~2 months left!

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Well not much has happened since the last blog entry... just going to class and planning out my upcoming trips. Barcelona this weekend if we can find good prices (we´re cheapskates!)

3 weeks left of class, and then begins the month-long exam period. I have 4 classes but I am only taking 3 exams. They're all spread out pretty evenly... one a week I believe. I am hoping I can move one up a week so that I can begin traveling sooner!

I have to change apartments next month as well. The deal with this apartment was I could rent it out up until June 15th, and then the normal renters were going to return from vacation or wherever they were. Kind of a sublease deal but it was nice because it afforded me a great apartment for a very good rate (200 euros/month). So I found another apartment I'm going to rent out for the final month here in Spain. It's not too far from my current one. And the rent is almost as good (225 I believe). I'm going to go there probably tomorrow to check everything and make sure it'll work for a month.

Sunday I got up nice and early (3pm) to videochat with Grandma, Grandpa and my parents (who went to W'burg for the weekend). However they had technical difficulties, so it was 2-way audio, 1 way video (no video from them for me). So that was a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon... chatting with the family, joking about the Spanish education system, the lack of warm weather, and also picking up some travel tips from some very experienced travelers. 

Right now in my trip planning I'm trying to roughly estimate the total cost on the entire trip to make sure I can afford everything we want to do. I have to change my flight date, so that means a $200 fee maybe. I had some friends change their flight for free and they were flying out via Iberia too so we´ll see. I'm trying to fly out of Madrid without going through Oviedo, so hopefully that'll save me some money... we'll see. Before I change anything however I need to figure out a way to get my luggage to Madrid (the part I don't want to travel with) so that I don't have to return to Oviedo in order to fly out of the country (flying out via Madrid). We´re thinking that instead of taking the train directly to Paris, we´ll bus to Madrid first, and then fly to Paris. This is probably the cheapest option especially if we can find someone in Madrid to hold our luggage for free! If you´ve got any contacts in Madrid let me know! 

If this isn´t possible, I'll take the bus back to Oviedo from Madrid at the end our grand trip and then fly back to Madrid (my flight home goes through Madrid and London). Sounds counterintuitive, but hey, I'm a broke college student haha. The bus ride is 5 hours. The flight back to Madrid is... about 45 minutes? :) I would rather avoid the trouble so hopefully I can get my luggage to Madrid. However, I am very excited for this trip! Overly so probably.