¡DIOS MIO!
Seemingly overnight, the weather has shifted from fall-like mild weather (moderately warm-in-the-sun days, cold night) to summer! It gets HOT now in the day, and stays warm enough at night that I don´t need a sweatshirt! This excites me to no end. Finally starting to get the weather I came to expect from southernish Spain. The beach awaits my pale white ass.
Small additional bits:
Parents left the other day. Things went well and they seemed to have a good time. They went off to Barcelona, and will be deaprting shortly for a weekend in England - a place much colder than here.
Got the bullfight pics up. They came out alright. I have three videos I wanted to post as well, but I don´t know exactly how to go about doing so at the moment. I´ll let you all know if I figure it out.
Greg, my last roommate from NU, will be joining Eric and me for our Northern Europe Spring Break Extravaganza. I´m very excited about this, as it´ll be nice to have an extra familiar face in unknown lands. Everything is booked and ready to go, just need to count down the days now.
Off to some vineyard in Jumilla this weekend with my group. Should be cool times. I´ll report back.
Applying for a job in Barcelona for the summer as an RA with a language program for high-schoolers. If I can get this, it would be massively cool. More on this to come soon.
That´s it for the moment. Be back soon
Hasta Pronto
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
¡Viva la Sardina!, ¡Olé!, y mis padres
Man, I´ve needing to update like, whoa. Hopefully I´ll remember everything I need to say. Never had time to update this weekend because, as I briefly mentioned, mom and dad came to visit from the States for a few days. More on that in a bit...
So last Wednesday marked (what I think is) the end of Carnaval: La Muerte de la Sardina. I posted pictures of this on Flickr last week, but I suppose it deserves some explanation. Traditionally, this event is supposed to mark the beginning of Lent (some big Christian thing, I´m told), so everybody dresses up in all black, like a funeral, and is supposed to carry a sardine somewhere and bury it. I guess this symbolizes putting the meat away or whatever. I never understood the whole Lent thing to begin with.
So at the Alicante one, it was a little different than was explained to me. Basically, all the drag queens come out in black along with the rest of the the hardcore (mostly) middle-aged Carnival-goers. Most of people were dressed in extravagent funeral clothing and everybody met at the top of Las Ramblas where there was a giant paper/wooden fish that people were carrying and dancing around with. There was also a seemingly less important paper/wooden ship, and a dude with a PA system on a roller cart who was chanting like a pope (I think popes chant, right?). So, there is this small marching band that keeps playing little songs, and then all of a sudden they break into a dance/march down last Ramblas. So the fish/ship people dance, the band plays cadences and songs, while everyone else follows doing call and response chanting with the pope guy (Viva la Sardina!, Amen, etc.). The procession cuts into the Barrio at one point, and does the same spiel down the narrow streets for a while, until we hit a small plaza with a stage set up. Everybody pours in, and the ship and sardine are placed in the middle of the plaza, where they are doused in some sort of flammable liquid. The band is playing, and the pope gets up on the stage and the call and response continues for 10 more minutes. Then they light the spark sticks and suddenly everything is up in flames. Excellent! When the fire dies down a tad, everybody dances around the wreckage while music plays in the background. It was a very cool night, even though there weren´t more than 150-175 people in attendance.
The whole thing seemed to mock the Church a little, but it didn´t seem excessively derisive. It seemed as though it was all in good fun. I was told that La Muerte de la Sardina is a bigger event in other cities, but for tiny Alicante, it´s apparantly only for the hardcore of the celebrators. There was no ridiculous borrachos (drunks) like during the weekend festivities.
That was probably the most notable thing I did last week. This past Friday was rather uneventful, and things were especially dead since everybody was probably all partied out from Caraval. The parents showed up on Saturday in the afternoon...
They were tired, of course, from travelling for almost an entire day straight, but happy to be in Spain visiting their better child. Neither of my parents really speaks any Spanish, so I had it figured that this could be a very difficult few days. The other hurdle I am facing is the total lack of shit to do in Alicante when it isn´t warm enough to sit your pale ass on the beach all day. So Saturday was low key since they were both travel-wary and jet-lagged. Sunday was the day for the parents to come to the host family´s place for comida. This, I thought, was going to be an awkward disaster, but I was completely off mark. I figured I would be the only way any sort of communicating happened between my Amercan and Spanish families, but my mom had a phrase book and was able to hold her own quite well. She ended up asking a lot of her own questions, which made my life much easier (translating from English to Spanish is much harder than vice-versa). So things went pretty smoothly and there was a good amount of conversation going on, with only a few awkward pauses. On the whole, I´d say it was a successful lunch.
We departed a while afterwards for mine and my parents´ very first bullfight (pictures will be up on Flickr soon). Now I suppose I had an idea of what these things were like, but actually going to one was a very different experience than I was expecting. For the most part, much of Spain has become disgusted with the idea of the bullfight (with good cause), so it is now a "sport" relished solely by old-schoolers (read: old dudes who smoke cigars) and witnessed by confounded tourists. I personally had a great time, and was fascinated by the brutality of it, but I can easily see why it´s not for everyone, or even for most self-respecting people.
To start, they let the bull out into the ring and run him around a few times to get him riled up. There are several guys with pink sheets/capes that take turns waving them to get the bull to move around where they want it. They will move him around until the Picador comes out. The Picador is a dude on a horse (which has some sort of horn-proof armor on) with a giant spear. They get the bull to go near enough so the picador can stab him directly in the back, a little below it´s head. Of course, the bull starts ramming the horse (who is blindfolded for obvious reasons) like crazy, so the Picador just rams the spear in that much harder. After a minute or two of this, they lure the bull away, and the Picador leaves the ring. After this, three guys will come out, one at a time, with two harpoon tipped spears in their hands (maybe 2 and a half feet long at most). The dudes with pink capes get the bull to see the dude with spears and then they (the bull and the spear dude) charge each other, resulting in a present for the bull (two harpoon spears in it´s back). That ends up being 6 spears total if your math is shoddy. These effectively tear up the muscles in the bull´s back/shoulders, tiring it out and making it more manageable for the the final matador guy who comes out (or so my mom overheard someone saying). At this point, this guy comes out with a blood red cape and a sword, and messes around with the bull for a while. This is where he gets to show off a lot and do all the fancy crap that most people assume is what a bullfight consists solely of. Eventually, he takes his sword and rams it all the way into the bull´s back. The bull maybe lasts another minute, then either sits down or outright collapses. At this point, they take a dagger and mash it into the top of its head and wiggle it around to make sure it´s dead. Oh yeah, the whole time the bull gets stabbed at all, everybody cheers wildly. hehehe. After it´s over, they drag the bull out by way of two horses. Pretty, barbaric, no? Well, I had a good time, although my mom wasn´t so into it.
By Monday we´ve pretty much run out of things to do. They are still here today (Tuesday), and I´m struggling to think of what to do this afternoon and evening. We planned on seeing the archeological museum, but then after that it´s pretty much up in the air. They are gone early tomorrow for Barcelona, where they´ll have plenty to keep them occupied for 2 nights. Anyway, it was good to see them here, regardless of the lack of activities this time of year.
I´ve been feeling really good about my Spanish lately. I´m comprehending a whole lot more than before and finding it much easier to speak in a flowing manner. I´ve somehow managed to convince my brain to not worry so much about forming perfect grammatical sentences when I talk, and things have just starting coming out so much more easily. I feel as if (here comes a way over-used cliché) a levee is about to break and all the Spanish is starting to pour out. Having my parents here asking me what things mean or how to say phrases has made me realize I´ve actually retained. I also notice I don´t have to fish around for words in my dictionary nearly as often as before. It´s exciting to know that I have over two months more to improve before I´m gone.
So the rest of my week consists of a project and a test, and then midterms are next week. After that is Madrid and Valencia (for Las Fallas). I want to try to get another independent weekend trip in soon to Granada or some other not-too-distant Spanish city. It´d be cool to rent a car for this one so I can really take in the countryside and stop wherever it seems like a good place to do so. We shall see about that.
Well, this post didn´t end up as long as originally planned, but I need to be getting on with the day. It´s becoming a hell of a lot harder to keep this thing up to date with all the schoolwork I have and all the stuff I get into during the weekends.
I´ll try to have bullfight pictures up soon enough.
Adios for now
So last Wednesday marked (what I think is) the end of Carnaval: La Muerte de la Sardina. I posted pictures of this on Flickr last week, but I suppose it deserves some explanation. Traditionally, this event is supposed to mark the beginning of Lent (some big Christian thing, I´m told), so everybody dresses up in all black, like a funeral, and is supposed to carry a sardine somewhere and bury it. I guess this symbolizes putting the meat away or whatever. I never understood the whole Lent thing to begin with.
So at the Alicante one, it was a little different than was explained to me. Basically, all the drag queens come out in black along with the rest of the the hardcore (mostly) middle-aged Carnival-goers. Most of people were dressed in extravagent funeral clothing and everybody met at the top of Las Ramblas where there was a giant paper/wooden fish that people were carrying and dancing around with. There was also a seemingly less important paper/wooden ship, and a dude with a PA system on a roller cart who was chanting like a pope (I think popes chant, right?). So, there is this small marching band that keeps playing little songs, and then all of a sudden they break into a dance/march down last Ramblas. So the fish/ship people dance, the band plays cadences and songs, while everyone else follows doing call and response chanting with the pope guy (Viva la Sardina!, Amen, etc.). The procession cuts into the Barrio at one point, and does the same spiel down the narrow streets for a while, until we hit a small plaza with a stage set up. Everybody pours in, and the ship and sardine are placed in the middle of the plaza, where they are doused in some sort of flammable liquid. The band is playing, and the pope gets up on the stage and the call and response continues for 10 more minutes. Then they light the spark sticks and suddenly everything is up in flames. Excellent! When the fire dies down a tad, everybody dances around the wreckage while music plays in the background. It was a very cool night, even though there weren´t more than 150-175 people in attendance.
The whole thing seemed to mock the Church a little, but it didn´t seem excessively derisive. It seemed as though it was all in good fun. I was told that La Muerte de la Sardina is a bigger event in other cities, but for tiny Alicante, it´s apparantly only for the hardcore of the celebrators. There was no ridiculous borrachos (drunks) like during the weekend festivities.
That was probably the most notable thing I did last week. This past Friday was rather uneventful, and things were especially dead since everybody was probably all partied out from Caraval. The parents showed up on Saturday in the afternoon...
They were tired, of course, from travelling for almost an entire day straight, but happy to be in Spain visiting their better child. Neither of my parents really speaks any Spanish, so I had it figured that this could be a very difficult few days. The other hurdle I am facing is the total lack of shit to do in Alicante when it isn´t warm enough to sit your pale ass on the beach all day. So Saturday was low key since they were both travel-wary and jet-lagged. Sunday was the day for the parents to come to the host family´s place for comida. This, I thought, was going to be an awkward disaster, but I was completely off mark. I figured I would be the only way any sort of communicating happened between my Amercan and Spanish families, but my mom had a phrase book and was able to hold her own quite well. She ended up asking a lot of her own questions, which made my life much easier (translating from English to Spanish is much harder than vice-versa). So things went pretty smoothly and there was a good amount of conversation going on, with only a few awkward pauses. On the whole, I´d say it was a successful lunch.
We departed a while afterwards for mine and my parents´ very first bullfight (pictures will be up on Flickr soon). Now I suppose I had an idea of what these things were like, but actually going to one was a very different experience than I was expecting. For the most part, much of Spain has become disgusted with the idea of the bullfight (with good cause), so it is now a "sport" relished solely by old-schoolers (read: old dudes who smoke cigars) and witnessed by confounded tourists. I personally had a great time, and was fascinated by the brutality of it, but I can easily see why it´s not for everyone, or even for most self-respecting people.
To start, they let the bull out into the ring and run him around a few times to get him riled up. There are several guys with pink sheets/capes that take turns waving them to get the bull to move around where they want it. They will move him around until the Picador comes out. The Picador is a dude on a horse (which has some sort of horn-proof armor on) with a giant spear. They get the bull to go near enough so the picador can stab him directly in the back, a little below it´s head. Of course, the bull starts ramming the horse (who is blindfolded for obvious reasons) like crazy, so the Picador just rams the spear in that much harder. After a minute or two of this, they lure the bull away, and the Picador leaves the ring. After this, three guys will come out, one at a time, with two harpoon tipped spears in their hands (maybe 2 and a half feet long at most). The dudes with pink capes get the bull to see the dude with spears and then they (the bull and the spear dude) charge each other, resulting in a present for the bull (two harpoon spears in it´s back). That ends up being 6 spears total if your math is shoddy. These effectively tear up the muscles in the bull´s back/shoulders, tiring it out and making it more manageable for the the final matador guy who comes out (or so my mom overheard someone saying). At this point, this guy comes out with a blood red cape and a sword, and messes around with the bull for a while. This is where he gets to show off a lot and do all the fancy crap that most people assume is what a bullfight consists solely of. Eventually, he takes his sword and rams it all the way into the bull´s back. The bull maybe lasts another minute, then either sits down or outright collapses. At this point, they take a dagger and mash it into the top of its head and wiggle it around to make sure it´s dead. Oh yeah, the whole time the bull gets stabbed at all, everybody cheers wildly. hehehe. After it´s over, they drag the bull out by way of two horses. Pretty, barbaric, no? Well, I had a good time, although my mom wasn´t so into it.
By Monday we´ve pretty much run out of things to do. They are still here today (Tuesday), and I´m struggling to think of what to do this afternoon and evening. We planned on seeing the archeological museum, but then after that it´s pretty much up in the air. They are gone early tomorrow for Barcelona, where they´ll have plenty to keep them occupied for 2 nights. Anyway, it was good to see them here, regardless of the lack of activities this time of year.
I´ve been feeling really good about my Spanish lately. I´m comprehending a whole lot more than before and finding it much easier to speak in a flowing manner. I´ve somehow managed to convince my brain to not worry so much about forming perfect grammatical sentences when I talk, and things have just starting coming out so much more easily. I feel as if (here comes a way over-used cliché) a levee is about to break and all the Spanish is starting to pour out. Having my parents here asking me what things mean or how to say phrases has made me realize I´ve actually retained. I also notice I don´t have to fish around for words in my dictionary nearly as often as before. It´s exciting to know that I have over two months more to improve before I´m gone.
So the rest of my week consists of a project and a test, and then midterms are next week. After that is Madrid and Valencia (for Las Fallas). I want to try to get another independent weekend trip in soon to Granada or some other not-too-distant Spanish city. It´d be cool to rent a car for this one so I can really take in the countryside and stop wherever it seems like a good place to do so. We shall see about that.
Well, this post didn´t end up as long as originally planned, but I need to be getting on with the day. It´s becoming a hell of a lot harder to keep this thing up to date with all the schoolwork I have and all the stuff I get into during the weekends.
I´ll try to have bullfight pictures up soon enough.
Adios for now
Friday, March 03, 2006
So little time...
Been too busy to do up a real post this week, even though I have plenty to post about. Got some new pictures up on Flickr of La Muerte de la Pescado, the ending ritual of Carnaval from Wednesday night. Parents will be in town from tomorrow until Wednesday morning, so I probably won´t be able to post an explinaton until after they´re gone. Lo siento. I´ll try to sneak into an internet cafe at some point.
Hasta luego para ahora
Hasta luego para ahora
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Carnaval was...
Saturday night sure was... "interesting". I guess I should say things were slightly unhinged, but that implies lots of things happened that I can´t really go into much detail about, so I´ll just stick to saying things were "interesting." Besides, it would be impolite to discuss in earnest some of the activities I witnessed some of my peers from the program partaking in. I don´t even want to talk about some of the crap the Spaniards were getting into.
I, myself, managed to maintain a rather high level of sobriety (for no reason in particular), but maybe that´s why so many things I saw last night seemed so much more crazy. Things started relatively mild, with a couple stages setup on Las Ramblas featuring some bad, but festive music. People were milling about seeming to have a good time, but things maintained a decently family-oriented atmosphere. However, as the night progressed the streets seemed to descend into a thick haze of alcohol-induced sleaze.
Most of the time (with certain exceptions), I think I dislike events where huge masses of people are getting extremely inebriated at once. I came up with a basic idea of why people seem to operate at their poorest and most selfish when under the influence of large amounts of alcohol. I am always reminded of this when lots of people around me are a lot drunker than I am, because I see a lot of sketchy behavior at once. Obviously, as we drink, more and more of our basic mental and motor functions break down, making it more difficult to perform basic tasks. As a result, we´re forced to focus more of our energy towards standing upright, keeping our eyes open, talking coherently, etc., while everything else (remembering to zip up our fly, paying for a drink, watching out for our friends) is relegated to our drunk auto-pilot program, whose effectiveness also happens to depend on how much booze is in our blood. Ultimately, this means we become pretty selfish creatures when we´re a few too many deep, mostly as an act of instinctual self-preservation. The consequences of these "survival skills" can be seen socially in a myriad of ways. This can be played out a whole lot further, and I could give lots of examples (especially from last night), but I´m just trying to get my basic point across. So, for the most part, last night wasn´t a sour experience per se, but I guess I wasn´t in the right "frame-of-mind" to not notice how slimy things were looking at times.
Anyway
People in Spain always go out with their big group of friends. I don´t know if you can call it an intesified form of the "clique" system, but people here seem to hold fast to one set of friends and these friends do absolutely everything together. So while it shouldn´t be so surprising that these groups all dress in identical costumes when they go out for Carnival, it still was... at least until after the 5th set of slutty nurses walked by. Usually, for Halloween in the States, people pride themselves on how original or creative they can be. Here, it seems like they should hand out awards for the most like-minded folks. It was easy to spot groups of Americans, because everybody in the crowd would be sporting a different costume. Even when we´re dressed up to fit in, we still stick out like sore thumbs.
One other thing I appreciated seeing was how there were large portable tents set up in various locations near the festivities where volunteers were stationed to attend to people in immediate need of care (i.e. getting their stomachs pumped). These stations were notoriusly not-busy which is definitely A Good Thing, but I think it´s comforting that the people are well looked after if they go a little overboard. Despite the overwhelming atmosphere of chaos, there was still safety nets available.
Other than that, there´s surprisingly little else (of a more general nature) to discuss. An imagination is only required if you wish to envision the juicier details of a publically condoned, all-night boozefest in the streets. This truly does make me wonder what the Fogueres de Sant Joan is like (the HUGE multi-day festival in Alicante that takes place after I leave in June). I suppose I´ll get a sample of a real Spanish festival when I spend a night in Valencia for Las Fallas in a few weeks, but it would be cool to experience an entire weeklong one.
Times about at the internet cafe, so I´m off to do some homework and get ready for a fun week of classes.
Chau
I, myself, managed to maintain a rather high level of sobriety (for no reason in particular), but maybe that´s why so many things I saw last night seemed so much more crazy. Things started relatively mild, with a couple stages setup on Las Ramblas featuring some bad, but festive music. People were milling about seeming to have a good time, but things maintained a decently family-oriented atmosphere. However, as the night progressed the streets seemed to descend into a thick haze of alcohol-induced sleaze.
Most of the time (with certain exceptions), I think I dislike events where huge masses of people are getting extremely inebriated at once. I came up with a basic idea of why people seem to operate at their poorest and most selfish when under the influence of large amounts of alcohol. I am always reminded of this when lots of people around me are a lot drunker than I am, because I see a lot of sketchy behavior at once. Obviously, as we drink, more and more of our basic mental and motor functions break down, making it more difficult to perform basic tasks. As a result, we´re forced to focus more of our energy towards standing upright, keeping our eyes open, talking coherently, etc., while everything else (remembering to zip up our fly, paying for a drink, watching out for our friends) is relegated to our drunk auto-pilot program, whose effectiveness also happens to depend on how much booze is in our blood. Ultimately, this means we become pretty selfish creatures when we´re a few too many deep, mostly as an act of instinctual self-preservation. The consequences of these "survival skills" can be seen socially in a myriad of ways. This can be played out a whole lot further, and I could give lots of examples (especially from last night), but I´m just trying to get my basic point across. So, for the most part, last night wasn´t a sour experience per se, but I guess I wasn´t in the right "frame-of-mind" to not notice how slimy things were looking at times.
Anyway
People in Spain always go out with their big group of friends. I don´t know if you can call it an intesified form of the "clique" system, but people here seem to hold fast to one set of friends and these friends do absolutely everything together. So while it shouldn´t be so surprising that these groups all dress in identical costumes when they go out for Carnival, it still was... at least until after the 5th set of slutty nurses walked by. Usually, for Halloween in the States, people pride themselves on how original or creative they can be. Here, it seems like they should hand out awards for the most like-minded folks. It was easy to spot groups of Americans, because everybody in the crowd would be sporting a different costume. Even when we´re dressed up to fit in, we still stick out like sore thumbs.
One other thing I appreciated seeing was how there were large portable tents set up in various locations near the festivities where volunteers were stationed to attend to people in immediate need of care (i.e. getting their stomachs pumped). These stations were notoriusly not-busy which is definitely A Good Thing, but I think it´s comforting that the people are well looked after if they go a little overboard. Despite the overwhelming atmosphere of chaos, there was still safety nets available.
Other than that, there´s surprisingly little else (of a more general nature) to discuss. An imagination is only required if you wish to envision the juicier details of a publically condoned, all-night boozefest in the streets. This truly does make me wonder what the Fogueres de Sant Joan is like (the HUGE multi-day festival in Alicante that takes place after I leave in June). I suppose I´ll get a sample of a real Spanish festival when I spend a night in Valencia for Las Fallas in a few weeks, but it would be cool to experience an entire weeklong one.
Times about at the internet cafe, so I´m off to do some homework and get ready for a fun week of classes.
Chau
Thursday, February 23, 2006
Last Weekend, Festivities to Come, and Finding Religion in España
Not a whole lot to report on this week, but I shall report nonetheless.
Last weekend was really low key, so not much going on over there. I guess there was one small thing: I was introduced to the number one botellón spot in Alicante. It´s near the bottom of the hill that the Castillo is on, and it was interestingly educational to experience. Basically tons of Spanish students (college-aged) come out to this spot with bottles, mixers, and -get this- bags of ice and plastic cups, then proceed to make mixed drinks and socialize until it´s late enough to hit up the clubs at el puerto. I found this to be downright hysterical, because if there was something equivalent to it in the states, it would simply involve lots and lots of 30-racks of bad beer. People actually bring out ice and cups and make mixed drinks when they drink in public here. Ridiculous!
Not sure how often you folks check the picture page, but I´ve updated pretty recently with my impromptu "Walking Tour of Alicante." (the other semi-notable thing I did over the weekend). I went a little overboard with the pictures of skinned rabbits at the Mercado Central, but they´re just so fun! Check it out. Link is to the right.
Finished doing all the necessary booking for my Spring Break trip, which is exciting and relieving. I think I posted the plan before, but as it stands now it´s looking like Amsterdam for 2 nights, then on to Rotterdam for 3 nights. After that, we´ll hop onto a train to Brussels (in Belgium) where we´ll drink some tasty beer and hopefully make it out to a few abbeys in the countryside (although this is still up for debate). At the very least we hope to make a daytrip or two to some close surrounding cities (Gent or Antwerp, perhaps), although I think they speak less English in these places than they do in Brussels. Neither me nor Eric knows French or German (or is Dutch the other language they speak there?) at all, so things should be interesting to say the least. After 4 nights in Belgium, I´m splitting off to England (3 nights) by myself to visit Matt. He´ll be on break himself, so we should be able to have an enjoyable weekend with his friends before I head back to Alicante on Monday. This isn´t happening until the middle of April, but I´m still extremely excited about the whole thing.
The parents are set to visit the weekend after this coming one. I´m struggling to think of things to keep them occupied with in Alicante, as there is not a whole lot to do here. Mi madre española said she wants to have them over for comida one day which will give me the honor of playing translator. That should be a barrel of laughs. I´ll remain optimistic that things won´t break into either a) a long awakwardly silent affair or b) a talk-fest that will have my brain bleeding trying to constantly translate. we shall see...
Paco, the dictatorial program director (as many now refer to him), has heeded to the many complaints of students disaffected by an extremely large workload that has been bestowed upon us and has given us a treat...
Las Fallas is a huge, week-long festival in Valencia (the 3rd largest city in Spain, which is about an hour and a half north of Alicante) that involves the construction of €30,000+ gigundus paper/wood floats by every section of the city. These are paraded about during the week (or maybe only once during a giant city-wide parade, not too sure on this detail). Basically the week is a non-stop party in the street, day in-day out, which culminates in the eventual burning of said floats at midnight on Sunday. This festival was played up quite a bit when we first arrived here in Alicante, but we were to have class the Monday that immediately followed it. Paco has graciously given us this Monday off so we can at least head in and get some partying done while watching shit burn on the final night of the festival. It´s impossible to find accomodations as all hostels require a 5 night minimum for booking, so I´ll be heading in Sunday evening (directly from a group sponsored trip in Madrid), and spending the whole night and morning enjoying the festivities. I´ll report back after this occurs with plenty of pictures.
Ooh, something funny happened while I was taking pictures for my Walking Tour of Alicante. This well-dressed dude saw me taking pictures and came up to talk to me. He was really friendly and was asking about what I was doing studying here and all that good stuff. It was cool to talk to someone new in español, and he seemed harmless enough. All of a sudden, he holds out this little pamphlet/magazine thing and tells me it´s free so I should take it. There was a picture of a woman and a baby on the cover and it said something about family values or whatever. Figured it would be good practice reading material (like the vicious anti-socialist leaflets that this guy storms around handing out are), so I take it and thank the guy. He walks off, and I start to leaf through only to find another, smaller pamphlet inside.On the cover of this one, there is a woman kneeling down infront of something (a grave maybe?) crying, and it says something about waiting for the return of Jehova, and then all this menacing crap on the inside about how we´re all doomed unless we repent. I then realize I had been approached by a real live Spanish Jehova´s Witness! I immediately threw the pamphlets out on sheer principle, but I kind of wish I kept them now just for kicks. Having become well-acquainted with the beliefs and policies of JWs from the Cults and Sects class I took last semester, I figured -at the time- there wasn´t too much the pamphlets had to offer anyway that I didn´t already know. I´ve never been approached by a Jehova´s witness in the U.S. so this was my first genuine experience, which is why I felt the desire to share it with you all.
Finished up my Spanish cooking class yesterday. We learned to make 6 different kinds of tapas, paella, Spanish tortilla, and this really tasty gazpacho. We also learned to make this cream dessert, which was delcious, but seemed hard to make. Still, there´s a few more things I know how to make now that I entertain friends with.
Every week in school we have a general theme or topic that we focus on related to Spanish culture. The first two weeks it was music (1st week was the 80s, 2nd week was current stuff). This week we´re focusing on Spanish food and wine. When we got here they said that Spanish people are in love with their cuisine and they think it is the greatest food in the world, and I can now confidently endorse this statement. After having popaganda about how healthy and incredible the Spanish diet is pounded into my head for 3+ days, I am quite certain that Spaniards have no idea there is any other way to eat than the way they do. I guess that´s why so many ethnic restaurants do so poorly with the locals. I suppose I´ve given the Spanish diet a bad rap for being really unhealthy, but I suppose if you are doing it right, it can be pretty well rounded. I think that my madre cooks a lot of fried meat because the guys in the house like that kind of stuff and yell at her if she doesn´t make it often enough. Still, there is no way that the amount of olive oil they use can be considered good for you. Also, we had to hear about how wine is the greatest discovery since... whatever came before wine. They talk the stuff up like it can cure every disease known to man (as long as it´s consumed in moderation). Somehow, I don´t think all of the mixed drinks Spanish youth consume while they botellón on the weekends is quite as healthful, but I guess they are on the right track.
Speaking of food and drink, I´m going to head off and get some. They have free paella, tapas, and wine/beer at one of the cafeterias here on campus every Thursday, so I´d be stupid to pass up the opportunity. Afterwards, it´s off to my uber-dull literature class. After some homework, I´m off to the jazz club tonight, one of my favorite places to be in Alicante.
Adios!
Last weekend was really low key, so not much going on over there. I guess there was one small thing: I was introduced to the number one botellón spot in Alicante. It´s near the bottom of the hill that the Castillo is on, and it was interestingly educational to experience. Basically tons of Spanish students (college-aged) come out to this spot with bottles, mixers, and -get this- bags of ice and plastic cups, then proceed to make mixed drinks and socialize until it´s late enough to hit up the clubs at el puerto. I found this to be downright hysterical, because if there was something equivalent to it in the states, it would simply involve lots and lots of 30-racks of bad beer. People actually bring out ice and cups and make mixed drinks when they drink in public here. Ridiculous!
Not sure how often you folks check the picture page, but I´ve updated pretty recently with my impromptu "Walking Tour of Alicante." (the other semi-notable thing I did over the weekend). I went a little overboard with the pictures of skinned rabbits at the Mercado Central, but they´re just so fun! Check it out. Link is to the right.
Finished doing all the necessary booking for my Spring Break trip, which is exciting and relieving. I think I posted the plan before, but as it stands now it´s looking like Amsterdam for 2 nights, then on to Rotterdam for 3 nights. After that, we´ll hop onto a train to Brussels (in Belgium) where we´ll drink some tasty beer and hopefully make it out to a few abbeys in the countryside (although this is still up for debate). At the very least we hope to make a daytrip or two to some close surrounding cities (Gent or Antwerp, perhaps), although I think they speak less English in these places than they do in Brussels. Neither me nor Eric knows French or German (or is Dutch the other language they speak there?) at all, so things should be interesting to say the least. After 4 nights in Belgium, I´m splitting off to England (3 nights) by myself to visit Matt. He´ll be on break himself, so we should be able to have an enjoyable weekend with his friends before I head back to Alicante on Monday. This isn´t happening until the middle of April, but I´m still extremely excited about the whole thing.
The parents are set to visit the weekend after this coming one. I´m struggling to think of things to keep them occupied with in Alicante, as there is not a whole lot to do here. Mi madre española said she wants to have them over for comida one day which will give me the honor of playing translator. That should be a barrel of laughs. I´ll remain optimistic that things won´t break into either a) a long awakwardly silent affair or b) a talk-fest that will have my brain bleeding trying to constantly translate. we shall see...
Paco, the dictatorial program director (as many now refer to him), has heeded to the many complaints of students disaffected by an extremely large workload that has been bestowed upon us and has given us a treat...
Las Fallas is a huge, week-long festival in Valencia (the 3rd largest city in Spain, which is about an hour and a half north of Alicante) that involves the construction of €30,000+ gigundus paper/wood floats by every section of the city. These are paraded about during the week (or maybe only once during a giant city-wide parade, not too sure on this detail). Basically the week is a non-stop party in the street, day in-day out, which culminates in the eventual burning of said floats at midnight on Sunday. This festival was played up quite a bit when we first arrived here in Alicante, but we were to have class the Monday that immediately followed it. Paco has graciously given us this Monday off so we can at least head in and get some partying done while watching shit burn on the final night of the festival. It´s impossible to find accomodations as all hostels require a 5 night minimum for booking, so I´ll be heading in Sunday evening (directly from a group sponsored trip in Madrid), and spending the whole night and morning enjoying the festivities. I´ll report back after this occurs with plenty of pictures.
Ooh, something funny happened while I was taking pictures for my Walking Tour of Alicante. This well-dressed dude saw me taking pictures and came up to talk to me. He was really friendly and was asking about what I was doing studying here and all that good stuff. It was cool to talk to someone new in español, and he seemed harmless enough. All of a sudden, he holds out this little pamphlet/magazine thing and tells me it´s free so I should take it. There was a picture of a woman and a baby on the cover and it said something about family values or whatever. Figured it would be good practice reading material (like the vicious anti-socialist leaflets that this guy storms around handing out are), so I take it and thank the guy. He walks off, and I start to leaf through only to find another, smaller pamphlet inside.On the cover of this one, there is a woman kneeling down infront of something (a grave maybe?) crying, and it says something about waiting for the return of Jehova, and then all this menacing crap on the inside about how we´re all doomed unless we repent. I then realize I had been approached by a real live Spanish Jehova´s Witness! I immediately threw the pamphlets out on sheer principle, but I kind of wish I kept them now just for kicks. Having become well-acquainted with the beliefs and policies of JWs from the Cults and Sects class I took last semester, I figured -at the time- there wasn´t too much the pamphlets had to offer anyway that I didn´t already know. I´ve never been approached by a Jehova´s witness in the U.S. so this was my first genuine experience, which is why I felt the desire to share it with you all.
Finished up my Spanish cooking class yesterday. We learned to make 6 different kinds of tapas, paella, Spanish tortilla, and this really tasty gazpacho. We also learned to make this cream dessert, which was delcious, but seemed hard to make. Still, there´s a few more things I know how to make now that I entertain friends with.
Every week in school we have a general theme or topic that we focus on related to Spanish culture. The first two weeks it was music (1st week was the 80s, 2nd week was current stuff). This week we´re focusing on Spanish food and wine. When we got here they said that Spanish people are in love with their cuisine and they think it is the greatest food in the world, and I can now confidently endorse this statement. After having popaganda about how healthy and incredible the Spanish diet is pounded into my head for 3+ days, I am quite certain that Spaniards have no idea there is any other way to eat than the way they do. I guess that´s why so many ethnic restaurants do so poorly with the locals. I suppose I´ve given the Spanish diet a bad rap for being really unhealthy, but I suppose if you are doing it right, it can be pretty well rounded. I think that my madre cooks a lot of fried meat because the guys in the house like that kind of stuff and yell at her if she doesn´t make it often enough. Still, there is no way that the amount of olive oil they use can be considered good for you. Also, we had to hear about how wine is the greatest discovery since... whatever came before wine. They talk the stuff up like it can cure every disease known to man (as long as it´s consumed in moderation). Somehow, I don´t think all of the mixed drinks Spanish youth consume while they botellón on the weekends is quite as healthful, but I guess they are on the right track.
Speaking of food and drink, I´m going to head off and get some. They have free paella, tapas, and wine/beer at one of the cafeterias here on campus every Thursday, so I´d be stupid to pass up the opportunity. Afterwards, it´s off to my uber-dull literature class. After some homework, I´m off to the jazz club tonight, one of my favorite places to be in Alicante.
Adios!
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
taking suggestions...
Open forum time, folks...
What should I be for Carnival this weekend? Hurry, cause the costume stores are packed this week and will only get worse as the weekend gets closer. Carnival is, as I´ve written in my past post, Halloween in February with lots of public drinking and a parade instead of free candy. I need something good and creative. Post in the comments section below. Help me out here, people.
Real post to come soon...
and by the way, posted pics of Alicante on my Flickr page, and upgraded to a Pro account, so from now on, there will be higher quality photos. good stuff.
What should I be for Carnival this weekend? Hurry, cause the costume stores are packed this week and will only get worse as the weekend gets closer. Carnival is, as I´ve written in my past post, Halloween in February with lots of public drinking and a parade instead of free candy. I need something good and creative. Post in the comments section below. Help me out here, people.
Real post to come soon...
and by the way, posted pics of Alicante on my Flickr page, and upgraded to a Pro account, so from now on, there will be higher quality photos. good stuff.
Thursday, February 16, 2006
My trip to Andalusia y muchas cosas
Ok, so it´s been a while since I put anything good up here, but that just means this post is gonna be that much cooler. Finally got myself established in terms of getting pictures posted. Opened a Flickr account finally: the link can be found to the right under my list of HoTT SiTeZ. It´s http://www.flickr.com/photos/sawbones84. I will be putting pictures up at least semi-regularly and it will give you folks a better idea of what I´m seeing with my own eyes. I might post less pictures in this blog than originally planned and just link to pictures over thar. At the time of posting this entry, I only have my Sevilla pics up, but plan on dumping the rest of my camera on there right after, assuming it´s not getting too close to dinner time. I´ve yet to take pics of Alicante, but they will come soon. Weekend after this one is Carnaval, which as best I understand it, is Halloween in February with lots more public drinking (botellón). I´ll try to bring my camera out for at least a little of that too.
One more thing regarding pictures and Flickr: I have a limit on how much I can upload to Flickr per month, so the pics are kind of small and of a lower resolution. If anybody wants higher res, larger copies of any of my pics just shoot me a message and I can get you the original in all it´s glory (usually 800kb to 1mb in size).
Okay, now that the salad is out of the way, on to the first first course...
Sevilla was simply incredible. Such an amazing city filled with tons of things to see and do. My pictures don´t really do it justice, but I think give a decent sample of some of the beauty that is to be experienced there. I pretty much spent the entire weekend with Anastasia, Lauren, and Jessica, some new friends I made on the bus ride up, so in terms of people, my pictures are dominated by them. I did hang out with others, but that was at night when I left my camera safe in the hotel.
So yea, the bus ride sucked pretty royally. 8 hours after all the breaks we took. The bus smelled like 40 or 50 something people in a poorly ventilated vehicle. Much fun. Smelled way worse on the ride back Sunday as most people were too hungover to get up early enough to shower. I guess we were just being more European or something.
We arrived in Sevilla around dinner time, so immediately got ready and went out into the night for (amazing) tapas and whatever else was to ensue. CIEE hooked us up with a few of their stash/horde of "Spanish Helpers." SH´s are Spanish students that are studying English that sacrifice their precious time dragging Americans around making them feel more at home. We happened to get a very cool batch this time around who had some very cool friends and after tapas they showed us where the cheap beer was at. 1.50 euros for 2 beers before midnight was certainly a good deal. By midnight, the street that our bar was on and all of the surrounding area was completely packed with people botellón-ing. All the bars sold 3 euro solo cup beers (or the Spanish equivalent to solo cups) and the entire place had an incrediblely chill yet lively feeling. People were talking, singing, hanging out in the streets all having a great time. I wish I had my camera so you could see what I´m talking about, but you can use your imagination. There wasn´t any fighting or excessive vomitting or anything of such an unpleasant nature.
Got back pretty late, but early compared to the local standard of 8am. Woke up around 11 feeling surprisingly fresh. The day before we received 25 dollars in what can almost literally be called food stamps. They were 5 dollar vouchers that are accepted by certain restaurants in the city. Caught Ana, Jess, and Lauren on their way out and tagged along with them looking for a place that took our food stamps. We decided to stay away from the organized tours our program was putting on, since organized tours are lame. We went to the cathedral which was filled with a huge organ and a bunch of other crap including the supposed casket of little Chrissy Columbus: Conqurer of People Tanner Than Us (no pic, came out too dark, no flash photos allowed inside). Next we climbed to the top of the tower and got a pretty decent view of the city.
Then we walked and walked and walked and saw lots of cool neighborhoods and ate lots of good food. You can see some of the pics over on the Flickr page.
Second night in Sevilla was much more low-key. As great as I felt that morning after laying it on pretty heavy the night before, I decided not to push myself too hard another night. I went out for a little but only had a beer and just talked to a bunch of people. Got back to the hotel and got a good night´s sleep... not that I needed it considering there was plenty of time to sleep on the ride home.
Sunday morning was a little more touring of places we already checked out the day before including the park and the Plaza de España, so we split off on our own and explored more of the park, checking out the flora and fauna. Bus ride back was -as explained above- smelly, and to add insult to injury I had to sit through "i heart huckabees," a movie that makes me wish guns were a more prominent part of Spanish society. yuck
I´d love to get back to Sevilla, but with such a short amount of time here and so many places to see, I´m not sure it´s going to be on the agenda this time around. Definitely recommended for anybody who makes it over to Spain, though.
So that was the weekend, now the rest... the second course I suppose
Classes are a mixed bag at best. For my language class, we lost our very cool, very funny and friendly teacher -Mar- from the intensive course and unwillingly traded her for a bipolar psycho hose beast (to use a Wayne´s World term) who switches between bouncing off the wall, screaming at the top of her lungs to standing very still looking like she is about to burst into tears, whispering to us about the proper uses of the conditional tense. Needless to say, it´s a crappy hour and a half to endure every morning. Besides being generally wacky, she´s a poor teacher in general, not explaining things very well and often speaking either too quickly, loudly OR too softly to be understood easily. I´m going to count on handouts and the book to get everything I need out of the class.
Literature is a straight up dull drag. The teacher seems very cool and is down to earth, but suffers from whatever disease plagues professors who think the only way to teach is with a powerpoint presentaiton. Things can get pretty dry pretty quick as one might imagine. Hoping things will pick up a bit as the semester progresses, although I can´t say spirits are at their highest right now. As a consolation, it looks like it´ll be an easier course than I expected. It´s mostly centered around poetry, so I won´t have to be struggling through any 300 page Spanish novels. yikes.
Modern History is awesome. The teacher is amazing. Really funny and smart and knows how to keep the class moving and interesting. I never look at my watch in that class. Not much else to say, really, except that I´m psyched to be in that class. She´s trying to convince CIEE to take us out on all sorts of field trips too including a possible weekend trip to the Canaries, subsidized by the program. That´d be too sweet for words. The only bummer is a 12-15 pager that counts for 60 or 70 percent of my grade, but I´m doing it on Sevilla so it shouldn´t be too rough.
Speaking of classes, I had the first of three cooking instructionals I signed up for through the university. First course was tapas, and as I suspected earlier, Spanish people do not eat very healthy. Out of the 6 dishes we were taught to make, the lady had to have used a liter of olive oil and an entire jar of mayo. It was still very cool, and I´m glad I went. We learned to make Ensalada Rusa which is peas, carrots, potatos, hard-boiled eggs, and tuna in a large amount of mayonnaise. The version at the cooking class was a little lighter and tastier than my Spanish madre´s though, so that was something at least. We also learned to make croquetes jamón which can best be described as "pork and milk mcnuggets." Sounds gross, but they are freakin´ delicious. I´ll be cooking those up when I get back the states, only with jalapeños. There was also patatas con alioli, which is just boiled, sliced potatos mixed in with this really strong garlic mayonnaise. Ridiculously delicious as well. There was also a fried potato dish with grated garlicky tomatos... again, TASTY AS HELL. There was also this one that was basically sardine sized fish soaked in vinegar and then sprinkled with olive oil and parsley but they weren´t very good. The last was just bread with the garlickly tomato crush mix and a piece of jamón cerano (basicaly prosciutto but a little higher quality) layed out on top. Simple and delicious. I think we´re doing Spanish Tortillas next class, which excites me. I´ll be cookin´ Spanish come June when I get back to the States. Line up now.
Started making plans for Spring Break, which is turning out to be a pretty big pain. Eric and I are planning a rather ambitious journey that starts in Amsterdam, moves to Rotterdam, then to Belgium where we will try to rent a car and do a short countryside tour of as many abbeys and breweries as possible, then back to Brussels where we will catch our respective flights out. Eric will be off to Paris, while I´ll be going to visit Matt in England to do some Proper English Drinking with him and his friends at the tail end of their Spring Break. Then it´s back to Alicante where I´ll have class on Tuesday. Between travel and hostels, there is a whole lot to think about ahead of time, especially with our excursion into the Belgian countryside. Regardless, I´m already getting excited about our adventure even if it isn´t for another solid 2 months.
And some more general random stuff... the dessert?
I´m starting to realize how spoiled I am by a life of total convenience in the States. Even in a modern country like Spain, I find myself getting frustrated from time to time when I can´t immediately get something I need from some big store any time of day. An example is chapstick. I lost my little tube I brought from home and needed a new one. No problem, right? Go to the nearest 24 hour store and pick one of the 500 brands to choose from. WRONG. You´d never notice until you think about it, but it´s incredible how may places don´t sell the stuff. Maybe it´s because Spaniards don´t use it that much, but my precious little pouters get chapped in the dry climate and I need relief. Corte Íngles sells it, but for like €5.00 or something ridiculous (I really need to devote a large section of a post about how much I hate El Corte Íngles. This will come soon), and most of the free time I´ve had this week has come during comida hours when everything closes and Alicante dies for a while (2:00-5:00, every day). With the exception of a few mega-chains like El Corte Íngles, there are very very few "super-stores" here (Carrefour is the only other that comes to mind, but that´s mostly groceries anyway). Beyond that, it seems like there are some unwritten rules about what certain stores do and don´t sell. For instance, you can buy a padlock with a key at a Feretería (hardware store), but not one with a combo lock. You need to go to a sports store to get one with a combo lock. And there doesn´t seem to be any other kind of store that sells padlocks at all. It´s the same story with so many things you´d never even think about. There seems to be a specific store for everything, and however these things are categorized is sometimes completely beyond me. It has been a minor source of frustration, but nothing too terrible to handle.
Language-wise, I´m feeling really good lately, being able to communicate much more smoothly in lots of sitatuations. My comprehension abilities have risen sharply since I´ve started classes, and my lexicon is widening so I can usually carry on a rough conversation about general topics for a good period of time. It takes longer to become bored by Spanish TV as I can generally follow plots more easily now, and I get a lot more from the news.
It´s been weird, cause we were told right off the bat that we would definitely experience culture shock - a period of deep depression where everything is terrible - but I haven´t come close to feeling anything of the sort. Mostly, it´s just gotten better and better as I´ve been here. My language keeps improving and I feel more comfortable every day in general. I do get pretty pissed of at the U.S. when it comes up in the news because there´s a non-stop stream of negative shit pouring out of it. Regardless of how objective I feel I can handle the way the U.S. handles itself on the international scale with the help of the Internet and a relatively sharp set of media-analyzing tools, it has still been a shock to see how preposterous we look from the other side of the ocean. I´m mostly talking politics here, because culturally Spain and the U.S. are frigtheningly similar at times. I´m not going to go into any real detail because my eyes are tired and I could fill an entire post talking about this stuff, but our administration really does look a whole lot more evil from over here, especially after having followed Spanish politics for a bit. At least here there is still somewhat of a sense that the leaders are working for the people, whereas in the U.S. everything is a blatant grab for personal interests. It seems so preposterous that all of this prisoner abuse crap keeps happening while Americans have no real sense of consequences. Over here, everything is so much closer and it´s easy to feel cultural rifts when the people you the people you are gravely offending are your neighbors. It makes our entire system of politics look ridiculous and terrifyingly destructive. Talk about a bad taste in your mouth.
Not to say Europe should be let off the hook. It definitely has it´s fare share of bad politics and xenophobia, but at least here the voices of reason can be heard as loudly as the voices of hypocrisy, if not more clearly.
Enough. This has to be my longest post since I´ve started this thing and my eyeballs want to fall out of my head right now. So much for uploading the rest of my pictures tonight. Time to go home and study. Thanks for following along!
P.S. I want a cat. The random mangy, scarred up strays that are hungry enough to come up to me and let me pet them aren´t doing it for me anymore. I wonder what my host family would say if I brought home a kitten one night...
One more thing regarding pictures and Flickr: I have a limit on how much I can upload to Flickr per month, so the pics are kind of small and of a lower resolution. If anybody wants higher res, larger copies of any of my pics just shoot me a message and I can get you the original in all it´s glory (usually 800kb to 1mb in size).
Okay, now that the salad is out of the way, on to the first first course...
Sevilla was simply incredible. Such an amazing city filled with tons of things to see and do. My pictures don´t really do it justice, but I think give a decent sample of some of the beauty that is to be experienced there. I pretty much spent the entire weekend with Anastasia, Lauren, and Jessica, some new friends I made on the bus ride up, so in terms of people, my pictures are dominated by them. I did hang out with others, but that was at night when I left my camera safe in the hotel.
So yea, the bus ride sucked pretty royally. 8 hours after all the breaks we took. The bus smelled like 40 or 50 something people in a poorly ventilated vehicle. Much fun. Smelled way worse on the ride back Sunday as most people were too hungover to get up early enough to shower. I guess we were just being more European or something.
We arrived in Sevilla around dinner time, so immediately got ready and went out into the night for (amazing) tapas and whatever else was to ensue. CIEE hooked us up with a few of their stash/horde of "Spanish Helpers." SH´s are Spanish students that are studying English that sacrifice their precious time dragging Americans around making them feel more at home. We happened to get a very cool batch this time around who had some very cool friends and after tapas they showed us where the cheap beer was at. 1.50 euros for 2 beers before midnight was certainly a good deal. By midnight, the street that our bar was on and all of the surrounding area was completely packed with people botellón-ing. All the bars sold 3 euro solo cup beers (or the Spanish equivalent to solo cups) and the entire place had an incrediblely chill yet lively feeling. People were talking, singing, hanging out in the streets all having a great time. I wish I had my camera so you could see what I´m talking about, but you can use your imagination. There wasn´t any fighting or excessive vomitting or anything of such an unpleasant nature.
Got back pretty late, but early compared to the local standard of 8am. Woke up around 11 feeling surprisingly fresh. The day before we received 25 dollars in what can almost literally be called food stamps. They were 5 dollar vouchers that are accepted by certain restaurants in the city. Caught Ana, Jess, and Lauren on their way out and tagged along with them looking for a place that took our food stamps. We decided to stay away from the organized tours our program was putting on, since organized tours are lame. We went to the cathedral which was filled with a huge organ and a bunch of other crap including the supposed casket of little Chrissy Columbus: Conqurer of People Tanner Than Us (no pic, came out too dark, no flash photos allowed inside). Next we climbed to the top of the tower and got a pretty decent view of the city.
Then we walked and walked and walked and saw lots of cool neighborhoods and ate lots of good food. You can see some of the pics over on the Flickr page.
Second night in Sevilla was much more low-key. As great as I felt that morning after laying it on pretty heavy the night before, I decided not to push myself too hard another night. I went out for a little but only had a beer and just talked to a bunch of people. Got back to the hotel and got a good night´s sleep... not that I needed it considering there was plenty of time to sleep on the ride home.
Sunday morning was a little more touring of places we already checked out the day before including the park and the Plaza de España, so we split off on our own and explored more of the park, checking out the flora and fauna. Bus ride back was -as explained above- smelly, and to add insult to injury I had to sit through "i heart huckabees," a movie that makes me wish guns were a more prominent part of Spanish society. yuck
I´d love to get back to Sevilla, but with such a short amount of time here and so many places to see, I´m not sure it´s going to be on the agenda this time around. Definitely recommended for anybody who makes it over to Spain, though.
So that was the weekend, now the rest... the second course I suppose
Classes are a mixed bag at best. For my language class, we lost our very cool, very funny and friendly teacher -Mar- from the intensive course and unwillingly traded her for a bipolar psycho hose beast (to use a Wayne´s World term) who switches between bouncing off the wall, screaming at the top of her lungs to standing very still looking like she is about to burst into tears, whispering to us about the proper uses of the conditional tense. Needless to say, it´s a crappy hour and a half to endure every morning. Besides being generally wacky, she´s a poor teacher in general, not explaining things very well and often speaking either too quickly, loudly OR too softly to be understood easily. I´m going to count on handouts and the book to get everything I need out of the class.
Literature is a straight up dull drag. The teacher seems very cool and is down to earth, but suffers from whatever disease plagues professors who think the only way to teach is with a powerpoint presentaiton. Things can get pretty dry pretty quick as one might imagine. Hoping things will pick up a bit as the semester progresses, although I can´t say spirits are at their highest right now. As a consolation, it looks like it´ll be an easier course than I expected. It´s mostly centered around poetry, so I won´t have to be struggling through any 300 page Spanish novels. yikes.
Modern History is awesome. The teacher is amazing. Really funny and smart and knows how to keep the class moving and interesting. I never look at my watch in that class. Not much else to say, really, except that I´m psyched to be in that class. She´s trying to convince CIEE to take us out on all sorts of field trips too including a possible weekend trip to the Canaries, subsidized by the program. That´d be too sweet for words. The only bummer is a 12-15 pager that counts for 60 or 70 percent of my grade, but I´m doing it on Sevilla so it shouldn´t be too rough.
Speaking of classes, I had the first of three cooking instructionals I signed up for through the university. First course was tapas, and as I suspected earlier, Spanish people do not eat very healthy. Out of the 6 dishes we were taught to make, the lady had to have used a liter of olive oil and an entire jar of mayo. It was still very cool, and I´m glad I went. We learned to make Ensalada Rusa which is peas, carrots, potatos, hard-boiled eggs, and tuna in a large amount of mayonnaise. The version at the cooking class was a little lighter and tastier than my Spanish madre´s though, so that was something at least. We also learned to make croquetes jamón which can best be described as "pork and milk mcnuggets." Sounds gross, but they are freakin´ delicious. I´ll be cooking those up when I get back the states, only with jalapeños. There was also patatas con alioli, which is just boiled, sliced potatos mixed in with this really strong garlic mayonnaise. Ridiculously delicious as well. There was also a fried potato dish with grated garlicky tomatos... again, TASTY AS HELL. There was also this one that was basically sardine sized fish soaked in vinegar and then sprinkled with olive oil and parsley but they weren´t very good. The last was just bread with the garlickly tomato crush mix and a piece of jamón cerano (basicaly prosciutto but a little higher quality) layed out on top. Simple and delicious. I think we´re doing Spanish Tortillas next class, which excites me. I´ll be cookin´ Spanish come June when I get back to the States. Line up now.
Started making plans for Spring Break, which is turning out to be a pretty big pain. Eric and I are planning a rather ambitious journey that starts in Amsterdam, moves to Rotterdam, then to Belgium where we will try to rent a car and do a short countryside tour of as many abbeys and breweries as possible, then back to Brussels where we will catch our respective flights out. Eric will be off to Paris, while I´ll be going to visit Matt in England to do some Proper English Drinking with him and his friends at the tail end of their Spring Break. Then it´s back to Alicante where I´ll have class on Tuesday. Between travel and hostels, there is a whole lot to think about ahead of time, especially with our excursion into the Belgian countryside. Regardless, I´m already getting excited about our adventure even if it isn´t for another solid 2 months.
And some more general random stuff... the dessert?
I´m starting to realize how spoiled I am by a life of total convenience in the States. Even in a modern country like Spain, I find myself getting frustrated from time to time when I can´t immediately get something I need from some big store any time of day. An example is chapstick. I lost my little tube I brought from home and needed a new one. No problem, right? Go to the nearest 24 hour store and pick one of the 500 brands to choose from. WRONG. You´d never notice until you think about it, but it´s incredible how may places don´t sell the stuff. Maybe it´s because Spaniards don´t use it that much, but my precious little pouters get chapped in the dry climate and I need relief. Corte Íngles sells it, but for like €5.00 or something ridiculous (I really need to devote a large section of a post about how much I hate El Corte Íngles. This will come soon), and most of the free time I´ve had this week has come during comida hours when everything closes and Alicante dies for a while (2:00-5:00, every day). With the exception of a few mega-chains like El Corte Íngles, there are very very few "super-stores" here (Carrefour is the only other that comes to mind, but that´s mostly groceries anyway). Beyond that, it seems like there are some unwritten rules about what certain stores do and don´t sell. For instance, you can buy a padlock with a key at a Feretería (hardware store), but not one with a combo lock. You need to go to a sports store to get one with a combo lock. And there doesn´t seem to be any other kind of store that sells padlocks at all. It´s the same story with so many things you´d never even think about. There seems to be a specific store for everything, and however these things are categorized is sometimes completely beyond me. It has been a minor source of frustration, but nothing too terrible to handle.
Language-wise, I´m feeling really good lately, being able to communicate much more smoothly in lots of sitatuations. My comprehension abilities have risen sharply since I´ve started classes, and my lexicon is widening so I can usually carry on a rough conversation about general topics for a good period of time. It takes longer to become bored by Spanish TV as I can generally follow plots more easily now, and I get a lot more from the news.
It´s been weird, cause we were told right off the bat that we would definitely experience culture shock - a period of deep depression where everything is terrible - but I haven´t come close to feeling anything of the sort. Mostly, it´s just gotten better and better as I´ve been here. My language keeps improving and I feel more comfortable every day in general. I do get pretty pissed of at the U.S. when it comes up in the news because there´s a non-stop stream of negative shit pouring out of it. Regardless of how objective I feel I can handle the way the U.S. handles itself on the international scale with the help of the Internet and a relatively sharp set of media-analyzing tools, it has still been a shock to see how preposterous we look from the other side of the ocean. I´m mostly talking politics here, because culturally Spain and the U.S. are frigtheningly similar at times. I´m not going to go into any real detail because my eyes are tired and I could fill an entire post talking about this stuff, but our administration really does look a whole lot more evil from over here, especially after having followed Spanish politics for a bit. At least here there is still somewhat of a sense that the leaders are working for the people, whereas in the U.S. everything is a blatant grab for personal interests. It seems so preposterous that all of this prisoner abuse crap keeps happening while Americans have no real sense of consequences. Over here, everything is so much closer and it´s easy to feel cultural rifts when the people you the people you are gravely offending are your neighbors. It makes our entire system of politics look ridiculous and terrifyingly destructive. Talk about a bad taste in your mouth.
Not to say Europe should be let off the hook. It definitely has it´s fare share of bad politics and xenophobia, but at least here the voices of reason can be heard as loudly as the voices of hypocrisy, if not more clearly.
Enough. This has to be my longest post since I´ve started this thing and my eyeballs want to fall out of my head right now. So much for uploading the rest of my pictures tonight. Time to go home and study. Thanks for following along!
P.S. I want a cat. The random mangy, scarred up strays that are hungry enough to come up to me and let me pet them aren´t doing it for me anymore. I wonder what my host family would say if I brought home a kitten one night...
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