studentsineurope

A camera is a good thing to bring to Carnaval.  Besides the obvious benefit of visually documenting the twisting, turning kaleidoscope of people, colors, costumes, and oddities, it will help you reconstruct a night whose chronology is probably indistinct and whose details get fuzzy at the margins.
Safely back at home after 16 hours in Cadiz, [...]

The most sacred Catholic holiday, after Easter, Christmas, and all the other ones, is Mardi Gras.  Ok, it’s not actually a Catholic holiday, but it’s often forgotten that the communal indulgence in drunken debauchery  known as Carnival (among other names) has its origins in the Lenten calendar.  After “Fat Tuesday” (”Mardi Gras” in French) comes [...]

I’ve booked private rooms in a couple hostels and found them to be far more accommodating than those shared, but I still don’t think I’d go as far as comparing these stark sleepers to “boutique hotels.”
In an interview this week with the Associated Press, Hostelworld.com’s spokeswoman Aisling White makes that very assertion, claiming that hostels [...]

Spaniards have an unparalleled obsession with pork. It’s a wonder they don´t put a pig on their national flag. I know of about five different Spanish words for pork, and that’s not counting all the terms for various cuts and varieties of the animal, let alone all the words I don’t know.
Pork is no joke [...]

Early one morning at the beginning of a long holiday weekend in Spain, my friends and I meet at the bus station with plans to head to Lisbon.  But Arthur comes with bad news: literally all the hostels in the Portuguese capital are booked.  We stand around shivering and trying to come up with an [...]

Whether it’s called “el crisis” in Spain, “die krise” in Germany, or “a válság” in Hungary, the global economic crisis has impacted Europe as much as it has the rest of the world.  Now, at least according the official line, the continent has emerged from the recession.  The Washington Post reported recently that the euro-zone [...]

“My only ambition was to create an honest picture that would interpret nature as she really is, as she ought to be seen,” the impressionist painter Joaquin Sorolla once declared. Sorolla, a Spaniard who painted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was adept at making his art glow with a special kind of [...]

Those who have grown tired of the near-thousand UNESCO World Heritage Sites may want to take a look at its newest members.
UNESCO – the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization – has added 13 new sites to its famous list, six of which are located in Europe. Some are cultural, some are natural, and [...]

A review of Sant Jordi Aragó Hostel in Barcelona, Spain.

The temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Familia, or Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family in English, is one of the most amazing structures in all of Europe, indeed in the entire world.  Europe is famous for its impressive religious structures with a rich history that includes the emergence and peak of many religious movements and [...]