I guess I don’t need to say that it’s been a while…things got busy, then my parents came to visit, and then, well…you can probably guess the rest. “I’ll just do it tomorrow…” But like Mr. Churchill taught me in 8th grade Algebra, tomorrow never comes! By the time we get to tomorrow, it has turned into today. A lot has happened in these three weeks though! Some big things, some little things, and some miscellaneous things.
Midterms were the last week in October so most of my energy that week went into “studying.” Of course this really means I spent most of the week in the library, with the things I needed to study open in front of me but actually spending my time looking up classes to take next semester, emailing back and forth with my slew of advisers back at the U of M to make sure I have all my graduation requirements in place, and discovering that the library in Toledo has an encyclopedia set of religion, written in English by a religious theorist that I learned about in one of my classes last spring. This was the jackpot of the week, because it is something I can use next semester as a background reference when writing my senior history paper. Eventually, I did actually get around to doing what I was supposed to be doing, got As and Bs on all my midterms, and made my way up to Madrid after class on Thursday to meet up with my parents.
We had the following Monday and Tuesday off from school, so my parents came to visit me for a long weekend! They flew in Thursday morning and stayed until Wednesday morning when they flew back to the States. We spent two nights in Madrid, walking around, looking at buildings, went to a market, and went to the Reina Sofia, a museum of modern art where the famous work by Picasso, Guernica, is housed. Never heard of Guernica? Heard of it but don't know why it's famous? Well, more history lessons! Guernica is the name of a little tiny town near the Bay of Biscay, right next to the French border.
In 1937, a year into the civil war in Spain and two years before WWII started in the rest of Europe, Francisco Franco and Adolf Hitler were fascist allies and Franco let Hitler experiment with a fly-over bomb raid on the town of Guernica. It was market day in Guernica, meaning there was an influx in the population for the day since many people who lived in the nearby countryside but had gone into town to buy and sell their produce and products. Eventually the German planes came and bombed the city quite literally to smithereens. Every single building was flattened. Picasso was living in Paris at the time and heard about the bombing and vowed never to return to Spain, his home country, until Franco was out of power. Sadly, Franco outlived Picasso. In response to the bombing and for the Spanish display at the 1937 World's Fair in Paris, Picasso painted the work Guernica - a HUGE painting (11' tall x 26' long) riddled with symbolism and significance that, now, can be seen as a work depicting the horrors of all war, not just the horrors that befell its namesake. After the World's Fair, the painting went on tour through some of the European capitals before it was entrusted to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for safekeeping, to raise awareness of the horrors of the Spanish dictatorship and to raise money for Spanish refugees. In the late 1960s, Franco wanted the painting to be returned to Spain, but Picasso wouldn't let it, and wrote into his will that the painting could not return to Spain until the country had returned to a republic and added other stipulations such as the restoration of public liberties and democratic institutions. After Franco died, MoMA finally returned Guernica back to Spain in 1981.
Anyways. Back to the original story. My parents and I spend the first two nights in Madrid and then took the bullet train down to Sevilla, a city in the south of Spain (see the awesome map I made for it's location!) where we spent the next three days. Sevilla was cool, but to be honest, I wasn't as impressed with it as I've been with other cities I've been to. We went into the cathedral, which is the third largest in all of Europe, after St Peter's in the Vatican (#1) and St. Paul's in London (#2). We also went into an archive that houses a jillion documents pertaining to Spanish colonialism and imperialism. Once upon a time, Sevilla was the major port city where Christopher Columbus, among others, started and ended his journey to the New World.
Their last full day here, we traveled from Sevilla to Madrid to Toledo on the bullet train (Toledo only has trains to and from Madrid). We walked around the city, I took them to my school and I took them to my house here to meet my host parents, which was a fairly successful endevour...considering that my parents speak NO Spanish and my host mom speaks NO English and my host dad only speaks a tiny little bit of English. AKA I was the interpreter for both parties. It was fun though. We had coffee/tea and some cookies and a few hours later my parents left for Madrid, where they spent their last night and I stayed in Toledo because I had class the next day.
Since then, life has been pretty normal. Our fridge has been acting up all semester and some days it doesn't work at all! So that's been a bit of an obstacle. Especially because it's a new fridge! My host mom has stopped buying things to put in the freezer because we never know when it's going to be working or not. The electric guy has come out to the house a few times and they might end up having to exchange it for a new one. Went to the Prado again this weekend. The Louvre-magnitude museum in Madrid And now I've been there three times and STILL haven't seen the sculpture room! I guess I'll just have to go back! A friend and I bought tickets to see the Lion King on broadway in two weeks! Super excited. A few other people at our school have gone to see it and have said it is all in Spanish! Should be cool. I saw it once in high school when it was in the Cities and it was absolutely amazing! And one of the cooler things I've done recently....went to a Real Madrid soccer game a week ago! It was awesome! They play in the biggest stadium I have ever seen in my entire life. It was HUGE! And has a capacity of 85,000 and was almost full! Super cool. Real Madrid won 7-1 (I have no idea who they played!).
Anyways. Will post pictures and more stories soon! (when I have faster internet!) Love you all!
finding what citrus?
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