Alexa in Wonderland

Oh yeah, I forgot to update all my loyal readers—like all two of you ;). Well the trip back to the US was not half bad at all because it included a week of hanging out with friends in New York City on beautiful Roosevelt Island and then one awesome weekend of Berkeley journalism advice, Chinatown shopping and wine tasting in the bay area with my Entrepreneur homies Liz and Jessica.

In NYC I had time to catch up with Gina, Alicia and Matt while cooking them Spanish food in turn for more journalism employment/living in NYC advice (just in case). I went to one job interview with a hyperlocal news startup and kind of felt super-cool as I walked around SoHo in BCBG high heels with something serious to do :)  In between job searching sessions I got to check out areas I hadn’t seen before like the Union Square farmers market and the Roosevelt Island tram with Alicia, Brooklyn, shadowed Gina while interviewing the owner of the first organic restaurant in the country and went with Matt to a pub quiz that reminded me once again how screwed I will be on the GRE without some serious studying.

Then I flew off towards Berkeley for an enlightening business journalism class I took with Liz and Jessica, where we were collectively humbled by the amount of business vocabulary we needed to catch up on—but it was all fun, and especially interesting given the peculiar economic situation our country has recently found itself in. Then we headed to San Francisco for Liz’s wedding dress fitting at this cute boutique and a night of sushi, saki bombs and drunken map-reading which resulted in a pretty thorough tour of most of the city. In the morning we drooled over Chinese knick-knacks including a dragon marionette that ended up being pretty good company during the road trip to wine country later on. We stopped in Sonoma where there was a Vintage Wine Festival, but especially enjoyed ourselves at this fun and ritzy-looking wine bar nearby. We stayed at Liz’s grandma’s house on the lake and discovered a WWII scrapbook of her grandfather’s that she had never seen. In the morning we headed to a winery and biodynamic farm where Jess and I wine tasted while Liz interviewed the place’s owner. Liz’s sweet parents, who I always enjoy meeting again, took us to lunch at a great local place that gave complementary mimosas.

Then we headed back down the state, my family picked me up off the 5 in Valencia and now I’m back home! I’m happy to be back too. But once I get the registration reactivated on my car tomorrow, I’ll also be traveling a bit more to see all the SoCal friends (and hopefully apply for a few jobs.)

I’ve got my cell-phone on hand now, so give me a call so we can catch up!

Liz, Jess and I did a couple wine tastings in lovely Sonoma and Lake County.

I’d seen Barcelona a couple times before but was waiting to see a couple different sites, like Park Guell, with Rocio when she came—so I kind of felt like I saw a whole different kind of Barcelona. My favorite tapa place—Sagardi’s—also became 10x better with Rocio. But that’s a whole story unto itself and some stories are better told in person :).

Palacio real in Madrid with Rocio peeps :)

London was beautiful, but still nowhere near Prague in my book. Of all the paintings, engravings by tower prisoners, crown jewel, etc. that I saw in the museums, the best things were all the works stored in The British Library.

I mean, the first thing I saw was the actual manuscript of Jane Eyre that Charlotte Bronte wrote with her own hands. Then I looked to my right and saw the manuscript of Persuasion by Jane Austen—Jane Austen’s freaking handwriting, on her actual writing desk. I was freaking out. I mean those papers were the first to know the story. Those were the papers that those authors had personally translated legendary works to. But I had a lot more freaking out to do, so I just stopped trying to calm myself down and shed a few tears of joy in front of Alice in Wonderland. All these original manuscripts were there: Um, BEOWULF, drafts of Paradise Lost by John Milton, Mrs. Dalloway, Wordsworth poems, envelopes The Beatles had first written lyrics down on, the resignation letter Sir Thomas Moore wrote to Henry VIII denouncing Protestantism, the ACTUAL letter Queen Elizabeth wrote to her council saying that she had no need to get married and finally the friggin Magna Carta. Definitely this and a lot of other things there would blow any former English major’s mind.

Shout out to Nolan who let me crash for free at his place while I was there. It was out on the English countryside and while there I saw a fox! A real, cute, red fox that kept on just staring at us and freaking me out until Nolan told me they never attack humans. Pretty cool trip, but I’ll have more details of it later …

I went to Pals and Figueres last week and had a lot of fun with Ursula and Albert. Pals is a small medieval town that was completely abandoned during the Spanish Civil War but was then restored/preserved by a local doctor that reclaimed the place. Today the town is full of rice farmers and chocolate makers.

The next day we went to the twisted Dali Theater Museum and had a lot of fun. Man, there were a lot of cool exhibits. But I had never been as offended by art before either. In one room I saw paintings and drawings that were so bad and so mysogynistic I was like outraged and saying out loud,”Man Dali—what the hell is wrong with you?” I mean, are we all sure that Dali wasn’t a serial killer or something? Yeah, it was nuts, but I’ve heard I’ve got more to look forward to when I see Picasso’s stuff at the Sofia Reina.