The Countdown Begins

Last weekend, I went to Georgetown for the first time in a very long time. I think the last time we went, it was still cold outside. We originally planned on going to the new cat cafe, but then we found out it was like $12 to even enter the place AND we had to make reservations because it was so crowded. Nope'd out of that pretty quickly and decided to just hang out. The thing I do appreciate about this particular cat cafe (Crumbs and Whiskers) is that they partner with the Washington Humane Society so that visitors can adopt the cats if they so please. I went to a cat cafe in Korea last year, and it was pretty evident that they were just a bunch of cats that the owners bought and put in there for the purpose of making profit out of the whole thing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like that's the case for a huge majority of cat cafes in Korea/Japan.

I forget which store this was before it was boarded up, and I don't know if this is supposed to be there, but it was super pretty.

Dean and Deluca and their damn amazing food. I actually don't know how it tastes (because it costs a million dollars a pound), but it looks beautiful. I first heard of Dean and Deluca when I was reading the Confessions of a Shopaholic series in high school (GREAT BOOKS, I STILL LOVE THEM) and Becky goes to Manhattan for the first time, and someone tells her to go there. I assumed it was some fashionable boutique because she never actually went there to find out what it was. So you can imagine my confusion when I see it in real life to find out that they are an upscale grocery store.

We ended the day with a Baked and Wired cupcake and some bird feeding and booze cruise watching. Speaking of Baked and Wired, I didn't know they don't sell Chaider year-round! Chaider is this awesome drink that's a mix of chai tea and apple cider, and it can be made hot or iced. I was pretty crestfallen when I found out...

Aaaaaand it's the end of July already. I actually have not been counting down the days until my flight to Barcelona. But now, I think it's pretty much unavoidable. There is officially one month left until I'm off to the airport for my semester abroad! There are so many words to describe how I feel, but I think terrified is the big one. Sometimes I get so anxious about it that I want to cancel my plane ticket and register for classes at CP, just because it's the easier and more comfortable (and cheaper...) option. But of all of the people I've talked to who have gone and come back in one piece on this same exact program, everyone has said that they loved it and miss it every day. So it can't be that bad, right?

I've come up with a list of things I want to improve about myself while I'm there. When it comes down to it, studying abroad is probably like 35% schoolwork and studying (and maybe not even that), and 65% growing as an individual and traveling and gaining all these incredible life experiences and blah blah blah. Maybe, and hopefully, some of you can relate to my list!

1) Stop being a picky eater. This is a huge one for me, because I'm going to be trying new foods left and right and many times they will be the only option for a few hours. I don't know why I'm so picky! I just don't like to try things. I get super put off by flavors and foods that are unfamiliar to me, and I honestly am glad I have Daniel because he gets me to try lots of new foods. I just need to keep telling myself that if I don't like it, it's not the end of the world and I won't have to eat it again. But at least I'll have tried it, right? Pickled herring, here I come. On second thought, I don't think I'll try that. More like Spanish ham and manchego cheese.

2) Stop freaking out and getting upset when everything is not perfect and smooth and on schedule. The Spanish are never on time. For real. Don't even get me started on the siesta. I'm the kind of person that is always ten minutes early to everything, and always makes multiple copies of important documents. I read a Reddit post recently about a person who is similar to me and he said that he accepted the fact that the more he tried to control every aspect of his life, the more he struggled, and that he was better off rolling with the punches and in order to have peace in your life, you have to have balance of both good and not-so-good. I didn't mean to get all zen on you guys, but it's true. This will be super important when I'm over there. As someone I know tells me all the time, "Being late to something almost never matters in the grand scheme of things". Wink wink.

3) Be open to new experiences. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I hate venturing outside of my comfort zone. It makes me super uncomfortable and anxious. I like routine and familiarity. I'm basically an old lady. But I know that this is the best time in my life to go to Europe (even if it is for school). I have no obligations like paying bills or taking care of a family. Pretty much all I have to do is watch my spending. Oh, and study, of course.

4) Get over my fear of flying. My fear of heights does not help this. Believe me, I know everything about how flying is safer than driving and how the odds of dying in a plane crash are astronomical. My dad is obsessed with planes and his whole career has revolved around them. But I just can't help but get scared whenever I get on a plane, or as Mrs. Voorhees' dad calls them in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, a great iron eagle. By the way, that is the strangest show I have ever seen on Netflix. Strange, but great and uplifting. I'm going to have to get used to flying real fast, because I'm going to be doing a lot of it.

That's all of the big points I can think of for now. I'll add more if I think of any so that I can look back on this and remember my goals. If any of you reading this have studied abroad, feel free to tell me about your experience! And the other way around, if anyone is considering studying abroad, I'm an open book and will tell you everything I know about the application/preparation process so feel free to talk to me. Because believe me, I've done a LOT of that.

WHAT'S (KRACIE POPIN) COOKIN

Today, I finally got to experience the magic that is the Japanese Kracie Popin' Cookin' candy kits. Basically, they're little boxes with everything you need to make candy. But wait, there's more! The candy looks like food. Like ice cream or burgers and fries or sushi. I've always wanted to make one of these but I just assumed I would never get my hands on one because they're made in Japan. Well, I was watching EatYourKimchi one day (one of my favorite Youtube channels, it's a Canadian couple named Simon and Martina who live in Korea and make videos) and they did a video where they made one of these kits. So I was like screw it, I'm going to buy these. Lo and behold, Amazon sells them for about $3-4 a pop, with free shipping. The catch is that they ship via standard shipping speed, FROM JAPAN. I swear they came on a literal boat because they took so long that I forgot about them, and I never forget about things! I think it took about four and a half weeks. I ordered a sushi kit for myself, and an ice cream cone one for Daniel. Mine arrived in about 3.5 wks, Daniel's just got here a few days ago so we didn't get to make it until tonight.

Here are the kits in all of their neon color glory. I really wish I could read Japanese, but I'm sure it probably says something like "Kracie Popin' Cookin' Candy Kit". Mine is on the right, Daniel's is on the left.

Look! It's an actual package from Japan! Whenever I get international mail/packages I get way too excited, unless it's from China because everything is from China. It's just really cool, like this little paper envelope has been in Japan. I'm crazy. I guess I'm excited because I've always wanted to go there.

This is the ice cream one opened up with all of its contents. To be honest, I thought it would be the more complicated one but it turned out to be super simple. Basically, you just mix the pink package with water and the blue package with water and those turn into pink and white icings, respectively. Then you pipe it into the sugar cones and decorate it with sprinkles and wafers. They smelled great, but they tasted kinda weird. I would not recommend consuming these. Just casually sniff them. Lol.

Daniel's little sister helping me mix and decorate. You can see on top of the box that I made my cone already. Where is Daniel, you might ask? He's in the kitchen doing something else and we decided to just start without him.

My ice cream cone! It looks pretty good!

Look who decided to show up, right when we're taking bites...

Daniel's creation. The kit comes with two sugar cones and one... pie/tart thing... so we let him decorate that one. He then ate it immediately haha

The sushi kit, unboxed but yet to be unwrapped. It looks kind of intimidating. But that's because I can't read it. This is how illiterate people must feel... and I mean that in the most politically correct way possible. I can't imagine looking at words and letters and not understanding a single thing. And at least this thing has pictures!

So, I got a little carried away and forgot to take pictures. But basically, this one came with a ton of different colored packets, a dropper, a mixing spoon (green), and the white mixing pan thing. Step one is to make the "rice". One dropper full of water and the entire contents of the blue packet, and voila you have rice! It was so weird because it was so similar to the texture of real rice but it smelled and tasted like candy.

The yellow and the red were also results of mixing packets with water. The yellow is supposed to be tamagoyaki, which is like an omelette that you put on top of rice. The red is supposed to be tuna. The black on the bottom is the nori (seaweed) for the sushi.

At this point I had no clue what to do and the instructions were unclear, so I asked Daniel to find a Youtube video of someone doing the same kit so I could just copy them. This kit was much more detail-oriented than the ice cream cone one.

Rice balls artfully crafted and ingredients ready to assemble. The orange liquid on the bottom was put into the blue liquid, one drop at a time. The drops solidified in the blue liquid to make "roe" (fish eggs). It was really cool and I was too busy thinking about how cool it was so I forgot to take a picture.

Convincing, eh? No? Well, I tried. It looks cool, and it smelled great, but I ended up not eating it. It's not that it tasted bad, but the idea of making it all from just powder was a little off-putting. I think Daniel ate one or two, though. All in all, this is a really cool thing to do if you have little siblings or you're babysitting or something, because everything is edible (except the tools, of course). Just make sure to get one for you and one for them, because there really isn't much to do for two people working on one kit. It shouldn't be a problem, because they are super cheap on Amazon. And obviously, allow time for shipping.

My Alternative Weekend

A while back in May, I signed up for an Alternative Weekend at Clagett Farm. The description was basically advertising a learning experience centered around the issue of food security and to also see what life is like on a farm. Honestly, I signed up because I think farms are really cool and I've always wanted a big vegetable/fruit garden in my backyard. This fact will be important later on.

So on Friday I left work early, drove back home, and then packed and drove back to College Park to meet up with everyone else in the group. Pretty soon after, we were on our way to the farm.

Cute, right? Apparently it was owned by a family called the Clagetts and they were complete assholes (which probably means they owned slaves... at least that's what the guy said), and then they gave the farm to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation after tobacco stopped being profitable and they were losing money. We actually stayed in a church very close to the farm and just drove back and forth during the weekend. 

Our lovely group of AW participants. I think in like every group picture we took, Daniel always stood somewhere that wasn't next to me haha. Maybe I smelled bad. 

This is Honey! She's one of two dogs that live on the farm and she was following us around all day. Such a sweet dog. Pretty much everyone petted her and played with her and she was loving it. Even Daniel, and he is not a dog person. I think the other one's name was Garlic, but I'm not sure. I think Honey is a really cute name but I don't know about Garlic... haha

The first day (technically the second day because the first day we just arrived at the farm/house and slept, we went to the vegetable fields and picked cucumber, squash, zucchini, and peppers. I think the cucumbers were the most satisfying and fun to pick, because they were practically the same exact color as their vines/leaves so they were really hard to spot at times. So you would see a nice big one and get all excited because no one else had spotted it yet. Or maybe that's just me. I definitely had the most fun in the vegetable patch, because it was exactly the kind of thing I signed up for and was expecting to experience. And to top it all off, we picked something around 687 pounds of produce. That's like fifty pounds per person!

This is from our truck ride to the pepper field, which about only half of us went to because it wasn't as big of a field. For some reason I thought peppers grew on taller plants so I decided to go pick them because it would be easier, but they grow on small little bushes close to the ground so you have to either sit or squat to pick them. So I guess that's karma for trying to pick the easier task. Squatting became painful after a while so I decided to just get dirty and sit on the ground. I think I got the dirtiest out of everyone on the trip, because I just stopped caring about squatting or kneeling and was like "Eh, I'll just shower later anyway". 

This picture really doesn't do the view justice, but off in the distance are Cut-Your-Own Christmas trees. They really grow everything here. 

A blurry but adorable picture of Honey sprinting alongside us in the truck, with her tongue flying all over the place. She must be in great shape, because she was running super fast. 

Tomatoes and zucchini. We didn't actually pick the tomatoes, I have no idea when those were picked.

Zucchini and squash. Yep, all of those yellow bins were full of veggies. 

This is a really beautiful flower garden that was planted right next to the main farm shed. Since Clagett Farm is an organic farm, they try to use as many creative and organic methods as possible for pest control. One method is to plant lots of delicious flowers really close to crops, so that all the bugs will be distracted by those instead of going for the vegetables and fruit. And it definitely seemed to be working, because there weren't many bugs on the crops we just picked, but just by looking at the garden from 20 feet away I could see the swarm of bugs all over it. I never knew about that, so I thought that was pretty cool. And I think the workers will occasionally pick flowers for the CSA members to take home to put in vases. 

So what does all of this work have to do with food security? Clagett Farm donates 40% of their produce yield to the Capitol Area Food Bank, which provides healthy food at an affordable price (or for free) to low income families in the DC area. The farm also is a CSA, which means you pay a set price each season to the farm, and you come every weekend to pick up your share of the produce that week. So it's basically subscribing to a farm. The good thing is that you get fresh, local, and organic produce. The bad thing is that you might pay a lot of money and end up getting not such a great amount of produce that season. It's a risk that you take together. I felt like the food bank part was the aspect that really had to do with food security, because I was watching the CSA members come to pick up their food and they were rollin' up in BMWs and big SUVs and other such midrange luxury cars. They definitely didn't look like the type that were suffering from food insecurity, but I guess the farm needs its money from somewhere.

After lunch, we took a truck ride to the watermelon field to do some weeding. You hear "weeding" and you think you're just gonna pull some plants and call it a day, right? Wrong. I mean, yeah, technically right, but wrong in the way that it was much more difficult than I imagined. It was super hot, there was hardly any cloud cover, and there were just so many weeds to pull. I'll admit I was very grumpy by the end of the day. I felt like I was going to pass out multiple times during that, but of course I'm sitting here in my comfortable bed and thinking "I could probably do that again, it wasn't that bad". Nah, it was pretty bad. 

See all of that on the right side of the field? Yeah, all of that was weeds, and we had to pick pretty much all of it by hand. Organic farming is exhausting. And I don't even do it as a job! I did it for like eight hours, tops! This weekend seriously opened my eyes to how hard farmers work. They work incredibly hard every day to make a living. Like, I felt super lazy just being around them and watching them work so efficiently. Pretty much everything they do is physically taxing, and to add insult to injury, a lot of the time they're working under the swelteringly hot sun. Hello, skin cancer and back problems. 

By around 4:30 PM we were back at the house and cooking dinner. I practically ran downstairs to grab my towel and clothes because I wanted to shower so badly. After dinner, we had a few hours of reflection and went to sleep. While a lot of the things discussed during reflection were insightful, I felt like a lot of it was also extremely repetitive, especially by the last day. I didn't expect it to be so centered around the idea of community service; I expected more of a discussion about food security and agriculture. Like at times, all of the discussion questions reminded me of what it was like to attend church camps in the summer, back when I had some form of religion in my life. Basically a lot of repetition to hammer certain concepts into our heads. But whatever. I couldn't fall asleep until like 2 AM, which was really bad because we had to wake up at 6:30 the next day to eat breakfast and clean the whole house. The fact that I'm literally incapable of falling asleep in a reasonable amount of time in places that AREN'T my bed at home makes me anxious for my semester abroad. I feel like I'm just gonna be a zombie roaming around Europe, chugging caffeine. 

The second day.... I'm not gonna lie, it was pretty awful. We were told we were going to be working in the tree nursery to pull weeds around the tree roots, and those trees would eventually be replanted in areas around the Chesapeake Bay watershed to help prevent erosion. However, we didn't actually do that (which is no one's fault, we just have to do whatever the farm wants us to do that day) and we were sent to a barn where we had to unload an entire wagon full of hay (probably like 150 bales, each around 35-40 pounds) and assembly-line it up to the very back corner of the barn so we could stack it all up. It was probably more than 100 degrees in that barn, hay was flying everywhere, there was no ventilation, and it was pretty dark in the way back of the barn. Oh, and there were holes in the hay everywhere so people were falling all over the place. I sound like a total wimp, but it was actually the hardest thing I have done in a while. And it didn't help that there were three guys out of all of us, and girls tend to have weaker upper body strength.

Anyways I'll stop complaining and show you some pictures so you can understand what I'm talking about.

That is the wagon after it was all unloaded. And that's me in the red shirt. If you look closely, I'm probably crying (kidding). You can't even see into the barn, but everyone else was inside it and higher up on top of the hay. See how big those things are?

The aftermath of Haypocalypse 2015. It looks like someone attacked my legs with a tiny whip haha. I made the terrible decision to wear shorts because I'd rather get scratches than sweat to death. My legs are actually fine now so that's a relief. After that, we had lunch, had some more reflection, and drove back to school and then drove back home. Overall, it was a really great experience and I'm really glad I went, because I would have most definitely sat on my butt all weekend if I hadn't.

Never mind, I guess Daniel did stand near me.

Obligatory post-alternative-weekend National Ice Cream Day celebration picture.

Serious Procrastination

 Okay, if anyone ever reads this, you're probably wondering "Why did she write a post about her stupid trip to DC? That has nothing to do with Barcelona!" I'm going to be totally honest, I only wrote this because I made this blog months ago and it's just been collecting metaphoric dust and I was really eager to actually start writing things on it. I made it pretty much as soon as I sent in my deposit for my study abroad program because I promised myself that I would at least try to maintain a blog and write meaningful posts about my travel experiences instead of just posting only pictures. I don't know if this is dumb or not, but one of the things I'm most excited for is getting to take and share tons of beautiful pictures. I would invest in a nice camera, but A) I'm broke B) I don't want to haul an expensive camera around Europe. It would just be one more thing to worry about. Anyway, I think my iPhone 5S does a satisfactory job!

So yesterday, July 14, I finally decided to get up off my butt since I had the day off and go down to DC and drop off my Visa application (is that capitalized? I have no clue, I'm thinking about the credit card company) at the Embassy of Spain. I am super late on this. I think I was supposed to do it like a month and a half ago, but I honestly couldn't get to DC because you can only drop off a visa application from 9 AM - 1 PM, Monday to Friday. Guess who has work at that time, like always! Me! So you can put your pitchforks down. Hopefully my visa and passport come back in time because if not, I don't know what I'll do and my study abroad advisor will probably yell at me.









Here is a lovely grainy photo of the Foggy Bottom GWU metro station, because I am an idiot and forgot to take a picture of the Embassy. It's honestly nothing special, so I don't feel bad. It's just a white building with the Spanish flag on it. However, it was super nice inside. I'm talking marble floors and granite countertops. I only waited like five minutes until I was called up by the lady at the window. She actually called me up in Spanish, like I would write whatever she said but I was too busy panicking to remember what she actually said. I was like "Oh my god, do I have to know fluent Spanish? I suddenly forgot all the Spanish I learned in my four years of taking classes" but it turned out to be fine because she could speak English. Duh. Turns out I actually got there at the perfect time because as soon as I was finished, like twenty people came in and lined up. I feel like this kind of thing always happens to me. I always leave somewhere right as a million people are just getting there.

Anyways, wow I wrote a lot. I guess this was a nice introductory blog post. And technically it counts because it's about Barcelona. Or, more like my impending journey to Barcelona. How do you end these things? I don't know what to say. Goodbye? See you later? I don't know. The next time I update will probably be the night before I leave. AHHH