My trip to Istanbul

When I finished high school, I went on a trip to Istanbul, historically known as Constantinople and Byzantium, the most crowded city in Turkey. I went with my classmates, especially with one of my best friends. 

I had been to many places by plane, but this flight was the longest flight I've had in my entire life because we were on the plane for six hours. In spite of had been to different places by plane, I get very nervous at the takeoff and at the landing in every single flight, and I think that it would be like this for the rest of my life!

When we arrived at the airport, we felt a little bit disconcerned because everybody was staring at us... maybe because we were a huge group of teenagers, our way of dressing, our haristyle... 

The first day was quite good. We visited many places and monuments: hagia Sophia, Topkapi palace, The Basilica Cisterm (the largest underground cistern)... but Hagia Sophia was the place that impressed me the most. Once it was a church, later a mosque and now a museum at the Turkish Republic. This museum has a very strict rule: woman must wear clothes that didn't let people (especially man) see certain parts of their body, such as chest, shoulders, legs... even sometimes woman had to cover their hair before entering. It suprised me as well the way muslim pray: they have five prayers each day that take place at very specific times, they have to cover their bodies, raise their hands and move up and down praying at the same time. I have to say that in every church that we went smelled like cheese, because they pray barefoot.

With the pass of the days, we felt more and more uncomfortable because everybody was staring at us because of the way we dressed. For them, seeing woman without veil was something unusual, but for us it was really shocking seeing woman covered from head to feet with a black dress. We could just watch their eyes.

The food was awful for me. I hate kebab and spicy food, so the supermarket and some fast food restaurtants were my favourites allies. Due to this, something that impressed me as well was that turkish man offer woman to have a cup of tea as someone that in our country asks for your number or your Facebook, so you have to be careful if you say yas to an offer like this.

I enjoyed very much this trip and I highly recommend it, but watch out this little things if you want to go!

My erasmus experience

I want to talk about my erasmus in Coimbra. It was the best experience in my life. 

When you go abroad you don't think about how much people you're going to meet there and fortunately those people change your mind. I was lucky because I met a lot of people and most of them were very different to me so I learnt other ways or life. They know how to seize the time and how being happy with others. In my opinion, this experience helps to you to open mind and see how you should change.

The city of Coimbra is amazing because a lot of students live there so you can go out every day if you want. But it isn’t the most important thing, I believe that when some person go there thinks that he or she would talk with everybody, not only when they have other interests. Also you can meet people from over the world, in mi case, my best friends were Spanish but I talked with Polish, German, French people... It’s interesting to compare how you behave and how other people behaves in the same occasion. 

I need to mention some of my favourite places there. There is a bar which is called Cabido, its waiters are nice and they put all the music we want like University song or something like that.

I used to go to a café called Luna which is located in Praça da Republica, the city centre, and my friends and me used to go there to drink beer because in Coimbra everybody drinks that instead of other drinks like gin tonic for example. 

I´m going to remember all this kind of things and obviously the people who I met there, especially my flatmate Marta, a person who has known me a lot in a very little time.

My Erasmus to Bologna.

My Erasmus to Bologna.

Last year I decided to go on an Erasmus to Bologna with two classmates who were also my friends.

We arrived to Bologna on 11^thSeptember without any apartment to live because through internet was impossible to find one. We had booked an hotel for a week, but one week wasn´t enough. We had to spend 3 weeks in different hotels until, finally, we found our perfect apartment.

The hotel experience is the only bad memory I have from the Erasmus.

Now, I’m going to tell you a bit about Bologna.

Bologna is the capital and the largest city of the Emilia-Romagna Region in the North of Italy and it’s the seventh most populous city of this country.

The arcaded streets of the central part of the city, built on the old Roman town, still preserve a medieval aspect from typical Italian city. The characteristic of this city are two leaning towers and you can go up to one of them, `Torre degli Asinelli´ which has 498 steps.

Another thing to mention about Bologna is its University `Alma mater studiorum´ is the oldest university in continuous operation and it`s the most prestigious Italian university. Every year many Erasmus students choose Bologna to study, like me, because of its parties at night and its prestigious university.

In my opinion I really like this place with its streets are full of university students from very different countries, each one of them with a different culture from which you can enrich yourself knowing more about them despite of the language or customs.

About the language, I have to mention that I was almost always with Spanish people and we spoke in Spanish and I didn`t practice my Italian, although my exams were in Italian, so me and some of my friends had to sign up to Italian classes and we went two days a week, being able to finally pass our exams.

Lastly, another great thing about Bologna is that you can travel to places as beautiful as Florence, Venice, Verona, Milan…because they are very close, and you arrive in less than 3 hours by train or bus.

In addition to how close the Italian cities the airport of Bologna isn´t not expensive so I could travel to Poland and France.

In conclusion, I'm really happy with my experience and I totally recommend travelling or living in Bologna especially if you are student.

My trip to Italy

Hello, everyone!! In this post, I will be talking about the amazing trip I made to Italy some years ago.

I went there with my school classmates five years ago. We decided, as it was out last trip together, that we would make the best of it so we thought about going on a cruise for six days and visit Italy. There we visited Rome, Pompeii, Naples and finally the island of Sardinia. I can assure you it was the best trip of my life.

As we had to get the ship, we went to Valencia by bus first. It was really tiring due to its eleven hours of journey. We arrived there at lunchtime, so after we had eaten, we went to visit the most important places in Valencia such as the Oceanographic and the ‘Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias’. We only stayed in Valencia for the afternoon, so unfortunately we couldn’t see much of it. At six o’clock it was time to take our ship and we were all really nervous and that only got worse when we saw that giant ship in front of us. It was amazing! The cruise had everything you can imagine: it had pools, jacuzzi, a disco, a really good buffet, a gym, and some areas where you could go to relax. It was really nice. And so were the rooms we had. They were a bit little but comfortable enough for us to sleep.

Our first day in Italy, we saw Rome and the most important places, like the Fontana di Trevi or the Coliseum, I really enjoyed being there! But the place I liked the most was Pompeii, which we visited on the second day. As I am a fan of archeology, that place was like a dream for me and I was thrilled when the tourist guides were telling us everything about the city, and how it was destructed by the volcano. They even showed us some photos of the bodies. As you can imagine, that was somehow creepy, but I still enjoyed my visit.

The third and fourth day we visited Naples and the island of Sardinia and I also liked the cities a lot but it was really hot so we couldn’t enjoy it as much as we wanted to! It was a pity, but it still was fun to visit them.

The fifth consisted in travelling back to Valencia and one thing I can remember perfectly is how the cruise moved when we were near the Baleares Islands! It was a bit scary and a lot of people got sick. Nothing happened but it still was something to remember. We got to Valencia at six o’clock in the morning. There was a bus waiting for us and we drove back to Ourense.

It was a really nice trip, but take my advice: If you go to Rome, be careful with the cars! They won’t stop even if you are crossing the street!

Hope you enjoyed this post! Let me know in the comments

Improve your English day by day

Hi! Like you, I want to learn English, and all of us know that there are so many different ways to learn it! For example, the secondary school classes of English where we only learn grammar and where we couldn't speak most of the time, are very different to the classes of our degree, which are more interactive and motivating. Don`t you think? So now, I am going to talk to you about a ludic way to learn English.

A few years ago, if you wanted to improve your pronunciation or your listening, the best way to do it was meeting with an English native or going to any English speaking country. Both of them are fantastic ideas, but maybe you don’t have enough money or time. Now, there are many options! As you know, nowadays all of us have access to Internet so we can watch TV series, films and listen music in English.

Instead of wasting your time watching TV series in Spanish, invest your time watching them in English. At the beginning, it can be a bit difficult, so I recommend you to watch again a film that you have already seen in Spanish. In my case, I have done this with my favourite TV series: Utopia, but you can choose your preferences. It is not recommendable to watch it with Spanish subtitles because although we don’t want, our eyes will be reading the text. Therefore, if you choose to watch it with subtitles take care of being in English!

Try to watch films or TV series from different places and pay attention to the different ways of talking. For example, the TV series that I had talked about, Utopia is from England so it has Britain accent, like Sherlock or Black Mirror, but if you watch Sons of Anarchy, you will notice that the accent is not the same because it’s American. Orphan Black is from Canada and 13 reasons why is from Australia.

   

Now, think about how many songs you have listened in English. Have you ever payed attention to their lyrics?  Do it! Look for the lyrics on the Internet, and besides of enjoying the music you will understand better the song and improve your English. It can be a bit boring but there are alternatives, for example in the page https://es.lyricstraining.com/ you can complete the lyrics of the songs while they are playing. Try it, it’s very funny!

If you introduce English in your day to day pleasure activities, you will notice that you will learn without realising it! 

A HOLIDAY TO REMEMBER

Hi everone! Today I´m going to tell you about my best holidays.

In summer of 2014 I went with my family to Pontevedra, as every year, to spend a few days on the beach. At first everything was going well, but the weather started being worse. The second day the weather was terrible and we had to come to a decisión: going back to Ourense, because we couldn´t stay there, or moving to another place.

As you can imagine we chose the second option. So that day we went to Lugo. It was a quite long travel from Pontevedra, but at the same time it was exciting. First, we visitted Souto da Retorta, in Chavín (Viveiro). It´s a small but magnificent forest (also a protected natural area) full of huge and incredible  eucalyptuses. Here we saw O Avó (the grandfather), than being more that 130 years old and with a height of 68 metres, is considered the biggest tree in Spain. If you want to see some pictures you can take a look at this web. Moreover, in Lugo we went also to the Praia de Augas Santas (Beach of the Cathedrals) and to an abandoned fish farm in Ribadeo:

The fish farm (on the inside)

As Catedrais (Ribadeo)

The fish farm (on the outside)

I took a photo of an informative panel because the image was cute

The school was a ground floor house

Before telling you about the days I stayed in Asturias I want to talk about another place we visitted in Lugo too, between Viveiro and Ribadeo. My grandmother (my father´s mother) worked as a teacher for many years and my grandfather worked as a merchant, so they moved several times during his life, looking for the best for their six children. For this reason my father lived in different sites in Galicia. One of them is a remote village, hidden among the mountains, called As Oiras. Here I show you a picture of its school (nowadays they don´t use it), where my father studied when he was a very young child.

About Asturias I could tell you many things, but I will try to summarize. When you are between Galicia and Asturias this is what you see:

Do you imagine practising mindfulness here?

But also:

Cows... a lot of cows

And nice horses!

The first we saw when we left Lugo was the Navia area. The views here are amazing and I recomend you to see it! Later we visited two different villages.

Oneta is a small and very green village with incredible views and a nice waterfall:

My father had a shower here

Here there were many cows too

And Luarca, a village where the mountains and the sea melt away:

Luarca

Moreover we stayed in different towns and cities in Asturias. 

In Oviedo we ate in a kind of shopping centre called Palacio de Exposiciones y Congresos (I know it doesn´t sound like a shopping centre, but believe me, it was) where there weren´t many people, but the structure of the building is superb. Click in the numbers to see diferent views of this place: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. 

In Avilés we went to the beach, but it started raining and we had to left. In Asturias it rains a lot!!!

The thing I liked most in Gijón was the University:

And the most beautiful things of our holidays were the Picos de Europa and the Bufones de Pría. When we decided to see the Picos the Europa we couldn´t see the mountains because it was getting dark and the weather was quite foggy, but I can show you a picture of the Santa Cueva de Covadonga, which is a small church built directly in the mountain´s rock:

Those small people are my parents and my sister

I couldn´t  find any video in English about the Bufones de Pría, but you can see this one in Spanish which explains very well what this place is.

In Cantabria we could stay only for a few hours. We went to El Sardinero, the most popular beach in Santander, but I haven´t got any pictures, so if you´re interested in this amazing city you can check this web.

Finally, we spent the last days in Castilla y León. First, we arrived in Astorga, a village where there´s a bullfighting arena, something  that surprised me a lot, but not for good because I can´t stand cruelty to animals. Even then, I liked this village and I remember my father looking curious to some old and abandoned buildings which were on sale. Next day we went to León. We took a walk in the town and we saw the Cathedral. Our trip finished in Las Médulas (Orellán), a gold-mining site near Ponferrada where the views are amazing! Then, we went back to Ourense with great memories of the places we had seen.

It´s me!

Las Médulas

I hope you enjoyed reading my experience!

Dinner in NYC

Hello, Everybody!! How are you?? Today I will show you my favourite place in New York City to have a good dinner. The place is called Ellen´s Stardust and it is marvelous. Stardust is a restaurant very cool, the waiters ans waitresees are singers, ok first you must wait in the line 1h or 2h to entry when you can sit you can check the menu. Menu is mainly hamburguers of meat and nachos or you can order salads, I don´t eat meat but they changed burguer of meat for veggie burguer for the same price. The portions are very plentiful, we ordered a portion of nachos and two burguers and it was too much food… the bill was very expensive but there are a good reason, you can eat while waitresees and waiters sing for you. Many the waiters end up working as professional singers in Brodway. In the last two years the were 22 for Brodway. It is amazing. I recommended?? Absolutely yes, It is a fantastic restaurant!!!