Las Noches Guapas

The weekends en España son muy divertidos! Jaja.  I went out last night with Nora after we ate at our respective casas.  There was a welcome dinner for exchange students, but neither of us went.  It was 15 Euros and it would have been all Americans, basically.  We wanted to go out with the Spaniards.  Get a taste of the real culture.  Also, she is a vegetarian, so she wouldn´t have been able to eat 15 Euros worth of food, and even though it was basically "All You Can Drink", I don´t drink enough for it to be worth that price.  I´m going to Covadonga for less than that!  Anyways, we met a la gorda and went bar-hopping, hoping eventually to find our group who had gone to the dinner.

We started at a quiet restaurante/bar called "Bellota".  It was nice, but there were not many people there and la gente that were there were older.  We stayed for 30/45 minutes, maybe, then left.  We walked to a calle that had a lot of bars where there were a ton of young locals hanging out inside and outside, even though it is January.  There we went to a bar that seemed really popular called "CuatroGatos" (FourCats).  We had to stand at the bar because there were only seats outside, and it would have been cold, and there were a lot of people smoking.  We did not stay long because of having to stand, so we moved on to another bar on a different street.  It had a name like "Pinchin", but Im not sure.  Nora grabbed a coaster, so I can ask her later.  We were there for a while chatting, but it was like the first place - empty and the only people who WERE there were over 50.  After that we went to Calle Gascona - where all the cidrerías are (where the specialty is hard cider - cidra - the drink of Asturias).  We ended up just walking through the street until we found some people from another American Universidad.  We integrated ourselves into their group and followed them to another street were all the discos were.

I think this is going to be my favorite street, since I like to dance so much.  But all throughout the street there were people who worked in the bars trying to get us to come in for free shots.  The group I was with wanted to do that, so we went into, like, three places.  It was funny, there was literally no one in some of those places except for the people who wanted the free shot, haha.  Nora and I had been out for a while, so I only just tasted them.  The third place we went to was where we were the other night for salsa dancing, and we ended up finding our group of Umassers there.  So we stayed for an hour or so and danced.  I walked home with some friends ~2am, which was awesome, and slept until 10am this morning.  We had a walking tour with all the Umassers and I took lotsa pictures.  Afterwards, we had a 3hour lunch at a restaurante on calle Gascona called Ferroviario.  Here is a sampling of the fotos I took:

Pretty European Architecture :)

Peacocks are apparently everywhere, haha

Campo San Fransisco - Sadly, this picture does not do this park justice

Las Montañas - I increased the shadows 100% to be able to see them through the glare and fog

The beautiful parque invierno with no shadow increases - foto doesn´t do it justice again...

The cathedral in the daylight

Queso!

Pan!

Anyways, tomorrow I am going on that excursion I mentioned before.  I know that I have been updating every-other day, but I felt like I wanted to write a lot, so I´m splitting it into two entries and I´ll be updating again tomorrow haha!

*Besos*