bonjor!!

greetings from marseille france! i dont have alot of time, but i wanted to let you all know we made it on the cruise safe and sound, and it is AMAZING. i cant even begin to tell you how much food ive alredy eaten!! haha!! today is our first stop.. a port city in the south of france famous for its lavender! (dont worry mom! you know im getting you some!)

it is absolutely ridiculously beautiful here.

i have about a million pictures of all that we have been doing, but its quite pricey to use the internet on the boat. (50 euro a minute! about 75cents! gesh!) but i will get some to you all as soon as i can.

after we finish exploring this city were going back to the boat to tan.. and then take samba lessons! yes!

miss you all. dont work to hard!!
s

hello please!

Hola! Sorry to announce that this is going to be a post with no pictures. I am at an internet cafe in Barcelona and i can barely get the keyboard to type in english, much less post pictures!
But i did want to give you a quick update and let you know that im having a really great time. Getting here was QUITE the pain, tons of issues at the airport. NEVER take British Airways! its terrible, i would take Ryan Air in a heartbeat!
Anyway, our residence for the week is fantastic. Misti's mom found us an apartment right off of La Rambla, the large walking/shopping street.
Ive spent the day tanning on the seaside and drinking lots of beer. Now its time for a shower, dinner and Sangria! (phew, what a day)
There are quite a lot of us here, Its Misti, Leah, Carrie, Jessie, Robin, James and Greg! party party. We leave for the cruise on Friday so we have some time to kill and do a little shopping. I tried not to buy much of anything in the UK because the pound does terrible things to the wallet!
I have to admit, i really wish Anna was here. She always makes things more fun, and its just not like the last trip without her! misti and i are constantly toasting to her, and she is certainly here in spirit! And dont worry Ann, you and i have more trips to come and im sure we havent seen the best one yet!

alright, my time is running out!! i love you all very much!
ciao,
-s

Days 5, 6 and 7!

Update Time!!! (i really wanted to start typing ABOVE the top picture.. but its not letting me. Bear with me people.)
DAY FIVE! Museum Day!! The above picture and the three below are all from the Royal Museum, in particular the millenium clock. its quite an amazing piece of art, its three stories tall, and every hour when it chimes the whole things starts going nuts (in a good way) and depicts alot of the suffering humanity went through in the 20th century. Misti has it all on video.. you will have to see it.

i really loved all the carved animals and people that were just decorating the corners.


Mom! how awesome is this monkey??



We also saw the Scottish National Museum. They werent to keen about me taking pictures in there, but we got to see tons of great art. The impressionist room was quite impressive! ha!

After that we went to a resturant called 'elephant house'. (which is funny because we had breakfast at their sister store 'elephants and bagels'! ) Apparently JK Rowling, the author of all the Harry Potter books used to live above elephant house, and she would come down to the cafe and resturant to eat and write some of the early books. pretty cool!

the food was great!

they had little elephant trinkets and elephant chairs and elephant shaped cookies. i loved it all.

that night we all went out for our friend Suzies birthday! We had a really nice dinner at a place called Maxies. I had grilled chicken with spinach and feta and roasted vegetables. yummmm!

L to R: Carrie, Misti, Leah, James, Susie, Me, Robin.

after our dinner we were all stuffed, and it was pretty early- so we decided to go back to leah and Robins place and play uno for a while!
this is Robin, she doesnt like to have her picture taken!

me and the birthday girl!
we went out dancing afterwards to a pretty local type place called 'the wee red bar' AKA the egg. we danced our little hearts out.

The next morning (saturday) we decided to get up and go get breakfast at the place leah works called Simple Feast.

It was probably the best breakfast ive ever had. And im not just saying that because Leah made it. I had a FULL scottish breakfast (hold the blood pudding please.) which consisted of Ham, hash browns, two eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes, sausage, baked beans, toast and jam. Tea is included, and i added an orange juice, which was also probably the best orange juice ive ever had in my life, and thats not just because Leah squeezed it!
Misti and james both had vegetarian Irish Breakfasts that came with Vegetarian Haggis!



us with our superb chef, Leah Robinson,

Leahs boss (who is suuuuper sweet by the way) gave us some homemade chocolate cake- on the house!!


This is the kitchen! pretty small! but magical.

We decided to walk around new town, and James was kind enough to be our tour guide for the day. this is just a normal street scene. crazy!

My favorite gargoyle so far!

We took a walking path down by the river, i felt like it was straight out of a fairy tale. beautiful.



We eventually came to the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the scottish gallery of modern art. (two separate museums, right across the street from one another.) (did i mention all of the museums are FREE?!?!?)
this was just a neat phone booth right inside the contemporary art museum, before i had to put my camera away.



When we left the museums we met up with our friend Peter. We actually met peter on our 2004 trip in Germany! He has since come to visit us in america, and toured Leah around scotland for a few days when she came over to look at the school here. He lives about an hour outside Edinburgh, so he drove in to hang out with us!
(peter is on the far left)

okay, more sideways ridiculousness. but this is me in a phone booth!

today (sunday) was our last day in town! We decided to hike up Arthurs seat. It was great! Wikipedia describes it as "a simple walk" but wikipedia is a liar. we walked up the main part in about 45 minutes.

the view from there is spectacular. and we were there late in the afternoon so the sun was low, just intensifying the beauty of this city.






sometimes you just have to strike a pose, yeah?

okay, go back up two pictures. to the one of Misti and Carrie sitting on the rock. Where they are sitting is considered the "top". But this wasn't quite good enough for us... oh no.... You see all the rock behind them? yeah. we decided we needed to go to the top of that thing. so.. we did! And i did it in the worst hiking shoes ever. AKA fashion riding boots. AKA i may as well have tried to hike in snow skiis. BUT! it was really really really fun! and entertaining too.

it was sooo steep!!
this is a view of the water from half way up.


The pinnacle!! right as the sun was starting to set. ammaaaazing. and we made some friends on the way! Nick, Luke and Corey. 2 aussies and and 1 argentinian.
it took us just over 31/2 hours to get up to the very top. The views were absolutely phenominal. It was super windy though! i thought i was going to get blown off!

our new friends invited us out to the local Australian pub! so of course we went!
L to R: Corey, Luke (aka prince harry), leah, Nick, Carrie.

and since it was our last night in town we had to hit the dance floor!!! at least for a little while! This is at a 5 story underground dance club called Espionage. Its not that great of a 'disco' but they dont charge at the door, so we all decided "hey! why not?!"

And that, ladies and gentlemen, wraps up Edinburgh. There truly aren't enough words to say what a great time we had here. Definately one of the best cities i have ever had the pleasure of going to.

Alright, well.. its 5:55am here, we have to leave for the airport at 8. (two hours!!) i should probaly take a quick nap!

SEE YOU IN BARCELONA!!!!!!!!!!!!

xoxo.
-s

days 3 and 4 recap!

hey guys!!! sorry its taken so long to get this up! There truly isn't enough time in the day! i dont really have much time now, so im just going to try and caption all the pictures real quick and go ahead and post this so you all can at least see some of what were doing.

the picture above is from the tron, the pub we went to on night two!

This is our new german friend. Friedrick. He is 6'11.. for real. im standing on my tip toes in the picture! and im pretty tall!

L to R: James, Leah, Misti, Craig

After we left i got fish and chips!!! so good.

Leahs road!! with all the car tags, i love it.

Walking down one of the main streets in edinburgh, North Bridge.


The Royal Mile

Misti is hilarious.


St. Giles cathedral. It is soo beautiful.



i climbed on a scaffolding to try to get a shot without so much of the trees.. evidently thats not allowed over here :)
This is looking down to Princes street, a very posh shopping area.

We climbed up "Jacobs Ladder". It was about 75 million stone steps. to the top of one of the hills here!
And we found this amazing old cemetery by accident.

That night we decided to go dancing at a place called 'liquid room'.


but we met up with all of our friends first of course! Leah and James have tons of friends over here, and they have adopted up straight away.


Liquid room:


The next day we went to see Edinburgh Castle.. its really cool!!!! it has really great views too.


oh yeah!!! and Carrie got here, my roomate from atlanta! she will be with us in barcelona too!


it was pretty cold outside to we found a really cute little wine bar. Grog street was the name, and the girls that worked there were so sweet!



After that we went back to Leahs, cooked pasta and went to the 'cinema'!

i realize im two days behind, and this post wasn't very descriptive, but it will just have to do for now! i still have tons more pictures and stories! expect to see them soon.

Love you guys!!!!!