The other day I learned that Christchurch is the only airport that planes leave out of to go to Antarctica.  There is a museum of sorts here called the Antarctic Centre, which raises awareness of Antarctica and the animals and research done there.  It’s been pretty rainy this week here in Christchurch, so on Saturday, some friends and I went to there to check it out.  I think the pricing is a little absurd, but we used bookme (a discount website) and got $20 off, so it was more reasonable.

One of my favorite things about Barcelona is all that it has to offer. We’ve got the beach, a multitude of restaurants, places to hike, beautiful architecture and vibrant nightlife.

But take a short flight to Andalucía, Spain’s southern region, and it feels almost like an entirely different country, complete with Moorish architecture and small plazas. I went to Granada this past weekend on a field trip with IES and was amazed by what I saw.

Scattered throughout the IES Beijing semester are a number of “Crazy Days,” or days that students wake up for class at 8 only to find that class has been canceled, and an outing or activity has been planned by the teachers and staff. This Tuesday, after our daily 8am 听写, the teachers announced that our classes were canceled and we could choose between trips to 香山 (XiangShan, the“Fragrant Hills”), the hutongs (more on that later) and 后海 ( HouHai, Beijing’s lake district), or one of the city’s prominent Muslim communities.

On Tuesdays, there’s a couple of students in our program that don’t have class all day long. So, we utilize these Tuesdays to the best we can! Two Tuesdays ago, my classmate, Tyler, and I went to the Shanghai Zoo! Here are some of the highlights from our day at the zoo.

One other big perk of going to Japan in the spring semester is the sakura! They started blooming around last week in Nagoya, which coincided with the start of the new school year for Japanese students. Club tables lined the main road through the college as the upperclass students handed out flyers and recruited freshmen.

I tried to make the most of the short time that sakura was around, and went to parks and sakura-viewing spots in Nagoya to appreciate the beauty: