on a bike taxi.

Ok, so not quite 24 days, but that’s the first six. Soon to come in the next 18:
- “I queued at Wimbledon”
- The Rau family invades London and I have to adjust (shorten) my searching      strategy :)
- Work becomes work, but then gets fun again
- Wales Weekend

Stay tuned!

Ems
(my nickname from one of the guys at work)

The Alicante Group w/ our host, Xenia

Going to bed so I can wake up at 415 a.m. I have to be at CNBC at 6 tomorrow and it takes a little less than an hour to get there. It's been kind of a rough week at my internship but today was great and I think tomorrow will be too. They are really short staffed lately, thanks to budget cuts (big surprise), so I've been doing the teleprompter for about 3 or 4 hours a day. It's awful. I don't mind doing it because I know they need help, but it just gets hard to be upbeat when I'm so tired. The frustrating part for me is feeling like I'm sacrificing other incredible experiences (exploring Hyde Park at sunset or exploring new kinds of beer at Kingshead) so I can be a little less exhausted at a job that leaves something to be desired.

I've been working on my blog updates, and I'll get them up as soon as possible. Everything is getting harder to squeeze in because the clock is ticking faster and faster! (Except when I'm doing prompter and I literally watch the seconds drag by...) I can't believe I only have a month left. I'm having an incredible time. I didn't do much today except work and nap, but I did go to the pub with Rachel, Mike and Katherine for a drink. The four of us are going on a trip to Amsterdam in a few weekends and I'm soooo excited. It's the only other big trip I'm doing and I think it will be a great way to finish things off. Rachel and I are going coasteering this weekend...check out the link:

http://www.preseliventure.co.uk/activities/coasteering.shtml

I had a great skype date with my mom and grandma tonight. She's been doing pretty well without my grandpa (it will be a month since he died this Saturday). She was telling me all about the retirement community she is moving to in August and I think she was a little shocked that I told her even more about it from the website. I love the non-internet generations. :)

I also got to talk to my sister Meg who is in Rwanda for 3 weeks. Here's a link to her blog: www.megrau.com

Ok, I'm off to bed! Tomorrow I'll continue my research on Swine Flu and start editing some video from Greenland for a story on renewable energy. Thanks for reading...

em

Hi Everyone! Just wanted to say hi because I don't think I've even been on the site for about a week. I did not actually forget about it, I just haven't had time or made time or found time...blah blah blah.

Since my last post I've gone back to London, then Spain (Alicante and Barcelona) and now back to London.It seems like yesterday that I was home in MIssouri with the family and now Adam and Megan are here with me! We've had so much fun so far and I think they've probably walked 15 miles in 3 days. Adam is mastering his photography skills (still plenty of nature pics) and Meg is being the wonderful big sister and orchestrator that she always is.

We spent Saturday in Windsor with my aunt, uncle and 3 darling cousins ("The City Raus"). Definitely on the reccomendation list for London visitors. Yesterday Ad and Meg slept in and then we went to the Tate Modern and the South Bank of the Thames. I got to see a ton of the modern artwork I've studied over the last year so I really enjoyed it, but I think for them it was a little eccentric without context to explain why Pollock's drip paintings are art and not a preschool project.

More on the past few weeks coming soon! For now I need to finish a paper that was due 2 hours ago and get ready for our class visit to The Guardian. Time Flies.