El Final

Well I'm down to my last several hours in Spain! These last weeks have been super busy with a combination of school work, travelling to France, and trying to fit in Christmas shopping while also seeing every last thing I wanted to in Madrid.


In France I got to visit the city of Grenoble, where two of my friends live, for five days before heading off to Paris to meet my roommate for another five days. We basically did all the touristy stuff but the city was in full-on Christmas mode so that made things extra wonderful (even though it was cold and rainy). Here's an example of the lights around the city:

There are also great lights around Madrid but my camera is pretty awful at taking pictures at night so none of those turned out too well. There was actually a fireworks show in the Plaza de Cibeles last Sunday which I got to see. The Christmas spirit is clearly alive here, even if it is different than in the US. For example, 3 Kings Day in early January is a much bigger deal here, almost as big as Christmas. The 3 kings actually bring kids presents on that day instead of Santa Claus (although recently Santa Claus is becoming more popular). My favorite part about Christmas in Spain has definitely been turrones and polvorones. Yum.

For our last day in Madrid we went to the oldest restaurant in the world for lunch, Botin:

And tomorrow I depart! This semester has of course been an incredible experience that has really made me want to travel more! Living in a different country for this long has been so cool, I hope to get to know other cultures as well as I've gotten to know this one. Happy holidays to everyone and I can't wait to see you all back in the good ol' USA!

Galicia

Last weekend our group took a trip to the region of Galicia, in northwestern Spain, to visit Santiago de Compostela (former tourist destination of ye olde religious pilgrims) and the countryside. Before going I had to do my final project on the region, so I'm pretty much an expert on the matter at this point, and by expert I mean I know way too many random historical facts and all the stereotypical reasons why people from Madrid think they're cooler than people from Galicia. Which may be true on some level. However, as far as food goes, I think Galicia may have Madrid beat.


I can't believe I'm starting this post off with food. I didn't even intend to, I promise. This probably has to do with the fact that yesterday was Thanksgiving and my brain is still saturated with gravy. (We went out to dinner at a restaurant that serves American Thanksgiving food, so I did in part get to celebrate this wonderful holiday thank goodness. Although apparently Spanish people think Thanksgiving includes clam chowder...) Galicia has really really delicious bread and cheese, but they are most famous for their seafood. I know, I don't like seafood, but I did indeed try Galicia's most famous dish, octopus:

Those are some straight up octopus tentacles right there. Also wine in a bowl. Have you ever had wine out of a bowl? It's pretty cool but difficult for those of us with smaller than average hands...

Anyway, the region of Galicia is really different from the rest of Spain because it's so rainy, making the landscape really green and woodsy. The first day, when we were in Santiago, it was chilly and rained constantly.

You can see in this picture that most of the buildings are made out of stone instead of the cute white buildings of southern Spain. This is because the region is basically overflowing with stone and they have plenty to go around. It also is probably useful for when it gets cold in the winter. Fortunately for us, the weather was perfect the next two days while we were in the country seeing things like these gardens:

The gardens were part of this castle-like mansion, made of stone of course. They were really pretty with all of the autumn colors. That day we also got to visit our director's family house! We all ate lunch with him and his brother's family and walked on the nearby Camino de Santiago, which is where the pilgrims used to (and still do) walk to get to Santiago. The last day we visited an old monastery:

And then we returned to Madrid! Next week two of my classes will be ending so I have finals to study for. Great. But I also have a ten day trip to France to look forward to, so I think I'll make it through :)

More Roma

Some text to go with those pictures....


Rome was incredible, of course. Everything was just so...Italian. The pizza and gelato on every corner. The beautiful old churches and ancient columns on every block. The Italians yelling at each other while gesturing wildly. The problem with traveling places is that it always makes me want to go back and see more, and Rome was no exception. We were there for almost a week and saw all the main sights, but there's just so much more to the city!


Something that Rome does 100% better than Madrid: the food. Obviously. Something that Madrid does 100% better than Rome: public transportation. I later found out that all the old stuff in the city center makes a metro system near impossible to construct without annihilating some precious artifact, which makes sense I suppose, but before I figured that out I did not appreciate walking across the entire city every day to get back to our hostel. It was a blessing and a curse though because walking around a city really is the best way to get to know it. It also made me appreciate the Madrid metro system that much more. There are so many available stops around here it's ridiculous.


The monuments were as you would expect, I'd say (awe-inspiring, momentous, what have you). We actually got to go to the Vatican for free because it was the last Sunday of the month, but had to get up early and wait in line for two hours. Definitely worth it, though, because they charge so much for that kind of thing and of course we don't get the EU discount. I actually preferred the more outdoorsy things we saw just because they weren't what I had seen in pictures and on TV so many times. Also it's always nice to see a couple trees after living an urban area for a few months. Tivoli was especially nice because it was outside the city. Such a refreshing way to end the vacation!


Especially because now I have about a million tons of work to do. Pardon me, a million kilos. Or maybe it just feels that way because I haven't really been doing any work up until now. I've been doing things like going to Rome...

Roma

So I decided to take a little six-day weekend to travel to Rome for my birthday. Wow.


Things we did other than eat and walk around:

The Colosseum 

The Roman Forum

The Pantheon

The Trevi Fountain

The Vatican

St. Peter's Basilica

The Giancolo

The Villa Borghese

Piazza del Popolo

All Saints' Day is a national holiday in Italy, and since everything in Rome was closed we took a day trip to the nearby town of Tivoli, where we saw:

Villa d'Este

Hadrian's Villa

Those are the brief highlights! More detailed post will follow at some point. I decided to spare you the enticing pictures of all the food we ate. You're welcome.

The Greatest Thing Ever

I went to my first professional sports game on Tuesday. Not only a professional sports game, but a soccer game. Not only a professional soccer game, but a European soccer game. Not only a professional European soccer game, but a REAL MADRID GAME. (real means royal here, not real, in case you were wondering)

Let me tell you the story. It was the night before the game, and I saw that some people had posted about it on Facebook. I really wanted to go but figured it would be ridiculously expensive. I decided on a whim to ask someone how much he paid for them, and lo and behold his friend was selling two tickets for cheaper than usual! So I convinced my roommate to go with me and less than 24 hours later there we were, sitting in the second row of our section (the worst section, but still the second row!) watching some of the greatest soccer players in the world crush the opposition like it's their job. Which it is.

You must realize that, although it doesn't seem like it now, the above story was really very dramatic and suspenseful while it was unfolding. I mean I REALLY wanted to go to this game. Really a lot. You can ask my roommate. I was freaking out before, during, and after. Still am. Time for PICTURES!

The advertisement for the game (we played Lyon, France):

The field/stadium before the game:

 Us before the game:

Me staring intently:

Our side taking a free kick:

Their side taking a free kick:

People straightening up the turf at the half! You don't see that on TV!

Now you feel like you were there, right? Ok, I took a lot of pictures. But it was that great. We were sitting next to some true madrileños who were cursing the entire time, making it easy to tell how the game was going in case I suddenly forgot. I'm not really sure what all the fuss was about considering that Madrid wins almost all their games and they easily took this one at 4-0. Truly an impressive team.

Day Off

Wednesday was a national holiday here in good old España, which is usually nothing too exciting because there are national/regional/local holidays around here just about all the time. This one, however, was kind of a bigger deal than the normal ones, it was the Día de la Hispanidad, otherwise known as Columbus Day. Yes I see the irony here. I in fact added to it by spending the day doing incredibly un-Hispanic things.


First off, I slept instead of going to the parade. Ahem. But I heard it was nothing special. So there.


Secondly, my roommate and I ate Indian food in the "multicultural" neighborhood of Madrid, Lavapiés. First spicy food I've had in this country, and quite delicious at that.

Thirdly, we went to the least Spanish museum in Madrid, the Thyssen. It was free! Most museums are free for students at least one day a week, but not this one, so that made it pretty sweet. What made it not so sweet was the long line and early closing time. I'll just have to go back another time...

Lastly, and most Americanly, we made brownies for a girl in our group whose birthday is this weekend. Yes, I said brownies. We had to go to the more upscale grocery store, El Corte Inglés, to find brownie mix. Yes, we made them out of a box. Later that night we realized we didn't have butter. So we went to the grocery store in the middle of the night. I happened to be wearing a pajama shirt, shorts, and flip-flops, with my hair unbrushed and looking rather unkempt. No, I could not have looked more American. No Spanish woman would be caught dead in that outfit. No Spanish woman would even own that outfit as a matter of fact!

We did make the brownies in the most Spanish way possible, though. That is, in a cardboard "mold" because brownie pans don't exist here, in a toaster oven because our real oven doesn't work. Too ridiculous? Proof:

I actually ended up quite thankful that we didn't have a real brownie pan, because it wouldn't have fit in the toaster oven. The sides of the cardboard one had to give a little as it was... In the end they actually tasted quite nice though! Since tupperware is also hard to come by, we put them in a big plastic container that formerly held crackers. Like one of these. Altogether a great experience I'd say. Happy Columbus Day.

Being Historical

A good bit of our class here is devoted to history, so last weekend and this weekend we've taken field trips to places associated with the royal history of Spain. First stop was El Escorial, a town north of Madrid with a monastery that was huge because the king built it to live there. It was very plain and austere compared to other royal abodes.

We also went to the Prado both last week and this week, each time focusing on a different era. We got to see the famous Las Meninas of course, and a lot of Goya as well. This is this front of the Prado with a statue of Velázquez (he's kind of a big deal here), although this part is not used as the entrance anymore.

Yesterday we took a walking tour around the Paseo del Prado and saw some more historical sites, such as the botanical gardens (not so great in the autumn...) and the Puerta de Alcalá, aka Madrid's Arc de Triomphe:

Lastly, we took a tour of the Palacio Real, one of many royal palaces constructed over the years by the kings of Spain. It definitely reminded me a lot of Versailles, but it's smaller and it seemed like more attention was paid to each room instead of someone throwing a bunch of gold and fabric everywhere just because they can. There was one room whose walls were covered entirely in porcelain! All the little details of every wall and piece of furniture were incredible. We unfortunately weren't allowed to take pictures inside, but here you can see the outside:

In other news, I will be travelling to Rome for the long weekend that we have at the end of October, which is super exciting because that's when my birthday is! I cannot wait for the food.... If anyone has any suggestions as to what to do there let me know!

Barcelona

Super busy weekend in Barcelona! The weekend before this past one, that is. We (my group from school) took an overnight train there and back, something I'd never done before. Unfortunately this was not the type of train with beds, so sleeping was rather difficult. On the way there we were crammed together without a lot of space, but on the way back at least we had more room and reclining chairs. We arrived bright and early and went to Parc Güell, of Gaudí's design.

The most notable "art" in the park is the tilework everywhere, but the park as a whole is really the work of art. In the background of this photo you can kind of see the cave-like part, which is totally different from the tile part but all the same concept! Next we continued with the Gaudí theme by going to the Sagrada Familia, which turned out to be my favorite part of Barcelona. I was so impressed by his fusion of modern elements with the medieval concept of a gothic cathedral. My camera takes pretty awful pictures in anything less than ideal lighting, but this one turned out well:

Every inch of the place is covered in detailed and elaborate design of some kind, which makes everything fascinatingly beautiful. It's taken a ridiculously long time to build the whole thing, and it's not even close to being done yet. Going to see the completed version is officially on my bucket list! For the rest of the day on Friday we went to the beach, where the water was freezing (swam in it anyway) and surprisingly clear.

On Saturday we saw some more Gaudí, this time his apartment building called Casa Milà. We got to go on the rooftop terrace and through one of the apartments. Living there would be so incredible! Here's a picture of a tower on the roof:

This guy's imagination was really crazy. Next we went up to Montjuic, a large area higher up a hill/mountain. This area includes a fortress:

as well as the Miró Museum, a fountain, the National Museum of Catalonian Art, some gardens, the Olympic Stadium (Barcelona hosted in 1992), the Olympic Park:

and I imagine a whole bunch of other stuff that we did not come across.

On Sunday we did not do anything super picture-worthy, although we did go to the Picasso Museum. The entire weekend there was actually a big festival going on with tons of parades and concerts, making the whole city pretty crowded but with a really lively and fun atmosphere. It was cool to walk around and see the city celebrating. Other random cool things: staying in a hostel for the first time and the Catalan language. Caution, if linguistic rants bore you, please skip the next paragraph.

Many people think that Catalan is just a dialect of Spanish, but actually it is its own language and not comprehensible to native Spanish speakers. Of course they share a ton of vocabulary and they are both Romance languages so they have basically the same grammar, but nevertheless there are enough differences to make them quite distinct. Catalan actually shares a lot of attributes with French as well. I talked to a native French speaker there and he said reading it for him was pretty easy because it looks a lot like French. Everyone who grows up in Barcelona/the region of Catalonia speaks both Catalan and Spanish, but I think they prefer speaking Catalan as part of the whole regional pride thing. As if my nerdiness is not yet apparent, I bought a Catalan newspaper to try to decipher for fun. We'll see how that goes.

Well that was my three day weekend in Barcelona! We were able to cram in a lot of stuff in a short period of time so I think we hit all the highlights! I would love to go back for a longer stay eventually. One day....

Toledo

Last Friday we went to Toledo! Since it was part of our program we focused on the historical parts of the city that relate to what we're learning in class. Toledo used to be the capital of Spain, so it definitely has a lot of history. The coolest part about it is that for a few centuries Christians, Jews, and Muslims all lived there without killing each other! Whichever religion was governing at the time definitely had priority in every sort of way, and eventually the Christians expelled/killed everyone else, but for a while there things were kind of nice.


In honor of all this religious tolerance, we visited:

A monastery, el Monasterio de San Juan de los Reyes

A synagogue

Another synagogue that was also a museum

The cathedral

and a mosque

As usual I refer you to Facebook for more pictures! I'm leaving for Barcelona soon so get ready for a great post about that later!

3 Euros

Yeah you heard me.

Segovia

As the title so aptly suggests, I went to Segovia this weekend with our group. For those of you unfamiliar with the intricacies of Spanish geography (don't worry I'm totally with you), Segovia is a town north of Spain famous for its Roman aqueduct and generally being quite old and historical. We went by very slow train and returned by very fast train (compare 2 hours to 20 minutes: a notable difference). I guess since I already spoiled it for you, I'll start with the main attraction:

Yay Roman ingenuity! Seriously though, this is one of the oldest and most impressive landmarks that the Romans left in Spain when they ruled it oh-so-long ago. The stones are not held together by any sort of cement or anything; it is pure engineering at work here. Next we have a shot of the town next to the aqueduct. The aqueduct is really right in the center of everything, which is useful for water distribution I'm sure.

Like other Spanish towns, this one was incredibly picturesque, with blue skies and a nice mountainous backdrop for your viewing pleasure. After marveling at the aqueduct and having a bite to eat, we ventured further into town and came upon the cathedral. We had to pay to get in, which I thought was ridiculous until we actually got in there and it turned out to have some pretty incredible stuff. I didn't get many good pictures inside, but here is one of the courtyard: 

Aside from the cathedral itself with the usual pretty altar and such, they had rooms showcasing paintings, tapestries, and silver. The best part in my opinion, however, was the old hymnal that they had on display near the organ. I'd never seen one so old before, and for some reason this thing was gigantic, like it was made for people twice our size (some sort of prize to whoever can tell me why that is...).  After the cathedral we walked around some more and came upon a castle, which we decided not to go in, but it was still cool to see from the outside. And that's about all we did in Segovia! On Sunday I actually went to the park again and saw more peacocks, a whole army of them really, but I'll spare you the details...let's just say that Facebook will have the evidence soon enough.

The "Study" Part of Study Abroad

I just finished up my first week of school, which was a bit of a shock to the system since I still feel like I'm on vacation. Last week we had orientation where we took a Spanish placement exam, did a tour around the campus, and listened to professors talk about their classes. The university we go to is an hour away from the apartment in a neighborhood outside the city, so to get there I walk to the metro, which I take to the train station, which I take to the neighborhood, and finally I walk to campus. The campus itself is much smaller than I'm used to, but there are multiple campuses around the city. Here's a picture of the central quad area, with the main cafeteria at the end:

My classes:

• Spanish-pretty standard except we actually learn how not to sound like foolish Americans instead of being taught by foolish Americans
• Culture and Civilization-class for only our program, taught by our program director
• Politics and Society-taught by a Spanish professor specifically for American students (there are actually a lot of us here)
• History of Philosophy-getting credit for the good ol' PNP major (if you don't know/have forgotten what that is, I'm sure you're not the only one but it's really too much to explain)
• Spanish Linguistics-more PNP credit, I predict this will be my favorite class because it seems easy, I like linguistics, and the professor is off her rocker enough to be entertaining

All of my classes are in Spanish and the last two are mostly Spanish students, which is cool. Because of the commute I have to wake up way earlier than I would ever have to in the U.S. so I may or may not become a coffee addict while I'm here. Despite the fatigue I am excited for weekend #2 in Madrid!!!

These Are a Few of My Favorite Chings

Chocolate con Churros: delicious fried dough covered in a thick layer of melted chocolate

Yum.

Chata: cute little dog living with us for a few days

Stole my sock but otherwise loveable.

A Protest in the Plaza and a Peacock in the Parque

Two randomly awesome things happened to me this week in Spain; as the title reveals they involved a protest and a peacock. First the protest.

My roommate Ariel and I were hanging out in the apartment when we heard a commotion outside. When we looked to see what it was we saw this:

An actual political protest! There were hundreds of people passing by chanting and waving signs. Why they chose our street I don't know, there aren't exactly any government buildings around or anything. Then we thought, well why don't we just go downstairs and get a closer look? So we did:

We were following it along the opposite side of the street when we stumbled upon some random signs, kind of like this kid:

We decided to pick up the signs as awesome souvenirs and soon found ourselves following the crowd into the main protest! So we protested! Someone handed us a flyer explaining the cause: apparently the Spanish government is planning on amending the Constitution to restrict spending and these people did not like that idea. It was a really unique experience because I feel like political demonstrations of that scale do not happen very often in the U.S. Speaking of unique experiences that don't happen in the U.S.....(semi-awkward segue)......

The peacock. Ariel and I went to el Parque de Retiro, the equivalent of Central Park in Madrid. 

We were just walking around casually exploring the park when we happened upon a rouge peacock! I kid you not, this thing was just chilling in the flowers doing whatever it is peacocks do. This pretty much sums it up:

I was SO excited, I don't think I'd ever seen one before, at least not that close. I took an incredible amount of pictures and eventually scared the poor thing away and up into a tree (can peacocks fly? If not they sure can jump...). The strange thing to me was that all the locals around us acted like it was no big deal while I was running around snapping pictures every second like a fool. I don't regret it though, that peacock was awesome.

Well I hope this post was somewhat entertaining in its randomness. I tried to put in a lot of pictures since the last one was pretty wordy :)