And Then All The Students Napped

             Napping was not all we did, but it certainly took up a good chunk of the day. Today I participated in another field program: we went to La Rioja for winery tours and wine tasting. We had to meet at the bus at 8:30am. 8:30! This is too early to expect college students to be energetic. The bus ride to La Rioja was an hour and a half both ways, so it is understandable that after three days in Spain we were all a little tired and bus rides are the perfect time for sleeping. We stopped at Cune/C.V.N.E. first and were led on a tour. As nice as it was to hear about the process of making wine and seeing barrels full of it, the very best part of this tour was seeing the wine cemetery. The cemetery is full of bottles of wine that Cune cannot sell for reasons I could not hear at the back of the group. Wine needs to be kept in a colder, humid temperature, so the entire wine cemetery is covered in mold. It was so fascinating. We got to walk all the way to the back of the cemetery and saw mold covering the wine bottles, the walls, and the ceiling. It was so gross but so, so awesome! Knowing I was walking on mold did not even faze me. Later, of course, we tasted wine. My friends and I had fun acting like we were posh wine tasters, swirling the wine and delicately sniffing it, but honestly wine is not my favorite, so the amount they gave us of both rose and red wines was more than enough for me.
            Next we went to La Lucia, not a winery but more of a wine museum. We watched one of the weirdest videos I have ever seen in my life, a video about a woman whose car breaks down and is approached by a rhyming fairy/elf and transported to a winery in La Rioja and has the best time ever. The premise is already a bit out there, but what made it so weird is that since the original video was made in Spanish, we watched a dubbed English version in which the fairy still has to rhyme. So the rhymes this fairy was spouting made little to no sense and instead of thinking about the lesson in this film, that La Rioja is a great place for wine, I spent the time wondering who in the world came up with the English rhyming lines and what possibly made them think the final product was anything other than ridiculous. We had lunch here, more fantastic Spanish food I don’t know the names for, and dessert. Our translator/guide said the dessert was French toast. Oh my goodness this is not what dessert was. It was some eggy concoction covered in a toasted, breaded mix with some custard on top. While it looked questionable, it tasted pretty good. But I wouldn’t ever order it again. The custard on top was delicious and if the dessert had just been custard I would have been totally on board. I’m sure some people did not mind the dessert was not amazing because of the free wine we were all given with lunch. Free things are something college students never pass up, especially if it’s alcohol.

After lunch it was back on the bus for us and time for Naptime: Round 2. Back on the ship we went up to Deck 7 and played another game of embarrassing ping pong. For the record, we’re getting better (very slowly) at ping pong. 
At Cune winery

THE WINE CEMETERY!

You could fit 50 of me in one of these barrels

Outside one of the La Rioja vineyards on my last day in Basque Country. Bye Spain! Off to Scotland!

Comments

  1. TrishaaaaaJuly 15, 2014 at 12:07 PM

    This was one of my favorite blogs you've written ;) Lookin' fab in those photos!!!!!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tesco is like Narnia

Image
            I’m writing this on my last day in Scotland, a Tuesday if you’re curious, and my friend decided that we absolutely had to go to the Tesco in Greenock, just so she could say that she went to a supermarket that is so quintessentially British. At the beginning of our short excursion we did not have particularly high expectations of Tesco; we thought it would be just like any ordinary American supermarket but with different brands. Once we walked into Tesco though, we realized just how extraordinary it truly was. Tesco, as my friend Emily said, is like Narnia. You walk in curious, but not overly hopeful, only to be completely amazed by what you find inside. Those average, automatic doors hid a wonderland of aisles as far as the eye can see. There were groceries, a deli section, oh, and don’t let me forget the clothes that take up the entire second floor. One of the first things we saw was Tesco’s escalators (not the step kind, the gradual incline t...
Read more

The Russian Orthodox Thigh Master

Image
Be prepared for many pictures...              The third day of Russia was one of the longest, as it consisted of a tour of four of St. Petersburg’s churches: the Holy Trinity Cathedral (along with the Alexander Nevsky Abbey and a Cemetery), Our Savior of the Spilled Blood Church, St. Isaac’s Cathedral, and St. Vladamir’s Cathedral. If you have the chance to visit the Spilled Blood Church, I would advise you to take it! The inside is the most amazing thing. There are floor to ceiling mosaics that show important Biblical figures and famous parables and I wish I could have spent more time inside since I wanted to see each and every gold, mosaic-surrounded image. My other favorite of the day was St. Isaac’s Cathedral. For this church we had the option to either go inside the church or to go up to the colonnade—ascending 262 steps to get there! My friend Sidney and I chose this option, and you may think that 262 steps is no big deal. Let me tell you, i...
Read more

Burr(en) It’s Cold Out Here (Ireland Day 3, Part 2)

Image
           After the Cliffs of Moher Mist it was lunch time so we stopped at Fitzpatrick’s Bar, which is a pub with the most Irish name to ever be Irish. Here I had some amazing seafood chowder and had the chance to get out of the very traditional rainy weather for a while. The next stop was actually my favorite stop: Burren. This is an area by the Ireland coast against the Atlantic Ocean. It’s a huge limestone deposit that has crisscrossing cracks known as “grikes.” In these grikes it is possible to see arctic, Mediterranean, and alpine plants all growing together because of the odd environment. Since the area is full of cracks, walking around on the deposit is almost like playing hopscotch because you have to hop from stone to stone to avoid the cracks. It was amazing because the landscape was something so unlike anything I’d seen before, but, it was also the coldest stop we made. Rain was coming down and there was a chill that even my scarf and rain jac...
Read more