Christmas Break

First official day of Christmas break! I finished my finals yesterday and celebrated by sleeping in today. And now I'm sitting at a cafe, eating churros with hot chocolate and some tea. How European of me. (Churros are basically just fried dough...something you'd expect to see at the state fair..) Finals went well for the most part, my grammar one was a little hard, but that was expected. I seem to be at a loss for words though, so I think this post is going to be a short one. This semester has been awesome! And I decided yesterday that I will continue writing in this blog for another couple weeks to keep filling you in on some of the things I have done that I have failed to blog about thus far. It will be my Christmas break project. It's hard to believe I fly home in two days. That 48 hours from right now I will be on an airplane somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean and 64 hours from now I will be landing in my home state of Minnesota. The land of hockey, snow and frigid winters. Crazy how time flies. That's about all I have today...and I think this will be my last post from the Eastern Hemisphere, so for now, Hasta Luego España. I will see you again someday. 

Christmas

Hello Hello! Time is winding down here. Not that I'm counting down, but I know for fact that some of you are...(9 days?). I've started listening to Christmas music and busted out the ugly Christmas sweater yesterday. I'll be honest, part of me is excited to go home, mostly for the holidays, it was super weird to be so far away for Thanksgiving, but a lot of me is also not ready to leave. I love it here! Sunsets are beautiful every night, the climate is finally more agreeable, the food could use a little spicing up, but it's not bad, the people are friendly, and the lifestyle is awesome.

It's been fun to watch Spain get ready for Christmas! Toledo has been gradually hanging up Christmas lights across streets and setting up light displays over the past two weeks or so. I went to Madrid this past Friday with my friend Meg to go see the Lion King on broadway (which was AWESOME by the way, and entirely in Spanish), and we walked around a little before the doors opened at the theater and stumbled across a mini ice rink for kids. Upon close inspection, turns out the mini ice rink was really just white plastic with some cotton batting around the edges for "snow". There was a giant Christmas tree next to it as well and lights strung across the main street we were on. And the best part? Last night they FINALLY turned on the lights they've been hanging in Toledo. It was magical. All they need now is a light dusting of snow to top it all off.

See you soon!

A plastic "ice" rink

At the show! 

The same tree next to the sad little "ice" rink, but all lit up! 

Halloween Town

Back to updating you all on my life.

A little over two weeks ago on the luckiest day on the planet, 11.11.11, we took a school trip to a town to the northwest of Madrid called El Escorial. History lesson #5 (#6? I don't remember where we are with these...!) In the middle of the 1500s, King Philip II of Spain built this palace with a multipurpose function. It consists of the royal apartments, a prestigious military school (that our guide compared to the USA's West Point Academy), a basilica, a school (different than the military school, that is used as a high school today!), a convent, and the seat of the Spanish Inquisition. The Inquisition was an institution used to regulate the orthodoxy of the Jewish and Islamic converts to Catholicism after the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel forced the Jews and Muslims out of Spain in 1492. Anyone who had converted who was suspected or accused of retaining any practices of their old faith was detained, tried, tortured and sometimes executed, and all his wealth was confiscated. El Escorial also has some pretty marvelous gardens and serves as the burial ground of almost 400 years worth of Spanish royalty. The kings and queen mothers are buried in their own special crypt directly underneath the high altar of the basilica, in a gorgeously designed, circular, marble room with  huge domed ceiling. Naturally, we weren't allowed to take pictures anywhere inside the building. Really not conducive to my record keeping and blogging adventures!

The bus ride there was also gorgeous. There is a small mountain range to the northwest of Madrid that was perfectly green with the addition of some nice fall oranges (the color, not the fruit for once!) and some picturesque fog and mist. El Escorial is nestled into these mountains and teh damp, cold, misty feel and look of the town made me think that it would be the perfect setting for Halloween. All it needed was some witches, jack-o-lanterns and some of those fake cobwebs.

the roof line of the palace

One half of one side...

The other half

The main courtyard. The last place we were supposed to take pictures..

But I might have snuck a picture of some of the gardens out one of the windows in the palace....

The palace complex

The dome of the basilica

There are pansies everywhere here! Makes me think of Theta every time!  (the black and gold pansy is my sorority's flower)

On Saturday, my friend Meg and I went up to Madrid for the day. She'd been wanting to go the the Reina Sophia (the museum of modern art) and I wanted to go back the the Prado (the older art). We also wanted to see if we could buy tickets to see the Lion King on broadway (in Spanish!) because it is playing in Madrid. We went to the box office first, and did get tickets. We're going this Friday, Dec. 2nd. And then we went across the street to Starbucks and ended up sitting there for two hours, drinking our drinks and people watching out their second floor windows. There is no Starbucks in Toledo. Probably a good thing though.... Eventually we made it down to the museums for a few hours before heading back to Toledo. 

Since this one took used a bit of space with the pictures, I'll write more soon with more adventures! I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend! I love you!

Thanksgiving

Since I can't be there in the United States to celebrate Thanksgiving and share my thankfulness with all of you in person, I am going to write a list of some of the things I am thankful for. 16 things to be exact (because that is my favorite number!).

1. I am thankful for J.K. Rowling. For giving us the epic Harry Potter series...books, movies..all of it
2. I am thankful for my audience...without you, I wouldn't be writing this blog!
3. I am thankful for history...it gives me something to geek out over every day
4. I am thankful for this awesome opportunity to live and study in Spain
5. I am thankful for Nepolitanas...those delicious, fluffy pastries with the chocolate in the middle that I've described before somewhere in this blog
6. I am thankful for my giant dictionary. Being in Spain without it makes me feel lost for words
7. I am thankful for the printing press...without its invention in the mid 1300s, literature, propaganda, books etc, even the education system as we know it would not exist
8. I am thankful for cold weather. I've always known I am a mid-westerner at heart, but I never knew how much I really love cold weather until I came to Spain
9. I am thankful for music
10. I am thankful for hockey. My favorite sport by a long shot (or should I say..slap shot?)
11. I am thankful for regulation size swimming pools. There's nothing more satisfying than a good long swim
12. I am thankful for Kappa Alpha Theta, my sorority which has helped me become the woman I am today
13. I am thankful that King Henry VIII split England from the Catholic Church...it gives me something to write about for my senior history paper next semester
14.  I am thankful for different architecture styles...they define eras and cultures, religions, give identity to the architects and neighborhoods, and give character to cities, towns, and country fields
15. I am thankful for the Romans...without it, Toledo would not be the city it is today
16. And last but not least, I am thankful for my family and friends. For always being there and supporting me, no matter how close or far away I might be. You guys are awesome! I love you!

Odds and Ends

I've noticed a trend in my postings...they're mostly about some of the bigger things I've done and some of the general cultural differences between the United States and Spain. I've decided it's about time I fill you all in on some of the smaller, but no less significant, things that I have been doing. The day trips and such. I tried to upload a few videos, but I keep getting a server error..will try to work on that later, or else you'll just have to wait until I get home!

Going all the way back to September, I went to a running of the bulls type even in a little town 10 minutes from Toledo. There were a good 10-12 of us students probably who went. One of the guys, Willie, who also went to Grenada with me, decided it would be a good idea to actually run with the bulls! Afterwards he said it was the one of the biggest adrenaline rushes he's ever had in his life! This little town, called Olias del Rey, was having a festival thing and on Saturday morning they did the bull run. It was cool to see. Nothing like the most famous one up in Pamplona, but for a first-timer, pretty cool. They had the path blocked off with a tall iron barricade, but with wide enough spaces between the bars for people to slide through, but narrow enough that a bull couldn't go through. The runners were being chased by the bulls, which were released one at a time (there were 3 total I think? If I remember right...) but some of the braver guys would hang back and provoke the bulls with red sweatshirts, towels etc...to get the bull to chase.

They had plywood attached to the barricade around the outside edge of the corner

Waiting

Along the same lines as the running of the bulls, I have also seen a bullfight. This happened one Sunday in October. 10 of us went up to Madrid to see the last bullfight of the season. It was a two hour event with six bulls each getting their own 20 minutes and matadors in their characteristic sparkly outfits with red and pink capes. Four of  us stayed for the whole two hours, and the rest left at the end of the first half. It was really interesting actually, and I have to admit, I enjoyed it. It wasn't anything like I expected. Yes, at the end of the ordeal, there were six dead bulls, but I had no idea how much of a production a bullfight really is. It was like a work of art. A dance. It was very methodical, rhythmic, intricate. It flowed. Towards the end, the main matador looked almost like he was seducing the bull. And at the end, morbid and ironic though it may sound, when the bull had lost enough blood and lay down to die, someone would come out right away to slice through it's spinal cord, putting it out of all misery. 

And then, a few weeks after that, I went on another day trip adventure, this time to see the windmills that the legendary Don Quixote fought against in his epic saga....and much to our surprise, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza were there! 

"At this point they caught sight of thirty or forty windmills which were standing on the plain there, and no sooner had Don Quixote laid eyes upon them than he turned to his squire and said, 'Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we could have wished; for you see there before you, friend Sancho Panza, some thirty or forty lawless giants which whom I mean to do battle. I shall deprive them of their lives, and with the spoils from this encounter we shall begin to enrich ourselves, for this is righteous warfare and it is a great service to God to remove so accursed a breed from the face of the earth.'

'What giants?' said Sancho Panza.

'Those that you see there,' replied his master, 'those with the long arms some of which are as much as two leagues in length.'

'But look, your Grace, those are not giants but windmills, and what appear to be arms are their wings which, when whirled in the breeze, cause the millstone to go.'

'It is plain to be seen,' said Don Quixote, 'that you have had little experience in this matter of adventures. If you are afraid, go off to one side and say your prayers while I am engaging them in fierce, unequal combat.'"  (http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/don-quixote.htm) 

Got turf? (yes, this really is turf...not grass.)

I think this is enough for now. Plus the fact that my computer is going to die on me soon and I need to do some homework on it before it dies. Happy Wednesday! Look again tomorrow for a special Thanksgiving edition! Love you!

Mariachi Monday

Happy Monday everyone! I had an adventure today! I was on my way back to school after "teaching" English to Carlos, which really is just a two hour conversation with a Spaniard in English with me correcting his pronunciation and verb tenses here and there. When I got off the bus at the main square (which, coincidentally, is also the last stop on the bus) there was a Mariachi band playing in the square! I walked over and watched them sing for a bit since I had nowhere to be and nothing I had to be doing for another two hours. Pretty cool! At one point, one of the guys put down his guitar and danced with a grandma who was singing along! It was adorable! They were all Mexicans (they kept saying "from Mexico to you!") and when they stopped playing, I emptied my wallet of change, which came to about 1.43 in Euros, and put it in the tambourine they were using as a money collector.

I hope you all have the chance to stop and smell the roses today. The opportunity to do something because YOU want to, not because you have to. One thing I've learned from living in Spain...Americans just go go go all the time. Slow down for a bit. I may only be 21, and I may be blogging to my aunts and uncles, my grandparents, my parents, and a whole bunch of people who have more years under their belt than I do, but from what I've learned so far, life is all about the little things. Like Mariachi bands.

Photo Updates!

Ok so in my last post, I got distracted by the history of Guernica, and forgot the punchline of my post! Well. Not the punchline per say, but I forgot to tie in my title with the story. So before I forget, one of the first things my parents asked me when they were here was where the citrus comes from in Spain. No idea. Well. We found out! On our way to and from Sevilla on the Ave (the name of the bullet train...pronounced AH-vay) around the city to the north of it, we passed by tons of fields of orange trees with bright orange fruit on them! Pretty cool! I was expecting Sevilla to be surrounded by olive groves like Grenada is considering that the two cities are more or less on the same parallel, but evidently that isn't the case.

And now some pictures from the past few weeks!

My parents with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in Madrid

At a market

An Alexander Calder sculpture in the courtyard of the Reina Sophia

At the Botanical Gardens in Madrid

There are pansies everywhere here! 

These are yellow pansies

Paella (pie-AY-ya) a rice based food characteristic of Spain

In Sevilla - the tower of the cathedral

The Christopher Columbus Archive in Sevilla

Part of the cathedral

The top of the tower in the cathedral

The entrance to the old palace in Sevilla next door to the archive and the cathedral

Part of the palace

A ceiling in the palace that is more or less all gold

Everything is super elaborately carved (sculpted...it's made out of stucco)

Another awesome ceiling

In the gardens of the palace

The former baths of the palace, originally built for the mistress of King Pedro I in the late 1500s

An upper level walkway that overlooks the gardens on both sides

There were peacocks in the gardens!

The cathedral again

A life size bronze statue of Pope John Paul II (Juan Pablo II in Spain) in the cathedral

The cathedral floor

The high altar

The tomb of Christopher Columbus

Columbus's tomb from behind

Fancy things belonging to the Catholic Church

I think it's safe to say that the Catholic Church is wealthy.....click on this picture to make it bigger and look close at all the diamonds, pearls, and other precious gemstones embedded into this crown

All diamonds...

A view of the courtyard of the cathedral while climbing the tower

From the top of the tower

We also got a tour of the oldest bullring in all of Europe. It was built in the  1750s. Prior to this, bullfights were just held in the main plaza in cities. 

The stadium of Real Madrid

From the inside

If you look close, you can see the yellow ball in the far left corner of the net, the goalie in the opposite side of the goal, the guy in the white jersey in the middle who just kicked the ball is Cristiano Ronaldo, the highest paid footballer in the world who is only 26 years old and then everyone else is behind him. Ronaldo had just kicked a penalty shot and everyone had to line up on the curved line facing the net until he touched the ball, much like on foul shots in basketball where players must outside the paint in the free throw lane until the ball leaves the hand of the shooter.

Playing the game