I'd say the biggest piece of news for you all is that Morgan and I just returned from about 3.5 weeks in Europe! Little to no wedding planning took place on our trip. I went out for a conference which ROCKED, and Morgan joined me about 5 days later. At least that was the plan.
See, her flight landing in London was late, and as a result, she missed her subsequent flight to Madrid, and then to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, where the conference was held and I was anxiously waiting for her to arrive. She made it to Madrid, but not Santiago before the end of the day. When she finally did arrive the next morning, her bag did not arrive with her.
Now think about this, for those of you who have not had luggage lost: You arrive in a country whose native tongue is not yours, you have only the clothes on your back (which have been there since you woke up the previous day to begin your journey from half-way across the world), next to zero toiletries, and a printout on the old printer pages that come in one perforated long line with no information of immediate use about how to get your bag back (those long sheets were used in what my Ph.D. advisor calls the "Golden age of algebraic topology," since one can write out long exact sequences to whatever length one wants). We call the number and get told that Iberia doesn't know where the bag is. To be specific, they said, "We don't know where your bag is. We don't have any idea when we will find it." As they say, when it rains, it pours, but at least we were told that in English.
And speaking of rain, a few days later we were absolutely drilled with it in Lisbon. Portland-style, sideways rain, soaking whatever articles of clothing we had managed to buy along the way for her (and soaking a lot of my clothes, too). Then, her bag appeared (not at all magically, but after 3 calls to Iberia in the same day), and we were off. But then the cold weather hit, and a number of other setbacks. I could go on about some others, but I don't want to confuse what is what I'm trying to get across, which I'm getting to.
Here's Morgan, FINALLY reunited with her bag.
Despite all of these challenges, though, we really did have a great time. We stayed in Santiago for a day and night.
The big cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
Then a bus ride to Porto, Portugal.
Awesome shot from one of the many bridges in Porto.
Then, on to Lisbon.
RAINY day in Lisbon!
The second of our days in Lisbon, we took a day-trip out to Sintra, where there are these totally bad-ass castles.
Here's one of the bad-ass castles in Sintra. It's Moorish.
In what was probably the biggest miscalculation of our planning (but to be fair to ourselves, one of the only miscalculations), we took an overnight bus from Lisbon to Granada... total travel time: 13 hours. Turns out it really wasn't what we expected. First, we get on and the bus is nearly empty. We stake out the far back to have 5 seats to lay out across for the journey. The problem is, at the next stop the bus nearly completely fills with people. One of whom decided to project her .mp3 music with speakers to the entire bus until about 2 AM. Right around 11 PM they decided to play an American soft-core porn movie with Portugese subtitles. Then boarder control stopped us and hassled an old lady, and did I mention that we actually arrived at the correct station for a transfer to a bus which was on our itinerary, but actually didn't exist anymore? Anyway, we finally, mercifully, made it to Granada where Morgan was eventually reunited with her bag.
Inside the Alhambra complex in Granada.
After we were done in Granada, we left for Cordoba, and it is at this point clear that we had WAY too much stuff, since we'd been buying stuff for Morgan in the absence of her bag. Check out what we looked like as we moved from city to city for the rest of the trip.
This is how Morgan looked for a lot of our journey.
This is what I looked like for a lot of our trip. The shoulder strap on that duffel bag immediately broke, leaving me to carry that thing like a 10-year-old human. The corpse of a 10-year-old human, to be more precise.
In Cordoba, we attended noon-time Roman-Catholic Christmas mass at the ginormous mosque there, after a pretty fun Christmas eve dinner at the hostel with interesting people.
Christmas Eve dinner with our friends at the hostel.
Here's the crazy mosque. This is my "Mandelbrot picture," in which, if you zoom in on the door, your zoomed picture is pretty much exactly the same... like a fractal.
The next day, we flew to Bologna from Seville, and then went on to the Italian riviera in the northwest corner of the Italian coastline, to a collection of 5 villages called the Cinque Terre. We stayed in Vernazza, probably the most scenic of the 5, where I had my first Italian food (pesto Lasagna), Italian wine (their standard house red is better than 95% of the wines I've ever had), and tasted Limoncello for the first time.
Pesto lasagna and wine. Awesome. Check out the oil with hot chilies on the left!
Limoncello, and yes, we brought some home, and we're brewing some at home right now.
Yeah, it was pretty sweet... a "coastal" feel while still being small, comfortable, and homey. Here's a picture from the deck of where we stayed, and other awesome pics.
Here's the view from our deck. Yep, a lot of awesome/terrifying stairs to get up there, but worth it.
This was just after we watched the sun set over the Ligurian Sea.
At any rate, we continued on to Florence, but Morgan had fallen ill, and we didn't get out much there.
Here's the Duomo. Awesome.
Then, on to Assisi, but upon arriving at our scheduled time there, we were vacuously greeted by an empty hotel. Yep, it was the right one. Lights: off. Doors: locked. Windows: shut and curtains drawn. You'd think that the people inside thought the apocalypse had begun and had sought refuge in their fallout shelter. After about an hour of hassle, we were told to check in at 2pm. Maybe 2:10, but definitely 2, and that shot a lot of our plans for our one day and night there. Morgan was still coming out of a bad chest cold, so we stayed in that day, but got a good look at Santa Maria Degli Angeli.
Here's Morgan in front of this awesome chapel. As it turns out, this chapel is where Saint Francis (of Assisi) "abandoned his tired body" (according to one of our books).
Finally, the next day, we took a train to our last city: Rome. Here's just a few images from our wonderful time there.
Here's a stationary Morgan in front of the Colosseum, as an in-motion Rome continues to exist.
Here's Morgan trying to catch our dinner. If we were homeless.
Come on. I love this picture. It's apparently the angel of death in the St. Peter in Chains church. I've never seen such an image in a church before.
Here's Michaelangelo's Moses in the same church. As a young visitor asked: "How did Michaelangelo get Moses to pose for that long?"
Here's an image of Raphael's, in the Vatican Museum. The man in the red robe bending over and drawing/teaching about triangles is Euclid, and the small boy on one leg writing on his other knee at the top of the picture is Pythagorus.
Overall, the trip was fantastic. A lot of setbacks and unfair challenges, but still fantastic. I think that really is a message that I am taking away from the trip and talking about on this blog. See, at some point after experiencing any one of these challenges we could have retreated into our own selves and just pouted. But in dealing with these obstacles--together-- we experienced a side of each other where we had to trust and support one another, and sometimes dig deep to either find a bright side to something or even to insist on looking up bus/train schedules early. Wonderful images and memories aside, that experience of relying on and trusting one another will be something I'll be keeping with me for a long time. It's also not as though we didn't already have this as part of our relationship, but part of traveling abroad is to explore yourself, and to rediscover those everyday aspects of your life which you find valuable. I'm seeing the trip as a whole in a lot of ways, and one of those ways is that, as we head into our final planning stages of the wedding, it is a well-timed reminder that life occasionally throws unwanted curve balls, and that these are to be expected. Getting through these difficulties, whatever they are, can be done together as we trust and rely on each other. And so, I wouldn't have changed the trip at all. Okay, maybe if Morgan's bag would have arrived with Morgan on the day she was originally supposed to arrive I think I'd be okay with that change.
So I don't know how much of a wedding blog this is as compared to an update sort of blog on what we've been up to. I don't think I can define really what it is, but Morgan told me to not think about it too hard, so I'll let you decide. But, I hope you like my blog effort, and hope you'll stay tuned to the website as we post things!
One last piece of business. As in the title of my first-ever blog (the quality of which I am still dubious about), we are getting very close to sending out our Save-the-Dates! If you've sent us your address, then you should expect to see one soon! If you haven't sent us your address, then get on it! 2 minutes. We need it! Then: expect to see a Save-the-Date. Rock on!
- Corey
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