Málaga

aprovechar = to take advantage of
botellón = a get-together where friends drink something that comes in a bottle (botella), usually outdoors somewhere
torrijas = a Semana Santa dessert, very similar to french toast

Let's play a game.

It's called, "Last Day In Spain: Time To Write About Everything That's Happened In The Past Like Month."

For the sake of pretending I've been keeping up with this blog thing, I'm going to dedicate one post to each city I've visited since I last communicated with you all (that would be four cities).

Here we go!

So, the week leading up to Easter, Holy Week, here in Spain is called "Semana Santa" (literal translation).  We got a week and a day off from classes.  Some friends and I aprovechamos the break to spend a few days in the city of Málaga, to the south.

The weather was absolutely beautiful.

Obviously, we spent the entire week on the beach.  This left little time for picture-taking, but don't worry—I got a few.

Our first day on the beach was extraordinarily windy.  Like, really.  The sand blowing in our faces genuinely caused pain.  But it was very warm and very sunny, and I very quickly got very tan.  Bahaha.

There isn't too much to say about Málaga.  I didn't do any sightseeing.  We were honestly just there for the beach.

We did catch a Semana Santa procession, though.  I'm not up on the full tradition, but it involved many costumed clerics carrying floats of Jesus and Mary.  Their costumes are reminiscent of the KKK, but rest assured, these folks have nothing to do with them.

Semana Santa procession

Candles!  

The rest of the week was solid beach-going.  On the last night, we met some people in our hostel and had a mini botellón on the beach.  That was pretty fun.

The following Sunday was Easter.  Ana showed me how to make torrijas!  It's very simple.  She boiled a medium-large quantity of milk with cinnamon sticks, a lemon peel, and sugar.  When it was "ready," she took it off the heat and let it cool off.  She had a special "torrija" bread that she used, but it was basically just a thick-sliced baguette.

She arranged the bread slices in a pan and poured in the cooled milk mixture, and she let it sit for about twenty minutes and soak up the milk.  Then she filled a deep frying pan with—you guessed it—olive oil, got it hot, and deep-fried the torrijas.

¡Y ya está!

She also made a glaze from boiled honey, lemon juice, and sugar, which she poured on the torrijas afterward to keep them from drying out.  Other common toppings include chocolate sauce and cinnamon-sugar.

Installment 2: León is soon to come!  Stay tuned.

Córdoba, Sevilla, y Valencia

rotulador = marker

casco = helmet

cristal = visor

ruedas = wheels

cara o cruz = heads or tails (literally: face or cross)

flequillo = bangs (literally: fringe)

capas = layers

coleta = ponytail

trenza = braid

sofreír = sauté

canela (en rama) = cinnamon (stick)

cocer = boil

tijeras = scissors

efectivo = cash

mezquita = mosque

Well.  It sure has been awhile.

I was busy for a couple of weeks with midterms, and then I just didn’t really have that much to write about.  We went to Sevilla two weeks ago, and since then, I’ve just been putting writing off.  I’ve got a lot to cover now, so this should be a pretty good length.

Two weeks ago, we took a weekend trip to Córdoba and Sevilla.  This one was hosted by my program, CIEE, so I didn't have to pay anything (extra) for the bus or hotel.  They even gave us (back some of our own) money for food!  The bus ride to Córdoba was about six hours.  Apparently, there's a law in Spain allowing hired bus drivers to take a half-hour break every two hours.  We took advantage of both of these breaks.  I'm not sure of the exact specifics of this law, but it's stupid.  I say, "Suck it up, bus drivers."

We were only actually in Córdoba for a few hours on Friday.  All there really was to see there was the mezquita.  It was built during the thirteenth century, and part of it was later converted into a Catholic cathedral.  This is one of the buildings we studied in my Art History class, so it was interesting to see it in person.

Exterior of the mezquita tower.

Interior.  The double-arches were inspired by Roman aqueducts.

After the mezquita, we got back on the bus and headed for Sevilla (about another hour away).  We went straight to the hotel that first night, which was a relief.  After a short rest, we went out to a secret hidey-hole bar and got to see some free flamenco dancing, which was very cool!  This woman was a fantastic dancer.

Whoa!  Where's her foot?  It's moving so fast you can't see it, THAT'S where!

The next day was raining… boo.  We spent some time wandering around, looking at gardens and statues, which was boring and frankly unpleasant in the drizzle.  Then we headed to the Reales Alcázares, which was inside and much nicer.  We also looked at parts of this in Art History.

This courtyard was on my midterm… Note the arcos polilobulados and the yesería, indicative of the estilo musulmán del siglo XIII.

Next, we saw the cathedral, which was definitely cool.  It's the largest cathedral in Spain, and the third largest in the world.  It was built during the fifteenth century in the gothic "flamigero" style (this means something like "flamboyant," I think).  We wandered all around the ground level, listening to our guide talk about boring things, and then went up the tower, la Giralda.  The original tower was actually constructed during I think the twelfth century, by muslims.  After the Catholic Reconquista, the current tower was built around it.

La Giralda

Soooooo big!

View of the cathedral from about halfway up the Giralda.

The next morning, we got to look around the Plaza de toro—the outside of it, anyway.  It wasn't very exciting.  We're pretty sure it was just to waste some time before we all got on the bus.

Last weekend, a couple of my friends and I went out with our "intercambio," Chema.  Intercambios are people who meet up to practice speaking in a foreign language—in our case, Chema is a native Spaniard, and we use him to practice Spanish.  Ironically, we went out to a birthday party for two American girls, so about half of the guest list were Americans.  We felt a little guilty for speaking English all night, but at the same time, it was nice to socialize in English, for a change.

Chema made sangría—his recipe was wine, rum, vodka, three kinds of Fanta, fruit juice, apples, oranges, and pineapple.  Spanish people will mix anything with wine.  A popular drink for college students is "calimocho," which is wine mixed with coke and sometimes a splash of grenadine.  It's not considered a very classy drink, but it's still tasty.  There's also something called "tinto de verano," which is wine mixed with sprite and fruit juice (like a cheap version of sangría).  This is what the natives order in restaurants while the foreigners get more expensive sangría.

The Americans we met were mostly grad students, studying in Spain and teaching English.  They had a nice little flat.  I forgot to ask how expensive it was.  It seemed like a pretty good deal, and their Spanish was much more evolved than mine.  I was a little jealous.

On Friday morning, a handful of us got on a bus to Valencia for the culmination of a month-long celebration called Las Fallas.  The bus left at nine in the morning from Madrid, so I was awake at six to take the train in and find the bus station.  The half-hour-stop rule was in effect here, too, which was REALLY obnoxious (and even worse on the way back) because it meant that I could only sleep in one-to-two-hour chunks.  There were about forty buses going, in total, and even though the seven of us booked at the same time, we each ended up on a different one.

The fallas themselves are like giant floats made of wood and papier-mâché.  They were extremely detailed and all very well made.  The minimum amount of research I did beforehand informed me that much of the year is spent constructing them, and they stand on street intersections for a week or so leading up to this past Friday night.  Then, once the sun goes down and for about four hours afterward, all the fallas are set on fire and burned to the ground.

It was awwwwwwesome.

This was our favorite.  Can you see the two tiny people doing the Charleston on the back of the armchair?  I estimated them to be approximately life-size.  That's how big this thing was.  It was probably one of the tallest, but they were all similar in hugeness.

Some of the fallas were just silliness, but many of them involved some kind of political or social satire.  In the falla above, the two ladies represent the pound and the euro, and the fat man with the beer and the cigar represents the dollar.  You can't see it here, but the armchair is perched on a "throw rug," which is actually a live tiger, and under that is a huge pile of coins.  There are a lot of smaller details, including a car carrying three members of the Real Madrid soccer team, and a grinning Obama floating in the water on a life preserver made of dollar bills.

This was the falla we decided to watch burn.  After the sun went down, we stood around for about an hour and a half, waiting… then they announced that they'd be burning it at one-thirty.  Great.  So we came back later and waited a little more.  At long last, and after some pretentious and frankly annoying fireworks displays, they finally set it aflame, and most of it was incinerated in the space of about five minutes.

It was SO worth it.

Here's what our falla looked like ON FIRE.

We arrived in Valencia around three in the afternoon and could already hear fireworks going off.  There were children as young as about seven or eight running through the streets unsupervised, setting off firecrackers that could take off a person's hand.  It was worrying.  Ana (my host mom) says that the kind of firecrackers that small children run around with during Las Fallas are actually illegal in the rest of Spain… but Valencia is part of an autonomous community, which means they get to make up most of their own rules, and, according to Ana, all of their celebrations involve fireworks, so it'd be unfair to make the small children stop throwing dynamite at poor unsuspecting americanas… not that I'm bitter or anything.

We only stayed one night, and our bus departed at six in the morning, so we didn't bother getting a hostel or anything.  The streets were FULL of people up until the buses pulled out, and there were still burning fallas and exploding fireworks, so it's not like we would have gotten much sleep, anyway.  The two-hour-stop rule was most annoying here, since all I wanted to do was sleep and the uncomfortable bus seats made it nearly impossible to fall asleep in first place (my knee was literally bruised from being squished up against the hard seat in front of me).  I barely slept on the bus ride, and then we spent another hour getting back to the train and riding it into Alcalá.

I got home right around two in the afternoon, yesterday, and promptly fell asleep until ten o' clock at night.  At that point, it seemed useless to wake up and go say good night to my host family, so I just went back to sleep and woke up again this morning around seven.  I felt a little bit guilty until I found out that the rest of my party had done more or less the same exact thing.

In other news: this afternoon, I finally got fed up with my split ends.  I had some pretty nasty ones, like two inches in length.  I've been putting off going to get it cut because I'm not confident enough in my Spanish to be able to communicate that I don't want the eighties-throwback-mullet that the rest of the country seems to find so appealing.  So, about a week ago, I busqué some information on how to cut your hair yourself, and this afternoon, I did it!

And it wasn't a total disaster!

Before (sorry, most of Claire)

After (I blame the Arrudas of my family for this face)

It's maybe not terribly noticeable, but it is to me.  I haven't straightened it, yet.  I'm hoping I will look less like a hippie than I did before.  Mostly, I'm proud that it seems to be the same length all around and that it didn't come out any shorter than I intended. :)

One more week of classes, then Semana Santa, which is the week leading up to Easter (are we that close already?).  We're spending a few days in Málaga, in the south… on the BEACH, woohoo!  May or may not have more to talk about before then, but I'll try to update with stories of my life, anyway.  Later, kids.

Free time! POUNCE.

portero = goalie
campo (de fútbol) = (soccer) field
disolverse = dissolve
llover a cántaros = (literally) to rain pitchers; (i.e.) to rain cats and dogs
chantaje = blackmail
(chantajear a alguien = to blackmail someone)

Hi out there, sports fans!

(THIS IS A PUN.  YOU WILL FIND OUT WHY SOON.)

Didja miss me?  Sorry.  I had a ton of work to do this week, and when I wasn't doing work, I was sleeping, eating, being in class, or sleeping.  Or sleeping.

So on Friday, my Art History class had a field trip to a city called Cuenca, of which I had never heard before.  It was a very cute little town!  If you're a Facebooker, you may have seen photos already.  They've been up for a short while.  The highlights include:

View of Cuenca from a high-up bridge.

Some call it creepy.  The museum curator would hang it over her bed

so she could see it when she woke up in the morning.  I call it "Brigitte

Bardot, 1959" by Antonio Saura, because that's what the little sign next to it said.

Precarious "hanging houses," for which Cuenca is (apparently) famous.

Cuenca was a very cute city.  We were only there for a day, and we didn't do much: we started by climbing a HUGE hill (to the aforementioned very high bridge), and from there we headed to an art museum.  Brigitte up there was my favorite piece.  It was all abstract art, but this was one of the only pieces that had an abstraction that still made sense.  There was another one involving cigarette cartons and match boxes painted in acrylic colors and arranged artistically behind a glass frame.  I liked that one, too.

Afterward, we went in search of lunch.  A few of us found "la Bar Dulcinea," which, as you Quijote buffs will already know, is named after the lady don Quijote fights for.

Then we saw a cathedral, but we weren't allowed to take pictures. :(  I got one of the outside, but it wasn't very good, so you're better off Googling it.

Side note: my Art History professor pronounces Google like "goo-gly."  Just like Craig Ferguson.

The whole day was very cold, overcast, and a little rainy.  We were indoors for the most part, but they didn't do a great job of heating the museum, and the cathedral wasn't heated at all.  I wasn't truly warm again until I was back home under the heater… mmmmm.

Okay, part two of Nicole's Amazing Weekend Adventure.

On Sunday night, I went with a few friends to see Real Madrid play Villareal (soccer)!  It was REALLY fun.  I bought a Ronaldo jersey—it may be fake, but it's SUPER comfortable, and it's my nueva camisa favorita.  In fact, I'm wearing it right now.  How lovely.

We were up very high in the stadium, but we still had a good view of the field.  Here are a couple pics.

¡El campo de fútbol!

¡Góoooool!

It was awesome.  The field was outside, but our section was covered AND there were heaters, so we were toasty and didn't get rained on when it started raining!  So that was good.  And Madrid won 6-2, so that was even better!

Have I mentioned the rain?  It's been lloviendo a cántaros for the past week or so.  Today was unbelievable.  I was literally soaked through after walking home from school.  Blech.  I thought it was supposed to be sunny here.

So, I had two essays due and a presentation to give today, so that's what I've been doing all week.  Work, you suck.  Especially when you follow me to SPAIN.  Go away.

…And midterms are next week, so I might be pretty out of commission this weekend, too.  Sorry!  Come next weekend, I'll be free as a bird.

The good news is that next weekend is a CIEE-organized trip, so the odds are that the next time you hear from me, it'll be about Seville!  Whoooo.  So you've got that to look forward to. :)

In other news, I've been thinking about my favorite words in English, lately, and I thought I'd share a couple of them with you.  Tautology.  Denouement.  Nonpareils.

Did you get the pun?

That's it.  Peace out.

How to Make Croquetas

pinzas = tongs
harina = flour
pan rallado = breadcrumbs
grumos = lumps (like in your oatmeal)

Word up, homies!

We had croquetas for dinner tonight, and Ana showed me how to make them.  They are these doughy little balls of fried delicious goodness, and they're very simple to make, if a little time-consuming.  The only tricky part is deciding how much milk to add—it's one of those things you have to do a few times to get a feel for it.  Additionally, Ana doesn't measure anything, so these are kind of approximations.

Ingredients: olive oil, flour, milk, salt, 1 egg, fine breadcrumbs, and whatever you want to use as filling (we used precooked tuna, but you can put any kind of meat, vegetable, fish, whatever).

You start with some heated oil in a frying pan.  Then you add about six tablespoons of flour. (Although what she called a "tablespoon" was really a tablespoon heaped two inches high with flour.  So like, as much flour as you can get to stay balanced on the tablespoon; six of those.)  You mix this up over medium heat to toast the flour.  When it gets brown and toasty, take it off the heat.

Let it cool all the way before adding the milk, or the sudden temperature change will make it seize up.  In total, she said she added roughly a liter of milk (which translates to about a quart).  Go a splash at a time, over medium heat, incorporating all (most) of the flour before moving ahead, and making sure to keep squashing the grumos.  Add salt to taste as you go.  I'd say a couple teaspoons of salt went into the batch we made.

Once you've hit just the right texture—something like a cross between pancake batter and silly putty—add the filling (tuna, in this case).  Mix it in, make sure all the milk is incorporated, and then take it off the heat.  Spread the dough into a casserole dish (or a shallow bowl, it doesn't matter, we're just going to chill it) about an inch-and-a-half thick, and leave it out to cool.  After it's reached about room temperature, cover it, pop it in the fridge, and leave it there overnight.

Cut to Day 2.

Pull out your dough.  It should be all congealed and gummy.  DELISH.

Crack an egg into a bowl and mix it up.  Pour about a cup or two of breadcrumbs into a second bowl.  Ana used two tablespoons to form the croquetas, but you can also do it with your hands.  Scoop out a chunk of dough about two or three tablespoons in volume (you can really make them whatever size you want, but they shouldn't be huge or they might not cook right).  Form the chunk into a prolate spheroid (or an oblate spheroid, if you prefer, or any roundish shape).  It can be hard to manage the dough, but make sure it's a smooth ball and that you didn't just fold the dough over on itself, or they will fall apart when you try to cook them.

Dip the rounded chunk into the eggwash, and then roll it in breadcrumbs.  You now have a raw croqueta!  Up until this point, everything can be done long in advance (how long, I don't know).  Just keep the raw croquetas in the freezer until you're ready to enjoy them.

About fifteen minutes before serving, heat up a pan of bastante olive oil (Ana's was about half an inch deep).  You're essentially going to deep-fry these puppies, so make sure there really is enough oil.  Side note: I discovered that Ana conserves the extra oil she uses to cook with—she strains it into a small watering-can-type thing and uses it again later.  She doesn't just discard it.  My dad does the same thing, only with bacon fat.

Once the oil is beginning to smoke, it's hot enough.  Using pinzas, start frying the croquetas.  You can do as many at one time as fit in the frying pan without touching each other.  Ana swirled the pan around to coat them with oil.  This scared me.  I would just turn them with the tongs a couple of times.  They take about a minute per side—maybe not even.  You want them to be an appetizing golden brown all over.

Pull them out as they get done, and drain them on a plate covered with paper towel.  ¡Ta-chan!  You made croquetas!  Now EAT them.  Yummm.

Ana says you can make sweet croquetas, too.  This is a dessert called leche frita, or "fried milk.  You make them almost exactly the same way, except that you leave out the filling, and instead of salt you add bastante sugar at the lump-squashing phase.  They are generally cut into squares rather than formed into balls, which makes that step easier, and after they've been fried, you sprinkle them with sugar and I think she said caramel.  They sound fantastic.  She said we'll make them, next time.

Somehow, it didn't occur to me to take pictures.  Hurr.  My apologies.  There are some left over; I'll photograph them tomorrow.

Speaking of tomorrow, my Art History class is going on a field trip to a city called Cuenca.  It sounds like there's a lot of interesting architecture there, so I might have another interesting blog post sooner than you think!  Cuenca is located in the part of Spain called Castilla-la Mancha, which is the region inhabited by fictional character don Quijote himself!  We won't be going to the part with the windmills, but it's still cool that we'll be there.

I mean, it's cool that we're in Spain, period.

Later, gators.

Barthelona

chocolate caliente = literally, "hot chocolate," but it refers to the really thick chocolate they drink with churros (or alone, commonly)
Colacao = a brand of what we think of as "hot chocolate" (i.e. Ovaltine)
café al bonbon = coffee with condensed milk
ojeras = bags under your eyes
calamares en su tinta = a way of preparing calamari (squid), using the ink

Went to Barcelona this weekend!

It was cold and kind of dreary, but I mean it was Barcelona so we had fun.  Having been there already, I wasn't too disappointed by the less-than-temperate climate.  I actually remembered my way around, more or less (more less than more…).

We got in Friday around noon, checked into the hostel, found some lunch, then headed up Passeig de Gracia to check out the Gaudí stuff.  We started with the Casa Batlló.  The façade is designed to look like skulls and bones, and the windows get smaller as they get higher—my guess is that it creates a kind of fake perspective to make it look taller.

 

Casa Battló (we didn't go inside)

Just down the street was Casa Milà, or la Pedrera (derived from the word piedra, which means "stone," so like, "the stone thing").  This time, there were other people there with me, so there are actually pictures of me on the roof.

  

The gang on top of Casa Milà

(Most pictures with me in them were taken by friends; for you Facebookers, flip through Pictures of Me to see more.)

View of la Sagrada Familia from Casa Milà

  

After Casa Milà, we took a walk across town to visit the Sagrada Familia.  In June, I went inside, but this time around we were content to admire from the streets.  It was cooler in June, when there was sunlight and warmth (PUN), but it was still pretty cool:

The Sagrada Familia (left = front, right = back)—as always, click for larger size

The next day was drizzly and even colder, but we powered through.  We started at the Museu de la Xocolata, which was really not all that great but still cool.  The ticket was printed on the wrapper of a chocolate bar, which was deliciously received.  The exhibits were all sculptures made of chocolate—the ones of Don Quijote and Bambi were my favorites.

The main attraction of the day was Park Güell.  I was there in June, as well, but this time there were far fewer people, and I was able to get a pic with the famous lizard fountain:

 At Park Güell

We had a late lunch and spent the evening strolling along the beach (of the Mediterranean!), pretending it was more than thirty degrees out.

All these and MORE (including my pics from June) available at a Facebook.com near you.

There isn't really a whole lot to see in Barcelona, but what there is I like a whole lot.  I.e. everything by Gaudí, and just the city in general.

The next big trip is to Sevilla/Córdoba in a couple of weeks.  I promise I'll update before then, though. :)

AH GAHT MAH CHURROS

Yes, I did, and they were delicious.  They're like buttery doughnuts... like a crueller or something.  And the chocolate is thick and dark, and when you put them together it is the happiest feeling on earth.

Mmmm.

Vocab:
fichas = legos
sumo = amount
granada = pomegranate (either the whole thing or an individual seed… not sure which)
nueces = walnuts
aliño = (salad) dressing
imán = magnet
mareado/a = dizzy

I think I'm giving up on word-of-the-day.  I'm not posting every day, and each time I post, I have more than just one word I want to share.

The granadas, the nueces, and the aliño, along with lechuga (lettuce) and sal (salt), are the ingredients of a very delicious salad that my host mom makes fairly often.  That's all there is to it.  The aliño is olive oil and (I think balsamic) vinegar.  It's yummy, and there's nothing bad in it, which makes me twice as happy to eat it.

We had some kind of salmon-and-potato stew for lunch today.  It was yummy.

As part of this whole study-abroad thing, they kind of made me sign up for some classes.  I haven't talked about them much (at all?!) yet, so, here goes.

I'm taking five classes: Cervantes' Works, Spanish Art History, Contemporary Spain, Spanish Woman Writers, and Advanced Grammar.  They're all about Spanish things, and they're all entirely conducted in Spanish.  In fact, none of my professors knows more than a few key phrases in English.  This can make things difficult at times, but they know we're not fluent, and I'm keeping up.

Woman Writers is my favorite, closely followed by Art History.  I like both the subject matter and the professors in both classes.

Cervantes is a little disappointing so far—we're reading select passages from Don Quijote (I've been spelling it with an X, but they spell it with a J here), as well as a bunch of his other stuff.  The format of the class thus far has been: 1) be assigned a reading for homework, 2) read the reading and look up vocab at home, 3) answer questions about the reading at home, 4) go to class and listen to professor read the reading, 5) be given time to answer the questions in class with a partner or two, 6) want to kill self.  Wednesdays are better than Mondays because we read the Quijote in class and are not assigned anything, but she still has a tortuously slow way of reading… and speaking… and moving… … …

Contemporary Spain started slow, and it's a history class, so it's not terribly exciting.  Also, the professor of this class is probably the worst at empathizing with us non-native speakers, so I don't always know what's going on.  Fortunately, all of her notes are online, and she's supposed to be an easy grader.

Grammar is by far the worst.  It's the one class CIEE (the study-abroad program) requires us to take, and the professor is also the program director, Cristina.  She is a very organized individual, and she takes her job very seriously, which is very very good.  We all feel very secure knowing that she's there to take care of us, and she's approachable with any qualm or conundrum a study-abroad student might encounter.

Her class is just awful.

This is sad because, as many of you may know, grammar is kind of one of my most favorite things in the world.  It is my guilty dork-pleasure.  Sometimes, I diagram sentences just for fun, deriving great amusement from Googling particular parts of speech to see how they should fit into my structure… Okay, not great amusement.  But still.  It's bad.

What's frustrating about this class is that I've already learned the majority of what we're doing right now.  We'll spend an hour-and-a-half class period on the preterito perfecto (I have done such and such a thing), and I will learn one or two uses for the tense that I did not previously know.  This comprises the five interesting minutes of class.  Then we will practice it.  Then we will practice it some more.  Then we will practice it standing on our heads.  Then we will take home three pages of practice and practice it some more, and correct the practice the next day in class.  Now I have spent three hours practicing something I already knew how to do, except for the one small part that took me five minutes to understand.

It's as if someone told you, "Turn the screw to the right, and the screw goes in.  Turn it left, and the screw comes out.  Now, practice putting in and taking out the following three hundred screws."  Only you're screwing the screws into my skull.

Practice is good, yes, right, practice makes perfect, okay fine.  It's just that I already learned all of this stuff in high school, and I don't appreciate being talked down to.

A lot of the other students haven't learned all of what we're learning now, which surprises me since it's supposedly a very advanced program.  And so I understand why there is the need for repetition and practice and driving screws into skulls and all this stuff.

It's just a pain.  Gr.

Hm, okay, I'll talk about something happy now.

This weekend, seven or eight of us are going to BARCELONA, whooooo!

The perceptive (or Mom) among you will say, "But, Nicole—you've already been to Barcelona."

Yes.  Yes I have.  And I'm going back this weekend, whooooo!

I'd be more than happy to revisit anything by Gaudí, and there is at least one structure of his that I didn't get the chance to see in June.  I'd also like to spend some time in the Boquería, a big outdoor market open on weekend mornings.

We'll be staying in a hostel just off of Las Ramblas (a very large, popular street section), a stone's throw away from the Boquería and Gaudí's Palacio Güell.  I suspect we'll visit the Sagrada Familia, and outside of that I don't know what our plans are.

 

(This is a picture of the trippy rooftop of Gaudí's Casa Milà, from my

last venture to Barcelona.  I would not mind going back.)

Weekend update

coli = short for colegio = school
por fa = por favor

This blog is quickly becoming a once-a-week kind of deal.  The thing is that I don't really do anything that exciting during the week.  I go to classes and take siestas and do homework and eat delicious Spanish food.  I'll do what I can to post more often, but we'll have to see.

This past week (by which I mean last weekend), I delved a bit into the realm of the social Spaniard.  It's a bizarre and confusing territory, and my research is as of yet incomplete, but here are some initial observations as well as a brief firsthand encounter.

So far, we (my American friends and I) are all stumped by the alleged nightlife here.  The first weekend or two that we were here, we didn't see anyone in the centro (downtown) past about one in the morning.  Conversely, our sources (host brothers and sisters) told us that 1) people our age go out almost every Friday and Saturday night, and 2) nobody even leaves their house until at least midnight—and then they regularly stay out until five or six in the morning.

...So where did they all go?

The answer is that "at least midnight" really translates to "more like two or three in the morning," and that the centro is not the party part of town.  The spot to be is called La Garena, and it's a little plaza of nightclubs about a ten-minute ride from the centro.

Last weekend, my friend's host sister Sara took the two of us with her.  We started in the centro around midnight in a little bar tucked away from anywhere we'd been so far.  At midnight, the place was virtually deserted.  After an hour or so, it started to fill up, and she said it wouldn't be until three that anybody would be at La Garena.  We left the bar around two and took a taxi to get there.

We popped in and out of a few clubs.  Now, I have no idea if these were typical Spanish nightclubs—it didn't seem like it—but they struck my friend and me as a little bit odd.  The places were packed, and there was loud music and bright lights, but nobody was really dancing or mingling.  They were kind of bouncing to the music and just really kind of... being there.  So we be'd in a couple of nightclubs for several minutes each, and around four, we called it a night.


My friend and I were exhausted, but it was clear that Sara could have stayed out longer.  We later found out that four really is on the early side to return from being Out.  Normally, she and her sister don't get back until at least seven, and sometimes as late as nine.  Then they sleep until three or four in the afternoon and do it all over again.


Overall, a confusing experience.  It was fun for what it was, but I'm not sure if I'll tener ganas de doing it again anytime soon.  Maybe I'm lame.  Or maybe I just need to find a real Spanish discoteca.  We'll go with the latter.


A note on Spanish fashion.

 

First of all, every person in Spain has exactly the same style.  You don't see prep and gangsta and goth and grunge and bohemian and hippie and chic and whatever other styles we have at home.  You see a punk/emo blend with just a touch of hipster, and black, black, and more black.  Seriously.  It's a little more casual during the day, with a little more variation of color, but at night, the above photos roughly describe the outfit of every single Spanish female my age.  They all wear boots, they all wear a crazy short skirt slash dress, and they all heap on the mascara.  It looks nice, but seeing as all I own are a pair of gray boots and the potential to heap on mascara (on which I'll take a pass, thank you), it's not easy to fit in.

My obviously not-dark-colored hair is a bit of a giveaway, too.

I'm predicting a relaxing tapas date with my amigos americanos tonight.  I'm lucky that my host family is regularly in bed by eleven.  Many of my friends get super-judged by their families—who are still awake—when they are "only" out until one.

Peluquería

peluquería = hair salon

(I figured out how to change the size of my pictures, so these are a little bigger than usual.  Also, you can click on them to view them at their original size, which is pretty ginormous thanks to my super-hi-tech-awesome camera.)

Oh boy!  I went to Segovia today!

Bet you've never heard of Segovia, huh?  I hadn't, either.  It was sort of a last-minute decision.  It's not very far at all from Madrid—our train took about twenty minutes to get there (Madrid is forty-five minutes from Alcalá).

We were delayed slightly when we got to Madrid and realized that the train to Segovia departed from a different station in Madrid, and by the time we got there, we had to wait an hour for the next train to come.  We got into Segovia around noon, at which point Rick Steves told us we could walk into town, so we did.  It was mostly highway, and it took us about an hour, but we stopped to (try to) feed a horse on the way and it was a nice walk.

Once in Segovia, we found our bearings and were able to locate the aqueduct.  In case you don't know, an aqueduct is an ancient Roman structure used to transport water from the distant mountains into a city.  The whole thing is built with a very slight angle downward toward the city, and the water flows through a channel at the top.

This is what the aqueduct looked like when we found it:

 

This is what it looked like after we followed it into the city:

 

It was so. big.  I was totally in awe.  I took almost two hundred pictures while we were in Segovia today, using up all the memory on my card, and I think at least a third of them were just this aqueduct at different angles.  It was so cool.

We also saw the Cathedral:

...and the Palacio:

We also tried a famous Segovian dessert, called ponche.  Imagine this: a thin layer of sponge cake, a layer of crême brulée (including the burnt sugar), another layer of sponge cake, the whole thing wrapped in what i think was like a marzipan fondant, and some apricot jam on top.  It was basically delicious.

 

The day was mostly a lot of walking around and not very long, but really, the aqueduct made it worthwhile.

In other news, I need to look into a peluquería because I realized today that my hair is far too long and riddled with split ends, and if I chopped off six or seven inches it would STILL be really really long, which means that should probably happen as soon as possible.

Aaaand all of this took place yesterday.  I only got around to posting it today.  Whoooooops.

Lots of words of the day!

agua de grifo = tap water
la nevera = the fridge
una moneda = a coin
un monedero = a coin purse
¡quítalo! = leave it!
un pincho = a thorn/spike/pinch or a small plate, like a tapa
escurrir = to strain (i.e. food)
un puerro = a leek
salmón ahumado = smoked salmon
la yema = egg yolk
¡ta-chán! = ta-da!

Today, I went back to Madrid with a few friends.  We checked out El Rastro, a huuuuuge flea market held every Sunday.  We knew pickpockets would thrive in such a packed environment, so ahead of time, I made sure nothing was in my pockets (not even my chapstick), put it all in my purse, and zipped the zipper very shut.

At one point, my friend and I were walking side-by-side, and someone kept bumping into me from behind.  She sort of glanced at me, and I realized the same guy was "bumping into" her, too.  We squeezed quickly forward through the crowd—and he followed us and bumped into us some more when we had to stop again.  It took me until then to realize he wasn't trying to feel us up—he was checking our pockets.  And continuing to check our pockets.

At that point, we sped up again and ducked into one of the tiendas, facing out with our bags clutched to our torsos, and stood there until the guy disappeared.  The rest of our friends caught up with us a minute later, and I learned the phrase ¡quítalo! from a girl who was here last semester.  Next time, she said, make a beeline for the nearest police officer.  Good advice, year-long girl.

After wandering around the flea market for an hour or two (and not actually getting anything stolen from us, great success), we headed for the Reina Sofia, a big ol' art exhibit.  I took this photo of a HUGE mural by Picasso:

Apparently, though, we weren't supposed to take pictures in that particular room.  Neither of the (two patrolling) security guards saw me, though, so, yes I could!

We had tapas and wine in Madrid before heading back.  I left the house at 9:30 am and got back around 4:00, so it felt like a solidly spent day.  I celebrated with a short siesta.

When my host family got home, Ana showed me how to make Spanish tortilla.  It's verrrrrrry easy.  I helped her make a "small" one to share with me.  She peeled and sliced three russet (or similar) potatoes, then fried them in olive oil (and a little salt).  Bastante olive oil, she said, which literally means "enough" but is used here to mean more like "a healthy amount."  Anyway, there was about a cup and a half of olive oil in that frying pan, I kid you not.

She fried those for several minutes over medium-low (suave) heat until they were very mushy, then escurrió out the olive oil and discarded all but enough to coat the pan.  We mixed the potato mush with about four beaten eggs until they were fairly well blended.  She said, "Sometimes, you need to add more salt."  And then do you know what she did?  She took a small spoonful of the raw-egg-and-potato mixture and put it in her mouth.

And then the National Guard swooped in, and the entire household contracted salmonella, and babies died and the whole world exploded.

She deemed it not salty enough and added bastante more salt.  And has not died from consuming raw eggs.

Yet.

So then the eggy potatoey goodness went into the (still-hot) frying pan, cooked for oh maybe five minutes, got flipped, barely cooked on the other side, and was done.  ¡Ta-chán!

We chatted (in Spanish! whoa!) while making the tortilla.  Bonding time.  Which was good, because I felt much less awkward over dinner tonight.  We talked about the euro and how everything in Spain is like 50% more expensive after they converted.  We talked about food.  She shares my love of every kind of food everywhere—including mariscos (seafood) and sushi!  She even has a little package of dried seaweed for rolling her own, though she says she doesn't like to buy raw fish—she uses salmón ahumado and gambas (shrimp).  She'll eat raw sushi at a Japanese restaurant, though—her favorite is tuna.

I explained over dinner that muy rico sounds weird to me because to say a food is "rich" (meaning tasty) is a very British-English thing to say.  We don't say that much in American.  At least I don't.

Ana also told me about a little flea market that goes on right here in Alcalá every Monday morning!  It sounds like it opens about half an hour before I have class, but they're supposed to have a ton of food and some clothes and bags and things, so I might check it out one day if I feel like getting up early.

Grabar

Grabar: to record.  As in, when my host mom was on the phone with the internet company and they told her that, even though my internet was doing funky things and we suspected something had happened to up the price, that was perfectly normal and she definitely wouldn't have to pay any more than she already was, I said, "¿Has grabado la conversación?"  Did you record the conversation?  So you can present it later in court when it turns out they were lying to you?

Apparently, the internet companies here are all crooks.  First of all, there are about seven companies in total.  Of those, there is only one that will allow you to connect by cable—the rest, like what I'm using now, feed off the magical 3G network, the efficiency of which depends on how close you happen to be to a Vodafone tower.  They had a cable modem set up when I got here, with a little wireless router and everything, and that worked swimmingly.  But since that company has a monopoly on cable internet, they can do ridiculous things to their consumers, like make my host family sign a year-long contract with them and not tell them about it until a week after they had bought the damn thing.

Obviously, they weren't going to sign any year-long contract just so little ol' me could have my precious internet for four months.  I wouldn't want them to.  What a rip-off.

So they went with option B, Vodafone 3G.  It has only kind of been giving me problems, but a couple of the other girls in the program still don't have internet in their houses, which must be horrible, so I can't complain.

My host dad showed me the contract they wanted him to sign for the cable modem, and there was literally a page of fine print.  From what they've told me, it sounds like the people in the store will lie outright to you about what they're doing and what you're getting.  And my poor host parents don't know the first thing about the internet, and I don't know how to talk about the internet in Spanish, so the whole thing has just been a major pain in the you-know-where.

Anyway.  The internet is working now, so I shall take advantage of it.

On a side note, I miss the sound of my coffee maker.  Of course they have coffee here, but the apparatus they use is like... a little tea kettle.  The water goes in the bottom, the coffee grounds go in a sieve-like thing in the middle, and then you screw on the top half and put the whole thing on the stove.  The coffee ends up in the top half when you're done.  I'll take a picture of it.  Maybe this is a Real Life Percolator?  I don't know.  But I miss Mr. Coffee.

Here are a couple of pictures for your visual entertainment.  They are up on Facebook, to which I believe all of my current Loyal Followers have access, but in case you didn't notice them, these are the highlights:

My street.  I live way down at the other end, but all the houses look pretty much the same.  I'll get a close-up one day soon.

Plaza de Cervantes in downtown Alcalá.

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in Madrid.  I think it's a fountain, but it could just be a monument.  Anyway, I love it.

I'm going in search of botas and school supplies today, and I think I'll be in Madrid again at some point this weekend.  Lots more pictures to come, so don't touch that dial!

Rebajas

(El Internet copped out as I was writing this last night, so I'm posting it this morning instead.)

I miss my straightener that I got for Christmas and have used like twice and to which I'm already really attached. The one I'm using here is clunky and snags my hair, but I guess it's better than blowing up my host family's house, so, I suffer.

Today's word of the day is rebajas. I see it all over the city in store windows. It means something like "reductions" and is used to mean "SALE." Muy bien.

I still haven't bought school supplies because nobody wants to explain to me how to get to Carrefour, the school supply store.

That's not exactly true. Allow me to rephrase. I'm directionally challenged as it is. Add to that the fact that we're not allowed to speak any English, and it's taken me a week and a half to get to the point where I think I might have an idea of approximately where the store is probably located, more or less.

No class on Fridays, thankfully, so I have time tomorrow to wander around Alcalá. All I want is a binder and a classy pair of boots (hopefully with rebajas).

Have I mentioned that everyone here (all the ladies, anyway) wear boots? Well, they do. Once I get my magic pair of boots, I just know I'll fit right in.

York y queso

Yesterday was my first day of Monday/Wednesday classes. I'm taking "Cervantes y su obra" and "Historia del arte." We'll be reading selections from Don Quixote in addition to other stuff Cervantes wrote (apparently he wrote other stuff). Art History should be fun, too. I've heard the professor is a good one, and he talks v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y, so he's easy enough to understand.

So far, my favorite thing about Spain is the way nobody does anything between the hours of about 1:30 and 4:00 pm. I came home from school today, had lunch, and took the most glorious nap of my life, and nobody thought anything of it.

We had tortilla for dinner last night. It was muy rico. They say muy rico here for "tasty." It still sounds really awkward to me.

For "brunch" between classes this morning, I bought an "empanada de York y queso" (an empanada is a kind of sandwich) from a pastry shop. I didn't know what York was, so I asked the lady behind the counter what was in the York-y-queso empanada. She gave me a strange look and said, "Como, York y queso."

Thank you, lady behind the counter. I asked my host family later. I guess it's boiled ham.

The empanada was rico, anyway.

When I came downstairs for lunch yesterday, Adrián was telling his mom about a word in English: "hen." He said it was a gallo, which is a chicken—albeit a male one. His mom was like, "A gallo (male) or a gallena (female)?" I cleared that up for them and explained that the word for a male gallo is "rooster."

Ana said, "Ah—"rooster"—that's like, roast chicken? Roaster?"

I explained that, no, "rooster" and "roast" are two completely different words that have nothing in common except that you can do one to the other.

We're thinking of going to Madrid this weekend. Hopefully, I'll have some slightly more interesting things to share with you after that.

Yesterday's word of the day was tirita, which is a Band-Aid. I wanted one to put on my ankle to stop my shoe from chafing it, so I asked Adrián how to say it and then asked Ana for one. I thought it would be awkward to ask Ana, "If I have a cut, and I want to put something on it, what do you call that?" and then say, "Oh, okay. Can I have a tirita?"

Today's word of the day is actually two words, and they're actually from yesterday.

I hate to miss an opportunity to show off my vast wealth of knowledge, so when my Art History professor asked yesterday what bronce (bronze) was made of, and nobody else in the class seemed to know, it was killing me that I didn't know how to say "TIN AND COPPER, you morons" in Spanish. He kept saying, "¿Nadie sabe? (Nobody knows?) ¿Nadie sabe?" But I knew.

For future reference, tin is estaño and copper is cobre.

Tapas americanas

I'm back!

My host family got me a modem (it plugs into a USB port) that taps into the Vodafone 3G network. It doesn't always get a terrific signal, but it's the internet, and I can take it just about anywhere, which is very cool.

Fortunately, not much went down this weekend. I was so tired! I slept until 12:30 yesterday (Saturday), which is late, even for me.

We did take a field trip to Madrid on Friday. The city is so big! I don't know how it is compared to like New York or Chicago, but it's so wide open that it looks much bigger. The streets are wider and the buildings aren't as tall, so it seems very broad.

We didn't spend much time in any one place. Fausto (one of the CIEE program leaders) led us around the city pointing out places of interest so we might know where to go when we return. The trouble, of course, is that it was all in Spanish, so I still don't really know what we saw... but there was what I'm pretty sure was an art museum that I'd like to return to. We also learned the metro system, and they left us in Madrid to figure out how to get back on our own (which we did, successfully). I was going to try to go back this weekend, but I was just out of energy. Next weekend.

Apparently, it's very common to have cookies for breakfast. That's what Adrián has all the time, and that's what Ana always offers me. "¿Quieres algo de comer? ¿Una galletita?"

Tonight, I met a few American students who have been here since last semester. We went out for tapas (basically small plates, like appetizers) and drinks. It's common here for them to bring you a sampling of tapas when you order a drink, so we ordered a round of drinks (there were about ten of us), and they brought us some tapas. One plate was Spanish jamón, salchicha, and tortilla on hamburger buns, and the other plate was piled high with hot-dogs and ketchup. It was kind of hilarious.

Since Friday, I've decided to learn a new word (or phrase) every day. Friday's word of the day was quedar. Not to be confused with quedarse, which means to stay or remain, quedar means to meet up (with someone). If I want to tell my family I'm going out, I can say, "Voy a salir," which means, "I'm going out," or I can say, "Voy a quedar con mis amigas en el centro," "I'm meeting my friends downtown," which is more specific, and therefore preferable.

On Saturday, I learned arreglarse, which is like to get ready for the day (literally, to fix oneself). Now, after breakfast, I have something informative to say when I leave the table: "Voy a arreglarme."

Today's word is subir. It's not very exciting; it just means to go up (i.e. upstairs), but it's something I've been wondering how to say for a little while.

More classes tomorrow! Art History and Cervantes' Work. I haven't had them yet. I hope they're interesting (and that I can understand what's going on...).

Hasta luego.

Day 4

It'd be great if this "speaking Spanish like a pro" thing that I'm told will happen eventually could hurry up and happen.

We met a girl who was here last semester with CIEE. She said she had taken Spanish all through high school and a little bit in college, but that even after a semester she didn't feel like she really spoke the language.

Greeeaaat.

I've been able to get by. It's just a little bit awkward at times sitting around a table with people who aren't my family but who I'm supposed to pretend are my family and having nothing to talk about. I don't know what kinds of things to ask them. We got most of the introductory stuff out of the way yesterday.

I'm in the middle of "Angela's Ashes," and I decided to read it in the living room so I could pretend I was being social. I didn't know the word for "ashes," but when I explained them to Ana, her face lit up and she said, "Ah, ¿Las cenizas de Angela?" She had seen the movie, but couldn't remember who played the title character. I bet my mom knows (she knows everything). I was just thinking today, "If they ever make this into a movie, it will be absolutely heartbreaking." Guess They beat me to the punch.

The internet has been kind of sketchy today. I'm typing this on a Word document, trying to get the wireless to work. I could just plug in the ethernet cable, but then I'd have to sit on the floor. I restarted the router and it's booting up now... We'll see if it takes. Urgh.

Adrián told me a joke over dinner. I'm pretty sure I've heard it before in English. It's about these three guys who go to a hotel one at a time, and each time the only room left is supposedly inhabited by a monster. When they get to the room, they hear, "¡Te quito el piel y te como!" (I'll peel off your skin and eat you!) The first two guys get scared and jump out the window, but the third guy opens the closet where the voice is coming from, and inside is a monkey with a banana saying, "¡Te quito el piel y te como!" as he peels the banana.

Ja ja ja.

I'll write more later. My wireless isn't working very well right now. :(