I kissed you in a style Clark Gable would admire; I thought it classic.

Last day in Ávila.

Last night the remaining estudiantes all went to Miguel’s house, for sangria and good music and (another) last hurrah with our spanish amigos. After we left his house we went out, but the night went downhill dramatically when a classmate lost her wallet & passport. She was (understandably) very upset, so I called her parents, made sure the credit card would be cancelled, left a message with the program director, helped write a note in Spanish for her host family, and Anna and I walked her back home. All should be okay. I’m crossing my fingers that I’ll leave the country without any similar misadventures.

Today I packed, finished up some laundry, and coughed up a lot of slime. I’m so sick and congested. I hope I feel better by the time we get on the plane. Once I flew to Nashville while congested, and that one hour flight was hell… I don’t really relish the thought of 8+ hours of that.

I don’t even like relish.

Relish doesn’t look like a real word, does it?

Okay, basta with the relish.

Carmen’s children and grandchildren and a few assorted relatives were all at lunch today. I’m going to be sad to leave.

I finally went into Ávila’s cathedral today. I think it’s one of my favorites that I’ve seen here in Spain. It’s beautiful and feels peaceful.

The churches here are sensory overload. It’s boggling to me. In the treasury of the cathedral is a huge monstrance that must be as tall as I am. It’s crazy.

Looking at all the chalices and gold and silver and religious *bling* produces some mixed feelings. I have very strong memories of my home parish in Maybee. I always helped the sacristan clean and set up all the necessary items for mass. It was a small country parish, not Europe, and our monstrance was nowhere near as extravagant as the one I saw today. But everything was still treated with respect, and I miss that almost daily routine of taking care of the church. It’s the tactile & sensory memories that are the strongest for me, always. It’s why people hang on so long, maybe for the wrong reasons: it’s comforting to have things you can see and touch, even if it’s just angles of light, cool heavy gold, embroidered fabric (ironed meticulously), saints made of plaster–always familiar; it’s the people who change.

The Catholic Church has a long history of beauty and romance that has gotten all tangled up in their idea of religion. Candlelight and flowers and songs and rituals. But like any relationship, the romance can only carry you through so long. The gritty difficult decisions outside, in daylight and in daily life, are something entirely different. If the romantic rituals are all you have, the relationship falls apart. No amount of romance or emotional residue can make up for serious character flaws or a lack of integrity. In the last month and a half I’ve seen a lot of romance and centuries and centuries of history tied up with the catholic church. There’s a lot of gold, a lot of empty beautiful churches, a lot of saints in museums, a lot of ruined cities that were sacked in the name of some kind of God, a lot of politicians & royalty buried under altars. If anything, being in Europe has only further obscured any realistic understanding of what religion should and should NOT be. God and I have been giving eachother a mutual silent treatment for a while now - less hostile than at one point, perhaps, on both sides – but that’s all separate from everything else: the romantic *bling*.

And I am sensory… not romantic. I’ve recieved plenty of flowers but my favorite was the Free Rose If Your Name Is ___ from that florist on Washtenaw, which wilted slowly in a beer bottle on my desk. My fondest memories are of train bridges, fire escapes, getting lost on purpose, reading on my roof, skinnydipping in summertime, driving barefoot with our feet out the window, inopportune picnics, climbing trees at night, spanglish on scaffolding, jumping on furniture, and other weird things.

And all that – religion and relationships alike – are tangents for another time and place.

Maybe as this trip winds down to a close I just feel like I need to make some big! overall! summary! of the experience. Sometimes I forget that I am NOT poised at the first sentence of the last paragraph of a five paragraph essay.

But thank god I don’t live in a didactic narrative.

And on that note, I am off to finish packing

say my last goodbyes

wake up muy early to go to madrid

shlep around madrid all day tomorrow

sleep in the airport – NOT the streets

get on the plane early monday morning, madrid time

get off the plane monday afternoon, chicago time

return to michigan sometime tuesday

and I will see you all stateside.

Ádios… almost.

Last night was our goodbye dinner. It was muy, muy divertido.  We went out to Tres Siglos, the snazziest restaurante I’ve been to in Spain so far. (That is, they had cloth napkins, pretty much. I haven’t gone to any snazzy restaurants here.) We filled up two tables with rowdy Americans, profesores españoles, and a few random amigos.

That’s Javier, nuestro profe de communicación, at my left. As it turns out, he DOES speak English, just not in class.

…and there’s the rest of the profes at the end of the table, making some crazy faces: Miguel (profe de cultura), Laura (profe of the other class), and Ásun (profe de grammatica).

We exchanged gifts from the amigos invisibles. I got a scarf and a deck of Spanish playing cards from Katie #2. Trevor liked his gifts from me even though they were a little odd: a deck of cards, a box of Yemas de Ávila, and a glaringly cheery train figurine, made of sugar. The Yemas are dulces that Ávila is famous for… I tried one for the first time today; they’re very sweet but not bad. The train was just a weird little afterthought. There’s a lot of trains in Spain. It’s made out of sugar. Need I say more?

The waitstaff of Tres Siglos looked on apprehensively as the excitement escalated… including a reenactment of a corrida de toros, thanks to Miguel, Josh’s torero hat, and Javier’s new letter opener. (The picture is Clare’s. Thank you, Clare.) Anna’s gift was the most fun… she got an electronic bull, which ran around our classroom a lot this morning. It runs around and makes torero noises: ¡Ay, toro! Thankfully, Josh had his torero hat on hand again.

 

After dinner, we went to El Encuentro, a bar just a few streets away from my house. I was way excited when I got there, because it was the Lord of the Rings-themed bar that I’d been looking for since I got to Ávila. Someone told me there was a Tolkein-themed bar somewhere in Ávila, but we could never find it, which was disappointing since I wanted to show certain members of my family who would be disproportionately excited about such things. And now, the last week here, I find out that it’s right near my house. Qué suerte. The Eye of Sauron is painted on the back wall and everything.

 

We far outnumbered the few españoles at the bar, and when the camerero found out (somehow…) that we were Americans, he proceded to play mostly American music. Josh and Trevor performed a stunning rendition of U2′s “With Or Without You”.  And there’s nothing like dancing the YMCA in a Spanish Middle Earth.

There’s also nothing like watching your profesores sing karayoke. I think Ásun and Miguel are singing something Spanish here, but Javier definitely sang “We are the Champions”.

I think that once you’ve sung “We are the Champions” with your professors in Middle Earth, the world is forever changed.

Ergo, today absolutely nothing productive happened in class. We took over, more or less, and played Spanish games in Ásun and Miguel’s class. Javier took us down to the cafeteria and bought us all coffees, and I lost a few intense games of Foozeball. He had some activities for us to do, but instead we took him to the computer lab and introduced him to Facebook. Once he was successfully initiated into the world of social networking sites, we combined forces with the other classes to play more Spanish Scattegories (just pronounced with a Spanish accent) and watch the aforementioned toy bull run around the classroom for the remainder of the class time.

We also got our certificates and grades for the course… I got an A+ in the Culture and Communication classes, and a B+ in the Grammar class. As of today I’m officially done with my classes for my undergraduate degree… unless Eastern springs something on me when I apply for graduation, and that is a very real possibilty.

But all that bad news will have to wait. For now I’m done, and I have one more day here in Spain before riding flying off into the sunset sunrise.

In retrospect, I think I’m becoming more and more Spanglish in this blog. I’m pretty sure I’ve even introduced you to the Spanish spelling of words that I originally meant to write in English. This is for your benefit; I’ll ease myself slowly into full Spanish one of these days.

Or maybe it’s just because I can’t speak any language purely anymore.

Uy, estáis muy guapetonas…

Mmm, productive day… I went shopping for my amigo invisible and got a few more regalitos for the people back home. We have our goodbye dinner tonight with all our professors. We’re hoping to get Javier to come out with us afterward (of course, Miguel will be there) and there may be some Spanglish karyoke in the cards, too.

Oh, yes… this past Sunday, Anna and I went to mass at St. Tomas, which is just down the road from our house. They had a Eucharistic procession after mass as part of their celebration of Corpus Christi. It was like the processions I remember from Michigan, except on a much larger scale, and in Spanish. The plaza outside of the church was covered with flowers and rose petals.

Oh… and the priest sounded like a Spanish Sean Connery.

Yesterday after class three classmates and I went to Segovia, just an hour away by bus. It’s a nice, quick, afternoon trip. The town is very pretty… it reminds me a lot of Ávila, as far as the size goes, and the general look of the streets. But while we have the murallas, they have the acueducto romano.

It’s been there since the Romans built it, thousands of years ago. Of course, since the time of the Romans Spain cleaned up its pagan look by putting a statue of the virgin in the center:

We saw a sign for public bathrooms near the cathedral, but that’s all lies. There are no real public bathrooms in Spain. This is the first time I’d even seen them try.

We also went in the Alcazar, a huge castle where “official events” still take place… it’s closed today for one, in fact, though we didn’t ever figure out what “official event” is occurring.

It even has a SCARY MOAT (mostly dry, but still…)

Besides the moat, the Alcazar has all the necessary components for any castle… a throne room:

A chapel:

Towers and battlements and whatnot: 

Crop-circle-esque gardens:

Ornate cielings in halls full of statues of old kings of Spain:

Lovely views of the realm:

Narrow claustrophobic-yet-very-attack-proof windows at the outer walls and towers:

SCARY DUNGEONS:

and lots and lots of armas:

We got to see the Queen while we were there:

…okay, well, maybe it’s just a painting. But it was impressive.

Oh, and in the chapel I was excited to find pictures of both Sts. Agatha and Lucia… my compañeras didn’t believe me when I told them the stories about the saints with severed breasts and gouged out eyes and so on. The picture of St. Lucy didn’t come out very well, but St. Agatha definitely is holding her severed, bloody pecho by the nipple:

I hope that improved your day a little.

p.s. – the title is a direct quote thanks to a creepy old man in Segovia…

Let go in small doses.

I can’t get enough of this.

Today in grammar class we had an examen. Uf… ¡qué horrible! The second hour of grammar we had to write a composition using all the perífrases, based on a picture. My picture was of a guy dressed in a beret, being brought into the police station. I wrote a tragedy, probably grammatically misshapen and horrible, about how Alejandro, newly moved to Madrid from País Vasco, got arrested for wearing his boina because of a new law against berets, in a horrible case of national misunderstanding and bias. I hope I pass this class.

If you don’t know what a boina is, maybe you should look it up and educate yourselves a little.

I’m still sniffly and congested. Anna was making fun of me at breakfast because I was chewing with my mouth open. Indignant, I tried closing my mouth and breathing through my nose… but, like I said, I’m congested, and ended up gasping for air. Well, I can be polite or I can breathe, I guess.

Oye, y de las noticias que no me importan… Real Madrid won last night. When a classmate passed on the news to us, she mistakenly said it was the first time in forty years they’ve won the title… which is way more exciting than the actual four years it’s been since they last won. Oh well… no sé nada de fútbol.

In more amusing television news, one of the best parts of my week last week was when I watched Family Guy in Spanish… El Padre de la Familia. It was the episode with Ollie Williams and “WHO WANTS THIS DOG?” …but it was Spanish, so it was “¿QUIÉN QUIERE ESTE PERRO?” I don’t know why things are so much more hilarious in Spanish, but they are.

Less than a week left in Ávila, and there’s still a lot I want to do.

–Go to Segovia tomorrow to see the famous acueducto romano…
–visit the Ávila cathedral
–mail the rest of my postcards so they get to the U.S. before I do!
–go out once more with my spanish amigos
–eat some more oranges!
–find some cheap yet delicious vino to bring back home… because this is new
–have our goodbye dinner with our professors
–actually get Javier to come out and karayoke with us…
–learn flamenco?! …probably not so much
–do laundry
–figure out how to steal Marcellino and take him home with me…
–figure out how to steal Carmen and take her home with me… eating my own cooking (or lack thereof) is going to be a sad reawakening
–buy some cheap sandals, because mine are broken and Ashes is a klepto puta back home
–buy something for my amigo invisible

At the end of class one day Miguel announced that we would have “amigos invisibles” (invisible friends) for the end of the class. We were confused. He was confused. He asked us if we’d ever had “un amigo invisible.” I said “sí, cuando era niña, pero…”

As it turns out, amigos invisbles are the Spanish version of “Secret Santa” exchanges in the U.S. So we all got names for our invisible friends, and have to buy them a small gift for our final goodbye dinner.

I did have an invisible friend when I was little. I don’t know if you family folk remember that. Her name was Susan. Becca got competitive and said that she had an invisible friend, too, also named Susan. It turned into the battle of the Susans, as we described the castles and dresses and horses and increasingly extravagant possesions that each of our Susans had. It’s difficult for an invisible friend to out-bling your sister’s invisible friend… I think eventually the Susans disappeared under the pressure, not due to any maturity on our part. I remember having quite a bit of indignation. Susan was mine first. Don’t you forget it.

People think I’m kidding when I tell them that my first friends were Susan and a tree by our driveway. I’m not kidding. Homeschoolers living in the boonies get lonely. They were good listeners, I’ll give them that.

…but so are you all.

I am dreading coming home, to my broken car, broken computer, broken bank, poverty, ramen, uncertain student teaching situation, lack of employment, and the humidity that I haven’t missed at all, living here in the mountains. I’m getting more and more anxious every day about the situations waiting for me back in the states. I’ve been exchanging emails with a guy in Washington about a 6-month program with AmeriCorps, tutoring and mentoring Native American and Hispanic students, which would be really exciting. Even if I actually can muster up the huevos to make that move, I can’t move across the country in January unless I actually escape from the clutches of the COE and Eastern in general in December.

All anxiety aside, I am looking forward to seeing all of you.

Until next time… un beso.

p.s. – I hope you clicked all the links. If not, you’re missing out.

p.p.s. – If you are on Facebook, this is the best group you will ever see.

Dónde

You know what’s a great idea? Staying out laaaaaaate on a school night. Those crazy españoles and their fiestas in the park.

Apparently the band in the park played the Numa Numa song!!!… but I missed it.

What am I going to do when I get back home, and can’t listen to Spanish accents?

Anna, Clare and I leave for Barcelona today, until Sunday. Still no luck on finding an available hostel or hotel… there’s some kind of music festival and everything cheap is booked. We’re just going to jump on the train and hope we find something. Clare and I are already experts at being vagabundos and sleeping in portals and whatnot. Or sleeping on the beach would be nice.

Tried to go shopping for a bathing suit yesterday, but after looking at my bathing-suited body in the bad changing room light (and through the lense of some PMS) I couldn’t find anything I could tolerate….. but hey. The ocean is the ocean.

Yesterday was rough, but I got on the bus and rode it until I didn’t know where I was, found a big rock under a bigger tree where I could sit and write for a while, and then found my wandering way back. Like the old days. My sandal broke again. It broke while I was subiring to the Cuarto Postes the other day, and Molly fixed it, but it didn’t survive my wandering.

I want to go in more abandoned houses.

This is kind of all over the place. Forgive me.

Next stop, Barcelona.

Toros

Bernd and I went to a bullfight on Sunday. I’m glad I went, since it’s such a longstanding tradition in Spain, but I don’t think I ever need to go to another. We left after four out of the six bulls had been killed; that was enough for me.

I was hesitant to go because I don’t want to watch anything die, but I think I was expecting something different: a guy and a bull in a ring, maybe. It wasn’t like that at all. When the bull first comes into the ring, the matador and his assistants are standing around with bright pink flags which they use to provoke the bull. When the bull charges them, they jump behind the wooden walls so they don’t get gorged.

After the bull is sufficiently riled up, two horsemen with long lances come out, riding some incredibly laid-back horses. The horses have their eyes covered (if you’ve ever seen a horse freak out at the sight of blowing leaves, you’ll know why this is a necessary precaution in a ring with an angry bull). The matadors continue to confront the bull with their bright pink capes. A few times the bull tried to charge the horses, but they wear very heavy armor, and the riders also have their lances to stab the bull in the back.

When the horses leave, the matador’s assistants approach, each carrying two short, colorful spears. They wait for the bull to rush at them, and then stab these into it’s shoulder muscles as they jump out of the way. By the time the main matador is left alone in the ring, the bull has several of these spears hanging off of his back.

The matador continues to confront the now wounded and angry bull, with his red cape and a sword. Near the end, he switches swords (for a stronger one, perhaps?) and stabs the bull through the heart. Even fatally wounded, the bull continues to try to charge at him for a few minutes before collapsing, at which point an assistant stabs him through the back of the head? the neck? …I’m not exactly sure, because I had trouble watching at that point. I don’t even kill spiders because I don’t like watching them twitch and die, and a bull twitching is worse.

After the matador stabs the bull through the heart, the crowd goes wild and waves white handkerchiefs.

When the dead bull has been dragged out of the ring by two (different) horses, the matador walks around the ring and does his rockstar thing…. people cheer and throw flowers and hats at him, and he tosses the bull’s severed ear in the crowd. I was very glad Bernd and I had the cheap seats, far out of bull-ear-throwing range.

I wasn’t very impressed by the matadors. Like I said, I was expecting something different. You’re in a ring with a huge angry animal, but you have half a dozen friends, wearing the same fancy embroidered pants as you. You have a cape, a sword, several horses, spears, and wooden walls to jump behind if the bull tries to impale you against the side of the ring. I’m not going to scream and throw flowers at you for that.

Another thing that surprised me is how quiet the bull was. I don’t know, exactly, what kind of noises I thought a bull would make…. but it seemed like it was the only quiet participant in the whole thing. Everyone else was yelling or cheering or playing in the band. (Except for me… I didn’t feel like I could clap, and a lot of the time my hand was over my mouth or my eyes anyway.) I’m too much of a wuss to be Spanish.

Still, I also don’t think it’s as horrible and barbaric as some people do. Anyone who has ever been cornered by PETA has heard about the way animals are treated in the United States. In Spain, they have an entire culture that likes to antagonize and kill bulls in stadiums full of cheering people. But we have an entire culture that is okay with dying animals… we just don’t want to see them die. I know full well that if I had to go out back and kill a chicken for dinner, I would be a vegetarian. Many people would. But if someone else kills it, chops it up, and makes it look like meat instead of just dead animal, it’s okay. In Spain, it’s just all out there.

One time at the DEMF I was cornered by PETA, and they were telling me about how cruel the chicken farms are, and I asked them what they knew about the boneless/skinless chicken farms… how do those poor suckers even walk around? Seriously.

Anyway, that’s the news from Spain. Yesterday I walked up to the cuatro postes, broke my sandal, had to shlep around in the rocks and dirt and glass with bare feet, watched a creepy movie, explored an abandoned house, and almost died by pigeon attack… but I’ll show you those pictures later.

The way it goes

It’s nice to have a quiet morning, wake up without an alarm, and sit at the table sipping coffee as long as I want.

Lots of things going on here.

I got my hair cut on Thursday. Apparently I didn’t do a good job describing what I wanted in Spanish. Then again, hairstyle standards are a little different here. Regardless, when I got home and looked in the mirror I was pretty horrified. Anna got home from the bar, laughed at me, and tried to even it out a little bit. Nothing like a tipsy roommate, a pair of scissors, and a haircut that really couldn’t get much worse. Here’s the cut before Anna fixed it, and then after she evened out that weird uneven part in the back…

 

What the heck is my hair doing in the back? It’s not even at all. It’s okay; I’m told that it looks “mas o menos normal” in Spain. Oh well. At least it’s not a mullet.

Regardless, Spanish hair and all, I went out again Thursday with Sergio, a spanish friend, and some of his other amigos. I mangled a lot of Spanish and they mangled a little bit of English. It was a good time. I think they are just as amused by my Spanish as I am by their English.

(Eating tapas in Spain means a lot of MEAT! …in various stages of sketchy.)

Yesterday was also our class trip to Salamanca. Alas, no puenting. But I liked Salamanca… it’s something like the Ann Arbor of Spain, since it’s a university town. The University of Salamanca is one of the oldest universities in Europe, and has students from all over the world. (Their campus in Ávila is where we are taking our classes, and it’s pretty exciting that we’ll get a certificate from the University of Salamanca at the end of this program.)

(That building on the right is the public library…) 

The university is beautiful. Salamanca has places like this, and Eastern has “Mark Jefferson Mall” and so on. ;) On one of the buildings, part of the intricate decoration is a tiny frog perched on a skull. If you find the frog, supposedly you have good luck in your exams. I hope that’s true.

 

Can you find it?

On many walls you can see inscriptions like this:

When a student gets his or her doctorate, they celebrate with a bullfight, and then write a commemoration on the wall with a mixture of paint and blood from the bull.

Salamanca has two Cathedrals… one in the Roman style of architecture, and a newer, bigger, Gothic cathedral built onto that. (Well, new compared to the old one, at least.) The plaza in front of the main doors of the Cathedral is often called La Plaza de las Tres Coños… because in the cold winters people stand there and say “Coño, qué grande… coño, qué bonito… ¡coño, qué frío!” (How big… how pretty… how cold!)

(Quick cultural lesson… don’t look up coño in the dictionary. The literal english equivalent is incredibly obscene, but here in spain it’s used as a very common and fairly tame exclamation… much like ¡joder!, which also doesn’t have the force here that it does in the U.S…. more like “Oh, crap!” than anything more profane. Expressions tame enough that our professors use them in class… well, our younger professors, at least. Who go out dancing all night with us, too…)

On another puerta of the cathedral, during one of the renovations, they added a little astronaut as a symbol of the 20th century. He’s right in there with all the saints…

We also visited the parque made famous by La Celestina, which we all had to read at some point during our Spanish Lit. classes at Eastern. Here’s the old crone herself:

 

The story takes place in Salamanca, and many of the more dramatic moments occur in this park… for example, the meetings of the lovers, and ultimately the protagonist’s fatal fall from one of the walls. The park was full of roses… another one of my favorite things about Spain. I’m glad we’re here in summer.

Salamanca was a very happening place this weekend. There was a parade, courtesy of the Red Cross, with all kinds of dancing and costumes from around the world.

We ate lunch in the square near the cathedral, where there were booths with people grafitti-ing them, a DJ, and break dancers. It felt like we had been transported to Ann Arbor.

After shlepping around all day, I slept a little on the busride home. I tried to siesta back in Ávila but for some reason I couldn’t, even though I only got a few hours of sleep the night before and walked around all day. I’ve been having really weird nightmares the past few weeks. I guess there’s something to be said for a screwed up sleep schedule where I never actually got enough sleep at a time to dream much anymore.

Anyway, in lieu of sleep, last night I went out to the fiesta in the park of St. Antonio, with some fellow classmates and Miguel (our profe). Despite the inordinate amount of skanky drunk middle schoolers who were out in full force, it was still fun. Lots of dancing to traditional Spanish music. Lots of dismay at Spain’s lack of public restrooms. Lots of peeing in the bushes. Lots of abandonment by the rest of the group because I went on said excursion to pee in the bushes. Etc.

After the party died down, I was sitting on a bench with one of my classmates, and I got fed up with the piropos from all the drunk bichos raros meandering by. I was tired and irritated, and when one more guy walked by and said something stupid, I snapped and put my knowledge of Spanish and Mexican insults to use. I don’t know how intimidating my (broken Spanish) ranting was, but he left.

One of my goals before I leave Spain is to have the level of language necessary to really tell someone off, without sounding hilarious…

Anyway, I think I am going to the bullfight tonight. Little bit scared. Wish me luck.

The Finer Arts

Yesterday I went to Madrid to see El Museo del Prado with a few people. I liked the very small piece of Madrid that we saw, because there were, surprisingly, so many trees.

(There’s a lot of sky in this view of the Prado… because I like sky, but also because there were some random tourists in front that I didn’t want in my picture. Sorry, random tourists.)

I’ve been hurting for an art museum, so it was a good trip. We saw a lot of Goya, which was interesting especially considering that we’ve been studying him in our culture class. I like his portraits a lot, and his “darker” works are definitely… dark.

“El Bosco” has some crazy surreal stuff. I couldn’t stop looking at El Jardín de las Delicias (The Garden of Earthly Delights). Hell is the stuff of nightmares.

It was strange to see all the paintings I’ve seen in books for years, like St. Catherine of Alexandria. Much bigger than I imagined… and I loved the red of her cloak. Things like that don’t come through in prints.

I think the sculpture was still my favorite. I can’t imagine what it must be like to carve such intricate and expressive details into a block of marble. Maybe it’s the three dimensional aspect of sculpture that I like. Maybe I still just want to go back to the “touch gallery” at the Art Institute of Chicago, where you can touch the sculpture. I’m just as tactile as I am visual, and I really just want to touch art.

…perhaps not as creepily as that sounds?

The Prado still wasn’t as enormous as I’d imagined… maybe because so many parts of it were closed. It only took us a few hours to wander through it. We had dinner at a Thai restaurant… oh man, I haven’t eaten Thai food in forever. As much as I like Carmen’s spanish food, I miss the international flavor of the Ypsi-Ann Abor area. Especially the cheap international flavor. I’m going to cook a lot of spanish tortilla when I get home, but I’m also going to be very happy to go eat at Dalat and Al Noor and maybe even a little Temptations.

We were delayed by an ice cream emergency of sorts, and got on the metro a half hour before our train was supposed to leave.

Here’s us, not being on time. Despite running up some escalators like crazypeople, we missed the train. Luckily the lady changed our tickets for free, and we got on the next train leaving for Ávila just fifteen minutes later.

It was a good trip, and now that I’ve taken the metro and the train a few times I’m a little more confident of my abilities to shlep around Madrid. I plan on going back sometime next week to see the Reina Sofia… I’m looking forward to seeing some more modern art. After culture class today, I’m especially excited to go see Picasso’s Guernica.

In class we learned a little bit about the history of Guernica: a town bombed by German planes during the Spanish Civil War. The horse and the bull in Picasso’s painting have been interpreted various ways– the bull as Franco’s army and the horse as the town, or as Spain itself under Franco. I think all the interpretations are interesting because of the roles of these animals in Spain. Although the strength of the horse is traditionally more controlled than the bull, both are used by people for their own devices. It’s tradition to provoke the bull to violence, which is very interesting in the context of this painting and the identities usually attributed to its components.

The painting itself was painted in France, and was in the US for many years, until it returned to a democratic Spain.

Speaking of bulls, I may go to a bullfight in Ávila this Sunday. I’m very unsure about this. I want to go because it’s such a tradition in Spain, and because people get so excited about it, but on the other hand I don’t know if I can handle it. Basically, I don’t want to go watch the bulls die…. but I do want to go watch the people watching the bulls die. ¿Vale?

We’ll see.

It’s also possible that I may go puenting this weekend.

Puente = bridge
Hacer puenting = A word based on “fake english” that basically means throwing yourself off a puente. AKA bungee jumping.

(They say “hacer footing”, too, to mean jogging. Silly Spanish.)

When the moment comes, someone may have to throw me off the puente, but I’m determined to be brave and do as many ¡con dos huevos! things as possible on this trip.

And speaking of Germany (that is, Germans other than those who bombed Guernica) we’ve been learning a lot of really interesting things about the German language and culture from Bernd, a German student who is in Ávila for two weeks to study Spanish. He’s living with Anna and I, though he’s going to a different school and program. The señora has trouble pronouncing his name, so most times she just yells an anonymous “¡Bajate para comer!” (Come down and eat!) up the stairs when it’s time for dinner.

I can’t really pronounce any German either, as I’ve discovered. But we’ve learned the German word for “mullet” (which I can’t remember or pronounce) and some insults, which are fascinating… for instance, one major insult is to call someone “a person who parks their car in the shade so that it won’t be too hot when they return.”

…and I do believe that I’ll leave you on that note. Some Spanish socialization tonight, and our class trip to Salamanca tomorrow. Assuming I survive puenting, I’ll see you later.

Tiquismiquis

Hola, amigos.

Some people went horseback riding in the mountains this past weekend, but I stayed in Ávila to have some time to myself. It was a fairly peaceful weekend. Well, sort of. There was another fiesta at Nuestra Señora de las Vacas. They’re always fiesta-ing over there.

Sunday morning I woke up to music, bells, and fireworks, and went out on the balcony to see the Virgin go by again:

(That’s Carmen, la señora, on the other balcony.)

On Saturday there was also La Ronda de las Leyendas, reenactments of various legends of Ávila. We went to see the legend of “La Mora con los ojos traidos”… the moor with the traitor eyes?

The princess falls in love with an Arabic soldier, pines away for him… etc, etc. He and her husband have a duel, but the husband pardons the soldier’s life. The soldier makes a plot to kill him, which the husband finds out, and then both the traitorous princess and her lover die in a fire. Pretty much all the elements of an exciting story.

(Death by fire… a good end to any story.)

After the Ronda, we stayed out until 6am with our professor, shlepping aroudn town and dancing, which was interesting. Even more interesting was the bar where we looked up at the tv and started freaking out, because there was definitely porn playing. Not just porn… instructional porn? It’s a European thing, I guess. The bartender was kind enough to change it to something more low-key. (Fútbol?) He was a cheeseball. That’s him on the left. The other cheeseball is a friend of our profesor’s.

(You probably can’t see it, but his shirt has a cow that is a mug of beer, saying “Eat yer heart out, Arthur.” No one knew what it meant. There are no shirts with Spanish on them here… just English. Not always logical, but always English. Anna and I saw one at the mall that said “IS THE ROCK FUN?!”

Yes, yes it is.

I’ve been trying to read as much as possible in Spanish… since I’m in Spain and all. The room I’m staying in has an entire shelf of books, mostly a very impressive collection of Gabriel Garcia Márquez. Last week I finished El Amor en los Años de Colera. I’ve read it twice in English, which helped when the vocabulary got murky. I brought another Márquez book, Los Ojos de Perro Azul, which was the only Spanish edition I found back in Ypsi (at the Cross Street Bookstore, which is one of my favorite places ever), but I haven’t started that yet.

Last night I finished Las Cenizas de Ángela (Angela’s Ashes), and I liked it so much that I’m starting Lo Es (‘Tis) now, both by Frank McCourt. I started reading an English copy of Angela’s Ashes at the library to get a feel for McCourt’s style, before continuing with the Spanish at home. I have a feeling that I’ll have to reread both later, in English, because some things (especially colloquial Irish phrases) just don’t come through in the translation. For example, “pedo de violinista” isn’t the same as “fiddler’s fart”. It just isn’t.

In other news, my classmates and I have been giving presentations in our Communication class about the cities we’re from. Clare and I gave one about Ypsi (I couldn’t think of enough about Maybee to give a presentation. At least Ypsi has crime and the Brick Dick.)

Please note my superior map drawing skills, and also the Brick Dick. Javier asked if we had any famous monuments, so we tried to describe it as politely as possible, and then I had to draw a pictures.

And tiquismiquis means “nit-picky”… we were talking about Ann Arbor yuppies.

Tomorrow I’m going to Madrid and to the Prado; I’m excited. But for now time is running out, amigos. Hasta luego.

Whoops…

I had a beer in class yesterday morning. No, let me explain. It was an accident. This past week when Katie and I were researching parks in Santiago, one of the translated sites misspelled “shady” and described the park as having “many shandy areas.” So today in between classes, I was in the school cafeteria and saw a bottled beveraged called Shandy, situated next to various juices and iced tea. I purchased it to show Katie, for the sake of nostalgia and humor. It said “flavor de limón”… I thought it was some kind of tea. It’s not. It’s a beer, which I proceeded to drink back in the classroom. My classmates (and professor) were perturbed and amused by my apparent alcoholism. Whoops. I’m not a connoisseur of beer, much less obscure Spanish (and somewhat sissy) beer. I had no idea. But if they don’t want students to drink beer in class, they shouldn’t sell it in the school cafeteria, eh?

Anyway.

This past weekend’s Santiago trip turned out to be quite the adventure… an adventure that extended far longer than anticipated. But those stories will have to wait until later. The pictures are almost all up.