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