Day ___: Spain Day 1 & 2

September 6 and 7

The flight from Raleigh to Toronto left at 4:20 pm.  The flight itself was no problem, though I was not happy with the 8th Harry Potter book very much, and this threatened to derail my entire sense of belonging with Harry Potter and my mental well-being.  The flight was also pushing us to get to our 7:10 flight fast.

The trip overseas was good--I finished The Cursed Child within 2 hours, and found that all of the characters had redeemed themselves into the characters that I had envisioned before, minus the whole Ginny-being-anti-sugar-for-at-least-a-phase-of-time. But I loved it.

I slept on and off with Vanessa for a few hours, then awoke to the nice (aka hot) flight attendant giving me a cold breakfast package (aka a blueberry muffin, a plastic fork and knife, and butter).  The rest of the ride was spent reading the second of the Millennium series, The Girl Who Played With Fire.  We landed in Spain at 7:45am Spain-time.

Car Rental
By 10 or so we were at the Solmar rental car place right outside of the airport.  And the wait was so looooong.  It was pretty ridiculous, the way every customer had to be given a 15 minute spiel/debate ads to what expensive insurance they should get instead of the cheaper basic insurance.  Finally, thou, we got our car and drove it into Barcelona.  We were starving.

Jamón Serrano, here we come
We parked in a public deck and walked thirty seconds to a place Vanessa had spotted: La Pata Negra.  Our dad was left at the table whole the ladies went to wash their hands, and the waiter came right as my sister and I left the table.  We hurried to the rescue as our dad tried to speak to him and ordered water to drink.  Then we ate like Spaniard kings: the cured ham (jamón serrano) sandwiches were freaking amazing.  Crunchy crust, soft inside Spanish bread with tomato rubbed on the inside; in the center layers of flavorful, smooth jamón.  And as my mom said, as Spaniards we don't need more than a simple, perfect sandwich.

Premia. . .oops jk, Pineda de Mar
So, my dad did an awesome job getting us to a town, but we didn't realize until driving around for a while that it was the wrong town. We wanted the further north Pineda de Mar, not Premia de Mar.  After calling our Airbnb hostess a few times, we got there and saw her at the town's train station that juts right up to the sea.
The apartment rocks.  Enough said :)

Eating
We chilled a tiny bit, then walked for literally an hour, trying to find a place to eat.  We hadn't eaten anything since the delicious jamon sandwiches, so at 5:55 we started scouting out restaurant.  In Spain, people eat dinner from 7-11 or so, so almost nothing was open.  We ended up back at the street our apartment is at, at a place that promised bocadillos and tapas.  Well, for us, it promised an open area full of men playing cards and betting, a ton of cigarette smoke, some really good salted peanuts (I was that hungry), water, and a waiter who spoke Catalán, the language of the Spanish region Cataluña, and not Spanish very well,  He informed me that they had 3 types of sandwiches and no tapas.
We ended up at The Buccaneers, an Irish restaurant that had patatas bravas and croquetas as their Spanish part of the menu.  The bravas were hot and delicious, the sauce tasting of the Spanish sausage chorizo, and the croquetas good except breaded in corn meal.  The owner and our waitress were really nice too.  I hadn't expected the first dinner I ate in Spain this trip would be at a non-Spanish restaurant, but The Buccaneers was a fine alternative if it HAD to happen.

"Home"
We stopped by a small supermarket to buy essentials: anchovy-stuffed olives, cheese, bread and Nocilla (the best creation known to man), beer (don't worry guys, not for me), María cookies, peaches, salchichón, and chocolate.  We proceeded to feast when we got home, and then I went straight to bed at 9:05.

Day 2
I woke up at 10:20 after an okay-night's sleep.  I unpacked my bulging suitcase and Mama went for a run.  I journaled on the sunny balcony overlooking the smattering of gardens, the buildings, and the hint of sea.
Breakfast was a gorgeous, unpasteurized (YES, America, that's a thing, and no one here is dying of bacterial infection), delicious fried egg, a hunk of bread, a few slices of peach, and a María cookie.

Lunch
After a bit, we drove to Girona, stopping at a restaurant on the side of the highway near a town called Quart.  Of course, as a Spanish custom, olives with pits and bread to begin.  I got buñuelos de bacalao (fried cod) as my first plate, and sardines for the second.  The buñuelos were good--small, fried, only slightly fishy.  The sardines were delicious, though the buttery sauce wasn't needed.  For my dessert I got a panacota de chocolate, a luscious chocolate cream mousse.

Girona
We got to Girona and parked in a deck.  We came up to the ground and looked at an old Girona hospital exhibit, then walked aimlessly to a centro-looking areas.  It was all shops--we bought paraguayos, the best fruits ever that can't be found in North Carolina, a Costa Brava map and a Girona map for free by the nice store owner, and my mom and Vanessa got some cute shoes at a shoe store called Mary Paz.  Then we all realized that we were in Girona's commercial district, not the historic one.  We walked back near our deck and found the beautiful river and historic cathedral, buildings, and fortress on the other side.  The views were incredible, and as were the people.  All sorts of people walked around the old, yet hip cobblestone street with shops, benches, and trees lining them.  Vanessa and I each bought a pastry: V a sugar and cream sheet, me a reixcha: a criss-crossed wedge of chocolate and pastry. 
Then we found steps going upward via alleyways, and followed them until we saw the fortress, cathedral above and the city of Girona below.  The fortress was inter-connected by 2 long, high walls with narrow passages and the top and slits cut in the wall for low-and-arrow shooting at intruders.  We walked along this, listening to the almost-constant chapel bell from 6:30 to 7:15.

Tapas and Music
We walked back to the busy old street and sat outside at a tapas bar, listening to an awesome musician  singing on the side of the road by the river and bridge. We listened to him singing popular American songs while eating chorizo, bread with tomato, and cheese.

We drove home in the night, and stopped by the supermarket as we walked through Pineda to get to the apartment.  Vanessa finished the eight Harry Potter book, so we talked until 2 about it :)

Day 1 Pictures

Toronto from the air

'Sup Canada!  How you doin?

First food in Spain!

View from the Pineda de Mar apartment

Tapas in apartment

BREAKFAST IS LIFE

Day 2 Pictures

Cool art in Girona

Yay paraguayos!

Reixcha pastry of deliciousness

Old part of Girona

Admiring the view

Look at this awesome plant in the fortress!

View from the fortress wall

The river threading into Girona's old region

GSE Alumni Day

Day 55: July 16, 2016

Governor’s School is the best summer program ever.  I went with my sister last summer with 648 gifted students to one of the two campuses in North Carolina.  Vanessa and I both were accepted into the Natural Sciences discipline--one of the ten subjects a student can be accepted into.  The 325 students at Governor’s School East, along with the absolutely fascinating and amazing teachers, were vibrant and excited to learn as much about each other and the electives as we were about learning about our respective subjects.  I went to electives discussing the unjust incarceration system in the US, the queer theory and various LGBT issues, dance figures, and a Turkish movie discussing its terrorism.  I played ultimate frisbee (briefly-mainly just chill frisbee :)) in the courtyard, had jam out sessions with the incredibly talented instrumental music students as well as the rest of us who liked to sing collectively, and partook in a euchre (a card game) competition.  Oh, I did learn about natural sciences--environmental sciences, chemistry, and physics--and did a fun project called a Scilemma, where my group discovered how much copper was actually in a penny using a spectrophotometer, cool equations, and calibration curves.  We found out the composition of a 1960 penny and a 2015 penny.  The 1960 penny was composed of 96.11% copper, whereas the 2015 penny was composed of 2.64% copper.  This correlated with what the US Mint values were.  How cool, right?

This shows a calibration curve--the spectrophotometer's maximum absorbance of color (copper absorbs red, thus the more red the dissolved penny solution absorbs, the more copper there is.  This is the copper nitrate solution of the 1960 penny.

This is the cailbration curve for the copper nitrate solution of the 2015 penny.  Notice that the amount of red light absorbed was much less than that of the 1960 penny.

So Governor’s School Alumni Day came with much anticipation to see my friends and old teachers.  All of us wore our lanyards from the year before, and greeted people we didn’t know form GSE ‘15 with smiles.  Vanessa and I met up with a few of our friends, and we saw our chemistry teacher, GSE’s dance teacher, who totally rocks, and our Area 3 (group therapy, self-discovery class basically) teacher.  We went to a few current GSE classes, and the natural sciences class had changed the most.  This was due to the Scilemma, which, instead of coinciding with environmental sciences, chemistry, or physics, every group had a psychology-based project--current GSE students acting as the subjects of these studies.  My friend group moved to meet our Instrumental Music friends.  The IM students this year were also absolutely amazing, and we listened to them practice for their concert tonight.  Then we headed to the chapel, which is where the choral students sing their days away.  The 2015 students were outside the chapel with the awesome choral teacher, singing and beating the rhythm of a song they sang last year.  It was beautiful and upbeat--a perfect representation of our time at Governor’s School the summer before.

Elective time!  The electives at GSE were always thought-provoking and sought to delve into current issues and come out understanding them a little better.  This student-led elective was no different.  The big group of alumni and current students alike discussed stereotyping of people, people we haven’t ever met, people we have met once, and maybe even people we know relatively well.  The student leaders were superb, introducing the concept of stereotyping and how it in turn makes people defensive, fearful, and changes their behavior from one of their actual selves to an abstract mold created by the judgmental society.  Obviously spoken word was used to introduce this issue.  Then we discussed as a group how us as individuals have been categorized and assumed.  We concluded, with the wise point made by one of the student leaders named Isaac, that we stereotype as a defense mechanism, a way to judge enemies and friends.  Terrible, right?  Our brains “crave efficiency,” thus we stereotype people in a desperate attempt to find a foolproof pattern to better stereotype them.  And it’s affected every single one of us negatively, minorities probably more so, but then we have to think of how straight white males have been wrongly stereotyped too.  No one is untouched by this phenomenon, yet many of us are unwilling to continue; it’s so ingrained that we catch ourselves stereotyping and admonish ourselves, but do it time and time again.  Awareness is the best way to minimize stereotyping: every time you see someone, check yourself, avoid thinking of an assumption about that person, and keep an open mind.  I think of multiple scenarios about that person to create a broad range of possibilities that the person will fall somewhere into.  There’s probably a less assumptive way to open my mind, but my method nevertheless helps.  And I think of people as individual exceptions--all 7.4 billion of us are exceptions of the facade of stereotypes in the world.

So, after consuming a great deal of soul food at the elective, my friends and I struck up a conversation with two of the outspoken students in the room.  We talked with them about Spanish and the different dialects and words we used in our respective countries: Cuba (Sheila, one of the awesome 2016 students), Honduras (Jalarope, another awesome 2016 woman), Puerto Rico and Mexico (Iliana, my hilarious, fun, and wonderful GSE friend), the Dominican Republic (Rachel, a badass and funny GSE friend), and Spain (me and Vanessa).  We ended our interesting conversation with hugs and promises to see each other at the instrumental music concert later in the day.  Then Rachel, Tyler, Chase, Vanessa, and I went to Jasmin (IF YOU LIVE IN RALEIGH GO), a fantabulous Greek and Lebanese restaurant three minutes walking from Meredith College, the site of GSE.  We frequented there last year, and my out-of-city friends were especially happy to go back.  Jasmin has a few locations, and take advantage of those :).

The IM concert was, as per usual, awe-inspiring.  It was in the evening, and Vanessa and I had gone back to our house to change into formal dance clothes.  A group of 2015 students organized a GSE 2015 prom of sorts, and we paid to go and planned to go after the concert.  Alas, we didn’t go, because our friends hadn’t paid to go with other plans to hang out.  After the beautiful IM concert, where tears were shed and standing ovations were had, our friends and us braved the sky that had decided that it would be a great time to have a huge thunderstorm and pour ocean-amounts of rain onto our heads and streets.  Vanessa and I went in our car to Chase’s house, meeting our friends there.  Of course there was a gutter on the roof of Chase’s house that created a waterfall onto the walkway.  It was very eventful, wet, yet fun. Then we talked with our peeps until midnight and went home, avoiding the particularly flooded roads.  A perfect day with perfect people.

Day 42-49: July 4 - 10, 2016

Monday, July 4, 2016

America Day! Whoop whoop for the US.  We have some things we could be doing way better, but that's what the future is for, right?  Anyway, the day was really nice, filled with chilling out and planning the family three-week Spain trip (!!!!!) in September (!!!).  I went on a run with my mom, and promptly died, as I am, um, not the greatest runner, and my mom is in pretty amazing shape.  Goals.
My family did celebrate the Fourth of July, surprisingly, with America's number one staple (especially on the fourth obviously): burgers.  Well, besides the fact that they were soy burgers, and my mom had a soy hot dog, it was exactly like a typical American's dinner.  And oh my goodness the grilled pineapple was amazing as a dessert!  Nothing beats that except for West Wing, an awesome tv show that EVERYONE should watch--but we watched a couple episodes that night, so it was great.

Tuesday-Friday, July 5-8, 2016

It's so cool to have a job.  My sister and I have been doing various volunteer/internship stuff with the NC Museum of Natural Sciences, and our mentor, John Gerwin, decided that since we're 18, we should get paid for the particularly tedious jobs we do.  Fine by me, especially since the things we get paid for I actually enjoy immensely.  The huge project that we are working on with mainly Edward, as well as two Young Naturalists named Andrew and Ashley, is eggs.  Egg collecting was outlawed in the US in the early 1900s, so almost all of the eggs in the museum are from the late 1800s and early 1900s.  However, there are exceptions of ones from mid-1900s of collectors still illegally collecting these eggs or those who just happen to find abandoned eggs and send them somewhere.  The Museum received a huge collection that UNC-CH had acquired but no longer needed, so it's our job to identify the eggs that have lost their labels (almost all of them), and record any data that we can find.  Organization, patience, and attention to detail is required for this, because you have to look at the egg, see if there is a tiny number on it to indicate the date it was found, number corresponding to a know numbering system for eggs (to determine what species), or set mark, a number telling us how many eggs were in that clutch.

If there is any data regarding location or date, we write it on an official Museum slip so that it can go into the archives where scientists or artists can loan them to do research or draw them. The others are still fit with a label, but it’s just a slip of archival paper.  All of these eggs go into little plastic or cardboard boxes.  It’s pretty great, doing this, staying down in the bottom level of the museum, and getting $$$ ;)

Hummingbird egg!

Day 34-41: Beach Week

June 26 - July 3, 2016

A blog post in pictures.  Beach week is a week my entire dad's side of the family spends together at the same two cottages on Atlantic Beach they've been going to for generations.  The pictures are pretty self-explanatory: beautiful cousins, bubble-blowing, beaches, and steps in one way or another.

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Day 26 - 33: June 19 - 25, 2016

This was the chill week; a fresh, relaxing week sandwiched between two busy but awesome weeks.  It consisted of reading, cleaning out my and my sister’s room, doing the survey at Prairie Ridge where we count the birds we see and hear, and going to the Museum of Natural Sciences.  There were a few noteworthy events that were fantastic.

• Sunday, June 19: Vanessa and I drove back from the Black Mountains.  Our parents joined us on Saturday, and we got to show the trail and how we set up the mist nets.  We attempted to catch the first and third Hermit Thrushes that had radio transmitters on them in order to take the transmitters off.  We saw both of them, but they did not go into the net.  For the first HETH (who we call .615), he responded to the playback vocally and flew a few times just over the net.  That was frustrating, but at least he was responsive.  The third HETH (.715) was seen only once, and the other times he did not respond at all to playback.  We caught another thrush that we had only color banded two days earlier instead of .715.  That’s how it goes!  Anyway, our parents saw the struggling side of the study, which is fine, especially considering the success of banding 13 total birds throughout the study.  Vanessa and I left separately of our parents in order to go see our friend Leah in Asheville.  She was my closest friend at NC Governor’s School, an absolutely incredible program created for gifted students who enjoy learning.  I went to Governor’s School last summer (it’s 5.5 weeks of amazingness).  We met at the parking lot and walked throughout Asheville to find a place to eat.  We saw a famous street Asheville band.  They were the bluegrass hippie type that dressed in mountain country clothes, and used instruments such as the harmonica and kalamazoo.  The lead singer had a beautiful, unique voice.  We ate at an all-vegetarian place, and I got a piña colada “mocktail,” and some really good bean and corn cakes with an interesting nutty sauce.  We walked to a beautiful bookstore after that and spent some time browsing the used books.  There was a candy store that we went to too that had the best sarcastic signs and some, ahem, colorful candies.  Then we walked to the best place ever: The French Broad Chocolate Lounge.  I got a delicious, gooey coconut macaroon chocolate brownie, and Vanessa and Leah got the heavenly chocolate creme brulee.  V also got a chocolate chip cookie that was about a half-inch thick and half the size of her face!
  
  

  
  

   

  

  Creme brulee + cookie and books = happiness

  
  
  

  

  Creme brulee and coconut macadamia brownie

• Tuesday, June 21: My family went to see a tap dance-drum duo at Page Auditorium.  Part of ADF (the American Dance Festival), the tap dancer was Savion Glover, and the drummer was Jack DeJohnette.
  

  • They were both amazing!  Savion Glover just tapped on a smallish tapping board for forty minutes or more, and then was accompanied by Jack DeJohnette.  He did a long drum solo before going to Glover’s space, tapping for a second, and then they did a rhythmic, erratic duet.  It was one of the strangest (in a good way) concerts I’d been to, but I enjoyed it immensely.

  Wednesday, June 22: My mother, her friend Marjorie, and my sister and I went to a Hillary Clinton rally in downtown Raleigh.  It was so neat! I’d never seen a presidential nominee (hopefully our soon-to-be president) before, but I was in for a treat.  Hillary was very nice as she spoke to the several hundreds of us without a teleprompter, notes, or anything.  She was amiable and talked not condescendingly, but as equals, as she described her plan to improve all American lives.  She was detailed in her planning, listing out five steps to tackle the US’ economic, social, political, and foreign issues.  It was very fun to be a part of that enthusiastic crowd; all of us cheering at certain parts or clapping excitedly.  And Hillary Clinton made cogent points about Trump’s hateful rhetoric--his idea of scapegoating Muslims and slandering all minorities was a roadblock for America’s future, not a promise or a plan.  It was nice to hear actual, detailed goals and steps to ameliorate our problems, not details about our (sometimes nonexistent) problems.  Through living, we can understand our own issues pretty well.

  Saturday, June 25: I did a bird banding again!  It was fun, and always challenging and rewarding.  It was a little slow though, always a factor in banding, and we mostly caught Cardinals (they bite really hard, too! But they’re tough as the rest of them of course) and House Wrens with their baby fledglings.  The fledglings are quite adorable, all feisty like their parents except fluffier.  With it being so hot, banding ended around 11, because it’s not safe for the birds to stay in a net or be handled when it’s really hot--they get more stressed out.  The most important thing about banding is this: stress--we want to reduce it as much as possible, and we do.  If there was another way to collect data about bird species’ locations, ages, populations, etc. we would do it in a less stressful way, but for banding, the stress is for a short amount of time only.

  
  

  After banding on Saturday, I got packed to go to the BEACH!
  
  

  

  See what I mean? House Wrens are adorable.

  
  

  

  Juvenile Red-winged Blackbird

  
  

  

  Heck yeah for awesome, decadent nacho lunches!