Spain Part II Wool and Wedding Festival

On our way from Girona to Montblanc (Spain, not France) we went through a city called Ripoll that was having a festival. It was such a fun day! Sheep shearing contests, weddings, dancing giants and communal food!

Spain Part I Cont. Exploring Girona

Girona is an old city with part of the city wall still walkable and beautiful churches and cobblestone streets (built on a hill). The concert was a guitar orchestra playing the "Sound of Silence'!

Spain Cont. Bike Ride!

We rented bikes and rode from Geneva to the coast and then were shuttled back. It was 27 miles and rained a bit on us, so we ducked inside for a drink.

Spain Part I Flowers

We flew from Geneva to Barcelona and then took a bus to Girona. We were there 3 nights enjoying the local festival of flowers and a bike ride. Here are some of the flower exhibits!

Geneva

Here is the beginning of our trip!

My Badge for the W.H.O., THe United Nations Building and Bob and I at Lake Geneva one evening.

Home!

I'll try to get pictures up this week, but we are home now and getting back into work and Pacific time. The laundry is almost done and the pets are home from their vacations.
We had great luck researching and then had a wonderful time with friends on the vacation following. In a short wrap up, northern Spain is beautiful, Catalan is possibly harder than French, flying in the last row of an airplane sucks, traveling with friends is (sometimes and in this case) more fun than traveling with just your spouse.

something bigger

if i have learned anything the last few days it is that french is hard, foreign keyboards are frustrating to type on, and the world health organization is pretty cool. it has been great fun to be a part of something bigger, something global. i cant quite express it completely, but yeah, wow.

Day 2

Right now I am sitting in a library with Bob, pretending to be a graduate student. We are on our first joint research trip and after the second day, I am exhausted. I do not know how he gets through more than one day of looking up the documents, locating them, and then photographing the parts yyou actually need. It is all very interesting to me and there are so many topics here that fascinate me since I have a bit of a medical love. For example, pre 1970 the attempt to defeat malaria was referred to as malaria erradication, but then it switches to the anti malaria campaign and then again to malaria containment. I also found that the WHO and their yearly assemblies wanted to have clean water and sanitation for all by 1990 and health care for all by 2000. We stopped looking at records in 1980, but I can only imagine the dispair as those years approached and then passed.
In non research news, our hostel is fine, the weather is rain then sun and in the 50s. It is expensive like most large cities and we wish we spoke more or any French. Obviously there is internet at the library to keep me awake inbetween document reviewing, but we actually hope to finish up here tomorrow...a day early! Until next time I have a moment or something new to share.