March 30

3-30
What a weekend! I guess I really haven’t done all that much, but I feel like I’ve been quite productive. I saw a musical, visited a convent and fulfilled a life-long dream; I think that’s enough for one weekend!
Thursday night after class a few other girls and I went to see Grease. It was so much fun! We all know the music and the story backwards and forwards in English, and it was cool to hear it all in Spanish. I wasn’t sure the entire thing would be in Spanish, since in movies sometimes they dub over the dialogue but leave the songs in English, but everything was translated. It was quite funny to see the Spaniards’ interpretation of American teenagers in the 50s! It was quite different from a play in the States, too. There was a lot more audience involvement, with things like ‘if you think Frenchie should go back to high school, scream’ and stuff like that. The audience was also really into the music; they were swaying and doing the Greased Lightning arm movements, and I’m pretty sure some people were singing along at times, although it wasn’t so loud that it was distracting. It was a really fun night!
Friday morning I went to the Monasterio de la Encarnación. It was a 45 minute guided tour, all in Spanish, but I got most of it. There were a lot of paintings and frescoes, and of course the usual opulence of silver and gold in the sanctuary. There was also a room of relics, where there were bones or pieces of bones from I don’t know how many saints. All four walls were covered with glass cases that displayed them. There were even several with skulls. It was a little unnerving. And once again, I wonder: how do you go about getting the skull of a saint? This particular monastery is famous for its dried blood of St. Pantaleon, which mysteriously liquefies every year on July 27, the anniversary of his death. I strongly suspect there’s a duplicate vial somewhere in the monastery that gets filled with red water and stuck in the cabinet. I actually had a dream last night about that, involving a secret passageway behind the wall where someone could replace the vial without anyone seeing. Strangely enough, it was my uncle Tim who was the one sneaking back there to replace it. I have absolutely no idea where that came from.
Friday night I had choir rehearsal, and I still hadn’t received an email with the information about the concert on Sunday. I asked Nuria (the director) when the concert was, but instead of just telling me, she called over another person in charge of the emails and had me talk to him. So I gave him my email and hoped that he would send it before Sunday. Also, we had a rehearsal on Saturday that I wouldn’t have known about if she hadn’t mentioned it at the last minute. And I still didn’t know the time of the concert or of the rehearsal right before it, or what we had to wear. So I went home quite anxious and upset that night. I hate not knowing important things!
I still hadn’t received the email by the time I had to leave for rehearsal on Saturday afternoon. I was hoping it was at the campus, but I had printed out directions to the cathedral in case I got to the school and no one was there. I got there a bit early and asked one of my friends and she told me what I needed to know. So that eased my mind quite a bit. They did tell us at the end of rehearsal, so I would have known anyway.
Sunday I was going to go to the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales, but by the time I got there all the tours were full, so I couldn’t get in. So I just went to the Corte Ingles instead and picked up a gift for a certain someone. Then I did some homework and headed over to the cathedral. I have always wanted to sing in a European cathedral, and now that I knew what I was supposed to do, I was excited! It had probably a 3 second echo, which sounds awesome, but let me tell you, it sure makes singing a lot more complicated!! We had 2 hours of rehearsal before the concert in which we smoothed over most of the problems, and then had an hour free time before it started. The first guy I gave my email to last week asked me if I had received his email. I don’t know if he sent it Saturday after I checked or if I just didn’t get it. I didn’t check my email on Sunday. But I would have thought he would send it a little earlier than that!! (I hate not having internet at home!)
The actual concert went very well, for the most part. We sang two pieces by Handel: Dixit Dominus and the Coronation Anthem. We sang with a small orchestra, harpsichord, organ, trumpets, recorders, and timpani. There were also five soloists who sang on various pieces. It was a surprise when all those instrumentalists showed up at rehearsal on Friday, but I was really glad we weren’t just going to sing with the organ! Singing with an orchestra just adds a whole new dimension to the music. There were a few parts during the concert where we started speeding up and had to watch Nuria very carefully. There was only one part where the sopranos totally fell apart. I’m not sure if we had gotten ahead or behind, but it sounded very strange for a few bars. But we got back on before too long. The audience seemed to really enjoy everything. They started out clapping in between movements of the Dixit (have I mentioned how much I hate it when people do that? Apparently Nuria hates it too, because she made a face every time) but then they realized that they shouldn’t. But then they did again after a few movements. I don’t really understand why they suddenly started clapping again, but whatever. They were good on the Coronation Anthem. And we got a standing ovation at the end of the concert, which is always nice. Jeanette came to see it and support me. That was very nice of her. I’m glad she came. A couple of the other girls had talked about coming, but she was the only one who showed up. I was happy to see a familiar face in the audience.
So that was my weekend! Now I’ve got 4 days of school before I’m off to Hungary! I can’t believe spring break is almost here. I’m really looking forward to it, but I’ll be so relieved when it’s over. I’ll be traveling alone for 4 days, and it’s a constant worry at the back of my mind. I’m sure it’ll be fine, but it’s still there, nagging. But at the same time, I get to see Salzburg, and Milan in addition to Budapest and Vienna, which I wouldn’t have been able to do if I stayed with Jen, and that’s going to more than make up for any uneasiness in traveling!
Well, I’m off to school. Bye!
Bethany

March 24

Hola todos
Today is March 24th, and we all know what that means. Well, maybe you don´t, so I´ll tell you anyway. Today is the 2 month mark from when I arrived in Madrid. It seems like I just wrote a blog exclaiming over how quickly one month had gone by, and now I´m already here again at two months. I think this second month has been a lot less eventful, with more school and less traveling. But it sure has flown by! I think the routine of school has probably had a hand in that. Time seems to mush together when it´s all the same thing day after day. Luckily there are plenty of weekends to have crazy adventures! :) I´m looking ahead in the calendar and realizing that I don´t even have two months of school left! I´m past the halfway point of Madrid (but not of Europe!), and I feel like I just got here! Well, in some ways. In other ways it feels like I´ve been gone for ages. This next month will be fun, because it includes spring break (Budapest, Vienna, Salzburg, and Milan) and Easter, for which I´m hoping to find a mass to go to. I don´t think there are protestant churches in Madrid. At least, not that I´ve found. But it should be cool to see a Spanish Easter service. I don´t know if Manuel and Rosaura will go to church, but if they do I´ll see if I can tag along. It will be weird not to be with my family for Easter. That´s never happened before. And I bet there are no Easter baskets in Spain! Sad! Oh well. I´m getting ahead of myself. It´s still March, and I have plenty of time before then.
Speaking of looking ahead, I got my scheduling information for next semester and, as always, its an absolute disaster. There is only one Spanish class offered that I haven´t taken, and it conflicts with a music class that I absolutely have to take in order to graduate, that won´t be offered again for four semesters. So I don´t know if I´m going to be able to take any Spanish classes next semester, which seems to bode ill for my Spanish major. I don´t need any more credits for that one, and I could take two classes next semester to get all the requirements in, but I feel like I don´t want to skip a semester of Spanish, especially right after I get back from Spain. And if I don´t take it, I´ll be taking exclusively music classes. Now, there´s nothing really wrong with that, but I´m not sure how many classes outside of my major I´m supposed to have, so I´m a little wary about that. There is one class in particular, a theatre class on costumen construction and design, that I really really want to take, but it conflicts with not one, but two of my other classes. It´s a MTW class, and I have a class on MWF and another on TR at that same time. Go figure. And I´m most likely going to be jumping into a Conducting II class even though I haven´t taken conducting I (which is offered this semester, of course. I talked with the prof and she thinks I could probably learn enough on my own over the summer to not be completely lost), but I really want to take a conducting class, since I want to have a choir some day. I´m also debating taking Orchestration, which doesn´t conflict with anything, but that class looks hard and that might put me over the limit credit wise. It´s all a huge mess. I emailed my Spanish advisor this morning begging advice, but he hasn´t gotten back to me yet (I suppose I´ll forgive him since it´s not even 8:00am there!). I wish there could be one semester in my entire life where scheduling wasn´t a disaster! Why does Ripon College hate me so?!
Well, that´s enough ranting for one post. I´m sure more will come later. ;)
Bethany

March 22

3-22
Hello everybody! I’ve had a busy weekend, and I’ve been too tired/lazy to write about each day when I got home that night, so I’ll combine it all into one blog. I’ll try to keep it brief-ish.
This Thursday was the Fiesta de San José, so we had off school! That in itself was exciting enough. A lot of people went various places far away (some girls in AYA went to Dusseldorf, Germany), but Katie and I decided it would be cheaper to do various day trips from Madrid, and that way we wouldn’t have to pay for planes or hostels or anything. Actually, we only decided this after we realized we had left planning for this weekend too late and the plane tickets to Portugal were way too expensive. But whatever, it’s fine.
Thursday we went to Salamanca. It’s almost 3 hours away by train. I got to use my Eurail pass for the first time! I’m still a little fuzzy on what the best way to use it is, but what I did worked, so I guess I’ll just do that again. It was good, because my ticket for there and back was only 8 euros instead of almost 30! My friend Yvonne from church was going to come with us, but the metro was having problems or taking a long time or something, so she didn’t get there in time and the train left without her. I felt really bad about that. So then it was just Katie and me. For those of you who don’t know, Salamanca is the home of one of the oldest universities in Spain. Or at least, one of the oldest Christian universities. I think the Muslims had some older ones before they were driven out. Anyway, we saw some of the buildings, which are all huge and amazing, with sculptures and statues and pillars and royal crests carved on the outsides. We were able to go inside the library (which is called the House of Shells because it’s got tons of conch shells carved into the outside) and the Universidad Pontifica, which was a church. Then we saw the Plaza Mayor, which is the most famous in Spain, apart from Madrid’s. The Plaza Mayors of Salamanca and Madrid are in competition for which is most beautiful. Personally, I think Salamanca’s is better. But that’s just me. After that, we went to the Cathedral of Salamanca, which has got a newer and an older section. We thought we were buying tickets to go inside, but it ended up being a ticket to climb the towers of the older, medieval part of the cathedral. It was really cool. There were little museum rooms where they displayed artifacts and diagrams and stuff. There was a display of medieval and renaissance instruments and music books. That was very exciting for me! Then we climbed up the scary spiral staircases to the towers. We got to walk outside along the roofline, where there was not only an amazing view of the city, but an amazing up close view of all the stonework on the cathedral itself. Then, back inside the cathedral, we got to walk along the perimeter, way above the ground, and get a bird’s eye view of the interior. It was so cool. A very different cathedral experience from any I’d had so far! We never actually got to go inside on the ground level (it was closed whenever we passed by), but this made up for it! After that we went across the Puente Romano, which is an ancient Roman bridge that’s still standing and functional. We wandered around the city for a while, and then took the train back home.
Friday we went to the monastery at El Escorial, which was built by King Felipe II in the 1500s. It’s sort of a mixture between a church and a palace, and it’s huge! There were royal apartments (Felipe’s chambers had a little portable organ that only had about 3 octaves of keys and was so cute!), state rooms, and other various things that were clearly the royalty part of the palace. But there were also churchy things, like the rooms where the bishop lived and worked, and several rooms of tombs where the various rulers of Spain are buried. We couldn’t go inside the Basilica because it was under construction or restoration or something. There’s also a famous library there, that’s got an amazingly painted ceiling and books from the Renaissance!! They were all behind cages, of course, but they had some of them open so we could see what they looked like on the inside. They were beautiful! They had brightly painted pictures and beautiful script that I couldn’t read for anything (I think it was Latin). They also had some instruments that scholars used, like one model (I can’t remember what it was called) that was supposed to show the solar system with the Earth in the middle and the planets as rings around it. They also had globes (one that didn’t have countries on it, but all kinds of wild animals and monsters; I’m not really sure what that was supposed to show!), and old desks, and all sorts of cool things! There were also several little museums: paintings, tapestries, and architecture, which included plans of the monastery and the tools they used to build it. They had this machine that had pulleys and a clamp thing that they used to lift the huge building blocks to make the walls. It was really cool! After the tour of the outside, we went out to the gardens that surround the monastery. There weren’t many flowers, but there were lots of cool patterns of hedges and little fountains. We walked back to the train station by way of the Park of the Princes, which is home to the Casita del Príncipe, which is a little palace were the royal family would spend the summers. We couldn’t go inside, but we saw the outside. Rosaura had told me about it, so I was expecting something pretty cool, but it just looked like a big house with white shutters. It was cute, but nothing spectacular.
That night I had choir, so I had to stop home and grab my music and rush to Leganés (that’s the city where the campus is). I arrived about a half hour late, but there was nothing I could do about that. Our concert is next Sunday, so the directors are getting anxious and a little short tempered. It doesn’t help that the students (just like in the States) insist on talking incessantly every time we stop. I guess some things are universal. I had a rather happy moment, though. There are two directors for the choir: one that does the warm-ups every other week, and one that directs the actual songs. The warm-up lady sits and watches the rehearsal when she’s there, and makes comments and suggestions to people or sections. It’s almost always something to improve on. So when she came up to me I got a little nervous. But she just said that my face was “fenomenal” and went on to another person. I was quite happy about that! Facial expression is one thing that I’ve always had problems with, and I’ve been working hard to improve. It was very nice to hear that it was working!
To get home from choir I have to take the train to the metro to get home. I can either take it all the way into Madrid and then take a short metro home, or I can take it to the bottom of my metro line and take the metro all the way to my stop. Usually I’ve been doing it the first way, but I think the second way is a little shorter. Anyway, I was glad I had discovered the second way, because when I got on the train there were tons of people on it, all probably high school or college age. They were all being really loud and obnoxious, and one girl was smoking, which is prohibited on public transportation. There was vomit on one of the seats, and there were so many people in the aisles that you could barely get through. Then a couple of the guys started breaking the glass that covers those hammers that you’re supposed to use to break the windows in case of an emergency, so there was broken glass all over the floor. I was expecting security to come any moment, but they didn’t while I was on the train. It was scary. There have been very few times I’ve actually been scared on public transportation, but this was definitely one of them. I was so glad that I had discovered the way home on the metro, because it’s only 2 stops on the train that way, and I was anxious to get off! That was crazy.
Saturday we went back to Toledo. This time Yvonne did go with us, and she brought one of her friends. It was so good to see her! We’ve been living in the same city for two months and we still hadn’t gotten together yet! We were going to take the train into Toledo, but there was such a long line for tickets that it had left before we were able to buy ours, so we decided to take the bus instead. We spent a lot of time wandering around the city trying to find where we were when we were there before. We went into a synagogue, and went back to the cathedral. Actually, we didn’t get to go all the way in. There was an entrance where you could go for free just inside a small part of it. I think it was so you could pray at a chapel or something. But it was like 7 euros to get in the whole cathedral, and we were feeling cheap. At least this way we could see it, even if we couldn’t walk through it. I wasn't so important for Katie and I since we had been there before, but it was the first time in Toledo for Yvonne and Laura, so they wanted to see it. But not enough to pay 7 euros. We had a lot of fun on the busses that day, too. We were trying to take a bus to a plaza where there’s a little tourist train that’ll take you across the river, because Laura wanted to see a famous view from one of El Greco’s paintings, but we got on the wrong bus and ended up driving through residential Toledo with absolutely no idea where we were. So we just stayed on until it got back to where we had gotten on, and then waited for the right bus. We spent so much time waiting for busses yesterday! It got a little ridiculous. But whatever. We just got to see more of Toledo that way, I guess. . . . Then when we got to the bus station the bus was there and ready to go, so we got in line, but right before we could get on, it was full. We had to wait another half hour before another bus came for Madrid. We didn’t get home until 8:30 last night, which was really long, considering I had left the house at 9:45 that morning. The day was longer than any of us expected, but it was still fun. I was absolutely exhausted last night.
This morning, I slept until 10:30, which felt amazing. I finished my homework and then sat down to write this blog. I was thinking of maybe going to the park to read today, but right now I’m feeling very lazy. Maybe I’ll just watch a movie here instead.
Bethany

March 15

3-15
Today Katie and I went back to the Prado museum. It wasn’t free to the public until 5, so we went an hour early to see some of the sights around it. We were heading toward the Vertical Garden, which is a garden planted on a wall, straight up and down. We wandered into this art exhibition that our Estudios Culturales teacher had told us about, but we had no idea where it was. It’s called Arte en las Calles, which means Art on the Streets, and I think it’s collections of art that come to Madrid for about a month and then move on to another city. This month’s collection was all Rodin sculptures from Paris, including The Thinker. It was so cool to be walking down the street and suddenly, out of the blue, see one of the most famous sculptures in the world staring at me. There were eight statues total, all by Rodin. I think our teacher said it was the first time these statues have been out of the Paris museum, and I had wanted to see them, but I didn’t know where to look. I thought they were in another museum; I didn’t realize they were out in the open. I love how we always wander into cool things! Then we realized that the vertical garden was right there, behind the statues, and we had been seeing it the whole time while we were taking pictures without realizing it. It was mostly just green up a wall, since the flowers hadn’t bloomed yet. It was interesting, but nothing spectacular. The statues upstaged it by a long shot.
We still had some time before 5, so we decided to go into the Botanical Gardens that are next to the Prado. It was mostly green, and there were only a few flowers, but it still smelled heavenly. The flowers that there were were beautiful, and it was such a gorgeous day that it was very nice to walk through the little pathways amongst all the greenery.
In the Prado, we finished seeing everything in the permanent collection. We saw a lot of Italian Renaissance paintings, and I recognized a fair few of them. There was even the portrait of Mary Tudor that I used in my presentation about her last semester! It’s so cool to see the originals of all these famous paintings I’ve seen in books and stuff. We saw the treasure of the Dauphin, which was a collection of glassware, precious stone-encrusted gold and silver dishes, medallions, and little statues. There were even pictures that looked like paintings, but were actually made from precious stones like jade and amethyst. It was amazing. They were so detailed; I can’t imagine cutting the stones into such tiny little shapes and fitting it all together so perfectly!
There were also a couple of temporary exhibits that we saw. One was called Sleeping Beauty, and it was a collection of Victorian paintings that all depicted sleep in one way or another. There were some works that were sketches of the bigger paintings that were there. There was a set of three paintings that depicted scenes from the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, and one that was called the Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon or something, that showed King Arthur sleeping in Avalon until the day he’s called back to Earth. My favorite was called Flaming June, which is a pretty famous painting. There’s a huge version of it in the Pallas restaurant that we’ve been to in Brookfield or Wauwatosa or somewhere around there. It’s a woman in a bright orange dress who is curled up sleeping on a bench in front of the ocean. They were all really beautiful.
The second exhibit was called Between Gods and Men, and it was all ancient Greek sculptures. I think a lot of them were copies of the originals made during the Renaissance. I don’t think many of them were actually the ones that were carved a couple hundred years BC. There were a lot of sculptures of gods, naked athletes, drunken revelries, and naked women. A lot of them had missing limbs or heads, and some of them were just heads. And, of course, they were all in white marble. It was pretty cool.
I’m sitting in my room listening to Jesus Christ Superstar. I love King Herod’s Song! “Walk across my swimming pool!” Hehe.
Well, that’s all for now.
Bethany

March 14

3-14

Hello again.

I haven’t written in several days, so I’ll just catch you up on what’s happened before I tell you about my trip to Avila today! This week was crazy. Lots of busyness and anxiety. Katie and I had a presentation in cine on Thursday about Spanish patriotic film. We were given our groups the week before last, and last week we met for about 2 minutes after class to see who everyone was. Last Thursday, one of the guys got everyone’s email and was going to send us all one so we could figure out what we were going to focus on and research. Mind, this is a week before the presentation. He didn’t send the email until Monday morning. That gave us three days in which not only to research and put it together, but to find a time to talk and figure out what the heck we were presenting on! I was getting so anxious! On Tuesday we finally met and picked our topics and assigned specific themes to everyone. After that it was easy, and the presentation on Thursday went fine, but I was so stressed out leading up to it! I hate group presentations! Especially when it’s with a bunch of people you don’t know, who live on opposite sides of Madrid and its surrounding areas, and people are always traveling on the weekends. It’s just not a good idea! And meanwhile, Jen was carping about the group presentation we have with her that’s not for another 3 weeks! She kept badgering us to think about topics of what we want to present on, because the professor left it hugely open ended, but Katie and I were super stressed about this cine presentation and we couldn’t think about the one that wasn’t for another several weeks!! It was very aggravating.

On Friday, Katie and I went to the Parque del Oeste, which is a park in Madrid. The main attraction there is the Templo de Debod, a 2200 year old Egyptian temple that was a gift from Egypt to Madrid at some point in history. It consists of two freestanding stone square arch and a multi-chambered temple, all in the middle of a pool of water. It was really cool. There were shallow carvings of hieroglyphics and those cool Egyptian drawings on the walls of the inside of the temple. They had some pieces of the original temple that had fallen off that had more carvings, and a diagram of what it had originally looked like. It had another arch in the front, and each arch had a huge wall coming off from each side. It’s hard to explain. I’ll put pictures up soon. I felt like Indiana Jones (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Debod?), and I half expected a giant boulder to come rolling down at me or poisoned darts to come flying out of the walls at any minute! It was a really cool place.

After the temple, we walked around the rest of the park for a while. It was really beautiful; there’s so much green, and there were trees blossoming all pink and white! And it’s March! I love being out of Wisconsin and missing all the cold!! It’s been hot the last few days. This morning I discovered that my chest got burned yesterday! I had joked to Katie that I would get burned, but I didn’t really expect it to happen! Stupid fair skin. . . . After the park, I had to go home in time for lunch (can’t be late for that!), and then I had a few hours free before choir, so, having been inspired, I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark. In Spanish. It was quite amusing. Then last night I had choir rehearsal, which seemed extraordinarily long, since I was so tired. I got home around 11:15 and went straight to bed. After reading for a bit, of course. J

This morning, Katie, Jen, and I went to Avila, which is a city about an hour and 45 minutes away from Madrid. We were going to take the 8:45 train, because Jen wanted to go early enough in the day that we could see things before they closed for siesta. So I woke up at 7:00 and dragged myself out of bed and to the train station. I texted them to let them know I was there, and Katie texted back, saying that her alarm didn’t go off and she was still at her house. There wasn’t another train until 2, so we decided to catch a bus. Of course, the bus station is on the other side of Madrid. It was a little before 9, and the next bus left at 9:30. Jen and I got there on time, but Katie had farther to go on the Metro, so she didn’t get there until about 5 minutes before, by which time they had stopped selling tickets for the 9:30 bus. So we bought tickets for 11:00 and found a Corte Ingles to kill an hour and a half in. We ended up not getting into Avila until quarter to 1, and siesta started at 1:30. The main thing we wanted to see that closed was the Convent of Santa Teresa (Saint Theresa of Avila). We had the hardest time finding it, and it was after 1:30 by the time we finally did, but we still wanted to know where it was so that we could come back at 4 when it opened again. Stupid siesta. So we went and found somewhere to eat. We ate at a Telepizza, which is like a Pizza Hut. It’s really good, which is good to know because there’s one right across the street from me. I thought it was just delivery pizza, but it’s not. Also, they had the Simpsons on in Spanish on TV. It was awesome! It was the Cape Feare episode, where Sideshow Bob is trying to kill Bart so the Simpsons move to a houseboat via the witness relocation program. It’s one of my favorite episodes (I love Sideshow Bob!), and it’s been so long since I’ve watched the Simpsons! After that episode another one came on; the one where Homer goes back to college. That’s got one of my favorite quotes in it: “You must find the jade monkey before the next full moon. . . Sir, we found the jade monkey. It was in your glove compartment.” Haha! I love Mr. Burns. “Excellent. It’s all falling into place.” Hehehe!! I know: I’m a nerd. I embrace it.

Avila has a wall all the way around it, preserved from ancient times. It’s the best preserved walled city in Spain. The walls are called las marallas. After we ate, we went up and walked along them. There are four sections where you can go up, and we went on two of them. The stairs to get up there are scary; they’re steep and uneven and there’s just a thin railing to hang onto. But once you’re up there, there’s a spectacular view of the city, the countryside, and, of course, the mountains. It was really cool. They were all crenulated, and we were imagining being besieged and what it would be like to shoot arrows down from the walls and have to dodge flying rocks hurled up by catapults. Leave it to Katie and me to start imagining that! We were going to go into the cathedral, but it was like 4 euro and Katie and Jen didn’t want to pay that much to get in, so we just saw a little bit of it through the divider before the ticket booth. I would have liked to go in, but that’s ok. All these cathedrals are much the same anyway.

By that time it was almost 4, so we started heading back to the Convent of Santa Teresa. Katie especially wanted to see it because St. Teresa is her confirmation saint. It was a beautiful little church, and there was an old woman who must have worked there who told us a little about various things. Not being Catholic, I didn’t know much about St. Teresa, but it was still very pretty. There was a little room off the church where the relic is kept; they have her ring finger, preserved and displayed. It’s fairly disgusting: half decomposed, but with two gold rings on it. I asked Katie and Jen, the Catholics, how churches got relics, but they didn’t know. I’m imaging people swooping down on saints as soon as they die, cutting off their fingers and pulling out their teeth to distribute to various churches. I’m sure I’ve just horribly offended every Catholic in the world. Oh well. J There was also a museum at the church, but it was also more expensive than we were willing to do. We meandered back toward the bus stations. We stopped in the Plaza Mayor to buy yemas de Santa Teresa, which are a kind of candy made from egg yokes and sugar that are characteristic of Avila. That put off Katie and Jen a bit, but Rosaura had said that I should try them, so I got a small box. They’re actually pretty good. They have about the same consistency as very soft cookie dough, and they don’t taste at all like egg yokes.

We caught the 6:00 bus back to Madrid and arrived back around quarter to 8. It’s 9:00 now, and I’m just sitting writing this, waiting for supper. There’s not much more to tell. Tomorrow Katie and I are going back to the Prado museum to see everything we didn’t see last time. It’s free Sundays from 5-8, so we’re going to do it then. Yay for free entry!

I can’t believe it’s halfway through March already. This month is flying by!

Bethany

March 8

3-8
Today we went to Patricia’s house to cook Spanish dishes. We made tortilla de patata (Spanish tortilla, which is a kind of potato omelet), espinacas (spinach with onions, green pepper, raisins, and tomato), arroz con leche (rice with condensed milk, lemon, and sugar for dessert) and, of course, sangria. It was a lot of fun. We mostly chopped vegetables and stirred things, and Patricia’s neighbor did most of the “real” cooking, but we did get to help. There were 16 of us total, including Patricia’s husband and two sons, so everything was in mass quantities. We made three tortillas, I think; all bigger than a dinner plate. Probably about the size of a frozen pizza. You cook them like omelets in a fry pan and then when the time comes to flip it you put a flat lid on the pan, flip it upside down and then quick slide it back into the pan. It was rather impressive when Patricia’s husband did it; we gave him a round of applause. One of the ones we made was over an inch thick, but the others were probably only about a half inch. Everything was delicious. Well, the spinach was not so good. It was alright for a one time thing, but I don’t know if I would make it again. Maybe without the raisins. They gave it a weird sweet taste. Patricia is going to send us the recipes for everything we made (in quantities for 4 instead of 16, and with American measurements!) so I can make it for people in the States! We also had cheese slices and three kinds of sausage, including blood sausage which was actually quite good, and sliced ham. Delicious! We ate an entire platter of meat and cheese before lunch because we were all hungry, and then there was another platter during the meal. We ate for probably 3 hours between the pre-meal snacking and the very long, multi-course meal. Which, of course, is very Spanish. Their meals tend to be very long, social occasions. It was fun to get together with the AYA group again. We actually talked in Spanish most of the time this time because the neighbor and her husband and kids were there. The kids speak English, and I think the other two know some, but mostly it was Spanish. We sat and talked for a long time after we finished eating, too. We got there a little after noon and didn’t leave until 6!
When I got home I talked to my parents for about an hour and a half. It was a different time of day than normal, and a little longer than usual because I hadn’t talked to them for two weeks. When I was done and I brought the phone back, Rosaura told me that I can’t talk that long because she was waiting for a call from her daughter who usually called then because that was when her baby went to bed and she could only call on Saturdays and Sundays because she had work and yadda yadda yadda (as if I could talk to my parents who are 7 hours away at any time I please). First of all, I understand that she wanted to talk to her daughter. But I felt like she was giving me one of those classic Rosaura scoldings where I should feel terrible and never do it again type thing. I don’t know if that was her intention, but it felt like it. I was upset at her for tarnishing my good mood, but I tried to just let it roll off. I wasn’t going to let her make me feel bad! But I think in the future we’d better keep to our normal time frame on Sunday nights.
Well, that’s all folks!
Bethany

March 7

3-7
Yesterday was a crappy day. Almost as soon as I woke up, I started worrying because I’m still undecided about what to do during spring break. I have a nonrefundable flight lined up out of Salzburg on April 7th, but then I would get back to Madrid and have a week with nothing to do and everyone else gone. So I was thinking about scrapping the ticket and using my Eurail pass to get trains to other cities and travel on my own. And I think for the most part that would be ok, except there are some trains you need to pay an extra charge if it’s a high speed or a reservation fee or something were it wouldn’t be free. So I’ve been trying to figure all this out, in the 20 minutes or so I have at a time on the internet between classes. So I started the day out worried. I decided to go to Sol because I wanted to go to FNAC (the book/music store) to get the second Harry Potter in Spanish, and I needed to buy toothpaste and stuff from Corte Ingles. At FNAC I found Golden Compass, the Hobbit, and Pawn of Prophecy in Spanish too, and I was so excited! I could buy them and read some of my favorite books while still practicing my Spanish. But they wouldn’t take my credit card without ID, and they wouldn’t accept my international student ID card or a copy of my passport (it has to be the original passport). So I ended up just getting HP with the 20 euro I had in my purse. I was so mad. It was so stupid. So, then after that I only had 5 euro left for Corte Ingles, so I couldn’t get everything I needed. I was in a really bad mood. Not to mention, I was still worried about spring break. I stopped in the locutorio for a little bit (it couldn’t be very long because I didn’t have very much money) to try to figure out some of the eurail stuff, and what little I found was just discounted tickets, not free. All I wanted to do was talk to my parents about things to try to sort some stuff out, but we’re not going to talk until Sunday. I also found out my grandpa had a mild stroke (either that or an MS ‘attack’). The way it was presented it didn’t sound like that big of a deal, so I wasn’t really worried, but it didn’t help matters! I came home and decided to watch a movie to take my mind off things. I watched V for Vendetta, which isn’t a happy movie, but it’s so good it didn’t matter. I was in a little better mood when I went to choir in the evening, and after singing Handel for four hours I was a little happier. But still. I texted mom to make sure Grandpa was ok, and she called back, so we did get to talk a little. We didn’t get anything resolved because we didn’t talk for long (it’s expensive via cell phone!), but just being able to talk with her cheered me up a bit. So then I spent the rest of the night (until 1 am, to my surprise) looking at the train timetable that came with my Eurail pass to try to figure out which trains needed reservations and extra fees and which ones would be free/very cheap. Then I decided that the day needed to end so I went to sleep. All in all, not my best day.
Today we had a field trip for my cultural studies class. Actually, it was two field trips in one. First, we went to the Reina Sofia museum to see Picasso’s Guernica and some other works by him, Salvador Dali, and a couple other vanguardia artists. It was a lot of cubism and surrealism and all that other kind of stuff that I’m not really into, but it was still interesting. Our teacher talked so long about everything that we ended up spending two and a half hours on one floor, and I don’t think we even saw all of it. Guernica is huge and impressive and disturbing. It’s about the size of a wall in a normal sized room. It is named after the city that was bombed during the civil war, but according to our reading it’s a general anti-war work. It’s the most famous painting in the Reina Sofia, and the one that they bought to draw people in (against Picasso’s express wishes that it stay in the Prado museum, I might add). It is jealously guarded: there were two museum employees for that one painting alone, and if anyone gets too close a buzzer goes off. They wouldn’t even let Jen sit on the floor during our lecture. I have no idea why. But it’s under so much surveillance because at one point it was stabbed. I don’t know when or why, but I assume it was probably some pro-facist/pro-Francoist fanatic. Anyway, not an attractive piece of work in the slightest. But I suppose it gets across the message of the horrors of war as well as anything.
Later this afternoon, we went to Valle de los Caídos, which is a monument built by Franco to commemorate those who fell in the civil war. It’s a very controversial place. It’s about 40 minutes outside of Madrid, up in the mountains. There’s a huge cross that stands on the top of one mountain that can be seen for miles. It’s 50 stories tall, and the base is another 50, so in total it’s 100 stories. Beneath it, carved into the mountain, is a basilica where about 30,000 or more soldiers are buried. The whole thing was built by prisoners of the civil war; republicans who lost to the facists and were captured. The prisons were overfilled, so Franco used them to build his monument instead. Hundreds of them died while hollowing out the mountain and building the cross and basilica. At first, Franco wanted to bury only those soldiers on his side who had died, and because no one wanted their loved ones to be buried so far away in a mass setting like that, he made it mandatory and had tons of bodies moved there from their previous burial places. Then in the late 50s, Franco decided to make it a more unified symbol and said that any republican soldier who died in the war and was Catholic could (must) also be buried there, so there was another huge batch of bodies moved. Because of this, there are thousands of unidentified bodies, and lots of people don’t know where their parents/grandparents are buried. In addition to the soldiers, the founder of the Falange (fascist group) Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera and Franco himself are buried there. There was a huge controversy about what should be done with the monument after Franco died; some people wanted it destroyed, and others wanted it preserved as a part of the nation’s history. The current president made a law in 2007 that it will be preserved as an apolitical monument, and they are starting to try to identify the unknown bodies buried there. A huge project, since there are more than 30,000. I hesitate to say that it was a cool trip, because the history behind it is so horrible, but seeing that huge cross amongst all the mountains is certainly beautiful. Maybe it would be better to say it was impressive. It’s hard with things like this, because the Spaniards have such strong opinions when it comes to Franco, since it was so recent in history, and I don’t always know who thinks what or why. I don’t want to unthinkingly say anything that would offend them. It’s very different for us, whose country has been free for hundreds of years, than for the Spaniards, who had a dictator less than 35 years ago, and the majority of the population lived through it and remembers it. It’s weird for me to imagine that. As Americans, we take such pride in our freedom; I can’t imagine living without it. It seems like something like dictatorship should be a thing of the past, or at least be somewhere very far away (I suppose I am very far away, aren’t I. . .). But it was a reality for everyone here. It’s weird.
Tomorrow we have our cooking class at Patricia’s house. One of her neighbors is a cook and she’s going to teach us to make some traditional Spanish dishes. So when I come home I can cook Spanish tortilla and flan and stuff for you! I can’t guarantee it would be good . . . . But it should be fun. She gave us the bus number and the name of the street to get off on, but we’re sort of supposed to find our way on our own, which should be interesting. Thank goodness I’m going with Katie! It’s such a relief to have another person; that way, if you get lost at least you’re not lost alone!
We have a 4 day weekend coming up in a couple weeks because Thursday the 19th is the Día de San José and there’s no school. Katie and I were going to go to Portugal, but everything was so expensive that we decided to scrap that and take day trips instead. There are a lot of places we want to go within a couple hours of Madrid. We want to go to Salamanca, Cuenca, Guadalajara, maybe return to Toledo, el Escorial, Aranjuez; there are more places than we have days! I think this’ll be better than one big trip because it’ll be a lot cheaper!
There’s someone in our apartment building that plays the oboe and always practices around this time and I can hear. He/she is really good, and it always makes me happy to hear oboe music coming from the open window!
Well, I should probably get some homework done before supper. Later!
Bethany

March 2

3-2
Happy March, everyone!! I just got back from Barcelona this morning! It was amazing!! It’s the second largest city in Spain, after Madrid, but it has a totally different feel. Everyone kept telling me it’s more European than Madrid, but I don’t know what that means. I guess that it’s less modernized or something, but I don’t really understand. The streets are much wider and airier, and it’s on the Mediterranean! It’s a 7 and a half hour bus ride, so we took a midnight bus. At the termanial, I asked a guard for directions and he started hitting on me!! It was weird. He asked if I was English, and I said no, American, and he told me he had never met an American before. Then he said he wanted to see me again after this and asked if he could give me his number. I told him I wasn’t interested (I didn’t know what to say!), and then he started wheedling. He said he had always had a dream to date an American. (I don’t know if this is because of the reputation American girls sometimes have of being easy or what.) I told him he should visit the States and maybe he could find a girlfriend there. The he asked me if it was because he was black, and if I didn’t like black people. I was like no, that’s not it at all! Then he was like: have you ever had a black boyfriend, you should try it. He was going on for like 5 minutes about all of this. Finally I said I’m sorry, I’m not interested, and I’m going to be late. I have to go! It was a very uncomfortable experience!
I went with Katie and her friend from home, Greg, who’s studying in London this semester. We got on the bus (the midnight bus, mind you) and this lady came on with a 2 year old girl. For the first half hour or so they were making weird noises, like baby noises, and talking. Then the girl started crying. I was like shut your kid up or I will do it myself!! It was like 1 in the morning!! Grrr! Fortunately, after a while she must have fallen asleep, because I didn’t hear anything more the rest of the trip. We stopped at 2:30 and again at 4ish for a break/change of drivers, and each time they turned all the lights on and made an announcement over the loudspeaker, so it was impossible to sleep through. I did fall asleep in some form, but I don’t know for how long or how well I slept. We got into Barcelona around 7:30, just as the sun was rising. It was very to pretty to see the sunrise over the city! We found our hostel and were lucky enough to be able to check in right away. We decided to take an hour or so to sleep because nothing was open in the city anyway until 9 or 10. Our hostel was really nice (it should have been, for 25 euro a night!) and it was right in the middle of things. We could walk almost everywhere.
We decided just to start wandering, and right away we found the monument to Christopher Columbus, which is at the port. It’s a huge obelisk thingy with a statue of Columbus on the top pointing to the spot where he landed in Spain after discovering America. The pedestal has a statue of Queen Isabel and various scenes of him petitioning the trip and stuff. It was cool. After that we went to the Cathedral of Barcelona, which was, of course, under construction. They were restoring the front of the building, so they put up a huge banner thingy with what it was supposed to look like when it was done, complete with a giant Telefonica logo. All you could see of the actual building was the peak and the spires. Stupid construction. It was free to go inside, though, and we were able to take pictures. It’s weird: I’ve seen so many cathedrals now that I don’t really know how to describe them any differently. They all look very much the same, and yet there’re still always worth visiting. Just being there and seeing such a huge, beautiful, historic building is so cool, that it doesn’t really matter if it’s not that different that ones I’ve already seen.
Our next stop was the church of Santa Maria del Mar, which was basically a cathedral except maybe a little smaller. Very beautiful, with lots of stained glass windows high above the altar. While we were there, a man started playing the organ, so we got to hear it reverberating around the church. It was awesome.
Our next stop was the Museo Picasso, which is (obviously) the Picasso museum. It had a bunch of his sketches and lesser known works. At least, they were lesser known to me. And since I am the ultimate authority on everything, if I don’t know it, it isn’t famous. I was surprised at how much of his stuff wasn’t cubist. I didn’t know he had such a long normal period. Much of his work was intelligible and pleasant to look at. I was glad, because the whole abstract, cubism thing just doesn’t make much sense to me. I like to know what I’m looking at. There were several different styles of paintings; some portraits, some still-life, even one that looked just like a Monet! There was also a room that talked about his collaboration with Diagilev and the Russian Ballet, which we studied in 20th Century Music! There were photos of the set and costumes he designed for one of the ballets (of course now I can’t remember the name of it. It wasn’t one I knew). They talked about Satie’s Parade, which is one of the ones we studied, but there were no pictures of that one. The most famous of his works, like Guernica, are in other museums. We’re going to see Guernica and some of the others in the Museo Reina Sofía with my Estudios Culturales class on Saturday. Should be interesting touring a museum, with my class of 60 kids . . . .
After the museum, we wandered a little bit more. We ended up at the Arc del Triomf, which is a huge gateway type arch in the middle of a long walk with statues and cool lampposts and stuff. It was very cool. And kind of random. That’s one of the things I love most about Spain though; there are so many random statues and monuments just hanging around on the street, oblivious to the modern world around them. It really gives the cities a different feel from anything in the United States.
Next we went and saw some Gaudi stuff. After a little bit of confusion in which we got slightly lost, we found the Casa Batllo, which is one of the houses Gaudi built. It was just a tall, narrowish building in the middle of the block, but boy, did it stand out! It was all colorful with wavy stone balconies and pillars, and cool little spires on top. I read somewhere that Gaudi often emulated eroded stone in his buildings, and the smooth, rounded edges of both Casas does look like that. It also looks to me like it’s melting. The Casa Mila, which is the other building he designed, is an apartment like building with more of the cool wavy balconies. This one isn’t colorful, but it’s got spires on top that remind me of Dairy Queen ice cream cones, with the same kind of swirly twist. The Casa Mila also has these really cool wrought iron-like railings on the balconies that look kind of leafy. We would have gone inside the buildings, but they were 15 and 18 euros, and that seemed a little expensive for us, so we just looked from the outside.
Then we went back to our hostel to rest for a while. It’s tiring walking all around a city! After maybe an hour or so, we went out to Port Vell, which is the seaport. There was a mall and an aquarium and an IMAX and a movie theatre and a whole bunch of stuff there. You couldn’t really see the ocean from there because of the buildings and all the tall ships. We were going to go to the aquarium, but it was like 12 euros, which was too expensive. Then Katie and Greg wanted to see a Monsters of the Deep ocean movie at the IMAX in 3D, but I vetoed that. IMAXes tend to make me a little sick sometimes, and I hate 3D stuff, so both of them together sounded less than fun for me. Although, I suppose the ocean one would have been better than the Dinosaurs Alive movie that was also showing. But we decided to just go see a regular movie. We saw Slumdog Millionaire in Spanish. It was a good movie. I was pleased by how easily I understood everything. I didn’t like the end, though. Well, not the end of the movie, that was fine, but when the credits start . . . well I won’t ruin it for anyone who hasn’t seen it. I just thought it ruined the mood. After the movie Katie and I went back to the hostel and Greg went to meet some friends of his who were also visiting Barcelona this weekend.
Sunday morning we went to Colonia Guell, which is a little town 20 minutes outside of Barcelona where Gaudi designed the church. This is the one my aunt Janny told me was her favorite of all the Gaudi buildings. Only the crypt was completed when the patron withdrew funding, and even though they’ve added some more to it after his death, it’s still not finished. It was really cool: there was a sort of stone canopy over the entrance with rounded pillars that Greg said looked kind of like spider legs. There were lots of roundish stained glass windows with cool little peaks over them. Inside, there was a one room chapel. They had just finished holding mass, so you could still smell the candles. It was beautiful, with all the stained glass and the unique ceiling and curved pillars. I think there was an upstairs, or more rooms somewhere, but it was closed off. There were stairs outside where you could go up on top of the church by the bell tower, where there was a cool view of the colony. I definitely thought it was worth the trip, but I’m not sure if Katie and Greg liked all the Gaudi stuff. They kept referring to it as gaudy, and I don’t know if they didn’t like it, or if they thought it was interesting, but just a little ostentatious. I’m pretty sure Greg used the word obnoxious once, but I don’t agree. I think it’s cool.
When we got back to Barcelona (much later in the day than any of us had expected) we went to Park Guell, which is the park Gaudi designed. It was a million and a half miles from the metro station, and at the top of a huge hill. There were 7 or 8 escalators in the hill from the bottom, plus two very steep blocks to walk up. When we got there, we had to rush through because it was getting late and we still wanted to see the Sagrada Familia before it closed at 6. So we saw the main gate entrance, where the gingerbread house-like buildings of Gaudi’s are (a lot of Gaudi’s stuff reminds me of desserts, apparently), and we saw a little bit of the grounds. I wish we would have had more time, but what can you do? What we did see was really cool.
From there we rushed off to see the Sagrada Familia, which is Gaudi’s famous unfinished cathedral. Another hugely long walk back (though a different route this time without the giant hill), and a couple metro stops later we got there, at almost quarter till 6. Greg and Katie didn’t want to pay 9 euros to get in, but I knew that if I didn’t, I would regret it forever. So I went in. The inside is almost all under construction, because they’re still working on building it from his plans, so there wasn’t a whole lot I could see. I saw the outside walls and huge windows and a few stained glass windows. There’s an elevator you can take up one of the towers, but it was closed by the time I got there. So I stayed inside the compound until about 10 after 6. There were still people there, but all the workers were starting to leave, so I decided to go out. That’s when I got pictures of the outside, which is the most impressive part of the church. There are two façades, on opposite sides of the building. The nativity façade is beautifully carved, with pretty figures. There were musicians carved around the stable scene, and one of them was playing the bassoon! So I got a close up picture of that! J The passion façade, on the other side of the church, is the crucifixion, and all the figures are very angular and strange looking. Both of them are immensely complex and detailed; so much so that it was hard to see everything. It didn’t help that it was so immense. There are four spires on each side built so far, that tower over everything nearby. These are supposed to be the shortest of the 12 towers in the plans. I don’t know how much they’ve scaled down Gaudi’s original plans, but I think they’re still going to make all the towers. The Sagrada Familia is the most impressive of the Gaudi things I saw, just from the sheer size and detail of it. It dominates the plaza, and it’s hard to look away because there’s just so much there to see. It was awesome.
After that, we didn’t really have any plans. Greg wanted to go find a beach, so we went back to the Port and walked along the seaside until we found sand. It was just starting to get dark, so it was really pretty with the sea and the lights from the city. We took off our shoes and socks and waded in the water. So cold!! When we were done freezing our toes off, we went up to a convenience store type thing that was close and bought some wine coolers and chips and sat on the beach in the dark, listening to the sound of the waves for a long time. It was really beautiful. And it smelled so good! But it got cold after a while, so around 8 we headed back to the hostel. At 9 we went downstairs to the restaurant owned by the hostel people and had dinner. I had paella for the first time in Spain. It was yummy. Katie and I got one to share, and the waiter asked us if we wanted two, because the one was small, and held out his hands to about a 6 inch circle. We didn’t want to pay for two, though, so we still got one. When it came it was at least a 12 inch pan! I don’t think we would have been able to eat a whole one each! Stupid waiter trying to get more money out of us . . . .
After supper we went back and went to bed. We got up at 6 this morning in order to get to the airport before our flight left at 8:30. It was less than an hour flight and we were back in Madrid. Much better than 7 and a half hours on a bus! I had a couple hours home before I had to go to class, so I showered and sorted pictures. It doesn’t feel like it was just this morning that I was in Barcelona!
Well, I think that concludes another of my Spanish adventures. Sorry for the long blog, but if you’ve made it this far, you win a special prize! And that is . . . you have been granted the knowledge of what I’m doing in Spain!! Woo hoo!! Wow, I’m in a weird mood. I think I need to go to bed.
Good night all!
Bethany