Hello again, everyone!

I loved reading the comments, thank you for those!

Now, first of all (well, I suppose second) I hate Flickr. It´s only letting me upload pictures from my camera one picture at a time, which, when you have 200 pictures to upload, just won´t fly. SO-- I´m going to post pictures to the blog and I think that´ll have to be it until I can get back to the EE UU (AAAH Spanish: Estados Unidos) and post my mountains of pictures (many of which are pictures of mountains).

This week I went to a buuuunch of places in Asturias. Friday was our first excursion. We went to a town called Conga de Onis (I think), which was celebrating its patron saint´s day (San Antonio). As a result, there were people everywhere in traditional costumes, there were bagpipes (or gaitas, as they´re called in Spanish) As another result, there were a bunch of drunk people. Combine the two, and we had drunk people in traditional garb stumbling all over the place, laughing their heads off, and it was really ridiculously funny. Please remind me never to get drunk in public. (Kidding, Mom!)

We also went to Picas de Europa, (Peaks of Europe), which was a collection of mountains, one of which we drove up and it amounted to an incredible view. People (including myself) had others take pictures of them with the beautiful mountains in the background-- what a contrast to all the cheesy school photos with landscapes on the photographer´s backdrop. Our next stop were three famous lakes of Asturias, but it was extremely cloudy so we could only see the lowest one.

Finally, we went to Covadonga. Firstly, a bit of history... During the first part of the 8th century, the Muslims were conquering Spain. They started from the south and in a period of about 10 years, they´d worked their way all the way up to Asturias (very North of Spain). In 722, they started on Asturias, but were stopped by a man named Pelayo. Legend has it that a woman appeared in a cave at the battle site to aid Pelayo: the Virgin of Covadonga. In the cave today, there´s a little chapel and a statue of her, and it´s a holy place for Asturians-- if something really good happens, many will go visit the Virgin of Covadonga in thanks. So anyway, we visited the cave and it was quite interesting.

Over the weekend, I visited a bunch of sea towns with my family, and there are some beaaaaautiful photos from that. On Sunday, we were on the beach and we played Uno for an hour on the rocks while waves of the Cantabrean Sea (is that right in English? I only know the Spanish name, geography whizz that I am :D) crashed onto shore.

AAGH my hour´s up, I´m going to have to be more efficient with photos next week, and there are still experiences from this week to recount. I think photos are a losing proposition here...

Love to all! (leave more comments)

Katherine

P.S.: I´m getting my daily serving of vegetables.
P.P.S.: And by vegetables I mean patatas fritas. I´ll just leave the translation to you. It´s especially good because my parents don´t speak Spanish. :)