Sofia Somewhere

April came along, and before I knew it, I was down to my last two months in Spain. In between my last couple of weeks at work, I took the weekends off making trips to visit friends and see more of Spain, to make the most out of it all. A quick round up below :) 1 - In the first weekend of April, I made the long train ride down to visit two friends in Huelva . I was excited to visit since it's the only province in Andalucía I hadn't been to yet, and of course, I was missing some Filipino company. I arrived on Thursday evening and caught up with my friends over dinner and white wine. We eventually had to call it a night for the next day we headed to Aracena , a town in the Huelva province. I made the trip with my friends Lia and Nice, plus her coordinator who had invited us, another colleague of Lia's, plus two interns who were working at her school. Quaint Aracenas Aracena is famous for its Gruta de las Maravillas (the Cave of Wonders) which is a 1km route of li...

After my Asturias weekend I mostly planned on staying home and saving up for Morocco, but then my cousin Maya messaged me that she would be in Madrid, so I decided to head for one night to meet up with her. Maya had just finished her shows in Sweden, and was currently performing at the Teatro Real in Madrid (then off to San Sebastian and Pamplona). I took the afternoon bus and arrived in Madrid at around 7pm. Maya was still performing, so I walkd along Gran Vía and did some window shopping, then met Maya near the theatre at around 8:30. We started the night off with some drinks in a café near Plaza Sol and caught up. We nearly lost track of time (we had plans to watch a flamenco show), but we transferred to a restaurant, and had some dinner before heading to the tablao . A tablao , which is derived from  tablado (in the South, speakers tend to drop consonants between vowels), literally means "floorboard," and is the term used for a place where flamenco shows are perfo...

To continue our Asturias weekend, we spent Sunday exploring Oviedo. The capital of Asturias, Oviedo is a UNESCO World Heritage Site due to its many Pre-Romanesque architectural buildings (mostly churches). The city truly is beautiful, and despite the rain, made for a lovely stroll. We walked through Campo de San Francisco , a huge beautiful park, which though green, had bare trees. I can imagine how pretty it must look in the spring. With our umbrellas! As I mentioned before, we were all part of the same student organization during our university days. The organization was called University of the Philippines Círculo Hispánico, or UPCH for short. So we attempted a picture making the letters. :) UPCH We continued through the park, and at this point we began to start noticing the many sculptures of Oviedo. We saw this one below, and several more in the park. After exiting the park, I remembered that there was a Woody Allen statue, and a quick search said...