April 19

Hi all
I’m just sitting here playing Solitaire, so I decided I should write a blog. This has been a fairly busy weekend. On Friday did homework all morning, chipping away at the mountain of work I have to do before the end of the semester in three weeks. (!) In the afternoon I had a field trip for my Estudios Culturales class to the Museo Reina Sofía. We went once before, but this time we looked at different artwork; more modern stuff. I still didn’t really like it. I like being able to recognize what I’m looking at without extensive analysis. Not to mention all those paintings that are nothing more than a few drops of paint haphazardly splashed across the canvas. There was one work of “art” that was all crushed hay pasted to the canvas with two strips of metal making an x across it. The professor made a comment that there’s a line of thought that works like this are only considered art because they’re in a museum, but if it was out on the street no one would pay any attention to it. I would agree, and add that many of the things I saw would be considered vandalistic graffiti. I’m not showing my bias here, am I? I really enjoy going to art museums generally, but when I start seeing things that my dog could create, I get bored. I like seeing skill and talent, not unintelligible randomness. Anyway, after listening to my professor jabber on about modern art for two hours, I stopped to get a sandwich, had a half hour at home, and left for choir. We had a concert on Saturday so we were polishing up the music we had sung at our previous concert. We actually got out a little early, which is unheard of in the time I’ve been there!
Saturday I did homework again all morning. It seems like as much as I work on it, it never gets any less! I have three papers, two tests, a debate, and a project I know nothing about yet to do in the next three weeks! Not to mention an entire play to read and five final exams to study for! But I did get a good chunk done this weekend. That’s good, because I hardly did anything today!
Our choir concert was in the evening on Saturday, and we had a rehearsal before. The concert was in a church in Aranjuez, which is an hour away. We had a bus that took us there from Leganés, where the university is, at three o’clock, which meant that I had to leave home at 2. Our rehearsal was from 4 until 6:30 or so, and then we had some free time. The concert went from 8-10. It went really well. It wasn’t quite so echoy, so it was a lot easier to hear everything that was going on. It was a charity for a group of nuns who run a homeless shelter, and every one of the 400+ seats was sold! We got a standing ovation at the end and we did an encore of the last song. The crowd was very impressed with us, if I do say so myself! J It was fun. The bus left at 10, arrived in Leganés at 11, and I had to take the train home from there. So I didn’t get home until midnight. 10 hours of my day were dedicated to that concert in some way or other!
This morning I went to the Museo Thyssen-Bournemisza or something like that. I don’t know how to spell it or pronounce it. The first floor was all modern art again, so I was a little worried that it would all be like that, but the second and third floors were real art. There were a few famous paintings that I recognized, like Picasso’s Harlequin with a Mirror (from the period before Picasso went crazy), and the portrait of Giovanna someone I can’t remember that is a famous Italian renaissance portrait that I knew from all my costume research. I was surprised and excited to see it there! There was a lot of Italian renaissance art, and a bunch of landscapes and 17th century Flemish paintings, and French impressionists, and a whole bunch of things. It was a nice museum. After that, I walked over to Sol and ran into this outdoor kind of market thingy with a bunch of jewelry and scarves and things like that. I think it might have been a part of the Rastro, which is the big market they have every Sunday, but it was after the Rastro closes, and it was just a little section, so it might have been something else. I went to Sfera, which is a clothing store, in search of capris because I, in my Wisconsin state of mind, didn’t bring any summer pants, but they didn’t have any. It’s April and they didn’t have any capris or even shorts! Only long pants and skirts. I was surprised; in the States they would have started selling summer clothes a while ago. Next I went to Corte Inglés to find some little shampoo bottles for the plane. I’d had a hard time finding them; everywhere else I went they only had huge bottles. There are some normal sized bottles of shampoo and that kind of thing here, but a lot of what they sell is at least once and a half the size of the bottles in the US, if not double. On the way home I stopped and got a kabob because it was after 4 and I hadn’t eaten lunch yet.
This afternoon I worked on my Europe planning for a while. I checked my email from my phone and found out that my Grandpa is in the hospital with aspiration pneumonia. He’s been in a state of steady decline for a long time, and it’s gotten worse since he was moved to the health center at the retirement home in February (I think), so I was worried to hear that he was in the hospital. Apparently he’s doing fairly well, though. They’ve got him on an IV of antibiotic, and they’re giving him blood because he’s anemic. Poor Grandpa’s in constant pain and has almost no strength. It’s all he can do to move from the wheelchair to his armchair with help. I don’t know if he’s going to be strong enough to recover. It would almost be a relief for him to go, because he’s got such a poor quality of life. But I hope he holds on at least until I get home so I can see him again. Must think positively: he’ll recover and I will see him again. I will.
Tonight I talked with my mom and discovered she’s in Illinois at my aunt and uncle’s house! So I got to talk with them, too! I haven’t talked with my aunt since she was diagnosed with amyloidosis, so it was good to hear from her, even though we didn’t talk about it much. She starts chemo and bone marrow transplants in May, so it’ll be a tough month for her and for everyone. But mostly we talked about Spain and happy things. We only had about a half hour because they had somewhere to be that afternoon. But it was still nice to talk.
Yesterday was April 18. I leave for Dublin for my European tour with Brent and Danny on May 18, and I return home on June 18. Two months until I come home. It still sounds so long when I say it like that. Better to think that I’ve been here almost three months, and I’ve only got three weeks of school left! That sounds better.
Well it’s almost midnight so I think I’m going to go to bed. G’night!
Bethany