Picture Time. :)

Whew.. SO! We have been many places these past couple weeks! We don't have very much time to write this entry, so it might be "short" and sweet. :) Here is a list of places we have visited since we left Switzerland at the end of our last blog. :)

Ilanz, CH (CH is Switzerland..don't ask me why.)  -  Bellinzona, CH  -  Riomaggiorre, Cinque Terre, IT  -  Savona, IT  -  Paris, FR  -  Madrid, ES  -  Lisbon, PT  -   Tomar, PT  -  (back to) Madrid, ES  -  Guadalajara, ES  -  Barcelona, ES  -  Granada, ES  -  Ronda, ES  -  (back to) Barcelona, ES  -  Geneva, CH  -  Ilanz, CH  -  Kehl, DE (Germany..)  -  Strasbourg, FR  -  Mannheim, DE ..  ..And that brings us to present day!! :) All in 12 days..! ..we are crazy.. :)  

Ok. So, we left the Haabs house in Ilanz, Switzerland, to go on a 9 day trip to Spain. We left our huge backpacks at the Haab's house, planning to return to pick them up on April 3rd. So! This is taken on our way to Bellinzona, CH, the Italian part of Switzerland, at the beginning of our 9 day adventure. :)  It was such a beautiful train ride!!!!

Arriving in Bellinzona was quite confusing. Italy.. in Switzerland.. ..wierd. So, ALL the houses were Italian-looking. It was beautiful. And, if you can see, there is a castle at the end of the street. Just, you know, so normal. How would you like a huge castle on your block? :)

After leaving the Italian part of Switzerland, we headed down, once again, to Cinque Terre, because I had forgotten some things at our hostel. (..maybe I "forgot" them.. we'll never know..) :) So, this is on our way down to Cinque Terre.. *sigh*.. Isn't it beautiful?? :)



..Our sleeping quarters for the night. .. :) Yes, under the bush, in the corner. This is in the town of Savona. We missed our trains, and so didn't get on the night train to Avignon. So. the train station was closed, and so we had to sleep outside. ..It was.. fun. But actually! It was beautiful. But it got a little chilly during night, and we only had our little blankets. But.. we are still alive, so thats good! :)



... ... PARIS!! ..   ..what?!  :)

..Paris Gare de Lyon. Yes. Hm. How did we end up here, you ask..? We don't know. We were taking our train the next morning to Avignon, but then somehow missed our stop, and our train turned into an express train bound for Paris. No stops before. So, we went from the very southern part of France, to the North, on a high speed train, and it took about 2 hours, tops. :) ..Oops. But, then we had about 2 hours in Paris, and so we saw..

..NOTRE DAME! It was SO beautiful. And with the dark sky behind it.. hm. Epic. Then that dark sky opened up on us, and we got soaked. It.. RAINED. It was awesome, but we didn't want to get too wet because we had no safe, dry, warm place to go that night, or clothes to change into. But it was still a fun little day in Paris! :) Haha... funny.

So, from Paris, we took a night train to Irun, Spain, right on the border of Spain and France, then took a train into Madrid!! YAY! And discovered that Madrid is all about two things, really. Football, and..

..Fountains! Odd combination, we know. But fountains were EVERYWHERE in Madrid! Little ones, big ones, funny ones, wierd ones, simple ones, traditional ones, and then even more ones. (..Not gramatically correct..) :) We had a good day exploring Madrid, it was beautiful. That night we took a night train to..

..Portugal! We went straight to Lisbon, had an hour and a half there, then took a day trip from Lisbon to a town called Tomar, PT. Because we were tired of big cities and wanted to see some CULTURE! And so we did. And Tomar turned our to be a beautiful town, a perfect adventure. Because.... 

..there was a huge awesome castle on a hill! SO, we decided to walk towards it. We thought that we would just keep walking, and stop when we were not allowed to go any further. Thankfully.. no one stopped us!! So we just kept right on going, up the hill and around the corners, until we saw..



..the castle! (..sorry, we really like the "dot dot dot..", leave-them-hanging-for-a-while effect..) :) It was SO EPIC. And we kept right on going, inside the castle grounds! :)



It was incredibly beautiful. Seriously. Just like in a story book, or an old-fashioned movie. It was.. ah. So cool. :)

The little city of Tomar, under the protective eye of the castle. It was a great view.

The castle! It was just so cool!!

After our day in Tomar, we left Portugal on a night train from Lisbon, bound for Madrid, once again. Since we had already explored Madrid, we decided to take a day trip to some random town close by. We wanted to go to Toledo, just so we could say "Holy Toledo!!"  :) ..but then, it didn't work out.. :( So, we chose the next best thing, a town with an awesome name, and so fun to spell and say. :) Guadalajara! And we love nature, so we always seem to find the parks in any city we go to. So, here is us lounging in Guadalajara.. "'grantastic' green grass in Guadalajara"! :) Then it was off on a night train to..

..Barcelona!! (Whenever we say the name of this town, it is pronounced, "Barthelona", because thats the Spain spanish was of pronouncing the "s" sound, I think. Also, Lisbon was "Lithbon". :) It sounded cute when they said it!) We spent the day here, exploring the city. I.. love Barcelona! It was beautiful, and fun!

Some of the architecture, I think was modern architecture, was so cool! Anna thinks (and I agree..) that this building looks like bones.. Its kinda creepy. But so intriguing! As a city that Picasso called home for many years, I can understasnd their creativity!!

Also, another attraction of Barcelona.. IKEA! :) Haha, yeah, we saw a lady with an IKEA bag, and so we asked the tourist information office where it was, and we found it! We really wanted to go to the one in Sweden, because there HAS to be one there, and it would have been fun to go to the one in the country it originated in.. But we couldn't find it.. :( SO, we went to one in Spain!! :) Haha, it was so fun. 

AND. We went to the restaurant, just to see.. and there was a special on that day.. 10 meatballs, with potatoes and gravy for €1!!! ..uh. let me think. ..OK! :) It was SO GOOD to have a warm meal again. ..Up until this point, we have been buying bread, and having it with Nutella, or jam that I bought. For every. meal. So, this was a nice change! And we got Swedish dark chocolate bars for €0.60.. We could not pass that up. :)
So, that night we took a night train to.. :)



..Granada! And a LOT of things happened here, lots of good stories.. but we will stick to the basics for now. (Once again, it is almost close to midnight, and we are tired.) We stayed at a campsite overnight!! And there was a basketball court..! So, put two and two together.. what do YOU think I did all day? Thats right. Basketball! It was fun to play (albeit, by myself..) again. Nah, I didn't do it ALL day. We explored Granada, too! :)

We walked by a fruit stand once, and the strawberries looked WAY too good to pass up.. :) So, we bought some! They sold them by the kilogram only, we found out..! So, that day we ate 1 kilo of strawberries.. MMMmmmmm.. SO GOOD. :D

Sierra Nevada! The mountains there were beautiful. Not the Swiss Alps.. but pretty good for Spain! :)

This is taken from the train travelling on a day trip to a town called Ronda. We actually wanted to go to a town called Algeciras, a town right on the southern tip of Spain, and we could have seen Africa from there! But, it would not have been possible (time-wise, and train schedule-wise) to get BACK to Grenada that night, and apparently Algeciras isn't a totally "safe" town.. So, we stopped in a town called Ronda along the way, to have time to turn around and go back to Granada before it got dark.. :)
Here is how Anna feels about Ronda:

..It IS beautiful!! :) We hung out in Ronda for about 50 minutes, :) because the last train back to Granada was leaving then. But it was a great 50 minutes! It was so warm, about 28° C, and the Spanish streets were so beautiful to explore. :)  We headed back to Granada.

Ok, so. Has anyone heard of a thing called a 'tapa'? We sure had NOT. While we were in Barcelona, we met a Canadian lady who told us that Granada was the home of 'tapas' and when you go to pretty much any bar, they give them out for free. So. We assumed that it was a drink.. cause niether of us had heard of a tapa. We were.. wrong? :) We were forewarned that it was not a drink from the lady in the office of our campsite, but we were not expecting.. this. :) So, two of the things we both dislike the most are olives and seafood. Guess what our 'tapa' was.. Good guess. Olives and seafood. :) Eventually, we forced them down.. ate as many olives as we could stand, and drank our beer. :) Whew.. it was pretty difficult. I never thought I'd say this, but the beer was the best part of this meal, for sure. :)

Viola. A 'clean' plate. As clean as we could possibly get it, anyways. :) We were impressed with ourselves.
We left the restaurant, eager to spend a beautiful night under the stars of southern Spain. .. .. ..which turned out to be the most interesting experience of our trip thus far.. (Mom, don't read this.) Haha, just kidding, its not that bad. Here's the story: (in a very tiny nutshell)
We went to bed at 11:00, after a little run to get warm. Anna woke at about 1:30 am, because she was cold, so she tried to resituate herself, and get comfortable again. Bad move. Apparently, there was a guy in the next campsite who had been watching us, waiting to see if we were awake. When Anna moved a bit, he assumed we were awake, and made his way over the where we were sleeping, and started talking to us. He didn't speak English hardly at all, except for about 5 words.. "Come.. sleep.. tent.. with me." UH.. Let me think.. NO. Oh, and he knew the word "Please." He used that one a LOT. :) ..So, after about 20-30 minutes of him trying to get us to sleep with him, (it might have been completely harmless, him just wanting us to be out of the cold) we finally picked up all our bags, and went to see if the person on night watch in the reception office could help us. ..Turns out, of course, that he didn't speak English either. We had nowhere to go. Waldo (this is what we began to call the guy who starting talking to us, because he was wearing a red and white striped shirt) was following us around everywhere. So.. where did we end up sleeping the night, you ask..? .. 

..You guessed it. The washroom at the campsite was the only place with a lock, and it was even a deadbolt, so it couldn't even be unlocked with a key. So, we spent a cramped night in a bathroom stall. BUT. We were safe from creepy men, and it was actually warmed because there was no wind! Although we did not get the best sleep that night, we knew we did the right thing by not getting in that tent with Waldo. The funniest part of this story: The morning (1:30 AM) it happened was none other than April 1st. April Fools Day. .. Ha. Ha. Jokes on us.  :)

The next morning, after the night running from Waldo, dawned bright and sunny. ..Making it even hotter than the day before, about 32°. Ahh, lovely. Except when you want to climb up a big hill to get a great view of the city below. :)

This is the view of Alhambra, a "palace and fortress complex constructed during the mid 14th century.. and one of Spain's major tourist attractions, exhibiting the country's most significant and well known Islamic architecture", according to Wiki. :) This is the view from the top of the hill we (and evey other tourist in Granada) hiked up. I took 5 pictures, then made them into a panorama! ..Beautiful, eh?? :)
And that evening, after spending a beautiful day in Granada, seeing amazing things, we left on a night train back to Barcelona. Our plan was to spend the day (April 2) in Barcelona, then take a night train to Geneva for church the next morning! ..But. We found out there was no night train going that night.. Huh. So, we took a series of 5 trains during the day to get there, arriving Saturday night into Geneva, Switzerland. We now had another problem, though.. We had no place to stay. On one of those trains during the day, we met a guy from America! He is from Vermont, but doing something similar to us, travelling Europe. We was headed to Geneva as well, and also like us, had no place to stay. So! we all decided that we would stay in the trains station. Anna and I had been very hesitant to stay anywhere by ourselves, after our Waldo experience, so we had no idea what we were going to do. But then we met this nice American guy, about our age and very nice and polite, and we all decided to stay in the train station together. It was a good night, not too much excitement, and a good bench in a waiting room to sleep on. It was fun to get to know this guy, too. Justin from Vermont. We are now all facebook friends. :)

The next morning, we set out to try to find our way to the church we were told was amazing, called "Evangelical Lutheran Church of Geneva English Speaking Congregation". Quite a moutful. :) But the church was AMAZING! It has been SO long since we had been to a english church, and the people we met were so cool and welcoming.. SO many cultures, languages, nationalities, denominations, etc, represented in that church. It was so cool. At the beginning of the service, the first hymn we sang was Amazing Grace. It was the most amazing moment I have experienced in a long time, looking around at the different nationalities of people, all singing to the same God and in the same language. I.. got a glimpse of heaven that day. :) It was a great church, and I will definately go back if I ever return to Geneva! We left the church feeling very full, spiritually. It was.. ah. Wonderful. :)

Walking through Geneva, we saw this beautiful hill with flowers.. then we realized it was a clock!! The Suisse are so cool. :)

After church in Geneva, we headed back to the Haab's house in Ilanz, Switzerland. We wanted to buy them flowers because they had been SO gracious, and wonderful hosts. But.. we forgot. :) So, on our hike up to their farm, we picked wildflowers for them! :) And I think they loved them more than store-bought flowers. :) It was also so fun for us! THe countryside if FULL of beautiful, Swiss wildflowers.

After staying the night in Ilanz, we hopped on a train to Kehl, Germany. This town is significant, because do you see on this sign where it says "Strasbourg"?.. Well, thats in France! So, both towns are bordering the Rhine River, which is (in this case) the border of Germany and France. :) So, we left Switzerland, went to Germany, and walked to France. :)

We had lunch in France, and Anna used up the last of her Nutella. .. :( Sad day. After lunch, we walked for a bit, but then it started raining and getting kind of windy. So, we walked back to Kehl and took the train to our next stop. ..Manheim! Yes, again. :) We thought that since we wanted to go to Kehl/Strasbourg, Mannheim was on our way to our next official desintation, Paris, and so we would stop and say hello! And we can't pass up an opportunity to stay in a nice, warm bed and visit with wonderful people! :) So, the Shareski's graciously let us stay with them again. I wonder if they are getting tired of us by now.. :)

The next morning, (now April 5th) Anna and I made banana chocolate chip muffins!!! It was so fun. I had been craving home baking for a long time. :)

In the afternoon, Ralph and Ruth took us to a place in Mannheim called Luisenpark. It was beautiful!! The flowers were pretty much in full bloom, and so we just wandered around, looking at the flowers, and they have so many different kinds of birds there, like owls and storks and funny-looking birds, big birds, :) and.. penguins! They were so cute. :)

Afterwards, Ralph and Ruth treated us to come ice cream at the tea house in the park. It was a beautiful day, Shareski's!! Thank you so much!! :)

And THAT brings us to the present. We are spending the day today, April 6th, doing next to nothing, because our bodies need it. :) We have been go-go-going for SO long, and we need some down time. Just a day. :) We are leaving for Paris on April 7th, (tomorrow) to stay with a friend there. Did I ever tell you about Vickie? We met her in Venice, and she is from Calgary but living in Paris (or close to) teaching English. She said we could come stay with her! So, that is the plan for tomorrow. We will be flying out of Paris on the morning of April 10th, for Dublin, Ireland. AH! I am so excited for that. :) And that is probably when we wll write next! We are staying with a lady named Jemma Lee, and souchsurfer in a town near Dublin. We will be staying there for about 4 days, then leaving for Great Britain. So, I am assuming at some point during our stay with her, we might have time to update our blog! :) 

Until the next time we write.. God Bless. :)

Demara and Anna.