First, I want to talk about what I was up to after my Rome trip. I got to spend most of my last month in Europe in Holland, exploring more of the country and catching up with a lot of unfinished projects and papers. I went to Keukenhof, the largest flower festival in Europe, located an hour away from Rotterdam in a town called Lisse. Here are some awesome pictures from the flower festival. Notice the picture of me with tons of azalea bushes (azaleas are the flower of Mobile).
Aside from the fabulous springtime weather and beautiful flowers in bloom all around Holland, there were also fun Netherland traditions taking place in May. One big celebration at the end of April was Queen's Day officially celebrated on April 30th. It's kind of like a 24 hour celebration of the former Queen's (of Holland) birthday. In this celebration...people wear crazy orange outfits and get incredibly incredibly intoxicated and roam around the people-filled streets eating random food from food carts and dancing to live techno and hip-hop music. To give you an idea, here are a couple of pictures:
There's also a Queen's Night celebration the night before where people party through the night. Both Queen's Night and Day are celebrated throughout the country in pretty much all the major cities. The biggest celebration is in Amsterdam, where I went, but the Queen usually attends a parade in one of the smaller towns in Holland. Unfortunately, some lunatic this year decided to go on a rampage and drive into the crowd at the parade, killing nine people and injuring even more. Insane! It was apparently an attempt to take down the royal family.
Okay, enough about my random adventures in Holland. After finishing up most of my work at RSM, I went on a weeklong vacation to Spain towards the end of May. It was incredible to get away from the still cold May Holland weather and bathe in the warmth of Spain. I landed in Barcelona on a Sunday afternoon and it was absolutely beautiful. I met up with a friend from Penn, Lauren (I already mentioned her in my previous posts). Our hostel was in the center of Barcelona, a super cute place full of really friendly people. We met a lot of randoms on our Barcelona trip. We went to all the touristy places: Gaudi's La Sagrada Familia was amazing! It's also absolutely huge!
Of course every place was amazing...Barcelona is a really fun city with a lot to do. 
We went to Park Guell, the beach (where apparently, lots of foreigners/Asians go around asking you to buy overpriced drinks and offering massages every five minutes...really really irritating and made me appreciate the beaches in Alabama!), the magical fountain that wasn't even running (we totally missed out on the light show), and of course, the main street Las Ramblas. We even met up with my roommate's sister who was studying in Barcelona! So after our tour of Barcelona, we hopped on a six hour bus ride to get to Madrid. Luckily for us, Kelly (coke intern from last summer who is now working for Coke in Madrid) was able to accommodate us in her apartment. Kelly met us at the bus station and we went to Tapas and Josh's (friend from Penn who went with us to Rome) housewarming party because he just found an apartment for his summer housing in Madrid. The next day, Lauren and I met up with James (my old friend from high school who happened to be studying in Alcala, a town right outside of Madrid) and he took us to the central plaza, Plaza del Mayor, and to the gardens (read gigantic park) in front of Madrid's Royal Palace. It was a lot of fun, and we saw some cool peacocks just hangin' out on the lawn. Here's a fun picture.
Afterwards, we met up with Josh and his family (who were in Madrid to visit him for his birthday) to go to the Prado Museum (which by the way is free from 6-8pm on weekdays!). It was awesome, Josh gave us a great tour because he took a class on the paintings in the Prado. Later that night, we went out for tapas and to a random Hawaiian bar. Seriously, Madrid is the city of random! A ton of fun! I'm not going to further bore you with the in depth details of my Madrid trip but I can pretty much assure you it included a lot of wine w/ spritzer (sangria, vino de verano, etc.) and other drinks and tons of random tapas that usually had some sort of ham and olive oil involved. I love Spanish people but I definitely do not like Spanish food. Imagine tons and tons of pork meat and olive oil on everything! Don't get me wrong, there are definitely amazing things about Spain, like its super chill and super nice people who are willing to help you at any time! I'm going to end this post with my favorite picture from Spain...if you think about Spain, think "JAMON!" 
So I've been home for two weeks hangin' out and getting ready for my next trip...going to Vietnam...which leaves in a little over three hours! I'm pretty excited and I'm hoping to keep my blog updated throughout the summer...so check on it every once in a while!
