Ember Travels

Good morning/good afternoon/buen dia where ever you are in the world! It is a lovely Tuesday morning in Sevilla, Spain and this marks the two month aniversary of my journey! I want to thank all of you, who I know and don`t know for your comments, messages and endless enthusasium for my travels. Your support has been amazing and it´s always nice to hear from a familiar face! A little bit about my travels...I am excited to be in a country where I  finally  speak the language! I arrived in Spain yesterday and plan to spend a few days in Sevilla, then head to Grenada where I can hopefully find a place to settle down for a month or so to practice my Spanish and meet some locals. Keep your fingers crossed, I´m not sure how the whole, "I want to rent a room for just a month" thing will go, but things always seem to work out, so I´m not too worried. A friend recently commented on my luck saying that I may actually be the center of the universe, so I´ll just bank on that :) Either way...

There are only a few things in my life that I’ve seen that are completely mind blowing. If I were to make a list of Ember’s Wonders of the World, Xilitla, Mexico would be number one and Petrodvortes would be number two.  Alex and I made the trek outside of the city on a whim. Mike had to leave early in the morning for a trip to Finland and mentioned in passing that there was a cool palace with some fountains that we could check out if we had time. I wasn’t expecting anything spectacular, heck, I wasn’t even expecting that we would actually make it to the palace (the directions seemed a bit confusing) but since we had time to kill and were looking for adventure, we threw the Lonely Planet guidebook in the backpack and jumped the metro. My apprehensions about making it to Petrodvortes were soon pushed aside. We make a sign in Cyrillic that read, “Petrodvortes” and everything else was a piece of cake. Of course no one spoke English, but at least they could point us in the right direct...

I have so many thoughts about my time in Russia, I don't know where to begin. In a way, Russia was everything I expected and everything unexpected, also. We were fortunate enough to stay with Mike, a friend of Alex's from Seattle who has been working in Saint Petersburg for the past nine months. We learned so much about the history of the city and Russian Culture from Mike and had a personal translator to top everything off.  If it weren't for Mike, the trip could have been  real  interesting. Virtually NO ONE in Russia speaks English, not even a word. The Cyrillic alphabet doesn't help Westerners either. Needless to say, I got really good at miming, so watch out for a game of charades when I get back to the U.S! The one piece of advice I got before the Russia trip was to never EVER ride in a taxi. I was told that driving there is a zoo and riding in a taxi is a sure sentence to a near death experience. Needless to say, that was the first thing we did upon ...