CEA viaje a Cuenca!

"Imagine a city where graffiti wasn't illegal,
a city where everybody could draw wherever they liked.
Where every street was awash with a million colors & phrases.
Where standing at a bus stop was never boring.
A living breathing thing which belonged to everybody,
not just the estate agents and barons of big business.
Imagine a city like that."


This weekend my program, CEA took us on a trip to Cuenca, about 2 hours Southeast of Madrid. The super early freezing morning on the metro to Conde de Casal was quite the experience. We met in Hotel Claridge for our entire group and then took 2 big buses to Cuenca! When we arrived in the small town of Cuenca, we were able to see almost the entire city driving to the hotel. Cuenca is up tons of winding and twisty,turny, skinny roads. Going up the roads reminded me of driving up the roads in Yosemite, turns and skinny roads every 20 seconds. Once we got to the hotel, we left our bags in our rooms and headed to La Ciudad Encantada. There are tons of huge rocks everywhere. There is even a rock that is called El Torno because it looks like a tornado. We could climb up the rocks and look at the scenery. A group of us even got lost because we didn't follow the arrows. After La Ciudad Encantada- The Enchanted City, we went back to the hotels for lunch. We were served a HUGE HUGE HUGE lunch. Later that day we went to the actual town and busy spots of Cuenca. We first had a tour around the city in the bus and then our tour guide, Hugo took us to the cathedral and showed us other spots in Cuenca. After the tour, we had some free time to sit down at a Cerveceria and go to the shops. Cuenca is on top of a humongous hill and let me tell you, I definitely got my workout this weekend. Later we had dinner and all hung out around the hotel.
Early, early Sunday was breakfast and then off to CuencAventura for cliff jumping! Cold morning and 10 degree Celsius water is a tough one! When we got to Cuenca Aventura, we separated into the groups of cliff jumping and horseback riding. About 5 went horseback riding and the other 50 of us went cliff jumping. We grabbed our wetsuits, helmets, gloves, life jacket, water shoes and changed into them.... hardest thing ever. The guy said for girls the wetsuits would be like putting on leggings.... leggings that hardly budge over your feet... all of us were bitching and complaining because everything was soo hard to get on. By the time we were all dressed we split into 3 groups and took some vans to the tunnels. We walked through the tunnels and then came to the river. We walked down some paths and then tried to walk, not fall down the one to the water... While getting in the freeeezing cold water we tried to doggie paddle to get warm. After awhile, it wasn't too bad. We floated and swam down the river and went down rapids. We jumped off of 5 cliffs which were all high! The biggest cliff had to be over 30 feet in the air. It was CRAZY!!!! After trudging back up the hill in our cold, tight wetsuits, we walked back through some tunnels and got our rides back to CuencAventura. Cliff jumping was definitely the highlight of the trip. After changing back, we had a BBQ with TONS of food, chorizo, salchita, tortilla espanola, empenadas, hambuerguesas and tons of other stuff. We got back on the bus back to Madrid around 4pm and made it back within 2 hours.


Cuenca was so much fun with the group and it was nice to get to know the other new CEA students.

Earlier in the week, I did some pretty cool spanish stuff and definitely feel more Madrileno!
On Thursday night, 8 of us went to see Grease: el Musical in Spanish. The entire script and songs were in spanish which was really cool and funny. I bought the soundtrack and am starting to learn the words.... I realized when we bought the tickets that it would probably be alot easier to see a musical that we already know the storyline to because these Spaniards speak VERY VERY FAST! I definitely understood alot of which was going on but if we saw a musical that we didn't know the story to, it would have been really hard to understand. So that was really cool and a such a great experience! Also Grease is only playing here til the end of October, so a once in a lifetime opportunity, checked off!

Friday night, we went to the Spanish Cinema. We saw La Cruda Realidad, The Ugly Truth. It was really weird to hear other voices dubbed over the actors and actresses but still awesome. I understood alot more of the movie even without subtitles. La Crude Realidad just came out here Friday, like 3 months later than in the U.S. Next weekend, we're planning on see 500 Dias Juntos- the movie 500 Days of Summer which I have not seen yet but heard is really good!

Busy weekend but a new week comes tomorrow with another week of school and another city in Spain. I think on Thursday night we are planning to bus it to San Sebastian in the Basque Region which is way up North. :) I gotta make sure I hit up all these cities in Spain!

Un Besito!