Parisian Food

I feel I'm not doing justice to Paris without providing a post about the food as well. We had great food the entire weekend and I'd like to share some of the pictures of our delicacies.

I know that I have already pointed out the small bakery we went to, but the sandwiches were delicious. They seem to bake the bread to the perfect temperature so it melts in your mouth. We noticed that they had quiche at the bakery, so we had to try a little. this one was salmon. I was a bit surprised because all of the quiches available had some kind of fish (there was a tuna one too).



After our hours in the Louvre, we went to the Latin Quarter famished. Most of the restaurants in the area were on the pricey side. Luckily, we found a trendy place that served something called Croquettes (I might be incorrect about the name). Basically, it's two pieces of toast with mozarella. I had ratatouille in mine and A had a fried egg on his.





When we left the restaurant, we came across a street vendor selling crepes. We were quite excited and bought ones filled with nutella and banana. They were a bit pricey for our taste (4 euros!) but absolutely delicious!



The next day, we had a quick sandwich lunch during the day. We wanted to eat and run since we hoped to see everything possible. For dinner, we went to a local restaurant near the Sacre Coure. One of my students recommended that we try the French onion soup while in Paris (here, they just call it onion soup). I'm not usually a fan of this soup, but it was quite good!



Another thing I liked about Parisian food is that there were a lot of healthy choices. We decided to split a salad and duck dish. When the food came out, I didn't realize that the salad was actually a full meal!



A's brother recommended that we try the duck, so we also had that with some pommes frites (french fries). The duck was quite tender.



So, there's your sampling of some French food. O la la! Our days are numbered here in Spain now, so we're packing in as many trips as possible (without going broke!) Next week, we'll be traveling to Sevilla and Granada! Hope to report back soon!

Paris, je t'aime!

We have arrived back from a wonderful weekend trip to Paris! I was a little nervous about going. I had heard that the French are quite annoyed when you don't speak their language (and I only have 2 years of middle school French under my belt). On our flight, we reviewed the few phrases I could remember in the cobwebs of my brain.

We arrived in Paris and first walked to our hotel. The first thing to catch my eye was the charming architecture of the apartments. I loved the shutters on the windows and the details in the building!



After we dropped off our luggage at the hotel, we went into a small shop for lunch. It was a bakery as well and people were dropping in to quickly fetch their daily baguette. Here's a picture of some of the delicious desserts!



We then made a beeline to the Louvre museum. You honestly need several weeks in order to actually see everything in this place! At one point, this place was a palace and I can only imagine it changed because too many royal figures got lost and were never found again.





My photos do not do justice to the sheer size of this place! In addition, it had quite a crowd! We were able to enter the museum among throngs of people from all over the world. I don't want to bore you with lots of art photos, but here are the highlights.

Venus de Milo


Mona Lisa


Liberty Leading the People


You get the idea--lots of famous art. Every room was cluttered with art, which is saying a lot since the edifice was already enormous. It took us 4 hours to hit all the important works that my artist partner insisted we see. After that, we crossed the bridge over the River Seine and headed to the Latin Quarter for dinner.



The next day, we awoke early and went to see the Eiffel Tower. For some reason, I have fallen in love with this structure. It's quite elegant in the Parisian backdrop!



The building becomes a motif in my later pictures, so I'll just leave you with that one now. Later, we went to the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. It's a famous street lined with expensive shops and this Arc de Triomphe.



We then headed over to see Notre Dame. I tried to get a nice picture, but it was difficult because there was this giant tent holding a bread station.



We went into the tent and watched dozens of bakers mix, mold and bake bread. Here are some of the workers. You can see the ovens behind them.



We then went over the bridge and back into the Latin Quarter, where we found Cafe de Flore, a famous coffee shop where Ernest Hemingway used to write. When you sit down and start to balk at the price for a cup of coffee (4 euro!) you notice that there isn't any obvious indications that Hemingway had been there. Apparently, there's a small plaque over where he used to sit, but we never saw it.



After purging our wallets in the Latin Quarter, we went up north of the city where Sacre Coure is located. This is a large beautiful church-you get a great view of the city from there!





You may know this building...



We returned to the centre of the city and I was able to capture this shot of the Eiffel Tower at dusk.



And no trip to Paris is complete without a visit to the Moulin Rouge! It's located amid a lot of sex shops. O la la.



So that was our trip to Paris! As I said earlier, I was quite nervous before going, but in truth, it was wonderful! The people were very friendly and usually spoke English. The food is a bit pricey, but delicious! I might have to make another posting simply for the food!

Au revoir!

A day in the life...

In my effort to travel and make interesting blog posts, I realize that I never actually showed pictures of what I do on a day to day basis. Since we are having a low-key weekend, I thought I would dedicate a post to our normal work week as ESL teachers.

In general, we work from Monday to Thursday. There are opportunities to teach on Fridays, but we decided to decline those on account that we wanted to travel. Instead, our Monday through Thursday schedules are pretty packed. There are classes that begin at 8 in the morning and you can teach classes until 9 or 10 at night. Classes are usually scheduled around the normal workday. For example, they are an hour or two before work (at 8am), or they are at lunchtime or they are after work. This means that there are several hours in the day when we don't teach. At times, it can be frustrating, but I find a good book makes the time fly.

On Mondays, I work in the north of Madrid at an area called Alcobendas. It's outside of downtown and is mostly business buildings.

The metro stop is Ronda de la Comunicación. It takes about an hour to travel there from home, unfortunately.



Those large glass buildings are Telefonica. They used to be the only telephone and internet service in Madrid. Now, there are competing services, but they all have to work through Telefonica because they established the phone lines.



In the next few pictures, you can see the Guadarrama mountain range bordering the buildings.





Also, I can see these four skyscrapers from Ronda. These four skyscrapers were recently completed in 2008. Each was funded by the money earned in selling important Real Madrid (the soccer team) players to other teams. I know that one was funded with the money from selling David Beckham and I cannot remember the others.



Twice a week, I travel even farther north to La Moraleja. This is the wealthiest neighborhood in Madrid. Near the metro stop, there are mostly large businesses. Both A and I teach classes here at Cap Gemini, which is an international company that produces computer programs and software. That's the best explanation I can give. It's a French company, but it has locations all over the world.



Not all of our classes are for businesses in the north. We also teach private classes to individuals who just want to learn English. For some students, I travel to their homes in Madrid and others prefer to come to my home for class. I really enjoy these classes because the students really want to learn English! Also, they love to tell me more about their Spanish culture.

It's nice to have a balance between business classes and private classes. With business classes, you are always going to have class on that day and time. Even if no one attends the class, you still get paid because the company pays for X amount of classes. The only problem is that the pay is low and you sometimes have students who are forced to learn English. In general, we have been lucky, since most of our business classes are filled with students enthused with improving their fluency. With private classes, you can name your price for the lessons.

So this is our daily life here. At times it is tiring and difficult, but our students make us love our job!

We have just returned from a wonderful trip to Paris! In that short weekend, I somehow took 400 photos! We will be posting highlights from the trip soon!

Ciao Roma! Due

I have much more pictures and stories to share from our trip! My posts have been a little delayed because I have been under the weather. Yes, Spain has finally embraced Spring, which feels a lot like summer. I think the change in temperature gave A and I mild colds. As I try to get on the mends, here are some more highlights from Rome!

Whenever we traveled into the city center, we had to take the metro. It's only 2 lines and the cars are covered with graffiti, like this one.



Makes the New York City subway look pristine. I also have to put up the amazing warning signs on the metro. I find them hilarious.



When you're in downtown Rome, you can't miss all of the ruins splayed out in the area. Some of the cousins informed us about one site where they were planning to build something and discovered more ancient ruins, which they didn't want to remove. It's amazing that a large amount of the pieces are in tact. We were lucky enough to be in Rome fr "Culture Week" so admission was free.



These are pictures of the Roman Forum. In the one below, you'll notice a group of people dressed up in costume. I was really hoping it was one of those history tours like the ones in the U.S. when you tour with a colonial period person. However, the characters in these photos look quite spiritless.







From the ruins, you aren't far from the Roman Coliseum. I have seen this a few times, but it is always an awesome sight. It dates back to the 1st century AD.



We decided to have an overpriced drink by the Roman Coliseum. Hey, you only live once.

One of the other important items we saw was the Bernini sculpture called The Ecstasy of St. Teresa in the St. Mary of Victory Church. The church is small compared to other religious edifices, but it contains an immense amount of art!



Here's a picture of the interior of the church.



And here is the famous sculpture.



I wished I had had more time in this church; it was so packed with statues and paintings that you had to allot yourself some time to actually peruse through the building.

After that, we headed over to St. Peter in Chains church where Michelangelo's Moses sculpture decorates the tomb of a pope. He carved this statue out of one block of marble.



A told me an interesting story about this sculpture. While Michelangelo chisled away at this statue, he was determined to make it life-like. In anger, he hit the statue on the knee exclaiming, "why don't you speak?!" Apparently, there's a scar where he struck the statue.



That was the end of our Rome visit. We got packed on Monday only to see the news that the Iceland volcano ash covered most of Europe. We received an email stating that our flight was cancelled! The email had a hyperlink directing us to book another flight, but it didn't work. The email stated we could call, but there was no phone number! We decided to go to the airport and try to handle things there. The ticketing desk told us we wouldn't be able to get another flight until next Saturday or Sunday! We decided to get a refund on our tickets and try to return to Madrid through cheap trains or buses. As the ticketing agent tried to process our request, he discovered that our flight indeed was leaving today! We looked at him perpelexed and he explained that they cancel all the flights and then start them up again if the airspace is safe. Though I was mentally cursing at this man, wondering how in the world we were supposed to know that when we were given the impression we had no flight home, I was releived to see our flight on the board. Unfortunately, many people were stranded at the airport. Here's a picture of the departure board. Granted, this was a small airport, you can see that the majority of flights were cancelled.



We have some more travel plans happening in the near future, so come back soon!