This past weekend, I took part in a trip to the St. James Range with the Tramping Club here at UC.  (For those who don’t know, Tramping is what they call hiking here).  We were told that if you went on the easy route, it took about 3 hours to the campsite if you walked at a good pace.  My friends and I decided to take the medium route and was told it would likely take around 6 hours.  Boy were we in for a surprise.  We started the tramp at 11am and after about 2 hours on the easy track, the groups started splitting off.

Buenos días!

This weekend I visited the Sierra de Guadarrama which is a mountain range about an hour away from my beloved Madrid.  Spring has arrived here in Madrid and the Sierra was perfect with its crystal clear blue skies, and pure white snow.

This past weekend I went with one of my friends and another friend’s friend who was visiting her from Germany down to Wexford, which is about two and a half hours via Bus Éireann south down the coast from Dublin. It’s near Rosslare, out of which one of the ferry lines from Ireland to Wales operates. This trip down to Wexford marks the first time I’ve gone out of the reach of Dublin Bus service with the exception of my Pink Training trip to Belfast.

This year, my friends and I decided to try to watch the Oscars, live. It’s not that we were really invested in who won (until the night of, only one of us has seen any of the nominated films), or that any of us are big film buffs, but we thought it would be a nice excuse to get together and eat food which is very bad for you.

This weekend I was lucky enough to take a day trip to Tuscany and visit two wineries. The trip was possible thanks to Bus2Alps, they planned the whole day and provided transportation there and back. I will definitely be looking into their other trips for the remainder of the semester.

kasha Horton’s 2nd February Video

A close friend invited me to visit her host family and her in Copenhagen, Denmark for a long weekend. Once I met her family, petted their golden retriever, and finished a home cooked meal, I was overwhelmingly happy for my friend.  She deserved this wonderful experience! I could not help but feel a desire to also live with a compatible host family for support and cultural integration.

This will go down in history as one of the best experiences of my life- the night in the Sahara desert.

One of the greatest things about living in Beijing is having constant access to some of the world’s most impressive and historically significant cultural sites. Famous examples include the Great Wall and Tiananmen Square, but two sites often forgotten are the Lama and Confucian temples in Beijing’s Dongcheng District. The original temples date back hundreds of years and house several important religious relics. (Take a look at the Maitreya Buddha below—it was carved from a single tree!)