Love Padlocks

If you can't tell I have had a pretty relaxing and non-eventful weekend considering I have had time to update my blog 3 times in the last 2 days... haha.

I wanted to share about the Love Padlocks here in Europe.

What is a Love Padlock?:

According to Wikipedia...

(also known as Love Locks) a custom by which pad locks are affixed to a fence, gate, bridge or similar public fixture by sweethearts to symbolize their everlasting love.

Basically how it works is a couple who is in love will write their names on the lock and will put it in a public place where they can lock it up. They lock it up and throw away the key, this symbolizes everlasting love.

This is an example:

Sometimes the government does not like it so they start cutting off the locks. In Sevilla I heard that the police cut the locks off every couple of months, but of course people still continue to put more locks up.

This is very popular in Sevilla. There are hundreds of locks, locked up to the bridges! Even though it may seem a little tacky, I think it's cute.

So... When Brian came to visit I said, you know what, even though this may be a little high school I want to do this! We were able to use a lock that he used for his luggage, all we had to do was buy a permanent marker and we were all set.

The last night that he was here we made sure to do this. Here is how it turned out...

Truth is, I should have done my research on this before we closed our lock!...

Funny Story: We put the lock up on Sunday night and Brian left early the next morning, naturally I was sad that he left but I was keeping busy to keep my mind off of it. My roommates and I went out to dinner and I showed them the picture of our lock. THEN my roommate Shayla asked me" So did you guys throw away the key in the river after you locked it up?!". DOOH!! Yep, we screwed up and we did not know that you had to throw the key away in the river. As you can see in the picture there are three keys, so I told Brian that we should write our initials on the keys and then we can each keep a key for ourselves to just have as a memento. At the time I thought it was a great idea. Luckily at the dinner I had the key with me and my superstitious self started to take over. I was thinking to myself, " Laura, you should have known to throw the keys away, now your going to have bad luck, etc!"

I didn't know what to do so my roommates suggested that I just throw the key away into the river, even though he wasn't there with me, at least the key would be thrown away. So that's exactly what I did! On the walk back from dinner we walked over the bridge, I went to where we put our lock, I gave the key a kiss and I threw it into the river :).

I like having our lock there because its something I can walk past each day and it reminds me of Brian and how we had such a nice trip when he came to visit me.